Chapter Thirty Three

Morning approached with dismal slowness, and a cold wind blew down from the ever-closer mountains. She could see clouds hovering around their peaks, and not for the first time, Carza remembered the stories she'd heard in that awful temple. The glass men who apparently lived up there, spirits, mountain gods, whatever you wanted to call them. Gods so profoundly impressive that the Yasa had devoted their temples to ascending to their level - to immortality and perfection. Sometimes she saw the sun catching on the smooth banks of snow which tipped the peaks, and in the glimmering, imagined one of those mountain gods staring down at her. Inviting her? Maybe. Challenging her? Possibly. Morbidly curious about if she was going to reach the mountains at all? Most likely. Either way, there was journeying to do. The night had been spent huddled int he hut - Anthan, in his boundless wisdom, had insisted on it. There was something out there. It had come, watched them, and left a moment later without doing anything more than scaring them. Carza worriedly combed her fingers through her hair, nervous of the idea that all this stress was going to turn her prematurely grey. She'd heard about that, apparently it was a thing. And she desperately wanted to avoid it. She wasn't... vain, but if she could avoid going grey at twenty-one, she'd really rather like to. If at all possible.

The night had been long and silent.

The animals had come back. But the presence... it kept hovering in her mind. The stench had been real, she'd swear on it. Maybe the paranoia had exaggerated things, but something had been here. And as morning dawned and the group ate in silence, Lirana scratching herself irritably - Carza could sympathise, clipping mutations was bloody miserable and just left one feeling unclean - they began to explore. No-one had slept well. The village was barren, empty, and it seemed to exist as a negative space. It drained things, and in the morning light that was only more apparent. All the shadows seemed deeper than they ought to be, all the huts seemed to still be lived in despite being utterly abandoned, and the crumbling shacks seemed like huge creatures shuffling around the perimeter. Mangy dogs larger than any person. Some of them even had fur-like moss growing over their pulpy surfaces, which breathed and stretched as the sun began to grace them. Then even sweated as the sun's heat increased and moisture began to leak from the damp wood. This place was draining. Just intact enough to be eerie in its silence. And the knife in the well...

Carza still had it.

It shone on her belt. And in the morning light, it was... well, more obvious. Carza had unwound the leather from the hilt - even treated, it was still mouldering a little, and she didn't want to grip damp, slippery leather in a life or death scenario. Sounded like a pretty embarrassing way to die, honestly. And she saw, to her surprise... a factory marking. A serial number, stamped into the metal with the force and precision of a dedicated instrument. She showed it around, trying to get some insight... and she wasn't surprised to hear Lirana's conclusions. It was Mahar Jovan - but then again, everything was from Mahar Jovan out here. What, was it meant to be from some kingdom which had no involvement out here? Now that would be remarkable - but a Mahar Jovan factory-made knife, well-made but otherwise unremarkable, being found in a region where Mahar Jovan had been for nearly a century now... it was utterly unsurprising. But she kept imagining why it had been in the well to begin with. Maybe someone had been hiding a treasure, maybe it'd been an accidental deposition... it looked recently deposited, but with the high quality metal and the treated leather, it was hard to tell for exactly how long it'd been there.

She couldn't help but imagine the bloody 61st Expedition. Maybe this was a trophy taken by locals after the expedition had been torn apart, maybe it was just from a corpse, maybe a whole slew of weapons had flooded the area after the expedition died, with all its equipment unrecovered by Mahar Jovan itself. For all she knew, every village from here to the mountains had rifles from Mahar Jovan's doomed 61st. The knife was hers now, though. She needed something sharp, something that would work at close-range. Because Founder knew she had the aim of a blind, deaf woman who'd just been spun around repeatedly. At least a knife had a basic principle to it - she didn't need to practice trigger discipline on something without a trigger, right? No need to reload a knife. No need to aim with a... well, technically she did need to aim with a knife, but it was probably easier than aiming a chunk of metal which exploded violently-but-usefully when poked in an inclement fashion.

