by Kate Ormand
Skyfly yelled for help, and Kean shuffled over to help him with the lines, obeying the bellowed instructions blindly.
Essa and Veramus were in Tranquility, one of the blue rooms laid out with low seating and tables, a place where you could browse through stultifyingly correct poems and writings about Arcone. Here friends met after work to talk in low voices and sip water in moderation. After the rains had come, the water dispenser would be restored to its place in the corner; at this time of year, you brought your own drink.
“Look,” Veramus said proudly. He picked out a sheet of paper from those scattered on their table.
Essa read aloud, “‘The Shape of Water.’ Oh—it’s yours, Veramus.”
He smiled modestly. “It is.” He read out the poem.
“From rock runs water,
Clear, caressing, wearing down.
My hand passes through it,
No form of its own,
Shaping the stone.”
“Yes—good. Very good, Veramus.” She caught herself sighing and said firmly, “No, I mean, tremendous. The short ones are the hardest, too. It’s really good.”
“Well, I’m d-d-doing what I can,” he said smugly. “What about y-you?”
“Oh, I’m behaving myself,” Essa said dully.
“It’s not enough. D-do what I do—m-make yourself seen and heard—p-paint or sing or wr-write some p-p-poems. I’ll do one for you, if you like.”
“No thanks. I’m all right. It was only a demerit and a little Low Toil.”
“Well, it’s your life. It won’t c-count against you forever,” he joked with difficulty. “I’d swap any day!”
She looked away from him, embarrassed by his pain. They had him, all right. Since his release from captivity, he spent almost every moment working, trying to make up for his thought crime.
The bland blue walls suggested a banal change of subject. “It’s lovely in here, isn’t it?”
And about as tedious as you could get, like poor Veramus.
She had gone back to her own work today, and it was so different. The gloss had gone off her chosen career before she’d hardly started. All the time she felt there were eyes watching her now. The Pacifiers. Her foster parents …
From birth she had been marked down as a potential troublemaker, and knowing it didn’t make her want to conform. The opposite, in fact. And a moment would come. It would. Before that time, they couldn’t get her again. She was guarding against her natural impetuosity. Thinking before she spoke. Saying nothing spontaneous, not to Veramus, not to anyone.
A moment would come.
TEN
Kean had not envisaged spending the night floating three hundred yards above ground level, where the thermals could not reach them and neither could anything else.
“We’ll get some drift, but not a whole lot,” Skyfly reassured him, after letting out some gas from the balloon so that they descended beneath the winds.
The cat skins became blankets. They had not been properly cured and gave off a scent of putrefaction. Kean buried himself beneath some of them in a fetal curl. He felt Skyfly’s foot touching his ankle and heard the old man cackle, “Cozy, isn’t it? We ain’t friends, boy, which is why I don’t mind knowing exactly where you are.”
So it was to be another largely sleepless night, then. Kean put one hand on the handle of his knife and imagined Skyfly doing the same.
He found it odd how tiring it was, just hanging on and watching the world go by. The fatigue was increased by the strain of keeping super-watchful as they searched. He was continually fooled by the movement of wildlife down there. Greenbacks and charjaws, and the larger lizards.
Every now and then he saw richer colors where the water was … or had been. The valley’s nature was to throw up an oasis and then withdraw it. He looked most carefully in the clusters of trees they flew over, because if Fireface had decided to wait out the Season, he was likely to be found in one of them. Kean looked for movement, for signs of life, for something unusual. He watched for living human beings and feared to find dead ones.
The next morning, breakfast came from a small sack: a few ounces of water and some jellified lizard leg. Kean forced himself to eat while Skyfly tucked in with gusto. They watched each other eating, saying nothing. It would be another very long day. Skyfly’s intention was to sweep the valley floor on a line laid down by Hawkerman after the deal was made. The team leader had drawn a rough map of the valley in the dirt and plotted Fireface’s most likely route. Now he knew how gigantic their homeland was, Kean realized there was little hope of finding Hawkerman’s brother.
