The Tree of Story (14 page)

“Where are we now?” Will asked, gazing around.

“We’ve gone where the Fair Folk went,” Rowen said.

“Where is that?”

Rowen didn’t answer.

Will glanced up at the sky. The low, dark clouds were churning, shredding apart and fusing again, as if a storm was brewing within them. Here on the ground the air was still and quiet.

He turned to Rowen. “Do you recognize this place?”

“No, but I think we’re on one of the paths the Fair Folk take when they conceal themselves. One of their hidden ways.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t,” she said, and then peered down at the thin film of water at their feet. “But I don’t think we can go back.”

“This place we have come to,” Shade said. “It is no longer my world.”

“What do you mean, Shade?” Will asked. “This isn’t the Realm?”

“It is … hard for me to find the words,” the wolf said. “Where I come from, everything has a voice. The sunlight, the rain, the wind in the leaves. They are all part of a great speaking, and so am I. Here, that voice is very hard to hear. We are in the Realm, but we are not.”

Will looked up and down the road. In both directions it ran straight until it vanished in the haze. Then he glimpsed a small green structure by the roadside and half hidden in the trees. “Let’s find out what that is,” he said. He set off, and Rowen and Shade followed.

The little building, whatever it was, turned out to have a roof and three walls, but was open on the side facing the road. The green paint was chipped and flaking. There was a bench inside the structure, also green, and a few scraps of paper and other things littering the dirt floor.

Shade sniffed at the bench and the walls. “Someone has been here. Not long ago,” he said.

“What happened to the other wall?” Rowen said, glancing around inside. “Who would build a house like this and why?”

“It’s not a house,” Will said. “It’s a bus shelter.”

“A what?”

Will didn’t answer. He toed the trash on the floor of the shelter, recognized a cigarette butt, a bottle cap, broken bits of amber glass that had probably come from a beer bottle. Rowen bent and picked up something from under the bench. It looked like a crumpled ball of paper, but it crinkled noisily as she unfolded it. The paper was transparent.

Rowen’s brow furrowed. “See-through paper,” she murmured wonderingly. “But there’s nothing written on it. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Will nodded. Rowen was holding an ordinary piece of plastic wrapping.

“This isn’t some hidden path,” he said. “The mirror didn’t bring us to the Fair Folk—it took us back to my world. This is the Untold.”

Rowen gaped at him. “Are you sure?”

Will gestured to the scrap of plastic Rowen was still holding.

“There’s a lot of that kind of thing in my world. I don’t recognize this place, but that doesn’t mean anything. We could be somewhere far from where I live.”

“But if we’ve crossed over into the Untold, why would the mirror … why would the Fair Folk bring us here?”

Will had no answer.

They left the shelter and kept on along the road, which rose slightly and then began to bend around a curve. The haze in the air had thinned somewhat and now they could
see tall, bluish rectangular shapes rising in the distance beyond the road and the trees.

“Are those towers?” Rowen asked. “They’re so tall.”

Will nodded. “That’s what a city looks like in my world,” he said.

“Should we stay on the road, then, Will Lightfoot?” Shade asked. “You told me once there were few wolves where you come from, and most people had never seen one. If this road takes us to a city of your world, is that a place we want to be?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “There’s something strange about all this. We should’ve seen more people by now. More buildings. Cars. Road signs. I think we should just keep going until we know more about where we are.”

Not long afterward the road plunged into a cutting between two high stone walls overarched by a wooden bridge. The cutting was filled with deep shadow and at its edge they halted instinctively. If some threat came at them in that narrow space, they would be trapped.

Without having to discuss it, Shade took the lead. Rowen and Will followed him warily. The paving stones underfoot were even more cracked and uneven than the rest of the road they had walked, but they hurried along faster than ever, eager to reach the light at the far end.

When they were halfway through the cutting, Shade pulled to a halt and lifted his head.

“Something is coming along the road,” he said, “from the direction we came. I hear wheels, and hoofs.”

8

A
S ANOTHER DAY DAWNED
pale and cold over the Valley of Fire, Corr Madoc’s five remaining skyships set out for the city of Adamant.

Finn stood with Corr and Doctor Alazar on the bridge at the stern of the flagship. On the long main deck below them, sixty armoured Stormriders stood hunched against the relentless wind. At least twice that number were crowded into the hold below. The other ships were filled with men, too, and with Nonn’s folk. This was the long-awaited day for the Ironwise, as well.

Corr scowled into the blast of the wind. His scarred face was a ghastly, mottled colour, but he showed no signs of fatigue or pain. Thanks to the
gaal
, Finn thought, which was also coursing in his own blood. He could not use his right arm—it was still a dead weight in its sling—but he had been
taught to wield a sword with either hand. He could still be helpful. As long as there was fever iron to sustain him.

Finn glanced at Ord, the golem, who stood to one side of the bridge, the same impassive look on his grey features as always. If the ship fell to pieces and they all plummeted to their deaths, the expression on the clay man’s face would not change, Finn thought.

I’ve become like him
.

The ships were sailing above the low cloud cover to conceal their approach from any watchers below. As the sun rose, it flared like a newly kindled fire at the edge of the earth. Looking west, Finn saw snow-capped peaks marching off into shadowed lands where night was not yet over. To the north, gleaming white snowfields rolled away, seemingly forever.

