CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN - CARNIVOROUS HALLS

Dark on all sides. Dark above. Dark below. Dark all around.

But never was the darkness flat.

There were gradients. A shifting surface to it, sometimes grey, sometimes almost brown, sometimes a flickering red... only faint, though. So faint, and so quick, that she could easily pretend that she was just projecting a pattern onto the blackness. Anything to break the monotony. She wasn't... drifting in some fathomless deep, but she felt numbed. Distant from herself. Sleeping in the parts of her brain normally occupied by... fatal parasites and suppressed thoughts. Sometimes, she felt... something, a vague pressure, but nothing sharp, nothing real. Wasn't... right, she vaguely remembered. Nerves, the nervous system, the branching filaments that carried sensation. Dull those, and what could you feel? Squeezing. The slithering of organ against organ, muscle against muscle. The body didn't change, not really. Not unless you were paralysed. But you engaged with... maybe you were engaging with it more honestly, when in a state like this. No convenient system that translated it all for you, you had to speak with the body on its own terms. Each fibre. Each pulsing gland. Each hollow chamber. Each hard pillar around which blood vessels coiled, muscles contracted, and fat ensconced. A sense of the skin as it truly was - dead matter, a leather bag holding in everything important.

When you were anaesthetised, you were more human than ever before. For once, your body was your own. For once, you were honest.

If only you weren't unconscious...

Well, apparently even like this, she was capable of having peculiar thoughts. Not sure if that was good or not.

She'd been knocked unconscious and was alone with her thoughts, at no stage could any of this be described as good. But... she'd managed to erase evidence. She'd managed to obscure. Her mind was running too quickly, in a way. The gyre was widening, the ends flinging further and further in wildly different directions... unconsciousness had loosed the dog of thought, and now it was bounding away from her, legs blending together, eyes burning like the sun-kissed snow... managed to spite them, hadn't she? A spiteful part of her thought that she'd stained the interrogation with Tom-Tom. Would they believe her when she undoubtedly said she'd said nothing? Would they suspect that she'd revealed too much? At no point in the notes she'd assembled did she mention Tal-Sar, even when she'd interviewed him she'd kept his name unwritten, was considering him an anonymous source. Nor did she mention Yan-Lam. Yan-Lam... was she dead? She'd seen the blank-eyed pitilessness of Lyur when he cracked open a man's skull. Would he ignore her when she screamed for him to stop? Would he see any functional difference? Maybe he'd notice a slight softness of the bones, a slight pitch to the scream... nothing else. Marana might be dead, too.

Tanner had done this. She could've stopped it. And hadn't. If she'd noticed earlier, she might've been able to get help, or fight more effectively. So what if she hadn't fought since she was a child, when she didn't know her own strength and how easy it was to hurt people. If she hadn't gone for Fyeln. She'd thought he and Marana were together, that there was real, genuine affection at play, why shouldn't she go to him? Maybe Fyeln had told people. Tanner shouldn't have probed. Shouldn't have gone out. Should've just sat neat and pretty in her office, waiting for spring when she could beg for reassignment to somewhere warm and uneventful. A professional death sentence, consigned to the lowest duties for the rest of her life, her permanent record filled with black, indelible marks...

She just wished she hadn't dragged the others down with her.

Should've told Marana to get lost immediately after she arrived. No guarantee that she wouldn't have been killed in the streets instead of the house.

Should've never brought Yan-Lam. Should've brought Tal-Sar. If she explained... maybe he would've come with her. No guarantee that he would've come, that he would've survived more than a few minutes, that his presence wouldn't have just accelerated the ambush, that his presence would intimidate Tom-Tom in the same way that a living representation of her crimes would. No guarantee that they wouldn't have gone for Yan-Lam anyway, as retribution, to sterilise a leak. No guarantee.

Should've brought more soldiers. Would've made them too visible, Tom-Tom would've noticed, never have entered the house, and the bouncers would know that she suspected an assault, meaning, she expected them, meaning, she was investigating them. Meaning, they had no reason to hold back. Kill her in her sleep.

