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I had to check a couple times to make sure I was seeing right – this was the shoddiest dock in town, which meant it was a good, fine place for me to get day-drunk while looking at the water and imagining I was going to do real work – but no, I was right.

Eleven, maybe twelve years old. Kiddy lisps and mumbles all gone, voice still too high-pitched and squeaky, but talking in deadly grown-up earnest all the same.

“I want a ride,” she repeated, stone-faced. And that just made Angel laugh harder, hands on both knees now, dockmaster’s coat flapping from the wind of her joy.

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Oh I bet! Caught some minnows and now you want to go whale-hunting, huh? Get a vouch from someone that isn’t your mommy.”

“I’ll do it,” said the spirits, using my mouth. Damn, I’d had more than I thought. My impulse control wasn’t usually this bad.

“A vouch from someone that isn’t your mommy or halfway alcohol by volume,” said Angel.

“You’ve let me take Charlie-Jetty out when I can’t even talk, Angel,” I argued. “Go on, let the kid be. Worst that’ll happen is she can’t find anything.”
“Worst that’ll happen is she gets them both fed to a damn shark.”

I fumbled around in my jacket until I found the hooks in my pocket – had to fight them out, they’d gotten snarled in the weave – then flung them in the dockmaster’s direction. She took them up with a quickness and a grin that let me know she might have planned on this.

“G’wan then, shorty,” she said cheerfully. “Go catch your whales.”

“Thank you,” said the kid. Teeth not gritted, face still stony. This wasn’t the first time she’d been treated like this. How many docks do you visit before you go to the shoddiest one in town?

Maybe none, if the others aren’t dumb enough to rent out fins to prepubescent. And you’d be out of luck there too if a sentimental and contrary drunk wasn’t on hand to play scapegoat if the kid doesn’t come back.

Those were the cheerful thoughts that filled me as I watched the kid scud away into the early-morning mists atop the low-slung and scaleless back of Charlie-Jetty, short legs dangling from the croc’s flanks so her toes just touched the water’s surface.

“If she doesn’t come back,” Angel said, clicking my (her) hooks against each other thoughtfully, “I sure hope Charlie does.” A cheap ride, but a consistent one, and sensible. “There’ll be some sad old abalone hunters without him – he practically does their runs for them.”

“She’ll come back,” I said. An uninformed opinion, but a stubborn one, and hopeful. “She’ll come back.”

Then I dealt with my anxieties as best I knew how, which meant I wasn’t awake that evening when Charlie-Jetty came back to dock, rider included. But I knew he must have when I slept clear through ‘till morning, groggy and stiff.

Angel’s laugh always woke me up early. Too loud, too sharp, too pleased.

***

The kid was back soon after that, before I’d had time to think about breakfast. Walked right up to me, hand out, fistful of hooks.

“For yesterday,” she said. There was an uncomfortable amount of direct eye contact happening, and I realized I was feeling an old reflex to salute.

“Thanks,” I said. And took the hooks, and thought about other things I maybe should’ve said or asked while she walked to Angel’s post, rang the bell, argued her case.

Like “what were you doing?”

And “should you be doing it alone?”

And “why are you thanking me for letting you do it?”
Then Angel started laughing again and oh I didn’t want to hear that, not without breakfast. So I went down to the rocks and the little shack and bought a bottle of it, came back to sit by Charlie-Jetty’s berth and lie to myself that I’d be taking him out for baitfish in an hour, a few hours, the afternoon, tomorrow.

Angel came to keep me company and took the bottle from my hand, asking for neither. “You have an eye for talent, So’west!” she said cheerfully. Then she took a pull, then she made a face. “No goddamned taste though. Christ, you could clean the birdshit from the boards with this – if you didn’t mind turning the dock into a firetrap.”

“What’d she want?” I asked. I wasn’t going to ask for the bottle back. I wasn’t.

“Seems your old boy here didn’t hold her appeal.” Angel bucked her chin at Charlie-Jetty, sleeping like a (smooth) log in the way that sea-crocodiles do. “She wanted something bigger. A lot bigger. And well, I would’ve said no, but you gave me a bit of a turnaround yesterday, So’west. I’m a bigger woman now, with a generous, open heart.”
My hands shook a little faster. “Give me the bottle.”
“Huh?”

“Give me the bottle please.”

“Oh of course, no worries.”

I was trying to count the leads tied to the piers and swallow at the same time when she said “I reckon Bruce-Boy will do her fine,” gaze high and tight on the horizon, watching the sun climb out of its sullen grey bed.

I immediately failed at everything I was doing. It hurt worse than the last time, not least because while my throat burned and my heart wrenched my ears were full of Angel’s friendly, good-natured laughter.

***

I stayed up that time. Drank half my breakfast and put the other half in my pocket and took up a place at the lookout post, tucked in the corner where I could get a good view past the breakwater and pretend the young-and-bored postie wasn’t looking at me every five minutes and sharing the same opinion I’d developed of what he was seeing.

Young. He had to be twice the kid’s age.

And she was out there with the meanest near-reptile I’d ever met. Bruce-Boy had nearly six metres of neck and a mouthful of knives and if he was displeased with you he had a nasty habit of letting you know right away and everything from lack of food to early work to the sun in the sky to being ridden at all displeased him, displeased him greatly and thoroughly.

I had a few marks on my arms from Bruce-Boy’s displeasure, and if I’d been slower or had a bit more breakfast at the time I had no doubt I’d be missing fingers. That kid could lose a hand or worse.

The bottle was still in my pocket.

“Hey you want a drink?” I asked the postie.

“Not on watch.” And isn’t it nice to know you’re bringing out the best in people, Southwest? The barely-shaved watchman of the shoddiest dock in town can learn a bad idea when you show it to him.
“Good,” I said. Like that had been my plan. A good influence on all young people I am. This young man will go on to have a bright career thanks to my intervention, and that kid will probably go on to be a layer of gut flora in Bruce-Boy’s duodenum.

Moved by the spirits, I pulled the bottle out and dropped it over the side. It didn’t splash, and the first thought I had (the first EMOTION I had was blind regret and rage) was oh no, I hope I don’t get any of the fins drunk.

Then I thought of Charlie-Jetty drunk and swimming upside down at abalones and laughed. Messy, snorting, snot-dribbling, undignified, giggly and near-hysterical. The postie not-looked at me like I was the worst thing he’d ever seen.

It’d been a long time since I’d heard a laugh from someone that wasn’t Angel. It felt good.

Felt better when – just as the sky was turning red – in came Bruce-Boy, smooth as butter and worryingly traceless – all the froth and motion and force coming from a body only a little bigger than Charlie-Jetty’s, all the eye drawn to a neck twice that long with a malevolent little skull on it, leering at you from just above the waterline.

He looked happy. As far as that goes. And the kid, all things toothed and scaly be praised, looked unharmed. Tired, but unharmed. Well, unharmed by teeth – she had a sunburn fit to murder God and her posture looked more stiff than straight for once, but she had all her limbs and all those limbs looked unbandaged and unbleeding.

I was down from the lookout post before I had time to realize it, halfway through tying a hitch into Bruce-Boy’s lead before I remembered I’d forgotten how. Cinched it, tugged it, shrugged it off, offered a hand.

The kid ignored it – jumped up with a wince and a slap of the palms on the wood, shaky-armed – but nodded to me anyways. As was proper, if she’d been three times her age.

“Good day?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. And all she had to back that claim up was a foul-smelling fish-pack half her own size, but she said it without a pause or a stall or a thought, so I didn’t doubt her for a second.

“I’m Southwest,” I said.

“Cleat,” she said.

Then she left.

I looked at Bruce-Boy. He gave me the serene look of a cruel and temperamental beast with a full stomach.

“What’s she finding out there, eh?” I asked him.

He turned his back on me with more dignity than the postie had.

***

I skipped breakfast. My stomach rebelled and rejoiced all at once.

The air at the dock helped both. Dead fish and salt spray and the thick cool coating of a foggy day, inside and out. I could almost imagine I was a fish myself.

Angel was in a bad mood. She stared at the fog as if it had jimmied her brother then skipped town, the smoke of her pipe aggressively encroaching on its space.

“Unless you’re hunting harbour eels, no go,” she told me shortly. “Wait ‘till it burns off. Maybe a little noon traffic.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Might take Charlie-Jetty for a spin. Get my fins back on.”
“Didn’t know you had the means for a pleasure spin, So’west.” The bite was there, but the cheer was forced.

That mixed mood of my stomach spread to my tongue, and this time I couldn’t blame it on the spirits. “Well, Cleat paid me back. Reckon I’ll be set for a little.”

Muscle crawled on her jawbone like a lizard on a rock. The pipe twitched and I heard a little crunch.

“I’m going out,” said Cleat.

We both jumped. She wasn’t that quiet for a kid, but damn the fog ate noise.

“I’m going out,” she repeated. “And I need a big one.”

“Nothing doing,” snapped Angel. “Not in this fog.”
“I’m going out,” said Cleat. No change in tone; not impatient, not annoyed. All business. “The biggest one you can send.”
“Go hunt frogspawn in the crick.”
“I’m going out,” said Cleat. She held up both hands, opened them.

It’d been a while since I’d seen that many hooks. Some of them were doubles. I thought one might have been a triple.

“The biggest one you can send,” said Cleat.

Angel’s face moved through a few expressions, which was pretty funny if you didn’t see that her eyes didn’t change once. “Fine,” she said, as flat as Cleat had. “Let’s roll out Jenny-Regina.”

I choked on the fog and my own tongue. But Cleat didn’t say anything, just nodded, and I couldn’t put the words together right, not as they walked out to the security pier, not as they raised the gate and pulled the anchors loose, not as Angel held out the ammonite-shell chime that would hang from Cleat’s waist and remind Jenny-Regina that the tiny thing on her back existed, and the foul-smelling sack of nudibranchs that would dangle from Cleat’s neck and remind Jenny-Regina that the tiny thing on her back was not edible.

I couldn’t say a single word as Cleat leapt down – still a little stiff from yesterday if I wasn’t fooling myself – and seated herself on the saddle and smacked the goad against keeled scales and she was off.

Off atop Jenny-Regina. Fifteen metres of Meuse-lizard, finned and tailed and massively jawed. Indifferent to anything that didn’t threaten it, unthreatened by anything.

I couldn’t relate, especially when I found my tongue again after the two of them had passed beyond the breakwater, and all I could manage was “what the fuck, Angel?”
“Her hooks, her funeral,” said Angel. She sucked on one cheek and bit down. “Going to get early lunch. Go suck a bottle or kiss a harbour eel, I don’t care.”

A flip of the hand, a hook bounced off my forehead, and I was alone.

Then I was at the little shack by the rocks. Then I had a bottle.

But my stomach felt worse whenever it came out of my pocket, so I left it there and went back to the dock and tried not to think about why or what I was trying to do.

The fog was still so damned thick. Which is why I almost walked into Angel, and why she didn’t hear me do that (biting my tongue when I stumbled helped).

She was at the end of the dock, untethering something.

Then she was in the water. Barely a splash, head still level with the dock, and then moving off.

I ran to the end and caught the end of the tail.

Thomas-Clock. The old timeeater himself. The other end of the security dock. Short tail, long paddles, short body, long jaws. A mouth to rival Jenny-Regina’s.

I thought about what was going on, which was worryingly easy, and then about what I should do about it, which was a lot harder.

The good news was that while I was wasting my time thinking my body – uninfluenced by the spirits and feeling enthusiastic about that – ran down to Charlie-Jetty’s dock, stuffed fish in his mouth so quickly he almost bit me in surprise, and cast him off.

The water was up to my thighs. I hadn’t taken out fins in… god. A year? More.

But you couldn’t forget.

***

Following Tommy-Clock was easy. Charlie-Jetty’s nose was good and he knew his distant dockmate’s smell well. All I had to do was keep him pointed in the direction he was most uncomfortable.

Damn, I owed him more than a few fistfuls of bait.

We went out past the breakwater, swaddled hard in dead fog, and for a while we went straight out. Downcoast and out, towards where the shoals would be if the season were better. But a big fish-pack-full of plain food didn’t bring in a fistful of hooks and then some, and I wasn’t surprised when we took a sharp turn.

Near back to shore. Nearer. Nearer. A long way from town now, closer to the headland. Ragged and rocky. Charlie-Jetty slipped through with ease but steering Bruce-Boy would’ve been tricky and Jenny-Regina would be like pushing a cork back into a bottle.

The rocks were getting closer. One bad wave I couldn’t see coming and I’d be a bag of broken bones held together with meat glue. At least I’d give my fins his snack, assuming he didn’t end up worse…

… then a wave came – no, not a wave, a current – and slid us closer, and under, and THROUGH – oh, oh, there’s your secret.

Cleat had found a sea cave. Barely above the water, barely below it. I crouched low over Charlie-Jetty’s back and breathed between the cold wet slaps of the current against my face, and when the light came again – fogbound though it was – I blinked it away until things made sense.

The roof had collapsed long ago; I was inside a gigantic bowl, tall-walled, invisible inside the cliffs of the headland.

I was also next to a gigantic carcass, which explained why I vomited.

God, the smell – overwarm, overrotting.

Cleat HAD been whale-hunting. Or the sea had done it for her. The carcass alternated between dark barnacle-studded hide and pale half-rotted bloodless flesh, riddled with reeking decay. It was a wonder I wasn’t up to my armpits in sharks.

A splash. Violent. The water ahead of me moved against the current – then back again. A gigantic scaled flipper broke the surface and smacked it, sending up a sheet of water that could’ve soaked a house roof to floorboards.

Jenny-Regina.

No wonder she’d wanted a big set of fins. And from the lunge and the ripple and the sudden stone-still hesitance of Charlie-Jetty to proceed, Tommy-Clock was here too. But the riders were either off or dead; they wouldn’t let them dive in a fight, not both at once – too risky being a loose fleck of meat between two apex predators, even with the nudibranchs and the chimes, so-

“Back off!”

There they were. And that was the first time I heard Cleat’s voice raised. No wonder she kept herself monotone: level enough and you could forget her age, but when she yelled it came out shrill and made you think of refusing to go to bed or complaining about dessert.

Angel laughed because of that. Genuine in a way her face hadn’t been all morning.

“Why? It’s a free salvage. Else what? You threatening me, kid? That’s a crime, you know.”
“I’m not stupid!” and oh that was the wrong thing to say in that voice, it just made Angel laugh harder and that’d make Cleat angrier, and she’d feast on that like a warm dinner.

I took that sick heat of worry inside me and let it distract me from my gooseflesh as I slid off Charlie-Jetty. He was used to the abalone hunters; he wasn’t fussed.

“Sure, kid. Sure. You just thought you’d take advantage of my generosity because I run a poor dock at a good price and you’d use that to sneak twenty kilos of ambergris a day past me without so much as a thank-you, good-bye, or by-your-leave. You’re not stupid, kid. You’re an asshole. And a toll-dodger.”

“I paid double fare today!” Like fairness or facts would help. It wasn’t fair this was happening; and the fact was I was swimming like a drunk false-lizard, trying to paddle with my shoulders instead of my arms, splashing too much.

“And what was that compared to your take? Going to bring home two bags today? On my fins? Do you know how to do percentages yet?”

Do you know if that yank at your left foot is the current, the shearing force of a ten-metre-plus reptile shooting by, or a three-metre skull snipping your foot off at the knee?

“There is no cargo toll!”
“Not if you announce the cargo,” happy as a clam. Never as happy as when someone else is miserable. Always happy to see me. Had she ever paid me for that? “Without doing that it’s smuggling. Smuggling and threatening a dockmaster…” Sharp, clear, slow tisks. “And we’re on the water. So the justice is summary. But you’re young and I’m generous – tell you what, kid: give me back the dock’s property and you can swim home. You’re good at what you do, I’m sure ol’ Jenny’ll treat you like a fellow queen, chime or no. Deal?”

I had my hands on the corpse now. Spongy where it shouldn’t be and thick in ways it hadn’t been when alive. A bruise in the shape of a body, half septic.

Cleat wasn’t talking. Sensible. Saving her lungs. Mine ached with strain as I hauled myself clear of the water, face nearly buried in semisolid flesh. I clawed upwards through the consistency of sticky pudding.

“Deal,” agreed Angel with herself. A slight stir, metal and leather slapping on a palm. “Put the knife down or I take your doggypaddlers off before I throw you in.”

I’d love to say I planned to grab her leg right then. The truth is, I was blinded by some of the foulest-smelling glue I’d ever imagined, I was groping blind, and when my right hand gripped Angel’s ankle my first thought was it was a rib.

Then she yelled “What the FUCK,” kicked, slid and fell over – cling-cling went the chime at her belt, cling-cling! – catching herself with a hand that sank down to her elbow in melting blubber.

