DESIDERIUM - Desiderium

D E S I D E R I U M

It is neither night nor day when the warboat comes quietly as arrowflight and touches the near shore where other such crossings have landed. All as it was. More years on everything. That’s all. I drop into the waistdeep water and take the bowline over my shoulder and haul it up the beachcobbles, a small figure slouching out of the surf, the waves brimming over the gunwales. It has ploughed the sea long enough. I get it ashore and turn it over to let the water drain, algae and rust flakes running through the beachstones back to the ocean. The stones leach back what they caught of the day’s warmth. The beach not touched by the tide is filmed with fine dust. Blue light drifts in the west like the suffusion of a faraway fire.

I have left a white wake where I have passed. Only now has it crested. I did not see it being you. I still don’t. As I have asked for nothing I will take what I get. How sorry a state you are in. I’m sorry I didn’t come here to make it better.

Listen to me.

In the morning you put on the uniforms chosen for you and take the skywire up the dam. I’ve seen you watch your daybreak shadow fall for miles over the tin roofs and smokestacks and out to where the sun crests the Trellarr Sea. Watch the yellow light slingshot off the waves, squint your eyes at the world. By midday you sit in my old domain while you stare out stained glass windows at the city laden with volcanic ash. Its soul lies in the catacombs, in the banners that hang like drying fish from the dam. You know this. And you know I knew this too, before you. You can feel me in your hackles and at the base of your spine, in your temporal and frontal lobes. Wherever I can be. Wherever you’ll let me be.

You steal away at night like a fugitive and watch the walls, the gates opening, grinding shut. You watch the Geissler lights come on and the trains spin on their turntables and sink like hunting whales into the darkness. In the heart of the rookeries there are tall brick buildings and you crawl to the top and speak into the wind corridor, into the smoke, in communion with the lead in the air. The midnight markets are below you, the coughing wagons, the mules. The stalls carved from burnt motorcars on cinderblock supports. The streets here were not made for fourteen million. Not made for anyone at all. Least of all you. The world submerges in a slow delirium. You are wasted here but you will not be forever. You know this too.

On these same shores we fell in time past, landing not differently to me, bearers of steel and fire in a land of bronze. It took very little time before it was in our hands. Very little. Then we went back out like nothing had happened to us or anyone at all. Concrete, brickwork, electric light remain like carvings in the concrete of a bridge, solely to say we were here and nothing more. Sea wind tilts the trees east, the earth itself shying like a horse away from where I came or perhaps just me.

It is not long until the hammer touches the primer. The arclamp is lit and the curtains rising and is it you in the circle of light? Is the swan song within your lungs? Your consciousness crawls into your brainstem. You try to drown it like a newborn in a bathtub but it won’t quit, will it. You return to Meropis, same as I. Soon you’ll be back in the world and I will be gone but you will know where to find me. Go there. When you see the blue horizon we will talk again.

Black Sky

I - Afterparty

The lamp pole shook in the wind and the ash and bent again when Euphrosyne Slake grabbed and leaned into it and vomited onto the cobblestone sidewalk. It was dark outside but unseasonably warm and she had her jacket off and didn’t know where it had gone or who had taken it and she coughed and rubbed the tears from her eyes and retched again and stood. Two in the morning. The narrow streets very still this time of night. Old brick. Old concrete. Ash fell and blanketed everything thinly and for just a moment she thought it looked like a tintype of somewhere distant and wintry, a postcard sent from overseas viewed through a liquored hammered-glass lens. She looked at the sky and the lamp and turned and looked at herself and her stained army uniform in the black window of a draper’s shop. Electric swing music was still leaching out of the windows in the apartment above and when she heard it she bent forward and stumbled and caught herself on the storeglass and threw up on it. “I can’t take you anywhere,” said Issal.

Slake wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and spat and stood up and stumbled to the curb and grabbed the lamppole again. “You finally figured that out,” she told him.

He gave her his hand but she batted it away closefisted and they swayed off down the middle of the road, swaggering like whalers just back from a yearslong voyage. A train howled four streets over. This was an unfamiliar part of the damtop to her. Four, five, six story buildings, verdigrised roofs, windows shuttered and latched against the ash. It had started to pile in the gutters, long wisps of it. There were supposed to be street sweepers that came around every hour to sweep it up into bin trucks and toss it over the side of the dam. From there it would fall in long waves like sheets of rain onto the city below, some of it settling onto rooftops and others mixing into the water in the spillways and the rivers they made would turn to torrents of muck that carried off cattle and a few children every year. When it reached the sea some of it would settle on the bottom and pile up and over time form small islands just heavy enough for the sea to not wash away. The rest would come ashore and fertilize the silty beach and when harvest season came around flowers would bloom from the deathcoloured sand. But that was a long ways away and until the winds came and scattered the last of it the ash would keep falling. Like dandruff from a skyborne scalp. Like marine snow. She combed her oily headfur with her fingers and flicked the dusting of ash off and scratched her beak. Just her and the sodium vapour lights and Issal. Outside of her perception the world was swaying and if she thought about anything else she’d fall down and be there until the sun came up.

They came out of the side street onto Machira Avenue and stopped to let a tram pass, each of them grabbing and pulling at the other to keep from wandering out and getting flattened. It clattered past with the single front light cutting over the street before it like a miner’s headlamp in a cave. The cable buzzed. Vague shapes of people within, standing, sitting. Wettiger’s Salted Grapes read the ad on the side. Across the street a twist of geissler tubes spelled something that she couldn’t make out. She kept hold of Issal’s vest and pulled at it again. “Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“You got any more drink?”

They went into an alcove with a little waterpump and trough meant for horses, the older stonework dark and mildewy. A pile of rags in the back, possibly someone sleeping in it. They paid them no mind. Issal put his briefcase down and took the bottle out. A drink like the blood of a crab. The bottle was for nicer liquor that had long been drunk and there were candied orange bits in the bottom and powdered mushrooms floating all through it. It looked lethal.

“Give it here,” said Slake. She took it by the neck and tilted her head back and held it up. Before it reached her beak she lost her balance and stumbled and caught herself on the damp stone. Her shuffled footsteps echoed metallically off the walls. She drank and immediately doubled over, holding her beak shut with one hand. Shit, she thought. She got it down in three swallows and coughed and took another sip. Issal held out his hand to take it back and after one more drink she did. “That’s some of the worst shit I ever drank.”

He held it up against the light from a streetlamp and studied the powder and chunks of fruit swirling slowly in it like leaves in a windcaught corner. “The oranges don’t help?”

“You can put as many oranges as you’d like in heavy oil and it’d still taste like oil.”

“This ain’t oil.”

“It’s not far off.”

He shrugged and drank, Slake watching him, swaying. He opened his beak and tilted in a healthy dose, bubbles roiling in the bottle, the near-oil chugging out. Not a second later he threw his head forward and spat a huge blue spray, partly aerosolized, most just sloshing right out. He set the bottle down and thumped his chest and coughed. “Oh that’s just awful.”

“Yeah. You gonna finish it?”

“Fuck no. Throw it out.”

Slake picked the bottle up and wound her hand back and tossed it out of the alcove. It spun out across the sidewalk and cartwheeled across the road and burst in the dark on the cobblestone. She watched it for a second, the alcohol running and filling the seams. A motorcar went past, the driver a dark shadow that she knew was looking at her but only briefly. Everything swimming. Like looking at the world through the heat coming off a tin roof despite the chill. You’re going to ruin yourself doing this. Ferriswheel lights were sweeping the corners of her eyes and when they didn’t go away after a few blinks she gave up. Something crinkled behind her. She looked back to see Issal unrolling a little waxpaper pack and pressing his beak to it and sniffing.

“Is that cassa?”

He came up from the paper with his nare powdery. “Yeah.”

“Well shit.” She took it and looked at it. Pinkish powder, just a tiny bit left. Light on her feet all of a sudden. Whoa. She leaned against the wall and scratched some up onto her nail and sniffed it. A sneeze sensation that wouldn’t go away. She was crumpling up the paper when Issal started swearing. “What?”

“I think I left the skull behind.” He was scrabbling through his briefcase, the contents of it torn out and thrown. “Damnit. I think I left it. Actually left it. Probably still on top of the bannister.”

She looked over his shoulder. Empty packs of cigarettes. A textbook. Notes. Deeper within he hooked his fingers through the holes of a bowling ball and pulled it out and held the thing with both hands. “That’s a ball,” she said.

It took Issal a few seconds. He was drooling. “What?”

“Did you take a bowling ball from their place?”

“What are you on about?”

She blinked. He was holding a bowling ball and then he was holding the bleached white chiropteran skull of a Nyctian with his fingers through the eyesockets and his thumb in the nasal cavity. Issal’s theory and the theory of the Advanced Biological Department and many others was that the root of the front teeth extended far enough into the skull to reshape it and press against the temporal lobes. Such is why their hearing is phenomenally sharp but their memory dull and easily eroded. Haplogroup. Lasiurus? She was just guessing. Brain and eyes tuned to different channels, different AM towers. Issal thought showing it off would get him a woman for the night but the only woman he got for the night was Slake and it was she that he showed up with and the skull had nothing to do with it and he didn’t like her anyways. “Found it,” she said.

“Yeah.” He set it down on the ground and stuffed his affairs back into his briefcase and picked it up, skull in the other hand, him in his stained and creased button shirt like some kind of demented salesman. “What did you do with the drink?”

“I threw it.”

“Alright. Good. Let’s go.”

They went on down the street. Very cold for this time of year. They’d neither of them ever seen their breaths but this was close. They went on down Machira Avenue and followed the curve north and took a right onto Tianneau. There were lights on in some windows, each one barred over, the thin dark lines prisonlike falling on the narrow road, on their heads and jackets as they passed, walking erratically, bumping shoulders, bumping walls. The air smelled like exhaust and navigating it was to walk through cold treacle and she could barely even see. No stars in the sky, not that they’d’ve used them. In front of a garment store they stopped so Issal could stumble into an alley to piss and when he came back out he was holding the skull twohanded and he looked suddenly very vicious, wild, the drugs only part of it.

“You wanna know how much this thing cost me?” he asked.

“You stole it,” she told him.

“No. Bought it.” He stepped back towards the garment store, still looking at her. A light was on in the store and him standing there against it in the otherwise darkness of the alley looked like a blurry silhouette on a wall, dramatizing its caster’s movements. She couldn’t see his face but she could see the skull just fine and she noted very dimly that there were no bars on the windows. “Four strings of ket.”

“Oh.” She waited, watched him. “I thought you stole it.”

Issal turned and whipped the skull overhand at the glass. One moment he was standing there looking at her and the next he was on one foot, kinetic, his briefcase dipping to the ground in his offhand like a crane’s counterweight. Gerraine & Oryphas Men’s Garment Company read the painted letters on the archtop shopfront window and the skull impacted the y in Oryphas and shattered the window completely. The glass dislodged from the frame and split and split again, colliding midair, collapsing into thin diamond fragments on the sidewalk and, the wooden floorboards in the shop. The fragile old skull careened through the store like it was shot out of a cannon and skipped off the floor and smashed a mirror in a back dressing room and itself fell mostly to pieces. Damn good throw. “Shit,” said Slake. She thought for sure someone would come out but no one did. Just a light on in the back. No one there. Issal looked at her and he looked at what he had done and swayed his way over to the store and stepped in through the broken window, clutching a shard of glass to keep himself from falling. She stood there dumbly and watched him. There were no bars on the windows before but there would be within a week.

“Might as well’ve rolled in shit for all the good the thing did me,” she heard him say in the store. A light came on in the window over the shop. Well you can’t just stand there. She went over to the broken window and put her hand on the frame and looked in just as Issal was coming out with an expensive army style knapsack. His hand was bleeding.

“Where’s the skull?” she asked him. He just shook his head. Above them a window opened. She wasn’t looking up and she wouldn’t have seen much if she did but she knew there were eyes on her. On them. Something told her. She grabbed Issal by the shirt and they went on down the street back to where no streetlights touched.

They had Issal’s hand wrapped up by the time they got to Sloe Boulevard. The last road on the edge of the dam, a busy thoroughfare at any time of day. Beowend only, at least this part. They came out from Postmasters Way and stopped under the huge concrete portal and stood there struck dumb just by the sight of anyone else. The ash fell and caught in the current from passing cars and trucks and vanished, the traffic slow, not dense, headlights crawling by like barreleyes in deep sea fish. The street was wet from a water truck not long past and the shops were all closed up and down the bricklined street but there was music playing from somewhere and she knew the eatinghouses were open. Across the street there was just nothing. This was the edge of the dam. A grey abyss past that. Some kilometers distant a few red radio tower lights blinking. A gas flare that she could only just see through the ashen haze, brief as a firefly. She wanted badly to vomit but she didn’t. Do not go near those railings.

The pair went south, navigating the sidewalk in long and uneven side to side arcs, passersby steering well clear if not drugged themselves. She had the stolen pack in her hands with no memory of how it passed from Issal to her and she walked with it held out slightly as if to keep it from staining her shirt. They shuffled past late night eating-houses that smelled of onions, tired nightcooks of all species seated on boxes in side alleys, silent and smoking. Ten story high buildings. The loud sound of sex from a fourth floor window on a building painted bright white. An oil stain iridescing on the pavement. Someone passed in very new birdskin boots. The street curved very gently, following the arc of the dam. Sound of a streetcar rattling past. They stopped at a telephone booth on the corner of Sloe and Bascaris and Issal said he had to call for a car.

She leaned against the huge stone bricks of a bank while he talked, her hands on her knees and the pack between her legs. Every time she opened her eyes the world began to spin like a flywheel. Issal came out of the booth and shut the door and nudged her with his knee to get her attention. She looked up at him and there were two of him and then there was one. “Phone’s yours.”

“I don’t need to call anyone.”

“Well you’re not riding with me.”

“That’s alright.”

Slake straightened up and leaned back against the building. He stood next to her, breathing hard. She took out a cigarette and lit it and put a cigarette in his beak and lit that too and he nodded thanks and they stood there smoking. Issal had called for his personal car with a personal chauffeur to come pick him up. Slake had no such car nor had any car ever come for her nor would one.

“The department’s getting new inventory in tomorrow,” Issal said. “Igerina told me. Live specimen. Medical science is done with it so they’re moving it over.”

“We’re a dumping ground.”

“Dunno about that for this one. You ever seen a live Nyctian before?”

She looked at him. Was that serious? She couldn’t even see his face. “I don’t think anything alive has.”

“Then we’ll be the first in years.”

They smoked. A crowd of partiers come from the nonstop revelry of Upper Sloe came past, five in number, the four of them each holding a limb of an unconscious Beowend suspended between them. They looked at Slake and Issal and the two looked back and Slake checked her watch but it had been broken and gone from her wrist for two seasons. When she looked up they had gone or were never there and Issal was nodding, his beak against his chest, lit cigarette against his shirt. She kicked his shoe and he stirred and looked up like he had been there all along. “I wonder what they’ll do with it afterward,” he muttered.

Slake didn’t know. She was trying very hard not to throw up.

“You regretting your major change yet?”

She straightened up. She felt like something in illfitting skin or in no skin at all and when she looked at Issal she hoped he’d be looking anywhere but right at her but he met her eyes. Light brown. “I think I could’ve chosen worse,” she told him. “Lots worse.”

“Lots better, too. You were doing alright in political theory.”

“I was.”

He shook his head. “I just don’t see why you did it,” he said. “Mother would’ve shot me if I’d come home with news like that.”

“There’s a lot of news you get that’d make her shoot you.” She sniffed. “At least I would.”

“I know what’ll make her pull the trigger and what won’t. I walk the tightrope.”

“One of these days you’re gonna fall.”

“At least I’m falling instead of getting shot.”

A car came by, three-wheeled and closed top, rattling down the stonework road on too-thin tires, bald from age. It came up to the corner and turned slightly and the dark silhouette of the driver rolled the window down and looked out. Issal stood up and went towards it but it wasn’t his and it turned and drove off. Wrong corner. Wrong young man. The single-one cylinder engine puttered off down Sloe Boulevard and Issal stood there on the corner in the amber circle of the streetlight and watched it go, beaking silent words after it. “How about I just ride with you?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Slake told him quickly. “You oughta get a better chauffeur.”

“I don’t hire-”

A second motorcar came around the bend and stopped at the corner and parked. The driver was a Simälken with a dark green cap and uniform and he glanced out the window at the two of them and got out and opened the backdoor for Issal. He went towards it with the grace of a fallen puppet and threw his bag in and climbed face first after it into the back seat and rolled onto his back and half sat up.

“Said I don’t hire them,” he said.

The driver kept the door open for Slake. Oh. Polite looking young feline with a huge tail like a featherduster. “I’m alright,” she told him. He hesitated until she held up her hand and he nodded and shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat and he was still looking at her when he put the motorcar in gear and motored it gently to the T in the road. The motorcar’s wheels veered right and it turned the same way and was out of sight with near-white exhaust hanging low to the ground behind it as the only evidence it was ever there. Then it was just her. There was no car coming. Her family had never had a car and never would.

She went on a few minutes down the road until she came to a skywire station with a long lineup at the gate and joined in, clutching the railing, prying her eyes away from the edge of the dam but she couldn’t help but look. A crowd of railyard workers and cooks and clerks getting off shift, they paid her no mind. The rest of Hallatin was a kilometer down, built between the enormous spillways, so faint through the ash but it seemed to go on forever, to her, from up here, like luminescent seamoss. The flares of Red Beach burned like candleflames. Every borough and district entirely separate from all others but you could only see it from up here. The electric lights of West Shim. The smouldering wood stove and gaslamp flicker of Moontrout. There weren’t supposed to be buildings built up against the dam but no one enforced that anymore. A gondola was crawling up the wire, nearly at the top, and the crowd started to move. She held the railing tightly and pushed forward until it was her turn at the booth and she leaned on it with her elbows.

“Twenty ket,” said the man behind the glass and steel bars. She went through her pockets and grabbed at cloth until she found a tenth of a string and put it in the little slot and threw two loose ones in after it. The attendant looked at her. Not Beowend. Someone thin and scaled.

“That’s all I have,” said Slake.

“That’s alright. Go on through.”

She went on through the gate and crossed the metal platform, squinting against the wind and the ash, and went into the gondola and pushed through to the front. If the wire was cut or a bolt failed and the whole line plunged downwards the front was where Slake wanted to be. The gondola weighed maybe fifteen thousand kilograms and the weight of all three hundred odd riders was maybe the same. That’s three hundred crammed into a space made for a third of that. When it came to drag coefficient and the meterage of it Slake gave up but knew it would be somewhere around a hundred meters a second. And if it happened right away, as she always prayed it did at the start, that was fifteen seconds straight down, falling alongside the concrete. Ash jamming something important. Some wind shear. A heavy pair of bolt cutters or maybe a mashing of buttons and fifteen seconds and that would be all it took. If you died in that uniform would you be content? Ask yourself. With that debt over your head and the strange numbness in your feet you get when you think about this. What would they put on the raft they send you off in? Is this how you want to go?

The door grinded shut behind the last of the passengers and the technicians waved to one another outside to signal the all clear. Departing now. Down they went, more vertically than horizontally. Slake looked back and over the heads that glistened like polyps in the dim light she could see lights blinking along the side of the dam, rows of small red dots flashing from left to right and disappearing out in the ash. Brown rust tearstreaks where rebar showed through the concrete. Workers hung on wood platforms beside these marks scrubbing the rust off and patching the gaps but it seemed to her that the damage far outpaced the repairs. The banners of the Kard Electric Company, proprietors of the dam and everything above and most everything below it, hung loosely beside them. After a few minutes it rose out of sight, just a black void behind them. Another gondola passed nearby going the opposite way. Eyes watching each other from both sides. On clear days you could see the ocean. Not too much farther until she was home.

The gondola stopped after the ten minute descent on another little steel platform and the riders surged out like steam from under a pot lid. Slake was the last one out, moving very slowly. The platform was built on a bridge over one of the spillways and though she couldn’t see it in the darkness she could hear the whitewater roar of it some ways down and she stopped and peered down and retched up nothing. Another group of passengers had almost fully loaded onto the gondola when she stepped away and went down the corroded zigzag stairs to the street and went on.

A whole different city of smoke and mud. Ash season gave it some quietude in the late night and Slake walked down Pago Street and Whalebone and Ilmannette Memorial Avenue mostly alone. The streets had long flooded over with dirt and dust and grime and shit and were now hardpacked dirt but a ways beneath them you could find pavement if you looked for it. The buildings were rough. Leaning abominations most of them, once normal enough stone and brickwork that had built up out and down with the whims of the occupants. Knots of electric wire hung at every corner like bundles of mating snakes and the lines went off in every direction, buzzing ferociously under the electrical load. Air thick with the smell of burning tires and oil and the ocean on every fifth gust. Slake’s legs felt like they were walking down stairs but the rest of her didn’t. She turned her head and five Hallatins dragged out behind where she’d passed her eyes. Nowhere to stop and sit. Smashed bottles and nails glued to every window, fire escape ladder rungs all wrapped with barbed wire or just snapped off, no shopfronts, no benches. A boneplated Osamac woman pushing a cart watched her from across the street as Slake put her hands on her knees and was violently sick in the street, just her head and shoulders in the pool of sodium light, like a disembodied nightdemon stopping only to vomit.

Something touched the back of her neck. She whipped around and almost fell off balance, stumbling forward, one hand out in front of her. The other took a small fighting knife from a jacket pocket and flipped it open and she fell into a psychotic fighting stance and whipped her head around looking who touched her but there was no one there. The Osamac was gone. She was in the dark. Not even the same street, she didn’t recognize the buildings. She could hear the hiss-whine of a gasflare but couldn’t see it. What are you doing. She straightened up very slowly and spat and felt at her pockets. Nothing missing. There’s something wrong with you. Her head pounded. “Yeah,” she told nothing. She thumbed the latch on her knife and folded it back up and got it back in her jacket on the third try. “I know.”

Conquerors Row was the sole Beowend neighbourhood in the lower district and that was a tenuous label at best. Her home was a detached row-estate fallen to ruin, one of a few on the street. There was a guardpost by the front gate but they didn’t have the money to keep one and someone had set up a little tarpaulin lean-to under it. She wound back and kicked it a few times on her way past to chase the settler off and carried on around the tall wrought iron and razor wire fence to the side gate. She unlocked the first four locks and stood there a moment to wait out some dizziness and checked behind her and unlocked the fifth. She slipped through and shut it quickly behind her and did the locks and chains up again and walked up through the weedeaten garden.

The colonial-style house was white but it wasn’t doing well in its fight against the encroachment of green from the yard. They’d have to get someone to cut it back soon, she thought. She unlocked the back door and went in and shut and locked it behind her. She felt for a lightbutton on the wall and pressed it but nothing came. Just a click. There was music playing somewhere, tinny voices whispering through the house. A power cut, maybe. One more thing broken. She put her hand on the wall and shambled by memory past the front foyer to the stairs. In a parallelogram of grey light in the living room she saw the lower half of her father from where he sat on a couch, asleep. A battery powered radio played beside him. There was a piano and a baritone in the song. I’m living in a kind of daydream, fizzed the singer. I’m happy as a king. And foolish though it may seem, to me that’s everything. Slake walked up the stairs, one floor then another, then down the last hall until she was in her room with the door closed behind her.

Geissler lights in the butchershop window across the street painted her room faintly red and green but it was a complete kaleidoscope to her. She grabbed what she thought was her dresser and pulled her boots off and shrugged halfway out of her jacket and slumped facefirst onto the unsheeted mattress. The clock on the wall ticked. Couldn’t hear anything else. Her window was open, a cool and oddsmelling breeze seeping through the mesh. She fell into sleep.

One hour later, at four fifty six in the morning, Slake stood back up and looked down at her body.

The woman lying on the bed was sprawled sideways with her arms out like the image of a lion in some royal crest. A pile of gold fur in a uniform with nobody home. Dead in every way save the basest essentials. It’s you. She stood there completely and absolutely sober and watched her for a moment until she saw her chest rise and fall. Not the shudder of an overdose. She snored when she drank too much. Nothing to be alarmed about. Check anyway. She knelt on the bed and leaned in over herself with her knees to her body’s back and put two fingers up under her chin. Ba-thump. She got back up and took a look around the room. Sober as a hanging now. Nothing out of focus. She watched herself for a moment longer then turned and walked through the door out into the hall.

It was still pitch black in the hallway save for the dull quadrilateral lightshaft from the window. Old, old house. She passed through the light casting no shadow and went to the stairwell soundlessly and looked down. Silence from the floors below. The radio’s battery must be dead. She listened for her father snoring but couldn’t hear that either and noted dully he may have already left for work. Hushed sound of a bus passing outside, the squeak of rusty shocks knocking along over cracked roadwork. People waking up for real out there. Not long before dawn.

She went up the stairs through the locked door to the attic hallway and stood there on the ancient green carpet and waited. Many times she had passed through but the dust on the floor got no thinner nor had she ever left tracks. Small lizard tracks went up the left wall, over the old peeling floral wallpaper. The roof was made of glass and cast iron bars but it was grimy enough that it might as well have just been tiles. At the end of the hall was a huge old teak door, padlocked thrice, braced with steel. Getting through it would take dynamite. She took the padlock in her hand and pulled on it a little. Then she walked through the door into her great grandmother’s study.

Euphrosyne Valensa had not been in the room for ninety-eight years and it looked like it. The room was circular and the roof was a dome of stained glass with the four Sisters each taking up their own quarter. The left side held towering bookshelves topped with bronze trophies and small trinkets from the homeland. Old war medals in a little metal case that Slake herself had dug up and put out. Palm In Silver For Gallantry. Transdinesterine Campaign Medal. Beside the medals a sextant, an empty case that once held a handgun. The back end of the room was a broad window so overgrown inside and out that it let almost no light in. The floorboards were warping to the point that the support beams below were visible. Moss and mildew erupted from gaps in the hardwood like verdant lava. When she first stepped foot in the office there had been books scattered everywhere but now they were stacked neatly, damaged ones in piles on the floor, finished ones along the shelves, hundreds in number. Slake moved to the desk on the right side of the room and began her nightly routine of working through the damaged pile.

Careful work, this. It needed a delicate touch that Slake had. Her project of the past few days was a children’s book, a collection of old-world stories, hardcover and printed with bloodink that liked to get sticky when exposed to heat and humidity, both of which the study possessed in dreadful abundance. She had done most of the book save for the first few pages. Best to do it in reverse, store the book with the front cover down. Her tools were a small penknife that she summoned from memory and a hammer. Watch. She slipped the sharper edge of the blade under the corner of page five and very gently tapped it forward with her finger. Then she lowered herself to eye level with the book and gently separated the pages as far as they would go. If there were strings of ink connecting the two pages it meant she’d gone too quickly but she hadn’t. She rose up and tapped on and three minutes later the page was done. This story was awful but she nonetheless enjoyed it if only for the illustrations, a connection to the past. Like it could have been for her, once. A loutish brigand turns hero through devotion to his species. Typical tale. In later pages he became a general. She guessed he would start off as a prisoner. When she’d read the words she pried open the next and put the blade in and moved on and was soon proven correct.

When Slake reached the front cover the knife went in again but as she pulled the page open to check for damage it just opened up with a small peeling noise. No writing on this page but there was a note stuck to the flyleaf, a small square folded one way then the other. It was well-preserved and Slake could see the small bump of a wax seal on the bottom and hurried black writing. Something smelled of sulfur. Something industrial. Her first instinct was to take it out immediately but she hesitated when her finger touched the edge. No. Not hesitation. She’d stopped herself. She leaned back in the old wormeaten office chair and looked at the book and she looked up at the stained glass, the twin heads of Argei directly above her, staring down. She tapped the penknife on the desk and folded it and put it down. Alright. She took the letter out and put it on her lap and just looked at it. The old seal was still red, preserved.

It’s not a letter for you.

Who’s it for, then.

You’d have to open it to see. But it’s not your letter.

If you open this letter you will walk a path of fang and steel, flame and gunsmoke. Of this she was suddenly certain. Like there was a hand on her shoulder, fingers to her carotid, a faint whisper of assurance in her ear and sulfur in her nose.

What you should do is put it back in the book, put it on the shelf with the others, go get the next one. You don’t have to read it. You’ve got that chance.

Slake blinked. She looked over her shoulder but there was no one. Just a shelf. A small silk fan in a dusty glass case. She took the paper and unfolded it and read. It was addressed to her grandmother and she thought she could see blotches of moisture staining some of the words. The letters were scrawled quickly with a southpawed slant. In an instant she knew who wrote it. It read:

Risca

Darling daughter, I have told Iivara to give you this book for your eleventh birthday, but if you are anything like the child I remember you’ll be ready for it much earlier. So happy tenth, ninth, or perhaps eighth year. I am certain you are excelling in your studies, and you must know that I am proud of you. The smart girl I left in Meropis, however, certainly must be wondering how someone she hardly remembers could be proud.

I am writing this letter not only for well wishes but with an urgent plea: do not come looking for me or your father. I love you more than words on paper can express and for that reason I must beg you never to seek me out. The land I was born in is far and the journey there by now impossible. It is my home and it is where I’ve sought to go but it is not your home. Remember this: Meropis is your home. Embrace this fact as I have been unable to.

You cannot

An ink splatter. Streaks from the back of a hand or a tissue trying to smudge it away to no avail. Spilled post-writing. The letter continued.

But I know you will. If you’re anything like me you will not be content in one place. You will go where the wind catches your sails. Should you find yourself desperate to fly and stay still no longer you will find some of my affairs in Barathrum. Look for a colleague of mine, Staurakimos Ketas. He will have some papers and personal affairs to give to you. It is the most I can do for you. It is the only thing I can do for you.

Be safe. I love you.

Your mother,

Euphrosyne Valensa

Slake put the letter down and nudged the chair away from the desk and put her hands on her stomach and just looked at it. As far as she knew her late grandmother had never left Hallatin. Couldn’t, in her time. And she certainly had never read this. A letter for no one, then. Well. Not quite.

Somewhere deep within her a candlelight that had been burning for as long as she could remember had grown too hot by the barest fraction of a degree. You need to move. She got up and went over to the window and brushed it with her hand and looked out. Hallatin in the early morning. Smog and ash today, a light barely brighter than black rising on the city. Staurakimos Ketas. She hadn’t heard that name before and this letter was nearing a century old. Whoever they were, they were dead by now. The chances of finding whatever was left behind slim to none. Probably none. It wasn’t a good idea to go after it. And how far was Barathrum from here? Three thousand kilometers in a straight line through the interior? Six thousand if she took the coastal route? And for what purpose. “Don’t,” she said, “even entertain it. You idiot. Do not.”

Slake was tired and thinking wasn’t helping that. She looked around the room again. Her great grandmother once had left it more or less how it was now and locked the door behind her for the last time. Eventually Slake would do much the same. That day would come eventually. Maybe soon or maybe not. But she could think about that later. She crossed the floor and walked back out through the locked door, down the stairs, and back into her room, where she lay down next to her sleeping body and studied the long braid of fur on the back of her head until she fell asleep for the second time that night.

Drifting. In the dark of the night sea. Again. Here you are another night.

Don’t want to.

Don’t care.

Let me sleep.

The dreams crawled out of the depths of her, abyssal things, translucent, the colour of eggshells with their many arms and legs dragging behind them. Up into her brain they crawled and sunk their teeth into her hippocampus and she dreamt.

A woman she swore she knew was hunched over a desk in a dark room with green glass walls and a green banker’s lamp beside her. Maybe a man. Hard to say from a high angle. They hammered at the spacebar of a typewriter with their palm, their forefinger, a blank sheet clattering sideways. It reached the end and they pushed it back and resumed their work with intense focus. As if this meaningless duty was the most important task in the world. As if there was nothing else to do in the world.

Slake was deep beneath the earth in a flowstone cave, dolomite walls damp like innards. Her breath steamed. She put a hand out and walked on. She was knee deep in water and felt it growing higher, almost to her waist, but there was no panic in her. The reverberations in the small space sounded like birdcall. Small holes in the wall beside her where blind cave geckos reared their heads and clicked at her and vanished. Insects dispersed before her, skating over the water’s surface on twelve legs. Before her a figure in a red robe walked across the water holding an electric torch, the beam cutting left and right in time with their footsteps. It rounded a corner then peeked back out to regard her with huge yellow eyes, as if to check whether it was being followed. It was. Slake was there looking at it, her shirt clinging to her ribs. Then the figure turned and ran and she pushed after it but the water was neck deep now. There was nothing behind her. Nothing to go back to. Just move forward.

In a pool of crimson liquid that she thought must have been blood, two pale hands clutched a hacksaw and took hold of a rusted length of chain. It looked big enough to hold a ship’s anchor, thigh-sized, but there was already a deep cut in it and the saw slipped into the groove and began to work. Godawful droning noise from the iron, like the call of a dying whale in the hadal zone. An electric cattle prod descended out of the murk and held itself to the hand and it shrieked but it did not pause its work even for a moment to dull the pain. It just kept working and it was nearly through.

II - Preflight

Lots of waiting all the time. Wait for the skywire, wait for dusk, wait for Black Sky to be over. Two weeks after the party Slake stood in line at Kard Central Bank and ate fried mushrooms from a piece of greasy wax paper and watched a corpse get taken off the streets.

The little lizard was a pickpocket and had chosen the wrong one to pick. The woman behind her told her that he had bumped into one of the dam-masons and tried to take a string of ket. But the mason caught on and ran his assailant down and killed them with a hammer. When Slake arrived the thief was freshly dead and a crowd had formed around them and the dam-mason was telling the guards what transpired, and they were more curious than concerned. He was Beowend and so were the guards and now as the corpse was being lifted into the back of a police motorcar there was only one bystander remaining, a lone woman who looked to have maybe been the thief’s mother, maybe an aunt. Same species. She wore a long grey shawl the colour of the sky and was crouched with her head in her hands, blubbering. No one stood by her. Slake watched her for a moment as a guard went around the front of the motorcar and cranked the starter. Then she spat on the ground and had another mushroom.

She needed money. She always needed money but now she really needed it. Her father was always a good way to get some but he would ask questions. Nominally he was paying for her education in political philosophy. She had switched fields not long ago and had accepted the enormous fee and was failing. Now she needed as much as she had to get across the continent. The line moved slowly and by the time she was in the doors the mourning woman was gone and within ten minutes she was at the teller.

A deep black Simälken in a white uniform stood behind the teller’s bars with her hands on the counter. She looked at Slake with feline impassivity and asked her business.

“Withdrawal, please.” She had her bankbook in her hand already and pushed it across the mahogany.

The teller took it and inspected it, first the small image of Slake then the prior withdrawals. A regular withdrawal of three thousand a month for tuition. Small amounts infrequently. The records were to the teller’s liking and she got her pen out. “Are you making a withdrawal today?”

“…Yes.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-two thousand ket, please.”

Slake and the teller exchanged a curious look and the former fought hard not to look away. Voices of other clients echoed off the domed ceiling like moviereel chatter. Seconds passed and she passed some kind of barrier to entry, and the teller got out a form and set it before her. “That’s quite the number.”

“I’m moving across the continent,” Slake told her, already writing, “and I’d rather have it in hard currency than deal with an order of transfer.” She wrote her account number, twenty-two thousand for the withdrawal amount, and signed her name twice on the dotted lines. Her forearms ached and she wasn’t sure why.

“Understandable. It can be a hassle.” The teller looked past her client to the line, a herd of suited and dressed otherwise beformalweared people standing in neat order with their papers in their hand, and sighed. “May I ask where you’re moving?”

“Barathrum.” Slake pronounced it incorrectly. Ba-ray-thrum.

At this the teller smiled as she took the finished papers and pushed across another. Slake normally had to sign two to get four thousand ket out at a time. For a full transfer she imagined she might have to sit down and get an interview in a side office. What would their impression of her be? A woman dressed like an admiral asks for a fortune and says she plans on moving across the continent on her own. She ought to find a story. A graduation and employment in the field of biocultural anthropology. The papers were signed. She put them forward and scratched her anconeus and only then realized that the teller had said something. “What?”

“What part of Barathrum are you settling down in?” The Simälken smiled up at her, irises like rings of molten copper recessed in basalt molds. Slake hadn’t a single clue what the place even looked like let alone the specifics of its subterranean anatomy.

“The upper levels.”

“I have family in the Weavers’ Quarter,” the teller told her. “An uncle. It must be nice to be below the earth in black sky, don’t you think?”

“Just get me the money, please.”

Her smile vanished. The bankworker took the collection of papers and Slake’s bank book and shuffled them into order and told her to wait there a moment. Then she turned and walked into the back behind a line of wrought iron fencing. She vanished around a corner and now it was another waiting game. A minute passed. Two. Three. The man behind her was tapping his foot on the old marble floor and soon she was doing the same. A man in a foppish suit looked out at her from an office in the back then turned away. Seconds later he and the teller came back out and the man stepped into the till and put his palms on the counter and addressed her. The teller held a ledger book in her hands.

“Madam,” he said, leaning in towards her, “it’s my understanding that you’re looking to take out twenty-two thousand ket today, correct?”

“That’s correct,” Slake told him.

“Well.” The man she now assumed was the manager took the ledger and put it on the counter and opened it. There was a picture of her on the top, two years younger, a signature, and a list of withdrawals from the past two years. Four thousand regularly for tuition for the past seven months. Two hundred here. Five hundred. One thousand and fifty-five ket. She faintly recalled spending that on a trip out to the sandflats. A chauffeur service. Her account total had long passed the twenty-thousand mark and was now an eight and a zero.

Slake looked over the ledger again, then a third time, and asked if she could take out the remaining eighty.

Five minutes later she stood outside the bank and stared down at the four-fifths full string in her hand. Eighty stamped pieces of bronze with small inscriptions on each one, an inch across. Everything she was worth distilled down into a little under half a kilogram. The length of coins looked like a fat burnished worm and Slake like the bird that just plucked it from the guts of a hollowed bank account. Lunch had cost her ten ket. Eight small meals from this. A few decent pairs of socks. A new shirt. The next tuition payment is in four days and where are you going to get the money for that? From where will you summon the cash for a train ticket, o prodigal daughter? Hold your hat in your hands and ask a passerby? Head for the next branch before day’s end, take another eighty out there, and be far past the walls by sunset?

The thief’s mother was gone. Slake realized she was standing next to where the killing had happened. A faint stain on the concrete, bootprinted, dusted with ash. A tooth. She had a lecture in twenty minutes and it did her no good at all to be standing there. She put the money in her pocket and vanished into the grease-stained dam-top crowds. Within an hour there was no evidence in that spot that any violence had ever taken place at all.

The specimen transferred to the anthropology department was a Nyctian. Its cage was wheeled in by aides and set up on the lecture hall’s stage under the arc lamps. Its ankles were chained to the bars and it didn’t move for the two hour lesson. The department head took notes and sketched out known parts of its species’ brain on a slate blackboard.

This is how it got here:

Two hundred years ago a group of Beowend walked into a camp carved out of a solutional cave and shot every Nyctian inside. There was anthracite in the earth that they refused to leave. The bodies were left there to rot and the Beowend thought nothing of this. A few days later the bodies of the killers were found tied spread eagle to trees, decapitated. It could have gone the other way around. It may not have been precisely two hundred years ago. But that doesn’t change anything. The two were going to kill each other en masse eventually and this was as good a reason as any. This one stole something and had been in its prison for three months. A kinder fate than a hammer, perhaps. But don’t tell it that.

There were eleven species living in this land and among all of them only the Nyctians were known as the First Folk. They dwelled in the interior in great basaltic lava tubes and in karst. They could barely see in daylight and took to wearing blindfolds, or so it was said; the one in the cage got no such luxury and shut its eyes tightly when wheeled past windows. The species cherished bronze for reasons unknown and all took on their mothers’ clan names at birth. At random points in their lives they were prone to bouts of uncontrollable illustration, locked in a trance with chalk or ochre in their hands, etching the faces of the fallen, theirs and others, on the nearest walls with uncanny similarity in their artistic styles. That was the subject of today’s research, for there was proof that this one had already been in such a trance and there existed great curiosity in the department about the precise reasons.

Slake sat three rows back from the center and sketched the bat’s head in perspective, putting small ink dots on the pterygoid, the nasal aperture. When her illustration was finished she looked up to the caged being. What she’d drawn in its image looked like an inkblot test and what came to her mind when she looked at it was not a skull. No matter. Her artistic skill was never something she put much stake in. With her mind on what she’d have to get for her trip she stared at a stained glass window and watched the light be interrupted with swirls of ash until the lecture was over and it was time to work. The department had drawn straws to see who would be taking measurements on it first. Her and Issal opted to work together and drew the shortest.

The anthropology lab was a cluttered room on the top floor that reminded Slake of her great grandmother’s office if it had been properly maintained. The ceiling was a great dome of stained glass that was presently half-covered in volcanic ash, obscuring the image of the Conqueror herself, who stared down at the room below with a hot coal in one hand and a blindfold on. Along the edge of the room were old offices that were now just storerooms. Half were boarded up. Old diagrams of foreign species with notes scrawled on the edges were tacked to every square inch of wall, some on the ceiling. The floors were piled with books and discarded old typewriters and glass sample cases as though the hardwood floors were splitting open and pushing them upwards and outwards, the tectonic plates of the academy shifting and erupting with forgotten paperwork.

Slake and Issal sat across from one another at a table and examined their notes while the Nyctian was wheeled into the room in which it was stored when not being examined. Through the half-open door she could hear the low buzz of a prod as it was dragged out and shackled to an examination bench. By the time they were ready the sun had set and now the room was lit only with dim electric light, their faces gaunt and dramatically shadowed. Issal was smoking a cigarette and a haze of thin smoke hung in the room at eye level. “Weird place for a jail,” he said.

“I think the proper term is oubliette.”

“Whatever you wanna call it.” He pulled from his cigarette and tapped the ash into a tray and sat there looking out the window. “Wonder where they caught it.”

“The interior.”

“How far in, you think?”

“It can’t have been that far in if they were able to actually get it back here,” Slake speculated. She didn’t know a thing about the interior. “Maybe a few kilometers. Far side of the reservoir. Somewhere like that.”

“Probably.” He coughed. “It’s an uglylookin’ bastard.”

She nodded and held her hand out for a cigarette and he put one between her fingers. She lit it and looked at the psychograph that sat on the table between them. It was meant to fit over someone’s head but to her it looked like a brass sea mine. She knew what the measurements were and how to read them and had a faint clue of how to adjust the dials but that was it. No knowledge at all of how to put it on anything, how to resize it. She looked at the device then at Issal, who was watching her with narrowed eyes. Then she looked back down at it and picked it up. It was heavier than it looked and it looked heavy. “You wanna do this?”

“Not really,” came Issal’s reply. Now he was smiling a beaked smile that came only from the squint of his eyes and nothing else. No getting out of this one.

“Alright.” Slake took the psychograph and stared at Issal for a second longer. He inclined his head but before he could say anything else she turned and walked to the door and nudged it open with her foot and passed through.

The Nyctian was strapped to some kind of chair with its head facing towards the door and its arms and legs held down to a bench with leather belts. It was in a sort of squatting position, not one that looked particularly comfortable. There was an iron bar wrapped with cloth in its teeth and a length of thin rope tied off behind its huge leaf nose and under its chin to keep its jaws shut. A thin string of saliva ran down from the left side of the makeshift gag and hung nearly down to the floor but didn’t break. Its eyes were closed and it hardly seemed to be breathing. She thought it might be asleep.

“Hello,” she said, without knowing why. It cracked open a deep crimson eye to look at her. Wide awake. Just resting. She took a step towards it with the device held in her hands, slightly closer to her chest now. So thin, this one. Pale, too, beyond just the white fur. The leaf nose and jutting incisors told her it was in the Desmodus haplogroup but to her it just looked like it had been beaten in the face with a wok.

There was a metal support next to the Nyctian’s head with a slot for a headpiece to be screwed in. Slake did so. The bat watched her move, both eyes open now, only able to see the edge of her as she worked.

“I’m going to put this on you.” The words just fell out of her. This naked animal probably couldn’t understand a word she was saying. They were more for her than it but it was listening, its ears swiveling like radar dishes. It was easy enough to hook the headpiece up but when she swung the arm around it clocked the Nyctian in the forehead. It hissed. “Tsull’s tits. Sorry.”

Slake lowered the psychograph down onto the bat’s head and fastened it tight then set to work adjusting the dials. Its head shape was awkward and a wingnut wasn’t coming loose, so she put a foot on the chair and pulled at it and cursed until it came free. The Nyctian sat there mute as a stone, hardly moving. It reeked. Its long mane of fur was matted and discoloured, off-white, filthy. Probably hadn’t bathed in ages if ever. She took a minute to think the situation over, then undid the clasps for the prongs and lowered them, paying close attention to where they fell on its head. Two just above its ears, one more behind them. One just above each eye. Many on the forehead and more on the back, the jaw, the bizarre split lip. Then she walked in front of it with her notebook and studied it and it studied her, pupils like obsidian stones in poppy fields. Then it closed its eyes and moved no more save for the drawing of breaths.

“Can you understand me?” Slake asked. Nothing. She stared at its face for another second then walked around it and took notes.

The zygomatic was enormous and protruded nearly too far for the device to handle. Slake noted its likely inferior memory, shrunken prefrontal cortex. Thermoreceptors on the nose indicating predatory instincts and a generally violent nature. This was confirmed by small dips in the sphenoid just before the ears. Poor judgmental abilities, poor logical reasoning. Write it down, take note, commit it to memory now and for future Beowend. Curiously the occipital told her that it liked to talk. She supposed she wouldn’t have been in the mood to do so in its position either and moved on. When all was said and done she stepped back and reviewed her notes and grimaced at the portrait of a genuinely unpleasant specimen that the psychograph had shown the Nyctian to be. “They’re never too kind, these machines,” she said to it, hushed, as though Issal might have had his ear pressed to the door. “It sure wasn’t nice to me. I wouldn’t take the results personally.”

She disassembled the device and looked at the chained thing one last time. It was surely asleep now, hadn’t moved for a few minutes. Useless to try and talk to them, you know. Won’t get anywhere. She shoved the door open with her shoulder and set the psychograph down then pounded on the wall with a fist to signal for the aides to come back and wrangle it.

“Well,” said Issal. He’d been sketching a tree while she was gone, an osier with its branches dipping into a stream. Far better at illustration than she was. As soon as he saw her looking he folded the paper and set it aside. “How did it do?”

“I don’t envy it.” She handed her notes to him and he read from them, craning his head back like a senescent with a newspaper. He grimaced and handed them back to her.

“Typical.”

“Yeah. I think we’re done for the day.”

“Maybe you are. I’m going to stay around a while longer,” he replied. “Maybe get a decent nap in at the library. The power’s been out at the estate for two days now and I don’t feel like reading by lamplight.”

“Rough,” said Slake. “I’ll see you later, Issal.”

He told her goodnight and the two parted ways. When she was gone Issal opened his sketchbook up again. Slake trod off down the ancient halls and passed through the guts of the university and was soon back out in the zinccoloured night. It was not a windy day, hadn’t been for a week. In the spaces the cleaners couldn’t reach volcanic dust sat in small heaps. What once dwelled in contentment beneath the earth was pushed forth into this world against its will and was carried on air currents and now sat here. It fell heavily that night, reeking of acid. Slake pulled some loose fabric over her beak and buttoned her jacket tight and went on, a lone black outline passing before xanthic-lit windows and off into the streets.

“We don’t even sell firearms, let alone for eighty ket.”

Slake spent the rest of the evening in surplus stores and thrift markets and wasn’t having any luck. Her last stop of the night, three blocks from her estate, was a small shop in the basement of a brown brick tenement. Two rooms stacked floor to ceiling with old uniforms, backpacks, cuirasses pockmarked with holes, helmets piled like the spoils of war, proof of conquest over an ancient foe. There was a good iron falx in a locked glass case but it was well beyond her budget. Canteens were ninety ket, and holsters were off the table entirely. She’d seen the man behind the counter before at roadside food carts and in a cobbler’s shop, and now he stood with his hands in front of him and clenched them as hard as he was clenching his sabertoothed jaw.

“You really don’t?” asked Slake. Her eyelids were starting to sag like window shutters aged by the sun. She needed a cigarette and she needed to sleep but she needed supplies for the coming journey even more, so she tapped her foot and stared the man down. Leaning in wasn’t getting her anywhere.

“No rifles, no pistols, not a single bullet of any caliber.”

“Alright.” She turned and made for the door, up a flight of stairs. It had started to rain halfway through her walk home, the heavy kind where every droplet can be heard. “You have fucked yourself over,” she said to her burry reflection in a puddle of runoff. “You’re incorrigible. Have I ever told you that?”

Incorrigible indeed. A motorcar came rolling up the street, a six wheeled one with a wide flat bed on the back carrying day labourers back home. The chassis was sandblasted, no paint. One flat tire. A pile of workers holding onto the side stared at her as they passed and she stared back and when she looked back down the puddle was gone and so was her reflection. She crossed the street to a cigar store and with the last of her money purchased two packs of cigarettes and lit one as soon as she was back in the street. Then she walked the rest of the way home, her fur soaked, soon reeking of tobacco.

The power was back on but Slake hardly noticed. Back in through the side door. She took one boot off then unbuckled the other and kicked and it went sailing down the hall and left a bootprint on the wallpaper. Her jacket was left in a soggy heap. There was music playing from somewhere. Likely the arsenal. That was her last stop of the night, where her father kept the rifles, the uniforms, his old army supplies from his younger years. But it was also where her father kept himself when he was out of the factory and not sleeping and he, the benefactor she had dismissed without his knowledge or permission, was not who she wanted to talk to that night.

She was halfway up the stairs when her name. “Slake, daughter. Is that you?”

“Go rake shit,” she called back.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said I’m coming.” Slake cursed again, turned, and made for the arsenal.

Loath though she may be to talk to her father, the arsenal was the best room in the house, pristinely maintained above all others. Slake’s father’s name was Ducas. She didn’t know his blood name by heart but before he was a manager at a cement factory he had been an officer for the electric company, a high one, the kind that wears and carries steel and is given medals for bravery and honour in the field of battle. The trophies he clung to through his spectacular fall from the upper levels of society were arranged on the walls and on cabinets without a speck of dust or corrosion on them. A portrait of himself in a black uniform, sixty pounds and thirty years ago. Two suits of armor by the door, ancient family heirlooms, worn by a long dead matriarch who took both into battle and died in the one on the right. Rifles above the fireplace, hunting shotguns on racks on the wall. And in the center of the room beneath an enormous chandelier, an in-progress war diorama with small metal figures dotted about. Ducas sat in a chair on the far end with a pair of brass watchmaker’s glasses on, painting a miniature soldier. There was a stack of papers beside him and more on an overflowing mahogany bookshelf behind him. This was his room and in Slake’s mind, even if he died, it would remain that way until the house fell to pieces.

“Slake,” he said. The two hadn’t seen one another in a week. Her father smiled, she did not. He beckoned her over and she took two tentative steps closer, not daring to put her hand on the table. “Sisters, girl, I’m not going to bite your head off. How are you?”

“Tired.” The simple truth to which he nodded sagely. She suspected he knew the meaning of that word on a deeper level.

“Well, aren’t we all. These are trying times to be a Conqueror. Where’s your uniform?”

“I took the jacket off. It’s raining out.”

Ducas took the magnifying glasses off and turned to the water-streaked window. Like he needed proof before he could accept that explanation. Her word alone was not enough. Slake took a step back. “I’ve had a long day,” she told him. “I’m going to go sleep.”

At this her father set his brush down and leaned forward to put his hands on his knees. He looked exhausted before but now he looked like he might deflate, like all the energy he may have had was about to escape through a newly poked hole that Slake has just made. “Slake,” he said, sounding like he was about to plead with her. “Stay a while, please. Just for a few minutes to talk.”

She looked at him for a few moments, then to the door. You could leave. He wouldn’t come after you. The bed’s just upstairs. She looked back at him and moved to sit in a chair at the opposite end of the table. “Alright.”

The two of them stared across the table at one another like duelists. She spoke first. “How was your shift?”

“Terrible,” he told her, “just terrible. The head of maintenance is out with the rising lights, the poor woman, so we’re stuck with a replacement. I tell you, I don’t know how she keeps the rest of them in line. A bunch of animals when there’s no one around to whip them into shape. Do you know how many cigarette breaks a gang of Čalo take a day if they’re not being watched?”

Ducas stared at his daughter as if she might know the answer to this and all he got back was a look so blank it could be drawn on with chalk. He held up his left hand and extended the three fingers remaining on it, then did it again. “That’s how many. I’d sack the lot and hire nothing but Conquerors, but good luck getting them off the dam. Not that I blame them, the way the lower city looks these days. It’s just a big slum that we live in, isn’t it. It wasn’t so bad when I was an officer.”

“Uh-huh,” Slake grunted.

“Uh-huh? That’s all?” He leaned to the side and hocked something up into a brass cuspidor on the floor beside him. “Slake, you’ve got no idea how far we’ve fallen. When I signed into the company there wasn’t a single man or woman beside me who wasn’t a Conqueror. Not a one. When I left they’d let a Mekkara in. You should have seen the graduation photographs. They made him stand in the back and even then he stood head and shoulders over the man in front of him like something from fiction. Now a full quarter of what they let in aren’t Conquerors. The upper species only, of course, but imagine that. The life of a Beowend is hardly for the faint hearted nowadays. But I tell you, it might just scare the underspecies bastards we used to round up more that society is decaying around us. Imagine it, some hardened thug or pickpocket or any manner of degenerate waking up one morning and being no different from the average person. Maybe they’d start killing one another more, just to prove they haven’t lost the art form. Do our jobs for us.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe indeed. But you,” said Ducas, gesturing with a tilt of his hand across the table at her. “I put you in political theory for a reason, you know. I’m an old man, Slake. I’d be retired had I stayed with the company. Only the young have the right to carry any sort of torch and throw it, even if it flickers in the rain, into tomorrow. How are your lectures going, by the way?”

It took Slake a second and a half to realize she’d been spoken to. She had taken a small metal soldier in her hand and was inspecting it when she caught his gaze. “They’re going well,” she told him effortlessly. “We’re covering Ellisian political thought, late Conquest-era. Nearly in the finals.”

To this Ducas nodded once more, like he’d been agreed with. “Very good.”

Back to staring now. He had something more to say. Slake didn’t know what about him gave him that look but she knew it well and something was coming. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms but that did nothing at all to soothe her. Ducas reached down beside him and fetched a sheaf of papers and set it on the desk. “Slake, what species is the registrar at the academy, if I may ask?”

Slake thought her heart was about to fall out of her with all the veins and arteries still attached. Through the mouth, or through the other end? Whichever came first. She knew what was in those papers. The implications. “A Simälken,” she told him, very calmly, as he unwound the strings.

“Sisters, they don’t train them like they used to.” He sounded normal, and she thought that was a good sign. Keep your eyes on him, not the paper. Focus. “The season’s tax is coming up. You’d think living down here is punishment enough, eh? Anyways. I was having my accountant - good man, another cat, academy ought to hire him - give it all a look to see if everything was in order. Well. They haven’t billed me for your last semester.”

Her heart sounded like a trip hammer. Could it be felt through the table? She put a hand to it but thought not. “As in, the payment just never went through?”

“That’s what it looks like, yes.”

“Well. Maybe we ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Oh, that’s a tempting course of action,” he replied, still looking at the papers. The one he held had a stamp at the bottom and even if she couldn’t see it in detail she knew he wasn’t pulling this out of thin air. “I certainly don’t need lighter pockets. But if they find the money hasn’t gone through, they’ll pull your degree and make those years of work worthless. I’ve seen it happen and that fate won’t befall my daughter.”

“So what will you do about it?”

“I’ll have a courier send an inquiry tomorrow. Just to let them know that they’ve made an error and that I’m happy to correct it. I don’t want to put you at risk of anything.”

Tonight. You need to leave tonight. Steal from your father, take what you need from the university, and go. Hop a train. A boat. Anything. Just go. She had to fight to keep her legs from carrying her off right then and there. “Alright,” she told him. “Thank you.”

“Not a problem.”

Then there was silence in the room. A wall clock somewhere. Piano music. Rain on leaded glass panes. Somewhere blocks away she thought she heard someone holler a name. Slake didn’t know she’d been sweating until a single drop of it ran down beside her eye and fell into the seat of her pants. “Shall I let you go?” asked Ducas. Slake took just a moment to think. Can’t look too hesitant. Then she nodded and stood and stretched.

“Thank you for talking, Slake. I don’t mean to intrude on you too much. Really. But I don’t see much of you, so… well, I take what I get.”

“Of course,” she replied. “I’m sorry that we haven’t seen one another much. You’re busy, I’m busy.”

“Adulthood’s not what you thought it would be, hm?” He put his hands on his stomach and smiled at her with his eyes. His jacket was small on him and he had to keep the buttons undone. “Pleasant dreams.”

“And to you.” Slake backed out of the room. As soon as she was out of sight she turned and rushed for the stairs like the floorboards were falling away behind her. Halfway up the stairs she thought she heard someone call her name and was tempted to ignore it but something compelled her to stop and she stood there listening.

“Slake?” Her father.

Consider this now. Were she to leave this house tonight would she look back on this talk with joy? The small metal soldiers. An oversized uniform. The rifles on the wall. Commit that all to memory and piece together a picture in the mind, a room with her father in it that would have to serve as all of him from that point on. The final and definitive Ducas, frozen in daguerreotype, blurry at the edges. She replied. “Yes?”

“Come back. Just for a moment.”

Slake walked back into the arsenal. Her father was retrieving a cigar from a humidor, a long one, Imperial Silver brand. He looked very tired now, more tired than she’d ever seen him. All around his eyes his dark skin was creased like rhinoskin and he stood with his back hunched. This was the first time she had seen him and thought he looked truly old. He’d need a cane some time soon. A year from now, maybe. “Care for a cigar?” he asked her, offering the box out. There was only one left. She shook her head no and he leaned up against the table and struck a match and lit it the right way but didn’t pull on it. He just held it and looked at her. Like he wasn’t the only one being frozen in time that night.

“If you were in trouble,” he said, “deep trouble. The kind that puts your back against the wall. Puts the fear of death in you. Would you tell me?”

She wasn’t going to. Wouldn’t even dream of it. Not then and not ever unless forced at gunpoint. But she knew what he was saying and she thought he knew that. “Of course,” she told him. “I wouldn’t keep things from you.”

“Good.” He nodded once and only then put the cigar in his beak and puffed awkwardly on it. “That’s all.”

She turned and left the room. The floorboards sagged under her feet and her back hurt and as desperate as she was to rest she stopped and turned back and looked into the arsenal one last time. Ducas stood over his diorama with his cigar in his beak and his hands on the table, surveying the battle. On the right side where Slake had sat a company of black clad soldiers ran across a faux-mud field with their rifles blazing. One figure held a thumbsized banner aloft. Her father looked tired in the way an old machine looks tired, when its bearings are failing and its tolerances are slipping and there’s a knocking in the engine that no trip to the mechanic will fix. He didn’t look back at her as she left and soon she turned and made her way up to the second floor and was alone again.

This was her last night in Hallatin and she was becoming acutely aware of it but saw no other way to proceed with the evening other than the usual routine. Nothing to be done while her father was awake. She bathed then made her way to her room and inspected her wardrobe. All uniforms, few of them useful. A few years in the Rangers taught her to pack light and she figured one set would do. A black uniform shirt, a rubberized rain cape. Three thousand kilometers to Barathrum. She picked out a pair of burgundy jodhpurs and ten pairs of footwraps and laid it all out on the floor. Six thousand kilometers on the coastal route. She heaved open a trunk at the end of her bed and retrieved a large knife in a leather sheath and took it out and felt the sharpness with her thumb. It was dull but that could be fixed later and she threw it down with the rest. Her boots were by the door, her good ones. No gun. Food from the kitchen. Not enough cigarettes for a long journey but she set them on the bed and moved on. She took the brand new pack from beneath her bed and laid it on the floor and stuffed her socks and the knife in then sat back and thought.

There were other things she was missing but she’d never been beyond the city walls and didn’t know what to expect. Hadn’t a single clue. Matches, of course. An axe would’ve been good but even she couldn’t walk the streets with one of those without being questioned. She didn’t have a compass but she’d be on a train or a boat so no need. A notepad? She threw one in. Bandages? Alcohol? Rope? A tarp? “Idiot,” she told the floor. “You’re a lunatic. A psychograph would not be kind to you nor should it.”

When her meager packing was done she put the backpack beside her on her bed and lay there on her back with a cigarette in her hand. All else that she needed she’d take half an hour after she heard her father’s footsteps pass her room. Her time counting was precise and by then he’d be asleep. Her last night on her bed. Not even in it, no sleeping. Come morning she’d be somewhere else. This was a gate of sorts, she thought, but are those not attended by those who’d lower the bar if unpaid? Something in her wanted to shriek but she pushed it down and pulled from her cigarette and waited until it was time.

III - Hegira

Exactly half an hour after her father had gone to his chambers Slake got up and took her pack and made for the first floor. She stuck close to the walls so the floorboards didn’t creak and avoided the fifth and twelfth steps down into the foyer. They wouldn’t wake anyone but she was taking no chances. She stood in the front hall for a moment and just looked around. The wallpaper, the painting of an uncle she’d never met. Then she moved on and was soon in the arsenal.

She turned the light on and almost everything was as it had been left. The papers were gone and the scent of tobacco lingered. From a cabinet near the door where the unimportant things were kept she found a length of tarred rope and took it. A canteen. A small gas stove that she suspected was broken. In an old burlap case she found an ancient pair of binoculars and took them too. Might as well take any gold bars she finds, too, she thought. There was a small safe in the corner that she didn’t know the code to but she nevertheless spun the dials a few times. She tried her birthday, then her father’s. Then she spun the dials aimlessly a few more times. No luck.

A gun. She needed a gun. There was no law beyond the walls and besides she’d feel better with one in her possession. The only ones she could find in the room were long guns. She took a semiautomatic from the wall above the fireplace and held it in her hands but like an axe she couldn’t walk the streets with it and it wouldn’t fit in her pack. Her father’s old marksman rifle was on another wall with the five-eyed taxidermied skull of an animal just below it. Not that either. Suddenly she stopped and stared at the armor by the door. What caught your eye? It took her a moment but she realized she was staring at an empty holster on its hip and immediately switched to searching the bookshelves and cabinets until she found a large brass case.

Slake knelt and set it down on the floor and undid the clasps and lifted the lid. Inside a colossal five shot revolver with wood grips sat in red velvet with ten finger-length cartridges and a small bottle of oil beside it. A tag on the top side of the case read Bistell & Daughters Repeating Pistols, East Damtop District, Hallatin. It was open-frame, gate-loaded, a small manufacturer’s stamp on the grip. The whole thing was the length of her forearm. She took it and lifted it out of its case very carefully and tilted it sideways to check to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t. She put the safety bar in place and raised it in two hands and leveled it at the fireplace, then at the table. Good sights. “Alright,” she told it. It took her half a minute to load it and when she was finished she put it and the remaining rounds and the oil into a side pouch of her pack and put the case back on the shelf from which it came.

She turned the lights back off when she left and made her way to the disused kitchen and pulled open the pantry. Canned fish, jarred fruit, old dusty tins she knew were out of date. They were too heavy for her liking but there wasn’t an alternative so she filled the remainder of her pack with them. It weighed nearly thirty pounds. No more room for anything else. She left the kitchen without looking back and made for the side door. Boots on, hallway lights off behind her. How long until he notices your absence? It could be tomorrow. How fast do missing posters go up? Or would it be buried under all the others in a day. She put her boots on and took a moment to think over the contents of her pack. If she was missing something she’d find out in a hurry.

This is it. Last few moments at home and have you anything to say goodbye to? No. Well. Nothing you care enough about. She unlocked the deadbolt and pushed the door open and shut it tight behind her. It had stopped raining and the ash was coming down again, small white specks against a slate sky that caught the light from Geissler tubes a few streets over and turned technicolour. The air smelled of sulfur and cooking meat and sawn lumber. She pulled a cloth mask up over her beak and walked out through the overgrown yard and into the street, heading for the dam, hands balled in her pockets. She looked back only once, three blocks away on a rise in the road, but could not see the estate through the haze.

Hallatin seldom slept and the skywire was packed with night labourers and merchants and all manner of wretches summoned up from the lower city. None looked at Slake and she looked at no one. In the glass she could see the dull outline of her eyes and further beyond that not a thing. The gondola seemed to be ascending from the abyssopelagic zone with a cargo of bottom feeders. Minutes later it approached the dam. The concrete expanse of it lurched into view like an enormous palm reaching from the darkness and enveloped them. There were gaps and dents taken from it and the iron rebar within had been washed out in long tear streaks, not just stains but permanent fixtures. Then the skywire ground to a halt and they were at the top.

The university had guards but they’d seen Slake enough times in her militaria to not pay her any mind. One of them mock saluted her beside the gate but where she’d normally chastise him for some made-up deficiency in his outfit she instead walked by without a word. The grounds were devoid of life and nothing moved, though the windows were lit, painting black webs across the manicured courtyard. From the third floor above her beneath a limestone carving of some homeland animal a pale face darkened the window and stared at her as she passed by then vanished and returned to its studies.

Her bootheels clicked on the tile floors and reverberated off the walls like the sounds of a distant battle but there was hardly a soul around save for a cluster of students near an enormous oak door, smoking from pipes and conversing quietly. She thought she recognized one among them but didn’t dare to turn her head. None called out or came after her and to this Slake thought a silent prayer of thanks and moved up the stairs. Without any light coming in from the vaulted glass ceiling the university was in penumbra. Up to the second floor, the third. Linguistics down the southern hall and anthropology in the north. She took a moment and looked around the corner to see if she could see any reflections in the windows, any movement. There was none and she felt immensely foolish for worrying but nevertheless hurried on and climbed the flights to the lab and shut the door behind her.

The lights were on. Everything was as it had been left including Issal’s papers, among them further illustrations of great mulleins and hellebores and other greenery. A discarded pen on the floor. His overcoat hung over the back of a chair. Slake froze and looked about the room but there was no one. She now had a time limit. He may have been asleep in the library but she herself wouldn’t leave her affairs for long and she suspected that he wouldn’t either. She set her pack down by the door and moved slowly, eyeing the stacks of papers lining the room for anything that resembled a map or a dossier of names and addresses or anything that could have been of use.

What exactly she was looking for here she didn’t know but she didn’t find much. A stack of failed ethnology papers in one corner with enough red ink to make her eyes hurt. Water damaged leatherbound books. Whole stacks of string-wrapped sheets that she didn’t have the time or the space to look through. She pulled the drawers open and browsed them quickly. After five minutes she found within a hardcover textbook a rail map a generation older than her great grandmother and while she suspected it would do her no good she tucked it in her jacket and moved on. Soon there was nothing else to check in the main room. All junk, all new, none useful.

Slake tested the door to one of the side rooms with a blank brass nameplate on the outside. It was locked but it had give to it. She put an ear to the wall and listened for footsteps but heard no one, so she wound back and shoulder checked the door and it fell open with little resistance. There were no lights in this room, a hole where a switch once was, but with the light in the doorframe she could see rows of wood cabinets along the walls in vertical alphasyllabic order. She crossed the room in a second and traced the categories until she found the first letter of her surname and was soon pulling open a cabinet marked Euphrosyne. But it was empty save for an insect the size of her palm that chittered at her and she shut it immediately.

Staurakimos was next and to her surprise that section was not empty. There were a few loose sheets of paper that threatened to fall apart in her hands when she lifted them up and held them out and inspected them. A transfer order for a list of numbered natives. Damoyen, Nyctian. Recondite results of tests related to ribcages and lungs. She couldn’t make sense of it but she nonetheless took them and left the room, pulling the door closed behind her. There was dust on the floor and a splinter of wood from the door frame but she kicked that aside and it looked alright.

Five minutes later she had searched two of the three other rooms but found nothing in them. In one there was an old sextant that she thought might have been useful but it was bulky and she ended up leaving it. She stood in the center room with her fists clenching and unclenching at her side and looked about. There was only one more room left and she knew what she was going to see if she opened it but she had to check. It would keep her up if she didn’t at least try. So she took the key from its hook on the wall and unlocked the door. Before she entered she put the key back on the wall again and only when she had double checked for silence did she step into the Nyctian’s room.

The bat stood with its back against its cage with its front to her and it squinted in the sudden brightness. Wide awake but what finer moment than this to be. It held up a slender hand to block the light and evaluated her with enormous red eyes and something about it seemed guilty. Like she had walked in on something she ought not to have. “Hello again,” Slake whispered, to no reaction. She looked behind her and pulled the door shut as if to give it some privacy. There wasn’t much in this room. Most of it had been cleared out to make way for the cage and all that remained were a few metal fileboxes in the corner in which she found nothing. She could feel its eyes on her back, scrutinizing her work. What may have been going through its chiropteran mind she could not possibly fathom.

There was nothing here for her. She had a hunch that that would be the case but now she could sleep about it. When she turned back to look at the Nyctian again it had moved imperceptibly and in complete silence to wrap its hands around the bars of the cage near where the padlocked chain held it shut and it was now staring at her intently, blank-faced, like a nocturnal peripatetic waiting to receive its daily wisdom to ponder. The fur on the back of her neck rose immediately and she didn’t know why.

It looked at her. She looked at it. No words were exchanged and neither of their expressions shifted a muscle. Slake held up a finger and put it to the end of her beak and it blinked at her. She couldn’t decipher whether that had any meaning, but if it had said nothing yet she assumed it would say nothing to anyone. She backed out of the room and shut the door behind her and went to her pack and opened the side pocket where she kept her cigarettes but the pouch was empty. The opposite side that held her pistol told her she’d simply left them at home, all of them. She cursed aloud and stood up and tapped her foot a few times and just then she thought she heard a noise.

It came either from her left or below her, maybe in the Nyctian’s room. A metallic sound, very quiet. A click then a scrape, and nothing else. She froze in place and listened again. Ten heartbeats. Twenty. A floor below someone coughed. Somewhere outside kilometers distant the growl of a truck’s engine downshifting. It’s an old building. Stress makes people hear things, she thought. Lots of old pipes in these walls. It’s nothing.

She could make the journey without a great many things but smokes were not one of them and with a silent apology she walked over to where Issal’s coat hung over a chair. He kept the pack he was smoking on the exterior breast pocket and she shook loose from it the only two cigarettes it held. In an interior pocket he kept a second and that one was full, but as she withdrew her hand she felt the familiar weight of bronze in it as well and pulled out a small string of ket and stared at it. Well. Not the first time you’ve stolen tonight and if you would do it from the man who raised you, a friend who you have likely laid eyes on for the last time hours ago is of no concern. She put both objects in her pocket.

When she turned the Nyctian’s door was open and it was standing up with her handgun in its hands. Before she could think to say anything it raised it and aimed between her eyes. “Get your hands up,” it told her, and squeezed the trigger halfway. All Slake could think of was that it had a lower city accent.

Everything she was thinking about moments prior evaporated. She didn’t even realize that a gun was pointing at her until a few seconds later. “Last warning,” it told her, and she slowly raised her hands to head height. It was two meters away, maybe less. The muzzle looked like it was kilometers across. She could see the rifling of the barrel and the cupronickel jacketing of the bullet that would kill her. She thought her legs might give out but they didn’t.

“Turn around.” She took a step back and made an about face as slowly as she could, not daring to drop her hands. The room was oscillating. A sharp electric buzz in all her senses.

“What do you want?” Slake asked. In the window she could see the reflection of her captor. The pistol was double action and it had the trigger pressed almost all the way back. The hammer was an errant heartbeat away from falling. A twitch and everything she was and could have been would be on the floor in front of her in a smoking puddle.

“I want you to keep your hands up,” the Nyctian said, “and tell me the fastest way out of here.”

“You just want out.”

“That’s right.” Slake felt weightless. The Nyctian was singularly unbothered by the situation. She had not yet seen his expression change. “Tell me this and you’ll never see me again.”

“And if I don’t tell you?”

“You don’t have to die here,” it told her, “but you would.” Despite the frailty in its arms the pistol hadn’t yet wavered and she knew any shot it took would hit true.

“If you think you can kill me and still escape,” said Slake, “you’re wrong. You won’t make it past the end of the hall.”

“Why would that be?”

“Because that gun you’re holding is very loud. If you shoot me everyone in this building will hear it. Students and faculty and the police, and the police have rifles. You’d be shot. Or drawn and quartered and it’ll all have been for nothing.”

“No,” said the Nyctian. “Not nothing. I’ll have killed an Interloper and that’s a good way to spend a life.”

“Well.” There was no arguing with that. It shifted its weight from one foot to another and spared a quick glance behind it to the door that Slake didn’t even see. It looked neither angry nor sullen and she suspected that it had rehearsed such a scene many times. “At the end of the hall is a staircase,” she told it, speaking very slowly. Her cere and the skin around her eyes was sweating and she had to blink to clear them, each one perhaps her last. “You’re on the fifth floor. Go down two flights then head right at the landing and go to the end of the hall. There’s a window with a fire escape. Pull the latch left and down to open it. The walls are low and they should be easy to get over. Then you’re out.”

“Was that the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” The Nyctian had not yet moved. It looked like it was contemplating something and that was the truth. She could see it breathing in its reflection, its ribcage like twin harps, expanding and contracting like blanched bellows. In the silence all she could hear was her heartbeat.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Don’t. There are-”

Just then the door opened and Issal stepped in. He barely had time to see what was going on and before he could open his mouth the bat swung and shot him in the forehead.

Slake hit the ground and to her shock was still alive. No blood on her and more importantly she could think but she couldn’t hear. Everything was ringing. Dust fell from the ceiling and covered the floor, her clothes, the stacks of books and the table. She looked up and saw the lower half of Issal in the doorway. The bat was standing with one hand against the wall with its mouth agape. Like it had just snapped out of a violent fugue state and was only now conscious of its actions. The recoil had knocked the gun out of its hands and sent it clattering to the floor between them and they both saw it at the same time.

The two dove for it but the Nyctian was faster. It raised it and swung it backhanded into her parietal and she fell clutching her head. It wound up and kicked her in the ribs then dashed for her pack and grabbed it and sprinted off down the hall. She felt blood welling up into her hands but when she stood she found her footing was steady and she stepped over a pile of knocked over books to the door where Issal lay with the back of his head flowered open, pieces of his skull unfolded like petals. A pint of his brains were soaked into the hardwood floor and Slake thought she saw some mild surprise in his obliterated visage that his days in the theater and his artistic skill and everything he’d ever dreamed about had just left the world and would not return.

Thirty seconds later a Beowend face appeared at the top of the stairs and stared with their beak open at Slake standing in a cloud of gunsmoke with a corpse beneath her feet. There was a hole in the far wall where the bullet had passed. A fine mist of blood everywhere. They turned immediately and vanished. She heard their feet pounding down the stairs and a scream for help.

Go. Now. Down the stairs and into the night.

Slake ran for the stairs and threw herself down them, taking the steps two at a time. Her side was in pain and her head was worse. It occurred to her she was panicking but the awareness changed nothing within her. At the bottom of the steps a small crowd had assembled, a handful of professors shaken from late night stupors and students who’d stayed late. Her head was still bleeding and someone put their hand on her shoulder and helped her down onto the landing. People were talking but they sounded distant, like they were in another room. They don’t know yet. Use this.

“Are you alright?” asked one voice.

“You’re bleeding,” said another.

“I’ll live,” she told them, and looked to the end of the hall. The window was open and no one else seemed to have noticed. The Nyctian was gone as was everything she’d brought with her. Her whole life in a little bag. Keep moving. “I ran down when I heard the shot. Slipped and hit my head. What happened?”

“I’m not sure. The guards are on their way up.”

“Alright.” She took a few steps back and they let go of her shoulder. When it became apparent she wasn’t a victim the crowd’s attention turned and they kept looking up the stairs, some hiding behind pillars or walls as if to shield themselves from further gunfire. Or to see if someone might descend and proclaim themselves the shooter. The promise of further violence was more enticing than a potential victim of it. “I’m going to go clean myself up,” she told no one in particular, and stepped quickly to the second set of stairs and hurried down into the foyer. A few men with guns stomped up past her and started shouting for all to disperse. When she reached the foyer there was someone in a side room speaking rapidly into a telephone without pause for breath.

