“From us the heretics took our city, Prefect,” the captain said. “All we have left is this platform. Like to get our city back, we would, but far downriver it is, and higher than this we cannot fly. We try to go through, and from the tops of hills heretics fire down on us. Sweep us off the platform like bugs off a leaf. And the river’s worse; out there they have many gun platforms floating. No, Prefect. For ourselves we can’t do it, and for you we can’t do it either. As far as we can we have taken you. Enough talk. To berthing we must attend.”
The captain swung away into the dense green canopy. His crew turned as one and followed, disappearing in a flurry of shaken foliage.
Columns of soldiers were assembling at the debarkation points on either side of the flying platform’s wide black wedge. The big fan motors at its stern roared and roared as it began to turn into the wind. To port, ranges of mountains covered in dense forest saddled away, their peaks shining in the last light of the sun above valleys full of shadows; the river stretched to starboard, gleaming like pewter. It was only a decad of leagues wide here, its deep, swift flow pinched between the mountains. An advance force of heretics was attempting to take the city which had once dominated this narrows.
Pandaras and Prefect Corin had spent a day and a night and most of the next day on the flying platform, traveling steadily toward the front line. Like all the big lifting bodies, it warped the gravity field of the world so that it floated on the wind, and motors had been added so that it could be maneuvered. It had once supported a floating garden, but the little wood at the point of the platform where the crew lived and worked was all that remained; the rest of the surface was webbed with a complex of ropes and struts to which cargo or living quarters for passengers could be anchored.
Like the troops, Prefect Corin and Pandaras slept in the open and ate at one of the campfires, although Pandaras had little appetite and hardly slept at all, fearing that if he did the platform might tilt and he would wake tumbling through the air an instant before his death. The Prefect did not seem to sleep either. All night he sat cross-legged, with his hands turned up on his knees, watching the Eye of the Preservers as it rose high into the black sky before reversing its course and setting at the downriver vanishing point of the world, and all the next day he stood at the point of the platform, staring like a perched hawk waiting for a glimpse of its prey. Now and then, Pandaras tried to strike up a conversation, but he was not so much rebuffed as ignored.
None of the troops or their officers would go near them, and Pandaras had little idea of where they were being taken. Except that it was downriver, toward the war, and toward his master. That was some comfort, at least.
The note of the motors deepened; the platform was making headway against the wind as it moved toward the shore. Prefect Corin plucked his staff from the mossy ground and walked into the darkness beneath the trees. The little machine stung Pandaras’s neck and he trotted at Prefect Corin’s heels. Wind whipped them as they came out of the shelter of the little wood, and Prefect Corin put two fingers to the brim of his black hat. A huge baobab tree stood at the point of the platform, webbed with cables and hung with little platforms. The crew, a single family unit, was swarming everywhere, chattering in a high, rapid patois.
The foothills of the mountains came down to the edge of the river. The city stretched along the narrow ribbon of flat land at their margin. It was in ruins. Not a single building was intact, although the grid of the streets was still visible. The stumps of several huge towers stood at the shore like a cluster of melted candles. The air swarmed with glittering clouds of tiny machines that blew back and forth above the ruined city, twisting about each other but never quite meeting. Pandaras saw that there were many burnt places, and craters of different sizes on the forested hills, and thousands of trees had been blown down along one high ridge.
The flying platform was maneuvering above the encampment of the defending army, townships of tents and domes knitted together by roads that crawled with traffic and marching columns of soldiers. Hundreds of men worked on huge machines folded into pits and surrounded by cranes and scaffold towers.
As the platform neared the ruined city, edging toward a series of flat-topped pylons, bright sparks shot up from the slopes of the foothills as if in greeting, and puffs of white smoke bloomed in the darkening sky, seemingly as innocent as daisies. A rapid popping started up somewhere beneath the platform and streams of fiery flecks curved in to the source of the display; gunners strapped in blisters on the underside were replying to the heretic bombardment.
Even as the platform was being tied down, the troops began to swarm down hundreds of ropes. Equipment was lowered in slings and nets. A disc swooped out of the dusk and came to rest a handspan beyond the point of the platform’s prow. Prefect Corin took Pandaras by the arm and they stepped onto the disc, which immediately dropped toward the ground. Pandaras thought that he knew now how Prefect Corin had escaped when the giant polyps had sunk his ship. Because the disc warped gravity, there was no sensation of falling. Rather, it was as if the world tilted about the disc’s fixed point and jumped forward to embrace them. Before Pandaras could begin to feel dizzy, they were down.
Prefect Corin strode off at once. Pandaras had no choice but to follow him, for the pain caused by the little machine fastened to his neck increased in proportion to its distance from its master. Prefect Corin walked quickly and Pandaras had to half-trot, half-run to keep up with him.
“This is a great shambles,” he said breathlessly, dodging to one side as two columns of men in black resin armor jogged past. They were following the traffic that streamed along a wide muddy road. Crackling arc lights made islands of harsh white glare in the gathering darkness. There was noise everywhere, the braying of draft animals and the shouts of men, the roar of motors and the constant thunder of distant explosions, and snatches of wild music carried on the wind. Pandaras said, “Where have you brought me, dominie? Is this part of your plan? Will we become caterans?”
“We will not be here long,” Prefect Corin said, and stepped into the dazzle of the headlights of an oncoming steam wagon and raised his staff.
The wagon slowed to a stop, belching a huge cloud of black smoke. Prefect Corin swung up on the bench by the driver and said something in his ear. Pandaras hastily clambered onto the loadbed as the wagon started up again, and was thrown amongst loosely stacked rolls of landscape cloth as it swerved away from the road and bounced across churned ground toward the battlefront.
The city had been built from land coral. Here and there patches which were still alive had thrown up spires and brain-like hummocks and had smothered one of the tower stumps in a lattice of red threads, but most of the city was dead, piled in heaps of rubble that bordered the cleared streets. Trenches had been dug everywhere, lit by dabs of foxfire or strings of red or green electric lights. Soldiers squatted around heat boxes or campfires; a few scouts stood on platforms behind sandbags, scanning the enemy lines, which were only two leagues distant.
When the wagon stopped Pandaras jumped down and trotted after Prefect Corin in near-darkness. They skirted a trio of overlapping craters filled with muddy water and climbed to the top of a low rise. A series of bunkers was dug into the reverse side of the slope. A man in a long black leather coat came out of a curtained doorway and greeted the Prefect. He was the commander of the defensive forces, a lean, nervous man of Prefect Corin’s bloodline. His name was Menas. A decad of little machines hovered around him; the largest shed a fitful yellow light by which Menas consulted a timepiece as large as an onion and studded with an even decad of dials.