Farisa tried to scream, but no sound came. Kanos’s face tightened in forceful malevolence, looming, the last thing she’d see if she didn’t act. Her heart pounded and her face tingled. She grabbed a stone of two-handed heft and charged. Kanos’s spell wavered; the pressure on her throat lessened. Overtaxed by the misuse of her power, Kanos collapsed.
She stepped back, letting a tree support her weight. Coughing interfered with her breathing, and her vision was fuzzy and colorless. She hunched over. Sweat stung her skin; her heart was still beating at thrice its normal speed.
I should do it now. He did attack me.
Did that happen? Or was that the Marquessa?
It was real. He killed the unta, he threatened your cat, and he’s a goddamn mage. Do it!
She raised the stone over her head.
“Farisa!”
Garet stepped forward.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Kanos muttered as he returned to consciousness.
She set the rock down. “I need to see Claes. Now.”
#
Claes led Farisa through the weeds to a stream where they sat on a log.
“I don’t think anyone will hear us out here,” Claes said. “Tell me what happened.”
Farisa summarized the prior hour, careful to keep the story within facts, since the stakes of this place were too high to indulge in a self-serving alternate reality.
“Kanos says you attacked him without cause.”
“He—I suppose he has the right to feel that way.”
“I know you didn’t,” he continued. “You wouldn’t.”
“I threw the first—well, it wasn’t a punch.”
“You must have had a reason.”
“He’s a mage,” Farisa said. “That, I think I remember.”
“You think you remember?”
“I’m sorry. It happened so fast, but as I remember it—”
“A mage.” Claes shook his head. “It would explain...”
“Explain what?”
“He says someone—he didn’t say it was you—choked him out, but there’s not a mark on him. Except for his fall, he’s unbruised.”
Farisa looked at her hands. She had never liked Kanos, and she still did not, but now she realized he was a victim of the horrid Marquessa as well. They were both sick with the same malady; in that, they were of a kind.
“It must have been a shared—” She did not want to use the word hallucination, because the episode had been real, but she could find no word to describe a shared—an entangled—madness.
Claes looked aside. “If he is a mage, and if he attacked you, then we don’t have a lot of options.”
“He killed the unta, Lucy, and that was wrong, but I shouldn’t have—” The Marquessa played tricks; what, in Farisa’s memory, was true? Had she imagined that sneer on his face? Had the lack of nourishment they were all feeling caused hallucination, as it did for fasting monks? “I can’t be the only witness. It can’t be on my memory alone that we decide—”
“I understand,” Claes said. “For what it’s worth, I fully believe your account of events, everything you’ve told me. Let me ask you this: do you think he meant to kill you?”
“He wouldn’t have gone that far,” Farisa said. “I didn’t feel it in him. He wanted to scare me, not end me.”
“Are you sure of this? If he meant to kill or to seriously harm you, I will right now go and—”
“That would be a terrible idea if it’s you alone,” Farisa said. “Given what we know he is, it will have to be you and me.”
“It probably will.” Claes snapped a branch off a bush and stuck it in the water.
Farisa noticed that his beard was white more than gray; the lines on the man’s face had become permanent creases.
He continued. “The only one who can stand him is Runar. It’s not rare to have a fistfight or two on an adventure like this, but if he’s a mage, then...”
“I am also a mage,” Farisa said.
“You don’t want to do it.”
“I don’t think I do. Let’s give him one more chance.”
“If his only interest in being with us is the money, he might grab a fistful of Switch Cave treasure and leave us on his own.”
“He’s an asshole, but I don’t think he’s a murderer.”
“Do you think he’s been...?”
“Entering minds?” Farisa chuckled. “No. That level of power is rare. Even most mages can’t do it. He certainly hasn’t tried to enter me. I’m a mage, so the attempt would probably kill him.”
“So, he won’t get into you?”
“Not on this side of life and death.”
Claes reached into his jacket. “I wish I had more of these.” He produced a pendant with a cloudy purple stone. “Cost me five thousand, but I’m glad I have it.” He put it on. “Try to enter.”
