compulsion

Myghal had folded a napkin into an imperfect aeroplane with lopsided wings and trailing tail. It did not seem aeronautically feasible: when he launched it, it wobbled across perhaps an inch of air and then gracelessly dropped over the mezzanine rail onto dance floor below, where it quickly disappeared beneath the roil and churn of moving bodies pressed closely together. There would be no survivors.

"Littering," Ilja said. "Disgusting habit. I think that's why you never made Warrior."

Myghal shot him a dirty look. "Yeah," he said. "That's why."

"It's as good an explanation as ever we'll get. Hierophants don't have to justify themselves."

"Come to mention: where is your Hierophant?"

"Doing amphetamines in the bathroom," Ilja said. "You know they're part of standard military packs these days? I don't know what they'll think of next." Ragnar's sister had overdosed in clinical trials. He had mentioned it at dinner last week – or had it been the week before? The days were collapsing in on top of one another, a cataclysmic concession to the weight of the sky and stars overhead. Ilja said, "We're truly living in an age of innovation."

"He's still not speaking to you," said Uriasz, quite astutely. Ilja had forgotten he was there. These lights did him all sorts of terrible favours: someone so sharp worked best when the lights roved thus, when the shadows pulsed and shifted. It did interesting things to the hollows in his throat, the angles beneath his eyes.

"I haven't particularly," Ilja said, "tried to speak to him."

Myghal said, quite distractedly, "amphetamines, you say?"

Khalore was coming up the stairs, looking utterly focused on her task. She was carrying a fresh round of drinks. She distributed them assiduously – a pint for Myghal, a pint for Ilja, a pint for herself, and a cluster of shots – and said, distractedly, "you shouldn't litter, Myghie."

"I did tell him, Lore," Ilja said, and Khalore nodded vigorously in agreement with her Chariot.

Myghal, leaning heavily on the railing, as if it might be the only thing in the world keeping him up, eyed them unhappily. "This," he said, gesturing to between them. "I don't like this."

Ilja laughed.

"I liked it better when you hated her," Myghal said, quite miserably.

"So did he," said Khalore, quite cheerfully, raising a shot. "Prost!"

There was a single shotglass left sitting on the tray afterwards, lonely and waiting for Ina to deign to accept it, but Ina was away: Ilja had caught sight of her here and there in the tangle of bodies, the braided hair and the black scars, but he had lost her again, quite quickly, as ever he did. She was a menace, was their Inanna: the first night they had gone out thus, like they were any group of friends in their early adulthood, straddling the cusp of maturity and adolescence, she had gasped to see the tangle of strings and fled home within the first hour. Now, she rather resembled, Ilja thought, a black widow in the midst of a perfectly whittled web: these were her strings, and she played them sweetly. Soldiers who bothered her were banished with a single gesture of her fingers, and those she had tempted before were tempted again, ceaselessly, flies tumbling over one another to drown in honey.

She was dancing close with Yves, the blonde comrade with the hardened face, like a version of Pekka that had been beaten about the face as a child, and throwing her hair back like a girl with far fewer worries than she possessed. Ilja wondered if this made him one of very many staring eyes, to watch her so closely, and if it was the curse which made him watch.

He was as bad as Zoran these days. No better, surely.

Uriasz said, "nice to see her happy."

It certainly would be.

Somewhere across the city, the clock tower was tolling two. The gates to the ghetto had long been locked – they may have been Warriors, but they were still Kur, and even if they had been permitted to avoid curfew, Ilja privately thought that they would not have, so much comfort was there to be found among their fellow sinners – and it would be dawn before they quite knew it. The night was cold and bright, though the stars were not so clear here as they had been in Ganzir. He couldn't tell if the constellations were the same. He would have to ask Inanna.

Ilja said, "I have to head home early. Seeing the chancellor tomorrow."

Khalore said, "Uri, let's not leave Ina lonely."

Myghal said, "should I tell Czarnecki you were looking for him?"

Ilja downed his pint, mostly to avoid the question, and when he could avoid it no longer, he could only say, simply, "I don't think I am."

occhiolism (n.) a sudden realisation of the smallness of your perspective

He had never seen water go so far before. This lake seemed entirely without end: it extended into the embrace of a fog, long grey tendrils stroking the waves like the face of a loved one, and stretched out in a great crescent around the bay, wide and sweeping as a smile. It was endless. It went on, quite forever. And the princess's voice was quite burdened by a childish sort of wonder when she spoke.

Asenath said, "Oh, you can see Irij."

Sanav had been quite certain that he couldn't see anything, but Asenath was good enough to point it out to him: a long black shape against the horizon, lying so low against the edge of the water that one could be quite forgiven for assuming it was only a trick of the eye that made one imagine peaks and valleys in its silhouette. There was a thin haze of something like smoke hanging over it all, which shrouded its edges and softened them, blunted them, until it seemed more a mirage than a city.

Asenath said, "I've never seen it before."

Lorencio and his men were hard at work excavating the angular shape of an abandoned boat jutting from the sands. They had brought their own, of course, but another couldn't hurt, and Lorencio was curious – how long had it lain thus, beached thus? Its bow pointed towards the mists. Towards Irij. Towards a world empty of druj and tagma, if Kinga could be believed, and Sanav did believe her. Despite himself, he believed her. They had left their druj behind them when they had fled, and seemed to care little what would be done to them in the wake of all they had wrought. So no tagma, and no druj.

