Chapter Forty

The village remained as silent as ever. No idea where the inhabitants had gone, no idea why they'd suddenly stood up and left... no idea whatsoever. The pub became a fortress, with the windows sealed with planks, and the doors barricaded with upturned tables. Empty bottles - they had a terrifying number after a single night of building tension - were placed around these tables, and any other blockage. For someone to get in, they'd need to batter down the doors, smash the windows, and in the process shatter multiple glass bottles. The mother of all rackets, enough to wake them up. Just three left... three damn people left. The expedition had lost half of its members, half. She huddled in the pub and waited for the morning to come, wondering if Lirana was... well, still herself. If she was huddled in some strange part of the forest, waiting for mutation to drive her insane... maybe she was already dead, killed by her own hand, or some wandering mutant. Maybe even now she was gorging herself on mutated flesh and licking up the Godsblood that could make her larger, stronger, and more and more inhuman. No idea. Ideally, she'd never learn. Ideally, Lirana would find some kind of peace before the end. Again, she checked the biography - still intact, the envelope still sealed. If this thing was damaged, she'd... well, she couldn't forgive herself. Lirana had no-one left but her cousin in this world, if Carza went around damaging the one remnant of her existence, the one thing which served as a legacy...

"Hull?"

Her voice was quiet. Swallowed up by the darkness of the room. Hull was here, sleeping in a chair - both of them were. Neither felt comfortable enough to sleep in a bed, not when something could be out there. Not when Lirana, mutated and insane, could come back. Maybe they were all contaminated. Maybe soon enough Lirana would be here with her wits gone and her hunger screaming for her to hunt them down and tear them limb from limb, and...

"Yeah?"

"...this has been a bit of a disaster, hasn't it?"

"It could've gone better."

He took a deep breath.

"But, given what's happened... I'd say the fact that we're alive means this thing hasn't been a total wash."

"You think?"

"We were taken prisoner by insane rebels, chased by those same rebels, hunted by a possibly centuries-old mutant, exposed to contamination, and now we're here. At any of those stages there were a dozen ways to die. Hell, even this place... the supplies we've gotten from here might keep us alive in the mountains. We were running a little low before we arrived... if this place was just burned to the ground, we might've had to stick around making... jerky or something, letting Anthan teach us to hunt bears or whatever."

Carza snorted.

"That'd be something. I can barely hold a revolver. Not sure if that'd do it against a bear."

"I'm sure you'd manage."

They fell silent. Sleepy. Tipsy. Both had drunk too much... toasts to Lirana, toasts to Egg, toasts even to Cam. To the success of the expedition. To the continuing survival of its members. To the burning mutant, to the death of Kralat, to the entire sequence of strangeness which had led them to a silent village in the shadow of a mountain range. Stone spears thrown into the back of a monstrous creature, according to Lirana's cosmology. Lirana, who'd... in the brown envelope Carza now kept in sight at all times, there was a record of her desire to have children, to live a normal life, do all the things normal people did. But... wealthy and secure. Drifter, trying to make enough money to settle down and accomplish all of that. And for the first time, Carza looked over at Hull and wondered what it'd be like if the two of them huddled closer. For warmth. Comfort. Nothing more than that, just... staying close. Lirana had spent her whole adult life trying to achieve normality, and in the process had left herself with no close social ties, no real roots, just... drifting. And by the end, she had regrets and little else. Unafraid to meet the end because there was so little she had to leave behind.

Would Carza end up the same way?

She stretched out a single, skinny hand, and took one of Hull's paws. Held it softly. Not clutching, just... wanted to be reassured that he was here. That he was alright. Talking to Anthan had reawakened a whole suite of old memories, and... she remembered a vital lesson from living with nothing. Once you had something, you clung to it with tooth and claw and snapped at anyone who might want to take it from you. No matter what, once you'd been with nothing, you appreciated having anything. No matter how small. A knife. A scrap of food. A purse with a few rusty coins. A friend, a real friend, the sort you could trust.

