He got to his feet and swayed as his head went light. It took a few moments for everything to stabilise again. He wasn’t, he reflected, in good shape for facing certain death anytime soon.
‘Alright,’ he told himself unconvincingly. ‘Let’s do this.’ And he stumbled off to rouse the crew.
Twenty-Seven
The Ketty Jay hung in the white wastes of the Hookhollows, a speck against the colossal stone slopes. There were no other craft to be seen or heard. Below them, there was only the bleak emptiness of the mist. It cloaked the lower reaches, shrouding canyons and defiles, hiding the feet of the mountains. Down there, in Rook’s Boneyard, the mist never cleared.
High above them were jagged, ice-tipped peaks. Higher still was a forbidding ceiling of drifting ash clouds, passing to the east, shedding a thin curtain of flakes as they went. A poisonous miasma, seeping from volcanic cracks and vents along the southern reaches of the mountain range. It was carried on the prevailing winds to settle onto the Blackendraft, the great ash flats, where it choked all life beneath it.
Frey sat in the pilot’s seat, staring down. Wondering whether it was worth it. Wondering whether they should just turn tail and run. Could he really get them out of this mess? This ragged collection of vagrants, pitted against some of the most powerful people in the land? In the end, did they even have a chance? What lay in that secret hideout that was so important it was worth all this?
Their victory against Trinica had buoyed him briefly, but the prospect of flying blind into Rook’s Boneyard had reawakened all the old doubts. Crake’s words rolled around in his head.
As a group, we’re rather easy to identify. Apart, they’ll probably never catch us. They’ll only get Frey.
Was it fair to risk them all, just to clear his own name? What if he sent them their separate ways, recrewed, and headed for New Vardia? He might make it there, across the seas, through the storms to the other side of the planet. Even in winter. It was possible.
Anything to avoid going down there, into the Boneyard.
Crake and Jez were with him in the cockpit. He needed Jez to navigate and he wanted Crake to help figure out the strange compass-like device, which nobody had been able to make head nor tail of yet. He’d banished the others to the mess to keep them from pestering him. Harkins and Pinn had been forced to leave their craft behind again, since it was too dangerous to travel in convoy, and they were insufferable back-seat pilots.
‘It’ll be dead reckoning once we’re down in the mist, Cap’n,’ said Jez. ‘So keep your course and speed steady and tell me if you change them.’
‘Right,’ he said, swallowing against a dry throat. He pulled his coat tighter around himself. He wasn’t sure if it was the hangover or the fear, but he couldn’t seem to get warm. He twisted round to glance at Crake, who was standing at his shoulder, holding the brass compass in both hands. ‘Is it doing anything yet?’
‘Doesn’t seem to be,’ said Crake.
‘Did you turn it on?’
Crake gave him a look. ‘If you think you know a way to “turn it on” that all of us have missed, do let me know.’
‘We don’t need your bloody sarcasm right now, Crake,’ Jez snapped, with a sharp and unfamiliar tone to her voice. Crake, rather than offering a rejoinder, subsided into bitter silence.
Frey sighed. The tension between these two wasn’t helping his nerves. It had been slowly curdling the atmosphere on the Ketty Jay ever since they returned from the ball at Scorchwood Heights.
‘Where’s all this damned mist coming from, anyway?’ he griped, to change the subject.
