Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [119]
“Perhaps those numbers didn’t mean distance after all,” Crake suggested churlishly, for Jez’s benefit. Jez didn’t reply. He went back to reading them off. “Ninety … ninety-five … Now the numbers have reset to zero, and the first needle has joined the other three.”
“I suppose that means we’ve gone out of range,” Frey suggested.
“But there wasn’t anything there!”
“That’s fine with me.”
Jez called out a new heading, and Frey took it.
“You might see a—” she began, when Frey yelled in alarm as the flank of a mountain emerged from the fog. He banked away from it and it slipped by to their starboard side.
“—mountain,” Jez continued, “but there’ll be a defile running out of it.”
“I didn’t see any defile!” Frey complained, annoyed because he’d suffered a scare.
“Cap’n, I’m navigating blind here. Accuracy is gonna be less than perfect. Pull back closer to the mountain flank.”
Frey reluctantly did so. The mountain loomed into view again. Jez left her station to look through the windglass.
“There it is,” she said.
Frey saw it too: a knife slash in the mountain, forty meters wide, with uneven walls.
“I don’t much like the look of that,” he said.
“Drop to nine hundred, take us in,” Jez told him mercilessly.
Frey eased the Ketty Jay around and into the defile. The mountains pressed in hard, narrowing the world on either side. Shadowy walls lay close enough to be seen, even in the mist. Frey unconsciously hunched down in his seat. He concentrated on keeping a steady line.
“More contacts,” said Crake. “Two of them.”
“Two needles moving?”
“Yes. Both of them pointing directly ahead.”
“Give me the numbers.”
Crake licked dry lips and read them off. “First needle: distance ninety and descending. The other number reads fifty-seven and holding steady. Second needle: distance … ninety also now. That’s descending too. The other number reads minus forty-three. Holding steady.”
“Minus forty-three?” Jez asked.
“A little minus sign just appeared where that blank digit was.”
Jez thought for a moment. “They’re giving us relative altitude,” she said. “The first set of numbers shows the distance we are from the object. The second shows how far it is above or below us.”
Frey caught on. “So then, the ones ahead of us … One is fifty-seven meters above us and the other is forty-three meters below?”
“That’s why we didn’t see anything the last time,” Jez said. “We passed by it. It was thirty meters above us.”
Frey felt a mixture of trepidation and relief at that. It was reassuring to believe that they’d figured out the compass and could avoid these unseen things, at least. But somehow, knowing where they were made them seem all the more threatening. It meant they were really there. Whatever they were.
“Crake, keep reading out the distances,” he said.
Crake obliged. “Twenty … ten … zero … needle’s swung the other way … ten … twenty …”
Frey had him continue counting until they were out of range and the compass reset again.
“Okay, Cap’n,” said Jez. “The bottom’s going to drop out of this defile any minute. We come down to seven hundred and take a heading of two eighty.”
Frey grunted in acknowledgment. There was enough space between the mountain walls for a much bigger craft to pass through, but the constant need to prevent the Ketty Jay from drifting was grinding away at his nerves and giving him a headache. He dearly wished he hadn’t indulged quite so heavily the night before.
As Jez had predicted, the defile ended suddenly. It fed into a much larger chasm, far too vast to see the other end. The fog was thinner here, stained with a sinister red light from below. Red shadows spread into the cockpit.
“Is that lava down there?” Frey asked.
Jez craned over from the navigator’s station and looked down. “That’s lava. Drop to seven hundred.”
“Bringing us closer to the lava.”
“I’m just following the charts, Cap’n. You want to find your own way in this mist, be my guest.”
Frey was stung by that, but he kept his mouth shut and began to descend. The fog thinned and the red glow grew in strength until