Stabbing pain from his bladder forced Mazelton to wake up. He couldn’t possibly make it to a chamber pot, let alone an outhouse. He pissed in the corner, his urine a rusty brown color. Not his house anyway. Not anyone’s, now. The family had fled in front of him, three generations on their two wheelers, loaded with whatever they could grab in a hurry. He didn’t even have to break a window- he just walked right in, drank enough water to make him want to puke, and fell over into a still warm bed.

He had no idea how long he had passed out for this time. The house was uncomfortably warm, which told him that the dust cloud had reached here and he was poisoned again. This poison he could manage a bit better, the dispersion was high this far out. Mazelton fell back into bed as he slowly swept the heat up from his body and channeled it into his core. He might be mediocre as a polisher and a disgrace as a Ma, but this? This he was good at. You can’t implant heat cores in your flesh unless you are really good at managing internal heat. Well, not more than once. He gathered up his Grandmother’s generous gift and spun it down, compressing the core and adding a new layer of luster. As for the metal, the options were less good.

Mazelton pawed through the wardrobes. Not much. Apparently the family that lived here was pretty efficient. They snagged almost everything. He found a laundry basket with a pair of socks that more or less fit. He never knew how much he would care about socks, until he had none. Now, socks were a priority. Underwear was reduced to a ragged pair of thick wool leggings that had fallen behind the wardrobe. They were not in the best state, but had the immense advantage of being mostly intact and available. Shirts? None. Robes? None. Jackets, rain gear, hats? None, none, and one that was too small and clearly belonged to a child. He tried it anyway. Didn’t work.

The shoes department was slightly better- nothing that actually fit, but at least there were some too big sandals. He could work with that. One of the sandals had a broken strap but, again, under the circumstances it was a win. Just straw sandals anyhow.

Mazelton started wandering the house, exploring it and inventorying as he went. It was a single floored building, built around a central courtyard. The courtyard had a small well, a chicken shrine and some rather lovely trees that were dying fast. The little bench under the trees would be lonely for a long time. The house was clean, scrupulously clean, plastered brick washed white, large, neat bronze blue glazed tiles for the floor. Expensive, for a suburban family. He bet they used to brag about it to guests.

“Oh, shoes off in the house please. The tiles are genuine Bosuwain and antique. Such a bother to clean! I’m sure your cement floors are so much easier to manage.”

He could see a little mat by the front door. Just the spot for shoes. Never again. Or at least, not for a very long time.

There was a kitchen with a pantry. A little root cellar with a cold box. A small library with some dozen books still on the shelves. He picked one at random- Gambesons’ Commentaries on Podurick’s Lives of the Golutios. No mystery why they left it, the only mystery is why they bought it in the first place. Maybe someone was a real glassblowing enthusiast? Who knows. No etchings either. He put it back on the shelf. Maybe someday it would be part of a valuable cache for some prospector.

He found some old blankets in a chest, some big crocks of pickles that had been skipped over. A hatchet. Some clothesline. No easily negotiated valuables. No cores. Two heating stones- one in the kitchen and the other in the main family room. The Ma clan chop proudly visible from across the room. No matter how useful they might be, he wasn’t even going to try shifting slabs of stone thrice his weight on a trike.

Mazelton wandered out the front door. Nailed to the right of the door drain was a little stone scroll capped with a feathered snake head. So, Xi clan offshoot, probably a few generations back but still on the books. Maybe Mother or Father ate one of their uncles or aunts.

He saw the delivery person he killed. He saw the look of shock and confusion as the rock smashed into their skull, and the beginnings of pain before the second blow landed. They looked so confused, so unable to understand what was happening as the blows landed again and again. He was killing the delivery person again, right here, except right here was on the road just outside of the city.

