It seems only days ago that Fragile the Sixbraid was living a quiet life in his people’s village, in the ancient and storied land named Goal. Without provocation, a group of soldiers from a hate-filled empire entered into it, killing his friends, his family, and all the keepers of their tradition. A Wandering Star, a lone warrior from a distant land, arrived just in time to save Fragile and the Sixbraids from complete annihilation. Finding pleasure in each other’s company, these two, a stronghoof, and an enigmatic presence named Bell now plumb the countryside for work and residence. Wander helps the people of Goal, and searches out a new home for her companion; in secret, she pursues her long-standing vendetta against a blind and destructive enemy.

-

The digger’s hands found rock. It was found at the point of metal. Metal chipped and bent and broke, so he used his fists. Metal broke, would always break, but fists fixed. The digger’s hands found rock.

Once the digger was called ‘heart.’ He was born and met others like him. Then they were taken and put on wheels. They arrived at distant pits and were pushed into them. He grew hungry, and was given bread that was not food. Hearts cooked bread a different way. At first he wouldn’t eat, but then he began to die. So he put it in his mouth. He was a digger, and he went in pits, and he ate more bread.

The land they dug was cut out and driven off the ruler’s firmament, a canyon built by lash and need. Incident forces poured over them in the mouths they made, and onto porters and their backs, where they were bound. In the darkness the digger and his friends quartered stone, which was stubborn, bit, and was breathable. It did not want to move. It took measure of its porters; it pressured the pumps and veins and subcutaneous cell storms that produced every shape each man could assume. In their guts lightning lit. Water fell from a porter’s brow, and he collapsed. His friends walked over him.

Once the digger had known day. Now he only knew night. Part of him yearned for the ending of this waste, the ending of this prank called birth. Another part of him loved the prank, and yearned to make others, and to keep the ones his friends had borne. The digger’s hands found rock.

The diggers went then and went again. Their bodies flooded pits and tunnels, up and out. The sky, which was once divine, had turned hissing and icy and a grey thing now. The sky looked on their stone, and a color emerged that their masters sought, which the hearts had seen in pitwater. Hoisted high and far away were new signals of new divines, wrote on cloth that flapped and whipped and slapped about on the ridges of the pits. They had been raised up to the sky and the stars, where offerings were sent, and now laments. At their side dangled men from rope made weary. Beside those were heart-deprived ones, who no heart could hear, and who had such tired eyes, and would beat them with canes when they were told.

The porters looked at the hanging dead as they passed. They ascended the slopes of the pit.

Close by were the huts and staked up roofs where the families of the diggers dwelled, built from sticks and coverings and covered in dirt and dust underneath the new white frozen floods. There, a body’s bearer was pierced and cried out from a hidden place. They fought against the hunger and anger and nightmares of the biggest heaviest.

A short tune began, carried on high voices. The sun’s rays reached out and cast at them many miles away from a place where it still shone, a place all could see but none could go, because they were entrapped by great Walls with rocks and weapons. Their open spaces were wild and cold and cramped and there were few where they could mingle, but in those they had wandered out a child bruised and blue and half-naked. He sat down in a ditch where an old woman was resting and she took him into her arms and they closed their eyes there. The air was saturated by the tainting odor of pit water and pit drops. The singer’s voice lilted and tripped but continued and continued and continued and continued and continued, a little softer each time and a little less the thing it was.

A house sat on the edge of this teeming development, on the ridge high above it all and gilded with good stone that shined, possessed of papers, testament, and those who could write them down. It was brought up by the born, brought up by the hunger, and brought up on the backs of those made hungry.

Torches flickered and the holes where they were buried breathed. The digger and his friends knocked and bashed at a prickly wall of rock. Their ripping was performed with thick lumpen picks that sent down dust and sharp bleeding pieces. Clumps of stone and sand and frozen dirt were cleaved out by their dull and inconsiderate rhythm. On the left edge of them the digger brought down his own shaft in knocks and bashes, with a thrust and demand unlike the others. On his most vicious strike, a clear note pealed out from the rocks.

He looked at the place where he had been digging. His finger, whittled white and red, brushed up against it. The stain of him spread on smooth cut stone.

“Aie,” he called out. Their fire wavered. The other workers did not hear him.

He threw down his spike and dropped to his knees. He inspected the flat rock with both hands and began to shout at them. “Aie!” he cried. “Aie! Look! All of you look!”

The call was echoed. The Goals glanced at his discovery, prodded its surface, and then clamored around it, discussing its quality. One of them struck the space around it, revealing more of the discovered block. Others began to hack and rip at the jagged mass covering it up, and at last a towering creation was revealed. Eyes looked into it, and palms were set flush to its surface.

With great heaving energy, the Goals groaned and pulled at the block. The moment it gave way, the dirt crumbled underneath them, and the Walls, and the digger howled as the ground fell out into a bleak and lightless pit. The others jumped away from it, startled, until he howled no longer. They peered into the cloud that his fall had produced.

The dust settled, and a gap was revealed.

----------------------------------------

Once upon a time...

Near the shell of Sunwood.

The fire snipped softly and blew out its body’s gleaming wisps. Wind shiverred through the crevice they had climbed through, blowing in blizzard water and snowfall chill. The sun was leaving, and they had hiked so far, so Fragile collected wood from the ground and Wander hoisted the stronghoof on her shoulders and they all crowded in to a small alcove on a nearby cliffside.

The animal’s smell competed with the smoke for space. Fragile warmed his hands over the fire, took Wander’s shortblade, and tended to it with stone and cloth. He noted with raised eyebrows the vined hammer that addressed the face of her cloth; he liked its color and shape. Wander drank from her skin and sat against their hole’s far slab. The branches’ burning broke color from her face, which shined like bronze and made a ribbon of her figure. She slid a hand across her mouth and threw it at Fragile. “‘Back,’” she said.

He looked up from her metal and her stone. “‘Pakh?’”

“‘Back.’ An important word. This is ‘me’ in Sprak. ‘Me.’”

“‘Back,’” Fragile repeated.

“Back. ‘Backs’, this is ‘we.’”

“Backsih.”

Wander cocked her head.

He tried again. “Back- back-suh.”

“Backs-ss.”

“Bax.”

She nodded. “Back-ss.”

“Bax-ssh.”

“Back-ss.”

-

“This is the word.” Fragile said.

He drew an arch on the cave wall with a sharp rock. The fire’s light washed against the scar he had produced.

“The word.”

He nodded. He drew small, multinodal shapes around the arch. “These are the signs,” he said. “The signs of the rulers. You can put them anywhere. You can put them all over the place. They will show you how to speak.”

He drew one of the signs at the top of the arch, and put another on its side. “Now the word is, ‘hear.’” He put a line beneath the arch. Its leftmost tip curled upward. “Now the word is, ‘to hear one’s thought.’”

Wander hobbled next to him, took a rock, and copied his symbol. She scratched it into the stone with such force that a sheer gash was made, bleaching the tip of her instrument. Bits broke off and fell to the ground in a dusty pile.

“Please keep speaking,” she said.

He made a second version of the word, which she echoed. “I adore this shape,” he cried. “Oh, I do adore it. This is the river’s sign, you see? In this way, the word means, ‘to river-oneself.’ If a change is made-” He etched a mark on the symbol’s side. “-it means, ‘to river-another.’”

“In Sprak, this would be said as, ‘to push off dirt,’” Wander said, producing another gash. “‘To wash.’ I have never known words like Goal’s. A ruler is a word to you hearts.”

“It is the riversland,” Fragile said. “We are in its shape. I think it so adorable. And it is such an adorable word.”

He drew another, and their revels continued.

-

Time passed and the fire on the ground died. Colorless baselight, given to no rays or shine, crept in to their hidden rocky spot.

They departed the cave the next morning and past the cliff, up a long paved road. Fragile held the stronghoof’s lead and walked slowly. His head swayed back and forth. Their shoes crunched through the freshly packed snow and the nearby wingtrees creaked under its pressure. The wind could blow it like sand. It formed kneehigh mesas and warped drifts that they chanced upon in the road, and were forced to move around.

As the morning advanced, the cold burned and stilled and stung their cheeks. They walked for a time while the sky broke open, and the sun and stars were revealed.

To entertain herself on one of the long, straight stretches they encountered, Wander released the stronghoof’s lead and scratched its neck. It blinked, nuzzled her, and carried on.

She reached into her coinpurse and took out a single lofte. With quickness and cool, she spun it on the tip of her finger, flipped it with her thumb, and rolled it through her knuckes.

She felt Fragile’s gaze on her display and glanced at him; he looked away. She reached for another coin and flicked it at him. His eyes widened when he registered the projectile and it rebounded into the bushes, where he scrambled for it.

Fragile rushed to return it, but she would not take it back. Instead, she balanced the coin on her pinky in demonstration. He mimicked her.

She slowly swapped the coin between her pinky and her ring finger. Fragile tried to do it, and it fell through his fingers and onto the ground.

They continued like it, Wander rolling the coin through her fingers, and Fragile trying and failing to roll his, for a long while.

On a late attempt, by one nerve’s serendipitous twitch, Fragile managed to roll the coin through two knuckles before it fell from his grip. He gasped in elation and beamed at her.

Something pulled at Wander’s cheek. She rolled the coin through her knuckles once more and slipped it into her pocket.

Fragile rubbed the coin she had given him. He stared at it. “Is there only one kind of city gift?” he asked.

“There must be many,” Wander replied. “Although I have long wondered why your people name them such.”

“City gifts?”

“Elsewhere in the riversland, a gift, like they would name it, is not a button of nightrock or cityrock,” she said. “They call that differently.”

“How do they call it?”

“The Makars have a word – something like ‘common,’” she said. “Parts,’ for the Laruns. Rootcliffs call it ‘change.’ It’s like a gift for everyone, but not itself a very good gift. They’re only used for getting something else.”

“Then what is a gift, to them?”

“Well,” she said, “that also depends. It’s just usually not rock. Not when it’s melt or cut this common way.”

“I knew hearts were different, beyond the houses, but never just so.” He shook his head. “How could one possibly get a grip on it all?”

“In all Ourland, I have never met one who did,” Wander replied. “I do not think there is any one who will ever again consider the whole. Maybe once, but not anymore. It is all too much.”

Fragile fiddled with this for a time. “How did rocks become gifts?” he asked. “How did breathers ever come to adore them in such a strange way?”

“I suppose it is the thing they are. That which is required to retrieve and produce them – and now, what they allow you to obtain otherwise.”

“What are they? What does it take? What do they allow?”

Wander held her chin and narrowed her brow. She held up a finger.

