CHAPTER TWENTY - FINGER-WINGS ATOP MIST AND ARTERY

They drank well that night.

And when morning came, Tanner was in a very peculiar mood. The surrealists hadn't... she wasn't remotely tempted to agree with them on anything, she found them downright ridiculous, and yet... there was something about their confidence, their simple ability to embrace a lifestyle which oscillated between harmlessly absurd and completely insane, their... well, again, their confidence. Frankly, Tanner couldn't see how someone was meant to act that insane consistently, it sounded like a hell of a lot of work, and probably required immense quantities of basic self-esteem. Oh, she was sure they had tormented souls and were wracked with their own kind of peculiarity, but... they had societies, salons, clubs, cults, meetings in restaurants and hotels across the world. They danced naked because it made sense in the confines of their minds, and carried it off well enough to make some sort of career. They were spiteful buggers who had, nonetheless, a collection of companions and associates. They were derivative hacks who were nonetheless well-read and had some basic level of skill with things, and had ingratiated themselves with the right communities. Tanner... Tanner was none of that. She couldn't move without worrying about breaking something, couldn't speak without being terrified of shouting or saying the wrong thing or saying it the wrong way or simply coming across as a total bore. Couldn't ask anything without worrying about the worst possible outcome. If she did any of the things they did, even one, she'd have a mental breakdown within a month.

Put simply, she regarded them as ridiculous, and she also wondered why all that basic competence and immense confidence had to go to them. Them.

The drinking helped.

And Marana was... well, they drank, spoke of little, drank some more, Tanner was terrified of seeming like dull company next to the surrealists, terrified of seeming like annoying company compared to those oddities... just wound up being quiet. Marana's quiet told Tanner that this was the expected and desired outcome, which made it slightly better. Only a bottle of wine - one third Tanner, two thirds Marana, and while Marana passed into a drowsy slumber (needed to be carried back to her cot by Tanner), Tanner remained awake with no sense of tipsiness. A question sprang into her mind as she struggled to sleep. They mentioned the smoke of a titan, up north. No idea what that was, but... north. Id est, the place she was going. Now, there were many things in the north, primarily snow and mountains, but... anyway, anyway.

The morning brought light. Clarity. A telegram from various observers along the river, telling the captain that things were just fine, the weather was clear enough, they were good to go. No hunters had been through the area in a bit, so there'd be good pickings. A note that there was another settlement, a tiny, crude place which basically just served as a dock for people heading out towards Rekida, which was where Tanner would wind up. Marana was still intending to stay here, as far as anyone knew. The surrealists had yet to emerge from the hotel, but Tanner imagined them sprawled around their rooms, ready to get up at one in the afternoon. Tanner and the captain found themselves in a rather odd position - sitting together in the dim post office, a place maintained by a single bewildered old man who seemed to have retired out here for the quiet, and was surprised when a town just emerged around him, like some sort of fungus. The post office was like the rest of the town - immaculate and dead. No mail in, minimal mail out. Telegrams were written, taken downstream by a regular ferry, sent off from the nearest place with a cable. Tanner was writing out something for Eygi, letting her know how to get in touch in future, wishing her the best... struggling. Hard to express things in a telegram, when she had to pay by the word.

The captain had no such hesitations, and was just scribbling out note after note after note, passing them to the silver-haired man behind the counter. He was that sort of old were the cheeks decided to give up on this whole 'structural stability' nonsense, and wanted to sag, and sag deeply, giving him a practically curtain-like set of jowls. Tanner would mull over a single word for a minute, and the captain would've already hacked out something loud and vulgar, directed at one of her suppliers. Complaints about the quality of fuel, mostly, based on her highly audible grumblings. Ammunition supplies, the temporary theurgist's quality, threats to sue, threats to violently assault in the street, letters to old commanders and other hunters warning them away from certain suppliers... 'all part of the business, you have to keep them on their toes or they think they have a valued client and they'll stop massaging you and your ego. You need to ruin a merchant or two before anyone takes you seriously'.

All sounded terribly stressful to Tanner, but what did she know.

She spoke suddenly as she chewed the end of her pen morosely, voice slightly muffled as a consequence.

"They mentioned a titan. The surrealists, sorry, they mentioned a... titan? North of here? Is that...?"

She trailed off, not sure if the captain heard her - she was still writing away in a wipe, looping hand... and then her eye swivelled uncannily to stare at Tanner at the other end of the counter. Stared for a solid few moments, even as her hand worked on autopilot to screech a bit more abuse at her arms supplier.

"Well, can see for yourself. We'll pass it in a few days."

