by Robert Reed
“That little fletch is too close,” he said.
“What does that mean?” asked the Archon.
“It means that the asshole is near enough to kiss,” said the crippled man. “Fire again, and we’ll cut our own guide wires and likely puncture our bladders too.”
“This is madness,” the Archon said.
Nobody else spoke.
“Why would the man put the boy at risk?” He looked at Diamond and tried a smile. “What else is planned?”
Again, Diamond swung at the window.
The glass shook but held, and the Archon watched him. Recognition came into that narrow plain face, bringing doubt and amazement and a sturdy capacity to do nothing, not quite believing what he knew to be true.
Several cannons started firing from the ship’s stern.
The healthy guard thought that was good news. “Merit’s getting punched now,” he said.
But the crippled man just shook his head. “Those are long shots. Don’t you know anything? We’re shooting at the coronas, now that they’re nipping at our tail feathers.”
“Both of you, shut up,” the Archon said.
The men fell silent.
Turning to the healthy guard, he said, “Grab the child. Now. We’re going to the hanger, to the escape ship.”
The guard took a wary step toward Diamond, and then he paused.
Talking to the crippled man, the Archon said, “Stay here with King. When he’s strong enough, come join us.”
“I can carry your son now,” the healthy guard volunteered.
“No, he has to save himself . . . after trying this crap . . . ”
King laid still, armored eyes closed tight.
Looking at his new hand and the long steel blade, Diamond marshaled his strength for one more swing.
The guard took another step toward him.
“I told you to grab him,” the Archon said.
“But he’s got that sword.”
“You think the baby’s dangerous?”
“He put your son down. That’s some kind of power.”
Furious, the Archon said, “You have a gun. Shoot him. A bullet in the chest and you carry him like a sack.”
The guard looked down at his pistol, apparently surprised to find it waiting in his hand.
Diamond lifted the sword and spun, ready to try another desperate whack at the window. But he didn’t have time. The guard lifted the pistol. King was still flat on the floor. Then the guard started to aim, and King moved. Furious and swift and nearly silent, he reached for the guard’s hand and the gun. Diamond hit the window once more, accomplishing nothing. The guard’s wrist shattered with a hard crack, and the man crumbled and screamed, and King was standing over him, the pistol inside his strange hand.
The Archon shouted, “No.”
He told the guard in the doorway, “Shoot both of them.”
“I could try doing that,” the crippled man replied. “Or I could do nothing and finish out this damned awful day.”
King turned to Diamond, and the one mouth asked, “So what’s the rest of your father’s plan?”
“I jump and he catches me.”
“What if he misses?”
“A corona eats me, and Father spends the rest of his life hunting for that corona and for me.”
King’s mouths made different little sounds, and then he turned to stare at the Archon, saying nothing. For a long moment he was as still as any statue. Then he said, “Save myself,” and the pistol lifted. King aimed carefully and pulled the trigger and six bullets struck the glass, ricocheting wildly across the suite. But the seventh bullet pierced the pane, cracks spreading out from the center.
Once again, Diamond swung the sword, and this time shards of heavy glass tumbled free of the airship, and the sword followed the glass downwards, spinning fast as one boy leaped into that chaos, plunging toward the late day sun.
SIXTEEN
Diamond was on his back, flattened against the roaring air, waiting to be scared. He promised himself to act brave when the terror grabbed him, crying a little maybe but with the stiff-faced resolve of a wooden soldier. Except he wasn’t scared. Not so much. He felt safer while falling than when he was standing with King and the Archon. And what surprised him even more, he was comfortable. A warm wind blew up into him, and nothing was touching him, and the airship was slowly growing smaller while the little fletch flew just beneath it. The fletch’s belly looked as if it was burning, bright purple flames flowing around stubborn patches of blackness. Diamond’s skin seemed to be dipped in the same rich purple. Both ships were pressing ahead, desperate to leave him behind, but they still felt close. Only a few moments had passed since he jumped free. And now the flames weakened and then dissolved, save for one stubborn blotch that meant nothing. Diamond’s father had taught him today: to coronas, significances were carried by a light’s patterns and rhythms, and even more so, by the intricate darkness between.
A tiny figure came out from the slayer’s ship.
Diamond moved when he shouldn’t, flipping and spinning before ending on his belly, gazing down at a great forest that had grown old inside one brief day. He wasn’t truly scared. This was so much easier than fighting his brother. But a dread had started to claim him. He contemplated falling for a very long time and then vanishing, maybe forever, and this shouldn’t happen, not in this way, and what shook him was the powerful sense that he was failing to meet some great old promise.
Silver disks moved above the demon floor. From high overhead, the coronas looked delicate and slow and lovely. They looked simple. Human eyes wouldn’t be able to count them in a glance, but Diamond could. He found sixty-one of the giants, and then he counted again, discovering five less. Then the largest individual changed shape, compressing its body as it turned, and once it was narrow like a spear, it dropped. It plunged. The demon floor absorbed the impact, and a splash of golden vapor welcomed the animal back into its world.
