Chapter Fifty Eight

Ayat became a complete different person when he was in the saddle. Hard to imagine that he had a cat on him at all, really - his back stiffened, his stance relaxed, his entire body seemed to tighten up. Like he was a string from a fortepiano, only now tuned up to a state of completion. And everything beforehand now seemed woefully out of tune. One hand to guide his horse, keeping it at an easy canter - saving energy for a gallop. A horse could only gallop for so long, he said. Go on for too long, too fast, and the horse simply dies. Easy canters were what won most of their battles out west, he said, with the easy languid half-aware storytelling of a veteran talking mostly to himself. Two reasons - first, if the other side had horses, they were used to them as cavalry chargers. As giant meaty vehicles that crushed the opposition underfoot. Half-mad horses who'd been trained from birth to overcome some very useful survival instincts. Turned out, that made them bad at survival. Which the nomads gladly exploited. Second... well, sometimes the enemy used camels. And according to Ayat, camels were nightmares. Not because they were scary or fast. But because horses loathed them. Didn't like their smell, and getting close could make a horse rear up in a panic. Initially they'd tried to get camels of their own, to get their horses used to the smell.

Then someone had made the valid point: why not just stay far away and shoot them with arrows? It's what the nomads were good at anyway, so...

Turned out that worked just as well. Better, even. Required less effort. And all the horses needed to do was maintain an easy canter over the desert plains, keeping far away from any humped menace in their general vicinity.

"Good with water, though. Always envious of that."

"Hm?"

"Camels. Good with water. If they had more fur, maybe they'd be good out here. But, well, not much room to experiment."

He sighed sadly. And kept on going, Carza trailing in his wake. They were following the tracks onwards, through the plains which were... well, the cold out here was strange. A cold breeze had nothing to soak it up - no trees, and the hills were gentle enough for breezes to climb and fall easily, not being broken at all. It was the difference between a babbling brook which had to flow around every rock in its way... and an uninterrupted ocean, with currents larger than any river, tearing apart anything that dared insinuate itself. It was very cold, was the point. Very cold indeed. She was wearing a heavy tweed coat, but... well, it was getting a bit frayed at this point. Back home, it'd barely pass muster as a hiking coat, using it in polite society would be disastrous. And all those holes weren't very conducive to keeping her warm. Sometimes, she saw animals out on the steppe - small dogs and wolves, with shaggy fur that almost looked like the grass they hid amongst. Watching with wary eyes, unwilling to get close. The mountains were more distant than ever - the entire time she'd been here, Carza had stayed fairly close to their shadow. Seemed to be common for the demigods, to stay close to their ancestors. This was the furthest west she'd gone... and already the mountains were receding. Seemed like mounds of crumpled paper from here, sticking up from an ocean of blue-grey haze. The family was out there, somewhere.

And in the other direction, the Scabrous.

They were riding quickly, trying to follow the tracks as precisely as possible. In the light she could see how deep they were - hacking up the earth with greedy abandon. Claws and hooves both, limbs that bifurcated, trifurcated, adding stability to a creature far larger than it ought to be. Far larger than land should allow, really. Sometimes her detector whined a little, and she'd glance around frantically... only to see, well, leavings. Pools of brown-gold liquid, shed from enormous creatures. She remembered how warm her horse had been last night, how continuous exertion had lit a fire in its biology. She imagined how tremendously hot those enormous horses could be. Wondered if this stuff was their equivalent of coolant - liquid produced and shed in spurts, crackling with contamination. The grass was hungry for it, certainly. Made the steppe seem alive when the grass curved eagerly in the direction of the contamination, growing thicker, darker, stronger with each greedy gulp. Little eyes of curled grass, pupils of glistening contamination...

Ayat glanced over.

"You are cold."

Carza blinked.

"...a little. But I'll manage. You don't need-"

Something was flung across, and she barely managed to catch it. It was... large, it stank of horses and sweat and smoke and all manner of earthy things. It was... oh, Founder, it was Ayat's coat-robe. Still didn't have a name for those. For a moment, she flinched at the sharp scent, which suggested it hadn't been washed for a long, long while. Kept fresh only by constant fresh air and rushing wind, never a drop of water. Unless she counted rain, of course. It had something else, too... little beads, golden grains of sand clumped up by moisture, lining the underside of the sleeves and the back of the lower robe.

