Mazelton sat on a bench outside a cabin, and leaned his head back against the wall. It hurt, a little, remembering that his tent was in Duane’s wagon, currently getting further and further away from him. That he would have to hop on his cheve and ride for hours to catch up, and even then he would have to set up his tent. He contemplated spending the night in the village, but that would make the tent even further away the next day…

A cold glass of unsweetened tea was put in his hands.

“Drink up. You need it.” It was the man with the hoe, the Humble’s husband. He… never mentioned his name. Of course, Mazelton had never asked. He felt momentarily guilty about that.

“Thank you.” No so guilty that he would ask, of course. The man nodded.

“I hear that you are going to settle in New Scandi?”

“Yes. Policlitus has been scaring me about the journey over the mountains, but no matter what, that’s where I aim to be.”

“It’s shaping up very nicely, from what I hear. Still a one cheve farming village, and likely always will be, but nice.”

“Quiet and nice sound just perfect.”

“Would have taken you for a man of action, all blood and thunder.”

Mazelton stared out over the waste, remembering people being beaten to death in the tunnels. There was a gauze-like covering over the memories- he could see them, but somehow he was still detached from them. He knew that he would fall through the gauze if he stared too long at the memories.

“What was done with the corpses?”

“We hauled ‘em away. Wanted to ask you about that, actually. Right now, they are just outside the settlement, but the head is still blindingly bright. The other body looks more normal, but, you know, how would we know? I was hoping you had some advice.”

Mazelton groaned. “Advice” meant “thinking” and “thinking” meant “effort.” With immense reluctance, he hauled himself to his feet.

“I’ll go take a look.”

The Insect and her “Wife” were laid side by side in the dirt. The “Wife” was in one piece, sort of. Her guts and throat had been torn open. His spear had caught her right through the belly, and from the look of it, he had been lucky and cut an artery. She would have bled out eventually. It had taken a few chops for him to find her neck, so her torso was a bit mutilated. Well, he was blinded from whatever they did, so really, who’s fault was that?

He was still pretty blind. Little bits of progress, but he had the horrible feeling it would be days or even a week before his vision recovered all the way. He was still getting by on his heat sense, which was in no way a substitute for vision under normal circumstances. Someone had to take him by hand and lead him to the corpses.

The Insect was a damn mess, missing part of an arm and otherwise badly hacked up. Mazelton felt the rage draining out of him, looking at the corpse. It was just possible, he reflected, that he had been pushing all the building resentment and frustration of the journey onto the cultists. That “slow, horrible death” was usually considered an extreme reaction to people being shitty. Looking at the chopped up body, he had a hard time caring about what most people thought. He was just tired.

Even through the blindness and the jacket wrapped around her head, she was still glowing. Not her whole body, just the skull. It was, in his expert opinion, weird.

He poked at her corpse with the toe of his boot. Nothing happened. He sighed. Actual effort would have to be applied. Damnit.

He focused on the Wife first. “Luckily” the two had “inexplicably high” levels of heat in their bodies. Sheer bad luck, doubtless brought on by low morals. A common sign of poor morals was offending Polishers and their friends, a well known fact. Mazelton shook his head and refocused.

He let his attention drift from her feet upwards, letting the heat act as his eyes through her body. She had no major implants or grafts that he could see. No odd organs whose purpose he couldn’t identify. If she had any serious pathogens, he wasn’t seeing any evidence of it. But then, he might well not. It’s not the sort of thing heat really picked up. No metal bones. No metal tattoos on her bones. No bone tattoos or carvings generally. Just a boring, basic corpse. He yawned.

“You can dig a hole somewhere and kick that one into it. I wouldn't burn it, but burying it somewhere away from any wells should be fine.”

The man nodded. “And the other?”

“Give me a minute.”

The Insect was a good deal more interesting. He could see faint traces of scar tissue along her arms and legs. Someone had very carefully peeled the flesh back and carved some sort of flowing script along her bones. He didn’t recognize it, it sort of looked like four or five different languages without actually being any of them. It didn’t appear to be functional, but he had been wrong about that kind of thing before.

There was evidence of prosthetic joint replacement in her right knee. Some kind of metal coated ceramic? Very interesting, he would usually associate that with near instant infection and death. Someone had access to some quite advanced medical care. Better than what he saw in Old Radler. Very interesting indeed. The spine was boring and normal until you started reaching the neck, at which point things took a bit of a turn.