"We will?"

"Sure. Hard to miss."

"...what is it, exactly?"

The captain pinched the bridge of her nose slightly.

"Big mutant. Very big. Crazy big. Back in the Great War, they used them to go and crack cities open, smash armies, terrify people. Had armies of mutants riding around on their backs. Most were up north, mutants started cannibalising them once they needed quantity, not quality. Hard for them to cross the river, though. Slowed them down, all that mud. They'd just sink into it and get stuck if they weren't careful. Four tried to cross, one was wounded, one was killed, the other two retreated."

Tanner blinked.

"How did they die? I mean... if they're so large, and if only four was considered good enough to invade, then..."

"Theurgists."

Tanner paused, and nodded understandingly.

"Right."

In short, 'no bloody clue, no-one knows what theurgists do, how they do it, why they do it, they just do, and if you question them they stop repairing all your lovely, lovely machines. Good luck being profitable without those things, enjoy having a bunch of ticking time bombs ready to go off'. That still left one issue, though.

"But... if it's dead..."

"You'll see when you see it. Mutants don't die quick. Titans, less so. Damn thing's still burning."

The captain fell silent, and kept writing, her eyes fixed downwards now. Conversation over. Tanner returned to her own task, writing words with deliberate slowness, each little curve of her letters articulated with such force that she almost started carving into the counter-top. Too much to say. Unsure of how to say it. Meeting Algi again, meeting those surrealists, it... well, she was feeling unsteady. And after chatting to Marana about eels, she felt a little drained. Just a little. Not writing about Algi in the letter, obviously - the censors would check it, and she didn't want to get Eygi into any trouble with the Erlize. Just thinking about those tweed suits and diamond cufflinks was enough to make her shiver - the feeling of being in trouble still haunted her nightmares, even years down the line. So... the surrealists? What was she meant to say? 'I met a bunch of complete weirdos, I keep finding myself envying their organisational capacities, the nudist dancer reminded me somewhat of you in terms of being unashamed and confident, though you're much more pleasant to be around. Also, I think I might have a small fondness for wine, and I'm growing curious as to how much I can drink before I feel warm inside. Talk soon!'

...hm. Well, if she removed the nudist dancer part...

And if she spent a while just talking about how to get in touch when she was in the north, she might fill up most of the telegram already...

Hm...

The door chimed loudly, and... Marana swept in, a fashionable sky-blue shawl around her shoulders, and her hair arranged into something much more ornate than it usually was. That is to say, it was combed and neat. Didn't look like drunken fingers had entangled themselves in it while she tousled herself up, seemingly out of habit. And she didn't smell like anything. Someone was feeling functional today.

"Tanner, wonderful, you're here. And captain, good to see you."

The captain grunted curtly, somehow transmitting a vast series of messages through that single sound. Admittedly, all those messages ended with narrowed eyes and a pugnacious 'huh?', but still. Quite admirable.

"I think I'll be extending my holiday. Apply to my parents when you arrive back in Mahar Jovan, captain, if you'd be so dear - they'll recompense you immediately, I'll write a telegram now."

The captain slowly stopped writing.

"Sorry?"

"Nothing to apologise for, dearheart, nothing at all. Simply asking if you could possibly-"

"We can't take you anywhere else. There's a schedule. There are places we have to be, dates we have to meet. We make one stop to drop off the judge, then we move on."

Marana snorted slightly.

"Oh, but naturally, the impressive and heroic mutant-hunters have schedules."

The captain set her pen down with great delicacy, slowly turning it until it was completely parallel to the paper. She drummed her fingers once upon the table, five little taps from each hand. A small breath inwards. A small breath outwards.

"Yes. We do. There's only so much river, and far too many boats. We get this portion of territory to hunt for a set period of time. We can't make back our days. If we hunt too much, the mutants just retreat, and everything becomes harder. We need to rotate. Like crops."

Marana paused, tilting her head to one side.

"Well, captain, there'll be no need for any deviations from your schedule. Your bloody harvest won't need to be interrupted by a single swing of the pendulum - I intend to jump off at the same point as our esteemed judicial friend."

And now Tanner set her pen down with very great care, steepling her fingers, unwinding them, steepling them in a slightly different pattern, before stretching them and relishing in the popping of her knuckles. A deep breath in. A deep breath out.

"Excuse m- what?"

Marana had a small smile on her face - she'd been preparing for more of that 'I'll allow it just this once' crap. Not today. Not today.

"I'd quite like to visit Rekida. If at all possible. You mentioned last night, while we were drinking, that you intended to hitch a ride, to use the colloquial expression, from some little settlement along the river. I only hope there's room for two."

