CHAPTER THIRTEEN - RIDING ATOP THE NAMELESS DEAD
Dear Eygi,
I do hope you're doing well. Now, this is a first draft, I don't intend to send this to you, so pardon my curtness, pardon my lack of concern for your own conditions and the weather around your estate, pardon in general my lack of courtesy. But... time. I wish to rant about time. I wish to make very strong points about time which ought not to be recorded in a court of law. There's no easy way of putting it - time is a bitch. I hate time. Time has stolen my money and kicked me down the stairs. Time is an ugly child who keeps throwing stones at my head. Time is a serial philanderer who insists on seeding the world with more bastards in its image. Time probably doesn't take its hat off while indoors, and smells if mildew and sweat. Time doesn't bathe. The point is, Eygi, or at least the version of Eygi which I'm writing to given that I'll never send this letter at any point in my life, I don't have many fond thoughts regarding time at present, because time is passing too quickly for my liking. For once, in the last few years, I haven't been able to lose myself in routines, none of them - don't get me wrong, Eygi, I'm trying. Boy oh boy, am I trying.
See, what I try to do is lose myself in work - I settle down, I examine relevant case law, drag out relevant precedents... it's been a while, but believe it or not, I'm still using pecia, just like when we were studying together. It's only become... it's sad to admit, and this isn't going in the final letter, but the trips to the scriveners have become one of my few interactions with others. I find the proper references in the library, head out to the scrivener, make awkward small-talk while they prepare the relevant pecia... sometimes I copy it out when I need it for later, sometimes I just reference. Anyway, anyway, I'll be doing that, working in my room or in the libraries or just wherever I can find a table, I sip tea, I eat little things I buy while going to and from the scriveners... I have every reason to be relaxed, the work is fine, nothing unusual, and usually it'd be working just fine, but now I have time sitting behind me like a little scrote so-and-so, poking me in the back of the head with an ice-pick.
Always just forcing me to return to the fact that I'm not going to be here for long. None of this is going to last. First time I've had to confront that in... years. Years and years. Even when you left, there was no warning, so I didn't have time to dread it. Now, I do. I'm going to ship off soon, very soon indeed. Just four briefs left. Should be three by the end of today. I either get them done in two weeks, or I hand them to someone else. Have to pack, get supplies, everything I need... thick coats and boots, definitely. At least there's not really anyone to say goodbye to - not with you in the countryside. I'll send a proper goodbye letter before I go, but I intend to stay in touch! Need to share things with someone, after all. Already imagining the cold mornings...
I'm wondering what to do with the unsent letters. Now, this is something I'm not going to include in the final draft of this letter, but it's weighing on me, and I feel like putting it down somewhere. Not like I talk about these letters with the others. Point is, I... don't like sending you small novellas, I like to keep things nice and short, to-the-point, easy to read. And I understand it takes you time to write replies, I don't mind it one little bit. So what happens is I write you a letter, I send the letter, and while you're getting round to replying, I write more letters which I stuff into a drawer and keep under lock and key. Then, once your letter comes, I start dissecting all these old letters for anything I still want to mention to you, any turns of phrase I liked using, any encounters that are still significant with the passage of time. It's nice, honestly, I enjoy this sort of thing. Helps put things in perspective, stops me rambling. Like I'm doing now. See, aren't I nice, I'm definitely cutting this part out of the final letter! I'm sparing you the worst excesses of my rambling.
Which is good, because I have too many thoughts to count right now.
Anyway, probably just going to burn them, but I'm thinking of taking the unsent letters with me. Binding them up, wrapping them in brown paper, just slipping them in with the rest of my notes. Is that odd? Or is that perfectly reasonable? Anyway, I'll... consider doing it. Wish I could ask your advice, you've got a wonderful sense of perspective. Or does writing to you just place my own life in perspective? Unsure. Will consider once time has passed and I'm less stressed. Anyway, we ought to stay in touch. We need to stay in touch, actually. I'll see if I can arrange things once I get further north, I'm sure there are means of conveying letters - it's a Fidelizhi colony, surely there's something. Goodness, I've even heard that they're starting to roll out these... telegram things for intramural communications, they're managing to get over some of the issues with contamination eroding the cables. If I must, I'll use them, but... well, I like letters. I like rambling. And I dislike going STOP all the time like some sort of broken theatrophone. Speaking of which, have you been listening to the Annals of Tenk? I adore that show, I'm sure you can get it out in the countryside too - slightly racy, but very fun to have playing in the evening while I work. If you listen to it, let me know, I have numerous thoughts on Princess Yallerilli, you know, Tenk's main love interest. I think I might know where her character's going, but none of the other judges really listen to Annals of Tenk, more's the pity. Anyhow, anyhow, I'll stop rambling - I'm sure telegrams will do, if they're the only option.
