'Against a handful of us,' said Molly.
'My plan involves infiltration, not assault,' said the great sage. At a touch of the console on his carriage, a section of floor disappeared and a line of black forms rose into the chamber. They looked like dissected slats hung over a fence post as a warning to any others that might trespass. 'These are slat suits. They will seal around your body when you step into them. Like the soldier ants guarding my mountain they are indistinguishable from the real thing – they smell the same, walk the same, emit sonar screeches from the throat, and will translate the slats' own tongue both ways.'
'An impressive feat, Fayris softbody,' said Coppertracks. 'But not as impressive as a moon-splitting weapon miniaturized down to the size of one of my iron fingers.'
'To understand my weapon you need the truth I talked of,' said the great sage. 'Before you arrived on Kaliban, you passed through a disruptive field of some sort?'
'That terrible wall of energy that nearly burst our craft apart?' whined the commodore. 'The wicked thing nearly did for us.'
'That was because you were passing through it the wrong way,' said the great sage. 'It was only intended to admit causal objects travelling the natural way along the timeline, from the past, forward to the future.'
'Timeline?' said Molly.
Coppertracks' skull blazed with light. 'Of course! All the stars, disappearing, being in the wrong place! Procession…'
'Procession? Are we to have a blessed parade now?' said Commodore Black. 'Talk some sense, Aliquot Coppertracks.'
'The field we passed through in the darks of space was no defence field of the Army of Shadows,' said Coppertracks. 'It was a time field. When my telescope back at Tock House was looking out onto the sky, the stars had appeared to move because the portion of the sky I was observing was sitting behind a field of time – I was staring at the right stars, but as they were in our past, rotated out of kilter by the dance of galactic procession. No wonder the Steamo Loas have been ignoring my calls, my rituals of Gear-gi-ju… it is not physical distance that led them to forsake me: my ancestors haven't even been born yet!'
'Quite correct,' said the great sage. 'The Army of Shadows aren't just invading your world from Kaliban, they are invading you from the Kaliban of your own past. As soon as I saw the heavens above Kaliban shifting around your celestial sphere, saw new stars appearing and other stars vanishing, I realized what the masters were doing. From the level of processional movement in the star field, I would estimate that your Kingdom of Jackals lies some five million years in the future of Kaliban as it sits now.'
'How can you be sure of this, man?' asked Duncan Connor.
'Because they plundered the equipment and the fuel source for their time field from a facility very like this one,' said the great sage. 'We only made one, you know. An artificial singularity heavy enough to distort time itself when it rotates, a stillborn star. It was mostly my research into the fifth dimension the masters stole. I had to watch the Army of Shadows plunder my singularity two thousand years ago. Then, a century ago, the masters constructed the iron moon with what was left of our land's mineral wealth, building it around the singularity. They launched it on a comet's trajectory through the solar system, set to pass your world every few millennia. A timer was set to open a gateway back here, a gateway that leads five million years ahead to our future. Our future, but your present.'
'But why did this dead star they stole from you need to be loaded onto the iron moon at all?' Molly asked.
'The only stable time field we found we could project was one that extends backwards, from the present to the past,' explained the great sage. 'We could use our technology to travel back in time, but not forward. Our time machine must already be sitting in our future in order to open up a passage to the present. But that is not a problem. A comet's trajectory keeps the iron moon and its chronological distortion mechanism safe from erosion and geological incident, safe from interference by sentient creatures. You can keep something as hardy as the iron moon spinning around the solar system for millions of years. You could launch the iron moon today, and if you can set the timer on its machinery accurately and it survives long enough, next week you can have the moon open a portal in time above your world, a doorway leading millions of years to the future.'
'But why?' asked Molly, her head spinning. 'Why would the Army of Shadows send their legions forward millions of years into the future, to invade us from our own past? Why not just invade our world as it is now, in your present?'
'You must trust me on that matter, it is better that you do not know,' said the old Kal, avoiding her question. 'I am aware I am asking a lot of you, attacking the iron moon. Even though your people find violence easier than mine, but there are things that you are far better off not knowing if you are to succeed.'
'They're a strange evil crew,' said the commodore. 'I don't care that they're from our blessed past, it's enough for me that you say that little marble in your hand will stop them.'
'I'm sorry, young Sandwalker,' said Fayris Fastmind looking at the nomad guide, tears in his ancient eyes. 'Do you understand now why this weapon won't help our people? Why I couldn't give it to you when you asked me for it. My little weapon contains the fragment of a cosmic string that can be set vibrating at a frequency that will destabilize the singu-larity's rotation and collapse the time field, destroying the iron moon in a tide of tremendous violence.'
'You're planning to seal the Army of Shadows off in this age,' said Sandwalker.
'Stranding them in our time, without sustenance,' agreed the old Kal. 'The masters are a cancer and any cancer will die after it has consumed its host. We can give the masters no new bodies to feast on. They have made a graveyard of Kaliban and I shall see them entombed alongside our bones before I die.'
Sandwalker spoke slowly, his mind-speech heavy with remorse. 'This is how the Kals are to fight them? With our own sacrifice.'
'No, this is how your people fight!' laughed a familiar voice coming from just outside the chamber's door. Molly spun around. It was the carnivore Tallyle, holding a slat rifle, the black, beetle-armoured bodies of a company of the Army of Shadows' slave soldiers standing behind him. His rifle opened up and a bolt of energy hit Sandwalker square on the chest, burning a smoking hole through his robes. Then the slats were everywhere, their talons flashing menacingly, hissing at Molly, circles of jabbing rifles surrounding the expedition members. Two of the beasts ran to where Fayris Fastmind was hovering and overturned his carriage, spilling the ancient sage onto the floor and smashing his floating chair apart with their rifle butts.
'You fight like a filthy sand-born bean muncher who has never tasted flesh and the kill, who has never sucked the life out of his prey,' laughed the corrupted Kal.
Sandwalker stumbled back, moaning, into Molly's arms and she tried to protect him from the slats coming to seize him, but one slapped her to the floor, leaving a bloody claw gash in her cheek. The other slats howled fanged warnings as the commodore and Duncan bridled. The slats' meaning was clear enough.
Tallyle picked Molly up by her throat and licked at her face. 'So, you're the new breed. Well, more salt in your veins than in the Kals'. Must be your diet.' He tossed her contemptuously against the broken carriage, and turned to grin at Commodore Black and Duncan. 'Yes, I can see you two can fight. Good. Meat eaters. Bring the sand-born to the table.'
Slat soldiers pulled the fatally wounded nomad to a circular table and pinned him down. Tallyle crossed the room, dipped down and unleashed his fangs on Sandwalker's neck and face. The wounded Kal's death throes were thankfully brief as Tallyle tore into him, draining his blood.
Carnivore Tallyle rolled the body off the table and imperiously clicked his fingers, prompting his personal retinue of slats to fall upon the corpse and tear it to pieces. Tallyle turned to Keyspierre. 'Where is it?'
'The woman slipped it into her pocket as you broke in here, compatriot,' said Keyspierre.
Carnivore Tallyle walked over to where Molly was kneeling by the carriage and dipped a hand inside her pocket, triumphantly lifting the great sage's little golden sphere in the air as if it were an eye he had plucked out. Dropping the moon-destroying weapon on the floor he crushed it down under his boot heel into a mound of broken metal filaments.
Commodore Black tried to lunge towards Keyspierre but the slats surrounding the commodore clubbed him to the ground and kept on with their beating until he lay still.
'You filthy jigger,' Molly spat towards the Quatershiftian. 'How much have you sold us out for? Did they promise to give you a set of blood-sucking fangs?'
