“His statement,” she said. “Show it to me again.”
The lieutenant handed her an important piece of paper.
The trees just begun falling when an old woman in the dispatch office announced that one very suspicious man once stood at her counter. Was it twenty days ago, or thirty? She described the suspect to her colleagues. They didn’t remember him. She claimed that they weren’t paying attention to their jobs, and why didn’t anyone else see that he was evil? But the woman had developed a sloppy memory, the sort of mind where yesterday was lost while the deep past was vivid and close. There might have been a suspicious visitor once. Who knew? But the woman was close to retirement, and her colleagues liked her well enough to help her search the recent files, and that’s why the recent permission form was discovered—a thoroughly routine document allowing one survey team and one airship to fly through the highest, darkest reaches of the forest, coring out samples of the living trees to determine their health. That was a routine project. But the flight was happening ahead of the published schedule, and the airship wasn’t only several times larger than necessary, but it was last stationed in the wilderness, working for foresters living on the brink of papio air.
The prisoner’s signature lay at the bottom of that form.
The barefoot man confessed to writing his name on the appropriate line. How could he deny it? But he also claimed no special knowledge or evil design. The form was a duty. As a member of the Archon’s staff, his duty was to tend to hundreds of forms that slid over his desk every day. Making official business happen: that was what he did, and that’s all that he had ever done.
The prisoner was brought here and the interrogation commenced. Again, Prima read the bold words and studied the eerily neat signature. The confession didn’t take long, and it admitted to very little. The man was guilty of nothing but a rank principle, an ugly belief. This young man told his interrogator that the Diamond creature was no child, and it wasn’t human either. He claimed that the Archon and her government were coddling a soulless beast that was only pretending to be human, and as such, the corona’s spawn was even more dangerous and vile than the armored King.
Bealeen was the prisoner.
Her one-time aide had admitted to nothing but hatred, pure and rich.
About the surveying airship, he knew nothing. But Bealeen did mention that if he were given the chance and half a measure of courage, he would have done exactly what others had tried to do. On that ordinary stationary, he wrote that ten thousand dead was no great loss when the world and Creation were at stake, and he was proud. His loathing was majestic and it was just, and against some long odds, he had kept his thoughts hidden from foolish eyes.
The Archon put her fingers through the wires, watching her prisoner.
She didn’t know this man. This Bealeen was silent, eerily composed. He hadn’t made any noise since she arrived, his face damp from sweat but genuinely impassive—despite the arm hanging from the shoulder, out of joint, the collarbone presumably shattered.
It was the stare that she came to see. She studied those hard fixed eyes and the face carved from unfeeling wood, and the man’s silent rage. There was enough rage to spread thick across time, making the next twenty generations ache.
The one leaf had recovered, standing still in the blowing forest.
Prima dropped the confession, watching the useless page twist and curl on its way to the floor. And then to her lieutenant, she said, “He knows a lot more than we realize, I think.”
“Madam,” Sondaw said.
“I can see it in him,” she said.
The officer stared at the same face, seeing very little.
“There must be ways,” she said. “On a day like this, with so much at stake, we have to take every measure.”
Bealeen made a raw little sound.
“I am no expert,” Prima continued. “But I can’t help but notice that our suspect has that second arm, his writing arm, still sitting happy in its socket.”
In little places, where boughs and foliage made tangles, there lived pretty little creatures named whiffbirds. The papio aircraft was named after them. Like their namesake, the machine was ferociously hungry, able to fly only brief distances before gulping down more fuel. Diamond had read about them. He remembered a big book and the specific page. This whiffbird’s body was tilting, long bone propellers carrying it closer to the corona-hunter, and three papio soldiers filled its open hatch, guns pointed at the machine shop and the crew inside.
None of the crew moved now, everybody staring at the apparition. Diamond was staring. The soldiers were big papio, two women and a man. In the last moments their smiles had become something else, more toothy and much more serious. They wore identical uniforms, blotchy gray fabrics and tall boots and glass masks over their long-jawed faces. Rubber cords kept their bodies pinned to the cabin floor. Every soldier was shouting. They were shouting in a language they barely knew. Bountiful was still rising and the odd craft was keeping pace, propellers screaming in the air, and Father shouted something to someone—an order, maybe—as the whiffbird slipped around an overhanging limb and then moved closer, offering the harpooner one perfect shot.
The long spear leapt out of the barrel, out through the open air. The papio had no time to react. They screamed commands that couldn’t be heard over the roar of engines, and the world felt thick and slow, and Father was turning, turning fast and shouting, “Don’t fight don’t fight,” as one hand started to wave at his son.
The steel shaft plunged into the cabin. A fourth papio soldier was standing back from the hatches, and then he was gutted and dying, and the bright razor nose of the harpoon dug into the hull behind him, that jarring impact detonating a charge meant to kill one gigantic creature.
The whiffbird’s backside was shredded.
Diamond watched the force of the blast shove the doomed machine towards them. It seemed as if the whiffbird might get shoved against the airship’s body. But Bountiful kept rising while the other ship began to fall, its tail dropping fastest while the propeller on the nose tilted until it was nearly vertical.
That propeller had four blades of carefully shaped bone, mounted on a metal hub and spinning toward the opened doorway.
Merit was running for Diamond.
The boy knew what would happen. In perfect detail, he saw everybody being sliced apart. His legs made the decision. On instinct, in panic, he turned and started to run, maybe to do nothing but save himself. Except he couldn’t die, not this way, and that simple thought pushed away the ugly rest in what he was thinking.
Tar`ro had his pistol out.
Master Nissim was standing beside Tar’ro, reaching for the running boy. But the butcher’s hand had already missed.
Elata was standing with Seldom. They weren’t moving. His friends looked as if they were posing for a fancy picture, the kind of image taken with cameras and expensive chemicals, with sunlight focused on the children while tense invisible parents begged them to surrender their feelings and smile.
The propeller struck the open doorway and the rubberized floor, its hub shattering with a hard sharp crash. Each blade had been carved to cut at the air, and now every shard flew across the shop.
Diamond managed several full strides, arms outstretched.
Too late, his friends began reacting to the catastrophe.
The racket was enormous and much too complicated to decipher. The only good fortune was how the blades smashed into the floor and ceiling and back into the floor again, losing momentum. The ceiling was armored. The shop was built to contain accidental explosions. Bone and fancy alloyed metal exploded, and Diamond collided with Elata and grabbed Seldom, shoving them down hard on the floor as a bright white piece of corona spun through the air, perfectly aimed to cut off every head but too slow, missing all of them in the end.