Chapter Fifteen

The governor's study was narrow. Dedicated to productivity and nothing else. Audiences could be received in other chambers, collective work could be done in more comfortable surroundings... Carza actually felt a genuine pulse of kinship. In front of her was someone who had clearly done some honest work, and had an environment he preferred for it. Reminded her of how she worked. At the end of the day, she worked best in a small office, with her own equipment, and ideally, a firm deadline. She didn't need much in the way of aids, and even being surrounded by books was just a hint of vanity for her, she worked better with no distractions. This study was much the same. A hardwood desk set underneath a small window, a sturdy chair in front of the desk, and multiple piles of dull-looking ledgers lining the walls, the pages marbled to prevent anything from being removed. The swirling patterns were almost hypnotic, like someone had spilled oil over the walls, and the light was creating a shimmering rainbow in the inky depths. A few pictures hung as concessions to humanity, all of them of foreign landscapes... and a single image which made Carza blink a few times. Camera. Photograph. They were still very rare in ALD IOM, mostly used as ways of impressing visitors to one's office... and here a photograph was, sitting proudly on the desk, just next to a typewriter, so the person seated there could glance at it frequently.

A handful of soldiers in the blue-and-red uniform of Mahar Jovan's army. A mix of men and women, all of them prematurely aged by stress, and by dust which accumulated in the lines of their face and made them look like harsh charcoal etchings that had crawled out of a page and decided to pretend to be people. Their eyes were hollow, their smiles were broad, and their uniforms were stained with mud and bother, unmentionable substances. Hands curled easily around guns - like they hadn't put them down in a very long time, and at this point were more comfortable clutching them. One of them was much taller than the others, and had a splendid set of mutton chops. Ah. The governor. Interesting that he'd been on the front lines, she imagined him to be more of an armchair general type - just based on his current status. She noted that the picture had been taken inside some kind of fortification - barbed wire lined every wall, mud was foaming up from the movements of hundreds of people, smoke rose from the horizon, and huge mounted flamethrowers were scattered around the scene, with one of the soldiers holding a smaller model with heavy tanks poking above his shoulders. Great War, then. She still only knew the vaguest details there - some kind of awful conflict that led to the northern part of the continent becoming halfway uninhabitable and totally abandoned in some areas. Thousands, maybe millions dead. ALD IOM had been blissfully isolated, but... it was hard to ignore the scars that remained in the outside world.

The governor leant easily on the desk, his huge body covering the window. He looked weary. All the enthusiasm from the beginning of the dinner was gone, now all that remained was a very, very tired man who looked like he wanted to get some sleep. And some more to drink. He followed Carza's eyes, and picked up the photograph, staring at it fondly.

"Oh, yes. My old buddies. Back in the war, you know."

Hull blinked. Ah. He too was wondering why the governor had been on the front lines, instead of sitting comfortably back and ordering others around. Not as an insult, it just felt... well, rational.

"Were you an... officer, sir?"

"Hm? Oh. Yes. Officer. Captain. Of course, that meant front lines in those days - no point keeping anyone in reserve. Miserable years, but... ah. Anyway. Half of the people in that photograph are dead, most of the others are locked up in a sanitarium from all the contamination they breathed in during the conflict, a couple more are just crippled... I'd say I'm about the only one left of my squad that has all his limbs, all his wits, and a beating heart."

His eyes turned defensive all of a sudden.

"Not that I was some sort of coward who let his troops take every wound intended for him, though."

...was that a case of a coward protesting his own cowardice, or someone scarred by the war and plagued by guilt over his own health? Survivor's guilt was a thing, she thought - her novels certainly seemed to think so. Very popular genre in ALD IOM before the outside world came in. Grizzled soldiers weeping over bottles of liquor, before running off to mope in the arms of someone with a tiny waist and a tremendous pair of legs. The novels got a bit repetitive after a while. Though... his wife was very attractive, objectively speaking, so... she wasn't sure where she was going with this thought, but she definitely didn't want it to end with her thinking about the governor's sex life. Her judgement of him was limited by the fact that he was much, much taller than her, and he'd produced a daughter that legitimately frightened her a little, so... well, she was unwilling to be too judgemental. Or judgemental at all. Because he was very very tall, and very very tall people seemed to be immune to judgement on account of the fact that they could use her as a particularly spindly chimney brush.

