Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale (15 page)

‘
Maaaastaer
Haaaawkmooooth aaaaasks yoooou to follow meeeeeee. He lllllives
away yondeeeeer upoooon Barrrrrrroww Hiill wheeeere the Dead Mannn
watches aaaall, beyyyyond Thoonsk, Thoonsk, beyooon Thoonsk and the
murrrr, Muuurdered Sea.
’

Gargaron frowned
and looked around at his steed, as if for some sort of suggestion
as to how to proceed here. But to his surprise, as if Grimah knew
something he did not (or sensed something he could not), he were
already moving, trailing the metal man. ‘Oh, well as long as you
think this be a sound idea,’ he said to the horse. But he could not
deny it, he himself were intrigued. Hawkmoth? And other
survivors
? And the
claim, true or false as the case might be, that there were some
knowledge of the blight and its method? And of its remedy. Well
then, why not trail it? Besides, what else were he to do in this
town?

He had come to Autumn to seek
answers and all he had found were death. He had used Skysight to
locate the nearest inhabited and unaffected settlement, and strive
for it. To uncover nothing but a dead world beyond had shaken him,
perplexed him, flummoxed him. Beyond this he had no
contingency.

So, he trailed after the mekanik.

5

Apparently, when
he had seen the A7-VRIT zeppelin airship floating over Autumn, he
had not been dreaming after all. For there on city’s northwun
fringe, ten strokes of the clock after leaving the vicinity of the
mash-smoke parlour, there bobbed its mighty balloon, trussed to an
enormous open-decked gondola which in turn had been anchored
to
earyth
by no
less than eight anchor chains, with claw-clamps gripping tree,
shrub, footbridge, building, anything with a sure
footing.

‘
Th-thiiiiss way
if you pl-please,
’ the mekanik spoke as a
sizzling burst of sparks erupted from its chest
plate.

There were a ramp already lowered
at the back of the landing-boat and any concerns Gargaron may have
had about the contraption not being of suitable size to accommodate
he and his steed were quickly alleviated. Indeed, Gargaron, once he
had strode aboard, found that there were ample room to accommodate
he and horse. Lounges thick with felt layered cushions lined its
wooden decks. Soft rugs lay across the empty spaces between, roped
down by cords strung through eyelets lest a mischievous breeze
should suck them off-deck. A wooden liquor bar complete with
twirling, twisting bottles of all manner of wine and spirit and
liqueur were situated near the foredeck, just behind the pilot’s
chair.

Strange artful designs carved and
painted over in the wooden gunwale that ran around the
landing-boat’s perimeter were what struck Gargaron. Indeed, if he
had been here with his daughter he would have strongly advised her
to avert her eyes. The detailed images around the wooden guard
depicted many a soul caught in acts of fornication, and the figure
head at the front of the landing-boat showed off two lusty,
multi-breasted Jayesque females twirled together in an embrace of
love.

This Gargaron now
knew, were a decommissioned pleasure craft, where the rich, the
affluent, the well-to-do, the decadent, had once paid high price to
come and relax and indulge and titillate themselves. They would
slurp exquisite Oranjjin wines, sip aged Uloricah brandy and single
malt whiskey of Looth. They would nibble at reej eyeballs, pickled
veekaan paws, liver of sea-cat, spiced minced plains-goat, and all
the while enjoying sweet, alluring pornigrafica as it played out
before them: couples, threesomes, foursomes, entire orgies, those
of differing sex, of same sex, of differing species, howling and
hissing and snarling as they sucked and kissed and fingered and
pulled and thrust at each other. Naught much had been taboo up
there in the clouds as the great
Pornigrafica d
’Zeppelin drifted
about on Godrik Vale’s gentle airways.

It had Gargaron thinking. He had
quite forgotten the pleasures of the bedroom since the fall of the
blight, since he had seen away his beloved wife. And yet the images
here did nothing to stir him. Where once he may have delighted in
them, here now, with his family decimated, and the world he had
known now cradled in death, they meant nothing.

