your Order who desire war merely for the sake of war.’
Ciro scowled at this, looking back and forth between Demothi and Danlo. In his high, angry voice, he said, ‘It’s too bad that you ambassadors will be safe in the city while we pilots risk our lives in space to protect you from your own Fellowship when it attacks us.’
‘And as for that,’ Nicabar broke in, ‘you should be aware that things are very different in Neverness than when you deserted her five years ago. We’ll try to ensure your safety, but there are many who won’t welcome you, either as ambassadors or as wayless.’
‘I am sorry, but I am not familiar with that word,’ Danlo said.
Ciro Dalibar shot Danlo a quick, cruel look, and he was only too happy to explain this term in Nicabar’s place. ‘There are those who follow the way of Mallory Ringess into godhood. And there are those who refuse to realize the truths of Ringism and turn their faces from the way. These are the wayless.’
‘I see.’
‘Some, of course, have never heard the truth so it’s our glory to bring it to them.’
‘I see,’ Danlo said in a voice as deep and calm as a tropical sea.
But his equipoise seemed only to enrage Ciro further, for he stared at Danlo and half-shouted, ‘And you – you’re the worst of the wayless! You helped make Ringism into a force for truth, and then you just betrayed us! You betrayed your own father and everything he lived for.’
Danlo had no answer for this, in words. He only looked at Ciro, and suddenly his dark blue eyes deepened like liquid jewels alive with an intense inner light. Because Ciro couldn’t bear the sheer wildness and truth of this gaze, he muttered something about traitors and then stared down at the ice in silence.
‘We’ll say farewell, now,’ Nicabar Blackstone said. ‘The lords are waiting for you and we must return to the stars. I’m only sorry that in the coming battles, I won’t have the chance to test myself against the pilot who mastered the Vild.’
With that he bowed to Danlo with perfect punctilio and led the other pilots back across the gliddery’s ice to their ships. It took them only a moment to fire their rockets and a few moments more to shoot off into the deep blue sky.
The tall, serious journeyman who had his hand on the throttle of Danlo’s and Demothi’s sled, turned to look at his two passengers.
‘Are you ready, Pilot? Lord Ambassador?’
‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Please.’
‘Very well. My name is Yemon Astoret, if you should need to address me.’
All at once the seventeen sleds fired their own rockets, and eight of these thundered down the gliddery ahead of Danlo’s sled. Then, with a jolt, he felt his sled begin to move, sliding across the red ice on its gleaming chromium runners. The remaining eight sleds followed them across the Hollow Fields northwards into the city that had once been his home.
‘So this is Neverness.’ The Ede hologram, projected out of the devotionary computer that Danlo carried on his lap, seemed to be drinking in the splendour of the city as if he were as alive as Demothi Bede or Danlo. ‘The City of Man.’
Many call Neverness by many names, but all call her beautiful. Once, Danlo had thought of this beauty as shonamanse, the beauty that men and woman make with their hands. But there is always beauty inside beauty, and Neverness had been built inside a half-ring of three of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Adjoining the Hollow Fields, almost so close that Danlo could have reached out his hand into the cold air and touched it, was Urkel, a great cone of basalt and granite and fir trees gleaming in the sun. And to the north, Attakel the Infinite, with its jagged, white-capped peak pointing the way towards the heavens for all to see. Just below Attakel, where the city rises up against the mountain, Danlo could make out the stunning rock formations of the Elf Garden where he had once gone to meditate as a journeyman. And far across the city to the northwest – across a narrow sound of the ocean which froze hard and fast in winter – he saw his favourite of the three mountains, Waaskel. It was Waaskel, this shining, white horn, that had guided him when he had first come to Neverness from a very different direction so many years before.
Losas shona, he thought. Shona eth halla.
Halla was the beauty of nature, and the glory of Neverness as a city was to mirror the natural beauty of Neverness Island itself. As Danlo rocketed slowly along the broad orange sliddery connecting the Hollow Fields to the academy, he marvelled at the great gleaming spires built of white granite or diamond or organic stone. There were the spires of the Old City, numerous, lovely and ancient, and the more recently-built spires such as those named for Tadeo Ashtoreth and Ada Zenimura. And the most recent of all, Soli’s Spire, named for Danlo’s grandfather. This needle of pink granite was the tallest in the city. At the end of the Pilots’ War, when a hydrogen bomb had destroyed much of the Hollow Fields and the surrounding neighbourhoods, Mallory Ringess had ordered it raised up as part of his rebuilding programme. This newly-made part of the city he called, simply, the New City, and it was these well-ordered blocks and graceful buildings through which the procession of sleds escorting Danlo now passed.
‘I was in the Timekeeper’s Tower when the bomb exploded,’ Demothi told Danlo above the wind whipping through the open sled. ‘I saw the mushroom cloud rise over this part of the city. And after, the utter ruin of streets that I had skated as a child. Every tower of the Fields broken, blown down. Almost every building. And look at it now! There’s no sign of the war, is there?’
Danlo looked out at the shopfronts and the many people coming and going from the various apartments giving out on to the street. Many of these buildings, with their pink granite and sweeping garlands of icevine flowers, reminded him of similar architecture he had seen throughout the Old City. All kinds of people thronged the sliddery itself, making travel slow. He saw wormrunners, courtesans, astriers, harijan, hibakusha and of course many Ordermen skating in the lanes to the side of them. The Academy Sliddery, as this street had been called for three thousand years, was one of the oldest in the city and usually one of the busiest. And now, on this 98th day of false winter in the year 2959 since the founding of Neverness, it seemed much as it always had at this time of day in this fairest of seasons. The air had fallen warm enough to melt the sliddery’s orange ice, and a sheen of water slickened its smooth surface. Songbirds warbled from their roosts in the elaborate stonework of the buildings while fritillaries swarmed the icevine flowers or the snow dahlia bursting from the planters in front of many restaurants. These were real fritillaries, insects with their lovely violet wings, not the organisms of the Golden Ring named for them. They added to the brightness and gaiety of the street; looking at them fluttering about in their thousands, it was almost impossible not to feel a certain peace.
And yet beneath the surface serenity of a typical false winter day, Danlo saw signs of war. Not the Pilots’ War that had befallen Neverness when he was still a child, but the coming war, the one he must stop even if it cost him his life. To begin with, too many people were wearing gold. Wormrunners and astriers and even harijan in their billowing pantaloons – many of them wore at least one garment that had been dyed a golden hue. All the courtesans, he saw, in their two- or three-piece silken pyjamas, were dressed wholly in gold, a clear sign that their Society had wholly converted to Ringism. And all the Ordermen wore bands of gold, often sewn into the very fabric of their robes. Five times he saw Ordermen actually wearing golden robes, and these were not grammarians as their colour once would have shown, but rather a horologe, a librarian, a cantor, a notationist and a holist. These five women and men wore armbands coloured red, brown, grey, maroon and cobalt to distinguish their respective
