It was not the only moment of the journey when time clotted, and Cutter was stuck fast. A day was only an instant drawn out. Motion itself-the putter of insects, the appearance-disappearance of a tiny rodent-was an endless repetition of the same.

They did not sleep long that night for the sounding of the bloodhounds and Drogon’s whispers from his camp ahead. They were weighed down by weapons they had taken from the militia, and they left a trail of boot-knives and heavy rifles.

Once they saw a garuda way above them, stretched out like someone on a cross. They saw her dip, lurch earthward, veer toward Drogon, then break and ascend.

"He tried to whisper her," Cutter said. "But she got out of it." He was pleased.

Their rhythms were not the day’s: they slept for minutes while the sun was up, as well as at dusk and night. If the whispersmith slept it was in the saddle. On the sierra they passed smudged pebblebeasts, something between giraffes and gorillas, knuckle-walking and eating low leaves.

"You have to speed," the whispersmith told Cutter. "The handlinger’s coming."

By moonlight they followed Drogon and their quarry toward a hill-line topped by plateau. They saw dark, a corridor through the butte. They would reach it in daylight, and Cutter could imagine the relief it would be, the punishing hot sky just a band seething above lichened rock walls and stone stiles.

Elsie said: "Something’s coming." She looked gaunt. She looked horrified. "Something’s coming from the south." There was a disturbance behind many waves of landscape, beyond sight. Cutter knew that Elsie was a weak witch, but she felt something.

The east was weakly shining, and in the first light Cutter saw the dust of Drogon’s horse below the mesa. The whispersmith was almost at the entrance to the chine.

"Follow the way through," Drogon said to Cutter. "Quick. The handlinger’s closing, but you can make it here if you keep on. The dogs’re howling. They can smell our man, he’s close, through here. Make it here, maybe we can… maybe we can face the handlinger, an ambush." A weak plan.

Drogon must have turned then and hauled behind the pack as they bayed and ran into the split rock path. Cutter thought of the overhangs they would pass and saw with clarity what he had seen in the room of his runaway friend, that had sent him here. Cutter saw the tripwire and the men dead and stoved in, lying under anthropoid outlines in random materials.

"Godsdammit. Get back! Get back! "

He shouted as loud as he ever had. Pomeroy and Elsie staggered; they had been sleeping as they walked. Cutter made his hands a trumpet and roared again.

"Stop! Stop!" He fired his repeater into the air.

Drogon was in his ear. "What you doing? The handlinger’ll hear you…" But Cutter was speaking, and lurching on exhausted legs. "Stop stop stop!" he shouted. "Don’t go in, don’t go in. It’s a trap."