Mazelton tried to think through his escape route. Between him and his hideaway in the catacombs was near half a mile descent, and three miles horizontal travel. He drew the map in his mind, ignoring the numbing of his lips. He would edge out along the ledge of the window to the next room. The next room had no floor, but there were pipes that ran for some eight or nine floors. Then he would have to try and cut through the street- except he musnt. That was Soi 43, any young bravo looking to blood their lance would be running their chev up and down 43’ nice long straights. If he couldn’t cross the street, could he go down again? He couldn’t recall. Old Radler was practically nothing but hidden paths and abandoned rooms. He was sure he could find something.

Once across the street, it was three alleys till the Rat Trap, and from there another drop into what were once sewers. Some great parties there. Then it was but a hop skip and a jump through several partially collapsed tunnels, doubling back a mere six times, until he made it to the Catacombs and his hidden nest.

Mazelton grinned mirthlessly. The faster he moved, the faster the poison would work, but the sooner he got his remedies, the more likely he could cure it. He stripped off his robes, tearing them, wrapping his hands and face in the cloth. He hadn’t been cut too badly by the Jasmine. Physically, anyway. He went.

The ledge was no problem. How many hours had he spent climbing the city? Since he was old enough to crawl, seemed like. He could see smoke starting to rise from the Clan’s warehouses. He devoutly hoped that whatever moron started the fire did so after they removed all the radioactive cores. Otherwise fire would be the least of everyone’s problems.

Mazelton made it to the pipes in moments- not the first time he fancied a dangerous shortcut. He wrapped a strip of twisted cloth around the back of the pipe, and walked down the wall. It went well, until the poison kicked the legs out from under him. Mazelton slid down the pipe, bashing his face against it, tearing a gash on his chest. He only just managed to slow down before he would have followed the Jasmine into a messy death.

That cut was definitely going to get infected, but what could he do? A quick wipe with a cleaner bit of cloth and hope that the swelling on his face would be minor. Just… had to get to the nest.

Mazelton staired blearily around the bottom of the shaft. There were no obvious exits, but there was an impressive amount of bits of pipe and stonework. He imagined making some sort of sledge hammer, realized that was dumb, thought of using the old “Brick in a piece of cloth” trick for bashing walls, realized that there was no such trick, and with immense reluctance, concluded that chipping away with a pipe was the best choice.

Unfortunately, while Mazelton might have remembered which wall lead to the street under other circumstances, between the poison, attempted knife murder, fall, head trauma, and emotional trauma, he was completely turned around.

Mazelton spun a likely length of metal up into the air. It came down pointing to the wall to the left of the risers. He picked up the pipe and stabbed it into the wall, chipping a hole in the crumbly concrete. Progress was quick. In what seemed like no time at all, a jet of high pressure sewage shot out of his brand new hole in the wall, slammed into his chest and splashing all around the room. It was that awful, penetrating sort of smell that you can taste. It was textured, a slimy, burrowing, maggoty thing with notes of cabbage, your worst bowel movement and, horribly, bubblegum. And the sewage wasn’t draining from the room.

Mazelton started digging at another wall with manic haste. The concrete seemed to be in as much hurry to get out of there as he was, and he quickly knocked out a tiny hole. The sewage was up to his ankles now, and rising fast. By the time he dug a hole big enough to escape through, the sewage was waist high, lapping at the edge of the hole. From the sound outside, the public was starting to notice. He did his best to wiggle through the hole, the fermenting sewage greasing the way.

The bravos and their long lances couldn’t get away from him fast enough, as he ran screaming across Soi 43 and into the alleys. The swearing over the sewage was profound. It seemed like a tiny crack in the universe had opened, the contents of a fecal dimension invading our world.

Mazelton ran unseen through alleys for the Rat Trap, the wide channel that surrounded the old Grand Counsel Hall of three epochs back. Yesterday, he would have described the waters as brackish and foul. You needed a hidden glass elevator to cross. Today, Mazelton didn’t even break stride as he dove straight in and swam for the bottom. Across the mucky channel bed, up the hidden gap in the wall and then, lungs bursting, back up into the air in the fifth sub basement of that old wreck of a building.

He lay on his back, sobbing for breath. The poison had gone to work on his kidneys, he could feel it stabbing and punching away in there. His balls hurt, which he couldn’t explain, but they really did. His chest burned. He smelled like shit and pickled fruit. One eye was starting to swell shut, he must have hit the pipe harder than he thought. And the entire city was tearing itself apart.

He had to lay low. Regroup. If the clan survived, he would swan back in, none the worse and with a kill to his credit. If they didn’t… Not many knew more ways to escape the city than him. He would make for Uncle Matele’s place in Lone Pine. They hanged Confeds on sight up there, on the lamp posts and city gates.

