“Pull in and try again,” Raen paid. The beta hit retract, waited, lips moving, hit the sequence again. Of a sudden the lights greened, the recalcitrant wings began to spread, and the betas cried aloud with joy.
“Get us down, blast you!” Raen shouted at them, and the ship angled, heart-dragging stress, every board flashing panic.
They hit a roughness of air, rumbling as if they were rolling over stone, but the lights started winking again to green.
“Shall we die?” an azi asked of his squad leader.
“It seems not yet,” squad-leader answered.
Raen fought laughter, that was hysteria, and she knew it. She clung to the armrest and listened to the static that filled her ear, stared with mad fixation on the hands of the terrified betas and on the screens.
Pol, she kept thinking, Pol, Pol, Pol, blast you, another lesson.
Or it was for him also, too late.
ix
“So it’s you,” Moth said, leaned back in her chair, wrapped in her robes. She stared up at Ros Hald, with Tand; and the Ren-barant, the Ilit. “It’s Halds, is it?”
“Council’s choice,” Ros Hald said.
Moth gave a twisted smile. She had seen the four vacant seats, action taken before she had even announced her intent. “Of course you are,” she said, and did not let much of the sarcasm through. “You’re welcome, very welcome beside me, Ros Hald. Tand, go find some of the staff. We should offer hospitality to my partner-in-rule.”
Tand went. Ros Hald kept watching her nervously. That amused her. “What,” she asked, “do you imagine I’ve let you be chosen . . . to arrange your assassination, to behead the opposition?”
Of course it occurred to him, to all of them. They would all be armed.
“But I was sincere,” she said. “I shall be turning more and more affairs into your hands.”
“Access,” he said, “to all records.”
You’ve managed that all along, she thought, smiling. Bastard!
“And,” he said, “to all levels of command, all the codes.”
She swept a hand at the room, the control panels, the records. The hand shook. She was perpetually amazed by her own body. She had been young—so very long; but flesh in this last age turned traitor, caused hands to shake, voice to tremble, joints to stiffen. She could not make a firm gesture, even now. “There,” she said.
And fired.
The Hald fell, the Ilit; the Ren-barant fired and burned her arm, and she burned him, to the heart. Tand appeared in the doorway, hung there, mouth open.
And died.
“Stupid,” she muttered, beginning then to feel the pain. The stench was terrible. She felt of her own arm, feeling damage; but the right one had not been the strong one, not for a long time.
Azi servants crept in finally. “Clear this out,” she said. Her jaw trembled. She closed the door when they had gone, and locked it. There was food secreted about, an old woman’s senile habit; there was wine, bottles of it; there was the comp centre.
She sat, rocking with the pain of her wound, smiling to herself without mirth.
x
The ground was coming up fast and the sir was full of burning. They broke through haze and came in over bleak land, desert. It was not what the display showed on the screen; the ship’s computer was fouled. The sweating betas laboured over the board, retaining control over the ship, jolting them with bursts of the braking engines. There was no knowing where they were; cloud and panic had obscured that. They might yet land.
And all at once a mountain wall loomed up in front of them, vast beyond reason.
“Blast!” Raen shouted. “Altitude, will you?”
“That’s the High Range,” one of the betas said. “The winds—the winds—the shuttle’s not built for it, Kontrin.”
“We’re on the way home, we’re over East, blast you: take us up and get over it!”
The deck slanted. They were launching themselves for what altitude they could gain for that sky-reaching ridge. A beta cursed softly, and wept. The High Range loomed up,
snow-crowned. Jagged peaks thrust up above the clouds which wreathed them. The mad thought came to Raen that if one must die, this was at least a thing worth seeing—that such a glorious thing existed, uncultivated by Kontrin, who hungered after new things: hers.