Dragons on the Sea of Night (31 page)

The next morning, taking the icy ledge upward, they entered Cloudland. Even Bjork, who had apparently roamed the lower slopes of the Mountain Sin'hai, had never ascended to this height. The thick clouds tasted of antimony and copper. The storms were constant, lashing the travelers with a combination of sleet, hail and the same dry snow they had experienced last night.

Even so, it was an enormous relief not to be hanging on to sheer rock with fingernails, boot toes and tied-off lines. It felt good to use the legs again as they had in altitudes below, before they came to Sin'hai. Even Hamaan came to recognize that they were no longer a part of the old world – the world of Iskael and Aden, of the Mu'ad and even the Khashm. This was terra incognita for all of them.

In a way, Moichi felt sorry for him. Hamaan was a warrior, and such people had no business being prisoners, though often enough that was how they ended up. Part of the process, one could even argue, but there was something about it that struck Moichi as akin to placing a magnificent wild animal in a six-by-six cage. They needed to be free or be dead. But not this.

At night, he lay awake, listening to the tick of his own body as if it were some instrument he had been brought in to study. In his exhaustion, he longed for Sanda to come to him again, in a dream or in any other way. For perhaps it was her judgement rather than God's that he awaited. His own judgement, so distorted by complex emotions, he did not trust in this matter. He thought of Sanda's spirit held somewhere in a curious prison and the pain in his body was overcome by the ache in his heart.
I want you back
, he thought, clenched fists pressed tight to his eyes to stop the hot tears from forming. Why couldn't Sardonyx's magic bring her back? Why couldn't she reach into the stew of Time and choose another future, one in which Sanda lived? It was too late. Even sorcery could not resurrect the dead. But he found that the mere knowledge of it made his sister's death all the more difficult to bear.

When he slept, only the rough souls of Syrinx chased themselves across his dreaming mind, reliving for the span of a blink of an eye an entire lifetime.

The icy rock of Cloudland was on the whole easier to negotiate than the sheer, vertical face of the lower levels. How this could be Moichi never could quite figure out, since the interminable ice storms made even a mental mapping impossible. As soon as they passed through a certain section it vanished from view in a welter of ice pellets and bitter wind, and it was as if it never existed.

They pushed on, bent into the wind, ascending through ice fields, across glacier-like floes. Once or twice a day they were obliged to break out the pterons and, hooking their safety lines to them, begin a vertical assault. But, though often difficult, these vertical sections were never large enough to leave them stranded on the smooth face of …
Forget that!
Moichi admonished himself.
That particular reality belongs to another future
. Or was it by now the past?

Often, he wondered what it must be like to be able to peer into the ocean of Time and see the swirl of multiple futures and to pluck one out like a bright-scaled fish. Just like a god. And that, perhaps, was why Bjork had warned Sardonyx to keep her sorcerous profile low. Up there, somewhere, was the House of God, and no other power could stand before Him.

At night, it was so frigid that the material of their tents froze into stiffened corpses. Accordingly, Moichi instructed them to carve out blocks of ice with which they built small conical structures, which they found protected them from the elements better than the tents ever had.

But their sleep was interrupted by strange howlings that chilled them as even the cold could not.

‘What is that?' Moichi asked.

‘Wolke'en,' Sardonyx replied. ‘They are large snow-white predators with ice-blue eyes. They live in Cloudland and above, but occasionally Bjork would glimpse them on his journeys across the lower slopes. Even he gave them a wide berth; they are said to be very clever, relentless killing machines once they are on a hunt or smell blood.'

‘I will remember that,' Moichi said, tucking his head into his arms and trying to close his ears to the eerie cries.

Daytime came as a pale wash, but since the night-time was bright with sparking lightning the differences were negligible, and they were obliged to rely on their own internal rhythms to identify the demarcation between the two. When they were tired, they slept. Otherwise, they plodded on.

Hamaan, living his whole life in the desert, suffered the most. At least Moichi and Sardonyx had lived in colder climes when winter came without mercy. Still, neither of them had experienced such bone-chilling temperatures and inhospitable weather. Hamaan's wounds, which seemed to be healing well, were chafed by the heavy exertion and they opened, suppurating.

