The Children of the Sky

Battle on Starship Hill

Chapter   04

Remasritlfeer had been working for the Great Tycoon for more than two years. This was a constant source of surprise to Remasritlfeer, who had never taken kindly to fools, even ones as rich as Tycoon. The two years had been one crackbrained mission after another, some more dangerous and exciting than the explorer in Remasritlfeer would have ever dreamed. And maybe that was why he continued to work for the madpack.

This latest piece of insanity might finally bring an end to their relationship. Exploring the Tropics! The assignment was more dangerous, more insane—literally insane—than anything Tycoon had demanded before. But truthfully, the first few days had been magnificent: Remasritlfeer had totally survived and in two ways he’d matched or exceeded the triumph of any explorer in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, that was four tendays ago. Tycoon just didn’t know when to give up. Glory had degenerated into deadly tedium, tenday after tenday of failures.

“There has to come an end to it, you know.” The words expressed Remasritlfeer’s heartfelt opinion, but they were spoken by his passenger on this flight. This final trip, if there was any mercy in the world. Chitiratifor was a well-dressed sixsome who barely fit in the balloon’s passenger platform. The Sea Breeze’s gondola was a cramped place where every pound had to be accounted for. The insulation round the passenger platform was so thin that Chitiratifor’s anxiety was painfully loud. Remasritlfeer could see claws and jaws here and there through the partition. His passenger was gouging the frame of the gondola with all his strength. There were retching sounds, some of his members barfing into the muddy water below.

Remasritlfeer waggled a semaphore at Tycoon’s sailing fleet below. They paid out the tether a bit faster, let the sea breeze blow the Sea Breeze steadily toward the swampy inland. This had been the routine twice a tenday since the beginning of this horrid exercise. All through the predawn, Tycoon’s support vessels would puff away, mixing iron filings with various corrosive poisons, filling the gas bag of the Sea Breeze or its alternate. Then, as the morning wind picked up, Remasritlfeer would lift off, sailing through the air like no one in history, like no one in the world (if you didn’t count the Sky Maggots).

“We’ll be over land in a matter of minutes now, sir,” he said cheerfully to Chitiratifor.

Chitiratifor made some more mouth noise. Then he said, “This has to look good, you know. My master says that Tycoon is still claiming the Tropics will make him rich beyond the dreams of all packs past. If we are not convincing today, he’ll be sailing around down here forever, pissing away our treasure.”

Our treasure? Chitiratifor and his master Vendacious were a presumptuous pair. They had some reason. They had provided critical fixes that made Tycoon’s inventions—including these balloons—workable. Remasritlfeer could sense their contempt. They figured they could use Tycoon; it seriously upset them when the Boss could not be swayed.

It was too bad that in this particular case Chitiratifor and Vendacious were absolutely right. Remasritlfeer looked inland. The weather had been perfect so far, but there were high clouds ranked to the north. If those clouds marched south, this afternoon could get exciting. At the moment, they simply blocked the far view, the jungle basin that fed the River Fell. Even on the clearest days, one pack’s eyes could not see the all of that. The Fell stretched northward to beyond the horizon. Its fringes were a vast network of great rivers descending from smaller and smaller ones, ultimately from mountain streams at the edge of arctic cold. Those lands had their own mysteries and threats. They were the scene of endless deadly stories and many of Remasritlfeer’s own explorations—but they could not compare to the Lower Fell, to the mystery and the threat of the ground below him now. Their balloon wasn’t more than a thousand feet up. Details were lost in the humid mist—except when he looked almost straight down. There was the muddy water, the occasional swamp grass. It was hard to tell just where the outflow of the Fell ended. Normal ships ran aground on barely submerged mudflats that extended more than a hundred miles out. The color of the shallows and their smell had given the Fell its name before any pack set eyes on the river mouth itself. You needed rafts or special-built ships to get as close as Tycoon’s fleet. And I am even closer yet! thought Remasritlfeer. It was a rare privilege, one that he would treasure—after he was far away from here. As for now, well, he’d seen cesspools in East Home with much the same appearance as the murk below, and the smell was like nothing he had ever experienced, a mix of rot and body odor and exotic plants.