Filaria - Brent Hayward [61]
He took a step back. “It’s only a crazy old car,” he said. “I, uh, I don’t know what happened to your canteen.”
“Cynthia, that’s not all.”
“There’s more.”
“More?” She turned back on the pair. “What else more could there possibly be?”
“Well, his friend, the driver — ”
“McCreedy?” Phister asked, suddenly forgetting his own problems. “What about McCreedy?”
Words came out of two mouths, mingled as if from one. “He’s dead.” They fell upon Phister like stones. “He’s fucking dead!”
DEIDRE, L1A (SUPERSTRUCTURE)
Vertigo, rushing disorientation, hot tears, and nausea. She was unbelievably high. Above the scaffolding. Adjacent to one of the suns: the massive fixtures that illuminated and heated the world, beginning their morning burn, were right there, so close Deidre felt the growing heat of their radiant proximity crackling at her skin, so close they blinded her.
She would never open her eyes again. Never. For now day was burgeoning, she had also seen, instead of endless black, glimmers of distant, unreal lights (the flicker of flame, pinpricks of lanterns, perhaps?), actual land: cities and townships and roads and miniature forests, openings of shafts scattered across it like piping mouths, all through morning’s wispy cloud cover.
A good deal of it smouldering, or already charred. This rarified air, sucking it in: the taste of smoke, even up here, at the roof of the world. Closing her eyes could not make that go away.
She heard the slow beating of wings, the shriek of alien voices, felt wind in her hair and on her skin from the force of those wings, from being carried, swiftly, across vast, open skies.
When the angels had first plucked her away from her mother and sisters — swooping down from smoky darkness to grab her where she stood by the wagon’s side, watching with horror as the conflagration consumed the valley before them — she had tried to cry, to scream, to fight. And Lady, turning in a crouch, had hurled herself forward. Mother had screamed too, reaching with one hand for Deidre’s foot as it receded up into the night.
There were three, possibly four of them. During the flight, they had transferred her in mid-air twice, from one set of talons to another.
Angels were strong and fast flyers. Thin legs wrapped tight around her waist, bony knees clamped snugly to her ribs. Talons, sharp as blades, easily gripped her, cutting into her soft skin if she struggled too much.
She stopped struggling long ago.
They spoke, but she could not understand their language; neither could they comprehend hers. Or, at least, they showed no signs of comprehension. So she had also ceased demanding to be returned to her family, ceased vacillating between screaming threats to her aerial kidnappers about the wrath of an Orchard Keeper and desperate, whispered promises of vast rewards for her safe and prompt return to Elegia.
Her clothes were torn, her skin raked, streaked with blood.
And now it was morning.
Shrieking louder and louder, sounding remarkably like girls, giggling hysterically, the angels soon became increasingly excited; the feel of their wings, and the rate of their collective beating, changed in ways Deidre could not define. Pressure made her ears pop. She never wanted to open her eyes again, had vowed to herself not to, never, but she did, one more time. She had to:
Boughs and boles, woven crudely, lashed together: a massive cradle had been built into the crotch of the structural beams that lined the sky. These were not at all like the filaments she saw when she looked up from the ground; this close, the beams appeared bigger around than the girth of her waist.
The angels had built a nest.
Short walls had been constructed into the structure, dividing the aerie into a series of rough compartments. Strips of fabric, sparkling junk, and what looked to be constellations of dry white bones littered the open areas. The stench that assailed her, when a gust of wind picked up, was