“Surely you know.”

“No.”

“Love came back to me.” She gave him a peaceful smile. “After that I had no choice

The fulfilment Toller should have felt was lost in black territories of fear. “But you attacked Leddravohr! And he has no mercy, even for women.”

“I don’t need reminding.” Gesalla looked back at the slow-moving, attendant figure of Leddravohr, and for a moment scorn and hatred robbed her of beauty. “You were right, Toller — we must not simply surrender to the butchers. Leddravohr destroyed the life in me once, and Lain and I compounded the crime by ceasing to love each other, ceasing to love ourselves. We gave too much.”

“Yes, but.…” Toller took a deep breath as he strove to accord Gesalla the rights he had always claimed for himself.

“But what?”

“We have to lighten the ship,” he said, passing the burner control lever to her. He went into the compartment vacated by Chakkell and began hurling trunks and boxes over the side.

The pursuing soldiers whooped and cheered until Leddravohr rode in among them, and his gestures showed that he was giving orders for the containers to be carried back to the main landing site. Within a minute the soldiers had turned back with their burdens, leaving Leddravohr to follow the ship alone. The wind speed was about six miles an hour and as a result the bluehorn was able to keep pace in a leisurely trot. Leddravohr was riding slightly beyond the cannons’ effective reach, slouched in the saddle, expending little energy and waiting for the situation to turn to his advantage.

Toller checked the pikon and halvell magazines and found he had sufficient crystals for at least a day of continuous burning — the ships of the royal flight having been more generously provided than the others — but his principal concern was with the ship’s lack of performance. The rip in the balloon was showing no sign of spreading past the upper and lower panel seams, but the amount of gas spilling through it was almost enough to deprive the ship of its buoyancy.

In spite of the continuous firing of the burner the gondola had gained no more than twenty feet, and Toller knew that the slightest adverse change in conditions would force a descent. A sudden gust of wind, for example, could flatten one side of the envelope and expel precious gas, delivering Gesalla and him into the hands of the patiently stalking enemy. Alone he would have been more than prepared to contend with Leddravohr, but now Gesalla’s life also depended on the outcome.…

He went to the rail and gripped it with both hands, staring back at Leddravohr and longing for a weapon capable of striking the prince down at a distance. The arrival on Overland had been so different to all his imaginings. Here he was on the sister planet — on Overland! — but the malign presence of Leddravohr, embodiment of all that was rank and evil in Kolcorron, had degraded the experience and made the new world an offshoot of the old. Like the ptertha increasing their lethal powers, Leddravohr had extended his own killing radius to encompass Overland. Toller should have been enthralled by the spectacle of a pristine sky bisected by a zigzag line of fragile ships which stretched down from the zenith, emerging from invisibility as they sank like windborne seeds in search of fertile ground — but there was Leddravohr.

Always there was Leddravohr.

“Are you worried about the hills?” Gesalla said. She had sunk to a kneeling position, out of Leddravohr’s view, and had one hand raised to work the burner’s lever.

“We can lash that down,” Toller said. “You won’t need to keep on holding it.”

“Toller, are you worried about the hills?”

“Yes.” He took a length of twine from a locker and used it to tie down the lever. “If we could get over the hills there’d be a chance of wearing Leddravohr’s bluehorn out — but I don’t know if we can gain enough height.”

“I’m not afraid, you know.” Gesalla touched his hand. “If you would prefer to go down and face him now, it’s all right.”

“No, we’ll stay aloft as long as possible. We have food and drink here and can keep up our strength while Leddravohr is slowly losing his.” He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Besides, littlenight will be here soon, and that’s to our advantage because the balloon will work better in the cooler air. We may yet be able to set up our own little colony on Overland.”

Littlenight was longer than on Land, and by the time it had passed the gondola was at an altitude of slightly more than two-hundred feet — which was a better gain than Toller had expected. The lower slopes of the nameless hills were sliding by beneath the ship, and none of the ridges he could see ahead seemed quite high enough to claw it out of the sky. He consulted the map he had drawn while still on the skyship.

“There’s a big lake about ten miles beyond the hills,” he said. “If we can fly over it we should be able to.…”

“Toller! I think I see a ptertha!” Gesalla caught his arm as she pointed to the south. “Look!”

Toller threw the map down, raised his binoculars and scanned the indicated section of sky. He was about to query Gesalla’s remark when he picked out a hint of sphericity, a near-invisible crescent of sunlight glinting on something transparent.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “And it has no colour. That’s what Lain meant. It has no colour because.…” He passed the binoculars to Gesalla. “Can you find any brakka trees?”

“I didn’t realise you can see so much with glasses.” Gesalla, speaking with childish enthusiasm, might have been on a pleasure flight as she studied the hillside. “Most of the trees aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen before, but I think there are brakka among them. Yes, I’m sure. Brakka! How can that be, Toller?”

Guessing she was purposely distracting her mind from what was to come, he said, “Lain wrote that brakka and ptertha go together. Perhaps the brakka discharges are so powerful that they shoot their seeds up into… No, that’s only for pollen, isn’t it? Perhaps brakka grow everywhere — on Farland and every other planet.”

Leaving Gesalla to her observations with the binoculars, Toller leaned on the rail and returned his attention to Leddravohr, the relentless pursuer.

For hours Leddravohr had been slumped in the saddle, giving the impression of being asleep, but now — as though concerned that his quarry could be on the point of eluding him — he was sitting upright. He had no helmet, but was shading his eyes with his hands as he chose the bluehorn’s path through the trees and patches of scrub which dappled the slopes he was climbing. Off to the east the landing site and the line of descending balloons had been lost in blue-hazed distance, and it was as though Gesalla, Toller and Leddravohr had the entire planet to themselves. Overland had become a vast sunlit arena, held in readiness since the beginning of time.…

His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden flapping sound from the balloon.

The noise was followed by a downward rush of heat from the balloon mouth which told him the ship had blundered into turbulent air flung up from a secondary ridge. The gondola abruptly began to yaw and sway. Toller fixed his gaze on the main crest, which was now only about two-hundred yards away on the line of flight. He knew that if they could scrape over it there might be time for the balloon to recover, but in the instant of looking at the rocky barrier he realised the situation was hopeless. The ship, which had been so reluctant to take flight, was already abandoning the aerial element, sailing determinedly towards the hillside.

“Hold on to something,” Toller shouted. “We’re going down!”

He tore the extension lever free of its lashings and shut the burner off. A few seconds later the gondola began swishing through treetops. The sounds grew louder and the gondola bucked violently as it impacted with increasingly thicker branches and trunks. Above and behind Toller the collapsing balloon tore with a series of groans and snaps as it entangled itself with the trees, applying a brake to the ship’s lateral movement.