Chapter Forty One

There were no trees here. The forests had died in the shadow of the mountains, and even here, where the sun could rise, reach its apex, and set while still casting light down a long stony corridor... even here there were no trees. No forests. Well, maybe that was inaccurate. There were stones, and huge amounts of them. The mountains on either side of them were enormous, and she couldn't tell when one ended and another began. Without this pass, they'd be completely stuck - no number of hooks or ropes could haul them up those slopes. Well, not with Carza's muscles. She'd probably need to be carried inside her largest pack, all curled up like a cat or a particularly bony towel. Eh. Either way, she found it a little curious to be in such an open place after days and days of obscured forest growth. The stones were immobile, unliving, the only thing which could thrive on them was lichen, and the trails of disturbed earth behind them indicated that they'd been shed from the mountains - closer to fallen leaves than trees in their own right. When the snows came, they'd be buried. When the snow melted, they'd wash away into the beds of scree which surrounded the mountain range. It lent them an air of fragile impermanency which was... honestly quite nice, compared to the forests.

The forests had been warm, dense, dark, and alive. This place was cold, sparse, constantly illuminated, and thoroughly dead. It was a slim mountain pass where the primary form of life was blue-grey grass that cracked under her boots and rocks which crawled with rusty lichen that flaked away in great chunks when she brushed against them - used to the higher altitudes, where air was scarce and temperatures were low. Down here, even the slightest change had... damaged them, just a little. Dragged out of the little niche where they did well, into a place where they weren't failures, but were simply... average. Which was almost as bad as being terrible. Urgh, she was thinking about exams again, and grading, and... anyway. The pass barely curved at all, and when it did, it was only at its lowest - the overall pattern was almost unnaturally straight. It meant that the sun was constantly in sight, and some part of the pass was always bathed in light... even now, as the sun set, she could see its movements perfectly. A tiny gold disk, burning the sky as it slipped lower, lower, lower...

Carza was closer to her goal than ever before. The steppe was... well, not too far away. A few days travel through the pass, and then, all maps ceased. All direction ceased. And all that would remain was the boundless rolling greenery of a world she knew nothing about, full of peoples who might speak a language she had some command over, or might speak something entirely unrelated. Maybe they had some connection to the peoples she'd found over here... the Yasa, the Court of Horn, or maybe they were completely divergent. Waves and waves of conquest... who could say if the old state of affairs was still true? And she couldn't stop imagining what their culture might be like, how strange it could be, how... well, fascinating it could be. But also how risky it could be engaging with it. Anthan's story about the seemingly mythical corpse-country to the east made her think - the Sleepless were willing to kill anyone from Mahar Jovan due to old grudges, but they were also willing to attack members of other ethnic groups, specifically the Unglara, and had no great fondness for foreigners in general. Willing to hold foreigners ransom instead of letting them walk free, after all. Point was, maybe the folk on the other side of the mountain would look up from their fires, blink a few times, shriek the word for 'damned foreigners' in their language, and promptly open fire, loose arrows, or unleash whatever weaponry they'd developed. Maybe they'd plugged the whole pass with cannons just to stop people like her from coming in and ruining a peaceful existence.

...and this was the same place which had produced the Yasa, a group which worshipped the glass-skinned men of the mountains and attempted to mutate themselves into godhood, alongside the Court of Horn, who had committed a healthy number of atrocities in the distant past against ALD IOM and had actually conquered most of it at some stage, and then had gone back home in fairly decent numbers. A culture that voluntarily crossed the mountains, entered the green hell of the forest, conquered it, then moved north, found a paradisical city, conquered that, and then either kept going or went home was a culture that might be a little risky to engage with. ALD IOM was, in her view, almost perfect - the idea of people going through the green hell, reaching it, and then leaving was so inconceivable as to be insane. Because, politely, she doubted that the steppe was a boundless paradise they were eager to return to.

Anyway.

Thinking was occupying her nicely. Stopped her thinking about Lirana. Or Egg. Or Cam. Or... everyone. Everything. She was leaving civilisation firmly behind, not even a trace was out here. The 61st expedition had never reached these mountains, and if they had, they'd not lingered. One village, that was it. One village, and it was abandoned. She doubted anyone would even realise it was abandoned for years to come - it didn't look like it traded much, just... farmed. Subsistence economy. And when somewhere was basically self-sufficient, it could be politely ignored for generations, until everyone in the village was so inbred that they all had twelve nipples and seventy-two dialects. She'd give a place like that a hundred years before the isolation made them invent new groupings just to occupy the time - maybe a few new religions, a cult or two, maybe some more ethnic groups based on number and arrangement of nipples, and... she was having weird thoughts.