“It reminds me of the deserts in my homeland,” Alazar said to Finn, shielding his eyes against the blinding white glare of the snow. “You could travel for weeks without seeing anything but sand.”

Since they’d set out, Finn had avoided speaking with the doctor. He didn’t want to see the concern and pity in the older man’s eyes.

“Balor told me that in the Sunlands you were the king’s physician,” Finn said.

The doctor nodded. “I entered Prince’s service when he was a still a boy. The old king, his father, was terrified his son would contract the same disease that afflicted him: leprosy. And so the prince was never allowed out of the palace, and he yearned to know about the world outside its walls. For that he had to rely on what stories I could tell him of my own few travels. He spoke often of the great journeys he and I would make together when he was older and stronger, and I encouraged him, thinking that these were no more than a boy’s dreams.

“Then came the day his father went hunting and was
unhorsed and killed by a lion. Suddenly the boy was king. I saw very little of him after that. It was as though he’d been walled in by counsellors and petitioners. And then one day I was summoned to the young king’s chamber. He showed me a pale lesion he had found on his neck, and I knew that his father’s fear had come true. I told him that I would do all I could to cure him, that I would seek out the finest physicians in the Realm. But he shook his head. He said he was releasing me from my duties as royal physician. ‘I will never make those journeys we used to speak of,’ he said, ‘and so I ask you to make them for both of us. My only command is that one day you return and bring me back tales of all the wonders you’ve seen.’ And then he put on a golden mask shaped like the sun—the same mask his father had worn to hide his own disfigurement. And that was the last time I saw his face.”

The doctor sighed and glanced away.

“I think he wished to spare me pain,” he went on. “The pain of watching the disease take him a little at a time. I did not want to leave, but it was his command. So I left his service and went in search of the Realm’s wonders.”

He gazed out over the rolling white fields.

“Like snow,” he said.

Finn was startled to feel tears sting his eyes. He had thought the fever iron had killed any feeling in him other than cold rage, but the sight of the snowfields had stirred something. He had believed the Valley of Fire lay at the uttermost edge of the world, but now he knew the Realm went on past this hellish place, on and on into lands he would never see or know. It might be that the Realm went on without end, and if it did, then maybe no one, not even the Night King, could ever conquer all of it.

“So one day you’ll be leaving the Errantry and returning home?” he asked the doctor, keeping his face turned away.

“That was my king’s command,” Alazar said. “And I think now, after all of
this
, I can return with enough to tell.”

A Stormrider who had been leaning over the prow of the ship looked to the bridge and shouted something Finn did not catch over the wind’s roar. Corr, still intent on the chart, straightened and barked orders. Men clambered into the rigging and the mordog at the helm eased off the huge treadle at his feet. There was a rumble and hiss from below, steam shot up in plumes from gratings in the deck, and all at once they were descending. The roiling cloudscape seemed to be rushing up to meet them.

Corr turned to Finn and Alazar.

“This is it,” he said, gripping his brother’s shoulder. “You and the doctor had best keep a hand on the rail. The ride down will be bumpy.”

He had just finished speaking when the ships plunged back into the roaring wet and gloom of the clouds, into the reek of ash and sulphur.

The flagship shuddered and bucked as it descended. The timbers rattled and groaned under Finn’s feet, and he wondered whether the ship would hold together long enough for them to reach Adamant.

All at once the planks seemed to drop away beneath him. His stomach lurched and he feared they were falling out of the sky. But in the next instant his knees buckled under him as the ship rose again, reassuringly solid, if shaky, under his feet.

“Heated air from vents in the ground below,” Corr shouted in his ear. “Shakes the hulls something fierce, but not to worry. It means the ride is nearly over, brother. We’re close to the city now.”

Through a sudden gap in the clouds Finn caught a glimpse of the grey, barren valley still far below, and what looked like a path or road snaking through a field of boulders, but there
was no sign of Adamant. Then a shadow crossed a thick bank of cloud beneath them and Finn looked up to see the hull of one of the other skyships appearing out of the mists.

Like the flagship, this ship and all the others had the same odd iron latticework that projected from the hull at a point midway between the rail and the keel. These were the lightning collectors that the dwarf-smiths had fashioned. The latticework ran along the hull, tapering to a single dark band when it reached the prow with its figurehead of an eagle. Finn did not understand how Nonn’s folk had contrived such a thing, but the skyships harnessed the lightning, or the invisible, nameless power that sparked it, and held it in reserve until needed. When let loose by the gunner in the prow, a white-hot bolt of lightning would lance from the eagle’s eye sockets.

The hull of a third ship appeared out of the mist just then and Finn knew the other two could not be far away. They were falling into formation now behind the flagship.

The mist suddenly lifted away. The roar of the wind fell off at the same instant and the ship’s terrible shuddering ceased. They had dropped through the floor of the clouds, and the long trough of the Valley of Fire lay revealed beneath them.

Corr turned and beamed at Finn.

“There it is, brother.”

Adamant had been built in the crater left by a great rock that fell from the sky ages ago, and that is what Finn saw at first: just another of the smoking holes in the earth that dotted the valley. But as they drew closer, he could make out more detail. All along the rim of the crater an earthen ring-wall had been raised, thirty feet high or more and topped with a stone battlement that bristled with huge spikes. A tall iron door was the only sign of a way through the great wall. The
city itself lay within this fortified circle, but they were still too far off to see over the rim of the wall.