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.

Wander, 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, the foreigners and the friends who found them now plumb the heart of the New Wild, pursuing towards Herdetopp the forces that stole Wander's childhood and feast now upon The Land of Rulers.

-

For two days, Wander and Fragile travelled with the carts of Bright’s company.

At night, they were compassed by flat ground. Bulleting clouds hung in the distance, tracing the sky with streaks of blue and orange. They put their carts in a square, cleared the snow from it, and exploded fires that they built with boards and planks ripped from the carriages. Fragile watched the Laruns’ Roadpoint observe the stars and their horizon, pressing a hollow metal tube etched with indications to his eye socket. It descended and found him roomy. The needle-rugged occidenteer squatted down, working against his paunch and tugging at his protruse jaw in observation of reed papers that he marked with stylus and a muck like blood. He wrapped his hands around a brown furrow and belted out noises, “Heah! Heah! Heahy! Heahy! Heaoo!”, as he chopped out a heavy depression in the frozen soil, pointing South.

Wander the Dzhrymin and Fragile the Sixbraid joined the Roadpoint, along with Bright, the Hoofpoint of the Laruns, and the Kontor of the fighters who surrounded them. This commander was an older woman with short, thin hair, wearing a caped bryst with thick guards, stitched out from the back of a stomper. She leaned up her blade, concealed by an inscribed covering, up on the stool where she reclined. She tilted up four branches over the fire that sat between them, and hung a pot between them. She set herself beside the flames, crushing up berries and dicing meat and roots with a knife shaped like a kite.

When she was finished she whistled and beckoned at Fragile. She had to do it twice, as the little man was swaddled in his cloak, and his eyes had started to roll back. Wander had sat herself against a rock, studying her own documents, and he brushed at her hair with a smooth iron comb. His looked snapped over to the armored Larun’s invitations with a high brow.

“Do you cook, little hillface?” she asked.

Fragile shook his head.

“Come and cook, little hillface. Fire work. Dark – eating now. Come, come. I make you hands.” Fragile struggled to make sense of the lingual mix she had employed, but he understood enough to wrap himself up in his coldover and answer her summons.

The Kontor gestured to her ingredients when he had knelt by. They were laid out, rustled with Fragile’s mounds of hair by the frosty gale, on a scratched and beaten silver cloth. She gestured to each part and named it. “Listen now, little hillface. Listen and see. That,” she said, pointing, “is named ‘the hairy-tongued one’. This is named ‘downparts’. And these, ‘stomach-cutters’. When I ask, give me one squarepart – one of each. One squarepart.”

Fragile tilted his head. “A squarepart,” she continued. “It is – how the thing drags. In your hand. One squarepart should drag like eggs. A few eggs. A few eggs of the riverwing. Can you hear that?’

He thought of it, and nodded quickly.

“Give now. Cook for your Firstpoint, little hillface. Give what I say.

She turned the pot with a long, crescent stir, and when she asked, Fragile brought her handfuls of fruit and plants. “Come, come,” she said, once her supply had been exhausted. “Come and hold.”

She gave him the stir and he dipped it in the stew. “Slow,” she said. “Like a paddling along. You born have a river, yes? The river has a seer. You do not want to wake him. We cook hairy-tongued ones; we should use cooler fire. But these empty-heads are cold, so it will have to be hot, and they will have to be ruined, at least a little bit. If you have to cook it hot, like a paddling along. Count five breaths around, and around. If it is right, it is not so bad.”

The stew was poured out into bowls. The others at the fire received them, all except for the Hoofpoint. The Hoofpoint, who fed and tended the animals that drove the carts, did not eat. Instead he rubbed his hands together, disregarded the fire, and took no comfort from it. The Wild rushed around their flames and barriers, gushing snow against his side and greeting him with the noise of a solitary howl.

“That poor cannotfollow,” the Hoofpoint said. “How can it have come here, as deep as we?”

In his hand, the Roadpoint held a circular panel that reflected light. He gazed into it, and as he did so, he cut apart his beard with a thin sheet of metal. “They are lost,” he said. “And there could be more than one. When the howls are lost, only one will sing.”

“Can she find her way home?” Fragile asked.

The Laruns looked at him.

“The-” he stammered, “the howl.”

“She?” the Hoofpoint piped.

Without looking up from her pages, Wander confirmed, “It’s a girl.”

They turned to the warrior. “But how can he know, Dzhrymin?” Bright asked.

At that moment the howl’s gleaming song washed through their space again, with such chime and biting heat that Fragile squeezed shut his ears with two little fingers.

As it declined and vanished, Wander explained. “Their men have smaller hearts,” she said. “If it were one, he would have lost his breath. The others can speak well.”

Fragile’s leg bounced. He reached out and steadied it.

Bright’s mouth opened. The Kontor raised her brow. The Hoofpoint and the Roadpoint looked at each other, to a shrug.

Fragile addressed the Kontor. “May I know your speaking, eldwoman?”

The Kontor took a drink of her brew and looked at him. “My speaking, little hillface?”

“The words you have.”

“My words are my sprak,” she said. “A Wild sprak. They speak it in the mass of buildings. In Spot of Rocks, and Partition Hill, and Herdetopp. Have you never heard it said?”

“I have never heard such words from a Larun.”

“Some of us are not just Laruns,” the Hoofpoint threw in. “I am a Moat.”

He turned away from the dark and faced the Sixbraid. “A Moat,” The Hoofpoint repeated.

“What is it?”

“The Moats are toward the night,” said The Kontor. “Larunkat’s night. Very far that way.”

“My shell was Fivehouses,” The Hoofpoint continued. “Our lodgepoints visited a Kontor each month, in a place of splendid mass. They carried with them a bag of parts, and did not return with it. There are less of mine there now; women have been taken out to the Freemen, because many are gone and they need new ones. Some of those must travel, and some of those will fall; all produce the Freeman’s type.”

“Why did you not speak of our like?” asked The Kontor.

Now The Hoofpoint turned to her. “Are we?”

“I am a Moat,” She said. “I am a Stirred Larun. My oldman was from the River – the Ashed River, little hillface – but my old woman was Moat. After we were pushed out, she travelled eight-hundred binyaks over mountain, and through dirt and water, across ice and dirt where there is no breath, walking with her preference and a tithe, searching for a mass where they could eat. She found a mass with parts and papers, and she makes coverings now. The most careful and precious in all of Larunland.”

“Stirred!” The Hoofpoint’s eyes widened. “How could I have known? You do not have the brow of our kind, or the mouth.”

“We do not all have the eye. The mouth has been taken from us. Laruns prefer their own words.”

The Hoofpoint squeezed his arm and bowed his head.

The Roadpoint noticed The Hoofpoint’s shivering. He intervened, “In the way of you both, neither am I just a Larun.”

The Kontor crossed her arms at the wrinkled pathfinder. “Is that so?”

The Roadpoint smiled and pounded his chest. “My birthwoman was a Postan, a hot kind of fire! My birthman, too, was a Shamol – a powerful nivman, whose producers made a tent and three hoofs into a smallwreath. They came from their own cells, in the seats where they were grown. They made a mighty Sprak, and new.”

“Were they Tjeni?” asked Wander.

He nodded at her. “Right, Dzhrymin.”

Wander put her knee up and draped an arm across it. “And you see yourself a Larun?”

“What, star, would he see otherwise?” asked the Kontor.

“I am not a Larun.”

The Roadpoint had not spoken. Bright, the renamed, little-nosed partsfighter, had cast in his piece with a shrivelled hiss. It trenched the brows of his companions.

“I am not,” he insisted nervously. “I am from the right-handed bank. That of the Ash. I am one of Lots. The kind born of hoofs and talons.”

“’Lot’” is another word for Larun,” The Roadpoint said.

“Yes,” Bright replied. “It has been made that way.”

The Roadpoint pursed his lips. Bright crossed his legs and looked into the fire.

“I wonder often what my old ones knew,” he said.

“Your ancestors?” the Hoofpoint asked.

Bright held his hands together by the flames. “I wonder where they had to go. They could not see Sett. And now they are gone. I will never see them. They cannot see me, or what will happen to us.”

“It is a needless ask,” said the kontor. “Do not suffer it, little one.”

“Yes,” The Hoofpoint. “You can see Sett. He saw your trouble. He took your old ones. I am sure it is all a good way.”

