Chapter Sixty Five

The fall was blessedly brief. Blessedly? Maybe? She had legitimately no idea, and wasn't sure if she wanted one. An idea, that is. Maybe it was for the best that the fall was short. No time for her life to flash before her eyes... no point, either. She'd already had it flash when she was writing her last notes. Founder, she hoped that the dog hadn't done something to them before chasing her, and that Kani and Ayat understood and would take them away. Hadn't finished her letter to Melqua. Just the first part, the core, the initial draft done in light pencil which she intended to scrape away. Founder, she... she found herself wondering something. The only thing she could wonder in the time available, before the ground rushed out of the dark with all the suddenness and strangeness of the surface of some barren planet. An alien world which had never known a human, and she would've live to tell anyone about it. Wouldn't remain human for long, either. And the thought which ran through her head in the second when the darkness seemed overwhelming and final... it was that she wanted a new pencil. She'd heard about these wonderful inked pencils, capable of leaving a permanent mark on paper but without the force of a metal nib. If she had one of them, she could start writing on the thinnest paper imaginable, on the stuff they wrapped up those awful newfangled cigarettes in or printed massive reference books on topics no-one particularly cared about, written by a scholar in need of a quick bit of money for some personal project. Encyclopedias... loathsome things, like you could summarise all human knowledge into a handful of volumes... she wanted an inked pencil, ideally many, and hundreds, thousands of whisper-thin sheets of paper she could use for writing down her many thoughts and-

Thump.

Ow.

She'd reached the bottom. Faster than expected. And she realised with dim horror that her last thought could've been about inked pencils. She'd never even used one, just seen them in an advertisement in a newspaper she'd glanced at once, next to another dozen little gadgets... ow. She was embarrassed, sore, confused, irritable, her neck ached, and... all of it was coming back. In drips and drabs, the world was re-emerging as a present existence with its own stresses and worries. Right. The terror of death had given her brief amnesia. Funny how that worked out, how death made her think of pointless things when it was staring her in the face, but when it was inching closer over long, agonising minutes, she found herself introspective and shrunken and weary. But when she was actually falling, actually about to die, actually about to see the end... she thought of pencils and paper. Maybe that said something about her. Probably that she was incredibly boring.

Maybe it was for the best that she'd become a chaste scholar-nun, bound to never enter into a relationship. She'd be very boring. 'Oh darling, look at all these pencils I just obtained, aren't they grand? Oh, yes, of course, romantic dinner, anniversary business yes yes whatever, but look at my nibs!' The Court of Ivory had spared some poor man the chance of having her as a wife.

...and now she was thinking about Hull. Good to know that she was thinking rationally again, at least.

A crash. A slicing sound. Carza rolled frantically over the floor, terror flooding her system. The temple. The dog. The red-hot collar of mutated flesh which was slowly strangling her, slowly infiltrating her body. No telling when it would be done, no telling when it would be irreversible. Oh, damn, she was moping incessantly and not thinking about the mutated dog that was trying to kill her. She really was thinking normally again. She scrambled to her feet, and ran. No idea where she was... the basement, maybe. A cellar, a crypt, a tomb, something else. The temple was ancient, not some flawless structure which endured through the ages with ease, it was a structure like any other and could suffer structural weakness. Maybe next time she was exploring an improbably ancient structure she'd remember that. If she lived. Which she wouldn't. So... no point learning her lesson. The collar around her neck twitched hard, trying to drag her to the dog to feed it with more contamination. Her own mutated tumour which demanded hungrily to be fed, Founder damn it all, and...

Her steps slowed.

Something was nagging in her mind.

The dog wasn't following. No sound, no thump of paws on the ground, no scrape of claws, no light panting as it exerted itself, nothing. She turned around slowly...

