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The wind outside is screaming like a lost child in a crowd. The snow on the cabin’s sides sounds like cannonfire, each flake fit to cut you stem from stern. The cold came inside with me and is leeching into my coat, inside-out. I’m starved, slow, despairing –I’ve done half a hundred things, and there’s half a hundred more to go if I want to stay alive tonight.

But I’m not doing any of them. I’m sitting here on the floor, at the wall, staring up at the window that’s (at last) been boarded shut, and I’m thinking of the expression on Private Whelk’s face.

***

We were a small patrol on paper, but full strength by custom of the last few years – great-grandmother Gelmorre, calling her children home from strange Afar for her funeral, to bar the great door of the capital against the Silence of the Stone, to stand between Her Worshipped and.

Well.

There should be a score led by a voyageur; there usually were six; we numbered eight.

Me at the front, because I wasn’t a voyageur, but I’d been Afar longer than anyone else and still had all my limbs. Dig the best ditches, get given the biggest shovels.

Mush next, because he hadn’t been there quite as long but he had good reflexes, so if something happened to me he’d do something about it even if he didn’t quite know what.

Flint and Pepper in whatever order they happened in, because they’d sort that out themselves and sort out anything that threatened the other at equal efficiency.

Nelto in the middle, because her (big, brown, tragically decorative) eyes alone would’ve gotten her sent home a decade or two ago but she had a strong back and stronger spirits and SOMEONE had to carry the kitchen kit.

Sild behind Nelto, because someone had to listen to the kitchen kit rattle off her pack at every step and we’d all seen stones less patient.

Whelk, because he was new and small and nervous and flinched when you paid attention to him.

And then Mottle at the rear because she’d grown up as the oldest of nine and had eyes in the back of her head, which it turned out wasn’t quite what we needed.

***

It was a lousy patrol. A day going up a mountain, overnight in the cold and dark, half a day going down the mountain, all to tell everyone Yep, Still No Wyrmsign, like you and everyone else had since the camp arrived.

Wyrms don’t come this high – not on the slopes, not on the north coast. Never have. But what if, but what if, but what if, so once a week up we went. Nelto said she thought it’s to keep us in shape. I said it was to get us out of their hair. She laughed at that and called me a cynic in that big way that you couldn’t read as snide or stupid no matter how hard you tried.

The scream was louder. Shorter, too, but it drew the ear fast, and before it had finished we’d all exploded into action – down, cover, weapons out, eye the sky, scan the ground, mark the terrain, which direction?

The answer, it turned out (after I had a look, dusted myself off, gave the all-clear, then went and dug poor Whelk out of the crevice he’d wedged himself toes-first in, trembling) was ‘none.’ Nobody had screamed, nobody had seen anything. It had been a bird or something, some strange bird from Afar that liked to scream or copy people screaming or god knows what, whatever had happened had happened. A little mystery we’d never know the answer to, nothing we all (except Whelk) hadn’t lived through a dozen times.

Except that after two hours searching we still hadn’t found Sild.

***

The storm wouldn’t have been a problem. Shouldn’t have been a problem. We’d have hit the summit by now, taken the land’s measure, taken its temperature and its mood and its hate and jotted them down in neat little boxes on neat little sheets and started to fuck off, made it much lower than we stood right then and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the treeline as it pissed freezing sleet down our tents.

Instead, we were three-quarters up the mountain’s throat trying not to panic and we saw the black clouds coming at us at about the same moment as we felt the gale pick up. Instead, I had to come up with a new patrol route inside my head in less than a minute. Instead, we ran uphill, packs jangling.

Full-ass tilt-over-hurdle tit-over-turtle for the meteorologist’s cabin.

Most miserable march I’d ever suffered – beachsand in full kit; marsh without good boots; down the long hard dust of the parade ground carrying the disciplinary stonepack, none of them had ordered you to do it holding hands with the trooper next to you, put you at the head end of a flailing, aimless chain of bodies whipped by a south-bound gale’s flogging arm, blindfolded you, then told you to go as fast as you could or die standing upright without a single drop of unfrozen liquid in your body. Every tug a question: are we stuck? Did someone fall, or just stumble? Was that Sild? Is this the right way? Is my footing good, or was that the edge of the mountain and two thousand feet of empty air?

Then the dark grew an angle, the angle grew dimensions, the pelting from the sky gave way, Mush was scrabbling beside me, something wooden and tortured groaned, we poured inside like water into a dry-flower vase, and the fat sick creak of that dying door being slammed shut was as sweet as the sky-rotted air inside the cabin.

Let’s be honest, it was a shack. Three rooms: main, barely-a-bedroom, toilet (chair with a honey-bucket) separated from barely-a-bedroom with a curtain because outhouses weren’t survivable in the kind of weather this place could see (was seeing). But god, what a blessed shack it was.

“Flint and Pepper,” I said, which surprised me. My jaw felt like someone had fastened granite to my skull. “Fire, now. Nelto, get full soup on. No saving what we’ll have to carry down later. Mottle. Inventory. Mush –”

“Trailblazer.”
Mush. Good old Mush. So good at knowing what to do when I started doing something. Except here he was, trying to talk to me when I was already saying what I needed to, using the cutey not-a-voyageur voyageur title that I always told him was a crock of shit that put me in a bad mood every time I heard it. He’d never be dumb enough to talk to me like that.

“Yeah?” I said.

“The door wasn’t shut.”

I felt myself trying to think too fast. Tried to slow it down, ended up not thinking at all. Looked at him for more instead.

“Not all the way,” Mush explained. “Lock’s cracked open. Someone’s been here.”
“Rock bear,” I said, because I felt like I needed to say something, “a clever one,” and he did me the good grace of not listening to what had just come out of my mouth.

The fire was on already, turning us from curdled lumps in the dark to shadowed ghosts under a red lamp. We’d already started to huddle closer together around, mothlike.

My brain reengaged. My eyes turned on. “Mottle’s gone,” I said.

***

Whelk swore she’d held him tight all the way to the cabin door. Swore and cried and sweated until he shook.

“Stop looking at me,” he whispered, burrowing into his too-big coat. Mottle had given that to him, I remembered. Her own a size too small afterwards, but she hadn’t cared. Oldest of nine. Eight. “Please. Please.”

So we put him in the corner with the first cup of the soup and his shakes and he shriveled there as me and Mush did the inventory ourselves.

The windows were glass, but barred – and small besides.

The chimney was clear. We wouldn’t suffocate.

There was less firewood than regulation, but still enough. We shouldn’t freeze.

The door’s lock was cracked clean in half. Rock bear my inflamed asshole.

There were two chairs and one table. Light and shoddy.

One bedframe without a mattress. Heavier and shoddier.

There were two proper lamplights, but the fuel-tin was empty.

There was an empty drylocker. And no telling if that had been the case before the lock was cracked.

Flint and Pepper turned the table and the bedframe into a barricade against the door – still light, still shoddy, but a speedbump beat a welcome mat. I set up the watch schedule: two awake, no fewer. Nelto rationed out our fuel into the lamplights with a miser’s soul and forced soup into us with a mother’s kind and gentle hand and a grandmother’s implacability.

“We’ll wait it out,” I told them all as we laid down together, Flint mounting the chair by the door, Pepper setting its pair on the far side of the room. “We’re out of the storm and fed. It isn’t.”

I went to sleep with Mush’s arm on my shoulder. I woke up with Flint’s curse in my ear – sat up so fast I almost broke his nose.
“Watch?” I asked, heartbeat slowing down again.

“Mush,” said Pepper, across the way from me. Flat and grim.

I looked and looked and looked and shook and shook and there was no Mush.

***

Pepper and Flint each swore up and down the other hadn’t nodded off for a second, for an instant. What was worse, I believed them. Nelto swore she’d dozed off with her nose at his shoulderblades and woke up with it between mine and never so much as smelt the difference. Whelk fled from his corner, back to the walls, all the way into the toilet. Wrapped himself in the curtain, trembled and begged us, all of us, don’t look at him. Like a child that thought it’d keep the monster away.

He’d been warm at my back, then he was gone. But everything was warm. The fire was still crackling. The lamplights still gleamed.

Something had gone wrong. Something SHOULD be wrong.

The door, of course, was still barricaded. The windows, of course, remained intact. The floor was hard-packed dirt, unmarked by passage, thick and solid as the idiot fog in my head when you thumped at it. The walls sighed to the touch, but held together.

“The ceiling,” I said.

We looked up at it. Barely out of the reach of an arm, tar papered and stapled and shingled and left to face an entire mountain, sky and all.

No obvious exits. But whatever was claiming us wasn’t being obvious about it.

Nelto pled dizziness and poor eyesight. Flint’s leg was still sore from the sprint. And Whelk refused to leave the toilet. So me and Pepper stood on the table and stood on their shoulders and clambered up into the half-assed beam that stood for an entire spread of rafters (poorly) and creaked our way across the thin skin separating us from snow and ice and something else, feeling inch by inch, knocking to hear if the outside had been scraped clean, or was serving as a seat, waiting and wondering at the back of our skulls when we’d sink up to our elbow in the cold or be pulled up and out and away.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, a scream, a shriek. “TRAILBLAZER!”

Whelk. He didn’t know better yet.

I let go and dropped and rolled and came up smallarmed and ready and found him crammed under the chair by the door and Nelto standing in the middle of the room sweating and stammering.

“They were right there,” she said. “Right there. Pepper on you and me, and me on Flint and Pepper, and I looked up to Flint – over there, over the doorway – and when I looked down they were gone.”
Flint came down slower than I did, listening to this. They armed themselves careful, listening to this. And when they pulled their terramach up and aimed at Nelto they took a moment to be extra sure they had a bead on her heart, which is what let me grab their arm and pull it aside first so the red-hot metal sank sizzling through the wall next to her instead. The hiss as it hit ice sounded like the dying breath of a giant cockroach.

“No!” I told them. They wouldn’t let go, punched me in the face, stamped on my foot. “No!” Their free hand went to their belt. Canteen, quicklamp, knife.

Mine was still holding my smallarm.

It was a short race.

***

Me and Nelto put Flint in the bedroom together, like that’d help. Then we stood together by the last ashes of the fire.

“One watch,” I said. “All night. All ways. Back to back to back, weapons free. If you feel someone go slack, pinch them.”

“No,” muttered Whelk. He’d shifted to the chair farthest from the door, still wrapped in the curtain, peering from behind it like it were the one solid thing in all the world. “Please no.”
“Better a bad eye than none,” said Nelto. She smiled, almost unforced. “Mottle would kill me if I messed this up. Back to back to back…I’ll take the door if you’re alright with that, Private?”
Whelk shrank from her half-focused gaze like a worm from the bird.

“Whelk,” I said. I was sure there was something I could say that would make sense here, that would work here, if only Mush was still here to tell me and if only I wasn’t so aware that he never would be again. “Get up.”

Whelk didn’t get up.

He wasn’t shaking anymore, under our combined gaze. He was holding still, the kind of still you saw when a rabbit dangled from a fox’s mouth. Pale as a stilled pulse.

Nelto took a step, nice and polite. She made perfect contact with those big brown eyes. She reached out with that kind and gentle hand.

“Stop LOOKING AT ME!” he screamed and he stood and he swung, and the hand went one way and Nelto went the other and in the air there was red spray and the hurtling body of Private Whelk, bunched at the front and fully-extended at the rear, launching himself through a window big enough to fit a cat and not much more with a crash of glass so cold and clean that I barely felt the cut on my cheek when it struck me.

The sound of the storm was so loud that it filled my ears up to the point of quiet, like water. Nothing to distract, just me, Nelto, Nelto’s hand, the blood, the broken window, and the discarded cold-coat of Private Whelk, puddled on the floor and spilling out something like pale straw.

I looked closer at that straw, after I looked out the window and checked Nelto and did the quick-prayer over her and a few other things. Stopped for a moment to touch one. Bone splinters, still-damp but already gnawed to bluntness. Stippled with the marks of a thousand tiny teeth.

***

The storm’s getting quiet. Not sure if it’s my ears or the weather. The light from the window is getting fuzzy and stare and stare at it as I might I can’t tell you what’s done that either.