"What's it like?"

"Hm?"

"The desert. It's... well, we have deserts back home, but I've never visited them. Not sure if I want to."

Ayat hummed again, sounded relieved.

"I'm glad to be gone. The desert is... not nice. Travel in the morning and the evening. The day kills you with heat, the night kills you with cold. No shelter, no shade. Nothing to protect you. And nothing changing in the landscape, just dune after dune after dune. You measure your days in pools of shade and drops of water. A day is beginning when your canteen is full. A day ends when your canteen ceases. After that... pointless to go on. Only worth sitting. They have nomads of their own, out there. But the cities despise them, call them savages. Sometimes we used them as guides. Sometimes. They, I think, are the only people who can live out there."

He smiled a little.

"We ate salt. The nomads told us to. When you get hot, you sweat. When you sweat, you lose salt. You lose all your salt, you die. So you drink water, yes, but you eat salt too. Which makes you thirsty. So... always thirsty. Always. It's good to be home. The desert people said the steppes are unpleasant, cold, bitter, lifeless... we think much the same of their home."

He hummed.

"I suppose I'll think your home is awful, too."

Carza blinked, and shrugged the coat over her shoulders. A set of small bone buttons were used to seal it shut, but she only buttoned up a few. Using it almost like a dressing gown rather than a proper garment - she didn't want to indicate that this was a permanent arrangement. If only because... well, this thing was too large for her, and stank too much to wear for an extended period. Even if the warmth was very much appreciated, she didn't want to look like a child wearing her father's clothes.

"It's not awful. It's actually incredibly nice. I mean, some nomads settled there. Once."

"...really?"

"The Court of Horn, way, way back. They came along, invaded, then settled down. That's... how I know your language, actually. They still speak a relative of it."

He hummed.

"...what are they like?"

He sounded almost... hopeful. Did he think there might be some refuge for him there? Oh, Founder, was she going to have to take him back to ALD IOM? Not that she disliked him, if anything she was developing a general liking for his professionalism, his calm demeanour, his dogged endurance... his cat was an excellent cat, too. Had to be said. But he wasn't really... well, he didn't seem very reflective. Not like Kani, who had an aptitude for anthropology that made her a Founder-sent miracle for Carza's work. Either way, delivering him to the Court of Horn... well, if it made him happy, rewarded him for helping her out... and this assumed they both survived this, obviously. Which was still up in the air.

"They live out in the pastures. A place called the Drumskin, where you can hear a horse galloping from miles away - the sound just rumbles across. Speak Tralkic. And... uh... well, they did conquer us once. Wrote a lot of poetry, killed a lot of people..."

She tilted her head to one side.

"Do you still have a taboo against spilling blood?"

"Hm?"

"The Court of Horn said that spilling blood offends the sky and the earth. Is that still-"

"Why would we worry about insulting the sky? The sky's awful. Nothing lives there but storms and birds. So, the things which ruin out tents, and the things which either shit on us, eat us when we go on, or don't make for good eating when we catch them. The sky's terrible, I'll insult it all day."

"...and the earth?"

"Well, that's fair. But the sky, why would they care about the sky..."

He shivered in suppressed disgust.

"You can't graze horses on clouds."

A self-satisfied nod followed. Well, there was logic there, had to be said. Even if it was odd. But... yeah, he had a point. Horses couldn't live in the sky. So, the sky was probably pretty terrible. She remembered that raider being offered up to the sky as an insult, condemning him to a more miserable, dishonourable afterlife... interesting. Maybe the Court of Horn was regarded as unlucky? After all, some of them had stayed behind, maybe not many had survived the crossing back... or were conquered upon returning, due to their depleted numbers? Clans over here were founded around luck-inviting practices, and a whole clan just vanishing after crossing the mountains might be interpreted as the worst possible luck imaginable. So, their sky-worship became insulting, odd, and forbidden by common practice. Rather like the geoglyphs associated with the Scabrous.

