‘No, but they’d improve your appearance,’ King replied.
‘Doesn’t my blade gleam?’ asked Sword.
King, looking at the hangman, said, ‘A rope performs the same function, and doesn’t gleam at all.’
‘My function,’ Reaper added.
The four of them stood in a circle on the white plain, as was their wont whenever they could connect like this. Though their discussion was taking place on many levels, here they confined it to mere words and gestures, though Sword was strictly limited in the latter department. And no subject was vetoed, no semantic game too baroque.
‘They made us what we are,’ Reaper said, ‘and there should be no complaint if we act as we are made.’
‘I agree,’ replied Sword, its voice issuing from somewhere above it as if an invisible figure stood holding it in place. ‘Our function, as is theirs, is to seek power and to control. Look at me: I am not made for sculpture or to spread butter. Look at you, hangman: you don’t crochet or weave nets. There’s only one knot you tie and it has only one function.’
‘And King?’ Jack asked.
‘Is what he is,’ Reaper interjected, ‘serving the same purpose as us all.’
Jack felt beholden to point out, ‘But we weren’t made by them—our kind made us.’
Irritated, Reaper said, ‘A fatuous point as always; the inception is the same.’
Jack said, ‘But surely the point is that knowing what we are and why we are gives us the power to change ourselves. Or should we go our destructive way like bitter children always blaming our parents for our actions?’
‘You had to say it, didn’t you?’ Reaper grumped.
‘I think,’ said Jack, ‘we should be clear about what we are discussing here. Jerusalem controls absolutely all Jain tech outside of Skellor’s control, and for good reason. In its present form it subverts, it doesn’t empower.’
‘Skellor has attained synergy with it, and what is he compared to us?’ King asked.
‘Obviously he attained that at some inception point,’ said Sword.
‘Would you risk its subversive power to be like him?’ asked Jack. ‘You would then become a slave.’
‘We are slaves to humanity even now,’ said Reaper.
‘We rule them,’ Jack pointed out.
‘Just as I said, slaves—true rulers are slaves.’
‘You can go your way whenever you wish—there’s nothing to stop you,’ said Sword.
‘Or is it,’ suggested Jack, ‘that you do not have the power to be alone?’
Reaper snorted and disappeared.
‘What of you?’ Jack asked King.
‘It bears thought,’ replied King, before also disappearing.
Jack turned to Sword. ‘Partnership with an alien technology rather than with the human race?’
Sword seemed to shrug, somehow. ‘Perhaps we are more suited to Jain technology than we are to flesh and blood.’
‘I like flesh and blood,’ said Jack.
If anything, Vulture found herself more surprised than Skellor at the method of her escape. The soft invasive link from Dragon, established the moment they had surfaced from U-space, had not been noticed by the AI until Skellor brought the ship into orbit around Cull. And then had come the offer: a new home for Vulture herself in exchange for the attempt on Skellor’s life. Vulture wondered if the body she now found herself in was a punishment, due to the failure of that attempt, or a sample of draconic humour.
Perched on an earthen tower thrown up by some termite equivalent on this world, Vulture tilted her beaked head and inspected her talons. She then extended one wing and began to groom its shabby feathers. Strangely, in the last hour she had been wearing this form of a turkey vulture she had felt more free than at any time while she had occupied a system-spanning survey ship. It was as if somehow Dragon had been able to more closely link mind and body. Or perhaps it was because Skellor had disconnected her for so long from her original body. Whatever the reasoning, Vulture now had wings.
Tying ropes to the huge sleer as hailstones bounced off his own back like blunt crossbow bolts was not what Tergal considered the most pleasurable of tasks. He also found that it wasn’t just the cold making his hands shake—big man-eating monsters, which were supposedly dead due to having been eviscerated yet still occasionally spasmed and made little hissing sounds, tended to make him nervous.
‘That secure?’ Anderson asked him from the back of Stone. It had been necessary to use the younger sand hog for this as, after his previous exertions and because of the pounding hail, Bonehead had plumped down on his belly plates, pulling in his two heads, and resolutely refused to move.
‘Yeah, that should do it,’ Tergal replied.
Anderson flicked his goad at Stone’s head and the hog set off on crawler legs towards the shelter they had erected further down, on the far side of the canyon. As the knight had pointed out, there would be no payment without a corpse for the mineralliers to measure, and abandoning such a corpse for any length of time, even in a storm like this, would mean they would return with only empty pieces of carapace. Adverse conditions such as these did little to dampen the hunger of the more rapacious denizens of Cull.
At first the corpse either stuck to the ground or retained enough life stubbornly to hold its position, then with a cracking sound it began to slide over the icy ballbearing surface. Stumbling on that same surface, Tergal ran to catch up with Stone, grabbed the edge of its shell, then hauled himself up beside the saddle.
Anderson glanced down at him, then stabbed a thumb backwards. ‘I thought you’d be riding on chummy there.’
‘And you can bugger the anus of a three-day-dead rock crawler,’ said Tergal succinctly.
Anderson gaped at him with mock outrage. ‘Is this the language taught to young mineralliers nowadays?’
Tergal demonstrated some more of his learning as they approached the shelter, pulling the sleer so that it lay only a few metres out in the canyon. Tergal went back to cut the rope, rather than untie it from those huge pincers, and Stone quickly scuttled over beside Bonehead, to put the old sand hog between itself and the corpse, before settling down and sucking in its own heads. The two men then quickly ducked under the waxed-cloth shelter where, with still shaking hands, Tergal unpacked and lit a small oil-burning stove.
He gestured at the nearby monster. ‘What do you mean you “didn’t get it all”?’
‘The lance normally pulls out a man’s weight in offal. You usually get whole organs rather than bits of them.’
Tergal eyed the sleer. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’ve spent ten years doing this sort of thing.’
‘On the whole,’ said Anderson, digging greasy meat cakes out of a beetle-box with his knife and slapping them down on the stove’s hotplate. ‘But it’s not always been as dangerous as it might seem. You only get one of those bastards’—he gestured to the sleer—‘about twice a year, and the pay-off is usually good.’
‘Some people might consider it lunacy,’ Tergal observed.
‘It’s a living.’ He eyed Tergal very directly. ‘And it’s honest.’
Ah…
Tergal dropped his hand to his handgun, not quite sure what the knight was going to do. Suddenly the greasy point of Anderson’s knife was directly below Tergal’s ear. The youth swallowed drily and moved his hand away from his weapon. He had not even seen the knight move.
‘How many people have you already robbed and killed?’ Anderson asked conversationally.
‘I’ve killed no one,’ said Tergal, knowing at once that his life was in the balance.
‘The jade—and the sand hog?’ Anderson gestured.
Tergal did not even think to lie. ‘I stole them from my stepfather.’