I searched halfheartedly for half a day, and never even found Tythus's bag. I did however find evidence of a settlement, so I followed the signs (mostly discarded trash and the smell of piss), until I found a large, no, a cavernous room under a domed ceiling. The ceiling was so high that the breath of the people below it could turn to condensation and even rain. What a people, to hedge their realm with a mote of urine and spit on themselves en masse.

They lived in tents, mostly of canvas, some of polymer fabrics. The large tent in the center was made of the same smooth maille as my shroud, though it was black. I learned the name of the stuff while listening to the township's smith. Kel'var, he called it. Watching from the shadows, I saw them to be a weary folk of tragedy, with strict rites to keep an infiltrator from blending in. Guards would walk the roads between districts with spiked poles and say a phrase in some weird dialect. If a stranger hesitated to reply, or simply repeated the phrase, they'd be struck on the head and dragged into the shadows. Once I saw a woman turn and run, and they stuck her in the ribs with the spiked ends of their clubs. I'd leave out what followed, but where else would people find food in a place like this? I did find gardens in a vacant corner where fungus grew in long furrows under a battery of violet lamps, but one craves a steak from time to time, I suppose.

Rather than go through the arduous effort of learning their ways and earning their trust, I chose the voyeur's path, haunting the township from within my little pocket universe. The scrying eye of Lord V had no presence this far up, and the other eye that watched seemed unconcerned with me, so I decided to learn how to dwell in that liminal land. It was difficult at first, but after a few months I was able to sleep there. Only when I found in a far corner where no one ever walked did I feel myself changing, slipping, and what was once between was then before, calling, singing. I pulled myself back, looking at a petal shaped door. The town bell rung.

"You'll hafta go to Redwolf," said Ladybeth.

"I'll not!" said Jekk.

"Kosh! You will!"

Jekk raised his fist. Ladybeth raised her hand and wrapped her paper 'round his rock.

"You will." She softened her voice.

"I hate them heirogrammates."

"Jekk, you'll hafta talk to his lot if you're to do the thing you promised. Learn to talk softly, play nice, and give them what they want from you."

"I'll not bend no knee to that littlun."

"You will. You need them to think they don't need to be fraid of you, Jekk. Longs while their fraid you'll be in the rings, far away from the gas. We need you in the gas, Jekk. Deep in it. Bend your knee and crawl to the center, and then you'll be the one the rings are spinnin' round."

"And the shrubber?"

"You need him. He's a bigust. Rutger's good by us, Jekk. He refrained when I feigned a daliance, remberit."

And Jekk got angry. "I can't bethrottle Redwolf on a quim whim."

And Ladybeth got angry. "You'd haven't even found Balverine if not for me. It cosen me you wear his pelt!"

And Jekk raised his hand again, but this time she couldn't stop it, and he hit her hard. She fell in tears, and a ripple almost formed in the air where an avenger was about to emerge. But Ladybeth rose from the floor, leaving her shift behind, and the avenger barely made it out of their tent before their lovemaking began.

In the tent of tent of Kel'var, north of the plaza where the Sun Brothers gathered in a circle and raised their arms, Redwolf held the Ulster out to Hearing Man and the Pig. They each wrapped their fingers around the red branch and swore their peace, then sat on the floor across from Redwolf and Meb, his lover-ally.

"The ogres are hard by hardhere," said Redwolf.

"It's the sour dunder!" Cried the Pig. "But how could we have known they'd hate it? Ogres have no taste."

"Do you know anything?", the Hearing Man said. "Ogres are all about taste. Nothing more than eat and drink. Pass it through those teeth and that's their life. Remberit! We set ourselves up for siege with bad trade."

"We'll need siege engines of war," said the Pig.

"No," said Meb. "We've neither the time, nor the sources. What we need is a cattle raid, fair and fashioned."

"Starve them out?" asked the Hearing Man, but the Pig was skeptical. Redwolf nodded and smiled. He was proud to be a partner in Meb's wild lust, but more so to be privy to her plans.

The Hearing Man and the Pig left the tent of Kel'var and spoke to the littluns of the cattle raid, while Redwolf lamented to Meb that she wouldn't be his queen.

"I'm my own queen," she said. "Besides, it wouldn't befit for us to both be locked up. You're John Barley, and should be free to taste all the corn of hissen field."

