CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO - THE CHAINED TOWERS

She set off when the first light came, and the snowfall seemed to be stopping for a while. Her coat was thick. Her boots were sturdy. Over her shoulder were slung two things. A basket brimming with goods she intended to give to Beldol, and a military satchel containing a certain wooden box, alongside all of her papers, wrapped in thick brown paper to keep the damp from claiming the findings etched into their surface. All her findings, bound together into a humble little pile, neatly written in the smallest letters she could manage. To someone without a proper set of judge's lenses, these papers would be downright incomprehensible. Good. There was stuff in here fit to set the colony... maybe not alight, but certainly enough to agitate. Maybe even to provoke. Vague evidence of murders, covered up by collusion amongst the door-guards. Evidence of conspiracy towards uncertain ends. Evidence of the Colonial Office scrubbing the records of people to make them more palatable for the colony - importing people capable of intense, repeated acts of violence against their fellow man, capable of working together outside the law, capable of colluding to advance their goals. Whatever those goals were. And that was the problem - she had bodies, she had records of murders, she had all sorts of compelling pieces of evidence... but she lacked a why.

And into the stew of uncertainty came something else. Tal-Sar. The bear hunter who'd fled the colony to... presumably, a chained tower. Hopefully a chained tower, hopefully not some comfortable-looking snowdrift where he could sleep until spring woke up the rot sleeping in his flesh. His house... apparently there were discoloured patches on the walls. Patches like those in Tom-Tom's house, in Dyen's house, in all the houses where people, where They had tried to remove and conceal the cast-iron decorations that seemed to be pivotal to this mystery. Maybe... maybe Sersa Bayai had misinterpreted them, not like he'd seen what Tanner had seen, maybe he'd mistaken nothing for something. Maybe. But...

Either way. Tal-Sar was known to Yan-Lam and her father. An old family friend. And that bunch seemed... basically insulated from the conspiratorial goings-on. Even Lam, who'd been involved in the Tyer business, seemingly had to be pressured into engaging with it. It wasn't his day job - he'd needed to see his daughter with a nasty bruise around her arm to convince him to play along. If you needed to be blackmailed into cooperation, then you were probably more trustworthy than the person who just needed to be paid, and was content to cooperate time after time after time, with business much nastier than a little bit of lying. And she was willing to provisionally extend that courtesy to the friends of such a person.

...but the faded patches made her concerned. For reasons hard to express.

Also in her satchel she had her automatic quill, her lenses, sheaves of untouched white paper, some water, and a little food... but a moment before stepping out of the front door, she remembered Bayai. The first time they'd walked together. First time someone had asked to accompany her, on regular occasions, on her little constitutionals. He'd brought a sandwich with him, and stuffed the thing under his shirt, keeping it warm against his skin. Stopping it from freezing and becoming hard as rock. With a slight flush, she did much the same, negotiating the long roll of bread down her dress, and... well, that felt odd, but at least she'd have a warm sandwich. Fairly warm, anyway. Nowt else to be done. The colony beyond was a tattered place - the darkness of the roofs was visible, the heat of indoor fires slowly melting the snow into sludge, until it lay in tattered rags only, stubbornly clinging where warmth wouldn't touch. She was alone in the morning's infancy, alone and hunched, like she was afraid of the glare of the sun. Feared it like a criminal feared the suspicious eyes of the law-abiding. The streets were silent, but she avoided them nonetheless. Skirted the edges of the colony like a wolf shirking the fire of a camp.

From a high window, a lone chambermaid watched her go. Tanner didn't look back, but she could feel the gaze. Could feel the low-simmering urge for revenge in them. Life in the shantytown had trained her to be quiet about these things, to avoid confrontation unless you knew the result. To keep her trap shut around the Erlize, to keep her head down and move silently. But... Tanner knew well, you couldn't just bury it all forever. You needed outlets. The bigger the emotion, the bigger the outlet needed to be. A minor irritation was solvable by a little complaint to a trusted friend. Existential woes were best offered up to invisible friends, to the flaying air, to the things which wouldn't or couldn't reply. And that sort of simmering rage...