The vertebrae appeared to be plated in some kind of metal. He couldn’t tell which using just his heat sense, but it was modestly impervious to heat. Probably a fraction of a millimeter thick. The skull itself appeared to be bone, but it was bone in the process of some kind of transformation. He was certain that it ultimately would have been fatal, but he was damned if he understood enough biology or chemistry to understand why it was happening. Something had triggered the conversion, but what or how, he had no idea. It was fascinating.

“Well damn. I took such efforts to make sure it couldn’t make a liar out of me, but here we are.”

“Oh?”

“I want to keep that skull.”

Eventually, carefully, Mazelton sawed off the head and neck of the Insect. The owner of the saw didn’t sound overjoyed to volunteer their tools, but no one was prepared to argue with the dangerous wizard who might also be a cannibal over something so basic. Oh sure, he said he didn’t eat flesh, but he had been staring at those bodies for an awfully long time…

Loranne brought him two heavy sacks, thick enough to block the light that was still pouring out of the skull. It really did need to be double bagged. She even stitched them closed, which he thought was very kind of her.

“So… this is it?”

“Where we part? Yes. You were wonderful company on the trail, Loranne, and a good friend. Thank you.”

“You were a good friend too. Though I am now starting to wonder about those stories you told me?”

“What about them?”

“Um. I had thought you were mostly making things up. I mean, a building made of crystal and steel, where every step made another note, and people would run up and down its ten floors to play music? That can’t be real.”

“Corner of Soi 51 and Elkrund’s Revenge. They put on light shows with the concerts. They used to.”

She laughed quietly and shook her head.

“How many were true?”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Mazelton looked offended.

“All of them. I never lied to you.”

“Making up stories on the trail isn’t exactly lying.”

“Well. True. But I lost… so much. For a while, I thought I lost everything. I didn’t want to lose myself with it. Lose my city.”

Loranne looked at the strange beanpole of a man she had known for just a few months. It felt like a lifetime.

“You do seem happier now than when you started on the trail. Most people, it’s the reverse.”

Mazelton grinned. “The secret is not cooking your own food. Make someone else cook, then you fix it up with condiments. This is the true path.”

Loranne laughed. A Dusty on a cheve rode up next to them, to lead Mazelton back to the wagons.

“Safe journey, Mazelton. Write to me when you get to New Scandi, and I hope your life with Danae is all you dreamed of.”

“Happy life, Loranne, I’ll write when I can.”

It was only a few hours' ride to catch up with the wagons. “Only.” Mazelton considered himself a minor expert on the miseries of riding cheve, but this was a new discovery. It turns out that while there is no theoretical reason why you need eyes to ride a cheve, beyond navigation, there are a number of practical reasons. The sense of disorientation and discomfort grew and subsided in waves of anxiety and fatalism. It was a very tired Mazelton who rode into camp, and when he found his tent set up and waiting, he nearly burst into grateful tears.

This miserable world didn’t deserve Duane. Mazelton skipped dinner and fell directly into bed.

Mazelton felt that his head had barely touched the pillow when an irate Policlitus started yelling for him to wake up and get out. It was the middle of the night.

“Mazelton, what the hell did you bring into my caravan?”

Mazelton was still mostly blind, and the lack of light didn’t help.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Oh? Think it through. Is there anything, anything at all that YOU MIGHT HAVE BROUGHT BACK WITH YOU!”

“Are you… talking about the head?”

“It’s a head?!”

“Policlitus, I am mostly asleep. I very much want to be all the way asleep. What the hell are you talking about?”

It seemed that Mazelton had not untied the burlap sack from his cheve when he handed it off to a teamster. The teamster tossed it in a pile with the saddle, figuring it would go in Mazelton’s wagon in the morning. The sack, however, had a strange smell to it. A sort of sickly, rotting smell with overtones of cooked meat. Lots of cooked meat smells. And it was warm to the touch. Not hot, just… warm. So, figuring there was no harm to it, and being maybe a little too curious about the business of polishers, he unstitched just a corner of the bag and took a quick peek. The screams apparently woke everyone up, except Mazelton.

“Blinded by the light?”

“Yes, Mazelton, as it happens, he was.”

“Me too.”

“What?”

“You aren’t even a blur to me right now. Just a light show with some black and gray spots swimming around in front of me. It’s slowly getting better, but it will probably be a week at this rate.”

“You are blind.”

“Temporarily. Your man should be fine, with time. Sounds like he only got hit for a second or less.”

