CHAPTER NINETY-ONE - COURT OF THE AXE

The gathering of the mutants was eerily silent.

Tanner waited, axe in hand, for the General to bring his troops into the open. And one by one, they came. All of them deformed, all of them in some way scarred by their time down here. They were squalid, their red cloaks festering with parasitic life, their bear-fur belts bristling with fungi. Their skin was pale and mottled, and their bodies were slowly succumbing to mutation. One stood taller than even the General, and his back was heavy with cancerous horns that resembled those of no earthly animal. Uncounted horns, growing together, growing even as she looked upon them, a root system seeking out the contamination that surrounded them on all sides. A winding briar of the things that forced him to walk on his knuckles like an ape, and effectively wired his mouth shut where they grew up to graze the face. Another was uncannily small and slight, none of the muscle of the others... but his skin was slowly turning translucent and gelatinous, gleaming with accumulated moisture. And through the thin membrane, she could see squirming black organs, the shade and consistency of leeches, none of them truly resembling something a human ought to have. His eyes were tiny and black, shivering in hollow sockets like tiny pearls, and his teeth were long, hollow, venom-filled. More came, each one unique in their strangeness.

She had time to think. To plan. To plot. To grow a little nervous. She... gods, she was in an underground river, with an axe, gathering a small army of heavily mutated soldiers who... oh, she didn't care. Something in her had snapped. Twisted until it could bear no more, and gave way with a snap that echoed throughout her entire being. She felt... both in and out of control. There was a spiralling instability twitching through her, the same sensation she'd had when the carriage had overturned, all that time ago. Weightless, swimming in air... but at the same time, she was tight. Her muscles were lacing together perfectly, her body thrummed with energy, her eyes felt like they were on fire. This was uncharted territory for her - failed in her duty as a judge, ignored the law, forsook the principles Sister Halima had drilled into her. Done things she shouldn't. Overstepping her boundaries. Not... totally too late to back down, though. Could always just run, renege on her promises, let the soldiers burn these mutants alive.

They said there was a god in this axe. Many gods. And if she betrayed her sacred trust, they'd flay her. If they betrayed their sacred trust, the axe would never return to them, disgusted at their disloyalty.

The law had ceased to murmur to her. Ceased to dictate her actions. Thinking of the lodge conjured up nothing but bad memories and vague, childish anger. Their words meant nothing to her, not down here. No candle would burn brightly enough to shelter her from witchcraft in this place, and... and she was getting the feeling that if she wanted to be lucky, she had to do what the Rekidans did. Smash the world's face into the ground over and over until it did what it was meant to. Her back was unburdened of Fidelizhi gods - she'd never really believed in them, and she had no-one to impress down here, no-one who would actually care about the performance. And no desire to hide behind more masks, more layers of restriction. Even bringing to mind those who might be judging her for doing... all of this didn't have much of an effect. Eygi wasn't her friend, and Tanner had been a gormless idiot who'd repeatedly humiliated herself. Dug a deeper grave with each letter she wrote. Parents... her parents had stopped being a part of her life a long, long time ago. Her father would want her to survive, and her mother had sent her away, had basically given up the job of raising her to the judges.

And she'd cast off the judges. The weight of expectation. The beliefs she didn't share, not after all she'd seen. The ties that bound her to a road where she had to watch as everyone else cocked things up and brought her closer and closer to death with each blunder they made. Cast them off, and decided...

Decided to do what she thought was right. Ignoring due process and standard procedures.

Might be making a catastrophic mistake. Might be dooming herself. But... but...

The shadowy version of herself that would linger after death was already a shabby thing. If she died here, there'd be two sources of documentation people would pay attention to. Her correspondence with Eygi, and her case files, particularly the files in her bag right now. And neither painted a pretty picture. The correspondence made her seem desperate, clingy, ignorant, obsessive. The case files made her seem doomed from the start, at best there was a... slightly entertaining, if pathetic, air to the whole thing. An investigation that went nowhere, and ended where it started. Never really moving a step, never changing the world, never improving a single damn thing. Just a sequence of her turning over a rock, getting bitten by the huge spider living underneath, and then moving on to turn over another rock, with another spider. Over and over.