Anyway.

Eerily triangular green eyes watched unblinking as she vanished into the black labyrinth of the colony, with its thousand darkened windows staring at her like the eyes of beetles.

At her waist swung the solid, comforting weight of her truncheon.

Something funny about these things. Truncheons, bludgeons, hammers, clubs, cudgels... they were the most law-abiding weapons, weren't they? Something with an edge was judgement and punishment, the sentencer holding the sentence to the throat of the sentenced. It was final. Using it meant that judgement had already been made. A club... a club could delay. Beat someone unconscious. Crack someone about the head and watch them reel. Bring them to heel, but don't kill. It was the promise of future judgement - just a tool to help in the act, equivalent to a pile of papers containing evidence, a pair of manacles to prevent flight. Could still kill with it, though. Or punish. Or restrain. Cudgels had versatility, was the point. When she brandished it, maybe she was about to deal a death sentence... or maybe she was just going to do a quick caning.

Ideally she'd do neither.

Didn't like hurting people. Always terrified of hurting people by accident, and doing it deliberately was...

She already lost sleep over a spot of accidental rudeness towards a waitress four years ago, seeing someone feeling pain because of her would probably make her develop chronic insomnia for the next century.

Didn't take long for her to reach the outskirts. Wondered, madly, if she'd see Marana on the way... no. The woman was probably sleeping off another hangover. Gathering information on people Tanner had already mostly written off as prime suspects. Marana called them murdered with iron-scented breath... but the way she described them made them just seem terrified. Isolated. Unsure of the future, just like anyone else. Keenly aware of how few they were. How trapped. Hired overseers from the ranks of the bouncers out of convenience, then were manipulated by those same overseers into pursuing their own agenda. Oh, she had no doubt that if she had a few dinners with them she'd develop a firm dislike - too much drinking, too much desperate laughter, too much isolation. Would remind her too much of the surrealists in their grim little room in an empty hotel. But Tanner had seen the ledgers, she'd seen how much there was to manage in this colony, the movements of people, the interlacing of agendas, the flourishing of conspiracy... she almost found it impossible to imagine that a bunch of company owners could manage all of that at some level.

The colony was a chaotic thing even the governor had been incapable of controlling. It'd torn him apart in the end - and he was a man well-placed to understand and regulate the place. Perhaps the best placed.

Anyway.

The guards at the gate nodded her out, and she scurried through as quickly as possible - the act of the paranoid judge remaining intact. Yes, just a paranoid woman heading out to interview an equally paranoid woman in a chained tower. But in reality, she was going to interview a paranoid man in a chained tower. Well, presumably paranoid. Then again, hard to imagine someone free of paranoid choosing to unexpectedly and without announcement to ditch his home and run off to the wilderness. She could definitely see the appeal - and if she could, then it was probably a bit of a paranoid move.

The snowy expanse welcomed her like an old friend.

Within a few minutes, she was wading through snow that came up to claw at her shins, and soon enough, her knees. There were enormous pits where guards had patrolled, and her gait shifted, with er slotting her boots into these old footprints. Hobbling along as the wind picked up, and straggling flakes of snow continued to fall. The ground was utterly invisible, the only indication of roads were the wooden poles protruding like cigar stubs, marking the boundaries. Stopping her from charging off into the untamed areas, where the snow lay in drifts high enough to swallow her whole, and narrow creeks lay frozen and concealed under layers of powder, eager for her to stumble in and lose her foot to frostbite. The colony's walls lingered behind her, a dim black horizon that faded quickly into the omnipresent pale haze. Felt like the clouds had found the sky too cold to dwell in, and had sagged downwards. Maybe if she went up high enough, it became so cold that there was nothing but a solid ceiling of ice, a bubble enclosing this entire region. Ice that banished the clouds lower, to shelter around the earth for warmth. Either way. She walked for a little while, breath fogging up in front of her. Every so often, she consulted her map, and felt a twitch of fear when she looked around for landmarks... nothing to be seen. Too much snow on all sides, erasing all uniqueness. Still. The outlines of the roads remained known - so long as that remained constant, she could find her way forwards. So long as she could see the walls of the city, she could find her back back.

