by Stephen Hunt
‘She was a loyal servant of the Commonshare. Her real name was Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, a compatriot lieutenant attached to Committee Eight.’
Commodore Black suddenly leapt at Keyspierre, landing a punch on the shiftie’s chin and sending them both sprawling, the intelligent fabric of the tent trying to reflect their forms back at them as they flailed and rolled under one of the brace poles. Only Duncan Connor was strong enough to haul the u-boat man off Keyspierre, pulling the commodore away as he tried to land a boot in the Quatérshiftian’s face.
‘Jared!’ Molly shouted, shocked by her friend’s sudden explosion of violence. ‘What in the name of the Circle do you think you’re doing?’
‘Why don’t you ask this wicked wheatman,’ spat the commodore. ‘Ask him about the Quatérshiftian aristocrats who escaped with their lives to Jackals but without their children. Tell us about your secret police’s schools, Keyspierre, where wheatmen stole the young from the revolution’s death camps, training and honing the ones who were strong enough to survive to become fanatics to serve your cause.’
‘The job of the people is to serve the people,’ said Keyspierre. ‘Would you rather I had left Jeanne to die in a camp? She was young enough to be re-educated. She didn’t deserve to be condemned for the accident of her noble birth any more than our gutter children deserved to be left to starve outside the gates of the Sun King’s palace. And I’ll take no lessons on how to treat aristocrats from a Jackelian. Jeanne lived as a productive sentinel of the Commonshare; my people never kept her as a living archery target to be trotted out for a stoning every time parliament needed a distraction.’
‘I can see there’s aristocratic blood in your veins,’ said Commodore Black, ‘because you’re a royal bastard right enough. She was never your daughter to take.’
‘You insult me! She was a daughter of the revolution,’ said Keyspierre. ‘One who gave her life to keep your useless carcass walking through the desert. And after this is over—’ Keyspierre patted the knife tucked under his belt ‘—I shall demonstrate to you how very foolish it is to strike a ranking colonel of the people’s brigades. What is it you call it in the kingdom, grass before breakfast?’
‘That’s a mortal fancy name for a duel,’ said Commodore Black. ‘But if you’ve a plain taste for a little simple murder, I’ll give you satisfaction and we’ll see which of us is planted in the soil after the dark deed is done.’
‘That’s enough,’ ordered Molly. ‘You two can lock horns after we’ve saved Jackals and—’ she looked meaningfully at Keyspierre ‘—Quatérshift.’
Sandwalker shook his head in dismay. ‘Your friends bicker like slats fighting over the finest cuts torn off one of the city-born.’
‘Our people do that when our nerves fray, when we lose people we were fond of,’ said Molly. ‘Apologies. It is unnecessary.’
‘Well,’ said Sandwalker, ‘then you have all come to the right land. Kaliban is the realm of the unnecessary. Lie down and I shall attempt to ease the pain in your skull.’
Molly did as she was bid and Sandwalker laid his blue-skinned fingers on her forehead, the throb inside rising then easing and pulsing back to something more bearable.
‘The very desert we trek through is unnecessary,’ continued Sandwalker, his fingers browsing her scalp. ‘Every grain of sand, every electrical storm, every dry riverbed: all the products of our masters, a mentality that gorges itself until the cycle of life is broken with no hope of repair. The light that burns the soil, the storms that now ravage the world, the waves that lap no longer in our seabeds, they once gave my people the energy they needed to live peacefully within the cycle of life. But the more sophisticated your civilization, the more fragile its structure, the more you rely on the cooperation and specialization of the Kal who stands beside you. Millions upon countless millions died on Kaliban when the masters and their slat legions arrived. Almost everything we knew was lost, much of the rest looted and wrecked by the Army of Shadows. No more living machines to be raised as crops. No more learning permitted to our children. Now, thousands of years later, all we are left with are paltry splinters of knowledge. An imperfect remembrance of the fact that the objectionable existence we find ourselves trapped in is a cruel, needless perdition compared with the paradise we had created for ourselves. A paradise we would have willingly shared with the masters and their slat armies if they had but asked.’
