Cloudland Read Online Free PDF Page B

hands together and started feasting, tearing off handfuls and stuffing them into their gaping mouths. Whenever they raised a hand, one of the hunched Cloudians behind them shuffled forwards, set a flask on the table and shuffled back.
    What kind of place was this? Lucy looked down the long table. Near her, the gaunt Cloudians, the Cirrus, sat eating in silence, chewing slowly and staring at the high dome. At the far end, the fat Cumulus chattered and waved their hands in the air, sending gobs of meringue flying. Behind them all, the hunched servants waited, never speaking. The feasting Cloudians looked greedier and more alive with those patient Stratus at their back.
    Lucy thought back to the cloud hall: a column for every hundred years the Cloudians had lived in the clouds. There had been at least a thousand columns. She glanced at Daniel. Already, he had eaten half a cake. He was grabbing another handful, dartingsuspicious looks up the table. Meringue smeared his cheek and shirt. Lucy saw that he had hidden some food in his pocket.
    The cake was cold on Lucy’s teeth but it tasted sweet. As she chewed, she felt colours swirling through her. Her nagging thirst vanished. The colours were tastes – pale yellow and green and orange, all the colours of an early-morning sky. She remembered eating January’s cloud biscuits and then drifting up into perfect calm. Now, again, she was suddenly radiant, with a feeling she could float from her chair into the high air.
    The statue hadn’t eaten. It sat staring straight ahead. Lucy tapped its hand, resting on the table, and said, ‘There’s been a mistake.’ The statue didn’t stir. Lucy twisted in her chair to look up at its face. Its eyes shone like streetlights on wet pavement. Lucy tapped its hand, harder, but its eyes didn’t flicker. It was a statue again.
    Its stillness frightened Lucy. She looked at the hunched servants. Did they come to Earth, she wondered, and become what people imagined ghosts to be: pale, silent, see-through creatures? Was she a ghost up here? Was Daniel? She studied his face. He looked real enough: his face tight with worry, his skin mottled with cold. She had always felt queasythinking of everything packed into her skin; her teeth poking up through her gums, her veins piped through her flesh like creeks under an asphalt city. Now she clutched her arms, squeezing them until she could feel her bones.
    The statue started to hum, a low sound that made Lucy’s skin sting as though she had stepped into ice-cold water. The Cloudians stopped eating and turned to watch. In a slow voice, almost chanting, the statue said:
‘The first story is of ice. Ice on Earth and ice in Cloud: A cold thought, the Kazia made winter without end, cold years past counting. Only a creeping life, scant life, for the survivors. Their hunger forced them far in search of food. So it went on, cold long past counting, until at last a Protector came up from ice Earth –’

CHAPTER SEVEN
Speaking Statue
    â€˜Protector?’ broke in Lucy. ‘A Protector fought this Kazia thing?’ Across the Citadel, the Cloudians rocked back, but the statue only paused, worked its head around, and fixed its eyes on Lucy.
    â€˜It is the old song.’ The statue lifted its hand and pointed at the Cloudians. ‘They forgot, these ones, happy in the cities and habits they had made. They forgot the old stories. They left the safe heart, their Citadel, empty. Only this year, they came creeping back to us. In dribs and drabs, they crept in weeping for their frozen cities, their citizens changed to ice.’
    â€˜They don’t normally live here?’ interrupted Lucy.
    The statue thumped its fist on the table. ‘A Snow Owl told us of a castle raised at the end of our Forgotten Lands, a castle of ice where the cold lived. Then we knew and it was certain: the Kazia had risen again.’
    The statue stared down at Lucy. ‘We sent our Heir