'I've run a fault-check on the syrinx. There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with it.'
'That's not an answer.'
'I know.' Tyrant sounded sullen. 'I still don't have an explanation for what went wrong. And I don't like that any more than you do.'
Tyrant fell into the atmosphere of Lecythus. The transmissions had resumed, allowing the ship to pinpoint the origin to one of the larger airborne masses. Shortly afterwards, a second source began transmitting from another floating mass, half the size of the first, located three thousand kilometres to the west. The way the signals started and stopped suggested some kind of agonisingly slow communication via radio pulses, one that probably had nothing to do with Merlin's arrival.
'Tell me that's a code in our database,' Merlin said.
'It isn't. And the code won't tell us much about their spoken language, I'm afraid.'
Up close, the broken edges of the floating mass soared as tall as a cliff. They were a dark, streaked grey, infinitely less regular than they had appeared from space and showing signs of weathering and erosion. There were wide ledges, dizzying promontories and cathedral-sized shadowed caves. Glinting in the low light of Calliope, ladders and walkways - impossibly thin and spindly scratches of metal - reached down from the icebound upper reaches, following zigzag trajectories that only took them a fraction of the way to the perilous lower lip, where the floating world curved back under itself.
Merlin made out the tiny moving forms of birdlike creatures, wheeling and orbiting in powerful thermals, some of them coming and going from roosts on the lower ledges.
'But that isn't a bird,' Tyrant said, highlighting a larger moving shape.
Merlin felt an immediate pang of recognition as the image zoomed. It was an aircraft: a ludicrously fragile assemblage of canvas and wire. It had a crescent moon painted on both wings. There'd been a machine not much more advanced than that in the archive inside the Palace of Eternal Dusk, preserved across thirteen hundred years of family history. Merlin had even risked taking it outside once, to see for himself if he had the nerve to repeat his distant ancestor's brave crossing. He still remembered the sting of reprimand when he'd brought it back, nearly ruined.
This aircraft was even flimsier and slower. It was driven by a single chugging propeller rather than a battery of rocket-assisted turbines. It was following the rim of the land mass, slowly gaining altitude. Clearly it intended to make landfall. The air on Lecythus was thicker at sea level than on Plenitude, but the little machine must still have been very close to its safe operational ceiling. And yet it would have to climb even higher if it was to traverse the raised rim.
'Follow it,' Merlin said. 'Keep us astern by a clear two kilometres. And set hull to stealth.'
Merlin's ship nosed in behind the struggling aircraft. He could see the single pilot now, goggled and helmeted within a crude-looking bubble canopy. The plane had reached ten kilometres, but it would need to double that to clear the upturned rim. Every hundred metres of altitude gained seemed to tax the aircraft to the limit, so that it climbed, levelled, climbed. It trailed sooty hyphens behind it. Merlin could imagine the sputtering protest from the little engine, the fear in the pilot's belly that the motor was going to stall at any moment.
That was when an airship hove around the edge of the visible cliff. Calliope's rays flared off the golden swell of its envelope. Beneath the long ribbed form was a tiny gondola, equipped with multiple engines on skeletal outriggers. The airship's nose began to turn, bringing another crescent moon emblem into view. The aircraft lined up with the airship, the two of them at about the same altitude. Merlin watched as some kind of net-like apparatus unfurled in slow motion from the belly of the gondola. The pilot gained further height, then cut the aircraft's engine. Powerless now, it followed a shallow glide path towards the net. Clearly, the airship was going to catch the aircraft and carry it over the rim. That must have been the only way for aircraft to arrive and depart from the hovering land mass.
Merlin watched with a sickened fascination. He'd occasionally had a presentiment when something was about to go wrong. Now he had that feeling again.
Some gust caught the airship. It began to drift out of the aircraft's glide path. The pilot tried to compensate - Merlin could see the play of light shift on the wings as they warped - but it was never going to be enough. Without power, the aircraft must have been cumbersome to steer. The engines on the gondola turned on their mountings, trying to shove the airship back into position.
Beyond the airship loomed the streaked grey vastness of the great cliff.
'Why did he cut the engines . . .' Merlin breathed to himself. Then, an instant later: 'Can we catch up? Can we do something?'
'I'm afraid not. There simply isn't time.'
Sickened, Merlin watched as the aircraft slid past the airship, missing the net by a hundred metres. A sooty smear erupted from the engine. The pilot must have been desperately trying to restart the motor. Moments later, Merlin watched as one wingtip grazed the side of the cliff and crumpled instantly, horribly. The aircraft dropped, dashing itself to splinters and shreds against the side of the cliff. There was no possibility that the pilot could have survived.
For a moment Merlin was numb. He was frozen, unsure what to do next. He'd been planning to land, but it seemed improper to arrive immediately after witnessing such a tragedy. Perhaps the thing to do was find an uninhabited land mass and put down there.
'There's another aircraft,' Tyrant announced. 'It's approaching from the west.'
Still shaken by what he'd seen, Merlin took the stealthed ship closer. Dirty smoke billowed from the side of the aircraft. In the canopy, the pilot was obviously engaged in a life-or-death struggle to bring his machine to safety. Even as they watched, the engine appeared to slow and then restart.
