“You’re going to be all right, Hallie,” Dalacott said as he knelt again by the couch. He used the edge of a coverlet to dab perspiration from the boy’s face and was dismayed to find that he could actually feel heat radiating from the beaded skin. Hallie gazed up at him mutely, and his lips quivered as he tried to smile. Dalacott noticed that the Ballinnian ptertha stick was lying on the couch. He picked it up and pressed it into Hallie’s hand, closing the boy’s nerveless fingers around the polished wood, then kissed him on the forehead. He prolonged the kiss, as though trying to siphon the consuming pyrexia into his own body, and only slowly became aware of two odd facts — that Conna was taking too long to return with the doctor, and that a woman was screaming in another part of the house.
“I’ll come back to you in just a moment, soldier,” he said. He stood up, tranced, made his way back to the dining room and saw that the guests were gathered around a man who was lying on the floor.
The man was Gehate: — and from his fevered complexion and the feeble pawing of his hands it was evident that he was in an advanced stage of pterthacosis. While he was waiting for the airship to be untethered, Dalacott slipped his hand into a pocket and located the curious nameless object he had found decades earlier on the banks of the Bes-Undar. His thumb worked in a circular pattern over the nugget’s reflective surface, polished smooth by many years of similar frictions, as he tried to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened in the past nine days. The bare statistics conveyed little of the anguish which was withering his spirit.
Hallie had died before the end of the littlenight of his coming of age. Gehate and Ondobirtre had succumbed to the terrifying new form of pterthacosis by the end of that day, and on the following morning he had found Hallie’s mother dead of the same cause in her room. That had been his first indication that the disease was contagious, and the implications had still been reverberating in his head when news had come of the fate of those who had been present at the celebration.
Of some forty men, women and children who had been in the villa, no fewer than thirty-two — including all the children — had been swept away during the same night. And still the tide of death had not expended its fell energies. The population of the hamlet of Klinterden and surrounding district had been reduced from approximately three-hundred to a mere sixty within three days. At that point the invisible killer had appeared to lose its virulence, and the burials had begun.
The airship’s gondola lurched and swayed a little as it was freed from its constraints. Dalacott moved closer to a port hole and, for what he knew would be the last time, looked down on the familiar pattern of red-roofed dwellings, orchards and striated fields of grain. Its placid appearance masked the profound changes which had taken place, just as his own unaltered physical aspect disguised the fact that in nine days he had grown old.
The feeling — the drear apathy, the failure of optimism — was new to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying it because, for the first time ever, he could see cause to envy the dead.
PART II
The Proving Flight
Chapter 6
The Weapons Research Station was in the south-western outskirts of Ro-Atabri, in the old manufacturing district of Mardavan Quays. The area was low-lying, drained by a hesitant and polluted watercourse which discharged into the Borann below the city. Centuries of industrial usage had rendered the soil of Mardavan Quays sterile in some places, while in others there were great stands of wrongly-coloured vegetation nourished by unknown seepings and secretions, products of ancient cesspools and spoilheaps. Factories and storage buildings were copiously scattered on the landscape, linked by deep-rutted tracks, and half-hidden among them were groups of shabby dwellings from whose windows light rarely shone.
The Research Station did not look out of place in its surroundings, being a collection of nondescript workshops, sheds and shabby single-storey offices. Even the station chiefs office was so grimy that the typical Kolcorronian diamond patterns of its brickwork were almost totally obscured.
Toller Maraquine found the station a deeply depressing place in which to work. Looking back to the time of his appointment, he could see that he had been childishly nai’ve in his visualisation of a weapons research establishment. He had anticipated perhaps a breezy sward with swordsmen busy testing new types of blades, or archers meticulously assessing the performance of laminated bows and novel patterns of arrowheads.
On arrival at the Quays it had taken him only a few hours to learn that there was very little genuine research on weapons being carried out under Borreat Hargeth. The name of the section disguised the fact that most of its funds were spent on trying to develop materials which could be substituted for brakka in the manufacture of gears and other machine components. Toller’s work mainly consisted of mixing various fibres and powders with various types of resin and using the composite to cast various shapes of test specimens. He disliked the choking smell of the resins and the repetitious nature of the task, especially as his instincts told him the project was a waste of time. None of the composite materials the station produced compared well with brakka, the hardest and most durable substance on the planet — and if nature had been obliging enough to supply an ideal material what was the point in searching for another?
Apart from the occasional grumble to Hargeth, however, Toller worked steadily and conscientiously, determined to prove to his brother that he was a responsible member of the family. His marriage to Fera also had something to do with his newfound steadiness, which was an unexpected benefit from an arrangement he had plunged into for the sole purpose of confounding his brother’s wife. He had offered Fera the fourth grade — temporary, non-exclusive, terminable by the man at any time — but she had had the nerve to hold out for third grade status, which was binding on him for six years.
That had been more than fifty days ago, and Toller had hoped that by this time Gesalla would have softened in her attitude to both him and Fera, but if anything the triangular relationship had deteriorated. Irritant factors were Fera’s monumental appetite and her capacity for indolence, both of which were an affront to the primly sedulous Gesalla, but Toller was unable to chastise his wife for refusing to amend her ways. She was claiming her right to be the person she had always been, regardless of whom she displeased, just as he was claiming the right to reside in the Maraquine family home. Gesalla was ever on the look-out for a pretext on which to have him dismissed from the Square House, and it was sheer stubbornness on his part which kept him from finding accommodation elsewhere.
Toller was pondering on his domestic situation one foreday, wondering how long the uneasy balance could be maintained, when he saw Hargeth coming into the shed where he was weighing out chopped glass fibres. Hargeth was a lean fidgety man in his early fifties and everything about him — nose, chin, ears, elbows, shoulders — seemed to be sharp-cornered. Today he appeared more restless than usual.
“Come with me, Toller,” he said. “We have need of those muscles of yours.”
Toller put his scoop aside. “What do you want me to do?”
“You’re always complaining about not being able to work on engines of war — and now is your opportunity.” Hargeth led the way to a small portable crane which had been erected on a patch of ground between two workshops. It was of conventional rafter wood construction except that the gear wheels, which would have been brakka in an ordinary crane, had been cast in a greyish composite produced by the research station.