"Lovin's for love," he said. Then he pointed to the south. "Jekk has a wife, of all knaves. And here I am a simp and a cuck. It doesn't do."

She shushed his lips with hers, and the avenger left the tent, but stayed close enough to hear their talk when they were done.

"You're Kosh," she said. "Kosh doesn't simp. Kosh can't simp. Let me be your favorite ear, but don't begrudge me peelin' off my husk for other reapers. Especially not now, with the ogres at their apogee."

To the reeding tower, where the parliament sits and Redwolf holds the Ulster, Jekk has made his play, asking to meet for solace. He bends his knee so far the parliament feels pity, so Redwolf does what he has to do to stay the Kosh. He holds out the red branch and Jekk wraps his fingers around it, then he lets it go.

Bread skinned striders roved in the moldy passages above Red Side. The Pig was building saddles and tack to fit their wide haunches, while Redwolf led a troop to capture some as mounts for the cattle raid. With him went Jekk, and while away the bigust Rutger climbed a scaffold over the house of the Pig. By the knees of a broken statue, he heaved up a marble toe and rolled it off the scaffold, crushing underneath the Pig and blowing his house away. He then felt himself in a rut, and looked for Meb to give her a bit of a rape. And so it was that Redwolf and Jekk came back to find their top lieutenants dead, for not even an ogre could safely rape Self-Queen Meb. But with no seats to ride the striders on, the cattle raid was canceled, and so they readied as best they could for siege, barring all the giant doors and dousing every light. Then a little Hermes came from the serpentine halls of the ogres, and the avenger once again was close to bursting through the curtain, seeing the little rat tusked boy he carried out of the pit.

Tythus carried the shadow of death, so the feuding leaders paused their grief. Even Meb was calm. Tythus spoke and they listened.

"I've heard you planned a coopetat, Jekk Elheide. I urge you to put those plans aside for the nonce, as the fomorians are not just off on bad spirits, but have long been planning to captivate you all, so they can put you in their vats and make you all into mockavees like me. Is there a bigust among you? You wear Balverine's pelt, Elheide. Are you strong enough to be your people's mactroick?"

"I'll die before I call Jekk War King," said Meb. But Redwolf had already stepped forward. A wise man was he, not a fighter. He was a thinker and a lover and a leader, but definitely not a fighter. Perhaps because he'd guessed who these fomorians were, and perhaps because he wanted to meet the dead boy living, the avenger broke the fourth wall and showed himself, and the people pointed at him and called him the White Shadow. This is how he got that name.

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The people bowed, clearly terrified of what the cat dragged in from its romp through the void. The avenger carried a long spear with a stormfront whirling around its tip, and he was dressed like he'd robbed the clothesline of a ghost.

"I will be your mactroick," he said, not having the foggiest notion what such a crazy word could mean.

"Do we have the time to raise him?" asked the Hearing Man, who only then had ceased his weeping for the Pig.

"He's a mockavee!" shouted Jekk, holding a rock to throw at the avenger. The avenger, who was much taller than these malnourished pygmies, took the rock and tossed it aside.

"No," said Redwolf, "he's a reelmakoi."

"You mean..." Jekk was too frightened to say the rest of his words.

Tythus said it for him, as he was staring at the avenger with open eyes. "He's a Boy of the Batch."

"No need to take him to the Judicator then," said Meb. "Can you save us now?"

The White Shadow shrugged.

"I'll show him the way," said Tythus, and he took the avenger by the hand and led him through the southern giant doors.

---------

"Tits!" exclaimed Tythus. "Every time I talk to those idiots I feel like I'm going to be trapped there forever."

I took off my shroud and nodded my head. "I've been with them for half a year."

"Half a year?! Why would you stay with them so long? How could you stand it? There's something seriously wrong with those people."

I shrugged. "They're isolated."

"Everyone above ground level is isolated. Those people are extra isolated."

"So what exactly have I agreed to do for them? I met the fomorians. I doubt I could stop them on my own."

Tythus waved a hand. "No one can. And if you could, our Lord would just replace them with someone just as bad, or possibly worse."

"I'd like to save those people if I can. If they left perhaps, and made a village somewhere out of the fomorians reach..."

He waved his hand again. "They're fine. That room keeps them safe as well as stupid. The ogres will kidnap a few of them if they wander outside their village, but they'll forget about it in a month. This happens all the time."

"Then why did you come up here to warn them if the ogres aren't going to attack?"

