Cloud Castles (23 page)

Suddenly, with no sound at all, the whole gardens were flooded with glaring light. It turned the open lawn stark white and threw the uniformed figures who came charging up into brutal silhouette. Before Jyp or I could move, Mall’s anger overrode her weariness. Springing up from her feral crouch, she unleashed a fearful swinging kick that caught the leading guard in the stomach and simply smashed him off his feet and into the man behind. A gun hit the ground and jarred off a burst at nothing, skittering across the terrace on its own vibration. A machine-pistol, safety off, no challenge – these weren’t any ordinary security men. The others jumped
back. One raised his hand, and the turf spewed fragments where I’d been. But they were too slow, far too slow; they hadn’t fought out on the Spiral, and there was no rage in them. I drew and slashed in one savage sweep; the gun spun into a flowerbed, the man whipped round and fell. The last already lay at Mall’s feet.

We ran then, shading our eyes, our long shadows racing across beside us like spindly giants. But we weren’t half-way to the trees when we heard the thudding of other feet behind us, and the hoarse, harsh panting. The dogs were after us, and our ghostly shield was gone.

Mall was already turning to bay, sword held vertical in both hands. With one stroke she could sever even those blunt necks; but she made no move to. She stood, breathing deeply, as the beasts rushed in on her; and at the last moment she tilted the sword, caught the intolerable glare of the floods and with inhuman accuracy flashed it right into their eyes. They twisted, blinded; and she hit out with the flat only, a swift slapping left and right. They rolled, stunned and yelping. Jyp’s pistol barrels spat and smoked in turn; two of the lights went out in a spray of hot cinders, swathing us in shadow again. Mall plunged into the copse ahead of us, bounding through the undergrowth to the fence. I saw her run straight past the tree we’d come down, and take a mighty swing at the swathe of wire along the top. Too late to shout, I winced. There was the whipping twang of razor-wire parting, then a mighty explosive sizzle and a fat spark. Mall knew perfectly well about electricity, but she didn’t always remember.

We hauled her out of the bushes, still clutching her scorched sword, shinned up into the gap she’d made, and, sitting astride the fence, struggled to hoist her after us. We had her draped across our knees when we heard the rushing footsteps, and hastily tipped her down. There was a muffled thud in the leaf-drifts below. But as we swung our legs across to jump after, we heard a harsh,
‘Halt! Ruhren Sie nicht!’
from outside. They’d used their heads and sent men round the fence. I couldn’t see them, but I heard their breathing, harsh and fast. Big men – heavies from the gate, probably. ‘
Kom ‘runter!
’ barked the voice.
‘Und kein Scheis—’

More or less at their feet Mall rose up like some sort of local wood demon, plastered with several season’s leaves, and enveloped them. As we landed
there was a brief thrashing, then we saw her beckoning. Silently I handed her her sword. She snatched it, and ran. Beside me Jyp tripped over something solid, and swore; and that was the first word spoken since we left the roof. We raced up the slope, wheezing and gasping; I was amazed I could still keep up with these two hardened superhumans. I even had the energy to risk a brief look back as we crested the rise. Flashlights were sweeping the woods below, and the grounds still blazed with floods; but the cupola was dark and silent and still.

We ran through the night, not silently, maybe, but light-footed and fast enough to pass unheard. Jyp’s night eyes and sense of direction kept us in line and away from obstacles, and the steady rhythm of our feet and the roaring blood in our ears helped to blot out our simmering feelings. Just at the first hedge I heard what might have been a shot far behind, but it didn’t come anywhere near us. Across a road, through fields, vaulting a stream to more fields and a small neat farmyard, the kind the EC subsidizes so that German farm-owners can work full-time on the assembly lines. Beyond that, across more fields, by the half-hidden shell of an old church, to the low wall of woodland into whose shadow we’d managed to push the helicopter. I only hoped we’d have the strength to push it out again. We were alert for pursuers, but we saw none. I guessed the guards mightn’t feel too eager, given what we’d done to the others. If Lutz had been at home it might have been different.

Somebody had apparently filled the ‘copter with lead blocks while we’d been away, and Mall was a shadow of her normal self. Nevertheless we managed to haul it far enough on its skids from under the trees to get a clear take-off. When I slumped down into the pilot’s seat, though, I found my hands were shaking too much to press the starter. I knew I didn’t have long. It would be dawn soon, and people about; a helicopter in a field would be visible for miles and attract all kinds of attention, not least from the local cops. The sky ahead was growing definitely greyer, behind what looked like gathering clouds. I glanced back at my passengers, sprawled gasping in their seats. They gazed stonily back at me, as grey and drawn as I must have looked. Delay broke down our defences, and opened
the door to memory. ‘What happened?’ I demanded, and was startled at how choked I still sounded. ‘What
happened?
’

‘What d’you think?’ said Jyp dully. ‘Like she said, we weren’t wary enough. We tripped the big one.’

