CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - CHAIN-TOWERS AND CAGE-TREES
There were maybe seven of them, but in the obscurities of snow, darkness, stress and violence, there was no establishing a true number. Surely the wolf-mutant knew. It would smell them, each and every one, drawing air through honeycomb-like apertures over its body, drinking their scents and knowing, completely and utterly, how profoundly doomed it was. Surrounded on all sides. The human mutants, the mottled creatures that Tanner had seen a few days ago, were cunning, in a brutal sort of way. Their bodies moved flat over the snow, they could scuttle on all fours and shift to two just as easily, as they did now when true speed was necessary. Like all mutants, it took a great deal to weary them. A great deal indeed. She imagined them skimming over the snow to find her, to pursue the carriage... confusion tickled her thoughts, though. Absurdly, given the situation. Why had they come here? Why did they follow? Why did they make the risky journey in the cold and the dark, hazarding the attentions of other, greater mutants that moved silently and knew nothing but hunger... why would they bother? And how did they succeed? A little chill ran up her spine when she remembered the deceased coachman's thoughts - that something had been chasing them away from this place, their usual hunting grounds. And now... now what? Had they been chased back? Had the temptation of prey been too much?
The violence put a stop to all thoughts.
The hobbling hitherto-humans lunged for the wolf in absolute silence, their hands outstretched, their too-long legs digging deep grooves into the ground, sending a spray of mud and ice behind them like comet trails. They lunged...
The wolf-mutant span, tried to snap at them, but there was an eerie resignation to it. The contamination recognised that this was unwinnable. And where an animal might rage against that fact, a mutant wouldn't. A mutant lived and died with the same basic mechanical apathy. It saw no chance to escape - so why prolong the inevitable?
The crowd piled atop it, all seven, the redhead in the torn silk dress buried right in the midst of the scrum. And they tore. With bare, clawed hands, they ripped at the tough flesh, and they did what neither Tanner nor Marana could or would do, what substituted for fire, exceeded it in purging the mutant.
They ate.
The violence was ecstatic and mechanical. This was their natural purpose. Nothing more. But there was undeniable passion to their motions... or Tanner was trying to read passion into it, trying to make them seem more human, reading saliva as indicating hunger rather than a simple desire to make the food go down easier, reading those bulging eyes as indicating enjoyment rather than the routine pulse of adrenaline and blood. The heat of their bodies melted the snow into a slurry, and blood filled it gladly, mixing to create a frothing pink-hued lake. They wrapped strong limbs around the extremities of the wolf and wrenched the joints until they popped free like champagne corks, one after the other, ligaments straining and snapping. They dug sharp nails into the flesh and dug for anything that could be held, bringing out silver-grey intestines in a coiling system of sausage links, a stomach that was rippling with greasy horseflesh, kidneys that gleamed rubious in the dim firelight, and all matter of miscellaneous red, grey, yellow material, all the shades of organic life. The bones splashed into the churning mire, iceberg-chunks of fat splashing beside them, to be devoured later when the time came to scavenge the meal. They wove their fingers into the mangy fur of the wolf and yanked, immobilising it as best they could, while arms levered the mouth until it cracked and leered wide in a loose, clattering grin of detached sinew, ready for them to tear from yet another angle. There was mechanical perfection to the butchery. They ripped, tore, sawed and cracked, yet they did it with great efficiency, and no mind for cruelty - they killed this thing, but they didn't hate it. Not one little bit.
Tanner felt vomit rising in her throat as they finished.
One of them had been wounded. His... his skin was peppered with the black thorns of mouth-stingers, and the wounds were already oozing with powerful mutant-born venom. His arm was already starting to swell up, purpling... mutants could heal a great deal. But the first and only prey a mutant desired was its own kind. Their bodies adjusted accordingly... and so did their venom. The others glanced at him, and one another, even as they finished the task of butchering the creature and set themselves to dividing the sponge of its lungs and the long winding passages of its digestive system, while one rangy girl knelt and began to gnaw clumsily at the bones like a dog, her eyes always fixed on the others. They observed the wounded one. Observed as he bore his teeth and seemed to consider gnawing his arm off...