Eh.

Either way. They explored around the exterior of the village, near the ruins of the old palisade wall. Just to check for... tracks? Maybe? She wasn't sure, but she stuck close to the others. Unwilling to let herself get picked off like one of the side-characters in the cheaper variety of horror pulp novels she sometimes sampled. Not the overly raunchy kind, of course. But... yes, sticking close. The forest was thick, and the dew on the leaves caught and reflected the dawning sun's rays in a shower of tiny motes of light, constellations exploding around her in every single direction. Beautiful, yes, but... whenever she flinched, she remembered how the river had stopped the Sleepless from attacking. A little body of water, and suddenly they'd been stopped. A few motes of light, a few moments of blindness, and she could be thrown to the ground, her knife and gun taken, and her scalp removed from her head. She could expect no mercy... nor, honestly, did she want any. The mercy of a pack of ravenous mutants was probably worse than their cruelty. But the forest was still lively. Birdsong continued, insects buzzed... the contamination detector wasn't reading anythnig more than the slightly-higher-than-average levels around the village. They patrolled, explored, poked around... Hull was sleepy as all hell, and kept slumping against trees while pinching his nose and muttering to himself. Eager to get on the road. Never fun, this sort of early-morning small-walking. The kind which didn't wake one up, but just reminded one of how much they could have actually accomplished if they just... set off immediately. Hadn't dallied. Maybe it was nothing, maybe it'd been some passing mutant that had observed them and left just as quickly, uninterested in the uncontaminated, unwilling to fight them to get to whatever limited stores existed in the village itself. Hell, if she was walking... might as well. She withdrew her clippers, bit her lip... and clipped. A few skin tags fell to the ground, purple, mottled, and tipped with a single drop of blood at their stumps. The medication she took burned on the way down, clearing out her insides, helping to neutralise and clean out any budding growths in her stomach. She was so focused on this that she barely noticed when Hull stopped in front of her, only realising when she bumped into his back with a low 'uff' of annoyance... and stopped.

A low, low whistle.

The detector was going off.

And she noticed that birdsong had ceased.

Her clippers were back in her pocket before she could think, her knife was twitching uncertainly in one hand, her pistol was in another... Anthan shot her a quick look.

"Pick one. You're not good enough with either to use both. Just pick something to be alright at, not two things to be terrible at."

Embarrassed, she sheathed the knife... then reconsidered... reconsidered again... reconsidered one more time... and finally pulled out the knife, holstered the pistol, and gritted her teeth. Well, if in doubt, she could just... hold her knife in front of herself and hope that whatever attacked her charged straight-on and convenient fell onto the thing. Because strength was most certainly not on her side, she had the muscular potency of someone who generally spent their time writing, reading, and eating fruitcake. Silence all around, silence and the clicking of firearms being readied. They stuck together, and advanced carefully... and the whining began to increase in pitch. When they began, it was a low hum. Then a low whistle. Then it crested, higher, higher, higher, like a kettle coming to the boil. In a matter of seconds it went from the whistle to a dim shriek, and finally, a loud howl. Strong concentrations. Had they found the spring near the village, or...

Anthan pushed aside a bush... and paused.

Carza looked over his shoulder, and her eyes widened behind her mask.

One of the Sleepless had received a dose of his own medicine.

He was... there was no other word for it. He'd been splayed. Two trees, not too far apart, served as poles for him to be split apart. She saw that his back was a ragged mess, his front hung strangely loose with his spine torn out, his ribs scattered over the ground, and his organs... no sign of them. Something had grabbed him, nailed him to these two trees using jagged branches, and had promptly... spatchcocked him like he was a roasting chicken. His entire damn torso had been emptied, and his skin hung loosely, belly sagging like a pregnant woman's as it bulged with air. The stink was tremendous... and blood was splattered over all the trees in the vicinity. No wonder the detector had been going mad, all the contamination in him had been flung around, soaking the earth, dousing the trees... already she could see mutations beginning. Whorls developing, eerily eye-like, in the bark of every daubed tree, branches almost seemed to reach down. The poles which secured the Sleepless man were almost curving, thin branches extending eagerly for a drink. Reminded her of a vascular system... some had already connected, and now a bark-made system of veins and arteries protruded from the mutilated corpse, slowly drinking every last drop of contamination left in him.