There would be far worse things, he thought, waiting for them there. They would miss the druj, perhaps.

Asenath said, "when we arrived here, we burned our boats."

Sanav said, "I thought that was just an expression."

"No," said Asenath. "We put them out to water, and cremated them, and we watched them sink. The water turned black with ash. We promised we would never return."

Sanav said, "never?"

"We were happy here," Asenath said. "Our people were happy here."

Her face darkened.

"And then they sent the druj," she said.

She shook her head, and turned away from the sight of her once-and-never homeland, to look back at the dunes they had scrambled down towards the beaches. There were great wounds in the sand where their boots had lost purchase. It had felt, for the first time in a great many days, like they were not being pursued.

They could afford to trip over themselves. Indeed, Kane and Reiko and Evanne and Vsevolod had stripped down to their undershirts and waded knee-high into the water to wash themselves of the forest's strange scent. The water was salty, Evanne had reported back. It stung the eyes, and the wounds on her face, and there were large dark shapes moving amidst the tide a little further from shore, so Tzeitel was gathering driftwood for a fire as though it might possibly hold horrors at bay.

And beyond it all, the place they called Irij: Irr-izh, the sound long and soft and sibillant, like something hissed. The place of the birds, Asenath had said: it had been named for the swifts which swarmed overhead in the summertime, shrieking their arrival.

How wonderful to see home, Sanav thought, how terrible it was here.

They could still turn back. He said as much to Asenath now: "we can still turn back."

The hand on the pocketwatch she clutched so fervently juddered forward a single step, and then another. It was nearly noon. Time flowed forward.

Asenath said, "I cannot, in good conscience, let you believe that, Sanav."

pause

So much of their lives now were spent waiting. It didn't suit him. His knee bounced and his veins jumped and he kept taking off his glasses and cleaning them and putting them back on again. They were new – military funded, he thought, like his very vision was weaponry of a sort – and he was starting to wonder if perhaps Illéa had not been all soft shapes and clouded patinas of light, as he remembered it, as it came whispering to him in the night. Perhaps he had just needed his glasses.

He had believed himself the only Kur in the whole place – ministers and aides gave him a wide berth and an occasional wary look – but when the receptionist turned in her chair he could see the red cloth knotted around the sleeve of her dress and knew he was not along. She had noted him as well: gold eyes flickered over and across and away. She was avoiding trouble. She was right to.

He stood up, and went over to her.

"Nirari."

"Schovajsa."

She was busying herself with nothing at all: hands on papers, eyes on the desk. There was a wireless radio sitting on the counter that she didn't seem to be allowed to switch on. He said, "I didn't think you'd know who I am."

"You're a Warrior." Irony dripped from her voice. "You're famous."

He should have liked that a bit more than he did. A counsellor emerged from the chancellor's office, and stared at him, and nearly tripped down the stairs. He was wearing his mourning band exactly as they had been taught, ends tucked neatly into one another, shining black from a crisp white shirt that, too, had been purchased for him by the armed forces.

He took off his glasses, and cleaned them, and put them back on again.

She said, "I'm surprised you knew who I am."

"Of course I do," he said. "Your sister wouldn't shut up about you at the Academy. Any of you. Pekka either, for that case."

Her hands tightened. He remembered again that Pekka had a family. She said, "oh? Which one am I, then?"

"Sherida," he said, "or – "

"Yes," she said, "I'm Sherida."

She looked slightly pleased that he had got this right. He did not point out that her name was prominently printed on the pencil holder that took up the leftmost corner of her desk. She looked pleased, and she looked like Inanna had once looked: she had very smooth brown skin without scars beneath her eyes, and wide gold eyes that were not bloodshot, and artfully tousled black, black, black hair, though she wore hers cropped boyishly short as though she had made the ill-advised move of taking style advice from Pekka.

"You have three Warrior stipends coming in," Ilja said. "How come you're working here?"

Sherida's gaze bored into him. She said, "I like it here."

He laughed. She didn't seem to have been joking. She had a miraculous poker face that was quite unlike Inanna's – Ina, who was always so quick with her face and her smile and those gold eyes of hers, who could never hide her tears or her joy or how hollow it had all become.

Ilja nodded towards the door. "What's he like?"

"The chancellor?"

Ilja said, "I've never met him before."

She said, "he's a politician, Schovajsa. Very charismatic – utterly lovely."

"And?"

"Totally dead behind the eyes," Sherida said, "but he gives me two hours for lunch and the day off for Fall, so I won't hold it against him."

Ilja said, "sounds cushier than our gig."

"Yes," Sherida said, quite unsympathetically. "Well. All for a good cause."

Ilja said, "I think so."

He had meant it to be funny – I think so – but it came out sounding slightly pensive, slightly lost. I think so. I'm not here. I'm not sleeping. I'm not sure. I think so.

Sherida abruptly held up a finger, and picked up the phone beside her. It had not rung, and she dialled no number. She just started speaking. "Yes, sir," she said, "I quite understand, sir. He's here. Yes. I'll tell him."