I do hope things are going well for you. I know you must have a great deal going on, what with administration and accounting and debating with your freeholders. I remember reading that your town was getting a garrison stationed there permanently - is everything well? Well, if it's an unfortunate event, I commiserate with you. If it's a sign of greater prosperity coming to your town, then I'm sure it was entirely because of your work in particular, and I heartily congratulate you. Delete as appropriate. I suppose we won't be meeting in-person for a while, then, but I do hope we manage to bump into one another at some point in the future. I'm heading by Mahar Jovan, incidentally, as part of the journey north. If there's any errands you'd like me to run, I'll be happy to.
Now, this is also getting cut out of the final letter - honestly, this is just an excuse for me to ramble, I don't really have anyone else I can talk to about this, not for very long. I suppose someone else might just write a diary, but I like to address someone. Just imagining talking to you is enough to help settle me down. Again, this is being cut out, I won't embarrass you by being unnecessarily mushy. I'm heading to Rekida, or a settlement clinging to the outside, and... my research isn't very happy. It's cold, and it's ruined. The Complete Annals of the Great War, the one by Pothbar, well, he describes the sacking of Rekida in volume four. I thought about using it as a reference document before flicking to more specialised accounts, but... I don't really think I want to now. In fact, I think I'd rather not have read it at all. It was sacked fairly early on, back when the mutants were really getting going, rolling over the landscape like a tidal wave. This was really before their advance was broken, so there was no reinforcement coming from any humans, and the mutants were more or less unending. Pothbar just has page after page of survivors talking about... mutants slaughtering their own, then using the bodies to contaminate the rivers, the reservoirs, everything. Some sort of titanic creature vomited crude oil over the fields, drowned them, then burned them up. Firestorm that lasted days and days - can you imagine mutants using fire? Seems ridiculous, but... well, all the survivors agreed that it happened. Agreed that the mutants would contaminate humans, shove these parasites into their skulls, send them into the city to contaminate wells, burn storehouses. The sky was full of leathery bat-things, swarms of locust creatures, the rivers were choked with mutant bodies, your own neighbours weren't necessarily human... they lost whole districts when sleeper agents exploded in a shower of contaminated spores, and even the cemeteries were cannibalised for more parts.
Then they just... cracked the walls of the city open like the shell of an egg, flooded inside, killed anyone who hadn't left. Used their matter to create more mutants and march further south. Air was so choked with contamination by the end that even gas mask filters weren't working, nobles traded gold and diamonds just for a handful of them, though. Finding it hard to sleep since reading about that. Just... mounds of skeletons. I'm terrified of going there and finding piles of bodies in the streets, it must be cold enough to preserve them... the unknown is frightening me deeply. The unknown just has a thousand possibilities, no, infinite possibilities. I think of soemthing awful, and the unknown just broadens to swallow it, it can contamin everything I feed it, and there's always room for more. Infinity of possibilities, mathematically speaking, means an infinity of catastrophes. And... I can't stop thinking about it all. Starvation, hypothermia, murder, theft, ruin, destruction, madness, mutation...
The thing is, that book on Rekida, it's not really about Rekida. There's nothing about what the city was like beforehand. It's obscure enough that there's no other books on the topic of it, it's just... the first time it entered the imagination, it was because it was getting sacked. I know literally nothing about its culture, its gods, its rulers... I'm heading there, and if it wasn't for the fact that it's a Fidelizhi colony, I'd be terrified of just not knowing the language. Wish I could do more research on it, maybe order some books from elsewhere, but... no time for that, no time for anything to arrive. It's frustrating. And it means that I can't imagine it as a city, as a place people live in. I can just imagine a wasteland and a ruin. The first thing I learned about their fields was that they were soaked in oil and burned. First thing I know about the walls is when they were cracked open. First thing I know about the rivers is when they were poisoned. Hard to imagine anything functional living out there. Hard to imagine me living out there. Or anyone else.
You know anything about hypothermia? I started reading a little, we have a fairly good medical library, just so we known what our medical consultants are rambling about... anyway, anyway. I started reading, reasonably enough, but I just had to stop. Wound up just staring at this one case I had dragged out from the scriveners, seventy-seven years ago, here in Fidelizh. Bad winter. Awful, honestly. But not awful enough for someone to die of hypothermia, though. Not really. So people came to the judges when a little body was found curled up and dead on a lonely street corner. They'd investigated. And found no killer. No killer they could punish. All they found was evidence of cold. The man had walked out into the cold, drunk out of his mind... the alcohol had pushed the heat from the body, confused the brain, then the cold made it worse. He became dizzy. Insensible. One reluctant witness described him ripping his jacket off and throwing it away, even as he shivered like mad. He could've survived. He removed his jacket, convinced he was fine, he was warm, too warm. Then he fell into a small canal. No ice to slip on - he seemed to have just peacefully stepped into the water, then climbed back out again, sopping wet, before walking a little distance away to die. He was driven mad by cold, alcohol made it worse, and he just...
