The Stars of Mount Quixx, page 1
The Stars of Mount Quixx
The Brindlewatch Quintet, Book One
S.M. Beiko
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
1: The Bell’s for the Birds
2: Slanner Dannen and the Kadaver’s Soiree
3: The Mountain with a Mind of Its Own
4: Tea with the Arachnastronomer
5: A Gift of Sky
6: The Volunteer Star Brigade
7: The Future Fandango
8: An Old Fire Still Burns
9: Weave a Circle Round Them Thrice
10: The Platinum Plot
11: The Most Monstrous Monster of Mount Quixx
12: Split the Heavens
13: A Meteoric Bridge to the Blessed Unknown
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Dedication
For Peter, first, who believed in Quixx before he saw it on the page. And for all of you who look up at the stars with wonder, and dream.
Prologue
I can handle whatever Mount Quixx throws at me, Klaus had joked, before work had swallowed the weeks and she’d left him that last time. He was always so sure of himself. And Camille had been sure of him, too.
But the smoke peeling off the mountain now was thick and cruel — the best evidence that there had been an explosion, save the dull ringing in her head. So many flares of sharp, jaundiced light that shook the world, still there when Camille closed her eyes. Neighbours screamed, running down the street in their nighties. The night was alive with fear.
But will we survive what Mount Quixx has thrown at us?
Camille tightened her fist around her scarf, her heart keeping time with the hallway’s carriage clock. She should’ve hidden beneath the kitchen table throughout the blasts, but her body wouldn’t allow it. She’d watched it all, silent as stone. The house had been sturdily built and wasn’t about to be knocked down. Neither was Camille. What it came down to was this: Klaus was on that mountain, which had just been haloed in celestial bombs. Camille was sturdy, but not sturdy enough to lose him.
She counted the seconds between the aftershocks, held firm to the counter as broken china littered the parquet. The house was still. She’d waited long enough. Pushing her spectacles up her nose, she was a flurry out the front door.
The hackled mountain next to where Camille had grown up was practically on the doorstep, which is why this arrangement had been so perfect for her and Klaus. Except now her doorstep was ringed in fire and doubt. The house was located across from a clearing, and then the mountain, but now there was a crater where the clearing had been, a quarter mile wide and charred. Camille barely pulled her spectator shoes from the edge in time, arms spiralling as she landed on the road behind her. She’d already waited for the worst of the blazes to subside, yet still the air scorched her skin. She pulled her legs back under her anyway and got up, shaking. She tried to peer down the street to see if there was a better way. But smoke — no, fog? — seemed to rise from the crater, rise and spread, its fingers greedy, swallowing Camille’s neighbourhood before her eyes.
She looked up at the bent spire, up and up to the place where she knew the observatory was, hidden now by fog and maybe a little bit of doubt. She knew if she went directly down this new slope the crater had made, it would be the most direct route to Klaus. The fastest. Never mind that it was all crackling brimstone; this had to be just another of the mountain’s many tricks.
That is, if the observatory was still there.
Camille shut her eyes. Tried to listen. Tell me what I should do, she begged the night air, searching for the voice that had always guided her. Please tell me that he’s all right.
No answer. Just the wind. Just the fog. The barest sense of a great pain. So she scrambled into the chasm as fast as she could — she had to get up the mountain, and to Klaus, whatever the cost.
It was taking much too long to reach the bottom of the crater, too many throat-scorching gasps, Camille splaying out her arms and teetering blindly. She hadn’t even tried to find the launcher in the chaos — that would have been the most direct route — but with all the fog and the possible damage to the landing zone, who knew where she’d end up. More questions shot through her: What if I’m too late? What if the telescope caved in on top of him while he was scribbling in his damned notebook? What if the sky has fallen and all of them are . . .
She shook her head, catching a dangling root in her outstretched hand and hanging there. Keep going. She put her feet back down. Soon she was at the bottom of the crater, the mountain ahead and up. Red embers and burning brush showed her the way to the steep mountain pass, and though every step was peril, Camille knew it was time to forget everything. Forget everything and let the mountain take her where she needed to go.
To keep her steady, she imagined Klaus’s brogue, as clear as if he were whispering directly into her throbbing skull: Physics are useless here, he joked. The scarf on Camille’s shoulders floated around her head as she turned a corner. Her feet slipped off the ground as she entered a familiar pocket of geographic anti-gravity. The mountain has its own rules. That, she’d always known. And she’d learned them well. But she expected that all to change after tonight. Camille grabbed for anything she could on the rock face and pulled herself upward.
You can do anything if you’re foolish enough. That proverb had been hers. As she climbed higher and higher, her body half-floating as if it were a bit of dandelion, making progress around the dark trees that bearded the slate. The stench of smoke became enough to lead the way. All she had to do was keep going up.
