by Stephen Hunt
‘This is Baxcyteen,’ introduced Sandwalker. ‘His people work with us against the masters.’
‘The few of us who are left,’ said the creature, its eagle-like beak opening, the feathery scales of its muscled neck quivering in the heat. ‘The slats still visit the mountains to burn our villages where we have not concealed our caves well enough.’
Even the whistling accent in his speech put Molly in mind of the lashlites. Her novels often featured races similar to the race of man being discovered on one of their moons, so perhaps she shouldn’t have been so surprised to discover that the pattern of her world’s other species might also be repeated on other celestial spheres.
‘I shall not keep you from your home for much longer, brother of the wind,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Can you bear the two of us down to the dunes outside the city?’
‘I flew you up here,’ said Baxcyteen, ‘and two will not be so bad for the glide back down. But we must be quick, for if gravity is on our side for the journey down to the sands, it is our only ally. The slats have been passing overheard in their flight balls. I think they suspect free Kal are abroad in the salt wastes.’
‘They have good reason to, my friend. We were betrayed in the city. Another of our people has been given the hunger and many of the resistance lie dead behind us.’
Baxcyteen hissed in frustration. ‘They seek you, Sandwalker, and they would burn my wings from me for helping you. Come.’
Taking each of them under one of his arms, the lashlite waited for his passengers to grip on tight, then unfurled his massive wings and ran forward until he found a strong enough thermal, beating up into it and rising above the face of Kaliban. They were riding heavy with their combined weight, even Molly could tell that. She kept her eyes shut for most of the flight down, only the churning inside her gut indicating the means of their escape. They were still in the shadow of the carving’s chin when the three of them put down on the gloriously soft and safe sands. Molly steadied her beating heart while Sandwalker unfurled two pieces of diaphanous white silk-like material from a pouch around his waist and helped the lashlite fix the cloth to his wings. ‘A present from the free tribes of the south, traded through our friends in the city, Baxcyteen. I would have accepted a little more if I knew they were going to be betrayed and the exchange shut down.’
‘A good present,’ said the lashslite. ‘A fair trade for your life this day. Your people in the south are canny.’
As the sun struck the material it began to turn orange, the same colour as the sands, matching the ground perfectly. Even standing a foot away, Molly could barely see the creature.
‘My tent is also made from memory silk,’ said Sandwalker, seeing how she was staring at the lashlite. ‘It is a meta-material. The silk also bends sound around itself, so the slats cannot see it, and matches the heat of its surroundings so the twisted creatures in the desert cannot hunt us through our body warmth.’
Sandwalker waved to the lashlite as the lizard-man took a run down the dunes, and threw himself up into the air. A brief shimmer of his memory silks then Molly’s rescuer vanished out of sight.
‘I was rather hoping your friend might be able to whistle up some of his flight and fly us all out of here,’ said Molly.
‘We do not know where his villages are, just as he does not know where the great sage hides. Our two people meet at barter points scattered throughout Kaliban, and hope our rendezvous are not betrayed while we wait.’
‘The slats want the great sage so badly?’
‘You have no idea,’ said Sandwalker, wrapping a turban above his blue-skinned forehead. ‘My tribe’s sage is called Fayris Fastmind and he is as our people once were. The masters fear him as if he were a plague that would make an end of them. There were many sages once, but over the centuries our secret holds in the wastelands have been betrayed and uncovered. We have so few of them left now. Fayris Fastmind may be the last of his kind, and he is certainly the most powerful. I think the masters suspect that he has the power to destroy them and if the Army of Shadows has one defining trait, it is that they cannot bear to suffer that which they cannot control. Even the wastes left by their uncontrolled appetites have been infected by their twisted spawn to exterminate the few Kal that live free and evade the slat hunts.’
One of Kyorin’s memories of the creatures haunting the outskirts of Iskalajinn surfaced unbidden and Molly stumbled, nearly fainting with the pain of it.
‘I fear for you, Molly of the Jackelians,’ said Sandwalker, helping her to her feet. ‘Your second soul is growing too heavy for you. We should find the others in your party and leave here at once.’