In short, could she be judgemental? Yes. Was she too nervous? Also yes. He was so very tall, and his daughter was very strange.

She remained silent. The picture returned to the desk. And the governor extended his hand, politely asking for the letter. Receiving it, he tore it open carelessly, and scanned the pages with quick motions, his eyes twitching like the head of a nervous bird, flicking from one side to the next with barely a second to really take it all in. It only took him a minute to read the entire document, which spanned several pages. Carza had no idea what was written on it... but it mustn't have been terrifically important, because he easily scattered the pages over the desk, in full view of the two of them. Not that either had much time to read them, as his strong voice filled the room once again. His breath stank of wine, and he spoke flawless city-speak. A hint of foreignness, but overall, he would've blended in quite easily in ALD IOM if he was so inclined. She wondered how he'd come to learn the language... and how many others he knew. Then again, being the governor of a colony like this probably demanded having a grand old talent with languages... honestly, travelling outside of one's home, no matter where one was, usually meant running into a foreign language.

"So. Your war. Now, officially, the position of the colony of Krodaw and the mother city of Mahar Jovan is that it doesn't get involved in disputes within foreign cities, not unless it has a very good reason to do so. That being said..."

He paused, just for a second, maybe to let the atmosphere build, and... no, he was just burping slightly. A combination of rich red meat and copious quantities of cheap wine had apparently led to some interesting intestinal reactions.

"...sorry. Anyway. That being said... I'll be honest, there's not much we can do. Your bosses want me to help out with this journey, and in exchange, they'll... do me a whole host of good turns, immediate enrolment for all my children in the Court of Ivory, larger-than-life nude statues of me sculpted by an army of fine artisans, probably a few bottles of wine as well, and a villa to retire to in order to store my statues and drink away the last few years of my life. Your Court of... Salt, is it? They've been here too, they want me to help with their expedition out to the steppe."

He groaned. Carza was frozen. It was eerie to hear the intense, era-defining struggles of her home city being... summarised like that. Made it sound like a petty regional squabble - she was approaching the governor of a whole city with the equivalent of a scuffle by the side of a sports field, in a town he'd never visited and... no, no, she was being overly harsh. This was important, just because it wasn't important to him didn't undermine its importance to her.

"I'm not in a position to help you. Not properly. If you're out in the steppe for a few years, I guarantee by the time you come back someone else will be ruling this place. And it won't be someone from Mahar Jovan. It might not be anyone at all, honestly. You might come back to find a ruin filled with dogs and the skeletons they're gnawing on."

Brutal honesty.

Hull smiled weakly, and Carza couldn't even bring herself to do that much. The governor was utterly serious, though. No jokes, no sarcasm, no gallows humour. A simple statement of fact. The city would fall, and when it did, so too would fall any help she could expect to receiver. The governor leant further against the desk, the sturdy wood groaning a little under his weight. He seemed a little lost for a moment - like that honesty had been building up for a while, and upon being released had left very little behind but dull resignation. His voice was low, and Carza felt deeply uncomfortable - like she was being confessed to by a stranger. A mix of intimacy and alienation. Two contrasting flavours that only served to upset the stomach, kill the appetite, and mar the tongue. Corroding future sensations for quite some time.

"What do you think about this place?"

Carza shifted. Hull shrugged and spoke.

"It's hot. Humid."

"That it is. Makes you want to crawl out of your own skin. Silly thing, coming here. You know, another city tried this sort of thing, once. Coming out here, to the arse-end of nowhere because they had things worth buying and selling. Centuries ago. Fidelizh tried, they sent out an expedition... guns weren't around then. The strings of their bows rotted off in the heat, insects infested them with enough diseases to cripple their armies, and the locals finished off the rest. Scalped them, hung them up from the trees, left them to die. The next time we came out here, we had guns, we had more resources, we had trains to ship out more faster than the locals could destroy them. And even then, none of us set out to conquer. We just wanted a trading outpost."

Carza remembered something Marana had said.

"...the merchants liked trading with you, yes? Something to do with... not being taxed by a hundred warlords?"

