He was just beginning to think he was safe when the entire underside of Thunderlungs' Cry began to blow apart in a series of thunderous and buffeting explosions. There was an ominous cracking from above, too, and as the air about him began, suddenly, to fill with falling stones, rocks and even boulders, he realised that Thunderlungs' Cry itself was coming down. Slowhand cursed and frantically began to manoeuvre the glider through the deadly rain, avoiding pieces of the collapsing bridge by inches and aware that even a single impact could slap him from the sky. Whether through some innate piloting skill or sheer luck, he emerged unscathed, and was about to whoop in triumph when a growing shadow on the distant ground made him instinctively look up.
Ohhh, fark! he thought.
Because Thunderlungs Cry had saved the best for last, it seemed, and — seemingly in slow motion — an entire middle section of the bridge was plummeting towards him.
Slowhand never thought he'd be grateful for more explosions, but for the final, momentous detonation from the rockface, he most assuredly was.
He suddenly found himself being punched across the sky. The shockwave from the final detonation had caught the glider and punched it into a spin away from the rock face and, to Slowhand's misfortune, higher rather than lower into the mountains. As he sailed dizzyingly above the immense chasm he realised that while he had been punched higher, this did not necessarily mean that he was going to remain high as the shockwave had severely damaged what little integrity his invention had possessed in the first place. Swallowing uneasily, the archer craned his neck to inspect how bad things were, and his worst fears were confirmed. His jerry-rigged frame was bent and warped, and where he had lashed catgut to hold it together, it was now either snapping away from the metal or uncoiling from it with a sound like multiple cracking whips. He estimated he had perhaps a minute before the whole thing came apart.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to keep the glider aloft, and there was nowhere he could bring it in to a forced landing. He was going down.
Slowhand found his attitude becoming unexpectedly philosophical. Maybe Hooper and he were going to meet up again, after all, and he could imagine the conversation already.
"Hooper."
"Slowhand."
"How's things?"
"Ohhh, you know… dead. You?"
"Dead."
"Mmmm."
"Mmmm."
"So…"
"So…"
Killiam Slowhand smiled, but it was a smile that faded as it formed. Because one of the last things he saw from his aerial vantage point were the k'nid, spilling towards the peninsula.
Then, abruptly, there was no more time and the glider impacted with the ground.
There was a rapid and utterly disorientating series of cracks, thuds and crunches, accompanied by the sound of a whistling wind and breaking struts and bones. Then the world turned sideways, lengthways, diagonal, upside down and, ultimately, dark.
The body of the archer lay face down amongst the wreckage in the remote peaks, twisted and spasming, and he reflected that if there had been a small chance that he might ever be found, that chance was dashed as flurries of snow blew in around him, then over him, covering him in a thick, white shroud that, come night, would freeze about him completely.
His hand moved slowly, shakily towards a pocket, searching for the bracelet Jenna had given him, hoping for comfort in its company. But his fingers felt nothing, the piece of jewellery that had seemed so important to his sister had been lost in his frantic attempts to flee the harbour. The archer sighed lengthily, though knew the sound was only partly disappointment and that, in truth, the strength to care was deserting him.
His eyelids fluttered closed and, as white flakes began to settle on them, he did not blink them away. His face unmoving now, more flakes settled layer by layer until, at last, his features were indistinguishable from the snow.
High in the Drakengrats, nature had built Killiam Slowhand his grave.
Chapter Five
The Drakengrat Mountains flared for a moment with a light so intense that it whited out the eyepiece through which Merrit Moon watched the event occur. The old man turned quickly away, rubbed his eye, and then frowned deeply. The ancient elven telescope — a rune inscribed, hand-lathed and polished thing of great beauty — was infinitely more powerful than any such device humans could have made. However, even though, at full magnification, its lenses permitted him to gaze across what amounted to a third of the peninsula, it should not have made what he had just seen seem quite so intense or immediate. That could mean only one thing. The explosion in the Drakengrats had been incredibly powerful and, consequently, the catalysts or combustants involved, like the telescope itself, had to have been infinitely more powerful than anything his own race could have manufactured.
The conclusion was inescapable. Something Old Race was up there — had been up there — but what?
Moon bent back to the eyepiece but any details on the far distant mountains were now obscured by a strange, mushroom-shaped cloud and he'd see nothing for a while. Besides, the sun was coming up, and it was time to open the shop. He was about to turn away when a slight nudge to the telescope shifted its focus down to the plains of Pontaine and something there caught his eye.
What is that?
It looked like some strange black cloud moving over the landscape, or at least would have done had it not been at ground level. And it appeared to be heading towards Gargas. There was something else, too. Something familiar. In the middle of it. A bulky black thing with something on it, moving at speed, as if trying to outrace the cloud. Moon adjusted the magnification on the telescope but, by the time he had done, the object and the cloud had become obscured by what few hills existed in that part of the province.
This was surely a day for mysteries.
Moon sighed, covered telescope with a cloth, and made his way over to the spiral staircase that wound down through two floors to ground level. The old man grunted as he began to negotiate the creaking risers, the wooden stairs having always been a tight squeeze but having become something of a tortuous ordeal since his unfortunate 'accident' in the World's Ridge Mountains. Though in the months since the events of the Clockwork King he had managed to concoct a number of potions and medicines that kept Thrutt's ogur form in relative check, his physical mass and bone structure remained twice what it had been. This left him with a physiognomy that had a tendency to make babies cry and small dogs bark. He had to force himself to be philosophical about this, however, as he had learned on a number of unfortunate occasions that what seemed to trigger the Thrutt transformation was a rise in his blood pressure. A condition flagged by a tendency for his nose and ears to turn a bright red, his eyes to bulge and his mood to become very, very angry. It was embarrassing, yes, but he supposed it could have been worse, even if he wasn't sure exactly how.
Calm, he told himself as he squeezed between the stairway's walls, dislodging pictures and ornaments as he went, cursing the resultant clattering. Calm.
The old man emerged into the shop, found it dark and, yawning, moved to the two windows and door to flip their blinds. Azure dawn light flooded Wonders of the World and, through a criss-cross of dusty motes, he took a quick inventory of stock, working out which lines he would need to replenish from the cellar. Goblin death rattles, for sure, always popular with the babies. Shnarl fur dice and the stick-on elf ears, too — the only non-authentic line he carried. And there had been quite the run on troll testicles of late, but then it was spring and they were always popular at this time of year.