Cloud Castles (17 page)

That didn’t altogether surprise me. But even here I hesitated, under the familiar sign that seemed to show a different set of languages every time, all of them gloriously misspelt and unidiomatic. I’d brought danger on my friends often enough, but never so consciously as now. Still, there was no help for it; I had to have their advice. I pushed upon the door, and the familiar waft of spice and beer, strong pickles, woodsmoke and odours less familiar wafted out around me, the low buzz of voices, mostly human but not quite all. It carried with it the memories of kindness and, more, of belonging. I shut out the world behind me, and went down the steps. And at the foot Katjka was waiting.

She draped her arms around my neck, and I wrapped mine around her. It wasn’t at all hard to be fond of Katjka, though she could be disconcerting and just occasionally a lot more than that – and though the position made it fairly obvious that, as usual, she hadn’t washed quite recently enough. It wasn’t in her cultural background, whereas cheap rosewater apparently was, in quantity. She was dressed, also as usual, in one of her peasantish dirndl outfits, if you can imagine the kind
of peasant who hangs around under lamp-posts and leans low over bars, somewhere between a milkmaid and Lili Marlene. But tonight there was nothing of her usual sardonic come-on; the wide, innocent grey eyes that were the best of her were troubled, with dark smudges beneath, and the cynical furrows that flanked her mouth were deeper somehow. I bent down and kissed her, and noticed her lips were badly bitten.

‘I am glad you are ssafe, Sstefan,’ she murmured, transforming my name with her sibilant accent. ‘Sso nearly you were not, asstray in all that. But you did well, sso well!’

‘Last night, you mean? You know about that?’

She gave me another highly pneumatic squeeze. ‘I know, some at any rate, though there is much I do not undersstand – that bitch who is trying to kill you, for one. But ah, I’m proud of you, proud!’ She followed up the squeeze with a wriggle that did terrible things to my self-control, and drew me down into the warm embrace of the tavern’s main room. Its customers mostly preferred the privacy of shadow and soft speech, so it was hard to tell how many there were; but today it had a curiously empty, quiet feeling about it. ‘Come, Master Pylot is here, he must hear from you all about your heroicss!’

‘Yes, but how do you know? You weren’t … keeping an eye on me?’

She laughed, ‘Would that I could, always! It might while away the long days here – sso long, sso very long! But it would be too much a strain. Besides,’ she gave me a sidelong look, ‘I sshock easily. This …’ She shrugged. ‘This was close at hand, a violence in the Sspiral; that I was bound to esscry by all the means I have. And in doing sso I found many things – and one of them was you.’

I stirred uncomfortably. ‘Making a bloody fool of myself. Trying to stem a flood. Bossing everyone about—’

‘Beating ssome sense into their thick skullss!’ she spat. ‘Ssomebody musst lead. I know you, I love you, my Sstefan, but I would not have thought it of you, you who have sstood on a great threshold sso long, never quite sstepping over. Something happens, something grows within you, at lasst. Those times, they called for one who would stand against the flood, who would become a leader of men. And you came forth.’

I thought of witches, and scratched
my head. ‘I didn’t do much good. It was a God-awful mess—’

‘Ssome is better than none!’ she snapped, eyes hooding. ‘Believe me! You used your head, you saw what was afoot, you cut the heart out of it where you could, both in your own time and in the sshadow – and where it was not sso clear, you let it be. Without you that night’s work would have been worse – so much, sso much worse! As I feared it would; for already I was uneasy. Ssomething has happened, Sstefan, something you would not know of, but it is ssomething awful, terrible. Something that has not happened in all the days of my being here, and they are very many. We were expecting trouble.’

‘Which translated,’ drawled a quiet voice from the shadowy stall near the open fire, ‘means I was lookin’ for the first ship out. Dammit, I’m just in off the Ultima Thule run with a cargo of fire-amber and rhino furs and icicles in parts personal! All I want’s a quiet spell and my feet warming, and suddenly here’s all Hell breaks loose.’ Jyp snorted uneasily, and levered his spare frame up to greet me. ‘Literally, just about. And now look what the wind blew in!’

‘It nearly didn’t!’ I told him, when we’d exchanged the usual backpounding and ritual insults. ‘Blow me in, I mean. Is it the Wardens, or what? There was hardly a road open!’

Jyp nodded. ‘Me, I’d’ve been just as happy to see you back home and out of all this. Still, ol’ Sir was a good safe guide, nobody’d bother you with him on board. Glad to see you got on okay.’