When Slake reached the outer courtyard she walked to the gate with great confidence and strode past the guards once again without looking at them. They were talking between themselves and glancing back at the university but when they saw her they watched her go. There was blood staining her collar already. Blood in her eye, too, which she blinked away. “Ma’am?” She didn’t even look at them and continued down the avenue until she was around a corner. Then she pulled her mask up and ran, the string of ket she took from Issal clinking in her pocket.

When she stopped three blocks later she was completely out of breath and she stood with her back to a wall and looked down the street and listened. A stray howled in an alley somewhere. Drunks conversing on a balcony across the street. The click of a draft horse pulling a wooden cart with boxes of what she thought was fruit in the back. Its Damoyen driver said something to the horse and nudged its flank with the heel of his boot. Still that ringing but it was quieter now.

There was no one after her but that wouldn’t last long. Wouldn’t last an hour if they bothered to talk to anyone at the stairs. Yes, officer, that was Euphrosyne Slake that came down and she reeked of blood and gunpowder. The specimen’s missing, too. Her address is in the directory, just ask the registrar.

The wind was blowing and on it came the scent of woodsmoke and rubber and the ash still came down heavily. From around the corner a tractor with a sweeper on the front and pulleys and chains along the side came onto the street and a work gang walked in front of it, all armed with brooms and masks. They looked like extras in a low budget stage play about trenchfighting. They pushed the ash that had collected into the gutters into the middle of the street and the sweeper collected it into a bin at the back. Slake watched them go and in their wake the street looked a bit cleaner. Within a day it would look no different than it just had.

It was two thirty in the morning. Maybe closer to three. There were no passenger trains running and there wouldn’t be until the next morning but by then it could be too late. She could escape into the lower city, where most of them were, but she figured that that would be the next stop of any constabulary that came for her. Post a guard at the stations and look for any Beowend trying to get aboard. There was one rail yard on the dam, though, the Southern side.

What are your chances of making it outside the city limits? She didn’t know where the next town was. No, she did. Far but not that far. Not a walk, but maybe a drive or a train ride. But there was no future for her here anymore, and beyond the guilt was the complete certitude of her demise here, spiritual or otherwise, in that city. “No,” she said aloud. Her voice didn’t sound like hers and she suspected she may have broken a rib. “You gotta go. Right now. Come on.”

The bleeding had mostly stopped and she wiped her forehead with her arm to stop the last of it from running into her eyes. She had the look of something dragged from a shell crater and laid out in a field hospital. You have to move, she thought. There’s a train station on the South end. Go there. She went South, taking alleyways and back routes she’d memorized. She stayed far clear of Sloe Boulevard and the main roads and the skywires.

Slake had felt like this before, once. This terror. A long time ago but not far from here. She could not remember the source but she hadn’t thought it would ever return. The gravity of everything would sink in later but now there was only flight.

The train yard was not as big as she’d expected and there weren’t nearly the amount of trains she wanted. The station was called Upper Mountain Central Station, a copper-roofed stone building with three large domes and a huge iron gate around it on all sides to keep those with intentions like hers out. Past the building two dozen tracks lay side by side with three cargo trains being loaded. A team of workers watched a massive steam crane pick up a container of coal and swing it sideways in a slow arc and set it down on a flatbed where they latched and chained it in place then stepped back to wait for the next. When the cars were full a shunter pulled it slowly forward and an engineer threw a switch behind it and it reversed again into another train of cars and it was soon hooked up.

Slake crouched near the edge of the fence behind a pile of old rebar. This was as near to the city wall as she could get without being in the searchlights. There was a guard tower somewhere behind her. An ancient and barely legible ad for a cobbler lead painted onto the wall. Beside that a much newer sign reading Trespassers Will Be Shot. It had started to rain again and long ovals of light were skidding aimlessly across the slick concrete. Behind the wall there was yet more light and when she craned her neck she could see the canopy of a forest a few meters back from it. The station was high in the mountains and she could see the barely lit forms of hilltops in the distance. She had been close to the walls before but never outside them and a small part of her managed to sum up something resembling excitement. Just past there is where your new life starts. Meters away. Not how you wanted to enter it but here you are.

She waited for a few minutes and just watched. In the tower from which they were shone she could see someone’s outline moving the searchlight from side to side and eventually they stepped away and it came to a stop. Five seconds passed, ten, and she knew she’d have no better opportunity. In the cover of semidarkness she dashed from the rebar and pressed her back to the vine-covered fence and felt her way along. It could be climbed with ease but there was razor wire at the top, black with rust, interspersed with sharp glass from broken bottles. She pulled at the cyclone fence every few meters until she felt a spot with some give. She lowered herself to the ground and shimmied on her stomach under the small gap and just as she pulled her tail through a ray of light fell through the ash and rain and illuminated the spot where she had just been.

There was no cover. Just a flat expanse of tracks, maybe two hundred meters from where she crouched to the nearest train. The electrical lines overhead were as thick as anchor chains and the breeze whistled through them. Beyond that the sounds of cars being linked for imminent departures and the low rumbling of a steam crane. Something about it sounded broken, like it needed new parts that it would never get. An occasional shout came across the yard from a tinny speaker. Weeds grew from cracks in the concrete, foreign and strange-coloured ones with odd leaves and dark seedy fruit, seeds carried in from parts of Meropis that no one save for the train crews had seen.

Most importantly there were no passenger trains. There was a dynamometer car and a tie crane hooked to a small engine but Slake knew that they would be occupied and likely wouldn’t go far from the city. There were cabin cars in a distant corner of the yard but from what she could see they were half disassembled for scrap and would go nowhere. The rest were freight. There were conflats with small vehicles chained to them and gondola cars with tarps stretched over the top. A few boxcars, tank cars. A few mandatory armed cars with holes carved out of the side. She could see the barrels of watercooled machine guns sticking out from them, the rivets from where steel plates had been fastened on. One car held a twin-barreled cannon so large that it had to be from a naval ship. Certainly those would be occupied and they were ruled out immediately.

The closest train to her was her only option and there was no way to describe it other than beastlike. The engine was huge and had a deep red glow beneath it from an ancient RITEG somewhere deep in its core. On the front was a colossal sawblade ripped from a mill. Its name was stenciled in white letters on one side but she couldn’t make it out. She counted twenty-six cars behind it, a third of them armed. No boxcars among them. Nearest to her was a tank car and she decided that that would be her destination. It had the best cover. A team of workers was going along the sides of each car and she assumed it wasn’t long until the train left. They looked between the cars and then stepped back as it lurched forward and came to a stop to test if everything was secure and everything was. She thought she saw something on the tank car move. A lever flipping on its own, or maybe someone sitting on it. Then she blinked and it was gone.

In five minutes she had summed up her courage to make the sprint as many times but every time something made her stop. Thrice someone had emerged from the engine and looked back at the rest of the train. Once a team of railroad bulls in armor walked alongside it with torches and shined their lights into the crevices. One of them had something with six legs on a leash and it snarled at the tank car but they quirted it and it whimpered and went on. The fifth time she had just lost her nerve, tried to will her body to run but her legs didn’t move. She counted to thirty, and tried again and while her arms left the ground her legs still did not and she barely caught herself. She cursed and sat back and before she could start the count again the train blared its horn twice and lurched forward.

A huge iron gate started to grind open. It rolled inwards on wheels in deep grooves in the concrete. The left door got stuck and the engine powering it whined until it came free with a colossal noise like a bomb going off that echoed thrice across the yard. The train that Slake was to leave on started to disappear through it and she would get no other opportunity than this.

The pressure was enough to make her move and she got up and sprinted for the train. She felt like she’d never run so quickly in her life but her pace was average for someone who’d been kicked in the chest not long before. Atomic trains moved fast and it was at a walking pace in seconds. Soon she wouldn’t be able to catch it. She tripped on a stray rail hidden under the wet ash but she caught herself and kept running. As she reached the gate and came alongside the train a searchlight swung and illuminated the gravel before her and then it moved sideways and she was caught in the light.

The wheels screamed against the rails but through that and her heartbeat she thought she heard someone behind her yell to halt. It was coming on morning and the ground was taking on the colour of gunmetal. The train was getting faster and while she looked for a foothold anywhere on nearby cars there were none. Only the tank car would work. They’re not going to shoot, she thought. You’re Beowend. They’d hang for it.

The ground behind her exploded and coated the back of her uniform with mud and gravel. The ricochet cracked past her and tore through the forest to her right. On the wall someone in a uniform was working a bolt on a rifle but the searchlights were getting dim the further she went. Up ahead the tracks curved and started to angle downwards and she was three cars away from the tank but it was gaining speed. Her legs fought against her and she fought for air but ran on. No more shots came.

When she reached her car she leapt for it and wrapped her hands around the rails of a ladder but one of her legs gave out. She jerked it back just in time but not soon enough to stop a wheel from taking a strip out of the fabric of her pants. An inch further and it would have taken her leg. Her feet scrabbled on the ladder until they found a hold and then she just hung there, breathing hard, her vision grey around the edges. The inside of her beak tasted of copper. She glanced back in time to see the gate closing and then the train rounded a corner and it was all forest, enormous tree trunks hung with grey moss and thick with ash.

The wind whipped at her and bit harder and colder than she thought it would. Being wet didn’t help. She stayed where she was for another few minutes, staring straight forward at the steel hull. Eventually she hauled herself up and made her way along the side with great caution, not trusting her legs. On the front side there was a small metal outcropping that looked to be shielded from the wind. She crawled to it, clutching any handhold she could get so hard her knuckles were white even beneath her fur, and when she reached it she pulled herself into it without looking and lay there for a few seconds, breathing.

When she opened her eyes the Nyctian leaned down from where it was sitting and put her own gun to her jugular. It raised a skinny finger and pressed it to its lips to silence her. The train carried along unaware that anything at all had happened in the city it left behind.

IV - Southbound

When dawn broke the gun was still pressed to Slake’s neck. She sat there shivering with her head against the wall of the alcove. The Nyctian had opened her pack and was wearing her rain cape, eating awkwardly and with great care from a can of tinned fruit. Both of them watched the misty countryside roll by through a small gap in the metal.

The train first passed through kilometers of jungle on a downward angle, rattling and shaking down the ill-maintained tracks. Within minutes of leaving the walls the forest was too thick to see into. There was a bit of gravel around the tracks where no plants grew and then it rose from the earth like a green barrier through which no thinking being could ever pass. Over the squealing of brakes, birds and morning lizards screeched their daily wake-up calls in a wailing chorus that hit a high note and did not cease. Once they crossed a trellis bridge. The valley below them cut into the mountain and the Nyctian looked out at it. The air smelled of moss and glacial runoff. A line of tall trees marked the path of a river at the bottom. A few pebbles came loose as they went along and fell silently down into the undergrowth far below. There was an ancient lumber mill down there somewhere and apart from the foundation and a handful of rusted blades piled to one side there was no other trace of its presence. It had ceased raining but the wind bit hard. She wanted to ball her hands and blow into them but that would probably get her shot so she didn’t.

The sky was clearer that morning. Long streaks of sunlight came through the struts on the tank car and stippled the ground on the other side. At one point the world went white and when they were through the cloud layer the forest had been hacked back and to the East the land flattened out. To the north was the city of Hallatin, its buildings not unlike a collection of concrete ticks swarming the side of the great grey beast of the dam. The far end of it couldn’t be seen. Its tenements and factories and seemingly infinite alleyways went on to the horizon and just kept going. It sat obscured in a haze of miasmatic yellow that never went away no matter the season. All along the walls a collection of shanty towns hugged it like a parasite’s parasites. Between them and the train were farm fields. Ash season was when tripwheat was planted. Tractors went along in uneven lines through the black plots and left hundreds of smoke columns like those from campfires. Small bipedal figures went behind them with hoes and seeds and scattered them in the rich soil.

Far to the east was the sea. The surf came in heavily and fell onto the beach without interruption. Giant black birds took off in clouds from the sand and circled up and went north down the shore, calling to each other and down at the world below. Everything in Meropis was built by the sea, if not on the coast then near the closest estuary. Many had tried to settle inland and all had failed in one way or another. The train eventually hit level ground and straightened out and picked up speed.

Slake and the Nyctian had not shared a word since they left Hallatin. It sat there holding the gun and had eaten three cans of food so far, very slowly, taking its time so as not to be sick from it. The inside of her beak was dry and her throat itched and even though her pack lay between them she didn’t dare reach for it. There was enough room for the two of them to sit with the pack facing the same way and that was it. No stretching room.

The track curved and rattled across an old stone bridge. On the other side of the swale was a field in which a hundred or so workers walked and hacked into the earth with hoes. Two oxen were pulling a plow down the middle and a young canine girl walked behind them, holding the handles. As they passed all looked up from their labour and leaned on their tools and watched, their backs lit orange in the morning sun, the sight of an engine entirely familiar but nevertheless requiring a break to watch. The jagged shape of a gasworks rose up from the sea far behind them, flare stacks aflame. The sky was grey mostly from the pyroclastic flow far inland but it was equal parts factory smoke out here. They went by a railway signal, bell ringing deeper as it fell away behind them. Slake wondered if anyone could see them but she doubted it.

An hour later they were rolling through hills. The mountains towered to their right. There were still fields here but they were up on the hills and grew fruit. Slake moved to scratch at her knee and the Nyctian pushed the muzzle further into her neck. It was instant, a reflex. She turned and looked at it and now the gun was pointed at her beak. “Are you going to kill me now?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” it told her. A moment later it leaned forward and dug through her backpack until it found the canteen and held it out for her. She reached out and took it and drank. It was just about the best water she’d ever tasted. Top three.

She left some for later and handed it back. “Thank you.” The Nyctian didn’t answer.

“Where are you going?” she asked it. She could think of nothing else to say and silence was doing her no good.

“South.” To that she nodded, like she was giving her approval to that idea.

“What’s South?”

The Nyctian shifted uncomfortably where it sat. When it lifted up its arm she could see under the rain cape and only then she saw that it was resting its gun arm on a ledge. No way it could have supported that with its own strength for hours. She thought something about the bat looked contemplative. As contemplative as she figured Nyctians could be.

“Home,” it told her. “I’m going home.”

At noon they entered the town of Mecamilla. Just outside its walls a small militia with shotguns and spears were inspecting something with far too many limbs caught on the barbed wire. The train slowed to a crawl and rolled through the gate alongside the only paved street. All the buildings were low, no more than two stories, but they were made of brick and stone and it looked like how she’d pictured a small town. There were power lines beside the tracks, humming dangerously in the midday rain. At each building there was a junction and a bundle of wires hung low across the street connecting the two, the second precious link to the city. The paths that peeled away from the main street were just boards laid out in the muddy earth to keep trucks from sinking in, which seemed to be of dubious merit for two minutes into the train’s arrival Slake peered out and watched a team of people pulling a rope to free one from a quagmire.

The Nyctian had one of the old rail maps out on its lap and was studying it. The map was big enough to serve as a blanket. It traced a clawed finger from the star and line that stood for Hallatin and followed it down the coast until it reached what could only have been the town they were pulling into. From there the track split into three. One of the lines, a small one, went inland. Another two went down the coast. The one that went closest to the sea had been washed away ninety-seven years ago and the other was likely replaced or went a different direction entirely. All that could be puzzled out was that the route forward was no longer as certain as it seemed. This brought a quiet curse from the bat and it folded the map up and put it away and leaned back, watching its hostage.

The train jerked sideways and went off into another switchyard. Slake was still watching the world pass by outside. A crowd was assembled at the tracks, labourers and men and women in their finery, colourful dresses and shawls and waistcoats. The Nyctian put its head beside hers and watched for a second. Then it picked up the pack and looked at her with a curious sort of look in its crimson eyes. Like it might get a read on her it didn’t already have. She caught the look and asked it: “What?”

It took its finger off the trigger and put the gun away in its pack. Slake didn’t even register that it wasn’t pointing at her until a few seconds later, and by then it had slung its gear over its shoulders and had both hands firmly on the hull, like it was getting ready to leave. She got up as well, crouched behind it in the small space. Like she’d been shaken out of a sleep and reminded that they had the same plans and in many ways they did.

When the train was about to stop the Nyctian climbed out and swung its legs over the side of the car and hopped down. It landed shakily and looked like it was about to collapse but it didn’t. It looked down at its legs, then back at the slow-moving train, like it couldn’t believe that it had made such a jump. Or that it had barely made such a jump. It watched the assembled crowd but they were walking to where a certain tarp-covered conflat was bound to stop and none of them paid any mind to a lone and mostly-nude transient.

Slake made the jump a few moments later with relative ease and sank to the ankles in the ashen mud. She pulled her boots free with a loud sucking sound, like the last of the water in a sink flowing down the drain. She looked about. The train had not yet stopped but already there were enginemen opening crates tied down to the conflat and were yelling out names and addresses into the crowd. The weekly mail, magazine orders from the city. Among the crowd Slake saw only one Beowend and he was the one who seemed to be in charge of distributing the parcels. If there was anyone in the armored cars they didn’t fire. No sense wasting ammunition.

As she stood and watched, the Nyctian had already started walking, unperturbed by its lack of footwear. She thought it was odd that it didn’t have a blindfold on. That it could see fine in the light. The train finally halted and down the line the atomic engine hissed and sighed pneumatically. The ground shuddered under it. A wave of steam washed out from beneath the engine and slank out along the ground like temporary moss.

She had no plan at all and was only now becoming aware of it. For the morning her thoughts had been moment to moment. Observe the countryside. Drink. Get off the train. Now she stood there in the mud and pondered. This is not ideal, she thought, to put it in the mildest of terms. But action was better than inaction and with this principle she was familiar. By now there were engineers walking down the train, checking the couplings. One of them was an Osamac in a waistcoat and when he saw her he leaned against the tank car she had just leapt from and watched her without hostility. Standing there with her torn pants and her stained forehead she looked like the victim of a bad cycling accident.

The crowd looked more or less like the people she lived among, or used to. Working people, the women in roughhewn dresses or overalls and the men either suited or just in field clothes. Some of them wore pistols and most had at least a knife. There was a small bar by the side of the waterlogged train yard. Breakneck Dance Hall And Liquory. A few elderly Beowend men sat or squatted on the porch behind a thin veil of rainwater sloughing off the roof and smoked and watched the proceedings. She looked around. A truck passing. Birdcalls she hadn’t heard before. A lot more greenery here than she was used to. A few seconds later she turned and plodded off after the Nyctian.

The two passed the crowd of mail recipients without fanfare. They ascended some stone steps alongside the small brick shack that served as the station and walked past it. The train yard was at the far southern edge of town and a single dirt road led away from it. On the left was a vineyard and beyond that a concrete wall falling to pieces. On the other side, uninterrupted rainforest all the way down the coast. There was an old motorcar in the ditch, six-wheeled, its hood open and its engine removed. Ferns poked through the soaked soot covering it. It had been sitting there for at least a few decades if not longer.

A ways down the road the bat stopped and turned to Slake with its eyes narrowed. She knew it knew she was following it. It had kept an ear on her the whole time. “Are you a defective or something?” it asked her, holding the strap of the backpack in one hand.

“I’m going west,” she replied. “And you have all my gear.”

“Uh-huh.” It looked her up and down, its eyes resting on the blood on her forehead, and for a moment Slake thought it looked the same kind of guilty it did when it was in its cage. But that soon passed and it gestured with a tilt of its head towards the road into town. “I was giving you a chance to leave.”

“I know.”

“So leave.”

A large part of her wanted to take the opportunity and turn around and run as fast as she could back to Hallatin. Back behind the walls, back to the dusty old estate, the arsenal. She was a quarter of the way through fixing a collection of short stories and realized she’d never read the rest. There were a lot of things she’d never finish now. Didn’t matter. “I can’t,” she said. “That’s not really an option anymore. As I’m sure you know. And I have no food. No water. You’ve got it all.”

“You don’t even have a compass in here. Or an axe.” The bat tapped the shoulder strap with one hand. “And all your maps are way out of date.” It pronounced its Ps like Fs. Couldn’t do the right sound with its lips.

“I know. I wasn’t expecting to need them. I also didn’t pack to ride less than coach with a gun to my head.”

There was a break in the clouds. The sun fell through it and caught the volcanic dust and coppered the road and the two standing in it. Somewhere back in town a steam whistle hooted. A few repeated bangs from a forge. There was a light breeze and the clouds were trying to rain again. Wind caught the tall grass on the roadside and set it to rustling. The Nyctian put an arm to its face and coughed into it and regarded her inscrutably. She had no way to tell precisely what it was thinking. But she wasn’t in any way scared of it. She wondered whether she should be.

“We’re going the same way,” she told it. “Probably. The same route for at least a while. Once I’ve got some food of my own we’ll part ways. But I’m dead anyway if you leave me with nothing.”

The clouds passed back over the sun. The Nyctian looked back over its shoulder at the destroyed wall past the vineyard. She looked too. It was crumbling to pieces but there was still razor wire at the top. Going over seemed unlikely. The bat looked back at her and stared. She stared back. This was the truth, what she was telling it. It unslung the pack from its shoulder and undid the side pouch. Out came the gun again. It raised it to hip level and thumbed the hammer back. Two clicks. She took a step back and didn’t even realize it but still no nerves invaded her conscious brain. They stood in the road a few meters apart and said nothing to one another for a minute. You might be dead anyways no matter what you’re left with. Come on. Do it.

Then the Nyctian sighed and turned away. It held the hammer with its thumb and pulled the trigger and lowered it back down. Then it rotated the cylinder until it was back where it had been. Must have used a revolver before. It turned and shrugged the rain cape back over its shoulder and set off down the road. Seconds later Slake followed it.

They walked towards the wall and skirted along the outside of the vineyard until they found a ladder on the ground next to a few other scattered tools. Some clippers, a wagon. An ox stood a few meters away with its tail swishing, chewing on a small pile of hay. It paid them no mind. There were fresh prints in the wet ground where workers had no doubt been not long before but for now there was no one. Slake was the first to the ladder. She picked it up and leaned it against the four meter high wall while the bat watched her with its arms crossed. When it was set up she pulled it down to dig the feet into the earth and gestured for the bat to climb up.

They both had paused for a moment to observe the tools and among them they both laid eyes on a good splitting axe. Slake bent down and picked it up and tilted it from side to side, feeling the heft of it. The head was rusted and the wood handle felt old. Not the best of tools. She was about to put it back down when a few voices came through the vined trellises, and instead she turned with the axe still in her hand and ascended the ladder. She swung her leg over a small gap in the razor wire and pushed the ladder back down and hopped down to the muddy earth where the Nyctian waited. Then they followed the outside of the wall back along to the road in silence. Behind them a woman’s voice was asking who moved everything around.

When they reached the dirt road there was no one about save them. Through the bush to the West there came a low howl as the train they arrived on blared its horn thrice and picked up speed. This was far enough from the city to use the sawblades and above the sound of birdcall and the wind in the canopy they both heard the high whine of it as it got up to speed. Slake couldn’t picture what could warrant such a thing but she could guess and she didn’t like the implications. Neither did the Nyctian, apparently. It held the revolver a little tighter. They stood there for a few moments, waiting, listening until the train was a low rumble in the distance. She thought they must have been thinking the same thing, that if staying on rails was a good option they’d have taken it in a heartbeat. But it wasn’t to be. The two of them started down the road in unintentional unison and soon the town of Mecamilla was behind them. If either had their way they’d never see it again.

The rains came again in the afternoon and didn’t let up. The road first went through a shallow valley, the trees slender but far taller than those in the mountains outside Hallatin, and Slake figured that there must have been farms around here long before that had since been eaten by nature. Ancient telegraph or electric poles stood by the side of the road, barely upright. Some had fallen over into the bush, homes for fungi and lichen. Around a bend they passed a collection of canvas tents beside the road, strung up near a pile of old boulders that may have been a building in the distant past. From within one of the tents two people emerged and stood to the side of the road as they passed, watching them with a heedful leer. A human and a Damoyen, big canine with huge hands and a snaggletooth. They were unbothered by the axe but when the Nyctian pulled the cape back and showed them the pistol they turned and went in again.

Slake had not expected the countryside to be so loud. In her mind’s ears she associated the streets in which she grew up to be the noisier of the two. The droning of small two-stroke engines, the night markets, the endless waves of people constantly talking, shouting, fighting, moving. Insects wailed in the canopy and the rain glancing off the leaves and on the dirt path was cacophonous. It smelled better, at least. Petrichor was her favourite scent and breathing it was a rare joy. The worst by far was coming off her new traveling companion, from whom she kept a distance of several meters.

When evening came they paused under a granitic outcropping and ate a can each. Slake chose a tin of fish soup. She peeled the lid off and bent it into a crude spoon and ladled it up slowly to her beak. A peal of thunder passed overhead from left to right. Water was running off the side of the rocks like the drippings from a wound and formed thin rivers that crossed one another in the dips in the road. The potholes were miniature lakes. The Nyctian was crouched nearby and ate from a can of Northern Pastures potted beef. It took ratlike bites from it, hardly pausing to chew, and it was done well before Slake. It pitched the empty can into the forest and sat there waiting, watching the rain with wide eyes, its huge ears twitching. The meal did her good. She hadn’t eaten in a day and while she would normally turn her nose up at seafood it tasted great. This is alright, she thought. Being out here. It’s a hike but that’s not so bad. Before they left they shared a drink from the canteen. A few minutes after they left an enormous lizard with a tail two meters long emerged from the bush and stuck its muzzle into the can Slake left behind.

It was getting late and she knew that when night came it would be there in a hurry. She had no flashlight, which the Nyctian pointed out when it noted crudely that she also packed no bedroll. They were walking near the banks of a river when three vehicles came by, headed for town. The first one was a little armored vehicle on tracks. Another Damoyen was leaning out the top with a wide brimmed hat on, their hand resting on the grip of a mounted gun. The duo stood to one side and waited while the convoy went by, both parties watching each other closely but saying nothing. After that came two lorries, Kleras-made if their badges were to be believed. The one in the back had an unpleasant groaning sound coming from the engine and the front of it was dented and stained dark brown. The beds were covered and the cargo couldn’t be discerned. They veered to the high side of the road to avoid getting stuck but their tires nevertheless left deep grooves in the earth that quickly filled with mud. Eventually they rounded a corner and all that remained of them was a thin haze of exhaust that made Slake cough.

“Wish I had a truck like that,” said the Nyctian.

“We need to find a place to stop.”

The Nyctian paused in the road and looked back at Slake. It was pouring and she stood with her hands tucked under her armpits. She had undone her braid of fur and now it all hung down to the middle of her back. It was getting greasy and a day from now it would start to get matted. The calf of her left pant leg was in tatters and thick with mud and her shirt clung to her fur and she had the overall appearance of something drowned. The bat wasn’t doing much better. Everything below its knees was a mess of jungle grime the colour of charcoal. Rainwater kept pooling in the grooves of its leaf nose and it had to wipe it away periodically. It held the gun limply in its left hand and looked about into the forest, as if trying to summon shelter up out of the earth. “Yeah,” it agreed. “Another cave or something.”

But they found nothing. There had been no good cover by the roadside and the closer they went to the ocean the less there was. The Nyctian muttered something to itself about light. Beside the road there were old irrigation pipes, huge ones that had once been buried, almost completely rusted out. Slake descended the shoulder and inspected them. There were holes big enough to crawl into and she was about to call out to stop when she got the idea to check if it was occupied. She rapped a fist on the side twice. Something inside the pipe shifted and made a thumping sound. It was enough to make her leap backwards and walk off in a hurry. Then she stopped.

The old power lines still came out this far. They had long been stripped of their wires and now resembled bare crosses but the nearest one bore the cylindrical shell of a transformer on the top. The Nyctian watched her with vague interest. She went back down the shoulder, a ways away from where she heard the noise, and climbed over the pipe. She pulled the undergrowth out of the way and looked into the forest. It was invisible from the main road but she could see the remains of a macadam path winding off into the bush and up a small hill. Laying across it was another power pole, barely recognizable.

“There’s probably a building back in there,” she called to the Nyctian. Something about being near the forest, even the edge, made her skin crawl, and she retreated to the road. It had walked over and was looking past her, like it was trying to picture the old path in its head.

“I don’t see anything.”

“There has to be one. Look.” She pointed up at the old transformer. “I saw another pole in there, fallen over.”

It examined her carefully but there was no reason to lie about such a thing. The amount of times she could get a look at the bat without any walking or firearms being waved about were few and she was still noticing new things about it. It was shorter than her by an inch or so. Its gauntness put a few years on its features but it couldn’t have been much older than she was. Mid-twenties at the latest. It had the eyes of an elder. Some time ago she had glimpsed a scar on the back of its knee. “Worth a shot,” it said. It rolled its shoulder to get the cape out of the way and held the gun at hip level, thankfully not pointed at her this time. Slake gripped her axe. “You go first.”

Slake did so but there wasn’t much bushwacking to be done. It had been a long time since the old path had seen use and there were trees sprouting from it but the stones could still be felt underfoot. There was room enough to walk between the trees and they made good progress. She noted with dull interest that it must be nearing the end of black sky. At the height of the season the whole forest would be grey with soot but now the only traces of it were piled in the recesses between roots and under covered spots, discoloured and filthy like city snow. The sulfurous odour that the air usually held was mostly gone and in its place were the scents of wet earth and moss. A patch of meter-tall white lilies grew to the left of the path and Slake caught herself staring at them.

A few minutes of walking later they passed the wreckage of a greenhouse by the side of the path, then the destroyed shape of an old barn, and she figured out quickly that they’d stepped into what was once a magistrate’s property. The two inspected the greenhouse but it was just a wireframe. Slake was about to approach the barn when the Nyctian spoke up.

“I’m not sleeping in a fucking barn,” it spat. “Done with that.”

She was about to open her beak and ask why, then, was it okay sleeping in a cave? But between them it had the only gun and she decided it wasn’t the best idea to piss it off and they moved on through the bush and eventually came to the hacienda itself.

It was a three-story U-shaped building that would have once been a joy to live in for the previous owners. In the center was a courtyard with an old fountain, so overgrown that she was certain she couldn’t hack through it all even if given a week. There were old iron hitches out front for horses and pack beasts. The left half of it was collapsed down to the foundation, the support pillars and all having fallen with it, leaving a pile of incomprehensible masonry. The right side was intact. The vine-covered stonework was solid, made from local granite, and though there were huge holes in the copper roof where trees had fallen and weather had done its work it didn’t look unstable. No more unstable than any half-collapsed building could be. Slake looked down and before her was a pile of bricks where the gate would have been.

She pushed her way through the undergrowth and strode over to the front door, the Nyctian her pale shadow. It was made of iron, huge like a bank vault’s but rusted clean through. All the windows were missing and the house was dark. There remained a knocker on the door and she wrapped a hand around it and knocked thrice. He knew immediately what she was doing and when she got out of the way it aimed the gun at the house and they waited. One minute, two. She looked behind them to the forest, the brush twitching sporadically in the rainfall like the green flank of a beast beset by watery flies. When nothing came the Nyctian stepped forth and put a shoulder to the door and heaved and they were inside.

The wreckage of splendor. Old marble floors carpeted by moss. Peeling woodwork. Holes in the ceiling through which shapes that were once supports and pipes and wires form metal cobwebs. The oak fretwork all destroyed. A decapitated marble bust sat on its side by the door and paintings of forebears unknown either hung limply on the wall, so water damaged and moth-eaten that only their outlines could be discerned, or lay face down on the floor. The chandelier had fallen and shattered long ago. The Nyctian stepped through the door and saw this and immediately made for another room, keeping to the edges to avoid cutting its feet. Slake walked after it.

The bat set the pack down on a destroyed end table in the parlor and opened it. There were old couchframes about. She tested one with her foot but it sagged and she decided it was best not to chance it. The Nyctian took out a can of diced ocean fish and shrugged its cape off onto the floor, untroubled by the lack of modesty now that it was indoors. Slake couldn’t give less of a shit if she tried. She grabbed a can of oats in syrup. They went across the room in tandem and sat on the floor by the fireplace and ate in complete silence, the only sound coming from their chewing and the sound of rain water dripping through the old house. The gun sat on the floor by the bat, pointed at the wall.

The Nyctian finished first. It set its can down and smacked its lips and looked about. This place was nice, once. The fireplace was made of imported marble and there was an old clock above it that had stopped at four. The minute and second hands were missing. When it had done a survey of the room it refocused on Slake, who had gotten halfway through her meal and now held it in one hand, expression blank, the lid-spoon resting in the can.

“Are you going to eat the rest of that?” it asked. She startled up, like she’d just been snapped out of being half asleep. She hurriedly took another spoonful.

“Yeah.” She could talk pretty well with food in her beak. The bat grunted, stood up, stretched, then walked back over to the pack and took out the canteen. There was hardly a mouthful left. It tilted it all the way back to get the last of the water out then wiped its mouth with its forearm.

“We need water,” it said. Slake looked up at it as it talked. She had not yet taken another bite. “I’m going to go look around for some that isn’t rain. Do you know how to build a fire?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. Have one going by the time I’m back.”

She walked over to the pack and switched her half-eaten can for the axe and climbed out one of the empty window frames. The bat watched her go in silence, then looked down at the food she had left. Half a second of contemplation later it decided that yes, it could use some more, and it took the canteen and walked off through a doorway with both of their cans.

Slake stood outside the hacienda for a moment and breathed deeply. It had been a day and a half since she last slept. Or two days. She couldn’t recall exactly. Her eyelids were sagging and she could feel the onset of shin splints but she couldn’t imagine sleeping. It just wasn’t an option. Didn’t even come up on the list. They needed dry wood for fires but the forest was damp to the bedrock and as the sun started to set and the temperature changed an unearthly mist hung over everything, like she was in a cloud layer. Like they passed through on the train earlier. No. Stay in the present.

The best place to find good dry fuel in wet weather was off the ground. The ground gets the wettest. And nothing alive burns well, either. She kept the hacienda in sight and walked around, her feet sinking in the leaf-strewn earth. What she wanted were branches that had fallen from trees and gotten caught in the lower parts of others but hadn’t hit the ground. There were conifers that bore windsnapped branches. She gathered some up in her arms and took a load back inside and set it by the fireplace. Kindling was next. She walked back out and around the back of the hacienda and was examining a pile of branches near a collapsed wood shed when her knees gave out.

She sat there in the dirt with her hands on her shins and her head buried in her knees and had never wanted anything more in her life than to holler curses at the ground. With nothing but menial work she could no longer escape the previous two day’s events and now they crept in from the vault in which she kept unwelcome thoughts and settled in the forefront and refused to leave. By now a funeral would have been arranged for Issal. The morticians and medicine women would have come in and doused the room with salt and burned candles and led his spirit to the homeland, to the waking world. Then he’d be picked up and wrapped in silk and taken to the coroner, his death caused in equal parts a gunshot wound and the theft of tobacco. The news would reach her father by dusk at the latest. Right about now, actually. Ducas it is our great displeasure to inform you that your darling daughter has either shot a man or aided in his death for no reason and turned fugitive. She is believed to be in collaboration with a member of the lowest of species. Do you know where she is? She shuddered. It could have been the cold but it wasn’t. She wanted to say something and opened her beak to but nothing came out. You should be put out of your misery. Or walk back to the city and take the bullet when they find out your completely empty accounts can’t even pay the gild. That’s the best way this could turn out.

When she got up the forest was almost completely dark. Her eyelids sagged and she now wanted nothing more than to sleep, forever if that was an option. But it wasn’t to be by her own hand and she knew that. And there was still work to do. She searched through the wreckage of the wood shed for anything small and dry and came away with a few scraps of oily bark and a handful of twigs that would have to suffice.

The Nyctian had not yet returned from its expedition for water for which Slake was quietly grateful. She squatted before the fireplace and wiped her mud-caked hands on her pant legs and began to pile everything in, kindling, tinder, sticks and logs around the edges. From her pocket she retrieved a destroyed sleeve of waterproof matches and struck one on the marble and lit the fire and blew on it gently until it caught. Ten minutes later she had a decent flame going and she held her hands out to warm them. When the bat returned the room was in complete darkness save for the flames. It appeared out of the night like a wayward soul, its filthy fur the colour of sunset in the firelight. She hadn’t heard it come in. It came up beside her and set the filled canteen in the middle of the fire and sat. They both watched the flames lick the bottom of it until it started to boil, entirely enraptured by the sight of it, the primal motions, the heat.

“I’m going to sleep,” said Slake, to which she received no response. Not even a twitch. She undid her boots and took them and her socks off and laid them beside the fire. Within a minute they began to steam. It was tempting to find a more secure place to sleep a floor or two up but the whole hacienda had no windows and all rooms save this one would be cold. She set up a makeshift lean-to from a pile of mouldy rags against the legs of a table. She took her jacket off and tossed it towards the fire beside her boots. Then she lay there with her knees to her chest and was asleep within a minute.

Later that night Slake stood back up.

The fire had burned down to embers and the room was black as a coal pit. The Nyctian wasn’t sitting by the fire anymore and she looked about but didn’t see it. She checked under the table and there she was. Slake in the flesh. A bit of blood on her head like a religious anointment. Her beak was slightly open, completely vacant, like something retrieved from a riverbed. She could tell she was still alive by the slow motion of her chest. Loath though you may be to accept it, Slake thought, this is you. Your body and your mind. She turned and left the room.

Nothing about the house had held her curiosity before but there was nothing else to do for as long as this lasted. The air was damp beyond belief and moving through it felt like wading through tar. She passed through the entryway and over the field of broken chandelier fragments and into a kitchen. An old gas range, the ruined shape of a refrigerator. The walls still held a few scraps of faded floral wallpaper. She put her face through the doors of all the cupboards and into the pantry, expecting to find nothing and not coming away disappointed. There was a cellar door in one corner, chained shut. She looked in there too but the way was blocked by dirt and she figured it had caved in.

Up the stairs to the second floor. Heavy rain shook the roof and made an orchestra out of the old copper shingles. She passed through a thin hallway and looked into the first door on her right, a bedchamber. A good iron trunk at the foot of a trashed bed had been opened and its contents emptied onto the floor in haphazard fashion. Some of it, books and an old typewriter, were ruined, but among the goods there was a decent looking two-part backpack and a set of men’s clothes, tattered and torn and filthy but wearable. They looked newer. Not ancient or they wouldn’t be here. Someone had come upstairs before them and changed and left them there. She looked about for the bat but she neither saw nor felt its presence.

On the third floor there was another door chained up crosswise like the cellar, or like certain derelict structures near the family estate into which she had ventured as a girl and a few times more in her adulthood. Among her indulgences going through locked doors placed near to the top. She pulled at the chains. Rusty but still strong after who knows how many years. At least ninety-five. Was it barricaded for a reason? The thought gave her a moment of pause but she was certain that nothing on the other side would be shocking and stepped through it.

The room was a master bedchambers and on the curtained bed lay a corpse. The final stages of decomposition had come and gone long ago and nothing was left of it save for bones. It was half covered by ratty bedsheets but even in the darkness something about it just wasn’t right. Slake approached. One of its legs had sprouted extra joints and hung off the end of the bed and coiled on the floor like a serpent’s tail, the foot bones missing. The ribcage was tumorous and misshapen, the left side colossal. It looked too big for the bed. The skull was gone but Slake knew from anatomical studies that this was the body of a Beowend. Before whatever happened. What it looked like just before death she couldn’t fathom. Even in her nonphysical state something about the room made her uneasy. A closet to one side was open and she almost looked in but a sensible part of her told her she ought not to. Look at what’s on the bed. Think. Do you want to know more about this? The dark parts of the continent await you yet and shall this be your first introduction? She backed out of the room.

When she reached the second floor landing she saw the Nyctian again. Where it had come from she didn’t know. It was sitting at the top of the stairs reassembling the pistol. It had done most of it and was fiddling with the ejector rod. When it finally got it in place it was complete, but it immediately set it to the side, like it was too hot to hold for long.

The bat was thinking about something. It sat there with both elbows on its knees and leaned forward and stared at the destroyed woodwork in a manner not dissimilar to her earlier pose by the wood shed. It closed its eyes and began to mutter something. She crouched beside it and leaned in with her ear near its muzzle and while she couldn’t understand the language she recognized the cadence well enough to know it was a prayer. To which Sister she couldn’t tell. When it was done it rose and picked up the gun again and was about to descend the stairs when it stopped, foot hovering. It swore quietly and went to pace the hall instead. Slake noticed it favored the unscarred leg. Only when it thought no one was watching. It went all the way down the hall and back to the landing. It shook its head and took a few deep breaths. “You have to do it,” it said. “You have to.” Then it started the descent.

In the parlor it walked over to where her body lay sleeping and stood there in the darkness like something summoned from an underworld to judge the living. She knew what was coming. Its intentions. It stood there for a minute and just watched her, but it didn’t look vengeful or furious or anything in between. She thought she saw its lip quiver once but she couldn’t be sure. Eventually it bent down and cocked the pistol and put the barrel to her head for the second time that day.

And that would probably be the end of things. In an old war book she read not long ago a young soldier wrote about charging through shellfire and the only real fear he felt was disfigurement. The loss of a hand or perhaps a leg or lung was to have one’s life ruined but the simple fear of death seemed to hardly even be in his mind. A bullet to the head was immediate and as painless as it got. Nothing to it, he had written, after seeing it more than once. The bat was shaking. Its hands had not so much as twitched in the anthropology lab but now it shook like grass caught on a breeze. “Come on,” it said, very quietly so as not to wake her sleeping form. All this over an old letter. Some cigarettes. It all felt foolish.

She knelt through the piled rags and slipped her hand beneath her body’s and held it while the bat stared at the spot on her forehead through which it sought to put a bullet. She wondered whether the world would instantly go black or if she’d get to see her life leave her. Neither one was good but she could do nothing about it. She rubbed the back of her own hand with a thumb and watched her expressionless sleeping face. It looked peaceful. It didn’t know what was going on and she supposed that was a blessing. “It’s alright,” she told her body. “There’s nothing you can do now.”

The three of them stayed there for what could have been an hour, or just thirty seconds. Twice the Nyctian put its finger on the trigger only to hold the hammer and decock it, then cock it again. Trial runs. Just practice. To Slake’s surprise she didn’t close her eyes. If she was going to go out then let it be known despite her trepidations she wasn’t one to shy away from it. The bat’s eyes were nearly shut. Like it didn’t want to see what was about to happen.

Finally the bat stood up and walked out of the room and she was left there holding her hand. She heard it curse, then again, louder. It went upstairs and she didn’t pursue it. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. She lay down next to her body and stared straight up and just felt drained, totally empty at the promise of death that had just been avoided. Soon after she lapsed back into sleep.

Up they came again. The dreams. Swing at them though she may with fire and sword they could not be stopped. The pale beings that showed her things she did not want to see. They crawled past her bloodied form and put the reels into the projector, all torn and shredded and out of order, cut and cannibalized. No. Not tonight. Please. I just want to sleep. Please.

“That’s all I wanted to do with my life, you know. Make art. Something I paid for with my own money and now I’m shackled down to pass on a blood name.”

A wooden door in a sitting room somewhere. Sunlight. Mid morning. This was a memory though from where and when and the precise reason why a four year old Slake could not tell.

No, she could. This was her first. Bedrock on which the sediment of her mind accumulated.

The door was open. Just a crack. The rest of the room could not be recalled, not in any waking hours. The scent of red ochre pigment and liquor. Her arm hurt. Slake knew nothing save for the fact that she wanted to get out. Through the door. She had her back to the wall and she inched to the side with child’s caution. Someone was watching her. “And don’t think you don’t take centre stage in my downfall. Whelp.” Inch closer to the door. Don’t let her see you and it will be okay.

“Come here.” Do not. “Slake. Were you born deaf, girl? Come here. Now.”

Now another scene pieced together from fragments of books half eaten by the rain. A loutish heroine turned brigand through devotion to her species. She begins at the walls of a great city within which lies her judgment and rides a horse with no saddle backwards across lands summoned from pages of a novel written for children. Through fields of grass and scablands. Meadows in the bowls carved from mountaintops where glaciers once dwelt. Old shapes of iron and stone. Knives came in and pushed through the sky and flipped from evening to day to morning and guided her gently through the long and frigid nights. Don’t let this go to your head. None of those stories are yours. But you know what you still want. Right? Do not be so afraid of loss that you won’t try to have anything. There’s nothing to go back to. Just move forward.

V - Noms De Guerre

The road South washed out in the night. A tree had fallen and lifted its roots and brought half the hillside and a hundred meter stretch of road down with it. In this new valley where the road ran not a day prior two new rivers came and crashed through the jungle. The uprooted forest lay at the bottom so twisted and bent that it wasn’t fit for a pulp mill let alone the shipwright’s saw.

Slake and the Nyctian stood a ways back from the ruined road and observed it. It was midmorning and neither of them had spoken much nor encountered any tracks on the road to be concerned about save theirs. The night had not been kind to either of them. The bat still wore her backpack and cape but had thankfully bathed in the rain and donned a pair of trousers from the chest upstairs. Slake wore the older backpack with nothing in it and had gotten no cleaner. They were looking at a wide trough carved into the far side of the newly-formed ditch and both realized at the same time that it came from something crawling its way out then vanishing into the scrub. Beyond it a pair of tire tracks approached the wash, turned, and went the other way. Perhaps a laggard from the convoy the day prior. The sun came through the clouds and she put a hand over her eyes and spat. Both agreed they’d need another way around.

The Nyctian moved from the road and lowered itself without ceremony into the bush. Slake dropped down beside it. When it motioned for her to go first it did not make eye contact. It hadn’t looked at her all morning. They descended into the brush with her at the forefront, her axe hacking aside the occasional branch too thick to push. On the crest of a hill in a brake of ferns they resurfaced and got their bearings. The bat had the map halfway unfolded and was studying it. A town somewhere ahead. The section of forest washed away had thinned out considerably and they pushed their way through the churned red earth, soaked to the knees. When they reached the far side of the road both had to stop and catch their breath and share water.

It began to rain again, lightly, but the clouds rolling in from the west were blacker than those they replaced. The road soon turned upwards and by noon they were high enough on a granite ridge to see the ocean. Something about the sight seemed to stir the Nyctian for it stopped and put a hand on its hip and looked outwards over the misty surf like it was posing to be painted as an officer of some bemired military. It didn’t even try to disguise its awe at the landscape. A kilometer away the waves boomed against the sand. A lighthouse sat abandoned with a gap where the beacon once shone. Saltwater corrosion gnawed at the foundation and left it skeletal. Far out where the world began to pale in the fog a side-wheel steamer moved North towards Hallatin, trailing dense smoke behind it. A monument of industry that yet moved through these reclaimed waters. They could just hear the engine’s churning, faint and vague like the call of an animal. Of sentient life in the forest there was no trace.

The tire tracks were shallow and half vanished from the rain. Recent but not fresh. When it was done watching the tide come in the bat wandered over and squatted and observed it more closely, and Slake bent over it like a Beowend umbrella to get a look. The Nyctian pressed a finger to a tread mark as though it might discern some portent from it. She had never known the natural world to tell anything but the truth but it withheld whether the tracks were something they ought to be following. But there was forest to one side and a sheer rock drop to the other and behind them the ruins of the road. It was at least a blessing to know no one would be coming up behind them.

The storm clouds rolled around them and the sun reemerged and the rain did not return that day. By midday they had changed little in elevation, following the cliffside road with great faith. They passed a swath of forest uphill that had been scorched by wildfire some years prior and now the gaps between the blackened tree trunks played host to a bloom of fuchsia astragalus. It was hot. Slake’s clothes steamed in the rare sunlight. She was concerned that she’d start to reek soon and her fear was well-founded.

The Nyctian had paused in the road ahead and was crouching with the revolver at its side. When she noticed she knelt without thinking and watched it but the gun wasn’t pointing at anything. Just the ground. It was studying something near the cliffside. She straightened up and approached. In a dip on the edge of the cliff were enormous marks from what could only be claws. A huge trough in the mud just past them where something enormous had laid and cooled itself and then tracks from its departure, four feet in total. They looked to be of similar age as the tire marks but she knew she was no tracker. The Nyctian stood up and actually looked at her for the first time that day. As if to ask, well, what’s your plan if we run into this sucker? Slake held the axe up and made a mock swing in front of her and she almost thought she saw the bat smile but it turned away and kept walking. There was a sudden leaden weight in her chest. Beyond the walls there were beasts. Until recently this had been a mere fact, but she had never expected to see one that wasn’t in an anatomy lab or on a plate. This is why you brought the gun. The gun no longer in your possession. At least it’s closeby.

Up ahead in the road was an old cliffside town built on a wider part of the escarpment and crashed into the walls was a truck. A hundred meters back in the center of the road was the wreckage of a rubber tire and a hubcap and other mechanical viscera. The two tracks, beast and machine, had become a swerving mess some time before that and an iridescent sheen of oil turned the ground slick. The truck was the same model as the ones they’d seen yesterday. It had careened off the path to the edge of the cliff and impaled its engine on an ancient iron beam which was the only thing keeping it from falling off entirely. Its frame was all bent and the roof had been torn from the back. The bat peered over the edge of the cliff and saw the gaps in the canopy into which its cargo had all fallen, lost forever, whatever it was.

Slake inspected the truck. The driver’s door was open and blood darkened the upholstered seat, the earth just outside it. Even in the sun it had not yet fully dried. There was a bullet hole in one of the doors. Something that she assumed was a body had been dragged from the cab and off the cliff where yet more claw marks dug into the rock face. She moved over to the Nyctian, wary of her footing, and followed its gaze. The marks went straight down the rock face without a care at all for grip or gravity.

They stepped back in unison and looked past the truck. There was an old iron frame by the roadside that bore no sign and probably hadn’t for years. Past the crumbled walls was a small town no larger than a city block. The shapes of old stone buildings beyond silhouetted against the dull sky, most hollow enough to let light through. No sound save for the natural, the breeze through the forest below and above, distant birdsong. The air smelled of heavy oil. A pair of digitigrade bootprints moved into the town at a sprint and had not yet been touched by rain. Slake looked around the walls but there was no other way through. The fortifications went to the edge of the cliff and any path that may once have led around it had fallen away. They set forth into the town, each with their respective weapons held out like flambeaus to ward off an encroaching night that had yet to fall.

No one had lived in this place for a great many years and it had long been denuded of any valuables. It was a single-street town, not big at all. They passed the collapsed wreckage of a hotel, identifiable as such only by two characters on a sign. Strangling vines erupted from the jumble of stones. On the inland side was a collection of old mining equipment that sat completely engulfed in overgrowth. Only their vague shapes could identify them as what they had once been and even then it took imagination. There was nothing worth stopping for. In the middle of the town they walked over a collection of ancient metal bars lying scattered about for reasons unknown. If Slake had to guess they may have been tent poles. Weeds grew to their waists and they followed a trampled-down path where the escapee from the truck had run, winding this way and that. The bat was looking about, its ears rotating. Something in one of the old storefronts creaked and it instantly brought the pistol to bear but nothing came of it.

The most intact structure that yet stood in town was a temple by the far gate that looked older than the buildings surrounding it. A few hundred years, if Slake had to guess. Beowend didn’t build like that. Perhaps a pilgrimage site. Above the doorframe was an empty circle in the stone that once held a depiction of one of the Sisters. Foliage showed through it, lit from a missing roof. The Nyctian gestured for her to look at something on the ground. The bootprints were leading to the temple, spaced much closer together now, heels dragging. They shared a look. There was no way anyone this far outside a city wouldn’t be armed and anyone pursued by something that could wreck a truck would be jumpy. She knew she would be.

The bat took a rock from the ground and threw it sidearmed through a window. It skittered across an overgrown tile floor and clacked off a back wall. Nothing stirred. Slake looked about and the town was completely silent and motionless like an old tintype. No sound but the breeze. On the western side of town the granite mountainside rose almost straight up. When a minute had passed they proceeded with great caution into the temple.

In the center of the room lay the body of the lone survivor from the truck. He was a Naiassen, a tall serpentine figure, and he’d been shot through the gut accidentally. He had stumbled from the truck first at a run but soon blood had turned his shirt black and now here he lay on his side in a parallelogram of flaxen sunlight, one arm out, grimacing. A warrior’s death in method only. Had they been half an hour earlier they might have found him barely alive. Slake stared at the body from the doorway. She would realize later that she felt very little looking at it.

He still had his gear on. The shirt and pants were black with blood but it wore good calfskin boots, a canteen on its hip, a loop of brass shotgun shells around its shoulder. The Nyctian saw the implication first. It approached it cautiously, like a sudden movement might wake the body from the slumber of death, and rolled the pallid corpse over with its foot. The body held a shotgun close to its chest, which the bat immediately seized and regarded with pure reverence from barrel to stock.

Potsherds from old icons decorated the floor like small caltrops. Nothing remained of the old altars. In times prior there would have been one in every corner, one for each Sister, each season. The walls bore old frescoes of them. In one corner was a painting of a great cowlike beast with foliage erupting from all orifices. Tsull, goddess of harvest, of the calm season. By the door was Argei, a woman the colour of anthracite, double-headed and bearing a sword. Goddess of war and the season of fire. The dominant faith of the world, a Sister for each moon. Over time the Beowend came around and worshipped them too. Slake had never been religiously inclined but she couldn’t help but feel judged.

Soon the two had set upon the body and were relieving it of its possessions. The boots were too big for the bat but it took out an extra pair of footwraps and tried them again and they fit well enough. It took the belt and all its pouches without so much as a pause to inspect the contents. Slake took a canteen. It was smaller than theirs and when she opened the lid and sniffed the contents she discovered it to be half full of rum. When they had ransacked the corpse they stepped back and looked at it once more. No name tag. No identification. In a year’s time the clothes would start to rot and lesser scavengers would pick it clean down to the bones and there would be no evidence that anyone who ever had a name had died in this place.

The Nyctian made to leave, but Slake called after it. “Hey. Wait.”

It turned and regarded her impatiently from the doorway and she felt unexpectedly idiotic, so much so that she had to look away. Not so much so that she didn’t continue.

“Should we leave something?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re taking from the dead.” She gestured to the body. That’s all it was now, a lucky break. “Do you think we should leave something behind? A thank-you?”

The bat took a step back into the temple and looked up at the painted walls. It had put the pistol away and now cradled its newly loaded shotgun like it was comforting a crying child. For a moment it was silent. It looked at the corpse, then up at the Sisters looking down on it. A sudden twinge of shame behind those eyes, like it had forgotten to do something. She saw its narrow shoulders draw inwards. “Yeah,” it said. “We can do that.”

Slake took a heavy rock from a corner and lifted it with a loud grunt and hauled it to the dark spot on the floor where an altar used to be. The Nyctian put a piece of hardtack on the makeshift shrine and lit a scraggly handrolled cigarette taken from the dead man and let it burn. Slake uncorked the rum bottle and poured a few drops out onto the ground, very carefully so as not to let it slosh. Something compelled the Nyctian to put a brass shell beside it all. A real warrior’s sendoff, this. The two stood back and looked at the assembly. Mephitic smoke coiled up from it, an obscure form of candle for an obscene ritual.

“Do you know the words to the death-prayer?” she asked.

“I do. Shouldn’t you be saying it?”

“I don’t know it.”

It looked at her like she’d just spoken in another language. “What do you mean you don’t know it?”

“I just don’t. I used to but the last time I had to say it was years ago. We should also be leaving the gun if we were doing it the right way.”

The Nyctian scratched its forehead and looked at the freshly mudlarked body. No arguments to be made against that. “Yeah. Ours is the greater need.” It had not expected to be saying postmortem rites today. It knelt on the floor and put both hands on the altar and spoke aloud. Slake stepped back to give it some room and watched it. It was speaking its own language again and she realized that it was repeating what it had said to itself the night prior. It addressed Liyag first and asked for permission to see the body’s spirit off. It had a woman here whose name it didn’t know but she was a woman nonetheless. Not ideal but acceptable.

Slake’s fur stood up on end. She didn’t know why but there must have been a reason. She turned her head and listened.

The Nyctian noticed this and rose immediately. A bracken leaf in a rear window had moved. Too sudden to be the wind. Immediately she started looking for exits. There were holes in the wall on the opposite side that she thought she could get through. If you have time. You probably don’t. A heavy footfall came down on a loose rock outside. The reverberation of it rose through the soles of her boots into her chest. The bat swallowed hard. She felt like something caught in a deadfall.

The beast came in through the front window just below the painting of Argei. A wedge-shaped head, four small eyes like pony beads, the colour of lilac. Its mountainous torso slunk in without a sound and kept coming for what felt like a minute. When it stopped its hindfoot gripped the windowframe and carved long troughs in the old stonework. Its claws had the texture of wrought iron and when it opened its tri-jawed mouth to scent the air its teeth were of the same make. Slake’s legs moved her a step back. She no longer smelled the cigarette smoke. Everything in her peripheral vision seemed to have blurred out like she was looking down a rifle scope.

It took a step forward. Another. The bat held the shotgun at hip level but did not dare to fire. It had taken its backpack off without either or them noticing. The beast’s hide was segmented, the colour of birchbark. Maybe camouflage. The axe’s handle bit into her fingers. Her arms were lifting it very slowly without her knowledge or permission. Three meters away. She realized dully that it was looking at her and her alone. This temple isn’t that big. If it pounces you’ve got no manoeuvring room. It didn’t even seem to see the Nyctian or the corpse. Two meters. Her shoulder itched. Its tail was only now coming through the window, a long thing with a tip like a hypodermic needle. One of its eyes moved, a quick wink like a reassurance that this was all part of some elaborate game. She could hear it breathing. There was a high tone on the exhale like the putter of a two-stroke motor. From her angle she couldn’t see that it had been shot not long before, a chunk taken out of the underside of it that had only just started to scab.

One meter. Look at the guy lying on the floor. Just for a moment. How resolute are you that you won’t be sharing his fate?

Last night she’d’ve replied differently. Not very would have been the answer But there was only so much she was able to tolerate being held at gun or fangpoint and she saw no use in waiting to see the outcome. Her axe rose up and as the beast crouched back on its hind legs she yelled and swung it down into its forehead.

She missed. The axehead fell just short of the skull but chopped a huge section out of its lip, its gums. Her legs threw her to one side just as the beast shrieked and leapt for the spot in which she just stood.

The Nyctian fired the shotgun and the world rang again. In the small space of the temple it could have been cannonfire. Rocks rattled loose from the ceiling. It had far better aim than Slake and hit the beast in the lungs. Slake rolled to the left and pushed herself to her feet in time to get clubbed by its tail and sent cartwheeling. She saw a dull blue rectangle as she passed a window and then the floor came up to meet her and stole her breath.

Full-body pain now. She thought her back might have been broken but when she told her legs to move they answered. Fuck this hurts. No, do not just lie there. Get up.

She pushed herself up and lifted her head and saw the Nyctian raising the shotgun to its shoulder. She dove back to the floor just as the second slug passed through the beast’s torso and cratered the back wall. The round didn’t hit her but she could feel it as it went by, the pressure. The beast didn’t make a sound and leapt for the bat. Its eyes went wide. Raw terror on that pug-faced visage. It thrust the shotgun forward like a spear and jammed it down the beast’s throat and ducked just in time to avoid being slammed against the wall. It had its foot on the backpack and when it leapt again it sent it skidding across the floor towards her.

Slake tried to breathe but couldn’t. The Nyctian was fast but it was frail and she could tell it wouldn’t be able to keep up any sort of dance for long. Both of them were disarmed. Get the gun. She shoved herself up and scrambled for the backpack. The beast turned, its eyes sunken and now deeply bloodshot. It knew her intentions and would not tolerate them. Shit. The bat’s gun came loose and was flung across the room.

The beast leapt for her. Its jaws were a meter wide, its teeth half cloaked in skin like a snake’s. She got the pistol - her father’s pistol, her pistol - half a second before it set upon her and cocked it and shot it in the mouth.

The huge bullet tore its tongue and the back of its throat to bits and deafened her. She shot it three more times, wherever she could aim, no conscious thought involved. The third round fulminated out its back and took a handful of spinebones with it. The Nyctian retrieved its shotgun and slamfired every round it had into its side, the concussions feeling like kicks to Slake’s ribs. The beast’s forelegs rotated like it was trying to swim. After the last shot it sighed and flinched like it had just been scolded and tilted and fell facefirst onto Slake and that was the end of it.

Slake thought she might black out but she didn’t. She lay there under the fallen animal with her arms out to both sides for a minute, sucking in air. Her head felt wet and so did her chest. A fog of gunsmoke hung at knee height. Everything reeked of saltpeter and nitrates. The paintings of the Sisters stared down at her without emotion. The vaulted ceiling was out of focus and she couldn’t make it stay in place for long. The bat stood on the opposite side of the room and was pushing shells into its gun with a shaky hand, alternating between looking at its work and the body. She tested her limbs. Fingers, feet, shoulders, knees. Pain in most of them which she figured was a good sign. With the revolver still in her hand she shoved the corpse off her and got to her feet.

Her and the Nyctian stood there in total silence and watched their kill for movement that never came. Slake had never killed anything before. Nothing that she’d remembered. A few bugs. She pointed the revolver at it and put a foot on its head and rolled it to one side to examine the lifeless eyes. She didn’t know how to feel about it. But apart from a general ache and a nasty bruise on her arm she didn’t feel bad. Not bad at all. Just sweaty. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and it came away soaked with blood.

She looked down at herself, her ruined appearance. The wipe had only made things worse and she had to dry her hands on her pants and wipe away more blood that was streaming into her eyes. Her black jacket had turned a glossy maroon hue. Only a trace could be seen of the golden fur above her neck. Her long mane was matted and viscid with blood and parts of organs unknown and it almost looked like she had been scalped. “Shit,” she said.

When she turned to the Nyctian it was looking at her. It didn’t know what to make of its unwanted travelling companion now that it was armed. She realized this a second later. She had no intentions of using it against the bat and never had but still she moved with caution. She put the safety bar in place and bent down to get the pack free from under the dead beast’s tail. There was a new rip in the front, not big enough to worry about. She opened the side pouch and put the gun back in and when she stepped away the pack was smeared with blood. When she was done she looked for her axe and found it half buried under dead leaves by the door. The bat slung the freshly ripped pack over his shoulders with some effort. It did not point the shotgun at her.

They left the temple together. Slake paused in the doorway to look back in. There was a vague outline of splattered blood on the ground where she had lain beneath the beast. A strange and hitherto unknown part of her felt like she should have taken a trophy. Beyond that the body of the Naiassen, rigor mortis setting in. Something behind her made a noise and she whipped around to face it but it was just the Nyctian.

“Are you coming?” It was standing a few meters away, a pale silhouette in the verdant overgrowth. The sun was out. Early afternoon. Warm and humid. She was starting to be able to hear the wind again.

“Yeah.”

They left through the town’s southern gate and neither looked back at it.

When they reached the ocean Slake took her boots and shirt off and lit a cigarette and sat in the surf smoking. In seconds the water around her turned red.

The road outside the town was sloped and they had spent the second half of the day heading downhill to the coast. Two hours out they went by an old railway but did not follow it. In the evening they paused and sat under an enormous white oak by the roadside and ate in silence. The blood had matted in her fur and she ate carefully to avoid getting any in her mouth. Sisters only knew what it may have carried. The scent of saltwater grew heavier the farther they walked and by dusk the road bent and went by a patch of mangroves and beyond that was the Trellarr Sea. They made for it and now Slake was washing the gore out of her fur while the Nyctian sat on an overturned mast from a ship of which no other piece remained.

When she was as clean as she could get - not very - she stood up and put her shirt back on and stared out over the water. The sun was going down and the cumulonimbus clouds were turning a deeper shade of orange by the minute. A gaggle of seabirds had landed not far away and were in contention amongst themselves over a dead fish. As calm a night as one could get this time of year despite the day’s earlier rains. Her feet ached. When she finished her cigarette she pitched the remains out over the water and walked back up the craggy shore between rows of dead jellyfish and the flowers that grew between the rocks. She put her hands on the mast and shook herself off like a dog then sat down beside the Nyctian.

She dug through her pack and got out the canteen of rum. Saltwater was still dripping into her eyes and she left wet patches wherever she touched. The bat sat beside her with its boots off and the rain cape over its shoulder like a toreador. It watched her idly. She unscrewed the lid and took a small sip. Not too much. She wasn’t a heavy drinker and tipsiness wasn’t something she was willing to chance but she had earned it. It tasted like shit.

“Want some?”

The Nyctian looked at it and kept looking for a moment. “No,” it said eventually. “I don’t drink.”

She shrugged and drank what it would have and put the canteen away. The two of them sat there for some time, sore to the bones, thinking about the day’s events. They had no plans for a place to sleep and hadn’t seen any good shelter since the town. There was enough food for the next three days, four if they didn’t eat too much, but she thought the Nyctian wouldn’t make it a day if it went without. She was shocked it had made it this far. She was shocked she herself had made it this far.

The sun was touching the edge of the world behind them and a dull purple hue rose up from the horizon. The storm clouds had turned the colour of sumac and the first stars were revealing themselves. Two of the world’s moons hung low in the sky, Tsull and Liyag, the first a hazy and rufous semicircle flanked by the far smaller second, so dim it could have just been another star. In a few days’ time the temple bells would ring and black sky would be over. Soon after the season of rain would arrive from the west with its thunderheads and fogs and settle across the landscape like a humid pelerine. In the fields outside the city of her birth the fields would flood with debris from the mountains, collaboration between water and ash the only thing that grew enough to feed the restless and crumbling city. Far offshore a rubbery hide breached through the swells and took in air and went under again, to a space below the knowing of Beowend and Nyctian alike. There was nothing beyond the seas to the East. For thousands of years people had searched and either returned with nothing or didn’t return at all. The occasional volcanic island, lots of whales. No more than that. Apart from the unreachable land from which Slake’s forebears originated there existed nothing else of this world.

When twilight came a dull glow flared to life in the sky to the North as the lights of Hallatin bloomed to life. Slake could see it in her mind’s eye. Sloe boulevard with its brothels and geissler lights and constant parades of drunks and advertisements for liquor. Lampflames and globular sodium-vapor streetlamps in the lower city. The lights of the dock that she used to watch from the roof of a warehouse, a realm of cranes and floodlights and containers being cut open and inspected by company men. To the South the darkening sky devoured the land. There would be nothing to rival the city for many miles. Out there lay the real Meropis that she had until very recently only dreamt of seeing.

While she was lost in her thoughts the Nyctian had gotten up and wandered down the beach a ways. Sealife shrunk away from it as it passed the tidepools. As night fell, luminescent microbes turned the waves light green. It took a flat rock between its thumb and forefinger and walked to the shore and pitched it sidelong across the water. It bounced six times then hit a wave and vanished. It stood there for a while just watching the horizon, its arms limp, heavy. Then it turned and went for its pack.

Slake became aware of the world again when she saw the bat retrieve the revolver in the corner of her vision. She got to her feet in an instant but it was just unloading it. It worked the ejector and pushed the four empty cases and the lone intact one out and handed them to her. She just stared at them.

“If I give you your gun back,” it asked, “you’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

The two looked across at one another. Somewhere in the mangroves an arboreal bird sang a low-high-low song and flew off from its branch. A crab watched them from a few meters away, bug-eyed. “No,” she said, and that was the truth. “As long as you don’t point yours at me again.”

The Nyctian held the empty gun in its right hand and studied her like it might get a better look at her in the evening light. The crab scuttled off. For half a minute the only sound between them was the wind and the surf. “Alright,” it told her. “Deal.” It grabbed the barrel with its free hand and took it off half-cock and offered it out to her.

She reached out with great caution and put her hand on the grip. It was watching her carefully but not with any concern. Their vague shadows splayed out on the rocks, connected by their exchange. A few seconds later it let go and the gun was well and truly hers again but she didn’t dare move to load it yet. The bat was putting its pack on. You’re not getting that back. “What are your plans now?”

“I’m going to find a place to sleep,” it said. “Where are you going?”

“Barathrum,” she told it.

“The underground city?”

“That’s the one.”

The bat sniffed. Slake could see her black reflection in its huge pupils. “That’s a long ways away,” it said.

“Well I was going to take a train.”

They sized one another up as if preparing for a fight. The Nyctian had its belt tightened to the last hole and its pale fur was turning the colour of wine as twilight came on. It looked at her with wide eyes, like it was waiting for her to speak. Or like it was trying to get a better view at whatever unpleasant thing was coming down the tracks at it. You’ll die on your own and you know it damn well, don’t you. Barathrum is just too far and luck is a finite resource.

“I don’t think either of us are going to make it on our own,” said Slake.

To that it nodded. A godawful truth that it had already considered and been reminded of. “The hoshin was wounded. That’s the only reason we’re alive.”

“I’m sure us shooting it helped our chances.”

The bat exhaled through its leaf nose and looked into the forest. It thought for a second then looked back at her. “Alright. How about this. We’re going the same direction.”

Slake nodded. She could’ve ended up going the other way. Blind luck that she took this path. The Nyctian continued. “We’ll go together until you either get enough for a train ticket or I get to where I’m going. Then that’s it. We don’t have to see one another again.”

It was as good an offer as she was going to get. Nothing better was going to appear out of the mangroves. “Alright,” she said.

It moved its gun to its other shoulder and held its left hand out. Slake met it and shook it firmly. Shocking grip strength in those skinny fingers. “Do I get to know your name?” she asked.

It withdrew its hand and wiped it on its pant leg. It looked faintly amused at the question. “Why ask that now?”

“Would you rather go nameless the whole time?” The way it looked at her told her that yes, it would very much like that. But that only lasted a moment. It had been a long time since anyone had called it by its name. No such dignity in a cage.

“Shoreline,” he told her. “My name is Shoreline.”

Slake looked down the beach for a moment with her brow furrowed. Really? “Just Shoreline?” she asked.

“To you.”

“Alright.” She didn’t believe him but he looked earnest. No laugh or slap on the arm or I’m just fucking with you came after it. “I’m Euphrosyne Slake.”

“Which of those is more important?” he asked.

She’d never been asked that before. “Slake, I suppose.”

Shoreline, Slake. The sun was nearly down, twenty minutes of light left. She looked back one last time at the glow from Hallatin. “We should go,” she said. Shoreline turned and sauntered down the beach and she jogged to catch up to him and the two figures walked together into the darkening forest, headed south.

The Floods

I - Apoapsis

Enter now the time of poverty and the season of rising tides. Watch the spillway gates fall open not of their own volition and the banks of rivers and causeways bow and fall in reverence to the passing waters. Two weeks and two days after their departure Slake sat beneath the rawhide awnings of a vaticinatrix’s shelter. Her tail would not fit inside and a passing trickle of mud turned the underside grey.

“Twenty-five ket,” said the teller of futures. From where she sat she could see only their single remaining eye peering out at her from the deepest parts of the tent. A slender hand, scaled, with all bones and sinews piped just beneath the skin like hydraulics, extended at her from the darkness. She took the last of the ket not yet spent and dropped it and the string into the hand, which seemed to vanish as soon as it had the money. She could not tell the species of the woman she talked to and her eyes refused to adjust that far into the darkness. A wave of rain came down on the tent like a drum roll. A few seconds later two of the ket came sailing out of the darkness and hit her in the chest. “Don’t want these two. Keep ‘em.”

Slake put the two ket away and leaned in and watched. The tent reeked of unwash and shit and stale vegetables. The combination hit her like heat from an open oven door. In the corner where the vaticinatrix sat she saw a pile of schmattes move, layers of them stacked like the levels of a degenerate wedding cake, half scales. Small cages lined one wall within which small creatures twitched and muttered in drugged sleep. The figure leaned forth and ran her finger over the gated doors like an inmate with a cup. At the bottom of the pile she seized a particular cage and withdrew it and half the pile teetered but Slake put a hand out to steady it. She thought she heard a muttered thanks but she couldn’t be sure.

The vaticinatrix opened the cage and withdrew from it a small rodent, half-starved. Its tail flailed once and then no more. The glint of a piece of sharp bronze rose from the pile of rags and came down on the rat’s neck and it didn’t even make a sound. In under a minute its ribcage had been peeled open and both figures were bent over it inspecting the auguries of what its heart, its liver, its lungs had to say but only one could make any sense of it.

“You didn’t come here to ask about yourself,” croaked the vaticinatrix, “did you.”

“I don’t know what I came here to ask.”

“Yes you do.” Out came the skeletal hand again. It reached into the unfolded rat with a hooked finger and took from it the mucilaginous intestines. In the lower part of one of the strings was a lead pellet from an airgun that it had either swallowed or had shot into it. “You don’t care about you. You want to know what’s comin’ down the pipe at you. That’s all.”

“Sure.” Slake crossed her legs, uncrossed them. There was no comfortable position she could assume without moving further into the tent but she had reservations about that.

“Well.” The vaticinatrix held the guts up and tapped the pellet as if she hadn’t already seen it. “It don’t look good. Pain in the guts is no good sign. Could be worse, though. Could be cancerous.”

“What would it mean if it was cancerous?”

“It ain’t, so don’t concern yourself over it.”

Slake turned her head and hocked and spat into the damp earth outside. Her spit vanished in seconds in the rain. Some twenty-five ket. Or twenty-three. She’d have to see just what she got given back later. When she looked back in the rodent’s skull had been cleaved open with its brain on display. A faint black bleed on the right side. “What’s that mean?”

“Mm.”

She looked at the raggedy fortune teller with her eyes narrowed but the figure just held the cerebellum and shrugged. “Answer my question.”

“It’s what you make of it,” the vaticinatrix replied. “How’s your hand feelin’?”

“What?”

“Your hand. Does it work?”

“It does.”

“Mhm.”

Fucking useless. “Alright. What else?”

“Another twenty-five ket.” The hand emerged from the pile of filthsoaked blankets at her again with its palm up.

“You’re not getting another damn scrap,” Slake told her. She stood up and backed out of the tent.

The town of Lay was not one worth admiring. It was built beneath an old railway bridge, half out of jute cloth and half of reclaimed scrap iron and was peopled with a few locals and hunters and Sisters knew who else summoned up from the coast when the floodwaters came in, no walls. Laughter came from one of the tents as she passed. Water was coming in from an overflowing lake inland and through the center of town passed a great deluge of muck. It had been raining for as long as the two had been travelling together and it showed no signs of stopping. The night prior a crate of knives several years old had been caught on the stream and washed up into town. A pack of the town’s mismatched youths had broken into it and were now taking turns throwing the blades too corroded for use overhand into the trunk of a dead tree. All turned to watch Slake as she passed and one held out a hand for spare ket but she stomped her foot in the mud at them and they saw her gun and backed away.

She went down a narrow and semi-dry path along the ancient supports and paused for a moment to examine herself in a pool of water. She had already shed some weight and she had to cinch her belt a notch tighter. Her feet had not stopped aching but she had learned to ignore them. They had traded the broken gas stove for a few valuables and she now wore a leather shoulder holster under a cheap flaxen poncho in guerilla style. With her fur-braid done back up to cut down on matting she looked like something to be picked out of a rogues’ gallery. “You look like shit,” she told her reflection. A caprine face looked out at her from what she had assumed to be a collection of scrap lumber but when she turned to address them they had already gone away. She trod through the puddle and kept walking to the rubble pile in which she and Shoreline had made temporary camp.

Shoreline had the map out on a flat section of the rock and was sitting crosslegged with a small piece of charcoal in one hand, examining it. He seemed to have gained the weight Slake had left behind and no longer looked in danger of falling to pieces. The journey had not been a simple one and the crude lines he had drawn on the map bent and curved at queer angles. A backtrack at the coast, a detour to get around a landslide. They had left the coastal mountains behind and were facing down the Southeastern scablands, the chaparrals, the fynbos and forests. Slake had never seen any of it before and the bat would not say if he had.

“You’re in my light.” He spoke without looking up from the map. He had a hand on his chin like some old world philosopher’s statue and was trying to puzzle out a route. Slake moved an inch. “What’s the verdict?”

“Does your hand work?”

He held up his hand not holding the charcoal, made a fist.