They had interrupted a feeding session.

And she could see worms crawling out of the earth, reaching for any drop of blood that the plants hadn't yet stolen away for themselves.

The detector was shrieking.

And Carza quietly, carefully stepped back, terrified of being mutated.

And her confirmations were confirmed. Something had been out here last night. The Sleepless had been here too... and those two presences had met. One had come out on top. And one of the Sleepless had been butchered, torn open and messily devoured. Egg expressed her feelings adequately.

"No wonder there weren't too many back at the river."

He took a deep breath, the sound reduced to a death-rattle by his mask.

"...they're being hunted."

How many were dead already? How many of the Sleepless remained? Did any remain? Had they turned back? Were they being slaughtered even now? How many other trees had been used like this? Carza gripped her knife so tightly that her knuckles turned the same shade as the snow on the mountaintops behind her. The group stared at the body... and wondered what the hell could've done this. How vast. How strong. How fast. How... enduring, if it had lived despite so aggressively fighting the Sleepless. And perhaps the most terrifying questions - how clever was it, and how hungry was it? Would it kill them for invading its territory? Would it kill them because of the contamination they'd taken up by natural exposure? Her breaths were coming faster. The stench from last night. It'd been close to her. Maybe it'd been right behind her, listening, watching, sniffing... tasting the air to see if she was some sort of mutant, something juicy and delicious. And then a more delicious target had shown up, and it had gone on its merry way... or maybe she was completely unappetising, yes, maybe that was it, maybe she was legitimately an unappealing little morsel.

Maybe she was safe.

Maybe she was in danger.

Maybe it was right behind her.

...the forest was silent to her thoughts. It had no answers for her. Only ambiguities large enough to contain something which... well. Which could do this. The sharpness of her voice surprised surprised even Carza herself.

"We need to move."

There was no disagreement.

* * *

The detector hadn't gone off for hours now, and Carza felt safe enough to remove her gas mask and let the cool air wash over her face. The river was running peacefully beside her, and she stuck a finger gently into the water... and shivered at the sudden cold. The mountains were coming closer. Maybe a few more days of travel, Anthan thought. His smiles were gone, replaced with a burning intensity in his eyes, and a firm grip on his gun. No more cheery comments, he was utterly focused on the task at hand. Surviving until they got to the mountains. Conversation had died with that man back there, had been left to moulder in the contamination. Egg was tense as well, but... more than anything, the man looked tired. Ready for a nap. Lirana was jumpy, and Carza remembered what she'd said - she was twenty-five. Barely four years older than Carza. Anthan and Egg were both in their thirties, but... Lirana was close to her in age. If she was in the Court of Ivory, Lirana would've still been considered her peer, both of them barely-graduated novices struggling to prove themselves. And Hull... Hull was pale, shivering, and yet kept on walking with his usual good humour. Unwilling to show weakness.

She remembered the feeling of him grabbing her and throwing her from the water... and felt a genuine flush of affection.

The forest, if it had ever been neutral, was neutral no longer. Something was out there. Something huge, fast, dangerous, and undoubtedly mutated - those organs had been eaten, no way this was some benevolent local willing to stand up for their helpless group by using excessive brutality on the Sleepless. Something was coming for them, and every tree could hide it, every second could bring a low, warning whistle from the detector, keenly audible as every bird went silent and every insects decided to go anywhere else. She... she tried to remember her old lessons on mutants, and discussed them quietly with Hull, just getting her ideas correctly in order. More accurately, they just went over things both of them already knew. Mutants, contamination, how dangerous it was, how fire was the best damn thing in all of creation... Egg interjected as they talked, and gave his own impression. One informed by practical experience.