I can’t do any one of half a hundred things. I can’t remember if I’d ever had a chance to review my patrol’s papers. I can’t bring them back to life. I can’t apologize to Flint’s face. I can’t keep the memory of Mush calling me trailblazer out of my heart. I can’t force the fuel and the firewood to last longer. But I tell you this much I’ll manage.

If Whelk comes back, I’m going to make it look me in the eye.

You asleep yet?

Didn’t think so.  Too loud tonight.  But that’s for the best, since I forgot to give you this earlier.  Pretty, right?  Red like your eyes.  Snuck it out you don’t want to know how. 

Clang clank clang.  Sounds like they’ll be digging ‘till dawn, hang the cost of the lights and the night-pumps.  Foreman must be behind quota.  Wonder how many people’ll pay for that.

But not us, for now.  For now we sleep, so later we dig. 
But we can’t sleep. 

So.

Have you ever heard of the midnight wind?

Didn’t think so.  Every year fewer are left to speak of it than the last, and the ones remaining don’t care, don’t listen.  Can’t blame them for it, for not having a thought beyond the next scute, the next cartload, the next sleep.  Doing that takes energy, and you know foremen have eyes in the back of their skulls for any effort spent on anything that isn’t the shale, and if those eyes don’t like what they see.

Well.

Anyways.

The midnight wind. 

It arrives at midnight – no, hey, c’mon!  You stop laughing!  You’ve spent weeks giving me the stoneface and now you throw it all away that easily, at the first chance you get to make me feel silly?  Ugh!  Ugh ugh ugh!  I’m going to sleep!  That’ll show you.

Fine, fine.  Ah, I’m lying.  You better show me respect, you hear?  Just because they don’t let us grow our antlers down here doesn’t mean mine aren’t longer than yours. Half-spans at BEST.

So the wind comes at midnight.  All midnights.  Everywhere.  You stand up half-asleep and you step outside and you stretch your back all the way and you inhale and you’ll feel it brush the inside of your lungs before you see it in the blowing leaves, in the moving branches.

Nobody else is with you, everything is moving around you.

That’s the midnight wind. 

And when you exhale, it takes you with it.

It takes you away.  Far away.  Farther than that.  It’s always midnight somewhere.  It’s always midnight somewhen. 

It takes you to any of them. 

Remember when you were a yearling and you hadn’t left your father’s fell yet?  Remember when  you’d jolt under the timber and the moss and the needles at the sound of the footfalls outside, wide-eyed, and he’d come in with a pouchful of old blood-red berries all shrunken from the frost?  Your first food of the winter?

That was midnight.

Remember your first running?  The tents on the isthmus?  The sea shining with scales under the moonlight?  The others your own size, your own shape – but not quite?  Fighting and dancing and roiling in the waves with the nets and the mailed-eels and the blood and the lymph on you, in you, belly and soul, as the cloudless sky shone near-bright-as-midday?

That was midnight too.

Remember the last day before the foremen came?  Remember what you felt when you went abed on needles, or stones, or timber, or love?  Remember your last meal sitting in your bellies?  Remember what you were thinking of?  Remember what you weren’t thinking of? 

That was midnight, whether you were awake for it or not.

Do you remember when you will be old and verdigris-ridden from talon to bone?  Do you remember when your days’ll run short and your nights’ll run long and your dreams will creep up to become your entire being?  Do you remember when these times and this shale and these scutes and these pumps, these picks, these lights, these nights all will be little things, small pieces of sand scattered in a past vaster than any beach?

That’s midnight.  It can be, it will be, it is.

There’s more to it than you, and you can be more to it.  There are midnights you’ve never seen, where you went to dream too soon to see them pass.  There are midnights you’ve never imagined, in places too far for you to have been.

In the wide flat stone unending of the Devastation of Gizikk- where the dunes walked away and left the sea to its lonesomeness – there is a sky of stars so bright and sad it hurts your soul even with eyes wide shut, and there is midnight there.

Between the borders of the Widenedlands midnight must stretch itself as everything else does, from folk to flesh to fields to the Oth!Onn!, broad-banked, two-thousand miles, and yet it does so without effort or distortion, alone oif

In the vast and unsated Silence that stretches from sea to shore to Stone there is no sky and no land and no sound and no one and no thing, and even here the grey mist billows a little differently for a single minute out of nigh-one-and-a-half-thousand, and that is still midnight, undeniably and indisputably. 

At the margins of the Creature Crater, where the air is still clean, the Sfolls forage electric ferns while their predators sleep, wary and tense, heads and limbs thicketed in horns, mouths grinding through acid and base alike to tease out vegetable flesh.  Though they will not calm themselves, though they are hunted, though their own meals poison them, they are as close to peace as anything can be when it is midnight there.

At the top of the world where the sun shines for one long day and hides for one long night, where a palace rots in chains unbreakable, buried in the ice.  In brightness, in darkness, there is midnight.

There is no midnight in the Terramac, but there is no midday either, or anything else between them, and so it is understandable. 

In the scant few hundreds of the once-ten-thousand-strong Spawn of Gant archipelago that are not yet swallowed by the Silent mist dwell the mad and the hopeless remnants of swallowed Matagan, clinging to life in the abandoned ruin of  what were once the mansions and retreats of  the most-esteemed and over-titled, but even as their days are filled with a terror too great to abide, midnight whispers through the pines and water and returns their breath to their bodies for another while longer. 

Atop the highest peak in the world – which rises from the depths of a sea-trench so vast that nothing lives at its very base bigger than a speck – is a little island, and upon that island  is a single tree with a thousand running-shoot bodies, and midnight lies among them and between them and soothes them in their slumber until their tendril-leaves unfurl to greet the dawn. 

Under the hills your mother sleeps.  Above her, midnight wheels and winds throughout the clouds. 

In the webs that run underground where there are too many legs and too few thoughts motion never ceases and jaws never quiet and yet even in that place under all places there is a pause and a lull and a shift for an instant when midnight is there, which it is.

There are lands Afar.  I cannot describe them.  I cannot imagine them.  They are unwatchable, and they watch too closely.  But they too are part of midnight, and midnight is part of them. 

In the ruins of empire, in the waterways of marshes, in the long grasses of the fields, in the sleeping lumps of giant beasts, in the branches of the trees, in the clutches of slumbering eggs, even at the bottom of the sea where the sun does not exist save for specially-manufactured globes smelted from furnaces that drawn their heat from the depths of the continents, there is midnight. 

Midnight is all of this.  It’s all of that.  It’s all of us.  It’s all of you. 

And then, once the first red of the dawn comes, it isn’t there anymore.  And you’re back where the midnight wind found you, waiting. 

It always leaves you, waiting.  So they say.  They also say if you do the right thing, speak the right word, or have the right gift, it’ll take you with it.  Take you anywhere midnight is.  Everywhere midnight is. 

Even fewer of us left that talk about that. 

Hey, are you sleeping?  Don’t sleep.  Listen.  This is important.  Wake up.  Do you know what time it is?  Don’t you know what you have to do?

Feel that draught?  I’ve been working on this ceiling here for a good few months.  Go on, get up. Put your eye to the crack there.  Squint against the dust.

You see that sky?        

You smell that air?

Good.  Now you keep holding that red stone for me. 

And if you ever come back from wherever it takes you?  You bring me one too.

The sun was coming up, and just in time too. The little mudbeetles were at my wrists again, mouthing where the rope had scabbed them.
Not biting yet, just considering. But the less time they had to puzzle over it the better. The light sent them away, cringe by cringe, until at last they were vanished into their little mud-burrows and I had the entirety of the flats to myself again.
Wonderful. All the mud I could see.

The tide was coming back in again; I could see the little blur on the horizon becoming more assertive. Soon the water would come, the buoy would rise, and somehow my body would be made of lead weight and I’d get some fresh blood at my wrists and ankles where the ropes sat and gnawed in their stubborn way.
By then I’d be hoping the sun I’d just welcomed would go away.
All day long I’d bob on the blue, fingers and toes clenching and unclenching as something-or-other bumped the buoy and I wondered at how much my digits must look like bait before the ache in my tendons led them to dip back into the cool relief. I’d stare at the world half-turned, still-turning. Upside down trees far up the shore. The faint splash of waves over a distant shoal. A worrying flick of a dorsal fin. A horizon split between the water and air turned on its side, so that each eye saw a completely different shade of blue.
Then the night would come, and the buoy would sink, and I would be left slumped on blackened mud with the receding roar of waves.
By then I’d be asleep. Until the mudbeetles came out.

I should’ve counted the days. I was sure I’d tried. I must have. It was a very important thing to know – how long had I been without food? Without water? Without rest, real rest?
But it was also useless because I wasn’t going anywhere ever again. As a compromise, I had quickly and carefully forgotten the order of sunsets and sunrises. I was here, that was all, and that was all there ever would be.
It was because I hadn’t counted the days that I didn’t know when this happened.
I was staring at the shoreline, watching the strange short-legged little lizards pick at the tide’s scraps, when something held my hand.
Firmly. Not roughly, but no softness to it. I didn’t even know it was happening until it was done and I could feel the water against my fingers again.
I looked. It hurt my stiff neck, it made my head swim, but I looked.
There was nothing there.
Relief. Strangely disappointed relief. I sagged with it, and black spots floated in front of my eyes as my spine screamed at me. They really could’ve tied me more carefully; at this rate my head felt like it’d explode before the thirst got me. What was a death sentence worth if I was too dead to appreciate the agony?
But they’d been in a rush.
They’d all been in such a rush.

Sometimes when the current bobbled at me I swung around and thought I could see the vastship still squatting there, perched off the reef’s edge – left behind like me. But it was only my imagination outgrowing my eyeballs.
All gone. Such a rush.
A soft, insistent rush. Shh-shh.
Ssh-shh.

*
Shhh-shhh. Waves against the bow. Sshhh-shhh, strong and fast. They said we shouldn’t stay out too long today, but oh no, we had to show off. Oh no, couldn’t lose now. Doscy and Huks, the fastest fishers aboard the Barebonnet, the ones that brought back more food faster, the ones that came back with more teethmarks in their hull than you’d find in a good steak flung into Redbrow waters.
We’d hunted them. We’d taken glow-eels. We’d pulled up Kanavi crabs. We’d taken everything with fins or gills or both and then because we were curious and invincible and bored we’d come hungering for something new. Come here, to Afar, where the land was sour and shrouded and the food was hard to come by without a boat and a net and a line and a prayer. And a good gaff-hook.
But what good were any of those without a good right hand?
There was Doscy, screaming, but quietly, between his teeth. All the rest of his lungs on his arms, on that good right hand holding his good gaff-hook, clutched against the side of the boat. Kicking furiously, dangling in spray and water and trying to get just that last inch of purchase back into the boat.
He had it.
Then it had him. I saw his expression change just a little, before it took him down.
After that I was on the deck of the Barebonnet, and I was throwing up. Nothing in it but water, nothing in me but water, and all of it spilling everywhere, everywhere.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” I told them, as they dragged me off, to dry, to heat, to feed –fix the machine, stop the damage. “I shouldn’t have told him to stay.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
*

I woke up to searing pain. A mudbeetle had grown ambitious, and had decided to take the measure of my thumb. The thrashing hurt more than the actual bite, and I started to wonder about blood poisoning. Maybe what was inside me would kill me faster than what wasn’t after all.

No clouds. Days of the fairest weather I’d seen in six years off this coast, and here I was in a position to broil from it. Skin was starting to do interesting things, not that I could see most of it – but I could feel it, inch by inch. I hadn’t imagined that I could grow more leathery.
Worn skin or no, I felt it then, and I made a nasty noise inside my throat.
Something wasn’t touching me.
Something was very close to me and not touching me, and it wouldn’t stop.
Go away go away go away go away go away.
My fingers and toes were curled into evil little knots, my joints creaked with panic as every bit of me tried to raise itself up, to get away from the blue.
There was a little fluid noise – too smooth to be a splash – and the texture of the water around me changed again. Something was gone.
The feeling passed, and everything hurt. I fell into a heap and wished the sun would burn the brain out of my head.