Justifications meant nothing. Ash on her mind's tongue.

Unconsciousness ate her up, and left nothing behind. Gradually, even thoughts left her.

Nothing to do but wake up.

* * *

Honestly, she was surprised there was an awakening. Wondered why they hadn't killed her. Hadn't seen a knife. Hadn't seen a gun. Would've been simple to slice her throat and leave her to... no, no, they wanted to be bloodless. Blood left stains, trails, and in the snow, they were livid as lightning at night. Wanted her to die clean. Choke her to death, beat her to death, smother her... no, no, why would they break the window if they wanted to be clean? Broken glass, there was no way that would go unnoticed. Slowly, her body came back to her. Her skin... well, it felt gritty, clammy, stiff. How many people had touched her since she'd gone unconscious? This wasn't the house. She'd been moved. The feeling of... other people lifting her up, carrying her around, oh gods... no, focus. Her eyes slowly cracked open, a pounding headache lurking behind them. The sort of headache that lurked throughout the entire skull, seemed to turn the bone into a red-hot vice slowly clamping inwards... her eyes snapped shut again, welcoming the soothing darkness. Muscles... stiff, but not painful to move. Just a little clumsy. She tried to move... no, ropes binding her wrists, her arms... they'd done everything in their power to keep her still. Her ankles had suffered much the same treatment. But her mouth wasn't gagged. A foul, chemical taste lingered on her tongue, polluting every breath, making her stomach twitch uncomfortably at the idea that any of this stuff could reach it.

Come on.

Move.

Open your eyes.

She tried... come on, focus, try to feel the gods. The governor's spectral, broken fingers digging into her back, the lodge with their innumerable staring eyes and burning hands, Sister Halima shaking her head in shame, Eygi smirking in that strange portrait Tal-Sar had, Yan-Lam with a broken skull, next to her father with his slashed stomach, Marana with a face turned wine-red by being strangled, all of them, each and every one gripped her around the spine and hoisted her upwards, forced her protesting limbs to stir to life, compelled her eyelids to open.

She'd almost starved herself to death, vomited blood, gone days without sleep because it was expected of her, and she would open her eyes for the same damn reason.

They cracked open. A flash of pain. Not suppressed, just... tolerated. She was large, she could handle this. That was how size worked.

Meat surrounded her.

Shimmering like jewels. And she knew exactly where she was.

The underground tunnels. The ones under the cold-house, filled with meat, preserved for the rest of winter in case the machines inside the cold-house failed. She'd been told they were too small for her. That no-one could hide in them.

Lie. Another lie. Of course they'd lied - there was a cast-iron decoration in the cold-house. She knew what paranoia smelled like, did deceit taste like iron?

Forced herself to shift. To get a better impression.

She was in a... chamber, of sorts. No sign of the walls, though. The room seemed to be square, and meat softened every corner, turned everything into the same vague mass. Like she was being digested by an enormous intestine. The meat was cured, hung from hooks, from chains... sides of beef, chunks of ham, trails of sausages, all of them gleaming strangely and glittering with tiny flecks of salt and other spices. Some were red, some were grey, some were black, some were the colour of fine wine, and all of them shimmered before her eyes, blending together. The smell was... strange, a mixture of far too many spices, and the salt in the air explained the painful dryness of her throat. Pickled ox tongues were sat, plump and grey, in great glass jars, like scientific samples of some exotic, grotesque deep-sea creature, blind and senseless. Around the top of the room, an array of pig skulls stared down at her. Picked clean, the single signs of flawless white in a room of shining burgundy. But they didn't stare eyelessly. From their eyes were long strings, binding together long trails of cured ears which folded over themselves like old paper, and cured tongues which looked like pallid leeches, shivering slightly in the invisible air currents of the meat labyrinth. Ribs protruded from the walls like fangs reaching out for her, ribs from every angle, jagged and clawing... the ground was covered in a thick, thick carpet of what felt like buffalo fur, the stuff the hunters had brought in, and her knees were invisible amidst the black, wiry tufts.

