When The Cane fought The Beast, his body shook. The essence of it was under threat.

  She was hot and strong. Pure, perfect Disorder! An absolute against. An end to it in her; one shaking and spitting! Not a kind with laughs or crying, but a kind with shouts and banging knives.

  The roundseats' fire screamed her into him. A chill in the arm. He had a moment to look, and his head bent down. The Cane could see his name snatched away, and his body made a lodge for it. The length of him passed through the length of him.

  The spaces between points grew blurry, as she insisted. Soon he found himself too in the flames, melting down. The mouths gowned him, wrapping over ends and centers with sunset-shaded comfort. He looked up at the stars, and found the eyes of the nearest one. They were also blue.

  He saw the young girl, when she had still been shook around by fire. He could still feel the smoke of the one he had made. The steel in it, which his hand had tossed her in without its knowing, had rested, and now it bent around.

  A law, he thought, against-law.

  The flames ground down The Cane's skin. The mouths on it whispered, shrilling.

  "Is it lost? Are we lost?"

  "Prodda! Help me Prodda!"

  "Come here, Dry Man. Let me strike at you."

  "A good work. The work was good. All was given whole and full."

  Another whisper came. It was heard inside his ear.

  S-soft one… small one...

  His partner touched him one more time, and slobbered over his sight.

  I must go… said The Creator. I must go… she will eat me! She will eat me too!

  The Creator pushed himself inside all of The Cane. He hissed.

  I am myself… I am still here. Begone, covered one. Let me see your light go out.

  He withdrew, and The Cane was empty. The fire bit down. A word left his lips.

  His eyes quit their job, and he began to see.

  Two months earlier

  Partition Hill.

  De coughed.

  The city air was more crowded than the country. He walked through the facesquare. His dwindling frame shifted and jittelled and retched. The wind shook his mask; its thin supports wrought from smooth laq shivered in the wind and threatened to fall away and throw the sunlight on him. The heaped sweeping mounds of red cloak and cord that wound about his body training through the snow, etching a trail of the ice and dirt. With his right hand the Cane of Teller planted himself in the soil, and steadied his body by the tool which had produced his title and so much more grief among a thousand peoples.

  A facesquare. Teller’s facesquare. De knew that was what they said. He looked around, but could not see the faces promised by the name. Where sprang a gaze he saw stone and words and paint, but not an eye or its needer.

  Where those saw a facesquare, he saw a field. He saw an exposed pitch of land concealing bodies that did not breath or beat. He saw winding tiered stone towers over named casings, gilt by rocks that the sun shined everywhere. Gold and silver and blue lights shot apart each man’s face and struck upon the snow as the whirl of the daytime stars caught and played the gems and features that owed life to their ancient blast and furnace thunder. Mounted above all else were sculptures of dead men, slashed and beaten out from grey cliffs that this power did not move. All kinds were in its number; Laruns could be seen, and Rootcliffs, and feurkun Goals, who had ventured beyond their species and been handed a way to look. They stood apart now, grasped alike by silence, keeping fearsome watch about the others to ensure the happiness and good conduct of their hidden and rotted kin. The effigies clasped their hands over their heads in the best aesthete devised by him, Peerless the moulding one, whose acclaimed seams now shaped the gaze of every man who sought to make his mark in such a place and with the gazes of other people.

  The ground beneath De was dust, rocks and frozen rain. In the distance the walls and steepled highs of the koropolis watched them too. They had been made with rising peaks of metal, and swooning stone figures. Their bulk, rustled by the wind, was available for all to see, a quiet invasion by chisel and trowel. In the far distance people with light brown skin of small shapes, worn leather, and soft gray fabric, grown from seeds and shorn from the animals below, watched in those walls and steepled highs and from the shuttered viewlets of all the Hill's tallest places.

  Beyond the conic of this koropolis, and beyond the stall markets built in parallel- beyond till the papering house, and the inking stalls where masses of Tjeni were written upon and renamed with bright green stains- beyond still the gaps between houses, and the side ways which were punched up with wooden spikes and patrolling nivmen- beyond still the tipper courts, and their venues spectacular, where the common people looked on as the firm's tippers were caged and left for public learning and public discovery- beyond still the carthouses, and the animal pens, where hundreds of snorting and clopping hoofs dragged on covered carries, arrived even now, rattled in past the Hill's great walls, untied and unloaded by hunched Freemen and then whispered through the roads and side ways toward ovens, casks, pipes, tipper courts, inking stalls, papering houses- the Hill's grand walls showed up. They had doors a meter thick, which locked with three wooden bars the height of many persons. When they did open, they threw out in a lumbering swing, and revealed the roads built on Goal.

  De trembled through the facesquare. He and his companion pased by a casing made for a Goal, and the face they had produced for him. A stonecutter had drawn his jaw in a way that was prized by Hubun Eazim, the place De now knew he would not venture. The border of his possible world shrunk with each decline of the melting star, and he moved past the Goallandish man.

  The one at De's side was a Lastfacer, a man with the light brown skin of Laruns, with their prickling hair and swerving chatter, which felt oily and sour on De's tongue. The Lastfacer held a scroll at his side and smiled at the dustless edges and polished contours of the bodies taken by his company.