"Ever seen old growth?"

Both shrugged. Unsure what he meant. Egg smiled faintly, his mouth a red slit on a wide, pale, hairless face. Good that he was on their side - Carza had to admit that seeing his face on her enemies side would be pretty damn intimidating.

"Old growth forest. This place doesn't quite count, it's... well, it's had a few fires, I'd imagine. A lot of this is new. Only reason we can walk. Old growth... it's tougher. Gnarled. Grows in places where fire isn't needed to clear away debris - the damp takes care of it. And yet it's not too damp, not so damp that it's going to kill the trees where they're rooted. You can always tell when you're in an old forest. The trees grow thick, there's no scars from burning or logging, the ground's covered in fallen trunks, all of it overgrown with this thick, thick moss, thicker than any grass you've ever seen, twice as soft, and ten times as inhabited by things that crawl and jump. You leave a forest alone for long enough, and I mean hundreds and hundreds of years, and you wind up with somewhere... well, pristine. Dense. Hard to navigate. Forms strange patterns, inhabited by things that would be extinct anywhere else. There's a forest out east, some real old growth, and they say there are still aurochs in that place."

Carza blinked.

"...aurochs?"

"Old type of cow. Extinct in most places... but not there. There, they're still alive. No-one to hunt them. And those things are big, bigger than the cows we have, hairier, wilder. And all because you've got no-one with an axe running in to cut them down and use their horns as decorations."

He paused, looking around.

"Mutants are the same. When you hunt them, they die. That's it. You hunt them well, and there's no way for other mutants to get at their contamination, their matter. Leave them alone, though... springs come up, mutants consume it, mutants consume each other, they get strange. You saw those Sleepless - they're young. Old mutants, they eat more and more, they grow larger, denser... stranger by far. Imagine something which has eaten specimens from a hundred different species over hundreds of years, in varying combinations, with contamination changing them in unique ways... imagine something that incorporates parts from all of them."

He shrugged, looking more than a little nervous.

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"Old growth mutants are ugly bastards, pardon my vulgarity. They say that's why that damn Great War started in the first place - some old old growth mutant. Centuries, millennia... all alone on some peninsula way up north, getting weirder and weirder until... well. Until it somehow sent millions of its kin down to break anything in sight. The smoke from burning those damn things... we've had black snow for years now. Black as coal. Too much smoke in the air from all the pyres, all the huge ones we had to burn which took weeks to render to ash, just kept on regenerating over and over, almost as fast as we could burn them..."

He trailed off. Carza felt a stab of guilt. He was clearly... going through some memories at the moment. Anthan patted him on the back sympathetically. Two old soldiers, both veterans against... Founder, millions? She thought... well, she was still thinking of them as a proper army. She'd heard that mutants had flowed south in the Great War, but she thought it was closer to a conventional legion, with legion-esque numbers. Millions, though... smoke enough to turn the snow black for years on end. What was the east like, she wondered? And what was left of the north? Lirana listened to Egg carefully, but didn't seem as viscerally affected... her father had been a soldier, Carza remembered that much. Something on a bitter northern peninsula had almost... well, if she was being honest, had almost wiped out all humans on the continent. What kind of thing had developed there? What kind of thing had developed here? Something powerful and swift... and intelligent enough to avoid those who posed more risk than they offered reward.

There was no conversation after Egg's story. Only the forest, the river, and the dropping temperatures. Carza shivered slightly... she shivered. It still felt wonderful simply to shiver, to realise that the world could be colder and she hadn't been infected by the heat. The forest had an end to it. Just needed to push on, and they'd be fine. The Sleepless hadn't shown themselves, and... well, that might be because they were all dead. Their numbers had been low at the river, had that thing been hunting them since then? No, stop wondering about things she could find no answers to. They passed by only one other village on today's journey, which was starting to trend further and further uphill. Another village, and again deserted. But this one didn't feel like it'd just been abandoned. It was burned to the ground - a charred ruin softening to black sludge from rain, damp, the river... must've been burned years ago. The village last night had felt almost-alive. A bitter, empty life, yes, but life regardless. This was just dead. It had nothing left to threaten them with... and nothing to offer, either. No houses filled with frogs and mice, just crumbled foundations. The one luxury they had now was the fact that the Sleepless were likely all driven off, or hung from the trees like a butcher's stock, ready to be carved and eaten.

