The mad monster that was Stanislav seemed to be having just as much difficulty. The loose surface slid underneath him, and his tentacles fought to hold on to the shining rock.
Pushing Mary ahead of him, he turned to Stanislav and brandished the knife.
‘You want me? You want her? You can’t have us. You can’t keep up because you’re weak. Weak, you hear me? You’re just a sheep like the others. A sheep.’
He had no idea if Stanislav had heard him or not. The wind stole his words away the moment they left his mouth. But what was important wasn’t whether Stanislav understood, rather that he could see his defiance with all hundred of his eyes.
Taunt him. Goad him. Make him angry and make him careless. Just as long as he followed them up the mountain.
It seemed to be working. He crawled and rolled up the bare rock after them, thrashing and bubbling, extruding tentacles into crevices and joints, slowly, inexorably, coming after them.
Whereas they were nimbler, but less sure-footed. Stanislav wasn’t going to get blown over the edge of the cliff; they, with their bloodied fingers and toes, their long limbs and impractical clothing, might.
They kept belly-low, but sometimes it wasn’t enough. The wind would whip in between them and their handholds, and bodily lift them into the air, driving in like a crowbar to separate them from their tenuous grip on life.
Whenever it happened, Dalip’s stomach lurched and his blood ran cold. He splayed himself out and pressed himself to the rock, and prayed for it to pass so he could keep going. It wasn’t far now. If he looked up, craning his neck at an unnatural angle to see the zenith, it glowed with pent-up energy. He could feel the buzzing on his skin, the prickle of electricity dancing in the clouds so close above his head, he could have reached up and touched them.
So close, so very close.
‘Come on,’ he bellowed to both Mary and Stanislav. ‘Come on!’
They were all but at the summit, in the very heart of the storm. Fat lances of light burned the rock, cracking it apart, sending shockwaves through the mountain and a blast of hot air against his back. Mary was just below him, and he hauled her up after him, pressing on her head to keep her low.
Stanislav was right behind, a shifting mass of pseudopods dragging itself over the last ledge to the unforgiving bleakness of the top.
The clouds roiled and seethed, and there was nowhere else to go. Dalip had brought them all up here. It only remained to see who would descend again.
The knife was hot in his hand, glowing with a blue aurora. Bringing metal up here, in the middle of an electrical storm? What was he thinking?
This. He started to run, not away across the broad shoulder of the summit, but towards Stanislav. He jumped, flinging his arms high, and brought them down again as hard as he possibly could, plunging the blade deep into the central mass. He couldn’t stop himself from falling on to him, turning his head at the last moment but landing square on.
It was like hitting a balloon full of jelly. Soft, yielding, somehow firm and rubbery. It was vile, and even more so as mouths opened up under him to suck him in, tentacles wrapped around him to feed him into the waiting maws.
Dalip let go of the knife, only to find his arm held tight. He kicked hard, then harder still, and the ropes of flesh gripped hardest of all. Eyes flickered at him, reflecting the bright sky. He needed to get away, and yet there was no way of doing so, no way that Mary could intervene without getting trapped herself.
For a moment, one hand was free, and he gouged at an eye. It tried to sink back into the skin, and his fingers followed it, dragging it up from the depths, pulling it away until it was only attached by a thin cord. That seemed to cause Stanislav discomfort, enough that he was lifted clear, then thrown like a discarded toy.
Towards the cliff. He bounced and rattled. The sheer drop behind him yawned, and he teetered, winded, his legs sliding over the edge as he scrabbled for purchase.
The clouds overhead were almost white.
Mary ran to him, reached over his head to grab his boilersuit at the neck, tried to pull him back on to solid ground. That wasn’t what he wanted. Instead, he reached up and fastened his hand on her arm. Her eyes flashed wide and she started to rear away, but he wasn’t going to let go.
Stanislav was right behind her, tentacles flailing across the rocks, dragging himself closer. He was almost within reach, his bright eyes fixed on her legs.
Dalip leaned backwards, planted his feet firmly on the cliff edge, and pushed.
He and Mary tumbled out into space together, just as the lightning spat down, drawn by the irresistible lure of the knife.
31
They fell. Mary, blind and deaf from the sudden explosion of light, felt the wind start to tear at her and the one point of contact with Dalip falter and slip away. She could blink, and that was all. Her skirts tangled into her legs and her hair covered her face. She was bent like a bow, hands and feet above her, spine curved so far she could almost touch her toes.
The ground, when it eventually came, would be very hard. Even the storm-tossed surface of the lake would be enough to shatter her into a thousand pieces.
Then she remembered.
The transformation seemed to take both forever and a mere second. She was falling, then she was flying, time stretching out long enough that she could experience her skin erupting in feathers, the constricting clothes melting away, her hood of hair disappear and all her senses become as sharp as her talons.
She wheeled away from the orange figure fluttering below her.
She remembered again. The raggedy twist of limbs was worth catching, but she’d left it very late. Her wings, hard against the updraught, folded against her body and her neck craned forward. Not so much falling as diving, faster than anything in the sky, able to outrun even the lightning.
Here he came, flailing in the roaring air, closer and closer, and though the lake was topped with white foam fingers that were reaching up to embrace him, she was quicker. Her legs swung down and her claws opened like traps.
They closed around him, a black keratin cage. Now they were both going to strike the water together. She unfurled her wings to their furthest reach, and her dive became an arc. All her flight feathers strained, and her tail spread wide.
Her speed became unfathomable. There was the water, and there was air, and it passed her in a single blur of steel grey. She lifted her legs as high as she could, because she was that close to dragging them, and her precious cargo, through the surf.
And finally, the curve turned upwards. There was a hair’s breadth between her and the rushing ground. Then a hand’s breadth. Then more, but no, here came an obstacle, a wall, Down-made but already ruined by the storm and the vagaries of nature◦– she soared through the gap and managed to gain enough height to crest the opposite side.
She registered that the top of the tower was on fire, but that was all. Its significance eluded her for a moment, as she dropped down into the valley, speeding up again, standing on one wing to pass through the gorge and up back towards the mountain-top.
Now she slowed, her wings wide as she skipped over the shoulder of rock and into the col behind, down towards the lake shore. She flapped once, twice, to kill her forward movement, then fluttered gently as she lowered Dalip to the ground.
He didn’t move. He lay just as he was placed, flopped, boneless, lifeless, amongst the shale rocks at the water’s edge. She might have killed him, but the blame wouldn’t be hers. He was the one who’d thrown himself backwards over the edge of a cliff, knowing that only one of them could fly. It wasn’t like he’d discussed his plans with her beforehand: if he’d died, it would have been only because she hadn’t quite managed to save him, and with the smallest chance of success at that. He’d known the risks◦– or at least, decided that using the storm to get rid of Stanislav took priority over his own life.