by Kate Ormand
Unless there was someone already up here, lying in wait …
In the corner of his eye, Kean saw a flapping mass descending on him from above. He reacted, rolling onto his back and raising his legs, squeezing them back against his chest in a human spring. The flapping mass was a man whose cloak flew behind him and whose body thumped down onto the soles of Kean’s feet. Kean leaned back onto his shoulder blades and kicked his legs with vicious speed, throwing the human bundle far over his head. The man was as light as a hollow-boned bird and flew far, smack into the edge of the outcrop. When Kean had twisted around and bounced to his feet, he saw the man struggling back up, trying to reach the knife he had dropped. Kean got there first and kicked it away. He drew his own knife with one hand and grabbed the man’s hair with the other.
“You be still.”
The man’s eyes rolled in his head as he felt the blade against his throat. “Yes. I will,” he whispered.
“We’ll stay as we are awhile.”
“Oh yes.”
A minute or two later, Hawkerman hauled himself up onto the stone.
“Saw you had some action. Who you got there?”
“I think he was going to kill me.”
“Rob you, that’s for sure.”
He walked over to look at Kean’s prisoner.
“One of Skyfly’s boys. He rides the basket.” He took the man’s face in his hand, squeezing it. The man was hollow-cheeked enough already, with milky eyes. “You’re not going to do anything, now are you?”
“Oh no,” the man whispered. “No, no.” As he gazed upward at Hawkerman, Kean saw that he was totally sunblind.
“You watch him, Kean,” Hawkerman said, and let the man go, surveying the rocky hollow. “Good site. Do us well.”
Within a couple of hours, the tent was in place on the outcropping, and the twins were guarding it while the rest of the team made their way up higher over the boulders, going to the gas geysers where Skyfly made his home. The sunblind man led the way, surefooted in his own territory when daylight failed. They saw none of the big cats, only heard one coughing nearby. At this time of day, the cats were exactly the same color as the rocks.
They saw the balls of flaming gas leaping into the sky long before they descended the other side of the rocky hills and came to a low plateau on the margins of the Gray, a desolate place where gases erupted between fissures in the rock.
The team walked in under the eyes of all. Skyfly’s hangers-on made their homes in caves down here, dependent on the master of the skies for handouts and protection. In return, they serviced the balloon, which was a full-time job. In the interests of weight, it was made of the lightest snake skins that could be found. Reptile hunting—often with fatal consequences for the hunter—was a year-round activity here, as was water fetching. The nearest natural well was a day away, and the water tasted of sulfur when it arrived.
Lying loosely folded, weighed down with stones all around, the big balloon was like a gargantuan snake curled up. The balls of flame were caused by Skyfly burning off excess fuel from the ground, an operation so dangerous that only he would do it. Like a priest in the service of the monstrous expanse of snakeskin that was his livelihood, he himself wore reptile skins, a tiny bent figure of a man whose iron-gray hair was so unruly that he might have been charged with static. His back was to them, and the team watched as he set his flaming torch at a spot in the air about a yard above ground level, and as if he were a magician, another fireball of gas ascended into the sky. Beyond him the broken terrain of the Gray was dark, and the impassable mountains were black in the distance.
“You’re going to catch light yourself one of these days,” Hawkerman observed.
The balloonist turned. Took note of the strangers.
“You have to do it when you’re not tapping gas for flying,” he answered casually. “It builds up just underneath the surface, and then you can get explosions. When it’s close to the Season, you might have a little lightning in the wrong place and—whoosh—we all fly!” The old man grinned toothlessly at his own joke. “What you doing with Spitless?”
“That his name?” Hawkerman said, interested. “He tried to murder one of my men.”
“All by himself? He doesn’t learn, do you, Spitless?”
The man they had captured shambled over to Skyfly. “No,” he whispered, conciliatory.
Skyfly ignored him. He was still looking at Hawkerman, and his voice became thin and hard. “What do you want?”