A corridor led away from the room... no, several corridors. All of them well-constructed, sizeable...

The ledgers had always shown discrepancies in the amount of food being sent to cold-houses, and the amount of food actually being tallied up.

Some of it, presumably, had come down here.

And she could hear the low wheezing breaths of the theurgic engine above her head, cooling the air, draining it from jars stuffed with immaculately preserved meat...

She shivered.

Tried to stand up... no, nuts. They'd lashed her ankles together, and her knees. Anything to stop her from getting the proper leverage to tear her way out of her bonds. Like trussing a deer, ready for butchering. She started to wriggle on the ground desperately, trying to find some sort of purchase... her eyes immediately locked onto a strange nest around the edges of the room, behind the meat. Horns. Bull and buffalo horns, deer antlers, the tusks of boar, and teeth, huge mounds of them, roots eerie in their nakedness, making her own teeth itch at the thought of those long, slender points lacing into her gums... when animals were killed, they tore them apart for the meat, every last scrap, and had no reason to neglect the bones. Even just for ghoulish decorations. But the horns were sharp. And if she got close, she might be able to cut through her bonds. Her eyes darted around, vision obscured by the thick buffalo fur all around her. Right, don't panic, don't panic, just... wriggle towards one of the horns.

She was panicking.

She was panicking.

She was very, very afraid indeed.

...stop it. Stop being... being so weak. Go for the horns. Come on, do you want to get your head split open?

Started to wriggle, eel-like, over the soft furs, coming closer and closer to the pungent walls of salt-speckled meat, examined all the while by the meat-filled eyes of the pig skulls, closer, closer to the cairns of teeth and the nests of tusks, closer...

"You won't get very far with that."

Familiar voice.

Lyur.

How hadn't she... oh. Buffalo fur. Muffled footsteps. She rolled over quickly, staring at him. He looked like he always did. Bulldog-like jowls. Sturdy, muscled torso, arms like industrial machinery, eyes reminding her of river stones, skin reminding her of an amphibious creature, gleaming with the faintest hint of sweat. He lounged on his heels, staring at her as she writhed about helplessly, a fish on a hook. She saw the steel toes of his boots, and a trill of fear ran through her... suppressed by what she was expected to do. Tanner wasn't here. Tanner had gone away. Tanner was basically non-existent. All that remained was a shell, a hollow thing made by the perceptions and commands of others, a being that was made, not born. Knew nothing but what it had been constructed to do, trained to do. And right now, Tanner Magg was a judge, weighed by expectations, and she did not panic or beg or insult. Her face was flat, immobilised by panic, as it always was when she was terrified. She stared.

He stared back.

"What are you intending to do with me?"

Her voice was calmer than she felt. Much calmer. Tanner would be panicking - but she wasn't Tanner, because Tanner wasn't here. And the person who was here didn't even have the capacity to panic.

Lyur shrugged, his eyes cold.

"Kill you. Eventually."

Tanner didn't even blink. Just packed all her panic down tightly, and kept talking.

"Are the others dead, or were they captured as well?"

"Some of them, perhaps. Perhaps not. Their existence isn't very relevant to yours at this moment."

He settled into a lazy crouch. His eyes never really seemed to blink - like his own natural moisture was enough to keep them from drying loud. She saw the scars along his knuckles. When you hurt someone enough, punched them enough, did you compact them down? Did you make them denser, forcing more and more matter into a tighter and tighter space, the whole thing growing stronger... and did things get forced out, along the way? She imagined a man being beaten with a truncheon, the chemicals lingering on her breath still cursing her with odd, rambling thoughts. She imagined a man being beaten, and with each strike, he expelled something. Yellow fat crawling from his ears and nose like bloated maggots. The appendix, useless and vermiform, squirming from the throat. The tail-bone exploding outwards and clattering away. Wisdom teeth popping, one by one. Breasts, smashed flat and featureless. The skin pounded thin and smooth, incapable of forming goosebumps, which were useless responses after humans had shed the thick hair of other animals. The slow, painful refinement of the human form. And then... maybe remorse went away. Empathy. Pity.

