CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE - HIS EYES

A giantess ran through a labyrinth of meat and fur, blood running freely from her wrists and her arm. Her arms were purple with bruises - she'd torn muscles, she knew she'd torn muscles, be lucky if she could raise her arms after this. No idea where she was going. The chamber had opened up in several directions, she'd picked a random one and run, carrying nothing but a long knife she could barely curl her fingers around, what with how stiff they were, how numb... paled by loss of blood, purpled by bruises, reddened by the blood which was escaping through ragged bracelets of torn flesh. Her eyes were darting about constantly, searching for any clue, any sign of escape, any sign of danger... follow the humming, that was her only choice. Follow the humming. If she did that, she could find the theurgic engines powering the cold-houses, if she did that, she could escape into the cold. Into... into a building filled with people loyal to the cartel. A building with a cast-iron decoration proclaiming its loyalties. He'd monopolised the food supply, she realised belatedly. Monopolised the whole damn food supply. If he wanted to, he could starve the colony to death. Destroy one cold-house, and the colony would need to lose some of its people, would need to reduce the number of hungry mouths.

Maybe that was the plan.

Starve the Fidelizhi to death. Leave the Nalseri to survive.

Maybe. Maybe. She just... she didn't know.

All she wanted was to escape. For now, even being a judge was beyond her mind. She felt like she did when Tyer had reappeared - the same single-minded focus consuming her body and mind, the same awareness of each and every one of her muscles, of the upper limits of her strength, of the wind playing over her skin... she could feel everything. There was a raw lethality to her existence, a kind of... absolute reality that she didn't like, not one little bit. She liked to be surrounded by expectations, by restraints, by conditions. But now... now she had nothing to rely on. No expectations to depend on. What would a judge do in this situation? Exactly what she was doing. Running away. What restraints should she be obeying? None. If she obeyed any restraints, she was going to die a long, painful death, and the sliced remnants of her body would never be found. She would vanish into the frozen north. Her mother would never know that she died screaming and begging for it to stop. The red smile on her arm seemed to widen and contract as she moved, sometimes a smirk, sometimes a grin, sometimes a coy little expression that was almost teasing.

Her arms felt useless. Increasingly numb.

How large was this labyrinth? How many ancient tunnels had they excavated? The tunnels were wide, well-constructed, the walls and ceiling invisible behind layers of fur and meat, but she could swear that there was smooth, flawless stone at the heart of it all. She tried to imagine... why any of this would be built. Maybe Rekida had just been a centre of paranoia and plotting. Maybe these were defences against their enemies - Rekida didn't expand, but it made damn well sure no-one could take them. They might not have many guns, might have fewer than ten cannons in the whole city, but if you came here... they'd retreat to their tunnels, fight you in close quarters, ambush you from behind your lines, make you hurt. Leave you with a sterile, impregnable city, all the food hidden away where it couldn't be found, all the fields burned... she stood in a web of centuries of paranoia and suspicion, terrified of the outside world, terrified of the rumbling agitation among the slaves, terrified of each other, terrified of a universe that had to be chained for it to be tolerated, keenly aware of how easily the chains could slip...

She turned a sharp corner, and... her sleeve caught, just a little, on an exposed ribcage. Useless arm. Numb. Swinging like a club.

She moved...

It was the sleeve that'd been cut by Vyuli.

A tear, and her arm was completely bare. The red smile on full display. She kept running, leaving it behind, flinching internally as she saw a little train of pearl buttons patter soundlessly into the thick black fur. She turned another corner, then another... forced herself to stop breathing for a moment so she could listen... a vague hum, she could hear a vague hum. Theurgic engine, whirring away. Unstable from the moment it stopped being maintained. A bomb ready to go off at a moment's notice - a razor placed over the throat of the colony, ready to cut. The governor had to have known the risks when he did that. Had to have known that it would create a vulnerability... a long enough period of isolation, the entire thing might destabilise catastrophically. Maybe he'd decided to do it because... because he wanted the option to sterilise the whole colony. Maybe the cartel had manipulated him into doing it, into giving them more power unconsciously. Two governors... two governors, one colony. One governor, sane, rational, a little authoritarian, a little condescending, but... decent, in her view. Mostly decent. A little shady. And the other governor... a mad old man obsessed with reclaiming a destroyed homeland, and if that wasn't possible, recreating it somewhere else. She doubted he'd ever succeed. A colony of debtors, dragged up here to absolve themselves...