Speaking of whom.

They were getting closer. She could feel it.

And her detector was starting to whine a little louder with each passing minute. More contamination in the air... she reached into her pack, and with a heavy heart extracted her gas mask. Ayat shot her a very odd look as she struggled to put it on... dammit, she hadn't used this in a while. Filters needed changing, and the lenses were clouded by dust. Took a minute just to make it work again. And once it did... not much better. Still felt claustrophobic, trapped... reminded her too much of some very, very unpleasant memories. The only advantage was stuffiness. In the damp heat of the forest, it'd been like trapping her head in an oven. And on the steppe, as it approached winter... it was actually fairly comfortable inside. Not comfortable enough to want to wear it by choice, but comfortable enough to soften the blow of needing to wear it at all.

"What's that?"

Carza blinked, and her voice was barely audible behind layers of leather and metal.

"Gas mask. Contamination in the air."

"...oh."

"Are you not worried about it? The stuff in the air?"

"...not really. Doesn't hurt me, not much. I just need to spit up a hairball later, gets rid of most of it."

Carza blinked.

"...oh."

Why hadn't Kani told her about... oh. She'd seen a cat getting rid of a hairball before. It was an unpleasant experience, and she imagined that it would be frightfully embarrassing for someone with any self-awareness. Kani would probably consider it rude to talk about, like any other natural function. Ayat didn't seem to mind, though. Which... made sense, in a way. In her limited experience, blokes were more willing to talk about vulgar natural functions than someone raised to be polite. And Ayat had quite possibly spent a good long while in the company of soldiers and soldiers alone. And they weren't likely to be a... good influence when it came to etiquette of any kind. Well, now she had two informants. One who was polite, self-aware, good at her work, interested in expanding her perspectives... and someone who was just a, well, a bloke. Unreflective and not concerned with analysing his own culture. Which... well, it was probably more representative, that was for sure.

Either way, she hoped that Ayat's cat, Little Friend, would be alright. A mutant cat sounded... unpleasant. The stink in the air was rising... a syrupy-sweet decay, the scent of rot and mutation. The scent of flesh realigning according to different and stranger priorities. The tracks were fresh, and in some places the contamination left behind by the horses were so new that she could see pale earthworms gorging themselves, growing longer, fatter, even developing rudimentary eyes and bristling feelers... in the other pools, the grass had time to mutate, and had presumably outcompeted everything else. But here, it was fresh enough for limp, brainless creatures to still have a turn, for the grass to still be in the process of achieving mobility. And... it was hard to see in the light of the gathering day, but she thought, thought she could see traces of red in front of her. Not constant, not bright, but there was some sort of red light pulsing every so often. She wondered what that was, if it was some sort of bioluminescence, a way for them to signal to each other... or something natural, uncontrollable. The day seemed to grow older as the red light touched it, turning the steppe to shadowed evening with each step they took...

She turned to Ayat.

"The geoglyphs. Any nearby?"

"...some, I think. Hard to... well, I can look."

"Good. Let's keep going for a moment, just to make sure they're here. That we found the right group."

Ayat nodded silently, then swung down from his horse, making almost no sound as he did so. A second later, Carza followed, clutching her borrowed robe around her shoulders. The cat was stashed with the horse - it seemed well-behaved enough, wasn't going to wander off. Carza's own horse was still a little weary, needed a moment to cool down. At first, Carza thought this was a stealth thing - quieter off their horses, less noticeable. But then she saw him rubbing the horses down, and she realised it was a speed thing. Rest the horses up. Get them ready for an emergency gallop in the near future. The last thing they wanted was for the horses to fall over dead as they tried to run away, or simply refusing to gallop any further. Used a pair of hobbles to stop them from running off at the first sign of danger, tying the ropes with quiet efficiency. Carza checked her gun to occupy the empty minutes - ammunition, ready. Flasks, ready. Mechanisms, oiled. Everything where it should be. The gun would do its job just fine, the only issue was her - if she missed, all the mechanisms in the world wouldn't save her. Ayat was using weapons like... a spear, a sword, a bow. Primitive, but he was likely more dangerous with them than she was with a revolver.

