Chapter Fifty Five

How could Carza describe the flight south?

Tiring. Long. Bone-achingly cold. The cold was really how everything was defined. The landscape was unchanging, day after day after day. The horses were changed out, but the entire herd was growing wearier as time went on... and the cold. The cold. It chewed slowly at her skin, seeped between her pores and around her bones, made her almost forget what heat was. Oh, she was living. She didn't think she'd die of cold, but she was on that border. When things became too cold, too cold for a human, then warmth spread through the body. The body was too dead at that point, couldn't feel the cold at all. Either death, or desperation - stop feeling cold, stop feeling pain, here, have blessed relief and move with it. Don't let pain hold you back! Or something along those general lines. But when the cold was bad but not fatal, she felt like she'd been kicked by a horse (a sensation she hadn't yet had the pleasure of experiencing). And the cold never numbed, always scraped. As long as she felt like this, she was probably doing just fine. She was getting by. She would survive.

...too cold to drink liquor safely, though. Much too cold for that. Snow was creeping in, tendrils stretching from the roots of the mountains. Like white fungi spreading slowly over the stone and earth, sprouting after months and months of quiet slumber. Hadn't checked her notes since they'd set out... only the occasional pat to make sure the damp wasn't setting in. Not that there was much dampness - the air was infuriatingly dry, enough to make her throat feel itchy and unpleasant. Sometimes she could see why the Court of Horn's precedents had decided to run back home - when the steppe was beautiful and quiet, perfect strangeness in every direction, a landscape which could be lived in but never tamed, and thus far had been free of contamination to the point of being near-paradisical. Sometimes. And sometimes she wondered what the hell had been wrong with them. Why on earth would someone decide, voluntarily, to go back here instead of staying ALD IOM, the most perfect place on the surface of the planet? Queen of cities? Most perfect secluded garden, beloved by any god that had a lick of sense, and made the best damn sandwiches this side of the afterlife?

Feh.

Lunatics, the lot of them.

Not this family, of course. She was growing rather fond of them. And the constant riding, the constant cold, it... well, first, it made her damn good at riding. She felt confident, sturdy, powerful. No wonder people liked horses. Not that she'd shirk from eating her horse. It was big and fat, of course she'd want to eat it if the situation demanded. But she could appreciate it mechanically. Even if those damn teeth continued to unnerve her. Never trust an animal capable of beating you to death, outrunning you, or biting your fingers off. Horses sat at an unhappy intersection. Apex predators, the lot of them. Second, she was being distracted from any kind of unpleasantness. Her expedition... well, she remembered them constantly. But if she was riding, she found it hard to dwell on those remembrances. Half-formed shades at the corner of her vision, never resolving perfectly. Hull still hurt. A lot. Doubted she'd ever recover from that, but... she had a host family, a damn kindly one too. She had a research partner, one who was uneducated by still bright, bright enough that Carza was thrilled to work with her. Best subject she could've asked for. She had purpose, and was finding legitimate success in her work. Hull would've loved this, and she would've loved to see him here. Hearing his thoughts, his ramblings... she had to ramble, now. Rambling duties fell on her and her alone.

And as enjoyable as Kani was, she wasn't Hull. She filled the desire for companionship. But Hull had completed her in a way Kani simply couldn't, sad to say.

Days and days and days passed. The distances out here were so great that even constant riding could only do so much - she dreaded to think how slow they'd have been if they actually camped properly. No wonder Tobok had been so nervous. If things were snowy before they started this mad marathon, then things were going to be rough by the time they arrived. Presumably. One night, as Carza slumped in her saddle, barely capable of remaining awake... she heard Kani talking quietly. Hurriedly. She'd noticed something in the distance. Carza followed her gaze, barely comprehending what she was actually saying... and she saw something. A shadow, silhouetted against the dying light. It was only visible for a few moments before the sun went down completely and darkness swaddled the land, but... for a second, it was there. A horse with a rider. Too far away to really recognise... and Carza remembered the stories of the red star, of the Scabrous, of the raider leader's grandfather. The one who'd... changed. Mutated. Horse and rider becoming one and the same. Her eyes were bleary, the world seemed fuzzy and distorted... was that shape two creatures, or one? Was it a horse and rider, or some kind of mutant, watching them? And as shadows consumed the horizon in greedy gulps... she wondered it it was still out there. Tobok didn't respond well. His teeth gritted, his eyebrows furrowed, and he drove his horse to go faster, even as its breath formed an omnipresent cloud of mist around its head, growing larger and larger as it strained itself to continue. His mutters, though, were audible to everyone.

