The Red Queen (77 page)

‘Free/release Marumanyelloweyes!’ he snarled into my mind, saying that his tail was trapped. But I could neither release it nor reassure him, frozen with terror as I was at the sight of the yawning crevasse into which we were about to plunge.

I had a terrible memory of the sickening helplessness I had felt when the stones had moved, carrying me towards the abyss beneath the observing house, but even as the glide began to slide forward into the rift, there was an explosive bang and then another and a hard jolt; instead of falling into the fissure, the tail of the glide fell with a thud, against the far edge of the rift. The glide was resting upside-down, its blunt nose jammed against the near side wall of the crevasse. I could hardly breathe for fear, and the belt cutting into me. Surprisingly little had fallen, for everything in the glide was fixed in place, but I felt completely confused, as if all my thoughts had been tipped upside-down along with my body.

Maruman was still demanding furiously to be freed and clawing my belly, so I wriggled until I could brace my feet against the seat in front of me. This was only possible because of the angle at which the glide had lodged. Even so, the back of the chair was at such an angle that I had to hook one arm about the seat I was attached to before I released myself from the belt, to prevent myself from falling into the nose of the glide. I had warned Maruman, and even as he slithered from my clothes he reached out his claws and caught himself from falling. Fortunately the roof had been shaped into steppes, which meant that if I could get down to it, I would be able to climb back to the hold door. I beastspoke Maruman and the wolves, bidding them make their way there as best they could.

Only then did I become aware of the high, terrified whinnying of the horses in the hold.

Sick fear gripped me at the thought of the equines’ strong but terribly fragile legs. I was about to climb up to the hold entrance when Ana, who had been sitting right at the front of the rows of chairs, began climbing deftly back to me. Darga leapt to the roof and bounded towards the back of the glide. I turned to see Swallow had extricated himself from his seat and was helping Dameon. Maruman was on the back of a chair alongside him and beastspoke him at the same time as I called out to ask Dameon, ‘Will you take Maruman out for me?’

‘Of course,’ he said, gravely courteous even under such circumstances. Maruman leapt onto Dameon’s shoulders and Swallow cast one look of urgent longing at Ana before he and the empath began to make their way carefully back up to the hold entrance.

Behind us, I saw that Gavyn was still sitting in his seat upside-down, clasping Rasial in his arms. He was so motionless that I would have thought he had been knocked unconscious, if not for the fact that he had to be holding the full weight of the white dog. I looked up to the hold and saw the wolves leaping from the door of their chamber out into the main chamber and then straight through the hold door in one lithe pale stream. Darga reached the hold a moment later and went through in their wake.

‘The way we have fallen, the hold is the only way out,’ Ana gasped, reaching me. ‘Somehow Hendon knew.’

Dragon had got free of her chair at last and I bade her go and get Gavyn out of his harness.

‘I suppose the glide instruments told him what was coming, but he could do nothing,’ I said.

‘He did something,’ Ana said. ‘Otherwise we would have fallen straight into the crevasse. She looked back at the androne, hanging improbably from the control bench, and frowned, then she said, ‘I need to talk to Hendon. Get to the hold and get out. The door will be open, but I am not sure how easy it will be to get out at this angle.’

‘It is getting the horses out that worries me,’ I said. I had farsought Gahltha to find that although he and the other equines were shocked and bruised, they had come to no harm because soft bags had shot out from all sides and had held them in place when the glide toppled on its head. I had bidden him calm the others and we would come to help them in moments.

‘Go and see to them,’ Ana urged. ‘I am not sure how stable this position is.’

As if to underline the urgency in her voice, the glide creaked and shifted slightly. Then I heard Swallow’s voice calling my name. I looked up to see the gypsy had got nearly to the hold door with Dameon, but was gesturing back to Dragon who seemed to be struggling with Gavyn.

I climbed up to her and saw that it was not that Gavyn’s belt was stuck. He was holding onto Rasial so that Dragon could not get to it. She was trying to persuade him to release the beast so she could reach the belt, but Gavyn’s eyes were wide and staring and he was holding the white dog in such a powerful grip that she was wheezing. I tried to pull his arms free, but he was astonishingly strong. Exasperated, I beastspoke Rasial to bite the boy. She blinked and then turned her head and nipped him hard. He gave a yelp of surprise and released her. She fell but landed on her paws on the side of a bench, then bounded to the back of a chair, by which time Dragon had freed Gavyn. The boy dropped to all fours and then gave a barking laugh of triumph, seeming to forget his rigid terror, if terror it had been. I bade the white dog get him out of the glide through the hold entrance we had used to enter and told Dragon we must go with them.