The sun rose higher.

The snow exploded with light, glittering, blinding... immediately, Tanner used her teeth to pull off one of her thick gloves, feeling the cold air cut into her gums as she did so, seeping down her throat to numb her entire chest... and used her bare, freezing hand to fumble for a pair of dark glasses, borrowed from the mansion. Thought they belonged to the governor, once. Pince-nez, thankfully. Anything else wouldn't fit, but pince-nez were far more adaptable. The darkness that descended over her vision was bliss, even if it made the world seem even stranger. They said, these days, that the moon was like this - a great, dead silver surface, bleak and cold, much of it lost in permanent gloom. Theurgists had known this for centuries, apparently. Their telescopes were more powerful than any other - just decided not to tell anyone for a long, long while. Pathologically secretive, that bunch. Either way. It made the landscape seem more alien, hostile. Left her a lone pilgrim on the bleak surface, hunched as she powered through the freezing air.

Around midday, she stopped for a spot of lunch. Her sandwich was filled with cured meats, and even with her body's warmth, it was still brittle against her teeth, the coarse grain of the bread unyielding, forcing her to tear at it like a dog.

The wind howled aimlessly.

She munched, each individual crunch a lonely bit of noise amidst a land that seemed to devour sound - all sound but the wind.

Lunch finished, she kept moving. The chained towers were near here - a cluster of three. Potentially fit for a single human to live, if he wasn't averse to the risk of a collapse. After this, she'd head for the tower where Beldol was sheltering under the watchful eye of several guards. Make her presence known, stay for the night, then head back in the morning. The unusual length of her journey could be explained by her inexperience with the landscape, her weakness after her poisoning, and perhaps a simple desire to move around in the outdoors. Good plan. Very simple. Would have no doubts about it at all, were witchcraft not hanging in the air like a vast cobweb, sticky black strands slowly coiling around her limbs, laughing like small children as they started to twitch everything in the direction of maximum misfortune. If there were ever conditions for something to go terribly, terribly wrong, it'd be these. Still. She had her excuses, she had her reasons. For all she knew, no-one was even aware of Tal-Sar being out here in the first place. A flush of paranoia ran through her with all the suddenness and randomness of morning sickness. Had she been followed? Had she been tracked? She glanced around... no, nothing in the snow, her tracks died barely a little way away, and half the time she stepped in the trails of old patrols. No sight of anyone following. Maybe someone had noted her departure, though. And asked themselves 'what could a judge be doing out there at this time in the morning?' followed by 'I wonder if this is connected to that Bayai fellow who found Tal-Sar's house empty yesterday' followed by 'oh goodness gracious, she's heading out to find him! Summon the wolves! Awaken the great statues! Kill every chambermaid and surrealist in sight, and if you find a surrealist chambermaid, detonate them with gunpowder!'

Or something along those lines.

She paused. Could go to the tower with Beldol now... go there, do her interviews, work a little, then head back home... come back after a while, do that a few times, build up the impression of a habit. Then, deviate suddenly, when no-one expected it. Could work, could work... thing is, Bayai already had a habit of knocking on doors and enquiring after the occupants of isolated homes, apparently. So... maybe this was being utterly unnoticed.

Just had to visit Beldol at the end. Make sure she had an alibi. All her papers were with her - They would have nothing but vague suspicions, no absolute proof that she was still pursuing them, getting close enough to taste their iron-scented breath, poisoned by murderous intent. Marana just had to keep up the act.

Slowly, the towers came into view.