Tanner gritted her teeth.

"I... don't know. You have a conference, don't you? Captain, can we... wait for a few more days?"

It wasn't that Tanner didn't want to go with her to a settlement in the middle of nowhere. It was... well... alright, Tanner was keenly aware of how tiny, tiny instabilities to her routines, once established, could become nightmarishly awful. She had, back over the last year of so, been legitimately put into a sour mood for hours because her stockings caught slightly on her ankle and took a second longer to pull up. Her routines were that consistent that she could sense even a second or two of deviation, and it annoyed her. Those were stockings. Those things she used to protect her legs from the elements and preserve modesty. Marana... this was a tiny settlement in the middle of nowhere, there were no conferences, no happy little cafes for her to dive into, no salons, no exhibitions, no nude interpretive dance for her to judge, there was nothing. And Tanner would be the only person she knew.

She didn't need to spell this out, she wasn't so blind to her own faults to think that Marana wouldn't slowly erode her mind over the course of... a few weeks. Months, maybe, at best. It was hard enough to imagine setting up her new routines, developing her new work-habits, adding 'be entertainment to a drunk middle-aged surrealist aristocratic heiress' to her list would just be too, too, too, too much.

Too much.

The captain shook her head silently, firmly. No staying. And Marana's face froze up slightly, her smile became slightly more fixed, and the strain made her look a little more her age.

"Well, let's say the conference might well have been... more of a temporary visit."

Tanner hesitated. Part of her wanted to be dismissive - the captain certainly was being dismissive, just grumpily asserting that 'if the judge wants you, then you can come, but you have to pay extra. I'll watch you make the telegram'. She wanted to just send her away, but... she'd not seen that fixed smile in quite the same way. And she'd said that she'd... forgotten how straining those people could be, so...

"Is something wrong? Did something happen up there?"

Marana twitched slightly, before quietly pulling out a chair and slumping into it, the barely-used wood creaking alarmingly, everything still new and squealing. Like a piglet, really. Chairs were like piglets, the younger they were, the sharper they squealed. Had to wait until they were older for a bellowing boar-like moan of ancient wood.

Anyway. She sat on her piglet-chair, hummed, nodded in greeting to the tired-looking old man who was busying himself with... anything else, and spoke confidentially.

"Like I said. I forgot how they can... be, sometimes. Have you ever, my judicious companion, found yourself craving some random piece of food, something utterly random, some random pie, perhaps, and you set out in search of your crusty comestible, returning eagerly, nostrils flaring as you tear the paper bag open, spill the contents, sharpen your knife, carve, and dig in... only to realise after the first bite that your imagination was a much stronger thing, and perhaps you had a little too much to eat today, or too much to drink, and now the matter crudely slides down your throat like a hunk of raw clay, and you look down at this vast, appealing confection of human ingenuity, swinish flesh, and the most elaborate chemical processes of dough and water... and you realise, you made a mistake. A mistake, and one you have to live with. You wasted money, time, and now you have a meal you either eat, or you discard. The humiliation boils. Do you stick with it, simply to be stubborn, only to feel sick and shameful instead? Do you throw it away, and waste everything, admit your error, admit your weakness? What's the womanly option?"

She took a small breath, catching herself, her face a little red around the cheeks.

Tanner blinked.

Coughed in slight embarrassment.

"...almost? I mean... I'm always somewhat hungry. I'm large. I need food. Always have. But... well, sometimes I think 'I might like spice, spice isn't so bad, I could go for something spicy', and within half an hour I'm just staring dead ahead with lips the colour of... of..."

The captain interrupted, her head still almost pressed against her paper, such was her concentration, and her voice emerged as a growl.

"An explosion in a tomato cannery at sunset."

Marana snorted, and Tanner smiled faintly.

"Quite. And I'm sweating like a hog, and I'm dreading the next few hours. Yes. So... perhaps. A little. Why are..."