So...

So, either she let this shadowy version of her, shabby, ugly, half-formed, in desperate need of a redraft, shuffle off with as much dignity as it could... or she could ignore it, and do what she wanted. For once. If she was going to die out here, then why not shed every restraint, why not try and set her own rules, why not do anything necessary to win? To survive?

If she died here, the version that would live in people's minds would be a shambolic thing. No chance of making another while she was stuck in this colony.

Might as well.

The mutants continued to assemble. Twenty-five, they'd said. Each one probably worth a good number of other humans, just in terms of strength and endurance. Twenty-five soldiers immune to the cold, independent of any need for food or water, strong beyond measure, and content with dying in the field of battle. Old, experienced, hardened by war... twenty-five, but worth double, maybe triple that. They were uniform in their dress - the bands around the arms, the belts of bear fur, the red cloaks, the green boots (if they still had feet capable of wearing them). Their hair, when it remained, was always shockingly red. She stared at one of them for a moment - completely twisted by mutation. Shaped into something inhuman. Moving on all-fours, with limbs positioned like a lizard, spread-eagled and many-jointed. Could see vestigial limbs trying to form out of the ribs. Could see how his mouth had expanded, how the seam of the lips ran down his neck, and if he opened them... she could see how far it would reach. How powerful the bite would be. But his eyes were bright and clever, and that was all that mattered. He was still intelligent. Twisted, but intelligent. One of the strangest was a soldier who... appeared to be merging with her equipment. Of the twenty-five, only three were female, and some were heavily mutated to the point where she couldn't tell if they'd originally been a man or a woman. Silent as the rest, twisted as the rest. And one of them had started to grow into her uniform. Her arms were plated with metal rusting to a shade of green, her armbands seeming to expand into a suit of armour. But her legs were shaggy with fur, and around her waist she could see the vague outlines of a bear's head trying to grow out of the belt - but improperly, and mindless. A series of teeth, a twitching piece of muscle, a curling ear, a glaring eye. A dismantled bear trying to emerge chaotically from human flesh.

When the woman breathed, black powder emerged, stinking of sulphur. Like she was growing gunpowder inside herself.

More.

Until the bone orchard was thrumming, everything in it trying to wake up to devour the massed troops. Tanner studied them carefully. Right... well, they were all functional. But they were starting to shift, mentally. They were completely silent. They always kept their eyes on one another, hated having someone standing behind their back. The silence of mutants, the paranoia of mutants. The girl at Tanner's feet was eerily similar to some of them - and they watched her warily, while she studied them with absolute expressionlessness. Sizing them up to see if they were worth devouring, wondering if she'd win in a fight. At present, no. But Tanner would need to keep her far away from any wounded soldiers, she might get some ideas. Or she could just... kill her with this very large axe. It wouldn't be hard, and she didn't need her at this stage. She'd done her job, now she was more of a liability than anything.

Didn't crush her skull, though. Not sure why.

Felt wrong, somehow. Even though she was keenly aware the girl regarded her as nothing more than a meal ticket. Would abandon her without a second of hesitation.

Still.

Still.

The General gestured vaguely at the troops, proclaiming something in that rolling, poetic voice of his. Funny, how things changed over time. Tal-Sar had a nervous, retreating voice. Lam had been painfully polite. Yan-Lam defaulted to formality whenever possible, very rarely letting the mask slip. Habit drilled into all three of them by the shantytown's... conditions, most likely. But the General had never lived in the shantytown. Never been in the position of a refugee. He was a noble, and command came to him with effortless confidence.

She gripped the axe tighter as All-Name translated quietly.

"The General is introducing you to the men. He's explaining the situation."

A pause.

"...are you heading straight for the surface, judge?"

"Not yet. One stop."