And saw the dog. Impaled. And she realised, abruptly and unpleasantly, that she was an inch away from having died in that fall. The pillar with the mural, it... extended downwards, through both floors of the temple. But... the image had changed. Above, it was a giant being vivisected while adoring masses with elongated heads watched with rapturous glee. And here... the mural had become three-dimensional. A statue seemed to tear its way out of the stone, sculpted to seem as though it was escaping a stony prison. It towered above her, nearly double her height, and it still bore the wounds from above, from which all its organs had been steadily removed. And now... now it was this bizarre, hulking figure, skin bristling with piercings, stomach sliced open for ropes of intestine to hang, studded with yet more metal. Arms reduced down to wiry sinew, still large enough to crush her to death, ribs so hollow she could count each and every one, and the stone skin sank deep enough between the empty bones for her to lose her hand inside the resulting valleys. It was... starved, and hollow, and in every way uncanny. And the joyous face, lacking both eyes and teeth... it was still stretched into a nauseating smile, skin falling limply around it, stretched into position by yet more piercings. Rings, hooks, loops, chains... all of them to stretch the skin of the body back into an ordinary shape, despite the lack of organs.

And below the statue, was an array of smaller, more deilcate statues - coming up to Carza's neck, as opposed to towering above. The same elongated figures, with long fingers stretched high... bearing curved, vicious-looking knives studded with barnacle-like growths, handles dripping with seaweed. The air down here reeked of salt... and rot. The dog had fallen on this field of statues, impaled a dozen or more times. Bleeding freely, struggling weakly as its flesh rebelled against its fate. Eager to leave. Carza stepped closer in cautious silence, wondering if it was going to try anything, curious about burning it, or getting back up, and... and she felt something in her. A needling in her head, in the back of her brain, in the most primal elements which worked on simple logic - food, drink, survival, reproduction, all the inherent qualities of a human. And Carza... Carza could feel it telling her something. A new priority.

Go on. Take some.

The dog was dead. But parts of it were still alive, the contamination animating them and trying to get them to leave. Legs twitched like worms, attempting to slither free of an immobilised torso. Even the head was starting to pulse as muscles and bones reshaped, trying to force it free - it was only impaled once, it could manage it. And the toso was quivering as organs began to fend for themselves, the overall structure failing. If they succeeded, the body would dismantle itself. Form tiny mutants, which would devour one another senselessly, form into a shivering mass that could mop up the rest of the dog, and then... shamble off. A little would be lost. Nothing would be gained. The resulting body would be weak and incoherent, desperate for more contamination to finish its evolution. And if it succeed - doubtful - it would become something else. More refined. An actual creature, and not an animate, squirming pile of limbs and viscera aligned into a chaotic tangle. But... the thought in her head made her want to do something more than burn. The corpse in front of her... it was bristling with mutation, riddled with it. A dense little package of the stuff... and it was already dead, there'd be no fighting. She could just lean in and take a big, healthy bite, let the contamination flow through her to the pulsing of a vast underground heart and-

She stepped backwards, bile rising in her throat.

Was this what Lirana had felt, towards the end? The collar around her neck was pulsing, and she felt like... like a dog herself, like she was being driven by a capricious master to go and eat, go and savour the helpings she was given, go on girl, go. Go and feast. And... and it was tempting. She couldn't even smell the contamination as contamination any more, just as... as a tantalising, foreign flavour in the air. A spice which invited her to dive in and try some. Just a nibble. And then she'd feel the gore on her lips, would feel the meat between her teeth, would feel the mutations around her neck bursting to life, sinking deeper and deeper, taking away any kind of thought or worry. No more pain. No more anything, the feeling whispered. And that was how it operated, she realised. It just changed things around. The scent of contamination became sweet and enchanting. The writhing of the dog's body wasn't even revolting in a visceral sense. She had to think of really chewing a mound of raw meat to create a sense of disgust... and even now that was weakening.

How long had this been going on? How long did it take for this mutation to infiltrate and start changing her priorities around?

...had it made her more relaxed? Too relaxed to, say, check the detector in her bag?

How long had it been with her?

How long did she have left?