He smirked. "I just come here to see Meb. But I had to make something scary up or they wouldn't let me in."

"Why not?"

His smirk died. "Because I'm... like you."

"You're a Boy of the Batch?"

He shook his head vehemently, and even raised his hands. "No. No sir. I'm not holy. I'm just..."

"You can't die."

"No. I can't. No matter... never mind."

"No matter how hard you try?"

He nodded. I wanted to put my arm around him then, because he looked so terribly sad. "If you're not of the Batch, how is it you can't be killed?"

"The ogres did it to me."

"Why?"

"They do all sorts of things to people. I don't know why. I guess, maybe, because things were done to them. If you've seen them, then you know they're not right."

"No. They're not. Let's not speak of them."

We wandered for a while, and Tythus showed me the lay of the land, even describing the basic power structure of the different districts.

"There's the prison towers way at the top. There's some targs living on one of them, but you can't come down once you've gone up, so they just attack the prisoners on the other towers."

I decided not to mention the targ father and daughter I saw earlier. There was something different about them.

"The highest district is Filly's Egg. There's a great big dactyl that their princess trained to protect them, and that's how she keeps her people safe."

"How high up is it?"

"Almost all the way. At World's End, their sign says."

I raised an eyebrow at the notion of communities here having signs. It was amusing to me somehow.

"What was the town with the crazy people called?"

"That's the funny thing; I don't know. Its always on the tip of my tongue, but I can never remember."

I waited a good long while before asking the question that was giving my brain a rash.

"I found you in a dried up cistern full of bagged corpses."

"There's corpse wells like that all over. They're all divided by kin."

"You'd been beaten very badly. Would you like me to find your attackers and let them know you've found a new friend?"

He shook his head, and while he looked sad, a corner of his mouth seemed determined to creep upward a little. "They were just tourists."

"Tourists?"

"Yeah. Homeless. They wander around different districts looking for work or food, or people to rob."

"Were you carrying food? If you're like me, you don't need to eat."

"They didn't rob me." His shoulders drooped, and his eyes watched his feet. I reached down and patted him on the back, letting him know I'd guessed his attackers' purpose, and that he didn't have to tell me. I was determined to protect this boy, and let no more people cause him pain to satisfy their curiosity or need for distraction.

"Can I ask you a question sir?"

"Of course. Ask me anything."

"Who are you? I mean, I know what you are, but I thought our Lord was the last."

I shrugged. "I am what you see me to be; a Victor of that particular Batch. As a boy I served the Dolomites in their sanctum, and when it was assaulted, I fled to Haven. I worked in the Bibliotheca and married a sad, pretty girl named Eris. When Haven was destroyed by the Devils, Eris and I helped the Cataphracts fight them by giving them food and supplies. Eris died of a lifelong sickness, and after grieving I enlisted with the Cataphracts. I was at the very last battle, and saw Regis, head of the Chalcedony Angels, kill the Devil commander in single combat."

Tythus was completely lost.

"Have you ever been outside Thirty-Third Day?"

"What's that?"

For the boy's sake I held in my sigh. "It's what people who don't live here call this place."

"People who don't live here? How can you not live in Tarthas?"

At a loss, I changed the subject. "The idiots said something about seeing a Judicator?"

Tythus nodded. "You'll hafta see him if you want to stay up here, and aren't from here. Well, most people do. You won't, since our Lord sent you."

I knelt down and put both my hands on Tythus's shoulders. "I haven't asked your name."

He told me.

"Well, Tythus, my name is Victor 39, and we are in what is called a magnacity, and its name is Thirty-Third Day. Tarthas is a much bigger place than this, though I can understand how this city might seem like the whole world to you. But it's not, and I'm a stranger here. If the custom for newcomers is to appear before this Judicator fellow, then that's what I'd better do. Will you take me to him?"

Still confused, he nodded. As we walked he asked me questions about the alleged 'outside world', and I answered them as best I could. He was more skeptical than curious, and I think that the only reason he was entertaining the possibility I was not a liar was because I was of the same ilk as his 'Lord'. We were several levels above Red Side, crossing a bridge over a large span of melted and twisted metal, when he asked me a question I did not expect, but probably should have.

"So why didn't the other Victors come? You know, 34 through 38?"

I was so taken aback by the question that I stopped.

"You know Tythus, I've never even wondered about them before. I have no idea if they even exist."