Retribution Falls

Twenty-Seven

The Ketty Jay hung in the white wastes of the Hookhollows, a speck against the colossal stone slopes. There were no other craft to be seen or heard. Below them, there was only the bleak emptiness of the mist. It cloaked the lower reaches, shrouding canyons and defiles, hiding the feet of the mountains. Down there, in Rook’s Boneyard, the mist never cleared.

High above them were jagged, ice-tipped peaks. Higher still was a forbidding ceiling of drifting ash clouds, passing to the east, shedding a thin curtain of flakes as they went. A poisonous miasma, seeping from volcanic cracks and vents along the southern reaches of the mountain range. It was carried on the prevailing winds to settle onto the Blackendraft, the great ash flats, where it choked all life beneath it.

Frey sat in the pilot’s seat, staring down. Wondering whether it was worth it. Wondering whether they should just turn tail and run. Could he really get them out of this mess? This ragged collection of vagrants, pitted against some of the most powerful people in the land? In the end, did they even have a chance? What lay in that secret hideout that was so important it was worth all this?

Their victory against Trinica had buoyed him briefly, but the prospect of flying blind into Rook’s Boneyard had reawakened all the old doubts. Crake’s words rolled around in his head.

As a group, we’re rather easy to identify. Apart, they’ll probably never catch us. They’ll only get Frey.

Was it fair to risk them all, just to clear his own name? What if he sent them their separate ways, recrewed, and headed for New Vardia? He might make it there, across the seas, through the storms to the other side of the planet. Even in winter. It was possible.

Anything to avoid going down there, into the Boneyard.

Crake and Jez were with him in the cockpit. He needed Jez to navigate and he wanted Crake to help figure out the strange compass-like device, which nobody had been able to make head nor tail of yet. He’d banished the others to the mess to keep them from pestering him. Harkins and Pinn had been forced to leave their craft behind again, since it was too dangerous to travel in convoy, and they were insufferable back-seat pilots.

‘It’ll be dead reckoning once we’re down in the mist, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘So keep your course and speed steady and tell me if you change them.’

‘Right,’ he said, swallowing against a dry throat. He pulled his coat tighter around himself. He wasn’t sure if it was the hangover or the fear, but he couldn’t seem to get warm. He twisted round to glance at Crake, who was standing at his shoulder, holding the brass compass in both hands. ‘Is it doing anything yet?’

‘Doesn’t seem to be,’ said Crake.

‘Did you turn it on?’

Crake gave him a look. ‘If you think you know a way to “turn it on” that all of us have missed, do let me know.’

‘We don’t need your bloody sarcasm right now, Crake,’ Jez snapped, with a sharp and unfamiliar tone to her voice. Crake, rather than offering a rejoinder, subsided into bitter silence.

Frey sighed. The tension between these two wasn’t helping his nerves. It had been slowly curdling the atmosphere on the Ketty Jay ever since they returned from the ball at Scorchwood Heights.

‘Where’s all this damned mist coming from, anyway?’ he griped, to change the subject.

‘Hot air from vents to the west blowing over cold meltwater rivers running off the Eastern Plateau,’ Jez replied absently.

‘Oh.’

The conversation lapsed for a time.

‘Cap’n?’ Jez queried, when things had become sufficiently uncomfortable. ‘Are we going?’

Frey thought about sharing his idea with them. He could offer to cut them loose and go his own way. Wouldn’t that be the decent thing? Then nobody had to go down into the Boneyard. Least of all him.

But it all seemed a bit much to try and explain it now. Things had gone too far. He was resigned to it. Easier to go forward than back.

Besides, he thought, in a rare moment of careless bravado, nothing clears up a hangover like dying.

He arranged himself in his seat and released aerium gas from the ballast tanks, adding a little weight to the craft. The Ketty Jay began to sink into the mist.

The altimeter on the dashboard ticked steadily as they descended. The world dimmed and whitened beyond the windglass of the cockpit. The low hum of the electromagnets in the aerium engines was the only sound in the stillness.

‘Come to one thousand and hold steady,’ Jez instructed, hunched over her charts at her cramped desk. Her voice sounded hollow in the tomb-like atmosphere.

‘Crake?’

‘Still nothing.’

They’d puzzled over the compass for most of the day, but nobody had been able to decipher its purpose. The lack of markings to indicate North, South, East or West suggested that it wasn’t meant for navigation. The four needles, which seemed capable of swinging independently of one another, made things more confusing. And then there were the numbers. Nobody knew what they meant.

They’d established that each pair of number sets corresponded to a different arrow. The pair of number sets marked ‘1’ matched the arrow marked ‘1’. Each number was set on a rotating cylinder, like the readout of the altimeter, and presumably displayed the numbers zero to nine. The upper set of each pair had two digits, allowing a count from 00 to 99. The lower set had the same, but was preceded by a blank digit. All the numbers except this blank were set at zero.

