Tanner was horrified by Hedrigall’s flight. It wounded him. But he talked his thoughts out loud, trying hard to see things as his enigmatic friend had seen them. Must’ve felt trapped, Tanner thought. All the years he lived here, to suddenly see the place doing things in a new way. He don’t belong in Dreer Samher no more, and if he thought that he didn’t belong here neither… what must that’ve done?

He imagined Hedrigall fixing the Arrogance ’s broken motors in some of the spare hours he spent aboard it on his own. Everyone knew that Hedrigall was a loner who spent a deal more time in the Arrogance than he needed to. Had he untwisted the girders in the Arrogance ’s fins? Tested the pistons that had not moved for decades?

How long you been planning this, Hedrigall?thought Tanner Sack.

Couldn’t he have had an argument? Did he feel so strongly? Did he feel that there was no point even fighting for his home? Did he doubt that that’s what it was any longer?

Where you now, man?

Tanner imagined that big ungainly aerostat heading south, Hedrigall alone at its wheel.

I bet he’s crying.

It was suicide of sorts. Hedrigall couldn’t have amassed enough fuel to reach land, not anywhere. If he reached Armada’s waiting fleet, they’d want to know what had happened and why he’d left the city, so he’d avoid them.

The winds would take him over the empty sea. The gasbags were very strong; they might keep him buoyant for years. How much food did you store, man? Tanner wondered.

An image came to his mind, of the Arrogance adrift for years, four or five hundred feet above the water, with Hedrigall’s corpse rotting slowly in the captain’s cabin. A windblown sepulchre.

Or maybe he could stay alive. Maybe he would unroll a great, absurdly long fishing line from the Arrogance ’s bay doors. Tanner imagined it cascading through the air like a spring unwinding, till its baited hook reached the water. By choice the cactacae were vegetarians, but they could survive on fish or flesh if they had to.

There Hedrigall could sit, on the edge of the hatch, his legs swinging like a child’s, reeling in fish. Rubbery bodies flapping on the journey up, air-drowned and long dead when they reached him. He could live for years, blown around the world. Slipping into the roundstream winds that circled the Swollen Ocean, growing old and obstreperous on his unchanging diet, his skin wrinkling and his thorns turning grey. Alone, going mad. Talking to the portraits and heliotypes on the Arrogance ’s walls.