Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (45 page)

Gargaron frowned. ‘Lose anything
of importance?’

‘
Amongst some poultices and my
randweed creams, Wrenbug’s bottle of Skinkk blood were cracked in
two.’ He looked over at Gargaron. ‘It were seeped out before I
discovered the bottle were in pieces.’

Gargaron thought of Drenvel’s
Bane. ‘A shame, I guess.’ Though surprisingly he found he did not
much care now for the so-called legendary weapon. ‘An important
substance for your concoctions, I assume.’

‘
Aye. Though I were thinking more
of your war hammer.’

Gargaron shrugged. ‘It matters
not. I doubt now such blood would have helped us bring back
Drenvel’s Bane anyway. I feel Hor the Cutter took its secret to his
grave.’

Silence again between them.
Gargaron watched Hawkmoth continue with his sewing. There were
something calming, almost enchanting, about someone going about a
menial task. A monotonous, repeated chore conducted with calm
concentration, patience and care.

‘
You mind if I ask you something,’
Gargaron said.

Hawkmoth did not pause in his work. ‘Go
ahead.’

‘
The star beast, Jhegoth. You
claimed it be a witch ally.’

Hawkmoth sewed up the last of the
hole in his pack. ‘I believed as such, aye. And I know what you’re
going to say. If the Harbingers be the pawns of witches, why then
were they attacking it?’

‘
Aye.’

Hawkmoth sighed as he held his
pack at arm’s length, studying his patch job. ‘Believe it or not,
giant, I have been sitting here puzzling over that very same
problem. I have not all the answers, you must realise. But perhaps
Jhegoth has turned rogue, or done something to anger its masters. I
have long kept my eye on Jhegoth whenever it has arisen from its
hiding places. It is not of our world and I have feared for many a
year that it may try one day to sully our lands, to make them
unlivable to all but itself. And so perhaps in these days of Ruin,
while the boom-shakes do their worst, while any survivors stumble
about the lands shell-shocked and disorganised, Jhegoth has peaked
out of his hole and observed this sudden power vacuum and as such
has decided to weigh in on the current conflict in order to claim
its prize. That being Cloudfyre. And perhaps the witches have seen
this and will not stand for it and have thus dispatched its
mightiest Darklings to take it out of the picture.’

Gargaron considered this and both
he and Hawkmoth fell again to silence. For a few moments, the
distant snowcapped ranges were seen briefly above the cloud banks.
As he watched them, Gargaron considered what the crabman had
relayed to him. The story of the Elven woman and her sudden death.
He thought about telling Hawkmoth, to fish for his thoughts… but
ultimately he decided against it.

‘
Anyhow, giant,’ Hawkmoth said,
packing away his bone needle and twine. ‘You ought to rest while
you can. Once we reach the mountains, the climb is long and arduous
and biting cold as I remember it. And once we find Sanctuary, I
dare say we will have a fight on our hands to claim Mama Vekh. Best
rest and recuperate now before the next leg of our
journey.’

9

Once Gargaron had left him,
Hawkmoth gazed ahead in deep thought. He could not see the mountain
range before him for the rain clouds were thick and dark and
clotted, yet he could sense it there. As the garetrain sped onwards
he could not help but consider Sanctuary. It had been many a year
since he had left there. But he recalled the day clearly enough.
For he had been most unceremoniously booted out. Thrown out if he
remembered rightly. Marched out across Sanctuary’s forecourts by
Sanctuary guardsmen, dressed in their robes of deep stone-blue, and
in front of his Brothers, ridiculed and spat on, kicked and
slapped, and warned that if he ever returned he would be strung up
on the forecourt wall for all to see and he would have his belly
cut and splayed and the alpine buzzards invited to peck his out
intestines.

The memory still hurt. After all
this time. But he would not have changed it. He had met Eve, and
she had taught him love, true love. And he had truly lived life
with her, where as in his days residing behind the walls of
Sanctuary, he had known naught but a void in his heart.

