and (so his wife had often bragged) an astonishing lover and also (as I knew from my own experience) an inventive and poetic story-teller.
I spoke a prayer for the dead, and then I called my loyal cathary over to me, and I stroked the creature’s mane and kissed its snout with genuine fondness.
Then I took out my second largest dagger and slit the beast’s throat, and stood back as blood spouted from her slit artery. Her knees buckled, and she sank to the ground, staring at me; and then she died.
I regretted the death. But I dared not leave the creature here, where it would, as hunger assailed it, be bound to feed upon the corpses of the dead. That would be a sacrilege; the carrion birds could and would do their worst, but no cathary should ever eat the flesh of a Maxolu.
The ground shook beneath me.
I was startled, and almost lost my balance. I looked up, and saw the skies were black.
A distance-missile and skycraft battle was in progress, I deduced, above and inside the city, which I estimated was 234,333 paces away from my current position. The missiles that were being dropped on the city must be enormous, because they were sending shudders along the planet’s crust. And clouds of black smoke were now billowing in the sky to the northeast of me, a clear indication that high toxicity weapons of some kind were being employed.
I muttered a subvocal prayer to release the hidden doors of the skycraft hangar; and stood back as the sands shuddered, and parted, and the skycraft deck was exposed.
But at that moment a sandstorm sprang up, with an abruptness that shocked even me, and I was flung upwards and backwards, and battered with sharp grains of red sand. I rolled over, letting my body go loose to avoid injury, then clambered to my feet and ducked down low with my back arched and my hands clutching my knees; and tried to walk towards the hangar. But the blasts of the gale were too strong, and I was once again snatched up by the teeth of the snarling wind and sent tumbling like a broken shrub-branch along the desert dunes.
Finally, I managed to hook my wrist-grapple to a deeply buried rock, and my flight was halted. I turned over and lay face up as if I had been staked to the sand to die. A streak of lightning shot across the sky above me, like a three-pronged spear. The clouds were bright silver moons now, as countless missiles exploded in mid-air and seared their softness with angry flares. The ground shook again.
Was this, I wondered, the end of me? Was Sharrock finally, after all his many adventures and countless terrifying brushes with angry death, to be defeated?
No, I thought.
Never!
I waited until there was a brief lull in the battering gale, then I detached my grapple and crawled on my belly over the sand, my eyes shut tight as the wind ripped at me with dagger-stabs of blinding pain. I felt as if I were climbing up a high mountain made of turbulent seas, as the soft sand moved beneath me and the wind tried to tear the skin off my body.
The world above was red whirled sand; and the ground below was treacherous liquid-softness; and thunder roared; and my veins could feel the pulse of electricity in the air as the lightning flared.
And I dug deep into my soul, until I touched that part of me that will never ever be defeated; and I crawled, and crawled, into the sharp teeth of the savage spitting storm.
Eventually, I reached the dip in the sand that marked the hangar deck’s opening, and I tipped myself over and fell downwards into the sand mountain, and slowly slid to the bottom. I was now entirely buried in sand, with grains in my nostrils and ears and eyes and no way to see. But the sand was slitheringly soft, and I was able to slide my way through it, not breathing, and not opening my mouth or nostrils for fear of suffocating on sand-grains. It took me thirty minutes, almost to the limit of my lungs’ capacity, before I reached the side of the hangar bay, guided throughout by my infallible sense of direction and mental map of the hangar area that allowed me to “see” precisely where I was without the use of eyes.
Once I had touched the wall, I fumbled with my hand until I found the clicker that turned on the hangar’s fans; and then I clicked it.
And I was now inside a sandstorm, clinging on to a rail like a cathary-breaker clutching his mount’s silky mane as a tornado of red sand grains rose up and around me and then flew upwards into the sky like a comet.
And when the world was clear again, I coughed like a dying beast, and tried to spit but my mouth was too dry. The fans continued to whirr, creating a single oasis of calm air within the swirling sand all around. And I opened the store cupboard and clad myself in armour, slipping into the soft but impregnable bodyweave that yielded to my body’s every muscled contour, and fitting the black mask tightly on my face so that I became a shadow with no visible eyes. Then I chose the fastest of the fighter jets that were parked on the deck inside invisible-wall overcoats; shut down the invisible-wall with a signal from my pakla; and clambered in.
I sat in the cockpit, buckled up, and spoke the silent prayer that would tell any friendly pilots or skycraft controllers nearby that my craft should be accorded urgent passage.
Then I started up the skycraft’s engines and it bucked instantly upwards, then soared effortlessly into the air like a stone hurled by a warrior up at the moon. I flew over the massacre site, hovering above the mounds of the dead below me, and wondered if I should use a missile or an energy-beam to burn the rest of the flesh off the corpses’ bones.
But that might, it occurred to me, attract the attention of the enemy. I did not even dare to send a message from my pakla to the city with news of the massacre, for fear it would be intercepted and used to home in on my position. No, I would have to deliver my message in person.
I switched my engines on to full and the skycraft ceased hovering and leaped forward through the air like a wild maral pouncing and snatching a bannet from the sky before swiftly fleeing its victim’s brutal mates.
The speed-weight crushed me to my seat. And as I flew, I had a moment of reflection on what I had lost; my friends, my village, and my two deep and abiding true loves: Malisha, my wife, so truthful, so funny, and so passionately loving. And Sharil, my daughter, three years old, sweet, and mischievous, cursed with my own dark roguish features, yet blessed-nay thrice-blessed!-with her mother’s beauty and wit, and radiant smile.
For a moment, I recalled these two and I felt their presences.
And for a longer moment still I was appalled at their evermore absences.
But then I had no more time to mourn.
I took the plane up high, out of the atmosphere, until I could see the cratered pockmarks of our purple moon and the unmistakable towers of our lunar city. But I realised that the towers had all fallen, and the moon was pock-marked a thousand times more than usual. Then I banked and ripped downwards through the sky of Madagorian, and proceeded at a fast diagonal towards the capital city, Kubala.
Then I saw it.
It was one of the enemy’s skycraft, without a doubt. A vessel larger than a battle-plane, and bizarrely coloured in varying hues, and shaped, extraordinarily, like the stem of a harasi tree. It was invisible to my matter- sensors, and the dazzling sunlight on the hull made it opaque to ordinary vision too. But the faint heat emanating from the craft was clearly visible to me through my enhanced-vision mask-eyes.
I smiled, in anticipation of vengeful victory, and launched my missiles.
Then my craft kinked, in a savagely fast manoeuvre that was designed to avoid any return missile fire.
The Philosophers had dreamed the single-seat skycraft to be winged creatures that embodied air and speed and grace; they were to be supple beautiful flying-machines that merged with the minds of their pilot, so that flesh and machinery beat with a single heart. And our warrior-scientists had followed the Philosophers’ dreams precisely and with unmatchable skill.
And so my craft, a tiny dot in the air, was now as much sky as sky-plane; it was a bird and a cloud and a raindrop; and yet it was also a killing machine with near unquenchable reserves of bombs and missiles and devastatingly powerful fast-fire guns.
And my sky-craft had another eerie power; it was able to change direction abruptly and swiftly without the effects being felt by the Maxolu warrior in the cockpit. So that when I piloted the plane, I could fly faster and more unpredictably than any bird that had ever lived.
I and the plane-that-was-part-of-me skidded across the sky, and reversed and looped, and plunged towards the ground, and recovered from the plunge, and accelerated at a speed so near to light that time itself, as measured by the skycraft’s clock, very near stood still.
All the missiles achieved direct hits, for my aim was unerring; but the enemy vessel clearly had some kind of