She stepped away from the statue, feeling fear rise up in her. Right, focus on anthropology, focus on culture, focus on academia and all the things which helped her stabilise. Higher things, get away from the base of her brain where the mutation was slowly creeping, red threads like vines scrambling up... like those thorn-clad trees in the swamp, a dead, sterile thing slowly being overtaken by mindless, shapeless, violent growth. Focus, focus. Uh. Elongated heads, right, that was... oh. Oh. She was seeing... seeing something connected to the Sleepless, no wonder this place had felt familiar. Kralat and his men had worked out of an old temple... she'd focused on the mutation element, on the glass-skinned gods and the scented stones. Those had all been explained, the point where this culture, the Yasa, had taken inspiration from the ancestors up in the mountains. It'd been interesting, but she'd set it aside as just that - interesting. Little relevance to her projects after a point. But... but now she saw something related to it. The same basic structure - a grey stone tower, figures with elongated heads and long, long fingers... but the specifics were wildly off. This place was substantially larger, for one. Different architecture, for another. More refined, in some ways. Murals, yes, but not many murals. Tastefully used on certain areas, the rest was left consciously plain. Maybe the same emphasis on mutation, or...?

She stared at the statue. Barely saw the mural above, with its vivisection scene.

A figure going from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Filled to hollow. Organs harvested by an adoring crowd. Two memories: the family she'd dined with before coming here, and their story about the giants who used to be in this area. Lurked in the swamp in the mysterious times of a grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather - in short, myth, with no basis in fact. But maybe... maybe this was that basis. A massive temple, with massive doors, and a massive statue in its dead centre (and she thought this was the centre, it certainly felt like it)... well, an impressionable person, finding this place by accident, might well come to conclusions, and it'd just take a few odd stories to start a rumour, and a rumour could take a long, long time to die. But the other memory that came up was... well, those raiders. When they offered an apology to Tobok and the family, they'd told a story about the Scabrous. That they were born when a civilisation butchered their god, and released a burning red star from its belly which it had been sheltering them from. They'd consumed the flesh of their god, mutated, and used the light of the red star as their banner, as the centre of their 'empire'. She'd almost believed it a few times. But it'd always been too outlandish. The glass-skinned men of the mountains were just another species. The Scabrous were just an advanced group with an eerily inhuman mentality and a sublime command over mutation, which... presumably had addled their own brains to the point of never doing anything with that command. The red light was their herald, and did act as something important... but it was just the bioluminescence of a creature they used to produce their most powerful intoxicants.

...and now here she was. And it didn't take a genius to figure things out.

A shudder ran through her as the collar twitched again, shivering through her skin. Thicker, stronger, nastier now, filaments sliding inwards to coil around her spinal column. Stupid image, no bearing on reality. The collar was just part of it, little scraps would be filtering into her blood, into her body, before carrying contamination to the brain after a while. It wasn't a living creature, even if it felt that way sometimes. It was as foreign as a tumour - it was her, but turned into her worst enemy. A rebel, not an invader. Shouldn't treat it as the latter. Misleading. And comforting. Made her think it could be repelled, when it really, really couldn't. She found herself feeling annoyed. Why couldn't she record down her thoughts? Why couldn't she record these last scrawlings - even a few of them would be enough to fuel someone else's work into the Yasa people, into the nomads in general... but no. On another floor, and she couldn't see a way back up. Maybe in the darkness somewhere there were some stairs, but she had no idea where those might be.

Right.

Anyway.

So... this place, the culture which produced it, had served to influence the nomads. Planting myths of giants, the notion of devouring a god to gain its power, and the notion of mutation as a route to ascension. She doubted the Yasa had built this place. It was old, much older than Kralat's temple had been, and the structural idiom was entirely different. Blank hexagonal pillars... maybe it was impossible to make these out east, but she'd seen an early Yasa site of worship, and it involved nothing even close to this. The Yasa had their own style, but it was influenced by this temple, by this culture. She wanted to plug this all into the nomadic way of thinking regarding luck and whatnot, but... no, no, the salt marshes were repellent to the nomads. Bad for horses, bad for herding, bad for just about everything. They had their own peoples with their own methods, are were considered foreign by the nomads. So... presumably some cultural cross-pollination, but still a distinct cultural group. And this place was clearly ancient, so... an even further remove from anything she was personally acquainted with.