The cold could drive me mad. Creep into my head. I could wrap up warm and snug, could do everything correctly, and the cold could still just wipe me away. Maybe they'll find me, naked and alone, freezing in the wasteland. Preserved in the snow for the next spring thaw to uncover.
This is what I keep dreaming about. Work helps. Planning doesn't. But I don't have enough of the former, and the latter is just too necessary to ignore. And I'm seeing my mother again. My mother. And my father. And my lodge. I need to write her a letter, we should get dinner, but... anyway. Anyway. I'm buying coats, boots, gloves, long johns, all sorts of warm stuff. My normal clothes should do nicely for the most part, I'm not exactly going around doing manual labour, should still be in a nice, warm office. Do you think they'll have one of those quaint iron stoves for me to use? I've always wanted to have one, can't quite say why, but I love this image of a solid black pillar in my room, just emanating heat, perpetually boiling water for tea... it's petty, but I'm clinging to it. Better than thinking about the cold, or the food, or the people, or the work, or the mutants, or the bodies. Gods, this letter is useless, I need to revise it so very much before I'll dare send it off. I'm sorry for rambling. Having to sell off my stuff. Put up notices in the news room, selling it all off to the highest bidder. I need to run off soon, have currency to pick up - they use Fidelizhi thrones up at the settlement, but on the way up... anyway, I'll need to grab some two-headed kings for back home in Mahar Jovan, maybe some promissory notes for anywhere along the route, should work out. Terrified of being penniless before I get up there. Anyway, we should keep in touch, you should tell me more about your estate! What sort of animals do you keep up there, you've never mentioned, and I keep forgetting to ask. Anyway, I need to run off, currency, immigration office. Need to submit a giant pile of forms to them, should be fun. Currency, immigration office, boots, coat, cleaning room, ooh, buying a bottle of citrinitas too, might need something to revive me out in the wilderness!
Eygi, I'm doing everything I'm meant to, but I still feel paralytically nervous. I mean, my body is moving, part of my brain is functional and rational and reasonable and completely capable of doing this job, but... I don't know, the other part of my brain, the part where my actual soul lives, that part is just completely terrified. Absolutely, resolutely, indisputably terrified. I keep thinking I won't come back, and I keep wondering how many people would actually miss me if I didn't. I mean, there's you, my mother... that's about it. My lodge would be disappointed, my father hasn't had a thought in his head for years, and that's it. Even my colleagues... I don't know them well, and that's been fine for a long time, but now it's just terrifying me.
Gods, I'm afraid. I can't tell anyone, won't tell anyone, but I'm afraid.
We ought to stay in touch.
Yours, now and for as long as you'll have me,
Tanner
* * *
She blinked. And found herself on a dock. She had her bag. Her papers. Her currency. Everything. Nothing remained for her to handle.
Been operating for the last few weeks on muscle memory. Felt like a clockwork soldier, clicking along, step by inevitable step, constant and unyielding... and slowly, painfully coming to a stop, the internal mechanisms winding down. And here she was. Clockwork judge, locked mid-step, desperate to be wound back up again. Wondering where her key had gone, and only capable of imagining the keys on the wall of the lord's room, the room with the ivy ceiling and the anonymous books, that little grey-swaddled ancient infant, his eyes gleaming like the flat disks of the moon.
And she imagined him winding up judges, putting a key from the walls in their spines and twisting. One by one by one. Sending them off, running on the tension he instilled, click-click-click... until they ran out, looked around, and wondered how they'd gotten here, what they were doing, if they could get back home someday, where home was meant to be anyway...
She thought of the expectations.
Tightened her grip.
Could feel the key twisting again, ratcheting up the tension, the conviction, the demand to move.
And here she went. Clockwork judge.
Click-click-click-click-click.
* * *
The mutant-hunters were moored at the edge of the great dam, the sudden explosion of water which lay precipitously over the shantytown. A few snaps, a few collapses, and the entire shantytown might be wiped from the face of the earth. For now, it held. Tanner stood at the dock, which still had a sheen of newness to it, the original docks long-since rendered useless. The paint smelled fresh and metallic, the ropes had a springy lightness to them which spoke of youth. Tanner stepped uncertainly on the boards - they were young, and that meant untested. Even if, logically, she knew they were fine, properly constructed, she had this instinctive nervousness towards the excessively novel. Novel meant untested, untested meant dangerous and unreliable. Ergo, herself going north. Ergo, her nervousness at going to a fresh, raw settlement. The sapling might be the foundation of the greatest oak in the world, but that didn't mean she wanted to sit on it, or build her house out of it, or do anything but steer clear and let it move along.
