CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - ANGUILLA ORACULA

Tanner was having an amazing evening all of a sudden. One of the hunters had passed her a very long net and an average-length bucket, and Tanner was fishing out an eel or two. She just wanted to have a look at them, was all. They must be heading to the random place where they'd eke out a living for the next few decades (potentially), if someone didn't catch them. Well, she intended to release them afterwards, obviously. She wasn't a monster. Marana watched with bleary fascination, eyes twitching up and down Tanner's tall form as she focused intently on the slithering surface of the water. Her tongue stuck out one side of her mouth as she concentrated, feeling her muscles straining like steel wires, shivering ever-so-slightly as she ducked the net down, down, down... contact with the river, and she let the net hang loose, feeding on the current. A splash, a shiver up the pole, and she was hauling with vicious speed, knowing precisely how easily one of these creatures could escape from a net. Nothing could stop them from getting to their destination, nothing but being killed and eaten - she'd heard of them bashing their heads to pieces against the side of their buckets, desperate to get away by any means necessary. Not afraid, just... determined. Die or live, they still had places to go, and no damn bucket would get in the way. She hauled...

And a moment later, she had a nice, watery bucket, with a handful of shimmering black bodies undulating about lazily. She knelt over it, brushing her skirt until it lay flat, not even paying attention to how she was putting her good skirt in direct contact with the deck of a mutant-hunting vessel. The hunters, incidentally, were largely just sitting around telling stories, mumbling them in a half-hearted susurration that spoke to long nights doing this exact same thing. Come to think of it, she'd never seem them sleeping much - suppose the mutations were helping there, keeping them running for longer. Like that metal heart under the deck, thumping away even now, sluggish and bloated with whale oil. It was burning slow, but it was burning nonetheless, and sooner or later it'd destabilise and blow everything to kingdom come. The mutant-hunters were the same, really. Sooner or later, they'd explode, perhaps a little less spectacularly, but... anyway. Eels. Eels! They were fished mostly in Mahar Jovan, meaning very few managed to get to Fidelizh, most didn't other at all - the Tulavanta was wonderful for them, they had a whole string of estuaries and bogs to play around in, no wonder they swarmed here in such enormous numbers.

She stared into the bucket like she was a seer, prophecying something by reading the undulations of eels. And what did she find? What did she predict? What great insights into the cosmos did she elucidate from the coilings and toilings of these ardent anguilloids?

She learned that eels were lovely and she loved them. Obviously.

Tanner glanced around uncertaintly, seeing Marana staring intently at her. Her fingers itched. The huners weren't doing anything else. Well... ah, who cared. Who bloody cared, she was tired, she was emotionally strained, she was heading for the northern wilderness where nary an eel dwelled, and her only witness was a middle-aged alcoholic who she'd never meet again in her entire life, most likely.

Screw her cowardice to the sticking place, she was eager.

Her hands plunged into the bucket... and a slightly embarrassing laugh bubbled out of her throat uncontrollably. Oh, goodness, they were lovely. She'd caught three of them, three big yellow eels - yellow in terminology, not in colour, they were largely fairly mottled, like those river pebbles which gained a thin coating of algae. The term actually emerged from their undersides - which were slightly yellow. The feeling of them wriggling around her hands was... well, it was delightful. They were smooth, muscular, almost impossible to grab - if it wasn't for the sheer number of them down below, she'd never have caught them with a net, she'd need tactics. Proper tactics. They were swimming freely at the moment, the moonlight inviting them out to have a little fun in the water - they knew to fear the sunlight, which meant heat, predators, hooks. During the daytime, these little fellows would be hiding among rocks, in burrows of mud, under fallen timber... some people baited them out with little worms, before hooking them and dragging them out of their dens. She'd seen fishermen with long wooden poles with numerous worms in rings at the tip, catching any eels which went for the bait. Some people didn't even bother with the bait, they just set up long tubes of wood in the right places, offered refuge then snatched them up once the time was right. Some people were honest, though - they just used spears and scythes, slashing into the mud while hoping to hit something that wriggled.