But Camille’s panic finally caught up with her body. Her skin prickled as the hot wind chomped her heels. She couldn’t spare a hand to find the next hold. The tears were a surprise, the air searing her light-starved eyes. Camille never had patience for tears. She needed to take another step. Yet when she tried, she lost purchase and slipped, hand and foot, the upside-down momentum sending her flying upward and out of control.
The mountain caught her like a cradle, with a slab of rock at her back. As the air came back to her lungs, she tried to look ahead, above. There was no sky, but the mountain was a bleak burnt temple blending with the dark. Her body pressed into the rock and she heard the mountain. Pain, it echoed. My pain. And yours.
Camille permitted one sob to bubble up, burying her face in the scarf as she thought of the small, strange family she had built on this mountain — a mountain that was hurting but which had betrayed her all the same. Her tears floated up past her head. The fabric still smelled like Klaus: resin and spilled ink and bergamot tea and country air. She held on to that. She knew with terrible certainty that she’d never smell him again.
“Please,” came a voice almost as miserable as her thoughts. “Please don’t cry.”
Camille stiffened, her head turning wildly as she adjusted her glasses, her eyes, and tried to see what she didn’t want to see, but what she must.
“Where are you?” she croaked, trying to find relief. “Are you hurt? Is he—”
“I wasn’t brave enough.”
Camille held fast to the outcrop of rock so that she wouldn’t float away, turning towards the broken voice.
“It’s all right,” she said into the dark. It was very much not all right, but she needed to be strong. Strong for both their sakes. She held an arm out. “I’m here now.”
Camille couldn’t shrink from the whimper, from the sharp arrowhead pain it sent through her as the figure clarified. There was nowhere for her to go. The whimper fell into an aching sob.
“I didn’t know — I tried. I — I was . . .”
Camille would be surprised at herself later, that she had no reaction save numb silence as she stared at Klaus’s body held close in four shaking indigo arms. Even in this night of shadow and fog and long-extinguished fire, the white of his tight curls still shone, brilliant, as he had been. Brilliant as a star, one that would no longer shine, save in memories.
The mountain had nothing direct to say about it. Not now. But Camille swore she heard the faintest offering — We can one day heal from this. Just not yet.
1
The Bell’s for the Birds
She’d let her mind wander for just that one second. I’m dancing, as always. I know the dance well. But somehow I’ve lost the steps. The music is still playing — but what comes next? The air is filled with smoke and fire and butterflies . . .
“What’s this now?”
Ivory broke the silence in the car as it came down the patchy hills and valleys outside of Ferren City.
“What?” Constance broke out of her daydream like a ship’s figurehead through a storm. This was her first time driving outside of the City, alone no less. Her eyes didn’t leave the road, but her mind had. She was definitely not a daydreamer. Where had that come from?
Ivory unstuck her face from the window. “Are you blind, Connie? The light’s fading and there’re no clouds out.”
Her sister was right, even with the barb. Constance checked the dashboard clock. The sun should be bright in the morning sky, but it was slowly choked out by a soupy haze. As they went deeper into the valley, it only seemed to get darker.
Constance shook her head. “Maybe there
“We’d be able to smell it,” Ivory countered, rolling down the window of their parents’ brand new car and inhaling grossly.
Constance sighed, unwilling to get into another match of Who’s the Better Detective this early.
“I’m sure it’s nothing that won’t clear up by the end of the day.” But Ivory, as usual, wasn’t about to let up.
“Maybe it’s coming from Quixx,” she guessed. “Maybe the whole town’s on fire and we’ll have to turn around and go home, and Mother and Father will give up trying to send us away for the summer.”
“Ivory!” Constance snapped. “Stop wishing for disasters. One day they’ll come true.” Constance swallowed the retort: Mother or Father could send us to the other side of Brindlewatch, but the split continent wouldn’t be a big enough distance between us and them.
The younger sister rolled her eyes. “Oh, Constance. Always so proper. Don’t pretend you’re remotely invested in this trip. A disaster would be more likely than any of this working out.”
Constance pressed her mouth into a tight line. She wasn’t about to admit anything to her fourteen-year-old sister. Now wasn’t the time. She needed this trip to be a success. She would not succumb to a bitter back-and-forth when they hadn’t even reached their destination. Constance would keep her mind open.
“A summer getaway?” her father had repeated after Constance had made the suggestion, barely looking up from the documents on his desk or turning to face his daughter from his wingback chair. It was just before the end of term, and Constance was . . . more than desperate. “What for?”
He’d sounded amused, as if she were a child again, tugging on his pant leg and asking for another pair of dancing shoes. But she was eighteen now, almost graduated, and her needs were not as frivolous. She was trapped aboard a freight train hurtling towards a blown-out bridge, and she had been sitting calmly in coach sipping tea for far too long.
She’d found her own voice just long enough to stammer, “Wouldn’t it be nice? All of us, together? Like . . . old times! Before I go away for good, to college and . . .” A wilted hand gesture, signifying whatever came after that, and a weak smile to seal it. “Well, Father?”
