Ares Express

22

Panic on the streets of Molesworth.

All night the rival political gangs, incensed by what they respectively interpreted as humiliation or jubilation, chased each other through the stone boulevards, party banners flying, flinging partisan abuse and bottles, bombarding each other with ripped-up paving setts and cafe chairs. Windows were smashed, those merchants incautious enough, or just too cheap, not to have bought security shutters were gleefully looted. Fires burned, Molotov cocktails showered down from balconies. Blouses and chemises set to dry now blazed merrily, lowest festoons catching from the fires in the streets and igniting those above. Burning tramcars, driverless but not powerless, careered along their tracks; vans and delivery drays were commandeered and swivelled into hasty barricades into and over which the respective party colours were set. Civic guards were mobilised, militias summoned from their beds and hastily armed. Military units at Gesserem and Shrelby were put on full alert; deep in their titanium-lined caverns under Chryse’s laval shield, robot divisions opened their beady red eyes from eight hundred years of cybernetic slumber and lifted their heads. This was a big riot. Molesworthians took their politics seriously.

A combination of water cannon and wide-spectrum force-fields cleared most of the rioters and their barricades from the streets. Here and there, short shield squads baton-charged the mobs and fell enthusiastically to hand-to-hand. By morning most of the fires had been extinguished or had burned themselves out; the street was the province of ashes, charred shells of trams and trucks, those sweeping up broken glass and the occasional carload of young turks driving at mad speed along the splintered boulevards whooping and hooting and waving party flags from their windows and sunroofs.

Molesworth was a wreck, but the immediate crisis was over. The robot legions lowered their heads and closed their eyes.

In Rembrandt Platz the plane trees had all burned down but the early morning news vendors were sweeping away the broken glass and cinders and setting up their booths. Agency three-wheelers came scooting through the wreckage; newsboys in folded paper tricorns sporting the morning’s headline sent bundles of daily news bounding across the debris before whizzing on to their next delivery. The gossip must get through.

Early starters picked their way cautiously past hissing, sparking tram cables brought down in the night, marvelling at the completeness of the destruction. Only one set of windows had escaped the crystal night, and those belonged to Torsten Toskvig’s Salon Du Thé, the most venerable in Molesworth. The proprietor attributed this reputation to the excellence of his mint, picked by hand with the dew fresh on it from the family fields at Tullaswaygo, and he held that it was this, and this alone, that had protected his tea-house from the mob when Cossivo Beldene fell.

Here, on this morning, five people sat, taking their morning tea and reading the early editions. They were, left to right; a stocky young woman with spiky hair; a tall, wire-thin man with skin so black it swallowed light; a pale, languorous girl with the air of studied artiness and jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it; an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville and a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth. Skerry, Bladnoch, Mishcondereya, Seskinore and Weill. Together they called themselves United Artists. Same order as above, their arts were circus skills, observational comedy, performance artist in interactive micro-drama, dundered-in stand-up and anarchist. Their trick with the cake and the specially written song, hastened to the Glenn Miller Orchestra by express courier, had precipitated all the destruction which lay around their feet as they sipped their mint teas in the tea garden. Exactly as planned. This was no stunt. This was a precise act of political sabotage. These five people were secret agents, under commission from the Synod of Anarchs of Wisdom to seek out threats to their genial non-government and humiliate it with massive practical jokes.

Accrington LeCerf, phoney faith healer and abstracter of wealth from pensioners, had received his comeuppance when a curtain at one of his healing meetings had dropped, revealing the supposedly “healed” sitting backstage smoking and chatting, actors one and all. A mob of incensed old ladies had beaten him severely with his own collection bowl. He had been hospitalised for three months. United Artists arranged for that curtain to drop.

United Artists had set it up so that Ramon Drube, the corrupt Indian politician and the heart of the Cash-for-Sugar row, took a timely pratfall into a keg of eels when he bestrode his next electoral platform.

Gyorgy Krinz, a powerful lawyer with contacts among the Exalted Families, was also a notorious seducer of young boys in public conveniences, until United Artists, in a complex sting operation, converted an innocent WC into an all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganza featuring the Cottage Boys in gold lamé and urinals fountaining flames like coloured roman candles. It was broadcast live on three networks. Viewing figures went through the roof. Gyorgy Krinz went off the roof. Convictions against the Exalted Families became more regular.