‘Ana ought to come too,’ she said, looking past me.

I nodded and turned to call out to Ana, but she shook her head and shouted, ‘Hendon said he calculated that we were going to land on the edge of it and topple in, based on the directions God had given the computermachine, which could not be changed. So he worked out how to use some sort of grapples to stop us and jam the glide in place. But they were not made to hold so much weight in such a position.’

‘Let’s go then!’ I cried, wondering why she was telling me this now.

‘Elspeth, listen to me,’ Ana called tersely. ‘Hendon says the weight of the glide will dislodge us in about twenty minutes.’

‘Ye gods,’ I gasped. ‘We will have to manage it.’

‘Yes, but Hendon can’t release himself from the control bench because it was damaged by the crash. There is a lever I can use to free him but the moment he gets loose, the grapples will retract and the glide will topple into the crevasse. You need to get everyone out before I release the lever. You can farseek me when everyone is clear. There will just be time enough for Hendon to get out, he says.’

‘It is too risky! What if you can’t get out fast enough?’

Ana gave me an incredulous look. ‘We can’t leave Hendon to die!’

‘Ana, Hendon is a machine. He can’t die! But if you stay to release him,
you
might.’ She opened her mouth but I forestalled whatever she would say harshly. ‘I have a quest that demands my life. You pledged yours to it. Would you be foresworn?’

She followed wordlessly when I began to climb up to the hold entrance.

All was chaos in the hold. Supplies were trapped in netting but a good deal of it had been slashed, presumably to free the horses. The hold door lay open so that, incredibly it seemed, I could see the stars overhead. The air was astonishingly hot, given that it was night, and I realised the glide had protected us from any notion of the weather outside, for it produced its own weather, adjusted for our comfort. Swallow’s dark face and bare chest glistened with sweat as he gave Ana a leg up and told me with some asperity that he had laid some matting that would give the horses’ hoofs purchase on the slippery hull, but Gahltha had refused to leave without me, and that the other horses would not leave without
him
.

I turned in dismay to see the horses standing together on the stepped roof, Gahltha at their head, barely visible in the darkness of the hold.

Swallow went on, ‘The wolves and dogs are out, and Dragon and Dameon are outside standing on the bottom of the glide. We have been getting out as many of the supplies as we can while we waited for you.’

I bit back a curse. ‘Forget the supplies – they are no use to us if we are dead,’ I said. ‘Hendon says the glide is going to fall into the rift any minute.’

Swallow looked momentarily aghast, but to my relief he wasted no time on demands for information. He waved a hand to the horses, telling me to deal with them. He would get the supplies piled on the hull out of the way. Then he shouted out to Dameon and Dragon to get back, that he was coming up.

Stripping down to my undershirt, I climbed up myself to look at the length of hull the horses would have to negotiate and the gap they would have to leap to reach solid ground, and then I climbed back into the hull, shifted the boxes the others had used to climb up as I showed the horses a vision of what I had seen. Then, checking the others had got to solid ground, I stood back against the wall so that Gahltha could get as much of a run up as possible in the limited space.

My heart climbed into my mouth as the black horse leapt forward, bunched his powerful haunches and then jumped, clearing the hold in one magnificent arching leap. There was the muffled metallic thud of hoofs on the hull, and then, after a heart-stopping moment, the sound of hoofs thudding on good hard earth. Hearing the others cry out jubilantly, I breathed a sigh of relief myself, and turned to Sendari.

The grey horse was older and stocky but also, as he had once told me, very strong. He, too, galloped at the wall and then leapt out of the hold. Again I heard the muffled gong of hoofs on the padded hull and then, after a silence, the sound of cantering hooves on the earth.

I turned at last to Faraf. She was small and, as I had feared, when she took her turn she could not leap high enough and crashed to the hull, slipping sideways before managing to gain her footing on the sloping surface. I laid down more matting and bade her try again, sweat trickling down my back. She tried but shied away from the leap at the last minute. I saw in her mind that fear had begun to exaggerate the height of the leap and the smallness of the hold opening.

‘It is too high,’ she beastspoke me despairingly.

Rather than try to convince her, I laid down a ramp of boxes as best I could, to give her extra height, but more to help her negotiate the barrier of fear that had risen up in her mind. At the same time, I noticed the stone sword hanging from the webbing where I had left it. I freed it and hooked its harness over my shoulder as I stood against the wall. But Faraf was trembling and reluctant to try again. I beastspoke Gahltha who gave a shrill and imperious whinnying scream. The little mare shivered all over, flared her nostrils then bolted at the ramp, leapt up to it and flew lightly and gracefully out into the star-speckled darkness.

