bled for this.'
'Peace!' Silk called to the shadowy crowds, waving the cane.
'Peace!'
'Peace!' Oreb confirmed, and hopped up onto Silk's head flapping
his wings. The day was brightening at last, Silk decided, in spite
of the storm-black cloud hanging over the city. How appropriate
that shadeup should come now--peace and sunlight together! A
cheering woman waved an evergreen bough, the symbol of life. He
waved in return, meeting her eyes and smiling, and she seemed
ready to swoon with delight.
'Don't start throwing flowers to yourself,' Hyacinth told him with
mock severity. 'They'll be blaming you soon enough.'
'Then let's enjoy this while we can.' Seeing the woman with the
bough had recalled one of the ten thousand things the Outsider had
shown him--a hero riding through some foreign city while a
cheering crowd waved big fan-like leaves. Would Echidna and her
children kill the Outsider too? With a flash of insight, he felt sure
they were already trying.
'Look! There's Orchid, throwing out the house.'
A light directed at the flag showed her plainly, leaning so far from
the second-story window through which Kypris had called to him
that it seemed she might fall any moment. They were floating down
Lamp Street, clearly; the Alambrera could not be far.
As Hyacinth blew Orchid a kiss, something whizzed past Silk's
ear, striking the foredeck like a gong. A high whine and a booming
explosion were followed by the rattle of a buzz gun. Somebody
shouted for someone to come down, and someone inside the floater
caught his injured ankle and pulled.
He looked up instead, to where something new and enormous
that was not a cloud at all filled the sky. Another whine, louder,
mounting ever higher, until Lamp Street exploded in front of them,
peppering his face and throwing something solid at his head.
Oosik shouted, 'Faster!' and disappeared down his hatch, slamming
it behind him.
'Inside, Patera Calde!'
He scooped Hyacinth into his arms instead, dropping the cane
into the floater. It was racing now, careering along Lamp Street and
scattering people like chaff. She shrieked.
Here was Cage Street, overlooked by the despotic wall of the
Alambrera. Hanging in the air in front of it was a single trooper with
wings--a female trooper, from the bulge at her chest--who leveled a
slug gun. He slid off the coaming and dropped, still holding
Hyadnth, onto the men below.
They sprawled in a tangle of arms and legs, like beetles swept into
a jar. Someone stepped on his shoulder and swarmed up the spidery
ladder. The turret hatch banged shut. At the front of the floater
Oosik snapped, 'Faster, Sergeant!'
'We're getting a vector now, sir.'
Silk tried to apologize, to tug Hyacinth's scarlet skirt (about
which Hyacinth herself seemed to care not a cardbit) over her
thighs, and to stand in a space in which he could not possibly have
stood upright, all at once. Nothing succeeded.
Something struck the floater like a sledge, sending it yawing into
something else solid; it rolled and plunged and righted itself, its
straining engine roaring like a wounded bull. Reeking of fish, a wisp
of oily black smoke writhed through the compartment.
'_Faster!_' Oosik shouted.
The turret gun spoke as if in response, a clatter that went on and
on, as though the turret gunner were intent on massacring the whole
city.
Scrambling across Xiphias and the surgeon, Silk peered over
Oosik's shoulder. Fiery red letters danced across his glass:
<font size=2>VECTOR UNACCEPTABLE</font>.
Something banged the slanted foredeck above their heads, and
the thunder of the engine rose to a deafening crescendo; Silk felt
that he had been jerked backwards.
Abruptly, their motion changed.
The floater no longer rocked or raced. The noise of the engine
waned until he could distinguish the high-pitched song of the
blowers. It ascended to an agonized scream and faded away. A red
light flared on the instrument panel.
For the second time in a floater, Silk felt that he was truly
floating; it was, he thought, like the uncanny sensation of the
moving room in which he had ridden with Mamelta.
Behind him, Hyacinth gasped. A strangely-shaped object had
risen from Oosik's side. Before Silk recognized it, it had completed
a leisurely quarter revolution, scarcely a span in front of his nose. It
was a large needler, similar to the one in his own waistband; and it
had bobbed up like a cork, unimpelled, from Oosik's holster.
'Look! Look! They're picking us up!' Hyacinth's full breasts
pressed his back as she stared at the glass.
He plucked Oosik's needler out of the air and returned it to its
holster. When he looked at the glass again, it showed a sprawling
pattern of crooked lines, enlivened here and there by crimson
sparks. It looked, he decided, like a city in the skylands, except that
it seemed much closer. Intrigued, he undogged the hatcheover over
Oosik's seat and threw it back. As he completed the motion, both
his feet left the floor; he snatched at the hatch dog, missed it by a
finger, and drifted up like Oosik's needler until someone inside
caught his foot.
The pattern he had seen in the glass was spread before him
without limit here: a twilit skyland city, ringed by sunbright brown
fields and huddled villages; and to one side, a silver mirror anchored
by a winding, dun-colored thread Oreb fluttered from his shoulder
as he gaped and disappeared into the twilight.
'We're flying.' Incredulity and dismay turned the words to a sigh
that dwindled with the black bird. Silk coughed, spat congealed
blood, and tried again. 'We are flying upside down. I see Viron and
the lake, even the road to the lake.'
