The Specter was leaning over the pilot and pressing what would be its face to his. His daemon, a finch, fluttered and shrieked and tried to pull away, only to fall half-fainting on the instrument pahe pilot turned his face to Lee and put out a hand, but Lee had no power of movement.
The anguish in the mans eyes was wreng. Something true and living was being drained from him, and his daemon fluttered weakly and called in a wild high call, but she was dying.
Then she vanished. But the pilot was still alive. His eyes became filmy and dull, and his reag hand fell back with a limp thud against the throttle. He was alive but not alive; he was indifferent to everything.
And Lee sat and watched helplessly as the zeppelin flew on directly into a scarp of the mountains that rose up before them.
The pilot watched it rear up in the window, but nothing could i him. Lee pushed back against the seat in horror, but nothing happeo stop it, and at the moment of impact he cried, "Hester!"
And woke.
He was ient, safe, aer nibbled his . He was sweating. The shaman was sitting cross-legged, but a shiver passed over Lee as he saw that the eagle daemon was not there near him. Clearly this forest was a bad place, full of haunting phantasms.
Then he became aware of the light by which he was seeing the shaman, because the fire was long out, and the darkness of the forest rofound. Some distant flicker picked out the tree trunks and the undersides of dripping leaves, and Lee k once what it was: his dream had been true, and a zeppelin pilot had flown into the hillside.
"Damn, Lee, youre twitg like an aspen leaf. Whats the matter with you?" Hester grumbled, and flicked her long ears.
"Aint you dreaming too, Hester?" he muttered.
"You aint dreaming, Lee, youre seeing. If Ida known you was a seer, Ida cured you a long while baow, you cut it out, you hear?"
He rubbed her head with his thumb, and she shook her ears.
And without the slightest transition he was floating in the air alongside the shamans daemon, Sayan Kotor the osprey. To be in the presence of another mans da;mon and away from his own affected Lee with a powerful throb of guilt and strange pleasure. They were gliding, as if he too were a bird, ourbulent updrafts above the forest, and Lee looked around through the dark air, now suffused with a pallid glow from the full moon that occasionally glared through a brief rent in the cloud cover and made the treet with silver.
The eagle daemon uttered a harsh scream, and from below came in a thousand different voices the calls of a thousand birds: the too-whoo of owls, the alarm shriek of little sparrows, the liquid music of the nightingale. Sayan Kotor was calling them. And in ahey came, every bird in the forest, whether they had been gliding in the hunt on silent wings or roosting asleep; they came fluttering upward ihousands through the tumbling air.
And Lee felt whatever bird nature he was sharing respond with joy to the and of the eagle queen, and whatever humanness he had left felt the stra of pleasures: that of eager obedieo a stronger power that was wholly right. And he wheeled and turned with the rest of the mighty flock, a hundred different species all turning as one in the magic will of the eagle, and saw against the silver cloud rack the hateful dark regularity of a zeppelin.
They all kly what they must do. And they streamed toward the airship, the swiftest reag