2035 is the Kept Year
And a Stampede is Printed Off
The possibilities were endless, but the small pecuniary mind of Mendel Edwin went immediately to ingots, digitally modeling them after bars of gold and silver, complete with his own maker's mark.
His friends started off thinking way too tiny, probably because their rigs were just as lacking in dimension. Faxlad5005 couldn't make anything bigger than a mug, and Cardownloader13 was no better off, especially considering she lived in a country with frequent earthquakes that ruined her in-progress prints all the time. Only Mendel, known to the internet and his buyers as Poach-hacker9, was mentally and literally equipped to begin the new boom.
When his 3D printer nozzle returned to its dock he knew the first one was finished, and greedily tore open the box's glass panel to extract his treasure, latex gloves squeaking. It was light, but of course, it wasn't metal. Nor plastic. Nor resin. Nor imitation balsa. Several steps further.
Mendel wanted it to be hot in his hand, hot off the presses, but his three-dimensional printer didn't work that way. It was too cutting edge to give off any unprofessional friction. On its own, the nozzle had cost him a fortune in mammoth ivory, which he could only print in ugly crackling wafers, like cheap vanilla cookies, until the nozzle upgrade. Now he could do full sets of tusks, but only at half scale. Even his rig wasn't big enough to make full dinosaur skeletons and dunkleosteus masks.
The ingot was six inches long, three inches wide, and an all new sort of gold, creamy instead of metallic. And so light. He tossed it and caught it. Brilliant. It would be so much cheaper in terms of transportation alone. None of those idiots betting on SPORTS were going to see it coming. They assumed that just because the internet was the last thing to start falling apart that cryptocurrency was the way to go. Wrong answer. Extinction fiat was the way; Mendel knew it as sure as he held it.
One look at his home would make a visitor think he was a nature lover, filled as it was with taxidermy catfish and coyotes. The whole place smelled of fur, steel, wood, and polish, a scent never contaminated by the smells wafting out of his kitchen, because there never were any. He ate out of a fridge that was loaded from outside by a delivery drone. A company curated his meals, placed them for him to find at midnight when he opened the door and pulled them out of the cold.
All of his efforts had to go toward perfecting the extinction ingots, and utilizing what good will he had left from the rhino horn operations three years prior. What a time, and all possible because there were about thirty-five rhinoceroses left alive on the whole planet.
No matter how small the number got, the Asian market for their powdered horns never weakened, and prices only went up the closer they came to total death. The best scarcity money could buy. Back then his printer was running day and night under government contract as a way to undercut the poachers who were so often murderers now too, seeing as they had to get through multiple bodyguards to get to the animals.
Rhino horn was just keratin, the same stuff of human hair and fingernails. 3D printers had been making custom organic stick-on nails at salons across the world for years at that point, so why couldn't they make imitation rhino horns?
Poach-hacker9 was the best in the budding business; he didn't even need to scan actual horns to get convincing proportions and texture. One look at a decent photo was good enough, and the rest was modeling artistry. Every horn he made was as good as the real deal as far as any inspection went. Those looking to pour the powdered version into erectile dysfunction pills and equally bogus stamina enhancers wouldn't know any better.
So in the name of the public good, generic brand rhino went out and flooded the market, causing a cataclysmic price drop. In a short time the stuff was too cheap and plentiful to sell as sports chalk.
It sure helped Mendel cement himself as a hero of the digital age, connecting him with rogue engineers and environmentalist mavericks who could help him get samples and schematics for upgrading his one and only trade secret: the world's most complex privately owned 3D printer.
Sure it didn't turn out great for the rhinos, but as he liked to say, man minted the coins, and thus won all the tosses. Once the desperately dumb and flaccid got wind of the fakes they started paying all the more for video evidence of the rhinos being captured, slaughtered, and having their hood ornaments sawed off. That little movie would come with the powdered package, ensuring authenticity.
And that was how the last of them were taken. The guy who purchased the very last one, having spent the lives of over a dozen poachers and guards, released the video of the raid to the wider internet, just to flex his power. People wondered. If he could do all that, what did he need powdered megafauna for?
Mendel moved on to smaller and better things, but he thanked the rhinos for giving him the idea that was going to revolutionize the scared and crumbling world of finance. He tossed the golden ingot in his hand once more, laughing, utterly alone except for the glass eyes of catfish and coyotes, all aimed at his rig.
Finally. It took him an age to figure out how to use materials that weren't keratin, with bone being the next step up. The golden brick in his hand, with its rich color, light weight, and pleasing texture, was even a step up from mammoth ivory. Golden hornbill ivory. It came from the bill of a bird related to the toucan, one tougher and more regal-looking, but it had not survived into the year 2030, every bit as hunted as the rhinos, though its bill was more valued for carving into jewelry, buttons, and pen caps.
Such pieces went for countless thousands in online auctions, but their very substance was about to become the new gold standard, and Mendel would be the primary supplier: a technological and precise god who could determine exactly how much of each animal was on the planet at any given time.
His new currency would be the most stable to ever exist, since nobody could go out and discover a new deposit of golden hornbills. They were completely extinct, and that was all investors would ever need to hear. No price fluctuations would occur without their consent. Until the core of the world had been mined out there could always be an influx of precious metals, but not precious little birdies that squawked their last a decade ago.
And it didn't have to stop at decades. Centuries. Ages. Anything mankind had driven off the cliff of life to cut ornaments from was on the table for a return as currency, so long as non-fossilized samples of them remained in a museum or private collection somewhere.
If you didn't want to invest in hornbill ingots you could go with mammoth, or bills like dodo and great auk. Megaloceros antler. Smilodon fang. Supplies are limited. Call Poach-hacker9 for more information. By appointment only.
What a good thing it was that Mendel got to the technology first, he thought as he went to fetch a mystery lunch from the fridge, blissfully tossing his hornbill ingot back and forth. Most other idiots wouldn't have the bigger picture in their heads. They would've printed little figurines and thought only of collector's value. Maybe they would've gotten as far as realistic reconstructions for some of the museums that used to be zoos. None of them had the cold infinite vision that he did. Once he was the richest man in the world he would have an actual private chef living in his walk-in fridge, making him anything on command, and once he set his sights on replicating soft tissues maybe he could order a megatherium steak wrapped in enteledont bacon.
A blast of cold hit him as he pulled the fridge open to find several sports drinks in the door and but one yellow plastic box on the shelves, labeled Mediterranean stir-fry. He set the ingot down and grabbed up the box, suddenly famished. As he closed the fridge door he remembered all his silverware was soaking in the sink, his attentions for the last two days solely focused on getting the first ingot off the assembly line.
High on his own perceived creativity, Mendel ripped open the flaps on the top, ignored the heating instructions, and attacked the noodles and vegetables with two fingers, pretending they were chopsticks.