Bright’s gaze was not warmed by his friends’ comfort. “Sett,” Wander said. “This is your name for him?”

The partsfighter wiped his brow. “Name? For who?”

“He Grantar.”

Neither Bright, nor The Kontor, nor The Hoofpoint expressed their witness to that effect. Only the Roadpoint answered. “Right, Dzhrymin,” he said, “but they do not know those words.”

The Kontor raised her brow. “What is this now, little looker?” she protested. “What do you have that we do not?”

“None of you have walked through an aldir,” he said. “The Gathering sent me to one, many seasons past. I believed you might have, kontor. But I see now that you are the same.”

The Roadpoint placed down his mirror and shaver. He popped them into a smooth black chest, filled with brushes and grained ointments. It clapped shut. “He Grantar was the name of a Rootcliff seer,” he said. “The ones of the old rule offered to him. They pushed him to the dark, to our place, before the new rule was written. He is Detsome Blirsett, the one we see, and now he is ours. You would hear this at an aldir. You would hear this, and it would be chained to a thousand seasons of struggle and tears.”

He laid on his side. “And you would not gain much.”

-

The column of hoofs, carts, and partsfighters trod up anchored bluffs, which had become slick and icicle in the wake of the winter’s storms which had scoured through the place. To recall their darkness weighed on the day. Wander and Fragile walked alongside Bright and the train of fruitless hoof-trucks, tread by creatures that stuck in and plod through mud and slides carelessly and with little more than a grunt. The Roadpoint sat atop the tallest point of the tallest cart, looking out at the horizon and drawing referents. The Hoofpoint watered each cart’s charge and clucked quietly in their ears. The Kontor sat at the head of the column with her eldest subordinates, all armor-coated and bristling with blades.

Fragile and Wander travelled near the center, leading The Stronghoof. The Stonehoof sat closer by them today, occasionally nudging up to Fragile and basking in the sun. The Bell was silent, and wound her form of rope around The Stronghoof’s tail, letting him flick her about as a knotted black pendulum.

“How are you feeling?” Fragile asked Wander.

“I feel good. And you?”

“I feel good.”

He smiled. Her lips curled in that unsmiling way. He gave it to her and looked away.

“These men are interesting,” Fragile said.

“The speakparts?”

He nodded. “Did you know they were such a manyfaced kind?”

Wander looked at their faces. She looked at the Roadpoint’s, which was thoughtful and drooping. She looked at the Hoofpoint’s which was soft and bearded. And she looked at Bright’s, which was little and wide-eyed.

“Yes,” she said. “I knew. But I have rarely seen it.”

They walked through the night by lantern fire. The plain they walked was seated atop a mound that brought them up to the clouds, and they descended it. The depth of a valley flew out before them, filling their eyes with dimming emptiness, ribbed by white bluffs and stone columns, with hived forms that had coolled and come in from some primordial bubbling. The space beneath them was sketched out with dark lines dusted over by snow, leading to the towers and leaning fortifications of the Couth that they awaited, and there was breath and murmur among the speakparts, partsfighters, Laruns, Moats, Stirred, Lots, Shamins and Goals as their eyes took part of it. A large wall wired up the settlement, peaked on all sides with towering nodes of beaming fire, radiating out into the dark. Smoke plumes rose up from its roofs and its fences, and it was not long before the relieved murmurs turned to the name of Sett, spluttering out the lips of the Laruns three times and more.

“Eah!” Bright moaned. He fell to his knees. “We are unseen! We are unseen! Sight has fled from us!”

Many of the other speakparts tore at their hair with them, tugged the ornaments lining their jaws and cheeks, covered their eyes and slumped against the carts. “What has happened?” Fragile asked Wander. “Why are they afraid?”

“Too much fire,” she said. “There has been a fight.”

“What can we do?” Bright sobbed. “What can be done? There is no journey elsewhere.”

“We must turn back,” The Kontor insisted. She looked to Wander. “Turn back, and turn away, now. For the hillfaces will have seen us.”

Wander raised her brow. She shut her eyes and put her ear to the bushes and her nose to the wind, magnifying a small crackling and shiftings in the snow. There were many heartbeats all around, and they were loud, but those farther back were quiet and slow. The air smelled of snow, and of sweat, and of roots and seeds she had not noticed before.

She ruminated and the column of carts and riders encouraged their hoofs to turn, so that they all might start away from the destroyed settlements. Their hoofs screamed and neighed and tripped through the mud and over one another. At the peak of their misalignment, clumps of hazy figures sprouted from the snow on both sides of their path, their bodies shrouded in brown and white. Their rise lifted a wave of lances that embedded itself in the carts and those who walked beside them.

Some of the Laruns were shot apart immediately by the salvo. The others cried out and rallied to their Kontor.

“To wither, to gale!” she bellowed. She swept out her blade and drove it forward like a torch wrapped in heat; the sheer glare of it caught the sun and Fragile’s eye. It was no langniv or cane; a tool of finer make. “Shooters to your spots! Produce lines! Produce lines! To gale! Produce lines!”

Running Goals, their thick black hair tied away from their eyes, their thick black hair tied away from their eyes, their overs clung tight to their chests and legs, their canes bared and gleaming, ducked beneath a second barrage and blew into the truck-guarding partsfighters, tackling them to the ground and pressing blades to their throats. Many in the company did not answer their Kontor’s call but broke for the forest, filled with screaming by injuries and by the signalling shrieks, cries and roars that heralded the Goalish forces, who screeched like wings and bellowed like stompers as they made response.

Wander caught a lance thrown the way of her and tossed it aside. Their animals cowered; The Stonehoof screamed, but kept by them, while The Stronghoof blinked anxiously and shrank back toward Wander. She whistled in its ear and sent it fleeing into the rounds. Rather than put Fragile on it again, she seized him and thrust him beneath a cart whose charges had been cut loose, and whose men had been impaled on its spokes and wheels.

“Stay here,” she said, tucking him in to the mud. “Stay down. Do not make noise. Do not move.”

She stood back up as the hill people met their place in the column. Two of them bore down on her, levelling jagged canes and stickers, their mouths pressed into thin lines in the absence of any command to howl at their friends. She lunged forward and for a moment her teeth assembled in the light, gnashing, and her eyes exploded into bloodshot orbs, before her fist met the nearest Wall and delivered him to the ground and returned her composure.

The Goals screamed and bayed at a distance as she pummelled her way through them, pitching them into the carts and each other. She picked up a fallen Goal’s sticker and beat them with it as a switch, turning away their blades with a flick of her wrist and slapping them lightly across the cheek. All comers were exhausted.

Before her, by the remaining fighters, were gripped a half dozen of the speakparts, including Bright, the Hoofpoint, and the Roadpoint, wrapped up in arms and their throats bloodied by metal. The body of the Kontor lay in the dirt, along with her magnificent weapon, and the remains of her company.

So Wander laid down her weapon and the clamor finished.

-

The Laruns were placed in a rank, and Wander in heavy iron chains. The blaith was torn from her back and thrown onto a cart. The ragged Goals ran among them and the cart, checking everywhere for hidden knives and secret clubs. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Wander asked the Bell, who had curled up in hiding and sashed herself around Wander’s waist.

I could not see them, she whispered. There is dark. De’s dark. When she heard his name, Wander frowned.

Many of the Goals surrounded the pile where the Larun’s weapons had been tossed, picking the best ones. One of them took up Wander’s blaith and fiddled with the tip. As he brought it out from its covering, the glow of its signs came up from the metal. He dropped it and stepped away in shock.

“Ih!” he exclaimed. The other Goals looked toward him. He approached Wander with the blaith.

“Outman,” he said, “is this yours?”

She nodded.

He stepped forward, leered, and unsuck a littlecane that he kept within his belt. He drew down the collar on Wander’s vest, exposing the shining light of her inscriptions.

“The words of Athad,” he whispered. There was no movement from the Goals.

“The words of Athad!” he shouted. “The words! The words of Athad!”

“A star!”

“A star!’

“We have taken to ground a star!” And they were driven down into the valley.

Outside the Couth, as its walls and entrance rose before them, they passed through a number of roundseats stacked up and stitched together by its inhabitants. They were ramshackle, and many other Goals peeked out among them at the victorious train of fighters. They looked on the faces of the countrymen with fear and some curiosity.