At one end of a line, she had the Yasa. A group which had conquered the area around Krodaw, became a ruling caste, set up temples, worshipped the idea of 'perfect' mutation, and engaged in cranial deformation. Along the way, they were influenced by the locals they conquered, the ancestors/demigods from back home, and whatever this culture was. From the locals, they gained some... architectural techniques. From the ancestors, the emphasis on scent, and an idealised form of what they were trying to achieve. And from these people, the very idea of the perfect mutant, the architectural idiom of this temple (later elaborated through the lens of the locals they conquered), and the rite of cranial deformation. Out of those three influences, she was seeing a very strong connection to this place, and the rest seemed tangential, just providing more imagery and rites for an existing belief system. Carza tilted her head to one side, almost forgetting the collar completely. So... this place had the strongest influence.

And yet she knew the least about it. The idea of a culture which worshipped mutation was weird enough, and it sounded unstable. She'd thought of it like... well, like everything out here on the steppe. A clan had tried out the idea. It hadn't caught on with other clans, and the Yasa had self-destructed after a few successful conquests (fuelled by berserk mutants, presumably), their rites had been deemed very unlucky, and no-one had ever reproduced their errors. Simple as. But this... this temple was in the middle of a marsh, it would require effort to build, lots of effort. Unlike any she'd seen so far on the steppe. It indicated continuous authority and continuous belief, which stood in stark opposition to how unstable mutation-worship made an authority or a belief system. How could they have sustained a group long enough to build this place over the course of many years, maybe over a generation, when their elites were turning into savage mutants, their people weren't far behind, and everyone around them probably considered them so dangerously insane that it was recommended to kill them on sight, burn their tents, salt their fields, and-

She was projecting her own spite.

Bad anthropology.

Bad.

She knew nothing here. There was no writing, just... art. Was that giant purely metaphorical, or terrifyingly literal? Was there another species up here? Maybe it was a corroded memory of the ancestors, or maybe the Scabrous. Maybe the Scabrous had come from here, moving south to form a new country to call their own. Maybe this was a missionary outpost for the Scabrous, in days when they were more diplomatic. Or Scabrous copycats. The statue loomed, grinning toothlessly, skin hanging loose in some areas, painfully stretched in others. The dog had stopped moving, and Carza slowly backed away. Didn't want to deal with it, didn't want to deal with it. Couldn't even trust herself to burn it, a nightmarish part of her brain wondered if she would just dive in and eat the roasting meat, licking the fat from her fingers, eyes slowly glazing over as idiocy took hold, letting her teeth sharpen and her skin thicken and-

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She walked.

Stumbled, really. Legs were a bit shaky, from the fall and... everything else. Hugged her arms around her body and just searched for an exit. Stairs back up to the surface, presumably there were some. Ladder, maybe... a chute she could climb up, possibly. Anyway. She stumbled along, shivering uncontrollably, running through her life, moment after moment, all of it blending together into a single basic instinct - she didn't want to go. On one side, animal acceptance. She was going to die, ought to do whatever she could. On the other, human resistance. The desire to go on even when it made no logical sense, even when it was utterly impossible. Even despite all of that, she wanted to keep on going. At minimum, she had a letter to write. And she'd be damned if she died before she finished it, or became a shambling idiot somewhere through a paragraph. Be embarrassing if that was her last written piece - a rambling grumble which subsided into scribbles halfway through, maybe an exploratory nibble at the edges like the giant rat she might well become.

Maybe she should find some mutated rats. Think about the aesthetics of the abomination she was going to become soon enough.

Urgh.

She was awful. Didn't deserve a drawn-out dramatic death, give those to people who could get through them without having weird, weird thoughts. Her stumbling came to an end as she reached what felt like a wall... she touched it, definitely a wall. The light was weaker now, her horn was guttering out. And her collar kept inclining her backwards, to the dog, to her meal, to her baptism into true mutation. She stumbled to the wall, felt along... no doors, none, no stairs, no chutes, nothing... not even a ladder or an oubliette. No sign of what this particular chamber had been used for, no skeletons, no altars, no... her foot hit something, and she almost screamed. No, not a dog, nothing alive, just.. another stone. The pedestal of a statue, smaller than the one in the middle, but larger than the elongated figures surrounding it. She carefully navigated around it, holding up her light... almost screamed again, Founder, she was acting like a victim from a bad pulp novel (not that she read any, she was assuming)... but in her defence, this thing was definitely eerie.

