By the time he was sure those had been the two Seas, he had begun to realise how high up they had been when they’d started falling, how small even two substantial seas and a mighty river could look from a great altitude and how enormous the world he had lived in all his life really was.
The landscape beneath was bulging up towards him. How were they to stop?
The suit started to grow around him, extending a mass of bubbles from every part save that he must be looking through. The bubbles enlarged; some slowly broke and kept on extending, becoming a delicate-looking tracery of what appeared like an insect’s near-transparent wings or the infinitely fragile-looking skeleton structure that was left when a tree-leaf had lost all trace of its light-gathering surface and only the sustaining filigree of its sap-transporting veins was left.
The top of the atmosphere imposed itself as a very slowly increasing sense of returning weight, pushing against his back, so that — as he continued to look downwards even though he was actually on his back — he experienced the vertiginous sensation of being propelled even faster towards the ground beneath. A faint whispering sound transmitted itself through the suit. The push grew harder and the whisper swelled to a roar.
He waited to see the red, yellow and white glow which he had heard things meeting atmospheres produced about them, but it never appeared.
The suit twisted, rotating so that he was actually facing downwards now. The tracery and the bubbles collapsed back in towards the suit and became crescent wings and thin fins protruding from his arms, sides and thighs; the suit had been gently reconfiguring his body so that his arms were stuck out ahead of him now, as though he was about to dive into a river. His legs were splayed behind him and felt as though they were connected by some sort of tether or membrane.
The landscape was much closer now — he could see tiny dark rivers and hints of other surface features picked out in blacks and pale greys in the gloom far beneath — however, the ground was no longer rushing up towards him but sliding past beneath. The feeling of weight had shifted too and the air was whispering about him.
He was flying.
Anaplian dropped back to touch with Hippinse as they flew. “Worked out what’s messing with the local systemry?” she asked. Hippinse was monitoring the disturbance in the surrounding level’s data complexes and analysing data they’d collected earlier while in the Aultridian scendship.
“Not really,” the avatoid confessed, sounding both embarrassed and concerned. “Whatever’s corrupting it is almost untouchably exotic. Genuinely alien; unknown. In fact, right now, unknowable. I’d need the ship’s whole Mind to start attacking this shit.”
Anaplian was silent for a moment. “What the fuck is going on here?” she asked quietly. Hippinse had no reply to that either. Anaplian let go and flew ahead.
Ferbin and the suit dipped, passing close enough to the ground to see individual boulders, bushes and small, scrubby trees, all tailed by narrow deltas of the same pale grey as though casting strange shadows. Gullies and ravines shone palely too, as if filled with softly shining mist.
“Is that snow?” he asked.
“Yes,” the suit said.
Something lightly grasped his ankle. “Are you all right, Ferbin?” Djan Seriy’s voice said.
“Yes,” he said, starting to twist round to look back but then stopping himself just as she said, “There is no point looking back, brother; you won’t be able to see me.”
“Oh,” he said, “so you are behind me?”
“I am now. I have been flying ahead of you for the last two minutes. We are in a diamond formation; you are in the right-hand position. Turminder Xuss flies a kilometre ahead of us.”
“Oh.”
“Listen, brother. While we were in the tube, just before we dropped, we picked up repeated signals from an Oct news service talking about the Falls and Oramen. They say that Oramen lives and is well but there was some sort of attempt on his life nine days ago; an explosion in the excavations and/or an attempt to knife him. It may not have been the first attempt on his life, either. He is aware he is in danger and may already have accused people around tyl Loesp, if not tyl Loesp himself, of being responsible.”
“But he is well?”
“Lightly injured but well enough. Tyl Loesp in turn accuses Oramen of impatience in trying to wrest the crown from the properly appointed regent before he is legally of an age to do so. He returns from travels elsewhere on this level and has signalled forces loyal to him to gather just upstream from the Falls. Werreber — in charge of the greater army — has been contacted by both Oramen and tyl Loesp and has not declared for either side yet. He is on the Eighth, though, and is ten or more days away, even flying. His ground forces would be many weeks behind that again.”
Ferbin felt a chill. “We are not quite too late, then,” he said, trying to sound hopeful.
“I don’t know. There is more; some artifact long buried in the Nameless City was reported to be showing signs of life and all attention had been turned to it. But that was five days ago. Since then there has been nothing. Not just no news service but no fresh signals at all from the vicinity of the Falls or the Settlement or anywhere else within this section. The data networks all around this area are in a state of locked-in chaos. That is odd and worrying. Plus, we are picking up curious, anomalous indicators from the Nameless City itself.”
“Is that bad?”
Djan Seriy hesitated. This worried Ferbin all by itself. “Possibly.” Then she added, “We’ll set down on the city outskirts downstream in about twenty minutes. Tell the suit if you need to talk to me in the meantime. All right?”
“All right.”
“Don’t worry. See you soon.” His ankle was patted once, then the pressure on it was removed.
He assumed she was resuming her position ahead of him in their diamond formation but he couldn’t see her pass him or spot her flying in front.
They zoomed over a small hill without losing speed and Ferbin realised that they were doing more than just gliding; they were under power. He asked to look back and was given a view from the back of his head. There was a membrane filling the V between his legs and two small fat cylinders sticking out from his ankles. The view through them was a blur.
He looked ahead again just as they went hurtling over what looked like a road, some old railway lines and a drained canal. Then the ground just fell away and he was staring at a flat, icy landscape another two hundred metres further beneath, a shadowy wasteland of broad, frozen waterways, slim, sinuously curved channels, rounded banks and mounds of sand and snow, the whole linear, winterbound plain punctuated at random by a variety of misshapen shards, stumps of arbitrary debris and jagged wreckage from what looked like ruined buildings or sunken ships all sticking chaotically aslant, broken and alone from the pitted, frozen surface.
They swooped, dipping in towards the centre of this new and pitiless landscape contained by the sheer and distant cliffs on either side.
When they got to the Nameless City, arriving over increasing amounts of fractured, haphazardly jumbled detritus trapped within the ice and the frozen wastes of sand and snow and mud, they could see many thin trails of smoke leading up into the sky from their left above the cliffs on that side. Hard against the cliffs, visible under modest magnification, they could make out zigzagging traceries of stairways and the open lattices of lift shafts. Nothing save the smoke was moving, drifting slowly upwards into the quiet, windless dim.
In front of them, the city rose, its highest spires and towers still some kilometres distant. They crossed the first outskirt jumble of short, few-storey buildings and began to slow. The suit released Ferbin from its gentle grip, letting his arms and legs free.