A Red Sun Also Rises

11. BATTLE

“We have never fought before,” Gallokomas said. “You must guide the flock.”

I looked up at the dense cloud of Zull circling overhead and said, “Yissil Froon is directing the Divergent, so the primary objective must be to locate him and break his mental domination of them. I reserve that particular mission for myself. Like all of your species, whether they are at the Yatsill, Mi’aata, or Zull stage, he can sense my emotions but not my thoughts. I hope that’ll give me an advantage.”

“Humph!” Colonel Spearjab interjected. “I owe the blighter a thrashing. A thrashing, I say! You’ll allow me to accompany you. Remember, I can help you to locate him. What! What!”

By way of illustration, the colonel lifted the pikestaff we’d brought from Phenadoor and jabbed at the air with it.

“And if he applies his powers to you?” I asked.

“Harrumph! Harrumph! Granted, he controls the Divergent, old chap, but shocks and revelations have placed me in a unique position. I know what I was, what I am, and what I shall be! I rather think that gives me a better sense of myself than the bounder can handle. Ha ha!”

I smiled, but shook my head. “No, Colonel. When I confront him, I hope Yissil Froon will become sufficiently distracted that his hold over the Divergent loosens. I’d like you to move among them and help them reorientate themselves—have them abandon their weapons.”

“Ah! Humph! I see. Well, orders are orders! What! What!”

“And me, Aiden?” Clarissa asked.

“We’ll put you on one of the foothills overlooking the forest. You’ll be out of harm’s way, but with those remarkable eyes and your telepathic ability, you’ll be able to follow the movement of the rupture and warn the Zull away from it. I don’t want any of them sucked in and flung to Koluwai.”

“Out of harm’s way?” she protested. “After all we’ve been through, you consider me too delicate to engage with the enemy?”

“Of course not. I simply intend to make the best use of your specific talents, Clarissa.”

She folded her arms angrily, glared at me, then, a moment later, relaxed and nodded. “Very well. I’ll do it.”

I turned to Gallokomas. “What of closing it? Have your scientists developed a method?”

“Regrettably, they have not, Fleischer Thing.” He took Iriputiz’s crystal from his bag and handed it to me. “This resonates only with the part of it that opens onto your world. We cannot use it here.”

I felt myself go cold. “Then I have no choice. The only option is to do as Iriputiz intended, but rather than drawing the opening to a populated area, I must relocate it somewhere remote—even more remote than Koluwai—where no one will wander into it.”

Clarissa murmured, “We’ll go together, Aiden. I’ll not be separated from you.”

I smiled at her. “We can return to Ptallaya the moment the path becomes active again.”

I hung the crystal around my neck.

Gallokomas looked toward the East. I followed his gaze and saw a wide band of orange light brightening the horizon. The Eyes of the Saviour would soon reappear. How I longed to see them!

“It is time,” the Zull said.





The Heart of Blood had almost completely set by the time we reached the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings. Only its tip showed, and directly overhead the sky had deepened to a band of such an intense purple that stars were visible in it—the first I’d seen from Ptallaya. The four moons, clustered closely together, shone brightly in the East, where the heavens were afire.

The flock soared over the dripping forest. The atmosphere was thick with steam. Thousands of tiny creatures bobbed lazily over the canopy, tethered to it by silken threads. Many of the trees were burdened with what appeared to be giant fruits.

“Do you see all the pupae, Colonel?” I shouted, pointing down through the mist.

“I do! I do! What! What! I hope they’ll not be damaged! Harrumph!”

Led by Artellokas, the flock continued on, passed over the beach, and headed out to sea. Meanwhile, Clarissa, Colonel Spearjab, Gallokomas, and I, having veered to the left, landed on one of the foothills at the northernmost tip of the Mountains That Gaze Upon Phenadoor. It gave an unrestricted view over the entire forest.

Clarissa pointed to the northeast. “I see the rupture. It looks different. Unstable—like a quivering tube extending into the heavens.” She pulled her goggles down over her eyes, then pushed them back up again. “We may have a problem. The light of dawn is becoming too bright for me. I shall have to wear my protection soon, and I can’t see the rupture through the glass.”

“Hold out for as long as you can,” I said, “but not so long that you damage your eyes.” I raised my arm to show the tattoo on my wrist. “And give me frequent reports.”

She dipped her head in acknowledgment before turning to Gallokomas. They looked at each other and communicated silently. The Zull then said to me, “Miss Stark Thing will also speak to me through her tattoo, and I shall use my mind to pass her directions on to the flock. We—” He stopped as a jagged line of energy suddenly sizzled over the forest. “We will avoid that!”

“Or, to be more accurate,” Clarissa said, “the mouth of the rupture. The storm might spread across the whole valley, but the mouth itself appears to be a fairly small phenomenon that moves about within the disturbance.”