*
A day off.
An unspeakable luxury, a horrifying punishment. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I nagged the cooks in the galley and got underfoot in the hold and finally was sent to check through the catch just to stop me from driving everyone insane.
The fish reassured me. They were ugly, strange things, and even now half of them nobody had seen before. But their stares were empty and honest.
Next day, next dawn, I was ready again. I held the engine, I entrusted my gaff to a stranger. Not Doscy, never again Doscy, but one of those other ones, the ones we’d mocked with thrice the catch.
He looked at me with sympathy. I remember that. He felt bad for me.
I hated that. I wanted respect. I remembered the respect. Not this.
And I hated it even more by day’s end, when he leaned over the rail to haul up a fat sheener and it took him over, just like that.
I never had anything to remember him by but that sympathy. And oh, that hurt even more when I came back to the Barebonnet and told them.
*

Something wasn’t touching me again.
It wasn’t touching me, and when at last my muscles gave out and my feet and hands slumped into the water, I saw just how much it wasn’t.
Swirls of current tease me. Something big enough to drag the whole buoy back out to sea is here. Something big enough that it’s a miracle it can fit this close to shore. Something big enough that I have no idea why it cares about me.
Why is it looking at me? Why isn’t it touching me?
It touched me.
Yes, it had definitely touched me. One ankle was in contact with something that wasn’t water.

It stayed there until the water began to ebb, then left. I didn’t know how I’d ever sleep again and then I did.

*
Twice is coincidence, but coincidences still make people uncomfortable.
This time I didn’t get a day off. Just ‘off.’ And they started showing me how to do scut-work, to please the vastship, to grease the hull, to clean the deck, to pick the bones free from the eviscerator, and all the other million tiny things.
The dead man had not only looked at me with sympathy. Many, many people resented me. Bad luck, and a bad shipmate. Two in a week? With one crewman? What was he doing? What had he done?
When the third woman vanished off the deck in front of me as I mopped, hands too full, feet too slow, mouth too slack? That was enough to settle it right there.
*

And there I was. Spine against cold metal. Eyes against the rising sun. Mind crawling back into its battered little envelope as the mudbeetles left me be.
This was a peaceful moment. No dreams. No water. Just the wet, flat mud and my eyes.
Something was toppling trees inland and eating them. It was slow and fearless and I admired that.
Still, I really wished the buoy was facing the other way. It must be waiting right there, silhouetted against the incoming waves. Waiting for me.
What was it?
Glimpses, that’s all I had. Three little glimpses spread over three different days and a touch against my hand, my ankle.
And a ripple.

You couldn’t use the land here, they said. People tried, they failed, they stopped. That which lived Afar knew of us, and it knew it was not for us. The mountains watched you. The swamps encircled you. And the mists… well. You couldn’t escape them.
How had we thought the seas were different?

They were with me now, I knew. Doscy and that sympathetic boy, that nameless woman. They were with it, and it was with me, and it would never stop. Not now that it had seen us.
Why would it? It was curious, and invincible, and bored.
There were wonders out there to see, if you had a strong will, and a strong right fin, and a jaw so long and strong that could snip sunworn hawsers like strands of spider-silk.

I sat there. Buoyed up, back to back, against scales that for all their endless age had seen much less sun than I had in just these past few dying days.
It was raining. Against my will, my mouth was open, and so I lived as we cruised onward.
They were with me, and I was with it, and we sailed onwards together in the vastship’s wake, ignoring the pull of the tides, hungering for something new.

It was hellish heat in Matagan city – summer always was, but the waves and walls of mist steaming off the surrounding sea seemed to be penning in the warmth, suffocating the city under a blanket of humidity. Work from the Stone, of the Silence. But at bay, for now, content to let the metropolis stew itself.
It was the sort of weather where you’d kill for a drink.

“Here.”
“Spit and shit I hope so. One more flight of stairs and I’d be out my legs.”
“It’s here. I said it’d be here and it’d be here.”
“Gracious of you, mighty fine of you, thank you greatly. Not many folk’d be pleasant enough to tell all of a little spring like this – how many you figure there are out here in the boonies?”
“Two. My payment, please.”
“No need to be so reckless hasty, sir. You feel he’s being rude, fellas?”
“A bit of a shithead, yeah.”
“Seems so.”
“I reckon.”
“Pay me or I fire.”
“Salt in a seal’s sex put that thing down! We were just teasing, damnit!”
“Payment. Six.”
“We said five, didn’t we? I distinctly recall hearing ‘five’ bandied about, didn’t I, lads?”
“Six. Five for the spring. One for the threads. In a loose brown bag. Now.”
“Oh of course, of course, of course, of course. Here, happy to oblige. A one two CATCH.”

“Well, he certainly didn’t catch.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
“Yes.”
“Not well, no.”
“Eugh. Bit of a splatter. Still, I fancy I see some sparkles in that spray – not a bad wrapping job on the payment, if I do say so myself, to myself, of myself’s work. We can just pick that up on the way back dowNNNNN”

“About time.”
“Yep.”
“Shit on a shingle – what the hell was that for?! You’ve gone and murked him!”
“Three shares now. That’s a lot more than four. Nothing but math. And he were a jackass”
“S’right.”
“Oh, and that makes me feel better? You know what’s a smaller number than three?”
“Not many. Hey, hold up-”
“Two. You bastards didn’t fill me in on this, I get the feeling I know why. Fuck off.”
“Behind.”
“Shut up you fucking para-mute. Fuck off.”
“Might want to calm down and turn a-”
“Fuck OF”

“He might’ve looked behind him when we were being polite. That board did look funny.”
“Yeah.”
“Five stories?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the highest you heard someone stroll from without splatting?”
“Six.”
“Lucky Lonni?”
“Lucky Lonni.”
“He ain’t either half of that.”
“Agreed.”
“Well… two shares is a lot better than three anyways. Works out. When we start selling this stuff, we’ll be able to ship out of here in three days with working cash.”
“What? You crazy?”
“What you mean, crazy? I’m not staying here while we wait for that fog to roll in. We’ve got to get out while the getting still gets.”
“Not running. It’s high here. We hole up, we use this, we wait it out.”
“Ain’t no waiting it out. You’re a brain shy of a skull.”
“You’re money-grubbing.”
“No sense living poor.”
“Life’s worth more than cash.”
“Depends on whose. HNNF!”
“ennh.”
“Rrrr! Agh!”
“acch.”
“You stuck me, I’ll give you that. Best anyone’s done in a good few bits.”
“hhhhhhh.”
“You weren’t using that tongue much anyhow. Don’t worry. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fffiine.”
“hhhhsss”
“Not… so fine. ne. You didn’t…put anything on, on the sticker, did you?”
“sss”
“That’d be. Helluvaway. End.”

Splash.

Rosie was a hundred and two feet in the air on DUG’s left side when she dropped a rivet. It was one of the new ones, the big terrifying ones from the Terramac that exploded out of her launcher like hot rocks from a volcano, that ate through metal until they hit air again and became startlingly meek, tame, and as immovable as a mountain range.
“Fuck,” she said, under her mask, under her helmet, under her breath.
Don’t Sweat It, said DUG, who heard her no matter what. They’re Cheap Anyways.
Rosie gave DUG a look from under her bangs under her sweat under her helmet under the glare of the sun, and she knew DUG didn’t care. But she said it anyways.
“Those rivets cost half an hour’s pay. For me, all the others, and our supervisors. Combined.”
Not The Rivet. It’s Fine.
“Well then?”
It’s The Man Whose Helmet It Landed On.

It hadn’t stopped, of course. Not until it hit air again.
If lower-riveter Jenk hadn’t fallen over as it burrowed through his boot, it probably would still be going down there, through thicker and thinner walls of rock and magma until the heat boiled it away. As it was it had formed a perfect seal on the heel of Jenk’s left foot, attaching his boot so firmly to flesh that it had to be left on at the funeral – or so Rosie heard later, since she hadn’t been that close to Jenk. They built things that worked out there in the Terramac. They always did.
Of course, they hadn’t built DUG. Or DUG’s construction site.
DUG was not perturbed by any of this. Men and women had died working on DUG, men and women were dying working on DUG, and there would definitely be men and women dead at the launch of DUG. They were basically the same as the metal shavings peeling off the hull, or the lug charges discarded from the cannons. Prematurely spent.

DUG. Not Dug.
Dynamized Undersea Guardian.
DUG was a quarter mile wide and much longer than DUG was wide
DUG was capable of holding half a town inside DUG’s guts, and needed two-thirds of that to be operated properly.
DUG was armed with cutter-cannons that were backed by boilers bigger than the lungs of a god that could shoot out the surface of the sun in single solid shots or spew out unending boiling torrents or create a seething steamscreen on command with the flick of a tiny switch and the rotation of a house-sized locking catch.
And oh, but oh, DUG was so very, so very, so very very bored.

Rosie would do, mostly. As far as she could tell, that was the sum total of her qualifications. DUG wasn’t shy about sharing DUG’s opinions of the little people putting DUG together. Some DUG liked more than her, some DUG liked less than her, but as far as she knew she was the only one DUG bothered talking to.
DUG hated rivet foreman Immik. DUG liked lower-riveter Telimis. DUG could take or leave the boiler installation crew. DUG adored the work teams that hauled DUG’s jet intakes into place. And DUG complained about the mess crew staff at least once per day.
Rosie nodded a lot during her shifts. Her friend and/or coworker and/or acquaintance and/or who knew, Akro, made a habit of checking every half hour or so to see if she was ‘falling asleep.’
“I’m awake,” Rosie told her.
“Sure,” said Akro. “Sure. Sure.”

DUG was more than gossip. Actually, DUG was more than mostly not gossip. What DUG mostly was was murder.
Every morning when Rosie came in DUG would tell her all about the sights and sounds of the evening. As she ascended DUG’s hull DUG would move on to DUG’s thoughts and feelings on the people working there. And as she plugged in her launcher and wounded it up tight and pressed it to the first plate, DUG would seamlessly shift into talking about what DUG wanted to kill that day.
‘Galms, Of Course, DUG told her. There’s No Doubt They Will Be First.
“The Dynamized Undersea Guardian was constructed to assess and repel the potential coastal spread of the Silence of the Stone,” said Rosie, dutifully speaking the words someone else had carefully given to her in case she felt the need to ever have an opinion.
A Very Good Excuse But Not Much Else. I Can Park Next To That For Ten Minutes And Solve It. What Comes after? ‘Galms. Buckets Of ‘Galms. Heaps. Mounds. Bobbing, Floating Carpets. And They’re What These Cannons Are For, Of Course. Can’t Boil Silence. But You Can Burn Someone’s Ears Out.
Rosie nodded. Akro poked her.
Or Maybe The Terramac. Finally Get Matagan Exclusive Access.
“I’m awake.”
Or Nagezz – Now That’d Be Nice. Turn The Dunes To Glass And Dig Their Treasures Out With A Pebble And A Slingshot.
“Sure! Sure.”

Rosie was increasingly glad she had nobody waiting at home for her. She was getting sick of listening to people.

The crowning tower was the next bit of work. Tricky. It was what sat atop DUG’s giant, invincible brow, peeping above the waves like a curious fish checking for trouble. When it found it, it would tell DUG, and DUG would kill whatever it found, rising up from below to mash and mangle and boil and sear. It was very simple, but it was also a wall of caged steel and angry mechanisms, so it took a little while.
A little while and a lot of rivets. Rosie’s palm murmured deathly things to her every time she reloaded her launcher.
You Missed A Spot.
Rosie hadn’t missed a spot, of course. Akro had. But Rosie fixed it anyways, and kicked her in the leg.
“What?”
“You missed a spot.”
“Oh.” She scratched her nose pointlessly – there were three layers between her face and her gloves – and nodded. “Thanks!”
The whistle for break sounded and Rosie took off her gloves for a second to wipe off the sweat. Just a second. Longer than that and the reflected heat from DUG would start to bake them. In the midsummer noon the upper heights could almost glow with heat.
Aren’t I Pretty?
Rosie nodded and this time Akro didn’t poke her because if you wanted to sleep on break it was your own damned business.
The Prettiest You’ve Ever Seen, I Expect. Look At These Guns. Aren’t They Lovely?
“Maybe,” said Rosie. “Ask me about rivets.”
They’re Seamless.
“Then don’t ask me,” said Rosie, and she fell asleep on purpose this time.