"Hull?"

"Hm?"

He sounded sleepy. A pulse of guilt at keeping him up, suppressed only by... everything else. Drunkenness, guilt, weariness...

"Was it... my fault that Lirana died?"

"'Course not."

"But we brought her out here."

"I did too. Hired her. Found her down in the ironworks near the station. Her and the others. Found them eating beans from tins, asked if they wanted to go over the mountains on an expedition. Showed my money, showed my credentials, they came along. Simple as."

Carza glared at him.

"You didn't interview or anything?"

"They seemed trustworthy."

He shrugged.

"They were. Egg was a decent lad. Anthan's nice enough. Competent. And Lirana... she was in multiple impossible positions, and kept going through all of them. That takes guts."

He paused.

"But if I could go back and find another team, full of people I didn't personally like, who were personally loathsome and professionally impeccable... then I'd do it."

Carza smiled sadly. She thought the same. Guilty for dragging her out here... but she'd come of her own accord. And guilt was a form of selfishness, really. It was a way of making everything about her. She'd brought Lirana out, she'd made the expedition go in such a strange direction. She'd brought the mutant to kill Egg and almost kill the rest of them. But really... Egg and Cam had come because they wanted to be paid. Lirana too. And they'd been decent about all of that. Chosen of their own free will - they had jobs elsewhere, they had other opportunities, but they chose this. They'd come here, and they'd died, and Carza couldn't... couldn't... damn it, she still felt guilty. And yes, she could absolve herself by following a deterministic chain back to some far-off event she had no connection to. Why blame Lirana? Why blame herself? Blame Mahar Jovan, blame Lirana's family, blame some cultural mandate which influenced everyone's choices. Take agency out of the hands of everyone, and into the hands of something vast, invisible, and practically unnameable. And at that point she was just blaming a god.

But it was just them. Just all of them, making poor decisions, suffering poor luck. That was all.

She felt guilty, and she couldn't rationalise that away.

A memory came back.

"Lirana told me to give a message to you."

"Hm?"

"She said... sorry, she said she was sorry she hadn't... been with you."

Hull froze.

"...corks."

"I apologise for the vulgarity. She was trying to be diplomatic. I'm not concealing any... harsh words."

"...well, that's... very flattering of her, I have to say."

"You think so?"

"'Course. Not many folk would be that honest. Refreshing, really."

Carza squeezed his hand.

"...she died with quite a few regrets."

"I can imagine."

"...I... don't know if I'll have any regrets if I die on this expedition. I'm not sure. I think I will. I ought to, I... still have a whole life ahead of me, lots of lost opportunities..."

Hull's eyes were dull spheres, gleaming in the moonlight.

"I'll have regrets. I don't know anyone who wouldn't. I think even Anthan might. People he could've saved. Places he could've been. A family he could've raised."

"...would you regret the same things?"

"Regret a bunch. Part of me thinks it would be nice to burn out rather than fade away. My pa and ma... they'll be taken care of by the Court, they don't need me around. And they saw me graduate, saw me set off. That's something to be proud of. And then a part of me wants to go back home and read obscure poetry for the rest of my life, sitting in a nice warm office and thinking."

"Living death."

"Death's a peaceful place. Why not take some of that peace, put it with the living? We're the ones that need it."

Carza didn't reply. He understood her feelings. She agreed with him - living death was better than chaotic and pointless life, constant stress and tension and havoc all building up until it came to a crashing end. Better to live peacefully and die quietly. For Carza, it was an instinct drilled in by quite some time living on the streets as a pathetic little urchin, hungry and thirsty and chewing coca like her life depended on it. For Hull... maybe a personality defect. Maybe she'd infected him. Maybe he was just that way, and he understood the allure of peace better than most. As well as she did. The two sat together in silence. Carza felt the warmth of Hull's hand, the slow pulse at his wrist... the reality of him. And she wondered something. The future he wanted - where he quietly read poetry in a warm office and thought. Could she be there too? Could he read her poetry, the poetry that no-one else understood and he found meaningful? Could she share the warmth of the office? Could the two of them think about everything and nothing together, while away the hours in blissful silence...