At last the flier spat out a bone and stood up in the basket. The gauzy strips of cirrus cloud were almost motionless above. “No sign of storms. And I got a good feeling about this morning.”
He chose which ballast stones to throw overboard and the balloon rose up again in search of the thermals.
Before the sun was at its highest, the search was done. The land was dry and featureless, and the two stationary trailers were not hard to spot. They stood in the middle of nowhere, reflecting the sunlight like a distress signal. A sense of foreboding drew Kean’s mouth into a tight line.
Skyfly was not so reticent, letting out a whoop of triumph.
“Yahoo! That is the sight I longed for! This is so fine!”
He pulled on a line to vent gas from the balloon, and they swooped downward. Once they were below the reach of the thermals, they traveled on the momentum they had built up.
Kean took in each detail as it became clear. First, the tents were not erected. Second, there were men lying around outside the trailers in the heat of the day. Third, not much was left of them after the vultures had dined.
No vultures now. No flesh left to eat. He saw scattered bones. A red cloak, stained brown with blood.
Had he been watching Skyfly, Kean might have marveled at his expertise as he landed the balloon within fifty yards of the trailers, with a bump so slight that although they both fell sideways, they were not hurt.
The scrawny flier was out of the basket fast. He scampered around, accumulating personal possessions first. He piled them up and then threw the covers off the trailers, talking to himself in happy tones as he rummaged through the goods. “What have we here? A set of gears! And excellent plastic tubing. And look here, will you? It just gets better and better!”
He made another pile of larger items from the first trailer and added to it from the second. Gradually, anxiety seemed to come upon him. He began to sort through the larger items again, grumbling to himself.
Kean had done nothing but watch with contempt. Now he went to Skyfly and stood over him. The old man was engrossed in all the goods. “I can’t leave that,” Kean heard him mumble to himself.
The first he knew of Kean’s presence was a loud clear voice in his ear.
“Old man.”
Skyfly jumped a mile. Kean continued, with soft danger in his voice. “You can’t take it all, and you are taking me. I don’t want you to start thinking otherwise. I’ll give you five more minutes, and if you’re not done, I’ll kill you.”
“I can’t waste all this!” Skyfly shrieked, in agony at the profit he would lose.
“Then you’re dead.”
“You won’t do anything. You can’t fly the balloon without me. You’d die yourself.”
Kean took hold of the back of Skyfly’s leathery neck and whispered slowly into his ear, with a terrible kind of glee, “I don’t care.”
Skyfly got the message. He grouched at having to leave so much, and then got happy again about what he had gained. He threw Fireface’s cloak around him and twirled in it as though modeling it. He called to Kean, “Isn’t it something? Isn’t it so good?”
He had to hold the cloak in place. The brooch which pinned it was lost somewhere in the dirt. He looked ugly and ridiculous.
Kean walked to the basket. Above it, the floating snakeskin balloon swayed and pulled, as anxious to leave as he was.
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nbsp; Skyfly shouted, “You give me a hand here—we’ll be done in half the time!”
Kean leaned on the basket. He was beginning to think it would not give him a moment’s concern to have to kill that human vulture over there.
Skyfly read his mind and called, “Don’t get superior on me! I got to take what I can—it’s how I make my living! We all got to live, don’t we?”
Kean tried to think what Hawkerman might require from him and went to examine what was left of the bodies. It did not take a physician’s knowledge to conclude that these men had died violently. The body that Kean took to be Fireface’s had a deep depression in its skull.
He shouted to Skyfly, “Move yourself. We’re going!”
The old man labored hard to fill the basket and was trembling from his exertions by the time they took up their places for flight again. Sneering to himself, still muttering, he unloaded almost all the stones, with Kean’s help, and the balloon dragged itself from the dusty ground. Now it was the trading goods and possessions that acted as ballast.