Great, austere things. Not terribly tall, but in this bleak landscape, any amount of construction seemed monumental. And these... the tower, the chains that bound them to the earth like they were in danger of being blown away, the gates formed from the bodies of faceless statues clutching a snake between them to form an arch. Engraved all over with spiralling symbols. Idly, she wondered what they meant. They were just... well, symbols, weren't they? Written language? Why hadn't anyone just... pointed out to her what they meant? No, wait, wait... the Breach, the entry point for the city. There was a huge fallen chunk of one of the wall-statues - an enormous breast, as it turned out. Carved all over with names. Not one of them had been in this type of script, not even from the locals. Everything done in the same script Fidelizh and Mahar Jovan used, the same basic, right-to-left style. None of the spiralling convolutions, the interlocking shapes, the seemingly endless complexity...

But there was rationale to them. They weren't just meaningless squiggles, there was actual meaning. Just... lost to her.

How many generations did it take before people forgot the script of their homeland? The language? The customs?

How many breaks did there need to be in the chain for the whole thing to fall apart?

...stupid question. One. The answer was one. Famously, chains were as strong as their weakest link.

That's what she got for thinking about things when she lacked the qualifications.

She checked her map, shuddering against the cold. The wind was making her contract a little, she could feel her body compressing inwards, sheltering itself and concealing all the warmth it could manage. Made her feel... pleasantly focused, really. Encouraged her to move step after step, turned the towers into more than just foreboding landmarks. It'd taken her until past noon, but... well. Anyway. Had enough time to do what she needed to do. The first tower was simple enough - she advanced through the gates, shivering under the eyeless gaze of the gate-statues. Did only the wall-statues of the city deserve eyes, mouths, features...? What was the significance of that? The cast-iron decorations... Fyeln, according to Marana, said that some of the decorations had jewelled eyes embedded in them, maybe eyes had some sort of significance in Rekida, such that lesser statues couldn't possess them. Ms. vo Anka would know - this was definitely her field, far more than it was Tanner's. Funny thought - if Ms. vo Anka had come out here, she might have a hell of a time. Old cultures, new cultures, foreign cultures, mingling together in a big old hurricane of beliefs... anthropologist would fit right in.

Anyway.

She stumped to the first tower. The towers were sheer, sharp, aggressively plain. Only small, jagged doors that seemed designed to swallow light. No, they were designed - light and its play was a thing for the Rekidans, their statues outside the city proved it, cunningly designed to change their expressions depending on the time of day, the angle of the viewer, the cloud cover... always rational, never comical or ugly. They'd definitely engineered these doors to devour light, extinguishing the sun beyond their boundaries. No signs to warn people off, and she pushed her way through, reaching into her jacket for a lighter...

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Darkness and rubble and rot.

No life. Too cold even for the insects. Her breath steamed in the gloom, and she saw fine fingers of frost crawling across the floor, along with thin rags of snow that managed to get inside. She saw... saw ice making its way into the rock. Water would get in, worm into every crack, then freeze, expand, strain and break the rock... and finally, melt in spring. Leaving voids. The snow was eating the tower, and she could feel how parts of it were held up through ice alone. Once spring came, the whole thing would groan like an old arthritic man, the joints would strain, the internals would seize up... and a ceiling would sag, a floor would drop, stones would clatter. And it would come one year closer to its end. Even now, icicles were hanging from the ceiling like fangs, too frigid even to drip. The cold was a thing made of jaws, of gnawing implements. Even now, it formed jaws and fangs in the corpse of its latest victim, devouring inside and out. No sign of recent activity. No sign of carvings, or furniture, or anything. No sign of what purpose this tower might've once served. Then she looked... and saw marks in the stone. Ancient marks, long-since filled with ice.

Claws. As if a colossal beast had prowled into this place. Destroying furniture as it went. Damaging stone.

Muzzle sniffing for anything human.

She left quickly. There was no life in that place. At best, desolate and abandoned. At worst, a tomb. A mass grave. The harshness of the wasteland beyond was... well, at least it was more sterile. More open. Openness gave the illusion of escape routes.

Wanted to scribble the location out on the map. Just for the visceral satisfaction.

But if someone found the map...

As she left, the scent of dust, old stone, and rancid paranoia filled her nostrils.