“I’d say it was a waste of bronze.” Slake scampered up the rock beside him and looked over his shoulder at the map. There was an icon of a city some hundred kilometers distant to them that had an X drawn over it and its name some time in the distant past for reasons unknown. She hadn’t known there had been anything worthy of note along the Eastern coast. She retrieved the two ket she’d been returned and set them down on the stone and Shoreline instantly seized them and put them in his pocket. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“Not a damn clue. Tried to ask a cattleman whether he’d come from the south or not but I don’t think any of these fornicators of livestock even know where they’re at, let alone how they got here. The floods are really bad this season.”

“Do we even know where we’re at?”

He tapped a point at the end of the coal line. The map was two meters across in both directions and showed everything in remarkable detail but it had not been updated for a century. Where he had gestured were two small lines next to one another to indicate a bridge. “Here. I think. I don’t really know. It’s the only place that makes sense for us to be.”

“Do we have a route?” Slake looked out past the old steel trestles into the valley the bridge straddled. The rain came down in sheets and had for the last half hour, so thick she couldn’t see fifty meters distant. They were at least twenty kilometers from the coast and had been lucky enough not to run into anything like the hoshin but that luck had to be finite. It wasn’t a windy day but the drops that fell from the featureless morning fog were the size of bottlecaps and hit the earth like mortar shells.

“You ask a lot of questions,” he told her, then turned his head to the side and gestured with a tilt of his hognosed head to where she had been looking. “There’s a path in the valley thataways. Saw some herders coming up last night with their lanterns.”

Herders meant pastoralists. She knew those appeared in the south, the Cadha’i and the Damoyen with their tunneler beetles. The right way indeed. “Alright. Leave when the rain slows down?”

“That’s the plan.”

The Nyctian folded the map back up and wrapped it in a leather pouch and tucked it away. Slake had taken to marking down the dates in the notepad she’d packed and scrawled the word Lay beside the fourteenth day of the flood season. Then she lit a cigarette and the two sat there on the rock, watching the rain, the tobacco ember rising and falling in the bridge’s shadow like a slow burning parabola.

Halfway through the day the rain had not slowed and they could wait no longer. They headed into the valley and through a soggy couloir on the other side. They walked through sage flatlands, through low fields ringed by fieldstone whose soil had borne no harvests in a century, past the occasional timber from bunkhouses long collapsed. A grain elevator loomed out at them through the mist and passed and vanished behind them. In drier times it would have been easy going but every step was fought for, their tracks vanishing behind them in the grey and sunless murk.

Shoreline had sawed the stock from his shotgun and whittled the splinters down so it held like a huge pistol. Two towns prior he wrapped a length of rope through the forward sling pin and around the grip and now wore it around his neck with one hand permanently on the receiver unless otherwise required. Slake used her axe as an alpenstock and walked first. At midday a convoy of migrants went by coming from some flooded town on the coast, maybe salvageable when the water receded, maybe not. Among them there seemed to be no dominant species. Their animals came first, pack beasts with necks as long as their laden-down bodies, riderless. The people came after in remarkable order like a parade or a soaked holy procession. A strong-backed man at the head of the group wielded their only firearm and was followed by another older man with a stiff corpse half-wrapped in fabric in his arms, drowned. Over its closed eyelids two false pupils had been painted in verdigris and cinnabar. Its head was tilted back and it was the sole member of the hundred-strong group that regarded the two drifters standing to the side. Shoreline tapped a hand to his chin and then to the center of his chest in respect and when all had passed they walked on.

That night they took shelter on the rim of an old quarry. In certain parts of the southeast there was limestone in abundance and within it once was silver. They passed the manager’s office, an old brick building brought down to ruins, wet to the foundation. As the world darkened they came to the old machine yard where a dragline excavator sat overturned with its electrics and engine long gone. They crawled into the cabin and Slake ate a dinner of freshly rehydrated dried meat and horrendous bread while Shoreline wrung his cape out. They sat for a while in silence and listened to the rain hit the old machine’s hull, the trickles of water running down the rusted metal and onto the ground. Just before nightfall she took her waterlogged notes out and scratched the date in along with a half-moon symbol and three question marks. There was no sense to be made of the map and Shoreline didn’t bother to check it.

Slake took watch for the first half of the night. She climbed the struts of the arm with relative ease and when she reached the top the bucket was still there facing the ground, its jaws parted open as if its work had ceased mid-vomit all those years ago. There was a dry patch beneath it and she sat there with the revolver in one hand, tapping out a beat on her knee to keep herself awake. Darkness fell with an almost audible hush, no sound but the rain and faint snoring from the cab below her. The fog came up heavily off the swamped earth and the air was humid and black as bitumen. She aimed at the darkness to test her vision and couldn’t even see to the end of her shirt.

At around midnight the skies cleared and three moons emerged from behind the clouds, Akō and Argei and Liyag lined from east to west. She sat in the quiet darkness and listened, her eyes on the southern horizon. No lights anywhere, fire or electric. The world was blue and the earth shone after the rains. To their North was the valley through which they’d passed and where they were headed the landscape was knifewounded with deep channelled scablands where glaciers had been in times before anyone on two legs had walked the lands. An old railway cut a line through the shrubs. No sign of the coast. In the bottom of the quarry a herd of colossal animals the names of which escaped her had stopped at the foot of a ruined bucket wheel excavator to drink from the runoff and she watched them dip their long mouths into the polluted water and rise up to call their deep cries to others in the night. Minutes then hours passed and she watched the moons tilt to the side with a splattering of stars at their heels. A thin atmosphere swirled on Tsull’s ruddy surface. Another storm in another unknowable place. She put her elbow on the rail and remained in the cobalt darkness still drenched in the day’s clothes like a gargoyle summoned from a muskeg and when one of them had dropped below the horizon she climbed down and shook Shoreline awake and fell asleep instantly.

A day later they entered the scablands. They cut low into the canyons and at noon the sun came out, just briefly but enough to set their clothes steaming and leave them crouched beneath the wavering shade of a gum tree with their mouths open, breathing hard. Their canteen was running dry but the stream that ran through the gully for all its might was undrinkable with mud and debris and branches. The air smelled of geosmin. Green songbirds peered from their nests dug into the loess valley walls and dove through the brief sunlight to pick worms from the ground. Shoreline watched this for a moment then looked up at the canyon. At the top were trees, grasses, a patch of dry dirt with roots showing through. Tracks from some scampering beast. He held a hand out to Slake and asked for her axe. It was the first exchange of words between them since they’d left Lay. She acquiesced and he walked to the gum tree’s trunk and put his hand into the puddle forming in a natural bowl in the center. The bark was smooth, almost sanded, familiar to him. He wound back with the axe and sunk it vertically a foot below the bowl and water flowed out in a trickle from it. He dropped the tool and pressed his mouth to the bark and drank, then moved so she could to the same, her head craned awkwardly so it would drip into her beak. They filled the canteen and as it started to rain again they moved on while the water still flowed from the tree.

They took three nights getting through the valleys and hardly said a word to one another. The first day they came upon the aftermath of some slaughter out there in the wilds from years passed. A plane had crashed into the canyon wall, a push-prop with broad wings that was somehow kept running until the motor got shot to pieces. The nose was jammed into the wall like a dart. The pilot was a Beowend, skeletal and nude, their clothes long subsumed into the earth. A handful of round marks stencilled under the cockpit. The burnt husk of a tracked truck and several pack beasts lay sunbleached beside it and enough seasons had passed that only the spines and nasal bones still showed themselves. Four more seasons and they might not show at all. An ulna and radius stuck up at an angle from the ground near the plane. More bodies below. But there were tracks from the day prior, bipedal and wearing boots, and they didn’t stop save for the minute it took them to look around and within another five they had left it behind entirely.

Near the heel of the canyons they passed a collapsed bridge. There were no roads leading to it nor any on the other side and it appeared to have been set there in error, a concrete megalith with the rebar showing like cracked ribs, leaching iron oxide into the river. It was made for cars but much of it had been carted off to build homes in another part of the valleys they had not passed. The only evidence remaining was an axle resting on a half submerged slab that had fallen into the river midway through and was the only piece of solid land that could get anyone or anything across to the stonefields further south. They watched it for some time. A leathery bird circled far overhead and shrieked once into the misty air and fell away. Nothing else.

They walked for another hour to the end of the valley but it rose straight up from the earth, raw granite, completely impassable even without rain, and they turned back and by dusk they stood at the foot of the bridge and observed the river roiling past. “I think we’re shit outta luck,” said Shoreline.

Slake was looking over her shoulder. It was a habit she’d picked up some time after their fight with the hoshin that she herself could not place the origins of. She turned her head and spat on the ground and set the axe down into the mud head first and leaned on it. “Yeah.”

“I don’t think I’m a good enough swimmer for this.”

“We’ll have one of us jump across to the middle part,” she told him, gesturing with a nod of her head to the slab. “Probably you. Then-”

“I think not,” he said, waving a hand at her. “You first.”

“Alright. I’ll go across. You throw over the bags, the guns. Then we do the same to the other side.”

Shoreline sniffed. It was pouring. His pants were old and the knees had been patched over once in the last week but had ripped again earlier in the day. His fur was slick and greasy and clung to him in matted strands and his cape sat loose and water-blackened around his shoulders like a pair of useless wings. He looked like something that could be caught while fishing and Slake was no different. “Sure,” he said. “We’ll do that.”

They went as close as they could to the banks and dropped their packs. Slake put a hand on her shoulder holster and shifted it. She waved her arms to test if she could swim while wearing it and she figured she probably could. Shoreline took his shotgun off and unslung his shellbelt and hiked his pant legs up over his knees and fastened them with some loose string and both were ready.

Slake made the jump first. She put her back to the one remaining support pillar and breathed in. Water leapt up at the banks and seemed to be on the verge of spilling over, white and brown and black waves moving past faster than cars. There was hail in the rain now and it hissed on the silt. Soon it would accumulate and she’d slip off if she waited any longer. She shook her head and swore and ran and leapt. Her feet came down on concrete but her legs almost went out and she had to catch herself. When she stood back up there was a cut on her palm. “You’re good right here,” she called back, pointing to the spot where she’d just landed.

He moved to the shore with their packs and threw them over with great effort, one by one. His shotgun was last. Of all of their gear it was the closest to being an extension of either of their bodies. He looked at it, then at the river. Then he threw it underhand and Slake caught it and then he made the jump with greater ease than her.

The second half’s gap was wider by half a meter and both crouched low and peered over the side at it. Neither had any idea what the slab was supported by and when they leaned it shifted subtly underfoot. “The rule remains,” said Shoreline.

She took a moment to compose herself then backed up and ran and jumped again. She came down on her stomach. One foot landed short and splashed into the water. She scrambled further to the shore and when she stood up the front half of her was black like she’d just been drenched with oil. The hail and rain and the rush of the river made a sound like applause. Three out of ten for a leap like that.

Behind Shoreline on the ridge a white wall of hail was emerging through the rainy murk. They could hear it coming in a wave, the slapping impacts on the ground where larger pieces were following. The wind had picked up and the breeze smelled of ice. “You’d better haul ass,” she told him. He took the bags and threw them across. She took hers and held it by the straps and lifted it over her head to keep the hail off. When he moved to the far end of the slab it swayed on its supports and bent to one side and he had to keep his arms out for balance. Something under his feet cracked. A loose piece of concrete previously hanging by a thread detached and came loose and vanished into the river. He ran for the edge and when he was mid-leap the whole thing bent to the right like a ship rolling over. She saw his arms swing out for just a moment and he came down with a heavy splash into the river and she lost sight of him immediately.

In a second Slake was at the bank. She didn’t remember dropping her pack. Shoreline’s head came up a few meters downstream, mouth wide, one arm scrabbling for purchase on the vertical shore. She ran beside him and dove for him and seized his wrist with one hand and hauled with as much force as she could muster. The hailstones were the size of coins. One pranged off her oblique and left a purplish bruise under her fur but she didn’t notice. Shoreline’s face reappeared from the water and gasped for breath. The rest of his body was a pale shape, blurry. His legs worked furiously and his other hand gripped the bank, finger marks dug deep into the mud but before he could throw a foot up his grip slipped and he fell back in and was carried off.

Slake saw his ears through the waves further downstream and sprinted after him, a tall plume of mud kicked up at each step. Her visibility wasn’t more than a few meters and if he got out of her sight that would be that. Run, damn you. His head crested the water and she saw him take a breath. When she reached him again he had his hands wrapped around a tree root sticking out from the bank. She grabbed his wrists and hauled so hard that when he finally came up she fell backwards into the mud.

Shoreline crouched there for some time, coughing. His back heaved and he put his elbows on the ground and hacked until a trickle of water ran past his lips and onto the ground. His eyes were bloodshot like he’d just been sobbing. The hail came down like bullets. There was another tree near where she’d left their packs and she took him by the arm and dragged him still coughing over to it and left him in a heap in a dry patch. She sat against the trunk with her hands tucked to her begrimed shins and looked elsewhere while Shoreline fought for breath. The world was white and full of noise. She could barely see to their packs and the river could only just be discerned. She thought she heard another sound, concrete on concrete, but she figured it was probably the remainder of the bridge falling into the river. Her shirt was ruined and her poncho wasn’t much better. Her arms hurt. One shoulder felt worse than the other but it wasn’t debilitating. You could’ve pulled something. All that for the Nyctian who tried to kill you.

When Shoreline was mostly done coughing he crawled to sit beside Slake with his back to the tree and both knew they’d get no further that night. The hail didn’t stop but elsewhere the clouds must have broken because the sun cut through it and painted everything orange and she got the impression she was watching the sunset of some mistfilled alien moon. Normally the mud on her would have hardened but it was humid enough to keep everything damp. Eventually she got up and ran out with a hand over her head to grab their bags. She dragged them and the shotgun and her axe back to the tree. After they had shared some water Shoreline reached into his kit and pulled out a piece of old bread, half sawdust, sodden and limp in its waxpaper holdings like a dead eel. They had run out of cans long ago. Slake didn’t eat anything. She took out the canteen of rum and uncapped it and peered inside. Still a bit left. She brushed some dirt off her palm and shook a few drops onto the cut and hissed, then put it away. When Shoreline finished his bread he leaned forward and coughed and turned to look at her. “You should eat.”

She looked back at him. He had his cape off and was hunched forward and his huge eyes were sunken behind his soaked fur. She could see herself in the reflection of his irises. Her cheeks looked thin. “Fine.” Before she could reach into her pack for anything he tore off a piece of scrawny sausage from another waxpaper package and offered it to her and the two sat there in the darkening fog chewing slowly, staring out at the rain-wrapped world.

At night they strung their bags up on the limbs of the tree and climbed up it to make camp. Slake offered to take first watch but it was Shoreline’s turn and he insisted. The hail had mostly ceased but in the foggy aftermath of the day’s rains night came on like a wet cloth draped over the earth. She couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or closed. No form to anything, no sense of space. She had her shoulder in a dip in the tree and her legs hung over either side of the branch to keep her from falling but that and the sound of rain in the canopy was her only link to anything outside her mind. Neither had changed their socks that day but there were no dry ones in either of their packs. She wore the same clothes she left Hallatin with, excluding the poncho. If the sun shone tomorrow the mud covering her would harden like she’d been excavated from an archaeological dig. Her chest felt heavy. He could have died today. It happens just like that. Could’ve been you. She reached out with her hand to grip the side of the tree and got the impression that nothing else existed in the world beyond her immediate perception and words came out of her without her consent. “Shoreline?”

The reply came from somewhere to her left on another branch. She could hardly hear above the rain but she made it out pretty clearly. A metallic click out there in the darkness, a shuffle of clothes. She could visualize him adjusting his shotgun in her head. Still there. She put her head down and counted backwards and did simple math and fell into restless sleep.

On their fifth day out they spotted lights on the north face of a hill. They stopped on the crest of a hummock over a rocky and soaked lowland and Shoreline watched it through the binoculars while Slake unslung her pack and followed his gaze. Good stone walls, a railway of dubious utility. Flat land for crops. A gas lamp pole jutting from the mire near the town gate glowed orange and cast a long shimmering pattern across the wet shrubland. There was a sign that neither could read. It was three kilometers distant at the most. No sound but the rain, no wind. Apart from the tracks by the plane they had seen no trace of any other travellers and the both of them watched this town on the horizon intently, like it might vanish if they so much as turned their heads. Shoreline lowered the binoculars and scratched his chest and raised them again, like he might get a better look the second time around. “There’s tents out by the gate.”

Slake took inventory of everything she had. The revolver and five empty shell casings. A dull knife, the axe. Six pairs of socks including what she had on her feet. The canteen, a half-empty box of matches, three cigarettes wrapped in old butcher’s paper. The notepad, a small piece of coal, two ket, fifty or so milliliters of horrendous rum. They’d eaten the last of the food that morning. She looked over her shoulder at the land behind her, the mire through which they’d trekked. She was soaked all over and filthy to the waist with wet earth and she looked like something half sculpted from clay by an amateur of the craft. “We should stop for the night,” she said.

They cut to the right and followed the railroad. The stone ballast was the first solid land they’d crossed for hours and Slake’s legs thanked her for it. It was getting dark fast and in the last of the trypan evening light they could make out the sign as they passed it. Sersal-pos was its name and it was full for the season and not accepting any more labour. Gates closed. Don’t cause trouble.

They wandered through the small tent village like soused hypnotees. They walked across the narrow duckboards through a row of tents on oak platforms to keep them above the muck. The aisles had tarps strung across them and water poured through the gaps like drippings from showerheads. From one of the tents a small Čalo man pried back the entrance flap and peered out at the two passersby, their weapons. Sound of a child crying within, the smell of flatbread being baked. A covered chimney pipe coming out the top smoked quietly. He nodded deeply as rainwater soaked the red scales on his forehead and the two nodded back and when Slake looked behind her after they’d passed he had gone back inside.

There were maybe four dozen tents and yurts in total and for all their asking and offers none were open to them. A woman in a heavy oilcloth coat and a cuirass with a gun around her shoulder walked the walls and looked out over the ramparts, surveying the tents below. A bell chimed from somewhere in the town. They could see the orange glow of gas lighting inside and the distant sound of a syncopated piano flowed over the masonry. The two of them had exited to the other side of the encampment and they both stood there in the cold and dark and listened, their shadows flickering over the puddles behind them. A slight breeze came in from the east. Neither would be comfortable tonight and both knew it. Slake called to the guard and asked whether they could camp in a dry patch by the wall. The guard replied that they could and pointed them to the east side. They walked around to it, sinking to the knees every step now that they were off solid ground. On the east side there was a small flat space with a junkpile beside it made mostly from old iron but also a few good pieces of old dry wood. She asked if they could get a fire started and the guard told them they could as long as they didn’t fuck anything up. Then the guard went away and it was just them.

They took their packs off and sat there on the ground and watched the darkness for a while. Shoreline moved first. He staggered to the pile of refuse and dug the top layers out of the way and searched for anything that would burn. Old pallets, a broken bedpost, newspaper so thin it flaked to nothing in his hands. He threw any halfway dry piece he could find out behind him onto the dry strip by the wall and after a while he had a decent collection. Near the bottom of the pile he found an old tin jug and when he shook it there was a bit of liquid left and when he smelled it he knew it was lamp oil. Slake took her axe and split the wastewood into smaller pieces and arranged it all in a cone with loose rocks around it and some old paper for kindling. She struck a match and set it in the middle and Shoreline held the oil can at the ready. They didn’t end up needing it. He cupped a hand to his mouth and blew into the flames and they rose and soon they had a good fire going and both of them squatted on opposite sides and stared into its heart as if caught in a trance.

Eventually they turned their backs to one another and peeled themselves out of their ruinous clothes and laid them by the fire like animal skins set out to cure. Shoreline washed himself in a miniature lake in a pothole and Slake used the rain, both of them with their respective weapons in hand, shotgun and axe and pistol, like combatants from times remembered only in pictographs. When they returned to the fire they shook their bags empty and set their sodden gear around the flames and soon they were steaming. She looked behind her in the dark. Dull orange light played over the sunken farm fields and just below the shimmering and rainsoaked surface she could see the vague bronze outline of the first sprouts of tripwheat and something about the scene compelled her to put a hand to the side of her chest. She could feel her ribs in prior times but now she could really feel them. Well, that’s what happens when you don’t eat. Shoreline was looking at the fire and when she spoke he didn’t look up. “We don’t have anything to eat, right?”

“Not a crumb.”

She looked up. The sky was black and completely without definition. No clouds that she could pick out. The shape of rain coming in on an angle and the embers spiralling up and vanishing were the only things to colour it. “Shit.”

“I’ve got sixteen shells,” said Shoreline. When she looked back down to him he was watching her from across the fire, his fur the same colour as his eyes in the light. “We can trade a few in the morning.”

“We’re going to run out of those eventually.”

“We won’t.”

But there would be no eating tonight, concerns over ammunition aside. Both knew it as well as the other just as they knew the rain would keep falling. If the wind changed in the night they’d wake up soaked and the fire would die. At least they had the oil. She was about to get up to fetch more wood when he spoke again. “You talk a lot in your sleep.”

She paused with her palms on the earth and lowered herself back down. Her poncho had ceased steaming and she grabbed it and wrapped it around her neck and head like a grandmother’s shawl. “I know,” she told him. “I wouldn’t if I had a say in it.”

“Do I talk?”

“Not often.” He examined her carefully but again she had no reason to lie and he soon looked back into the coals, unblinking. “Sometimes. Just words. You move around a lot.”

Shoreline’s rain cape had mostly dried and he too put it over his shoulders and then moved for his pants. They both dressed quietly and sat back down. He wasn’t cold or shivering but he held his hands out to the fire regardless as if it might read his palms and tell him his future.

“When I was young my father brought a medicine woman in to see me about it,” she said. The Nyctian’s ears moved. He was listening. “He said when I went to sleep I wouldn’t shut up. Just kept talking until I woke up. She put salt on the windowsills and gave me zetsil root to chew but they didn’t know I was allergic to it. I almost died.” Why are you telling him this? “Do you dream?”

“Yes,” he told her. She thought she saw him nod but he might have just been tired. “A lot.”

“I think if you dream but don’t talk much, it’s good. Something’s gone right.”

“But I move around a lot.”

“You do.” She pawed the ground behind her for her pack and dug through it and pulled loose one of the cigarettes and lit it in the fire. You’ll need more of these. How many a shotgun shell would get her out here she couldn’t fathom. “I don’t know what to make of that.”

Before they slept they constructed for themselves small shanties out of old sheets of corrugated steel. They piled their dried clothes into their packs and tucked them and their weapons close to their chests, arms wrapped around them to ward off thieves. Shoreline was a light sleeper and would wake up from most disturbances but she would leave nothing to chance. They both used more bent iron to lift themselves off the ground and when the wind shifted in the night and rain fell straight down on them they remained mostly dry. The fire hissed out in the darkness and grew quieter by the minute. She watched its light sway on the walls, watched for any shadow that may cross it but none came. In days past when it rained in Hallatin she could hear it outside her window impacting the copper roof. A low tinny sound like a strange watery factory line running. In her youth she would move to the window and sit with her head on the sill watching water run off the side and make a river in the eaves. In her adult life it was reduced to a tool to help her fall asleep but she nevertheless thought about it in both contexts now and didn’t know why. Before she could interrogate it she had lapsed into sleep. Neither of them so much as twitched the whole night through.

II - Lower Ground

Hunger beyond hunger. Pale faces among the migrants in the wilds and soon amongst the two armed wanderers walking in their midst. The rocky sound of their steps, endless precipitation. Slake and Shoreline followed the railway out from Sersal-pos on empty stomachs and walked for a day and a half on the same and slept in the wet. On the second morning a diesel electric train tore in from the fog and the rain and went past as they watched it from the trackside bog, soaked to the knees. Passengers crowded the cars, inside and on top, clinging to it like remoras. Its bell chimed as it went past and it blared its horn to clear the tracks ahead of it. A child waved at them out an open window and Shoreline waved back. A gun car clattered in from the mist and tracked the both of them and he froze with his hand in the air, neither willing to take a chance. Soon the train was a rumble in the distance and they clambered back to the ballast and continued on alongside the still-warm rails into the torrential southeastern wilderness.

Daybreak the following day saw them crouched in a tree on the crest of a low hill in a wooded valley. The tracks were passing too far inland and after some argument they made the decision to veer off. They were in foothills and there were mountains to the west but they didn’t dare enter them. Just prior they had spotted a wide road of thousands of tracks, deep-clawed, reeking of blood and shit. Slake needed no explanation to be told to climb and now they glassed the treetops and listened. Birds all around sang whooping calls unfamiliar to both of them. More vultures than usual. The everpresent storm with thunder somewhere distant. Her stomach made a sound like a dying animal for lack of food but it was the only complaint either had made and there would come no more. She asked whether they ought to be up so high with the lightning and all but he insisted it was better than the alternative and they stayed there for half a day. Once in the distance they thought they heard the call of the hounds so dreaded by the Nyctian but they went away and didn’t return. When they climbed down they moved in a hurry and didn’t stop all night and by the next day they walked asleep on their feet and collapsed together in the cab of an old tractor left to rot in a hillside glade.

The next morning still starving they came upon more tracks in the dirt. Barefoot, four toes, spaced like they were walking, neither large nor small nor short nor especially deep or shallow. Digitigrade, biped. Shoreline squatted by them and looked about. They seemed to have just appeared there on the forest floor, moving in no great hurry, and in no more than one hundred meters they vanished and could not be found again. He stood back up and shook his head but had to lean against a tree for a moment to keep from falling over. They hadn’t been able to trade for any food and neither had eaten for as long as they’d been walking but at least they had water, at least Slake could smoke.

They came across more tracks later in the day on a rocky acclivity, hooves. Deer, Shoreline explained. He thought. He wasn’t sure. They followed them over the crest and down the other side, pausing every few minutes to sit and wheeze and collect themselves. Inclines were getting treacherous for the both of them. Slake wondered what was feeding her heart right now. Muscles, bones. You can live for two weeks without food as long as you’ve got water but it sure doesn’t feel like it. She had to lean on her axe more and more. They fought their own bodies to move through the sucking mud downhill, gripping trees to pull themselves along and when they reached the bottom there was a shallow and fast river, whitewater spraying at the boulderous banks, and on the far side upwind from them a six point chital stood with its head down chewing on a bush, like it had been placed there for them. Shoreline brought his shotgun up and aimed and shot it through the heart.

It sat down and put its head on the rocks and bled to death. The two crashed through the river towards it, frenzied with hunger. Shoreline butchered it with appalling crudity while Slake built a fire and used the leftover lamp oil to light it. The two sat there on the rocks for the better part of the rest of the day, roasting the meat over the flames on sticks and eating ferociously, and they said no prayers or thanks. But they could not bring the carcass with them and after they’d eaten their fill they left it behind save for a few cuts wrapped in leftover waxpaper, walking east downriver. In the night following as they slept something emerged from the forest and took it in its jaws and carried it off. The rain washed the blood away and pushed the ashes into the river and their prints were gone by morning.

Two days later they passed near the eastern oil fields but did not dare get close. They could smell it even at their distance. All on the horizon on the coast they could see the flares and black smoke from gas wells, thousands in number in the tarpit river deltas, the faint moving shapes of the derricks churning away over the thinned treetops. Boats, too, floating just offshore with huge bloated gas tanks like dead fish. They passed through an old rubber plantation, past the collapsed storehouses, then a kilometer long stretch where the forest had been hacked back and filled with old tires too smooth to be of any use. There were families there that had made shacks out of hubcaps and animal skins and the folk that dwelt within them looked out at the passing drifters with great curiosity. Around these makeshift dwellings were old scraps of clothing, piles of shoes with the soles worn clean through, old backpacks. A human mother sat on an overturned rim and nursed a kwashiorkor stricken child and watched the pair but the two paid none of it any mind. Slake took a bike tire and nudged it along beside her with the axe handle in a manner not dissimilar to how she recalled doing such in the streets in her youth but when they left the yard the tire stayed behind.

That night they made camp on a ridge overlooking an old dried muskeg and considered their options. They were under a small ledge of rocks with a ratty ligustrum hedge making for a good door and windbreak but it did nothing to keep out the gathering heat. Shoreline had the map out. A corner had fallen off it and he kept it from blowing away with a rock. They had not moved far but they’d die if they turned back. The closest town was sixty kilometers away. “I don’t think we have a choice,” he said.

“And if we stayed here for a few days and tried to hunt for something?”

“This close to the oilfields I wouldn’t count on it.” They hadn’t heard the call of a bird since the derricks came into sight. Only insects and very few of those. The sun was descending outside through a lull in the rain, a burning dot through the smoke. Slake watched it fall while she whittled at a piece of wood. Another habit picked up. Everything smelled faintly of bitumen and their boots were black from the day’s hike. “And that tire town has probably eaten everything there is to eat.”

“So we’ll just have to keep going,” she said.

“Yeah.”

That night Slake was supposed to keep second watch. She woke to a shake on the shoulder and stumbled to the door with her axe and gun and sat on a rock, yawning. It was clear out. First clear night in how long? One of the moons hung low and enormous but after she’d blinked a few times she still could not make out which it was. She smoked a cigarette and tapped the axe against the ground to stay conscious but Shoreline told her sotto voce to shut up and she did. Five minutes later her head nodded and she fell back asleep.

Once in her childhood days in the harvest season her father had taken her to watch an airshow out by the docks. That afternoon she sat on his shoulders with her hands on his ears and watched the gantries dip like fishing birds to take the cargo from ships. As the sun set she lay on the grass of an overgrown yard and watched a blue and yellow hot air balloon pass slowly through the evening sky. There was a deli across the road and the air smelled of spiced sausages. Past the fence beside her a couple was talking about having their first child but she wasn’t paying attention and did not know why she recalled it. It was on that evening that she first contemplated that the sky was not up and she wasn’t down but the whole thing spun and she clung to the whirling earth, the grass, the cracked asphalt, as if out of fear of being flung from it with her eyes closed until her father came back and put her over his shoulder and carried her home while she pretended to sleep.

Or dreams not from memory now. A day on a beach somewhere with green water, no reason for it. Tall sailing ships off the coast with men jumping from them. She walked into the waves and found a door and opened it into a submarine library and spent some time reading from a picture book. In another dream a friend showed her pictures of something she’d drawn, a shark, and Slake found herself blind with envy. She took the pages from her hands and ripped them but when she looked back they were intact again. A third and final dream of wealth, of signatures on bank slips, of pearl necklaces, of diamonds. Then it all turned black and her sleeping form muttered senselessly onto the rocks as if cursing the sudden absence.

She woke up first. Her eyes were still heavy and rubbing them did no good. She swore that something still smelled faintly of a deli. She felt for their packs to get water but they were not there.

She sat up immediately and looked and saw no signs of them. They were kept by the foot of where Shoreline slept. A faint wet print on the limestone, digitigrade boots, not big at all. She patted her chest and her gun was in her holster, her axe still beside her where her hand had rested. He still clutched his shotgun. She stumbled to him and shook him violently but he did not wake. “Get up, man. Fuck.”

When he came to he blinked and followed her gaze to their missing gear and rose roaring. “Are you blind?” he yelled. “How?”

“I feel asleep,” she told him. “We’re going to lose them if we don’t move.”

“Tsull’s cunt.”

“I know. Come on.”

They broke out of the cave into a grey and overcast world, a fine mist everywhere. All was still in semi darkness as if the sun was circumspect about rising on a scene such as this. There was a band of fog that passed through the forest on the inland side where a river ran. A set of very small footprints went into the space where they slept and came out to join a group that had apparently stood around and waited. Four in total, if she had to guess. The prints turned and went out over the muskeg at a jog. Almost brand new and it had not begun raining yet. Couldn’t have been more than half an hour ago.

They moved like wild dogs through the mire in pursuit. Through the muskeg, up an embankment, down the other side. Past that it all blurred. Keep running. Slake’s chest burned and her throat was in flames for lack of water but neither of them stopped and they could not stop. She thought she heard Shoreline repeating a curse but she couldn’t be sure. He was in the lead, following the tracks. How much time since they started running? How much farther? They had saved the scrap of meat for breakfast but those were likely gone. She thought she might give out entirely. Keep running. Come on. She thought she couldn’t go far but she did. You’re going to have to do something here. Her legs took her upwards and she caught only glimpses of what they passed. Birch bark, the foundations of an old house. The edges of her vision were black. Then they came out on top of a knoll and there they were.

The thieves were indeed four in number and were some distance away across a clearing in the wetlands. She did not recall when the clouds had parted but they had and the heat was extraordinary but she hardly felt it. A flight of pelicans lifted out of the reeds and flew past. No other sign of wildlife. They stopped and watched the bandits lope through the shallow water and from their slow pace she figured they must not think themselves pursued. One Damoyen among them, a Scrounger, too. The dark shapes of their packs in their hands and one of them clutched something long. Shoreline stood beside her with his hands on his knees and looked like he was about to retch but he gathered himself and looked out with one hand over his eyes.

He dropped to his knees and Slake instinctually followed him down. He looked at his shotgun for a moment but set it aside and held out a hand to her without looking. “Give me your gun.”

“What?”

“Give me the damn gun and be quick about it.”

She undid her holster and passed him the revolver. He gripped it with both hands and leaned back with both feet on the ground and his knees up and rested his forearms on them. He pulled the hammer back with both thumbs. Moisture was pouring into his eyes and he had to look away to wipe his face on his arm. Slake’s clothing clung to her and her chest felt like she’d punctured a lung. Her breath came out in a whine. She wasn’t sure that the revolver could make the shot. The four thieves were only walking and still seemed unaware of their pursuers but they weren’t getting any closer. Five hundred meters, if she had to guess a range. Probably more. She plugged her ears.

Shoreline sucked in air, more winded than her. He couldn’t hold an empty lung long enough to get steady. Another ten seconds. One of the small figures looked back and with no better opportunity he squeezed the trigger. The gun sprayed a hoop of flame and second later the round passed through the looker’s chest and glanced off a rock on the other side. The slug made a sound like a hawk’s screech and ripped off into the distance and the figure dropped in a heap while the others all staggered back then ducked to try and pick their comrade up.

He gave her the revolver back and she ran down into the water towards the thieves. He called for her to wait but she didn’t listen and soon he was at her side. She tried to summon a thought about the situation but came up empty.

When they were a hundred meters out they raised their weapons in unison. The one that was shot had a sucking chest wound. A Damoyen woman no older than them. A small human, maybe fourteen years of age, was weeping over her, holding the edges of her darkening shirt. The one with the long object was a Simälken, a ratty looking thing with few clothes and a broad shaved patch on its side where the fur was too matted to fix. A bit of white paint above its eyes. No tail. In its hands it held a wooden crossbow and it didn’t dare level it at them but didn’t drop it either. There was a bolt readied in the groove. The fourth member seemed to have cut and ran. Their packs lay half submerged where they’d been dropped.

“Get away from the bags,” said Slake. The Damoyen’s chest was heaving and they lay in a pond of blood. A piece of a rib stuck out from their chest. The child wouldn’t stop wailing. Shoreline kept the shotgun on the one with the crossbow while Slake went up and kicked the kid in the abdomen and sent it sprawling.

“Just leave him,” said the Simälken. No placing its accent. It was speaking through its teeth and looked over its shoulder quickly as if to check for a previously unseen way out or if the fourth would return. Slake pointed her gun at it, one-handed, the axe taking up the other. “He’s done.”

“Take a step back and put that down or I’m going to kill you.”

It stepped back, just a small step. Their boots sloshed in the water. Ankle-deep. Shoreline had taken an imperceptible step closer to Slake and glanced at her.

“Farther,” she said. The thief didn’t move. She saw a muscle in their jaw work. “I’ll kill you. I will. Where did the fourth one go?”

“He ran off.”

“What direction?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Tell us.”

It didn’t say anything. The fourth could be coming back around. Slake looked down at the water, a faint game trail hacked in the phragmite that might have functioned as the getaway. As soon as her eyes were off the thief she heard the faint crack of the string being released and she shot it through the chest without looking. An instant later Shoreline fired his shotgun twice and the thief died before it hit the ground, their back torn open and bubbling. The sound of the shots came back over the moorland once and then again. The child had their hands over their ears and sat shrieking. She felt nothing.

“You swine,” said Shoreline. He had a hand to the side of his chest but Slake couldn’t see the bolt and figured it must have grazed him. She took another look around and hurried over to him. “Oh, you fuck.”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m alright.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

She bent down to take both their packs. He reached out for his but she wouldn’t give it to him and he didn’t ask again. The Damoyen thief was twitching like a fish. Their mouth flinched open with every shallow breath. Slake raised her pistol at the kid but he told her to stop. “Don’t,” he said, and she didn’t. He reached down and held the dying canine’s legs still and undid their boots and took them then went through their pockets. A pack of waterproof matches, a rusted knife. He took the other one’s boots too but one of his slugs had cracked the crossbow in half. They left the child to ululate and walked off in silence.

They had to stop in the afternoon. Shoreline was not doing well. He had washed the cut with rum and packed it with one of Slake’s mostly unspoiled socks but it would not clot fully. They found a cracked and ancient path in the woods and followed it until they saw signs of an old entryway to an enterprise long forgotten. A faded sign with an advertisement, WELCOME TO. The rotten hull of a car propped on cinderblocks, puncture marks on the gas tank that now sprouted plants. They went up the path with her in the lead, cutting back branches. Birds flew out of the canopy away from them. At the end in a clearing that had not yet been repopulated by trees was the brick shape of a mill for something, sugar maybe. The support beams on the side were falling away and it didn’t look stable but it was raining hard and it would have to do.

Inside they shrugged off their packs. The roof had gone and the old stone floor was mostly grown over. Vast mushrooms grew in the shadowed corners, veinlike mycelium spiderwebbing the floor. The meat had been eaten but they shared some water as Shoreline took his rain cape off. There was a three inch long cut along his ribcage that dipped into what little fat he had there and when he raised his arm up to inspect it more closely he nearly doubled over with pain and had to lower it again and sit for a minute with his eyes closed. “I can’t just bandage this,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just leave me for a while. Give me a knife before you go. Yours, not the new one.”

She fetched it for him and went away while he sat slumped against the wall, breathing. She went outside and circled around the building once, twice. Past the same cluster of cinnamon ferns. An hour prior the clouds had returned and she pulled her poncho up over her head to keep the rain off. You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you. She kicked at a rock and thought. Then she went back around to the side where they kept their packs and leaned against the wall and looked in.

He had the knife in one hand and had retrieved a scrap of leftover bone from the waxpaper somehow uneaten that he split down the middle and then again and made smaller through whittling until it had the quality of a needle. He held it up and turned it in his hands and it seemed fine. In better times he’d have bent a hypodermic or something but it wasn’t to be. He dropped it into the canteen of rum and took his belt off and fished around in Slake’s pack for another of her socks. He tore it apart and took the threads from it and the vague annoyance that her clothing was getting ruined was the strongest thing she’d felt for hours.

When he had the thread he sat back and looked up. His hands were shaking and for a moment he closed his eyes just to collect himself. Prayers would not help him here and he didn’t utter any. He lifted his arm as far as it would go and turned himself sideways and braced it on a pile of stones. From the rum canteen he retrieved the needle and held a patch of sock to the lip to soak it and washed the wound. A faint purplish tinge to the skin under his fur around it, bad bruising. She thought she probably ought to look away. He tied off the sock thread to the end of the sliver of wood and looked at it in his hand, then down at his ribs.

He pushed the needle in and turned it sideways and pushed it through with the thread attached and made a noise. Just a small one, not loud, a caught breath. When the needle was out he sat there and clenched his fist, unclenched it. He repeated the motion on the other side and made a loop and tied it off and repeated this twice, on the top of the cut and the bottom. When all was done a bit of blood had stained the white fur on his ribs and he sat there for a moment just breathing, staring at the far wall. He drank from the canteen, very slowly. Then he stood up and put his cape back on and swayed over to the door where Slake was standing and leaned against it. “Are you good to move?” she asked him.

“Yes.” She looked at him and had her doubts immediately. His nose was beaded with sweat and he had to keep his fingers dug into his palms to stop them from shaking. There was a gash in the cape through which the bolt had passed and though he was no longer bleeding he still had the look of some exotic disease patient summoned from a field hospital. But he was standing, moving. “Do you remember that city on the map?”

“The one with the X drawn over it?”

“That one.”

“I thought we agreed to stay clear of it.”

“We should change our plans. It’s getting bad.”

And there was nothing else beyond that for some distance, not that they were likely to reach. A small town at the foot of the mountains rumoured by some in the previous to shoot on sight in all seasons but the harvest and a few pastoralists with their herds that were not keen on sharing the wealth. Slake looked over her shoulder. There were ferns in the forest that flinched at the rain. Chirruping frogs somewhere past them. An insect landed on her shoulder and she swatted it away. There was a very good chance that Shoreline could have died not two hours prior on some obscure wetland and there was an even greater chance that they’d get too weak to continue and curl up under a rock somewhere and waste away and that would be that. “Do we have any choice?”

“We do.” She looked at him but the look he returned was blank and she knew the alternative wasn’t much of one.

“Then we go to the city. You don’t look like you’re fit to travel.”

“I’ll manage.”

“They’ll probably charge an entrance fee.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

Shoreline meandered back into the mill. There was a drop of blood on the ground to indicate where he’d been. Slake followed him in and he took out the map and they squatted there in the mildewed husk of a building and studied it together, examining the topography, the elevation lines, the best route. Most of the railways were gone but she faintly recalled some story about a man her father knew riding one, once. At least one still active. They’d move through some lowlands, through a pass, out the other side and there it would be. They’d see its lights on the horizon by the next night if they made good time. When they were done he folded it carefully and tucked it away and they set out into the rain and the gathering evening.

They walked until near-darkness and made camp in a banjaxed stone house on a riverbend. In latter times it was maybe a farm but of such history there was no evidence. The two emerged from the woods in dark and misshapen silhouette and threw stones through the windows like waterlogged teenage hoodlums and waited but nothing stirred. The clearing in which it sat was a lake. They went through every room and checked the cellar and outbuildings and though they had been rifled of all possessions of worth there were serviceberry trees hanging by the river which they gathered in their pockets.

They ate a dinner of fruit in silence on the floor of the old parlour with their respective weapons and the dead thieves’ boots kept beside them like forks and knives. Weeds grew by the door. The wooden floorboards had all been pried up for firewood ages ago and much of the furniture save for a bookshelf without the shelves had met the same fate. There were nails in the mortar where paintings had once hung, metal bars on the windows that seemed to have been added in times not as distant as the building of the house. When both had eaten Slake saw to making a fire with some dry branches brought from one side of the house and cut to size with the axe. Shoreline walked outside and went to the outbuilding in the last of the day’s light and hauled out an old aluminum basin and left it under the corner of the eaves to catch the runoff. He stood and waited and watched the house. Dull orange light through the window. Someone with good eyes could see it from some distance. When he came he pushed the old bookshelf in front of the window to block the light.

He dragged the basin into the drawing room and washed in the rainwater and by the end looked no different than he had the rest of the day. Slake declined a wash and the basin was left where it was. He repacked his wound with another of Slake’s socks while she marked the day’s progress in her notes and they stayed in front of the fire for a while until he announced he was going to sleep.

She took first watch and went upstairs to one of the upper rooms, navigating by feel. No echoes of footsteps to listen for. The faint odour of mould on everything. Something flapped out of the eaves and took off through the window as she entered but nothing else joined it. She went to the window and sat down with one arm up on the sill and the revolver in her hand. It still looked fully loaded from the front. Darkness everywhere. Nothing but rain outside. The occasional splash from a fish cresting the river. Something small passed through the yard and she listened for it again but didn’t hear it. She couldn’t see the forest or the tops of the hills in the west. When she figured it was past midnight she got up and headed back downstairs, a dry patch where she had sat.

The fire had burnt to embers. Shoreline sat motionless in front of it. She thought he was asleep until she saw the glint of his eyes, his splitlipped face turning towards her. “You’re still up,” she told him.

“You’re a keen one.”

“Your turn on watch.”

“I know.”

She stretched and laid down on the floor next to him and put her head on her pack but he didn’t move. He lifted his arm a bit and canted his head down towards his chest, a faint whistle of air through his nose.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking to see if it’s infected.” He sniffed again. They both smelled foul. Were it infected for real she didn’t think either would be able to tell. “I think it’s good.”

She sat up. No vertigo this time. Their dinner wasn’t substantial but it was enough. He had been looking at the boots. Only after she had sat in silence alongside him for a while did she come to that realisation for she was looking at them too. “Do you think we can get something for those?”

“There’ll always be a market for boots. The small ones are pretty badly made.” The footwear in question was made from stained buckskin and had a sole made from an old tire, treads carved into it with a knife for grip. Purchased by them, in a sense. Now something to barter with. “How do you feel?”

“About what?” She looked at him. Old woman’s eyes. They were faint but just barely present in the remnants of the firelight, like something looking at him from the bottom of a well. Evidently he found the answer he was looking for and he turned away and spat into the darkness. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“They would have done the same. They tried to.”

“I know.” He sniffed, not at his chest this time. She dug through a side pouch on her bag until her fingers closed around the one remaining cigarette. It looked like an elongated dead grub in her hands, faintly damp despite the paper it was kept in. It occurred to her that this was the last one in their possession. But you may not get another chance to smoke, another day like today rolls around. She pressed it to the embers in the fireplace and lit it and sat back pulling from it. It was absolutely terrible and the smoke made her cough.

“And you?” He was watching her smoke, his pupils locked on the burning tobacco. She offered it to him but he held up a hand.

“I don’t know yet. I don’t like killing.” Were she any less sane she might have chanced asking him why he was the way he was in Hallatin. The question hung in the air between them, clinging to the cigarette smoke, inquired by her stare alone. He caught it. “You can ask me. I don’t mind.”

“Is that what you were in chains for?”

“No. I was in for stealing two bottles of brandy. And vagrancy. I guess the school needed an anatomical doll and I was conveniently there.”

“Doesn’t seem like a prison worthy offense.”

“Normally you just get beaten senseless.” He gave her a hard look and she dropped the subject immediately, no further prompting needed. He looked away. “They weren’t kin. Those people today.”

“So you’re alright with it?”

“It makes no difference. They’re dead and we took back what’s ours and nothing else is relevant.”

He left for watch and Slake laid there sprawled on the floor like a drunk. She didn’t sleep for a while. She laid there with her gun on her chest and her hand over it as if she were checking for a heartbeat somewhere in it. Neither the day’s events nor any trace of violence lingered in her head beyond the prior conversation and try though she might she could not pin something there to examine it. It occurred to her that in the city there would probably be trains and if the opportunity presented itself a faster way west. The revolver felt no different in her hand save for a small change in weight. Once long ago a man not unfamiliar with violence cleaned it one last time and put it away in a case and never thought it would be used again. Now here it lay. Hold it, hold it close for there will not come another with a birthright in such agreement. This is your only kin for miles in every direction and you would do well to remember that.

Later before daybreak she woke from a troubling dream. Something about old friends and being chased through a castle. Unimportant things. She raised her head. Their backpacks were still there. Him too, back from watch. His back rose and fell slowly and the bandage and stitching held. In maybe two days’ time they’d be at the city and from there perhaps she’d be on a train and he’d be off to whatever part of the continent he was seeking and their paths would never cross again. She put her head back down and clutched the handle of her axe until her knuckles turned white and stayed awake until the sun rose.

III - Shells

There were no lights on the horizon. No scent of smoke, no outlying towns, no buzz in the old power cables, no smog. They had walked through the night to reach it and now as dawn broke Slake and Shoreline sat crouched on a rough slopeside talus behind a cluster of bushes and surveyed the old city through waterlogged binoculars.

It was not as big as Hallatin. Not even remotely. Slake hadn’t conceived that cities didn’t have to be so large but it made sense, didn’t it. It was built on the outer bend of a river in a wide valley and from a distance it was part of the landscape, completely overgrown with kudzu, with foliage. Birds rose from the canopy between the old brick buildings with something leathery in pursuit. She could see the clearings where old railways had been, one clear enough to still be in use. A turntable, an enormous iron gate through which the trains would have once passed, two cannons on the walls drooping downwards with age. Wrecked vehicles, some newer than others. She could see the brown shapes of them through the thin trees. The walls were curiously intact but the city itself was a shambles. It looked like a poorly maintained urban park and with the horizon obscured by rain there seemed to be little else of the world. They sat there for an hour until they were confident nothing was moving.

“Well,” she said. She lowered the binoculars and offered them to Shoreline. He just set them on the ground beside him. “Haven’t seen anything yet.”

“I should’ve known it was empty. We would’ve seen the lights at least two nights ago.”

“It was our best bet.” They had spent half the previous day plucking crayfish with Shoreline’s instruction from a slow river and roasting them on a fire and they were fed well enough to walk without much discomfort. Shoreline had his rain cape off and he sat there crosslegged like some cenobite from a benighted wilderness order, staring out at the world. He raised a hand at the walls and pointed at it with two fingers.

“The guns are still there,” he told her. “Nobody carted them off.”

“Is this place too out of the way?”

“Definitely not. There’s still at least one railway down there that looks used.”

“Think there’s a reason?”

“Probably.” He sniffed. She looked at him and waited for him to say more but he didn’t and she looked away.

They sat there for another ten minutes in the mist and the wind before he got to his feet and she followed him down the scree towards the gate. The forest floor was a pond and frogs scattered before them as they sloshed their way through it. The old rails along which they walked had not been maintained and neither had the service road beside it for both were cracked and the ballast scattered where trees had grown through it, mature already. There were lines of old cars facing the city, jammed up against one another. A birch grew from the window of a rusted pantechnicon and Shoreline went up and started taking its bark while Slake went around the truck, just looking. The grill seemed to be grinning at her. Some symbol painted on the side, old and faded, maybe a brand. It looked to have been burned at some point in the past. What remained of the tires were black and melted shapes around the thin rims. When she circled around the back she peered through the half open rear door. It was mostly moss but there were other shapes within. The wreckage of an iron trunk. Down the overgrown road were more cars, all burnt, patterans bearing a message she could not make sense of. When she went back around the Nyctian had stuffed his pack with bark and was bent over, examining something in the water. When he came up he was holding an ancient and corroded rifle cartridge.

The gate was twenty meters wide and just as tall and with no engine it would not open. The walls were carpeted with vines with razor wire at the top, wrecked with age but no less deadly. They walked in its shade and circled around the side opposite the river and came upon a small bunker-like entrance but when they pried the ruined steel door open enough to look through the passage had been bricked off and a white X painted over it. Near a watchtower they came upon a collection of bones, senseless in their form. A tibia elongated and twisted, a radius and ulna coiled together like coupling snakes, a lower jawbone that extended and sprouted hundreds of teeth, all misshapen. She nudged the pile with her foot and when nothing stirred they moved on.

On the farthest side there was a hole blown in the wall with the rubble scattered everywhere. Bits of ductwork and pipes and rebar jutted out like porcupine quills, old and oxidized, worth nothing in scrap. They stayed a ways back and observed it through the trees but even at their distance there were pieces of scattered concrete wedged in the mud, some of good size. Through the middle of the gap a clearing had been made large enough for several people to fit through and the two of them crouched there in the downpour for half an hour just watching, observing, muddy to the waist. She almost nodded off. There were some concrete rooms in the walls and past them the shapes of a city street, a faded blue sign for something or another on one of the brick edifices. The rain came down hard and they could only just hear the calls of distant birds and little else.

“I bet there’s people in there,” said Shoreline. He had his shotgun hanging from around his neck on its strap and was staring at the gap as though someone might come through it at any moment, like they’d been expected. “Or at least there have been at some point recently.”

“Maybe. We should still take a look.”

“They might try to kill us.”

“I’d shoot us too looking the way we do.” They knew the answer. She looked over her shoulder to the ruins of some outbuilding rotting away in the forest. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s probably been rifled of everything by now. She couldn’t help but feel like this was an intrusion and she had not felt that way about anything old before.

“We need to go in,” he said. “Even if just for the night. We’re not gonna find anything but it’ll be dry.”

They moved to the gap, Shoreline first. He dropped to his belly and crawled up the rubble and peered in. He looked left down the street, right. Everything was underwater. No soil for anything to drain into and the sewers no doubt completely submerged. A blanket of kudzu covered every building, an old streetcar just another green shape. It all smelled wet and nothing else. His ears turned in different directions, listening, listening. Eventually he waved her up. She began to walk to him, her eyes on the ground to look for tire tracks or hoofprints from horses but before she could see the evidence of the latter something caught her eye and she stopped.

There, pressed into the moss. A bare footprint, a fresh one, not his. Four toes. Clear as day. She stooped down to inspect it. She had seen the shape before, similar to her own. It was just the one but she could see the claw marks and they were heading into the city. Shoreline spoke but she didn’t hear him. She pressed a thumb into the moss beside it and watched for how quickly it sprang back. He called for her again and she looked up. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“There’s a print here.” He came down the rubble and she pointed to the spot where it had been but there remained no trace of thumbprint nor claw. He looked at her cynically and she felt absolutely idiotic all of a sudden. Narcotized by lack of sleep. Must be. “Or I might have just been seeing things.”

“What did it look like?”

“It wasn’t anything. A big cat probably. Let’s just go.” She wiped her hand on her thigh but succeeded only in soiling it more and the two climbed up over the rubble and meandered with their heads swivelling like tourists into the streets of the nameless city.

They pieced together its history as they walked and were mostly incorrect. Stone and brick buildings with verdigrised copper roofs erected in the height of a latter day Conqueror golden age, ten stories tall, twenty, thirty, as high as the cranes once reached, most of them in some state of collapse. Narrow streets with twin lines for streetcars going down the middle of the obliterated cobblestone with the occasional hulk of an automobile bent at an odd angle, a curious abundance of ambulances and hearses and open bed trunks among their ranks. It all looked more like a forest than the place it had once been. No glass in any storefront, bars on certain windows with hasty weld marks keeping them in place and on others nothing but nails in the frames where wood had once been. A warm rain came down and danced off the submerged streets. It took them a long time to get from one block to the next. Near the center of town they came by a bank, the old windows rimmed with black stains from a fire. One of them was still intact. A stained glass icon in the granite above the grand front door. Shoreline stopped and looked at it and Slake stopped a few steps later. Their wakes rippled slowly outward behind them. “Who is that?” he asked.

Slake scratched her beak and sniffed. The icon bore an image of the Conqueror in her armor with a tasseled spear in one hand and an object in the other that had once been a hot coal that age and weather had dulled down to a brown shape. “What do you mean?”

“The woman in the glass. I saw her in Hallatin a lot on older buildings, usually.”

“That’s Ellise,” said Slake. “You can tell from the coal.”

“Oh.” He let the words hang in the air for a few seconds but nothing more came of it. He passed his gun from one hand to another and tapped his thumb on the hammer and stared at the glass on a building of a type he wouldn’t have even dared get close to in times not so distant. The stained icon, blindfolded, did not stare back and the entryway hung open like a corpse’s mouth. “Do you want to look inside?”

“Sure.”

They went up the steps slowly, feet sloshing in their boots. The top of the stairs had concrete barriers half blocking the way in with gaps in between that sandbags used to occupy. Bronze letters hung on either side of the door.

“I would have thought for sure someone would have taken anything bronze within reach,” Shoreline said. He was looking inside but almost no light penetrated within and neither of them could see a thing.

A few of the letters were missing but she found one on the ground and pieced the words together without thinking. Merchants Bank of Éa Shale. They went over to the doorway and stood there for a few seconds before Shoreline took one of the bronze letters and flung it underhand inside and it clattered like dropped cookware across the marble floor and eventually went still. An echoing ring kept on for a few more seconds and then all they heard was the rain.

They took three steps inside and stood there and let their eyes adjust. In the center of the vast lobby a coil of skeletal remains splayed out in an ossified puddle, its many limbs reaching out like roots searching for moisture. The stained glass of the ceiling was through some miracle intact and the lobby and teller booths were painted in dull pastel shades, all tinted green from the kudzu. The letter Shoreline had thrown in was resting against an open jaw on the bonepile. They did not linger.

They paused in a riparian alleyway to get their bearings and discussed a method of retracing their steps. With no street signs to read the buildings looked similar with the exception of the bank and docking spire on the other side of town. Their entrance was on the west side and by the time they had reached the conclusion to leave no trace and go by direction night was starting to fall on them with its great dark hush.

They circled the block twice and stopped on a corner in front of the façade of what could have been a pub in days long past, a nice one. Arched windows, only the wireframes remaining, an empty coat of arms in each. The second floor windows were glassless and there were eight floors in total. Stairs to the entrance, not high enough off the street to stop a few centimeters of water from getting in. The front door must have been made of wood because all that remained were the brass hinges on the frame. An iron sign bearing the vague image of a crown hung off the side and creaked in the evening breeze. Slake squatted and felt around her feet and peeled a piece of asphalt off the ground and lobbed it underhand through an open window. The sound reverberated out but was muted by the vines. Twice while they waited the fur on her neck stood up and she scanned the foggy avenue and saw nothing. They stood there submerged to the waist in the street, their packs balanced on their heads as if every inch of them wasn’t already drenched. When nothing happened they walked up and in.

There were no taps and there were no seats, no tables, no booths. All that remained of the establishment was a granite bar, the oak countertop scorched away, everything else carted off or burnt. The ceiling was higher than it looked from the outside and on it was a painted fresco of some military scene almost too blackened to make out. Empty picture frames on the walls, melted geissler tubes. A puddle of mud in each corner, ash from the past season coagulating like black earthen bloodclots. They stood there sodden and dripping in the entryway as though someone might show the two derelicts where the seats were but no one came. There was a stone staircase in the back and they went up to the hostelry in silence but they stopped at the top and went no further up. The furniture from the ground floor had been dragged up and piled in front of every door in haphazard fashion but most of it was so decayed they could see through it. The walls were stripped of paint and bits of ancient mineral wool sagged down from every angle and made the hall look smaller than it was. On the third floor they pushed past a rusted heap of scrap on the top steps and wandered through the halls, checking every corner, every door. Gainsboro light filtered in through empty windows. Slake kept looking over her shoulder and couldn’t find an explanation as to why.

They made camp in a corner room above the entrance with a good view of the street. The room was once a good suite but it had burned and then rotted to nothing and the floor was gone in certain places that she could see the rooms below. There were some empty shell casings by the window so old that when she picked one up it crumbled in her fingers. They sat in silence and shared a drink of water. Shoreline looked out the window, a ghostly chiropteran shape staring down at an empty city from an otherwise empty building, watching the rain come down and hiss on the street-turned-river. Slake took her revolver apart and wiped it down and put it back together and thought. This place was a bar once. Bars have kitchens and kitchens have pantries. “I’m going downstairs,” she told Shoreline.

He watched her with wide eyes, like she was a specimen in formaldehyde. “Why?”

“Just to take a look around. See if we missed something.” She snapped the trigger guard back into place and put her gun in half cock and reloaded it slowly, carefully, spinning the cylinder so it would shoot when she needed it to. She put it back in its holster and stood and picked up her axe.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll stomp on the floor three times if I see anything.”

“Should I run back up if I hear that?”

He thought for a moment. He leaned out the window and looked about at the foggy evening. No more than a block’s worth of visibility in any direction. He pulled himself back inside and grabbed his gun and leaned out the window again, testing how fast he could bring it to bear in either direction. She glanced at his chest and saw the stitched cut. It was healing well. No infections. “No. If I thump thrice, run or hide. If I do it four times, come back up.”

“And if I see something first?”

“I don’t know. Just start shooting.”

She went back downstairs to the bar wearing her pack with her axe in both hands. She stood there in the foyer and surveyed the room again. The low rumble of the rain poured in from outside. In times long gone soldiers and workers alike would congregate in this place after shifts to get drunk or drunker. Slake stood there in her wrecked army shirt like a dishonourable discharge and it occurred to her that she may have been the only Beowend to enter in close to a century. It also occurred to her that for the first time in a few weeks she was on her own, no one else within earshot. She looked up. The ceiling fresco bore the image of a naval officer, just the upper chest and head remaining, but the painting was permanently looking away to the right and when she followed its gaze she saw an open doorway to a back kitchen and went in.

The old steel countertops and cabinets were just dark rusted shapes. No refrigerator, a gap where a range might have been with halved pipes sticking from the wall like car exhausts. No light save for what came through the doorway. The shelves were all collapsed, indistinct piles of what used to be cutlery and pots all scattered about on the wet floor. There was an old stone slab for a table in the middle of everything with a single porcelain plate somehow still intact on it. She picked it up and blew the dust off and tapped it with her finger but it was nothing special and she put it back and looked around until she saw the gap to the pantry.

The room was ransacked of everything and she figured she should have expected it. Nothing of worth in any of the corroded metal cabinets. Any bags that may once have held something had rotted away and everything smelled of mould. She couldn’t see anything in the darkness and she went by feel, running her hand over every shelf, feeling for what her eyes would not show her. The concrete walls were cracked and damp and her watery footsteps sounded odd in the small space. She was about ready to stop when her fingers fell into nothing.

She stepped back and willed her eyes to focus. A vague square of even darker darkness that she recognized immediately as a dumbwaiter. She pushed her hand back in and felt around she found a steel cable, somehow still intact. She gave it a pull and heard the sound of water moving below and pulled harder until the top of the dumbwaiter was in view, still dripping. She jammed her axe in to hold it open and grabbed the top and hauled it up with one hand and reached in. Her hand closed around a bottle of sloe gin.

She reached in again but found nothing else. When she removed her axe the dumbwaiter plummeted back down to the basement. There was a snap from somewhere above her. The stress must have been too much for the cable for it too came loose and fell into the dark basement water and never again would anyone enjoy its convenience.

In the bar section she stood there once more holding the bottle. The glass was green and dulled with age but the cap seemed intact. The liquid within had taken on a strange hue. Is one hundred year old liquor good to drink? She had no idea but she knew that it was probably still alcoholic and when she turned it and shook it a little nothing came out. She turned the screw band and popped the lid off after a bit of effort. It hissed very faintly. She wafted the bottle under her beak. It smelled horrific but she was sure she’d drank worse. She smelled it again and almost felt lightheaded. She leaned there with an elbow on the bartop, her axe beside her, and watched the street for a minute. Then she lifted it and tilted a bit into her beak and spat it out onto the floor immediately.

She looked at the bottle as if it might be plotting something but she just needed to try again. So long with good alcohol will sully one’s appreciation for the ungood. She smelled it again and held it sideways to her beak and swallowed before she could taste it. High proof, probably close to fifty percent, if she had to guess. It tasted less like sloes and more like something used to grease factory equipment. She took another small drink and then a third but no more. Not good to drink on an empty stomach, not here. She put the bottle down on the bar and put her elbows up and her forehead in her hands and stood there. You are drinking from a bottle fished from a flooded basement alone in a ruined bar in an empty city. Your kind left this place to the wilds years ago and now only you and this lone bottle remain. She looked around again. Thunder echoed in from outside. She tried to picture in her head an after-shift scene from a century prior. Assemble the tables, oak ones, chairs around them and men and women seated. In Hallatin she had sometimes frequented public houses on the dam with a friend she stopped talking to the year prior. She could still hear the quiet hush of conversations in her mind’s ears but could not remember the taste of the cheap saison they drank. Can someone please inquire as to what this Beowend woman is doing here?

She turned back to the bar and stared at the bottle of gin, trying to picture a label on it, something imperial, something worth drinking. Just then a pair of hands with white cuffs at the wrist placed themselves on the other side of the bar.

Slake stepped back with the bottle in hand and slipped on the tile floor and the gin went soaring across the room and exploded like a grenade. She came down hard on her ass and her hands scrambled for her axe but it was too far away. When she got up she was alone.

She didn’t move for thirty seconds. She kept her eyes locked on the spot where she had been standing as if she might catch some afterimage of what had transpired. A gust outside brought rain sideways in through the doorway and some of it splashed against her leg. The uniformed Beowend on the ceiling stared off at the side door, as it had. Nothing moved, nothing happened, no one but her in that bar on the corner whose name no one alive recalled. She moved forward very slowly, making her footsteps as quiet as she could, and grabbed her axe. She held it at the ready in treecutting fashion and stepped to the side around the bar but that too was empty. No evidence that anyone had been behind it. She moved to the kitchen and looked in but the darkness unnerved her in a way it had not before and she didn’t look for long. When her survey was done she went over to the empty bottle. There was glass everywhere and it crunched underfoot. You are losing your fucking mind, that’s what’s going on here.

Thump thump thump. It took her some time to register what she’d heard. The building was ancient and made constant small noises as if it were restless in its sleep but the sound was unmistakable and everything she’d just been thinking about was gone. The echoes of past conversations, the gin. Her pistol was out instantly. The rain was coming down hard, an off-grey static that fell almost horizontally, and she figured it would make good enough cover to get a look out a front window and that’s what she did. She regretted it immediately.

There were eight figures pushing their way through the waist deep water down the street towards her, knights of the road or tobymen or mosstroopers of unknown allegiance carrying guns and spears and clad in hammered steel. She shrank back from the window subconsciously. These were no migrants. The one in the lead carried an ox tongue spear with a lanyard tied near the middle to keep it on their hand and others in the procession carried firearms, a side by side shotgun, a military rifle of some variety with a good wooden stock. They wore helmets, cuirasses, rain capes, gauntlets. No way to tell the species at a glance. Some distance away where the street was not as deep someone waited on horseback, an apparition in the rain, barely identifiable. All of them wore a white band somewhere on them. They are going to kill you. Are you ready for that? She recoiled from the window and got down on her hands and knees and stared at her gun. Then she looked out again. It was slow going and though they were getting closer they weren’t moving fast. Maybe they will but you can’t just sit here. You need to move.

She had the advantage of being indoors and she knew that. Going upstairs was not an option. If she did they’d send people up to look and they’d corner her and Shoreline. She wondered what his plans were and only then did she start to hear the blood in her ears. She looked across the street. There was an old workhouse on the opposite corner, a squat brick building with a bit of solid land around it. The brickwork on it was crumbling but it looked solid enough. Run out, dive underwater to try not to get shot. What she’d’ve liked to do is just run but she wouldn’t be fast enough and she settled on the workhouse and told herself not to hesitate but she did regardless. Her legs would not move no matter how much she willed them to and she cursed them. The mosstroopers did not relent in their approach and they did not say a word amongst themselves, their purpose and plan already agreed upon and needing no more discussion. She could hear them now, the sound of them pushing through the flooded street. As she got up and started for the door Shoreline leaned out the window and shot the one in the rear through the chest.

The shot man dropped like an ironclad stone into the water and his armour kept him there as bubbles escaped his mouth and the wound and the gaps in his clothing and rose to the surface like the newly red water was boiling. The one in the lead hollered something just as Slake went out the front door and as soon as her head was underwater she could hear the high percussions of gunfire in the street. A bullet slapped into the water to her side and she found it curious that she could hear the slug hitting the road. She swam as far as she could, not far, then came up for air and went under again. She kicked hard. The cobblestone blurred past. An old bone wedged in it. Loose bricks. Bullets detonated on the surface of the water and clinked to the ground on either side of her. When she came up on the other side she hurled herself onto the sidewalk and legged it and fell behind a mossy brick wall. A slug took a piece from the side of the workhouse, a clay explosion, and she crawled on her hands and knees to an empty window.

She still had her axe and her pistol and without checking whether it was clear she dove through. A bullet snapped past and caromed off the dark back wall. The air felt hot where it had just passed. She crouched there below the window in a pool of melted glass and once she had gotten her breath she scrambled to the next one over and looked out. The window from which Shoreline had leaned out had been shot all to pieces, huge chunks taken from the façade. Two of them were going in the front door and the sight filled her with enough fury that her vision almost doubled.

Three more of them were sloshing through the street towards her. They saw each other at the same time but Slake already had her pistol up. She cocked the hammer back and fired at the ones going through the door to the bar but the shot went wide and took a fist sized hole out of the doorframe. The whole workhouse seemed to shake with the gunshot and dust was suddenly everywhere, an unpleasant whine in her ears. She turned and ran.

On the far side of the room was a stone staircase and she took the steps four at a time. She washed up on the second floor and went up again until she was on the fifth. There were shadows moving three floors below. They can follow your tracks. She was still dripping from the but she ran on regardless. She went down a hall with what looked like animal pens on either side, the old wrought iron doors flaking away. The place was a labyrinth and the twilight hour did nothing to help her. In seconds she would not be alone on the floor and she kept moving until she found an open doorway to a fire escape. Take it. She threw herself onto it and the stairs groaned underfoot but did not give out. Her steps were loud. The metal sang beneath her and the final ladder was gone so she had to jump for it. She went down the alley at a sprint and as she neared the end a wave of buckshot passed so close to her left that she could feel the air move and the wad from the shot swung and tapped her in the calf.

Slake moved as far as her legs would take her. Down backstreets, flooded corridors, through the arcade of an old temple and out the other side. Birds settling in for their nightly rest rose in feathered sheets before her. Something in a second floor window hissed and swelled its throat up like an adder at her passing but did not give chase. She did not stop of her own volition. She fell through a doorway into a black room on the first floor of an ancient municipal building and collapsed and nearly vomited the gin back up. Her heart was pounding against her sternum and her lungs and underfed muscles were in agony. She lay there with spittle trailing out of her beak into a thin pool on the moss beneath her until she found the strength to get up. Listen. Her heart was still pounding but she thought she could hear the faint boom of a gun from a few blocks away. Just the one. Or it could have been thunder. She looked at the ceiling and closed her eyes. It was so thin she could see the latticework of old piping like the strings in an ancient guitar. You need to get up.

She got to her feet, completely invisible in the dark of the night. There were wide bootprints and drag marks of rainwater led in from the door to where Slake stood. If they came in with lights there’d be no hiding where she was. Maybe even if they didn’t have lights. She had no memory of the floor plan. Where she came in could be rooms away or a room over but staying put was not an option. Everything hurt and her calf was the worst of it. She thought she might have taken some shot but didn’t check. Her throat itched but she thought she’d left the canteen with Shoreline. Go back the way you came from, retrace your steps, do anything, but don’t just stay here. And get your gun up before you get killed.

She went back into the previous room and took stock of the place with her pistol clenched in her hand like a talisman. More pipes in this room, a junction of them curiously untouched by fire. A steel switchboard on one wall with gauges, dials, frayed wires sticking out like post-lightning hair. She threw a switch on a control panel nearby but the click it made was loud and she did not touch it again. The asbestos walls hung down in long strips and all that was left behind them were the studs and the concrete supports. Her heart percussed in her ears, twin thumps. The next room held a tall drum that rose out of the floor from the level below, hundreds of small pipes snaking from it along the walls, all labelled, illegible. A service building. She tapped on the drum and it came back hollow. No water inside and she thought maybe there might be a basement.

Into the next room now. She kept her eyes on the floor and looked for any reflections of water, her backtracks. Everything she passed was new to her. All her clothes were soaked and soon they turned cold and claggy against her skin. She walked through the crumbling halls, a locker room. A destroyed pair of overalls hung over an upturned bench and the shape in the darkness caught her so off guard that she nearly shot it.

When she came to the main foyer night had completely fallen. She listened for anything that wasn’t her. Water flowed in through cracks in the verdigrised roof and through the wood ceiling and sang on the old stone floor. The chirping of an insect in an adjacent room. Faint rustle of the kudzu in the wind. It had stopped raining and a few shafts of grotty moonlight fell diagonally into the room and she did not dare go near them for fear of being silhouetted. Slake stood there in her tattered clothes reeking of travel and dirt and mould like the building itself anthropomorphized and while she pondered the similarity a light flashed across the twin entrances.

It was so gone so quickly she didn’t realize she saw it until the cone of incandescent light swung in again and went away. She did not remember raising her gun but she was looking down the sights and kept them on the doors. There was movement outside. Boots through water, more than one pair, the tapping of a spearshaft to gauge depth before taking the next step. The light came back and flashed across her prints on the floor, the flaking lead paint. The ceiling was partly collapsed. Not enough to hide behind but she could still run, there were exits, one not yet taken. She could not see the room beyond but with little other choice she ran through it, looking behind her to where she saw the light last.

It was a staircase down, eighteen steps total. Slake’s pistol went one way and her axe went another and she fell headlong down the steps and smashed through a rotted old wood barricade at the bottom. She felt a rib crack and tasted blood in her mouth. She thought her leg was broken but she couldn’t be sure. When she tried to draw a breath her throat made an awful noise and she got no air. The second time she fared no better. Past the pain she thought she saw the top of the stairs illuminated, a great crevice in the brick wall, the shapes of the structural supports. Beyond that the certainty of her death that no doubt heard her unplanned descent. Her arms still worked and she pulled herself across the floor, feeling for her gun, her axe, anything. There was nothing around her and she rolled to the right and felt again. Her hands closed around the barrel of the revolver just as the light appeared at the top of the stairway.

She got a good grip on it and yanked the trigger back. The world went bright and loud and the figure holding the light vanished like a lighthouse’s lamp turning away. In her freshly deafblind state she could not hear the shifting of the wood joists beneath her nor could she see the inward sag of the walls. The round had taken a beam out and the staircase was collapsing. She did not have the air to yell when the ceiling came down and blocked off the world above. The floor gave out and Euphrosyne Slake went down with it into complete and absolute darkness and silence.

IV - Places Unseen

No one came for Slake. No brigands, no rescue. She laid there under the concrete and ductwork and floorboards and breathed dust and agonised until her air came back and coughed until her blood stained the tomblike slab above her, stained her destroyed shirt, pooled on the ground around her neck. She tried to move her legs but they would not budge or she could not feel them, either prospect as bad as the other. Her tail seemed to be out of commission. No way to know whether her eyes were open or shut. Her ears were alight with a high cicada whine that did not retreat.

Did she sleep? Maybe. She could tell neither minute nor hour but time had passed. She felt for the strap of her pack. It was not on her chest but she felt the canvas of it by her hip and raised her head to try and grab it. Big mistake. She put her head back down and put a hand on her pulsing skull. Strange thoughts, nothing but strange thoughts. You hate visits to the doctor. You are midway through writing a paper about taxonomic forensics that you will never finish. When you were very young you owned a pair of plimsolls that dug into your toes. Oh, and your head still hurts very badly. “Ah,” she said, and did not hear herself. She closed her eyes again.

Do you remember your favourite meal? Yes. What is it? It’s shulla-shulla. Spiced rice with fish and shrimp and peppers. What is seventeen plus thirty-six? Fifty-three. Right? Yes. Correct. In the inkblack basement of an old works building Slake lay half dead beneath several thousand pounds of rock and wood and wire. See her now, the near-equal of a place that has ceased to be. Her beak was dry and her throat was a torment from thirst and dust. She felt for her pack again and found it where she had tried and failed to get at it the previous time. She pulled at the strap and when it did not budge she pulled harder and it came free. Something in the pile shifted and she waited for a loosened stone to finish her off but nothing came. The canteen was in it and her hand did not come away from it wet. She thought that was a good sign. When she took the cap off with a shaky hand she kept her head still and opened her beak and poured water in through the side. One small sip, then another. Then a third, longer sip and she put the canteen back down beside her and slept for certain.

She dreamt of a garden of chrysanthemums in which a party was taking place, black tie, please put on your finest or you shall not be permitted to enter. Many figures she half-knew stood in the flowerbeds and drank from clear bottles of water. Drunken Cenrice. A maths professor. A man she once passed in a painting in a hall whose face stuck with her for reasons she did not know. Behind them a tall white palazzo with apertic gargoyles keeping watch at the corners, open windows bearing silk blinds that moved in the breeze. All in attendance were drinking and she stepped forward to pass through the wrought iron gate but an arm put itself across her chest and pushed her back. Please grant her passage, madam, for she is dying of thirst. Lo, but have you seen her ridiculous getup? When she looked down at her body there was nothing of it but her chest and arms.

It’s not that ridiculous. It’s just me.

It’s half of you.

Half of me is still me.

You’re starting to piss me off.

Are you telling me to leave?

Smart girl. Get out of here. Slake left the garden. She stood on the side of a lightsoaked street and watched the harvest parade. Grand purple floats manned by bacchanal musicmen with horns and flutes that did not fit their beaks, half crazed with the drink, their eyes saucerlike in the music. Troops of amber dancers that walked by with their feet coming up to their shoulders and back down like scantily clad footsoldiers. Ay ay, called someone behind her. When the parade had passed all that remained were flyers and bits of newsprint swirling in the empty grey street behind them and the sound of distant elephantine trumpets.