Needed to talk.

"How long should we go on for?"

Nuts, that made it sound like she was complaining. She wasn't. At all. So she adjusted.

"...just out of curiosity."

Anthan shot her a glance.

"Bit longer if we can manage it, want to milk the light for all it's worth."

He shivered.

"...I don't like this place."

Carza tilted her head to one side.

"Why? It's quiet, open, it smells wonderful..."

Anthan shrugged.

"Alright, fine, it does smell like... nowhere I've ever been, I'll say that much. Smells bloody lovely. But it's... alright, think of it from where I am. This place is unknown, and it has nothing. You either go forwards or backwards. Cover is limited, if the ground ahead gets hard we can't go around it, if we get surrounded we can't escape... if a landslide happens, there's barely anywhere to run."

Carza glanced at the rocks surrounding them. The land kept rising through the pass, and the rocks kept increasing. Boulders, pebbles, sometimes a stone the size of a house... still, some of them were so large that they could hide behind them, that should protect them during the night. Maybe. Hopefully. Hull coughed.

"Should we keep our voices down? Landslides, I mean."

Oh crumbs, yes. She'd read about that. Keep quiet, or the shouting would start a landslide, all her novels said that was a thing. At least, when they were set in the mountains. Which happened sometimes - though she wasn't too fond of mountain novels, they either involved too much frostbite, or too much... intimacy in elegant chalets with fur carpets. Had to close the novels when she reached those parts. Vulgar. Anthan snorted.

"That's not a thing."

Carza glared, and whispered.

"It could be. You said you've never been here before."

"There are mountains in the continent. Different to these, sure, but mountains nonetheless, and trust me, yelling doesn't start landslides."

"But you've seen-"

"All these stones, yes. They're falling because of something called gravity. Not because a bird was very loud."

Hull grunted.

"Not a bird, but a person..."

"A person isn't as loud as a bird."

"Bassier."

"Alright, bassier, fine, but that's really irrelevant. Look, I've helped start two landslides, and trust me, yelling won't work. You need explosives to do that."

He pulled a bullet out of his belt and wagged it, the metal gleaming in the golden light of the setting sun.

"See? The black powder in this is more likely to start a landslide than you screaming your heads off."

He paused.

"That being said, don't scream your heads off. It'd be annoying. And... I don't really want to attract more attention than necessary."

Carza could think of a counterargument there. This was a mountain pass, it was narrow as can be, if someone was here, they'd know about their little party. No doubt about it, and no amount of screaming would change that, nor any amount of silence. So, might as well scream their heads off. But that raised the question... why would she scream her head off? What would be the point? She didn't like screaming, it hurt her throat and attracted... attention... urgh. Alright, Anthan had a point, but for her attracting attention was bad because of a general dislike of attention, not because she thought it would get them killed by... someone or something. Honestly, she doubted anyone or anything lived here. The oat fields were left behind, all that remained was grass and scree. Ah, yes, all the wonderful mountain plants - grass, more grass, yet more grass, and rock. Better look out for the lichen-farming nomads of the mountains, better stay away from their villages that vanished under the snow every year, they might attack with all the muscles that eating lichen and grass developed.

She was getting a little odd. Thoughts going in strange directions.

Too much damn silence and anticipation. Reminded her of being in the Court of Ivory, of the long years when she'd just... studied and studied and studied, meeting with Melqua, studying some more... the last stretch, where she'd been revising on her lonesome with no lectures or essays to distract her, that'd been a time where she'd become this odd. Melqua had politely taken her for a series of long walks after finding out that Carza had been sleeping on the floor in her room for weeks, for no reason but to break the silent monotony of life. She'd been marking the walls with tally marks, too - how many days in a row could she sleep in a hard floor before her back went all funny and she needed to be eased back under her normal covers? How long? Melqua had told her that she was being a moron, and either she could start living like a normal person or she could be forced to live like a normal person. And that meant no more sleeping on the floor, no chewing her hair, no eating nothing but biscuits and drinking nothing but tea, and definitely no more reading those novels where oily men wrestled for page after page.

