The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (79 page)

And they were gone. Every nerve on the skymaster, human and Twav, was afire. The silence was immense. My Turkic is functional but necessary – enough to know what Ferid Bey is actually saying – and I recalled the few words of the skycaptain I had overheard as he relayed communications to the crew. The assault on Camp Oudeman had been part of a surprise offensive by the Tharsian Warqueens. Massive assaults had broken out along a five hundred mile front from Arsai to Urania. War machines, shock troops – there had even been an assault on Spacefleet: squadron after squadron of rockets launched to draw the staggering firepower of our orbital battleships from the assault below. And up from out of the soil, things like no one had seen before. Things that put whole battalions to flight, that smashed apart trench lines and crumbled redoubts to sand. As I tried to imagine the red earth parting and something from beyond nightmares rising up, I could not elude the dark thought: might there not be similar terrible novelties in the sky? This part of my eavesdropping I kept to myself. It was most simple: I had been routinely lying to Count Jack since the first day I set up my music on the piano.

"I could murder a drink," Count Jack said. "If there were such a thing on this barquadero. Even a waft of a Jameson's cork under my nose."

The wine on the deck of the
Empress of Mars
must have corrupted me, because at that moment I would gladly have joined the Maestro. More than joined, I would have beaten him by a furlong to the bottom of the bottle of Jameson's.

Up on the bridge, a glass finger projecting from the skymaster's lifting body, the skycaptain called orders from his post at the steering yoke. Crew moved around us. The battledores shifted the hue of their plumage from blue to violent yellow. I felt the decking shift beneath me – how disorienting, how unpleasant, this sense of everything sound and trustworthy moving, nothing to hold on to. The engines were loud; the captain must be putting on speed, navigating between the wind-polished stone. We were flying through a monstrous stone pipe organ. I glanced up along the companionway to the bridge. Pink suffused the world beyond the glass. We had run all night through the Labyrinth of Night; that chartless maze of canyons and ravines and rock arches that humans suspected was not entirely natural. I saw rock walls above me. We were low, hugging the silted channels and canals. The rising sun sent planes of light down the sheer fluted stone walls. There is nothing on Earth to compare with the loveliness of dawn on Mars, but how I wish I were there and not in this dreadful place.

"Faisal."

"Maestro."

"When we get back, remind me to fire that greased turd Ferid."

I smiled, and Count Jack Fitzgerald began to sing.
Galway Bay
, the most hackneyed and sentimental of faux-Irish paddywhackery ('Have you ever been to Galway Bay? Incest and Gaelic games. All they know, all the like') but I had never heard him sing it like this. Had he not been seated on the deck before me, leaning up against a bulkhead, I would have doubted that it was his voice. It was small but resonant, perfect like porcelain, sweet as a rose and filled with a high, light innocence. This was the voice of childhood; the boy singing back the tunes his grandmother taught him. This was the Country Count from Kildare. Every soul on the skymaster, Terrene and Martian, listened, but he did not sing for them. He needed no audience, no accompanist: this was a command performance for one.

The skymaster shook to a sustained impact. The spell was broken. Voices called out in Turkic and Twav flute-speech. The skymaster rocked, as if shaken in a god-like grip. Then with a shriek of rending metal and ship-skin, the gun-blister directly above us was torn away; gunner, gun and a two metre shard of hull. A face looked in at us. A face that more than filled the gash in the hull; a nightmare of six eyes arranged around a trifurcate beak. The beak opened. Rows of grinding teeth moved within. A cry blasted us with alien stench: ululating over three octaves, ending in a shriek. It drove the breath from our lungs and the will from our hearts. Another answered it, from all around us. Then the face was gone. A moment of shock – a moment, that was all – and the skycaptain shouted orders. The Twav rose from their perches, wings clattering, and streamed through the hole in the hull. I heard the whine of ray-rifles warming up, and then the louder crackle and sizzle of our own defensive heat rays.

I thought I would never hear a worse thing than the cry through the violated hull. The shriek, out there, unseen, was like the cry I might make if my spine were torn from my living body. I could only guess: one of those things had met a heat ray.

We never saw any of the battledores again.