The arm with the axe wavered in midair, ready to come down but not sure of what her target was.

“So’west?” she half-said. I think she might have just mouthed it. My eyes weren’t any better, and her face was a lot closer to the corpse than it had been a second ago. Her mouth was twisted in a half-retch and I wasn’t sure if it was the whale or me.

Then I lost my footing, scrabbled at thin air, slid loose belly, chest, and arms, and down we went.

Cling-cling, cling-cling!

Splash!

Splash!

I went under first, Angel on top of me, between me and air. Feet and arms windmilling.

Hatchet just missing me, free hand shoving at the water. Cling-cling!

I ignored both of them, grabbed the bag at her waist, and tore as hard as I could. It slid free and I followed it, grabbing before it could sink out of sight into the dark, then turning for the surface.

Sharp pain in my shoulder. Cling, cling, cling-cling. I’ll give Angel this much: she kept that axe sharp. Even underwater it stung. I rolled around, leaving a little red trail between me and the light, between me and the blacked-out silhouette of Angel, hand groping for me, other arm rearing back for a second strike.

I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, it was still dark.

Cling-

I blinked again. Still dark.

Then the mass that had blotted out the surface moved on, propelled by a fluked tail taller than I was, and I could see all the way up to the surface and the sun.

I swam to it. Sore-shouldered, leaking a thin line of red.

Not the only red in the water now.

Cleat was watching when I broke surface.

“Hand up?” I gasped.

“By the tail,” she said, pointing with her chin. “It’s too steep here.”

“I noticed.”

She did her best, eleven-ish as she was, but getting me out took time. When I finally laid on my back, bloated whaleflesh beneath me, a just-clearing sun above me, I felt like I would never be dry again.

“Are you okay?” asked Cleat.

“Maybe,” I said. My shoulder hurt – and something was jabbing my side. I shook out my jacket and watched, neck craned, as broken glass slid its way onto the shark-bitten meat below. “I lost my bottle,” I observed.

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“No thanks,” I said. I leaned back and thought about how we’d get two of the meanest sets of fins in the docks home without eating each other, how long it’d take before poor Charlie-Jetty found the courage to walk himself home. Last time he’d had to do that was when a shark took his abalone diver. “You’ve given me quite enough.”

There weren’t any giants in the earth in those days. Too small, too low, too cramped, too narrow.

They’d moved into the sky instead. The ceiling was higher, the floor was airier, there were less bothersome little things underfoot.

But there was also less to eat, and what there was to eat was scarcer than would be appreciated, and the nutrition it supplied was smaller than convenient, and nothing could go to waste. And because of all of this and because giants have big appetites even for their size, certain professions were taken up.

Beantender Buckletin was a respected giant, and in a way that had nothing to do with his size (a moderate fifteen metres) or his wisdom (adequate to find his way out of an empty room within three tries) or his strength (he could hold a thunderhead overhead without his arms shaking for at least a few moments). No, it was the reason his mother had been a respected giant, and her father before her, and his father before him, and so on and on. They had been beantenders too and they had been revered for it as he was even now – a giant’s plate without a beanstalk of stratus upon it was empty and sad indeed, and a giant’s bowels would blame them for it most petulantly. All nodded to him when they met him, all knew his name, many thanked him when they parted.

But he bet they didn’t have to deal with things like this.

“Burrowed right up through the turf and stole a whole pod for itself, the little thief!” he complained to his wife, who was inspecting the hole in the cumulus with a critical eye guiding a steady hand holding a fog patch. “Where the little pest came from I don’t know, but we need to put a stop to it – are you sure that’ll hold?”
“For now,” she told him absently. Her name was Broomplate, and she was in work mode. No promises. “If there’s more they could dig in around the edges. Never seen this kind of damage before. Got any idea what it is?”

Buckletin held the cup-and-plate he’d captured the intruder in up to the light, fashioned of rainbow-hued glass burned in the kilns of the heavens. It bared its teeth and hooted at him.

“Not the faintest clue in the big broad blue and beyond,” he admitted. “Looks like a horrible tiny little giant if you ask me, but its belly is too small and its mouth is all narrow and puckered. Gross. Gross gross gross.” He shuddered. “Give me eelnadoes any day. At least those are big enough you can punch them.”

“Mmmm.” All attention on the hammer now, cold grey stone capped with ice, mountainous.

“I suppose I’ll fling it off the margins. Eugh, but what if it clings to the glass. It has thumbs, tiny little thumbs – augh, what a beast!”

WUMP, tons and tons of force slapped into fog slapped over puffy white cloud, ice particles and mist everywhere. Broomplate blew away the residue and freed up her attention span for a second, and with that second she said thusly the words of doom:
“Take it to the bakery.”

“Pardon?”
“It stole calories and vitamins. Let it become calories and vitamins. Nothing must go to waste.” She lined up the hammer again.

“Oh. Oh! Yes, how convenient. How poetic. I love you, you know. And your poetry.”
“Mmmmmmm.”
He scrutinized the offending creature with a newfound (wary) enthusiasm. “Mushy, but with a crunchy core… yes, that could do. That could do! The cup will be back before the evening is out!”
“Mm-hm.”
“Farewell!”
WUMP

So Beantender Buckletin took his cup and plate down to the bakery and left them there, and the first he heard of the rest of the day’s events was the screaming and crackling flames.

***

“I’m telling you, I’ve been off my feet since before the day started! Why, first that starwhaler comes in a week late with no notice before midnight, then as I’m trying to get that under control then grey-upon-his-skull Kettlemuck comes rushing down my door with a racket about how this sackful of barometernacles are perfectly fresh but need grinding down NOW before they spoil, and by the time I’ve made halfway progress on THAT everyone else has dropped off their own materials and I’m behind again, just like I was last week when we had all that overflow from the eelnadoes and I’d shut down early since the starwhaler wasn’t back yet.” Grinder Spoonfrond stopped for breath, then recalled his manners. “You DO remember that, right? I’m not boring you?”
“Guh,” said his audience, a perfectly innocent giant of advanced age and respectable clothing who arrived at precisely six o’clock in the morning every other weekday and whose name Spoonfrond would definitely get around to learning someday. Twenty minutes ago the golden doorchime at the bakery’s entrance had rung proud; twenty minutes in which the last twenty years of another’s life had been funneled into her skull via her ears. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Anyways, your loaf,” Spoonfrond said, and from the great burning oven he plucked bare-handed a brick of meteor-heated snow-iced ground cloudbone bread. “Was in a cirric dogfish this time yesterday, now it’s on your plate. Come again!”
“Bwuh.”

“Yes, I said come again – the gold-upon-the-door chimed, then chimed again – “WHAT NOW oh sorry beantender didn’t see you there, was talking about something else to someone else. Anyway! What have you got there?”

Buckletin held up a cup and a plate and a creature and a blissfully unaware smile. “Garden pest!” he said proudly. “It stole a bean, let it fulfill a bean’s function! Can’t let something go to waste.”
Spoonfrond inspected his prospective ingredient closely. He flicked the cup, watched its flesh ripple and its body cringe from the shockwaves.

“Well, there’re bones in there,” he said dubiously. “And I suppose they’ll do even if the flesh is no good. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see if I can fit it in.”

“Tomorrow?” said Buckletin with the genuine alarm of the blissful encountering a fact. “Oh no no, are you sure you can’t just take it now? I promised my wife the cup would be back this very evening! Please, my friend, my good grinder, can’t you just squeeze it in? Last thing before your meal, quick as a blink – see how small it is? It won’t take more than two twists of your pestle!”

In the face of such marshalled, earnest inconsiderateness from a publicly revered person Spoonfrond caved, but had the self-respect to do so gracelessly. “Okay fine, sure, I guess, well, maybe this one time, it’ll be tough, I’ll fit it in somehow,” he said in one long beleaguered sigh.

“Thank you!” said Buckletin, filled with cheer and an utter absence of awareness, and he departed in good spirits, leaving all of his troubles in his wake to fume and spill over the great granite slab of the grinder’s counter of the bakery.

Spoonfrond glared in distaste at the little trapped beast. It was, he realized with a pinch of amusement and a pound of revulsion, mirroring his expression in a most uncanny way.

“Vile beast,” he muttered, and put it to the back of the queue and out of his mind.

He took up the great pestle, hewn from a sapling that had held up a rainbow’s end. He took up the broad mortar, hollowed from a skywhale’s brain-pan.

There was grinding to do.

So grinder Spoonfrond ground.

He ground the fat-defleshed bones of the skywhale that had come in last night, thicker than his forelimbs and fighting the pestle every turn of the way, sparking with lightning that seared the scant hair of his forearms, and he put them into broad cakes that stank most heavenly with ozone, each a feast for a family with leftovers.

He ground the last bones of the day’s catch of cirric dogfish – lean and crumbly when dried, elastic and springy fresh, barely bones at all if you asked him, but oh what a fine toothsome loaf they made.

He ground the musty attic-smelling still-dripping bones of a nimbostratic gulper, and he shaped them into dumplings to be boiled in rainbroth at home until they were no longer bitter and would instead of spittle drip with toothsome, oilsome, delightsome grease.

He ground the many and thin and MANY bones of a sunfish that had swum too close to the sky, and he patted the charred lean loves that emerged fondly – they always baked so evenly.

He ground a little too vigorously, and cursed as he knocked over the scale and had to retrieve it from the floor. Clatter clatter clunk clang smash clang clunk.

He ground the fine-toothed bones of the lean skylurks that whispered unwholesome things under the gables of the giants’ homes and crept into their shoes at night to nest, and put them into simple muffins for midday snacks.

He ground a long, long, long sheaf of dried auroarfish borealis vertebrae, pale and perfect in the night, and from them made an anniversary cake of eighty beautiful interlocking donuts like chain-links, that could wrap around the happy couple twice over with room to spare, seasoning each in a different colour.

He ground until he was light in the head and then realized he was suffering from smoke inhalation, and that the air was hazy, and that it wasn’t coming from the oven, and that his door was open a crack and he hadn’t heard it happen because his golden doorchime was missing.

Then he fell over.

Spoonfrond’s last blurry thought before he passed out was that his head hurt from more than the impact. Someone had left broken glass all over his floor, and the cupboard he kept the matches in – dried pine saplings dipped in their own tar – was swinging wide open.

When he woke up again it was all over and it was too late to do anything but complain about it. Which he did, to every being in the hospital.

***

Kettlemuck was picking his teeth with a knife down at the wharf – as sky-fishers did, or so he’d assumed they did when he was a child, which had been whole YEARS ago by now – when he smelled the smoke. That got his attention. Then he saw the running fire brigade with their emergency glacier-buckets, which raised his eyebrows.

Then he heard a doorchime. That just confused him until he saw it scuttling along the ground at ankle-height, clutched in the grips of what smelled like a very tiny and very dirty giant.

“Ho!” he called. “Halt!”

The thing didn’t halt, which meant it was probably alright by the code of the sky-fishers to do what Kettlemuck did next and fling his knife at it. A meter-long blade of good wholesome sunset steel spun happily through the last of the day’s blue and embedded itself precisely in front of the scuttling vermin, which ducked and wove and hurried its way under the lofty cloud-pillared wall of the nearest garden.

Kettlemuck looked down the street. The bakery was aflame. The doorchime looked familiar. And if the bakery was aflame…

“Little shit! My order wasn’t ready yet!” he shouted at the unthinking vermin and the world in general, and took the wall at a leap, harpoon unsheathed and at the ready, bad-weather kilt of haze and smog swirling about his legs, teeth gritted until thunder cracked, every inch the portrait of the sky-fisher at the ready, defending kin and feeding kith with every expedition into the trackless reaches between the big broad blue and the black beyond.

He landed on the far side up to his ass in beans, tripped over a stalk, and almost landed on top of the escaping vermin, which shrieked in a barely-audible voice whose pitch cleaned his ears like a finger round a cup’s rim. Kettlemuck’s mind recoiled, Kettlemuck’s body lunged, and Kettlemuck’s harpoon split the difference and plunged a jagged furrow through the clouds below, dropping him down to his armpit – and then, abruptly, dizzingly, up to his armpit. He dangled below the garden, tangled in bean roots, gripping to the edge of the world by one finger.

Something touched the one finger.

Kettlemack looked up and saw a good meter-long blade of wholesome sunset steel and a little vermin clutching a golden doorchime in its free hand.

“Cursed be ye and yours from all that lies above,” he said. But he was a little surprised still and the knife was very sharp, so instead what came out was more like this.

“Ah! Uhh-nuh! ACK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH”

and so on.

***

Jack cut down the wispy cloud of a beanstalk afterwards to be safe against pursuit, then moved on out – to a bigger city, a bigger place where you could sell a magical golden thing that made music on its own.

But slow month by slow year, eventually, gradually, a second beanstalk sprouted from the crater where Kettlemuck had landed. A scrap he’d kept in his belt for emergencies, for an empty plate in times of need, fueled by his good strong bones and learning, root by root, stalk by stem, of all that lay around it.

And oh, and oh, what lay around it was such excess, such luxury, such shallow-rooted fleetingness! It knew how to compete with that. A thing that lives in the sky knows that nothing must go to waste.

It grew long meters while remaining a humble surfacebound sprout, wispy and ethereal. Downwards. Outwards. Reaching, gnawing at the deep earth’s feed of minerals and organic detritus, drinking down its cold hidden waters steeped straight from the bedrock. Storing its treasures in roots and tubers and nodules. Bracing its feet before stretching its arms.

There were no giants in the earth in those days.

But that left room for just one.

In a manner of speaking, Nezzy’s brother had been killed by the dragon.

It had been the dragon that had come to their lands years before, unprovoked and unsent for and unwanted. It had been the dragon that had hollowed the old bailey into its den and feasted upon the headmen within. It had been the dragon that had taken as satisfaction a head of cattle a moon – and two sheep besides –in payment. And it had been the dragon who at last fell to the blade and hooves and bravery of an adventurer-prince, bestial and ravening hunger laid low by skill and grace.

So if the dragon had been a little fiercer, a little faster, a little hungrier, a little less clumsy and a little more wise, Nezzy’s older brother wouldn’t be on the gibbet in the Square right now, where the crows were debating over the division of his eyes.

***

It had been a long time since their lands had known the hand of a king. Things had been relearned slowly. Allowances had been given. He was a just ruler.

Do not cut or fell the trees in the woods without express permission of the king, through his headmen.

Do not hunt the game in the woods above a given size, and do not seek permission otherwise from the king or from his headmen.

Do not fail to pay a tithe of the harvest or its equivalent value to the king through the headmen, annually.

Do not refuse a request of the king or his headmen for your time or your labour.

Do not gather an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods.

Nezzy’s family had broken one or another of those rules in the first few years, but whose hadn’t?

Then mother passed, quick and quiet in the winter, and father drank until he got in fights enough to follow her, and Nezzy and her brother had gotten a bit behind, a little distracted, and that earned them a few big warnings and then her brother had gathered an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods, and when a headman had suggested that some of them looked fresh-cut he had expressed his disagreement less than delicately.

So now he was on the gibbet, and his tithe had been taken, and Nezzy was owner of an elderly donkey and two worn cows and a half-broken shack and a headful of thoughts she shouldn’t dwell on and couldn’t stop.

Going somewhere was more important than deciding where to go. So she went, and her body did the thinking while her head did the wandering.

***

Dragons weren’t common, and thank the skies and the stones that it was so, people said. They lived in the trackless and traceless places, on moors and in thickets, where hills were stony and soil grew thin and no farm or herd could tend for a single season. No one looked for them, no one wished for them, some were just afflicted by them, and who could dare ask why?
But if you talked to the folk who worked in the woods – the deep treecutters, the charcoal-makers, the rangers and the trailblazers and the huntsmen, they would mention things. Not speak of them, you mind – not dwell on them, not introduce them, consider them, measure them, offer advice on them. Just little things in passing.

“Big one out past quarter-moon lake.”

And everyone present hadn’t nodded, hadn’t grunted agreement, had just kept on talking and if anyone had asked why none of them had ventured out by quarter-moon lake in almost a year, maybe they’d get the same answer and maybe they’d just get a shrug.

Best not to talk about what you didn’t want to think about.

Well, Nezzy was past thinking now. And past quarter-moon lake by a league, where the remnants of the trails were uneven and strange.

No fresh blazes. No woodsign. No trace of tent or graze.

But the path itself was clear. The trees hadn’t grown in. The shrubbery hadn’t swallowed it whole.

Something walked here.

Nezzy’s body, which was still doing her thinking for her, kept checking the wind and scanning her sightlines and – most importantly – never once loosened her grip on Irribelle’s lead. If something was wrong the donkey would know before she did, half-blind or no, and she wanted to have firsthand advice on which way to run first.

***

The cave smelt like death.