The boy blinked in surprise, but translated. The General nodded silently, then began to direct the soldiers to collect weapons, to gather all the gear they might need. The bigger, stronger ones began to weigh themselves down with additional weapons and whatever ammunition they preserved. All their armaments were... to put it lightly, antique. Had an air of tradition to them, an air of being well-loved... and also being deeply archaic. Only a few had guns, and they were old, old models. Beautifully engraved, but by the standards of the colony, woefully outdated. One of them, a huge one, was carrying out an enormous cannon ripped free from its mounting, and staggered under the weight of heavy iron balls and sacks of gunpowder. The rest were outfitted with close-range weapons, and these were a little more... modern. In the sense of being basically equivalent to what the soldiers up above would be using. Generally, they'd carry two weapons apiece - one designed to bludgeon, the other to rend. Chief opponents down here were mutants, which meant you either bloodied them to the extent that other mutants went into a frenzy and tore them apart, or you bludgeoned them and killed them without exposing oneself to excessive contamination. Same principle with this axe, if she ever used it in combat - blunted, completely blunted. Closer to a hammer, really.

What surprised her was... well... when she thought of 'noble warriors', she thought of honour, of refined weapons, of elaborate armour, and a whole code of conduct that pervaded every engagement. For crying out loud, the General had chosen to speak with her because it was the polite thing to do, to have a civilised conversation with the person you were about to declare war on. But... they were pragmatic, down here in the dark. They had means of starting fires, had a whole host of tools for dealing with mutants. Bolas to trip, innumerable caltrops designed to tear open enormous wounds, primitive grenadoes fashioned from scrap, viciously sharp wires that could be conceivably used in traps... if something could be modified into a more brutal shape, it was. If something could be used to great effect in battle, it was used, regardless of the dignity of it. Could tell this just by looking at them, didn't need anything explained. They moved without regard for strict marching formations, and were impeccably silent.

If they decided to attack the surface, maybe they'd lose... but they'd give one hell of a fight. Experience and training alone would make them deadly, add mutation to the mix, and you had... people she definitely didn't want to fight.

Abandoning her scruples had stopped her from having to fight them.

Well. Could doubt her decisions for many reasons. But that was a fairly unambiguously good result.

The General hissed - and they began to move, sticking behind their commander. They moved in single-file, navigating carefully through the bone orchard. Tanner walked ahead, but the female mutant slithered away to lurk at a distance, unwilling to stay too close to so many mutants she knew she couldn't beat. There was no argument among the troops, no shouted objections - they simply obeyed. No marching songs, no stumbling, they moved like animals. The instinctual organisation, the smooth obedience, the unstructured structure that allowed them to function.

The General murmured to her, and All-Name translated.

"Where are we going, judge?"

"The laboratory."

A pause.

"...the place with all the witchcraft."

The young man blinked owlishly.

"Oh. That... are you sure? They might kill us."

"I have a key to get inside."

"They might kill you."

Tanner handed the bag over to him.

"And if they do, go to the surface and give these out, explain the situation as best you can. Ask for two people - Marana and Sersa Bayai, they're good people. If you meet Mr. Canima, kick him in the shins."

All-Name nodded solemnly. Ah, he... might actually kick an old man in the shins.

Eh.

If he did, then she was dead, and was hardly in a position to care. The General, on receiving her marching orders, let out another polite laugh. Didn't object, though. Was he... hm. She studied the man. Wondering what he was thinking. How much of him was left, how many memories endured, really. He was a... general, a soldier. How long had he been in charge? Was he enjoying having someone else call the shots, at least for now?

His malformed face offered no hints. Tanner walked swiftly, and the mutants followed in her wake. The axe was almost weightless in her hands, and she let it rest over her shoulder, taking comfort in its solidity. Didn't take especially long to reach the lab - the mutants knew good routes through the thicket, and Tanner's long legs carried her forwards easily. It sat there, metallic and ungainly, a giant steaming blight on the riverbed. The Rekidans stiffened at the sight of it, something like hatred playing on their features. This thing had been the last straw, the insult that provoked the governor's death. Not that she could prosecute them for that, nor hold them accountable in any way, shape or form. Right in front of her was an insult to the Rekidans, and an insult to the judges. Even with... her attachment to the law weakened, she still felt a rush of anger. Obeying the law meant leaving theurgists alone, letting them run around doing as they pleased. Obeying the law meant allowing them to break the law. Like Lyur, like the mutants, like Canima, here before her stood a refutation of the law she'd served, the principles she'd been expected to dedicate herself towards.