Mazelton rolled onto his belly, then made it up to his knees, then, on the third try, made it to his feet. Just… down a flight of steps into the old sewers of the Seventh Republic, then you are practically in the catacombs. One foot in front of the other.

Mazelton didn’t know how long he slept- hours, certainly. The antidotes, hangover cures and buckets of water seemed to have helped. The wound purification core had dumped a full charge in, and the healers always swore blind that more than that would cause the flesh to rot and tumors to grow. He was in a mood to test that theory, as the herbal remedies the Clan healers came up with could only do so much to treat infection from the inside.

Some civilizations, in epochs past, had apparently found ways to cure infection from within, medicines that could kill the tiny invaders without radiation from cores. Without the omnipresent “heat.” So far, no recovered cache has explained how. Mazelton was quite prepared to give the left testicles of his very closest friends and associates for a nice big jar of however it worked. Even grafting testicles on to those who didn’t have them to begin with, if necessary. His piss and shit were bloody. That was probably fine.

Mazelton’s little nest was very Ma. Using bone as wicker, he had woven a domed hut within a vast mound of rib bones. Light cores were half concealed within the roof, lending the perfect, dim, romantic atmosphere to the place. The small platform bed was made from femurs, carefully knotted together with… leather..., and the mattress was burial shrouds stuffed with human hair. He had had some amazing sex here. Come to think of it, it was where… What was her name? Pazira? Pazimi? Someone from the Pa family. She got him to convert, turn Dusty in this little hut. Who would have guessed that he would actually start believing? She… moved? To Landowe Green? Would she let him hide there if he had to run that way?

Probably not.

Mazelton ran his eyes around the hut- his bed, a chest holding some clothes, snacks and drinks along with a double handful of cores and diadems and his remedies. In the middle of the room was a wide basin, a genuine treasure of the Intoqui civilization. It harvested moisture, condensed it, purified it and let it seep upward into the basin. He had no idea how it worked, no one did, but it had been working for some six hundred years uninterrupted. He won it in an insult contest. Too big to run with. Against the wall opposite the bed was the little work table he had built. He had scavenged remnants of an altar so ancient that he couldn’t even guess at the religion, smoothed the top, and set powerful light cores over it. A thick roll of dark green cloth lay honored in the middle of the altar.

He unrolled the cloth,and looked down on his polishing tools, the only really valuable thing he owned. And the clan would dispute ownership. All the diadems and cores and art, even the substantial stash of drugs, were pocket change in front of serious wealth. The Ma clan’s wealth. Even the everfull basin was a “valuable antique” that would have gotten lost in any one of a dozen Clan houses filled with “valuable antiques.” They were all just... stuff. Stuff never lasted. The tools were power and legacy.

Mazelton glanced over at the auroch skull over the door, as he walked his fingertips over the tools. He was fourteen again. Out of the six hundred and forty eight children in the Zel generation of the Old Radler Ma, he was one of just sixty from the main Ma family line. His initiation was a matter of serious importance to the clan- the eighteenth to be called. And perhaps the fifth to die.

The blood is thinning, the elders muttered. Maybe they were right. He barely hung on through the two weeks of fasting. He would have died in the steam purification, if an unknown uncle hadn’t discreetly shoved him into the cold bath. At the end of the weakening rites, he was called before the Matriarch, Hag Malima. The last phase of the ritual was in an empty stone room with a bare stone table. Hag Malima and the core elders of the Clan sat calmly in their seats around the table, looking at the one empty chair. Leaning against the chair was a long handled hammer and a heavy knife.

“Hungry, child?”

“My hunger has passed, Grandmother.”

“You are starving. You will die soon.”

“What must I do?”

“In times of prosperity, eat fruit and vegetables. When there is just enough, eat grains. In the bad times?”

“In the bad times, Grandmother, we must eat,” Mazelton suppressed a shudder, “carrion. We must do anything to ensure our survival and the clan's survival.” He recited by rote, having heard the phrase since he was weaned. The Hag nodded, once, and rang a small bell.

An auroch was led in, a bull in its prime. It was painted with whorls in ocher and black, a white circle drawn on its brow, and a red circle on its chest. It snorted and bellowed, its long, black tipped horns thrashing, frightened by the smell of blood that had long since soaked into the floor and walls.

“To live, you must eat. To command your core, you must steal another's. What will you do, child?”

“I will do what is necessary. I will grow up.” To a starved mind, some matters are very clear. So he picked up the hammer and rested it on his shoulder as he awkwardly held the knife in his teeth. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to make two trips. The auroch bucked its head, but it was pretty well held down by some of his uncles and aunts. Mazelton walked up and smacked the hammer as hard as he could into the circle between its eyes. It wasn’t hard enough. He was too weak from the fasting. It took six blows before the bull stopped screaming and finally fell down for the last time.