When they broke at midday, both Moichi and Sardonyx worked on him, cleaning the wounds, making sure they were well padded. But he nearly froze to death while he was uncovered and they knew that they could not expose him to these harsh elements again.

‘This is the way the world is at night,' he said, his head tilted back against an outcropping of ice. His eyes were slits so that the snow and hail would not blind him. ‘We are surrounded by dreams.' So he felt them, too. ‘And the dreams are given presence – a life – by us.'

‘They are the souls of Syrinx,' Moichi said, binding a wound.

But Hamaan shook his head. ‘For you, perhaps. But for me these dreams are familiar. At night, they come to feed off me like sharks.' Moichi gave Sardonyx a quick glance. ‘Oho, brother, I know what is in your mind. You think I am being haunted by those I have murdered or have ordered murdered. You think that here, on the Mountain Sin'hai, a miracle will occur.' He grinned through teeth gritted with pain. ‘God is showing me the nature of my sins so that I may repent.' His torso shot forward suddenly and he gripped Moichi by the front of his vest. ‘That is what you think, isn't it, brother?' Nose to nose, they glared at one another. ‘But I am incapable of repentance. I am like a shark, myself. A predator. I go forward, ever forward. I do not look back. I despise the kind of contemplation that is your weakness.' He dropped his hands, lay back, panting. ‘I am weak now and so the nibbling begins. When I die other predators will know and they will feed off my corpse.' His own breath drifted from between his lips like smoke. ‘That is the way of it; the way I wish it.'

He seemed stronger in the morning, as if spitting his bile into his brother's face had energized him. They performed their brief morning rituals and struck camp. The way became steeper again and they spent the better part of the day slung in their gear, Moichi hammering pterons through ice and rock. This was an increasingly dangerous task because as they ascended into the upper reaches of Cloudland there were larger patches of black ice – ice that had been made part of the rock face for so long it took on the color of the mountain beneath and so was virtually indistinguishable. But unlike fissured rock it would not hold the weight of one person, let alone three.

More than once, the deeply sunk pteron broke free beneath the testing weight he put on it. Worse, once it held solid for the test but gave way as he climbed onto it. The ice face rushed by him as he fell. Then the safety line brought him up short and he swung from the end of it eight feet below where Hamaan clung.

‘Pull on the line!' Sardonyx called to Hamaan, as she began the process of reeling Moichi back up the mountain.

Hamaan staring down at his brother did nothing, until Sardonyx said, ‘Start pulling now, Qa'tach, or I will put a knife between your shoulderblades.'

Hamaan shrugged without taking his eyes off Moichi. ‘If you kill me, lady, who will help you haul your beloved to safety?' He paused a beat. ‘I want a concession.'

‘What kind of concession?' Sardonyx asked just as Moichi was shouting, ‘No bargaining, chill take you!'

‘I want to sleep unfettered,' Hamaan said. ‘I weary of being treated like a tethered animal.'

‘That was your choice,' Moichi shouted, working to stabilize his swinging. ‘Not ours.'

‘If we free you at night you will try to escape,' Sardonyx pointed out.

‘I give you my word I will not escape.'

‘What is your word worth, brother?' Moichi called.

Sardonyx looked at Hamaan for a long time. ‘All right,' she said. ‘Now do as I say.'

Hamaan worked in perfect concert with her, hauling away, bringing Moichi up the mountainside by increments. As the two brothers came abreast of one another, Hamaan said, ‘One day you will thank me for my generosity, brother.'

Moichi said nothing. He was angry with Sardonyx for making the deal even while he was grateful to her for bargaining in a situation where he could not. He understood the necessity of what she had done but he did not have to like it.

Some time later, a fierce snow and ice storm swept over them. This one was the worst yet, a stinging white blanket falling across the world, making it impossible to see more than a hand's breadth in front of the face. Virtually blind, they struggled on up the ice face, making slow but steady progress.

