Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Keyspierre passed the sack of food he had been given back in Iskalajinn to the nomad. Sandwalker rummaged around gratefully in the bag and removed one of the long bean-like vegetables, squeezing a green pod out of its end to chew on. 'You are very generous in your sharing. You should eat more of these yourself, Keyspierre. They contain a juice which helps your body retain water.'

'Alas, compatriot, I am an unashamed carnivore,' said Keyspierre. 'I shall stick to my tinned fare, even though Jackelian canned beef is far removed from fine steak that has been shown the flames of a fire for the requisite two minutes.'

Molly could see that the nomad found the idea of what was inside their supply cans quite disgusting, almost as strange as the idea that something as precious as tin would be used just to preserve rations.

Watching Keyspierre spoon out lumps of jellied meat, the commodore began to sing one of the oldest Jackelian drinking songs, each verse hummed out between swigs from his canteen. 'Should the shifties dare invade us; thus armed with our poles; we'll bang their bare ribs; make their lantern jaws ring. For you beef-eating, beer-eating Jackelians are sorts; who will shed their last blood for their country and king.'

Molly met his eyes and the commodore fell to silence. Keyspierre hadn't risen to the bait, but at this rate, one of them was going to run the other through before they reached the lair of the great sage.

Sandwalker led them across the shifting sands of the dunes for two more days and nights. Then they climbed an escarpment to a sandstone plateau where they were presented with dramatic views of whirling, tornado-like storms scouring the desert floor below. One of the ravines they passed contained a thin scrub of vegetation and a pool of water, but the nomad refused to allow them to go down, saying only that the tarn was a false oasis, containing creatures twisted by the Army of Shadows. Traps, always traps. Climbing through the maze of gorges and gullies was time-consuming, but the alternative – risking the low floor of the desert with its dust devils – was too dangerous to contemplate. Those storms could rip apart even the nomad's tough tent fabric and would scour the flesh off the Jackelians' bones within minutes if they were caught in the open.

Luckily for the expedition, the height of the plateau also allowed Sandwalker to use another of the devices from his pack, a flimsy kettle-sized pyramid of transparent panels that he would religiously assemble and leave outside their tent each night. By morning a thin trickle of water had formed inside a plate in the pyramid's centre, capturing the dew of the sunrise, and he would refill their dwindling canteens as best he could.

On their fourth day crossing the plateau they spied a pair of silver machines walking across the desert floor on a nest of whipping, cantilevered metal tentacles, bodies like teardrops pockmarked by round smoking holes. The tentacles looked like magnified versions of the organic ones Molly had seen on the masters' bodies in Kyorin's memories. Molly couldn't tell exactly how large the machines were, but to be able to see them stumbling through the desert at this distance, they had to be truly massive. For once, Sandwalker didn't require that the expedition members scurry off and conceal themselves in a ravine. These were blind, stupid machines, part of the masters' network of devices to tame the atmosphere and stop Kaliban's weather from turning more vicious than it already appeared.

Every extra day burning under the Kaliban sky only stiffened Molly's resolve. If they couldn't find a way of defeating the Army of Shadows here, then this life would become the fate of the Jackelians' descendants. Living feral like rodents, crawling in-between the Army of Shadows' cities and surviving on whatever crumbs they could scavenge from their soiled world. It didn't matter that Molly was a mere shadow compared to the power she had possessed when she had piloted the Hexmachina. Nor were the petty rivalries of her world's nationalities of consequence – they had no home under this boiling Kaliban sky. Here, Molly and her friends could be only prey or predator.

A day after they had left the plateau behind, Molly began to suffer additional physical side effects from carrying the weight of Kyorin's memories. As well as the headaches, she was struck by bouts of muscle cramps, nausea and drowsiness. She was slowing them down, now, and in a territory they needed to pass through fast. They were traversing an area of sand mists, grains that had been beaten as light as flour by the sun and the storms, and which now blew as a fine silicate across the Aard Ailkalmer Issah. Even the name of the territory being pronounced by Sandwalker was painful to Molly, the alien Kal syllables echoing like a battering ram inside her skull.

By the third day Molly started to suffer waking hallucinations, seeing faces briefly in the shadows and dust hazes, hideous leering goblin-like devils that might have belonged to the dark gods from before the Circlist enlightenment. She would flinch in alarm and swear at them before they snapped back to being mere shadows of rocks.

Sandwalker insisted Molly suck on strips of blue salt and chew the bitter pods from the vegetables in his supplies to help alleviate the symptoms – her heated brain made increasingly susceptible to sunstroke. But Molly could tell from the way the nomad looked at her now that he was seriously worried about her condition. It seemed as if Keyspierre's prediction that her affliction would become a burden to the expedition was proving correct after all. The pain inside Molly's mind swelled and ebbed. Increasingly when the pain was on the rise, she would become confused, her mind experiencing things that had once happened to Kyorin as if they were happening to her now, or seeing things that made no sense at all. Once, she even thought she had come across Duncan hiding behind a basalt column and talking to his precious battered travel case as if he was expecting an answer. She was going mad, slowly. Then not so slowly at all.

Molly caught Keyspierre looking at her as they trudged along the dunes, his eyes deceitful and narrow under the turban that protected his face from the blowing dust.

'Stop looking at me!' Molly shouted.

'Compatriot?'

'I know what you are planning to do.'

Duncan Connor was ahead of Molly, holding a guide rope to stop them becoming separated in the endless floating sand haze. 'Are you all right, lassie?'

'He's planning to kill me!'

Duncan looked back at Keyspierre. 'What are you about, man?'

Molly threw herself towards the uplander. 'Keyspierre's planning to slip a cushion over my face and smother me in the tent tonight so I don't slow us down, or he'll cut my rope and leave me to wander alone out here. Anything, Duncan, anything to ensure we get to reach the great sage. All for the people, they must prevail. The people.'

'Molly,' said the ex-soldier, feeling her forehead. 'You're burning up, lassie.'

'Don't let him kill me! Duncan, please, I saved your life from a blazing sail-rider rig back in Middlesteel, now's your chance to repay me by saving mine.'

'There are a good few in this blasted land that deserve to die, compatriot,' said Keyspierre, coming towards her, 'but I do not count you among their number.'

Molly took a step back and fell over something buried in the sand. 'Liar, you dirty shiftie liar. You'll kill us all to make sure you reach the great sage!'

Sandwalker appeared out of the haze. Unslinging his canteen and helping Molly to her feet, he was about to offer her a sip from his water, but then he spotted what she had tripped over and stopped, his eyes widening in shock. Jutting out was a long fused tube of sand that had been petrified into glass. 'This is fresh.'