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If you inflicted enough violence on a person, could you brutalise away every single extraneous instinct, structure, and thought?

Did Lyur think? Or had that been beaten out of him too? Was he purely mechanical?

All of these thoughts, bound up in the gleaming crescents of scars along his knuckles.

Forcibly, she narrowed the gyre of her mind, snapped it shut, kept it focused into a single, immaculate string.

"Are you here to kill me? Torture me?"

"Neither. I'm here to take you to someone else."

He leaned a little closer.

"Do you regret coming to this colony?"

Tanner didn't answer.

"At what point did you become the sort of person who would come here and stay, keep investigating when all signs warned you away? Did you think the story Dyen and I told you was to throw you off?"

He smiled, the motion curiously reptilian. Refusing to meet his glistening eyes.

"Maybe it was kindness. When you force an enemy to retreat, you always leave them a route to escape. If you don't, they have nowhere to go but through you. And an animal caught in a corner has no reason to hold anything back."

Tanner remained absolutely silent. Not giving him the satisfaction. Kindness? No, no, definitely not. The equivalent of anaesthetising someone before you bashed their brains in, maybe. Make her numb and stupid... then wipe her out once she became inconvenient. Once a judge entered the colony, this process had started. She was just executing it. Her own agency was irrelevant. What mattered was what she'd been instructed to do for seven years, and practised for one. Everything practice for the colony. Girl the mother of the woman. Her hands were worming backwards, fingers stretching as far as she could... she imagined she could feel an aura of cold around the horns and teeth, like they'd soaked up the chill of the cold-house and now expelled it for her, growing more and more as she reached closer and closer...

"You know, there's a pit. Not too far from here. I hunted, when I first came to this place. And there's a pit, several days north of here, where the buffalo used to graze in the winter. A box canyon, but shallower than expected. Erratic at the bottom, landscape jagged. I climbed down, my rifle slung over my back... and my boots crunched. It was a canyon of bones. I think they once did that to the buffalo - didn't shoot them, nor spear them. They simply chased them by the hundred into the canyons, and left them there, some with broken legs, until they felt like they needed meat. Mounds of horns, high enough to reach my head. And I think they used it more than once, sent a huge number into the pit, over and over. Standing on the broken bones of the kills that came before, until there was no grass to be seen."

He smiled.

"Wonder if some of them thought, if they kept dying here, eventually their bones would fill the whole canyon, and no more could ever die in the future. But... I saw the piles of skulls. I think they started killing each other, down there in the rot and the dust and the snow. Kill enough, and you could climb up to the top of the pit and escape. Saw some wolf bones there too. Dog bones. Chewing at the kills, but never escaping."

A shrug.

"I could climb in and out. And I did. Even a buffalo could, it was shallow enough. And I went away, and kept on hunting buffalo."

A second of silence. Tanner was close to the horns. Was he trying to say... the ground's capacity to swallow violence was infinite? Violence endured, no matter what solutions you thought you found? Submit to violence, and the violence continued, encouraged by the lack of resistance? What? A voice came from another corridor, and a familiar face showed itself.

"Get her ready to move. Big man wants her."

Dyen. Dyen was here, stepping out of a meat-lined corridor, his face just like it'd always been - a tight, cadaverous skull, sagging with age into little jowls and wattles, tension failing all over his musculature. He'd never been killed - and Tanner could easily see the pattern. The man had been interrogated by her. Come close to confessing. And he ran - and Tanner remembered something, how the crowd of people seemed so... abnormally present, filling the space, blocking entrances for her, but not for him. Imagined an overseer declaring an early lunch break for a whole shift to fill the cafeteria to bursting, just to inhibit her. He escaped, and was given a story. He gave it. The terror was real - how could anyone in a situation like that not be terrified? But the story was false as could be. Then, they took him away, into the depths. To the world, he'd seem to have died, validating his story - a canary screaming that there was gas in the mine, before toppling over on the spot. She glared flatly at him, reaching desperately. Come on, come on...