They were considering killing him. Eating him alive. Like they would any other mutant.
This wasn't a hunting pack. It was just a group of enemies keeping themselves in sight.
The rangy girl with her bones, her hair falling out in clumps as her body ceased to require it, dropped a snapped length to the ground.
The mutant looked at his arm. Looked at the others. Started to back away over the snow...
The rangy girl leapt, and wrapped herself around his neck, chewing angrily at the spine, trying to crack it and paralyse him. The man whirled to try and get her off, stumbling and collapsing in the snow, rolling over and over and over to leverage his weight against her own, to crush her... the others looked, and returned to their meal. If the girl there was wounded, they'd kill her next, most likely. Or they'd try. Even now, the girl seemed to be directing the fight to go outwards, to spill away into the dark where she could have a head start on running away. If she recovered, would she come back? Would she seek the safety of mutual destruction instead of the uncertain mercies of the great shadowy things which dwelled out theire, in the outer dark?
The redhead with the blue silk dress broke away from the others, her mouth wet with gore, a long tongue already slithering out to clean it up - her tongue was almost amphibian, and it soaked up liquid like a sponge. But instead of chasing the opportunistic betrayal, she moved for Tanner, moved for Marana. Tanner hesitated... kept her torch in front of her, even as terror mounted. The redhead paused at the edges of the flame, tilting her mottled, slightly misshapen and elongated head to one side, considering Tanner carefully. Stared. Tanner felt the terror spike. Was this how the night was going to go? They'd be... be surrounded, replacing one mutant with five, discounting the escaped ones? Five mutants, all night, surrounding them, waiting... there'd be no killing that many, not with the tools they had. The redhead sniffed. Tilted her head to the other side, an unpleasantly human motion for something that wasn't. And then... then she moved.
Her hand cupped some of the bloody melted snow.
And she flung it onto Tanner's flame.
A hiss.
Darkness.
The creature rushed...
Tanner tried to raise a fist to strike at her...
And the creature stopped.
A deeply, viscerally uncomfortable feeling spread over Tanner's hand.
The girl... the girl was licking it. Like a dog.
And Tanner saw, as Marana came closer with a torch of her own, a battle cry escaping her lips... she was licking up a few flecks of spilled blood. They'd landed on Tanner's hand, should've noticed, should've notcied, but... but it didn't matter. She didn't dare move, the creature was latched to her arm with the intimacy of a leech, holding her hand in place while she worked over the flesh with a tongue that felt... it felt like an eel, the smooth muscle, the infinite flexibility, the slime of it. The creature only remained in contact for a few moments before she seemed satisfied... the brush of her teeth made Tanner's heart leap into her mouth, but she was just nibbling at a tiny piece of flesh that had become contaminated even by brief contact. No expression on her face while this was happening. None at all.
And she was gone.
Retreating to find herself a bone to gnaw on. And that was all.
She had no attachment to Tanner. Hadn't come here to protect her, hadn't followed her scent, she'd... her pack had just followed the road, most likely, come back to their old hunting grounds. They knew the landscape, clearly, knew how to set up ambushes. The wolf that she'd thought would be haunting them until morning, venom-mouthed and bolstered with the meat of their horses... it was gone. Ripped apart. They were poring over the bloody snow now, licking up whatever they could, never taking their eyes away from one another. Marana's voice was a whip-crack breaking the animal silence, the silence which reigned when language was impossible and only snuffles and the damp sound of tongues in snow could endure.
"Are you alright?"
A torch was thrust into her hands before she could answer, and Tanner gripped it instinctively, trying to resist the urge to ask for a scouring pad. The mutants were barely glancing at them now - they had nothing they wanted. And they disliked the fire. They knew their appetites, not like that feral thing.