Now she got to do something that was... deeply unlawful. And painfully lawful, at the same time.

Wonderful.

She gestured for the others to stay back, finding concealment in the orchard and the darkness, murmured a few instructions to be conveyed... and advanced. Still had the hourglass key in her pocket, and the grumbling of the mechanisms no longer provoked any nervousness. Just like before - slot it in, listen to the whole symphony of hisses and clunks, wait for the door to open, step inside, wait for decontamination... the theurgists were notably less nervous as well. Most barely looked up from their work as she entered, though they did slow to a halt for the sake of security. The female one who'd offered her coffee the last time shot her an odd look, but otherwise remained silent. The leader, Mr. Mask, was downright irritated by her arrival, and made this known rather... quickly.

Barely stepped inside before he was storming over, glaring up through the black lenses of his mask.

"You brute, what on earth are you doing back here, this is a secure facility, not a kaff, we're not here for your entertainment. Your arrival has forced us to delay several experiments, and-"

Tanner removed the axe from her shoulder. Let the head clunk to the ground, making many of the implements around the room rattle ominously. Mr. Mask gulped.

"Now, listen here, the key in your possession was designed for emergency communications, not for regular social calls, and the governor was quite aware of this fact, so... where on earth did you find that thing? Is it decontaminated?"

Tanner stared at him.

She knew how she ought to behave.

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She knew what a judge would do. What a lawful individual would do. But looking at this... impetuous man, all she could see what she needed to do. Necessity stripped of obligation, refined down to a hard logical core. Her flesh was warm. Her blood was hot. Her heart was a roaring engine, and her stomach had completely settled. Everything moved in harmony.

And all she could see was how short this man was. How frail. In the burgundy glow of the lamp overhead, she had no doubt that her appearance verged on the haunting. Good.

Quietly, she walked back to the door. Now, how had... there.

She pressed a button.

The door opened.

Mr. Mask began to rant at her, moving to warn her away from the controls... too late.

The General and one of the female soldiers, the one with gunpowder breath (Ms. Sulphur it was, then) stepped through the opening, and with another click, they were inside. Looming above the theurgists. To their credit, the theurgists didn't scream and panic. They backed away from their tables, shuffled to the back of the room, remained very, very silent. Terror obvious in their frames. They had no reference for this - this place was impregnable, they were shielded by the governor's protection, they were theurgists. No-one went after theurgists, they were an aristocracy of untarnished value, you couldn't get rid of them, you couldn't threaten them. That was the best thing Tanner had seen in a while - theurgists terrified, but somehow indignant at the same time. Mr. Mask mumbled vaguely, his chest starting to rise and fall faster and faster as panic mounted.

"Now, ah, you... you see, there's... rather a lot of experiments going on, and some are delicate, and..."

He came back to himself.

"You beast, what do you think you're playing at, bringing mutants in here? Get them out, get them out immediately, before-"

"Shut up."

Mr. Mask fell silent. Shocked, more than anything.

The General stumped past her to smile genially down at Mr. Mask, before moving away to find... he was going for the kitchen. Ms. Sulphur growled through black-stained teeth, her ruptured eyes scanning the room, nervous at the openness of the place, the brightness. Her weapons hung loosely at her sides, but her hands were tight around the hilts of her gouger and her crusher. The malformed chunks of bear around her waist twitched slightly, as if they, too, were trying to snarl and bite what the woman saw as a threat.

"I'm here to formally tell you that your services are being requisitioned by the colony. We need you to put together some weapons for us."

Mr. Mask stared.

Seemed to blink.

"...of course not, we're staying down here. Don't you know who you're talking to? Don't you know who we are? We could ruin your career like that, we could have you barred from every last company in the civilised world, we could destroy you, and-"

Tanner stepped forward, and loomed above him.

