The missing skyship was the one in which the King was flying.
There was nothing very unusual about that — Kedalse was an ultra-cautious pilot who liked to slow his descent at night, preferring to keep the other ships a little below him where he could easily monitor their positions — but this time he was not even visible in the upper sweeps of the sky.
Toller swiftly lifted Setwan and had just placed him in the passenger compartment with his family when he heard frantic shouts from Zavotle and Amber. He glanced towards them and saw that they were pointing at something above his ship, and in the same moment a gust of hot miglign gas came belching down out of the balloon mouth, bringing a startled whimper from one of the children. Toller looked up into the glowing dome of the balloon and his heart quaked as he saw the square silhouette of a gondola impressed upon it, distorting the spider-web geometries of the load tapes.
The King’s ship was directly above him and had come down hard on his own balloon.
Toller could see the circular imprint of the other ship’s jet nozzle digging into the crown of the envelope, endangering the integrity of the rip panel. There was a chorus of creaks from the rigging and from the acceleration struts, and a rippling distortion of the balloon fabric expelled more choking gas down into the gondola.
“Kedalse,” he shouted, not knowing if his voice would be heard in the upper gondola. “Lift your ship! Lift your ship!”
The faint voices of Zavotle and Amber joined with his own, and a sunwriter began to flash from one of their gondolas, but there was no response from above. The King’s ship continued to bear down on the overloaded balloon, threatening to burst or collapse it.
Toller glanced helplessly at Gesalla and Chakkell, who had risen to their feet and were staring at him in open-mouthed dread. The best explanation he could think of for the crisis was that the King’s pilot had been overcome by illness and was unconscious or dead at the controls. If that were the case somebody else in the upper gondola might begin firing the burner and separate the two craft, but it would need to be done very soon. And there was also the possibility — Toller’s mouth went dry at the thought — that the burner had failed in some way and could not be fired.
He strove to force his brain into action as the deck swayed beneath his feet and the fabric of the balloon emitted sounds like the cracking of a whip. The pair of ships had already begun to lose height too quickly, as was evidenced by the fact that the other two visible ships had acquired a relative upward movement.
Leddravohr had appeared at the rail of his own gondola, for the first time since the take-off, and behind him Zavotle was still emitting futile blinks of brilliance from his sunwriter.
It was impossible for Toller to get away from the King’s ship by increasing his own rate of descent. His craft had already lost gas and was coming perilously near the condition in which the air pressures of an excessive fall-speed could collapse the balloon, initiating a thousand-mile drop to the surface of Overland.
In fact, there was an urgent requirement to fire large quantities of hot gas into the balloon — but doing so, with the extra load imposed from above, was to risk increasing the internal pressure so much that the envelope would simply tear itself apart.
Toller locked eyes with Gesalla, and the imperative was born in his mind: I choose to live!
He twisted his way into the seat at the pilot’s station and fired the burner in a long thunderous blast, engorging the hungry balloon with hot gas, and a few seconds later he pushed the lever of an attitude-control jet. The jet’s exhaust was lost in the engulfing roar of the burner, but its effect was not diminished.
The other two members of the royal flight drifted downwards and out of sight as Toller’s ship rotated around its centre of gravity. There came a series of low-pitched inhuman groans and shudders as the King’s ship slid down the side of Toller’s balloon and came into view above him. One of its acceleration struts tore free of its lower attachment point and began wandering and circling in the air like a duellist’s sword.
As Toller watched, frozen into his own continuum, the sluggish movements so characteristic of skyships abruptly accelerated. The other gondola drew level with him and the free end of the strut came blindly stabbing down into the galley compartment of Toller’s ship, imparting a dangerous tilt to the universe. The shock of the impact raced back along the strut and its upper end gouged into the other balloon.
A seam ripped apart — and the balloon died.
It collapsed inwards, writhing in a perfect simulation of agony, and now the King’s ship was falling unchecked. The leverage it exerted through the strut turned Toller’s gondola on its side and Overland flashed into view, eager and expectant. Gesalla screamed as she fell against the lowermost wall and the looking-glass she had been holding spun out into the blue emptiness. Toller threw himself into the galley, risking going over the side in the process, gripped the end of the strut and — summoning all the power of his warrior’s physique — raised it and cast it free.
As the gondola righted itself he clung to the rail and watched the other ship begin its lethal plunge. At the height of a thousand miles gravity was at less than half strength and the tempo of events had again lapsed into dreamlike slow motion. He saw King Prad swim to the side of the falling gondola. The King, his blind eye shining like a star, raised one hand and pointed at Toller, then he was hidden from view by the swirls of his ship’s ruined balloon. Gaining speed as it settled into the fall, still seeking a balance between gravitation and air resistance, the ship dwindled to become a fluttering speck at the limits of vision, and finally was lost in the fractal patterns of Overland.
Becoming aware of a fierce psychic pressure, Toller raised his head and looked at the two accompanying ships. Leddravohr was gazing at him from the nearer, and as their eyes met he extended both arms towards Toller, like a man calling a loved one to his embrace. He remained like that, mutely imploring, and even when Toller had returned to the burner he could almost feel the prince’s hatred as an invisible blade knifing through his soul. A grey-faced Chakkell was gazing at him from the entrance to the passenger compartment, inside which Daseene and Corba were quietly sobbing.
“This is a bad day,” Chakkell said in a halting voice. “The King is dead.”
Not yet, Toller thought. He still has quite a few hours to go. Aloud he said, “You saw what happened. We’re lucky to be here. I had no choice.”
“Leddravohr won’t see it like that.”
“No,” Toller said pensively. “Leddravohr won’t see it like that.” That night, while Toller was vainly trying to sleep, Gesalla came to his side, and in the loneliness of the hour it seemed perfectly natural for him to put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder and brought her mouth close to his ear.
“Toller,” she whispered, “what are you thinking about?”
He considered lying to her, then decided he had had enough of barriers. “I’m thinking about Leddravohr. It all has to be settled between us.”
“Perhaps he will have thought the thing through by the time we reach Overland and will be of a different mind. I mean, it wasn’t even as if sacrificing us would have saved the King. Leddravohr is bound to admit that you had no choice.”
“I may have felt I had no choice, but Leddravohr will say I acted too quickly in rolling us out from under his father’s ship. Perhaps I would say the same thing if the positions were reversed. If I had waited a little longer Kedalse or somebody else might have got their burner going.”
“You mustn’t think that way,” Gesalla said softly. “You did what had to be done.”