Frey had the sense that this compass was vital to their survival in Rook’s Boneyard. They were in danger until they could work out what it did. But right now it didn’t seem to be doing anything.

Frey brought the Ketty Jay to a hover when his altimeter showed they were a klom above sea level, down among the feet of the mountains. The mist had thickened into a dense fog, and the cockpit had darkened to a chilly twilight. Frey knew better than to use headlamps, which would only dazzle them; but he turned on the Ketty Jay’s belly lights, hoping they’d provide some relief against the gloom. They did, but only a little.

‘Alright, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘Ahead slow, keep a heading of two-twenty, stay at this altitude.’

‘We’ll start at ten knots,’ he replied.

‘Right.’ Jez looked at her pocket watch. ‘Go.’

Frey eased the Ketty Jay forward, angling to the new heading. The sensation of flying blind, even at crawling speed, was terrifying. He suddenly found a new respect for Harkins, who had chased a Swordwing at full throttle through the mist after the destruction of the Ace of Skulls. That nervy, hangdog old beanpole was braver than he seemed.

For long minutes, they moved forward. Nobody said anything. Frey could feel a bead of sweat making its way from his hairline, across his temple. Jez called out a change of heading and altitude. Mechanically, he obeyed.

The pace was excruciating. The waiting was killing him. Something was bound to happen. He just wanted it over with.

‘I have something!’ Crake announced. Frey jumped in his seat at the sudden noise.

‘What is it?’

Crake was moving the compass around experimentally. ‘One of the needles is moving.’

Frey brought the Ketty Jay to a stop and took the compass from Crake. Jez glanced at her pocket watch again, mentally recording how far they had travelled on this new heading.

Crake was right. Though the other needles, numbered 2 to 4, were still dormant, the first needle was pointing in the direction that the Ketty Jay was heading. As Frey twisted it, the needle kept pointing in the same direction, no matter which way the compass was turned.

The number sets corresponding to the first needle had changed, too. Whereas all the others were still at zero, these had sprung into life. The topmost set read 91. The bottom set, the one preceded by a blank digit, read 30. They were not moving.

‘The top one started counting down from ninety-nine,’ said Crake. ‘The bottom one just clicked to thirty and stayed there.’

‘So what does it mean?’ Frey asked.

‘He doesn’t know what it means,’ Jez said.

‘Do you?’ Crake snapped.

Jez turned around in her chair, removed her hairband and smoothed her hair back into her customary ponytail again. ‘I’ve some idea. The topmost digits were counting down when we were moving, and now they’re not. I’d guess that they show the distance we are from whatever the arrow is pointing at.’

‘So what is the arrow pointing at?’ Crake asked, rather angry that he hadn’t worked it out first.

‘Something ninety-one metres ahead of us,’ Frey replied helpfully. ‘So now what? Can we go around it?’

‘I’d rather not deviate from the charts if we possibly can,’ said Jez. ‘They’re very precise.’

‘Alright,’ Frey replied. ‘Then we go very, very slowly, and let’s see what’s up ahead. Crake, read out the numbers.’

He settled back into his seat and pushed the Ketty Jay forward at minimum speed. Crake stood behind him, eyes flicking between the compass and the windglass of the cockpit, where there was still nothing but fog to be seen.

‘Needle’s holding steady. The other set of numbers is still at thirty. The top one is counting down . . . Eighty . . . Seventy . . . Sixty . . . No change anywhere else . . . Fifty . . . Forty . . .’

Frey’s mind was crowded with possibilities, tumbling over each other in a panic. What was it that waited there for them? The entrance to the hideout? Or something altogether deadlier?

‘Thirty . . . Twenty . . .’

He was so taut that his muscles ached, poised to throw the Ketty Jay into full reverse the instant that anything emerged from the murk.

‘Ten . . . Five . . . Zero.’

‘Zero?’ Frey asked.

‘Five . . . Ten . . . The needle has changed direction. Now it’s pointing behind us. Twenty . . . Twenty-five.’

‘Let me have a look,’ Frey said, and snatched the compass from Crake. The needle was pointing directly behind them, and the numbers were counting up towards ninety-nine again.

‘Um,’ he said. Then he handed the compass back to the daemonist. ‘Well. That’s a puzzle.’

‘Perhaps those numbers didn’t mean distance after all,’ Crake suggested churlishly, for Jez’s benefit. Jez didn’t reply. He went back to reading them off. ‘Ninety . . . Ninety-five . . . Now the numbers have reset to zero, and the first needle has joined the other three.’

‘I suppose that means we’ve gone out of range.’ Frey suggested.

