“Oh gods, Ellis, don’t be dead!” Siren’s voice echoed down the long dark tunnel and came back to her sounding hollow and weak. Do I really sound like that? “You can’t be dead… it just… it just doesn’t make any sense!”
As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she could see that his head had fallen forwards into his chest, his arms lay spread out to either side, resting in pools of blood. Siren was almost too scared too touch him, because then she would have her answer, but the longer she waited the less hope there would be, so, carefully, she reached out a hand to his cheek and lifted his head up. His eyes were open, glazed and cold. She could see the delicate pattern of his hazel irises, dilated fully, in an endless stare into darkness.
Panicking, she ran her fingers down his cheek to his neck and pressed for a pulse. At first she felt nothing at all and tears began spilling down her face, blurring her vision, then, as she pressed harder, desperate to defy all the evidence, she felt the faintest beat against her fingertips.
“He’s still alive!” she called, turning towards the silhouette of Franck, standing near the mouth of the tunnel, “He’s alive! Quickly, we need to do something!”
Franck had been frozen to the spot, unable to move at all out of fear that, if he moved, so would time and that would condemn him to the knowledge that Ellis was dead, that there was nothing they could do, that they had been too late. His eyes skimmed over the details, not daring to take them all in; pools of blood leaking out of the veins on his arms, the way he was slumped against the wall, those expressionless eyes as Siren lifted his head.
Then Siren’s voice rang out with a message he had not even dared to hope for. He didn’t need to be told thrice.
Siren lifted Ellis up and began to carry him out towards the light as Franck rushed towards her. He felt so light and blood was still dripping down his arms to splash onto the stone slabs of the tunnel floor. His pulse had been so weak that, even now, she was unsure if he would be alive by the time they were able to do anything for him.
Franck reach her, almost breathless, and tried to take some of Ellis’ weight, but there was really nothing for him to take and so, instead, he lifted one of the youth’s trailing arms and examined the deep cut along its length.
“We need something to bind the wound,” he said, sounding distant and uncertain, not at all like the recklessly confident Philosopher Siren had been getting used to, “and then.. and then I think we’re going to need to give some of our own energy to replenish him.”
Siren wasn’t even listening properly. Her only concern was to get Ellis out into the light and lay him down somewhere soft. She spotted a patch of mossy cobbles not far from the entrance and made her way towards it. The greenish sunlight slid across his face and she was shocked to see how pale he was. He’s like a ghost already, she thought.
“Sydney!” Franck was calling, “I’m going to need to gut some parts from your Skyboat. I’d search for them in there,” he pointed back to the entrance to the Silverspire, “but we don’t have time.”
Sydney was staring in shock at Ellis’ corpse-like form, but Franck’s voice managed to snap him back to reality.
“Uh, sure, whatever you need.”
“I’ll need you to come with me and we’ll have to run most of the way. I can’t stress enough how urgent this is!”
“Then let’s get moving.”
Franck turned to Amy, “Stay with Siren and look for the ring. You might be able to use it to feed him some of your own energy until we can get back with the parts we need for a proper transfusion.”
Amy gazed back at him in some confusion.
“Just do what you can!” he yelled and then he and Sydney loped off around the rear of the building.
Siren’s attention hadn’t left Ellis. Now he was out in the sunlight she could see that he was, indeed, breathing, however slightly, but his wounds were still leaking blood at an alarming rate and that wasn’t going to stop anytime soon unless she could make a tourniquet for each arm.
She felt Amy’s presence lingering over her shoulder and looked up. The spectral woman was gazing down at Ellis with a look of mild concern which Siren did not find encouraging.
“Can you watch him, Amy, while I try and find something to stop the bleeding?”
Amy gave her a sort of dazed half-smile. She seemed even less with it now than usual. It was hard to imagine her reciting poetry from memory anymore. It would have to do.
“Thank you,” Siren managed breathlessly as she leapt up onto her feet and began to run towards the forest boundary.
Crackling, rustling, heavy breathing, footfalls sliding in mud, slipping across ancient cobbles, finding purchase on charred rubble and tripping over gnarled roots; Franck and Sydney didn’t stop, or even slow, for anything as they charged through the forest.
“Keep going straight on,” Sydney would shout through raw, searing breaths, like some kind of encouragement, but the Former Baron was silent as he ran and surprisingly not out of breath. His eyes were focused ahead and his mind, so often a maelstrom of plans and ideas, was fixed and frozen on one thing; a single image that he refused to let thaw.
“Keep going,” shouted Sydney.
The forest seemed so quiet. Even with all the sounds of leaf and stone, bird and beast, Siren found that the atmosphere beneath the canopy was much more tranquil than the sunlit chaos of the clearing. Somewhere inside she was aware that that was the wrong way round. The clearing was silent and still, sombre as the grave, even, and the forest was full of furtive activity and, above all else, life, but the sight of Ellis’ bleeding body, the panic of the situation, seemed to reverse all this. To be surrounded by living things was to lose oneself in a comforting dream.
