hologram seemed astonished to discover how long Danlo could sleep when he was really tired – in this instance, for most of three days. When he finally broke back into consciousness and looked out on the stars, he realized that he had slept too long.
‘We will fall on, now,’ he said, angry with himself though well rested. ‘I only hope that war hasn’t come to Neverness while I was dreaming.’
And so they fell. Danlo took the Snowy Owl back into the manifold, and they fell on past Kalkin and Skibbereen and the great red giant star known as Daru Luz. Although the Danladi wave had slightly flattened these familiar spaces and broken a few of the familiar Fallaways as a windstorm might snap a tree’s twigs, most of the pathways through the manifold remained untouched. He made a mapping to a little star near Summerworld, and then on past Tria, Larondissement and Avalon. All these stars lay along the rather roundabout pathway towards Neverness that he had once rejected as too lengthy. But the Danladi wave had made it so that this journey required little more time than his original and more straightforward approach. And it required much less risk. Even in the spaces near Larondissement, one of the Civilized Worlds most devoted to the new religion of Ringism, he descried no tells of any Ringist ship which might be lying in wait for him. On this last segment of his surprisingly peaceful journey, he encountered no other ships at all, not even the vast deep-ships of the Trian merchant-pilots which usually plied the Fallaways filled with cargoes of gossilk, neurologics, firestones, firewine, Gilada pearls, sulki grids, bloodfruits, jook, jambool, blacking oil, and a million other things grown or manufactured on the worlds of man. When he reached Avalon, a pretty blue star so close to the star of his birth, he made a final mapping. It was the famous Ashtoreth mapping, named for the pilot Villiama li Ashtoreth who had discovered it at the beginning of the Order’s Golden Age in the year 681. It carried the Snowy Owl across three hundred light years of space in a single fold, where it fell out in the thickspace near the Star of Neverness.
‘Home,’ Danlo whispered as he looked out at the soft, yellow star that had lit all the days of his childhood. ‘O, Sawel, miralando mi kalabara, kareeska.’
In truth, however, he wasn’t quite home, not yet. He looked out with his telescopes across seventy million miles of vacuum where he spied the planet Icefall spinning like a white and blue jewel in the blackness of space. He might have instantly made a mapping to a point-exit only a few hundred miles above Icefall’s atmosphere, but such a rash act would have set off the planetary defence systems, and he and his ship would surely have been destroyed. As it was, his peril was still great. The Snowy Owl gleamed in the radiance of the Star of Neverness like a dove with a broken wing. Its opening of a window from the manifold had surely created tells that any lightship in this neighbourhood of stars would detect. And surely, with war so near, the Lord Pilot, Salmalin the Prudent, would have deployed many ships to protect Neverness from surprise attack. Danlo waited for the arrival of these ships. It was almost all that he could do. But first he aimed a radio signal at the city of Neverness informing the Lords of the Order of the Snowy Owl’s mission. He did not think that the Old Order’s Ringists had sunk so far into barbarism that they would simply murder two ambassadors out of hand. The danger was that one of the arriving lightships might act without waiting for instructions from Neverness. Some reckless young pilot might perceive the Snowy Owl as only the vanguard of an invasion fleet and fall immediately against him.
And so Danlo waited in the pit of the Snowy Owl, counting heartbeats as he searched for the tells of other lightships. He began counting the seven hundred and fourteen seconds that his radio signal would take to cross seventy million miles of realspace and be returned as a command to all the Order’s lightships that Danlo and Demothi Bede were not to be harmed. He waited exactly eighty-eight seconds, and then a lightship fell out of the thickspace near him, followed only a few seconds later by four more of these deathly diamond needles. He recognized these ships. There was the Infinite Dactyl, piloted by Dario of Urradeth, and the Golden Lotus and the Bell of Time. And Nicabar Blackstone’s Ark of the Angels, with its lovely, curving wings. The fifth ship he knew well because he had been at Resa with its pilot, Ciro Dalibar, as chance would fall. He had even helped Ciro design the heuristics for this uniquely pointed ship, which Ciro had named the Diamond Arrow.
Ahira, Ahira, Danlo prayed, and he beamed a radio signal to each of these ships. And now he waited for the five pilots either to accept his parlay or to destroy him. That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.
Much later he would learn that these five pilots, floating in the dazzling void near the Star of Neverness, had held a conclave among themselves. Ciro Dalibar, with his cruel, thin lips and jealousy of Danlo, had argued that as a pilot of the Order of the Vild – and thus of the Fellowship – he should be slain as a just act of war. But Cham Estarei of the Blue Lotus had spoken against such bloodthirstiness. As had Nicabar Blackstone. Nicabar, a master pilot and eldest of the five, told the others that it would do no harm to wait to hear from the lords on Neverness. If they wished to accept Danlo’s and Demothi’s embassy, well and good. If they did not, then the Snowy Owl could be sent back to Sheydveg or wherever the Order of the Vild’s fleet might be. Or they could send Danlo into the Star of Neverness. The five ships, acting together, could open a window into this blazing star whenever they wished and send Danlo’s ship into the fires of hell.
‘We’ll wait for the wishes of the lords,’ Nicabar Blackstone told Danlo and Demothi. Nicabar’s imago, with its glowing green eyes and deathly white countenance, had appeared in the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘We must ask that you attempt no motion in realspace nor open any windows into the manifold. If you do, we’ll fall against you and destroy you.’
And so, with the noses of five ships pointing at him across only a few miles of space, Danlo waited. It took more than two thousand seconds for the Lords of Neverness’s message to arrive. Neither Danlo nor Demothi Bede were to be harmed. Danlo wi Soli Ringess was instructed to make a mapping to a certain point-exit above Neverness. The five lightships were to ensure that the Snowy Owl fell out into near-space exactly where it should. Then they were to escort the ambassadors down through the atmosphere to the Hollow Fields, where a sled would carry them to an emergency session of the Lords’ College.
‘I’d advise caution,’ the Ede hologram said in the privacy of the Snowy Owl. ‘The Ringists might wish to trap you.’
‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Of course they will – we will be as prisoners the moment we touch the ice of Neverness.’
Demothi Bede drew his hand across his old, wrinkled face and said, ‘Still, it will be good to see the city again. And my old friends. I never thought I would.’
‘To see old friends,’ Danlo repeated softly. His eyes were grave yet full of light. He felt a terrible burning behind his eyes, and terrible images began streaming into his mind as if he were looking far across space and time. ‘To see the city again – and what lies above.’
A few moments later, at Nicabar Blackstone’s command, Danlo made a mapping to the point-exit above Neverness. The Snowy Owl fell out exactly as arranged, and Danlo gasped at the changes that only a few years had wrought in the once-empty reaches of space encircling Icefall. To begin with, the sky above his world’s sky was swarming with ships. There were deep-ships and long-ships, fire-ships and gold ships and many, many black ships armed for war. He counted more than forty-eight thousand ships spread out below him in a vast moving carpet of steel and diamond and black nall. He counted two hundred and ten lightships, too; a much larger fleet than that of the Fellowship of Free Worlds, even though all the Ringist lightships were not present. Some of these two hundred and thirty-one missing ships would be off on raiding missions such as the one that had surprised the Sonderval’s ships near Ulladulla. Others would try to detect the movements of the Fellowship’s fleet when it finally fell away from Sheydveg on its unknown pathway towards Neverness. Surely Salmalin would have