She'd gone through all the stages of oddness, then. Weird thoughts. Sleeping on the floor. Consuming unreasonable amount of tea. Obsessing over developing muscles for herself to improve her self-esteem. Examining her pores one by one. And finally, reading about muscled men covered in oil while buried underneath her covers and flinching whenever someone came near her door.

It was a chain of events. And she was standing at the beginning with her weird thoughts.

Slowly, a strand of hair entered her mouth, and she chewed it automatically.

Hm. Tasty. Tasted like... uh, air. Hair. Bit of salt. Needed more salt.

Her hair needed more salt for her to chew it with anything more than automatic drudgery. Maybe if she managed to scent it with the stuff in the air around her...

No. No, this was... Founder damn it.

It was too quiet, admittedly. Her paranoia had a place, her odd thoughts had a reason to occur, which... made them mildly better, in a certain sense. The forest had been noisy. This place was the polar opposite, and it made her feel like something had to happen. Like, yes, a mad scrawny nomad who fed on lichen, dew, and chewed rocks for sustenance. Mutants weren't going to hunt them here, the detector hadn't gone off once, and none of them were dealing with particularly bad mutations at the moment. They'd clipped regularly, burned the remnants, taken their pills... they were fine. Even if they pressed the detector right against their skin, there was barely a tiny adjustment in the whistling sound. No mutant would live in a place with no little contamination to consume, such small quantities of prey... she'd barely seen anything out here, just the occasional bird circling overhead, a few small rodents, some flies... no large animals of any sort. Just silence, stone, and the smell.

Founder, it was still wonderful. Even after a whole damn day of wandering, it hadn't gotten old. She didn't wear perfume - too expensive and not her style - but if she did, she'd want it to be like this.

The sun was drawing lower, the world was getting darker... time to stop soon.

And then they crested a small rise...

And all of them stood completely still, their eyes widening.

For once, though, the reaction wasn't inspired by seeing some... awful monster or terrifying massacre. For once, they weren't terrified. They were just... just awestruck. Legitimately awestruck.

In front of them, between two mountains, was the biggest statue that Carza had ever seen. It was larger than most buildings she'd ever seen, it was incalculably huge. Nothing in ALD IOM came close to its scale... the Court of Ivory almost entered that category, but that place was a series of structures lumped on top of one another, a perpetual growth of architecture which had emerged from conditions of too little space, too much time, and far too many underemployed architects. This was a single structure. One phase of development, one overall plan, one complete project that had never been added to or amended. The only additions over the years were a few cracks and a hell of a lot of lichen clinging around the ankles. Dark stone, the same shade as the mountains, and barely weathered - even the snow hadn't managed to do much beyond leaving a gradient. Darker at the bottom were the snow would lie, lighter at the top where the air was perpetually clear. Carza was awful with gauging scale, but... it was big.

It was a woman. A titanic woman, wearing what looked like... armour. A design she'd never seen before, of neatly placed metal bands which circled the torso and arms, more like a cage than anything practical. Legs armoured similarly, and... and her hair tumbled around her shoulders, sculpted with the kind of dedication that must've been excruciating to exert - so high up, with such cold, so much wind, so much work... people had been dedicated to this statue, dedicated enough to be precise with their carving. It was wavy, almost curled but not quite, and tumbled down to the small of the woman's back. No idea what colour it'd been on the actual person - and she'd immediately assumed that this was sculpted after someone who'd once existed, there was no way someone had just invented features this precise from nowhere. It had to be based on someone who'd lived... the armour was sculpted in a way that contoured precisely to the muscles underneath, the hair was organic and flowing, the figure was positioned in a way that looked natural - not perfectly symmetrical, because people weren't symmetrical. Distressingly lifelike.

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And her face...

What could be seen was tough. Angular. A face of hard lines, with heavy brows and shadowed eyes. A chin that tapered to a point, a nose which was slightly off-centre from being broken, and cheekbones sharp enough to cut your finger on. She wielded a sword, planted tip-down in the ground. Chunks of the statue had been lost to time - landslides, mostly, chipping it away. But overall, it was surprisingly intact for something she assumed was very old indeed. That village hadn't built this, and it was facing towards them - maybe the steppe had built it? The Yasa, the Court of Horn, their common ancestor... a warning to invaders, perhaps? To advance, they'd need to walk between her legs, there was no easy way around the statue... maybe once there'd been a wall built between them, and the statue was simply a thing to intimidate an army, while the wall did all the defensive duties. Or maybe it was just... part of something so old and so strange that she couldn't begin to fathom its purpose. It didn't look like any of the statues the Yasa had made - the head was normal, the fingers were normal, nothing about it seemed mutated. It was painfully realistic, nothing stylised beyond, perhaps, the sharpness of those cheekbones, and the dramatic curl of the lip.