Lyur shrugged, and marched over to push Tanner upright...

He pushed her a little backwards as he did so, fumbling for purchase...

Tanner's fingers wrapped around a sharp, jagged piece of bone. Antler, horn, tusk, tooth, didn't matter. It was sharp, and cut into her palm. Slipped it up her sleeve immediately, with all the skill she could muster... not much, but she thought she'd managed to wedge it into the fabric somehow. Could feel it scraping lightly against her arm whenever she moved.

Thank the gods for her black dresses. Easier to conceal things in a black dress.

Lyur hauled her up with a grunt, and she shivered at the feeling of his breath on her face. Dyen moved in to help, the two of them supporting her - barely. They were clearly struggling under the weight, and hauling her along was something else entirely. She wondered why they didn't manacle her feet, allow her to move slightly but never to run, and... hm. Did they have no manacles that would fit her? Or were they nervous of giving her any free range of movement at all, no matter how slim? No, no, definitely the fit. Just lacked the right size. They started to drag her along, hooking their arms under her own, and hauling her while her hands and feet remained lashed together. The smooth floor, softened by buffalo pelts, was... eerily comfortable to be dragged over. They were clearly streuggling, but Tanner simply slid across, almost frictionless. She imagined that if she was flung against a wall, unless they threw her into a ribcage, she'd feel nothing but cool meat. If she fell down, the fur would cushion her.

Like being in a lunatic's dream of a padded cell. The sort of thing they stuffed the violent killers inside... or those suffering from advanced contamination, left in a place where hurting themselves was impossible, and hurting others even more so. The two men huffed as they dragged her, but Dyen tried to speak between the pants for air.

"Show respect to the big man. No insults, or we beat you until you're weeping blood. You can die quick. Or you can die slow. And we can make it very slow."

Tanner stared flatly at him. And Dyen seemed to take this as a challenge, his voice accordingly dropping to a snarl.

"No crying in front of him, no embarrassing yourself. The man has seen more than you can fu... bloody imagine, and you're nothing in front of him, you hear, nothing."

He glanced around nervously, like someone might've heard the aborted curse, and judged him for it. Tanner almost felt reassured by his words. He was talking... talking about the 'big man' like a gang leader, like a tough guy, a brute, a thug, a hoodlum. Something rational, in a certain sense. Something she could hold comfortably in the confines of her mind, without straining any of her preconceptions. Her face was flat as ever. And now Lyur spoke up, his voice unusually monotone. Reminded her of his voice when he'd killed Tyer.

"Ignore him. He's nothing to say. But you know that pit? With the bones?"

Tanner didn't respond, didn't nod.

"Let's say that he's the buffalo which managed to climb out on one of the skull-mounds."

Tanner didn't... know how to respond to that. Her silence extended... and she finally, finally chose to speak.

"May I ask how Tyer fits into all of this? I never figured that out."

No answer. Just a slight smile from Lyur, before he got back to huffing and puffing. Dyen was struggling even more, and sweat clung to him like he was some sort of invalid on the brink of death, where even the act of living was exhausting. Good. She made no moves to help either of them. Neither spoke, not offering new provocations, nor delivering any answers. The conversation was over. Dyen had snarled like a guard dog... and Lyur had made a chill run down her spine. So, this was where it ended. This was where Tanner Magg ceased to be.

She hoped the person to come next appreciated the avalanche she might've helped to start.

She hoped they'd remember her well.