She trailed off. Figured it out. Headed out here to have a little soiree with some old friends. Found they were much fonder creatures in her memories, where all the ugly details could be filtered away, all the irritations could be smoothed like a well-made bed... hm. Strange sense of... no, nothing. Maybe a flicker of deja vu, but she doubted it. She tried to smile sympathetically at Marana, who tried to shoot her an airy little quirk of the lips that was artful, graceful, ambiguous... really just came across as a slight facial spasm, honestly. Either way. Maybe she just wanted to extend her holiday to... what, save face? Avoid going back home, confessing that she wasted her time? She...well, she was an artist, an heiress, Tanner could imagine her using this conference as a way to justify her continued career instead of committing to something more... concrete. Coming back home, shamefaced and shambolic, stating that she didn't actually like the other surrealists, and so she had to come home after barely a day with them... there'd be something uniquely humiliating about that. It was one thing to choose an odd, unprofitable, eccentric career, it was another thing to fail at it. Tanner found herself thinking, in her rambling way, that if you were going to be eccentric, you had to earn it. Tanner hadn't earned eccentricity. Presumably, in the future, when she was learned and respected and elderly, she could start to bumble along innocent pavements while talking to herself vaguely, and could pin people down for stupid little chats as her senility worsened. But not yet. Not now. Hadn't earned it.

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For a second, she felt a genuine pulse of empathy between herself and Marana. Could see exactly why she didn't want to go home - oh, this was fun, she got to be a kind of emotional detective, how positively bold. Her smile became more complete, more sympathetic, and her voice tried to be warm.

"Well, if the captain's fine with you coming along, and... well, I'm fine with you coming along, if you're sure you want to visit a place in the middle of nowhere, and won't interrupt my work, then... well, if she's fine, and you're fine, and I'm fine, then I suppose we're all fine, and... that's that?"

People should only earn the right to have vocal chords once they'd gained a degree in speaking like an actual human and not a limpid baboon. Urgh. Marana's smile broadened, and she leant back in her piglet-chair, letting it squeal a little, and her fingers twitched like she was trying to hold an invisible cigarette holder... a flicker of annoyance on her face at the motion. Well. Happened to everyone. Tanner sometimes pretended her pen was a cigar, made her feel very distinguished. In the confines of her own room, of course. Never in a post office. Hm. Small thought. Marana chattered away idly, not mentioning anything about what had happened in that hotel, what particularly had made her leave, not just general distaste. Didn't mention why Tanner should qualify as better company. Tanner hummed at the right places, nodded from time to time, did all she was meant to... while thinking about the telegram she was writing. A few minutes passed...

"Marana, could you... help me? With this telegram? It's... well, I just need some... words."

She trailed off pathetically, smiling helplessly.

Marana blinked.

"Oh, of course. Quite the epistolist, if I dare say so, and my cup of intellect overfloweth - please, if you like, sample some of the run-off. So, is this to a parent, a friend, a colleague, an enemy, a lover, or some mixture of these categories?"

"Friend. Friend."

Marana's smile turned toothy.

"Ah, naturally, naturally. Friend. Well, it's a telegram, so you can be brief... goodness, you're not using the right contractions. Listen, you think about what you want to say to this friend, and I'll contract this all down a bit - you're using too many words, far too many. Telegrams aren't meant to be flawless. Now..."

She paused.

"Hm. Eygi?"

"Friend."

"Hm."

Tanner didn't say that Eygi was Algi's sister. Just... there were things she didn't... need to bring up. She liked to keep her life neat, every little aspect separated into nice little compartments. Childhood acquaintances were filed away here, professional colleagues here, Eygi here, temporary encounters here, let none of them meet, let the issues of one never stray into the issues of another. She'd never let any Eygi business interfere with her professional obligations, and she'd really rather keep Marana (currently qualifying as a travelling friend) separate from all the other things, including Eygi and... that whole business. It was just... once things became tangled, they had an annoying tendency to self-sustain. One segment holding up another segment. At least, that was her nightmare - everything tainting everything else, a close friend being associated with a temporary acquaintance, forcing her to pivot between radically different behaviours. Being forced to engage with professional colleagues in a... gods forbid, a domestic environment. She was proud, proud, that she hadn't been invited to any house parties, the concept of engaging with people in both casual and formal environments, where she acted very differently, was... anyway.

Wanted to keep Marana separated from that. How Tanner behaved was dictated by circumstance and context, but people tended to think that the way you acted was they way you were, and once her nice compartments were breached, suddenly she came across as a rampant schizophrenic who flickered between different behaviours at a whim, and the entire experience was more stressful than it was worth. Maybe she'd have to stumble into this later, but... for all she knew, Marana would leave that little colony in a few months, Tanner would be there for years, and nothing would happen. There was a non-zero chance of nothing happening, and that was good enough for Tanner. Oh, she'd heard the phrase 'bite the bullet' before, but why bother? Why not just, you know, spit the bullet out, or not put bullets in your mouth? And even if you did have to bite it, why not use those nice sturdy molars at the back, the chunky ones, which were good at biting hard things, rather than the more delicate stuff at the front? Hell, why not store it in the cheek like a deranged hamster? Point was, there was alternatives to biting the bullet.

