it?’
‘I guess not, but it’ll keep you heading in one direction. You see, up here it’s a bit like before sailors had longitude to help with navigating. Up here we only have latitude: the cracks between the floorboards. They only go in one direction. So you can tell how far you are along, say, an east to west line, but you can’t tell where you are north to south.’
‘That seems to make sense too, but I don’t think it helps me much,’ said Jordy. ‘Thanks for trying, anyway.’
‘You’re welcome. Now long trek navigation. The stars.’
‘Stars?’ repeated Jordy, looking mystified. ‘What stars?’
‘Two kinds. Glass and timber. The first kind is the skylights. The second kind is timber. In the outside world they can only see stars at night. We can usually only see ours during the day, though sometimes a bright moon will illuminate them. Now, over there,’ he pointed, ‘a bunch of skylights will appear in the morning. They’re my Ursa Major. Beyond them is a big bright skylight, my Sirius, which lines me up neatly for the constellation of Capricorn, a series of glass tiles which dot the heavens of the Far Corner of the attic. Orion’s Belt, Capella, I’ve got ’em all in my head. They speak to me, as the night stars speak to explorers in your world.’
‘Wow!’ cried Jordy, fascinated.
‘Now the timbers – the rafters – are different. I guess they’re not so much like stars as like mountain ranges. You look up, you recognise angles, shapes, formations. There’s the Cat’s Cradle Matrix formation just a short day’s trek from here, and Johnson’s Totems beyond that. That leads to the Mechano group. Anywhere I am I just look up at the rafters and there’s a pattern I know – or if I don’t know ’em I log ’em in my head for future reference, notin’ just where they are in relation to other timber formations.’
‘That’s ab-so-lutely brilliant,’ murmured Jordy, impressed. ‘You think I could learn?’
‘If you’re a lifer, sure.’
‘Oh.’ That didn’t sound so good to Jordy, who certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in an attic.
They seemed to have run out of conversation for now and Jordy sensed the bortrekker wanted to be quiet for a while. He found the pillar beneath which the rats were now both sleeping and leaned against it, staring out into the darkness of the Attican night. The moon out there in the outside world seemed to have gone behind a cloud, for there were no lunar shafts striking through from the skylights. Jordy’s former loneliness had now drained from him and he was feeling refreshed. He still missed his brother and sister, of course, but that awful empty feeling of forced solitude had gone.
Jordy liked the bortrekker. He knew Chloe wouldn’t approve of him: she was a bit funny about purposeless souls, but Jordy found him fascinating. No school. No real work. Nothing but this day and the next, one after the other.
There was a flash in the sky, like sheet lightning.
‘What was that?’ cried Jordy, sitting bolt upright. ‘Did you see that?’
‘Happen I was asleep,’ grumbled the bortrekker. ‘What’re you gabbing about?’
‘There,’ said Jordy excitedly. ‘There’s another one. Out there. Did you see it? A flash of light.’
‘Oh, that.’ Jordy could hear the rustling of the coat of many capes, as the bortrekker settled back again. ‘That’s a storm. Probably over the Great Water Tank. Electric dust storm.’
‘Electric dust storm?’
‘Yep. You know this place is full of dust. Dust on the rafters, on the beams, on the boards of the floor. It’s lain here since the attic was created. Some places it’s knee deep. There’s even areas where it’s so thick and wide you can drown in the stuff. Quickdust we call it. You want to stay away from quickdust, or you’ll go under and choke, a horrible dry death. Yep, half this world is dust. You can see it in the moonshafts, you can see it in the sunbeams. Dust, dust and more dust. Dead insects, cobwebs, dried rodent droppings and dusty old dust. That’s why I wear a kerchief over my mouth an’ nose most of the time. Here’s not bad, but there’s places you can’t even breathe when the South Draught blows. In a blistering high summer there’s a mistral draught comes in from the fractured roof of the East Wing – hot and weary – and dries you to a piece of leather …’
‘What’s that got to do with the storm?’