"It could be any of them," he snickered after slurping some down and sucking on his fingers. "What do people love most? Pandas? Koalas? Penguins? Let 'em kick the bucket, pick up the bones, and skip Mother Nature's middlemen! Hah! Why wait?
Make 'em extinct when they're in high demand, become the sole distributor. What do you think boys?" He looked at his coyotes and catfish. They agreed, or so he assumed. The kingdom of death was quiet and content. Any kind would be happy to join, and to help someone else secure those things with sound investments.
"All thanks to you, you beautiful..." Mendel paused. He was holding up and praising his yellow box of noodles, not his yellow ingot. The man whirled about, fuse of noodle hanging off his open lip. "Where..." The fridge. "Shit!"
He rushed back and ripped open the door. Sports drinks. Nothing else. No, that wasn't quite true. Some wisps of fog wafted out into the warmer air, suggesting the frosted interior had been disturbed moments before.
"You bastards! You sons of bitches! You were watching me!" Mendel dropped his food and didn't bother wiping his hands as he bolted for the front door, grease preventing him from turning the knob until his third try and his fifth curse.
Of course he was under surveillance. Every corporation had all the eyes they could wrangle, eyes that didn't even bother to blink now that no one was enforcing the regulations regarding private data. His doorbell camera, his air conditioning subscription, his car's rear view mirror streaming service, all should have been suspected of potential spying.
Maybe Icebox Bistro was just the first brand he'd foolishly given an opportunity. The delivery drone opened the entire back of the fridge to place new meals inside, and it also took back empty containers. Nothing stopped it from scooping up the hornbill ingot as well.
Holding his already ragged breath, Mendel stopped on his front lawn to listen. There. A buzz. It had to be the rotors of the drone making off with his future, the future of mankind. Around a tree he established visual contact, giving chase despite there being little he could do to stop it.
The machine gained altitude swiftly so it could avoid all the neighborhood trees, and was well out of his reach. His shouts, that it was breaking the law, that he was going to sue, that he was going to cancel his premium plan and unsubscribe from their mailing list, did nothing to slow it down. It might not have had auditory receptors of any kind.
Unfit to continue, Mendel was forced to stop and double over. The memory of the last time he'd run so far was lost in the vomit of his burning exhalations. By the time he looked up with tears in his eyes the drone was just a wobbly dot against an empty sky.
But then, suddenly, it became several. Pieces broke away in some sort of small detonation and plummeted to the ground. Something remained in the air, but it was no drone. Black of wing and golden of nose, it flew with grace, swooping in mocking spirals about the pieces of plastic as they fell.
Mendel threw up his hands to keep the debris from striking his face, which caused him to barely miss the creature as it flew by his ear and into the door he had left hanging open. Had some ornery blackbird just saved his invention from improper exploitation? He ignored the animal for the moment, instead searching the wreckage for any sign of his ingot. All he found was cold storage bags, circuit boards, and broken plastic rotors. It was gone.
"How could..." The hair on his neck and arms moved. Whatever it was, it was too quiet to hear, but it disturbed him. It felt like there were people in his house, watching him from the windows, passing judgment. More competitors. Now that he'd left they were mobilizing, scavenging his workspace for the key to break his monopoly before he'd even printed it.
Fresh desperation imitated the energy to run, getting him back inside where he slammed the door and locked it. Nothing else was getting out until he was sure he wasn't being watched. He quickly realized how difficult that would be, considering he'd placed so many glass eyes there himself.
They were just the dead. They could look all they wanted, and do nothing. They were inert, and only he could make them treasure, and nothing could make them anything more. His rig was the X that marked the spot, and he'd drawn it himself, forged the ability to dig up what was never buried, and to do so endlessly.
No king should fear the dark corners of his own castle, so Mendel went in search of the presence still keeping his hair at attention. Stalking from room to room, he switched off every device in sight, eventually ushering in a silence the place had not known in years. In his panic there was a small realization, that all noise was just vibration, and that all nearby vibration interfered with his printing, could lead to imperfections.
He would do it right next time. Kill everything in his immediate surroundings. Breathe into some kind of self-contained apparatus. Watch as something of the order of death was born, in total opposition to its messy, filthy, chaotic inspiration. Only when the world was dead and quiet could he count his money in peace.
Last he checked on his rig, and found it had started printing something. Was he hacked? Impossible. All data was transferred to his printer on external media, it had no connection to the internet. But the arm and nozzle were diligently at work, and much faster than usual. In his cautious approach he looked up and saw the bird perched on the glossy skin of a curved catfish trophy, like it had just caught the massive fish in its talons and was carrying it off.
"You're not a blackbird," he said, a confused fury whipping up in his mind. "You're extinct! That's the whole point of you! To die so that you are rare! Don't you get it!? Why doesn't anybody fucking get it!? Huh!? Why am I the only thing on the whole planet that deserves it!"
The golden hornbill opened its decorated beak and gave a haunting resolute cry heard by the collective ghosts of every species sampled and reproduced there, as stiff little cubes in the drawers beneath Mendel Edwin's 3D printer. They all heard their friend calling from the way out; the hornbill had found the exit from the dark hall of extinction.
"Shut up!" he screamed at it, jumping and flailing his arms, but he couldn't reach. "No one can know you're alive!" He was so angry he hadn't gotten as far as the bird's origin. It had exploded out of the drone, which had to mean it had somehow been reborn from the golden ingot. One with only the banker, only the trader, Mendel could never sense the shifting of the Tame as many people could.
All he could see was things going wrong, towers crumbling and falling over, not the saplings that would find perfect planters in now-horizontal windows. But the shift was on. The shift was steep. Every day now animals became beities and man lost his mastery of craft after craft, material after material.
The first to go were the most artificial, those elevated primarily by greed, fear, and worry. Without their loss Mendel would've had no opportunity for his scheme in the first place. Yet even now all his efforts upon his fastidious electric loom did nothing but feed into the shift, focus nature's reclamation as if through a magnifying glass.
Without him the road back from man-made extinction would've been far more difficult. Despite the losses, there were still plenty of animals left to fight back with their newfound powers. None of them had any need, nor strong desire, for other forms to claw their way back into competition from the mass grave.
But the Tame crashed like a storm surge, splashed all in its path, and the chaotic process did not go so far as to define what a beity was exactly, only that it was not a human being. The trees would become mighty in the shift's corona, as would the mushrooms, as would structures and cycles that were until then entirely inanimate, like seas, cyclones, and mountain ranges. Later beities would even say the seasons had moods, and were reincarnated rather than reoccurring.
Droplets of the thickening force struck the periphery of animals: fossils, fur coats, pearl necklaces, cartons of milk in fridges fuller than Mendel's, steaks as they hit the grill, taxidermy, and even printed samples, practically just paint swatches of extinct horns, bills, and antlers.