People were monsters, sometimes. Maybe that was why so many of the fairy stories she'd heard as a child involved evil creatures that lured people in with promises of food, shelter, warmth, comfort. Kindly grannies that ripped off their faces to show skulls writhing with maggots, weeping tears of pure contamination. Or... right, that was it, she remembered the stoires about the mermaids. Mutants below the waist, long, pale worms extending deep into the earth, latching into the underground rivers where contamination flowed. The upper body was that of a beautiful woman, luring people closer, before grabbing them, dragging them under the earth and immersing them in contamination, breeding new adaptations, new power for the mermaid. Maybe humans came up with these stories because they knew, in their heart of hearts, that they were being cruel to creatures like eels, exploiting their desire to rest during the day, their hunger, their movement, all of it. Innocent creatures just trying to live out their life cycle, and humans knew they were doing something wrong. To her, eels had mystery, in a way that a pig or a dog never could - and that made them special. Some people didn't eat dogs because of some kind of instilled loyalty, or cats because they knew how to manipulate human emotions, or carrion birds because of some perception of uncleanliness, a kind of liminality which made them symbolically risky in some way. But eels...

Eels had mystique. Shouldn't that make them special, independent from consumption? More worthy of it than dogs and cats, really. They were just glorified prostitutes, whoring themselves out for humans in exchange for scraps of meat and bowls of milk. And vultures, crows, ravens? What bird wouldn't give eating human meat a go, she'd heard of people eating horses, and she knew those things weren't exactly averse to chomping on a human or a small animal when they had a chance, those teeth were vicious, and what were you going to do, run from it? From a horse? Oh, but, sure, let's eat or not eat horses depending on taboo, but eels?!

A sudden interruption - a hand plunging into the bucket, squeezing in beside her own. A hand she recognised. Marana swam her hand around a bit, shivering slightly as the eels made contact. Her head tilted from one side to the other, shaking up her brains for some kind of exertion - just like Eygi did. Maybe there was a whole subspecies of humanity with brains that required shaking up, like salt cellars or sauce bottles. The Vinegarians. A small smile crept across her face, and her alcohol-scented breath washed over Tanner.

"Is this some sort of sexual perversity, then?"

Tanner gasped automatically, before her mouth snapped shut and curled into a scowl. And she glared. Indeed, she loomed.

"No. Don't be obscene. I just like eels."

Marana appeared to have grasped that insulting the very large person wasn't a very good move. Not that Tanner would do anything violent - that wasn't legal, not in a situation such as this one. But she rather wanted to. Just briefly. She actually went through the reasons why she should be permitted to strike her, calming herself down, diving into her memory room, going through the slightly sordid garment which contained all the laws relating to self-defence - again, something useful once she got up to a colony where law enforcement might be a little on the spotty side, and people felt the need to settle their disputes outside of the law.

"...really? Eels?"

Marana hummed. Well? Was she going to say something vulgar? Something grotesque? Something-

"Well, they're certainly... ambiguous. Strange-looking, somewhere between a fish and a snake, unusually edible and esteemed as a delicacy despite their strangeness... I mean, look to the monkfish, that's a vulgar little animal that's quite tasty, yet is generally shunned for being utterly ugly, and lobsters resemble enormous insects, only fashionable for dining amongst those poor fishermen on the coast. Eels, though... giant worms, snakes, even, and yet we consume them by the bucketload - my father had a great fondness for lampreys, once upon a time. Why do you think that is?"

Tanner blinked.

She hadn't expected an actual contribution.

"Well... they're common enough, and... hm, lobsters, they degrade very quickly once killed. Taking them inland is difficult, expensive. Easier to just eat them on the coast, but eels are... everywhere. They crawl over land, did you know that? If you look out there, you could probably see them moving through the reeds. I've even read about them crawling in meadows to hunt earthworms, sometimes."

Marana hummed.

"I didn't know that, not at all. Goodness, that far inland?"

"Rare, but possible. I mean, when they're grown-up, eels just lose the ability to eat, committed to travelling out to breed in the ocean. I don't think lack of determination is an issue for them."

"Does that make them harder to catch?"

Marana's eyes were bright with interest.

"I mean, if they're incapable of eating food, surely they won't go for bait, does that make them harder to catch? I remember hearing an epicure once talk about golden eels, rare, expensive, hard to catch, delicacies..."

Tanner thought for a moment, shivering slightly at the thought of eating an eel.

