The Fire and the Fog (35 page)

And then Erris put an arm around his
shoulder. ‘You can do it,’ she said, and she smiled as he looked up
at her.

And then he started to play.

He started with the ocean. Major key, low,
calm. Measured and steady. The notes that rang out were low, calm,
warm, everything Gel imagined the sea would be like on a clear day,
the sun shining down and not a breath of wind to be felt. This was
the refrain. Strong, steady, a melody he would return to constantly
as he played.

He played the refrain twice through, and then
started to play for the wind. This he started slow, just as slow as
the refrain, but strong, and chaotic. Wild, and uncontrollable. He
played for the wind, then returned back to the refrain, played it
through, and started again on the strong, chaotic melody, but a
little faster. As he played, he kept the two parts circling, the
refrain ever slow and steady, the chaotic verse always chasing the
refrain, speeding up, pushing it forward, trying to catch up.

He played until his fingers ached, the same
two phrases, looping and chasing each other constantly, their notes
flying out over the sea to be choked in the fog. Everything sounded
muffled, dulled, and when at last he stopped, his fingers aching
too much to continue, nothing had changed. The ocean still ebbed
and swelled lightly, the boat rocked up and down with its crests
and valleys as it had before, and the air was still dead, devoid of
any wind whatsoever.

Gel knew he had failed. He wasn’t good
enough, and now they would all die.

‘I…I’m sorry,’ he started, lowering the lute,
and Erris chimed in on top of him, staring daggers at Dan’r.

‘Now what do we do?’ she asked, venom readily
apparent in her voice.

Dan’r shrugged. While Gel played, he had tied
down the sail and made it fast. Now he sat with his head leaned
back against the mast. ‘Now we wait,’ he said, his eyes closed
indifferently.

And they did.

Erris talked to Gel, trying to comfort him,
but it was impossible. He had doomed them all. Dan’r had said they
would die if he failed, and now they would.

Dan’r said, and did, nothing.

Ten minutes passed, the small boat bobbing up
and down on the ocean, trapped in its bubble of light, surrounded
by dual oceans of water and fog.

And then twenty minutes slid achingly by.

Gel and Erris didn’t even notice it at first,
the tiny gust of wind. But Dan’r did.

He sat up, his eyes popping open, and he
grinned.

Gel and Erris didn’t notice him.

They did notice when the next gust of wind
hit the boat. It was longer this time, steadier, and it even pushed
the sail out slightly.

‘You did it!’ Erris grinned, throwing her
arms around Gel in a hug, the boat rocking slightly back and forth
on the calm waters.

And then they were moving. Slowly at first,
the wind weak, straining to fill the boat’s sail, but with time,
the wind began to push in earnest, and the small boat began to, if
not fly, then at least glide, through the water.

For hours, even Dan’r was in high spirits,
smiling, talking with the children, even laughing once or twice.
But with the passage of time and the monotony of the trip, his mood
slowly soured again.

For five days they kept on, Gel playing to
the wind and ocean every few hours. Dan’r provided food, replaced
sputtering torches, and answered any questions with a surly
churlishness that much belied his previous good humour.

Then, without warning something happened. The
front edge of the light thrown by the torches made a pinprick hole
in the grey surroundings. Then the hole widened, and they were
through it, the whole boat, out of the fog. Not into the sun, the
wind and the rain or the stars, but into a giant, grey dome,
reaching up high into the air.

The colour in the giant bubble was, well,
grayscale. There were no shadows; everything was covered in the
same sort of diffused, muted glow thrown off by the fog. Colours
were muted as well, the blue of the water, and the grey and brown
of the rocks ahead seemed dry, washed out, like fabric or paint
left out too long in the sun.

The torchlight illuminated the rocks ahead,
and the boat hit them, straight on, crunching. Its nose rose up out
of the water, trapping itself on the large, angular rocks and the
wind in the boat’s sails held it tight.

Even as excited as they were to be through
the Fog, to be on solid land again, no-one made a sound. The dome
of colorlessness they found themselves in was too still, too solemn
for anyone to break its silence easily.