“What they are – shining things,” she said. “Noticeable things. There are not many of them. What it took – water, from the brow and heart. Much strength is expended in their taking. The ground is torn open and pierced and propped up by metal, because that is where they lie. This produces many wounds. What they allow – the answer of needs.”

“Needs?”

“Needs.”

“Could they break apart a block-building?” he asked excitedly. “Lift up a fallen heart again? Let one speak with the rulers?”

Wander blinked. “These are your needs?” she questsaid.

“Ih… it is a few of them.”

“They are an odd bunch.”

He shrugged. His cheeks turned red.

“They cannot break apart a block-building,” she continued. “but if there were a way, they could bring together many hearts who could do it. They cannot let a fallen heart come up again, but if there were a way, they could bring together many hearts who would do it. They cannot let one speak with rulers.”

“How would they accomplish these things?”

“By answering the needs of those who are brought.”

“Then…” Fragile scratched his head. “It sounds as though... the rock… it can not, itself, answer needs.”

Wander’s head had turned away from the road. She tripped over a rock and kicked it aside. “And what can?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The gathering? The ways?” He paused. “The need?”

“How could a need fill a need?”

He shrugged. She held her chin.

-

The morning advanced, and soon came noon and then evening.

Fragile held Wander’s guide in his hands. It was a broad sheaf of coarse paper that felt like soft bark and whose smell turned his nose; he did his best not to tear it. On its face was painted many symbols and words of used by the Rootcliff people. Wander pointed to a small line tracing through it.

“This shape speaks of a path,” she said. She waved at a group of green blotches. “These tell of thicktrees.” She tapped a group of roughly painted roundseats. “And these speak of a sitting place. It’s our last spot. That’s somewhere you can be.”

Fragile, seeing her jaw set, did his best to get behind that idea. He handed the guide back to her. “I cannot hear it,” He said. “For it to be made – can the paper see?”

Wander rolled it up and slipped it into a bag on the stronghoof. “The paper cannot see. Why do you suppose it would?”

“It is much for anything to see and write,” he replied. “To write something so great – it would be as to assemble a peak from wads of dirt. The wind would soon blow them all away.”

“It is like that,” she said. “And the wind does blow.”

The shell soon came into view. The distance flattened it, and it looked quiet. It was a good day and a shell of good size and Fragile imagined that at a time like this, noises would be made. Bread would be cooked and eaten, children would cut skins and crush grain, fireworkers would cut and mend, Walls would wrestle and animals would speak. But the wind was empty and carried neither sound nor stench. The broad limits of the shell loomed. There were no Walls to greet them.

“Stay close,” Wander said. “I may have to push you off again.” She tugged the stronghoof’s lead. “Like in Our.”

Fragile turned his nose at the memory, but he obeyed.

They entered the shell and moved past the hollow roundseats. No bodies or voices emerged. The smell of rot did emerge when they drew close to a doorway, and passed into the gaps between houses. All the wood in the inhabitants’ shacks and huts had been stripped away. They found the stalls of a hearthouse, which lacked hoofs, bearers, or animals of any kind.

They came upon a Speaking Place, a round open complex where stood a large roundseat, a wicker stool inscribed by lines, and a Larun monolith at its center. Its stone was small, chipped, mottled brown and rough, and of a separate, less tenuous consistency than that of the others they had seen. Its spot was as voiceless as the rest of the shell. A whiff of blood wafted into Wander’s nose, but it was much too faint for Fragile to detect.

He trudged up to the monolith. “It says this is called, ‘Sunwood,’” he said, “the place of ‘Threeheads.’ Where could they have gone?”

Wander let go of the stronghoof’s lead and crouched down. “I don’t know,” she replied. “But wherever they are, they left before the snow.”

“How do you know?”

She threw out her palm to the flat white terrain of the Speaking Place. With the exception of their own footprints, only the paws of howls and jumpers had made any impression on its sun-soaked surface.

“We’re alone,” she concluded.

-

They picked through the remains of the settlement, moving from seat to seat. The buildings in Sunwood were stacked green wood. A great mass had covered up the sky when, having found no people in any of the places that they checked, they at last entered a seat with a large fireroom and a foul stench. Pale winding lines of exhaust oozed off a rock stove. The room was damp and busily laden with cloth, hammers, knives, bowls, and overs of assorted density and size.

They stepped inside. A voice – a hissing, burbling croak - called out from a dark corner of the cell, towards Fragile.

“Yon,” the voice moaned. “Yon.”

Wander turned and saw Fragile had become transfixed. Before them was a man covered in filthy sheets of earthy wool. He had streaks of white in his hair and tender folded flesh. He was with spots, and with winding nose hairs, and in his mouth she could see that a tooth had been removed. His legs were thin, discolored and thickly veined.

“Yon,” the man repeated. The two of them sat down at his side.

“Water,” he said. “Be kind to me, yon. Water. I need water.” He pointed his finger out towards his seat’s open portal, where sat a well encrusted with ice and snow.

Fragile jumped up, picked up a bowl sitting next to the man’s head, and lurched out from the seat. He raised up water from the well, hauled it back in, and filled the dish up. Wander pressed it to the man’s lips so that the liquid began to trickle down his chin. The man struggled to keep still. When he swallowed, his eyes figured shut, and he pulled it down his throat in convulsing gulps as though he could not bear it. He shook his head when she offered her more. His hands passed towards his legs. “The offmen would not take me,” he said. “I begged them to take me, yon, or to let me in the ruler’s house. But they would not.”

“What did they do, birthman?” Wander asked. “Where has your family gone?”

“All of them have been brought out.” He took hold of her hand. Her skin crawled and she suppressed a shudder. “They took them lightside, to that smashing place. It is a giftmaker. They have taken all hearts there.”

He rattled his fingers on his chest. “Think of this, yon. Once, I raised grain. My birthman and my birthwoman – these were voicewoman and Lodge. They adored me above all else. They were offered many gifts by the Laruns for my heart, but all was refused. They would not give me out to them. And now, on birth’s edge, do I seek nothing more than to go out to the Laruns, so that I can go on with the hearts I know.”

Wander’s fingers curled around his. “I know your seeking, birthman,” Wander said. “I know its kind. But it is not possible. You will not keep here long.”

He shut his eyes and nodded, and shook his head. “But there is a need, yonwoman. There is a need.”

“Tell me your need, birthman.”

“I have no offering,” was his lament. “I have no gift. The Laruns see that I have nothing for these. As long as the ones alike suffer, my heart will never rest. Ih, my heart will never rest. It will scratch at the doors of the rulers’ house. It will scratch and tear down its doors and make a hole for all outish things. Ih, my heart will never rest. Ih, my heart will tear down doors!”

“I know, birthman.”

“Will you go to them?” the last Threehead asked. “Will you go to them, outman? Will you let them walk around again?”

Wander held his head. “It will be. I am so commanded.”

He held her hand and smiled. Then he breathed one more time and died.

-

“They’ve been taken into stabs,” Wander said.

The two of them milled about the stronghoof in the snow outside the dead man’s roundseat. Wander fiddled with its bags, retrieving various moulds, a stick of cloudrock, and other effects. “Stabs?” Fragile asked.

“Stabs. They’re smashing places…” She retrieved a corked bottle of resin, sniffed it, and stuffed it into her vest. “…digging places. It’s where rock is got to make parts with, and weapons, and gilding, and adorable things. They slash holes in the ground and pry it all out. Like I said. They usually use Freemen for it.”

Fragile looked off to the side and bit his lip. “Can we do anything?”

“I’m going to,” she said. “I’ll go there and look at it. The Laruns need stabs, so they send them many fighters, but these have grabbed at Goals. If they’re short of workers, that may mean they’re weak and desperate. Breathing Goals are good, and Laruns should be fought. I am so commanded.”

“Can we stay here for a little while?” he asked. “Before we go?”

She turned to him. “What makes you think you’re coming with me?”

“Ih, nothing. I didn’t… I’m not. I don’t.”

He looked away, and felt wrong for his clinging.

Wander pointed to the seats and peaks and distant woods behind her. “I’m going to go to this place,” she said, “and send back the hearts to their shell. You’ll be here to receive them. And our gathering will be ended.”

“Yes,” Fragile said. He bowed. “I hear you. Thank you, star.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds. Fragile looked away.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” Wander said, “and this shell’s stores are picked clean. So you will need to go hungry for a while.”

“Yes, Wander.”

“There would be bites and meat-hungry hearts,” Wander said, “and these seats are good shelter for them. So you would need to go hide for a while.”

“Yes, Wander.”

“I may not return,” Wander said. “If I did not, you would still be hungry. So you would need also to venture out, and be alone for a while.”

“Yes, Wander. I will do whatever you say.”

They were silent.

“Before you go,” Fragile said, “I wish we would do something. It is small. It would not take long.”

She raised an eyebrow.

-

The man in the roundseat had emaciated, and likely died because he had not eaten. Fragile learned this when he made to pick him up and drag him outside, and found that he weighed less than himself.

While he extracted the man from his seat, brought him into the sun and laid him in the snow, Wander removed her short blade and began to chop at the foundations of his house, which had not been stripped totally of its materials. She produced a number of splintered logs smelling of freshwater and mould; Fragile laid them into a pile and dragged the man on top.

Then quiet came, because he had stopped heaving, and she had stopped chopping. He picked among the seats, walking through cold firerooms and sleeping places, searching for any place where the shell held fire.

He found what he was looking for in the open air, outside a seat uncovered from the wind or rain. The ones in Sunwood had fashioned a large bowl from stone that he could fit himself inside, and they had filled it with wood and black rocks and put a box of dirt next to it and a long rod of wallrock, and Fragile had seen a thing like them. So he went into the seat where that was couched and found a spot where the ground had been stabbed out and found a jug of something he would name fire water. Then, he poured it over the bowl, and put a branch in the fire he set there, and cast it on the mound where the dead man lay. He sat in front of it and watched it all burn. He took his littlecane and cut open his palm, and shed tears and cried out at the mark’s making. He laid his blood against the snow and the dirt underneath it.

Wander watched and smoked her pipe. She watched him watch until the mound had burned down to a cinder and the smell of boiling bone and muscle had burned up with the wood. She wondered how it was that the metalworker had become learned of such things.

-

In the morning, Wander got up and tugged Fragile awake. “Come on,” she said. He did.

They left before dawn had broken and verged on the stabs in search of Sunwood’s folk. They took the roads Sunwood was attached to, in the way the spoken to had told. It started in the open air and passed into a dense forest where the trees crowded in. They found a place where the road had been covered over with roots and leaves and fresh saplings. A low wailing note swelled beneath their ears. Wander did not chop those trees down, but urged them all around, and set out to abandon that position very quickly.

