The man at the cannon hatch looked up at him for a split second, frowning. As he did so, a blue sheet of flame burst out of the opening and engulfed his hand. He dropped his fire-sticks and sprang back with a bellow of pain and surprise.
‘No, no!’ cried Wick, clawing past Tymon. ‘It’s a trick! Ignore him!’
‘Back to your posts, men!’ snarled the Envoy from behind them. ‘I’ll throw anyone who disobeys me overboard!’
But it was too late. The soldier with the fire-sticks was already scrambling away from the blast-cannon, an expression of abject fear on his face. His companion shouted to the sailors in the rigging, warning them to get away, get back, it was all going to blow, everything was going to blow. Large wet drops began to spatter the deck. Flames licked out of the cannon’s blunt nozzle, blue and treacherous.
A black shape leapt in front of Tymon, causing him to come to an abrupt standstill. For an instant, he thought that a wild animal had been let loose on the ship. But the thing before him was no beast of the Tree. He saw with a shock that it was the Envoy. Behind the mask-like human exterior lay another reality, visible to his Grafter’s eye as a thing made up of twisting darkness, all shadow and no flame, untouched by the Sap. It fluctuated, pulsed, acquired and lost definition, forever changing shape. Sometimes it had two legs like a man, but possessed no head; at other times it grew four legs and stumpy wings to become a hideous, malformed monster. The thing-that-was-Lace bounded towards the cannon, vomiting darkness. But the net of quenching shadow it unleashed was useless. Tymon’s Seeming had passed the point of no return. Too many people had seen the blue tongues darting from the engine’s mouth. The sailors’ voices erupted in a babble of panic: Grafter fire had become real fire.
As if it realised its mistake, the shadow thing skidded to a halt on the wet deck. Tymon could have sworn he heard the sound of scraping claws through the mounting patter of rain. The knotty shape wheeled around, turned its headless malevolence on him as he backed away. Though it had no eyes, the boy knew that it Saw him. The thing gathered itself for another, final leap.
And then the blast-shot ignited in the cannon, and everything did blow.
26
Tymon was thrown backwards against the main mast by the force of the explosion. He tumbled onto the deck not far from where Galliano lay, crumpled in a heap at the foot of the mast. Consciousness slipped away from him. When he came to his senses again it was to the sound of the dirigible’s hull wrenching and groaning and a stab of pain in his legs. He shielded his eyes against the red glare of flame. The subtle visions of the Sap had disappeared; barely twenty feet in front of him crackled a wall of ordinary fire, greedy and perilous. Where the Envoy had been there was only a blazing hole in the side of the ship. Tymon shuddered at the thought of the unnatural thing he had Seen with his Grafter’s sense, bounding across the deck boards. He recalled Laska’s warning, his talk of Beings outside the pale of human law. Was the Council in league with demons, then? Or did they not realise what was lurking in their midst?
Whatever Lace’s true nature, however, he was gone, vaporised in the fire unleashed by the blast. Wick was nowhere to be seen either, though whether his schoolmate had been close enough to the cannon to perish in the explosion, Tymon did not know. Gigantic flames licked up from the hole in the deck, sizzling incongruously through the pouring rain. The starboard ether sacks were ravaged by fire and the ship had already begun to list. He heard the sailors’ voices, a dim echo of dismay somewhere behind him. Feet thudded on the deck and soldiers barked orders. He could not get up to see what was going on. He lay where he had fallen, trapped and groaning, and soaked to the skin.
Something was wrong with both of his legs. He was only mildly uncomfortable if he stayed still, but any movement was torture. Gradually the voices of the sailors grew faint, replaced by the roar and splutter of flames and the hiss of rain on hot wood. The ship was leaning at a precarious angle now, spinning in a slow arc southwards. They had lost a great deal of altitude. He glimpsed one red envelope of a life-vessel in the sky, and then another, drifting northwards. Some of the crew had escaped the disaster on the dirigible. And still the screech of ether filled the air as sack after sack succumbed to the blaze. He found he could inch his way across the deck if he favoured his left side and used his elbows to haul himself along the planks. He dragged his unresponsive body to where Galliano lay and eased himself down next to the old scientist. The wall of fire had spread to form a high arc along the right side of the ship, impervious to the rain and sizzling greedily through the ship’s rigging.
