Chapter Thirty Four

The rain had only grown, and now it formed a solid sheet, a curtain which parted before them, closed behind them, and otherwise isolated them completely. A sense of frenzy was building in the river, a sludge-grey froth which pulsed faster and faster, higher and higher, too much water, too little time, too little space. Rushing on and on, down and down, into the depths of the world. There was the ice of the mountains in it, and there was a muted lukewarm air that the sky carried. The drizzle wasn't furious, the drizzle wasn't passionate, it simply... fell. Like it was all it could imagine. And it carried with it a sickly warmth that could only come from nature at its laziest. She thought there was steam coming up from the ground, flowing around her feet and cloying at her face, but... no, no. They had clothes for this. Some. Rain capes, heavy leather and cloth treated with material that stank of tree sap and pine needles. It kept the rain off, but only where it could cover, and it weighed everyone down. Carza especially. She had a narrow frame, and the cape almost drowned her in its mass, leaving her feeling more and more like a trapped rodent. And she kept twitching, which... really only worsened the general effect.

In her defence... the forest was inaudible past the rain. And if it was inaudible, noisy or silent meant the same thing to her ears, and quite something else to her general health. Noisy was good. Noisy meant there was life, natural and unafraid, going about its own way. And silent... silent meant it was coming. It was watching. Maybe it was watching now, but the wetness of an eye stared down at her was the same consistency as a wet leaf, and a moving limb... could easily just be rain weighing a branch down, making it sway rhythmically, and she'd be moving so quickly herself that she'd only catch a glimpse of it... and at that point, it might as well be a limb. The guns weren't broken, but she saw how worried Lirana was whenever she looked at the thing. Could happen. Could. The rain was constant, maybe even now it was worming its way into the mechanisms, rusting them, clogging them, soaking the bullets and rendering them useless, and none of them would know until they pulled the trigger and heard a clunk of rejection. Well, she assumed there'd be a clunk. A click? A... whumph, like someone with the air driven out of them? Well, the sound of the gun was irrelevant, because the sound that followed would be significantly louder, and she could already guess what it might be - mindless screaming as a huge creature disembowelled the unlucky shooter with a derisive swipe from claws longer than her entire torso, and...

Calm down.

She didn't know it had claws longer than her torso. They could be shorter. Or it could have no claws at all, just huge fists to turn her into something which could be... no, not buried in a shoebox, buried in a damn sausage casing. Or teeth to grind and chew, or acid, or venom, or razor-sharp spines like a porcupine, or...

She had so many unpleasant ways to die today.

And onwards the rain fell... and onwards they trudged. Water soaked up through her boots, her socks, clambering up her trouser leg... the mountains were completely invisible now, reduced only to vague shadows which shifted too often for her to say if they were real or not. She wanted to smoke, but she didn't want to lose her cigarillos to the rain. There was something unfair about rain, now she thought about it, in her meandering academic way. Rain could just... happen. Millions of inconsequential little droplets that could fall each and every day with no effort. They didn't even try, they were just... falling. And yet, excessive exposure ruined her nice clothes, which took effort to make, ruined her tobacco, which took time and care to grow, and ruined any book which faced the rain head-on, despite it being born of modes of thought the rain couldn't possibly imagine or comprehend. That felt unfair. Rain was a philistine. Rain was a metaphor for the forces of mundanity and pointlessness which eroded away at the foundations of understanding and reason. Rain was a turd. She hated the rain. Rain was emblematic of everything she loathed in the universe. It was... uh... well, it was emblematic of the mutant scourge. And also rain, because rain didn't need to be emblematic of things for her to hate it.

She could just hate things, she didn't need to justify it with some sort of high-faluting logic. Rain was just sort of awful.

Ugh.