Clamped down on her rambling. Tightened her gloved grip on her bag - a big leather thing, waterproofed to hell and back. Somewhere between a bag and a trunk, really. Took a while buying it, yet she couldn't remember actually doing it - might as well have materialised in her hands one random evening. So much had been done on muscle memory, and now she was aware. Weeks from that fateful meeting. Weeks she barely remembered. Yet... no going back.
It was a hideous boat. Hideous. She'd seen them before, but from a long way away. Felt like a young girl again, gutting fish with her father on the docks, listening the rumbling song of the hunters aboard. Then, it'd been a distant shadow, cloaked with clouds of oily, greasy smoke from their clanking engines, sustained by crimson-robed theurgists. Now, it was a looming, monolithic reality. And what a reality it was. The stink hit her first, the reek of both contamination and its cleansing. Contamination fizzed in the nose, it popped like champagne, it had a nauseating sweetness and sourness which combined together unpleasantly. Felt like... well, like the little confectioner that made the ceremonial sweets for the judges (and she had an ample supply in her bag, wrapped carefully), but if the confectioner had died in one of his vats during the middle of summer, and the reek of sugar, rot, heat, and spice was mixing together. And then, the chemical stench of cleanser, something universal and caustic. Made her head swim, just this first proper whiff. No idea how the hunters managed it. And beyond the smell was the boat itself - a hulk. An ugly lump of matter that had no reason to float, but it somehow did. Less a ship, more a loose mass of metal and wood and bone. They bound it with mutant bone, inhumanly vast and powerful. Mutant bones, strung with metal, containing a burning heart into which they fed the choicest part of every mutant. Brutal spikes hung from the side, ready to hang their kills. The more they killed, the more the stink fo contamination rose, the more mutants came to feast on the decay, the more kills for the crew. Three great pillars of metal rose from the deck, curling and spiralling, like the horns of a titanic goat, belching smoke. Everything was notched and whorled, little tallies of kills, little scrimshaw engravings on the great structuring bones. The bones rose above the rim of the deck, curling above - it was a cage. A huge ribcage sealing the boat inside, with its burning heart and its horn-column-vents.
Most alarmingly, there was an artillery piece mounted in the middle of the deck. Huge and well-worn, carved all around until it resembled a titanic dragon, complete with whiskers of cartilage and ornamented insectile wings made from stretched mutant-hide.
The mutant-hunters were stopping here for a resupply. More weapons, more fuel. Fidelizh had some of the finest caravans in the world, some of the finest and best-supplied merchants around. The hunters could pick up fuel for their flamethrowers, sharpened harpoons, specially treated food which was resistant to contamination, treatments for the mutation that might set into themselves, special gear for protection and offence. Everything. There were engines in the hold which needed to be repaired, parts which needed purchasing. The sails, used in case of emergency, had to be mended and replaced. Long patrols were the norm, and they had to supply themselves for long periods of potentially being stranded. People bustled to and fro, surrounding Tanner and flowing on either side of her, unwilling to come too close. She could tell the new recruits from the old hands by their skin. The novices were cherry-cheeked and fresh. The veterans, though... they were mottled. Skin like the skin of toads, wart-ridden and scarred, all tinted an unhealthy shade of blue-grey-green. Little patches of the stuff, blooming like leprosy. Mutation had stained them - just the skin, at least. But it spoke of growing corruption. In front of her were humans and animals both - the animals clawing their way out, inch by bloody inch, until only they remained. And until that happened, the hunters would sling harpoons over their shoulders, mount guns on their vessels, and sail up the river to find anything that stank of mutation.
The captain was no different.
A woman, maybe ten years older than her, with a face half-ruined by the mottling. Plenty of women did mutant-hunting these days - simple reason, the men had already run off to the Great War, the women had been left behind. The first mutant-hunters had been old Great War veterans who refused to stop fighting, knew their time was short and wanted to make the most of it. Then they'd died. Gone mad. Whatever. Leaving the female veterans, possessed by the same urge but insulated from the worst of the Great War's chaos, to pick up the slack.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Tanner stood nervously before the captain. The captain worked away busily, snarling orders to the others with professional rapidity and unprofessional savagery. A tattered oiled coat was slung around her shoulders, but she hadn't stuck her arms through the sleeves, leaving the bare, scarred limbs to furl angrily in front of her chest. One of her eyes had ruptured pupils - she was mutated. How many years before she changed? How much of this aggression was natural, how much was induced?
A filthy cheroot was stuffed in her mouth, and she growled around it.
"Here to haul cargo? I don't need more hands."
Tanner smiled nervously (as was expected), and handed over a little chit of paper, explaining her situation as she did so.
"...damn, never mentioned the size. That's all your bringing?"
"Yes, captain."
