Skinner was all knots. Body and mind still contorted by prison. His arms felt light and unruly with the shackles gone. His mind squirmed like a nest of rats as he walked through Camshire's disquieting avenues. It wasn't long before the felon's thoughts turned away from his lofty fantasies of redemption upon his release under Warden Hotch's bargain and went into a darker and more needful place. To the stars with the Warden and to the pits with them missing urchins—they could all wait. Skinner needed smite. That first. The rest, after. He secretly knew and feared his imagination would ultimately veer once he first allowed himself to fantasize how sublime that first hit would be after going so long without the intoxicating stuff. Just one wick to burn through the night and set him even. Just one.

No. No. This was to be Skinner's second chance. Probably his last. He couldn't spit in the face of new luck, a chance at salvation. The repeater steeled himself and thought of those poor lost kids and trumped westward, away from Fetterstone prison and toward the lower wards of the city. As he went forward he watched the orderly and lifeless row houses of Gallowshade decay into the more dilapidated hovels rented by the laborers who toiled in the Hookyards beyond. Every jaunt through the city of Camshire was a tale that could fill a book. There were drunks in the gutters, thieves in the alleys, chaotics on the rooftops. Every last man and woman seemed to have some scheme in the cookery, a half-forged and deluded and often diabolical way out of this pit. There were bodies in the streets. Some crumpled on the spot they had perished. Others had been dragged outside and left for the so-called 'Ferrymen' in their beaked masks who carried the dead on carts to the hungry crematories that never ceased their burning—or more nefarious destinations if the conspiracies were to be believed. Some of the dead had the black eyes and veins of the Rot, giving them the look of diseased gobs. Others had fallen to less exotic cause. All were now at peace. Rendered into things to be dealt with, obstacles for the still living who must walk these streets, serving as reminders of their own mortality.

Of course not all of Camshire was so pandemonic but only privileged eyes ever saw the manicured gardens and grand architecture rumored to sit beyond the enormous walls that sectioned the city like a butchered hog. It was a metropolis divided. Skinner saw that the Diluvian hardsticks had taken it up a few notches during his stint. The city guards regularly patrolled in formations under the pretense of maintaining order and peace in greater numbers than before. The blackened armor they wore and the halberds and shields they carried were designed as if to instill fear—the better to control the masses. The most notable change was that their helmets were no longer open, their identities now masked by frowning reptilian plates. Skinner knew the kinds of faces hidden under those masks. The kinds he'd like to knock the teeth out of.

Soon the repeater's feet carried him past the sighing districts of those who still clung to any domestic ambitions and into a steaming jungle of alleys and shanties and mud and lowfolk. Self-evolved complexes of rambling scaffolds and walkways threatened to collapse or burst into fire at a blink. These runaway monstrosities had succumbed to the flame again and again in the past. Sometimes the infernos would claim thousands of souls before finally being snuffed by a wash of chemical rain, the only time such weather was ever praised—but still people just kept on building in every direction and lighting their candles and torches. An entire community with a death wish. Dangerous neighbors to have—and so everyone had iron daggers in their sleeves and iron jackets round their hearts.

This was the Gutters, where hope went to die. The rambling blight smeared the line between the miserably poor and the truly starving, an unsanctioned ward teeming with dens of every known sin. Truly a bad place for an addict to visit. Skinner ignored the temptations from the festering pushers ("A pinprick, blood? To quiet down the nasties?") and trudged onward. A parade of sick scenes played out in these streets and parlors, and worse transpirings still, Skinner knew, in the alleys betwixt them and the basements below and the attics above. Want to watch a woman suck off a woebeast? Witness a live vivisection? Try your own hand at either? The Guts was your place. This sprawl was itself a rot upon the metropolis. A mindless scourge of sinkholes and reeking aqueducts and railways for freight carts pulled by enslaved muscle. Walls crowned with spikes and broken glass that did little to keep the blistering masses of poverty at bay.

Skinner passed a bearded and barmy street preacher who exclaimed to all who passed: "Arnimpha only comes once every thousand-and-nine years! A cabal of immortal mages ride on the back of that glorious comet and fly in the wake of her radiant hair. Are you ready to be judged by the old magi on their roaming star?! Have you cleansed yourselves of wrong?! Utter your confessions now! Acknowledge the corn, as our friends in the fields say! Fall into the mud and wash your filthy souls of sin!"

