Free Cloud Castles by Michael Scott Rohan Page B

she was a middle-aged Bell I’d bought second hand, nominally a five-seater provided two of your friends were garden gnomes, and a bit lacking in get-up-and-go. Presumably the company would be able to buy me a better model, maybe one with NOTAR technology – no tail rotor – and faceplate control displays, all the trimmings, but that thought didn’t excite me so much now. It was in danger of feeling like dirty money.
    As I burst up through the cloud cover, though, my mood could hardly help improving. Out of grey damp gloom and over an expanse of cloud sparkling in the sun’s long rays, it reminded me of the most liberating moments of my life, when I set sail upon the Spiral. Few other experiences approached the sheer astonished wonder of seeing the bows lift abovemundane seas, heading out towards the cloud archipelagos and the oceans of moonlit mist through which great ships pass to all the seas of the world, in every era there has been and even more that haven’t. They had their equivalents, those eerie oceans, in earth and air – regions of land and sky where horizon and heavens blended, where time and space became one shifting, hazy borderland where perspectives shrank and parallel lines met, a mass of vanishing points through which you could slip into realms of shadow and archetypal myth. I’d encountered some on land, within the shadows of great cities and ancient centres of worship, but never in the air. I’d heard they were fewer and less easy to penetrate and pass, and I often wondered how they must look. Now I guessed it might be something like this, this glittering dream landscape where snow-capped mountain-top and thrusting cloudcap merged and mounted in towering, infinite ranges. Maybe that was how Le Stryge had summoned me …
    Even as the thought struck me, so did the surprise. I stiffened, sending the rotor fishtailing behind me. The still low sun mounted over one such row of cloud crests – and its warm light shot two shapes into dramatic silhouette against the blazing whiteness. Twin towers, tall and narrow, just as I’d seen them from the mountain path.
    I didn’t have a lot of fuel to spare; you never did in a little machine like this. But I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I banked steeply and went whirling in towards them, sweeping between phalanxes of reaching cloudy cliffs, crags of mist and insubstantial steeps; and the towers grew, or so it seemed. Tall airy things, Gothic structures that made stone seem almost as light as the mists over which they rose. I stared, forgetting my course. A harsh grey cliff-face loomed, and instinctively I pulled away, forgetting it was no more solid than a dream – or was it? Jagged edges, stark crevice and weathered chimney; I was climber enough to register those things as they reeled across my windshield, as dangerously solid as any stone that ever scuffed my shins or drew blood beneath scrabbling fingernails. I hauled back on the stick, pitched the rotors and pulled hard around, banking across a vast expanse of sheer savage mountainside. The sweat trickled down inside my helmet. Ill-judged; too fast. Had I made that mistake? Or was this how the landward ways of the Spiral opened, where instead of islands in an azure ocean the pathlessclouds would resolve into real mountains with fortress summits, castles of cloud into mighty crests of stone – was it like this? The mists swirled before me as the machine plunged away, and seemed to pull me down.
    Lost in grey, without up or down, I struggled to control her, swinging this way and that for long moments, until finally I saw the indicator on the artificial horizon line creep level and the altimeter settle at a reasonable figure. I checked the radar, but there was nothing aloft except mountainsides and me. Then I tried to call Frankfurt control. Nothing. Nothing from Munich either; only noise. I thought for a moment, and then I relaxed the rotor pitch and sank; and we burst out into daylight over a wide