“They look upon us as though we are outborn,” one of the fighters said.

“Let them look!” another cried. “Let them see it. We are our own.”

The seats had been built up over many years, and they were outside another segment of houses. These were ancient enough and displayed the circular architecture of another century.

As they approached the gates, they could make out the Couth barrier as built of stone, and pillared high above where they could climb. The jut of the walls’ ranging guard was marked by the fires above them, which stood ensconced in metal fixtures around the whole scope of it. The eyes of the taken evaded the fire, twisted wreathing blaze, cautious to it. The columns of death beyond the wall hung heavy above its own. Some of the takers looked as they went past and regarded its spool, unballed into parched shadow that left the light for greater emit.

The stone of the Couth’s walls was firm and squarely cut. Without light, its walls had no color. Within it, they were given an orange hue. The Goals who had taken them shouted at their own as they passed through the gates: “Call the Wildfire! Call the Wildfire!” And they were released into the settlement.

Immediately, Fragile and Wander were met by a new sight. The Couth, in outline, was akin to the other that they had seen outside the Empty Houses, and it too possessed a Salon, but this one was of much greater size, and its rooms burst from its facade with superior volume than even the one in Partplant. From its construction, it had no resemblance to either of those buildings, appearing instead much older, like the Rootcliff buildings outside the Couth walls, modified with but a few Larun standards, their drinks and their presence. The standards had been torn down, the drinks tumbled into the snow, and their presence reduced to piles of people stacked up in three sites around the Couth. More Goals stood there, their faces covered in applied clays and soot, their weapons red-bloody, pouring firewater over the bodies of bryst-clad Freemen and Laruns whose affect remained in yawning shrieks and grimaces that continued to deliver hatred. Sticks with fire were thrown them and they were made a blaze.

Opposite the Couth’s salon was a nivhouse, warm and homely, accompanied by the remains of the Couth’s nivmen. Their bodies too and their possessions were shattered into pieces.

Different buildings surrounded the barrack and its salon, including houses full of goods, yards of hoofs and meatbearers and squawking caged wings, and the blackened remains of a star-shaped papersquare that had been burned to the ground. Beyond and peripheral to them all, their derived axis was the aldir of Firmen Couth.

The building’s stone had been worn down by an age of gentle wind, and stained by ice and by the sun. It was composed of three angular blocks that protruded from a single central cone whose structure rolled like water up to its apex, where a cracked metal globe formed the shape of a hesign. One block of the aldir, at its base, contained many cells for its caretakers, the majamry, equipped with a rack of slits in its wall that they could receive daylight by, and which now threw out light with lapping shimmer. Seats of soil for respected seeds and their corresponding shapes had been dug out from the soil, the latter of which rejected any claim to nativity with its squished white sediment characteristic of the West. The trees had trunks grown thick even in deep winter, draping prolific shoots of leaves over the path inside and shining with glittered tips of organic, gemmish sapforms. All the plants were kept in iron cages that matched the vigor with which their charges swayed in the wind with their indifference and chill. Wander recognized the design, and saw in it the lines made over a thousand turns to emplace the root of its descent authorities. A mural on the entrance of the aldir depicted the name of that root.

HE GRANTAR

At the Salon stood a man with a piece of cloth. He wrote on it, making marks with his finger and a shell filled with dye as men brought up brown jars of drink and roots from a crypt and threw them in a pile and set fire to them. The man’s features had the delicacy and shine of youth, drift to hardening and scales wrought by the sun’s common ravages. He washed his hands in a trough of water and dried them on his over, which was colored white that had been stained with bolts of red. The fingers on his left hand were braced by the knuckles of a Larun gauntlet that had been slashed apart and stitched anew.

The youth approached them all and spoke. His words were Sprak, carried by a voice with gentle repeal that offered to wash into song. “What have you seen, friends of my friends?”

The foreigners looked at him uncertainly. He clapped one of the Goals on the back. “Good,” he said. “This work is good. Was it a plan?”

His interlocutor smiled and shook his head. “No, eld,” he said. “We took safety, where it was needed. I tried to tell them not to. I was an empty-head.”

The youth squeezed the Goal’s arm again and stepped before Wander.

“Are you the Kontor?” he asked.

“No.” Wander replied in Goalish.

His brow bent and his smooth, unbroken lips parted with a hiss. “Then with whom should I be speaking?”

Wander’s lips, savaged by the cold, crumbled and wept in irritation, but they did not open. She studied the youth’s face as she would a bug or small animal. He strode up to her and knelt; his forehead came up to the ridge of her nose. He looked at her cuts and bruises. “Your words are like ones I know.”

“Yes.”

“Some Laruns can speak words,” he said. “But yours are like ones I know. Your voice is less touched than the others.”

He looked over at Fragile, held next to her bound and gagged. “I suppose he has spoken many secrets.”

Wander sneezed.

“My name is Wildfire.” The youth gestured to the other Goals. “They tell me plans.”

“They call me the Dry Man.”

Wildfire’s expression did not change. He poked at the strands of artifice that covered Wander’s head, and brushed his glove across its rim.

“You are one,” he said. “There are many outmen here, with many families. Which one is yours?”

“The one of He Grantar.”

“It is good that we should meet,” he said. “Mine is the kind that cuts it out.”

Wander looked around the Couth, shifting in her restraints. She spied the aldir, its grand ascent, and the Laruns’ divine signal; there, at the base, situated in a series of tents and campgrounds, was the majamry, its cloistered host, clad in the brown and yellow robes of their profession. They peeked out from behind cloth and rubble spots in clammy terror. Carrion eaters snapped and pulled at the flesh of the dead. “This work I see,” she said, “is in and whole.”

Wildfire saw where she was looking. “That kind helped us in the cutting,” he said. He raised his finger to a male majam, who was the only about their number that did not hide or cower. “He put the gap in their stone. The drink of his Walls was joined by a skinned root, and they were left on their backs. There was one with words like yours; we took his head away.”

“He gave you help,” Wander said, “so that yours would not cut his?”

“The work and its plan were outborn. He approached we. What has brought you to it?”

“Nothing. What will you do with us?”

“I will take your head away,” Wildfire said. “And your little one’s, too. He will be cut apart like his kind, which speaks our own to you. We will scatter his guts on the walls of this place. We will drink up your ashes so that they do not pollute the rulers’ house.”

“Are you sure of it?”

Wildfire stared at her. “I am sure.”

She broke free of her bonds.

The hard grey links that bound her hands shattered and she grabbed the youth. She plucked the blade from his hip, a heavy cane with a thick body, held it to his throat, and held him at the Goals, who bared their arms and snarled.

As she was mustering a good threat, three of the fighters swung their blades at her. One of them coursed directly toward Wildfire’s neck. She threw him down and swung around and pummelled the aggressor. They danced and danced and in a moment Wander had dispatched ten of the Goals guarding ther lot, including the one that had seized Fragile. She took him up and was preparing to leave when a voice shot out from the aldir.

“Eldman,” the Larun exclaimed.

She stopped, as did the other Goals, levelling their shooters and weapons at her and the other captives. Wildfire lowered a littlecane he had raised to the fight after his recover; the little figure of the majam who had been looking so boldly from the aldir was at the fore of his company. He beckoned to Wildfire with a nod and the recline of a hand.

Wildfire looked between Wander and the man and put her behind. For a long time, about which Wander’s various opponents were consumed by a gasping and sweating and batting of the eyes, the Goal and the Larun muttered together. Then the youth was returned, his hackles lowered and his blade turned still.

“Wheel-Lodge is this shell’s keeper,” he said to Wander. “He has said that you will stay.”

-

They were released from the Goals and taken instead by the majams. One or two of them looked at Wander with wide and narrowed eyes, their hands remaining close to their belts, where they were armed as well with Larun weapons. Out they went past the salon and the other smoking ruins of Firmen Couth, into the mass of tented vigil that their kind had established outside the monument at its center.

Wander’s hands were let out from the debris of her shackles, and she massaged her wrists, along with the bruises her knuckles had incurred. “Who is ‘Wheel Lodge’?” Fragile whispered. “I did not know the Laruns had such men.”

“He is a majam,” Wander said. She looked at the Larun, who lead on his neophytes at a spirited clip for his age. “A site-matam, perhaps. That is, the first one here, who would tell all the others. He is old enough for that.”