...she hoped the others were alright. If she could do anything, if... no, no, horn, use that to cut her bonds once she had the freedom to do so. The ropes were clearly being improvised, they weren't used to someone her size. Bands around the wrist and ankles, but then more bands around the arms and the calves to reinforce them. If she could cut through those - they were naturally looser, just by a tiny amount - then she could maybe snap the rest and... run, presumably. Run, and try and do some good. Not sure what she could do, but... follow the hum of the cold-house, that was it, just follow the hum. Head for the surface, and... break out into the cold, to find that the people here had her companions as hostages and could demand whatever they liked from her. So, rescue them, get a cudgel, start breaking skulls, do anything in her power to get them free, and... and all they'd need to do would be to hold a razor to their necks and she'd be immobilised. So, she had to find out where they were, would need to get there ahead of anyone else, then escape, and...

...it'd honestly be easier if she died here, from an organisational perspective. She couldn't plan having lunch with someone else without pacing her room in agitation, planning every single angle and catastrophe, creating contingencies for the most unlikely situations, and then she'd get the timing wrong and find out they were unavailable and... how could she negotiate a situation like this?

Just wait.

Wait, and try to escape. Work things out then.

...no, she couldn't put off her thinking. Her mind spun with plans, all of them rooted in ignorance, and thus as thin and brittle as dry parchment, tearing at the slightest provocation... ready to be replaced by more. And more. And more. Couldn't stop thinking, and it only made her more nervous, more indecisive, almost eager to see what was coming next, just so she had something to work with, anything. The 'big man'? Did the conspiracy have a leader? What pit had this particular buffalo escaped from? Was that the message Lyur had been trying to give - that in the end, you had to claw and chew and fight if you wanted to survive, that no loyalty endured when you wanted to survive? And how did they get Dyen out of the mansion, why were they confident enough in their ability to do it to let him be captured? They couldn't have known what room he'd be kept in, not at all - so how did they do it? The two bouncers were unwilling to talk. And so was she - spluttering questions to solid walls wasn't a good way to seem remotely capable, now was it? Made her seem pathetic. The governor wouldn't splutter around asking question after question while getting no answers time after time, no he would not.

Didn't take long for them to arrive.

Felt much longer, though.

They emerged into a larger room, which felt... it felt old. Surprisingly old. How had all of these tunnels been built? There was no way the governor would just... overlook the amount of dedicated labour necessary to make these things. The goods being siphoned, was all of that just to fund this complex? No, no, that would be noticed, that would be picked up on and stamped out immediately. Questions continued to whirl around, and for a second, she felt a genuine spike of anger at the thought that she might die ignorant. If she got to go to some variety of afterlife - be it Maharite, Jovanite, or Fidelizhi, or even Rekidan (if this country claimed all who died in it), the last thing she wanted was to see her ancestors, all the great and good in the world of the dead... while being unable to explain all the details of her own death. That would be... that would be beyond humiliating. Not knowing the answer to a question was humiliating enough, and she'd have zero chance to rectify this error, and it'd be her first impression, and the company around her would never vanish, just gradually grow, and the people asking the question would be people she respected... oh, gods, she was going to meet the great kings of Mahar and Jovan, and they were all going to laugh at her for not knowing about her own death.

...she was worried about embarrassing herself in the afterlife.

She was worried about making bad first impressions in the afterlife.

Something inside her had snapped, hadn't it?

The room. Focus on the room. It was like all the others in terms of its carpets of buffalo fur, and the walls heaving with cured meat. Clustering in so tightly around her shoulder and head that it felt like she was inside a whole cured womb - appropriate. Begin in a womb, end in a womb. The darkness was cloying, and the air stank of spice and salt. There was something in the centre. Something moving. She thought an animal was there, but that was just the impression of the bones and meat, some sort of inner belief that a human wouldn't be found in a place like this. She felt embarrassed at her rumpled dress, her missing buttons, her unkempt hair. Embarrassed at her lack of composure. Her face was flat, and the bindings were oddly liberating, stopped her from thinking of where her hands should be, her feet, her entire body. She was where she was. And if she kept her face policed, as she always did...

The shape in the middle moved again. Her heart beat a little faster.