Again a dream of the sea and a door beneath it. She could see it there under the grey surface, a dark shape set into the sand and coral, eel-infested. Schools of trout went by with their scales winking in the light. It made her nervous, that promise of a library, endless books, and when she looked up she saw a stadium of cyclonic clouds and sky the hue of molten copper. As she stood there the door swung open soundlessly and from it stood a dripping figure of seakelp and rib bone, beak hanging open in a silent grin. When it took her in its cadaver’s hand it held her up and inspected her like a misstamped foreign coin. The seabeing produced a cavalry sabre and clutched it between two claws and tapped her once on both shoulders. Then it discarded her with a flick of its wrist and sent her careening into the sea.

You are dying in a basement. Do you know that?

I’m well aware.

This is not the interruption you wanted.

I don’t know what I want. Well. That’s a lie. I don’t want to die in a basement.

You still want to crack on with going west, don’t you.

I would like that.

Even with broken legs.

I could pull myself along.

Or be pulled. Would you do it alone?

Silence. I thought that might be the case. Let me show you something.

It’s you. Slake looked at the wasted copy of herself laid out on a stone slab on an island in a river of fire like a body being readied for an underworld entombment. Asbestos dust clogged her fur and blood smeared her head and both legs and a hand where she had received a cut she had not felt. Wrecked clothes, part of her thigh dissected, one boot sole missing, left eye swollen shut. Her tail hung limp over the side of the slab like a dead fish. She put a hand on her wrist and felt for a pulse but her body was cold and damp and entirely lifeless. Then it opened its cataracted eyes and stood up. It moved with little urgency but she was not alarmed and soon she stood face to face with her desecrated self in this nocturnal embalming room. Refulgent firelight played on their fur. Are you paying attention? Something looked out at her from behind the body, something very quick and small and shadowy like a darkened child looking out for someone encroaching on their hiding spot. It did not reemerge. She could not focus on anything. Her vision was getting blurry. “Shit,” she said. It’s alright. These won’t return for a while. You ought to get up.

When Slake reentered the sightless world she knew that if she closed her eyes again she would die. She took a few breaths to ready herself, then shifted her hands around. A piece of fabric, possibly from her pant leg. The backpack. Her shirt. It was hard to tell where her hands were in the darkness. She moved them to the sides and then up and felt the dimensions of her little coffin. The rubble above her felt solid and was high enough for her to sit up, so she did. The sensation made her nauseous but she did not lie back down. Very carefully she moved her feet. Left, right, extend. Her left leg ached but it worked as well as the other. She withdrew them each very carefully from their concrete housings and when they were free she was sitting sidelong in a prison cell of rubble. She felt for her matchbook in her jacket pocket and found a handful, maybe six, unbroken. She struck one on the floor.

Her body emerged from the dark into the tiny orange match flame’s light like the raising of a corpse from a flooded grave, ragged, beaten, bloodied, squalid, its colour indistinguishable from the rocks around her. There was a puddle of semi-dried blood where her head had just lay and another on her thigh but since she was still alive the latter was not arterial. She touched her face to find the wound and only then realized her left eye was swollen shut. She held the candle out and took her pack and scanned the rocks looking for a gap. One by her feet, too small. Another to her right that she thought she could maybe squeeze through. She leaned forward to look through it and stuck the match down. It went for two meters and faded to open darkness. When she pulled her arm back the match was getting low and she set it on the ground beside her and told herself to not run out of them. Then she pushed her pack into the tunnel and wormed her way in after it and stood up on the other side in a black void.

She took her steps carefully. She could have used a match to see but she didn’t and went by feel instead, her arms outflung like a zombie. The floor was concrete and would not give way and after a minute she moved confidently. She tapped the floor with her soled boot and the sound came back thick. Small room. Or maybe it was the rubble muting everything. Two steps later she felt a concrete wall and slid a hand along it. Cinder blocks. A dented pipe. There was no sound but her breath and the taps of her mismatched feet. It all smelled faintly damp but the walls were dry and powdery and she moved on.

Slake memorised the texture and height of the pipe and circled the room entirely. It wasn’t large. There were iron air ducts on one side, she thought. Another was blocked by fallen debris and she picked her way over it with great but insufficient caution and came up on the other side with a cut on her shin, her exposed foot held in the air to keep from getting a cut that might keep her from walking. Back along a wall with a metal door she did not dare open. She rapped on it gently and the sound that came back from the other side was hollow. When she looked up the ceiling was dark as starless night and she could not feel it when she extended a hand to it. Soon after she was back where she had started, probably.

With the room’s vague dimensions in mind she took to shuffling her feet just to hear the noise of it. Staring into darkness too long made everything move and she shut her eyes and did not reopen them. Near the pile under which she had been buried she kicked something wooden and stooped to pick it up. It was her axe. She felt its shape in her hands, the cold steel head. The feeling prompted her to pat at her chest, the empty leather holster, and she set out around the pile, waving and patting at it blindly but she found nothing. Just as she was about to step back and go for a match her unsoled foot came down on the cylinder of her revolver. She stooped down and picked it up. To hold these two objects against the encroaching black gave her some small comfort while she felt the gun for damage. The front sight might have been crooked but it was otherwise good. “Thought I lost you,” she told it.

She shuffled until she found the door again and paused. The knob had vanished and her fingers fell through the bore where it ought to have been. Armed though she may have been she hesitated. Alright. Fine. She tucked her revolver beneath her arm and took out another match and struck it. She hadn’t pictured the door looking unoxidized but she hadn’t really pictured it at all. Then she swung it open and closed it behind her. She held the match left, then right. Her dimly lit hand looked like something found in a tomb. Brick walls, narrow, faint moisture beading them like sweat. Older architecture than the previous room. Once she held the match up to a gas tube that might have been a lamp. One step at a time. She stayed close to the right wall. Pipework descended from the ceiling and followed beside her like a coil of iron snakes. One bore a pressure gauge reading zero. She could still make out the manufacturer’s stamp on it. She moved until she found anything worth looking at and as her light was getting low her feet came down on a door that had been pried from its hinges. Just after it was an empty doorway. She put her foot through it to check. She smelled the air. Something vaguely sweet. She stepped back and pulled up the door to inspect the other side for a sign and in the last of the tiny flame she made out the words retort room stamped on a brass plate.

When the match went out Slake carried on along the wall until she came to a corner, no more than a minute’s journey. Twice along the way she caught herself bending dangerously forward for lack of sight to orient herself and she willed her back to be straight. She waved an arm out into the empty nothing as if to hail a ride. “Echo,” she said aloud, and the hall in both directions replied oh. She turned back and went along the wall until she felt the gap where the door was. She spoke again and her voice came back more quietly. The doorway smelled faintly of fruit with an undercurrent of something earthy. She took another match out and struck it and stepped through.

It took her ten minutes to navigate the room but she figured it out. The steel shape of the gasifier loomed on the far side of the room, vents and ducts and pipes chaining it to the wall, a steel animal in hibernation. The retort’s hatches hung open like the mouths of fish. She felt a steel coal bin, a wall of gauges. The floor was layered with grit and in one corner of the room she felt a shovel’s wooden handle but she did not pick it up. Her back began to stoop in the darkness but this time she did nothing to stop it.

No. Stop. Straighten up. Think about this. She felt her way along the wall until she got to the coal bin and opened the lid. She reached inside and she did not have to reach far to pick up a handful of bituminous coal. She pushed the lid open and felt for a latch and locked it there. A gasifier couldn’t be much different than a coal stove, she thought. Same principle. She felt her way back to the shovel and picked it up.

The retort was full of waste coke. Slake spent the better part of half an hour in the pitch darkness of the room pulling it out with a shovel until it felt clear. Her axe lay on the floor near her and her pistol was back in its holster. The coke sat in rough piles at her feet and she shoved it out of the way to make room. She picked one of the lower retort mouths to fill and came back with a shovelful of bituminous coal but she stopped halfway there. The coal in the retorts would not keep without something underneath being lit. She lowered herself and put the shovel down and felt with her hand until she felt a steel grate on the refractory bricks, a latch. She pulled it back and swung it open and shovelled the coal in. Three shovelfuls later she came back and set her pack down and felt inside for what might work as kindling.

All she had was some waxpaper and the matches. That was it. She felt for the shovel. It had a wood handle. Her axe, too. Coal would not catch without good embers but this was all she had and if the fire was wasted there would come no second chance. She squatted there in the dark and listened, just to distract herself. The room was so quiet without her moving she could hear the blood moving in her ears and behind that a slight screech. She shook her head and patted the floor just to make some noise but the screech came back and she knew she was just delaying. Striking a match and holding it to the paper would be the start of what could be the end and she wasn’t ready for that responsibility. Don’t give it enough air and it will go out. She tore the waxpaper apart and set a bit aside, layering the rest in a small pile. She took the shovel and set the head down on the floor and broke the flimsy handle with her booted foot. Don’t add wood at the right time and it will go out. She assembled the splinters and pieces of handle and sorted them into a pile and built a cone from muscle memory, feeling the pieces of wood very gently to know whether she got the shape right and she did. Now she held a match. She considered everything for a moment. Then she struck it and held the lit match to the paper.

She built the fire well. The shovel wood was dry and caught easily and she fed it slowly, gradually. The small flame glowed like a molten tulip, Slake’s thin and artless face peering in at it, disembodied by darkness. She saw lines drawn on the paper, a scale bar measured in hundreds of kilometers. Just ignore it. The pipes around her and overhead hung like tree branches and their shadows faltered and swayed in the ancient room that had not seen light in a century and the sight and heat of it made her giddy. She fed the rest of the waxpaper to it and the rest of the wood and waited until the embers were good, then fed it some coal. Dust motes whirled in the firelight. It was a slow process but she did not dare to look away from the fire for what lay behind her was the greater fear. When the coal caught she let it burn for a while then used the shovelhead to clear some space and added more coal and knew the fire would not burn out. The ovenlike heat soon forced her back. She took what little remained of the shovel and moved to the coal bin and hardly registered that she could see the outlines of everything in the room.

Her throat was dry by the time the coals were hot enough to push down the feeder. She ferried loads of coal to the open retorts and fed them into each one, small shovelfuls at a time. Heat rushed from between the low grates on the retort and dirty sweat got in her eyes but she did not cease the work of filling each retort to capacity. She went along and shut and latched the doors and stood back and looked. It looked no less weak than she felt, a flickering echo of its prior superheated echo. She threw more into the feeder but it did nothing to improve it and only when she looked again did she notice the handle of a bellows beside the oven. She took the handle in both hands but it hardly moved. She put her weight into it, then again. “Piece of shit. Come on.” The bellows sagged with a long and crackling wheeze. The fire brightened and died down again. Slake pumped the bellows until her arms were numb, stepped away to throw in more coal, worked the bellows more, a slow cycle that had her head sagging the third time she took the handles but she told herself not to stop and she didn’t until the pipework hissed.

Light in the room now. The wall supports shifted and made strange sounds from the heat. The pipes shook and clattered softly from the gas. A pressure gauge ticked once and not again. She took her axe from the floor and surveyed the small space as though she might be looking for something to hack away at to pass the time. Then she looked up and stared at the ceiling, considering storage tanks, volatile gases in motion, scientific studies in educational years mostly slept through. There has to be a valve. She looked around the retort then around all the gauges until she found a pipe labelled halls. It had a control valve on it, a knobbed wheel that she turned in one hand. It gave no resistance and the sound in the pipe did not change. She took the destroyed shovel from the floor and broke the rest of the wood off with her foot and opened one of the retort’s doors and held it as far inside as her hand would allow until the tip smouldered.

Back into the hall. An isosceles of light fell from the doorway and illuminated the wall opposite and she tried to listen. She thought she could hear a faint coaldriven whisper from the walls and the sound alone was enough to set her fur to bristling. Everything felt more tunnellike. Come on. Forward she went into the black with the charred handle in one hand, smoking, until she found the shape of a lantern on the wall. She felt for a hatch with her knuckle and swung it open and stuck the ember inside and turned the release valve open a quarter of the way. The wick caught, incandescent cat’s eye unlidding. She had to close her eye and open it very slowly to keep from being blinded. Curved brick wall bowing to her, iron drains in the floor. Her arms were black from the elbow down. She stared at the new light to ensure it wouldn’t just go out but it didn’t and she went along to the next and lit it too and then one after it, solitary lamplighter in these blind halls, the last there’d ever be.

Curious sights in the underground infrastructure. Cave-ins, tunnels dug by hand. A discarded sabre. Pale white velvet worms and translucent scorpions and other troglobionts and a Beowend indistinguishable among their ranks save for a piece of smoking shovel. Through service tunnels, past staircases submerged from the second step down. Over a bridge on a narrow canal, a rowboat belly up in the motionless water. No moving air. In the sub-basement of Galskouas Engine Co. Slake stopped in front of a chained double door and lit the next lamp and put the head of her axe on the floor and leaned on the handle.

The halls were stacked nearly floor to ceiling with carburetors and tires and other vehicular implements but her eye was getting worse and for that she ignored these details. She could feel the weight of the hematoma trying to pull the left side of her head down further than the right. Her throat ached for lack of water and gin but a poster on the wall pulled her attention from it. A Beowend family picnicking around an elegant motorcar in a meadow. A princely father in a waistcoat, sleeves rolled. A mother with grey fur in imperial uniform and a boa, their children cherubic in their features like a trio of inbreds or victims of pregnant drinking. A new line of elegant cars, said the ad. 2450 Ammeter Avenue, Éa Shale, Meropis. The image was tinted orange in the lamplight as if they were staring at a sunset or perhaps Slake herself. She pried her eye away, no sense in giving her attention to deceased car companies. She got up off her axe and held it in both hands and moved a rotting wooden crate out of the way with her foot to make room. Then she lifted her axe and swung it down onto the chains. The impact hummed off the dry brick walls, the piles of metal. She swung and swung again and on the third try it caught the chain well and shattered a link to rusty pieces and she pulled the chain off and swung the door open with her foot.

The sheetwrapped bodies were stacked like cordwood in the aisles of the storeroom. They were bound at the hands and ankles with ropes and chains and adhesive surgical tape, some with neat holes in the fabric at the forehead. Slake’s hands moved automatically and lit the lamp just inside the door but she did not step in. The air smelled sour, faintly of soiled linen. The concrete floor was stained deep brown. The shelving had been cleared of its contents and on it were more bodies, dull and lumpy in the faint lamplight like goods waiting to be shipped off. She pondered this sight for a few seconds, then closed the door.

No other avenues to pursue. The stairs had been blown in ages ago with no way to crawl up, no guarantee of light. She went through a dead end office. A calendar on the wall, the twentieth circled. An overturned leather chair near a green desk lamp shattered by a wall into which it had been thrown. Further down the hall she lit another lamp and found a closed gate to a cargo elevator, the bottom of the shaft an abyss into which she kicked a rock and heard an impact a few seconds later. There was no moving air from above and no sign of a ladder and she moved on but her search only took her to where she had come in from. Soon she found herself standing in front of the previously chained storeroom door again. She could smell it from out here, just hadn’t realized it before. Her pistol was in her hand and she had no memory of drawing it. She took her fusty poncho off and tied it around her face, the loose fabric thrown over her shoulder. A rare moment of clarity, of foresight she would never recognize. Had she not covered her face she’d’ve died screaming a month later. She put her axe into her belt and nudged the door open with her foot and stepped in.

There was total silence in the storeroom save for her muffled breath. Her silhouette fell jagged over her long dead kinfolk. The lamp had dimmed since she entered last and she could see no more than five meters into the room. She counted five dozen bodies, then stopped counting, everything abstract past that. She reached out and twisted the gas release valve to brighten it. The ceiling was out of view and were she to walk forth to the other side the valleys between the wrapped corpses in the aisles were no wider than her shoulders. At the far side there might be an exit. Or there might be nothing at all. It wasn’t a big room. She stood there and held the piece of shovel up into the hatch to get it hot again. One more second by the light. You have to. It’s not optional. When she could muster no more excuses against herself to stay she walked with great caution into the rightmost row.

The stacks were twice as high as her and the smell up close was hideous. Small sepia motes like dust or perhaps just dust shifted in the lamplight as she moved, a wake of them spinning behind her. Again she noticed the holes in the heads, brown stains around each, singe marks, shattered beaks where the rounds had fragmented. The wrappings were imperfect. Above her a skeletal foot, black and leaflike skin draped on the fibula. Pools of desiccated fur and blood around her feet, she had to lift her foot to get over them. Some of the wrappings were imperfect, hasty. She had to turn sideways to get through. In one body bag the wrap around the head was so thin she could see the outline of the Beowend face within, the hollow eye sockets, the orbital bones, the edge of the bronze wedding torc poking the fabric and the silent scream permanently on their face. The sight made her pause and stare. Has the world shrunk in here? Your hometown. The sky. The names of your progeny. Do you remember them? Will you remember this? The answer came as a dry thud on the ground to her left.

A body bag had fallen off from a high shelf, one of the unshot ones. A skeletal tail stuck out from the bottom and she noted immediately that it was longer than it ought to have been and though hairless the flesh was not black. She was at the end of the aisle in seconds. The light hardly reached that far. Darkness seemed to writhe on the wall. She felt at the outline of another gas lamp and shoved the charred wood roughly into the hatch and turned the gas crank but it did not light. She turned it further, nothing. In her panic she had moved too quickly and had broken the wick to pieces. Damn you. Damn you. There were noises behind her, perhaps her heartbeat but she knew they weren’t. Now hyperventilating, Slake moved along the wall and looked for anything, anywhere but behind her. She found a hole that looked to have been carved out with a pickaxe, waist height. Without thinking she threw herself into it and crawled.

The stone wall of the tunnel was damp. She could not find a place to put her hands that was not wet either but she could not turn back, would not consider it, and she felt her way along the intestinesque tunnel, holding her breath, falling over herself to move forward. Her hands sunk to the wrist and her knees dug even more. It sloped up and she followed it, feet slipping. Her toe caught on something sinuous and she could not help but yell but no you do not stop and you cannot stop. In her left hand the small ember still burned faintly, the only thing visible to her, and she followed it like religion. When she emerged into open space she did so at such speed that it sent her sprawling.

Tile floors. Dry. Find a lamp, strike a match, do anything. She scrambled to her feet gasping and felt madly for her pocket. A layer of something putrid coated her hands and she wiped them on her pants but those were little better. She considered whether she had any open cuts. Still filthy, she took a match and felt for the nearest wall. It was rough enough and she got it going and went along blindly, quickly, far too quickly to notice the golden wallpaper or the granite columns or the subdued sound of rain. She found a lamp eventually, a small one. The valve was already open, she could tell by the hiss, controlled elsewhere. When it caught the light came on chary and reluctant to enter the world. There was a bell cart nearby. She grabbed the tarnished brass handles and rammed it into the hole in the wall hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling then turned it on its side and blocked the hole off entirely.

Slake stood back and listened for movement but could hear nothing over the whine of her breath under her poncho mask. She took it off and discarded it down the hallway. Something was dripping into her eyes, and she shut them before listening. Nothing. No sound. None but you. She considered looking at herself but decided against it. Then she went on and lit another lamp down the hall and shoved her way through an open door into sunlight.

The light blinded her. She closed her eye and shut the door behind her and bent down with her arm over her face to block more of it out. The phosphenes swam and arced across her vision. She heard the rain now, the patter of it on glass and wood. There was something plantlike under her foot, moss maybe. When she finally opened her eye the misty sunlight found her staring at the wreckage of a ballroom lit through an open skylight shattered long ago. The hardwood floors had rotted away to nothing as had the pine supports beneath them that gave them their bounce and a light rain fell in through cracks in the ceiling and dripped into small ponds formed in the craters left behind. The walls though faded and cracked and structurally unsound still retained a coat of brilliantly white paint trimmed with gold, real gold, in floral patterns, small scenes of celebration or romance or chivalry painted in the gaps. Most of the crystal chandeliers had fallen to pieces, barely distinguishable from the rubble, but a few still held to the ceiling and refracted the sparse light into iridescence. A gramophere stood mounted to the far wall near the exit door, still clutching a music globe. The air smelled of stagnant water but Slake breathed it eagerly. She half expected to wake up under a pile of rocks any second.

She walked to the center of their room and stood under one of the streams of falling rainwater. Her shirt had torn at the shoulder and half her arm was exposed to the open air. She closed her eyes and leaned in and let the water clean her, the coal dust, the viscera. The water fully extinguished the piece of shovel that had served her faithfully. She noted this and cast it aside to be with the rest of the rubble, then patted herself down and felt for wounds. Her calf ached but that was all. Her heartrate slowed. When she stepped out of the water she had the look of something dredged from the seafloor and a pool of offcoloured muck remained where she had stood. Rainwater was not safe for drinking, she knew this, but her throat was in such pain that she leaned forth once more and opened her beak and drank a bit.

The gramophere caught her eye on the way out and she stopped to study it. She had seen them before in other ballrooms. The electrical cables that once powered it had oxidised to nothing and the good oak wood frame was furred with mould. She inspected the musical globe. The wax looked good, the grooves still held. No water had gotten to it. The tuning needle looked good and there was a crank handle on the side and before she had thought about it her hand was wrapped around it. It couldn’t hurt. She looked behind her at the door she had come through but it was closed and she was alone. She turned the handle and the globe creaked and whined to life and over the crackling trumpet and ghostlike piano a woman’s high voice sang quietly to the ruined ballroom’s sole occupant and never again would anyone hear its music.

I’ve never met you
Yet never doubt, dear
I can’t forget you
I’ve thought you out, dear
I know your profile and I know the way you

The fork caught on a divot in the sphere and jammed in place and even in the best of times it would take a technician to fix. The gramophere fell silent for the last time. Slake let go of the crank handle. She stood there for a while and looked at the empty room and thought about everything that had occurred. The axe, the gun. She still had those. Then she pushed through the exit door and through the half collapsed lobby of the ancient hotel and out into the street.

V - Signing On

Slake leaned out the window above the public house and looked into the street. It took her hours to backtrack, made longer still from trying to do it quietly. She saw no one. What had transpired the day prior may for all intents and purposes not have and the rain fell as it had for weeks, incessant. A colourless world out there. Fresh bullet holes in the windowsill and ceiling. The signpost squeaked in the wind.

The contents of Slake’s pack and every other possession save for her worthless clothes were laid out in front of her on the rotted floor like a display of seized goods at a border crossing and though her left eye was reopening it did nothing to make her like what she saw. A gun, a bullet. An axe. Scraps of waxpaper and the dented canteen. A few loose socks like a collection of drowned rats. The notebook had vanished. Her matches were wrecked as was one of her boots. All that remained of Shoreline and the shootout were a few holes in the wall and the shoes they’d taken off the thieves, cast aside in the corner. She had not had a drink since the ballroom for newfound fear of the groundwater and nothing to eat in two days. In no more than a day’s time things were going to get dire. Walking was already getting difficult. She bent down and picked up the lone remaining bullet and held it between her thumb and forefinger. A frog in its puddle domicile on the far end of the room watched her with its dark and distant eyes. She read the manufacturer’s stamp twice. Then she picked up the revolver and put it into the cylinder and rotated it into place and immediately put it back down. None of this was a new feeling for her but she thought she might never acclimatise to it. With no documents to consult she sat down on the ruined floor and thought. She could find out what way south was easily enough. Then just keep walking south until you reach the coast and follow it. Yes, it’s as simple as that. You’ll have to do it with one shoe. Hope you’re ready for a hike and a hike on your own, no less. She put her hand to her forehead and shut her eyes. What are you doing here.

When she opened her eyes she pried her soleless boot off and inspected the damage. It was entirely desoled, the rubber gone, only a few scraps left clinging to the sides where the stitching held. She hadn’t remembered wrecking it so badly. She took her pack and inspected it for damage and found it mostly intact, tough old surplus thing, you could take a knife or worse to it and it’d be fine. She looked at her sleeve, the ripped one without a shoulder. It couldn’t look much worse with the sleeve gone so she took the jacket off and laid it out on the floor like laundry and took her axe up and hacked the sleeve off in a few rough blows. Tufts of dark fabric were wedged into the dents in the wood where the axe had cut. She sat there for some time cutting and tying the scraps together into a rope. The thief’s shoes lay nearby and she looked at them, considering their size. Then she took the likeliest of them and hacked the sole off and tied the worn-out rubber to the underside of her boot. It was not comfortable and when she stood up to test it she had to lean against the wall to stay upright. She could hardly recall what she had set out to do. Cautiously she walked across the room and back. They worked. Better than no sole at all.

Next she took the tattered remnants of her army jacket off and examined its damage. Holes in the front, a long tear in the back, three missing buttons, the freshly removed sleeve. The chest was smeared with something foul smelling. It would work better as a vest. She cut the other sleeve off and put it back on and left the front open.

She gathered her effects and stuffed them into her backpack. No order to it, there wasn’t enough for clutter. She went down the stairs and moved through the empty bar quickly and out into the rainsoaked street. An empty brass shotgun shell winked beneath the ankle deep water like a coin in a fountain. The sagging buildings bowered the streets and she stared up at them, as if someone might reveal themselves and wave to bring her in out of the cold and wet. She felt her shoulder for her poncho but touched only her bare fur. In days long past military parades would have come down this street to confetti from the rooftops and brass bands. Folk in their fineries lining the sidewalks. Aerial displays and soldiers leaving to fight a foreign war. All of them doomed and they never even suspected it. She looked down the street where a kudzu-coated building knelt half in shambles in the avenue and felt that more than just time had come and gone in the nameless city. Of all your kinfolk only you remain. She didn’t know how to mourn it. Or whether to. She brushed such thoughts from her mind. Standing would do her no good. She puzzled out a bearing and walked.

The gap between the rubble had been widened in the day prior. The displaced stones had been rolled or dragged into a heap not far away. Slake watched this from the ground floor of what was a cafe in the shade of a rotted sheet metal awning with her thumbs hooked in her belt, two notches tighter than she wore it in Hallatin. A bird went by, airborne sliver of cobalt, its squawks sounding twice on the walls. She tried to listen over the sound of water and heard nothing that wasn’t her. Into the street now. Clear both ways, like she was checking for oncoming traffic. Even just standing made her legs feel like they might buckle. She wanted to move but needed to rest a moment and sat down on an empty windowsill.

When she awoke she was slumped over forward with her chest to her thighs and she rose up blinking at the subtly changed light. Her throat itched and when she coughed her throat made a tearing sound. You can’t sit down again before nightfall or you’re not going to get up again. She pushed herself out of the window and staggered across the street with her arms at her sides like an ape.

Beyond the gap was the dark forest from which she’d observed the city behind her not long before. Oh sister, it wasn’t worth it. Once more she observed the ground for tracks and found none. Then she checked over her shoulder. Everything as she’d seen it, past and present. The sword ferns growing up through the rocks were taller than her and the sound of their whispering in the rain was all she could hear. She picked her way through the gap and came out the other end.

Something disturbed her. She didn’t know what. Small signs in her brain, signs she saw or heard but did not recognize. The fur on the back of her neck was up and when she looked back through the gap again two men on horseback had materialized some two hundred meters down the street and one was watching her through binoculars. They wore white bands tied around their waists and both carried lances with the pole resting against their hip and the forged steel spearheads silhouetted sharply against the grey buildings behind them. She turned and ran.

She was weak but she moved at as full a run as she could manage. The rootladen ground was too treacherous for her to pull her eyes from and her footprints were deep in the mud behind her. The trail she left through the goatsbeard and bearberry undergrowth was not dissimilar from the trail of a deer. Within two minutes she heard the hoofbeats. She passed an old service road, a flatbed truck overturned on its side. A brief pause to inspect it, find a hiding spot, but as soon as she turned she saw them and they saw her. The two horsemen wore cuirasses of hammered iron and the chain they wore beneath chinked and clattered with the rise of the horses’ backs. The leftmost one had a length of cloth pulled over his canine muzzle and an ill fitting hood on his head with holes cut for his tall ears. The one on the right rode bareback and wore a black duffel and a helmet and both regarded her with little expression at all. They looked well fed. The leftmost tugged the reins and told his horse come on and guided it at a canter to her left. They did not speak to one another. Her breath caught in her throat, couldn’t get enough air in and on empty lungs she scrambled madly away from them.

Not fifteen seconds later they were on her and she could run no more. She collapsed in a small clearing, bits of ancient stone in the ground under the dirt and fallen pine needles. She patted for her holster and unclipped it and drew the revolver and stood back up. The horsemen lowered their spears to hip level and each led his horse a separate way and circled her. She held the revolver in weak hands and her vision seemed to be rippling like desert heat, heart in her throat, small stars falling across her vision. When she tried to speak she ended up coughing.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked the canine. His accent was unclear through that mask and his eyes were like rhinestones. She could not reply. What they made of her she had no idea. Nothing good. She had one hand on her knee to keep from keeling over and the horseman leaned to her and shifted his hand lazily on the spear. Before he could level it at her she aimed the gun at him and pulled the trigger.

An enormous report, the sound startled all parties. The horsemen drew back through the cloud of gunsmoke and the distinctive sound echoed over the treetops like a peal of thunder. Slake nearly dropped the gun but didn’t. She cocked the hammer with both thumbs. You can’t use that trick again. The horsemen stood at some distance from her on opposite ends and both held their weapons at their sides. They appeared to have no guns between them. Her head swivelled to keep both in sight. “You oughta put that down,” the Damoyen said.

“I’ll kill you,” said Slake. “I will.”

“How many bullets you got left in that thing?”

“Four. Don’t come any closer.”

“You’re lying.” The barrel was drifting away from him and she raised it again with great effort. Neither approached. When the very same gun was pointed at her she saw the rounds in the cylinder. “Why don’t you put that down.”

“No.” Birdcall from the truck’s direction. The other one looked, then looked back at her.

“We don’t have to haul you back dead. Rather the other way around.”

“I said don’t come any closer.” The speaker had inched closer and Slake in turn had stepped to one side and put her hand on the head of her axe. When she forced herself to stop moving her feet sank to the ankles in the mire. Rain came down at a steep angle through the branches. They were looking at her gun and as soon as she stopped moving one of them saw light through an empty chamber

“She’s out. Get her.”

When she opened her mouth to reply all she could do was cough. The force of it nearly doubled her over and the speaker nodded to the other. Both moved for her just as she was rising back up and the helmeted one pulled his spear arm back and thrust and lanced Slake in the side.

She felt the hot pain of it on the right side of her chest. It was just a cut but it was enough to send her backwards and blood was already soaking into her shirt. She absentmindedly waved the gun at her attacker but it did nothing. “Aim for the legs,” he said, and the other man rode up alongside her and pushed his spear out and got her in the left calf. She sat down, tried to stand up, sat down again, and did not get back up, curiously expressionless. The horsemen seemed five stories tall. At some point her pistol had fallen from her hands and lay in the mud beside her with its barrel still smoking faintly. She didn’t remember dropping it. A river of blood ran down her leg and pooled in her boot. See her now in the final stages of disassembly. All she wanted to do was sleep.

At that moment he came out from behind the overturned truck at a dead run. He wore no shirt save for an empty shellholder and three separate lengths of bandages torn from the fabric of clothing not his and his hands were bound with stolen medical tape. A hole let light in through the center of his tall right ear and there was another chunk taken out just below it where buckshot had passed. His white fur was streaked with grime and blood from parts unknown, some his some not, his forehead painted with black charcoal dust and he ran with the whites of his eyes showing on all sides, bloodshot and crazed with fury, and for all his wounds he ran with great ease. In his hands he held a long military rifle with a bayonet fixed to the end. The canine horseman turned and hauled on the horse’s reins but not fast enough. Shoreline screamed and shoved the bayonet in to the barrel between the horse’s ribs.

The horse slumped to the ground. The horseman was scrambling to try and get free but his mount rolled sideways and pinned his leg. Shoreline took the bayonet out and swung it up in an arc, drops of blood flung skyward. They were at eye level and the Damoyen’s yell for help was cut short with a bayonet to the stomach through a gap in his cuirass. The other one was coming around and called Shoreline a son of a bitch and other such insults while his friend lay clutching his stomach to keep himself together, the steel in his spine making him limp. His lance had fallen and lay half submerged in the mire. Slake did not consider it for long and lurched forward to grab it. Where the strength to rise came from she could not say.

The second horseman was coming around with his spear dipped. Shoreline had his foot on the horse to try and get the bayonet unstuck but all he succeeded in was pulling the skewered man along with him to the ground. The spear shot out at Shoreline but he was quicker and the weight of the rifle he left behind in the Damoyen rolled the rapidly dying man over onto the ground where he lay with his arms outflung like a crucifixion. Slake approached and the horseman didn’t seem to notice until she stabbed him through the heel. “Bastard,” he told her. He didn’t have the range to poke at them. The Nyctian came around and seized him by the wounded ankle and pulled and Slake let the spear drop and did the same and soon the man was in the mud beneath them with his eyes wide in his helmet like an animal looking out at them from a cave. The horse did not linger.

No negotiations and no quarter. The man’s carpal flexor had been torn and his leg all but useless. Shoreline kicked him in the side of the head, again. Slake was holding the shaft of her axe to his neck and putting her weight to it while the man seized her by the shirt and tried to force her off. She lifted the axe up and brought the handle down hard onto his larynx and did that ten times until he wasn’t cursing anymore and another dozen times beyond that until there was blood coming from under his helmet. Shoreline had switched to stomping. When she let his gory head fall three minutes later he did not move. She rolled off him and lay next to the dying man and could not remember what she was doing seconds prior.

She came around to Shoreline shaking her shoulder. “Yeah,” she said.

“Are you alright?”

Slake felt her chest. It was bleeding pretty badly and when her fingers touched her wound the pain was enough to take her breath. “No.”

She noted dully that he’d never looked nervous before. He bent down and wrapped his arm around her other shoulder and tried to pull her up but couldn’t. She was looking off to the side at the man half pinned under the horse with the pink of his intestines exposed. “We can’t stay here like this. You gotta get up.” Any strength either of them had to spend had just been spent. He heaved again but Slake wouldn’t move and he stood there with his hands on his knees looking down at her.

“Slake, please.”

With great effort she rolled to her stomach and was half submerged in the wet podzol. Sisters knew what was getting into her wounds right now. She thought about this, then got onto her elbows, then her knees. An ant was crawling across the back of her hand and she shook it off. Shoreline helped her up and she leaned heavily on him while he hit her pistol on his thigh to get the mud out of it to little effect. She was shivering. “Is your gun empty?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. That’s not good. Can you walk?”

“I don’t see how that makes a difference.”

In the distance they heard the sound of an engine. Eight cylinders. Then another. A holler came through the trees. Only Shoreline heard that. Past the engine all Slake could hear was her heart. Or his heart. Hard to tell. He shook his head, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing but there it was.

They came from the trees in pairs. Men and women but mostly men with white armbands and patches and lengths of it tied around their thighs and painted on their helmets and breastplates, carrying rifles and shotguns and old cavalry sabres and one had a submachine gun of foreign make slung across her chest on a sling. They came to standoff distance and ducked behind trees when they saw the pair and raised their guns at the unarmed drifters. Neither tensed, what for? The engine revved off through the trees and died down. Slake had heard planes a few times and this engine did not sound dissimilar. Plane engine in a car? “Hey,” said Shoreline. He nudged her with his shoulder to keep her upright. Someone pulled the bolt back on a rifle. The two looked like works on a potter’s wheel. You wouldn’t outrun whatever that is if it came for you. Neither of you.

A second engine cut out. The two stood motionless and the gunmen did not once look away or think to aim elsewhere. They could see the whites of their eyes. If this is what you were up against all along you were dead the moment you walked through those walls. If either of them moved they’d be dead but they remained still, as still as they could, wavering and sagging against one another like nearly felled trees. In the back someone was moving. They just looked blurry to Slake. They bent down by the overturned truck and examined the distance between the Nyctian’s tracks and nodded their head in approval. Good pace for a dead man. They marched past the line of warriors and the gunmuzzles parted without a word exchanged and stopped fifteen paces out from the duo.

The woman who stood before them was an old Beowend with fur the colour of fresh milled iron and eyes set back deep in her skull. She wore a field grey uniform with a gold tassel linking the shoulder to the breast and three identical purple medals and on her hip she carried a good six shot revolver in a leather holster and an arming sword and canteen on the opposite side. She was not wearing shoes. When Slake noticed this the woman smiled. Or she thought she smiled. She thought she smelled sulfur but when she smelled again all she got was the metal tang of her own blood and the earthen reek of the forest and their bodies. The other Beowend took the peaked cap from her head and shook it once to get the water off and stood there with her hands and hat behind her back and said: “Aren’t you two a long way from home.”

Neither replied. Slake felt ill. The woman looked between them. “You must be thirsty,” she said. She took her canteen from its pouch and uncorked it and drank. Then she feigned throwing it to Shoreline and threw it for real the second time. “Here.” Slake pawed uselessly at the air to catch it. It arced towards them with its strap trailing and came down at their feet with a splat. He didn’t even look at it.

“You know how much a horse costs?”

A lot of ket, that’s how much, Slake thought. “Just shoot us,” said Shoreline.

“A lot of ket. A lot. And feed and tack and all of that. Leaving aside the lives of the riders.”

“Just shoot us.”

“I did.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

The woman rocked back on the balls of her feet and looked around. Slake was getting heavier and the Nyctian was struggling but still he held her and still the rain came down practically unnoticed. “What am I going to do,” she said.

“Either kill us or don’t. Just don’t stand there.”

A beaked smile. It hardly reached her eyes. “Are you begging for not just your death but hers too? It doesn’t reflect well on you. I thought you would at least try and talk your way out of this.”

“Go rake shit.”

“You’re very bold, the two of you. When I first laid eyes on you I didn’t fully believe it. I haven’t seen two people alone this far into the interior and I’ve been doing this a long while now.” She looked between the two. “A sign of the times. That’s my best guess. What do you think?”

Shoreline didn’t answer. She pointed to Slake. “Look at her. She has open wounds and she’s been rolling around in mud. Don’t tell me you have antiseptic or alcohol or clean gauze because you don’t. In about two days they’ll start to smell bad and in three she’ll be dead. I don’t have to use a bullet. The earth’ll do the work.”

“Then let us go and let it work.” Slake was falling again. He threw his shoulder up and put himself against her for leverage but his side touched the still bleeding wound on her chest and she cried out. They stood there in the rain with Slake regarding the ground with wet eyes.

“Who taught you how to shoot?” the woman asked Shoreline.

“What?” He heard her. She waited. “I taught myself.”

“We have medicine. Dry beds. Hot food. There’s a place in the ranks even for you. I take what I get these days. Competence alone will suffice.”

“You’ll find other recruits.”

“Shoreline.” It was Slake. She was looking up at him, nearly doubled over. He looked down at her and he kept looking for some time, even after she looked away. She was about to pass out. The canteen sat three quarters submerged. The woman in uniform watched quietly like she’d seen just such a scene play out before and was bored with it already.

When he looked back up the fight had left him and in its place there was nothing. Only himself and her. “Alright,” he said. She had gone completely limp and he now held her with both hands, her body diagonal. “How do I know you’re not just going to take her and shoot me?”

“You don’t.”

They looked at one another for a time. Then he said again: “Alright.”

“Oi, you two. Help carry her.”

“Get her leg, it’s draggin’.”

“Shit. Sorry.”

“On three. One. Two.”

“Don’t worry, she ain’t heavy.”

“Start ‘er up. Come on. It ain’t crankin’ itself.”

“Give me a damn break, man.”

“Watch her head.”

“Can you hear me? Right arm up. Up. There we go. Left arm. Did someone put you through a woodchipper?”

“Amph.”

“Yeah. Lemme give you some of this.”

When Slake awoke in the dark of the tent she thought that she’d died. No. Faint grey light. Rain on waxed canvas and a throbbing cottony sensation all over and most of all in her throat. She had slept a dreamless sleep. In past sicknesses she would rise in the early hours feverish and dizzy out of strange visions of dead aunts and being examined beneath microscopes and she would call feebly until her father or the doctor arrived with more water and a stick of incense to put beside the bed. No such occurrences here. She felt herself beneath the thin wool blanket and while she could not see any of it she determined it was still her. Her eyes kept drifting shut. Serpentine lines of precipitation ran sideways above her, wormlike shadows joining and splitting and rejoining, and she told herself you are missing something here.

Him. She tried to sit up but the pain was like falling onto concrete and she laid there until she thought she could see again. Her beak felt glued shut. Thirst? Or perhaps wrapped with tape to keep from clacking during surgery. She reached up to feel it or perhaps cut the tape but when she did her fingers made contact with another woman’s hand.

The officer was seated beside her on a folding wooden stool and was studying her intently there in the half light with abyssal blue eyes. A rawboned and macilent woman, she wore a leather glove on the hand not touching but she held her with her bare palm and met her eyes and did not look away nor did she let her go. A shape that stood in the doorway vanished and the light that came in through the canvas doorslats in its place could have been the sun. Slake’s eyes swung wildly through the room like an animal’s but the two were alone and when she learned that their eyes met again. “Go back to sleep,” she told Slake, and pushed her head back down to the loose clothes that served for pillows. She had no strength to fight it and closed her eyes again.

She awoke again later and rose and laid back down right away and shut her eyes until the hurt passed. Just do it once and you don’t have to again. She sat up quickly and collapsed forward and felt like she had just fallen onto upturned knives. She waited for a while. Then she rubbed her soaked eyes with her knuckles. It was hotter in the tent and there was no precipitation and no Shoreline either. Wet thwacking sounds came up beside the tent, boots being sucked into the mud, and faded away. When was the last time you woke up and didn’t know where you were? That’s a stupid question. She threw the blanket off and swung her legs out over the side of the cot and planted her feet on the dry dirt floor and only then did she notice the gauze encasing her cut foot. Her tail felt weightless. All of her did actually. She hadn’t thought to check but the air smelled of acridine and sweat and urine. Her arms were similarly gauzed as was her chest and she could feel fabric on her neck. Mummified in your sleep. The last time that happened was never.

The officer was seated on the opposite side of the tall tent by the flat door. She held her hat in her lap and when Slake saw her she dipped her head in greeting and gestured with a tilt the opposite way to a small table beside the cot where her revolver sat by her canteen and a bowl of maybe soup. She stared at this for some time, at the amber glint of new rounds in the chambers. It looked to have been disassembled and cleaned and polished. She reached for it and paused with her hand halfway there and looked back to the other woman. Neither moved. Then she grabbed the canteen and undid the top and drank. Cold water, it was beading on the outside. She drank half of it and poured a bit on her forehead and capped it and held it to her chest to feel its chill. Some drops ran off her beak and stained the blanket in her lap.

“We had some spare twelve millimeter,” said the woman. “No Conqueror should walk around with an empty gun.”

“I’d’ve kept from it were that an option.”

“I know. The bat’s fine. Some of the men had a bet going whether you’d make it or not and he damn near shot them. He’s been eating well. You should, too.”

The two regarded each other in silence until the officer once more gestured to the bowl of soup. Slake drank the rest of her water and set the empty canteen down beside her and just kept watching. “Who are you?”

“My name is Ousland Nehalennia.” She did not speak for two seconds but Slake did not mouth the words back. Someone outside with a high voice shouted. “You can address me by whatever combination of that you’d like.”

“Alright.” She tossed a coin in her mind. Nehalennia. “Why didn’t you kill us?”

A real smile now. “I don’t kill kinfolk unless I absolutely must.”

“I shot one of your men.”

“You shot at them, yes.” Nehalennia leaned forward and put her elbow on her knee but must have found it uncomfortable and straightened her back again and drummed her fingers on her thigh. Slake looked at the bowl of soup but didn’t go for it. “What were you doing out here with a Nyctian?”

“Going west.”

“West to where?”

“Barathrum.”

“You’re Hallatinian.”

“I am.”

“I can tell from your accent. Not from the dam. Why west?”

“I wanted to find someone.”

“Who?”

“Family.”

“Who in your family?”

“Why are you asking me all this?”

Nehalennia stood up and walked to the table and took the bowl of soup and set it gently on the blanket beside her. A pewter spoon rested on the rim, half-submerged. Slake took it in both hands and set it in her lap and spooned some to her beak. Watery meat broth. Her greasy face rippled back at her. A few stray chickpeas floated in the bottom. It tasted like very little and she ate it slowly for a few minutes, her arm moving mechanically from bowl to beak.

“I don’t know how you made it this far,” said Nehalennia, “but luck isn’t going to get you to Barathrum and you’re shit out of that. I’m amazed they didn’t nab you going past the oilfields. It doesn’t get any better down the coast. Civilization is far between and it is not friendly to outsiders most seasons and if the fauna doesn’t kill you the heat will soon. You hardly even had a pair of boots. The bat played courageous but he would have followed you into the grave.”

“So what do you intend to do with me? Us?”

“I’m in the employ of the Kard Electric Company.” Familiar name. The ancestral dambuilders, damkeepers. “Myself and my men are headed south to deal with an interruption at a copper mine. You found us by chance. We were set to leave the day you showed up in town. Anyways. Five of my men are dead. This is something I’ll overlook for our species’ sake. But they need to be replaced somehow, and sister, pickings are very slim in this part of Meropis.”

“You want to hire me.”

“Hire is the wrong word. Bring you along. Enlist you.”

“We won’t be in Barathrum when it’s done.”

“You won’t. But you’ll be closer.”

She took more spoonfuls of her soup and ate until she saw the bottom of the bowl and licked the remainder like a dog and set it aside. A lead weight seemed to have settled in her gut but she did not feel ill. The officer was not difficult to talk to. She was realizing this. “And he’ll be coming with us?”

“If he doesn’t cause problems.” Nehalennia got to her feet and took the bowl and canteen and left her gun. “I’m going to give you some time to consider your options. Think about all you’ve seen. If you want to leave I won’t stop you, but it gets no better going forward and something like this won’t come along again. There are clothes for you in the corner.” Then she turned and shouldered her way out through the tent flap and let it fall behind her and now it was just Slake sitting slouched on the cot staring at her lap with hardly the strength to raise her head up. She rolled back over and put her head down and felt the bandage on her neck where a patch of fur was shaved away and the near-black flesh under it poked through and pursed tightly with silk thread. An unlit candle sat in a holder near the tent flap, wax nearly melted down to the brass. She closed her eyes.

Later she woke and rose to her feet, swaying dipsomaniacally. Her tail tried to pull her backwards back onto the cot but she fought it and won. Besides a distant sting on her bicep where she’d been given medicine nothing hurt but she felt like a seized machine. She went to the new clothes and held them to herself and looked down and thought they’d fit well enough. She put on the undershirt, the grey wool field blouse, the pants, the new leather military boots. One of the pant pockets held a pack of cigarettes and a few cheap matches. Someone was talking outside. There was a belt with a holster and a white armband below the pile and she took the latter both hands and just looked at it for a while like it might change shape but it was nothing but cotton. She tied it off around her arm and put her gun into the holster and pushed past the tent flap into sunlight.

They had made camp at the mouth of a deep valley where the woodline had burned away some seasons ago. In its stead were blooms of pink fireweed rearing up through the blackened husks of trees wherever there was room. The hillsides blued away into the distance. A clear but hazy day. It had been some time since she’d seen the sun proper. The Kard men were some eighty in number and they had slung their canvas tarps over the side of a treaded truck or tied them off on the side of a gunned halftrack or wherever there was room enough for their poles. Men and women of most species filled their ranks. Some sat by the side of a thin and frigid freshet and played cards. A group of four Scroungers with prison camp tattoos squatted in the back of the halftrack, acolytes to a fifth reading from a water-wrecked book, pausing between words to squint at the page. Two deer had been tied by the ankles to a log rack and flayed to the muscle for the night’s meal and nearby some horses stood with their broomlike tails swaying. Most looked up at Slake when she emerged and kept their eyes on her as if to capture her image and looked away again. If there was animosity for her for the death of their comrades she did not feel it. Her extensive shadow fell roughly in the evening light and she put a hand over her eye in a limp salute to keep the sun from it and it was in that pose that Shoreline saw her when he came around the other side of the truck.

He dropped the firewood he was carrying. The woman hauling the next load behind him cursed him but he did not pay attention and instead ran to Slake but thought better of it and stopped a few meters away and stood with his hands on his scrawny hips with one foot kicking the ground. He had on an outfit similar to hers minus the jacket and his white band was tied off at his thigh like a tourniquet. His shotgun had returned to its rightful place at his shoulder. “You’re awake,” he said. He was trying not to smile and when she noticed this he succeeded.

“I wouldn’t go that far but I’m up.”

“You don’t look good. I thought you were going to die.”

“Well, I didn’t. And I don’t feel good either. Where can I get some water?”

He led her back around to the front of the truck and stooped to collect the wood and told her to grab some. They took it to a firepit where a tall flame was being built, a long white snakeplume of smoke trailing upwards and shifting valleyward in the wind. The company kept the water barrels in the back of a truck and he explained how they filled them with boiled glacial runoff and filtered rainwater. Her canteen was waiting for her there. She lowered it into the barrel and stood there drinking, water rivering out of her beak and darkening her jacket. The rat-lizard Scroungers had ceased listening to their struggling orator to observe this strange golden creature making a waste of their water. When she was finished she refilled the canteen and held it in both hands and followed him back out of the truck bed. “Alright,” he said. He gestured with his head away from camp up the hill and stepped out over a charred trunk and she followed him.

They stopped out of earshot. Shoreline sat down heavily on a granite boulder and Slake squatted opposite him with one hand and her tail keeping her from falling over. He spoke first. “Are you alright?”

“I will be.”

“What happened to you?”

She told him everything save for the bodies. The Nyctian whittled at a piece of burnt wood while she spoke and when she was done he had it down to a sharp point which he examined and cast over his shoulder to the blackened earth.

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

“I guess so. You?”

“I shot a few of them.” She waited for him to say more but he didn’t. Instead he said, “We’ll be leaving just before it gets dark. I got a bag packed and hidden away for you.”

“What?”

“We’re going south. I couldn’t find the map in your bag so I used one of theirs. We’re maybe four hundred kilometers to where I’m going. We can make that in a little under a half-season. I packed your kit for you.”

“I burned the map,” she told him.

“You what?”

“I said I burned it. And we’re not going anywhere.”

He looked at her dumbly and tapped his foot on the rock, a small metal clicking from the heel. “Alright. Why?”

“Fucking look at us, man. You don’t weigh a hundred pounds. Half your weight’s that shotgun. If we leave we’re going to die of starvation or something worse.”

“We haven’t so far,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her anymore.

“You’re missing half your ear. Come on. We’re killing ourselves if we just leave.”

“These people are no better. I’ve seen the looks they give me but they’re not doing anything because you’re here and that woman won’t let anything happen but that’s not going to last. We can make it on our own. We have food, we have new clothes and new boots.”

“And we’re not going to last if we just leave. We should have died more than once. I don’t like this either but I don’t see any other way. Be reasonable here.”

Shoreline got up off his rock and circled it to the other side and leaned his elbows on it and looked down between them. They were quiet for a while. The mountain wind tossed the grass about and the air carried with it the scent of meadow and woodsmoke. Down the hill the camp lay innocent in the golden hour sunlight. Four armbanded hunters were coming up the mountainside with rifles and freshly shot rodents. A group of butterflies had perched on a cluster of fireweed not far away. A strong breeze came and swayed their roost and they rose up in a great orange cloud and were carried off down the mountainside with their delicate patterned wings guttering. “They’d’ve killed me if you weren’t here,” he said. “There aren’t any other Nyctians in the company.”

“Well, I’ll stick around and make sure they don’t.”

He looked at her and canted his head to one side in canine fashion. “I’m not going to convince you, am I.”

“No.”

“Fine.” Shoreline rose to his feet and put one hand on his shotgun to keep it steady while he walked and walked past her down the mountain. “I think I get it.”

Slake watched him walk back to the camp. She half expected him to look back and at one point he turned his head and spat onto the wet and ashen earth but that was it. Soon it would get dark. The horizon was purpled already and past the valley in which they’d been intercepted long arcs of summer heat lightning fluoresced on the horizon like bombs on a distant front line. Stars were coming out overhead and the enormous shape of Argei hung in a crescent just to the east, studded with meteoric impacts, deep valleys that even the naked eye could see. She smoked three cigarettes back to back and watched the stars come out and eventually the brilliant smudge of the galaxy. Deep within her something felt bizarre in a way it had not before. Either something was missing or something had been gained and she did not know what or where it had gone or where it had come from but your mind was made up the moment you put on those boots and you know that very well. They were just given to you and yes, nothing is given for no reason, but you’re a Beowend and so is she. That’s the reason and there are no others. She put the last of the butts on the ground and stomped them into the mud and picked her way back to the camp.

The company was seated around the fire eating a dinner of deer and potato stew and rum so watered down it may well have been water. Slake accepted a bowl from the shabbily dressed cook and asked for rum and bread but the cook declined, citing vague orders to keep her from too much solid food. For few day, he told her. She sat at the firelight’s edge and ate slowly. Most were quiet while they ate, a clattering chorus of spoon against bowl and plate and the semi-damp firewood snapping like gator jaws in the flames. There were faces of Cadha’i and Damoyen and Scroungers and Humans and others deeply shadowed and luminous in the flames but among their ranks she saw no other Beowend save one. Opposite the fire stood the regal form of Nehalennia, a pipe hanging limp from the side of her beak. Slake took her bowl and walked around the fire and stood before her but by the time she got there Nehalennia had already produced a leather pencase and a folded piece of paper. Slake set her bowl down and accepted an ornate ballpoint pen. “There are two lines at the bottom. Read it over and write your name and signature.”

She looked for a flat surface and settled on the side of one of the trucks. The flickering light darkness made it hard to read and she didn’t. Name and signature written vertically at the bottom. When she turned around to give it back she saw Shoreline watching her, looking up from his food, expression completely blank. She thought he would have walked off into the night already. Nehalennia was already watching her when she approached with the signed paper.

“I’m giving these back conditionally,” said Slake. The two were silent for a moment. Permission to keep talking. “How far are we from the mine?”

“Five hundred kilometers, give or take.”

“Alright. He’s going somewhere else down south a bit closer than that.” She jerked her head towards Shoreline. He wasn’t watching anymore. “I’ll sign on if you let him part ways when we get there.”

“Sister, I’d kick a Nyctian outta my company even without a contract signed.”

“I need a yes or a no.”

Nehalennia smiled. “Let’s call that a yes.”

Slake handed the paper over and they shook hands. Then she picked up her bowl and went back to the fire to sit beside Shoreline. The two turned their heads up to the dark sky and watched sparks trail off into the night.

Raging Winds

I - Ignition

Enter now the season of ubiquitous death. Sing, Sisters, as the days grow hot and the land lies sere and scorched beneath a summer sun from which your gaze brings no relief. Bring the lightning and lava from your molten cores and cast them on the land like gambler’s dice. See the engines and horses march slowly along the southern coast and among their ranks one who may yet live to see the land of her birth burned to the final root and the ashes of comrades left as crowfeed.

On a hot afternoon in the far southern plains of Meropis they lay down atop an esker and had target practice. Shoreline had taught Slake how to skin an animal and the day prior she had shot a deer and sold it to the sutler for a box of ammunition, the contents of which she wore on a belt prone to digging into her abdomen and on this occasion it was. To her right the aforementioned chiropteran lay with a semiautomatic rifle and black charcoal dust beneath his eyes and reliably splintered lined-up pieces of firewood a few hundred yards downrange. The Beowend was holding her revolver in two hands, consistently missing while a Scrounger whose name she’d come to learn was Nabon squatted beside her and held her inked open hand over her eyes to keep the sun out while she aimed. The only thing reliable about Slake’s marksmanship was her inaccuracy.

Heat rippled up off the phragmites and the westerly wind was hotter yet and brought no relief. With cotton stuffed firmly in both ears she could hardly hear the movement of the plants but there was little to hear. No insects, no frogs. She pulled the hammer back and rested her hypothenar in the dirt. Half an hour prior she had split the wood she now aimed at with her axe and she could not focus long enough to get a good shot. Her back roasted in the heat of the day. She decocked it, cocked again. “Havin’ trouble?” Nabon asked.

She looked up at her. The Scrounger’s inked face looked back down at her, grinning. The sun was bright behind her and her features were dark but she could make out the vertical lines on the left cheek and the prisoner’s brand just below it that gave that half of her face a permanent semi-slouch. Three dots with a vertical line on the right. Assault. Shoreline had fired his last shot and was sitting with his rifle’s stock in the earth, barrel to the sky, watching disinterestedly. Slake turned away and aimed as best she could. The piece of wood seemed to keep doubling. Her ears hurt. “You don’t shut up, I’ll turn this thing on you.”

“Waste a’ bullets that’d be,” said the Scrounger, grinning wider.

When she thought she had the best bead she could draw she fired. A hoop of gunflame, a wide noise that went to the horizon and did not return. The slug took the tops off a few reeds and vanished in the culms. All of her wood pieces stood intact on their earthen pedestals some hundred meters away. She took the cotton from her ears and flicked the pieces away and the other two did the same. “I need my eyes checked,” she told no one in particular.

“If I see an ophthalmatrician, I’ll refer ya,” said Nabon. They all rose to their feet. They were hardly inland from the southern coast and at such a distance the warm air carried with it the scent of salt and dictyopterene. Through the reeds a sparse few tamaracks stood dead on the small islands on which they’d rooted themselves, the bark peeled from the naked and bugeaten wood beneath. To the north the distant shapes of sheer rock mountains purled in the feverish midday and as the day grew hotter they’d grow unrecognizable. The sky was blue from one end to the other. The company had been travelling south then west for the past four weeks and for three of those the sky had been entirely without clouds and the temperature was yet rising. The day prior it had hit forty-one on the thermometers. The ancient dirt service roads over which the convoy passed were cracked like miniature mesas and the scarce iron rails were buckled and all knew it would get hotter before the season ended. Some ways away the vehicles had parked in the shade of a copse of maples. The occasional shapes of bipeds went to and fro between them and the horses but most were asleep in the heat of the day. The heat from her revolver’s barrel started to sting and Slake put it back into the holster. She looked at Shoreline but his gaze was elsewhere, surveying the land between them and the mountains with one hand shading his crimson eyes.

They walked back to camp and ate a quiet and lukewarm lunch of pemmican and hoecakes and potatoes and plentiful water with their backs to a tree amidst the forms of their volunteer confrères sleeping in the grass. Both Beowend and Nyctian could bring ample complaints but food was not one of them and the former thought it likely that it was the only reason the latter stuck around. Slake had gained ten pounds and she thought Shoreline had probably gained about the same. The company was not short on food and they both ate second helpings. When they were done they went off to sleep the heat of the day away. Slake hung her jacket and bullet belt off the side view mirror of the truck and climbed in, sliding her tail in through a gap in the back of the seat. She slept in her shirtsleeves with her feet on the dashboard while the other two slept sprawled in the sweltering truckbed.

In the evening they departed. Slake was shaken awake by the engine rumbling to life as if it too were being called out of slumber. The hood slammed down to reveal a small group watching the starter motor being cranked. She blinked the sweat and sleep from her eyes and pulled her jacket and ammunition back in and set them on the floor. Outside she could hear men and women speaking to their horses and footsteps in the back of the truck. The halftrack’s radial engine guttered and spat and she could see someone coming up through a gunner’s hatch on the back and just as she was about to lean out the window Nehalennia pulled the driver’s side door open and climbed in. She was wearing her full uniform with medals and all and if the heat bothered her at all she put forth no evidence of it. “I don’t like to get a move on this late in the day,” she said. A man with a long tail and a cuirass guided his criollo past Slake’s side and took up the head of the convoy. “I don’t.”

“What’s the time?”

“About six. Forty-three centigrade, so the thermometer says.” The bed of the truck rose up directly behind the cab and blocked the rear window. The rear view mirror could not serve its practical purpose but Nehalennia nevertheless used it to examine herself for a moment. Someone thumped the top thrice and she put the truck in gear and the convoy moved on from the shade, a heliotropic column of steel and equine, the thick exhaust smoke from the engines lingering behind them. As soon as the sun hit them it felt fifteen degrees hotter. The two Beowend riders squinted. “I’m inclined to believe it.”

Slake put her arm on the window but the sudden sting from the heat was wasplike and she retracted it immediately. She busied herself with reloading her revolver. The road and the suspension conspired to make it as difficult a task as possible. Twice she missed the loading gate and pushed a bullet towards the footwell.

“Don’t shoot your foot off,” Nehalennia told her. “We don’t keep spares.”

“I aim not to.”

“Your aim’s nothing to put faith in.” Slake shook her head and turned away but she could feel the smile coming off Nehalennia like stovetop flames. When she’d finished loading she put the gun away and put her head against the worn leather headrest. The foreign southern countryside rolled past. An endless monoculture in these damp coastal headlands. For two sleeps they had seen little but common reeds and they would go a ways yet before such changed. The truck crested a rise in the dirt and turned slowly, hardly above a brisk walking pace. Through the brightly lit foliage a lone telegraph pole stood like a deity’s discarded toothpick, canted forty-five degrees, its wires vanished. A single electrician’s foothold stuck out near the top.

They went on. They came down a hill and drove across a stretch of dry land by an old sugar plantation of which little remained but the husks of the silos and the squat dark shapes of bunkhouses. A dragonfly-esque harvester eaten by corrosion lay half-submerged in phragmites which had long taken over the fields and pushed out the crops of old, the imported crop prevailing at last. The man on horseback before them was passing through a stretch of shallow mud. He looked back at the truck and gestured to the ground. “That there’s the Nelnyle Sugar Company’s old plant,” Nehalennia told her. “One of them, anyway. Hold on.”

Slake straightened up and pulled the hem of her shirt down. The sun coming off the hood made her squint. She did not have time to ask how she knew that before the truck’s rear end slid out sideways in the mud and her hand instinctively grabbed the side of her seat. The cargo and passengers in the rear collided with a heavy thump and yells, many tons of stockfish and diesel fuel and ammunition and water straining against their ropes. The horseman had been watching above the cab and was bent over laughing at the pileup in the rear. Nehalennia put the truck in second gear and accelerated slowly. It lurched like a canoe in whitewater, the eight cylinder engine near redline. The tires spun. Gouts of damp earth kicked up behind the front wheels. No use. Nehalennia swore and pulled the handbrake and Slake had already opened her door and jumped out.

She walked around the back where the passengers were disembarking like itinerants at some scorched backcountry terminus. Shoreline had been walking alongside the truck and already had a flat plank of wood in his hand to wedge beneath a stuck tire. Other members of the company congregated at the rear. A thin Damoyen man was bleeding from his brow and muttering in quiet anger but no one came to his aid. Slake observed the work with her hands on her hips. A ways back the rear end of the convoy stood and watched, the driver of the halftrack leaning out the window with a cigarette in her mouth. The air behind them was dusty. The Nyctian kicked the wood into place, then again, then stepped away and looked at her briefly. Are you just going to watch?

When she got to the back of the truck there were a dozen pairs of hands on the rear panels, the edges, the center, wherever there was room. She took her place near the edge, one grey uniform among many. Those with tails had them high off the ground to keep them from the damp earth. To her right Nehalennia was conversing with the injured man, her uniform pants rolled to her knees, mud dirtying her unshoed feet. She patted him on the shoulder and gestured to the open driver’s door, to which he nodded and climbed in. Then she looked at Slake and asked: “What are you doing?”

It took her a second. That was at you. “Beg your pardon?”

“I wasn’t done talking. Come here.” The woman beckoned with a tilt of her head and a wave. She looked at Shoreline but he wasn’t watching her. She stepped back from the truck and trudged slowly to where Nehalennia was standing. Someone from the rear column came to take the younger Beowend’s place. “Kaadyr, you’re good to go.”

“Alright,” the driver yelled back. He leaned his head out the window and looked back and put the truck in first and stepped on the accelerator. The truck sprung forward with a great noise from the engine and the pushers pushed but the front tires just sunk in further. Again, same noise, same result. The halftrack rumbled forward. It had a winch on the front but Nehalennia looked no happier for it.

“Gonna be here all damn evening,” she said. She tapped her foot twice on the ground then turned to look over the reeds. Slake followed her gaze, mostly. She glanced back at the truck now and then. “Where was I. Sugar. Great-grandaunt had part ownership. In Nelnyle, I mean. They kept her running for six years after parts stopped coming in.” The silos out in their old fields blurred into a single dull shape, a giant grey headstone, the old white dome tops missing. Conveyor belts that broke down for the last time long ago had fallen away into the mire beneath. Curious scenes of disrepair from the distant past. Teams of mechanics fixing old motors until the motors could run no more. Not long after came teams of dusty and shirtless labourers pulling hand cranks to make them run, beaten if they slowed. One morning the last hands left the handles and no one ate sugar from these fields again. Soon after there was no sugar at all to be had. “There used to be about two dozen up and down here and the eastern coast. Shipped a quarter of it up to Hallatin and sent the rest back off to the homeland. The books say they shipped twenty-three thousand tonnes of clayed sugar a year overseas alone.”

“There aren’t any more plants still running down here, are there?”

Nehalennia didn’t answer that. “Sugar wasn’t the only thing. They found the best copper in the hemisphere not too far west from here, seven percent grade, eight percent. Just pure chalcopyrite. The Gaosh Pit made about six million tonnes in a decade.”

Faint recollections of distant lectures. Copper cultures in the far south. An awl and a spearpoint in a dusty glass case. Five thousand years old or older. The wind hissed through the inflorescences but this low to the ground she could hardly feel it and sweat was already getting in her eyes. “Is that where we’re going?”

“Almost. We’re headed for the Fyrclende Pit. A lot of the homeland engineers in that one stayed behind. It hasn’t shut down yet.” Nehalennia looked at Slake with one eyebrow raised, a faint smile reaching her eyes. The flat response she received did not erase the expression.

The halftrack had made its way through the mud and two men were hooking the winch to the front end. They stepped back and one waved his hand up. Good to go. The engines of both vehicles roared in unison and with a long groan like a dying bear and a combined yell from the pushers the truck came free from the mud and lurched forward, huge clumps of mud caked to the underside. “Alright, out,” she told the driver, but he was already dismounting. The two Beowend retook their spot in the cab of the truck and when a hand slapped the top thrice to signal it was loaded the convoy moved once more.

They were another day getting out of the reedlands. The company was roused before dawn and led through its morning exercises in the lukewarm early morning light, a collection of blinking souls pulled from short slumbers in hastily worn uniforms, white bands tied randomly to limbs, wrists, heads. They had no room to run but the callisthenics were vigorous. Pushups, pullups, stretches at all latitudes. For the company of convicts and labourers and farmhands it was routine. Shoreline picked it up quickly when they got their first full rations. For Slake it felt easier by the day but not easy. They left the doused cookfires behind as the sun came up and by noon that day the thermometer read forty-five and climbing and she lay beside Nabon in the shade beneath the truck and napped in the half-degree cooler dirt with a sore arm over her eyes while the reeds shimmered in the heat like sorcerer’s illusions.

The landscape changed. The vehicles and horses and walking irregulars drove their way up a rise and out of the flat coastal marshes. Behind them the wilting phragmites vanished in the afternoon blur. The brown and green vista they left behind wilted and waved in the extraordinary heat. Twice going up that short hill the singlefile company had to stop for water and sit panting in the shade of the struggling trucks. Half an hour later they reached the top and pushed forth into a stretch of acid rain-burnt forests.

They drove through stretches of blue spruce spaced evenly five meters apart at the trunks with rows like aisles in a wooded shop between them. An overgrown stone fence here. A lone brick chimney standing erect in a wrack of grey timbers, the occasional trace of a road, crushed stones showing now and then through the dirt. The dead needles were ankle-deep on the ground, powdering underfoot, long shed from the trees from which acidic rain sloughed them in times not so distant. More than once they had to dismount and clear thick patches of it from beneath the tires. By the end of the day four of their number were laid down with heat exhaustion. Not one among them, heatsick or not, had heard the call of a bird that day and of insects only a lone cicada’s whine that came once and not again.

As the truck rumbled its way through a spinney of barkbare apple trees someone slammed their fist on the roof thrice and the truck came to a jarring stop that sent Slake forward in her seat. White steam was hissing from under the hood of the halftrack and its riders had leapt down out of the scorching truckbed to watch it. The overheating engine made a curious whopping sound. A few agreed they could fry an egg on the hood. Cook a steak, said another. Do it medium. She leaned out the window to watch and saw Nabon’s short form step up onto the bullbar and throw the hood open, her shirt clinging to her back, soaked through with sweat. A cloud of awful steam emerged from inside. The Scrounger waved it away and leaned in to inspect it. From where she watched Slake could see a slowly-spreading puddle under the front end. After a minute Nabon rose up and hopped down and sauntered over to the truck and pulled herself up onto the driver’s side step. “Give me good news,” said Nehalennia.

“If all the news a mechanic gives ya’s good, you oughta get a new one,” the Scrounger told her. She regarded Nehalennia with her huge yellow eyes, twin eclipses with a raw slyness that some convicts come by. Her ragged sleeveless shirt was glued to her torso and she seemed to have been dipped in grease from feet to forehead. “He blew an O-ring somewhere. S’leakin’ oil all over the place.”

“How long?”

Nabon made a noncommittal gesture. “A while.” One more look into Nehalennia’s eyes now. The Scrounger did not like what she saw and turned away to look at the stricken halftrack around which a small crowd had gathered to observe like metal roadkill. “At least the rest of the night. If you drive ‘im ‘fore we get the parts swapped you’ll just fuck ‘im up even more, if he runs at all.”

The company made camp between the row pines as the sun dropped to the horizon like a tossed molten stone. The riders tied their mounts off to trees and scattered chaff for the wilted horses to eat, their equine mouths chewing mechanically, necks bent and alight with flies that seemed to follow them, as flies do. The temperature hardly dropped and they all lay half disrobed in the soft earth save for their leader whose uniform could have been freshly laundered. There were no cookfires that night for fear of stray sparks but their potted salmon and dried fruit were hot regardless. Above them a purpling sky, Tsull waning gibbous, Argei full, a vesperine planet nictitating bluegreen to her four o’clock.

Nearby someone had found a small brook enswathed by dogwoods and as soon as dinner was finished and mostly cleaned some seven dozen of the partisans submerged themselves in it and bathed with their rifles and spears and magazine belts piled on the shore like pre-battle offerings to a riparian war deity. The water was barely below the temperature of the air. Slake took a spot next to Nabon upriver and stuck her face into the fast moving water and held it until she was out of breath and had the sensation that any part she submerged was hissing in metallurgical fashion.

When she came up, Nabon was scrubbing her inkblued forearm with offwhite scale pomade. A small aluminum tin of the stuff sat open on a riverside rock.

“Is that soap?”

“Don’t smell like it, but it is,” Nabon told her. She tilted her head at it, silent agreement for Slake to take as much as she wanted so she took a fingerful and smelled it. Honey and grease trap. No. She leaned back in the water and wiped it off on her thigh and looked at Nabon. The little ratlizard’s back was tattooed from the base of her neck down to her tail with intricate patterns and iconography that Slake did not recognize but that she thought held some significance. A Nyctian woman bearing a spear in one hand, her face drawn by someone with a poor idea of what a Nyctian looked like. A pentagon over each vertebra with three dots in the center. A cartridge casing, a sextant, a sabre stuck vertically through the eyesocket of a malformed Beowend. Numerals on her fingers.

“Are those prison tattoos?”

“Sure are,” Nabon replied. If the question offended her it wasn’t obvious. “‘Fore you ask, there’s no way to tattoo fur. I could shave ya.”

“I like my fur as it is.”

“Bet ya do.”

“What were you in for?”

“Bank robbery.”

“No you weren’t.”

“Yeah, alright. Assault with a deadly weapon. N’ technically it’s labour camp ink. If we’re goin’ into this.” She glanced back at Slake but she hadn’t yet looked away. “Someone robbed my mother’s food stand so my sister and brothers and I got him in an alleyway n’ cut him to pieces. They didn’t catch none but me n’ they didn’t have no proof n’ the guy’s family didn’t have any money to bring nothin’ against me. Didn’t have guns either. In the end they just sent me off outta the city to drive spikes. Year four comes around n’ ol’ jackboots shows up n’ rounds up everyone with an assault or murder charge n’ asks who’s ever shot a gun before. Then she takes us all aside n’ says right. You can stay in here for as long as you’re stayin’ here for n’ swing ‘til you drop, or you can come with me n’ get paid decent n’ fed. Says there’s gonna be shootin’ but you’re already dead out here in this yard. Just do what she says n’ don’t do drugs or run off n’ you’ll go back to Hallatin as free women n’ men. That’s how they got about forty of us. Rest all showed up when they started lookin’.”

In the day’s last light Nabon’s scales had taken on a tyrian tone as had Slake’s fur. The second half of what she said was lost on Slake as she dipped her head in the water and washed her ears. Someone had brought two lanterns and set one nearby. A lone green-winged moth circled the nearest one in an erratic lepidopteran orbit. “Did anyone try and run off?”

“Yep. That was just outside Hallatin, too, group o’ three. We caught ‘em the next day n’ tied ‘em up by the ankles in a drainage ditch.”

A few moments of silence now. Downriver a high-pitched whistle and a laugh and a knock that shit off. The lamp hissed. The wind had died down somewhat and the tops of the spruces swayed soundlessly against the backdrop of the early night. The forest around them lay quiet. She could see the shape of a helmeted man with an automatic rifle standing watch from the halftrack’s top hatch. Two more were looking at the engine, one on his back beneath it. She could also see her ribs but they didn’t stick out as much anymore.

“So why’re you out here?” the Scrounger asked.

“I don’t know,” said Slake. “Some stupid reason.”

“Gotta be downright retarded to make you end up with a bat in the middle of nowhere.”

“I didn’t have much time to think it through.”

“Well, you’re here now. What’s his story?”

“I don’t know,” Slake told her. “I won’t speak for him.”

When darkness came she rose up from the river and dressed and walked the small camp. It couldn’t have been less than forty degrees and the humidity stuck around like a curse. In less than a minute the coolness of the river had left her. Through the thinning westward trees a crimson ribbon clung to the edge of the world, soon to disappear and bring the day with it. The camp sat in relative silence. They had pitched their tents on the deadfall amidst the shrivelled trilliums and greyroses and scarce fungi and on that soft bedding souls lay snoring under the oilcloths. She walked to the halftrack and watched with her arms folded. One of the mercenaries turned mechanic was fishing for the broken seal with a piece of hooked metal, his plated head turned to one side, tongue stuck out, the tips of his righthand horns stained with engine grease. She moved on. A gust of wind brought with it the scent of evergreens and yet more heat. She circled the truck, opened the door, sat in the passenger seat. The reflective windshield showed her nothing of herself but her eyes hovering over the bonnet. She watched them and thought about the day and the one before it. Then she got up and went back to the halftrack and snapped her fingers to get the mechanics’ attention. “Either of you two seen the Nyctian?”

They looked at her. One was a small Čalo who held a lantern on a stick so his Osamac counterpart could see. She thought the latter’s name was Mazat but she wasn’t sure. The light cast their faces in amber horrorshow shadow. Smell of heavy oil. The former did not speak her language but the latter did. “Is he in the river?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t know.”

Slake turned and walked off. She could hardly make out the forest but she could make it out well enough to see and she knew exactly where she’d be if she knew it was in walking distance and it might well be. A sudden consciousness of the revolver on her hip came to her as she stared into the trees. That’s not enough. She made for the truck and climbed into the back, duckwalking past three sleeping forms sprawled out on the wooden bed. From one of the crates she retrieved a round dynamo flashlight and wound it and shined it into her palm. Then she climbed out and looked up and traced a path south and walked into the woods with the light held backhanded at her shoulder.

She moved through the bone dry timberland and down into a coppice where squat green ferns rose from the semi-damp earth. There were no mosquitoes, no nightbirds, no crickets. The noise from the camp faded, a single call of a name she didn’t know and then no more. Up a rocky embankment on the other side strewn with browned lichen. She shone her light behind her and saw nothing but after that she walked with the gun in her free hand. In a flat stretch of dead tall grass she passed through the wreckage of a small house. A concrete foundation, sun and acid bleached bricks. A few fragments of glass, a weather-wrecked chair, a pot jutting from under a collapsed beam. That was all. It had come down seventy years ago and nothing worth noting remained. All was silent save for her footsteps and the wind. She moved on with the halo beam of the flashlight sweeping the trees in front of her.

