Truth walked out of the Anak residence with a sack full of beef skewers, a few jars of sauce and a big helping of dirty looks. Truth spotted some of Susan’s female cousins. They were, if anything, bigger than her. They were also, clearly, not into him. One made a very complicated hand gesture. He hadn’t seen it before, but the meaning was remarkably clear.

He didn’t take it to heart. He was planning to fuck off anyhow.

Truth made his way over to a souvenir stand, bought a card, wrote Niles that note and sent it winging on its way. He loved watching the enchanted paper fold itself up- turning from something flat and lifeless into a somewhat plausible looking bird. He loved that with a touch and a nudge of his will, it would go flying off to land in a mailbox on the other side of the city. Something so ordinary that you wouldn’t look at it twice, and a genuine marvel at the same time.

Was he done in Harban? His heart said no- he still had a couple more stops. He wouldn’t visit Sophia, or try and track down the other sibs. Truth Medici died years ago. Best to leave him dead for now. Sophia knew. That was enough.

Mom and Dad? If they were still alive? Get a bit of… no. Not even as a fantasy. Now it just made him feel sickly. He had seen too much, understood too much. He might not forgive them for what they did to him and the sibs, but he could understand them now. Truth had said he was the logical consequence of billions of bad decisions. Well, his parents were too. For him, they died years ago.

It was enough. Truth would never be entirely free of his parents. They shaped so much about him. Lead him to so many decisions. But he didn’t have to let them ride on his head for the rest of his life. He would leave them in the ground, buried in the poisonous earth of Harban. Though, he did need to make a trip to the slums.

The abandoned industrial building had been melted into slag after he made his report. It probably said a lot about developers in Harban that a new building was smacked down on top of the still warm embers of the old. Was the site cursed? Had hundreds died unspeakable deaths on that very spot? Unless it meant they could buy the site for less, the developers didn’t care. Unspeakable curses sound like a problem for someone living in the slums.

Truth walked through the street, down dark alleys, looking into the stairwells of dingy buildings. Looking at the slumrats. The slums had never been a good place, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they had gotten worse.

He leaned against a corner and watched a guy with a fresh haircut leaving the barber shop. A tubby little guy walked up behind him, threw an arm around his shoulders and without breaking stride, tubby stabbed him in the ribs.

“You like talking, huh? You a chatty guy? You like talking? You fucking rat!” The knife went in and out like a sewing machine embroidering revenge. Truth wasn’t the only one watching. Must have been twenty witnesses or more. Nobody said anything. Nobody even looked surprised. The barber barely shook his head. Truth could hear him murmur-

“And this is why I don’t give credit. Damn fool, what did he think was going to happen?”

It didn’t even rate an “Mmm hmmm” from the other barbers. They just kept on cutting. The customers weren’t looking out the window. They put a lot of effort into not seeing things they shouldn’t see. This was no different.

The whores were openly bartering now. Services for their next fix, and maybe the one after. Food. Medicine. Whatever they could get. Truth felt something stabbing into him. It was sad. It was desperately sad. He was sure he’d never pitied a whore in his life, but these weren’t ‘whores,’ they were people, starving, sick, hopeless people, and they were doing the best they could with the nothing they had. So were the people selling them base and murdering each other for their shoes.

They weren’t good. They were, in fact, ‘bad,’ as most people thought about it. But so what? The rats didn’t sink the ship. Should he condemn them for biting each other as they tried to keep ahead of the water? He wasn’t condoning it either. The rats would need to change if they wanted to live. But a man with a sack full of beef skewers and a few jars of professional-chef-crafted dipping sauces didn’t seem to have the moral high ground.

Hell, he had his own lifeboat waiting. He had his own lifeboat waiting, and he was standing here, watching the rats suffer before they drowned.

“That’s not okay. That’s fucked up. And I’m not okay with it. Which, by everyone else’s standards, is fucked up. Which I am okay with. Which is fucked up.” Truth breathlessly laughed. Then laughed harder. So many of the people here hadn’t opened their apertures. Lots and lots and lots of them.

What would happen when they realized that the cops couldn’t stop them anymore? When the apartment towers came tumbling down and the shops had no food and none of the lights worked but OH LOOK, the Ghul were still here. Maybe they shouldn’t stick around in the slums.

He had thought about it in Confen, thought about adopting one or two of them, showing them the light. Letting the knowledge wash away the rat and leave something better behind. At least make them rats with dreams.

He didn’t have that kind of time. More to the point, he didn’t have that kind of mind. Truth was pretty proud of how far he had come, but he wasn’t a teacher. He could only clear the way as best he could, and hopefully they would figure something out. When you got right down to it, the only person he had really ‘taught’ was Niles, and that wasn’t exactly something to replicate. Also, debatable if he really taught him anything, rather than giving him a new dream.

