nearby explosion. By the time the boom erupted, they had rolled through the sky to the other side of the skyle.
Another blast scythed the top off the small skyle and fountained the surrounding space with gravel.
The poke touched down on the tiny skyle and licked off again: immediately, bounding toward the next nearest skyle.
Before they reached it, the small skyle they had thrust off wobbled under repeated fire. The din ruptured hearing, and with a deafening force, the skyle shattered.
The pulverized rock spun away from a writhing, electric-blue bolt of ionized air. A spearhead of crushed stone pierced the skull of the man carrying Carl. His partner clutched at Carl, and the two whirled with the humbling force of the devastation.
A dizzying plunge whipped seeing to a blur. Impact jolted sense out of Carl, and he lay spraddled face up, staring at the distant black grin of the killer ship, 'Get up, you foal!' Allin's angry voice cut deeper than Carl's daze.
Carl sat up and realized that the binding straps had burst.
The rug moved slickly under him. He had landed on the man who was carrying him. The dead man's face was twisted around a purple scream.
'Come on, idiot!' Allin shouted again. 'Get over here before they fire again.'
Carl staggered to his feet and gawked at the spired precipice he was on. Allin was waving to him from another skyle across a gap that dropped into gaudy, cloud-fiery distances.
Carl balked. Allin called out once more: 'Just leap as hard as you can! The fallpath will carry you.'
Carl's muscles were stymied with fear. Allin moved to bound toward him, but at that moment the gunship fired again. A brain-stuffing roar shook Carl to his knees. The ship had hit the spired skyle he was on.
Voices cried through the muddy echoes of the blast. He looked up and saw five of the Foke vaulting toward him. The sight of them coming for him stood him up. He waved, the ship flashed again, and the five flyers burst like blood bags.
Allin roared and leaped into space. He shot over the gap and rammed headlong into Carl, hurtling them both off the spire as it splattered under a direct hit.
Carl retched for breath and glimpsed veins of inky dust bleeding into the alien sky-glimpsed streaming manes of blood and a blue tangle of intestine-before Allin hit him and soared him into darkness.
He came around a minute later, and they were lying in the tall grass on the edge of another skyle. The blow had unlocked his clarity, and be saw with sharp precision for the first time.
His head was twanging with pain, his sight greasy with tears, and he quaked with the memory of his cowardice and the grim result. But for once, he recognized the truth of where he was.
Overhead, the corpses were unwrapping in the flow of the fallpath. In a cloud of blood, ravelings of entrails wavered like a shredded banner, and heads and limbs in rags of flesh toppled in a slow spin.
Behind the spur of rock where they lay, the gunship waited. Its name shimmered into Carl's awareness: It was a zotl jumpship-perhaps the zotl jumpship that he had seen earlier when the thornwing was gliding with him through .the Welkyn. Now that he remembered, he was convinced that the ship had been arcing down toward these gloaming levels. It would wait to see if there was movement. The zotl's detectors were useless against them, because they had no radios and little metal with them, apart from Allin's pistol. The jumpship was a carrier vessel and would be reluctant to come closer. Too many others had been destroyed by plastique bombs. That understanding settled Carl into a wait, though his insides were jangling with what had just happened.
He pressed his back into the wet ground under him and stared through the mess of broken shapes at the motes of skyles hanging higher than his sight into the tottering reaches.
And in that moment, under, the fluttering smoke of smashed bodies, lives lost to save him, he awoke.
Until the keen agony of that time, he had merely been a name, Carl Schirmer, in an endless life that could have been happening on earth or in the Werld or anywhere. He was just the shadow of his smiles and words and habits. He was just the scree of time, a jumble of genetic and historical accidents that he called I. . He had been too muddy with flaws and selfish emotions to carry any reflection, so he never really was selfaware, he never was an I, until he had been chased to the tip of death.
Lying there, watching the flame-antlered clouds and, nearer, the drifting gore of the dead, the voltage of
his life sizzled into awareness. His hard brain went soft, and he felt his livingness as never before. His body was strong, powerful even, and the animal tension in his nerves smoldered in his muscles, eager for movement.
The eld skyle had indeed adamized Carl,, for he had never experienced before the integrity of bone and tendon that he knew now. A new health, made terribly alert .by contrast to the stew of body parts swimming above him, centered his perceptions. All at once, Carl was an I, an ephemeral summoning of minerals, water, and light into mind. The gruesome deaths of the five Foke jarred him into the itchy, gummy, renitent physicality of his body. The adamized changes made that immersion easier and more palatable. His flat feet were gone and the achy calves- that went with them.
The hair on his hulled chest had the glow of fur. And the vitality of his lifeforce stretched him above the dumbness of his meat into the unchangeable domain of I.
'Let's go,' Allin breathed from nearby.
His voice sharpened Carl's focus, and Carl felt the chill air gnawing him. He was still naked. He rolled to his side and saw Allin bellycrawling deeper into the long grass. He scuttled after him, ignoring the switching cuts of the blades and the thistly ground. At the far end of the long field, the earth (ah, ironic word? crumbled into a deep deciduous pit.
'We're going to jump again,' Allin told him. His red eyes were a smear of disdain. 'Do you think you can do it?'
The side of Carl's jaw where Allin had hit him pulsed louder. 'Hell, let's go.'
Allin pushed to his feet, dashed to the lip of the pit, and leaped upward.
