you, Lord Pilot,’ Danlo said politely. But his voice was full of irony and amusement – and with dread.
‘If your mission fails and you’re imprisoned, you mustn’t let the Akashics read your mind. And you mustn’t let the Ringists torture you.’
‘Do you truly think that Hanuman would—’
‘Some chances would be foolish to take,’ the Sonderval said. ‘The brooch’s pin is tipped with matrikax. If pushed into a vein, it kills instantly.’
‘I see.’
‘Your vow of ahimsa doesn’t prevent you from taking your own life, does it?’
Never killing or harming another, not even in one’s own thoughts, Danlo remembered. And then he said, ‘Some would say that it does.’
‘And what do you say, then?’
‘I … will never tell anyone the stars along your pathway.’
‘Very well,’ the Sonderval said.
He moved closer to Danlo and bent his long neck down as might a swan. For a few moments, he whispered in Danlo’s ear. Then he backed away as if he couldn’t bear such closeness with another human being.
‘Before you leave, I’ll meet with Lord Bede by imago,’ the Sonderval said. ‘But I won’t tell him what I’ve just told you.’
‘But is he not a lord of the New Order?’
‘He is not a pilot. There are some things only pilots should know.’
Danlo bowed, then fixed his burning eyes on the Sonderval. For a time, in the deep silence of space, the two men held each other’s gaze and looked into each other’s heart. And then finally the Sonderval had to turn away.
‘I was both wrong and right about you,’ the Sonderval said. ‘Wrong, because you’ll serve us very well as an ambassador. But you would have made a great warrior, too. As I know you secretly are. The fire, Pilot, the light. Hanuman would do well to fear you.’
‘But it is I … who will be at his mercy.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps.’
For a moment, the Sonderval looked at Danlo strangely before bowing to him. Perhaps some presentiment of doom came flooding into him like an ocean wave then, for his eyes misted and his perfectly shaped chin trembled slightly. Considering that he was the Sonderval, the most perfect and aloof of all men, this was one of the most remarkable things Danlo had ever seen.
‘I wish you well, Lord Pilot.’
‘And I wish you well. I hope I shall see you again.’
Danlo smiled and said, ‘When we have stopped the war – when the war is over.’
‘When the war is over,’ the Sonderval repeated. And then he said, ‘Fall far and fall well, Pilot.’
With a final bow, Danlo returned to his ship. It took only moments for the two pilots to disengage the Cardinal Virtue and the Snowy Owl. These beautiful lightships orbited above Sheydveg like a pair of silver thallows while Lord Demothi Bede spoke with the Sonderval and received his final instructions. And then the Snowy Owl rocketed away from the thirty thousand other ships towards Sheydveg’s orange-red sun. Danlo opened a window into the manifold, and so he began the last part of his journey to return home and to bring an end to war.
Life is light trapped in matter.
— saying of the gnostics
Life is the ability of matter to trap light.
— saying of the eschatologists
In mapping his pathways from Sheydveg to Neverness, Danlo had a choice between two conflicting purposes. Since his mission cried out for speed, he might have fallen from star to star by the shortest pathway, which would have taken him to Arcite, Darkmoon and Darghin, and thence to Fravashing and Silvaplana before falling on to Qallar and Neverness. But his safety – and Demothi Bede’s – was important, too; dead ambassadors stop no wars. Since the Ringists were already at war, a lone lightship falling suddenly out of the manifold near some hostile world might find itself attacked by ten others. Certainly, therefore, Danlo would best avoid such worlds, for Ringist pilots might be lying in wait along such an obvious pathway. It would be safest for him to make a great circle through the Fallaways, past the great red sun of the Elidi and then on to Flewelling, the Nave, Simoom and Catava. Safest, truly, but such a journey would take long, long. In the end, he decided upon the shorter pathway. Once, his friends and fellow pilots had called him Danlo the Wild. But he was not wild beyond the cooling draughts of reason, and so he began his journey with a falling off towards Agathange instead of Arcite and planned to approach Neverness by way of Kenshin or Tyr.
His journey across the stars was both the easiest and hardest he had ever made. Easy, because he fenestered through the most ancient and well-mapped part of the Fallaways, and the spaces he crossed were almost as familiar to him as the snowy islands of his childhood. If Arrio Verjin was right and a Danladi wave would soon rip through the Fallaways and turn the manifold into a raging black sea, Danlo saw no sign of this. The manifold before him – the emerald invariant spaces and Gallivare sets – was no more dangerous than a forest brook. He passed well-known stars, Baran Luz and Pilisi, a red giant almost as lovely to look upon as the Eye of Ursola. As always, he marvelled at the colours, the hot blue stars, the red and orange, and those loveliest of lights whose tones shone more as pale rose or golden yellow. This, he thought, was the glory of being a pilot. To behold a star with such closeness as if it were a bright red apple hanging from a tree was very different from standing on an icy world and looking up at the sky. Then, at night, the stars hung from the heavens like a million tiny jewels. And they were almost all white. From far away, the stars were like white diamonds because the human eye’s faint-light nerve cells couldn’t respond to colour, while the colour receptors couldn’t feel the faint touch of starlight. Once, as a child, he had hoped to see the stars just as they really were. And some day, he thought, he still might look out at the galaxies with his eyes truly open and naked to the universe. But now it was very good just to gaze at the colours of Cohila Luz or Tur Tupeng through the clearness of his lightship’s windows.
The hard part of this journey came from his continual surveillance of the manifold. For many days, he studied this space beneath space with the intensity of a tyard bird watching a snowfield for the slightest sign of a worm. Always, within a well-defined region about him known as a Lavi neighbourhood, the manifold rippled with undulations, most as faint as a whisper of wind upon a starlit sea. These he ignored, indeed, scarcely even noticed. What he sought – and hoped not to find – were the tells of a lightship, those violet traceries and luminous streaks made when a ship perturbed the manifold. Just as he passed by a spinning thickspace near the Valeska Double, he thought that he descried such tells. For the count of ten heartbeats, he didn’t breathe. But upon deeper scrutiny, it proved to be only the reflection of the Snowy Owl’s own tells, an unusual phenomenon when the manifold flattens out like a clear mountain lake. Four more times between Darkmoon and Silvaplana, Danlo was to detect such reflections,