I watched the atmosphere flicker and flash for a few moments, then said, “Let’s join our fellows.”

Clarissa stepped over to me. “Be careful, Aiden.” She leaned forward and kissed my lips.

Gallokomas made a sound of surprise. “Miss Stark Thing! What was that you did?”

“Something a possessor of mandibles shouldn’t try,” she responded.

“Humph!” Colonel Spearjab added.

The Zull, Mi’aata, and I floated into the air and raced seaward, shooting over the wide beach and across the water until the land had receded so far behind us that only the jagged peaks of the mountains were visible. Ahead, the flock, spread thinly, was wheeling back and forth over a wide expanse of ocean, every Zull’s eyes looking down. We joined the patrol.

Hours passed before anything happened. The sky continued to darken on one side and brighten on the other. The calm surface of the water sparkled purple, red, and orange.

I considered the threat that faced us—a mad creature capable of controlling minds and armed with war machines, hungry for power and intent on invading the Earth. The odds were not in our favour. How could the peaceable Zull possibly oppose Yissil Froon?

Gallokomas suddenly pointed to one side and cried out, “Over there, Thing! A Zull has noticed something moving beneath the water!” He looked behind us. “And there!”

A large squarish object, submerged and only vaguely visible, passed below me. I saw more of them to the right and the left, obscured shapes sliding rapidly over the seabed, speeding toward the shore.

A quarter of a mile to our rear, a sudden explosion sent water bulging upward. Oval lights shimmered under the slowly rolling swells—flashes, indistinct activity, a second detonation.

“What is happening?” Gallokomas called.

Colonel Spearjab swooped in close to us. “Underconveyances! The Quintessence must be pursuing Yissil Froon’s army! Pursuing, I say!”

A loud sequence of discharges shattered the surface, sending water so high that it splashed over us.

“Back!” I yelled. “To the shoreline! We’ll strike as the machines leave the water!”

Zull engulfed me as, like a single entity, the cloud folded in upon itself, condensed, and streamed eastward. After a moment of confusion, I regained my bearings and rescued the colonel, who was spinning wildly in mid-air, his tentacles flailing. We joined the race, slapping at our gears’ control units until we’d caught up with Gallokomas, hurtling along near the front of the throng. I reached his side and called, “Order the flock to keep moving back and forth along the beach. Let’s not make easy targets of ourselves!”

Lightning flickered on the horizon ahead of us. I pressed the tattoo on my wrist. “Clarissa Stark. We’re on our way back with the invasion force hot on our heels. I can see the storm.”

“It’s expanding rapidly, Aiden—spreading over the central expanse of the forest, about a mile inland. The rupture is at its western edge, moving northward.”

In short order, we came to the shore, spread out over the wide ribbon of sand, and began to fly in a loop from one end of the beach to the other, with our faces to the sea. Behind us, the atmosphere was rent by electrical discharges while, approaching from the west, explosions continued to tear through the water, though they rapidly decreased in number and soon ceased altogether. The Quintessence’s underconveyances had either retreated or been totally destroyed.

There followed a few minutes of tense silence, then, about a quarter of a mile from my position, something rose from the water. Before I could properly get the measure of it, a blinding bolt of energy arced out of it, lashed across the beach, and impacted against the edge of the forest. Wood and foliage erupted into the air with a deafening crack.

More things humped up onto the sand. They were metal machines, each a boxy rhomboid mounted on two very large rimless wheels—comprised of eight spokes ending in curved and studded “feet”—while a third, smaller wheel was affixed to the end of a shaft extending from the back. Twin funnels thrust upward from the rear of the vehicles. These were the first part of the contraptions to break the surface, and as they did so, valves popped open at their ends and thick plumes of steam came screeching out at high pressure, assaulting my ears and casting a veil over the scene for the entire length of the beach. This almost instantaneous pall glowed weirdly, illuminated from within by glowing crystals positioned at the end of short shafts, each protruding from the front of the machines. It was from these gemstones that the bolts of energy were released to terrible effect—the seaward edge of the forest was decimated before the flock could fire a single retaliatory shot.

The scene was deafening and chaotic, the air filled with pounding detonations and blinding flares. Splinters and branches whirled past. For a moment, I was paralysed from the shock of it, then a hand grabbed my arm, bringing me to my senses, and I saw that Gallokomas was at my side.

“They are concentrating their fire on the trees to either side of the river!” he shouted.

I squinted through the roiling vapour and saw that this was indeed the case. “They must be attempting to widen its path through the forest, Gallokomas! It’ll give them a route in. Order our cannoneers to focus on the machines closest to the river’s mouth. Disable them and they’ll block the rest!”