She set down the phone sharply – it barked out a jangling, dissonant tone as she did so – and looked at Ilja very hard again. "Your appointment has been delayed," she informed him, standing up from her chair and slinging her coat over her arm. "You'll have to come back tomorrow."

Ilja wilted. He could not help but stare at the door to the chancellor's office, which remained resolutely shut despite his gaze.

"He's very busy," Sherida said, as if she had read his mind.

"I'm one of four Warriors," said Ilja, and oh, those words had sharp edges. He could practically feel his mouth filling up with blood, just to pronounce the shape of it: four. "He can't find ten minutes?"

"He's very busy."

Ilja shrugged, and picked up his jacket, and his bag, and put the summons back into his pocket as carefully as he could manage.

Sherida came around the edge of the desk. She was holding her coat very tightly. She was taller than Inanna, thinner. "You Warriors all call each other siblings."

"Sometimes," said Ilja, and found that it was true when he said it. He could tick it off in his head: Kinga, yes, his sister, Zoran, no, never, Nerezza, no, Khalore, yes, of course.

"Then you've been an exceptionally absent brother for a very many years," Sherida said. "Come. Your redemption starts now: you can get me lunch. I have two hours."

Ilja said, skeptically, "this place doesn't pay you enough to buy your own?"

"No," she said. "Like you said. We're on stipends."

aimonomia (n.) a fear of learning "why"

The pocket watch she had taken from her father's room had stopped working. Mainyu bound it to a single moment in which it tried in vain to click forward, and only bounced back to the moment prior, a tiny loop of a single second.

They said that, when the Schreaves had first arrived on Illéa, they had travelled through this forest for a day while a thousand passed. They had buried their dead as they went and they had buried so many in that day-of-a-thousand-days, the ashavanas and their apprentices and their acolytes, and Asenath had convinced herself, over the many long years, that it was hence that the druj sprang up like daemons of old: some strange monstrous birth of dead and dying magic, the last remnants of the curse-stuff whence xrafstars and druj alike might burst forward and devour all that lay before them.

It had been her first request of Oroitz: go out, and find them, and show me where they lie.

They had been skeletons, bound in robes and the white death-shroud of the old Kur empire, and they had been dead, dead, dead. That had been before the cremations; Illéa had not yet begun to burn its dead. Swietłana had been the one to call for it, and well did Asenath know the story: how her mother had come to the old king, and knelt, and told them that their dead would be as ammunition if war ever arrived on Illéa, and Priscus, spotting her, had known what she could be. So they had begun the bonfires. Asenath had always wondered at it, even as she had pried apart druj in her dissections and found the remnants of what they had once been: teeth embedded in their guts like shrapnel, bone fragments woven into their flesh as the stitches of a seam, rolling eyes amongst their ichor-black innards that blinked and wept.

Not human. Not anymore. Not in any way that mattered.

Her eyes snagged on the xrafstars on the other side of the clearing.

Not in any way that mattered.

It was to this Priscus had gifted all he had, unto nothingness; it was to this that Silas had gone, quite without understanding what it was to initiate and why the Schreaves always paid tithe to the Radiance. Like the heroes of old, she thought, who tied maidens to rocks as a sacrifice to appease the monsters in the sea and the gods in the sky. Xrafstars were apart from druj and humans alike. They calcified with it.

She said, "he's probably dead by now, is he not?"

"No," said Reiko, fiercely, defensively.

"Probably," said Death, and she almost loved him for it.

And Death had departed her father to join her on this journey, and so death had probably taken him while she was gone. Kasimira had not wept, when she let her daughter go, even though she had known what it had meant: Oroitz had kept Aviram's death at bay for all the time he had remained at his king's side, and now he was gone, and that meant Asenath would return to a bonfire and ash on the air. Her mother would be a Kasimira no longer, and a widow merely, and what did that mean for all upon which she had spent her life? If the widow was even left alive. The watch juddered again, unsteadily.

All to keep alive the wretched thing they called Kunegunda. She should have let Kane kill her, as she knew he longed to do. She had broken her promise, and she had transformed without permission, and Asenath should have asked for her head. Oroitz had been so wasted sustaining her thus: her only worth was in her memory, and her knowledge of the world into which they now ventured and the land they had left behind. They could manage without, Asenath thought viciously: if they needed to, they could manage without.

She had the Sun, after all. If she needed the Sun, she had it – and Reiko was here, and Reiko was willing. Reiko would burn for Asenath, if Asenath needed them to, and Asenath would burn anything at all to retrieve her Silas from the place he had gone.

And this second kept going. It kept going as the day dipped into dusk, and as the dusk stayed; it kept going as the dusk lingered, and lingered, and lingered. It kept going even as the fire died down, and the xrafstar got a hungry look in her eye; it kept going, even as Asenath slipped into a bed that was not her own, and lingered there; it kept going, even as the horses were saddled anew and forth they went into the forest, alive with unspoken malice.

midday

"You have more expensive taste than your sister."

Sherida tipped back a sip of sake. Light wicked along the black strands of her hair like starlight on broken glass. She said, "Inanna never knew how to treat herself."

She spoke about her sister, quite miserably, in the past tense.

Ilja said, "you've got that right."