When she'd arrived, this place had reminded her of Jovan. The same air of secrecy. The same air of cloistered knowledge that everyone but her was privy to.

When she'd arrived, the governor had talked about how he was... 'trying to run a sustainable colony. Not interested in creating some awful little prison camp where everyone hates us'. And he'd done his best to avoid that. But the second governor had gone ahead and creating a prison. A prison for people who owed him money, favours, anything. His loyalists, his cartel standing at the top in a perverse aristocracy... and everyone else at the bottom. Had Fyeln been in debt? Had Dyen, Lyur, all the rest? What had bound them to the cartel?

The shantytown had made this place. Provided the conditions for its emergence, like... like a stinking jungle where diseases festered freely, everything warm and damp and crowded, ripe for transmission and infection. A training camp that taught people to stay quiet, to cluster together, to never talk to the judges, and certainly not to the Erlize. Basic distrust. And then, a place where violence was common, crime was rife, no-one born there escaped looking flawless and unmarked. Everyone ended up involved in something, developed some kind of record.

No wonder this place felt the way it did. No wonder she felt so uneasy.

It was like walking back into Jovan on that first day, when the lodge still didn't know her.

And with that memory, came all the others.

The physical examinations. The interrogations by the other members. Being poked and prodded by her aunts until they deemed her worthy. Feeling gazes upon her as she shivered in the middle of a wide, dark room, wearing nothing but a shift, answering question after question after question... feeling eyes on her as she acted in their mystery plays.

Her candle had long-since burned out. Witchcraft clustered... no, no, she'd escaped.

Maybe the candle burned for her even now.

She kept running, following the hum, and...

A deafening crack filled the air, and Tanner reeled backwards, slamming into the hard-packed wall, feeling ribs and teeth dig into her back.

Gunshot.

They were hunting her.

Blocking off the exits.

She peeked... saw a figure. Familiar. Dyen, looked like. A lamp burned behind him, casting his form into shadow... but she could see the gleam of a revolver's barrel, could hear the click of the hammer being drawn back. She could tear through bindings, but she couldn't survive him unloading that thing into her. He'd have a massive target to aim at. She gauged distances... could run forwards, try and get to him. But... no, no, too large, too clumsy. Her arms were too numb from blood loss, she might wind up just... bleeding on him. If she didn't die before she reached him. He was standing guard, silent and grave, eyes flashing in the dark.

Could she beg?

Could she get close enough and slice his throat?

Her hands shook. No. No. Wouldn't... wouldn't be that kind of animal. She was Tanner Magg, she was restrained. She was decent. Judges didn't just kill people because they were in their way. Find another way out. She'd get shot and die anyway.

If she killed someone, how easy would it be to kill someone else?

Would she ever sleep correctly again? Would she ever be able to... to live, knowing that if she pushed herself, if she really eased on her restraints, she wouldn't just embarrass herself, she wouldn't just hurt someone, she'd kill. Her breath would stink of iron for the rest of her life. She'd be a murderer, and the ability, the will to take another life would sleep in her heart, her muscles, her mind until the day she died.

Her mother and father would be ashamed. Sister Halima would be disturbed. Eygi would be horrified. The lodge would shake their heads and turn their backs. Marana would know her as a murderer, and would shun her for being just like all the others in her life, all the people she hated. Yan-Lam would idolise her for it. It'd vindicate her own desire for revenge.

No killing.

She turned and began to run, ears still ringing with the force of the gunshot.

Dyen didn't follow.

Attempted murder of a judge, assistance in capture and attempted torture and murder of a judge, wilful deception of a judge, perjury, conspiracy to commit multiple crimes, pattern of suspected assault, intimidation, and murder.

