Chapter Thirty Eight

The village had no name. It was a dark spot clutching the huge body of the mountain range like a shrivelled tick, barely capable of getting enough to survive, let alone to glut itself. It might've been here forever, wearing a hundred different names, a thousand different faces, but at this time... it was a low series of cabins, with a sun blazing in the centre, and nothing else. No name, and certainly no people. Not a soul could be found, but every house had signs of recent inhabitation. Bowls of stew with flies buzzing hungrily at the top, eggs laid on the surface like scattered sesame seeds. Rats were gnawing at some of the sacks of provisions, mostly oats farmed in the slice of sunlight the pass afforded. The sun in the centre of the village was, indeed, a theurgic lamp. She had no idea how the theurgists made these things, but this was a long-haul model, the kind designed to last for years without any maintenance. Good thing, out this far. Or maybe the village had a retired theurgist here, you never knew. The peace of the mountainside was something she craved, and she'd only been in the stinking forest for a few weeks. If she'd been there for years... she might well have come scrambling up the slope, rabid at the thought of burying her head in snow, followed by the rest of her a moment later. It was a heavy, ugly, iron thing, hanging from a metal post anchored against the storm by a series of sturdy wooden struts.

Humming lightly, exuding constant light... flicking on when the time came, whether or not anyone was there to see it.

Maybe when they left, it would still be going. Flicking on, off, on, off... night after night, until it broke down. For such a simple mechanism... that might well be years.

There was, to her surprise, something that passed for a pub in the middle, and it was there that they gathered, in a pub with no signs, no patrons, no bartender... but there was a low counter, a fireplace they could encourage to a roar with only a little time and effort. Deserted, like everywhere else, and the four of them kept their eyes firmly away from the stained, half-filled mugs on the bar, the plate of rotten food which had been started on by humans, and ended by a combination of rats, flies, maggots, and whatever else had decided to poke around. Bears, maybe. No, wait, maybe that light was keeping the bigger animals out - signalling that something was still here. Maybe they, and the mutants, ahd learned to associate the lamp with people, with getting shot at. Maybe that association had lingered, and this place was going to be untouched by anything but the smallest vermin for quite some time. Heavy bottles were sat around the bar, most of them corked, all of them unlabelled and made from creamy ceramic. And for the first time in days, they had a roof over their heads, warmth that wasn't unwelcome, and...

And liquor.

Four glasses. Dusty.

Filled.

Anthan sniffed his.

"Oat liquor. Huh. Been a while since I've had this, honestly."

No-one listened to him, they were all busy necking back their respective drams. Carza winced as the acrid stuff burned her throat, but... but it brought warmth, and a sense of general rightness. That perfect stage between mildly tipsy and completely demolished, where everything seemed possible, and the entire universe suddenly made much, much more sense. Then Lirana sniffed again, and reality snuck its way back in, icy fingers dancing up and down her spine, tickling her vertebrae with malicious intent. Reality, the absolute sod, what was it doing here? Absolute git. She was trying to drown her sorrows, she didn't want to think about... gah. Anything. Anyone. Not any charred bodies in the ground, one of her own employees, her hires, someone she'd liked... feh. She drank another dram, listened to the crackling of the fire, and tried to imagine that it was the sound of dozens of people, a whole pub's worth. Finally, finally, she actually took in the place. The ceiling was blackened by soot - the chimney was only mostly-functional, a few tongues of smoke always escaped and left soft kisses along the beams. Carza wasn't a pub person, but she'd read her novels, and she remembered the day of her initiation. She shot Hull a glance, and the answering grin told her that she was right on the damn money.

"Reminds me of that time back then, a few months ago. We found that... fellow, don't you remember? Ashykh, or some such Tralkic name."

A strong-looking man with flesh hardened by the sun, who'd mocked the two of them for being untested, soft, weak, poor. A bunch of pampered, spoiled creatures who had no real hope in the world, because they had educated themselves into redundancy, and when they could've been focusing on driving the Court of Ivory into a gleaming future, they'd just sat around drinking from the samovar, eating fruitcake, and nothing besides.

