"Ellis, wake up. I think we've arrived."
Siren's voice cut through a murky sea of dreamed half-logic and impossible continuities, dragging Ellis up to surface into hot, filtered daylight, a seatbelt strap cutting into his side and an ache in the small of his back. He shifted into a more upright position, turned to face his fiancée and attempted a smile. It felt lopsided and half-hearted, but Siren returned it with a glorious one of her own - a sunrise to his fading nightscape.
"It looks like you could have used a few hours more," she said, brushing a lock of hair away from his face, "but I think you'll do." A quick kiss finished the magical resurrection and Ellis began to feel human once more.
He peered out through the window of the sky-cab to see a vast, empty desert plain stretching off towards the horizon. It was such a surreal sight on that world of endless streets that he had to do a double take.
"We're still on Shadow, right?" he asked, turning back to Siren. Annabella, sitting opposite, let out a giggle.
"Yes. What you're looking at is sometimes known as the equatorial divide, the great desert that rings the continents of the world where those who have built this city over many thousands of years have never sustained a surface settlement, but don't worry, the city's still there, in the cracks."
Ellis watched as the ground rose up to meet them and its cracked surface loomed larger and larger, until, what he had at first taken for the effects of a parching sun, proved instead to be the work of millennia for a network of streams and rivers - narrow ravines and great canyons, criss-crossing the dessert in a haphazard fashion, opening beneath them like the many, grinning mouths of a mercilessly hungry planet. The canyons held Ellis' attention for most of their descent as he watched in fascination all the unfolding details, the carved stone-rooftops and hypostatick lanterns that came into focus out of the gloom, so it was only at the last moment, as the sky-cab dipped below the level of the desert itself and descending into one of the canyons, that he noticed the dust cloud in the distance and, in a movement so fast he couldn't be sure he had seen it at all, great hulking shadows and sinuous extremities within.
"What was that?" he asked as the dark enfolded around them, the city rose up past them and the sky-cab plummeted ever deeper.
"A herd of Brontopods," Siren replied matter-of-factly. "They are the other reason, apart from the sun, that no settlement has ever survived on the surface of the equatorial divide."
Ellis vaguely remembered Siren mentioning them once before. They sounded like dinosaurs, but the shapes he had seen in the cloud had been less well-defined than that, the limbs more slender, the bulk less well-supported, as if they were somehow taken alive from within a painting by Salvador Dali.
"Are they dangerous, then?"
"Only if you get under their feet." Annabella replied. "They can't come down into the canyons anyway. I've been reading up," she added as Ellis turned towards her with a puzzled expression.
The Sky-cab began to slow in its descent, hovered gently for a moment, then touched down. Ellis listened for the sound of the engines whirring to a standstill, then unbuckled his seatbelt.
"We're here," came Sydney's voice from the cockpit, "and its safe to step outside now."
"Thank you," Siren said as she opened the hatch and climbed down onto what looked, to Ellis, like the roof of someone's home, albeit one in the midst of a sea of boxes carved out of the rock, all light by cold, blue lanterns, "I don't know what we would have done if Franck hadn't been able to get in touch with you."
"Ah, you'd have found a way to get here one way or another," the pilot demurred as Ellis made his own way down onto the roof, Annabella following closely behind. "Do you want me to stick around here, or is this going to be a longer trip?"
"I don't know how long it will take to be honest. If you go, can you be back in a few days?"
"Probably."
"Then let's try that. We'll meet you here on this rooftop in three days’ time. If we don't show, call a search party." Siren said this last with a laugh, but Ellis wondered how serious the suggestion might really be.
"Yes, Captain!" Sydney offered a salute as Siren closed the hatch and then they all had to step back as the Skycab's many propellers began whirring into action again, to carry the ugly little conveyance up into the skies once more. They watched it dwindling far above them until it disappeared over the lip of the canyon, before turning to each other to make their plan.
"Where do we go from here, then?" Ellis asked.
"According to the maps the Former Baron gave me the ruins should be about a mile further down the canyon," replied Annabella, pointing down the narrow sprawl of streets and terraces into the gloomy distance.