"Could be a local keeping an eye on us, thinking we might be raiders. Could be a raider himself scouting us out. Winter's setting in. People start to feel their stomachs shrinking and get silly ideas in their heads like attacking a moving party with nothing to lose."

Carza frowned.

"Or it could be one of the-"

Tobok's hand lashed out, and tapped Carza firmly in the centre of her nose, shutting her up through sheer shock.

"Bad luck to name those things when the eras look likely to change. A child comes when its name is called. Why not them?"

Carza nodded shakily.

Right.

Fine.

There was nothing immediately unnerving about the figure, but in this great expanse of sheer nothingness... well, anything was notable. This was a place where life was stretched thin, where a garden's worth of animals were spread over a whole damn neighbourhood's worth of space. Like marmalade over too much bread... Founder, she missed marmalade. More proof of how amazing ALD IOM was. Bitter oranges - disgusting, weird, awful. No-one liked eating them. So what did ALD IOM figure out, on finding that its land could only support bitter oranges? Marmalade. She didn't even like marmalade all that much, more of a meaty sandwich person than a sugary sandwich person, but now that she'd been without marmalade for months... no, she wouldn't kill for one. But she'd punch someone for one. In the arm, the leg, the chest... give it a few more weeks, she'd go for the face. She had a hankering, and back home she'd satisfy it. But here, it could just grow, grow, grow...

...wait, what was she thinking about again?

She was very tired right now. And as much as she adjusted the sash around her waist, she was fairly sure the riding was shifting her organs around. Which probably had some odd side effects. Hadn't some old soothsayers once thought that you could detect the future by analysing the livers of birds? Well, birds were tiny things. Had tiny livers. She was tall, thin, and presumably had a tremendous liver. Which meant that you could detect tremendous things in the future, good or bad. Which meant that having her organs shifted around by her horse was going to do unfortunate things for any soothsayer who wanted to cut her open and read the future. Meaning, in short, that this horse was currently dooming the world to a more and more chaotic fate. Shifting the weather, changing the rolls of a thousand thousand dice, making roulette wheels explode from their tables... this horse was changing reality. It was also giving her a bad stomach ache, a headache, and her thighs were as red as a mound of hot coals (when she dared to look at them). No wonder these people placed such an emphasis on survival, their horses were probably rendering a decent number of them completely infertile, grinding unmentionables to slush... very bad for population numbers. Very bad for inbreeding.

She was going to eat this horse one day.

Rats weren't meant to ride horses, rats ran from horses and then ate the horse once it did something stupid and couldn't resist her gnawing.

Founder, the weariness was making her strange...

When she was riding closer to Kani, she saw how the others were keeping their strength up. She'd been curious - how could they keep going? Was it because they weren't human? Was it some sort of magical steppe technique? Maybe they communed with their heathenish gods and were granted powerful boons like in some of her bad pulp novels about the majestic and excessively muscled barbarians of the great north... but then she saw. Kani kept popping little red strips into her mouth, pulled from underneath her saddle. Strips of raw meat. Placed under the saddle, against the horse. The constant motion tenderised it, softened it for consumption. Even warmed it, possibly. Another segment for the book. 'The nomads of the steppe, specifically the demigods, must at times ride for exceptionally long periods with very little rest, and no time to stop and cook. To accomplish this, they change their horses frequently, they eat dried milk paste, they tenderise raw meat underneath their saddles, and they doze lightly during quieter moments, never truly slipping off into slumber. This reflects the precariousness of their existence, that they are well-practiced in these techniques. Very frequently do they find themselves in possession of little, and in need of much. Precariousness pervades the most minute corners of their existence..."

Carza trailed off in her own head.