They ran up on a column of figures when the road had grown thin and the sky bright blue. The road people wore thick trailing gowns of a shade Fragile had hardly seen anywhere beneath the clouds, and never once in overs or other clothes. They were put up on hoofs, and accompanied by a few Freemen. These provided a rear guard, and drove on or led each rider’s animal.

“Who are these strange travellers?” Fragile asked. “Their overs bear such a soothing face. It is like they took the sky and wove it in.”

“They are skyshade women, from a skyshade house,” Wander said. “They should not bother us.”

“What’s a skyshade house?”

“An awful place.” Wander tugged on the stronghoof’s lead and quickened their pace. “They are probably not bad hearts, but we need not address them. They have nothing we need.”

They went up the road and soon the skyshade women passed by them. Their draping gowns trailed off into the dirt, and curled around their greycoatted servants, but few of them gave the Star or the Sixbraid more than a passing glance. Fragile marvelled at the golden ornaments which threaded through their brows, and at one woman who had had off her nose and replaced it with a green crystal simulacrum.

“Ha, friend!”

Just as they were about to surpass the retinue, a woman dipped from the front of the column, approached them, and addressed Wander. The group halted, and turned in curiosity toward the strangers in white and black.

The woman had pins of gold in her chin and cheeks, accentuating her sharp features. Her hair was bound by a red sheet. “Can you speak like a thinker?” she asked.

Wander stopped walking, and Fragile with her. She switched her eyes off the road. “Yes,” she replied in Sprak.

“You are dressed up for fighting,” the woman said. “Are you Seen? Are you walking for Eighty?”

“Eighty?”

“Eighty,” she said. She tilted her head. “It’s a stabbing place. It sits a while past this road.”

Wander did not answer immediately. She considered resuming the ruse she had employed with the Freemen, but she supposed this had been rendered impossible. “I am a star that wanders,” she said, “and my work is not for speaking, skymarked woman.”

The woman pressed her hands together and raised them to her temple. “My design was not indignity, star. But if we are to share this path, perhaps we might share our parts. This is a needy and feurkun country, and it has many dangers for us both.”

Wander hesitated, and then bowed her head.

The woman placed a hand on her chest. “I am Sunmeasure,” she said. “We are glad for your companionship.”

“My name is Hillmeasure.” Wander gestured at Fragile. “This is my feurkun helper, Camp. He cannot think yet, but he is learning.”

“By what means did you come by a helper, star?” Sunmeasure asked. “Have you Tjeni papers?”

“He likes to help,” she said. “These are simple breathers. I found him in the Wild; ours is a company, now.”

She supposed it was partly true.

Friend, the Bell whispered.

Sunmeasure and the other skyshade women nodded and paid her glances of admiration. As they did it, their tallest member, a woman near the front, glared at Wander. She was on foot, and not gilded like her peers. In the back of her light bleu gown, thin and shorter than the others, hung a long, thick lump of cloth that tapered near its end.

Friend, the Bell repeated. Strong thing. Speak. Listen. Know.

“Who is that?” Wander asked Sunmeasure.

Seeing the hard gaze of her companion, Sunmeasure beckoned the bleu-dressed woman out from the crowd and put a hand on her shoulder. “This is Virtuous,” Sunmeasure said. “She is new to our company, and kind. But she is always suspicious of new ones. That is her great concern – the knowing of the new.”

“It is a fine grain to have,” Wander replied. “There is no wrong in it.”

Virtuous did not speak. She only glared. The wind whistled by.

Tell me of her feeling, Wander told the Bell. And why she seeks a fight.

She has known many fights, the Bell replied. They are like yours. Speak. Listen. Know.

-

They walked along the road with the skyshade women. Two peaks in the distance touched the clouds. In the darkness of early evening the stars were still bright enough to see by, and they walked toward the horizon’s gold. Fragile sniffed the air.

“What is that smell?” he asked Wander. The heads of the skyshade-women remained set forward, and did not address his lilting chatter. “It’s adorable!”

“It’s…” Wander thought of a way to explain it. She took off her hat and scratched her scalp. “Have you smelled a flower?”

Fragile nodded.

She lifted her palm. “There are those who learned – you can take the smell. You can put it in water.” She waved at their companions. “These do. And they put the water on themselves.”

“A smell in water!” He shook his head. “Why would they do it?”

“…because of their work.”

Fragile was naturally inclined to ask what their work was, but Wander seemed unusually tightlipped on the subject. So he let it be.

Just then, their column halted. In the distance, the shape of a stonehoof stood in profile in the middle of the road. Its black hair and skin stood out against the pearly Goalish barren. She could see weapons at its rider’s side, and that they wore a captured fit of Larun armor dyed the snow’s white.

Wander reached over her shoulder and brandished her blaith. Fighters?

The Bell was silent for a moment. Yes, she said. Takers. Rule-breakers. Bites.

They want coins?

No. The Bell’s gaze turned to the skyshade women. Wander turned with her.

The one named Virtuous stepped forward and stood behind Sunmeasure, who did not flinch in the face of this wannabe extortioner. The man unsheathed his drycane, dressed at the hilt by a wide paper fan, raised it up and urged his hoof forward. A crowd of stonehoofs emerged from over the faraway hills and descent at their leisure.

Sunmeasure noticed Wander’s glance. “We will be safe if they attack us, Star,” Sunmeasure said. “We have our own protection.”

Wander did not bother to inquire what that protection was, anticipating that the answer concerned the few timid Freemen who they surrounded. They shortly became encircled by the bites, whose animals snuffled and whinnied as their passengers directed them.

The bite who had been standing in the road reared his hoof and pointed at Fragile. “You,” he said, in Goalish. “Can you hear me?”

Fragile frowned and looked up at Wander. She stepped forward, and their eyes turned to her.

“I can hear you,” Wander said, “if you will speak, eld.”

The bites scoffed. “She speaks like a Dip heart,” said one. “Did the Dip teach you that, offman?”

Another giggled. “Listen to that nose! She says it like a little one!”

“An offman who can speak. An offman who has words.”

“Think: it is an offman who can speak. Any offman who can speak - it is a strange new one.”

“Where come you, offman?” the first bite asked. “Is your cane with these Laruns?”

“It is not with them. I come from the dawn. I am a star that wanders.”

“Very good,” he said. “Give us the Laruns, and all your Larun gifts, offman. If you don’t, we’ll cut off your heads, and put you all in a hole.”

“I have Larun gifts,” Wander said. “And I would gladly give them into you. But these others are not all Laruns, nor are they mine to give.”

“We will take them, then.”

“They are neither yours to take.”

The bites grumbled. “And who are you to hold them, star?” the first bite barked. “All the rulersland has been wasted and disjoined under their arms. Our parts of the rulersland; your parts of the rulersland. Where could we find such keeping when the Laruns came down for their heartgifts? We will take them, what is ours now, and restore the qualities taken from us.”

Fragile stepped forward and shook his fists at them. “Wander is the sign of lightning,” he cried. “If any were to hold them, there would be no better in the riversland to do it. You are not anywhere near her position!”

The bites laughed and looked at him. “Look at the little howl,” one jeered. “Hitting the ones who attack his master. Sweet little howl! Good little howl!”

“She is not a master,” Fragile insisted. “She is not like a master. She is a wall! She has eaten whole the Laruns who would eat riverhearts. She has touched her cane to the meeters of the Night Ruler. You are little bites, and if you do not seek out virtue, she will send you all to the ruler's house!”

The bites’ amusement turned to concerned mumbling.

“The Laruns who cut the riverhearts?”

“Is it true?”

“It cannot be. One could not fight so many men.”

“She wears the words. She is a star! Perhaps it is so.”

The first bite sniffed. His eyes ran over her hesigns, numerous and glowing. He adjusted his grip on his drycane.

It is not enough, the Bell said. He will still demand, even if he must freeze.

I do not wish to fight them, Wander replied. What shall I do?

Do not use coins, the Bell replied. That will not work. He thinks himself a virtuous man.

Wander walked toward the first bite, until she could look down into the eye of his hoof. She loosened her shoulderskin and let it drop to the ground. She turned her back to the bites, such that Fragile could not she what she showed them. She pulled down the neck of her shirt.

“Do you know what this means?” she asked.

The bites studied her neck with curious and furrowed brows. “Yes,” the first bite said. “I know what that means.”

She covered herself up and turned back around. “I am here for its giver,” she said. “I have carried it for fourteen colds. I am bringing it back to him, everything he gave me."

She picked up her garment and threw it back around her shoulders. “We should not be enemies.”

The bite pressed his lips together. They quivered. His fellow riders looked between him and Wander. “You think this should make us go away?” he questsaid. “You have been hurt, star. You have been hurt, it is true. An offman offmen hurt. There are many of you.”

“There are no more of me.”

He snorted. He spit off the side of his stonehoof, and shook his head.

“Give me gifts,” he exhaled. “Some gifts, star. Perhaps I will give you one.”

Wander removed the whole of her purse, still bursting with coins, and tossed it up to him. He caught it.

He weighed the bag in his hand for a moment before tossing it to one of his companions. “We’ll speak of you to our friends,” he said. “They call me Throat. We will be making response here soon, for all that the Laruns have done to us. But you should leave while you can. Those we know are harder and many more than us. And they do not hear as well as we do.”

“We can hear it.”

The bites swept past her in a rude and mingling column, and past Fragile and the skyshade women too, until they had become a smudge and then a fading mist on the horizon.

-

In the hours beyond their run-in with the bites, the light bent away from their hemisphere and Sunmeasure’s company decided to pause in a snow-covered plain on the side of the road. The Freemen hitched their stonehoofs and the stronghoof to a dead tree and threw in poles to the ground and stretched leather coverings about and over them, producing a round shielded place for their charges to wait and sleep. Then they stood guard on the icy moors outside, watching the starlit perimeter with unblinking eyes as rivers of white drifted over the icedrowned marsh.

The women crowded inside their facility, and laid out sleeping rolls of soft plush fabric that Fragile yearned to touch. When Wander first looked at the cramped shelter, so full of hands and bodies and errant limbs, a chill went through her.

So Wander grabbed a sack of feed from the stronghoof and put it down in the snow and sat on it and smoked and watched along with the Freemen. Fragile wrapped himself up in his coldover and threw out his own sleeping roll by her spot. She produced no objection.

“That was cunning of you, star.”

Sunmeasure’s voice came out of nowhere. Wander turned around. The skyshade woman had emerged from the tent. She laid out a cloth over the snow next to Wander and sat down, rubbing her hands for warmth.

“It is a cold night, proddi,” Wander told her, eyeing her thin blue dress.

“I’ve known colder.”

