"Run," ordered Fethan. "I'll try to lead it away."

"The gabbleduck?" asked Cormac as they broke into a trot.

Fethan appeared puzzled as he listened to the rushing sound. "No… definitely not. Hooder, I think. Something really big, anyway." He beckoned to Gant, and then he and the Golem split off to one side.

"Fuck," Thorn gasped out. "Gant's got the APWs."

"Gant'll be back… if they can't lead it away."

"Yeah… great," Thorn managed.

Saving his breath for running, Cormac did not continue this conversation. Unlike the cyborg and Gant he did not have an option. Keeping his hand tight around Shuriken, he watched his footing and just kept going. Glancing up, he saw something boiling into the air and surmised this was from the landers, and that he was getting close. When something heavy crashed past him, he turned to throw Shuriken but desisted when that something said, "Scabber-abber-abber," accusingly and accelerated away, its gait lying somewhere between that of a cheetah and a caterpillar.

"What the hell!" shouted Thorn, when something else went growling and hissing across in front of them, its hide not quite changing fast enough to match its surroundings, so for a time there were strange misplaced animal imprints in the air. Behind them, the rushing sound in the grasses was growing louder and louder — but now much less specific, for it seemed to stretch out on either side of them as well. Suddenly Fethan and Gant were with them again, as they came out onto open ground where the vegetation had been seared and flattened, and wrecked landers formed a wall of ruptured metal carcasses and scattered engine cowlings like giant cored olives. Coming to the nearest of these wrecks, Cormac stumbled to a halt, the others stopping with him.

"APW!" he shouted at Gant, but the Golem did not seem to hear.

"Bloody hell," said Gant.

Cormac glanced at Fethan, who for the first time looked utterly perplexed. Now, turning his attention back the way they had come, Cormac realized there was something very odd about this sound: a kind of slapping vibration like… like feet? Stepping up onto an engine cowling, he saw huge movement cutting towards them through the grasses, and shapes moving fast in the purple spaces between vegetation clumps. One of these shapes now leapt from a tangle of both new and old stalks and, trailing papery fragments and coloured buds, it thumped down into a crouch before them. This first one snarled, drawing lips back from its curving white teeth, as its fellows stormed out behind it. Dracomen — thousands of them.

"Third to the valley of the Hooded One came Brother Egris, and seeing how Stenophalis and Pegrum had failed, he was undaunted."

The Valley of Shadow and Whispers now resembled the aftermath of an explosion in an abattoir, and if seeing that mess did not put off Egris, then he must have been stupid and deserved everything he got.

"Astride the valley, he was silhouetted black against Calypse, and did not shine in his armour of iron, as he demanded of the monster below him, 'Come forth and face me! "

The woman shook her head and drummed her fingertip against the cold page. "Bad move, Brother. You should have left it to that arsehole Nebbish."

Strangely, Egris seemed to look out of the page at her for a second, as if annoyed at her interruption, before turning his back and gazing into the coagulating darkness below him.

"The Hooded One came forth, and he smote it with thunderbolts until its scutes flamed in the air, the very ground smoked, and all that grew nearby was burned to ash."

The woman pulled her finger away from the page, because the memory fabric had suddenly warmed as Egris began using some kind of unlikely weapon it seemed idiotic to use when clad from head to foot in metal The thing he held — something like a chrome saxophone with an image-enhancer sight — hurled lightning into the shadowed cowl, causing glassy things in there to glow like filaments.

"But thunder availed him nought, and out of dying fire the monster rose to pull him down into the Valley of Shadows and Whispers, and his armour parted like butter under the knife of the Hooded One."

The woman paused contemplatively before adding, "And Egris spread like butter too."

Molat had no wish to have this cripple impeding him, while there was quite obviously something unpleasant moving about back there, but Aberil had kindly picked up Molat's rail-gun to replace the one he had lost to the Outlinker, before instructing Molat to help the injured man. Speelan was not exactly generous in his thanks for this assistance: every time Molat stumbled, and every time he himself stumbled, it was all put down to Molat, and Speelan regularly swore at him.

"Be silent!" Aberil slurred when this swearing became too voluble.

Speelan fell silent and bowed his head — like Molat he did not much like now looking at the Deacon's face. Whoever it was that had dropped in on them so unexpectedly, he had certainly made a mess of it.

Aberil went on, his whispering distorted by his ruined mouth, "There's something back there, and if your cursing attracts it, then I will leave you to it."

"I'm sorry," said Speelan. "I'm sorry… it hurts."

Molat realized the man was obviously terrified that Aberil would do what he threatened, so meant every word of his apology. A gusting hiss he heard from behind, after the earlier movement in the grasses had long ceased, immediately raised other concerns in him.

"That's a siluroyne," Molat stated.

"Yes, you would know, wouldn't you?" said Aberil, looking him up and down contemptuously. "Come on, keep moving, there might be some craft still undamaged back there."

They came out into one of the ubiquitous channels, where the ground was wetter and the plant life distinctly different. Molat wondered if it was because the soil here was wetter that no flute grass grew on it, or if the ground was wetter because no flute grass grew on it. Such was the kind of chicken-and-egg conundrum that had been the speciality of those delivering religious instruction — your answer could always be wrong, and wrong answers were always punishable.

"Damn fuck you!" said Speelan, losing his footing and painfully crunching his full weight on the leg in which the pond worker girl had put a hole.

Molat restrained the surge of rage he felt at the injustice of it all. He could not afford to get angry with either of these two, as they could have him stretched on a frame with just a word… if they ever got back to safety.

"Keep your mouth closed," Aberil hissed.

Molat felt his own mouth doing exactly the opposite as he continued to gaze up into the sky. Calypse seemed now the breadth of an imaginary hand above the horizon, and the sun was gnawing at the edge of reality beside it. But these were common sights to Molat, and not what drew his attention.

"What's that?" he asked faintly, unable to find any other words.

Speelan glared at him, before turning to follow his gaze. With watery eyes in his ruined face, Aberil studied the Proctor as if suspecting some trick to distract him, before looking up as well. Molat's fascinated stare could not be broken. In the sky he was witnessing something fantastical. It was titanic, this golden ship with whole cities of instrumentation blooming on its surface, and it was knotted in something grey and incongruous, like some vast opaque topaz wrapped in the mummified corpse of some cephalopod.

"It's him," muttered Aberil. "He burnt Faith, and now he's here."

Just then, something that felt no awe of strange objects in the sky, but rather felt some gnawing hunger in its stomach at the sight of the three individuals before it, let out a gasping hiss to get their attention.