Mazelton racked his brains for ways to kill the Collective with little risk to himself. Explosives. Poisons. Fire. Long range weaponry from ambush. Ah… traps? Like, environmental hazards? Kill by proxy? He kept his hands busy while he worked. Char cloth, it turned out, was very easy to make and even easier to spark into a fire. Not quite the “rag soaked in pure ethanol” that he dreamed of, but… pretty damn good, actually. He had seen people making it in little metal canisters during the trip, and had always low-key thought they were being silly. They were not.

Breaking it down- explosives. He didn’t know how to make any, and if there was any in the convoy, he didn’t know who had it. Maybe Policlitus had some blasting caps to remove obstacles, but he couldn’t count on that. Also, except for a couple of very memorable days when he was seventeen, he had no hands-on experience using them. And the main gist of the lessons on explosives were “If you don’t really, REALLY know what you are doing with them, stay the hell away from explosives.” Explosives were duly removed from the mental list.

Fire. Well he was already doing that, but fire was nearly as dangerous to him as it was to the Collective. He wanted the caravan to survive, so starting a wildfire was not the best strategy. A localized fire, just on the Collective’s wagons, would need to be very, very fast spreading and very hard to put out. On top of that, if they did lose a significant number of wagons, then they would shed all pretenses and just take what they needed.

Collective doctrine held that anyone not of the Collective was functionally a slave to the parasite class, and no better than them. Worse, really, because they willingly fed their exploiters. It was only by strict reeducation that a slave could be redeemed, and if such redemption was impractical… best to deny the parasites their means of support.

Fire could be used, but it could only be a distraction, not the main killing method. Poison, then.

Mazelton was more than a little familiar with poisons. They were as much a hobby as a tool of his trade. He wouldn’t call himself a skilled poison maker, but he could compound a few useful things. None of which he had the ingredients for. The best he could do at the moment was poison smoke from the poison oak and he had no idea of dispersal, or what constituted a lethal dose, or how to use it safely. It would be part of the killing methods, but it wasn’t too reliable. Other poisons? He frowned. His go to would be to irradiate their food and water, but they had kept themselves from him for months now.

He had a sudden vision of black, boiling clouds of smoke, carrying radioactive dust out over the city. The warehouses burning, the rookeries burning. And the heat spreads into every little nook and cranny of the city, into every nook and cranny of people’s lungs and just dissolves them. He hugged his knees and tried not to throw up. He could do that. He could. Maybe if everything was completely fucked and he was going to die anyway, he would. But not otherwise.

It took him a bit to compose himself, but fortunately the char cloth was pretty hard to wreck. No harm done.

Right. What was next… kill them from ambush. Worked if he was picking off one or two of them, not several hundred of them. And they were a lot better at it than he was.

Traps… usually worked with explosives. Or not. Pitfalls, a rock slide, things could be arranged, probably. Of course, anything that could take out the majority of the Collective would also likely take out the rest of the Caravan.

Mazelton sighed. In an ideal scenario, he would just convince the rest of the Caravan to expel the Collective, and they would each go their own separate ways. That wasn’t going to happen, however, as there was just the one trail through the mountains. What, would they just march a day behind the Caravan? Unlikely.

It would probably have to be a few things. He would have to weaken the Collective enough that he could take out a majority of them with one savage blow, ensuring that the rest would conclude that their safest route would be to obediently follow the Caravan and not cause trouble. And he would have to do it without making them feel threatened, because they were just looking for a reason to throw hands at this point.

Mazelton stared moodily at his work. He was making these things because they might be useful, not because of a coherent plan. That’s what he picked up watching the elders in his Clan- you make as many little preparations as you can, so that you can respond with some preparation to anything. Big preparations could only be made for immediate or obvious problems. He had a big, immediate problem. What was the last means- he had folded environmental hazards in with traps. Was there a big swampy patch up ahead, where he might be able to encourage disease in their camp?

Mazelton pictured the map. No swamps came to mind, but something else did. They were right next to it, in fact. Unlikely to kill many, or any, members of the Collective, but there may be something there he could use. An unforeseeable variable. He swore he would never do it, but circumstances had driven him to a desperate place. He would have to go prospecting.

It never occurred to Mazelton to look for allies.

The day was lovely, starting cool and rising to an entirely bearable heat with the wind off the mountains. The flies would swarm up fiercely, for a time, and those in Mazelton’s good graces got to enjoy watching them fall at their feet. The trail narrowed here, between the mountains and the shockingly turquoise river, but it was still quite passable. Mazelton would lose himself looking at the mountains, the forests and the rivers. There was something profoundly beautiful about it, something that called to his soul, and helped calm his fears. At lunch, he dug out his precious box of letters from Danae, few though they were. Yes, the last letter she wrote, accepting his proposal.