‘But there wasn’t anything there!’

‘That’s fine with me.’

Jez called out a new heading, and Frey took it.

‘You might see a—’ she began, when Frey yelled in alarm as the flank of a mountain emerged from the fog. He banked away from it and it slipped by to their starboard side.

‘—mountain,’ Jez continued, ‘but there’ll be a defile running out of it.’

‘I didn’t see any defile!’ Frey complained, annoyed because he’d suffered a scare.

‘Cap’n, I’m navigating blind here. Accuracy is gonna be less than perfect. Pull back closer to the mountain flank.’

Frey reluctantly did so. The mountain loomed into view again. Jez left her station to look through the windglass.

‘There it is,’ she said.

Frey saw it too: a knife-slash in the mountain, forty metres wide, with uneven walls.

‘I don’t much like the look of that,’ he said.

‘Drop to nine hundred, take us in,’ Jez told him mercilessly.

Frey eased the Ketty Jay around and into the defile. The mountains pressed in hard, narrowing the world on either side. Shadowy walls lay close enough to be seen, even in the mist. Frey unconsciously hunched down in his seat. He concentrated on keeping a steady line.

‘More contacts,’ said Crake. ‘Two of them.’

‘Two needles moving?’

‘Yes. Both of them pointing directly ahead.’

‘Give me the numbers.’

Crake licked dry lips and read them off. ‘First needle: distance ninety and descending. The other number reads fifty-seven and holding steady. Second needle: distance . . . ninety also, now. That’s descending too. The other number reads minus forty-three. Holding steady.’

‘Minus forty-three?’ Jez asked.

‘A little minus sign just appeared where that blank digit was.’

Jez thought for a moment. ‘They’re giving us relative altitude,’ she said. ‘The first set of numbers show the distance we are from the object. The second show how far it is above or below us.’

Frey caught on. ‘So then the ones ahead of us . . . one is fifty-seven metres above us and the other is forty-three metres below?’

‘That’s why we didn’t see anything the last time,’ Jez said. ‘We passed by it. It was thirty metres above us.’

Frey felt a mixture of trepidation and relief at that. It was reassuring to believe that they’d figured out the compass and could avoid these unseen things, at least. But somehow, knowing where they were made them seem all the more threatening. It meant they were really there. Whatever they were.

‘Crake, keep reading out the distances,’ he said. Crake obliged.

‘Twenty . . . ten . . . zero . . . needle’s swung the other way . . . ten . . . twenty . . .’

Frey had him continue counting until they were out of range and the compass reset again.

‘Okay, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘The bottom’s going to drop out of this defile any minute. We come down to seven hundred and take a heading of two-eighty.’

Frey grunted in acknowledgement. There was enough space between the mountain walls for a much bigger craft to pass through, but the constant need to prevent the Ketty Jay from drifting was grinding away at his nerve and giving him a headache. He dearly wished he hadn’t indulged quite so heavily the night before.

Just as Jez had predicted, the defile ended suddenly. It fed into a much larger chasm, far too vast to see the other end. The fog was thinner here, stained with a sinister red light from below. Red shadows spread into the cockpit.

‘Is that lava down there?’ Frey asked.

Jez craned over from the navigator’s station and looked down. ‘That’s lava. Drop to seven hundred.’

‘Bringing us closer to the lava.’

‘I’m just following the charts, Cap’n. You want to find your own way in this mist, be my guest.’

Frey was stung by that, but he kept his mouth shut and began to descend. The fog thinned and the red glow grew in strength until they were bathed in it. The temperature rose in the cockpit, drawing sweat from their brows. They could feel the radiant heat of the lava river flowing beneath them. Pinn came up from the mess to complain that it was getting stuffy down there, but Frey barked at him to get out. For once he did as he was told.

Frey added aerium at seven hundred metres to halt their descent, and pushed onward along the length of the chasm. Visibility was better now. The mist offered hints of their surroundings. It was possible to see the gloomy immensity of the mountains around them, if only as smudged impressions. To descend a few dozen metres more would bring the lava river into detail: the rolling, sludgy torrent of black and red and yellow. The heat down there would be unimaginable.

‘Contacts,’ said Crake again. ‘Ahead and to the left a little. We—oh, wait. There’s another. Two of them. Three. Three of them.’

‘There’s three?’

‘Four,’ Crake corrected. He showed Frey the compass. The needles were in a fan, all pointing roughly ahead. Frey frowned as he looked at it, and for a moment his vision wavered out of focus. He blinked, and the feeling passed. He swore to himself that he’d never again drink excessively the night before doing anything life-threatening.

‘Any of them directly in front of us?’

‘One’s pretty close. Twenty metres below. Oh!’