It'd hit home. Funny of think of it - she remembered a tobacco-stained fingernail, and she imagined it tapping a series of dominoes, which fell one by one, click, click, click, one after the other while growing more and more tainted. Dominoes the size of buildings, rumbling as they tumbled, and crushing people beneath their weight. Cam, Egg, the local girl, the entire patrol, Kralat, the Sleepless... her eyes flicked to Lirana, and stopped. Hesitated. Imagined the dominoes again. Where did they end? How many times did they curl? Would they perhaps snake into their own path, until the ruins could pile on ruins, and...

Another bloody dram of oat whiskey.

"I remember him. Funny to think how it all... plays out, I suppose."

Hull's smile turned a little sad.

"Funny how a few words can set a pair of idiots like us off, huh."

"We're scholars. We're meant to do that. A passage here, a reference there, a strange choice of phrase... sets us off like bloodhounds, doesn't it?"

Hull shrugged.

"I suppose, I suppose. Me more than you, honestly, I'm the one who studies poetry, I actually have to get worked up about the line-by-line nonsense. Point is, we're just... well, those sorts of instincts, it's like overpowering your common sense, isn't it?"

She smiled back at him, eyes glazing over from drink and weariness. First time sitting in a real chair, even if it was in a place abandoned inexplicably to things she didn't want to think about. They'd sleep altogether tonight - her fantasies of having her own room would have to remain unfulfilled. Alas.

"We educate ourselves into idiocy."

Hull snorted.

"I'll toast to that."

That, incidentally, was the toast. No follow-up, just a raised glass and another dram. They'd spread throughout the pub, looking around... a few rooms at the back for the owner, and then some barrels. Looked like a standard pub for this part of the world, for this type of settlement. Owner would sleep here, work here in the evenings, and during the day would just... get along with his normal work. Farm like everyone else, hunt like everyone else. Maybe a smaller plot of land, a smaller range of hunting, but... well, it was one of the first lessons of anthropological analysis of a culture, a way of identifying good and bad ethnography: 'people aren't game pieces, they don't serve a single role, they are multivalent.' Everyone performs multiple duties, and they can be very different people in very different situations. A poor anthropologist reduced people down to a single one - the proper mode of analysis relied on thick description, gaining a more... total view of a people, a group, a whole damn society if possible. Someone was law-abiding in one way, criminal in another. They were religious and atheistic. Patriotic and apathetic. A dozen professions depending on the time of day. And all of this made sense.

That was really the crux of anthropology, the part which made it all function.

The faith that it did make sense. That there was an overpowering logic. Because if there wasn't, then... then what was the point?

Why bother studying it? Might as well study the flecks of sea foam on the crests of waves. If there was no overpowering logic, then you might as well study pure chaos and get over any pretensions of utility. Stare at the waves and go mad like a normal person, don't waste other people's time by interviewing them and analysing their culture.

She was wasting her time, wasn't she?

Lirana was sneezing to herself in another room. Hull leant forwards and stared at his drink with resolute focus. Anthan downed one... then another... then another still before he dared to engage. Specifically, by grabbing Carza around the shoulder, hauling her to her feet while she was still processing the initial contact through a haze of optimistic tipsiness, and was dragged bodily out through the door. Hull stood up abruptly, staring daggers at Anthan... who murmured quietly that he ought to stay. Keep Lirana occupied. The night was cold, the false sun was bright, and the mountains were invisible but known. Definite presences that could be sensed despite being utterly outside her sight. No snow, not quite yet - no-one would build a village where the mountains induced perpetual snow, not least because that meant you were opening yourself up to perpetual avalanches as well. No, none of that, but the ground was cold, hard, the silence of the village was oppressive, and beyond its bounds she could hear the sound of canine laughter. The laughing-dogs of the mountains, she'd heard them called. Barking and yipping at one another, hunting in packs, muscles tight and packed with powerful sinew, stomachs bloated like ticks, faces curved into permanent smiles. They roamed this place, supposedly, but... she hadn't really wanted to hear them.