Regardless.

She had a telegram to write.

* * *

The ship was stiffening.

Bit by bit, the hunters were winding themselves up to a higher level of tension. Their guns were being oiled and repaired in shifts, almost automatically - they refused to be unready, even for a moment. No more lounging around with boredom written over their faces, now they hunched over the railing, scanning the wild horizon. The Tulavanta was coming close, and the land was becoming marshier, boggier, generally wetter. It felt like travelling over a great bed of moss, where random areas would sag and fall away, while others rose higher, and yet it all felt uniformly thin. At the end of the day, any of the greenery was just a carpet covering a harder reality. Well, a wetter reality, in this case. The Tulavanta... right, she remembered a little story, been wracking her brains for it for days. Trying to remember this one little myth that described why there was a great watery channel in the world, this long, long artery flowing from the mountains to the sea, why it should be so large. She remembered. It was... there were underground rivers. Huge underground rivers, pulsing with contamination. Sometimes they slithered upwards, infiltrated the ground, soaked into the roots of trees or burst outwards in little stinking springs. Mutating everything they touched. But these were just eddies, really, little offshoots. The real underground rivers were incredibly deep, and profoundly huge. If the little springs were the results of capillaries, and they led down to small veins, then the true rivers were arteries. Mother said the Tulavanta was one of the arteries, dragged up to the surface by the hand of an old king, cracked open with a sharp hammer and drained until the poisoned heart of the world abandoned it, left it hollow and dry, let it fill with water instead of rot. The lodge said this was one of the great mysteries of the world, something to be contemplated and never understood, to accept that some things will always remain unknown - so, yes, she ought to shut up and do what she was told, it wasn't her place to understand.

Judges didn't have many thoughts on the topic. Fidelizh in general didn't. Maybe they lived too far away, didn't feel the need, didn't understand just how... well, she could see why the Tulavanta inspired myths. It was approaching, and she could see the signs, the way the ground belched mist from gloomy furrows and divots, the way everything felt strangely formless. She'd been terrified when she first heard of the underground rivers, like... there was something writhing underneath her even now, something hungry. Snakes, wriggling blindly in the dark, inching upwards day by day until the tip of their forked tongues could break the world's skin. Maybe the glistening apex of a slender fang. Maybe more. Rot, behind the world, always itching to break in. Living in the walls of her home. Sleeping in the springs of her mattress. Always coming closer.

She shivered. This was the sort of landscape that inspired such thoughts, even if it was only conveyed through stories. Rugged, shapeless, shifting, uninhabited. The only villages which survived out here were those that rested on stilts, and even then, they didn't stuck out here, in the mud and moss. Nothing to hunt, nothing to forage. Like life had just decided, all of a sudden, that it didn't enormously want to work for humans, and would keep this place for itself. So the meat of the animals was lean and stringy, often filled with parasites. The plants were inedible or meagre. The ground sank under creatures as clumsy as humans, sank and swallowed them whole. Overheard, she could see the whirling forms of the leathery birds of the Tulavanta, some of them with wingspans wider than her spread arms. Their beaks were long and sharp, their cries hoarse and unpleasant. The animals... well, the animals she could see were thick and strange, lumbering over the landscape with ugly, struggling motions, eerily delicate atop the ever-shifting vegetation. A lid covering a great lake of mud, surrounding a torn artery of the world. Funny, really. The way the mud worked, the river worked, contamination found it hard to take root here. Hard to seep through the ground when the ground was changing so often, sinking downwards faster than contamination could push upwards. Made it impossible for humans to live here, of course.

One of the animals looked over at her, head twitching on a thick neck to stare at the boat. Recognising it wasn't a threat, by fascinated simply by the motion. It was an ugly damn thing, not sure what it was called, but... well, it was large. Maybe the size of a bear, and built like a war machine. Wart-ridden, with thick, grey-green skin, perfect for blending into the mossy environment. Had viciously sharp teeth protruding from its thick lips, some of them almost tusk-like with their thickness, stained where it'd been at work recently. Its muscles looked like they were made of stone, shifting slowly and powerfully with even the slightest movement. It moved slowly, following the boat briefly, and it clambered across the ground like some sort of lizard, the torso swaying very slightly as it did so. Its tail twitched suddenly, rattling a little, and a mane of wiry, greasy fur around its neck twitched unpleasantly, closer to a mound of whiskers than anything warming. Something between a bear, a wolf, a lizard, a rat, and yet all those comparisons felt inadequate, like saying a parent acquired features from their children. It stared with eerily human eyes, rippling with a kind of uncanny intelligence. It was... unformed, like it wasn't quite finished, still had to become smoother, finer, cleaner. Despite that, it was healthy-looking, had bright eyes, didn't look likely to go extinct any time soon. No human lived here to hunt it. No mutation was there to corrode it. For all she knew, when she came back from the north, she'd see an identical creature looking at her. Just as countless voyagers had beforehand.

