Daniel Chace had watched the battle from a safe distance. He would have made little of these people, had he not known how far they had come into this strange new world, and with so little. The dossier on Claes said he was only forty-five, but he looked almost sixty. The Wyovian man’s hair was white, too. The large Teroshi had been crippled in the fight and was riding their sole living unta as much as possible. They had one husker left, a tad underweight. There was a child and there were two women, one missing a hand, among them. A naive bettor would have given them a week to survive, but they had defeated hundreds of orcs—and other tropical terrors, surely—with six people still alive. If only the Global Company could find people like that.
Chace's group had produced a more unfavorable ratio. Sixteen men, a month and a half ago, had boarded the Cog-Lion II in Moyenne. Four of them had adjusted so badly to altitude, motion, and isolation that they were hardly missed when they gimped off in Portal, leaving twelve. Son of Schlag had died at twenty-five thousand feet. Three more had perished (rest in peace, Beef Curtains) on that grocery run gone wrong. The airship’s explosion and its aftermath had taken most of the rest. Chace was, as far as he knew, the only one left—the sole survivor. The glory would be his alone, but he would have to be careful. They had set off as sixteen fighting-age men against seven misfits; now they were—he was—one against six.
The bulk of the airship's provisions were ashes riding the trade winds, but he had carried off a rifle, a pouch of blackrue, and a few other effects. Surely, last night's battle had drained Farisa's powers—recovery might cost her days, possibly weeks, and the tincture would keep her muzzled as long as he needed.
After the battle, Chace followed the six through increasingly dense woods. They traveled slowly—they would have been immobile had they not put their gimped nyrrit on their sole unta—and, at each moment, Chace sized up the opportunity. A sniper’s sole advantage was surprise; it was not given up for free. On the first day, a clean shot did not materialize; if he fired when the group was together, they would figure out his location in time to respond.
At sunset, he smelled their cooking fire. His hunger was catching up with him. The odorless airship rations had barely filled him, and he had now gone thirty hours without a meal. He had to eat something, but what was edible out here? He knew nothing of this world’s plants or fungi—he had never been too thrilled about mushrooms back home—and the tiny bright lizards he frequently saw scurrying were surely poison on four legs if they could keep such colors and survive. Birds would require the use of his loud rifle, so mammalian meat would be the safest bet. He set a snare trap in the last of the day’s light. He hoped the night would stay warm—a fire was no option—and went to sleep early on the hard ground.
His trap worked; he woke up to an animal’s shriek, so like a human’s it gave him an erection. In the absolute dark, he grabbed the snare's rope and felt his way to the animal's neck, which he snapped so it would stop fighting. Hunger took control of him and, though he could not see the furry creature, skinned it quickly. He suspected it of being some kind of hare. No cooking fire could be made out here—no matter, he ate it raw..
The earthy iron taste of blood filled his mouth; his lips imbibed that gentle living warmth—neither the touch of time’s coldness, nor the sharp dry heat of cooked food—and he fell into ravenous ecstasy. This was the delicious taste of triumph; the wild had designed these odors and textures for victors only. The fresh-fallen flesh tickled his teeth at the gums; the juices soothed his parched throat. His tongue curled around a creamy elastic tube of tissue, the best feature yet, and it gave a delicious pop as his incisors punctured it.
The matter inside had a grassy, buttery taste, pleasant for a tenth of a second before it curdled into violent bitterness, causing him to gag. He spat, but the tar-like substance stuck to his tongue, sticky as napalm. He coughed and spat, but could not dislodge the stinking chyme from the roof of his mouth until he put his fingers in to remove it.
The rest of the night, he would wake up and find his chin itching, scratch his trimmed beard, and find a stuck blade of grass. The odor would not go away.
The sun seemed to rise in a hurry, as if accusing him of indolence for his failure to strike. As he watched these people pack up camp in the morning, he tried to decide the order in which he would open fire. Their leader, Claes, would have to fall first. The Wyovian man, who seemed to be their doctor, Chace could take second. Or would it be better to leave Claes alive, but take out their husker? They would be on nature’s time the moment it fell; Claes would listen to reason. But could they get home with only an unta? He had his doubts.
He could see now that Claes was going off somewhere—keep going! keep going!—with the boy and Farisa. Z-6 Chace steadied his gunsights, aligned the crosshairs with the center of Claes’s chest, and put his finger on the trigger—
An animal yowled, startling him. He looked down. A silver tabby cat swished its tail.
Just a damn wildcat. Pull yourself together, Chace. This is the mission of a thousand lifetimes.
He returned his eye to the scope. He steadied his gun arm, breath drawn and held. It felt almost wrong to open fire on people who had no knowledge of his being here, but graveyards were full of honorable fighters, and this sort of opportunity would not come again. So close to victory, he could taste Farisa's fear. He scratched his finger with the trigger and—
Wings flapped overhead. He looked up. An owl had settled on a branch.
An owl. Nothing more than an owl. The cat was still staring at him. Did the wildlife down here have no fear of people? Did these animals not know what guns could do? After I’m done with them, it’s you two mothercunters.
A gentle wind pushed leaves, blocking his line of sight, so he stepped forward. A branch snapped underfoot. Had he been heard? He looked up from his gun’s scope. It did not seem so. Claes and the Wyovian had finished gathering whatever they had come out for, and were heading back to the tent.
And... now. This was Work, true Work, Company Work, and love-a-loaf did it feel good. He fired...
... as pain erupted on the crown of his scalp. The sound of his own ripping skin filled his ears. The owl had struck him, causing his first shot to miss. You stupid fucking bird. You shitting corpse cunt. He looked around and could not spot the aerial assailant. Just as well for you. The others had heard his fire; they were coming, but he could get one shot more from the rifle before switching to his handgun...
Talons collided with the back of his head, ripping out hair. Hot blood poured. A dim blur occluded half his visual field as wings flapped. He swung his rifle overhead in rage, ready to club the owl to death since he would be unable to shoot it, but his weapon struck a branch, jerked itself out of his hand, and landed on his shredded scalp, causing him to scream again.
