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Without turning toward them, Sciathan nodded vigorously.
“I’ll ask Patera Incus to shrive me later today. Will you excuse me now? I… I would like very much to be alone.”
As he left the cockpit, Auk told his back, “Get him to tell you how he charmed the slug gun.”
A flimsy door of canvas stretched over a bamboo frame was all that separated the cockpit from a narrow aisle lined with green-curtained cubicles. Hearing a familiar voice, Silk pushed aside the curtain on his right.
The cubicle seemed overfilled by a bunk, a small table, and a stool; Nettle occupied the stool, holding a needler, and Saba smiled in a way that Silk found painful from the bunk.
“Poor girl,” Oreb muttered.
Silk traced the sign of addition in the air. “Blessed be you, General Saba, in the Sacred Name of Pas, Father of the Gods, in that of Gracious Echidna, His Consort, in those of their Sons and their Daughters alike, in that of the Overseeing Outsider, and in the names of all other gods whatsoever, this day and forever. So say I, Silk, in the name of their youngest, fairest child, Steely Sphigx, Goddess of Hardihood and Courage, Sabered Sphigx, the glad and glorious patroness of General Saba and General Saba’s native city.”
“Gracious of you, Calde. I thought you’d come to gloat.”
Nettle shook her head. “You don’t know him.”
“I came — or at least. I left the cockpit — to escape my friends,” Silk told Saba. “I had no more than stepped out when I heard you and looked in. ‘When neither our fellows nor our gods spoil our plans, we spoil them ourselves.’ I read that when I was a boy, and I’ve learned since how very true it is.”
Nettle said, “She was telling me about Trivigaunte, Calde. I don’t think I’d want to live there, but I’d like to see it.”
“We go in for towers.” Saba smiled. “We say it’s because we build such good ones, but maybe we build good ones because we build so many of them. Towers and whitewash, and wide, clean streets. Your city looks,” she paused, searching for a telling word, “squatty, like a camp. Squatty and dirty. I know you love it, but that’s how it looks to us.”
Silk nodded. “I understand. The interiors of our houses are clean, I believe, for the most part; but our streets are filthy, as you say. I was trying to do something about it, and a great many other things, when I was arrested.”
“Not by me,” Saba told him. “I didn’t order it.”
“I never thought you did.”
“But you were talking to the enemy without telling us. If—” Saba’s voice broke, and Oreb croaked in sympathy.
“We each have our sorrows.” Silk let the green curtain fall behind him. “I won’t ask you to palliate mine, but I may be able to ease yours. I’ll try. What were you about to say?”
“I started to say I’d put in a word for you back home, that’s all. Because we’ll get you again when we get back this airship. If Siyuf’s not ru
“You weren’t insane,” Silk told her. “You were possessed by Mucor, at my urging. You were possessed in the same way at my di
“I didn’t want to hear it. Is Hadale your prisoner too?”
Silk shook his head. “She left the airship with most of your pterotroopers to capture a caravan. That let Auk and Gib and their friends overcome the rest.”
Nettle held up her needler. “We fought too, Horn and me both. We’d fought hoppies already for General Mint, but a lot of Auk’s people had never fought before. Hardly any of the women.” To Saba she added, “Your pterotroopers were good, but our hoppies were better. You couldn’t panic them.”
“I’m sure you acquited yourself creditably,” Silk told her. “I, unfortunately, did not. Hyacinth knocked a needler from the pilot’s hand and subdued her. I picked it up and held it, feeling an utter fool. I couldn’t fire for fear of hitting Hyacinth, and with the needler in my hand I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Then someone back here started shooting. Slugs came into the cockpit, and it was only by the favor of a god that all three of us weren’t killed.”
Silk paused, reflecting. “Have I thanked you, General, for your obvious goodwill? I should, and I do. I’ll see to it that you’re not mistreated, of course.”
Saba shrugged. “That man Auk said I could stay in here, which was nice of him. Those were my jailers that almost shot you. I like this girl better.”
She fell silent, and Silk found himself listening to the hum of the engines.
“My pterotroopers fought alongside Mint’s when we were the only Trivigauntis in Viron, Calde. We fought beside your Guard to get you out of that place outside the city, too. If I said I was pla
“Of course.”
“I wasn’t, but I should have been. I was thinking about covering my own arse, as if that mattered.”
“Don’t torment yourself, General, I beg you.” Silk pushed back the curtain that served the cubicle as a door. “In the second gondola there was a hatch toward the rear that opened onto the roof. Is there a similar hatch here?”
“Sure. I’ll show you, if it’s all right with her.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Silk stepped back and let the curtain fall.
A rope ladder rolled and tied at the ceiling marked the hatch. Pulling a cord released the ladder. The light wooden hatch was held shut by a simple peg-and-cord retainer. Silk removed the peg, threw back the hatch, and climbed out onto the open, empty deck.
With a glad cry Oreb left his shoulder, racing the length of the gondola, shooting ahead of the airship until he was nearly lost to Silk’s myopic vision, wheeling and soaring.
More circumspectly, Silk followed until he stood at the gondola’s semicircular prow, the toes of the scuffed old shoes he had never found time to replace hanging over the aching void. He looked down at them, seeing them as if he had never seen them before, noting as items new and strange small cracks in their leather, and the ways in which the shoes had shaped themselves to his feet. Beside his left shoe there was a brass socket set into the deck. Presumably a flagpole would be put in it when the airship took part in military ceremonies in Trivigaunte.
Even more probably, similar sockets ringed the entire deck. Light poles would support railings of rope, used perhaps when dignitaries stood where he was standing now, bemedaled women in gorgeous uniforms waving to the populace below. It was even possible that the Rani herself had stood upon this very spot.
He recalled then that he had wished for flags to be raised on this airship to signal the approach of Siyuf’s horde. The signalmen (who would more plausibly have been signalwomen) would have kept watch from here with telescopes, would have run their flags up one of the immense cables from which the gondola hung. Below them -
Some minute motion of the gondola, some response to a tiny variation in the wind, nearly caused him to lose his balance; he came very close to putting his right foot forward to regain it, and would have fallen if he had, ending the persistent pain in its ankle.
It would not have been such a bad thing, perhaps, to have fallen. If one did not dread death, it would be an experience of unparalleled interest; to fall from such a height as this, a height greater than that of the loftiest mountain, would provide ample time for observation, prayer, and reflection, surely.
Eventually his body would strike the ground, probably in some unpeopled spot. His spirit would return to the Aureate Path, where once he had encountered his mothers and fathers; his bones would not be found — if they were found at all — until Nettle’s children were grown. To the living he would not die but disappear, a source of wonder rather than sorrow. All men died, and all died very quickly in the eyes of the Outsider. Few died so well as that.