hard to tell in the dark of the sluice system; she could just see a lantern in Sandwalker's hand, something that looked like a round flat black stone throwing out a strong beam of yellow light straight ahead. The face of Kaliban was large enough to contain thousands of miles of these tunnel systems. How did the nomad know which way to turn? She tried to search her inherited memories but the stab of pain that came back was like a knife slicing across her skull. Damn Kyorin's memories overheating her brain, it seemed they were going to kill her slowly even if the slats and their fang-mouthed friends among the Kal didn't finish her off sooner.
As her vision returned properly Molly started to panic, the weight of the walls crushing in on her. Her hands were trembling, her heart thumping with the feeling of being buried underneath hundreds of miles of stone.
Sandwalker stopped. 'We can talk now. Any slats who came after us will be lost miles behind. Are you sick?'
'I don't like enclosed spaces,' said Molly. She had been a stack cleaner in her poorhouse days, forced into the tight spaces of Middlesteel's pneumatic towers; and the tunnels of this carving were far too similar to the conditions she had endured then.
The nomad laid a hand on Molly's forehead and shut his own eyes. She could feel the weight lifting, clearing – the shuddering of claustrophobia along her body abating as the Kal pushed into her mind.
'You will last until we get outside. This fear lives very deep within you and it would be dangerous to remove it entirely. Let me see your face.'
'That hurts.' Molly winced as the Kal gazed into her left eye, staring at her iris from different angles. Then the right eye.
'Blast blindness, mild. You are lucky. If the rifle shot had been nearer it would have boiled both your eyes inside their sockets.'
'Are you a doctor, too?'
'No, I am a stupid, ignorant sand-born primitive with the dust of the desert still fresh on my trousers.'
Molly ignored the caustic remark. 'With fangs or without? I was under the impression your people were plant eaters.'
'You mean Tallyle back there? As you saw, he is not one of us anymore. Search your Kal memories for being made a gift of the hunger.'
Molly tried, but the pain was too great and she had to stop. Nothing was returned by the part of her mind that was Kyorin.
Sandwalker saw the pain she was in and shook his head as if she had failed a test. 'Poor fool; Tallyle must have let the slats take him alive. The masters have turned him into a carnivore. He survives on blood now. The masters corrupted his body inside their machines, as a warning and a punishment and a source of ironic amusement. He now follows only his endless appetites in their service.'
Molly didn't need to hear the disgust in his voice to know that there could be nothing worse to the gentle herbivores.
'The Army of Shadows sees it as an improvement, no doubt,' said Sandwalker. 'And for the masters it is the easiest way to turn a select few of our people into eager collaborators. Nothing wasted, you see. The masters drink our souls – our very life essence. Then those of us they have given the hunger drain our blood. Finally the slats feast on the meat and bones that are left. A little something for everyone in the cruel pyramid of life they have shaped, with us crushed at the bottom as their cattle.'
Molly listened to his words in horror. And now the Army of Shadows' masters had new acres to farm, herds that had yet to be depleted. Her entire nation, and the rest of the continent.
The Kal indicated a ladder inside a pipe positioned above their heads.
'We're still going upwards?' asked Molly. 'We've been travelling through these garden sluices for hours.'
'Garden sluices?' Sandwalker snorted. 'The gardens on the walls outside needed only a fraction of the water that would have come through here. Don't you know what the face of Kaliban was?'
Molly shook her head.
'A power mill, once. The greatest on Kaliban, fed with water for fuel and harnessing the very power of the sun itself.'
'A giant steam engine.'
'Of a sort,' said the nomad. 'Our people have forgotten so much. A whole population murdered and farmed and controlled down to the few that live in the last city now.'
'But you remember in the desert?'
'A little more than is safe for us,' said the Kal. 'Which is why it suits us to be looked down on as ignorant root-grubbers by the city-born. We free Kal are usually as stingy in our sharing with our kind in the last city as they were with you. The city-born are infiltrated too easily by those who have been twisted against us by the masters' hunger.'
'And you really have a weapon to defeat the Army of Shadows?'
Sandwalker nodded. 'So it is said.'
'One that you haven't used yourself.'
'It is how I became a servant of the great sage. I travelled to seek him out as a boy, to beg him to give the weapon to me, so that I might use it.'
'He didn't give it to you?'
'He only told me it would not help us,' said Sandwalker.
'You do not defeat your enemy by becoming him,' Molly repeated the words of Kyorin's wife. 'But if your people are pacifists, would you have been able to use the weapon if the great sage had given it to you?'
'I once slit the belly of one of the masters' twisted abominations crawling through the desert towards me at night to feed on my body,' said Sandwalker. 'I do not think it so different. A matter of scale, perhaps.'
'Maybe there's hope for your people yet,' said Molly.
'I fear otherwise,' said Sandwalker. 'Else the masters' blood would be on my hands, and your help would not be needed.'
Her hands. Molly focused her blurred vision on her fingers. She had been the guardian of Jackals, once, the last symbiote operator of the Hexmachina; had wielded the power to cast down gods. But the Army of Shadows had entombed the Hexmachina inside the heart of the world as easily as a butterfly collector pushing a prize specimen into an empty matchbox. What weapon could the Kals possibly possess to stand against such a force? How terrible would it have to be that they had never used it? And how monstrous did they think the race of man was to actually unleash such a horror against the Army of Shadows?
After a further hour of travelling, Sandwalker stopped by a wall. The surface looked featureless enough to Molly, but Sandwalker placed his fingers on it and there was a click, followed by a section of the wall sliding into the ceiling. A dark shaft lay on the other side of the opening, squares of light activating as Molly stuck her head through, a long line of luminescence, smaller and smaller down towards a vanishing point. Craning her neck around, she saw the lights stretched away into the darkness above her, too. The shaft must extend from the very foot of the carving to its top. Molly took some convincing to step out into the air at Sandwalker's urging, but she finally acquiesced after he used his torch to demonstrate how the flow of gravity's polarity had been reversed inside the vent, the shaft serving as a lifting room. It was the oddest sensation, floating upwards, every sense in her body crying out that she shouldn't be falling heavenwards, quite unlike the weightlessness she had briefly experienced inside Lord Starhome – and that had been bad enough.
Odder still was the sight that greeted her when she stepped out of the door at the top of the shaft. Not the fact that they were standing under the beating sun on the rim of the face of Kaliban's mouth – a dark chasm, which Sandwalker told her, had once expelled water vapours as the giant power source's sole pollution – but the shape of the creature that was waiting for them. Taller than Molly by a couple of heads, green scales shining in the light, two massive wings wrapped around it like a cloak to shade it from the heat. It was a lashlite, or something as near identical to the people of the wind that made their nests in the Kingdom of Jackals' mountains as to make no difference.
'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.'