Seven more coronas followed while others continued to circle, not one of them working to climb this high. The fletch wasn’t calling to them anymore. The raging, insulting voice was finished. But three coronas had been threatening the airship. He hadn’t seen them. Were they gone too? And almost too late, Diamond rolled onto his back again.
The heat fell over him. It struck hard and there was a terrific wild irresistible motion. His flesh felt ready to burn as the creature passed just above him, no warning that it was close, and then it was past, and he felt its scorching body and the slipstream that rolled him and spun him and left him tumbling on a new course.
Feet down, he fell faster.
The corona was smaller than the one Father killed, and it was enormous, and graceful, and spectacularly alive. The great body was as fluid as it was solid, silver with glimmers of color washed away by sunlight. Diamond thought of umbrellas. He thought of certain mushrooms and wide bowls filled with sweet oils. A giant round mouth buried in the creature’s flatter side, surrounded by a tangle of necks sporting jaws and teeth and eyes. A jet of furnace air roared from that mouth. Then the jet quit. Sharp percussive blasts shook Creation. Bladders were made huge and empty in an instant, and the body was enlarged, swollen and buoyant, matching his pace of falling, the trailing necks and heads catching up to the body and flowing into it as the beast twisted around, deftly starting back toward him again.
That gaping central mouth swallowed air, compressing each breath, making its jets ready to fire again.
A brave pair of necks stretched far away from the body, supplying the eyes that stared at this tiny apparition, this human-like creature that fell from above perhaps to feed a great soul.
Diamond flattened again.
The corona fell a little ways beneath him before swelling more. Diamond flipped and flipped, trying to flee, but the vacuums balancing its weight. Infinitely more graceful, his companion deftly matched each of the boy’s desperate moves. A single neck extended, triple jaws opening and tongues emerging, and Diamond rolled
and kicked, but a tongue touched his foot and pulled back and the head retreated a moment later.
The corona had wanted nothing but a taste.
In the roaring wind, a voice shouted.
Diamond didn’t understand words or guess directions. It was possible to believe that one of the corona’s heads had called to him—not the most incredible notion in a day filled with impossibilities.
“Leave me alone,” he shouted at the head. “Go away.”
Then a man screamed, telling someone, “Leave him alone.”
Father.
Diamond turned onto his back again. The fletch had pulled away from the airship, a final few glands still leaking purple. One of the two remaining coronas was clinging to the slayer’s ship, jaws biting into the skin and struts as the long necks twisted, wrenching free whatever was weakest.
Father plunged toward Diamond. His trajectory was close but wrong, and sweeping past the boy, he flattened out, arms and legs supporting fabric wings that rattled and popped as the wind swept past.
He waved, beckoning.
Diamond tipped his head and fell faster, and the corona fell beside both of them. A dozen heads studied them; none bit. Not yet. Diamond pulled closer but slipped past his father, and the man stretched and reached and touched a hand but couldn’t hold on. Then Merit changed the angle of his body and wrenched his old back far enough after that finally, after such a very long fall, he managed to collide with the little boy, sweeping him up with his arms.
Father was wearing a drop suit and a bulky pack, and around his waist was a wide leather belt. “The bottle on my belt,” he shouted. “Pull its plug.”
The rubber stopper was topped with a shiny ring. While his father held tight, Diamond yanked at the ring. A cold thin fluid exploded out into the wind. What was inside was sweet and thick and alien, and Diamond buried his nose in his father’s chest while the man kept clinging to him, as the corona got a first awful whiff.
Blistering air came from the mouth, and the giant fled.
Father laughed.
“I got you,” he said, congratulating both of them.
“What was in the bottle?” Diamond asked. “It stinks.”
“You can smell that?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a year’s worth of corona musk.” Then Father admitted, “I never met someone who can smell it.”
His unhuman son had to be moved to a better position. When they were facing the same direction, bellies down, they wrapped an extra belt around Diamond and fastened it and cinched it tight before Merit shouted, “Wings.”
Diamond clung to one arm. His father reached behind with his other arm, pulling a handle, and the big pack exploded into fabric and cord that leaped up behind him, catching the air.
There a staggering jerk, as if a hand caught them, and then the screaming air was gone and they were falling gently beneath a grand umbrella shaped like a wing. It was as if they had been pulled into another, more peaceful world. Diamond held the arm but didn’t need to, relaxed and happy even though he couldn’t imagine where they would touch down.
“Look,” Father said.
Up, he meant. Diamond threw back his head. The third corona was bigger than the first two combined, and it had deftly woven its necks across the ship’s bow, covering the bridge, assuring that the Archon’s cannons couldn’t fire at any part of it. Yet nothing about its actions looked violent or even mischievous. For all of the movement it made, the creature might have been resting.
“There’s a favorite old trick,” said Father. “Wait.”
The great airship was tilting. The bow was no longer buoyant enough to remain trim, and the corona added to the catastrophe by collapsing its bladders one after another, and blowing with its jet, nudging the bow lower still.
“The captain should know better,” Father said. “But he can’t imagine the monster being his master.”
Water and sawdust were falling free, lightening the load enough to bring the ship back where it should be.