Five minutes later she started to smell the salt and another five beyond that she came out of the treeline and went up a rise then onto a mudstone coastal bluff. Past that was the South Trellarr Sea. She stood there in the hissing beachgrass and watched. In the sand some fifty meters down the hulk of an old oil tanker lay wrecked on the shoals. There was a gash in the skeg where a rock had broken it years ago. The breakers roared in the light of the twin Sisters on the offshore rocks. In lighter conditions she would’ve seen the colour of the algae growth. She turned her flashlight off and breathed in. Salt and fish and something else distant and industrial. The smell of home, almost. She looked to the east and then west and in the brightness of the stars she saw a pale figure seated with his knees up to his chest and his arms around them and his scattergun close at hand on his right side. He’d been watching her.

When she climbed up onto the boulder beside him and dusted her palms on her pant legs, Shoreline was looking back out over the ocean again. A loud wave smashed against the beaten hull of the shipwreck. His ear twitched. “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

“You do whatever you please.”

As close to a yes as she’d get. She nodded and took a loose cigarette from her sleeve pocket and sat down beside him to watch the waves.

“Dart?” Shoreline shook his head no. She took only two drags before ashing it on the rock. “Are you alright?”

“I’m alright,” he said. She couldn’t tell whether that was the truth from his voice. “I’ll feel better when I get home.”

“Are we closeby?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I don’t recognize the area but I recognize the land. It’s been a while.”

They lapsed into silence. The ocean breeze reeked of dead sea life and algae but it was cool and that was enough. Far from the coast they could see the lights of a ship moving over the shoals, an angled bow, fourteen inch guns on the deck. An old warship kept running through what Slake thought must have been prayer and prayer alone. No higher tide would come for three days and even at their distance with the wind in the grass and the surf they could hear the distant mechanical song of its piston-driven engine hurriedly pushing it to whatever obscure eastward destination its helmswoman was taking it. Above them the moons tilted against the infinite smear of their permanent celestial backdrops so scattered with stars from the protracted collision of two galaxies that there was scarcely any black between them. All the details of Meropis were illuminated in blue at this hour. The blades of seagrass, the incandescent white crests of the combers, her hands in the glass beside her, the starlight coming through the buckshot hole in Shoreline’s ear.

“I’m just scared that I’ll pass by it and it will have been so long I just don’t recognize it,” he said. “That won’t happen. But it still keeps me up.”

“But you know where you are right now. And you know it’s not far.”

“Yeah. I’ll know it when I see it. It’s just the thought of not knowing.”

Slake nodded. She wanted another cigarette but she didn’t reach for another. Only then did she realize her gun had been sitting beside her in the sand. She took it and put the safety catch on and hit it on her thigh to get any dirt out and put it back in its holster. “I thought you’d be happier to be close to home,” she said.

“I just want to get there. Then I can be happy.”

“You’ll just walk off into the woods once we’re there and that’s that?”

“That’s that,” he replied. Simple as that. One day soon she would see the back of the man she walked the eastern wildlands with’s head for the final time. She had felt something when they discussed parting ways by train before the dead city. She felt that same strange knot in her abdomen now and could not place its origin.

“What are you going to say when you see them all again? Your family or whatever.”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” he said. “I’ll probably just eat and sleep for a week straight. There’s not much I have to tell them that’s any good. Maybe not to go to the big cities. That’s all.”

“You’re not going to tell them about the trip, then.”

“No. There’s nothing to tell.” Shoreline turned his head to the side and spat into the sand and stretched one leg out in front of him. From the west they heard the solitary cry of a seabird from its nest in a hole in the bluff. He watched that direction for any signs of it flying out but they didn’t see it. “I know it’s about the trip, not the terminus. But anyone who says that’s never been on a trip before. If I could’ve flipped a switch and just been there I would’ve.”

Slake nodded. Were she to be presented with that same switch she would have flipped it too, she thought. Maybe. She wasn’t sure the more she thought about it. “We should go back to camp.”

“We should,” he said. But they didn’t. The two sat on the cliff well into the night in silence and watched the combers and they watched the warship fade into the grey murk on the eastern horizon and only when the shape of Tsull’s hazy semicircle dipped behind the curve of the earth did they rise and walk back through the woods side by side.

The company was running low on heavy oil. Not dangerously low but low enough. They had found a train track some hours before not entirely warped by heat and now in the furnace-like heat of midday Nehalennia was withdrawing a dipstick from the gastank of the halftrack and noting in a logbook that it sat at one-third capacity and they had four days to spare. Slake and five others watched her with their backs flattened to the vehicle’s side to keep from the sun. The day prior the thermometer had reached fifty-one and as long as the sun was up it refused to drop. They had exited the shade of the old row pines and were passing through ancient lowland farmfields, through overgrown fields of tubers and tripwheat long colonized by infernos of kudzu. Everything in the fields was left as it was. A tractor flipped with its belly to the sky, no tires or engine. Sunbleached bones of cattle and women and men alike mixed in the trackside ballast, too hot to touch, blinding to look at. The cloudless sky burned like smelted verdigris and only the voice of their commander could rouse them from the noontime heat to take up their arms and return to the vehicles.

Some minutes later Slake had an old surveyor’s map spread out in the truckbed in which she had taken to riding for better airflow. Some peered over her shoulder but most who weren’t on watch duty were lying down with wet cloths over their eyes, a strange cargo of blind men headed off to war. She traced the dotted red line of the railroad they followed until it reached a small dot marked with the word Cachua. She held her fingers to the scale bar and kept them steady and tried to guess their distance. Maybe fifteen kilometers if her guess was right, maybe thirty to forty if she was off. She pinned the map down with a canteen and climbed over the side of the truck to the driver’s side, one foot on the front fender, the other hanging. They hit a small bump and the axe handle at her hip clanged against the door. Only a pair of gloves kept her palms from being burned. Nehalennia didn’t even look when a golden face appeared in her side view.

“There’s a town about forty kilometers out,” said Slake. “Maybe a bit sooner.”

“What’s the symbol?”

“Just a dot.”

“What’s it called?”

“Cachua.”

“Never heard of it. Do you think it’s still there?”

Slake grabbed the bar holding the rear mirror to anchor herself and turned her head to look forward. One of the belts was going in the engine, she could hear it whining. The wind wasn’t enough to cool her and she kept blinking to get the sweat out of her eyes and she could smell herself even over the carbon fumes leaking from under the hood. A telegraph pole went past, unhindered by wires. Further down the line the brick and tin shape of a section house and a water tower and very far past that there were clouds on the horizon. “I think it has to be,” she replied. “The map’s only two years out of date.”

“Alright. Is on the railroad?”

“Just off it. You’ll probably see it.”

Not long after the squat shape of Cachua came into view over the rise of a hill, dark against the green backdrop of overgrown hills. The immense heat set it to swaying and it did not come into focus for some time. An old company town. They could see the quonset shapes of the roofs that once held off winter snows and the concrete walls studded with wrought iron spikes hammered out of fences on which dark mummified shapes of herd predators hung, dried to blackened jerky. Only a few tents hugged the entrance gate. There were few travellers in the hot season. Nehalennia pushed the truck off the path and down a dirt path dug between two wasted fields littered with dead sheafs of harvested tripwheat and in the wake of it and the halftrack and the dozen horses the dust hung behind them like a desert ghost.

When they reached the front gate a few wasted refugees had emerged from the burlap tents with their hands over their eyes, blinking at the new arrivals. A small team of guards had appeared on the wall just above the gate. Nehalennia got out of the truck and Slake climbed down from the back and went to stand by her side without being asked. The people on the walls leaned down to watch. They wore neither helmets nor armor and one carried a bolt action rifle and another a break action shotgun with its stock bound in tape and yet another held a recurve bow. Damoyen seemed to be the dominant species among them. The front gate was hardly any higher than the trucks and still bore the emblem of the dead agricultural enterprise that once owned it.

They called down to Nehalennia directly without any introductions made on her part and asked her business in broken Beotic. She replied with a half-fable. They were a group of hunters of dangerous game sent from Hallatin by none other than the Kard Electric Company and they had come to the southern reaches with a contract for swarmhounds. Their destination was not far up the coast but a cast of morons had conspired to leave them short on fuel just before their arrival. She waved a hand and sent for someone to retrieve a locked bronze box from the rear of the truck and when it was brought forth she opened it and held its contents up for the guards to take a look at. They leaned down. Several thousand ket arranged neatly in strings of one hundred pieces each, and more where that came from, she told them. They told her to wait and some vanished from the walls while others watched them through narrowed eyes. The company had taken to standing in the shade of the walls and the vehicles.

When they returned they told her that they could trade but they would accept only the truck and six of them within the walls. Nehalennia agreed and bowed her thanks. “Get in,” she told Slake. She then selected a team to ride in the back, Nabon among them with a submachine gun the size of her torso bouncing on her back. When all were loaded the gate was hauled open by a small team from the inside and the first truck in years to pass over its flagstone streets entered Cachua.

It was not a big town. There were no more than fifteen buildings arranged in a semicircle around a small town square, in the center of which sat a sunbleached stone fountain with no water. There seemed to be no one about. A cellar door on the side of a house swung open and a trio of girls looked out, their canine heads stacked atop one another, tapetum lucidum glowing in the shade. Two men who had been standing outside one of the stone huts looked at the truck and then at each other and vanished through an open doorway. The town square smelled of unleavened bread and horses. An elderly Damoyen woman was waiting by the largest of the buildings, a storehouse. She was stooped nearly ninety degrees at the waist and wore a ragged blue huipil with bronze beads that hung nearly to the dirt around her neck. Her grey whiskers curled like hammered wires. The truck stopped in front of the warehouse and the officer and Slake went to greet her, the latter carrying the ket. Behind them a few of the fuel barrels were rolled from the back of the truck.

“Good day,” Nehalennia said. The chieftess did not respond. She gestured for the younger Beowend to step forward and present the ket, and she did, lowering it and opening the lid. The old woman took one of the strings and held it beneath her in her skeletal hands and turned them. Slake looked around. Three guards stood on the ramparts to her right and another four stood uneasily on the far side of town, only their upper halves visible past the curved roof of a building. More townsfolk were turning out, a queerlooking canine bunch among whom there seemed to be no unified dress code. A woman with five children holding the hem of her dress in a doorway. A squad of rough looking men. Almost all Damoyen, a few humans, no more than three. The old woman made a noise. When Slake looked back she was nodding her head like she’d been flicked. “You need how much?”

“As much as you can give us,” Nehalennia said. “Two hundred liters minimum.”

“Five thousand and five hundred ket.”

“How much is that for?”

“Three gnigrua. Three barrel.”

“How many liters in a barrel.”

“One hundred fifty. Close.”

Nehalennia told her that was fine and Slake counted out fifty five strings that a young man took from her and carried off into the storehouse.

The chieftess said something in a language Slake didn’t know and waved the rough men over. They disappeared into the dark maw of the storehouse and the elderly woman yelled after them. The company had all moved to stand on the close side of the truck with their weapons slung over their shoulders, some glancing about. Sisters it was hot. She could feel the heat coming off the stones into her boots and her sweatsoaked socks. The sunlight fell so heavily it could have been rain. She wiped her brow and her hand came away wet.

It took them some time to retrieve the gas. They retreated to the truck and squatted in the thin band of half-shade beside it and soon three of the six were asleep including Slake. There were noises from the storehouse, metal flexing and scuffling feet. Nehalennia took her eyes off the old woman only once to check her watch. Some time later three old black barrels were carted out on dollies and set down beside the truck. The crew slowly rose to their feet.

“Heavy oil,” said the chieftess. Nehalennia nodded.

“Good. Would you mind if we topped up before we left?”

A grunt in response. Two of the rough men maneuvered a dolly over to the truck while another went to fetch a siphon pump. She told them where to set the barrel and took the hose and fed one end in and opened the lid on the gas tank and fed the other end in there and squeezed the pump. Clear liquid rose up through it. She put her beak close to it and sniffed. Heavy oil. She pumped in three liters then stopped and pulled the hose out and nodded at another barrel. “Let me have some from that one too.”

“What?” The old woman tilted her head down at her.

Nehalennia looked back at those she’d brought along and all met her gaze, mismatched pupils shining back at her in the sunlight. One of them tilted their helmet to the side. She looked back at the old woman. “I want to take some from one of the other barrels.”

The chieftess looked back at her. Everything was motionless for a few moments. Slake watched the men behind her and saw one of them setting his jaw. She wasn’t sure whether seconds were passing or minutes but the old woman nodded and gestured to bring another one forward. Nehalennia slid the hose in and stirred it and sniffed near the opening. She sniffed again.

“This isn’t oil,” she said.

“Deal is done.” The chieftess raised a crooked hand and pointed to the gate. “You are going now.”

“How much more do you have in there?” The old woman didn’t reply. The woman with all the kids had vanished and so had a few of the faces in the windows. The men who’d brought out the fuel couldn’t find a comfortable way to stand. Nehalennia gestured to Slake. She stepped forward and opened the case again. There remained a few thousand ket and more in the truck. The chieftess looked at the money, then at Slake, then at the steelcoloured Beowend.

“No more,” said the Damoyen. She had to look up to lock eyes with the Beowend but lock eyes she did.

“How much more do you have.”

The stooped chieftess turned and waved her helpers away. They did not look happy at the proposal but they nodded to her and put their hands to their abdomens in near unison as some obscure salute and walked away, never once taking their eyes from the company who returned the looks with equal suspicion. “I will get more,” she said. The Damoyen woman turned and hobbled back into the darkness of the warehouse door. Later that night Slake would note with dull interest that at some point while the old dog had her back turned her axe had entered her hand with neither her permission nor disapproval.

Nehalennia looked at her men. Some of them had subtly taken the safeties off their guns. Slake went to stand by the door with the case of money in one hand held to her side. No noise from within. The stone architecture of Cachua swayed in the heat. Her palm was damp on the axehead on her belt. Even fewer faces watched them now. Nehalennia waited with her arms folded and her head off to one side, most of the company seated or kneeling to get some shade by the truck.

She was about to look inside when the old woman shambled back out with a muzzle loaded rifle in her hands. Slake saw it first and raised her axe. The money box fell from her hand and broke its latch on the ground, pieces of bronze clinking in the dirt. As the woman raised her gun she swung the axe overhand and buried it nearly to the eye in the woman’s parietal. The old woman’s grip on her gun instantly came loose and it too hit the earth. The cock came loose and struck the frizzen and the gun burned its half-full pan and fired and sent a lead ball skittering across the town and through a glass shopfront window.

In seconds the company had turned their weapons outwards and were firing at anyone who showed their face in the courtyard and into every building. Nabon had turned her submachine gun to the men who’d brought the fuel out and was firing into one of their supine corpses and another dragoon was kneeling by the rear wheel firing at the guards on the wall. Two bullets came past before Slake figured out she was being aimed at and she dove to the floor, her revolver in her hand, the handle of her axe pointed skyward with its head still lodged in another. Nehalennia sighted a man running for a doorway and shot him through the stomach then turned and walked out from behind the truck with her blued pistol trained singlehanded on one of the guards on the wall. She shot him through the chest and she shot the woman who knelt to pull him away to safety. Slake saw a woman appear in a door to the closest house with a small pistol in her hands. It was pointed at her. Her own much larger pistol bucked thrice and when she lowered the enormous smoking barrel she saw a pair of shoes sticking out of the doorway and a spray of blood hanging in the air and on the doorjamb. One of the truck’s tires had deflated and as she crouched next to the driver’s door the side window burst in a sudden downpour of diamonds that scattered off her head, a few loose pieces falling into her shirt. “Someone get the damn gate open,” Nehalennia roared over the gunfire but before she’d gotten through open Slake had already risen to her feet.

Over the ringing in her ears she could hear yelling all about her. A woman had fallen headlong through a window with the top of her head shot off and a smaller body lay in a pond of dusty blood near where her brains had spilled. A pack of goats previously unseen had turned loose and were running in a panicked death spiral around the fountain. Guns were emerging from their places above mantles and just such a rifle had taken aim at Slake. She heard the crack of a round pass just behind her and felt the whisper against her back. She glanced to the side and saw someone crouched behind an overturned wagon and the black dot of a barrel and she shot at them twice midrun, the wood splintering and bursting like it was packed with cordite. There was a guard atop the gate who saw her and drew his bow but someone outside the wall shot him in the back with a shotgun and he lurched forth and toppled off the wall in a heap and did not move.

She reached the front gate and slid to a stop behind a stone wall. When she came up a woman with two shrieking children holding her legs watched her with wide and bloodshot eyes and her hands over her ears. Slake pointed the pistol at her. She did not hear the striker hitting an empty cartridge but she felt it and the woman took off with the children and vanished around a corner. She unlatched the loading gate and was drawing a bullet from her belt but realized she had no time to do that. The truck was getting shot to pieces. A man leaned from behind it with a magazine fed rifle but the return fire was so intense he couldn’t even get a shot in. A bullet skipped off the ground beside her and went buzzing over the town wall. She legged it for the chain to the huge steel shutter door that acted as the gate and hauled on it.

Beyond the walls she could faintly hear movement, the rotary engine in the halftrack. Her ears hurt and her nose was filled with the scent of brimstone gunpowder and dust, dust everywhere, her eyes, her fur. The gate was not opening fast. A pistol round tore by her and impacted the wall near her arm. She ducked but she did not stop pulling the chain. A foot off the ground now. Somewhere behind her a twenty-round burst from an automatic thudded out its leaden cacophony. When the gate was up to her knees she heard the high guttering sound of the halftrack’s engine being pushed to redline. The front end of it smashed the rusted metal of the gate and tore it up from its housing and as soon as it was clear two dozen fighters rose from the back like they’d been summoned to stand by an orchestral conductor and began firing into windows, doorways, the earth, townsfolk dead and dying, the goats, and behind it came the rest of the dragoons with their rifles and spears held over their heads and at their shoulders spitting fire at anyone without a white armband. She fell in among their number and loaded her pistol.

Within five minutes the gunfire was one sided. A few last holdouts who’d ran out of ammunition were dragged from their houses by the tails and ears, a short death-prayer spoken before they were executed with single shots in the brain or the butts of rifles, their corpses piled into the old fountain. Those who were found unarmed or with children were being held in a sobbing and furious group face down in the scorching earth and the heavy sulphurous fog of gunsmoke that clung to it. There were few noteworthy weapons among the fallen. They found and took a lever action shotgun and whatever ammunition and gunpowder they found and left everything else where it had fallen.

The warehouse was being ransacked. There were four barrels of aged heavy oil in the back corner that the company rolled out. Nehalennia had survived the affair unwounded and was holding a rubber tube, filling the truck’s unpunctured engine while a small group put it up on jacks to swap the shredded tires for spares. Other goods were being carted out by the minute. Bags of potatoes and dried fruit, grain, small surplus cases of ammunition with old manufacturer’s marks and calibers stencilled to the side. Among the more valuable finds there were bottles of decent wine and rum that Nehalennia explicitly forbade anyone from drinking under punishment of death. Slake had found some packs of good cigarettes and she now stood outside and watched bodies pile in the fountain while she lit up with a steady hand. Shoreline was dragging a corpse by the feet across the courtyard and when he turned his back to her and heaved it up she did not see any smoke leaking from the barrel of his shotgun.

Among their number there were seven wounded but none so seriously they couldn’t walk. They were seen to in the back of the halftrack. She had Nabon clap beside her ear and she could faintly hear it over the ringing. The horse riders were ordered to take a goat each and a small competition was held to see who among them could catch one and by the end twelve freshly decapitated caprines hung limp from the backs of the saddles. A woman who had protested fiercely in her foreign tongue was stripped nude and tied off to the gate chains and beaten into unconsciousness with blackjacks and clubs. The rest were left tied and chained. When they finally rode out they had the same stocks of food they had half a season prior and enough fuel for several hundred kilometers. They went back through the field to the tracks and followed them westward. Slake watched Cachua fade away into the mirage behind them as she cleaned the gory axe head with a rag in the rear of the truck, the last vehicle in the procession. She took her cigarette from her mouth and discarded it into the trackside grass, slid the axe back into its place at her hip, and climbed over the side to sit in the front passenger seat beside Nehalennia. Within twenty minutes a small fire rose from the dry foliage in which the cigarette had been thrown.

The company made camp at nightfall and roasted the goats over separate cookfires, turning them on spits and cooking wide thin pieces on rocks of the same shape, turning the burnt meat over sometimes too early but mostly too late. Their hides were preserved with newly acquired salt to keep the rot from them and hung from the sides of the vehicle like battle standards, the animals’ bones brewing in large pots to make broth and to whiten them to wear as ornaments and affix to the truck hoods or to armour. Who got which part of which corpse was being discussed with great vigour. Some kneeled on reed mats laid out in the dirt and cleaned weapons with heady gun oil that reeked of vanilla and others still had eaten early and were sleeping. A normal evening with some added jubilation, nothing more. By about seventeen hundred that day the clouds had moved in and a sharp wind had picked up halfway through dinner that turned the kudzu horizontal and when the company had settled in to sleep it hurt the eyes to face directly.

At midnight Slake stood some distance from the camp and watched a dry lightning storm gnaw at the eastern horizon, close enough to just barely be heard, like distant artillery with the backing of quiet snoring from the camp and quiet conversation and the wind and the faint insect screech in her eardrums. She watched yellow forks of it run veinlike against the black bodies of the thunderheads. In the whipcrack light the shapes of mountains and the dark-turned-light expanse of the oceanic rim of Meropis were shown to her once, twice, briefly, then no more. The wind tore at her clothes and the fur on the back of her head and when the lightning had moved farther down the coast she saw in its wake faint orange shapes of small fires carved from the hollows of shattered and blackened trees and in patches of dead grass and old timbers like the land itself had a vast army in pursuit of them to punish a transgression. The sight of them burning quietly out there in the dark brought the day back to her. She saw the woman at the end of her gun fall backwards with a hole in her chest and she saw the eyes of the mother by the gate and when the second face showed itself some dark thing that dwelt within her howled up with the wind that were her gun loaded she would have shot the latter dead and she’d feel no different than she did staring at the flickering wildfires. Ambivalent to their passing but not just that. Whether it would always be so she would not profess an answer, but she knew it. She turned from the lightning storm and went up into the truckbed and slept better than she had the past three weeks. In the darkness her form could not be distinguished from any other.

II - Homecoming

The fire stalked them for two weeks before the smoke caught up. The night prior the heavens had shut like stage curtains had been drawn across them and that morning they ran through the tallgrasses for morning exercise under a sulfur sky, a crimson sun ascending in the east that did not hurt the eyes to look at. Nehalennia led the company at a brisk jog down an embankment, over a riverbed that held nothing but a small trickle whispering under the rocks, up the other side onto a rise and back into the wind and the shifting grass. The shapes of the company moved like a slow stampede, their feet tramping the grass down further as each passed behind each. The horizon of that ruined corner of Meropis was close and growing closer by the hour and the day grew hotter by the minute and in two days time the ground on which they walked would be incinerated.

After a breakfast of oats and horsemeat Slake went to the cab of the truck and changed her shirt and put her gun back at her hip and got out again, her arms more sore than the rest of her. Mandatory food was something she did not enjoy in Hallatin but after a few weeks of it she stood a full head taller than most of the company. Men were saddling their horses, the cookfire was being doused and the pots thrown into the halftrack to be cleaned as they travelled. The day prior two more of the horses had collapsed in the heat and had to be shot and hastily dressed. There was a new urgency to their journey that every morning seemed to accelerate. It was open country to their west, rolling grasslands to the horizon. She climbed up into the truckbed to look for Shoreline and found him perched on one of the fuel barrels with a pair of binoculars to his huge eyes and the lenses aimed to the ochred mountains to the north. “Finding anything?”

The truck started with a tectonic scraping sound and both Beowend and Nyctian reached in tandem to steady themselves on the side rail when it lurched into gear. He lowered the binoculars and offered them out to her, the leather straps hanging. One of the Scroungers watched them, picking at his jagged little teeth with a carved oak needle.

“See those four mountains in a row there?” Shoreline asked.

She took the binoculars and widened them and held them to her eyes. A yellow world, yellow sky, hills that got more yellow with distance. “I don’t see them.”

“You’re looking in the wrong place. Follow my finger.”

She did. Four mountains, the two on the outside taller, one in the middle with a peculiar flat surface. “Got ‘em.”

“I recognize those,” he told her. When she lowered the binocular she saw he was still looking. They both could barely see them through the haze though they couldn’t have been more than twenty kilometers distant. “I think. From a long time ago. I’m trying to remember what they were called.”

They said no more after that and each sat on either side of the truckbed. All day they did not stop save for once to fuel the vehicles and to give the eight remaining horses water. At noon they spotted a lighthouse on the coast but its lenses had guided no ships since before any of them were born and they moved on. In the afternoon they rode by a large folded wedge of metal jutting from the parched earth. Before many speculations could be made on its origins they crested a hill and saw the wreckage of a small incorporated commune with its steel front gate torn off at the hinges and lengths of ruined chain hanging in pairs from the ramparts, tibias and feet and some bleached ribcages still dangling where they’d been hung after a slaughter as warnings, sections of the nearby rail torn up and used as reinforcement for the walls. The dragoons peered at this bygone slaughter through slats on the side of the truck with only their eyes showing like children at play but nothing moved in the wreckage and nothing that day took them off their course on an ancient railway.

Some time later Slake climbed over the side of the truck and came through the window to sit next to Nehalennia. The truck was old but a good model at the date of its manufacture and the radio in the dashboard had somehow remained. She flipped the on switch and dialled it from five to sixteen slowly but nothing came back, empty from one end of the band to the other. She rolled it to her favourite station in Hallatin and listened to the electric hiss for a moment, then turned it off. “I keep checking,” said Nehalennia, “but there’s nothing out here.”

The younger Beowend had taken to wearing just a sleeveless shirt with two belts of ammunition for the pistol worn around her abdomen but the elder was uniformed in full. “I figured. I just wanted to hear for myself.”

“Is the bat still looking to leave?”

Slake looked over at her but Nehalennia had not taken her eyes from the horse that walked before the truck. “Yeah,” she said. “His mind’s made up.”

Nehalennia grunted. She looked in the side mirror then to the side at Slake briefly then forward again when the truck’s front right wheel hit a divot. “I won’t stop him. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

She put her elbow out the window and put her cheek in her hand. The obscured sun did not heat the metal to burning but it wasn’t comfortable and she retracted her arm and sat straight. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Good. As soon as he gives back what he’s been loaned he’ll be free to leave. Walk right out into the woods and vanish.”

They sat quietly for a minute. Slake shook a cigarette from a pack she kept in her bandolier and lit it and pulled on it and looked at nothing in particular.

“Mean bastards,” Nehalennia said. “Nyctians.”

“I don’t think I’d describe him as such.”

“Not it. Them.” She raised a hand from the wheel and made a circular motion at the road ahead. “Very mean bastards. A work camp in Atzillia I used to oversee had a few of them. When they weren’t fighting they’d make a break for the fences the second you took your eyes off them. Got to a point we wouldn’t even take them anymore.” She put her hand back on the steering wheel and looked at Slake. “Wouldn’t have ever thought it. Finding the two of you side by side out there.”

“Neither would I but that’s how it is.”

“I suppose so.”

They went quiet. Slake smoked slowly. One of the stolen cigarettes from Cachua, it tasted aged and not in a good way. Halfway to the butt she put it out on the door and flicked it away.

“You’re not happy about any of this, are you?”

“What do you mean?” Slake looked at her without turning her head.

“The Nyctian leaving. I can see it all over you.”

“What I want makes no difference here.”

Nehalennia nodded. Correct. She went on anyway. “What you need to get through your head,” she says, “is that the fact you tamed one Nyctian does not mean you’ve tamed them all. You are prey out there not just to the birds and the hoshins and whatever else. Even if you had it right beside you the whole time they’d kill you as soon as look at you and only ask later what it was you were doing there. You want to go with him. Is that right?”

Slake turned her head now, said nothing.

“That’s right,” said Nehalennia. “And as a free Beowend woman I reckon you have just about every right in the world to do as you please, contract or not, with the - I believe - very reasonable terms that you forfeit your pay for days gone and with the caveat that we will not be slowing down to wait for you.”

There seemed to be no comfortable spot in her beak for her tongue and Slake watched herself in the side mirror with her jaw set for a moment, thinking. “You said loaned earlier. What he’s been loaned. What does that entail?”

“Well.” Nehalennia tapped the items out with her finger. “Clothes. Ammunition. Food. Kit. That’s the knife and the webbing.”

“So you’ll send him out naked?”

Nehalennia smiled. “He can keep his shotgun.”

“I’m glad you’re no thief, at least,” said Slake.

“You watch yourself, sister.”

They sat for a second. There was an old billboard at the side of the railway faded back into a blank canvas with the old lights and lampcovers atop it gone. A hawk had made its nest atop one of the old pillars that kept it up but it looked empty, the sticks and twigs dry and old. “I suppose if I went with him you’d strip me too,” she said. “Is that right?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I won’t have you paraded nude. It’s not dignified. You can keep your boots and your pistol. And your bandolier and bag, sure. But I won’t be arming you. If and when they pick your body over out there I won’t have it on my conscience that I put a loaded gun in their hands.”

“Alright,” said Slake.

The evening saw Shoreline playing the role of observer with the binoculars, his head pointed compasslike. Slake rode in the truckbed again and had dug through the pile of communal gear to find the old pack she’d joined with and when she got it out she had to beat it on the tailgate to shake the dried mud from it. It looked rough but it would work. When the other riders were turned away or occupied by the scenery she took supplies from the boxes and hid them away. A small matchbook tucked in an old sock. Some slugs for Shoreline’s shotgun and a handful of twelve millimeter rounds for her pistol, all stored in separate pockets to avoid any metal noises. From an old wooden storage crate she took a can of cranberry sauce looted from Cachua and put that in a side pocket in her pack. In the bottom she put a few strips of salty horse jerky and a pair of thin linen pants and a spare shirt, then laid her jacket over it without folding it. It seemed normal enough, no more bulky than if it held only the previous item. Shoreline had looked her way once but not again.

And at a riverside at nightfall they made a fireless camp. The vehicles had come down a gap into a coulée and stopped on a stretch of fine gravel. Shapes of shells and bones of ancient origin were stamped in the dry sediment walls like fingerprints and closer to the riverbank a scouting party came across a firepit that looked like it had seen flame in the past three weeks but not any sooner than one and they paid it little mind and they agreed to stop for the night to let the vehicles cool and to change a belt in the truck. The sky was the colour of mud and a few hours prior everything began to smell faintly of woodsmoke. The wind passed over the top of the small valley in which they stayed and shifted the grass in near silence.

“Some fuckin’ river,” said Nabon. Slake had wandered out to the center of it where only a miniscule stream of water flowed soundlessly under the shade of the marlstone rocks and she was crouched with her finger tracing the spinal curvature of a four hundred and seventy million year old insect that had died there. What little showed of the riverbed aside from rocks was thick black ashen silt that had washed downstream earlier in the year. The Scrounger was washing her hands and stealing occasional glances downriver where the small valley curved away. Dinner was being cooked in two huge pots set up over gas stoves. Sweet-smelling horsemeat with broth and bannock. A small crowd was observing a woman trying to undo something in the engine of the truck. The only Naiassen in the company who Slake suspected wasn’t yet of proper fighting age was seated on a rock and orating an old newspaper to a few listeners. “You think it snows here in the winter?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen snow.” Slake looked away from the fossil and stood up. Nabon did not come higher than the bottom of her ribcage. She gestured with a tilt of her head to where Shoreline was pacing down the riverbank with his hands behind his back, intensely focused on the ground in front of him. “Ask him. He’s from around here.”

Nabon put two fingers to her muzzle and whistled. It got the Nyctian’s attention and he walked over reluctantly, looking between the two of them to see who had summoned him.

“You know if it snows around here?” the Scrounger asked him.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Sometimes. Way up in the mountains.” He paused to gauge her reaction but the Scrounger gave none. The question had been asked in earnest, one lower city dweller to another. “In black sky only, though. It was hard to tell if it was ash or snow falling so you had to put your hand out and feel which was which. Snow was wet and cold. Ash was just cold.”

“Did this river flood?”

“I don’t know about this river, but most of them did. In flood season and near the end of black sky. We’d…” Shoreline trailed off. He was looking down at his feet and when Slake followed his gaze she saw him looking at the hexapodal fossil embedded in the rocks. He bent down to look more closely at it and traced around the outside of it with great reverence and when he looked back up his face had a strange sort of look that she’d seen once in an attic office far from there. It took Slake a few seconds but she realized it to be shock only after he had turned away to look upstream where the river snaked off towards the darkening foothills.

“You’d?” said Nabon, but her words landed on ears that would listen only to the words of one woman in the company and that woman was not her. He turned and bounded across the rocks to the truck and climbed up into the back and Slake hurried after him.

He came down from the truckbed with his gun in one hand and his rancid pack in the other. Nehalennia had materialized nearby and a few of the dragoons had come to stand at her side like spectators of a street fight. The two shared a look as Slake went to get her pack. “This is the place?” she asked him.

Shoreline unslung his shotgun from his back and braced the grip against his stomach and held his hand to the ejection port and racked it five times. He knew the trade before it had been told to him. Four shells spilled into his hand and a fifth fell and hit the dirt. He put his gun back on his shoulder and picked up the loose one in his other hand and placed them all into Nehalennia’s open palm. Then he took the bandolier he wore off and put that on her arm. Any annoyance he might have felt at this disarmament didn’t show on him. “Yes,” he replied, and he would speak no further to her on the matter.

Nehalennia gave the bandolier to a man at her side who dutifully walked it back to the truck that Slake was climbing down from with her pack in her hands. She too had taken her belts of ammunition off and was holding them over her shoulder. “That isn’t all I gave you.”

Shoreline looked around. At least two dozen pairs of eyes were looking at him, the circular black pupils of the two Beowend and the Scroungers and Damoyen and the vertical eyes of the Čalo and at minimum two other types that he could see. One among their number had seen him caged before but she suspected he had not been made to do it himself. He tallied their number and looked back at the one demanding all of his worldly possessions save for a stolen backpack. “Really?”

Nehalennia put one hand on the curved grip of her pistol. Slake thought she saw his shoulders sink but she couldn’t be sure. He reached up and undid the buttons of his shirt and handed that and his undershirt to her. His beaten boots followed with the rest of his clothes until it was him and the pack. When he was done he collected them all and folded them without precision and handed them over and stood there fully nude with no expression at all. There was a new divot in his back where he’d been hit by shrapnel late in the past season but his condition had never looked less dire as long as Slake had known him.

“I don’t suppose you want an ear, too,” he told the officer.

“I just want you gone.” She tilted her head upriver and he turned immediately and set off across the loose riverside dust and the marl, the sun making two tones of his pale fur. In two minutes he’d be out of sight. Most of those who’d gathered were watching him go when Slake went to stand where he was a moment prior. She had already emptied her gun and put the rounds back in the belts and she handed both over without any ceremony but she still wore the white band around her bicep. “Has anyone ever told you how foolish you are?” Nehalennia asked her.

“I’m sure the last time’s a ways off yet,” she replied. She showed her the gun was empty and she gave her a glance inside the pack where a jacket and a bough of pine needles just below it masked the smell of meat and as soon as she got a nod she set off downriver at a jog after Shoreline and caught up to him a few minutes later.

Enter now the land of his birth. The two followed the dead river for half an hour before Shoreline led them out of the small valley, following a trail left by decapoda ruminants into the foothills. Six kilometers behind them they could barely see the white chop of the tide rolling. The shrivelled bluebunch grasses moved lazily in the dirty late evening light. The railway they’d been following cut a lengthwise iron scar across the country. The land smelled like a campfire, faintly of salt. Before them at equal distance to the sea the dolomite barrier rupes rose like fortress walls with talus slopes so steep no one on two legs could ever put a hand on the near face. They walked on and soon they were ascending the first legs of the uphill journey. They encountered silver maples first, their leaves yellowing too soon in the year, squat little things that barely clung to the parched soil in which they were rooted. The wind kept them cool enough. The Nyctian paused but once to put his hand on a bloodied section of bark where something had rubbed its antlers to clear them of shed but he otherwise did not slow and neither did she. Neither had walked on a truly full stomach before and she was confident that if they could remain like this they could make Barathrum in four weeks.

They walked long into the twilight where the maples gave way to a section of flatter land where a wildfire had passed perhaps a decade ago. The glacial boulders were dark from sootstains and amidst the wildflowers and the waist-high grass a small handful of young larix meropia were sprouting up through the black and fertile soil and the two travellers walking among them in their mismatched uniforms bore the look of a gamewarden escorting a primitive poacher off of private land. When they reentered an evergreen forest it was nearly too dark to see. Shoreline led them down into a gully through which a decent stream of water quavered. He told her it was safe and the two crouched prostrate to press their yet more unequal mouths to it and drink their fill. It was decided that they’d stop there for the night.

Slake took her pack off and tapped the wall of the gully with her foot. He had taught her to do that in the flood season to keep from being buried and though it hadn’t rained for weeks she kept up the habit nevertheless. Other than a few loose roots showing in the dirt there was no danger to it and she sat with her back to it and her legs out, her hands on her stomach. He was sitting beside her with his legs crossed and had done no such check for structural integrity.

“You don’t think we’re being followed by anyone, do you?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “No one but you.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t let you go alone.”

“It’s alright,” he told her. In the oncoming dark she could barely make him out, his white body like some phosphorescent night spirit emerging from the sediment. “I’m just worried about how you’ll get back.”

“I’ll find my way,” she said, with the full knowledge that the convoy moved far faster than her legs could carry her unless she made the journey at a run. He made an apelike sound and shifted to get himself comfortable but kept one eye open to watch her as she reached for her pack. She pulled out her jacket and the clothes she got for Shoreline and set them beside her and held the pack upside down to shake the pine needles from it. When most of it was out she reached into the bottom and tore open some of the stitching above the leatherbound bottom and took out two large, flat pieces of dried horse flank and handed one to him.

It took him a moment to realize the clothes were his. “You’re a traitor to your species,” he told her, tearing a chunk off the end with his vampiric incisors. She could hear the smile in his voice. She ripped the leatheresque meat with her hands and even in the darkness she swore she could see a cloud of dust rising from it, so dry it was. It went into her beak to soak while she took her jacket up and dug through the pockets and found where she’d stashed the bullets for her pistol. “Oh, you sly dog. I thought you were just taking food.”

“I’d be a damned idiot if I passed up a chance to steal some,” she said. She had three shells left to spare after it was loaded that she put in her pocket. Seconds later she came up with a shell for his shotgun but when she turned to him he was drawing a long cartridge for her pistol from the side pouch of his pack. When he saw the faint shine of brass on what she was offering to him he grinned and offered to trade.

The hot summer night that fell on them was black beyond black. Smoke coated the sky and not a ray of moonlight or the gleam of a single star fell through it and they made no fire. Following their typical routine they sat with their packs between them. Slake had taken first watch and she sat there in the casket-like darkness with an upset stomach and her pistol held beside her, pointed at the far wall of the gully as if she could keep whatever might approach in the night at bay by threat alone. Whether her eyes were closed or open made no difference. Over the creak of the trees and the chatter of the stream she could hear him shifting in his sleep and for how normal it seemed to be the finality of the night did not escape her. How many days’ travel until he’s gone? Two. One, maybe. You could wake up tomorrow and walk for an hour and he’ll rejoin his people and that will be that. You could also wake up tomorrow and find he’s decided to walk on without you to keep your kind from ever finding him again and has he not enough reasons enough for that already? Parting words would be nice but there is no time to waste finding an eloquent way to put them. The time is tomorrow. The time could have passed already. Sweat was dripping into her eyes. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and felt for a rock and pitched it into the darkness and when the hollow report of its impact on a tree stump reached her she knew what the knot in her stomach was. It was despair. Soon you will be more alone than you have ever been and there’s nothing to be done about it.

In the early morning she reached over to shake Shoreline awake. He rose reluctantly and even though she couldn’t see him she could hear the slight twitching of his ears and the sound of him rising to his feet. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he told her. He looked up at the sky and held a hand out to grasp at the warm darkness as though some unseen latch to an attic door might reveal itself. Then he sat down. She heard him pick his gun up off the ground beside him. “I was dreaming. That’s all.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He didn’t answer her. He racked the shotgun to chamber a round and decocked it and set the gun beside him in much the same fashion as her and for a minute more they exchanged no more words. The less said in parting the better, perhaps. Slake folded her jacket and laid it beneath her head and he spoke just as she closed her eyes. “I don’t think I should talk about it,” he told her. She tried to stay awake but within ten minutes she had fallen asleep.

They rose at dawn and followed the river upland through the sepia morning, pausing to breakfast on gooseberries growing in rich clusters in a thicket of spruce. They squatted on their heels and ate handfuls of them gathered in their shirts and watched a troupe of migrating hurazans heading westward on ten long, spindly legs, their shaggy two-tone fur dragging behind them in the grass. The walking was all uphill but they did not pause all day save for a few stops for water. Not long into the day they passed through another cluster of burned trees where a lightning strike had ignited the timbers years ago, but Shoreline did not comment on it and neither did Slake and they walked on. The onset of the afternoon saw a shape cross the dull halo of the sun and they lost two hours of daylight crouching beneath a limestone outcropping until its cries had faded and just as the sun was setting they followed the sound of running water and fought their way out of the bush with axe and hand to follow a stream upriver. Once the water may have been blue and many meters wider but now there were no spots that went any deeper than the ankle. They paused to drink and just as she came up with her beak dripping she saw him bending to look at something in the rocks close to where the bank once was. “Another fossil?”

“No,” he told her. He was holding something very lightly in his hands. A stick or a piece of wood. She crossed the dry and jagged riverbed to get a better look.

“What is that?”

Shoreline set the wood down and moved to one side to let her see and it took her some time to make sense of it. A few old pieces of timber, too even to have never seen a knife and bleached like bones by seasons of sun and exposure to weather. Two more years and they’d be gone entirely. Sitting limp on the ground between it were a few scraps of interlocked twine, jute or something. The remains of a trap for crayfish. It had been left in this place to rot and had not been disturbed since. “It’s a trap,” Shoreline explained. “For shrimp. They’d spawn up in the mountains. In the rainy season some of them would float downstream. All you had to do was set these up in the fast-moving parts and come back in a day and they’d be half-full.”

She took a piece of the net in her hand and rubbed it with her thumb and it flaked away to dust. Then she looked at the river. The trap was nowhere near a narrows or bend. It had to have been carried there on the current a long time ago and left where it was. She looked at Shoreline and he too was looking upstream. “Did you ever set these up?”

“Oh yeah. My sister and I would do it all the time. We’d get up before dawn and I’d carry her on my back. She was small. We’d pull four out with us and set them up and then check two and bring back the catch in a bucket if they had anything. Sometimes they didn’t but not often. Then you just boil them and take the shells off and eat them.” He sniffed and stood up and looked the other way down the river. It went on for a few dozen paces then curved right. It had been long enough that no more dead algae clung to any of the outlying rocks. They were as white as the wood. He scratched his cheek.

“How old were you when you left?” Slake asked. He looked at her and she regretted asking immediately but he seemed to hold no malice against the question.

“I was nine.”

They carried on up the creekbed. The day was as scorching as the last and as the climb grew steeper they stopped more and more to rest in shade, even into the evening, their silhouettes anonymous and crenulated. They ate the last of the meat and more gooseberries and strips of yellow mushrooms peeled from treebark that Shoreline said was safe. Just before dusk the two came to a point where a fork in the river joined, the trees around it blackened and needleless, skeletal shadows blackening the riverbed in the sulfurous evening light. A cairn of two rocks stood on a small outcropping at the upstream end of the fork and when he saw it Shoreline walked up and put a hand on it. Slake held back. There was barely any water sound from the riverbed this far up. She had to strain to hear it over the wind in the grass and the trees. One of her hands rested on the grip of her pistol and hadn’t moved in the past half hour. The Nyctian kept his hand on the stone for some time as though it was communicating something to him that he would not otherwise hear. Then he stepped back and turned to Slake. “We’re almost there,” he said. “We’ll make it by the time it’s dark.”

“I need to know something before we go on,” she replied.

“What’s that.”

“Am I going to get shot when they see me?”

Shoreline turned his head and spat onto the dusty earth. When he went to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand he was not looking at her and he had no expression worthy of note on his face. She had expected him to look giddy by now. “Of course they’re not. They might not let you in right away or at all but they’re not going to kill you.”

“You’re certain about that?”

“Completely positive. I wouldn’t have let you come along if I thought they were.” He turned his back to her. She watched him step lightly across the sharp rocks to the western side of the fork before he turned back with one hand on the strap of his shotgun, watching her blankly. Go on. You’re not going to put this off forever. Her legs carried her after him and the two spent the next twenty minutes walking in silence through the charred mountain forest, the wild roses and summerblooms sprouting from the ashes tall enough to reach their waists.

She was expecting to see a light. They had not followed a proper path since they left the trucks and there were none here but they carried on regardless with Shoreline in front, hacking away brush with his axe, when he paused suddenly enough that she almost bumped into him. She followed his gaze and saw some hundred meters off through the trees what looked like a wall fashioned from cut stone, behind it the sheer face of an escarpment that rose almost vertically from the earth. All was dark behind it. There were no fires burning. He dropped the axe and charged forward with his hands working madly to clear the undergrowth, hollering in a tongue Slake did not understand. She got her axe off the ground and followed him some paces behind and came out in a small clearing where the trees had been cut back some twenty meters around the small mountainside compound in which her only companion had been born. The walls were five meters high and draped from end to end with barbed wire and every last inch from soil to sky was darkened by a layer of fine black soot that almost concealed the myriad paintings in ochre and kaolin clay and purchased lead paint, images of winged lizards and crocodiles and firearms and women bearing children in one arm and sabres in the other. Whatever buildings were within were either too low to show their roofs over the top of the walls or no longer existed and no matter how many times Shoreline yelled the same phrase of ehnsha Sorlén sahntén fé in the only thing that called back to him was his own voice echoing off the cliff walls. His language had not been spoken in this place in years and never would be again.

He yelled five times, each time louder than the last before he stopped. There was a new frantic edge to him that kept Slake at a distance. In truth, you should have seen this coming. The gap in the wall where the wooden front gate had been was wide open and he walked over to it and went in. Once there were bronze beads that would have hung over the entrance but they had been taken and melted down some time ago. The wooden buildings had collapsed into carbonized heaps like megafauna skeletons and the daub houses were cracked and warped. A few stone buildings remained but that was it. Shoreline traipsed a bizarre pattern through the rubble, the small town populated by memories whose fogs were lifted more at each step. He went first to a stone shieling that had fallen and now more closely resembled a pile of rocks to mark a mass grave. Twenty-three years ago he had entered the world there without a sound and was carried out through the front door and shown the night sky for the first time. Next an assembly of sticks that had once held drying fish. Much time spent there learning from his uncle how to salt them properly. Neither of the two spoke in present or past. Four hundred people had once lived there and all had left. They came across no bones, no graves in which those who could not escape had been buried. The Nyctian inhabitants had gone away when the fire looked certain to pass through and had simply never resettled. Of them there was now little trace.

In all the town only two houses still stood as intact as they would have in the past. The roofs were fashioned from lengths of dried water reed and the entrances were doored with crude assemblages of wood. When Shoreline saw this he took his shotgun from his shoulder and walked over to the nearest one. Ten paces away the door opened briefly and closed again. The new inhabitants of this village of ghosts were no Nyctians and both knew it. He drew back a hand and pounded on the door hard enough to nearly shake it from its lashed hinges. Somewhere within a child began to cry and shortly after a heavily pregnant Damoyen woman with a young child on her back and a rusted billhook in one hand emerged very carefully and stepped to the side. A man of the same species joined her, carrying a breech loaded pistol that Slake knew on instinct alone had nothing in it. From the doorway five young children from four to about ten years of age were looking out at them. Two of them looked to have been crying. There was another voice from within, high-pitched. More than one family in this place and likely more hiding in the other house. The two Damoyen looked between their guests uneasily. Shoreline spoke first.

“Who are you?”

He could have been speaking his mother tongue for the looks he got. The pregnant woman held up a hand as if to pause him in place and turned to the man and spoke in a low voice. He turned and jogged to the other house and went in. Seconds passed. It was getting dark. The Damoyen didn’t even have cookfires going and they did not look well-fed. The woman shifted her feet and put the billhook in a sash around her swollen waist and held her hands at her sides facing them to show she was unarmed. The man soon came back with another taller Damoyen with reddish fur and intense yellow eyes wearing a fraying dress shirt and rawhide pants. He looked like an aristocratic castaway and he stood some distance back and spoke with the rapid cadence of a stockbroker. “Hello,” the man said quickly. He had an accent that may have been Hallatinian once but had worn away with the passage of time. “Welcome. Is it necessary to have a gun-”

“Who are you people?” Shoreline’s gun did not move from his side. The castaway looked at it and he looked at Slake. Of all the people to enter their home a Beowend was the least expected. “Answer me.”

“We live here,” he said. “There are thirteen of us. Two women, two men, and seven children.”

“That isn’t what I’m asking. This place isn’t yours to live in.”

The story was laid out carefully, like sounds arranged to soothe a beast with its teeth bared. The group of eleven, previously eight, was made homeless when the rains washed away a town many kilometers westward down the coast. They followed the herds like nomads of old until two ash seasons prior when they ventured up the mountain for better shelter and stumbled on the place that they now called home. Three of the children had been born here. They did not have much. The other two did not mean to offend with the weapons and at first they thought the two were spirits, that’s all. When the story was finished Shoreline turned and spat into the nearly-black earth. Night had overtaken the group but even in the last light his eyes floated in the dark like twin afterburners.

“I don’t understand how you live up here,” he said. “There’s nothing in the woods. The shrimp can’t be running much anymore. What do you eat?”

“There are mushrooms in a cave not far from here. Just down the-”

“I know where the damn cave is. What do you do for meat?”

“Whatever we can trap. Sometimes.” The man had taken to leaning against the stone wall of the house with one hand against his hip. He kept looking at Slake’s jacket. The sight of it had perhaps stirred something of a distant code of dress etiquette half-forgotten within him for he had done up the top two buttons of his shirt halfway through the story of the group’s travel. “It’s not an easy life but it’s enough for us.”

“You’ve been here for two years?”

“Two and a half. Yes.”

“And it was empty when you showed up?”

“Yes. There weren’t any tracks or anything. We haven’t seen any Nyctians around either. Not until you.”

She thought Shoreline was going to shoot him. More than once she had seen the subtle tense in his forearm and the movement of his thumb onto the hammer and she saw that again now but it went no further than that. His gun stayed at his side and no shots would be fired that night. His people were gone and had left neither track nor note. Be they inland or up the coast any chance he had of a reunion had long vanished during his time away and no amount of gunfire would signal their return.

“I’m sorry,” said the castaway Damoyen. “But we have nothing for you.”

Shoreline turned on his heels and walked away. Slake looked between the two parties. One of the children had started to cry again and another she hadn’t yet seen had emerged from the night to clutch at the castaway’s pant leg like an emaciated leech. He reached down to put a hand on her head and without another word Slake turned and walked after the Nyctian. He passed through the rubble of the town without so much as another look at any of it and went through the front gate one final time and the two set out back down the mountain.

When they saw the lights of the convoy burning away in the pass they stopped on a cliffside to watch. It had veered north to take the railway bridge over the Lézin River and passed the Nathlone Mine that the two had walked by the day prior, an immense open-air limestone lesion where the ancient digging machines still turned in their pursuit of copper and tungsten. To the east the light of the wildfire sweeping up the coast turned the sky orange like the glow of a distant city and the hot wind carried with it the scent of pine and ash and enough smoke to nearly blot out the stars. It wouldn’t be long until it caught up. The forest was a tinderbox of fallen needles and undergrowth and the grasslands they’d left behind were not faring well. She thought they could maybe reach the convoy by morning if they hurried but she wasn’t sure.

Neither had talked save to tell the other to watch their step. They had taken three days to catch up with the vehicles and neither had slept or eaten much. She kept an eye on Shoreline. She thought they might’ve had to take longer to catch up because of him but they hadn’t. When she lowered the canteen and looked at him he was watching the lights from the truck. A small figure was carrying a lantern away from the camp. A bird’s shriek echoed faintly up the canyon over the wind. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“Yeah.” They headed down a thin and rocky slope down to the scree and were back in the trucks by the time the sun was up.

III - Battue

On the fifty-first day of raging winds they entered the pitlands. Some hundred and seventy five years ago when the richness of the stone had been measured, bucket wheel excavators had swarmed the land in the thousands and tore into it in a flurry of steel and indentured labour. Much of the metal had gone but what remained in the wake of the Conquerors’ rush were half-mile-deep terraced scars in the earth. Somewhere down there under the immense forest canopies that had grown to cover the bottom of the pits the old machines still sat in pools of leached-metal brine where they had been left, rusting away. The husks of steel mills and petroleum coke refineries remained as they were when the power had failed, the ageing belts still clogged with raw ore, the trucks and trains resting where they had been left, gutted for any parts that could be salvaged. They travelled on the thin overgrown ledges between the pits where the old road was still dented from where heavy tires had passed too many times. Visibility was awful from the smoke and more than once the convoy had taken a wrong turn. On their third day moving through the pits a horse fainted from the heat and lack of air and fell headlong down a rocky slope, taking its rider with it. The convoy had paused for no more than fifteen seconds before it was decided that nothing could be done.

Slake had been given a filter mask with chrysotile filters to wear. It was clenched between her beak and fastened to her head with leather straps and she took it off only to smoke, drink, eat, and sleep. A few others wore either similar gear or cloth masks but Nehalennia seemed wholly unaffected by the smoke. She didn’t even cough. These nights they seldom made camp, opting to sleep in shifts as they drove and eat from the stores of preserves that required no cooking. The land itself had nothing to offer in the way of water or game and the old pavement was choked with seared greenery but it was faster going than they had expected. Nehalennia mentioned the names of certain factories and old noble families that had owned them but she was more quiet than usual. When night fell Slake climbed to the back of the truck and sat among the sleeping bodies to keep an eye on Shoreline and to watch the horizon grow a brighter shade of orange by the hour.

The mines that still ran could be heard before they were seen. They were surrounded by thick concrete walls studded with rusted spikes and barbed wire strung with the dismembered skeletons of beasts that had run aground or been impaled on them and shot to death. The low sound of machinery drifted over the walls like the breath of Meropis itself, the pits six, seven, eight hundred meters deep and filled with barely-functioning excavators and legions of the imprisoned and indentured. They passed a clear section of road before the main gate of the Ramodor Pit. A faded purple Kard Electric Company banner hung from the cracked walls and flapped loosely above a small workteam of young and skinny men with machetes, cutting back vegetation and spraying herbicide with a hose under the watchful eye of uniformed men in an armored car. The men were shirtless and those who could sweat were soaked, their skin and fur etiolated yellow from the smoke-clogged sky and the morning sun, the constant thump of blades into roots like a drumbeat. Some of them looked at the passing convoy but none ceased their work.

Later that day they reached the Fyrclende Pit. Its wall was not in good shape but it held. They saw the tail end of the train first and followed it up to the engine. Faces watched them from slats in the steel-plated gun cars. All the freight cars were empty. The train wound around the front gate to a cargo entrance dominated by a disused bucket crane and an elevator whose entrance had been barricaded with rocks. They parked parallel to one another between two large and rusted haul trucks with their tires punctured and the six remaining riders dismounted their horses. “And here we are,” said Nehalennia. The two Beowend got out at the same time. Slake was buttoning her jacket up when the conductor, a small Simälken woman, emerged from behind the train’s engine and threw her hands out in greeting.

“Ousland, eh? You get all the best jobs.” The conductor offered out her left hand and Nehalennia took it and clasped it with both of hers to shake.

“They weren’t about to send someone untested. I’m sorry to have kept you and your crew waiting so long.”

“If the Kards are still covering our expenses, consider yourself forgiven.” She released the officer’s hands and stepped back. Slake figured she may not have registered the presence of a second Beowend given the lateness of the bow, but she bowed nonetheless. “And this is a protegé of yours?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. This is Euphrosyne Slake, and you’re to address her with the same respect as you address me.”

“Of course, of course.” The Simälken looked her up and down. Slake couldn’t tell what she made of her but she was confident enough that Nehalennia’s orders would be followed. “I’d love to catch up but there’s a non-proverbial fire under our asses. Let me fix your men something to eat while we talk business.”

She brought them into the driver’s cab. In these older diesel electric trains they were built spaciously and the conductor who soon came to be known as Kyrro had at the helm an oak table around which they sat and drank lukewarm tea. The train had not moved in some time but meticulous dusting had kept the instrument panel clean despite the mote-filled slats of light coming through the windshield. Slake took her mask off and set it on the floor beside her, the fur on her head flattened into a curious new three-pronged style. She drummed her fingers on the tabletop and looked at the wall of the mine while they talked. Some months ago the workers of the mine snuck arms in on a shipment of grain and drove the few guards away. The cat sketched a crude map on the back of a fuel report and circled a spot around in the shorter arm of the L-shaped pit. It was in that spot around the tracks of an excavator that the miners and their families, some thousand strong, lived in a small fortress of stacked support beams and circled vehicles. They drank filtered groundwater and though she did not know what they were eating they had neither starved nor turned on each other, nor did they seem to want to venture out.

“Did they have any demands?” Nehalennia asked.

“If they do I haven’t heard them.”

“We don’t have that many men. Seventy-two. And only six horses. Do we know what they’re armed with?”

“Nothing big. They didn’t sneak any mortars or anything in but it was enough to drive off the handlers.”

Nehalennia sat back in her chair and drank her tea in silence. Kyrro left to refill the little china teapot. As soon as the door to the engine room closed Nehalennia rose and set her cup down. “Alright, come on.”

Slake followed her out. They crossed the small switchyard back to the trucks with the two intermingled crews watching them from the shade of the train, indistinguishable from one another in their haggardness and sense of dress and the way they sat well clear of the blue gasflames heating their lunch. The weeds showing through the gravel and around the tracks had curled and died in the heat but still the officer crossed the scorching earth unshod. She retrieved a good pair of binoculars and a small notebook and pencil from the halftrack and the two set out to walk the perimeter of the wall.

The mine had been ill-maintained even before the rebellion. They walked the peripheral road and though they didn’t have to cut the undergrowth back it was getting bad, the dry thornbushes and thistles reaching to their thighs. Here and there an old truck or trailer was left in the drainage ditch where it had failed, or some piece of battered mining equipment that she didn’t know the name of. The walls themselves were half covered with dead moss and roots of plants trying to overcome the concrete, unsuccessful this season but perhaps not in the next. Some sections were crumbling. Were something to emerge from inland and throw itself upon it it would fail but nowhere in the parched pitlands had they seen so much as a bird. No hares, no deer, no insects, only the faint scent of whitedamp and the constant wind, quiet as a temple cloister. They reached a bend in the wall and followed it. Slake thought the sun might be close to setting but it would get no cooler and she dismissed her curiosity. Near a section of wall devoid of life they passed a spot of grassless ground stained ferric red and smelling of picloram, then another two hundred meters down. How long had they walked for? She wiped the sweat from her eyes. Maybe half an hour. The sky was no less yellow. No sooner had she lowered her hands when Nehalennia strode up to the wall and put a hand to a deep crack and began to pull herself up.

She sat with her legs saddlewise and lensed the pit below her while Slake struggled up the wall. The concrete was obscenely hot but she got to the top and sat the same way. The pit was four hundred meters deep and L-shaped as the map had foretold with its sides dug out in a staircase pattern and a sloped road leading down to the bottom where a pool of teal runoff stood stagnant. They had parked at the end of the longer part of the L but the smoke was so thick they couldn’t see the far side. Somewhere in the firehaze a train sounded its horn and the noise came back clangorous from the half-grey half-patinated calcite. Seven excavators as large as city blocks stood where they had been shut down far below, still industrial hearts surrounded by arterial conveyors and footpaths turned white from seas of heavy feet ferrying the raw copper away to trucks. At the foot of the closest one a small town seemed to have taken form, eddying in the heat. Nehalennia focused the binoculars on it. The walls had been shaped from engine blocks and the hulls of vehicles without tires and overturned trailers, the buildings within little more than shanties and the excavator itself overburdened with canvas tents. She lowered the binoculars just as Slake reached the top and pulled her mask off to catch her breath. “Can I take a look?” asked Slake.

“Sure.”

Slake wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took the binoculars and raised the eyecups to her eyes and turned the focus wheel. “Is it that one there?”

“Yes.”

She got it in focus and steadied herself on the wall with one hand and looked. The canvas strung from the counterbalance boom swayed in the wind. On the third highest platform she thought she saw someone walk from left to right. She waited. They emerged from a black doorway to wave their arm at someone down the catwalk and vanished again. “There’s someone on the rear of it. Near the engine where all those cables are.”

“Good. Can I have those back?” Nehalennia double checked and set the binoculars on her thigh and took the notepad out. She sketched the mine quickly in the fashion of an architect then drew a side cutaway, dotted lines on the side and the top for elevation and distance to where they sat. She looked up and held out her finger and studied her claw and wrote the measurements, accurate to within ten meters. From memory she recalled the length of the mine’s walls from a longago briefing and wrote that below the diagram and from there calculated the angle of the ground, the fuse time for the shells used by the train’s naval guns, the powder charge. The mathematics took her no more than five minutes. When she had checked and double checked her work she closed the book and the two Beowend sat in silence watching the shadows grow long and jagged up the east side of the mine. “They’re dug in pretty good down there.”

“Looks like it. I can’t see how we’re going to get down there without them seeing us coming.”

“We’re going to move on them in the morning. Very early, just before dawn. We’ll set up at night.”

“You’d think they’d’ve left by now instead of sitting here for a full season.”

“Where would they go?”

Slake looked over her shoulder, as if there was anything to see. She could just make out the wall of the next pit in the yellow smoke. Three sets of tracks ran parallel between her and it and no doubt the trains that ran them had not only orders but an interest in not adding to their tonnage. She pulled loose a fragment of concrete from the wall and lobbed it underhand down into the pit where it clattered down the rocks and came to a stop three levels below wherein she could no longer discern it from the pile it had landed in. Then they climbed back down the wall and walked back to camp.

The company ate a rare hot dinner of stockfish and rice. Half of them slept an early and agitated sleep while another half appointed by Nehalennia were put to the task of loading magazines and belt after belt of ammunition and oiling the rifles. At dusk while Slake slept with her legs sideways on the driver’s seat of the truck and one arm dangling limp from the side window like a stricken snake Nehalennia took one of the boxes of ket from the back and walked past the reloading teams with the hempen strap in one hand, the weight tilting her form a few degrees. She knocked at the train’s door and checked a pocket watch and waited. When Kyrro opened the door the fur on the left half of her face was flattened. The Beowend took the box in both hands and explained the situation, the fortifications, the numbers of troops and ammunition. She explained the angles of attack and cited the Battle of Col and the strategic use of artillery and the resounding victory that had resulted. Kyrro refused and brought out a report of expended ammunition and their near-depleted provisions. But there is little in Meropis that the weight of a string of bronze coins in the hand and the promise of many more cannot buy and the train’s guns were not on that sacred list. Nehalennia gave her the sheet of formulas and the case and the two shook hands.

She went to find Shoreline but neither he nor his weapons could be found in camp. She looked for him for some time but when she had circled the train and looked under every car she gave up and stood in front of the engine with her hands in the pockets of her jacket watching the faint glows of the mining pits in the dark and counted the seconds and minutes. At three-thirty in the morning exactly she checked her watch and walked to the truck and took Slake by the wrist and shook her awake. Her arm disappeared and moments later a bleary golden face appeared in the window. “Get out,” Nehalennia told her.

“Is it time?”

“Not yet, but you need to get ready. Come on.”

Slake dismounted and followed her to the rear of the truck and could not tell whether she had slept or not. The space between the vehicles had become a sort of warehouse of armaments and was lit by oil lamps and the mechanical sound of brass being pushed into steel belts was constant. Nabon sat on a wooden crate marked fragile surrounded by neat rectangular hills of bullets and watched the two pass. The man she had seen fixing the halftrack’s engine was strapping on metal shin guards. Nehalennia climbed into the rear of the truck. A moment later two large and very old looking crates slid out of the darkness. “Get those out onto the ground,” she said. Both were heavy but she did as told and Nehalennia came back out with a crowbar in one hand. “What are you shooting?”

“What?”

“I said what are you shooting. What are you carrying into battle.”

She looked down at her waist where her axe and pistol rested. “I don’t have a rifle.”

“No, you don’t. A revolver won’t cut it anymore.” She offered her the crowbar and gestured to the crates and stepped back. Slake looked at the longer of the two first. The box was made from wood and was very old. It had a half-rotten carrying rope on either end and the lid had been hammered on and she could very faintly make out a serial number and a lot number and though the rest was too faded to read she thought of the ammunition belts and knew exactly what she was going to see when she opened it. She shoved the crowbar under the lid and heaved down on it and that section lifted up with a dull crunch of wood. She went around and got every nail loose then reached down and pulled the lid off.

On a thin bed of wood shavings was a black aircooled machine gun that had not seen the world outside its box since it had left the arsenal more than a century ago. There were wooden slats to hold others but they had all been removed and there remained only the one. She bent down to inspect it. It smelled of petroleum and its metal bore no corrosion at all. Its serial number was 48222 and it had been made one hundred and eight years ago by Muranne Mechanical Works in the homeland. She took it by the grip and the bipod and lifted it up. Heavy but manageable. Something about it felt correct. She flipped up the sights and lifted it to her shoulder and took aim at the night. The length of pull could not have been any more perfect were it custom made for her and the stock was comfortable and made from walnut. Good sights, they could be set for a kilometer. When she tested the action it was smooth, well-lubricated, the motion as natural as anything that had ever come to her. In the box were three spare barrels. “I didn’t think there were any of these left,” she said. Two black stains had been left where oil had touched her fur, one on her cheek and the other on her shoulder.

“There aren’t many.”

Slake set the gun back in its box while Nehalennia unlatched the other crate and lifted the lid off. It looked like a bedside trunk, one that was once grey but had darkened and cracked from age. She took from it something wrapped in thin oilstained cloth and gave it to Slake. It was heavy. Slake pulled the cloth back to look and her hand first touched four leather straps with buckles on the end, then steel. When she let the cloth fall she was looking into the eyeslits of an old surplus sergeant’s helmet. A strap under the top beakplate held another piece of steel to fit below it. She turned it and held it up to her head and figured it would fit alright. “How old is this helmet?”

“If you told me you got it out of a museum I’d believe you.”

“But it’s not a museum piece.”

“It sure ain’t.”

There was more in the trunk. A heavy steel cuirass over chainmail, plating for the arms, the shoulders, the thighs, the legs, one to hang over the crotch, gauntlets, a neckguard. Slake took them all out and arranged them on the ground and stood back. How many kilograms altogether? She took the right-hand gauntlet and put it on and closed her hand. It had a plate over the back to keep her fingers from being shot off and it would do its job unless she held it strangely or wielded something else. It fit her well. “Were you going to wear this if I wasn’t here?”

“I was,” said Nehalennia. “But I’ll be fine. I don’t trust you not to get shot.”

“It hasn’t happened yet. I’ll call for you if I need help with the straps.” Nehalennia nodded to that and vanished around the corner and she fell to putting it on. She cast her jacket aside into the truck along with her belt and the axe and put the hauberk on, feeling the small gaps where it had been chipped or hit ages before by arrows or other crude ammunition. She put the cuirass overtop and put the waist straps on and fastened the thigh and shin guards, then the arms, one after another, then walked back and forth a few paces, tilting left, right, forward. It was heavy but very well-balanced, each step a strangely harmonious click of metal. Not as hot as she thought it would be. The last thing she put on was the helmet. She held it in her hands and stared at the faceplate, a crude and expressionless steel imitation of a Beowend visage, its earguards flat against the sides of the head. She could see nothing through the slitted eye covers and when she put it on her face, too, would vanish. Who wore you? She lifted it to her head and set it in place and did the beakguard up and tightened the straps behind her head. The world shrunk to a long rectangle. “Yah yah,” she said. The words came out as two indistinct grunts. She tied her belt back around her waist and seated the axe on her right side.

Nehalennia came back around the corner holding Slake’s pack in one hand and an aluminum box in the other which had been filled with seventy millimeter-long cartridges. Over her shoulder sat a leather harness that held two more. “Food for the gun,” she told her, and she set both the pack and gun down by the machine gun box. “How’s it feel?”

“Heavy.”

“Not too heavy, though.”

“No. I’ll get used to it.”

“It’ll happen faster than you think.” Nehalennia took the machine gun from its box and gave it to Slake. She rested the stock against the ground and held it by the shroud. When Nehalennia saw this she smiled with her eyes. “These boxes hold a hundred rounds each. You’re going to go through that in about five seconds.” She swung the harness up over her shoulders and set to buckling it up at the back while Slake held her arms out, the gun canted. It was the first time she could recall that her pack felt heavy. “I’d’ve had you training on it but we couldn’t spare the rounds. Every fourth round is a tracer and the one right after it is explosive. You’ll see where you’re shooting pretty clearly. See that latch just in front of the receiver?”

“Yeah?”

“Push that forward and that part’ll swing open. Then you push the barrel with the heel of your hand and tilt it and it’ll slide right out. Do this every three hundred rounds, no more and no less.”

“Alright.” She knelt and seated the magazine that Nehalennia gave her onto the side of the receiver and lifted the top up to seat a round and closed it and stood back up. She looked Slake up and down then grinned and patted her on the shoulder.

“You don’t have to wear that helmet yet, you know.”

“I figured I should get used to it.”

“Attagirl. I’ll be around. We’ve got some time to kill. Drink some water. When we move it’s all going to happen fast.”

She watched the rest of the company load their arms and aid one another into armour, the clatter of metal and low voices and racking of bolts and the grind of swords and spearheads on a grindstone a premonition of what would happen at dawn. In the complete darkness of that caliginous night the glow of the nearby pits lurked in the dark like the lights of distant cities, the grandest and most populous among them the orange fireglow to the east. How long until that caught them? At the speed it moved, three days? Two? Soon the ground on which she stood would be burning and along with it the walls, the trains, the pits themselves filled with unbreathable smoke and soot but in the face of the land and its inhabitants’ fate she found herself oddly at peace, fire or flight or death by the sword. She had long abandoned the pretense of her journey and in its place stood not a taste for the killer’s life but the silent approval of its rapid settlement within her, a gun the only remnant of a home and life she neither would nor could return to. She would see the sun rise through the smoke once more but perhaps never again after that and of all the women and men in the Euphrosyne lineage to have died with their eyes open and a rifle in their hands the survival of the name and the blood had never been more in question than now. Well what of it.

Shoreline had reemerged from where he had built his prayer fire and was crouched by the front wheel well of the halftrack sharpening a crude old falx with a whetstone. He wore a cuirass hand-beaten out of a piece of iron from an old stove affixed to his back with leather straps and a belt of shotgun shells around his waist and a sacrificial bloodletting cut from his ear left a long red river to the lowest lobe. He had blackened his forehead and his eyes with soot from the fire mixed with loam and water and bound his headfur into a short braid to keep it from getting in the way, his face sculpted into a frightening chiropteran death’s head that would be the final sight of more than one pair of eyes before noon. The falx was already sharp and it took him little time to get it to his standard. He passed the whetstone to the man beside him and took his shotgun and stood up and looked around with both weapons hanging loose from his hands. Were it not for his species he would not look so out of place. When he saw Slake his eyes lingered on her for a moment. Then he looked away.

Daylight broke over a land of sulfur and stone. The wind had calmed earlier that morning and aside from the men and the horses nothing moved at all. At four-thirty Nehalennia called a meeting at a hand-drawn map of the quarry and the dragoons assembled in a prayerlike semi circle around it, some kneeling some standing. Some of the train’s men watched, half-interested. Nehalennia had donned a surplus rifleman’s cuirass but was otherwise clad as she normally was. She looked over the company and neither nodded nor chided anyone for their choice of arms or dress. Nothing would be improved upon now. A kilometer away the miners had not yet stirred. “Listen up,” she said. “We’re moving in five minutes. Look here.” They crowded in. She pointed to the shorter end of the mine and circled it with her finger. “There are two entrances we’ve found. There’s a good piece of wall that we can scale easy enough. We’re gonna knock some of it down so the horses can get through. The other’s the front gate, right about where we are. There’ll be two teams, a hammer and anvil. The hammer team’s gonna come with me, that’s anyone without a big automatic. The anvil’s going to go through the front gate and wait around the corner. The shells will drop when we’re ready, and the hammer’s going to hit ‘em with everything. They’re gonna break and run and the anvil’s going to get them on the way out. I don’t want prisoners. They’ve had their chances.”

No room for concerns or revisions. Nehalennia mounted a horse while the rest of the company barring twelve of them Slake had never so much as spoken to stayed behind. The truck peeled off with the horses and their riders and ironclad men trotting after it like a demented collection of automatons. The rest of them crowded around the gate. Slake held her machine gun by the stock and balanced it on her shoulder and held the barrels in a repurposed quiver in her other hand. Kyrro climbed down from the cabin of the train. She looked to not have slept much and she wore a flat-brimmed conductor’s cap to hide the disarray beneath and she had a massive brass key in one hand. “Showtime?” she asked. No one replied. The cat looked up at Slake’s immense ironclad form and swallowed. She put the key in its slot and twisted it forty-five degrees, then again, and hauled back on it. The gate swung open quietly and left three deep digmarks in the gravel over which it had slid. “Right. Best of luck in there.”

They had to descend two of the pit mine’s benches just to see the bottom for how thick the smoke was that day and they went down four just to be sure of friend or foe. The spot they settled on was a section of working bench where an ore crusher rotted away and a woodfired truck lay submerged to the axles in what used to be mud. They laid out their ammunition near the edge and dragged over pieces of patinated rocks and scooped debris around them to form crude barricades to stop bullets. Slake took a drink of water and lowered the beakplate down and fastened it and unfolded the bipod on her gun and tried to guess the distance when someone asked how long it might take until it starts. His last word came out as “star”. Even with a wall separating them the noise from the sixteen inch gun was tremendous, lingering as a loud wail in the pit for half a minute. “Here it comes,” someone said. She set the sights for three hundred meters and leaned up over the berm.

The first shell struck one of the excavator buckets. Shrapnel the size of car doors ripped through the camp, glowing with heat, tearing tarps from their fixings. The second and third landed as the freshly deafened miners crawled from their tents. Nehalennia signalled a charge on the shattered camp while ejecta was still landing.

The six riders with Nehalennia at the helm led the charge and stormed through the snapped-off gate and shot those still strong enough to stand and ran down those they found crouched or lying prone in the splintered dunnage of their homes. Men and women and animals alike staggered in the dust with thin trails of fluid running from their ears down the dust on their necks and were cut down where they stood be they silent or screaming. The footmen got there some seconds later, a company of dusty and painted madmen bearing club and pistol and for the speed of their charge not a single shot had come their way.

Nehalennia rode her horse to the base of the excavator with her gun in one hand and her bloodied cavalry sword in the other. The minefolk were clambering from their hovels and she shot only those she saw with guns or spears. By then bullets were tearing through the encampment and in the remnants of the artillery’s howl a great shriek had arisen from the camp like some abyssal women’s choir. When she reached the excavator she leapt from her horse and put her sword in her beak and climbed. A face appeared on the railing above her and she shot it twice and in the space it had been hung a cloud of blood and brain matter. When she reached the first deck a man came out of an operator’s compartment holding a shotgun and Nehalennia shot him before he saw her. She swung the cylinder of her revolver out and pushed more shells in, slowly, carefully, then put her arms on the railing and took aim over the carnage.

The dragoons went through the camp in threes and fours with their rifles nearly aflame from the gunfire and their weapons whirling ceaselessly. A fire had broken out and was leaping from hut to hut. A woman came out dragging a flaming child behind her while another stood and wailed in a burning dress that clung to her fur and when they were spotted all three were hacked apart and shot once through the chest. The few animals the miners had left were running crazed and their cries couldn’t be ascertained over any other. In the farthest corner from the gate a small party among the miners had rallied bearing their old equipment and a few sparse and half-loaded firearms. When Nehalennia saw this she shot the likeliest among them through the jaw and he fell, the ramrod still showing from the barrel of his gun. The rest scattered. Two who had run hand in hand were cut down by Nabon’s submachine gun and another few were pursued by bullets of similar caliber and lay gasping like fish in the dust. Anyone who surrendered was decapitated.

