Cloud Castles Read online

  Just beyond the car an overhanging rhododendron twig leaped and flew up, landing on the bonnet in a shower of leaves. I braked violently, and something else sang down and threw up a spatter of gravel at the driver’s door. I more or less stamped on the accelerator; no mistaking what that was. Just as the car lurched forward an intense green point glittered on the windscreen; then there was another whine through the open window, past my ear, and a rear window crazed. I ducked, changed up like a maniac and saw two more gravel fountains spout around the car. Then I was at a bend in the drive, and nearing the gate. The gatekeepers sprang up, and I half expected them to leap into my path with machine pistols; but instead they flung the gates open with as much of a flourish as before, so I hardly needed to slow down. I sailed through with a nonchalant wave, half expecting a bullet in the back, and saw their faces stiffen as they registered the crazy cracking on that rear pane. Too late; I was through, away and down towards the village. But it wasn’t till the cobbles of its main street rumbled under the tyres that I slowed down and stopped, shaking, to wonder just who the hell had been after me with a long-range laser gunsight.

  I couldn’t have offended Lutz that much; or if I had, there were a hundred easier ways he could have disposed of me, and not on his premises either. And he wouldn’t have let me slip through that gate, not Lutz. But whoever it was had missed. Could it just have been a warning? I reached out and touched the shattered window; another centimetre and that would have been my head. Warnings don’t come that close. Which meant that our sight-wielder was an assassin all right, just not a very good one – lack of practice, maybe, at least in real-world situations.

  I drew breath and started the car up again, heading for the Autobahn; these winding little lanes were unnerving now. At every bend I kept expecting to see that green glimmer again, and then – nothing. But on the Autobahn I could build up a bit of speed, and be harder to hit, impossible in traffic. The Einfahrt sign, which normally made me chuckle, looked like the gate to paradise when I reached it, and the bumpy concrete-block surface, a legacy of the Third Reich, rumbled with safety and security. I’d been shot at more than most people, and if anything I liked it even less now; every miss brought that inevitable hit one statistical notch nearer. I put my foot down and let the car’s power take over, snatching me up and sweeping me away. I’d have liked the road a bit less empty, for cover’s sake, but at least I could open her up.

  It was the roar from beside me that caught my attention, the sound of a fast car being pushed; and it was too close. I glanced around, saw the dark saloon loom up, the window slide down. The sight of the slingshot almost made me laugh, till I realized its purpose. A bullet in a crashed driver’s head causes comment, but there are a hundred ways a lump of jagged metal or stone could have got there. Frantically I ducked, wrenched at the wheel to swerve away – and screamed aloud.

  The big black truck which had been quietly minding its own business some way ahead had become a roaring, swinging monster right in my path, driving me towards the outer lane, the concrete lip of the road and the blackness beyond. I swung the car, braked, and the truck smashed into the concrete in front of me, rebounded in a spray of chips, and here was that bloody Merc again! I swung right, only to see the truck wheels loom above me like whirling mincers, too close to avoid now. There was a thudding crash, the broken back window exploded – and the Merc, cutting in towards me, burst off them like the ball off a roulette wheel. As I struggled to steer into my long skid I saw it leap the centre and go skidding along the crash barrier, then overturn with a noise like crumpling tin. I pulled the car round as the truck bore down on me, clamped down hard and felt some two hundred and fifty horsepower take hold of the road and heave. Friend or foe, the truck couldn’t even hope to keep up. It fell away behind, and good riddance; there’d been nothing accidental about any of this. The wind from the empty light behind whistled savagely; it would have been my side window, and probably me, if it hadn’t been for that truck. I’d been shaking earlier; now I was just plain and fancy furious.

  It was nearly two when I pulled back into the hotel, causing the sleepy night porter to goggle at the sight of my car, with its side stove in. I’d stopped to report it, not that it would do any good, but it would keep the hire company off my back. The police were politely sceptical, asking if driving on the right had not by chance confused my lane discipline, and squaring up to breathalyse me – until they found out where I’d been. One mention of Lutz and C-Tran, and it was yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir, which isn’t supposed to happen, but does. That put me in an even filthier temper, and to avoid another set of explanations I said I’d park the car myself. I trundled around to a suitably obscure corner in the shadows at the side of the hotel, and that made me think of 1726. I looked up at her window, but the light was off. I resisted the temptation to rush up there and wring some more explanations out of her, though; the best thing for me would be getting out of here, fast, and back home, to find some more reliable advice. And somehow, during all this lunatic pursuit, my subconscious had placed that strange symbol on that beautiful floor, and disturbed me deeply in the process. I wished it had been something like a swastika; that I could almost have comprehended, loathed but related to history, to purely human horrors. But the last place I’d seen a shape like that was among the ghastly tangles of obscene carving on the high stern transom of the Wolfship Chorazin. A geometric five-pointed star, set within a double circle of inscription, an emblem of ill intent, a pentacle.

