Geis laughed. “Literally,” he said. “And it didn’t suffer the way the heuskyn must have.” A puzzled, exasperated look appeared on his face. “I’ve often thought, you know, that that’s what matters; suffering. Not death, not actually killing. If you die instantly-really instantly, with no warning whatsoever-what are you missing? Your life might be terrible from then on until when you were going to die anyway. Of course, it might have been great fun instead, but the point is that at any given moment you just don’t know which. I don’t think there should be any penalty for killing somebody instantaneously.”

“But what about the people left behind, their family and friends?” Breyguhn protested.

Geis shrugged again, glancing over the side of the gondola as they drew slowly to a stop. “The law doesn’t pretend we prosecute murderers because of the effect on the murdered person’s nearest and dearest.”

He and the martialer hauled the rope ladder to the gunwale.

“But then,” Sharrow said, “if people knew they could be killed at any time, and their murderer would get away with it, everybody would be frightened all the time. No matter who you killed, they’d always have suffered.” She spread her hands.

Geis looked at her, face creased in a frown. “Hmm,” he said, his lips taut. “Yes, that’s a point. I hadn’t thought of that.” He looked at the martialer, who smiled at him. Geis shrugged, handed the martialer his gun and said, “Oh, well. Back to the drawing board on that idea.”

He took his knife from its sheath, held it between his teeth, then lowered himself over the side of the gondola and down the rope ladder.

Sharrow watched him descend. He climbed down out of the shadow of the airship; the sunlight glinted on the blade of the knife in his mouth. She leant out further, aiming her gun down at the crown of his head as it nodded its way down the ladder towards the ground.

“Excuse me, lady.” The martialer took the gun from her with a regretful smile.

She sat back in the seat. Breyguhn smirked. She tried not to blush. “I wasn’t actually going to fire it, martialer.”

“I know, Lady Sharrow,” he nodded, taking a round from the breech and handing her the gun back, “but it is dangerous to point guns at people.”

“I know,” she said. “But the safety catch was on and I’m very sorry. You won’t tell Geis, will you?” She smiled her most winning smile.

“I doubt that will be required, lady,” the martialer said.

“He might not…” Breyguhn said, smirking at Sharrow.

“Oh, he doesn’t believe anything you tell him anyway, Brey,” Sharrow said, dismissing the girl with a wave. She smiled again at the martialer, who smiled back. Breyguhn scowled.

“Hey, girls!” shouted a faint, taunting voice from below. “Any particular part of this beast you’d like?”

They camped on, a low rise at the edge of what was probably a range of small jagged hills the Entraxrln had grown over long before, leaving clogged canyons and deep, dark caves leading up steep V-sided ravines; tall spires, splayed and spread over the landscape in a way that looked geological rather than vegetable, were probably rocky pinnacles, wrapped in the Entraxrln’s intimate embrace and now acting as anchor-points for membrane cables. The landscape in the hills and beyond them was even more dark and choked than it had been in the three days since they’d left the town. They had passed a few little towns and villages, and seen a couple of small castles in the distance, homes of lesser nobles, but had encountered few other travellers.

Leeskever, their guide-a lean, garrulously knowledgeable and spectacularly ugly hide-trapper they’d met in the Broken Neck and who sported an eye-patch Zefla thought most dashing-said that if the gentlemen wanted to see any savages or outlaws, they’d be in there somewhere, but he wasn’t going to lead them any further. This was bandit country.

Miz decided that his place was looking after the ladies. Dloan went in alone, on foot.

They left the jemer mounts to graze and passed the next two days walking near the camp and climbing the more gently sloped cables with loop-guides, while Leeskever talked about the thousands of animals he’d killed and the half-dozen or so buddies he’d lost; to stom, tangle-teeth, other assorted wild animals, and the effects of gravity when people fell off cables; all of them in country much like this.

Sharrow slipped out of the camp a couple of times when Leeskever wouldn’t notice, tramping half a klick into the Entraxrln undergrowth to do some target practice. She used the silencer on the HandCannon and set up some blister-fruits ten, twenty and forty metres away.

On her second visit to her private shooting gallery, she heard something move above and behind her just as she was changing from one magazine to another; she slammed the clip home, stepped to one side and turned. She had the impression of something diving towards her, and fired.

The clip she’d just loaded was wire-flechette. She checked the magazine later; four rounds fired.

She wasn’t sure how many hit whatever it was trying to jump her, but it disappeared in an exploding cloud of purple blood she had to jump away to avoid. When she went back to stir the warm, gently steaming debris with her boot, she couldn’t tell what it had been, except that it had had fur rather than skin or feathers. The biggest bit of chewed-looking bone left was smaller than her little finger.

She decided she didn’t need any more target practice.

They sat, secured by ropes to hard-bark spikes stuck into the three-metre broad cable above them. They ate lunch, feeling a warm, sappy-smelling tunnel-wind blow about them, looking down the hundred metres or so to the ground. The rise holding their camp was visible a kilometre away across the grotesquely deformed landscape of the Entraxrln.

Leeskever shoved the tap-spike into a vein-like bulge on the surface of the cable. Clear water seeped through the membrane over the end of the hollow spike and started to fill a little cup hanging under its handle. He sniffed the wind. “That’ll bring the King’s stom, that wind,” he said.

They all looked at him.

“Glide-monkeys,” he said. “Stom come for the annual migration; there’s one male troupe that’s half-tamed; they roost in the trunk north of the town.”

“They don’t actually ride them, do they?” Zefla said.

Leeskever laughed. “Na! And never did, neither. Don’t you believe what people tell you. Stoma sooner eat you than smell you. Just legend, all that stuff about flying them.” He sipped water from the small cup, then passed it to Zefla. “The King and his court go up to one of the male roosts in the trunk and stand looking at the beasts, choose one as their own, tippy-toe up to it, waft some sleepy-gas at it and spray a mark on it. Coward courtiers and ministers have their aides do it; the rest pretend they’re brave.” Leeskever accepted the cup back from Zefla and hung it under the dripping tap-spike. “Then the dignitaries sit in their viewing-gallery, watch the stom take monkeys and cheer on their particular beast. Highly civilised spectacle.”

“Sounds it,” Miz said.

“What’s that?” Zefla said, pointing down.

“Eh?” said Leeskever. “Ah; now that is one of those tangle-teeth I was telling you about.”

“This the beast that has a taste for your companions?” Zefla asked him.

“Might even be the same one, for all I know,” Leeskever said.

They watched the long, striped back of the tangle-tooth as the quadruped padded slowly through the jungled confusion of roots, stalks and long tatters of fallen membrane on the level below.

Sharrow remembered the airship, and the animal Geis had killed. When he’d returned, blooded, to the gondola, he’d presented her and Breyguhn with nothing more nocuous and shocking than the animal’s ears.