nostrils, along with the vision of Jeanne disappearing in the sudden fire-flash, the siren on her barge silenced as pieces of it ricocheted off Kaliban's mighty canal works?
Molly broke the quiet. 'You've not spoken of Jeanne since we climbed out of the canal.'
'What is there to say?' remarked Keyspierre, rubbing tiredly at his stubble. 'She died to save us, so that we might reach this great sage of the Kal. She put the preservation of the Commonshare of Quatershift before her own life – as I would expect any good compatriot from my nation to do, as I would do myself.'
'You're a cold one, Keyspierre,' said the commodore. 'She was your daughter, man, your blood. Would you not have done anything for her?'
'Do not presume to tell me how to grieve for one of my own,' said Keyspierre.
'One of your own, perhaps,' said Coppertracks, the steamman – sitting furthest from the heat of the brick while he generated his own warmth from his furnace. 'But not your blood, I believe. Her iris shared about as many inheritance vectors with your eyes as it did with the scratches on my vision plate. She was not your daughter, dear mammal. Now that she is dead I think you owe her – and us – the truth.'
Duncan Connor sat bolt upright at the news. 'I kenned it. There was something not quite right about the pair of you numpties from the start.'
'You know nothing of me,' snapped Keyspierre.
'I know that you are no scientist,' said Coppertracks, the steamman's voicebox becoming uncharacteristically firm. 'Your understanding of the gunnery project at Highhorn was the superficial sort I would expect to come from a potted briefing on wave mechanics. And aboard Lord Starhome you didn't know one end of a fully functioning circuit magnetizer from another.'
'You're just an informer, aren't you?' accused Molly. 'A shiftie stooge sent to keep an eye on your scientists at the Highhorn project?'
'Is that how highly you think the Commonshare values the survival of its citizenry?' said Keyspierre, sadly. 'That it would dispatch a menial merely to spy on its scientists' fraternization with your Jackelian friends? You are wrong! I am a colonel attached to Committee Eight of the People's Commonshare of Quatershift, charged with ensuring the success of our mission to Kaliban at any cost. At any cost.'
'So then, the wolves have been let out to run free.' The commodore sucked in his breath. 'Your kind I've heard tell of before. Seven central committees operating under the rule of the first, and the eighth that doesn't officially exist at all. You're a wheatman is what you are, as bad as any of the dirty agents from the Court of the Air.'
'A typical Jackelian mangling of our tongue,' said Keyspierre. 'It's huit, you dolt.'
'A secret policeman by any name,' said the commodore. 'Ah, poor young Jeanne. I did not know you for what you were.'
'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 Quatershiftian'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 Quatershiftian 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 '-Quatershift.'
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
