On the second day, the farms were larger, and less arable. Cattle, sheep and ostriches roamed across bigger and bigger meadows. Abandoned quarries disfigured the land. Slvasta was amazed at how much ore, sand and rock had been dug out in the past. The hills to the south grew steeper – precursors to the distant Algory mountains. Active quarries were still and silent, their mod workforces penned up in corrals while their wranglers waited for the sweeps to finish and give the all-clear. Forests began to dominate the rolling landscape, most of them with big square areas eaten out of them where logging operations were felling timber. Farms were further and further apart, and most buildings were made from wood rather than stone.

Trees lined both sides of every public road on Bienvenido, forming leafy avenues the whole world over. It was a law dating back to Captain Iain, who ruled seven hundred years after Landing, so travellers could always see the route ahead. Here, they were just icepalm saplings, the hope of a road to come rather than a definitive path. The convoy began to split up, with carts rolling off at junctions down tracks marked by even smaller saplings. As the sweltering afternoon stretched out interminably, Jamenk’s squad rattled on until they finally left the sentinel trees behind. All that marked the way to Romnaz valley now was a couple of wheel ruts in the ground. Their driver dropped them off at the head of the valley. The last village they’d passed was half a day behind them.

‘I’ll pick you up back here in eight days,’ he told them. So their sweep began.

*

The squad’s equipment and supplies were carried by a regimental horse-mod and a pair of dwarf-mods. Slvasta was never entirely comfortable around the creatures. They were different from most of Bienvenido’s native animals, which bolstered his suspicions. He just found the whole thing weird – the way their embryos could be moulded by skilled adaptors into any form. In their neut form they were simple six-legged beasts half the size of a terrestrial horse, but fatter. Six odd lumps along their back were vestigial limbs which the adaptors could coax out in the various mods if they were needed. He simply didn’t see how that could be natural.

For the mod-horse that carried the bulk of the squad’s kit, adaptors had produced something not dissimilar to a basic neut, but larger and with stronger legs. More subtle internal changes gave them colossal stamina; they weren’t fast, but they could carry a load for days at a time. And the simple thoughts in their brain could be easily controlled with ’pathed instructions.

The mod-dwarfs were loosely modelled on a humanoid form. With four legs and four arms kept in vestigial form, they were bipedal, though clumsy with it. Their heads came up to Slvasta’s elbow. Jamenk had given them the flamethrower cylinder backpacks to carry. If they did find any Fallers, the mod-dwarfs could hand over the weapons quickly. In an emergency they could even fire them – though Slvasta wasn’t entirely convinced about how good their aim was.

Flamethrowers were supposedly a fool-proof method of dealing with Fallers. They could cover themselves with much stronger protective teekay shells than most humans; bullets didn’t always get through. Even so, Slvasta felt reasonably confident that the carbine he carried on a sling would give any Faller a pretty hard time of it. If the weapon worked, that is; they jammed all too often in practice firings.

The mist began to lift, long tendrils winding up lazily into the sky, where they vanished amid the delicate indigo twigwebs of the quasso trees. Bright beams of sunlight filtered down past the blue-green leaves, dappling the lingrass. The sky above became very blue again, with no clouds.

Slvasta took his tunic jacket off, and ’pathed a mod-dwarf. The dumb creature trudged over and took the jacket from him.

‘Did you ask permission to do that?’ Jamenk asked. ‘Regiment uniform will resist an eggsumption.’

Slvasta didn’t let his contempt for the corporal show through his teekay shell; he was too used to the idiot’s insecurities for that. Jamenk had been a corporal for four months; he was twenty-two with all the maturity of a twelve-year-old. The youngest son of the Aguri family, who owned some land in the county, which was why he was in the regiment in the first place; he wasn’t going to inherit anything. And also why he’d got a promotion while better men languished in the ranks.

‘Sorry, corporal,’ Slvasta said in a strictly level voice. ‘It’s getting warm. I was worried the jacket might slow down my reactions when we come across the eggs.’ And he was mighty dubious about the jacket being resistant to eggsumption; it was just ordinary tweed soaked in mythas herb juice.

‘All right,’ Jamenk said. ‘But nothing else, okay?’

‘Yes, corporal.’ Slvasta made sure he didn’t look at Ingmar. They’d both smirk. No telling how Jamenk would react to that. Half the time he wanted to be their friend; the rest of the day was spent trying to lord it over them. Inconsistency: another sign of a truly bad NCO.

After another half-hour the mist had vanished altogether. Jamenk and Ingmar had both taken off their jackets. Plenty of sunlight was filtering down through the trees, heating the still air underneath. Even the bussalores had stopped rushing round as the heat built. Thankfully the lingrass was shorter here, or it would be exhausting work just to walk.

Jamenk unrolled the map Captain Tamlyan had given them, then closed his eyes. Somewhere high above, his mod-bird was gliding on the thermals, keen eyes scouring the bedraggled tree canopy that smothered the rumpled valley – a view which skilled ex-sight could borrow. Slvasta wondered why the regiment didn’t give all of them a mod-bird and train them to see through it; the ungainly things had excellent eyesight and actually did most of the searching during a sweep. But it was a status thing, of course. Officers and NCOs only, distinguishing them from the ordinary troops. That would be one of a very, very long list of things Slvasta was going to change when he was lord general of the regiments.

‘I can see where they’ve been logging,’ Jamenk said, his eyes tight shut. ‘Another couple of klicks.’

The track was easy enough to follow. It wasn’t used much, but there must have been some traffic. Trees had been chopped down where there were particularly dense clusters. A couple of streams they’d crossed had been forded by trunks laid across the bed. According to the Prerov mayor’s office, the Romnaz valley was claimed by the Shilo family, who were foresters by trade.

Jamenk nodded in satisfaction and rolled his map up. ‘Come on.’

The mods began plodding forwards again. Slvasta started to follow the corporal. He knew he should be looking round for any sign of a Fallen egg. Smaller trees broken, strange tears in the canopy of larger forests, long furrows in the ground, dead fish in ponds. But none of that was going to be visible in this wild forest. It was impossible to see twenty metres on either side of the track. He just kept trudging on, remembering to take regular sips of water from his canteen. The air was horribly humid, but he was sweating hard. It was important to keep hydrated. That was one of the few things he remembered his father telling him when they were out in their smallholding’s fields.

‘This has been used recently,’ Ingmar said. He was looking at the track as it passed across a runnel.

Ingmar was a skinny youth whose limbs seemed to belong to someone even taller, with glasses that had the thickest lenses Slvasta had ever known. They made his eyes implausibly large, showing up the milky stains in his irises. In another ten years, Ingmar was going to be using his ex-sight alone – just like his father before him, who’d been eye-blind for the last eleven years.