They ate silently, and she tasted the coppery rain with each bite. She drank, and felt rain flow into the canteen whenever her lips parted from it. She struggled onwards, and upwards. Because the incline had begun. They were in the foothills, the mountains were close, they had to be. But the thing was closer. Every glance into the bushes made her wonder if an eye was staring back. If grey flesh, flecked by rain, was contorting in a lunge. Could be. No whistles from the detector, at least. The rain had silenced the birdsong and the insects, so it was the last metric of detection she had left. The day passed, the sun became a silver disk barely visible through a sheet of grey, indistinguishable from the moon. The day passed. And as night fell... an issue raised. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep moving. To struggle onwards and out of the mutant's territory. But the rain had been constant, the mud had risen, the incline had grown worse. And in the end... their pace was declining. Anthan struggled onwards, Egg behind him, but the two were clearly the strongest of the bunch, and even they were having difficulties. Roots that once would've been nothing special now became genuine hazards in the gathering dark. A single trip, and someone might slide right back down the hill, or fracture something, twist something... and if one of them had to rely on the others to move, their progress would crawl to a painful halt. Worse than a halt - at least stopping implied resting and recuperation, this would just be maximum exhaustion for minimum reward. As the hours dragged on, and she felt blisters itching to form... she wondered if, in the event of tripping and falling, she'd even choose to get up from the lukewarm, soft, gooey mud. They said that in some parts of the continent, there were animals that bathed in mud to stay cool, and right now, her vision was being affected by the sheer amount of sweat on her face. It was like everything was coated in a dim halo, the salt staining her eyes with a bleariness that refused to clear.

And finally, finally...

"Alright. We're stopping."

Anthan sounded tired. Resigned, really. Not even annoyed, he was too professional to be annoyed. The others, though, weren't too professional to be relieved, and to express that relief in the form of a symphony of sighs that the rain consumed gladly. The canopy was thick, and the trees were large - more than a few had roots so old and sturdy that they formed small cages, the earth around them washed away or eroded by time, and the structure of the roots lingering nonetheless. They sought shelter in one of these wooden cages, where the rain couldn't find them, and they could find a soft bed of fallen, dry leaves that crawled with tiny insects which scuttled away as these large, blundering things invaded their quiet home. For once, she felt dry... well, more accurately, she felt drying. True dryness would come later. For now, she was just happy to have some freedom from the rain, some distance from the brooding sky with its endless clouds. Her reservations against... indecency faded fairly quickly as necessity rose, and she gladly huddled with the others in the small space, guns pointed outwards.

Silence reigned for a long few minutes as they watched the downpour, listened to each patter of droplets on leaves, and wondered how quiet the creature was.

Carza found herself between Lirana and Hull - not a bad position, really. Better than being crammed up next to Anthan. Not that she disliked him, he'd saved her life, but... well, she'd read enough bad pulp novels, and she knew what happened when a rugged gentleman was placed next to a deliriously attractive young lady in tight confines in the middle of the night while tensions were high. Scandal happened. She wasn't even particularly attracted to him, but then again, the pulp novels didn't have much chemistry either, and yet the protagonists still got down to business like a bunch of rabbits at the drop of a hat. Maybe it was a pheromone thing. Either way, she preferred to huddle down here with Hull and Lirana. Because she wasn't attracted to either of them, and she'd spend long enough around both to be pretty sure they didn't exude pheromones. Oh, Founder, she was having weird thoughts again, she blamed it on... on everything, really. There were a lot of possible causes.

For a time, there was silence.

And then, like it had never been... they talked.

In quiet tones, yes. But there was nothing else to do here... well. Almost.

Egg began.

"Nice weather, isn't it?"

Oh, thank the Founder. She was good at weather talk. She cracked a small smile.

"Yes. Lovely. I particularly enjoy the mud."

Lirana grumbled, and scratched idly at her chest.

"I personally enjoy the flu. Think I'm coming down with something because of the rain, throat's full of phlegm."

Anthan snorted.

"Lovely, Lirana. Lovely. Not too fond of rain myself, but I have to say, it's not as bad as I feared. You get some fierce rain out in this part of the world... this is quite mild."

Carza blinked.

"Really?"

