Thinblood ignored the ladder and vaulted down, landing beside her with a smug thump. Instantly, the surface under their feet began swaying, and little flakes of rust showered down. The ladders here to save the pipe, not your feet, Venera said loudly. Thinblood looked abashed; the others clambered down the ladder meekly.
The ladder descended the vertical part of the pipe and they now stood where it bent into a horizontal direction. This tunnel was ten feet wide and who knew what it might originally have carried? Horse manure, Venera suspected. Whatever the case, it now ended twenty feet away. Late afternoon sunlight hurried shadows across the jagged circle of torn metal. It was from there that the roar originated.
Come. Without hesitation Venera walked to within five feet of the opening, then went down on one knee. She pointed. There! Sacrus!
They could barely have heard her over the roar of the thin air; it didnt matter. It was clear what she was pointing at.
The pipe they stood in thrust forty or fifty feet into the airstream below the curve of Spyres hull. Luckily, this opening faced away from the headwind, though suction pulled at Venera relentlessly and the air was so thin she was starting to pant already. The pipe hung low enough to provide a vantage point from which a long stretch of Spyres hull was visiblemiles of it, in fact. Way out there, near the little worlds upside-down horizon, a cluster of pipes much like this onebut intactjutted into the airflow. Nestled among them was a glassed-in machine-gun blister, similar to the one Venera had first visited underneath Garth Diamandiss hovel.
Thats the underside of the Gray Infirmary, she yelled at the motley collection of generals and revolutionaries crowding at her shoulder. Someone cupped hand to ear and looked quizzical. Infirmary! In! Firm! She jabbed her finger at the distant pipes. The quizzical person smiled and nodded.
Venera backed up cautiously, and the others scuttled ahead of her. At the pipes bend, where breathing was a bit easier and the noise and vibration not so mind-numbing, she braced her rump against the wall and her feet in the mulch of rust lining the bottom of the pipe. We brought down telescopes and checked out that machine-gun post. Its abandoned, like most of the hull positions. The entrance is probably bricked up, most likely forgotten. Its been hundreds of years since anybody tried to assault Spyre from the outside.
She could barely make out the buzzing words of Carasthants general. You propose to get in through that? How? By jumping off the world and grabbing the pipes as they pass?
Venera nodded. When they all stared back uncomprehending, she sighed and turned to Princess Corinne. Show them, she said.
Corinne was carrying a bulky backpack. She wrestled this off and plunked it down in the rust. This, she said with a dramatic flourish, is how we will get to Sacrus.
It is called a parachute.
face was buried in the voluminous shoulder of her leather coat; her hands clutched the rope that twisted and shuddered in her grip. In the chattering roar of a four-hundred mile per hour wind there was no room for distractions, or even thought.
Her teeth were clenched around a mouthpiece of Fin design. A rubber hose led from this to a metal bottle that, Corinne had explained, held a large quantity of squashed air. It was that ingredient of the air the Rook s engineers had called oxygen; Veneras first breath of it had made her giddy.
Every now and then the wind flipped her over or dragged her head to the side and Venera saw where she was: wrapped in leathers, goggled and masked, and hanging from a thin rope inches below the underside of Spyre.
All she had to do was keep her body arrow-straight and keep that mouthpiece in. Venera was tied to the line, which was being let out quite rapidly from the edge of the airfall. Ten soldiers had already gone this way before her, so it must be possible.
It was night, but distant cities and even more distant suns cast enough light to silver the misty clouds that approached Spyre like curious fish. She saw how the clouds would nuzzle Spyre cautiously, only to be rebuffed by its whirling rotation. They recoiled, formed cautious spirals and danced around the great cylinder, as if trying to find a way in. Dark specklesflocks of piranhawks and sharksbrowsed among them, and there in great black formations were the barbedwire and blockhouses of the sentries.
To be among the clouds with nothing above or below seemed perfectly normal to Venera. If she fell, she only had to open her parachute and shed come to a stop long before hitting the barbed wire. It wasnt the prospect of falling that made her heart poundit was the savage headwind that was trying to snatch her breath away.
The rope shuddered, and she grabbed it spasmodically. Then she felt a hand touch her ankle.
The soldiers hauled her through a curtain of speed ivy and into a narrow gun emplacement. This one was dry and empty, its tidiness somehow in keeping with Sacruss fastidious attention to detail. Bryce was already here, and he unceremoniously yanked the air line from Veneras mouthor tried; she bit down on it tenaciously for a second, glaring at him, before relenting and opening her mouth. He shot her a look of annoyance and tied it and her unopened parachute to the line. This he let out through the speed ivy, to be reeled back to Buridan for its next user.