Again, the skymaster shook to an impact. Count Jack lunged forward as claws stabbed through the hull and tore three rips the entire length of the bulkhead. The skymaster lurched to one side; we slid across the decking in our tail-coats and smoke-smudged dickie shirts. An impact jolted the rear of the air ship, I glimpsed blackness and then the entire tail turret was gone and the rear of the skymaster was open to the air. Through the open space I saw a four-winged flying thing stroke away from us, up through the pink stone arches of this endless labyrinth. It was enormous. I am no judge of comparative dimensions – I am an auditory man, not a visual one – but it was on a par with our own limping skymaster. The creature part-furled its wings to clear the arch, then turned high against the red sky and I saw glitters of silver at the nape of its neck and between its legs. Mechanisms, devices, Uliri crew.

While I gaped at the sheer impossible horror of what I beheld, the skymaster was struck again, an impact so hard it flung us from one side of the hold to the other. I saw steel-shod claws the size of scimitars pierce the glass finger of the bridge like the skin of a ripe orange. The winged Martian horror ripped bridge from hull and with a flick of its foot – it held the bridge as lightly and easily as a pencil – hurled it spinning through the air. I saw one figure fall from it and closed my eyes. I did hear Count Jack mumble the incantations of his faith.

Robbed of control, the skymaster yawed wildly. Engineering crew rushed around us, shouting tersely to each other, fighting to regain control, to bring us down in some survivable landing. There was no hope of escape now. What were those things? Those nightmare hunters of the Labyrinth of Night? Skin shredded, struts shrieked and buckled as the skymaster grazed a rock chimney. We listed and started to spin.

"We've lost port-side engines!" I shouted, translating the engineers' increasingly cold and desperate exchanges. We were going down but it was too fast... too fast. The chief engineer yelled an order that translated as brace for impact in any language. I wrapped cargo strapping around my arms, and gripped for all my worth. Pianists have strong fingers.

"Patrick and Mary!" Count Jack cried and then we hit. The impact was so huge, so hard it drove all breath and intelligence and thought from me, everything except that death was certain and that the last, the very last thing I would ever see would be a drop of fear-drool on the plump bottom lip of Count Jack Fitzgerald, and that I had never noticed how full, how kissable, those lips were. Death is such a sweet surrender.

We did not die. We bounced. We hit harder. The skymaster's skeleton groaned and snapped. Sparking wires fell around us. Still we did not stop, or die. I remember thinking, don't tumble, if we tumble, we are dead, all of us, and so I knew we would survive. Shaken, smashed, stunned, but surviving. The corpse of the skymaster slid to a crunching stop hard against the house-sized boulders at the foot of the canyon wall. I could see daylight in five places through the skymaster's violated hull. It was beautiful beyond words. The sky-horrors might still be circling, but I had to get out of the airship.

"Jack! Jack!" I cried. His eyes were wide, his face pale with shock. "Maestro!" He looked and saw me. I took his hand and together we ran from the smoking ruin of the skymaster. The crew, military trained, had been more expeditious in their escape. Already they were running from the wreck. I felt a shadow pass over me. I looked up. Diving out of the tiny atom of the sun – how horrible, oh how horrible! I saw for the first time, whole and entire, one of the things that had been hunting us and my heart quailed. It swooped with ghastly speed and agility on its four wings and snatched the running men up into the air, each impaled on a scimitar-claw. It hovered in the air above us and I caught the foul heat and stench of the wind from its wings and beak. This, this is the death for which I had been reserved. Nothing so simple as an air crash. The sky-horror looked at me, looked at Count Jack with its six eyes, major and minor. Then with a terrible scrannel cry like the souls of the dead engineers impaled on its claws and a gust of wing-driven wind, it rose up and swept away.

We had been marked for life.

I
rony is the currency of time. We were marked for life, but three times I entertained killing Count Jack Fitzgerald. Pick up a rock and beat him to death with it, strangle him with his bow tie, just walk away from and leave him in the dry gulches for the bone-picking things.