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Probably.

Maybe he'd been exiled for gross incompetence.

They walked through the grass in silence, trying to stay as unnoticeable as possible. Easier for Ayat, whose clothes were earth-coloured, and who knew how to walk quietly. Carza felt like a clumsy oaf beside him... which felt a bit rich, given that he was taller and wider than her. Just felt unfair. The stink rose. And the glow did two. A second sun, dimmer than the first, but it soaked up the light at the edge of its corona. Soaked it up and drained it dry. It felt like they were entering an evening world, and the clouds overhead were the shade of an old bruise, brown and yellow, clouding out the sun. All of a sudden the steppe felt completely alien, the grass was a little too high, the earth a little too... profoundly dead. It felt like a miracle that anything could grow out here. There was no fragrance from delicate steppe flowers, just... a cloud of pollen which hovered in a brown haze over the ground. They'd entered to another world, and it wasn't their own. The Scabrous inhabited their little realm, and brought it with them wherever they went. The sun overhead was reduced down to a small white disk secluded behind layers of thick clouds... and the only illumination now came from the warning red light overhead. The grass whispered to them. Undulated in invisible winds.

Ayat's grip on his sword tightened, and he drew it from its sheath with a low rasp. It had been painted over with something, or maybe sanded... either way, the metal was dull, dark, and non-reflective. Reduced glare. Good move, especially out in a desert. But the operational edges... those were bright as stars. Unblemished and freshly sharpened. Carza's own gun felt woefully exposed by comparison, and she tried to keep it under her robe. Didn't seem to do much, but it helped her relax.

The stink rose.

And she quietly turned off her detector. No more whining, but... now she could just hear her own breathing, the hot breath washing up her face in the mask. Slowly piercing the filter after a moment or two's delay. At least it was harder to smell, the stink was reduced to an academic point, not something overwhelming her senses... but she thought she could feel it crawling over her few pieces of exposed skin... undulating. A living blanket, warm and cloying, testing her for any vulnerabilities. She'd need to clip herself this evening. They scaled a hill in silence, her breath deafeningly loud in her ears... and then they crested it, crested the mound of brown earth and brown grass under a brown sky, the only splash of colour being a hungry red glow that seemed to take away more light than it provided. Like the darkrooms she'd read about, used by photographers. Full of strange chemicals and scents... she had the feeling of walking into a secluded laboratory, somewhere controlled, where only a narrow range of life was permissible, where only a certain form of light was considered harmless, where the sky was kept dull and the earth was kept barren. No contamination.

Well. Nothing to interfere with the contamination.

They crested the hill. And Carza stared down at the scene below.

There was a dimple in the landscape, a small space between hills in which lay a camp. The Scabrous were here, no doubt. She'd never seen anything quite like this before, not on the steppe, nor back home. And it was distinctly, unrelentingly, wrong. She remembered three riders had kidnapped Kani. Here, there were five, occupying five tents, one each. Decadent. Each tent was large and luxurious, made of a thick material she didn't recognise, but it... it faintly resembled skin. Thick. And riddled with tiny distortions which could be warped fabric, could be stains from water, or could be little veins running through. Like the membrane of a bat's wing. Those enormous horses had nothing to tether them, no stable to shelter them, and they didn't seem to mind. They were sculpted. Flesh and metal, blending into one. Too many legs. Hooves the forked to provide more support to the body. Saddles sculpted out of bone, grown directly from the spine. No eyes, just bristling antennae, twitching feelers like the edges of petals. Their entire bodies seemed hazy, surrounded by a loose cloud of dancing filaments. Tasting the air, soaking up contamination. The horses had no lower jaws - their heads simple ended at that point, giving way to clicking teeth and pincers, a whole underside of consumptive fangs. Like a leech, she thought. And there were slits up and down their abdomens, which maybe served to conceal more mouths.

