Read Online Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress - Free Book Online Page B

into buying into the system . . . into agreeing with the . . . the word for . . . Never mind.”
    Aveo had to not mind. Nothing she said had been rational. Keeping a tight grasp on his own rationality, he said, “What shall we do now, Ostiu Cam?”
    “We still have to get to your king. And now we’re going to have to fly.”
    “Fly?” That word had been all too clear. Still, Aveo’s mind rejected it. Fall from the sky, maybe, things could fall from a great height. But fly . . . only birds flew. Then Cam spoke another word to the wall and it lit up with an army.
    Despite himself, Aveo gasped. Uldunu Four’s soldiers, attacking the egg . . . no, not irrational sorcery but only some kind of window, showing the outside. Spears and fire besieged the egg, and the terrified faces of brave men loomed close.
    “Bye-bye, tin warriors,” Cam said. Aveo felt the floor lift beneath him. The soldiers outside fled, then grew smaller. Obu crumpled into a faint. Ground flowed beneath them like water. They were flying.
    Aveo, for the first time in many years, had to consciously resist crossing his arms over his breast in the sign of submission to the Goddess.
     
    “HERE’S MY PLAN,” CAM SAID , “unless you have a better idea. We land the ship just outside the city and walk in, since you think the ship will scare the king so much. Then we—”
    “No,” Aveo said. The ground still rushed away beneath them so dizzyingly that he had to look away from the window-that-was-not-a-window. He must hold steady; she clearly needed him. Or somebody. She was like an unbroken animal that ran blindly around a room, knocking over furniture and slamming into walls.
    “No?”
    “No. If you leave the . . . the ship outside the city, Uldunu Four will know of it before we reach him and be just as frightened. Spies are everywhere. Also, a thing reported at a distance can be misrepresented, but a thing seen close to the capital and by men he trusts cannot. Thus, you may as well land it on the roof of the palace and invite him to enter it, as you have me and Obu.”
    Cam glanced at Obu, curled into a corner and refusing to uncurl, and sighed.
    “Also,” Aveo said, “if I walk with you, I will be dead within two minutes of leaving the ship. I am a traitor, and I do not have your invisible armor.”
    “You’re a traitor? Really? What did you do?”
    Not a woman: a child. Did she really think he could, or would, answer that? Apparently she had learned nothing playing kulith. What kind of place did she come from, that such stupidity was not already dead? Instead of answering her, he said, “Ostiu Cam, what is a ‘lucca’?”
    “Lucca—Oh, you overheard me on the—No word for it. Okay. Lucca is the name of my friend.”
    “And ‘kular’?”
    “That’s what we call your world.”
    Again, nonsense. The world was the world. “And ‘witness’?”
    She frowned. “That means ‘to see something and report on it.’ ”
    “You are a spy.”
    “No. Yes. I mean, a spy is looking for information to help win a war, right? I’m just here to see something else, and to report on it to . . . to some other people.”
    “Report to what people?” Aveo asked.
    “I’ve never actually seen them.”
    “Report on what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You are here to ‘witness’ something you cannot identify to people you’ve never seen?”
    Cam ran both hands over her face, pulling the skin into a grotesque stretch and then releasing it. “It sounds weird, I know. But we were told we would know it when we saw it. Although so far that hasn’t happened.”
    “And you believed these people that you will ‘know it when you see it’?”
    “Yes. The ship is theirs, not ours. So they—Look, Aveo, this doesn’t matter now. We need to decide what we’re doing. Look, there’s the city.”
    It was true. Aveo saw the city wall, the West Gate, the palace towers rise over the horizon like a real ship nearing land. In so short a time!