"They're... actually a little easier to catch. Silver eels, I mean. Silver eels are when they're about to breed - see, they're not going to survive for long, they need to move quickly, so they abandon their nocturnal habits. Yes, they're immune to bait, but it's possible to just... scoop them up out of the water with hand nets. Usually that's... very difficult, I only managed it because their numbers were high enough, they had less room to move."

"And... golden?"

"Never heard of those, I'm afraid. Is there anything...?"

"They're small, if it helps. Harder to catch, slightly transparent..."

Tanner snapped her fingers.

"Oh! Oh, you mean glass eels. Earlier stage in the life cycle. Not sure why he'd want to eat the little things, they're... well, they're just babies. Barely grown up enough to move on their own, honestly. I mean, they've just come in from the sea, exploring riverlands for the first time, they're just curious, and... sorry."

Marana hummed curiously, and moved her hand a little, letting one of the eels slither around it casually, dismissing it a moment later as both inedible and harmless - thus and therefore, nothing more than another obstacle. Tanner enjoyed the feeling of the long, glittering fins rubbing against her skin. They'd be getting ready for an escape attempt, soon enough. Didn't want to waste the night being doted on. But her mood was already improving, she found there was a sharpness to her vision that had slowly faded away since... not sure when, but she felt like the world was standing out clearer than it had in some time.

"You said they go from river to ocean, and ocean to river. I wasn't aware of that."

Tanner found herself grinning.

"Oh, yes, they breed in the ocean, we've no idea where. You know, we still don't know much about them. They just come into the rivers for a brief sojourn, all the important stuff happens far, far away. We've never even caught a pregnant eel, did you know that? Not a single egg. We cut open so many of them, thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions over the course of years, beastly business, but we haven't found one pregnant eel! They're modest, they only do their business when we can't find them. They're... goodness, they're so determined, I could cut the heads off each and every eel in this bucket, turn away, and they'd be slithering back to the river. It's like... you know those stories about the old pilgrims, the ones who'd go on long adventures up to the north?"

Marana nodded silently.

"It feels, sometimes, like we're just side-characters in one of those. We're just temporary hazards. Some of these lovely things will outlive us, they can spend seventy years, seventy, as yellow eels before changing up for breeding season. They swim, and crawl, and climb, and we're just obstacles to them."

Marana smiled very, very slightly.

"Tell me, honoured judge, have you ever read the novels of Sarrows?"

Tanner shook her head after a moment, feeling a slight rush of ignorant shame rush into her cheeks, and-

"You ought to, you might like them. They're set in the fens, the ones closer to the Tulavanta, one of... yes, yes, those little townships near Khunrat. Not from too long ago, part of that whole pastoral redemptionist movement in literature, trying to drag it all back from the dismal realists who thought that writing about ten shades of mud in scientific detail was the pinnacle of art... anyway, he wrote well. Excellent descriptions of mud, reeds, weeds, fish... little castles and manors on isolated points of dry land, surrounded by swamps so strange and deep that the eels crawl upon the land with as much facility as in the water, and people stride out with scythes to rip them from the mud, load them into carts, and send them to these little islands in great squirming piles. The old barrows of old kings, the heads of rock, were used for weirs, and all the novels revolve around discovering a crowned eel, which has managed to dine on the remains of a king. Wonderful novels, plenty of incest."

Tanner blinked. Those books sounded fantastic, until she got to that last point. No idea about the appeal there, but it made the books sound raunchy. Vulgar. She suddenly remembered a little thing, a small story she'd read about in a bestiary. And she told it to Marana in halting, uncertain tones, aware of the sound of her own voice, all the little drawls and drags in it, her accent charted out like the topographical map of some deeply canyon-scarred country. Anyway. The story was this - during winter, eels tend to retreat to the warmth of the mud, where they could stay nice and still and happy. But they still needed to breathe - and so their little black heads protruded from the mud, like tiny berries, and hunters would stalk the frozen fens with hooked spears in hand, hunger flavouring their breath. One group of people, out to the west, thought they were fruits of the underground rivers, little rotten buds that had all sorts of symbolic meanings - and the people in this group were called Packlefens by some, for their fenland home, and their habit of packing their eel-spears in with them when they slept. Anyway, during winter, the eels hid in the mud... but things could make them leave. One village on the Tulavanta, a stilted village which hung above the mud to avoid the variable floods of the great river's branches, spoke of blacktides, where the winter burrows would erupt. The eels would flood outwards, scattering towards the cold water immediately, heedless of the chill. It meant the underground rivers were shifting, contamination was rising. The villagers lived on for years and years, relying on their blacktides to know when to run and when to stay, thus avoiding mutation and ruin. Became well-known for it. Until a local potentate decided to use them as reliable oracles, something to dictate the movement of many more people, marking the blacktides up and down the river instead of in a single place. Had dreams of profit, of reliable settlement, of avoiding mutation, of gaining an edge over his competitors by keeping his workforce intact.