"Well, yes. Proper rains don't have build-up, you know, starting with drizzle, working their way up, rising and falling, maybe half an hour, a few hours of intense rain and then fading to nothing... no, proper rain is like a competent artillery salvo. It starts suddenly. No build-up, no variation, just boom, boom, boom. Regular. Heavy. Unyielding. Stops as suddenly as it starts."

Egg hummed.

"You get that up in those canyons, then?"

"Not so much, but... around this part of the world, yes. Definitely. See these roots?"

He patted the cage around them.

"Seen a bunch like this. My guess, the rain gets so heavy that the earth gets washed away... or there's so much churning mud that trees just grow up high on the perpetual mudslide. Like houses on stilts."

He talked a bit more, but more business was pressing on Carza's mind. And painfully, she began the applications. Medication was consumed, making her guts churn unpleasantly. Mutation was... well, it was a disease worse than most. You weren't exactly curing it, just blasting it out of your body with as much force as you could muster. Sometimes, the body made it easy by shunting it out for clipping or... in the case of the stomach stones, being passed in a very, very painful manner. Medication served two purposes - to clean out those accumulations and help them flow freely. And to brutalise what remained. This medication, for instance, effectively shredded a layer of cells from most of her digestive system, just a thin one, enough to stop mutations from digging deeper. Because once they became part of one's biology... then getting rid of the mutation meant attacking one's own biology and hoping one got lucky. Thus, the churning. She was committing strategic self-harm for the sake of long-term survival and stability. The silvery pills were taken by herself and Lirana, while Egg, Anthan and Hull sampled from their own supplies. Larger pills for different biologies.

So far, the risk had been to her epidermis. Her digestive system, too. And respiratory... well, that was where her next medication came in. It came in a tiny bottle which almost looked like it was appropriate for perfume, but the liquid inside was a muddy brown thing that smelled like tar and burnt grass. She sprayed it quietly into her open mouth... and broke out into a fit of coughing. Her chest felt like it was contracting, she hunched, and with a final rib-shaking cough, she spat out a gobbet of bloody matter to the ground outside the cage. Soon, the others were joining in, coughing and spitting and spraying the awful stuff down their throats... this, this was why the filters were important. They protected them, sure... but in the end, they reduced the need for the spray down to once every week, depending on exposure, as opposed to once every day like the other pills.

And finally, the brute-force removals.

Scissors were used to clip away yet more bruise-purple skin tags, but this time... well, this time it was getting more complicated. Maybe she'd just been lazy, maybe she'd missed something, but... anyway. Her arms weren't the only parts exposed. Her legs needed to be clipped, and to her concern, her neck and collarbone needed clipping too. All of them were developing the same faintly soft growths, that reminded her a little of the pads on a cat's foot, but... lighter in colour, suppler in texture, still figuring out what they wanted to be. Cutting them away was... well, it confirmed a suspicion. There was nothing but air underneath - they were almost like external gas pockets. And she figured out why pretty damn quickly. Protective layers. Her body had mutated, and it had decided to use that mutation... to protect itself from more mutation. Little gas pockets covered in dead flesh incapable of mutating. An interesting idea, but... mutation was mutation. The cat couldn't be let out of the bad, the consequences were too... anyway. The body wanted to preserve itself, it couldn't anticipate the negative mental effects of mutation. Different game altogether.

The piles of clippings built up... and when Carza looked around, she saw that most of the others had already fallen asleep. Only Anthan remained awake and watchful in the dark, and Lirana breathed with the stuttering rasp of someone who was probably developing a nasty cold, and found it hard to breathe through the nose. And then the spray made it uncomfortable to breathe through the mouth, and... anyway. For a moment, she thought she had to do something else. Was there another job? Then her eyes began to slide closed, her face relaxed, and she... fell. The leaves welcomed her. She hadn't undressed, but she didn't care, it was just pleasant to sleep while soothed by the regular falling of rain on leaves, on the outside of her wooden cage.

And as she slept, she dreamed.

