“They seriously won’t lend you a pot? How is your pot not big enough?”

“Because I don’t need that big a pot to feed myself, and I don’t want to carry some heavy pot if I have to go on foot? And no, they won’t lend us the pot. Apparently they have a thing about boiling skulls.”

Mazelton gawped at Lettie.

“What is there to have a thing about? We’d clean it out afterward.”

“It is a thing for most people. Most people don’t boil skulls. And since I don’t want them thinking that I am also a cannibal…”

“Didn’t even eat one person.” Mazelton muttered.

“I am not going to start asking people to borrow their dinner pot for skull boiling. We have to think of another way to de-flesh this thing without blinding ourselves.”

They heard a drum beating out a tattoo. Time to move.

“Ugh. Another day on the road. I thought you were stopping at Shale Snake Ridge? Or even Cold Garden?”

“I would set up in Cold Garden, but… there is too much weird stuff cropping up at the moment. Look, are you familiar with Ze**{#’s work on cumulative statistical aberration?”

Mazelton violently shook his head.

“Can light blindness mess up your ears? Ze what?”

“Ze**{#” Lettie enunciated.

“That’s not a name. That’s not even a human sound.”

“They were a famous philanthropist as well as a brilliant mathematician.”

“And a dry mind?”

“No! As human as you and I. Bigot. Anyway, the theory goes that a given person will have a life that falls into a particular statistical range, based on degree of abstraction. So if we were to look at the entire population of, say, the Sea Folk, we could say that they would on average live so many years, have a working life of so many years, live in a house so big… you follow me. But it would be so general that it would be meaningless. No one person would be exactly described by all the terms. It just gives you a sense of the average Sea Folk person.”

“Ok?”

“So as you dig into the numbers further, say dividing by age or gender or class, you find people moving further and further away from that “average person.”

“Still with you.”

“Well, Ze**{# postulated-”

“I think you have machine parts that let you make that noise.”

“THAT SOME PEOPLE will have life experiences that push them further and further away from the average. And it’s an accelerating curve, though obviously it is influenced by the length of time the person survives and their own personality. Crucially, they could demonstrate that statistically unlikely events are more likely to happen to people who have already experienced statistically unlikely events. They died before they could finish their work on the causality. Poor thing. Torn apart by giant river otters in his bathtub. Random accident. No way for a mathematician to go.”

“You are fucking with me.”

“Yeah. Seven out of forty three mathematicians die due to mustelid related incidents. Their death was all too predictable.”

Mazelton gave the blur of lights and colors where Letty was a long, cool look.

“You are a weird shit magnet, Mazelton. And since you have been involved with some pretty interesting weird shit, I figure I’ll stick around until you reach New Scandi, then start exploring the mountains. Maybe go as far as Vast Green Isle before doubling back.”

Mazelton could hear the smile in her voice.

“I want to settle down some place and build a library. But until then, I am very, very interested in learning what the hell is going on around here. Call it the Pi in me.”

It happened late in the morning. They were plodding up a long slope, not too steep, no dramatic drops, just another stretch of nowhere. They reached the top of the hill, and Mazelton saw them. The Ramparts. Even out on the edge of the horizon they looked huge. Hungry. Like they were tearing open the belly of the sky. They looked close, somehow. The downward slope helped the illusion. He could almost feel them crowding in around him, like they were so massive and ancient they filled up all the available space in his mind, too.

He slowly got out a sketch pad and tried to draw it. Somehow it never quite looked right, the mountains were too small or too big, and never impactful enough.

The wagons kept up their plodding pace, and Mazelton could practically feel them sinking into the mountains. The hills got taller and craggier. Some were so big that he wondered if they were small mountains. A lot of them had the bare tops he associated with tall mountains. All this was filtering through the light show in front of his eyes. The mountains would magically appear and disappear, as though they were just illusions. A mirage of mountains.

He was starting to wonder if the altitude was finally screwing with him. He felt a bit light headed and short of breath. But he hadn’t just a few hours ago, so maybe it wasn’t related? He just didn’t know.

When the wagons stopped for dinner, they camped by a long lake between two mountain spurs. Mazlelton wondered if you would call it a valley or not. It was very wide, so “valley” felt like a stretch, but then, what else would you call it?

“Policlitus. Just wanted to ask, are we in the Ramparts now? I mean, officially?”

“Official according to who?”

“Good question. Are there competing opinions?”

“If there are, I don’t know about them. But here.” Policlitus stood, grasped the front of his shirt in his left hand, grandly gestured with his right and declared “By the power and authority vested in me by the Nimu Caravan Company, I declare this here lake and valley to be part of the Ramparts. Officially.” He sat again with great dignity.

Mazelton grinned and nodded his thanks. The whole exchange got some chuckles from the teamsters. They were still skittish over the whole “glowing skull” thing, but he felt like they were settling down.

“Why did you want to know?”

“We have been so focused on getting up and through here, I felt like it should have been marked. “You are officially in the mountains now.” Something. Also… New Scandie is on the western side of these mountains. It feels like the last big push.”

“You aren’t wrong, though the amount of concentrated weird in these mountains is impressive.”

“Oh?” Mazelton said warily, refusing to admit any potential evidence of Lettie’s theory.