The blacktide came, rushing out... people were moved, villages were abandoned, and the potentate felt proud for having avoided a catastrophe. He let his competitors move into the land, willing to let them squander all their labour and investment...

Nothing happened.

No contamination came out. The eels just left. Like they were burdened with the weight of execptation, and felt the need to remain mysterious. Unwilling to be chained by any kind of prediction, any kind of understanding. Eels were to remain unknown, at all costs. The potentate was ruined, and his people shambled away grumbling to beg for jobs from his competitors, the ones who'd moved into their abandoned houses. Some thought it'd been a small earthquake, enough to frighten the eels away. Some thought it was some mysterious signal, like the ocean had murmured that it was time for an explosive breeding season, and they ought to hot-foot it into the water immediately. A visceral allergy to being reliable, perhaps. Either way, the blacktides were never trusted again, and so long as they were considered peasant superstition which had no bearing on reality, they worked flawlessly. Or, rather, the consequences of failure were so small as to be negligible.

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She trailed off, and found Marana was staring directly into her eyes - the evening had long-since died, the night was progressing, the faintest imprint of blue was cresting the horizon like a great wave, flecked with the whiteness of suddenly-illuminated clouds. Marana hummed. Clicked her tongue slightly. Glanced down. Glanced back up. Resumed her stare.

"Goodness. You ought to tell that story to the fellows at the conference. I'm surprised, really. I thought you judges were a mound of legalistic prudes with no sense of imagination. I still think you are, but..."

Tanner bristled slightly.

"It's a career."

"Hm. You know, it's funny - actually, a quick question, do you have a god riding on your back currently? I know that's the fashion in Fidelizh, and-"

Tanner interrupted, flushing slightly.

"Yes. I do. Clambering-Amber-Debutante. You can tell from..."

"The amber, yes, quite. We ought to talk more about that in future. But don't you find it... imprisoning, I suppose? Having a god riding on your back, monitoring and dictating your actions, withdrawing benefits if you don't comply... it's rather like being in some sort of elaborate torture mechanism, no privacy, no internal life, completely focused on the exterior."

Tanner tried to get her thoughts in order, move away from the eels, but... no, speaking of eels, these ones had to go back in the river. She pondered the question as she strode unsteadily over to the railing, bucket churning in her hands, and a second later the smooth, black bodies of the eels were rejoining their kin, ready to snap up whatever food they could before buckling down to weather the sunrise. She thought to herself... no. No, not really. Having a god on her back was nice, restraint was nice. Even here, she felt like she could start doing some damage to the railings, to the decorations, to something. Hell, Marana wouldn't last a second before Tanner picked her up and threw her overboard to join the eels. And the fact that she was capable of having these thoughts, to Tanner, proved exactly why she needed to be restrained. 'Prison' was thrown around like some sort of slanderous term, but Tanner saw it differently - prisons were where you put criminals, dangerous individuals. A zoo was a prison, and she knew full well that there were some terribly rare creatures preserved in them, studied in them. Most of the insights into eels had occurred under conditions of captivity. Is a volatile chemical reaction 'imprisoned' when it's kept under control, limited in its full, explosive potential? Oh, sure, you could get more out of the reaction by letting it run unchained, but you'd also lose a lab and everyone inside it, and maybe more people, if the reaction was especially unpleasant.

She turned, ready to give a deeply righteous lecture on the virtues of law and order, the necessity of a dictating principle to keep things regulated, the importance of restraint in the human psyche, and...