They were sitting opposite the clocktower in which the chancellor's office was based, behind which lay the sacellum in which Ilja and his fellow Warriors had undergone initiation. His grey skin crawled to think of it: he had ceased to exist for several long hours. He had been as a scarf lying unravelled upon the street, and he had wondered if this was the place to which all returned in the end. Was it this place to which Azula had gone back, when his knife had finished her – all disparate threads, strewn across the palace floor?

"What was it like? Illéa?"

"Strange," Ilja said. "Normal."

She raised an eyebrow. "Which one?"

"The second," Ilja said, "which meant it was the first."

"You made friends out there," she said

Ilja thought of Reiko, and Silas, and laughed. "Oh, never."

"Why not?"

"That wasn't why we were there."

"But you lived with them for so long and they were," she said, "people. Like – full lives. Cities. A kingdom. Inanna told me – "

"Not anymore," Ilja said. Not the way they had left it. He found himself reaching for his glasses again, and stilled his hand – it was a weight on his face now, had it always been so? - and redirected his searching fingers to his pockets, where he could find his box of matches and turn them over between his fingertips instead. He didn't remember being a fidgety person before.

He took a deep breath.

"What's with the questions, Sherida?"

"As if I could ask Ina," said Sherida. "I want to understand but I don't want to..."

Her hands tightened over her implements. For lack of other action, she took another sip of sake, and Ilja did too, and took a deep breath, and wondered why he snapped so more readily at such questions – they should have been quotidian by now – when they came from a girl with gold eyes.

"You left friends out there," she said.

Ilja glanced at her.

Sherida said, "Krzysiek Szymański has been petitioning the chancellor for months now."

"He'll stop soon," Ilja said. He remembered what Jaga had told him: Krzysiek never attended the funerals of the girls he raised for the curses. He did not recognise the things that were buried as daughter or sister or cousin. "He's..." Hand through hair, stalling. Matthias weeping over the dead Jaga-thing. Kinga, illuminated by the red light of the flares overhead, telling him to go. "He doesn't mean it."

Sherida might have been thoughtful then, or she might have been more focused on her food – it was, Ilja thought, a little hard to tell. She had a stillness about her which was most unlike Inanna, and it perhaps unfair to compare them so incessantly, and yet he continued to do so with a tight feeling in his chest like compulsion. He couldn't help the thought that gnawed at his brain stem, rabid: here was a Nirari, unredeemed, and richer for it.

He said, "what do you do when you're not working, then?"

Sherida laughed drily. "I'm always working."

"I know the feeling."

She glanced up at him, startled, and laughed. "Yeah," she said, "but you don't look too busy to me right now."

"Lunch break," he said, "two hours."

"Touché."

He flipped the matches between his fingers and leaned forward, elbow on the table, hand around his mouth, toying with the words before he teased them free. "What would you have been?"

Sherida's eyes were a little paler than Ina's: the depth of colour was not quite the same. If Inanna was sunlight, Sherida was whiskey. She said, "I always thought I'd suit the Hanged Man."

"Lot to live up to," he said.

"Tower, then."

"You think that lowers the bar?"

"He didn't even make it a day, Ilja."

Ilja sat back. He was not certain if it was a cold day: he could not feel it, though it was not as if he was particularly warm either. There was a persistent chill lying under his flesh these days. The way Sherida was dressed – warm coat, thick tights – suggested that it was cool, but she had agreed to sit outside, so it couldn't be all that bad.

"So," she said, "how long do you have left?"

"Bit of a rude question," he said.

"I'm invested," she said. The street was busy: this part of town, they were not the only Kur about, and there were many people moving back and forth across the street with red crepe bound around their arms to show their allegiance. None wore it as neatly or defiantly as Sherida: with her short black hair and narrow gold eyes, he could not help but think that there was something about her that suggested imminent self-immolation. "You don't know?"

"I don't know," said Ilja.

"Zoran hasn't told you?"

"I don't think he knows."

Sherida raised an eyebrow and chased remnants of soy sauce around her plate with a forkful of fish and rice. She said, quietly, "alright."

He rolled a cigarette, and lit it; belatedly, and trying to remember how old she was, he proffered them to Sherida and was waved off with a brusque shake of the head. He did not think he would ever imagine her beyond the age of six or seven: that was always how he had imagined her, when Inanna had spoken of her. Sweet Sherida, the artist of the family. Where was that artistry now? She was a low-level bureaucrat for a nation that had taken two of her siblings into its ever-hungry maw.

She said, "those'll kill you, you know."

He chuckled, and moved his hand through the air to watch the orange path left by the glowing end of his cigarette. "Not in six years."

"Fair," she said. "And true. They fuck up your lungs, though."

Ilja said, "I don't have to worry about death marches anymore, Sher."

"So?"

"So," he said, "what am I using my lungs for?"

She gestured with her fork. Her eyes were more heavily lidded than her older sister's; it gave her an oddly serious look, even when she was being mordant thus. "They're redeploying you," she said, "ain't they?"

He had thought so. He had believed that to be the reason he was summoned to the chancellor's office. He had no intention of letting on as much. So he said, "Ina is."

Sherida sawed through another length of fish and, distractedly, said, "the border isn't safe, you know."

