By mid-afternoon they were seeing the first plantations and pastures encroaching through the flood meadows. Big white-painted manor houses were glimpsed amid the dense groves. Then the villages began to appear on the banks; like Portlynn, the houses were all built from wood and stood on stilts. Landing jetties extended out into the river, with boats docked and stevedores busy.

‘It all looks so lovely,’ Kysandra said wistfully as the pretty little communities slid past. Nearly all the original jungle had been cleared, surrendering the land to cultivation. Rigid lines of citrus trees stood proud in their groves. Small armies of mod-dwarfs moved through them, picking the colourful globes. Big carts stacked high with wicker crates full of fruit wound along the dirt tracks lined with tall fandapalms to the jetties. Paddy fields glinted rose gold in the afternoon sun, with even smaller mod-dwarfs wading through them, planting rice. Cattle and ostriches grazed long lush meadows. Humans walked about or rode horses, all wearing wide-brimmed hats against the powerful sun. It looked such a settled, easy life.

‘Would you like to live here, señorita?’ Jymoar asked.

Kysandra gave a small furtive smile and glanced round. Jymoar was standing beside the small wheelhouse, looking at her. He caught her eye and grinned happily. She blushed and turned back to stare at the riverbank. Jymoar was maybe nineteen, serving his apprenticeship with his uncle Migray. Cute enough, but . . . No thanks.

‘I already have a home, thank you.’ Even as she said it, she regretted it. The lad gave her an apologetic nod and turned to go.

‘But I could be persuaded to move.’ She gave Nigel a sly glance. ‘My guardian won’t be able to order me around forever.’

‘Guardian?’ Jymoar said in confusion.

Nigel tipped his hat at Jymoar. ‘That would be me. But I’m going to check on the horses, or something; you kids have fun.’ With a private ’path, he added, ‘Play nice, now,’ to Kysandra.

‘So have you travelled this far east before?’ she asked.

Jymoar hurried forward to be with her. ‘Never so far, no. But I have only been on the Gothora for seven months. One day I will have my own boat.’

She gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Really? What sort?’

*

As night came, lights from the villages and more isolated manors shimmered across the fast quiet water as the Gothora kept a steady course upstream. They stopped at a village the next day to replenish their logs and buy fresh food for the galley. After less than four hours, they set off again.

It took eight days to navigate the length of the Mozal. Fortunately the main river extended almost all the way to the southern end of the Bouge mountain range, a thousand miles due east from Portlynn. Only the last fifty miles saw them turning down a tributary river, the Woular, heading north again. The mountains had grown steadily up from the horizon for the last two days.

The land on either side of the Woular had reverted to long stretches of raw jungle and scrub. Estates and villages were spaced further and further apart. This was wilderness country, devoid of any terrestrial vegetation. Native natell and quasso trees grew tall along the riverbanks, festooned with vines decorated in an abundance of white and purple flowers. The water was getting clogged with rotting fallen branches and long vine tendrils. Tough bakku weed grew along the edges, forming large wiry mats. Captain Migray had to reduce speed, while he and Sancal used their ex-sight diligently, probing the river for snags. They hadn’t seen another boat for hours.

Finally, Croixtown slipped into view round a long curve. The village was made up from about fifty houses, none of which had a second storey. They were huddled together at the centre of an array of big pens, whose high, strong fences contained bison and wild boar. Smaller pens contained neuts. Kysandra craned her neck forward, her retinas zooming in.

‘Are those camels?’

‘You have good eyes,’ Jymoar said, smiling worshipfully. He’d spent most of the voyage flirting hopefully with her and was now badly smitten.

‘Thank you.’

‘And, yes, those are probably camels. The rancheros, they don’t care what they drive into their corrals, as long as it fetches a shining coin from the markets.’

‘That’s a lot of livestock out there,’ Nigel said, regarding the pens attentively.

Jymoar didn’t flinch quite as much as he had at the start of the trip whenever Nigel said something. ‘Si, señor. The savannah is home to many beasts; they run wild here. There are few predators, just mantahawks and roxwolves and dingoes – and the rancheros hunt them down to protect the herds.’ He looked round furtively, then lowered his voice. ‘I’ve heard that the people of Shansville like dingo meat.’

Kysandra stared past the pens. Beyond them, the land rose slowly to the foothills of the Bouge range, a vast open region of savannah where the blue-green native gangrass rippled away like some sluggish sea. The occasional ebony whipwoor tree stood proud, thorny blemishes speckling the endless shifting gangrass. ‘Is that where the Desert of Bone is?’ she asked.

‘Beyond the mountains, yes,’ Jymoar said. ‘I wish you were not going there, señorita. It is a bad place.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Everybody knows. Not even the Fallers dare to travel there. They say there are ten thousand bodies piled up in the centre, their bones are a monster’s treasure hoard and their souls haunt the desert, weeping tears of grey light into the sand.’

‘Fascinating,’ Nigel said. ‘What sort of monster?’

‘Nobody knows, señor. If you encounter it, you do not survive. Those that do manage to avoid its clutches are scarred for life by what they have seen; many go mad afterwards.’

‘Ten thousand bodies? That’s a lot of people. Where did they come from?’

‘Nigel,’ Kysandra chided, frowning at him. It wasn’t fair to mock the poor boy’s superstition.

Jymoar shrugged. ‘You doubt me, but those people have died in the Desert of Bone, señor. I will not go there, not even for the señorita.’

‘And I would never ask you to,’ she told him kindly.

Gothora tied up at Croixtown’s single jetty. The townsfolk were disappointed it wouldn’t be taking any of their livestock down river to the big markets, but Nigel was paying Captain Migray to stay there until they got back.

‘For a month,’ the captain said. ‘Your coins are good, señor, but the Gothora is my life and my living. I cannot chain her to the land; she must travel the river.’

‘I understand,’ Nigel said. ‘We’ll be back before the month is up.’

‘I will wait,’ Jymoar ’pathed privately to Kysandra, ‘until you return safely.’

‘Don’t worry about us,’ she ’pathed back. ‘Please.’

Nigel whistled happily as he led his horse down the jetty. ‘Ahh, shipboard romance. Finest kind.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she growled at him.

5

It was hard riding across the savannah. Kysandra was almost in tears the first night, she was so saddle sore. Even the nerve blocks her secondary routines established to ease the pain didn’t seem to help much. They set up camp in two tents that Skylady had fabricated to resemble ordinary canvas, but were actually lightweight thermo-stable sheets. ‘They’ll keep the temperature just right in the desert,’ Nigel explained. ‘Nights can get exceptionally cold. Explorers have been caught out by that before.’

Kysandra lent some half-hearted help putting them up. She didn’t want to sit down, and watched Fergus disapprovingly as he showed her how to use the valve on her self-inflating mattress.

‘It’ll be soft enough,’ he promised.

‘Nothing could be,’ she assured him.

But because the mattress was some fancy Commonwealth fabric, it was indeed soft enough to lie on without wincing and cursing. Madeline came in with a large tube of cream from the first-aid kit and told her to roll onto her front.