I reasoned, by dint of a ready water supply and a scrap of paper, thrown in, that showed a sluggish but definite flow, that we should follow the canal. I had little knowledge of the twisted areography of the Labyrinth of Night – no one did, I suspect – but I was certain that all waters flowed to the Grand Canal and that was the spine and nervous system of Operation Enduring Justice. I advised us to drink – Count Jack ordered me to look away as he knelt and supped up the oddly metallic Martian water. We set off to the sound of unholy cries high and far among the pinnacles of the canyon walls.

The sun had not crossed two fingers of narrow canyonland sky before Count Jack gave an enormous theatrical sigh and sat down on a canalside barge bollard.

"Dear boy, I simply cannot take another step without some material sustenance."

I indicated the alien expanse of rock, dust, water, red sky; hinted at its barrenness.

"I see bushes," Count Jack said. "I see fruit on those bushes."

"They could be deadly poison, Maestro."

"What's fit for Martians cannot faze the robust Terrene digestive tract," Count Jack proclaimed. "Anyway, better a quick death than lingering starvation, dear God."

Argument was futile. Count Jack harvested a single, egg-shaped, purple fruit and took a small, delicate bite. We waited. The sun moved across its slot of sky.

"I remain obdurately alive," said Count Jack and ate the rest of the fruit. "The texture of a slightly under-ripe banana and a flavour of mild aniseed. Tolerable. But the belly is replete."

Within half an hour of setting off again Count Jack had called a halt.

"The gut, Faisal, the gut." He ducked behind a rock. I heard groans and oaths and other, more liquid noises. He emerged pale and sweating.

"How do you feel?"

"Lighter, dear boy. Lighter."

That was the first time I considered killing him.

The fruit had opened more than his bowels. The silence of the canyons must have haunted him, for he talked. Dear God, he talked. I was treated to Count Jack Fitzgerald's opinion on everything from the way I should have been ironing his dress shirts (apparently I required a secondary miniature ironing board specially designed for collar and cuffs) to the conduct of the war between the worlds.

I tried to shut him up by singing, trusting – knowing – that he could not resist an offer to show off and shine. I cracked out
Blaze Away
in my passable baritone, then
The Soldier's Dream
, anything with a good marching beat. My voice rang boldly from the rim rocks.

Count Jack touched me lightly on the arm.

"Dear boy, dear dear boy. No. You only make the intolerable unendurable."

And that was the second time I was close to killing him. But we realised that if we were to survive – and though we could not entertain the notion that we might not, because it would surely have broken our hearts and killed us – we understood that to have any hope of making it back to occupied territory, we would have to proceed as more than Maestro and Accompanist. So in the end we talked, one man with another man. I told him of my childhood in middle-class, leafy Woking, and at the Royal Academy of Music, and the realisation, quiet, devastating and quite quite irrefutable, that I would never be a concert great. I would never play the Albert Hall, the Marinsky, Carnegie Hall. I saw a Count Jack I had never seen before; sincere behind the bluster, humane and compassionate. I saw beyond an artiste. I saw an
artist
. He confided his fears to me: that the days of Palladiums and Pontiffs had blinded him. He realised too late that one night the lights would move to another and he would face the long, dark walk from the stage. But he had plans; yes, he had plans. A long walk in a hard terrain concentrated the mind wonderfully. He would pay the revenue their due and retain Ferid Bey only long enough to secure the residency on Venus. And when his journey through the worlds was done and he had enough space dust under his nails, he would return to Ireland, to County Kildare, and buy some land and set himself up as a tweedy, be-waistcoated red-faced Bog Boy. He would sing only for the Church; at special masses and holy days of obligation and parish glees and tombolas, he could see a time when he might fall in love with religion again, not from any personal faith, but for the comfort and security of familiarity.

"Have you thought of marrying?" I asked. Count Jack had never any shortage of female admirers, even if they no longer threw underwear on to the stage as they had back in the days when his hair and moustache were glossy and black – and he would mop his face with them and throw them back to shrieks of approval from the crowd. "Not a dry seat in the house, dear boy." But I had never seen anything that hinted at a more lasting relationship than bed and a champagne breakfast.

"Never seen the need, dear boy. Not the marrying type. And you Faisal?"

"Not the marrying type either."