It’s beautiful here, and while the snows are nothing to laugh about, we wouldn’t get them if it wasn’t so much warmer than the plains. The smell alone is worth the trip. Balsam and cedar and fir and a dozen other woods that spread their scent over the snow. Like warm spice dusted over a cold drink you sip with every breath. The mountains so huge and tall, but you feel like you could just reach out and pet them. You will love it, I promise.

The romantic in me hopes that as you fall in love with this land, we will fall in love with each other.

Mazelton reached his hand out towards a mountain peak, breathing the scent of the forests.

Camp that night was still subdued. The pain of losing so many people, so brutally, weighed on everyone. It was the slow ritual of it. A group or family would come to the mountain and be tested. If they didn’t match up, if they weren’t strong or smart or skilled enough, the mountain killed them. And you had to watch, thankful that you had already passed the test, or numb with horror for the test to come.

It was in this grim environment that Policlitus banged the drum to assemble. Nobody stirred at first, and then they came in dribs and drabs, dragging over to see what the noise was about. No one from the Collective came, until Policlitus yelled over that this was exactly the thing they wanted to know, so turn up or shut up.

They turned up. Armed and pissy. They stood at the edge of the crowd closest to their wagons, eyeing everyone else. Mazelton kept the smile off his face. The more they made themselves the common enemy, the better.

“Alright, I suspect nobody has any enthusiasm for prospecting, but, AS NOTED IN THE HANDBOOK, there is a very lucrative prospecting site about four miles from here. Right there, in fact.” Policlitus pointed at the enormous mountain taking up a good chunk of the skyline. Its top looked a bit like a ruined wall, making an admirer start thumbing their thesaurus for words like “weathered” and “craggy.” It was almost offensively picturesque.

“That particular mountain has about fifteen names that I know, and those are just the ones from the last few millennia. The name you might have heard is Bastion.”

That got some murmurs, and more than a few laughs, from the crowd.

“Yep. That’s the genuine article, original, mountain from the songs. People out east think it’s a myth, and there aren’t enough people out here to make prospecting it appealing, as it is in the middle of nowhere. Though, the Sky Runners have a regular campsite a bit closer to the foot of the mountain, so if you have some business with them, it’s worth checking it out.” Policlitus cleared his throat, then continued.

“So here’s the real story. Long, long, LONG ago, somebody noticed that there was this visually striking, huge mountain, with easy access to fresh water, lots of game animals to hunt, easy access to a major trail and plenty of wood. And best of all, it was in the middle of nowhere, so nobody would come and bother them. So they built a secret bunker. Dug right into the side of the mountain and made their own little hidey hole. Except they didn’t do a very good job at keeping it hidden, because now the mountain is absolutely stuffed with “secret bunkers.” That got some more laughs.

“People have been hiding out here for at least millennia, and quite possibly epochs. If that sounds unlikely to you, just remember that every person who had the “amazing idea” of building a hideout here did so centuries after the last person with the same idea died. Likewise, prospectors have been picking through the mountain every few centuries, with middling luck. The thing about building a secret mountain hideout is that they tend to be fortified. Big iron doors with ruined, impossible to move locks, secret passageways sealed with a meter thick slab of stone, that kind of thing.”

Policlitus grinned.

“See where I am going with this?”

That got some more laughs.

“So on the one hand, we know that there are a lot of unopened bunkers with who knows what inside. But it’s probably very well preserved, and potentially extremely valuable. You got to be rich to build a secret underground lair. On the other hand, those bunkers are closed because nobody knows how to open them. Now, maybe you get lucky, or you have some tools or something that you think might do the trick. If you are interested, by all means give it a shot. BUT.”

He looked hard around the circle, and especially at the representatives from the Collective.

“It is VERY, VERY, VERY DANGEROUS. It is packed full of unstable tunnels, many of which were amature jobs to begin with. Many of the bunkers require dangerous climbs to reach. The kind of fall where you would take a long time before you bounced. Some prospectors reckon that a particular bunker is “theirs” somehow, and set traps to protect their claim. If you choose to go, ON YOUR OWN HEAD BE IT. I won’t be going, and neither will my people. That being said, the usual prospecting gear will be on sale at Mazelton’s wagon, first come, first served.”