“I want a trip in the sky. I’m looking for something.”
“It’s too late. I’ve quit for the Season.”
“There’d be time, the way things are looking.”
Skyfly looked him up and down. “You’re too heavy, anyway.”
“Sure, if you say so. But I’ve got someone here who owes me and who’s light enough and sees real good. He’d go up for me.” Hawkerman turned to Kean.
Who did not appreciate the idea one bit. “What do you mean, I owe you?”
“Saved you from some charjaws not long back. You can’t have forgotten that. I think I should be allowed to choose how you pay.”
NINE
Essa hated Arcone. Hated the order in everything and hated the orders she was given. She hated being told to find beauty in her surroundings, hated being told she was lucky to be here. Hated always being told exactly where to go and what to do.
The period of punishment hadn’t been too bad for the first days, when she was spraying chemical growth-enhancers on the tight little buds in the indoor fields where plastic grew. Here dwarf oilseed plants were injected with the genes that produced plastic polymers in them. It was not healthy work, the spraying, and the workers in the fields were always glad of the help provided by punishment duties.
The advantage of the plastic grown in the Pyramid was at the same time its disadvantage: it was biodegradable to one degree or another, depending on the gene material used and the conditions of growth. The longer-lasting plastics took proportionately longer to grow.
Eventually all plastic artifacts lost their elasticity and were disassembled and turned into a kind of plastic compost useful for the manufacture of non-fade paints. It was this composting work she had gone onto when the spraying was finished. Sorting types of material, hastening the rotting process by warming and endless mashing, straining the resulting goo until it was free from impurities—all amid a smell worse than Maxamar’s body odors. She hated it.
At home Bonix maintained a chilly aloofness in their relations. While Marran was being kind enough, she also had a slightly cool quality about her—but then, she always had.
When the day came, what a release it would be when Essa could talk to someone about who she really was.
Skyfly had said it was too risky at this time of year. Furthermore, it took three days to fill the balloon with gas. And when they got up there, he would be flying with a novice and not his usual crew member—the dim-witted Spitless. Since these arguments were put forward during a journey to the team’s tent to view what they had to offer, Hawkerman knew it was a matter of price.
“My brother had two whole teams with him,” he told Skyfly. “That’s a lot of weapons and some fine goods. Plenty of personal belongings, good clothing. I’ll pay you, anyway, and if you find any or all of them and they’re dead, well, you’ll get the goods on top.”
“He had that cloak, didn’t he, Fireface? I always did admire that,” Skyfly ruminated. “Lightweight but durable. My kind of thing.”
“Most handsome, yes.”
Although he knew Hawkerman well, Kean was taken aback at his lack of emotion when discussing how the balloon pilot might be able to plunder prize possessions from his dead brother’s body. You could just see the twisted little man salivating over the rich pickings that might be his. Nevertheless, Skyfly did not allow this attractive dream to destroy his common sense.
“Most likely he’s alive,” he said sourly. “What’s to say he didn’t just decide to wait out the Sea
son someplace else?”
Hawkerman said, “He had something he wanted to do. It had a time limit on it, and he was hurrying for the Lakes when we met up with him. I can give you the course he would have taken. It’s not like you’ve got to traverse the entire valley. In any case, you’ll do it when you see what we got.” He kept up the note of confidence. “The usual conditions will apply—half now, half on completion.”
The outcome of the trading session was inevitable. Skyfly’s bargaining position was unassailable: he had something Hawkerman wanted, so he could charge his own price. After several hours, he had evaluated all their trading goods and earmarked the best of them for himself. It was the only time Kean had ever seen Hawkerman come out of a deal badly.
The team leader allowed his rancor to show through after shaking hands on the deal. He jerked his thumb at Kean and said to Skyfly, “You don’t do this search good and my man here will kill you.” He looked over at Kean. “You could do that, couldn’t you?”