It took Mazelton a long time to come back, shaking and curled up on the ground. He could barely look at the trike, but it was too necessary for him to look away. The front basket was empty, the back basket was filled with what appeared to be flower bulbs. Not that he knew much about flower bulbs, but that’s what they looked like. He cut one open in the hope that it might be an onion. It was not. He tipped them out onto the ground in a reasonably sunny spot. Maybe one of them might survive, as the other bulbs died and composted. Eating carrion.

There just wasn’t enough food. No beans, no grains, certainly no fresh fruit or vegetables. Praise the Sun, there was some dark leafy greens, some manner of brassica, in the vegetable patch. He grabbed all he could and ate them raw. It wasn’t enough by itself, but he knew it would help with the poison. Maybe the neighboring houses would have more, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Besides, sooner or later looters would be coming, or Confed soldiers investigating what, exactly, happened.

Water was ok. The well was covered so it would be relatively clean. There were plenty of jugs and jars he could fill. But food? Almost nothing.

Mazelton didn’t realize he had walked to the chicken shrine until he was standing in front of it. Lacquered black walls, red doors, dusty red clay tile roof. Solar motif and the poultry life cycle painted in yellow with loving hands across the black walls. Along the bottom edge was written the prayer of thanks, each generation of the family adding their hand print as soon as they were weaned. A long row of tiny hands wrapping almost around the shrine.

Should he look down on them for eating eggs? It was still eating flesh by the standards of most decent people. Some argued that it didn’t count, the eggs were unfertilized embryos and thus never really alive. Nobody, well, nobody of Mazelton’s class, ever bought that. You were eating flesh. Tainting yourself with the Sin of Cass, of Toa and of Xoliani. Damning the world one egg at a time until the world suffered another Grand Collapse. Rearing livestock for labor was permissible. Eating them was not.

Mazelton pressed his hands together and offered a small bow. Careful to use only his left hand, he gently opened the shrine doors. The dim light showed the lovingly cleaned interior, blue painted walls, thatching under the tiles for insulation, and three dead hens lying on clean straw.

That was an old wisdom. Watch the birds. When the birds start dropping, run away.

He stared at them. The dust would have destroyed their lungs, all the soft tissue of their organs, maybe their brains. Not too likely that it got into the muscles. Provided he could drain all the blood, discard the organs and head, maybe don’t eat the bone marrow too… he should be looking at four water of strong food. And all he would have to do would be to eat carrion.

His left hand reached for the first hen. It shook, like he was expecting the bird to jump up and peck him, like it was a venomous insect instead of a real, living, feeling being that he was going to eat. He didn’t kill it, but he was going to eat it.

“I can’t puke, Father would be furious.” He muttered it over and over in his heart. He picked up the bird. The feathers were soft and smelly. He laid it out on the bench, trying to be as respectful as possible. The other two followed.

Mazelton stared at the three dead hens. How do you even get the feathers off? Do you skin them and it all peels off? Do you pull them out, like hair? You can’t possibly shave them. And, ok, remove the blood and guts, but how, exactly? He could imagine cutting the head off and letting it drain (and didn’t that make the bile rise), but were the guts attached to stuff? They must be. So how, exactly, did you get all that out?

The family that lived here would have fought him to the death for even wondering such a thing. When their benefactors eventually died from old age, they were reverently buried at the foot of new trees, a sign of the eternal cycle of life and the family’s eternal gratitude. And now Mazelton was going to leave them without an intact corpse.

He took the birds to the kitchen. Did a last, desperate search for food. Found twine and some big knives instead. So he took the birds back to the yard, sat on the bench with them and started messing around with the feathers. It was revolting. They smelled. They felt nice, but they smelled. He tried pulling them. They needed a firm tug to come out, but it was doable. The feathers broke sometimes. The skin was an awful, pinky yellow color. Same kind of off yellow he was seeing in some of his infections. There were even tiny feathers that needed plucking. Were you supposed to use tweezers?

Oh right. You weren’t supposed to be doing this at all. This was a sin, even to the Ma clan.

