The sleer tried smashing its back against the canyon wall to dislodge him—failed. Crane continued excavating glistening nodules and scarves of pink flesh, rubbery masses of tubes and handfuls of quivering jelly. Eventually the creature’s movements became spasmodic, when not painfully slow. It walked sideways up towards one canyon wall, leant there as if resting, then walked sideways towards the other wall… but never made it. Suddenly the life went out of the beast as if Crane had pulled its power plug. Its legs gave way and, with a sigh, it collapsed.
After dismounting, Mr Crane used sand to clean his hands, rolling the gore away in balls just like the sleers he had watched earlier had shed sand mixed with their mating juices. He took some time doing this, occasionally glancing back towards the main canyon. Once his hands were pristine again, he used the edge of a sulerbane leaf to scrape much of the ichorous mess off his coat. Only then did he look around for his hat.
Seemingly undamaged by its brief departure from Crane’s head, it was lying over by the far wall of the canyon, where first-stage sleers had bored numerous burrows. He walked over, stooped and picked it up, straightened it and brushed away the dust. Only as he was placing it on his brass skull did he notice the blue eye gleaming in shadow. Then the great cobra thing hurtled out and slammed into his chest, bore him to the ground and pinned him there, smoke boiling away around it as if it were the contact head of a giant spot welder. Crane struggled to rise, then slumped back like the sleer he had just killed. The Dragon pseudopod remained connected to his chest for some time, then, as if having thoroughly drained its victim, slid back into the sleer burrows.
Crane remained motionless, deep down inside himself.
There were all sorts of interesting and complex compounds floating about in the air—the pollution produced by a nascent industrial society. But, as he walked through the streets of the Overcity, Skellor also noticed oddities that could only result from such industry ascending from a basis of a previously acquired body of knowledge. The phocells were a prime example: photoactive electricity was not something you stumbled across in a society where people still used oil lamps and candles. Another such example was invisible to the few citizens still up and about this night, but not so to Skellor. He tracked the neat line of red-shifted photons spearing up from the tower below which he now stood. This edifice was a steel column topped by a small dome, from which protruded the cylinder of an optical telescope. Yet certainly it was not that item which was producing the laser beam.
Still invisible, Skellor entered the building and began to climb a winding stair. A ticking, hissing sound followed him up as his creatures first walked to heel, then spread out at his silent command. Here he found some night people whose work concerned the sky and the stars.
‘A message laser,’ he observed, standing over a woman in a corridor convulsing as an aug insect bored into her skull. All around him, his creatures were taking over the inhabitants of the tower, one after another, and through them he was tracking everybody down. Two mechanics in grease-stained ankle-length coats fell in behind him as he came to the upper viewing chamber. His creatures instantly took a man and woman as they pored over their calculations, but the old man standing, thickly wrapped against the cold, gazing through the telescope’s traversal slot, he left alone for a moment. Someone had bolted the message laser to the side of the telescope, probably because the positioning mechanisms of the telescope could aim it accurately.
The beam itself, Skellor now knew, having extracted the information from many minds, was produced by a ruby wrapped in one of the magnesium bulbs whose production process it had taken this man, Stollar, ten years to perfect. It was also through this device that they hoped to bring down one of the landing craft from the Ogygian, though Skellor doubted their primitive computing powers were up to the task.
Stollar turned. ‘Who…What is…?’ He looked in horror at his assistants, took in their vacant expressions, the things attached to the sides of their heads, and others of their kind swarming about the floor. ‘You’re the one it warned Tanaquil about.’
With a nod, Skellor acknowledged the speed of the man’s mind. ‘It?’ he asked.
‘The sand dragon.’
That came as a rude reminder, almost like a slap to wake him. Skellor focused his attention on Crane’s control unit, and only then realized how smoothly it had been taken out of his control. There was no contact now, no contact with the Golem at all. But something was still subverting the control unit inside Skellor himself- some subtle infiltration.
‘You are controlling all their minds.’ Stollar’s horror was intense, his face chalk white, as he stepped up onto the first rung of one of the telescope’s maintenance ladders, to try to get further away from Skellor.
Skellor had no further time for the man. He shifted Jain substructure inside himself, coughing at the reluctance of the device to move—his eyes watering in reaction to this thing caught in his throat.
‘How many do you control?’ Hysteria now in Stollar’s voice.
Skellor released his hold on the aug creatures, and they scuttled towards the other man. He coughed, hacked, then spat up the black stone of the control module. ‘Damn you, Dragon.’ He looked up in time to see Stollar stepping back through the traversal slot, trying to claw away the creature attached to one side of his head. He fell. The link was just going in when Stollar hit the unyielding metal of the platform below. His death was instantaneous but not, unfortunately, sufficiently thorough. Skellor turned to go and make his way down. He wouldn’t waste a mind like that—all that was required was a few repairs.
Crane dropped from the otter-hunter’s outrigger and hit the copper-salt sea with the curtailed splash of a lead fishing weight. Foam white surrounded him briefly, then he was sinking fast, trailing large lens-shaped bubbles made by air escaping his clothing. The bottom of his coat flared out around his legs, and he clamped his right hand firmly on his hat to hold it in place. Looking down, he momentarily thought he was seeing the bottom, until light reflected from scales in the green mass below him as the shoal of adapted whitebait swirled away. Then, finally and abruptly, the bottom came up with a crump against his hobnailed soles. Glittering silt spread in a cloudy ring from his impact point, then quickly settled. The seabed here was almost entirely composed of shell fragments and whole shells: trumpet shells with their distinctive banding, the bone-white carapaces of pearl crabs like miniature human skulls, iridescent penny oysters, sharp scythe shells, and the occasional dull-bronze gleam of dark-otter bone. Taking his bearing from his internal compass, Mr Crane turned until he was facing in the right direction, and began striding towards the distant shore.
‘You must be merciless and swift. Kill anyone who gets in your way—they don’t matter—but be sure to get Alston.’
In one fragment of Crane’s mind: the perfectly recorded image of a man behind a pedestal-mounted harpoon gun, him swinging the gun around and firing, braided wire snaking out after the barbed missile with a hiss like cold flesh dropped into scalding oil. Enough for face recognition.