* * *

Sometimes Carza imagined that dreams made sense. That they portended some awful future. Maybe they'd be based on everything she'd seen so far. Maybe they'd be pleasant strolls through fantastical landscapes, but... if she was going to be honest, sometimes dreams were simply strange. No artist could come up with it, the sheer nonsense that spiralled through her tired brain. And when it was a nightmare... well. Then it was significantly worse. She dreamt that she was running. Not through a forest, but through... uh... a garden. One of the courtyards in the Court of Ivory, then the halls, then another courtyard, another courtyard... all conjoined by delicate archways. And she kept running, naturally, but everything came clumsily. The ground was an uneven mass, and when she fell she felt only a dull thump echo through her, and her arms and legs felt as loose and disconnected as a mass of gelatin. Unfeeling, like she'd slept funny and had severed all the proper circulation. Pins and needles didn't quite capture it, it was too... woolly. Like she was made of loose ragdoll limbs, and couldn't feel through them, could barely move using them. Kept stumbling and falling and... and perversely, she felt tired. Her eyes ached to close, she longed to sink into the spongy earth and fall asleep, but she was already bloody dreaming. Sometimes she caught fragments of her waking self, and the weariness bled through to the dream, making her long for darkness and stillness and non-being.

Any feeling of irritation, though, was masked by the fear.

Something was behind her.

It was the mutant. It was Kralat. It smelled of almonds and rosewater. It was silent and still and coming. She didn't remember staggering to her feet, but she was running again nonetheless, through the barren and empty corridors of her home, always running and yet never feeling like she made any progress - everything looked the same, and nothing made sense. Doors opened to gardens, and archways led to rooftops without a single stair being climbed, and the paintings on the walls were of her friends and imaginary animals, and with each step she felt a splinter... and looked down to see a shattered cup of tea. Every single step, and yet only when she glanced down did the tea exist, otherwise it was just a sound, just a feeling, just a pulse of shame at the imaginary image of fine porcelain crumpling into nothingness. She ran, and ran, and hoped against hope that she'd wake up soon, or fall into a different dream... sometimes she did. Sometimes she was reading, sometimes she was studying, sometimes she was convinced that she had work to prepare for something due this very day, and yet... and yet always the fear. Sometimes the subject was muddled, but the fear lingered, and the prickling of the scars on her arms lingered, and each step shattered another priceless cup of exquisite tea...

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And then she felt something squeezing around her chest. Something heavy.

A gasp left her throat...

* * *

"Don't. Move."

Anthan's voice was low, dangerous, and quiet. Carza couldn't move anyway. She could barely breathe, her chest felt like it had iron bands around it, and she couldn't do more than wiggle a finger or two, and... and maybe that was for the best.

Something was out there in the dark.

The others were asleep.

But the detector let out a low, mournful whistle, before Anthan shut it off quietly. Sounded like a sea bird, the sort which cried in the middle of grey mornings above the wrecks of ships. They knew it was close, the two of them. The silence beyond was all-consuming, noticeable even through the rain. The canopy had vanished. The stars were gone. Something was blocking them. It was... it was huge. So much larger than her, so much longer, and she had no idea how it was built. She saw nothing, just the absent space it occupied. And she heard... heard it snuffling on the ground. It made no noises, not really, but she could hear the rustling of a snout, a mouth, a huge jaw moving over the earth and disturbing leaves, the slither of flesh as a tongue extended, and then... a wet gulp as something was eaten. What was... what... oh.

The clippings.

It was eating the clippings. The tiny pieces of contamination they had left. No lights, only a dim glow from the moon which hid more than it revealed. Should've burned them, should've burned them. There'd been... right, if they were to burn them, they'd need a dry space, they'd need dry tinder, they'd need to waste some of their fuel, or... idiots. But they were all tired. Would that excuse console her when she was ripped to pieces? She was frozen, watching with wide eyes as the thing moved, devouring anything which could provide a hint of sustenance, and... and there was something beside her. And the dread in her chest rose.