‘Ye gods,’ I gasped in relief, hearing her reach the ground, and using the ramp to climb out, I stood up and ran along the hull to leap across the gap to the edge of the rift. Even as I reached solid ground, the glide gave an ominous creak and I heard a shower of stones fall into the abyss. Swallow had caught hold of me, but once he had steadied me, he turned to Ana who had moved to the edge of the rift, her expression woebegone.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘We are all safe. The supplies . . .’

‘I don’t care about the supplies,’ she snapped. ‘It is Hendon! He can’t get free without releasing the grapples, and when he does, the glide will fall into the crevasse.’

‘Not immediately,’ Swallow tried to reassure her. ‘The glide is still jammed pretty tightly in place. I reckon it will last a good five minutes after the grapples go, and he is very quick.’

‘But he can’t get free!’ Ana cried, giving me an accusing look even as the glide let out a metallic groan. Then her expression changed, hardening into mutinous determination. ‘He saved us, and I will not leave him,’ she declared, and leapt into the chasm. Even as she landed, surefooted on the hull, the vessel slipped sideways, and she stumbled and fell, or would have done, had not the mat we had laid down given her purchase. Flinging out a desperate arm, she caught at the edge of the hold and dragged herself towards it.

‘Ana!’ Swallow bellowed, lurching closer to the edge, clearly intending to jump after her, but even as she hauled herself into the hold, the glide rolled further sideways so that the opening was no longer accessible from the top. The mat fell, coiling heavily into the swallowing darkness even as Ana vanished into the vessel.

‘No!’ Swallow said hoarsely.

Ten long, fraught, helpless minutes later, we heard a grinding crunch and then the grapples slackened and retracted. The glide remained in place for a long moment, then the weight began to tell and the nose slipped until the glide fell down into the chasm.

‘Ana!’ Swallow groaned, and dimly I heard the wolves howling. Then, dreadful long moments later, we heard a distant crunching crash and the grinding shriek of tearing metal. There was a muffled explosion and we saw a gout of flame far below. Then there was nothing further but the sound of a little shower of stones falling from the broken rim of the crevasse. Swallow dropped to his knees and peered into the chasm.

‘Swallow, don’t,’ I said, shocked and grief-stricken, but worrying he would launch himself into the darkness after her.

But he made a chopping movement with his hand and snarled, ‘Be silent!’

I looked at him in pity and sorrow. ‘Swallow, my dear, no one could survive that fall . . .’

‘Listen!’ Swallow roared.

I tried to think what to say, then stiffened, for it seemed to me that I
could
hear something from the chasm: a voice. Heart hammering, I dropped to my knees beside Swallow and leaned over the edge of the chasm to listen. I could hear nothing now, but I shaped a probe to Ana’s mind and sent it striving down into the dark. Then I looked back at Swallow who was watching me intensely, desperate hope in his eyes.

‘You are right,’ I said, laughing incredulously. ‘It
is
her. She is alive!

‘When she released Hendon he simply threw her over his shoulder, ran for the opening in the roof of the glide and leaped out even as the glide began to fall,’ I said, incredulously relaying to the others what Ana was telling me. ‘Ana says he leapt at the wall and simply punched his fists into the stone and hung there as the glide fell past them.’

Swallow still looked haggard with shock and fright, and he gave a ragged gasp as Dameon came to him and laid a big gentle hand on his back. Despite the heat, the empath looked calm and cool. I had no idea whether he was empathising calm or sharing in the gypsy’s reactions, but the sight of them both, together, brought me to tears. In truth it was some moments before any of us could begin to be coherent, and it was Swallow who recovered first, lurching to his feet and calling himself a fool.

‘What we need is
rope
, not tears!’ he growled.

I caught his arm as he would have rushed by me. ‘There is no need. Ana told me Hendon is climbing up the wall, gouging out foot and hand holds as he goes.’

‘Is he now?’ Swallow laughed again, a wild and giddy sound. As he swung back to the chasm and looked down into the darkness he shouted, ‘Bring her to me, Hendon, and henceforth we will be friends, for whether you be machine or no, you are a hero.’

We stood there, staring down, waiting.

Rasial beastspoke me in her cool, hard mindvoice to say that the wolves wanted to know what had happened to Ana, for they regarded her as pack. I had guessed as much, but it was still a shock to hear it said outright. I beastspoke Gobor and told him as best I could, though he could not seem to grasp that a glarsh had saved Ana of its own free will. Indeed I heard him tell the pack she had commanded it to save her. And maybe she had, for how could the androne save her of its own accord? Unless it had merely been obeying its instructions from God to take care of us.