‘Goodbye, old man,’ Tymon whispered over the motionless form of his friend. He could have wept with exhaustion. ‘Sorry you didn’t get to find your World Below.’
‘You give up so quickly!’ Galliano stirred and smiled faintly. ‘Shame on you.’
‘It really is over this time, Apu,’ Tymon replied. ‘I can’t get us out of here and the ship’s going down. It might have been better if you’d stayed out cold.’
‘And miss the final journey? Never! I wish to take notes on dying, my friend. To my knowledge I have never done it before.’
At that moment the timbers of the dirigible groaned and cracked, and the whole aft section of the hull ripped away in a blinding shower of sparks. The ship tilted steeply, throwing them like helpless jetsam across the deck. They began to slip—slowly, inexorably—towards the fiery hole on the starboard side. Tymon could feel the heat of the inferno through the driving rain. The danger was immediate, physical. He knew instinctively that no subtle art of Grafting would help him now. No apparition would come to guide him. He must save himself or accept defeat. He bowed his head and set his shoulders against Galliano’s back, doing his best to keep them both from sliding into the hungry flames.
Some distance above the ruin of the Envoy’s dirigible, out of earshot of the two forlorn figures on the deck, a steady thrumming filled the air. The Lyla wheeled through the rainstorm, making as close an arc about the doomed ship as her captain dared.
‘Nothing,’ said Laska. ‘If they didn’t make it on the life-vessels, then the explosion must have taken them, Samiha.’
She did not look at him, locked rigid at her post by one of the Lyla’s windows. ‘Just one more time,’ she pleaded. ‘Fly by just once more.’
It was hard to tell through the noise of the storm and the propellers, but the Kion’s voice might have trembled. Laska stifled his own objections and brought the air-chariot round to the north for the third time. The beetled form of the Lyla dipped and soared through the clouds, almost invisible in the lashing rain. It passed to starboard of the Envoy’s dirigible. The ship itself was a flaming hulk attached to its few remaining ether sacks. The aft had disintegrated; all that was left of the starboard side was a bright and gutted hole, belching smoke into the stormy sky. The whole vessel listed so badly that the masts were tilted towards the level. Everything on the steeply slanted deck would have slipped into the burning belly of the ship or been consigned to the Void.
But not everything had remained on the deck. The anxious watchers on the Lyla saw them at the same time: two huddled forms at the base of the skewed mast, clinging like rats to the drifting wreck. Samiha gave a gasp and Laska pulled hard on the air-chariot’s brake rod, driving down through the smoke and the rain.
‘They’re not moving.’ Samiha craned worriedly out of the window.
As she spoke, one of the figures looked upwards and waved, his dirty white novice’s tunic visible under the grey Nurian cloak. She expelled a slow breath of relief. They dropped the Lyla as low as they could over the mast, killing the back propeller and hovering about thirty feet above where Tymon and Galliano lay. But when Samiha began unrolling the emergency rope ladder from the air-chariot’s hatchway, the boy only shook his head emphatically and pointed to his legs.
‘One of us will have to go down,’ said Laska. ‘It’s the only way.’
Tymon had greeted the miraculous appearance of the Lyla with a numb, d
isbelieving joy. He had been sure they would not be sighted through the clouds of steam and smoke that encompassed the ship. He had run out of places to crawl to and been waiting for the inevitable, for the dirigible to crash into the canopy. His relief at the reprieve was soon coloured by exasperation, however. He could see Samiha’s breeches wriggling backwards out of the hatch. She descended the ladder, calling something inaudible to him over the din of the storm. What did she think she was doing? She might be able to carry Galliano up to the machine, but he was twice as heavy as the old man.
‘Why is she so stubborn?’ he exclaimed in annoyance. ‘Why didn’t she let Laska come down?’
‘You don’t understand,’ muttered Galliano. The scientist’s condition had worsened in the past hour. He was delirious with fever, slumped against Tymon on their perch. ‘Don’t question the heavenly angel,’ he urged. ‘She appears only once in nine hundred years.’
