Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

But he knew one thing. As soon as she was up and running, Trinica would be after them with redoubled fury. Without her strange compass and her charts, she wouldn’t be able to get to the hideout, but she knew that Frey would be heading that way. She might be able to get word to her allies somehow. He wanted to be in and out before she had a chance to act.

He got to his feet and swayed as his head went light. It took a few moments for everything to stabilise again. He wasn’t, he reflected, in good shape for facing certain death anytime soon.

‘Alright,’ he told himself unconvincingly. ‘Let’s do this.’ And he stumbled off to rouse the crew.

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.