“Fay Glass is rarely happy with concrete beneath her feet; but in the air — that is something else. The swift-shifting currents are her milieu, the bright wind-drift. She was laughing when the heat-beam hit her. Four thousand feet above the mist, she shouted in a peculiar guttural voice and fell like a bundle of brown rage, spinning. Her wings glittered uselessly. There was a glowing coal along the rags, then a bright bloom of flame.
I caught her.
She cartwheeled down, an incendiary puppet, and I caught her.
Mist and lunatic sky looped improbably, crashed and spun together. bells in my head. The impact plucked me out of the updraught like a hand taking a fly; knocked me down, down, towards the bright rocking floor. Fighting her flailing limbs, disorientated, I rested the weight of both of us on my damaged wings. It hurt. We lost two hundred feet clear, accelerating and hopeless, before they bit, scooped, and hung like bleeding finger-ends from the parapet of the air. Slowing so slowly; half a mile slipping past and Fay (quiescent now, all her bright flames dead) mewling in my ear, indistinguishable from the complaint of the laminar-flow. I held steady at a thousand, clawing feverishly, wings singing like a distant dragonfly on a drowsy afternoon.
Which was no comfort at all because my beaten muscles weren’t good any more for climbing; and Malice Priest was breathing down my neck. He hovered, his death-mask expressing nothing. The laser his sting. Two Jane could have been away and free, but she circled down and stared mutely at the mad girl’s blackened clothing, at Priest’s empty face. We hung in a desperate stasis. There was nowhere to go: if I dropped once more, it would be into the mist, and forever.”
I caught her.
She cartwheeled down, an incendiary puppet, and I caught her.
Mist and lunatic sky looped improbably, crashed and spun together. bells in my head. The impact plucked me out of the updraught like a hand taking a fly; knocked me down, down, towards the bright rocking floor. Fighting her flailing limbs, disorientated, I rested the weight of both of us on my damaged wings. It hurt. We lost two hundred feet clear, accelerating and hopeless, before they bit, scooped, and hung like bleeding finger-ends from the parapet of the air. Slowing so slowly; half a mile slipping past and Fay (quiescent now, all her bright flames dead) mewling in my ear, indistinguishable from the complaint of the laminar-flow. I held steady at a thousand, clawing feverishly, wings singing like a distant dragonfly on a drowsy afternoon.
Which was no comfort at all because my beaten muscles weren’t good any more for climbing; and Malice Priest was breathing down my neck. He hovered, his death-mask expressing nothing. The laser his sting. Two Jane could have been away and free, but she circled down and stared mutely at the mad girl’s blackened clothing, at Priest’s empty face. We hung in a desperate stasis. There was nowhere to go: if I dropped once more, it would be into the mist, and forever.”
—London Melancholy (excerpt) / M. John Harrison
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