Tymon shook his head at Samiha once more, gesturing towards his ears, and then with a worried frown to Galliano. When she had climbed down low enough to jump onto the mast, balancing effortlessly on the rounded beam, he cried, ‘You should have let Laska come. I can’t use my legs, and you certainly won’t be able—’
‘Wear this,’ she broke in, handing him a long, belt-like contraption she had slung over one shoulder.
It was a harness attached to a rope, he realised, a sling like the ones he had seen used in the Tree-shaft to transport the wounded soldiers. The rope belayed all the way to the air-chariot. He could make out the winch now, just inside the hatchway. He slipped the belt over his shoulders and tightened the buckle around his waist, embarrassed more by his outburst than his mistake. He should have given her other, more important news first.
‘Solis didn’t make it,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I’m so sorry, Samiha.’
He could not tell what she was thinking. As she bent over him to check the knot on the harness the rain sluiced down with redoubled force, slicking the hair to her face.
‘I know, Tymon. We found his body outside the hangar,’ she replied as she pulled the knot taut. ‘Solis knew the risks when he went with you. We all did.’
She flicked the drenched hair from her face and squatted down on the mast beside Galliano, gathering the tiny scientist into her arms. He made no sound; he had lost consciousness again.
‘The old man’s worse off than I am,’ Tymon warned her. ‘He’s been in and out ever since the explosion. He’s running a fever. I’m worried that he’s hurt on the inside, something we can’t see.’
Samiha nodded and used another, shorter harness to attach Galliano to her belt. She braced him as gently as she could over her shoulder, then climbed briskly up the trembling rope ladder. Tymon stared anxiously up through the rain until she had delivered Galliano to the Lyla’s hatch and scrambled inside herself. Rain was prevailing over fire. The blaze on the dirigible had retreated to glowing, red-hot cavities at the ship’s core. Warmth radiated from the planks of the deck behind him, now a vertical wall. He wondered if the flames had reached the space within. Then the air-chariot’s propellers changed register and the Lyla lifted, drawing the harness taut. He grimaced as he was pulled upright with a jerk.
They rose with dizzying speed towards the clouds. Soon he felt the harness jerk once more and the winch began pulling him up through the whistling emptiness, the rain and wind stinging his eyes. He glanced down a last time at the glowing hulk of the Envoy’s ship. Only the front half on the port side remained unscathed, attached to its dismal collection of ether sacks and drifting dangerously close to the topmost branches of the canopy. Perhaps it was a trick of the flames inside the dirigible, but he thought he glimpsed an ashen face at one of the fore-cabin windows, gaping up at him with panic-stricken features. He strained to see through the smoke and rain. Was someone still there, trapped inside the burning vessel?
Samiha wound up the last few feet of rope, her shoulders aching from working the winch. But when she leaned out into the pelting rain to pull Tymon through the hatch, he was already talking, pointing frantically down towards the dirigible.
‘Just one sweet green second,’ she grumbled.
She hauled him in until he was able to roll through the opening, as wet as a newborn chick. He started to speak again, then yelped as he rolled too far on the floor of the Lyla’s cabin and knocked his legs against one of the benches.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘Let me get you comfortable before you begin chewing my ear off. What’s wrong?’
‘Back to the ship,’ he groaned. ‘We have to go back to the ship. I saw him. Wick’s in there and he’s still alive.’
They did go back in the end, despite Laska’s misgivings and Samiha’s deep lack of enthusiasm. Tymon’s account of Wick’s political clout, his ties with the Envoy, only served to strengthen his companions’ initial resistance to the idea. But the boy would not let the matter go. He dragged himself to a sitting position on the air-chariot’s bench, puffing with pain, and harangued them. He had failed Solis, he said. He had failed his friend; he did not wish to fail his enemy also. This announcement appeared to confound the other two. Samiha glanced at Laska and Laska shrugged his shoulders. The captain steered them back in a loop towards the wreck, and they came level with the hulk of the Envoy’s ship as it skimmed with ghostly speed above the tips of the twig-thickets.