If she died here and now, would she regret not asking?

Would he regret not replying?

"Hull?"

Her voice met nothing.

He'd fallen asleep.

And a few minutes later, Carza was asleep as well. Quietly dwelling on regrets, past and present and future all at once. Wondering if she'd die in the mountains. Dreaming of strange, strange things... and dreaming of Lirana. A ragged dark figure in the wilderness, moving on two legs, and staggering down to four, snuffling at the earth like a dog. First, a voice. Then, an animal howl. And finally... the silence of the mutant. The absolute silence of something which was alone in the world, alone amidst all of creation, enemy to all and friend of none. No more regrets in a head which thought only of hunger and growth. A few sparks of wonderment - a family, peace, wealth, living death... and then nothing at all. Nothing but a dream.

Nothing but the thirst.

* * *

The morning came faster than she'd have liked. A headache brewed in the back of her head. She could barely even remember the drinking... just warmth, slowly spreading from her throat to her lungs to the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet. A warmth that had lulled her to sleep. She didn't bother changing, just felt too... clammy to do anything like that. The pub was hostile territory, really. So much was unknown that... anyway. The others were already gathering in silence. Lirana had never been the most talkative person, but she'd left her mark on the group. Snarking at others, making little comments, just providing a form of commentary that added to... well, everything. And with her gone, the silence was palpable. Anthan kept checking and rechecking his weapons in grim silence. Looked lost in memory. Hull didn't look like he'd slept well, and he kept yawning loudly - one of the few sounds to break the stillness. Bags were packed. Equipment was gathered. With one more person gone, they had to spread the weight out differently - they couldn't bring as much specialist equipment, that was for sure. And Carza felt her muscles straining as she slowly strapped a back on over her thickest coat. Chill in the air. Made her joints creak like an old woman's. Frost was spreading its long, thin fingers over the windows, and the world beyond was soaked in fog.

Food. Hooks. Sticks for getting through snow. Firestarters if they ran out of any kind of wood. Heavy clothes. Everything they might need. The pass would be open, but it wouldn't be... easy. Survivable, at least. She consoled herself with the knowledge that to get here, traders would need to go through miles of dense forest, swarming with mutants, and in the past such a journey would be close to impossible - unless you were very well-financed and supplied. And who would invest such effort into a journey which might end in disaster due to simple unluckiness, or might end with nothing at all? No profitable routes, no friendly peoples, nothing. Only modern technology had gotten them to Krodaw with such ease, only guns had kept them going during the chaos of the forest. That was why there were so few accounts of people crossing over. That was why this pass seemed so unexplored. It might be simple, and they were just... in a very strange position.

Maybe.

They had papers to draw their maps. Anthan, being a former scout for the reconnaissance core of his home city, Apo, would be handling those duties. He knew how to scribble down the most important details, how to create something detailed enough to be useful, while not being overburdened with every tiny point. Carza and Hull were already feeling a little weary as they stepped out of the front door - a typewriter each, plentiful quantities of paper secreted away in thin-walled cases that would repel moisture, ink ribbons, books for translation... the tools of their trade, really. And then there was regular old ammunition to factor in...

It would be challenging. Without Lirana, they had one less back to carry things... and what they were left with was one slightly older veteran in excellent shape, and two scholars who were... well, Carza was finding that she was somehow even skinnier now. Hull was definitely a little more lean around the stomach area, not that he'd been fat. Just... well, children had puppy fat, she and Hull had scholar fat. Just came from sitting down for long periods doing things which were exhausting enough to demand food, but not active enough to work off the resulting weight. Bit of a devil's bargain, right there.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

...she missed Lirana. She'd have had something utterly vulgar to say there.

Founder, she was missing vulgarity...