She'd fallen asleep before she could discard of the newest clippings.

The huge presence stopped. A final brush of motion over the leaves, checking for morsels... a sniff. It was tasting the air, making noises no animal ought to make. And then, just as soon as it had start making noise... it stopped. But the absence remained. The silence endured. It was still here. And it had found something. Carza tried to be as still as possible, even as control slowly returned to her limbs. The absence was moving in perfect silence, and she caught a few glimpses. Grey, mottled flesh... looked dead. Looked utterly dead. Like the skin of a corpse. No armour, no fur, nothing. Just meat, coiling and uncoiling as the huge thing flexed itself... like Kralat, it filled up the absence with... well, anything. Anything could be there, all she knew was that it was large, and it could kill any one of them in a second if it chose to do so. She heard something unfolding, something...

She felt something at her side, and twitched fearfully, worried that Hull was waking up, and...

That wasn't his arm.

It was too cold.

Her eyes strained to see it while her head fought to remain still, no matter the rising terror.

A grey, cold arm, unnaturally long, was at her side. It was human. It looked human at least, just... dead. Utterly dead, leached of colour. The nails were tough and black, the veins were a delicate blue which remained present despite... despite everything. It was long, reaching from the darkness of the night beyond, still wet from the rain. Too many fingers. Too many joints. It reached, and caressed her side, fingers twisting like antennae, trying to scent out what they longed for. The touch was cold... so very cold, and gritty with grime. Damp with rain. Her entire body revolted against it, goosebumps breaking out, her skin crawling, her stomach churning with a combination of medication, fear, and sheer disgust. Her eyes saw a dead arm moving. Her brain insisted it was impossible, but accepted it. And her body rejected it out of hand. Instincts that knew better than the brain ought to, and passed their judgement - this Should Not Be. Some animal part of her consciousness felt fear. The fear of being around something large, hungry, predatory. The fear which made her want to huddle around a fire and never glance beyond the light. The arm shifted, trailing up, catching the low light a little...

... and then she saw it. The seam running down the middle, from between two of the fingers, over the palm, over the forearm... down and down and down into the dark. It was nothing, just a long, dark seam, a fault line, but looking at it made her terror spike higher than ever. It fumbled, and she let out an involuntary whimper... her gun, where was her gun? It was a solid weight on the other side of her body, it was right there, it was available. If she could get it, whip it around... the hand felt strong. It could grasp her wrist. Stop her. Or just lunge and snap her neck like a twig... or maybe choke her, or use those long, sharp, darkened nails. Dark as bark. Similar consistency. Flawless - undamaged. Tough. her eyes flicked to Anthan. He shook his head imperceptibly, eyes gleaming like marbles. She could see the sweat trickling down his forehead. The great presence was too vast, too close, too unknown. Just... just wait. If it wanted her dead, she'd be dead.

Quietly, she prayed in the confines her head. To the Founder. To the most revered Founder, to he who walked in the dreaming deserts and formed a needle of thought to pierce the overinflated concerns of the dreams and delusions which wandered amongst the ash. A needle to carve his holy words. She prayed to the Founder who surmounted the Coursing and climbed the ever-coloured tower, and who rushed through the true-fall... she wanted to murmur holy words to herself. QUZ AXAXAXA UQLON, the holy gyration of the brain which asked '...and?' THIZ KAA VOLI, the three-faced mantra which is rising and peaking and setting at all times, THIZ, the purification of wiping the dust from one's eyes on waking, KAA, the refinement in the heat of day, and VOLI, the word which is yet to come and will not be understood until the Court of Ivory realised its purpose and could finally put away its books, content that all was known, and all was accounted for, and all was good. She wanted to murmur all of this and more, to bring out her golden needle and anoint it, and...

And she whimpered.

The words weren't helping. She was still so very, very afraid...