  Though this one had been filled with what looked like odd mosaic patterns …

  I stopped suddenly, turned round. Something had moved behind me, something like a momentary flicker of light, a rustle of movement to go with it. When I spun around again it stopped, then sounded again, louder. Over the bonnets of the parked cars something flowed, barely visible except against their mirror polish, a faint misting that moved in tendrils, amoeba-like. Now I could see it in the air, just, as the lights glimmered on it. There was that sound again – not a rustle exactly, more like a faint hoarse exhalation. It looked like nothing at all, and yet the feeling grew on me that it would be a very bad idea to have that clammy cloud wrap itself about me. I backed away, and saw it seem to rear up, facing me, an invisibility no more than a shimmer against the stunted trees behind and their single low lantern – and then, shockingly, whiter, thicker, as mist flowed back into it from all around. It was gathering itself into a thick misty cloud there; and I turned and ran. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the thing move, too, gliding forward, on my tracks, glittering among the parked cars, flowing over their cold metal like a caress. It was fast, too, but I was faster; I made the front, and practically fell through the glass doors as they soughed back. The porter was contemplating me with fascination.

  ‘Mist,’ I explained. It happens to mean ‘manure’ in German, but that was all the explanation I felt like right then. I limped over to the lifts and straight up to my room; but though I was bone-weary I poured myself a drink and went out onto the balcony, unable quite to credit the last couple of hours I’d lived through. The physical attacks, maybe, though who had anything to gain I couldn’t imagine. But even they seemed improbable now, faintly ridiculous, as if I’d somehow exaggerated them out of distorted memories. And the mist – okay, I’d had strange things happen before; but surely that had to be pure panicky imagination. Hysteria, even, triggered off by stress.

  But when I looked down all those floors the car park was still shrouded in that faint haze, setting glittering haloes around all the lights, enveloping the ground floor of the hotel. It stirred as I leaned over, and seemed to stretch a long tendril up towards me, like a wave climbing a sea cliff. But it couldn’t make it, and like a wave it fell back into the stuff it came from, spreading faint ripples of ghostly turmoil.

  I sank into bed that night, very tired and uneasy, wondering just what I’d got into, what I’d created, and I dreamed. More than once it woke me, sweating, but only one image remained from a v
aguely terrifying jumble. A map of Europe, a child’s map in the dulled colours of an old school atlas, and spreading across it a web, a grey, complex, dirty web, full of shrivelled death. At the heart of it, tense, malevolent, ready to spring, there crouched a small black spider.

  Chapter Three

  The next morning, oddly enough, I had fewer doubts. That was because I harboured some interesting cuts and bruises, which had taken advantage of the night to stiffen up; and because I had to spend ages arguing with the car-hire company and persuading them to send another car to get me to the airport. The whole thing infuriated me so much I almost forgot 1726, but when I called down, the desk clerk, an old acquaintance, assured me that yes, Fraiilein Perceval had checked out at six thirty and taken her car out of the garage and, speaking of which, mine had just arrived. It turned out to be chauffeur-driven; which is one way of making a point. I sat in stony silence all the dull and drizzly way, brooding. Perceval, eh? Distinguished, as cover-names went.

  I’d meant to spend a few days more, at least, but with all sorts of people gunning for me, and complications straying in from the Spiral, I had urgent business at home. So much for my climbing, too. I was feeling mean as a rat; they wanted my head, did they? Well, they’d better watch out for theirs. With my cases poised on a wobbling trolley I went through airport security, which had become twice as annoying as customs and passport controls ever were, and trundled my way over to the behind-hangars backwater set aside as a heliport. The sight of my own little machine rolled out and waiting cheered me up a bit; I threw my cases into the minuscule back seat, sent the trolley to hell and went over everything even more thoroughly than usual, just in case somebody had bribed a mechanic to loosen a nut or block an oil line.

  Paranoia rules, okay – and who told you?

  All the same, I felt relieved when I’d covered all the more obvious possibilities; there are too many of them on a helicopter. At last, wiping oil off my fingers, I settled into the pilot’s seat and pulled on my helmet. I had just time to run through the pre-flight checks with traffic control before the slot I’d booked came up, and the impatient ground staff waved me out. The starter coughed, turned, and unleashed the worst din in the world. It made me shrink a bit, after last night, but I’d no time to spare. Right hand on the cyclic joystick, left on the collective lever, twist the throttle grip and listen to the quickening hiss of the rotors overhead. As it speeded up I rocked the rudder pedals gingerly, checking the tail rotor’s response; I’d only been flying solo for two years, and I didn’t want to lose it right in the middle of a major international airport. My left hand gunned the throttle and eased the collective forward, angling the rotor blades to generate lift, and the tarmac sank away in my windshield as the little beast lifted and began to swing. I eased down on the pedals, pitching the tail rotor to kill the swing, tipped the cyclic to tilt the whole rotor assembly, angling the downdraught backwards, and inched the collective along, sending her slowly forward and upward, all the while obeying the controller’s patient monotone, keeping a wary eye on the airport around me and darting nervous glances at the crowded control display. Flying a ‘copter is a whole-body experience, like sex without the fringe benefits.