There indeed was Wick, a lonely speck on the upturned port side, waving desperately to them. The proud deputy of the Council had scrambled half out of a cabin window and clung to the listing hull like a bedraggled green moth, his robes sodden in the rain. Flames licked up from the window behind him. It seemed to Tymon that they would never get him out before the dirigible smashed into the canopy. Laska brought the Lyla down as low as he could over the flaming hulk, but there was a heart-stopping delay while Wick was cajoled into climbing the rope ladder alone. Samiha refused to go down to help him and Tymon was in no state to do so himself. Only when the young priest had crawled up the shuddering rungs and through the hatchway to collapse, trembling, on the bench opposite his old schoolmate, was the Lyla finally free to veer in a long arc southwards and depart the wreck forever. As they sped away, the Envoy’s dirigible hit the canopy with a deafening crack, trailing a stream of fire and smoke.
Then there was only the grey light of the rainstorm outside and the thud of the propellers as the two boys sat opposite each other in the narrow cabin. Samiha had her back resolutely turned to them, crouching by Laska at the controls. To the aft of the machine Galliano lay stretched on the floor, moaning in his delirium.
‘They’ll pay you a reward for my safe return,’ declared Wick in the uncomfortable pause that followed.
Tymon did not answer at once. He had expected to feel triumph now that he had presided over his schoolmate’s humiliation. Instead, he was achingly tired, and uninterested in humiliating anyone.
‘Who is authorised to negotiate treaties for the Council?’ he asked.
‘I am, with the approval of the Admiral of the fleet.’ Even now, Wick’s mouth twisted with arrogance. ‘In his Excellency the Envoy’s absence, my mark and seal carry absolute authority in the five Domains, from Spice City to Cherk Harbour—’
‘Then you’ll talk to the Admiral and mark and seal a treaty with the Freehold judges,’ interrupted Tymon. ‘Once that happens, you’ll be transported back to the Argosian fleet.’
Wick stared. ‘That’s it?’ he asked.
‘That’s it.’ Tymon lay down to rest, with a fair amount of trouble, on the hard bench.
‘You should have joined us, you know,’ said his companion after a while, his tone half sneering, half respectful. ‘You could have been something special. Lace told me so. I was even jealous about it.’
Tymon sighed as Oren’s pendant pulsed softly inside his tunic collar. He shrugged off the tendrils of power emanating from Wick, the spidery will to dominate.
‘Stop doing that,’ he growled. ‘It won’t work.’
<
br /> Wick gave a grunt of forced laughter through the din of the propellers. His hand had crept up to the cord at his throat. ‘Doing what?’ he smiled.
‘Listen, Wick.’ Tymon raised himself up painfully on one elbow, to stare fully in the face of his adversary. ‘I know you have a piece of orah there. Don’t try and use it against me or anyone else. You won’t find me as easy to take in as before, and I warn you, you’ll have absolutely no luck with the shanti. If you were half as powerful as you claim to be, you’d use your wits and get out of this with some kind of dignity.’
He lay down on the bench again. The noise of the air-chariot’s engine and the silence of its occupants filled the cabin.
By the time they reached the rallying point south of the promontory, the rainstorm was easing and patches of washed-out afternoon sky showed through the clouds. They settled on a branch just under the twig-thickets, near the spot where the Freeholders’ old trading dirigible had been moored to await the arrival of the villagers. They were met by Gardan with the good news that Caro’s convoy was making excellent time on the branch-paths, and would arrive by evening. Laska left in the air-chariot to establish the position of the Argosian ships while Samiha set about organising the removal of Tymon and Galliano to the temporary hospice aboard the dirigible. Gardan took charge of Wick.
The prisoner immediately began making highhanded demands and complaining of ill treatment. Gardan gazed at him steadily with her bright blue eyes for several moments and let him talk. Then she reached forward and, with a sharp movement, ripped the cord and pendant of orah from Wick’s neck, as one might confiscate a toy from a child. Wick gasped in astonishment.
‘Gag the Argosian sorcerer,’ said the judge flatly, turning to the members of her personal guard. ‘Take him to the brig and see that he remains in solitary confinement until he is called for. Do not remove the gag or engage in conversation with the prisoner. He will be seen in due time by the judges’ quorum.’
Tymon's Flight Page 40