Something slammed past Tyrant, triggering proximity alarms. 'Some kind of shell,' the ship told Merlin. 'I think someone on the ground is trying to shoot down these aircraft.'
Merlin looked down. He hadn't paid much attention to the land mass beneath them, but now that he did - peering through the holes in a quilt of low-lying cloud - he made out the unmistakable flashes of artillery positions, laid out along the pale scratch of a fortified line.
He began to understand why the airship dared not stray too far from the side of the land mass. Near the cliff, it at least had some measure of cover. It would have been far too vulnerable to the shells in open air.
'I think it's time to take a stand,' he said. 'Maintain stealth. I'm going to provide some lift-support to that aircraft. Bring us around to her rear and then approach from under her.'
'Merlin, you have no idea who these people are. They could be brigands, pirates, anything.'
'They're being shot at. That's good enough for me.'
'I really think we should land. I'm down to vapour pressure in the tanks now.'
'So's that brave fool of a pilot. Just do it.'
The aircraft's engine gave out just as Tyrant reached position. Taking the controls manually, Merlin brought his ship's nose into contact with the underside of the aircraft's paper-thin fuselage. Contact occurred with the faintest of bumps. The pilot glanced back down over his shoulder, but the goggled mask hid all expression. Merlin could only imagine what the pilot made of the sleek, whale-sized machine now supporting his little contraption.
Merlin's hands trembled. He was acutely aware of how easily he could damage the fragile thing with a miscalculated application of thrust. Tyrant was armoured to withstand Waynet transitions and the crush of gas giant atmospheres. It was like using a hammer to push around a feather. For a moment, contact between the two craft was lost, and when Tyrant came in again it hit the aircraft hard enough to crush the metal cylinder of a spare fuel tank bracketed on under the wing. Merlin winced in anticipation of an explosion - one that would hurt the little aeroplane a lot more than it would hurt Tyrant - but the tank must have been empty.
Ahead, the airship had regained some measure o
f stability. The capture net was still deployed. Merlin pushed harder, giving the aircraft more altitude in readiness for its approach glide. At the last moment he judged it safe to disengage. He steered Tyrant away and left the aircraft to blunder into the net.
This time there were no gusts. The net wrapped itself around the aircraft, the soft impact nudging down the nose of the airship. Then the net began to be winched back towards the gondola like a haul of fish. At the same time the airship swung around and began to climb.
'No other planes?' Merlin asked.
'That was the only one.'
They followed the airship in. It rose over the cliff, over the ice-capped rim of the aerial land mass, then settled down towards the shielded region in the bowl, where water and greenery had gathered. There was even a wispy layer of cloud, arranged in a broken ring around the shore of the lake. Merlin presumed that the concave shape of the land mass was sufficient to trap a stable microclimate.
By now Merlin had an audience. People had gathered on the gondola's rear observation platform. They wore goggles and gloves and heavy brown overcoats. Merlin caught the shine of glass lenses being pointed at him. He was being studied, sketched, perhaps even photographed.
'Do you think they look grateful,' he asked, 'or pissed off?'
Tyrant declined to answer.
Merlin kept his distance, conserving fuel as best he could as the airship crossed tens of kilometres of arid, gently sloping land. Occasionally they overflew a little hamlet of huts or the scratch of a minor track. Presently the ground became soil-covered, and then fertile. They traversed swathes of bleak grey-green grass, intermingled with boulders and assorted uplifted debris. Then there were trees and woods. The communities became more than just hamlets. Small ponds fed rivers that ambled down to the single lake that occupied the land mass's lowest point. Merlin spied waterwheels and rustic-looking bridges. There were fields with grazing animals, and evidence of some tall-chimneyed industrial structures on the far side of the lake. The lake itself was an easy fifty or sixty kilometres wide. Nestled around a natural harbour on its southern shore was the largest community Merlin had seen so far. It was a haphazard jumble of several hundred mostly white, mostly single-storey buildings, arranged with the randomness of toy blocks littering a floor.
The airship skirted the edge of the town and then descended quickly. It approached what was clearly some kind of secure compound, judging by the guarded fence that encircled it. There was a pair of airstrips arranged in a cross-formation, and a dozen or so aircraft parked around a painted copy of the crescent emblem. Four skeletal docking towers rose from another area of the compound, stayed by guy-lines. A battle-weary pair of partially deflated airships was already tethered. Merlin pulled back to allow the incoming craft enough space to complete its docking. The net was lowered back down from the gondola, depositing the aeroplane - its wings now crumpled, its fuselage buckled - on the apron below. Service staff rushed out of bunkers to untangle the mess and free the pilot. Merlin brought his ship down on a clear part of the apron and doused the engines as soon as the landing skids touched the ground.
It wasn't long before a wary crowd had gathered around Tyrant. Most of them wore long leather coats, heavily belted, with the crescent emblem sewn into the right breast. They had scarves wrapped around their lower faces, almost to the nose. Their helmets were leather caps, with long flaps covering the sides of the face and the back of the neck. Most of them wore goggles; a few wore some kind of breathing apparatus. At least half the number were aiming barrelled weapons at the ship, some of which needed to be set up on tripods, while some even larger wheeled cannons were being propelled across the apron by teams of well-drilled soldiers. One figure was gesticulating, directing the armed squads to take up specific positions.
