Chapter Twenty Six

The wife had done her work. And by gum, she'd done it well.

Kralat had summoned Carza curtly, and asked, in short terms, how much she needed, and when she intended to leave. He didn't acknowledge any of her arguments, nor did he pretend that it was all his idea - he treated it like something they'd agreed on a very long time ago, and now he was attending to it with the same dispassionate professionalism that he treated everything else he did. Mass murder included. She needed a guide? She'd get one. She needed food? It would be provided. She needed her equipment back? He wasn't an idiot. On the off-chance of one of her companions getting any funny ideas, her equipment was not to be dispersed, not until the time had come for their departure. Which felt... fair. The prisoners here outnumbered the guards, the Court of Salt were being kept in line using the stockade, but if, say, Carza used a climbing hook to wrench open the bars in the middle of the night while her employees ran interference... well, maybe the Sleepless would win. No, they'd definitely win, they were trained, healthy, and brimming with contaminants that removed the need for sleep, winning was an obligation. Carza couldn't do much more than throw her degree certificate at them.

...actually, that might work. It was back home, sure, but it was in quite a heavy frame, so...

No, no, silly. Dumb. Moronic. The kind of thing only someone trapped in the same temple for several days in the awful heat with no changes in clothes and nothing to think about but all the awful ways she might die...

Anyway.

She felt a sense of surging relief as she found her luggage, brought down by two sweating guards. Still a prisoner, just... 'work release', that was the term he used. Kralat thought she could do him a good turn, so she was going to march out. No idea if he thought of her as someone sympathetic to his views... she doubted it. But maybe he understood that she was too damn scared to really do much, even if she disliked him and his ideas. Which was basically correct. Her plan was to get to the steppe and then pretend this place never existed until she needed to go back, by which time their guide would be completely mutated beyond reason, and maybe Kralat would've died because he tried to preach his vision of the world to someone armed with a large firearm. Simple as. Hopefully. And now she had gear. Warmer clothes that made her sweat just to look at... climbing equipment... rope... some dried rations... medication... spare filters... cigarillo. Her wonderful, wonderful boxes of cigarillos, all of them still crisp and perfect and wonderful and she loved them, loved them, loved them. Wasn't meant to take anything from the boxes, but... she was able to sneak out a single one. Just for an emergency. Right, anything else... had anything been stolen.

So far?

Yes.

Bullets? Gone. One of her shirts? Gone. And any weapons stored away in any of the other boxes had been plundered, along with all their ammunition. Plus, a nifty little theurgic toy that could provide light without tinder, flint, gas... gone. Stolen by the Sleepless. They'd searched her things, clearly. Everything was a little in disarray, scattered around, her shirts were unfolded and marked by filthy fingerprints... and despite being searched by eager murderers, everything was still so much cleaner than her actual clothes. Which was a little bit miserable.

But it did the job. And when the boxes were sealed and taken away... she still felt a genuine spurt of optimism that almost, almost overpowered the general panic which was constantly pumping through her system these days. They had a way out. A genuine, legitimate, established way out. Oh, she was aware where things could go wrong. Kralat could've been more... pressing on the issue of loyalty, could insist on sending a whole troop of soldiers with her to ensure she did his bidding, could have been attacked by one of the other leaders at any time - who could say how long it'd take for mutation to totally drive a group to insanity, and how long it'd take for them to realise that the best source of food were their old comrades. And she could see more and more soldiers succumbing to mutation by the day. It seemed like every eye she saw was split open these days, pupils dividing over and over and over. The diet of grains, she now realised, was... probably for the best.

Mutation could confuse creatures. Could fuse them on a genetic level, then spread that fusion outwards as a basic model.

Grains were simple. The only mutations derived from them were... slightly tougher skin, and an ability to remain still for very long periods, soaking up the sunlight with ease. Nothing too dramatic. Nothing too violent. But the changes were still occurring - she saw them drinking contaminated water sometimes, glugging it down and shivering as the changes progressed. They were taller than her, much taller, and more muscular - but it was random growth, no kind of overriding pattern existed. It looked like they were reinventing themselves with each inoculation, a new model for the body emerging and overpowering the last one... and then being overpowered before it could finish the job, leaving a strange layered effect. A torso that was thin, and layered with far too many ribs... giving way to heavy muscular arms, with long delicate fingers, and supported by legs which were marred with ungainly knobs of muscle that seemed to serve no purpose at all. Their teeth were sharp. Their breaths stank of raw meat. And some of them seemed to barely be able to speak, they simply snarled and snapped at those around them, gabbling in a random assortment of sounds that might be language, but...