It was beautiful.

Surreal.

And the mystery of its existence surrounded it like a halo, like a film of mist. And no matter how long she stared at it... she couldn't unravel anything. It was just a statue of a woman, but it was so realistic that it was hard to pin it to a stylistic school, and so impeccably made that she couldn't even get a read on its age.

"...Founder..."

That was all she could muster. They should've sent someone better for this, someone who could capture its scale, the feeling of intense smallness that it projected. Hull nodded mutely, even more stunned than her. And Anthan... Anthan was pale as a sheet.

"Bloody hell. It's... thumpin' massive."

He paused, tilting his head.

"...familiar."

Carza's head turned so fast that she could feel the air cracking like a whip along her cheek.

"What?"

"Said it was familiar."

"How? When did you see something like this? Do the cities out east make statues this large? How do they do it? Who does this depict? When was it built? Who built it?"

Anthan blinked slowly.

"...no idea who did this, or when, or why, or anything. It's unusual. Never thought there was anything this large out here... looks a bit like the Lonely Monarch, though."

Hull stumped over, grunting with the weight of his pack.

"Do I have to ask?"

Anthan hummed absent-mindedly, eyes still fixed on the statue.

"She's a myth. Some old queen from... well, you know, it's always 'thousands of years', or 'hundreds of generations' or 'before the time of my father's father's father's father', or just 'a very long time ago'. Myth-time. No idea why she's... well, a thing. Fidelizh says she was a conqueror, someone who conquered and conquered until the world became civilised, then she went off to find the most savage spots in the world. To bring more peace to them, whether they liked it or not. Said she wore the skulls of broken kings around her waist, crowns nailed to their foreheads. Said her sword was made from star-metal and cooled in the blood of a great mutant. Said that she could bathe in the blood of mutants and never get infected."

He shrugged.

"Fidelizh says a lot of things. They call her 'self-possessed'. Her throne's on their coins, y'know. All about self-reliance and independence. Makes sense, Fidelizh kicked out their king centuries ago - reason why Mahar Jovan has two, actually. They got Fidelizh's king in addition to their own. But then the Golden Parliament were like... well, like people who grew up with no fathers, and spend their entire life looking for a proper father figure. Collect them like stamps."

Hull snorted.

"They have a king-shaped hole in their hearts?"

"Exactly. So they filled it with a lady who famously walked out on her country, if she ever existed. Interpreted her as someone who wanted to teach people independence and self-reliance. An empty throne is a proper symbol for them, I suppose."

Carza leant closer.

"But you know her?"

Anthan backed off slightly, rubbing his hands together to ward against the cold.

"I'm from Apo. We have myths about her. But we just think of her as an insane monster that killed thousands, got bored when people started serving her instead of fighting her, then ran off to find more thousands who hadn't yet learned to just lie down and accept her rule. She's a villain in bedtime stories. No-one thinks she actually existed."

"...your cities aren't close together?"

"They're pretty far. Apo's much closer to the coast. Fidelizh is by the river. Long way away."

"But you have the same myths? The same... basic idea?"

"More or less."

"...how peculiar."

"Hm."

"Do people out here worship her?"

Anthan shot her a look.

"I'm not an anthropologist. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't think so... but hey, if Fidelizh and Apo know about her, maybe someone out here did too."

Carza hummed thoughtfully.

"Or the myth started here and spread out east."

"Unlikely. Look at her - does she look like she's from somewhere over the mountains? Does she look like a local? Come on, just look at her hair - that'd get her eaten alive by mosquitoes in the forest, she'd strangle herself if she walked under the wrong sort of branch. No-one has hair like that around here."

Carza peered, then removed her binoculars and studied that huge, harshly carved face. She... didn't look local, that was certain. The facial features were a bit off, and she didn't look like she was from the Court of Horn either. She looked harsh, sure, but she lacked... no, it was all hard to say. Could be from anywhere if she stared enough. Could be from the Court of Ivory, maybe - those shadowed eyes could be faintly scholarly, the habitual squint of someone who spent too long staring at tiny words in badly lit rooms. And her hair, well, it did look like she barely cared for it, which was very scholarly... but then again, the self-reliance, the feeling of independence and soaring ego, that was very Court of Salt. And yet the undeniable pagan savagery of her appearance, the huge sword, the banded armour, the wild hair, the general feeling of godliness which surrounded her... Court of Axe. Very Court of Axe, this woman was drenched in traditions that were incomprehensibly deep and yet utterly unfathomable. And yet that sense of mystery made her seem like she was from Slate... and the habit of butchery and obscurity made her seem like Wax...