He scraped off the little feathers with a knife. He figured the whole thing would go faster if he tried pulling out the feathers by the handful. He was right, but figuring out just how to do it took time. So much time. The feathers fought him. They didn’t want this. He didn’t want to do this.

The wings were awful. The big, proud wings turned into brittle branches as the long feathers were torn away. The pinky yellow flesh worming away along skinny bones, shamefully exposed to the sun. Mazelton had the sudden hallucination that he was humiliating the bird. But he was starving, the fever was starting to rise and he must eat carrion.

He got the hen naked and splayed on the bench, her dead sisters forced to watch her violation. He tied the legs together, wrapping the twine around a low branch, then cut off the head at the base of the neck. Blood came gushing out, and it stank, Dusty world, it stank of metal and something primal. Some old memory. Should he save the blood in a bowl? No, it was probably poisoned. Let it all drain out. And things came out with the blood, the long stretch of neck and, horribly, some organs were still attached.

The digestive system is basically one long tube from the lips to the anus. He remembered that from class. Mazelze shoved him up against the stone wall and told him that his lips and asshole got swapped around in the womb and that’s why he always talked shit. Then Mazelze punched him in the gut and his friends laughed and most people pretended not to see. Big hands and bad skin is all he could remember about Mazelze. Couldn’t seem to really remember the face. Hard to hate Mazelze, now. He didn’t survive the rite of passage.

Even with everything, Mazelton couldn’t think of Mazelze as one of the lucky ones. The kids who didn’t pass were removed from the family rolls and the bodies buried in the fields of the clan’s farms. The least they could do was give back some of what they took, or so the elders said.

It stood to reason that if he cut the throat, and the blood has more or less stopped pouring, then he should remove the other end. Just core it out. Reach in and pull out everything, cutting away what didn’t come out.

When the entrails spilled out over his hands in their wiggling, earthworm grey looping coils, and dense purple-red lumps, he shamed his parents and threw up.

When he had finally plucked, gutted and cleaned the bird as best he could, he brought it to the kitchen. He left the other hens strung up and bleeding out in the courtyard. No reason they had to watch this too. He tried cutting the meat off the bird, then giving up a bad job, just tried to hack the carcass into pieces. None of the knives seemed to be able to cut through the bones. He got the job done with the hatchet.

Salt? He could see the dark spot next to the stove where a salt box once lived, far from the sink. It would have been finely fitted wood or very well glazed ceramic, both with a tight lid. Salt was far too expensive to forget, even in the face of calamity.

Apparently so was mustard, chili, oil, vinegar, or any spices. Bastards. He would have done the same thing, of course. Could he cook it in the pickle brine? He had no idea. Mazelton had never cooked before, or even seen it done. Cooking was always done in the big communal kitchens by teams of retainers, or collected from taverns and roadside stalls.

And nobody he had ever met had dreamed of cooking flesh.

Mazelton tossed the chicken onto the hot stone, skin still on, and scooped brine from the pickle jar with his hand. The flesh sizzled on the stove, really hissing and spitting when the brine water was splashed over them.

God the smell! Sickly, greasy, but horribly appealing too, like deep fried bean curd. It was starting to burn. How do you turn it? There was a shovel thing, some sticks, some spoons and other implements Mazelton couldn’t even guess at in a little vase by the hot stone. He gingerly grabbed the shovel and tried to nudge a bit of the leg over. It stuck. He pushed harder. Still stuck. He sort of scraped the hard wood shovel against the stone to try and wedge it under the bird, but the skin stayed put, fused to the stone as the leg rolled over. The flesh underneath was a wretched pinky grey. Not the same earthworm grey as the guts, thank the Sun, but still horrible.

He stared at the skinned leg for a while longer. The other pieces were definitely starting to burn. He tried to flip them too. Some of the skin stuck to the stone, some came off easily. He had no idea why. The stuff that came off looked golden and a sort of nut brown, keeping with the deep fried bean curd thing. Was it done? How would he know when it was done? Everyone knew that eating meat would poison you, especially if you ate it raw. Then you had both the poison and the angry spirit of the animal hadn’t been driven out by the heat. Mazelton let them cook until he could see wisps of smoke starting to rise.