"Good. Get on board, stay out of the way. You've got a cabin, as agreed. Trip shouldn't take more than a few days to Mahar Jovan, we're picking up most of our food there, then we're off up the Tulavanta. Then up a tributary for a while, no guarantees on time, depends on the mutants. Good?"
She nodded rapidly.
"Oh, very good, completely fine. Sorry."
"The fuck are you apologising for?"
"...I don't know. Sorry."
"Gods. Go on, get aboard, girl. We're leaving within the day."
She grinned over. Her teeth were uncannily sharp - her biology adapting to the chief food of mutants. That is to say, other mutants. Soon, her tongue would harden and refine itself for drinking contamination from pools, becoming more of a proboscis. Her eyes would shatter forever. And then she'd need to be burned to death or sent into exile. Tanner trotted past her hurriedly, bag thumping against her legs, reminding her of when she'd first arrived in Fidelizh. The boat was worse up-close. So many stains... so much weathering. The boat wasn't a vessel, really, it was a floating fortress. It was a fortress that could run away when the going got bad, and could run further in once a further tareget presented itself. She saw scars in the metal, intimidatingly large - mutants, had to be. Mutants had attacked, and gouged scratches inches deep into the solid steel. And... she moved away from the thoroughfare of sailors, moving for one of the railings, trying to lean against it...
Flinched.
The railing was decorated.
Jaws. The metal was ornamented by the plundered jaws of mutants, some of them uncannily human-like, with incisors, molars, all the usual. Embedded above the top railing, forming rings which... no, not decorations, reinforcements. She could imagine people resting their guns in the nook created by specially selected jawbones, could see the places where gunpowder had stained the teeth slate-grey. And partway along the railing... a harpoon. A huge, pneumatic harpoon, ready to spring out and impale a mutant. The barbs were vicious and hooked, designed to haemorrhage, to be impossible to remove. And like everything, the launching mechanism was decorated with mutant bones, this time fingers, looped around and around in a double helix.
A mechanism like this had crippled her father.
She could see why. The tight coils. The way the metal already seemed to strain. It was always designed to erupt with force, all that had happened on that awful day was a... misapplication. The wrong outlet of the same force. If it'd been correct, it would've been caving in the skull of a mutant, or a mutant-hunter resigned to a death of some description, be it slow and painful or fast and glorious. This would be fast and humiliating. It had been fast and humiliating. She reached out slowly, tracing her hand over the surface, feeling the cold metal, the low hum of mechanisms in static harmony... a little touch of the harpoon, and the barbs were sharp enough to draw blood on the slightest contact.
They'd shoot this at a mutant, hook in, rip as much blood as they could out. The mutant might fight back, it might run, but the ship would accompany it. And the more contamination it shed, the more it weakened, lost the power to regenerate and recover, lost everything. And more mutants were drawn in to rip it apart. She imagined a mutant shambling pathetically in front of the ship, like a hunting hound, or a canary in a mine. Sacrificial lamb. Others drawn in to gnaw at its ragged sides, while it loped weakly to an inevitable end. And all the while the mutant-hunters would laugh and laugh and laugh.
If that mechanism had been an inch to one side, her father would be fine.
Another inch, and he'd have died on the spot.
Another inch, and he'd have been left with a smashed face, so demolished that they wouldn't be able to spoon food down his throat.
This harpoon, or one very much like it, more than anything, had probably sent her here. More even that the woman with the letter. A harpoon snapped, and her relationship with her mother strained enough for her to be sent off at the first opportunity, sent packing to a substitute parent. Mother had always been awkward after father had been injured, clearly wasn't ready to be a single parent. Collected substitutes like stamps. There'd been the judges. And there'd been the lodge. And there'd been the woman with the letter. All of them assigned some sort of responsibility to make up for the loss of her father. The lodge had tried, the judges had managed it for good. The woman had simply been a route to the latter.
Judges as a substitute father. No wonder she'd been so eager to obey the lord in his grey cape, in his room of ivy and keys.
Her thoughts were human. Her thoughts were human. She had a clarity in her, a clarity that frightened her. Routine had snapped, so her mind was whirling in a widening gyre, reaching random conclusions and conjectures, observations that would never otherwise occur. The judges as father figures, the significance of the harpoon in her mind and her life... her imagination was beginning to click, piece by piece. Clockwork judge - shove a key in her back, turn it round and around, fill her with tension and send her off with automated motions. But her imagination didn't need a key. It was just a gyre that widened and widened with each turn. It wasn't wound up, it was unleashed.
A twitch of nervousness.
She wanted to write to Eygi. Needed to write to Eygi. And as the sailors began to hum a low hunting song, the new recruits unsteadily joining in after a minute, she leant against the toothsome railing and withdrew her notebook. Already beginning to scribble.
Dear Eygi,
I lean on teeth and I smell champagne. I think I'm heading into some sort of hell.