‘You sound like a professor friend of mine,’ said Molly. ‘Back in Jackals, she’s an expert on a classical fallen civilization called Camlantis. I think the Camlanteans had a little of the life you remember. At about the same time as your civilization, too, I think. They fell to our own barbarians, though, the Black-Oil Horde. We didn’t need the slats to destroy our land’s paradise.’
‘How very sad,’ said Sandwalker. ‘How much better if our two peoples had met in those ancient days, rather than like this, in the ruins of the Kal civilization. What marvels might we have achieved together as friends?’
‘Kyorin showed me how the Army of Shadows flies like locusts from sphere to sphere, reducing the land to a husk before moving on.’
‘I once heard the great sage theorize that they are getting better at controlling the convulsions of our world as they consume it. Who knows, with enough millennia to practise, perhaps they will have learnt how to live within the cycle of life by the time they reach the very last unharvested celestial sphere that spins around the sun. They will have all our ghosts to teach them.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ insisted Molly. ‘We’ll stop them, Sandwalker. Trust me. It’s what my people do best, killing and fighting.’
‘Carnivores,’ sighed Sandwalker. ‘Well, we have tried everything else over the centuries. Now it seems we shall have to trust your people to do what they do best.’
After the nomad had eased away the worst of the pain inside Molly’s head, she went to sit next to Coppertracks, who – if the swirling patterns of energy inside his skull were anything to go by – had something occupying his own mind.
‘A penny for your thoughts, old steamer. Are you worried about Quatérshift’s involvement with the expedition now that you know the truth about Keyspierre and Jeanne?’
‘No I am not, Molly softbody. That Quatérshift would involve someone like Keyspierre in the expedition is wholly predictable of that paranoid nation. I have a deeper concern, one concerning the rituals of Gear-gi-ju.’
‘I saw you calling your ancestors’ spirits earlier today,’ said Molly. ‘You need to be careful how much oil you shed at your age.’
‘Calling, indeed, but calling without any answer at all, dear mammal. I have never experienced the like of this before – ignored for one calling, yes, but like this? Night after night, day after day of complete emptiness as I toss my cogs. It is as if the Steamo Loas have, to speak plainly, completely forsaken me here.’
‘There is the distance to consider,’ said Molly. ‘How many million miles are we from the Steammen Free State here on Kaliban?’
‘Physical distance means nothing to my ancestors,’ explained Coppertracks. ‘They exist outside distance in the realm of the spirits. No, there is something else to account for this void, something that I am missing. I cannot believe the people of the metal’s ancestors have abandoned me in this land. So much is strange about this wasteland the Army of Shadows have created. There is something terribly wrong here, and it is staring me directly in my vision plate, yet I cannot see it.’
Molly had no answer for her friend.
If even the gods of the steammen had forsaken Molly and her friends in the dark wastelands of the Army of Shadows, what did that say about the expedition’s chances of success on Kaliban, now?
Sandwalker was leading the expedition along the dunes in the welcome shade of fluted columns of basalt – giant anthills towering as high as any Middlesteel tower – when Coppertracks stopped, his tracks entangled in something. As he pulled at what was caught up in his caterpillar treads, a series of cab
les was revealed and a black box fell out of the side of the crumbling rock of the basalt, yanked free by the steamman’s efforts.
Seeing what had happened, Sandwalker came running back. ‘Don’t touch the box!’
Coppertracks gingerly placed it on the sand.
‘Is it a snare or the like?’ Duncan asked, helping the steamman untangle the cable from his treads.
The Kal nomad shook his head. He picked up the box and examined it, then pushed it back into the face of the basalt rise. ‘An old fibre communication line. Our tribes had them hidden around the desert, but the Army of Shadows discovered the cables and adjusted their machines to detect the mechanism of light transmission we had believed was secure. It was centuries ago, but we lost half the free Kal before we realized how the slats were suddenly finding our caravans and hidden bases.’
‘I wonder if they were doing the same back in Jackals?’ said Molly. ‘Reading our crystalgrid messages before they attacked, learning about us?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Sandwalker. ‘The masters do not like to leave such things to chance when they lay their plans.’