IV

They pulled themselves out of the boat
quickly, climbed carefully over the sodden rocks by the surf, and
then stood, all three, and looked out at a large, grey stone tower
reaching up into the fog above; looked out at a sloping, fertile
island.

‘Where are we?’ Erris asked, as she and Gel
looked at Dan’r.

‘We’re on Kol,’ he replied, and for the first
time in days his voice seemed to relax, to soften slightly, ‘we’re
on Kol, and that,’ he said, pointing to the tower reaching up into
the fog not fifty meters away, ‘that, as luck would have it, is
where we’re headed.’

‘The fog, it’s flowing out from the tower,’
Dan’r explained as they walked towards the stone structure, ‘we’re
in the umbrella below it now, I think, and if we want to stop it,
well…’ He looked up, to where the tower disappeared in the dome of
fog, and left the statement unfinished. Gel and Erris both knew
what he was going to say, and they needed no further incentives. If
that tower was where they had to go to save their families, well…so
be it.

‘I had hoped to use the lighthouse to get
above the Fog, to see where it’s coming from, but...now we don’t
have to.’ He continued as they climbed over the rocky terrain
leading up from the shoreline. ‘Luck, of some kind.’

As they approached the tower, they realized
it not only reached high into the sky, but was also very wide at
its base. The large wooden door at the bottom of the tower opened
easily, noiselessly, and they stepped into a large, mostly empty
column. A wide staircase wound around the left side of the tower,
the steps and the low railing made from the same stone as the rest
of the structure. Buntings and flags in various states of disrepair
hung every few steps all the way up to the top.

They climbed the stairs. At first, Gel tried
to count them, but he quickly stopped caring when he hit a hundred
and fifty, and instead tried to guess how many stairs might be
left.

‘What’s that?’ Erris asked, noticing a large
metal frame. It hung through a hole cut in the stone of the
tower.

‘Elevator,’ Dan’r said shortly, taking
advantage of Erris’ question to take a quick break for breath.
‘Whoever lives here would ride it up and down, rather than take the
stairs.’

‘Why didn’t we?’ Gel asked, also breathing
heavily. It seemed Erris was the only one of the three not gasping
for air.

‘Well, it’s up here, not down there, isn’t
it?’ Dan’r answered, and Gel had no response.

They continued up the stairs as they passed
through the ceiling, now walled on both sides by the grey stone of
the tower, until they came to a second large wooden door, which
opened as easily and soundlessly as the first.

They stepped out into a large sitting room.
Couches and high backed, well padded chairs lay about the open,
circular room. Various rugs and unlit lanterns were spaced out to
alleviate the stark gloom of the grey stone.

They ignored this first floor, open and empty
as it was, and continued up the stairs. They stepped into a much
smaller sitting room, this one with an empty fireplace and two well
worn chairs facing it, a scattering of books strewn about. Erris
immediately wanted to turn to the books, to go through them, but
Dan’r moved ahead purposefully. Beside the sitting room was a small
kitchen, with a table for eating. It was all spotless, unused. The
stairs continued up the left side of the tower, but at the back, a
stone wall cut off the rest of the room, and a short stone
staircase lead to a raised room at the back. Dan’r ignored it all,
and continued up the stairs.

They stepped up to the third floor, and Erris
wondered why she had even bothered to notice the few books that had
sat near the chairs below. The third floor was a study, lined with
books and parchments, hundreds, thousands of them. More than Erris
had ever seen. She was awestruck, and Gel had to pull at her arm to
get her to move, stumbling, forward.

They stopped in the center of the room, where
a wide stone stairway reached into the ceiling, and Dan’r reached
into his cloak, grunted, and pulled out another torch, then lit it
with another paper pulled from his cloak.

‘Stay close,’ he said as he started up the
last staircase. Erris and Gel followed.

This last staircase ended in a trap door set
in the ceiling, and as Dan’r started to lift it, Fog started to
pour in, only to meet the light of the torch and retreat. With a
shrug, Dan’r threw the trapdoor wide, then looked back at Erris and
Gel, only a few steps behind, and motioned up with his head, before
climbing out ahead of them.