He sent out a mental command and a large number of Zull rapidly gathered directly above the leading Divergent machines. Hovering in pairs, they aimed their cannons. For a few seconds nothing happened, as frequencies were adjusted. Then my ears popped and some of the war vehicles spluttered, jerked, and shuddered to a standstill.

The response was immediate and devastating. The other machines turned their weapons on the Zull, sending bolt after bolt crackling up into the flock—and where we’d restricted ourselves to disabling the enemy, the Divergent showed no such constraint. To my horror, I saw hundreds of Zull killed in the blink of an eye, their charred bodies raining down.

Gallokomas slapped his hands to his head and screamed as the slaughter sent telepathic shock waves through him. I held him by the shoulders, steadied him, and hollered, “For pity’s sake, order them to keep moving!”

He recovered and nodded. Moments later, all the Zull were flying again, dodging through the haze-filled air, and far fewer of them were being hit.

“But we cannot aim our cannons properly!” Gallokomas observed.

“We shall have to do the best we can.”

A final line of war machines exited the water. The Divergent forces were four vehicles deep and crowding toward the river.

I noticed hatches opening in the sides of the disabled contraptions. Mi’aata clambered from them and made for the trees.

Hitting my harness’s control, I sped forward, swooped down, drew my pistol, and fired at the creatures. A mass of Zull pistoleers followed me. The Mi’aata, armed with pikestaffs, turned them upon us and sent shafts of lightning into our midst. More Zull fell.

I hovered for a second and wiped sawdust, sand, and sweat from my eyes. The war machines had started to batter the forest again, and foliage and powdered wood flew around us as they pushed forward. The vehicles were completely careless of the Divergent who were “on foot” and crushed many of them beneath their massive wheels. It occurred to me that Yissil Froon, wherever he was, possessed only small control over his forces—sufficient, perhaps, to drive them forward, but not enough to keep them properly organised.

I picked my next target, plummeted, slowed, touched the ground with my toes, aimed my pistol, fired an invisible beam of focused sound at a Mi’aata, and saw it slump and drop its weapon. Springing upward, I narrowly avoided an energy discharge, which sputtered past so close that it scorched the calf of my right leg.

A war machine rattled and died just beneath me, hit by a sound cannon, its crystal power source disabled. The hatch in its side swung downward. Tentacles emerged and gripped the sides of the opening. I dropped, landed, crouched, aimed, and sent the three crew toppling backward into the cabin.

The smouldering carcass of a Zull thudded into the sand a few feet from me, twitched, and lay still. I paced away from it and was swallowed by the swirling and ever-thickening cloud. Nebulous forms shadowed through it. Light flared and guttered. Booms reverberated, shook the ground, rattled my teeth.

Dimly, I became aware that someone was bellowing my name.

“Mr. Fleischer! Mr. Fleischer! I say, old thing! Harrumph!”

Colonel Spearjab and Artellokas descended.

“What is it, Colonel?”

“The pistols are having the desired effect, what! The Divergent hit by ’em are dropping their weapons and becoming thoroughly addled. Addled, I say! Old Yissil Froon can’t control the blighters at all.”

“They are filled with need,” Artellokas shouted over the din of battle. “They want only to enter the forest to pupate.”

“That’s the last place they should go!” I exclaimed. “They’ll be shot to pieces by their own forces!”

“Quite so!” Spearjab agreed. “But they are of my own kind—What! What!—and I retain a little of the old mental attachment to ’em. Mr. Artellokas here thinks he can—can—humph!—what did you call it, old chap?”

The Zull scientist raised a hand and tapped his own head with his forefinger. His accompanying words were lost in a cacophonous sequence of blasts.

I shouted, “What?”

“I said I can amplify Colonel Spearjab’s thoughts, Mr. Fleischer. Together, we might attract the Discontinued away from the conflict and toward the southern edge of the forest. It is safer there.”

I ducked as a thick branch bounced past and splinters rained onto us. Pressing my inner wrist, I called, “Clarissa Stark!”

“Aiden! What’s happening? It’s pandemonium!”

“No time to explain. Where’s the mouth of the rupture?”

“It’s drifting in a northeastwardly direction about a mile and a half inland—moving quite slowly at the moment.”

“And the forest nearest your position—is it quiet?”

“Yes. The chaos is farther north along the beach.”

I turned back to my two friends. “Do it. Artellokas, issue an order to the flock. Tell the pistoleers not to shoot at any unarmed Mi’aata.”

Whatever acknowledgement I received was lost in a terrific explosion and another shower of fragmented wood. By the time my eyes had recovered from the flash, my friends had departed.

Clarissa’s voice pierced the ringing in my ears.

“Aiden! Aiden!”