The next morning saw Mazelton slip away from the camp, carrying a pack and leading one of his cheve. When he thought he was far enough away that he would not be heard, he mounted up and made for the Sky Runners camp. The pre-dawn light blurred everything into a sort of liminal void, where you knew you were on a trail, and there were mountains and trees and all that, but you still felt like you were on the edge of a pulling emptiness. Mazelton had the faint hallucination that if he stepped off the trail, he would roll down an endlessly long slope until he fell thousands of meters to his death. He was almost childishly glad to hear the challenge from the Sky Runner’s sentry. For a moment, he had thought he was the only existence in the void.

Danae had written him back. The copy of the letter had been kept in a little horn tube, carefully sealed with wax. Mazelton was told he could keep it- a valuable gift and a token of the Sky Runner’s appreciation. Mazelton, of course, responded to the gift with several of his own, along with a request that they look after his cheve while he went prospecting. “Come back in a week or we will assume you died and keep it,” was not a… compelling guarantee, but he knew he was lucky to have them here at all.

Mazelton put the letter in his pack without reading it. He knew that he would read and re-read it obsessively, wiping out a big piece of the day. And he had things to do, if he was going to see Danae.

Mazelton started climbing. He had no idea where anything good was hidden, but he figured that between his heat sensing abilities and general paranoia he would have a good hunch as to where to look. And at some point, you had to just trust in the strength of Father Sun, the protection of Mother Moon, and pray that the Great Dusty World would catch you gently should you fall. So Mazelton started picking turns at random and began boldly hiking up the mountain.

It was at this point that Mazelton realized he fucked up.

Scale is, by definition, a relative thing. Bastion was not a particularly tall mountain, as mountains in the Western Ramparts go, but it was still a damn mountain and you could have lost Old Radler thrice over in its interior. The slope up it, at least on the side Mazelton was coming from, was quite hikable until you got two thirds of the way up the mountain and it turned into a vertical face split with innumerable cracks. But you had to hike hours to get that high, and the slope was fully prepared to punish you for your hubris every step of the way. The pine trees seemed to trap all the early morning humidity under their boughs, so your clothes stuck to your skin, clammy and choking, as your body started to sweat. The whole mountain, Mazelton concluded, was a machine for generating human misery.

It took Mazelton until lunchtime to reach the top of the slope, where the pine forest stopped dead and the rock face rose. This particular trail terminated at a rock face that had faint carvings in it, some sort of abstract geometric shapes that tickled a vague familiarity in him without actually sparking a memory. One of those things that just happens to look like a lot of other things, he guessed. He had a look around and found a thin winding trail that meandered up the rock face. That craggy mountain silhouette was another deception of scale- those “cracks” in the face were actually ripples in the side of the mountain, tens or hundreds of yards deep. Mazleton was starting to understand how you could lose epochs of bunkers in this mountain. He hiked up, and since he saw more of those geometric carvings, decided that this was a promising path. He had heard that there was a lake somewhere around this mountain. He hoped he found it. His canteen was running low, fast.

The little path swung out away from the side of the mountain a bit, a small promontory facing west. He stood there and looked out across the wide valley between the mountains. He could see the river they had been traveling beside. It looked utterly massive from up here, like machine polished blued steel winding through the forests. It was no wonder the Sky Runners and Voyageurs could treat the West like their own backyard. He stared at it a minute longer, then nearly fell on his ass laughing. He got it. He finally got the joke the Sky Runners had been telling for half an epoch. The painfully bright blue sky reflected on the river, and there they were, canoeing away on it. Running on the sky.

He sat and pulled out the questionably flavored seeds he got in Cold Garden. He was still quite thin, and all this hiking wasn’t going to help that. Mazelton looked out across the wide river valley, at the mountains who’s white tops were lost in the clouds. His sense of scale was going out of whack again. The mountains looked like ordinary boulders. Steep, vertigo inspiring slopes became a gentle swell. The vast, dark pine forests were just moss, growing on the side of the boulders, nestled as they were against the little trickle of a stream. He sat and ate for a timeless moment, then forced himself to his feet and carried on hiking.

By midafternoon, even his well tested indifference to heights was getting frayed. It was a long, long way down. But the little pictograms had kept on snaking up the mountain, so he followed them, trusting that there must be something interesting at the end of them. His faith was ultimately rewarded. Just short of the peak, tucked in a fold of the mountain was a little flat area a few square meters across. The path ended here- with vertical cliffs above, and more vertical cliffs below. One final, large, geometric pattern was carved into the cliff face, above a bare stretch of rock. And kicking at the rock and swearing was one Madam Lettie.

Mazelton coughed loudly. What else could he do? Lettie spun around, her hand dropping to a pistol at her waist. When she saw who it was, she swore again and threw her hands in the air in frustration.