‘The preliminaries were a bit rough, but – Sir?’

‘Well, just what’d
you
call a seven-foot guy who –’

‘– can turn into a polar bear? Right. But listen, what is all this? What’s been happening?’

Jyp sucked his breath between his teeth, obviously very hesitant. He never liked drawing me into the darker affairs of the Spiral, not since he’d accidentally done so on our first meeting and almost got me killed several times over. ‘Better let that ride awhile. Not the kind of thing you get gabby about, unless you have to. But I can tell you, I’m just hitchin’ up my pants ready to sling my hook for quieter climes when Kat here shows me you’re right in the thick of it – and I figure that sure as hell you’ll be panting up here next morning, so I stick around. Meanwhile everyone else’ll have the same hunch, and the
devil a berth I’ll ever raise, not so much as a fo’c’sle flop on a tin-tray coaster. Things I do for my friends!’

I chuckled. ‘You know damn well there’s hardly a skipper on the Spiral who wouldn’t cheerfully trade in his soul, his wife or half his cargo to have you as his sailing-master. But don’t think I don’t appreciate the thought; I’ve a lot to tell, more to ask. So why don’t we –
Myrko
!’

The landlord, face agleam like an appreciative toad, came barrelling out of the darkness, bearing a tray laden with beer steins,
tujica
flasks and bowls of fierce pickled vegetables. ‘
Daj, daj, panye
Stefan, they tell me you is comink! And I ssay trouble, trouble,
bielzhaje
trouble – hah? Pulls you like lodestone. So I pulls the beer. Skies may fall, spearss be stolen, but beer – that you can trust! Hah!’

‘Stolen –
what
was that?’

But he just bustled about the table and wouldn’t be drawn; which was unusual. And under the patter he was looking more serious than usual, too. I began to press Katjka, but she pushed me down into Myrko’s cushion-draped settles, put my feet up before the fireplace with its crackling logs, and flopped herself down between us.

‘It’s not sso often I get ssandwiched between two such bravos,’ she smirked, stretching and writhing like a cat in the fireglow. Then abruptly her mood changed again; her eyes grew hooded and cold. ‘Sso now – tell of last night!’

‘It goes back longer than that,’ I said. ‘I was literally just home – I’d been to Germany, for the C-Tran—’

Katjka sat bolt upright, and rounded on me.
‘Germany?’

Jyp put his hand over his eyes. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said quietly; and Jyp had had a religious upbringing. ‘Say it ain’t so …’

‘You’d better hear it,’ I said. ‘From the top …’

They listened; and as they listened I felt Katjka’s body stiffen against mine, and her breath go faster, shallower, as if she was living every minute of it with me, that mad race across cloud-driven heights, its crazy aftermath, the vision of the city and my terrible homecoming. Jyp stared moodily past his outstretched feet, into the fitful patterns of the fire, and never interrupted; but at the end he leaned forward sharply, shivering, and tossed two big logs into the grate.

‘Figures,’ was all he said at first. Katjka said nothing, only held on hard to my arm, as if striving to weigh
it down. But both their faces betrayed their feelings – pale, stricken, appalled.

‘What figures, Jyp?’ I asked patiently.

‘Clouds. Mountains. Both fractal forms, kind of similar progressions. Make the transition easier.’ He watched the ceaseless shaping and unshaping in the flames as if it meant something to him, and perhaps it did, for he could draw meaning from the flux and flicker of space and time along the Spiral itself, and steer a true course between them. After a while he added, ‘That town … how’d you feel there?’

‘You mean, apart from hunted? I … I liked it. I think I’d have been drawn to it even without Le Stryge’s ’fluence or whatever it was he put on me.’

‘A
geass
,’ snorted Katjka. ‘A brutal thing to wrench at mind and heart.’

‘Kind of a subtle one, to work so directly and still not tip off the poor guy caught up in it. Stryge’s been learning himself some new tricks, it sounds. And you don’t even know what the damn place is called? Then I’ll tell you. It’s Heilenberg.’

‘Heidelberg?’

Jyp’s face twisted. ‘Heilenberg. And I wish I had a nickel for all the guys who’ve spent half their lives struggling to find that little town that you just landed and waltzed so calmly into, that’s all. It’s – what’d be the word? – one of the most powerful places on the Spiral. No, power-filled, that’d maybe come a tad nearer.’