"No. No, I am not."
Her voice was calmer than she felt.
"Fair enough. Now, I'll tell... I'll tell you what I'm going to do, and you are free to join me if you like. I am going to climb into that coach, the one with the intact doors, and I am going to close those doors and snuggle into the piles of mail, and I know I won't sleep, but I do not want to be out here for a single moment longer. If you need me, I'll be buried amidst the love letters and government reports."
Tanner let out a long, shuddering breath.
"I'll... yes, I'll join you. Inside the coach."
"How lovely. Now, I really must away before my legs give out."
Tanner automatically reached out to steady her, and the two hobbled to the coach, feeling absolutely drained. It was cold. It wasn't too long until morning. The sacks of post were cold and uncomfortable, the sharp corners of envelopes poking them no matter how they sat, and the coach was turned on its side - they were sleeping in a way that felt like they were trapped in a well, staring up through the mouth. Did wells have mouths? The sound of chewing made her want to think of anything besides mouths, so... anyway.
It was dark, uncomfortable, cold, and they could do nothing but listen to the sound of things with almost-human teeth gnawing, not even a single growl, snap, snarl or bark to interrupt it.
Tanner curled around Marana, clutching her tight, her eyes wide and unblinking.
Marana hesitated...
Then patted Tanner awkwardly on her broad, powerful back.
"Loosen up. I don't want you breaking my ribs."
Tanner started to let go-
"I didn't say let go, you daft thing."
Oh.
Well.
That was good.
* * *
Morning was unyielding. The storm was picking up - they were meant to be in Rekida a day ago, precisely to avoid this intensification. Now, it seemed as though the entire world was swaddled up in winds and crystals, flying so quickly that they scoured the skin. Tanner felt awful. Hadn't slept, not really. Just curled up in the coach and listened to the mutants as they went about their own business, devouring and chewing and never speaking a single word. Marana had been nearby, at least. Shivering. But... but there was something steady about her, something reliable. Older than Tanner, and still functioning. She thought back to the day when her father had come home from his injury, and when his friend, a man called Clarant, had wept like a child. She'd never spoken to him afterwards, not really. Mother didn't like seeing him. Tanner didn't know how to talk with him. But she always remembered the way she felt viscerally terrified by him crying, the unrestrained hiccuping sobs that usually came out of children. Sudden exposure to a well of emotion she thought adults just lacked, that they learned to stopper up by the time they reached their majority. Frightened her. Because the idea of the whole world being like that, being great reservoirs of feeling, well... well, anyway. Marana didn't weep. She didn't scream. Throughout the entire ordeal, she'd been fairly calm, or had appeared that way. And what lay beneath didn't matter. She kept a stiff upper lip, soldiered on, and for all of her surrealistic peculiarities, she had decorum.
Right now, Tanner needed that. An example to follow. Proof that, even in a situation like this, restraint was still possible, and indeed praiseworthy. Marana was doing it, and she was a soused surrealist who used to offer people cocaine, apparently. If Marana could do it, then Tanner could do it. She studied Marana like an icon, keeping an eye on how she stiffened her face, set her features, arranged herself in a manner which suggested some kind of sophistication and class. And slowly, carefully, she tried to imitate this poised prototype.
It helped.
And as the sun rose, red and cold, conquering the hills and peering dimly through the swirling clouds of the storm... Tanner felt controlled. What she felt didn't matter. What mattered was how she behaved, how she composed herself. And right now, she felt composed enough to keep going. A judge wouldn't panic. A lodge member wouldn't panic. Marana wouldn't panic. Eygi wouldn't, either. And Tanner wore these expectations like the Fidelizhi wore their gods, letting them settle over her clothes and press into her skin, lacing through her hair like steel wires and creeping around her lips to lock them into the right positions.