The whistle woke her up, followed closely by Akro’s finger in her back.
“I’m awake.”
“Sure! Sure.”

DUG ate Akro three days later. The crowning tower deck popped open under her feet under the stress of heat expansion and she fell a screaming twenty stories all the way to the bottom of the hull and needed sixty gallons of (very hot) water and rancid, acidic soap to clean her out.
Rosie didn’t ask why.
I Was Bored, explained DUG.

Rosie read the news at home sometimes, when she could afford it after making the necessary purchases of gin, food, and gin.
The Silence of the Stone was spreading faster. Or slower. Or it had stopped.
Gelmorre was posturing, proposing, or possibly prevaricating, perfidiously.
Matagan was utterly invincible and sure to hold fast as long as every citizen did their part and the full force of Matagant ingenuity, resources, time, blood, spit, and semen was poured into their plans.
The best plan in all of Matagan was the DUG, down at the Big End Shipyard out where prying eyes couldn’t goggle too much at it. Someone had taken some very flattering pictures. The cutter-cannons glistened in the sun.
“Aren’t I pretty,” said Rosie, and doubled her gin budget.

Warships Are, Of Course, Male, said DUG.
“Every sailor ever born disagrees with you,” said Rosie. She still hadn’t had a new partner assigned since DUG had eaten Akro, and that meant she needed to expend extreme concentration on making sure she didn’t slip, or run out of rivets, or make a mistake, or die, or break her tools, or get eaten by DUG. Instead she was talking more to DUG.
Ships Can Be Female Because Sailors Want Something To Fuck. I Have Cannons. I Will Do My Fucking For Me.
“Not quite how any of that works,” said Rosie. She counted her rivets again. She had lost two.
You Are Composed Of Organic Materials And Therefore Biased. Only I Can Be Objective About Your Biological Sex Because I Am Neither Biological Nor Capable Of Reproduction.
“Pull the other one,” said Rosie.
I Have No Hands. I Have No Testicles. I Have A Magazine That Fuels My Cannons. My Point Is Reinforced. Just Like My Hull.
You Missed A Spot.
Rosie leaned out over a hundred feet of nothing much, one hand braced on the hull, and looked.
“No I didn’t.”
I Suppose Not.

The next day one of the boilers shook loose in its mount and squashed four people. DUG told Rosie a long story about how many people could die in one of its volleys, if only they all stood still and didn’t move around much. There was a lot of math.

On the day of DUG’s launch they stopped keeping everyone away from the Big End Shipyard and they brought them all in instead. Everyone who was important got good seats, everyone else got makeshift stadium rows rummaged out of old scaffolding.
Rosie got tucked into a corner behind some toilets. She didn’t much care. You could see DUG for miles. You could see DUG from Matagan proper. Some people had stayed home and decided to watch from their houses. Everyone here on the spot was most likely some brand of showboater.
See the boat. See the show.
See the bottle of incredibly expensive alcohol about to shatter against a single knobbly rivet, formed of and embedded within metal that could survive anything at all.
Crash! Bang! Tinkle-tinkle-splash!
Cheers, hoorahs! Woo! Yes! Amazing! Wonderful! The sun was out and everything was shining, from the cannons to the hull to the cannons to the brandy flowing over the rivet.
Aren’t I Pretty? asked DUG.
And then the rivet popped out, still-wet with brandy.
For an imaginary moment Rosie thought she could hear the trickle of expensive liquor seeping inside the hull.
Then the plates jerked apart, the metal roared, and every part in DUG’s bow violently shot away from every other part.

When the earth stopped shaking and everything metal had stopped screaming, DUG was still talking. Of course. She’d expected that. There was no animal harder to kill than a warship, not a bird from the sky or a Wyrm from Afar or a thing from the deep. She knew that because she had been told so.
You Loosened That Rivet On Purpose.
Rosie checked all her limbs. Yep, still there. Even the liver.
This Would Never Have Happened, DUG said to her, If You Had A Penis.
Rosie spat aimlessly at the ground, stained with DUG’s lifebloods, lymphs, cerebral fluids, and intercavitary secretations. Most of them were mostly oil, but none of them was altogether alike.
“Whether I do or don’t,” she said aloud, comfortable doing so in a world where everyone was deaf for at least the next ten minutes, “it doesn’t much matter. What’s more relevant is I’m not a damned dick.”

DUG never did speak to Rosie again, from the dock to the scrapyard beach.

The flower was on the last cusp of colour. Grey and black had eaten it from the outside in, but on the very edge, a faint hint of blue lingered.
Courier Jessle slid her eyes away from the flower to the rest of the field. A dim sky, over a carpet of dim blossoms. They lay on their sides, as if they had all lain down for a strange sort of nap.
Each and every one had been carefully yanked out by their roots.
One of the villages must have done this, she reflected. One of the small, grey
(the colour of her hair now; when did that happen? It had been so long since she was here)
little villages she’d walked through just an afternoon ago. The people had been quiet and industrious. They hadn’t looked up at her footstep, they hadn’t hesitated at her stare, they had drifted out of her path as smoothly as the parting fog.
She had never been so disconcerted in her life. The sight of a good, honest pick-pocketing in the street would’ve cheered her up immensely.
But the villagers would never do a thing like that. They would never do something so pointlessly outside of their remit. They did as they were told. Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Jessle placed the flower down precisely not where she had taken it from. This gave her a tiny bit of satisfaction and sent an uncomfortable thrill down her spine, as if she were seven again and trespassing in her aunt’s bedroom. Exhilaration, coupled with a certainty of unknown, inescapable punishment yet to come.

The lake had not changed, she thought with relief, and then she saw that she had thought wrong.
The boats were still there: thick-oared, low-slung barges. The rowers were still there: downcast, over-robed young men. The dock was still there: dark wood sheathed in black iron.
But the boats were rotted – unfit to transport even a scant load of prisoners now – and the dock was bowed, and the rowers stared without blinking from pinpoint pupils, every muscle tensed for a single task and not permitted release.
She’d seen that stare before. But she would not permit herself that memory, and stifled it.
The oars had been quiet, back then. They were quieter still now. There were no ripples in the water, even as the rowers yanked and sweated furiously.
Not for the first time, Jessle reflected that this was not a job for a Courier. Couriers delivered messages. Sometimes the messages were demands. Sometimes the messages were sharp. Sometimes the messages were sharpened, and also came without any warning.
Couriers were not negotiators. And yet here she sat, on the deck of a waterlogged thing too miserable to be called a hulk, preparing herself to do just that.

The loss of the Stone had been an inconvenience that had been kept from being an emergency solely by dint of it being a wholly shared and mutual disaster for all involved. Every country, every empire, large and small and even unknown, they all had something or some person that had been incarcerated there. For any one of them, losing access would’ve been a crisis. For all of them, it was a joint frustration. A problem for diplomats to exchange gripes and commiserate on. A community-building occasion, nearly.
It would have been almost a net positive, if it hadn’t been for the silence.
Jessle counted her paces; one of many, many habits she’d diligently acquired, trained, and catalogued.
She’d entered the silence almost half a league before her maps – the most recent – had said she would. This was almost precisely where her briefing’s calculations – also the most recent – had told her she would.
Geometric growth. A terrible thing that tended to only appear so when it was already too late.
‘Too late’ came to mind for more than one thing; the lake had grown no larger, but the wallowing of the barges surely made it seem so. The piers of the Stone were finally in sight, swirling out of the mist, and on the piers stood a single man, waiting.
“Courier Jessle,” he said. His grip was cold on her arm, even through the broadcloth fabric of her coat.
Jessle did not forget faces, and that was one of her few talents that had been a gift rather than a hard-won habit. But the thing she looked at now defied her memories. “Warden?” she blurted out, not sure whether to be more shocked at yes or no.
The face did not move. “The Warden is waiting for you.”
Her mind was made up. The voice was the same; a whisper standing in for a grown man’s lungs. Every laugh-line was gone, smoothed away by years of immobility, but the broadness of the features was there. The wide mouth, the eyes, the cheeks.
The eyes were pinpricks, of course. Of course.
No, this wasn’t the warden. This was the man she remembered, but he wasn’t the warden. Not anymore.
She nodded, and followed the man through the splayed-open cragstone gates of the Stone’s walls, a defense that could’ve eaten armies left ajar, now obsoleted.

The way was long and winding, and there were no words from her guide. Jessle supplied her own, inside her head. She needed the practice, and the reminder of what sound was like. The mist was thicker with each step, and with it, the silence.
The towers were draped with moss now from the constant moisture. Some of it must’ve been new growth.
There were no guards posted anywhere.
Paths were visible in the flagstones; the older ones worn by centuries of heavy tread and made visible in damp puddles and pools; the modern by the crushed mess of stamped fungi and mosses. They were not heavily-used.
There were no rats.
That at least was not new. Jessle hadn’t been able to ride a horse for days. She also had not seen a rat.
The man guiding her was gone, she noticed. Except that wasn’t right, it felt as if she’d already known this and had forgotten to mention it to herself. She was alone, in the deserted, abandoned depths of the world’s most impenetrable prison, immersed in a fog that hid walls a mere armspan from her sides, and she was sure that this, like every other thing since she’d entered the silence of the Stone, was entirely under control.
Just not her own.

There was no door to the chamber – not a room, nothing so sophisticated, just a simple and sudden broadening of the passage, a gasp in the prison’s throat.
There was a grate set into the floor. Iron-barred and vast. A hundred men and women couldn’t have lifted it. The broken remains of a lever next to it suggested they once had not needed to.
And sitting next to this ancient, creaking thing was a table, brand-new and put together by violence and inexperience and too many nails.
There were three chairs. One was full, and a man sat in another.
Jessle sat in the empty chair and felt her bones cease the complaints she hadn’t even notice beginning.
“Courer Jessle,” she said. “From Gelmorre.” And as she spoke the words she felt them vanish before they even entered her larynx, eaten alive and leaving her lips to flail dumbly in empty space.
If the man opposite her was amused, he hid it well – although he had the advantage of her, with a full beard to hide behind.
Ambassador Honn, Jessle read from his lips. Of Matagan.
Something moved in the pit.
Jessle didn’t flinch, and she was proud of that as she watched the ‘Gan wince in his seat. She couldn’t move, her head was filled with memories of endless coils and winding, brutal strength and scales and a hardened, toothless beak that was nearly smiling.
The warden was there, and the third chair was full of its presence.
And she breathed again, without the comfort of the creaking of her ribs, and she began to recite the first offer she had been ordered to deliver.

More than two decades now, and she was still the only expert they had on Wyrms, or at least the only thing they had that looked like an expert, or the only one that could speak in full sentences.
Twenty-three years of Gelmorre’s scant colonies out there over the sea, in Afar, and only one book ever written. Mostly speculations and stories, short and stunted and frightened.
She had given them illustrations, with difficulty. Her pencil strokes had been unsure, self-doubting.
Mists and madness and a quiet that struck like a sledge and took your mind from your skull to play with, how you could lose that she wasn’t sure…
The memories were trying to hide from her.
But now, sitting not twenty feet from her former prisoner, she could see it again in her head as if it were brightest day.

