Sandwalker insisted Molly suck on strips of blue salt and chew the bitter pods from the vegetables in his supplies to help alleviate the symptoms – her heated brain made increasingly susceptible to sunstroke. But Molly could tell from the way the nomad looked at her now that he was seriously worried about her condition. It seemed as if Keyspierre's prediction that her affliction would become a burden to the expedition was proving correct after all. The pain inside Molly's mind swelled and ebbed. Increasingly when the pain was on the rise, she would become confused, her mind experiencing things that had once happened to Kyorin as if they were happening to her now, or seeing things that made no sense at all. Once, she even thought she had come across Duncan hiding behind a basalt column and talking to his precious battered travel case as if he was expecting an answer. She was going mad, slowly. Then not so slowly at all.
Molly caught Keyspierre looking at her as they trudged along the dunes, his eyes deceitful and narrow under the turban that protected his face from the blowing dust.
'Stop looking at me!' Molly shouted.
'Compatriot?'
'I know what you are planning to do.'
Duncan Connor was ahead of Molly, holding a guide rope to stop them becoming separated in the endless floating sand haze. 'Are you all right, lassie?'
'He's planning to kill me!'
Duncan looked back at Keyspierre. 'What are you about, man?'
Molly threw herself towards the uplander. 'Keyspierre's planning to slip a cushion over my face and smother me in the tent tonight so I don't slow us down, or he'll cut my rope and leave me to wander alone out here. Anything, Duncan, anything to ensure we get to reach the great sage. All for the people, they must prevail. The people.'
'Molly,' said the ex-soldier, feeling her forehead. 'You're burning up, lassie.'
'Don't let him kill me! Duncan, please, I saved your life from a blazing sail-rider rig back in Middlesteel, now's your chance to repay me by saving mine.'
'There are a good few in this blasted land that deserve to die, compatriot,' said Keyspierre, coming towards her, 'but I do not count you among their number.'
Molly took a step back and fell over something buried in the sand. 'Liar, you dirty shiftie liar. You'll kill us all to make sure you reach the great sage!'
Sandwalker appeared out of the haze. Unslinging his canteen and helping Molly to her feet, he was about to offer her a sip from his water, but then he spotted what she had tripped over and stopped, his eyes widening in shock. Jutting out was a long fused tube of sand that had been petrified into glass. 'This is fresh.'
Duncan Connor knelt down and examined the glass. 'It's not the spoor of one of the kelpies that live out here, is it?'
'A beast,' said Sandwalker. 'But not a living creature. This is the sand flash left from a lightning strike on the dunes. There is a permanent pizo-electrical storm we call the Beast, but it normally rotates eight hundred miles north of here. The masters' systems are truly failing if the storm has moved so far south.'
Molly tried to break out of line and flee into the haze, but Commodore Black caught her and pulled her back. 'No, lass, that's not our way.'
'Keyspierre wants us to die,' insisted Molly. 'He knew the storm was here. You have seen what his people are capable of, Jared. He wants the great sage's weapon just for Quatershift, not for us. We all have to die.'
'I'll not lighten that secret policeman's reputation,' said Commodore Black, 'but this is your fever speaking, lass. Your imagination is swinging wild on the yardarm with your sickness.'
Why couldn't the commodore see what Keyspierre was doing, was planning to do to them all? He was so dangerous.
'We don't have time for Molly to rest,' said Sandwalker. 'We must be skirting the fringes of the stormfront or we would already be dead. We have to clear the basin and the storm area before we are-'
His words were cut off by a tremendous burst of light in the sand haze, an ozone stench and a sound like a cannon being given the fuse right next to their ears. Coppertracks' sole remaining mu-body was blown apart by the lightning strike, cut in two, sent spinning into the dunes.
A wave of aftershock from the discharge rippled through the sand haze, making the skin along Molly's hand twitch as if someone were pinching it.
They had met the Beast and they were balancing inside its maw.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
With a scraping sound, the lid of Purity's crate was wrenched off, blinding her with the sudden flood of light. Pulling her aching body out of the crate, Purity saw she was in a room lit by a solitary gaslight on a circular table. And there! There was the one-legged jigger who had attacked her, accompanied by a steamman, an old four- armed affair wearing a leather apron over his iron chest, hung with hammers, pins, scissors and other tools of the cobbler's trade.
'What-?'
'Quieten down,' said the apprentice boy. 'We had to hide you. There were men looking for you who thought they had seen you come into the shop.'
Purity rubbed at her swollen eyes, the skin of her face red and peeling where the apprentice had drugged her with his rag.
'Leather cleaner,' noted the apprentice. 'As good as a teeth-puller's gas if you're not wearing a cobbler's mask.'
'Or don't have a boiler heart not much subject to the vagaries of atmospheric composition,' said the steamman. 'My name is Cam Quarterplate and this young softbody is my apprentice, Watt.'
'What in the name of the Circle are you doing?' Purity shouted. 'Those men at the front of the shop were my friends.'
'The men who came looking for you weren't the ones you went walking down the hill with, that's so,' said Watt. 'They were the chief's men, damson.'
'Chief?' said Purity. 'What chief? Are you two foot-shodders completely mad?'
'That's what the softbody who now runs the town calls himself,' said Quarterplate, his twin stacks nervously quivering out a trail of smoke, his voicebox set low to a whisper. 'They came out of Middlesteel, a horde of them. Convicts, we think. From Bonegate or one of the other large prisons. Wainsmouth belongs to them now.'
Watt nodded sadly. 'And everyone inside the walls is as good as their slave. Rumours I heard in town say their chief used to be a leech-monger, a doctor who was waiting the rope in Bonegate for poisoning rich patients after the carriage folk had changed their wills to favour him.'
'But there are soldiers outside the gates,' said Purity, shocked, 'and that vast u-boat sitting in your harbour…' 'There are men dressed in uniform outside the gate. Our garrison cleared out months ago with the rest of the army to march east to the war in Quatershift,' said Watt. 'And the chief's brutes took the Spartiate's crew just like they've taken all you refugees. The Spartiate sailed into harbour looking for fuel. Except we haven't got any, of course. If we did, the chief and his men would have seized the u-boat and sailed off to Concorzia like all the bloody guardians did when the capital and parliament fell to the Army of Shadows.'
'This is no free town,' said Cam Quarterplate, the outrage seeping through his voicebox. 'The only freedom we have here is to be made deactivate if we go against the chief. That duplicitous fastblood has made a deal with the slat creatures.'
'Don't you see, damson?' protested Watt. 'We don't have the victuals to feed a tenth of the people who have come to camp outside Wainsmouth's gates. You refugees come here with supplies, the chief's men steal them off you, and then you leave as food. Food and slave labour for the slats. There are not enough of the bloody monsters in Jackals for the Army of Shadows to hunt down everyone yet, but when people on the road hear of our free town and the free feeds down in Wainsmouth's warehouses, they all make their way here readily enough. The slats are licking the bugs off the flypaper in Wainsmouth.'
'Will one of you two please tell me what happened to my friends?'