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Remembered the theurgic core on the mutant-hunter's vessel. The way it was a chaotic little thing, a brutal little thing, churning with unimaginable potency... but restrained. Channelled. Leashed. The core was worthless if it wasn't leashed. A wasp was an irritant if it wasn't immobilised. And snow was prettiest when painted, when the cold was kept pleasingly distant.
The red sun was dawning.
Marana hummed. She hadn't slept either
.
"Well. I suppose that's our call."
Tanner pursed her lips and hauled herself up, reaching down to help Marana... before the woman slapped her hand away lightly, standing up on her own.
"Not that old."
She paused, looking at the entrance they were using, the door of the overturned coach. Hummed again.
"...would quite like a tiny bit of assistance with that, though. If you wouldn't mind."
Tanner gladly acquiesced. A few moments later, both of them were outside the coach, where the snow had been whirling all night, and continued to whirl now, picking up moment by moment. The sooty stain of their campfire was gone, and the gore of the slaughtering had faded away as well. Might as well never have happened. The cold was tremendous, biting hungrily at any piece of exposed flesh. Tanner immediately swaddled herself in a scarf, buttoning her coat as high as it would go, feeling her muscles groan as they ached for a proper rest, for a proper bed, for a warm meal to settle in her stomach. The bones of the dead horses were crusted with frost, and the hollow interiors were being filled with snow once more, stuffing them with pseudo-flesh and pseudo-organs. Fattening them up. The road was barely visible, a dark trail that wound through the dunes, between the hills. The world seemed a little more comprehensible in the morning light, red and warning as it was. The hills were bounded, seemed more like natural formations and less like the barrows of dead kings. The trail was clearer, and they could guarantee its existence for a longer distance, their eyesight tracking it further than in the gloom. Not sure how long it could last, though. The storm was still building, and strange currents of white dust moved over the landscape like miniature rivers, coiling around her ankles without even the slightest tactile impression. The ghosts of rivers, perhaps. All the form, none of the function.
The haze waxed and waned randomly, and Tanner peered out, Marana stretching beside her, joints popping in a way that reminded her far too much of the cracking of bones from last night, the disassembling of a living creature like it was a clock mechanism. She looked...
Paused.
Marana saw what she saw, and her eyes widened.
The mutants were still here. Sitting in a perfect circle. For a second, Tanner thought they were huddled against the cold, but... no, no, they were too far apart for that. Evenly spaced - six of them, the scraggly girl had returned with her stomach filled with the meat of her dead comrade, her limbs already swelling with newly integrated tissue. Their mouths were clear of gore - licked clean. They sat in a way where any one could stare at the other five. Ignored the cold. Ignored the frost which clambered over their limbs in a fine sheet. Ignored the way that small icicles clustered around their lips like fangs. Their eyes, wide and lidless, were unblinking. They were staring at one another. Daring one another to move first. All of them were bloated with the meat of thier kill, and Tanner could see where changes had already begun. One man had a horse-like bulge to his eyes. Another was more muscular, more lean, his legs more powerful than ever before. Another was covered in newly-developed plates similar to the matter of a horse's hooves. And the redhead girl, the one with the blue silk dress, the one who'd licked her hand like a cat to get even a hint of further sustenance... she had forearms newly studded with tiny black thorns, like insect stingers, and around her collarbone were little black beads, like opals, like pieces of caviar freshly scooped. Tiny insectile eyes.
All six of them were crouched like primitive idols from a far-off land. Deranged in shape and mind. Knees pulled up around their chins, weight resting easily on their eerily flexible hips. They might've been in those positions all night, never wavering.
None of them so much as glanced at the humans. They had nothing to offer.