They emerged into the chill mountainous air. Great mounds of stone on one side, and tall dark forests on the other. And them in the middle, ants crawling on the surface of something enormous and unknowable. The pub had the fortune of a proper tap in the back, a pump leading to a cistern. Its own water supply, quite the luxury in a place like this. But even so... Anthan grunted.

"I need to check that well. Fill our canteens. Don't trust the cistern unless I've seen it myself, made sure the water isn't full of cholera."

Oh, goodness...

"Right. Yes. Wise."

"Hm."

Anthan stomped away, a dark look on his rugged face. The well in the centre of the village was simple, but hard-worn where ropes had been lowered and raised over and over, surrounded by buckets starting to succumb to ants and mould... used by the entire village, looked like. Only the pub had the fortune of a private water supply, probably pretty damn useful in a public house which needed water for washing the surfaces, washing the crockery, watering down the beer and oat whiskey while no-one was looking... Hull smiled slightly at Carza when she shivered.

"Nice to have some cold, isn't it?"

"Definitely. I'll be sick of it by tomorrow. But for now..."

"Better than the heat."

"Better than the bloody heat. I don't know why more people don't live here."

"Probably all the things in the way. And... well, whatever made this place empty out so quickly."

Another shiver ran up her spine, unrelated to the temperature. As a scholar, she ought to be interested in how this place was abandoned. As a scholar, she really ought to have a profound concern for all unsolved mysteries in the world, from the smallest disappeared village to the largest concerns of cosmology and theology. In reality... she liked anthropology. Leave the cosmo- and the theo- to someone else. Leave the villages to people who were willing to risk life and limb for it. It'd been days. Maybe the villagers had been kidnapped, or were already dead... but Carza legitimately couldn't see any indication that investigation would result in anything useful. There were no leads, and... well, she didn't want to remain here any longer. Maybe people had simply left. Maybe they were worried about landslides and had evacuated... maybe, maybe not. No leads, no indications, nothing. Might as well just count their lucky stars that nothing had remained to attack them, and move on. She already felt guilty about getting half of her expedition killed, this was just more to add. And she was certain that in a few years she'd still be having dreams about the laughing dogs in the night, the looming mountains, and the emptiness of the houses. The sight of flies buzzing over abandoned bowls of stew in houses where rats tentatively poked their heads. Curious at the silence.

Anthan hauled up a bucket, getting out a canteen.

And froze. A mutter escaped his lips, barely audible to the two scholars.

"...the fuck..."

She didn't chastise him. And quietly, she walked forwards, hand on her gun.

"What is it?"

Anthan shrugged, and stared intently into the bucket. Carza wasn't sure what was so odd, it was just a bucket filled with water. Nothing to...

Huh.

That wasn't water.

It looked like water, though. Clear, liquid... but thicker, somehow. No particulates, but she felt that if she dragged her finger through the thing, she'd leave a channel that would endure for a good few seconds. Not that she did. It stank of... syrup and champagne. Oh. Oh. She backed off immediately, covering her nose. She knew that stink. Contamination. Godsblood. Anthan swore quietly and drew back himself. The bucket was abandoned so swiftly that it actually lingered on the edge of the well precariously for a moment... before tumbling back into the empty gulf. Contamination, nuts. Damn it. Maybe that was why they'd evacuated, and here they were, just... wait. Why hadn't the detector gone off? Why hadn't they smelled this throughout the village? Why hadn't mutants started clustering around this place? Anthan looked nervous - he was realising the inconsistencies. And from the well came a sound thicker than a splash - a gulp as gelatinous water parted to allow the bucket entry into the depths. No idea how deep it went. Was that... was that it? Had the village evacuated temporarily due to contamination?

But why hadn't the detector picked up on anything? A well of contamination... they'd have picked it up hours ago. But that scent, it was unmistakeable...

"I'll refill from the tap. Take our chances. Think I have some water purification tablets. Just in case."

"Good idea. What do you-"

"No idea. And I don't want to know."

