Chapter 20
“Would it help if we rowed?” I asked after several dull hours of gentle drifting across the endless sand of the Pathian desert.
“It might,” Drakeforth replied from under his hat. He had retired to his hammock while Goat steered the airship towards the horizon.
My internal dialogue went round in circles. Where are we going? Oh, but if we know that, we won’t know how fast we are travelling. I could see how fast we were travelling. I could shimmy down a rope, run a few laps around the shadow of the airship, and casually climb back up before it had travelled more than two ship-lengths across the burning sand.
With Drakeforth hiding under his hat, I was left to stare out at the drifting dunes. The worst part of being on such a slow boat was how it left me with no one to interrogate except myself.
All right, Pudding. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.
Yes, I mentally nodded. We’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel, so why not make a go of it?
Well there’s no need for that kind of attitude.
Are you sure?
Winning an argument with my inner voice was unlikely. It felt easier to take action instead of talking about it.
“Goat!” I shouted.
“See!?” he bellowed from the helm with such intensity, we may as well have been in the grips of a terrible typhoon and not drifting through the calm air as sedately as lint.
“You don’t know where we are going!” According to Berkeley Upsqueak, if you are going to subvert a question by making it a statement, then speak with confidence and volume.
“What?!” Goat reacted as I had hoped.
“You have no clue where we are!” I enunciated each yelled syllable.
“I don’t?”
I took a deep breath. Berkeley had also said that if you find yourself going through homophones, then keep going.
“No idea!”
I waited for the weight of my words to have the desired effect. It took a moment, and then the ship groaned as the air had intensified. I grabbed the rail and hung on. Overhead, the tight mass of inflated goat intestines squeaked indignantly under the strain of the rising wind.
The tones and shades of the sky changed so rapidly it felt like one of those interior design paint books had been riffled through at close range. The swelling clouds went from Snow Cake to Crusty Frypan,and my skin tingled with the building static charge of impending lightning.
There is no way this is going to work, I warned myself.
“Shutup,” I replied aloud.
Everything went from mildly off-putting to extremely weird in what might have been a few seconds. I sighed and closed my eyes.
Cats arranged themselves like self-cleaning gargoyles along the convoluted ledges and edges of the Pathian Museum of History. The building itself was a low hill of stone blocks and pillars that gave the impression it had been built by a legion of blind stone masons, each of whom had no idea that anyone else was working on the project.
Goat’s ship appeared in the shadow of this eye-twisting edifice with a sound similar to a cat coughing up a fur ball.
Space and time, and all the possibilities between, hurriedly got their story straight and the sky returned to normal. Except for the floating mass of inflated goat intestines with the haphazard wooden cabin swinging underneath.
“We’ve arrived?” Drakeforth asked, joining me on the deck.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It wasn’t that difficult, once I realised we can’t possibly know where The Tree is, or where it is going at the same time.”
“Which means the chances of it actually being here are as remote as Nin’s hot-chip caravan in Yambake, Malakam,” Drakeforth replied.
“Is that remote?”
“Stupidly remote.” Drakeforth adjusted his hat. “Come, Pudding, we have a library to explore and possibly rob.”