"That," Ilja said, "was meant to be classified."

"Doesn't take a genius. It's in all the newspapers. Kur insurrection in the hinterlands, and Ina out of town on the next train west."

Ilja was not in the habit of reading newspapers any more. "I'll take your word for it," he said.

"Well," she said, "I don't get it."

"What do you mean?"

"What's Inanna meant to do out there? She isn't a fighter."

"She isn't," Ilja agreed. "She's a Warrior."

"So you don't know either."

"It's not my job to know," he said.

Sherida looked at him for a moment as she chewed and then, as abruptly as she had earlier picked up the phone, she said, "shall I get the dessert, then?"

"You shall," said Ilja.

jouska (n.) a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

Oh, he had thought they might be used to it by now, but it still came as a fright: the things emerging from the night were dark enough that, at first, their silhouette was not clearly defined. They lumbered forward, and seemed to take up the entire world as they did.

As they advanced it became obvious that their shape was not clearly defined – their edges unformed and reformed, coalescing along ought to have been form and structure and bone as something dense like smoke, curling and uncurling like their entire being was optional and extendable.

They were mottled like a bruise, all reds and purples and blacks, and shaped like a child's idea of a sculpture, all misshapen long limbs, hands dragging, and overstretched necks with perfectly round and featureless spheres set atop.

Sanav had been on watch, and he had done his part: the whole of the camp was awake and armed by the time the first druj came into sight. Indeed, the first was stymied by a warning bolt loosed from Evanne's crossbow – oh, but only for a moment.

The arrow caught between what should have been ribs. When the faceless thing's shape rippled again, the arrow disappeared beneath folds of cloud-dense flesh. They could hear it splintering.

Kane, with a single hand gesture, ordered Reiko and the others to hold their positions. It was possible – unlikely – that these things would pass peaceably along. They had no eyes: it was possible that they had not seen them.

Reiko ignored his signal, and moved, quite silently, across the forest floor until she was no more than two paces from him, her boots planted evenly to his so that neither was closer to the threat than the other. He eyed her, but said nothing.

The druj moved through their encampment slowly, agonisingly slowly, and each footstep – they had short, stout legs that seemed to take an enormous amount of energy to move, each step taking a painful amount of time and effort – shook the leaves upon the dirt and made Kane tighten a hand, over and again, on the blade he slept beside.

The druj moved through their encampment, and were gone into the forest again. Kane waited for their shapes to dissipate back into the darkness, and then for the thunderous sound of their steps to fade, and then waited another moment for good measure. Only then, did he speak. "Is everyone alright?"

Reiko said, "why didn't they attack?"

Sanav had taken to performing his watches from aloft in the trees, fastened to the branches by his harness. He landed now, quite perfectly, but whatever faint pride or recognition might have stirred in Kane to see his cadet so adept was quite extinguished by the tagma's next words: "there are more coming this way."

"Aggressive?"

Those things had been fleeing something worse than themselves.

Sanav said, "looks like it."

His words were lost to a faint shriek in the depths of the forest. Faraway – exceptionally faint. Moving closer. Kinga had been feigning sleep beside the wagon: when he glanced in her direction, he could see the black sheen of her half-eye, eyelids but barely parted. She was paying attention.

So this would be trouble.

"Reiko," he said. "I think you should take the princess and - "

"Vsevolod can take her," Reiko said brusquely. Her boots did not move. There was dust piled up around the iron toe and the heel, as though she had ground herself into this place of the clearing, rooted herself here. He did not need to look: the Scholar had scrambled into motion.

"Not sure I trust anyone else with her."

Reiko made a resentful, irritated sound with her teeth. "Don't do that."

He glanced at her – there was a shape to her mouth, a strange twist – and any other time he might have laughed but the sounds were drawing closer and had the forest always been so dark? He said, "unsheathe your sword now. Have it ready."

She swore. The forest seemed a little brighter when her blade was in her hand: it dimly shone, like polluted quicksilver, from its wavering place as she flourished it, eye-high and ready. She was alone in that much: tagma all carried their blades casually, the point practically grazing the floor, the handle resting on their second knuckle. Kane refrained from telling her that much now.

He'd tell her so. After.

"Sanav," he said, "what sort were they? Something we've seen before?"

"Apes," said Sanav.

When Kane looked at him, he could see how pale the cadet had gone. Big, then? They had the most awful cries: it sounded something between a whoop and a howl, and it came whistling through the forest like a memory.

"Should we go to them?" Reiko murmured.

"They might pass by," lied Kane.

They loomed from the darkness: they were wearing skull-shape masks, or so it looked, for there were bony growths covering their twisted grey faces, and patterning their barrel-broad chests. They were enormous: they had contorted long arms, three-times as long as their torsos, dragging in their wake, fingers raking through the dirt and leaves, and their red eyes glowed from the dark, the colour of curdled blood.

Four eyes followed Kane intently as he moved away from the treeline.

Lorencio, behind him, said, "one here as well."

Three, then. They had gone very silent: the screaming was very far in the background now, as though these were only the scouts for a much larger troop.

Reiko said, "where did it go?"

Two, then – no, still three, but now they could not see the third. Was that it? Kane tilted his head back, and maddened himself staring into the black tangle of branches overhead. He could not see anything.