Might need work. More citations, definitely. Hm. That would be interesting, she was more used to citing others... 'blah blah blah this reflects the precariousness of their existence, an observation made by Me, Myself, Carza vo Anka, and I (date: the second I'm writing this, literally right now at this explicit moment)'. Be eerie, doing that. These thoughts occupied her. To be vulgar - and she was allowed to be vulgar, the future was being rewritten as her organs were slowly deformed by this horse (that she was going to eat one day) - she'd say that her thoughts were being deprived of a partner, and without a partner, without something to work with, they reduced themselves down to... autofellatio. Urgh. She really was turning into a monster as a result of this expedition, she was being twisted into something horrific and inhuman that ought to be put down like a rabid dog. She was suffering from mutation of the spirit. Point was, she had no more research. The riding was too constant to talk her way through specifics. All she could do was mentally go over and over ideas for new paragraphs, but then she'd never write those ideas down due to, again, riding constantly and being dog-tired at the end of each day. Her finger were worn ragged and red from the reins, she couldn't work a typewriter, nor did she want to. No more research. No capacity to write down her plans. And the landscape was delightful but, pace to the locals, it was very similar. She wondered, sometimes, her heart fluttering like a newlywed, what would lie over that hill? What would lie beyondeth thine gentlest hillock? What could it be? The ocean? A desert? A valley? A boundless mountain of golden flowers?

...or... perhaps.... more plains?

Oh, goody! She loved plains! She adored them! Oh, she was hap-hap-happiest girl in all of civilisation, she was deliriously happy she could almost tumble from her horse and snap her neck in twenty places.

Urgh.

Shouldn't be this grumpy. But long rides seemed to bring out the suicidal depressive in her, and then that mixed with her omnipresent curmudgeonliness into something she didn't really want to think about for too long. Easily her ghastliest incarnation. They rode for days, and days, and days, and swiftly Carza lost any count, any reckoning, any damn comprehension. People and events were reduced down to trends. Tobok would grumble and look worried, and his worry increased - but if she was asked 'how worried was he on day two' then she's be absolutely bloody stumped. Dog was looking suspicious. Mrs Cauldron was looking haggard, but had an admirable quality for remaining stoic. Kani was a blend of her parents - one part stoic, one part worried, and the end result was someone who kept looking perpetually confused. One nice thing about this was that Carza had no chances to self-sabotage. Kani had agreed to help her - and Carza had no opportunities to change that fact, unless she deliberately tripped her up. When the stakes became: 'reach the pass before being trapped and starving to death in the cold and the dark', the only obligation became survival. Socialisation? Research? Character fulfilment? Pish-tush, nonsense, absolutely bunkum. All that she owed right now was a second. A second of time, owed to herself a second from now. And a second later, she'd have to owe another second to the future of herself, so on and so forth until she lived and could think. Sometimes, in good moments, she owed her future an hour. But as her nervousness rose...

A second it was. And a second it remained. Possessions became meaningless. All she had was her time on this world, and all she had to give was time to her future. Purifying? A little. But also utterly exhausting. And it reminded her far too much of the mountains, of the forest, of being pushed to the absolute bloody brink. The last time she'd gone through that everyone else had died around her.

And still... the dark shape on the horizon. The thing following them. Sometimes she saw it, glimpsed it vaguely in the parts of the morning and evening where light became ambiguous, and figures were easy to pick out on the horizon - slow as they woke up, slow as they grew weary, highlighted starkly by the glow of the dying or birthing sun. A horse, a rider. She was certain of that now - a horse and rider, nothing more unnatural. But was it a raider? A scout? And why did it keep following them? That thing imposed another obligation to her, surpassing survival. Observation and scheming. Survival was self-centred, survival was easy, any animal could do it. Observation? Scheming? Harder. Much harder. And much more human, and when she dwelled too long she found the human seeping back into her, drop by drop, bringing back all its worries and stresses, rights and responsibilities, and she found her clothes feeling intolerably dirty, her skin painfully unwashed, her mouth feeling like it was full of grey fluff no amount of winter-chilled water could dispel.

Day after day. Meal after meal. All punctuated with glimpses...