“Mostly harmless as long as you keep your distance, of course.”

“Oh good.”

“Like the trash talking tree.”

“Uhuh.”

“Don’t believe me? Ask around, it’s real. Made of some kind of rock, it’s not a real tree. But it can detect humans and it immediately starts launching insults at them. Mostly in a language nobody understands.”

“Then how do you know it is insulting you?”

“The branches… gesture. I do not wish to draw you a picture.”

“Mmm. And nobody blew it up in all these millennia?”

“Nope. Still there.”

“Annoying but not dangerous.”

“Unless you get too close. Then it eats people. But it’s nowhere near the road, so it’s safe enough.”

Mazelton picked up his rice bowl and headed for his tent. “Good night.”

Mazleton’s eyes were recovering faster than he had expected, but they were still pretty messed up. No matter. For this, his eyes were completely optional. He dug into his food chest and pulled out a heavily padded jar. In it were six lemons, packed in salt and sugar, practically glowing with vibrant acidity and flavor. The Collective had used it to pay for his lecture on how his old heat weapon worked, and now it was time for it to start showing it’s value.

With immense care, Mazelton unscrewed the lid. Using a pair of clean sticks, he carefully lifted one out, doing his best to not lose any of the salt or sugar in the jar. He then, with agonizing care, cut a quarter of the lemon, then cut that quarter in half. He set one of the halves aside, and returned the rest to the jar, gently shaking it to make sure everything was coated. He gave it a quick dose of purifying heat (not that it needed it) and sealed it up again.

Now came the tricky part- how to use it. He remembered Policlitus (and some others, now that he thought about it) claiming that the only really edible part was the thin yellow rind at the edge, and the rest was too salty and bitter to be eaten. He staunchly denied this assertion. This stuff was far, far too precious to be simply discarded. If it was too salty, that meant that it should be diluted with less salty stuff.

He pulled his lethally sharp belt knife out and quickly minced the piece of lemon, scraping everything into his rice bowl. He stirred it all carefully together, then went in with his very best spoon.

It was too salty. Surprisingly bitter. And it tasted like the warmest, sweetest summer day. He absolutely loved it.

“Welcome to the Ramparts. With luck, you will live a long and happy life here.” Mazelton whispered. He devoured the rest of the bowl and smiled blissfully. Then sighed, and pulled out the remaining half of the quarter. He dug a hole and, with immense reluctance, put the lemon down in the dirt. He nicked his arm, and let the blood flow over it. The Aelflaed had looked after him well so far, but that was no reason to think they would keep doing it. And he would need their help if he was going to make it to Danae.

Morning came with a drizzle. Mazelton blinked up into it. It was that very annoying intensity of… you couldn’t even call it rain. Sort of a heavy fog with threats. It made everything worse. Didn’t matter what it was, it was worse. Your clothes soaked through. People and aurochs got cold, fast. Packing up the wagons took on a few extra layers of misery. Do you know what wet canvas smells like? The caravanners sure did by this point. Do you know what mildewed canvas smells like? They knew that too. But the tents still had to be rolled up and put away wet, because what else could they do?

It was a very miserable caravan that rolled away from the lake. Not twenty minutes on the road, and the sun came out. Mazelton thought it was spiteful.

They rolled along the ancient road, roughly paralleling the west running river. It boggled Mazelton how fast they went from prairie grass to spruce. There were some flat leafed trees near the road, but barely twenty meters in… all evergreen trees. Densely packed, crowding the road and giving the impression that they were as solid and impenetrable as the mountains they grew on.

Lunch time came, and Policlitus didn’t stop the wagons. Mazelton looked around in confusion- he was usually very regular about breaks. It looked like a fine spot- river not too far away, flat ground, not a great camp site, but they had camped at worse. Mazelton turned to ask Duane, if he knew anything, but before he could speak, Duane cut him off with a raised hand. He pointed into the woods.

Standing in the dark between the trees was a corpse. The face was still recognizable as a face- a masculine looking person with short, spiky hair and skin that uncomfortably drooped from his limbs. Mazelton didn’t recognize the clothes. He was distracted. The corpse’s heart was torn out, the entire left-center side of his chest pulled apart, looking like a looted reliquary. Then a few trees over, another corpse. The same face. Nailed to the tree with dozens of thick iron spikes. Then another, burned. Then another, same face, drowned. Then hung. Then covered in blisters and reeking of pestilence. Over and over again, the same face, the same person, dead. Mazelton counted forty of them before they stopped showing up.

He turned to look at Duane, about to demand answers, when Duane cut him off with a raised hand. He just shook his head, and drove on. Twenty minutes later, Policlitus called lunch. Nobody was very hungry. When Mazelton asked him about it, he just shrugged. The bodies were some kind of engineered mushroom, apparently. No matter how often they were cut down, they always sprang back up. They never spread outside that particular area. How or why they did what they did, nobody knew. Harmless, apparently. But, as Policlitus put it, who the hell would want to eat looking at all that?

They rolled on. The rest of the day was downright boring, and the complaining about mildew took on an almost soothing quality. Things still hadn’t dried out. The night was surprisingly chilly. Mazelton wondered how many people were able to stay warm that night.