A tiny figure came out from the slayer’s ship.
Diamond moved when he shouldn’t, flipping and spinning before ending on his belly, gazing down at a great forest that had grown old inside one brief day. He wasn’t truly scared. This was so much easier than fighting his brother. But a dread had started to claim him. He contemplated falling for a very long time and then vanishing, maybe forever, and this shouldn’t happen, not in this way, and what shook him was the powerful sense that he was failing to meet some great old promise.
Silver disks moved above the demon floor. From high overhead, the coronas looked delicate and slow and lovely. They looked simple. Human eyes wouldn’t be able to count them in a glance, but Diamond could. He found sixty-one of the giants, and then he counted again, discovering five less. Then the largest individual changed shape, compressing its body as it turned, and once it was narrow like a spear, it dropped. It plunged. The demon floor absorbed the impact, and a splash of golden vapor welcomed the animal back into its world.
Seven more coronas followed while others continued to circle, not one of them working to climb this high. The fletch wasn’t calling to them anymore. The raging, insulting voice was finished. But three coronas had been threatening the airship. He hadn’t seen them. Were they gone too? And almost too late, Diamond rolled onto his back again.
The heat fell over him. It struck hard and there was a terrific wild irresistible motion. His flesh felt ready to burn as the creature passed just above him, no warning that it was close, and then it was past, and he felt its scorching body and the slipstream that rolled him and spun him and left him tumbling on a new course.
Feet down, he fell faster.
The corona was smaller than the one Father killed, and it was enormous, and graceful, and spectacularly alive. The great body was as fluid as it was solid, silver with glimmers of color washed away by sunlight. Diamond thought of umbrellas. He thought of certain mushrooms and wide bowls filled with sweet oils. A giant round mouth buried in the creature’s flatter side, surrounded by a tangle of necks sporting jaws and teeth and eyes. A jet of furnace air roared from that mouth. Then the jet quit. Sharp percussive blasts shook Creation. Bladders were made huge and empty in an instant, and the body was enlarged, swollen and buoyant, matching his pace of falling, the trailing necks and heads catching up to the body and flowing into it as the beast twisted around, deftly starting back toward him again.
That gaping central mouth swallowed air, compressing each breath, making its jets ready to fire again.
A brave pair of necks stretched far away from the body, supplying the eyes that stared at this tiny apparition, this human-like creature that fell from above perhaps to feed a great soul.
Diamond flattened again.
The corona fell a little ways beneath him before swelling more. Diamond flipped and flipped, trying to flee, but the vacuums balancing its weight. Infinitely more graceful, his companion deftly matched each of the boy’s desperate moves. A single neck extended, triple jaws opening and tongues emerging, and Diamond rolled and kicked, but a tongue touched his foot and pulled back and the head retreated a moment later.
The corona had wanted nothing but a taste.
In the roaring wind, a voice shouted.
Diamond didn’t understand words or guess directions. It was possible to believe that one of the corona’s heads had called to him—not the most incredible notion in a day filled with impossibilities.
“Leave me alone,” he shouted at the head. “Go away.”
Then a man screamed, telling someone, “Leave him alone.”
Father.
Diamond turned onto his back again. The fletch had pulled away from the airship, a final few glands still leaking purple. One of the two remaining coronas was clinging to the slayer’s ship, jaws biting into the skin and struts as the long necks twisted, wrenching free whatever was weakest.
Father plunged toward Diamond. His trajectory was close but wrong, and sweeping past the boy, he flattened out, arms and legs supporting fabric wings that rattled and popped as the wind swept past.
He waved, beckoning.
Diamond tipped his head and fell faster, and the corona fell beside both of them. A dozen heads studied them; none bit. Not yet. Diamond pulled closer but slipped past his father, and the man stretched and reached and touched a hand but couldn’t hold on. Then Merit changed the angle of his body and wrenched his old back far enough after that finally, after such a very long fall, he managed to collide with the little boy, sweeping him up with his arms.
Father was wearing a drop suit and a bulky pack, and around his waist was a wide leather belt. “The bottle on my belt,” he shouted. “Pull its plug.”
The rubber stopper was topped with a shiny ring. While his father held tight, Diamond yanked at the ring. A cold thin fluid exploded out into the wind. What was inside was sweet and thick and alien, and Diamond buried his nose in his father’s chest while the man kept clinging to him, as the corona got a first awful whiff.
Blistering air came from the mouth, and the giant fled.
Father laughed.
“I got you,” he said, congratulating both of them.
“What was in the bottle?” Diamond asked. “It stinks.”
“You can smell that?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a year’s worth of corona musk.” Then Father admitted, “I never met someone who can smell it.”
His unhuman son had to be moved to a better position. When they were facing the same direction, bellies down, they wrapped an extra belt around Diamond and fastened it and cinched it tight before Merit shouted, “Wings.”
Diamond clung to one arm. His father reached behind with his other arm, pulling a handle, and the big pack exploded into fabric and cord that leaped up behind him, catching the air.
There a staggering jerk, as if a hand caught them, and then the screaming air was gone and they were falling gently beneath a grand umbrella shaped like a wing. It was as if they had been pulled into another, more peaceful world. Diamond held the arm but didn’t need to, relaxed and happy even though he couldn’t imagine where they would touch down.
“Look,” Father said.
Up, he meant. Diamond threw back his head. The third corona was bigger than the first two combined, and it had deftly woven its necks across the ship’s bow, covering the bridge, assuring that the Archon’s cannons couldn’t fire at any part of it. Yet nothing about its actions looked violent or even mischievous. For all of the movement it made, the creature might have been resting.
“There’s a favorite old trick,” said Father. “Wait.”
The great airship was tilting. The bow was no longer buoyant enough to remain trim, and the corona added to the catastrophe by collapsing its bladders one after another, and blowing with its jet, nudging the bow lower still.
“The captain should know better,” Father said. “But he can’t imagine the monster being his master.”
Water and sawdust were falling free, lightening the load enough to bring the ship back where it should be.
And then with no warning, the corona let go of the Ruler, calmly falling away.
The airship’s bridge leapt up, dragging the great long body with it.
“And now the captain’s going to panic,” Father explained, his voice excited but also sorry. “But he can’t let too much out. In the afternoon air, with all the free oxygen, he’s inviting a fire.”
“What will happen?”
“The pride and heart of the tree-walker’s fleet is going to crash into the canopy, where it’ll be snagged and useless.”
“Will people get hurt?”
“I hope not. I didn’t want this. But I never imagined so much incompetence either.”
The catastrophe continued to unfold slowly and with great majesty, the Ruler driving into the thin, sun-blistered branches.
Then Father told him, “Look down.”