The arm and the presence which sustained it didn't react to the sound of her whimper. But she almost screamed when the fingers brushed against her face, and she knew it would react to that. By grabbing her neck and twisting. Another whimper came as the hand slid down, fingers twitching and shivering and filled with an awful tremor that reminded her of an old man's fingers... but this was more deliberate. Maybe it was eager with hunger, and this was how it drooled. Maybe it was happy, and was nuzzling her. Maybe it was furious and restraining its desire to crack her open. And maybe it was a natural motion, like a cat twitching its ears back and forth, an instruction encoded into its basic biology. Shiver. Provide the impression of motion at all times. Provoke the enemy. Taste the air. Never allow the enemy to know when you're reading yourself to move, by moving at all times. Or maybe it was blind and feeling her out, making sure it knew every inch of its prey. The fingers twitched, fumbled, caressed...

And then it found the clippings.

And the seam opened.

The entire arm divided. The seam wasn't a seam. It was a lip. And the mouth ran up and down, teeth like the teeth of a zip, clicking perfectly and uniting the flesh when not in use. And now it was in use. And she saw... saw grey gums dripping with corrosion, riddled with tiny sores that probably served some purpose. Teeth like saw blades, yellowed and sharp and strong. For tearing and trapping - hooked to stop people from struggling. It was to keep her in place, while... while...

The one living thing.

A long, red, worm-like tongue, slithering out from a bottomless throat, coiling swiftly around the trimmings. It was puckered, sores that looked like eyes, suckers, something that produced a sticky coating which swept up the clippings with distressing ease. A slither, and it was back. The seam closed, and it might as well never have opened at all.

And a low, low rumble echoed from beyond.

The arm twitched over her face and the bloody welts where she'd removed the growths to begin with... one last check. But nothing worth consuming.

A quiet withdrawal without ceremony.

A second.

And the absence was... absent.

Anthan quietly popped off the cap of the detector, letting it feel the flow of air... it let out a small strangled wheeze, catching up for lost time... and then a low moan... and then a dull whimper... and then nothing at all. Silence. The contamination was gone. Washed away. The presence had dropped from the sky with the rain, and flowed into the river with it once its time had come. Soaked into the soil and the mud, dripping down and coiling around the roots of the trees. And she remembered the bodies. The boneyard. One village butchered. How many others? How many had been burned until they couldn't be seen? How many roots had been roots, had many had actually been the stubby remains of old houses, charcoal-black and charred to their cores, invisible in the night and the rain and the ever-present mud. One resource that wasn't scarce. Bodies. Human bodies. Old, yes, but... age was nothing when contamination emerged. She shivered, twitched... and then curled into herself while Anthan spoke with reassuring speed.

"You were right. Our friend wanted a midnight snack, and thought we were laying out treats for it. I'm sorry, I should have burned them."

Her voice was quiet.

"Why didn't you?"

"Tired, stupid... and I thought the rain would take care of matters. It usually does, washes things away, confuses scents... it must've been close. Knew where we were, knew what it was looking for."

"Following us all the way."

"Like a stray cat following someone with a bucket of fish."

She shivered.

"But why? We have clippings for it. Nothing much."

Anthan looked uncertain as well.

"Possible that it thinks we'll have some more feed for it soon. Some more Sleepless. Feel like attacking another temple? Luring a hunting party?"

"We should never have split up. Let the whole camp follow us."

"If we did that, we might all be dead. Worse, they might've killed the thing, and then we'd have Sleepless bolstered by an old-growth mutant."

"What is it?"

"I said. Old. And mutated."

"It had a human arm..."

"I saw. It had a human arm... and it looked dead. The only living part was that tongue, the rest..."

He grimaced, and she saw the barrel of his gun glinting in the moonlight, shining like a piece of solid marble with the rain coating it so completely...

"It's gone. I'm sure of it."

His fingers itched for something, she could tell. Tobacco, alcohol... it had that twitch, that stiffness. She felt the same. And his voice was low and warning.

"Mutants take all kinds of shapes. Never the same process, but often similar themes. Best you can do is walk quietly and carry enough fuel to burn down the whole damn forest if you need to."

"...do we have enough?"