Carza thoroughly agreed. The well remained in her vision at all times... she remembered the thick sound of the water splashing back down, the gelatinous look to it, the stink of syrup which burned and popped in her nose... the pressure of mutation was... wait. No. Just imagining it. She'd felt no pressure. There was the scent, but where was the feeling?

What was going on?

Hull was still here. Hull was safe. The detector wouldn't lie to them - they checked it a half dozen times, just to make sure the elements were still working. A minute later, Anthan emerged with their empty canteens, filled to the brim with fresh water from the pub's cistern. Safe, he said. Detector said nothing, smelled fine, felt fine. If there was a problem with the water, it would be localised to the well, not the pump. Different sources. If so, though... why would the village evacuate? Why not stick to the pub's supplies? Why take nothing with them?

Quietly, the three departed from the village, which remained precisely as they'd left it - albeit with some of its alcohol consumed, and some more squirrelled away in small hip flasks. Carza's heart was beating faster than she'd like, and a cold sweat had broken across her skin, catching the breeze and turning freezing with each gust. Her coat was thick, as was her scarf... but the chill was still building up. She stalked through the world, alone save for Hull and Anthan. The mountain pass spread before them, great pillars of stone on each side. Tremendously vast, and so vast that she couldn't really comprehend it all. Not in the sense that she was being driven to madness, just... it was large enough for her to evade any sense of real scale. The rocks were rising higher, the peaks remained unassailable, and... too high for her to climb. Too steep. Too cold and dangerous. They became impossibilities. Not beyond her understanding, but she really failed to understand them in relation to herself. They were impossible to climb, so why concern herself with their height? A giant pile of barbed wire would have the same effect. Who cared how much taller than her it was, it was still something she'd never climb, and would have to around.

Or in this case, between.

The oat fields swayed around her. No-one to harvest - they'd be growing out of control soon enough, already the weeds were starting to strangle the stalks, already small green pests were crawling amidst them, hungry and cautious all at once. Overcoming their fear of the farmers with... well, whatever they used for pests. If there was anything, if they weren't just tolerated. No idea. The well disappeared behind them, the village faded... and the land rose and rose. It felt like they were on a pimple, really. A hill that would rise into the mountains, shoving the mountains aside... like the hill had grown up and displaced the entire mountain chain, part moving north, part moving down... a small crucial area. A gap for them to move. She'd heard about things like this happening in the ocean, where islands were born from some great underground drama of magma and pulsing stone. Maybe this had happened. Maybe they walked on the back of a baby mountain waiting to grow up. Maybe one day they'd come back, and find... no pass at all. Just another mountain where the pass had once been.

Maybe.

They walked in absolute silence, and the strangest thing happened. She could smell the most wonderful thing she'd ever smelled.

It was like walking into a bakery, being surrounded by warmth and spice. More exotic than she was used to, hints of things that she'd barely experienced... caraway and liquorice, cinnamon and cloves, smoky paprika and warm nutmeg... it was beautiful. She had to stop for a moment, just to inhale deeply. The others were slowing down as well, they needed to breathe it all in, to welcome the strangeness. Maybe they grew spices here, or... no, no, that was impossible. Not all of them. And then... then she remembered what the smell was from. What she was being reminded of. The sculpture in the middle of the forest - the ring of sculpted heads surrounding a vast slab of seemingly pointless rock. Rock that smelled like... like this, but weaker. Older. The mountains were just... they were so very wonderful, she couldn't imagine what was making it. Maybe it was just a happy miracle of things.

And she remembered the Yasa. How they thought of mutating themselves. And their glass-skinned gods in the mountains.

Maybe this was why they believed it. The smell was so wonderful, and the mountains so inaccessible that... that it made sense that it needed to be worshipped. This smell, it was the sort of thing that she imagined scenting the gates to a city of gods. She almost wanted to find whatever was making it, just to bring it back home, to see what the others thought...

And then she turned.