Fidelizh would sentence him to death for that. Hung by the neck in a dark cell in the bowels of the Golden Parliament. The judges wouldn't do the deed, but they'd gather evidence, make the recommendations, argue their case before the Parliament's committees. Making a rope out of paper and looping it around his throat.

Kept running... well, more of a vague stagger, the halls were too short for a proper run. She'd slow down to turn a corner, lope to something approaching a trot, then have to slow once more, dragging her shoulders in to avoid scraping against the bones. Hollow pig skulls watched her, mockingly. Empty sockets bristling with sausages like the feelers of a mole. They'd be blocking all the entrances to the cold-house above. Obviously they would. Block up the exits, leave her to... what, wander around? Not going to starve, not in this place. Maybe just... narrow her down, or... no, no, what had Lyur said? Always leave a route open for escape. An armed giantess was running around their centre of operations, if they left her no options, she'd eventually have to go through one of them. And when that happened, there was no certainty of her winning, and no certainty of them winning. Maybe she'd get lucky. Throw a knife and hit. The gun would jam. She'd soak up a bullet and get close enough. Find a gun of her own. And if she got out, entered the rest of the colony, then...

Then what?

Tear them apart? Leave them no avenues of escape, practically invite them to detonate the cold-houses and murder the whole colony?

She almost stopped running.

Maybe she should've... hell, if she'd moved her neck, maybe she could've forced Vyuli to cut her throat. To cut too deeply, nip an artery. Let her heart's size and power work to kill her faster, pumping blood out of the body, kill herself in seconds. She paused.

Slapped herself in the face. Firmly.

No crying. No pitying herself. None of that. She was alive, she wasn't going to die here if she could help it. There might be an escape route. Might be a way out of this place. She didn't think for a moment that there weren't preparations in the event of an escape - there were guards at the entrances immediately after she got away from Vyuli, he'd definitely anticipated it, regarded it as a dim possibility. He'd certainly fled with the speed usually associated with the well-prepared. So, either he had a good way of killing her down here - flooding it with poisonous gas, with too many bodies for her to overcome, with contamination, with something. Hunting her down area by area with teams, like they were chasing an animal through the undergrowth. Or, they had a desired route for her. A way out of this place. Maybe...

Oh.

Ah.

She paused, getting her bearings, nursing her injuries. Should've grabbed her sleeve, used it for bandaging... she reached down, and winced as she tore her lovely, lovely dress around the hem, her fingers clumsily fumbling... had to use the knife to really get a clean cut. Still more ragged than she wanted to acknowledge. Bound her wrists with the black cloth, flinching and hissing through her teeth as the fibres rubbed painfully against the exposed meat... another strip, around her arm. Felt a bit more together. Not by much, but... it was something. She stopped running, started walking, examining every passage... moving away from the hum. The reassurance of the theurgic engines. Off into the bowels, into the places where there might be a way out. Either this, or charging through a line of men with guns. Being... large had its perks, sometimes, but something important to consider was that buffalo were larger than a human, and she was walking on a carpet of their pelts, so abundant they could be used to coat this entire labyrinth. Not just succumbing to humanity, but succumbing en masse. Remembered Lyur talking about the killing canyon. How many hundreds, how many thousands had been killed that way? Driven into canyons and left to freeze, preserved for whenever the humans needed a quick snack...

She could be as large as she liked, humans could still kill her, just like they'd killed every other animal larger than themselves. Even whales could be killed with enough harpoons.

The hallways kept going. The dead lingered in them. Like they were trying to impregnate the soil with them, leach meat and bone and spice directly into the earth. No-one stood against her, she didn't even hear a single footstep, a single raised voice. The furs would conceal the former, admittedly, but... nothing. She moved quietly, cautiously, down corridors that must've been drilled into the earth over the course of centuries. When Rekida had decided to stop expanding, when they decided to chain their city and not a single other... evidently this had become the next obsession. When expansion outwards ceased, expansion downwards remained an option. the furs gave way to bare, dusty stone at points, and the meat was less prevalent. What was more common were bones. Turning from a cold-house to an ossuary, the bones of uncountable buffalo, pigs, cows, and so on just... lying in heaps, with austere paths carved through them. Fish bones lay in delicate cairns, their skulls gaping dumbly at the work around them, eye sockets wide in perpetual surprise. Why would... no, she knew. Glue. Fertiliser. They were preparing for a long, long game. Stockpiling every resource they might need.

