with red and yellow salts, while here and there along a crested ridge the black rock oozed molten orange lava. The nodes were complex in this area, which extended in a band from the northern end of the Dry Sea towards the southern, before curving around towards the Hornrace.
‘We’ll have to go lower,’ said Tiaan. ‘I can’t tell what’s going on from up here.’
As Malien was flying along the molten centre of the ridge, the thapter jerked and the whine of the mechanism broke into a series of buzzes.
‘Tiaan? Is there something strange about the field here?’
‘There are lots of fields and the nodes are long and thin, not round. They run along the ridges and the field weakens rapidly to either side.’ Tiaan took a closer look. ‘That’s strange. The field keeps changing from up to down; I suppose that’s why we’re jerking so much. Try going a little to the left of the ridge.’
Malien turned left and the jerking stopped. ‘Can you still map if I follow this heading?’
‘More or less.’
Twice more they had the same problem, when they passed over long faults in the rock that had shifted the mid-sea ridge to left or right. As Malien corrected yet again, Tiaan put a hand on her arm and pointed down.
‘Hey, that looks like a wrecked construct.’
‘What would a construct be doing way out here?’ said Malien as she turned the machine and headed lower. The mechanism began to stutter and she directed it away until it resumed its normal note.
Tiaan lost sight of the wreckage in the jumble of black basalt. ‘This country is too broken to hover across. Malien, what if it’s a thapter that crashed?’
‘It must be – it was broken in half, as if it had fallen a long way. And it’s not one of ours, so it must be from Stassor.’
Malien went lower and turned back towards the place where they’d seen the wreckage. A construct came into view. ‘Is that it?’
A shiver worked its way up the marrow of Tiaan’s backbone. ‘It can’t be. The front is smashed in but it’s all in one piece.’
‘Two crashed thapters?’ said Malien. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I suppose the second came looking for the first and met the same fate – they weren’t experienced enough to cope with these fields. Look, there’s the first. Set down. There may be someone still alive.’
‘The impact has torn it apart,’ said Malien, circling about ten spans up. ‘No one could have survived that.’
‘Sometimes miracles happen.’
Malien settled the thapter down with some difficulty, for the basalt was scored, twisted and wrenched into stacks, blades and sheer-sided ravines. There wasn’t a piece of flat ground big enough to spread a tablecloth.
The jagged rocks proved troublesome to walk on, too. Malien reached the wreckage before Tiaan, who had to go the last twenty spans on hands and knees. Her back began to ache where it had been broken.
Malien looked in through the torn metal, which had a blue tinge. ‘There’s no one inside.’
Tiaan went round the other side and stumbled over a body before she realised what it was. It was the colour of dark tea, the flesh desiccated to strands of muscle covered by a few scraps of flaky skin. The clothes were gone, apart from the faded shreds of seams. ‘Malien, could you come here?’
Malien examined the remains. ‘A natural mummy. It’s so dry here that nothing rots, and the salt would help to cure it. He was a tall man, though you wouldn’t know it, the way the drying flesh has pulled his backbone into a curve. He was definitely Aachim – see the extra-long fingers?’ She took up a scrap of cloth, inspected it and let it flutter away.
‘He must have been dead a long time,’ said Tiaan.
‘Months would be enough to cure a dead man, out here.’
They found another body not far away, a woman whose skull was crushed. ‘Thrown out by the impact,’ said Tiaan.
‘One of the lucky ones. She would have died instantly.’
Others had been less fortunate. They came on a cluster of bodies twisted into positions that indicated painful, lingering deaths. Tiaan couldn’t bear to examine them.
‘Let’s go to the other machine,’ said Malien, the shadows growing under her eyes.
The second construct was only a hundred paces away, but it was easier to fly there than pick their way across the jagged ground. It was also made of blue-black metal and was full of bodies as mummified as the others, though a faint death smell