Wait.

This wasn't a statue.

It was a pedestal, but there was no statue on it.

Just... just something mummified.

Oh. Oh. This was a tomb. This was the temple's tomb, and this was one of the things interned. No wonder the atmosphere was so...stable compared to the damp outdoors, they needed keep these things fresh, had put some effort into climate control. If she peered into the gloom, used her light, she could see other mummies too. The collar twitched, and she instinctually reached up to scratch... idiot. The collar tightened. Her throat closed. And for a terrible second she collapsed to her knees, gasping, spluttering, feeling stars bloom in front of her eyes as her tumour tightened, eager to choke the life from her so it could fill up the absence with something new and raw and wild. Her knees were scraped by the floor, and the salt crystals piled along it. And for a second she had a nightmare vision of a parade of mourners marching over the steppe, from the lands of the Scabrous to this place, to the place where there was enough salt to preserve anything. A temple built amidst the damp dunes for them to leave their dead... but only four, she only saw four. Her eyes, rapidly becoming bloodshot even as she forced a few desperate drams of air into her lungs, flicked up. What made them so special?

Why would someone bring these here?

The mummified body was impassive. Wrapped in tight bandages, black and curled from age, sometimes so thin and brittle that she could see straight through them... no ornaments, no decorations, nothing. They were minimalistic to the point of brutality, almost becoming clinical. Like they were just props placed against a black background for a photographer to snap a daguerrotype of. But... but the dust, the aura, the atmosphere, it was all... damn it, why wasn't she breathing yet? Her throat wasn't opening, her throat wasn't opening, it wasn't opening enough. She felt panicked, and the panic made her breathe faster, made her need more air, and she simply wasn't getting it. Hyperventilation and suffocation, a one-two punch which amplified itself, a feedback loop growing louder and louder and louder and louder. She could hear her heart beating in her ears. No, no, two... two beats. Her own, faster and faster as her stress rose, and another... another deeper one, the pulsing of a poisoned heart in the earth, ventricles the size of oceans, veins and arteries like the mouths of great rivers, pulsing contamination into the great underground labyrinth. The poisoned heart of the world... madness, pure madness, and yet... yet she could feel the rushing of liquid, louder and louder, could feel it calling... the mummy looked down at her, mocking, cruel, apathetic which was somehow worse than any form of malice...

Her eyes started to flicker.

No, no, no, not like this, she'd scratched her throat, why was... it wanted her to sleep, to sleep and be at peace so the mutation could continue, she could feel the tumour twitching with laughter, she could... could...

Darkness.

And now, she thought something appropriate. Hull. Melqua. Kani. Ayat. Lirana. Everyone and everything.

So many things she still wished for.

* * *

She dreamt.

She imagined the mummified body in front of herself rising up. Standing on its two legs, extending upwards and upwards like an enormous praying mantis, hunched against the ceiling. Staring down with faceless bandages, blackened by time and crusted with salt until it gleamed like a diamond in the flickering light of her horn. And then... then it fell onto its front limbs, adopting a dog-like posture. Long and sinuous and inhuman, all strange, nightmarish proportions and glistening bandages. A diamond-bandage hound, blackened and aged, scuttling lightly along the ground, some perverse combination of a dog's gait and a spider's scuttle. A whole pack of the things, moving together to the centre of the room, to the statues and the hulking stone figure which they worshipped adoringly with their curved knives and serene grins. Ants worshipping a mad god with sensuous wounds up and down its titanic body. Holy wounds for them to devour holy flesh. Carza was unconscious, but she could still see it, clear as day, the scuttling shining pack of mummified corpses, only the faint crack of shifting crystals to sound their approach as they moved and moved and moved...

And Carza imagined another scene. Dreamed it in her haze of suffocating delusion.