I hope the weather is good where you are, I'm sure it's better than over here, but I suppose I'll be begging for any humidity soon enough!
Do you ever think the modern human is like a clockwork toy?
Write soon!
Tanner
Hm.
Definitely needed a second draft. Didn't want to frighten her.
Dear Eygi...
* * *
"Haul! Haul that bloody mortar, I want that thing mounted, damn your eyes!"
The captain was a snarling dog, nipping at the heels of her crew as they shunted yet another ghastly weapon of war. Tanner was still on the deck, watching carefully, noting down something every so often. Not that she was truly interested, she was more... well, getting into the habit. Observation was her job in the Rekida settlement, observation and notation. Plus, housekeeping. What had Brother Olgi said when she started up at the inner temple? Best to start how you intend to go on. Had it been Olgi, or had it been in one of her first lectures? Blast, memory already going. Bad sign. Either way, habit could never be formed too soon. She noted how the ship operated, the ranking, the invisible signs. Her eyes had to be sharp for injustice and shameful behaviour in the settlement, sharp to the sort of thing the judges had to start working on. She was helping to plan an offensive, and it was her duty to do some damn good reconnaissance.
The mutant-hunters were odd. Very clear divisions between them, probably based around squadrons from the Great War. The women were the last of the veterans, only one or two men among their ranks. The female battalions had only really been raised once the going was truly miserable, once they were drafting children into the factories just to keep the ammunition coming - meaning, the male veterans were usually older, and had succumbed to mutation or retirement. The women here... it was interesting, she could tell the older veterans from the younger ones simply by their necklaces. The older veterans had necklaces with a single ring on them. The younger ones had nothing, or necklaces with miscellaneous knick-knacks. And this marked a division. Then, there were veterans and recruits - another division. She could already see little hazings happening. The older veterans were lounging around, leaning on railings and guns, barking orders and insults at the lower orders. The younger veterans, the ringless, were more lean and hungry, still aware of how many years they had left - their skin was less mottled, their frames less mutated. They snarled at the recruits, barking and bellowing, ensuring they worked at the maximum. The recruits...
Well, some still had spirit in them. There was a raw, chaotic savagery to the boat which unnerved her, so different to the calm, civilised environment of the inner temple. This wasn't part of an army, this wasn't a regular navy, it was just a chaotic bundle of doom-driven warriors who wanted to die doing what they loved... no, what they lived for. One of the younger veterans growled at her, and Tanner took a step back, getting out of the way of another gun being hauled along. This veteran was... she was wounded. Half her face, and a good chunk of her upper torso, were swathed in thick bandages and dressings, oozing with antiseptic. Two of the fingers on her left hand were completely fused into a single claw, tipped with a nail the colour of jade. A tower of greasy black hair was tied up with a bolt of red cloth, looked like some sort of antenna. Her single remaining eye boiled with resentment... and curiosity.
"Big fucker. Big fucker."
She leaned closer, her breath slightly fetid. Tanner shrank back, despite the woman being maybe half her size. There was a gun at her hip, and Tanner's eyes kept drifting towards it. The woman laughed hoarsely, something dancing in her eye... then poked her solidly in the stomach with her green-tipped claw, and Tanner almost leapt over the side out of sheer alarm.
"Bit of muscle, enough muscle. Good, not one of those fat giants. You know, we meet mutants like you. Big fuckers, real big, usually means they've eaten someone, or injected contamination right into their skulls, something like that. Tell you what..."
She reached over the railing, patting something.
"Check it."
A skull. A skull embedded into the metal. Almost human... almost. But not quite. Too large, for one. Too many teeth, eye sockets too large, skull fractured where the brain had tried to spill out. Little divots where stingers and pincers might've been mounted. The eye sockets had sagged with contamination, the eyes maybe expanding, or dying away and being replaced with something marginally more useful. Whatever it was, it made the giant skull look like it was weeping, sad eyes and grinning mouth, each tooth long and sharp, ready to tear.
"Best not stick around when we get drunk, big lady. Better not. Might get ideas, think that you're one of the enemy. Know what we do with them? We hook them up. We bleed them into the land. We draw the other mutants in, gun them down, over and over and over, pile the bodies higher. Sometimes we choke the river so thick that we can only move with barge poles, we make rivers look like ground beef. And then we burn it. All of it. We take whales, render them for oil, burn the oil to kill the mutants. And once it's all burned away, we move on. Listen, big lady, maybe you stick with the crew, haul guns for us, give us ammo crates. Let us show you the fires. When mutants burn, they burn rainbow-like. Like an oil slick stretching to the horizon. Stinks like you wouldn't believe, but you keep wanting to smell it, smell your work..."
She licked her lips, relishing in how Tanner shivered.
"I've seen things, big lady. Things you wouldn't believe."