She walked in the halls of the dead, and sightless skulls stared at her, some mournful, some idiotic, some narrow and cruel. Here and there was a shrivelled, ancient piece of cured meat, forgotten or discarded... turned black with age, shrivelling so tightly that they looked like living creatures themselves, something amorphous and strange. Lamps swung from the ceiling, and she saw the lit ones tapering off sharply as the darkness grew... gladly, she grabbed one, hissing as the weight made her wrists scream in protest...

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Tanner paused.

Listening to the silence.

Rekida's world was... hollow. Very hollow. Like they couldn't trust that the earth beneath their feet was secured until they invaded it. Idly, she wondered if Mr. Lam had been right to not teach his daughter about the city. If Tal-Sar was right not to teach Lam, in turn. Hard to imagine this place ever being functional. She reached out, stroking one of the bare stone walls curiously... very smooth. Very smooth indeed. Didn't look ancient, looked damn near flawless. She imagined that down here, the bones would turn to dust, the pelts would rot, the meat would shrivel into nothingness... but the walls would never change their shade, never collapse, never be marred. Maybe it was due to the foundation stone - the stuff was unnaturally tough and resilient, and the north had a couple of massive concentrations... maybe she was walking through tunnels reinforced by the stone, or she was walking through carefully excavated passages in an enormous bedrock of the stuff.

No idea. The walls didn't speak. And the dead were silent.

She let out a long, shuddering breath...

Leant against a wall...

And remained there for a minute. Breathing in and out. Staring ahead.

Couldn't... stop seeing that knife. Couldn't stop feeling the terror. The way Vyuli had undressed to stop her blood from staining his suit. The way he sounded regretful. She'd... she knew she'd have talked. All her... expectation, all the promises she made, telling herself she was content with dying here if the judges expected it of her, ignoring the spasms in her stomach whenever she had that thought... all of it, and when confronted with a knife, with torture, with death... she'd capitulated. If she hadn't torn her way free, she'd have talked.

They'd need to cut out her tongue to stop her from talking. Everything she'd learned. She'd have sold out Tal-Sar if she thought it would stop her from dying or being hurt... no, she'd have told them anyway. She'd talk because they wanted her to talk, and gradually every false story would be whittled down, and she'd scream the truth.

She knew she was weak.

Seven years of training. One year of practice.

Hadn't beaten the cowardice out of her.

...would she have wrung that old man's neck if she'd gotten her hands on him? Would Tanner Magg have gladly snapped his spindly bones until he stopped moving?

Would he scream and beg like she had?

...no. No, he'd have died silently. Glaring at her.

But she would have killed him. If she'd caught him, if she'd been thinking about anything but escaping, she'd have crushed him. Even in her weakened state, it would've been easy. No wonder he'd run away so quickly. Wait. Wait. She... he hadn't had any guards nearby. Presumably he'd just sent them to watch the entrances, to leave him to work in peace. Why? Why had he done that? If he hadn't, she... there was a fair chance she wouldn't even have managed to break her bonds, let alone escape. Shame? Shame that he was torturing someone at all? Discretion, a kind of twisted altruism where he wanted to give her some privacy while she was screaming her lungs out? Did he not trust his guards enough to let them watch him at his most amoral, his most depraved? Was there a more pressing need to watch the entrances, as if someone might be out looking for her, trying to break inside? Or... oh. Maybe that was how it worked. Start with him, and him alone. Then, bring more people in. She'd get used to him, get used to the solitude... then more people could come and watch. Maybe even participate. A way of escalating the experience.