Would he first see the druj in the moment it tore him apart?

A movement – a shudder in the trees – it might have been a bird – but...

"Chae."

Evanne loosed a bolt. It flew over Kane's head, and struck something in the trees that shrieked, and the great ape druj dropped onto him, long arms reaching, strong hands seizing hair and shirt and sword as it tore at his throat and eyes.

Not my eyes – he reflexively staggered back, hands flung up to defend himself, and where his blade struck the ape it scored great black lines into its brown-furred arms and deflected, shedding sparks, off the bone-white masque through which those red eyes glared.

To the ground, which was the death of a tagma, and again up with his hands and his swords. He had not even used his hooks. The weight on his chest was enormous.

Every muscle burned with the effort of keeping the druj at bay.

He did not even have breath to protest the end.

The thing was many times his size, and the smallest of them: all around, he could hear Lorencio and Tzeitel calling back and forth as the second, larger, attacked from the other side of the clearing.

The sounds came to him quite dully, as though filtered through a great mass of water; he could only feel the ape's hot breath on his face, the damp of the scream as it roiled over him, and the anticipation of those enormous yellow incisors, inches from his own flesh, which tore at the skin like barbed wire.

Reiko put her blade through the back of the druj's skull. It burst through a gap in the bone-face – not through the eye, but the gap over one cheekbone – and pierced the ground next to Kane, splitting hairs.

There was gasping breath that might have been his own.

After a moment, and with a sound of quiet effort, she withdrew it.

It dripped blackly from her hand.

Kane threw the carcass aside.

He took in a breath. It rattled.

Reiko stood over him. She offered her hand.

For a moment it felt like he was fifteen again. Wasn't he wearing dirt in his hair, wasn't he bleeding? She was in her undershirt, muscles bared, a shine of sweat across her collarbone and brow. She had never offered her hand then.

He took it. She hauled him up.

She pulled away from him as he turned towards the others.

"Sanav?"

Sanav, panting, glanced up – "shit, yeah!" - and hastily replaced the hooks on his harness so that he could take himself back into the trees and scan for other advances. The other ape lay dead on the ground, peppered with brown arrows. Its head lay a few feet away with extinguished eyes. Lorencio, with the expression of one who missed his study, was sitting next to it, poking it gingerly with the butt of his bloodied blade.

Oroitz, whose throat had been torn out in the affray, spoke thickly through the black viscera congealing around his tongue. "Perhaps Kinga had the right idea."

Kane threw him a dismissive look, and did so quickly, so as not to waste too much time on the matter. He didn't need to look to tell that Reiko's expression would be quite identical. It seemed it was this man's curse to be eternally, aggravatingly cryptic.

And then his eyes fell upon the place where Kinga had been. The place she was meant to be.

Reiko snarled. "You let her go?"

"I wasn't," Oroitz said. The state of his neck warped all of his words into a strange thickness, like he was speaking around broken teeth. "In a position to deny her."

"She can't go too far," said Reiko. "Isn't that so? You shackled her."

Oroitz's black eyes bored into the lieutenant, quite emotionlessly. He said, "she rather slipped me."

Reiko said, "Hijikata," but Kane had already turned and moved towards the woods by the time her words reached him. She pursued him, and seized his sleeve, and he shook her off, a quiet reminder of who, in the end, had won their spars.

Oroitz said, "she wasn't herself when she went."

Reiko said, "Hijikata, fucking think for a moment."

Her voice slowed him, but did not stop him.

Sanav said, "Kane."

And Kane kept going.

The forest was very dark and damp-feeling, close around him, warm like a hand around his throat or breath on the back of his neck. The ground was soft and pliable, and churned up in small spots where a boot had ground through it, torn up in greater swathes as he went onwards as the girl in the boots had given way to the thing with the enormous claws that dug, claw-first, through the dirt and the ground.

Well, she had been warned. It had been headed this way from the start. She had known what lay at the end of it. He had not been given that courtesy. He had not been granted the dignity of mourning in advance, of seeing the betrayal in all of its sketched-out glory.

There was a part of him that was curious. Would he know her? The thought bubbled to the surface, and he choked back a laugh: this was a forest full of monsters. How would he know when he had done it? Would he be cursed to remain here in total fulfilment of his duty, druj after druj, canvassing for a strand of hay in a needlestack?

If it could be done, they would have done it. The lands of oldest Illéa were scorched with the pyres of women and men who had scourged as many druj as they could, day-in, day-out. If it could be done, they would have done it.

As though in tribute to these thoughts, there was the scream of another ape-druj in the forest ahead of him, the third of its set, and another joined it, and another, and another, and Kane was conscious that the fires of their camp were very far behind him.

But he did, in the end, know her when he saw her.

The winged druj did not, as he had expected, snarl, or attack, or flee. It lay, corpse-still, on the forest floor. Its wings had been too large for the undergrowth: they were pinned aloft by the branches and thorns through which they had torn in their movement, as the druj had searched for a wide enough clearing to the sky.

It was smaller than it had been the last time, a diminished version of itself.