“Yes, Clarissa?”

“Listen! Yissil Froon is still expecting Iriputiz to return through the rupture. That’s not going to happen, which means our enemy will have difficulty pinpointing its position. When he realises his plan has gone awry, what will he do?”

I cursed under my breath. “He’ll probably spread his army out among the trees until one of them is sucked into the thing, then the rest will make a rush to that position.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought, too. And the wider the war machines spread, the more Zull pupae will be destroyed.”

“All right. Thank you.”

I peered through the eddying murk. I wanted to speak with Gallokomas. Where had he got to?

As if by magic, having sensed my need, he dropped to my side. “You have orders, Fleischer Thing?”

“Yes! Follow me!”

We flew straight up until we were above the dirty and expanding cloud, then hovered and surveyed the battlefield.

I pointed at the indistinct war machines. “All the Divergent vehicles are on the beach now. It means we can get behind them. Their weapons are at the front, and unless the whole machine turns around, they can’t shoot backward. Order the cannoneers to the waterline. From there, they must work hard to disable every vehicle. We have to prevent further destruction of the forest and protect the pupae. The armed Mi’aata will try to escape among the trees. Have our pistoleers follow and stop every one of them!”

Gallokomas gave a satisfied nod. “Yes! Good! But what of that—?” He pointed inland to where the atmospheric disturbance was fast filling the valley.

“Clarissa will tell you exactly where in the storm the mouth of the rupture is located. You must avoid it but, at the same time, prevent any Divergent Mi’aata from reaching it.”

“I understand.”

We parted. I joined the pistoleers as they first congregated, then swept forward en masse over the machines that clogged the river. Beams of electrical energy sliced into us. Zull fell before we passed the greatest danger and plunged into the forest. There, on foot, we engaged with the advancing Divergent.

A sort of guerrilla warfare now ensued and the combat took on a phantasmagorical quality. We were ahead of the blast zone but debris continually drifted from it to mingle with the steam and dust, making the atmosphere, in the hellish twilight, a sickly rust colour, and the nearby explosions and thunder, muffled by the dense air, were reduced to an almost unvarying rumble which, along with the shaking ground, gave the impression of a never-ending earthquake. Intermittently, a branch or clod of earth would come ricocheting through the tree trunks, while stuff constantly rained down on us from the canopy overhead. Through this maelstrom, from bole to bole, we stalked our prey.

The Zull could sense their enemy, but I possessed no such ability and was again and again taken by surprise as Mi’aata suddenly lurched out of the pall, raised their pikestaffs, and sent a jagged line of light whipping in my direction. Repeatedly, I dodged, ducked, dived, rolled, and raised my pistol only to have it seemingly fail in my hand. There was no report from the thing, no recoil, no sensation that it had discharged, nothing to tell me the confounded device had worked at all until I saw my target limply drop its weapon.

Always, the Divergent I hit shuffled off southward, while the Zull pistoleers and I, by contrast, gradually retreated toward the East, deeper into the trees, as the war machines continued to tear into the forest.

And now a further hazard endangered us:

“Aiden Fleischer!”

“Yes, Clarissa?”

“The storm has enveloped the whole valley now.”

I looked up. With the ongoing barrage, I’d failed to notice there was fierce lightning overhead, too.

“The rupture is sliding toward the centre of the forest,” she said. “If it continues on its present course, it will reach your position. Damnation! Just when you need me most, I’m going to lose track of it. I can hardly see, my eyes are watering so.”

A Mi’aata rounded a tree trunk, pointed its pikestaff at me, and fired. I twisted but was knocked off my feet as the discharge ripped through the skin of my flight sac. Crashing down amid the roots of a Ptoollan tree, I fumbled for my pistol, threw myself to one side as the creature took another shot, then raised my weapon and pulled the trigger. My assailant rocked backward, the pikestaff slipped from its tentacles, and moments later the creature began to dazedly move away.

“Are you all right, Aiden?” came Clarissa’s urgent voice.

“Yes. Hold out for as long as you can, but don’t risk your eyes.”

“All right. Stay safe.”

I climbed from among the roots, pulled the shredded membrane away from my harness, cursed my ill-luck, and suddenly became conscious of a strange keening coming from behind me. This, in turn, made me aware that the reverberating thunder from the direction of the beach had lessened in intensity—the cannoneers must be winning out against the war machines. Turning, I stepped around the tree and discovered the source of the mournful noise—a large cocoon. Could the thing inside the leathery shell sense the bedlam occurring around it? Apparently so.

Feathery leaves cascaded from above, and, among them, Gallokomas. A nasty-looking burn furrowed his chest.

“You’re injured!”

“Zull have died, Thing,” he said. “I am merely hurt. We are fighting for the survival of our species, and through our sacrifices, we are beginning to overcome the Divergent. Many of their vehicles have been disabled.”

