To his right, he saw Lemon rock and swirl in her kite, fighting to keep it level as the wind yanked them onward and upward. He leaned on his handle, pulling closer, although not so close as to risk tangling the tethers.

‘You all right?’ He had to scream to make himself heard over the wind.

‘Aye, wee bear, just fucken peachy!’

‘Can you control it?’

‘If you can control your fucken self!’

The walls flashed below, then the gorge was beneath them, hundreds of strides over the smashed ruin of the bridge and the spindly aqueduct beneath. It seemed utterly black, a chasm of pure darkness. Then the wind tugged at them, and the misty lip of the plateau rolled beneath their dangling feet.

‘Ready?’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Here we go!’

Chel leaned into the handles, and looked for where the fires weren’t.

***

Shapes flashed beneath, dim blurs, pale against the dark of the plateau. Chel tried to steer his kite along a line of torches that marked a road through the camp, fighting against the wind’s own opinions, starting to lose the feeling in his fingers and ears. The clustered weapons dangling from the construction’s wings above his head jingled constantly over the creak and rustle of the kite’s structure, and he began to worry about them knocking together and immolating him in mid-air. Just out of his vision to the right, Lemon was a fluttering white oblong, rising and falling on the waves of air, and no doubt still screaming.

The first rays of dawn had lit the limpid eastern sky, and suddenly he could see, the fuzzy blurs of the plateau taking shape, rows of tents and larger structures, rolling wagons, milling fighters. The camp was already alive. All it would take was for one of them to look up and notice their drifting forms, hundreds of strides above, and things would take an unwelcome turn.

The bundled cords pulled at his numb fingers, anxious to be released. Already his arms ached, his back aflame despite the chill of the wind’s embrace. Needless to say, his shoulder was throbbing, a surly and neglected pulse beneath the rest of his aggravations. The sheer joy of flying in the morning sky had paled as the physical efforts took their toll. A voice at the back of his mind started to whisper that he’d made a dreadful mistake.

‘Fuck this,’ he muttered, fixing his eyes on a largish structure, inherited by the church forces from the refugees who’d formerly occupied the plateau, well clear of any sources of flame. If I’m going to freeze and fall to my death, I might as well make the place interesting before I go.