Toller gave a warning cry, but the sword had not been aimed at a human target. It arced high above him and sank to the hilt in a lower panel of the balloon. The fabric split and the sword fell clear, spinning down into the grass. Leddravohr reined his bluehorn to a halt, jumped down and retrieved the black blade. He remounted immediately and spurred the bluehorn forward, but he was no longer overtaking the ship, being content to pace it at a distance. Gesalla fired the second cannon, but the projectile plunged harmlessly into the grass well clear of Leddravohr, who responded with a courtly wave of his arm.
Still firing the burner, Toller looked up and saw that the rent in the varnished linen of the envelope had run the full length of the panel. The edges of it were pursed, invisibly spewing gas, but the ship had finally gained some upward momentum and was continuing its sluggish climb.
Toller was startled by the sound of hoarse shouting from close by. He spun round and discovered that, while all his attention had been concentrated on Leddravohr, the ship had been drifting directly towards a scattered band of soldiers. The gondola sailed over them with only a few feet to spare and they began to run along behind and below it, leaping in their efforts to grab hold of the ledge.
Their faces were anxious rather than hostile, and it came to Toller that they had only the vaguest idea of what had been happening. Praying he would not have to take action against any of them, he kept on blasting gas into the balloon and was rewarded by an agonisingly slow but steady gain in height.
“Can the ship fly?” Gesalla came to his side, straining to make herself heard above the roar of the burner. “Are we safe?”
“The ship can fly — after a fashion,” Toller said, choosing to ignore her second question. “Why did you do it, Gesalla?”
“Surely you know.”
“No.”
“Love came back to me.” She gave him a peaceful smile. “After that I had no choice
The fulfilment Toller should have felt was lost in black territories of fear. “But you attacked Leddravohr! And he has no mercy, even for women.”
“I don’t need reminding.” Gesalla looked back at the slow-moving, attendant figure of Leddravohr, and for a moment scorn and hatred robbed her of beauty. “You were right, Toller — we must not simply surrender to the butchers. Leddravohr destroyed the life in me once, and Lain and I compounded the crime by ceasing to love each other, ceasing to love ourselves. We gave too much.”
“Yes, but.…” Toller took a deep breath as he strove to accord Gesalla the rights he had always claimed for himself.
“But what?”
“We have to lighten the ship,” he said, passing the burner control lever to her. He went into the compartment vacated by Chakkell and began hurling trunks and boxes over the side.
The pursuing soldiers whooped and cheered until Leddravohr rode in among them, and his gestures showed that he was giving orders for the containers to be carried back to the main landing site. Within a minute the soldiers had turned back with their burdens, leaving Leddravohr to follow the ship alone. The wind speed was about six miles an hour and as a result the bluehorn was able to keep pace in a leisurely trot. Leddravohr was riding slightly beyond the cannons’ effective reach, slouched in the saddle, expending little energy and waiting for the situation to turn to his advantage.
Toller checked the pikon and halvell magazines and found he had sufficient crystals for at least a day of continuous burning — the ships of the royal flight having been more generously provided than the others — but his principal concern was with the ship’s lack of performance. The rip in the balloon was showing no sign of spreading past the upper and lower panel seams, but the amount of gas spilling through it was almost enough to deprive the ship of its buoyancy.
In spite of the continuous firing of the burner the gondola had gained no more than twenty feet, and Toller knew that the slightest adverse change in conditions would force a descent. A sudden gust of wind, for example, could flatten one side of the envelope and expel precious gas, delivering Gesalla and him into the hands of the patiently stalking enemy. Alone he would have been more than prepared to contend with Leddravohr, but now Gesalla’s life also depended on the outcome.…
He went to the rail and gripped it with both hands, staring back at Leddravohr and longing for a weapon capable of striking the prince down at a distance. The arrival on Overland had been so different to all his imaginings. Here he was on the sister planet — on Overland! — but the malign presence of Leddravohr, embodiment of all that was rank and evil in Kolcorron, had degraded the experience and made the new world an offshoot of the old. Like the ptertha increasing their lethal powers, Leddravohr had extended his own killing radius to encompass Overland. Toller should have been enthralled by the spectacle of a pristine sky bisected by a zigzag line of fragile ships which stretched down from the zenith, emerging from invisibility as they sank like windborne seeds in search of fertile ground — but there was Leddravohr.
Always there was Leddravohr.
“Are you worried about the hills?” Gesalla said. She had sunk to a kneeling position, out of Leddravohr’s view, and had one hand raised to work the burner’s lever.
“We can lash that down,” Toller said. “You won’t need to keep on holding it.”
“Toller, are you worried about the hills?”
“Yes.” He took a length of twine from a locker and used it to tie down the lever. “If we could get over the hills there’d be a chance of wearing Leddravohr’s bluehorn out — but I don’t know if we can gain enough height.”
“I’m not afraid, you know.” Gesalla touched his hand. “If you would prefer to go down and face him now, it’s all right.”
“No, we’ll stay aloft as long as possible. We have food and drink here and can keep up our strength while Leddravohr is slowly losing his.” He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Besides, littlenight will be here soon, and that’s to our advantage because the balloon will work better in the cooler air. We may yet be able to set up our own little colony on Overland.”
Littlenight was longer than on Land, and by the time it had passed the gondola was at an altitude of slightly more than two-hundred feet — which was a better gain than Toller had expected. The lower slopes of the nameless hills were sliding by beneath the ship, and none of the ridges he could see ahead seemed quite high enough to claw it out of the sky. He consulted the map he had drawn while still on the skyship.
“There’s a big lake about ten miles beyond the hills,” he said. “If we can fly over it we should be able to.…”
“Toller! I think I see a ptertha!” Gesalla caught his arm as she pointed to the south. “Look!”
Toller threw the map down, raised his binoculars and scanned the indicated section of sky. He was about to query Gesalla’s remark when he picked out a hint of sphericity, a near-invisible crescent of sunlight glinting on something transparent.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “And it has no colour. That’s what Lain meant. It has no colour because.…” He passed the binoculars to Gesalla. “Can you find any brakka trees?”
“I didn’t realise you can see so much with glasses.” Gesalla, speaking with childish enthusiasm, might have been on a pleasure flight as she studied the hillside. “Most of the trees aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen before, but I think there are brakka among them. Yes, I’m sure. Brakka! How can that be, Toller?”
Guessing she was purposely distracting her mind from what was to come, he said, “Lain wrote that brakka and ptertha go together. Perhaps the brakka discharges are so powerful that they shoot their seeds up into… No, that’s only for pollen, isn’t it? Perhaps brakka grow everywhere — on Farland and every other planet.”