Ugrik looked around the empty hold. ‘Ain’t nobody else comin’?’
‘Reckon they’ve done more than enough on my behalf already,’ said Frey. ‘This is just you and me.’
‘Well, alright,’ said Ugrik with a grin. ‘I like a man who goes down swingin’.’
‘That’s the thing about underdogs,’ Frey replied. ‘We never know when we’re beaten.’
He stamped on the accelerator. The Rattletrap raced across the hold, down the cargo ramp, and leaped off the edge into the night.
Thirty-Eight
The sun, the relentless sun.
Frey had briefly wondered why Ugrik had bothered to pack a sheet of tarpaulin while they were loading up the Rattletrap. He’d assumed it was another facet of the Yort’s general oddness. It wasn’t u/ntil dawn, when they stopped to fix the tarp to the roll cage with twine, that he saw the sense in it. Frey had brought water, but he hadn’t thought about shade. He never was much of a forward planner.
He drove stripped to the waist, his back running with sweat. The sand was bright enough to blind. The morning had been the worst, when they were driving into the sun. Now it was overhead, and the tarp was doing its work, but his eyes still hurt from the light and the sand thrown up by the Rattletrap’s wheels
He took a swig of warm water from a canteen and passed it to Ugrik in the passenger seat. Ugrik was also half-naked, revealing a scarred torso covered in tattoos. He had a bit of a gut on him, but he was built like a bulldog.
Ugrik had been muttering for an hour now. The conversation he was conducting with himself veered from argument to agreement and back again. Frey could only imagine what was being said. He couldn’t understand a word of the yawling, snarling Yortish tongue.
Eventually, Frey couldn’t bear it any more. He had to talk. He needed something to distract him from the monotony of the journey and of other, darker thoughts. And besides, he was beginning to feel left out.
‘So what’s your story, Ugrik?’ he asked.
‘Eh?’ Ugrik seemed confused by the interruption.
‘You’re an explorer, right?’
‘Aye,’ came the suspicious reply.
‘Explore anything good?’
‘Oh, plenty,’ he said. ‘I was on the first craft out after they found New Vardia. Spent years out there, I did. Trailblazin’ and so forth.’
‘Yeah?’ Frey was interested. He’d always thought of New Vardia as a possible bolt-hole if he managed to screw things up too badly in the country of his birth. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Wild out there. Every man for himself.’ He ran a clenched hand down the red braid of his beard and tugged at the end absently. ‘My kind of place.’
‘The broadsheets reckon that whole towns full of people disappear out there. Without a trace. That true?’
‘Aye,’ said Ugrik. ‘Gone. Hard to tell if they upped and left or if something did for ’em. Some head into the wilderness ’cause they don’t want to pay the Archduke’s taxes. They say there’s a whole lot of people all banded together in secret under a man named Red Arcus, who don’t answer to no Archdukes or Chiefs or God-Emperors, nor no Speaker for the Republic like they got in Thace.’
Frey steered the Rattletrap along the flank of a dune, careful not to skid on the loose sand. ‘You ever seen any of ’em?’
‘Not a sign,’ he said. ‘Lot of stuff goes missin’ out there, but it’s the frontier.’ He cackled. ‘Course, that’s only one story. Lot of worse tales they tell. Some say New Vardia weren’t as deserted as we thought when we set down, and them that were there don’t take kindly to sharin’ their land.’ He scratched his cheek and snorted. ‘But I got nothin’ to say about that.’
‘Ever been to Jagos?’ Frey asked, keen to keep him talking. He was better entertainment than the silence.
‘Aye. I was one o’ the first.’
‘What’s there?’
Ugrik’s face darkened. ‘Fog ’n’ shadows. Seems like the Wrack reaches right down into that land. A barren place, I saw, and damn if there’s not somethin’ fearful unnatural about it.’
‘Didn’t reckon on a famous explorer being superstitious,’ Frey said, with a sidelong glance.
‘I know what I know. Strange things happen there. They’re settlin’ New Vardia as fast as they’re able, but only madmen go to Jagos.’
Frey opened his mouth to point out the irony in that statement, then decided not to bother. ‘Anywhere you haven’t been?’
‘Peleshar,’ he grunted. ‘That’s next on the list. It’s a big ’un.’
‘You haven’t heard? It’s disappeared, or some such bollocks.’
‘Oh, aye? Your broadsheets tell you that, did they?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. He’d seen headlines in some of the more lurid publications. PELESHAR: THE VANISHING ISLE! Crake had sniffed at it and dismissed it as rubbish.
‘Well, this time they’re right. Sammies lost it.’ He chuckled. ‘Don’t mean I can’t find it again.’
Frey raised an eyebrow. ‘Seriously? You actually believe there was a whole country that disappeared?’
‘Lot of things we don’t know about Peleshar,’ Ugrik said. ‘Only one aircraft came back from the Sammie’s first expedition out there, and the pilot had some tales to tell, but not many that made much sense. Then the stupid bastards sent a war fleet, ’cause that’s how Sammies are. Invade, invade, invade. Those fellers diAse felledn’t ever come back either.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Frey scoffed. ‘You’re making it up.’
‘Believe what you like,’ Ugrik huffed. ‘Only one of us is the son of the High Chief of Yortland, y’know. We got spies just like everyone else.’
Frey drove on for a while. He wasn’t sure whether Ugrik was taking him for a ride, or the other way round. The sun beat down, and the Rattletrap growled and sputtered.
‘Really?’ he asked at length, unable to resist. ‘I mean, the Sammies had a war fleet? And they lost them?’
‘Aye.’
‘Why didn’t anyone hear about it? I mean, it’s bad enough that they have a war fleet at all, but-’
Ugrik muttered something to himself, then waved a calloused hand at Frey. ‘Most people don’t know a thing about what goes on down here. Anyway, that was more than twenty years ago. A few years before the First Aerium War. They had plenty o’ aircraft then.’
‘You’re joking. They’ve known about Peleshar for that long? That’s
…’ he worked it out, ‘That’s before Crewen and Skale discovered New Vardia.’
‘Crewen and Skale were lookin’ for Peleshar,’ said Ugrik.
‘Bullshit!’ Frey said. ‘You’re having me on.’
‘Course they were! Your lot heard about what happened in Samarla, with your spies and whatnot, and you sent your fellers out to look. Only the Great Storm Belt was kicking up again, and with aircraft not being so good back in those days, lot of men got lost and some got blew off course. New Vardia was an accident.’
‘Bullshit!’ he said again, although he wanted to believe it. It fitted with his sense of the world, that it was a random and ridiculous place.
‘You don’t have a bloody clue, do you? Half the reason they had the First Aerium War was ’cause Samarla felt threatened by having Peleshar over there – that ’n’ wounded pride – and they needed the aerium to tool up an even bigger fleet!’
‘Bullshit!’ Frey cried.
Ugrik roared with laughter. ‘It’s true! Then the Storm Belt really kicked up, and for the next fifteen years or so you couldn’t even get across the Ordic Abyssal from Pandraca, and meantime we were all at bloody war and no one much fancied goin’ the other way round the planet to try ’n’ find it again. After the stoAAfter thrms cleared and everyone had stopped killin’ each other, they all headed out west again. But Peleshar wasn’t there no more.’
‘It’s been seven years or so since they’ve been heading west to settle!’ said Frey.
‘Aye. Seven years since the Sammies knew Peleshar had gone. Seven years since your Archduke knew, and my father, and everyone else wi’ spies in the right places. Took your broadsheets a sight longer to catch up.’