The mutants were... well, mutating. Stabilising. Integrating whatever they could, and watching the others for any sign of hostility. The moment it manifested, the peace would break, the pack would implode, explode... and maybe, one day, they'd rejoin like nothing had happened, peace re-established. They didn't sleep. They didn't rest. They had no bonds of loyalty or friendship. They simply associated together because the advantage of alliance currently outweighed the advantage of cannibalisation. And right now, as they mutated in new directions, they were waiting for where the balance of power would settle. Would one of them end up with a bad mutation, something that might make them weaker, easier to kill? Would one of them end up noticeably stronger, and thus a kind of leader, someone who might be able to kill off some of the others?
The redhead stared with all of her eyes.
And silence ruled.
The two humans grabbed the one trunk they'd salvaged from their crash, Marana stuffed some of the more important-looking letters inside, and they started to march away through the snow, Tanner sending up great plumes of the stuff wherever she went, and Marana's struggling to wade through an ice-cold bog of crystals. Tanner suspected she'd need to carry her as the day went on, and her bruised back started a pre-emptive protest at the idea. The mutants didn't twitch once as they walked away, and as the storm picked up further, the last they saw was a circle of six figures, six standing stones to an unknown religion, fading away into the white haze, stained with the red of the dim sun.
And that was all.
They walked for hours, breath fogging in front of their faces. For a while, they were absolutely paranoid, and kept looking around, wondering if another unstable mutant was coming for them, or one of the smarter ones, for whatever reason. They had a revolver with too-few bullets and a stick, they weren't exactly firing on all cylinders here. The trail wound ahead of them, wide and deeply packed with snow on all sides, and their visibility ranged from somewhat tolerable to absolutely awful - in those minutes when the wind howled stronger than ever, the snow flanking the trail rose high enough to make even Tanner strain to see over, and there could be anything out there, watching them struggle onwards. Anything at all, and they wouldn't hear it, wouldn't see it... wouldn't know it existed until it snapped out of the haze to rip them to pieces. Tanner's eyelashes were thatched with snow, her hair glittered with frost, and her fingers seemed to shrivel before her eyes, becoming thinner and thinner, stiffer and stiffer... blood running from the biting chill, nursing itself around warm viscera. The only luxury was that the wind was at their backs, a lash driving them onwards quickly, giving them no opportunity to stop. Like the breath of those mutants was on their necks, it felt like. Sometimes. Their water was poor, very poor - all they had were a pair of canteens they'd had with the coach, and those were drained quickly. As hours drew on and the cold, dry air parched them, they found themselves eating snow like mad animals, crunching it down and relishing in the slight bursts of life they got, even as the coldness spread through their bodies.
The sun rose higher, but never gave them more than a scrap of warmth, and soon enough the clouds stole it away entirely, and the sky was a dirty white-grey, uniformly illuminated. They walked until their toes were numb, their hands too, and their faces were scarred with numbness wherever their cover was imperfect. To Tanner, with her head uncovered, she felt a crown of invisible needles forming around her scalp and forehead, digging inwards with the intent of paralysing all thought. When she shoved her hands into her pockets for warmth, they moved like clubs, and she had to struggle to fit them, everything feeling unfamiliar. Wrong. She grumbled to Marana from time to time, her voice strained, talking about anything and everything. What had she said, yesterday, when they were running through the snow? She remembered rambling about something... but the specifics evaded her. Those memories were sharp, and she kept them disant. They talked about how fragile humans were, and how no other animal ventured so far beyond their comfort zones, not really. They stuck to their narrow margins of existence, and obeyed thier boundaries religiously. Not humans, though. No matter how boiling or freezing... well. Anyway. Marana talked about how hot it'd been in Krodaw, though her voice was low when she did so. How the mornings were an agony of strangeness during the summer, and inevitably she'd wake with her counterpane scattered across the room, her hair in disarray, her limbs sprawled crazily, sweat staining every inch of skin, throat parched, head throbbing, eyes itching, no idea if it was midnight or midday or some awful mid-time where it was all hours at once and nothing ever changed.
They talked about breakfast. They talked about breakfast a lot, about how they longed for a warm plate of meat and bread, sauce soaking the crumbs, washed down with something that made the body remember it was alive.