‘Yes, yes, for Chrissake, I know that! I mean, what—Where’s she gone? Is she alive or dead?’

Jyp’s mouth twisted. ‘Death she could’ve coped with. She felt four centuries was too long. She’d have preferred it.’

‘Why? Mall’s lived longer!’

‘Aye, free to roam across the seas of the Spiral, to seek out all the hidden corners of the Earth! Free to grow!’ Mall, still leaf-crowned, made no move to look up. ‘She had to live out hers within the compass of a little tavern in a lesser port, seldom straying and that not far, roaming only in the length of her long sight. Yet that she endured, sooner than founder again in the slough she came from. Now she has.’

‘Well, can we get her out? Get her back? We’ve got to, dammit!’

Mall’s eyelids fluttered closed. ‘I see scant chance of that. She is gone back to the Brocken.’

‘The Brocken, the Brocken! It’s just a mountain, blast it! Is this something happens there, or what?’

Mall wiped her hair back, and shuddered. ‘Just a mountain, aye. But mountains cast shadows like aught else, and this one – blacker than most. Places there are – not many – where the powers from the Rim may reach inward, even to the very borderland ‘twixt Spiral and Core. Some such you have trodden, many a time. Such is the Borobodur. Such is the City of the Graal, such is the mountain. The pentacle over the map was a gate thither.’

Nobody said anything, but the wind swirled outside, and sang a song of cold and emptiness. A few drops spattered across the windshield. Mall’s blazing eyes were dimmed. ‘Even in my day ‘twas a name known. From the earliest times it has been a dark hallow, a place of power, and this is no accident; since the forebears of Frank and Saxon first came wandering out of the east, since Germania’s
Urwald
held at bay the mightiest marchings of Rome, since the coming of the younger kindred of men drove back the Elder to the mountains in the wake of the Great Ice. Deep within that shadow something settled and made its habitation and its strength, some
force that had followed those first of true men on their
Volkwanderung.
Followed, as the wolf follows the herd.’

The day was coming, but it was still far from light enough for me. A fine drizzle wept across the windshield. ‘What kind of force?’ I demanded sharply.

Jyp snorted. ‘Hope you never get close enough to find out. Those who do, don’t tell – like Katjka. Or can’t. I hope to Hell – because that’s what spawned it, for sure.’

Hell wasn’t something I’d ever believed in. ‘Something from outside? Something from out near the Rim, like the Graal? Something that was human once?’

The sound Mall made was not a laugh. ‘Like, yet so very unlike. And as to human – if so, it took sorely against the condition, for it has long wrought havoc upon humankind, joying in pain, spreading malice and disruption where it may. And yet,’ she added, suddenly thoughtful, ‘it might well be that it once wore flesh, for it seems obsessed with it, both to revel in and to excoriate, pleasure and pain always to excess …’

‘Sounds like a classic sadist,’ I said, and shivered slightly at the thought. ‘Only writ large.’

‘Writ, and in letters of blood and fire,’ said Mall. ‘The panics over witchcraft that struck so hard through Europe in my time and earlier, they were but shadows. For the most part witches danced only in the addled pates of witch-hunters deranged or evil, greedy for pain to inflict or goods to confiscate. Oh, here and there ‘a might find some misremembered shard of old heathendom, maybe, or harmless hedge-wizardry; but they were nothing. And yet there was a core of grim truth, little though the hunters made of it; a terrible timeless focus of ancient evil. A power that sought to ensnare humanity to its service, dangling strange knowledge and arcane arts and pleasures as a lure; and by awful ceremony and the misuse of those arts in malice and revenge, it bound them.’

Again, that bitter negative of a laugh. ‘Does aught happen there? Aye, a happening indeed, a thing of dread, a work without a name, timeless, without beginning or end – the Grand Sabbat of all the witch cults. Once Katjka walked that path, longer and harder than most, until the same strength that had sustained her along it led her to break free and seek atonement. Many times she visited it, suffered much but learned much, and received many powers. Now she has been
dragged back there, not for a brief passage but sans let, sans release. Dead she may be, or far more likely tossed back into that fearful cauldron and lost in it, victim and perpetrator both. If so, ‘twill never loose her more. There may be some with power to help her, but this I know, that I do not. It is not in me. She is lost to us.’