“Can you carry me, Gallokomas? I want to assess our progress, but my flight apparatus has been destroyed.”

He stepped forward, gripped me beneath the arms, and hauled me up through the canopy and into the sky over the forest. We flew low beneath the storm, skimming the treetops.

“It is dangerous here,” Gallokomas said. “If we are not killed by the storm we might be shot by the remaining war machines. We must hurry past them to the sea, then we can ascend.”

That we were in the line of fire was illustrated an instant later when a coruscating beam seared through the air to the right of us and came sizzling in our direction. Gallokomas pitched downward then swooped up, arced around the deadly beam, and sped out over the sand.

I looked to the right and the left. What of the Zull flock I could see through the haze appeared thinner, with half of it now hidden among the trees and the rest distributed along the beach. I was dismayed by the many bodies littering the ground. Our casualties were high.

By equal measure, the war machines, which had threatened so much, were more than two-thirds disabled, and the progress of those that still functioned was blocked by those that didn’t. The mouth of the river—the easiest route into the forest—was completely jammed by incapacitated hulks.

“We should order the—” I began, but was cut off by one deafening report after another as spears of light pulsed past us and smashed into the forest, instantly reducing hundreds of trees to dust. Gallokomas rocketed upward, turned, and let out a cry of shock at what we saw floating motionless about two hundred feet over the sea.

It was a flying ship; a thing comprised of two immense cigar-shaped structures, set parallel to one another, both reminiscent of dirigible balloons—such as that flown by Henri Giffard in 1852—with a flat glass-covered platform spanning the distance between them. A big propeller was spinning at the front of the platform and another at its stern. Steam spouted from pipes set along the outer sides of the dirigibles and cannons poked from bulging domes, one atop each structure and one below. It was from the bottom pair that the hugely destructive light rays were shooting, cutting a broad channel through the trees and into the centre of the forest.

“Get above it, Gallokomas!” I yelled. “I want to see through the glass. I’ll wager Yissil Froon is inside that behemoth!”

My friend plummeted down until we were just a few feet above the water then sped out to sea, angling away from the monstrous aero-ship. We went unnoticed as we circled around it and began to gain height.

“Aiden Fleischer!”

“Clarissa! Do you see it?”

“I never thought to! I designed the thing when I was barely sixteen years old. Yissil Froon is aboard—I can sense his presence!”

“What’s its weakness? How do we bring it down?”

“It’s unstable. If the Zull concentrate their attack on just one of the dirigibles, they might succeed in unbalancing the whole thing. Have Gallokomas order them to use the pikestaffs dropped by the Divergent.”

Gallokomas heard this and telepathically issued the command. My friend and I had by now risen above the warship. We eased forward, approaching it cautiously from the back.

“What of the rupture, Clarissa?” I asked.

“I can’t see it. I had to put my goggles on. I’m sorry, Aiden.”

“Don’t be. Stay undercover. We’ll come for you when it’s safe.”

Gallokomas and I circled high over the glass-topped platform. I could see six Mi’aata inside, and, standing at the pointed prow, the unmistakable form of Yissil Froon, still a Yatsill.

An inky cloud of Zull came swirling through the sky toward us—a tiny attack force on its way to assault the gigantic aero-ship. Below us, the turret on top of the leftmost balloon swivelled until its cannon was directed at them.

“Warn them!” I shouted.

Energy suddenly snapped not from the weapon we were looking at but from its opposite number, which, unobserved by us, had turned and pointed in our direction. Blistering heat screamed past, scorching the side of my upper right arm. Gallokomas cried out, and before I could properly grasp what was happening, I was falling. The sky and sea and ship whirled around me. I caught a brief glimpse of my friend tumbling away, whether wounded or dead it was impossible to tell.

I hit glass, crashed through, and thumped onto a hard deck. Sharp fragments clattered and shattered around me. I struggled to retain consciousness, to draw in a clarifying breath, to comprehend what had just happened. I felt my eyes slipping up into my head. No! I couldn’t allow it! Don’t escape from the pain! Cling on to it! Use it to stay alert!

Rolling onto my side, I tried to lever myself up on an arm and failed. Glass crunched beneath me. Blood trickled across my skin. The four click-clacking feet of a Yatsill approached. I tried to speak but could only moan.

A familiar voice: “Aiden Fleischer!”

Long sharp fingers clamped around my neck and my thigh. I was heaved into the air and flung with great force against a flat bulkhead, bouncing off it to smack once again onto the metal floor. I tried to drag myself away from the oncoming footsteps but they caught up with me, chitinous digits dug into my hair, and I was yanked by it up onto my knees. Yissil Froon twisted my head around until I was looking into his ghastly face. His horns curled like those of a ram. His vertical lips gaped and the inner beak clicked in the rat-a-tat manner of Yatsill laughter.