Now that she did... she could see why the false sun was so important to this place. Anything to keep away the laughter, which made it sound like the entire village had slid out of their clothes, marched into the hills and devolved to the level of beasts.

"D'you have a cigarillo?"

She offered him one quietly, taking one for herself. Had some matches, thankfully. Not too many, though. Ought to preserve them. Anthan mumbled to himself between puffs of air to get the fire going, to really let the smoke flow.

"Not usually my thing, but desperate times…"

She hummed in mild agreement.

"I found our equipment, by the way."

His mild comment made her head snap in his direction.

"Excuse me?"

"The attic over the pub, I poked my head up... supplies. Dried meat, fresh canteens... nice heavy coat or two. Everything a fellow might want. And all of it in crates marked with that symbol Miss vo Larima painted on your forehead back in the temple. That snowflake-thing."

"Salt crystal."

"Right, right. Well, that means her contacts here paid off... would sure like to know where they went, of course."

"You don't think we're in danger?"

Anthan grinned around his cigarillo, and she was reminded of just how... sinfully rugged he was. Urgh.

"I think inside the village or outside, we'll be in danger. I think we've be in danger all day, really. All week. Since we arrived in Krodaw, honestly. The fact that I don't know where the danger is coming from, what it's nature is... well, I knew what the mutant in the woods was, didn't mean I could reliably kill it. Know it or not, danger's danger, and with things that depopulate whole villages, I find that knowing about it doesn't really help. Just instils you with a more articulate form of dread."

"...uh-huh."

"I'm glad you agree."

The two of them fell silent, filling their mouths with smoke, letting it sit like a fine wine, before exhaling in great clouds that vanished into the dark a few seconds later. Wind was too strong to develop a proper haze, and the dark too absolute to really see it half the time, not unless it came within the light of the false sun lantern. The laughing dogs yipped at one another, cheerfully rolling around some fresh kill. A villager, maybe. At least the laughter and the numbers meant they were normal. Mutants could hunt in packs, yes, but... well... Anthan put it best.

"Don't worry about them, they're normal. Mutants sometimes form groups, but not often. And if they do... it's a prelude."

"To what?"

"Total fusion. If the contamination decides, for whatever reason, that it wants a group to work together... more accurately, it's treating a group as a single individual and is trying to heal them. Put them back together. At least, that's my theory. And when it wants that, why would it bother with a mode of communication as crude as barking? No, it'd try something like... pheromones, or pulsing lights invisible to the naked eye, or other things. Sounds out of human hearing range, that's another one. So if you can hear them laughing, they're just animals."

"And they'll want to kill us for our meat, not our contamination."

"Exactly."

"...so Lirana would be fine."

Anthan's smile vanished. She had to say it. Had to broach the topic, like the turd she was, but... it was necessary. That's why they were here, after all. Anthan sucked on his teeth for a moment, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. Wasting time. Disliked talking about this. Maybe it was her age? She was barely older than Carza, presumably back in the Great War he'd been working with veterans, tested by the fires of conflict. Lirana, by contrast, was... an employee who wanted to do her job and make some nice money, that was all. See the world, maybe. But ultimately, her goal was to go back home, pockets bulging, and set up with a house supplied by a stable of manservants to satisfy her every need, like the... freakish little lady that she was.

Carza tried to make light of her in her own head. But every thought just made her more melancholic.

"There's tests. To see if mental faculties have been compromised."

"She forgot something in a conversation a few days ago. And she's been very quiet since."

"So we force her to talk. See how much she can remember. We had things like this in the war, we had ways of telling if you were a goner or not."

"Can you do them?"