It stared.

She stared back.

And with a low rumble and a click, it ambled away, disappearing in moments.

"Hunting us."

The captain's voice startled Tanner out of her reverie, and she almost jumped. Shivered slightly in the cold, drawing her thick coat around her shoulders a little more. Draughts were like interruptions to routines - the tiniest one stood out. The better one did at eliminating them, the worse they seemed to loom in the mind. The captain was chewing an unlit cheroot, the damp leaves sagging weakly in the moistened air.

"Excuse me?"

"Hunting us. Not enough humans to make them afraid of us. Just figuring out if it's worth trying to get aboard... decided it wasn't. It's fine, they usually decide that."

"What... is it, exactly?"

"Gorgonopsid, I think. Well, that's the type, not sure of the exact species. Big bugger. Seen one open its mouth to a damn right angle, didn't hear a click or anything, just... smooth. Bit off an animal's head like that, crunched through the spine like it was nothing. Freaky thing. Steer clear."

Tanner intended to. Felt redundant to say that, though. She lingered in silence, the captain tapping her foot restlessly. Occurred to Tanner that she didn't know the captain's name, despite travelling for days. Everyone just said 'cap'n', didn't go any further. Did she have a name, was there something symbolic going on? Or was Tanner just a useless little ingrate who'd forgotten to ask, and had now lost her chance to do so? Awkward to ask... she bit her lip slightly, trying to figure out a way of learning it... hm. Start a conversation, work up to it. The gorgonopsid was completely gone now, and the captain wasn't offering further information, so...

"So... when you drop me, sorry, us off, what next? I mean, I can imagine you shooting guns, and sailing, but... I'm a little unclear on the rest."

The captain shot her a look, her mottled face twisting slightly.

"...didn't you hear about hanging mutants up? Remember one of my girls mentioning that. Oy! Didn't you tell her about hanging mutants up, bleeding them?"

She yelled across to one of the hunters, standing watchfully by another railing. It was the half-bandaged woman with the slightly fused fingers, the one who'd decided to be odd around Tanner when she first arrived. The woman glanced, hummed, shrugged, glanced away again with an expression of absolute tension. Too busy with being paranoid to answer questions, the enemy could attack at any time. Stood with military rigour, hands on her gun, fingers away from the trigger, legs spaced enough to give her support, eyes scanning the horizon with mechanical readiness. No smile to be seen. The captain spat crudely into the river, grumbling to herself.

"Well. We do. See, what we do, we head north, find a river, go along it as far as we can, then we start hunting. If we get a mutant, we haul it up on spikes... can see the cranes right there, not active right now, but when they're going they hang over the boat's side. Same things whalers use. The contamination gets into the air, that attracts more, we keep hunting them, the stink keeps building, eventually they stop coming, we burn the lot, move on to another place."

Tanner blinked.

"How do you get that first mutant? I mean... I don't want to be rude, and tell me if I'm being stupid, but... mutants don't go for... non-mutants. Nothing to gain. And if you're putting up a fight, half the time they just go. Or, well, that's what I heard. I'm probably wrong."

"You're not. Mostly. Sometimes we get lucky and just spot one. Sometimes we have to get out these lures - got some in the hold. Sometimes we have to do little expeditions out of the boat, hunt around, set lures, plant traps... something shows up, we kill it, staunch the wounds immediately, haul it back to the boat, then start the bleeding."

"And what if none come? Just... surely they'd start to figure it out? That it's killing them, hunting here?"

The captain leant back a little, before settling into a crouch on the deck, squatting with lazy ease. Tanner wasn't going to join her, that pose looked like hell on one's knees. The captain hummed, turning the soaked cheroot around in her mouth a few times. Not humming in confusion, just humming in thought, with a certain amount of mechanical satisfaction about it - she liked talking about her job, or at least, liked not having to think about what to say, just how to say it. Always nice when a conversation partner gave you most of a script, turned things into a case of fill-in-the-blanks rather than inventing from scratch.