The cows refused to budge before Nezzy even caught wind of it. Irribelle dug in her hooves at the sight of it. And her stomach tried to keep her out when she stepped into it.

Dangerous to have the light at your back.

Dangerous to stand between any living thing and its only path away from you.

Dangerous to go alone into the woods where anyone with sense was staying clear, keeping out.

Dangerous to be the last member of a family whose second-last member had called the king in his bailey all sorts of things in public that you shouldn’t think even in private.

Dangerous to have half a fallen-down shack and two cows and a donkey to your name with winter coming on sooner than later.

While her mind collected all of those facts and stood there looking at them like an idiot, Nezzy’s body struck a light and walked in.

Still a breeze at her heels from the outside. Safe.

Still a dancing spark in her grip. Safe.

Still no movement on the walls beyond the twist and turn of the shadows. Sa

it growled.

Nezzy’s body stopped moving. Her mind accelerated.

The growl wasn’t stopping.

She stepped back. It sunk.

She stepped forward. It rose.

She stood where she was and raised her light and it pitched into a snarl into a short sharp squeal and a cluster of tree-gluttons bounced free of their nest and seethed past her feet to more hidden corners, bright teeth bared and angry eyes glistening, beautiful fur on sleek-shouldered frames and sharp sharp claws.

The nest, she recognized on inspection, was a bear’s carcass, half-mummified and half-skeletonized. It had probably died in hibernation, starved in its bed with nowhere to find food.

That could explain a little of the smell, and the rest was set by the leavings around the nest. All very regular. Very normal.

The noise she heard was not normal at all and also somewhat quieted by distance, so it took Nezzy a moment to place it: a donkey, frightened, cut short.

***

She’d seen the dragon six times. Four as a child, twice as an adult; five living, one dead and dangling from the tree of the Square, before they cut it down and raised up the gibbet. It had been huge and huge and huge and huge and stayed that way until it was dead and she could see it was taller than a horse, but not by much, and longer than a horse, but mostly in tail, and fiercer-toothed than any bear, but not impossibly, and so on. Its size had grown up with her in a way its body hadn’t.

This dragon’s belly was taller than a horse. This dragon’s tail was longer than a house. This dragon’s skull was larger than a bear. This dragon’s mouth contained all of Irribelle’s body, bar one stray hoof.

It crunched. The hoof fell and landed, maybe it made a noise or maybe it didn’t because Nezzy couldn’t hear a thing that wasn’t her own heartbeat.

Maybe the cave wasn’t helping. Her heartbeat was resonating up from her bones into her ears out and into the stone and back in her ears and to fix this she needed to get out of the cave. Yes, that was reasonable.

She stepped out of the cave into the daylight and the dragon looked at her. Tilted its skull, let those two seemingly-tiny eyes settle on her. Forward-facing like an eagle. Feet like an eagle too, three-toed and three-clawed. No arms.

Nezzy had seen the dragon six times. But she’d lived with it for years and years, and she remembered the rules her parents had taught her.

Do not make eye contact. If you do, do not hold it. Release it and move on.

Do not shed blood near it, nor show weakness or illness.

Do not stray from the adults. Do not let go of the children, and do not bring them near where it may be.

Do not ever run, and do not ever ever run away.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

So Nezzy looked at the dragon’s tail, side-on as she walked – without flinching, without haste, without wobbling or whimpering – and saw by its bobbing and turning the dragon’s casual observation of her and a lack of alert focus.

And she thought to herself: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that I’m not an important meal.

And: poor Irribelle, but at least it would have been quick.

And: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that she won’t fill it up forever.

The cows were gone from where she’d left them, the tether worn apart in the sort of long-term sustained-effort that came from terror rather than panic, and it took her until near sundown to find them again, trembling in a thicket. She soothed them and patted them and brushed their sides and patted their noses and felt very badly about what she was going to do tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after.

She’d grown up with them. She’d make it quick.

***

Nezzy took Mop first. Poor trusting Mop, her brother’s favorite, who went with her because what else could she do, and she led Mop back towards home and tied her close to a tree and killed her as quick and quiet as she could, which was hard because Mop was no deer and she hadn’t had occasion to practice on deer since the king came.

“Sorry,” she said afterwards, and in reply she thought she heard that half-quenched bray again. Sorry Irribelle. Sorry Mop.

Better than to starve, right? Would brother have said that? Before or after he went on the gibbet?

Her knife grew dull and her arms grew sore, but the work gave her legs a rest until it was done and it was time to move, joint by joint, cut by cut, bone and muscle and sinew, all that weight that Mop had taken every moment of her life heaved up and hauled through the too-clear-paths by a single aching human body, limbs hauling limbs.

She alternated heavy and light. A big chunk. A tantalizing giblet. A whole leg. The liver.

Work and rest, work and rest. The trip back to Mop grew longer, the distance to the cave shorter.

“Hurry up,” Nezzy told herself as she flagged. The sun was high, the evening was going to come. This wasn’t something she wanted to do at night, although she’d bet her shoes that no bear wolf or otherwise was left in these forests for as far as they could run.

She threw the last, bloodied chunk – Mop’s tongue – into the air in the direction of the cave – as far as she could – and left, a stumbling, red-smeared walking corpse. If quarter-moon lake wasn’t as far away as all she’d walked today combined she’d have taken herself all the way there to clean herself; she made do with a cold stream and a mossy stone for a scrub, then shambled all the way to where Brush waited.

She hadn’t broken her tether this time. Either she trusted Nezzy more or she was too frightened to move without Mop. Nezzy wasn’t sure which made her feel worse, and slept guiltily against the cow’s flank with Irribelle’s death-cry in her ears again, distant and wavering.

***

She moved at dawn, stiff and sure, and before she’d even reached Mop’s butchering ground she knew she’d done it. The distant stink from downwind. The quiet of the larger birds. The little itch at her eyes that said: Look Wider, Look Carefully.

The dragon lay at rest under the tree, tucked neatly on its coiled legs like a hen, long tail behind it. Its eyes were open or maybe not, shaded under the thick ridge of its brows.

Mop was no longer in evidence.

Were its sides fuller? Did its stomach look distended? At rest it was hard to say what was which, and it wasn’t as if her parents had ever let her anywhere near the dragon when it was full, scarce less when it was feeding, never at all when it was hungry.

But she measured Mop by the bloody tether wrapped around the tree’s trunk, and she measured the dragon from that, and she put that together with Irribelle.

It can make room, she told herself. But a day or two first. A day or two. There’s water nearby, the weather is nice. It won’t move.

A day or two. She could brush Brush. Comb her until she shone.

The dragon’s head had raised up. When had that happened? It was smelling the air. She should’ve heard that, she’d forgotten how quiet the old dragon could be, had already lost in disbelief her memories that this dragon had crept up on Irribelle and killed her by surprise. Big didn’t have to mean loud. Not all big things were kings.

She walked back into the woods, kept downwind the whole way. And for two, three, four days she tended to Brush until her lean sides gleamed like new, in the noon sun and under the full moon, and with every other sweep she told her ‘thank you,’ because that sounded less cruel and self-serving than ‘sorry.’

***

Brush she doled out over a wider distance. Four days of observation showed her a dragon willing to slumber in place after a good meal, and she took that time to prepare a long and bloody trail, one that took them past the very rim of quarter-moon lake.

She didn’t see it move, at night or in the day. But on the morning of the fifth day it lay happily in the morning sun where Brush’s carcass had been.

Nezzy breathed out slow.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy breathed in slow, then almost choked because she knew better than to make a single noise around this thing and because she knew better she hadn’t done that, she swore she hadn’t unless her mind was fighting her body one and for all right next to a no-longer-sleeping dragon. Its head was up. Its snout tested at the air lazily.

She was downwind. Safe.

“Thank you,” said her own voice.

Nezzy broke her own rules and ran. She was not punished.

***

She stayed away five full days that time. Told herself she was waiting for the right game to come by. Told herself she was waiting for the dragon’s belly to empty again, get it just hungry enough. Told herself several things that were completely true while being obvious lies.

So she sat in a blind she’d made by a stream she’d favoured some years ago – when food had been tight and doing something the king didn’t know about seemed safe – where the tracks seemed fresh enough, and for three days she let the selfsame stag drink and walk away, telling herself she was just holding on for something a bit bigger, or getting up the perfect shot.

The stag left again and she walked back to her den, scraped under a fallen tree. A bear would likely appreciate this spot come winter, and by the smell of it, already had.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy jumped, full on leapt straight upwards like a squirrel on a branch with her heart between her teeth, and before she landed she knew that wasn’t her imagination, she wasn’t tired enough to be mistaken, and that it was her voice.

Nobody near, not in sight, not on the trail.

She wanted to run. She couldn’t see where to run. She didn’t run.

“Hurry up.”
She ran. She ran like she hadn’t since she was four and racing her brother. She ran like she hadn’t since the miller had called to her and said the leech was with her mother. She ran like she hadn’t known better.

When she was done she cowered in her scrape of dirt and dead wood and maybe she slept and maybe she didn’t and she rose with the dawn and stopped the stag’s life before it saw another sunset.

The knife was dull as a spoon by then. She kept her mind on that, and off other things.

***

“Dragon!”

Thump thump thump, the noisy sound of human feet on human floors of human dwellings, the loudest thing she’d ever heard. She hadn’t been in the woods that long, had she?
“Dragon!”

A distant whisper, a cautious mutter behind closed doors and latched shutters.

“Dragon!”

She was loud. She was so damned loud, louder than any of them, loudest thing she’d heard. Was that enough? She hadn’t been in the woods that long, surely.

“Dra-“

The bailey’s door opened under her hands, which clawed at nothing for a moment before fisting in a shirt. A headman blinked at her, groggy in the daylight, annoyed by her presumption. He hit her – irritated, businesslike – and she let her head snap to the side and pass the force in one side and out the other, gasped like she had no air in her lungs (she didn’t) and like she was shocked (she wasn’t).

“What?” he asked. Thump thump thump, other feet on the move. She HAD been loud enough then; they’d heard her words, not just some idiot making a ruckus.

“Dragon!” she said, loud but talking-loud now, shaken but reasonable, eager to speak up. “In the fields! It took my cow!” She clawed at his arms, blood slipping wetly from her to him. “Get the king! Send for the king! Help! Help! Help! Dragon!”

She took another punch then, but she’d expected that, made sure to smear the headman extra good on her way down the ground – which earned her a kick and she’d expected that too but damnit, his boots were too new and too good.

“Dragon?” the next headman asked. She could hear it behind the shutters in the houses too, between the tiny whispers. Could hear it passing from headman to headman down the hall into the bailey. Dragon? Dragon? Dragon?

“Who knows,” said the first headman, whose clothes were so fine he must be the bailey’s steward, and she might have smeared a bit too much blood on him because he sounded more upset with her than he did about the hue and cry. “But – hst! Hear that?”

Bless the paranoia of the shepherds. Bless the keen noses of their dogs. Bless whatever quick-footed paranoid had made it to the warning bell in the Square first.

Ding! Ding! Ding! The dragon was hungry! The dragon was to be fed! Let it come to the sound! Let it come to the square!

Nezzy could have left then. Their eyes were off her. Their thoughts. Their hands.

But she was too busy hoping, too busy thinking, and for once she let her brain creep into those thoughts too: did it work? Will it come? Will the bell frighten it? What if?

What if what if what if what if what if

“Bring her.”

Firm. Decisive. Sure. Mannerless.

She’d never actually heard the king speak before. But with that voice – not its pitch, or its timbre, but its attitude – she didn’t need to see the steed or the steel armour or the fine blade, did she?

***

Down the way from the bailey they marched in company, two score good headmen and all the rest besides, and the king at their front, armed and armoured. To the Square, to the gibbet, to the bell.

Nezzy got to march near the front, besides the steward. Well, half march, half drag. If she did too much of the former he shoved her until it became the latter.

The Square was empty, the bell-ringer fled. Even the echoes had gone cold before they arrived. Headmen spread like lumpy jam across the way, hammered on doors and pried at shutters.

“Open up!”
“Did you see anything?”
“Who ran the bell?”

“Hurry up.”
It was not very loud, it was in Nezzy’s ear. It was in her own voice.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up,” she said aloud. The steward looked sharp at her from the end of her cuffs.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up!” she called. He swore at her and yanked her tight, was shouting something in her face.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry UP!” she yelled, shoved him hard in the stomach, smearing what sticky blood was left on her palms on his oiled mail. He grabbed her face and put a hand on his belt and someone made a short sharp cry.

Like Irribelle, she thought.

The steward turned to look. Everyone did. Nezzy shouldn’t have, but she’d shouldn’t have a lot of things.

The dragon stood between the company and the bailey, nosing with interest the remains of a headman. His body was heaped, if it was in pieces it couldn’t have been more than two.

Then it stood up and looked at them. All the way up.

It had forearms, Nezzy realized. They were simply very very small compared to the rest of it.

Its mouth opened the tiniest fraction. Something wet and sharp was inside. “Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice, right in her ear. Right in everyone’s ear, the way the company jolted.

“Thank you,” said Nezzy.

“Thank you,” said the dragon. And then – a quick jerk of its head – a short, sharp terrible sound, the half-choked bray of a donkey cut-short, and like that was a rallying horn the company raised their arms and cried and it moved.

Nezzy broke her rule again. Nezzy ran. Nezzy ran away, and Nezzy ran for the end of the company, where the king was cursing and wrestling with the head of his horse – the same he’d killed that older dragon atop? Surely not – and grabbed at his stirrups and hauled herself up, still coated in the leftover drying paste of stag’s blood, and started a fight with a man coated in tempered steel and brandishing a sword meant to be used from horseback.

It went poorly for Nezzy, although the sword wasn’t much help against someone practically inside the same suit of armour as its wielder. She swore and spat and clawed at the metal mask and twisted and thrashed like an eel as the horse jerked and shook under her, took two solid blows that – at the very least – removed some of her teeth, and did everything she could to keep all her weight, all her pressure on that one arm that was groping at his waist, where his dagger was.

The horse bucked, but even if she wasn’t strapped in the king was, and she took the weightlessness and let it put her right full on top of him, capturing his arm until he gave up and let loose the reins and struck at her left-handed and even as she lost a few more teeth she fell and grabbed and stole the dagger loose as she fell, swung wildly against firm hide and heard a terrible equine shriek, felt hooves slam near her head, then something else.

The world moved. A claw bigger than her forearm moved past her, one of three on one of two gigantic feet.

She’d broken a second rule. She’d contested the dragon’s prey. But it had broken another, and another, because not only was it bleeding but it turned to flee.

The king shouted something, and if he’d still had use of his sword he’d probably have brandished it. But instead all he could do was wave his arm –

Do not contest its prey. Do not make eye contact.

– which was what the dragon took him by, and when it tore him loose from the horse and let him fly he was limp both in flight and after his landing, so that Nezzy wasn’t quite sure at which moment he’d been killed.

She laid there on the ground, bleeding slightly, surrounded by many who were bleeding thoroughly, and when she was done she stood herself up – steadily, not slowly or quickly – and looked at the dragon’s tail, which indicated the dragon was bent over (face deep in the king’s horse, which was larger than any of the many, many, many headmen lying about, and less metallic) and facing in her direction.

Nezzy brushed her sides once, deliberately, and walked forwards – edge-on to her audience – and towards the door of the nearest house.

She knocked.

“Thank you,” said her voice.

“This is the new steward of the bailey,” she said. “Please let me in. There are some old rules you ought to know about, and some new ones you can forget.”

Part II: Fit For A King
The world was warm and dark and soft and vast, so vast that the little loud angry part of it is Nezzy’s ear stuck out all the worst, like a tiny pebble in a big boot.

She bent all the power of her will to ignoring it.

Success. All was wasn’t once more and forever.

Then water broke everything.

Nezzy shouted something unspeakable and jerked upright, hair turned traitor and congealed into a sopping mop that kept the cold hateful liquid close to her tender scalp. A scalp that was presently clutched in a big none-too-tender hand.

“You up for real this time?”
Nezzy said something unspeakable again.

“Good. Nod off again and I’ll stick a funnel in your ear and piss in it. Can’t make you dumber.”

“Cousin,” said Nezzy.

“Cousin. Family. Yes, if you’ve got nothing else, you’ve got family. And we’re all the family we have now, aren’t we?”
Yes. No more ailing mother, no more grieving father, and aunt and uncle had gone years before in the fire. And no more brother. Just Nezzy and Cousin Hacca. Cousin Hacca and her gentle manner. Cousin Hacca and her slender blacksmith’s arms.

“Go and die,” suggested Nezzy.

“Maybe I will. Maybe you’ve helped with that. Maybe it’s time for you to fix what you broke. Had a good night’s sleep after a hard night’s drink and fight and ruining everyone’s lives so I guess you’re ready now as any. I brought a sausage.”