Speaking English, he snarled, “Pitiful creature! You think to oppose me? Impossible!” He dragged me to my feet.

His hard right hand slapped my face, the serrated inner fingers ripping the flesh from my cheek, sending me reeling away and leaving him holding a clump of hair. I collided with a Mi’aata. Its tentacular limbs wound about me and hoisted me around to face Yissil Froon.

The Yatsill froze, then raised an arm and pointed at my chest.

“The crystal! You have the crystal! Where is Sepik?”

I managed a grin, and blood bubbled from my mouth. “He’s splattered at the bottom of Zone Four, you damned maniac, and good riddance to the wretch!”

The Yatsill Magician hissed venomously. “No matter. I can do without him!”

I laughed. “You poor demented fool. You’re delusional. Your machines are constructed from the imaginings of a child! The Zull have already incapacitated most of them. Your army is a barely controlled rabble! Do you really think Earth will fall to such a pathetic mob? Millions inhabit my world! Millions! We’ll design and construct superior machines. You won’t stand a chance!”

Yissil Froon gazed at me. His fingers moved slowly. “I can manipulate minds,” he said.

Three loud blasts rocked the aero-ship. The deck lurched and listed to the left. We all scrambled to regain balance, but my captor’s hold didn’t loosen.

“The Zull are attacking!” one of the Mi’aata crew reported.

“Retaliate! Kill them!”

The crewmember had spoken in Koluwaian and the reply was barked in the same language, but Yissil Froon switched back to English when he addressed me again, and I noticed that when he did so, one of the other Mi’aata, standing a little way behind him, gazed at the Yatsill’s back fixedly and moved its mouth as if silently repeating every word.

“Fleischer, you think you have the better of me, but you forget your own vulnerability. What I can do to you, I can do to all your kind.”

The pain of my fall suddenly blossomed, an abysmal flower, its razor-sharp petals slicing through me, its fiery stigma blazing up my spine. Horror, cowardice, and shame throbbed through my veins.

“No!” I moaned, and clamping my teeth shut, I summoned the will to resist. It rose up inside me, a dark and bestial thing, a sickening ferocity—a monster.

I faced it, accepted it, embraced it, and in an instant, there was nothing abominable about it at all.

Letting out the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding, I said, “You cannot coerce fear out of me. I no longer doubt myself. There’s nothing for your vile mind to latch on to.”

The vehicle pitched and weaved as the Zull fired more energy bolts into its side.

My captor’s hold momentarily loosened.

I snatched the stock of my pistol, pulled the weapon out of its holster, curled my wrist, and fired backward into the creature. Its tentacles fell away from me.

“No!” Yissil Froon shouted. “Succumb!”

Two Mi’aata came flopping across the sloping deck, their limbs outstretched. I shot them. They sagged.

I heard an exclamation, “We’re losing altitude!” and glanced back. It had come from one of two Mi’aata hunched over consoles at the prow of the platform. I swung my arm around, aimed, and fired. The creature staggered back, its four eyes blinking, its mouth opening slackly.

Yissil Froon pounced forward and knocked the pistol from my hand. He grabbed me by the harness and flung me sternward. I hit the deck and went skidding through broken glass until I bumped against the Mi’aata who’d been watching the Yatsill.

“I say! Steady on!” it exclaimed.

“Hold him!” the Magician ordered.

“I don’t bloody well think so, old fruit!”

I looked up in wonderment. “Lord Brittleback?”

The Divergent returned my gaze. “That’s it! That’s what I was trying to remember! Lord Upright Brittleback! Of course!” It raised its tentacles and examined them. “By the Saviour! What in the name of Phenadoor has bloody well happened to me?”

Yissil Froon addressed the only Mi’aata remaining under his control. “Get the ship moving! Fly into the storm. Fast!”

Painfully, I pushed myself upright. “Lord Brittleback, would you stop that Mi’aata, please, while I take care of Yissil Froon?”

“Mi’aata?”

“The Blood God, Prime Minister.”

“Ah, quite so! Jolly good!”

I drew my sword and faced my enemy. The deck was listing about twenty-five degrees to port. It jerked beneath my feet as the aero-ship began to accelerate. Whatever advantage my blade offered was nullified by the Yatsill’s four legs, which gave Yissil Froon much more purchase on such an unstable surface, as was immediately demonstrated when, with my first step toward him, my foot landed on a shard of glass and slid out from beneath me. I fell sideways onto my thigh, and before I could recover myself, Froon swooped forward, snatched the sword from my hand, snapped the blade in half over one of his thighs, and cast it aside.