An enormous man. A fleshy man, all muscles and sharp angles, made bulky by nature and nurture in tandem. Eyes dark and flawless as opals, wide as a child's. A smile curled with bland amusement, witnessing the shifting of the world with delicacy. He lay on a great table, and all around him were sharp-featured men and women, much smaller by far, with elongated heads. And the man was laughing, deep belly-laughs as he encouraged them to begin their work, to slice and cut and extract. Peel free mortality, invite eternity, rot not darling idlewilds but remove the putrid organ and dine on their fossilised beauty. A grain of sand could be passed over and over and over until it became a pearl, and so an organ could too. Passed and passed and passed and shaped, refined into something gleaming and crystalline and dark as oil. Dark and soft, ready to be gnawed and chewed and lapped at by loyal dogs. The man encouraged them more and more as they sliced with their curved knives, which one second were knives and another second were actual mouths, slug-like and gleaming, extending their red tongues to lap at the holy wounds they made from which organs twitched forth on their many many limbs, growing them spider-like and made of ruddy vein-matter, cloaked in bloodclots, mutated into perfection... scuttling and jumping and hiding and giggling with half-formed mouths while the enormous man told them no no no no not to do that but to leap into the mouths of the watchers one by one by one their throats bulging like the toads in the swamp and their skin now boiled with tadpoles in fleshy pockets and they shuddered and moaned and licked their bloodslicked lips into which more and more organs leapt, red dark and anonymous and-

And Carza was here.

She was weak and thin and small and here. And surrounded by the moaning, chewing figures, their mouths monstrously wide and their teeth were changed, now hollow and shrivelled and thin. Like the mosquitoes which had plagued her since she arrived in the steppe, their needle-like teeth locking around the organs and sucking them dry, filling the skin with redness which never faded, growing redder and redder until they stopped being red at all, but a hideous bruised purple, and then they began to draw their knives over each other while the enormous man rejoiced at their work, intestines hanging freely from his sliced stomach, bristling with metal piercings. The man-hive - for that was what he was, a hive of organs which scuttled and flew and laughed - stared happily at her as she was lost into the crowd, surrounded by stick-thin limbs and needle-thin teeth, throats bulging like toads they ate and ate and ate... and one of them grabbed her arm, hooked her from the ground. No idea if it was a man or a woman, they all looked the same in this light, all monstrous and inhuman... and it gripped the sides of her head and drew her inwards...

The lips were cold as ice and flavoured with tears.

She screamed and lunged away, and she felt again the theurgist's ink-laden needle tracing an eye into her forehead, but this time it was all around her lips, little stabbing motions from those needle-thin teeth that dimpled her with wounds, and... and the crowd was lost. The floor was plain. Carza gulped, and she could feel an organ in her throat, slithering deeper, laughing as it went, leaking contamination which tasted how Kani and her ancestors smelled when they chose to, of every scent and spice in all the world merged together with harmony. Carza gulped, but there was always more, gulping and gulping and yet she could only feel herself changing and... and she was surrounded by those mummified dog-men-insects, a whole pack, moving quickly, so quickly that she was carried along in a gleaming river, her teeth clogged with meat, her throat thick and strangled, her eyes bulging and bloodshot. She was running, running, and she was forced to all fours, to run like they did to the foot of a towering thing, something Scabrous and unsightly. And now the mummified dogs had golden ornaments dangling from their limbs, perfect and gaudy and marking them as trophies... and now Carza was at the foot of the towering creature, the size of those carriages of her youth, the horse-drawn carriages which had run down a few of her fellow urchins and turned them to pulp. Remembered hearing the crunch and the squeals, because they never died immediately but died over the course of many, many minutes, and she would hear all of them and pretend it was an apathetic whim of fate but would have nightmares about for weeks and weeks.

Still did. Sometimes. Childhood terror that returned into her mind like vomit up her throat.