And she saw a dark figure standing in the centre of the village, already little more than a vague shape in the distance. The houses were like clustered pill bugs, the well was a mite clinging to the blue-grey grass... and standing beside it, a figure. Carza stared down... and a second later, she dragged out her binoculars from around her neck, from their protective leather case. The others were already moving on - Carza inevitably trailed a little, given that she was... well, skinny as a bone and had about as much muscle. Had to move a bit slower, and if she didn't make it obvious that she was stopping, the others might go on for a brief while before realising anything. She stared owlishly down... and froze. She knew the figure. Still hazy, but... she saw a long coat, a rifle slung over the shoulder. A mask with an elephant-like tube running from the mouth, a trunk leading to a clip of filters. Standing right beside the well of gelatinous matter which had smelled like contamination. Nothing behind the lenses of the mask. And no sound from the mouth. But her binoculars must've gleamed, because the figure seemed to realise that she was looking.

It raised a single arm.

A salute.

Lirana was down there. And something was still her in the mutation.

Carza quietly raised her arm up as well. Returning the salute.

Good luck, Lirana seemed to say. Make it worth it.

I'll do my best, Carza replied.

The last thing she saw before continuing her climb was Lirana bending over the well, grabbing one of the buckets and plunged it down into the dark. She heard nothing. Too far away. But she could imagine the slurp as the matter gave way before this intruder, filling it up with sluggish pumps. Something thicker than water... and something Carza still didn't quite understand.

Then the binoculars were gone, and the image vanished.

That was all.

* * *

The mountains were... hard to describe, once they swaddled them up. The ground was covered in desperate grass - no other way of putting it. The grass grew quickly when the snows melted, died out once the snow returned, and lay in wait for the next year. It had to grow in with as much speed as it could muster, and then leave behind what it could. No chance for anything more than survival. Blue-grey and scraggly, omnipresent and thick, but each individual blade was thin as a whisper, and it crumbled easily when she stepped on it. Fields of the stuff, clambering up the slopes of the surrounding mountains until the altitude killed it off, and grey-blue grass gave way to grey-grey stone. To heights were only lichen could grow in rusty patches. Silence for a little while, silence but for the crunching of grass. Each sound echoed loudly in the pass, which pressed in tightly on both sides. The pass was less... straight, yes, but there were still complications. She peered around Anthan's shoulder as he worked away during one of their rest stops, sketching out a map to be sold off to the highest bidder whenever possible.

"...it's not very difficult, is it?"

Anthan shot her a look.

"The distances are important to map. So, not completely easy."

Hull chipped in from his own seat on a low rock - a comet-trail of upturned dirt lay behind it. An ominous reminder of how volatile the mountains could be. How many loose stones lay up there, waiting for a breeze to detach them? And for a mountain like this, a 'little pebble' could be large enough to crush them into paste. Right. Anyway. Hull.

"But... it's straight. The pass, I mean. Not much chance of wandering off-course."

Anthan snorted.

"Not much chance of that, no. But you could still make mistakes. I'll keep an eye on things, but... say, maybe some areas look more risky, are prone to avalanches. Maybe there's fields of boulders which anyone interested in making a railway would definitely want to know about. Maybe there's patches of bog - all that snow up there has to go somewhere, maybe some of it drains in the lower parts of the pass and leaves behind little swamps. The pass is wide here, but further along it might become significantly narrower - how narrow? Imagine commissioning a railway, only to find that the measurements are off, and your narrowest train is still too wide. What about rivers, small gorges, things that will need bridges? What about-"

Hull grinned.

"I get it. I get it. Fine. Thanks for doing this, by the way."

"No problem. Your job is on the other side. Establishing networks and whatnot."

Carza laughed nervously.

"Yes, yes. We can... do that. Might take some time."

"Not for me to question. I'm still getting paid, eh?"

He said it jokingly, but... yeah, if she didn't pay him, he had no reason to help them. The terms of their contract had kept him loyal, and she got the feeling that violating that contract would do... unpleasant things. Doubted he'd kill them or betray them, but he might not remain with them. He was a hardened veteran, and a private part of her doubted that he was treating this expedition as anything more than another chapter in a long and bloody career. For all she knew, he'd outlive all of them. Grim thought, that.