It was hotter than ever, up in the sky. Once he could no longer see all the stuff he had been forced to leave behind, Skyfly became happier, little by little.
“You’re a hard man.” He grinned at Kean, shaking his head.
Kean despised him. “When will we get back?”
They were traveling high and faster than ever before. “We got good carry from the thermals here,” Skyfly said. “If we find some more of these, we could even get back by nightfall. Around this time of year, most of the action goes toward the Big White.”
Soon Kean would find out what had happened with, or to, Hawkerman and the others.
Later the thermals were not so helpful, and Skyfly had to use his considerable guile to keep them moving in the direction he wanted. He was getting nervous, Kean saw, and was constantly monitoring the skies.
In the late afternoon, Skyfly grunted with pleasure. “Caught another beauty. This one might get us all the way.”
The balloon sailed through the air and Skyfly smiled.
A minute later he said, “I was going to say this was one of the best days of my life.”
“And isn’t it?” Kean glanced down at his feet. It was almost impossible to move in the basket because of all the odds and ends around them. Dead men’s goods.
Skyfly ignored his treasures, gazing back where they had come from. “We got new clouds. One in particular.”
Kean searched the skies. By some conjuring trick, the clouds had turned to ragged tufts, not strips, and whiter. Resting on the horizon was a heavier cloud, a kind of pleated mass of vapor, miles away.
It was very far off. Kean said so.
Skyfly said, “It’s got a stain on it.”
Kean looked intently. There was just a hint of darkness spreading through it, like mud stirring in a waterhole.
“So … ,” he said slowly.
“So we just hit the Season.”
“Oh.”
“Put it a different kind of way: in an hour or so, the Season’s going to hit us.”
In Arcone all maintenance crews were on full alert. The short stubby vanes on the windmills were turning faster than they had for months, and the sensors on top of the Pyramid registered very low atmospheric pressure.
Floors and ceilings were not a priority, and Bonix and his men would act as backup to the exterior maintenance crews if there was damage to Arcone. In high-velocity winds, it took only a small hole in the outer fabric of the Pyramid to produce catastrophe. If the hole widened, the winds would charge in and wreak devastation, lifting whole walls and ceilings.
Disaster like this had not struck in Essa’s lifetime, and there was no reason to think it would happen over the coming weeks. She welcomed the drama, all the same. Now her arms were tired from mixing filler, and her mind had gone dumb with the monotony of the work.
She jumped as she heard the sudden movement of the air outside. It sounded like a crowd gasping at a moment of drama in the arena: a sharp inhalation.
The gust whipped onward over the Pyramid. The next one would not be far behind.
This was the Season; it was on its way at last, no doubt about it now. And Arcone was the place to be. She felt sorry for the Wanderers outside the city. It would be awful to be caught in some exposed place at a time like this.
The balloon was traveling faster and faster, as if trying to escape the oncoming cataclysm. Meanwhile, they were being surrounded by clouds of great bulk, rolling in from nowhere and continually redrawing themselves under the influence of the blasting wind. You looked to one side, and the sky had changed; you looked back, and what you had just seen was no longer recognizable.
Kean held onto the basket so tightly that his knuckles hurt.
“You’re making good time!” he shouted encouragingly. It was horrific, and yet at the same time, wildly stirring to fly this fast.
“Don’t you got brains? This is nothing to do with me!” Skyfly yelled back.
“Can you get us down? Somewhere?”
The wind pulled at Skyfly’s face until it looked almost as though he was grinning. “Your man—your Hawkerman—he’s killed us!” he shrieked.
The valley was darkening. The rushing air was warm and heavy, and the clouds boiled blacker as the sun set. It was as if they were in the middle of the devil’s digestive system, and it had gone very wrong.
With the blackness came terror. The balloon was going so fast, it was well ahead of the basket, trailing it along behind. The gales played spiteful tricks, snatching at them from different angles: the basket heeled over, and trading goods spilled out. A flying piece of metal whirled into the snakeskin envelope and lanced it as if it were a big flying boil.