Mavda Quinsana, daughter of the more famous mother, ran a small but effective money-laundering empire from a few artificial atolls in the Syrtic Sea. Conventional justice failed, until United Artists slipped her a mickey in a margarita and convinced her, through clever suggestion and set design, that she had died and gone to hell, whereupon she fessed up all her known crimes and a wodge more nobody had even suspected. The walls of the fake hell opened, the shirrifry marched in, the real hell began.

Shareholder meetings of several big companies with pie-flavoured fingers were spectacularly disrupted by Amanda the Corporate Crime-busting Armadillo, frequently provoking shareholder riots when the extent of board-member remunerations were made public. United Artists, again.

Last night, United Artists had arranged for a very large chocolate cake to be delivered to the Gubernatorial Pleasance in Molesworth. Ooohs, ahhs. As the new Gubernator leaned forward with his cutting knife, the top had blown off and out leaped Seetra Annulka, Cossivo Beldene’s former mistress, dressed in a spangled bikini, silver bootees and hoolie-hoolie feathers. As painstakingly rehearsed, she strutted up and down the stage to the whoops and cheers of the guests, singing a specially commissioned song. The whoops and cheers had grown louder as the audience became aware of the lyrics which had to do with nipple clips and glue, poultry, hooks in the ceiling, orphan girls in pristine white panties and stuffing the state jewels of Canton Chimeria into orifices not designed to show them off to their fullest glory. By the third verse there was not a whisper in the great Festhall.

To a riot of laughter and outrage in equal measures, Cossivo Beldene, his entourage and his guests were off stage before the final chorus. Shortly after the first chair was thrown and the fight broke out that was to spread from the Rathaus to the entire city.

Now, in the early light, with the smoke of burning washing still on the air, United Artists were reading their reviews.

“Gobbling Gubernator Feast-Farce,” Skerry read, fresh and tight after her morning run, which she did for ten kilometres every day, riot or no riot. Whatever, wherever, whoever, she always showed a lot of healthy, glowing skin.

“A bit overdone on the alliteration,” the solemn black man, Bladnoch, said in his soft, low voice. The best comedians seldom laugh. He had been the comedian’s comedian; so funny he backed into being not funny at all. “Ball-clamp Beldene in hiding,” he read, from his copy of The Chimerian, then flipped the paper over to the sports section.

“As in, hiding out, or a good hiding?” the languid, over-pierced woman said. She was Mishcondereya, bad daughter of a very good family, and even drinking morning tea she radiated a hunting-cheetah grace and lethargy that was at once attractive and extremely irritating. She was natural-born aristocrat. Of course, she had the quality daily, Landing Times: “Anarchy Rules Molesworth: Mobs Run Riot as Beldene Falls. That should please you, Weill.”

The little skinny anarchist merely picked pieces of mint off his teeth. The over-tall, over-loud, over-coiffed and over-corseted middle-aged man in his trademark too-small silver suit commented from behind his Impartial Reporter, “I thought better of the Times’s editorial than to let an oxymoron like that on to the front page. You know, I remember when I was on the riverboats, I once met a newspaper copy-editor. Or was it a typesetter?” Seskinore’s reminiscence was submerged by a chorus of derision from his fellow artistes. He added, lamely, “They’re trying to get Glenn Miller to release it as a single with vocals by Seetra Annulka. We could be in for royalties.”

“I’d buy it,” Weill the anarchist said.

“Steal it, more like,” Mishcondereya sniped. “Did you pay for that Harbinger?”

“Of course not.” In twelve months training and thirty-six as roving agents of the Synod of Anarchs, Mishcondereya had not yet learned that Weill took her blunt little sarcasms as compliments. “No one buys when Babylon burns. This capitalist rag gives us a decent write-up.”

“Is it top of the hour news yet?” Skerry asked.

“Seven bells,” Weill said, nodding across the ruined plaza at the municipal clock on the tram-halt. Every piece of glass had been reduced to sugar cubes, but the naked hands told the time, slowly, steadily, for Molesworth. “Looks like it. Is there a wireless in this place? Well, look who it is.”

A lady in widow’s black was crossing the plaza, stepping resourcefully over the wiry piles of charred tires, ignoring the paperlads’ entreaties. She held her hands folded decorously and did not look in the least out of place in the aftermath of Mob.

Seskinore folded down his paper, raised his eyebrows.

“Ah, our interestingly pedigreed trainlady.”