“Gimme.”
Hacca gave her the sausage. It was cold and lint-ridden from her pocket and over-greasy and off to start with and she’d never needed anything so badly as long as she didn’t think about her brother and the last month.

“C’mere and take a look,” said Hacca. She’d stood next to the window.

Reluctantly, in defiance of the awful, hateful, penetrating light, Nezzy approached and looked outside.

They were in the bailey on the second floor. That explained the good bed she’d been slumped over and the fine desk she’d knock over and the sturdy chair she’d kicked until a leg came loose. That also explained her sore foot.

The dragon sleeping outside the bailey’s gate explained the rest.

“Like what you see?” asked Hacca.

“Should I?”

Hand on the scalp again, yanking on her braid like they were six. “Yes you’d BETTER you wart on a mule’s taint, because YOU did that! You! You brought it here! You’d better have some idea of what you were doing, and you’d better have some idea of what you were going to do next, and that’d better not have dribbled out your behind with the rest of your brains while you sucked down half the steward’s best firkin! Now REMEMBER.”

Hacca released her hair. Nezzy’s chin nearly hit the windowledge before she caught herself, and in that sharp drop and intake of breath she remembered another breath, another angry voice.

***

The folks of the Square had been tense. Having a king slaughtered on your doorstep with all his headmen did not soothe the nerves. But she’d gone from house to house, slipping through the alleyways and the shadows of the eaves while the not-too-distant crunch and gulp of the dragon’s dining slid alongside her.

“I am the new steward of the bailey,” she said to each door. And she told them the old rules they should know, about eye contact, and showing blood or weakness, and watching the young and elderly, and not entering the woods when it was hungry, which made them shrink. And she told them that the new rules – of tithe and tribute and duties and forbiddances – were all gone, which made them stare. And then she told them goodday and went to the next house.

It was the eleventh house – farther from the battle – where someone spoke back.

“Why’d you do it?”
“I didn’t do anything,” she’d lied.

“Why’d you do it? You left to die in the woods and then you came back and that thing came right behind you! I saw it when the bells rang! You led it to the bailey and put blood in the streets and a dragon back in our midst, just when we’d gotten rid of the old one, and for what? Because your brother was too stupid to shut up when the king-”

She wasn’t sure who he was – he? Yes, probably? – but she’d hit him very hard. Yes.

Someone else had taken exception and she’d hit them too.

***

After the fight was over Nezzy had gone home (which was the bailey now, since she was the steward) and gotten drunk, which was amusingly backwards now that she was awake enough to think about it.

That explained some of her bruises. The missing teeth were the king’s responsibility. She’d taken the trade happily; less than a minute later the dragon had killed him like a cat would a rat: irresistible yet restrained force delivered in eager glee

“I remember,” she said.
“Really?”
“Not opening the firkin,” she admitted. “But everything else.”
“Glad to hear spending the night stuck in here waiting for you to wait up wasn’t a total loss. You remember how to get rid of it?”
Nezzy squinted down again. The dragon was still sleeping, hadn’t budged. She knew how quickly and quietly it could change that. “No?”

Movement stop-and-started behind her, paused from slamming her chin into the stonework.

“Softie.”
“It’s the kids,” Hacca said frankly, unfondly. “You learn to reel it in or you learn to accept being your mother. In the name of all and everything, I’m not doing that.”
There was a significant syllable in that sentence. “Kids?”
“Yeah. Get rid of that thing you dragged in and you’ll live long enough to be an aunt again. Deal?”
Nezzy’s eyes hadn’t left the dragon, but her attention had. Was its snout turned to that side before? Too quick and too quiet.

“Deal,” she said. Because just like last time, it was this or nothing. And nothing never was what it promised.

***

Get rid of it.

Well, how could that be harder than bringing it there had been? Days and days and days freezing in the woods, dismembering three animals into breadcrumb trails with nothing but a sharp knife and total disregard for safety and sanity because that had been less important than daring a dragonslaying king to do it again against an animal half the age and ten times the size of the one he’d put down.

Now the king was dead and Nezzy was still alive and, she was startled to realize, she now cared about staying that way. Not in the bitter, nailed-down panic of someone who had a goal to accomplish come flame or scream but in the abstract, messy, vague way she vaguely remembered feeling all her life until she’d watched her brother spin and dangle in the Square.

What an inconvenient thing to feel again, when leaving the bailey meant walking right by the body of a slumbering animal whose mouth could fit three of her inside it without difficulty or a need for chewing.

No, there were better things to focus on. Like the bailey door. Well oiled, well tended – the king had been a prudent man, had cared for the things that stood between him and the rest of the land. Like his doors, and his rules, and his armour. And much good that had done him.

Nezzy appreciated the door, but didn’t rely on it. Slipped loose, sideways. Heel-toe, heel-toe, careful as if she were stalking a deer. Glanced at the dragon, saw it still sitting senseless.

Good. Good. She was out.

Now she could plan. With the air around her she could think again.

Get rid of it.

Not for a few days at least, not after the meal it’d had. At least. The king’s horse had not been small, and. Hmm. Neither had been the king and his headmen. Two score and more of headmen, all loyal to the end or loyal to too-near-to-flee.

She’d better check the battlefield. If she wanted the dragon to hunger again, to be lured again, to be spirited away into the woods, she’d need it without a banquet.

So she walked the road to the Square – longer now than it had been before, desperate and angry and frightened and tethered – and surveyed the wreckage.

Untouched. On the one hand, not a shock: from what she remembered of the houses she’d visited last night, nobody had been in a hurry to step outdoors. One day, one sleepless night, one morning. There’d be a little bit longer before anyone decided they needed laundry or chores or drag away and bury the corpses of men they feared-at-best more than they needed to avoid the dragon.

On the other hand, untouched. Within sight of the bailey, where the dragon slept. The horse was an unpleasant stain on the cobbles, taken hooves, saddle and all. But every one of those two score and more remained where they fell – to pieces, in pieces, whole but made small, whole but bent oddly, torn loose and leaking.

None of them touched. Morsels spread out far and wide and unplucked by the dragon.

Still sampled though. There were crows, enjoying a feast far grander than that ever provided by the gibbet. Anyone face-up was eyeless.

Nezzy thought of her brother and felt her teeth bare giddily. And as if drawn by a magnet, she took her feet to the king.

Yes, left where he fell. No crows for him, covered head to toe in armour. Untouched, if you didn’t count the interesting smells already brewing from within him. Death, in its majestic equality and dignity, did not see fit to withhold the royal bowels from the cobbles.

She was laughing. Quietly, but with real joy behind it. So she made herself busy and her over-blunted knife and began to cut loose the king’s armour, piece by piece, and when his body was free she dragged it to the center of the square, to the stump of the tree, to the gibbet, and she looked up at the rope and her arms already ached twice over.

“Deal?” said Hacca.

“Deal,” said Nezzy.
“Deal?” said Hacca. “Deal?”

Nezzy’s gut let her tired, hungover brain know that Hacca would never leave the bailey as long as the dragon was still sleeping in front of it.

“Deal,” said someone who wasn’t Nezzy, in her voice.

She went over the old rules from the old dragon again, very quickly and very calmly.

Do not make eye contact. Do not hold it.

Do not shed blood near it, do not show injury.

Do not let the children in its sight.

Do not run.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

She wasn’t doing any of those things, mayb-

The king’s corpse hung like a side of beef in her hands.

Do not contest its meals.

-well. She hadn’t done most of those things.

Nothing to do but lay down the body – carefully, with a gentleness she didn’t feel, no sudden movements from either of them – and step back and stretch your arms, casually, overhead. Warming up in the still-rising sunlight. Glance around casually.

The dragon was standing behind her, head at a slight tilt, something like a dog or a bird and a lot more like a fifty-foot pile of scales and death on two legs. She could smell the horsemeat and blood on its quiet breaths, even closemouthed.

Nezzy didn’t step back. She turned and walked away at an angle, behind the gibbet. Not turning her back, not backing away, not cowering. Calm and collected. Untroubled and unbothered. She nearly filled her pants four ways over.

The dragon stepped forward. Not for her, not for Nezzy. It stepped forward and pressed its nose to the king, inhaled one long, steady huff.

Then it took him in its mouth, raised its head, and with a twist of its neck – thicker than Nezzy stood tall – it flung him through the air.

He was unarmoured. The noise was thicker and wetter this time.

“Hurry up,” the dragon said in Nezzy’s voice, head tilting again.

She leaned against the gibbet and watched.

Sixteen times. Sixteen times it smelled at him, pawed at him with its great three-toed foot, plucked him from the dirt with its teeth like a bitch with her pups, sent him to flying. On the thirteenth time it stopped to investigate his innards, licked him cautiously.

It took an hour, one of the best of Nezzy’’s life. And at the end it sighed – a real true bone-rustler of a sigh, all the way out, a little bit back in – and turned on its heel and walked back up the way,

Back to the bailey.

And there, at the door, it once again curled its long, thick-muscled legs under it, hunkered down like a broody chicken, and shut its eyes.

Well then.

Nezzy watched as the crows came for the splatter of the king and began to think.

So. Not such a banquet after all. Too sour? Too sweet? Too salty? Too small? Just too full for now?

A horse was maybe enough. A horse was clearly preferred. A cow had sufficed, a donkey had been accepted, a deer would do. Beg some livestock to be sacrificed now for future benefit, lure the dragon into the woods, farther and farther. Lure it all the way out to past quarter-moon lake, back where she found it, and – and…

…and hope that it stayed there, where it had clearly been hungry enough to eagerly follow her scraps?

Hope that it didn’t stay here, where it had stood and fought – against small enemies, yes, but so many of them? It could’ve left. It hadn’t. It had fought and killed for this ground, and now it was comfortably sleeping there – had chosen to comfortably sleep there again.

Did she have to pull it out into the deep woods and find something to fight it? Hope that it liked its new home better? Hope she could find a place to park the biggest dragon she’d ever heard of that had enough food to sustain it and wasn’t so favoured by the other woodsfolk that she’d be ‘accidentally’ shot by hunters in midwinter and have her body hidden in a charcoal pile?

Too much hope needed over only so much at hand.

Nezzy walked back to the battlefield, back to where the king had laid. Picked up his helmet in her hand, stared into its idiot polished surface. Flecked with crow guano on the outside.

She turned it. A hint of dried bloody spit marred the inside.

Fine steel still, though. Fine steel. Their king had taken their wealth and spent it on what mattered most to him.

Well, he had given it back, in its way. Useless but for trade, though – you couldn’t hunt a deer with a sword, but you could buy cattle for-

Ah, now that was a thought, and-

Oh.

Oh.

Nezzy trotted back to the bailey; forcing all her muscles to slow into a double-step as she approached the dragon. It squinted one eye open at her and grumbled in a sleepy way as she slipped through the door.

“I’ve got it,” she told it.

***

“I’ve got this.”

“You’re out of your mind,” said Hacca, but quietly and without intensity. Her body was too rigid to muster rage, standing with a single-however-thick wooden door between her and a sleeping dragon.

“Come on. It’s safe. I’ve been three times now. I’m there right now. Am I eaten yet?”
“You’re going to kill me and run.”
“No.”
“You’d rather murder me than be an aunt again.”
“No.”
“Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice.

“What?”

Nezzy held up one hand and looked at the dragon. It shut its eye again and gurgled quietly.

The scent of horsemeat in her nose again. Sharply half-digested.

“I said hurry up,” said Nezzy. She could explain that later. “I’ve got something for you to look at.”

Hacca was paler than fresh snow, but she listened. And she listened when Nezzy hissed not to run, and she watched their backs up until Nezzy found the king’s fallen sword and she had something to look at that was, to her, so much more interesting than the dragon.

“Never seen it up close before.”
“And?”

“It’s quality,” said Hacca. “The headmen carried worse.”
“Yes, but they carried two score and more of them.”
“Mmm.”
“And the steward’s chain. And their rings. And the king’s armour.”

Hacca was still glaring, but in the way that meant she was concentrating. Adding up all that metal. All that craftsmanship.

“That’s a lot of cattle,” said Hacca.

“Enough cattle?”
“Enough for what? You want to eat one a week?”

Nezzy scowled. “Not me,” she said. “And if that’s what we’ve got, it won’t be enough. Not if it’s going to stay.”

Hacca dropped the sword, the sort of gesture that happened because every tendon in her arms spasmed without her say-so.

“It’s going to what?” she hissed, a yell forced by (still-sleeping) circumstance to exit between her front teeth.

“Stay,” said Nezzy. “It doesn’t think we’re tasty. It’s in no rush to hunt us as long as it’s full and we’re respectful. If you could stomach our last king you can stomach this one, at least it’ll only kill you for what you DO to it, not what you SAY about it.”

“And in return we feed it a cow a week until we’ve out of cows and deer and elders and have to start stuffing children down its gullet?” said Hacca.

“No,” said Nezzy. “We feed it a cow a week until we’re running low on cattle. Then we beg the aid of an adventurer-prince. ‘Slay the dragon! Take the land as king!’ Just like the last time. Except now our dragon is a lot bigger.”

Hacca stared at her.

“An adventurer-prince has a sword,” said Nezzy. “And headmen with swords. And a horse.” She shrugged. “More cattle. And cousin, I don’t think our neighbours will ask too many questions about where our trade-goods come from so long as they keep coming and we keep asking for their cattle.”

Hacca wasn’t blinking.  Her mouth was open just a little.  Her breathing sounded funny, not too fast, not too snow, not too hard.  Just a little funny.

“Deal?” asked Nezzy.
“All and everything above and below,” said Hacca, almost awestruck. “My idiot baby ranger cousin stands in front of me and talks of harvesting humans for their gear like conies for their pelts, to fund a murderous beast whose only function is to kill anyone that comes to challenge it.” She clasped her hands atop Nezzy’s shoulders.

“You really ARE the new steward of the bailey.”

Then Nezzy’s cousin’s forehead came at her like a bowshot.

Nezzy lay there on her back, head ringing from cobble-shaped bruise on one side and broken nose on the other.

“Deal,” said Hacca’s voice, flat and dead above her.

“Deal?” asked Hacca’s voice, distant at the bailey.

“Sure,” said Nezzy. The blood was trickling into her smile, into the gaps the king’s mailed fist had left. “Sure.”

Opinion: Bring Back the Tribute-Obelisk of Golgripper the Masticator of Limbs

That’s right, you’re reading this here, and it isn’t a joke.  I, a concerned and furious citizen of this undermountain, did spake these words and convey them to the moleish and cowardly carvers of this mockery of a daily news-slab.  I dare to say what any delver worth their canary-bat should: the continued absence of the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs that once lay at the heart of our fair city’s Grand Hollow is a mockery of all that we have propped and beamed. 

Was it not Goldripper who most boldly led the Far Tunneling from the Undercoast, where now dwell only those who delve not but wring their hands, and would sooner swing fishing poles than axepicks?  Was it not Goldripper who most astutely recognized the wealth of strands of Earth-Nerves that ran throughout the peak we now house our heads and forge our souls under? Was it not Goldripper who most bravely routed the turbulent and vile Countess of the Scrabbling Munch, tore her arms and tentacles free and devoured them, and who planted the Victory Spike in her mantle?  Was it not Goldripper who, having secured an endless font of wealth by strike and stratagem, so selflessly had all the spoil of the war heaped into his Tribute-Obelisk where it would not benefit him but instead ward the prosperity and ventures of all who followed?

If it weren’t for granddelvers like Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs this undermountain would be as barren stone fit for dead bats and live crickets. And how do we treat this memory?  With scorn!  We have piled scree and rubble upon his deeds, poured pig-iron slag over his titling – his Tribute-Obelisk was ‘taken to a secure workshop’ to be ‘repaired of vandalism’ by ‘skilled chiselmasters’ and now it has not returned!  This is a plot, a plot by the Scrabbling Munch – yes, they are not dead, not as we were told, for Goldripper was BETRAYED by his advisors and they were saved by whispering in weaker delver’s ears of hidden veins leading to rich pustules of the deep earth! Long have they bided their time, and now they walk among us – ask yourself of a delver: who are those that gain from besmirching the great history of our undermountain and seizing the tribute of its founder, and find yourself the answer: THEY ARE THOSE WHO MUNCH.  Wrapped in stolen delver-hide; hidden under knitted delver-hair; swaddled in foul undelving LIES, they plot to use the wealth of their ancient foe – our founder –to deliver us to their conspirator-Scrabblers that envy our might and glory in our downfall! We must tear them out, pebble and boulder, hill and peak!  Cast the vermin from the highest chambers unto the World Above!  Redraw the great sigil in their lymph! Rend riven the paws of the slavish beasts who publish this travesty of a palsy-gripped news-slab and chain their weakling limbs to axepicks and orecarts that they might redeem their blindness in honest labour!