Wander removed her pipe from her mouth and offered it. Sunmeasure accepted the gesture. “Of what cunning do you speak?” Wander asked. “Even if you knew their words, they were just angry ones. Their needs are not unknowable. And now I am with less.”

“I don’t think so,” Sunmeasure replied. She put the pipe in her mouth and puffed. She removed the ornaments from her brow and a set of jewels pinned around her cheeks. “Only purest cunning could change taking to acquiry. I cannot know Goalish words, but I can see Goalish faces. Those ones missed something when they walked away from you.”

Wander did not respond. Sunmeasure paused. “You must not cut yourself down,” she said. “All this-” She let the jewels fall on her blanket, where they sparkled in the starlight. “It is all we have. It is our only shine to them. And you shine well, it is true.”

“Them?”

“Ones who hold,” she said. “Ones who want. And the holding itself.”

She passed the pipe back to Wander, who replaced it in her mouth.

“I am not a thing,” Wander said.

“We are things all to it, star.” She gathered up the jewels and placed them in an embroidered pouch. “To the takers. To the houses built big. To the papers that made them. To their hoards and hoardings.” She pinched her own cheek and tossed away the gems. “Dispose of these rocks. This is the shining thing. It can shine very well, and we may be well cared for. But there will always be a winning sought of it.”

Wander looked out to the snow and blew smoke. “Then it must not be won,” she said.

They continued to pass the pipe back and forth between them before Sunmeasure got up, folded her arms and padded back inside the tent.

Wander and Fragile bedded down.

“I could not hear it, Wander,” Fragile whispered to her. “What were you speaking of to that bite? What was it he knew? What was it you showed him? Why did they leave at all?”

Wander sat with her head against the sack. Steam rose up from the snow. She tilted her hat over her eyes. “You will never need to know the answers to those questions,” Wander said. “I am sure of little, but I am sure of that.”

Then she went to sleep. Fragile got on his side and followed her.

-

Ten-Six could feel the wires in her body, and she could feel them being pulled.

She saw sculptures built from gold. They had faces she recognized. She knew that they were people trapped, and not sculptures, and that they had been replaced long ago.

She could feel her stomach being filled up with sand. She felt as though she were being bitten away by fire.

She knelt down and saw the hesigns on her body. When she looked again, they had turned to gold coins, and the heat had welded them to her flesh.

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She could feel grass on her knees. She looked to the sky, searching for Am and his sons, but it was black and empty of them. The contours of a massive living shape protruded from the dark, its mouth quickening and its body shaking in a way that shook the ground. She could not move herself.

She looked down, and saw that the sky had gone under her feet. The whole world had become dark.

She heard a scream, and a wire in her body snapped. She heard another scream, and another wire snapped. She started falling through the darkness, and back onto the ground.

-

“Don m'ke'mih!” was the scream. “Don make mih!”

Fragile’s slurred caterwauling jolted Ten-Six awake. Wander got up from her sleeping spot and saw Fragile thrashing in his sleep, his jaw wired open.

“Bada,” he screamed. “Bada!” he howled. “Bada! Bada!” His throat bruised and burned and his voice became a scorched yowl.

The skyshade-women had stirred. A few of them wandered out from their covered house at the noise, including Sunmeasure, and the one called Virtuous. The Freemen had turned their attention to him too, and some had rushed to his side and reached out to touch him.

Wander got to her feet and waved them away. She knelt at his side. “What is wrong with you?” she asked. She did not receive an answer.

“Wake up,” she insisted. “Wake up.”

Fragile whimpered and clutched his arm tight. He bit his lip and Wander saw blood.

“Wake up,” she repeated, confounded. She pushed his head. He flailed wildly at her touch and clutched his chest.

“Wake up!” she roared. She mustered up and shot out her bare hands to shake him. “Wake up, you disable man!”

In her frustration, Wander lost track of her strength. Her attempt to lightly rattle him slammed his head against the ground. He cried out in pain and curled up into a ball. Water leaked out from his eyes, which had welded themselves shut.

Her brow unfurled and her eyes bulbed as she released him. She pulled away as though she had touched fire. Her hands hovered over him and shivered uncertainly.

“Am,” she exclaimed. “Am, please help. Key, I wish I didn’t do that. Please hear me. I wish I didn’t do that. Please wake up. Please. Wake up, my friend. There’s nothing that can hurt you. I will let nothing hurt you. Am.”

Sunmeasure and her companions watched Wander head hang over Fragile’s violent, wrenched figure. In spite of her efforts, the Sixbraid did not wake up. But something in him did hear and did grow quiet. A muscle unclenched. His breathing eased, and the screams went back inside him.

The others returned to their repose. Virtuous stood alone and watched until the two had fallen back asleep.

-

Fragile opened his eyes to Wander’s unconscious, supine body, positioned a foot away from his. He thought that she looked troubled, and very tired. Her eyelids shook slightly. It was the first time he had woken up before she – at least unintentionally.

He sat up and rubbed his face. From a distance, Sunmeasure and Virtuous were chattering quietly and looking at them. The sun had shot a wave of yellow light onto the rolling plains and staggering mountains and onto the sheets of white snow and ice that made a canvas of them. The skyshade women had begun to pack up and leave, wrapping themselves up in their cloaks and leaping on the hoofs with their Freeman pilots.

Fragile assembled his effects in a hurry, throwing on his three-string and tuskleather bag. Then he grabbed Wander’s shoulders and shook her. “Wander,” he whispered. “Wander!” His little shakes did not stir the warrior. If it weren’t for her heat, he might have thought her a corpse.

Someone reached down from a distant perch with a smooth, pruned, delicate hand. It took hold of Wander’s cheek, pinched it and withdrew. A moment later, her eyes blared open.

“Quiet Feet,” she accused.

“I didn’t-” Fragile looked up, back, and around, finding nothing and noone, in a panicked attempt to exonerate himself.

Then, the two of them spotted her. Virtuous stalked away, back toward Sunmeasure and their retreating company. Her boots pushed lightly through the windswept snow.

-

Black clouds had begun to stack up over the horizon. They were much larger than any Fragile had ever seen, except in the summer, when fire would join the rounds. The road passed by a gaping ravine. Fragile peered down into it and stumbled, sending rocks plummeting into a rushing torrent of underground water. Wander’s hand reached out and latched onto his arm, leaving him teetering over the side, and he yelped. Just before she could yank him back to safety, Fragile began to make out teeming rock spires and cream-colored crystal which glimmered in the darkness below. He saw something else in the current. She hauled him back from the edge.

“Wander,” Fragile said, “there’s a man down there.”

She stopped, though the skyshade-women and their helpers continued. He pointed to a spot at the bottom of the chasm. Beige rocks surrounded it and the blue-green water, covered in snow and ice. A tangle of red and grey disrupted their facade, held up by a stubborn node of stone that the river ran against and had smoothed down into a dark green nub. Sunlight shined past them and glinted off the victim’s langniv.

“That’s a Freeman.”

Wander and Fragile turned around. Virtuous was looking at them, and had spoken in high, lilting Goalish.

“He walked in,” she continued, “most like. Or he jumped. They don’t jump often.”

“How do you know?” Wander asked.

“Because they do it.” She went to their side and looked down. “Their work is terrible. They are good at terrible work. They will not fight it, flee it, or fight themselves. But sometimes they go off, and do a thing like this.”

She looked at Wander. “It is the only path they have.”

Then she walked away, going after their departed company. Wander and Fragile followed her.

As they moved closer to Eighty, Virtuous’ theory was strengthened by the territory. They spied a bryst and its owner keeled over beneath a tree obscured by fog. They passed over a frozen river, and saw three holes near the middle where the ice had broken. They found a man in a ditch, his head and face rent apart by claws and teeth. His weapon was sheathed.

In the meanwhile, Fragile and Wander walked alongside Virtuous at the rear of the column, where Fragile’s curiosity rapidly overwhelmed his hiding.

“You have amazing words, eldsister,” he told her. “It is as though you learned them in my shell!”

“When I learned your words, I had not seen twenty colds,” Virtuous replied. “The heart that did it feels so different than I. But I’m happy she learned them well.”

“How have you come by them?” he asked eagerly. “How have you become so learned of Freemen?”

“Everyone in a skyshade house is accustomed to such things.” She brushed her hair back. “We must speak with all those who come to us, and we must be known by the Laruns. It is all our work.”

She speaks falsely, the Bell whispered.

Why? Wander asked.

She knows you more. But she does not know it all yet. She could still fight, if you brought her to it. Speak, listen, know.

“It is surely a splendid work,” Fragile was saying. “What kind is it?”

Virtuous’ face soured. “I’m not sure you want to know,” she replied. “You’re wordy for a Goal. How did you go work for this little lost star?”

“It is everything I said.” Fragile tugged at his coldover. “It feels as though everything I saw was once dark. Now there is light in it. The Laruns came to our place. They fixed me in rope, and I was very scared. I would have gone to the rulers, but she defeated them. I have followed her for a while. Now, we travel with you, and when we-”

He stopped. Wander was giving him a wide-eyed look that he tried to interpret. He realized, with shock, that he had just been about to reveal their venture’s aim. Virtuous raised an eyebrow at their silent, gawking exchange.

“-and... I do it still,” he said. “I still do. Follow her. For a while.”

Virtuous nodded.

“How did you become a skyshade woman?” he asked.

“I chose it,” she replied. “Which may come as a surprise to your friend.”

“It does,” Wander said.

“That’s good,” Virtuous replied. “If it gets you to speak.”

“I was told that the Laruns marked hearts and drove them into it,” Wander continued. “I have never met one who followed them inside.”

“It has happened the way you say. But one does not forbid the other.” Virtuous frowned. “And they need us, now. They need Freemen. More than they did before.”

“And you chose to fill their need.”

Fragile noticed a sharp edge to Wander’s tone. The thunder in her voice had grown closer.

Virtuous recognized the anger in Wander’s voice and turned towards the road. “If I did,” Virtuous said, “what would that make me to you?”

“Strange,” Wander said. “There are other ways toward power. Your work walks among the poorest of them.”

“My work,” Virtuous echoed. She squinted her eyes and her lip bent inward. “And how do you think of your work, hm?” Virtuous asked. She turned to Fragile. “How do you think of it, Goal?”

“My work is help,” he said. “It is help for her.”

Virtuous scoffed. “Your work is for an armed fighter,” she said. “Your work supports her and supports her command, regardless of your need. Or your cane’s.”

He tilted his head and searched for the need she meant. He turned to Wander.

“She’s playing with you,” she assured him.

“Your creator has commanders, yes?” Virtuous asked Fragile.

“I don’t-”

“You don’t have to answer her,” Wander said. “I have commanders. What are you saying?”

