Morning clawed its way over the horizon early, forcing Mazelton to confront two unpleasant facts- he couldn’t think of a better way to write his letter to Danae, and he really, really wanted to ask the infamously silent Duane what was going on last night. He let a breath hiss out between his teeth, collected the first bowl of porridge from Cookie (Mazelton’s tastes were now so depraved that he quite enjoyed the hot sauce addition to the meal. Really, just a few drops could change the whole bowl for the better.) and set out for the Sky Runner’s office. Similar to Sky’s Echo, it was close to the caravansary. He supposed it was set up that way in Muddy Waters too. He just never thought to use it.

The Sky Runner’s factor was lean and long, all shaved down lines and a calm, unsmiling face.

“What services do you run out to New Scandi? I have a page of text and a dozen or so small pictures.”

“How much money do you want to spend?”

Mazelton gave them the same flat look that he gave the factor in Sky’s Echo, then sighed.

“Do you have the second fastest option? How much would it cost from here?”

“Yep. We are on the relay chain.”

“And the cost?”

“Well about that.” They looked over Mazelton for a long moment. “You with the Nimu caravan?”

“Yes…”

“You’re Mazelton, then. Folks been raving about those insect barrier cores, and how long the food purifiers have been lasting.” The factor grinned, only a bit like a lynx spotting a fat rabbit. “Might be that we can work out a discount in trade.”

Mazelton grinned too. He hadn’t paid for an unpolished core in three months, and was making basic polished cores in minutes flat. Lots of practice. No deal comes together like one where both sides think the other is a sucker.

Mazelton handed over the package. The Sky Runner looked vaguely interested in the art, but quickly passed it through to the operator in the back for transmission.

“How do you want to handle the reply? If there is one?”

“Next stop is Cold Garden. I will check in there. If something has arrived, great, and if not, well, the next stop after that is New Scandi.”

“That ain’t strictly correct. There are things scattered in the Ramparts. Old, old places. We have stations set up near some of them. We will try to keep track of where you are, see if we can’t get the mail ahead of you.”

“Why, thank you very much! That’s very kind of you.”

“Of course, if you felt like returning the kindness, maybe you could give us the straight word on what we've been hearing from the Two Souled?” The friendly look was gone. Mazelton sighed.

“No secret. Or at least, I never promised anyone to keep it a secret. The wagons roll out soon, so I’ll try to keep it short.”

He laid out what he saw and what he guessed, making very clear which was which and why a very healthy degree of skepticism should be used. The Sky Factor’s face didn’t shift a single muscle. They just nodded, thanked Mazelton politely, and said that the letter would reach New Scandi in a week or less. More post headed into the disputed territories, these days.

“Oh, and those boys you got into a scrap with last night?”

Mazelton hadn’t realized that there were witnesses. Or hadn’t cared, now that he thought about it.

“Yes?”

“Just so you know, they’re Famil Ninivut. Might want to stay out of the woods and off the water as best you can, at least until you are past Shale Snake Ridge.”

“Don’t know who that is?”

“Voyageurs cross most of the continent, and they stick mostly around rivers and lakes. They move so fast on those canoes, you would not believe it. Really the only group of people that could give us a run for our money. Occasionally we mix it up with them out on the waters or trails.”

“Could be ugly.”

“Not too bad usually. We aren’t strictly in the same line of work, and for them it’s more about turf than anything. They seem to think that once you are some distance from the coasts, it’s their country.”

“That is a… bold assertion.”

“Ain’t it just? And they know it too. So they build up into these tribes of people and dice up the river networks between them, trade routes and all that, sharing when a river is just too central to be monopolized. We tend to go east-west across the continent, and we don’t travel too much farther north than this. Just nothing up there for us. The voyageurs disagree.”

The factor started tapping their desk for emphasis.

“Famil Ninivut is a weird, nasty bunch. They go to the deep, deep north. Endless trees, followed by endless ice. Cold like you wouldn't believe, and snow that lasts for most of the year. Deeper than your head, too. Too much time alone. In the dark, in the cold. No one to talk to but each other. And they feed and clothe themselves by hunting and trapping. That does things to a person.”

The factor looked deeply at Mazelton.

“Even the other voyageurs think that they are touched by something evil, out there in the endless woods. They take people trying to get out badly. Just something to think about.”

Mazelton nodded thoughtfully, and made his way back to the wagon. He really, really needed to make that new weapon. And make a few offerings. It had been a while since he had sacrificed to the Ælfflæd, and he wouldn’t want them thinking he had forgotten them.

Mazelton looked over Colmbe as the wagons rolled through. It really was a nothing place. Lots of dig sites, empty and abandoned. Lands that should have had scrub growing on them were hard packed and barren. Something had happened around here. Something that poisoned the land so hard that even the passing of millenia didn’t fix it. But it was still a useful river, and this was a useful intersection of the river, so people set up shops, piers, small warehouses and bigger bars.