‘Numinous?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah. Wish I had your schooling. Numinous it is – and it’s one of the most dangerous, too.’

‘As you say.’ I sighed. ‘It figures.’

‘Yeah. Kind of goes together. See, it’s like this. You know the Spiral well enough by now, you know how places have their shadows …’

I nodded. Long shadows, like those the fire threw across the stone-flagged hearth; thrown out of the Core into the Spiral, out of time into timelessness. Blending and uniting the changing natures of a place to embody its character. Everywhere men have lived – and more …

‘Well, like you might expect, whole nations cast those shadows too – only kind of broader, enveloping the others. That’s what we ran into back in Jawa. But whole continents, now, groups of nations, they do as well. Only they’re less material, sort of misty; but there’s almost always some kind of
focus, a centre, a place that embodies their spirit, their history, all that and more. All that’s truest about them, what some folk’d call culture or civilization, but that don’t more than half cover it. Heilenberg, now, you could call it the heart of Europe, of European civilization and everything gives it its inner life and strength. That’s why you felt right at home.’

Even now the rightness of it was startling; but I shook my head. ‘In Germany? The heart of Europe? I can see some problems with that.’

Jyp had sailed in two world wars. He laughed. ‘We’re talking history here, feller,
real
history, from the Old Stone Age onward, or older. Common history – enmities, alliances, tyrannies, they’re submerged, they’re just ripples in the stream. Even in recent history you could have a bigger beef with France, maybe Holland and Spain too, but that’s nothing, that’s irrelevant. I mean, look at you – your grandpa fought the Nazis, but you speak German, French, Lord knows how many other tongues, you come and go there as you like. And that’s just one generation on – how about a hundred? Another thousand? It’s a whole wider view, friend. You’d be at home there; so’d Kat, though she’s from a side of Europe that’s more of the Spiral than the Core. Even me, though I’m a Midwest boy, ‘cause that’s where my folks came from. Though we’ve got a centre too; but it’s different, its foundations not so deep-dug – not yet. It hasn’t got what yours has at its heart. There’s a mighty power dwells there in Heilenberg, Steve – a great force, from the outer reaches of the Spiral.’

A fearful chill ran in my veins. That great demi-cathedral rose again in my mind, dark and haunted, that sense of presence. ‘Like that
dupiah
thing, you mean? Like Haiti and the Invisibles? Or the Balinese spirits, or Ape?’

Jyp pondered. ‘Up to a point, maybe. It’s an intelligence, it’s only part material – but, Lord, you couldn’t measure them against it, any of them.’

‘Not even Ape?’ I grinned. ‘He was pretty hot stuff. Wish I could set him on Le Stryge.’

Jyp, unusually, didn’t match the grin. ‘You better believe it, Steve. This – it’s not just stronger, it’s … vaster. A whole order. And more, it’s …’ He flailed the air with his hand. ‘It’s less rooted in human things, less able to come and go in our world. Less easy to understand. See, Ape, the
Barong, even that little creep Don Petro, after a fashion – they were still a whole heap human, in their ways. They’d grown beyond it, but they could still take their old shape, walk and talk and eat and fight and – well, one or two other things, huh? Like the Rangda lady, the way you told it me, huh?’

He grinned; I shrivelled; Katjka sniffed, and ran her fingers along the inside of my thigh. ‘But this,’ Jyp shook his head, ‘it don’t interact like that, I guess it can’t. And what makes it tick is a sight harder to sort out. Mind you, I do hear it was a human mind once, maybe; one that went reaching out further and further along the Spiral, always out towards the Rim.’ He brooded, while the fire danced. ‘That could be.’

‘Like Mall, you mean?’

‘A ways. You’ve seen her in action; you know a little. She’s more already than one material body can rightly contain. But this, it’s gone a lot further than her, than the Ape, than ‘most anything else I ever heard of. Anything got that far, however human it was to start with, it’d be bound to be – changed. Out there space and time, they become more and more one. Things you and I’d call certain, solid, they get less and less fixed, less material; things that’re just abstracts here, they take on a real existence, become clearer, more defined, closer to absolutes.
The
Absolute.’

‘You told me about that, once. And this – thing? It’s been there?’

He brooded. ‘So they say. And come back, to take a hand in the world it left. And the shape it’s taken – well, I’ve never been to that city, I’ve never seen it. But there’s no mistaking that description of yours, that cathedral-hall, for sure. And what it held. Though there was something a mite odd there.’