"...right, well. Mutants aren't stupid, but they're still animals. Usually. All they want is to get more contamination into themselves, grow bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, smarter. Thing is, contamination... it improves them, but it does it badly. Keeps reinventing the wheel. Maybe it decides that this scar should be how all skin looks, so it makes you covered in scar tissue. Maybe it thinks this disease is part of you, and you should be optimised to spread it. Maybe it just starts working on something, but there's not enough contamination to do it, so you get something half-finished. No guarantee further doses will finish it, or if it'll just start some other project, or keep repeating mistakes. Mutants out there? Great War mutants? They're more stable than most, sure, but they're still mutants. They'll kill each other if they can. Eat whatever contamination they can get. What we're hunting out here aren't soldiers, they're dregs. The more they eat, the more chaotic they get, half the time they get dumber, and they need more and more contamination to stabilise it all. Maybe some figure it out, but so what? If they don't figure it out, they come close and we kill them. If they do, maybe they wait and come later to lick up what we leave behind - good, that stuff's burned sludge, hundreds of mutants swimming around in it. Destabilises them, makes them dumber, makes them easier to kill. Maybe they just leave. Hell, sometimes we let mutants go, let them run off to poison their own damn species with the instabilities we planted in them. And if they leave... good. Great. That's what we want. Dead or gone. Nothing else."

She came to a stop, chewing in a satisfied manner on her cheroot, the damp leaves oozing brown liquid to the deck, like she was munching her way through some comatose living creature, juicing it bit by bit. Like when you stepped on a slug and the innards frothed out through the head in a tangled pale pile. Tanner hummed, thinking.

"...I see. I see. Great War mutants, though, some of them were... fairly powerful, I mean, surely... some of them have figured out to stay away from your ships, but they're still in the area. I mean, if they figure out that it's wise to stay away, then they can just... migrate, really. And then you kill off their competition."

The captain glanced up at her.

"Sure. We know that."

Tanner blinked.

"You do?"

"Sure we do. We're not idiots. We're killing the stunted, wailing little freaks, we clear the way for the smart boys. What do they call it... right, natural selection. 'cept, here's the thing - mutants are never friends. Never. No mutant gets along with another mutant for more than a minute at a time, and that's just an alliance of convenience. Every second of their little friendship, they're wondering if now is the right time to break it. They're competing for the same supply, and other mutants qualify as food for them. They're cannibals. Warfare cannibals. Never going to get along."

She paused, grinning grimly.

"The dumb ones get killed by us. The smart ones kill each other."

"But... they worked together during the Great War, so-"

"Exception. Never happened any other time. Great War's over, so that exception is over too."

Her voice was firm. Don't talk about the Great War. Ugly example.

"Right, right, sorry, didn't mean to... anyway, anyway, I can imagine that, the smart ones killing each other, but... again, there's so many, you've been hunting for years, and you haven't mentioned stopping, so... just, just out of interest, what happens if-"

"Gods, just ask the damn question."

"What happens if some survive?"

The captain grunted.

"Some do. Few."

She stood up suddenly, lifting one leg and placing it on the railing, stretching the calf muscles as half her face screwed up with exertion. The muscles crawled underneath her skin, twitching in ways she didn't tend to see human muscles twitch. Mutated. Did her muscles have more in common with some animals? Or was this just... the ideal state of human muscle, to slither and crawl, to move in unnatural motions, was that just better than what humans had come up with?

"Want to give you an image. Smart mutants. Clever enough to avoid us. Clever enough to not just destabilise and get killed after they eat some contaminated contamination. Big, most likely. Tough, too. But there's plenty of them. Like you said - there's enough up there, even a small proportion of the total horde is still a lot. Imagine... alright, imagine two kingdoms. Two countries."

She drew her leg back, and used her foot to trace two circles in the dew coating the deck.

"Two countries. Kingdoms. Whatever. They're both powerful. Both want the other one dead and gone, to take their people as slaves, take their resources, their territory, everything. And hell, maybe they could. Either country could march off, right now, and might win. If they get lucky, they'd be just fine. But they might not. Maybe they lose some men - a lot of men, maybe. They commit. They send their armies here, and... well, maybe a third country gets interested. Comes in. 'cause this third country, it sees one country dead, and another country weak, so if it slides in, it gets two for the price of... well, not even one. Half, maybe. That's pretty tempting."

She smiled grimly.

