Patrick Woodhead - The Cloud Maker (2010)

Stepping past them, Shara knelt down on the snow. Pressing her hand against the back of Bill’s legs, she felt the heat coming through the bandages. She rolled one higher, pulling it tight, and Bill let out a groan, his legs buckling under him. Luca had to widen his stance to take the extra weight.

As Bill regained his balance, he looked down at Shara.

‘How much farther?’ he asked, his voice no more than a whisper.

‘Not too far now. But we must keep moving. The infection has set in.’

With that, she stepped out towards the first of the outlying rocks, moving towards one in particular. Shining the beam of the torch carefully up the side of the immense slab, she looked back down at the book before shaking her head in frustration.

‘What are you looking for?’ Luca asked, but Shara only started striding off once again, skirting round the rocks and higher up the mountain on the snowline.

‘Wait! For Christ’s sake, Shara.’

Ahead of them, the beam of light flashed from side to side, illuminating the towering pinnacles of rock piecemeal. Occasionally Shara would stop to rub her hand against one in particular, brushing away the dust and snow.

Suddenly she stopped by a massive pillar. It was shaped like an obelisk and tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. They watched her run her hand over the entire length of the stone as if searching for something. Then abruptly she stopped, retraced where she had been, and shone the torch on a spot she had been touching. Stumbling up behind her, Luca followed her gaze and saw that three lines had been etched together in a triangle at about knee-height. One side of the triangle was slightly thicker than the other, the whole thing being no bigger than a child’s hand.

Shara suddenly turned towards them, the torch beam swinging round with her.

‘Follow me,’ she said, her voice grim. ‘Step exactly where I step.’

Without another word, she ducked under the slab of rock, her body melting into the shadow of the Kooms.

The strain on their arms and legs was relentless.

All around them the pillars rose twenty or thirty feet above their heads. Slabs of rock lay broken at different angles, forcing them to turn up and down, right and left, as they weaved their way past each obstacle. Shara’s beam of light twisted ahead of them in the darkness, pausing only occasionally as she felt her hand across another rock, then pointing the way through.

Luca looked at the chaos around him. At some point during the mountain’s past, the main part of the cliff must have collapsed in on itself in a vast avalanche, carving out pillars of rock and tabular formations that stretched down the entire western side of the slope. The rocks were so crowded that once inside the giant maze, they could see only brief glimpses of the night sky above them. Within minutes of passing the outlying rocks, Luca had lost all sense of direction and simply followed Shara’s moving torchlight, using his own to pick their way across the holes in the uneven ground.

As they moved deeper into the rocks, he realised that most of the stones were leaning towards the right, in the direction the avalanche had fallen. The easiest route would have been to follow their line down the slope, but Shara was persistently heading through the more difficult terrain, back up the mountainside.

She clambered from rock to rock, methodically searching for the next mark and only pausing to refer back to the book. Luca and Bill followed behind, crawling on their hands and knees across flat slabs, before slithering through a dark hole and dropping out into a new part of the maze below. With each new obstacle, Luca had to shoulder most of Bill’s weight, supporting him under his shoulder when they were vertical or dragging him across by his arms when the route got worse.

Bill’s face was etched into a continuous grimace and whenever the underside of his leg caught on a sharp edge of granite he shrieked with pain.

Resting against a nearby rock, Luca looked down at his friend’s face in the bubble of light from the headtorch. Bill’s jaw was locked rigid as he fought back a sickening wave of nausea and his body slumped forward with exhaustion.

‘What is this place?’ he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

‘A nightmare,’ said Luca, doubling over on to his knees as he tried to catch his breath. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope you were wrong about her, Bill. We’re entirely in her hands.’

They fell silent, watching Shara’s torch beam bob along ahead of them. A few moments later it wavered and then switched back to where they stood.

‘Be very careful here,’ she said, her voice tense. She was perched on top of a high boulder, looking back at them over her shoulder. ‘Keep close to the left.’

Luca shook his head, staring up at her with his hands still on his knees. He raised himself, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and watched as she wriggled her way down the other side of the rock, disappearing from view. Luca began to speak, but Bill raised his hand for him to be silent.

‘Listen to that,’ he said.

Luca froze, his senses straining. There was the sound of running water, bubbling away somewhere beneath them.

‘An underground river?’

Bill nodded slowly, wincing again as he pushed himself off the rock and on to his feet.

‘Must be the meltwater from the glaciers higher up.’

They staggered forward again, dropping down the other side of the boulder after Shara. Beneath was a flat section that was easier going and they moved side by side, with Bill’s arm over Luca’s shoulder. Luca was looking up towards Shara, the beam of his torch following his gaze, when Shara suddenly turned back towards them.

‘Left!’ she shrieked, shining the light at their feet. Just a few inches away from Luca’s right boot, the rock sheared off and there was a series of chasms dropping down into the darkness below. They could hear the rush of the water beneath and felt an undercurrent of cold air rising up to meet them.

Luca instinctively leaned left, away from the drop. Together they staggered forward again, nearly losing their balance as they tried to keep their shoulders pressed up against the far wall.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Luca hissed as they reached the safety of the next boulder. ‘This is fucking suicide.’

For another half-hour they followed her lead. The route started to get a little easier now, the spaces between the rocks widening. Finally they rounded a giant boulder and came out in front of the narrow snow gulley that they had seen before from the lower slopes. Shara stopped, knee-deep in snow, staring up towards the top of the ridge.

‘We’re nearly there,’ she whispered. ‘One last push.’

Bill tilted his head up towards the slope then shook off Luca’s grip, sinking down to the ground.

‘It’s too much,’ he breathed.

Luca stood next to him, bent double and winded by the effort. The relief he’d felt at finally being out of the Kooms quickly evaporated as he ran his eyes up the length of the gulley. It was less steep than he had first thought, but the snow was deep. It stretched up, perfect and unbroken in the moonlight, over five hundred feet above them.

To their left was a near-vertical wall of rock which bent round into the gulley. At the very top, Luca noticed something hanging down over the slope – a snow cornice. From the constant wind whipping up the side of the mountain, the snow there had stacked up into an immense, overhanging slab which could easily trigger an avalanche if it collapsed.

Luca stared at it, trying to focus through his exhaustion. They were hemmed in on both sides by the cliffs. If that cornice went, there would be no escape.

Behind them, the first flecks of dawn had started to blossom over the horizon. The sky was turning grey, a half-light before the sun managed to rise above the mountains and burn off the night’s gloom. Dawn would soon be upon them.