“What is ‘macham’?”

“Majam. A man of secret words. A kind that offers whispers. Like your men of fire. But it is done for He.”

Fragile curled up his brow, and his eyes widened. “The Larun works for He?”

“His work does not. He will say it does. He may believe that is its way.”

“I see it.”

Wander looked at him. “You do?”

The pitch of her voice lifted and he turned his head at the change. “I do – I- I believed I did?”

She turned away. Fragile rubbed his fingers. “Sixbraids fought Sixbraids,” Fragile said. “And Unders fought Unders. Drymen can be the same. It would follow the path I know.” He held on to his coldover.

“It was not always so. These follow a false call. The Laruns wrote it.”

“And Brightplague?”

She nodded.

“What does it ask?”

“Bad work,” she said. She shook her head. “Its call is old and long. There are too many words you do not know. They like Larun things now. That is the end.”

In the court of the majamry, where the men of whispers knelt beside the aldir, which had been scratched with Goalish words, the majams muttered to each other. Then Wander, Wheel, and Fragile were left alone, unguarded. Fragile’s gaze did not leave the head of their host, whose hairless figure showed in the light. His own look and Wander’s were fixed on one another.

The majam’s frame had a hunch and thickening of age, but in spite of these, strength rose to the eye out of an immanent history of bends and hits, each of which sat rigidly manifest in the contours of his robes. Those he wore were rough, fraying, and their vis could put one in mind of tree bark. A black beard, cragged and burnt, grew untended around his mouth and chin. His dark skin was spotted with red and white blotches. His shaved head was a well-rounded ball, squat and luminous.

He spoke first. His particular way of Sprak was coarse, idiosyncratic, and twisted in its representation relative to the Freemen and others they had met. It was all delivered by a throat so far screamed and sicknessed past a time in which any word might have flowed happily past the ditches and sored knots of its chapped gape.

Fragile nudged her when she did not respond. “Wander?”

“I don’t know what he’s saying.”

“I do.” They turned. The Hoofpoint had been carried to the tent as well, along with some of the other speakparts and faithful among the Goal's prisoners.

“He is speaking Roundround words,” the Hoofpoint continued. “Not mine. But close. They would be his home country’s. A little Sprak. Very little.”

He was brought forward. He spoke in the Larun’s style, and Wheel repeated his message.

“‘The againstfollow looks upon her kind,’” The Hoofpoint translated. “‘We breath as one.’”

“We do not.”

The Hoofpoint repeated it. Wheel shook his head. “Fah!”

“I want to know why he helped the Goals.

Wheel’s eyes narrowed as The Hoofpoint gave it to him. “He asks if you mistake your own work,” The Hoofpointgave her. “He says he knows who you are.”

“I do it because it is good,” she said. “You are a figure of their gatherings and riders. You do nothing that is good. They have put the Lefthanded places into fire.”

Wheel babbled angrily. “He is He’s man-” The Hoofpoint followed, trailing him. “-not the Otiser’s. No hand nor its pen can write a word that resides above his own. The Taking walks on the parts-shaded way; the breaths he takes bring others to it.”

Wheel slapped his throat twice.

She considered it and gave him nothing else. Wheel turned to Fragile, and spoke in Goalish. “Where are your braids, riverborn heart?” he hissed.

Fragile took a shock when his words emerged from the majam’s other tongue. He clung to his coldover. “E-eldman?”

“You speak from the river,” Wheel said. “Where are your braids? I should see two.”

Fragile tilted his head. He reached a hand to feel for the knots, and could find no grip. He seized his locks with both hands, picking through them frantically. “My- the- where-”

“They’re gone,” Wander said. He looked up at her.

“Your braids. They’ve been gone since you found me. You didn’t know?”

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His eyes wet and he blinked. He shook his head.

“I can make you new ones,” Wheel said. “Sixbraids passed through here, before. They asked for bread.”

Fragile looked down and bit his lip. He peeked up at the croaking Larun, his expression skewed, and Wheel met his gaze. “Are you the last one?” Wheel asked.

“T-the last-?”

“I have heard of one,” he said. “Not as much as one helped. But her song rises loud and long. The more we listen, the more names can be found upon its edges.”

“I am her friend, eldman,” Fragile said. “There is a sun between us, eldman.”

Wheel half-nodded at him. “There is sun between us all.”

Wander watched the two share their gaze. The majam rotated his eyes back to her. She asked him, “Why have you brought us back?”

-

Wheel and Wildfire brought Wander and the Hoofpoint to the face of the Pale Aldir.

She left Fragile with the Laruns, and with the crowd of Goalish Walls who surrounded them and their carts.

“Cover your ears, Fragile,” she said. His eyes became round and his brow raised, but she did it. She addressed the Goals and he watched as their expressions shifted variously. The older ones among them did not make much of a fuss at her words; some of the younger ones appeared to keep a brave face, even as they shook and shivered. When he took his ears away, they were nodding easily. “We can hear you, Star,” they said. “We can hear you.”

Wheel and Wildfire brought her out, along with her interpreter, to the face of the ancient creature. The building’s columns and spheric pinnacle cast their shadow in the evening light. The flowering trees were drowned in pools of overflowing mud and vines that wrapped around and out the bars and over the monument. Their cages rose out from the ground, feasting on the soil as the trees appeared to.

Light shined out from all cells of the aldir’s blocks, on either side of the monument. The Goals sitting by its entrance opened it, a huge armored facade that swept out, illuminating the dark with a sourceless might. The guards shut it back up behind them after the four had entered.

Their descent into the aldir’s reception revealed the extent of it. It was small, and provided some rooms for the lighting of branches from a fireholder, and those had been lit. A broad corridor fed them into chamber of worship. Murals on the wall depicted spritely figures passing from darkness and soil into the air. Silence was not at any point permitted; there was speaking that surrounded them, which echoed out from a further space.

Wander’s ears picked them up slowly, and then they were present. The voices did not whisper and could not. They spoke loud and together enough that this chatter was on the ground, like the room was full of prostrated crowds iterating titles and incantations.

Wheel explained in a course of gestures. “He can hear some offerings,” The Hoofpoint said. “But most of it is unknown to them. He says there must be some bad work in it. Some work that is not of Sett.”

They went deeper into the aldir, where they discovered the veneration chamber. It was adjoined by tunnels to other cells, for living, writing, and the ritual slaughter of breath. It displayed in full rich gifts to its base: gems laid in offering, murals, stacked human skulls polished and colored blue with shoulder mounts wreathed in fine smelling roots and flowers. The room was domal and filled with thin, black-and-white-hued cushions on the floor layered in depth and volume such that they appeared to checker it for a year in each direction.

It was and had always been very cold. Fine smelling green roots trailed out of it, and a rush of air like breath spilled out. The voices stopped as they arrived at its precipice. At their center, between the columns that grew taller as they structured the cone, was a pedestal with a pair of scrolls. On their front was a word in the Rootcliff scripts:

BASE

They were surrounded by a large pool of liquid, enough to bathe in. It shone bright white.

“He will not tell me what it is,” Wildfire said. “Do you know?”

Wander crouched down and “It’s supposed to be water.”

“The ones who we have sent underneath do not come out,” Wildfire said. “We lost three. Wheel Lodge lost five.”

A cry emerged from the deep. Wheel broke down sobbing.

“It is one of the majam fighters,” Hoofpoint whispered. ‘Breaker’, he cries.”

“Why don’t you burn it down?” Wander asked.

Wheel recovered and raged spittle at her when The Hoofpoint carried her suggestion. “He- eah- he does not want that.”

They were silent.

“This place is Wheel Lodge,” said Wildfire. “Every heart needs smoke. But if he does not want it, then he shall have none.”

-

“You haven’t answered my question,” Wander said.

The aldir’s exterior breathed heavily as Wheel, Wander and Wildfire assessed it from a distance. The other Goals watched it in a crowd. Some of them continued to write their Statements on its surface, calling for the help of their rulers.

Wheel spoke. “They want you to go inside,” Hoofpoint told her. Wander watched beads of sweat crawl down his neck. His eyes flicked back toward the Laruns, where blades were being forced to their necks, and the Goals dispassionately prepared their slaughter, throwing wood on one of their fires. Fragile too was under arms, although he had been stood alone; the Goals watching him did not venture more than a few feet to his center. “He says y-you will know its type. He says you can find its neck, and break it.”