'Can you understand what he's saying?' Merlin asked, knowing that Tyrant would be picking up any external sounds.
'I'm going to need more than a few minutes to crack their language, Merlin, even if it is related to something in my database, of which there's no guarantee.'
'Fine. I'll improvise. Can you spin me some flowers?'
'Where exactly are you going? What do you mean, flowers?'
Merlin paused at the airlock. He wore long boots, tight black leather trousers, a billowing white shirt and brocaded brown leather waistcoat, accented with scarlet trim. He'd tied back his hair and made a point of trimming his beard. 'Where do you think? Outside. And I want some flowers. Flowers are good. Spin me some indigo hyacinths, the kind they used to grow on Springhaven, before the Mentality Wars. They always go down well.'
'You're insane. They'll shoot you.'
'Not if I smile and come bearing exotic alien flowers. Remember, I did just save one of their planes.'
'You're not even wearing armour.'
'Armour would really scare them. Trust me, ship: this is the quickest way for them to understand I'm not a threat.'
'It's been a pleasure having you aboard,' Tyrant said acidly. 'I'll be sure to pass on your regards to my next owner.'
'Just make the flowers and stop complaining.'
Five minutes later Merlin steeled himself as the lock sequenced and the ramp lowered to kiss the ground. The cold hit him like a lover's slap. He heard an order from the soldiers' leader, and the massed ranks adjusted their aim. They'd been pointing at the ship before. Now it was only Merlin they were interested in.
He raised his right hand palm open, the newly spun flowers in his left.
'Hello. My name's Merlin.' He thumped his chest for emphasis and said the name again, slower this time. 'Mer-lin. I don't think there's much chance of you being able to understand me, but just in case . . . I'm not here to cause trouble.' He forced a smile, which probably looked more feral than reassuring. 'Now. Who's in charge?'
The leader shouted another order. He heard a rattle of a hundred safety catches being released. Suddenly, the ship's idea of sending out a proctor first sounded splendidly sensible. Merlin felt a cold line of sweat trickle down his back. After all that he had survived so far, both during his time with the Cohort and since he had become an adventuring free agent, it would be something of a let-down to die by being shot with a chemically propelled projectile. That was only one step above being mauled and eaten by a wild animal.
Merlin walked down the ramp, one cautious step at a time. 'No weapons, ' he said. 'Just flowers. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have hit you from space with charm-torps.'
When he reached the apron, the leader gave another order and a trio of soldiers broke formation to cover Merlin from three angles, with the barrels of their weapons almost touching him. The leader - a cruel-looking young man with a scar down the right side of his face - shouted something in Merlin's direction, a word that sounded vaguely like 'distal', but which was in no language Merlin recognised. When Merlin didn't move, he felt a rifle jab into the small of his back. 'Distal,' the man said again, this time with an emphasis bordering on the hysterical.
Then another voice boomed across the apron, one that belonged to a much older man. There was something instantly commanding about the voice. Looking to the source of the exclamation, Merlin saw the wrecked aircraft entangled in its capture net, and the pilot in the process of crawling out from the tangle, with a wooden box in his hands. The rifle stopped jabbing Merlin's back, and the cruel-looking young man fell silent while the pilot made his way over to them.
The pilot had removed his goggles now, revealing the lined face of an older man, his grey-white beard and whiskers stark against ruddy, weatherworn skin. For a moment Merlin felt as if he was looking in the mirror at an older version of himself.
'Greetings from the Cohort,' Merlin said. 'I'm the man who saved your life.'
'Gecko,' the red-faced man said, pushing the wooden box into Merlin's chest. 'Forlorn gecko!'
Now that Merlin had a chance to examine it properly, he saw that the box was damaged, its sides caved in and its lid ripped off. Inside was a matrix of straw padding and a great many
shattered glass vials. The pilot took one of these smashed vials and held it up before Merlin's face, honey-coloured fluid draining down his fingers.
'What is it?' Merlin asked.
Leaving Merlin to hold the box and flowers, the red-faced pilot pointed angrily towards the wreckage of his aircraft, and in particular at the cylindrical attachment Merlin had taken for a fuel-tank. He saw now that the cylinder was the repository for dozens more of these wooden boxes, most of which must have been smashed when Merlin had nudged the aircraft with Tyrant.
'Did I do something wrong?' Merlin asked.
In a flash the man's anger turned to despair. He was crying, the tears smudging the soot on his cheeks. 'Tangible,' he said, softer now. 'All tangible inkwells. Gecko.'
Merlin reached into the box and retrieved one of the few intact vials. He held the delicate thing to his eyes. 'Medicine?'
'Plastrum,' the man said, taking the box back from Merlin.
'Show me what you do with this,' Merlin said, as he motioned drinking the vial. The man shook his head, narrowing his wrinkled ice-blue eyes at him as if he thought Merlin was either stupid or making fun. Merlin rolled up the sleeve of his arm and motioned injecting himself. The pilot nodded tentatively.