She turned and walked out of my room.
I finished dressing, and tucked spare clothes and Barbarisater into a leather grip I found on top of the wardrobe. Then I picked up the rune staff and-
-stopped in the doorway.
The Malus Codicium was still in the drawer of the nightstand. I wrapped it in a pillow case and tucked it into the grip. How could I have nearly forgotten it?
The first answer that occurred to me was strange and unnerving. Perhaps it wanted to be forgotten.
The flier's interior lights illuminated a patch of the little courtyard. Aemos and Eleena had stowed everything – clothes for each of them, and the manuscripts and books we had rescued from Spaeton House. I put my own stuff aboard and ran a pre-flight. The flier was charged to optimum.
'Help me, damn you all!' Crezia said.
She was dressed in a dark green utility suit and a quilted coat, and had two travel bags with her. Medea lay on a grav-gurney, strapped in place with a resuscitrex unit and a narthecium full of supplies magnetically anchored to the underside of the gurney. Crezia had slaved two med-skulls to our patient, and they hovered in the air behind the stretcher.
We got Medea aboard and then clambered in ourselves. Crezia sat beside Medea, saying nothing. She didn't even look back at the house as we rose into the night and powered away.
We flew south, towards the main Atenate range, a massif of gigantic peaks that split the centre of the continent for three and a half thousand kilometres. The Itervalle and its neighbours were just foothills compared to this great geological structure.
I didn't want to stay in the air for too long. Tarl knew we had a flier and would have informed his comrades. This was just a short hop to get us going. I studied a chart-slate and began to compose a route.
By dawn, we were about ninety kilometres to the south-west and several hundred metres higher, in the base valleys of the ragged-edged Esembo. It was a soaring black shape in the early light, with a glinting wig of ice. Its mighty neighbours lurked behind it.
We set down at a town called Tiroyere, a small place that thrived as a logging centre and a waystation for travellers heading to the resorts at the top of the Esembo Pass. I parked the flier on the edge of the town under a brake of firs that would shield it from aerial observers.
No one had said much. The air was briskly cold and I turned the cabin heater to maximum for Medea's benefit.
"We should eat/ Eleena said. 'I'd go and get something… but…'
None of us had any money.