Marana was drinking again. But her eyes never left Tanner's face. Studying her carefully... even as the seconds wore by, and her eyes became more and more glazed, her body more relaxed... the conversation died a quick, unceremonious death. She tried to keep talking, mumbling a little, her accent somehow becoming archer as she became more tipsy. Even managed to churn out one or two aphorisms, but most of them perished before she could finish them. Drunkenness had taken root, and it killed her brain, her thoughts, her wit. Turned her into something which... honestly, appeared ludicrously confident, and yet was quite clearly barely a tenth of the woman Tanner had just talked to, who'd shown interest in her eels, treated her with some kind of respect... honestly, and it was odd, but Tanner had never actually talked about eels with Eygi. Just never came up, beyond the occasional reference which never led anywhere. And here, Marana had engaged her in conversation, didn't ridicule her interests once she realised how important they were, and immediately started giving book recommendations. Even her father hadn't done that. And now the alcohol had killed that person, and left a drooling idiot behind, swimming in her memories and spewing out whatever it could snap up. Tanner sighed internally. She'd have to carry her down below. Wasn't going to trust her on those narrow steps, not with those heels, not with those eyes. She moved quietly, hauling her up, steadying her, ignoring the laughter of the crew. The thump of the engines was in lockstep with her own footfalls as she went downstairs, towards Marana's cabin. A sudden grunt came from the older woman, rather unladylike, and a spark of intelligence returned to those cloudy eyes.

"Hm? Oh, yes, of course, terribly good of you. Apologies, I was parched. Now, you...you should come to the conference."

Tanner blinked, almost dropping her by accident.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'll allow it, simply because you've done me a favour by taking me downstairs. Terribly good of you, incidentally."

"You said."

Marana thwacked her on the shoulder lightly, a drowsy smile crawling across her face like an elongating slug.

"Now, none of that. You ought to come to the conference. We're holding it in this beastly little hotel, for poetic reasons - most of us are heirs, heiresses, or simply have rich friends, getting out here was never going to be an issue. Regardless, you ought to come. A giant judge with an affectation for eels, oh, there's something very good there."

Tanner wasn't entirely sure she liked being treated like a prized show dog. And anyhow, she'd only known Marana for... what, a day? A drunk encounter, followed by a fairly decent conversation, followed by more drunkenness. Admittedly, it'd only taken a pie and a brief chat for her to latch onto Eygi, but... well, she was more adult now, needed to approach friendships or acquaintances in a more mature manner. Meaning, no tumbling head over heels because someone showed a vague interest in her brain - they were probably just wondering if being so large meant the brain increased in size as well. It did, incidentally. Not sure if it made her smarter, but it definitely felt bigger. So, there was that. She'd find out how useful that little feature was once she had some sort of brain injury and could compare herself to the rest of the medical canon.

"Hm. I doubt I'll have time. But I hope you have a good-"

"Oh, shush. You're coming. My guest. Just for a night - a bit of talking, a bit of drinking. I say conference, it's more of a drinking party with impromptu speeches. Our symposiums are just the little rooms we stagger to in order to drink in like-minded company."

"I don't even know what a surrealist is."

But she knew it sounded dangerous. Marana blinked.

"Well, that makes far too much sense, you're a judge, I imagine you stay far away from the arts. Surrealism, darling, is a form of art which attempts to grasp a higher or more primordial form of reality. To unify reality and dream into a super-reality, something rebellious, truly rebellious. Oh, some people talk about wages and rights and infrastructure and all that boring practical stuff - the only revolution worth doing is in the confines of the human mind, the only shackles which matter are mind-forged, and by breaking them, the shock can ripple outwards to inspire new, unimaginable flourishings of nature and art. Humanity is a fossil, my darling, a fossil buried in the soil, under interminable layers, and we're being crushed into oil, crushed into stone. The only thing, the only noble thing one can do is clear the layers, or content ourselves with becoming oil and nothing else for the rest of time, fit only to burn. Either we climb out of the earth, or we condemn ourselves to oil. That's the choice, and surrealism supports the latter. Well, it believes it's the only choice, and..."

She paused, running out of breath, and gasped slightly.

"Come in, I'll show you."