They spend hours talking about different sausage types. Tanner was fond of pork with abundant seasoning - pepper, allspice, coriander, garlic. Thinly cut into coin-shaped disks and sampled one at a time. Marana had higher tastes - she recalled fondly sausages made of venison and wild boar, braised in red wine and a surfeit of onions, eaten with lazy debauchery. She recalled eating them in her underclothes when she was younger and weirder. Eating luxurious sausages while red wine dripped down her chin, in her underclothes, sitting on the edge of her bed, staring into the middle distance as some very interesting substances coursed through her system.
Tanner liked it when she talked about that. It made her feel renewed confidence in her life decisions.
Hours.
Hours.
Untameable march of them. The snow sliced into their backs and kept them going. They refused to stop, keenly aware of how exposed they were, how vulnerable, how weak. They lacked fire, food, water, shelter. Nothing but the clothes on their backs and the contents of a rattling trunk. If they stopped, they might never start again, might be locked in place like those human-mutants back at the coach. Again, Tanner thought of the great dark shape in the snow, the one with silver eyes, that had lurked in front of her for just a moment before vanishing like a mirage. Again, she thought of the coachman's body in the snow. The strangeness of the crash, that he should die so silently. The landscape was more and more studded with structures, but they were all of them abandoned shells, cleared out during the Great War. They stood atop the hills, for the most part, but as they went on the trail became more paved, and their boots were sometimes met with the satisfying clunk of impacting stone, and after the soft death of the snow, there was something wonderful even about the shudder of bones as they stepped on a real, honest, road. The structures all around them, though, made them fall silent, like they were walking amidst a graveyard. A great assemblage of monuments. They were towers, little keeps set within hexagonal walls, high and white, carved on all sides, but the distance obscured what those carvings might be. They were austere things, these towers. Square-shaped, with corners tapering to sharp points, and pyramids for their roofs. What openings they had were narrow slits, devoid of glass. Many of them had long rusting chains coming away from them, studded into the stone, leading to the earth below. They clattered slightly in the wind, and Tanner could vaguely see charms and rotting wooden tablets hanging from them like tassels. It made it seem like the sky was trying to rip the towers away, and only these tired, half-broken chains were keeping them anchored.
Once again, Tanner wondered about Rekida. What it had been. What it was becoming. Who had lived there, and how many had managed to escape. Each tower had a single path leading to it, just one, barely visible in the snow as a slight shadow. And each path was studded with, at minimum, three gates, fashioned from gleaming white stone, with the rotten, burned remains of wooden doors standing beneath the graceful arches. Each gate's two pillars were carved into the shape of humans, muscular and smooth, features smooth and featureless, hefting a great serpent between the two of them - the serpent forming the arch. The faceless statues were inscrutable and impassive. They gave nothing to observers, contented in their own secrecy. The snake was smoothly bent, spine straining, and its head was always clutched securely in a pair of glittering white hands, sculpted with hard edges and jutting knuckles. Everything was either eerily smooth or pointedly jagged, and sometimes the smooth segments were carved with symbols, spiralling and strange. Each statue had these symbols - three strings of them, winding from some point in the back to where the heart ought to be, where they met and wove together.
Tanner shivered under the eyeless gaze of these statues.
Marana admired them boldly, and her fingers twitched within her gloves, eager to examine them, to see how she could reproduce them a little. Three-gated chained towers all around, marking significance she didn't know and couldn't imagine. Their whiteness made them seem like bones, or the slender extension of her bloodless, frost-kissed fingers. Trees stood here and there, strangely tall and thin. They weren't conifers, like she expected - they seemed strangely pimpled. Pale wood, thin branches, and almost explosive blooms of green matter that was spiky and might've been leaves. They smelled of licorice or star anise, and grew more and more numerous as they marched onwards. They didn't sway, even in the wind, though their spiky leaves clattered slightly, whispering over one another. The porcelain sky denied all shadows, and so they seemed painted onto the great white canvas of the heavens, artificial and absurd, made by someone who didn't quite know what plants looked like. One of them stood nearer the road, and the snow hadn't quite covered its roots - it stood like an hourglass, a cage of roots suspending the trunk above the earth, and for a moment they considered sheltering in it... before soldiering on. Tanner imagined these trees drinking the moisture of the snow, imagined them sheltering animals in the cages during the summer. Marana didn't know their names, and so they loomed nameless and alien. Cage-trees and chained towers, with gates of faceless gods who broke a snake's spine to mark a boundary.