“How does he know that it must be broken? Perhaps Sett has a use for his men.”

Hoofpoint inquired, but Wheel did not answer.

“What do you gain from this?” she looked to Wildfire.

“Wheel Lodge has asked our help,” he said. “Without it, we must pursue the fight alone. We do not have a way to be as strong as Laruns. We can only be quiet, and whisper, and set their fire to their friends and fields and shells.”

Wander looked at him and away.

“You need to free the Laruns,” she said.

Wildfire and Wheel looked at each other. The Hoofpoint adored the Dzhrymin.

“These do not fight for the Otiser’s firm,” she said. “And their breath is enjoyed by others.”

Wheel rumbled. “He asks if you have sun for these men,” the Hoofpoint translated.

“I do not have sun with Laruns,” she said.

Wheel looked to Wildfire. He blinked, waited, and shrugged.

“They can go,” he said. “We have had our fill of water.”

He looked at Wander. “My friends are weary,” he said. “It has been a long day. We will be ready for your battle tomorrow.”

-

After they had departed the aldir, Wander was returned to the Laruns.

The captives were released from their chains and let free. Goals shut the gates to the Couth, put bars against them, and left. The speakparts and partsfighters roamed the ruins of the compound. Some clumped together in bunches. Others sat alone.

The Goals did as Wildfire had said and dispersed from the confines of the Couth, disappearing as quickly as they had come. Only Wildfire himself remained. He sat alone, next to one of the fires on the Couth’s perimeter wall, drinking from cups of grain that he poured out with a bottle, looking inside the compound at his work, at his captives, and at the aldir that glowered at them all.

Wander sat with Fragile, Bright, the Kontor, and the Hoofpoint, who began to gather wood for a fire out of the husks and the murdered swatches of work that remained. Once it was lit, she looked up toward Wildfire and touched Fragile’s arm.

“I’m going,” she said.

“Will you be back?” He followed her gaze, up toward the fighter.

“I will. But I want to learn something.”

She stood up and left them. The eyes of the Laruns and others trailed her as she climbed hand-over-hand onto the ledge separating them between civilization and a tangled wilderness. The Wall peered down at her at she wrenched her way up to his position.

“Have you come for drink, outman?” he asked. He sloshed around the bottle. “I am afraid I will run out soon. I did not bring for two.”

She fully scaled the wall. He offered her no hand or courtesy as she placed herself next to him and slapped her cloak once. “You are a teller,” she said. “Why aren’t you with your Walls?”

He sipped. “They have no need for me.”

She sat down beside him. “Why didn’t your fighters stop,” she asked, “when my blade was at your throat?”

Wildfire smacked his lips. “It was my throat, not theirs. We do not know why Laruns stop when we take their friends. But they do.”

“I did.”

“You are an outman. You are like their kind.”

She did not respond to the insult. Wildfire gestured over to the light on the wall.

“That fire is going to go out,” Wildfire said.

Wander looked out at the fire, which was in a bright blue metal cone, lapping at its edges, and sending out a bright beam on both sides of the fortification.

“When the Freemen come,” Wildfire said, “when they come in thousands, they will find whoever they can and lay down everyone,” he said. “There will be no more fire. If the Freemen stay, they will find whoever they can and lay them all down with this outborn shine.” He pressed a finger on the tip of his cane, the metal of it glinting with starlight. “There will be no more need for fire on the outside. Everyone will be inside.”

“Because you will all be gone?”

He nodded.

The place outside the Couth was quiet. A yell went up and was silenced. There were fires there too, and smaller walls.

“When I was a boy,” Wildfire said, “I did not know what a shell was. I was given canes, and I sharpened them. The canes went away, and they came back, and they would be dull enough that I could work again. Then I was taller; I carried messages. Then I was taller; I cut open throats, and I slipped poison into wells, because I was adorable. Not like the fighters. When one is adored, they are not seen. The Laruns did not see me. And I had many friends.”

He rubbed his hands together. “The outmen flooded our country. They had done it in too thick a way. Many of us were gone. I had one creator left. We went to the meeting-ones, and we were brought to a round between the trees. There was a patch of green flowers there. The branches there were packed thick, so that the sky could not see us. It was shaped like the rulersland, except for the middle. In the middle was a pit. I did not look at it.” He bit his lip. “We sat there for twenty nights. I began to believe that we had been brought to the rulers’ house, because it was so adorable, and we were by it. There was no smoke and the only ones I could see smelled good. I asked my birthman if it were so, and he told me that it was not. He told me that there would be more Response.”

Wildfire paused. “I wish that he had been silent.”

He said nothing else. The stars sparkled. Wander took out her pipe and lit it.

“I do not say it to smile,” Wander said, puffing, “but I shake at your kind of heart.”

He looked at her.

“I shake at all of you,” she said. “All you Goals. Every parcel of your home makes me want to leave. There is nothing in it that does not send me fire. You move house quickly, away from your creators, without even a bit of sorrow. You have no care for the tug of heartswater. You do not attend all commands. If you wanted to stay outside, why did you not stay together? If you had, you would not have been destroyed.”

“The Laruns call us Goals,” Wildfire said. “I do not know why.”

“You are of Goal. You are of its kind.

“You are in Goal, too,” he said. “The word is from places in the dawn. But my place is in the evening.” He gripped his cane. “But what a Larun says is what others say.”

She did not argue with it. “What about your secret-speaker?” Wildfire asked. “Wheel Lodge says he has a mouth like the river. The river is in the light. Do you shake at him too?”

“I shake for him, that he was made to have been born of you.”

“He was not born of me.”

Wander curled her fingers. “He should have been born somewhere smiling, with green grass, and fire, and hearts that would embrace him. What you are, Goal or not, there is nothing of it in Key.”

“You must prefer it,” he said. “That you have one for yourself alone.”

At this, she brought no reply. A gust of wind rushed past their post, dragging the smoke from Wander’s pipe out up a plume that stretched out into the sky.

Wildfire threw out his hand to the aldir, which breathed menacingly before them. “What is that?’ he asked Wander, gesturing at the large, cracked spherographic that made the temple’s peak. “What is written on this Lodge?”

“I don’t know.”

“I believed you stars had those words.”

“I do not.” She rolled up the sleeve on her arm, revealing the hundreds of circular glyphs etched into her skin. “This one concerns protection from cuts,” she said, tapping a circle. She tapped another. “This one concerns protection from burns. This one concerns protection from enemies with tricks, who cannot be seen.”

Wildfire leaned forward and goggled at them, wide-eyed. She rolled her sleeve back down. “I can’t make them myself. Hearts cannot. Only He.”

She nodded at the aldir. “This one may not be spoken. “The Lefthanded Blade may have simply asked for one, and received it.” She looked down at the simmering light which poured out from between its gaps, cutting poles of gold and grainy distinction through the dark.

“Words without breath,” Wildfire said. He shivered. “Perhaps we do defy a ruler.”

Wander watched as he set aside his cup and bottle and wrapped his arms around his legs in a familiar way. She brought out the pipe from between her lips and handed it to him.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Still.”

“What do you mean?”

“This smoke has a boon,” she said, squeezing it. “The boon is still.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Where there is none.”

Her handed remained extended. He took it over, put it to his mouth and inhaled it in the way he had seen.

It fell into his lap. His muscles relaxed and he sat still. He breathed in and out. The wind drifted over the tower and the clouds rolled by. Spirits fell through his open lips. His eyes grew wide and wandered the sky, and he heaved with breath.

“This boon...” he said. “Thank you, Dry Man. Destroyer. Shakes at born…”

Wander waited for him until the fire had burned down and was lit again by a watchman. The still still had him, so she got up and left him to it.

-

“There has been a disaster done to these hearts,” Wheel said. “All of us are contained in it. It does not keep itself to the feurkuns. That is what I learned. We cannot keep to ourselves. There is a touch between us.”

Bright’s company sat in the darkness and around a fire in the center of the Couth, now deserted in the wake of the Goals’ retreat. Fragile waited with them, anxious for Wander to return from her appointment. The Goals who remained did not bother chaining them, with their weapons extracted, their supplies confiscated, and their guide left to rot and disappear with the slain beyond the walls. Wheel and some of his majamry came out to the Laruns that night, hollow-eyes, whispering, and muttering passages from the Base of Azad Kadra.