Gah.

She was everything and nothing depending on how she looked at the statue.

Hull nudged her in the side, and she almost jumped out of her skin.

"Hey. So we're going to have to walk under her legs, right?"

Carza knew where this was going, and sharply elbowed him back.

"Shut up. We're both keeping our eyes firmly ahead while we're under there, understood?"

"I was intending to. Just making sure we were on the same proverbial page when it came to modesty."

"Good. Now eyes forward."

Anthan grunted.

"Probably best we stop here, actually. It's late, and I don't like the look of that slope. Too much scree, if one of us falls in the dark..."

He trailed off. But his point was made. The mountain pass rose and fell, a languid grey-green snake lying between soaring peaks on both sides. A river connecting two oceans of normal land, with impenetrable rock betwixt the two. A smuggler's route, really. And in this segment of the great serpent, the land declined, and it was littered with stones, most of them thin and flecked with white patches where they'd been torn apart by sudden descents. Not even the grass could really endure, not beyond a few stubborn strands here and there, and the occasional flattened mound of dead brown matter where stones had pulverised something else. Not much beyond that. He was right, it'd be profoundly unwise to go down. The light was declining, the sun vanishing behind the great statue of the Lonely Monarch - if that was truly who the statue was. With the sun briefly stolen, the statue became a solid black silhouette, surrounded by the dim outlines of stars gradually emerging from the veil of evening redness.

It was an absence which soaked up meaning like a sponge. No, not a sponge - like the great gulf. Once, astronomers thought that the world was a great disk resting on an infinite pillar, and that the depths of the ocean were infinite - nothing but gloom all the way down. The earth was a whirling disk surrounded by oceans, and the currents were the swirling patterns of the whirling rim. And if you went out far enough, you'd fall off the edge, into the darkness at the rim. It was almost scientifically correct, just... not quite. Point was, this statue reminded her of those old maps which included the Gloom at the rim of the world. It was nothing. It was absence. And yet it was everything, infinity, the entire damn universe down there somewhere. Dig around and you could find anything.

And they slept in its gaze.

Fires were... limited. They had firestarters, yes, but those were mostly useful if they had wood. Which they did, but only a little, for emergency purposes. Thus far the cold had been growing, numbness was lingering in her fingers for most of the day, but that was all. Not going to burn up their wood because it was chilly. So they scavenged for twigs, used knives to chop up a small shrub into a pile of little sticks and dry leaves, gathered grass in a large pile, cleared out a patch of ground... and a few matches later, they had a merry little fire going. Smelled awful... no, no, it smelled like burning grass, and by comparison to the perfumed mountains, it was downright ghastly. Again, Carza wondered why no-one had decided to live close to here, or maybe extract the scent from the stones, something to exploit this scent to its fullest. She could lean back and luxuriate in it, and each step only made it more potent. She hoped it was infecting her clothes somehow, so she'd get little reminders of it over the next few weeks... months... maybe years if she was lucky. No, not lucky, she was living in the middle of the steppe, there'd be limited opportunities for washing. She might have a good scent in her clothes for her entire expedition if she was lucky.

Hull groaned as he leant back against his pack, a rudimentary pillow and chair all at once.

"...where the hell is that smell coming from?"

Carza shrugged rudely, realised her rudeness a second later, and adjusted.

"No idea. I assume it's some plant, or-"

"What plant? The lichen? I remember a rock smelling like this a while back, but it didn't have lichen growing on it - nothing like the stuff round here."

"Maybe the lichen produces the scent, but it's strong enough to linger for a long time on the rock."

"Where's the advantage there, though? What's the point?"

Anthan looked up from the fire, sipping from a small hip flask - just for warmth.

"Good point. Lichen doesn't spread via insects or birds, it spreads by the wind dispersing it over the environment. No evolutionary advantage in it."

Carza blinked slowly, and Anthan shrugged.

"Correspondence course in botany while I was recovering from getting a kidney ripped out."

