bring them back around the Tooth’s crown.
“More lift, Angus,” he said into the trumpet.
Another hiss. They dropped two fathoms.
“I said lift, man. Not purge. Lift.” Devon’s voice was steady, but the vibrations from the engine shook his hand on the wheel. The quarry floor unfolded below, rose quickly to meet them.
The cliffs loomed closer. Devon throttled the starboard propeller and wrenched the rudder hard to port. The warship rolled slightly and began to nose away from the rock. Cables pinged overhead.
“Lift, Angus.”
Angus’s voice came through another trumpet. “Drop dead.”
“Unlikely,” Devon said. “I would walk free from any crash. This course of action will do nothing but kill you and the priest.”
A barrage of tinny obscenities erupted from the engine-room trumpet. Another hiss, and suddenly they were dropping even faster.
Damn him to hell.
The ground came up at them. Devon nudged the front of the envelope away from the cliffs. Through the portside windows he saw massive funnels rising quickly past. They were now between the Tooth and the rock face, falling too quickly to manoeuvre safely past the huge machine.
“Lift, Angus, or you’ll never see another drop of serum.”
Angus did not reply. Devon swung the wheel hard to starboard. He slammed both elevator levers back, then cranked the propellers full.
Engines rumbled, then roared. The bridge shuddered. To port, the shadowed hull of the Tooth rushed upwards. Cliffs hemmed them in to starboard. Clouds of dust billowed through the front ducts. Devon coughed and blinked furiously, trying to see through the bridge windows. The ground was close, rising. He felt the bridge tilt.
“Last chance, Angus,” he shouted. It might have been into the wrong trumpet—he didn’t look, didn’t care. They were going to crash. He had to level the ship. He cut the propellers, forced the elevator controls forward.
Dust choked the forward view, a storm caught between two rising walls, dull white on one side; sharp, ragged rock on the other.
A heavy grinding sound from behind. A loud crack. Ropes fretted, twanged. Wood snapped, splintered, and they hit the ground with a bone-breaking crunch.
Devon’s chin smacked hard against the wheel. The bridge windows shattered in an explosion of glass and dust.
The warship settled with a series of long creaks and groans. The gondola listed to one side, and came to rest with a final hiss.
Devon cut the engines and turned to check on the Presbyter. Sypes’s chair had slid across the floor and rested against one wall, but the old man was still slumped there, snoring lightly.
“Incredible,” Devon muttered.
Bleating noises forced his attention back outside. Through the falling dust he saw goats bucking and kicking among piles of broken wood and torn hide. Chickens fluttered and squawked, scattered feathers everywhere. TheBirkita had landed on the Heshette animal pens. A cockerel hopped through the bridge window onto the control deck and cocked its head at him.
“Bother,” Devon said. He shook Sypes awake.
The Presbyter blinked and rubbed his eyes, then squinted at the cockerel. “Good landing?”
“We’re down, aren’t we?”
“Not the best start for your proposed alliance,” Sypes said. “I urge you reconsider. The Heshette will murder us on sight for this.”
Devon grunted, picked up his bag of poisons, and left to survey the damage. Angus, if he was still alive, could stay where he was and rot.
Extricating himself from the wreckage proved to be a lengthy process. Devon picked his way through the shattered pens, dragging aside sun-bleached poles to clear a path. Frightened goats clambered over each other as they struggled to escape, bleating incessantly.
The Birkita was in poor shape. The gondola listed at a shallow angle. Splinters of teak formed a jagged line where the aft deck had buckled. The starboard propeller hung loose and the port one had sheared, a foot shorter on both blades where it had collided with an outcrop of rock. Three of the four main aether-lights were smashed. But, incredibly, the envelope was still intact. It rested against the hull of the Tooth, hardly reaching an eighth of the way up the giant machine.
The Tooth rose like a pale citadel, its sheer walls tapering to scorched funnels high above. Underneath, rows and rows of massive wheels sat in shadowed tracks among piles of crushed rock. Fine lines had been etched into the hull in endless whorls and curls.
Some sort of ceramic? Three thousand years and there is hardly a mark on it. Light too, or the whole thing would sink into the desert. The refuse of a civilization so much more advanced than our own, abandoned here