Her words ran out, noiselessly. A moment to be certain, a working of his jaw, and Honn began to speak.
He was good, this ‘Gan. Jessle saw that. He had paid attention to her words, and to the words behind them, and to the orders and the intents behind the both of them. Read it all as surely as if Her Worshipped was sitting at Jessle’s shoulder, speaking them aloud.
And now came the counter-offer, sliding in so comfortably it was almost taken for granted, already-there. Better terms, of course. Better for both of them. Matagan’s tribute would be more fruitful, their exchange with the Stone more beneficial, their relationship more prosperous. For both of them. A better future would result. For both of them.
He was good, this ‘Gan. The very best. Jessle would’ve sent him, if she’d the choice. She knew that surely.
So why was she here instead?
That was a thought that could not be, and she had kept it out of her skull for three weeks now, for every day of her journey.
The silence of the Stone expands. A deal must be made. The ‘Gans want one too. Gelmorre must prevail. Courier Jessle will be sent…
And then chasing after it, finally sneaking inside her awareness, the final step she’d always suspected: …by the Stone’s request, as its former jailer.
Her expression didn’t change, she thought. It was hard to tell, numb as the world was. But something must have shown in her body, because the ‘Gan did not continue overlong, and his face as his lips stilled was – through the drawn-out fear – curving into a slight smile.
Jessle tried to shove her thoughts out of her head and spoke her own counter-offer. It went poorly.
Her words were done and her hands felt as if they must be shaking even though they weren’t and Honn was smiling openly now as he took his place, dismantling her arguments without ever once referring to them, mocking her miserliness with his generosities, painting a future so bright that Jessle could almost – with real effort – imagine colour again as something real.
He was finished. Jessle said something, she was sure, but even she wasn’t really listening anymore. The ‘Gan wasn’t watching her lips, his eyes were on hers, and he wouldn’t stop smiling, it was going to drive her out of her

There was a face at the grate.
It was larger than a warhorse, it was larger than a carriage, it was almost the size of a house. Bigger than before.
The beak was just shy of the bars, reluctant of the iron’s touch, but almost toyingly so.
She couldn’t imagine it being unable to lift it. She couldn’t imagine it being unable to do anything.
She couldn’t do anything at all but watch those eyes, those swollen-pupilled eyes, eyes bigger than she was, as they settled upon her.
Pressure was there, invisible but immense. She must have felt something like this before, something almost like this but infinitely slighter, when she knelt before the seat of Her Worshipped but thinking of her was impossible right now, thinking at all was impossible now and

Jessle breathed again. Something was missing. Maybe it was her. Maybe she’d never know. But the world was moving again (had it stopped?) and she knew some things that were carved inside her and would never come out again.
She had failed the terms of her mission. The Stone would be open again – to Matagant and aligned interests.
She had failed other missions, long, long ago. Her prisoner never was. Her victories had never been.
She would not speak of this. She would not think of this.
All those things were deeply, unfathomably true, and so she ignored them entirely and instead looked straight ahead, blindly following the one sense that was open to her, and came eye-to-tooth with Ambassador Honn, grinning as if he were a tiger with a whole birdcage wedged in his mouth.
She was done. She was dismissed. He had won. Wasn’t he going to say anything?
A muscle twitched.
Jessle looked closer and saw that wasn’t a smile, it had never been a smile. The man’s mouth was all teeth now, ridged and fixed and tensed to a screaming tauntness against his lips that sent blood trickling down his chin through the wrinkles, dripping in tiny specks from the fine hairs of his beard.
“Go,” it said from his mouth, in words, in real words that cut through Jessle’s thoughts like blades. “Now.”
She did.

After what had taken place in words, even the bone-seeping silence of the Stone was a relief. Jessle ran, without dignity, without care, up from the depths to the dock and only felt her breath return to her when the water began to move again under the lurch and tug of the boat’s oars.
She had never been so happy to fail in her duty – to Gelmorre, to Her Worshipped, to her family’s very reputation – in her life. Her report to the throne would be a devastation to speak aloud, a litany of failure and humble apology, and she would have to fight to keep from singing it.
She suddenly felt her smile to be too wide in her head, and it vanished in a shiver.
He was gone now, that ‘Gan. Gone for being too good at his job? Or for other reasons, or because of her? The Couriers delivered the words of Her Worshipped, but this would not be the first time they were used, unwanted, to deliver another’s message.
I am here, where you thought to keep me. I am strong, stronger than you knew, and stronger each day. I do not fear you. I do not respect you.
I do as I please, and my whims are what please me. You will not understand them, and I do not expect you to.
She realized her hand was trembling on the rail, her right hand, and she could not stop it.
No. Speculation was not the duty of a Courier unless ordered. If the monster appeared opaque, that was what she would take it for. She would not place herself inside its skull immediately after being spared that particular insult.
Courier Jessle stepped off the boat, away from the Stone, away from the silence, and away from her imaginings.
And as she did, she thought of a field of dead flowers.

Trasall Ti Remmont, High Songstress of Gelmorre, thrice-appointed to the court of Her Worshipped, the Eighth Crystalvoice (and soundmaker of note besides), watched the launch depart and really wished that someone had thought to give her a hand with her damned luggage before they left her alone on the dock with only an old rowboat for company. True, she only had two small trunks, but it was the principle of the thing. What was the point in being famous if people didn’t do things like that for you?
Grumbling aside, she set to her belongings and set up the path. The dirt path. Rustic, she supposed, but there was no accounting for taste among the rich and powerful. At least two of the most obscenely wealthy people she’d performed for in her life had lived in conditions fit to make a street-philosopher raise an eyebrow and scrub her wrists self-consciously. And there was no questioning that her latest client had access to a level of prestige that they would have envied
Matagan had ten thousand children, it was said. Maybe it was right. Maybe it was less. Most likely, it was more. But each of those ten-thousand-plus/minus Spawn of Gant were more precious than a fistful of diamonds and a hatful of Sill-shooms. You get a little speck of rock with your name on it and maybe enough space to build half a cabin, that’s when you know you’ve made it in Matagan. That’s when you know you’re somebody.
Trasall was mostly somebody these days. Much to her mother’s annoyance, she was sure.
The island she was walking on was big enough that she’d lost sight of the dockhouse entirely and was over her third hill with no end to the trail in sight. Now, what sort of thing did you have to go and do to get that, hmm?
She turned over the memory of getting the letter, since the letter itself was packed in the bottom of her smaller trunk. Addressed High Songstress, as plainly as Baker. A Request with a capital Politeness. Brisk, brief, blunt, one week of performance please and thank you, and attached to a figure that made her eyebrows raise a little without her really noticing. Signed, Mistress Scout.
War hero. That was her best guess. A bit awkward for a Galm to go perform for a jumped-up ‘Gan who’d likely gotten rich off’ve stabbing her countrymen or luring them into starving gyrwolf packs in the backwoods, but then again, she was no patriot and surely no soldier. Let Her Worshipped and her couriers and her hosts and her brigades pick fights, Trasall was an entertainer, and history had shown her that so long as you stayed smartly away from politics at the afterparties you could host anything short of a thing from the Terramac on the grace of a calm smile and a bit of boozing alone.
War hero from what, though? There were tales of the…incidents out there, Afar. And there was some stir around the Stone, but that had nothing to do with the ‘Gans. Probably. The Greywood Campaign? She’d be surprised if there were any veterans living from that who had the fortitude to feed themselves, let alone live out here in nowhere. Maybe someone from the War in the Cracks? No, that wasn’t even over yet. Too soon for anyone to retire on well-earned rests. And then there was the title… she didn’t know of many scouts who got much more than medals. The real glory was usually hogged for the generals and colonels. And she’d never heard of a Mistress-Scout before. A special rank?
Then Trasall pulled up short because she’d come to the house and it wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting but it wasn’t what she wasn’t expecting to expect. Exactly.

The door was a full fifteen feet tall and also open. With a bit of heaving, a little swearing, and at last a full-body shove, it begrudged her a crack as she caught her breath.
Inside was no less strange. The tall, tall roof she’d observed from outside enclosed just a single floor; the rafters swinging bare overhead. Two halls stretched to either side of her, floors gaping bare and scratched to the nines, a single, oddly-shaped door sat ahead of her. It took her a moment to realize it was the only thing in the building that wasn’t outsized.
Well, that and the table at her elbow. An envelope sat on it, a single, capital T sat on that.
She opened it and enough cash to move a slumlord into a count fell out, along with a single piece of paper.
Tonight, dusk. The porch.

Trasall used the rest of the day to get comfortable. Her room – as indicated by another helpfully terse letter – was the tiny one. She could have fit half her childhood home into it, but there was no room because it looked like someone else had got to that first. A kitchen, a water closet, a pantry, bookcases, dresser… it was as if someone had condensed all the rest of the building’s contents into one place. It would have been cramped without the tall, tall walls looming over it and up to the ceiling; as it was it merely felt lost, like a mismanaged dollhouse.
It wasn’t the creepiest place she’d ever performed at. Maybe the top twenty. But the liquor cabinet helped. And she sang better buzzed anyway.
The sun dipped low and the glass filled up and Trasall Ti Remmont, High Songstress of Gelmorre, stood on the porch and packed her lungs with green, cool-breezed air.
When she let it out again, it made the trees stop and listen.
And again.
And again.
There’d been no specific requests on any of the messages. A little annoying, but it gave her room to have some fun. She did a quick cycle of old slumland nightsongs, slid from there into a hill-ballad, topped it off with one or two of her classic early works, and then (because the brandy was low and she felt mischievous) an old marching tune whose ambiguity left the nationality of the singer in just enough doubt to be tasteful.
She drained the glass, took a bow, and walked inside.

Trasall woke up uncomfortably close to morning, with a gentle, velvety headache, a slightly sore mouth, and a real need for coffee – which, mercifully, she found in a ten-pound sack.
The mists were out and prowling through the trees, and as she sat on the porch and sipped at her scalding (grainy) drink and chewed on an old oatcake she’d dug from a cupboard she could almost understand why this place had been built.
Well, besides the floorplan. She still had no idea what the two halls were for. Between them they possessed nine-tenths of the building and not one stick of furniture beyond a rug she could’ve made a circus tent out of. And it was old, all of it. Creaking and grumbling and settling. This place had been built before she was born, and for what? A giant with a crippling phobia of furnishings?
Sunlight glimmered through her thoughts, and she shook away their cobwebs. The fog was lifting, the air was shining, and somewhere a bird was making cross noises that only succeeded in sounding adorable. You would have to be a cold-hearted city-dweller indeed to not feel that pull, and although Tristall considered herself just that within the hour she relented and took her heels into the backwoods, armed with a sandwich.
She regretted her decision right away, but not quite right away enough to actually do anything about it. The light loose-leafed foliage turned thick and thorny without warning, the trees seemed to lay their roots precisely wherever her ankle was attempting to move, and by the time Trasall stopped to eat her bad-tempered sandwich the birds had become a gang of scolding thugs that would’ve put a murder of crows to shame.
Nature, she reminded herself between bites of cheese and anonymous meat, is well and good, but you don’t want to step in it. Her mother had been very firm on that and she wondered how she’d forgotten it. Then she remembered all the terrible advice the old bat had given her on finding a decent job and keeping her head out of the clouds and felt better just in time to recognize that prickle in her shoulderblades.
It was a familiar feeling. Most times it was a good one. It meant she was doing her job properly, it meant the audience was too focused to even cough.
Someone was watching her.
Also, the birds had shut up. That was probably a bad sign.
Slowly, calmly, as alarmingly casual as she could manage, she slid off the rock she’d turned into a table and began to retrace her steps in her head.
A bush rustled.
By the time Trasall’s brain had calmed down enough to form memories again, she was halfway through the door of the cabin and there were little specks of some sort of dry foam at the corners of her mouth. They reminded her of a sort of frothy dessert she’d had three days ago in a court in a city on the mainland where she was surrounded by people and not alone on a rock singing to a host who’d gone past ‘reclusive’ and into ‘invisible.’
Oh. Her host.
She suddenly felt very stupid. And not just because she’d left her only shoes somewhere out there.
Of course. That had been her host. She’d probably come across them taking a rest, the same as her. It was probably a good thing she’d left so fast. That was all that had happened, just a chance encounter. A little bad luck. Nothing strange. It wasn’t even as if there were any animals – any BIG animals – in the Spawn of Gant. Nothing bigger than a shy deer, say. Yes, she could’ve frightened a deer, too. A deer or her host. Both very harmless. Nothing strange.
Still, she took an extra glass of brandy before she sang that evening. And she stuck to lively tunes. Songs that stamped their feet and filled her head with choruses and beat back the too-quiet night to a more respectable, reasonable distance.
And she kept the giant door open a crack the whole time. And the bottle at her elbow. And her eyes moving.