"Most of them. Not the most precise ones. The thing is, the best way of telling is... alright, so, it's not easy to define. Soldiers just used the definition, and pardon my language, 'if it looks like a fucking mutant then it's probably going to be a fucking mutant'. Again, pardon my language, very vulgar of me. You see?"

"...her back was very mutated."

Anthan hummed, and she felt an urge to defend Lirana.

"But I clipped it. All of it."

Anthan reached down, grabbed a small clump of scrubby grass, and tore sideways, ripping the blades at their base. He held the clump in front of her face.

"Did I kill the grass?"

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"...uh."

"No. It'll be back. You can tear out the top of a weed, but unless you get rid of the roots, you're just asking for it to regenerate. And for mutation, it's... well, once the roots are in, you can't get them out. Not unless you're willing to chase the infection through the body, cutting and cutting and cutting, burning everything... and even if the person survives, their brain might be compromised, so that would need to go too. You can't cure mutation, just cut it out."

He sighed.

"...there's a theory for why it does that. Kill the brain, I mean."

"Really?"

"Oh yes. Some people say it's a malevolent force, wants to kill us, turn us to animals, the vengeance of some old god of the wilds... but one theory is that we're too damn smart for it."

She blinked owlishly up at him.

"It improves us, I mean. We become stronger, faster... and Lirana's been setting the pace all day, even I was struggling to keep up. They live longer, stop needing to eat, drink, sleep... so many advantages. It does improve us, whether we like it or not, and the great... well, the flaw is the brain. The one part it can't improve properly. One idea is that we're just too... smart. We think too clearly. It can't improve the brain, but it can hamfistedly try."

He tapped his skull.

"How do you improve memory?"

"...alter the brain, presumably."

"What happens if you make a mistake? You lose memories, presumably. Maybe it tries to encode memories as instincts, make them deeper... but by doing that, people end up with too many deep memories, embedded deep in someone's skull, and... well. Enough of that, and you just start going mad. The brain is vulnerable, so it starts making parts redundant, to prevent catastrophic loss... maybe it makes a tiny mistake. Anywhere else, that's nothing. It'll smooth it out. Brain? No chance. One loss causes more, causes more, causes more... and it can't repair all of that, it can't even find what it was meant to be."

He sighed... and kept smoking in silence. Carza stiffened her back.

"I'll talk to her."

"I think I should test her, Miss vo Anka. More experience."

"I've talked with her, and... and I employ her. I need to..."

She trailed off for a second, resuming with another thought.

"...do you think the thing in the forest was..."

"Maybe. Impossible to say, unless you want to have a conversation with it. Maybe it was looking for her, maybe it was you with those scraps, maybe it was the Sleepless, and you actually stopped it from attacking us wildly in the middle of the night. For now, I say... leave it there. If we blame each other, we'll just get used to snapping at each other's necks. It's over, now we're just dealing with the final emanation."

"And what do we do, if..."

"If she's totally compromised?"

"Yes. That."

"It's her choice. But she can't come with us. Not when her mind's about to go at any time, not when she'll attract mutants to us."

She moved closer to him, and the alcohol made her suddenly very conscious of her own existence. Her body beneath her clothes, her thinness, the way her stomach seemed to press against her ribs, hollowed-out from hunger... the way she had so very many nerves in her face, so many muscles, and all of them were at her command if she wanted... and why would she? She had the right of command, and nothing to do with it. She'd like to say that she put her face into a neutral, beautiful mask, but in reality, she was probably twitching like a cut of meat with electricity run through it, the way she'd seen a street performer do once when electricity was fabulous and new and fascinating. She'd just watched how the meat bunched and flexed, and created a thousand divots, like rain falling in a puddle...

"...you've had experience. What do people tend to do? Your... fellows."

"My comrades... well. Once they knew... some just walked into the wilds and waited for something to kill them. Some asked to be left alone with a bullet for the rifle, and then they took off their shoes. I imagine you know why."

She remembered. The local auxiliaries, afraid of capture in that strange fort in the forest. Taking off their boots and socks so they could use their toes to pull the trigger.