Kean stared at the flier, weighing him up and letting him know it, intimidating him in the way you could if you had studied how Hawkerman did these things. He waited, and Skyfly twitched a little under his steady gaze.
“Yes,” Kean said. “I can do that.”
Saying it, he knew he meant it, and for a moment, he did not like himself. But it was useless to threaten unless you were prepared to act on it. Maybe it was all right if you were only doing what you had to in order to survive. If you only did what you had to do, maybe that kept you halfway decent, halfway honorable.
Still, it was hard to be a Wanderer. Potentially damaging to something precious you were born with.
Gas was channeled into the snakeskin envelope at an almost imperceptible rate, traveling through well-greased tubes made of animal intestines. Waiting for take-off made Kean jumpy. The rest of the team had gone back to their tent site on the other side of the valley wall. Hawkerman did not like the idea of having his forces split. He would not be shaken from his conviction that Snakebite had set someone to track them.
Kean had a cave to himself, and if he looked out during the cold, starlit nights, he could see the reptilian balloon growing, a lazily shifting, living creature. He looked often and slept little. Ax had lent him a thick cloak to act as a blanket; it smelled of the trailer and made Kean wish he was with the others, instead of being here among enemies. The desiccated halfwit, Spitless, was deeply affronted that he had lost his place in the basket beside Skyfly, and Kean felt his brooding eyes on him the whole time. He was fairly sure that, if he could, Spitless would slide a knife between his ribs, so he arranged tripwires and scattered pebbles all around the cave mouth. During the second night he was woken from an exhausted doze by the click of stones disturbed. He reached for his knife as a frail figure scuttled away. Somewhere not far away, a boulder discharged a frozen shard of rock with a sound like a rifle shot. Kean drew the borrowed cloak around himself and shivered.
However slowly it moves, time gets there in the end. At last, on the third morning, the balloon was almost fully inflated. Kean stood near it to watch the final preparations. Most of Skyfly’s followers were a little in awe of the Wanderer who had come among them; as they rushed around the balloon with lines to tie it down, or brought stones for ballast, they glanced at him with smiles of respect.
“You wouldn’t get any of that lot into the sky,” Skyfly observed, coming to his side. “They ain’t crazy enough. That’s why I got Spitless. But you do as I tell you and we might make it.”
Working as a true team, the shabby outcasts had rapidly assembled two aluminum gantries, from the top of which they worked on the balloon once it was pulling moodily at the lines holding it down. First they fitted an arrangement of short wings and airfoils, which gave the appearance of being a kind of utility belt on the now spherical serpent. The aids to navigation were fashioned from strong lizard skin and vulture feathers, and were braced by bone like a real bird’s wing. The lines that worked each individual device were fastened to the basket when finally it was hoisted into place. It was little more than a flat-bottomed leather bucket, strengthened with plastic struts.
One by one, the stones that were to be the ballast were hoisted into the bucket under the supervision of Skyfly, who selected each one himself, making sure there was a wide variety of weights available to him.
He put on his mottled flying hat, the one article of clothing not made from reptile skin. It had a long visor on it that would shield his eyes from the sun.
“You’re not taking any headgear?” he asked Kean.
Kean shook his head. “I don’t burn.”
“You might where we’re going. You want real heat, go high like we’re going to.”
“What’s the hat made from?”
Skyfly looked around furtively. “Porcupine skin. But I tell them it came from a man. Keeps ’em in good order. You hop in now.”
The lines holding down the balloon remained taut. A dozen men stood around as Kean and Skyfly got up into the basket. Kean tripped almost at once. There were a number of cat skins strewn around haphazardly, as well as all the ballast stones. This was not a luxury mode of transport, and the basket felt worryingly insubstantial. You could feel its floor bulging under your feet when you moved around.
All about them lines were being loosed alternately—untie one, leave one holding—and now Kean felt the balloon tugging upward, anxious to leave the earth behind.
