upright. “Lord Brittleback, would you stop that Mi’aata, please, while I take care of Yissil Froon?”
“Mi’aata?”
“The Blood God, Prime Minister.”
“Ah, quite so! Jolly good!”
I drew my sword and faced my enemy. The deck was listing about twenty-five degrees to port. It jerked beneath my feet as the aero-ship began to accelerate. Whatever advantage my blade offered was nullified by the Yatsill’s four legs, which gave Yissil Froon much more purchase on such an unstable surface, as was immediately demonstrated when, with my first step toward him, my foot landed on a shard of glass and slid out from beneath me. I fell sideways onto my thigh, and before I could recover myself, Froon swooped forward, snatched the sword from my hand, snapped the blade in half over one of his thighs, and cast it aside.
“Pathetic creature!” he snarled. His fingers caught my neck in a vice-like grip and he hauled me into the air. “Without machines! Without an army! Even then, I can take your world!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Lord Brittleback struggling with the Mi’aata at the controls.
“So the rupture still opens onto Koluwai, does it? Very well, the islanders will be the first to fall under my spell.” The Yatsill slammed me down and crouched over me, his sharp fingers constricting my throat. “And from that island I shall spread my influence until it infiltrates your so-called civilisation.” He leaned close until I could feel his breath upon my face. “I have seen inside Clarissa Stark’s mind, Aiden Fleischer. I understand the nature of your Earth. I know your species is divided—that most are less developed than the Yatsill, while the rest are in the grip of powers every bit as stultifying as the Quintessence. What resentments and fears must seethe in the masses! What longings and frustrations! What angers and hatreds! Those shall be my weapons!”
I thought of overcrowded Whitechapel and its inhumane poverty, of the teeming masses of discarded, disenfranchised, and wretched poor, and of the monster born out of that Inferno, of Jack the Ripper. By God, if Yissil Froon loosed his mesmeric powers upon such misery, could he not produce from it a vast army of demonic murderers? How easy for him to take those whose path to goodness was already fraught with such terrible obstacles—deprivation, disease, corruption, drudgery, violence, humiliation—and cause them to turn away from it, to face in the direction of lessening good, to become evil!
“Ah, yes!” he hissed. “I see that you understand!”
I clutched at his wrists, tried to pull his hands away, but couldn’t match his strength. With agonising slowness, he was throttling me to death.
The aero-ship began to shudder. Its propellers howled. At the periphery of my fast-clouding vision, I saw Lord Brittleback dragging the other Mi’aata away from the console.
“We’re descending too fast!” it screamed. “We’ll hit the trees!”
The port side of the vessel suddenly dipped. Yissil Froon and I, the stunned Mi’aata, and Lord Brittleback and his opponent all careened across the deck. The Magician let go of me as he fought for balance. He toppled over and collided with a bulkhead. I skidded into him, kicked at his face, and felt it squelch beneath the heels of my sandals. He knocked my legs away. The foot-long tip of my broken sword came skating by. I slapped my hand onto it and swung the metal up, around, and down, ramming it point-first into Yissil Froon’s upper right arm, careless of the fact that in doing so I cut my fingers to the bone. The blade cracked through the carapace and into the soft flesh beneath. Blood spurted. The Magician screeched. One of his knees came up and impacted against the side of my jaw. I rolled away, my senses reeling, saw the shattered glass roof spinning past my eyes, caught a glimpse of Zull flying close, trees looming, and the zeniths of twin suns flaring over the horizon. I bounced off a metal wall and was thrown against the remains of the roof. The aero-ship corkscrewed downward.
“Brace yourself, Mr. Fleischer!” Lord Brittleback yelled. “We’re going to hit the bloody ground!”
Yissil Froon seized my left ankle as I fell past him and pulled me into a crushing embrace. We were tossed around the cabin, rebounding from one side to the other. Lord Brittleback bumped against us, went whirling away, struck glass, smashed through it, and was sent flying out into the open air.
With a deafening roar, the machine ploughed into the Forest of Indistinct