“They didn’t bother to stop at Azure,” Jolly said.
“I don’t understand. How can they run so quickly and still follow our trail?”
“The middle truck, it follows our trail.”
“But it’s farthest behind.”
“So they already know where we are? Is that what you’re thinking?”
I glanced over my shoulder. There was a small bluff a mile or so to the east, and another, closer, to the northeast, but to the west there was no eminence for many miles. “Let’s change direction. West and south will take us from the sight of any watcher on high ground.”
So we descended again into the little canyon we had only recently escaped, and we followed a branch of it west for many miles, until it became a shallow drainage between two low hills. At last we were able to look back: only to discover the convoy had not followed our trail to its farthest point. Instead, they had cut across the land, as if they’d known of our change of direction almost as soon as it was made. Not even two miles separated us now, and that gap was closing swiftly as the three trucks sped toward us. “They are watching us! But how?”
Jolly’s voice was whispery with panic: “Look there.” He pointed to the north. “That glimmer.”
Almost lost in the shimmering heat was a metallic spark, but it was not a truck, for it floated high above the ground. I squinted. “Some kind of bird?” Then it caught the sunlight, reflecting it in a brilliant flare as only metal can. “Or a savant,” I said, reaching for my rifle.
Jolly pulled it from the sheath and handed it to me. “Hurry! They’ll be here in a minute.”
I refused to look back at the trucks. “Don’t breathe,” I whispered as I brought the rifle to my shoulder. Taking careful aim, I squeezed off one shot, then another, but to my consternation, neither found its target. A second later the glimmer descended from sight, disappearing into a low swale… and a cold confusion took me. I twisted around to look at Jolly. “Did you see that?”
He nodded, his cheeks pale beneath a frosting of dust. A savant is a small thing. When I’d taken aim with my rifle I’d judged it to be much less than a mile away. Farther, and we would not have seen it at all through the heat shimmers of that desert noon. But the swale where it had disappeared was two miles, maybe two and a half to the north—farther away than the pursuing trucks. “That was no savant,” I said softly. “It was something larger.” Much larger, though what, I could not imagine.
“Let’s go!” Jolly’s voice was breaking in panic. “Jubilee, now!”
I nodded, though I had no plan, no idea what to do except to run. I eased the bike forward. I was picking out a path on the crumbly slope when a muffled voice spoke my name from somewhere close behind us: Jubilee!
I jumped in fright and the bike slipped. Jolly cried out, throwing his arms around my waist. The voice called again: Jubilee! An old man’s voice, shouting as if from behind a pillow: Jubilee!
I recognized it then. “It’s the savant.”
“What?”
Again I stopped the bike. “Open the saddle box. Let it out.”
“There’s no time.”
“Just do it, Jolly.”
Furiously, he popped the hasp. The savant bobbed into the air, unfolding into its smooth wing shape. “A call,” it said in its calm and formal voice. “From Yaphet.”
Yaphet?His image coalesced on the savant’s mimic screen. Dust smudged his cheeks and lightened his hair, and his eyes were hidden behind black sunglasses, and still I caught my breath, so much did he resemble Kaphiri. Jolly’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Jubilee, he looks like—”
“I know.”
But Yaphet’s skin was bronze, and flushed with heat, while Kaphiri’s face was cold and pale—and Yaphet stirred in me a different kind of fear. I hoped he was still far away, but I did not believe it, and his first words confirmed my hope was in vain. “Jubilee, I’ve seen you. I think it’s you. Two players on one motorcycle? You’re running west.” He gestured with field glasses held in a black-gloved hand.
“Where are you?” I wasn’t ready to meet him. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to meet the trucks. It was all coming down too fast and I wanted to be anywhere but where I was.
He saw my panic and answered cautiously. “I’m here. A few miles north… or north and west of your position.”
I looked to the northwest, but I could not see him. I had no field glasses.
“There’s a second convoy, Jubilee, three miles or so west of me. It’s moving to meet the other trucks.”
I was aware suddenly of the dryness of my mouth in that desert air. “We’re trapped then.”
“Drop back to the south,” Yaphet advised in a voice so flat it did not sound truly human. “It’s not over yet.”
We turned south. There was no sign of the dark line of storms I had seen that morning. The sky was brassy with a dust that blurred the sun but did nothing to mute its heat. I sniffed at the air, but there was no scent of silver anywhere. The sun was too bright, and all I could smell was dust and my own sweat.
Jolly kept watch behind us, twisting around every few seconds to see if anything had changed. After a few minutes he said, “I see that savant again—or whatever it is. It’s moved farther east.”
“Can you see the second convoy?”
“No.”
A concussion struck my ears, a booming roar of thunder that I felt in my chest. There was a great rumbling of sliding stone, and when I glanced back, a cloud of cinnamon dust was climbing into the sky, from beyond a ridge to the northwest. “Yaphet,” I whispered, for he had been out there, only a few miles away.
Then I too saw the savant. It was much closer now, less than a mile away, and clearly, it was no savant.
It was a flying machine.
An impossible flying machine, soaring at least a hundred feet above the ground. I could see the dark shape of a player suspended beneath it, prone within a harness. I thought I could see a sparkle of silver along its wings. It passed behind an outcropping of rock.
My hands shook as I brought the bike to a stop. “Could Kaphiri order the silver away, even from a flying machine?”
“I don’t know! Maybe he can. Do you think it’s him beneath that wing?”
“Jolly, I tried to shoot him down! What if I had killed him?”
“We have to go. Now.”
I hesitated. Yaphet was out there somewhere. Had he caused the explosion we had just heard? That night at the Temple of the Sisters I had told him everything. I warned him Kaphiri must not die, but did he believe it?
“Jubilee!” Jolly shouted. “We have to—”
The thunder of a second explosion overwhelmed his voice. Then the flyer reappeared, speeding toward us down the canyon we had followed. Something else moved on the ground beneath it: a thread of glimmering water some six feet long. It flowed around boulders and down shallow slopes, retracing exactly the tracks left by my bike, and suddenly I knew how the convoy had followed us.
I thought my heart would stop, but Jolly’s reaction was the opposite. He had never seen a worm mechanic before, but I had described it well enough. “Go!” he shouted, and his fist hammered my shoulder. “Go now! Go now!”
But Yaphet was shouting too, and this time his voice did not come to us through my savant, which I had locked away again in my saddle box. Instead it reached us on the open air. “Get ready, Jubilee! Abandon the bike! There is no choice!”
Every word was clearly uttered, yet none of it made sense until I looked up at the flying machine.
It had overtaken the worm. It had run ahead of it, so close now I could easily see the face of the player suspended beneath it. It looked like Kaphiri, but it was not him.