Her bare arm felt cold. Very cold indeed. The wound seemed to mock her with its cleanness, its neatness. Such a swift, perfect cut that she'd barely felt it when it was made. Could see the stain it made in the dark cloth. The shape of the smile, widened and distorted until it seemed to be opening wide, ready to swallow her whole.

Come on. Get back on the road. Stop thinking about what had... had almost happened.

Stop thinking about where the torture might have gone.

Stop thinking about his sad, sad eyes. Walk among the boneyard, among the remains of countless buffalo, pigs, boars, cows, even some horses, their skulls monstrous without a sheaf of flesh, uncannily long and with teeth that seemed to belong to some ancient predator. The tunnels just kept going, and...

She heard something.

A footstep in the dark.

A footstep on the bare stone. Echoing down the hall.

She turned...

And barely managed to avoid the gunshot that screamed through the air, a blazing comet that illuminated the corridor in stark monochrome for a split second, almost blinding her. The lantern fell from her hand, her grip already weak, the shock undoing it completely. The metal object crashed with a deafening racket, but it seemed dull and insubstantial compared to the bullet. Oil spilled, igniting, creating a small, feeble, ghost-fire that burned amidst the bones, oil splashing into the empty sockets of leering skulls, pooling in their mouths to give them infernal tongues, filling their ribs with a perverse half-life, already ebbing low. Her eyes were wide. Could hear the hammer being drawn back again.

Saw a study, powerful face in the darkness.

Lyur.

His face was solemn. Carved from stone.

The same face he'd had when he bludgeoned Tyer to death.

Tanner didn't think. Just turned on her heel and ran into the darkness. The firelight faded immediately as she turned a corner, reduced to an ominous red glow that died another turn later. The bones seemed to loom all around her, mountains ready to collapse at a moment's notice. Her every footstep felt calamitous enough to almost stand the fatal landslide, to invoke the dead herds to crowd her path, to gnaw away at any clear route, to bury her alive in a heap of eyeless, grinning skulls, animal features turned monstrous by the absence of flesh and fur. Each pant of terrified air from her burning lungs seemed powerful enough to blow the delicate arrangement over, too - no part of her was subtle, no part of her was neat, everything crashed and blundered and stumbled, and she felt her face reddening with effort. She clutched the knife, thought about turning, lurking behind a corner, facing him honestly, cutting his throat. Might never get a chance. Close range. Only him. Might never muster the resolve. Thought of his dark eyes. Thought of his stories of the bone pit.

Had he known this would happen?

How could he have known?

The movement had stirred up dust and ash from the ground. A startling amount of it - the residue of crushed bones, of slow erosion. It clawed at her dress, like frost advancing over a windowpane. She turned her head... and caught a brief, tiny glimpse of Lyur walking steadily after her, boots clicking on the ground, right before she turned a corner. He had a lantern hanging from his waist, once shadowed, now allowed to blare freely, a fatal star in the bone-strewn night of the tunnels. She almost missed the sickening, cloying spice of the meat-halls, the constant feeling of grease over her fingers, like candle wax. She saw his eyes. His dark, dark eyes. The bone-ash was sticking to him in great quantities, stirred to life by the inferno he'd walked through. Turned him into a pale shade. Something not quite earthly. His voice echoed through the tunnels.

"Keep running. There's a chance you might escape. If you run fast enough."

Click, click, click went the retort of his shoes, as certain and doom-laden the clicking of a revolver's hammer.

"I think someone could escape a situation like this. If their will was strong. If you keep running, there's a chance of escape. If you take too long to catch your breath..."

She could hear the smile in his voice, though she was sure his face was still as rigid as if it were one of the city's wall-statues.

"I gave you a warning shot."

Tanner ran.

And Lyur pursued.