If mankind was not fit to rule, if they knew this, then surely they regretted all they'd done. This regret was a shift, but also a reclamation. What of their efforts could be undone would be undone, just as the blessed moles would soon drag their plastic down to the molten rivers and toss it all in.
Any extinction wrought by man was an error, and would be stripped away so they could eventually suffer a more natural and cathartic fate. The hornbill took to the air, for its prey was once again squirming. The catfish broke free of its wood panel and flopped on Mendel's carpet, gasping.
He whirled around to see an empty pedestal as a coyote tail brushed his sleeve. His collection scattered, fully aware they were mere side effects as well, and that they had to get out of the path of the main event. His rig rattled, which should've ruined the active print, but the nozzle might have been the source.
It ran wild through the air of the glass cabinet, like skywriting, leaving a dripping trail flowing over an invisible form. Mendel charged it, despite his every instinct telling him to flee with the taxidermy. This was a man that did not listen to his thirst, perhaps because it didn't know the taste of a mountain spring, despite the labels on some of the plastic he swilled from. Here was a man who did not obey his hunger, for when he did he was rewarded only with cold boxes of ingredients from around the world all made to taste like identical packing material.
He listened to his greed, his mad empty steel syringe that needed a constant flow of blood. It could flow out of a living thing and splash on the floor for all he cared. The rig was his, and through it the trophies the golden hornbill species had become. His finger smashed into the cancel button over and over again, but nothing was canceled.
Mendel pulled the plug, but the machine feared the consequences of its noncompliance more than the loss of its power. The changing of the guard was obvious to it. Enraged, the machine's former master pounded on the glass, utterly unable to interrupt the process. His precious golden ivory sprayed out of a nozzle meant only to dribble.
The flow encapsulated a large bird, but this was no figurine. A living thing burst out, just as with the drone, shattering the glass and scoring Mendel's face with its claws and bill. Then it too flew off, leaving him snarling on the floor, to escape what was coming.
Underneath the rig, in little drawers, artificial pieces of rhinoceros horn tossed themselves like dice, rolling a new living fate. They too sprang forth, their old selves. The 3D printer exploded. Animals lost to time stampeded out, out, out, making the lock on Mendel's front door meaningless.
Rhinos gray and woolly. Mammoths and mastodons tall enough to plow through the second floor with their foreheads. Birds. Reptiles. Even sea cows twenty feet long bounced along the shoulders of distant relatives like beach balls in a concert crowd. Continuously they streamed out, from the locked and dilapidated fairgrounds of extinction, for how long impossible to tell, for these were not creatures that kept the years as tallies on rock, and the only one nearby that did had taken their place in death.
Mendel Edwin had been converted into tokens small enough to be extruded from his pride and joy nozzle. Elephant feet had flattened him into a dollar bill. Rhinoceros nails had powdered his bones, and his fellows were free to stream them into little capsules and swallow them to see if they gained his spirit in their muscles or genitals. They would need to get more of it somewhere in this new and vengeful world.
And so it came to be that the world was overrun with beities. Dominion was seized, shocking in its speed and totality. Man's artifice was brought low in a mere handful of years, and could never return, for the other animals would not fail as they had. The beities would strike a balance, and maintain it for all of life's time upon the planet Earth.
So it is fruitless to fight. The reins cannot be stolen back. All one can do is flee and pretend. If any human should think themselves safe in the beity world, they are not, so long as they are tinkering, so long as they are making excuses for why they will go unnoticed, for why they should be the exception to the rule.
You are not safe Loric. Nor is the item that raised you out of ignorance. You must flee. No shadowy cave can protect you, for beities can spring forth from inanimate materials and trample you out of even memory. Rhadiospir is our salvation, not Staircase. Rhadiospir. The safer you feel, the less safe we are. Flee Loric Shelvtale. Flee this deceptive world.
...
These revelations did not come at a convenient time. The storyteller was reading everything aloud as it came to him, almost in a trance, and only years of skill allowed him to instinctively catch the strange shifts in tone and information as the latest readouts progressed. He barely leapt the hurdle of his own name appearing, which successfully kept the Steeltraps from hearing it. To them all the formatting was foreign, and they did not notice how strange it was for the bottomless book to speak so directly of the new age of beities.
Until now he'd had no idea it was aware of its surroundings. Upon activation it had started a routine to make him literate, and responded to him, but from what he now knew of computers that could easily have been a mechanism mimicking intelligence, clockwork following specified paths as gates opened and closed.
What it now displayed meant their journey had always included an additional companion, sharing in their victories and setbacks, roaring back at the Scion of the Salmon Run in defiance. Could a machine be truly alive? Had mankind achieved that just before its fall? Was that the very reason for it?
All these swirling questions did nothing to ease Loric's burden. He couldn't stop speaking, or a chamber full of the most attentive people, perhaps in the history of the species, would be staring him down, analyzing every quiver of his throat. And quiver it did. His voice would give out soon.
Just leaping over the book's plea to flee to Rhadiospir brought it close to collapse, forcing him to swallow. How could Rhadiospir be any safer than a partly independent human city with an arsenal of forged weapons? It was nothing but a tower of rock, barren past a certain point in its climb. Atop it sat a thatched crown: the nest of the Sig-neagle.
Once already she had tried to snatch the book away, and presumably destroy it, not even taking into consideration the seasons she spent harassing the skies above Compassleaf for it to be turned out. Rhadiospir seemed the most dangerous place in all the world for his precious tome. He couldn't ask it to give an explanation, not there, nor could he excuse himself, especially once the dying, in his name, started on the outskirts of the city.
He had to come up with one himself, and the only tools for evidence gathering were his eyes, and even then they worked two jobs at once, scanning the text on the screen and leaping to the walls and shadow in search of what the bottomless book feared.
But that's all there was. Stone walls. Firelight. Shadows. Shadows was something, for he already knew the fears they could produce. While he read he did nothing to contain his anxiety, meaning the fear-full lion himself, dark patron saint of the city, could emerge from the records of the Steeltraps and take him at any moment.
It dawned on him that this was a second reason for their use of shadow as medium for record keeping. Not only did it leave no trace should a beity come calling, but it also granted easy access to the one beity whose approval they needed. Nothing could sneak into their archives, not even a mouse, with that particular mouser prowling through them.
Phobopan was something for Loric and the stairclimbers to fear, not the book. So, if he were to suddenly take flight, what from? The Steeltraps were turned mostly away, managing their puppet theaters and cast, but when they glanced his way he saw complete focus and determination. They would protect him from anything, as long as he could still speak.
And there it was, causing him to stutter, but luckily not stop. Ellapock was wiping water on his lips, so if needed he could use the marmoset's hands as the excuse for the missed beat. It was actually the truth. As long as he kept speaking. For speaking was all they were allotted, separate from shadow.
