Chapter 62 - The Kraken Gate
‘We’re going back,’ I said, when I had eaten the few rations that remained in my pack. The mist had gone, dissipated by Ganessa’s solitary rising star.
‘Back to…?’ Benjamin jerked his head to one side, indicating where we’d come from.
‘Back to…no, not there,’ I said, understanding his confusion. There was no point risking our lives. Even if we found remains, we wouldn’t be able to carry them back. ‘Back to the portal.’
‘We’re leaving?’
‘Yes. This was a bad idea. Harman can send someone else if it’s so important.’
Benjamin nodded, but he waved Evershed’s notebook at me. ‘What if I told you the place we’re looking for is less than a league to the north, over that ridge.’
‘I don’t care. It’s not worth it.’
‘No, I agree…except it’s practically on our route back. We ran so far last night that we went right past it.’
I took the notebook. In it, Evershed had described the location of the first site in detail. He’d even sketched a dog-toothed pinnacle or rock. Benjamin pointed, so I looked over my shoulder and there it was. The only difference was that his drawing showed trees all the way up the slopes and up onto the skyline, but when I looked in the direction Benjamin had pointed, the top of the ridge was naked rock. It was an unlikely omission, given the apparently meticulous log book. Benjamin saw my puzzled expression.
‘Yes. I noticed that too. Maybe Evershed completed it from memory and had to guess at that bit.'
‘Alright. Since we’re here, we’ll climb to where we can get a view. We can make a short detour if the route looks clear.’
We picked up our packs, which were depressingly light. I wished I had had the presence of mind to scoop up Ankush’s pack. At the very least it might have contained some food. All mine contained was four packets of quicklime, and an empty water bottle. We would need to find water again, and soon.
We pushed our way carefully through clumps of waist-high, dark brown stalks, topped off with spiky bracts, until we reached the tree-line. The woods that choked this hillside consisted of twisted, multi-stem trees, their branches tangling with those of their neighbours. Very little foliage thrived beneath the thick canopy that resulted, which meant that the chief obstacle to our progress was the steepness of the way, treacherous with slippery mud and rocks that recent rains had left behind. Benjamin took the lead, trying to pick the easiest route.
My brain worked overtime as we wound our way up the incline. Benjamin is clean, so who placed Coleman in our platoon and gave him the kill order? Why did I allow Ankush to finish him off? He might have told us what we need to know.
I also spent some time wondering whether the failsafe mechanism could be replaced with an air-lock. Inigo had floated the idea early on, but Director Harman had been dismissive. Too restrictive, he’d claimed, and he had been right. I thought of the various supplies we’d brought with us to construct the fort, such as logs and timber. Any airlock large enough to accommodate these things would have been too large and cumbersome to operate at speed. Not for the first time, I drew a blank.
‘What the..!’ exclaimed Benjamin. I looked up and saw that we were approaching the summit. Above us, the trees were bereft of foliage, their branches stripped and naked, clawing upwards into the lightening sky. Nearer the top, every single one had been flattened. Many had great scars where branches had be ripped off and many others lay toppled, uprooted and forlorn, all pointing in the same direction as we were headed. At last we crested the final rise and the full extent of the devastation became apparent.
‘Draxil’s Beard!’
We stood upon the rise and gazed at a wasteland. It was impossible to fathom exactly what we were looking at. I rechecked Evershed’s notes, but aside from the matching pinnacles that climbed another thousand hands into the sky on our left, nothing looked familiar. If his sketch was correct, there should have been a small wood no more than twelve-hundred paces away, but it was nowhere to be seen.
‘No, wait!’ exclaimed Benjamin. ‘Is that it?’
The spot he pointed to was a ruin of rubble and upended tree stumps. Nothing remained of the trees above shoulder height, their branches and leaves torn off and gone. The tangled mess was half a league from where it should have been.
‘Draxil spare us!’ I breathed. Stretching out before us was a gigantic crater that had to be almost a league across. All around it, the land thrust upward, as though a giant had cupped his hands and heaved upwards from below, pushing rocky fractured fingers of stones towards the sky. Books on astronomy described the craters that pockmarked the surface of Meniah, and I had seen the power of explosives tear great holes in a battlefield, but what lay before us was of a different order of magnitude. Where the centre of the crater should have been flat, there was a second, bowl-shaped depression, large enough to swallow Harman’s mansion several times over.
Benjamin stared, trying to take in the scale of the thing. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Is this what we’re looking for?’
‘As strange as it seems, I trust what Evershed wrote. This is the place.’
‘This crater is thirty or forty times bigger than the one in Emberly!’
I nodded. ‘The failsafe couldn’t have done this,’ I said. ‘I doubt there’s enough dynamite in Emberland to cause this, and look…’ I pointed to the slopes outside the crater. ‘There’s no debris.’ An explosion this big should have littered the surrounding area with boulders and rocks, but we had come through it and seen nothing, not even any dust.
‘A chain reaction?’
I shook my head. ‘I have no idea. I wish Maddison or Dr. Betz were here to shed some light.’
‘Do you think Harman knew this would happen?’
‘He must have suspected. This is why he wanted me to investigate it.’ Another thought occurred to me. ‘And now I understand why his niece was so keen to know how to disable the failsafe.’ So keen she asked me twice.
Benjamin rubbed his chin which was covered in a couple of days stubble then looked me in the eye. ‘You know, Dr. Betz even asked me if I knew.’
Suddenly I had an image of Jenniver, naked and waiting for Benjamin to return to his bedroom in the manor house so that she could ask him the same question I’d avoided answering. I shook my head. Absurd! He shares a room with the other officers, Banks and Overstrand. And then I wondered if Benjamin knew what had passed between her and me. I returned his stare for a moment, hoping that he knew, and wanting him to say something so that I could come clean, but he turned away and the moment was lost.
‘Did she now?’ was all I could manage.
‘Come on, Connie. Let’s go. We’ve got what we came for.’
We surveyed the landscape one last time and began the climb down off the rim of the crater.
‘Poor Tyrone,’ I said, placing my feet carefully and occasionally reaching out with one hand to steady myself. ‘I wonder if he’d have tried to save Finnian and the others if he’d known what was coming.’
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