6

The mekanik took to the pilot’s
chair situated before an operations console that included a series
of spherical gas pods from where steel tubes snaked down into the
floor and disappeared beneath the wooden decking. These reappeared
through a rounded vent encircling the base of the central mast, a
mast, Gargaron realised, resembled a wrist and forearm (albeit,
ones far thicker and longer than his own). The “arm” jutted
straight out of the deck perhaps one and half times his own height
where a monstrous hand with a dozen fingers, each segmented by
several knuckles, acted as a cage that housed the gas-balloon, each
bony finger enveloping the balloon.

The gas pipes
that rose from the floor snaked up and around the arm, ultimately
vanishing into holes bored through the “wrist”, and beyond that
Gargaron could only guess where they ended: in fluted openings no
doubt, at the base of the balloon’s interior where they breathed
out whatever mix of gas that enabled the craft to lift from
earyth
and head for the
skies.

Gargaron observed the mekanik at
work. How it twirled hand-cranks and adjusted brass leavers. In
short time, the zeppelin awoke hissing and spluttering. Gas pods
shuddered, pipes shook, there came the sound of whooping, rushing
air and the sounds of the balloon creaking and expanding, taking on
gas. The mekanik hauled another leaver connected to a pulley system
which both simultaneously unclamped and wound in the
anchors.

Before both Gargaron and Grimah
knew it the zeppelin had lifted gently from ground and
rock.

1

AUTUMN fell away beneath them: its
streets filled with the dead and their silence, loose leaves of
disassembled newspapers fluttering and tumbling along gutter and
cobbled street, and distantly there came the mewling, somehow
victorious sound of the Corpse Flowers, as if by sheer weight of
numbers they had overwhelmed the giant and seen him off.

Gargaron watched all of this drop
away. He felt somehow like the sole survivor of a mighty
catastrophe being airlifted to safe ground. The only part of Autumn
still higher than he were the lonely upper reaches of Skysight
tower. Again he could not help but feel that needle, that Skysight
eye, watched him.

As they rose skyward the mekanik
turned a hand crank positioned above a clear glass canister; sticky
green grime and residue and condensation were smeared and beaded
against its smooth interior. It were a quarter filled with some
chartreuse coloured liquid. The mekanik tilted its head and studied
it.

A floor-mounted metal barrel were
held in place before the console by large metallic clamps. A
flexi-hose ran up from its base to a nozzle and tap which the
mekanik now reached out and grasped. It shunted the nozzle into a
valve at top of the glass canister, turned on the tap, and pumped a
lever at top of barrel. Fresh green liquid gushed forth, filling
the canister.

Once done, the mekanik removed
nozzle and hose, and again wound the hand crank situated above the
glass canister. Green juice pumped from it through a pipe which
split off into two: one running out to port, the other to
starboard. Here beyond the gunwale, bolted to wooden seats were
what Gargaron at first sight thought were more mekaniks; one a
piece on either side of the craft, both facing outwards toward a
stunted wing. They were not mekaniks, though, Gargaron had
realised. But merely fashioned as such from black steel. The pipes
that ran out beyond the gunwales ended stuffed inside the mouths of
their faceless steel skulls and once the green liquid chugged into
them their long steel legs began to pump objects that looked at the
same time to be both feet and pedals. These in turn spun a sprocket
that rotated a larger sprocket that wound a set of wooden
propellers.

Once the legs began pumping, as
the props soon began to spin in a blur, there came the soft whump
of chopping propeller blades and the zeppelin now stopped simply
drifting and took on a definite forward momentum. The mekanik
hauled the steering rod, shifting rudder at zeppelin’s rear, and
the craft turned and took on a more westways heading from
Autumn.

2

They flew over westwold farming
communities, and out across glades of giant tree-fern. They covered
several hundred miles even before Gohor and Melus were chasing each
other toward distant horizon. Occasionally below, some town or
village would drift by and Gargaron would study them eagerly
through his spyglass, ever hopeful that survivors remained. But
they proved always silent, where no living thing moved, and only
the dead populated the streets, some of them lying there with their
dead unseeing eyes, gazing up as the zeppelin thrummed by. Some
settlements overrun by Corpse Flowers.