He heard a pessima’s voice. “Are you sure ‘e—?”
“I’m sure he’s Company,” whispered a man. “I caught sight of his uniform. And that shot was definitely meant for us.”
Chace ran up a ridge, missed by two crossbow bolts. Granite boulders dotted the downhill slope on the other side; these would give him the best place to hide he’d get—with the element of surprise, with his knife or pistol, he could kill at least one of these assholes. He kept his breath as quiet as he could make it.
“Can’t leave a G-Comp alive out here,” said the woman. By her accent, Chace guessed she’d come from Exmore, and one of those double-digit districts, fourteenth or worse.
No, I will not lose Farisa to Snake Bay trash. Of fucking shit, I will not let that happen. I’ll kill her first.
“Think ’e went over there?”
“No,” said the old Wyovian. “He’s behind the big one.”
Chace looked at his fists. He wanted to kill these people—at least the woman—with his knife, because that was always the better way to kill, but his pistol was the more prudent choice. He grabbed it and...
“Meow.”
The gray cat, the one who’d found him before, had caught up with him.
“Ouragan?” said the Wyovian man.
The pessima said, “The kitty found ’im.”
The owl, who did not show the decency of returning the ounces of scalp it had borrowed from Chace, landed on a branch ten yards away. The pessima—she was missing a hand and most of a forearm—stepped out, pistol aimed at his heart.
Having no choice, he put his hands up. “I surrender.”
#
Mazie, were this man anything but G-Comp, would have felt sympathy, because the airship's explosion had reddened his skin, and his scalp and face bore evidence of a savage animal attack. His tattered uniform sported stains in colors she had never known stains to have.
Saito tied the captive’s hands together. “I worked for Geshna, long ago, so I know that you have a cyanide capsule, but I also know how cheap the Company is. There’s an eighty percent chance it doesn’t work.”
The G-Comp nodded.
“Our priority is our own safety, not your suffering. So, while we will be asking you questions, the process will only be as unpleasant as you choose to make it.”
Mazie knew, and she was sure Saito did too, that this man’s apparent cooperation in his own arrest was the result of training, not good will. He would turn treacherous as soon as an opportunity arose. She asked, “What happened to your scalp?”
The G-Comp said nothing.
“It looks like you might lose an eye. If we let you live, you’ll get to know what a glass eye smells like. I'd be curious to know."
Saito glared at Mazie, then asked the captive for his name.
“Daniel Chace.”
“Any other survivors?”
Mazie looked aside. Like he’d tell us.
“None I know of.”
As they walked back to camp, the soldat’s forearms tied behind him, Mazie said, “I’ve seen fucked-up shit, but a fallen comrade as orc bait? That’s bitched even for G-Comps.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
Mazie closed her eyes, because she had a fierce headache. “I suppose we have to take your word on that one.”
There was a question she wanted to ask, a suspicion she wanted to voice, but her mind was failing to find words fast enough to speak. The back of her head tingled. A cloud covered the morning sun but, even still, the world was too bright—paradoxically too bright and also too dim, because every momentary change of color felt like the moment before fainting, a reminder that she was not altogether well. You’ve done it now. You’ve got yourself the damn Marquessa. The tropical air stung her skin with invisible needles. Her ungainly tongue would not keep still, and mental exertion was required to stop it from rolling out of place because the red muscle wanted to twist itself off, wanted to break itself free, wanted to expand until it filled her mouth and throat... and she realized she had taken for granted her entire life the motions of breathing, which had always made sense, without instruction, but were now alien as they could not be derived from accessible principles.
Mazie’s legs shook. I’m disgusting. I’m used up. I lost half an arm and I’m a low-bred, bisexual pessima. I'm so repugnant to the useful world I had to run a thousand miles away from myself, but you never get away from what you are, you stupid girl Mazie, you never get away, you woman-loving slut out in the midst of nowhere with a band of society’s rejects. Farisa? Farisa? You got bored after a few disappointing men—so you switched colors and... What was her name? Farah? You did love her. You do love her. You tried. You should love her. She’s dying, you know that, right? The Marquessa takes mages, takes them all. It will break your heart when F— dies. You knew it. You picked her because you knew she wouldn’t live long. You just want to be in love. That's all it is for you. Love, and love again. You do not give love, you take it. Farina, was that—is that—her name? Boys or girls, Mazie? Pick one and stick with it. Do you even know who you are when you get back to the world you thought you could run away from? She won’t want you. She’ll be back in the world that calls you pessima, that calls you garbage, and then it’ll all be... it’ll all be... where are we? Where are you? What happened to your hand? Why is the sun so high? Who are all these people and why do they act like they know you? Never let them know you, never let anyone know who you really are.
The sky and trees lost color. She had seen those old men arguing with dead relatives on Exmore’s streets—she was now one of them, sobbing about some unreality she could not describe. How did madness start? With a fantasy, like this one. With a pulling inward of the skull. A long sobbing shake that doesn’t end. A loss of defense. Defense, get it? Who will defend you? No one, no one! You did a madness. You thought you could be a mage, you thought you could be a god. You did a madness and the madness is doing you.
A dark-skinned woman handed Mazie a canteen. She was attractive, but socially awkward and slightly imperious; a certain assumed familiarity made her strident. "Drink. You're dehydrated."
Mazie took a swig—she was thirsty, and it was hot today—but her throat clamped shut; her body had forgotten the difference between drinking and drowning, so it rejected the water as if it were poison. She cried in shame.
“As fast or slow as you need.” The woman sat across from her on a rock. “I’m with you, sweetheart.”
“Sweetheart?” I don’t even know you. We’ve never met before.
She tried to drink again. She had to gargle to prepare before she could take anything down. Her heartbeat slowed a little bit, but she could not figure out where she was—she was sure she had seen all of Exmore, but this park's vegetation was downright odd, and she could see no city landmarks.
“I seem to have misplaced myself,” Mazie said after a long pause.
The dark-skinned woman laughed. “It happens to me, too. All the time. Let’s get back with the others.”