1

WHEN Melai awoke, she sat up
shivering, realising the garetrain had stopped. There were a frost
upon the windows, and inside the cabin a deep cold lingered, the
like she had never known. Outside she saw frozen, barren marshland
stretching off into deep fog.

Melai stood and
flew across to the door and pushed it open. Its brass handle were
so biting cold to the touch it made her flinch. She peered up and
down the aisle. ‘
Gargaron?
’ she called. A cloudy
vapour puffed from her mouth. ‘
Locke?
’ No-one called back.
‘
Does anyone hear
me?
’

It were silent. She vacated her
cabin and moved down to third carriage, supposing Gargaron were
down there asleep beside his Grimah—the sleeping berths were far
too small for his size after all. She found carriage three vacant.
No Razor, no Grimah, no Zebra. No-one.

‘
Gargaron
,’ she called again, growing
ever more concerned. ‘
Can anyone hear
me?
’

Again no reply.

She turned and
strode back through carriage two, rapping on cabin doors as she
went, calling, ‘
Locke? Haitharath?
Anyone?
’ She did the same through carriage
one, her anxiety building. This were not a place in which she
wished to be abandoned.

When she reached the mighty
locomotive she found the driving compartment vacant but the engine
still thrumming. She heard distant voices. Holding her arms about
herself for warmth, she moved to front of cockpit. She were too
short to see out the forward windows unless she fluttered up onto
the console. So she spread her wings, flew to console, perched
herself and peered out.

She saw Gargaron, Locke, and
Haitharath. They were poised at the edge of a mighty ravine where
the rail line crossed a long stone bridge.

2

Outside, Melai stood by Gargaron
overlooking the chasm. Wind whistled and moaned and the way forward
were shrouded in a green fog. Melai saw here their
conundrum.

Part of the stone bridge had
collapsed and its beam-braces gone down with it. Between where
Melai now stood and the remaining span of standing bridge, there
were a gulf that must’ve stretched up to a hundred feet. Without
braces to support the railcourse, the beam thinned and eventually
became nothing but a waving, wispy green tendril on the wind. When
Hawkmoth returned to the driver’s compartment and switched off the
garetrain engine the beam sizzled and spat and faded slowly to
nothing.

From here, their garetrain would go no
further.

3

Far below, a
misty river wound through rocky stacks where foaming rapids crashed
and roared. The ravine walls were sheer, too steep to climb,
especially for those such as their steeds; and the opposite wall
would have proven particularly challenging for
any
soul for it were curved inwards
and climbing it would have potentially brought down the overhanging
lip.

‘
An interesting dilemma we have
before us,’ Hawkmoth spoke, gazing out to where the bridge edge
hung in the fog.

‘
Can you not summon some beast of
the air?’ Locke enquired of Hawkmoth. ‘To lift us all
across?’

Hawkmoth grinned. Perhaps at the
childlike innocence of the request, a belief that he, Hawkmoth,
could move mountains on a simple command. ‘I’m afraid I
cannot.’

Gargaron looked eastways and
westways as the ravine ran. He fetched his map from his pack.
Searching for an alternative crossing point. ‘Perhaps we might walk
either that way or this, and see if we do not come to another
bridge,’ he recommended. ‘Or someplace where the cliffs are not so
sheer.’ On his map the ravine were marked by a small, meandering
blue line. There were not even the bridge in front of them marked
here. But instead one marked perhaps a hundred miles to their east.
He glanced up at Hawkmoth. ‘If this map be accurate, there be a
second bridge in that direction.’ He pointed.

‘
Aye, Choner’s Crossing. And two
day’s travel we will have lost reaching it,’ Hawkmoth
warned.

Across the ravine, as the fog
thinned out, they saw a tall statue of what Hawkmoth claimed were
the depiction of Pukaya, the river nymph. And beyond her, the
railcourse line-braces wound up into the lower foothills of the
Bonewreckers; so close and yet so far. The sky roaming slopes of
the mountains themselves were still hidden beyond cloud banks but
here were already an altitude where trees were becoming scarce and
the few that had settled amidst the shale and slate and stone
looked thin and crooked and lacking in foliage.