And then with no warning, the corona let go of the Ruler, calmly falling away.
The airship’s bridge leapt up, dragging the great long body with it.
“And now the captain’s going to panic,” Father explained, his voice excited but also sorry. “But he can’t let too much out. In the afternoon air, with all the free oxygen, he’s inviting a fire.”
“What will happen?”
“The pride and heart of the tree-walker’s fleet is going to crash into the canopy, where it’ll be snagged and useless.”
“Will people get hurt?”
“I hope not. I didn’t want this. But I never imagined so much incompetence either.”
The catastrophe continued to unfold slowly and with great majesty, the Ruler driving into the thin, sun-blistered branches.
Then Father told him, “Look down.”
Between them and the demon floor was an object moving slowly, working to hold a useful position. Their target seemed tiny even when they were close. Father put on goggles and jerked hard at the parachute’s ropes, gliding them into a better course, and inside another two recitations Diamond saw the woman painted on the side of the Happenstance, and he heard a bright horn blowing in celebration.
“We’ll land on top,” Father promised.
“Can we?” Diamond asked doubtfully.
“I don’t know,” he said, laughing. “This is a first for both of us.”
The Happenstance remained trim and nearly motionless beneath them, and they turned and dropped over the bow, Father starting to run before his feet reached the hull’s taut skin. Then a stray gust of wind gave the umbrella new life. The fabric thudded as it filled with warm damp air, and they lifted as he yanked at the straps, once and again, and they dropped together. Diamond was down with Merit kneeling over him, both of them watching that great wing soaring, pressing fast into the bright distance.
“You should know,” Father said, gasping. “I thought this crazy plan would work. I couldn’t have believed in it more. Right up until you were inside the big ship, out of my sight, and then all the things that could go wrong showed themselves, and in my heart, just as sure as before, I knew you were lost.”
The gust failed and the lost parachute collapsed, falling fast. Diamond squinted against the glare, watching it shrink.
“I flew up and you didn’t jump. I assumed they’d wrapped you up in chains, or worse. So I made another plan. I was going to board that ship and search every room to bring you out. That’s what I was getting ready to do when you jumped. And with that idiot scheme, I was confident all over again.”
Father was laughing, releasing Diamond’s belt.
“Consider this a warning, son. When your mind tells you a story, you have no choice but to believe in it. Unreasonable stupid or mad as any fantasy might be, you’ll embrace it, cling to it, and do your best to let it enslave you.”
A top hatch opened. Out came the smiling face of the little pilot. “Those two jazzings are still paying dividends,” he boasted. “Let’s get below, and I’ll rush us all back to Ivory Station.”
Diamond hesitated.
Father pulled at him. “Come on now.”
The boy shook his head. “No.”
“We don’t have any choice, little man,” said the pilot. “A lot of explaining needs to be done, and delaying won’t help anybody here.”
The parachute was a crumpled wad below them, and then it spread wide, the demon floor slowing its fall, the fabric spreading out, as if hands were pulling a sheet across a tidy bed. Then it slipped through the magic barrier, turning to fire, to ash and nothingness.
Father pulled, but the boy slipped under his hand and stepped away.
With a rare sternness, Father said, “Diamond.”
The pilot laughed grimly. “Yeah, their big ship is foundering. Oh, this is going to be one expensive day.”
Diamond said, “I don’t want to go the Station. I want to be home.”
The slayer tou
ched his own face, fingertips running along the scar.
The pilot climbed onto the hull. Watching the boy, he noticed the injured hand, the last hints of damage quickly becoming the smoothest, most perfect skin. Under his breath, the little man offered a simple prayer, and then he looked at Merit, ready to ask some obvious question.
Father spoke first.
“All right,” he said, pointing into the distance. A tiny shape had appeared—another fletch carrying his crew. “Are they close enough to signal?”
“Soon if not now,” the pilot responded.
“My orders,” Father said. “Tell them to sprint to the Station and explain what they can. If they get the chance, meet with Prima. Tell our Archon that I think she is a wonderful leader and smart and that I have delivered to her more misery and danger than she would ever wish to bear. But she needs to come to my home and meet my son.”
Diamond was crying, and he was giggling.
“Then you’ll fly us to our front door,” Father ordered. “I think this boy deserves that much consideration. Don’t you?”
The sun and the day weren’t brilliant anymore. Seldom was standing in the passenger cabin, standing beside the windows, pressing old binoculars against his bare eyes. Spellbound, he caught glimpses of Diamond falling free from the Ruler and the corona dancing beside his friend for what seemed like ages, and then Merit caught his son and where was the corona now? Gone and the parachute had opened, Merit and Diamond falling in a looping course while the Happenstance slowed its engines, wishing them to a safe landing.
Nobody spoke. Elata and Master Nissim and Seldom watched the parachute until it vanish somewhere above the ship. Haddi was standing above, in the crowded bridge. Then the engines turned them back into the wind and slowed. The old woman screamed from the bridge, which had to be bad news; Seldom had never felt so scared. And the pilot sounded scared when he started to shout, except the words were good.
“They’re down, we got them,” he screamed. “Damn we got them.”
