‘I’d like to take a flight, please.’

‘Certainly, sir. The orientation and flightware tutorial takes several—’

‘I really need to get out there now.’

‘It’s not just the matter of queue-jumping, sir. Your safety is important to us.’

‘I … Forgive me. Sorry.’

‘That’s quite all right, sir.’

He shrugged at the waiting people as he left. Once outside, he projected the public interfaces from his tu-ring as before; then he released his burrowers and introspectors, code-forms evolved to infiltrate and unravel, passed into the unsuspecting service operations disguised as innocuous parameters. Besides his secret in Ascension Annexe, this was the other thing he had not mentioned to anyone in Labyrinth, or anywhere else: Dad had bequeathed a copy of all his subversion ware, every covert utility he owned, dumped in a zipblip from tu-ring to tu-ring, father to son.

It was a simple hack of a public service to descend through the deck to the level below, and pass through the wall into a storage bay half-filled with stacks of penrose containers. Creating the quickbug took another two minutes, due to the amount of security-breaking computation required.

Then he was sitting inside a hollow sphere sliding towards the metres-thick hull.

Let’s hope I got this bit right.

The hollow passed inside solid quickglass. Then the front cleared. Vertigo startled Roger: there was only thin quickglass between him and the long drop to the cloud-banks below. Being a passenger in a mu-space ship had not prepared him for this.

Behind him, the rear of his quickbug looked darker and more solid: the tail of the teardrop. As the wings extruded on either side, he forced himself to reinterpret his fear as fight preparation, to be grateful for adrenaline that would power him through the hunt.

The quickbug flyer launched.

And fell away from the city.

By the second hour, he was enjoying himself. Dipping in and out of clouds, floating past other flyers – waggling his wings to say hello, all other comms disabled – and the simple process of controlling the glide-configuration with occasional pulses from the drive arteries: it absorbed all his concentration, yet his feeling of freedom bordered on elation. Still with no sign of Helsen, though occasionally he had felt something close by, like sensing thunder before it occurred.

There.

And she was on him.

The other flyer was huge in comparison, shearing overhead, tendrils smashing into his quickglass bubble – tendrils! – because it was configured for attack. There were two figures inside, he was almost sure of it, as the big flyer banked left and down, and he twisted his own quickbug’s wings to follow.

Diving now.

They were inside intermittent cloud, all the other flyers lost from sight, and not by accident: that bitch Helsen had set an ambush, and attacked but failed to kill him. He let loose the drive power, accelerating downwards, everything beginning to shake, vision blurring as his eyeballs vibrated.

I’ll take you down with me if I have to.

There was someone waiting for him in Ascension Annexe but Helsen was here and now and she had killed everyone on Fulgor including his parents and there was no way she could be allowed to live. The sound inside the quickbug was rising and he wondered if the flyer could shake itself apart but that did not matter because his target was – there, left – and then he was diving even faster: full power, designed for emergency climb, driving him down.

She pulled aside at the last moment, once more whipping her flyer’s tendrils against his hull.

Shit shit shit.

His quickbug flyer was finding it hard to respond, shaking as he tried to pull it level, sudden loss of vision all around as cloud swallowed his quickbug; and then a high, splintering sound cut through the roar, a second before he saw the cause.

The quickglass was cracking.

It’s not supposed to do that.

He spread the wings further, wondering what he had done wrong.

Venom in the tendrils.

Helsen was smarter than he was, that was all.

‘Bitch bitch bitch.’

The cockpit was opaque, webbed with cracks, about to fail.

Shit. No.

But the rear of the teardrop remained intact, or seemed to, and there were seconds left before the cockpit bubble exploded but Dad’s subversion ware had been the best and he trusted to it now.

‘I’m not going to die, you bitch.’

A hollow opening appeared inside the teardrop tail.

‘Not before you.’

He crawled inside.

Close up.

The command was executing, the gap closing to a hand’s width, when the world disappeared in a massive percussive bang.

Drifting, his sleep so peaceful. Mum and Dad were with him, and all was warm with the soft wind so distant. Wonderful to curl up in here for ever.

A bump.

Go away.

Voices, and then the hands upon him.

‘—deprivation, and acid in the lungs.’

Shaking. Tipping him.

‘—bubble aloft so long, he’s lucky.’

Falling once more.

SIXTEEN

EARTH, 777 AD

The solitary hunt.

This is where I belong.

Ulfr hid with Brandr alongside him, man and war-hound sharing body warmth. The landscape was crinkled ice under snow, patches of tough heather and grasses showing through, and the lakes like steel. The deer-herd moved as a compact unit, their deep wordless wisdom protecting them against lone hunters, for they were vulnerable only when split from their fellows.

Not like me.

For all Vermundr’s nonsense about Ulfr’s being chieftain one day, this was the best life: just himself and Brandr below the sky, and the immediacy of the Middle World without men: dark-smelling soil, cold purity of air and the skin-toughening breeze, tiny thumps and crunches caused by moving deer, fine detail of their hides, and the lustrous, knowing eyes.

Ravens, in the distance.

If you catch a dark poet on his own, can you run him down as you would a deer?

Not all ravens are Stígr’s.

But these, but these …

You are, though. Aren’t you?

Brandr’s growl was a deep vibration. Two hundred paces away, a stag raised his head to look.

‘We hunt.’ Ulfr placed his hand on Brandr’s back, feeling the quiver of muscles lusting to explode with movement. ‘But not the prey we thought.’

He rose, spear held horizontally at his thigh, and the tableau broke, deer-herd galloping away to the right, maintaining the group formation.

Live free, until we meet again.

Then he began to jog along the icy ground, Brandr at his side as always.

But something attacked Stígr before Ulfr could get there.

It reared up from the soil, spilling roots and clay and ice. Worms wriggled, exposed to the air. It was the earth moving: swinging a disintegrating limb to hit Stígr’s shoulder as he scrambled back, shouting. The noise of the torn earth drowned out the words. From inside the moving mass came a glimpse of glowing scarlet.

Stígr pointed his staff at the creature – he moved easily despite earlier wounds and the troll’s impact just now: more dark seithr magic – but the staff’s tip flared with crimson fire, not his doing. He flung it from him as if burned. Ravens whipped down from the sky, attacking the mass; but the mud caught them, enveloped them, then flipped their struggling, mud-soaked forms aside.

Their intervention was enough: darkness folded around Stígr, then sapphire fire blazed, and as the mud-form lunged, Stígr twisted away – turned impossibly – and was gone: the moving soil passed through air and thumped onto solid ground.

Thórr’s blood.

Eira and other volvas could work with men’s spirits and heal broken bodies; but this was the true, dark sorcery of legend. For the second time, Stígr had been rescued by demons, carried away in a manner no man could see or understand. And now the massive, moving soil-creature was turning towards Ulfr.