He thought now of the hummingbird’s tongue. Whenever he was forced to leave Morwenna, he always imagined a thread of stretching molten glass, tinged with gold and spun out to the exquisite thinness of the hummingbird’s tongue, connecting himself to her. As the distance increased, so did the thinness and inherent fragility of the tongue. But as long as he was able to hold that image in mind, and consider himself still linked to her, his isolation did not seem total. He could still feel her through the glass, the tremors of her breathing racing along the thread.
But the thread seemed thinner and frailer now than he had ever imagined it, and he didn’t think he could feel her breathing at all.
He checked the time: another half-hour had passed. Optimistically, he could not have much more than thirty or forty minutes’ of air left. Was it his imagination or had the air already begun to taste stale and thin?
Rashmika saw the caravan before the others did. It was half a kilometre ahead, merging on to the same track they were following, but still half-hidden by a low series of icy bluffs. It appeared to move very slowly compared to Crozet’s vehicle, but as they got closer she realised that this was not true: the vehicles of the caravan were much larger, and it was only this size that made their progress seem at all ponderous.
The caravan was a string of perhaps four dozen machines stretching along nearly a quarter of a kilometre of the trail. They moved in two closely spaced columns, almost nose-to-tail, with no more than a metre or two between the back of each vehicle and the front of the one behind it. In Rashmika’s estimation, no two of them were exactly alike, although in a few cases it was possible to see that the vehicles must have started off identically, before being added to, chopped about or generally abused by their owners. Their upper structures were a haphazard confusion of jutting additions buttressed with scaffolding. Symbols of ecclesiastical affiliation had been sprayed on wherever possible, often in complicated chains denoting the shifting allegiances between the major churches. On the rooftops of many of the caravan machines were enormous tilted surfaces, all canted at the same precise angle by gleaming pistons. Vapour puffed from hundreds of exhaust apertures.
The majority of the caravan vehicles moved on wheels as tall as houses, six or eight under each machine. A few others moved on plodding caterpillar tracks, or multiple sets of jointed walking limbs. A couple of the vehicles used the same kind of rhythmic skiing motion as Crozet’s icejammer. One machine moved like a slug, inching itself along via propulsive waves of its segmented mechanical body. She had no idea at all how a couple of them were propelled. But regardless of their mismatched designs, all the machines were able to keep exact pace with each other. The entire ensemble moved with such coordinated precision that there were walkways and tunnels thrown across the gaps between them. They creaked and flexed as the distances varied by fractions of a metre, but were never broken or crushed.
Crozet steered his icejammer alongside the caravan, using what remained of the trail, and inched forwards. The rumbling wheels towered above the little vehicle. Rashmika watched Crozet’s hands on the controls with a degree of unease. All it would take would be a slip of the wrist, a moment’s inattention, and they would be crushed under those wheels. But Crozet looked calm enough, as if he had done this kind of thing hundreds of times before.
“What are you looking for?” Rashmika asked.
“The king vehicle,” Crozet said quietly. “The reception point—the place where the caravan does business. It’s normally somewhere near the front. This is a pretty big lash-up, though. Haven’t seen one like this for a few years.”
“I’m impressed,” Rashmika said, looking up at the moving edifice of machinery towering above the little jammer.
“Well, don’t be too impressed,” Crozet said. “A cathedral—a proper cathedral—is a bit bigger than this. They move slower, but they don’t stop either. They can’t, not easily. Like stopping a glacier. Near one of those mothers, even I get a bit twitchy. Wouldn’t be half so bad if they didn’t move…”
“There’s the king,” Linxe said, pointing through the gap in the first column. “Other side, dear. You’ll have to loop around.”
“Fuck. This is the bit I really don’t like.”
“Play it safe and come up from the rear.”
“Nah.” Crozet flashed an arc of dreadful teeth. “Got to show some bloody balls, haven’t I?”
Rashmika felt her seat kick into the back of her spine as Crozet applied full power. The column slid past as they overtook the vehicles one by one. They were moving faster, but not by very much. Rashmika had expected the caravan to move silently, the way most things did on Hela. She couldn’t exactly hear it, but she felt it—a ramble below audible sound, a chorus of sonic components reaching her though the ice, through the ski blades, through the complicated suspension systems of the icejammer. There was the steady rumble of the wheels, like a million booted feet being stamped in impatience. There was the thud, thud, thud, as each plate of the caterpillar tracks slammed into ice. There was the scrabble of picklike mechanical feet struggling for traction against frosty ground. There was the low, groaning scrape of the segmented machine, and a dozen other noises she couldn’t isolate. Behind it all, like a series of organ notes, Rashmika heard the labour of countless engines.
Crozet’s icejammer had gained some distance from the leading pair of machines, which had dropped back behind them by perhaps twice their own length. Batteries of floodlights shone ahead of the caravan, bathing Crozet’s vehicle in harsh blue radiance. Rashmika saw tiny figures moving behind windows, and even on the top of the machines themselves, leaning against railings. They wore pressure suits marked with religious iconography.
The caravans were a fact of life on Hela, but Rashmika admitted to only scant knowledge of how they operated. She knew the basics, though. The caravans were the mobile agents of the great churches, the bodies that ran the cathedrals. Of course, the cathedrals moved—slowly, as Crozet had said—but they were almost always confined to the equatorial belt of the Permanent Way. They sometimes deviated from the Way, but never this far north or south.
The all-terrain caravans, however, could travel more freely. They had the speed to make journeys far from the Way and yet still catch up with their mother cathedrals on the same revolution. They split up and re-formed as they moved, sending out smaller expeditions and merging with others for parts of their journeys. Often, a single caravan might represent three or four different churches, churches that might have fundamentally different views on the matter of the Quaiche miracle and its interpretation. But all the churches shared common needs for labourers and component parts. They all needed recruits.
Crozet steered the icejammer into the central part of the path, immediately ahead of the convoy. They had encountered a slight upgrade now, and the slope was causing the icejammer to lose its advantage of speed compared to the caravan, which merely rolled on, oblivious to the change in level.
“Be careful now,” Linxe said.
Crozet flicked his control sticks and the rear of the icejammer swung to the other side of the procession. The nose followed, and with a thud the skis settled into older grooves in the ice. The gradient had sharpened even more, but that was all right now—Crozet no longer needed to keep ahead of the caravan. Slowly, therefore, but with the unstoppable momentum of land sliding past a ship, the lead machines caught up with them.
“That’s the king, all right,” Crozet said. “Looks like they’re ready for us, too.”