Frey asked.
‘Five . . . Ten . . . The needle has changed direction. Now it’s pointing behind us. Twenty . . . Twenty-five.’
‘Let me have a look,’ Frey said, and snatched the compass from Crake. The needle was pointing directly behind them, and the numbers were counting up towards ninety-nine again.
‘Um,’ he said. Then he handed the compass back to the daemonist. ‘Well. That’s a puzzle.’
‘Perhaps those numbers didn’t mean distance after all,’ Crake suggested churlishly, for Jez’s benefit. Jez didn’t reply. He went back to reading them off. ‘Ninety . . . Ninety-five . . . Now the numbers have reset to zero, and the first needle has joined the other three.’
‘I suppose that means we’ve gone out of range.’ Frey suggested.
‘But there wasn’t anything there!’
‘That’s fine with me.’
Jez called out a new heading, and Frey took it.
‘You might see a—’ she began, when Frey yelled in alarm as the flank of a mountain emerged from the fog. He banked away from it and it slipped by to their starboard side.
‘—mountain,’ Jez continued, ‘but there’ll be a defile running out of it.’
‘I didn’t see any defile!’ Frey complained, annoyed because he’d suffered a scare.
‘Cap’n, I’m navigating blind here. Accuracy is gonna be less than perfect. Pull back closer to the mountain flank.’
Frey reluctantly did so. The mountain loomed into view again. Jez left her station to look through the windglass.
‘There it is,’ she said.
Frey saw it too: a knife-slash in the mountain, forty metres wide, with uneven walls.
‘I don’t much like the look of that,’ he said.
‘Drop to nine hundred, take us in,’ Jez told him mercilessly.
Frey eased the Ketty Jay around and into the defile. The mountains pressed in hard, narrowing the world on either side. Shadowy walls lay close enough to be seen, even in the mist. Frey unconsciously hunched down in his seat. He concentrated on keeping a steady line.
‘More contacts,’ said Crake. ‘Two of them.’
‘Two needles moving?’
‘Yes. Both of them pointing directly ahead.’
‘Give me the numbers.’
Crake licked dry lips and read them off. ‘First needle: distance ninety and descending. The other number reads fifty-seven and holding steady. Second needle: distance . . . ninety also, now. That’s descending too. The other number reads minus forty-three. Holding steady.’
‘Minus forty-three?’ Jez asked.
‘A little minus sign just appeared where that blank digit was.’