“Claes, I explained before that, as I consider you family—”
“I know. Just try.”
Farisa went into the blue. She moved her point of focus to Claes’s hand. She could make a finger twitch until he took conscious control of the arm. She moved up his arm, up his neck, and when she tried to enter his mind, she heard a snap in the air and her whole body tingled.
“Harder,” Claes said. "You won’t hurt me.”
Farisa squeezed her eyes shut. Every muscle tightened. The forest sounds disappeared. She was alone in black space, drawing power from the abyss.... With all her mental power, she slammed herself into the silver door of his mind. It would not budge, and any more force would break her mind into pieces.
“So?”
“It works. I couldn’t get in.”
“Good,” Claes said. “Then Kanos won’t. You never know, when you buy one of these things, if it has the power the seller claims. It usually doesn’t. It’s yours if you want it.”
“I won’t need it. As I said, it’s almost impossible to enter a mage. I’ll never get into him, but he’ll never get into me.” Farisa paused. “You should wear it at all times, though.”
“If he enters a mind, even once, we have to kill him. That’s one thing we can’t afford to have him do."
Farisa counted the ripples of the placid stream. “I agree.”
#
They ran out of food on September 4. No meat, no beans, no rice or grain. No fish. No pickles. No flour. No oats for their animals. No hardtack. Their clothes had been gnawed to bits; rats had taken everything.
“We have animals,” Kanos said.
“Untas are barely edible,” Garet said. “Their meat is like bear liver. You could eat a small piece, but if you tried to subsist on it, you’d die of the breaks. Huskers, we’d have to do all at the same time, because otherwise the ones kept alive would know, and they’d not be happy about it.”
Claes added, “And there’s no way we get through the Ivory Ashes without huskers to carry water.”
Mazie put her finger through a hole in her shirt. “So, we...?”
“We keep looking for food as we go,” Garet said. “That’s all we can do.”
Runar, in the early afternoon, noticed a snake along the path. He chased it down and stomped on its neck. It would provide an ounce or two of meat for each person. After fording a river, they spent the rest of the day fishing, catching three small fish that were mostly bones—it almost would have been better to have eaten the bait.
“We’re fucked,” said Kanos. “Of course we are. We have three girls and a child with us.”
“Shut up, you motherless cunt,” Farisa said under her breath.
The untas' movement had become languid, and the huskers’ thinning bodies seemed to hang from their skeletons. There was green underbrush in all directions, but nothing the animals could eat. Farisa had lost the characteristic tiny roll of fat between her navel and waistline—she had grown fond of it—but her stomach didn’t look firm so much as deflated. Her breasts, as well, seemed half empty. Her arms were beginning to lose the muscular definition she had built on the Road. Ouragan had thinned out enough that Farisa could feel the cat’s ribs; the silver feline, up to Portal, had been a fifteen-pound beast that plopped on her chest with a thud and slept too hot for comfort, but weighed ten pounds now at the absolute most.
Why, she wondered, hadn’t Ouragan been hunting—or, at least, scaring away—the rats who’d been stealing their food? Was that not a cat’s historical purpose? Were the rodents uncannily large or dangerous? Was their meat poisonous?
Runar, as well, looked awful: he had lost a tenth of his two hundred pounds, and his hair was turning white before its time. Talyn’s face hung like a sheet. Saito’s body looked empty. Mazie hardly spoke to anyone. Eric held himself together during the day, but at night, Farisa could hear him moaning in pain.
They had faced danger before, but this was the first time in the journey they had felt despair. To the eye, this forest was no more hostile than any other. Altitude limited the heat to four hours each day, and there was sometimes a misty rain that would have been pleasant had malnutrition not left them so sensitive to cold, they shivered at night. Farisa started regretting the decision to come here. They could not quit and go back, as Globbos would kill them or worse, but starvation was a much longer route to the same morbid fate—a demise so passive and long it left the victim to walk toward it, hundreds of self-same miles through sickening green. One woke in pain, one walked, one slept, one woke in pain again, one walked, one slept.