"...any other options?"

"Some beg to come along, arguing they were fine. Those were hard, but at least you knew you were in the right. Half the time the stress just worsened their mental symptoms, made it easier to leave them behind. Two men were so fervent that we had to force them to stay. One was... well, he was too dangerous, and too violent to be properly contained."

The implication hung heavy. He continued hesitantly, rolling over his words like they had a strong, strong flavour which he needed... not to savour, simply to process - a process that took time.

"And a few... a few took another option."

"What was that?"

"I'll tell you later. For now... we ought to deal with this before we set out. Give the village its due. Already gobbled up its inhabitants."

He was trying to say something funny, but he didn't seem to know how it was meant to be funny, so he just... said it. No smiles, no laughter. Just a reflex. A final question.

"Why me? Why not talk to Hull? I know Lirana better, I could have kept her occupied more effectively, and..."

Anthan did something unexpected - he reached out, and ruffled her hair. She hated it. Hated every second. But it was... communal, in a way. A way for him to show affection - by scratching her like she was a bitch-dog who only needed a little scritch-scritch to be the happiest thing in all existence. Insulting and gratifying all at once. Very disconcerting.

"You're in charge, aren't you?"

"It's a... joint expedition."

He stopped ruffling. Good.

"But you're in charge."

"I'm really not. I delegate to you and the others. I know nothing about survival in the wild-"

"But you know about survival."

She looked at him sharply, and he smiled very slightly.

"An urchin knows another urchin."

Her cigarillo dissolved to ash in her hands.

"Don't worry, I haven't told anyone, but... there's that look our sort gets, eh? A hunger, a real damn hunger for living, no matter the cost. This feeling that life's taken away everythnig else, you've no money, no home, nothing worth a damn, but you have life. And if you have life, you have something. And you fight for it, because it's the one thing you have left to fight for. It's the last spark of ambition, and when you nurture it, it can propel you anywhere and everywhere. Volatile stuff, and-"

"Stop it."

"...and it's driven both of us here, I'd say. I saw the way you looked around Lirana - coca chewing, I presume. Don't get me wrong, we had that too, it's a common bloody weed, and-"

"Stop it."

Her voice was damn near plaintive. Anthan glanced.

"What's the problem?"

"I don't like thinking about it, I like talking about it less."

"...hard time?"

"I don't like talking about it."

Silence reigned for a moment. She ought to go back inside. Talk to Lirana. Sort through this situation. She knew the symptoms, and Anthan was good at it all. There was work to be done. The dogs laughed at her in the dark, accompanied by the snapping and tearing as they stuck their flat muzzles into the bodies of dead animals, laughing merrily as they fought with one another for the meanest scraps, laughed in warning and anger and long-nurturing revenge. Laughing at her. At the entire expeditionary concept. Idiots, the lot of them - humans were animals, and like all animals they had pots to stick to, always. The laughing-dogs stuck to theirs, but humans... humans were so terribly strange. Somewhere, out there, there were islands of perfect foundation stone where nothing mutated could touch them. Animals were good as mutants, humans were always reduced by the process. The world was for animals, humans presumably had a wonderful city somewhere, full of golden fields behind solid white walls, and they ought to find them. And it was theirs. And yet in their foolishness, humans had to venture out of its walls, out of their perfect valley of Courts, into a world which was simply not meant for them.

Might as well.

She might not get a chance again.

"...my mother died when I was young. Died before I could be taught to read or write, or do anything useful. I took everything I could from our little flat, and just... sold what could be sold. I was ripped off, made a few scraps. Enough to stay alive for some time, but..."

"It all runs out."