“You have commanders,” Virtuous said. “And I have commanders. All these ones do. It is the commanding,” she insisted. She poked Fragile’s head. “This is what the commander needs. All else is play. All else is play. Vicious play, and wind and raging fire. That is all it seeks. That is the work of the whole world. You take commands; it is your work too.”

Fragile frowned. “But she has never commanded me,” he said.

“She wanders. She seeks to be commanded. You pillar her commands.” She waggled a finger at him. “And do not tell me you do not receive. You do receive. You can breath and burst because of her. Isn’t it true?”

“It is true!” he exclaimed gladly.

She smiled. “Hegrantar, Hegrantar, Hegrantar. You are a soft one.”

Fragile blushed.

Virtuous raised her eyes to Wander. “I can be a part of it. I have learned to keep with that. But I shake against the one who will not see it – this telling and this knowing and this moving.”

“I can see them,” Wander said. She looked away. “I was born to be told. This telling leads me right. So I will do it.”

Virtuous regarded her with contempt.

“Do what you will,” she said, “little star.”

-

Sunmeasure’s company entered their final approach to Eighty, and began to witness its touch.

First they passed by many clusters of black-barked and leafless trees. Between them worked companies of panting and shouting woodcutters. They dredged up dustclouds that filled the air with an exciting scent in their hacking and bleeding of the trees, which they killed with slabs of serrated metal. Their hands became covered in red and green liquid.

One group of Freemen pulled a tree down with a rope and staked hooks. The pullers stumbled, and one of their members was caught under the tree’s wayward body, sending up a scream. More Freemen scaled the trees with hooks and short knives, dismembering them, and throwing them into harnesses that the ones below might pull on them some more. A loud thud shook the forest, and Fragile jumped; one Freeman, balanced precariously on a too-thin branch, fell down from the canopy and produced a tremor in their company. It put only a moment’s pause to their sawing and hacking and chatter. These resumed.

A craning assembly of wheels and ropes stacked up log frames that were hammered together by the Freemen, and then placed on creaking hoofdrawn carts that carried them up the road into the cutset. Here there were no trees, and all one could see was the stump-speckled ground stretching out everywhere and the smoke of Eighty.

More hoofdrawn carts rattled past them, carrying grain, jingling with coins, jangling with loads of hammers and straight iron picks, brimming with meal and feed for animals that careened over their sides. An enclosed cart rocked past them gently, guarded by Freemen on hoofs, equipped with see-holes, Sprak phonograms, and a bone-and-arrow insignia that Wander regarded with suspicion. Columns of Freemen stamped past them porting loads of raw rock, glittering with flecks of gold and silver. They tramped along in synchronous parade, their backs hunched and their faces smiling.

The cutset gave way to buildings wrought of stone and wood. Fragile gazed up at them with his mouth open. They passed dwellings and facilities built in a square way. Tall portalled houses spilling over with grain and snow stood by pens that milled with hoofs drinking from ice-covered pools of ripping green water, spread out both near and far away from them. The road became paved with rock.

They reached a gate populated by three groups of Larun nivmen. Behind it, the source of the black clouds loomed. Crumbling gray walls proceeded out from the gate on either side and wrapped up the facility they concealed. They passed through it quickly, undeterred by its keepers, who averted their eyes from the skyshade women and all who accompanied them.

The yard where they arrived was broad and circular. Carts, hoofs and riders had set themselves into place there either by arrival or departure from the stabs. The thick, jutting broon soil was frozen solid and kept clear of snow. Some hoofs galloped and carts rolled past them as they arrived, bearing loads of rock or people. In other spots, teams of ten Freemen unloaded the carts, bearing sacks of grain, jars of liquid, and people.

The skyshade women halted. Sunmeasure approached Wander and Fragile. The women and their attendants observed them all.

“I believe this is where we part,” Sunmeasure said softly.

“I believe it is,” Wander replied.

Sunmeasure took two fingers and pointed to the sky. “We keep always in your memory,” she said. “May that which is seen see you, star. I hope your work meets its happy conclusion. Whatever it is.”

Wander echoed her gesture. Sunmeasure turned away and the skyshade women rode on, out of the cartplace, up toward a highly placed stone palazzo on a ridge far above the complex. As she passed them, Virtuous gave a short look at the two, and then followed Sunmeasure.

They were left alone in the cartplace. The Laruns moved around them, wheels rolled, and the stronghoof looked at them questioningly.

Fragile looked at Wander. “These are stabs?” he questsaid.

“Yes,” she replied. “These are stabs.”

-

The smell of spoil and feces was overwhelming. As they pressed into the huts and places where Goalish people poked out their heads, they found that every Goal in the complex had had their hair cut off. Each was marked on the back of the neck with the symbol Fragile had seen on Manor.

The Goals inhabited crude approximations of roundseats comprised of sticks and mud bricks that appeared to have been gleaned from the numerous cast-off demands of the facility and its sprawl. The bodies of the Goalish were covered by rags; they were dirty, bruised, and many were too thin. They looked up at Wander and down at Fragile as they moved past, comporting baskets made from cracked clay and bowls of water. There was no friendliness sent to them, but neither was there an air of unfamiliarity or agony, and they were left unmolested as they descended through this territory towards the sounds of metal on rock.

They walked to the edge of the Goalish residences, where the ground had been lifted and parted and gouged out by the Laruns, forming a large canyon filled with tunnels. It was populated in the distance by men with picks and Laruns wearing brysts. The clanging that it produced tilted the air.

As they had descended toward the stabs, Fragile had grown more horrified, until his eyes were wide and cold sweat beaded his forehead. While they surveilled the scale of the Laruns’ operation, he looked up and saw that Wander appeared untouched by the conditions of the Goals.

They turned away from the stabs and moved to a place where a crowd had gathered. A punisher, more permanently established and raised above them on its own platform, had been set up next to flags displaying the divine sigil of the Laruns. Freemen had begun the process of cutting down eight rotting bodies that still hung there. When they had removed them, a Larun in a bryst and wearing the insignia beneath the flag led a young Goal onto the platform, his hands bound by rope.

“Now begins the work of fire,” the Larun said in Goalish. “Listen, all you who can! This man stole from us, but he is a good worker. We will turn him to a thinking one.”

The Goal was forced to his knees. Oil was dripped over his scalp. One of the Freemen put a torch to it and it was set alight.

The Goals who had gathered shouted out in protest as his head was scorched. He screamed. Some of them tried to leap up onto the platform and intercede, but they were beaten and pitched from it by the Freemen. Those who threw rocks were skewered by arrows. The shouting only grew louder.

“Who will dig?” a Goal with one arm shouted, the Sprak falling off his tongue like shards of glass. “Who will dig? Who will dig if we are all broken?”

They screamed at the Laruns in shredded Sprak. “Who digs it?” they demanded. “Who digs it?”

The sound escalated to a fever pitch, outstripping even the suffering lament of the tortured Goal. Wander’s hand gripped the handle of her short blade, and trembled as she did. Before she could draw it out, the Goals swarmed the punisher, clambering up on it en masse. The Freemen swung at them wildly with clubs and langnivs, but the blood they shed did not deter the Goals; with rocks and sticks and digging spikes, they drove the Laruns from their spot and buried the victim’s head in cloth, suffocating the flames. A group of men took the Larun who had poured the oil and dragged him over to the ridge. His flailing body tumbled into the stabs, and the slopes flensed the cloth and skin from it before it had reached the bottom.

As the temper of the Goals coolled, the shouting was replaced by crying and then silence. A party of hoofs thundered down from the gilded house. The crowd had already dispersed; they moved past the few remaining bystanders unpposed. They stormed up to Wander and Fragile, kicking up snow that splashed onto her shoulderskin and his coldover.

The highest Freeman among the posse leapt off his hoof. He was adorned in hesigns. His body’s skin appeared smooth and curated.

“You are new,” he said to Wander.

“I am,” she replied.

“You came with women.”

“I did.”

The Freeman pointed to the house on the hill. “You must come with us,” he said. “We will take your animal. There is a need.”

Wander looked at the house. “So uncover it," she said.

“There is a need,” he repeated.

“Wander?” Fragile asked uncertainly.

Wander’s hand twitched toward and then away from her short blade.

“Come on,” she muttered.

The Freemen surrounded them. They pulled away the stronghoof, who let out a distressed cry. They lead them away from the stabs.

-

They rode up to the head of the complex, and started on the road to the house of stone. It was surrounded by a low slab wall and many nivmen wearing the gray raiment of the Laruns. A man in a purple cloak stood at the stairs leading up the building’s ornate wooden door.

The path that the Freemen guided them up was well-produced, laid with precious stones and stone lamps that bald-headed tenders dressed in tightly woven dirt-covered clothes lit with long matches. They passed through the fencing and the nivmen near it, and the Freemen leading the stronghoof guided it toward a large covered shelter below the big house, where large stonehoofs milled about drinking from wooden trenches. The man in purple stepped down to greet them.

“A star of Azad,” he said. “Does she have a name?”

Wander said nothing. She looked at the stranger’s face. There were weary lines on it, and behind his smile lay irration. Although his hands were smooth and unfussed from the handling of metal, the back of his right hand was bruised, and she could smell blood from it.

“We have heard of your work,” he continued. “I suppose you’ve done something for the new parts of my house. You have entered us into obligation; that is unacceptable.”

“I never agreed to coins,” Wander said. “We came to help your friends by chance, not by work."

“That’s true.” He gestured to the estate. “You must take our food, now. You and your feurkun too, and you must also use our roof. A good man replies well. And if I do not, I will not be a good man.”

“That isn’t needed.”

“I think it is.”

The Freemen surrounded them. “You must take our food, and use our roof,” Priceless repeated. “After that, you will depart the Otiser’s stabs.”

Wander eyed the Freemen warily.

Will he hurt us? she asked the Bell.

He would if he could, she said. But he is learned. He knows it would be hard.

They walked toward the house.

-

The door to Priceless’ estate was large, ornamented, carved and open. The interior was filled with good and ornate furnitures carved with women, winged figures and throned men, that one might use to sit, reflect, or contemplate. Teams of attendants – Freemen and Goals – with scalps flat in a Larun way attended to Priceless and those men and women surrounding him. The attendants were clean, and cloaked in garments spun from liq, a temperate material whose qualities Wander had only read about, but the body of every Freeman and every Goal bent and snapped, displayed scars and bruises of the cheek and burns on the head or hand, and all the Goals shook in a constant struggle to stay upright. Wander could feel their legs wobbling like jelly, rippling air throughout the room.