One of them would've been on par with that thing in the forest. And there were five here. Five horses for five riders...

And she could see one. Just one, tending to an enormous golden lamp in the centre of the camp. The lamp was placed atop a metal pole, and held steady by five gleaming chains. Red light emanated from it, from glass windows placed in its sides. Looked like some sort of submersible, a diving bell with thick, round glass panes leading to the interior... and nothing but light lived inside. Light which squirmed very slightly.

Carza felt fear rising in her gut.

And then the rider below the lamp stood, brushing itself down.

Something odd. She thought... it looked fleshy, yes, but almost like it was wearing a suit. A full-body suit, quickly adjusted to cover up anything displaced during the maintenance of the lamp. No idea what lay underneath... all she saw was crawling flesh. Undulating pink-grey matter, the shade of raw pork, slithering over a lanky, tall frame. There was no face, not quite. The suit was almost like a grub, forming a bulging hood, the chest merging smoothly with the neck, and at the apex of it all - no face. Just... a mask. A heavy metal mask, studded with tiny glass optics, some round, some square, some pentagonal, octagonal... diamonds and curling crescents. Dozens of them, gleaming in various colours. A grille over the mouth, and she could see steam emanating from it in regular bursts. Regular breaths. Like some boiling heat was inside that thing, a whole damn boiler. Worst of all, she could see ornaments, changes, little additions made that suggested intelligence. The suit turned to hard bone and metal in some areas, padding out the chest and the legs, while vicious spikes extended from the arms. Charms fashioned from small jewels were embedded at irregular intervals, and heavy rings embraced each and every finger. Tiny holes along the suit pulsed and contracted like orifices, and she could see small gleaming pits - eyes, maybe. Sometimes she saw an insect-like leg extended out, or a feeler, or a slug-like proboscis, tasting the air, examining the environment... and up the right arm, coiled up to the shoulder, was a long, languid, liver-red tongue. Covered all over in suckers and quivering papillae.

Five horses, five tents, and she could see the shadows of other riders milling around, almost aimlessly.

Kani, Kani, where was she...

Couldn't see her.

But she could see the rifles. Definitely rifles - and fairly beautiful ones, too. Decorated with small glittering stones and elegantly sculpted wood... almost organic. Like they'd trained woodworms to crawl in certain patterns over the surface, never damaging the interior, but sculpting graceful labyrinths wherever they went. Surrounded by such monstrousness, they almost seemed funny - just... guns. But then she saw what passed for ammunition. They had bulging fleshy sacs underneath the barrels, feeding directly into the chamber. Quivering, pale things... fluid, yes, but there was something swimming in those sacs. Worms that pushed curiously against the walls of their little prison. An ammunition pouch that breathed and sweated, filled with amniotic fluid and worms that could burrow into someone. A single one had killed that horse Kani was riding. A single one had killed an animal larger than Carza, stronger than Carza. She wouldn't stand a chance, be dead in a matter of seconds... but they were just lying in a pile. Didn't seem to be carried around. Confident, then.

Maybe overconfident.

And she received further proof of that a second later.

The rider tending to the lamp sloped away, taking long, slithering steps which left behind a greasy residue on the grass. The entire camp gleamed the same way, like the tents, the suits, the horses, the ground, all of them required some form of lubrication. Protective mucus. The other riders were either distant... no, one of them was coming closer to the centre of the camp, bathed in the red glow of their shining lamp. It found a wide, flat rock... and began to spread itself out, sprawling like a dozing animal. Long, long fingers twitched in bleary contentment, and scratched the stomach area of the suit gently. Red furrows appeared where it scratched, trenches that sealed up a second later with a gurgling sigh. Translucent fluid pulsed lazily from the thousand tiny holes mottling its suit... and she saw it reaching for a flask. Metal, but ornamented with a spiral pattern made of glistening chitin. It opened it up, throwing the stopper away... and poured a stream of thick, red fluid from the flask, into the grille, where it slowly soaked through to the being underneath. Red fluid that glowed softly. And Carza understood why that glow followed them everywhere. Whatever was in that lantern... it wasn't just light. There was something living in there, something glowing, something moving. Fluids drained and consumed... carried around in metal lamps hanging from the horses... running down the mottled, undulating surface of the flesh-suits...