"All of it. And then I was hungry and alone. Begging worked on good days, but I rarely had enough. Stealing could work, but half the Courts are... firm about thieves. I could go to the foundlings, see if I could get into a Court that way, but... well, I was Courtless. Mother had been Courtless too, she'd been in debt to the Court of Salt for a long time - they call it 'arithmetical citizenship'. Anyone pays a Court its dues, socially and financially. They just... enumerate it. Saline Manifesto says 'it costs an enormous sum to nurture a citizen from childhood to adulthood, a wise Court considers this an investment, but rarely is this investment paid back entirely. Let it be enumerated, so that citizenship may be more efficiently rationalised'."

"Sound like insane consultants. Met enough in my time."

She sighed.

"I can't blame them for it. It's their religion, even if they call it secular. Faith in basic numbers and sums. Made them rich. But it's soulless. I get the feeling half of them hate their own Manifesto, even the most powerful ones."

She could talk about that for a while, but... no, no, she couldn't. It was cowardice, plain and simple. Weakness. And she'd had quite enough of that. Even now, the laughing dogs inspired this... fear in her, a pulsing, sparking fear, like a malfunctioning theurgic contraption, and... no, no, it was like a crashing wave. It would crash in with fear, and wash out with shame along the beach of her mind.

"...but my mother had left them. She'd become a barmaid, and thought she could leave the Court. Shuck off her debt and try to make her own way. But... well. Suddenly she still had debts. But now there wasn't a Court to count them out and provide a safety net. Now the debts were being handled by ugly men with too much stubble who..."

She trailed off.

Bad memories.

"...I suppose I was just... well. Most of the Courts don't take foundlings, except from their own ranks. The only Court that might take me was Salt, and they were... well... I'd get her debts. And maybe I just thought about how desperate she'd been to not live under them, and thought of them as these nightmares that couldn't be approached. Ever. I grew out of it, but for a child, it was... compelling."

"I understand."

"Debt meant all the things my mother went through before she died. Now, I know the Court of Salt is... better than that, at least, they are now, not sure what they were like back then, and maybe I could've found a life there, but-"

"You were a kid, no point justifying your actions intellectually."

"...I know. My mother had her reasons, even if I don't understand them, but at the time... her wishes were the only things I had going for me."

She paused.

"I scavenged, I stole when I dared... or when there was no other choice. Felt life on the bottom of the heap. Lived on the streets for a good few years before I moved to the Court of Ivory."

"How'd that happen?"

"Blackmailed my father. He's meant to be celibate."

"...very nice. For me it was the army. Decent food, roof over my head, and I just needed to shoot at a target and march in a line and say 'yes sir no sir' day in day out."

"Did you hear people complain about that?"

"Constantly. Not me."

"Me neither. Studying felt so small compared to what else could be waiting."

She trailed off as Anthan nodded in agreement. She had more to tell. The first time she chewed coca. And the simple, bloody truth of it all. The thing which she could never live down. The thing which put her where she was, and... the thing she didn't think about. The thing which ignited the gnawing in her stomach into a frantic, ravenous devouring force that insisted on survival. And... she wasn't talking about that. Not now, not ever, certainly not with Anthan. He patted her on the back. She remembered the way she curled up with the other girls she found on the street around her age, just to keep warm in the winter - one of them awake, others half-asleep with their eyes a little open, just to be sure. The way she saw... saw the women with their white-painted faces in those houses with red lamps and the stylised image of a cat on their signs. Saw how they aged quickly, how they decayed inside and out, how... how she'd do anything not to be like them. Dying from lover's slough, or ageing without promotion and finding themselves washed up and unwanted.

"I'll go in."

"Thanks for the cigarillo."

"You're welcome."

"I won't tell a soul."

"...thank you."

She wasn't that girl any more. She was older, a little stronger, a lot wiser, and she had a home. Rites. Been initiated into womanhood like she ought. Her mother had decided to live Courtless, to seek freedom, and she'd found herself staring down the barrel of a few long years of worse debt, worse poverty, and worse everything else. Death before she was due. And a dozen men she was told to call 'pa', before they got tired of her mother and moved on. Until the men dried up, the work dried up next, and then health went down into the pit. Carza had learned an important lesson from her. That the best life was living death. The best life was one where you thought little and worried little, and simply moved through existence with pleasing calm. Serene and rich and idle. Routine. And if that meant captivity to a greater force, so be it. If that meant pledging yourself to another Court, so be it. She could do that. Easily.

