Underfoot, I heard Lady Phoebe wind her hunting horn, a long, chilling note.
At that noise, Victor pointed a finger, and an invisible beam punched a clean hole though the skull and breast of two of the clamoring dogs at his heels, passed through the clouds below, and left a circle in the cloudbank as neat as a mechanical punch might make. The Huntress must have been directly below. The horn-note squawked and died.
Victor sent a radio beam toward me, a silent commutation that ignored the hurricane of wind noise all around us. "She is doing magic. I can hold some of it back, but she has millions of ergs of electromagnetic life-forms, many more than Quentin commands."
Up. Straight up. There was nowhere else to go. I could not go right or left. If I went into the fourth dimension, I would be going much slower, and I could also see her dog things were partly in my paradigm: They were flickering in and out of the moonlight of earthland and dreamland freely. If I left three-dimensional space entirely, they might get me.
The goddess was coming. She was not so fast as I was, not so fast as her own dogs, but I could see the winding strands of energy reaching into the past and future. I was gripped with the sick, sudden certainty that, in the same way that Mavors the Warrior could not be defeated in melee, Phoebe the Huntress could not lose her prey.
Cloud. The dogs had the internal nature of clouds. They were made out of cloud. An atmospheric phenomenon.
I could not reach escape velocity. Orbital velocity is a different thing. But...
The air should have been too thin for speech, or life, at this altitude, but the free air blanketing us, and Vanity's imposition of more Aristotelian laws of nature that did not worry about concepts like friction and air pressure, allowed us to talk.
I put my mouth to Vanity's ear and shouted. "Call your ship!"
She yelled back, "It's a ship, not a plane!"
"Call your ship! That's an order!"
"There is no water up here!" she said in a voice of misery.
The dark world was underfoot. The pattern of city lights followed the coastlines of England and, across the channel, Normandy. A curving red line of fire defined the distant dawn to the east. To either side was thin stratosphere. And still the pale, blind dogs chased us. And overhead:..
The shadowy form of Quentin pointed with an ebon finger. "I see a river," he said. By some trick of his, the words were clear and close within our ears, despite the raging noise of our terrible acceleration.
Vanity's eyes followed where he pointed. There, mystical, wondrous, were the million gem-gleaming stars of the Milky Way, a stream of light.
Silhouetted against the jeweled splendor of the Milky Way was the slender silhouette of a Greek trireme. The solemn eyes painted on the prow were looking at us.
I said, "She has to match velocities with us, because we need to remain geosynchronous above the room. The dogs will have a chance to attack when we board. Um, everyone, if my bubble of free-willed air around us breaks when we cross to the ship, you'll get an attack of flatulence. Let it out, Chaucer-like, if you know what I mean, or else your internal organs might get damaged.
Colin! I am counting on you to kill and slay and maim like Cuchulainn, or one of those heroes from your ridiculous Irish epics. Once we board, Vanity looks for a secret compartment that is airtight; Colin and I saw her find a trapdoor leading into a hold, so maybe she can find a pressurized cabin. And then, um, and then..."
Quentin said, "Where can we go that the goddess will not follow? She will pursue us to the ends of the Earth."
The word came to my lips without effort. "Mars!" I breathed. "The Red Planet!"
I gave Colin a kiss on the top of his head. "Kill the dogs for me, Colin, and we'll go put the first footprints on the planet Mars!"
When we engaged, Colin ripped the jawbone out of the first monster hound his hands found, and he beat the others to pulp with it, and gore was sprayed in slowly falling crescents of mist across the upper atmosphere.
The Red Planet
During those frantic moments when we had to cross several yards of high stratosphere to the hull of the ship, I think Victor actually killed more dogs, because they disintegrated into cloud when his azure beam lanced through them. But Colin fought like a demon, laughing. His skin was dark and hot as blood suffused it, and the hair on his head stood up like the arched back of a witch's cat.
Yes, it was in midair, in the troposphere, and yes, Colin should have simply fallen to his death, like a parachutist with no chute, and should have suffered frostbite and decompression, but no, his paradigm did not work that way. He was inspired to slaughter the dogs. He went berserk.
Vanity sought and "found" an airlock leading into a space below the hull, a wooden torpedo-shape, reinforced with iron ribs, pierced by small, round portholes above and below. It looked like the type of submersible Jules Verne would have developed. The upper deck and the mast could fold themselves into the dream-dimension (I don't know what that process looked like to anyone but me), and the whole ship, now a spindle-shaped cylinder of ivory, silver, and wood, darted like a slender fish through the troposphere.
She still had a ram on her prow, painted eyes to either side. There were no lifting surfaces, or ailerons, no source of thrust in the spacegoing aspect of the ship, any more than there had been sail or steering board in the seagoing version.
"Who built this ship?" I remember asking Vanity in wonder and awe. It was the perfect vessel to explore the universe in.
Vanity fiddled with her glowing green necklace until she found and established a set of laws of nature amenable to our needs. Aristotle thought the air was a transparency that conveyed the potential for light to the eye, made of a continuous substance. No molecules, no partial pressures, none of the Pascalian air-has-weight stuff.
And no oxygen-carbon dioxide cycles, not in a universe with only four elements. We did not worry about the air going stale, because that was not something that happened in the particular paradigm of the universe that currently obtained within the hull of our craft.