Mazelton’s bet paid off- this stretch of road was profoundly flat, punctuated very rarely by the dry etchings of old rivers. You could sort of see them, the twisty lines of a deeper green filling shallow troughs tens or hundreds of miles long. They wouldn’t have been very big rivers, shallow and not too wide, but the land remembered them even after they had vanished. When the caravan stopped for lunch, he was almost refreshed.

The Leoinidas Collective continued their stony blockade. Must have been too long since their last dose of the flux. Mazelton frowned a little bit. Their looks had always been hostile, but it was a sort of generalized hostility. The looks were starting to get a bit more specific. He shook his head. He didn’t know what that was about and he didn’t really want to know. Likewise, he was sure he was going to find out. He sighed. Well, they were soldiers, right? And war is politics by other means. And as someone who knew a lot about politics…

He made his way over to Humble Bissette’s wagon, purifying as he went.

“Humble, might I beg for some of your time?” He bowed politely, his fingers fluttering a graceful beseechment.

“I can never tell when you are being sarcastic. It sounds sarcastic.” Bissette grumbled. Mazelton looked shocked.

“I have never said a sarcastic word to you. Not even once.”

“Mazelton, nobody, anywhere, is that excessively polite all the time and isn’t sarcastic.”

“I am? Courtesy and respect for one’s elders are cardinal virtues.”

Humble Bissette just snorted at that.

“What do you want, Mazelton? I have little enough of that time you asked for.”

“Two things. First, that woman who accused the Pooles of theft? Do you know what her story is?”

“Oh, her.” Bissette got an ugly look in her eye. “Not sure. She says that she’s out of the Venn Falls Coven, but I don’t know. I don’t see her around the prayer circle, at least, and she and her wife are far from sociable. Why?”

“She keeps trying to recruit me for some faction of hers, the Blessed Children of the New Earth? Talking about the Revealed and Enlightened.”

Humble Bissette stopped with a jerk, then seemed to shrink in on herself. Never a very big woman, the news seemed to make her quite small.

“That’s… unfortunate. You aren’t planning to say yes, are you?”

“No. Not remotely. I know a cult when I see it. And not the good kind.”

“Not even going to ask what you mean by “the good kind.” They are a cult, yes. They draw in people with the notion of an earthly paradise that can be reached by cutting away everything that makes life sweet or bitter. Food. Sex. Wealth. Most music. Most art. Followed by an eternal heavenly paradise, for the select few.”

Bissette quite deliberately kicked a rock into a tree.

“Not a big bunch, but there are a fair few of them and they do tend to form up on the fringes. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Explains a lot.”

“Oh?”

“Hunger makes you pretty crazy, and if she is joining up with an established group of cultists, the extra supplies will be badly wanted.”

“I suppose. How much of a threat is she? Or they, I should say, as her wife is with her.”

“They aren’t really married, I guarantee it. It’s a disguise.”

Bissette brooded for a moment, then her face turned pale.

“Mother Moon protect us- the seeds! A monopoly on seed oil is exactly the kind of income those degenerates love! A chance to recruit and make money at the same time.”

Mazelton nodded deeply.

“How do you want to handle this?”

“Want to handle this?” Bissette laughed. “I am a very humble Humble, Mazelton. And a dying one at that. I don’t want to handle this at all.”

She looked away. Mazelton waited.

“All I can do is rally the Coven. No, create a Coven. Right now, we are scattered, easy to pick off singly. Easy to corrupt and lead astray.”

Humble Bissette looked down, then up, drawing strength.

“Dusty World and Mother Moon. I set out on this journey to make a better world for the kids. It was never going to be easy, but did it have to be this hard?”

The world didn’t answer in a way Mazelton could hear, but Bissette seemed hear differently.

“Alright, one more thing. Just being a humble little speck, calling to the other little specks, and building a great Dusty World.”

Mazelton bowed, and walked back to his tent. With the right kind of eyes, you could see the swirls of a hurricane lily as he passed.

The afternoon passed much as the morning had. Mazelton spotted a few herbivores capering around in the woods, skinny little things with long legs that managed to jump astonishingly high. He had no idea what they were. They didn’t approach too close, but they weren't overly scared of humans either. There must not be a settlement within days of here- this far out, people would be hunting.

After all, in the leanest of times, one had to eat even carrion.

Mazelton tried to forcibly derail the spiral of negative thoughts. These trees, for example, looked a bit like oak, but also not. What could they be? Larch? Well, aside from the fact that he had no idea what larch looked like and only a generalized notion of what oak looked like, they could well be! How interesting! And these herbivores were adorable! Look at them jump, so cute.

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Should he sketch them for Danae? Yes. As the intrusive thoughts started battering the walls of his mind. Yes, he should definitely sketch the little bouncy creatures and the trees that may or may not be larch. And he was going to just ignore how that branch had the exact same shape as the cane the Disciplinarian in the school beat him with so, so many times.

He could picture the hidden bath he found, still somehow connected to plumbing after all these years, where he could wash off the blood with some sense of safety. Kill them when they’re sick was dinner table level strategy in the clan. He felt so, so smart when he found it. He was, what? Nine? Probably nine.

Mazelton closed his eyes and focused on his breath. Controlling his breathing. Consciously relaxing his muscles from the top of his head and working to the soles of his feet. Watching the memories fly by, like swallows swooping past the window.

At dinner, he casually asked Policlitus how Nimu managed to contract with the Collective, given that they didn’t exactly respect private property or contracts. The point wasn’t the answer, the point was to ask the question. The hurricane lily spun, and just like magic, the Collective was trusted that little bit less. They were that little bit more foreign, more dangerous. And Mazelton became that little bit more “one of us.”