We should also bring back the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs, as I have indicated in this editorial’s title. Praise to you and yours,

–Your Thoughtful Neighbor

***

Opinion: Don’t Bring Back the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs

Please don’t put that thing back.  Please, for the love of a straight and true shaft that doesn’t sag.  Do you enjoy having money and neighbours that actually like you?  We only just started real trade with the Scrabbling Grip last century but nowadays that’s where half our crafts go, and putting up a giant statue announcing we revere the delver who backstabbed them after they did all the actual work of fending off the Scrabbling Munch is not a good way to keep the scutetokens flowing – or the nectar. Does anyone else want to go back to sloughfungus smallbeer?  I don’t.  You don’t.  Nobody does. It’s just not practical.  Nothing about putting that tribute-obelisk back up is practical, and more than that, it isn’t a good moral example.

Do you want to tell your joeys that when they’re in trouble they should mine their friends for all they’re worth and take a fast rail out of town?  Goldripper did it – drained Agate Current dry of credit and left them to fracture, and folks nod his obelisk and call him bold. 

Do you want your neighbours to swear on stacked shale that they came up with every blueprint and floor plan you draft? Goldripper did it – would’ve settled two ranges over with nothing to live off of but moleverines and flint had his fartunnelers not persuaded him otherwise. He took their ideas and wrote his name on them and folks nod his obelisk and call him astute.

Do you want your axepickers in the breach to call for a charge against the foe, to watch you fight and bleed and fall, and then sink their blade in your spine once you’ve burnt your brown fat to the quick in their name?  Goldripper did that to the Scrabbling Grip, and he did no better to anyone else that spoke against him, and folks nod his obelisk and call him brave.

You know better than that.  We all do.  We all have for a long, long time, and the only reason that stupid thing was still standing was because the few people that would’ve cared are louder than a rockslide in a nursery.

Whether it really was taken down to fix the vandalism or not who cares, just don’t bring it back.  Praise to you and yours,

–Grontle Gemcrack, Your Tired Neighbour

***

Opinion: Gee, I Get Why People are Upset About the Obelisk, but Can’t We Get Along?

Well this is a fine what-do-you-mean and a real mudotter in the brewvats, if you’ll forgive my foul words (old habits)!  It seems like our neighbours are rowdier than a rat with a king tied to its tailbone, and over just a little piece of stone.

I understand that everyone feels right deep in their guts about this.  Goldripper was a proper darksaint of mine and my poucher before me, and hers before that – grow up strong like Goldripper; think ahead like Goldripper; gnaw at that problem like Goldripper would on a limb – but I’ve also caught the whistle from other neighbours that maybe he was a complicated sort of delver and sometimes he made a mistake. I mean, he masticated a lot of limbs, sometimes in the hurry of the collapse you just drop the wrong tools, right?  And by drop the wrong tools I mean masticate the wrong limbs, if you feel my carving here. For instance, if he’d gotten that Second Great Mine he pushed for we would’ve ended up brawling with the Scrabbling Grip, and some of my best friends are Grippies – coprolite-on-copper, they’re pretty much nearly normal these days!  So maybe some of his ideas weren’t always perfect.  On the other hand, some of my OTHER other neighbours said that if we don’t put the obelisk back up we’ll forget Goldrippper ever existed, and that sounds like a real bent-beam of a time to have because I don’t know how we’ll make sense of our history slabs when there’s some delver mentioned all over the founding and nobody knows what his name was.  Also they told me once we’re confused like that the Scrabbling Munch will invade us from the surface with minewheels that shoot lightning and rain. That’d be a proper bucket of ammonites in your breakfast, wouldn’t it? 

So what if we try putting HALF the Tribute-Obelisk back?  Or all of it, or none of it, but half the time, or something.  So that everyone can get along.  Praise to you and yours!

-Clurg Shoemetal, Your Friendly Neighbour

Newsvein Uncovered: Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs Revealed to be Fraudulent

Chiselmasters under the Grand Hollow have submitted bonded and alloyed testimony on the nature of the Tribute-Obelisk of Goldripper the Masticator of Limbs being a piece of slovenwork.

“The stone rings true enough to eye and feel,” Grand Carver Muush Crunchstab declaimed in subargument prime, “but a fingerspan beneath is hollow as sucked spider eggs since its erection, with a false bottom spanning ‘twixt a sealed bolthole-path.  As Obelisk it bare satisfies, as Tribute it denies in totality. Throw it to the overmiddens and spit on its makers. Strike that last comment.  Too tardy? Damn.”

The Accounts and Ledgers Geode has expressed extreme interest in the possible location of the missing tribute.  Undermayor Goldripper VII the Buyer of Big Delves decried comment on his family and ancestors.

More is very likely to pointedly follow. Praise to your and yours.

-Vunk Plungebrick, Master News-Slabber

“Run!” screamed the watcher on the belltower of the tallest steeple on the hill.

So they ran.

What else could they do?

What else could lord or serf do, could manager or employee do, could king or lover or thief or wizard or software engineer do but obey the simplest command?
The earth under Murble’s Crossing trembled. The sun shone watery in the pale blue sky. The snow dusted itself from the tree branches. A wren folded its wings and fell weary and resigned from the heavens. Someone’s cow gave a grunt and heaved out the hindlegs of what, it had become obvious some time earlier, was a three-headed calf. Mercury had started last night in retrograde, changed its mind halfway through, then punched Venus in the face. The moon had new spots on it. The mayor’s favorite cat had gone bald last night and had regrown all its hair five minutes ago (she had also gone from tabby to tortie).

Yes, even a blind eagle or a deaf bat could understand what was afoot. All could, save for Burtholomew Puddle, who was staying at the Murble’s Crossing Holiday Inn and was still angrily ringing the bell.

“About time!” he said to the manager, as she erupted from the backroom like boiling lava. “Your clerk just interrupted my simple request for cleaner sheets with – hey! Hey! Hey! Get back here!”
“Run!” called the manager over her shoulder, head only half turned, word gasped as much as shouted – only the sparsest of effort diverted from her own headlong flight. “Run!”

Then she was gone and Burtholomew stood alone at the desk with the tragic and bereft face of a man with a full head of indignation and no target whatsoever, a cat that had failed to catch their own tail.

He consoled himself with a pocketful of complimentary hard candies.

***

Burtholomew walked into the parking lot in search of someone else to complain to and found no one and nothing, including his car.

“Outrageous!” he seethed. “There wasn’t a SINGLE handicapped person around when I took that spot, and it’s a weekend! They have no right! On a Saturday! I ask of you, what kind of day is THAT to remove an innocent man’s personal transportation?”
“It’s the day.”

The words were gasped, the face was strained, the body was fumbling at the lock on a bike rack. A shallow curse, the withdrawal of an expensive phone from the pocket – oh! A hammer! Bam-bam-bam! The lock broke apart, the adolescent dirt bike was taken, the person – a perfectly respectable middle-aged man in a suit (no tie) fled down the road like the police were on his heels.

He’d dropped not only the phone – screen now an interesting diagram of geologic stress fractures illustrated by a professional orb-weaver – but his wallet. Harvroy Blonk.

Burtholomew pocketed it for safekeeping.

“He could have,” he told the lonely street, “at least kept cash on hand. For a finder’s fee.”

It did not answer.

***

After ten minutes it became apparent to Burtholomew that the bus was not coming, nor was anything else. The road was bare and dry and empty.

He waited five more minutes to be sure, then gave up when a turtle he’d been idly watching had reached the central lane marker completely unthreatened. Downtown wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t walk it, it was merely so far away that he deeply resented it and was going to add to the litany of complaints to lay on the desk of the mayor, the chief of police, the local bylaw officer, and anyone else who looked at him.

Maybe Harvroy Blonk, he considered. He’d looked like he had money, and now he’d owe Burtholomew. If not for the wallet, then for not telling people about stealing a teenager’s bicycle. That wasn’t the sort of thing people got arrested for, but it WAS the kind of thing that made people talk.

Downtown was empty. Doors were unlocked. A trail of hair in the street messily dithered back to a barbershop, clearly dragged by an errant boot. Half a bumper marked a sudden and clearly nonfatal disagreement between two vehicles, which apparently had induced neither those involved to stop nor witnesses to set up traffic cones.

The police station was unlocked. The secretary’s computer was still on and their chair was still warm. Their browser, private browser, and calendar were all open, the calendar foremost.

On the calendar February the second stared back at Burtholomew.

“Ground hog day,” he read. Horse and bull puckies. Why not rat day? Why not pigeon day? “Fwaugh,” he enunciated. It pleased him. “Pfft. Blmeah.”

“Help!”

“Hello?”
“HELP!” The voice was desperate and scraped and – it came to pass – belonged to a man in Murble’s Crossing’s single jail cell, whose hands were bloody at the nails and the knuckles and the tips from the clawing and punching and grabbing at the (cheap, but only half-dented) lock.

“Let me out let me out let me out let me out let me OUT” he said, too frantic to get enough air in him to scream properly. “Almost too late let me out let me out let me OUT!”
“What are you in there for?” asked Burtholomew. “It’s not stealing is it? I hate thieves. Low work effort and no pride. Disgusting..”

“I punched a guy I took the lord’s name in vain I shot up the stagecoach who cares let me OUT please let me OUT please please please please key’s on the desk PLEASE-”

With the long sign of a reasonable man put upon beyond all belief by reality, Burtholomew located the keycard and brought it forwards.

“Really,” he said as he waved it around. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Is groundhog day so important here? What stupid little nickname did you give your local weatherrodent?”
“NO NAMES!” howled the man. “They’ll HEAR it! It’s today! Today the ground hog wakes and seeks Their shadow!”

Burtholomew realized the cell door required a slide rather than a tap and unconsciously decided to pretend he’d known that all along and had been waiting until now on purpose. “Fine, well, but I don’t see what’s –”

The door beeped, then clonked directly into his face. The man fled in a single long hyperventilation.

“Hey!” he shouted after him. “I’ll call the police back on you!”

He didn’t care. He didn’t hear. He didn’t stop.

Burtholomew, fuming and rubbing his sore nose, made the best of a bad situation with the contents of the breakroom fridge. Someone named Sarge DON’T TAKE THIS had left a half-serving of meatloaf and greens.

***

City hall was empty too.

Even on a full belly this was very nearly too much to bear for Burtholomew. His sheets had not been changed. His car had been towed – or, as he had come to suspect, been stolen in whatever frenzy had gripped this miserable little town – and he’d been forced to watch a bicycle theft and not received payment for helping a stranger with their wallet and he’d had a door opened in his face. He’d eaten a just-a-little-too-small meatloaf and then been let down by subpar greens that left his mouth bitter and resentful. And all of this without a single person to complain to.

“I WILL,” he vowed in front of the empty hall in the middle of the empty street in the midst of the empty town, to himself and the whole universe, “meet with whoever is to blame for this cavalcade of poor service and worse manners.

The ground rumbled.

Burtholomew swore and kicked at a pebble.

The ground shifted.

Burtholomew yelped and clutched at a lamppost.

The ground rose, and was not the ground.

Up rose ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Earth-Mover, the Mumbler, the Mountain, the Ground Hog, and the ground was They and They were the ground and it mantled Their shoulders and it was Their shoulders as a cape of ermine would delineate an emperor or a halo a saint or a haze of blood and sweat the naked flesh of a dying berserker lying prone on some plundered shore among the driftwood.

Burtholomew opened his mouth and made some noises.

Up rose ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Whistler, the Chucker, the Incisive-More. And so down was cast Murble’s Crossing, rent in ribbons around coarse fur thicker than iron bars and hoarfrost-tipped with the secret veins and lodes of the deep stone where the gold is rich and the heat is boiling and the liquid-rock hum of the mantle grows loud and unavoidable; dripping in pavement and asphalt around forty stout limbs tipped with claws that turned through adamant as if it were unfired clay; spilling big box stores and suburbs and apartments into a Deep hollow below a body that could only be described as perfectly massive, perfectly unstoppable, and perfectly round.

The Deep was below. It was not the concern of the day. The great craggy head was still rising even as the body halted; the blunt stubborn neckless head questing, the nose sniffing – a space that aircraft carriers could be lost in was sucking in air and sampling the atmosphere, determining heat and cold and pollen and things humanity had neither words nor weathermen for, and after determining all those things the head reached its zenith and Their eyes opened.

Slowly. Watery (if magma were water). Carefully. They had been so Deep for so long.

ABEC-Quillawthcellpleric, the Earth’s Tail, the Not-A-Pig, the Fore-Caster, reared up into the blinding face of the still-rising sun, snout questing in squinting bafflement, and so did not see Their shadow, and was not afeared.

So They saw. And so They squeaked – once: short, sharp, satisfied, and so deeply-pitched that only an old, old earthquake warning system in Beijing could detect it. And so They turned and descended, limb by limb and turn by turn, until Their legs, Their skull, Their roundness was once more held beneath, and the Ground was ground again and the soft soil beloved of multicellular life once more hid Their back beneath.

All was as it was once more, save for Murble’s Crossing.

And Burtholomew, of course. But nobody much minded that.

6:15AM: Gladys Short, while shoveling, stops to clear a blocked nostril, discharging the contents of her sinuses into the nearest snowdrift.

6:39AM: Stray mucosal particles interact in unlikely ways with the fine matter present in the snowdrift (road salt, ice, snow, dirt, dirty ice, fossilized dog feces), undergoing biogenesis and producing the first simple single-flaked organisms. 

8:43AM: The first multi-flaked organism evolves within the snowdrift.  A lightweight creature, it reflects heat from the sun and uses this to melt its competitors so that it might add their liquified mass to its own. 

10:39AM: A branch of multiflaked life develops icy body tissue, leading to a sudden profusion in radical and experimental bauplans deemed the Brunch Explosion.

1:00PM: Life reaches the harsh and exposed surface of the snowdrift.

2:15PM: Life on the snowdrift is nearly obliterated by a passing snowplow.

3:34PM: Life on the snowdrift is nearly obliterated by Cheryl Thompson doing a neighbour a solid and helping with the five additional centimeters left on her front steps. 

4:50PM: Life on the snowdrift is nearly obliterated by a frolicking on-leash labrador retriever (age one year six months). 

5:47PM: A new ice age begins on the snowdrift as the sun rapidly descends. 

6:20PM: A species of microsnowman arises on the snowdrift as part of an adaptive radiation of tiny ridiculous bipeds that constantly obsess over gossip and sex.

6:22PM: Microsnowmen spread across the snowdrift’s surface.

6:29PM: Complex microsnowmen societies form around rich surface deposits of fallen icicles, which are used to construct weapons to take other’s icicle deposits and palisades to defend one’s own and not much else.

6:31:48 PM: In an effort to understand the vastness of the universe around them, three grand theories purporting to explain microsnowmanity and its place in the snowdrift: Metacryocity (which holds that all beings containing an uneven number of flakes should be exterminated); Zeta Anti-Metacryocity (which holds that all beings containing an even number of flakes should be exterminated); and Remoulded Slipperyism (which holds that all microsnowmen beings contain an immortal essence that slips away on death to a better place as one’s foot might slip on good quality ice, and so it is best to exterminate everyone).

6:31.50PM: After long centuries of bitter warfare and insularity, beleaguered microsnowmen in the Large Surface Depression forge a tentative connection with their long-lost brethren of the Top Crust Overhang for mutual aid and defense.

6:31.51PM: The Large Surface Depression betrays, invades, and repeatedly annexes the Top Crust Overhang, coveting its vast crusty ice deposits. 

6:31.52PM: New Crustland splits into three feuding states over whether or not they should keep invading nearby polities, switch to browbeating them into submission through humiliating trade demands, or annihilate them with snowballs from above.

6:31.53PM: In a productive and exciting span of time, semiautomatic and automatic snowballers, barbed tinsel, the tank, antifreeze, chemically unfrozen dog urine, deliberate snowslide, and the H (heater) bomb are developed and shared by, for, and with the microsnowmen at the cost of millions of generous and grateful lives. 

6:31.56PM: A tentative and fragile truce holds the snowdrift as it sits under the threat of being melted into water by H-bombs.  This truce is enforced by building more H-bombs.

6:31.57PM: The tentative and fragile truce sort of ends without violence after The Hole By The Shovel’s Handle undergoes a partial societal collapse while in possession of the largest H-bomb arsenal on the snowdrift.  In the spirit of coexistence, all agree to keep their H-bombs close to hand. 

6:31.58PM: The snowdrift’s surface begins to show warping and disfiguration due to the side effects of every microsnowman of means now owning a private and massively oversized Zamboni that runs on a series of complex ice-based mirrors that channel huge quantities of light and warmth directly into the snowdrift. Nothing can possibly be done about this. 