"We have enough to burn something. Just remember that a mutant isn't an idiot. If it's stabilised, then it won't stick around when the risk outweighs the reward. If we had more fuel - a wagon's worth - I'd have this whole stretch of forest burning. Show it that we mean business."

"And with the amount we have?"

"If it gets close again, when we're not all trapped in a damn wooden cage, I'll hurl the canister right at it. Burn it badly enough, teach it to stay far off."

Carza turned on her side, her heart still beating out of her chest, only the conversation keeping her from thrashing simply to express the pounding stress which rushed through her veins and up and down her spine.

"...answer me something. Please."

"What?"

"What are our chances. Tell me honestly. I want to know if..."

She trailed off. Anthan's eyes flicked away from her, back into the shimmering curtains of rain that broke up the night.

"Too many variables. Temperament, to what degree we've been contaminated, environmental effects, how far the edge of its territory actually is…"

"As it is now?"

"...in a fight... I can't say. But in general..."

He flashed a small smile.

"Don't worry about it. Egg and I, we're used to this sort of thing."

"Reconnaissance."

"Precisely."

"What was it like?"

"...like this. Tense. Long periods of waiting, brief periods of action. We were gonig behind enemy lines to find... anything. Mutants are smart, see. Especially these ones. Sometimes we'd find enclaves of survivors too terrified to leave their holes, too well-dug-in to be removed easily. So we'd drag them out of the dark, make them start trouble. We'd plant these... bombs in wells of contamination. Slow-burning bombs, theurgic things. Evaporated most of it, collapsed the springs... we tried to find out what they were doing."

His voice was quiet. He sounded almost regretful about some of the points. Carza wanted to press more, wanted to ask what the mutants were doing, but... the way he'd stopped talking made her think he wouldn't answer. So she went to something else. Just out of curiosity.

"...that woman..."

"Hm? Oh. Yes. Lovely lady. But a gentlemen doesn't kiss and tell."

"You were being serious, then? About just... stumbling across her, and-"

"She stumbled across me. I just... followed where things went."

Another grimace.

"Shame, but I doubt I'll see her again. And it'll be good for her if that's the case."

A little spark of something romantic in Carza's chest. A little spark of idealism, to contrast the darkness outside. The mutant which had caressed her.

"...really?"

"Hm. Trust me, it's a lovely story - the lady falling in love with her rescuer, but... fact is, it's dependence. I saw it a lot. Some other scouts, they've got dozens of children, one has close to a hundred, all from finding people, rescuing them, getting lucky... when people lose everything, they cling to what remains, and they cling tight. My special lady with the Sleepless, she and her... sister-wife were more or less slaves to Kralat. Tending to all his needs. And then he goes, and someone else shows up, and she's been so beaten down by years of him, that she can't stand up on her own, not yet. Needs time. It'd be irresponsible for me to try and marry her, or make her a long-time commitment. She deserves better than to flit from one violent maniac to a less-violent veteran. If she gets out of Krodaw, she might have something worth her time waiting on the other side."

His voice was a little mournful, in a grizzly, brooding way. Once again, Carza felt like she was a side character in someone else's story. Anthan was a dramatic, brooding person, good-natured and insistent on solitude, honourable and dashing... and here she was, a skinny little drowned rat, terrified of the dark, incapable of shooting and content with bashing people over the head with her stupid little gun until their faces disintegrated. A gnawing little urchin. Still hadn't changed from her time out... out in ALD IOM. She kept remembering those days. Never could quite forget them, no matter how many years passed. The way hunger made her breath stink as her body digested itself in lieu of anything else. The way she learned the wisdom of cutting her hair short using the same knife she used for eating. And above all, the feeling of being a rat, scuttling from place to place, avoiding the sun, avoiding the large figures which moved incessantly, chewing on her coca leaves and sitting in a daze in abandoned buildings, sometimes in company, sometimes alone, chewing and chewing and losing all sense of time or hunger or sadness or...

She curled up slightly.

