Their rhythms were not the day’s: they slept for minutes while the sun was up, as well as at dusk and night. If the whispersmith slept it was in the saddle. On the sierra they passed smudged pebblebeasts, something between giraffes and gorillas, knuckle-walking and eating low leaves.

“You have to speed,” the whispersmith told Cutter. “The handlinger’s coming.”

By moonlight they followed Drogon and their quarry toward a hill-line topped by plateau. They saw dark, a corridor through the butte. They would reach it in daylight, and Cutter could imagine the relief it would be, the punishing hot sky just a band seething above lichened rock walls and stone stiles.

Elsie said: “Something’s coming.” She looked gaunt. She looked horrified. “Something’s coming from the south.” There was a disturbance behind many waves of landscape, beyond sight. Cutter knew that Elsie was a weak witch, but she felt something.

The east was weakly shining, and in the first light Cutter saw the dust of Drogon’s horse below the mesa. The whispersmith was almost at the entrance to the chine.

“Follow the way through,” Drogon said to Cutter. “Quick. The handlinger’s closing, but you can make it here if you keep on. The dogs’re howling. They can smell our man, he’s close, through here. Make it here, maybe we can… maybe we can face the handlinger, an ambush.” A weak plan.

Drogon must have turned then and hauled behind the pack as they bayed and ran into the split rock path. Cutter thought of the overhangs they would pass and saw with clarity what he had seen in the room of his runaway friend, that had sent him here. Cutter saw the tripwire and the men dead and stoved in, lying under anthropoid outlines in random materials.

“Godsdammit. Get back! Get back! ”

He shouted as loud as he ever had. Pomeroy and Elsie staggered; they had been sleeping as they walked. Cutter made his hands a trumpet and roared again.

“Stop! Stop!” He fired his repeater into the air.

Drogon was in his ear. “What you doing? The handlinger’ll hear you…” But Cutter was speaking, and lurching on exhausted legs. “Stop stop stop!” he shouted. “Don’t go in, don’t go in. It’s a trap.”

Dust came toward him and reconfigured as if moulded by the growing heat, and became a man on a horse. Drogon was riding back. Cutter shouted.

“You can’t go in,” he said. “It’s a trap. It’s a golem trap.”

Drogon rode around them as if they were steers, and when they buckled he would whisper to them, to their underbrains, and they could only obey. “Run,” he whispered, and they were helpless not to.

By the raised plain were slippy scree paths, so they held onto boscage while they climbed toward the dark. Drogon took his horse at speed along a route that looked impossible. The dogs, tied by the crack’s entrance, pulled, imbecilic with their porcine eyes and bared teeth. They were in agony to enter, to reach what they could smell.

“He knows,” Cutter said. He leaned against his knees to cough up the stuff of the path. “He knows they’re coming for him.”

“Handlinger,” said Drogon. A fleck at the edge of the plain. “We have to go.”

Cutter said: “He knows they’re coming and he’s not tried to hide his scent. He thinks it’s the militia after him, and he’s funnelled them here. It’s a trap. We can’t go in there. We have to go over. He’ll be on the other side, waiting.”

They did not debate long, with the handlinger curdling the air as it approached. The dogs bayed and Drogon shot them dead inside the tunnel. The others followed him up a steep root-ladder to the rocktop plateau. Drogon whispered to them “Climb,” even suspended as he was himself, and they found their footing and their grip.

Drogon led them by the edge of the crack. They saw his horse and the carnage of dog-flesh below them. He whispered to the horse, and it snorted and turned as if to go through the conduit.

“What you doing?” said Cutter. “If you don’t keep it still I’ll shoot it, I swear. We can’t risk it triggering anything.” There was an instant when it seemed the whispersmith might fight, but he turned and ran again, and the horse was still.

Cutter looked back and cried out. What followed them, dangling, had the shape of a man. It carried a burden. It was scant miles off, arrowing with grim unnatural motion toward the wall and the shaft.

On the other side they looked down across sierras, a slowly rising landscape. In the full sun of dawn Cutter saw runt trees.

“We have to wait until that bastard thing’s gone,” said Pomeroy.

“We can’t,” Drogon said to Cutter and Pomeroy in turn. “It’s not tracking your friend, it’s tracking us. By our mind-spoor. We have to get beyond. Turn and fight it.”

“Fight it?” Pomeroy said. “It’s a handlinger. ”

“It’ll be all right,” Cutter said. He felt a great and sudden conviction. “It’ll be taken care of.”

It was he, not Drogon, who found a way down. One by one they descended, the whispersmith last. “ Damn handlinger’s so close,” he said to Cutter. “He’s by the entrance, he’s seen the dogs, he’s going in.”

Cutter looked around them. Come see, he thought. Come look at your trap. He ran toward the tunnel exit. “What you doing?” his comrades shouted. “Cutter get back!”

“Stop,” the whispersmith said, and Cutter had to stop. He screamed in anger.

“Let me go. I have to check something,” he said. His feet were rooted. “Godsdammit, let me fucking go. ”

The whispersmith set him free. He stumbled up to the breach. With terror and care he came closer to the opening strewn with stone debris, the trash of boulders. He leaned in. He said, “Come help me. Help me find it.”

There was a sound. He could hear air moving. An exhalation from the stone.

“It’s coming,” the whispersmith said. Drogon did not move, nor did Pomeroy or Elsie; they only watched Cutter as if they had forsaken any idea of escape.

“Come help me,” Cutter said, and peered into the dim. The crooning of what approached buckled him.

He saw a glistening of light. A wire taut across the threshold, extending into piled-up rocks at either side, tethered to batteries and engines Cutter knew were hidden within.

“I found it,” he shouted.

Cutter looked up and heard the dismal howling. Leaves and shreds of moss were pushed through the cleft. The noise of the handlinger was very bad. In the fissure Cutter saw swirls of leafmould gust. He could hear staccato, a snaredrum beating and a horse’s exhalations. He slid back to his companions. “Be ready to run,” he said. “Be ready to fucking run.”

It came. Loud. A horse galloped for them. Its legs moved with such mutant rapidity that they sounded like a company. Drogon’s mount. It tore itself faster than any horse had ever run, over jags and unstable ground that turned its ankles and splintered its hoofs but it ran on through these injuries, and sweat and blood from its abrasions streaked its body. Something clamped to it. A mottlesome thing grasping its neck, a stub-tail growing maggotlike and nosing into horse-flesh.

Behind it a man emerged. A man. He stood in the air, his arms folded; he guttered toward them at dreadful speed. He saw them. He angled down, his body motionless. They began to fire, and the man came at them so the tips of his toes bumped on the rock.

Cutter stood and fired and fell backward and slid on shale. They were all firing. The whispersmith had his feet apart and sent off rounds like an expert, a gun in each hand, Pomeroy and Elsie shot wildly, and their lead hit; they saw blood burst from the horse and the impassive man, but nothing slowed them.

The dangling man opened his mouth and spat fire. The searing breath licked the wire and made it glow, so there was an instant, a fragment of a second when the handlingers saw the metal, and their momentum took them toward it and man’s mouth and horse’s opened in alarm but they could not stop. They breached it, and came into the sun.