Another poke in the stomach.
"You shed your fat quick out here, the contamination doesn't like fat, too useless, too much space wasted. Your heart will boil hot enough that you don't need fat to warm you, your stomach will hunger for things other than food, things you can't put into fat, your teeth with lengthen and sharpen, and you'll be all lean... then you can start growing muscle..."
The captain seemed to materialise from nowhere, cracking the veteran over the back of the neck with a crooked handspike. The veteran hissed like an animal, whirling angrily. The captain glared. Looking her right in the eyes. And a second later, the veteran slunk away, one final look at Tanner. A look Tanner didn't like. The chaos of the boat's set-up continued onwards, but the captain had an aura of calm around her, even with her half-feral eyes... Tanner smiled nervously.
"I apologise, I'll get below deck, and-"
"Oh, shush. Listen, one of my girls starts getting nasty, you look them right in the eyes."
Tanner blinked.
"...and?"
"That's it. The older ones are afraid of direct eye contact, makes their brains go zap. Like getting a bucket of cold water thrown over their heads. Look 'em in the eyes, and if they don't back off, whack 'em with something, understand? Something heavy."
"Understood, captain."
"Respectful bird, aren't you?"
Tanner shrugged.
"I'm a guest, it's... really all I can do."
"Could shift ammo crates for us."
Another blink. The captain grinned.
"Not joking. If you want to, you can shift crates for us. Wouldn't mind, would quite like it. Convenient. You're big enough. Go below, you're the cabin... right, down those stairs, second on the left. Open for you, key's on the cot, have fun. Go below, get that smart crap off, then start hauling things. You're large enough."
The grin widened, and her teeth were unpleasantly sharp and malformed, like her mouth had tried to grow different sets at different times - never settling on a single design.
"You're a guest. Happy for you to sit around and eat our food, but I'd mightily appreciate it if you pitched in. The girls like people more when they lift things, and you look good at it. Proper work mule, you. Go on, crack on, give us a bit of the old hee-haw, eh?"
A hoarse laugh, a firm slap on the shoulder. Tanner coughed slightly, shifting uneasily...
"May I ask a question, actually?"
A blink of surprise.
"You may. You have a mouth. You have a tongue. Presumably you have an arsehole too, so you can talk out of it if you please."
Goodness, such vulgarity in this place. Tanner shifted a little, moving further from the harpoon. It unnerved her and fascinated her, she didn't want to get too close, but she didn't want to move too far away. It was like having a gun in her hands, or a knife, or something strong and useful. A desire to keep it nearby at all times, even if it repulsed just as quickly, repulsed with its certainty and completeness and significance. That harpoon could kill her in a second.
"Are things... I mean, are things safe? Some of the senior veterans, they're... very mutated, is there anything I need to worry about, or-"
The captain grunted irritably, all humour suddenly gone.
"What, think we're going to eat you alive?"
Tanner froze.
"...no, no, no, not that at all, I-"
"You think we're a bunch of animals, need to lock your door at night, sleep with a big old gun by your head?"
Her tone was becoming slightly more aggressive, and with someone who stank very slightly of blood, oil, and contamination...
Crumbs.
She always did this. Put her foot in her mouth. Asked something unfortunate. Happened the moment she wasn't asking ritualised, formalised questions, like she did during her cross-examinations. Her curiosity was always taking her to unpleasant places, always. Even now, even now, she was wondering about other embarrassing things, to do with hygiene and whatnot. She'd ruined any sort of rapport, and-
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean any offence, I'll just-"
The captain sighed, lounging back against the nearest hard surface, her teeth grinding in a way that suggested she wanted to smoke something, chew something, do something to exert the energy bubbling in her half-mutated, sun-shrivelled, salt-preserved frame.
"Listen, you think the city would let us get this close if we were about to go feral?"
Tanner spoke without thinking, nervousness propelling her to answer.
"Well, we're not really in the city, we're just-"
"Shut up. Listen, you can get bodily mutated a whole bunch, it's brain mutation you need to worry about. And my girls are fine, mostly. We take the right pills, we get examined every other week. And you're not going with us into a war-zone, you're just with us for a while, staying civilised. I know what it looks like when someone's about to snap - my girls aren't there, not yet. Seen it enough."
"...oh."
"Don't believe me?"
Well, she was half-mutated herself, so surely she'd be slightly blinkered on some points, and-
"Listen here, you think idiots last long?"
"Uh."
"Not on this boat, they don't. They die quick. And they're long-dead, trust me. The folk left are the folk with the right fucking gumption to stay alive. Right smarts, right spine. When you see someone on the brink of going insane, you'll know it. Now how's about you settle down, calm your tits, stop spluttering like a pig mid-rut, and get to work. Or get out of our way. Understood, lass?"
