disjointed dreams.
And sometimes, briefly, he came fully awake, and knew that the hissing rain sound was just the noise of the sand singing beneath the wheels of the black sand ship.
“Don’t be afraid,” someone told him.
“Wren?” he asked.
“Was she with you when you were taken by Grandma Gravy’s boys? Were Wren and Tom with you?”
“No, no,” said Theo, shaking his head. “They’re far away.
They’re in the north, on the bird roads. Wren sent me a card at Christmas… I hoped I might find her when we reached the north…” Remembering the wreck of the
A hand touched his face, gentle and shy. A mouth brushed his forehead. “Don’t be afraid, Theo. Sleep.”
He slept, and woke again, and saw that the woman who sat beside him was Wren’s mother. Above her head an argon globe in a squeaky gimbal swung to and fro, sloshing black washes of shadow up the cabin walls. When the shadows hid Hester’s face, Theo could imagine that it was Wren sitting there beside his bunk, but when she saw that he was watching her, she said harshly, “Awake, are you? You’d better pull yourself together. There’s no room for slackers on my sand ship.” It was as if she hoped that he would not remember the gentle things she had said to him earlier.
Theo tried to speak, but his mouth was drier than Bitumen Bay. Hester reached out roughly and raised his head and pushed a tin cup against his lips. “Don’t drink too much,” she said. “I can’t spare it. I was only in Cutler’s Gulp for food and water, and thanks to you I had to leave before I found either. That lout I shot was Grandma Gravy’s golden boy. She’s not best pleased.”
The sand went on singing against the hull of the speeding ship. Theo slept again. Hester stood up and climbed the ladder to the open cockpit, where Grike stood at the tiller, his green eyes glowing. The ship was west of the sand sea, running across plains of roasted shale. Away in the east a band of pale light showed on the horizon. The wind thrummed in the rigging. “He keeps going on about someone called Lady Naga,” Hester said. “I think she must have been with him when the scavs found him. Ever heard of Lady Naga?”
Grike said, “there are ships behind us.”
“What? Damn!”
Hester had expected the old witch at Cutler’s Gulp to send someone after her. Grandma’s reputation for black magic meant that her men were likely to be more scared of Grandma than they were of Hester or her tame Stalker. She squinted at the horizon until she could see them too, the thin, sharp shapes of their sails, like the teeth of fish. She had expected one or two, feared three, but Grandma had sent six, ranging in size from a tiny cutter to a big, twin-hulled dune runner. “I suppose we ought to be flattered,” she said.
The sun rose out of the ragged hills astern, and the lookouts on the masts of the pursuing ships saw the black sail ahead. A flare rose from the dune runner, signaling “chase to leeward.” A few minutes later there was a puff of smoke aboard one of the smaller ships, and Grike and Hester saw a dune a few hundred yards astern explode in flames and flung sand.
“they will soon be in range,” Grike said impassively. “if they hit our tires while we are traveling at this speed, the vehicle will be destroyed.”
“Damn,” said Hester again. She went below to the gun locker and took out something she had stolen from a bandit she’d killed way out in the Djebel Haqir. It was an automatic jezail, taller than her, with pretty silver chasing on its walnut stock. If the bandit had been sober, he might still have been alive; it was a good gun, with a range of several miles. Hester loaded big brass shells into the chambers and filled her pockets with more. She checked that Theo was still sleeping. He was, curled up like a child, gentle and vulnerable. Hester made herself turn away. If she wasn’t careful, she would start to care about him, and she knew too well that when you cared about people, you opened yourself up to all kinds of pain.
She climbed out into the light, which was hard and white. The scouring wind was full of sand, and the ships were closer. The one that had fired first was smallest and fastest; it was coming up quickly on the starboard quarter, and Hester could see the men on its hull taking aim at her with some kind of swivel-mounted cannon. It puffed out white smoke, and she felt the shot whisk past her, exploding among a stack of biscuit-colored rocks a hundred yards to larboard.
She wiped her nose on her sleeve and steadied her gun against the cockpit rail. “Be easier if you could do this,” she told Grike, pushing her sand goggles up her forehead and squinting through the jezail’s telescopic top sight. “I can hardly see them…”
“i cannot,” said Grike. “I have told you many times. something dr. zero did to me; some barrier in my mind …”
“I wish I had your Dr. Zero here right now,” grunted Hester, trying to focus on the little knot of men busy with their sponges and ramrods around the swivel gun. “I’d put a barrier in
Luckily the men on the other ship were no better than her; shot after shot went past her as she worked her way steadily through a pocketful of ammunition. She was about to start on the second pocket when the other ship suddenly veered off course.
“Did I do that?” she asked.
The enemy ship was out of control. Maybe one of Hester’s stray shots had severed a cable or pierced a tire. It curved across the line of ships, and a three-wheeler close behind it swerved wildly and collided with a little armed yacht. Tangled together, both ships overturned and started to cartwheel impressively across the sand, shedding spars, wheels, sails, and scraps of broken mast. The leading ship had overturned too, throwing up a billowing scarf of sand that hid the remaining three for a while, but they emerged again, vague at first, then sharp and clear and gaining fast. Bullets from a steam-powered machine gun mounted on the big dune runner started thumping against the woodwork close to where Hester crouched. She said something filthy and lay down out of sight.
“THEY ARE TRYING TO CAPTURE THIS SHIP, NOT DESTROY IT,” Grike guessed. “NOW THAT THEY HAVE LOST THREE OTHERS, GRANDMA GRAVY WILL NOT WANT THEM TO RETURN WITHOUT A PRIZE.”
“Well, that’s comforting,” said Hester, looking up at him from ankle height as the bullets hanged off his armor. “What are you going to do when they board us?”
“IT WILL NOT COME TO THAT.”
“What if it does?”
“THEN I SHALL DEFEND YOU IN ANY WAY I CAN,” said the Stalker patiently, “I WILL SNATCH AWAY THEIR WEAPONS. I WILL RESTRAIN THEM. I WILL STAND BETWEEN THEIR BLADES AND YOUR BODY. BUT I WILL NOT KILL THEM.”
“And if they kill me?”
“THEN I WILL KEEP THE PROMISE I MADE YOU ON THE BLACK ISLAND.”
Hester squeezed off a couple more shots at the dune runner. Overhead, the sails were starting to fill with holes, but the silicone silk was tough and did not split. “Why did she do this to you?” Hester shouted. “I mean, tricking you into smashing that Anna Fang thing, fine, but why couldn’t you just go back to normal once the job was done?”
“I AM SURE THAT DR. ZERO HAD HER REASONS FOR LEAVING ME WITH A CONSCIENCE.”
“Well, I miss the old Grike.”
“AND I MISS THE OLD HESTER.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
But she never found out, because at that moment the dune runner pulled alongside, and grappling hooks came hurtling across the narrowing gap between the two ships, and it was time to drop her jezail and pull out her pistols and fight.
The hammer blows of bullets against the hull got into Theo’s dreams, so perplexing and out of place in the quiet green spaces he was drifting through that he had to wake up to find out what they meant. He lay on the bunk for a moment, wondering where on earth he was and why it was jolting about so. The portholes on the wall above him were shuttered, so it was shady in the cabin, but just above his head someone had stretched a golden cord right across from one wall to the other. Theo wondered why anyone should do such a thing. Was it a washing line?