And an oil lamp slowly ignited. A long tongue of flame spilled up into the glass chimney, and a second later it dimmed, subsiding to something milder, more sustainable. Going from gallop to trot.

The warm orange light emanated gently into the room, flickering feebly all the while... shadows lapped around her like the ripples in a wind-scraped lake, chaotic and omnidirectional, turning the meat into strange lumpen jewels, the organs into burnished opals, the skulls into leering masks. The light of a flame, and the whole assemblage of gore, bone, salt, spice, and fur became eerily human, infused with will.

And in the centre was a man.

In many ways, he was painfully ordinary. Even as he sat on a small heap of deeply ancient cured hams, so old they were black as coal, so shrivelled they'd reduced to the size of small organs. A ham-cairn, atop which was a strange, ordinary man. He wore a dark suit, three-piece, made of thick, cheap cloth. Hard-wearing and warm, a little ragged at the edges. An equally thick white shirt with an uneven collar, pinned in place with mismatched buttons. His tie was just a thin strip of aged cloth, so faded it was impossible to tell what colour it'd once been. Now, it was the colour of dishwater. His shoes were the most expensive part of him - leather, flexible, gleaming, creased deeply where they'd been used for uncounted days, but the material was moisturised and tough, clearly years away from any sort of decay. He looked like any worker in Fidelizh. Hard-wearing, unremarkable clothes, heavily scented with the sweat of the day's work. The only expensive component being the things which needed to be - shoes, usually. A hat, from time to time, in the pursuit of some limited vanity. She'd seen countless people like this come in and out of the outer temple, bringing small claims for the judges to quickly address.

That impression ended at his face.

It was a scarred face. Scarred by cold. Part of it had been frozen, once. A whole half of the face had probably turned black and dead, blood drawing out of it, fleeing the chill. And then it'd peeled free like the layers of an orange. The flesh had gradually healed, but in cobwebs of scars, clinging tightly to the skull, yet strangely deformed in other areas, twisting into little whorls. Like the bark of a tree, almost... riddled with anomalous growth. Or rather, frozen flesh. Where chunks had remained, or muscles had bunched up and locked... it left half his face absolutely paralysed, and the flesh around it was pale and still. The eye was riddled with cataracts, and blind as could be. Still twitched, though. Awful in its paleness. The whole ear on that side was gone, snapped free, leaving a vague black hole. The other half of the face was almost intact, save for a few stubborn fingers of scarring that seemed to try and reach out, to expand their territory. An older man, with a frosting of white hairs around his jaw that made him seem older still... and his one functional eye was a soft shade of brown that made her think of a wild doe, or some other gentle, herbivorous animal. There seemed to be no whites in the eye, with its drooping eyelid. Only the gentle brown, warm and inviting... with a pupil squirming in the middle like a tadpole or leech. Clever, long fingers. Muscle cording him - but old muscle.

He looked... looked almost like he'd migrated directly from youth to age. As if, faced by the prospect of slowly ageing and sagging and softening, he'd taken a razor to his throat and gotten it all over with. Rushed to age rapidly by commanding his youth to commit suicide. He'd been a large man, and while his flesh was shrivelling inwards, there was a strange, vascular vitality to it all. His face was strong and bold, but it was beginning to be hollowed by wrinkles, and the cheeks were retreating inwards like moles entering a burrow.

He didn't smile.

He looked from Dyen to Lyur, then back again. And he nodded silently, almost wearily, eyes dropping to the ground like he was tired of holding them up.

The two dropped Tanner to the ground, and she resisted the urge to squirm into an upright position - take her time, think it through, move carefully and with dignity. Don't wriggle around like a worm on a hook. The man hummed lightly, and spoke. His voice was heavily accented, and she couldn't identify its origin.

But she knew it wasn't Rekidan.

"You were closer than you thought."

A moment of silence, a slight shudder of air entering old lungs, inflating a chest interested in the prospect of never moving again.