6:31.59PM: Facing increased snowdrift instability to the point where the ground itself is shaking and sliding beneath their feet, the greatest and most powerful leaders of The Large Surface Depression, New Crustland, Old Snowangel, and  The Hole By The Shovel’s Handle agree to invade all their neighbours and pour all available resources and time into developing newer and more expensive ways to arrange decorative bouquets of water molecules that spell out flattering messages to themselves. 

6:32PM: Gladys Short arrives home and discovers her front steps a mess of mangled slush and snow, says ‘for FUCK’S sake,’ and fiercely dismantles the snowdrift, killing every single multiflaked organism.

6:55PM: Glady makes herself hot chocolate with many extra-large marshmallows.

In a manner of speaking, Nezzy’s brother had been killed by the dragon.

It had been the dragon that had come to their lands years before, unprovoked and unsent for and unwanted. It had been the dragon that had hollowed the old bailey into its den and feasted upon the headmen within. It had been the dragon that had taken as satisfaction a head of cattle a moon – and two sheep besides –in payment. And it had been the dragon who at last fell to the blade and hooves and bravery of an adventurer-prince, bestial and ravening hunger laid low by skill and grace.

So if the dragon had been a little fiercer, a little faster, a little hungrier, a little less clumsy and a little more wise, Nezzy’s older brother wouldn’t be on the gibbet in the Square right now, where the crows were debating over the division of his eyes.

***

It had been a long time since their lands had known the hand of a king. Things had been relearned slowly. Allowances had been given. He was a just ruler.

Do not cut or fell the trees in the woods without express permission of the king, through his headmen.

Do not hunt the game in the woods above a given size, and do not seek permission otherwise from the king or from his headmen.

Do not fail to pay a tithe of the harvest or its equivalent value to the king through the headmen, annually.

Do not refuse a request of the king or his headmen for your time or your labour.

Do not gather an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods.

Nezzy’s family had broken one or another of those rules in the first few years, but whose hadn’t?

Then mother passed, quick and quiet in the winter, and father drank until he got in fights enough to follow her, and Nezzy and her brother had gotten a bit behind, a little distracted, and that earned them a few big warnings and then her brother had gathered an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods, and when a headman had suggested that some of them looked fresh-cut he had expressed his disagreement less than delicately.

So now he was on the gibbet, and his tithe had been taken, and Nezzy was owner of an elderly donkey and two worn cows and a half-broken shack and a headful of thoughts she shouldn’t dwell on and couldn’t stop.

Going somewhere was more important than deciding where to go. So she went, and her body did the thinking while her head did the wandering.

***

Dragons weren’t common, and thank the skies and the stones that it was so, people said. They lived in the trackless and traceless places, on moors and in thickets, where hills were stony and soil grew thin and no farm or herd could tend for a single season. No one looked for them, no one wished for them, some were just afflicted by them, and who could dare ask why?
But if you talked to the folk who worked in the woods – the deep treecutters, the charcoal-makers, the rangers and the trailblazers and the huntsmen, they would mention things. Not speak of them, you mind – not dwell on them, not introduce them, consider them, measure them, offer advice on them. Just little things in passing.

“Big one out past quarter-moon lake.”

And everyone present hadn’t nodded, hadn’t grunted agreement, had just kept on talking and if anyone had asked why none of them had ventured out by quarter-moon lake in almost a year, maybe they’d get the same answer and maybe they’d just get a shrug.

Best not to talk about what you didn’t want to think about.

Well, Nezzy was past thinking now. And past quarter-moon lake by a league, where the remnants of the trails were uneven and strange.

No fresh blazes. No woodsign. No trace of tent or graze.

But the path itself was clear. The trees hadn’t grown in. The shrubbery hadn’t swallowed it whole.

Something walked here.

Nezzy’s body, which was still doing her thinking for her, kept checking the wind and scanning her sightlines and – most importantly – never once loosened her grip on Irribelle’s lead. If something was wrong the donkey would know before she did, half-blind or no, and she wanted to have firsthand advice on which way to run first.

***

The cave smelt like death.

The cows refused to budge before Nezzy even caught wind of it. Irribelle dug in her hooves at the sight of it. And her stomach tried to keep her out when she stepped into it.

Dangerous to have the light at your back.

Dangerous to stand between any living thing and its only path away from you.

Dangerous to go alone into the woods where anyone with sense was staying clear, keeping out.

Dangerous to be the last member of a family whose second-last member had called the king in his bailey all sorts of things in public that you shouldn’t think even in private.

Dangerous to have half a fallen-down shack and two cows and a donkey to your name with winter coming on sooner than later.

While her mind collected all of those facts and stood there looking at them like an idiot, Nezzy’s body struck a light and walked in.

Still a breeze at her heels from the outside. Safe.

Still a dancing spark in her grip. Safe.

Still no movement on the walls beyond the twist and turn of the shadows. Sa

it growled.

Nezzy’s body stopped moving. Her mind accelerated.

The growl wasn’t stopping.

She stepped back. It sunk.

She stepped forward. It rose.

She stood where she was and raised her light and it pitched into a snarl into a short sharp squeal and a cluster of tree-gluttons bounced free of their nest and seethed past her feet to more hidden corners, bright teeth bared and angry eyes glistening, beautiful fur on sleek-shouldered frames and sharp sharp claws.

The nest, she recognized on inspection, was a bear’s carcass, half-mummified and half-skeletonized. It had probably died in hibernation, starved in its bed with nowhere to find food.

That could explain a little of the smell, and the rest was set by the leavings around the nest. All very regular. Very normal.

The noise she heard was not normal at all and also somewhat quieted by distance, so it took Nezzy a moment to place it: a donkey, frightened, cut short.

***

She’d seen the dragon six times. Four as a child, twice as an adult; five living, one dead and dangling from the tree of the Square, before they cut it down and raised up the gibbet. It had been huge and huge and huge and huge and stayed that way until it was dead and she could see it was taller than a horse, but not by much, and longer than a horse, but mostly in tail, and fiercer-toothed than any bear, but not impossibly, and so on. Its size had grown up with her in a way its body hadn’t.

This dragon’s belly was taller than a horse. This dragon’s tail was longer than a house. This dragon’s skull was larger than a bear. This dragon’s mouth contained all of Irribelle’s body, bar one stray hoof.

It crunched. The hoof fell and landed, maybe it made a noise or maybe it didn’t because Nezzy couldn’t hear a thing that wasn’t her own heartbeat.

Maybe the cave wasn’t helping. Her heartbeat was resonating up from her bones into her ears out and into the stone and back in her ears and to fix this she needed to get out of the cave. Yes, that was reasonable.

She stepped out of the cave into the daylight and the dragon looked at her. Tilted its skull, let those two seemingly-tiny eyes settle on her. Forward-facing like an eagle. Feet like an eagle too, three-toed and three-clawed. No arms.

Nezzy had seen the dragon six times. But she’d lived with it for years and years, and she remembered the rules her parents had taught her.

Do not make eye contact. If you do, do not hold it. Release it and move on.

Do not shed blood near it, nor show weakness or illness.

Do not stray from the adults. Do not let go of the children, and do not bring them near where it may be.

Do not ever run, and do not ever ever run away.

Do not contest its meals.

Do not venture out when it is hungry.

So Nezzy looked at the dragon’s tail, side-on as she walked – without flinching, without haste, without wobbling or whimpering – and saw by its bobbing and turning the dragon’s casual observation of her and a lack of alert focus.

And she thought to herself: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that I’m not an important meal.

And: poor Irribelle, but at least it would have been quick.

And: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that she won’t fill it up forever.

The cows were gone from where she’d left them, the tether worn apart in the sort of long-term sustained-effort that came from terror rather than panic, and it took her until near sundown to find them again, trembling in a thicket. She soothed them and patted them and brushed their sides and patted their noses and felt very badly about what she was going to do tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after.

She’d grown up with them. She’d make it quick.

***

Nezzy took Mop first. Poor trusting Mop, her brother’s favorite, who went with her because what else could she do, and she led Mop back towards home and tied her close to a tree and killed her as quick and quiet as she could, which was hard because Mop was no deer and she hadn’t had occasion to practice on deer since the king came.

“Sorry,” she said afterwards, and in reply she thought she heard that half-quenched bray again. Sorry Irribelle. Sorry Mop.

Better than to starve, right? Would brother have said that? Before or after he went on the gibbet?

Her knife grew dull and her arms grew sore, but the work gave her legs a rest until it was done and it was time to move, joint by joint, cut by cut, bone and muscle and sinew, all that weight that Mop had taken every moment of her life heaved up and hauled through the too-clear-paths by a single aching human body, limbs hauling limbs.

She alternated heavy and light. A big chunk. A tantalizing giblet. A whole leg. The liver.

Work and rest, work and rest. The trip back to Mop grew longer, the distance to the cave shorter.

“Hurry up,” Nezzy told herself as she flagged. The sun was high, the evening was going to come. This wasn’t something she wanted to do at night, although she’d bet her shoes that no bear wolf or otherwise was left in these forests for as far as they could run.

She threw the last, bloodied chunk – Mop’s tongue – into the air in the direction of the cave – as far as she could – and left, a stumbling, red-smeared walking corpse. If quarter-moon lake wasn’t as far away as all she’d walked today combined she’d have taken herself all the way there to clean herself; she made do with a cold stream and a mossy stone for a scrub, then shambled all the way to where Brush waited.

She hadn’t broken her tether this time. Either she trusted Nezzy more or she was too frightened to move without Mop. Nezzy wasn’t sure which made her feel worse, and slept guiltily against the cow’s flank with Irribelle’s death-cry in her ears again, distant and wavering.

***

She moved at dawn, stiff and sure, and before she’d even reached Mop’s butchering ground she knew she’d done it. The distant stink from downwind. The quiet of the larger birds. The little itch at her eyes that said: Look Wider, Look Carefully.

The dragon lay at rest under the tree, tucked neatly on its coiled legs like a hen, long tail behind it. Its eyes were open or maybe not, shaded under the thick ridge of its brows.

Mop was no longer in evidence.

Were its sides fuller? Did its stomach look distended? At rest it was hard to say what was which, and it wasn’t as if her parents had ever let her anywhere near the dragon when it was full, scarce less when it was feeding, never at all when it was hungry.

But she measured Mop by the bloody tether wrapped around the tree’s trunk, and she measured the dragon from that, and she put that together with Irribelle.

It can make room, she told herself. But a day or two first. A day or two. There’s water nearby, the weather is nice. It won’t move.

A day or two. She could brush Brush. Comb her until she shone.

The dragon’s head had raised up. When had that happened? It was smelling the air. She should’ve heard that, she’d forgotten how quiet the old dragon could be, had already lost in disbelief her memories that this dragon had crept up on Irribelle and killed her by surprise. Big didn’t have to mean loud. Not all big things were kings.

She walked back into the woods, kept downwind the whole way. And for two, three, four days she tended to Brush until her lean sides gleamed like new, in the noon sun and under the full moon, and with every other sweep she told her ‘thank you,’ because that sounded less cruel and self-serving than ‘sorry.’

***

Brush she doled out over a wider distance. Four days of observation showed her a dragon willing to slumber in place after a good meal, and she took that time to prepare a long and bloody trail, one that took them past the very rim of quarter-moon lake.

She didn’t see it move, at night or in the day. But on the morning of the fifth day it lay happily in the morning sun where Brush’s carcass had been.

Nezzy breathed out slow.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy breathed in slow, then almost choked because she knew better than to make a single noise around this thing and because she knew better she hadn’t done that, she swore she hadn’t unless her mind was fighting her body one and for all right next to a no-longer-sleeping dragon. Its head was up. Its snout tested at the air lazily.

She was downwind. Safe.

“Thank you,” said her own voice.

Nezzy broke her own rules and ran. She was not punished.

***

She stayed away five full days that time. Told herself she was waiting for the right game to come by. Told herself she was waiting for the dragon’s belly to empty again, get it just hungry enough. Told herself several things that were completely true while being obvious lies.

So she sat in a blind she’d made by a stream she’d favoured some years ago – when food had been tight and doing something the king didn’t know about seemed safe – where the tracks seemed fresh enough, and for three days she let the selfsame stag drink and walk away, telling herself she was just holding on for something a bit bigger, or getting up the perfect shot.

The stag left again and she walked back to her den, scraped under a fallen tree. A bear would likely appreciate this spot come winter, and by the smell of it, already had.

“Thank you.”

Nezzy jumped, full on leapt straight upwards like a squirrel on a branch with her heart between her teeth, and before she landed she knew that wasn’t her imagination, she wasn’t tired enough to be mistaken, and that it was her voice.

Nobody near, not in sight, not on the trail.

She wanted to run. She couldn’t see where to run. She didn’t run.

“Hurry up.”
She ran. She ran like she hadn’t since she was four and racing her brother. She ran like she hadn’t since the miller had called to her and said the leech was with her mother. She ran like she hadn’t known better.

When she was done she cowered in her scrape of dirt and dead wood and maybe she slept and maybe she didn’t and she rose with the dawn and stopped the stag’s life before it saw another sunset.

The knife was dull as a spoon by then. She kept her mind on that, and off other things.

***

“Dragon!”

Thump thump thump, the noisy sound of human feet on human floors of human dwellings, the loudest thing she’d ever heard. She hadn’t been in the woods that long, had she?
“Dragon!”

A distant whisper, a cautious mutter behind closed doors and latched shutters.

“Dragon!”

She was loud. She was so damned loud, louder than any of them, loudest thing she’d heard. Was that enough? She hadn’t been in the woods that long, surely.

“Dra-“

The bailey’s door opened under her hands, which clawed at nothing for a moment before fisting in a shirt. A headman blinked at her, groggy in the daylight, annoyed by her presumption. He hit her – irritated, businesslike – and she let her head snap to the side and pass the force in one side and out the other, gasped like she had no air in her lungs (she didn’t) and like she was shocked (she wasn’t).

“What?” he asked. Thump thump thump, other feet on the move. She HAD been loud enough then; they’d heard her words, not just some idiot making a ruckus.

“Dragon!” she said, loud but talking-loud now, shaken but reasonable, eager to speak up. “In the fields! It took my cow!” She clawed at his arms, blood slipping wetly from her to him. “Get the king! Send for the king! Help! Help! Help! Dragon!”

She took another punch then, but she’d expected that, made sure to smear the headman extra good on her way down the ground – which earned her a kick and she’d expected that too but damnit, his boots were too new and too good.

“Dragon?” the next headman asked. She could hear it behind the shutters in the houses too, between the tiny whispers. Could hear it passing from headman to headman down the hall into the bailey. Dragon? Dragon? Dragon?

“Who knows,” said the first headman, whose clothes were so fine he must be the bailey’s steward, and she might have smeared a bit too much blood on him because he sounded more upset with her than he did about the hue and cry. “But – hst! Hear that?”

Bless the paranoia of the shepherds. Bless the keen noses of their dogs. Bless whatever quick-footed paranoid had made it to the warning bell in the Square first.

Ding! Ding! Ding! The dragon was hungry! The dragon was to be fed! Let it come to the sound! Let it come to the square!

Nezzy could have left then. Their eyes were off her. Their thoughts. Their hands.

But she was too busy hoping, too busy thinking, and for once she let her brain creep into those thoughts too: did it work? Will it come? Will the bell frighten it? What if?

What if what if what if what if what if

“Bring her.”

Firm. Decisive. Sure. Mannerless.

She’d never actually heard the king speak before. But with that voice – not its pitch, or its timbre, but its attitude – she didn’t need to see the steed or the steel armour or the fine blade, did she?

***

Down the way from the bailey they marched in company, two score good headmen and all the rest besides, and the king at their front, armed and armoured. To the Square, to the gibbet, to the bell.

Nezzy got to march near the front, besides the steward. Well, half march, half drag. If she did too much of the former he shoved her until it became the latter.

The Square was empty, the bell-ringer fled. Even the echoes had gone cold before they arrived. Headmen spread like lumpy jam across the way, hammered on doors and pried at shutters.

“Open up!”
“Did you see anything?”
“Who ran the bell?”

“Hurry up.”
It was not very loud, it was in Nezzy’s ear. It was in her own voice.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up,” she said aloud. The steward looked sharp at her from the end of her cuffs.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up!” she called. He swore at her and yanked her tight, was shouting something in her face.

“Hurry up.”
“Hurry UP!” she yelled, shoved him hard in the stomach, smearing what sticky blood was left on her palms on his oiled mail. He grabbed her face and put a hand on his belt and someone made a short sharp cry.

Like Irribelle, she thought.

The steward turned to look. Everyone did. Nezzy shouldn’t have, but she’d shouldn’t have a lot of things.

The dragon stood between the company and the bailey, nosing with interest the remains of a headman. His body was heaped, if it was in pieces it couldn’t have been more than two.