Apparently, for some of those bars, the bartender was part of the attraction. You had the music and the whores, but some folks just wanted to get drunk and watch a show. So the bartender would flip bottles around and juggle the shakers. Drinks were set on fire, doused, and garnished with bits of fruit or paper cut into fascinating shapes. Even beer (sort of fermented grain beverage, as Mazelton understood it) could be purchased in big mugs. Mostly for children and the hung over, it was weak stuff, but the novelty of it was appealing. The bartender would fill a mug with the beer and then move his hands so fast that the mug would swing around without spilling a drop, landing right in front of the patron.

He would have liked to see that. But then Mazelton saw the tanning racks and disassembled meat heaped in front of it and watched the blood run into the wide river and decided that he could live and die without watching the bartender show.

The river actually had a bridge across it. A ferry system had been used for a long while, but after repeated “discussions” between rival voyageur gangs over who got to operate the ferry, the non-voyageur permanent residents decided it would make more sense to build a bridge. So they clubbed together, hired a construction crew out of Cold Garden, and with a less than expected forty dead, built a toll bridge. The rates were extortionate, but then, how many bridges over this river were there?

Mazelton could see the caulked wagons foundering and going under in his mind's eye. It had happened often enough, this trip. This was a wider river than most. Money well spent. There were a conspicuous number of six person canoes zipping around too. None openly carrying arms, but you could hide a lot of guns under those furs. Mmm… pretty much all men again, too.

“There must be women voyageurs too, right? Or whatever gender?”

Duaine pointed due north.

“In the woods.”

“They don’t come into the cities?”

Duane shook his head slowly. His eyes went far away for a moment. His stoic face looked very sad. Then with a flicker of disgust, he returned to his usual flat affect.

“Safer for everyone.” Having used up almost two days worth of words, Duane started to close up again. He made one final, immense effort and added- “They are the bad thing in the woods.”

Mazelton felt that it would be very easy indeed to stay off the water and out of the woods. It was a direct return to the land of the flat and empty. He felt vaguely wronged. The map showed the ramparts as being very close. It should at least be hilly, right?

Geography is famously indifferent to your aesthetics. It was so flat, it could have been laid out with a spirit level. There were occasional clusters of small trees. Never more than three or four of them together, and you might see two such clusters in an hour. Or not. Just endless prairie grass, gorse, prickles and sky. It seemed like the big empty got to Policlitus too. He drove them long and hard that day. The caravan usually did between fifteen and twenty miles in a day. Fifteen was on the low side of normal, Twenty was a long haul, but in good conditions, it was doable. Policlitus drove them twenty four miles that day. Two people died, and Policlitus looked like his only regret was he couldn’t push them harder, longer.

Mazelton briefly made his rounds in the evening. Fewer wagons now than at the start of the journey. Much fewer. Still, he reckoned he had done well. They were a long way from reaching even one in ten losses, let alone the dreaded one in five. He did a quick survey, and flinched. Maybe they weren’t so far from one in ten. Some of the wagons would be stopping at Cold Garden. A few more at Shale Snake Ridge. They would have a chance to rest and heal soon. The mountains would be the real sorter of the living and the dead. He could see Policlitus obsessively working a bit of knotted string over a map while consulting his records. Clearly he didn’t like what he saw.

It had been a week or so since he last “dosed” the cultist couple. The horrible insect woman was still trying to recruit him in the most hamfisted way imaginable. He made appropriate noncommittal noises while trying to find out where, exactly, their compound was. Top secret, apparently. They looked a bit pale, maybe just a touch of sway to them. Now, was it malnutrition, or was the heat kicking in? Hard to say, hard to say. Either way, he wouldn’t bet on them reaching their grand enlightened whatevers.

Since he was soon to loose the company of Madam Lettie, he made a point of hauling her out for a walk. The land was… deceptive. They had halted the wagons by a couple of small ponds, barely enough to water the aurochs and refill the barrels. But ten minutes walk in any direction revealed more, equally small, ponds. Each pond was below the level of the land, like some giant had poked lots of little dimples in the earth with their fingers. Poke, poke, poke, hundreds of times, scattered about more or less randomly.

Madam Lettie looked a bit grossed out by it.

“There was a battle here.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, these are weapon impacts. Look how identical the ponds are. Erosion didn’t do that, and it’s too haphazard for human cultivation.”

Mazelton took it in. He really couldn’t tell.

“Speaking of weapon impacts, I expect rumors of what I saw out with the Two Souled have circulated?”

“Oh yes.”

“Want to hear the straight story?”

“You know I do.”

So Mazelton told her and watched her carefully. Her eyes glowed as she took in all the information, slotting it into the huge warehouse of things she already knew, making connections. It wasn’t a turn of phrase, there was a slight fluorescence in the iris. She was a main line Pi Clan, but only just. The ones he knew back in Old Radler lit up like someone was shining light cores through their ears. A purely aesthetic quirk, as far as he knew.

“Thoughts?”

Madam Lettie tapped her lip and thought a bit longer.