And she was different now. She was naked as the day she was born, not a hint of embarrassment, and yet she was pressing her cheek into the looming creature's palm. Purring like the cat Kani kept sealed in her robe. Nuzzling, and relishing the contamination flowing through her. No more intelligence, no more worrying, no more grieving, no more nightmares. Humanity was a burden, an evolutionary accident which made humans poorly adapted. Every other creature could mutate happily into something greater, but humans had to fear it, humans had to claim intelligence they were loath to lose. And what had it all bought? Fear of tomorrow. Fear of yesterday. Fear of today. Give in and become a loyal hound of the masters, become something which listened only to the wind and the pulsing of underground rivers. Drink deep and know freedom. A human would drink liquor to become a beast and escape the pain of being a man, and yet a human shirked the idea of using contamination to do the same thing. Both achieved the same result, but liquor was poison and contamination was a gift. The collar was tight, and now it was made of gold and jewels, winched tight and welded shut, never going to come off...

Running through the marshes with the other hounds. Limbs twisted until she could move on all fours, teeth sharp and many-layered, eyes with pupils burst, and mind empty of thoughts. Stick-thin, but corded with muscle. Stronger than she'd ever been, and happier. No more anthropology, no more writing, no more purpose. Happiness in its purest form, through sublime idiocy. Intelligence brought misery, ignorance brought contentment. Live in simple stupidity and be content, the contamination said - and she said yes. She wanted nothing more than contentment, and when all her goals fell through... why not redefine contentment, and seek it with ease? And here she was, naked and running, strained from head to foot with mud and gore, thin and powerful and quick. Snarling and screaming to the sky, hunting a smaller, weaker mutant. Holding it down and digging her teeth into the tender neck-veins, ripping them free, screaming to the moon, and looking down... to see Hull's pale, dying face staring up at her. Or Melqua's. Or Lirana's. Or Kani, Ayat... so many people, even her own father, face in the same rictus of shock as when she'd first showed up at his door to blackmail him.

Her scream became more human.

Her pupils contracted and healed.

And her hands reached up to her golden collar-

* * *

Someone was hunched over her, and for a second she was about to reel backwards, old memories surfacing... just Kani. It was just Kani, with something over her throat, something which... oh, Founder. Her throat was working again. The collar had relaxed, just a little. Grey stone all around, she was still in the temple. No sight of the dog, no... Kani did something, and relief flooded through her body. Oh, Founder... crushed-up herbs, smeared loosely into the tumour around her neck, soothing the burning, relieving the compression. Waking her back up with a flood of ice-cold clarity. Oh, it wasn't enough to remove it, but it was enough to comfort her. And right now, that was all she could ask for. Kani's eyes were wide with worry, and Ayat didn't look much better. Carza tried to speak, but her throat took a moment to function enough for that - still sore, still stiff.

"What-"

An outbreak of coughing put a stop to her question, but the intent had been transmitted. Kani looked uncomfortably over at Ayat.

"...we found you down below, could hear you... uh..."

Choking? How had they- Ayat interrupted.

"Screaming. Howling. Sounded like an animal."

Her mind slowed down, and she stared sorrowfully... oh. She wasn't even wearing her clothes. Where were... had that dream been real, had she really run across the marshes with... no, no, she had a blanket, had her underclothes, she was still mostly decent. The shame of being seen in such a state was enough to make her feel a little more human, enough to make the mutation feel lesser. Founder, it was like a grey cloud around her mind, harder and harder to see through it. Memories were still there, but harder to see, to distinguish between. Her entire life seemed a single block, vague and uncertain, with no sharp distinctions or events. Just... a single mass, hazy in the mist. Like the temple, in a way. Kani coughed awkwardly.

"There were some stairs down below. We followed them, and found... well, you."

Carza blushed.

"Was I-"

Kani interrupted, mouth curling downwards with embarrassment.

"Yes. Naked. Clothes were scattered, and... you were snarling, struggling, barely able to walk. Curled around yourself, hissing and..."

A flood of terror.

"Are my eyes-"

"Alright. So far. But..."