And one day, she blinked, and realised it was snowing. And had been snowing for some time. The winter was stored up in the mountains, she thought. The ancestors were kind folk, they buried it in the underground caverns where they sheltered, forced it below and lived aboveground during its imprisonment. But it grew strong, in the dark. Soaked up the cold of the stones, the chill from the roots of the mountains. Mutated from underground rivers of contamination. And it burst out eventually, uncontained and uncontainable. Reigning like a king for a few dark months until the ancestors could wrangle it back down with ice-slicked lassos and snow-licked harpoons. She'd heard of snow blindness before, but she'd never heard of snow madness. No, wait, the snow had nothing to do with it... and everything to do with it. Cold madness and heat madness were very different, and now she'd experienced both. Heat madness was a madness of discomfort and impotence - move too fast, and the heat becomes worse. Stay still, and let the minutes feel like hours and let the heat be unrelenting. Strip down until there's nothing but skin to peel away. Cold madness was a madness of slowness. Heat surrounded you with little needles, poking you one way, the other way, yet another way still, always on the move and always uncomfortable, stay still and be in pain, move and be in worse pain, and yet feel within you the burning desire to move nonetheless. Cold madness was needles too - but needles behind her. They poked her onwards. Faster. Move faster. Never stop moving. Stay still, and the needles begin to enter the flesh, dissolving as they go, paralysing as the stingers of some monstrously fiendish insect. Feel the seeds of hypothermia, feel them growing, larger and wider with each moment. Move, and the seeds shatter. Move, and they seem like nothing.

But only when you keep moving.

Stop, and they grow again. Sleep, and wake to find a whole seedbed of the stuff, a whole damn root system. And after a while, after moving for so very, very long... you feel the seeds are still growing. They're getting used to you. Heat was apathetic, heat didn't seek you out, it just hurt. It made Carza hate her own flesh, every part becoming a liability. It was a torture of abundance. And the cold did the opposite. Shrank her down. Fingers? Nonsense. Abandoned. Toes? Hadn't felt them in hours. Face? Frequently a mask of frozen skin and mucus which ran freely from her nose, glittering with ice crystals. But her life... her inner heat, that was very keen. Heat made you hate what you had. Cold reminded you of how little you possessed, and how easy it was to snuff out. Cold was a personal enemy. Cold chased you, cold probed you, cold grew when you didn't see it. Cold intruded into her dreams, cold made you ache to move until the heat returned, and then made you simply want to sit down and nurse your warmth in peace and silence. Heat was a revolution. Cold was a foreign conquest.

One night she found Kani looking at her strangely.

"You're going a little mad, aren't you?"

"Hm?"

"Mad. You. You look a bit feral. You told me about your home - it sounds warmer than this, calmer than this."

"...I suppose it is, yes. I'm alright, though. Getting by."

Kani shuffled over. They were stopping for a little bit. Rotating horses, letting them graze a little, refuelling before shouldering on. No sleeping, sleeping was something that started as an hour nap and then became a day, multiple days, weeks, and before you knew it you were being dug out of the snow, blue and shrivelled, by wolves or scavenging birds, themselves made rake-thin by the blizzards. No blizzards yet for them. But she could see the clouds dancing over the mountains to her side, sometimes. Glittering with crystals.

The dark figure was still there. She could feel it. Not visible at the moment, it knew to keep a healthy distance. Only at sunset and sunrise, like some kind of mythical taboo was applying to it. Well, that thing in the forest could've been revered as an old god by folk who knew no better, the glass men of the mountains were called gods by the Yasa... who could say? Both of those were quite real, so-

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Stop thinking."

"Uh."

"I can tell when you're thinking, you chew the inside of your cheek like some sort of large rodent. Come over here."

Carza hesitated, and Kani grunted in annoyance, shuffling over across the frosty ground. She grabbed Carza's shoulder and dragged her closer, until the two were practically fused into a single huddled mass.

"I don't feel the cold so badly. You, though, you look halfway insane. Come on, have a snuggle."

Carza groaned.

"I don't want a snuggle. I want to get to that valley before the snows come in."

"Oh, goodness, the oversized rodent has misplaced priorities. Come on, you look downright mad. You need a quick snuggle, clearly."

"Stop it."

"Someone hasn't had their snuggling rations."

"I was planning, that's what you're confusing with madness. I have an ethnography to write."

Kani snorted.