She sprinted, crashing from passage to passage, no point in hiding her tracks in such conditions of dust. Light was death. Darkness was peace. Darkness was safety. She charged through it, and the piles of bones gradually declined, from enormous dunes to smaller cairns, to little piles, to nothing at all. And then there was just her, and the clicking of Lyur's footsteps, and the tunnels. Ancient, plain tunnels. Carved so flawlessly she could barely see a single brick. Unmarked by any decoration. Descending, inexorably, down at a subtle angle. Her wrists throbbed with pain, her arms hung like useless weights, barely capable of stirring. But the knife remained. Gleaming. Sharp as can be. Each corridor was a gamble - was it a short one, with a quick turning? If it was, she was safe. She could run and feel that she might see the next few seconds. If it was long... if it was long, and straight, and unwavering, then each step brought Lyur closer. He wouldn't need to be too close to shoot her down the rigid beam of the corridor - like shooting fish in a barrel.

Hide behind a corner. She'd have no chance like this again. Turn and cut him.

He'd killed an innocent man. Killed him because it was quicker and easier than keeping him alive. Then stood by and kept doing his job, misleading, hunting, killing. Might well have hung Myunhen with peaceful detachment. There was no clemency in him. No pity.

The air was growing colder.

She pursued the cold. She relished the cold. The cold was the outdoors. The outdoors was safe.

Safer than the tunnels. Maybe. But out there... out there lay no chance of killing Lyur. The ground was too open. The views too wide.

The sentence for his crimes would be death in Fidelizh. They condemned lesser criminals than him to death every day. She wanted him gone. She suspected, truly suspected, that he was involved in killing Lam and the unnamed soldier. Coward, couldn't do what needed to be done. Weak.

She ran on.

The cold intensified.

And tears pricked her eyes when she saw a growing pale light along the ground. So faint it was only perceptible when she'd spent such time in the dark. The most beautiful shade she'd ever seen.

Ignored the cold as it pierced her dress with ease, turned her bare arm into a painfully numb piece of flesh, blood retreating inwards. The wounds stopped hurting quite so much in the cold. The blood was slithering to coil around her organs, hiding from the chill.

She could almost imagine the wounds scabbing over with crimson ice.

A second...

A click-click-click of approaching heels...

The tunnel was narrowing, narrowing, she felt her numb elbows scrape against the walls, not even feeling a spark of pain. She burst out into the light. Hadn't stopped running in... not sure how long. Her lungs were burning, but she... she felt like there was a reserve of energy inside her. The flailing, powerful movements of the amateur, unsure of how much effort was too much, of what exhaustion felt like, of what it was to strain or tear a muscle. Inexperienced. And giving power freely, without reserve or hesitation.

Running without stopping into the pale.

Until not a scrap of darkness remained.

She blinked...

Looked around...

Her heart sank a little. Just a little.

Snow. Snow, snow, all around. Fields of it. The tunnel emerged from the side of a hill, cunningly concealed by an overhanging lip of rock, dripping with icicles, and long, stringy, beard-like lichen. Emerging in such a way that it was almost invisible from the outside. Narrow enough to be confused with a small fissure or simply a piece of unremarkable stone. And around it... nothingness.

A barren, endless plain of nothingness. Simply snow, rolling in great dunes like sand in the desert.

Saw nothing.

And the heels were still coming.

No choice but to run. She slipped between the icicles, glancing back... could she turn around the hill, run for the colony, could... no, no, the distance, the openness of the terrain, the ease of tracking her. Lyur could stride out of the tunnel, see her tracks, follow her lead and put a bullet between her shoulders faster than she could get to cover. And there'd be more guards. More bouncers. More of the hidden forces that the old man had kept beneath the earth, fattening up on the produce they skimmed from the colony. Could see their shadows, vaguely. Like statues in the pale glow, rigid and unmoving, guns in gloved hands. She'd have no cover. Retreat over the hill, and before she got to the colony she'd be going through their territory, through the very place she'd just run away from. Going forwards was the only option. The dunes were deceptively covering, she could lose Lyur there... but how long would she live afterwards?

The man had a warm coat. Gloves. Maybe even some food.

If she killed him, stole these things...

If she beat him, she could confiscate these things and move on. He was close enough to return home. She tried to remember the maps she'd read... there might be towers out there, but she wasn't getting her bearings, not sure where she...