  I made rather heavy weather of clearing the crowded airspace, but patient the voice remained, so I couldn’t have been doing too badly. Finally I was up and away, and I could do what I’d been yearning to, just lean on the stick and let her soar. As high as she would, anyhow: she was a middle-aged Bell I’d bought second hand, nominally a five-seater provided two of your friends were garden gnomes, and a bit lacking in get-up-and-go. Presumably the company would be able to buy me a better model, maybe one with NOTAR technology – no tail rotor – and faceplate control displays, all the trimmings, but that thought didn’t excite me so much now. It was in danger of feeling like dirty money.

  As I burst up through the cloud cover, though, my mood could hardly help improving. Out of grey damp gloom and over an expanse of cloud sparkling in the sun’s long rays, it reminded me of the most liberating moments of my life, when I set sail upon the Spiral. Few other experiences approached the sheer astonished wonder of seeing the bows lift above mundane seas, heading out towards the cloud archipelagos and the oceans of moonlit mist through which great ships pass to all the seas of the world, in every era there has been and even more that haven’t. They had their equivalents, those eerie oceans, in earth and air – regions of land and sky where horizon and heavens blended, where time and space became one shifting, hazy borderland where perspectives shrank and parallel lines met, a mass of vanishing points through which you could slip into realms of shadow and archetypal myth. I’d encountered some on land, within the shadows of great cities and ancient centres of worship, but never in the air. I’d heard they were fewer and less easy to penetrate and pass, and I often wondered how they must look. Now I guessed it might be something like this, this glittering dream landscape where snow-capped mountain-top and thrusting cloudcap merged and mounted in towering, infinite ranges. Maybe that was how Le Stryge had summoned me …

  Even as the thought struck me, so did the surprise. I stiffened, sending the rotor fishtailing behind me. The still low sun mounted over one such row of cloud crests – and its warm light shot two shapes into dramatic silhouette against the blazing whiteness. Twin towers, tall and narrow, just as I’d seen them from the mountain path.

  I didn’t have a lot of fuel to spare; you never did in a little machine like this. But I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I banked steeply and went whirling in towards them, sweeping between phalanxes of reaching cloudy cliffs, crags of mist and insubstantial steeps; and the towers grew, or so it seemed. Tall airy things, Gothic structures that made stone seem almost as light as the mists over which they rose. I stared, forgetting my course. A harsh grey cliff-face loomed, and instinctively I pulled away, forgetting it was no more solid than a dream – or was it? Jagged edges, stark crevice and weathered chimney; I was climber enough to register those things as they reeled across my windshield, as dangerously solid as any stone that ever scuffed my shins or drew blood beneath scrabbling fingernails. I hauled back on the stick, pitched the rotors and pulled hard around, banking across a vast expanse of sheer savage mountainside. The sweat trickled down inside my helmet. Ill-judged; too fast. Had I made that mistake? Or was this how the landward ways of the Spiral opened, where instead of islands in an azure ocean the pathless clouds would resolve into real mountains with fortress summits, castles of cloud into mighty crests of stone – was it like this? The mists swirled before me as the machine plunged away, and seemed to pull me down.

  Lost in grey, without up or down, I struggled to control her, swinging this way and that for long moments, until finally I saw the indicator on the artificial horizon line creep level and the altimeter settle at a reasonable figure. I checked the radar, but there was nothing aloft except mountainsides and me. Then I tried to call Frankfurt control. Nothing. Nothing from Munich either; only noise. I thought for a moment, and then I relaxed the rotor pitch and sank; and we burst out into daylight over a wide valley.

  It glowed green beneath me, lush and rich, the floodplain of a river that ran down it like a vein of silver, flanked by chessboard fields and rolling meadows. And as I swung the ‘copter away from that all too solid mountainside, I saw where it flowed to, and the reason for those towers. Straddling the river via a tall island at its centre, a town dominated the valley, and was dominated in its turn. A huge walled fortress town, like nowhere I’d seen except maybe Carcassonne; and this was larger, and even more beautiful, with winding rows of red-tiled roof-tops and golden stone walls that glowed in the mellow light. But above them, rising from the island, were darker, taller walls; and from their heart rose those cloud-piercing towers. They were the spires of a massive building like a cathedral, an escalating mountain of Gothic walls and arches and buttresses and scale-tiled roof-tops and towers that looked impossibly delicate until I realized just how enormous they must be. The whole thing wa
s like a minor peak in its own right, glowing dark amber against the sunlight that streamed down through the broken cloud. I swung closer, looking for any clue to where this place might be. There were boats in the river, mostly sailing ships and barges; but though there were ribbons of dusty yellow road, I couldn’t see a single car or truck on them. I thought of coming down, taking a closer look, but I didn’t want to overfly the place, draw attention to myself and maybe start a panic. If I was right, they might not be too used to helicopters here.