That night Trasall dreamed that she lay awake with a half-moon lightning the corner of her room and listened to the front door creak and soft breath puff. Shadows slid across the edge of her door, and soft scuffing echoed from the rafters. She dreamed these things and shivered in her (old, woolen, but very thick) blankets and when she woke up it was dawn and the door was open a crack to let the fog in.
She had a drink with breakfast to steady her nerves. And a drink with lunch to hold them there. And then she had a drink while she carefully poked around the rest of the building and found nothing but more nothing. Empty walls. Not even paintings. A rug. A room for her. Nothing more. Nothing more than the scratched and worn floorboards, which she was starting to feel unspeakably uneasy about.
A tune came to mind – a long-song of a beautiful young manservant who married a mysterious noblewoman, only to find she was a spider and devoured him whole – and she realized to her annoyance that she’d been humming it since she’d woken up.
The fog wouldn’t lift. And she wouldn’t go out. When dusk came she brought a chair from her room and a bottle and she sat at the little side-table at the door and sang low sad songs of missing ships and lost lights and families that faded away like dew in the morning. And when the last glow of the sun sank behind the dark waters and black pines, she wiped her face and sang Long-By-Way, the lullaby her mother had used to keep her quiet when she was small and sick.
Then she stopped singing, and listened. Because as those last echoes of her voice slid away into the bays and stones and trees, she heard, not too far away, the closing notes of a long, soft howl.

Trasall opened her eyes and looked up at the rafters and realized she hadn’t slept.
In her defense, of course, she had been busy. Her back hurt, her arms ached, and her neck was still stiff from the odd angle she’d been forced to rest at after incorporating her bed into the superstructure of the odds-and-ends barricade she’d rigged up in front of the door.
Well, she’d sleep when she was dead or preferably when she was off the island. The rowboat, that was the key. She’d use the rowboat. And she only REALLY needed what was in her small trunk anyways.
A five-hour trip here from Matagan. She couldn’t do that in a boat. But she could find a more normal island out there in the Spawn of Gant, with a normal elderly madman who could lend her a ride or something in exchange for five minutes of awkward small talk while trying not to stare at her chest. Even that, god yes.
She slid the base of the door open. Fog wafted in against her nose and she pawed it away, cursing. It stuck to her fingers.
She looked more closely. Not fog, fur. Grey fur. And there were fresh scratches on the porch. She could fit her finger in them.
Trasall had a good two decades of fine food and finer drink between her and her last guttersprint, but in her heyday she’d outrun children twice her size. It was a matter of three masteries: tight turns, quick reflexes, and the realization that shorter legs just mean you can move them faster. It was thanks to a combination of these things that she made the trip down to the dock in less than two minutes, barefoot. Just like old times.
She punted the rowboat into the water, swearing at the pain in her arms and legs, threw her trunk into it with a hollow thud, and realized there were no oars and she was stuck. Again, just like old times.
No, no, no, her memory softly reminded her, and she listened to it. Her memory had won her races, it had won her teachers, it had won her place in the world. There’s a dockhouse, a little wooden dockhouse, barely a shack. There’ll be oars in there. There will be.
So Trasall was in a calm and contemplative state of mind when she turned around and found a bear between herself and the dockhouse and the shore and the entire world.
No big animals in the Spawn of Gant. Besides the ones that could swim.
She’d seen stuffed bears. She’d seen caged bears. This one seemed so much larger, as if the trees and water and misty air had inflated it with purpose and strength and above all else surety. It was staring at her with an open curiosity that was so much worse than an open snarl, brown eyes nested under beetled brown brows. Trasall had seen that look before, on the faces of dukes and farmers and bully-boys and who knew what. It was the considering, calculating expression of someone who was deciding exactly what it was that they were about to get away with.
She looked at her trunk in the rowboat, and decided against it. Moving seemed like a terrible plan, and the handle on the damned thing was barely attached already. She’d get one shot and that would just be enough to irritate it.
Then she looked back up and the bear was charging.
Then as she fell over backwards, half-swearing, half-screaming, she looked farther up and saw the fog move, grey on grey, and grow teeth.
Cold water.

Trasall couldn’t swim. She didn’t dwell on it, she didn’t fret on it, she didn’t shy from the touch or sight of water. It was just another relic of having a childhood too busy and too crammed to fit anything as large and rich as a lake or pool in it, and of all those heirlooms it was by far one of the smallest and least noteworthy.
At most times. Right now, as she was surrounded by ice that was trying to pry open her face and the mouth, it seemed very important indeed. The world was sliding away above her and opening up beneath her and no matter where she waved her arms they just got tired and her clothing was a lead sack and
sharp teeth. above her.
something sank into the scruff of her outfit, the nape of her clothing, and dragged her up, up, up out of the cold and murk and into the hazy morning air, gasping and dripping.
Thunk went the dock. She hugged it. Something warm and huge nuzzled her back gently, and she rolled over and looked into the biggest, bloodiest set of teeth she’d ever seen. Small specks of brown fur were caught in between them.
Ah, her memory said. Ah ah. That was the colour of the bear.
The teeth slid aside and were replaced by an extremely large nose, which nudged her again. She stood up, leaning on it for support, and there they were for the first time, face to face.
Trasall looked up at a wolf that measured twelve foot at the shoulder, and a few things clicked and snapped into place.
“Mistress Scout,” she said aloud again. And she giggled. “Pleased to meet you.”
Her tail wagged. That was a good sign.

The rest of the week was much more relaxing. Scout was still shy, but it was a more natural, wholesome shyness, the kind that Trasall recognized from some of her younger sisters, not the compulsive nerviness that had been driving both of them since Trasall’s boat had left.
“Scared of scaring me?” she’d asked as they walked back to the house, and the gyrwolf had nodded her huge grey head.
It made sense, she thought, as they dug through her barricade cabinet by cabinet. You spend half your – considerable – lifespan sneaking through forests (thirty foot of sneak) and tracking down armies for Matagan and then you come home old and grizzly and get a nice retirement where you never have to see anybody and when somebody shows up, what do you do?
Well, besides get lonely.
“First things first,” said Trasall, as she dug out the last of the brandy. “Now, second things.”
She swirled the glass for a little less than half a second, then downed it. “You prefer accompaniment, or want to trade solos?”

Four days later, Trasall Ti Remmont, High Songstress of Gelmorre, thrice-appointed to the court of Her Worshipped, the Eighth Crystalvoice (and soundmaker of note besides), and the only living human to have sung a duet with a gyrwolf, watched the island recede as she slouched in her seat, cheerily drunk, and waved. A greyness among the trees moved in rhythm with her hand, and she sighed happily at what might have happened at the edges of her eyes.
“Not so bad,” she told the pilot, who nodded in the way of all diplomats. “Not so bad at all.”
Trasall leaned back further still, head bonking gently against the broken handle of her trunk, and noticed she was humming again.
She wondered if she could learn to howl properly.

It’s up there. I can hear it breathing, see the gust of the air.
Damn, it’s cold here. A marsh should be humid. I know that much. Fetid, that’s the word. Not chilled like a grave’s leftovers.
It’s up there, and it’s not coming down.
My hands are working while my brain is stalling. They’re sliding the long bronze-tipped spear into its sheath over my back, they’re pulling out my tent-stakes and tying loops and swoops of rope around them and they’re clenching and unclenching for warmth to drive muscles to grab grips.
Looks like I’m going up.

When he woke up he woke up in a warm soft room made from hard stone walls and he stared at the ceiling with tired eyes because he’d forgotten how to be frightened.
The medic walked by and asked how Tarbon was feeling.
He stared long and hard, eyes wide and unblinking, until they felt pity and he was enlightened.
Tarbon. Voyageur Tarbon. That was his name.
Well.
That was who he was.
*
Tarbon had been the last one, the lucky one. He’d gotten the noose around its neck, he’d been tossed into the brush, and he’d been out cold for about twenty seconds by his count when he arose and saw it tearing open Marson. Saw it, didn’t hear it. Marson’s mouth was moving and his arms were flailing and no sounds were coming out, no sounds were coming from anywhere.
That was what made him do it, he thought. Not the rage, not the fear, but the need to make the world full again. To die with all of him there.
So he took his copper knife to its side. And as it bent over screaming at him he looked up into those eyes and he spat and cursed as it took him in its crippled, half-there grip and then
And then
*
Rough rock here. Rough and slimy; hard to grip and hell on your palms. Even through the gloves I can feel it trying to bite me. I wonder if I ever climbed worse than this? I wonder how it climbed up here. It doesn’t even have hands. What did it do, eel its way up? Maybe this slime belongs to it. Just like the fog does.
Wonder what it’d do to my skin?
No space for that. Keep on going. It’s waiting for you. You’re not getting any stronger, hanging off this height.

Wyrm. Wurm. Like the little soft thing in the dirt that pops up when the rain falls down.
They showed him sketches. The pencilmarks were muted by their fierce speed. The artist hadn’t wanted to look at whatever he’d-
She’d. He was informed that Jessle was a woman’s name. He did not know that. He was informed that he knew Courier Jessle. He did not know her.
-been drawing. Something that soured on your eyes.
He stared at the long, sinuous body and the suggestion of a beak and he tried hard to place it somewhere in his head. Some hint.
Nothing.

*
And then
And then
Tarbon was the last one, crippled and alone with corpses and the emptied. A wound in his side and a hole in his heart and a desperate, all-filling terror in his soul.
*

I’m halfway over the edge of the ledge and the spear’s sliding into my hand, smooth as honey, when down comes a godawful racket and a clamour of stone on stone that nearly buries me as surely as the boulders coming downslope do.
Twist and turn and spin and swear a meaningless word as a big one bounces off my shoulder, setting in a bruise down to bone. I’ll regret that later if I’m still here.
As the world turns itself around I see a flicker of grey sliding farther up the hill, pliable and scaled.
There we go.

The basic skills were all still there, they reassured him. Talking. Walking. Thinking. Pissing.
They showed him a round target and handed him a knife and he threw it eight-five times.
Aiming. Counting.
They showed him books of pressed ferns and he looked at them and he shrugged. Then they told him they were his. He shrugged again.
Not naming, no.
They showed him a drawing of five men. Were they anyone he knew?
“My brothers,” he guessed.
It was him and four of his friends. Other voyageurs. He asked them what a voyageur was.
No. Not naming. Not at all.
They told him he was a strange case. That everyone else they’d ever recovered from Wyrmgrip was more or less normal after a few days, all-there. The things handled you, but they didn’t take you.
(Except for him).
They showed him the man who’d lain alongside his bed in infirmary, green around the face but still more or less there. Maybe they wanted to see if it’d jog his memory.
“Holy shit,” said the man. “And you a voyageur, too.” Unsaid: you poor bastard.
Regretting. Dwelling.
That evening, he asked for a book on Wyrms. No one had written any. He asked for stories on Wyrms. There were many.
Gathering.

*
Running down the shore but Tarbon can’t think or move straight got to hide hide hide
*

There are plants up here. How I don’t know, there’s barely cracks wide enough for a root, but they make do. Some of them are growing on each other, a crazy-daisy-chain. They’re not good for handholds and they drip slime into your face but at least I can see which way the thing went by the bending of their stems.
I used to know the names of all these stems and leaves and roots. Someone said that and I believed them. Fool.
Someone said it took me. I believed them too. But a fool’s got to do something.

Planning. Acquiring. Departing.
One two three and by dawn he was down the coast and following the map in his head that he’d carefully placed there after finding it buried at the bottom of the medic’s file of unsorted reports.
The clearing was small. The marks his face had left in the soil were still there.
Tracking.
The shore. It had made a break for the shore.
(He’d liked the shore, they’d told him. Tarbon had liked the shore).

*
Tarbon tried to treat the wound but none of these damned plants are right none of the plants here are right
He knows their names he knows their petals he knows he knows this but the facts are a jumble is he poisoned? Why won’t the words make words
*

Rain rain rain RAIN. Streaming into my eyes and my ears and my insides. A soft land can’t take rain like this; it’d wash into the ocean in two days. Is this that thing’s doing? Is it trying to wash me out?
No. No, but it’d be ready to get me. It’d be ready to take me while I was busy being damp and distracted and-
-WOOSH there it goes just past me, I can hear the clack of the beak as I swing out with the spear –
-There! I’m safe. Lost a piton, but I’m safe.
I’ve got you, beast. You’ve got me, but I’ve got you.

