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Auk declared, “We’re not giving the slug guns back.”
“Not now, at least. That will depend upon whether there are arms on the craft the Crew provides you, though I imagine there will be.”
Horn mopped his forehead. “Nobody understands this except you, Calde.”
“It’s simple enough. Neither General Saba nor I desire a war between Viron and Trivigaunte. We Vironese have seized this airship, the pride of its city.”
Horn looked to Nettle, who said, “They’d seized as.”
“Exacily. Another reason for war, which General Saba and I wish to prevent. The solution is obvious — our freedom for the airship.”
“We’re free now!”
“Nobody can be truly free without peace. Consider the alternative. When we returned to Viron, Generalissimo Siyuf would try to recapture this airship by force, while General Mint and Generalissimo Oosik tried to prevent her; it would cost five hundred lives the first day — at least that many, and perhaps more.”
Saba told Nettle, “You’re going to have to wait a little before you get a tour of Trivigaunte. When he wanted to know if I’d take you home if I got my airship back, I was too surprised to say anything. But I will, and let Auk here and the rabble we loaded first out at Mainframe, if that’s what he wants.” She bent over her footlocker. “Some of you are afraid I’m going to cross you. All of you, except your Calde, most likely.”
Auk grunted.
She straightened up, holding a sharply curved saber with a gem-studded hilt. “This is the sword of honor the Rani awarded me last year, and I’m proud of it. Maybe I haven’t worn it as much as I ought to for fear something might happen to it.”
Oreb whistled, and Nettle told Saba, “It’s beautiful!”
Saba smiled at Auk. “The girl let me keep it. I told her about it, and she said leave it where it is, Auk won’t mind.”
He muttered, “I’d like mine back. That Colonel’s got it.”
“If you come back with us, I’ll try to get it for you.”
“No cut!” Oreb hopped from Silk’s shoulder to Saba’s to examine the sword more closely.
She drew it and took a half step backward, holding it at eye level with both hands grasping the blade. “By this sword I swear that as long as Calde Silk’s on my airship, I’ll do whatever he tells me, and when I land him and his friends at their city it will be as passengers, and not prisoners.”
Silk nodded. “On the terms you have described, General, we return command to you.”
“You’re going to let me talk to the Palace on the glass and tell them what we’re doing?”
“If you choose to. You are in command.”
Saba lowered her sword. “Then if I break my oath, you can take this and break it.”
She led them through the gondola to the airy compartment from which Silk had climbed to the deck. It held cabinets, a sizable table, and two leather seats; there was a glass on the wall, next to the door. “This is the chartroom,” Saba told Silk, “the nerve center of my airship, where our navigational instruments and maps are. There’s a speaking tube that runs through officers’ quarters to the cockpit. Do you know about those? Like a glass, but only to the one place and all you can do is talk.”
“This’s where you ought to be,” Auk said, but Silk shook his head.
Saba pointed. “Right up there’s the hatch. We go up to take the angle between the ship and the sun, mostly. Now it should be zero.” She swallowed. “I’ll check it as soon as I talk to the Palace.”
Horn touched Silk’s arm. “Don’t go back, Calde. Please?”
Auk asked, “You were up there, huh? Somebody nearly got killed is what I heard.”
“He was going to jump off,” Horn told Auk. “I grabbed him and I guess I got him back, only I don’t remember, just sort of wrestling, and the roof gone, and music.” Puzzled, he stared at Silk. “Someplace down there was having a concert, I guess.”
“I saw the evil in the whorl,” Silk explained. “I thought I knew it, when I actually had no idea. A few days ago, I began to see it clearly.”
He waited for someone to speak, but no one did.
“An hour ago, I saw it very clearly indeed; and it was horrible. What was worse was that instead of focusing on the evil in myself, as I should have, I gave my attention to the evil in others. I would have told you then that I saw a great deal in Horn, for example. I still do.”
“Calde, I never said—”
“That was utterly, utterly wrong. I don’t mean that the evil isn’t there — it is, and it always will be because it is ineradicable; but seeing it alone, not merely Horn’s evil but everyone else’s too, did something to me far worse than anything Horn himself would ever do, I’m sure — it blinded me to good. Seeing only evil, I wanted with all my heart to reunite myself with the Outsider. That would itself have been an evil act, but Horn saved me from it.”
“I’m so glad.” Nettle looked at Horn with shining eyes.
“Just by coming up on the roof of this gondola, really. For Horn’s sake, I won’t go there again, though it’s such a marvelous thing to stand in the sky smiling down at the whorl that I find it difficult to renounce it; merely by standing there, I came to understand how Sciathan feels about flying.”
Auk cleared his throat. “I want to tell you about that clamp. All right if I do it now, before she talks to ’em back in Trivigaunte?”
“You found it, I assume.”
“Yeah, only that wasn’t a fuel hose. It was a lube hose.”
Saba’s eyes opened wide, “What!”
Auk ignored her. “The clamp cut the flow to where they got hot and seized. It didn’t show on the gauge up front ’cause it just measures tank temperature. The tank was all right and the pump was ru
“They’ll never be as good as they were.” Saba sounded disgusted.
“They weren’t anyhow,” Auk told her. “I made a couple little improvements already.”
Oreb eyed them both. “Fish heads?”
“I feel the same way myself,” Silk a
Saba stepped to the glass and clapped; it grew luminous, as the monitor’s gray face coalesced. At once dancing flecks of color replaced it — peach, pink, and an etherial blue that deepened until it was nearly black.
Silk fell to his knees; for him the sunlit chartroom and its occupants vanished.
“Silk?” The face in the glass was i
He bowed his head, unable to speak.
“They can scan you at Mainframe. As I was sca
Silk found that he was staring up at her; she smiled, and his spirit melted.
“You’ll go on with your life. Silk. Just as it is. You’d be Pas too. And he would be you. Look…”
The face lovelier than any mortal woman’s dispersed like smoke. In its place stood a bronze-limbed man with rippling muscles and two heads.
One was Silk’s.