In the end it were Melai who
voiced a solution. ‘Why do we not construct a skywalk from here to
the standing portion of the bridge?’

The others looked at her. Gargaron
were about to ask where she proposed to source materials for such a
span when she pointed over her shoulder at garetrain.

‘
The carriages?’ she asked. ‘Can
we not break them down and utilise their materials?’

4

Hawkmoth may not have had an
ability to summon flying beasts of the mountains but his staff had
a keen knack of being able to dismantle things neatly; or at least
it could melt rivets and bolts and welds without too much
disruption to the various panels that made up this garetrain’s
carriages.

Gargaron and Locke lugged as much
as they could to ravine’s edge and as they worked Locke broke into
song; it helped pass time and helped distract his team from their
labour. These were songs of the sea, he told them, songs from days
when workers would haul nets in from the surf, singing as they
plucked spine fish from nets.

‘
So, you do sing?’ Gargaron said
to him.

‘
Aye. And mostly without a
lute.’

Gargaron smiled. Though no-one
berated Locke for singing. Despite what he claimed about his
singing prowess, he were not bad of voice, and his stirring tunes
helped elevate group mood as the cold mountain air did its best to
dent their morale.

5

Once they had dismantled much of
carriages two and three, their next conundrum were how to go about
suspending the various pieces above the span. Locke suggested
sending his Zebra across. He pointed at the rope coiled and strung
from rear of Razor’s saddle. ‘She could slither down slope with
your rope in her jaws, and up pylon,’ he explained.

‘
Does she know her knots?’
Hawkmoth enquired.

‘
Knots? Are you pulling my leg?
You ever seen a serpent tie knots?’

‘
Exactly my point. How will your
dear Zebra tie off the rope?’ Hawkmoth wanted to know.

‘
Ah,’ Locke said. ‘I see. Fair
point.’

The simpler solution, as Melai saw
it, were to have herself fly the windy gulf between ravine’s
precarious edge to the remaining portion of bridge, carrying with
her the length of rope.

So it were agreed upon. She flew
across, the wind buffeting her as she fed the rope through a
segment of bridge. Here she took up rope’s loose end and carried it
back to her companions. One end were now pulled through the iron
grill of the garetrain, and the other through the bridge. Once both
ends were tethered to one another, a vast rope loop had been
established.

Hawkmoth now prepared to climb
across to the bridge, testing first the rope’s integrity. Then,
with his staff strung across his back, he sat on edge of ravine,
and clasping the two lengths of rope he swung out over the drop and
arm over arm pulled himself across to the bridge.

He were panting by the time he
climbed up onto platform and sat there, his legs dangling over the
ironwork, catching his breath. He were almost lost from view beyond
the green mist; naught but a ghostly figure from the point of view
of Gargaron and Locke and Melai, and them naught but wraiths to
him.

He called back. ‘I am ready
here.’

Gargaron and Locke secured the
first segment of dismantled carriage via metal hooks (hooks that
Locke had fashioned from carriage scrap) to the rope. And once
done, with Hawkmoth hauling rope hand over hand from his end, and
Gargaron hauling hand over hand from their end, they pulleyed the
steel panel across to bridge.

And so began construction of
Melai’s skywalk. It took much of the afternoon for the pieces to be
lifted and pushed into place, for Hawkmoth to meld them together
with either bespoke metal clamps, or by melting the edge of one
segment to the other through superheated flame squirted from
Lancsh, the demon face on his staff. The final touch were to add
support struts beneath their skywalk, two held in place by bridge’s
stone pylon, and two more dug in against the rocky ravine wall,
Hawkmoth hanging precariously firstly from the bridge pylon to weld
strut in place, and then from the ravine side of the footbridge to
dig the strut into the cliff face. Then he imbued the entire
construction with a strength enchantment.