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“Hello, Silk.”
He whirled. Mucor was sitting on the deck, her shins embraced by her skeletal arms; he gasped, and felt the pain of his wound deep in his chest.
She repeated her greeting.
“Hello.” Another gasp. “I’d nearly forgotten you could do this. You did it in the tu
She bared yellow teeth. “Mirrors are better. Mirrors scare more. This isn’t, is it? I’m just here.”
“It was certainly frightening to hear your voice.” Silk sat too, grateful for the chance.
“I didn’t mean to. I wanted to talk to you, but not where there were so many people.”
He nodded. “There would have been a riot, I suppose.”
“You were worried about me with so many people gone. My grandfather came to see if I was all right. The old man and the fat woman are taking care of me. He wanted to know where Grandmother and the little augur went, and I told him.”
My grandfather was Hammerstone, clearly; Silk nodded and smiled. “Does the old man have a beard and jump around?”
“A little beard, yes.”
Xiphias in that case, not His Cognizance; no doubt the fat woman was a friend of Xiphias’s, or a servant.
“I’ve been eating soup.
“That’s very good — I’m delighted to hear it. Mucor, you possessed General Saba, and there’s something that you can tell me that’s very, very important to me. When does she expect us to arrive in Trivigaunte?”
“Tonight.”
Silk nodded, he hoped encouragingly. “Can you tell me how long after shadelow?”
“About midnight. This will float over the city, and in the morning they’ll let you down.”
“Thank you. Auk intends to try to take control of this airship and fly it to Mainframe.”
Mucor looked pleased. “I didn’t know that.”
“He won’t be able to. He’ll be killed, and so will others I like. The only way that I’ve been—” He heard voices and paused to listen.
“They’re in there.” Mucor looked over her shoulder at the dangling canvas tube.
“Going down into the gondola? Can they hear us?”
“They haven’t.”
He waited until he heard the hatch thrown back. “What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
His forefinger traced small circles on his cheek. “When you go, will you try to find out, please? It may be important, and I would be very, very grateful.”
“I’ll try.”
“Thank you. You can fly, I know. You told me so in that big room underground where the sleepers are. Have you been all over this airship?”
“Most of it, Silk.”
“I see. The only way that I could think of to stop Auk from trying to take it and being killed was to disable it some way — that was why I climbed up here, and you may be able to tell me how to do it. In a moment I’m going to try to tear the seam of that tube and climb up.”
“There’s a trooper up there.”
“I see. A sentry? In any case, I must find a way to open the seam first. I should have gotten new glasses; I could have broken them and cut it with a piece of glass. But Mucor,” Silk made his tone as serious as he could to emphasize the urgency of his request, “you’ve given me another way now, at least for the time being. Will you possess General Saba again for me?”
She was silent, and as seconds crept by he realized that she had not understood. “The fat woman,” he said, but Mucor would surely confuse that with the woman Xiphias had found to care for her. “The woman that you frightened in the Calde’s Palace. She spilled her coffee, remember? You talked to me through her before Hyacinth and I went into the cage.”
“Oh, her.”
“Her name is General Saba, and she’s the commander of this airship. I want you to possess her and make her turn east. As long as it’s going in the direction that Auk—”
Mucor had begun to fade. For a second or two a ghostly image remained, like a green glimmer upon a pool; then it was gone and he was alone.
Condemning himself, he rose again. There had been half a dozen things — eight or ten, and perhaps more — he should have asked. What was taking place in Viron? Was Maytera Mint alive? What were Siyuf’s plans? The answers had melted into the fabled city of lost opportunities.
He walked forward to the tube and examined it. The canvas was thi
Even if he had possessed a knife, there was a sentry at the top of the ladder. If he was able to poke a hole in the canvas and enlarge it enough to climb through, he would almost certainly be captured or killed by that sentry when he emerged from the tube. Saba had no doubt worried that her prisoners might break one of the hatches; but a single pterotrooper there would be able to hold her position until she exhausted her ammunition, and her shots would have brought reinforcements long before then. Saba’s prisoners had not escaped through either hatch — not yet. But Saba’s logic confined him as though he had been its object.
Shaking his head, he crossed the deck of the gondola to the nearest cable. Woven of many ropes, it was as thick as a young tree, and its surface was rougher than the bark of many. Still more significantly, its angle, here where it was bent through a huge ringbolt, slanted noticeably off the vertical.
Removing his robe, he put it over his shoulder and tied it at his waist. Once he had finished praying and begun to climb, he found it relatively easy; as a boy he had climbed trees and poles far more difficult. The key was to fix his eyes on the surface of the cable, never stealing even a glance at the snowy plain of cloud so achingly far below.
He had boasted of his climbing to Horn, while conceding only that he had climbed less adroitly than a monkey; it was time to make good that boast…
Gib missed the companionship of his trained baboon — what would Bongo think, if Bongo could see him crawling upward with chattering teeth and sweating palms? Could baboons laugh?
The airship was, just possibly, turning ever so slightly to its left. To look down was death, but to look up?
The whir of the engines sounded louder, but of course he was somewhat nearer them. He reminded himself sharply that he had not yet climbed far…
The airship’s southward course must necessarily have put its long axis across the great golden bar of the sun. If he looked up — if he risked it, and it was not much risk, surely, he might be able to catch sight of the sun to one side of the vast hull from which the gondola hung…
Momentarily, he halted to rest the aching muscles in his thighs, and glanced upward. Scarcely ten cubits overhead, the cable entered the monstrous belly of the airship proper; beyond the opening, he glimpsed the beam to which it was attached.
“Done try, laddie.”
“Tick!” Hyacinth stared, blinking away tears. “Tick, how in the whorl—”
Auk handed him to her. “Came in through the window, didn’t you, cully? A dimber cat burglar, ain’t you?”
“My see, wears she putty laddie?” Tick explained. “An Gawk sees, hue comb wit may. Den my — add word!”
“Lo, girl.” flapping in advance of Silk, Oreb ignored the little catachrest. “Lo, Auk.”
Auk swore. Hyacinth dropped Tick (who landed on his feet) and Silk embraced her.
To him, so lost in the ecstasy of her kiss that he scarcely knew that her right leg had twined about his left, or that her loins ground his, Horn’s distant shout meant less than nothing.
“So what?” Auk inquired from the West Pole. “Let ’em come.”
After what seemed an eternity of love, something tapped Silk’s arm and Hyacinth backed away.