* * *
‘Ah, lass,’ cried the commodore, seeing Molly peering over the broken fabric of his half-buried dome. ‘I was about to go out searching for you, so long have you been gone.’
The commodore and the others were not alone in the dome. Coppertracks and Duncan Connor stood behind the corpse of a vast blue snake-like thing – its circumference wider than an oak tree. The creature was lifeless, a sabre driven through the middle of its three eyes, multiple whip-like tongues lolling across the dome’s floor.
‘Lucky you did not come back last night, though, when this terrible beast came slithering out of the dark with a taste for my mortal legs in its wicked sharp mouth. But it met its match when it tried to add brave old Blacky to its diet.’
Duncan coughed.
‘Well, with a little help from our ex-officer of the rocket corps, here. I see you’ve brought our guide at last, but where is that rascal Lord Rooksby?’
‘I’m afraid things didn’t go well in the city,’ said Molly. ‘He’s as likely dead, along with Keyspierre and his daughter.’
‘Surely not, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks, the steamman’s iron hand gesturing behind Molly and Sandwalker. ‘Unless they are a mirage.’
Molly whirled around. It was the two shifties, Jeanne and Paul-Loup Keyspierre following the trail out of Iskalajinn together.
‘Stop them!’ Sandwalker pushed Molly to safety behind the commodore. ‘They may have been twisted by the masters and turned against us. They may walk with the hunger inside them.’
Commodore Black drew his pistol, breaking the gun and feeding a charge into its breech. ‘That does not sound too good, my blue-skinned friend.’
‘How can we be sure?’ Molly whispered.
‘One of us must risk their life by getting close enough to check.’
Molly was about to say that she would do it, but the nomad was already off. Sandwalker ran up the dunes towards the two shifties. The expedition desperately needed the nomad alive, or all of them would be doomed to wander the desert aimlessly until the slats finally hunted them down. Sandwalker stopped in front of the pair and after a brief heated conversation, Jeanne and Keyspierre opened their mouths and allowed the nomad to inspect inside their jaws for newly grown fangs.
‘What is going on, lassie?’ asked Duncan. He had drawn his pistol, moving to stand beside Commodore Black and the steamman.
‘The Army of Shadows has a little trick to commission you inside its ranks,’ said Molly. ‘It involves turning you into a monster with a taste for drinking blood.’
Keyspierre and his daughter obviously passed Sandwalker’s inspection as he waved to Molly and her friends and then led them down the dune towards the ruined dome. Predictably, the two shifties were not happy.
‘Are we also to be given a turn to test you for the mark of the enemy?’ Keyspierre spat.
Molly opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out at the scientist. ‘Test to your heart’s content. How did you two get away from the Kals’ hideaway?’
‘In much the same way as you, compatriot, I would imagine,’ said Jeanne. ‘We ran for our lives when the Army of Shadows broke into the resistance base. We ducked down a tunnel that eventually led to another of the Kals’ safe houses. The so-called revolutionary that lived there couldn’t understand a word of what we had to say, but he knew we were trouble wit
h more following us. He packed us off with these bags of supplies and led us to the edge of the city.’
‘He gave us this, too.’ Keyspierre produced a red hexagon made of what looked like gutta-percha with interlocking triangles moulded on its surface.
‘It is the harvest mark,’ said Sandwalker. ‘The Kal you met has been chosen in the lottery to feed the slats and the masters at the next cull, and – I am ashamed to say – to feed our own people who have been given the hunger. It is the city-born’s tradition to pass the token to a friend the day before they are taken, to remind us why we resist the occupation.’
‘Did you see what happened to Rooksby?’ Molly asked.
‘Your aristocrat friend was captured,’ said Keyspierre. ‘I saw him clubbed down and dragged off struggling by slat soldiers before we escaped down the tunnel.’