There were stairs built by great masters that led to the upper floor, and clear containers of many fluids different and shining and stacked up on a wall. The room was lit by many small, condensed fires, rather than the great snapping rough ones Fragile had always known. Each was confined to a single black fibre wrapped in wax, and Fragile could not smell the smoke of one. He looked to the sky and saw many little ports in the ceiling, whose arrangement had been dreamed and paid for by the merits of this place. Its glow and shape turned around his mind, and the room was much larger by it.

To Wander’s mind, it put her in sight of the stabs – the digging and turning out of places which one found useful and enjoying about the world.

They were brought up the stairs, where there sat a long ornate wood table gilded with silver. There sat two Larun women adjacent to the table’s head, three Larun men, and three Goalish women who sat beside those. Aside them, to her surprise, were Sunmeasure and Virtuous. The skyshade women glanced up at Wander, but their eyes said nothing.

The table’s surface was covered by twelve sets of tools, placed before seats painted the same hue as the table. Before each woman at the table was an egg-shaped cup and a bowl, filled with steaming broth, and before each man was a dark cut of meat. Each set included a handheld scoop, akin to a metal shell, and a hooked lance the size of Fragile’s hand. He wondered what they were for.

Before he could wonder further, one of the Goalish attendants snatched him by the ear and dragged him back, Wander’s hand reached out and locked onto his arm.

The attendant, a short man with brown hair dressed in a blue cloak, pulled harder. “Not him,” he insisted in thickly accented Sprak.

“Why not?” Wander asked.

“Firkun ones do not eat with knowing ones.” He yanked roughly at Fragile’s ear and arm, causing him to cry out, but Wander’s grip fixed him in place. “It is not a thing done.”

Priceless turned himself around and cast his weary gaze on them. “Will you not be easy, Newpoint Highmind?” he implored.

“You would eat with him, Firstpoint?”

“Is he touched?”

Highmind wrenched down the scruff of Fragile’s coldover and exposed the back of his neck. He explored with his eyes and fingers as he searched for a mark. At the sight of this, Wander applied another pound of pressure to Fragile’s arm. He cringed.

At last, Highmind looked up, frustrated. “He is not touched.”

“Then he is not in our care,” Priceless said, “and it does not matter whether I would eat with him or not.” He took a seat at the head of the table.

Highmind released him. The moment he had been set free, Fragile broke away, and his shoulder pressed tightly to Wander’s. She shoved it away.

Priceless waved his hand at the other diners, who chattered among themselves and observed them curiously.

“You know your friends,” Priceless said. He pointed to each person sitting down. “These two are my house. These three are my sons, and those three are the houses for my sons.”

Like the other women at the table, Sunmeasure and Virtuous were dressed in gold ornaments and a white garment that covered their whole body below the neck. Its fabric flowed and splashed like liquid. The men were dressed in comfortable cloaks the same color as their father’s. Although their hair was cut and their skin glowed with moisture, they reeked of ash and soil. They had scars, and much smaller ones.

Priceless addressed Sunmeasure, pointing to Wander and Fragile. “These are the ones you spoke of?”

Sunmeasure nodded.

“Then we can begin again.”

Highmind and another Goal pulled out two of the table’s high-backed seats for Fragile and Wander at its end, a few places down from the main host. The two women sitting beside Priceless looked at their guests with suspicion. The Goalish women, sitting beside Priceless’ sons, looked at Wander’s hesigns angrily. The men looked at nothing. They paused from their eating like halted automatons, occasionally shifting to blink or breath.

Fragile went to sit alongside Wander. He scurried to the seat at his place, poking his hands between the patterns carved into the rear, running his hands over its fine material, and inhaling its fresh, oily scent. Wander hooked one finger under his arm, gently tugged him to his feet, and guided him into it.

When they were seated Priceless stood. He took a cup, a larger one glazed with silver, in both hands.

“The Executor saw fit to place me and my family in this trying place,” He said. He raised the cup to the left of the table, where the sun would set and where lay Larunkat. “The Otiser’s qualities continue to shape us, inside and out.”

His family, Sunmeasure and Virtuous all raised their cups the same way. Priceless dropped his; it fell to the floor with a screeching bounce and bled out its contents in a pool that smelled of fruit and liquor. The attendants beside Highmind, standing dutifully on the table’s periphery, rushed over to correct the mess with bundles of cloth. Priceless sat down and slouched as they reseated and refilled his cup and the diners resumed their meal.

As the men carved up their flesh and the women sipped from their bowls, the attendants placed down platters of food before Wander and Fragile. Neither had received meat or broth. Instead, they had been provided a potpourri of crusts, rinds, and small, veiny cuts of some pack animal’s muscle, diced into a fine hash.

One of the attendants bent into Fragile’s ear as he gave him his food and whispered in Goalish: “Pinch your nose,” he said, “and you need not taste it.” Fragile suddenly took up a fascination with the cloth that he had been provided to guard his chest and lap, woven with a smoothness and precision that he had only seen like in Wander’s shoulderskin.

Wander, for her part, ate prodigiously; Priceless swallowed a bite of meat with grit teeth and a retch as he watched her chomp away at even her most grotesque and inedible portions. After she had cleared them away, she looked into his eyes, got up from her seat, and walked over to the middle of the table. The whole host was stunned as she snatched a glass pitcher of juice from the table’s center and drank it down in a single chugging gulp, replaced it nearly, and crashed back into her seat.

One of Priceless’ sons, the youngest of them, attempted to engage her. “What was your first region, star?” he asked. “We see so many breathers here. They come and go, but I have never heard anyone with words like yours.”

She looked at him. She chewed on a bone and there was a pop and a crunch. “My region was in the laif,” she said. “It went under yours, many fourseasons ago.”

“The laif,” he repeated. “I see. We have never had such people here. No Shamins, no Shamars. What little nightsights you must have had out there! I’m sure you prefer it here.”

“You are.”

“Yes,” he said excitedly. “Do you know it? It was uncovered – Laruns can see bigger sights than those in laif regions. It is a fundamental article. Laif countries are lower, with lower valleys; dacif countries are higher, with higher peaks. So many more breathers in our land think of places bigger than those in Shaminland or Shamarland.”

“Is that so?”

“It is,” he said. “A fundamental article. What is seen is certain. Breathers in high places. Breathers in low places seek out high places. That is a central leg of totalitet.”

One of his brothers nodded like he knew what was being discussed. The other shook his head.

“You have too many thoughts, Partsmany,” the dissenter said. He stabbed a piece of meat. “Too many papers. You should take some of your time and produce something. Produce a house, at least.”

“I’m not as intrepid as you, Pointstrong,” Partsmany replied. “I could not possibly produce from these feurkun gaps. Yours cannot even speak. They are good for fun and one afternoon, but little else.”

He picked and chopped at his dish. “On this article, there has been a blocking element, here in Goalland. Have you encountered it, star?”

She said nothing. He spoke anyway. “You see, there are those who have looked for what the Goals can find when they lie down – if they can find anything at all. What has the Goal been given? What is certain to her?” He smiled playfully and shook his head. “Those who search – Peer, Worthmaking, Collector – beside all the Otiseran’s working places, they have never found the answer here. No Goal will speak of what he sees. They do not think it good! So greatly has their ‘vertoo’ weighed them down. Can you believe it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can believe it.”

His eyes lit up when he received a response.

Their father picked at his food. “See now,” Partsmany said. “Our producer. He had such an excellent sight, and now, in the stabs, its truth has been told and revealed to us. That sort of thing is not concealed from one’s family. Tell it to her, prodda. Tell her your sight of parts. Your sight of holes.”

Priceless’ lips soured. He took a drink from his cup. “I do not wish to do it.”

The tall woman seated next to Priceless noticed his melancholy and put a hand on his.

“She knows, prodda,” Partsmany said. “Tell it like you do. It was true enough, wasn’t it? What have you to feel wrong about?”

Priceless put down his cup and closed his eyes. The table became silent and all its diners waited for him to speak.

“I saw myself,” Priceless said, “as a man without parts.”

He continued, “I was walking. I was walking on the Ash Road. I met a man; his chest was shot through. I have seen him before, in Litonland. A Palestoneman.” His eyes unfocused. “And I had few parts. I became certain that he had fewer still. His body had lost all its shapes; the fingers he could touch with. The eyes he could see with. The ears he could hear with. The feet he could walk with. I asked him then, how he had been so hurt. He said that…”

Priceless breathed heavily and a bead of sweat fell from his brow. “…he said that he was searching for something. He was searching for a hole. He said that his shapes had been buried underneath there. He promised me parts, and a share of them, his shapes, if I could stand the risk of digging. I agreed. I would do whatever was needed to gain my own parts.” He held a hand to his head. “I dug. When I had finished, I found myself in darkness. There were no shapes there. But I know that there were parts.”

As suddenly as his demeanor had fallen, it rose up again. Priceless wiped the sweat from his brow, took his thumb and forefinger and stroked his chin.

“Three days later, we stumbled on them,” he said. “The rooms in the fourth stab, and all its precious materials.”

“It is like I said,” Partsmany exclaimed, “a much bigger sight! What is seen is certain.”

Priceless nodded. Wander’s brow furrowed at the mention of the ‘rooms.’ She did not inquire further.

At this point in time, Priceless’ gaze turned to Fragile, who had been poking at the tools he had been provided to eat with, and had not touched any portion of the meal he had been offered.

“Star, your feurkun does not eat,” Pointstrong said. “He is so weak. He must grow strong to carry your loads.”

“It’s true,” Priceless affirmed. “Is he turned around? What has happened?”

Wander looked at Fragile. “They want to know why you won’t eat.”

“I-” His eyes flickered between the men and women and the nivmen in the room. “I cannot.”

“Why not?”

“The ruler.”

Wander blinked. She had forgotten the Goals’ daytime prohibition on meals. “He will not eat,” she said. “They do not do it before nightfall.”

“It’s their feurkun way,” Partsmany said. “Don’t you know it, producer? For as long as light shines, all the plants and animals are beloved by itself, and they see an injury in the eating of anything it enjoys.”

“I remember that,” Priceless responded, rubbing his chin, “But it seems many fourseasons ago when we did tell this out of them. He is feurkun, star, and it is a feurkun way. He must have these disintegrating items lifted off of him eventually. What better time than now?”

“I’m tired,” Wander said. “I will let him be.”

There was a prolonged silence. Priceless waved at the hulking Freeman who had brought them up. He moved to Fragile.

“If you are not inclined to do it, we will help,” Priceless said. “It is always a happy thing to reduce unknowing.”

The Freeman seized Fragile’s jaw. He wrapped his fingers around Fragile’s chin and cheeks and squeezed. Fragile’s eyes went wide and watered, and he began to rattle and thrash and squeal. The Blade picked up the dish and tilted it toward his throat.

