The Blood Debt Part 18

*I think this is an opportunity we'd be rash to dismiss,' she said, shoving his hand aside. *With Sal coming one way and us coming the other -'

*We might find ourselves holding nothing but air.'

*So we do nothing?' Frustration flared into anger. She felt that he was dismissing her suggestion without properly considering it. *We expect Sal and Skender to do it all on their own while we twiddle our thumbs in Laure?'

*That's not what I'm suggesting in the slightest. Yes, we go to Laure, but don't think I intend to leave it at that. Remember: get there and we'll have the resources of a small city behind us. Doesn't that sound a little more appealing, my friend?'

She stared at him, trying to tell if he was fobbing her off with empty words. His deeply etched features seemed sincere enough.

*I am duty bound to do the Alcaide's will, as channelled through his loyal representative.' Kail's nostrils flared. *But I can promise you this: I'll also do my level best to ensure that Sal and Skender - and the Homunculus, if it matters to you so much - aren't left in the lurch out here. Do you believe me?'

She did, although she didn't want to admit it. It unnerved her that he could so easily turn her around when she had been so sure of herself. There was something about him that made her believe him.

Maybe, she told herself, it's just because what he says makes sense. If only Marmion had half his brains ...

*Very well,' she said. *I'll take your word on this. But if you let me down, you'll regret it.'

Without a trace of irony, he said, *I'm sure I would.' His gaze left her and took in the distant smudge that was their destination.

Shilly reconciled herself to the change of plans and did her best to swallow the worry she felt for Sal. She was still angry at him for leaving so precipitously. Why couldn't they have gone to rescue Skender's mother together? What was the big rush? The temptation to turn her frustration back on herself or those around her was very strong.

We'll be back for you soon, she called to him, although she knew her mental voice went no further than the inside of her skull. Be safe until then, my love.

The Divide.

*Of all the new creatures contending with Humanity for dominion of the Earth, the man'kin are the worst. Fashioned after us, yet owning none of our civilisation, they deserve only the hammer and the chisel. Talk to one at your peril, for lies spill from their lips instead of breath.'

THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 177.

J.

ust don't fall.

Simple words; an even simpler instruction; but surprisingly hard to obey when strapped to a wing that seemed to have a mind of its own. Sal opened his eyes a crack and instantly squeezed them shut again. The ground was spinning around him. He didn't think it was supposed to be doing that - and he was certain he didn't want to be so close to it while it happened.

*Can I help?' He yelled the words over the sound of the wind flapping and snapping past the wing.

*I don't know,' Skender yelled in his ear, flinging his weight from side to side. *This is harder than it looked.' Sal heard his old friend's desperation as clearly as he heard the wind. Each movement seemed to overcorrect a previous mistake. It was impossible to find an even keel.

Sal hung on to the straps for all he was worth. The Change thrummed through the charms on the wing, sending a strong vibration up his spine. He sought a way to sh.o.r.e up the charms, since he couldn't do anything for Skender at the control end. If it had been a case of brute force alone, he might not feel so useless.

But that route proved futile. The charms were elegantly fashioned, intricate things, relying on balance and delicate synergies to keep gravity at bay. His blunt intervention might unravel them all and send him and Skender to their deaths. If Shilly had been there, maybe ...

He dared another glimpse. The Divide cliffs were horrifically near. Skender avoided colliding with an upthrust stone spar by bare centimetres, and then only to plunge even closer to the ground. They lurched upwards like a drunken bee, almost tipping over in the process.

Sal had to think of something, fast. He could a.s.sist neither Skender nor the wing itself, but there had to be another way. The Change was in everything; surely there was something else it could act on to help them out of this predicament.

Of course. He took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts.

It was hard to ignore the chaotic tumbling - or the fear that they might be dashed to the ground at any moment - but he did his best. He needed to focus on the world in a less emotional way. He needed to become part of it, to insinuate himself into it as he had insinuated himself into the mind of the seagull over the beach in Fundelry, days ago. He felt the sun's warmth beaming down on him, the bluff solidity of the Divide's southern wall nearby, the erratic s.n.a.t.c.hing of the wind at his hair ...