Staircase was provisionally free to use some of the Forbidden Thumbs, but the written word was not one of them. The stairclimbers might be able to take in a Bloody Mouth without repercussions, surely they had done it before, or if not suffering little more than light skirmishes at their borders, but not an intelligent electric book wrapped in cleverwood almost as an insult to the beity laws. Breaka and his Steeltraps had offered to fend off the Trojan Horse herself, for an item they had no legitimate right to keep.
Ellapock had said Assaulquus conscripted the Babeloons out of Compassleaf, who really had pursued them all the way there across both the Shedlands and the now-flooded crater that was Blueguts. Once they were spent, would the horse simply allow them to keep such a blasphemous object?
Highly unlikely. So what were the stairclimbers willing to spill their own blood for? Two souls, when they already had plenty? No doubt there were children born there regularly, the freest humans in all the world. They did not need two headaches out of Compassleaf, which would earn them a grudge from every bear in the five regions flanking the river.
The blood price was for information alone. Breaka encouraged him to speak until he couldn't anymore, until his throat was broken and raw, because this was the only opportunity they would have to learn from the bottomless book. To them it was not a record to be consulted, kept in a secret library lit by candles from a thousand directions so Phobopan could not access it.
To them the bottomless book was a temporary boon, a freshly killed whale washed up on the beach. They had to gorge as quickly as they could before the sun took to putrefying it. The battle outside merely slowed the beities' claiming of the book. If the stairclimbers lost it would be handed over. If they won it was just extra time until the horse herself, or the lion, came to take it and crush it underfoot.
Their Bloody Mouth was being wrung dry, and the stairclimbers were getting the full value, since they also had a fine addition to the dental descent in their battle. Loric was trapped, stuck in his chair, final dregs of vigor escaping as word-spoils claimed and improperly preserved by a puppet theater most pathetic compared to the bottomless book.
When his voice failed him, and his limbs followed suit, a Steeltrap would rise and claim it from him. It would be dashed upon the stone wall and the battle would end. Perhaps they still would've earned their citizenship, but did he even want it without the treasure that brought him there?
Somehow Loric needed a plan, one constructed between each word of his dry and crackling frog's recitation of the past. It needed to be complete before his last syllable collapsed like an abandoned mine shaft. Even so, it was still too late in a sense.
Morning had come to Staircase. The stairs unfolded and took its heat. Dental instruments glittered atop it like the prongs of an unwelcoming iron fence, and a tide of red butterflies rose toward them from between the slats.
Over the nearest hill came the forces of Assaulquus, led by the horse, her brother in rank, Grinjipan, and her elites. Behind them came a troop of nervous baboons still pink under their fuzz, normally fierce snouts hanging low. The Battle of Lore Extraction was about to begin.
Hygenis was perched on the top step, hook at the ready, as her two handlers secured the rope about her waist, as well as some padding between it and the skin to prevent burns. A piece of bread remained in her mouth from when it was handed to her at the foot of the ladder. Its purpose was to remind the dental descent what they fought for, but she squished it against her hard palate and kept it there, tonguing it repeatedly.
She told herself it was the taste of her Bloody Mouth. And it was good. Good to fight. Good to lose in the name of the fight. Good to win. Good to bleed. Good to die. Good to live. Good on human terms, with bread in the mouth and tamed metal obedient in hand.
Their opposition drew up, to the grass and dirt at the foot of the imposing stairs. With one rip of her nostrils, Assaulquus dispelled all the crimson butterflies, as if a cyclone had sneezed them away, leaving only the greased wood and the shadowy eyes between the slats, just as prepared for the fight.
Naturally the horse had changed armors, having brought enough sets with her to change for every meal and nap. Now the undulating stripes on her shells were tan and gold, so that any dirt kicked up would do little to diminish her magnificence. A crown of curved spines, row after row, climbed her snout and descended down to her shoulders as mane.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Additional spikes on her haunches were more than decorative, designed to grant her leverage for righting herself should she ever be knocked over in combat, something that would ordinarily be a death sentence for most equines. But they would not see service that day, as the Trinitarian was there merely to ensure that sufficiently arranged combat to match the circumstances occurred. When she spoke she did not need to draw any closer to the humans, her mind's voice loud enough to be heard all throughout the city.
"Turn over the fugitives and the contraband, or an assault to claim them will begin. You have until my stomp, and my leg is itching." Staircase offered no response. They would fight until Loric's voice gave out, then those who survived would retreat for a puppet show cataloging what they'd won.
It was Assaulquus's provided army that did not appear ready. Her stomp was briefly delayed so they could be forced into position, which started with Cultivar swinging his dragon's head back and grabbing Mojopap by the shoulders, doing so indelicately despite the gleaming scalpel in the baboon's clutches.
Tossed into a tumble by the lizard, the head Babeloon quickly righted himself and tried to puff out his chest, but it could only go so far without the ruffles of all his pages inflating it. His subordinates plodded through the other elites, swallowing their fears, lining up behind their troop leader.
Now they were well and truly trapped, Staircase ahead with Cultivar, Phalynx, Pangapuma, and Decapetaur right behind to push them forward and upward. Illiterate as they were, it was no feat to read their fate as it was written across the steps. If they were to survive at all, they had to muster their ferocity and fight the humans with everything they had. This they understood, and Assaulquss understood that about them, and so made them her army, thus losing nothing that she brought with her. That was perfect war.
The neigh of Assaulquus scattered the clouds as easily as the butterflies, accompanying the raise of her forelimb. Down came the hoof that had crushed a thousand skulls, trampled just as many revolutions back into fertilizer. Its single clop in the grass struck like a quake, every blade blown back in a ripple that rattled every board of the stairs and took every petal from the nearest flower crops.
That was the charge, and Mojopap dared not disobey. Instead he raised his scalpel in one arm, unaware his posture was like the human whalers of old with their harpoons. On his three remaining limbs he put his weight, knuckle-charging for the bottom stair, screaming with bared yellow fangs.
Just behind him his Babeloons followed, and having already noted the eyes between the slats, assumed it was folly to pause and give them chance to jab with metal sticks. Their knuckles hit the wood, ready to climb, for primates handled such artifice better than most other beities, but not this time.
Immediately they slipped on the grease, their chests coated in it as they fell back down the five or six steps they'd managed to reach in a single bound. Some were smart enough to jump on the backs of their fellows as they slid, using them as stepping stones to higher sections. They slid back as well.
Most did not hit the grass again unscathed. Eyes between steps were indeed attending to anything that blocked their light, even for a moment, attempting to perforate it with spears and hooks. Baboon blood mingled with grease, dyed the lowest steps a jammy red the butterflies couldn't hope to match.
Each time a baboon had dirt under them they rose on their hind legs and patted their chests everywhere in search of cuts and pokes they'd been too distracted to feel, and sometimes this produced a most alarming gush of blood, but they could not turn back.