The number of humans was counting down. Faster and faster. Not much time left before they had to go out, just to milk some use from the terminally mutated, for whom madness was a day away.

Always watching her.

Sometimes she woke to them close enough to touch... teeth bared a little, eyes burning with minds that couldn't quite be called human.

There must be a spring here. Must be. Some point of contact with the great underground rivers.

She worked with fevered intensity. Wasn't going to succumb. Not like the rest.

Egg was a solid force, reliable, good. She still found it hard to believe that he didn't know about how Cam had sold out information to the Court of Salt... even if it hadn't amounted to anything, it might've, and she was disturbed by the idea that her group was that easy to infiltrate. He must've known something... and that tainted any further conversations. He remained cheerful, remained good at his work, and never complained, but... but she wasn't sure how much of it was an act. How much of it was the god riding on his back? How much was him? Was there anything resembling a self underneath his role? And if she thought about that, she wondered just how much she was trying to wear the role of the devout scholar, and how much that identity's burdens weighed on her... and then she started having an existential crisis, and that was something that was just stupid.

She was having a regular crisis. A physical one. And a mental one. Adding existence to that felt like voluntarily squeezing a lemon made of salt crystals into a bleeding wound while wailing at the misery of her life and how unfortunate it was that the lemon made of salt was entering her wounds, oh boo hoo, boo hoo, woe is her, woe is her.

...hm.

...did she actually look like a wet rat?

She felt like a wet rat.

Also felt like she was going crazy.

Was she going crazy?

No. No, no, no, she was... flirting with the process of mild disturbance, but nothing close to crazy. And leagues away from mad. Insanity was well off.

She checked a puddle, and saw a pair of tired eyes staring back, a sallow face shrunken by hunger and eat, a gnawing in her expression which... did look a bit rodent-like... and she hadn't washed, so she looked grimy, and sweaty, and damp, some would say... wet, and...

"I don't look like a wet rat."

"Hm?"

Damnation!

Egg was giving her a look from where he was working - which mostly just involved doing a great number of push-ups to 'get himself back into the swing of things'. Which she... partially understood? Not the push-ups, though. That was just weird. Why would anyone do that?

Some people were true freaks.

Everyone knew the ideal body type was unhealthily skinny due to forgetting to eat, and slightly hunched from studying too much, with bony knees and... and... she was going mad.

"Nothing."

"No, not nothing, you said you didn't look like a wet rat."

Egg heaved himself up, his bald head glistening with sweat. Founder, he was tall. Like a big, weird mountain.

"You do, incidentally."

And belike a mountain climber she would scale the peak before her and bite out his eyes.

"I do not."

"You do. It's very endearing, don't get me wrong, boss, but you do look like a wet rat."

She narrowed her eyes.

"I do not. You have no proof for this statement, and as your em-"

"Bad posture, unreasonably skinny, you always look like you're going to bite someone or something, you gnaw your meals, and the look in your eyes is the kind which only really emerges in the sort of creature that had to fight for a teat the second it was born."

She glared.

"Which god are you today, Insulting-Slandering-Baldy?"

He laughed. Loudly. Made her jump sharply, and hunch just a little more, which only made him laugh harder. And suddenly... he stopped.

"That's deathly insulting to my culture. Continue, and I shall become the god known as Burly-Scholar-Squasher, who made his name from his well-honed recipe for scholar chutney."

Carza blinked.

"That's a made-up one."

"Yes, it is. But no, I'm wearing the role of the Hunting-Citrus-Pronghorn, and I shall likely continue to do so."

She remembered this one. A mourning role.

"...still wearing it, then?"

"Yes, I am still wearing it. It's more than mourning, though. The Hunting-Citrus-Pronghorn mourns, yes, but it also sings to the wilds, and defends its territory with fierce pride... it is an older god, old and sweetened with age, turned into something kindly and remembering than... savage and cruel. Many old gods are cruel, but not this one. Sometimes, though, one needs a little depth, no?"

He smiled sadly.

"Sometimes it's best to feel things deeply. It means they mattered, and that... that has a certain charm to it, don't you think?"