When you'd seen the alternative...

Then nothing seemed quite so hard.

And she had closure to find. The pub loomed behind her, a dark, silent construction, a half-life dancing in its dusty windows. They were giving some illumination to the corpse of this place, even if they had no idea why it was dead to begin with. The silence was permitted - the cold made this place kindlier, somehow. Cold meant silence, and it meant stillness. So this dead place felt somehow appropriate. Didn't feel quite so... very wrong, like the dead village they'd slept in when the stench first came, and they found a shining dagger in the well. She thought something odd - Lirana had come far. Further than the 61st. Perhaps further than any citizen of Mahar Jovan had in this part of the world. Run into the Sleepless and come away living. When Krodaw fell - if it hadn't fallen already - she doubted anyone from her city would traipse this country for quite some time. She was here to witness the edge of her home's most disastrous colony, having survived all the horrors of its collapse. The door creaked like an old man's knees when she pushed it open, and the wood was bitingly cold beneath her fingertips. Light fanned out, warm and crackling. Fire was warmer than the false sun. The latter burned cold and constant, this, at least, had some mortality. Every flicker - would it go out? Would it endure? Where would the fire-flecked coin land? And when it did... joy. There was no guessing with the false sun. It was working, or it wasn't, and there wasn't a thing they could do about it.

She opened the door back to the old pub, where bowls of ice-cold stew sat where they'd been abandoned, and she could see scars of mud on the ground from boots that had passed her only a few days ago... and now were no more. Amongst the remains of the vanished and likely dead, the living sat and drank oat whiskey fermented in great barrels under the pub, in the clammy earth which kept everything cool.

Lirana sat at the bar. Dark hair. Strong back from labour. Powerful limbs from the same. No more glasses, she cradled a whole bottle of the unmarked liquor.

She was still sniffling relentlessly.

Hull was at her side, standing around the corner of the bar and looking down into the wood worn smooth as a mirror by countless elbows over countless years, lacquered by the spilling of alcohol over and over and over. Silence surrounded the two. And Hull never met Lirana's eyes... not that she met his either, nor sought for it. She stared down as well, still as a corpse save for the sniffling and the occasional swig. Hull flinched at the sound of the door opening... and looked up to meet Carza's eyes. Walking away a second later, once she mouthed a command at him. Leave. Go. For me. She'd appointed herself to this duty, and she intended on fulfilling it. Hull didn't know Lirana... nor did Carza, but that was why she was here. To learn. The laughter of the dogs faded, and all that remained was the crackling fire, the sloshing of liquid, the occasional sniffle, the tapping of boot heels on wood softened by continuous use. She sat down clumsily, awkwardly, and leant on the bar. Her voice was quiet.

"...Lirana?"

The woman looked over.

Her lower face was crusted with mucus. A solid, half-gleaming mask. A frozen waterfall. And Carza remembered... remembered the Sleepless. Mutation could confuse organisms. She was ill... and she was mutating. The mucus which gleamed like a mass of diamonds, and distorted the flesh beneath until she looked even more monstrous. She had a cold. And now she was becoming it. Every part of her specialising to accommodate it as part of her. Illness as a stable state of perpetual existence. Her eyes were bloodshot, almost pulsing with thick red veins, like the ribbons on the creature in the forest. And her voice was thick, half-choked. When had... when had this happened?

"I know why you're here."

Carza's eyes widened.

"I-"

"You're here to kill me."

"I'm-"

"Do it. Get it over with. Or shall we go outside first?"

"...I really-"

"Been sniffling for hours. Can't stop. Always hot or cold. Can't focus. Head's full of cotton wool."

She grunted.

