BOOK FIVE

Those who Fall

1

It was two days before Kysandra’s seventeenth birthday when the thing plunged flaming through the night sky. She was sitting by her bedroom window on the top floor of the farmhouse, eyes a blotchy red from another bout of crying. The argument with her mother had been epic, even by their standards, starting that morning and carrying on all afternoon. The ancient mod-dwarfs that helped out around the farm whimpered softly and crawled under the dining-room table, folding their arms over their heads as the air filled with screams, insults, threats and denouncements, and ’path emotions saturated the aether like firework bursts.

‘I hate you. You’re the worst mother ever! I hope you die!’ was just a mild opening salvo.

None of the insults made any difference, nor the pleading, nor the anguish. Sarara, her mother, was too skilled in this battlefield. Anger was answered by scorn and fury. Threats came thick and fast from both sides. More of the kitchen’s dwindling stack of crockery had been hurled. Sometimes by hand, often by a near-involuntary teekay reflex, thought becoming deed without restraint.

By mid-afternoon the argument had become so fierce that Sarara had inevitably turned to her pipe of narnik. After that, the dispute became surreal as the drug amplified and soothed the woman’s thoughts in random surges. Sometimes she’d be sobbing, moaning, ‘sorry, sorry, sorry,’ while at other times her eyes would be focused with manic hatred and she’d hold a carving knife dangerously in her shaking hand as Kysandra unleashed another torrent of abuse.

Exhausted and distraught as the sun dropped behind the valley where Blair Farm nestled, Kysandra had run upstairs and slammed her bedroom door shut, then pushed the old chest of drawers across it. Mother and daughter had shouted at each other through the wood for a further ten minutes before Sarara had stomped off downstairs for another pipe.

Kysandra had cried pitifully as her mother fumbled her way into another night of mad narnik-fuelled dreams. Ex-sight showed her Sarara’s comatose form sprawled across the parlour’s settee. Every so often she would jerk about and yell something incoherent as the drug sparked a fresh hallucination in her brain. Then she’d sink back down again to resume a soft snoring and sniffling. The cold empty pipe had fallen onto the bare floorboards beside her.

Adding to Kysandra’s misery was the hunger. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and that had just been some apples and a glass of milk. But she refused to go downstairs to the kitchen. Even though there was no chance of her mother waking before morning now, she was powered by a stubbornness which had governed her whole life.

‘Girl, you have an attitude from Uracus,’ her father used to say, half in delight, half in dismay, as she refused to back down or apologize for whatever mischief she’d performed.

But that was years ago, before her father had gone off with the Adeone county militia to help sweep after a Fall. Eight years. And he’d still not come back.

Kysandra was still waiting for him, refusing to give up. That had been one of the first massive battles with Sarara, when she found her mother getting rid of Dad’s clothes. It was around the time Sarara had started smoking to cover her own grief and the difficulty of looking after a farm by herself. Those difficulties had just kept getting worse as the fields turned fallow, the mods grew old and the buildings in the compound started to deteriorate.

After eight years without Dad, they could just about keep the compound’s vegetable garden going, along with maintaining a couple of pigs, an ageing cow for milk and a chicken coop – which the bussalores kept getting into. It was hard to feed themselves some days.

That was why Kysandra was due to marry Akstan in two days, as soon as she was seventeen and it was legal (with parental permission). Sarara hadn’t simply given permission; she’d eagerly agreed to the whole dowry arrangement with Akstan’s grubby family. It was simple enough. In exchange for Blair Farm (and Kysandra), Sarara would get three rooms of her own above one of the family’s stores which sold cloth to the town. With an easy job behind the counter, she’d finally be rid of her whole nightmare inheritance problem. In her more hurtful moments, she’d screeched at Kysandra that without a brat daughter and a crap farm holding her back, she’d be able to find herself a decent man again. Kysandra had hurled the last remaining china jug at her for that one.

So there she was that clear night, looking out at the splendid nebulas whose moiré radiance dusted the Void. Their remarkable intricate shapes and glowing colours did nothing for her. She simply stared at them, trying not to think of how Giu had claimed her father’s soul. She alternated that with malicious snarls at the idea of Uracus taking her mother and Akstan, and the rest of his wretched family – including their matriarch, Ma Ulvon, whom Kysandra was secretly rather scared of.

Tonight Uracus glowed brightly high in the night sky, its malevolent carmine swirls surrounded by tattered amber veils curling back into the empty gash at its centre, like a raw wound across space. An omen, she thought miserably, signalling how crudding bad my life is going to be. Something moved across the evil nebula. A smudge of amber light, racing out of the north-west. And growing brighter.

Kysandra stared at it. Puzzled to begin with. She’d never seen a nebula like it. And she’d certainly never heard of a nebula moving. The thing began to elongate, a thin perfectly straight line of hazy salmon phosphorescence stretching out behind it.

That’s not a nebula!

There were only two things that moved in Bienvenido’s skies. The Skylords gracing the planet with their awesome presence, or—

‘F . . . F . . . Faller!’ she yelled in shock.

An utterly pointless shout. Sarara was deep in her narcotic sleep, and the mod-dwarfs were still curled up under the table.

Kysandra kept watching the glowing spectre. It was a lot brighter now as it streaked closer, heading almost directly for Blair Farm. A second equally pointless shout of warning died on her lips. Faller eggs dropped straight down, or so she’d always believed. And they were dark. Nothing like this.

A new kind of Faller?

Curiosity overcame her initial burst of fear. The glowing object was changing somehow. Its glow diminished as it soared above the valley, yet the orange light expanded as it drew ever closer to the farmhouse. It was big, she realized – far, far bigger than any Faller egg. The weird shimmering tail of luminescent air started to shrink, like smoke wafting away.

Kysandra could barely turn her neck fast enough as the glimmering thing shot overhead with a roar almost as loud as a thunderclap. She managed to catch a swift glimpse of its shape: the body of a giant egg, with stiff curving triangular wings. It was as if a shipwright had tried to build a boat that flew. For the last eight years Kysandra had been steadily reading her way through her father’s huge library of books (another bone of contention with her mother), and she couldn’t recall anything remotely like this in any of the manuals and accounts published by the Faller Research Institute.

The impossible thing shot away over the river, sinking swiftly out of the sky. Its glow vanished as it reached the treetops. Only the writhing streamers of iridescent air were left, ghostly indicators of its path. They ripped away to nothing just as the noise reached the farmhouse – a cacophony of crashing and snapping as trees were smashed apart from the impact.

Then everything was still. The night sky was clear, the nebulas shimmering exuberantly as normal. Nothing moved.