Carza blinked.

"...I think so? Yes? Yes."

"Go on, keep scheming, wet rat."

An involuntary and embarrassing growl escaped her throat.

"I'm not a wet rat."

"...all I'm saying, is if I found you in a restaurant's kitchen, I'd expect the place to be burned to the ground by sanitation workers."

"...oh, shut up. I'm not. And that's final. I'm your employer, you ought to respect me just a little more."

He saluted lazily.

"Yes, great leader. I shall follow you into the depths of hell. Now, if you can lead me back out again, then I'll respect you."

"...I'm working on it. It's a lengthy project with multiple working parts. Get back to your push-ups."

"Join me."

"No."

"A lady cannot survive on brainpower alone."

"Worked so far."

"Very well. Keep the appearance of a wet rat. It hardly troubles me."

"Shut up, Egg."

With a sharp laugh, he got back to work. Carza sidled away quietly. Still felt guilty about Cam... but the idea that it was just a random drunken brawl that killed him was... it was something, she'd say that much. Complicated matters. And then the idea that Cam had been spying on them, Egg had probably known... it made everything messy, and she couldn't extract a message or a moral from it. Be guilty, no, don't be guilty, wait, do be guilty anyway because a life was lost, she was to blame, not to blame, somewhat to blame, trust people, don't trust people, acknowledge that she was so unimportant that anyone trying to screw her over was likely just doing it for the equivalent of spare change...

...huh.

Being irrelevant really did make things easier. Blackmail was useless when she was poor, spying was pointless when she knew nothing... so many cruel activities would have no rational reason to occur to her. Assuming, of course, that the people performing those activities were operating rationally... and only some crimes were based in any kind of rationality.

Not all. Not even close.

Life was still life.

That'd have to do.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

* * *

She imagined this would be her final visit to the cage. A quick alert - she'd done it, she'd be on her way, the agreement still stood. She was sorry she couldn't do anything more. The bodies were tightly-packed, the steam from their bodies rose in a haze into the air, a shimmering mirage that almost concealed the wounds, the spreading infections... It was like gangrene had gone airborne. Seemed like half the injuries she saw were starting to reek. Mutation would be spreading in soon enough. And once it did... she knew about it. Feedback loops. Contamination set in. Mutant insects came to feed on it. People would fight them off, killing the insects, and thereby spreading the contaminants in their own bodies, attracting more mutants... eventually, this place would be a zoo, a cage of slavering animals that were barely recognisable as has-been humans. No idea how long these people would last, and she felt guiltier with each second she stood here. Maybe that was the point. She was getting out. They were staying here. There was something uniquely awful in that. She wasn't even going to hazard an attempt at getting them out - she'd fail, she'd lose, she'd die or be locked in there with them. there was no logical reason to do so. And it still...

A memory.

A very, very old memory.

She shivered.

No. Not reliving it. Not now. Never now.

The gnawing in her gut intensified. The desire to live. The rat-like urge to survive at all costs, to grow fat and happy and stupid in the confines of a warm den, where no-one could bother her or take away her comfort. It was a kind of death-longing, she knew that. A desire to stop thinking and stop advancing. To reach the state where decline was permissible. She was a person who wished to decay, but only when nothing could exploit that decay, only when that decay came without any damn consequences.

Pathetic urge.

But hers. Always hers. A gnawing she could never get rid of. And in this heat, in this forest, surrounded by Sleepless... it was all she had. And it grew louder and louder with every day, every hour, every minute, every damn second.

She blinked.

Hold on. She could see people moving in the cage. A man slumped with his forehead against the bars, and she spoke quietly.

"I'm sorry, did something change in there?"

"More room."

He croaked through cracked lips, and smiled in a dazed reverie.

"...why?"

He was silent. She studied the crowd, and... and... oh. Oh Founder. Miss vo Larima was gone. Vanished. Missing. Nuts, nuts, nuts... she looked around quickly, studying the guards... no, she couldn't talk to them, she didn't speak a word of their language... returned to the prisoners.

"Please, where did Miss vo Larima go?"

A prisoner was swaying from side to side, too weak and spindly to force his way to the bars for any kind of rest. His stomach was starting to bloat from starvation, and his arms looked like they were taken from a wax dummy - no life in them, none at all.

"She... she was taken..."