She scanned the foliage, looking for leaves, vines, anything that might help. All was green and brown, blurring together in fast lines as she turned, losing focus all the time. Her eyes were burning and her mind was spinning, her heart pounding fast and yet faltering. She couldn’t see anything that she could use. She couldn’t even make enough sense of anything she could see to decide if she could use it or not. She couldn’t think.
Her eyes spilled over, salty streams rode the contours of her cheeks, dripping to the forest floor to be forgotten. Her hands rushed to her face, wiping away the moisture with hurried motions as more tears formed to follow the flow of the first.
“Stop it,” she muttered, through clenched teeth and with uneven breath, “stop it and focus!”
But the tears weren’t to be stopped so easily and so she let them come, standing alone beneath the greenish blue of the canopy, as life went on around her.
“It’s too late,” she said as her focus slowly returned, “whatever we do, it’s too late.”
But that’s not going to stop me from trying.
She saw a bush with large flat leaves and quickly grabbed as many of them as she could to serve as bandages. As she did so her gaze penetrated a little deeper into the forest and latched onto a thick vine growing around the trunk of a tree. Once she had her bandages she made her way over to it and cut several lengths of it with her knife, looping it around her arm, then, wiping her eyes once more, she ran out into the sunlight.
“It should be just ahead,” Sydney called forwards as he staggered up to a tree, desperate for a chance to catch his breath, but feeling guilty that he couldn’t keep up. Franck was already disappearing ahead, through the veil of leaves which separated the forest edge from the clearing they had landed the Skyboat in.
Sydney shook his head, both amazed and ashamed by the Former Baron’s mysterious agility and endurance, then he pushed away from the tree trunk and began to jog once more, stumbling as he went, towards the glow of the clearing.
Siren nearly dropped the leaves and vines when she saw what was happening in the centre of the Silverspire’s plaza. Amy was kneeling down beside Ellis and the youth was hovering, a few inches above the mossy stone. His pale skin was glowing.
“Amy, what’s happening?”
The spectral woman glanced up at Siren as she approached. Her face was calm, almost unreadable, but there was a tightness about her lips which suggested that the rational Phiosopher was currently winning over the confused poet. Either way, she said nothing, merely studying Siren for a second in the silence before returning to look down at Ellis.
Siren stepped closer, until she could see Ellis’ glazed, endlessly staring eyes. She swallowed.
“Is he…?”
“Yes, he’s dead.”
Siren’s hands were covering her mouth in an instant and the tears she had fought so hard were brimming over once more. “Oh gods…”
“No,” Amy said, her voice cold and piercing like a blade of ice. “I’ve worked too hard to lose him now.”
“What do you…?”
But Amy wasn’t listening. Instead she was reaching down to the silver ring on Ellis’ finger, stretching out a spectral digit of her own until her nail was almost touching the metal and then-
There was a clatter of metal as Sydney dropped his spanner and it bounced off the landing supports and then onto the ancient stonework. He didn’t notice, however, because he was staring at the sky.
“What the hell is that?”
Franck was gazing upwards as well, his eyes gleaming with intense interest and his features animated with Philosophickal passion. His single frozen idea was not thawing, but was instead shattered by the inrushing web of complex informational patterns now forming in his mind. Plans within plans, ideas linking to ideas, the patterns inside his head were beginning to resemble the one which was the source of his instant renaissance, burnt into the sky with purples flames, five hundred feet above his head. Circles, lines, curves and runes were all clearly visible against the pale green backdrop of mid morning and, striking up through the centre, a line of fire a thousand feet high marked the source of such a marvel: the epicentre.
“It’s an equation,” he said, excitement building in his tone, “and, like all equations, it performs a function. In this case it is a function which acts upon the very nature of reality itself.”
“But what does it mean.”
“It means that Ellis is alive!”
“But… how?”
“What’s more, someone wants him alive enough to put themselves at great risk.”
“Who?” Sydney asked, sounding utterly lost.
“Let’s head back and find out, shall we? I can assure you that we won’t be needing any of these parts anymore.”
There were several more clanks as pipes and valves and pumping engines were all sent tumbling, recklessly, to the cobbled ground, and then two sets of footsteps began tapping their way south through the forest.
AUTHOR COMMENT: This episode was quite exciting to write. It was interesting to introduce a new element to the world of Hypostatick Philosophy and it was great to bring the character of Amy to the forefront of the story once more. Expect big reveals about her in the very near future.
ReplyDeleteThis was also a good opportunity to start to work on Siren's feelings for Ellis - to begin to explore that in more detail, which you'll start to see play out in the second half of this volume, but I warn you - this one is for the long haul, I think.
Anyway, I hope you liked it.