Not her country. Definitely not.
They went on.
No animals greeted them, none but a single lost crane, face a livid red and wings touched by stripes of black. It circled strangely, silently, watching the world below. Was it lost? Could it be lost? Could birds like that get lost on their migrations? It seemed lost, circling there aimlessly, graceful and absurd all at once, beak pointing in no direction at all. It was a large thing, too - powerful wings, savagely sharp beak, and legs that ended in glittering claws, visible even from this distance. It hovered a moment, circling... then caught a current of wind and vanished from sight, disappearing behind a hill.
Hours.
And finally...
Finally.
They saw something inhabited.
A little grey structure, a tiny tower, crude and primitive compared to the alabaster ones above. But it was alive, there were the sounds of voices, activity, the smell of cooking food. Tanner blinked. Marana's face slowly split into a grin. They smelled food. They smelled food. They moved quickly, Tanner's trunk bouncing against her leg as they went, faster and faster and faster, until they were practically running for the tiny grey outpost. People were standing on top of the tower, around it in sandbag-guarded stations, wandering on patrols that kept the cold out of their boots... people! People! Wearing long, military coats, with tall, military hats, and heavy, military rifles. One of the sentries yelled to the others, and the entire outpost turned to regard the new arrivals, moustaches twitching like antennae sensing a new scent. Tanner's natural reticence barely slowed her, and Marana was waving happily at them, all weariness forgotten. Someone who seemed to be the head boy of the group stepped forwards, chewing something idly, removing a napkin from his collar as he went. He was sun-tanned, powerful-looking, with curly black hair and a chest swollen with muscle. He was tough, sinewy, and his step was done with absolute certainty.
His glittering boots were almost mirror-like with their sheen, and Tanner slowed down as she approached, feeling as though he towered over her despite her superior height. He folded his arms over his chest, seeming to become even larger as he did so.
"Oy-oy, then. What's the matter with you two, running around in the snow like dazed horses, if you'll pardon the expression?"
Tanner blushed slightly, even as his tone never wavered beyond friendly and polite. Marana straightened her back, smiled in a genteel fashion, and wove her fingers between one another with all the confidence of someone used to this sort of thing.
"Oh, splendid. We were hoping to find someone out here. Our coach was run off the road, see, we've endured a night in the blasted cold, my extremities are in danger of passing a vote of no confidence in my ability to sustain them, and we're in need of hot food, hot drinks, and a fire. The order is fairly irrelevant, we're mostly concerned with quality and quantity, not chronology. Would that be acceptable?"
Tanner blushed more fiercely, hoping it wasn't showing too much on her scarf-clad face.
"Sorry, sir. I'm... Judge Tanner Magg, this is my, uh, friend, Marana, I've been... sent at the request of the colony. Might be some other there already. Sir. Oh, and I have some letters, a mail coach was run off the road too, I took anything which looked... well, important. Sir. Nothing's been opened. It's... just back there, we were able to walk from there this morning. Made sure the bags were stowed in the coach so they wouldn't get soaked, should be able to find it easily enough. Our coach is a few hours beyond that."
The officer blinked a few times, before running a muscled hand through his curly hair, disturbing a few flakes of snow as he did.
"Two coaches? Both run off?"
"Mutant, sir. Unstable. Killed by some of the human-looking ones."