She figured out where she was. The sun, faint as it was, told her where east and west were.

She was in the part of the colony where she shouldn't be.

The part leading into the fields of snow punctuated by endless frozen rivers. Frozen only at the surface. Covered in layers of snow. Step wrong, her foot would go through, she'd basically have lost the foot to frostbite immediately, especially out here, without a fire.

They were herding her into a place where she'd never be found. Not until spring.

This was how they always did their kills. The snow could kill more effectively than a man could. The snow would hide the dead, mar the bodies, prevent them from becoming evidence.

The click of heels.

A pair of dark eyes stared out at her, gleaming like stars in the tunnel's dark.

There was a strange truce between the two for a moment.

Lyur spoke.

"You could make it. There's towers. Intact enough. Might even be some dry wood to burn."

"...I..."

"You could. It's a matter of willpower."

He stroked his gun very slightly, the metal turning cloudy as the chill settled into it. Willpower. Could she kill him? Could she get close enough, cut his throat, try and... and... he tossed, underhand, a packet of matches. Tanner caught it uncertainly, fighting to stop her frozen, blood-starved fingers from releasing it by some accidental twitch. If she got to a tower, she could make a fire, she could warm herself, she could... could survive?

"Why..."

Lyur smiled very, very faintly, his eyes unblinking all the while.

"Because there's no sport in doing it the efficient way. And I'd have to drag you out to those rivers anyhow."

The smile broadened.

"Same reason I convinced Tom-Tom to try that moronic plan of hers. Same reason I told her it'd be the most fantastic plan ever conceived. That it'd make her father proud of her, and not her two dead sisters. Encouraged her, fattened her up with praise. When the old man sent her out to fish because he didn't want to put up with her, I was there. Saying hello. Giving her all the reasons she needed to do something... catastrophic. Same reason I made sure my buddies split up Tyer and his lady friend. Isolated him. Same reason I helped take Tyer in once the plan started. Kept him. Nursed him. Fed him stories. Told him that Lam was out to kill him for something he did, way, way back in another colony, something that... ooh, might inspire someone to hire a man to come out here and put him down for good. Told him that Lam was getting closer, that he was panicking. Getting clumsy. Told him that Tom-Tom was helping him out, that the accusation was a way to draw Lam out of hiding. Big old story. The smitten lady helping out the innocent fugitive. Oh, you should've felt the romance in the air."

Tanner was frozen in place, ignoring the chill that spread through her whole body.

"Same reason I told him, one bleak winter night, that Tom-Tom was dead. That she was dead, and it was because of him. Lam had panicked. Lam had killed her. He'd been alone with me for a while, then. Kept with me, all paranoid, just waiting for something, more alone than you can imagine. And the one real ally he had, the one friend... dead as dead can be, because she chose to help him. And when he found that knife in my drawer... a knife from a little collection I'd been building up for a while at that point? A little collection I'd donated to his house after he'd vacated it, hid it under the floorboards... well. What's a half-crazed, paranoid man to do, when told that Lam had killed his one and only remaining friend, and was coming for him? He ran out. And we know the rest."

Tanner didn't...

She had...

There was no response on her lips.

"You..."

Lyur didn't smile. But his eyes shone, and his amphibian-like skin gleamed in the pale glow of the winter sun. Tanner saw nothing in them. Just... pits. Why? Why had he... who would... she... Tanner had nothing. What could she say to something like that? To that kind of... sheer brutality? Sheer pointless brutality? Like he'd gone into events with no desire but to make them as bloody as possible, no mind for success, no mind for a grander goal, just... how many people could die on that night? Lam, and a soldier, killed by a man fattened with delusions and deceits. Tyer, killed by the man who'd engineered it. Myunhen, hung by Lyur, maybe to stop him ratting on Lyur's part in things, after Lyur asked him to inform the authorities of Tyer's movements. 'Please'. He'd been asking someone he thought was a friend for help. For understanding. For forgiveness. The one person left... and he'd cracked him over the skull in the middle of the night, with no expression but professional detachment. His eyes were pits. His skin was white with ash. His muscles seemed mechanical - like they'd been designed first, the ideal to which he was meant to aspire, never a child, never an adolescent, always this.