"Fine, fine, whatever you say. If you're so concerned with your ethnography right now, let's talk about the mating habits of the nomads. You see, you start with a glarbmagulon and then a fluooragamoona and you add them to a pile of rendered fat-"

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Ah, I see, you're not well-versed in our ritual language. How disappointing. Let me try and translate - so the glarbmagulon is the space between your nipple-"

Carza growled. Vulgarity.

"I will hurt you, Kani. I will hurt you with sticks."

"Spoilsport."

"I'm more insulted at you making up a language for the sake of a joke. I was instinctually trying to parse those words, you know. If I knew-"

Kani dragged her in a bit. Founder, she was warm.

"There, if you're not willing to listen to long explanations about mating habits, then I suppose you're not overly concerned with ethnography, and you are going mad, which means I get to give you a small hug, you oversized rat."

Why did people keep calling her that? Sure, her posture tended towards the hunched, but that was natural, she was tall. Tall people were bigger targets, hunching was nature's punishment for being so splendidly large. Point was, she was caught between two points. Her hate for vulgarity. And her desire to perform extensive ethnography. Allow Kani to talk about awful, grotesque things... or let her win, but in doing so, have her innocence remain intact... hm... Kani's face was impressively stoic. Oh. She was making another one of her excellent jokes. Ha. How lovely. How droll. How... Founder, no wonder she could survive so well in the cold, she was toasty. Well, they'd be here for a little bit, and... ah, to hell with it. She felt a little less... not miserable, she wasn't miserable at all, but she felt a bit less like she wanted to write a meandering novel. Not the pulp kind with thrilling action, amongst other things. The bad sort of novel which was just about someone being incredibly sad in a very mopey way, then never improving that sadness because sadness is the root of all art.

She'd tried that stuff once. Hated it. Wondered why the people involved didn't go out drinking or something, or maybe walked somewhere that wasn't a barren moor or a lonely cliff.

Bah. Gave introspective types like herself a bad bloody name.

And the fact that she was thinking this probably showed that the brief snuggle was helping her get over her funk.

* * *

Days had passed. Many days, in fact. The mountains were coming closer - they had to get closer in order to enter the valley, but getting closer meant more bloody cold. Still. She was getting by. Best as one could, really. Dog kept shooting her odd looks, though. She'd tried to talk with him, a few times. He was curt, surly... she honestly didn't know why Kani had agreed to marry him. Maybe it was an arranged marriage, maybe it was a matter of property or tradition, but she found it difficult to reconcile the surly, quiet little fellow with the odd glares with Kani, who was significantly more interesting. She'd felt this way once or twice, mostly with some of the secretaries in her father's typing pool. She might like them individually, but when they decided to have relationships she found herself wondering if she was really going to trust their judgement on anything now they'd made a decision that catastrophically awful. Boring individuals, uninspiring individuals, downright unpleasant individuals, and yet they were in relationships with people she respected. Another reason she liked being a scholar-nun, she didn't need to worry about any of that.

Mostly.

Memories of Hull always came up when she considered these things.

She didn't consider these things very often, as a natural consequence. So she hadn't dwelled on the relationship. Apparently it was taboo for fiances to interact much, especially during a period of indentured marital servitude. Once Dog had completed a few years, he'd be allowed to marry Kani, and then ride off with part of his own family's herd, some of Kani's family's herd, and could start a nice little family on the steppe. She'd been interested in marital allegiances, actually - did Kani's allegiance to her old family disappear when she got married? Was a new family created with no connection to either founder's ancestors? What relation would her children have to their maternal grandparents? Mrs Cauldron had been a strikingly confident sort, and had often taken charge with difficult matters. But maybe that was atypical... it was all very difficult to discuss. Asking how marriages worked was a simple anthropological question, the bedrock of some older forms of scholarship, and she found it simply too awkward to bring up. How did you ask 'oh, yes, please, let me pick over the proverbial scab of your upcoming marriage to someone who makes no disguise of disliking me'.