Wander’s vision went red. She felt her nerves tense and flex. Then the Freeman was pinned against the wall, and his throat had gone inside her hand. She admired its delicacy.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she heard someone crying out for her to stop. She looked down and saw Fragile’s arms wrapped around her waist. Around her were three Freemen with weapons drawn. One of them appeared to have a broken hand.

The Freeman gargled and gasped for air. She released him. He fell to the floor and slumped against the wall, wheezing.

Priceless drank. Sunmeasure gawked at the scene in horror.

The Freemen pushed past Wander to help up their friend, hauled him away from her, and ripped off his bryst to let him breath. When they did it, Wander saw the beginning of long clawing welts on his neck and collarbone, moving down onto his body.

Priceless turned to Highmind, who trembled in fear with the other attendants at the far end of the room. “Our visitor is tired,” Priceless said, “Find somewhere for her.”

-

The quarters Fragile and Wander were lead to was small, with four beds. It was more of a storage or a cell than somewhere good to sleep, and it was drafty. It was on the top floor of the estate and lit by a candle, and they could see out onto the slopes and scape of Eighty through a small shuttered window. The shadow of one or more Freeman drifted in from under the door. The beds were flat, short, and hard, but they were full of blankets woven from fibre and thick wool.

“I’m sorry,” Fragile said in Goalish.

“That wouldn’t be right,” Wander said. She took out a corked bottle from her vest full of a bitter-smelling ointment, dabbed it on her glove, and lightly rubbed in the places Fragile’s jaw had been rent open by the Freeman. She could feel him shaking. “So do not be.”

“The virtue has made things hard for you. I wish it did not.”

Wander said nothing.

“What is this place?” Fragile asked. “Why are we here?”

Wander corked up her bottle and put it in her vest. Then she sat down on the bed across from him. “There is a word for this place in Sprak: ‘papersquare.’ Those men we saw decide what happens here, and down below.”

“Did they take the Threeheads?”

“Probably.”

“Can you fight them?”

“Yes. They’re hurt, and I am in a good place to hit from.”

“Will you?”

Wander looked out the window. “If you were safe, I would now, and let go all the hearts they carry,” she said. “But you are not.”

She laid down on her bed. “Tomorrow I’ll bring you out of this place, and then I’ll bring out a path for the others. Try to shut your eyes. This is your first time on a cushion, isn’t it?”

He felt the plush fabric of the bed in his hands. “Is that its name?”

She nodded. “It may feel wrong to your skin. But try not to leave it. It’s better for your body.”

She shut her eyes.

-

The sky hissed with ice. The sun went away, and mounds covered up the night.

The houses and facilities of Eighty stood. The smell of the many hoofs and tusks and bearers bred, kept and cut apart by the Laruns wafted through the Goalish section and the sloping, ice-hitched homes made up by the people there. Some hearts could sleep. The work had burned them away, and they shiverred together in blanketed spots with whatever material they could scrounge. Others kept still and their eyes stayed open.

Bites arrived at dawn. They arrived in many gatherings; they emerged over the hills, climbed up from cliffs and gulches and rode out from the woods. They carried fire with them on poles and lances and mounted wreathes. They came over the horizon, beyond the quarters of the workers, who were first awoke by shouting and thunder, and beyond the pens where the hooves were saddled, beyond the Freeman houses. And over the ditches, atop the frozen desert of the cutset, in rows and packs and mobs, the bites all massed. A group came among them, of men and women and children, their throats marked with black ashen stripes, and they screamed out a Goalish phobiphony.

This phobiphony was screaming and howling. It had few names, but all knew its shape, which was carried by the wind into the skull of every fighter and lasher and keeper and rich man of Eighty. Twenty men squealed like pigs. Forty women howled like wolves. Sixty boys and girls cried and wept and screamed like human children. Then they rejoined and yelled all common and simple rage, erupting their throats and digging them apart with the sheer terror and invasion which had produced their proclaim.

So the phobiphony began, and the bites swept across the complex, throwing about wood and flames, leaping on Freeman guards, hacking them to death with knives, and lancing them in the throat. All the diggers and their families rushed out of their homes and heard the phobiphony and knew that response was given. Every heart took up the weapons of the fallen and wooden branches and rusted knives and scraps of iron and rocks and stones and fists and legs and exploded apart Eighty with tired and excoriating mutiny. Flames shot up and Fragile could see them from the window.

All the Freemen and Laruns not awake woke suddenly, falling out of their beds in darkened halls and orderly sleepplaces and knife-racks, and whipped up a tempest of voices and commands and running and mustering. Soon there was shouting and clattering in their yards and stables and stockhouses and tabled eateries, and in the encampments of those visitors outside these who had come to feed the stabs.

The battering commotion of screams and banging metal had dragged Fragile from a dull and muddy sleep. He tore himself off the floor next to the bed, and realized Wander’s bed was empty. After he had seen the swarming pickets overrun and throw up fire in the facilities below, he heard began to hear crying elsewhere in the house, and the ground vibrated with resound of distant and direct contacts. The door to the chamber was ajar.

He descended the stairs and walked through an access corridor. Thunder shook the papersquare with every step. He emerged into the main hall.

Wander stood among a crowd of fallen Freemen. To Fragile, she looked a myth. She was washed in red and black that stuck to her face. She gripped her short blade in her left hand, wet with fresh blood. She looked towards Fragile. A number of Goalish servants stood nearby, wailing in grief and terror.

-

The bites surrounded the house of Priceless. They leapt over its walls and set up a ring around it and levelled their weapons at its gates. There remained some fading wails in the distance and more fires sprouting up from the houses of Freemen, grain stocks, and hoofpens. But the phobiphony had ended, the air was clear, and they girded themselves for a quiet fight.

The bites took up fire and wood and marched up to the door of the estate. At their head were many people; a large Goal with a burnt scalp, a short Goal with a scar on his cheek, a tall Goal with short hair.

The door creaked open. Jingling boots descended the steps to it. The bites watched the descent of the figure and the package she carried in a sack of cloth, which dripped red onto the extracted rock of the estate’s stairs.

Wander approached the Goal at their center, and stood eye to eye with him. She uncovered her package, revealing the head of Priceless.

She threw it by the hair to one of his companions. “This face belonged to the creator here,” she said. “The one who has driven your brothers and thrust on your sisters for many seasons.”

The Goal’s friend handed it to him. He laughed and spat on it. He tossed it to the side.

“So you are an offman without virtue,” he boomed. “Like every other offman we’ve known. We burnt them away and lowered them. How do you expect to be treated?”

The Goals glowered at her, but she didn’t move.

“Voicecane,” a voice from the crowd called.

The bites turned into the crowd, onto the body of a man who stepped forward. Wander recognized him as the bite who had robbed them on the road to Eighty.

Throat looked up at Wander and then toward her accuser. “I know this star,” he said. “Please friend, turn away for now. I would like to speak with her.”

Voicecane looked between Wander and Throat.

“I will stay,” he said. “If Throat Giver will hear an offman before he hits her, she is an offman worth hearing.”

Throat nodded. He turned to Wander and clasped his hands behind his back.

“The offman with Dip words,” He intoned. “It has not been so long since we met.”

“How come you here?” he asked. He nodded at the head of Priceless, which had begun to run dry on the stone. “How does it come into you, this adorable gift?”

“The Laruns’ way,” Wander said, “I think. Our work against you was a good thing for them. Their virtue demands that they offer for it.”

“Offman ways.” Throat shook his head. “They are a mystery to me.”

“They are not so unlike others,” she replied. “And this is not only a gift. I wish something in return for it.”

Throat inclined his head.

“I know you will destroy this house,” she continued. “I wish you would let out and let past the hearts in it who remain. I have thrown out all the wrong ones. Everyone left is unarmed or like your own.”

“My friends would like gifts,” he said. “And the ones who reside there would make good ones. This would be a great offering.”

“The house is already filled with city rocks. I want none of them.”

Throat looked back at the head of Priceless. “Why treat with us?” he asked. “It puts a strangeness to your character. I doubt your intent.”

“I am glad to demonstrate my qualities.”

“And what are those?”

“I want Laruns gone,” she said. “And the happiness of Goals. I am so commanded.”

He bit his lip. “There is a way,” he replied. “There is a way you can demonstrate these. And then, perhaps, we can speak further. And I can give you the gifts you want.”

“What way is that?”

He lifted a cautious hand to her shoulder and tugged it. “Come, star,” he said. “Come and see.”

-

Throat, Voicecane and Wander went down from the guarded cloisters of Priceless’ mansion, toward a ridge where their lord once might’ve looked out onto the gutted chamber of soil that he governed. Many bites gathered around a tunnel in its far end.

“What do you see?” Throat asked Wander.

She raised an eyebrow. “I see rock. There is dirt, too. There are holes.”

“There is rock,” he replied. “And there is dirt. And there are holes.” He threw his arm out to the cleaved territory – to its piles of rubble and soil and unmelted metal. It occupied the senses. “We know that this can be used to produce a change. They think that we do not know. This is fire. This is cities. It is learned ways to bring up what is under us. Have you read the words of Flowered?”

“I have.”

“His papers. He called them Beliefs. I found them, and a reader of them, in the pouch of a Larun body. He wrote down that the only way forward for the unthinkers, the feurkun, was to take up the cutting and digging and stabbing of this place ourselves.” He looked out at the stabs. “What do you think?”

Wander looked at the tunnels.

“A tunnel is a tunnel,” she said. “I do not know what it does besides itself. I have never wondered. It is hot, and lies heavy. That is all I know.”

Throat nodded.

“What will you do?” Wander asked.

“I think that I will take everything of this place,” Throat replied, “I will take some wood into it. I will make fire, and encourage fire. It will not theirs. It will be our fire. A feurkun fire. I would like to see what kind of change it makes.”

He pointed to a tunnel at the far end of the canyon, marked with a thin white strip, where the bites had gathered.

“The last of the thrusting offmen have gone into that place,” he said. “A party of twenty men or more. It would be difficult for us to fight. Many of my friends would go away. If you will go into it, I will know your qualities. And they too will be known to others.”

-

Wander walked past columns of Goalish fighters as she descended the muddy slopes leading down into Eighty’s stabs. Rock mounds that loomed over everything turned to fingershapes in the mist. As the bites set fire to the punisher and Larun flags on the ridge, she pressed toward the tunnel she had been directed toward. Fragile and Throat watched her from above.

On her approach to the tunnel, she stumbled on deserted tools. The canyon was rife everywhere with abandoned carts and rubbish pits and gaping maws in the ground. A small pocket of bites aimed arrows and drycanes and langnivs at the entrance. They watched her with stern, ashy brows as the darkness buried her underneath. Her eyes shrivelled away, and she saw with sweatsight.