He stuck out a shrivelled tongue, trying to lap up some of the moisture which dripped from the top of the cage. A Sleepless was perched up there like a bird of prey, watching with barely concealed amusement at how he struggled to catch a single drop in his mouth, without coming close to the bars - that would warrant punishment. She could see the torture they were performing - the prisoners could lean against the bars, for now. But then the axes would come out, beat them back, and they'd be standing together once again, locked up like tinned sardines. Contraction, expansion... the cage was a beating heart, and right now they were relaxed, the chambers were filling... and then they'd be crushed down, begging for a circulatory system to take them away. A great, wooden heart that beat on despite having no body to feed. Beating on for the entertainment of a few watchers. She could see axes being sharpened. Cut the prisoners back into a huddled circle where they could barely move, and bright eyes would stare hungrily from the dark, eager to get their axes dirty.

They were very, very bored.

And the prisoners were suffering from diminishing returns. The weaker they got, the less fun they were to poke.

"Where? By whom?"

Silence met her. A wall of it. She sensed... maybe a little bitterness? Anger? Or just weariness. None of them had any connection to her. She got the feeling half of them loathed her, honestly. She'd loathe her in their position. The little cow that got out through no talent of her own, just luck and not being tied up with a Court that the Sleepless loathed.

"Please, just... just tell me, why did she go?"

Silence, the kind which didn't just represent sound's death, but the kind which killed it - killed it and left its corpse to drape over the world, a predator leaving its kill uneaten. She could hear strangled words hanging close by, unspoken and unheard.

And she saw the guards standing nearby. Staring at her... and the prisoners. They looked feral now. Like it was a conscious effort to remain on two feet, not on four... not on more, in the case of some, who wore more clothes than usual. Concealing something, maybe. They were young, she realised. Very young. No wonder. This was how the Sleepless worked, apparently. Plunder villages for soldiers, mutate them into positions of strength, then burn through them before they could become a problem. Even the shortest was taller than her, and taller by far. The most distressing thing about them was their skin. It was thick, yes, and dead. Like... like eggshells. Dead, bloodless, just waiting to be cracked and replaced with something else. The final barrier to cross for a mutant. The point where all resemblance to the original form ceased, and what remained was... nothing. The cow's leg by the train tracks, wriggling as it tried to survive by any means necessary. She could see where the skin was flaking... see how their muscles were churning, with their skin unresponsive. Disconnected. Just a cocoon for them to slowly grow.

They were weeping.

Weeping fat tears of pink-red fluid. She remembered reading about butterflies going into their chrysalis. Dissolving into liquid. Dying, in a very real way. Ceasing to be... so something else could reform. A second birth, a second gestation, and no father/mother but themselves. Some cults thought it was a beautiful thing, but she'd always found it a little horrifying.

And now she saw it happening in front of her.

Chrysalis-skins, and haemolymph tears.

No idea what lurked inside at this point. Not a single word escaped those dry, dry lips... maybe they couldn't speak any more, or maybe they simply didn't care to. Maybe they saw her as food at this point. Maybe they always had.

There were... there were maybe very, very few humans left here.

Silently... she retreated, conceding the cage to them. The prisoners weren't being useful. Her thoughts were paralysed with fear as she went... and the moment she felt the eyes lifting from her, the moment the stone columns surrounded her once more, haunted by the ghosts of dead scents, her thoughts exploded.

Not useful.

Not at all.

Damn, damn, damn... where was she? Where was Miss vo Larima? Dead? Being tortured? Part of Kralat's debates? Some kind of sick way of proving that her mercantile ways were sinful, only proven by cutting her open and breaking her neck and forcing everyone to watch so they could see how right he was... Oh, Founder, if she was part of those... Carza couldn't handle more dead eyes staring at her, she just couldn't, not in a hundred years, there was something about the local girl's eyes that still haunted her waking and sleeping moments. Always approaching at the worst times, gleaming dully as grey clouds spread to cover them... no, no, no, not happening. She walked... and broke into a light jog, then a spring, sweat pouring down her forehead and dripping painfully into her eyes. She barely paused to wipe it away... no, no delays. The temple was close, this was a small complex, she... she summoned the others. She ran to them, spluttering and gasping, even the short run tiring her out a little, and started to poke them into coherency. Lirana, Hull, Egg. The last three people on her side.

Miss vo Larima was gone.