The felon moved on and plunged deeper into the Guts. In this limbotic bridge between the working-class homes and the steaming shantytowns beyond was the dirtiest string of dive bars this side of the city. Skinner had some trouble finding the sinhouse he sought for these avenues constantly shifted like a living slime and it had been a long while since his last displeasure of entering the district. The establishment itself, 'The Last Leg,' was one of the older buildings of the Gutters. The stonebrick saloon leaned in the mud, one end sinking. Skinner walked through its winged doors. No one looked up from their cards and mugs. Just a smattering of drunks playing games of stakes low to all but themselves. One rumbled through conspiracy tales for whoever would listen as he dealt a new hand:

"...from the deep, sirs. Invadin' us at the highest levels of gov'mint. Infestations. Nasty, slimy things from the sea. They find 'em curled up where they's brains should be when the coroners cut open the skulls of politicians an' judges. Brains eaten away by the parasites that take their place. Runnin' us all."

Another man added to the story: "Friend of mine's cousin says he knew a fisherm'n who found one of the damn sea-things in his net. All tentacles and stingers, some squirmin' mass straight outta the black fathoms." He played a card and named it. "Lord of Tongues." The others groaned and bitched as the winner claimed his money.

The bar and furniture inside the watering hole had been shimmed with wood slivers to keep them somewhat level. The effect made the interior look off-kilter. Skinner wouldn't want to get too drunk in this antigoglin place. He went to the bar where a pocked and bloated bar dog tended.

"Here to meet someone," Skinner said as he took a stool. "Was told to ask for 'Church.'"

The tender unhooked a key and tossed it onto the counter. "Room's upstairs. They'll knock."

"Know how long?"

"No. Bend an elbow to pass the time?"

"Who's payin'?" Skinner asked.

The barhand's expression said enough and Skinner reached into his pocket. "Yer cheapest rotgut." He tossed a coin onto the bar. It clattered and spun and the barhand slammed the bartop with his fist, kicking the coin higher. The drinkslinger caught it from the air with his other hand with practiced ease and turned around to pour the beverage.

Skinner listened to the chatter behind him as he waited. The drunk theorist went on describing the fisherman's alien catch: "Body was clear an' you could see its purple organs still beatin'. Folks found a little black pearl in the middle of the squid's brain. Tiny little etches, shaped like an acorn. Got a pretty sweet crown for the prize from a rakshasa drifter."

Absently rubbing that scar on his palm again, Skinner caught his own dull reflection repeated in the bottles on the shelves as he listened. He was glad those glass vessels weren't better polished for what little he could see in that conspiracy of hims looked wretched indeed. He'd encountered such bony and haunted and sunken visages before in those lost to smite or other miseries and those who wore them never came back their old selves. The repeater felt judged by the legion of strange doppelgangers in the smudged glass and wanted to smash them all.

The bartender set a foaming glass of mead down in front of Skinner and the felon's percolating breakdown was quickly snuffed. Just the act of slipping his fingers into the handle and around the mug was like coming home. The mead was cheap and watery but when Skinner put it to his mouth and its foam crisped and he caught the first faint scent of honey his appetite for things other than smite was quickly reignited. He swirled the stuff around and savored the smell. This would be Skinner's first drink of booze in years. He took a sip and swished it in his mouth and over his teeth and gulped it down into his deprived gullet. The stuff tickled his plumbing from tongue-tip to belly. Skinner smacked his lips. "Ahhhh."

"The man likes his mead," said the barhand. Skinner looked up and the other's face ruined things. The con wanted to be away from people. The walk here had been a gauntlet of abject humanity after all that time alone in a cell. Skinner needed solitude again, a place to collect himself. He stood and picked up his glass. "Think I'll finish this in my room."

"Second on the right."

Skinner rose from his stool and made his way for the stairs. Damn, was he tired to the bone. The inebriated gambler's tall tale went on: "That fisherm'n went back out to sea and weren't never seen again. Boat washed back ashore some days later. Empty. Rumor was that one of them creatures of the deep got in that poor fool's brain and talked him into jumping into the sea..."

Skinner went up the creaking and narrow stairs and found his room. The shoddy quarters were the cheapest money could buy but to the felon it was a palatial suite after all those years rotting in a damp and moldy cell. The window afforded a view of the Guts' hectic maze of acid-stained rooftops under a hazy brown sky. Most free men would consider the view it afforded a repulsive showing but the convict's cell in Fetterstone had featured no window at all. Skinner laughed at himself for wondering how he would pass the time as he waited for this mysterious man Church. To Skinner these accommodations were sublime, no matter the desperate and vulgar babble of the bedlam outside or the ants on the walls or the stains on the sheets. He opened the window and sharply breathed in the cold and smoggy air like it was the scent of the open sea. The bed beckoned. He gently set his full mug on the nightstand and stretched out his arms and farted as only a free man could. Fell back into the mattress. Though the linen was coarse and the pillows lumpy it felt to the repeater like the bedding of a king. He was fast asleep in no time at all. Dreams eddied in and out like the tides. Skinner felt lost far down in some bottomless chthonic sea where drifted glowing jellies with psionic crystals in the seats of their ungodly brains that had the power to charm fishermen to their watery deaths.

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