A drop of rain hit the windglass. Then another, and another.
‘Oh, that’s just great,’ Harkins complained. ‘That’s all I bloody needed.’
The Airbat, which was on the outside of the curve, with a better view down the gorge, suddenly pulled up hard. It gave Harkins a fraction of a second’s warning before he saw the danger himself: a diagonal arm of rock reaching across his path.
Instinct chose for him. He dived instead of climbing, plunging beneath the arm, where the river had tunnelled through it and left a precarious arch hung with straggling foliage. He blasted past it with a boom of thrusters, close enough to make the vines thrash.
He wasn’t allowed even a moment to recover. The gorge fractured again. Three routes to take, no time to decide, so he took the most obvious. He was flying too fast from trying to keep up with the Airbat, and as he climbed and banked out of his dive, he barely missed clipping the wall.
Keep it together! he told himself, as he plunged into a new gorge. He throttled back a little. If he so much as sneezed at this speed, he’d be dead before he opened his eyes again. The walls were even tighter here. The Firecrow rattled and shook, buffeted by the wind. At least the sound of the Airbat’s thrusters had faded: the Yort had taken a different route.
Then he saw what was coming, and his heart stopped. A rough, sheer wall, charging towards him. This gorge was a dead end. No wonder the Yort hadn’t followed.
No! Impossible! There were no dead ends on the map, he was sure of it!
Pull up now. Pull up, give up, before it’s too late!
He looked down through the nose-bubble of the Firecrow. There was a river down there! Where was the river going, if it was a dead end?
Then he saw. The wide, gaping dark. A massive tunnel, a rough and broken maw, swallowing the river.
‘Oh, no,’ he moaned to himself. ‘No, no, no.’
But the momentum of the race had taken over, and he was swept along with it. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d dumped aerium and was diving towards the tunnel. By the time his cowardice caught up, it was too late to climb out of the gorge, and he was committed.
‘Harkins, what in rot’s name are you doiiiing?’ he screamed, his high, thin voice lost in the titanic bellow of the river as it rushed up to meet him. He just had the presence of mind to hit the Firecrow’s bank of lights before the tunnel consumed him.
There was no space for thought any more. He was lost in the thunderous black. The river was mere metres below him, spray blasting up in great fins behind the Firecrow. The walls and ceiling, illuminated in cruel relief, waited to smash his fragile craft to flaming ruin. His lights lit up the tunnel in an arc, stone upon stone plunging towards and past him, and beyond that was a void. He flew into it, every muscle taut, a thin and constant squeal slipping unnoticed through his clenched teeth.
Then the void was filled with rock.
His reactions saved him again. His instincts knew what he had to do before his conscious mind had worked out what it was seeing. He put the Firecrow into a shallow dive, following the curve of the river as it went over a ridge and sloped down. The tunnel roof sloped down with it for a few dozen metres, then levelled. And there, ahead, was a tight arch of grey light, getting brighter and closer until suddenly Harkins was out, the world expanding around him, and he was in a spacious gorge hung with pennants bearing the number ‘3’.
He laughed wildly as he turned into the gorge. Behind him, the river burst from the tunnel mouth and plunged a hundred metres to join another river at the floor of the gorge. It was raining in earnest now, splattering across the hood of his cockpit, but Harkins didn’t care. He felt invincible. He’d reached a pitch of fear that was indistinguishable from mania.
The span between the third and fourth markers was wide and curved, and a great relief to Harkins. At first he suspected some kind of trick, but then he realised that a long, open stretch would be perfect for the second lap, when the pilots would be using their guns. He also realised, when he saw Sleed coming up behind him in his Nimbus, that he was ahead of the pack. The tunnel had been a considerable shortcut.
He passed a ravine on his left, a narrow slash in the land. Glancing at his map, he saw that it cut across the curve he was flying on, and came out directly at the fourth marker. It was another big shortcut, if anyone was crazy enough to take it, but it was barely ten metres wide.
The chasing pack had caught him up, and Sleed was back in front, by the time they passed the fourth marker. The sky had darkened, and rain slid off the hood of the cockpit, driven away by the Firecrow’s speed.
The final stretch was the worst.
The gorge had evidently collapsed at some point in the distant past, then been bored through by the river. The floor rose up by steep, uneven steps in a jumble of stone and waterfalls. Precarious stone bridges soared overhead. Crooked pillars leaned against bulky protrusions of stone. The water found its way through everywhere, joining and dividing, gushing through tiny gaps and leaping off cliffs. Thick foliage hung wherever it could get purchase. It was an upward-sloping obstacle course to the finish, shrouded in a thin water mist.
Harkins airbraked off the straight and took the rise as fast as he dared. The mesh of rock bridges near the top of the gorge made it easier to stay low and cut through the pillars. He weaved left and right, climbing all the time, the Firecrow responding eagerly to every twitch of the flight stick. Huge formations of stone flashed past him with a whumph of air. The mist and rain made it impossible to make out detail, but he saw shapes, and that was enough.
Up and over a spidery limb of rock; shooting beneath a ragged arch; rolling his wings to vertical as he screeched past a pillar. Ahead of him, a dirty cough of flame. Another flyer down. Five left, including himself. Harkins scarcely noticed. All he knew was the sound of engines and the sheer panic of the moment.
He burst out on to the straight in third place. Sleen was in front, the fat man in the Blackbird hard on his tail. Harkins was panting and laughing at the same time. It felt like he was losing his mind. The stress of it all was unbearable, and yet somehow he was still flying, and he took a savage joy in that as the starting line approached, and with it the second and final lap. He could see the crowd gathered along the edge of the gorge, hands raised as they cheered.
It seemed impossible that he’d made it this far. And now he had to do it again. This time with guns.
‘Harkins!’ It was the Cap’n, through the earcuff. ‘I can see you. Thank spit you’re alright. Listen, Harkins, there’s been a development. I reckon Crickslint’s gonna stiff us. Pull out. Take the disqualification. Don’t risk yourself on my account.’
‘Oh, er…’ he said. ‘I think I’ll finish if you don’t mind. I think I can win this.’ It sounded like someone else’s voice coming from his mouth.
‘Harkins!’ Now it was Jez. ‘There’s no point. He doesn’t think Crickslint’s going to give us the relic even if you do win!’
‘Still,’ said Harkins.
‘Harkins! Pull out! That’s an order from your captain, you hear?’ Frey barked.
‘Yes, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘I hear you.’ And he pulled off the earcuff and threw it in the footwell of the cockpit.
The finish line came flying towards him. Htowootwele squared his shoulders and hunkered forward. The rain redoubled in fury, and thunder detonated overhead.
‘I can win this,’ he said to himself. He flashed across the starting line and opened up with his guns.
Sixteen
Harkins abandoned himself to the race. He didn’t know what he was thinking – everything was moving too fast to stop and consider it – so he did what he felt. And what he felt was that he wanted to beat these other pilots. He was fiercely, angrily determined to beat them. Every humiliation that had been piled upon him – and he’d had a lifetime’s worth – he blamed on each and every one of those men. He was so sick of being pathetic.