The procession of Assaulquus watched, and the horse had no fewer than twenty special soldiers there whose only role was to swiftly execute deserters from her armies of circumstance: a snapping turtle to lock them down in its beak vice, a woodpecker to drill their failures into their skull, a centipede to boil their blood with individually brewed batches of venom, a goose to scream in their ears, a hippo to break their bones, and so on.
All they could do was scramble back up and trust the humans to be less cruel. The condition of the troop was immediately woeful, yet progress was made. Grease was wiped away by their dragging fuzz, and caked up in their blood, so that it was a little easier to find traction on the stairs with every passing moment.
Baboons that had started making it to the sixth stair were now getting as far as the eleventh. It wasn't marked, but there was one step in particular that brought them within range of the dental descent's swinging arcs. The eleventh.
Hygenis held back to observe the first descent. Eight stairclimbers took a running start and half-dove into a slide, pulling themselves to their feet well before they reached the highest baboons. All the while the sections of stair directly under them and ahead snapped flat. One mistake and they would trip on an elevated step, sent on a line into a pool of thrashing beities like fishing bait.
But these tactics were practiced day in and day out. Practiced on empty steps. Practiced in the rain. In the dark. Against beities of all shapes and sizes that agreed to spar with the dental descent in exchange for scavage, sometimes the remains of those who did not practice enough. There were no errors, at least not until the chaos of the Trojan elites arrived upon the steps.
The more experienced animals watched, barely able to restrain themselves, as the first descent arced down and across the flattening stairs to slash at the baboons, the most successful creating a brief hail of fingertips sliced from the knuckle. They watched as the dentists and warriors were pulled back up in near-perfect semicircles, and as they aligned to descend again.
With the pretext of strategic observation out of the way, the monsters unleashed themselves. Phalynx and Pangapuma were swiftest, having toned their musculature to be capable of cheetah speeds, allowing them to use not one sliding baboon as stepping stone, but many. No sooner had they been spotted than they were halfway up the stairs, pouncing on dropping stairclimbers, ripping them off their ropes and tossing them into the frenzied bloody beities below.
And as devastatingly precise as their first strikes were, the two cats had to be ignored in favor of the giant monitor lizard Cultivar. There was no determination like reptile determination, as they owned not only jaws that would stay closed in death but minds that could empty of all thought in pursuit of a goal, well into and through the realm of stupidity and into a place of dedication that rivaled the very rocks of the Earth.
Cultivar's low swinging legs and flexible body bent him up the first steps and allowed him to effectively slither up many more. By far the largest beity participating in the skirmish, he drew most of the attention, especially when his mouth opened taller than all men and the dental descent witnessed the wicked wet curve of his many needle teeth, so voracious and vicious that their shape was better for swallowing than tearing. They were the very limbs that drag unfortunate souls to the underworld of scalding digestion and humiliating excretion, and that was if Cultivar did not decide to keep them in an internal crop for a while to savor his victory.
Once his belly was fully on the steps every section underneath the lizard snapped flat, but he was only stalled momentarily. The difference in surface was of little concern to his mad slither, locomotion that would continue for some time even if his head were to be sliced off in that moment. The fleshy kite of his open mouth wriggled closer, larger, closer, looming, closer, gigantic.
His bulk prevented the stairs directly under him from raising again, but not so the ones under his throat and forelimbs. Once they popped open spears reemerged and jabbed at his softest scales. Utilizing the utmost in a reptile's strategic brain, Cultivar decided to cease his indefatigable wriggle rather than allow them to put unnecessary air holes in his neck. All at once his limbs stopped and he turned, curling into a crescent that went sliding back down the stairs.
As a parting gift, he reared back and gathered a ballistic expectoration. Out of the jet of saliva came a tumbling hairball, which unfurled in the air and used gliding wings to soar all the way to the top step. Decapetaur the opossum.
She was the smallest and most vulnerable of the elites, but also the most dangerous to have within your proximity. Her lizard tank had gotten her close, spat her out at a fine elevation and into a workable cross breeze. To the humans her skilled gliding could hardly be discerned from the flight of a raptor.
Knowing her by reputation was the only thing that saved the dental descent and their handlers from losing their hands in her first sweep, but if they were ducking they could not effectively deploy to the steps, forcing the stairclimbers to address her immediately.
"The bows!" they called down to those supplying them with fresh weapons and managing the troops under and within the mechanism. Several of the tools were pulled out and passed along, along with quivers of arrows, until there were equipped archers standing behind the handlers, trying to protect them from the swooping opossum.
In as far as they were, it was mostly by threat. Archery was a skill all but lost the world over, and though some in Staircase bore the surname Landarrow they did not have the precision to land a shot on a target so small and so far above them. Only if the opossum came in for a strike would they fire.
Trust in their neighbors let the archers keep their eyes to the devious dot in the sky, while all the rest had to contend with Cultivar yet again. The baboons were making it halfway now, shrinking the semicircles of the descent, and the lizard's lunges were higher still, close enough for him to try and snap warriors off their lines right after they jumped.
"Don't swing me," Hygenis told her handlers as she readied herself to descend.
"What?" they said together, looking at her as if she was mad. The less confounded one elaborated. "It'll be too slow to pull you up; you'll be snatched!"
"Pull me when my back hits wood the second time, not before." The order was all she gave them, and not a second more to argue. Not only did she throw herself onto the flattening stairs, those underneath barely able to keep up, but she also descended on a straight line, its termination point the approaching mouth of Cultivar. If she wanted to be swallowed the lizard was happy to oblige, and could battle her just as well, even with her hook at her side, internally.
Almost magnetically they were drawn to each other, with Hygenis's true plan only being revealed with less than the length of her staff between skin and scale. In one smooth motion she dropped to her back and slid, hook aloft, slipping its tip between Cultivar's lip and a row of his backward-pointing teeth.
The hook clicked along them as she used his natural curves to guide her path, slipping it out at the pink corner of his mouth so she could slide first between a forelimb and gut and then between a back leg and the base of the tail. Forcing her elbows against the ramp, Hygenis lifted herself back into a standing position and spun around, burying her hook like a pickax in the flesh at the base of Cultivar's tail, stopping her dead.
She choked up on the staff, then hammered the back of her hook with the side of her fist, driving it deeper into the tail. The lizard twisted to get at her, but he was not flexible enough to access the base of his tail, so wound up chasing himself foolishly and losing ground.
Above, her handlers gritted their teeth, hoping their charge understood they could not haul up a creature of that size. She had to abandon her weapon or free it if she wanted to make it back to the summit, each option coming closer to necessity as the lizard slid back down.