Carza studied the place carefully. Burned to the ground, years ago... come on, this was getting too obvious. The knife. The gun. And now this. Two abandoned villages, and one burned while the Sleepless seemed mostly interested in just claiming the population for their own war effort. She glanced at Lirana, who shrugged helplessly. She was uncertain - but Carza thought that this place was definitely connected to the doomed 61st expedition.

...then again.

They paused for an hour here, eating, drinking, talking in low voices. But no new information had emerged, nothing new to really process the situation through. Right now, their strategy was simply to get to the mountains, out of the forest, and away from whatever had butchered the Sleepless. The fact that only one body had been found didn't give them any reticence on assuming that the Sleepless were gone for good, at least, the party pursuing them was. If they were so dissolute as to split up even with their numbers reduced, then they'd be picked off easily, or were so far-gone that they might well have forgotten what they were even pursuing. And... well, if one could be torn apart like that, the others could be torn apart too. The question wasn't 'are the Sleepless dead' the question was 'is the thing still chasing them, has it moved on, or has its attention shifted'. Carza wandered the outskirts of the village, gun in hand, watching the forest with a slow-burning dread that warmed, chilled, motivated and paralysed all at once. It was the right emotion to have on the edge of the great forest, where the mountains rose to meet her. Between the heat of the forest, the cold of the mountains... the known terror of the forest, the unknown tension of the mountains... the difference between obstacle and object.

She paused when she saw the bodies.

A light drizzle was beginning to fall, and she felt the fingers of rain tickling the brim of her overlarge bowler hat. The bodies were scattered freely in the trees, hung over trunks, face-down in the mud... all of them ancient. Long-since picked clean, all that remained was the stretched skin which had bloated and shrivelled in that order, and bones which gleamed wetly in the slow-falling rain. A strange thought occurred to her frazzled mind, strained by the knowledge that something was out there. Rot had bloomed in these bodies, once. A whole world of maggots and flies and festering lifeforms, planets of black organs and untouchable oceans of bone, all secluded in an atmosphere of skin which nothing wanted to pick clean. Too dry. Too... dead. And now... all gone. Worlds had been born, worlds had died, and she saw the ruins. Theurgists had done that, she thought. They hated people knowing about it, but they used their great engines to magnify their images of the great wandering stars. To show that they had lands, and oceans, and strange formations... to show that there were more worlds than these. If you believed the theurgists, of course. And not everyone did. She stared at her graveyard of worlds, and she barely heard her own voice crying out.

There were so very many of them... clothes destroyed, eaten away by time and rain and heat and things which fed slower and more completely than maggots and flies. Moss. Lichen. The things which even now clambered on the fringes of bones, filled the eyes of skulls with spongy green growths... old, old bodies. Old growth forest. Long-gone. Nothing she could do. The others were nearby now, she barely noticed them at all. Even Hull, whose heavy hand fell on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. No time for them. All she saw were the gleaming bones and the green green eyes that stared back into hers. She saw abandoned weapons, rusted and useless, mechanisms fused. Only a few of those, though. Most just had knives, swords, clubs... all the things which could be kept in a shed without much maintenance, kept around in case of terror without any need for replacing old mechanisms or oiling delicate machinery. Even now, some might still be a little usable... but the guns, none. Not one. She saw belt buckles, buttons, rings... metal. Cloth was gone.

She knew what she was seeing.

A battle of the 61st.

She saw barely a handful of soldiers... and she saw so very many people with clubs and knives and axes and swords, all of them old and rusted. Lying limp in fleshless hands.

A hipflask was thrust into her hands, and she sipped gently at it without thinking. Stronger than brandy... she vaguely heard a chuckle as her face wrinkled up in disgust. Not her style.