"Imagine ten countries. A hundred. A thousand. All of them hate each other. That's the mutants. All of them are terrified of fighting, because if they do, they might win, but they might get wounded. Weakened. Need time to integrate the contamination properly, safely, stop it just destroying their long, hard work of refining themselves. But the moment they kill one of the others, they put up scents in the air, and the smart mutants, they smell this, they know it's not one of the hunters, so they come in, they attack. Tear apart both. But maybe... maybe mutant number three is wounded, hm? Or inconvenienced. So they might get torn apart too. It's a long, cold, quiet war up there. The dumb mutants die to us. The smart mutants are quiet, though. Always moving in silence. You'll never see them. Never. I barely see them, sometimes, and I know what I'm looking for. I've seen them stalking other mutants for days, even the dumbest ones, before they think about going in. And when they do, it's perfect. And I mean perfect. They kill in one strike, perfectly planned. They ambush immaculately. They cut off the smell of contamination from the wound, then rip off what they can, and run away. Disappear in seconds. I saw a mutant, some big ugly thing, kill another big mutant in a second, snatched what it could, gone. Not one other mutant came by to that corpse. The smart ones weren't going to approach, no-one wanted to be first, to be vulnerable. Huge corpse, full of contamination, they just abandoned it."

Her smile faded.

"Saw... well, friend told me about it. He'd seen it, when he was working for a crew further east. This mutant, big, big thing. Long beak, more like... those needles that mosquitoes have, you know?"

"Proboscises."

"Right, that. One of those. No, bunch of those, moved independently, like fingers or tentacles or something. Anyway, it was covered from head to foot in this black, black leather stuff, really tough. Why? See, it was smart. Figured out a good way of hunting. Tar pits. Big, stinking tar pits. Something goes in, it doesn't come out. Hot and nasty. And this thing... my buddy, he saw it kill some other mutant, opened up its ribcage like a mouth, enveloped the thing in this... leather skin stuff, like a reverse cattle birth. Swallowed it up, then ran for its pit. Jumped over, released the body, let it sink. Smell, gone. Like that. And sometimes, the thing would come back, stick its little beak-things into the tar, stick them down, and would drink from its larder. I've seen mutants hang their kills on trees like shrikes just to attract more prey. I've seen them vomit mucus over their enemies, choke them to death, stops the smell of contamination getting out. I've seen them paralyse, not kill, then feed slowly and carefully from the warm meat. And the thing is?"

Her smile was gone, but her eyes danced with a morbid kind of humour.

"Those guys will never hurt you. If you're not mutated, and even if you are, if you can defend yourself well... they'll leave you alone. They don't care. The dumb ones, the idiots, the poor little things we burn by the hundred? They'll hurt you. Some of them still remember hunger, still think that just eating something will help, haven't quite figured out they only want contamination. But the smart ones... they're your friend. They'll kill the idiots. They'll leave you alone. They want nothing to do with you. They'll look you dead in the eye during a meal, and do nothing else. Could sit next to one and it'd probably just shuffle away, if it even thought it was worth doing."

She leaned close, her breath slightly fetid.

"Think about that. Rekida's far north. Plenty of untamed ground there. Big old silent war, out in the snow. You're not even a player in it. Just an observer. A hazard the players need to avoid from time to time, nothing else. Hell. There's some watching us now, I know it. I know it. Always watching. Just don't think it's worth it attacking. Like that gorgonopsid out there in the reeds - wasn't afraid, was hungry, but didn't think it was worth the effort of swimming out here, didn't think the gamble was necessary."

She sighed.

"So that's how we hunt. We hunt idiots. The clever ones leave us alone and rule the north. We never really took it back. We just started building stuff, and we hope none of those things in the snow think it's worth coming after us. Like having a vulture always over your head, staring down, waiting for you to die."

Tanner shivered.

"I... see."

"Nah. You won't. If you see one of these mutants, and it's not doing anything? You're fine. If you never see them, ever? Then they're coming after you. You only hear these freaks when they don't care about you. And when all the burning's done, all the idiots are dead, all the people back home say the Great War's over... well. Me and you, we'll know. We'll know."

Know that the north wasn't a place for humans. Not any more.

Tanner stared out into the darkling mists, the chill seeping to her bones, the air rich with the cries of strange, crude life amidst the moss and mud. A leather-bird swooped down suddenly, perching on one of the railings surrounding the smokestacks of the boat. Shaking itself to shed a little moisture. It glanced down, beady eyes glinting like marbles. Tanner looked up, and the thing stared back. Two crests emerging from its head, long, needle-like beak bristling with teeth, wings the colour of wet sand, the impressions of little bones barely visible through the leather. It didn't screech at her, just stared, like it was wondering how her eyes might taste. Head twitched to one side. Twitched to the other. It shook, shedding more dew.

And a moment later, it was gone.

Swooping over the remains of the earth's gored artery.