‘Don’t just say “oh!” ’ Frey snapped. ‘Oh, what?’

‘One of the needles moved . . . now it’s changed back . . . now it’s gone back again.’

‘What you mean, it changed?’ Frey demanded. He wiped sweat from his brow. All this tension was making him feel sick.

‘It moved! What do you think I mean?’ Crake replied in exasperation. ‘Can you stop a moment?’

‘Well, why’s it changing? Is there something there or not?’ Frey was getting flustered now. He felt a fluttering sensation of panic come over him.

‘There’s more than four of those things out there,’ said Jez, who had got up from her station and was looking at the compass. ‘I’d guess it keeps changing the needles to show us the nearest four.’

‘There’s one thirty metres ahead!’ Crake cried.

‘But is it above us or below us?’ Frey said.

‘Forty metres above.’

‘Then why tell me?’ he shouted.

‘Because you told me to! ’ Crake shouted back. ‘Will you stop this damn craft?’

But Frey didn’t want to. He wanted to get this over with. He wanted to be past these invisible enemies and away from this place. There was a terrible feeling of wrongness stealing over him, a numbness prickling up from his toes. He felt flustered and harassed.

‘What the bloody shit is going on, Crake?’ he snarled, leaning forward to try and see what, if anything, was above them. ‘Someone talk to me! Where are they?’

‘There’s one, there’s three in front of us, one behind us now . . . umm . . . two above, thirty and twenty metres, there’s . . .’ Crake swore. ‘The numbers keep changing because you’re moving! How am I supposed to read them out fast enough?’

‘Just tell me if we’re going to hit anything, Crake! It’s pretty damn simple!’

Jez was staring in bewilderment. ‘Will you two calm down? You’re acting like a pair of—’

But then Frey recoiled from the window with a yell. ‘There’s something out there!’

‘What was it?’ Jez asked.

‘We’ve got one twenty . . . ten metres ahead . . . it’s below us though . . .’ Crake was saying.

‘It looked like . . . I don’t know, it looked like it had a face,’ Frey was babbling. His stomach griped and roiled. He could smell his own sweat, and he felt filthy. He wiped at the back of his hands to try and clean them a little, but all it did was smear more dirt into his skin. ‘The ghosts!’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s the ghosts of Rook’s Boneyard!’

‘There aren’t any ghosts, Cap’n,’ Jez said, but her face was red in the lava-light and her voice sounded strange and echoey. Her plain features seemed sly. Did she know something he didn’t? A blast of maniacal laughter came from the mess, Pinn laughing hysterically at something. It sounded like the cackle of a conspirator.

‘Of course there are ghosts!’ Frey turned his attention back to the windglass, trying to will the mist aside. ‘Everyone says.’

‘Two of them are behind us now,’ Crake droned in the background. ‘One ahead, one passing to the side.’

‘Which side?’

‘Does it matter?’

Something swept past the windglass, a stir in the mist. Frey saw the stretched shape of a human form and distorted, ghastly features. He shied back from the windglass with a gasp.

‘What is it?’

‘Didn’t you see it?’

‘I didn’t see anything!’

Frey’s vision was slipping in and out of focus, and refused to stay steady. He burped in his throat, and tasted acid and rotten eggs.

‘Cap’n . . .’ said Crake.

‘I think something’s wrong,’ Frey murmured.

‘Cap’n . . . the second set of numbers . . .’

‘What second set of—’

‘The numbers! They’re counting up from minus twenty towards zero! It’s coming at us from below!’

‘Cap’n! You’re drifting off altitude! You’re diving!’ Jez cried.

Frey saw the altimeter sliding down and grabbed the controls, pulling the Ketty Jay level.

‘It’s still coming!’ Crake shrieked.

‘Move!’ Jez cried, and Frey boosted the engines. The Ketty Jay surged forward, and a split second later there was a deafening explosion outside, slamming against the hull and throwing Crake and Jez across the cabin. The craft heeled hard, swinging to starboard, and Frey fought with the controls as they were propelled blindly into the red murk. The Ketty Jay felt sluggish and wounded. Frey caught a glimpse of the compass on the floor, its needles spinning and switching crazily.

They’re all around us!

Crake started shrieking. ‘Daemons! There are daemons at the windows!’ Frey’s vision blurred and stayed blurred. There seemed to be no strength in his limbs.

‘Cap’n! Above and to starboard!’ Jez shouted.

Frey looked, and saw a round shadow in the mist. Growing, darkening as it approached. A ghost. A great black ghost.

No. A sphere. A metal sphere studded with spikes.

A floating mine.

Jez grabbed the flight stick and wrenched the Ketty Jay to port. Frey fell bonelessly out of his seat. Crake screamed.

There was another explosion. Then blackness, and silence.