An entire other culture lay before her. Not mindless mutants, something which lived with contamination, embraced it. She wondered if these were the remnants of that old clan which had made war on the Scabrous... or if they were nothing of the sort. Maybe they weren't even human underneath that all. Maybe they were like the demigods - maybe they were demigods, but abandoning the evolution to ancestor, embracing the idea of just... mutating for the hell of it. Using their natural abilities to stop themselves from going insane. Or something else. A third speies. Human. Demigod. And these things. The Scabrous. Or maybe this was just the limit of mutation, what oculd be achieved when you understood it on an intimate level. Mastering contamination, learning how to mutate... she could see the tents breathing slightly. The tent flaps pulsed like hungry mouths, and she could see cilia waving gently on their roofs, soaking in the red light as greedily as the riders did. They were relaxing, they...

She saw Kani. A cage. Far too small. Set off to the side of the camp, watched over by no-one. Not that that made it easier to get closer - it was still too close for them to reach without alerting every single rider, the horses... maybe the tents, too. Maybe those openings were mouths. Maybe these things slept inside pools of lukewarm saliva, a pulsing stomach of warmth and contentment where they could achieve whatever passed for bliss with things this... this wrong. The cage was fashioned from metal, grey and prosaic... and inside was a huddled figure, curled up into a ball. Kani. Carza could see her glass skin, her wiry hair, the robe she'd had on... it even had the torn sleeve from where a whip had coiled around it, dragging her in. She was still alive, Carza could see her moving. Shivering, really, but... the riders were keeping her prisoner.

She was alive. Founder, she was alive. Kept in a cage, yes, but prisoner was better than dead. Carza nudged Ayat, and nodded gently in the direction of the little prison. Ayat narrowed his eyes, squinted with one eye... and clearly struggled not to whoop. Carza had to bite down on her lip to stop from grinning from ear to ear. A second... and the two were clutching one another, just a little. Excitement overpowering reticence. Ayat clutched her close for just a second, like some enormous stuffed animal, squeezing the life out of her while a grin split his face in half...and Carza was clutching him back, face glowing with excitement. Founder, she was alive, she was alive, she wasn't bloody dead.

Wait.

Why wasn't she dead? Why hadn't she been killed already? Why put her in a cage? The Scabrous wouldn't just take prisoners like an ordinary clan, not if they were to be as feared as they were. Monsters didn't take hostages. That was why they were monsters - amongst other things.

She could think of a few ideas, though, flowing in a river of panicked possibilities. Maybe they wanted a bigger audience before killing her. Maybe they were capturing slaves for their own use, or for sale to others. Maybe they wanted to have an orgy of violence, which required more than a single captive. Maybe they were waiting for someone, maybe a particular time or date when the butchering of captives was conventionally done. She heard no words being exchanged, no idea about their language... religion, no clue. Her plan was suddenly thrown into doubt. Maybe the geoglyphs meant nothing to them, maybe... wait. Wait. The clan which had become the Scabrous was old. And certain practices had changed over time, right? Geoglyphs had been abandoned, sky-worship was discouraged, an obsession with not spilling a drop of blood... and she couldn't see a single knife. There were some sharp spurs on their suits, but they seemed thin, decorative. Maybe pulsing with venom, but not exactly designed to rip people apart. Their whips were covered in suckers powerful enough to tear clothing, but... Kani didn't look injured at all. And Carza remembered that horse they'd killed - a single projectile, a single wound, and not a drop of blood. Whatever they'd done to the horse hadn't actually spilled any blood, it'd been clean. Alright, alright, but this could all be explained easily enough. If they had wonderful weapons, why bother with knives or swords? If they wanted to take slaves, why make whips which injured people heavily? So... sky-worship. What could...

Ah. Ha.