The two of them rejoined the other vagrants. These people were clearly newly homeless; their features, though aged by that life, were still too handsome to have been in it for more than a year.
Mazie asked, “Where are we going?”
“South,” said the middle-aged man whose trimmed beard had gone white. “South today, just as everyday.”
“Of course,” she said. It settled into her mind that, wherever these people were taking her, none of this was Exmore. By ten in the morning, the sun was alarmingly high; even in summer, shadows weren't supposed to be this short.
Mazie said to the brown woman, “You’re very pretty.”
She was puzzled, but responded, “Thank you.”
“What’s your name?”
The woman scoffed at Mazie, as if she had said something silly; then, she glared. The woman had spoken, up to this point, with a charming lilt, but now she had the monotone one expected from a doctor.
“The episode you had shouldn’t happen again. If it does, let me know or let him know,” she said as she pointed to the dark-haired Wyovian man.
She’s Farisa, Mazie remembered, for a moment. We know each other. We were—
So much had stood clear and true for a second and a half, then faded like a dream. Her eyes locked with the pink flowers of a palm tree in the distance. I’m not supposed to be here. And there is something off about these people. Where are they taking me, and why?
She looked at her arm, saw that half of it was missing, and screamed.
#
Shit, shit, shit. Farisa waited for Saito and Andor and Eric to calm Mazie down, to guide her through acceptance of what she should never have had to accept in the first place, but was true now on account of a man they had killed.
Farisa knew the consequences of using magic to kill could be dire, but she had been hoping Mazie, who had lit up the airship in the defense of herself and five others, would be spared. Alas, the woman's memory was fading. Farisa wondered if anything similar had happened to her yet. No, that's ridiculous. I remember everything.
Claes double-checked the knots that Satio had used to tie back the arms of the group’s new captive, a leering blond man from the airship. Farisa—to avenge Runar's death, and because of what was now happening to Mazie—wanted to scream at him, but an outburst would show emotion to a man who deserved to see none. The anguish, she decided, would come no higher than her throat. The acids of her stomach, given time, would dissolve it..
They made twelve miles on December 3; their path rose back into the mountains. The temperature dropped by three flags in the hour after sunrise, so they sat their captive near the fire to keep him warm. The Globbo way would have been to freeze him, to starve him, to beat him until he fainted in agony then wake him and beat him some more, but even after thousands of miles and great losses, they were better than that.
Claes did open the first interrogation that evening with a smack across Chace's face.
“This is for Runar. It’s not how we prefer to do things, but you won’t respect us if we don’t avenge him. So, there you go.”
The man in gray gave a knowing smile, and nodded.
“We have worse in store, but we hope we won't need it.” Claes looked up at the starry sky. “You gave your name as Daniel Chace.”
“Correct. Formerly a Z-6.”
“You say formerly?”
“There is no Global Company down here, sir.”
“We wish to keep it that way.”
“As you should.”
“You’re quick to disavow them,” Claes said. “Two days ago, you were on that airship.”
Farisa stepped between him and the fire and crossed her arms. “You tried to kill us.”
“I am a mere conscript. A survivor. I have no illusions. I’m captured. What would the Company do for me now? I am of no use to them and it is surely their preference that I die. It would be too expensive to save me.”
“So you say.” Farisa tilted her head back. “Tell me. Why’d you take this mission?”
He gave an irksome smile. “I came for you, of course.”
“Toward what purpose would I have been put?”
“The Patriarch is almost sixty. Someone with your talents could give him more vitality and time.”
Farisa knew Chace was holding something back, but entering his mind would have been impossible, given the fatigue of her abilities after the battle two days ago. Simply walking today's miles had left her as sore as if she had run them. She would, if she wanted information, have to do this the ordinary way."
“That was hardly the sole motivation,” she said.
“The Patriarch believes that a public display of your presence would give credence to the, uh... new direction in which he wants to take the Company.”
She dug her boot heel into the ground. “New direction?”
“You would probably not survive the transition.”
“So I thought.” Farisa uncrossed her arms. “Don’t forget, you’re with outlaws now.”
“Your hands stay tied for now,” Claes said. “We have one unta, which Andor needs. This means that if we can’t trust you on your walking feet—”
“I understand what you would have to do.”
“Good.”
Farisa waited to hear Daniel Chace say something of his own accord, but he kept silent over the next two days. He ate all the food offered, but never requested more. He did not complain, not even in the convivial trade of gripes about insects and weather, nor did he banter. He did laugh at a joke—one of Runar’s, retold by Farisa for Mazie’s benefit.
Andor, in that time, had carved a sturdy crutch out of a log they had found. With it, he could walk two miles before needing the unta. Eric’s spirits seemed high, and he was quick to finish camp chores; he seemed less troubled by the brutality of Lethe Tell than Farisa had expected a boy should be. As these hours of normalcy passed, Saito and Claes seemed to improve in mood as well—they did not seem to mind so much the daily roots and rocks of the journey, the rough terrain and stuck wheels. Fatigue showed itself on their faces, but they felt confident of a long, well-deserved rest in Malisse.
On the other hand, Farisa was scared by Mazie’s condition. When they had performed Runar’s sunset ceremony on the fourth, Mazie cried over his pyre and shared coherent stories and true memories; but the next morning, she woke in terror and demanded that her “kidnappers” tell her how to get back to Exmore. Sometimes it would take more than an hour to calm the woman down—to remind her of who she was, why she had come this way, and where they believed they were going.
This would soon get much worse.
#
In the harsh light of tropical noon—Farisa squinted as she looked at the sky—they reached an abandoned campsite.
“You’ll find nothing,” Daniel Chace said, after looking around, as if he’d been given the right to have opinions. “Just orc filth.”
Farisa and Claes looked at each other. The Z-6 was probably right, but out of defiance, they decided to search. The fact that this despised man had expected them to find nothing forced them to make shine of whatever they find, even if they uncovered no more than a clean bone.
Mazie discovered a small leather case. It had likely fallen into tall grass during the rainy season; in this dry hour, it could be spotted in the brush.