"You'd need to tell people, first. And until the mutants are dealt with..."

The implication hung heavily. She could kill everyone here, and so long as there was no evidence, nothing recorded of her presence... well. And ultimately, if the choice was 'live on with the theurgists being deeply grumpy about her' and 'die painfully at the claws of a horde of mutants', she'd pick the former, thank you very much. Gods, it was freeing, so utterly liberating to ignore the future, to ignore what she ought to do, to ignore the lure of status and acceptance. Must be how ordinary people felt all the time.

"We... have no obligation to work for the colony."

"You do now. If you accept, you can come up and shelter with the rest of us. If you refuse-"

"What, you'll kill us? In cold blood? Kill all of us?"

His voice became higher, verging on the hysterical. The others were huddling together in a corner, their masks shivering out of fear, and Tanner felt... a tiny burst of guilt. Suppressed by the fact that she'd committed, and could hardly go back, now could she?

"I could give this key to people who would be annoyed at the idea of you sitting this out. My associates could break your door mechanisms. Or, we could just destroy everything in here."

That last one seemed to hit them where it hurt. Take away their research. Nothing to do for months and months, maybe even years before they could get resupplied. Imagine that - years of nothing, sitting around with nothing to do, nothing to work on, nothing to tinker with. They'd live, but...

Mr. Mask was struggling to speak.

"Death sentences. All of them, death sentences. You can't force us-"

"No, you're in the same boat as the rest of us. If the mutants win, we all die anyway. If the mutants lose, then you get to live, same as us. Now, I have places to be - have you got protective gear? How many tools do you need?"

Silence.

The female theurgist was the only one to speak.

"...we... have gear, yes. Tools... we... a lot of this is for research, we don't need it. As long as we... we have our basic kit, we should be fine. But there's really only so much we can do with... with limited time. Honoured judge."

The use of the title sent a spark of anger running through Tanner, for reasons she... no, it was... she wasn't acting like a judge, not at all, and the title made her feel like she was disgracing her old colleagues. And while she might disagree with them on some points, and she might not share their beliefs, she still liked most of them. Didn't want them lashed up with whatever she was doing.

Ah, well.

"Good. Pack up, and get ready to move within the hour."

Mr. Mask exploded.

"Now, listen here. We're not marching off to die with you because... because you're threatening us, we're staying right here, and maybe, maybe we'll make you something, but we do it from here, and on our own time, and-"

Tanner reached out, grabbed the front of his robe, and calmly hoisted him into the air a little.

Stared him dead in the eyes. Thought she could see them watering behind the lenses.

Her voice was absolutely calm, even as fury and fear twisted inside her.

"I believe that you assisting in this battle will allow us to live. I believe that you refusing to assist will condemn us to death. If you don't come, you're a murderer, in my eyes. Your choice is either to come to the surface and remain innocent, or to remain below and become murderers. If you want to choose the latter, then, as criminals, I can requisition your possessions as evidence. If that includes the door mechanisms, your tools, your research, and everything else - fine. That's your choice."

She set him down.

"Get ready to go."

The General stalked back in, clutching a full percolator of coffee in his single, enormous hand, unheeding of the heat radiating from the metal vessel. With distressing delicacy, he poured several cups, passing them around with a faint smile on his face. Ms. Sulphur downed hers in a moment, face utterly flat. Tanner sipped hers placidly, even as her skin seemed to fizz with energy, tightening around her bones like it was trying to tear itself apart. None of this actually felt real, in a sense, she was still operating on a kind of dream-logic, floating from one situation to another. Dream-logic was the right word, really. In dreams, you were unrestrained, your subconscious flowed to the front of the brain like the tide rushing into a sheltered cove. In dreams, there were no consequences, no inhibitions, nothing. And... she'd committed to this. To this way of thinking. To doing whatever she felt needed to be done, no law, no god, no lodge holding her back, a perpetual state of high-adrenaline chaos. The dream was never-ending. It was like... it was hard to describe, but...