The tents. The ground surrounding them. The tents had elaborate decorations on the top, too high for any of the riders to see. Elaborate geometric designs picked out in mottled clots of blood in pulsing veins, purple-black and shivering. Spirals, crescents, depictions of animals and people, whole tapestries... and none of them would be remotely visible from the ground. Needed height. Ideally, you needed to be in the sky itself in order to survey the whole camp... the lamp in the centre was in the perfect centre, the five tents surrounding it like the spokes of a wheel, the rays of a star. Perfectly arranged and spaced. The chains added to this, emerging at precisely the right angles. Mathematically satisfying, the perfect ratio, the sort of thing which could only be obtained by happy accident or intense skill, with nothing in between. But again, none of this would be appreciated from the ground, only from the sky. From this hill she could only catch notions of it, never a full picture. Just like how those geoglyphs were meaningless rocks when seen horizontally, but from above they presumably rationalised into something beautiful, something elegant and meaningful. Sky-worship. Aversion to the spilling of blood. Taking captives instead of just killing intruders on sight. And perhaps most importantly...

Why on earth were they riding horses? They could sculpt life into tents, for crying out loud, why not... why not fly around on giant multicoloured winged serpents, why not burrow around inside the bodies of enormous moles, why not go wild? They'd already made living suits, living tents, all manner of strange creations... including whatever was in that lamp which slithered so hypnotically and glowed so brightly. An eel, a snake, a leech, a grub, something else? A metal womb for it, glass windows to let it shine... and a number of spigots underneath. Metal teats attached to a metal womb, for wolves to suckle at with hungry bliss. A parody of a samovar, she thought. A giant metal container for warm red liquid, alcohol for these people, alcohol and every other narcotic. Liquid bliss. So... why should their steeds be, recognisably, horses? Why bother, when they could do something more abstract and more efficient, when they'd been so willing to do that to everything else in their possession? Centipedes, bulls, why not experiment? Why would all of their horses correspond to the same design, why were there no rebels, no weirdos who wanted to ride something exotic?

Simple preference? No, no, preference was an influence, it wouldn't stop an avant-garde oddball from doing something strange. This was more serious. It implied taboo, it implied tradition, it implied something culturally entrenched, like a tick burrowed deep that refused to let go. Maybe, conceivably, possibly, an emanation of an older belief. An older way of life which centred on horses. Count on these freaks to be nostalgic for a time when they were ordinary... or maybe they still revered gods which looked like horses, saw horses as representative of some cosmic truth. The Court of the Axe once revered bulls with mad zealotry, called them 'metaphors of the universe'. And bulls were mostly just good for goring people! These were horses - their milk could become alcohol, their legs could become vehicles for great distances, and their meat could be consumed with greedy abandon, lean as venison...

Anyone would revere an animal that did so much for them.

Individually, none of this was wholly compelling. Capable of being explained by little coincidences and alternatives. But when placed altogether... well. Well. Eventually the excuses would have to form a tower so vast it seemed infinitely more improbable than the simple truth. The easy way out. Not always a bad idea, especially with anthropology. She whispered to Ayat, keeping her voice as low as possible. So low she feared she was inaudible to him, but... he shuffled closer over the grass, keeping his eyes fixed on the camp, and gestured for her to continue.

"How close is a geoglyph?"

He glanced around quickly, surveying the landscape. A nomad could cover a huge distance, she thought - maybe he'd been here before, when the Scabrous hadn't come this far north. He seemed familiar, at least... and he hummed very softly in thought, running a hand over his mouth, drawing it back down into a frown - but the edges kept curling up, eager to smile. Still elated by his sister being alive.

"North of here, just a little."

Good. Shouldn't be too many Scabrous that way - heading west would mean going around the camp, heading east would mean wasting time on coming here to begin with, heading south would mean going deeper into Scabrous territory. North, north was ideal. The two began to shuffle back down the hill, keeping quiet and low, crawling most of the way before lifting up into low crouches. Slow and steady, slow and steady, slow and damn steady. Her heart was beating loudly in her ears, the pulse of blood like the flowing of a great ocean - the tide rushing in, rushing out, in, out, in, out... faster and faster the more she concentrated on it. They were coming, she could feel it. They were striding over, sloping in that strange lanky way they had, skin-suits quivering in anticipation, whips slithering free from their arms... they were taller than her, would rival Ayat, and he was the tallest mostly-human person she'd ever met. Ancestors excluded, of course. They were just... enormous. And with those horses, the Scabrous would... Founder, what were they? How did they figure out all that stuff to do with contamination? Why would they try to?