Wander walked down into the aperture the Laruns had stabbed open. She saw tools and smelled perspiry, blood, and a stinging hint of urine. The opening curved into a long tunnel that she descended, going further into the stabbed place. She began to make out a hole dropping off into the side of the cavern. She stopped in front of it, where a slope lead down into a circle full of more tools and an entranceway in the wall it was.

The hole was part of a wide round building, part of whose tremendous frame had been dug away and revealed to be an insulation of white stone. A large block had been tugged away from its upper tiers. She drew her short blade and stepped inside the complex.

She emerged into a cavernous chamber. The ground was flat and grooved. Oval gaps had been carved out in the floor, and it smelled of ancient mould. The room was round. Above the door to the next chamber, a lithograph had been carved into the rock. It depicted a squat figure with exaggerated and various sexual organs, one that had been separated into two halves.

The chamber was empty of people. She gripped her shortblade and pressed past it, beneath the lithograph, into the next.

The second chamber was as round as the first, although the ground was flat. She saw a table and a blade coated in sticking, jagged red dust. The same figure that had been carved above the prior door was carved above the next. The smell of ancient blood filled the room, and in the corner she spied a cast-off thighbone. It was as empty as the facility’s other parts, and she passed through it.

The land gasped as Wander crept inside the third room. A gust of wind blew past her head.

The final chamber was the largest. It was filled with long rows of blocks, consisting of stacked grey metal. She touched her hand to them, and realized they were not made of iron or steel. Stacks of rotten wood also stood by, and statues and garments and weapons gilded with the same material. They were stacked in orderly loaves until the coming of the chamber’s far end, where laying on an altar was a rectangular stone receptacle. Behind it were many more of its same type, raised vertically and in rows, each marked with a particular symbol on its face.

The room was populated.

She first saw one Larun nivman on the floor. He lay in his bryst with his knife unsheathed and his tanned waterskin splayed out on his smooth stone floor. There was excavated a thin crevice in his chest, whose color would surely be red in the light. There were two Larun nivmen, with four arms between them. Then there were three and four, and five and six, and numbers gave way to singular mass and note of their affection of the territory. Pools of them poured out into stains on the floor. The damaged ones reminded her of the field she had produced in Fragile’s original shell.

A pair of black, pea-sized eyes stared at her from across the room. Their owner gripped a long blaith dressed with hesigns and running blood.

“How are you, Hillmeasure?” Virtuous asked.

Wander stepped forward, over the bodies.

Virtuous peered back into the uncovered receptacle, eyeing something Wander couldn’t see. “This was a place once for breathless ones,” she continued. “Now it is again. It is I think, a more labored place to breath last than any you or I might once have wished for. It is twice a shame that neither of us will do it here.”

“You seem sure.”

“If I wanted you gone, I would’ve taken your head on the first night.” Virtuous looked back at Wander, removed a cloth from her vest, and began to wipe off her sword. The skyshade woman’s sweatsight flickered in the dark. “I am sure.”

Wander stepped over the corpse of a man whose right arm had been severed at the shoulder. “My count is Ten-Six,” she said. “Uncover yours.”

“I have no count,” Virtuous replied. “I am Virtuous. That is my name. I am not an animal, nor a worker, nor a coin, Shamin shorttooth.”

“Then what are you?”

Virtuous shoved her blaith into its sheath and hung it over her back. Wander guessed it was the lump she'd perceived. “I am what you claim to be.”

“You’re a Wandering Star?”

“Did you really think me a skyshade woman?” She beat herself free of dust. Wander could see now that she had discarded the tight blue cloak that she wore in the company of Sunmeasure and adopted a raiment of patchwork guards and tanned coverings, layered over a vest similar to the one Wander wore. Out from these came the telltale glimmer of hesigns. “Well, you’re young.”

“I am. What are you doing here?”

She tossed a fibrous bag to the ground. Metal bricks spilled out of it. “I heard about this place from a hoof-driving man.” she said. “There are many men here, with many mouths, or there were. Such shining parts are noisy. They can be heard from far away. So I met with Sunmeasure, and made my price passage here. Laruns do so dislike us, even when we aren’t unsettling their territory.”

Wander gripped her blaith. Virtuous’ eyes flicked to it.

“I wonder what you’re planning to do with that,” she said.

“If you are uncommanded,” Wander said, “you know what is required.”

“I do.” Virtuous leaned on her leg easily.

“Then put out your weapon.”

“I see no reason to,” Virtuous said. “The Family is not precious to me. Nor you, I don’t think.”

“They command,” Wander replied. “I am commanded. And they provide. It is what I need.”

“Is that why you call out the name of a forgotten ruler, instead of their own?”

Wander flexed her fingers. Her grip loosened.

“Before I go,” Virtuous said. “I did want to ask why you keep him around. The Goal.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“No, it doesn’t. But it does make you strange to me.”

“He didn’t make me strange.”

“I don’t think he did.” Virtuous paused. “You must know he’d be safer away from a place like this, but you brought him here. And you’re here now, with me.”

“Yes,” Wander said. “I am.” Her eyes fell.

Virtuous nodded to herself. She picked up her bag, threw it over her shoulder, and walked toward the exit. Wander kept a hand on the hilt of her blade and looked forward. Virtuous stopped briefly as she passed.

“We can breath today, star,” she said. “I have a hope. I think that you might adore what is precious. Not the things they’ve been made to build. But the next time we meet, I may be in a new mood. And you are still commanded. We will see then what your kind really is.”

Another gust of wind blew through the chamber. Wander turned around. The room was empty, and she was alone. On a whim, she walked toward the opened receptacle, and peered down into it.

Within it, cut into two halves, were the remains of a man. All he was had turned white and bleached.

-

The fires of the papersquare raged as Wander and Fragile departed Eighty. Sunmeasure, the skyshade women, and the Goalish inhabitants of Priceless’ domain were in tow, trailing behind them in a long column of stonehoofs. In the distance, the Threehead Goals, among others, made their way out from the destroyed stabs, leading bound animals, sacks of grain and metal and tools, and carrying those among them too hurt to walk.

They came to the top of a hill in a cutset and turned back. They could see the fires consume the stabs’ dozen risen points, and everything beneath them.

Sunmeasure went up to them again. “We must go again, star,” she said.

“I know,” Wander replied. “I’m sorry to foist the Goals on you.”

“They’re no burden,” Sunmeasure said. “We will drive toward Lowcliff. They can find places there.”

She paused.

“Who are you?” Sunmeasure asked. She looked to Fragile and then back to Wander. “You and he. From the start, I thought you had offered less. But now I think that you have offered everything, and nothing at all.”

It was a long time before Wander answered. “I don’t know,” she said.

Sunmeasure watched her for signs of deceit. “I wish you would find out." She pointed to the sky again. “I hope that we will meet again.”

Wander nodded. Sunmeasure leapt on a hoof, and the skyshade women started off to the North.

Wander and Fragile observed the masses of departing Threeheads, mingling with columns of hoof-mounted bites and captured carts of supplies.

"They'll be going back home," she said. "You should follow them."

Fragile felt cold. "I will," he said. He smiled in the way he was taught. "They will surely need new hands wherever they decide to go. It will bring up great excitement."

"Yes." Her gaze shifted. "You should know that the Laruns will surely come back here soon. They'll do their cutting. Their anger will be great; the bites will be like to hide quickly. They will not stay in one place long."

He perked up. "I think so," he said. "It would be best if they split apart and went elsewhere. That would be very safe."

They looked at each other silently for a moment.

"There's places to be still," she said. "If you want, you can accompany us a little further."

Fragile tried to stop smiling, the way he was taught. He nodded frantically.

They watched the Threeheads pass and pass until they too had disappeared into the rounds. Then, they set out once more, heading further South.

“What happened to eldsister Virtuous?” Fragile asked Wander. “I did not see her among the others.”

“She was inside the stabs,” Wander replied.

“Inside the…?” Fragile’s mouth opened in awe.

“We talked,” Wander continued. She rubbed her chin. “She’s gone now. We may see her again.”

“I hope so,” Fragile said. “I did not mind her friendship.”

“And I did not,” Wander concurred.

As they trudged through the snow, putting more distance between themselves and the pits of Eighty, Fragile fiddled with a plant petalled yellow and deep purple. He spun its stem about his fingers, and Wander took notice.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“It was in the house,” he replied. “They had many more.”

“There are not many like those,” she said. She paused. “It is a difficult kind to care for. It will fall very easily. But while it is, it is adorable.”

He smiled. He smelled it and offered to her. She could smell it from where she was, but she took it anyway, and put it up to her nose, basking in its sweetness.

“Yes,” she said. “It is adorable.”

She handed it back to him. He tucked the flower’s stem inside his tuskleather bag. Its petals stuck out and looked up at the sky.

----------------------------------------

The Unders had recovered slowly from their defeat at the hands of the meeters. Those who had survived their kin’s onslaught slunk back to Our and its neighbors from the rounds, addressing its street with bodies that had been cracked and melted and cut apart by the conflagration they had wrought.

Between them, people pulled water from the wells. Children chased wings that squawked and ran about, flapping their arms. People painted statues yellow and green.

Some time after their defeat, Voicer had limped back into the shell after his master had been torn apart and slain. He brought a shaky hand to his lips and drank from his waterskin, pulled a coldover closer to his shoulders and shivered. He considered the last words of the voicewoman, adorned with a large chunk of the night ruler’s stone. The light nearby fell into it.

Voicer’s men surrounded him. They changed one another's wrappings, which guarded their limbs, torsos, and eyes. They sharpened their drycanes, and drank. One of them sang under his voice, recounting the problems of Hone. He and his friends sat in the Place for Hearing, shivering beneath the Larun monolith and surrounded by each other. Voicer brought a shaky hand to his lips, emptied his waterskin in his mouth, and contemplated the last words of the voicewoman. Any sunlight that managed to break through the clouds fell into a large chunk of the night ruler’s stone, which had been committed to the writing’s side.

The clouds curled around the sun and made a shadow.

A group of Laruns on the backs of the stonehoofs pranced into the shell. They surveyed the carnage and suffering of the Unders. They stopped by the Speaking Place, and two figures descended from their hoofs. Voicer struggled to his feet and hefted his drycane before going to meet them.

One of the figures was short, shaking, and covered in robes. The other was tall and broadchested. His muscles exploded from his body. His neck was bound by a gold chain.

Voicer pointed his sword at the tall man. “We have had enough business with outmen,” he growled. “Leave now, or you will be thrown out.”

The tall man stepped over to them. He smiled.

"'Outmen?'" He laughed happily. “Little feurkun. This place – it is yours and mine. We are in it. There is nothing that can keep us out.