“What the hell is she doing here?” Skerry demanded, sliding on a pair of dark glasses. “You know, Weill, sometimes you piss me right off. In fact, most of the time. Okay, she did us a favour, the little old dear’s got some kind of weird shit trainpeople magic thing—enough inbreeding, you can do anything—but you shouldn’t have invited her to the show. Least of all, our own table. I worry about your sense of security, comrade.”

“At least I have a sense of decency,” Weill said. “I don’t know about you Tharsians, but in Grand Valley, even us anarchists treat our grandparents with due respect.”

By now Grandmother Taal had arrived at the tea party on the verandah. The past ten hours had been a whirring daze of some notion or other. Forty-something years, and life can still knock you silly. The strange doings with that cake in the back alley, the unexpected invitation to the Pleasance, the very fine food and wine as she sat with these odd people—the last one would imagine on the guest-list for such a lofty event: then everything being thrown up in the air to hang a fearful minute while the girl in the silver spangles sang the satirical song, only to come crashing down in a rush of reporters, a lightning storm of camera flashes and a broadside of chairs flung toward the stage. She had followed United Artists as they fled, skulking along the lines of tables as the fighting broke out overhead, thanking her newly young knee and back bones. Her first thought had been to go with the band, but all she saw of the King of Swing was his tour bus driving away at speed, chased by a pelt of bottles and hurled imprecations that the Glenn Miller Orchestra would never sell another record in this town again, buddy. The fighting had by now transferred to the streets; she was alone in the great Rathaus. Plenty of places to sleep. It would not be the first time, Grandmother Taal thought as she swept broken glass from the plush sofa, wrapped herself up in table cloths and bedded herself down for the night. Nor, she sensed with grandmotherly insight, would it be the last. Outrage, riot, confusion, and then the dream.

She had woken with a shock, convinced that she was back in her mahogany cubby on the train, that Sweetness was a three-year-old again, banging on her door when her mother and father were sullenly arguing again. Her eyes told her no, you are on a bench in the Members Bar in Molesworth Rathaus; her ears told her, through the distant shouting and sirens and gobble of burning, there is a riot outside. The dream had been so vivid, so insistent; the dark cloud and her granddaughter standing under it in a deserted stone square; with none of the skewed logic or narrative absurdities of dreamspeak. Meaning was not veiled in metaphor or subconscious sexual imagery. No trains entering tunnels, no umbrellas or daggers or pointy airships. This was classically structured, with a clear and precise message, if packed overdensely with important points and presented in Sweetness’s characteristic all-in-one-breath delivery. This was no dream. This was a sending. Grandparents believe in such things. She wrote down the gist of it on a napkin, studied it for a time while listening to the ebb and flow of riot outside, then slept again without further dream or sending.

“Sit ye down,” Weill invited, gesturing to a chair. “Well, I told you it would be funny.”

Grandmother Taal did not sit. She surveyed the ruined plaza. It was comment enough on Weill’s sense of humour. Then she said, quite formally, “I do not know who you are, but I know what you are capable of. I am asking you, please help me find my granddaughter. I fear she has become enmeshed in great danger, for herself, and for us all.”

She spread the napkin on the table. The newspapers all folded shut at once.

“I had a sending,” Grandmother Taal said.

Bladnoch read the napkin. Seskinore sat back with a faraway look in his eye, then pointed at Grandmother Taal and asked, “Last night, didn’t you say you were a Chordant Asiim Engineer? Is that any relation of the Chordants of Vermeulen? Maybe not, they weren’t actually trainfolk, but I am acquainted with many people from the trains. Do you know I used to work the South Rim Scenic Recreational?”

Bladnoch raised an eyebrow, passed the napkin to Skerry, whose pupils dilated after the first line.

“Marvellous people, marvellous. It was more of a cruise than a train trip: the very best you know, food and wine, and standards of service! And clientele too; the very cream, you had to be to be able to afford the South Rim Scenic; and though I say so myself, the entertainment, top of the line. And the views down over Grand Valley in the evening, quite wonderful.”

Skerry now passed the napkin to Mishcondereya, whose look of mounting impatience at Seskinore’s enthusiasm for bounding into showbiz reminiscence at any opportunity turned on an instant to concern.