The governor glanced over, taking a second to come back to reality, pinching his nose and squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment. The artillery fire was resuming. The Sleepless attacked at all hours. Little probes, she guessed. She wondered how much they were armed with, how sophisticated their training was. An artillery shell could be huge, the operation of firing one requiring skilled personnel and immensely expensive equipment. A single probe by a few glorified farmers with rusty muskets, provoking a strike that would cost more than any individual piece of kit they had, which would, at best, kill a couple of peasants that could be replaced within a day. The governor's eyes flicked open, his hand removed itself from his nose. Some amount of focus had returned.

"More or less, yes. We settled here, built a trading factory. We didn't want to take over this much, but... well, the merchants started coming our way, because we taxed them less and gave them access to bigger markets. The warlords got angry. So they attacked us. We fought back, and we had a choice - bloody their noses until they leave, wipe them out to the last man, or take control. The first option would just set us up for another fight. The second was monstrous, and would provoke a war across this whole damn region. And the third... the third is what we did. Good choice, hm?"

Another thump as a shell pounded in the countryside around the city. Carza was still paralysed, unsure of what she was meant to do in this situation. Did normal spies have instincts for this?

Did he want a hug?

She wasn't giving him one. She wasn't sure how she felt about this whole situation anyway. Her novels seemed to like the underdogs in this scenario, but honestly, she was keenly aware that the underdogs were, apparently, completely terrifying in this scenario, and she'd really rather stick with the bigger dogs that weren't going to... to scalp her. Maybe? It could just be propaganda, Marana had said they were making propaganda, and... alright. Marana had said she disliked politics, but clearly she didn't, and had just learned not to make a big deal out of it because her opinions annoyed people. Carza, though, was legitimately distasteful of politics, disliked thinking about them, talking about them, anything. She liked anthropology and linguistics and tea. And tobacco. Founder, she loved tobacco. Politics was weird. And annoyed other people, which meant that she was wise to stay out of it. The governor, thankfully, didn't seem likely to ask either of them what they thought about this whole... situation. He was really just rambling to himself, the fact that he had an audience was simply an unhappy coincidence.

"And then, we've no good options for leaving. They'll get rid of us, and then... then what. Chaos. Pure and simple. At the moment I'm just trying to get as many trains running as possible to evacuate all of us, and any collaborators, back to Mahar Jovan. Like we're not dealing with enough newcomers as it is..."

He coughed, returning to reality again.

"Alright. Your mission out to the steppe can be supported, but - you're talking to someone who won't be able to hold by any promises in the long-term. Even medium-term, if we're being brutally honest. That being said, one of our larger patrols is heading out in that direction soon enough. The Sleepless don't attack our larger patrols, not if they want to keep their forces intact, so you should be safe. You're obviously foreign, and once you get west enough, down to the mountain passes, you're likely to be out of their territory. Busy with taking the city, no time for a pair of scholars and their tiny entourage."

Oh, hooray. They had a city collapsing as a distraction for their expedition. How nice.

"But, you should be aware of something. The reason I'm allowing any of this is simple - the Court of Salt is trying to muscle in on this area. They want to have shares in any railroad that goes from here to the steppes. If that's possible, then... well, it should be profitable. I know almost nothing about that area, certainly not its current status. Too far out from our own territory, and completely irrelevant to our operations. Now, if that Court is playing for the long-term, then they're likely to make some kind of overture to the Sleepless. A trade route to the west would be good for them if anything going east collapses once they take over. We're happy to loan you a patrol to get you far west, but you have to do us a favour as well."

A sinking feeling manifested in her stomach. Neither of them said anything, just... hovered, awkwardly, strangers in a strange land with struggles they didn't particularly understand or have any connection to.

"If you map out the steppe, the mountain pass, the entire procedure first, it might take the Court of Salt years to mount another expedition - it's expensive, and they might as well burn their money if the expedition turns out to be a failure. Meaning, you'll have years as a head start. Meaning, they'll want to stop you from reaching the steppe. Meaning, if they're working with the Sleepless, they'll want to get their allies to go against you."

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Carza gulped.

"...so... we're bait?"

"You're a target. The patrol makes you less of a target. Me, I've no interest in letting the Sleepless get not just the city, but a brand new trade route to exploit. My superiors are of the same mind. Best case scenario, nothing happens - the Court of Salt aren't idiotic enough to work with the Sleepless, and everything works out just fine. Worst case scenario, you might need to come back to Krodaw and wait a while, but the Sleepless are always at a disadvantage if they have to fight an honest battle. Either way, they get denied a trade route for when they take over, or we get some breathing room after massacring a few of them after the Court of Salt try to intercept the patrol. Either way, we benefit."