Finally, she spoke.

"It's the 61st, isn't it? It's old enough, there's just... too much evidence for it."

Lirana shrugged.

"I wouldn't know. I didn't map them."

"Yes, you said."

Lirana gave her a very odd look at that. What was the reason for that? Why give her an odd look at an innocuous statement? Her thoughts were washed away as the bodies became rather more... well, interesting than interpersonal drama. Anthan picked his way over to some of the soldiers...

"Bloody idiots."

He mumbled, barely audible over the pitter-patter of rain.

"Bloody, bloody idiots. Look at them, no hills, no defensive positions. Half of them died from cracked skulls, cracked from behind - tap, tap, tap, and down they go. Never fight locals in a place like this, they know the land better, it doesn't take much for them to get an ambush off, even in the middle of a damn battle. They weren't covering each other... weren't doing anything right. Reliant on guns."

Hull spoke loudly.

"Dozens of locals dead for each one of them, though."

"Exactly. A good soldier would've killed this whole bunch by himself. No guns among the locals, no training..."

He shrugged.

"It's unprofessional. Slaughter in general is, but botching a slaughter…"

Egg laughed darkly, too desensitised to be disturbed.

"I think they annoyed the locals, provoked them, then reaped their just desserts. Seen it enough."

Lirana spoke quietly.

"I think the locals knew they were coming, and prepared a welcoming party. They knew what this expedition was going to do if it found them."

Anthan shrugged.

"I don't care why. Find me a diary, then tell me. Until then, I can just say - they fought poorly, the locals fought wildly, and if they had fewer guns this battle would have a hell of a lot more bodies from Mahar Jovan. Say, though... just a few bodies. Just a few."

He tilted his head to one side.

"What do you think? Do you think this was them at the end of their tether, and this represents a fair number of a tiny fighting force? Or was this just a bad skirmish? A full confrontation with some acceptable casualties?"

He poked a pile of bones.

"I'd clear off the last one, first. They were closing on this one point. If there were survivors, there weren't many. Couldn't fit a battalion into this bit of dirt, not in a hundred years."

Carza felt a little ill, and she wasn't sure if it was the calming tonic she'd taken, or just being around so much... death. Even old death, rot long-gone.

"...I... I think we ought to move. There's no shelter."

"Don't want to stay around the dead for long?"

Hull spoke up.

"She has a point. And I'll admit, I'm not too eager on spending time in this old boneyard."

Anthan grinned with the morbid humour of a veteran who'd seen much, much worse things. This kind of slaughter, but significantly fresher. Egg was more jittery, but... mournful, that was the overriding emotion. And Lirana was barely processing it, more tired than anything else. The five shuffled off grimly, leaving the dead be. Carza brought up the tail, her legs failing to obey her... and as Hull vanished into the bushes, as the silence descended, she crouched and poked at one of the weapons left behind. It was a club. Just a wooden club, but whoever had taken it had taken a living limb. It had planted itself now, and the way it'd twisted over the years, the roots were entering through the ribs of its user, and in some areas were flowing up the spine and into the braincase. She imagined a gnarled bundle of roots, a bulb forming a replacement brain. It'd damn sprouted, it had little leaves... it was a whole sapling. She could probably date the battle from it, if she was so inclined. If she chopped it down and read its rings... was that still a thing? It sounded so convenient that it could be false... it ought to be false, nature was never that satisfying when it was alive, only when it was dead and pinned did it become nice and simple and reduced to pleasant characteristics. Life was chaos until it entered the killing jar.

She froze.

There was no whistle from the detector. But the birds had gone quiet. The rain? She couldn't hear much over it, it pattered on the leaves of the canopy and sent up a storm of rustles and shivers. Impossible to hear anything, and... well, why would birds sing in the middle of the rain? Why would...

Something moved in the boneyard.

She stared. And remained very, very still.