"Understood, captain. Completely understood, captain. Sorry, again. I didn't mean any offence. I really didn't. I apologise for any offence I caused. I truly, truly apologise."
Her words were running over each other like a horde of stampeding buffalo.
"You're really sorry?"
"Yes, captain, very much so, captain. Sorry."
The captain reached up quickly, patting her gently on the cheek.
"Then get to hauling something."
Tanner's next apology was frozen on her lips as the captain stalked over the bone-ornamented deck. A hellish figure, tall and powerful, gnarled with mutation and with the grim, fascinating aura of the doom-driven. A question was boiling in her stomach, but the moment had long-since gone, and she'd squandered all her goodwill already. But... she needed to ask, even so. Before the voyage ended. Just wanted to ask about dates. When the captain had last been in Mahar Jovan. Who it was who might've been captain of the vessel that injured her father. She glanced around, seeing the veterans stirring to life as the ship approached completion. The golden rings around their necks glinting in the dim sun, swinging from mottled necks. And then... she could hear the engines stirring. Warming up. Ready to go. A low thump-thump, and some of the veterans started stamping, the deck immobile no matter what they did. Stamping in time with the thump-thump of the ship's chaotic heart. And little tongues of steam began to ooze through the deck's slats, easing upwards...
While the great grey smoke-pillars started to belch enormous clouds, each one thick, black, oily, stinking.
Tanner shivered.
Started to head below. Intended to help. But these buttons wouldn't stand up to hard labour. All around were crates - crates of food, crates of fuel, and crates of guns, ammunition. The guns were monstrously huge, just like the harpoons. Pistols designed for dragoons, not sailors, carrying long rifle charges in their six cylinders. The veterans had already claimed a couple, and rested them lazily on their trousers, stroking them gently with mottled fingers, fingernails closer to insect chitin than anything else. The guns were terrible, not in terms of quality, just in terms of purpose and power: the rifles had bores larger than her thumb, each one with a brutal bayonet designed to hook, to immobilise prey before another hunter could rip them apart. Even their guns had harpoons. They seemed to want to immobilise and bleed their prey as much as kill them - to hurt them, in some fashion. To take away the only thing mutants truly loved and needed. Tear it away, and only then, only then, rip their skulls apart with a solid shot. Tanner intended to go below, but... she had to try. Reached down, placing her bag softly on the deck... and tried to pick up a crate of ammunition, half-pound conical balls ready to snap into the firearms, ready to drive through inch upon inch upon inch of putrid mutant flesh. These guns had won the Great War, the guns and the flame. She hooked her fingers underneath, wedging a little...
Then hauled.
The ammunition crate sprung from the ground. Tanner's breath caught in her throat. She felt her muscles moving, felt things waking up that had been asleep for a long time. Felt the entire organic engine aligning, her heartbeat in time with the thump-thump of the engine below, the colossal mechanical heart of this corpse-ship. One of the veterans whistled appreciatively as she hefted the crate, barely feeling a thing.
She couldn't... really remember the last time she'd actually used her muscles. Lost restraint and exerted her frame, didn't crush it down under a cape and hunch over a book. Her mind was whirling strangely, she couldn't help but imagine hauling larger things, challenging herself a little. There was a slight burn in her arms she hadn't felt for a long time, and it reeked of satisfaction. She could feel the parts of the organic engine turning... and could feel them tempting. Go on. Challenge a bit. Get stronger. Get bigger. Shed every lingering ounce of fat and become a walking statue. Chisel herself. She could pick up that Lord of Appeal with a single finger, even now...
All very silly notions. And she ignored them immediately. Tanner Magg was no... strong-woman, fit to haul ammunition and nowt besides, she was a judge, and a fine judge, fine enough to be sent to the very depths of the wilderness! And only the best judges were sent to the depths of the wilderness, to a dead city and a carbuncular settlement, surrounded on all sides by contamination and ruin. Only the best judges got positions like that.
Another whistle of appreciation. She shot the veteran in question a shy smile, and the veteran responded with a hoarse cackle, revealing snaggleteeth and a tongue the colour of a leech, with little barbs to boot. The deck shook under her feet as she moved.
Her voice was low and quiet, comical with her size and strength.
"May I... possibly ask where this crate ought to go? Sorry, I should've asked beforehand. Terribly sorry if I'm getting in the way."
And now the veteran was laughing harder than ever.
Well. There went the euphoria. Replaced by mild embarrassment. Hm...
Might as well try to pick up a second one. Not that she was particularly fascinated with being a burly brawler, but... well, once one got started, it was tempting to see how far it could go. Even the claw-fingered woman with the half-bandaged face was looking interested. Seven years of training. One year of judging.
And this was the first time she'd really shown off her strength.
Still processing how it felt, honestly.
But she could say, without a doubt, that it didn't feel unpleasant.