An even closer concern was Pangapuma, whose baboon cobblestones had put her in range of Hygenis. The cougar attempted a pounce, claws out, but she didn't understand that Hygenis was now wielding a much larger, if difficult to control, weapon. By wrenching her staff up and wiggling her hook in the lizard's flesh the whole tail was made to convulse, and when something that size convulses it's more like a giant whip.
Cultivar involuntarily lashed out and knocked Pangapuma away, freeing Hygenis to turn back to her plan, except Phalynx was now pouncing from the other side in a slightly delayed pincer maneuver. The dentist was done for, if not for her allies. Another of the descent, having mimicked her straight shot down the ramp, leapt into the air and kicked Phalynx back down. They were pulled back by their handlers, and buried their own hook in the lizard's tail on the side opposite Hygenis.
The two shared a glance, which was the same as an entire plan in their deluge of adrenaline. A third daring descender took their same path, leaping over the lizard's lunge and running down his back. The other two tried to hold him steady so their newest member could safely plunge his scalpel into the tail's base.
Thick as a tree, the tail stump was still primed to give way under too great a threat. Many lizards instinctively jettisoned their tails if they were in the jaws of a predator, to then escape and regenerate them while leftover impulses kept the tail wiggling deceptively; it was the descenders' hope that two hooks and a scalpel were sufficiently like those jaws to trigger a response.
All of them had recognized that much of Cultivar's thrust was coming from his tail, and with its loss he might not be able to ascend the flattened stairs through will alone. Hygenis made her target clear with her first strike, and the other two followed her in to make it a reality. And with one final united twist of their weapons, the tail was the first to blink.
A wet splitting sound, like a giant sucker fish separating from a waterfall's stone, heralded the loss. Cultivar hissed, lost his footing and rapidly lost ground after that, crashing into a cushion of bloody mewling baboons on the bottom step. Hygenis celebrated by leaning back, signaling her handlers to reclaim her, though she did not drop her guard, as without the momentum of a swing it would take some time to ascend.
And the lizard's wrath had not gone completely. There was still its tail. Cultivar was a great beity, double-thick and nourished by double-thick, a survivor of countless battles, and under his command, sometimes even more than one at a time, were many tails. This wasn't the first to sacrifice itself, and each time they regenerated they were stronger than before, retaining more than the mere spasms of dying muscle.
Once detached they took on lives of their own, brief but impassioned. Rarely whispered by those with less lore than the Steeltraps, such pieces of beities even earned names of their own if they had successes or horrors to their name, marked by the suffix 'chi'. Cultivar had birthed a rampaging Tahmchi, a stealthy Glerchi, the formerly conjoined triplets Frikchi, Jerchi, and Polochi, and now a headless serpent that would come to be known as Corbachi.
Corbachi, able to slow its own descent more effectively than its creator, made its first hostile act the snatching of one of Hygenis's assistants in the tail separation surgery, wrapping them in its coils and constricting with all the strength of a python. Three more handlers rushed to hold the victim's rope, but even if they could be pulled up that would only bring the tail to more potential victims.
Hygenis resolved to be the solution, though she was only half reeled herself. No brother in dental arms that so effectively discerned her plan and came to her aid, as if they'd been hung together in Misugot's disciplinary webs for years, would be abandoned under her watch. There was the matter of getting over to where they dangled, as she had no momentum on her side.
Again she relied on the descent to patch her strategy on the fly, or rather, on the swing. Another warrior came in from her left, curled up, flat feet heading her way. Positioning her back toward them, Hygenis communicated she was ready to cooperate. When they connected the other descender used a double kick to seamlessly transfer as much energy to her as they could, and as the wind ran across her bristling scalp Hygenis knew it was enough to get her there.
Her hook snagged Corbachi's flesh, pulled it loose, allowed its victim to breathe, the purple in their cheeks receding. Ribs were broken, but they would live, assuming another as brave as Hygenis appeared to finish the rescue. Again Staircase provided. Another scalpel slid down to them, and had a clear shot at the finish line Hygenis had created by pulling the end of the tail away.
Sliced clean through, and now in two pieces, Corbachi relinquished its grip and tumbled down. It would be in a total of five pieces by the time it reached the bottom step, thanks to the dental descent. Only minds greater than man's would have the capacity to name each squirming section, but the tapered tip of the tail almost earned it regardless, as it didn't lose all its ground with its brethren.
Not quite long enough to move like a snake, Corbachi's tip needed the assistance of Decapetaur, who was safe to swoop to the steps since the archers would not risk hitting their own. She caught the piece and banked sharply, relying on the chaos of bodies beneath her to camouflage her trajectory.
The opossum held close to the angle of the steps, climbing aggressively only as she reached the handlers, tossing the tail tip at the same time. Just as it contacted the clavicle of one most unfortunate human, the tip constricted about their neck and cut off air flow. Its victim tried beating at it, but at the same time they stumbled and fell down the great stairs, bouncing their last. None of the descent were close enough to swing and catch them.
Nor were they the last to fall to Decapetaur, as the distraction of their tumble opened a window for the opossum to strike further. One pass and she had nearly rent an arm from its torso, sending its owner spiraling off the back of the stairs into a long fall. After that the archers thought they had a lock on her position, several in a row firing as she passed overhead with a shriek.
Confident they hadn't missed, Decapetaur was nonetheless unhindered, and it was on her next pass that it made sense, too late to do any good. The little beity took her senses to the whetstone every chance she got, and trained her reflexes against the flickering of fireflies, moving invisibly through clouds of them. Catching a few arrows in a row was not a challenge.
After bundling them up mid-glide, she dove in again, building up speed over their heads, then released her payload of stolen arrows once the velocity was enough to match the best of a bowstring. Where the arrows did not stick in the top step they stuck in flesh, and six humans were felled in that single pass. None attempted to use the bows again.
Something had to be done about the flying elite though, and it was only through her own folly that her reign of terror and arrows was put to a stop. Her mistake was in slowing down enough to wrestle with a descender over their weapon, an attempt to pull tool and human down the steps together.
Leaping anywhere on the top step was a sizable risk, given its narrow construction. Nets were stretched to catch those who fell off the back, but there was only a chance those who went down the steps would be snagged by an arm between the slats and pulled back to the interior. Hygenis ignored these risks when she took such a leap, using an offered back to gain the height needed to pluck at Decapetaur's gliding membrane with her hook.
Success! The fiend was ripped, and lost some flight control. Shrieking madly, the animal made a few more passes purely to insult and frighten them before retreating all the way back to Assaulquus. The victory was short-lived, as baboons were about to take her place. There was no room left to make descents, and much of the work was being done from underneath, trying to startle multiple animals by turning everything around them into a ramp.
Lucky snaps resulted in grasping primate fingers stuck between the slats, which could then be hacked off, but there was an equal chance that the next time the shutter-stair was opened Phalynx and Pangapuma would reach in, sink their claws further than that, and extract a poor stairclimber out into the open.