“It appears you were wrong,” Farisa said to the Z-6.
The man looked down.
Farisa opened the hand-sized pack; inside, she found a few coins and a dried-out crude pen, as well as a deck of paper cards.
“What are those?” Mazie asked.
“Playing cards, I think.”
She laid them out on a stone. She admired the minimalism of their design: the four suits had been represented with solid-color symbols, two red and two black. The printing seemed inexpensive but elegant, simple so the cards could be easily produced. The shapes were crisp; the faces on the (presumably) high-ranking cards were more intricate.
“A sign of civilization,” Farisa said.
Andor said, “Our kind, or orcish?”
“Orcish.” She handed him one of the figure cards. “How strange.”
Eric pointed at a card with a white rectangle and a solid red circle at its center. “What’s that one?”
“It appears to be a fifth suit.” Farisa looked through the entire deck. “And there are more like this.”
She counted twenty-five such cards as she laid them out. The swatches were almost always rectangular, usually with bold colors. Some were simple designs, rectangles divided in two or three, vertically or horizontally. The white one, with the solid red circle, made Farisa think of a morning sun. There were others with crosses; one had a red maple leaf; there was one in red, black, and green with an oblong shield at its center.
“And these two.” She paired the cards together between fingers. “They’re almost the same.” The common picture was relatively complex—fifty-four white stars in a sea-dark corner, with red and white stripes on the fringe—but one had its colors swapped in a region shaped like a hammer and scythe.
“I know what these are,” Andor said. “They’re Matra symbols.”
Farisa stepped back. “Matra as in the Mother World?”
Andor nodded, then explained that a belief of many ancient religions, though ridiculed and doubted by modern philosophers, was that all the people in this world were descendants of a race on another planet—called Matra—that was inexplicably similar in nature and climate to the one they knew.
“It seems far-fetched,” Claes said.
“I don’t believe it myself. There’s no evidence of life on other planets. Daraya would be too cold, while Prado and Ki are too hot.”
Farisa picked up a card with a spiral-and-star. Numerals had been written under it; she could cross reference those with glyphs on other cards, the semantics revealed by the counts of corresponding symbols.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Seven, three, one, seven,” she said. “Seventy-three seventeen. Did anything happen in that year?”
Andor shrugged.
“Beats me,” Claes said.
“Shit,” Farisa said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Claes asked, “What’s wrong?”
She closed her eyes. “It’s all too much on top of too much.”
The men looked at each other, as if she had uttered a sentence in a foreign language.
She held up the card. “This spiral-and-star is exactly the same as the Vehu one. It could be...”
No one said anything.
“We might be... descendants of orcs. We might be orcs. We just killed hundreds of our own kind.”
“We did so in self-defense,” Saito said.
“Did we?” Farisa buried her face in her hands. “To them, we’re invaders. They’re right not to want us in their world, not because of anything we have done or will do, but because, if the Company follows us, their entire civilizations may be destroyed. The grandchildren of ‘orcish’ priests and scholars will be captured and locked up in the basements of those Globbo pyramids, and it will all be our fault.”
Her mind continued the dialogue, playing it out with such a loud interior rumble, it felt like her own personal earthquake. We are the monsters down here, not these “orcs.” I am the biggest Monster of them all, because I brought a warlike race into a place where it does not belong. I am no better than that forty-eyed thing in Cait Forest, and what even was that? Was it even real? Or am I the one who started the fire? I must have killed that woman in the striped dress. I must be the reason Cait Forest burned. Why, though? I never wanted to kill anyone. So why?
Her mind replayed, for a moment, a sequence of events in Cait Forest, but her soul refused to suffer the light, so the aperture closed and her memory rejected the mark.
She gathered the cards and returned them to their case.
#
Farisa watched as Mazie’s eyes opened. The woman’s eyes darted in the dawn light. She looked at her missing hand, screamed, and bolted from her sleeping bag, kicking a pole on the way out of the tent. She brandished a knife.
“What the ’ell did you do to me?”
Saito, who had snuck behind her, grabbed her knife arm. The blade fell into the dirt.
“I’ll explain everything,” Farisa said. “You came freely with us. The reason you don’t remember is—”
Mazie trembled. “The fuck I came freely. Let me go!”
Claes put a wet towel on the woman’s face, but she squirmed and bit his hand through it.
Farisa said, “Let me ask you something. One question, is all.”
“I’m not telling you shit until you tell me where—”
“When, Mazie.”
“What?”
“When do you think we are?”
“Today’s date?”
Farisa nodded.
“Fuck should I know. February? Yeah, February. Yesterday was the ninth, so—“
“February 10. What year?”
“You ’ave to be kidding me.” Mazie looked around. “Ninety-four.”
“This is progress,” Farisa said. “Yesterday, you thought it was March of ’93, so you’re only off by eight months instead of twenty-one. It is December 6.”
“It’s fucking hot.”
“We’re not in Exmore.”
Mazie growled. “Why should I believe a word you say?”
“You’ll want to sit down for the rest of this. We’ve talked about it before, but..."
Saito led Mazie to a log and she and Farisa talked.
Exactly as yesterday, Farisa told Mazie how they had come to travel together. She recounted all they had accomplished. Nothing of this process was quick: it could take an hour or two to regain enough trust and rapport for Mazie to accept that she had lived a whole life out here and somehow lost most of the memory of it. Claes had taught Farisa to establish prior history by use of knowledge most people wouldn’t know, but this required care; every time Mazie was confronted with an intimate detail about herself, by people she now considered strangers, she was as likely to respond with paranoid fury as to submit to the fact. Usually, it would be nine or ten in the morning—they would be two or three miles into a walk by this point, because they couldn’t wait forever for one person to come around—when Mazie returned to her usual self. What often did the trick, though it could not be forced, would be for Mazie to perform some routine camp or trail chore with fluency proving she had been out here for a while, which would make her accept that this journey had actually happened. It would put her at ease—for a while—but every morning, her mind would come undone.