Images of howling warriors charging out of the trees to massacre her protectors, her hires, her friend... being a spy was awful, she decided. Awful, simply awful.

"And this patrol..."

"Don't worry, we'll be outfitting them properly, giving you a fair amount of soldiers to keep you safe. No interest in you dying, after all."

Carza had a spark of an idea, all of a sudden. It was desperate, but... she set it aside. Just in case. Just in case. Hull nodded nervously, and Carza followed suit. The governor clapped them both on the shoulders, thanked them for their company... and rang a small bell. A soldier would escort them to the door and take them home, he said. Carza's meal felt like a lead weight in her stomach, and she dreaded returning to the mission and its stifling heat, with its mad occupant who rambled about underground forests and rivers... she wanted to stay here, despite everything. The cool air and the sense of security would be better than anything the mission could offer. Even isolation from the strangeness of a collapsing colonial administration. Hm. A tired-looking soldier with a rumpled uniform escorted them downstairs, through lounges that had probably once bustled with civil servants and networking merchants, but now... it felt like people were abandoning ship. She'd barely arrived in Krodaw, and it was already collapsing. No idea what things could be like on the way back. And that sparked another dim bit of horror - getting back. Unless they found another way back through the mountains, they'd need to cross this bit of territory again, this time with the Sleepless in charge, or whoever had taken over Krodaw or the countryside surrounding it. No idea what that would be like... then again, if she was out in the steppe for a few long years, maybe she'd manage something. Or, more accurately, maybe there'd be a startling outbreak of sanity.

Maybe.

Heat swelled around her as she left, a billowing invisible blanket that immediately made her miss the chilly interior of the palace. The night was as hot as the day, somehow, and no breeze disturbed it to cool her forehead. Her shoes, freshly polished and barely broken in, squeaked loudly on the damp stone. Breathing through her mouth felt like swallowing huge masses of damp cotton wads, choking down breath after breath, wad after wad, and all of it just felt like she was cooking herself from the inside out. Locals had retreated indoors for the curfew, but a few shadows occasionally clustered around an alley or two. The street lamps were unlit - no-one had bothered. Maybe the lamplighters were all gone, maybe it was deemed a pointless act given the curfew... but the soldiers who clustered around herself and Hull were led by a shivering man with a huge lamp perched at the end of what looked like a repurposed fishing pole. In the harsh light, everyone looked like a walking corpse, eyes cast into deep shadows, faces lined with stress, sweat dripping down in shining rivers, worm trails slithering from their foreheads, their necks, their cheeks, and down the tips of their fingers. The area around the palace was fine enough, but elsewhere... but elsewhere, things broke down. It was barely any distance at all to the mission, but the change was remarkable.

A man was slumped in a shadowy doorway, breathing lightly. For the first time, Carza had a moment to study one of the locals in Krodaw. He was dressed like one of the colonials, heavy suit that brimmed with absorbed moisture. A bottle glinted in his hand - drunk a huge amount, anything to make the heat blaze away from him, and then he'd collapsed before getting to shelter. The soldiers didn't pay attention beyond a cautious glance. No point causing trouble when they were already on their way out - any enemies they made today could be someone aiming a gun at them tomorrow once things went to hell. Mahar Jovan seemed to produce slightly shorter people, with strong backs and large hands, and skin that easily flushed in any amount of heat. The locals, though, had skin the colour of unfired terracotta, and their hair was dark and frequently shaved or worn in short patterns - even amongst the women, if she remembered correctly. Made sense in this sort of heat. All of it was strange - she had no kinship to anyone here, the colonisers or the colonised. None of them looked like her, and she doubted any of them thought like her. The governor had talked about trade routes, about the management of cities, about espionage... all of that was completely out of her theoretical ballpark, her mind wasn't at all adjusted for it. And she knew nothing about the locals, nothing about their culture, their language, their grievances or their history. All she knew was that she wanted to leave, and to never think about Krodaw again. The pounding of artillery grew louder as they approached the mission, and the soldiers tarted to cluster a little more, looking nervous. Probably a good idea. The streets were dark, everyone was hot and uncomfortable, and there was no indication of who might be waiting beyond the flickering light of the lantern, which jerked and weaved crazily as its holder grew more and more weary.

