Even some of those round this impressively large round table in this impressively large and cool and subtly lit boardroom-resembling-meeting-chamber might have been tempted to think about ways to cope with the threatened invasion that didn’t involve resistance to the last ship and soldier, if it hadn’t been for the oncoming Mercatoria Fleet.

Saluus supposed they had to assume that the fleet really was on the way. There were other possibilities, and he’d thought them all through — and talked them all through with his own advisers and experts — but ultimately they had to be dismissed. Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money: all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic.

Never mind. After covering the latest intelligence and his own. shocking remissness in not making the refitted ships invulnerable to alien hyper-weapons, the meeting was finally getting round to something useful.

Back to grisly reality.

“The main thing,” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice told them (the quaup commander was keen on Main Things and In The Ends), “is that the Dwellers don’t seem to want to continue hostilities.”

After their initial, furious take-no-prisoners attack and no-quarter polishing-off of those who’d got away, the Dwellers had just as suddenly gone back to their usual show of Shucks-us? ineptitude, claiming it had all been a terrible mistake and could they help with the Third Fury rebuild?

“And thank fuck for that!” Guard-General Thovin said. “If they did, we’d have absolutely no chance. Facing the Beyonder-Starveling lot and the Dwellers as well! Holy shit! No chance. No chance at all!” Thovin was a dumpy barrel of a man, dark and powerful-looking. His voice was suitably gruff.

“Instead, only almost no chance,” Shrievalty Colonel Somjomion said with a thin smile.

“We have every chance, madam!” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice thundered, banging the table with one tubular armling. His splendidly uniformed and decorated body, like a well-tailored airship the size of a small hippo, rose in the air. “We need no defeatist talk here, of all places!”

“We have seventy fewer ships than we had,” the Shrievalty colonel reminded them, without drama.

“We still have the will,” Brimiaice said. “That’s the important point. And we have plenty of ships. And more being built all the time.” He looked at Saluus, who nodded and tried not to let his contempt show.

“If they work,” muttered Clerk-Regnant Voriel. The Cessorian seemed to have a personal thing against Saluus. He had no idea why.

“Now, we’ve dealt with all that,” First Secretary Heuypzlagger said quickly, glancing at Saluus. “If there are any problems with the ships’ construction, I’m sure the inquiry will show them up. We have to concentrate now on what else we can do.”

Saluus was getting bored. Now was as good a time as any. “An embassy,” he said. He looked round them all. “That’s what I’d like to suggest. An embassy to the Dwellers of Nasqueron, to secure peace, make sure there are no more ‘misunderstandings’ between us and them, attempt to involve them in the defence of Ulubis system and, if possible, acquire from them -with their consent, preferably — some of the extremely impressive weaponry they appear to possess, either in physical or theoretical form.”

“Well,” Heuypzlagger said, shaking his head. “Oh. Now our Acquisitariat friend is a diplomat,” Voriel observed, expression poised between sneer and smile.

“Needing yet more supposedly gas-capable ships to protect it, no doubt!” Brimiaice protested.

“Haven’t we got one already?” Thovin asked.

Colonel Somjomion just looked at him, eyes narrowed.

The meeting only seemed to last for ever. Finally it was over. Saluus met up with his new lover that evening, at the water-column house on Murla, where he’d first really looked at her in the true light of day and decided, yes, he’d be interested. It had been at brunch, with his wife (and her new girlfriend) and Fass and the Segrette Twins, the day after their visit to the Narcateria in Boogeytown.

* * *

The RushWing Sheumerith rode high in the clear gas spaces between two high haze layers, flying into the vast unending jet stream of gas as though trying to keep pace with the stars which were sometimes visible, tiny and hard and remote, through the yellow haze and the thin quick amber clouds scudding eternally overhead.

The giant aircraft was a single slim scimitar of wing pocked with engine nacelles, articulated like a wave, ten kilometres across, a hundred metres long and ten metres high, a thin filament forever jetting like a swift weather front made visible across the waste of clouds beneath. Dwellers, hundreds of them, hung from it, each anchored like refuelled aircraft by a cable strung out from the wing’s trailing edge, riding in a little pocket of calm gas produced by simple shells of diamond, open to the rear and which, to the human eye, were shaped like a pair of giant cupped hands.

In a long-term drug-trance, downshifted in time so that the flight seemed twelve or sixty or more times quicker than it really was — the vast continents of clouds racing beneath like foam, the wash of stars wheeling madly above, wisp-banks whipping towards and past like rags in a hurricane — the wing-hung Dwellers watched the days and nights flicker around them like some stupendous strobe and felt the planet beneath them turn like something reeling out their lives.

Fassin Taak left the jetclipper and flew carefully in, matching velocities, then anchored the little gascraft, very slowly, to the underside of the diamond enclosure holding the Sage-youth Zosso, a slim, dark, rather battered-looking Dweller of two million years or so.

Fassin slow-timed. The wing, the clouds, the stars, all seemed to pick up speed, rolling racing forward like over-cranked screenage. The roar of engines and slipstreaming gas rose and rose in pitch, becoming a high, shrill, faraway keening, then vanishing from hearing altogether.

The Dweller above him, seeming to jerk and quiver in his little retaining harness, waited for him to synch before sending, — And what might you be, person?

· I am a human being, sir. A Seer at the Nasqueron Court,

in a gascraft, an esuit. I am called Fassin Taak, of Sept Bantrabal.

· And I am Zosso, of nowhere in particular. Of here. Good view, is it not?

· It is.

· However, I dare say that that is not why you are here.

· You’re right. It’s not.

· You wish to ask me something?

· I am told I need to make passage to somewhere I’ve never heard of, to follow a Dweller I need to find. I’m told you can help.

· I’m sure I can, if I choose to. Well, that is, if people still take any notice of what a silly old wing-hanger says. Who can say? I’m not sure that I would listen to somebody as old and out of things as I am if I was a young travelcaptain. Why, I think I should say something like, “What, listen to that foolish old—?” Oh, I beg your pardon, young human. I seem to have distracted myself. Where was it you would like to go?

— A place that is, apparently, sometimes called Hoestruem.

Drunisine himself, alone, had come to the quarters that Fassin shared with the two Dwellers, in the mid-morning of the day after the battle in the storm.

“We have delayed you long enough. You may go. A jetclipper is at your disposal for the next two dozen days. Goodbye.”

“Now there,” Y’sul had observed, “goes a Dweller of few words.”

— Hoestruem?” Zosso asked. — No, I’ve never heard of it either.

Night swept over them as he signalled, enveloping.

— In or near Aopoleyin? Fassin sent. — Apparently, he told the old wing-hanger, when the Dweller was uncommunicative for a few moments. — Somewhere associated with Aopoleyin.