It was more like surfing than flying. The air was made of currents and sudden falls. The Megalith’s soft flesh gusted around them as it swooped, slipped straight down and swooped again. All the time, the wind made a hollow roar; but the glittering emptiness they fell through gave Lucy the impression they were falling in silence – falling through a gap in time, even.
Daniel inched forwards hand by hand, digging his fingers into the Megalith’s skin. He peered over its shoulder and his face tightened.
‘Hold on!’ he called as the Megalith’s paws swept back and the wind roared. They thumped down; the shock of landing sent waves across the Megalith’s back. Lucy half-fell, half-scrambled down to the ice-hard cloud plain and collapsed onto her back, staring at the sky, where Altovia floated like one of those oversized cruise ships on a still sea. We’re safe! she thought, and wondered what had happened to Wist and Jovius. Had they escaped the Varactor?
The wind tossed a flurry of rain against her cheek – from Altovia, she realised, and its frozen Cloudians. She jerked to her feet and plunged her face into her sleeve, wiping it dry.
‘Are you alright?’ Daniel was bent double, clutching his chest, winded from the fall. She pressed one hand against his back and felt his ribs shuddering like buried wings. She had almost forgotten the Megalith. Now she saw it a few feet away, watching them with glass-bead eyes, set close together at the top of its snout. Its body sprawled behind it, spilling in lumpy folds onto the cloud plain. The body of a slug, the size of an elephant, with a colourless mole face – the Megalith should have been absurd but something in its gaze made Lucy feel she was in the presence of some ancient, endlessly patient creature.
‘Lucy?’ Daniel caught her elbow. His breath was still coming in jagged gasps. ‘Could it carry us to Earth?’ They both looked at the Megalith. In the same instant, it stretched out a long white tongue and licked its snout.
‘I am hungry,’ it said. ‘Will your friends be long?’ Its voice was reedy, piped down its snout, and oddly precise. Following its gaze, Lucy saw a white speck swooping from Altovia. Soon she could make out two figures: Wist and Jovius, standing with their coats stretched out behind them. They were riding a carpet like the ones she had seen in the Citadel. Wist was steering with tiny movements, tilting his hands this way and that.
The thought of Earth had filled Lucy with longing. Images gathered in her mind: waking late on Sunday, walking in the green-shadowed pine forest. They were memories she could hardly have described to anyone – out of focus somehow, as though she was remembering hundreds of days at the same time.
They stood watching Wist and Jovius drift down towards them. ‘So they escaped the Varactor,’ said Daniel. The bitterness in his voice startled Lucy. She looked at him, a pale, wind-bitten figure. On Earth, she would have dismissed him as a privileged little mess-up, yet now, when she looked at him, her breathing settled and things took solid shape again. She shook her head, confused, and looked back up at Wist and Jovius just as Wist bent one knee and slid the carpet through a half-circle. It skidded to a stop a little way above the cloud plain. Jovius bounded towards Lucy and Daniel and clapped their backs with his soft hands.
‘All safe!’ he cried.
Daniel shrugged him off. Jovius blinked up at him with the same smile fixed, uneasily now, on his face. Stretching up on his toes, he gazed around him at the empty cloud plain. Lucy thought of her father, standing in the kitchen, staring at familiar things – the toaster and kettle, their beaten-up chopping board – with exactly that vacant expression, and something twisted in her chest. She felt sad suddenly, and impatient. Jovius annoyed her, running after everyone like a poodle; and Wist annoyed her – the way he stood rolling up the carpet now without even a greeting.
The carpet compressed as he rolled it, shrinking to the size of a fold-up umbrella. He put it into his pocket. At last, he looked up.
‘There is a matter of Comclo,’ said the Megalith.
Wist nodded. ‘Six pieces, if you brought them safely down.’ He assessed Lucy and Daniel.
‘So Wist bribed that thing to rescue us,’ whispered Daniel.
‘Very well,’ Wist nodded to the Megalith. He pointed at Daniel. ‘You’ll have to ask that one for it.’
Lucy saw Daniel frown and then stretch his mouth into a deliberate smile. She could see exactly what he was thinking. Taking the Comclo from his pocket, he counted out six pieces and then stared into the box a moment longer, wondering whether there was enough left to bribe the Megalith to carry them all the way home.
One by one, Daniel flung pieces of Comclo into the air. With a flash of its tongue, the Megalith snapped at them and gulped them down without chewing. ‘You’ll eat it all now?’ he said, holding up the sixth piece.
The Megalith grunted. ‘I have not eaten for a month. The Kazia has frozen the last cloud left to us after Cloudian occupation.’
‘We are crossing Cloudland to fight the Kazia,’ said Wist. ‘You shouldn’t need bribes to help the Protector.’
‘Hunger makes its own laws,’ answered the Megalith. It pulled its weight around until it was facing Lucy. ‘Yet I will help you,’ it said. ‘I will show you something.’ It dragged its stomach across the cloud, snuffling and turning this way and that. Circling back, it stopped and started digging, flinging long streaks of cloud into the air behind it. Reaching into the hole it had made, it forced back a plate of polished cloud.
‘This will lead you safely to the Mist.’
Lucy looked into a tunnel, two metres down, walled with close-packed cloud and filled with pale light.
‘What is this?’ snapped Wist. ‘Made outside Cloudian knowledge?’
The Megalith made a rumbling sound. ‘Cloudian knowledge! This is one of the old ways of the Megaliths, made long before you Cloudians spread across all the clouds, forcing us into wild and barren places.’
‘You want us to go in there?’ said Daniel. His voice sounded scratched. Lucy looked at his face, fixed like a mask, and knew how he felt. Already, the silence of the tunnel was closing around her, constricting her throat.
‘As you wish,’ answered the Megalith. ‘Remember, a Varactor does not give up the hunt. It will have risen now into the high, cold places. When it has regained its strength, it will look for you again – and find you, if you stay on this shelterless plain.’
‘You’ll come into the tunnel with us?’ asked Lucy. ‘We’ll give you a piece of Comclo a day,’ she added, before Wist could say anything.
‘Very well.’ The Megalith threw a glance at Wist, who was glittering with anger. ‘I will guide you as far as the Mist.’
‘What Mist?’ demanded Daniel. There was a pause. The Megalith took a sudden interest in licking its paws clean. Jovius started rubbing invisible stains from his sleeves.
‘The only way to the Forgotten Lands,’ said Wist abruptly. He flicked his hand when Daniel asked more questions. ‘No need for us to enter any tunnel,’ he said, glaring at the sky. ‘The Varactor has gone.’
‘But it will come back!’ retorted Lucy.
Wist swung his face so close she noticed with a flash of repugnance that his eyelids folded at the bottom of his eyes. ‘Primitive,’ he spat. ‘We do not travel with the Megaliths.’ Something fierce and desperate in his look made Lucy’s skin shrivel.
‘We’re taking the tunnel,’ she answered. Wist straightened and stalked away. They watched him in silence: a pale silhouette against the sky. Lucy saw he would do what she said. Instead of exultation, his obedience gave her a queasy feeling – she imagined consequences stretching away from her feet in all directions, like long invisible shadows. She walked to the trapdoor and swung herself down. When she looked up, the sky had shrunk to a blue square.