‘Fate has been blessed unkind to your people for you to live like this,’ said the commodore. ‘Scuttling across the sands, always an eye open for the enemy, fearful even of sending a message, where every stranger of your race you meet might be hiding a fearful set of fangs to sink into your flesh.’
‘It is certainly not any way of life we would wish for our young,’ smiled Sandwalker. ‘Stop here for a rest. Eat your food but conserve the water, we have little left.’
In the lee of a rise now, the expedition members did not need further urging. Even sitting in the shade they found the arid heat draining. They were travelling day and night, trying to keep ahead of the slats. Molly brushed the sand off her billowing white trousers and made her seat on the gravel of the rise.
Keyspierre passed the sack of food he had been given back in Iskalajinn to the nomad. Sandwalker rummaged around gratefully in the bag and removed one of the long bean-like vegetables, squeezing a green pod out of its end to chew on. ‘You are very generous in your sharing. You should eat more of these yourself, Keyspierre. They contain a juice which helps your body retain water.’
‘Alas, compatriot, I am an unashamed carnivore,’ said Keyspierre. ‘I shall stick to my tinned fare, even though Jackelian canned beef is far removed from fine steak that has been shown the flames of a fire for the requisite two minutes.’
Molly could see that the nomad found the idea of what was inside their supply cans quite disgusting, almost as strange as the idea that something as precious as tin would be used just to preserve rations.
Watching Keyspierre spoon out lumps of jellied meat, the commodore began to sing one of the oldest Jackelian drinking songs, each verse hummed out between swigs from his canteen. ‘Should the shifties dare invade us; thus armed with our poles; we’ll bang their bare ribs; make their lantern jaws ring. For you beef-eating, beer-eating Jackelians are sorts; who will shed their last blood for their country and king.’
Molly met his eyes and the commodore fell to silence. Keyspierre hadn’t risen to the bait, but at this rate, one of them was going to run the other through before they reached the lair of the great sage.
Sandwalker led them across the shifting sands of the dunes for two more days and nights. Then they climbed an escarpment to a sandstone plateau where they were presented with dramatic views of whirling, tornado-like storms scouring the desert floor below. One of the ravines they passed contained a thin scrub of vegetation and a pool of water, but the nomad refused to allow them to go down, saying only that the tarn was a false oasis, containing creatures twisted by the Army of Shadows. Traps, always traps. Climbing through the maze of gorges and gullies was time-consuming, but the alternative – risking the low floor of the desert with its dust devils – was too dangerous to contemplate. Those storms could rip apart even the nomad’s tough tent fabric and would scour the flesh off the Jackelians’ bones within minutes if they were caught in the open.
Luckily for the expedition, the height of the plateau also allowed Sandwalker to use another of the devices from his pack, a flimsy kettle-sized pyramid of transparent panels that he would religiously assemble and leave outside their tent each night. By morning a thin trickle of water had formed inside a plate in the pyramid’s centre, capturing the dew of the sunrise, and he would refill their dwindling canteens as best he could.
On their fourth day crossing the plateau they spied a pair of silver machines walking across the desert floor on a nest of whipping, cantilevered metal tentacles, bodies like teardrops pockmarked by round smoking holes. The tentacles looked like magnified versions of the organic ones Molly had seen on the masters’ bodies in Kyorin’s memories. Molly couldn’t tell exactly how large the machines were, but to be able to see them stumbling through the desert at this distance, they had to be truly massive. For once, Sandwalker didn’t require that the expedition members scurry off and conceal themselves in a ravine. These were blind, stupid machines, part of the masters’ network of devices to tame the atmosphere and stop Kaliban’s weather from turning more vicious than it already appeared.
Every extra day burning under the Kaliban sky only stiffened Molly’s resolve. If they couldn’t find a way of defeating the Army of Shadows here, then this life would become the fate of the Jackelians’ descendants. Living feral like rodents, crawling in-between the Army of Shadows’ cities and surviving on whatever crumbs they could scavenge from their soiled world. It didn’t matter that Molly was a mere shadow compared to the power she had possessed when she had piloted the Hexmachina. Nor were the petty rivalries of her world’s nationalities of consequence – they had no home under this boiling Kaliban sky. Here, Molly and her friends could be only prey or predator.