Three minutes in and all in the camp with the strength to stand and the legs to do it with began to run for the smoke. The horsemen still mounted pursued them to a point then stopped and took aim at their backs and harried their retreat. They rounded the corner in the mine at a sprint, women half-naked and infants and men still in their nightclothes or no clothes at all and few bearing arms and when the anvil saw them they rose up from their berms. One of the miners pointed just as they fired. The ground leapt under their feet and from the bench a torrent of gunflame flashed from left to right and back again. A hail of bullets shook through the runners and took with them clumps of dirt and limbs and great sprays of gore. In the first pass alone a dozen fell, some with new holes in their bodies glowing phosphorescent red and smoking and some with exit wounds the size of dinner plates. Some flung themselves to the ground and some ran but their fates were the same and not one minute later three hundred souls lay dead and bleeding or disemboweled and a man with a small pistol who had turned and fired a shot at the machine gunners was torn to a souplike mess.

Slake turned her gun to one side and pushed the old barrel out and took a new one from the quiver and pushed it in and closed the latch and leaned back up over the berm and held the trigger down. Beside her a pile of brass and belt links reached to her shoulders. The flash from each shot was completely blinding and she fired almost without looking. Every fourth shot was a small red meteor that went skittering off the gravel or embedded itself in a corpse and smouldered and the shots right after detonated like rockets where they landed. She shot a young woman clad in nothing but a blanket, scraps of cotton sent drifting, and she shot the arm of a man running alongside his son and when the child saw he was holding just an arm he tottered and she swept the gun back and cut him to pieces.

On the fourth minute Nehalennia blew a silver pea whistle and screamed to cease fire. The camp was completely aflame. From one of the burning lean-tos two men dragged a woman with the seat of her nightgown soaked through with blood and ran her through with a bayonet and still the machine gunners were firing the last of their ammunition into the piles of dead and dying along the longer section of the mine, the corpses splayed like roadkill or an assembly of plague victims for an open air cremation. Shoreline loped among the bodies, soaked through with viscera, holding three heads in his left hand by the hair and headfur and ears and he bent periodically to raise his falx and cut apart those he found still breathing.

Nehalennia came up behind the machine gunners and kicked each in the ribs or thighs in turn and yelled to cease fire. The sound of gunfire pealed away like the passing of a storm but a low rumble remained in the pit for some time afterwards. When Nehalennia reached the end of the gunners she stood with a hand on her hip and surveyed what she could see of the mine through the gunsmoke. Gunfire had grown sporadic and in the haze she saw the wraithish shapes of her men lowering bootknives to silence agonal throats and the occasional flash and pop of a pistol. She raised a hand to her chest and looked down. A round fired by one of the miners had hit her squarely and she pulled a flattened piece of lead from the dent in her breastplate and studied it before casting it away.

Slake got up from her spot in the dirt and took her pistol from her belt and left the machine gun behind on the hill and slid down the bench onto the mine floor. Day had broken and though she could hardly see through the smoke she could see the carnage, the earth underfoot ripped up like a farm field. The light painted everything yellow. She picked her way over the bodies. They were stacked three high, four high. She didn’t recall seeing so many but she gave it little thought, gave nothing any thought until someone grabbed her leg.

A naked and dark skinned human woman with a hole in her chest and vacant eyes who was half-buried under a tall Cadha’i man torn in two at the hips held her ankle for a moment then let go. Slake looked down. Dark and dense dreadlocks arranged in an oddly neat pattern around her head, like she had arranged them carefully. The woman held an infant to her chest with one hand. Was it an infant? Something red. A smear, not much more now. She leaned over to watch and she thought for a moment the woman must have died but her eyes moved again and she looked at Slake and mouthed something. Blood was seeping through her lips and she saw that half her teeth were freshly missing. She mouthed the same word again and Slake aimed her pistol and shot the woman once between the eyes and left her there with her head collapsed inward.

IV - Fireline

All told the dragoons lost twenty-six men and twenty more were wounded from stray bullets or in knife fights in the camp or from burns, two of whom were so badly charred they were shot. Nabon had been shot through the thigh. She was reclining on the hillside as if to rest for a moment with blood seeping between her fingers like sap from a tapped tree and those that passed her by did not stop at her calls for help. When Slake saw her through the haze she holstered her smoking pistol and picked her way over the shattered assortment of corpses over to her, her legs similarly bloodied. Nabon looked up at her. She took her small fingers off the wound to show her then pressed down again and cursed. “I got shot, Slake.”

Slake crouched down and Nabon turned herself to let her at her leg. “Did it go through?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice shook. She seemed to have been crying not long ago and might have been on the verge of it again. “I didn’t check.”

“Lift your leg.”

She tilted to one side and swore and swore again and bent her leg at the hip. There was a tear in the back of her hessian pants soaked through with blood but nothing fresh was seeping through.

“It did. You can’t stay here.”

“I’d move but I don’t think I can walk.”

“Well we’ve gotta move you. Here.” She put her arm around Nabon and put Nabon’s arm over her shoulder and told her to hold on and stood up. Nabon howled with pain and tried to sit back down but Slake pulled her back upright and started to walk, half-dragging her with her, the rocks dark with blood where she had been sitting and the path they walked flecked with more. All about them the men were taking trophies from the fallen miners. They bent like vultures and took pocket watches and brooches and pried out gold teeth with small knives and they wore their collections around their necks and hanging from their stuffed pockets. The ground was muddy with blood and the two left deep prints in it. The camp itself was completely aflame and Nehalennia stood in dark and dripping silhouette before it. Others squatted or sat nearby smoking or drinking stolen liquor, watching the timbers collapse. Everything smelled of gunpowder and iron and barbecue. She dragged Nabon up an incline in the bench made for trucks and walked to where she had left her gear. She took her machine gun and tied it off to a loose strap on her bag and put the spare barrels into it along with the three belts of ammunition she had left and put that on her back then squatted to pick Nabon up just as Nehalennia called for a retreat.

They assembled in the trainyard. When no one else had come up through the gate in five minutes Nehalennia put her shoulder to the door and shut it and closed the latch and locked it with a key she had taken from Kyrro. While they were gone the train crew had started the engine and the flapping sound of it shook the dust off the ground. Further through the smoke other engines had already been started and were fleeing east through chaotic and crowded switchyards to get clear of the oncoming fire. There was no spare water for anyone to be washed with. They stood there on the gravel with blood hardening in their fur and on their skin like freshly flayed corpses held aloft by pulleys with their arms held out from their sides to keep them from drying in place. Nothing cast a shadow, so opaque the sky was. Slake put Nabon in the back of the truck and walked between the vehicles to the rest of the men. Out of all of them Shoreline was perhaps the bloodiest. He had left behind his heads but instead carried a row of twelve gory jawbones tied with string on his belt, some furred some skinned some scaled, and he hadn’t been wounded. All told they were now about forty in number and only two of the horses had survived, their riders standing beside them and holding them by the goresoaked reins.

“Well,” she said. She observed them all for a moment, oddly clean aside from a fine pink sheen all over her. She was smoking a cigarette. All through the smoke two dozen trains were being made to move, the din of engines setting the side mirrors on the truck to vibrating. “Job well done but we’re not sticking around to celebrate. Let’s pack her in.” She clapped her hands and the assembly scattered to the truckbeds. Slake climbed up into the passenger seat and put the gun down on the floor stock first and took her helmet and gauntlets off. Her braid was matted but she figured she would fix it later.

They rode the rest of that morning driving at near full-speed over the baked plains, riding alongside the tracks that they swerved away from madly to get free of trains going the same way they were. Despite the heat they rode with the windows closed to keep the smoke out. The sun hardly touched the ground, everything taking on a venusian tint from man to beast to soil, a world of brimstone. They drove without stopping that whole day. They passed copper processing plants that had been emptied of their workers hours prior and they passed warehouses both collapsed and intact with the lights left on in the absence of their usual inhabitants. In the afternoon they drove by a troupe of roadside refugees wearing little more than rags leading a pair of scabious and emaciated packmules, perhaps loaded with ore. A Cadha’i man stepped out in front of the truck to wave them down but Slake rolled the window down and leaned out with her revolver and they vanished into the undergrowth.

In the evening the wind had started again and it was blowing ferociously to the west and by nightfall there were hot ashes coming in on it and the occasional ember streaking past like a tracer. They could still hear the trains but now with the backing of a constant low roar like the sea and equally constant thunder. Nehalennia kept checking the side mirrors and Slake thought she might have looked nervous, if she knew what nervous on Nehalennia looked like. In the early evening they drove past an old steel mill. The brick and steel of it loomed out of the fog but they could see no more than five meters up the smokestacks before it faded into the murk. They took the quick route past it over the train tracks, past torpedo cars and boxcars full of coke that had been left to burn on the tracks. The truck was driving past a warehouse door with the number eight stencilled on it when something under the hood of the truck made a banging sound and the tachometer needle slid left.

“You are fucking kidding me,” said Nehalennia. She stomped on the gas pedal but it would rev no harder. Then the engine died. Steam furled out from under the hood. “Damn you, you fucking thing. Get out. Out of the truck.”

The moment Slake opened the door her eyes began to burn. She took her helmet and the filter mask from the cab and put them on and it was a bit better but not much. Already a crowd had assembled at the back of the truck and she joined them. On three they pushed, a squadron of the damned throwing themselves against the rear of the truck like underworld escapees. It rolled forward, the engine turning over, clacking, a rod thrown. They pushed five more times but it would not start and on the fifth time it seized and quit altogether.

Nehalennia stepped down from the cab and looked at the doomed truck. She took her gun from the center console then shut the door for the last time and walked back to her troops. The horses stood just to the right of the group and shied nervously. “Get everything you can out of this thing and get one of those bay doors open. We’re gonna get fried if we go any further.”

They got the bay door open and pulled the halftrack in then set about getting everything from the truck. Boxes, bins of ammunition, everything save for the fuel, everything done at top speed. The dragoons ran in pairs and groups with huge wooden boxes in their arms and rolled leaking barrels of water like children with tires and piled it all loosely in the back of the bay. It was an old spare parts room. Engines up on blocks, mechanics’ cabinets, tables and tools, freshly abandoned. The lights were still on. Somewhere a door had caught on the wind and was banging against a wall. Would a door keep the fire out? Would the walls? They were concrete and she thought they might have a chance unless weakened or if the conveyor belt above fell on it. What of the halftrack then? It was raining ash now, a thin coat of it settling on the overgrowth, the train cars. Just get everything in and do not think.

The first man she saw who broke and fled was the one who Slake had seen fixing the engine days prior, the Osamac. She saw him with a case of ammunition in his hands looking back into the smoke the way they came. Thinking the same as her, she guessed. How long. Then he dropped the can of ammunition and turned and ran the other way, following the tracks. Three more saw him running and went after him. Nehalennia yelled uselessly for them to halt, then informed the rest that if they ran they would be shot but there were fewer of them now, maybe twenty. The rest had vanished into the mill or the smoke.

They went through the mill at a jog. The whole structure warped and groaned in the heat, an immense animal of a factory, they saw very little of it. They passed through another railyard where cars of limestone stood on the tracks in neat lines, a spider’s web of huge pipes overhead. Into the furnace room now, a vast space that they could see the end of, thick with industrial smoke. The roof was vaulted like a cathedral and on either side of the room stood two towering arc furnaces ringed with piping, their shadows cast akimbo on the concrete floor. They went up a steel staircase and over a sagging catwalk. Cables on the wall still hummed, vents still howled, not a soul in sight but them. Crossing another catwalk outside they saw it. Through the smoke to the east, an orange glow like the sun coming back to the world. Nehalennia hit the man who had stopped in front of her in the back of the head to get him moving.

It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Everything took on the quality of dusk. They went off the catwalk onto a concrete platform overlooking a room in which long rods of steel were being rolled. Somewhere an alarm sounded. Two of the rods had escaped their guides and were coiled like misshapen neon signs but aside from them Slake could make nothing out down there. Her lungs ached. By now the blood on the lot of them had dried and she left small dark flakes behind her as she walked. The man before her looked like some ghoulish nightmare creature with his shirt glued to his back. She had not seen Shoreline since they left the trucks but she knew he was there. Up ahead Nehalennia had stopped at a heavy-looking door. Maybe a storeroom. They would find no better shelter than this.

The dragoons piled in and Nehalennia shut the door after the last man. It rang like a prison gate falling closed. Someone called for a light and soon a lone bulb above the door flickered to life. A control room. Along one wall an instrument panel alight with alarms and warnings. Some dials had the needles far past the limits and others had them at zero. A cup of lukewarm tea on a desk. Some men fell to fits of coughing so violent they were laid to the ground and most had to sit. Slake didn’t even remember slumping against the wall. She took her helmet and mask off and laid them beside her and sat with her head in her hands. Someone beside her was praying with one hand on their bloody forehead. They could go no further than this. Either they would burn in this oven of a room or the fire would pass them by. She clawed through her bag for some water and drank then looked for Shoreline.

The Nyctian was seated across the room in a wooden rolling chair. At some point he had ditched his falx but his jawbones sat on the floor beside him like some obscene ornament in a wolves’ den, the shotgun at hand. He took a canteen of water from his bag and drank some and poured a bit into a filthy rag and wiped at his forehead until it was a lone patch of white in his otherwise completely soiled fur. He drank a bit more then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at his trophies. More interlopers slain. He picked up the jaw of a Damoyen and was wiggling a gold tooth out when someone asked for the rag he had used to clean himself.

He handed it over. “Thanks,” said the man. He was a young man of tall and slender build though whether his fur was dark or just filthy couldn’t be discerned in lighting so poor. He sat down on the floor and spat into it and wiped his palms clean and threw the rag away. “What’re those?”

Shoreline held one up by the ramus, a human’s with pink gums and dark lips and bright teeth, the front two missing from where he had salvaged the gold. “Jawbones.”

“That some kinda religious thing?”

“No.” He went back to his work, holding the blade of a short jackknife and using it to excise a tooth he couldn’t get by hand.

“Is it a Nyctian thing?”

Shoreline paused. He set the jaw down on his lap and ran his thumb across the teeth and looked across the room where an alarm light incandesced on the control board. High water pressure. His own jaw moved silently. “What’d you say?”

“I said is it a Nyctian thing. Do you take ‘em as trophies or somethin’?”

Shoreline set the jawbone down in the pile and rose back up with his shotgun in hand. The other dragoon was just rising to his feet when he put the muzzle to his forehead and pulled the trigger. The back of his head burst like a dropped balloon, fragments of his skull and buckshot whirling around the room. He fell flat back against the floor and rolled onto his side with his face staved in and each of his eyes looking at the other. Those who had the wherewithal to cover their heads were looking about wildly. Shoreline lowered his shotgun and put his hand over the ejection port and the grip to his abdomen and racked it and caught the spent shell and put it in his pocket. Nehalennia was crossing the room, blinking, her ears flat against her head in a vain attempt to shield them from the noise. When she saw who had fired the shot she drew her pistol.

It took Slake no more than a second to get to her feet. Shoreline had only just noticed the gun that was about to kill him when she threw herself between the two and raised the machine gun to her shoulder and aimed at Nehalennia’s chest.

“Slake, damn you, move.” She couldn’t tell whether to aim at her kinfolk or the Nyctian behind her and her gun waved from side to side. “Get out of the way.”

Slake didn’t respond. Nehalennia stepped to the side and aimed at Shoreline again and Slake moved with her. “I said move, damnit.”

“You shoot him and I’ll kill you where you stand.”

The three of them stood there in silence. Others were drawing their guns but few could figure out where to aim and even fewer what was going on. Seconds went by. Nehalennia kept looking between Shoreline and Slake. What she eventually recognized either in the dark eyeholes of Slake’s helmet or the muzzle of her machine gun made her take her finger off the trigger and raise her hands in the air. “Alright,” she said, “alright. Just put the gun down.”

Shoreline was backing towards the door and Slake followed him, walking backwards. Seventeen pairs of eyes followed them. The blood from the man’s obliterated head had reached Nehalennia’s feet but she seemed not to notice. When they left the room Shoreline set off at a jog and she went after him, skipping sideways with her gun trained on the door until they passed a large vent that obscured it from view. “Where are we going?” she asked him.

He paused at the top of a flight of grated stairs and glanced back at her as if to judge the purpose of her coming to his defence. There was a fresh spray of blood on his face. Some was running down the side of his nose. He seemed unaware that he had just killed someone. “Somewhere else,” he said. “Not here. We just have to go.”

They went down into the floor where the steel was rolled. The rods that had leapt their rollers were still glowing dull crimson. The heat coming off them was terrific. Not long ago there had been a larger spill and flecks of hot metal clung to every surface. They tried an exit door but it was locked. The only other escape they found was an open hangar door. A huge truck had stopped directly beneath it and the door had closed on the box. They were running to it when Shoreline was shot in the lower back.

He fell to the ground and tried to get up and fell again and rolled over on his back. Slake skidded to a halt. On one of the catwalks she could just barely see the shape of Nehalennia and a handful of volunteers. Nehalennia was working the lever of a rifle and drawing aim again.

She knelt down over Shoreline and fired a full belt from the hip. The world turned white around her. The gun roared. Bullets ricocheted off the metal walls and careened on odd trajectories, buzzing like hornets. The explosive ones detonated where they landed. One of them hit a support for the catwalk and it rolled sideways and collapsed in the middle. A hundred rounds later the bolt fell on an empty chamber. The place hummed with reverberating noise and a cloud of gunsmoke hung at chest level around her. One of the explosive rounds had blown someone on the catwalk in half and the lower part of them hung from the side, caught on a pant leg. Their top half sizzled on the spilled metal below. The other Beowend was nowhere to be seen.

She threw the machine gun over her shoulder and drew her pistol. Shoreline had a hand over his chest and was looking at the ceiling. She knelt down and patted him on the shoulder and his head rolled lazily the other way. “Hey,” she said. She shook him again and when he didn’t respond she hit him backhanded across the jaw. “Hey! Move your hand, I need to pick you up.” He did. The bullet had gone right through the makeshift cuirass he wore, both ends. When he breathed it made a strange sound. The side of his chest seemed to be sinking.

She hooked an arm under his shoulder and hauled him back past the truck out of the building. She had resolved to shoot anyone that showed themselves but no one did. Outside she laid him down and set the pistol down and took her pack off, then his cuirass. He was bleeding badly. “Don’t move,” she told him, “don’t move.” She cut his shirt away with a knife. Sucking chest wound. She tore through her pack for anything medical. A bit of strong alcohol in a little flask that she hadn’t touched. Some fresh clothes. She took a pair of long socks and dumped the alcohol on it liberally. Her hands were shaking. When she pressed it to Shoreline’s chest he screamed and lurched to one side but she just pressed down harder. He gnashed at the air like something rabid and cursed the Beowend from ancestor to child in his own tongue until a fine spray of blood flew from his mouth and his head fell back onto the dirt. Slake found a shirt and soaked it and cleaned what she could from his wound. It was still leaking badly. She rolled him over and did what she could for the other side then took another shirt and tied it around him by the sleeves. He fell like a dropped puppet when she got him on his back again. A fine sweat beaded his nose. She put her pack back on and rolled him again. Then she took him by the shoulders and put his arm up and threw him over her back and ran into the smoke.

“Drop me,” he said. He was bleeding onto her back. The blood ran down her cuirass and soaked the hem of her uniform and the base of her tail. “You have to. Please.”

She didn’t answer. She rounded the corner of the mill. A small clearing between two huge buildings. Piping and cables ran overhead. A brownout ran through the lines and dropped them to a low hum then back up again in a short sweeping buzz. Nothing moved in the pipes, no more pressure. She passed by these and got to the next corner and looked right, holding Shoreline’s forearm in one hand and her gun in the other. A single empty rail line flanked by a labyrinth of ductworks. Just as she went to look left the power cut off.

There were fans all around that she had not seen that now wound down slowly. The power cables surged and hissed like cobras and cut out. Some piece of unseen machinery behind her made a wobbling sound and went silent. An alarm shut off. And down at the end of her vision where the smoke took everything away, no more than a hundred meters out, great bouts of flame were leaping across the tracks and ascending the side of the mill, the ductworks already entangled with fire. The light played off the two of them, her steel armor turned faintly bronze. She went the other way while the fire ate the building behind her, moving just that bit faster than her. “Drop me,” he said again. She was yet more bloody and his voice fainter.

“No. Shut up. Just shut up. I need air.”

“Please.”

She ran on down the tracks with Shoreline’s foot tapping her left thigh and the butt of her machine gun on the right. There must be shelter somewhere. A basement, a room. Fire consumes air. It could pass and take it out and leave the both of you dead. What if you find none? What then? You will not drop him, the choice has been made. The both of you will burn to ash and leave two empty breastplates behind in the dirt. She had no sense for where they might be going. Only away from the fire. Down the line she stopped to breathe, a ragged wheezing sound through the filter of her mask. There was bile in her throat but she forced it back and shrugged her shoulders to adjust Shoreline and went on.

The railroad curved and they followed it not knowing where to. When she rounded the corner the factory a ways up was aflame. Gouts of it sprayed from an open door and caught on the wind and whirled up in a small tornado. Further inside where a tank of diesel had caught a volcanic spout erupted through the ceiling. She looked behind her. A glow on the tracks. The slight overgrowth catching. Embers whirled at her feet. The wind did nothing to cool her. There was ash on everything, it was like walking through fresh snowfall. They were getting surrounded and she knew it. If there was no shelter here they would find none elsewhere. She went to a gravel channel between the tracks where once water may have run but it held nothing but stone and weeds. She could hardly get out again. Halfway up the embankment her knees gave out and she lay there with Shoreline atop her and her chest heaving. She couldn’t breathe hard enough to catch her breath but she crawled her way to the top and over the side on her hands and knees and looked up. There. Before her a ways, four huge silos, smokestacks just behind each one. They had safety railings wrapping around the side and platforms and a steep staircase leading up. Maybe five stories up was a little box with windows. A control room maybe. Metal won’t burn. Slake willed herself towards it. She staggered to the stairs and took the railing with her gun hand and pulled herself up one at a time. At the first landing she looked out. The trough in which she’d looked for shelter had caught, the oily runoff on the rocks catching and burning easily, a solid river of fire.

She slouched along the walkway four flights up bent almost ninety degrees at the waist. The fire was eating away at the overgrowth below her, she could see it through the grated floor. There was no air to breathe. When you put him down he might be dead. One more set of stairs. She moved up them on her hands and knees like an animal and gripped the doorknob and shoved it open and fell through it and swung her feet behind her to kick it shut. Shoreline slouched to one side. She ripped her helmet and mask off and retched a bloody slurry into the corner and waited there on her elbows and knees for a moment then went to Shoreline.

The run had not been kind to him. He had not moved from where she’d let him fall and his eyes, half-lidded, looked like polished marbles. She put a hand to his neck. There, just under the fur. A heartbeat. She put her ear to his mouth and he was breathing. His is yours. She took the bloodied bandages off. His skin crackled a little when she moved it. The bleeding had slowed but a pale foam stood just over it. Find something that will seal. She threw her pack off and went through it. Anything will do. A leather glove. She took a knife and ripped the palm out and put it over the wound and when he breathed in next it almost looked normal. The leather bent and flexed back into shape. “Shoreline?” Nothing.

She wrapped a shirt around his chest, hauling him up one shoulder at a time. When it was tight she laid him down and rested on her knees beside him like a penitent in prayer. Sparks were hitting the glass and the thin sheet metal door shook with the wind. She put her hand on the control panel and stood. She couldn’t see the railyard anymore, barely the stairs. The heat was incredible. Every dial and gauge had fallen to zero. Another industry fallen. Victory for Meropis at last, soon to join the ranks of the plantations and sugar fields. She flicked a crane operation switch on and off absentmindedly and watched the vague shape of the fire melt and reform and sway.

Slake sat down beside Shoreline and undid the straps on her breastplate and lifted it over her head and ran her fingers through her headfur, or tried to. It was matted down to her skull almost precisely to each bump and groove. She took her gauntlets off then set about undoing the plating on her shins. It felt too casual but what was there to do but sleep? With her boots still on she lied down next to him. Firelight swam on the corrugated ceiling like caustics. The dust in the room swirled to one side with the wind and wound back. She leaned to one side and coughed and wiped the blood from her beak on her filthy sleeve. Without thinking she reached out to her palm flat on Shoreline’s chest. A second of nothing, a dreadful stop in her own. Then he inhaled. Life. His is yours. If nothing else is true and if the world should burn away this will remain the ultimate truth. She closed her eyes.

V - Parabola

Back again. What dreams are proper for you? The Sisters think. There is a round table in a hall where a waterlogged sabre is spun on its quillon. Men in uniform wait with their hands clasped behind their backs. A hand takes the sabre by the blade and stops it and pulls away bleeding. A red fingerprint stains the metal.

The riders tear through the sky on horseback and this saber is held in the hands of the dicephalic woman leading the charge. Behind her an army of the goresoaked and the enraged dragged in chains at their ankles howl and cut at each other and sink finger into eyesocket and knife into chest and the dead and exhausted among them are trampled underfoot and carried in a great heap in the rear of the pack. They go by with a great stampeding of hooves like a constant thunder peal. The doubleheaded one swings her sword. O daughter of Meropis has your honour any worth? What guns have been aimed that have not been aimed at you? A transgression, the walls have failed. The waters stir at last. A ripple runs on the surface and crests the far shore.

The curtain is rising. The arc lamp has swung into place. In the waters a horn beaten out of bronze and hammered into a drake’s head sounds. Under your hand there is movement still and so it will continue. Your hematite soul yet remains. The firearms speak in hisses and clicks of hammers setting in place and in the supersonic snap of the passing bullet. The wood of the stage sags underfoot.

Slake woke up standing. She didn’t remember getting to her feet but there she was. A familiar weightless feeling in every limb. No more burning in her lungs. When she looked down she expected to see her lifeless body with an arm across Shoreline’s chest but it was just him there. She knelt down and put a hand to the metal where she had just been then looked at him. His eyelids moved. Breath. Pulse. She went to the window and put her hands on the control panel and looked out. The fire had passed and was tearing through the far reaches of the factory and where it had gone small infernos jetted from the ruptured gas pipes and small pits of flame burned in the yard like underworld sulfur pits. Everything was incinerated and black and far out where the flames were strongest the horizon turned orange like the world beyond was nothing but fire. She did not see it but overhead a gap in the sky where the dull rufous eye of Argei looked down on the world was closing. Soon everything in Meropis will burn. Everything a Beowend has ever touched or laid mortar on. Even the roads will grow over. The factories will fall away. Some day not far from now the Hallatin dam will crack and fault and the tenements and alleys will wash to the sea and come ashore a hundred kilometers down the coast like the contents of a wrecked cargo ship, picture frames and doors and old uniform stands dredged from the corners of arsenals. In the distance she thought she heard a war horn blowing. A train had caught fire and ruptured its horn’s diaphragm and the last of the air was seeping out but be it train or bronze the sound was the same. You’re still out there. If it did not kill me it did not kill you and you are not yet beyond my reach. You will never face a duty so important again in your short life. On the floor behind her the steel of the machine gun glowed orange in the hellish light. She looked at it for some time. Then she went to pick it up.

Shoreline opened his eyes and saw a dark shape moving in the room and knew who it was. He said her name. Or he thought he did.

She put her breastplate on and strapped the rest of the steel to herself and emptied out the contents of her pack onto the floor. Three full belts. Three hundred rounds. She put a belt over each shoulder and seated the third into the canister on the side of the gun and lifted the top and seated a bullet and closed it and put the muzzle on the floor and racked it. Her pistol was already loaded and on her. The axe came with her on the other side of her waist. Her helmet was the last to go on. She seated the top half and cinched it tight and put the lower beakplate on. “Slake?”

He hadn’t moved but she saw one of his eyes open and he was watching her. “Go back to sleep,” she told him.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back.”

“Don’t go,” he said. He tried to roll to his side but the strength just wasn’t there. “Please.” He didn’t get a response. Slake went to the door with her gun over her shoulder and went out into the night.

A world completely aflame that she hardly noticed. No more heat, no more pains big or small. Everything was in its right place. She went down the stairs two at a time and came out on the bottom and looked up at the steel mill. One of the smokestacks had a gout of flame coming out the top. A mill building’s roof had fallen earlier in the night and the coals of the equipment beneath it still glowed. Think. Where would you be. She did not retrace her steps and went left down the tracks and looped around the side of the collapsed building.

If it was mazelike in the daytime it was moreso now in complete darkness. Half of the mill seemed to have crumbled away as if bowled over by a giant hand and the debris was immense and most of it was on fire. She went through an open gravel floor where the only light came from lakes of burning oil that flickered against huge chains and pots of now solidified steel that hung from the ceiling like butchermeat on hooks. She only saw the exit from the silhouette of a forklift truck in an opened door. On the other side something had collapsed but she didn’t care enough to figure out what and she went over a pile of rocks under which live wires hummed and cracked. The train horn had long gone quiet and in its place only the wind and the rumble of the fire was constant. She went on.

By and by she found the truck. The fire had reached it and incinerated it and the husk of it sat on its rims with its tires ropelike and mostly melted into black slagpools. The canvas back was gone and only the ribbed steel supports remained, warped and bent. One of the horses had simply stood there and roasted alive. Its charred corpse lay in a heap a few meters from the truck. She took her gun from her shoulder and watched it for a minute, like it might try anything. It didn’t. She approached. The front compartment was empty. No one had tried to get it running again. Along the side she stepped over small fragments of metal that had been sent groundwise when the fuel tank had burst. She went around it carefully. There was a corpse hanging from the back.

It was Nabon. No one had taken her along and she burned with the rest of the truck. Most of her had flaked away and Slake could see light coming into her skull through the earhole. Dregs of flesh hung from her screaming jaw. Some of her bones seemed to have fused to the metal bed of the truck. The bullets in the belt she wore at her waist and in the magazines in her pocket had detonated and there were holes in the metal all around her like she had been machine gunned. She turned away from the body and left the truck where it stood and went for the garage door.

Slake had her hand on the latch and was going to open the sliding garage door but didn’t. She looked back, past the truck. Out there past the peripheral warehouses the scrub between the mines smouldered, the wind sending long arcing clouds of embers rolling away like migratory birds kicking and lurching into flight. She noticed with no feeling at all that a tornado made of solid flame was dancing its way from right to left past one of the pits, stooping, pausing, its ropelike form carrying on in absolute silence. She couldn’t see the top of it but she figured it must go up a ways. That didn’t make you stop. She put her head to the door and listened. The everpresent wind, the fireplace crack of the ignited grass, something else.

The first of them that came around the corner of the garage was a Cadha’i man with his headfur pulled back into two short fat braids and he didn’t seem to notice Slake. She was the same colour as the door and just as metallic. “Yeah, it burnt up,” he said and waved his arm. Then he yelled the same thing again, louder, to someone else. He came around the corner as did four other men. Two of them looked unarmed but the others had rifles. She waited for more to appear but no one else came.

They went around the far side of the truck, their bloodblack and stained forms moving penumbral through the wiry skeleton of the burnt machine. One of them stopped to inspect a tire. Just a mess of rubber wound around the rims and the pools slowly solidifying. They came around the back. The braided one saw Nabon and stopped and put his thumb in his pocket and tilted his head. “That’s just awful,” he said. Whatever she was to him before she wouldn’t be again. He looked away and his eyes crossed the door where Slake stood and went away. She tensed. By the time he figured out what he had just seen she was dropping her gun from her shoulder into her hand.

He wheeled around to face her in time to be lit from the front by the muzzle flash like he was having his picture taken. She held the trigger down for a full second. By the end he had collapsed in more pieces than he had been in standing and a corridor of dust stood between her and the truck. The others were falling backwards over one another. She aimed a little lower and fired again and went forward halfcrouched, the stock now at her shoulder. Her helmet was vibrating from the concussion. Something was leaking from a traincar that a ricochet had poked a hole in. One of them was holding his leg in silence and rocking back and forth. Another was flailing his arms at a melted tire to try and drag himself under the truck, the hot rubber coating his hands like tar. She shot both of them once and shot the braided one again and stepped past them. There were receding voices in the alley that she could only just make out and she went towards them at a jog.

She knelt at the corner and looked in. No one. Just a concrete corridor, a storage tank of something on the left. She went down it and pointed her gun into the shadows half expecting Nehalennia herself to be lying in wait but there was no one. She stopped again at the end and looked left and right into the alley between buildings. There was a short helmeted figure watching her from a catwalk a story up, she could only just see their silhouette. When they saw her they bolted and she ran after them and took the steps up two at a time. She couldn’t see who had ran off but the catwalk went on into a blower room. She aimed down the length of it and fired twice. A dull shudder ran through the mesh under her feet. Someone shrieked.

The machines in this room were still running somehow. Light came into the room almost horizontally through tall vertical windows on the wall with the glass all shattered. Down below the wheels on the blowers were turning slowly, the air ducts howling, the heat ovenlike. She went across the catwalk and again expected someone to be waiting with a gun but no shots came. Walking through the slats of light she went from nearly black to lit with no in between, only half there. Two thirds of the way down she walked past the motionless body of whoever she’d shot. If you were them where would you be. You wouldn’t be going back to the truck. You’d get the hell away from the machine gun. The door at the end had a crudely painted safety sign of someone opening a door and with that thought in mind Slake swung it open and stepped through and was shot in the chest.

She was sent backwards like someone had pulled her and rolled to one side, gasping, but she didn’t let go of the machine gun. She felt her breast. Big dents in the steel plating, nothing that punched through. Buckshot probably. It didn’t hurt but when she rolled onto her back and tried to breathe it started to. Her failed breath made a hissing sound. Everything seemed to be shimmering. You lie there for another second you’re gonna get killed. Already she could feel footsteps in the metal. She sat up and put the gun on her knee.

The man who stepped through the door was a reptile of some kind wearing the filthy remnants of a uniform and he held a shotgun with smoke trailing from the muzzle at hip level. She aimed approximately where he was and fired. The gun leapt and nearly cut him in half vertically. A full volley came from behind him, through him, cartridges of three different calibers. It looked like a team of cameras assembled in the doorway. She felt something strike her shinplate. Something ricocheted off her head and snapped it backwards and took her torso along with it. Without looking she aimed where she thought the door was and fired until she was out.

The gunshots faded the longer she held the trigger down and by the end it was a strange hollow thumping sound, like rocks being thrown into a canyon. Get up. She rolled to her stomach and stood. Her leg was wet and when she put weight on it the first time it almost buckled but was fine after that. She drew her pistol and went to the door. Most of the upper half of the pointman was seeping through the grated catwalk and the four or so dragoons fared no better, their arms scattered. She went back in and took up the machine gun and put the second belt in and put the muzzle on the ground and racked it twice and went on and the moment she was out the door a bullet passed her by and struck the wall with a shower of sparks that she only saw but didn’t hear.

She fought a running fight over the catwalks through the charred ruins of the steel mill, pausing to crouch and fire where she saw a flash and move on again. With the fire mostly passed she was the only threat. She took a flight of stairs down to cross a small railyard and at the bottom surprised another group of dragoons. They were so close they could have reached out and touched one another. She killed them with one long automatic salvo and stood in the sinking grey haze of gunsmoke and shot each of them again with a pistol she took from a corpse and kept going through the railyard. The steel of some of the cars had sagged and warped in the heat and some had spilled the slag they were carrying and half the yard glowed dull crimson, the rails that stuck up through the molten wastemetal like the gametrails of deer through lava. A strong wind came in through the yard. Slender inkblack trails of smoke bent overhead like contrails. At the other side she was about to head through a warehouse door when four rounds struck the ground at her feet. She turned in time to see someone with a rifle on a ringed catwalk around a smokestack gesturing at her to someone else.

A volley of bullets came through the warehouse door after Slake went in and skipped to the far side and flattened into leaden coins. She looked for stairs and went up. The paint on the railing flaked off in her hand. When the door outside didn’t open she kicked it and kicked it again and got out of the way. A bullet passed where her neck had been not half a second prior and she reckoned that the moment they saw her in the door there would be more but there was no helping it. She held out the machine gun without looking and let the recoil guide it from one side to the other then got up and charged out.

She couldn’t tell whether she got anyone but there was nothing to greet her. She slowed to a walk, her gun at her hip. The insulation wrapping of the smokestack before her had burnt away and smouldered like the ashes of a long and slender cigarette, dots of orange under grey. The walkway went around the right side on a gentle incline and she took it very slowly. No one. She crossed the bridge between two stacks and went around again and just around the final curve she saw Nehalennia trying to clear a jam from her rifle, cursing. Slake aimed at her and pulled the trigger but the bolt fell onto an empty chamber with a loud metallic click.

Nehalennia turned and for a second the two kinswomen were face to face and equally surprised but Nehalennia got over it first and threw her gun down and went for her revolver. Slake did the same. She let go of the machine gun and drew it and flung her hand back over the hammer and fired it onehanded without aiming but the flash from her gun was second to the older Beowend’s. She felt something impact her hand and stumbled back. She couldn’t see where she hit Nehalennia but she too went back and fell and got back up and turned and fled.

She ducked behind the stacks and looked at her hand. Her ring finger had been shot off at the proximal phalanx and the grip on her gun had been wrecked. She felt the gap in her fingers with her other hand but nothing registered. Where Nehalennia had stood a spray of blood was dripping from the guardrail. The hand is nothing. She followed the trail.

There was a lot of blood to follow. Here and there there were smears of it on the railings where her quarry fell or stumbled or paused. It went up a spiralling staircase around the smokestack. The heat it gave off was immense and the grating was so hot that the rubber of her soles was sticking to it, every third step or so leaving a spider’s web of rubber. It wound up the smokestack twice. Near the top she found the officer slouched clutching the floor but when she saw Slake she pulled herself away just as Slake shot the spot where she had been.

The next time she found her there was nowhere to run. The walkway looped halfway around and ceased at a fifty meter drop. Nehalennia had her back to the railing and sat with her legs in front of her like a discarded piece of militaria. The lower part of her beak had been shot almost clean off. A flow of blood came from the end of her destroyed tongue and stained the front of her shirt a darker shade of redblack. Her head rolled to one side but her eyes stayed on the figure in front of her, that metal imitation of a Beowend. Elsewhere the dull concussion of a tank of gasoline rupturing shook the superstructure and a squat orange fireball rose up briefly to the south and vanished. The fires beyond in the grasslands were the only source of light and Slake herself stood motionless, backlit, her hand dripping and oddly silhouetted. She watched Nehalennia for a moment, then looked down. Nothing. No one.

Nehalennia felt for her pistol but it wasn’t there. Slake stepped forward and put her pistol away and dropped to one knee and put her forearm on it. Even this close Nehalennia couldn’t see her eyes. Just a faint glint in black chasm of the eyeholes like a match struck deep in a cave. Slake cocked her gun and aimed it at Nehalennia’s chest, point blank. There was still smoke coming from the muzzle. “You can hear me, can’t you.” She could hardly hear herself but knew she was speaking, voice low and tinny through the filter mask.

Nehalennia nodded, very slowly. Gore was bubbling out of her throat. “That’s good,” said Slake. “Do you know why I came back?”

No answer.

“I came back because you shot Shoreline. When you did that I had to kill you.” She waited. “You can’t walk away. I won’t stand for it. We can’t both be alive anymore.”

Nehalennia’s head sagged but her eyes were still focused on Slake.

“Do you understand me?”

She nodded, another slow motion that made the remnants of her tongue wag from one side to the other. Slake watched her. Not long from now she’d be unconscious and soon after she’d be dead. She stood up. An oven breeze went by them. Her boots were melting through the floor. She put her gun away and drew her axe. Nehalennia looked down at the axehead, then back up at Slake. Go on then, do it. Slake raised the axe up and swung it as hard as she could into Nehalennia’s neck.

The axehead lodged in bone and when she pulled it out Nehalennia slumped forward, pawing at her neck. She swung and swung again and hacked her apart and five minutes after stood there breathing hard with the axe in both hands and blood staining her entire front half. With one final cut she took Nehalennia’s head off and grabbed it by the beak and held it up.

She had very nearly destroyed it. One eye, her throat a crimson rose pattern, the frontal bone sagging inward. She put her axe away and tied the head to her belt by the headfur and leaned against the railing. It was getting a bit lighter, a charcoal sky instead of a black one. She looked at her hand. It had mostly stopped bleeding but it was starting to throb. When she was sure dawn was starting to break she went back down the smokestack. Along the way she picked up her machine gun and went on back to the burned truck.

Everyone Slake had killed there was as she left them. The garage door was still closed. She had expected anyone left to have come along and made off with the halftrack but no one had. She limped to the door and grabbed the door handle and twisted it and pulled up.

The halftrack and provisions were completely untouched like the fire had just passed it all by without stopping to burn. The fuel, the food stores, all there. She went in and left the door open behind her.

She hadn’t used the halftrack before but she suspected it wouldn’t be hard to figure out and it wasn’t. She climbed up into the cab and sat in the driver’s seat and set the machine gun aside and put her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. Now everything hurt but there was nothing in her that could care about it. It took her five tries to get the choke right and she had to go out each time and crankstart the engine but she eventually got it. The plane engine under the hood coughed and revved up to life and dropped to a low burbling idle. She got into the driver’s seat again and put it into gear. Shoreline was still alive when she got back to the control room.

Calm’s Return

I - Breakdown

The halftrack died a ways up the southwest coast three hours after sunrise, a long time coming but still too early. They were taking it down a path or what looked like one in a copse of trees by a jerkwater river when the steam started, a near geothermal eruption of it shooting laterally from the gap in the hood. Put it in first gear. Something banged and made a high rattling noise that wound down gradually. The dials drifted, the brakes quit, no power. The left front wheel sagged into a patch of soft earth and spun once and the entire halftrack shook, one last proper rev to get free. The wheel was only just out when it seized and went silent forever.

Slake got out from the driver’s side and left the door open and went around to the front to unlatch the hood and looked in. She caught a brief glimpse of the polished radial engine slick with oil before the fumes forced her back and she went to the riverside waving her arm to clear it away. The water came past leisurely and completely turbid, she couldn’t even see the bottom at the shore. Something was leaking to the ground behind her but she didn’t check to see what it was. No use. After a while she sat in the grass and put her elbows on her knees and just looked out at the red hills on the other side of the coulee. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Hardly any wind. She put her hand in the water and let the water go by it for a moment then slicked her headfur back with her wet hand and straightened her braid and went back to the truck. Shoreline was standing up on the bullbar looking down into the engine, holding the hood up with one hand. She asked him how it looked.

“I’d say he’s hooped,” said Shoreline. “Look.” He levelled his finger at a pipe. She thought it was an exhaust pipe at first until she tilted her head. It wasn’t. It was a hydraulic pipe that had sheared clean in two along a weld line and it was still leaking a bit. Below it was another one they had tried to hold together with rubber strips and it had been working but they couldn’t find where this one should have connected to. “You know how to weld?”

“We don’t even have the kit to do it.”

He wiped his forehead and the patch where his hand touched darkened. “No.”

They tried to start it a few times with the hood open and it would turn and make a low whooping sound but it wouldn’t keep going. Neither were mechanics and beyond the hydraulic leak they suspected other faults at play but couldn’t find or name what to save their lives. They tried for two hours and convened and elected to leave it behind and go on foot. Shoreline came back around to the front and shut the hood and patted it like one might a dog behind the ears.

“Sorry, friend,” he told it.

They brought out a cookpot and built a fire on the near-crimson clay near the riverbank, Slake hauling deadfall out and cutting it to size, Shoreline cooking. They ate what was heavy and what couldn’t be packed. He cooked rice in canned chicken broth and boiled it with tinned tomatoes and peas and wild okra and lamb’s quarters and rabbit that had been shot and cleaned yesterday. While the lid was on and their meal simmered they went through the cab and took what they needed, an old railway map annotated by previous owners, a compass. There was an old potmetal pocket watch glued to the dashboard in place of the pilfered original and Slake put the axehead behind it and tapped on the back until it came loose and pocketed it. It had been six weeks since they took the halftrack and they had gone through only a fraction of the provisions. They shopped through the back carefully with their packs in one hand but there was no shortage of choice. The basics came first. Changes of clothes, preserved food. She was behind the driver’s side picking through one of the boxes they had filled with stolen goods from Cachua when she found her revolver.

It had been a while since she’d touched it. She had taken to wearing a repeater in its place and keeping the machine gun close at hand. She lifted it from the holster. Under the splintered wood grip she saw the mainspring cocked at a bizarre angle. The wood was still stained darkly and holding it there in her right hand she became acutely aware of her lack of a finger and looked away. Shoreline glanced up from where he was sitting and putting on a new pair of boots. “You taking that with you?”

“I dunno. I don’t think it’d fire.”

“You should. Be a shame to leave it behind.”

“It’s a shame to leave the halftrack behind.”

“Yeah, well. We can’t just tuck that in our pockets and walk away with it.” She read the stamp. Bistell & Daughters Repeating Pistols, East Damtop District, Hallatin. It’s not that much extra weight. She undid her belt and fixed it to the offhand side of her hip next to her axe but before she could fill her pack Shoreline told her food was ready.

Good food and double portions were everyday affairs in the halftrack and both agreed they’d come to miss it. They sat in the grass and ate from big bowls and watched the water go by, the meal hot and filling and good. Their spoons moved mechanically from the bowl to beak and bifurcated mouth. Even here in the heat of the day it wasn’t so bad. No more than twenty-eight. Just warm. Way out on the hills the scurfy sagebrush and the mulleins were clear to see, no mirages. When the meal was done they just cast their bowls into the river and watched them drift off, passing a cigarette between themselves. They threw that in the river too when it was done. “I guess we better get on,” said Shoreline.

They filled their packs with at least two weeks of food and plenty of water and took a bedroll each. Slake had been wearing her armour and opted to take that too, pockmarked though it was. The near-shattered remnants of Nehalennia’s beak and skull were still tied off at the wrist with twine. Shoreline changed into a pair of good military trousers that were baggy at the thigh and a sleeveless shirt with a coat tied to his pack just in case. He had traded his old pack for another newer one and had alongside his shotgun a small revolver in a shoulder holster and he looked good, healthy, ready to travel. She filled her pack most of the way and thought she was forgetting something but couldn’t puzzle out what. She climbed down from the back and went around the side and saw Shoreline tying a small string of ket to the side mirror. Right. Ten minutes later she had taken out a shirt and a few of the bulkier and less filling cans to make way for a wooden case with silver trim and a little twist handle packed with a small fortune. It was bulky and added a few kilograms but it’d be worth it.

One last look at the halftrack. They stood with their thumbs looped in the straps of their packs or in their pockets, Slake holding the machine gun with the barrel on her shoulder and one hand on the stock. It looked almost sad squatting there in the mud, angular and dark and faintly bovine with its big mirrors out to the sides, the ket hanging motionless off the leftmost one. “It’ll be a hell of a payday for whoever finds it,” said Slake.

Shoreline spat an orange gob on the ground and wiped his mouth with his hand and sniffed. His ear twitched. “If anyone finds it. Big if.”

“Yeah.” She wanted a cigarette. There was a fly or something buzzing by her ear and she waved it away. “Nothing we can do.”

“Wish there was.” He turned to leave. The wind had picked up a little and the fusiform leaves of the grove that would serve as the truck’s tomb were starting to shift and sing. Everything was tinted faintly green. The words of the death prayer still eluded her. She looked for her reflection in the windshield but between the dark shapes of the trunks and the river and spotty sunglare she couldn’t make it out. She caught up with him a minute out of the grove and they both travelled on through the ragged hills of Meropis’ southwest with nothing but their guns and the other and neither would have it another way.

They walked the rest of the afternoon with lunch heavy in their stomachs and followed the long arc of the river through the Bibros Valley. In the lowlands there they could see where the high water marks of flood season stained the gabbro talus. Rain had passed there two days prior and between the mulleins twice their height there were small clusters of balsamroot and milk-vetch in full bloom. Here and there they came across sunbleached bones where animals carried by the floods had been deposited and Shoreline remarked that the flowers probably grew where older corpses had sunk. They passed under an arch where a road from a time long before Beowend had been dug and stopped to check the compass in the shade and pressed on as the sun sank and their shadows grew more vague and elongated off their dextral sides. In the early evening they passed a sheer rock face and their black profiles followed them a few paces behind in almost perfect imitation. By and by an elbow or leg would collide in penumbra, a brief hybrid until one picked up the pace or fell behind and then they were two again. Just before dusk they paused to climb a small slope, just for a look. They stood beside one another and watched over a small lake with their hands to their eyes as the sun slipped behind the shade of the foothills. Slake checked behind them just in case but there was no one out there but them. She couldn’t even see their tracks. When they went back down the sky turned purple and before too long they stopped for the night.

They made camp beside a near-vertical prominence of gabbro so rich in iron they could practically smell it and they ate a flameless meal of dried fish and drier bread soaked in water and they pitched the remains far from camp. The hills took on a violet tint and Slake agreed to take first watch and sitting there in the dark with the machine gun across her lap wide awake even at this hour she looked very much the part of a bandit or deserter and she supposed in some way they were both. It got no darker when night fell, the starscape tilting and crowded and especially luminous. Tsull waned, Liyag dipped quietly in the north. Just past midnight a pack of something went by on the far bank of the river, howling and yelping out a scraped-metal bark, but they went on and she sat back down. Not long after she thought she heard the wail of a train horn but the noise was gone as soon as she’d made it out. Her ears had never really stopped ringing entirely. At two thirty she woke Shoreline and forwent taking her bedroll out and slept where he did.

In the morning Slake wasn’t feeling well. Something in her stomach. She tried to eat but the only thing she got down was some water and some dried fruit. A thin fog had come up from the river in the early morning and they traipsed through the mist with the sun almost at their backs. She had to stop often. He waited for her. In the hot season just past it had been hot enough to buckle the dirt they trod on but now it was soft and grasseaten and studded with burrows of small animals, snakes or rodents. Shoreline studied the map while he waited, squatting on his haunches. He looked like he was reading the morning news. He traced the path of the river he thought they were on with a finger and put two fingertips to the scale and measured how far they’d come and where they were going, guessing the actual distance listed. It couldn’t be too far but they’d have to ford the river eventually, the map didn’t tell him when it thinned. He folded and pocketed it and watched the brightening of the foothills, the brush thinning to total baldness at the peaks. Something leathery leapt from a ridge and descended and circled once and caught a draft upriver. Just as it vanished on the horizon Slake came back and said she was good to go.

By noon whatever mild affliction she carried had passed and they made good time. They followed the long arc of the river through a canyon carved by the shifting of ice millions of years past. There was no shade at all but it wasn’t too hot. To the east there were tall cumulus clouds passing them but they weren’t headed their way. In the afternoon they sighted something on the shore downriver and went towards it but before they got there they found a road.

They realized it only after they had walked its ancient paved surface for a few seconds. Slake kicked her feet to clear some dirt from it and there it was, bitulithic rock broken down almost to dust but unmistakable. She looked back down the valley and could just make out where it had been by the shorter scrub. There were no tracks of any kind there but she supposed there wouldn’t be on the inland route and they went along. The thing they saw at the riverside was a small lapstrake boat. It was canted on its side and had an empty mount for an engine and a thin sheet of iron hammered over the bow and looked like it could seat six comfortably. The bow was pointed upriver. It didn’t look old, there was still some white paint on it. It had an anchor lodged firmly in the ground and she figured that’s how it stayed in place but the purpose of its being here was suspect. There couldn’t have been many fish in the river. The motor hadn’t been taken apart, it had just plain been taken. Whether it was going inland or heading back she didn’t know and she looked to where the bow was pointing as if the owners themselves might return with their rods on one shoulder and miraculous fish swinging on hooks in their hand. Four seasons prior herself and friends at the time had motored just offshore in pleasure boats on a nice day to do much the same thing and she tried to recall what they had drank or discussed or what anyone had caught but apart from the sketched outline of the day’s events the storyboard was incomplete, the characters blank save for few faces and even fewer names. She wondered if it had even happened. You have dreamed in brighter colour.

Shoreline put his foot on the side and rocked the boat. It held together. “The map didn’t show any bridges ahead.”

“I don’t think they’d even still be there if there were.”

He nodded. “I think we ought to give this thing a try.”

They climbed a slope to where a small cluster of evergreens clung to life in the shallow soil and looked for likely sticks to serve as paddles but they ended up just chopping two of them down and hacking the branches off. She cut at the thicker halves until they were serviceable enough as oars, if splinterprone. They went down to the boat and dug up the anchor and threw it and the rusted chain in, then swung the ass end just into the river. Slake took her pack off and put it in the bottom next to her gun. “Let’s just hold it out there for a second,” she said. “Just to see if it leaks.”

Chasé. That was one of the girl’s names in the boat. A faint afterimage of rufous fur and matching eyes and that was all. She shook this thought from her head and went back to the boat. No leaks. They pulled it back in and she sat on the bow and looked at him. He just stared back. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Steadying it for you.” He looked at the boat then back to her. Right. He took his pack off and set it beside hers and did the same with anything heavy on him, his shotgun, the pistol, then climbed in and stood uneasily near the back. “Sit down. Have you ever been in a boat before?”

“…No.”

“Well shit. Kneel down in the bottom. If you stand up you’ll throw the center of gravity off and we’ll capsize. If I end up swimming to shore I’ll be pissed.” He did as she said and she nudged the boat forward into the water. It was heavy but she found that to be no issue. Just as it left the shore she swung her legs over the side and squatted down in the front and took up one of the paddles.

They crawled around and swapped positions and paddled in canoe fashion with her steering. The boat wasn’t deep but it was broad and the river was slow and strangely clogged with debris and deadfall that she hadn’t seen from shore, the two of them just another curiosity floating downriver with their arms and the bags and the box of ket close at hand like a guerilla’s paycheck. She asked whether they had to cross right then or if they could drift and get any closer and he said they could for a bit so she sat back with her gun between her legs and smoked a cigarette and watched the bank crawl by. Here and there another piece of debris. A collection of seaglass bottles winking briefly chromatic in the sun. A tire. A hood from a tractor. She studied the shore. Every hundred or so meters was a small stack of rocks to denote a plot of land but whether there had been anything built there before she couldn’t tell. Not important. She was just closing her eyes when Shoreline sat up and the boat rocked dangerously. She was about to say something when he pointed up and behind her.

About a kilometer and a half up a small push-prop plane was passing them by. It had long flat wings and gleamed like it had its paint sanded off and it was headed northwest, the same way they were. Slake put her hand over her eyes and watched it. She could barely hear the engine. It dopplered high then low a few seconds after it had passed and it neither banked nor veered from its path and was soon gone from sight. They both watched the sky for more but that was it. “Now that’s a way to get around,” said Shoreline.

“As long as nothing goes wrong. How’d you like to be up there if the engine gave out?”

“Still gotta be better than being down here.” He scratched his nose and studied his finger and flicked something into the water. In more peaceful circumstances they could have been sharing a drink. “Have you ever flown?”

She shook her head. “We never had the money for it. I know some people who did. Either they took an airship down the coast for travel or just to sightsee.”

“What’d they think?”

“I don’t really know,” she told him. “They never talked about the flight much. Only that the view and the food was good.”

“They serve food on those things?”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t they?”

He canted his head to one side then the other. Yeah, that made sense. “We should’ve hopped one of those instead of a train.”

“There’s always next time.”

And so it went down the river, the ride mostly silent. Some water had come through the transom where the tarwork had aged and cracked but an occasional handcup of water was enough to clear it out and soon Slake had her feet up on the thwart and her hands on her steelplated belly. If she went overboard she’d’ve sunk like a stone but the thought crossed her mind only once and was entertained only as a daydream. All down the river the land was sprouting ruins. Old telegraph poles ran along an old and dirtcaked road all bent at bizarre angles. Around a bend an old pulp mill that once intercepted log floats that came downstream loose not unlike themselves. The skeleton of a building shaded the river as they went by. Shoreline watched it with idle curiosity. There was still glass in the high windows, cloudy and filthy and shattered but glass nonetheless. The dirt was still the colour of slate from leached chemicals. A breeze came across the river and carried with it the same scent. Shoreline wrinkled his nose more and spat over the side and looked away.

Around seven in the evening they paddled the boat to shore and hauled it up into the grass and turned it upside down to let the sun take the wet off the bottom. It had already been determined that it would make a good shelter. Shoreline had his roughshod paddle in one hand and was poking the ground to see if it would sink through into a warren of bugs while Slake stood at the bank and smoked and looked downriver. She finished her cigarette and threw the butt into the river. They were on a little floodplain in the foothills, a hundred or so meters of flat land with grass up to her knees before it rose up in sheer cliffs. The telegraph poles had not vanished since they’d started seeing them and she walked towards one and stood on an old asphalt road cutting a thin path through the scrub. There was some grass growing down the middle of it like a dull golden artery and more on the sides but between those were two distinct wheel divots. She couldn’t see any treads but there wasn’t any mistaking it. “Huh,” she said. She listened for a motor sound. When she heard nothing she went back to the boat and told Shoreline what she saw.

“We’re pretty closeby,” he replied. “It doesn’t surprise me.” He had his shirt off and was eating from a labelless tin of fruit with a spoon, what kind she couldn’t tell. He didn’t wear a bandage on his side anymore. His chest had a strange divot in it but he seemed alright. They had hacked back a little clearing to sleep in and now that the boat was dry or getting there he had taken a seat on it. She sat next to him and as soon as she did she was soaked through the back pocket. “I thought we would’ve seen more farms or something by now.”

“It’s supposed to be underground.” She went through her pack for some food and settled on some ship’s biscuits and soup. She opened the can and broke the biscuits on her knee. They had old holes in them where bugs had gotten in but they’d all moved on or died, she double checked. She put them in the can and pushed the nearly open lid back down and put her hands behind her and leaned back. “Maybe we’ll walk right over it and never know.”

“Either way we’re gonna have to leave the river soon and head for the coast. Probably tomorrow. The map gets mazelike past that. Lots of roads and hills.”

“How many more kilometers?”

“Sixty or so,” he told her with a mouthful of fruit. He had to tilt his head back to keep it from coming out the gap in his lower lip. “We’ll be there in a week. Maybe less.”

Again she took first watch. They propped one side of the boat up on their packs and Shoreline slept under it, his snoring soft and hollow sounding from under the hull. Slake had her helmet off but the rest of her armor on and stood with the butt of her machine gun on the ground like a palace guard. A clear, warm night, no clouds when the sun dipped. The same Sisters in the sky. Crickets stridulated out in the grass but aside from that and Shoreline there was no noise, hardly even any wind. Her tail moved on its own and swept a long patch of dirt behind her clean. She hardly thought about anything at all.

At just after midnight some clouds came in from the northwest, vast dark shapes lidding over the heavens. She had her back to them for a while and it took her longer yet to focus on them. Something off. She squinted. They had blocked the stars but they weren’t black. Greyish-yellow. Lit from beneath. By the time she had woken Shoreline the clouds had moved and were dark again. She shook him awake and took her spot under the boat and hardly slept at all.

After a breakfast of oats and jerky they studied the map. Maybe ten kilometers to go on the water until they had to leave it by her reckoning but not by his. They quarrelled over how far they’d travelled the day prior and Shoreline was winning until she walked to the river and pointed upstream at the cutbank and showed how it was curved and pointed to the map and he agreed. They hauled the boat through the flattened grass back down to the water and loaded their possibles and cast off. Another warm day. Slake took the stern again. Within ten minutes they had reached the River of Junk.

The river was ordinary until it wasn’t. It started with the shorn rear half of an old motorcar half buried in the sand with the cadaverous framework of its former canvas roof showing. Soon came old barrels of oil or something or other beside a metal hulled boat, twenty feet long, upside down on the bank with a nest of branches and grass showing from beneath. She stuck her paddle under the water and poked. She felt nothing the first two tries but on the third she hit something hard.

In another two minutes there were buildings along the banks, old concrete and brickwork ones, a small town of little fish processing plants with leadpainted company insignias and windows with all the glass blown out and the tiles of the rough all sloughed off in great piles of clay and eroded copper, half of them completely collapsed. The river widened. Near the banks there were old concrete columns for docks or dams or walkways long gone. Around a bend a whole wind turbine had collapsed into the river and was blocking most of it off. They paddled to keep the boat still and studied it and discussed. It was an old electric one and it had fallen from the east bank next to a three-floor brick building now purposeless. Other flotsam had been caught in its badly rusted wireframe, scraps of tarpaulin and wood and another boat, this one small like theirs and made of wood with its underside nearly covered in bladelike mussels that opened as if to catch the sunlight in their maws and clacked shut audibly. Past it they could see the shells of old barges wedged into the banks and old power lines sagging into the water, a maze of debris. The river could get through alright but they couldn’t and eventually they decided to just go around.

The bank looked like it had been walled like a canal at some point in the past but the stonework had crumbled and they had their choice of where to get out. They ran the boat aground on the rocks on the west side. Shoreline climbed out and hauled it further up the shore. Once it wasn’t going to float away they got their guns from the bottom and went up. The old alley between the buildings was clogged with wood debris and fallen brick. They had to pick their way over it. Shoreline was in the lead but when he got out to the other side he froze and raised his gun. Slake cursed and hurried forward and went around the corner with her finger on the trigger.

They were in what was once an industrial riverside street, fallen almost completely to pieces. Everything in the buildings had been sorted through and looted and much of it was piled up in the road. Old pieces of broken electrical work, furniture, ducts, piping. Not thirty paces down the road there was a squat tractor with big tires and a large metal tank affixed to the back. It had a trailer hooked up to the back that was one sixth full with the likeliest looking bricks in the street. A lank old human with skin so black it was almost purple and thin strands of pale wirebrush for hair was coming around the side very slowly with his skinny arms over his head. He was dressed in old overalls that were little more than rags and he himself looked like something stitched together out of dark rawhide. “Keep your hands up,” Shoreline told him.

They moved in. Shoreline held him at gunpoint while Slake went around the car. The human had his meagre tools laid out and had been knocking his way through the wall of an old papermaking shop to get at the better bricks. She looked in the alleys and in the second floor windows and down the street both ways but there was no one else. “It’s just him,” she told the Nyctian. Then she addressed the human. “Do you speak Beotic?”

He looked at her warily with his head tilted downward and his chin working strangely, like he was chewing on something. “Do you speak Beotic or not? We’re not gonna kill you.” He didn’t respond. His left eye had been injured at some point and it was mostly white and pink and the pupil wandered away from her. She stepped away from him and lowered her gun and he mirrored her movement to let them have their way with the tractor.

“He thinks we’re robbing him,” said Shoreline. He too had lowered his gun but the man kept his arms up.

“He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying. Get him to stay here for a minute.”

He nodded and kept the gun away from the man but he held a hand up with his palm out to motion for him to stay. Whether the man got the hint or not was anyone’s guess but he didn’t move. Slake jogged down to the boat and took the ket box from her pack. She undid the clasps and took out two strings of a hundred ket each and she didn’t know how much that would be worth here but it wouldn’t be nothing. She put it away and went back up to an unchanged scene and showed the man the ket. He looked at it blankly, then looked at her. “Here,” she said. She put her gun down and undid the knot at one end and let a few of them slip into her hand and held them out to him.

The old man instantly lowered his arms and accepted the ket. His expression hadn’t changed but his eyes looked watery. He held it in both hands, very carefully, like one might hold a small animal, a fragile and precious thing that you couldn’t think to drop. “Barathrum,” Slake said. She spoke very slowly. “Do you know where Barathrum is?”

“Barathrum,” he replied. He had a higher voice than she would have expected. He clenched his fist around the ket as if to keep it from flying off and put his finger to his cheek and thought and pointed west northwest. “Barathrum.”

She held the ket by the strings and showed him the rest. He had seven already and there were one hundred and ninety three up for grabs. “We are going to Barathrum.” She patted her chest, then patted Shoreline on the shoulder. She did it again for good measure. “Us, to Barathrum.” She pointed at him and his tractor, then in the same direction he pointed to. “Will you take us to Barathrum?”

He looked at the ket and looked back at his truck and made his mind up in about five seconds and nodded. “Good. Thank you.” She counted another forty-three ket from the string and gave them to him. He would get the rest when they got there and he understood that without having to be told. He circled the tractor and opened a panel on the side of the wood burner while they went back to the boat to get their gear.

They packed everything they had into the back and mounted just as the engine came to life. The front of the trailer was piled high with bricks. She put her helmet down next to her pack and looked over the bricks. The human was watching them and she nodded at him. He waved his hand and put the tractor into gear and wheeled it around and made a seven point turn and went on down the street. Both passengers kept watch for an ambush until they were well clear of the town walls, mere piles of stone that suggested one had been there, little more. Only when both were confident that nothing was coming did they sit down, the ride jostling them, Slake’s armor clattering. “Well there we go,” she said.

Shoreline watched the town recede then looked at the river. It was completely clogged with debris of all forms, bits of jagged metal and fallen power lines and stones and old cars and other objects that he couldn’t fathom the origins of. There was a whole house roof there among the flotsam. None of it moved, like the current had just stopped. There was nothing to be made of any of it. He looked at her again. “Do you think we should tell him about the truck?”

She shook her head. “No. Leave it for someone who needs it. If he has a tractor he’s doing alright. And he doesn’t even have a gun.”

The Nyctian nodded and that was that. In an hour or so they left the little valley behind and parted from the river onto a worn dirt road in a much broader plain. The ground was less red here but still stood in harsh contrast with the vast cloudless pool of the sky. Slake had laid down with her head on her pack and slept while she still had some shade from the high wooden sides of the trailer. She dreamt amorphously. The chime of the bell in a drugstore and the cold scent of iodine. The bottom of the ocean where manylegged beasts with scales bright as poured copper crawled past with the typical lethargy of deep sea life. That was as far as she got before someone took hold of her shoulder and shook her. She swore incoherently. Get up.

Slake rose up with her hand to her eyes to keep the sun out. “Why,” she blurted.

“I thought you’d want to see it,” said Shoreline. He wasn’t holding her anymore and seemed to regret waking her but he stood up to get another look regardless. She stretched until she shook then rose to her feet and stepped up on the wooden rise on the side of the trailer meant for seating and looked out over the side.

The plain was all farmland from one end to the other. Between the natural rivers and hand-dug canals the harvest was running at full force and the fields were completely packed with workers, hordes of them, some driving mules and oxen pulling huge wagons being filled by the pitchforkful with tripwheat, all parts of the plant in its ripe golden form being taken from the beard to the veinlike roots. They passed a wagon going in the other direction, rumbling over the macadam. A lone Scrounger woman sat atop an overburdened horse wearing a hat almost as widebrimmed as she was tall and her eight children perched on the tower of wheat in the back and watched the two wanderers pass with waves and hoots and shrieks of greeting. The two didn’t even raise a hand. Farther out were smaller fields with smaller crops and yet more labourers were stooped there with wicker baskets pulling carrots and radishes out by hand. Waterwheels spun in some of the deeper canals, wooden blades ceaseless and slick with water and carting small bows of water to catch in the sun. The hillsides were covered in houses fashioned from clapboard or clay fired from local riverbeds and roofed with thatch. Thin trails of smoke from their chimneys bent eastward. They passed some workers in chains, all bound at the ankles and shirtless, men wearing cuirasses and brilliant yellow tabards standing by, their interest more focused on the tractor ferrying two strangers to their land than the prisoners. Slake nodded her head to them and waved subduedly and they looked away like she’d bid them back to their work.

They took the rest of the day getting through the farmland, acre after acre of it. The valley bent and the fields went with it, following the course of the river, the hunched shapes of the farmers and their equipment small and antlike in the waisthigh tripwheat. Where the river bent rice was being harvested, a goldgreen field worked by bucketed machines that rumbled and leaked smoke black as an oilfire’s. Then by the side of the road a wide panel of green glass embedded in a steel frame, angled to the northwest. There was someone asleep in the shade next to it. The two watched it go by in silence. It was almost dark when they got onto the main road. It ran next to a set of rails. They were approaching a tunnel when a diesel-atomic train whistled past from behind them, a brief blur of green and yellow and slatecoloured armoured cars. There were shapes backlit by the window and in the flash of the headlights Slake saw a sign in a foreign tongue carved into the stone over the tunnel. The train went on. The tractor’s engine turned and hacked through the darkness and when they emerged they had reached Barathrum.

It was in a grand cratershaped valley where eons ago a volcano had raged the earth and rock away. The valley was filled from end to end with coloured glass reflectors for the city below and a multitude of rivers, each dammed and bridged and lit brightly by floodlights to catch whatever might try to get in. In the center around an enormous stone monolith studded with vents and smokestacks a lesionous slum grew, squat and black in the fading light of the day save for the glint of floodlights off the metal roofs. There were other headlights about, mostly old trucks. The valley was maybe ten kilometers across and the slum half that, the monolith another half. Somewhere in there the entrance. The purpose of it all. Here at last. Collect your thoughts. Have you any? The tractor driver had not spoken a word all day and aside from a single pause to eat and drink he had done nothing but drive but now he looked back and gestured to them, mimicking holding a rifle. “Yes, we have guns,” Shoreline told him.

He nodded without understanding and made a wrapping motion. Then he pointed to the slum and made another gun motion.

“Ah. Yeah.” He looked at Slake but she understood it as well as him. “We’ve gotta wrap up our guns.”

“Do you know how to take the shotgun apart?”

“Yeah. You think that’s enough?”

“If it’s not we’d probably just get shot to pieces anyway.”

They took the guns apart. She stored her revolver in her pack and field stripped the machine gun and wrapped what parts wouldn’t fit in her pack up in a dirty shirt. When it was done they rose up and the driver saw this and parked on the side of the road. They were just at the edge of the town in front of a shack made from lift truck platforms with the gaps plugged with clay and grass. Maybe his home, maybe just a home. The two dismounted and so did he and he stood there by the puttering engine with his eyes on Slake. She took the two strings of ket and gave them to him and he bowed. “Thanks,” she told him. With no other delays they made for town and never saw the man again.

A polyglot ghetto of the poor and rejected, they walked through it like conquerors. Or like lepers, the sight of them enough to nearly clear a path, whether it was one of their species or both who could say. The town had sprung up not long prior when Barathrum had emerged from its decades of silence and was peopled by refugees of almost all species and creed equal only in their destitution. The old warehouses that once held goods bound for the elevators were overrun with tarpaulins and tumbledown walls to denote dwellings and more built on the roofs and walkways between them. Some encroached onto the old asphalt road, so crowded it was. Vendors sold what they had on carpets by the roadside and over all the shouting and general noise they couldn’t hear a single word of Beotic spoken nor see any signs and despite the crowding no one dared to get within arm’s length of them.

They circled the slum clockwise until they found the switchyards, a vast concrete sprawl of powerlines and rails and train cars, brightly-lit and humming with engines and electricity. Yellow tabarded men walked up and down the yard inspecting the trains. On the far side by an old brick station not dissimilar to buildings in the city of her birth the train that had passed them earlier was letting out passengers. They took a bridge over it and came out onto a road bigger than the others and more brightly lit. At the rockward end there was a checkpoint of some kind and shouting over a tinny loudspeaker. A metal sign at the roadside read Elevator Four in eight languages, their own third down.

They stood in the zigzagged line, a circle of space forming around them. In front of them was a woman leading two asses carrying wood walking canes wrapped in burlap sacks and behind them was a family of five Osamac, none of whom were properly dressed. Slake smoked. A walking machine circled the fence, a limping old sixlegged thing with clattering unrubbered stilts that bowed slightly right midstride. A man in a yellow tabard with a shotgun on top was looking at her but when she looked back up at him he was looking somewhere else. The line moved on. There was shouting from the front, people craned their heads to look. Soon two men who had been denied entry were being dragged half-conscious out past the fence and left in the street. It was near midnight when they reached the front of the line and a moment after the donkey woman was called forth they were directed to a small green tollbooth with glass windows and a yellow flag on the top and a big table to one side. A tall Naiassen sat behind it and slid the panel back. “Hello,” said Slake. “Do you speak Beotic?”

“Yes sir,” he said, his accent not one she’d ever heard before. One booth over another border guard was leaning to get a better look at them. Two soldiers pointed and conversed quietly about their origins. “Please show me your citizenship or entry cards, and empty your bags on that table.”

“Uh.” She scratched her cheek and looked at Shoreline. He looked back at her blankly. Did you expect him to know this? “We weren’t aware there were entry cards required. The signs didn’t make it clear.”

The Naiassen was still leaning forward in his chair. He had looked calm before but he was starting not to. “Do you have any other paperwork on you?”

“I’m afraid not,” she told him. “We just got here.”

The snake hesitated. Who among his ranks wanted to be known to turn down a Beowend, despite the company she kept? “Give me a moment,” he said. Then he left the booth to get his supervisor.

They emptied their bags and pockets on the table regardless. Five firearms between them and enough ammunition for as many gunfights. Clothes both dirty and fresh enough. Food for a few more days. A canteen. An axe. Nothing expressly illegal, at least for her. Slake put her helmet with the rest of it but kept her armor on. A crowd of guards had gathered to watch it all get laid out and they gestured to bits and pieces like auction attendees, especially the machine gun. She undid the latch to the box of ket and took six strings from it, then thought about it and took another two. She was just closing the latches again when the Naiassen returned with a squat little Simälken woman in tow and they both stepped into the booth but the Naiassen stayed back while the cat did the talking.

“I understand that you are lacking some paperwork,” she said. Her accent was pretty good.

Slake put the ket on the counter and leaned in to talk. Shoreline waited behind with his hands in his pockets and watched the brightly lit faces in the crowd stare at the both of them. “We are,” she said. “I’m not sure we ever had any in the first place. But we’ve come from Hallatin and we’re both very tired after this journey and we would really hate to get turned away right at the end.”

“I understand,” said the Simälken. She had a nametag on but it ran left to right and Slake couldn’t read it. “And I would not like to be the person to turn you away.”

“Of course.” She pushed the ket forward. A few weeks’ pay for the Naiassen. Maybe a few days for her. “In Hallatin we have the same problem, lots of undesirables washing up on the walls. A good wealth check is usually enough to weed the useless ones out. We aren’t coming here as beggars, you understand.”

The Simälken took the ket and weighed an equal amount in both hands and looked at Slake and smiled. She spoke to the Naiassen in a quick and choppy tone and he nodded and took her place and produced two printed cardstock tickets. They had a semicircular crest on them and while she couldn’t read what was on them she made out that day’s date or some date similar to it. The ninth day of harvest season. She thought it would have been farther in. “These are your permits,” he told her. “Keep them on you at all times. The carrying of weapons both ceremonial and for self defence is prohibited under the penalty of death, so please keep those disassembled or otherwise stored away. Welcome to Barathrum.”

A tunnel with a grate over the floor took them to elevator four. It was a few trucklengths across and was three quarters full with people and goods. Tired looking people sat on top of the sacks and boxes of their imports and smoked. Animals snorted and stamped. It smelled like manure and diesel exhaust and oil. The woman with the donkeys had made it in and perhaps out of celebration she had broken open a small bottle of something that may have been wine and was drinking, her muzzle angled like a stalagmite and her cheeks ballooned, the bottle aswirl with bubbles. It took another twenty minutes for the lift to fill. Then the gates were closed and latched and a switch was thrown in another room and the lift lurched downward. Slake’s crotch shifted up to her chest for a moment but it settled soon after. It should have felt more familiar but it didn’t.

They went through two minutes of dark cavern with nothing but dull incandescent lights embedded in the wall for light. Everything was lit in motley shadows. Before her eyes could adjust to it they were in Barathrum proper. She heard Shoreline curse.