“If you puke during the initiation, if you shame me, I will skin you alive.” His father had growled at him, before he was led into his cell to start his fast. Mother had just looked at him like he was already dead. She wouldn’t mourn him.

He didn’t puke. He pulled the knife from between his teeth and started hacking into the bull’s chest. The still hot blood poured out, covering his nakedness. The rib bones were too hard for him to hack through with the knife. Using the last of his strength, he snapped a few ribs with the hammer, pulled out the pieces, and cut his way to the heart. His wet hand wrapped around the slippery, warm, huge organ, the core stone hanging just below it. He cut both away, having to saw a bit to sever the thick, rubbery hoses of the veins and arteries. The smell was unreal, metallic and sweet and foul all at once. The core popped loose with a pinch, a muddy silver lump the size of his thumbnail. He brought both back to the elders.

They nodded. He put the core and the heart on the table. He lifted his bloody carving knife, cut off a piece of the heart, and placed it next to the core.

The Hag waved, and the elders bent Mazelton backwards over the table. Practiced hands wiped him clean, while other hands took up knives and hooks and brushes and paints of strange and ancient composition. A sharp blade ran across his sternum, and the elders opened his chest like a book. He was permitted to bite down on the heart to muffle his screams. It was the Hag herself who carved the ancient patterns on his heart, linking them to his nerves, his spine, his brain. So fine was her work that one would need the best microscopes to see even a hint of it. When her work was done, she took the unpolished core, its terrible, poisonous energy slowly saturating the air, and forcibly jammed it under Mazelton’s own lentil sized core.

“If you would live, child. If you would become an adult who can do what is necessary, eat carrion. Take the power that is killing you, and make it your own.” The elders began a wordless, pulsing, droning chaint. They ran their own core power down into the naked boy on the table, the energy pulsing along with the chant.

Mazelton was delirious with starvation, with pain, with the horror of killing, of eating carrion. The auroch’s core burned through all that. Mazelton could feel the invisible fire rotting his heart, killing the flesh and leaving disease and tumors in its wake. He had spent two weeks in his cell, starving, rationing his water as he memorized what to do during the initiation. He felt the path the Elders’ energy was following. And once he had the trick of following the energy, he reached out with his mind, and for the first time in his life, made the energy within him follow his will. He pulled from the auroch’s core. He pulled the core heat, the invisible fire from out of his heart.

The heat flowed easily over the bridges and roads carved by the Hag. From them, it flowed through the channels that already existed in the body, like tubes of flexible glass so clear, he had never noticed them before. He pulled, and when the energy came full circle, he pushed the heat into his own core. He felt it grow, fast, too fast. Fast to the point of bursting, but the elders were there. The Hag was there. They showed him how to spin down the energy, to smooth out the core. To polish it into a perfect vessel to contain this new power. Tracing along after them, he carved the patterns on his core with his own power, making it forever his.

Someone slapped the reserved piece of heart into his hand. He roasted it with an invisible flame, shoved it in his mouth and ate it. His body could strip out this little bit of heat, now. His teeth ground through the tough muscles, fighting for every sickening calorie. He hated this flavor, the way the smell rose like sick up into his nose. He hated it. Staring straight up into the bright lights over the dinner table, lacking the strength to move even his hands, he wrenched his lips into a bloody smile.

“Seconds, please.”

His performance was deemed adequate, meeting but not exceeding expectations. He was given a roll of polishing tools to bind and use, each tool’s tip shaped out of the core of a dead clan member. A polisher wasn’t just a member of a clan, they were a living legacy, a legacy they were expected to pass on. Mazelton was quiet and withdrawn after the ritual.

“An auroch. Pathetic innovation. Personally, I think it’s why the Zel generation is so weak.” His mother had pulled him aside for brick red tea, drunk from the flowers of now extinct plants preserved in glass. Not her favorite cups, Mazelton knew.

“No, if the clan had real expectations of you, it would be a human prisoner, an enemy of the clan. Much bigger core, and you need much bigger guts to pull it off.”

Mazelton stared into his six lobed flower, trying not to take her words to heart.

“I ate the heart of Bolansi. The Bo family still hunts for her, you know. Sometimes I leave hints that she is held captive here or there.” Mother smiled fondly, then let her smile slip away. “By taking her core I strengthened our Ma clan and weakened the Bo. To think my son would merely be a… meat eater.”

Mazelton came back to the present. He sat bonelessly on his little work table and tried to think through what to do next. Go home? Home was under siege, literally, and even if he knew the hidden ways of Old Radler, the Cabells knew them too. They were probably attacking through those same routes. No, any Ma property in the city would be marked and attacked. The mist plant would be as heavily defended as the clan hall, and as heavily attacked. So that was out too. Allies? The Ma clan had subordinates and rivals with varying degrees of hostility. It had no allies. No one would be willing to hide Mazelton.