At Wheel’s observance, the Roadpoint protested. “These hillfaces do not know anything, birthman,” she said. “They attack us. They have cut in two twelve of my friends, and friends of my friends. They given their days to mud and filth, to lying points, and they despoil the ones among them who will learn, who will show us and all what they have to give. They are a disaster of a great and long way.

“They know nothing,” Wheel said, growling out rhapsody from the Wild’s pidgin. “A beast-driver does not turn in his flock by weapons. For one thousand turns, the lines that brought you here breathed and fell in hope of it. They have all met metal. That is because it was always against the Rule; or do you think that Sett would bring you defeat out of the rightness that we all have? It cannot be good.”

“Do you know the Base, proddi?” The Hoofpoint asked. “Do you know its precious words?”

“I have them, and can give them to you, little one.”

There was whispering. “Do they tell you the words of Bringer? Can you tell us what is told?”

“What do you want to hear?”

“Something of a time such as this. When one does not know if he will breath through the night.”

“Sett protects you, little one. He gives you a place after breath has ended, and sends you back to the ones you have known. He has many spots of soil and many cannotfollows waiting for your service.”

The Hoofpoint said. “My birthman had many spots of soil. He had a whole field of cannotfollows in his service. What does Sett have for him, majam-brother?”

“Sett shall take those spots from him, along with his cannotfollows,” Wheel said. “They shall be spread out to the ones who do not have any. The Rule shall be made right too, in this way.”

The Hoofpoint was surprised.

Bright rubbed his hands and asked Wheel, “Majam-brother – will Sett give it to the feurkun ones?”

Wheel snapped his fingers, and one of his majams recited words, softly sung. “Sett does not like the feurkun ones,” Wheel said. “Even if he did, the feurkun ones seek no spot or part.”

“B-but…” Bright fidgeted. “I believed this disaster against his wishes. Is that what you said?”

“His wishes are unknown to us. His prices are a better wager.”

Bright’s head tilted. Wheel continued, “It is the Rootcliff people he prices best, for theirs was the First Rule entitled. Then are the Laruns, to whom was the Second Rule entitled. The third I cannot estimate; only that it shall rise, as the others did, with like shouting, burst of all spirits, and the emptying of wrong nations.”

“But then – what separates the feurkuns from our own?”

“They have put out the word, ever since the First Rule, and long before.” Wheel shook his head. “Have two Rules passed us by. So surely he does not want them in his place. But by this failure, he has made clear that he disapproves of this fight as well.”

“The Goals have a place of their own,” The Roadpoint noted. “The Rulers’ house. Is that one we will destroy?”

“Their rulers have never been heard,” Wheel said. “But we have had the voice of He. He is gone, now. And his words keep, still.”

Fragile stood up and left the Laruns.

The partsfighters fidgeted. Wheel’s eye moved to them. “You chafe, little ones?”

“What of the trees?” a partsfighter asked. “What of the howls, majam-brother? They can speak with the trees and with the howls. Why can we not? From where did they take these words?”

“A tipper steals, and these are a tipping kind,” Wheel said. “There is none among them who does not.”

Bright looked at the majam with nerves that flailed. He sat quietly as they sang their songs.

-

Fragile walked away from Wheel and the Laruns.

He wandered towards the gate of the Couth, and watched the fire on the wall. It flickered and jumped in place. The tinge of it brought on a nostalgic melancholy, and he saw the words of the fireworker beside it.

Feurkun . . . a voice whispered.

Fragile jumped and spun around. The words were strong and boiling. “W-who said that?!”

I am . . . friend.

Fragile furrowed his brow. He stepped back into the light as the shadows swirled around him, animated by fear. “W-what do you want?”

Ear! … Your … Ear! … Your … Firstpoint …

“I have not Firstpoint,” Fragile whispered.

Your … Firstpoint … Keep her away. Keep her away!

Fragile’s eyes watered.

I have … taken! It is … Lefthanded place! Unbroached of conviction! Punishment for entrance! Great punishment! Great … danger! Keep her out!

Fragile shut his eyes. He reached for his littlecane and held it out with both hands at the darkness. “Y-you are a shadow,” he whispered. “I have no Firstpoint!”

Keep-

“I have no Firstpoint!”

Feurkun…

“Go away!” he screamed.

“Fragile.”

Fragile fell backwards, onto the stone, as he flipped himself towards her. “W-Wander?”

The Warrior looked down at him with a furrowed brow. She had appeared behind him, hatless, her bare head exposed to the starlight. Her shoulderskin was gone, and she carried the blaith on her side, not her back. “I heard shouting.”

“I-ih.” He got up. “I-I just… it was nothing.”

“Okay.” Wander looked like she wanted to say more, but she didn’t. “I’ll go.”

“W-wait!”

He rushed over to her wordlessly, and put his arm by hers. They started to walk back to the fires of the Couth. The fire cast their silhouettes on the pavement before them.

“What is a shadow?” Wander asked.

Fragile blanched. “A shadow?”

“You called me a shadow, once. Do you remember?”

A pit formed in Fragile’s stomach. “Yes.”

He wrung his fingers. “A shadow… it is something you cannot see.”

They reached the fires. Wheel was there, continuing to gesticulate and ramble at the Laruns in broken, inelegant pidgin. The majamry stared at them still and silently in the dark.

“We can keep walking,” Wander said.

Fragile felt warm, and the opening he felt lost its shape. “Well,” he said, “it is such an adorable night.”

“It is.”

They continued past the Freeman house, stained with blood, the yard full of hoofs, now slaughtered, and the charred remains of the Laruns’ papersquare, full of blackened wood and jagged partitions whose gaps and scars revealed the depth of its ruined cells. “How can a person be a shadow?” Wander asked. “How would I be, if you could see me?”

The Goal fidgeted. He reached for his absent three-string, and his hands groped and clung for something they could not find. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were there. Even though I could see you. It is what is said. When a cloud covers the shell and light is in it, and we know that the dark parts are our friends – that is a shadow, too.”

“A shadow inside.”

“Yes.” Fragile nodded. “A shadow inside.”

They turned towards one another. Fragile removed a small, round stone from his hoofleather bag and offered it to Wander.

She took it. The light from the aldir fell upon its face and revealed its reflection. “The Roadpoint’s seer?”

“I asked him if I could borrow it,” Fragile said. He put his hands behind his back. “He just gave it to me. He believes that we will not leave this place. I don’t know what it is, but for its work – it must have some power. Can it help you?”

Wander bounced around her reflection in it. She looked awful. “Who knows?”

She stowed it in her belt. They looked back toward the aldir.

“It’s going to be a very long day,” she said.

He touched her glove with his hand.

-

They turned back to the camp and slept. The Laruns slept too, and the majamry. The fire they surrounded slipped away.

At dawn, the Goals returned, wandering out of the hills in packs. They shoved open the gates of the Couth. Wildfire gathered with his men by the entrance to the aldir, tying on equipment. Their overs had been dropped and held by the crones, replaced with sections of Larun armor, chopped out from discarded plates and guards. It shined and stuck close to their backs, chests, and backs.

Wander approached the entrance, along with Fragile and the Laruns. “What work is this?” she asked.

Wildfire drew out his cane, which glinted in the light. “This is my segment,” he said. “We will follow you into the outness.”

She regarded each of his men. “That covering will slow you,” she said, “and it is not like to help.”

Wildfire turned to them and flicked his hand upward. In a fit of hoisting, the Goals threw off their armor and dumped it into a pile at their center. He looked back at her.

Wander stepped toward the doors. Fragile stepped closer and brushed up against her shoulder, which was cold. She turned to him.

“I would like a smile,” she asid.

Fragile blushed. “I did not know it was a smiling time,” he said.

He produced one. She took it from him shortly and withdrew. He He got up on his tippie toes and hugged her around the neck. She grasped him by the chest and stepped away.

She drew her blade and gazed int othe entrance of the aldir.

For the second time, Wander and the Goals advanced past the temple threshold. The voices remained at an ordinary pitch. The Goals held tight their words, stained into strips of cloth and stitched into their overs. One of them drew a word Fragile had taught Wander on the wall with a pale grey mixture.