Before Tanner could protest that this all sounded distinctly weird, Marana was dragging her through the narrow, short door (Tanner barely avoiding bashing her brains out on the frame), into a cramped cabin. Her bag was open on her cot, though her clothes were eerily well-packed - Tanner was actually taking some mental notes on how she'd managed to conserve space, it had a kind of military precision to it all, and... anyway. Not the point. The point, or rather, points were the stack of drawings she had assembled on a tiny, rickety desk - more of a dining tray with legs, honestly, anchored into the wall to stop a storm from turning it into a dead projectile. The drawings... Tanner didn't like them. She didn't like much art, or rather, didn't particularly appreciate it beyond vague aesthetic appeals - a drawing of a flower was nicer than a drawing of a corpse, a happy dog was better than a snarling dog, a tastefully clothed portrait better than a debauched nude, some sort of... pornographic panegyric. These, thankfully, didn't fall into that category, but they swam before her eyes. Stark black-and-white illustrations, composed in delicate strokes of ink, sometimes by pen, sometimes by brush, sometimes by quill, which showed... monstrous things. Things with distorted limbs and bulging eyes, cloaked figures with axe-like heads cavorting madly over strange landscapes. A giant split open at angles which were uncomfortable to look at. A flower which, if looked at from the right angle, seemed to be aligning into a man and woman engaged in...

"Oh."

Marana grinned, looking almost girlish for a moment, age dropping away even as the drunkenness crept back in around her eyes. She focused on Tanner's face with uncanny intensity, like she was trying to anchor the giantess in her vision, resistant to any swaying or swirling.

"You see? It surprises, it alarms. The goal is to strike a chord within man, to shirk the usual aesthetic sensibilities of art in order to provoke more visceral reactions. How often do you see a work of art, and find that it looks like a work of art? Just exactly how 'art' should look in your mind? My movement rebels against that. Or, anyway, used to, I'll see if they've kept the faith at the conference. Art is meant to excite real emotions within the viewer, not simply a placid acceptance of norms and rationalities - these are my eels, Tanner."

A pause.

"...come to think of it, you should tell me more about eels, ideally immediately. Your images are... striking, I want to see if I can get some inspiration. Go on. Talk. Tell me about eels, tell me more, I want to develop some insights before we reach the hotel."

Tanner tore her eyes away from the distressing illustrations. Once more, she wondered if Marana had been around when Krodaw fell. Tanner had been a bit too young to remember it, but... well, she'd said she was the governor's daughter. And even if Tanner was too young, some calamities you didn't remember through the memorial services, or the deliberate invocations, you remembered them through the lingering scars in the eyes of others. Like Krodaw had been some enormous octopus attached doggedly to Mahar Jovan, and it'd been violently torn away - the octopus was gone, but the pucker-marks remained, red and raw, slowly fading but lingering longer than they should. A dampness where the body had clung. A shiver at the feeling of a cold creature wrapped too tightly. A strange hitch to the breath which had, for a time, been more than a little inhibited by crushing tentacles. People had scars from the war, people had neighbours who'd once been auxiliaries, merchants had old goods that smelled faintly of the forest, the train station had 'Krodaw' scratched away from the signs... felt like most people had a parent with one very unpleasantly sweat-stained bit of clothing in their wardrobe, kept around like a holy relic, and never once spoken of. Especially not when the children were around.

She studied Marana.

Marana stared back, her fingers twitching, eyes sometimes wandering for a moment before snapping back.

"Go to sleep."

"I can't sleep, I need you to talk to me about eels."

"No more eels for tonight. Go to sleep, Ms. Marana."

Again, she wished she had a hat, it would be wonderful to tip it right about now. Marana shuffled uneasily, opened her mouth...

Tanner laid a heavy hand on her shoulder, pushed her to the cot, and hummed.

"Goodnight."

"...hrmph."

And the drowsy drunken fool emerged once more, like a breaching whale crashing out of the surf. Her smile became wider. Her eyes were cloudier. And she mumbled a hundred meaningless phrases, included long words she stumbled through on muscle memory... and slowly leant back to stretch languidly over the cot. Tanner was already gone. Back to her own room, where she could actually sleep, just a little. Needed it. Not sure how she felt about Marana - Tanner was quick to like people, and did her best to avoid disliking them strongly. She slowly unbuttoned her blouse, feeling the god sag from her shoulders and vanish into the air. Removed her golden glasses, and saw the room swim slightly, everything a little harsher and sharper. Shivered from head to foot, eager to relax, to get away from people for a moment.

