The Cloud Road

  Contents

  PART ONE: THE WHITE DESERT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART TWO: THE BLACK PLAIN

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART THREE: THE CLOUD MOUNTAINS

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  THE CLOUD ROAD

  The Kingdom of the Lost

  Adventure and danger follow Bily, Zluty, Redwing and the Monster as they cross the desert and journey through the high stony mountains in search of a new home.

  A magical new series for younger readers from the award-winning author of Little Fur.

  About the Author

  Isobelle Carmody began the first of her highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles while she was still at high school, and worked on the series while completing university. The series, and her many award-winning short stories and books for young people, have established her at the forefront of fantasy writing in Australia and overseas.

  Little Fur, Isobelle’s first series for younger readers, won the 2006 ABPA Design Awards. The Red Wind was awarded the 2011 CBCA Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers.

  Isobelle divides her time between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and her travels abroad.

  Also by Isobelle Carmody

  Scatterlings

  The Gathering

  Green Monkey Dreams

  This Way Out (with Steve Taylor)

  Greylands

  Alyzon Whitestarr

  The Obernewtyn Chronicles

  Obernewtyn

  The Farseekers

  Ashling

  The Keeping Place

  The Stone Key

  The Sending

  The Legendsong

  Darkfall

  Darksong

  The Gateway Trilogy

  Billy Thunder and the Night Gate

  The Winter Door

  The Legend of Little Fur

  Little Fur

  A Fox Called Sorrow

  A Mystery of Wolves

  Riddle of Green

  The Kingdom of the Lost

  The Red Wind

  For Jan,

  beloved cloudwalker

  Frozen ripples and waves of sand stretched to the horizon in all directions, separated by misshapen pools of violet shadow. Nothing moved but an odd little vessel threading its way between moonlit dunes, dragged by two brothers.

  Zluty was pulling the lead tow rope. He had neat yellow fur, a short stout tail and a steadfast manner that showed in the set of his ears and the way he put his shoulders into the work. Bily had the side rope, which allowed the vessel to be steered to the left or right. He was slightly smaller than Zluty, with white fur that grew long and soft enough to tuft at the ear tips. His tail was longer, too, and made a swishing sound as it swept back and forth over the sand.

  That swishing sound told Zluty his brother was fretting, though he knew Bily was unlikely to be worrying about their need to find water. He would be worrying about the Monster, curled asleep in the wagon. Zluty had used a large piece of the metal shell he and Bily had come from to make the wagon. It carried sweetgrass and other supplies they had brought with them for the journey. It was all they had to remind them of the stony plain where they had lived for as long as either of them could remember. After a terrible strange storm of red stones had come, crushing their cottage and garden and destroying the well that was their only source of water, the wagon had become the closest thing they had to a home. That same terrible storm had herded the Monster into their cellar, half dead from a poisonous blackclaw bite.

  Zluty wondered if that was why he could not bring himself to trust the Monster, for how could a storm that brought such destruction bring anything good?

  At first Zluty had simply feared the Monster, for the enormous beast had long, deadly, claw-tipped paws and a red maw full of teeth as long and sharp as daggers. But it had been far too sick and weak to do them any harm and it had even seemed grateful for their help. Still, Zluty could not rid himself of the feeling that the Monster was as thick with secrets inside as fur outside.

  Zluty knew that any minute Bily would insist they stop and check on the Monster. But they ought to push on as long as they could before the heat of the day forced them to stop. The truth was that despite all his doubts and suspicions, Zluty was not sure the Monster would wake again. The little diggers bitten by a blackclaw had always died very quickly and in dreadful pain. The monster had not died, but the poison fever had left it dangerously weak and all but paralysed. Bily insisted it just needed time and rest to recover, but these were the two things they had been unable to give it, for the destruction of their well meant they had to leave at once to look for water.

  The Monster had tried to insist they leave it behind, but Bily would never abandon anything, let alone a creature whose life he had saved. So Zluty had turned his foraging wagon into a travelling wagon so that the Monster could ride in it. Beside it were two big water urns and the food and equipment they had salvaged from their destroyed cottage. He had also erected a wooden frame and canopy to shelter the Monster from the desert sun.

  Bily insisted the Monster would be able to walk again in time. Zluty doubted it, and he had seen the same doubt in the Monster’s yellow eyes, yet neither of them had said so to Bily. Zluty had seen from this how well the enormous beast understood the stubbornness of his gentle-hearted brother, and while he could not bring himself to trust it, he had come to respect it and would be sorry when it died.

  He turned his head to ease the ache in his neck and shoulders, and noticed a pink blush along the Eastern horizon. Dawn was coming. Turning his gaze to the West he wondered if today, when the last of the night seeped out of the sky, they would finally see the mountains that marked the other side of the desert. The Monster had said they would find water there, for there was none to be got in the desert.