One down. Two to go.

Time passed.

The second was much the same as the first. The cold was eating through her coat at this point, forming a light dusting of frost and unmelting snow on the exterior. She'd never experienced this sort of cold without the benefit of adrenaline - like on that awful, awful night with the screaming horses and the empty eyes and the ruined body in the snow. So cold that the snow wouldn't even dissolve on contact - it'd come to understand that the world belonged to it, not her. Not at this time of year. Not when even the sun's light could do nothing more than skate upon its surface, resisted at every turn. Tanner would leave a trail, the snow would devour it, and not a single flake would melt. She passed a gloved hand over the small part of her face not covered by her scarf, and rubbed - a little feeling returned to the flesh, but the moment the glove came away, the numbness began to return slowly. She pulled her woollen hat down further over her ears, resisting the little spikes of frigid air that wormed inside the ear, chilled everything in its way until it reached the brain. Funny, how numbness worked. Absence. When you were warm and comfortable, you didn't feel your toes, your fingers, any of it. They passed out of the mind, the brain going 'ah, yes, all in order, don't need to worry about them'. And the impulses stopped. And when you were numb, the impulses were being strangled by cold. Same result. Different route. She wiggled her toes... numb, definitely, definitely numb. No doubt about that.

Not too dangerous, though. The map told her she wasn't too far from civilisation at the moment - push came to shove, she could soldier through and reach one of the inhabited towers, sit down and warm herself. Hell, if things really took a turn, it wouldn't be too hard for her to set up in one of the nastier towers. Any kind of shelter was good, anything that would let her start a fire. Not much else. Just had to remember not to light a fire under any kind of ice or snow - no tree cover, no icicles. Anyway.

There were Ina trees all around the next tower... well, almost. They formed an almost perfect circle, a living wall that encircled the hill. A great ring of caged trees, their roots sturdy and interlaced, their branches comically abrupt and studded with flares of needles that reminded of her exploding fireworks. And when she climbed up towards the haughty stone finger, she saw why they'd stopped, hadn't marched up any further. The ground was full of stones. Jagged, harsh things. Protruding from the ground, visible as strange mountains and depressions in the snow. Interesting - so the Rekidans had made their own land hostile to plant growth to stop... what, nature from overgrowing them? Sterilising the land to ensure the towers retained their austere beauty, their smooth perfection, not undermined by a single root or branch. Wondered how long that'd last, before the roots churned up the stones, before vines marched over the walls, before the canopies stretched enough. The gate was already swallowed up by branches, and the statues seemed to be fighting against the snake-like roots that clawed at their legs. She struggled through the snow - it was easily past her knees, and it was an effort to keep soldiering on, to follow the wooden markers.

This tower was more intact than the last. Marginally so, anyway. The door still ate light, the interior was still unpleasantly cold and, without a doubt, utterly abandoned... but there were some carvings. Dignified figures with enormous attention paid to their heads, with the precise dimensions demonstrated with elegantly curving lines. They wore robes, armour, carried spears and whips, and their hair seemed to explode out of their immaculate skulls like the manes of lions. Haughty. Regal. Without a doubt imperial. There was a little furniture, mostly some little tables slowly oozing into the ground as rot took their legs... and, bizarrely, a single enormous teapot hanging over what'd once been a fire pit, and now was just a stagnant pond filled with chunks of ice and thick, black, brackish water. The teapot was... copper, looked like. Copper, and turning green with corrosion. Tanner stared...

And something poked its head out of the pot.

Tanner immediately squeaked and moved backwards, face turning utterly flat, sound choking off after less than a second...

A bird.

A very indignant bird.

...no, an owl.

With gleaming, near-luminous eyes, grey plumage, and a slight frill of purple feathers around each of its amber eyes. It stared at her, as regal as any of the carvings along the walls... even as it nestled in a teapot filled to the brim with branches and assorted detritus. It glared.

Tanner stared back.

And waved quietly.

Just to be polite.