Barathrum had been built in the largest cavern in the world and despite the lights and the geissler glow and seemingly endless brick and stone and concrete sprawl of the city it went on so far that it turned bluish with the atmosphere and she couldn’t see the back end of it the way she was looking. The ground was half a kilometer down yet and the fumes that accumulated near the roof of the cavern made her cough. She bent over the rail to see it but was almost overwhelmed with vertigo and stepped back. It was a canal city not unlike the lower part of Hallatin with its neighbourhoods clearly and effectively separated with bridges over the wide stone-lined rivers. Different shades of light delineated it all from above, everything from gaslamps to cold electrics. She tried to find landmarks. They were descending into some kind of annex on a colossal building built into the cave wall in later imperial architectural style. She saw the smokestacks and the brilliant tentwork of the weaving district but she didn’t know that was what she was looking at. In the distance she thought she saw some kind of palace type structure but there was so much that she could hardly register anything. It just went on. Shoreline spoke and she gave up. “How many people do you think live here?” he asked.

“At least five million,” she told him. “No less than that. No way. I didn’t think it would be this big.”

“The pictures didn’t ever show the whole thing. Look.” He was leaning way over the railing, almost his whole upper half hanging out. When he took a hand off the rail to point she grabbed the back of his shirt just in case. “You can even make out the different neighbourhoods. The way all the lights are different.”

“Yeah.” You could do the same in Hallatin on the skywire. She had forgotten until he said something. “Do you think the gaslamps are the rich parts or the shitty parts?”

He squinted. She studied his profile. His flattened nose. They went by a bright light on the guiderail and she could see the veins in his ear and a circle of light where he had been shot and when the light caught his eye she thought she saw something happy in it that she herself felt none of. “I think they’re the shitty parts,” he said, “if we’re going by Hallatin standards. If you couldn’t pay the electricity tax, you got gas or you just burned wood or something.”

“I know that,” she told him.

“Yeah.”

They descended into a groinvaulted chamber made out to look like a train station from the surface, fashioned almost entirely from imported limestone. At this late hour there were very few trying to head to the surface and the marble tiles were largely empty. A clock ten Slakes across hung on the wall, no longer ticking, with a motionless gold banner on either end. She couldn’t tell from where but she heard the hiss of a train’s engine and figured there must be a switchyard nearby to ferry goods and people around. The floor drew near chains rattled and banged and the ride slowed. Then it hit the ground.

An attendant in yellow swung the gate open and shouted in the local tongue for everyone to leave and gestured for those who didn’t understand. They dismounted somewhere in the middle. The attendant bowed when Slake passed, she didn’t even notice. Standing there wide eyed and reeking of riverwater and the wilderness and clad in their army uniforms they looked like homecomers of a war, news of the end of which had only just reached them. There were signs along the wall and with no discussion between them they went over and looked through them until Slake saw the words rooms for rent beneath an ad for a brothel. 1100 Theodetros Gate, paid weekly. There were no maps but after some inquiry they found a policeman who spoke some Beotic and he gave them passable enough directions and they were off.

It was cool and humid outside the station. They went down the steps and caught a ride on a streetcar far too old to still be running. The conductor was about to turn Shoreline away but when she saw Slake she let them on and they stood near the middle and watched the city go by with their faces nearly pressed to the windows. The conductor eyed them in the mirror. A busy night out there. They went down Crown Avenue, then The Egret. Geissler lights in all the windows, symbols of status that painted the shirts of passersby shades they had not worn moments prior. Dark shapes of people in a teahouse window slouched at a bartop. Groups of Barathrumites passed under the circles of streetlight, a troupe of street preachers, children, one of whom was carrying a knife. The streetcar ground around a corner and paused and the doors swung open with a rush of cooler air. Taller buildings here. Lights behind all the windows. A butcher shop closed for the evening, a whole ham suspended in the front window, tomorrow to be replaced by salted fish.

They went over two bridges and at the first street after that they stepped off the streetcar onto the brickwork street. The doors hissed shut behind them and the car lurched and shook away. She was very tired all of a sudden. They were before a small public house in a four story brick building. A jungle of cables buzzed dangerously in a nest of transformers on one side but they paid it little mind. She surveyed the street. A horse drawn carriage ferrying someone, the wooden wheels clunking on the bricks. Music from somewhere. The constant low sound of traffic, of a city. She had almost forgotten it. The public house had a manylimbed icon of the sister Tsull as its logo with its name written in two languages in the mouth, The Ninth Leg. “It looks alright,” said Shoreline, and they went inside.

They asked for the landlady and were introduced to an Osamac woman with broad shoulders wearing a robe slung sashwise around her with one breast out. She showed them to an upholstered booth and sat down across from them, anticipating larger business from the Beowend. A fan spun above them. Glass bottles of liquor behind an oak counter. A busy enough night, there were drinkers in every seat but none standing. The landlady’s name was Ahha and she asked in decent Beotic whether the two would like a room. Slake took her pack off and set it beside her and dug out the box of ket. She could tell Ahha knew what it was by the way she inclined her head. “We’re looking for the best room you have,” said Slake.

“I can give you the best room on the fourth floor,” said Ahha. “It is clean already. One bed, but there is a lot of floor space. It has its own toilet and a balcony.”

“That’ll do. How much?”

She looked between the two of them. Slake had her hand on the top of the box and didn’t move her hand. Someone dropped a glass and Ahha’s eyes slid to one side then back to them. “Call it five hundred fifty a week.”

Slake unlatched the box and slid twice that across the table to her. The landlady put it away in seconds and stood up to get them the key.

They went up to the fourth floor over the creaking floorboards through old peeling wallpapered halls hung with posters of old Osamac family matriarchs and their many children, more women than men. Her eyelids were heavy. There was only one room on their floor and she put the key in and turned it and nudged the door open. It was as described. One room with one bed and a door to the balcony. The windows had bars on them. She threw her pack down and kicked her boots across to the far wall and set about taking her armor off while Shoreline inspected the washroom. It had a toilet and a shower and a sink and a mirror. “Wow,” he said.

They picked sides of the bed, Slake closest to the window. There was no argument to it, they both wanted the comfort and neither would confine the other to the hardwood. They changed into cleaner underclothes and laid down. She couldn’t even recall the last time she’d felt a proper mattress under her but it was exactly as good as she remembered and they were both asleep in minutes.

II - Absence

The two slept for two and a half days straight, hunger be damned. Light of many shades from Barathrum’s surface mirrors fell through the windows in the afternoon over their forms under the sheets and climbed the walls and went away again at night and left them in darkness. The windowblinds shifted in near silence, indifferent to the changing of shifts and passing of motorcars. They slept through a fight in the bar downstairs and they slept through a black and fuliginous deluge of condensation, long streaks of coalgrime dirtying the window panes and puddling on the balcony.

Blood pools over herringboned mahogany and stains papers sent flying in the maelstrom. Dust descends from the ancient ceiling beams. Two pairs of footsteps fade away down the hall.

A match is lit on a pant leg and held up very cautiously between the thumb and middle finger. Emaciated hands black with frostbite descend to warm themselves. The fire is caged by the wasted digits and through the chartaceous skin the paths of veins and bones sway in the light. The heat is not enough. The hands descend towards the flame.

Wood door. Sitting room. Here again. This is how it went and how it always goes. She was not born deaf but she did not listen and has been beaten twohanded with a paintbrush holder hard enough to leave little circular divots in the fur on her face. She lies there half conscious with the dusty morning sun. The woman standing over her has thrown the paint brush holder across the room and knocked over a jar of oil paint. Flecks of it have stained the floral wallpaper. The woman bends down. Has she killed her? Her child’s head moves to one side. Blank and listless eyes the same colour as hers. No. Just knocked some sense into her, that’s all.

Now an argument. A woman’s voice and a man’s. She heard most of it from the side room in what used to be a pantry. Her neck is in a brace and the room still smells of the burnt patchouli the medicine women left for her. You can’t even give me a good reason. You’re going to kill her. Well I fucking should. I would have. I should have and I don’t know why I didn’t.

I’ll tell you what. Pick. You get to pick. Either take her and begone from my name or shut up. Damn you, woman.

Slake woke up with one hand gripping Shoreline’s belly fur and another scrambling madly on the bedside table. Something in her ear was buzzing but it wasn’t a fly and though she was speaking she couldn’t hear herself. He awoke, bleary-eyed, and patted his side for a pistol that wasn’t there. Only the third time he said it did she hear him. “What? What is it?”

Her hand fell away. Everything in the room was as it was. There was dull orange morning light coming in through the window that the steel bars cut into contour lines that fell over everything. Slightly peeling wallpaper. The low rattle and rush of hot water through pipework somewhere below them, it shook the floor just slightly. Their gear all piled at the foot of the bed and their dirty travel clothes strewn on the floor. “Shit,” she said. She tried to will herself to breathe normally. It sort of worked but the noise in her ears abated only a little. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.” He rolled over and rubbed his eyes and sat up beside her with the sheets over his knees and coughed. A column of carriages was jouncing past in the street with a cargo of expensive silk bound for the elevators. The clicking of ironshod arachnid’s feet echoed in the room and went away. “How long were we asleep for?”

“I think more than a day. My throat is dry.”

“Yeah.” He looked at her. An angular beaked face silhouetted against the window. The artery in her neck pulsed. He contemplated it for a moment and nudged her knee with his. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“It was just a bad dream. That’s all. I need to piss.”

She stood up on shaky legs and stretched and went to the washroom and locked it out of habit and sat with an elbow on her knee and her head propped up in her hand. She almost fell back asleep but she didn’t. She turned the tap on and cleaned her hands and contemplated the water. No sign telling her not to drink it. The tap spat and hissed. She put her beak to it and it didn’t smell bad or of metal so she drank for a minute and stood up and wiped her beak with her hand and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hand almost went back up to her beak.

The Slake that was looking back at her from the mercury was thirty years older. The tips of her ears and her brow and her cheeks were grey and they had a sharpness to them that were not present just three seasons prior. Her eyes were set back deeper in her skull. A deep scratch scar on her cere. That hadn’t been there before. She ran a finger down it and tried to think back but had no clue where it came from. Even below the neck she was barely recognizable. Not much fat on her. Her collarbone showed through her fur like it was trying to fight its way out. No more of this. She turned the light off and left the room. Shoreline was lying widthwise across the bed and she thought he’d fallen back asleep but he raised his head when she came back in.

They sat on the balcony in their nightclothes and smoked and watched the city. They weren’t at roof level but they were near to it and looking down the street they could see a few blocks. The roofs here were mostly made of copper or slate and the buildings were quarried and cut from the limestone they were built on. It was decently warm. The streets were still wet from the condensation rain a few hours prior. After a while their gazes turned upward. Through the faint haze of smoke they could see the roof of the cave. It was studded with heavy metal supports and exhaust fans whirling endlessly. Huge panes of bowled glass that radiated orange light this time of day. It took them some time to realize that they were reflectors to let in light from the surface. It was still dark but not that dark. Power buzzed through the jungle of wires between them and the road. A troupe of children went by kicking a ball before them. “Are you hungry?” Slake asked eventually.

“Yeah. A bit.”

“I’m going to go get something.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”

She dressed in a thin cotton military chemise with the strings around the neck loose and a pair of plain trousers and went downstairs barefoot and asked for the landlady but she wasn’t in. Next she asked for the cook. It took some effort to communicate with the man behind the bar but eventually a young and rotund Čalo in a stained apron was hauled from the back room. He didn’t speak any Beotic and he looked very intimidated to be talking to a Beowend but he understood what she was after and went away nodding. The pub was quiet that morning. No one had been in to clean it yet and the tile floor shone with bootblack and spilled drinks. She eased into a booth and opened a copy of the Barathrum Issue printed one day prior but it wasn’t in any language she knew so she looked at the images and tried to piece it together. The front page bore a grainy image of a geriatric Simälken with a braid of headfur over each shoulder and a martenskin coat. Their writing used the same numbers as Beotic and the headline read something something something one hundred and three something. Or the reverse if it was right to left. She flipped the page. An illustration of a Beowend in profile. An illustration of some kind of loom with two wheels on one end. An ad for the same brand of cigarettes she preferred. There was a panel on the side with numbers and decimals next to words and she figured it must be prices of something but she had no way of knowing what. Surely you have some funnies in here. She leafed through it until she found them. Decent artists in Barathrum. One of the panels was part of a five day story and she stared at the final panel of a young Osamac man holding a walking stick leaning against a wall for a long time. A bell on the bar rang. Food.

She took it back upstairs and set it out on the desk not knowing at all what it was but it smelled incredible. There were three metal pots with two wooden bowls and spoons and forks. One pot had a kind of spicy smelling rice with shellfish. Another held stewed red meat and the third was a mushroom and fruit salad. They took it out to the balcony and ate and watched people go past in the street. “Are you going to try going out on the town?” she asked Shoreline with her beak full of food.

He swallowed before replying. “I’d like it if you asked if it was alright. Just so I don’t end up getting shot or anything.”

“I’ll do that. I know as long as you’re with me you’re alright but I don’t want to be a burden to you.”

“You’re not,” he told her. “But thanks. Maybe if I wear good clothes.”

She let Shoreline shower first and he was in it for an hour and a half but she didn’t mind. She put the previous day’s clothes on and leaned on the balcony railing and smoked. In another part of the city a bell chimed ten times. At this hour the skylights took on a greenish tint and the slate rooftops looked to be shaded by trees. The same band of children went by again the other way but they seemed to have lost the ball. One of them happened to look up, a young Osamac. Suddenly an audience of small faces, wide-eyed and dirty from play and altogether impish. The Osamac seemed to be appointed leader and he yelled something at her she couldn’t understand and she spat off the balcony. They were going to say more when she heard the voice of the landlady and they scattered like lightstricken beetles. When they were gone she sat down and didn’t do much of anything until she heard the water turn off.

Slake locked the door again out of habit and turned the water on. There was no fan in the room and the wall seemed to be sweating. A pipe shook in the ceiling and there was a faint brown stain over the sink that wasn’t there before. She felt the water and turned it down and got into the stained tub and stood there with her beak to her chest and her eyes closed while her fur flattened to her skin. Soon after she sat down with her legs out and her arms beside her like a discarded doll. The showerhead chugged and hissed. Shoreline had left a soapbucket behind and after a while she got up and brought it into the tub and washed.

The hot water quit twenty two minutes in but she was done by then and she got out and took a dryish peshtemal and toweled herself then grabbed both sides of the sink with her hands and shook and dried some more. She looked like she had been caught in a summer gale and struck by lightning. On the journey there in the halftrack she had trimmed her headfur twice, very crudely. It hung down to her shoulderblades in a loose heap and she spent some time tying it in the same long braid she always had, her head canted at her blurry mirror reflection. Three people in the room below were arguing. Or fighting. Dull thump against the wall. She stilled. Far below she could just make out the hiss of something cooking. She drank from the tap and went out. She dressed again in a buttoned chambray shirt and trousers with a good belt and suspenders and a worsted field shirt and just as she was about to ask if he needed anything she saw that Shoreline had fallen back asleep.

He had been most of the way through dressing when he had put his head down just for a moment. He had his arms outflung and one hand on the nightstand and his mouth slightly parted. When he breathed in he snored. She’d never heard such a noise from this silent sleeper. She quietly took the money case out from her bag and took a good amount and put it in three different pockets and tucked a few loose ket in her boots then pushed the case under the bed. She crossed the room and closed the blinds and turned the locklatch on the balcony door and left him there sleeping.

Down the sagging stairs and once more into the bar and through it and out into the street. Even at this prenoon hour it was dark enough in the streets that the shops needed their lights on and the shopfronts spilled uniform squares of fading light onto the brick streets but not enough to silhouette anyone within. She crossed the road behind a sixwheeled motorcar with her hands in her pockets and took a left on Hukk Avenue. The finest rain of dust or somesuch collected thinly on every surface save the roadside gutters through which small filthy rivers ran. A streetcar was coming down the street towards her and she held her hand up and it slowed. The doors convulsed open and she went in. The conductor addressed her as sir and she put some ket in the slot and went on and stood by the window with one hand on a railing while those who were making way for her cautiously lowered back into their seats. She held their attention only for a minute until the outside was more interesting again.

A harvest day in Barathrum. The streetcar turned onto a market street stuffed with rows of carts and stalls hawking leafy surface produce and cured meat and carpets. The second floor level powerlines were so dense that the streetcar’s was lost and it seemed they were entering a cave. The doors opened and stayed that way while the streetcar emptied itself through the rear door and refilled through the front, the structure lurching in two beats with each new or lost passenger like an aluminum heart. Familiar smells of the same season out east, the farmland brought to the city and with it the thick odour of fertilizer and ethylene. The wires soon parted to make room for a brickwalled trading house that the streetcar just went clean through. Here a cross section of the city. The wealthier of the salespeople stood under buzzing geissler lamps twisted into insignias of their business with their goods arranged on racks and on shelves. Others simply squatted on rugs with their local wares piled in waisthigh heaps around them, stacks of salted tunnel eels, jars of oil taken from the leg glands of lizards. The thin aisles were densely peopled by men and women of most species. Here among the everywomen there existed no real fashion. The women tended to have their ears heavily pierced and sagging with gold and silver but that was all. A lone child with one shoe drags a half-full sack of potatoes. Through a tear in the bottom one rolls loose and a thin hand darts from the trouserlegs seizes it. The streetcar banked slightly and went past a tank of near-translucent cave fish. A woman points to one and a Damoyen in a yellow smock bends to retrieve it with a net. Slake squinted. The woman asking for fish was a Beowend. She wore a purple cinched shirt and a suit vest in a style she hadn’t seen in Hallatin and was flanked by another of their species wearing a cuirass and under the dull incandescent light of the market she took on the same general hue as the rest of the crowd. The Damoyen handed her the fish and the streetcar banked again and emerged onto the street.

She stepped off the streetcar a few minutes later on Trouverie Mews and went south to the nearest canal. The road was busy with carriage and motor traffic and she stayed on the footpaths, a full head taller than the rest of the crowd. At the corner of Trouverie and 110th she went into a grocer’s for a drink. A low box of a room with shelves on every wall and bare bulbs suspended from the piped ceiling, the name of the establishment in the window shadowed on the herringboned floor from the streetlight outside. Behind the counter a young lizard mid-doze snapped to attention. She stopped in front of him and looked at the wares. Soaps and sardines and razors, some brands familiar, some not. “Give me some Gælends,” she told the shopkeep.

He looked at her uneasily then looked out at the street like she might have left her translator outside. With his waistcoat and sootcoloured shirt and walleyed and snaggletoothed face he looked like something off a wanted poster. “Nay tiegium vé, šaba.”

“Cigarettes.” She pointed across the counter at the brand she wanted. The expensive kind. “Gælend. Two boxes.” Two fingers. She waved them at him, he got the message. She slid the ket onto the counter and was about to leave when she saw the bottles of soda silhouetted in the window. “Actually, I’ll take one of those too. Soda. The bottle.”

On a bridge over the Barathrum River it started to rain. Here underground where the rain came from ceiling condensation it fell straight down, no wind to catch it. Anonymous pedestrians buttoned their collars and hunched their shoulders and walked faster, motorcars pulled over to hoist their canvas roofs. Here and there the fwoomp of an umbrella. It was now noon in the underground metropolis and with the coming of rain electric lights flickered on in the windows, distorted in the quietly ferocious wakes of the undertow. Two bends down the river the stacks of the factory district stood silently over the boroughs, thin lines of steam and smoke drifting straight up from the tops. Each one bore a company crest and lettering, some Beotic some not. Senovra’s Arachnids. Boscobel Weaving Company. Spotlights swung through the mist and cut across the ceiling like advertisements for a travelling funfair. Slake stood in a dry patch beneath an arch with a statue of a horsewoman on it and smoked and drank her soda and read the smokestacks. It would be nice to get out of a uniform. In Hallatin anything from the Weaving District cost a fortune. She tried to recall who she knew who wore that silk hat but she couldn’t think of the name. When the rain stopped she pitched her empty bottle into the river and made for the stacks.

She went down Waterfront Avenue along the river and stayed in the low corrugated awnings and overhangs to keep from the rain, the cheap iron roofs banging percussively in the downpour. The scent of chemicals got stronger, the houses faded away and in their place were dusty and heavily trafficked stores with gowns and coats in the windows and smartly dressed children out front waving signs and grabbing Slake by the arm to pull her inside. The fifth one that grabbed her was a young girl in a pleated skirt and half an evening dress. She yammered something to the Beowend. Come inside, come inside. “You better not grab me,” she said. The girl tugged at her arm all the harder. She wheeled around and drove her knee into her little ribs and she dropped away to her knees, her reptile eyes wide and her breath coming in sharp gasps. A man headed down the footpath towards her checked and crossed the street. She didn’t look back.

Now a world of brick and concrete and the strong scent of urine and the din of the weaving machines, still running one hundred and fifty years later. The factories had high walls and uniform copper ceilings and were invariably decorated with stained glass of a religious nature, each window a different scene or Sister or other local figure. Strands of torn and wasted threads sat like the limbs of squids in the gutters, shifting and sootblacked with rainwater. Here the roads are half rail, little steamengines shuffle past, chugging, piled with silk and young boys ferrying to their shifts. A breakwhistle sounded somewhere. She went past the faded side mural of the Boscobel plant and took a left onto Fourth where ribbons on strings hang limp and dead like fish strung over the road and the lightwires. A phorotid was being brought down the street, she knew the name only from old textbooks. She backed up against a pipe railing to watch it. It was bigger than she thought, not the size of a train car but maybe half that. There was one man per leg with a chain held taught in their hands and they were heaving and shifting like rowers, moving one leg at a time. The beast shuddered and swayed and swung its drooling mandibles. It must be drugged. Its cephalothorax was branded in the middle with the number 449. It paused in the street near her and rolled forward and drove its head into the ground, its insect mouth hammering the bricks with a sound not dissimilar to a woodpecker. A woman behind it in a company dress uniform and caned its bulbous abdomen until it moved again and they carried on.

There were company stores here but she didn’t speak the language and the few shopkeepers who spoke Beotic didn’t speak it well enough for her. Soon she left the factories behind and went into the market. It hadn’t stopped raining. Weavers and salespeople sat beneath canopies or leaned in the doorway of little brick shops built right to the side of the path and smoked and checked the rocky sky as if to gauge when it might end. There were outlets at all price points. Some were little more than overturned trailers propped up with pallet wood but she wasn’t after those. There were more phorotidae here, smaller, larger, all caged, some upside down with their spinnerets hooked to wheels that turned slowly, long threads of gossamer shining under the lamplight. Slake figured that sericulture must be the more accessible way to make clothes here. By the end of the street she had bought a new undershirt and some socks and was about to give up when she saw a shop labelled Hallatin Fashions. It didn’t look like much. Just a little five meter wide slot in a low brick building. Water hosed from the gutter next to the door. She examined the windows. Posters from her home city. Fashion four years out of date. She went in.

The shop was kept by an elderly Simälken from Hallatin and it was bigger on the inside than it looked but no less cluttered for it. Every wall lined with shelves and racks of garments, the waterstained ceiling invisible, shrouded by clotheslines with shoes and boots tied to them by their laces for display. Bins of socks, undergarments, boxes full of thread and fabrics made from foreign wool for sale in bulk only. The door shut behind her with the quiet ding of a bell. It smelled heavily of mothballs. She decided that she liked the place. The tailor rose from behind his desk and put his glasses on and tilted his head up to get a better look at her. “Hello,” said Slake. “Do you speak Beotic?”

“I most certainly do.” A damtop accent, lightly tinted from years away but no less present. He climbed out from behind the counter, a wizened old cat with grey fur and white whiskers that stuck out almost an armlength from his muzzle. “What can I help you with?”

He led her down the aisles to a clear spot in the back with a desk and tools and a small booth for changing. The old concrete floor was scuffed and pockmarked in a small circle where thousands had stood and shuffled and turned. He stood her up against a wall with measurements marked against it and took her height. One hundred and eighty three centimeters. There was a bodysized mirror near her and she tried not to look at it. “I can’t remember the last time I got measured up like this,” she told him.

“That’s alright. I have people in here all the time who’ve never had it done at all.” He sat there with his measuring tape in one hand and his glasses agleam in the dull electric light and his back bent almost thirty degrees. “Are you looking for any fashion in particular? Festival dresses, riding wear?”

“I don’t really know. No dresses. As long as it’s clean I don’t care.”

“Alright. Do you know your measurements?”

She told him. He looked incredulous. “Would you mind terribly if I double checked that, madam?”

“Not at all.”

She held her arms out and he put the tape around her shoulders and her chest and hips and took quick measurements. “Well,” he said. He tapped his foot on the ground and put the tape back down on the desk. “I’m willing to wager it’s been quite a while since you were measured last.”

“At least four years. I thought I quit growing at sixteen. Did I shrink?”

“Quite the opposite. Your waist is the same but your shoulders have grown considerably.”

“Oh.” The shopkeep waited for more but she didn’t offer any explanation.

He walked her down the crowded aisles again and pressed clothes into her hand. Some familiar brands, some not. Boscobel. Northern Shore Tailors. He asked for input but she could offer little and she felt herself gradually numbed the more clothing she held. It was half menswear, more fitting for her body. Fifteen minutes later they were back at the desk with everything piled up on the floor beside her. He divided it into outfits and pushed them forward at her and ushered her into the booth to try it all on.

She put the outfits on and stepped out of the booth and examined herself in the mirror eight times. A horse-riding outfit fashioned from silk and wool. A long leather overcoat with suspenders. Yes, yes, said the Simälken, very good fit indeed. Two different suits made from gabardine, one blue, one dull dark brown with a waistcoat and a high collar. She tried rolling up the sleeves but he told her she mustn’t do that. In none of the reflections did she see anyone resembling herself. A storefront model of Slake morelike. The tailor tried to talk to her about Hallatin but she gave him few-word replies until he stopped. The last outfit she tried was a simple waistcoat with a subtle floral pattern on the left breast. Before the tailor spoke she raised her hand and his mouth snapped shut audibly. “Do you have anything surplus?” she asked.

He canted his head. “I beg your pardon?”

“Surplus. You know, military surplus. Uniforms and such.”

“Um.” He looked at the stack of discarded clothing next to the booth. The incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered and buzzed. “Well. I’ve got a bit, I think, some old Kard stock. Is that alright?”

“Let me see it.”

He came back with a heap of old uniforms her size and she selected an outfit and tried it on and stepped out. She chose a greyblue overcoat with black buttons a white undershirt and some grey trousers and she wore the front undone. A previous owner had written Kabasilis on the inside. She raised her arm and sniffed. Mothballs. Mildew. “This’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll take the coat and those three shirts, and those pants. And the officer’s belt with the strap, too.”

“Of course. A hat would go well with the overcoat. Perhaps a good leather slouch hat?”

“No, thank you. I don’t wear hats.”

She waited out front and smoked while he adjusted the outfits. An amaranth light filtered through the mirrors and tinted the tops of the tents and the rooftiles beyond. He called her back inside and she paid him. She gave him an extra string of ket and he tried to push it back but she refused. “I’ve got too much,” she told him.

He saw her to the door and waved goodbye. She returned the gesture over her shoulder and put her fourfingered hand in her pocket, the bag in the other. “Come back again,” he called, but she wasn’t listening.

It was still raining but not as much. Slake picked out the roofs of the city over the market stalls and made her way to them, not bothering to avoid the puddles. Drops of water beaded on her new jacket and drove dark paths down the side of her beak. What now. Well. It would be a waste not to follow up, wouldn’t it?

The door to Hallatin Fashions swung open again. The Simälken was sewing a leather patch into a pair of gloves and when the bell rang he looked up to see the Beowend standing there outlined against a geissler tube sign across the street looking very much like a collector of debts in some motion picture. “One more thing. Where can I find a place that’s got public records for me to look through, and are there any gunsmiths around here that can fix a pistol?”

A grey-furred and redclad archivist led her through the Barathrum City Archives down a long hall. It was a tall stone building by the train station with huge iron doors that swung open on rails embedded in the concrete and staffed by old men and women but mostly women in matching red robes. The ceiling was no less than fifteen meters up in this long hall down which they walked and the arches were studded with air vents that murmured constantly to keep the place dry. On the left wall leadlights in the shapes of Conquerors bearing spears let in the winecoloured evening light. The archivist leading Slake along was an old Beowend who went by the name of Hout and only Hout and other than their footsteps and the fans it was very quiet in the hall. They went to the end of the hall and took a right and went up the marble stairs. A big fan swished over the circular room, above then at eye level then below as they climbed. Past that a door was marked Residences. Slake stepped ahead to get it for Hout. “Thank you very much,” the old woman said.

Aisles and aisles of books and archive boxes, the rich smell of old paper and wood. Through the gaps she could see a central chamber from which the rapid mechanical song of a typewriter reached her. Old teak floors that creaked every few steps. It made her think of Hallatin more than she would have liked and she tried to ignore it. The aisles were denoted by species with about half the space devoted to Beowend and further subdivided by name. “These are all still in order?” she asked.

Hout was bent almost forty-five degrees at the waist and had her hands clasped above her tail, greying white fingers splayed like small peacock’s feathers. She just looked up at Slake and smiled and Slake went down the second E aisle, running her finger along the emarginate edge of the middle shelf, prints in the dust. Eupariadis. Eupara. Euperre. Euphurre. Eupidian. She stopped and went along it again and checked the shelves up and down and thumbed away the dust to check the nameplates and looked between the bound folders to see if anything had fallen through but nothing had. No record of her blood ever having been here at all. She backed out of the E aisle and went on up a spiral staircase to the second level. The S aisles stretched on for a while. There were two boxes labelled Staurakimos, a common surname at that time. She grabbed the likelier looking one. “Would you mind if I looked through this?” she asked Hout.

“Not at all,” she croaked.

Now an old kingwood desk, deeply pencilmarked and lit with a banklamp. She set the box down and fanned the files with her thumb until she found a fat file marked Staurakimos Ketas. She took it out carefully, the manila frail, delicate as pressed flowers in her hand. She set the lid back on the box and nudged it aside and opened it up. The most recent addition to the file was a two-page death certificate and it was old enough that it bore the seal of the Imperial Dominion of Meropis and used certain other old measurements. Name of deceased person, Staurakimos Ketas. Male. Date of birth, ninth day of the month of flaying, 305. Deceased on the fifty-eighth day of the month of lumber, 349. Ninety-four years ago. Two years after the retreat. Cause of death, Red Island Fever. Slake looked at that line for some time. Then she set it aside and looked through everything else.

Staurakimos Ketas was a cultural anthropologist at the Barathrum Institute of Sciences & Technology and he held a doctorate in the same subject he studied, a faded old certificate with signatures of forgotten deans and professors turned colleagues. His birth name had been Gainne. Tintypes to go with it all. A portrait of a handsome young man with glasses in a grey dress uniform and a sabre at his shoulder, a canted slouch hat. She couldn’t tell what colour his fur or eyes were but both were dark. Next a photo of his graduating class. Him third from the right, top row. Her own great grandmother at his left, but she didn’t recognize that. Yet more pictures. Himself and a woman in a photobooth with their hands together, the reflection of the flashbulb putting stars in their eyes. Four young children, three boys and one girl.

She looked for their documents and she found three death certificates for Staurakimos Alsas, Muvenna, and Atti and they were dated the same day as their father’s. A team of men cut the locks off a townhouse door in the Silver Lamp District and pick their way inside. The townhouse is hotter than the outside and the men wear masks and are all carrying shotguns. They go through the kitchen. The cellar door is locked. They take note of that. Up the stairs now where the smell is worse. Three children dead in their rooms, two in their beds with the sheets torn up around their hands and a young boy sprawled in a pile on the floor like a murder victim. In the master bedroom there is a constant thumping noise. They yell a warning and the sound ceases. A week later the Silver Lamp District was burned and stoned over and turned into factory land. Here is a death certificate for the woman of the household from one day later.

The last surviving member of the family was boarded at a school when his home was quarantined and his name was Staurakimos Callace. She went through what she could find of him but there was very little. He lived in the city until he turned fifteen and had been arrested twice in that year of his life for public violence. That same year he was employed in a mine, as far as she could tell. All she had of that was a very plain paystub submitted as proof of ability to pay rent, no address. Past that there was nothing. Callace simply was no more and this branch of the Staurakimos line ended. Hout was seated next to her and had been silent. She passed her the paystub and pointed at the date. “Were there any mine accidents or disasters around then?” she asked.

Hout tilted her head back and squinted at the stub with greying eyes, holding it at length as if to keep some reek from her nares. “There have been a lot of mine accidents here,” she said. “So yes, probably. We keep old newspapers as well, if you’d like to look through those.”

She took the paystub back and looked at it. Two-hundred and six ket every ten days. She scratched her cheek. “No thank you. Does the Barathrum Institute of Sciences and Technology exist anymore?”

“Only physically. It’s sat empty for about seventy years now. Most of the professors were called home, the ones who stayed died and that was that.”

The Staurakimos line is gone. There are no leads. His office has been rummaged, ransacked. Maybe ninety years ago there’d’ve been something but now there is not. You need to think about that. This box is all there’s going to be. She folded the paystub again, very carefully, and slid it back into its folder and put it all back in the box. “Thanks for your time,” she said.

It was midevening when the parade went down Station Street. Every year at the height of the harvest season the same loud festival, a stream of luminous colour cutting through the streets, one long ribbon of torchlight and lamps and the hooting of passersby and loud music from the horners and bands. As is customary the cavalry leads it, twenty-six men in polished steel armor from head to toe and with flags affixed to their backs and their horses clad in yellow, their rifles bayoneted and held high, the clopping of their shod feet echoing even over the cheers. The Magistrate follows them in a sixwheeled motorcar, a shrivelled old artifact of a Simälken in a golden robe who leans this way and that and tilts his hand gently like something catching the wind. Flowers and ket are scattered before him, everyone trying to hit the wheels of the car. The ket goes skipping over the cobblestone across the road where young children wait with their hats in their hands to catch it, the fur on their necks bristled in preparation for the inevitable scrap over it. The floats follow. Platforms of gold and green with bundles of tripwheat and peas and melons the size of torsos line the edges, women with their faces painted and long flowing dresses dance between them, a ritual circular three-step. They raise their wooden swords at the third and turn and knock the one behind them, throw, catch them by the handle, step on. A plaster icon of Tsull moves past, each limb moved by a team of men inside them. Whomever they touch in the crowds lining the street must run in and pass through the wide lamplit genitalia on the front and pass through the back and return to where they were, now covered in paint. Confetti falls out of what seems like nowhere. The horns play on.

Slake moved through the crowd like a fugitive, having seen such parades before. To see a familiar scene done anew in a foreign city ought to have sparked something in her, she thought, but it didn’t. Just a repetition of a repetition, look closely and you can see the wear in Tsull’s plaster, the cracking of the amber eyes and the legs shuffling under the tentacles. The half-drunken crowd paid her no mind. She was going by a public house called The Port Lights when she passed two people putting up a poster, nudging it into place with a broom. Do not stop. Just go on. She stopped and watched.

The poster bore a dozen or so old images of people. She recognized one immediately. It was an image of a young human woman, dark of skin and eye and dressed in the best dress her family owned, giving the camera a flat look. Not nine weeks ago she had looked down at that same woman and shot her between the eyes. Next to her, a sallow and roundfaced infant, blurred where it had moved when the picture was taken. She couldn’t understand what the poster was saying but she could recognize the Kard Electric Company’s logo and the rest could be understood pretty well from there. Some sort of violent message. The Scrounger who’d been holding the broom nudged the last corner into place and he and his partner took their roll of posters and moved on. She watched them go, the distorted image of her in the pub window likewise turning its head. The pub was on a rise in the street and from where she was she couldn’t see all of Barathrum she could see a good piece of it. The smoke from the chimneys, the parade stretching for kilometers down the road and every last bit of sidewalk strangled with people but they seemed to flow around her, no one daring to touch the Beowend whether she be blocking their path or not. A troupe of hornplayers blew their swinging tune that came back twice off the buildings and standing there watching the parade with a bag of new clothes in her hand it hit her. There is nothing for you here. No answers. No solutions. And what have you brought with you? She looked at the poster again and went on, shuffling through the crowds, taking the rest of the evening to find her way back to Shoreline.

III - Old Ways

Two long days of sleep and very little else. They slept through the day, they slept through the afternoon. They descended on the public house like attic ghosts in the quietest hours of night and took their meals in a booth. They sat on the balcony and watched the city, the damp and worn shape of it stretching towards the distant cave walls, smoke rising straight up from the chimneys. At night when the mirrorlights fade the streets are filled with light like gold fillings in broken black pottery. On the second evening Shoreline told her he wanted his fur cut.

He sat on the rim of the bath and pulled his shirt off while she looked for scissors. There were some under the sink. She snipped a loose strand on her wrist to see if it would cut and it did. He looked in the mirror at himself and tilted his head from side to side like an animal not knowing whether to make friend or foe of its reflection. His white fur fell about the sides of his head, greasy and half matted. Slake went to his side and pondered his head but his past wounds were of greater concern and she was soon looking at them instead. The crossbow wound had healed well enough but there would always be a divot where he’d been shot, always pain when he lifted his arm above a certain point. There was little to do about it from her but he was alive. A proper chirurgeon you are. He ran his hand up his ear and looked at her, grinning. “Do you do manicures, too?”

They settled on him sitting in the tub with a hand mirror held up but he didn’t care much how it turned out as long as it was shorter and she got to work. She cut the tufts off his ears and went down the sides of his head and back up to the front, holding up one section at a time, squinting. She cut all along his jaw and the back of his neck and the top of his head, the quiet silvery sound of the scissors melding with the noise of the building, the water in the pipes, the kitchen fan below. Tresses of white fur dropped to the tub. In the end she cut it all short and it looked alright. He turned the faucet on and let it go warm then put his head under the water and came up quickly, a semicircle of droplets sent ceilingward. Then he took the mirror again and looked at himself. How many years since he’d been cleaned up like this. “How did I do?” Slake asked.

“Wow,” he said. “It feels like I’ve taken off a hat I didn’t know I had on.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if I took off half a kilogram of hair. You were pretty shaggy.”

“Not anymore.” He rose from the tub and pushed his cut fur into a pile. “Do you want yours done?”

“No.” She took the base of her long plait of headfur and brought it around to her front. “I’ll stick with what I have.”

They ate a lunch of pork and gravy and cave peas on the balcony and discussed plans. The condensation was heavy again that day and it fell in soft half-misted waves, pattering quietly on the rooftops. She brought out the box of ket and they counted it up. It would last them a while but never as long as that much money ought to and they decided they’d need jobs before too long. Next the issue of rent. This room was fine. No need to move. Fix the gun. New clothes for Shoreline. That was as far as their plans went.

She took twenty-two strings of ket down to the pub. It was late in the afternoon and the first of the after work crowd was coming in, greasy women and men in stained overalls, all coworkers at a tire plant. They took seats far from her and watched her with a sort of subdued apprehension. She told the barwoman to get Ahha for her and waited, tapping her foot. Grainy piano creaked from a radio somewhere. The sign in the window buzzed like jarred flies. Ahha came out through the kitchen with a young child on her hip, a fat, scaled, and scared-looking little thing wearing a burlap sack. “Madam Euphrosyne,” she said, her huge hand splaying on the counter.

Slake put the ket down on the counter. The barwoman eyed the money, counting. “We’ll be staying at least another four weeks, if you’ll have us.”

“Of course.” The money vanished. She simply passed her hand over it and took it all up and put it into the pocket of her dress. “Was that all?”

“Yes. No. One more thing. Can Nyctians go out in the streets here alright?”

Not a question she expected. The Osamac looked at the street and thumbed at her long sabre tooth, thinking. “Well. I don’t see them walking around but I never heard of one getting killed, either. I just don’t think anyone would know what to make of him.”

“I get the feeling he’s used to that. Thanks.”

She took a sinecure at the Barathrum City Archives. All that was required of her was passing mention of a degree and she was given a red robe and a desk and told to stack, organise, put in boxes, file away. She was checked on once a day and spent most of her time walking the grand halls looking busy, lost in the intestinal marble depths of the place. In one of the sublevels she found a metal door behind which something clicked and whirred, locked. Maybe come back here one night. Floor two, a memorial dome to Beowend born in Barathrum and lost in a foreign war, the walls etched with thousands of names and small faces. She ran her finger in the grooved letters and looked for Euphrosyne and Staurakimos but found nothing. Her footsteps stir clouds of dust from the hardwood. On the roof there was a small garden that was once lush but was overrun by cave life years ago. Mushrooms of her height or greater sprouted from the old mulch, damp and rancid mycelium webbed the floor. The rain was harder up there and she pulled her hood up to keep it off and went to lean on the ledge. The city faded quickly in the rain. When her shift was done at six she went home and changed and would not let herself return until she’d hurt someone. Half an hour later she pushed open the door of the Gunena Hotel.

It was a place much like the one she rented from but bigger, more crowded, not a sign in Beotic to be seen. Fans lazily nudged the tobacco air above the booths and the round card tables, painted orange from the light in the windows. The wallpaper was covered in posters of nude women tilted at odd angles, poor attempts at covering holes. She stood in the doorway in complete silhouette. People watched her, none of her species, few afraid to harm a Beowend. Then she went in and shut the door behind her and went to the bar. “Beotic?” she asked.

The bartender was a little Damoyen who could not have been an adult. He wore a waistcoat stained with wine and old spirits and he just nodded to her, looking away, the both of them conscious of her purpose. She put five ket on the bar. “Whatever I can get with that. What tables are open?”

Soon she was sat at a table with four other Damoyen, all male, all inebriated or getting there and none looked happy to play with a Beowend. The card dealer was the bartender’s brother and almost as young and gave her her cards like they’d burn his hand if he held them any longer. She lifted the round edges. Six cups, mace, Argei. She bet fifteen ket and pushed Argei forward face down. The man to her left knocked. The second bet twenty and pushed. Knock. Knock. “Qawh,” said the dealer. They turned over. Twelve cups from him. The ket went to her.

She put mace forward with ten ket and kept her eyes on the second man. His foot thumped steadily against a worn spot on the floor and he was staring half-liddedly at his cards. The first man bet five and pushed. The second man pushed and bet another twenty. Knock. Push, five ket. Qawh. They turned. The dealer was just giving her the ket when the man got to his feet.

A roughlooking man, maybe forty, with yellow teeth and a rot in his gums on the left side and greasy fur, one ear cropped where the turning of an industrial belt had torn it away. He bent to one side and corrected himself. His friend put a hand on his wrist but he yanked it away and yelled. There would be no losing money to a Beowend today. When everyone was looking at him Slake put her glass in her pocket and tilted her head at him. “Outside,” she said, and went for the door.

She went out and to the side of the door and took the glass out. A heavy tumbler with a diamond pattern at the base, hard and cold like a river stone. She pulled her sleeve down and wrapped her hand in the fabric and held it tight. When the Damoyen opened the door she swung it as hard as she could and broke his nose.

He went backwards through the doorway with one arm at his face and the other arm flailing to grab at her, screaming. She leapt on him and seized him by the neck and they went to the ground. Already the tables were clearing and people were flattening their backs to the walls, more than one shootout having started in this same fashion in this same room. The Damoyen took Slake by the shirt and reared back and headbutted her, the dull whump of his skull against hers enough to shake the floor. She shook her head and drove her fist into his cheek, again, tufts of fur coming away where her nails caught. The man’s friends stood nearby unsure of what to do. He was grabbing at her shoulder when she took him by the ears and lifted his head and slammed it onto the tiles and she did this until he stopped moving.

She got up and stood there over her limp adversary, breathing hard. He was bleeding heavily from the nose, Slake with her bloody beak and torn shirt looming over him like some wilderness horror that keeps its dead prey in bars. Drops of blood were leaking from her face onto the man’s trousers. She didn’t remember biting her tongue but she must have. The spectators were starting to come away from the wall slowly, the barkid had vanished. Go. She backed out slowly, then ran for home without so much as a pause for breath.

So began a spree of violence. In the mornings she put on her red robe and reported to the archives and typed letters and death records and in the evenings she descended like a sickness on the bars and pubs and alehouses of Barathrum to get into fights and she was obliged wherever she went. In a public house called The Misery Whip she took a pack of cigarettes from a table and was followed into the washroom by its owner and she beat her, the mark’s back against the stall, Slake’s fist thudding into her abdomen. In The Hand And Sabre a man confronts her about her accent. She has read books of foreign languages at her work and calls him something ghastly. Within minutes a windowpane is broken and the two are in the street with glass lodged in their arms and hands. At a warren of a place with no name peopled exclusively by Scroungers she was refused entry at the door and she swung downward at the doorminder. She was not trained but she was big and vicious and she used sand, glass cups, bottles.

She saw Shoreline very little and he saw little of her, each avoiding the other for different reasons. She took care to get home when he was absent so he wouldn’t see her wounded. He came and went at odd hours of the evening, taking a bit of money with him each time. She thought about where he’d be spending it but she really didn’t care.

On the third week of this she was cornered in an alley by men more vicious than her and was stabbed just below the ribcage and beaten badly. They emptied her pockets and she lay there in the wrack of wet paper and oilslicks and translucent moss while their footsteps receded. A cold day in Barathrum, the rain was falling sideways but at its angle it wasn’t falling on her. She stared up at the bricks of the building opposite her. A curtain opens briefly, a dark face shadows it and goes away again. Insects swarm around a bare incandescent bulb. Her blood mixed with the rainwater and carried off in the gutter. She watched it go from red to pink as it got further from her. After a while she got up and limped home.

She slouched up the steps to the fourth floor and leaned into the door and tried the handle but it was locked. She felt her pockets for her keys but they were not there and she brought her palm onto the door a few times. Faint click of a lightswitch inside, a rummaging sound like something caught in a trashbin. She heard the chain fall away and leaned back against the frame to keep from falling inward when the door opened. Two Shorelines were standing there blinking sleep from their eyes. She blinked and then there was just the one. When he saw her he woke up immediately. “What the fuck happened to you?” he asked.

“I got in a fight.”

“Get in here and sit on the bed. Where are you bleeding from?”

“The ribs,” she told him. She went over to the bed but he beat her there and put a spare sheet that he fished out of a closet over her side of it. She sat on the edge and bent down to undo her boots but her head was pounding just reaching an arm out turned the edge of everything grey and she opted for just sitting there holding her chest.

He came back out of the washroom with a metal first aid kit he’d put together and put it on his side of the bed and took what he needed. Gauze, scissors, cotton swabs, ethanol. “Get your shirt off,” he said, and she did. It hit the floor with a noisy splat. She laid back, Shoreline’s blurry figure hovering there in the light with implements of pain in one hand and the tang of disinfectant summoning memories of dentist’s chairs. She thought she heard the whine of a saw but it was just the same ringing in her ears. He came around the side of her and looked at the wound in her chest, a short laceration filled with dirt and bits of cloth and glittering like fool’s gold with glass. “That’s fucking terrible. Did you get stabbed?”

“Just once,” she said. She lay there with one arm across her forehead and started to hurt more and more and she started to figure she must have crossed more drunks than she remembered. She had cut her tongue and bent a finger at an angle it ought not to have been in and one shin hurt very badly and the other wasn’t far behind it and one of her feet was wet and it wasn’t from the rain. She took a breath to test the limits of her chest but halfway through the inhale it felt like the knife had found its way back in, that the very act had summoned it from whatever bin it had been disposed of in. Does it hurt when you do that? Do what? Breathe. Does it hurt. Yeah. Then quit doing it. Something to consider.

Shoreline took her by the beak and pried it open and dropped two pills in. “Swallow.” She did. “Alright. Now we have to get you up and into the bathtub. If we don’t wash that you’re gonna catch your death.”

He took her under the arm as he had done before in another part of the continent and put the other arm over his shoulder and walked her very gently into the washroom, like you might help a geriatric along. Subtle thump of his heart into her side. He bent down and reached for the tap with her bending in tandem like a scarecrow on a pole and got the water warm and lifted her in. He said something about picking glass out of her. Past that she was hardly there.

Slake got up and steadied herself and held a hand to her ribs and it felt fine. Normal. When she went to look in the mirror the only thing she saw was the back of Shoreline’s head near the bottom edge of it next to the sink. He was kneeling next to the tub with a wooden cup in one hand and he had her hand up over his shoulder to keep it out of his way while he laved water over her gently, carefully, a slow stream pouring from the edge of the cup clear and running her lower back pink and dirty. It looked like something he had practised a lot and he had, this and many other knife related things. She bent to watch him work. He kept washing it until the water was coming away without any debris, then picked up a little pair of tweezers and bent in and squinted. Around the jagged center of the wound were small pieces of brown glass dug into her dark flesh. A bottle. Not a knife, a bottle. He parted her fur with his fingers and reached in very slowly and took one with the tweezers and pulled and it came loose. Next one. There was a lot to get out. You ought to just let him work.

She backed out of the room and crossed the room to the balcony and walked through the door, the muted tin sound of the rain rising instantly when her head passed through the glass. The harvest season was always rainy in Barathrum but moreso this year. In this damp hour manholes steamed like chimneys and the filthy rainwater lay like pools of space from which the stars had been stolen. A low mist from the rivers coursed over the brickwork and into the alleyways. Nightworkers and insomniacs moved leukocytically in the street with their oilcloth coats and umbrellas shining in chameleon hues, red past this sign, green past another. A grande horizontale by the corner under the light with her arms crossed and her shoulders drawn in, she called to a passerby who tilted his head to show her his wedding torc and kept walking. Electric lights blinked on the far ceiling of the cave, winking in the rain. She leaned against the railing and bent over it weightlessly to let the rain hit the back of her head. In the pub below someone was singing and she saw shapes moving in the incandescent parallelogram cast into the street. Nothing here. You may as well have stayed home and put the blindfold on and stood up against the wall yourself and just waited for the firing squad to come along.

She went back through the glass door and through the apartment. Two forty six in the morning, so said the clock. On a table by the foot of their bed Shoreline had mounted a vise to a table and in it was a piece of wood stolen from the lumber yard he worked in, slowly being carved into a stock for his shotgun. Wood peelings and sawdust covered the floor around it. A good cut of wood, no rot, carved well. He’d have to be up for work in three hours. You in four. Nothing to be done about it. She went on through the front door.

Slake passed down the stairs in silence and into the pub where Ahha was rousing sleeping drunks from their stools and tables and either showing or carrying them to the door. The floor shone with spilled liquor and grease. She threw someone into the street and dusted her hands on her dress and hollered something out at them. Slake went on. In through the kitchen now where the stoves had gone silent, the small fishscale tiles mopped and swept. The cook was sat on a stool in the corner, a cigarette in his mouth and a drink beside him and the newspaper open in his lap. She looked around but she had seen such kitchens before and she carried on through the open back door into the alley, a sodden and dark example of one, one incandescent bulb burning over the door. She looked up and down it. Doors to other apartments. A stairway down to a basement or boiler room. There we go. Down the stairs to a door slung across with chains, fastened from iron, welded, NO ENTRY painted on the front in a language she couldn’t read. The well at the bottom of the staircase had a grate but it was crowded with weeds and dirt and fragments of crushed cans and jellyfishesque condoms and the water came up to her ankles. She put a hand to the door and knocked. Bong bong. Not filled in or collapsed, just welded.

The basement was a charred hulk of a boiler room, the water waist-deep down the last two steps and the surface oily, stagnant, filthy with trash and wood splinters and a dusting of ash. The ceiling supports were rusted almost to nothing and buckling in and the boilers looked like oversized barrels in which the giant homeless might light a fire and warm themselves. She waded through it without disturbing the water and stared through the pitch blackness. Chips on the wall. No. She went up and put a finger in one and dug around and fished out a flattened coin of lead. They went in a close zigzag pattern, like someone had stood in the doorway and swept the muzzle from one side to the other. She touched the wall again and her hand came away black with soot. Shot up then burned.

She left the boiler room and went on into the basement hall of the tenement. More ash, the whole place had been flushed out with fire, men with flamethrowers working through it and into every room and back again, the wallpaper long gone and the wood rotted. The ceiling was raw concrete and it curved overhead like a culvert. No sound at all but the quiet drip of water. The concrete walls were completely eaten with mould and huge polypores with long tendrils hanging from the edges. She went very slowly down the hall with her arms up over the water even though she couldn’t get wet. Basement apartments down here, old metal doors corroded beyond recognition but the numbers were oddly intact. 011. 012. Someone ran past on the next floor up. The bassy footfalls approached and passed and shook dust and spores and asbestos from the ceiling and faded away. She picked apartment 015 and went in, ducking under the remaining upper half of the door.

She came up on the other side face to face with a gaunt black skull. “Shit,” she said, falling backwards through the door and into the water soundlessly, her arms pulling her to the surface. She got up and looked at the door again and listened to her heart until it slowed a little then went in again. The body was that of a Scrounger and it had died clutching a metal coat hanger with a distorted and overgrown hand. Cancerous growths erupted from the right side of its face. More bones showing on the surface of the water just behind it where it had fused with other bodies. It was just a one-room apartment but anything that could have given clues as to who had lived there and who they were had been burned away, every piece of furniture, every painting, everything on every shelf. There would be other such scenes in the other apartments and there is nothing of value in any of it.

At the stairs she almost turned and shut the door behind her before she remembered what she was. The kitchen door had been shut and the light switched off but she just walked through it. The cook was gone and the kitchen was lit by the light coming in through the bar. Ahha was seated at the bar with a ledger book open and the night’s profit in a locked case opposite her and a shotgun on the bar in case anyone dared come in through the front door. She went back upstairs, back home. The lights had been switched off since she’d been gone and

she reentered herself violently enough to make her nauseous. She sat up and regretted it immediately. The room swam, tilted, her mind tilted and brightened, hogged like an overloaded ship, sprang up again. She heard her father say her name in total clarity. In Hallatin again she is young again and she is sick, very sick. Something hit her window and hit her window again. A cicada screamed in the yard, the room swam. You always thought that stain on the ceiling looked like a bear. She got up and shuffled across the room in her nightclothes. A Scrounger who she was brief friends with whose name escapes her sees her face and waves. She was throwing a newspaper and when Slake opened the door it came tomahawking up and onto the floor.

At the edge of an ocean now where ships came to die. Lungweed rose and carried on the breakers and crashed to shore and was dragged back out again. She walked to the edge of the water with no prints in her wake and fell to her knees in the damp foreshore and howled at the horizon.

She fell back against the pillow, panting, her head in such agony it made her groan. “Agh,” she told the ceiling.

Shoreline hadn’t been awake for the rest of it but that woke him up. He rose up under the sheets and turned to her and switched on the light, his eyes big and red and attentive, never capable of real sleep as long as she was hurt. “Slake?”

Slake turned her head away from him, then towards him. She was starting to feel her own body again. No more glass, no more bleeding, a thick layer of gauze just under her breasts wrapped around five times and fastened with a pin. It stung awfully. Do not cough. Do absolutely anything but cough and it won’t be so bad. “I’m alright,” she lied. “I’m alright. I just bent wrong and it hurt like a motherfucker.”

“Oh.” He rolled over and lay back down with his arms over the covers. He had just deposited her there nude but she didn’t care, there was nothing to hide. She turned away to keep the light from stinging her eyes. He shut the lamp off. Darkness again. A car motored past in the street with the tires singing through the puddles and wet but other than that it was very quiet in the room save for the rain. She could hear him breathing in the dark next to her and he could hear the same, the both of them on their backs, looking at the ceiling. It was a few minutes yet until Slake spoke.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She could hear him turning to look at her. “Why?”

“I woke you up. Do you work tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn’t have had to wake up to take care of me.”

“Maybe not. Would you have done it if I got stabbed?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’d do it again. Don’t worry about it.”

“Alright.”

The clock read three twenty-five. Work in two and a half hours for him. Her red robe hung like some bloody phantom on the coat rack next to his coveralls and their boots just barely lit beneath them, small reflection off the grommets.

“And I’m sorry I dragged you out all this way.”

“What?”

“To Barathrum. There’s nothing here. I thought there would be and there isn’t.”

He was silent for a while. He reached onto the bedside table and took a glass of water and lifted it to his mouth and drank and set it down again. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t have any expectations at all. So I’m not disappointed. It beats sleeping under a boat.”

“Yeah. Still. It feels like a waste of time.”

“We can make something out of it. We’ve been handed worse cards.”

“We have.”

And that was that. They passed into silence again and within fifteen minutes he was snoring. She tried to sleep but she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that doing so was some kind of transgression, as if to fall asleep would be robbing him of the same, the action itself zero-sum. She lay awake until the mirrorlights turned the room orange and she watched him dress and leave without a word spoken between them and at six twenty five she got up and put her robe on and left for work the same way she had done the day prior.

They stopped and got lunch from a shop on Grie Avenue and carried on with their cargo of wrapped-up guns to Subterrane Gunmakers Company. A work acquaintance had recommended it to Slake and the two of them standing there before the blackened and barred windows of the factory shop dressed in militaria had the look of runaway recruits trying to pawn off their training weapons. There was very little to denote the store aside from the name and some taxidermy displays crouched behind the dusky glass. She recognized a Hoshin and a Southern Steamhand but the other creatures, pale and near-translucent dwellers of the caves around Barathrum, were not in her bestiary and if they were in Shoreline’s he didn’t enlighten her. Nothing said the store was open but she heard the buzz of some kind of lathe in the back. She went up to the great iron slab of a front door and knocked. The lathe softened, died. A slat in the door peeled back and from within a pair of eyes inspected her and saw what she was and unlocked the door.

The two of them stepped inside and scraped the mud off their boots. It was very dark inside the gunstore. There was a glass counter on one end filled with pistols and behind it a wall with guns mounted at every angle, rifles, shotguns, with and without external magazines, with and without stocks, military, civilian, anything at all in between. There were more displays inside of stuffed above-ground game, all new or new enough, none of it well done. Old ads on the wall for long-defunct ammunition companies. The pair of eyes belonged to an elderly yellow Naiassen whose name she wouldn’t learn. He shut and locked the door behind them and went behind the counter in silence and put his hands on it as if to keep the pistols from falling away and looked at the two of them cautiously. Old dead flower petals in a pot by the front window kept for good luck trembled in the doordraft.

“Hi,” Slake said. She stepped forward and put her two guns on the counter, the machine gun and the revolver both wrapped in canvas and locked. Shoreline hadn’t brought his. Didn’t need repairs. He stood with his hands in his pockets and he looked more nervous than the gunsmith. “Do you speak Beotic?”

“A bit,” said the gunsmith. He put a hand on the pistol first and looked at her. “You mind?”

“No, please.”

He slid it towards himself and undid the string and carefully unfolded the burlap and when he saw Slake’s gun he whistled. “Wow,” he said. He took it out and held it with one hand under the barrel and the other on the shattered grip and inspected the serial number and the make. Despite the journey there was not a spot of rust on it. “A Hallatin gun.” The word gun came out gone. “Where you get this?”

“In Hallatin. The main spring is broken and it needs a new grip. Can you do that?”

“Yes, yes.” He set it down. “What grips?”

“What?”

“What grips. You know.”

He bent, gesturing for Slake to join him in a squat. She did. He reached into the dusty display case and tapped at the revolvers. Wood, ivory, stag, whalebone, a material she did not recognize that bore the look of an oilslick. “Oh,” she said. “How about just wood. Give it a checker pattern like that one there.”

“Alright,” said the Naiassen. He stood up and took a small notepad from his grubby apron and scratched the order into it with a pencil. “Will take maybe two days. I am not busy.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “Second thing. I’m looking to sell this, it’s too heavy to travel with. How much is it worth to you?”

He looked at her with his head tilted back and his mouth parted, the same way most old men do when spoken to in a foreign tongue. “Sell,” she told him. “I want to sell. How much?”

He took it by the stock and pulled it towards himself and undid the burlap. A true animal of a gun, sitting there with the dull lamplight catching on the receiver it looked like something hacked from obsidian. She had taken it apart but even disassembled the barrel was the length of her arm. The gunsmith looked it up and down and ran his thumb over the safety and over the heat shield. When he looked back up at Slake he blinked. Would she and it vanish if he took his eyes off her for just one moment? It would not. He shook his head. “Incredible,” he said. “I know someone who will buy. Collector. You come back for the pistol and bring this I tell you how much.”

“Good,” she said. “Now. I need a pistol. Something small.”

They went down the display case, Slake pointing out what caught her eye, the gunsmith offering them to her and watching as she aimed them twohanded and onehanded into the corners of the room, testing the safeties or lack thereof with her thumb, feeling the weight. The eighth gun put in her hand was a sixteen-shot autoloader with a nickelplated finish and a rounded knob for charging it at the back and a detachable magazine. A small gun, she could fit it in her pocket despite the caliber. It would work as a stab deterrent. “How much?”

“See here,” said the gunsmith. He nudged the gun away from himself and pointed to the side at a third notch beside the safety. “Has automatic, uh. Piece. Sear.”

“Is that legal?”

“Yes. Just do not shoot it and lock it and everything legal.”

She planned on doing neither but she nodded nonetheless. “How much?”

He told her and she paid in ket and the two of them left the store, the machine gun tucked under her arm, the pistol cased and tucked in her pocket. Shoreline hadn’t said a word and he seemed glad to be free of the place.

The machine gun sold to a former chief of police and cognoscente of antique firearms for just over twenty-three thousand ket. He was waiting for her on the week’s rest day in the shop when she arrived to pick up her pistol, greeting her by name, a tall septuagenarian Beowend in a long coat and brilliant red trousers, smoking a cigarette through a meerschaum holder. As soon as she heard the price she shook his hand and thanked him and said that the deal was fine with her and took the money, three full steel cases. It was too much to carry and she ended up dragging it home on a wooden wagon with a new case for her revolver in one hand and the wagon handle in the other and a complement of yellowclad policemen with shotguns to keep onlookers at bay. She had the little automatic pistol in her pocket just in case. They left her at the entrance to the pub where Shoreline waited for her and they hauled the cases up in one trip and set them on the bed and dumped them and sat there on other ends counting their riches in silence, measuring each string, feeling the weight of the coins in their palms like something pulled from the earth to be eaten. The mirrorlight slid across the floor, red to orange. Shoreline counted out the last of his strings and they set them back into the cases. It was the agreed amount. Twenty-three thousand two-hundred ket. This was as much money as he’d ever made and ever seen from the day of his birth until then and for a long time after. He looked at the cases with a faintly amused look on his face. “Wow,” he said.

Slake agreed. “I feel like a criminal,” she said. “A bank robber.”

“The machine gun wasn’t really ours, so I guess you are. What do you aim to do with it?”

“First and foremost…”

She took one of the cases and closed it and latched it and pushed it at him. He shifted away from it, the bedsprings creaking. A heavy piece of metal, the case sank deeply into the sheets. He looked at it then at her then back at the case as if to ask the purpose of it.

“It’s yours,” she said. “I don’t want all of it.”

“No. No way.”

“I don’t trust myself with it.”

“Not a chance.” He stood up and backed away from the bed like it might combust. “And why’s it have to be mine or yours? Let’s just lock it in the closet or under the bed and take from it as we need it.”

She thought about that. Dual ownership of just about everything save for their guns seemed obvious. They’d been doing it already. Why it hadn’t occurred to her for this she didn’t know. Something to ponder. She grabbed the case meant for him and took it back. “Alright. We’ll put this one away but I have plans for these two. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t,” he said.

At the archives the next day with a fresh welt on her cheek and one eye swollen from another fight she asked another archivist about postage fees to Hallatin and package security. If she sent it on a good carrier it would get there on time and in one piece and she gave Slake a list of good companies. When she had finished her filings and secretary work for the day there were still three hours until the punch clock sang and she sat at her little desk with a fountain pen and some blank paper. The shadows her hands made from the light of the banklamp were near black on the desk.

Dear Father

She put the pen down and put her head in her hand and looked at the two words and crushed it and threw it out. It took some iterations. Euphrosyne Ducas. Mr Euphrosyne. Ducas. It had the feel of writing a letter of condolence to the family of war dead but that wasn’t what she found difficult. Sisters her cheek hurt. Just pick something and write.

Father

Attached to this letter are two cases containing 15400k. It is my hope that this will cover the gild of Modesette Issal, or at the very least alleviate the financial burden placed on you.

I am sending this letter from the western coast. I am in good health.

Do not inquire after me or attempt to seek me out. It is a certainty that by the time this has reached you I will have moved on. I have not turned to a life of criminality nor am I in poor company. The ket is legally obtained and you should have no fear of spending it.

Your daughter

Euphrosyne Slake

She bought an envelope on the way home and took the two cases of ket and cleared out her old pack and put them in it. It was heavy enough that she had to walk with her back stooped but it held. She asked Ahha where the post office was and caught a streetcar up to Station Street, her pack slung around her front for the ride, her hand on her pistol in her pocket, completely intent on killing anyone who might have made a move for her but no one did. The post office was a grand old building made from local stone, four-storied, with verdigrised roofs and carved cephalophagic grotesques of Argei above the windows. A carving above the door just read Post Office in Beotic. There was a line, of course. She stood in it and waited, tapping her feet, looking around. It moved slowly enough that she could track the mirrorlight moving up the far wall of the cave but she got in before it closed.

A polished stone floor muddied with prints from outside, near to opaque by the door. Offices on the second floor. There were conversations all around at the low booths and desks where illiterates recited their missives to the machine gun clamour of typewriters. From behind the building a truck engine revved and sputtered and receded with a load of mail. A postman waved to her from behind a wooden counter and she walked over and put the folded letter on the table between them and hoisted her pack. The impact of it was heavy enough to shake the table.

The postwoman was a small Simalken with huge glasses that made her eyes look huge and Slake immediately disliked her. “You speak Beotic?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Does Southern Coast Line offer guarantees on shipping sensitive packages?”

“Yes, madam,” the little Simalken said, “but there’s a fee for it. Fifty by default, one hundred for packages over five kilograms, and two hundred for between thirty and one hundred. Anything past that has to be negotiated.”

“Got a scale?”

In the little back room they weighed the two boxes of ket and it came out to twenty-nine point six five kilograms. She picked out a solid wood box with good iron fittings and a good lock and threw the letter in alongside the ket and watched the lid get fitted, sealed, nailed shut like a cartridge box. It was stamped on top with a seal for Southern Coast Line and stencilled with an address and then a man in overalls picked it up and took it away. Back in the main room she paid the fee and the two of them signed off on the insurance and each took a folded copy, hers in an envelope sealed with wax. “Is there anything else?” the Simalken asked.

“Yeah, tell me what kind of stupid I’m being.”

The postwoman tilted her head. The shine of the overhead lights caught one of the lenses but not the other and in the clear one Slake could just barely see herself seated across from her, a black and misshapen figure distorted in the glass. She was going to respond when Slake held up a hand. “Don’t listen to me. Thanks for your help.”

The two of them worked the week and in their off hours restocked their packs. Just in case, Shoreline said. They went out together and bought good cans of food and cigarettes and water filters and a good tarpaulin and ammunition and new knives for both of them and a new handle for Slake’s axe. Shoreline had finished the new grip for his shotgun. He sanded it and spent three nights sitting there in the dark of the room under a solitary lamp with a little cutter, tapping it along in the vise, the floor covered in splinters and sawdust. He stained the stock in the bathtub and let it dry on the balcony and carved out a spot for the trigger guard and fitted it on. It looked like it had left the plant that way. He sat on the bed and aimed into the corners of the room, aimed at the window, aimed at the painting on the wall. On the day of rest Slake suggested they go out for dinner.

“What kind of food are you thinking?” Shoreline asked.

“Something nice. Maybe steak or some local dish. As long as it isn’t translucent and squishy.”

“Sure. I’ll let you pick the place.”

They dressed and went out in the rainy midevening. The days aboveground were growing shorter and the mirrorlight took on a redder hue, a city soaked in crimson. They went up the road and took a streetcar through the market, standing side by side, Slake’s posture easy and Shoreline’s hunched, his shoulders close set. Headlights of trucks sailed past, a horsecarriage crossed just before the streetcar close enough for the conductor to lay on the shrill horn. Water ran down the windows and distorted the already foreign signs and geissler lights, bright ropes of argon hawking cigars, liquor, boots, tools. Commuters herded down the covered sidewalks like cattle under a sea of umbrellas. Slake looked out the window, looking at nothing, the little automatic pistol in her pocket.

They stopped in a public house called The Blue Man and Slake surveyed the menu while they sat at a little round table and drank lager but it wasn’t to her liking and they paid for the drinks and left. By eight o’clock the mirrorlight faded and they sat at the bar in The Gastown Tap and drank more but they didn’t serve steak. An hour later they were standing out front of the Western Ocean, the sign in Beotic.

It was up on Trouverie Mews by the canals, a three story brick building with bright windows behind which dark shapes of people moved. A geissler light in the window was bent into the figure of a man holding an axe and on the door was tacked a banner of a railway union Slake recognized and she figured it must cater to a foreign crowd. Three men stood outside smoking quietly. Movement in the alley. A fiddle and guitar and flute played out a reel from somewhere inside. The two of them stood there with their hands at their sides and decided without speaking to go in.

They picked their way through the tables up to the second floor overlooking the dance pit where already drunken railroaders whirled in loose alcoholic circles and eased themselves into a cracked old leather booth and looked at the sheafs of paper that passed for menus. There were holes in the walls hastily patched over, little chips taken from the wooden supports. Two tables over a gang of Hallatinian Osamac eyed them in silence. Slake passed a menu to Shoreline and reached for hers but stopped. “…You’re holding it sideways.”

“Oh.” He had tilted it to match the local script but he quickly righted it and scanned it for pictures but found no such thing. “What are you having?”

“I’m getting the T-bone cooked medium with potatoes,” she told him. “You?”

“I don’t know, I don’t eat at restaurants.”

“You do now. Get a steak.”

“What kind?”

“The priciest one on the menu.”

She went down and gave their orders to a waiter and leaned on the bar to wait for their drinks and looked out at the crowd. A patchwork of species gathered on both floors, almost invariably railroaders, the accents and language familiar. On the back wall a four-person band played an upbeat jig, the air thick and near noxious with cigar smoke and cursing. She caught more than one look directed at her and she did her best to stare back until the bartender came back with her drinks and she ferried them up to Shoreline, ascending the creaky and battered old steps. “Hey, barmaid,” someone called. Rough voice, laughter. Some kind of tension settled under everything like a string pulled tight. She walked by them and set one glass before Shoreline and took the other for herself.

He drank and wiped the foam off his mouth and looked around, his elbows on the table. “Pretty busy place,” he said, not looking at her. “Did you pick it because it was Hallatinian?”

“It was just a coincidence. How’s the beer?”

“Fucking good. I shouldn’t be drinking.”

“A beer won’t hurt.”

“I’ve seen a beer kill. I’m surprised they even let me in here.”

“Why?”

“Well. They wouldn’t have in Hallatin.”

“I didn’t see any signs saying you weren’t allowed in.”

“They usually don’t need signs.” He looked down over the wood railing to the dancers below. “It’s weird, finally making it into one. Except it’s not in Hallatin.”

“Most times I went to these places I’d end up getting kicked out because I was too young. Heads up, I think that’s our food.”

A waitress brought them their food on two good china platters with forks and long steak knives, two steaks cooked medium and heavily spiced, both with collard greens and hamhock and thin cut fried potatoes and a loaf of good bread to share between them with butter. Shoreline watched it get set down before him with the same expression he’d watch a naked woman with. They tucked in immediately, Slake cutting off thin pieces of steak to put in her beak and savour, Shoreline going for the potatoes first. The dancers slowed, cleared the floor, and the band played an older Beowend song.

O’er the western ocean, as the light declines
I’ll think of my fair Answall in the rare auld times

I’ve naught but songs and stories, no pictures of her now
Of the fading old memory of what once was Answall town
Of the walls and boarding houses, the dockyard mariners’ rimes
That once was my fair Answall in the rare auld times

A minute into their meal and they were both eating like they were out past the walls again, hunched over their food, the silverware rising and falling from their faces like the mechanism of a locomotive. Slake took another piece of steak and let it sit and swallowed it and drank some beer and that snapped her out of it a bit. She watched Shoreline eat. “Slow down, man, you’re going to choke on something.”

He looked up at her mid-chew, a shred of collard green stuck on one of his canines. “Am I supposed to eat this slow?”

“No. Well, sort of. But you can hardly taste it eating fast. How is it?”

“It’s good,” he said. “It’s really fucking good.”

My name it is Circuas, as Answall as can be
Born in the old South Wallside in a house that’s ceased to be
My father was a collier, lost to redundancy
Like the house that fell to progress, his trade’s a memory

A fight was breaking out along the back wall by the bar, who knows what for. A man grabbed another by the shirt over something or another and hit him in the ear and there they went, their friends and comrades falling to, grasping at one another while a huge Mekkara bouncer with a cuirass on shoved his way through the crowd towards them. “Wouldn’t want to get in his way,” Slake said.

The Osamac that were watching them before still were but one had enough to drink to get up and walk over to them while the establishment was distracted. A short example of an Osamac, she was still a head taller than Slake and she wore suspenders and a ripped old dress shirt and Slake could see something in her front pocket. She swayed in place and looked down at them from the head of the table and even at this distance she smelled of liquor. “It yours?” she asked Slake.

“What?”

“The bat. S’it a trophy or something? A display piece?”

“Told you,” Shoreline said.

“I’m gonna cut your damn head off if you don’t leave us be,” Slake told the Osamac. Shoreline glanced over at her and knew immediately that she wasn’t kidding.

“If this was Hallatin we’d’a kicked it out already. F’I had my way we wouldn’t have let ye through the door. My crew doesn’t hire Beowend.”

Slake stood up but Shoreline grabbed her arm and pulled on it hard. She looked down at him. “Tell you what,” he told the Osamac. “I’ll get rid of her for five minutes and we’ll call a truce. How’s that?”

The drunk looked at him blankly.

“Great. Slake, go for a smoke or something.”

She tore her arm away and stared at the Osamac with her fists clenched and very ready to draw back. She drew in a breath and held it.

“Slake.”

She kept her eyes on the drunk and shuffled past them and made for the stairs. They watched her go. Shoreline skewered another piece of steak and put it in his mouth and chewed it and spoke before swallowing and he didn’t seem at all troubled by any of this.

“Look,” he told the drunken railroader. “I’ve got no trouble with you and I don’t want any. But I’m pretty sure that woman came here tonight looking to kill someone and it’s going to be you if you keep standing there. If she gets her heart set on it I don’t think I can stop her.”

“I’ll kill her first.” She looked back at her comrades but they were all engaged in other conversation and she grunted like an ape.

“If you’ve got any sense you’ll do no such thing. Now get the fuck out of here or I’ll get that big bouncer up here.”

She stood there with a hand on the table to steady herself. Shoreline gestured with his eyes back to her table. She stood there for a moment longer, looking at the stairs to see if Slake would resurface but when she didn’t she went away back to her seat.

Slake went down the stairs, leaning on the bannisters to let others past, and went out through the round cardtables of the bar and past the argon beer sign by the front door and out into the street to have a smoke. It was pouring out, you could hear waves of it hitting the lead panes from inside but it was torrential outside and she shut the door behind her and leaned under the awning and went for her matches. In the middle of the street there were six men locked in a fistfight, two from one train and four from another. Their shirts were torn and soaked and they fought there in the downpour backlit from the lights of a brick boarding house across the street where faces of young boys watched them from the windows, pointing, cheering. She put a cigarette in her beak and lit it. One of the men, a Damoyen, caught a boot in his mouth and he went down in a midstreet puddle with his face half under the quickly reddening water while two of his assailants fell to him with stomps and fists.

A world within a world, this. She could hardly see the end of the street in either direction, no headlights, no passersby. The band’s notes fell soft and distorted through the rain and the door and no one at all paid her any mind while she stood there and smoked and watched the men fall to in the street like mating snakes, cursing, striking, hissing. By now the letter and the ket was getting loaded onto a train. Eastward bound. It would get there in twenty or thirty days barring an early ash season but to what? You might as well have thrown it all in a river. She thought about Barathrum but there was little to think of. She thought about Shoreline. She saw the Osamac standing over the table looking at him and she saw her taking him by the collar and pulling him out of the booth and down the stairs out into the street and the thought of the collar part alone made her hands shake. When she dropped the butt and crushed it under her heel two of the fighters had been left beaten and bloody with their pockets turned out. She knows what she’s after. Well you better give it to her then.

She eased back into the booth with the band downstairs playing a dorian prelude and went for her beer immediately. Shoreline was still there, eating the last of his greens with his fingers. He watched her approach and he watched her sit down with unusual impassivity. “Welcome back,” he said.

“It’s pissing down outside.”