Everything in the universe flowed through a filter. Everything in her mind was manifested through layers of understanding, bolstered and chained by tradition and expectation. In a sense, she wasn't in control of her own life. Every perception flowed through others before it reached her, she outsourced the process of perception, had to refer to a herd of cultural consultants before she could understand anything. This was the first foundation of restraint - becoming an ocular parasite, lurking in the eyes of others and viewing the world through them. She had, for a very long time, judged nothing as Tanner Magg, only judged based on the constructs that she allowed to breed in her mind, lens upon lens upon lens, until the actual reality seemed to fade away from sight. She had become a relative creature. Now, though... it felt like she'd broken some of those lenses. And when she looked at the theurgists, she saw them as creatures, she didn't see through them, she simply... saw them. For the first time, maybe, she was Tanner. And nobody else. She was full of bright calm. A kind of... perfected identity lurked in her, shimmering and incandescent. Like she was finally in direct communication with the world.

Was she going a bit funny?

Probably.

Yet here she was. Here she remained. She'd burned her sails and shattered her oars - now she went wherever the wind might take her. Retreat was no longer an option, movement was the only choice, movement forwards. Or... no, she'd butchered every last man and woman of her crew, and now she stood in total control of the boat. If it crashed, it was her fault. It went wherever she wanted it to go, but only where she wanted it to go. No-one else. She couldn't resurrect her crew. And she couldn't get more crew until she docked and went around with a billy-club, press-ganging anyone who didn't resist. For now, she was alone. But not adrift.

In a state of total responsibility.

Oh, gods...

She sipped again. The theurgists stared at their cups in mild terror, like the liquid was about to jump out and attack them. The General was content to drink in a corner, little finger sticking out.

And that was all.

* * *

"There'll be consequences for this."

"Shut up."

Oh, goodness, she was being rude. So very rude. The theurgists were all geared up. Similar to her own dress, though a little more refined, a little more ornate, and with far more tools. They gazed around, terrified of the mutants, of the last of the Rekidan nobility. The nobles, in turn, didn't look especially fond of them, either. There was a haughty dignity to them, though, which prevented them from being too spiteful, jerking them around and actively making them uncomfortable. But the dislike radiated in passive waves from them, almost like a heat haze. Hm. Tanner had... really aligned herself with a mutated aristocracy that had ruled this city with an iron fist and enslaved a large number of people, hadn't she? Morally, this whole affair sat a little strangely with her. A debate raged in her head. Had they served their penance at this stage, being mutated, butchered, humiliated... or were they basically unrepentant, unwilling to actually say 'we were brutal and wrong'? If they met, say, Tal-Sar, would they apologise, or would they sneer, snort, and go about their business as usual? Did staying to defend their city in a doomed last stand serve as some sort of redemption, or was it just suicidal stubbornness? How many people had died because they refused to flee, how many were prevented from evacuating, how many died, terrified, forced to remain by a bunch of crazed nobles?

Wanted to ask.

But... at the end of the day, they'd be dead soon. Their only 'descendant' was an adopted son who mostly existed to give them a bit of dignity in death. Madness would strike, in time, and the nobility would be gone for good. Might as well let them defend the city, one last time. Even if they were unrepentant, a good deed done for bad reasons was still a good deed.

They walked.

The lift beckoned.

Tanner glanced at All-Name, who walked in a loping, sidling fashion nearby, never quite walking in a straight line, always angling for corners and walls, places where the angles of attack were fewer. He walked like a shying animal. Quietly, she spoke to him, content that no-one else but the theurgists could follow, and they were all herding together like sheep, clutching their tools like shields against the haughty creatures which stalked beside them. Afraid of going too fast, for fear of the bone orchard. Afraid of going too slow, for fear of the mutant girl who followed the group, sniffing curiously at the people who'd once been her kinsmen. Afraid of going at the right pace, for fear of the mutants all around them who had no great appreciation for their existence. Just... afraid, really. Tanner would feel more guilty. She did feel guilty, but... she could feel it a bit more keenly. Feeling just wouldn't come, though.

"...I'm sorry to bother you, All-Name, but... could I ask, how did you learn this language?"