The owl fluffed its plumage irritably, and slowly withdrew back inside the pot, glaring all the while.

Tanner reached into her bag, and... yes, she did have a little food, saving it up if she needed a snack later today. Just some dried sausage, and... well, a little was easy to crack off, and she quietly left it on the floor for the owl to take. Remembered Yan-Lam talking about these owls, how she thought they were all gone. Evidently she hadn't checked enough teapots.

The owl's head poked back up, but otherwise it refused to move a single muscle.

Tanner dipped her head slightly.

"Goodbye, sir."

A solitary hoo echoed through the tower.

And Tanner was gone. The moment she left, she heard the owl fluttering out to grab the little piece of sausage, messily devouring it with claw and talon. Not sure why she spoke to it. Damn silly move. No, no, she knew exactly why. Because it was the polite thing to do, especially for a creature with such a... dignified mien. I mean, faces like dinner plates, voices that varied between pigeon-esque 'hoo's and deafening screeches, plumage that reminded her of ash, or dirty snow, and basically shaped like large pillows with legs, but they held themselves so well.

...she missed eels.

She dearly missed eels. Lovely things. And owls, dignified as they were, weren't eels. If an owl was a haughty noble that found pride even when they vomited up bundles of rodent bones and fur, then an eel was... just a fellow. No pride, because who needed pride? Why be haughty when there was work to do? Not too prideful to slither on land as well as water, not too egotistical to dissolve its own digestive system when it swam out on its final mission. Owls had dignity, but eels had jobs. Eels paid taxes. Eels had responsible fiscal policy.

And they were so slimy and squiggly.

...come to think of it, if she died here, then she'd never get to handle an eel ever again. Never able to dunk her hands into a big bucket of them, feeling their smooth, powerful bodies coil around her arms, startlingly gentle for all their muscle, never latching into her with their needle-sharp teeth, just... acknowledging her, regarding her coolly, and moving on with their lives.

She felt something twist in her stomach.

And moved on quickly. Leaving the owl to its little meal. Welcoming the numbness.

Two towers.

One more. Either he was here, or he was somewhere else entirely. Maybe another dead end. Maybe a literal dead end, and she'd find him frozen, or hung, or somehow taken care of in the ways the bouncers seemed fond of.

Her steps quickened. Her breath fanned before her like steam from a train's smokestack. And all the numbness couldn't slow her down by a single second.

* * *

The final tower...

The day was growing old. The sky was the grey of mountain stone, and it hung overhead in a flat, monotonous layer. No pillars, no mountains, no great islands of cloud - just a single flat ceiling, bearing down and bringing wind with it. Wind, and clawing flakes of snow. Tanner struggled on, clutching her satchel tight... remembering what lay inside. The papers. And the warmth of a little theurgic engine shaped like an hourglass. If she clutched it, maybe she'd... no, leave it be. Let it sleep. No leaving it with anyone else - who could she leave it with? A chambermaid? A soldier? A drunk? No, no, leaving any of her documents or evidence with them would make them targets, necessary obstacles to someone's cover-up. Obstacles to be overcome, and bulldozed out of sight. The more weight she let rest on her shoulders, the less weight had to crush down on theirs. Even now, she was... she wished she could do what Marana was doing. Going out, covering for herself, all that business. Wished. Because then Marana would stay in the mansion, sleeping off her injuries, moving on with her life. If she had more time... more skill...

Tanner opened her mouth.

And talked to herself. Her voice dying before it could even pass over a single hillock of snow. Practically dying before it left her scarf in a puff of steam.

"I should be doing that job. I should. Marana's doing it because I can't. Which makes me inadequate. As a judge. As a person. As a friend. I'm incapable. No time. No skill. If Marana fails, then it's my fault for sending her out. If I fail, then it's still just my fault, but at least no-one else gets dragged down with it."

She sighed.

"...no, at least she's not... well, doing something useful. Come on, not so bad. Could be worse! Could be worse. Could be. It's on the cards. It's on the table. It's in the deck."