“Wonderful little train; very select, you see. Wonderful bill: there was Jimmy and Alice, and Mr. Superb—whatever happened to him?—and Dimmy darling. Dear Dimmy—dead these three years, alas—but I suppose you wouldn’t know them; Engineer people don’t get back to the passengers too often, do they? Or maybe your branch of the family’s freight? That would be unfortunate, think what you’ve missed. Anyway, I got to know some of the Stuards; fine folk, if a little standoffish at first. That’s a thing you learn in my line, how to read people, then how to bring them round. If you can’t bring an audience round, you’re dead as a comic, dear, dead.”

“Seskinore,” Mishcondereya said, “as a comic, you were never alive.” She passed him the napkin. His mouth opened. His eyebrows steepled. He passed it to Weill, whose only response was a small smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.

“I think we can help you in this,” Skerry said, solemnly.

Half an hour later, Grandmother Taal was punching across Solstice Landing’s industrial scablands on a fast, executive express.

It was a low, fast, two-car unit with automated tilt mechanism designed to lean into the bends as the sleek, supercharged Great Southern Class 27 hauled it at speeds of up to five hundred kilometres per hour. Too small to have a resident Domiety, the engine was crewed by a newly wed team Grandmother Taal remembered from the lavishness of their wedding a few corroborees back. No kids yet. Nor likely to be; these priority service specials played fast and loose with the radiation shielding. Their privilege, their choice, but when she hailed them under the stone vault of Molesworth Main, they snubbed her. Bad word passed fast along the lines. The Asiim Engineers would be an age healing this social wound. For a moment Grandmother Taal contemplated invoking her full matronly authority; thought better. Molesworth and punk engineers did not deserve it. They whistled up and moved out on to the fast line.

The carriages were a symphony in cream leather, streamlined and smooth as infants’ buttocks. Clever machinery was concealed behind the curvaceous banks of hide; the leather was clever, too; a touch, a word and controls or information screens would appear like tattoos on the surface. The carpet was toe-deep fur pile, the raked windows tinted gold. All very sophisticated, high-tech, minimal yet with a whiff of decadence, utterly last century. This age favoured heavy wood and heavier metal: big brass clunking stuff. The Synod in Wisdom, which had little experience of and less budget for running a counterinsurgency force, had bought it cut price off a Lyxian broker who had bankrupted five generations of family fortune on speculation in mink futures. Now it ferried United Artists at speed and in fin du siècle luxury around the planet on missions of political practical joking.

“An old trainmother tells you something from a dream, and you believe the end of the world is nigh?” Grandmother Taal asked as the train took points at three hundred and eighty on to the westbound fast and powered up.

“We’re supposed to work eclectically,” Skerry said, fidgeting on a curving leather sofa. She was never comfortable sitting down for long. Weill had told Grandmother Taal she could put both legs behind her neck. I wish I could do that, thought Grandmother Taal, then realised she had a better chance now than for a long time. Bladnoch, curled at the other end of the couch, was the opposite; never happier than when horizontal. He surreptitiously watched the afternoon pelota on a televisual patch of armrest. Backstage in the comedy clubs, the whisper was, Bladnoch, he could have been the greatest, ’cept for that addiction to televised sport.

“She means, we don’t just take the word of sweet old ladies, no matter how good their juju is,” said Mishcondereya, glowing and scrubbed from a showering off all that nasty Molesworth grit. She towelled at her hair furiously, began the laborious task of reinserting all her jewellery.

“You see, my dear, your story about the hole in the middle of the line rang true, because it’s very far from being the first,” Seskinore said, pouring Grandmother Taal a glass of mint tea. He dropped in a sugar cube, pounded it with a glass rod, gave it three swirls. “My own trade secret. On the circuit, you learn the art of good tea.” It tasted no better than most others, worse certainly than Marya Stuard’s. He continued, “Bloody things’ve been popping up all over the place. Chryse, Tempe, Axidy. Even Grand Valley. Could be hundreds of the things out in the desert we never hear about. Little breakdowns in reality. Some of those orbital processors have been running constantly for well over a thousand years, so they’re bound to be showing the strain, and of course they skimp on the maintenance budget. Perfect opportunity for our friend up there to sneak in the back way.”

“Apart from that, we’ve been keeping an eye on Devastation Harx and his crew,” Weill said, feet up on a padded mound that served as a tea-table. “We keep an eye on most of the apocalyptic religions.”

“This Harx is an apocalypsist?” Grandmother Taal said, sitting primly on an uncomfortable banquette, boots buried up to the ankles in buff fluff.

“I think that’s what you’d call someone who advocates all-out war between humans and angels,” said Mishcondereya.