The burnt remains of the chicken were all collected in the biggest bowl Mazelton could find. He had no idea what sort of utensils you should use for eating flesh still on the bone. A knife? He needed to own what was happening here. He was committing a crime far worse than murder or usury. He should do it with his hands. He reached out, grabbed a bit of the leg and bit in.

Flesh is sweet. Greasy. Dry in some places, juicy in others, and with a mellow sweetness. It tasted like it looked. Mazelton tried not to throw up. He choked down the bite, feeling the thin, brittle crunch of the browned skin give way to the oily unctuousness of the flesh below. Even with the brine water, it managed to be bland and under seasoned.

He could imagine the kids growing up, watching fascinated as the hens pecked around the yard; chanting their revered names with excitement as they watched an elder perform the honorable office of collecting the eggs. Bravely presenting an expensive fruit to the birds as an offering.

I can’t throw up, Father would be furious.

Mazelton ate until he couldn’t eat any more. He didn’t even finish one leg. He forced himself to pack the cooked meat into a jar with a lid, and once he felt strong enough, cleaned and butchered the other two hens. He put the pieces in a second earthenware jar with a lid, then topped it up with brine. He had very little brine left, so he consolidated all the pickles (cucumber, onion and radish, at a guess) into one crock to try and stretch it. He started loading the trike. Food. Jar after jar of well water. Any surviving greens from the tuck garden. Any blankets, sheets, curtains that were missed. A crummy pot. The hatchet, knives, rope and twine.

His lips twitched. He couldn’t get far shirtless. He cut a hole in the sheet, then a similar hole in a blanket. No needles, so he couldn’t stitch it. It was just going to rip more and more over time. He put his head through the holes, then used a bit of clothesline for a belt. It was awful, but it was less awful than being half naked. He packed the chicken feathers. Might need them for something. He felt like he was forgetting something obvious. Couldn’t bring the heat stones. The family already took away any light cores. Ah. Cores.

Mazelton returned to the courtyard. To the scene of the crime. It was a gorey mess. He fought down the urge to vomit yet again. He dug into the parts and pinched off the ever so tiny cores from the chicken’s remains. He couldn’t stand leaving them this way, so he hunted around until he found a little ironwood hoe. He dug them a grave, and buried them under the trees. The trees were dead, they just didn’t know it yet. Still, even where hot wars raged, the trees eventually came back. The cycle wasn’t broken forever. Everything returned to dust, but nothing was lost forever. That was the Dusty way.

He felt like he should offer a prayer, but what could he say? What sort of monstrous hypocrite would he have to be?

Mazelton felt an intense nausea fall on him, driving him to the ground. He curled up, feeling his guts bloat. His forehead beaded with sweat, so much sweat, so fast, and it was starting to run into his eyes, the salt burning as his guts felt like they would explode. But didn’t. Nothing came out except his groans. He was poisoned, sick and cursed. He had committed the sin of Cass, and there was no going back from that. For him, there was no going back at all.

For the first time in days, Mazelton projected himself into the future. He couldn’t stay on the Eastern Edge, and even the middle of the continent was highly inadvisable. He had to get to the far shore, and if needed, cross into the vast sea beyond. He had no family, no clan. Not any more. His wealth was what was in his grave shroud sack and what he could loot. Everyone would be looking to kill him, once they figured out what the Hag had done. If he was going to survive, he would truly have to eat carrion. And that thought just about broke him.

He lay huddled on the ground until the sky started to turn black. The nausea was still there, but it was manageable. The future wasn’t going to be a problem if he couldn’t survive the present. He got on his trike, and pedaled west. There was a little boat house he knew of, on one of the freshwater seas. He could sail one of them, more or less. Might take a day or two to reach the western shore, but it would be two days away from Old Radler. He could hold until then.