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He still despised the slums. Despised the blindness of the rats. Despised their cruelty and the way they preyed on each other. But even if he did, wasn’t it time to admit to himself that he felt empathy? That he felt compassion for them? After everything he had seen and done, everything he had learned about himself and the world and the systems of the world, did he really feel the rats deserved their Hell?

If he had learned anything from his parents and from this whole damn world, he learned that ‘deserved’ had nothing to do with anything.

He drifted through the streets, keeping an ear out. Eventually he heard music, the beautiful, soaring music that he only ever heard when he visited a Ghul nest. He followed the sound into an apartment building. He looked up. It wasn’t the one he was born in, but it was more or less the same. Forty floors of insect-hives, filled with parasitic larvae and their murderous progenitors.

Or it was once. That music was awfully loud.

He walked in, following the music. There were no lights in the building. What window there were, had been blacked out. No gangsters hanging out in the hallway. No out of work denizens waiting for the next thing to come by.

Truth climbed the stairs, ignoring the perpetually out of order elevator. The music got louder and louder the higher he got. At floor forty of forty-five, the stairs ran out. Demolished. He walked through the door onto the floor, and into a tunnel dug through heaps of rubble. It was more of a climb, but eventually he reached the final floor.

Soaring five stories was a statue. So enormous, he had trouble wrapping words around it. The thing was in the shape of a snake, but it had the head and mane of a lion. It appeared to be eating the sun. Worshiping it were thousands of Ghul.

The statue beat on his consciousness. It was too real, too great for something so limited and fragile as a human to perceive. Truth felt a strange yearning for it. Strange, because he also felt revulsion. It was hideous.

It was revolting. It offended him in a way that no other Ghul statue had. Everything about it scraped at his nerves. Truth forced himself to confront the feeling, examine it, and try to understand.

The serpent seemed… very snake like. What was there to say? It was a riot of colors, greens, blacks, blues and golds, threaded with reds, yellows, whites and browns. Like it wasn’t just a snake but all the snakes. Like it was the very concept of every negative association you ever had about serpents. But that could only be part of it. He liked snakes fine. It was the lion’s head attached at the end that was so obscene.

It didn’t fit. Obviously. It wasn’t even remotely to scale, being a third the size of the snake body. The maine seemed both raggedy, dirty black streaked with gold, and lustrous. As though the gold were streamers pulled from living suns and the black was flecked with the stars and planets.

The mouth was snarling, lips pulled back into a sneer or a roar or both. The fangs reeked of endless hunger. They were the simple embodiment of predation. They were teeth meant to rip flesh. It didn’t cultivate or grow, it only ate what it pleased and shat where it pleased. Above the ravening maw were the eyes.

Truth could barely force himself to look at the eyes, and even then, only for a moment. Prideful. Hateful. Mean. Just mean. The essence of a bully refined with the arrogance of a god.

Oh.

It was grandpa. Many times removed.

Truth looked at the worshiping Ghul and rapidly reevaluated what he was seeing. They were fixated on the statue, but he didn’t think they were actually worshiping. They looked, as best he could read their corpse-faces, like they were honing themselves. Testing themselves against immense pressure. More of those strange symbols, symbols he had seen only once before, covered two walls. They meant something to the Ghul, but he couldn’t figure it out.

He couldn’t figure them out.

“Just what are you? Why are you?” He murmured. “Are you beings from a higher dimension that came down to… what, exactly? You have some strange connection to the Rough Patron, but he is definitionally below this… creator-god. He isn’t even a god. He is, or was, some kind of human, infinitely long ago. So why? You admire that he threw the first punch or… whatever? That he talked back to God?”

It just didn’t add up. None of it was clicking for him. If they were some kind of higher order of being, why the brutal dissection of random victims on the street? Why the sculptures, venerating the human form? Why worship a human that fought back, why worship the embodiments of a failed copy, rather than the beings above even the creator-god?

Hell, why descend into this shabby corner of reality in the first place? Can’t you do your worshiping from a distance?

Truth laughed, self depreciation tinged with madness. He was torn, trying to decide if they were shock troopers come to fight the apocalypse, or if they were more like maggots, come to clean up after the slaughter. Either way, they weren’t anything good for the humans on this planet. Sethians. Whatever.

And he was part of them. And they were part of him. Whatever their game was, they had touched him with it. They were his connection to the Rough Patron, yes, but also that nine-worm path he cultivated with. Those nine worms that still roamed his body, perfecting his form, making him ever more resistant to magic. Worms that also tied back to the Rough Patron, somehow.

Truth knew the Ghul were at the center of some vast mystery. Some awful, unspeakable truth. And he just didn’t have the clues to solve it. And he didn’t have the time to investigate further. He could usually accept not knowing things. This would eat at him.

The Ghul stood as one. They turned towards one wall- northeast? He had lost his sense of direction.

There was a sudden twist. An inversion of the natural order of things. And then, forty stories up, Truth could hear Harban screaming.