“So how did your misfortunate daughter become involved with such a disreputable villain?” Seskinore asked.

“My granddaughter did not take to an arranged marriage and ran away with a very common Waymender boy, who is also a member of this church,” Grandmother Taal said.

“I ran away and I did all right,” Weill said. “But then, I stayed well away from religions like any sane boy should. Especially ones you have to pay for.”

Mishcondereya flared her nostrils and gave a damp, disdainful flick of her still-wet hair.

“Not too bright, is she, your granddaughter?”

Before Grandmother Taal could riposte, Bladnoch’s sofa arm beeped. He bent close to the screen. Taal could make out neither the scratchy jerky images or the muttered words but something had come in on top of his sports channel, something that put furrows in his brow. Skerry was beside him. Grandmother Taal wondered if there might be something between the tall, thin man and the tough little woman.

“Trouble,” Skerry said. “Someone just took out three aerospacers on manoeuvres over Big Vermilion.”

“How?” Mishcondereya asked.

“Partacs,” Skerry said carefully.

“Oh,” said Seskinore. “So, either the angels have gone berserk up there…”

“Or Pastor Harx is cranking up his apocalypse machine,” Weill said.

Perked by the scent of action, Skerry leaped to her feet and pulled an anodised aluminium gosport horn down from the ceiling.

“Full speed ahead there!” she shouted to the engineers. On her word the Class 27 found power deep in its tokamaks and leaped forward, sending the United Artists reeling.

“Excuse me,” Grandmother Taal said, innately adjusting to the surge and sway, “but exactly full speed ahead where?”

“To the Comedy Cave,” Skerry said without a flicker of irony.

“Please explain. I am an old lady and have experienced much of late.”

“We’re not all improvisers like Weill there,” Mishcondereya said. “You think we make this up as we go along? I tell you, it takes time and a lot of effort to put a good routine together, and a lot of resources. We’ve got FX teams, costume designers, script consultants, hundreds of extras, all on permanent standby.”

“And my granddaughter?”

“Find Harx, and we’ll find her, if I know runaway brides,” Skerry said.

“Oh people,” Bladnoch said, leaning over the arm of his sofa to look out the window, “weather warning.”

Even as he spoke, Grandmother Taal could feel the train slowing from its flat-out gallop. Everyone rushed to the window, faces and hands pressed to the gold-cooled glass. Solstice Landing’s magnificent dereliction had been left behind; the United Artists Special now arrowed across the high, unkempt and only-partially manformed high Plateau of Gwyst. Not a clint or a karst or a crater punctuated the monotonous black-sage scrub that gave this country its informal name; the Ashlands. You could see clear to the horizon in any direction. No missing a duststorm out there.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Bladnoch said, “but this isn’t supposed to be happening.”

“It’s big,” said Mishcondereya coolly. Skerry was on the gosport again, hollering at the driver.

“I see it!” he yelled back, voice thin and tinny on the metal tube. “Mother’a’grace, don’t you think I see it? No way I’m going through that, lady, timetables or no.”

The train had already slowed from its high cruise to a canter. Brakes squealing as the pads felt the first touch of the dust, the United Artists Special came to a halt in the heart of the Ashlands. Moments later, the storm closed around it like a fist. The carriages went blind. The windows were opaque dark brown panels. The train could have been sealed in terra cotta like a hedgepig for roasting.

Sweetness, Grandmother Taal thought. Where are you, what are you doing, are you safe? She tried to summon up some echo of the psychic resonance of the sending to will a message back to her granddaughter but the electrical properties of the duststorm muffled the will, baffled the higher sensitivities. United Artists sat in the close gloom while Seskinore recounted an interminable epic of his days as a stand-up on the circuit made all the more unendurable by the creepy feeling, there in the hissing twilight, that everyone was dead, killed in a crash when the train jumped points and derailed at four hundred and eighty, and this was the hell to which God the Panarchic consigned state-sanctioned practical jokers.

“Clearing,” Bladnoch said at last and by the time everyone got to the windows to peer through the sand-blasted glass, the last grains of dust had blown away and the sun stood high over Ashlands, ashen no more, for every leaf had been stripped from every black-sage bush.

“Took the paint right off,” Mishcondereya said, again coolly.

“Think what that could do to your beautiful skin,” Weill said.

“Never mind that,” Bladnoch said, craning round to follow the track of the departing storm, “Think what Harx can do if he’s got into the weather.”

