his face a deep red, then he plunged through the crowd and shoved open the door of the cabin with a cry.
The door slammed shut behind him, though whether by his hand or some other force Lan never knew. He heard his father’s shout of rage, and a moment later something heavy smashed into the inside of the door, splintering the thick wood. There was a beat of silence. Then a new scream from his mother, long, sustained, ragged at the edges. Blood began to seep through the cracks in the door, and crawled slowly down to drip onto the deck.
Lan stood where he was, immobile, as the Weaver went back to work on his mother. He was watching the slow, dreadful path of the blood. Disbelief and shock had settled in, hazing his mind. At some point, he turned and walked away. None of the bargemen noticed him go, nor did they notice him picking up his father’s rifle on the way. He did not really know where he was heading, motivated only by some vague impulse that refused to cohere into a form he could understand. He was barely aware of moving at all until he found himself standing in front of the door to the cargo hold, hidden in the shade at the bottom of a set of wooden stairs, and he could go no further.
He raised his rifle and fired into the lock, blasting it to shards.
There was something in here, something that he was looking for, but whenever he tried to picture it he only saw that insidious blood, and his mother’s face. 71
His father was dead. His mother was being . . . violated.
He was here for something, but what? It was too terrible to think about, so he didn’t think.
The cargo hold was hot and dark and spacious. He knew from memory the dimensions of the place, how high the ribbed wooden ceiling went, how far back the bow wall lay. Crates and barrels were dim shadows nearby, lashed together with rope. Thin lines of sunlight where the tar had worn away on the deck above provided meagre illumination, but not enough to see by until his eyes had adjusted to the gloom from the blinding summer’s day outside. Absently, he re-primed the bolt on his father’s rifle, taking a step into the hold, searching. There were running footsteps overhead.
Something stirred.
Lan’s eyes flickered to the source of the sound. He squinted into the gloom.
It moved then, a slow flexing that allowed him to pick out its shape. The blood drained from his face.
He staggered backward, holding his rifle defensively across his chest. There were things down here. As he watched, more of them began to creep from the shadows. They were making a soft trilling sound, like a flock of pigeons, but their predatory lope made them seem anything but benign, and they approached with a casually lethal gait.
Shouts behind him. Bargemen running down the steps to the hold, attracted by the sound of the rifle.
Fuira shrieked distantly, a forlorn wail of loss and agony and fear, and Lan suddenly recalled what he was here for.
Ignition powder. The cargo.
A tidy stack of barrels lay against the stern wall, by the door where the other bargemen had rushed into the hold. They scrambled to a halt, partially because they had remembered the Weaver’s edict, mostly because they thought Lan’s gun was levelled at them. The darkness made it hard to see. He was aiming at the barrels. Enough there to blast the Pelaska to flinders and leave barely a trace of any of them.
It was the only way to end his mother’s suffering. The only way.
Behind him, there was the sound of dozens of creatures breaking into a run, and the trilling reached shrieking pitch in his ears.
He whispered a short prayer to Omecha, squeezed the trigger, and the world turned to flame.
SEVEN
The Xarana Fault lay far to the south of the Saramyr capital of Axekami, across a calm expanse of plains and gentle hills. In stark contrast to its approach, the Fault itself was a jagged, rucked chaos of valleys, plateaux, outcrops, canyons and steep-sided rock masses like miniature mountains. Sheer walls abutted sunken rivers; hidden glades nestled in cradles of sharp stones; the very ground was a shattered jigsaw which rose and fell to no apparent geological law. The Fault was a massive scar in the land, over two hundred and fifty miles from end to end and forty at its thickest