A few half-hearted salutes served as goodbyes.

Carza immediately hammered on the door to the mission, uncaring at how the metal door bruised her knuckles, then the side of her hand as she decided to take a route which didn't involve tearing her knuckles apart on solid damn metal. Ow. Marle wrenched the thing open - she hadn't dressed for bed, still wearing the same clothes as earlier, with a look of heat-inspired madness in her eyes. Carza and Hull spilled past her while she blinked dumbly, set themselves down at the table, and promptly sprawled. Robes were discarded. Buttons were undone to the point of near-indecency. They spread their limbs wide, and slumped in their chairs while trying to soak up as much cool air as possible, gasping like fish stranded on a hot beach. Marle slammed a bottle between them - lukewarm whiskey. Neat. Carza stared dully at the thing, and Marle grinned with the weariness of a veteran.

"Heat killing you?"

Carza groaned.

"Why do people live here?"

"Because we had to but the crazies somewhere, right? Would you want people who voluntarily lived in a place like this to stay in ALD IOM?"

Carza's groan lengthened. She didn't want to think about locals or colonies or anything. She wanted to sleep in a bed made of solid ice, and then run away from the city as soon as possible, ideally in the middle of a snowstorm. And she used to find the winters in ALD IOM to be brutal, now she was seeing them as damn holidays. Hull slumped, pressing his forehead against the table, soaking up any kind of coolness from the softening wood. Oh. Wait. Marle was actually aware of the espionage thing.

"So... have you spoken to the governor before?"

Marle shrugged.

"Not really. Mostly I talk to his secretaries. He's usually busy. I guess he's winding down now the city's-"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up. I don't care about Krodaw collapsing, I don't care about the Sleepless."

Marle grinned.

"You asked."

"Met his daughter?"

The grin turned to a sly smile, and she glanced at Hull, who had thus far said nothing. Well, unless you counted exhausted groans as speech - which Carza didn't.

"Oh ho? Asking about the governor's daughter? How... scandalous."

The two scholars groaned in unison. Carza spoke first.

"Don't... don't put it that way, she's weird. And scary."

Hull nodded in agreement.

"She's intense. And she's, like... an anarchist surrealist nihilist, and I barely understand any of those things. Meeting her has now made me want to crawl back into a library and never leave, just... study one isolated historical period and ignore the rest of existence."

Carza was his mood-kindred. This was why the two of them were friends. Well, that and sheer coincidence. Marle laughed lightly.

"Well, don't worry too much about her. She's not completely mad, just weird. I think her father's just glad that she's not the sort to sleep with half of the town and bring shame upon the family."

Carza shot her a dirty look. Must everything be so vulgar?

"Well, I say sleep, I doubt there's much sleeping involved, wa-hey."

Now Hull was shooting her a dirtier look. The intense girl they'd met was one they didn't want to meet again, for a whole host of reasons. Intensity. Invasions of personal space. Weird conversations. Other things, too. Smaller things that nonetheless added up to a person who was singularly off-putting. The steppe was probably better than this. Cooler. And less... less completely and utterly weird. Oh, and fewer people, that was important. It had fewer people. It was quiet. She could sit in a big old tent and interview people in the mornings, before passing out and rolling wildly in the nearest patch of snow while giggling madly. Did these people not know that heat was evil? The sun burned people, it was a gleaming gold coin that roasted people alive! It caused skin cancer (apparently)! It was an awful thing which people shaded themselves from if they were sane - and it was hot. Meaning, heat was bad. So why would people come somewhere this damn hot? Sure, the current residents had the excuse of being born here, but why would anyone come here in the first place, all those years ago? No wonder this place was mad, no-one sane came here, and nothing sane remained after the heat boiled away half your brain cells.

Urgh. She hated the heat.

* * *

No sleep.

Sheets were too hot.

Mattress was cloying.