#
“Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Claes asked.
“No,” Farisa whispered. “Good shit. Literal shit.”
“Figurative-literal shit?”
“Literal-literal shit.” Farisa pointed at a cluster of walnut-size pellets left in the center of a star-shaped fallen leaf.
“We’ll go after it.” Claes looked around. “I’ll have Garet call a foraging mission. We can’t have Kanos know we’re out here hunting, because he’ll—”
“Do something stupid to fuck it all up.”
“Exactly.”
They had gone four days without food, not for a lack of searching. Garet had found enough water to stave off immediate death, but there had been nothing swimming in it, not even tiny river shrimp. They were in the sort of fatigue where to close one’s eyes brought an immediate sense of displacement, but it was not rest, because this kind of exhaustion scoured the soul.
Claes handed Farisa a hunting rifle. “You know how to use this?”
Farisa kissed her left shoulder, then her right.
“Don’t do that.”
“It’s a Lorani pun on the word rhakis. Means ‘shoulder’ but also—”
“I know what it means. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Claes ran forward to tell Garet what Farisa had found, then retired to her. Farisa had, by this point, found hoof prints, indicative of an animal—a massive herbivore—and direction: southeast.
Claes returned. “Do you have your compass?”
“Of course,” Farisa said. “We’ll take the heading one-one-five.”
“And we’ll be as quiet as possible.”
There had been wind the past few nights, so the ground was covered in dried-out leaves. One had to watch every step; any noise would alert their prey—deer, boar, goat, whatever it was—and leave them in the same miserable hunger as before. They crept, often squatting to keep as low as they could, but careful not to fall forward.
Success in this hunt would mean more than food; it would be the first time Farisa had been useful without resorting to the blue. Kanos was the best with a gun, Claes the most charismatic, and Garet the most knowledgeable. Runar was often strong enough to extricate a stuck husker carriage with one lift; Saito was their medic. Mazie had the agility and reflexes of a gymnast—not to mention, she was beautiful, even with the grime of travel on her face—but what did Farisa have? She had driven away the skrums, but that was merely a correction for Kanos’s mistake. Her talent, on its own, often caused more trouble than it was worth, but if she could be the one to feed them, even just this once...
Claes held a briar bush back with a stick.
Farisa spotted a fresh four-inch hoofprint. “There it is. I think it’s an elk. This way.”
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“Check your heading.”
“Still one-one-five.”
“Good.”
Fog thickened, cooling Farisa’s arms. She wished she had brought a sweater. Hungry, we’re all so hungry. What if I can’t do this? What if I lose my nerve? Then we’re all back in this night-rain cold, this heaviness, it drags you down, drags you down like the Marquessa, she’s nine feet tall and she never eats, never sleeps, never tires... she brings the cold, the hunger... the hunger... the hunger....
She heard a rustle. She grabbed Claes’s wrist. Stop. They looked at each other. Claes nodded. Farisa quietly brought her rifle to eye level. In its sights, she saw an elk, almost as large as a bear, no more than fifty yards away. Its antlers spread four feet left and right, but the red patch on her forehead indicated that she was female. The animal looked at Farisa, then chewed on a bush with yellow flowers.
The gnawing pain in Farisa’s stomach forced a spasm. Her trigger finger pulled. The world cracked; there was smoke. The animal’s neck exploded; her head snapped back, then jerked to the side. Blood poured through the mouth. The terrified creature broke into a sprint, but her ruined neck could not support the weight of her antlered skill, so her body crumpled and flung itself down.
Farisa found herself in a hurried walk; the deed had been done, and there was no need for quietude. She hoped her first shot had finished the job, leaving no need for a sequel, but the elk was still breathing, face covered in blood.
She drew her pistol and fired. “Thank you for your sacrifice.”
Claes said, “May your next birth reflect your merits in this life.”
“You’re a believer now?”
Claes looked aside. “Out here, one has to be.”
Farisa heard a rustle behind her. Two fawns, lithe creatures with white spots on their backs, ran away.
“Fuck.”