Mazie was invariably the one to feed their surly captive, because she was the only one who could stand to go near him. Daniel Chace was never impolite, but he had failed to apologize for his role in Runar’s death. No one had much desire to kill him, because he was unarmed and harmless now, but there was little use in speaking to him except for interrogation, which was a long process.
Physically, their wounds from Lethe Tell were healing. The moral exhaustion worsened. Every morning, Farisa had to explain to Mazie who she was and how they had come to this unbelievable place, and every evening, the memories would fade and the same tale would have to be told again. Z-6 Daniel Chace once joked that it would be better to leave this dangerous woman behind in her sleep one morning.
Fuck you, Globbo scum. Mazie is one of us. She was, and she always will be.
Saito’s mental state also seemed to be deteriorating. Before Lethe Tell, he had been one of the group’s earliest risers, but of late he could sleep until seven or eight, eyes closed, in a state that seemed restless. “Amethyst,” he would say in repetition, as if desiring to bleed the word of meaning, and would wake up with no recollection of doing so.
Farisa counted the invisible miles. Malisse was less than two hundred miles away; there was no guarantee of anything being there, but the place—the City of Honey, five thousand years old—provided hope. She could almost pretend, on a hot day along a mountain stream, that Runar had gone ahead to scout and would be coming back with news of a trout stream, and that he would tell jokes by the evening’s campfire, and that he would scratch the spot above the brow of his ruined eye and either warn them of an imminent presence or tell them that they were probably safe. He was gone, gone like Garet and Talyn and countless animals they had never named.
Humid heat—they were losing elevation now—reached a level that did not let up at night. They were running out of medicine for Andor’s pain. They were down to one unta, one husker; they had a Globbo in their midst. The hours blurred together. Mazie’s memory had become an abused palimpsest; it was now fading more often—twice or three times in a day.
They came to a lake before sunset on December 9. All went for a swim but Mazie, who had stayed back to watch their captive. Farisa, clean after wading in, found her senses crisp for the first time since the battle of Lethe Tell. Her skin no longer itched; dinner was more flavorful; the stars were pointed and bright again.
“You should swim too, Mazie,” Farisa said. “I’ll take you.”
The woman, as she stood up, pulled a gun. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Claes stood, “What the hell is this, Mazie?”
“Tell me what you plan to do with me.”
“Put the gun down.” Farisa looked around. “We’ll answer every question you have. We’ve done this before.”
Mazie looked at the missing arm, then shook. “Promise me you won’t cut anything else off.”
“Maze, we didn’t. We never harmed you. We never would. I’m Farisa. Remember? I’m Farisa La’ewind.”
Mazie lowered the gun. Andor snatched it and tossed it aside. Saito handed Mazie a small book and said, “You’ve been writing in this.”
“This? I’ve never seen it before. What’s in it?”
“I haven’t read it,” Saito said. “None of us have. It’s your journal.”
Mazie opened it and turned through the pages. “This isn’t my handwriting.”
“You wrote it with your left hand,” Farisa said.
“Don’t insult me.”
“Read it aloud. Tell me if it rings.”
“You know these people and are safe with them.” Mazie looked at Farisa. “I think I did write that. I suppose I... I’m missing so much.” A tear fell down Mazie’s cheek. “When will this stop happening?”
Farisa handed Mazie a fountain pen. “Do me a favor. Take time to make sure it looks like your proper handwriting, and write on the inside of your arm: Farisa is with me always. Do it again each night so the ink doesn’t fade.”
“Farisa is with me always,” Mazie said as she wrote.
Daniel Chace snickered.
Farisa turned, glaring at him. “What?”
“I’m not the one who should be tied up.”
#
On December 10, Claes decided to call a fishing day. Since Lethe Tell, they’d had only coffee and hardtack to eat. The real purpose of the sojourn, however, was to get the others out of the way—or at least have them appear to be so, because interrogation never worked well with an entire group on the questioning side. Saito and Andor, by midday, had snuck back and were behind the tent, in case the situation turned dangerous. Mazie was still out fishing with Eric.
Claes said to Farisa before they approached the Z-6, “You're sure you want to?”
“I can lead it,” she said.
“I’ll be a silent partner. A mediator, if one is needed.”
They led Chace to a mossy rock that would make a comfortable seat and the two of them sat across from him on cut logs that, by positioning them in lower seats, would give him a false sense of power. They made small talk for half an hour to establish a baseline for truthfulness and deception, openness and anxiety.
To convince their captive that the interrogation had ended, though it had in fact begun, Claes said, “I trust you can finish up. I’ll go see if the kid has caught anything to eat.”
Farisa smiled; this had been rehearsed. She knew that Claes would be fifty yards away, rifle ready in case Daniel Chace did anything dangerous.
Farisa asked, “How old were you when you decided to work for the Company?”
“Six,” Chace said.
“Six? Do you know where I was when I was six?”
“I don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Farisa looked down. A long granite pebble lay in the shape of a nail. “Why should we believe your loyalties are with us now?”
“As I said before, I don’t see a thing they can do for me here or now.”
Farisa’s toes flexed inside her scuffed boot. “So, it’s all about what someone can do for you?”
“They sent me on a suicide mission.” He straightened his back. “One I would surely fail. As I did.”
He had stated an unfavorable truth about himself as a counter-interrogation tactic—to build rapport, but reveal nothing new, since there was no doubt among any of them that his mission had failed.
Unswayed, she said, “As I see it, you won. All those other poor bastards burned to death.”
“They were weak. The six of you are strong.”
Farisa put two fists between her denim-clad knees. “So, you respect strength. Is that it?”
“I grew up in a world where one has no choice.”
Farisa paused. Chace had a rugged look, teeth slightly crooked in an otherwise hardy face. It would have been difficult for a normal woman to dislike him, but she was—in this rare moment, she took it as a strength—no normal woman. She waited for Chace to get visibly uncomfortable—he did not fully understand why the attractiveness of his features failed to distract her—before she spoke.