They entered the chamber of worship. The voices shifted into melody. The painting Goal, and an accomplice, set to work further marking the aldir with their script; Wander could not be sure, but the singing seemed to dissonate the more they wrote. They were accompanied by a crackling, as though they stepped on and crushed crystals. The Goals expressed little in the face of it.

The pool of water stood before them. Masses of a a meaty algae swam across its surfaces. The voices grew joy-filled and noisy, entreating them in Larun, Goalish and Shamin to drink. Some of the Goals became affected by this chorus; their brows shifted. One of them shut his eyes and a tear fell out.

Wander looked into the pool. She pressed her boot onto the water, uttered a word to her Wiser, and waded into the pool.

As she moved toward the scriptures, the ground beneath her fell away until she was submerged. Any light that had cut through the water was blocked by its repugnance.

-

Wander blinked. She was no longer contained by the pool, and she was not wet or dripping. She could feel a breeze on her skin. Before her were lots of shrubbery and grass. She looked out for a horizon and found only the thickly packed trees of the Goals and their wisdom. She looked up for the stars, but the sky was covered over by branches, which reached out and formed a dense shield through which only a few rays could penetrate. She turned, her vest shifting and her shoulderskin sweeping up a knot of dust, but she found nothing new except the boy.

"Dry Man?"

A young Goal, disheveled and wound up in a little cloak, looked up at her. His furred coverings were askew, and his hair was unbound and flowed down.

"Where are we?" he asked her. Wander stared at him, her eyes measured and her mouth hard and unopened.

"I followed you," the boy said. "But the others, I pushed them out. And they did not want to come."

As he spoke, the boy's eyes wandered, and they grasped the particular variety of trunks and canopic netting that obscured them from the lights above. He walked past Wander into the round, and saw a patch of white flowers blooming in its darkness. Before them, leading into the soil, was a hollow cavity, scraped out by implements and cured by centuries of ice. He got on his knees in front of it, and placed his hands in a set of footprints hat lead inside.

Is it Wildfire? Wander asked the Bell. She did not answer.

"The house of rulers," the youth whispered. He plucked a flower from the ground and smelled it.

A hand touched his shoulder. "If you wanted to help, then come."

He looked up at the warrior. He nodded, and tucked the flower into a nook by his heart.

They entered the tunnel. There was banging and clattering all around the curves of the hole, and heavy breath from Wildfire, whose reduced and scrambling form lead them into the burrow. He crawled around the black until they emerged into noise.

It was a chamber. It was lit by a source that they could not see. It was wide and open, its shape square and ordered and paved with stone. Figures roamed among it, whispering offerings. At its center was a formation that they directed their bodies toward. It shifted between different promises of divinity, comfort, and satisfaction.

Wander and Wildfire stood up and dusted themselves off. They took the chamber in. Wander's eyes fell upon the worshippers. "Are these your men?" Wander asked. "They have your signal."

Wildfire said nothing. His eyes were contained by the shrine. Prior to its body knelt another boy, with hair as long and as fresh as Wildfire's. He approached.

"Yon," Wildfire said. The boy turned, and Wildfire had a shock when he saw his face, but he recovered.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. "Are you from the ones outside?"

“Will you kneel with me?” asked the boy.

Wander approached as Wildfire reached out his rough, spindling child’s hand and grabbed on to the boy. “What are you doing down here?” Wildfire asked again. “Has this place taken you too? Has it a wrong hold on you? We can help.”

“The hold is not wrong, eld,” the boy replied. “I was carried here by my birthman. His preference was with her. I like this place. My preference will follow me here. She has been promised to me.” The boy smiled

Wildfire’s mouth opened.

“Eldbrother?”

“What is your name?” Wildfire asked.

The boy paused. “I can’t remember.”

“Where are your creators?” Wildfire asked. “Where have they gone?”

The boy did not answer.

He stepped forward and shook the child, who tried to shrink back, but was pulled forward by the Goal. “Where were you carried from?” Wildfire shouted.

The boy remained silent. “Where were you carried from?!” Wildfire screamed, flicking spittle into its face.

“Yon,” called Wander.

Wildfire turned back. From her pocket, Wander retracted the Roadpoint’s mirror and placed it before Wildfire, letting him see the shape of himself.

The boy opened his mouth and cried, and Wildfire’s shape changed. He rose up to his full height. His youth was discarded.

“There is a house coming,” said the boy. “Please, do not be afraid.”

Wildfire brought out his weapon and held it at his side. “That may not suffice,” Wander said. She brought out her blaith, whose hesigns screamed and swirled about as they were exposed to open air.

She extended it to Wildfire, who looked at it and gripped its handle.

She brought his finger to a sign on the blade, and it glowed. “Touch this when you want it done,” she said. He walked forward.

“It does not need to be the boy.”

Wildfire stopped.

“These do not have pieces,” she replied. “Or heads. It is not a man. Cut what you like.”

He continued his advance. The boy spoke more quickly. “There is a house coming,” he repeated. “I am contained there. Do not worry, yonbrother. Before and again are the one and the light. There can be smiling where there was not, if you will kneel with me, please. It has been promised by our rulers.”

Wildfire planted his feet in front of him.

“What bade you to send this message?” Wildfire asked.

“I was not bidden.”

“How can I cut you? You speak the words of my kind. How gained you my face or sight?”

The boy stopped. He opened his mouth, and Wildfire waited.

When he found no word forthcoming, he plunged Wander’s blade into his double, and pressed the sign. It exploded into brilliant white.

-

The speakparts and Goals dispersed and surrounded Fragile, giving sight of the Sixbraid to Wheel and his assorted majamry. The Siter-Matam’s face exploded and tightened as Fragile began to speak.

“What is it, Goal?” Bright and the Roadpoint shook him. Fragile turned to the right-banker and continued speaking.

The call went up. “Bring a majam!”

“What is it, born?” the Roadpoint asked. “We cannot hear you.”

“Bring a majam!”

“Bring a majam of water!”

Fragile’s body changed into five patterns. The ground shifted underneath him. The fire on the wall went out.

-

Wildfire stepped back from the remains of the creature. The boy melted into residue which lay heavy against the ground. Wander took back her weapon from the fighter when he did not move.

She left him to his contemplation and then went about the chamber, hauling the Laruns and Goals who had collected there. She dragged them up to their feet and hoisted them over her back when they didn’t cooperate; the others followed her in a dreary haze. When she was finished, she returned to Wildfire, clapped him on the back and went back toward the chamber entrance. He followed.

She looked into the tunnel. There was no light at the end of it, just darkness. In order to leave the chamber, they would need to go through it.

“Can we get back?” Wildfire asked.

Wander blinked. She cocked her head back at him.

“Maybe,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

They went back through the tunnel. The darkness gave way to water, and they swam up into the aldir. The water was clear. The voices were silent, and the chamber was dark.

Wander and Wildfire guided the stumbling fighters to the entrance, out of which could be heard shouting. They pushed open the doors to the aldir. The trees adorning its entrance had withered. They were met by the figure of Wheel, bent over Fragile, thrusting a dagger at his heart. The elderly majam screamed in rage.

Between them, the speakparts and their fighters battled with the majamry, who struggled to keep the Laruns away from their master and his assault. Bright himself had broken through their mass of hitting robes and tore at Wheel, clinging onto him as he shook Fragile. Wheel turned back and struck him on the cheek, throwing him backward onto the stone.

Then he took Fragile to the ground and pinned him between his legs, gasping. He slammed a palm on Fragile’s arm and threw up his weapon-hand; its blade shined in the light. A wave of Larun hands and fingers, of the Roadpoint, the Hoofpoint, and a great assortment of other sellers and partsfighters wrapped around Wheel’s hand, arm, and knife just as its tip caught the fabric of Fragile’s coldover, scratching his chest and taking blood.

The star descended on them. She cast aside the majams who got in her way and put her hand on Wheel. The Laruns restraining him were driven back as she tore him off and pitched him forward onto the ground, where rolled, and moaned in pain and anger. He failed to rise, and soon Wheel was helped by two neophytes to a knee. He clutched five jagged points that the stone had carved into his brow. The Laruns and Wildfire forced them back and held them against the rock. A noisy sobbing emerged from his chest, and he roared in Fragile’s direction.

Wander’s gaze did not shift from Fragile, whose eyes were open. He was breathing quickly, and she went down to him, touching his shoulder. He sprang to life at the contact and clung to Wander’s neck.

