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The white-haired man said, “Perhaps you can help me.” I supposed that he had recognized me; and feeling in need of as many allies as I might enlist, I told him I would if I could.
“For the love of Danaides, be quiet,” the woman said to him. And then to me, “Do you have a weapon?”
I showed her my pistol.
“You’ll have to be careful with that in here. Can you turn it down?”
“I already have.”
She and the rest bore calivers, arms much like fusils, but with somewhat shorter though thicker stocks and more slender barrels. There was a long dagger at her belt; both the men had bolos, short, heavy, broad-bladed jungle knives.
“I’m Purn,” the blond man told me.
“Severian.”
He held out his hand, and I took it — a sailor’s hand, large, rough, and muscular.
“She’s Gu
“Burgundofara,” the woman said.
“We call her Gu
The man in armor was looking down the corridor in back of us, but he snapped, “Be still!” I had never seen anyone who could turn his head so far. “What’s his name?” I whispered to Purn.
Gu
“Where is he taking us?”
Sidero loped past us and threw open a door. “Here. This is a good place. Our confidence is high. Separate widely. I will be in the center. Do no harm unless attacked. Signal vocally.”
“In the name of the Increate,” I asked, “what are we supposed to be doing?”
“Searching out apports,” Gu
While she spoke, she had been steering me toward the open door. Now Idas said, “Don’t worry, there probably won’t be any,” and stepped so close behind us that I stepped through it almost automatically.
It was pitch dark, but I was immediately conscious that I no longer stood on solid flooring but on some sort of open and shaky grillwork, and that I was entering a place much larger than a common room.
Gu
Lights blazed with a yellower hue than that of the corridor we had just left, a jaundiced radiance that seemed to suck the color from everything. We stood, the four of us crowded together in a compact mass, upon a floor of black bars no thicker than a man’s smallest finger. There was no rail, and the space before us and below us (for the ceiling just above us must have supported the deck) would have held our Matachin Tower .
What it now held was an immense jumble of cargo: boxes, bails, barrels, and crates of all kinds; machinery and parts of machines; sacks, many of shimmering, translucent film; stacks of lumber.
“There!” Sidero snapped. He pointed to a spidery ladder descending the wall.
“You go first,” I said.
There was no rushing toward me — we were not a span apart — and thus no time for me to draw my pistol. He seized me with a strength I found amazing, forced me back a step, and pushed me violently. For an instant I teetered at the edge of the platform, clawing air; then I fell.
Doubtless I would have broken my neck on Urth. On the ship, I might almost be said to have floated down. Yet the slowness of my fall did nothing to allay the terror I felt in falling. I saw ceiling and platform revolve above me. I was conscious that I would land on my back, with spine and skull bearing the shock, and yet I could not turn myself. I clutched for some support, and my imagination fervently, feverishly conjured up the flying jib stay. The four faces looking down at me — Sidero’s armored visor, Idas’s chalk-white cheeks, Purn’s grin, Gu
I struck with a jolt that knocked out my breath. For a hundred heartbeats or more I lay gasping, just as I had panted for air when I had at last regained the interior of the ship. Slowly I realized that though I had suffered a fall indeed, it had been no worse than I might have suffered in falling from my bed to the carpet in some evil dream of Typhon. Sitting up, I found no broken bones.
Bundles of papers had been my carpet, and I thought Sidero must have known they were there and that I would not be hurt. Then I saw beside me a crazily tilted mechanism, spiky with shafts and levers.
I got to my feet. Far above, the platform was empty, the door that led to the corridor closed. I looked for the spidery ladder, but all except the uppermost rungs were obscured by the mechanism. I edged around that, impeded by the unevenly stacked bundles (they had been tied with sisal, and some of the cords had broken, so that I slipped and slid over documents as I might have over snow), but greatly aided by the lightness of my body.
Because I was looking down to find my footing, I did not see the thing before me until I was actually peering into its blind face.
Chapter III — The Cabin
MY HAND went to my pistol — I had it out and leveled almost before I knew it. The shaggy creature seemed no different from the stooped figure of the salamander that had once nearly burned me alive in Thrax. I expected it to rear erect and reveal the blazing heart within.
It did not, and until too late I did not fire. For a moment we waited motionless; then it fled, bouncing and scrambling across the boxes and barrels like an awkward puppy in pursuit of the lively ball that was itself. With that vile instinct every man has to kill whatever may fear him, I fired. The beam — potentially deadly still, though I had reduced it to its lowest strength to seal the leaden coffer — split the air and set a solid-looking ingot to clanging like a gong. But the creature, whatever it was, was a dozen ells away at least, and in another moment it had disappeared behind a statue swathed in protective wrappings.
Someone shouted, and I thought I recognized Gu
The shaggy creature came bounding back, but this time, having regained my senses, I did not shoot. Purn appeared and fired his caliver, swinging it like a fowling piece. Instead of the bolt I expected, it shot forth a cord, something flexible and swiff that looked black in the strange light and flew with the singing I had heard a moment before.
This black cord struck the shaggy creature and wrapped it with a loop or two, but seemed to produce no other result. Purn gave a shout and leaped like a grasshopper. It had not occurred to me before that in this vast place I could leap myself just as I had on deck, but I imitated him now (mostly because I did not wish to lose contact with Sidero before I had revenged myself) and nearly dashed out my brains against the ceiling.
While I was in the air, however, I had a magnificent view of the hold beneath me. There was the shaggy creature, which might have been fallow under Urth’s sun, streaked with black yet still skipping with frantic energy; even as I saw him, Sidero’s caliver blotched him more. There was Purn nearly upon him, and Idas and Gu
I dropped near them, climbed unsteadily atop the tilted breach of a mountain carronade, and hardly saw the shaggy creature scrambling toward me until it had bounced almost into my arms. I say “almost” because I did not actually grasp it, and certainly it did not grasp me. Nevertheless, we remained together — the black cords adhered to my clothing as well as to the flat strips (neither fur nor feathers) of the shaggy creature.