Serpents and Stairways

Chapter IV - Part 2

Georg couldn't remember what time or how he lay down, but he awoke easily, as if he didn't sleep at all. Pasha, wrapped into a duvet cocoon, had already perched stately on his chair at the deck.

"Listen," Georg said, walking into the fresh air that rushed to fill his relaxing lungs, exhausted after sleeping in uncomfortable positions, "let's head for the mountains?"

"But you yourself said the dragon caught girls on the outskirts," the boy flustered, "That sooner or later it should come back?"

"I did. But what if I was wrong?"

"If you're wrong, we both are done for. But it's much easier to ask than to answer, isn't it?" Pasha grumbled, "Go, get dressed. It's chilly in the mountains. Wouldn't want an inflammation to kill you. Especially since heaven—is a fiction of last resort, in case you've forgotten."

From down below, the witch's eye of Hexenauge lake observed them.

They spent a few hours in travel, during which Pasha explained how he used to be a dreamer in his childhood, and how in those young years he'd thought so many joyful and dismal thoughts, that by his adolescence he had as-if lived through his entire life in his imagination.

"... which is why man's passions seem to me boring and ugly," the young man said, "do you get it? Like a crude imitation of some terribly popular book."

Georg had a hard time focusing on his words—this was his first time this high up in the mountains in summer. Someone had spilled the inks of gentians, heartsease and bell flowers onto the cliffs' grey writing paper, soaking it in sapphire; he imagined it reflected in the mirror of their autopilot at the captain's bridge, and for some reason envied him.

It was a clear day. Their airship passed Silen by, ascending higher than its tallest spires.

Suddenly Pasha, in the middle of contemplating the obedience of the masses ("No, but just think about it! Beaters of systems are always most admired by the conventional,") fell silent. Georg reached for his spyglass, and tried looking in, approximately, the same direction. Could it be...

However, he had to look not up, but down—where the white-green fields of blooming clover turned gradually into glades of fresh snow—white-white. There was something else on the glade—carriages, boxes, several people and an object, the purpose of which was difficult to read from a distance. An odd object—resembling the stump of a pillar, or a piece of rock that had broken off.

"What do you think that is?" Pasha squinted.

"I think that's a flyer," Georg shrugged and returned the spyglass, "let's ask the Captain to make a stop."

But when their airship finally froze over the snowy lacuna (aerostats, unlike planes, were great at freezing still midair) he came to regret his decision. Of course. How else could this go. Who else could it be.

"I wouldn't recommend the windows this time," Pasha said, proud of his perceptiveness.

Georg didn't respond. The carriage turned out to be a palanquin on its own lion-like mechanical legs—and palettes wrapped with rope had the same. On one of those palettes, legs-crossed, sat Tamara in an old-fashioned bloomer pants costume. She turned to look at the airship, distracted from writing something down in a notebook, and waved her arm at Pasha, yelling something at two other people standing next to the piece of rock that caught Georg's attention. He didn't need a spyglass to recognise the two. The tall automaton, wearing men's clothes, cut like a man, too. The dark-haired girl with strange, as if slowed-down, movements and a cane in her hand. She didn't use to have it—the old one must have got lost when she fell from the skies. The girl turned around.