She'd given up on lying under the blankets, and had simply chosen to sprawl in a messy tangle of limbs on top, breathing messily as sweat slowly migrated downwards and she lost the willpower to mop any of it away. A glass of water had been drained, then another, then another, and now a stained jug was next to her bed, mocking her with the tiny droplets clinging to its pendulous lip. She'd already refilled it, drained it, and now she felt that she was just replenishing her stores of sweat, maintaining a temperature necessary for life without once approaching a temperature necessary for comfort. Comfort was irrelevant, comfort was never bloody well going to happen. Her tongue felt swollen, and she felt strange urges come over her - to sleep on the floor, and damn any insects that might crawl out to play. To stumble around in a mad haze, gibbering like a lunatic. Or simply to find a cold towel to wrap around her head and soothe her thoughts. She only slept for minutes at a time. And whenever she did, she dreamt of odd things. Bad things.

A governor standing knee-deep in mud and blood, face illuminated by the light of a flamethrower. He turned around, a sad smile on his face, weariness in his eyes, as unnameable shadows moved in the inferno beyond. Children clustered around his feet, siphoning fuel from the tanks on his back, depositing it into oddly-shaped wine bottles which they drank greedily, mouths brimming with flame, eyes melting and sockets licking with tongues of fire... and the governor smiled again, and spoke.

"Don't judge me too harshly, eh?"

A girl with her hair cut in a straight line across her forehead locking a claw-like hand around her arm, drawing her closer, eyes burning and teeth flashing, laugh sounding like... like ice cracking. Long, thin twangs and shudders, none of it remotely human. A blink, and she was holding a pair of bloody pliers in one hand, and was raising them towards Carza's lips... murmuring that Carza wasn't a bore, but was she a hypocrite? She was willing to sacrifice comfort and safety for this expedition. Would she sacrifice a few teeth too? Maybe all of them? Maybe her lips, too? Maybe her skin?

Piece by piece, disassembled like a jigsaw, piece by piece, taken apart and put away in glass cases filled with lukewarm whiskey...

She couldn't muster the effort to be panicked when she woke up. The moon was still high. The heat was still overbearing. And she passed in and out of consciousness, each time confronted with stranger and stranger visions. She was certain, at one point, that Lirana had cracked open the door and was standing nearby, a broken bottle in her hand, muttering her bastardised version of 'QUZ AXAXAXA UQLON'. The sacred gyration of the brain as it invited itself to find more, to complete the lacunae, to rise to the invitation of the word 'And?'. Well, she could feel the gyrations, she could feel the agitation of her cells, but she couldn't begin to explore the possibilities. This place was a whole host of complexities, and she wanted to explore none of them, damn it.

A bald giant with his small friend, both of them dressed like gods and sitting on thrones while dining on a feast of a thousand varieties of fruitcake, some of them filed with fruit, others with coins, others with gemstones, others with pulped paper, others with raw, bloody chunks of steak... a line of ants marched over them, stealing the cakes crumb by crumb, and the governor's daughter was killing them one by one with a tiny pin held between two long fingers, eyes narrowed in concentration. Melqua standing alone in a train station, looking a little lost. Unsure of what came next. Maybe she'd be dead when Carza got back. Maybe Carza would never get back at all.

It was the unique cruelty of ventures into the unknown that the unknown was frequently hot as hell. Heat made everything unfamiliar, it made matter shift and twist, it undid all certainties, it was, in short, miserable. She was eager for the mountains.

When her door burst open, she thought it was another dream, and thrashed in her bed slightly, mumbling-

Hull was there, blinking dumbly.

She couldn't help herself, she shrieked and pulled herself up in her bed. She was indecent, she was dressed in less than her nightclothes, she was practically just in her basic undergarments. She readied herself to throw the jug at him, when he shrieked as well and turned away, covering his eyes. Ignoring the heat, she buried herself under her blankets and hoisted the jug above, ready to attack if he thought to embarrass her in any fashion. Well, she was already embarrassed, but that didn't make much of a difference. She was always a little humiliated by something. Other people. The world. Reality in general. Herself. Her own thoughts. It was easy to be humiliated when you had a sense of common bloody decency. She hissed into the boiling dark.

"Explain yourself before I start throwing things."

"Sorry! Sorry! Thought you'd... OK, I didn't know what I was thinking."

"Close the bloody door you fool!"

He did.

He was still inside.

She wasn't sure if this counted as foiling herself once again. Did she have a dressing gown, or...

No. Too hot for one. And this room was barren. As was she - just a damn chemise and pantalettes, which was already on the verge of scandalousness. And her hair... she hissed between clenched teeth. Hull was a wonderful person and she liked him a great deal, but he had too few brains sometimes. She wasn't one of his beer-hall buddies, she had some scraps of dignity about herself, and she insisted on privacy. Anyway. Hissing. Like an angry cat, or a slightly muffled wasp.