A pause.

"Shut up, Tanner. You festering ungulate."

Oh, that was fun. Never got to talk to herself. Especially not now. Quite fun.

"She's not going to get to the heart of things, is she? No, of course she isn't, she's pursuing a dead end. Dead end in the figurative sense. Not the literal sense. No-one's dying. Not her. Definitely not her. She just hangs out with merchants and drinks and takes laudanum. Harmless. She's probably had more shots of laudanum than I've had hot dinners! Yes, she's fine. Completely fine. The stuff which killed the governor is about as far from her as I'm far from... uh..."

She stopped for a second, licking her frigid lips thoughtfully.

"...anyway. Totally fine. And Yan-Lam's in the mansion, away from here, and Bayai is just doing his job... I'm not inconveniencing anyone. How's about that, Ms. Magg? How's about that, not inconveniencing any-one. Wonder if the governor did that. I mean, maybe he just... let everything fall on his shoulders, did eveyrthing he could, left people out to protect them, was surreptitious and unscrupulous and clever and could do everything, and... then he'd died alone in the snow."

She walked on for a few minutes in silence.

"...and he died without anyone else dying next to him. Left behind a colony, didn't drag it down."

Now there was a man who knew what he was doing.

In her own way... she remembered her father. If he didn't have a family, if no-one had been around to depend on him, that harpoon would've just killed him. No-one to take care of his paralysed body, to stare into his glassy eyes... if Tanner and her mother, Tonrana, had never existed, then her father would've just died in a tragic accident. When you had too many people with you, sharing your life, then you ran the risk of destroying them when you suffered an accident, when you died, when you failed. The best sort of friend was one like Eygi - one who could decouple from her life, move on, exist as a sparse series of letters sent over the years. Not Marana. Marana, who was clearly changed by her time in Krodaw, and talked openly about her emotions. Yan-Lam, who lacked a father and mother, and clearly wanted her father's killers hung, drawn and quartered if at all possible. If Tanner died here, Eygi would be fine. But would Marana? Would Yan-Lam.

...not sure.

Hoped they'd be.

Anyway.

"Dear Eygi... weather, say something about the weather, always do that for politeness. Talk about owls, maybe. Something nice. Avoid the weird business, she wouldn't appreciate that. And don't talk about how much you miss her, that always makes you sound like a lunatic..."

The final tower approached.

Stark. Plain. Like all the others. Probably full of nothing but rot and ice and the marks of mutant-

claws dug into the stone. Fair number of trees, once more kept back from the tower by carefully placed stones. Her letter to Eygi died on her tongue as she approached - like she was coming closer to a grave, an activity that always demanded silence. She advanced closer, drawing her satchel around herself protectively, striding through deep, deep snow... feeling the numbness spread through her body, insinuate itself to caress her face...

And a voice broke through the silence.

"Fuck, they're sending giants?"

Tanner's face flattened.

The voice was crying out from a gap in the tower's walls. And...

Oh, crumbs. Gun.

Gun!

Tanner's face became rigid, and her voice became resolutely monotone as panic flooded her. Gods, sometimes she liked the fact that her body immediately did that when exposed to situations of intense stress. Sometimes.

"Mr. Tal-Sar?"

"What does it want? Does it want a hot bullet between the eyes?"

A pause.

"Hold on, you're-"

"I'm a judge, sir! Just here to talk!"

"Back off. No business with stinking judges."

How dare he. Judges weren't stinking. Notoriously well-groomed, they were.

"I don't mean any harm! I'm not even here to take you back to the colony, and I won't tell anyone you're out here!"

"Could just kill you!"

"People know I came out of the colony, I'm expected at another tower - if you don't want to talk, I can just leave. If you kill me, they'll know something's wrong."

Silence.

"...why do you want to talk, big lady?"

"I want to ask you a few questions about Rekida! About the city!"

A second for her to catch her breath.

"I was told about you by a girl called Yan-Lam, I believe you knew her father!"

The voice seemed a little strangled when it bellowed back to her.