“Mazelton, what the fancy fuck are you doing here?!”

“Prospecting. You?”

Madam Lettie gave him a glare that should have been far more lethal than her pistol. It was ineffective. Mazelton had been glared at by the best. Lettie was twenty years too early to intimidate him with a glare!

“Elaborate. Tell me how you managed to pick the one path that would lead you to this particular spot. Please.”

“I liked the pretty pictures, so I followed them. And now I’m here.”

Lettie made a gargling, choking sort of noise.

“They look kind of familiar, do you have any idea who made these pictures?”

Lettie sat down with a thump, unwilling to even look at Mazelton. Mazelton paid her no mind, and started poking around the blank face of the mountain. There must be a secret entrance here, but likewise it must be ferociously well hidden. It’s not like it was hard to find the path here- there were posted signs!

“Civilization F-833.”

“Means nothing to me, I’m afraid.”

“It means nothing to anybody. If they had any written records, they haven’t been identified. You find them all across the continent. They liked putting pretty beadwork on their clothes, had a surprisingly sophisticated material culture, tended to avoid figurative art to a degree indicative of religious doctrine, and they are all dead. That’s pretty much the sum total of the Pi Clan’s knowledge of these people.”

“So… almost nothing, then?”

“Yeah. There are literally hundreds of tribes like this, in just this epoch. There is a city, well, was a city, a very long way south east of here. We figure at its peak, thirty thousand people lived there. Which sounds more like a town than a city, sure, but they were in the hunter-gatherer phase of development. Genuine city, with rammed earth houses, streets, woven baskets and simple pottery, all the indicia of a real civilization, but they never figured out writing. So eventually they died or moved on, and we know almost nothing about them. Just what we can deduce by picking over their bones.”

She shrugged. Mazelton nodded.

“So what are you doing here? And how the hell did you get here before me?”

“I have been planning to prospect here since Sky’s Echo, and came as soon as we camped last night. I won a certain ledger in an underground death game. The ledger was bound in the flayed skin of an excommunicate Talipi Priest, which recorded the known secret bunkers of Bastion. I was the one who had to figure out an antidote to the poisons the book had been soaked in, even as they dissolved my nerves from the fingers up. It was not a good time. Then I had a knife fight in an alleyway with three Heretic Hunting Acolytes of the Talipi Church. I do not do hand to hand. It is not my thing. I really don’t do knife fights, as the one universal truth of knife fights is that everyone will be getting cut. You will understand that I am a little peeved that you just “followed the pretty pictures” to get here.”

Mazelton cocked his head to the side. “Talipi Church?”

Lettie gently covered her face with her hands, clearly trying to pretend Mazelton wasn’t there.

“A mystery cult.”

“Never heard of them.”

“The clue is in the name. Mystery cult.”

“Loads of popular mystery cults out there. Some of them are publicly recruiting.”

“Not these guys.”

“Shame. Some of those cults hold great street parties.”

The silence stretched.

“You are trying to wish me into non-existence, aren't you.”

“Embrace the Great Dusty World, return to the vast oneness from which you arose.”

“Soon enough.”

“Why wait? Eternity is calling.”

“Some things I still want to do. Besides, I am still Ma enough to think that this is the only life I get, you know?”

“Yeah, your faiths don’t really line up there.”

“They kind of do. The Ma say that you only get one life, and dead is dead forever, so wring every bit of good living out of your minute in the sun. The Dusties say that living and dying isn’t so clear cut- we are part of an eternal cycle, and the bit where we stand up and walk around is the smallest part of it. When we return to the dust, we are just going through some changes, and when we stand up again, we will have made another change. But I figure, whoever I stand up again as, it won’t be me, you know?” Mazelton let his eyes drift up the cliff face.

Lettie just sat on the ground. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, they just had nothing to say. Mazelton started poking around the cliff face, trying to see if he could pick up any hints of heat. There was the usual background stuff, no getting away from that, but nothing stood out. Mmm. Annoying.

Mazelton started considering it from an architectural perspective. This was not, to its creators, a secret bunker. You don’t post signs making sure people cannot lose their way to your secret bunker. You also don’t put a military or governmental installation somewhere only accessible by a tiny winding path. You need access for shipments of supplies. So that left a private person who set this up as some kind of holiday retreat (which sounded comically unlikely) OR, much more likely, this was the back door/emergency exit, and all the signs were telling people how to get down the mountain.

“You can’t find the mechanism to open the door because there isn't one. This is the emergency exit. I bet you it only opens from the inside.” Mazelton speculated aloud.

“The thought occurred. In fact, you came up just a few minutes after it occurred.”