A creak of leather and cherrywood. Her father’s pen laid flat but still a threat. Constance was less surprised that he said fine, and more that she had orchestrated all of this on her own: one last attempt. A weak S.O.S. to be saved by summer’s end, before college, before everything changed forever, one shot to convince Mother and Father, before—
“In all my reading,” Ivory went on, her leonine face buried in the crinkled brochure, “I’ve never heard of Quixx. And it’s so close to Ferren. ‘A gentle valley hamlet hemmed in by hills and forests at the foot of a stately mountain.’ Sounds like pastoral propaganda to me.”
“And you’d be the expert,” Constance said, plucking the broadsheet away and sliding it into the glove compartment. “You’ve read that thing end to end. Leave something to be surprised by.”
Ivory made a show of throwing herself backward into her seat. “I’m trying to take a leaf out of your book, little Miss Girl Scout. Always be prepared.”
And Constance was prepared. Usually. She swallowed the rising panic, unsure what was getting her worked up this time. Just focus on the road.
“A seaside resort would’ve been more diverting,” Ivory said, digging around in the extremely large army bag at her feet. “The time I spent gathering and reading marine life periodicals from the school library could have me on the faculty by next term.”
“Gathering,” Constance snorted. “You mean stealing. You’d better return those books by next—”
“And anyway, we both know they chose this place with the same amount of thought they do everything. Father must have shut his eyes and determined Quixx is the place depending on where his cigar ashes fell.” A snort, then a meek glance out the window. “Though there must be something interesting here. Maybe something to do with Father’s business. Or Mother’s socialite-ing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be joining us at all . . .”
Constance’s jaw worked, her fingers tightening on the steering wheel. To say their parents had been absent most of their lives might be an understatement, but the only one who’d say it was Ivory. Constance took a different tack. “At least it’s a vacation, out of the City. And when was the last time we all went away as a family? I think it will be a perfectly splendid experience.” This attempt at a silver lining was met with a pink tongue.
“If they actually come,” Ivory countered. “It could also be a neat scheme to send us even farther away. Out of sight, out of mind. More so than usual.”
That time, Constance did take her eyes off the road, regarding her little sister slumped and staring out the window at the ever-fogging landscape. She seemed like she belonged out there in the smoke and the smudge — all scrawny knees, mud-stained stockings, snarly hair, and dark-circled violet eyes. Though this trip wasn’t so far away from their daily lives as she’d wanted, at least Constance would get some time alone with Ivory. The last school year had been harder than ever. Children were cruel to those who didn’t conform, and Ivory had been drifting further and further into a world of her own making.
And that was both the problem and perhaps the solution.
Ivory always had some kind of plan for her future. Even if it changed constantly, at least she was determined. Any time Constance tried to imagine life beyond the path set out for her, there was only darkness, a fog thicker than the one before them now. And though the elder sister was as ever the embodiment of What Was Proper, the younger was the absolute inverse — all mess and chaos and “freedom.” It had Constance more than worried. Rules were all that kept her upright. Without them, she would crumble; she was convinced that rules were the only thing keeping her together, even now.
And Ivory was on a dangerous path; she’d been shirking the rules all her life, and her own future was now as uncertain as Constance’s — though Ivory didn’t yet realize it. It didn’t matter. Constance could be just as determined. She would spend the summer steering Ivory towards the right course. She had to.
“A summer getaway.” That was when her father had swivelled in his chair to face Constance at last. “A getaway can sometimes mean an escape. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”
Ivory perked up and Constance was thrust back into the present as a very decayed hand-painted sign came suddenly into view, barely distinguishable through the creeping tendrils of fog and scraggly overgrowth. Constance couldn’t believe she was flicking the headlights on.
“‘Mount Quixx, five miles,’” Ivory read, craning against her seatbelt to keep it in sight as long as possible. “That sign looked a thousand years old. I wonder if I could try carbon dating it.”
“Sit back, Ivory,” Constance snipped. Ivory huffed, crossing her arms.
“I don’t think I’d know what to do on a vacation with Mother and Father,” she went on, gnawing on her fingernail. Constance flicked her hand without turning her head. “Being raised by nannies and tutors my entire life hasn’t exactly resulted in a strong parental bond.”
Constance couldn’t help her ensuing smirk. “You might have bonded with the nannies and tutors, if you weren’t so hellbent on sabotaging them.”
Ivory shared the grin. She’d revelled in a naughty streak as much as Constance took pride in avoiding it.
She knew Ivory wanted to bond, but she couldn’t help defending their parents again. “Mother and Father invested a lot of money for our educations and upbringing.” She took the next corner with maybe too much care. “We should be grateful for all the opportunities life, and their sacrifices, have afforded us.”
“Grateful.” The word came out bitter, and Ivory was back to staring out the window through her black tangles. “Soon I will thank them thoroughly by running away and making many exciting discoveries, with treasure enough to fund my endless adventures. Besides, all the money in the world never made either of our parents very happy.”