"How's the girl?"

"Angry."

"Should be. Every right to be."

"I'm trying to find the people who... were involved in this business. Please, can I come up and talk? I'd rather not yell this all."

The gun withdrew back inside the tower, and the voice sounded immeasurably older.

"Very well. Come on. Step neatly now."

And that was all.

She walked briskly. Noting, as she went, the modifications made. The tower... from a distance it was completely abandoned, but once you were close enough to pick out the individual bricks in the walls, you could see where little repairs had been executed with the hand of a confident, competent amateur. Untrained, but hardened by years of living alone into, if not a master of all skills, then at least a very eager apprentice of them. Windows blocked up with stones, plugged with whatever was available. A rickety wooden door that scraped a little as it opened. A tiny, exceedingly well-concealed chimney that seemed... ah, that was clever. The top of the tower was clearly uninhabited, and if there was a stove inside, it filled the top of the tower first, before slowly making its way out through small cracks. Diffusing it, letting the wind scatter it. Not ideal, and clearly the man couldn't keep a fire burning as long as he might otherwise like, but it stopped people finding him. There was a casual attention to detail that caught her eye - the way he'd only used one path up and down the hill, which was cunningly placed to stop it being seen from a distance. The way he used the top of the tower as a smoke-house for food, taking advantage of the smoke he was already inevitably producing. The way he used the stones of the hillside to cover up little refuse pits, hiding them from both animals and prying eyes. Everything done to conceal, not in the sense of a professional infiltrator, just... someone who knew the basic tricks of the trade, and was in the habit of using them.

An old man stood before her in the doorway. A gun held cautiously at his waist - hunting rifle. Powerful one, too. Reminded her of the huge things the mutant-hunters used - guns designed not to leave a neat little hole, minimal damage to meat and pelt... guns designed to tear. To spray gore, and drive mutants to madness as they scented the release of so much precious contamination. The next best thing to simply burning them - brutalise them out of existence with high-velocity metal. Fit to disintegrate bone and turn flesh into a fine mist. Tal-Sar's rifle wasn't quite on that level - but it was close. It aspired to the prototype. He wore sturdy brown clothes that reminded her a little of tent canvas, and his moccasins were hard-worn and cracked with use, creased like old parchment. He slipped out of the dark doorway, narrow, clever, wary eyes scanning the horizon quickly and nervously. Nodded sharply for her to enter.

She saw an old man. Old and hardened by time, like ancient leather. She could examine the gun. The clothes. The shoes. The face. The eyes. But what stood out to her the most was his hair.

His skin was wrinkled and sun-toughened, his body was bending a little with age, but his hair continued to cling to colour.

And it was a shocking shade of red.

"Come on in, then. Get out of the light, get in here, come on, chop-chop, out of the cold..."

A flash of memory. A sudden recollection of that face, that hair, all of it...

"...were you... at the governor's-"

"Aye, I was there, bawling like a babe, no reason not to. Now get inside."

His tone was gruff with a hint of embarrassment... ah. Well. That cleared that up. Wept over the governor's body... can't say she'd seen anyone else doing that. And he didn't seem the sort to be proud of having a little cry. She moved quickly, nodding gratefully as she went.

"Now, we've palaver to have, a proper talk. Here to talk about Rekida? About this place? This old ruin? Why d'you want to know about a place like this, nothing good here. No, no, never mind that, sit down, warm up, there's food if you want it. Brought liquor? No? No, never mind then, shame. Sit down, sit down."

Tanner complied hesitantly, refusing to take off her coat quite yet.

"Suppose someone would find it eventually. Find me. Girl sent you here, good, good. She deserves to know."

"Deserves to know what, sir?"

"...there's a bloodletting coming. Red tide."

He let out a struggling, weary breath from a tobacco-scarred set of lungs.

"Red tide's coming. On account of me. Shouldn't have come back."

He stiffened his back, something oddly military in the motion.

"Got me a confession to make, big woman."

Tanner froze.

And reached for her quill.