The young man looked up, blinking a few times behind the thick lenses of his gas mask.

"Eavesdropping. Books. If you act like you own the place, people just let you wander around. Easy enough to pick up a little. And... once or twice, we had to get rid of someone who found us. A chance for conversation."

Explained how the General knew a little of the language. Still. Damn good talent. Tanner was terrible at languages, personally.

"And.. what happened to your parents?"

"Dead."

Nothing more.

"What do you intend to do, after this?"

A blink.

"After this?"

"After... well, you know."

"After all the others are dead?"

"Yes, that."

He shrugged.

"I'll go and hunt buffalo. Then I'll die of old age, or consumption, or cold, or starvation."

"...you don't want anything else?"

"Not really."

Tanner stared at him. The lad shifted, uncomfortable, and elaborated.

"If'n I leave, I'll just make a sham fool of myself in another place. General taught me that. Others did, too. If'n I leave, I'll bring shame to Rekida, to the nobility, to all of it. Die in a country with different gods, get whisked off to a different afterlife, no way for Rekida to end."

He coughed, clearly not used to speaking this much without someone feeding him lines.

"I mean, still stuff to sort out. Showed me how to make all the good funeral ointments, they did. Just bathe in the stuff, now. That way, see, when I die I've got most of the rituals done. Can die without servants to bury me, I'll just let the snow take care of it. Practising keeping the right herbs in my mouth, too - another ritual."

Tanner stared.

"Oh."

"It's what I'm meant to do."

Seeing this from the outside was very... distressing.

Definitely made her feel a little better in her decision, though. She wanted to... say something, offer him something. Money? No, had damn little of the stuff as it was, she was a judge, she wasn't paid well. Could offer him... uh...

Offering him amnesty from all crimes and free reign to settle in the colony was probably the best thing she could do. And she'd already offered that. Hoped that he'd... change, though. Like she had. Find something else to do with his life beyond dying in an honourable fashion. A sudden thought occurred.

"Do you people measure skulls?"

He looked up.

Blinked.

"We... don't measure the skulls of outsiders."

"Oh. I see. Just... there's someone in the colony pretending to be Rekidan. She's measured my skull a few times."

He snorted.

"That's stupid. Hold on. Wait. I don't see any plaster in your hair."

Now it was Tanner's turn to blink.

"Plaster?"

"Plaster. You dunk your head in soft plaster, then you send the cast off to get measured. That way you can get the right-sized adjustment cap, too."

"Adjustment...?"

The young man looked rather offended.

"Did this bimbo not know anything about our ways?"

"I don't think she does."

"Don't tell the General. He might kill her."

"...right."

The General looked over, smiling vaguely, before shambling off with the others. Ah. Very glad he couldn't understand her language perfectly. Huh. Well. This... confirmed something. The lift approached, and Tanner took in a deep breath, which rattled in her gas mask like the groan of someone about to die. Right. Now... now she went from this bizarre, unpleasant dreamland into the deeply fathomable wasteland of reality. From the black echo to the pale silence. Where her decisions suddenly became real, and this place wasn't just a long, surreal nightmare. The reality of what she was doing, what she'd done came crashing down on her with thunderous force. What was... she was leading a group of dying mutated nobles to the surface. She was going to tell Canima, to his face, that he was an idiot and she was going to be doing whatever she found to be necessary. She was going to show up, in front of Yan-Lam, as... someone who, in her own way, had forsaken being a judge. Maybe she'd never had real faith in the Golden Law, just... a desire to be part of something, to become mechanical, filled up with predicted responses and endless precedent. A relative creature who only lived when others were observing her. Her hands shook a little. She was going to stare at people she knew, in the face, and tell them that she was going to do what she damn well pleased, she was going to lie about how the governor died in order to keep the peace in the colony and preserve the aid of her new allies, she had the slave-holding aristocracy of Rekida on her side. She had murderers and slavers on her side.

She shivered from head to foot, and the monolithic structure of the lift seemed to her to be eerily similar to a tombstone, a long, vertical sarcophagus.

