Free The Story of Cirrus Flux by Matthew Skelton Page B

turned his head toward it.
    “Hungry, ain’t ye?” he said in a rough, gravelly voice, and scratched his brow.
    He had rolled up his shirtsleeves as far as the elbows, exposing thick, muscular forearms that were sun-bronzed and covered with strange inky lines. Tattoos. Cirrus had heard Jonas mention them once in one of his stories. A short brass truncheon dangled from a belt round the man’s waist. It wasn’t a pistol, as Cirrus and Bottle Top had suspected earlier, but something else entirely.
    A spyglass.
    Cirrus watched as the man suddenly threw aside his tools and stepped across the floor to a canvas sack that had been slung from a nail near the doorway. He pulled out several long thin shadows, each on a bit of string, and tossed them to the fire.
    They were rats! Dead rats!
    Immediately, the fire crackled and Cirrus saw what might have been a wing of flame flicker across his vision. A raucous screech filled the air—and Cirrus jumped back in terror, sweat coursing down his spine.
    He ducked, just as the man glanced toward the window.
    “Soon,” he heard the man say from the other side. “Soon, Alerion, I promise. We’ll go to the hospital, fetch what we came for and disappear for good. No more of this godforsaken city for us, eh, girl?”
    Cirrus sat bolt upright. Who was he talking to? And what was he planning to take from the hospital? He looked across the fields and considered running back to alert the Governor, but then he heard a soft cascading noise from inside the shed and craned his neck to see what had caused it.
    The man was dragging the large net of fabric along the ground toward the clearing. Cirrus scuttled forward, along the outside of the wall, tracking his movements.
    A wooden scaffold had been erected over the mouth of the well in the center of the clearing, where people had presumably once drawn their water. The man was now using a rope and pulley to hoist the fabric—like a sail—into the air above it. Once this was done, he returned to the shed for the wicker basket, which he hauled outside and tipped at an angle so that the prominent T-shaped pole was placed directly over the top of the well and beneath the mass of fabric. He then proceeded to attach a series of cords from the base of the sail to the edges of the basket, taking care to knot them tightly. Finally, wiping the sweat from his brow, he turned back to the shed and said, “Are ye coming, then? Or do ye expect me to get this contraption off the ground without ye?”
    Cirrus froze, terrified that he had been seen, but thenrealized that the man was speaking to whoever—or whatever—was still hidden in the shed.
    A ball of flame shot out of the building and circled round the clearing before settling on the iron perch above the basket. Cirrus staggered back and sucked in his breath in amazement. It was a bird made of fire! But that was impossible, surely?
    He rubbed his eyes and then stared even harder at the fierce, flaming creature. The bird was flickering all over with gold and crimson feathers. It burned so brightly it was painful to look at, but was so dazzling in its beauty it was difficult to look away. Even the crows had gathered overhead, silently watching.
    The man had donned a pair of thick leather gloves and was stroking the bird’s gleaming breast with his fingers. “Aye, that’s my girl,” he said. “How about we give them wings of yours a stretch, eh? No one’ll notice us in this weather.”
    The bird screeched in reply—a loud, piercing shriek that made Cirrus want to cover his ears—and then began to fan its wings, sending huge gusts of flame into the air. The crows broke into applause.
    To Cirrus’s amazement, the fabric above the basket started to bulge and flutter, as though someone were trapped inside it. And then very slowly the basket lifted a few inches off the ground.
    Cirrus gripped the wall of the shed, disbelieving his eyes. What sort of magic was this? Could he be dreaming? Hepressed his