What was more astonishing, maybe, was that Ana had risked herself for the androne, as if it were a living creature and not a machine built around a mass of orders devised by its human makers.

At last the androne appeared, Ana clinging, one armed and beaming, around its neck. The other arm hung loose, and she winced as Swallow helped her down and gathered her into a passionate and unrestrained embrace, kissing her and scolding her all at once. The wolves seethed about them, nuzzling at her and whining, and I noticed that Darga never left her side.

‘It really is
red
,’ murmured Ana, scooping up a handful of the powdery dust. The sun had not long risen over the arid red land, where shadows lay purple and heavy in the heat, and I wondered how much hotter it would get before the day was out, and us with only one watermaking device.

Swallow was trying to bandage the wrist Ana had sprained when she fell leaping to the hull, and he growled at her to be still. She smiled at him, and as she reached forward to kiss him, she opened her hand to let the wind carry the rusty earth off in a little coil.

I stood and surveyed the land again in a slow circle. I had been trying to decide which direction to take ever since the wolves had vanished before sunrise, presumably to escape the sunlight in one of the rifts that seemed to break the ground every few steps. Most were little more than cracks, but there were some wider fissures, though none nearby as great as the one into which the glide had fallen.

Before the Brildane departed, Gobor had beastspoken me to say succinctly they would follow me in the darkness. When I told the others this, Dameon suggested we wait until sun set. That would give us time to sort out the supplies we had managed to save, and allow me to think on which way we ought to go. Besides all else, it would be better to travel at night, given the heat, for it was like to get a good deal hotter as the sun rose higher. Certainly the moon would provide just enough light to see by, but the wolves were unlikely to follow until it had set.

I had been glad to put off making the decision. Ana began sorting the supplies, sighing over things left in Northport and now lost in the glide crash, after all the trouble she had taken to find and collect them. Dragon helped her because of her arm, and after a little, Ana concluded that we had food enough for a sevenday, if it was rationed – more if we could forage. Water was like to be a problem if we did not find some clean natural sources, because we had only the one waterbox, which Ana had carried in her own pack. She had found a second, but it was cracked and we were unsure if it would work. She especially lamented that they had thrown out only one bale of the fodder God had produced for the horses, having sent Unit A into Habitat to get it after Ana explained what was needed. But there was a large sun awning, which I asked Hendon to set up to give us some protection.

In truth, I was grateful that we had managed to save anything, but a good deal more than grateful to have the stone sword, the memory seed and Cassandra’s keys. Yet I regretted the loss of my pack with my few clothes and treasures in it, left in the glide along with Hannah’s few possessions and Kelver Rhonin’s papers. At least Ana and Dragon had their packs, which meant I could borrow some of their things at need.

Swallow set about dividing the supplies into three small bundles for the horses to carry, then he and Ana went for a walk along the rift, ostensibly to see how far it ran, since we would have to cross it if I decided we were to go west. Dameon said softly that they needed time alone, for Swallow had been shattered by the possibility of Ana’s death, whether it showed or not, and only she could salve that hurt.

After they had gone out of sight, Gavyn seemed to be inspired and retrieving his pouch, he set off along the rift in the other direction with Rasial, who swore to keep him safe and bring him back before dusk. Fey was left atop the bale of horse fodder, sleeping. Dragon told me that Gavyn had scooped her from her niche when he was leaving the large glide chamber and had put her into his forage pouch. Incredibly, she had been unharmed by the landing and the escape from the glide, and seemed not even to have wakened!

The horses had galloped off soon after we landed for the sheer pleasure of having their hoofs on the ground and being able to run, but they returned an hour later on the other side of the rift to nibble on some sort of lichen they found growing more abundantly along the inside edge of the chasm, rumps turned unanimously to the slight breeze that had begun to blow. I offered them the fodder from the glide, but Gahltha said they should save it until there was nothing else to graze on. When I told the others, Dameon said he doubted that would take long, for this land did not sound as if it would have much to offer any of us. It was not entirely devoid of plants, I told him, but most of the vegetation seemed to be mats of various kinds of the red-brown lichen that seemed to do little more than bind the soil and gravel. The wonder of it was that the horses could find even minimal nourishment from it.

It was early afternoon when it occurred to me to ask Hendon to climb down into the crevasse to see if he could salvage any of the glide’s cargo. I doubted anything had survived the fiery explosion we had seen, but when questioned by Ana on this count, for she and Swallow had returned by then, the androne had said the hull of the glide was unlikely to have been more than partly crushed by the fall. As for the explosion, that had almost certainly been the engine and power cell, which were fixed outside the hull, which was especially designed to direct destruction outward, away from passengers and cargo, should an explosion occur. I did not understand half of her explanation, and indeed I was glad she had not imparted this information earlier, when we were aboard the glide.