It was impossible to describe. She had no clear sight of it, it was behind a stand of trees which rose high and thick. All she saw was... was something grey. Grey, gnarled, mottled... changed in many ways. An old-growth. A very, very old-growth. Maybe the dead were coming back to life. Maybe the world had decided to produce that nightmare instead of all the others. Couldn't content itself with the old, had to innovate... something huge. Bigger than her. Grey and mottled like the lakebed. And she saw something moving, something picking up the bones with delicate grace, perverse grace for something so large...

A pause.

And an eye stared through the branches.

Her heart almost stopped.

It was the size of her fist. And it held nothing human in its depths. And it was only one of many.

She stared...

And the eye vanished.

The grey vanished.

And the boneyard was dead and damp once more, the rags of old clothes fluttering around ribs like flags waving feebly for surrender. Her eyes flicked, with the dreamy languor of someone resigned to being crushed into paste, and she saw... her eyes widened a little. A body was propped against a tree. Female, based on the hipbones, and the ragged dress which was now a series of brown, tough strands that nothing could eat, but a few things could feed slowly on like a child devouring a piece of candy one lick at a time over hours and hours and hours. And in the crotch, in the hollow hips, there was... there were a few branches, a few leaves, and a small family of dormice. They were shivering in a tight brown ball, sheltering one another, the parents keeping a close eye on the children. They knew the smell of contamination... and a second later, as the rain pattered down like tears, one of the dormice peeled away from the bunch, and started to paw around the body. None of the others stopped it.

But some of them came to join it.

The scent must be gone.

The eye never reappeared.

It'd been the size of her fist...

And now... now nothing. Now silence. Now the pattering rain and the sounds of the forest coming back to life.

The bone-gnawing hunter was gone, and she felt, in her heart of hearts, truly and passionately and utterly, that it was the same thing which had spatchcocked that fighter earlier today... it was following them.

Why?

Why was it following them? What could they give it?

Or... was it just monitoring them and making sure they made no trouble?

Was it waiting for them to kill some other mutant, and by doing so to give it a free meal?

Anthan had said that it was wise to burn the bodies of mutants, because if you didn't, the carrion feeders would elect you as their appointed keeper. The one who gave them nicely contaminated meat. Had to discourage them - like stray cats bonding to anyone who fed them, but in this case they'd rip apart their keeper if the supplies weren't forthcoming.

Maybe they had become this thing's feeder by sending it so very many. Maybe that was why it was gnawing old, dried bones...

Maybe it was waiting for a sacrifice.

She backed off... and broke into a frantic sprint a moment later, arms pumping, lungs burning, eyes pricking with tears. She couldn't say why she did that. Why her eyes needed to be wet. Maybe she was just a coward.

She was a coward.

The others waited in the charred ruins, looking around and stiffening at the sight of her.

"I saw it! I saw it! I..."

She leant heavily against Hull. Just needed something familiar. Something alive. Something beyond the mossy green eyes of those bodies, and the thing which was devouring them for some reason. No... no, she knew why. Bones were sharp and jagged. Some animals ate stones to grind up the meat and plants in their stomach. Maybe this thing did the same. Maybe she'd seen it preparing itself for a meal, much like someone else would put on a dinner jacket, a cloak, a napkin... much like someone else would thump their table with cutlery to signal 'food, food, food now before my tastes turn to things which bleed and scream and are ever-so-tasty'.

"I'm sorry... I just... it was large, it was grey, it had an eye the size of my fist, I think... I think maybe we brought it by making it think that we could give it food, I thought..."

She came to a halt. Anthan and Egg were looking at her very seriously indeed. The rain was still coming down sounding like the tips of a thousand thousand legs on the edge of every leaf, a swarm united to stare at them. The crowd was banging their cutlery on the table, and howling for food. Screaming for it, like children, infants, toddlers, other words for the squalling and innocently sadistic.

Anthan's voice was low and cold, almost growled.

"Damn. Fine. How large?"

"Don't know, hidden behind trees."

"Certain it was a mutant?"