“You said something about a skull.”

“You remember the cultists?”

“The WHO?!”

Mazelton sighed and turned for his bed.

“It’s safe as long as nobody opens the sack. Which was sewed shut for a damn reason. I am going to bed. You may want to count noses in the morning, as you are missing two more than expected. Not sure what’s going on with their wagon, actually, but if it’s still here, nobody should eat their food or drink the water. G’night.”

Oh did he get looks at breakfast. He couldn’t see the looks, but he could feel them. He sighed, considered explaining, considered that he was still tired, and added a sprinkle of numbing spice on his porridge. It tasted weird. Interesting weird, but he wouldn’t do that again.

He washed his bowl and started heading back to pack the tent when Policlitus called him out.

“Oh no you don’t! Mazelton, what the hell went on?”

Mazelton sighed. He was so damn tired.

Having fobbed off Policlitus and the rest of the caravaneers with a useful blend of truth and lies, he packed up and collapsed on the wagon. The head was starting to pong a bit. A lot. A whole lot. The head smelled really, intensely, bad. It was decaying a lot faster than it ought to have. Mazelton was quite puzzled by this. While he never collected all that many heads himself, you could hardly move through the residences without someone “casually” displaying their latest trophy. The blood drained and the stump cauterized, of course, unless they really wanted to get it from the Floor Wardens. And a more petty bunch of devils did not exist than the Floor Wardens. Heads, in his experience, did not rot this fast.

He really missed the caustic vats, where you could soak your trophy in metal sives until all the flesh sloughed off. They would make seeing what was going on so much easier. Not that he was in any position to see much of anything… Ah. He was being dumb. Was she still in the caravan?

He heard someone walking past, and it didn’t sound like Duane.

“Excuse me.” He said, in a voice that was not, in fact, apologizing for its intrusion. “Please pass my compliments to Madam Lettie and extend to her my invitation to an autopsy.”

“Huh?”

“Go find Madam Lettie right now, and tell her I have something weird for her to look at, but I said it in a polite way.”

He got the impression of the teamster gawping at him. He smiled warmly in the direction of the voice.

“Never even knew Amihan could run so fast. Amazing.”

“Who?”

“The… teamster you sent to get me? She works for Nimu?”

“Oh. No idea.”

“You have eaten breakfast and dinner with her almost every day for, what, three months or so? Four? Gods and demons, how long have we been on the road?”

“If you don’t know, how could I?”

“Seems like you don’t know much, these days.”

“Would you believe that I agree with that snide remark?”

“A humble Ma? Such a thing exists?”

“Oh, we all have our little defects. I seem to have some major gaps in my education, your skull isn’t a keeper, but we do our best.”

Mazelton could feel Lettie seethe. He smiled warmly at her.

“Oh hell no! Stop that at once!”

“What?”

“You look like a reanimated corpse showing its skeleton face. Threatening the living with its hideous, unnatural desires.”

“Lies and slander. I am warm and charming.”

“Did your mother tell you that?”

“No. She would rather die.”

That killed the conversation stone dead. After an awkward moment, Lettie asked,

“So… you have something weird you want me to autopsy?”

“Mmm. In the burlap sack. I would strongly advise not opening the sack if you can avoid it. Unless you have some way of shielding your eyes, which isn’t a Pi trait as far as I know.”

“It isn’t. I use smoked glass for that. I’ll see what I can find out.”

She picked it up and turned it around a bit.

“I hate it when they’re soggy.”

“Right? Something about the texture is just…”

“So gross. And you just know it would be both sticky and gooey.”

“I miss the caustic vats.”

A beat.

“You guys had caustic vats for skulls? Of course you had caustic vats for skulls. You know what, you don’t get to talk shit about the Pi Clan any more. No more for you. The whole Ma Clan.”

“I know for a fact that more than three hundred Pi families have a flocking instinct, because some of your ancestors considered pigeons as the highest form of life. To say nothing of the freak who thought everyone in that town should have “Jellyfish genitals.” I checked. That’s not a thing humans can have.”

“I’m… not going to defend every decision ever made by a member of the Pi clan…”

“And then there was the lady who thought that she could become a houseplant…”

“Alright, that is out of line. Project Ficus was incredibly bold and had huge potential. It is a shame it didn’t work, but she should be applauded for her efforts.”

They bickered back and forth as Lettie slowly examined the skull. Mazelton couldn’t see it, but her smile was every bit as creepy as his.