"...you had-"

"A kidney ripped out, yes, I don't want to talk about it. It was very painful and I almost died from infection. But while recovering in Apo, I had a correspondence course going. Hands still worked, eyes still worked..."

Hull grinned.

"Botany, though?"

"Botany, yes. I like plants, believe it or not."

For once, Anthan looked mildly flustered. Carza nudged Hull, stopping him from probing any further. This was clearly something Anthan liked, and... well, she wasn't going to bother someone over a perfectly reasonable academic hobby. Good on him for pursuing his interests. But saying that would probably come across as infuriatingly patronising, and... alright, she wanted to keep walking now, regardless of the danger. Talking was hard, and she disliked it. Necessity had improved her skills with it. Necessity hadn't made it any more enjoyable. And as the night drew it, Lirana's absence was even more palpable. Carza couldn't even say that the two of them were friends, they'd barely known one another, but had been through so much that it felt... wrong to just lose her along the way to damn attrition. But here they were. All three of them... half of the expedition. Two scholars and a guard/guide/survival expert/botanist/generalised employee. He was everything to them, and the barrier dividing them from the harshness of the wilderness seemed thinner and thinner.

And in silence, they waited for the dawn. It didn't even feel like sleeping, sleeping was too definite, it was a break, and existence felt too continuous for that. The sun even reappeared briefly - between the Monarch's stone legs, like she'd given birth to a tiny golden coin slipping quickly below the horizon. Then they were left with the mountains, the rocks, the tiny flickering fire in front of them, the glorious scent...

And a noise.

Anthan raised his gun and pointed into the dark, eyes sharp with nerves. Carza fumbled for her pistol. Hull did much the same. A sound - a little crack, like someone stepping over the grass towards them, like... like...

The crack came again... again... again... and then ended.

A stone.

Just a stone, tumbling down the mountainside.

Mountains which loomed as tremendous dark monoliths. Could be sheltering anything on those slopes... anything that wasn't human, of course. A human couldn't endure up there.

They waited, huddled in coats, warming their hands, lingering in silence...

And Anthan started to unscrew a few of his bullets. Carza stared as he worked - removing the bottom, pouring the black powder into a small glass bottle that'd once contained a tonic for mutation, long-since expended. Down to pills now, no other treatments beyond clipping. Bullet after bullet, his pace remaining steady the whole while - used to this. He kept going until it was almost full, then he... oh. Heavens. He still had some jellied fuel, a little siphoned off into a flask. He poured the greasy black liquid into the powder, shook it to make it a single emulsified solution, then stuffed a filthy handkerchief into the neck of the bottle, before finally sealing it up entirely with a cap. He nodded to the others.

"Little trick. Just in case."

"...is that an explosive?"

"Improvised, yeah. Volatile, so..."

He shuffled it far away from the spitting sparks of the fire. Carza backed away herself, even if the cold sank a little deeper now. Didn't want to be close to an explosive, if at all possible. She remembered the waves of flame that'd washed over that damn mutant in the forest, the one that'd killed Egg. The heat of it, the ferocity of a chemical catastrophe happening a few feet away. Anthan shrugged.

"You saying all that stuff about yelling to bring down a landslide... made me think. See, if we get chased, might be wise to have an explosive - seal things up behind us. Could be useful."

"...to trap us?"

"There are other passes, and the snowmelt should sweep away anything we lay down come next spring."

He looked up, pursing his lips.

"...snow."

Carza locked up, and huddled tightly into herself. He was right. The first few flakes were coming down. They were too high up, and the temperature was low. They'd set out after the snowmelt, there shouldn't... no, this might not be a blizzard. Probably just some flakes, enough to made the ground crackle and nothing else. Either way, she found herself bundling a hat on top of her head, and wrapping her scarf a little tighter around her mouth. The fire became much, much more appealing, even with the explosive resting beside it. The three of them gathered close together, sheltering as the flakes began to come down, at first slowly, building in speed until the air seemed filled with spindly white insects, drifting lazily... no, not insects, more like pollen, really. The whirling seeds of an albino sycamore hanging high, high above their heads, so high they couldn't see the lowest branches, could barely tell the trunk apart from the mountains.

And Carza felt something in her.

A nervousness.