They reacted poorly. Hull was immediately nervous. Lirana was absolutely terrified. And Egg... Egg clenched his fists.

Something had changed.

And the status quo had shifted.

And the status quo had been keeping them alive thus far. Letting their plan develop. Right, right, they... needed a guide, that was it. They needed a guide. Guide, equipment, supplies. The sun was starting to set, they'd not done much, because not much could be done by them. Everything was up to Kralat, they couldn't organise anything but themselves. The four gathered closely... and had nothing to share. Run? Get cut down in seconds. Act natural? Maybe, yes, but then they'd be unprepared. Maybe something was about to happen. She had visions of nightmarish things coming out of the dark, maybe they'd fed her to the feral mutants around the perimeter of the camp... Egg broke the nervous discussion with something concrete, something useful.

"Listen, my friends. The best we can do right now is remain calm, while making ready. You said our luggage is in the attic of that temple, yes?"

"Y-yes, yes, definitely, I remember where."

"Good. Good. Then, if necessary, we have the tools for escape. Navigation might be difficult, but..."

He shrugged.

"We can manage for a little while. The journey might take time, but we should be able to get to the mountains anyway - they're not exactly hard to miss. Until then..."

He reached into his trousers, and pulled out... knives. Several.

"If you need to, these should help."

Hull blinked dumbly.

"Where on earth did you get those?"

"The Sleepless are odd. Some of them have been... degenerating, and when they do, they don't exactly care for property."

Carza whispered, a little horror in her tone.

"You stole them?"

"I liberated them from those who didn't need them anymore. Yes, I stole them. One each. If the time calls for it, then we can maybe get up to the attic, get out luggage, and get moving. If we release those prisoners, we can create a distraction."

"They won't win, though, they'll-"

"Scream and die. As opposed to rotting and dying, which is what they're doing now. If we want to live, we need bodies. We get into that temple, we get our luggage, we run. Without it, we'll be starved out in a matter of days, mutated into shambling abominations a little after that. With these knives, we might be able to do some damage."

Carza shivered.

"Only if there's no other choice. If she just... died, then we can still go. If she sold us out somehow... we stay and wait for the ransom. Maybe she told him about our deal, about the... mercantile stuff. I'm... I'm sorry for dragging us into this, and-"

Hull coughed.

"Everyone, shut up. All we know is she's gone, and she was taken. That's it. She might be dead, receiving treatment so she can fetch a ransom at the end of this... either way, we just need to be ready for anything. Alright? Weeping can wait until we're well away from this place."

He squeezed Carza's shoulder, and she nodded jerkily. Alright. Alright. Overreacting. Just... easily alarmed at the moment. Highly-strung. Couldn't let anything go wrong... right, fine.

And so they waited.

With knives in their trousers, they waited. No more schemes to make - after a point they were just reiterating the same ideas over and over. No more equipment to acquire - they had knives and that was it. Nothing but endurance.

Carza curled up slightly, and stared at the ground.

* * *

The woman came to them.

The sun was setting, turning the sky the colour of saffron as it died. When it was high above, it barely seemed to move at all, but now it was chasing the horizon it seemed to be bolting for the dark, so fast she could mark it moving with each second. An acrobat that swung smoothly through the air... and only when they came close to the ground did you realise how fast they were tumbling, how dangerous their descent was. Only with reference did the sun become fast. On its own... it was indomitably still.

It was to be a dark night. She'd... never liked it, when it was this dark. Darkness was bad. Especially back home in the city. Darkness was never dead out there, darkness was where people hid, where animals lurked and ate garbage, where things could go wrong. She remembered some old... old story her mother had told her. Oh, heavens, she was thinking of her mother again. That usually meant she was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, or was simply feeling very morbid. Both were true at this precise moment. Her mother had told her about some demon that lived at the edge of the forests. She said that once upon a time, the streets of ALD IOM didn't exist - once, the city had been wall-to-wall, you had to walk across the rooftops. This was thousands upon thousands of years ago... but it was done for a reason. The outside world was dangerous, and in those days, people feared anything getting inside, getting into their slice of paradise. So they'd built everything close, filled their homes with idols, prayed to every god they could find. It took an army to crack them open, and once they did, they found a culture which could gather anything under its roof, and hold it tight. It knew what it was like to lose things, and it knew how to protect them.