Her brain had switched off during unconsciousness. And the mutation had taken hold. It already had her hind-brain, her most animal instincts... and when higher functions shut down, when everything reduced to that primordial seat of the soul, then there was nothing else for her to operate on. Nothing to override, no shame, no fear, no anger. Nothing human. And... and she could imagine herself thrashing on the ground, naked and animalistic, hind-brain overtaken, basic reflexes supreme and nothing higher. Not capable of moving, really. Lirana's mutations had been from multiple points, seeping upwards from there. Carza's were around the neck, to carry it right up to the brain. Barely a skip away, really. And... and she'd been thrashing. Like an animal. Not even capable of walking or running, just... screaming, the mutation figuring out how to work her body. She kept personifying it. It wanted things, it tried things, it was experimenting. It had no mind to it. It was an idiot stabbing at the controls of a machine it didn't understand - no, no, stop it. It couldn't understand, it had no capacity, it was just a tumour, stabbing away at controls, operating them blindly, her own body rebelling against her. Turning her into something else. It had her lower functions. It might have her higher functions soon enough. And then it would be in more than her dreams. More than her body. It would be in everything, eating at the seat of her mind. Her memories would be the last to go, she thought. Could already feel them gnawing...

The gnawing in her gut had moved. It was now in her brain, gnawing like a pack of insects, chewing and chewing and chewing like termites in a rotten granary, like vines up an ancient wall, slithering up and corroding...

Kani was hugging her. And Carza was too exhausted to feel embarrassed. Or too corroded. Animals didn't know shame, did they? Animals had no concept of shame, they walked naked as the day they were born.

Shame was civilisation. Shamelessness was savagery. And she was inching towards savagery, piece by piece by piece.

"Carza, oh, Carza..."

Ayat stood uncomfortably, but nodded in sympathy. Carza was stiff as a board, just letting Kani hug her. She had work to do. Letters to write. And her voice was low as she explained.

"I've written a... letter of introduction for ALD IOM, if you want it. Please, deliver my documents there. I have them-"

"Oh, shush, you silly creature."

Carza's eyes sharpened.

"It's important. There's a biography of a friend there, my best friend died for me to get this information together, and you two need something. Now, take the damn things and don't-"

"We found something with you."

"Please, I just need time, I don't know how long I have unt-"

She paused.

"...what?"

Kani reached for a packet... Carza realised with a flush that it was made from her old waistcoat and white shirt, bundled up to form a crude parcel held together by knotting the shirt-sleeves together. Kani untethered them carefully... and Carza blinked.

Gold.

Chunks of the stuff. Crude and unshaped, but smoothed by time and nature. Dotted with tiny bubbles, little dimples... warped and smooth as the stones at the bottom of a lake. Masses. Carza's project budget wouldn't come close to this... maybe half...

"Where?"

"Near you. There was a statue in the middle, chunks of gold nearby."

She had an image of the statue shedding organs of gold. No wonder these things were so oddly shaped, no smooth. So organic. The temple had... a basic kind of symbolism. Valuable organs done in gold, crude matter done in stone... and now they'd been plundered. Was it wrong to plunder a place of worship, no matter how old it might be? Did it violate some academic prerogative? She was dead anyway, and with her would die her scholarship, and her scholarly nature. Carza shrugged.

"Good."

"...you're not-"

"I won't be able to spend them. But I'm glad you found them. Now... now thank you for the herbs. But I need to get back to work."

"Why were you down there to begin with?"

"Doesn't matter. Just... just let me get on with it, please, I'm not sure how long I'll have before I forget how to wr-"

She didn't finish. Kani didn't interrupt. Nor did Ayat. They were both utterly still, and yet... yet there was a screeching in the air, sharp and violent, and then... a crack. A splinter. And a crash of enormous weights hitting the ground. Carza shifted herself around. She knew that. It was the doors. Someone, something had forced them off their hinges, sent them crashing to the earth. Something powerful and large, and... and she could hear something now. On the stone.

Hooves.

Her eyes widened, and her voice dropped.

"Run. They're here for me."

Kani sniffed the air, and her eyes widened. Ayat reached for his weapon.

Hooves. Strength. Casual dismissal of the works of others. And a reason to hunt them.

The Scabrous were here.

They'd found them.

Carza didn't want to go.