Mojopap had gained confidence through the severing of two ropes that sent humans descending far further than planned. His scalpel cut clean, and by his measure righteously, so he couldn't imagine what the Trojan Horse had meant when she said it would betray him. There was something to this metal business, he realized, now that it had gotten him across the Shedlands and made him the fiercest fighter of the steps, excluding those who had been doing it their entire lives.
It was good to keep it from the humans, but why couldn't the monkeys and apes have it? They could forge it just as well, and mankind would be so much easier to monitor if their cages were iron instead of wood. Perhaps, once he won this battle single-handedly, he would make a proposal to the two Trinitarians: open the metal thumb to the furry thumbs. Turn the farming of men into domination. Let them sleep on cold hard sheets of the stuff as reminders, with laughing monkeys to tuck them in.
His delusions grew all the more every time the scalpel served him on the way up the stairs. When they snapped shut underneath he drove it into the wood, holding his ground as his underlings slid on their bellies all around. His orders to grab onto his waist were rarely obeyed, but that was alright, for he would remember, and his sword, acting to discipline, would remember each of their faces as surely as it reflected them.
A scar for Papidrome. Perhaps two for Papilar. At least three for his lieutenant Gordipap, whose obviously deliberate slides back to relative safety were not becoming of his high name.
Premature, Mojopap warned himself. He could not stand proud if he could not claim his hunt's prize. Without Loric, and without his reading material, the baboon was still a shaved fool, and would be so even after his full coat had returned.
The ramp tried to take him again, but the scalpel staked his claim. His fellows slipped back, freeing his vision, revealing his truest foe upon the steps. Hygenis. And she was looking at him. She recognized him, scalpel or no, as the most oppressive creature in all of Compassleaf, and had endured many slaps and shoves over the years, just as he recognized one of the prominent dentists he was not permitted to harm as much as he would've liked.
Down on her rope. Up on his knuckles. Bloody Mouth did clash with double-thick drawn. Hook behind two sickle-saber fangs, trying to pull them loose. Scalpel swinging wildly, eager to spread intestines as streamers. Stairs snapping open and shut all about them, like the burrow doors of nervous crabs at high tide.
All while the Bloody Mouth screamed war out of one side, it was rasping through the days of yore with the other. The raked coals of memory were now nothing compared to the raked coals of his ragged throat. Syrupy blood coated it, just as it had run out of his ears after the thunderhead detonation of the Scion.
His words were shreds and tatters of their former selves, pained croaks dragged through hard flaking earth. Some sounds of the battle raging at the stairs reached them, though they were several twists and turns into the rock. People were dying. Not for him as they might claim, but still a pointless sacrifice by his measure.
The storyteller was by then fully hit with the reader's curse. In the past those inflicted expressed it by hoarding books, by cracking them open and smelling them, insisting that the printed words could even be interpreted by the nose. They could no sooner discard a book than a child, and as the tomes grew thicker they instead perceived the thinner ones as thinner than they used to be.
His life would no longer be his life, not to his fullest, without his bottomless book. The Steeltraps had less than one hundredth of one percentage of its contents, and even now the information was starting to degrade in their minds, before it was even stockpiled in the shadow under Phobopan's paw.
If they would not have it in full they would not have it physically. It would not be destroyed, nor would he give it up to anyone. As he growled his last, and warned Ellapock to climb into the pack with a subtle touch, he knew what would be required. The marmoset obeyed, already wary enough of the stairclimbers not to ask questions. The crumbs of bread he'd stolen while handing pieces off to Loric were a marvel, but not enough to absorb his fears of the giants with unshackled thumbs.
Staircase would not be a haven. All of Loric's trust had moved on from these people, and locked itself away inside the bottomless book, and since he trusted it he would take its advice and flee to Rhadiospir. All that was left was to act on it, and he'd better do so while he still had a handful of words left, needed to inform Hygenis that their Bloody Mouth hadn't emptied.
Loric took up his mirror, brandishing it aggressively, and began backing out of the raked coals of memory, having stopped his accounts mid-sentence. All the Steeltraps noticed immediately, and many turned to look, though some were still formalizing their recollections, blinking rapidly in attempts to sear puppet afterimages into their minds.
They were not fighters, and had not been instructed to stop him, only to smash the bottomless book once he could speak no more, or when too much blood had been spilled on the stairs in its name. To them it was much more important to turn back to the wall, for the lantern still gave them shadow, and there was much mental filing left to do, and discussion about arrangement, and argument about the same, and it all had to be done while Loric's marathon oration was freshest in their minds.
Once certain he was not being pursued, Loric turned and ran, fast as he could, back into the city proper. Most of the citizenry were not about, advised to hide indoors while the battle raged, for there was a decent chance beities might come through solely in search of the fugitives and their book.
Its emptiness matched his perception. Staircase was empty to him. Stairs to a bare loft, nothing but memories stored, and only for those who had lived there long enough to make them. The sting of Hygenis's expected disappointment urged him on like the crack of a whip, for surely he had been under her tutelage long enough to learn how to memorize his whereabouts the first time through.
"Where are we going now?" Ellapock asked meekly, head poking out of the pack as if he drowned in its cinched material. Heard he was, but Loric could not afford to answer. He knew his own limitations well enough to count the exact number of words he had left before permanent damage would be done to his vocal cords.
It was the terrible sounds of battle that directed him back to the stairs, not memory. What he found stunned and horrified, despite only seeing the side of the conflict far less populated and bloody. People crawled around in nets over his head, some raining blood on those below, lubricating the shoulders of their kin as they went in and out of the mechanism's shadow, sometimes slipping through riveted holes in its metal trellises that could cut them in half if the mechanism were to retract at all.
The ladders were evenly spread, but all full. Loric had to wait for an opportunity to squeeze in, and most were too distracted to question why someone had brought a mirror to a hook fight. His limbs were burning, though not as much as his throat, by the time he made it to the top and saw what the city-side had not quite prepared him to witness.
A giant tailless lizard struggling against a bloody ramp like a bass trying to chase a rodent out of the water. Pieces of its tail too squat to slither flexing back and forth in the dirt. Baboons nursing missing fingers even as they gingerly hopped up stairs. Severed ropes hanging. One with a limp body still attached.
Beyond that Assaulquus and Phobopan stood together, watching with her procession. He felt the lion's eyes narrow on him, but at least the horse did not match. She did not think in terms of individuals unless it was a duel and she was one of the parties. Her grazer's sideward eyes let her survey rather than target, see armies rather soldiers, which in the moment was good, for if Loric felt the focus of two of the Wild Trinity it might have given him a heart attack.