And at the edges of the forests lived a demon. A thing-from-beyond. They said it was made of dust... that the human mind was a sparking mass, according to theurgists. They said that the human brain was an infinite series of connections, little jumps of power from one point to the next. And if so... why shouldn't the same happen for other things? Why not the earth? Why not dust? And one such thing lived at the edge of the forest. A dusty creature which took on any shape it pleased, but preferred no shape at all. And if you came too close, it would slip up your nose, through your ears, behind your eyes... and then it would burn. It would show you the great wild world, the things in it, the horrors and beauties, the full scope. It was a storyteller at heart, and it would tell every story at once, blazing through one's consciousness until... well, almost all simply dropped into a dead faint. Some died on the spot, screaming their lungs out. And some would walk off into the forest, laughing airily, ready to lose themselves to the stories - to become one themselves.

Anthropologically, she knew it was a way of deifying community and closed-off thought. A way of making their isolation from the world seem good, and not stunted. The story had become less popular as it became apparent what isolation had done to them.

But... mentally, she could feel it. The roaring potential out here, at the edge of the treeline. A force which made her want to scream and run into the dark, stripping her clothes away, diving naked into pools of contamination, howling her way to the mountains as a thing of tooth and claw, of pelt and thorn. Something inhuman. And ultimately, something free.

Maybe if she'd listened to those stories more, she'd never have come out here.

And maybe if she wasn't such a colossal fanny, she wouldn't be complaining about this.

There was no seeing Kralat. But his wife...

The wife of Kralat crossed the temple complex. Sliding between the pillars where perfume had once been sprayed to honour men with glass skin. Even now, she was disturbingly elegant, trailing her fingers along the stone for a second, then allowing it to sway by her side the next, all as one smooth and effortless motion. It was hard to believe that she'd married someone like Kralat... that multiple people had. Then again... probably wasn't her choice. And in this entire temple, she was the only one who'd helped, shown anything besides lunacy. As the sun began to set, she walked out of the temple, moving with her customary smoothness and ease. Might be working for Kralat, might be here to exploit the positive opinions she'd cultivated by not being a complete and total psychopath. And giving them liquor and tobacco, which... admittedly, had made her pretty damn amazing in Carza's book. But... no, no, she was likely still with the Sleepless, still operating with them, still a complete and total lunatic at heart. And here to manipulate them. But as she approached the tiny lights from the little grass fire they were sustaining... Carza's thoughts locked up. She looked... nervous. Twisting her fingers, furrowing her brows. Looked natural, too. And her words didn't console any of them. Not one little bit.

"You may need to move. And soon."

Carza scuttled forwards, clambering messily to her feet, shifting awkwardly around the knife poking her in the thigh. Ow. Her voice was high and nervous.

"Why? What's the problem?"

The woman stepped back for a second, and Carza saw that she was breathing heavily. More evidence for the 'genuinely nervous' camp, that looked real.

"I... the woman in the cage, she was taken to my husband recently, I don't know what they're discussing."

"...maybe she just wants to be released?"

"No doubt, but she's wanted to be released since she was locked up, I don't know what's changed... either way. I want you people gone, keeping this many prisoners is locking up our troops, and they're going mad. My... companion, the other wife to Kralat, she's been unable to walk around the camp without feeling afraid, I'm much the same. It's not good when the animals have to be cooped up. They need an outlet."

She was lying. Definitely. Her explanations just weren't strong enough, and she failed to make eye contact. It was bizarre, she was nervous, she was telling the truth about wanting them out, but she was lying the moment she talked about the mounting mutations or the nervousness of her... sister-in-law? No idea what the term was. So... why? What was she trying to say, really? What did she want? What was her angle?

The others picked up on the obvious deception. But no-one confronted her. She was their one informant in the temple, pissing her off seemed like a terrible, terrible idea.

Terrible.

"...alright, so, so, so, I understand that much, fine, but... what are we meant to do? How can we get out? We need a guide, we need luggage, we..."

"My husband will take time to come to his conclusions. I can try and get your luggage. As for a guide... I have arrangements."

She was a bad liar. And that made Carza certain that she was telling the truth - the difference between truth and lie was as clear as day and night on her face, and right now? She shone with the former.

"...thank you. Really."

She paused.

"...why were you around the cage? I walked there a day or so ago, and... you were there."

A small sigh.