The wind.

He imagined being back on the vivid beach, down in the core of himself where ocean and bedrock met, and took what he needed. It was more than he had taken for many years, and he bent it to his will in ways he hadn't attempted since leaving the Haunted City: the Change came with seductive ease, fuelled by a desperation as strong now as it had been then. Power crackled through him like a bushfire through scrub.

The world responded instantly. The wind stiffened around them, filling the wing and lifting it higher.

Skender took advantage of the sudden development. The wing stabilised and its movements became more confident. Sal dared to open his eyes and found himself almost level with the top of the Divide, wobbling over the pitted, scarred ground below. He was far too high to feel comfortable, but at least they weren't about to crash headlong into solid rock. Giving Skender breathing s.p.a.ce in which to recover his wits was the important thing.

Sal's old friend gasped in his ear. *Did you -?'

He got no further. The air temperature suddenly dropped. The sun vanished behind a cloud that blossomed out of nowhere directly overhead, as deep and black as night. Lightning flashed, blinding Sal and deafening him with its thunder. The wind that had so welcomingly filled the wing now blew at gale force, threatening to smash them from the sky.

Yadeh-tash, the tiny stone pendant around Sal's neck, quivered violently, telling him that a storm was coming.

Too late, thought Sal, cursing the unpredictability of the elements. It's already here!

Skender sent them sharply downwards, out of the roiling vapour. Lightning flashed a second time. Freezing droplets of water materialised out of thin air, instantly soaking them. The boom of thunder pursued them as they dived for the relative safety of the ground. Sal felt the fury of the storm at his heels, and remembered then why he only attempted such things when driven by the direst of need.

The weather became less choppy away from where the black clouds pressed like billowing sails at the edge of the Divide. Skender didn't keep them aloft any longer than they had to be. Once they were level and a suitable place to land appeared, he dipped them lower by increments until they were barely skimming the sand. A sharp tug brought the wing up, catching the air and delivering Sal and Skender to a stumbling, awkward landfall.

One last rumble, as though from a giant's belly, saw the unnatural storm unravel. Yadeh-tash became quiet as the threat of rain pa.s.sed. By the time Skender pulled Sal free of the harness, the sun had come out again.

Sal collapsed gratefully onto the sand and wiped the water from his eyes. He was glad that their impetuousness hadn't resulted in injury or death, but he was bone-weary from the effort. The core of him was drained.

*Sayed, was that you?'

The voice came from Shilly, through Tom again. A sheet of imaginary *I' and *H' shapes rained down behind his eyes as the charm took effect. The touch of her mind brought home the fact that they were far apart, and that without her things always seemed to go wrong.

Sal clutched at the last dregs of his wild talent to reply.

*I didn't want to give you a fright. Sorry about that. A bit of a rough landing, but we're okay now.'

*Save your strength,' she replied. *I just wanted to check.'

Then she was gone and he was able to relax - in a manner of speaking. He was stuck on the bottom of the Divide with no easy way out, no clear destination, no supplies apart from the water bottle slung around Skender's neck, and with no clear idea of exactly what he was chasing. But it wasn't all bad news. The ground beneath him looked perfectly ordinary; the dirt was dry and finegrained, a greyish yellow in colour. He sniffed, and noted that the air smelled oddly of ancient ashes. A constant tingle of the Change surrounded him, but none of the legendary creatures for which the Divide was famous were in evidence, and nothing inanimate seemed likely to devour them in the next moment or two. He figured he could pause to catch his breath.

*Are you okay?' asked Skender. Somehow the wing had collapsed down to a roughly person-sized bundle. It lay on its side while Skender leaned over him, looking concerned. The black lines that had covered Skender's face and hands had vanished. His eyes had returned to normal.

*I'll be fine,' Sal said, knowing it to be true. The blood on his tunic belonged to Chu. *Just give me a sec to recover.'

Skender did that, although he was obviously restless to get moving. Sal watched him as he took his bearings and climbed a nearby mound to seek the Homunculus. Skender tested moving his shoulder and winced.

