FIFTEEN

After a desperate couple of minutes during which the two air-dreadnoughts came ever closer, Irisis was forced to abandon the controller, which was too different from the kind she’d spent her life crafting. She had no doubt that, given time, she could make it work, but time had run out.

With only twenty or thirty seconds to impact, she ran along the port deck, looking down at the thapter. It still hung in the nets but she was relieved to hear the sound of its flight mechanism, and to see Nish reaching out of the top hatch. He had a knife in his hand and looked set to cut the ropes. They’d done it.

He had his back to her. Irisis didn’t call out, not wanting to distract him in those last vital seconds. She took a firm hold of the ropes and held her breath – why didn’t they go? What was the matter? She braced herself for the impact, which was not as bad as she’d expected – at least, not to Ghorr’s craft. The other vessel was smashed in two, hurling its crew everywhere.

Irisis hung onto the side ropes while Ghorr’s craft came to a shuddering halt, the airbags lashing about wildly. She expected them to tear open, or even one to explode in a cataclysm that would spread to all the airbags and send the flaming wreckage into the swamp forest. It didn’t happen. The airbags held and so did the ropes. The cable of the wrecked vessel, still tangled in one of the swamp forest trees, anchored them in place.

The thapter was gone, though Irisis didn’t remember hearing the song of its mechanism. Had Malien got it moving in time, or had it fallen into the mist-wreathed swamp? Irisis couldn’t tell.

Malien and Nish were beyond her helping, one way or the other, which reduced her options to one. She headed back the way she had come, looking up for Flangers, Klarm or Yggur. It occurred to her that they might all be dead and she’d be more usefully employed saving her own life. Irisis didn’t give that any further consideration, for it wasn’t in her nature, though she didn’t see what she could do where the mighty had failed.

She circumnavigated the outer deck without seeing a soul, apart from a few battered survivors clinging desperately to the dangling wreckage of the other air-dreadnought. One, a woman Irisis could not see, called out piteously, ‘Help me.’

Irisis turned away. She was still seeing an occasional flash from above, which meant that either Yggur or Klarm must have survived. She clutched at her pliance, a momentary comfort, then tucked it back inside her shirt. Best if no one knew she’d recovered it.

‘Help me, please help me.’

She climbed onto the roof of the cabin, tied a length of rope to the rigging and swung across the gap onto the stern section of the other air-dreadnought, which now hung vertically from a single airbag.

The pilot, a little woman who rather resembled Ullii in her pale hair and blanched skin, had her arms and legs wrapped around the steering arm of the vessel and was crooning softly to herself. She didn’t look up as Irisis landed catlike just above her. The cry must have come from further down.

Irisis fastened her line to the rail so she could get back to Ghorr’s vessel, and went down the vertical side, using the meshed rails like a rope ladder. The woman who had cried out was lying on what had been the rear wall of one of the cabins, and she had two broken legs. She was middle-aged, thin, with lank dark hair and a cast in her left eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Irisis, making her as comfortable as she could. ‘The best thing is for you to stay here until it’s all over.’

‘Don’t leave me,’ the woman screamed, throwing her arms around Irisis’s neck in a crushing grip.

‘I can’t get you to the other craft by myself. You’ll be safe here.’ As safe as anyone else, she added silently.

The woman began to wail. Irisis disengaged herself as gently as she could and went out the now horizontal door, closing it behind her. The cries followed her all the way back up the rail. Coming across had been the wrong thing to do. She should have kept on with her own work.

The pilot was now standing up on the stern, wild-eyed. She’d removed her precious controller from the steering arm and hung it around her neck.

‘It’ll be over soon,’ Irisis said, trying to sound reassuring as she unfastened her rope from the rail.

‘It’s over,’ said the pilot, and stepped out into space.

Irisis was so shocked that she had to hang on to the rail for a moment. She looked down and wished she hadn’t.

Get on with it, she told herself. Yggur and Klarm may need your help. Ignoring the cries from the wreckage, she swung back onto the roof of Ghorr’s cabin.

Down the other end a series of ladders and knotted ropes led up to the four main airbags, which were distributed at the points of a diamond, and to the smaller central airbag high above them. They were held in place by a vast network of ropes, and it was no wonder the craft needed a crew as big as a sailing ship. The airbags and ropes became blurry outlines halfway up – Yggur must have carried his mist up with him. Irisis touched her pliance and could see power being drained from the field up there. Yggur and Ghorr were still at it.

She unfastened her line and looped it around her waist, then rested her foot on the forward cabin roof while she caught her breath. The roof, which was about fourteen spans by four, was stacked with rolls of canvas and airbag silk, barrels of tar, coils of rope, and boxes, chests and barrels of supplies, all tightly roped down. The supplies were covered in tarpaulins but spaces between them made ideal hiding places for guards who could shoot her in the back as she climbed.

Don’t be paranoid, she told herself. The guards are dead or up attacking Yggur. But where were the crew? It was like a ghost ship. No doubt some hadn’t been lifted from the amphitheatre, and others had been killed in the fighting, but she couldn’t see a soul. Irisis eased into the first alley, probing ahead of her with the tip of the weapon, lifting the tarpaulins and feeling between the crates and barrels.

She didn’t discover anyone, but as she went aft Irisis realised that what she’d thought was another crate was in fact a square cage. She could see the bars through the stretched canvas. She tapped on the canvas and heard a faint, mewling cry, a very familiar sound.

‘Ullii?’ she said, carefully cutting across and down, then peeling the canvas away.

The little seeker lay on the floor of the cage, though not scrunched up into a ball, as was her wont when distressed. She lay stretched out with her hands gripping the bars in front of her and her toes clenched onto the bars on the far side of the cage. Her colourless hair was a wild tangle, her eyes red and staring.

Crouching down, Irisis reached through the bars. Ullii did not like to be touched, as a rule, but she didn’t react when Irisis’s hand met her bare shoulder.

‘Ullii, what has Ghorr done to you?’

Ullii made no reply.

‘Why didn’t you free yourself?’ said Irisis. ‘The way you freed me that time in Nennifer.’

Ullii turned those tragic eyes on her. ‘Lattice gone.’

‘It’ll come back,’ Irisis said lightly. ‘Now, let’s get you out of here.’

‘Gone forever,’ said Ullii. ‘Nothing left. Want to die.’

‘Nonsense,’ Irisis said briskly. She couldn’t deal with that after the pilot’s shocking suicide. She smashed the lock off with the butt of her sword and wrenched the door open. ‘Come on.’

Ullii followed lethargically, evincing no curiosity, though Irisis was used to that. She turned to the rope ladder that led up into the rigging. An occasional flash still came from the nebulosity above, though weaker than before.

She climbed up into the mist, which thickened until she could only see a few of the rungs of the ladder above her, and just the top of Ullii’s head below. There was something up here, more than mist and smoke. She touched her pliance. Power was being drawn in dozens of places, though Irisis could not tell what it was being used for.