"I was looking at the prisoners. You asked me to do well by them. But I was too late, my aid was pointless - some of the guards are giving them bits of food. Likely to withdraw them at the first opportunity, of course, some new form of torture, but... anyway. I couldn't deliver anything."

Carza blinked.

...oh?

The Sleepless were giving their prisoners food and water, at least, some of them...

...Miss vo Larima had been eating something, had drunk something, they last time they met...

...and this woman couldn't have delivered it...

...oh. Oh.

No idea where this was going.

But it made her very, very nervous.

The woman whispered:

"There will be a tree hung with a lantern, just to the west of here. Go there, and someone will help you."

Carza grabbed her arm, desperation making her bold. Her palm burned where she made skin-to-skin contact, and she shivered, like she was the one being grabbed instead.

"Please, just tell me, why are you doing this?"

The woman stared at her.

"Let go of my arm."

"Why are-"

"Let me go. This game has more stakes than you can imagine, for me as well as you. Now let go of me."

Her voice never rose. Something she'd learned from her husband, maybe - the capacity to terrify and intimidate without raising her voice once, or even altering the tone.

She let go.

The woman left without saying another word.

A lantern on the edge of the camp... the west. She mentally mapped that out based on the position of the sun, and... thought she might have something pinpointed. No, she didn't, she was just staring at damn trees and thinking 'I could hang a lantern there' like some demented interior decorator. Oh, yes, a lantern there, a chaise longue there, and maybe some lamps, and oh goodness she was going a tad bit potty. She was going to get back to the Court of Ivory and become a strange recluse who grumbled and barked and was terrified of the sun for reasons no-one could get out of her, beyond shadowy rumours of a place in the forest where no man or woman returned. Except for her, obviously. Oh, yes, she'd be found one night with a young student, freshly tattooed, and she'd drink from a glass of brandy and growl out 'in my head I still see that temple, I still feel that sun on my neck', and there'd be nervous nods which would make her feel terribly powerful.

She'd gone mad.

Well.

Fine. Mad she was.

No she wasn't, she was just very very stressed.

She turned to Hull with a serious expression on her face.

"Hull, give me a hug. Right now."

He complied. It was pretty good. Carza barely glimpsed Lirana shivering... and more guilt pulsed in her.

"Lirana, you are contractually obligated to be more professional than this."

"Yes, boss. Sure. Good talk."

"Egg, is your god a brave one?"

"More... politely disaffected with the world, unaffected by its goings-on."

"Good."

She clapped her hands sharply.

"So."

She had nothing else to say.

The 'so' hung in the air.

...did she have a follow-up? She ought to have some kind of follow-up, she thought, it felt rational... but she had nothing... damn. The 'so' had been so tempting to say that she'd just said it... it would've been fantastic if it had some follow-up, but... gah.

She stood.

And walked away.

This felt satisfactory. Just keep walking, and they'd think this was some... avant-garde rejection of the conventional pep talk. Subverting expectations. Come up with their own pep talk, the real pep talk was the self-esteem they'd built along the way! No, that was... lazy, she needed to master something before she rebelled against it, otherwise she was just challenging a straw man to a boxing match. Hm. She'd still lose that, now she came to think about it. She was thinner than a straw man, at least, the straw men she'd seen. They were big lads. They were meant to scare off birds, she couldn't scare off birds, she'd been attacked by pigeons and lost, pretty decisively. She walked firmly...

Where was she going?

Oh Founder, she... needed to stick with her group.

Go back?

No, just... walk around for a bit, feign that she was a functional individual and she had been getting her bearings, that was all. Her third eye narrowed, almost mocking her, as her brows drew closer together. Were they laughing at her? Were they? They were totally laughing at her. Had to be. That tree over there was where the lantern ought to be. She adjusted her knife so it wouldn't poke her in the thigh... hm, still in the thigh, better to... crud, crud, crud... OK, not poking her in the crotch now... she stared into the trees, and... planned her return.

Something gleamed in the dark.

An eye?

Teeth?

Claws?

Dripping, congealing venom?

...she went back. Immediately.

They were laughing at her.

And somehow, she didn't mind all that much. Even when Lirana insisted on being her footstool on account of it being contractually obligated, and 'she probably weighed less than any of their bags'. Which felt unfair.

Better than the dark.

Better than the promise of what was to come.

...probably.

Maybe.

...yeah.