  Was it right? Certainly it had crossed the desertlands before coming to the plain. But it had not journeyed slowly as they were doing, keeping a careful eye out for water sources. It had fled before the stone storm and it must have moved at great speed on its long, lean, powerful legs, crossing the barren expanse before it had any urgent need of water.

  Zluty felt sure there was water to be found in the desert, and had been convinced they would find it. But they had been plodding along for ten days now and, despite their care, they would run out of water very soon. Zluty’s hopes were now pinned on Redwing, who had begun flying far and wide seeking water. The black and scarlet bird had yet to return from her most recent expedition and Zluty prayed she would have good news for them.

  Fortunately, they still had some of the fat green pods they had broken from a stand of cactus plants growing on the edges of the desert. Despite being picked days before, they gave a good nourishing moisture when squeezed, and you could then chew the rind and get quite a lot of goodness out of that as well.

  But once the last of the water and the pods were gone, they would not live more than a few days in the desert heat.

  Zluty scanned the horizon again. He had never seen a mountain, but the Monster said it was a place where the ground rose up into a steep sharp peak that thrust its tip into the sky. Zluty could not imagine why good flat, sensible earth would strive up to the clouds but the Northern Forest grew high and thick and lush in the midst of all the bare stony pla
in surrounding it and there was no reason for that to have grown there, either. He would have liked to question the Monster more closely about why it directed them so insistently towards the mountains. Perhaps it was simply because they would find water there and once they had refilled the clay bulbs and urns and drunk their fill, it had intended to guide them to the Vale of Bellflowers foretold by the Bee Queen, a soft green land where they would build a new home. The trouble was, the Monster had never said exactly where the soft green land lay, and it had slept more and more since they reached the desert. When it did wake, its mind seemed clouded and confused.

  The sun rose at last, stretching out long rosy fingers of light across the pale dunes, turning shadows deep blue and sharp-edged as they glided up and down the soft swells of the sand. Zluty relished the coolness under his toes, knowing it would not be long before the sun climbed high enough to make the sand burn.

  They had first reached the desert at night and had been enchanted by the silky feel of the sand. Bily had scooped up a handful of it, so fine and thin that it trickled through his fingers like water no matter how hard he grasped it. But though soft and lovely the sand had proven difficult and treacherous terrain to travel over. To begin with it had been firm enough and flat enough for them to drag the wagon, but later it rose into the soft mounds the Monster named ‘dunes’, and they had had to find a passage for their vehicle between them. Unfortunately the sand between the dunes was so deep that the wheels sank to their axels. Zluty had tinkered with the wagon to enable them to remove the wheels and drag it along on its smooth bottom; thereafter they only used the wheels when they came to firm, flat sand. There were also patches of dangerous, swallowing softness that they had twice crossed only after a terrifying struggle, for anything small and heavy would sink. Fortunately the wagon was too big to be absorbed so Bily and Zluty were safe, as long as they kept a good grip on the tow ropes.

  As he was thinking all this, Zluty caught a movement at the edge of his sight. He turned to see another Monster crouched on the sand ahead, shadow dark, tail lashing. But even as fear rushed through him, Zluty saw that Bily did not react, and he understood it was only a mirage. That was the name the Monster had given to visions spawned by the heat and the dry barren air of the desertlands. It had warned them the desert would pluck dreams and memories from their minds and make them seem real. They must ignore them lest they be diverted from their quest and perish.

  They had not understood until Bily saw their cottage, whole and lovely, to the North. A day later Zluty had seen the air shimmer and writhe and found himself looking at the cool dark shape of the Northern Forest. But soon, like the cottage, it vanished.

  Now, the strange monster shimmered and disappeared too. Despite himself, Zluty was relieved, though he did wonder why his mind had conjured up such a thing.

  He wondered, too, what would have happened had he followed his own instinct to bring them to the Northern Forest when the cottage was destroyed. They would have had food and a perfect source of fresh water as well as a cave that could have served as a winter refuge. But the Monster had insisted they would die if they went there because great and terrible beasts took refuge in the Northern Forest in winter. Zluty was still not sure he believed this. After all, the Monster admitted it had never been there. Its knowledge of the Northern Forest came from stories told by its ancestors, and they might not even have been about the same forest. Certainly Zluty had never seen such beasts on his foraging trips to the Northern Forest. Although he had seen the bones of some enormous beast inside a broken metal egg.

  When the Monster said they should travel West, and described a gentle grassy land beyond the desert bordering the plain, saying that ­bellflowers grew wild there, Zluty had agreed to make this their destination. For on his last trip to the Northern Forest, a bee queen had gifted Zluty with a fledgling queen and three warrior bees, saying she saw him taking them to a Vale of Bellflowers where they would establish a new hive. Bees saw what would come. Indeed, they saw the future so vividly they had the confusing habit of speaking of everything as if it had already happened. So Zluty was sure the bee queen’s vision must have been of the land the Monster described.