Then it stood up and looked at them. All the way up.

It had forearms, Nezzy realized. They were simply very very small compared to the rest of it.

Its mouth opened the tiniest fraction. Something wet and sharp was inside. “Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice, right in her ear. Right in everyone’s ear, the way the company jolted.

“Thank you,” said Nezzy.

“Thank you,” said the dragon. And then – a quick jerk of its head – a short, sharp terrible sound, the half-choked bray of a donkey cut-short, and like that was a rallying horn the company raised their arms and cried and it moved.

Nezzy broke her rule again. Nezzy ran. Nezzy ran away, and Nezzy ran for the end of the company, where the king was cursing and wrestling with the head of his horse – the same he’d killed that older dragon atop? Surely not – and grabbed at his stirrups and hauled herself up, still coated in the leftover drying paste of stag’s blood, and started a fight with a man coated in tempered steel and brandishing a sword meant to be used from horseback.

It went poorly for Nezzy, although the sword wasn’t much help against someone practically inside the same suit of armour as its wielder. She swore and spat and clawed at the metal mask and twisted and thrashed like an eel as the horse jerked and shook under her, took two solid blows that – at the very least – removed some of her teeth, and did everything she could to keep all her weight, all her pressure on that one arm that was groping at his waist, where his dagger was.

The horse bucked, but even if she wasn’t strapped in the king was, and she took the weightlessness and let it put her right full on top of him, capturing his arm until he gave up and let loose the reins and struck at her left-handed and even as she lost a few more teeth she fell and grabbed and stole the dagger loose as she fell, swung wildly against firm hide and heard a terrible equine shriek, felt hooves slam near her head, then something else.

The world moved. A claw bigger than her forearm moved past her, one of three on one of two gigantic feet.

She’d broken a second rule. She’d contested the dragon’s prey. But it had broken another, and another, because not only was it bleeding but it turned to flee.

The king shouted something, and if he’d still had use of his sword he’d probably have brandished it. But instead all he could do was wave his arm –

Do not contest its prey. Do not make eye contact.

– which was what the dragon took him by, and when it tore him loose from the horse and let him fly he was limp both in flight and after his landing, so that Nezzy wasn’t quite sure at which moment he’d been killed.

She laid there on the ground, bleeding slightly, surrounded by many who were bleeding thoroughly, and when she was done she stood herself up – steadily, not slowly or quickly – and looked at the dragon’s tail, which indicated the dragon was bent over (face deep in the king’s horse, which was larger than any of the many, many, many headmen lying about, and less metallic) and facing in her direction.

Nezzy brushed her sides once, deliberately, and walked forwards – edge-on to her audience – and towards the door of the nearest house.

She knocked.

“Thank you,” said her voice.

“This is the new steward of the bailey,” she said. “Please let me in. There are some old rules you ought to know about, and some new ones you can forget.”

There was the sky, and in the sky was a burning hole, and from that emerged a being, first hands, then limbs, then ancillary limbs, then cephalothorax, and finally propulsion.  It descended with solemn grace and nobody saw it until it had reached the ground in the center of town because they had all been told at a young age not to look at the sun. 

This being, they decided after brief observation, was close enough to the sun to count.  So they did not stare at it, though it was almost entire naked (save for a faint haze of ionizing radiation secured about its privates), and they most certainly did not make eye contact, for its eyes were two blazing photons that scorched everything they beheld, forcing it to witness the world entirely through the strategic reflective use of a little mirror it clasped carefully in the smallest hand of its smallest ancillary limb. 

“I seek the great metalsmith Shalt,” it spoke to the world at large in a voice that crackled like static on a cold dry day, “on a matter of most enormous importance.”  And since the truth of this statement was self-evident, and the bearing of the stranger was so unquestionably serious, and Shalt wasn’t exactly a braggart but she was self-assured in a way that annoyed some of her neighbours, and (most importantly) everyone was curious about what would happen next, directions were dutifully given to the workshop of Shalt by all present.

Shalt was sitting outside having a drink, half of which she spat back out on seeing her guest. 

“I am a Prince of the Burning Skies,” proclaimed said guest, sitting comfortably on a tuft of plasma, “and I come to you with a great and precious gift: the opportunity to make me a weapon unbreakable and unbeatable, your finest work to date, that I might cleave my foe asunder and claim this land as my rightful prize.”

“Cough, wheeze, gurgle,” said Shalt. 

“Indeed!” said the Prince, sweeping its longest limb magisterially.  “A mighty boon to be sure.  Grant me victory in my approaching contest of arms, creature of solid matter and carbon, and in return I shall promise your people a most comfortable serfdom and the use of a reasonable amount of my lands to sustain themselves.  My foe in this duel is terrible beyond your keenest reckoning in the depths of dreams, but he is ignorant to the secrets of this little place between our realms, and I have deduced that your craft – wielded by my hand – will be great enough to render me the master in our contest.  Remember: your finest!  Nothing less will suffice.  And if I should fall, beware – do not think my people will lie down to their fate quietly!  Our struggle shall be long and terrible, and in that war you and all that you cherish shall surely suffer down to the last smouldering atom!  Harken, the zenith departs!  I return three days hence!”

And so saying this the Prince grasped the single strongest sunbeam present and whirled his way back into the blazing hole above.

“Hhhhwwwweee,” managed Shalt, exalting in once again possessing a free and functional airway.  Everything else might have been a problem, but that was going alright.  She breathed in, then out, coughed, in, out, didn’t cough, shook herself off, spat on the ground, walked into her workshop, and shut her eyes in self defense against the thing standing next to her forge.  There had been a mantle and a visceral mass and something else, but she was pretty sure she’d stopped before she made the mistake of finding out if it had a head because behind her eyelids she could picture the face of her husband or her favorite set of tongs instead of whatever the hell that would’ve been. 

Something pale and insensible touched itself to her arm, and before she had time to jerk backwards she became aware of things. 

this is the Headsman of All Unlit.

its anther is a means of death and communication and poetry.

it is here to make a commission. 

a merely natural weapon to fell a supranatural enemy.

in payment, Shalt’s people will be placed somewhere with light until they are dead and do not need it anymore. 

if the weapon fails and the Headsman falls, All Unlit will war and there will be no darkness that is not toothed and no shadow that does not draw blood.

The touch she hadn’t felt faded.  The memories didn’t.

Shalt stood there with her eyes shut until her husband came in to ask her why she was late for dinner. 

“Sorry sweetie,” she told him.  “I just got told to do the best job of my life for two beings that each want the opposite thing.”

“Would talking to your godmother help with this?” asked her husband.
“Don’t want to.”
“Would beer help with this?” asked her husband. 

“No, but give me some anyways.”

“Sure, if you talk to your godmother about this.”
“Fine.  But I get the beer first.”

So she did, and the evening was less bad than it had been until Shalt was about to pull her boots off and get into bed when she saw her husband had drawn up the washing-basin and a candle and a thread. 

“I’m tired,” she said feebly.

“You can fall asleep right after,” he said. 
“She won’t want to,” she said desperately.

“You said she wanted you to visit more often after last time.”
“I don’t wanna,” said Shalt honestly. 

Her husband patted her on the back as he lit the candle.  “You never do,” he said fondly. 

Shalt took a deep breath and dropped into the basin face-first. 

Below was her bedroom, upside down.  The candle, the basin, her husband.

She dropped into that basin too.

Below, her bedroom inside out.  Above her was the comforting blanket of the night and the stars, above that the looming celestial vault of her ceiling; around her the hills and the trees and the cold deep spring lake and beyond them the endless crooked boards of her walls that held up the sky; underfoot was dirt and green sprouting things crawling up from the deep-seated floor.

There was a candle.  There was a basin. 

She put her face in that too.

Beyond that was a basin and a candle.  And beyond THAT was her godmother.

She was knitting, or something like it.  The motions were off and the material was impossible to parse.  Shalt had touched one of the needles once, and if she hadn’t learned how to replace it she very much doubted she’d be the smith she was today.  Or alive.  Or human. 

“Hello my singular little verb of a godchild,” said Shalt’s godmother.  She was smiling.  She was always smiling.  She was always smiling with teeth.  She was always smiling with someone’s teeth. 

“Hello, godmother,” said Shalt.  “I need help with something.”
“Best I can do is advice,” said Shalt’s godmother.  The needles didn’t click or clack; they coughed and chucked and croaked.  One of them was watching her with an amused glint in its eye, and she was pretty sure which one THAT was. 

“Advice’ll do.  Godmother, I’ve been asked to do my best work for two beings that each want the exact opposite thing, and whichever one of them doesn’t get it will be sure to ruin all our lives for it, and possibly in a way that worse than kills us.”

“You said ‘beings,’” said Shalt’s grandmother.  “Are they people?”
“Sort of,” said Shalt.  “The Prince of the Burning Skies and the Headsman of All Unlit.”
Her godmother was always smiling with someone’s teeth, but she wasn’t always laughing, which she did now.  It wasn’t a very nice laugh – like boulders landing on rotten spring ice – but it could’ve been meaner.  “Oh godchild, that’ll be easy,” she said.  “Things like that are already mostly people, pretend though they might, and people never know what they want.  If they say they want the exact opposite thing, and you can’t give them the exact opposite thing, then don’t give them that.  Give them something better.  I think your candle’s out.  Visit more often.”

“I,” said Shalt, before the thread pulled taut and she was yanked wet-faced and gasping out of the basin and out of the basin and out of the basin and out of the basin by the thread in her husband’s hand wrapped around her sleep-braid.

“Learn anything?” he asked, patting her on the back.

The candle’s dying smoke pooled in Shalt’s nostrils as she shrugged.  “I think so.”
“She wants you to visit more often, doesn’t she.”
Shalt punched his shoulder with her head. 

***

The work began the day after.  Shalt always thought best when she worked, because she thought less.  Easy to make room for the important decisions when your head was cleared out enough for them to stretch and stand there, unobstructed by anxious clutter and lazy mess. 

A forge, a hammer, an anvil, a mould, tongs, bellows, metal and an old box. 

Shalt considered all of this. 

Then she breathed in, breathed out, and began.

Metal.

Heat.

Those were the real work, and she let her body handle them while her mind ran over the contents of the box. 

Inside it, in a little leather bag, she had:

Crow’s teeth.

Pig’s feathers.

Shrike’s conscience.

And a pinch of an adult human’s innocence. 

Next to the bag, in a squat stone jar, she had:

A ray of hope.

A heart-ful of love.

A cloud of despair.

And a tragic truth.

Last, wrapped in thick cloth, she had a glass vial of grit and determination. 

Shalt thought about those things as she did the work, and she picked some up and put others down.

Then she was done, stumbling back to bed with soot in her hair and dry eyes and boots still on.  Her husband squawked and she fell asleep on him. 

Then she woke up and did it all again.

Then she woke up and it was done. 

And it was time. 

***

The Prince of the Burning Skies met Shalt at first light, walking across the scattered orange sunrise from the distant mountains to her doorstep. 
“My weapon lies with you, yearning for me,” it spoke, beckoning with half its hands and grooming its abdomen (frantically?) with the others.  “Bequeath it unto me that I might bestow upon my kind my victory and your kind your reward.”

“Here,” said Shalt, raising her hands and lowering her eyes (and they were already pretty lowered: even the mirror-gaze of the Prince made her forge-blistered arms redden uncomfortably).  “My work is done: this is a blade and its name is Wedge.  Hold it in your hand – like this – and face the sharper edge – this one – towards your enemy and propel the blade into it until it is dead.  It is the sharpest I’ve ever made, and the strongest: it won’t break or bend and it’ll cut anything it meets.  And it has a secret: see this spur here, along the cutting edge?  Even harder, ever fiercer, a splitter without equal.  Strike with that and nothing can stop being torn in half.”
“You are a worker most skilled and most clever for an entity lacking in luminescence and being of a lower state of matter,” decreed the Prince, its jet fumes burning with all the spectra of gratitude.  “I look forward to my victory.”  And so speaking it marched forth from the town, spinning the great sword from hand to hand like a child playing with a match.

The Headsman of All Unlit rose to meet Shalt when the rain came that morning, trickling in under the eaves and standing behind her ear as she froze at the workbench, cleaning what she could. 

“Here,” she whispered, holding her hand out, palm pronated, laden with weapon.  “My work is done: this is a blade and its name is Notch.  Hold it in your hand – like this – and face the sharper edge – this one – towards your enemy and propel the blade into it until it is dead.  It is the sharpest I’ve ever made, and the strongest: it won’t break or bend and it’ll cut anything it meets.  And it has a secret: see this gap here, along the cutting edge?  Let the enemy strike there and twist and their weapon will burst apart.  Nothing can escape that enters it.”

No anther descended.  The weapon was removed.  The Headsman was gone. 

“Rude,” muttered Shalt in profound gratitude.  “Rude, rude, rude.”
She went indoors and had tea with her husband until she heard the horns. 

***

At the first horn, the entourage of the contestants approached. 

The sun widened in the sky and disgorged a ballooning swarm of Earls, Dukes, Counts, and Lords, all descending on delicate sails woven of their own filaments and elegantly filigreed electromagnetic frequencies.  They used their own hand-mirrors carelessly, if at all, and so much of the viewership of the spectacle retired indoors where it ran less risk of being scorched by an errant glance.

The dark, cold spring lack cracked open at the seams and up from its black water marched the Jurors of All Unlit, soft tendrils coiling from their masked summits, their great soft visceral masses trailing something scentless and massless and hueless than was thicker than treacle and made your ears hurt when you looked at it.  They touched each other as they walked, anther to stigma, and the discussions that transpired were inaudible, inconceivable, and indecisive. 

At the second horn, the contestants and their seconds arrived. 

The Prince of the Burning Skies was armoured now as well as armed; beautifully ornamented in plates of firmament and hydrogen and outfitted with an extra set of photon eyes above its forehead.  Beneath the backwash of its heels stood a solid supporter, a thick neutronic mass with the bare suggestion of appendages and an implacable lack of face. 

The Headsman of All Unlit stood there.  Its petals moved gently across the hidden depths of its apex, hiding whatever crawled within.  Its vines cradled itself as gently as a parent might their child; behind them its bulb squirmed slightly, poking out soft uncoloured tendrils and tasting the earth before retracting in inevitable and resigned disappointment. 

At the third horn, the duel began. 

The opening moves were things Shalt and her husband couldn’t sense.  Decisions that happened and ended before they left the realm of notion. 

The initial blows were murkier, but there.  The wrestling of the clouds and the sun; the wavering of the shadows at their feet; the sudden gut-lancing-terror that caused every mouse nearby to climb up Shalt’s leg and cower in her shirt-sleeves; and so on. 

Then the gloves were off, and out came the secret weapons. 

Wedge sprayed gleaming from the incandescent core of the Prince of the Burning Skies, danced through all of its hands in one motion, and shot forwards like a volcanic plume.

Notch erupted from the crown of the Headsman of All Unlit, held in a thing that Shalt refused to understand, and swung to meet it. 

Both swords were steel so there was a sound, presumably.  It just got swallowed up by all the things that weren’t.  The snarl on the Prince’s face.  The rippling sneer on the Headsman’s mantle.  The strain of limbs and the heave of the foot.  The press, the weight, the pressure, the rigid rictus of impossible forces trying to communicate through impossible ones, leaning closer, closer, bringing more to bear, committing more of themselves, putting everything and every hope and all they were on one little fulcrum where Wedge and Notch met, pushing, reaching, longing for contact.

Shalt said the Prince kissed the Headsman first. 

Her husband insisted it was the other way around. 

Since the contestants’ entourages and seconds were too mortified to register fine detail the matter – like the determination of a victor, and who claimed ownership over the battlefield – was left permanently unanswered.

***

Shalt woke up, which was harder than it sounded after four months with a newborn.  But although the rap-rap-rap on the door was surreptitious and quiet it WAS desperate, and so she sighed and swore and dragged herself upright and half-dressed and through the dark and to the door.

“Come back tomorrow,” she said.  “Shop’s closed.”
“Fine, fine, fine, fine,” said the Prince of the Burning Skies, in the voice – one Shalt knew intimately now – of someone who had half their mind on a person that wasn’t part of the conversation.  “But, well, you see, I was wondering, if, that is… – I’m GETITNG to it, don’t worry, I just don’t want to be CRUDE about it – well FINE.”

There was a silence.  Shalt sighed into it. 

“So.  Do you do rings?”

They were.  This was no longer sufficient.

Mue bestirred themselves, and made nothing. 

They were nothing, amidst nothing.  This was sufficient, but not ideal.

Mie roused themselves, and manifested a singularity – all things in one.  This was ideal.

Moe got up, made time, and poked the singularity with it.  Everything went everywhere.

“Whoops,” said Moe. 

***

They descended, dropped from elsewhere to here. 

