Elime had been wildly excited. This visit had reinforced what he’d seen during his first time at the Surface and had made sense of all the things their father had been telling them since they were old enough to understand. Ferbin had been amazed; Elime was positively glowing with joy at the prospect of returning to their own level with a kind of civilisational mandate to carry on his father’s work of unifying the Eighth — and who knew, perhaps beyond.
At the time, Ferbin, who was just starting to take an interest in such things, had been more concerned with the fact that his beautiful second cousin Truffe, who was a little older than he and with whom he’d started to think he might be falling in love, had succumbed — with frightening, indecent ease — to Elime’s bluff charms during the visit to the Surface. That was the sort of conquering Ferbin was starting to take an interest in, thank you, and Elime had already beaten him to it.
They had returned to the Eighth, Elime with a messianic gleam in his eye, Ferbin with a melancholic feeling that, now Truffe was forever denied him — he couldn’t imagine she’d settle for him after his brother, and besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted her any more anyway — his young life was already over. He also felt that — in some strange, roundabout way — the aliens had succeeded in lowering his expectations by the same degree they had inadvertently raised Elime’s.
He realised he had drifted off in this reverie when he heard Holse shouting at him. He looked about. Had he missed a Tower? He saw what looked like a new Tower some distance off to his right and forward. It looked oddly bright in its paleness. This was because of the great wall of darkness filling the sky ahead. He was damp all over; they must have flown through a cloud. The last he recalled they had been flying just under the surface of some long grey mass of vapour with hazy tendrils stretching down like forest creepers all around them.
“…grit-cloud!” he heard Holse yell.
He looked up at the cliff of darkness ahead and realised it was indeed a silse cloud; a mass of sticky rain it would be dangerous and possibly fatal to try and fly through. Even the caude he was riding seemed to have realised things weren’t quite right; it shivered beneath him and he could hear it making moaning, whining noises. Ferbin looked to either side. There was no way round the great dark cloud and it was far too tall for them to go over the top. The cloud was loosing its gritty cargo of rain, too; great dragged veils of darkness swept back along the ground beneath it.
They’d have to land and sit it out. He signalled to Holse and they wheeled right round, back the way they’d come, descending fast towards the nearest forest on the side of a tall hill bound on three sides by the loop of a broad river. Drops of moisture tickled Ferbin’s face and he could smell something like dung.
They landed on the broad, boggy summit of the hill near a rough-edged pool of dark, brackish water and squelched through a quaking mire of shaking ground, leading the grumbling caude down to the tree line. They persuaded the caude to trample down a few springy saplings so they could all shoulder their way far enough in. They sheltered under the trees while the whole day darkened until it was like night. The caude promptly fell asleep.
The grit-rain whispered in the branches high above, growing slowly louder. The view of the hill’s top and a line of remaining brightness in the sky beyond disappeared.
“What I wouldn’t give for a pipe of good unge leaf,” Holse said, sighing. “Bloody nuisance, eh, sir?”
Ferbin could barely make out his servant’s face in the gloom, though he was almost within touching distance. “Yes,” he said. He squinted at the chronometer, which he was keeping inside his jacket. “We won’t get there in daylight now,” he said.
A few leaf-filtered drops of the dirty rain plopped down about them; one landed on Ferbin’s nose and trickled to his mouth. He spat.
“My old dad lost a whole crop of xirze to one of these buggering silse storms once,” Holse said.
“Well, they destroy but they build up too,” Ferbin said.
“I have heard them compared to kings, in that regard,” Holse said. “Sir.”
“We need them, both.”
“I’ve heard that too, sir.”
“In other worlds, they have no silse, no sticky rain. So I’ve been told.”
“Really? Doesn’t the land just wear away to nothing?”
“Apparently not.”
“Not even eventually, sir? Don’t these places have rain and such — ordinary rain, I mean, obviously — that would wear the hills down and carry them all away to lakes and seas and oceans?”
“They generally do. Seemingly they also have such hydrological systems that can build up land from beneath.”
“From beneath,” Holse said, sounding unconvinced.
“I remember one lesson where it sounded like they had oceans of rock so hot it was liquid, and not only flowed like rivers but also could flow uphill, to issue from the summits of mountains,” Ferbin said.
“Really, sir.” Holse sounded like he thought Ferbin was trying to fool him into believing the sort of preposterous nonsense a child would dismiss with derision.
“These effects serve to build up land,” Ferbin said. “Oh, and the mountains float and can grow upwards wholesale, apparently. Entire countries crash into each other, raising hills. There was more, but I rather missed the start of that lesson and it does all sound a bit far-fetched.”
“I think they were having you on, sir. Trying to see how gullible you might be.” Holse might have sounded hurt.
“I thought that, I have to say.” Ferbin shrugged, unseen. “Oh, I probably got it wrong, Choubris. I wouldn’t quote me on this, frankly.”
“I shall take care not to, sir,” Holse said.
“Anyway, that is why they don’t need silse rain.”
“If a tenth of all that stuff’s true, sir, I think we have the better side of the bargain.”
“So do I.”
Silse rebuilt land. As Ferbin understood it, tiny animalcules in the seas and oceans each grabbed a particle of silt and then made some sort of gas that hoisted creature and particle to the surface, where they leapt into the air to become clouds which then drifted over the land and dropped the lot in the form of dirty, sticky rain. Silse clouds were relatively rare, which was just as well; a big one could drown a farm, a village or even a county as efficiently as a small flood, smothering crops with knee-deep mud, tearing down trees or leaving them stripped of branches, breaking roofs of too shallow a pitch, paving over meadows, blanketing roads and damming rivers — usually only temporarily, swiftly resulting in real floods.
The gritty rain was dripping on to them even under the cover of the trees as it found its way through the now heavy, drooping branches.
From all directions around them, a sporadic series of loud cracks rang out above the sound of the silse storm, each followed by a rushing, tearing, crashing noise concluding in a great thump.
“If you hear that right above us, sir,” Holse said, “best jump.”
“I most certainly shall,” Ferbin said, trying to uncloy his eyes from the gritty stuff falling on them. The silse stank like something from the bottom of a latrine trench. “Though right now, death does not seem so unattractive.”
The cloud passed eventually, the day brightened again and a strong wind veered about the hilltop. They squelched out on to the doubly treacherous summit. The newly dumped silse mud covering the already unstable surface of the bog pulled at their feet and those of the caude, both of which showed signs of distress at being forced to walk in such conditions. The mud reeked like manure. Ferbin and Holse brushed as much as they could from their skin and clothes before it caked.