And a moment later, she was scribbling down a quick letter. She'd had a hundred observations tonight, little views on the world which spilled out of her mind too quickly to be of any use. In a flowing river, a single drop of water was borderline useless. So the paper received the deluge, and she wrote, wrote, wrote, getting out everything she could for Eygi. Would need to edit it, of course. They said there was a possibility of getting telegrams at this stopping point, a few days hence. Hoped to send Eygi a little note, just something nice. Definitely wanted advice, though. Definitely. Even if she couldn't receive it, just writing and imagining Eygi reading was enough to instil something in her, a kind of twitching confidence. Could vaguely hear Marana snoring, probably curled around her suitcase like a stuffed toy, her disturbing drawings ready to greet her on waking. Surrealism... eh. Tanner wasn't very artistic, hadn't hurt her none. And all she felt on seeing those drawings was... well, oddness. Interesting, from a certain angle, but it wasn't going to stop her turning into a puddle of oil or whatever Marana had been talking about.

There was something of the Golden Law in it, though. The idea of something self-evident and perfect, that just emanated through the minds of the people it affected. Hm. Might be something there.

Either way.

She had writing to do. And once she had the tiniest drop of citrinitas added to a glass of water, she'd have just enough energy to do a good job.

* * *

And almost a week later, full of days of idle conversation and very little else, the hotel came close. The land here was more rugged, more wild. There was a... demilitarised quality to it, hints where military equipment had sat until barely any time ago. The ground didn't move like it should, it was carved up by forces long-gone, the scars barely healed over by stringy, grey grass. Sometimes, they passed a crater, bored deep into the earth and gradually transforming into a small lake, a deep, deep pond too young for life to take root in it quite yet. The grass looked hesitant and provisional, the trees more so, like they weren't quite sure if they were welcome, and would happily vacate the premises if required to. They were here just until their contracts expired, that was all. They were coming closer to the war-front, to the place where the middle-kingdoms, like Fidelizh, Mahar Jovan, Tuz-Drakkat, Apo and so on, had held back the mutant horde and launched the first provisionary expeditions northwards. it wasn't quite a front line - but it was a place where fighting had happened, and where machines had needed to go. She'd heard rumours of the war machines, but most of them had just been left in the field, cannibalised for parts and left to rot - there were no roads home, and looking at the chaotic, jagged landscape before her, she could easily see why operators of decaying engines might just abandon them completely. Heading out would be bad enough - heading back, through the churned mud and detonated hills, the innumerable deep pools and the risk of land collapsing into the river, that was something else entirely

Sometimes, she even saw a piece of rusting metal. Sometimes intact... but usually erupted, malformed, half-melted and allowed to set into some abstract sculpture, something out of Marana's illustrations. A tattered flag hanging from a rotten banner. The bones of a horse half-embedded in the riverside, slowly being swallowed by the mud. Could even see the half-decayed remnants of a gas mask, a funeral shroud for the elongated skull of the poor beast. Tanner peered, and thought she could see the clever black eyes of an eel glinting within the depths of the ribcage, a nice little sheltered burrow soothing its strained muscles after the night's exertions. No sign of humans. Surprised anyone could settle here, when even nature was still giving it a wide berth until things were calmer. But apparently, apparently, there was enough settlement for a surrealist conference. Then again, there was something bizarre about this place, maybe that appealed in some sense. Marana responded to the question with unusual curtness:

"A hotel in the middle of nowhere is wonderful. They dote on you, and you can rent the whole place for a song and a handful of pennies. Simple."

When asked about the symbolism, she gave Tanner a wry look.

"Symbols are systems, systems are controlling. No, we rebel against symbols, and... goodness, it's bright this morning, isn't it?"

It wasn't. But she was hungover.

