The Children of the Sky

each other. Then Ravna noticed that both packs were looking off into the night, all in the same direction as the packs around the square. Amdi and Purity had spread out because they were listening.

Ravna and Jefri turned and looked up with the others. Full night was an hour old. The dark was starless, the cloud cover complete. Now … even to nearly deaf human ears … there was the sound of the airship’s steam engines.

Powers above, don’t let this be Nevil.

Amdi and the prince continued their proud poses, still grinning at each other. Purity’s guards were buckling up their armor; maybe they weren’t as confident as their boss.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It sounded as close as this morning, but there was an undertone that had been missing then. “There’s two of them out there,” Amdi said in his little boy voice.

Sound became substance, looming out of the dark. The aircraft coasted toward them above the south road, descending gently into the plaza. There was plenty of room for Scrupilo’s airships to land here, but the packs on board had extended poles to push the craft sideways to the edge of the open space. Eight members—two packs— tumbled out, carrying mooring lines in their jaws. They raced around, tying the airship to Purity’s heroic statuary.

Amdi was playing with the lamps: multiple spotlights splashed along the airship’s hull. They were looking at it head-on, but what she could see was Oobii’s design, adapted from aircraft of myriad terrestrial worlds, optimized for Tines World.

“That’s too small to be—” Amdi started to say, but he was interrupted by the prince’s laughter. A singleton was racing along the edge of the square, toward the airship. For an instant, Ravna thought Ritl had escaped. But this creature was larger than Ritl, and wore a dark cape. It came from the prince’s box. Amdi brought down a spotlight, tracked the running creature till it disappeared among the crewpacks who had dismounted from the flyer. That moment of light was enough for Ravna to notice the golden highlights in the glossy blackness of the cape.

There was only one cloth in the world like that. So the stolen radio cloaks had not been lost, and—

The engines on the grounded flyer hummed down to silence while the buzz of the other continued to grow. She stared into the darkness above the southern road: the second craft was slightly bigger than the first. Its circular cross-section almost filled the space between the buildings. Amdi brought the lamplight to bear on it, diffused to reveal the expanse of what they faced.

Ravna saw that Screwfloss had probably been right this morning, claiming that there were no humans flying above them. Nevil’s gang was most likely two hundred kilometers away, still at Newcastle on Starship Hill. But so was Woodcarver and anyone who could save them. The wash of light from Amdi’s lamp revealed the design painted around the bow windows of the second airship. It was the disk of the world, surrounded by a godlike pack of twelve.

Chapter 31

The face-off between Purity and Amdiranifani didn’t end quite as the prince might have wished. Some minutes passed while the airship crews made sure of the tiedowns; the prince’s statues were more fragile than they looked. The radio-cloaked singleton went from one ground crew to the other. The creature didn’t behave like any singleton Ravna had ever seen, not with the bombastic nonsense of Ritl nor the plaintive silence of a less articulate fragment. It seemed to be talking to the packs in a sensible way.

Finally a stairway was dropped from the second airship and one pack, a small-bodied foursome, emerged. Each member carried a pair of sticks that looked like the stocks of crossbows. They were strapped along the back, the metallic tubes extending to just short of the shoulder. They looked a bit silly to Ravna, until she realized they were lightweight guns—very much like the firearms she and Scrupilo had designed. The gun-toting pack approached Prince Purity, the radio-cloaked singleton walking almost shoulder to shoulder with it.

Pack and singleton stopped a few courteous meters away from the prince. When the singleton spoke, Amdi’s voice-over translation sounded in Ravna’s ears: “Well done, my good pack. You delayed the fugitives a fine amount of time.”

Prince Purity gobbled back, Amdi’s voiceover as snotty as ever: “It was at great expense, my lord. We all suffered, setting aside the Great Square for so many hours, pretending to enjoy this monstrous performance. Surely there will be some additional consideration for the unexpected unpleasantness of it all.”

Ravna looked sharply at Amdi. “Quit exaggerating.”

“I swear,” said Amdi, “Purity really said that.”

“Oh yes, Purity is as s-silly as your eightsome says.” The new voice sounded like a frightened little girl, though the sense of the words was sardonic. It was the singleton, speaking Samnorsk.

Amdi rocked back on his haunches, all his eyes on the singleton. “Who are you?”

Now the singleton sounded like an adult human, vaguely familiar: “You’ll find out soon enough, my fat friend.”

The radio cloak covered most of the singleton’s pelt pattern, but in any case, it was hard to identify a pack from a single member. Somewhere out there, each wearing its own cloak, was the rest of this pack. But where did the little-girl voice come from?

Prince Purity was staring at them all, perhaps realizing he was out of his depth. He repeated his demand for money, but more tentatively. The radio-cloaked singleton laughed and pointed its snout at the wheelbarrows of coin already collected.

The humiliation! Purity rose in heroic anger, his puce cloaks fluffed wide. All around the square, his soldiers unlimbered their crossbows. Two more gunpacks descended from the airships, and the local thugs wilted. Apparently they had seen what these firearms could do. Purity’s gaze swept the guards, the crowd. He came down from himself and walked with stiff dignity from the square. No doubt tonight’s story would be recast in his later speeches—but only when the contradicting facts were far away. His packs dragged the loot from the plaza. The crowds were gone, though Ravna could still see commoners, hiding in the shadows, watching with fearful fascination.

Tycoon’s packs left Jef and Amdi and Ravna alone in the center of the square while the radio-cloaked singleton directed a search of the pavilion and the circus wagon. They grabbed both lamp interfaces and all the emitters, even the ones placed on the far side of the plaza. Then they took jaw axes to the beautiful circus wagon. Strange, thought Ravna, I never really thought of the tinted wood and worn filigree as beautiful till now when it’s being hacked apart. The radio singleton showed no care for the folk art, but it directed the operation with great caution, evidently thinking there might be more magic toys to be found. All they found were the maps.

Meantime, Ritl had been released from the pavilion. She wandered around the demolition of the wagon. She looked mystified and maybe even sad, but soon she was giving advice to the ax-wielding packs. When her blathering was recognized as non-informative, the radio-cloak singleton took her aside. There was a short conversation. Then Ritl gave out a whoop and danced across the square, heading toward the airship with the Tycoon logo. She ran through the center of the square, gobbling even louder than usual. She dodged into Amdi’s personal space and warbled something questioning. Amdi lunged out at her, jaws snapping.

Across the plaza, the radio singleton said something imperative. Ritl backed off, looking at Amdi with her head cocked, very doglike. Then she turned and resumed her run to the airship.

“What did Ritl say, Amdi?”

Amdi had piled into a defensive bunch, glaring in the direction of the departing Ritl. “I don’t want to discuss it,” he said.

The tech trinkets, including the maps, were all put aboard the ship that bore the sign of Tycoon. The radio- cloaked singleton walked back to the center of the square. One of the gunpacks followed, with Screwfloss. The remnant was complaining about something. The chord for “loyalty understanding” kept popping up. The singleton just ignored the remnant. He looked at the two humans and spoke in the adult human voice it had used before. “Such a long chase, but now it has ended happily. Come along.” It started off for the airship that had landed first.