Sandwalker was not happy with that news. ‘He is alive and he knows you are waiting here? Your friend’s blue skin-dye won’t fool the interrogators for a minute. They will give him all their attention when they realize he is not a Kal. Every slat on Kaliban will be combing the land around here soon, looking for interlopers from the race of man. Pack your supplies now.’
‘You will still help us?’ asked Molly, trying not to sound as if she was pleading.
‘It is very dangerous,’ said the Kal. ‘But the stakes are high. I will take you to where I think the great sage is hiding, but if the slats look to be following us… you understand I cannot risk the great sage’s capture. I will flee and you will have to make your own way through the wastes as best you can.’
‘Where you think he is hiding?’ said Molly. ‘I thought you were the great sage’s servant. In the name of the Circle, when did you last see him?’
‘Three years ago,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Even that much contact with him is dangerous. The great sage normally changes his lair every few years, but if another member of my tribe tells him of Laylaydin’s death and the hunger being given to Tallyle before we arrive, he will move immediately as a matter of precaution. You were present at the fall of the largest resistance cell in Iskalajinn.’
‘Then we must go now,’ insisted Keyspierre. ‘The survival of everyone in the Commonshare and the Kingdom of Jackals rests with your leader.’
Sandwalker drew a diagram in the sand with his finger. ‘This is where we are.’ He scratched a circle around their position. ‘This will be the circumference of the slats’ initial search and sweep. We must move beyond this area and push into the deep desert far faster than they anticipate. After that, my sand craft will protect us from whatever slat patrols are scattered more widely. But there is only one way to travel so rapidly and it is particularly dangerous.’
Molly’s skull began throbbing, the meaning of the nomad’s suggestion filtering up through Kyorin’s memories.
‘We must ride the canals,’ said Sandwalker.
The canals of Kaliban. How many of them would survive the canals?
There was a brief flurry of sand as the leathery globe touched down, bone-like legs extending from holes and lending the craft an insectoid look as the blur of blades above the sphere slowed to a halt. A hatch opened in its side and Lord Rooksby was roughly pushed face down into the dune by a pair of slats. A moment later the corrupted Kal, Tallyle, appeared in the hatch, jumping down to land beside the prisoner.
‘On the face of it,’ noted Tallyle, ‘I would have to say things aren’t looking good for you.’
‘It was here,’ pleaded Lord Rooksby, cowering behind his captor. ‘It was. I have a perfect memory for geography. Here, sir, is the ravine, there is the carving of the face, the mountains over—’
‘Yet, I find no ship,’ said the Kal. He knelt down to face the quaking Rooksby, licking his tongue across his massive extended fangs. ‘Just as there was no one back at the ruined dome, and I know you didn’t grow wings to fly here across the celestial void from the Kingdom of Jackals.’
‘But there was the snake,’ begged Rooksby, spittle flying wildly out of his mouth and puddling in the sand. ‘The dead snake inside the dome. You could see the remains of their camp. And the ship we arrived on was here, I swear it. Your terrible machine knows I am telling the truth.’
‘There is that,’ said Tallyle. ‘But our slats haven’t had much practice on your breed inside the interrogator before. You are either a lot more clever than you look or a lot more stupid.’ He looked at the pair of slat soldiers. ‘You do have some needles and blades you haven’t tried in the interrogator yet?’
One of the slats bowed. ‘Yes, Carnivore Tallyle.’
‘There we are, problem solved. And the interrogator isn’t the only machine we can put to work on your body. The masters will be very pleased to be given a novelty such as you to play with.’
The two slats picked up Lord Rooksby and carried him shrieking back into the globe. Tallyle had a last glance around then tutted in frustration and climbed up into his craft.
After the globe had lifted off and was disappearing towards Iskalajinn, a tiny orange-furred creature resembling a beaver pushed its head out of the sand and started chirruping, more of its family doing the same around the dunes. It instinctively understood that the slats would feast on any members of the warren caught moving around in the open.
The creature chattered in alarm as a sudden massive eruption of sand startled it, a metal whale rising out of the dunes opposite.
‘That was exciting,’ said Starsprite. ‘I found some of those sand roots you like to feed to your litter while I was hiding.’