"Very close. But you fell short. There's nothing to be ashamed of, young lady. Some have reached stages of your conclusions... but they lack the faith, the madness to make the final leap of logic. A judge was not suited to find me. You'd need to be an inventor of fictions, and invent one that conveniently aligned with reality."

His voice was dry as dust, and she imagined that it stank of rosemary from the cured, spiced meat all around him. His cairn of ancient pork, sometimes with bones protruding like charms of an obscure cult. Tanner moved cautiously, sliding until she was able to move to her knees. Didn't like the feeling of kneeling to him, this gnarled, strange old man, crouched on his pile of flesh like some sort of gargoyle, unmoving. The placidity of the aged.

"Who are you?"

No time for politeness, even if her mouth ached to go 'uh' and 'ah' and 'sorry' and 'oh'. The mantra of nervousness.

The old man hummed, still not looking her in the eyes, just staring at the deep buffalo-fur carpet.

"I believe I'm the person you've been looking for. I apologise for the lateness. But... ah. You might appreciate this. Some do."

Tanner rose to her knees properly, and was able to look around... to see that Dyen and Lyur were returning, carrying something between them. One in front of the other, holding something long and metallic between their shoulders. Heavy, based on the expressions of intense concentration. Tanner stared...

And they brought it to the ground. Mounted it in a stand in the ground.

A hammer.

She saw an enormous hammer. Far too large for a single person to use.

And the faces...

The faces were achingly familiar. She knew those designs. Those shapes. Always mounted on wood, strangely out of place, like there was something missing with them, something more they ought to be doing. The cast-iron decorations all around the colony, associated with the conspirators, with the people behind all of this.

The hammer and the eye.

Here was the hammer. The decorations were meant to be mounted on this thing. This hammer. A kind of idol, perhaps, or a ritual instrument, some sort of mobile monument... Rekida had statues designed to chain the world in place. And these people had a hammer, something to bring with themselves, disassemble and reassemble, pass off as harmless decorations until the time came. Three rectangular decorations. Two squares, mounted at the horizontal extremes of the hammerhead. Never seen that shape before. Maybe it reflected higher rank.

But the eye...

She saw where the hammerhead was connected to the haft.

A rectangular cast iron plate. And she could barely see the decoration... a wolf. A snarling wolf. With a hollow circle where the eye ought to be.

A hole where the haft could be attached.

The hammer and the eye. Of course Fyeln had lied. Covered up for his masters. Maybe he hadn't even been paid as much as he claimed - some of it from Marana, some of it from these people, and he counted both of them in case she demanded to check. The decorations... she could imagine people meeting in this place, in this labyrinth of meat and bone and fur, the remnants of hundreds of disassembled animals. Could imagine them bringing their decorations, and removing them from the wooden mountings, casting them aside like the worthless pieces of wood they really were, reverently ascending steps to mount the plates onto the hammerhead... before the wolf could be placed, and the haft impaled through its hollow eye. Assembling the totem-hammer, the mobile monument, the reason why the Rekidans had fled and these people had come to this city instead. Rekidans only had to leave the sight of the statues to be severed from the city and all it represented, to escape it all. Their world had been a chained one, independent of themselves. Rekida was chained, and could not follow. But these people...

How could you escape a totem that could dissolve and follow you everywhere?

How could you possibly forget it?

Tanner pressed her arms toegther, feeling the sharp, ambiguous piece of matter that could be part of a horn, a tusk, a tooth, an antler, a bone... the thing pressed into her skin, and she relished in the sharpness, the clarity it brought, the way it grounded her in the present. No mind for past or future when the pain made her measure and treasure each and every second, marking them with all the power she could muster. The man on his throne of flesh finally looked at her with his one, soothing brown eye. Looking at her in the shadow of the hammer. His voice seemed like the crashing of a wave, and filled the room from edge to edge.

"My name is Vyuli, of the Headless Veneberality of Nalser. I apologise for not meeting you sooner. To bid you welcome to my colony."

He leaned forward a little, mouth curled downwards in a strangely sad expression.

"And, I suppose, to bid you goodbye."