sheets of incandescence erupted from it, each striking one of the waiting pieces. The thunder of their energies suddenly rose a hundredfold. Then they proceeded to close in upon one another. As they did so, Mater Motley turned the black clavicle skyward, and a tenth sheet of brilliance escaped the marrow. Maratien followed its ascent, passing the incandescence and reaching its destination a second or two before the signal.
The Stormwalker didn’t have nine pieces, it had ten.
The tenth lay against the top of the lightless sky, its very lean body resembling a spine along the length of which perhaps fifty pairs of multi-segmented legs were arranged, the limb on the left a perfect mirror of that on the right, the symmetric severity of their design touched now and then by tics and tremors. The bone’s signal didn’t cure the waiting spine of its agitations. In a matter of seconds, the tenth part went from being a vast stillness touched by flickers of lunacy to a mass of intricate shifts and unfolding that multiplied a hundredfold, then ten hundredfold.
“It sees me . . .” Maratien said very softly.
“Perhaps so,” Mater Motley replied. “If it does, then it sees something insignificant. A fleck of living clay clinging to its Maker. Don’t think—don’t
The tenth part was now beginning its majestic descent from the top of the sky, and as it did the other parts picked up speed, still making adjustments in their positions so as to match more accurately the parts with which they were about to be knitted.
There was another sound behind the roaring of their many unknowable engines. There was a rising whine of power, which became sharper and harder as the pieces converged, and arcs of scarlet lightning leaped between the parts, and down from the descending tenth, to connect with the nine below: a spitting, blazing net of energies drawing them together.
Below them all, still raised high in Mater Motley’s hand, was the beacon bone. The Old Mother kept her eyes turned skyward watching the convergence. But the moment that Maratien covered her ears and closed her eyes she knew.
“What are you doing, girl? I didn’t bring you up here to have you whimper like a beaten child.”
“It’s too much.”
“No, please, Mother, please! I’m just afraid!”
“I said: OPEN YOUR EYES!”
“Please, I can’t. Don’t make me.”
Mater Motley glanced down at the girl, with her face buried in the souls sewn to her gown. “Is that where you want to be, Maratien? You want to be wrapped up forever in a place you’ll be safe?”
Maratien didn’t open her eyes. She simply nodded and sobbed.
Mater Motley looked down at her with utter contempt on her face.
“You disappoint me, girl,” the Old Mother said. “You bore and weary and disappoint me. But if that’s what the child wants, who am I to deny her?”
“Thank you,” Maratien said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Oh don’t thank me too quickly, girl,” the Old Mother said. “Wait a hundred years.”
The fingers in Maratien’s scalp dug farther still, plunging into her thoughts and memories, reaching down with her needle fingers in search of the part she would keep: the soul.
Too late, Maratien understood the significance of the Old Mother’s words.
“No, Mother, please! No, I didn’t mean. No, no, no—”
Her words dissolved into a single shriek as Mater Motley’s fingers found her essence and closed around it. In desperation Maratien reached up and attempted to catch hold of the invading hand but before she could do so the will to act was taken from her in that same instance as her soul.
Out of the girl’s head the Old Mother drew the girl’s last light, delivering it into one of the countless rag dolls that were sewn to her gown, still awaiting a soul.
Mater Motley returned her gaze to the glories of the convergence that blazed above, allowing her hand to linger in Maratien’s head only long enough to raise the puppet corpse to its feet, then let it go. Gravity did the rest. The body toppled backward, and dropped off the point of the Needle Tower.
Just as the ten parts of the Stormwalker touched and fused, Maratien’s body met the ground. There it broke open, its pungent scent alerting scavengers from every direction to come partake of the feast while it was still warm.
Chapter 48
Smiles
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” Gazza asked. He had appeared over the top of the sand dune behind which Candy was summoning up a glyph big enough for two.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she told him. “I’m not even supposed to be looking at you.”
“Well, I am and you are.”
“Yes, so I see.”
“So where are you going? I know what you’re doing. I may be just a fisherman but I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You’re making a glyph. You’re flying away somewhere, leaving me—”
“I’m not leaving you. I’m going to find Finnegan.”
“Oh, good. So I can come?”
“No. I didn’t say—”
“You just said you weren’t leaving me.”
“Where’s Malingo?”
“All right, if you have to go, at least show me how to make a glyph for myself so I can follow you. I will. I can do anything if I want something badly enough.”
“I’m sure you could.”
“And I want to be wherever you are.”
“Gaz . . .”
“Is that wrong?”
“No. It’s not wrong. It’s just a bad time, that’s all.”
“You showed Malingo. He told me.
He ran down the slope of the dune at a rush, his piebald features bright with fury in the light off the solidifying glyph.
“You think I’m like all the rest, don’t you?”
“I don’t want you to get bent out of shape, but we don’t have time for this, Gaz.”
She turned her back on his stare.
“I’m not,” he said.
Candy stared hard at the ground, trying to remember where in the glyph summons she’d been. She was tired, and her fatigue was starting to affect her ability to get things done.
“Not what?”
“I’m not like all the others,” he said. He came around to the other side of the glyph so that she couldn’t continue to avoid engaging his stare. “I’m not waiting for the miraculous Candy Q to come up with all the answers —”
“Well, that’s good because I haven’t got any! Sometimes I think I don’t have anything except . . . except . . . except . . . you’re not to blame.” Candy looked up at him through the skeletal form of the glyph, its lines solidifying in the air.
“You look like you hate me right now,” he said.