The little creature warbled in disgust at the unnatural interloper – torn between its ancient instinct to cooperate with other species and the flight instinct that had more recently been imprinted in its blood memories – then it ducked back down to check on its warren.
‘Oh well,’ said Starsprite. ‘Thank you, it was a good warning call, anyway.’
Unnoticed by either Starsprite or the half-steamman ship’s new mammal friends, the slat scout that had dropped out of the transport’s other side pushed aside its rifle and started clicking in satisfaction under the shadow of its sand-coloured camouflage cover.
Carnivore Tallyle would surely let it have its selection of the next cull’s meat for finding the missing ship.
Commodore Black looked at the wide width of the canal alongside Molly, dabbing at his nose in disgust with a handkerchief. The smell of the brown sludge flowing down its length was overwhelming, worse than any slurry pit or Middlesteel tannery works.
‘You cannot be asking us to swim across that foul mess, Sandwalker?’
‘I am not,’ said the nomad. ‘What you see flowing down there are pollutants expelled from the masters’ processing centres. The acids in the canal would burn your skin off and blind you before you could make six strokes. There used to be seas of this filth when we still had seas. Now even the pollution from the masters’ machines and mills is put to use in their automated transport system.’ He indicated a series of dark ceramic barges piled with metal plating being swept along by the flow of filth. ‘The very last of Kaliban’s bounty pulled from her deep heart to be assembled into ships that will carry the masters across to their new home on your world.’
‘This is it?’ said Molly. ‘This is your plan for getting a head start on the slats?’
‘This particular canal runs all of the way out to the last of the polar mines,’ said Sandwalker. ‘It passes deep through the desert. And there are the empty barges travelling back towards the mines.’
Molly looked at the automated barges, small black oblongs chained together in convoys by rusted cables, running unloaded deep into the desert. The barges rode high in the sludge on catamaran-style hulls, tube-shaped engines on each hull powering them forward and leaving a wake of bubbling muck behind. Every barge had a dome the circumference of a barrel rising at the front of its prow.
Jeanne said what Molly was thinking. ‘The barges don’t look that big, compatriot. Will they take our weight?’
‘Th
ey are powerful enough to float a load of many tonnes down from the mines,’ said Sandwalker. ‘The real problem we face is that black dome mounted at the front of each barge. It is a thinking machine, similar to one of your transaction engines. The masters grew tired of our sabotage attempts and thefts from the canal system many centuries ago – those domes will detect us if we board a barge, then detonate a cache of explosives moulded into its keel. We will have three or four seconds at most until the barge qualifies our presence as an active threat rather than just a sand vulture landing on its hull, then there will be a quite spectacular explosion.’
‘Now I’m a game fellow for a lark,’ said the commodore. ‘But I think I shall take my chances with the wicked Army of Shadows and its minions nipping at my heels rather than jump down onto one of those terrible things.’
‘Stealing a barge and its cargo is a rite of passage among the free Kal of the salt wastes,’ said Sandwalker. He produced a handful of coin-like objects from underneath his robe. ‘You hit the top of the dome hard with this disk, like so, to activate it. The disk also contains a thinking machine – a powerful model designed to subvert the barge’s controls. Keep it pressed down on the dome and when the train of barges is under our command, I will re-instruct the lead unit to increase speed and stop when we are far enough into the desert to avoid all but a long-range slat patrol.’
Duncan unslung the supply packs the commodore was carrying and tied them around his own back, dangling them across his battered travel case. ‘If a wee Kal bairn can make the jump …’
‘I will jump first,’ said Sandwalker.
‘I’ll go behind you,’ said Molly. She fingered the coin-like device the nomad had given her. ‘I’ll take the second barge.’
The others called out their numbers and Commodore Black came in second to last, his barge in front of Jeanne’s. ‘What a cruel life this is. I’ll match a sabre with any enemy, but now my mettle is to be tested by leaping like a poor frog into the foul burning excretions of the Army of Shadows. What a shameful end for my rare genius.’