Those two young had lost their mother. The elk’s ghost would haunt these woods. Farisa’s guilt would hang, like a moth’s nest, from every tree here for all time. Motherless. I’ve left them motherless. For what? To feed ourselves, we desperados who belong nowhere? We killed this beautiful animal, only because we had this insane idea that a better life might exist beyond the edge of the world, but what if we’re wrong? There’s probably nothing beyond the edge, nothing but more death and more fire. I’m just a killer, a murderer, nothing but teeth and a stomach and...
She was sobbing, curled up against a dead stump.
Claes began to skin the carcass. “If I must, I can take it from here.”
Farisa looked at her hands. To her surprise, this act of killing had not blackened her veins.
“I understand. It’s normal.”
“It isn’t,” she said. “I should be stronger. I’ve killed before. I’ve fished. I killed a squibbani.” A knot of sadness, at first no larger than an acorn, spread its tendrils through her face and covered her in a veil. “But I did something I never should have done.”
“The squibbani was self-defense.” Claes removed the dead animal’s innards and threw them aside. “And just now, you did something that will keep all of us fed for weeks.”
“No, not that. I just remembered something I did a long time ago. Cait Forest. I think I might have killed someone—”
“The fire in Cait Forest?” Claes hacked through connective tissue. “You can’t blame yourself for that. The rest of the world will, but I know you, Farisa.”
In a crouched position, she sobbed into folded arms until the wave of sadness passed. “Enough of that,” she finally said. “I should help you.”
Claes handed Farisa a canvas tarpaulin; he had brought two of those. Each of them wrapped up as much bloody meat as they could carry and hauled it back to camp. Farisa’s clothes bore maroon stains by the time they got there, and her arms were exhausted from carrying more than half her weight in meat.
“You did a good thing for us,” Claes said as they approached the rest of the group. “You’ve earned a day off.”
“There’s no such thing out here.”
“No, there isn’t.” Claes smiled. “Still, take an hour or two of rest without guilt. Runar and Garet and I will go back for the remainder.”
Farisa sat on a decaying log and shivered. Her eyes fell out of focus, tracking phantom motions on a lifeless patch of dirt. She could accept that she had killed—she’d seen enough deaths of animals and orcs and Globbos—but she could not escape the image of those two lost fawns. She could still see their white spots and black noses, their sad eyes. She had left them in a world without guidance or hope. She cried and her chest withered in fear, because this time it might be “the long cry”, the fear of every mage, the sobbing that just never stopped until one of those hunched-over statue-like madhouse patients, and then...
Sometimes it’s better not to think, Farisa.
But it’s not-thinking that leads to madness.
So does bad thinking, and bad thinking gets you there faster.
Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do?
Eric sat next to her and grabbed her hand.
“I’m sad,” Farisa said.
“We’ll eat tonight. We’ll eat well tonight. You did what we needed you to do.”
Farisa looked at him and forced herself to smile.
“I have one memory of my father,” Eric said as he scratched his knee. “I must have been four. He took me out fishing. I caught one, and when I saw that it was a living thing, I didn’t want to kill it. He made me. He said, ‘Everything eats something, even plants.’ ”
“Everything...”
“I never figured out what plants eat, though.”
“The soil.” Farisa wiped away tears. “The sun, too, I suppose.”
“They eat the sun?”
Farisa stood up; she was feeling better. “They do. Photosynthesis, it’s called. I’ll explain it to you once we’ve had something to eat.”
#
No one in Garet’s foraging expedition had expected, it seemed, to uncover much, and indeed they found no edible plants within two miles of the Road in either direction, but Garet discovered a section of woods with brown puffballs, and Saito’s four-mile jaunt uphill had taken him to a field of wild red cabbage. At the same time, Runar had found a sack of flour, buried in an ammunition bucket, that enabled Garet and Mazie to put together an elk-meat pie out of all they had.
Mazie sat beside Farisa. “Ya ’ave to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Farisa admitted. “It’s not what I did. It’s... forget it. I’m being silly.”