She hadn't shared the dark figure. No point. Tell them later. But it'd felt... private, she supposed. A moment of her and Lirana. She'd recorded Lirana's life story, and Lirana had shown herself to Carza at the end of her life as a human. Again, she checked the envelope. Buried amidst possessions... and safe. Never losing it, not until she got back home and could properly place it into the archives of the Court of Ivory. Commemorated forever. Well, probably ought to make sure it went in one of the better-maintained libraries... been a scandal years ago when a few lazy librarians had ruined dozens of shelves, turned them to pulped masses of damp, ruined, illegible paper. Awful. No, Lirana would rest in the Gabled Archive. Lovely spot. She'd have liked it in life - close proximity to the bars and the short-lived opium den that'd been built for the more... chemically dependent scholars, before everyone realised that it was steadily killing those same scholars off. But also safe. Good dryness, well-maintained, prestigious enough...

She'd like it.

Hopefully.

The last thing Carza wanted was to get haunted because she'd spoiled Lirana's biography through surrendering it to sub-par librarians.

The map was continued. And a few minutes later, they were off again, crunching over the brittle grass. The glorious scent was enduring, and Carza found it difficult to get used to - it never quite exhausted itself. There was a constant... well, innovation to it. Never the same from one moment to the next, and never quite overwhelming enough to be unpleasant. No idea where it was coming from, and the others were equally as clueless. Anthan had shrugged, and commented that he'd seen odd things, heard of odder things.

"Scented rocks aren't too strange, Carza."

He said casually as he walked over the narrow trails by animals passing in single-file to conceal their numbers from predators. She listened attentively, trying to distract herself. No people to analyse around here, no-one but them three, and she wasn't going to start pretending to be a bloody psychologist. Didn't even have any sofas for them to lie on.

"Aren't they?"

"No. I've seen odd things. Heard about odder. And you said this smell was around a rock in the forest? Well, maybe that's it. The rocks around here smell."

"...what odd things have you seen? Heard about?"

Anthan grunted. Clearly he wanted to fall silent again, to scan the horizon with the brooding paranoia of the veteran in the wild with nary a hint of properly trained backup. Well, unless his enemies could be convinced by obscure poetry or odd anthropological theory, that is. And she doubted they could.

"...well, alright. How about this. Years and years ago, in the Great War, I saw something strange. Very strange indeed. We were hunting this group of disease-spreaders. Pretty common in those days, they'd sent these groups of specialised mutants, designed to breed as many diseases in their bloated stomachs as possible. Damn near incurable once they got out... they'd find water supplies, and then either vomit up the diseases for day after day, or they'd just be killed and chucked in if time was short. There was this mutant, looked more human than most. Had these... growths all over its body, though. Like shells, spiralling outwards perfectly. That, and some calcified lumps all over its stomach. Too many eyes, and a tongue tipped with a stinger. Nasty thing. But here's the thing - it was singing to the other ones. Chanting to them, or something. No language I understood. We were watching from a dsitance when this happened, making sure they didn't try to sneak off in the middle of the night. We had them pinned, they just didn't know it yet. And then..."

He took a deep breath.

"The human-looking one started to fold itself backwards. Couldn't even hear a snap - spine was practically liquid, I guess. Segmented like a centipede. It just curled backwards, further and further and further, until... it could snap its jaws down on its own feet. Perfect ring. Vertebrae all the way around the inside. The others, they just watched, and bowed, and hummed softly."

Hull blinked.

"They were praying?"

"I hope not. Don't like to think about clever mutants, hate thinking about religious mutants. Still, sticks with you. And not the weirdest thing I've heard about. Other people say they saw something like it, but... well, nothing ever came of that ring. The mutant eating his own feet. Burned them to death the next day anyway, let the disease bearing ones pop like boiling eggs... pretty satisfying."