"What. Is. It."

"There's... some guards outside, they want to see us."

Her eyes widened. Hull's eyes remained covered, to her satisfaction.

"What?"

"They want to see us. Something important has come up."

"What?"

"They won't say, I don't think they know - they were just sent to get hold of us, I think."

The city was under attack. The Sleepless were coming. The artillery strikes had reversed direction due to strong winds and now a shell was heading right for them. Plague. Mutants. Fire. The governor's daughter wanted to have another awkward conversation with her where she claimed allegiance to certain groups and then made fun of them, which was probably meant to make her seem disaffected and disenchanted, but really just made it very uncomfortable to talk with her. The governor himself wanted to talk with her again about the war or the colony or something ghastly. Oh, no, wait. That was a step down in terms of tension. The governor was just sad and awkward. His daughter was significantly worse. So... was she calming down? Was she still spiralling? Was she still in her bed in her chemise while a gentleman huddled some distance away? Yes to the last one. Uncertain to the first two. Gah!

"Get out. I'll dress."

"...might want to be quick."

"I'll be quicker if you leave."

"Alright, alright, fine, just... OK, hide under the covers, I need to uncover my eyes to find the damn handle."

She hid. The door opened, closed, and she immediately slithered out of the blankets like a half-drowned scholar who'd somehow wound up in an ocean made of wool as hot as the damn sun. She stumbled madly to the basin, dunked her head, paused, dunked it again, slicked her hair back along her forehead, and immediately got to work. Suit. Gown. Suit? Should she... no, not putting on that damnable jacket, no, no, no. Not happening. Never. Waistcoat. Braces. Shirt? Shirt. Tie? No. Gown? Did she have to? Yes. Yes she did, she'd earned this thing, and it was too hot she was melting she was dissolving glurghleblurghle and-

She chose to wear the gown.

For the sake of her survival and sanity.

Hull was standing outside, in a sweat-stained shirt rolled up to his elbows... a second later she followed suit, rolling up her sleeves. She looked debonair and worldly, she told herself. And then she stopped lying - she looked like someone who couldn't handle the heat and was barely functioning, and was trying anything necessary to stay cool, and none of it was damn working. Shoes - shoes, yes, shoes, even if it meant trapping her feet in leather ovens that were slowly turning her from medium rare, to well done, to hearty congratulations. Argh. The two of them stumbled out, where a squad of sweating guards greeted them. Half locals, half colonials. They were bustled down the street, and... shoved into a steaming Hansom cab, pulled by two skin-and-bone horses that were clearly too weak to haul artillery shells, so they had to work with two scrawny scholars. Carza's arms folded around her chest as she was driven into the night, with no explanation to where they were going or why. The breeze from their movement was bliss on her forehead, and despite her intentions to remain alert and awake...

She slipped off. Just for a few minutes.

When she awoke, a squat grey building that radiated cold was next to them, and her forehead was slowly migrating down the cloudy window of the cab. With effort, she detached herself - leaving a Carza-shaped shadow on the window which she doubted would ever leave - and stumbled out. Still no explanations. Rain was starting to fall, and it steamed on the streets. It was solid rain, none of the slow, meandering drizzles of ALD IOM. This was the kind of rain that burst and tumbled, that formed a solid ceiling of water that was already soaking into her socks and sleeves. Crud, crud, white shirt, white shirt. She dashed under shelter, followed by Hull. Both of them looked awful. Tired. Hot. Mad. Poorly dressed. A guard was waiting for them, coat undone and chest exposed - anything to cool down, evidently. With effort, he tucked his sweat-stained hair back under his cap, and spoke in very halting city-speak.

"You wanted."

Carza blinked.

"What is this place?"

"You wanted."

Hull tried too, phrasing 'what is this place' in simpler and simpler terms until it was understood.

"Dead place."

Carza froze.

"Dead place?"

"Place for dead."

Cemetery? No, no fields. Slaughterhouse? No. Place where they executed irritating scholars? Maybe. Maybe. Or... or...

Morgue.

Her stomach had already sunk in the governor's palace. Now it tunnelled through the ground.

They were outside a morgue.