They waited till they were passing through a particularly thick patch of foliage, and then ducked aside, hiding around the corner of a low building that had been half-consumed by soil, its walls dense with dangling tree roots. Anyone behind them would have to walk by, and they could jump out and confront them.
Frey waited, ears straining, sweat trickling from his temples. Ugrik, who was carrying a rifle from the Ketty Jay’s armoury, drummed his fingers silently on the barrel.
Nothing happened. After a time, Frey leaned over to Ugrik and whispered ‘You sure you heard-?’
‘ Ssh! ’
‘Right.’
They listened. A wild pig lumbered through the undergrowth nearby, snorting. Birds and insects rustled and peeped. Frey couldn’t imagine how Ugrik could have possibly detected anyone in amid all that noise.
Behind him, he heard the snap of a twig breaking under a boot.
He looked over his shoulder. Standing there were two uniformed Sammies, rifles trained on him.
That was mildly surprising. They weren’t who he was expecting at all.
Ugrik had noticed them too. He turned around slowly, his hands in the air. They said something in their own language.
‘Reckon they want us to-’ he began.
‘Drop the guns, yeah, I know,’ Frey said. He held up his pistol and threw it down, then tossed away the other one from his belt. Lastly he surrendered his cutlass. Ugrik laid down his rifle. The Sammies watched them carefully through narrowed eyes.
‘So I suppose these were the fellers you heard following us, then?’ Frey asked Ugrik from the corner of his mouth.
‘No,’ he grunted, pointing with his chin. ‘It was them.’
There was the unmistakable crunch of lever-action shotguns being primed, and Samandra Bree stepped out of the undergrowth behind the Sammies. Colden Grudge came with her, his autocannon ready.
‘Hello, Frey,’ said Samandra.
‘Hey, Samandra,’ he said cheerily. Now the world made sense again.
The Sammies, seeing that the Century Knights had them cold, tossed their rifles to the ground and raised their hands.
‘These friends o’ yours?’ Ugrik asked Frey.
‘Oh, we’re all best of friends,’ said Samandra. ‘Ain’t we, Frey?’
Ugrik frowned. ‘She don’t sound too sincere.’
‘You noticed that, huh?’ Frey asked, hands still in the air.
Grudge moved over to the Sammies and herded them up against the wall of the building, covering them with his fearsome cannon. Samandra never took her twin shotguns off Frey and Ugrik as she came closer.
Frey raised an eyebrow at Samandra. ‘You must’ve been pretty extraordinarily pissed, to follow me all the way here.’
‘You could say. Ever since your snake of a daemonist tried to mess with my head, you ain’t been my favourite people. But we got daemonists too, in the Century Knights. Bet you didn’t know that.’
‘Actually, pretty much everyone’s guessed by now,’ Frey told her with a shrug. ‘Sorry. By the way, I spotted you in Shasiith when you were following me around. Gotta be more subtle than that.’
‘You really shouldn’t tick me off any more than you already have, Frey,’ she warned.
‘Can’t help it,’ he said. ‘I’m just in one of those moods. So, what, you got your daemonist to tag the relic after you twigged that Crake was after it?’ Realisation dawned on him. ‘You were gonna let us escape, weren’t you?’
‘First we were gonna see if you talked. Then if you didn’t, we’d let you slip away with the relic. Just you. So you thought it was an accident.’
‘And then you’d follow me and find out who put me up to the theft.’
‘Exactly.’?actly. amp;r
‘But you shot at me,’ said Frey.
‘You shot first,’ she replied.
‘Not at you, though.’
She shrugged.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘As you can probably see, no one put me up to it.’ He put on a mock-pitiful face. ‘Although I’m hurt that you’d underestimate me like that.’
‘Well, regardless,’ she said. ‘You led us a merry damn chase all the same.’ She smiled. ‘But I got the drop on you in the end.’
There was a noisy clatter of weapons being cocked and loaded all around them. Malvery, Pinn and Crake stepped into view on the roof of the building, weapons pointed at Grudge. Silo and Ashua emerged from the trees behind Samandra, their guns trained on her back.
‘What’s up, Cap’n?’ Malvery asked. ‘Got some trouble?’
Samandra stared at Frey in amazement. ‘How do you do that?’ she asked.
Frey held up his hand with the ring on it and grinned. ‘I’ve got good people,’ he said.
Forty
It was snowing hard now. Not the blizzard conditions Jez had experienced the day she died, but a heavy, downy snow that drifted from the sky and laid a blanket over everything.
She’d gone to find her body, but it had been lost. Beyond the settlement was a clean white expanse, and no tracks to be seen. If her corpse was out there, she’d never find it. It didn’t seem very important anyway.
Rinn had disappeared at some point. Jez hadn’t noticed him leave, but that was how dreams worked, she supposed. Dreams, or trances, or whatever this was.
She made her way back through the domed Yort buildings. The drifts had built themselves high. There was no trace of what had happened here.
What had happened here? She was finding it hard to remember.
When she looked back, she saw that her tracks were filling up as fast as she left them.
She’d been here too long. It was time to leave. Time to will herself awake.
Where was Rinn? She’d enjoyed talking with him. She wished she could recall what they’d talked about.
Listlessly, she drifted through the settlement. It seemed like she was the only person in the world now. Just her and the cold and the turning, tumbling flakes of snow.
Adarik. That’s what it’s called. This tiny little town where I died. Adarik.
Why had it taken her so long to remember a thing like that?
She came out onto the main thoroughfare, and there was the dreadnought. The ropes and chains that hung from it dragged softly against the snow as they were brushed by the wind.
They were singing up there. The baying, discordant animal howls touched chords inside her. She found herself wanting to howl with them. There was freedom in it, and release. There was no self-consciousness among the Manes. Each knew its fellows intimately. Each was connected on a level that was at once primitive and near-divine. She listened, and swayed to the sound.
She’d been here too long. There were things she needed to do. Her people needed her.
She walked over to one of the dangling chains. It swayed before her.
She’d been here too long. It was time to wake up.
She grabbed hold of the chain and began to climb, up towards her brethren at the top.
Harkins was scared.
This was nothing new, of course. But today it was a different flavour of fear, and one he hadn’t tasted for a long while. Tonight, he was scared because he was alone.
Well, alone except for her.
He stood in the passageway, just out of sight of the infirmary door, jigging from foot to foot. A lantern dangled from each hand. The spare was necessary, because if he only carried one it might suddenly go out, and then he would probably die of a heart attack.
The Ketty Jay was eerily quiet, and a terrifying dark lurked beyond the lamplight. The sunset was a meagre glow, filtered through sand banked up against the windglass of the cockpit, which lay at the end of the passageway. Hardly enough to see by. Without engines or power, the Ketty Jay was just a lump of metal, still baking from the heat of the departing day. The floor underfoot seemed foreign and unfamiliar: the decks slanted forward because her nose was buried in the desert.