He had put his sword into her eye then, and his arm as well, elbow-deep. He had ripped out all the nerves, and soaked his shirtsleeves in aqueous humor; he had been dressed in her ichor for the remnant of that whole long day, and he had thought her dead when they brought her body within the walls. He had intended her dead. He had torn her wings off. He had realised that before, but he didn't think that he had known it – not the way he knew it now, in his very marrow.

He could see no fatal wound on the beast but a long, bloodless incision along the flesh at the nape of its neck, with black veins and arteries trailing down its withers. An escape. Had she only left the corpse here to distract them? She would be lighter on foot.

She could disappear into these dark forests, and live out the same day over and again, until something worse and bigger caught her by surprise and between its jaws.

There was a sound in the dark.

She was whole when she emerged. He had almost forgotten what she ought to have looked and moved like; she had been so like a corpse for all these past few days, which had made it easier to see her as the druj he now knew her to be.

So much harder, when she moved like a girl instead of a monster. She came forward through the shadows, and there was an odd weightlessness to her, the absence of a burden long-carried. She said, "wasn't sure I had another one in me."

She had cut open the flesh at the nape of its neck, and emerged now, tangle-haired and young.

For all their feigned enmity, he thought he could see some relation to Ilja Schovajsa now, in the way she bent and cracked her neck, in the way she put her hands through her hair to keep it from her ruined eyes. He had abandoned her here. Did betrayal taste tart to her too?

She shook her head, and laughed, and said, "you would have had to kill me. You know that."

"I was prepared."

"I know you were."

Her legs were shaking, though she tried to hide it from him. She moved in a circle around him, skirting the edge of the creature she had been, and then the edge of the other druj that lay upon the dirt. Kane hadn't seen it earlier. First – here was the third ape-druj, larger than the two that had gone before it: arms that were eight feet long and a head like an anvil. Then: there was viscera lying about that might have made up two – maybe three – of its compatriots. Finally: there was a creak overhead, and Kane tilted his head to see that two red-robed druj hanging from the trees with their necks broken.

She said, "I wish you would."

"No," he said, "you don't."

She could have ended it. She knew it, didn't she? The curse only continued for as long as she permitted it to. For all she spoke of the Moon like an enemy within, she held its leash. She could take its head off, if she was only willing to cut her own throat.

It was as though his thoughts were a-waft on the wind – she tasted them, and spat them out again. "I'd open up my veins," she said, "if only I didn't think it would hurt."

She smiled.

"You'd regret it then, wouldn't you? You'd be sorry for it."

Only sorry it hadn't been his blade.

She said, "oh, you'd realise then."

She said it like a familiar mantra, a favourite song.

"You will let me away with this one," she said. She knelt, and pried off the chestplate of the first druj she had killed, and ran her fingers along the strange shapes carved there. There was no layer of muscle or flesh below which might have sheltered the organs within, if there had been organs within, if there had been organs. There was only a black mass of something soft like soil, heaped upon itself over and again. It smelled sweet, which Kane had not expected, and it clumped, when Kinga pushed her fingers through it, clung to itself in little clods of crumbling viscera. She twisted her hand in the mass, like churning compost, searching for some hint of humanity within. Kane thought, someone's son, someone's daughter, someone waiting for them to come home in a kitchen made for two.

She straightened again. "Won't you? I did save our lives."

"Kinga," said Kane. "Why did you come back?"

She rose, and put her boot on the enormous bone growth, and pressed until it splintered, and pressed again until her boot had passed through it entirely, shedding little fragments of cartilage in every direction. She retreated, put the iron toe of her boot to its edge, and flipped it over entirely. It was a gesture of such futile vandalism that he could not even bring himself to acknowledge it.

"It shouldn't," she said, "I don't think this one should count. Else you wouldn't have been even alive to threaten to kill me." She pulled her hair back from her face; it was all matted with her own viscera, and she had black burn marks in her face where she had been bound to her own druj body, artery-to-artery, sinew-to-sinew. "I won't do it again. I promise."

She paused. She held her hands out to him, wrist-first, as though inviting him to cuff her.

"I don't think I can do it again."

"I think you're lying."

He was lying.

"My sister came back to say goodbye," Kinga said. "She knew it was going to be – she knew it would be over if she did it again. Sometimes you know. You know?"

"I know," he said. "I know."

vision

The new apartment was on Majnun Street, tucked between a bar and a bookbinder's. It was on the fifth floor of a very narrow building, and when Ilja glanced up at it from outside, he could see that the curtains were still drawn and the windowsills were overflowing with flower-boxes, all petal and stem, like they were somewhere much nicer than this grey place. He had thought that Ganzir had made him gray. But this city was as charcoal-coloured as any.

He pushed through the wooden door at the ground floor. The foyer had the feel of a building which might once have been grand – there was a broad tiled floor and wood-panelled walls that led to the primitive windlass at the end of the corridor, and stairs which swept upwards for the first two floors before tightening into a more prosaic set of stones steps, tightly spiralling like the cork of a wine bottle. Apartment Seven on the Fourth Floor had a blue door, upon which Ilja knocked thrice, though really he thought he shouldn't have had to knock at all.