During this time, the two of them could only hang on with clawed hands and watch. Skyfly had wound some of the leather lines around himself; Kean used strength alone to stop himself from being thrown from the basket.
The winds ceased with shocking suddenness. “Help me! Help me!” Skyfly screamed into the eerie silence, struggling to free himself from the lines. Kean crawled over, falling and rolling on his way to the old man. The sky still boiled; though nearly pitch-dark, it was hotter than ever. Directly above them, the balloon had lost some of its shape.
Kean worked the old man free. Skyfly howled, “We’re going down too fast—get rid of it all!” He began to jettison every last precious piece of booty. Kean scrabbled for something heavy and threw out a tungsten drill.
In a minute or so, they would be back on the ground. Then what?
The answer to that was never required. A stormy belch lifted them up again, and in an instant, the winds were back, redoubled in force. The basket shot upward as though it were on a rubber line. Skyfly was crying with fear now.
They soared upward to a towering height, a plaything of the heavens, which cast them down as rapidly as they had been elevated. The emptying balloon descended on them, pressed into the basket by the down-beating windstorm. Smothered, choking, they saw nothing until it was jerked up again, and they were whipped into the sky once more.
Sheet lightning flashed across the sky, blinding them. When he could see again, Kean realized with horror that they were somewhere above the Gray now and falling again, twisting through the thick air, coming down on the jagged mountain range.
In another flash of lightning, a serrated peak showed to his right, a monstrous edifice that began to tower above them. They were falling into one of the ravines: soon they would be ricocheting to their deaths between the rock faces. Thunder rolled. He felt hands at his throat.
“Altitude!” Skyfly’s voice screamed into his ear from behind. “Get out! Get out! I need altitude!”
Strangling Kean with bony hands, Skyfly lurched with him to the lip of the basket. The leaking balloon above them came down again, and they collapsed under a mess of reptile skin and leather lines. Skyfly’s hands would not let go of Kean’s throat: colors were sparking behind his eyes. He would black out at any moment.
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br /> With terror came strength that matched the flier’s. Kean bowed his body and rammed his elbows backward. Skyfly let out a gasp, and his hands loosened a little. Kean jerked and rolled them both over, elbowed Skyfly in the face, and hit him again, hard, breaking free of him.
In front of them, a rift ran through the mountain range and cut crossways through the ravine. Acting as a wind tunnel, it channeled a mighty blast of air to throw the balloon back up to where other massive winds grabbed it and threw it sideways. The snakeskin sack snapped upward, as if commanded to stop lazing around, and the balloon was once more flying, after a fashion, as it was designed to.
Kean was alone in the basket. There was no Skyfly. Had he fallen out? Above his head, he caught sight of something swaying.
It was a pair of feet clad in snakeskin.
Skyfly dangled, dead, caught in his precious lines, his neck broken in the instant he was wrenched upward.
The tattered balloon traveled on, a piece of rushing trash in the air. The basket was torn, and one of its plastic supports poked through. Kean grasped onto it and shut his eyes against tiny spears that shot into his face: the first of the rain.
The wind dropped to a simple gale when the rain came, enough to carry the remnants of the balloon onward, upward. Kean lost his sense of time. In each passing second, he was alive, and that was all that mattered. Hold on and be alive while time and space flew by.
As the rain became heavier and more gas left the balloon, the flying machine was inexorably driven lower.
Kean could see nothing through the deluge, until through slitted eyes, he beheld an enormous curved shape coming to fill his vision. It was the apex of a more angular shape, a perfect shape, manmade.
The basket crashed into the top of the Pyramid.
Bouncing and crashing down once more, Kean was pitched out painfully and tumbled down the side of the Pyramid, snatching at the smooth surface for something to hold onto. His legs met an obstruction that diverted him, spinning him around. A section of the clear roofing had buckled under the balloon’s first impact; there was a gap, a hole. His legs were through it already, and his momentum carried him sliding after them.