“Pathetic creature!” he snarled. His fingers caught my neck in a vice-like grip and he hauled me into the air. “Without machines! Without an army! Even then, I can take your world!”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Lord Brittleback struggling with the Mi’aata at the controls.

“So the rupture still opens onto Koluwai, does it? Very well, the islanders will be the first to fall under my spell.” The Yatsill slammed me down and crouched over me, his sharp fingers constricting my throat. “And from that island I shall spread my influence until it infiltrates your so-called civilisation.” He leaned close until I could feel his breath upon my face. “I have seen inside Clarissa Stark’s mind, Aiden Fleischer. I understand the nature of your Earth. I know your species is divided—that most are less developed than the Yatsill, while the rest are in the grip of powers every bit as stultifying as the Quintessence. What resentments and fears must seethe in the masses! What longings and frustrations! What angers and hatreds! Those shall be my weapons!”

I thought of overcrowded Whitechapel and its inhumane poverty, of the teeming masses of discarded, disenfranchised, and wretched poor, and of the monster born out of that Inferno, of Jack the Ripper. By God, if Yissil Froon loosed his mesmeric powers upon such misery, could he not produce from it a vast army of demonic murderers? How easy for him to take those whose path to goodness was already fraught with such terrible obstacles—deprivation, disease, corruption, drudgery, violence, humiliation—and cause them to turn away from it, to face in the direction of lessening good, to become evil!

“Ah, yes!” he hissed. “I see that you understand!”

I clutched at his wrists, tried to pull his hands away, but couldn’t match his strength. With agonising slowness, he was throttling me to death.

The aero-ship began to shudder. Its propellers howled. At the periphery of my fast-clouding vision, I saw Lord Brittleback dragging the other Mi’aata away from the console.

“We’re descending too fast!” it screamed. “We’ll hit the trees!”

The port side of the vessel suddenly dipped. Yissil Froon and I, the stunned Mi’aata, and Lord Brittleback and his opponent all careened across the deck. The Magician let go of me as he fought for balance. He toppled over and collided with a bulkhead. I skidded into him, kicked at his face, and felt it squelch beneath the heels of my sandals. He knocked my legs away. The foot-long tip of my broken sword came skating by. I slapped my hand onto it and swung the metal up, around, and down, ramming it point-first into Yissil Froon’s upper right arm, careless of the fact that in doing so I cut my fingers to the bone. The blade cracked through the carapace and into the soft flesh beneath. Blood spurted. The Magician screeched. One of his knees came up and impacted against the side of my jaw. I rolled away, my senses reeling, saw the shattered glass roof spinning past my eyes, caught a glimpse of Zull flying close, trees looming, and the zeniths of twin suns flaring over the horizon. I bounced off a metal wall and was thrown against the remains of the roof. The aero-ship corkscrewed downward.

“Brace yourself, Mr. Fleischer!” Lord Brittleback yelled. “We’re going to hit the bloody ground!”

Yissil Froon seized my left ankle as I fell past him and pulled me into a crushing embrace. We were tossed around the cabin, rebounding from one side to the other. Lord Brittleback bumped against us, went whirling away, struck glass, smashed through it, and was sent flying out into the open air.

With a deafening roar, the machine ploughed into the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings.





“Aiden! Aiden! Answer me!”

Clarissa’s voice penetrated my jumbled senses, cutting through the discordant shrieks, groans, and clangs of tortured metal. The deck was jumping and convulsing beneath my back. I opened my eyes and saw branches and foliage dragging past the jagged sides of the roof. The ship was still crashing through the canopy of the forest.

There was a girder across my body, pinning me down, excruciatingly heavy against my chest, but as far as I could ascertain, I hadn’t sustained any grievous injury—miraculously!—though I was so battered that even raising my wrist to my mouth sent spikes of pain through me.

“Aiden! Please! Please!”

“Clarissa,” I gasped.

It made no sense. Why wasn’t the vessel slowing? Its propellers couldn’t be rotating—the impact would have torn them apart—yet the aero-ship was grinding through the treetops, the boles so massive and densely packed that it couldn’t fall through them.

“Oh, thank Heaven! Get out of there, Aiden! Quickly!”

I reached down, took hold of the girder, and pushed. It shifted, but not enough.

“I’m trapped!”

My ears were assaulted by cacophonous thunder and the crashes and squeals of the disintegrating flying machine. The deck bucked and shrieked. It banged against the back of my head. A gust of wind whistled through the ripped metal, bringing with it the scent of lemons.

“I can’t get to you in time, Aiden! You’re being pulled into the rupture.”

“Don’t try!” I responded. I heaved at the girder and managed to push myself a little way out from under it. “Report!”

“What?”

“Report! What has happened?”