A voice hovered through – it's open – and Ilja tipped it open gingerly, peeling off his shoes on the entryway and moving quietly down the hallway into the kitchen where he thought the sound had emanated. There was stew bubbling on the stove. Despite all of Ilja's hurt, hurtful thoughts to the contrary, there were two places set on the table: two plates, two forks, two knives. The tablecloth was yellow paisley; it had probably been here before the new occupant had moved in, because it didn't seem at all his style. There were cigarette marks on the edge that someone had painted over ineptly, daffodil-bright. The brush marks stood out starkly, a human hand extending through time with paintbrush held aloft.

There was a typewriter on the table, pushed aside to make room for the dinner, and a set of notebooks on the armchair that had been placed close to the stove, as though the house was too cold for the people inside it. There was a blanket which had been knitted by a childless mother, and boots kicked aside, lying forlornly on their side, laces still knotted tightly over the tongue.

There were photos on the wall that did not belong here. Each of the tableaux were full of young people who seemed carefree, at first, in cafés and on staircases and at beautiful events in beautiful gowns, and then – when you looked closer – he did look closer – they were Warriors, obviously, obnoxiously. He could see it in them: their skin crystalline like diamonds or sloughing from their bones like that of something cold-blooded, their eyes hard and black, their boots bloodied and their fingernails chewed to the quick. He could see it beyond them: the uncertain edges around them, as though they had been silently shivering when the daguerreotype was printed, silvery wakes of mist rising almost imperceptibly from their silhouettes. He could see it before them: how carefully the photos had been preserved, the old lacquer of the frame, the age-old fingerprints on the glass, the reverence with which it had all been handled.

"Warriors are so myopic." Zoran's voice did not sound so forlorn as Ilja had expected – hoped, perhaps. He still sounded like Zor. Ilja glanced over his shoulder. Zoran was in his socks, and an untucked shirt, and he was drying his hands on a paisley towel. There must have been a sale on someplace with terrible taste. "We are so myopic."

Ilja adjusted his glasses with as much self-possession as he could muster. Zoran snorted out a laugh.

"Generations always think of themselves as self-contained. Where you go, I go. When I am gone, there are none left."

He came level with Ilja. His hair was too long; it didn't brush his collar so much as it brushed Ilja's, so close were the two standing.

Zoran said, "we always leave someone behind."

His voice was soft, and sound. Ilja stared at the photographs of long-dead generations, and wondered who had taken them, and who had kept them.

"Sit down," Zoran said. "I can't promise the food will be any good, but there'll be a lot of it."

"They're not paying us that much."

He said nothing, only sloped off to find bowls which were not, blessedly, paisley-patterned. They were beautifully plain: just green, that was all, just green ceramic.

It was only for Zoran's sake that Ilja thought so; privately, the Chariot was taking mental notes to go look for something of the sort at market tomorrow. A shirt in that colour and pattern would suit him, and certainly, he would not look like a government stooge dressed so. The mines would welcome him then, in his paisley.

Zoran did not ask Ilja why he was there, after so many weeks of him not being there, and Ilja did not offer the information, so that Zoran could only spoon out stew, and set bowls on the table, and place a basket of bread rolls between them – the kind they called baps in Old Kur, white and soft and pliable beneath the fingers. Ilja worked his fingers into its seams, and tugged it apart until he had released a cloud of white steam to hang, pointlessly, overhead.

After a few long minutes of silent, contemplative, meal, Ilja had spoken.

"It's good."

"Good," said Zoran.

Ilja stared at Zoran over the bowl. His glasses had fogged up with the warmth of the kitchen, but he had not removed them; he wasn't sure why. It was easier, maybe, to retain the warm core of resentment in his chest when he could not see his oldest friend too clearly.

He tore open another roll and dunked it into his bowl to chase a few lonely chunks of duck around the ceramic. Zoran stood up, and went over to the phonograph to put on a record. The music which rose from the speaker was scratchy and melancholy, but it was better than the silence had been. Dead Warriors stared down at Ilja from the walls.

"Thank you for coming," Zoran said, finally. The words sounded like he had experienced them as a physical weight – a burden, until it was spoken aloud. "I've been... the Bureau have kept me busy."

"How are they doing that?"

"They want me to write," Zoran said. "Which, you know." He turned his fork around in the dregs of his dinner. "The last thing any writer needs to hear."

"For the next generation?" Ilja paused. "Have we reached that point?"

"I don't think so," Zoran said. "It's all..."

He chewed his lip thoughtfully.

"I don't know."

"That's not your it's unclear face," Ilja said. "That's your it's simply too terrible to say face."

Zoran smiled. "I don't know what I can say."

"Start with the truth."

"I'm starting to sympathise with Matthias Kloet," Zoran said. "It's a terrible thing, to feel responsible for inevitability. What if I tell you something, and I drive you away from something wonderful? What if I don't, and I do?"

"You could tell me about the something wonderful," said Ilja. "Wouldn't that be a start?"

Zoran tilted his head.

Ilja said, "I don't think it's a good thing to sympathise with Matthias Kloet, my sweet. It makes you go all funny."

"And not funny like ha-ha," Zoran said immediately.

They finished the cliché together: "funny like strange."

They smiled at one another a little bit more gleefully than Ilja would have liked.

A bowl of stew. Was that all it took?

He could not let it be.

"Yeah," Zoran said together. "Funny."