occupying his own mind.
'A penny for your thoughts, old steamer. Are you worried about Quatershift's involvement with the expedition now that you know the truth about Keyspierre and Jeanne?'
'No I am not, Molly softbody. That Quatershift would involve someone like Keyspierre in the expedition is wholly predictable of that paranoid nation. I have a deeper concern, one concerning the rituals of Gear-gi-ju.'
'I saw you calling your ancestors' spirits earlier today,' said Molly. 'You need to be careful how much oil you shed at your age.'
'Calling, indeed, but calling without any answer at all, dear mammal. I have never experienced the like of this before – ignored for one calling, yes, but like this? Night after night, day after day of complete emptiness as I toss my cogs. It is as if the Steamo Loas have, to speak plainly, completely forsaken me here.'
'There is the distance to consider,' said Molly. 'How many million miles are we from the Steammen Free State here on Kaliban?'
'Physical distance means nothing to my ancestors,' explained Coppertracks. 'They exist outside distance in the realm of the spirits. No, there is something else to account for this void, something that I am missing. I cannot believe the people of the metal's ancestors have abandoned me in this land. So much is strange about this wasteland the Army of Shadows have created. There is something terribly wrong here, and it is staring me directly in my vision plate, yet I cannot see it.'
Molly had no answer for her friend.
If even the gods of the steammen had forsaken Molly and her friends in the dark wastelands of the Army of Shadows, what did that say about the expedition's chances of success on Kaliban, now?
Sandwalker was leading the expedition along the dunes in the welcome shade of fluted columns of basalt – giant anthills towering as high as any Middlesteel tower – when Coppertracks stopped, his tracks entangled in something. As he pulled at what was caught up in his caterpillar treads, a series of cables was revealed and a black box fell out of the side of the crumbling rock of the basalt, yanked free by the steamman's efforts.
Seeing what had happened, Sandwalker came running back. 'Don't touch the box!'
Coppertracks gingerly placed it on the sand.
'Is it a snare or the like?' Duncan asked, helping the steamman untangle the cable from his treads.
The Kal nomad shook his head. He picked up the box and examined it, then pushed it back into the face of the basalt rise. 'An old fibre communication line. Our tribes had them hidden around the desert, but the Army of Shadows discovered the cables and adjusted their machines to detect the mechanism of light transmission we had believed was secure. It was centuries ago, but we lost half the free Kal before we realized how the slats were suddenly finding our caravans and hidden bases.'
'I wonder if they were doing the same back in Jackals?' said Molly. 'Reading our crystalgrid messages before they attacked, learning about us?'
'Undoubtedly,' said Sandwalker. 'The masters do not like to leave such things to chance when they lay their plans.'
'Fate has been blessed unkind to your people for you to live like this,' said the commodore. 'Scuttling across the sands, always an eye open for the enemy, fearful even of sending a message, where every stranger of your race you meet might be hiding a fearful set of fangs to sink into your flesh.'
'It is certainly not any way of life we would wish for our young,' smiled Sandwalker. 'Stop here for a rest. Eat your food but conserve the water, we have little left.'
In the lee of a rise now, the expedition members did not need further urging. Even sitting in the shade they found the arid heat draining. They were travelling day and night, trying to keep ahead of the slats. Molly brushed the sand off her billowing white trousers and made her seat on the gravel of the rise.
Keyspierre passed the sack of food he had been given back in Iskalajinn to the nomad. Sandwalker rummaged around gratefully in the bag and removed one of the long bean-like vegetables, squeezing a green pod out of its end to chew on. 'You are very generous in your sharing. You should eat more of these yourself, Keyspierre. They contain a juice which helps your body retain water.'
'Alas, compatriot, I am an unashamed carnivore,' said Keyspierre. 'I shall stick to my tinned fare, even though Jackelian canned beef is far removed from fine steak that has been shown the flames of a fire for the requisite two minutes.'
Molly could see that the nomad found the idea of what was inside their supply cans quite disgusting, almost as strange as the idea that something as precious as tin would be used just to preserve rations.
Watching Keyspierre spoon out lumps of jellied meat, the commodore began to sing one of the oldest Jackelian drinking songs, each verse hummed out between swigs from his canteen. 'Should the shifties dare invade us; thus armed with our poles; we'll bang their bare ribs; make their lantern jaws ring. For you beef- eating, beer-eating Jackelians are sorts; who will shed their last blood for their country and king.'
Molly met his eyes and the commodore fell to silence. Keyspierre hadn't risen to the bait, but at this rate, one of them was going to run the other through before they reached the lair of the great sage.
Sandwalker led them across the shifting sands of the dunes for two more days and nights. Then they climbed an escarpment to a sandstone plateau where they were presented with dramatic views of whirling, tornado-like storms scouring the desert floor below. One of the ravines they passed contained a thin scrub of vegetation and a pool of water, but the nomad refused to allow them to go down, saying only that the tarn was a false oasis, containing creatures twisted by the Army of Shadows. Traps, always traps. Climbing through the maze of gorges and gullies was time-consuming, but the alternative – risking the low floor of the desert with its dust devils – was too dangerous to contemplate. Those storms could rip apart even the nomad's tough tent fabric and would scour the flesh off the Jackelians' bones within minutes if they were caught in the open.
Luckily for the expedition, the height of the plateau also allowed Sandwalker to use another of the devices from his pack, a flimsy kettle-sized pyramid of transparent panels that he would religiously assemble and leave outside their tent each night. By morning a thin trickle of water had formed inside a plate in the pyramid's centre, capturing the dew of the sunrise, and he would refill their dwindling canteens as best he could.
On their fourth day crossing the plateau they spied a pair of silver machines walking across the desert floor on a nest of whipping, cantilevered metal tentacles, bodies like teardrops pockmarked by round smoking holes. The tentacles looked like magnified versions of the organic ones Molly had seen on the masters' bodies in Kyorin's memories. Molly couldn't tell exactly how large the machines were, but to be able to see them stumbling through the desert at this distance, they had to be truly massive. For once, Sandwalker didn't require that the expedition members scurry off and conceal themselves in a ravine. These were blind, stupid machines, part of the masters' network of devices to tame the atmosphere and stop Kaliban's weather from turning more vicious than it already appeared.
Every extra day burning under the Kaliban sky only stiffened Molly's resolve. If they couldn't find a way of defeating the Army of Shadows here, then this life would become the fate of the Jackelians' descendants. Living feral like rodents, crawling in-between the Army of Shadows' cities and surviving on whatever crumbs they could scavenge from their soiled world. It didn't matter that Molly was a mere shadow compared to the power she had possessed when she had piloted the Hexmachina. Nor were the petty rivalries of her world's nationalities of consequence – they had no home under this boiling Kaliban sky. Here, Molly and her friends could be only prey or predator.
A day after they had left the plateau behind, Molly began to suffer additional physical side effects from carrying the weight of Kyorin's memories. As well as the headaches, she was struck by bouts of muscle cramps, nausea and drowsiness. She was slowing them down, now, and in a territory they needed to pass through fast. They were traversing an area of sand mists, grains that had been beaten as light as flour by the sun and the storms, and which now blew as a fine silicate across the Aard Ailkalmer Issah. Even the name of the territory being pronounced by Sandwalker was painful to Molly, the alien Kal syllables echoing like a battering ram inside her skull.
By the third day Molly started to suffer waking hallucinations, seeing faces briefly in the shadows and dust hazes, hideous leering goblin-like devils that might have belonged to the dark gods from before the Circlist enlightenment. She would flinch in alarm and swear at them before they snapped back to being mere shadows of rocks.