Here was where something expanded and cooled and calmed.  Bits of it plinked and cooled and turned almost comprehensible.

Mue flared their aperture. Space was tamed, space was calmed, and with it, time.  Gravity gripped and didn’t let up. 

Mie pronated their rostrum.  Particles precipitated into place.  Gluons glued; bosons bustled; photons phlew. 

Moe rubbed their limbs together and blew on them, then rolled a bunch of particles into a ball called hydrogen and sent it spinning down space and time, where it promptly spawned an absurd number of increasingly complicated imitators. 

“Strike!” shouted Moe.

***

They diminished, shrank from everywhere to somewhere. 

They shrank, but the universe didn’t – it spread itself wide and broad, differentiated itself with vigor and vim.  Hot and cold bubbled in its stew like potato and carrot. 

Mue spoke, and stars coalesced from bleeding nebula, flaring hot and burning brightly, filling the firmament with light.

Mie sang, and dust ravelled and spun around the stars, sweating and bleeding and clotting, a titanic and dusty new disc spun from old matter. 

Moe hummed a little ditty and the dust started to tear itself apart into little clouds, spraying shrapnel from there to here to all over the place and congealing into squat little blots.

“I meant to do that,” hedged Moe.

***

They squinted, turned their attention to the smallest large objects nearby.

Half-baked planets roiled in the deep of the solar system; red hot and pulsating.  Rock melted, ice shrieked, fresh-cooked skies boiled with furious vapours as gas turned solid turned occasionally plasma turned back to gas again. 

Mue spread their digits and they began to cool and solidify, turning round and ripe – some small stones, some gas giants. 

Mie swayed their abdomen and they began to clear their orbits, sucking small neighbours and stray matter down bit by bit, tidying the space around them. 
Moe did something with their feet and swerved two of them into each other, giving the larger a terrible black eye and sending the smaller spinning into the other’s orbit at less than a tenth its old mass. 

“Split,” mourned Moe. 

***

They slid into orbit and did not wish to slide away. 

Mue’s trowel crunched and chewed to itself as they patiently probed the depths of the new-formed-stone for gases that coalesced into water, flooded the fresh valleys of the planet with quiet seas.

Mie’s needles danced as they wove the magnetic field into a tight web, shielding the frail orb from the sun’s terrible shrieking winds. 

Moe’s glass overflowed as they spat some of their backwash back, emptied it on the planet, then watched as simple inorganic reactions accelerated away from being either of those things. 

“Neato!’ said Moe.

***

They observed and interacted.

Mue tended the little things that took in the heat and smoking minerals of the world’s heart, deep under the seas, and taught them to grow and multiply.

Mie sheltered the little things that took in the distant radiation of the sun, floating at the top of the waves, and taught them to spread and replicate.

Moe picked up some of the little things and taught them to eat each other over and over until a few of got wedged together that way, teamed up, and started aggressively getting larger.

“Not my fault,” lied Moe.

***

They nurtured and nudged.

Mue tended the first shoots that sprouted on the distant shores, greener, yet greener; taller, yet taller.

Mie assembled the first shells and notochords that scaffolded and supported tissues, bigger, yet bigger; stranger, yet stranger. 

Moe picked up anything that swam close enough and threw it out of the water onto the land to see what happened.  Mostly it didn’t work out well, sometimes it worked out way too well.

“Trial and error,” excused Moe.

***

They guided and cared.

Mue raised the seas and lowered them, turned the nutrients of the ocean floor over and brought them back to the light for all.  The waves were adrift with plankton and awash with nekton.

Mie midwifed the atmosphere, made sure the ozone was thick enough, was thin enough, kept the greenhouse warm but not boiling over.  Oxygen drifted up from a billion billion billion stomata; carbon wafted from a billion billion billion lungs. 

Moe slipped and dropped an asteroid on all of it at least twice.  Kerplunk, badoosh. 

“I was trying to help clean up,” explained Moe.  “Butterfingers!”

***

They aged and rested.

Mue set the currents and the continents in their manner then laid down in the rifts of the deepest parts of the earth and let themselves slide underneath it all, lulled to rest by the hot glow of the planet’s core that reminded them of the earliest days, grinding the deep processes along in their dreams. 

Mie spread themselves wide and broad, twining into the soil, into the air, until the biosphere was them and they were it and not one could be told apart from the other, and so all loved all even as all fed upon all, and grew from it, and changed from it. 

Moe got lost and got distracted and dithered for ages, wandering farther and farther and growing thinner and thinner for longer and longer until at last they were just a stray wisp, not even matter, and all they could do was crawl inside the hindbrain of the first passing creature – a vertebrate of some kind; a tetrapod; bipedal – and squish themselves up as small as possible – tiny enough to tuck between neurons, turned once more into neither something nor nothing.

“Hey friend!” greeted Moe.  “Wanna do something really funny?”

In the night sky of the new year hung the moon, and in the moon there was a door, and if you thought the right thing while you turned its handle the right way (there was no handle) you could step through the door into the other sky, the sky behind, and in that terrible and vast place there was a hall that kept the endless rain from dripping out of the sky and into your ears and your thoughts and your socks, and in that hall – the First and Final House – there were many voices, and those many voices belonged to wizards, thousands of wizards, wizards that were and wizards that was and wizards that would be, all hurrying, all abuzz with gossip and muttering of secrets and minding their own business by sticking their noses in each other’s. They moved keenly and sharply. A wizard didn’t rush or fuss, but they only had one night apiece, so they made it work. A bazaar had sprung into being, formed entirely of dimly-lit corners and hooded proprietors; the vast and shaded balcony was filled to overflowing with telescopes and auguries; in the attics dangled dozens by their heels, their arms, their throats, eyes flickering shut in blood-strangled concentration as they groped for secrets just beyond mortal reach.

Everywhere wizards, all the wizards. A willow wizard creaked and groaned under the ever—growing weight of its moss familiar, feeding it a little more of its soul to stay quiet and ppolite in mixed company. A lizard wizard squawked and shed its tome in self-defence as a careless passerby trod on its tail. Wizards that sang songs and wizards that rang gongs; wizards that raised the dead and wizards that sent them abed; wizards that ruled through fear and wizards that were perfect dears; wizards tall and wizards small.

“I’m bored beyond tears,” said Lyle. “Why did you drag us to this heap of nonsense’s nonsense?”

“Because it was your birthday and you wanted to do something fun,” said Howard with great earnestness.

“And you let me do THIS? You are the worst brother I’ve ever had, Howard, except for all the others whom I’ve forgotten on account of their worstness. Look at this garbage – what is this even?”

“That’s a genuine crystal ball, Lyle. You can stare into its depths and see your deepest desires!”
“Peernography and worse!” Lyle’s gnarled palm slammed the ball back into its display pedestal with as much force as he could muster. “Honestly, I can’t take you anywhere! I let you come with me to this place and you remain preoccupied with… that sort of thing.”

“I swear to you on our mother’s own sweet little grave that the thought never crossed my mind, Lyle,” said Howard, face filled with determination and filial love. “And it’s ‘pornography.’”

“Of course it isn’t, it’s meant to be peered at. Learn Enochian, Howard!”
“We’re speaking English, Lyle.”
“I should think full well that I know what I say when I say how I say it, you sloppy joe you! Now let’s get out of this hellhole and look at something interesting. Where’s the pub?”
“We left the pub because you complained about the smell.”

“It was full worth complaining about. Why’d they let the ant wizards run it I can’t possibly understand; they coated half the bar in their sordid musk-trails – if I wanted that sort of thing I’d have a picnic and save myself the pricing.”
“Lyle, that was the menu; you know the ants do like to write their sigils and such in scents.”
“Not where I’m drinking my coffee! Something interesting, Howard – and make it snappy! I feel my lunch getting at my guts. Why’d you put chilies in my lunch? You know turnips is all a body needs to stay regular.”
“I didn’t put chilies in your lunch, I put them in my lunch.”
“Why’d you put chilies in your lunch?”
“I like ‘em.”
“Selfish old coot. Repent and find us something worth seeing.”

***

Past the loud central halls, things got stranger. The air thickened of its own accord, weighed down by the density of secrets. The shadows lengthened and grew restless, playing here and there and elsewhere. The wind leaked through the walls, sending scurrying draughts that slid across the floorboards and whispered unspeakable things. The doors creaked. The air crackled.

In the nether wings of the First and Final House things happened that couldn’t happen anywhere else, even by wizards. Necromancy could travel hand-in-hand with the power of friendship true; a potion could be brewed from a prophecy and a pangolin; a prophecy’d destiny could be rolled up and rearranged like an uncooperative scrap of toilet paper; a dragon could glean the secret wisdom of how to overcome a brave hero and a magic sword. Dark collaborations bespawned things unthought of; broke open hidden organs of the world to reveal glistening secrets; raised merry hells and cast down screaming heavens; split the spectrum and dissected the rainbow.

And, in the very most hidden hollows of the highest spires and lowest pits of that place, the greatest and most dangerous of deeds was committed: the open and equal sharing of secret knowledge – profane, sacred, and universal. The ultimate and truest exchange: something for nothing.

“This isn’t worth the spit it took to say it.”
“Lyle!”
“What? It’s true, for Frog’s sake, it’s absolutely true, Howard – do you want your own brother to sit up straight and lie in front of strangers? Shame! Shame on you! Shame on you for asking that of me, and shame on you for bringing me to this chamber of folderollery and nonsense! ‘Secrets of the Archosaurs’ my least favourite foot (which is my left)! You call these secrets? This is nothing but base saurcery, the like of which any moron knows isn’t worth the stomach-swirling shame and lack of spine it demands to practice! Imagine, a whole branch of knowledge based upon calling your dear old dead grandparents for help! Imagine being the sort of cretinous clod that learns that and then wants to HONE it, Howard, hone it like it were a fine knife given to you at Christmas by your uncle Beaumont (bless his brows) – then seek out others to collaborate on that with you! Can you imagine being that lacking in skill, spine, spit, and wit, Howard? And then ADVERTISING IT OPENLY? To those you CONSIDER YOUR PEERS? The very notion of entering this moron’s-cabal of fourth-rate cauldron-droolers was an obscene insult to me, you, and our mother! You only brought me in here to try and give me apoplexy, didn’t you? You’re after the house again you slinking fink!”

“Excuse me,” said the lecturer, a gaunt pale ostrich with no eyes and two mouths, “but you must raise your hand when you ask a question.”
“And none of that was a question,” added his second mouth.

“Sorry about that,” said Howard.

“Bug off and go bury your head,” said Lyle. “I paused for my wind, not for your input, and I’ll thank you for noticing that.”

“Lecture ours,” rumbled the co-presenter, a saltwizard crocodile of forty feet and forty thousand years. “Disrespect yours. Apology.”

“Geez I’m sorry,” said Howard.
“You can’t dis what you never respected in the first place,” said Lyle, “and if I wanted to hear what sixteen sets of mismatched luggage said I’d call my aunt.”

“Then I am afraid,” said the ostrich, who did not look afraid, “that we must challenge you to a wizard’s duel.”
“I’m real sorry, but neither of us are wizards,” explained Howard helpfully.

“That is acceptable,” said the ostrich. “The duel will simply be very short.”

***

A suitable location had to be found for the wizard’s duel, of course. The lecturing chamber was a place of intimate knowledge, where one could cluster shoulder to shoulder and a whisper could travel all the way around the world from wall to wall. A duel was also intimate, but in a manner more deeply personal, and so – as with all wizardly personal affairs – should take place somewhere that both parties could scream as loudly as they liked.

As the challenged parties, Lyle and Howard had pick of locale.

“Up your rotten and creased backside with a stick,” said Lyle.

“Oh, anywhere’s fine, no need to make a fuss on our behalf or anything like that,” said Howard.

The ostrich had conferred with his scaled colleague and together they had chosen the roof of the First and Final House, in the lee of the titanic chimney (whose scalding breath cleared the air of some of its moisture, though not all). The rain thundered around the four combatants and their assembled audience of blast-casters, protagonist-mancers, devil summoners and sum devillers, conjurers and tricksters with a sound not heard since the days of brontosaurus feet.

Lyle sat in his chair and glowered like a cat watching Lassie reruns.

“An apology costs nothing, you know,” said Howard, as he adjusted the earflaps on his hat.

“You already tried to sneak that past me when we were six and you know it, you chiseling quisling,” said Lyle indistinctly, his jaw working furiously at a mashed-up Werther’s. “It was lies then and it’s a lie now and it never won’t be a lie. An apology costs your DIGNITY, and without that, you haven’t got anything. Are you done messing around with that stupid hat yet?”
“Yep!”
“Then you can give me my earmuffs. And upon my word Howard, if one speck of their fluffy has gone missing in your pocket, there will be bloodshed not shed nor seen since the Silurian.”
“I am taking that and you seriously Lyle, I promise you truly. Want your mittens too?”
“No way in hell or beyond. Now bugger off and play with the crocodile; I’ve got a bird to pluck.”
“Darn tootin’.”
“Watch your mouth or I’ll watch it for you!”
“Duly warned, Lyle, and thank you kindly. Good luck!”
“I never touch the stuff.”

So they took their places. The saltwizard crocodile, Great Old Craw, coughed up his finest orb from his belly-ballast and into the tip of his mouth, where it gleamed like a sour diamond.

The ostrich-saurceror, Ostimandias, bit his two grandest plumes in half with each of his mouths and feasted greatly on their hidden contents, opening the third eye in his throat.

Howard blew on his hands and shook out his fingers. Lyle glared at a stray raindrop that alit on his arm like it were a barbed mosquito.

“This will conclude the disagreement in total,” wheezed the adjudicant, a coelacanth. “None may object to this duel’s occurrence nor its outcome, after I wiggle my fin.”
Silence.

The adjudicant’s fin wiggled.

The ostrich-saurceror raised his long neck into the sky and took of the sky unto himself and he called. Boom. Boom. Vroom. Great pulses of air, flooded and ejected through his jet-engine of a body. Boom. Boom. Vroom.

And Lyle glared grimly.

The ostrich-saurceror began to dance. Thud thud thud went his two huge two toed feet, slamming into the shingles and making the rafters rattle. Somewhere far below a rope unraveled and a dangling supplicant-mage plummeted forty feet into a big vat of vodka and lime and toad and all her friends hooted and hollered as they fished her out with a knobbled staff.

And Lyle glared grey-eyed.

The ostrich-saurceror waved his plumes; tiny wings on his big body; huge wings on any other bird short of an albatross. They snapped and whipped and rattled against one another and the air between the raindrops began to remember things that walked and breathed and killed so very long ago, when the earth’s shape was different and its inhabitants were larger and the air was sweet.

And Lyle’s brow sank an extra-beetled inch.

The ostrich-saurceror hunched, leaped, let out a singular terrible and long BOOM and struck. Foot-first, faster than a gazelle, more deadly than a lion, bringing up the force of something ancient and terrible – three-clawed, scaled, massive and mocking in the face of tiny hairy glandular creatures like humans rats and elephants, striking to kill with the force of a hurtling asteroid and the voice of an avalanche.

Lyle leaned forwards into the teeth of the roar, pursed his lips, and said something.

The ostrich-saurceror faltered, let that falter creep into his call, let his call creep into his lungs, let his lungs creep throughout his entire pneumatized skeleton, fractured, and exploded into the distant past and also pieces.

“About damned time,” said Lyle. “Ridiculous song and dance frippery – just like the time you brought me to Broadway. All that kicking and wailing and carrying on! And for what? A little bit of spittle that falls apart when I call it ‘dogshit,’ Howard, – yes, you heard me – and nothing more! Two words! In one word! And that’s all it takes? This isn’t amateur hour, this is amateur HOUSE! Why on earth did you subject me to this again, Howard? Remind me of what the thought process in your food processor of a skull used to believe this was a good thing.”

“On account of the old days,” said Howard, reattaching his earflaps with one hand and taking Lyle’s elbow with the other, steering his brother away from damp splatter-spots and the respectful distance of the crowd. “Remember when we used to come here with Edith and Iris?”

“Well.”
“Well,” agreed Howard.

“You know.”
“You know,” concurred Howard.

The silence was agreeable and truthful and broken only by the crush and creak of priceless crystalline orb fragments under their battered old snow boots.

“Yes well you know I mean really honestly if you ask me I suppose you know what it could’ve been worse.”
The creases of Howard’s face folded themselves in a very well-used smile. “Why Lyle, you really do mean that, don’t you?”

“I mean everything I say at all times and you best full well comprehend that, if for some reason you’ve avoided realizing until now. And for this now, let’s go home. All that nonsense has made me feel your lunch getting at my guts again.”

“Could we stop at the hot ichor cider stand on the way out? For the old days?”
“Only one cup each and you’re paying for your own. And they have to put a candy cane in it or we’re not getting any.”