Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

Jez felt like she was emerging from a daze. Activating the Mane sphere had been like a hammer blow to her mind. The energy released, the sheer force it took to tear open a rift to another place, was colossal. All those in the ancient sanctum had been stunned by the detonation, but Jez had caught it worse than the others. The sphere sent out a cry for help, loud enough to resonate across the planet, to jar the senses of Manes everywhere. Unbraced and unpractised at dealing with her new, inhuman awareness, she'd been overwhelmed.

Since then she'd been operating on automatic. Her faculties were all in place, but her Mane senses were deadened. Down in the streets of Sakkan she'd killed Manes without compunction, and felt nothing for the loss. She knew the Cap'n worried for her, but he needn't have. There was no kind of tribal kinship there. She was part Mane, but she didn't owe them loyalty. They'd press-ganged her. She hadn't chosen to be one of them.

Now her Mane senses were recovering, and a new awareness was seeping in. Ahead, she sensed something: a vast, ominous presence, growing stronger as they ploughed clumsily through the clouds. The Manes. They were going to where the Manes came from, and their nearness threatened her. She felt herself slipping into a trance.

No. Not now. You could lose yourself for good, here.

But despite her best efforts, it was happening. She fought to resist, but it was all she could do to stop herself going under entirely.

She could sense the aircraft around her, like a living thing. She felt the shift and grind of its mechanisms, the stresses on its tortured joints. She could smell the fear coming off Crake, and plot the swirl of the clouds that whipped at the windglass. The darkness didn't affect her. She saw everything with uncanny definition.

Hold it back, she told herself. The temptation to let herself go, to allow herself to be subsumed in the daemon that shared her body, was terrible. Here, so close to the Manes, its pull was fierce.

But she wouldn't let it win. Her crew needed her now. They needed Jez the navigator, cool and collected. Not a wild Mane in their cockpit.

The craft surged to port, hit an air pocket and plunged. Frey hollered with amazed joy.

'What are you so happy about?' asked Crake, who was looking green.

Frey ignored him. 'Doc!' he yelled through the doorway. 'Can you see that shrapnel? Is it still stuck in our tail?'

'Can't see it,' came the reply. 'Then again, I can't see bugger all else, either!'

Frey swooped the Ketty Jay to starboard. She bucked against the wind shear. Metal howled and something burst deep in her guts.

'Wind must have blown it clear! I can steer again!' Frey said.

'Well, can you stop steering?' Crake replied. 'We were doing better before!'

Jez surged to her feet. 'Cap'n,' she said. 'Let me fly her.'

Frey was shocked by the request. He'd always guarded his place in the pilot seat jealously, and only ever let her fly when he wasn't there to do it. She didn't know the Ketty Jay' s quirks like he did.

'We're breaking up, Cap'n,' she said urgently. 'But I can ride the winds. I'll get us through.'

He gave her a long stare.

'Let her try!' Crake urged him.

'Alright,' he said. He slipped out of the seat, his expression faintly resentful. Jez took his place, grabbed the stick, and closed her eyes.

There was an invisible swell coming up from beneath. She angled the wings and let them be carried on it. It should have been a battering ram against their hull. Instead they were lifted, firmly but steadily, like a swimmer on a wave.

'I can get us through,' she said again, and now she knew that she could.

The winds in the vortex were a labyrinth, a three-dimensional maze of turbulence. Jez saw it in her mind's eye, all the impossible complexities laid out before her. She tracked changes in the currents as they began to happen, knots and valleys in the wind. By the time they reached her, she'd corrected their course to take advantage. She flew as birds flew, at home with the mysteries of the sky.

As she went, she sank further and further into the trance. Her entire concentration was focused on her task, and there was little left to resist the pull of the daemon inside her.

There were voices on the wind. Some called out, some screamed in pain, others murmured as they went about their industry. Drowning them all out was the alarm, the cry of the sphere, pulsing at her mind. It drew her with a primal urgency, like the wail of a newborn draws its mother. Its distress was her distress. Her brethren needed aid. She wanted to help.

The dreadnoughts were beginning to evacuate the Manes from Sakkan. She knew that, without knowing how. They covered for one another, beating back the beleaguered Navy, and let down their ropes for their crew to climb, bringing the newly Invited with them. The sphere was no longer in Sakkan, so they were gathering their people and preparing to give chase.

Even with her best efforts, the Ketty Jay's passage through the clouds was violent. She couldn't react fast enough to account for every variation in the vortex. The craft shivered and whined as she was pummelled from all sides.

But gradually, the chaos eased, and the jolts came less often. Finally they reached still air, a featureless blank of grey cloud. Jez sat back in her seat, her expression vacant.

'You did it,' said Crake, after he'd swallowed a few times to get some moisture back into his throat.

'Nice work, Jez,' said Frey. 'Bloody nice work.' He got out of the navigator's seat and slapped the bulkhead. 'She's a tough old boot, the Ketty Jay!'

'Cap'n,' said Jez, her eyes distant. 'Cloud's thinning out.'

A light was growing ahead of them, and the temperature had dropped noticeably. Frey and Crake pulled their coats closer around them and crowded up behind Jez. Their breath steamed the air, despite the Ketty Jay's internal heating system.

The picture faded in gradually, until at last the land opened up before their eyes.

'Oh, my,' whispered Crake.

The haze in the air had diminished but not disappeared, giving the panorama a bleary, dreamlike quality. The sun shone, weak and distant, forcing the barest illumination through the shroud. Beneath them, a dim white world was laid out, an ocean of ice and snow as far as they could see. Cliffs surged abruptly into the sky at steep angles, as if they'd exploded up violently from beneath. Some lay splintered against one another, smashed by epic, millennia-long conflicts. The plains were rippled with sastrugi, great breaking waves, flash-frozen. Distant mountains loomed high and bleak. At their feet was a wide, low shadow, all curves and angles, glowing a faint shade of green.

'By damn,' said Crake. 'Is that what I think it is?'

'Yes,' said Jez. 'It's a city.'

Even Jez couldn't believe what she was seeing. A city of Manes, here in the arctic. To the others, it was barely visible, but Jez's vision was far superior to theirs. The city was all circles and arcs, built from black granite without much thought for human ideas of symmetry.

The majority of the buildings were low and round, stacked in uneven layers, half-circles and crescents and S-shaped curves. Among them stood sharp towers of shiny, glassy black, slender stalagmites that thinned unevenly towards their pinnacles.

The stacks and towers were linked by a complicated sequence of curving, covered boulevards that fractured and split in all directions. The buildings were like points on a diagram, the boulevards a web of connections between them. A seething green light soaked upward from the ground around the city, but Jez couldn't see what was making it. It was too far, even for her.

'Where are we?' asked Frey.