It had not taken Skyfly long to explain the theory of balloon flight. Go down by releasing gas, go up again by releasing ballast. Now Kean swayed in the basket suddenly, hit by his tiredness after two nights of uneasy sleep. Well, all he had to do was follow orders. He should be able to manage that.
Then Skyfly was grinning and shouting, “Cut me loose!”
The rest of the retaining lines were severed cleanly in one swift motion, and at once the balloon began to rise majestically. It was such a stately ascent, so direct and so glorious in its silent ease, that Kean’s fear gave way almost at once to pure exhilaration. As they rose ever higher, directly up into the sky, huge tracts of his world were displayed to him. He clung to the rim of the basket and looked. The broken valley walls they had left already seemed an insignificant feature, diminishing into a long bony spine, and his eye was drawn to the unknown, the craggy lands beyond the valley. First there were the broad gray wastes, and then it really got rough out there. Fearsome. Mountains burst from the disintegrating landscape like an eruption of shattered teeth, split by deep gorges and bottomless ravines. There was no color in the landscape, and no hope of survival out there.
Balanced in the center of the basket, Skyfly was oblivious to him, busy working two thin leather lines attached to ailerons. Moving cautiously, Kean edged by him and peered over the other side.
Here was his own world. In contrast to the Gray, it was a more warm and welcoming color, sort of light brown, mostly.
His eye went to the great Pyramid at the head of the valley. Now he saw how it dominated the scene: it must be even bigger than he had realized. Even from here, he could see how at the top, where it was rounder, the panels were translucent, shining, showing like a bald spot on top of a human head. The windmills all around were a host of tiny dots in close-cropped cornfields of joyous yellow. What a miracle of order and civilization …
And how soon it ended. He could see the Big White behind the Pyramid, stretching outward into flat infinity, and looking the other way he could begin to appreciate how vast the valley was. He could just make out the line of rocky cliffs on the far side, but otherwise there was nothing but the outlands, which just got wider and wider, rolling along forever: the plains he had walked since he was a small child.
He dared himself to look straight down. The ground was going sideways—they were beginning to move fast down the Valley now, away from the Pyramid. Something below caught his eye for a split second. He was already turning his head to watch how Skyfly controlled their flight, and so disregarded what he had half seen
.
Skyfly was tying off his lines on the edge of the basket. He did not have to raise his voice in order to be heard. “We caught a thermal already. Warm winds you get up here. We’re on our way!”
Keen nodded and looked back down to where three specks moved across the plains. From up here, they seemed to move very slowly, traveling from the direction of the Pyramid.
Only they weren’t moving so very slowly when you worked it out.
Cruiser wagons. Snakebite. Who else would venture out toward the Rocks at this time of year?
Skyfly had joined him. “What you got there?”
No point in lying about it. “Looks like some wagons.”
The old man squinted down. “That’s what I make it out to be. You got good eyes, all right. There’s not many could see anything that far off. Yeah, not trailers. Cruiser wagons. Looks like trouble.”
Feeling the old man’s gaze on him, Kean faked suspicion. “What do you know about this? What are they doing out there?”
“I couldn’t say. My trading’s done long since.” Skyfly returned the distrustful look with interest. “Did anyone know you were heading this way?”
“Not that I know of.”
“My people are unprotected back there.” As if possible carnage among his followers was a cheerful thought, Skyfly grinned, breaking the tension. “Well, life is short, boy—and we’re up here—so whatever gives down there, we got nothing to worry about.”
A second later, the basket keeled over to one side, and they had to hold on to stop themselves spilling out. Skyfly worked his way back to his lines. Hot winds were buffeting at them. “This isn’t nothing!” he shouted. “We’ll get through this!”
Kean hung onto the rim of the basket, feeling faintly sick, either from the movement of the balloon or the horrible uncertainty that had hit him. Sure. Oh sure. Get through this and whatever else came their way and finally return, with luck, to what? Maybe there would be no Hawkerman left to report to. No team at all.