“I was five when I trapped my first rabbit. Too hungry to think, too hungry for remorse until I looked in that poor animal’s eyes—it knew I was going to kill it; it knew its little life had ended, that it had been betrayed by a creature it had not recognized as a predator—and you know what my only thought was?”
“What?”
“If I’d been born a rich girl, she’d ’ave been a pet, not food.”
Farisa stretched her arms out. “Oh, Mazie.”
“So..."
Farisa scratched her face. “I can’t get myself past the thought that, to the animals of these woods, we are orcs.”
Mazie gave Farisa’s shoulder a firm nudge. “You don’t eat things while they’re still alive, do ya?”
“Of course not.”
“Have you ever killed without a reason?”
“Never.”
“Then, Farisa, you’re nothing like an orc.”
“Since when are you an expert on orcs, Mazie?”
Mazie chuckled. “I haven’t slept well for a while, so I’ve been reading the books you’ve brought, including History of Wytchcraft.”
“Even the one with the sine and cosine tables?”
Mazie waved her hand, as an eccentric professor would. “The sine of twenty degrees is zero-point-three-four.” She laughed. “I’m kidding, of course.”
Farisa stood up. “You know, I think that isn’t far off.”
“What I’ve read is that orcs can eat anything we can. They could, in principle, be vegetarians.”
“Vegetarian orcs. Ridiculous.” Farisa, as the dark mist in her mind cleared, stood up. “Doesn’t garlic make them deathly ill? Or is that—?”
“Vampires,” Mazie said. “I think it’s vampires. Or it would be, if they were real.”
“Farisa!” Garet yelled. “Get over here!”
“I suppose feeling bad won’t bring her back.” Farisa rejoined the others and ate two slices of the pie. Claes and Saito spent the night curing the meat that hadn’t been used. With bellies full, they all slept better than they had in a long time.
#
Two days later, their hunger abated, they entered a forest of redwoods that reached twenty stories high. Copper-colored cones fell; some were the size of a brick.
“We are three miles above sea level,” Garet said.
Eric said, “Three miles? That’s—”
“A little more than three, in fact. Sixteen thousand, two hundred and forty-nine feet. Highest point on the road.”
Farisa interjected, “That we know of.”
“Of course. Enjoy it. From here, it’s downhill, and it’ll get quite hot.”
Their location did not seem lofty at all, not in comparison to the walls of mountains on both flanks, rising into bleak thin air where not even moss could live. The main cue of their altitude was the texture of the cirrostratus clouds, whose structure would have been invisible at sea level; the other was the inadequate brewing of their morning coffee—up here, water boiled eagerly at only thirteen flags.
They were eating well now, so the prior hunger blurred in memory; Farisa had lived long enough to know that a million bad moments could be tucked into the same memory and stored somewhere dark, like a child’s nightmares, too impotent to be numbered. That they had been hungry for so long, once they were full, did not weigh them down; instead, they made excellent mileage. The tall trees here did not permit much understory, and they could go quickly through it.
They were on a slow descent, at the end of a thirty-mile day that had begun two hours before sunrise, when Garet stopped in a flat, grassy expanse.
“We can stop here,” he said. “It’s not a bad looking place.”
“It’s not,” Farisa agreed. Thin clouds gentled but did not block the sun; white and purple flowers shone under a platinum sky.
Garet pointed. “There’s a lake and a waterfall that way, about a mile and a half.”
“Are you sure you don’t need us to help set up camp?”
“No.” He smiled. “Please go. Class dismissed.”
Farisa laughed. “That used to be my line.”
“This is his way of telling us we smell and need a bath,” said Mazie. “Right, old man?”
Garet guffawed. “Something like that.”
Farisa and Mazie had no trouble following the side trail. Wooden posts, painted yellow, marked the way. Dropseed and switchgrass rose in stands twice their height; honeybees crossed their path.
Mazie touched Farisa’s arm. “Can you hear it? The waterfall?”
Farisa listened. Giddily, she said, “Yes.”
“Some time ago, you said something. You said you feel more at home here than anywhere else, anywhere you’ve ever lived. Do you still feel that way?”
