crew as big as a sailing ship. The airbags and ropes became blurry outlines halfway up – Yggur must have carried his mist up with him. Irisis touched her pliance and could see power being drained from the field up there. Yggur and Ghorr were still at it.
She unfastened her line and looped it around her waist, then rested her foot on the forward cabin roof while she caught her breath. The roof, which was about fourteen spans by four, was stacked with rolls of canvas and airbag silk, barrels of tar, coils of rope, and boxes, chests and barrels of supplies, all tightly roped down. The supplies were covered in tarpaulins but spaces between them made ideal hiding places for guards who could shoot her in the back as she climbed.
Don’t be paranoid, she told herself. The guards are dead or up attacking Yggur. But where were the crew? It was like a ghost ship. No doubt some hadn’t been lifted from the amphitheatre, and others had been killed in the fighting, but she couldn’t see a soul. Irisis eased into the first alley, probing ahead of her with the tip of the weapon, lifting the tarpaulins and feeling between the crates and barrels.
She didn’t discover anyone, but as she went aft Irisis realised that what she’d thought was another crate was in fact a square cage. She could see the bars through the stretched canvas. She tapped on the canvas and heard a faint, mewling cry, a very familiar sound.
‘Ullii?’ she said, carefully cutting across and down, then peeling the canvas away.
The little seeker lay on the floor of the cage, though not scrunched up into a ball, as was her wont when distressed. She lay stretched out with her hands gripping the bars in front of her and her toes clenched onto the bars on the far side of the cage. Her colourless hair was a wild tangle, her eyes red and staring.
Crouching down, Irisis reached through the bars. Ullii did not like to be touched, as a rule, but she didn’t react when Irisis’s hand met her bare shoulder.
‘Ullii, what has Ghorr done to you?’
Ullii made no reply.
‘Why didn’t you free yourself?’ said Irisis. ‘The way you freed me that time in Nennifer.’
Ullii turned those tragic eyes on her. ‘Lattice gone.’
‘It’ll come back,’ Irisis said lightly. ‘Now, let’s get you out of here.’
‘Gone forever,’ said Ullii. ‘Nothing left. Want to die.’
‘Nonsense,’ Irisis said briskly. She couldn’t deal with that after the pilot’s shocking suicide. She smashed the lock off with the butt of her sword and wrenched the door open. ‘Come on.’
Ullii followed lethargically, evincing no curiosity, though Irisis was used to that. She turned to the rope ladder that led up into the rigging. An occasional flash still came from the nebulosity above, though weaker than before.
She climbed up into the mist, which thickened until she could only see a few of the rungs of the ladder above her, and just the top of Ullii’s head below. There was something up here, more than mist and smoke. She touched her pliance. Power was being drawn in dozens of places, though Irisis could not tell what it was being used for.
She began to sense a structure to the mist. It was like a series of scalloped platforms connected by stairs and ladders, though that could hardly be a part of the air-dreadnought. It was a creation of the Art, but Irisis couldn’t tell whether it was Yggur’s strange Art or Ghorr’s scrutator magic.
As they reached the level of the four main airbags, the air-bags appeared transparently in the distance, as if this place were only partly of the real world. Rigging ran between them, holding them in place, though here it appeared like strands drawn out of cloud or webs spangled with dewdrops. Tenuous paths led down and up, into nebulous cloud chambers. Between them, staircases ran to airy pavilions, arches and gates that had no part in an air-dreadnought’s rigging.
The flashes, now blue and red, came from higher up. Irisis put one foot out towards the first of the staircases.
Ullii snatched at her arm. ‘Not there!’
Irisis stepped back onto firmness then probed ahead with her sword. It went straight through what had appeared to be solid matter. The staircase was a deceit. Were any of the stairs and pavilions real, or was it a snare as cunningly designed as a spider’s web?