Frey came to a kind of bleary awareness some time later, to find himself crumpled on the floor of the Ketty Jay’s cockpit. His cheek was pressed to the metal, wet with drool. His head pounded as if his brain was trying to kick its way out of his skull.
He groaned and stirred. Jez was sitting in the pilot’s seat. She looked down at him.
‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
He swore a few times to give her an idea. Crake was collapsed in the opposite corner, contorted uncomfortably beneath the navigator’s desk.
Frey tried to remember how he’d got in this state. He was tempted to blame it on alcohol, but he was certain that he hadn’t been drinking since last night. The last thing he remembered was flying through the fog and fretting about the numbers on the compass.
‘What just happened?’ he asked, pulling himself into a sitting position.
Jez had the compass and the charts spread out untidily on the dash. She consulted both before replying. ‘You all went crazy. Fumes from the lava river, I suppose. It would explain all the ghosts and hallucinations and paranoia.’ She tapped the compass with a fingernail. ‘Turns out this thing is to warn us where the magnetic floating mines are. Someone’s gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure this secret hideout stays secret.’
Frey fought down a swell of nausea. He felt like he’d been poisoned.
‘Apologies for taking the helm without permission, Cap’n,’ said Jez, sounding not very apologetic at all. ‘Had to avoid that mine, and you were out of action. Close thing. The Ketty Jay took a battering. Anyway, we’re nearly there now.’
‘We are?’
‘It’s actually pretty easy once you work it out,’ she said, although he wasn’t sure if she meant following the route to the hideout or flying the Ketty Jay.
He got unsteadily to his feet, feeling vaguely usurped. The sight of Jez in the pilot’s seat disturbed him. It was an unpleasant vision of the future he feared, in which Jez - now possessing the ignition code - stole away with his beloved craft when his back was turned. She looked so damned comfortable there.
Outside, everything was calm and the air had cleared to a faint haze. Though there was still a heavy fog overhead, blocking out the sky, it was possible to see to the rocky floor of the canyon beneath them. A thin river ran along the bottom, hurrying ahead of them, and a light breeze blew against the hull.
Frey rubbed his head. ‘So how come it didn’t affect you?’
She shrugged. ‘Once I saw what was happening, I held my breath. I only took a few lungfuls before we flew out of it.’
Frey narrowed his eyes. The explanation had an over-casual, rehearsed quality to it. As an experienced liar, he knew the signs. So why was his navigator lying to him?
There was a clatter from the passageway behind the cockpit, and Malvery swung round the door. ‘Allsoul’s balls, what were we drinking? ’ he complained. ‘They’re all comatose down there. Even the bloody cat’s conked out.’
‘You weren’t giving the cat rum again, were you?’ Frey asked.
‘He looked thirsty,’ Malvery said, with a sheepish smile.
‘Eyes front, everyone,’ said Jez. ‘I think we’re here.’
They crowded around her and stared through the windglass as the Ketty Jay droned out of the canyon. And there, down among the fog and the mountains of the Hookhollows, hidden in the dreadful depths of Rook’s