"Get it over with. I know where I'm going."

Another sniff, not that it seemed to do anything. The mask remained intact and perversely flexible.

"It was my fault that Egg died. I figured it out. The moment I saw the clippings you took, I figured it out. Not too hard. M'memories getting worse. Harder to remember my parents. My home. Why I'm here. Easier when I'm walking... stopping makes it worse. Stopping means no distractions. That thing in the forest came here because of me, not you. I know it. And now I need to die. You're justified. Anthan's waiting with a gun, isn't he? You came to lure me out?"

Carza overrode her with the loudest voice she could manage... which didn't amount to much.

"No, no, it's not that. We just need to talk."

Lirana sniffed, and it sounded almost like a sob being barely repressed.

"What about?"

Carza glared at her.

"You cried on my shoulder when you killed someone in Krodaw. Said what you wanted in life. And then you saved me from Kralat. We're not putting you down like a rabid dog. We're talking our way through this, and seeing what we can manage, and how you want to go about it. You deserve better than that. I don't want to bury someone else today."

Lirana stared.

"...you're serious."

"I am."

"I got Egg killed."

"The Sleepless did. Or I did. Or you did. Or all three or none. Or the creature would've killed us anyway. Blame all of them. I am. Blaming myself and you and them. Egg died, and he died saving us all. You included. He gave you today."

She was being... more talkative than usual, and it frightened her. But there was a knot of tension in her stomach. The suspicion that had been building up for so very long, an awareness she'd had since the moment Kralat's blood washed over Lirana, but had been kept quiet. Hope had sated it. Then other concerns had overwhelmed it, but... it was all coming out now. And Carza was halfway talking to Lirana, and halfway talking to Egg. To Cam. To the local girl whose name she'd never learned and likely never would. To the people she'd failed so far, and couldn't apologise to. She couldn't say 'sorry' to Cam, couldn't find closure with Egg for his sacrifice, couldn't try and understand why the local girl had wound up in the auxiliaries, what ambitions she wanted to pursue outside of Krodaw... couldn't ask any of them anything. She was a scholar, she was... decadent, in a way. The only deadlines were artificial. Books wouldn't run away from her. Information might die, but she could see the scope of her own importance, and her research wasn't going to change the world. So much had been lost already that it was pointless to mourn it all. Better to stick to what remained. Information had no life, information had no... soul to it. It was data. Passionate data, but stale as well. Lirana was a whole life.

She hadn't even known Cam and Egg's last names. She hadn't learned the local girl's name at all, nor the names of anyone in that doomed patrol.

She wouldn't let that chance slip her by.

"You deserve better than this. So we're talking this through, and doing what we can, and that's that. As long as you're still alive, you're bound to me contractually, and by that contract, I'm telling you to come outside with me so we can talk."

Lirana's mouth shut. Opened. Shut. Opened one more time, and Carza noticed that her pupils were larger than they ought to be. On the verge of splitting. Mutant. Contaminated. A lure for all the devils in the dark.

"...the dogs might attack us. I can hear them."

Carza couldn't. Lirana's hearing was getting better.

"Not if you're around."

"...I suppose there's a point there."

"Now get moving. We have talking to do."

"...alright. Alright. Hold on."

She reached down, plucked out her gas mask... and placed it on her own head. Wrapped herself up in her heavy coat, and then grabbed some gloves from the supplies. Wrapping herself up like a present. Carza... saw what she was doing. Quarantining herself. Making sure she couldn't doom Carza. Once she thought she wasn't going to die immediately, she became conscientious. Reasonable.

Still something human in her, then.

Enough to talk to.

"Ready, boss?"

Her voice was muffled behind all her layers.

"Ready. Lirana."

And side by side, they ventured into the dark, and the false sun. To the world of laughing dogs and looming mountains. To the aristocratic trees.

And in the distance, Anthan followed. Rifle out. And eyes watchful... and mournful.

This wasn't a new drama.

But age didn't make it any easier.