‘Humans are not like Fellan,’ said Sonia.
‘So it seems. Never will we understand them.’
Rye hesitated. ‘I think, perhaps, you used to understand them better than you do now,’ he said awkwardly. ‘For a long time you have lived apart. Perhaps there is some knowledge that you, too, have forgotten.’
The Fellan regarded him gravely. He feared he had offended them, but it seemed they were only thinking, for after a moment he felt their answer, like cool, soft wings brushing his mind.
Perhaps …
‘There is still something we need to do,’ Sonia burst out, seizing the moment. ‘You know what it is. Will you allow it?’
As one, the Fellan smiled, and it was like the sun breaking through cloud.
‘We will do more than that, little sister,’ a tall female said. ‘For the sake of our friend and kinsman Eldannen, we will rejoice.’
Afterwards, the story of the breaking of the Wall of Weld would become legend, and the five who caused it would be called heroes. At the time, the citizens of Weld who heard a blast like a thousand thunderclaps and felt the earth tremble beneath their feet were sure their last hour had come. And those who saw Rye, Sonia, Dirk, Sholto and Jett appear out of thin air beside the Keep, who screamed in terror as under Dirk’s direction Jett and Rye began attacking the base of the Wall with metal spikes and huge barbarian hammers, cursed the five as traitors.
No one could get near them to stop them. Some power prevented it. Then the first bricks fell in a shower, revealing a yawning hole, and the watchers’ terror became horror, shock and disbelief as they saw huge, pale skimmers crawling sluggishly in the cavity, flapping blindly away from the light.
The Wall that had looked so strong, on which they had all depended and for which they had sacrificed so much, was hollow. Beneath its smooth surface, all that remained of a thousand years of building was a dark honeycomb of passages and chambers, infested with the beasts that preyed on them.
‘My theory is that the skimmers’ first ancestors were small, harmless creatures called clinks,’ the dark brother Sholto was heard to call to Tallus the healer, who was watching the scene with interest. ‘Long ago they tunnelled up through the natural rock outside, came upon softer bricks, darkness, warmth and rats and mice—a good source of food. They bred unchecked for centuries, each new generation bigger and hungrier for warm flesh than the one before …’
‘And of course the more we thickened the Wall, the larger the colony could grow!’ Tallus shouted, rubbing his hands and gazing at the ruined section of Wall in fascination. ‘Rat numbers dwindling rapidly. Larger prey needed. Creatures start venturing out of the Wall to hunt. Those with the strongest wings feed better than the rest, so produce more young … Certainly! Understood! But jell, my boy! What is this you say about jell?’
It seemed that the Warden’s order that jell should be tidied away by being built into the Wall’s ever-thickening base had caused the colony of creatures in the cavity to adapt to change very quickly. In a matter of years after the first jell went into the Wall, ferocious, strong-winged skimmers in large numbers were scrambling out into the Fell Zone night and flying over the Wall to feed.
‘And why should they have looked any further?’ Sholto drawled. ‘For them, Weld was nothing but a giant feeding bowl.’
Lisbeth of the Keep kitchens, who was weeping with joy in the arms of Crell, editor of The Lantern, shuddered at this, but the dark, keen-eyed young woman standing beside Tallus nodded calmly. She was a cool one, people said. Her name, it seemed, was Annocki. It was rumoured that she, Crell, Lisbeth and the beautiful, tawny-haired girl on Tallus’s other side had released the old healer from the locked room where the Warden had ordered him to be imprisoned.
But the Warden, at the back of the crowd, had not noticed Tallus, Crell, Lisbeth or the young women. His eyes were fixed on the ruined Wall, on the skimmers struggling into cover, on Rye and Sonia gliding hand in hand into the dark cavity, and moving towards the blinding light of the outside world, the skimmers’ galleries crumbling to dust before them.
As the two figures reached their goal, their red hair gleaming like fire in the sun, the Warden babbled charms and crossed his fingers and his wrists. As barbarian faces peered through the deep, dusty tunnel that now yawned between the outside rock wall and the inner skin of the Wall of Weld, he cried out, against all reason, that the lighting of the city against his orders had weakened the Wall.
The plumes of the Warden’s hat were drooping and stained with ink. His thin hair hung in limp strings over his sweating brow.
Appearing quickly by his side, Officer Jordan took his arm firmly, murmuring that the Warden was not well. The people tactfully looked aside as their leader was led away.
Then their eyes were caught by another sight. Rye and Sonia had returned to stand with Dirk, Jett and Sholto. The barbarian faces had vanished from the other side of the Wall. In their place was a dim circle. The barbarians had clamped something over the hole they had blasted in the rock. It looked like a huge tube or pipe, but what it was made of no one could imagine.
Dirk and his companions showed no surprise. With a slight bow, Dirk stepped aside. Sonia moved forward, her hair flying about her head like flame. Rye moved with her, holding her hand as if somehow the link would aid her.
‘Now Sonia will fill the Wall with smoke,’ Sholto called to Tallus, as casually as if he was discussing the weather. ‘It will take some time to fill the whole circle, but at last the smoke will drive all the skimmers out. Some may panic and fly straight out into the light, where they will die. Most, we hope, will escape into the feeder hose—and fly through it into the pipeline and at last into the sea.’
Tallus rubbed his hands. ‘Excellent, my boy!’ he was heard to respond. ‘Excellent! Now, about this substance the barbarians use to blast through solid rock. Most interesting! Do you think you could get me a sample?’
As the long day of fear and wonder ended, the citizens of Weld rejoiced.
The skimmers had gone. The barbarians had retreated in peace, taking their strange pipe with them. A great sheet of metal, the like of which the people of Weld had never seen, sealed the hole in the Wall by the Keep.
The celebration was more sedate than the riotous feast going on at the same time in Fell End, but it was no less heartfelt. Beneath the glare of the lanterns that now lit the night, Weld’s streets and squares were alive with music, talk and laughter.
But as the people rejoiced, the heroes of the hour sat in the shadowy Keep kitchen amid the remains of a very welcome meal and poured out their tale to Lisbeth, Annocki, Faene and Tallus, whose eyes grew wider with every word.
‘I cannot take it in!’ Annocki said, shaking her head. ‘There is too much to …’ She turned to Sholto. ‘The ships you and Rye saw waiting at the Harbour, beyond the Door that led to the future. Did they have anything to do with the daylight skimmers—slays— at all?’
Sholto exchanged glances with Sonia, Rye and Dirk. ‘We think they had everything to do with them,’ he said soberly. ‘We think they were the whole reason for the Harbour’s existence. In that future—’
‘The future that will now never happen,’ Lisbeth broke in, as if to reassure herself.
Dirk smiled at her. ‘That will now never happen, as you can see,’ he agreed, patting the rusty skimmer hook propped against his chair—the hook lost in Olt’s fortress, dug up by Carryl, and carried to Fell End to be part of the war against the Fellan. ‘In that future I found Father’s skimmer hook in the Saltings, and later it was broken—yet here it is, as whole as it ever was!’