At last, Moichi reached up for a spot to hammer in the next pteron and his fingers encountered a horizontal ledge. He called down to Sardonyx and Hamaan, then levered himself up.

He could sense almost immediately that this was more than a mere narrow ledge. They were on the edge of an ice field of some sort. It sloped upward, to be sure, but the angle was not particularly steep. When all of them were up, they started off up the slope. They had to be careful, for though much snow had already fallen up here, their weight often brought them down to the ice beneath and if their weight wasn't directly over their lead foot, they could take a painful spill.

Heads down to protect themselves against the storm, they plodded forward for several hours. They were obliged to stop more frequently now because of the increasing intensity of the earth temblors. Several made them feel as if the mountain was trying to shake itself apart. In the distance they heard, like echoes, the deep rumbling of rock slides and avalanches.

It was still light when Moichi called a halt in the lee of a jumble of ice-encrusted rocks. Something in those sounds, those eerie echoes, sent a warning bell ringing in Moichi's head.

‘We will make camp here,' he told them.

‘But why? The storm is rising and we are so exposed here,' Hamaan said. ‘We still have several hours of light left.' He looked around. ‘By then we might be off this Godforsaken ice field and in some decent shelter.'

Logically, Moichi knew he was right, but his decision had nothing to do with logic. Those echoes, still resounding in his head, caused him to sweat despite the extreme cold. Something was out there and he had no intention of facing it blinded by a snowstorm.

They made camp as best they could. They tried to hack off blocks of ice, but it clung to its stone base with an unnatural tenacity and all they came away with were long icicle-like shards.

As had been agreed, they did not bind Hamaan's wrists or ankles. He curled down in a ball, covered himself in his stiff tent and was instantly fast asleep. Moichi and Sardonyx took turns sleeping. He stood guard first. It was dark and close. The wind howled but otherwise the storm made it seem as if he were locked in a small closet. The earth trembled and was still, but those echoes continued, filling Moichi with fear. What was out there in the darkness?

He closed his eyes, trying to calm himself, and was soon asleep. He was startled awake by a human scent. He opened his eyes to see Hamaan crouched beside him. He held the point of an ice shard to the soft hollow of Moichi's throat.

‘I want you to know I kept my promise,' he whispered harshly over the wind. ‘I said I would not try to escape but I made no mention of not killing you.'

Moichi stared into his face without fear. ‘Did we come from the same parents?'

At almost the same instant the two brothers saw a movement in the night. They remained silent and still, listening to their instincts. A moment later, it appeared as if a mound of snow were moving. Then, the head came up and they saw a pair of piercing ice-blue eyes.

Wolke'en!

The beast, its thick snow-white coat dusted in snow, stared at them. It was as big as a man, perhaps six feet long. Its four legs looked powerful and its long bushy tail flicked nervously back and forth. Hamaan moved and its ears flattened back and it went into a crouch. Both men were sure the Wolke'en would leap at them, but it did not budge. The staring contest continued. They could see the tiny clouds of its exhalation staining the night. The ice-blue eyes did not blink. At last, so slowly that at first they were unsure anything was happening, it backed away, until it was outside the perimeter of their camp. Then it vanished altogether.

For a time, neither man spoke or moved as the built-up tension gradually evaporated. Slowly, everything came back to normalcy and the brief moment when the brothers had been locked together against a common antagonist vanished as completely as the Wolke'en.

‘Oh, yes.' Hamaan returned his attention to his brother. ‘Can't you see father in both of us?'

Moichi felt the makeshift weapon still at his throat. He closed his eyes. ‘Yes, kill me. Make the deed complete. Murder all your siblings.'

Nothing happened, and when he opened his eyes, he saw Hamaan had returned to his place beneath his stiff tent, curled in a ball, already asleep.

The next morning, as they were striking camp, the storm abated and by the time they were ready to set off, it was gone altogether. A rare glimpse of sunlight illuminated the snow-covered ice field. Above, blue sky glittered like an unattainable grail.

They moved up the slope of the ice field, crunching through the virgin snow. But directly ahead Moichi could already see a thin gray line, that became thicker and deeper with alarming rapidity until it resolved itself.