“The Slave Machines, as you call them, are almost certainly Nacon design. At least they all sound like the records I have of their drone fighting machines. In theory, a warrior caste Nacon, well one of their warrior castes, they had a bunch of specialties, would link their brain to the machine through special devices in their brain, allowing the manipulation of electrical signals to the drone. In practice, and much like what we probably have here, a dry brain would be controlling them.”

Mazelton nodded along.

“The stone “god” is a little more interesting. Nothing this epoch sounds remotely like that, or last epoch either. As for the epoch before that… well. That does get a little spicy.”

“The Pi archives have always been the envy of the world.”

“We aren’t that good.” Madam Lettie said dryly. “But these things are big enough and weird enough that we distributed the records widely.” She gave a little grin.

“They are from three epochs back?”

“No, older. Four or five epochs back is the best guess.”

“So how did the Nacon, and the Pi, know about them? And what do you know about them?” Mazelton asked, with what he thought was commendable patience.

“We, and the Technocracy, found what we thought was a particularly ancient cache. Buried very, very deep under the sea bed in the Cold North Sea, in about as tectonically stable a place as you can find on Earth.”

“How did you find them?”

“Does the term “Graviton wave distortion” mean anything to you?”

“Not really.”

“Then we used magic.”

“Oh fuck you.”

“I thought you were on that Dusty monogamy thing?”

“It was a rhetorical expletive. Ok, your ancestors and the freakshow found an ancient cache where there shouldn’t have been anything.”

“That’s a very narrow minded view of a complex and fascinating civilization. And yes, we did. Weird as hell thing. Perfectly sealed shell of some sort of ceramic that could hold immense pressure. Very, very non-reactive material. Coated in layers of thin polymers, almost like lacquers, whose sole function seemed to be to resist different forms of environmental corrosion. Engineered for the extremely long haul.”

“With you so far.”

“The undersea mining rig cut out the whole chunk of rock around the “cache.” Damn near a half kilometer long, wide and deep. Hauling it out took a few years and was a whole other long story, but we managed it. Got it up to the surface and started carving away. Cutting away the ceramic was another incredible saga. We are talking plasma cutters as hot as the surface of the sun not even heating up the ceramic levels of incredible. Eventually it took high powered lasers, a huge, huge amount of superheated plasma and a water cutter that pushed the definition of the word “water” to carve out the statues inside.”

“Yeeessss… is this the bit where the statues came to life and exterminated the Nacon?”

“Nope. See, the cache was actually a solid block of this super ceramic. No air pockets whatsoever. The only things in the “cache” were an enormous artificial core, and four statues. The core had a ton of heat in it, tens of millenia’s worth, but it was really stable. Barely let out a trickle of power. The Pi on the project guessed that there were microscopic connections between the statues and the core, connections which were destroyed in the unearthing process.”

She mimed cracking the cache open, which unfortunately looked like she was cracking open a dinner roll.

“Analysis is gibberish. I mean completely nonsense. We can more or less figure out most of the base elements, but not why they are assembled that way. We can discover some sorts of interior channels, but not what they are for or how they work. It’s got a horrifically powerful, extremely dense heat core inside of it, but it’s drawing in atmospheric heat. Somehow. No obvious moving parts, but it’s got some really odd exterior surfaces that look like they serve some kind of function.”

“Somehow, some kind, looks like.”

“And this is after years of analysis, including who know how long the dry minds picked at it. The thing that makes the Nacon downright giddy is that it looks a lot like some old records they had from a previous epoch. That they wouldn’t share, the bastards. But once they see what this thing really looks like, they start revising their holy texts for the lowest classes. They want people on the lookout for these things. And to turn themselves into functional drones, but let's not quibble.”

“No, I think that is worth quibbling about.”

“Millenia dead and gone. Point is that they want people looking for these things and ready to report them up the chain on sight. Then they kick everyone but the priest and king caste off the project, killing most of them. We lost a few thousand members, but it was way too late- we had been sharing the information heavily.”

She looked pleased. And stopped talking.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what happened to the statues of unknown origin and purpose?”

“No idea. Kicked off the project, remember? But it was only fifty years later that the Nacon apocalypse happened. Gray goo event, preceded by a lot of carefully engineered hints about how the Nacon were to ascend. Whatever that meant, but it sure sounded like “become dry minds or fuse with a vast dry mind.”

“That whole long story, and you only know that the Nacon found these statues and had no real idea what they were or how they worked?”

“And they were both scared of and fascinated by them. Yep.”

“And why would a Nacon dry mind throw a staggering fortune in steel and electronics at one of these statues?”

“No idea. Again. But I would guess that the dry mind doesn't like competition and unknown variables.”

“And what does the statue-God want?”

Lettie grinned madly.

“I think it wants to go home, or to bring its friends back. I think they are transhumans from an ancient epoch, time traveling to the future via a cryogenic sleep, and now they want to bring back all their friends. Now that whatever was bothering them has been taken care of.”

Mazelton stared at her for a long moment, picking through that one.

“Can we kill it?”

“No idea. But feel free to try.”