She didn't understand him.

She just... couldn't. She thought she understood criminals. The law told her about motives, about inciting incidents, about escalation, but...

Where did people like him fit into the Golden Law?

How could a Golden Law endure in a world where this kind of... person existed? For whom no law was self-evident and perfect, no moral system was rational, no...

She didn't understand him. The black pits of his eyes offered no answers.

His voice barked out like a whip-crack.

"Run."

She ran.

Lyur's eyes followed her for a solid minute before he began to pursue, his gun almost lazily held at his side.

Persistence predator.

Never run when he could walk. Never act rashly when he could be patient. Wound the enemy. And follow. Follow. Follow.

Follow until the enemy fell over dead, or slowed down enough to be killed.

She ran into the pale. Her face absolutely stoic.

Her long, powerful limbs driving her through the deep snow. Fleeing all that she didn't understand. She'd thought of... of conspiracies, of interlocking schemes, of clashes of power, of passive motives of greed, revenge, ambition... and she'd been right. There were conspiracies. There were schemes, very many of them. And then... then there was Lyur. Who started the red tide. Who created the first deaths. Had he killed the governor? Had he killed the governor too, just to make things worse?

She ran. Ran from all she did not know.

He hadn't admitted to that. He hadn't admitted to killing the governor. Her vision was hazy, exhausted, stressed... she thought she could see the dead moving under the earth. The heaps of animal bones, buried deep, deep, deep... soaking the soil. Poisoning it. The white of the snow reminded her of the ash in the tunnels, the cloying layers which still coated her dress, her hands, her face... too cold for her to sweat heavily, so the ash clung. Refused to leave. White war paint... surrender, painted all over her. A body turned into a white flag, flapping wearily in the gathering storm. For once in her life, for once, Tanner was doubting the Golden Law. The precepts taught by Sister Halima, Brother Olgi, all the rest. And without that... what was she? Priestess without a god. No, no, stop. Focus. Run. Into the wilderness. These might be her last thoughts. She might never be able to ponder these things again. Did she want to die with faith still in the air? Did she have time to resolve the churning instability inside herself? Lyur was coming. His gun swung at his side like a war club. If she turned, she might...

She might tear him apart. She might. But he might shoot first. If he did... if he did, then she died defying him, surely? A sacrifice witnessed only by him. A sacrifice that would be forgotten as soon as he moved her corpse to a river. She'd been terrified of death at the hands of the old man. She was still terrified now. And she knew she shouldn't be. But life... life was there, staring her in the face. It might happen. It might. If she got to the towers, if she got to the towers and lit a fire. Escaped Lyur, somehow. Somehow. If she did all that and more, all that and more, maybe she could turn this around. Where was Marana? Where was Yan-Lam? Couldn't die here alone. Couldn't. Wouldn't. She knew she was meant to, she knew she should be content to have served the law, to have started the landslide that might bury this whole wretched place, but... but she couldn't do it.

Yan-Lam bringing her coffee, falling asleep in a pile of ledgers.

Marana giving her genuinely good advice, taking her interests seriously, never maliciously mocking.

Bayai resting a hand on her shoulder like no-one had done in recent memory.

Eygi.

Did she know any of them? How much could she say she knew, how valuable was she to them? She shivered. Would they mourn her when she died? Would they speak kindly, or would they forget her? Couldn't... couldn't die yet, she hadn't made enough good impressions on them, she hadn't impressed them enough. If she died, she'd die incomplete. She'd die a half-person. Had to keep going.

In search of towers which might not even exist.

Across a landscape where one misstep would kill her. A slow, frozen death.

They said you felt warm before you died of cold.

They said it was a comfortable thing. Like falling asleep. That you felt like you were burning up, like you could strip off your clothes and be just fine.

...a kind bullet to get it over quickly? Or a slow sapping of energy, a slow realisation of what was coming, even as she felt more and more comfortable with the world.

Which way did she want to die?