‘
Should we not land?’ Gargaron
urged the mekanik. ‘There may be others down there, as I were,
seeking salvation.’

Sparks gushed
from the mekanik’s neck plates. ‘
Th-theeeeerrr be none l-l-l-left, leeeeeeft. N-none at
aaaaalll…
’

Hearing this squeezed Gargaron’s
heart but still he felt he ought to search. After everything he had
laid eye upon, all the death and dying, he would not give over to
the idea that all folk but he had perished. ‘No, I do not believe
that. How do you possibly know?’

‘
I have means of
sensing the living. And I sense none in these
settlements.
’ The voice were unhindered
again, as if once more it were Hawkmoth the sorcerer
speaking.

What has become
of this world?
Gargaron murmured to
himself.
Ranethor, Thronir, someone pray
tell
.

3

Occasionally he
attempted to strike up conversations with the mekanik. Wanting to
know if the sorcerer could hear him, if Hawkmoth had some means of
communicating across great distances, hoping perhaps he might
consult the sorcerer through the mekanik. But the answers were
either perfunctory or garbled or made little sense. ‘How far need
we fly before we reach Hawkmoth?’ Gargaron asked with a sigh,
resigning himself to the fact that he would receive no sensible,
honest or sentient counsel nor any sort of companionship,
fulfilling or otherwise, until he reached the sorcerer or some
other such sod with a
soul
.

‘
We muuuuust
traverse beyonnnnd, beyond Thoonsk. Aaaand crossss the Muuurdered
Seeea… Not untiiil M-Melus and Gohooor again hang directly over our
h-heads shaaaaall we reeeach Barrow Hillll upon which the Dead
Maaan sits and watches aaaaall. There innn, innnn his cottage,
Mastaer Haaawkmoth resides.
’

Through night and
half a day
, Gargaron reckoned. He resigned
himself to the idea they would be nowhere near the good sorcerer in
quick time. He decided then to settle in for a lengthy flight. As
he turned away from the metal man the old man’s voice came again
from the grill plate in mekanik’s neck: ‘
Should you and your mount require sustenance, I have packed
provisions. Please find all you require in the galley. Enjoy your
flight. See you on the morrow, my friend.
’

‘
Sorcerer?’ Gargaron said at the
mekanik. ‘Do you hear me?’

Alas, there came no
response.

4

He found smoked eel and pickled
eggs and cured ham and crusty bread, he found fruits of apple, pear
and grapes. For the steed there were oats but Gargaron let him have
his fill of the apples, saying, ‘I did promise you the king’s share
of apples, after all, didn’t I?’ There were even a selection of
mash-smoke: Greenshroom, Striped Dream, Funnel Skrite,
Pink-Duste.

Although he had indulged in such
in his younger years, he had abstained for much of his married
life. But now he grabbed a poke and laid himself down on one of the
felt lined lounges. He stuffed the cone on the floor mounted pipe,
lit the weed with the available flint-flare, grabbed the hose and
prod the sucker between his lips and drew back on the thick musky
smoke. Grimah lay there, munching apples, its two faces regarding
Gargaron curiously.

Gargaron tipped the pipe at him.
‘To us,’ he said and sucked back more smoke.

As Melus and Gohor began to drip
down into the horizon, the night fires began to twinkle in Great
Nothing and Gargaron’s thoughts slipped away for a little while as
mash-smoke fairies danced along the gunwales.

5

Morning broke and Gargaron awoke
to both an aching head and a troubling noise. He sat up, bleary
eyed. His steed were awake he saw, standing, and looking concerned.
Gargaron stood up, unsteady on foot, and saw the mekanik feverishly
wheeling pulleys and hand cranks, he heard the hiss and gush of gas
heaving into balloon, he felt the zeppelin climbing sharply. Indeed
when he looked over the side he realised they were considerably
higher from ground than they had been before he had bedded down for
night.