“I can hear it in here.” He gestured to the opposite end of upstairs, Slake looked. Tables had been cleared around a section of warped floor now freshly carpeted by buckets and pint glasses filled with rainwater.

“Wonder if it got in anyone’s food.”

“That’s probably why they moved the tables. You gonna finish your greens?”

She didn’t hear him. She looked away from the buckets and over at the table with the Osamac and as soon as she did the same drunk got up and started to push her way over. Already others were getting up and making for the stairs and the rest of their crew were leaning over their seats to watch. The drunk put her hands on the edge of the table and leaned down to say something. Before a word left her mouth Slake took her steak knife and stood up and swung it hard into the artery in the drunk’s neck.

The drunk cursed and reeled back with her hand on her neck. “You,” she said, “you.” Blood sprayed from either side of the lodged knife and through her fingers like a crack in a steampipe and misted the edge of the booth, her shirt darkening immediately. Fat drops of blood fell sidelong to the floor as she turned to one side and looked at her comrades with distant concern. As soon as they saw her they got to their feet in unison and so did Shoreline. Her left leg gave out and she tried to balance on a table. She slipped, crashing into it and sending the contents to the floor, glasses of brandy shattering on the scuffed hardwood, plates of noodles scattered. She rolled on her side and grasped the floor like it might be trying to throw her off and went still.

The stairs flowed with people headed downward like an eavestrough to the accompaniment of a jig from the band and the thundering of boots, enough to shake the floor. The dying drunk’s three friends stood there uneasily by their table, themselves drunk and no real fighters. One of them was nudging at the fallen one with her foot. “Chima?” she asked, Chima herself in no shape to speak. Slake left the booth at a run and went for them. Across the balcony someone tapped another on the shoulder and struck him in the jaw when he turned around.

Slake took the railroader clean off his feet and drove him into the far wall, the weight of them caving in the wallboards. He was pounding at her back with his fists but she turned and flung him and fell on him half screaming and threw all her weight into her knee and her knee into his chest. His ribs cracked under her and he exhaled like a bellows and didn’t breathe in. He kept reaching for his pocket but she stomped on his hand and he rolled over clutching it, gasping like a clubbed fish.

The upstairs cleared fast save for deadly groups of two or three inebriates charging at others to recoup lost investments on card games or to settle certain looks exchanged. Tables were upturned and the shouts of warning and curses rose to a dominant chorus under which the downstairs jigs still played. A conductor grabbed another’s shirt and struck him over the head with a plate and their two crews joined the affray. They swept across the upper level in a battle line, the dull percussion of their fists like the thumps of artillery. They trampled the dead drunk and wheeled sideways and bowled Slake over and she held her arms to her head to keep from getting stomped. “Kill you,” said a man above her before his voice receded. Someone threw a bottle at her and it exploded on the ground beside her head, she just barely kept the glass dust from her eyes. Someone else threw a chair and it hit her in the shoulder. She swore. She looked for Shoreline but all she saw was someone get thrown through the bannister in a great burst of woodwork and splinters, the throwee looking faintly nervous before she dropped away and through a table a floor down.

The battle line swayed into the outer wall and the building creaked like a ship, the floor shifting one way and springing back the other. Slake got up. Someone was coming at her, a slim Naiassen with his arm slick with blood holding a short folding knife, she didn’t know him. He cut at her, swinging in broad horizontal movements. He cut a slim rip in her shirt and she leapt back into someone and bowled them over. “Hey,” they yelled, but she never got a look at them. He went at her again with a jab and she went left and shoved his hand down and hit him squarely in the chin. The Naiassen stumbled back and opened his mouth and spat a fat glob of blood and a tooth onto the floor and went at her again but Slake was quicker. She hit him in the same spot and he dropped with his arms over himself like a cadaver in a coffin. Someone pointed at him and pointed at her and soon there were others sizing her up.

The floor was awash in spilled liquor and glass and more blood by the second. Slake stood before a shattered window fending off her attackers with a knife, a man lying broken on the bricks a floor below and out. Someone had run for the police and now four of them were coming up the stairs, cuirassed and pistoled and armed with blackjacks. They shoved their way to the top steps and were greeted with a wall of attackers wielding tables like shields, shoving them back, beating them over the head with chairs and pelting them with cups and roaring insensately. One of the officers swung his arm and struck a Damoyen between the ears with his club, an ugly sound like a brick hitting a side of meat. The Damoyen just went away. Someone yelled push and they shoved a table forward and the policeman lost his footing and went careening down the stairs backwards with a tremendous iron clattering, taking his comrades with him. Already there were bottles crossing the room like arrows downstairs and the band had vacated.

Slake struck a man in the ear and shoved him away. Her clothes were slick with blood. The bandage on her side had come open and turned that whole side of her red and there were cuts all up her arms from glass and little knives and impacts and each swing of her fist sent red drops arcing the same trajectory. She looked for Shoreline again.

He was standing with his back up against a wall under a portrait of some long dead automaker heiress with a gap between him and his attackers who fended at him with knives and spearlike sticks sourced from who knows where like they were trying to keep an escaped animal at bay. One of them would step forward and he would just swing at them and send them away either asleep or with their jaw shattered. She didn’t know if he was hurt but he didn’t look it. In the back of the crowd she saw a woman produce a revolver and pass it to the man in front of her and despite the noise she heard her say “Just shoot the bastard.”

Slake grabbed her own pistol from her pocket and thumbed the selector. Shoreline must have seen the glint of the nickel plating and dove sidelong. She held it onehanded and aimed at the crowd and pulled the trigger.

The pistol roared and emptied its magazine in under a second, the muzzle flash enormous, a scattering of sparks spraying from the barrel. She couldn’t even see where she was aiming. When the flash went away the crowd that had cornered Shoreline lay either dead or wounded, sprawled at all angles. She had shot one man in the occipital and his smoking brains were mixed with spilled brandy and another woman stirred quietly against a bulletholed wall bleeding very badly from the neck. The wall itself was shot almost to pieces, splintered and torn, the portrait shattered. She couldn’t see Shoreline in the pile of bodies. She looked and looked again but he wasn’t there. No. What did you do. What did you do. She was about to rush forward to look but he rose from the shot up crowd like something reanimated and looked at her, wild-eyed. Move, move, the police yelled. Everyone upstairs was either lying down or stampeding for the exit, none of them paying much attention to the two of them. Slake threw the pistol across the room and ran for the bannister.

She found a spot where the bannister had given way and collapsed and she grabbed the ledge and turned and lowered herself down and jumped and landed with a heavy crunch on the obliterated floorboards. She looked up to see if Shoreline was following her but he had already done the same and he landed on a table and jumped off. At the bar a Simalken in a suit was watching the bar and sobbing. Maybe the proprietor. The exit was jammed with people and more were going through the windows. Rain was blowing in sideways through the gaps around the windowborne exiters. They went out through a window, both of them blood-soaked, and took off down the street, their footsteps receding and vanishing in the downpour.

IV - Left and Leaving

They went in through the back door of the public house and shut it behind them and stood there in the doorway dripping with rainwater and pink bloody runoff, Shoreline with an arm on the doorway to catch his breath, Slake’s hands on her knees. It was a busy night for the pub but quiet in the stairwell save for the muffled noise of the radio and a grill hissing in the kitchen. They went up the stairs in a hurry and unlocked their room and shut the door behind them and locked all three locks. Soon enough the police would come knocking. Slake was not the only Beowend in Barathrum but there weren’t a whole lot and there were fewer Nyctians, if any but him. Shoreline hadn’t talked the whole way home but now he looked at Slake and he looked at the dark room and said: “Oh fuck.”

“We have to go,” Slake said. She kicked her boots off and went into the washroom to get the antiseptic out. Her forearms had stopped bleeding but they hurt badly and just moving her wrist made her cringe. “What do we need to take with us?”

“Guns. Packs. Food. Where did you put all those cans we got?”

“They’re in the closet in the corner.”

He went over and hauled their packs out from the closet and opened his and started shovelling their possibles in, the cans of food, socks, boxes of bullets. When his pack was halfway full he slowed down and sorted through everything and laid it all out on the floor. It was the most they’d ever had at any one time but they didn’t have room for all of it. “Are we taking the ket?” he asked.

“We’d better.” She sat on the edge of the bathtub and peeled her stained and soiled shirt off and threw it behind her. She undid the latches on the first aid kit in her lap and took what she needed and set the rest on the floor. She ran cold water over her arms until the dirt and debris was gone and she had totally stopped bleeding then went over it with the bottle of antiseptic and cotton swabs. It stung badly but her hands didn’t shake at all and she kept at it. There weren’t any that she thought might need stitches. By the time she was done the pile of bloody swabs lay like something washed up and dead on a beach somewhere in the tub, leaching a dull pink serum. She stripped and turned the shower on and stood under it for a minute. If the thought had crossed her mind that it would be a long time until she had another she might have thought to enjoy it more but she didn’t. She dried herself off well enough and wrapped her hands like a pugilist and covered the rest of her arms and figured that’d do.

Shoreline had packed both their bags full and set them on the bed and was putting his shotgun into a leather case, already loaded. The contents of their lockstep lives laid out before them, what was deemed important, what wasn’t. Leave the shoes, take the boots. Take the axe. The revolver. Leave the woodworking tools. Shoreline had emptied the boxes of ket and had put most of it in the recesses of their packs where it couldn’t easily be found. It was heavy but unless they were on the road for years they’d never get through it all.

Still in question was her armour. He had put that out for her too, arranged vaguely in humanoid form with the chainmail and cuirass in the center and the plating all around it, the helmet on her pillow. Fragments of Nehalennia’s skull were still tied off to the waistbelt. Slake looked at it while she put new clothes on. “I didn’t know whether you wanted it or not,” he told her. “It’s heavy.”

“When are we going to find another one?”

“Probably never.”

So it was settled. She put it all back on over the uniform she bought from the little tailor’s shop and tied the helmet to her pack and shrugged it on. Shoreline put a new jacket on and stepped into boots he’d only worn a little and regarded himself in the mirror by the door with the shotgun in a case under his arm. They had the look of two hunters going out to shoot dangerous game. She put her axe into her belt. Familiar sensations. The weight of everything again. You’d better get used to this. They looked through the closet and under the bed to see if they had missed anything important but they hadn’t.

They went down the stairs again and went out through the backdoor and down the alley. The rain had let up, the eaves still heavy with runoff, the divots in the brickwork riverine. They went up the street and rounded the corner to where the streetcar lines painted long quicksilver strokes in the road but they wouldn’t be running at this hour and they walked to the elevators in silence. Fog ran over the streets and through everything ran a dull electric hum like the buzzing of a jarred insect, a citypulse from somewhere deeper in the cavern yet. In this unsightly hour pedestrians ferry past in ones and twos as silently as the asleep, doubled in the puddles, fading. Lights shone behind curtains, loud sex reverberated from a slim bulblit basement. Scent of mould, the blackness of the cave roof, the onset of shinsplints. Somewhere in the depths the bones of ancestors who never went home, filed in vast stone cabinets. Did you think they’d come back for you? Or have you hedged your hopes on a land slipping through your fingers with the hopes a bucket would wait underneath to catch it. You might as well have let it all go.

They reached the elevators, quiet this time of night. They took the back way in and crossed the pedestrian bridge over a vast switchyard where train engines sat and idled with their loads of cargo, cranes above them in endless motion. At one end three colossal steel elevators, two up, one just setting down, the hydraulics hissing like adders, the foglights of a train slicing phosphorescent swathes in the mist and smoke. They went down into the main hall. The clock still hadn’t moved. Freshly polished floors, they could half see their reflections in it. She wasn’t paying attention to much of anything, keeping her eyes on anyone in yellow for almost too long but they made no moves to apprehend the pair. They spoke to the ticketer and manoeuvred his broken Beotic and declared their firearms and intent to exit and were given permits to leave.

It took three hours of waiting for it to be full enough to head for the surface and by the time it did Slake had smoked a full pack of cigarettes, the butts smeared across the grated floor under her left foot. The last truck boarded, the door clattered shut. A sudden gravitational change and then they were moving, the station receding beneath them through the ornate iron frames of the elevator. Someone was walking through the elevator with a tray of food, whispering out the prices. The elevator rose up through the top into a thick wet smog. Barathrum itself was just lights. The blur of a street here, soft dots of headlights. Windows slowly merging and fading into glows. Even the sound of it was muted. She heard a horn sound. A train shifting to life. She would never see Barathrum again.

Surfaceside the elevator came to a halt with a long rattling shudder that ran the length of the cables and came back again twice. It took five minutes for the rest of the passengers to clear and for them to be let off. They went through the customs gates unmolested and through an airlocked steel door and the first thing the both of them did when they got outside was cover their eyes.

It was still completely dark outside but the lights from the topside part of Barathrum were so blinding that they had to look away and squint. “Shit,” said Shoreline. They shuffled off to the side of a small escarpment beside the gate and he set his cased shotgun down and knelt on it so as not to have it stolen and rubbed his eyes. Slake put her hands over her face and squinted and looked through the gaps in her fingers and it was just dark enough for her to look around. A warm harvest night. Woodsmoke. Pollen. Scents from the surface she didn’t know she needed to be reminded of, and all of it clear, so clear. No humidity either. She breathed it in deeply.

“What should we do?” she asked him.

He had to think about that one. There would be no going east. Maybe they could have stayed another day in Barathrum but probably not. The world is not so big. “Have you ever seen the western ocean?”

“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s somewhere to go. We can figure things out when we get there.”

“Sure,” she said.

They set out on the western road and skirted around the surface switchyard and kept to the outside of the shanty town. In this predawn hour whole families waited by the side of the road with their beaten old tools and tents and waved to passing trucks, groups of eight or ten or twelve of them all shoeless and dressed in little more than rags fruitlessly soliciting work. Now and then men on the back of the trucks would point to some and usher them on, the children peering through the sideslats of the truck bed like cattle in stock cars. Slake and Shoreline walked by the side of the road very close to one another, both of them squinting into the oncoming headlights and the dust from the tires. The trucks kept coming endlessly. There were maybe fifty or more of all makes and models behind them snaking through the slummed outskirts, some with treads in place of wheels and some with no hoods and some with little more than corroded frames and a wheel and an engine and hammered wood to carry riders. Seeing that one of them was a Beowend, everyone gave them a wide berth until Slake stuck out her hand and raised her thumb.

The truck immediately beside them passed and swerved and threw its parking brake on and shifted to neutral, the engine grinding loudly and kicking a gout of white smoke out of the exhaust directly at Shoreline. He waved it away, coughing. The truckbed had a troupe of Scrounger farmhands in it, all young men and women, some barely adults and some not quite there yet. When they saw the two at the back they held their tools tighter and whispered to one another. Slake went around the front and grabbed the side mirror and got up on the running board. Behind the wheel was another Scrounger only just tall enough to reach the pedals, one scaled hand on the wheel, the other out the window. It took her a moment to realize that the driver wasn’t winking but missing an eye. “Oyo,” said the driver.

“You speak Beotic?”

“Some. Some.” She made a so-so motion with her hand and cocked her head to one side and clucked her tongue. “You working?”

“No. We’re looking for a ride. Are you going west?”

“West?”

Slake held the side mirror a little tighter and leaned back and looked for the dark shapes of the crater mountains. She could only just make out the peaks of some of them, faintly backlit by the coming of day. She pointed in the other direction. “That way. Is that where you’re going?”

“Ah, yes. Yes. I drive there. Hay bales.”

She gestured for Shoreline to come over and he stood behind her, looking around while she went into her pocket and fished out two strings of ket and deposited them on the driver’s lap. The driver just jerked her head backwards and they went around and climbed up into the back of the truck and shut the rear gate behind them. The Scroungers were eleven in number and they huddled together in one corner like nesting groundbirds looking out at something that wasn’t their mother but Slake and Shoreline weren’t threats and they soon spread out again, lounging next to their spades and pitchforks with their hats over their eyes. They took their packs off and sat with them over their laps. Slake undid her pack and got her revolver out and checked the cylinder and put it in her holster and put her head back against the sideboards. The ride was so bumpy that she switched to laying down within a minute.

The truck took them down the western road out of town, a path so rough and potholed that it seemed to have been mortared in the not distant past. They passed by the old warehouses and the surfaceside vents, enormous grated divots in the ground that held blades that spun ceaselessly and ejected a stream of air that reeked of exhaust and basement. You couldn’t see them well in the dark but you could hear the whooshing of them as they went by. The truck veered around a broken down bus in the middle of the road and carried on, heading for one of the gates out of the crater valley. Slake watched the center mound of Barathrum recede. A watchtower loomed over the gate, dual floodlights swinging to and fro over the road as if checking for convicts escaping from prison. More officers in yellow stood by but this early in the morning they just smoked and talked and paid little mind to the peasantry flooding by to work the fields. The noise of the tunnel was tremendous, a dozen engines flaring up and backfiring in the cramped stone space. Then Barathrum was behind them and they were out.

They rode through the morning down the sweeping coastal valleys of western Meropis. They passed through a wide valley in which the last of the wheat was coming in, workers scouring the fields behind the funnelled machines. Vultures circled in great swarms in the early sky. In the center of the valley was a good sized river that flowed much harder in the steeper incline and crashed whitewatered over boulders and along the banks, half choked with dead trees. The sun wasn’t up over the jagged eastern hillside but it reached the sky above them in long orange streaks that caught fine pink clouds that hung like motes suspended in water. Spores from inland, ejected straight up from their colonies and caught on the jet stream. When the ash came again they’d be forced down to take root where they would.

In times very long past older cultures had carved and built terraced farms in the hills and though they were gone their farms had far outlived them. They cut long horizontal swathes out of the hillsides like giant stairs and on some of them sat small stone farmsteads hewn from the dolomite beneath them. Electric windmills turned quietly beside them and through the dark she could see the little running streams from terrace to terrace and the shapes of people making their way along to pick the last of the vegetables. The truck rumbled past it all without slowing. It had seen it all before. Shoreline held one of the sideboards and watched it go by quietly.

The sun came up just when the road was really starting to get steep. They left the main road and the terraces behind and descended into a narrow valley with little more than the faint imprints of tire marks in the grass to delineate where trucks had passed before. No more power lines out here. The aridity of Hallatin faded away and the road was soon greened over, huge stalks of Meropian bamboo and araucana crowding the road, crawling up the close hillsides. Somewhere through the woods to their nine o’clock was the rumble of a waterfall but they never saw it. Occasionally a path would present itself in the undergrowth but whether it led anywhere or not was never obvious. It occurred to Slake in a dull and distant sort of way that it would be awful if they had to climb back up here but she didn’t consider it too much.

At one of the wider paths into the woods the truck banked hard enough that it sent their packs to the far wall of the truckbed. It went up a small incline, the engine sputtering and whining up to revs it ought not to be at when the front tires left the ground over a ditch and came up the other side. They rounded a bend and the trees faded away into a small plot of grasses home to maybe three dozen heads of cattle, tall enough to be hayed and cured. It was maybe eight acres in total hacked out of the forest, right at the edge of the mountain. If it ever rained hard all those tons of dolomite and gossan would wipe the place away but it hadn’t yet. There was a barn at one end, wood built on a fieldstone base, and a big farmhouse with wood shutters over the windows, clothes drying on lines. A well. People were streaming from the house towards the truck, all Scroungers. Slake and Shoreline got their gear and shrugged it on and gestured for the workers in the truck to head out first and climbed down behind them.

When the Scroungers from the house saw them coming they stopped immediately. An older man fell backwards over his feet and took off back towards the house. The driver was stepping down from her seat. Slake could see her better now that it was daytime. An easylooking woman, she wore a shirt without sleeves and had tattoos up one arm and at some point had donned a pair of sunglasses that looked more like welding goggles. She took those off and threw them into the cab and shut the door and looked at her family then looked at her two passengers standing there with their armor and guns. She held up a hand and spoke very slowly to the assembly of nervous hosts and showed them the strings of ket and explained herself and the short ride out. Slake lit a cigarette. When the driver was done her story she turned to the two of them and shrugged her shoulders and motioned backwards. “They invite you stay.”

“Do we look like farmhands to them?” Slake replied.

“Um. No, no. For food and bed.”

“No. I think we’d better get on.”

She nodded to them and Shoreline did the same. “But we appreciate the hospitality,” he added.

It took the rest of the day to reach the bottom of the mountain valley, walking down a road that faded more with each kilometer. Here and there they saw signs of life but not much. Game trails. Collapsed power lines. A heap of bricks that was once a building of unknown purpose. Just before noon they went along a cliffside some three hundred meters up from a sheer gorge, an almost ninety degree drop, nothing but rock and air between them and a small river that they could barely hear way down there. The wreckage of a car stuck up from the whitewater. Long gone tragedy. They carried on. The road wound sharply downwards. The panicgrass they had trod on rose up just as sharply to neck height, thick enough that Slake had to push it all back with her axe. A tree had collapsed over the road years ago and had been pushed to one side . They climbed on it to get a better look down the road but it was all grass and saplings and it was either this or they went off the cliff. The grass behind them simply closed back up and left neither trail nor seam and anyone who may have come behind them would see no sign of their passing.

They cut their way through it for the better part of the afternoon and came out on the other side and stopped for a lunch of crackers and potted meat and dried cave cherries. Slake found the cherries alright, Shoreline didn’t. Either way they both ate them and repacked and carried on. It was early evening when they found a cave.

He just barely saw it through the foliage, a darkening in the crumbling slope of the mountain and nothing more. He stopped and watched it, one hand on the strap of his backpack and the other resting on his slung shotgun. Small birds with tails the shape of playing cards shrieked to one another in the foliage and hopped about and chased each other off, the leaves twitching where their small bodies had been. A cicada screeched farther down the valley. “Are we stopping for the day?” Slake asked.

“No,” he said. “But I sort of want to take a look. Just in case anything’s nesting in there so it won’t come up behind us.”

“Alright.”

They took their packs off and tucked them in shaded spots by the trunks of trees out of view of the road and approached it with their guns drawn, Slake holding her revolver onehanded before her and Shoreline with his shotgun at his hip. It was pretty well hidden, the entrance crowded over with vines and pale hanging weeds of the same variety they had seen in Barathrum. Shoreline got to the entrance first and pulled back the vines to look in, the muzzle of his shotgun like a lowslung third eye seeing the interior with him. He looked for a few seconds then stepped back. “I can’t see all that well in there. Help me pull some of these down.”

She hacked some of the vines away with her axe and pulled some more down until there was a themshaped gap in the greenery. Shoreline took a goodsized stick and tossed it in. It clattered over the earthen floor into silence. He yelled in after it and they waited a few more minutes. Slake tapped her foot. Nothing came out at them. They went in.

It was just light enough to see the cave floor. A thin sediment of dust covered a wrack of smashed glass and small animal bones and the dull black shape of where a fire had been lit. They had no flashlights and to see better they pulled back more of the vines. Something odd about the flowstone walls, Shoreline had already moved in to take a better look. All up and down the walls and on the smoothed ceiling were handprints done in ochre and lead white and manganese. They were drawn in pairs and had been done by placing one’s hands in wet pigment and pressing them on. Big prints, small. Some with the faint impression of long nails and some without. Slake couldn’t count how many but there must have been thousands. She stepped in further to look about and while she was looking up at the ceiling her foot missed the ground and went down a short ledge. She wheeled her arms and caught herself. On the floor was a step that must have been carved out by hand.

Save for the sound of their feet shuffling in the floordust there was very little sound. The leaves curtaining the cave mouth twitched in the breeze but that was it. Shoreline stared at the handprints. They kept going into the cave and he followed them to where it banked left and peeked around the bend and froze. Slake went over with her gun up and looked over his shoulder.

A skeleton lay in a collapsed heap against the near cave wall and the spot where it once had its back to was smashed to pieces by bullets, the ancient brass cartridges scattered about. She looked at the skull. Nyctian. Lasiurus haplogroup? There wasn’t much light this far in but Shoreline stepped out to get a better look regardless. The remains of the Nyctian’s clothing lay about its body in loose rags. Some kind of fur near its neck. Tattered and pockmarked pants. Something bronze was half buried in the dust next to its right hand and she couldn’t make it out exactly but she was pretty sure it was a sword. Reconstruct this. The bulletmarks on the wall ran close enough to be automatic. They started at chest level and ran diagonally down the wall to where the Nyctian now lay. You just weren’t fast enough. There was nothing to be discerned about the corpse save for the fact that the hips were probably female. Its earrings lay around its head like coins tossed at it for good luck. She looked at Shoreline but there wasn’t much to read on his face. He looked deeper into the cave. Pitch black. It went straight for at least three more meters but past that who could say. They hadn’t packed flashlights.

His people down there somewhere, most likely all dead. Before them the way things were. She was going to say something but he turned and walked out of the cave without another word and without pausing for a last look. She followed him out and they took up their packs and walked on.

That night they stopped just before dusk near the bottom of the valley in a copse of osiers with a little clearing in the middle, the land not quite flat but good enough to sleep on. They dragged in rocks to make a little circle and broke off small dead branches from trees and cut bark from the undergrowth. Slake hacked some deadfall apart while Shoreline built the fire, cupping his hands over the young embers, blowing very carefully. She brought the cut wood over and put it squarewise around the flames and the fire was going pretty good. They hadn’t bought a grill but they had bought a decent little pot that they emptied little tins of broth and fish and a bit of salt into. The lid went back on and the two sat there in the early twilight, their backs on their packs, looking up at the near-cloudless purpling of the sky. “My feet are killing me,” said Slake.

“I’ve got worse shin splints than I think I’ve ever had,” he replied. “I think it’s all the downhill walking.”

“It still beats uphill.”

“It does that.”

Silence lapsed over them. A trio of birds went by overhead with the near silent flap of their wings just barely reaching the pair. Crickets in the treeline. “You want a cigarette?” she asked.

“No thanks.”

They poured themselves a bowl each and ate with small metal spoons. It was decent. They went into the bush with the pot and pan and found a small stream running down from the mountainside and washed the bowls and pot in it with a bit of soap powder and took some water back to the fire to boil. The fire hissed and snapped and little gouts of sparks surged around the bottom of the pot and ran skyward. Neither of them had brought a bedroll but they had thin blankets and they set themselves up on either side of the fire. Slake would be on first watch. He unrolled his blanket and shook it like you’d get dust out of a carpet and laid down and let it fall over himself and put his head on his lumpy pack.

Bright starscape that night, the immense motionlessness of the heavens at once distant and enormous. Tsull and Argei and Liyag out tonight. A star fell across the southern half of the sky. She watched it go and looked away into the bushes but there was nothing there but bugs. She checked on Shoreline. He was looking at her across the fire. “Hey Slake,” he said.

“Uh huh?”

“I’m sorry I shot your friend. Back at the college or whatever.”

She blinked at him. He swallowed.

“You know. When I got your gun and-”

“I know what you’re talking about. It’s alright.”

“I didn’t mean to shoot him. I thought I was going to kill you. I was deciding against it when he came in and I just swung and shot him without thinking.”

She nodded and sat there in silence. Think about this one. He wasn’t looking at her anymore but he was still listening. “Would you have killed him consciously? If you had time to think about it.”

“Yes,” Shoreline said instantly. He didn’t even have to think to reply. “I could manage you but if there were two people there one would have ran or yelled or something and I would have been fucked. So I’d shoot him again. I wish I didn’t have to but I would.”

“But you wouldn’t have shot me.”

“Not unless you made me. No.”

She nodded. “Well. Thank you.”

“That money you sent back out was to cover his gild, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” She looked at him. Bright red eyes watching her again. The firelight turned his fur dull pink. No more gauntness to it these days. “How did you know that?”

“I had a hunch. I just wanted to tell you I understand it. And if it was our money then I paid a bit of it and that makes me feel better. Less like a murderer.”

The water had been boiling for a few minutes and Slake figured it was good enough. She undid her canteen and drank a bit and poured half of the pot into hers and half into Shoreline’s. When it was empty she nudged some dirt over the fire until only a few small coals scintillated in the darkness. She put her back up against her pack and put the gun beside her where she could reach it easily.

“I’m glad I didn’t kill you,” Shoreline said. “I thought you would have died somewhere along the line but you didn’t. You saved me a few times. I never thanked you for that.”

“You don’t have to. You know that.”

“I wanted to say it anyway.”

There would be no more words exchanged between them that day. Shoreline stared into the coals until sleep took him and he slept a still and soundless sleep. She paced around the clearing with her gun in her hand. Once her eyes got used to the darkness she could see pretty well, the stars and moons were bright enough. Everything tinted in blue like an oil painting of a dockyard and just as motionless, the black mountain tops spineboned against the sky. No lights anywhere. Surely Barathrum had once come out this far but anything that had been was long gone to the forest or had fallen into the valley and joined the anonymous ranks of the riverstones. You need to consider some things.

Yeah?

Yeah. You don’t have any options.

The coast is an option.

Sailing away is not. By now they’ve probably looked through the room and taken your names and descriptions. Euphrosyne Slake and Shoreline sketched out and put in a rogues’ gallery. Shoot on sight. The penalty for carrying a firearm in Barathrum is death and you up and shot someone.

And I’d do it again.

Of course. That doesn’t change anything about right now. About your options, the lack thereof.

A bugsong rose up in the undergrowth and trilled and went past like wind and faded away like the receding of an engine. She went to the edge of the treeline and circled it once and went back to the fire and sat beside where Shoreline was sleeping. A sudden nausea made her look away, not the vomitous kind but the kind that sat in the space between her throat and her heart like poured lead. Here is the truth: you are going forward for no one else. Recall his smile on the elevator down and his sleeping in a bed for the first time. Hot meals. That is gone, erased by your infantile rage at nothing. In its place is a death penalty if he ever returns and that is entirely your fault.

She wanted very mightily to yell or fire her gun into the dirt but that would awaken him. His ear flicked. It is true that lightning strikes the same place twice. If it happened before it can happen again. Given enough time it will. What do you make of that?

It was just barely light when Shoreline woke up. Night of odd dreams. He blinked awake, shut his eyes again, scratched his neck. He felt around in the grass for his shotgun and his hand closed around the wood forestock and the cool metal of the barrel. Then he opened his eyes again. The sky was very nearly pink.

He shot up and threw the blanket off himself and took his shotgun and was about to yell Slake’s name when he saw her sitting by the fire with her legs crossed, hunched forward. She looked up at him. “Fuck,” said Shoreline. He exhaled long and hard through his nostrils and sank down to his knees with his hands shaking. “Why didn’t you wake me up for my shift? You scared the shit out of me.”

“You seemed like you were having a good sleep,” she said flatly. “I thought I’d let you keep at it.”

“Shit.” He let his head hang against his chest for a second and looked back up. “Go to sleep,” he told her. “I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

“I don’t mind leaving at the normal time.”

“No. You’re sleeping. Don’t argue with me here.”

She crawled over to where Shoreline had slept while he drank some water and reached for the blanket he cast away and pulled it over. Then she undid the clips on her armor and set the plating aside and loosened her boots and took the chainmail off. Everything felt heavy but it wasn’t the tiredness. She knuckled her eyes. Could he tell? No. If he didn’t comment on it then he couldn’t. The moment she turned her head to the side she was asleep.

They set out just before noon and carried on down the worn old coast road. It was two hours to the end of the trough valley and it was a warm clear day for walking. Each gap in the trees through which they could see the valley floor river it was getting closer, louder. Beyond the steep rise of the solitary wall of mountains below them was the ocean and now they could just taste the salt in the air. Mid afternoon they saw it. Shoreline looked up and paused and looked around for something to climb on. Big boulder, he hauled himself up the side of it without dropping his kit and put his hand over his eyes. “Look at this,” he said.

She climbed up awkwardly beside him and held his shoulder for balance for a moment and mirrored his pose. Just there through a gap in the peaks was the cobalt expanse of the Empresses Ocean. White breakers crashed on the distant shoals. Low tide. They couldn’t see much more of it but there it was. They climbed back down and kept going and in the evening at the foot of the valley they started to come across what was left of the retreat.

They stopped when they saw the back end of the first line of trucks buried in the panicgrass. It was at the bottom of the valley on flatter land and for just a moment it looked like they’d hit a traffic jam. An old military vehicle, the wireframe that once supported canvas was red with rust and it sat lower than it ought to have. In other parts of the continent it might have been a warning but it wasn’t dark enough for anything to be growing here and they approached it, still cautiously. Every truck had its rims and tires missing and the hood either rusted away or discarded in the grass nearby. In some the whole engine block had been taken out. Others had been successfully sabotaged and only some parts were missing. There were some gaps in the line where some had been fixed on the spot and driven away. Maybe still running. The stakebeds had rotted away but a few still held scraps of wood where crates had been stored or scraps of old barrels.

A ways down they started to find possessions scattered in the overgrown road. A heavy steel trunk upturned and opened. A hand mirror. A doll’s eye. Handles of suitcases with the leather missing. Take only what you need was the order and none of this was needed. No bodies. It was very quiet now, they both noticed. The bugs seemed subdued. Just a ways down the road around a bend they found the shell of an old tank.

It was a heavy rolled steel thing with the huge metal treads still intact and the turret long gone, not from any kind of detonation but from scavengers long past. It was completely rusted and the treads were three quarters sunken into the dirt but the metal still looked pretty strong. Slake circled it. Where have you seen this before? Somewhere within her she knew there ought to be an insignia on the side and through the rust she could just make out the opened palm with the coal in the middle. Clunk clunk came Shoreline’s knock on the metal from the other side. “Never seen one of these running,” he said.

“None of them run anymore. I think this is a Minalle Model Ten. They’ve got big V12 engines that just burn through heavy oil. They’re strong but they’re no good unless you’ve got a tanker truck to follow them around.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “How do you know that?”

“My father was into military stuff.”

“Oh.” He came around to her side of the tank and looked up at where the turret used to be. One pull of the trigger, instant obliteration of whatever it was pointed at. No denying its appeal to the mechanically minded. “Do you know a lot about all these?”

“No, only the real military stuff. I was young and I only paid attention if it had guns on it.”

He nodded sagely and they left the tank behind but it was far from the last of the militaria they’d see before the day was through. They passed a boxy truck with broad wiremesh dishes on the top engulfed in overgrowth that Slake knew was for radar but when Shoreline asked she couldn’t tell him a thing about it. The road widened. Box after box sat upturned by the side of the road and rifled of its contents long ago, boxes of ammunition, boxes of tools, boxes of personal belongings. A checkpoint where old cinderblocks and a solitary metal floodlamp post stood strangely austere in the green of the forest. Once there would be mounted guns here, soldiers checking passports, documents. In the middle of the road a sixlegged walking machine sat collapsed like something speared through during a hunt. The metal body was wide enough for one to stand in and had little gunslats in the side and the engine that once hung under it was gone. Another turretless tank of a different variety. A tank destroyer, the gun too integral to the frame to remove. It sat at the side of the road and aimed back the way they came. Seabirds croaked overhead and the grass seemed to grow thinner here but the forest went on for a ways yet and all the while they were stepping over the discarded affairs of emigrants whose terminus was at once a homeland and a complete unknown.

It was late in the evening when they hit the beach. They rounded the final hill and came out by an old riverside road onto a rocky slope of maybe thirty meters and then there was the sea. The both of them stopped right at the edge and just looked. All along the shore were the wrecks of trucks and automobiles and yet more military hardware, halftracks and fuel trucks and police wagons and motorcycles all lying in advanced decay like old seaweed washed in with the tide but they weren’t looking at that. Crashed and broken along the shoals were at least four dozen ships that they could see, all along the beach, some beached with the seaborne halves rotted and gone and some further out which had run aground in the chaos and just couldn’t be saved. Closest to them was a tugboat but farther out there was an aircraft carrier almost perfectly upright on the reef, lower than it ought to be. It had no planes at all on its deck but it was otherwise intact, if corroded. It had little sponsons all along the sides and a knife’s edge of a prow and a huge superstructure decorated with yet more radar dishes, some with broken supports bent downward as if they might get a reading on the flight deck. It was the biggest ship either of them had ever seen. There were other warships moored but it was this one that held their attention.

They went down the beach looking about like tourists. There was no one there but them. None of these wrecks held anything valuable anymore, the good metal looted, anything that could be driven or made to do so long gone but there was still so much. It just went on down the beach, as far as they could see. The side of the mountain that faced the sea rose up almost vertically like a wall constructed between Meropis and everywhere else and how true such a thing was. A few degrees above the water the sun still burned white and the reflection off the waves followed them. Apart from the seabirds there didn’t seem to be much life there at all. There was very little seaweed awash on the shore and it smelled of fish but not strongly. The surf wasn’t that strong at low tide. It came to shore almost politely, hissing against the rocks and washing back out again. Silence over the graveyard. Headstones where no mourner has come for generations. The end of Meropis.

They found a little cave in the cliff wall overlooking the beach a few meters through the trees and they set up camp in it. Slake they cut deadfall and dragged it back through the bush and started a fire on the dirt floor and got it burning pretty well. They cooked a sort of traveller’s chili with dried beans and tomatoes and cuts of cured beef and spices and they ate it on the beach, sitting on the rocks, watching the sun drop like a ball of molten iron into the horizon. They washed their bowls with leaves and a bit of water and cleaned the pot in the same manner and went back to the beach. Slake offered Shoreline a cigarette and he accepted and they lit both with the same match. He smoked like it wasn’t his first.

“I sort of want to dip a toe in,” he said, exhaling the smoke through his nares. “Just to say I’ve been to both sides of Meropis.”

“Why don’t you?”

He looked at her and smiled. “That’s a good question.”

He got up and undid his boots and kicked them off and rolled his pant legs up and walked down to the shore and stood on the wet rocks while a wave came rolling in. It washed over his feet, lingered, foamed, went out again. His cigarette was only half done but he took it from his mouth and threw it into the sea. He looked back at Slake and waved her over. Then he took his shirt off and waded out into the surf.

Why not. She rose and undid the straps on her armor and took it off, her jacket, her shoes, until all she had on were undergarments. She ashed her cigarette on the rocks and picked her way down to the beach where Shoreline had stood and watched while the ocean ran over her feet. It was cool but not cold. Shoreline had waded in up to his hips and he stood with his arms above the water watching her. “It’s just rocks,” he said. “No seaweed or anything.”

“You think there’s any metal or something out there? I don’t want to slice my foot open.”

“I’m going real slow just in case. You’re good if you just walk straight out.”

She walked out the same way he had, up to her knees, up to her hips. He was there waiting for her and when she got out to where he was he leaned back and pushed himself into the water, his arms wheeling slowly to move himself along. She watched him go. He hardly looked like the same Nyctian she saw in Hallatin. He was still lean but it wasn’t the bad kind. Athletic was the word she’d use. He turned and paddled easily for a ways with just his big ears above the surface and turned on his back again, spitting out some seawater. She sank down to her knees and pushed herself back with a kick of her legs and drew in a breath. Purple sky, a lone gull. She pulled herself along, breathing out sharply, inhaling deeply to keep from sinking. Her tail hung beneath her, the tip barely grazing the bottom.

They swam for no more than a few minutes but it was enough to feel clean and more than enough to mark the progress of the journey. This was as far west as anyone could go and it was a small group indeed that could say they did it their way. They went back to shore and shook themselves dry, Shoreline standing there with his arms out at his side and his eyes closed like someone preparing for a cliff dive, Slake undoing the braid in her headfur and wringing it out. She hadn’t packed a comb and just used her fingers to neaten herself as best she could. The sun was still out but it was just at the horizon. She waited until she was mostly dry and put her clothes back on and buttoned it all up and cinched her holstered belt back into place. Water in her ear still. She tilted her head and pounded it with her palm until it came loose with a queerfeeling warm shift.

“I wonder how much oil those things leached out,” she said, motioning with her elbow to the hollow hulks of the ships.

“Well I don’t see a lot of life. Probably a lot.”

“Didn’t smell oily, though.”

“Nope.”

They were headed back up to the cave when she paused, turned, looked back out at the ships. They were a bit to the north of the carrier but from this angle she could better see how skeletal it was, the internal bays rusted out, beams and scraps hanging from the upper levels. What about it. What about all this has your attention. “Would you mind if I just went for a walk down the beach?”

“Of course not. Do you want company?”

“No, thank you. I’m just going to check up and down and make sure we haven’t missed anything too obvious. Signs of anyone else being here.”

“Alright. Want my shotgun?”

“No, it’s alright.”

They parted ways. She went back down the way they came with her jacket undone. There was a breeze coming in off the ocean, strong enough to make her squint. Maybe a kilometer out the combers washed up and sprayed in big white jets against the barrier shoals that had wrecked many a ship on the way in. She walked past a shattered old halftrack, the frame cracked and the contents of the cabin pulled out and decomposed on the rocks. A motorcycle next to it, just a lump of rust. She could only tell what it was based on shape alone. See it. The rust, the beach. The sun. Feel something. But you won’t. There’s something else on your mind. A decision. The coin balances on its edge. She spat on the rocks and was going to walk on when she saw someone coming out of the treeline in front of her.

Moment of panic. She dropped low and drew her gun in the same motion and sprinted for the treeline and dove into it and came up behind a tree with the gun raised. More people were coming onto the beach through a break in the trees. She tried to listen. Engine? Yes. She could make one out, idling somewhere back in the bush. As soon as she heard it it cut out and whined into silence. Doors shut. The people coming onto the beach were all Beowend. She lowered her gun.

The first four onto the beach were dressed in old military dress uniforms, well-pressed and black as they ought to be with gold epaulettes and medals on their lapels and each was armed with a pistol in a black leather holster on their hip. Two men, two women. They all looked old, not octogenarian but old enough. They were joined by a small crowd of maybe twenty or so other Beowend and a single Simälken, all clad in their finest, all dark. Grey dresses, company uniforms, suits. Some of them looked very old and walked with canes or stood stooped at the waist or bent at some other odd geriatric angle. None wore hats and they barely spoke save for the uniformed ones telling the others where to stand. Murmurs drifting across the beach. Soon they formed a small column and when they were in position one of the uniformed ones stood at the front and faced back at the treeline and raised her hand.

Eight more emerged from the trees carrying a raft made from wood stacked high with provisions. Boxes of canned goods, little sealed containers of fish, of meat, of bread, cigarettes, bottles of rum. Paddles. A jug of gasoline. Wood for patching it. Fabric for a sail. It was enough to last one for a good journey. An engine was mounted at the back of the raft, just a little one. Slake watched it from the orangelit bushes. The long length of fabric she thought was a sail was a corpse lying atop the raft.

The column walked to the beach very slowly, picking their way carefully along the rocks. Some of them held the elders by the arms and guided them along. No medicine women present for whoever this was. They paused at the shore where the rocks turned wet and made way while the raftbearers passed and waded out into the water. On the count of three they lowered, their hips sinking into the sea, sliding the raft down off their shoulders. No one spoke. In the final sendoff back home it is not the voices of a foreign land one wishes to hear. The bearers waded from the water save one who gripped the pull start of the engine and stood back and hauled on it. The engine stuttered and gave a wisp of smoke. One of the older women made a noise like something wounded and fell to her knees. The Simälken kneeled to put his hand on her back. Two more pulls and the engine started. The man in the water set it into gear very cautiously and throttled it up and it lurched and churned at the water and started off, bobbing gently on the waves. It was very quiet save for the receding noise of the engine and the solitary wail of the widow. They bent to help her up and walked slowly back up the beach while the raft carried on, aimed straight at the half-gone sun.

They shuffled back into the woods in no real order. Out of all of them the Simälken was the last to leave. She could see him there at the treeline, orange-furred, long of whisker, big eyes. Clad in a waistcoat. Out there an ancestral home more distant yet. She just barely heard him say safe journey. Then he went away.

The engine started again. She put her gun away and stepped onto the beach. Something else in the air now. Exhaust. The afterimage of floral perfume. She couldn’t hear the raft anymore but she could see it in its straight trajectory out to the horizon. The sun was gone and a curtain of purple fell across the end of the earth. The coin turns and topples as if guided by a hand. She waited until the engine was well and gone then went back to camp.

V - The Door Under The Western Ocean

It was dark in the cave when she got back. She pushed her way in through the bush and said who she was as she walked so Shoreline wouldn’t open fire. He had the fire going and she could see him sitting crosslegged beside it with his pants laid out to dry in the heat and his shotgun beside him. The cave wall was very black and caught almost no light and he looked like someone meditating in a void. She sat next to him.

“I thought I heard a motor running,” he said. “I was going to come out but I didn’t hear any gunshots.”

“You heard right. It was just a dinghy passing by. Someone fishing, I think.”

“They can’t be catching much.”

“I guess not, but there they were.” She unclipped her holster and took her revolver out and set it to her side. He spoke before she could.

“Don’t even think about taking first watch tonight,” he told her. He pointed across the cave to where their belongings were piled against the wall and the blanket had been laid out with her pack to serve as a pillow. She wanted to fight it but the words weren’t coming out of her.

“Alright.” She took her pistol along and crawled over and rolled sideways onto the blanket and pulled the loose end over herself. He watched her. Whatever he saw or might have seen was outweighed by her compliance and he looked away. The surf came into the cave quietly and rolled off the walls. Firelight. Him. She turned her head away and shifted it against the pack until it had a her-shaped divot in it. It was as comfortable a sleep as she’d found when a bed was out of the question, the rocks in the ground couldn’t be negotiated. She didn’t know when she fell asleep but she did.

She got back up just before midnight and stood over her sleeping form with one hand on the wall to keep herself steady. A check of her body confirmed it was still there. You really do look old. It struck her so much that she had to double check that it was her. A lean figure in uniform sleeping on her stomach with her hands under the pack and her head sideways and her beak open. Crow’s feet beside her eyes. Grey fur on her face in the same manner a dog might get grey, it concentrated near her beak and her eyebrows. In company meetings long past that she attended in ornate frogged coats at the behest of her manager father she had seen chemical workers who did not look dissimilar. Ugly. Just ugly. Shoreline wasn’t there when she looked up.

She nearly went for her gun out of pure instinct but she saw him coming back up into the cave from the outside doing up his belt with one hand. He circled the fire and sat between her and the door and put his shotgun across his lap and stared into the coals, stirring them with a stick. A swarm of sparks rushed to the ceiling. There he would sit until perhaps three o’clock.

Slake sat beside him far closer than she would in her waking hours and bent in to inspect him, almost close enough that her beak touched him. She looked at his eyes. Nothing. He was all white already and nearly bloodred in the light of the fire so if he had turned grey she couldn’t tell but she suspected he hadn’t. She bent around him and he flicked his perforated ear and sniffed and looked behind him, not at her, just around. Something there? She froze. “Huh,” he told no one. He looked up the walls to the ceiling to see if something had fallen on him but nothing had. You’d best leave the man be. She rose and went out for the beach.

To be told of a thing is hardly the equal to seeing it and what Beowend could go without the tale of their lost homeland. The beacon lights of Answall looking out over the sea. The black coast. The exodus a century prior to a fate unknown and the solitary trace of that distant land existing only in a faint glow over the western horizon on certain nights at the farthest edge of Meropis. Five-thousand two-hundred and sixteen kilometers west you’d hit the shore. Many had tried but none had come back from leaving eyeshot of the coast of Meropis. Slake came soundlessly out of the bushes and stopped on the rocks and saw for the first time the lights over the western ocean. Pure blue, the kind of blue that comes off the power rods in a reactor. She had to squint to see them but there they were, jostling and waving like an aurora in the blackness of the firmament. She had not known the night sky well on her travels and she could name no constellations but they watched her nevertheless. The twinheaded mother, the coal. Every sister was present tonight. The gaseous crescent of Tsull shone over the eastern mountains. Argei hovering with Liyag at her side, orange and shiny like miswoven tapetum lucidum. Ako directly overhead. Be they aphetas or bearers of ill omen she paid them no mind.

She went down to the shore and bent to dip a hand in the water. Her hand didn’t leave a wake but she could feel it. A few degrees colder maybe. She stood and walked out to the aircraft carrier. The surface was cold on her unshod feet and each wave was something she had to ascend and descend like the crossing of a sand dune but past the breakers it was easy going.

From closer up it looked like a fallen skyscraper, something killed and turned on its side. The hull was rusted out entirely and barnacles fouled the seamost parts of it. The hull curved up and outwards and it was overall smooth save for where some foot-thick panels had fallen loose with the passage of time. She walked to the prow and looked down to the other end and saw where it had bent its keel on the rocks. In such shallow water it would never sink, just rot to nothing. She went along until she found a gap she thought was big enough to get in through and pulled herself up the concave hull and went in.

The guts of the old carrier were very little more than skeins of rust and the nearly hollow interior boomed with water like a sea cave. She hauled herself along a platform that once was part of an elevator and looked down. The storage deck had fallen many years ago and had taken everything down into the bottom with it. Support beams, containers, fuel tanks that had burst and spilled their leaden contents into the water. It did have some warplanes on it after all, she counted six. They were push prop models that she knew were used by naval aviators of old and they all sat in broken heaps half submerged in the rough water, all with their wings still folded, or what was left of them. A little tractor for towing cargo sat in the fallen elevator on its rims. Part of her expected there to be more here but she didn’t know why. No justification for it. Nothing else was here. Why would this be?

She went along the edge of the hull on the beams to a gap in the ceiling and manoeuvred up to the edge and pulled her weightless form up onto the flight deck. Some of the older models were made from wood but this one was steel and it was very flat save for the bump from the broken keel. Any bumps or features on it had melted away in storms past, every deck light, every hook. The wind was much stronger up this high. She walked over the deck and looked down over the edge and watched the waves breaking on the hull. Then she walked the perimeter of the deck. The moonlight was strong enough that the island cast twinned shadows across the deck. On the front part of the flight deck facing northwest she made out the number 16. Of how many, no idea. She was going to go to the bridge but she decided against it. You can permit yourself to sit down, though. She crossed the deck again and sat on the western edge and watched the blue lights. All concerns she might have had prior simply weren’t there. The bloodline, the next meal. You can’t put this off any longer.

There were criteria for how to do it and only some could be compromised on. You can’t be found. It needed to be done in absolute secrecy. He can’t find you. You cannot permit that. You must be gone in your entirety with no room for questions. It needed to be foolproof. No risk of a miss, no leaving things to gravity or chance. So no guns. No cliffs. She looked out over the ocean for some time and watched the stars glint on the stippled surface like a stagelight on a sheet of hammered iron. Perhaps that little motor still runs far out there. Over deeper seas home to whales and those who sailed out before. You’ll need to sort some things out. Prepare a bit. But that won’t take the whole night. You won’t need to see another sunrise.

Is it decided then?

Yes. It’s only the details that need to be sorted. Be as heavy as possible. Wear your armour. Find some chains on the beach if you can. Carry a rock. Stuff your pockets with them. Breathe out on the way down, breathe in on the bottom. Sink to the bottom quickly and be done. There’s nothing to it. Nothing at all.

She gripped the edge of the deck and put her elbow on her knee and her head in her hand and watched the horizon like someone waiting for a ship to come home. The stars wheeled slowly right to left, constellations sinking into the water, new ones rising from it like fish leaping. It was cool out and getting colder but she took her time getting up. The novelty of seeing stars at night after leaving Hallatin hadn’t worn off. Given time it might never but that wasn’t for her to know, any fates she may have held were things that should not be guessed at. She practised it. Pause, breathe out. Everything in her lungs. Then breathe in hard through her beak. She did it thrice. Then she just sat there for a while and watched the stars.

At about one o’clock she turned and held the edge of the deck and hung down off the edge and dropped down onto the water. She landed on the surface and walked towards shore, matching her speed with the waves, stepping over the ones breaking on the shore. Over the stones again and through the bush to where Shoreline kept his vigil over her sleeping form. He didn’t seem to have moved at all since she last saw him. She gave him a wide berth and sat down next to the shell of herself and leaned her head against the cave wall and shut her eyes.

He shook her awake just after two and she rose up blinking. Sitting between her and the firelight it looked like his shadow had come to life to rouse her from sleep but he sat back when she came to and looked normal again. She pushed the blanket off herself and shuffled over to the fire on her knees and sat. Everything felt heavy again, as it always did when she returned to herself. Like putting on a heavy jacket. Or armour. “Everything quiet?” she asked him.

“Nothing out there but the sea,” he said. He went over to where she’d been laying and sat up against the pack and put his hands on his belly and sighed. “I can stay up if you’re still tired. Felt sort of bad waking you up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. Her armour sat in a heap near his feet, the cuirass on top of the mail and plating, the helmet on top of the cuirass. It looked a lot worse for wear in this light. More dents, more scratches. The hollow eye slits watched her. She reached for it.

“What are you doing?”

Think fast. “You remember that boat I saw earlier?”

“Yeah. Oh. Just in case?”

“Just in case,” she confirmed. She put the helmet on first and cinched the plate under her beak tight and did up the straps and stood up to put the rest on. He didn’t watch her even though there was nothing private about the process. Do everything up tight. Don’t want it falling off. She sat down to do up the shinplates and sat back, clinking. Notice what makes noise and what doesn’t. How to move quietly. She put her hand on her knee and bent towards the fire and looked at him, expecting him to be trying to sleep but he was still looking at her.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Never been so sure of anything in my life,” she told him. He sighed and let his head fall back.

Now came the waiting. She had not expected nerves and they did not come. She kept her eyes off him for fear of waking him up by observation alone and listened intently to him, to the clinking of her armour as she moved her arm, her leg, bent her neck to one side or the other. The hauberk didn’t make too much noise but if she got up too fast some of her plating would collide and that would sound like kitchenware being tossed around. If she thought about much else while he fell asleep she didn’t know it. Half an hour later his breathing was slow. She turned her legs to one side as slowly as she could and hunched forward and pushed herself up at an odd angle and she got to her feet more or less without a sound and crept to the mouth of the cave and went out.

The lights over the western ocean had gotten brighter since she last saw them. They hung over the sea like curtains in the wind, rippling on some otherworldly jet stream. They were bright enough that she could see them on the water and on the beach where their light coloured everything a bluer blue than the moons could. Maybe she would have paid them more mind in normal times but she spared them only a glance and went on down the beach to look through the wrecks.

Most of them were little more than lumps of rust in vague and beaten vehicular shape but she sort of found what she was looking for. In the bed of an upturned truck she found a length of abraded chain that she put around her shoulder. Something circular with a hole in the center that might have been a rim for a tire. She wore that around her arm. You need to sink fast. Doesn’t matter how it looks. Or sounds. She carried on down the beach, rattling along over the rocks, bending down here and there to take a likely looking one and put it in her pocket. Heavier every few steps. Good. That’s good. The waves were a bit bigger now. Tide coming in. She hadn’t walked very far before she was weighed down pretty good. She was looking down to search for more rocks but in the corner of her eye she saw something washed up on the beach.

It was a log that looked like it might have been a power pole at some point in the past but it couldn’t have been. Wouldn’t have ended up here. But there it was regardless, five meters long, perfectly round and polished by the sea until it looked like a femur. She went up to it. Half of it was in the water, moving with the waves. It wasn’t anchored to land very well. A good push and it would come loose and if it’s here, it floats. She looked out over the water. A piece of driftwood as a chariot to her death. It gets you further offshore. Into deeper water. It will serve as well as any raft.

She mounted the wider part of it and sat sidesaddle on it and felt the balance of it. It was wide enough to not roll too easily and she could reach into the water to paddle once she’d gotten too far out to walk it. Should you use a paddle? You could use your axe. No. Wait.

She felt her hip with both hands and each one touched a different arm. Her gun and her axe. Out of everything of hers to come with her apart from Shoreline only these two had made it and both of them were stolen. Together they weighed a few kilograms. Mostly the axehead. She took them off her hip and laid them on her lap and just looked at them. She was not a sentimental person but to take these with her felt incorrect. A Beowend ought to be burned with their arms but it seemed like a waste. He could use the gun. And the axe. Don’t be selfish about it. She got off the driftwood and set them both down on the rocks just past the wetness of the beach face. He might not find them but he’ll at least have a chance to see the revolver in the sun. Her last time on dry land, it didn’t even occur to her. She went back to the driftwood and grabbed the drier end and hauled on it. “Heavy fucking thing,” she grunted at it. She lowered herself down and pulled with her whole body and got it free from the sand and went around the other side and rolled it into the water.

Slake walked along behind it nudging the bulk of it along with her shins, the wood knocking up against the plating with hollow thunks. Water poured into her boots, the lowest part of her pant legs clung to her. She moved it along until she was knee deep and bent to wrap an arm around it to pull it along with her as she walked, fighting to keep it from being dragged sideways. When the water was up to her hips she grabbed it tightly and leapt up onto it and swung her leg over. The log lowered in the water but it stayed afloat. She kicked and paddled her way along. Slower than walking but she was still moving.

The raft and the body it carried went over the rolling waves almost canoelike, with the same dipping motion, meeting each wave head on. The motion of paddling was immeasurably awkward from the metal she was wearing. She didn’t spare any looks back at land. The ocean before her was very dark against the blueness of the sky and the lights were doubled on the waves. How far out is far enough? She had taken no measure of sandbars in her swim and had no knowledge of the ocean but farther wouldn’t hurt. She went on for what felt like long enough then looked back. Three hundred meters from shore if she had to guess. Not as far as she thought she’d gone but far enough. She rose up from paddling and put her hands on her thighs.

She had felt like this before. A long time ago. The feeling of breaking something. Or watching a cup full of brushes fall from a table. A young and terrified face knowing what’s coming in five minutes. The feeling of being in trouble. Her heart. She rubbed at her cuirass like she might calm its beating and wound the chain around her other shoulder to make sure it wouldn’t come loose.

Alright. Alright.

Slake leaned to her right and fell into the western ocean.

A three second journey to the bottom in complete blackness. There was a faint splash on the surface that disappeared in moments. True to her prediction she sank immediately and impacted the sand with a soft thump. She breathed out as hard as she could. Bubbles ran up her beak and around her helmet and trailed off straight up through the pitch black water. When she thought she was done she exhaled through her nose, got a bit more out. Then she breathed in hard.

Her lungs flooded with seawater and it hurt worse than anything she’d felt in her life. Every bullet, every fist, the tips of spears and the knives. Her chest felt aflame. Worse than that, full-body immolation, drenched with gasoline. Her mind jerked her body around, exhaling, inhaling again. Only water. She clawed at the sand, caught a nail on a rock, pried it loose, didn’t even feel it. It hurts, she said.

She couldn’t see it but she knew it. Grey around her sightless vision and an enclosing blackness. She breathed again and it almost felt like air. Her body jerked about trying to pry everything loose but she had it all on tight. She kicked the sand. She cried for help. Blackness. Feel it. It happens fast. She yelled soundlessly through her strangled throat. She yelled for Shoreline. Numbness. It was working its way up her legs and into her arms. Everything automatic now, nothing conscious to any of it. She felt herself slipping. Slip. No. She grabbed the sand, felt the grains in her palms. Then she was gone.

Slake woke up in a hallway.

She pushed herself up onto her knees and looked at her hands flat on the weathered old floorboards and wretched and fell beak first into them. See her now. Dry again with her knees to her chest, almost fetal. She shut her eyes tightly and rocked side to side. Her whole body was shaking with cold that she didn’t even feel, the hall was warm enough. After a while she got up and knelt there like she was giving thanks at an altar. Then she got up.

Floral wallpaper, light cream with pink sprouts. Wall sconces holding lightbulbs, soft light. Green carpet untouched by weather or dirt or grime. There were no doors in the hall save for one at the end, a big teak door, important looking. She looked behind her. Not three paces back the hallway just ended and gave way to total blackness. Not total blackness. There was something else. A faint horizontal slit so faint she could only just make it out. Like someone opening their eyes after a long sleep. She watched it and thought maybe it was getting brighter, very slowly. But that isn’t for you yet. She turned away from it and walked to the door at the end and opened it.

Her great grandmother’s office, she recognized it immediately but not the state it was in. Everything was back in its right place. A round room with a stained glass ceiling completely intact. Morning light came through the coloured panes and mottled everything in subtle red, green, orange. The curved shelves stacked with books. She tried to recall their positions back home and they looked to be in the right place. The sextant was. So was the pistol case. It smelled of ink and paper and faintly of soap. She had never seen the window clear before but now it was. Past the trees in the yard she could see the townhomes of the old neighbourhood. Something different there, too. She went over the floor and put her beak almost to the glass and looked out. A car was going down the street. No animals. The shingled roofs were all intact and the roads uncluttered by wires, by stalls, by people. It was very quiet out. It must have been late in the harvest season because the glass was cool and that was the only time it was ever cool in Hallatin when there wasn’t ash on the ground. Noise to her right. Something subtle, like the scratch of a pencil. She looked to the desk and someone was sitting behind it looking back at her.

The woman behind the desk looked like her. Gold fur and orange eyes set on a greying face. She wore her headfur cut short on the sides in the way the naval infantry used to and she sat leaning forward behind a typewriter with her elbows on the table and her hands clasped. She looked like she’d been studying Slake and she had been.

“I know who you are,” said Slake.

“I bet you do,” said Valensa. She smiled at her but there was no joy in it. She nodded to the chair across from her. Something new in the office. Must have been carted off in her time. “Have a seat.”

Slake sat. “I didn’t think it would look this nice back in the day. Your office.”

“It was very nice. Took far better care of this than I did of the university one. I never cared too much about keeping it clean.” There was something unplaceable and foreign about her accent, Slake had never heard one like it. An Answall accent. “Thank you for maintaining the place. It was fruitless to expect you to clean the whole thing when the floor was rotting out but you did something. I wouldn’t have.”

“There wasn’t a lot else for me to do.”

“I guess not. Can I get you something? Cigarette? Tea?”

“No, thank you.”

Valensa took a pack of cigarettes from her desk and got one out and put it in her beak. “Do you mind?”

Slake motioned for her to go ahead. She lit it with an old and beaten military lighter. It was carved ornately with some kind of design but she put it away before Slake could get a look at it. When she had her cigarette lit she didn’t smoke it. She just held it between her fingers and looked at her through the smoke. “I have to tell you,” she said, “you got old pretty fast.”

“How old do I look?”

“You look twenty-one. But you look like the twenty-one year olds I used to know. In the service. I had hoped none of my children or their children would ever have to look like that but I suppose that was a lot to ask for.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“Oh, don’t be. It wasn’t your fault.” She paused. “Mostly. Are you alright?”

“What?”

“Are you alright. I’m not sure if I can phrase it any clearer than that. Are you feeling well, peaceful of mind, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know if I have a good answer for you given the circumstances.”

“Yes. I suppose that’s fair.”

“Do I look like I’m doing alright?”

“Pardon my forwardness but no. You don’t.”

“Well there isn’t much I can do about that.”

“Nothing at this point, anyway.” Finally she lifted her cigarette and smoked. “I’m surprised you made it,” Valensa told her. She seemed at ease here. Like talking to Slake was nothing she hadn’t done before. Slake herself sat with her hands in her lap and barely moved. “Not shocked. Capabilities were never in question. But you had a rougher go of it than I did.”

“Did you take a train?”

She shook her head. “I flew. Back in those days all the lighter-than-airs were still running but you could never get on them unless you had something to offer, something they couldn’t get just anywhere. The railways were packed. Everyone wanted out of the city. It was total panic. I took my old gun there and showed up in uniform and told them where I’d fought and how much time I’d spent on a ship and they let me on. We went the northern route. It was fire season and the captain thought we’d have a much better go of it up that way and he was right. Everywhere we stopped to refuel the prices were doubled from the last and the telegraphs were saying that most down south had simply run dry, they hadn’t any more. We were just north of Barathrum when the fuel stations were out. At that point I think most of the trains had ground to a halt and the fever was getting bad but the journey we’d been on wasn’t much trouble. It was more psychological than physical, watching it all fall down around you.”

“Did you crashland?”

“No. One of the deckhands came up and pulled the captain aside and whispered to her. Well check it again, she said, and he did. He came back soon after and just nodded to her and she gathered everyone on board, passengers and crew all save for the pilot. She told us we had six hours of fuel left and she was opting to set her down near the coast in whatever flat land she could find. Some people wept. I think perhaps they thought they could stay up there forever and keep the journey going the rest of their lives. As long as they were moving nothing bad would happen. But when they realized it was the end of the road they couldn’t put the gravity of the situation off any longer.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what, break down?”

“Yeah.”

“Certainly not. I could see it coming from a ways away so I had time to ready myself for it. About two hours later we set down on a flatland maybe two kilometers in from the coast. We got off just like you would in any port, the deckhands there with their uniforms on smiling and thanking us for our patronage. When the ship was empty all us civilians went our separate ways. I went alone. I looked back at the captain to thank her but she was speaking to her crew and their families. The smiles were gone. I don’t know what happened to her but I do hope she made it alright.”

“And you got to the coast.”

“I did. I walked until I hit the sea. Most of the boats had gone by then and there weren’t a whole lot that wanted to head out for the lights at that point but I found one who did eventually. A big old fishing trawler. I got there just in time, they were about to set sail. I ran out through the water waving like a madwoman and they nearly shot me. They took me aboard and we were off.”

Slake sat back in her seat and looked at her. Valensa did the same. They sat similarly. One arm on the rest and the other in their lap but Valensa sat with one leg over the other. “You’ve been watching me,” Slake said.

“I wouldn’t go that far. Passively observing. Riding along, sometimes paying attention.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s fascinating. Not necessarily you. But the concept of you. Of the times. It ought to be in a textbook.” She looked past Slake over to the window. “That’s for another time, though. May I ask you something?”

Slake followed Valensa’s gaze. The morning light from before was gone and something else was coming through the glass panes, something flickering and orange. The room still smelled like paper but it smelled faintly of smoke now, a tang of brimstone running beneath it. “What is that?” she asked. “Is the house on fire?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. But if you don’t mind I’d like that answer from you quickly, whatever it may be.”

She looked back to Valensa. She was sitting the same way she had been, having seen all this before. “Go ahead.”

“Euphrosyne Risca was my daughter, your grandmother. I had five children but the first four were old enough to look after themselves. She wasn’t. Did you ever meet her?”

She thought about it but everything before age six or so was a blank outside of certain dreams and her grandmother was in none of those. There were family pictures in the arsenal of the two of them. A shrivelled old woman who had children late, her back bent from years of labour in a candle shop. She stood on a balcony somewhere with Slake at her side, the both of them looking in different directions. “I did,” she replied, “but I couldn’t tell you when or what I think of her. She died when I was four. I don’t remember her.”

Valensa sighed and ashed her cigarette in a little jade tray. “That’s alright,” she said. “I’ve moved on. I was just curious.” She looked at Slake. “And you?”

“Do I have children?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Surely you’d know by now if I did.”

The older Beowend’s expression darkened. She wasn’t smiling before and nothing much about her had changed but there was a new edge to her. “So none whatsoever. You’re how old?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Hm.” She scratched her throat. Slake could hear the fire now and like all unseen fires she couldn’t leave it out of sight for long and she glanced back at it. Flames were pounding at the windows and a shuttling of sparks traced over the floor, the hardwood darkened and scorched where they landed. Valensa spoke while she was looking away. “So it ends with you.”

“My mother’s alive. But she must be getting on fifty now.”

“Functionally speaking, then.” She drummed her fingers on the table once and leaned back. She looked at her ashtray. Perhaps another would soothe her sudden nerves but she didn’t go for one. “I shouldn’t be mad at you. I won’t be.”

The curtains ignited. Flames rushed from the bottom to the top of the old lace and lashed at the ceiling, cracking the paint, hissing, popping. It wasn’t hot but it reeked of sulfur now. Slake stood up and took a step back but it wasn’t from fear. Apprehension, that was all. She looked at Valensa. “What is this?”

The older Beowend simply gestured at the ceiling with a broad shrug and canted her head. “All of this?”

“Yes. All this. You. You’re not Valensa. Whoever you are, you’re not her.”

Valensa rubbed her temple and thought about it. The carpet was burning. The way it smouldered it looked like a pool of gas set alight, radiating outwards like something spilled. “Shall I put it to you simply?”

“Yes.”

“You are drowning in three and a half meters of seawater. Right now you’re suffering from acute cerebral anoxia. That means that your brain isn’t getting any air at all and as of right now it hasn’t for some time. There are a few twitches left in your nervous system but that’s it. The prognosis isn’t good, I can assure you. You’re dying.”

“This is a dying hallucination, then. You’re just me. Some part of me that felt the need to speak.”

“You can think whatever you’d like. But I can tell you what Euphrosyne Valensa is. She is at the bottom of the sea two hundred and six kilometers offshore under two kilometers of water. I remain but she is dead. She is whalefall in Beowend form. Deep sea dust. A fading memory and little more.”

Slake nodded but she wasn’t sure why. The room was completely ablaze now. The bookshelves were being incinerated, the fire leaping through the dry paper like kindling and turning the far wall into an inferno. Parts of the ceiling sloughed down, fell, crashed to the floor heavily. “And I’m dead too now. Not quite whalefall but close enough.”

“That’s right. I’m sorry.”

She thought maybe she should take that in but it didn’t seem like there was time. “What’s going to happen next?”

“You’ll head back out through that door if you know what’s good for you. Which I don’t trust. But you ought to do it. You might not like what’s coming next. Or you might. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She ducked under the ceiling fire and put her hand to the brass doorknob. One last look at Valensa. She expected her to be watching but she was looking out to the window like she might be able to see from it normally. Then she hit a button and the platen clacked slightly to the left and dropped down and she started typing. She turned the knob but she didn’t open it yet. Get a good look at the place, fiery though it may be. You will not see it again. Not ever.

Slake opened the door. Someone beyond it called her name.

Shoreline woke up with the dimming of the campfire but that wasn’t what brought him out of sleep. In the dream he’d just been in he saw her by the banks of the river stepping into a boat with all her kit and he watched her idly. She had everything by the bank and she stood with one foot on the shore and loaded it all. Her pack and her armaments. The machine gun. Cartridge boxes. Hunched there in her armour he thought she looked like a warrior from an old painting headed off to battle in a foreign land or against some unknown foe from whom there’d be no returning save for myths of combat. When it was all loaded the little motorboat sat low in the water. The current was rough but it looked like she could make it. He had seen her weather worse and if nothing else his faith in her was absolute.

She paused halfway out of the boat just as she’d been standing and looked back at him and he saw she was crying or had just been. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes were red. He’d never seen her like that before. He thought she was going to wave him over. Instead she kicked off from the shore and hauled on the thin anchor rope and reached back to pull start the motor. The less words said in parting the better? Lest the whole thing be stopped. It kicked into life as the current started to angle the boat sideways and she steered it forward. He jogged after her along the grassy embankment.

“Slake,” he called, but she didn’t look back. When she heard him she turned the steering handle and the engine revved higher. He went from a jog to a run but she was leaving him behind and the bank was getting shorter and soon he could run along no more lest he fall headlong into the current. But he would not stop running.

Shoreline sat up immediately. The fire wasn’t down to coals but the flames were a lot lower than they ought to have been. Nothing new added for half an hour maybe. He looked around for Slake then listened for her but there was no sign of her. He got up with his heart pounding in his ears and took his shotgun and ran out of the cave calling her name.

It was still nighttime on the beach but the lights had gone and it just seemed like as normal a night as any. Raw moonlight painted the beach with harsh shadows. He looked up and down it but he saw nothing of her and he cut for sign and he told himself do not panic. You can do anything you’d like as long as it’s not panicking. He looked for disturbances in the rocks and he thought there might have been footprints there, odd ones that sunk deeper than normal going north down the beach. He walked that way. Then he ran.

Not far down the beach he was looking out over the water when he saw the driftwood. It was in more or less the same spot it had been. It was seldom that a sight put any fear in him but he couldn’t recall a time when anything had done so more. He almost fell over. Then he did, catching himself with his hands. He rose up shaking and ran down to the shore and saw her gun and her axe sitting there and he knew what happened.

He ran out into the surf and pulled himself along in total panic to the driftwood. He was not a fast swimmer but you couldn’t find anyone who’d’ve reached it faster. He grabbed onto it panting and called her name and scanned the water looking for her but he knew she wouldn’t be floating. The dark ocean told him nothing. He sucked in some deep breaths and went down to the bottom, patting along in the sand blindly, kicking back up off the sand only when he was close to unconsciousness. He hung onto the wood only as long as it took to get his breath back then went under again.

On the fifth trip he found her. His arm closed around her braid and he screamed, a torrent of bubbles rising from his mouth to the surface. He hooked his hands under her arms and got her back to the surface. She was immensely heavy but damned if he did not have the strength, if only temporarily. He broke the surface of the water and hauled his shoulders to get her limp and helmeted head out of the water. He yelled into her ear, yelled at the ocean, at nothing. No. Slake. Talk to me. You have to talk to me. Please.

When he got her back to the shore he was completely exhausted but he grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her up to where it was flat and dry. She fell back onto the rocks with water pouring from the gaps in her armour and from her boots and helmet. He took her helmet off her and shook her violently and he didn’t know it but he was sobbing. Her eyes were open and they were glassy and her face looked swollen and she was cold and limp and dead.

He tried to resuscitate her. He put his hands to her chest and tried pumping the water out and he rolled her onto her front and pushed at her back but nothing happened. He took no stock of the time and soon it was morning. Moonlight gave way to pale orange rays bleeding over the eastern mountains. It took him some time to realize that he had been trying for hours but she was no more alive than when he had started. He grabbed her by the hand and looked at the bluing of the sky. Then he sank to the rocks beside her and put his face to her neck and wailed.

Shoreline stayed with her for the rest of the day without moving much and he made very little noise save for a whimper here or there. He stayed while the sun crossed the meridian and swung through the sky to the north. Soon it was dusk again. He sat up from where he laid beside her and looked blinking at the setting sun. Certain feelings returned. He was desperate for water. Everything ached. He thought he might have swallowed some seawater but it couldn’t be serious. And he couldn’t leave her like this. He could do a lot of things but he couldn’t do that.

He took her by the arms and dragged her back to shore. Twice he broke down midway and just sat there like something shot and just sobbed. But he got her to the treeline eventually. He walked back down to the beach and got her gun and her axe. The latter was the closest thing to a shovel he had and he figured it would have to do.

It was early morning when he had the hole dug. He built a fire on the beach to see better and took her still wet armour and clothes off her and rolled her in a tarpaulin and tied it together with some rope. Then he took her over to the pit, carrying her with one arm under her knees and another under her back. He set her down beside it and rolled her towards it very gently and held the sheets to get her down without falling. It would have worked better with more people but he did it. The sun was coming up again when he finished shovelling all the dirt back on and tamping it down. He went along the beach taking the biggest rocks he could find and carried them over to the new patch of churned earth and covered her resting place as thoroughly as he could so nothing could get at it. Only then could he permit himself to be tired. He went back to the cave almost in a trance and laid down where they’d slept two nights ago and closed his eyes.

He didn’t know when he awoke but it was to an explosion and it sent him to his feet purely on instinct and he grabbed his shotgun. He didn’t remember bringing it up from the beach but he must have at some point. The noise of whatever it was echoed off the cave walls like the hollow remainder of a gong. He went out to the beach.

Ash season. Somewhere very far inland the volcano had erupted again and the sound was only just reaching him. He tried to feel it in his feet but the rumbling wasn’t as strong here like it was in Hallatin. But the effects would be the same. In not too many days he’d be buried in ash here. There would be no staying with her. Tempting as it was. He could only go on.

He collected what he needed from the cave and left certain things behind. He opted to wear her armour. It was too valuable to leave and though it would need adjusting it fit him alright. He tied the helmet to his pack and wore the rest, skull fragments and all. Her revolver went into its rightful place in the holster and he wore the axe on the other side and he sorted through her pack for as much food and ket as he could take. When he had everything he thought he needed he went back out to the cairn he’d built over her. What could you even say. What can you do. The anchor has been pulled up and the boats unmoored in seas unfamiliar. Never again in his life would he want so badly to shoot himself. He had wanted to before this, in other times. He would entertain it again but never again would he come as close as this. He put his hand on the revolver. Thought about it. Then he went on.

He walked away from where they’d entered the beach until he found a path leading off it, another old road. There was an old metal sign there with a few characters still legible but he couldn’t read before and he couldn’t read now either and he had seen nothing of anyone else in the world. He stood there looking into the brush. A seabird circled on a breeze downshore and went past on its wide wings and banked inland. He watched it go. Then he went on into the brush and he was gone.

The End

SINE QUA NON

S. L.

K. L.

K. Z.

W. R.

E. A.

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