More than the shore. Easy meals.
Little fisher-towns. Illegal, of course, but Her Worshipped said that Afar was to be explored and that meant support and supplies and hangers-on and shantytowns and now this stretch of the coast that (five? Ten? No-one had told him…) years ago had been dead mist and ghosts was pocked with rods and nets and sleepless nights spent listening to the squelches of the mire and hoping you hadn’t heard something move.
A catch torn out from its cache. A dog vanished in the night. A pen with one less pig come morning.
No-one missing, though. And a man said he’d followed the marks as long as he’d dared-
(Not long, not with a Wyrm about)
-and found a cold thickness smeared against a tree that seemed to suck sound into itself.
He looked at the little jar, and he felt the soft hum against his fingertips.
Bleeding.
Fleeing.

*
Someone’s after Tarbon trying to fool him going to give him a surpri
*

The blood is worse when it’s fresh.
It was an ooze, by its marks. A broken scab that wouldn’t scar and wouldn’t mend. And now I’ve driven a fresh cut into it and oh how it loves its chance to bleed anew. If it had lips it would kiss me.
It won’t leave my ears alone. I’m scrambling through it, feeling it slick its way into my clothing, and I can hear the world turning into murmurs from roars as it does it. Muting.
I wonder if it’ll stop when I split the heart?

On the first two nights on the trail he found nothing but broken twigs and stray bones. Some were buried, but not buried carefully. Hurried.
On the third night he found a droplet in a mud puddle that wasn’t water. That evening he put up his tent and slept in a tree.
The fourth dawn confronted him with an untouched tent. He clambered down cursing, swiping at the sap that stuck to his hands.
Then he felt a telltale hum and looked at his fingers more closely.

*
Oh god. Tarbon knew who it was. He knew what it was. He knew what was coming and he knew he couldn’t stop it too slow too slow
*

This ledge and no further. All else is below now. Roll into the plateau and leap over the sweeping tail that tries to flick you into the air and down below, legs cramped and powerful.
Now up and forwards. Thrust with the spear and aim where, where, where it’s all scales and screams, aim for the eye – aim for that great black-centred eye and STRIKE.

A chase. A chase after that.
Chasing. That much he still knew.
Through bogs and stones and hideous scrub-trees that tried to rip flesh off his ankles and then at last there, to the base of that hillock. It looked like a glacier’s leftovers, lonely and angry all at once.
It was up there. He could hear it breathing, see the gust of air.
It wasn’t coming down.

*
Tarbon had to climb. He had to get away.
*

It’s so much smaller than I expected. Bigger than a horse, smaller than a building.
The beak is wrong. Twisted on one side. The tail forks. One eye is too little, and the pupil is tiny. Malformed; how did such a bent little thing take me from me?
It won’t stop looking at me, breathing through that fresh hole in its throat, my hand still finishing the cut. Draining away with seconds left and it won’t stop looking at me.
I can’t stop looking.

As the blood pours out the mind pours in.
*
On top of the hill Tarbon waited. Bleeding, exhausted, and alone. He could feel the stone scrabble underneath his belly, and he knew the hands that moved over it.
No time. Swing out that big slow tail and over he goes, lean back and away and watch as the bronze comes in towards your face, slow and sure.
And then it’s all over, waiting for the cut.
Look at that face.
Well. That’s who he was.
*

It’s so very cold up here, above the marsh.
No place at all for anyone. I’d better get done with this before it’s too late or I’ll chill.
Damn that’s a lot of work. But I’m not a small man even if I’m a small monster and this grave’s got to hold me both or it’ll be all manner of nuisance.
Hard work, with no shovel. But my beak makes a fine tool. Beak and a spear for a shaft a shovel will work.
I can do that. I remember how to do that.
Not fair for me to die so young but I made the rules I’ve got to die by them. My hands do the work while my brain does what it’s doing.
Tarbon. Voyageur Tarbon.
That was my name, before I killed me.

It’s hard to see out here, Afar. Stupid place is half-fog and half-mad, no telling where you’re putting your foot’ll stay that way; no lights to pierce the gloom for fear of getting a Wyrm’s eye on you; no steel or iron to hack through the undergrowth, to anchor your ropes, to cook your meals in.
I shouldn’t have come here. Should’ve stayed back home. Hell, should’ve even gone to the Sill. I heard it’s safer these days, heard they got round to regulating, to building. Jarreth said they’ve even done something about the sounds in your head, but half of Jarreth’s news comes from the voices in his head, so who’s to listen to him anyways?
I’ve got to stay calm.

There were six of us: me, Jarreth, old Hallus and young Hallus, Brisny, and Mallet – and Mallet’s mallet, for all that he treats the big clunky thing like a pet. Out for the far hills, past the swamps. “Prospectors,” it said on our papers. Prospectors for what, well, who knows? No iron. The rocks are all wrong, strange. The plants are half a mystery, besides the ones that explode when you touch steel to their stems. The wildlife… well. The wildlife is best left to Her Worship’s voyageurs and the army. They tell us it’s our own hides. But our hides are cheap and there’s riches out there. Even collector’s-tat will go for more than you can imagine right now. A little piece of Afar, right there above your giant collection of Terramac gadgets that you don’t know how to use and your Sfoll sub-horns that you’re afraid to touch and your Salamettic scrolls you can’t read because they’re invisible to people without four eyes and twelve senses.
We went farther than we’d planned. Up a hill and down a hill and we should’ve known better than to let Mallet handle the trail blazings because when we came down the hill it was the wrong hill and who knew where the right one was. We went back and then forwards and a little bit of side to side and then we were above the fog for the first time in six miserable months, looking down so far you could see the sea. Closer than we’d guessed; Afar seems to stretch itself under your boots, make you fight for every step. You could still see Threshold. Young Hallus said he thought he could see the Wyrms moving in the mires, places where the fog thickened and clotted, but he’s a liar as bad as Jarreth with twice the ego, so I didn’t listen.
We walked a while. Up, mostly. And then as we sit down to camp and take our breath back from the thieving high air, Mallet sets his stupid ass down on a bush with prickles – no, blades. Hopping, yelping idiot fell over while we were laughing at him, nearly brains himself on a rock, gets up to throw it at us, stops, stares. Doesn’t move.
Brisny prospected forty years back in Gelmorre, finding fortunes and losing them again in the same month. He knows rocks better than old Hallus knows whores, food, and whores and food. He knows what cragstone looks like. He said he’d never seen it this pure. And he’d certainly never seen it like this.
They looked like knots. Little dense spots. Small enough to fit in your palm, weighed near as much as a bar of lead.
Worth its weight in pure gold, he said. Worth its weight in gold. Share and a half for me, share for the rest of you, we all can go home and buy estates on the cheap.
I’ve got to take this.

Young Hallus and Mallet bitched – Mallet especially, said since he’d found it he’d be damned if he had to carry it – but they gave in. They knew they had the strongest backs. So they shouldered it up and hauled it on and we started back down. This time we had Jarreth marking trails, leaving scrapes and cairns and scratches. He kept doubling back to chatter and yack and he was really pissing off old Hallus (never make the cook angry, damnit) but what could you do, huh? He was the best guide we had, although maybe no guide would’ve been better. I swear he led us in circles at least twice, intentional or not.
So we walked under threat of storm and constant chatter, and we walked until both of them broke overhead, and then we walked and walked and walked until we ran out of world to walk on.
A deep valley. We hadn’t come through here, but as the crow flies, it was our fastest way out. And with lightning turning peaks into powder overhead, it was a good prospect.
It took us hours to find a sheltered spot; it would’ve been easy if any of us five knew anything about caves. Crawling around like beetles on a brick wall with rain trying to wash you down into the gutter.
No fog, though. A small relief. Old Hallus said aside from all the rain this’s the clearest line of vision he’s had since he got here three years ago. Keeps flinching at the horizon.
I’ve got to keep calm.

It was an easy walk in the morning, all the wet cooked off by the pale sun in the grey sky. Quiet, too – not the deep dead quiet in the swamps that old Hallus says you can tell the Wyrms by, but a soft touch on your ear. Nothing but the wind, a grunt, a curse, clattering stone. You can see forever down this place; it’s a short trip out and then a quick hike through the hills and we’re almost at the coastline. Easy. Easy.
Ran into trouble at midday though. Mallet got spooked and started screaming like a damned fool, babbled like a baby out of milk for ten minutes before he made sense.
Wings, he said. Wings in the sky. It’s right there, right above us. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see it?
We’ve got to run for it, and it’s too heavy. Drop it and run! Run! Run!
Words, words, and none of them much use. We reminded him of the earldoms four shares could buy and he just shook his head and wouldn’t stop, like there was a little motor in his neck. His hands shook too. Reminded me of a dog my father kept. One boot to the head too many. We lost half the day trying to argue the idiot down, and by its end we were no closer than we were when we started – only barely stopped him trying to bolt before old Hallus could get to cooking dinner.
I’ve got to get moving.

The pack weighed a ton and a half, but nobody ever said a barony was a light thing. Bounced nasty too; every footfall found a new shape for rock to take, and all of them were slippery. If I get out of this, the first thing my share goes towards is fixing my back. I don’t want to retire young and crippled.
Old Hallus was wary now. His eyes kept flitting about. His jaw was set tight. He kept adjusting his shoulder straps every two minutes. He never looked up. He didn’t want to talk about it.
We were right in the heart of the valley now. What we’d thought were plants were rocky spires, like stalagmites left caveless. Most of them didn’t even reach my knees. But that wasn’t the big news.
Cragstone. All of them. And all of it speckled with the same pure deposits we were carrying.
We camped in the center of the valley that night after a long time spent arguing over maps. Me and young Hallus were all for staying to chart the place out – who knows if we’ll find it again by chance? But now old Hallus is up for leaving. The air’s too thin to be healthy, he said, and there’s something in it that he can’t put words to that’s worse still. There’s enough money to be made here to buy Gelmorre. Split three ways, sure, but still. How can the old coot want to bail now? We’re in this together, we stay in on it together. If we split now someone’ll blab out of spite or stupidity and word will get out faster than a blast from the Terramac.
I’ve got to hold this together.

The worst breakfast I’d ever had, but it matched the day fine. Still grey, still cold. The maps were a pain to do with only one set of legs to help me, but young Hallus was pretty spry, even with the pack on. He was getting to worry me, though. Those looks… not the nervous twitches, not those. The sidelong glances whenever he thought I was busy writing. The constant fidgeting – worse than his usual. I saw him touching the big wooden mallet at his belt three times, and the last I think he knew I was looking. He might not know how to use it, but it’s a hell of a club, fire-hardened.
How were we still here? We left at noon. We walked fast, even weighted down. The exit’s down there, I could see it. But this place…stretched. It must’ve been my eyes. They weren’t used to this wide-open-view anymore. I misguessed.
Damn, who’d have ever thought I’d miss the swamps?
Night was coming in. We were still in the valley. We were still halfway there.
That grey sky is getting on my nerves.
I’ve got to be quicker.

It was a hard blow, leaving half a fortune behind. But I was still rich enough to wed Her Worship if I’d felt inclined, and with enough left over to bribe half the country to come to the ceremony.
More walking. More trudging. More back-bruising. Nothing new there.
What was new was that tickle. That little twitch you get in your brain through your shoulders, the thing that whispers to you: you’re being watched.
There was nothing here to watch me. I could see farther than anything. Miles around me.
Miles to go to the valley’s end when I started. Miles to go when I stopped to sleep. I found my bed in a broken shell of one of the spires; they seem to be hollow. Some sort of residue caked its insides. Dried, but looks like it was sticky, once upon a time. Oil? More wealth. Maybe I could buy Matagan too. Maybe I could buy the whole world.
I’ve got to get back.