“I do.”
“So do I.” Mazie paused. “You’re not like me, though. You had things in the old world. You had a name people knew.”
Farisa laughed. “You say that like it’s a good thing.” As they walked toward the lake, their hands came together; their fingers interlaced. “I am like you, Mazie. Out here, I’m nobody. That’s why I am here.” She stopped the air and sniffed.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“I don’t either,” Farisa said. “The air is clean.”
“Hasn’t it been?”
“There’s been this faint odor of smoke forever, it seems. Since Muster, at least—no, since April. It waxed and waned, but it never fully left... but now it’s gone.”
Their arms brushed each other. This was a good place to be. Farisa let the waterfall’s rushing sound enter, and cleanse, her mind.
Mazie said, “Can you believe we’re here, in a place like this, together?”
“No. Yes. Both. I’m confused. I think... I think I fucking love you, Mazie.”
#
Kanos shook his head in contempt as he watched Farisa and Mazie leave the others. This group had made thirty easy miles today, but if he had come alone or with Runar and maybe Saito, they’d have done forty.
The others didn’t much like Kanos, he knew, but he had studied his behaviors well, and he knew what he was doing. Had it suited his interests to be liked by these people, he would have been someone else entirely. He might have changed his name, even. He wasn’t here to make friends, and he sure as shit didn’t need to be loved; so long as he was tolerated, his plan would work, because when it mattered they would be too desperate to go any way but his. In the meantime, it was best to keep the others at a distance, so they wouldn’t ask questions about where he had come from or what his true motivations were.
He pushed emotion aside, as much as he could. The life he had chosen had never given a dead fish’s fuck about what someone thought of it. Still, to meet Farisa in the flesh had enraged him; she did not even hide her attraction to women—in particular, an uncouth bitch named Mazie—and this was a tendency he never could tolerate. It reminded him of why his own station in life had fallen so low.
Kanos had barely known his father; his mother’s brother, Iyan Keldebeq, Z-5 at the Global Company, had filled that role. Iyan would have risen much higher, but his wife, being impulsive and short-tempered, left him in middle age for a woman. Word spread. Z-5 Keldebeq’s career ended; how could a man argue his fitness for management, if unable to manage his own wife?
This mattered quite a bit in the context of Kanos’s teenage offenses. Serious as they were, they would have been forgiven—expunged outright—had Iyan ever made Z-4. Kanos’s right to a career at the Global Company had been purloined by one cunt eater; he wouldn’t let it happen twice.
Careful sabotage required detachment. It required observation and delay. He could afford to be disliked. What he could not afford was to be considered incompetent. He had been volunteering for every chore he could take on, because out here it was the easiest way to win basic trust. On what authority did Claes and Garet lead the group? Both men were outlaws, despised for decades by the only institution that mattered; their words had weight because of the work they did, and because they mostly did it well.
Of course, he could not allow this group to become too comfortable. Knowing orcish cannoneers preferred to pick off the rear, he had put the bulk of their food in the hindmost husker carriage, while hiding provisions in places only he knew about. He had sickened Farisa’s unta—the lame one there had been no good reason to try to rescue—because it would destabilize the woman and make her seem weak to the others. He had started an avoidable fight with squibbani—that had been his only major mistake, the only time when he had felt in danger of losing not only his efforts but his life—in which he had scored the decisive shot. It hadn’t, he realized, suited his goals to put these people in immediate danger, because short-term mortal threats tended to bring people together, whereas lingering discomfort could reliably drive groups against themselves. The squibbani fight had been a mistake; letting “the rats” chew their clothing and eat their food had been, however, the correct play.
Z-3 Pann Grackenheit—a pompous and self-important man, but good to his own word—had promised that the steam-powered Hegemon would be sitting on Bezelia’s western coast, only fifteen miles from the southern end of Switch Cave, until the sandstorms arrived in October. Unto that ironclad warship, Kanos could deliver the Global Company’s most wanted mage, and then his youthful errors would be all forgiven.
