Sandwalker retrieved a thin black tube from his torn pack. He rotated its head to reveal a tiny spray hole. 'We must pass through the territory of the ant colonies to reach the mountains. This will help us survive.'
'What is it, lad?' asked the commodore.
'A synthesized version of the pheromone a queen ant uses to attract her workers and soldiers to her. If we are pursued, one of us must sacrifice themselves for the group. Once the pheromone is applied to a robe, the colony will chase only the one who has been sprayed. If this was my tribe's caravan, it would be traditional for the oldest and the sickest to be appointed as the lure.'
Commodore Black glanced nervously at the massive bladelike pincers of the dead ant's mouthparts. If it came to it, who would be selected in such a mortal awful lottery?
Which one of them would have die to save them all?
Molly woke up to burning pain slicing through her head, haunted by the shadows of things she wasn't quite sure were phantoms, or Kyorin's memories, or events that were actually happening to her now. She was being carried. Yes, the expedition to reach the great sage. To find the weapon. And to cure her, before her mind fried under the endless heat of the Kaliban sun and the weight of the strange memories.
She was being borne in someone's arms; her head so weak she couldn't even turn to catch sight of who it was. But she could see the great rise of a mountain in front of them. So tall, as were the ants. Two giant ants! Coming towards her, as big as shire horses, pincers snicking together hungrily. Molly tried to yell but her throat was too dry. She was placed on the ground and left there. The monstrous pair of ants were still coming forward, six legs apiece, sharp orange legs like lances jabbing at the ground. The head of the nearest ant dipped down, its antennae brushing against Molly's forehead, marking her scent. This treachery was Keyspierre's work, it had to be! The dirty shiftie secret policeman was sacrificing her as an offering to these monsters. Abandoning her as food to save his skin.
Now Molly's paper-dry throat summoned enough saliva to scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Even miles distant, Purity could hear the thunder of the Spartiate's guns as the first shells began to drop on the domed city that the Army of Shadows had built on the coast. Or rather, the dome that had been raised by their slaves' labours. Purity, the Bandits of the Marsh and their small volunteer army had come across a few of the pits where the slats had tossed the bones of dead polar barbarians after consuming those who had been worked to death. Nothing wasted.
Purity hoped that there were some of the ugly tentacled masters the slats bowed their eyeless heads to inside that dome… and not just because it would make it easier to entice the slat legions away from the hideous white beanstalk anchored in the frozen soil of the north. She wanted the masters to be there because, for just a moment, it would mean that the invaders might feel a fraction of the fear that the Jackelians had while the slats were rampaging across their home.
'It is working,' observed Samuel Lancemaster, brushing the falling snow out of his face. 'The slats are being recalled back towards their city.'
'They fear an assault from the sea,' replied Purity. 'Rightly so – for all the slats know, we might have dozens of u-boats waiting under the ice pack to surface.'
Columns of slats were forming up, emerging like beetles from snow-submerged buildings blasted into the hard ground of what had once been the polar barbarians' territory. Soldiers appeared in the shadow of their beanstalk, the hideous white appendage disappearing into the snowstorm and the night. No sign of the iron moon here, the baleful rusting eye of the Army of Shadows hidden like the home of the gods on its heavenly mountaintop. Only the occasional flicker of red light as capsules rode up the beanstalk. These were the same capsules Molly Templar had described crossing the celestial darks, now turned into lifting rooms. Purity arched her neck up towards where the giant cable disappeared into the whited heavens. It was at least the circumference of one of the capital's lofty pneumatic towers.
Yes, Purity had a good view of the beanstalk from the brow of the hill. But by her side the druid Ganby was paying little attention to their target. The closer they got to the drained leylines of the distant north, the more nervous the old man had become. Now he was lying alongside Purity shaking like a jinn-house lush without the coins for his next glass.
'Would that we did have such an underwater armada,' said Ganby. He rubbed his face into the snow, moaning as a circle of leathery globes squatting around the beanstalk started to hum into life, rising under their buzzing blade-wings before angling away across the hills.
'Eating snow won't make a man of you,' laughed Jenny Blow. 'We'll throw the hearts of a couple of slats on the fire for you later. That'll fatten you up.'
'The soil is so barren. They've drained the energy from the land. I'm too weak to fight them.'
'And you thought you had the sweating sickness the day before I met the gill-neck's prince in single combat,' said Samuel. 'Do be quiet, old man.'
'Is he always like this before a battle?' asked Purity.
'Every one I've seen,' confirmed Jackaby Mention. 'Except this time I believe he may have just cause for his humours.'
'This is my first battle.'
'I know. Your job is to sever the ring of cables anchoring the beanstalk to the ground,' said Jackaby. 'The rest you may leave to us.'
The rest. It sounded so easy. The element of surprise might carry them through the defences to the foot of the towering beanstalk, but how long could they last – how long would she last – hacking the anchor cables off it, before the Army of Shadows responded with force enough to overwhelm the small band of attackers?
It was then that Purity saw him, trying to hide down in the crowd of volunteers. Watt! Despite all his protestations, the young cobbler had returned to his old calling in the fleet after all.
She walked towards him, and seeing that he had been rumbled, he gave up trying to conceal himself amongst the crouching line of volunteers.
'I thought you were going to head into the forests with the other refugees from the port?'
He looked embarrassed. 'The old steamer can keep them in shoe leather well enough without me.'
'Your talents might be better off employed back on the u-boat. You'd be safer there.'
'You're a fine one to talk.' He held up a small rifle. 'I'm not out here to protect you, you know. After I was invalided out of the fleet, I promised myself I'd never die on one of those tin cans. I needed the air, that's why I'm here.'
The air. It was about to get a lot more bracing. 'Well, you look after yourself, Watt.'
He reached out and put a hand on her arm as she was about to go back to where the Bandits of the Marsh were waiting. 'I've got your shoes tied up in my pack. I made them myself. I sized them using one of your footprints from the dust back on the shop's floor.'
Purity laughed. 'Really? Thank you. I'll try them on when we've cut down the beanstalk. It'll be something to look forward to.'
Purity walked to the head of the hill and turned about to address her volunteers crouching down on the side of the slope like a hundred and fifty white ghosts, her voice competing against the storming winds and the distant thundering guns of their u-boat. 'I know many of you are scared, many of you are wondering if you will see your homes again right now. So I'm not going to ask you to fight your way through the slats down there…'
Shouts of mortification sounded back through the whipping snow.
'No, I'm not going to ask you to fight your way through slat legions and hold that ground down there. But here's the rub. I have decided that ugly bone-white beanstalk rising out of our ground offends my eye. It's unsightly. So I'm going to take a stroll down there and chop it to pieces. Perhaps you'd like to come and see me do that?'
Her volunteers shook their rifles in the falling snow.
'Then you're invited for a stroll!' shouted Purity. 'And if we bump into any slats down there, just remember