The train moved on and was soon back to its customary pell-mell, down from the Gwyst into the Banninger. Bladnoch’s warning spurred United Artists from their perpetual bickering and sniping to some manner of actions. They formed a creative huddle in a glassed-off office section at the rear of the carriage and spent the remainder of the sun-lit hours in professional level sniping and bickering. Grandmother Taal saw much gesturing and stamping around, finger pointing and table punching and fist clenching. She ate a desultory prepackaged dinner in a plastic compartment tray dispensed from a slot and lip-read oaths that made even a trainfolk Matriarch blench. She squared the two contenders. In the green booth: a flying cathedral, untold catamites, a warehouse full of apparatchiks on ropes and the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis, with which he sought to Trojan Horse his way into the programmes of the angels themselves. In the red pavilion; a trapeze artist with a penchant for indecently short shorts, an alleged maestro who had urinated away his genius for afternoon sports channel tractor-pulls; a wispy performance artist (whatever that might be) with a pierce everywhere but through her ego; a paunchy joke-jockey too piss-poor even for the cruise trains; a ferrety self-proclaimed anarchist whose only chance of defeating the great enemy was through body-odour. Grandmother Taal mused for a time about what type of world it might be when Devastation Harx dethroned the angels. If any were left alive to inhabit it. The Engineers had never in all their genealogy produced a theologian, so Grandmother Taal’s conclusion, by the lights of her Domiety, was quite profound: if the Evil One defeats the Panarch, he, by defection, becomes God in all his absoluteness. When he takes the adamantine throne, the universe is remade in its entirety, beginning to end, and every memory with it. What we become, we will remember always having been. If there are trains in that world, they will still need Engineers. If not, then she would never know what she had been.

With full night outside, the huddle of heads broke up. The leather table and bulkhead wall were covered in fibre-pen scribblings but when the door flew open and United Artists stomped out, everyone went as far from his comrades as the carriage would allow and no one looked at anyone. Skerry paced tightly up and down in the one square metre by the bar, punching her fist into her hand. Bladnoch lay face down on his sofa and flicked on the evening sulky racing from Charnoch Park. Seskinore sat on a pouffe, palms on thighs, tilted his head upward and began to hum, quietly but nasally, hits from Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. Mishcondereya huddled in a chair, knees pulled to her chest, to practise sulks and pouts and, when she thought someone was looking, let leak the odd hard-done-by tear. Weill picked ferociously at his teeth and, when done with that, slipped off his sandals and peeled white strips of athlete’s foot from between his toes.

Grandmother Taal fumed inwardly at this sullen brattishness. If they had been trainpeople, little Engineers, even good-for-nothing Bassareenis, she would have had their very lugs…Not even her dear, wayward granddaughter, whom she permitted liberties allowed to no others aboard Catherine of Tharsis, would have behaved like that in the face of adversity. She found she was clenching her fists, sucking in her lower lip and chewing it, frowning hard enough to spark a tic of headache from her pineal gland. Too much. Like a superheated boiler venting, her patience blew in a great calliope whistle.

“United Artists, you call yourselves? I’ve seen more unity in a truckload of Cathrinist pelerines. Professionals: I will tell you professional; professional is, even when your son has not spoken to his wife for four years, the lading bills are made up, the contracts are docketed and sealed, the trucks end in the right yards and always, always, the train leaves on time. Three whistles, and you are left behind. You would all be walking, if you were trainfolk. You think you are so clever, so funny, that you are the hope of the world. My granddaughter is funnier than you when she is not even trying, and I have more hope in her than I have in you. Heroes! Bah. I break wind at you. If you are all that stands between my daughter and rescue, if you are our last best hope for bringing down Devastation Harx and his machinations, then dress me in purple and call me catamite. I squat and ease on you all.”

After a long, cool pause, Weill drawled, “Hey, lady, dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Bladnoch, who of all had seemed most ashamed at Taal’s frustrated outburst, suddenly propped himself up on his forearm, squinted through the near-opaque window glass into the darkness.

“Many a true word, Weill,” he said, and no one could mishear the tone of fear in his low, soft voice. “Lights, down.”

The golden glow ebbed from the leatherette carriage.

“What is it?” Skerry demanded, rushing to the window.

“I rather think we’re going to have to wing this one,” Bladnoch said, as the dark Banninger night was shockingly lit by beams of lilac light.