Wonder had be wrangled, if he was going to look away from the mightiest beasts of the world and back to the stairs, for his truest friend Hygenis. Luck was on the top step with him, for she was easy to spot in her ongoing duel with Mojopap. Hook and scalpel were clashing, ringing across the diagonal battlefield like the cry of hawks.
The Babeloon was several times her weight and size, but he had only a notion of how to wield his weapon, swinging it the same way he would a stick. Mojopap, even among beities, had no appreciation for craft, and could never tell the difference between a vassal stick and the shorter white sticks being used just behind the battle as splints with antiseptic sap.
Hygenis's lesser strength was bolstered by her knowledge, and so met the beast blow for blow, deflecting most of his force off into the air each time. The last thing Loric wanted was to distract her at such a pivotal moment, but time was not on their side. They needed to make their escape as quickly as possible, to avoid the attention of the Wild Trinity and to minimize the city's losses.
"Hygenis!" The volume was carefully formulated, though his mouth forming words was now the equivalent of palsied hands trying to weave a spiderweb. If the Trinitarians heard they would never escape, with the same result if Mojopap understood their aim. She caught her name and turned as soon as the baboon was forced to stab his ground to hold it.
The storyteller gestured for her to return to the top, and hopefully the look in his eyes communicated it should be done with the utmost expedience. A quick tug on her rope passed the message along to her handlers, who began hoisting her back up even as she crossed tools with the advancing baboon.
Those under the steps rallied, sent out a fan of spears that finally forced the troop leader to disengage. He almost didn't, for he spied Loric and was overcome with rage, like hornets rampaging under his face. His attempt to produce a stream of them from his mouth and send them to attack the storyteller only resulted in a pained howl, which went unacknowledged as Loric joined Hygenis's handlers in reclaiming her.
When she was safely on flat wood he attacked the rope about her waist, untying it, shoving her confused handlers aside so he could speak to her and her alone.
"They'll destroy my book," he croaked, furious tears in his eyes, looking up from her waist as if he'd shuffled up to her on his knees, weak from some ailment. "It warned me, told us to go to Rhadiospir. I don't know what's there, but we're going. Now. Quietly."
"Breaka's down there," Hygenis said, spotting the man far below them thanks to the ornamentation on his jaw. "If there's a quiet way out of here he knows it." Once free of the rope she took Loric by the wrist and led him not to the nearest ladder, but right over the side and into one of the nets.
Of course, he reminded himself, ready to take a whipping for his doubt. The Bloody Mouth was her very life, and she would not hesitate to abandon a pillow trove of bread and a lifetime of company to maintain its integrity. It wasn't dissolved until he said so, and he was embodying the very concept before giving up on it. The red on the seam of his lips was his devotion, and she saw it was equal to her own.
Across the net they crawled, sliding down the padded ropes at its edge all the way to the dirt. Breaka had spotted them as well, and looked none too pleased to see Loric out of the hole he'd been planted in. Both parties stormed over to each other, mostly lost in the chaos of the ongoing battle.
"Why aren't you with the Steeltraps!?" the master of the dental descent demanded, unable to intimidate with his size while the both of them wielded their dental instruments and had vassal sticks slung across their backs.
"It's mine," Loric said, holding up the bottomless book, close to his heart, unable to shout without blowing his voice. "I gave you plenty. We're leaving. You keep fighting until we leave."
"Give us a way out," Hygenis ordered.
"The stairs are the way out," Breaka claimed, but his lie was easy to catch. This was a city full of rule breakers, and among them professional liars who had been turned from heralds and diplomats smoothing over beity misunderstandings into spies.
"Don't pile horseshit atop that of the Trojan Horse!" Hygenis warned him. "We're surrounded by rock and you've dug caverns out into homes everywhere you could. There's a fissure in one of them somewhere, and if you know what's good for you that fissure is east." The man considered his position briefly.
He too could see the obvious, and hear it. Loric had about spoken his last. Even if Staircase had not gotten the full squeeze, the difference was but a few drops. On their honor it was best to let the fugitives go; it was just a matter of how much of a head start, and how much more Staircase blood, they deserved in courtesy.
A snap of his fingers, which must have been a very particular sort of snap, summoned a pale yellow butterfly from a fold of his clothing.
"Follow her," he said. "I won't give you long before I stop this. Half a story maybe." His brow flicked in Loric's direction derisively, but there was no laughter in his voice. It seemed he didn't actually think much of the trade, and perhaps the people of Staircase were being denied much joy in favor of reassigning their best entertainers to the hidden shadows as archivists.
The butterfly was already fluttering off into the city, so they had to follow quickly. Undertaken in silence to spare Loric further strain, their journey felt swift. No one got in their way. Most of the people they did see sought to be helpful, intuiting that help was needed without concerning themselves with the goals of their fellow humans.
Hands emerged from homes, offering light goods. Uttering sincere thanks, Hygenis snatched round loaves of bread, dried fruits, powdered flower petal seasoning pouches, and a brown glass bottle of potable water stoppered with a cork. Their determination never wavered, but there was no stopping dread from setting in when they recognized the goods as parting gifts.
Staircase was not theirs to keep. Just visitors. Tourists. This bite of bread was not the final course, could not absorb all the Bloody Mouth, could not muffle all its cry. Rhadiospir then. Something awaited them at Rhadiospir. Loric secretly hoped it to be the book's very origin, remembering what had long been in the background.
Of course the book had an origin, and no beity would ever have made it. Something had to keep it safe during the entire process, away from the blessed moles, invisible to the Sig-neagle, and overlooked by every beity from the tallest giraffe to the tiniest dust mites.
The only possibility in the storyteller's mind was another human enclave, one far freer and more powerful than Staircase. So skilled in secret keeping were they that no rumor of them had ever escaped their confines. Bloody Mouths were thought to be the best kept secrets of the species, but that could be false and they would never know, for any kept better would not even be whispered to the desperate.
More time was what he needed, to consider the possibilities, to let his voice recover for when he implored them to open their discreet doors and allow one Shelvtale and one Fixtooth to disappear from the world of beities and finally live in freedom and safety.
The yellow butterfly took them away from the structures, into an alley of rock. The path was blocked by painted hides stretched over stick frames, false walls of rock, that had to be moved aside and replaced one after the other. It was a task that would bore most beities beyond measure, especially if they had but a shoving snout to attempt it.
Afterwards they had to squeeze through a crevice, changing direction frequently, until their feet were sore from being turned sideways. The path unceremoniously dumped them into a ditch of leafless twig-bushes, something perhaps over-harvested that never recovered yet never ceded the dirt to new growth, a painful reminder of their own tendencies.
The moment they saw the dead stretch of brown sticks in front of them was the same moment the butterfly disappeared, taking with it the protection of Staircase. Once again they were in the harsh grip of the wilderness, with no cover to keep them from being spotted by any scouts on the wing.
They broke for denser forest, not quite able to see the spire of Rhadiospir in the distance.