“You could be of use to us. None of us want to kill you.” She rolled her tongue in her mouth. “We’ve seen far too much death. To kill you, after all that, is the sort of thing Globbos would do. We’re better than they are. Of course, if you put us in danger, and we have to defend ourselves...” She clicked her tongue.
“I understand,” he said.
“Our priority is keeping this place secret. We’ve been trying for months to throw the Globbos off our scent. We spread rumors in Portal that we had all died. We sent back Claes’s journal, soaked in skrum fluid. We even left a wrecked wagon in a river.”
The Z-6 chuckled. “Do you think any of that worked?”
“Dissuade the Company? No. With its endless resources, it can chase down a one-percent chance. Erode the courage, at an individual level, of the people sent? Perhaps.”
“Such devices wouldn’t even kick a five-grot bounty hunter,” Chace said with a condescending smile. “You’re Farisa.”
“That I know,” Farisa said as she stood up and paced. “I also know you can’t go home empty-handed. You’d have no proof of your bravery, no proof of anything. No one would believe your story. The way Globbos think—”
“They’d suspect I had killed my companions, to return a hero on my word alone.”
“Right. Which wouldn’t work, by the way. They’d hang you and you’d die like a common deserter.”
“Good reasoning. Cait Forest teach you that?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I taught there, asshole.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m sure you were fantastic.”
“Nice attempt at flattery.” Perhaps this man was not irredeemable. She sat back down and looked into his blue eyes. “Here’s what I’m thinking. They’ve intercepted enough of my letters to know my handwriting, and I’ve got a book called Jakhob’s Gun where I’ve written in the margins. That will prove you’ve met me. But we both know that won’t be enough to hodge them off. Not far from us, there is—at least, there was in ancient times—a great city, Malisse.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“And it may not exist, but in the past, they had powerful magic, far beyond what exists today. They might be able to restore Mazie’s hand—”
“And her memory, you hope.”
Farisa did not acknowledge his comment. “If they can heal lost body parts, you’ll go home with more than my handwriting. I’ll give you... my face.”
“Your face?”
Farisa shrugged. “If they can grow it back for me—if they have the magic for that—I don’t see why not. You’ll have ‘proof’ you slew a witch.”
“Hampus Bell wants you caught alive, though.”
“Well, that I cannot provide. You will have done the best one can. You will still be a legend. You will be impressive to others, and you will live in comfort.”
Chace nodded. “It’s merciful, your offer.”
“It’s not for your sake, moron.” Farisa chuckled. “If you disappear down here, the Company will send another airship, but if you return—with proof that you have met me—and say there’s absolutely nothing, they might not.”
“You intend to stay down here forever?”
Farisa looked aside. “I’m not sure.”
“Your plan is intelligent, Farisa.”
“It’s not perfect,” Farisa admitted. “It has a glaring hole.”
“Which is?”
“I still have to figure out if I can trust you.”
#
The interrogation was finished by one in the afternoon, so they were able to make a dozen miles before setting up camp. Their captive, in spite of having no hands free, ate everything served and thanked them for dinner. They were beginning not to hate each other.
Mazie and Farisa were the last ones up, sitting by the campfire around ten o’clock on a night when the winds were variable, the air was desert dry, and the stars were uncommonly bright.
“My memory is coming back,” Mazie said. “More and more, it all makes sense.”
Farisa waved smoke away from her face. “That’s good.”
“I remember the day I met you. Not much about it, but it was in that railyard under... unusual circumstances.”
Farisa laughed. “Unusual. That is one word you could use.”
“I was impressed. None of us riffraff knew anything about you, but your name was all over the graffiti. ‘Farisa will arrive.’ And you did. You did arrive. And... I also believe I remember the day I met Claes. It was cloudy, unusually cool for late spring. The seventeenth of May.”
“That one I slept through,” Farisa confessed. “I had overdrawn myself. Nothing like...” She looked north and slightly east, in the direction of Lethe Tell, though they were too far away to see it. “Still, it left me sore and tired.”
“And then I believe that, on the ship to Bezelia—the ship here—I got seasick. Is that right?”
Farisa nodded. “It happens to the best of us.”
“You made me feel better.” Mazie tossed a twig into the fire. “Didn’t we play ehrgeiz in Muster?”
“Obbela.”
“Obbela. That’s right. Very hot. Six flags?”
“More than seven. Do you remember who won that game?”
Mazie smacked Farisa’s upper arm. “That you asked means you did.”
“We did. You taught me how to play.”
Mazie looked at Farisa. “I did, didn’t I?”
A blast of smoke stung Farisa’s eyes, so she moved over to Mazie’s side of the fire. “I also lost quite a bit of memory,” the mage said. “Just after the forest fire, the one everyone believes I set. I forgot, for a while, about my first love.”
Mazie wrapped her arms around her bare knees. “Tell me about him.”
Farisa chuckled. “Her name was Raqel. She was my best friend in Tevalon. She still lives there.”
“A woman?” Mazie puzzled her brow. “You prefer girls? I would never have guessed.”
A log settled in the fire. Glowing ash sprites climbed air.
“I’m not judgmental. It isn’t my thing, but I don’t have a problem with it.”
“I am utterly exhausted,” Farisa said. “Claes wants us all to be up by five. I’m going to bed.”
Mazie grabbed her arm. “Wait.”
“What?”
“We’ve been friends for a long time, right?”
“Of course, Mazie, and I’m sure we always will be.”
“I have a bit of a headache. Do you think I could have an extra dose of that snow lotus you all take?”
“Snow lotus?” Farisa crossed her arms. She knew Saito’s inventory. They had no such medicine. “You don’t need that. It doesn’t do much anyway.” She kissed the top of Mazie’s forehead. “Good night.”
#
“Get the fuck up.” Farisa shoved the sleeping captive. The dark sky spun noiselessly overhead. “Now.”
Daniel Chace, the Z-6, looked at her and, for the first time, showed resistance. “Where are we going?”
“There’s something we need you to see.”
His hands were tied behind him, so he had to roll into a seated position, then kneel, before he could stand. “In the middle of the night?”