The General glanced at her over his broad, powerful shoulder, the ribbons that had replaced his severed arm twitching curiously, like they were tasting the air. All-Name looked up, curious at the delay. Mr. Mask and his gaggle of theurgists stared at her with a mixture of fear and hostility, unnerved at the thought of what she'd do next. The mutant girl at the back sat on her haunches and watched with idle interest, probably wondering if the bloodbath was going to start or not. The axe weighed heavily for the first time.

Oh, gods.

What was she doing?

She'd said nuts to the law, perverted the course of justice, taken more authority than she was entitled to, and was... probably violating a good few moral limits.

She'd set precedent. She'd established that this was how she was as a person. Sin lurked behind her, digging long, smoky fingers into the taut flesh of her neck, coiling around her throat and loosely caressing it, an itch that reminded her of... of the fact that she'd done this, and lightning hadn't struck her down on the spot. She had done this, and she could do it again. She could keep doing it.

What was she doing?

Oh, gods, oh, gods...

What would... would Eygi think? No, she'd think 'oh, that Tanner, typical'. What would Marana think? 'Well, strange times make strange bedfellows, here's a story about Krodaw that relates to this situation'. What would her mother think? 'Stupid girl, this is why you can't be left unsupervised'. What would Yan-Lam think?

If Yan-Lam thought the mutants were going to wipe out the cartel and everyone responsible for her father's death, she'd think: 'good'.

None of the expectations bound her like they should. They felt too light, she found them too easy to dismiss. Wondered if they'd ever settle around her again. They were all staring at her - the twenty-five mutants, the General, the theurgists, All-Name, the girl at the back, all of them staring. No-one could see it, but her face was completely flat as panic raced through her. She could... run? She could run, head for the lift, take it up to the surface and then break the mechanism to stop anyone following her. She could. It was definitely on the cards.

But she wouldn't.

Instead, she moved forward in stately silence, even as a large part of her screamed to stop, you fool, stop, stop, don't do this, go back to the surface and be a judge again, leave this place behind, become a mechanical creature which never thinks and never doubts, become everything you're meant to be and never look back! Stop, stop!

Yet here she was. Here she remained. Here she endured. Despite everything, she kept walking. Because...

Because she'd set the precedent.

She'd established that Tanner Magg was someone who had no faith in the Golden Law, no faith in her lodge, no faith in her chosen path, no faith in her own understanding of others. She'd deluded herself about Eygi for so very long, how many others were buried under the same layers of myth? How many? Who did she really know? And once the... once the contamination entered, it couldn't go. It lingered. It remained as a separate, indivisible entity, impossible to dilute or purge. Once the doubt arrived, it could never leave again. Poisoning everything else.

She couldn't go back. She'd sinned. The black tar of sin was in her, and it would never leave. She didn't believe in the Golden Law, she didn't believe that being a judge would make her life any better at this juncture, and now she'd admitted it, it was real.

The sin was done. The oil was spilled.

She'd committed.

Now, she saw it to the end.

Maybe that end was her lying dead in a snowdrift, staring blindly into the pale dawn rising over a mutant-infested city. Maybe that end was her being sent home in disgrace, banished from her order, to work for the rest of her days as a fisherwoman of no great fame. Maybe that end was, just maybe, her winning.

No idea what would happen afterwards.

Slowly, the others joined her.

Her twenty-five soldiers. The General. All-Name. The theurgists. The girl.

And in her hands, the axe seemed to have a life of its own, the metal thrumming in her grip. Like it was purring, just for her.

Under the mask, her face was completely still.

And under her face, her mind was in perpetual motion.

Doubt, exhilaration, relief, terror, fury, shame, pride, every emotion was realised to its fullest extreme. Amidst the chaos, it was hard to tell what she was even thinking.

Maybe that was the point. Thinking nothing. Just acting, a vehicle of action that denied any attempt at stasis or routine.

Maybe.

The lift hissed. The first batch was heading up.

Took time to get everyone to the surface.

And when she went, at the very end... the mutant was curled around her legs once again.

Eager for the red tide to come.