Carza swallowed, feeling a wriggle of disgust at the sight of Anthan's obvious happiness. Not that she liked mutants at all, but... Lirana had become one. She wondered how long it took for any trace of the old person to vanish under contamination. Maybe there were always tattered remnants of self, maybe nothing lingered after a certain point. Who knew. She didn't, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to. Might make her life more unpleasant, being burdened with knowledge like that. Anyway.

"So... so what have you heard?"

"They say there's a corpse-country out east."

She blinked.

"What?"

"Corpse-country. Say if you travel for a few days over the ocean, you can find it. Big island, huge really. All one massive corpse... one titanic mutant, they say. Long-dead, and the skin's so thick that contamination can't even seep out - and when it does, other mutants scavenge it in seconds. They say that people live there, though. Folk that wear robes and masks, have feathers instead of hair... skin as red as a bleeding wound. Worship odd gods, kill foreigners that come too close. No hiding, right? No-one has skin red as them, no-one has feathers instead of hair... say that their legs fold backwards, that they have six fingers and two thumbs on each hand, spikes in their ankles for anchoring themselves when the corpse moves under them. Say that parasites move on the surface, that the locals ride on huge lice that are directed with lumps of mutant flesh dangled in front of their faces. Have a friend who swears he saw one of their boats once - long, thin, operated by oars and their own sort of theurgy, captained by folk in robes in masks... and he swears he saw the feathers."

He shrugged.

"'Course, he's a bit of a drunk, so..."

Carza stared.

"That was... a very detailed account for a drunk."

"Oh, the rest? Nah, that's from others. Now, you want to hear the bits of the story that made me stop believing it?"

"Hm?"

"It's a big vulgar."

Carza's lips thinned.

"I can handle vulgarity, I just dislike it. Go ahead. I'm interested."

Anthan grinned crookedly.

"People I've talked to about this place, they say that the locals don't even know that gold's valuable, and they use it to build their cities. Say that the belly of the great corpse has these... diamonds, old meals pressed over and over until they harden into it. Say that they dig them up, diamonds the size of bloody apples."

"Ah. Well, that's not-"

"They also say that local men will kill any foreigner, and any local woman will ride a foreigner raw if they come close. Sexually voracious, they say. Man-eaters, and-"

"I see."

Anthan laughed coarsely... but only for a moment. His hands were never far from his gun, and his eyes were constantly darting. Laughter was loud, it concealed the movements of people who might be sneaking up on them. But... nothing. The blue-grey desperate grass cracked under their feet, and no-one else's. They were alone. Almost as bad as being stalked, if she was being honest. Hull cracked an involuntary smile, but a sharp glare from Carza sent it back into practiced neutrality. Really. Well. Good to know that the... corpse-country was probably a tall tale erected by treasure-hungry drunks interested in foreign lovers. Feh. Red-skinned, feathers for hair... probably some woeful myth, or a misinterpretation of an existing people who lived off the coast. Why, apparently some merchant had come to ALD IOM believing it was a city of gods who lived in elaborate palaces. Very disappointed when they were, in fact, just a city. A very nice city, of course. Queen of cities, in her opinion. Her objective and entirely correct opinion.

"Right. Well. Let's power on."

Hull clapped her on the shoulder.

"Right-o, leader. Let's get moving."

Anthan grinned.

"Sounds grand to me. Unto the steppe, eh?"

Carza nodded sharply.

"Yes. Unto the steppe."

And into the pass they walked, into the scented rocks... into the place where the Yasa's gods had dwelled. Through the desperate, hungry grass that grew with the terror of something about to be extinguished by the rushing snow. Through the fallen boulders from the peaks above, over the ice-cold creeks carved into the soft earth... over the newborn mountain, still coming to its maturity.

And Carza was just thankful that half of them were still alive. And that Hull formed part of that half.

But her mind couldn't get away from the dark figure of Lirana, plunging a bucket into that strange well...

Almost enough to distract her from the narrowing of the path. The sharpening of the mountains.

And the very first flake of snow to scrape lightly against her cheek, coarse as a cat's tongue.