Aphran’s illusory form was growing young again — the flames dying away in the air around her.

‘From what I’ve seen, I don’t doubt he has the ability to rebuild Mr Crane. But because it pleases him?’

‘It pleases him. Please him. Love him.’

‘Do you know where he is heading from Viridian?’

Thorn now observed Aphran grow old again, then in a moment young.

‘Completion… the symmetry… aesthetically pleasing.’

‘Answer the question: where is he going? Where is the Dragon sphere he is hunting?’

‘I love you I love you I love you…’ Aphran was oscillating between extreme age and pubescence, and a halo of flame remained surrounding her.

Cormac turned to Thorn and Gant. ‘Is there anything either of you would like to ask? Maybe you might get some sense out of her.’

Gant spoke up: ‘What did he do to you?’

Aphran was now floating a metre from the floor. Her gaze swung down towards him.

‘Skellor,’ she hissed. Something then snapped inside her and she tilted her head back, opening her red mouth wide. A cycling wail issued from her, and she began to slide back away from them. Abruptly this movement accelerated, and she hurtled along above the deck and disappeared through the invisible wall.

‘Maybe some other question would have been better,’ suggested Thorn.

‘She said she’d paid,’ said Gant, looking directly at Cormac.

Coldly analytical, Cormac said, ‘Yes, I see. What would it be possible to do to a person if you could control the function of that person’s body at a nanoscopic level? Nerves, skin, bone and flesh could be rebuilt even as they were being destroyed.’

Thorn added, ‘She said he burnt her. I wonder for how long.’ He winced, pain not being something he could distance himself from right then.

Cormac turned and stared at the wall—at grey void. ‘Jack, should we erase her?’

‘That is your decision, but I would advise against it,’ the disembodied voice of the AI replied. ‘She has suffered but, with time and effort, can be restored. She may possess much knowledge about Skellor, and much insight.’

‘Without Mika,’ said the agent, ‘that might be something we’ll need desperately.’

‘Well, if you fully understand the danger, then I cannot dissuade you,’ said Anderson, knowing that the sister of a killer coming after him had only increased Tergal’s fascination. It was harmless enough: the danger Unger Salbec represented held no threat for the boy.

Golgoth was to the right of them now and ahead numerous trails tangled into the Sand Towers. This was not the usual route taken away from the city—which lay on the other side—but Anderson hoped thus to avoid encountering Salbec’s sister. He had intended to depart from the lower city directly underneath the platform, but Laforge had advised him against that because apparently the area of the Towers lying below the Overcity was swarming with nasty creatures—some of them possibly human. Here, but for the occasional sulerbane plants standing, with their woody frills and brackets, like petrified dwarfs in ragged clothing, the ground was barren. The coloured sand eroded from the layers had been trampled by the passage of many feet into a mixture of nondescript grey.

Raising his monocular, Anderson turned aside and studied the Overcity of Golgoth. Its two-kilometre-wide platform, as well as resting on the buttes themselves, was supported by steel pillars and arching trusses. In the shade thus engendered, there was movement amid scattered bulbous dwellings made of bonded sand. The Overcity, with its rectilinear towers, domes and spires, resembled an Earth city that Anderson had once seen in an ancient picture. He panned his monocular around to face the buttes directly ahead. He could distinguish falls certainly caused by the recent quakes and, above them, could just make out the occasional sinister shape of a sleer skittering across the high faces of sandstone, or in and out of the caves bored into it. The creatures were small, but it would be best to keep safely to the centre of the paths.

‘Have you ever had to kill a third-stage sleer?’ he suddenly asked.

‘They don’t have a third stage,’ Tergal replied.

‘Ah, they are rare where you come from, but not so rare where we are going.’ Anderson pointed. ‘Those are all first-stage—little more than nymphs. They’re cave hunters mostly, and for that purpose possess a feeding head with grinding mandibles with extensible antlers, ten legs attached in pairs on independently rotating body segments, and though quite capable of killing a man, they never grow larger than a metre in length. Also, like their adult kin they possess the ability to split themselves in two, but there’s no necessity for that as they are not breeders.’

‘I know what they are,’ said Tergal, giving Anderson a puzzled glance.

Anderson continued regardless. ‘After about two years, they encyst in the sand and transform to the second stage. The front segment folds up and melds into the feeding head, the two legs attached turning into carapace saws for dealing with larger prey outside the sand caves—prey they can now see because they simultaneously gain a nice triad of compound eyes. They also grow an ovipositor drill which they can use to inject paralytic. And at this stage they grow to about two metres in length.’

Tergal grunted, then shifted about in his saddle. He asked, ‘What’s an ovipositor?’

‘It is the egg-laying tube protruding from the rear of an adult sleer.’

Tergal turned to him. ‘There, you see: “adult sleer”, so why do you talk of a third stage?’

‘Because there is one.’ Anderson considered all he had learned during this journeying, and all he knew about sleers and their life cycles. One day he would write a book about it all, to add to the collection kept in the Rondure library—but not yet, not while there was still so much to see. He continued enthusiastically, ‘The second-stage creature, as you are aware, splits itself for mating: each half moving on four legs. The rear section can then go off to mate with the rear sections of other sleers, while the feeding or hunting end continues about its business—the two sections still communicating by low-frequency bio-radio. Once rejoined after mating, the whole creature lays eggs in a cave or burrow in which it will dump paralysed prey. Nymphs—first-stage sleers—then hatch out and feed on this preserved food. After many years, and for reasons I’ve not yet fathomed, a second-stager again encysts, and transforms into the third stage. These lay eggs in a similar manner, but out of them hatch second-stage sleers.’

‘What are they like then, these third-stage creatures?’

‘Bigger, inevitably. The first one I killed was three metres long. Its carapace was dark grey, rather than bearing the usual sand-coloured camouflage, and another pair of legs had ridden up beside its head to form pincer arms that act just like that punch axe you carry. And of course it now ran on six legs. It did that.’ Anderson pointed to the rim of his sand hog’s carapace where two large puncture holes had been filled up with a web of the epoxy strips normally used to shoe a sand hog’s feet. Tergal observed this damage silently, then his gaze slid up to the long case fixed further up the carapace.

‘How did you kill it?’

‘Not with that—I got that later.’ Anderson waved a hand at the case. ‘I hadn’t properly learned my trade then, so used my fusile. Luckily the creature was more interested in my mount than in me, and it clung on even as I kept reloading to shoot bullet after bullet down its gullet. Meanwhile Bonehead slid his feeding head underneath it, and chewed on its guts. While that was happening its breeding section broke away and ran off on two legs—I never knew what became of that.’

Anderson had noted one of Bonehead’s two eye-palps—which had extruded from its sensory head earlier as they first came in sight of the sleers—turning towards him during this conversation. It seemed that, after contact with a few human generations, sand hogs would begin to understand human speech. The irony was that after coming to understand their riders fully, the beasts often ended up abandoning them and heading off into the wilderness.