Kani was already clearly uncomfortable with some things. She disliked the ancestors and their detachment. She disliked the constant taboo observation which made it forbidden to speak the names of her own mother or brother. And she certainly hated the practice of raiding and kidnapping. Hated it, hated it, hated it. Maybe a marriage to Dog was part of that, maybe it wasn't. Maybe she was head-over-heels in love with him. Maybe she was dutiful. Maybe she was passionately uncomfortable and that was being expressed with discontentment towards everything else, like a tumour making itself known by causing all manner of other things to fail in a noisy and unpleasant manner. As an anthropologist, she wanted to ask, but was condemned not to do so by circumstance and etiquette, by the necessity of preserving a good working relationship with her hosts.

As Carza vo Anka, she was very bloody glad she didn't need to probe.

But as the days passed, as she ate quickly, rode often, slept in the saddle... well, there was a mounting feeling of tension. Kani had highlighted it when she'd given Carza that small cuddle. A feeling that... well, the last time she'd had this sort of feeling, it was on her expedition out to the mountains. Something was going to go wrong. Something bad was about to happen, and when it ended, there'd be blood on the snow. The last time she'd felt like this her entire expedition had died. And this would be worse - this wasn't an expedition, it was a family. A whole damn family, losing a single member wasn't like losing a colleague, it was losing a part of yourself. In the entire expedition she'd led, all the members Hull had brought on board were employees that she'd developed an attachment to, a sense of obligation towards. Anthan, Egg, Cam, and Lirana. Three of them she'd become friendly with before the end. Lirana's biography still weighed on her, all its tiny details and half-made recollections, needing to be properly compiled into a lucid document for submission to the library back home. Hull dying had torn something out of her, something that could be patched over, but never quite repaired.

This was a collective of Hulls. Any one of them dying would rip that same thing out of the hearts of the survivors. She couldn't watch that happen. Couldn't. Even Dog dying would tear her up a little, if it made the others weep. If it made Kani mourn like Carza had mourned.

So the tension rose.

Where were the raids?

Where were the mutants?

She had a detector, she kept it filled up, and it hadn't whistled - not beyond safe limits. Contamination seemed to find it hard to seep through here... well, she'd heard that foundation stone made it hard for things to grow with serious effort, maybe this place had foundation stone in spades... made it impossible to farm and live in one place for long, but kept the mutants away. Either way, she didn't have to deal with mutation, at least. But that only made her more worried.

If not mutants, then what?

And who was the dark figure?

One night, they settled down for a longer sleep than usual. The horses were strained. The dried provisions were limited, they needed to cook something. Carza could barely move, her thighs were red from too much riding, and her gait had shifted to something broader as a consequence. She'd heard that riding a horse for too long made you develop additional bones. If so, she could feel them growing in now. No wonder the body got the whole 'teething' thing done when you were a screaming vegetable incapable of advanced thought, growing a bone was nasty. She staggered off a little, stretching herself. If she didn't, she'd feel uncomfortable in the morning. Only a small fire tonight, Tobok was paranoid about raiders noticing them and attacking. Best bet was to stay mobile, and stay quiet. No fires, eat things that didn't require cooking. If they were attacked, even if no-one died, they'd lose a chunk of the herd. And they'd already lost some of that at this point. Carza wondered how they'd survived this long, but... no, she could understand why. She'd come to them in the late autumn, when people were scattering to find places to bed down, when raiding would be at its most frenzied as people realised how little they had and how long and cold the winter was likely to be. No, no, that made it seem so... functional. So environmental. Removed all human agency from the act. More likely, this family would be happy to raid as well. Tobok and his son, both of them large lads, maybe working with a handful of other families... they could plunder all they pleased.

And they'd had two slaves when she arrived. Used to have four.

This wasn't a case of snow-white innocents being brutalised by ungodly raiders, it was a case of tables turning, a wheel spinning. She idolised the victims today, and tomorrow they'd be conquerors. So... don't idolise them. But they'd cared for her, and for that alone they deserved sympathy. Stuck by her despite how useless she was in all matters but academic.

She kept her gun close, of course.

That, at least, was something she had for her own.

She blinked.

Lost in thought. Been lost in thought for days.

...she'd gone a little far from the fire. It was a gleaming point at the top of a gentle rolling slope... ought to head back. Getting cold. And her legs felt thoroughly stretched, now they weren't tense - just tired.

She began to struggle back...

When she heard something behind her.

Visions of the dark figure returned. The thing that had been watching them for over a week now, a week of constant bloody riding...