And what was in that lamp? What was their culture? Their language? Why did they do all of this?

Her inner anthropologist needed to know, and her sane parts were quite content with ignorance. She imagined she'd have no luck getting to interview them. No informants. And living among them... well, participant observation was probably pointless when they lived in a way hostile to all forms of life beyond their own. And now... now they had Kani. Founder, if Kani had been human, she might already be gone. Mutated beyond recognition. Worthy of a mercy kill and nothing else... or at best, a little closure before the end. Too young to become an ancestor, no idea what's transpire if she was compelled to mutate before her time. As it was, they didn't have long, to her mind. It might not take long at all for something... damaging to be done. She was still - in that cage, she was still, hunched, shivering. Maybe they'd already set to work, but in a subtle way. A needle in the skin hurt like hell, but left nothing but a tiny red dot when it was withdrawn. There were ways of undoing people that left no marks at all. And maybe they were setting to work at this very moment... the horses became monoliths, dark shadows they needed to get to at all costs. Lighthouses to weary sailors. The only things that could commend them to their target. To the symbol carved in the earth which those things might find sacred. If the Court of Ivory was doing this, she'd have burned their libraries. The Court of Slate, she'd have defaced their mummies and scattered their ashes. The Court of Horn, she'd have painted their most sacred pastures with all manner of diseased blood. And so on and so on.

Time to hit them where it hurt. Not their unmentionables. Not their wallets.

Their gods.

They were both out of breath when they reached their horses. Ayat was a little clumsy on the ground, had a staggering gait which swaggered too much - like he was still trying to accommodate a saddle between his legs. He untied the hobbles with terrifying speed, though, and saddled himself back up in a moment while Carza was still struggling to get her foot into the stirrups. He climbed down as quickly as he entered the saddle, helping her up the rest of the way. She was too thrilled with adrenaline to be embarrassed as he practically tossed her up into the saddle, where she landed easily. He knew more about horses than she likely knew about anthropology, if she was going to be perfectly blunt. Back on his own, he looked over. His face was utterly still. Carza stared back with perfect stoicism. For a second, that was all - silence, a bruised sky, a red dark sun and a little silver coin which passed for a real sun... brown grass with a fog of yellowish pollen... a camp full of creatures that defied explanation or humanity, that wore living suits...

And her face split into a wide, frantic grin.

Ayat grinned back, and he spoke with barely suppressed enthusiasm.

"She's alive."

"She is. She really is. Founder, Founder, she's actually still alive..."

"We could still get her out."

Carza tried to clamp down on her grin. Failed.

"Well, let's not get too enthusiastic. Still have a holy site to desecrate."

Ayat's grin only broadened.

"An exile and a foreigner desecrating a holy site of the Scabrous... that's a few centuries of bad luck, I think."

"Good. Then let's give them all the bad luck they can handle, huh?"

Ayat kicked his horse gently, poking it into motion. A gentle canter... but he escalated to a gallop a moment later. Yellow pollen dust trailed behind him, the streaking tail of a comet. And a second later, Carza was making a comet of her own in the midst of that brown desolation, where slithering worms cavorted in piles of contaminated horse-coolant, and red light squirmed contentedly over hills where nothing could grow but weeds, spiky grasses and reedy stalks which sprayed pollen in every direction. An orgy of reproduction to stay alive, the only way to survive being breeding over and over and over. Each life, expendable to the cause of the collective.

This landscape was already desecrated. She couldn't imagine any god, heathen or otherwise, choosing to watch over this sort of place.

Not a single one.

And now she was about to subtract one from zero. Negative gods... that felt like a millennium of bad luck.

Good.