A small, mean settlement stood near the river, with just enough infrastructure to be functional. It was odd - had permanent structures, proper roads, all that business. It just lacked people. Like it was being set up as an administrative formality, and most people had a healthy distrust of the churned landscape. All the buildings were handsome and fresh, most of them made of wood, some of stone, all painted the same uniform shades of blinding white and rich, dark green - planes of the former, and stripes of the latter. Too fresh for mud to have stained it one little bit. The town hall had a dome and a spire, but the flag of Mahar Jovan hung limp on its pole, unwilling to move in the still air. The ship came to a gradual halt at a long dock, comically so - there was nothing but a tiny cluster of fishing boats, certainly nothing to warrant the long pier. The captain snorted with laughter to herself as a lonely official started to jog down the dock, emerging from his office like a mole from a burrow. Everything here seemed ecclesiastical, in some way - the same sterile perfection, the same lingering coldness, the same sense of an individual human not necessarily being welcome. A congregation, maybe, but a single, profane individual talking and walking and being unworshipful... it was a church, but she wasn't sure what it was praying to, or how one was meant to worship. The dock official didn't seem to know either, and he pulled his thick, blue coat around himself like a blanket, glancing around nervously, his voice low and quiet.

He spoke of nothing but business. No personal matters, no inquiries to health. Yes, there was a telegram cable, it went to an old military base a few miles away and they rode back and forth every few days - just something to do, presumably. Yes, there were people in the 'hotel' - the official proudly proclaimed that it was the only original structure in the place. Originally, the settlement had been a real, actual place, but it'd been abandoned during the war, and had been rebuilt in a grand new style - all but the hotel, which was simply refurbished. Grand enough already, apparently. He did all the right moves - he hummed and hawed over forms, he stared at the sky for long periods when asked about the future weather, he goggled at Tanner's height, he tipped his hat with every other word, and he generally contented himself with simply talking. Tanner could see his little office in the distance - very small indeed, and with a tiny snail-trail of smoke easing out of its brick chimney, like it was embarrassed to be clouding the sky at all. The day was wearing on, and the captain dragged him down to the office to have a chat about certain things, mostly on the subject of maps. Not a single other person had emerged during the interim, not a single shadow. The settlement...

Now, she knew there was proper term. Village, town, hamlet. That sort of thing. 'Colony', perhaps. But... settlement felt right. A settlement could mean a small collection of dwellings, or it could mean a legal agreement reached as the disappointing conclusion to a case - Tanner disliked settlements, there was an air of resignation to them, a desire to escape the firmness of a proper judgement. And this place felt like that. A legal arrangement which might, indeed, violate the law, and postponed a proper, organic, virtuous judgement. This place existed on paper... but nowhere else. The shops were shuttered and dark, only some of the houses had smoke coming from their chimneys, and the broadness of the streets - designed for quite some traffic - only seemed to make pedestrians feel unwelcome. This place wasn't designed for you, it was designed for the great tides of the invisible many. And until they arrived, and you had the fortune to join their number...

You were squatting.

Marana shot Tanner a polite smile as the crew stumped down the gangplank to see if there was anything worth doing around here.

"Well? Conference?"

"I... really can't."

Marana shot her a look, and Tanner was uncomfortably reminded of the fact that drunk Marana and sober Marana were quite different people. Sober Marana was much smarter, for one. And much more driven. Her hand snapped around, latching like a vice around Tanner's arm, hard enough to almost hurt.

"Come on."

Tanner hesitated. Could probably pull away easily enough. She had the requisite strength, and-

Marana was moving her...

And awkwardness drove her to obey.

"I... do have other things, I-"

"No, you don't."

The words were one thing, the look was another. Just... withering.

Evidently being a governor's daughter had given her some skills when it came to ordering people around.

Because Tanner felt, utterly and irrevocably, that going to this silly conference was expected of her. And if she remained on the boat, guilt would churn in her gut like a mound of tapeworms, and she'd find herself unable to sleep, drink, eat, enjoy herself... the broad white streets of the settlement widened to greet them, and the idea of breaking away to wander alone felt as alien as... as trying to breathe underwater. Leaving Marana now wouldn't just be rude - it'd be stupid, it'd made her a stupid person, and she would be regarded as a stupid person for the rest of time.

Marana, in short, was a one-woman peer pressure engine, and Tanner had given way in less than a second.

Some things didn't change, apparently.