“Twenty it is,” said Varley hastily, and started counting the coins out into her hand before she could up the price.
The black sand ship found a berth in one of the garages on the flanks of Cutler’s Gulp. Its robed and hooded pilot furled its sails and then jumped down to make the ship fast. He seemed to be only a servant, or a crewman, for when his work was done, he stood waiting patiently until a woman came down from the ship to join him. Then, together, they climbed the stairs and started along the iron walkways that bridged the townlet’s furnace pits, heading for the huddle of cantinas and coffee shops near the stern. Beggars stretched out bowls to them, then saw their faces and thought better of it. Rough desert types with half-formed plans of robbery and violence changed their minds and backed into the shadows under ducts. Even the dogs ran away.
The woman was tall, and very thin, and she carried a long gun on her shoulder. She was dressed all in black: black boots, black breeches, black waistcoat, and a long black duster coat that flew out behind her like black wings when the wind caught it. In a place where everyone went masked or veiled, you might have expected her to wear a black veil too, but she chose to go bareheaded. Her gray hair had been tied back, as if she wanted everyone to see that she was hideous. A terrible scar ran down her face from forehead to jaw, making it look like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump, and her single eye stared out of the wreckage as gray and chill as a winter sea.
Her name was Hester Shaw, and she killed people.
She had appeared in the desert six months earlier. Her companion, a Stalker named Mr. Grike, had carried her aboard El Houl, one of the towns that was eating the wreck of Cloud 9. She had been ill, and Grike had demanded that the townspeople take care of her. They did not want to argue with a Stalker, so they called a doctor, who examined the woman and declared that there was nothing wrong with her beyond a few cuts and scrapes and a sort of settled melancholy that he had seen before in the survivors of calamities.
“Has she lost someone who was dear to her, Mr. Grike?” he asked.
“SHE HAS LOST EVERYTHING,” the Stalker replied.
So the woman lived for a week or two in one of the sackcloth-curtained cubbyholes that passed for houses on the underdecks, and the Stalker cared for her, and fed her on bread and milk, which he mashed up for her with his metal hands, and the people watched and whispered and tried to imagine what relationship there could be between this dazed, ugly woman and the Resurrected man.
Then, one day, the township’s engine master came to visit Grike and said, “Stalker, I want you to kill me someone. The sheikh who rules this town is old and fat. He takes too much of the salvage for himself. Kill him for me, and I’ll see you live in comfort on the topmost tiers, with fine food and a featherbed for your um, ah …”
He was still hunting for a word that might describe Hester when Grike said, “I WILL NOT KILL.”
“But you’re a Stalker! Of course you kill!”
“I CANNOT. MY MIND HAS BEEN … TAMPERED WITH.”
The engine master scowled and wondered about throwing the useless Stalker off his town, but he didn’t see how it could be done. He shook his head, and was about to leave when the scarred woman said quietly, “I’ll kill him for you.”
“You?”
“I’m Hester Shaw. My father was Thaddeus Valentine, the famous secret agent and assassin,” she said. “You want your sheikh dead? Give me a weapon and tell me where to find him.”
“But you’re only a woman!” objected the engine master.
So Hester Shaw found herself a fork and a crowbar and climbed the stairs to El Houl’s upper tier. She kicked open the doors of the sheikh’s house. She killed the sheikh. She killed his guards. She killed his dogs. She moved through the smoky rooms like a plague and left nothing alive behind her. She was more like a Stalker than her Stalker, who would only watch and wait for her.
With the money the engine master gave her, she bought a sand ship and a few guns, and she and her Stalker left El Houl forever, much to the relief of its inhabitants. Since then she had become one of the legends of the deep sands: the woman bounty hunter and her companion, the Stalker who would not kill. Even Theo Ngoni had heard a garbled version of the story, as he toiled away in the engine pits of Cutler’s Gulp, but the man who’d told him had spoken partly in Arabic, and had referred to the Stalker as a djinn and to Hester Shaw as the Black Angel. So it came as a complete surprise to him when he glanced up that afternoon to see them striding along the walkway that led above his station, and recognized them both.
For a moment Theo could not remember where he had seen either of them before. Cloud 9 seemed such a long time ago. Even the wreck of the Nzimu seemed long ago. He dimly remembered how he had dragged Lady Naga out through a rent in her cabin wall as the airship filled with fire, and how they had clung to a hawser on the steering vanes while the wreckage sank toward the desert, but it all seemed like something that had happened to somebody else; or something he had only read about.
He had been working hard ever since, on eighteen-hour shifts, whipped and beaten and abused, given little water and less food. He had begun to have bad dreams even when he was wide awake, and at first he thought it was just another dream when he saw Wren’s mother walking above him in the dazzling sunlight. But he shook his head, and pinched the sweat from his eyes, and she was still there, and the terrible Stalker beside her.
“Mrs. Natsworthy!” he shouted, and let go of the handles of the fuel hopper that he had been pushing toward the furnaces. Grandma’s overseers were on him almost at once, smashing him to the deck with their clubs of woven rope. But Wren’s mother had heard him, he was sure, for he saw her horrible face turn and stare at him in the instant before he fell.
“leave him,” grated the voice of the Stalker, louder than the clatter of the townlet’s engines, and no more human.
The overseers backed off. It had fallen very quiet in the engine pit. Theo could hear the men’s quick breathing. He tried to stand, but he was too weak; he fell on his knees on the hot, sandy deck. “Mrs. Natsworthy,” he said again, meeting the eye of the woman on the walkway. He did not really think that she could help him, and he knew that as soon as she turned away, the overseers would beat him to death. He just wanted her to know that he was here. Maybe she would be able to tell Wren one day that this was what had become of him. He said, “We met. Remember? On Cloud 9?”
“I KNOW YOU,” said the Stalker Grike.
“I don’t,” said Hester Shaw. Hearing her old name shouted out like that had unsettled her. She stared at the boy in the pit below her, a gaunt black boy like a bundle of burned sticks. His teeth were bared in something that she supposed was meant to be a smile, and blood was running down his face where the townsmen had struck him. “Who is he?” she asked Grike.
“HE IS THE ONCE-BORN CALLED THEO, WHO WAS WITH YOUR CHILD ON CLOUD 9.”
“Is he?” Hester had vague recollections of Wren having a boy in tow that last time they’d met. Perhaps they’d even been introduced. Hester wished he had not called out to her. She was trying to forget her past. She had come to Cutler’s Gulp only for fresh water and supplies. She didn’t want to get involved.
But as she started to turn away, Grike caught her arm. “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”
“Why not?”
“HE WILL DIE.”
“Everybody dies,” said Hester. “YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”
“Damn you, Grike. What did that Green Storm witch do to you, to make you so soft?”
“YOU CANNOT LEAVE HIM HERE.”