She felt certain that something was watching them. Maybe that sound had just alarmed her a little, maybe she was just being paranoid, maybe she was simply remembering that mutant in the woods which had stalked them for days before attacking. Maybe. But she... remembered that rock in the forest, which had smelled like these mountains. The stone here was just like regular stone, and stones didn't smell. Not like this, not so strongly. No plant did, either - lichen wouldn't, it made no sense. Maybe nature was just being delightful, but Carza doubted that. Why did the mountains reek of perfume? And why had a scented stone been at the centre of an old Yasa sacred circle, surrounded by statues of their human gods? Was it connected to their mythical glass men?

Her voice was quiet. Low.

"Do you feel like we're being watched?"

Anthan glanced sharply at her, but said nothing. Hull shivered.

"A little. Something prickling on the back of my neck."

Only after a solid minute did Anthan speak, after fuelling the fire a little more with some more plundered twigs. Barely any heat, barely any light... if anything, the brightness made the darkness thicker, all the shapes in it becoming vaguer.

"...well, I didn't want to make you feel nervous, but past the statue - looks like the pass widens out a bit. More of a valley at that point. Still shouldn't take long to cross, but... well, thing is, mutants enjoy caves. Tunnelling, really. If they can, they will - burrow through the earth to find sources of contamination no-one's touched yet, make places to hide and sleep to let sources replenish... wait out any problems. My guess, there might be some mutants up ahead, seen a few cave entrances higher up, too smooth to just be natural. Now, we'll be fine. We're not contaminated, no mutant will want to take us on - no point, really. But we're looking at some seriously old-growth mutants, slow-moving, efficient, powerful... if you see something moving in those caves, might be one of them."

Carza stared with wide eyes. Images of enormous worms tunnelling through the mountains, insects swarming behind them, creating caves prowled by packs of things that had once been wolves or dogs or... whatever. She remembered the laughing dogs in the shade of the mountain, and wondered if any of them had wound up in those caves, silent and vicious. Maybe one of those things had taken out the village. Drawn in by the scent of contamination, the village promptly evacuated as they saw something vast heaving its way out of the mountain. A mountain riddled with little channels, like a termite mound, pierced by things that slept in the cold, damp dark where contamination ran freely down the walls. Mutating beyond any limit. Again, she remembered the dark shape which had controlled those corpses, melted them into armour. Nothing close to natural life there, nothing resembling organic evolution. Maybe there was-"

"Oy. Carza. Focus."

She nodded quickly. Right. Focus. Yes. She could do that. Alright. Anthan grunted, and adjusted his rifle to make himself more comfortable.

"Mutants in the caves, no doubt about it. If you see them, though, they won't go after us - we've nothing for them. But, if one of them gets curious, noses around a bit... don't look it in the eyes, just quietly back away and break into a sprint when you reach the right distance. Follow my lead. Move too quickly too soon, and it might react violently just out of surprise, or because it thinks you're fun. Best bet is to act boring."

Hull spoke up.

"Why not play dead?"

"If they nuzzle you, you might end up coated in their stink - which will bring in the lesser mutants. And once they start..."

Carza finished.

"We kill them, they contaminate us, which draws more mutants, which we kill, that then contaminate us... until eventually we're either mutated or dead."

"Exactly. So, back off, keep your eyes down, move slowly, and once they back off a little, run. I'll help if I can. Otherwise, just... follow my lead, don't do anything stupid."

Carza grimaced, and glanced at Hull. They both remembered Kralat talking about the glass-skinned men of the mountains. The gods the Yasa had once worshipped. They'd found a titanic statue of unknown origins, the mountains stank of perfume, and there were caves filled with... things they didn't want to think about. Everything felt unnatural, and... believing in myths no longer seemed quite so ridiculous. Not after all they'd seen, the madness of the forest, the things which exceeded any basis of logic or reason, at least in Carza's eyes. Maybe the 'gods' were just huge mutants, changed by the mountains. Maybe they did have glass skin... or diamond skin, or something suitably reflective and easily mistaken for glass. Maybe. The three of them stayed close. Slept in watches. And always kept their guns ready, afraid of what the morning could bring. And always the snow fell, more and more, until they were forced to shift their position and find a boulder tilted in such a way to provide a roof - a patch of dry earth where they could watch the snow gently tumbling, more, more, more, spindly insects giving way to fat white flakes which settled on the ground... and didn't quite leave. Nothing disturbed the gathering layer. No animals, no people, no vehicles, nothing. It was impeccably smooth... and by the time Carza felt her eyes closing, the world beyond had turned a shade of brightest silver, with fingers of slim frost extending into their shelter... twisting around her foot... and piercing deep under her skin.

Lodging like an insect's stinger.

And just as sharp.