I couldn’t speak, not for a moment. My eyes stung, and if it hadn’t been for the iron concentration that flying develops I might have broken up entirely. For me that was rare. There was a time I’d managed to convince myself I didn’t need anyone else, that I was better off with casual sex and no entanglements, that I didn’t give the old proverbial damn. And then, all of a sudden, the warmth of the Tavern had wrapped itself around me, Jyp and the old couple who ran it, and Katjka. She’d been at once the most accessible – not to say available – and the most remote, a voice out of the shadows, a warm hand on your neck, a brush of the lips and a hooded glance that said everything and revealed nothing at all. Her intimacies were strictly on a cash basis, though she occasionally hinted otherwise, and there was no more forbidding defence than that. All I’d ever learned about her was from others, or from reading between the lines of her rare unguarded remarks. Her powers she seldom revealed except when a good friend needed them – and more than once that had been me. The Tavern without her seemed hardly possible; that stuffy little room under the eaves, with its clutter of odd old-fashioned balms and unguents and its enveloping feather bed …

I wrestled savagely with my helmet. If ever you catch the delusion that you don’t have a heart, try carving someone out of it and see. ‘You were right, Jyp,’ I managed to say, almost steadily. ‘It’s my goddamned fault.’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No, it isn’t. Sure, I wasn’t happy about her coming along; but I clammed up, didn’t I? If it’d been just your own private quarrel, maybe I wouldn’t have – but the Graal, now, that’s big. That’s something that’ll affect all Europe and the world, in the end, Core and Spiral both. You’re not to blame. We needed our answer.’

‘And we have it!’ I stabbed savagely at the starter, which coughed and missed. ‘Thanks to her. We know it’s this thing on the mountain behind Lutz, and
probably Le Stryge as well, and C-Tran’s tied up in it somehow, it’s all part of a wider plan. And – and – the hell with it!’ Anger welled over my grief. ‘It’s too wide for me! I’ve been blundering about too much! I’m not putting my friends at any more risk!’ I stabbed the starter. The engine spluttered and fired, the rotors swished to life, growing stiff and straight, slicing into the chill dawn.

‘So what’re you going to do?’ yelled Jyp, reaching for his helmet.

‘What I should’ve done in the first place. Go right back to the City and get things straight with them, risk or no risk. I won’t take the Spear back, I won’t so much as touch it. They can damn well send their own guards or Knights or whatever to fetch it. Let them deal with this Brocken thing, and Le Stryge! And after that,’ I breathed hard, and thought of what I’d like to do to Lutz, ‘we’ll see! Jyp, you said the City was hard to find. But you have the course I took before, and the time. If anyone can find it, you can.’

He glanced up at the grey sky, and the equally grey navcom screen. ‘Well, no law ’gainst trying.’ He swung himself over into the front seat, and peered around. The clouds were massing into great peaks and columns, vast forbidding fortress walls, the same in any direction; but he gave me a heading at once, and a corridor. I gunned throttle and collective, caught the tail rotor with the pedals as it tried to overswing into the trees, and tilted the main rotor assembly to send us wheeling away upward towards the clouds. Behind us, dwindling in the dawn, burned a patch of bitter floodlit brightness, and my curse went with it. I hadn’t finished with it, or its master, yet.

We moved from cloud to cloud, with Jyp’s keen eye flicking from my instruments to the shifting patterns of grey beyond. Which gave him the more guidance I couldn’t tell, but he seemed to feel there was something ahead; there was a quiet excitement in his voice altogether unlike his normal boisterous enjoyment, and after a while even Mall seemed to catch it. She leaned over our shoulders, shedding damp leaves, and when I glanced up I saw her face losing its lines of weariness and despair, growing keen again at the prospect of seeing this place. That gave me an odd lift, in its turn; these strange friends of mine had seen so much and lived so long I felt like a child beside them. But now, ahead of us here, was somewhere that impressed even them, somewhere I’d found for myself. I looked at the cloud-peaks ahead, and saw them flush and lighten with the first faint light of the hidden
dawn. Completely different from the ones I’d first encountered, of course, random as any cloudscape; and yet that didn’t seem to matter. There was a familiarity in their pattern, a consistency, as if I was seeing the same landscape from a different angle. ‘I think we ought to turn a little here,’ I suggested. ‘Westward …’