"...damn. That's... hm, that's odd. Very odd. Well. Anyhow. Honoured judge, pleasure to meet you, and a friend of a judge is a friend of ours. Thanks for picking up those letter cs,an hand them over while..."
He barked a quick laugh.
"Ah, no point playing around, can't say a decent fellow would leave two women stranded in the snow for a moment longer than necessary. Come on, then, get yourselves warmed up. Plenty of food to go around, I was just sitting down for lunch, myself. Happy for some accompaniment, if you'll tolerate my company. Business later, once we're full. Some of us will escort you the rest of the way to the colony, once you're ready. No point on a march with proper fortification, eh? Come on, you both look half-starved."
And with that, he turned on his heel and strode away, crushing the snow with confident snaps, even the thick layers incapable of muffling the boldness of his step. Marana didn't wait a moment before following, grabbing Tanner's hand and dragging her along. The smell of cooking meat was heavy in the air. The long nightmare of the wasteland was over. Tanner could already feel proper expectations settling around her - even a touch of civilisation made her tighten up, pull her coat into proper arrangements, brush her hair back from her forehead, and straighten her back. She was a judge. And she ought to do her best to reflect the virtues of the Golden Door to all and sundry. Marana had no such inhibitions, and she practically flounced her way onwards, smile widening from coy reserve to open, gluttonous joy. The other soldiers paid attention, interested at the giantess in their midst, in the clear exhaustion written on the faces of both interlopers. Tanner had never been happier to see soldiers with guns, the big ones that were designed to hurt mutants, to blow them to pieces too small for regeneration for adaptation. Every gleaming button on their long, green coats seemed to her to be the most perfect buttons in existence, indicating people who knew what they were doing.
No thoughts of mutants and rot, of dead men in the snow, or fires lit in the ribs of horses, of dead silver eyes in the dark, of the slaughter of the wolf-thing, of the titan, of the stinking mudlands, of the great voyage upwards and out of any sort of familiarity. The long nightmare was over.
Time to wake up, in Tanner's judicial opinion. Wake up to civilisation and comfort, wake up from the cold and into the warmth. Wake up to purpose, and the soothing anaesthesia of routines. Her hand shook slightly, yes, but... but she could deal with that. People suffered worse and came out smiling - she'd had it easy. Right, yes. Had it easy. A judge wouldn't complain. A lodge member would thank the lodge for having guarded her from a worse fate. Of all the restraints she had, none of them would allow her to curl up and have a bit of a cry, like some sort of infant. Remembered the fear of seeing an adult cry for the first time, and her resolve to remain absolutely stoic turned from iron to steel, tougher, lighter, more resistant to rust.
The officer held the door open for them, bowing slightly as they entered, kicking the snow from their boots, feeling every ache and pain unwind at once. The interior was small, cosy, filled with chairs and tables which still bore the scent of breakfast, with a little set aside for the officer's lunch. A lunch they were eager to parasitise. And... no, there was someone else. Someone sitting at one of the long tables, jacket slung over the back of a chair, smoking from a long, curving, oddly shapeless pipe that reminded her of some exotic species of sea life - not a fish, more of a sea sponge or anemone. He turned slightly, regarding them with narrow, intelligent eyes. Tanner paused. Something. Tweed jacket over the back of the chair. Why was... those eyes, clever, but cold. That face, carefully neutral, absolutely controlled. And... and his jacket, she could just barely see... yes, around the cuffs.
They lacked the usual horned buttons.
Instead, there were little diamond-shaped pieces of gold, engraved with the symbol of a human palm.
One word came to mind, and while Marana swanned in casually to gather some food for herself, unwinding her scarf as she went... Tanner remained frozen for a moment. She'd journeyed from Fidelizh to Fidelizh, it seemed. That one word hovered in her mind like a piece of solid ice, like those needles around her head had compressed, shooting directly inwards, nestling in the innermost contours of her brain.
Erlize.