Gel and Erris stayed close, both to Dan’r and
to each other, as they climbed out of the stairway. Both their
mouths fell open in shock as, for the first time in days, weeks,
they saw the sun. For a minute all they could see was the bright
rays filtering down through a clear glass dome. After weeks in the
fog, the sun was bright, too bright to believe, all three of them
stood, blinking and squinting painfully as their eyes slowly
adjusted.

The Fog was cascading like a waterfall over
the open sides of the tower top, spreading out as far as the eye
could see, and blanketing the earth below it in a grey haze, while
the sun, the clouds, the sky, continued unchanged above them. It
looked beautiful and terrible at once, the bright yellow sun
beating down from a cloudless blue sky, through the clear dome that
covered the tower top, illuminating the scene before them.

At the center of the tower was a bier, and
sitting on it was a woman, clad all in white, her skin and hair
grey, and the Fog rolled out from her in waves. In her arms was the
body of a man, his skin withered, dried, mummified.

As the trap door opened, as Dan’r and the
children stepped through the now open portal into the sun, the
woman looked at them, her face showing pain, fear, hatred, sorrow,
all at once. Her eyes were empty, dead, but Fog flowed down and out
of them.

‘He did it for me,’ she said as she turned,
placed the body of the man on the bier in her place, and stood. ‘He
loved me,’ she stated as her hands fell to her sides, as Fog
billowed out from her sleeves.

Dan’r moved closer to the bier, and Erris and
Gel followed.

‘You’re killing the world,’ Dan’r said as he
moved closer to the elderly woman.

‘What do I care for the world?’ the woman
screamed, her face distending as the Fog pulsed out from her
faster, ‘He’s gone, and the world can burn for all I care.’

It felt like her scream should shatter the
glass dome above them, should shatter their eardrums, and Gel and
Erris covered their ears in pain. Dan’r stood though, half
crouched, as if waiting.

‘Back,’ Dan’r said, pushing Gel and Erris
back and to the side as he flung open his cloak, papers fluttering
in their pockets as he grabbed at scraps on either side.

And then the woman was barreling forward
quickly, her feet gliding along the thin layer of Fog survived the
sun to roll fitfully along the stone floor of the tower-top.

Dan’r jumped to the right, throwing fire from
one hand, his cloak flapping behind him as the ball of fire
appeared in and left his hand, streaming towards the woman. One
hand forward, its long fingers extended towards Dan’r, the woman
shrieked as the ball of flame skimmed past her side, but it missed,
and she kept coming.

‘Do something!’ Erris yelled to Gel as Dan’r
ducked behind one of the columns holding up the dome of the
lighthouse, throwing lightning behind him, the crack of thunder
masking the sound of protesting stone as the woman’s fingers tore
deep furrows out of the column, her strike narrowly missing Dan’r
as he rolled out from behind his cover.

‘Do what?’ Gel yelled back as Dan’r threw up
a wall of water, scrambled behind another column at the far edge of
the tower top.

‘Anything!’ Erris yelled as she moved towards
the bier.

Gel noticed that the Fog, even weakened by
the sun overhead, was starting to crawl up Danr’s legs, almost at
his knees, as he tossed another ball of fire towards the woman,
narrowly missing her again. The Fog had already started up Erris’
ankles when she reached the center of the bier, bending down
quickly to pick up a violin lying on the ground. She yelled
wordlessly as she tossed the violin at the woman, striking her on
the shoulder. It threw her off balance a second, gave Dan’r time to
scramble away once more.

The woman turned slowly, pained as she
watched the violin fly off her shoulder, heard the twang of strings
breaking as it cracked on the hard stone floor, screamed in fury as
the violin tumbled over the edge of the tower, down through the Fog
below.

Dan’r threw again, from over on the left, a
stream of boiling water, steam rising off it as it flew towards the
woman, but her attention had shifted, and she powered towards
Erris, Dan’r’s attack falling impotently behind her.

The woman screamed as she came, and Erris
barely managed to throw herself out of the way of the woman’s
reaching claws, landing hard and striking her head against the bier
as the woman glided to a quick stop and turned.

Gel saw her as she turned, really the old
woman coated in Fog, saw her face, the pain and the sorrow in it.
She was old, frail, and the Fog fell down her face as if she were
crying. She was…sad.