“You’ll see it just fine.” Farisa grabbed him by the arm to lead him.
He barked, “Don’t touch me!”
“You don’t get to decide that, asshole.”
Ten minutes ago, Claes and Saito had both offered to do this, but she felt a personal desire to see this one through. If she’d had her full powers about her, she could have prevented it. They had, of course, taken all of his possessions upon capture—the knives, the cyanide—and this included the vial of white powder, which he claimed to be snow lotus extract, used to sweeten coffee in Moyenne.
“I blame myself.” Farisa scoffed. “Snow lotus. Do you even drink coffee?”
Chace said nothing; dried-out leaves rustled beneath their feet.
“Why don’t you tell me what the stuff really was?”
“Does it matter, at this point?”
“I’m going to guess it was... paladinite. Is that it?”
He said nothing, but kept walking at her pace..
“Mazie’s first loss of memory, that wasn’t your fault. It could have happened to me, but the worsening—the need every morning to convince her that we are not dangerous strangers—should have tipped me off. You drugged her overnight, didn’t you?”
“She drugged herself.”
“Bullshit.” She led him, by lantern light, through dense undergrowth. She considered using her machete to cut through it, but decided to let the twigs and branches and briars be, since they would fling back at the man behind her, who could not block his face. “You tried to turn her against us.”
He said nothing.
“Somehow, you won her trust. What did you say to her?”
“I told her what you were. Criminals and kidnappers. You don’t know her as well as you think you do, Farisa. She’s... she’s garbage from South Exmore. In a group of six other people, who is she going to trust? She’s going to believe the other prisoner.”
“We’re almost there,” Farisa said as she unsheathed her machete to cut through a wall of tough vines atop a ridge.
Chace had fallen behind. “Shit. My boot’s stuck on something. I can’t move.”
“Come on!”
“My leg is stuck.”
Farisa turned around. He stepped forward with an unstuck leg and kicked her in the shin. Then he slammed the crown of his head into the side of hers, causing her balance to fail. To get away before she fell, she flew herself downhill, landing away from him but with the machete out of her hand.
The man stomped through the grass, seething in anger. She could see by his silhouette that his arms were free—he had either undone his restraints or convinced Mazie to do so, the true knots replaced by false stoppers. She could hear his breath getting closer until he was no more than five yards away.
He’s going to kill me. She chastised herself for taking him out here, for insisting on doing this task alone. Stupid, stupid vengeful girl. Why had she brought him out here? To ask more questions? To gain a sense of closure? Violence was sometimes necessary, but there was never closure in it—and how had she failed to learn that?
She grabbed a two-handed rock and fell as silent as she could. As he kicked through the grass, she waited for him to come close. She slammed the stone on his kneecap. He howled in pain, which she hoped would wake the others, though it’d take time for them to arrive. She tried to enter the blue, but was still recovering from Lethe Tell and could not do so. She slammed the stone again on his shinbone, then his ankle. The machete swung an inch over the back of her head. She rolled to dodge it and pulled his damaged leg out from under him. He collapsed. She stood up and stomped on the wrist of his blade arm, causing his fingers to loosen and the machete to fall.
His notions turned sluggish and his eyes closed. She straddled him, still holding the stone she’d used to hobble him. She lifted the stone over her head.
No. That’s too good for him. Wait for his eyes to open, so he can feel the fear.
His long arms reached up—he had not fainted at all—and closed around her neck. When her inner throat touched itself, panic rattled her hands and the stone fell uselessly on his chest. He lifted her so that, while her fists swung, she could not reach him. An awful rattling sound came from her body and he squeezed the life and air from it.
She tried to enter the blue; the blue was not there; the blue was as unavailable as breath. This man was too strong for her. Three minutes. Three horrible minutes, then it’ll be over. Her body shook in anger and her limbs seemed to swing of their own accord, but when her boot connected with the Globbo’s knee, already damaged by several strikes with the stone, she heard a crunching sound and she repeated the kick, causing his face to tighten and his arms to slacken, though his grip remained strong. She dug her thumb into the flesh around his fractured knee and worked the damage. The man yowled. Eventually, his grip loosened enough that she could breathe. She grabbed the stone on his chest and smashed it on his face, blasting his features red with blood until he was unconscious. To ensure he would not be able to harm her, she broke both of his arms. The fight was over.
She waited for him to wake up, holding the machete to his throat.
“What is your name?”
His eyes had opened, but he did not respond. She would not kill him yet; she would wait for him to be aware of who he was—aware of who was being killed.
A few seconds had passed. “What is your name?”
No response. She spat on his face. He winced in half-featured disgust. It did not matter if he was playing false at this point; she had destroyed three of his four limbs and was no threat to her. She considered that it might be better to leave him out here to die, fully conscious and abandoned, and was ready to do so but found herself saying, again:
“What is your name?”
“I’m Z-6 Daniel Cha—”
But he wasn’t. As her blade tore the flesh of his throat, he ceased to be just one person. He was the Betrayer, a million-faced adversary. He was Hampus Bell, a friend of her fathers who had killed her mother in spite. He was Kanos, whom they should have dumped in the Ivory Ashes if not before. He was Erysi, in Cait Forest. The Z-6 gurgled and his ruined limbs shook, but the deed was now done, as quick as a red line of paint. Flesh a mother had once loved was now a hundred and sixty pounds of worm food.
Farisa’s skin turned clammy. Her heart spun inside her chest like a tornado, and she felt such nausea she wanted to bury her head in her knees, but sight was the only protection against her mind’s horrid moving pictures, the sights she would see in the black, so instead she looked up at the night sky for any source of light—a comet, a star, a meteor—she could hang her gaze upon.
#
A History of Wytchcraft, 6500–8250 warns the reader not to think of windwalking as a skill or talent, because the reflex cannot be controlled:
Princess Dzai, in the aftermath of her trauma, found herself moving with celerity and fluidity while invisible to the rest of the world. She recovered awareness three hours later, two hundred miles away, with no recollection of travel.