Ana eagerly bade Hendon go down and see if anything could be salvaged.

‘Yes, Technician Ana,’ Hendon responded in its unchanging, pleasant voice.

‘I
really
wish he would simply call me Ana, but it is always Technician Ana,’ she said in exasperation, when the androne had vanished into the rift.

‘It calls you what its program bids it call you,’ I said mildly, wondering why it so grated on my nerves that she insisted on treating the machine man as if it was a live thing. I had already accepted that this was part of why she communicated so well with it. Maybe it had been her readiness to risk her life and my quest for it that angered me, although my irritation was of longer standing than that.

Swallow, standing at the edge of the rift, began to pay out the rope he had looped over his shoulder, as the androne descended. The plan was that Hendon would create a net from the slashed webbing in the hold, then pile into it the water devices and anything else salvageable, and attach it to the rope, which Swallow would then haul up to the surface.

But the androne soon returned to say the glide had been buried under the rocks that had showered down in the wake of its fall, burying it. It would take many hours of labour to shift enough rubble to get to one of its entrances.

‘Begin then, Hendon,’ I said, for if it could find more water devices, it would be well worth a delay. Besides all else, I had not yet come to a decision about the direction we would take. It was hard to think at all, partly because of the heat, and partly because my mind still felt somewhat numbed by the shock of the landing and its dramatic aftermath.

Ana frowned, watching Swallow secure the end of the rope as Hendon vanished into the chasm again, and then she looked and me and said, ‘You should not speak to Hendon as if he were a servant or a slave.’

I bit back a fractious retort, realising that being rescued by the androne had exacerbated her attachment to the machine man. I looked at Swallow, hoping he would be the voice of reason, but he was frowning at me disapprovingly as well. I gave up, deciding it was too close to the androne’s seeming heroics to argue that these had been no more than the acts of a machine obeying its maker’s commands. In truth, we were all on edge after the sudden end to the long, strange and wondrous glide flight, which was already beginning to feel like a dream.

I asked Ana for the map, which she had brought out, and pored over it for a time, thinking that the land we had come to looked immense.

Of course we had known from the start that the directions God had given the androne were likely flawed because they were based on the Beforetime location of Eden. The fact that we had landed where Eden was supposed to have been in the Beforetime, but there was no sign of any settlement in any direction, suggested the map was out by a great deal. And although I had dismissed Ana’s comments about the large golator failing to locate Kelver Rhonin’s wrist golator, it was another indication that we were far from Eden. And Eden had not been our final destination. Even Swallow with his sharp eyes had been unable to detect a thing in any direction, and given that the land was untainted, it could not be that Eden had been obliterated by some weapon.

I had already scried out the terrain, but my farseeking probe found nothing save one area directly west, afflicted with an interference that might be taint. I tried again, and this time, when I came to the interference, I tried to probe beyond it, but found only more interference. This extended left and right, but when I questioned Hendon, the androne insisted that the land was untainted. I looked at the map and decided it could only be that my probe had reached the sea, for water usually created a barrier of interference.

I thought about the shore we had passed over after crossing what must surely be the Andol Sea and reasoned that since it had been a good way further north than the map had suggested, perhaps Eden simply lay further north as well. That had been the direction we had been travelling in just before the glide set down. Maybe the answer to which direction we should take was simply that we should continue north.

I explained my reasoning to the others, and they agreed it seemed the most logical course in the absence of better guidance, but Dragon said, ‘I think we should go west first, to the shore, and then make our way north.

‘I did not farseek any settlement,’ I told her gently, knowing she thought of Redport.

‘It might be that it is too close to the sea, and because water runs through all the streets,’ she said, glaring at me. ‘You ought to be sure the clue you seek is not in Redport before you go elsewhere. It would be mad to get to Sentinel and find you did not have what you needed because you had bypassed Redport. Besides, it might be that there are clear directions to Sentinel for you there.’

Her words were persuasive, for all I suspected that she was ruled by a growing desire to return to Redport and fulfil the prophecy that would allow her people to free themselves from the Gadfian invaders. It was not dishonourable that my quest was not her first priority for she had not sworn herself to it, and was their queen. Indeed it might be said that my quest had made ruthless use of her. It had certainly prevented her from coming to her land as soon as she might have done had she gone on the ships as planned. And I
had
originally been convinced that she and I were meant to go to Redport together. It suddenly struck me that the only reason I had come to think otherwise, was because instead of journeying with the four ships to the Red Land, we had been drawn inland on a course that seemed to make it impossible that the Red Land could be our final destination.