“Any clues from your weird Pi senses?”

“Nope. Your weird Ma senses?”

“Also nope.”

“Well that’s… super.”

Mazelton looked around for a suitable bit of greenery, and sighed when there wasn’t any. “I don’t suppose you packed a little brush, or rag maybe?”

“No. Why?”

“Because this place is ringing a bell for me.” He picked up a small piece of rock and used it to scratch a bracket on either side of the cliff face where the hidden door probably was.

“Would you say this is a comfortable height for most people to use a lock?”

“I guess. You think that there is a hidden mechanism that triggers another hidden mechanism that opens this door?”

“I mean, kind of messed up if you have to hike down a mountain, around the mountain, and through another passage back up the mountain if you lock yourself out accidentally.”

“Perfectly reasonable and logical, except that I and the who knows how many prospectors before me, after conducting a detailed, granular, search, found no such mechanisms.”

Mazelton took off his shirt and immediately regretted it. It was cold up here, and yet, he could feel a sunburn coming on almost instantly. He quickly started brushing the area inside the bracket, trying to remove any little clumps of dust or sediment. It didn’t go as quickly as he would have liked, but soon enough…

“Ahah! Promising.” It was a little dimple in the rock, low and on the right hand side of the face. He started blowing into the hole, trying to clear it out as best he could. Lettie looked excited for a moment and came over for a look.

“It’s a finger-sized hole in the rock. There’s nothing in there.”

“Says you.”

“Yeah. Says me.”

Mazelton grinned and stuck his index finger in. Then pulled it out and replaced it with his pinky. Whoever made this hole had dainty fingers. He let a trickle of heat run through his pinky and into the hole. He felt a tickle of feedback. Whatever was in there, it needed more than he was giving it, and he wasn’t giving it just what it wanted.

“Oh fun! They didn’t use their fingers at all. It must be a separate key.”

“Wait, you actually found a lock?”

“Sort of? It depends how you define a lock, I guess?”

“Mazelton, I am pretty sure I could throw your scrawny ass off the mountain. My toe grip alone could crush your sticklike limbs. Speak.”

“It’s the deformed skull shape that makes you short tempered. You should look into surgical fixes. Maybe just wear big hats with veils. Also, I’m not being intentionally cryptic. I think that the reason no one found the mechanism is that the entire mechanism is on the other side of the door, except for the keyhole. And it’s not exactly a keyhole, because it’s not exactly a lock- it’s the socket for an ignition device or some kind of starter. It runs off of heat, and it’s apparently picky about what kind and how much heat it gets.”

“Are you kidding me? How in the hell could you find that, in what? Twenty minutes?”

“Would you believe that I have seen this mechanism before?”

“No.”

“Shame. It’s true. It’s how I got out of Old Radler.”

Lettie gave Mazelton a long, hard look, then turned her palms upward in supplication.

“Rest easy Ze**{#. Your theory of Cumulative Statistical Aberration is now a proven fact.”

It was easy to find the mechanism, but it took him until nightfall to actually crack the thing. He had to modulate the heat in just the right ways for just the right amount of time to make whatever was on the other side turn over. He was drained near dry by the end of it. But nothing in the world could have refreshed him like the meaty KTHUNK that vibrated out of the rock.

A high pitched whine started somewhere deep inside the mountains. Mechanisms unused in millenia slowly returned to life, as a ten foot by ten foot section of the cliff, nearly the whole side of the ledge, slid into the ground. On the other side of the rock were two comfortable looking wooden chairs, a small wicker table, and what appeared to Mazelton’s experienced eye to be an ice bucket. They turned their back to the mountain and looked west. The door lined up just right with the wrinkle in the mountain to let someone sit here and watch a truly spectacular sunset.

“Hey, Mazelton?”

“Yes Lettie?”

“I’m going to throw you off the mountain now.”

“Seems mean.”

“Underground death game, Mazelton. Poison. Knife fights in an alley. I am still trying to remove the scars, both physical and emotional. And you followed the pretty pictures, stuck your finger in a dirty hole all afternoon, and found the top secret, millenia old back porch.”

“I wouldn’t touch the furniture. I bet it dissolves into dust with just a touch.”

“I agree, but don’t you worry about it. You just figure out how to fly in the next few seconds. Your hollow bones should be all the edge you need to succeed.”

“Alright. Any idea how you are going to open all the other mechanisms in this place?”

Lettie looked like she was seriously considering doing it anyway. Mazelton shined a light core around the room. There was another door at the back, with another little hole beside it. Lettie groaned, then strode in with Mazelton trailing behind her.