Behind them, the aldir was silent. Oblivion was believable again.

-

The gates were opened. The Laruns were released. They were given papers, supplies, and a guide.

The bodies of their friends were loaded onto the carts. Bright watched one of them, where the Kontor lay, retrieved from her resting place in the fields outside the settlement. All gathered in a crowd outside the walls of the Couth. The time was come for all to go their own way, Fragile and Wander another.

The majamry watched from the shadows. The Hoofpoint came up to Wander, rubbing his hands.

“Star,” he said. “He wants to speak with you. The siter.”

“And I with him.”

Wheel was hauled up to her by a pair of partsfighters. His hands and feet were bound by chains, which clinked and jingled as he walked.

“Dry man,” he said in Goalish. Wander regarded him.

Wheel flexed his cheeks, showing his teeth. “I break now my promise,” he said, “to leave the Goals their words. Because you must hear me.”

“You have hurt someone I have sun with,” she said. “For me to hear you would take more than words.”

“I have nothing else.” His hands, joined at the wrist by a lock, curled into fists. “You must destroy your preferred one, Dry Man. You must take up the blade of He and snap him in two and give him to the wind. His look is wrong and he is wrapped in shining fire.”

She did not indulge him with reply. “I have seen it,” he continued anyway. “When you were beneath the water, it opened its eye and expressed itself to us. The others could not see it happen, but I have its words. It is an enemy, and it believes in pain. If you do not destroy this plague, it will eat of you and make you invisible. That is its proclaim.”

Again she ignored him. He shut his eyes. “Fall down if you will, Dry Man. I have no way to move you.”

The partsfighters led him away, hunched down and whispering.

“What did he say?” Bright asked.

“Nothing. What will you do with him?”

“We will bring him and his friends back to the mass, where there are more majams.” Bright rubbed his head. “If that is still standing. He will not really be captured until we have put some measure between us and the Goals, who he has told not to hurt us.”

Bright did not move. “What else?” Wander asked.

Bright fidgeted. “I do not know what he said to you,” he replied. “But if it was about your friend… something very strange happened to him while you were inside. He spoke in words none of us had heard. The light became wrong on him. And…”

Bright pointed at the fire over Firmen’s Couth’s nearest wall. Wander lifted her head up to it and saw that it had evaporated.

Bright returned his hands to his chest. “I hope you will be safe,” he said. “That is all.”

She inclined her head, and he stepped away.

Wildfire approached her next. He brought out her pipe from his vest.

“Keep it,” Wander said.

He looked at her. “Its boon-” “I do not need it,” she said.

She extracted a cork of resin from her vest and threw it at him. He caught it.

“You put that in the end,” she said. “You crush it. Make a fire.”

The edges of his mouth curved up. He stepped forward, so that only she could hear him.

“Because of your boon,” he said, “and because of your kindness, Dry Man, I will offer it to you. You should leave our place.”

Wander saw his eyes shimmer and his ears tweak. “Why?”

“Because Dry Man - I too, have a family. They are ten thousand. Me and my friends have come here to speak for them. For twenty thousand seasons, we have Responded when we are touched. Can you hear what we are saying?”

The blasted walls and slaughter of the Couth sat behind him.

“I can hear it,” Wander said.

“This was a whisper,” he replied. “Some shouting is near. None will escape. But I hope you still can.”

He stepped away.

Bright stepped forward, holding a long blade in an inscribed covering. He eyeed Wildfire’s grim demeanor and Goalish mutterings with curiosity, but he moved from it, and extended the work to her.

“To replace the hand you were cut from,” he said. “For our first release. Our thanks in it.”

Wander took it in both hands. She ripped apart the leather binding, and slid out from it the Kontor’s sword. It gleamed just as brightly as it had. “Your teller’s weapon?” she said.

Bright nodded. “The material is Kathanrock. It is from that place. It was her finest piece.”

“A partsheavy gift.”

“The parts are delivered.” Bright said. “I only wish that it had words. It will not do what you need.”

“My first had none.” She glanced at his empty train. “But can you stand such loss? You are already short of sells.”

“There will be more sells,” Bright said. “More parts. But my breath, and the breath of my friends, is heavier than both. This is not a thing given; by the rules of Abhokar, the weapon and its piece are yours.”

She slid it back into its sheath. “You know what I will use it for.”

“I do, Dzhrymin.”

She hooked it onto her belt and held out her hand. He clasped her wrist.

“I know you are no Seenblade,” he said. “But I hope you will be seen, Dzhrymin.”

“I need one more thing,” Wander said. Bright inclined his head as she stalked away.

She went back over to the elderly majam and pulled him back from his guard, who backed away quickly from the warrior. She gripped Wheel by the chest and got in his face.

“I am looking for a Seenblade,” she said in Shamin. “He wears a cloak and a mask. He is called De.”

Even though neither group could understand her, the name alone shook both the Goals and Laruns. Wildfire’s eyes in particular narrowed and his grip clenched.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

Wheel rattled his chains. “De is the Cane of Teller,” he replied in her tongue. “He has fought in Goal for five turns.”

“Where is he?”

Wheel folded his lips and snorted. “He asked for bread. He carried a broken friend, and three children, wearing blades.”

“He was here?”

“Days past.” Wheel stepped forward and looked in the direction of her path. “He sent a wing To-Sidedark. He moves this way now. Your way.”

Wander watched Wheel squirm for another moment in her grip. Then she released him.

“What do you want with the Cane?” he asked. But she was already moving away. Wheel was taken back by the partsfighters, who returned him to captivity.

Bright lifted a finger to the sky, bowed his head, and shut his eyes. The rest of the Laruns echoed his gesture in Wander’s direction. However, before his head had crouched to its full depth, she reached out a hand and lifted it up. Her finger pried open his eye.

“I do not want the sight of Sett,” she said. “Nor of He. I want what I see to see me.”

The company extracted themselves from the ritual and returned her gaze, frightened and adrift. She looked at the rest of the people with him, at the Lots and Moats and Stirred Laruns.

“I can see you,” she said.

She set out beyond the walls, her boots clanking, She beckoned to Fragile who rushed over to her, trailed in his own wake by the canter of the Stonehoof. She reached the trees and sent up a high whistle. At its keen, The Stronghoof sauntered out from between the trees, shaking them with each step and blowing smoke into her face. She took its lead and The Bell fastened herself around Wander’s waist. The five of them left the wall and its fire, and returned to the heat of the Wild.

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

In another space of the Wild, a masked, robed creature found shelter in the darkness of a cave. The wind raged outside its aperture and threatened to freeze its inhabitants, who clung close to the scraps of the fire they could scrounge up.

A tall, handsome Larun, brought low by the battering of his own kind, was splayed out on the ground. Partless Joyborn gazed at De, sat cross-legged by the cave entrance, with eyes of rage. The bandages that bound his jaw were green and stained with pus. His three child-fighters sat around him, tending to his wounds, fluffing the cushion at his head, and bringing him water. One of them drew a shaver down his cheek. His jaw had begun to itch, and one of the boys dabbed his forehead with a wet cloth.

The space was too crowded for De. There were too many parties to it. With the Seeds, Joyborn, and himself, the veiled passage did nothing to offer space. It was a tight enclosure, with not enough entrances. Its only consolation was that it sealed them from the cold. And from the noise of the chaos beyond.

He blew on his pipe, sending out a high note that bounced off the stone and brought a smile to the mouths of Joyborn’s subordinates. Joyborn himself gave out a moaning snarl.

A voice whispered to him.

Feurkun . . .

The dust rose up in front of De. The children looked up from their tending at the whirling notes that formed themselves out of the snow and ancient sand. Their subject did not address them, but continued to play his pipe.

Its mass formed a boundless, shifting simulacra of human mouths. They gaped at De awfully, hanging out tongues and maws, spinning around him with yawning roars.

The little one . . . it said, breathes. The fighter . . .

The faces’ angle twisted and they took on the appearance of shrieking laughter. When De took the pipe from his lips, they frowned.

“S-stay,” De croaked, “a-w-way.”

The shapes stared at him as he raised his pipe to his lips again. Another note rang out.

They blew up in his face, coating his mask with a thin layer of dust and snow. It fell over the fire too, and Joyborn, falling over the flames and crackling. The Seeds flinched and ducked for cover.

De shivered and blew.