"If we have any difficulties, I'm sure the locals will know what we're looking for," added Siren.
"I guess you'll have to do that," Ellis said with a grin. "The presence of a Y chromosome makes that a physical impossibility for a man."
"Chroma-what-now?" Siren did not seem to get the joke, and worse, seemed annoyed that Ellis wouldn't chip in.
He shrugged, looked abashed and said "Don't worry. I was only joking. I guess it's an Earth thing."
She stared at him a moment longer, then shrugged and turned away heading towards a set of steps that led off the rooftop. Annabella gave him an unsettling grin before following. Great, he thought, I'm outnumbered.
The roof they had landed on turned out to belong to a municipal building of some sort and various officials, clad in garishly bright colours, gave them steely-eyed looks as they stepped down to street level and moved away. The rest of Noondeep's citizens were no less colourful, with ponchos and gilets of many vibrant colours being the 'in' thing to wear, apparently. In fact hardly anyone seemed to be wearing drab colours at all and Ellis couldn't see a single scrap of black fabric anywhere.
"What's up with the spilled-paint look?" he asked as they made their way down the street in the direction Annabella had believed would lead to the ruins.
"As you may, or may not, have observed, Ellis, this place doesn't get a lot of sunlight. People can get depressed easily and the bright colours and daylight lanterns help to alleviate that."
"Oh, yeah," Ellis said as understanding dawned upon him. "SAD."
"Yes, it is, I supposed, but the citizens have learned to cope."
"No, I mean S.A.D. Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's what we call that on Earth."
Siren paused mid step, turned to face him and then said, "You're very nostalgic today."
"Am I?"
"I dunno, just..." She shook her head. "Let's just keep moving, shall we."
The street led down through layer after layer of blocky, flat-roofed buildings, and, as the sun seemed father and farther away, so the frequency and brightness of the strange blue hypostatick 'day' lanterns increased exponentially. It gave everything a cold, glaring appearance which was singularly unwelcoming. Combined with the fact that the colourful residents eyed their dull clothing with considerably suspicion, then Ellis began to feel nervous and uncomfortable.
"Can we move a little quicker, please?" he asked after they had passed an unlit alleyway from which a group of disaffected youths stared with cold eyes, "I don't think we should stop to ask for directions either."
"I think we should have picked up some blankets at that last stall too," Annabella said. She was hugging herself tight and shivering the in the ever-cooling air. "How do people live here?"
"Lack of choice, I imagine," Siren suggested, but she picked up her pace all the same.
Eventually the lights began to dim and become infrequent once more, but this was due to a sudden lack of population, rather than an increase in altitude. Indeed they had descended so deeply now that the strip of sky above them was little more than a thread of silver-green and even the lights of the district behind and above them seemed rather far away. They were entering a deserted region, a place where even these canyon-dwellers would not live and Ellis couldn't blame them. Despite that, however, he had the feeling that they weren't alone and after a few more minutes he began to be certain. There was an unnatural echo to their footfalls, and irregularity to it and when he looked over his shoulder he was sure the shadows moved for a second before settling into stillness.
"We're being followed," he whispered.
"I know," Siren replied, "to the left!" And suddenly she was dashing into a side alley, half dragging Ellis with her. Annabella was hot on his heels. As soon as they were in darkness she pulled them all against the wall with her and motioned for complete silence. After a moment the footfalls came again, faster now, getting closer and closer. Ellis could feel the tension mounting as they approached their corner and he steeled himself, ready for action, but Siren raised her hand to signal that they had to wait. The footsteps were nearly upon them. Ellis clenched his fists.
And then, without a flicker of warning, Siren dashed out around the corner, her cutlass drawn, to face their pursuer, where she promptly froze.
“You,” she said and Ellis couldn’t tell if he heard only surprise, or disdain.
“Yes, okay,” came the accented voice of a woman. A familiar voice.
It couldn’t be, Ellis thought, a chill running down his spine made of guilt and fear, could it?
He stepped out into the street, taking his place beside his fiancée, and realised that he was quite right.
“It is you,” he said, staring at the black-clad woman before him, “what in Shadow are you doing here, Nadiyya!?”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please let me know what you think of this episode!