‘What are you doing?’

He shrugged.

‘Facing death,’ he replied. ‘What else is there?’

She sighed.

‘Not a lot, now,’ she replied.

‘You see the trouble you get me in?’ he said.

‘Bet you wished you’d never met me,’ she said.

‘Not even once,’ he replied.

The howling came again. Wind rushed across them.

The gun-cutter rose up behind the trees on the edge of the pasture, jets screaming. Nose down, it swept across the grass, lifting clouds of spinning leaves and stalks into the air. Drusher could see the amber-lit cockpit. Medea, grim-faced, pulling on the controls.

The forward ramp was lowering even before she put the big craft down on its heavy undercarriage.

They ran up the ramp.

‘Are you all in?’ Medea’s voice crackled through the intercabin vox.

‘Go!’ Nayl yelled.

‘Handholds!’ Eisenhorn ordered.

They grabbed what they could. Eisenhorn pushed Voriet into an acceleration couch and held him down. Macks grabbed an overhead strap, then grabbed Drusher as he staggered past.

The gun-cutter lifted. The ramp wasn’t even shut. Drusher could see the ground dropping away, the pasture…

The gun-cutter swung, lifting its nose. Everyone lurched the other way. Now, Drusher could see evening sky through the still-closing ramp. Acceleration pulled at them hard.

‘Strap in,’ ordered Eisenhorn. ‘Medea! Brace for shock wave in three!’

‘Shock wave?’ asked Macks.

‘I can feel it coming,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘The fire, you see? It was never put out.’

The gun-cutter climbed on maximum thrust, racing into the high altitudes of the great peaks.

Behind it, in the black fog of the valley, there was a blink. A flash of violet light and jade-green electrical discharge.

A two-kilometre square patch of the woodland folded into itself, and vanished.

Then, the shock wave.

Twenty-Nine

TWENTY-NINE

At the Closing of the World

‘Caffeine?’ asked Medea.

She held out a tin mug to Drusher.

‘Thanks,’ he said as he took it.

‘Took me a while to find you,’ she said. ‘What are you doing up here?’

‘Taking a last look, really,’ he said.

From the old walls of Helter, they could see across the valley. It had been raining since before dawn. Rain tapped off the Magistratum slickers they were both wearing. It spotted the lenses of Drusher’s old spectacles, but he could see well enough. Less than a kilometre away, the forest was gone, the earth scorched smooth. Great clouds of vapour were still rising off the scar.

‘You fly well,’ he said.

‘There was incentive,’ she replied. ‘Besides, it’s what he pays me to do.’

‘You’d do it even if he didn’t pay you,’ he said.