A day after they had left the plateau behind, Molly began to suffer additional physical side effects from carrying the weight of Kyorin’s memories. As well as the headaches, she was struck by bouts of muscle cramps, nausea and drowsiness. She was slowing them down, now, and in a territory they needed to pass through fast. They were traversing an area of sand mists, grains that had been beaten as light as flour by the sun and the storms, and which now blew as a fine silicate across the Aard Ailkalmer Issah. Even the name of the territory being pronounced by Sandwalker was painful to Molly, the alien Kal syllables echoing like a battering ram inside her skull.
By the third day Molly started to suffer waking hallucinations, seeing faces briefly in the shadows and dust hazes, hideous leering goblin-like devils that might have belonged to the dark gods from before the Circlist enlightenment. She would flinch in alarm and swear at them before they snapped back to being mere shadows of rocks.
Sandwalker insisted Molly suck on strips of blue salt and chew the bitter pods from the vegetables in his supplies to help alleviate the symptoms – her heated brain made increasingly susceptible to sunstroke. But Molly could tell from the way the nomad looked at her now that he was seriously worried about her condition. It seemed as if Keyspierre’s prediction that her affliction would become a burden to the expedition was proving correct after all. The pain inside Molly’s mind swelled and ebbed. Increasingly when the pain was on the rise, she would become confused, her mind experiencing things that had once happened to Kyorin as if they were happening to her now, or seeing things that made no sense at all. Once, she even thought she had come across Duncan hiding behind a basalt column and talking to his precious battered travel case as if he was expecting an answer. She was going mad, slowly. Then not so slowly at all.
Molly caught Keyspierre looking at her as they trudged along the dunes, his eyes deceitful and narrow under the turban that protected his face from the blowing dust.
‘Stop looking at me!’ Molly shouted.
‘Compatriot?’
‘I know what you are planning to do.’
Duncan Connor was ahead of Molly, holding a guide rope to stop them becoming separated in the endless fl
oating sand haze. ‘Are you all right, lassie?’
‘He’s planning to kill me!’
Duncan looked back at Keyspierre. ‘What are you about, man?’
Molly threw herself towards the uplander. ‘Keyspierre’s planning to slip a cushion over my face and smother me in the tent tonight so I don’t slow us down, or he’ll cut my rope and leave me to wander alone out here. Anything, Duncan, anything to ensure we get to reach the great sage. All for the people, they must prevail. The people.’
‘Molly,’ said the ex-soldier, feeling her forehead. ‘You’re burning up, lassie.’
‘Don’t let him kill me! Duncan, please, I saved your life from a blazing sail-rider rig back in Middlesteel, now’s your chance to repay me by saving mine.’
‘There are a good few in this blasted land that deserve to die, compatriot,’ said Keyspierre, coming towards her, ‘but I do not count you among their number.’
Molly took a step back and fell over something buried in the sand. ‘Liar, you dirty shiftie liar. You’ll kill us all to make sure you reach the great sage!’
Sandwalker appeared out of the haze. Unslinging his canteen and helping Molly to her feet, he was about to offer her a sip from his water, but then he spotted what she had tripped over and stopped, his eyes widening in shock. Jutting out was a long fused tube of sand that had been petrified into glass. ‘This is fresh.’
Duncan Connor knelt down and examined the glass. ‘It’s not the spoor of one of the kelpies that live out here, is it?’
‘A beast,’ said Sandwalker. ‘But not a living creature. This is the sand flash left from a lightning strike on the dunes. There is a permanent pizo-electrical storm we call the Beast, but it normally rotates eight hundred miles north of here. The masters’ systems are truly failing if the storm has moved so far south.’
Molly tried to break out of line and flee into the haze, but Commodore Black caught her and pulled her back. ‘No, lass, that’s not our way.’