In his youth, Skender had been round-faced and crazy-haired. Some of that baby fat had burned off in his teens, but his features remained broad and homely and his dark locks rioted with the same lack of discipline as ever. His skin was even paler than Sal's, marking his Interior origins. He didn't seem to be much taller than he had been when Sal last met him.

Skender performed a minor charm to test which direction he was facing. Sal wondered about the tattoos he had seen on Skender's skin. Skender was well trained and educated but lacked the depth of talent Sal possessed. Where had he found the capacity for such powerful Change-working as flying the wing? However, these questions could wait. There were more important mysteries pressing for Sal's attention.

*Tell me about your mother,' he called.

*She went missing around here somewhere,' came the reply.

*Surveying, I suppose.'

*Yes. I don't know what for. I came to find her, but haven't had much luck yet. I presume you haven't seen her.'

Sal remembered Abi Van Haasteren from his journeys in the Interior. A tall, proud woman in ochre robes, she had been with Sal and Shilly before the Cold Moon Synod in the city of the Nine Stars.

*If I had seen her,' he said, *I wouldn't be looking for her now.'

*Right.' Skender descended from the mound and came over to join him. The sudden wash of moisture in the air had made the dust on his face and robes streak. He looked like he had been roughhoused by mud monsters. *Thanks for that,' he said. *I don't think I would've got even this far on my own.'

*You never know. You were always pretty resourceful.' Sal held out a hand, and Skender took it with both of his. *It's good to see you again.'

They gripped each other for a moment, and Sal wondered where the two kids they'd been had got to. When had they grown up and started rescuing their parents, not the other way around? The years between then and now didn't seem numerous enough to account for the transformation.

Yet it was still Skender standing before him, and he was in just as much of a hurry as he had ever been, although for different reasons. He was bruised and his clothes were ragged. The dazed edginess Sal had seen in his eyes on the lip of the Divide was quite gone.

Sal allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. *Okay,' he said, brushing himself off and trying to get his breath back. *Where to?'

*There are tracks heading towards the Aad,' Skender said, pointing northeast along the Divide. *That's the other half of Laure, where I think Mum was headed when she disappeared. It's a Ruin of some kind.'

In the distance, he saw that the mighty cliff wall on his right had subsided down to the level of the valley floor before abruptly turning southwest. There, where the shattered slope met the plain, Sal saw a field of tumbled masonry. That, presumably, was the outskirts of the ruined city.

*Off we go, then,' he said. *Easy.'

*They're not human tracks.'

Sal followed Skender to the marks and saw instantly that he was right. The imprints were perfectly triangular and deep. Whatever had made them was very heavy. Three lines did indeed lead towards the Aad.

*Well, it's a start. Something went there. We might as well, too.' When Skender didn't seem rea.s.sured by his reasoning, Sal added, *And we'll look for more concrete clues along the way. Don't worry. If we cross the Homunculus's path, we'll know about it.'

Slightly rea.s.sured, Skender nodded and indicated that Sal should pick up one end of the collapsed wing. Sal didn't relish the thought of carrying any more than his own exhausted body weight, but understood that leaving the wing behind wasn't an option. Weary and covered in dried mud, the two of them set out across the surface of the Divide.

Skender did his best not to let his thoughts range too far ahead, or too far behind. As he and Sal followed the strange impressions in the blasted soil, he concentrated solely on the present, on what he needed to do. Find the Homunculus, Tom had said, and you'll find your mother. If you don't, you'll never see her again. The instruction was perfectly simple, even if the reasoning behind it eluded him. Doubting it soon saw him debating the wisdom of leaping off the edge of the cliff in Chu's wing.

Part of him suspected that he might have done a very rash thing indeed. All the stories he had heard about the Divide and the things that lived in it came back to him with unwanted vividness: creatures impersonating dead trees that impaled travellers on needle-sharp branches; caves that appeared to hold riches but closed shut like mouths when entered by the unwary; swarms of small, light-hating vampires that roamed freely at night but crowded fearfully together during the day, which meant that taking shelter in the wrong shadow could literally cost pa.s.sers-by their lives. Skender remembered the souls supposedly trapped in the stone cliff faces and was glad that Sal was with him. Although they didn't talk much at first, it was good to have company.