Stay in the catacombs? He smiled. The vengeful ghost of the Ma clan that stalked amongst the bones, feeding on bad Confed children who didn’t listen to their parents. Mazelton shook his head. People avoided the Catacombs, but with all the violence up top, they would be stuffed full soon. He could hide for a while, but it couldn’t last. And what kind of life would it be even if he could?

Flee the city? He did have family in Lone Pine. Uncle Matele was a force in the clan and the city. His looks had been a bit too appreciative when he last visited Old Radler, but, as the infection burned in his chest, Mazelton thought he could put up with that. Flee west? Keep going until he was far, far from old Radler, crossing the inland seas and even the Grand Redoubts to the far west? Mazelton just shook his head. He learned how to sail a little pleasure boat during summers at the lake. Occasionally rode a chev through the clan timber holdings as part of a group outing. Not exactly an outdoorsman.

Without thinking too much, he swept the tool roll and what supplies he thought he might need into a pillow case. The pillow case was then twisted inside a sheet and tied to his back. He jumped and wiggled around to make sure it was snug. Out of instinct, he looked at his reflection in the basin. The left side of his face was a swollen mess. His eye was bloodshot, it’s lids puffy. The skin was reddish, peeling and blistered in places. His lips looked like… well like he had kissed a pipe repeatedly and at speed. His clothes were vile smelling rags. He had managed to smear some wound paste over the cut on his chest, but it was still purple and turning black around the edges. You could almost see the infection pulsing outward. A perfect disguise- he couldn’t even recognize himself.

He panted out a silent, humorless laugh. One last piece of preparation, then he would be ready. He fished a bottle of liquor out of his chest, spiked it with azamanth powder, and set it square upon the altar.

“Ælfflæd, I call you. Ælfflæd, I pray you hear me. Ælfflæd, I bring you gifts and seek your favor. By the ancient contract, by blood, bone and fire, by the generations of our lines, Ælfflæd, I call you.”

Mazelton paused to think. The Ælfflæd had short memories for favors, but long ones for grudges. And they were easily offended.

“Clan blood has been spilled. The extinguishment of my line is at hand. I will eat carrion to survive. So I beseech you and offer this gift- grant me your favor. Brush away my tracks, and let the sight of others slip off of me. Grant me this, and I shall repay you with a life.” Mazelton shuddered, feeling the weight of the oath settle into his gut.

“Ælfflæd, thank you for listening. Ælfflæd, thank you for your favor. Ælfflæd, please watch over me. A drink, to warm you on your way.”

He pushed some heat into the bottle, sticking his finger down the neck to do it. The little stabbing rays slammed into the azamanth powder, lighting the drug and making the whole bottle into a flaming lantern. The red and green flames danced around each other, growing longer as the brandy turned into fuel, then air. A whirl of smoke spun for a moment in the bottle, and before it could escape, Mazelton inverted the bottle over his lips and sucked it down.

Holding the smoke in your lungs was a test of devotion. The invisible fires tore up the soft tissues, blistering them. A polisher could control the damage, if they were quick and their lineage strong. For most, the ritual demanded your life. You had to be really desperate to summon the Ælfflæd. Or ruthless. The Ælfflæd respected ruthlessness- if you were desperate enough to drink ælfsmoke, be ruthless enough to hold it till the end. Or ruthless enough to force someone else to do it for you. Mazelton held his breath until his vision dimmed and he couldn’t keep the fires at bay.

Mazelton forced the smoke out of his lungs and into the dim light of his bone hut. It formed the barest outlines of a beautiful form- inhumanly beautiful, like sunlight bouncing off a stream or the wind in a field.

The Ælfflæd came with music- the sounds of the city, it’s cries and creaks and rumbles and squeaks and the roars of the angry mob all coming together beneath a steady beat- onetwo threefour onetwo threefour onetwo threefour onetwo threefour… The Ælfflæd began to sway and twist around the bone hut, dancing to the music of the city. It flicked an appendage- a smokey hand? towards Mazelton, and invited him to join the dance.

Mazelton danced. They danced his life away, as the ecstasy of the ritual barely hid the pain from his wounded flesh and lungs. They danced until his limbs could barely hold him, until his lungs could hardly catch a breath and his eyes blurred from sweat and tears. The last he saw of the Ælfflæd, it gently waved him to the door- and vanished.

Mazelton, obedient to the spirits of his clan, staggered for the door. At the threshold, as he was never that obedient and considered himself a good Dusty, he scooped some grave dust from the floor and rubbed it across his third eye, lest others use witchcraft to find it. Having taken all sensible precautions, Mazelton began his escape.