"No birdsong. No sound of life."

Egg spoke slowly and considerately, drumming his fingers against his thigh.

"Could just be an animal. Nothing too sophisticated. Not like much things make noise like this, not like much can be heard..."

"I know, I know, but I promise, it wasn't natural, the eye was wrong, it... I think we brought it. Like you said, Anthan. Lured it in like a stray cat."

"...those are the small mutants, the carrion feeders. The big ones don't have that sort of habit."

"But what if we fed it all those Sleepless?"

"...hm."

He thought.

"We're moving. Big thing like that, it'll be cautious. Nothing that big lives that long without knowing how to restrain itself from feeding frenzies. We get out of its territory, enter the territory of another... caution will take precedence."

"And what if the territory goes up to the mountains?"

She was more talkative, panic driving her onwards. Egg hummed darkly.

"Then we go into the mountains, and we do it quickly. Harsher the environment, older the mutant, less chance of being intervened with... and surrounded by things as old and nasty as them. So that's what we do. We go somewhere with plenty of big, ugly creatures, and they'll ignore us, and it will slope off back to patrol its patch."

Hull spoke firmly, quietly.

"Are you sure? It won't follow us?"

"It'd be an idiot if it did, and if it's that big and old, it won't be an idiot. We move. And quick. I don't know what its game is, and ideally I don't want to find out. Lirana, ready?"

Lirana looked up suddenly from scratching her shoulder. Scabbing over, based on the look of it. Nasty. Itchy. She blinked a few times, chewed the inside of her cheek, and nodded.

"Ready. Do we move through the night?"

"Day or night it's dangerous. And if we give it time it can prepare for an attack. If we keep moving, we keep it on its toes."

"Or just enteratin it by leading it on a small chase. Tease it, make it think we're going somewhere fun."

"Or it's in the trees now ready to leap out and tear us limb from limb. Dead's dead. I see running as the best option."

Lirana slapped her knees as she stood up, hefting her gun.

"I agree. Let's move."

And with final nods... they did.

The light was declining, and subsided to a dim glow behind the grey clouds. It reminded Carza far too much of the shadowless light of the morgue, the theurgic devices that produced flameless light which never flickered and never dimmed. The sun was invisible. The rain was constant. And something was out there. Something that had protected them - been whittling the Sleepless down since they entered its territory. The Sleepless had kept going, and they'd been a readily available buffet. Maybe. She was trying to read the thoughts of something with a mind alien to her own, defined by instincts she could... no. She could understand them. If she thought of the gnawing in her stomach when her survival was threatened, then she could understand its longing. Its passionate desire to devour and feed and grow... and now they were a ticket to that. Either as providers... or as the final course. Consumed with fury that they'd stopped serving. The river had lost its direction... the rain was pattering down into it with such consistency that the current was hidden, concealed behind layers of ripples and splashes and cloudy disturbances that removed any path. The shining road was gone. A golden path had become a clouded ditch she could barely read the path of. Up, down? Were they going the right way?

Was there a right way at all?

The mountains loomed. Jagged teeth barely visible in the clouds.

How suddenly the path had become unclear.

She walked off, the rain soaking into her clothes, into her hat, and into the ends of her hair which had escaped the brim.

"Hull?"

"Yes?"

"...stay with me. Don't get yourself killed."

"I'll do my best."

"...thank you. Really."

"You're a funny sort of thing, aren't you, Carza?"

She smiled vacantly, and bumped into him. The closest she was willing to get to a hug at the moment, something that distracted neither, inhibited no actions, consumed no time.

Lirana turned, blinked, and grinned.

Carza's expression turned irritated.

"Shut up."

"I said nothing."

"And I said to shut up."

"Hull, are you-"

His amiable face turned thunderous.

"Don't make it odd, Lirana. Now keep your eye out. You'll have an easier time seeing our host than seeing anything back here. Right?"

"...yes, sir. Miss."

She bowed a little, scratched her shoulder, blinked... seemed confused just for a moment, and then kept moving.