Nobody really asked Mazelton what he did in the Ma clan. Funny that- like the words “Ma Clan Polisher” was such a complete identity that any more detail was unnecessary. They never wondered how such a rabid clan could survive epoch after epoch, beyond mutterings about dark magics. But the answer was so simple- there were many viable survival strategies. Why choose just one? There was always a hole, somewhere, for even the most oddly shaped peg.

He looked around the fire, his mask painted with a tiny smile as one of the teamsters pantomimed their latest romantic conquest to roars of laughter. Pegs in holes, cogs in machines, chev, aurochs in yoke, bravos, bonded, proletarians, all nice metaphors for the same thing. Someone decided you could be used, and you decided they were right. A thousand hands playing chess, until someone decided to flip the board over.

Mazelton took a sip of pine needle tea and thought through his next moves.

Polyclitus pushed them just a little bit harder the next day, stopping at a camp whose sole virtue, so far as Mazelton could decipher, was that there was plenty of fresh water available. Which was a real, tangible virtue- if the water wasn’t entirely in the form of ponds. Dozens upon dozens of tiny, crummy little ponds. Half of them were probably seasonal, the spring rains and winter melt filling up little depressions in the land. Come the end of summer, the very lushest, most tender grasses would be growing there. Now? The fiercest, most bloody minded biting flies grew there by the millions.

Not just mosquitos, biting flies. This was an entomologists' paradise and hell for the tender fleshed, those cursed souls who insects seemed to gravitate towards. They always got the biggest, longest lasting and most itchy lumps out of it too. Always. Mazelton had loads of insect barriers for sale, and his recharging service was even more popular. He reckoned it was the ring of insect corpses around him that sold it.

The Collective held out a good while, but eventually Mendiluze was sent with a sack of barrier cores to be recharged. Mazelton was the soul of courtesy when he charged them. He didn’t feel the need to mention he only put a week’s worth of heat in them, but then, Mendiluze didn’t ask.

“Should I come by to purify tonight?”

“No need, thank you.” Mendiluze was visibly uncomfortable. Mazelton decided to gently wind him up a bit more.

“Are you certain? It’s been some time, and I am concerned that the water in this area is stagnant.”

“Your concern is noted. Boiling water works perfectly well, and we prefer to use reliable means to ensure safety.”

Mazelton just smiled at that.

“Of course. We don’t offer refunds on the core charging, but I would be willing to buy back the insect barriers for twenty percent of the original price. No need to burden yourself.”

“Good night, Polisher.”

Polyclitus gave him a filthy look for that.

That night in his tent, barrier cores stationed fore and aft, above and below, Mazelton took a turn at whittling. He wasn’t a particularly good whittler. In fact, if he was pressed, he would have to confess to being a bad whittler. Generally he worked with clay, on those rare occasions that he did sculpt. Very occasionally stone or plaster. Wood, however… not so much. But tonight it called to him.

He set the piece of possibly larch on his little folding desk. It took a bit of work to scrape off the the bark. The trick was to angle your knife at an almost flat angle to the wood, then pull it straight towards you, one hand on the blade, the other on the hilt. It definitely took some getting used to, but the materials were free so he didn’t sweat the details. A big piece of wood, about the size of his forearm. He stared at it a moment longer, then shoved his head out of his tent.

“Hey.” He called out to a passing teamster. “Does this look like larch to you?”

“Not really? More like oak, if I had to guess.”

“Huh. Thank you. Pretty similar trees, right?”

“No? I mean, larch has pine cones, for a start. It is a kind of pine.”

“Really? Huh.”

“Like… that tree over there is a larch.”

“Thought it was a fir?”

“Nope. Larch.”

“Right. Well. Thanks.”

“Sure. Night.”

“Night.”

“Do I want to know what that was about? Nope. No, I do not.” The teamster muttered when he thought Mazelton couldn’t hear him. Still a positive conversation, Mazelton thought. Definitely fitting in better.

He turned the likely oak bit of wood out on his desk, and set to marking out what he could cut away with a bit of charcoal. Big chunks were just surplus to needs, so off they went. Mazelton was mentally alert after roughing in the sculpture, but his hands were killing him. Turns out that a saw, even a quite small saw, would have been an excellent idea. Cutting curl after curl of wood away made his hands ache abominably.

There were machines you could make, focusing intense beams of heat, moving along tracks so every movement was precise. Every cut was precise. Down to a fraction of a millimeter. It was one of those “machines to make the machines” sort of thing, used to cut machine tools and parts. There were a couple of them in the Ma factories. Terrifyingly expensive. Mazelton wondered if the fires in the factories weren’t set by his Clansfolk. Deny the enemy everything. Scorch the earth. We can live on scorched earth, they can’t.

He started putting in a bit more detail. The bed, the woman, or their outlines, at least. It wasn’t going to be done tonight. He lay down his knives, shook out his hands, cleaned and stropped his tools and put away the lights.

In the dark, he knelt on the ground and gently cut himself a little hole in the damp earth. He took one of the clean, sharp knives, and nicked one of the blood vessels writhing like rivers along the back of his hand. He let the blood drip into the hole, visualizing all his pain and humiliation drip into the hole, trapped in the blood. This wasn’t something the Ælfflæd could help with. Really, it was a Dusty thing, releasing the pain by remembering that you were just a tiny part of a vast world. Except they didn’t really favor blood rituals. It was a Mazelton thing, a bit this, a bit that, and fuck you if you don’t understand. He didn’t intend to explain a damn thing to anyone.

The world had to answer a few of his questions first.