Her breath hitched, and she reached for her gun even as her legs began to kick to a sprint.

The thing behind her moved as well, and she heard the rasp of a sword being drawn...

Too close.

She whirled, heart pounding out of her chest. Situation had escalated far, far too quickly. No time to think, no time to ponder, all she had was motion. She'd spent days thinking of everything and nothing, and now she was in a split-second situation where all that prevarication meant precisely zero. Hated it when that happened.

Her gun rose...

And she saw a figure yelping, while struggling backwards, raising both hands.

Oh.

...uh...

...Dog?

Had Dog been... no, no, Dog was up there, this was...

This was another demigod.

A horse was a little further away, she could see its shadow... why had... she saw the startled look in a pair of gleaming beetle-black eyes, and...

Ah.

That explained things.

He was as surprised as she was. Thought he was alone, and then...

Raider.

Her gun came up again. The man before her was, indeed, a demigod... from what she could see. Wearing armour, though. And that made her nervous. Had a long sabre at his belt, and a spear slung on his horse's saddle, plus a dagger which looked vicious enough for combat as well as regular chores. A bow, too, with a quiver of arrows... he was fully outfitted for war. A mane of black wiry hair was blasted away from his face, revealing a sharp widow's peak. His mouth was fixed into a firm line of affected stoicism, but his eyebrows were all over the place, his eyes were twitching frantically. He waved his hands desperately, far, far away from his sabre.

He recognised the gun. Knew what it was. Knew what it could do. Interesting. She pointed it at him...

And the man backed up.

He was taller than her. Stronger than her. He was like... Tobok was someone who was readying himself for explosive growth when he became an ancestor, his mass was concentrating inwards, more and more of it packed into a small space, like a bomb waiting to go off. This man was younger. Too young to become an ancestor. So his growth was more... outwards. He hulked, strong, powerful... emboldened by years of consuming nothing but meat and dairy, living his life precariously, riding constantly... tough.

Not tough enough to resist a bullet, obviously. Nice armour, but it wasn't even metal, save for around the arms and part of the torso. Black sash around his waist, not like that'd provide much protection. If she got him in the face...

The man kept backing off, hands raised, eyes wide with surprise.

Carza's finger found the trigger.

If she shot now, she wouldn't miss. He'd die. And...

And he was still backing off, making no moves to attack. She remembered the man who'd tried to kidnap Kani, the way he'd kept insisting he was a friend... but he'd been reaching for his knife. Caught in the act. This man... he had to be the dark figure on the horizon. Had to be. So... was he scouting?

Her teeth were gritted painfully.

"Who are you?"

The man blinked in shock. One hand reached to scratch his hair a little.

"...uh."

He looked around uncomfortably.

"...not good."

He mumbled to himself, almost absent-mindedly.

"Not good, not good, not good. Sorry. Sorry, very sorry, shouldn't... I'll just..."

He sounded almost childish. Could be an act. Carza's finger tightened... and the man never stopped leaving, muttering to himself all the while, not responding to future entreaties. Carza watched... and backed off herself. She couldn't... she wasn't... it wasn't some kind of pity or an aversion to killing. She'd killed. Seen death. This was purely anthropological. She knew that this culture took grudges seriously. If she attacked now, then she might just make everything worse. Best to play it safe, now she had time to think.

Right?

Right.

She wasn't just reluctant to kill someone else. Was just... interested in saving bullets. The man backed off a step. She backed off two, scaling the hill. One. Then two from her. Two from him. Three from her. Three from him. Five from her. The two were inching apart, never even daring to blink... and the man stared owlishly as she scaled the hill in increasingly confident backwards-steps. Getting the hang of it.

Another...

And she ran up the rest of the way, heart pounding, lungs straining, legs burning from the day's exertions, and the gun was impossibly heavy in her hands...

Oh, oh, crumbs... she'd... oh crumbs...

She burst next to the fire, panting. Barely managed to squeeze out her words.

"Someone out there. Someone's..."

She trailed off. The others were staring at her. Dog growled a little.

"Who? Who is there?"

"Figure on the horizon. Been following us."

Tobok stood with an angry grunt.

"Who? Tell me. What does this one look like?"

"Demigod! He's a demigod! Glass skin! Black hair! Black eyes!"