  Setting off, Zluty had not doubted they would reach the Vale of Bellflowers because of the bee queen’s vision, but his certainty had faded as they travelled further and further from their home. For he remembered that upon envisaging her hive would be destroyed by the stone storm, the bee queen had asked him to bury her hive to prevent it. And he had done so. Which meant that a thing she had seen in a vision could be altered. Perhaps, in the end, the bee queen’s vision was only another kind of mirage.

  ‘The Monster must have something to drink before it gets hotter,’ Bily said.

  ‘Let’s stop,’ Zluty replied, telling himself it was near enough to noon and they would drink less if they did not walk in the heat.

  They dragged the wagon to the Western side of the nearest dune and Bily went to tend the Monster, leaving Zluty to unroll the side of the shade canopy and anchor it using stakes he had whittled from what had once been the legs of their kitchen table. This done, he watched Bily carefully splitting one of the remaining cactus pods he had stripped of needles. He used the little knife Zluty had made from a small sharp bit of metal taken from one of the many metal objects that littered the plain.

  ‘Help me,’ Bily commanded when he had finished. Zluty helped him lower the hinged side of the wagon, and then carefully squeezed thick clear juice from one half of the split nubbin and then the other into the sharp-toothed maw of the Monster, which Bily held fearlessly open.

  Not for the first time Zluty marvelled at the boldness his once timid brother had displayed since the coming of the stone storm, which the Monster called the arosh. He wondered if he had changed, too. He could not think how, unless it was that he felt a small heavy emptiness whenever he pictured the cottage, in whose window Bily had always stood a lantern when Zluty had gone foraging, to shine until he came home. That lamp would never be set out for him again, he thought, nor would Bily be waiting for him at the end of the journey. Now Bily travelled with him, and they journeyed into the unknown West where home was no more than the shifty vision of a bee queen.

  The Monster shifted and muttered a few words and Zluty froze. Bily stared at it expectantly, but its eyes stayed shut fast.

  ‘It talks so often of the Makers and their plan,’ Zluty murmured. ‘Maybe the Makers are the reason it ran away from its home.’

  ‘It is strange,’ Bily said a little later, when they settled themselves on the side of the dune to gnaw the tart goodness from the tough rind of the cactus nubbin. ‘The desert seems so still but the sand is moving all the time, all those tiny grains, shifting and sliding. The Monster told me the dunes move, too, though very slowly.’

  ‘When did it say that?’ Zluty asked.

  ‘Just before the last time it fell asleep,’ Bily said. ‘It told me the desert was a place where nothing puts down roots and stays. Everything moves all the time – the wind, the sand, the sun, the shadows.’ He heaved a sigh and glanced over at the wagon. ‘I wish it would wake up. I don’t know why it is sleeping so much when its paw is getting better.’

  Bily suddenly leapt to his feet and began waving his arms wildly in the air. It took Zluty a moment to realise his brother had spotted Redwing, who was flapping lazily towards them out of the South. As she circled to land on the dune, something green fluttered from her talons. It was a fresh green leaf.

  Despite his impatience to find water, Zluty insisted they wait until late in the afternoon when it had cooled slightly before continuing. Bily had explained to Redwing that they needed her to bring them to the place where she had found the leaf. At first she had refused to listen. She did not want to go back the way she had come. She wanted to fly West. But Bily had persisted gently, and when they took up the tow ropes, she launched herself into the air and flew South. They followed, dragging the wagon behind them until they reached a seam of hard sand w
here Zluty could put the wheels back on.

  ‘Tell me again what she said?’ he asked as he worked.

  ‘She said she got the leaf from a crack in the ground,’ Bily repeated patiently. ‘But I can’t make out if she saw water or simply guessed it was there because of the leaves. She has been harder to understand since we left the cottage. She cannot make her mind quiet enough for me to hear her properly.’

  Zluty sighed. ‘Well, that leaf could not have grown without water. Maybe you should wait here with the Monster. I can follow her more quickly without the wagon.’

  ‘We must stay together,’ Bily said firmly.

  When the wheels were properly fixed in place, they set off again, moving more swiftly and easily. One wheel had began to squeak a little, a hoarse chirping sound that Bily rather liked because it reminded him of the cheeps of newly hatched baby birds. But he thought then of the birds that had once nested in the cottage garden and in its eaves and grew sad. Perhaps Zluty felt the same way, for all at once he took out his reed pipe and began a wistful song.

  They walked to the rhythm of the song until the sun set, and when the waning moon rose, spilling its cool, bright light over the desert, they stopped to rest and eat a bite. Redwing had flown out of sight again and Bily wondered if she had turned West.

  She had circled back to them twice after setting off, and each time he had to remind her that she must take them to the place where she had found the leaf. It was not that she had forgotten exactly, or that she had changed her mind. It was just that she was possessed by a powerful and mysterious urge to fly West.

  Bily had felt the strength of the compulsion in her mind, though he did not know what caused it. Her urgency reminded him of the birds that nested about the cottage when it came close to the time when they would fly South for the winter, and even a little of the way Zluty had always been so strongly drawn to the Northern Forest.