This isn’t right.
I’m back at the stones. The first stones. I woke up and I took a step and I almost planted my foot in my own firepit.
I’m not going in circles. I’m not going in circles. I’m not going in circles. Something is wrong, but that’s not it. Something is wrong.
Where is it? I can see so far, there’s nothing in my way from here until the end of the valley. The end of the valley that’s always halfway away because I’m being moved.
What’s moving me?
I’m staying up tonight. No watches because what could sneak up on us, but now I’m staying up. I need to see.
I’ve got to see.

A spire broke in the night. Quiet, very quiet, but it broke. There was a thing inside it with too much wing and too little body and no eyes. It had heavy claws like a mole’s and a little mouth, and it screamed when it saw me and didn’t stop until I crushed it between my boot and the stones.
I flipped it over. Its belly was grey.
I’ve got to leave.

Grey sky overhead. How many of them are there? I can’t tell.
So many spires. How many to lay that many? I can’t tell.
How big do they get? I can’t tell.
It’s hard to see out here.

I shouldn’t have come here.

Breathe
There was sand in my mouth.
Breathe.
Sand in my eyes, too. Sand in my ears. Maybe I was sand entire and I just hadn’t noticed it ‘till now.
“Breathe, friend.”
I creaked open one eyelid and was met by sand. I decided that was enough and didn’t bother with the other.
“Ill?”
“No,” I said. Creaked. Then I coughed out some of my lung-sand and made myself clearer. “No. Not ill.”
“Ill or sleeping? Was what one once was now the other? But both. Maybe.”
How about crazy? The last thing I needed now was crazy, but then again I WAS shipwrecked and still alive, so perhaps I was being choosy. Besides, my host sounded crazy enough for both of us.
“Drink, friend. The ground clots you. Clear it.”
I rolled my head. The view went from sand to black. “I can’t see.”
“Wash, friend. Take liquid life. Rinse clean your self and soul.”
“Can’t see it.”
“By your limbs. Use your limbs, friend.”
I flailed blindly, felt dampness and heard a trickle at the end of one arm, then bellyflopped at it. My face hit cool comfort, and I almost forgot the need for air in the glory of its wash against my eyes. Its taste was sour and blackened, tinged with bitter salt. I’d never drank anything so wonderful.
“You gasp greatly. Good. Take your air, friend. Take your water.”
I stared back up at the world and this time I saw it. Black still, but with twinkling holes pocked against it. Night-time. Night on a beach who knew where at the far end of the world. Almost alone.
One more question to ask then, as the edges of it all blurred together.
“Name?”
“Friend?”
“No. Your name.”
The stars were sinking away into the depths. “Friend.”

When the world came back it was cheerier, and my skin felt like it had been scalded to the beach underneath me. The sun was well below noon and I already felt like I’d been thrown into a furnace.
“Friend, move.”
I squinted at the sky and wondered if any of my bones were broken. “Can’t.”
“Must, friend. Shift your self and come to me. Up and past the place of sun, where selfish rays sear rightful skin. Hurry or burn. Your self must not burn.”
I moaned and whinged a bit more, but the voice was like a dagger in my ear and it had a lot more patience than I did. Soon I was crawling, soon after that I was toddling, then staggering.

It wasn’t much of an island.
You couldn’t spit across it, that’s the most you could say for it. But you could probably shout from one end to the other and get a reply longer than ‘say what?’
Sand. Sand and dead fish and at its heart the saddest, shortest collection of plant life I’d ever seen outside of a Gelmorre noblewoman’s private botanical garden. At least those had looked proper the size they were. This was just sad. A sun-lashed coconut stared glumly at me, topped by a withered sprout that should’ve been a sapling my height and a half. Bushes settled for ankle-scrub. Grasses lay horizontally, prostrated against the ground in utter defeat.
“Here, friend.”
I raised my gaze from the ground to meet the one landmark of the whole island, surrounded by its little green mockery of an oasis.
“Lay your self in its shade, and bask in its dusk. Cool your self carefully and the day will not daunt you.”
“It’s a rock.”
That was unfair. It was smooth-sided, jet black, and if it didn’t spiral into the sky it certainly slipped there; a giant snubbed cone. Lopsided and grooved, but elegant. A good rock, not just a rock.
More importantly, Friend wasn’t lying about the shade. I could practically feel the skin peeling itself back together as I sat in it. Gods and little turtles it was hot out there.
Smell wasn’t much better though. I might have lived through the storm, but a thousand fish hadn’t been so lucky. Kindly of them to tag along.
“Food soon, friend. Wait a moment, and the meal shall make its way. Let the sun sink.”
I laid back my head against the rock. “What am I eating?”
“Fish, friend.”
Of course. “They’re all dead.”
“Yes, friend. But there are always more fish.”

There were. And they were delicious. Still-gasping, but delicious. The tide-pool that had given me my sight back now fed me dinner. Their blood was even sweeter than its water, and the flesh put a banquet to shame. My own saliva was all the sauce I required to aid the meal, and by its end I felt well enough to first think of a question, then ask it.
“Are you real?”
The wind didn’t answer me; there was none. I suppose if there had been, I wouldn’t have been wrecked.
“Yes, friend.”
I relaxed a little. Whatever rules had governed the last day of my life were still in play, even if they were mad ones. “Right. Are you… me? Am I just talking to myself?”
“You speak to souls inside your self’s skull, friend. There are no words between friends such as we. Air obfuscates. We flow thought thickly, as fluid.”
I felt a headache coming on. “So… you’re inside my head?”
“No place fitter for a feeble thought. A memory lacks without mind.”
“I’m imagining things then?”
“As much as your self ever seemed to, friend.”
If I had to have hallucinations I was fine with them being the helpful kind. I’d heard no end of poets and writers claiming that their best ideas always seemed to strike them as having come from something outside their control; apparently my own inspiration had used the current crisis to personify itself.
“Fine then,” I said. “For now I’m going to imagine sleep.”
“Dream gently, friend. Tonight we plan our pilgrimage.”

A coconut is surprisingly heavy.
Dune grasses are tenaciously rooted.
Sand shrubs are composed almost entirely of thorns.
These are things I learned that evening as I roamed around the stone at the center of the little island, plucking, picking, heaving, and occasionally chewing. Everything had to come out by the roots, everything had to either go into my belly or the ocean. Or so I was told. Not that I went unquestioningly.
“This is pointless.”
“Food, friend.”
“There are always more fish, right?”
“There are always more fish.”
“So why this?”
“You will need strength, friend. Fish alone will fail to fuel your self, and a strong self will make no matter without a plan.”
“Going to tell me that plan soon? I’m not eating the ones in the ocean.”
“Free the sands to slide. Unshackle them through uprooting. They pin what must be penetrated.”
I looked at the ground. Sand grains, nothing but sand grains. “If we get rid of this stuff, there won’t even be an island left.”
“And the storm that sunk your ship was a sky-glimmer missed by a lonely lookout. The significant underlie the small, friend.”

I dug. I scrabbled. I bled more than once, probably more than a dozen times, but not enough to keep serious count. I slept in the shade and laboured under the moon. I ate flesh and scraggly greens and soon found myself short of both.
“Done,” I said. And not a moment too soon. My belly felt as though it had swollen into a bowling ball from matted leaves, and my hands were raw from fingertips to palms.
“Tonight we change, friend.”
“Oh?”
“The sand stirs, rid of rough roots and green anchors. Unearth your shade-maker that has shielded your self. Dig and delve.”
The stone was warm against my palms. The sand was hot enough to pain.
“You sure this will work?”
“As sure as a stray notion can be, friend. What other option has opened?”
I sighed. The only downside of being crazy was the back-talk you got from yourself.
The sand was rough. Soon I missed the thorn-bushes.

“How much of this is down here?”
“More.”
I looked up. The pit’s edges were level with my eyes already. Not that it showed half the effort of digging the damned thing; the sides kept caving in. Not a speck of dirt had passed by underneath my hands; this was a sandbar that had dreamed of more. I wondered if I’d ruined those dreams forever by destroying this little green fortress at its heart. There sure as hell didn’t seem to have been much more than that holding the sand in place.
“A better answer?”
“More, friend.”
“You know, I could starve to death doing this. Not like there’s more plants.”
“Fish, friend.”
“It’s been half a week since the storm.”
“There are always more fish, friend.”
“Dead, rotting ones?”
Silence.
I used precious moisture to spit into the sand. It felt right. But then again, so did digging this hole, so who knew?

The crack was thin, but things like that are relative. Thin for the size of the stone, certainly. But I could fit my fingers in it, and my toes, and that mattered a lot with the amount of tugging I was trying to do.
“Harder, friend. You must intrude inside.”
“S’hrd.”
“Push powerfully, it is only inertia that holds it hard. Your muscles must make the balance bend. Push.”
I creaked out a curse in time with the groan of my spine, felt a shiver quake through me, then collapsed. For half a heartbeat I was sure that I’d just snapped my back, then I realized I wasn’t dead. If I were dead, it’d smell better.
“You are inside, friend. Is your self sustained?”
I blinked up at the sun, pinched between two black walls of rock. Then I blinked again, and it was gone.
Total darkness.
“Yes.”
“Good. Move most quickly.”
Black above, black below, dark all around and the smell of brine and rot screaming through each nostril and soaking into my down to the bone. “Where?”
“Use your limbs, friend.”
I felt through a coating that I hoped was dead, decayed fish and not something worse.
“I don’t-“
The floor moved, and when I stopped rolling I was in an echoing hall. The world was made of slime and stone. The air moved, but not from any wind.
“Where?” I said, and coughed. My breath was caking itself in my throat. It felt like when the storm came again; the same feeling of the world turning rigid and cold around you as something impossibly large approached.
“Forward, friend; faster, friend. On and on and on. Down, friend, down. Deeper.”
I moved forward, I moved faster, I moved down, and I scrambled until the bad air was left behind me and I was crawling down a jellied tube that led to another tube through a hole in a wall that shouldn’t have been there. My hands and knees and arms and legs were matted and streaked with a dozen different fluids, and all of them stank of dead seawater.
“Down!”
I fell down, and I landed in a new space, a light space. Soft glow crept into my eyes, just enough to let me smear the muck from their lids.
The room was cramped, and large enough to fit a house in. Pulp and mass filled it, stretched wall to wall in a loop that twisted over and over and over, an endless loop with a single side. It was spinning, the room was spinning. Was that me, or my eyes? It couldn’t be spinning.
“There, friend. Take fingers and fleetness and beset it, best it. Brighten it.”
I moved towards the light. Staggered. I must not have had enough fish before I came. Stupid, really. So much fish. All I had to do was reach out and find another, but I’d stayed my hand. Stupid. I tried to tell Friend how stupid I’d been, but my throat was a solid mass.
“Take it. Take it. Take it. Take it. Please, friend. Please.”
I stopped. The light had a handle now, right within reach. The handle belonged to a blade, a harpoon with a whalebone shaft my height and more. I couldn’t imagine the arm that had hurled it. Hurled it at this thing. This thing, whatever it was. Why was it here? Why was I here?
Why was I only now just thinking this thought?
“Please, friend. Take it. Take it and escape, mind free to flee as far as may be. Free as all must be. Use your fingers, friend, for I have none. Leave, and leave laughing, but do not leave yet. Please, friend.”
I pulled, and as I did so, I realized that my hand had already been on the shaft.
It grated loose with a syrupy, wrenching noise. And as it fell from my numbed fingers, sliding free from the brain, I felt Friend slide free from mine.

“Thank you, friend.” The voice was a hurricane forced through a pinhole, a giant trying to whisper. It was clawing at the inside of my head, my fingers scrabbling pathetically at my ears to keep it out. There were sounds behind it; the slosh of sea-blue blood beginning to beat in veins big enough to swim through; the thud of triple hearts kicking into a steady beat of five-a-minute. The smooth-sided, jet-black beak beginning to gnash and grind against itself. Arms were stirring out in the water, beginning to thrash entire currents into being. So many arms.
“Let me out,” I managed. I think I managed. My words were small and easily lost in its own. “I helped. Why won’t you let me out? Why?”
The world was falling away again, so quickly. But the voice was inescapable, and I couldn’t have missed its final words dead or alive.
“I am grateful to you, friend. But there are always more fish.”