To get through Switch Cave would be the difficult part; the Ivory Ashes would break this group, as it did everyone. Kanos had spent nights thinking through every scenario, assessing the motives and strengths of each person. Some, he would be able to convince that the Company’s forgiveness was their best option. Others, he would have to kill.
Garet would be easy. Kanos could kill an old man in the Ashes and it would look like heatstroke. All that nonsense about it being dangerous to use magic to kill was false; Kanos had done it twice in his life, to no ill effect. The first had been in a robbery gone wrong ten years ago; the second had turned a losing brawl into a victory. Both killings had been achieved with his mind alone, leaving it impossible to trace the crimes, and neither act had worsened or weakened him.
Claes would have to go, too—the man was stubborn, and would protect Farisa to his end. He and Saito handled the huskers’ daily care. Kanos had not quite perfected the art of entering a human mind, but it would suffice to go into one of those simpler animals and stoke rage. Talyn and Eric could live or die, as far as Kanos was concerned—with Claes down, they’d have no choice but to follow the strongest man remaining.
Runar was one he had not figured out. Both men were bastards of the same shitty father, but Runar had a fool’s sense of chivalry. Kanos had explained on their first night together that the Ashes would surely defeat this group, not because they were incapable, but because the Company had surveyed the region for hundreds of miles beyond common knowledge and found nothing. Runar’s reply had been, “We’ll see.” Why see? What good existed in the sight of a hundred barren miles?
If Kanos’s brother remained unconvinced to go along with his plan, he’d have to kill him too, but he really didn’t want to do that.
Mazie, for a while, he’d need to keep alive. Farisa was, he had accepted, a more powerful mage than he was. A battle in the blue would leave her winded but destroy him, so that couldn’t be his way to go. Still, affection led to love, and love was weakness; a knife at Mazie’s throat would put Farisa still, all her talents be damned. He would even, for a time after becoming this group’s leader, treat Mazie well—until they reached the Hegemon. Once there, he could take Mazie for himself and show her what a real man could do. Talyn was too old for his tastes, Farisa too dark; Mazie, at least, had a symmetrical face and slim body—good enough for the second half of summer, as men in his town used to say. Once rich and reestablished in the Company's graces, he’d have access to much better girls—that wasn’t the point; the point was that it would break Farisa.
Kanos had always taken pride in his unflinching realism. At sixteen years of age, he looked in the mirror and accepted the sort of thing that would have shattered a weaker person—that he was ugly. No amount of physical fitness could compensate for eyes that sat off-center in his face and a nose and lips that made his entire face look predatory. Men like him were exactly why the Global Company had to exist; such men would never get quality sleeve in a decadent world where the owners of said sleeves had options. The Great Global Company’s real value to the world was in what it what cleared away—it humiliated beautiful men, for their femininity; it diminished the poets and lute players who muddled women’s minds with rhymes and sonatas; it disempowered the young to benefit the well-resourced old—rather than anything it produced. It rightly directed female sexual energies into the laps of men whose wealth and rank proved they deserved such affections, because even though those men were often unappealing to the senses—the typical Z-4 was an obese senile denizen of his own halitosis haze—the truth was that ugliness was closest thing in this world to virtue. Ugliness was truth.
The Company’s world was for the strong only; strong, Kanos was. He would deliver Farisa; he would make Z-4 and possibly Z-3—the Company would give him such wealth and rank, he would be able to stick his clam-puncher in the blue sky and women would flock to impale themselves on it.
To fracture this group, “the Wet Man” had so much still in store. He had figured out before anyone else that Eric wasn’t Talyn’s son. He’d learned things about Runar that would make him a pariah anywhere; worse, he knew about Saito’s past, and would expose the man’s history when it became useful to do so.
“Kanos!”
Talyn called for him. With one arm, she held a wood ax improperly; the other was in a sling. The dumb bitch had blown her shoulder out yesterday while trying to fix an axle of a husker carriage.
“Garet needs help gathering firewood. I’d do it myself, but...”
“Of course.” Kanos took the ax from her. “Please rest. I’ll take care of it.”