I shoved the beam again, my lacerated fingers sending a spike of pain through me, and gained a few more inches of freedom. Then the deck suddenly angled upward, the girder came loose, and I heaved myself out from beneath it. I grabbed a fold of twisted metal to secure myself. The frenzied whistle of escaping steam sounded from the rear of the machine, drowning Clarissa’s reply. I pressed my wrist to the side of my head and shouted, “Repeat! I can barely hear you!”

“The war machines are disabled! Colonel Spearjab and Artellokas are drawing the defeated Divergent to the forest below me. They’re taking to the trees and pupating. The rest are being hunted. We’ve won, Aiden! But you have to get off that ship! It’s almost at the mouth!”

To my left, a jumble of debris flew into the air and clattered upward out of the cabin. The storm was raging outside and everything was being drawn into it as if magnetised.

A buckled panel clanged aside and Yissil Froon burst into view. His body was dented and bloody, the shell ruined, his limbs broken. Still, he had strength enough to throw himself onto me with an inarticulate cry of rage, slicing his left hand down, its serrated digits gashing my chest. Then he was suddenly twirling into the air as the aero-ship jolted upward, and I saw him catapulted out of it and yanked into the sky.

I felt myself grabbed by a powerful force, as if gravity itself had reversed direction. The twisted deck plate was wrenched from my grasp and I was sucked out of the wreck.

The world pirouetted around me—trees, a band of purple, the moons, a streak of orange, Yissil Froon, the sea, the ship, lightning.

“Aiden! No!”

Clarissa’s scream followed me into a vertical tube of iridescent energy. I was enveloped by numbing cold and felt a sensation of immeasurable speed.

The last thing I saw, as my senses fled, was the aero-ship, below me, flowering into a ball of flame as some part of its engine—probably the boiler—detonated.



°



My eyes were brimming with pale blue sky—a memory returned but oddly detached, as if belonging to someone else—and a syrupy scent clogged my nostrils. I felt dewy grass between my fingers. A bee flew lazily past my face.

Earth.

And I knew exactly where on Earth, too. The intoxicating perfume was unmistakable. It belonged to a small blossom-filled glade on one of Koluwai’s hills, a clearing strewn with the corpses of Zull.

Dawn had just broken, the quality of the light told me that much, and the trees should’ve been alive with squawking birds and chattering monkeys. They weren’t.

I slowly turned my head, cautious of pain. The foliage around me was littered with fragments of metal and ragged strips of material—pieces of the aero-ship and its two dirigibles. The destroyed machine had been coughed through the rupture.

A shadow slid over me. I tried to push myself upright but a heavy weight thudded down onto my chest, knocking me back, pinning me to the ground.

Yissil Froon glared down at me, his head trembling from side to side as if in the grip of a seizure. Drool oozed from his mouth and sprayed my face as he gave a clacking laugh and exclaimed, “It’s better than I ever hoped! This world of yours is filled with so many minds! So many! And all consumed by panic and antipathy! It’s positively . . . delicious!”

He looked up to the heavens and flung his arms out.

“I will have it!”

The fringed outer lips of his mouth stretched so wide they tore at the corners. His face receded into the shell of his head. The front seam of his ruined body split open and red tentacles writhed out of it.

He screamed, “I am Yissil Froon! I am Yissil Froon.”

A network of cracks snaked across his exoskeleton. Wet flesh bulged through them.

“And I . . .”

I felt something solid on the ground beside my hand and curled my blood-wet fingers around it.

“Am . . .”

Yissil Froon’s carapace fractured and fell away as a horribly malformed Mi’aata burst from within it.

“God!”

Instead of four eyes, it had seven, varying in size but all burning with madness; its limbs were of differing thicknesses, the suckers and spines distributed irregularly along their twisted length; its torso was contorted and stretched over with patchy, discoloured skin; it was monstrous; it was pathetic; it was still Yissil Froon.

The devil looked down at me and whispered, “Worship me.”

“In all honesty,” I replied, “I’d rather not.”

I swept the object in my hand up and into the side of its head. The crunching impact sent the creature reeling sideways. I pushed myself away from it, jumped to my feet, and put my full weight behind a second blow. Tentacles wrapped around me but their grip was loose, the strength already draining from them.

I clubbed Yissil Froon again and again—and there was no wrath, no lust for vengeance, and no red mist before my eyes. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it without hesitation or regret. I smashed his head to a pulp, destroyed his sick brain, and wiped him from existence. Then I teetered, fell to my knees, and looked at the thing I was holding.

It was crusted with dried mud and smeared with gore, but it was recognisably the Webley-Pryse revolver given to me by the London Missionary Society so long ago.

They’d told me the life of a missionary is sometimes perilous.



°