"That's... very moral of you."

"Not really. Practical, mostly. I'd be a shoddy husband, and a lady with a gun is about as deadly as a man with a gun, at least if they can aim correctly."

"I'm... I'm sorry for all of this. Leaving my clippings. I just... fell asleep too quickly, but that's-"

"Shush. Over now. Try and get some rest if you can, I doubt it's coming back tonight."

Her curiosity became overbearing. She had to ask. Damn the consequences.

"What... were the mutants doing, in the Great War?"

Anthan stiffened, blinked a few times, and clenched his jaw in a way that showed off its sharp definition, the cleft in his chin...

"If I knew, I'd tell you. But no-one found out, and if they did, they're keeping it to themselves. Maybe that's just the end result of mutation. First, you go feral, become worse than an animal. Then, you stabilise, the mutations harmonise into something useful, the mind acclimatises... and then you start to become something else. Maybe at some point in that third stage you decide to try and rampage over the entire damn continent. Trust me, natural mutants are one thing... but in the Great War, some were sculpted. There were flying things that vomited out clouds of disease from pores in their backs, could depopulate whole regions given enough time. Time was, people were wearing gas masks constantly. Filters became worth more than gold. My parents were servants for a noble lady, and I remember the day when she asked my mother to go and sell her jewels, her priceless jewels, just for a few crates of filters for her gas mask."

He snorted.

"Some were bigger than buildings, some were small enough to sneak in through the water supply. Stopping them meant burning them, meant burning each other when the infections started. You can tell a Great War mutant because they're sculpted... and most of them have cages. Ribs coming out of their backs, usually. Meant for containing people. Dragging them back to be mutated themselves."

He opened his mouth wide, and she saw a vacant spot at the back of his mouth where a tooth had once been. When he closed it, when she'd processed the sight, he spoke.

"They started making these poison teeth standard-issue. Started for reconnaissance, then for basic infantry... nobles had them from day one. Way of stopping them from getting you. Want to know how the mutants responded? They made doctors. Things with needles coming out of their arms, neutralising the toxins we were using as a final gasp at mercy. Some of the best stuff on the market, they say. Capture one of those things, and milk them? You get some of the best antivenom money can buy. Worth its weight in gold."

A long silence endured between them. Carza didn't dare to break it, and Anthan didn't bother to. His story had no satisfying end, just a final anecdote, and... that made sense. The War hadn't ended satisfactorily, it'd just... stopped. The burnings outnumbered the bodies, outpaced their regeneration, and factories could make bullets faster than mutants could soak them up. Quietly, she lit up a cigarillo with shaking fingers, and stared out into the dark. The talk had calmed her. Just a little. Images of millions of mutants crawling over the landscape, spraying disease, bone cages bursting from their backs... the absence, the dead hand, it all seemed a little more manageable now. And based on what he'd said... she was happy where she was. If Anthan was meant to be some heroic lead carrying the torch of the expedition, fine. She didn't want to be in charge of this, she wanted to live, and get back home with Hull in tow. That was all. That was it. And if she accomplished that, she thought she could die happy, albeit with a few regrets rattling around.

The darkness loomed, and she could see tinges of grey light spilling through the raindrops.

Merciless morning.

The absence had left them. But she knew it was watching. The dead hand could still reach out again, if it wanted to. It could still find her. It could still hurt her.

But for now...

She patted Hull, making sure he was still there...

He was. Warm. Breathing. Alive. Asleep, but... that wouldn't last for long. As soon as there was enough light, they'd get moving. Already Anthan was stretching himself, working out the tension which she saw sitting between his shoulders. An itch to pull the trigger, if only to spite his killer.

Egg grumbled.

Lirana sneezed.

Hull mumbled good-naturedly.

And Carza could almost forget the cold, filthy touch of dead flesh on her cheek... the long red tongue that had lapped up the clippings like a cat with milk.

The rumble of contentment which had echoed out, one she could almost apply words to.

Compliments to the chef.

Eager for more.