There was a scent of honey, pulling southward. Malisse cannot be far away; I will be first of my world to see it. She was giddy, but terrified, because her rapid movement in this weightless, painless body could not be stopped. She closed her eyes and the self-same sky lifted her; she mixed her mind with sweet odors; she rode the vapors of place and time as they separated and joined around the branches of trees. She hovered as long as a thought could be held; she moved by miles in each saccade. She would have to find a way to steady herself, to touch the ground or the root of some willing plant, if she wanted the sense of wholeness that came from being solidly in one place.
Qaelet, she could see, existed—if she could slow her choppy enough to move in a straight line, she could go there.
#
“Amethyst.”
Saito bolted awake with one word in his mouth. He did not remember dreams—had not, if he were limited to all he could remember, dreamt in decades. Why would he have them? Dreams were for children—especially nightmares. What could frighten a man who had done Company work? No flickering false future could wound a soul the past had already maimed.
It is not a nightmare I have had. Whenever he blinked, he still saw himself trapped inside a rubble of purple stone, and had to swing his arms to convince himself the morning air was real. The horrible thing that had flown into his brain was not stray nighttime electricity—because I am close enough that...
He hurried to wake the others. They searched the area around the campfire, but the woods were so dense it would have been impossible to go without leaving tracks. Eric found Z-6 Daniel Chace’s body.
“She clearly won the fight,” Claes said.
“There are no tracks out of here,” Saito said.
“There must be,” said Andor.
“There’s nothing.”
“I suspect...” Mazie started.
The others looked at her.
“I suspect the lack of tracks tells a story.”
Saito’s face contorted. He was more convinced than ever they had to get to Malisse as fast as they could. “Mazie’s right.”
#
She walked the red clay road. Two hundred miles to the north, people whose names she had forgotten were looking for her. The sky was dark blue; it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. Conifers shimmered, batting the light like a cat’s toy. The mage’s legs and ribcage hurt, though she had cast no spell, instead feeling as if the pains of a prior life had landed in this future body with a hard thud. She wanted to rest, but movement had come effortlessly thus far and she was near her destination, so she resolved to walk the rest of the way. She spotted a wooden signpost. She could not read the lettering at first, but the symbols rearranged themselves for her benefit: Malisse—2.6 miles.
Tiny black lizards with white spines crossed her path. Trees seemed to hang back from this road, as if deferential to those traveling it, so she could often see far.
She had come about a mile closer to her destination when she saw the dark-haired little girl in a purple dress, coming the other way.
The girl spoke first. “Are you Farisa?”
“She, I am.”
The girl handed her a white cotton robe. “I brought you this. It gets cold up here.”
“Thank you.” Farisa realized she was quite chilly—the sky, a blur up to this point, had steadied and she could see by the orange horizon that it was minutes before sunrise—and put it on. The soft cotton felt impossibly fine against her shoulders.
“We have plenty of food in the city. Until we get there, have these.” The girl gave her a palmful of nuts, a mix of green and gold, oblong and round. Farisa did not recognize their species, but she was so hungry she ate them all. Their taste was woodier than she had expected, but their sweet afterglow left her wanting more.
She stifled a burp. “These are excellent. What’s your name?”
“I’m Sayuna.”
“Is all the food this good in the City of Honey?”
Sayuna stopped. “It’s best if you don’t call it that.”
“What should I call it, then?”
“Our city is Qaelet, in the Amethyst Vale.”
“Qaelet in the Amethyst Vale,” Farisa repeated.
The red road continued; it curved, then dipped, then cut through a hedge of bushy conifers that had been planted to block sight, beyond which their path rose gently to meet the Iron Gate, set into a dun-colored wall five stories high. Through the gate’s bars, one could see Qaelet, which had been designed so all its features struck the eye at the same time. Golden spires gleamed red as the sun rose. Ornate temples had been carved into hillsides. The tallest buildings’ variegated domes, painted brightly in white and purple, dwarfed the city’s outer well.
Once the girl had taken Farisa to the Iron Gate, a man greeted them from the other side and opened it. “Thank you, Sayuna.”
He introduced himself as Roqon. He was bald and thin, very handsome on the whole, but of illegible age. He could have said he was thirty or sixty and Farisa would have believed him. He wore black leather shoes, a dark-gray kilt, and a white tunic.
Farisa extended a hand.
Roqon smiled. “No, we bow here.” He tipped forward, bending at the trunk about fifteen degrees.
Farisa copied the gesture.
Roqon led Farisa into the city. The walls of the buildings were, like the domes visible from outside, of purple-and-white themes with an occasional splash of blue, but the houses’ wooden doors seemed to be in competition with each other, with green flames, yellow swirls, and animals of which she could not be sure whether they were this new world’s species or mythological creatures. The painted outline of an angel reminded her of the mural inside Cait Forest’s chapel.
The Qaeleti people were darker-skinned than Ettasi; their noses were small, their limbs long. Some were thin and some were obese, but their faces were never unattractive. Street vendors were selling roasted nuts of some kind, and the streets smelled like spices.
Farisa said, “It’s hard to believe this place is real.”
Roqon smiled. “Real as rain and snow.”
“Snow? You get snow here?”
Roqon pointed up and south-southeast to a range of high mountains that, like a convoy of huskers, carried the sky.
“It’s very pretty here.”
“Thank you.” He led her down another street with a bustling market. “I didn’t build the place, but I do my part.” Farisa recognized very few of the fruits being sold; the spiny purple ones smelled faintly of vanilla. They climbed a steep road—Qaelet had not seemed so by sight afar, but was in fact quite hilly. Roqon stopped and touched his chin. “I speak for all of Qaelet in saying we are delighted to have you as a guest.”
“And I am delighted to be here.”
“You should know that the Mountain Road that delivered you does not end here. Instead, it goes around our city and continues for a hundred more miles. The outlying pasture is under our watch and it is safe. Your companions will enjoy our protection there, but we cannot invite them into Qaelet.”
A chilly wind, a last remnant of the black night the tropical morning sun had extinguished, crossed Farisa’s face as she asked, “Why not?”
“They’re not dead.”