“Methven!” cried Cromis, and they answered him. “Methven!”
Something in the grey air caught his eye, a movement beneath the cloud base. But a blade nicked his collarbone, and death demanded his attention. He gave it fully. When he next looked up, there were seven airboats in the sky where there had been four, and three of them bore the arms of Methvet Nian, Queen Jane of Viriconium. “Grif! Up there!”
“If they are couriers,” said Grif, “they come a little late.”
The crystal launches clashed with a sound like immense bells. As Cromis watched, the Northern squadron commander closed to ram: but the sky exploded suddenly around his ship, and burned, dripping cold fire; and, tail-first and crippled, it dropped out of the sky. Faint violet bolts chased it down.
“There’s a cannon aboard one of those ships,” said Tomb the Dwarf wonderingly. “It is the Queen’s own flight.”
Confused by this sudden renaissance in the air, the Northmen drew back from their prey and craned their necks. The dying airboat ploughed through them and blew up, scattering limbs and bits of armour. Howling with rage, they renewed their attack, and the Methven on the hill were hard put to it.
Up above, one of the Viriconese boats left its sister ships to a holding action against the remaining three Northern craft, and began to cruise up and down the valley. But the Methven were unaware of this until its huge shadow passed over them, hesitated, and returned. Tomb crowed. He tore off Cromis’s tattered black cloak with a huge steel hand and waved it about above his head. The airboat descended, yawing.
Ten feet above the top of the hill, it swung rapidly on its own axis, and fell like a stone. The energy cannon under its prow pulsed and spat. A hatch opened in its side. Its motors sang.
It was a difficult retreat. The Northmen pressed in, determined to claim what was due to them. Tomb took a blow from a mace behind the knees of his exoskeleton: a servo failed, and he staggered drunkenly, flailing about him.
Cromis found himself some yards away from the open hatch, the old campaigner at his side. They fought silently for a minute.
Then Theomeris Glyn put his back squarely against a pile of corpses and showed the Northmen his teeth. “I don’t think I’ll come, Cromis,” he said. “You’ll need some cover.” He sniffed. “I don’t like flying machines anyway.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Cromis. He touched the old man’s arm, to show his gratitude. “We’ll make it.”
But Glyn drew himself up. His age sloughed away from him. He had lost his helmet, and blood from a gash in his head had clotted in his beard; his padded doublet was in ruins, but the pride in his face shone out clear.
“tegeus-Cromis,” he said, “you forget yourself. Age has its privileges, and one of them is to die. You will do me the honour of allowing me to do that in my own way. Get into the ship and I will cover your back. Go. Goodbye.”
He met Cromis’s eyes.
“I’ll gut a few of them, eh?” he said. “Just a few more. Take care.”
And Theomeris Glyn, a lord of the Methven despite his years, turned to face his enemies. The last Cromis ever saw of him was a whirling rearguard of steel, a web such as he used to spin when the Old King ruled, and his blood was young.
Trembling violently, blinded by the old man’s courage, Cromis stumbled through the hatch. The metal bird rocketed in after him. It was still screaming its useless message of warning: he suspected that its mechanisms had been damaged somehow during the fight. He slammed the hatch shut. Outside, the Northmen were beating their weapons on the hull, searching for another entrance, grunting like frustrated animals.
The ship lurched, spun, hung five or ten feet off the ground. In the green, undersea gloaming of its command bridge, lights moved like dust motes in a ray of alien sun. Navigation instruments murmured and sang. “I’m having some trouble here,” said the pilot, conversationally. “Still, not to worry.” He was a rakish young man, his hair caught back with a pewter fillet in the fashion of the Courier Corps.
Birkin Grif lay on the vibrating crystal deck, his face white and drained. Bent over his injured leg, a woman in a hooded purple cloak was attempting to staunch the bleeding. He was saying weakly, “My lady, you were a fool to come here-”
She shook her head. Russet hair escaped her hood. Her cloak was fastened at the neck with a copper clasp formed to represent mating dragonflies. Looking at her, Cromis experienced a terrible premonition.
Sprawled in a tangle of silver spars at the base of the navigation table, Tomb the Dwarf struggled with his harness. His ugly face was frantic. “Take her up! Take her up!” he shouted. “Help me out of this, someone-”
“We can expect a bit of fuss when we get up there,” said the pilot. “Ah. Got her. Do hold tight-” He opened his throttles. The ship began to climb steeply.
Cromis, stumbling toward the dwarf, was thrown to the deck. He dropped his sword. He hit his head on the fire control of the energy cannon. As he passed out, he recognised the woman in the purple cloak: it was Methvet Nian herself, the Young Queen.
We are all insane, he thought. The Moidart has infected us all with her madness.
7
Shortly after Cromis came to his senses, the airboat was rammed.
Clinging grimly to a stanchion as the daring young courier flung his ship about the dangerous sky, he felt as if he were sitting behind the eyes of a tumbler pigeon: earth and air blurred together in a whirling mandala of brown and grey, across which flickered the deadly silhouettes of the Northern airboats. He was aware that Tomb had finally escaped the embrace of his own armour, that Grif and the Young Queen had wedged themselves against the rear bulkhead of the command bridge.
But his concern with events was abstract-since he could in no way influence the situation-and he had something else to occupy his mind: a speculation, a fear stimulated by the sudden appearance of Methvet Nian Abruptly, the portholes darkened. The ship gave a great shudder, and, with a sound like destroyed bells, its entire prow was torn off. Shards of crystal spat and whirred in the gloom. Five feet in front of the pilot, leaving his controls undamaged only by some freak of chance, an enormous hole opened in the hulclass="underline" through it could be seen briefly the tumbling, receding wreck of the craft that had accomplished the ramming. An icy wind rushed in, howling.
“Oh,” murmured the courier. A twelve-inch spike of crystal had split his skull. Three fingers could have been got in the wound with ease. He swayed. “We still have power-if anybody can fly this thing-” he said, puzzledly. “I am sorry, my lady-I don’t seem to be-” He fell out of his seat.
Tomb the Dwarf scuttled on all fours across the listing deck to take his place. He fired off the energy cannon, but it tore itself away from the wreckage. “Benedict Paucemanly should see me now,” he said. He turned the ship in a wide loop, swung once over the battlefield. He flogged and cajoled it and nursed it over the waste, losing height. Beneath the cloud base, the sole uncrippled ship of the Queen’s flight fought a doomed action against the two remaining Northerners.