Too general.

"Wearing armour, carrying weapons, and... uh..."

Mrs Cauldron's hands flew to her lips.

"...does he carry a sabre, a dagger, a bow, and a spear?"

"...well, yes. But-"

Mrs Cauldron stood up suddenly, her eyes burning.

"Does the spear have a carving around the handle, like a winding vine?"

...did it? She... uh... right, she vaguely remembered there being a decoration. Maybe?

"I think so?"

"Oh, ancestors…"

She sagged a little, and Tobok caught her. What was... Kani looked shaken. Even Dog was wide-eyed and staring. What... oh. Oh. Demigod. Following them. Garbed for war. It was the brother, the unnamed brother who was meant to bring glory to the family, and a whole heap of treasure. Her face creaked into a smile. Well. That was charming. Nice story, right? She'd bumped into him in the dark, thought he was a raider, came this close to shooting him, and he was just... why had he left? Why had he been so nervous? Well, the gun explained that, but... anyway. Why had he just been watching them? Tobok's voice was low and very, very dangerous.

"What was my son wearing?"

"...armour?"

"What colour was his sash?"

Carza gulped, feeling as though something important rested on this answer.

"Black."

Mrs Cauldron burst into tears, burying her head in her husband's shoulder. Tobok's eyes widened. Kani drew in her breath quickly and fiercely, seeming to shrink. This was the first time Carza had seen them so emotional, especially Mrs Cauldron. She'd been stern and stoic even during a kidnapping attempt, but that single word had undone her completely. What was happening? Dog awkwardly shuffled over to Kani, squeezing her shoulder with the air of someone who was breaking a rule. Kani let him do it. Didn't react, just... stared sightlessly into the fire. For a minute, the family mourned someone Carza had just seen a moment ago, down the hill. She'd heard his horse leaving when she climbed up, for crying out loud, could still hear the faintest thump-thump of hooves in hard earth. What on earth was... why was...

"What's happening? He's alive. Uninjured. Why-"

Tobok's voice was drained of all its usual vibrancy. It sounded dead. Devoid of passion and life, of all the things which constructed his personality. There wasn't even sadness, it was just... devoid. An anti-voice.

"The black sash."

He paused, breathing very faintly.

"...exiled. He's been exiled. Must've... must've been something on campaign."

Mrs Cauldron kept weeping. Couldn't talk. Not a single word. And Tobok kept going, barely aware of anyone around him.

"He can't speak to us. But he has things to return. Needed us to... to…"

He trailed off.

Carza had a sinking feeling in her gut. She'd stopped a son from seeing his parents, his sister. Interrupted a carefully planned approach... something ritually acceptable. Oh, Founder, oh... and Kani hissed, her voice dripping with venom.

"Damn taboo. Damn it all. I want to see my brother."

"...Kani, he-"

"I don't care about that. I want to see him. I'll take the bad luck, I'll take a thousand years of bad luck, I don't care anymore."

She stood violently.

"I want to see my brother."

But the sound of hoofbeats was receding. Audible to all. He was retreating again, heading to a spot where he could observe. Plan another entrance... maybe there was some way for him to do it where he didn't have to... maybe it was a bravery thing. Unwilling to show his face to his family, disgraced as he was. Exiled? What would they have exiled him for? Where would he go?

Tobok growled.

"Back on your horse, Kani. We're moving."

"But-"

"I said to get back on your horse."

Carza understood.

Move. Keep away from thinking for too long. Overwhelm it all with motion. Damn the horses, damn their tiredness, just move. No sleeping, no thinking, no talking.

It was what she'd done.

And now she saw it being repeated all over again.

...was this the thing?

Was this the catastrophe she'd feared?

She almost hoped it was. Devastating. But no-one was dead. No-one was injured. There were ways of salvaging this, probably. It was a social problem, it was something that could be worked through that way. Everyone was still alive, right?

Right.

She moved to her horse, flinching for a moment.

For just a second, she thought she saw something. The dark figure, presumably. No idea how she'd seen him in the middle of the night, but...

...no, there had been something.

A faint glow, appearing for a split second and then disappearing, leaving no imprint, no shadow, only a fleeting memory.

Like the dim glow of a distant red star...