A constant, moaning wind swept along the floor of the Divide. It kicked up dust that made his eyes sting. The ground had a metallic tang that didn't smell quite natural. Skender's mouth filled with a strange taste that wouldn't go away.

*Over there,' said Sal as the sun crept higher into the sky and there was still no sign of the Homunculus's wake. Skender turned to his left to see Sal nodding at a feature in the twisted landscape that he had missed from the air: a dry creek bed, three metres deep, that wriggled along roughly parallel to the ravine wall nearer the centre of the Divide. They headed for it and slid carefully to the bottom, where soft sand held the tracks of numerous feet, some of them human-sized. Skender was instantly relieved at not having to walk in the open. The vastness of the Divide impressed itself upon him at ground level. He constantly felt as though he was being watched.

As they walked, they exchanged stories. Sal explained how he and Shilly had come to be with a party of Sky Wardens so close to the Interior. Skender listened with amazement as Sal recounted the creation of the Homunculus, Highson Sparre's pursuit of it across the Strand, the first meeting with Marmion and Kail, and the abortive ambush attempt on the edge of the Divide.

In return, he described how he had come to Laure and initially sought his mother in the tunnels beneath the city. It seemed weeks since Chu had rescued him and put him on the right path.

I'm sorry, Chu, he thought, favouring the aching muscles down his right side. He hoped she would understand. They both had priorities and his mother simply came first.

*So this licence thing,' said Sal on a fleeting rest break. *The yadachi made it to help you see the wind. Is that right?'

Skender took the charm from within his torn robes and handed it to Sal, who turned the black sheet over in his hands, marvelling at it.

*Does it work on the ground?'

*It was working when we landed. I took it off so I could see more clearly.'

Sal nodded, although it was obvious he thought Skender had made a mistake. *This could be just what we need to find the Homunculus. Remember when you crashed with Chu because you couldn't see the wind? You said it looked perfectly clear up there, above the Homunculus.'

Skender nodded, then slapped his forehead. *Ach! If I put the licence back on, I can look for clear s.p.a.ces ahead. They'll show me which way the Homunculus went.'

Sal seemed more amused than irritated by Skender's oversight. *I knew if we banged our heads together long enough we'd think of something.'

Skender averted his eyes as he took the licence back from Sal and placed it on his chest. Sal had changed since they'd last met, he mused, and it wasn't just the long hair and the stubble on his chin. He had become surer of himself, more confident. As a teenager, he had been stricken with guilt and conflicted at almost every turn. A smouldering, frustrated rage had seemed to fill him, keen for an outlet.

That rage appeared to have been tamed. Skender wondered how.

*Tell me about you and Shilly,' he said as the black disorientation swept over him again. *It's good to see you guys together.'

*We're good,' Sal said. *Very good.'

*Still living in that little town, in that old workshop?'

*Still there. Life has been quiet these last few years. It's made a nice change.'

Skender could appreciate that. *At least you're not towing a couple of sprogs along behind you. That'd make things a little inconvenient.'

Sal laughed. *Kids aren't an option for a while yet. We're still young. There's so much left to do.'

*Like what?'

A shrug was his only answer.

*Fair enough. Rescuing your father and my mother is enough to start with.' Skender stood up on aching legs and looked around. Sal's breath bloomed like smoke from his mouth. *Let's go topside and see what I can see.'

They clambered up the dry riverbank and peered over the edge. The air currents on the ground looked very different to Skender. Flows coiled back on themselves in complicated ways as they hit stone; everywhere he looked he saw turbulence. It was like trying to pick out a clear patch on the far side of a wheat field without standing up.

He refused to be discouraged. *I think there might be something that way,' he said, pointing in the rough direction they were headed.

*That's convenient.'

*Wishful thinking, maybe.'

They dropped down again and kept walking. Sal asked Skender about his father, and he explained that Skender Van Haasteren the Ninth hadn't changed at all since Sal and Shilly had visited the Keep. Tall and severe, his life consisted entirely of terrorising students - who seemed to idolise him - and occasionally arguing with bureaucrats from Ulum.