  The two of them wandered among these dead, appraising the new gazes that Larunkat's body, destroyed on the grounds of a distant land, had been given for its trials. They arrived an stood still at a case still larger than the Goal's, whose housing stood over them in an arched, three-sided block. Its inhabitant's name could be found inscribed on each of its outer walls, but De did not read any of them.

  “This work I made for Rippleson, the most known and helpful man of his section,” the Lastfacer said. He pointed to a hollow port facing them, shaped like a man in a sweeping cape. “At the end of every day, the sun falls through his shade. Then he appears a shining member of all firms. Many produced ones like the aim of it. It lets them gaze again on their producers.”

  De looked up at the figure, into its dusty eyes, scarred and pared back by the breeze. Its body posed in union with its fearsome brethren, joined to the conquest of this territory and the making of its pain. He supposed that it could be done.

  He shook, and wrapped the layers of cloth around him tighter. “N-no,” he replied. His voice, like his body, shiverred and splashed about. “I h-have not p-produced-d,” he chattered through his mask.

  The Lastfacer shifted. “I know it, Goodpoint,” he said, and he asked, “If you would give it out, have you a sort that you are searching for?”

  A secret voice emerged near the root of De’s thought. Its word threw venom that hissed and spit.

  He searches, it said, for a locked door.

  “No,” he told the Lastfacer. He frowned.

  Outside the yard, a rider galloped through past the stone arch of the facesquare on a hoofed, gasping mount, guiding a second at his side. He drove it down the road of casings, and reared it at the foot of De and his grayhaired companion. His charges kicked up a mess of snow that splashed against De’s robe.

  “Kontor,” the rider called. His voice was high and tinny. “The Firstpoint has requested your presence. He requests it now. He requests you to the Firstpoint’s square.”

  De turned to the rider. Thin vertical cuts in his mask gave him the sight of eyes, and a mould of his lips and nose jutted out and insisted on the light, chiselled with detail of lines in its lips and moles on its nostrils. No part of the face suggested irritation, impatience, or any strain of affected thought. The rider soon sweat as the kontor’s eyes thrust into him. A cleaving warmth pulsed through De’s chest.

  “He said it was needed, kontor. He said that there is tithe awaited.”

  De walked past the rider in silence, and headed toward the animal he had brought. It was a tall one, bald beside its head and hind, where locks of ivory flowed and flicked and cascaded over its pale body. It had four legs and a long head, all covered in its snow-white hide. It struggled and reared when he drew near, and its nostrils shot out jets of steam which scattered and diffused. The Goallandish would call it by its feet, and the Laruns would call it by its price. De decided did not.

  A glimmer leapt out from the space surrounding De and burrowed into the animal. Its pupils remained as rigid and slit as they ever, and its muscles as tense, but its rearing scream ended, and it stood quietly.

  De placed a hand on the seat and lifted himself atop his mount. He eased himself into place, took hold of its harness, and guided it from the facesquare.

  -

  A koropole is not a metropole. The koropole is houses that have been built and massed; that is like the way Laruns knew it. The Otiseran has written on the mass. The koropole – the mass, which is like what she would say – is a place for feurkuns. In Goal, a place which is like a colony, that means it has become a place for Goals. It is a place for them to learn how to walk, speak, and breath it in. It is what the Goal can given to eat, so that she can really learn of the metropole, and be stripped of her warped, rough, bad condition.

  The Hill: populating stones that scraped the sky. A koropole.

  De had not read these writings. By his own, Freeman condition, he could never do it. But he could see.

  A ride to the house of Teller. People ramped about Partition Hill's intestinal ways, crooks and alleys flush with swirling dung and ashes that associated freely with the snowfall, itself swallowed and brushed aside by the frosteaten hands of Freeman crawlers.

  The crawlers’ features, whose features called out to those of the Larun descendants who wandered here, mostly looked down at the stone, shivering in their gray cloaks as they swept it from sight. They moved from it only briefly to see De staring at them from atop his mount. They shared it for a moment.

  “He’s almost done,” one said, “isn’t he?”

  “It’s his twenty,” the other whispered. “They have all been counting.”

  “The pitiful pivot. No work can free you from the wind.”

  They looked at one another, and returned to theirs.

  The people walked with the animals, fuzzy and floppy and hoofed; saddled, muzzled and castrated, driven by tenders with half the stomach of their drives and two times the appetite. There were living men and women who carried the sign of Teller on cloths and metal breastplates heading on and off the roads of the koropole making for richer and more pertinent sites of social production, or making peace with their assignment to this one. They were carried by others in carts, and men dragged the carts. Each dragger bore the weight of this same sign, seared into the back of their sunstruck necks. These were the Tjeni.

  The Tjeni! That which named a state and not a kind, but whose conditions had found a kind all the same. The Tjeni, who could not move as they pleased, nor give their work to any other project, nor chase down any aim which the tithe did not select. For on these things were words written in places higher than their own; that which was put onto them, with ink and metal fire, was the lowest of ones greater, and its say said elsewhere.

  De looked at the branded draggers, as all with eyes did and could only do. Their faces were a sprawling and unmeasured record of the Otisrat's reach, marked with greater past, color, and newness of idea than could be known by any Larun or Freeman. None were from that territory, the ground on which De stood, though it would be said by their superiors that the draggers were in that way; the hair could be seen, and the flavor of their words named Goalish by ears named Larun; and so their mouths would be Goalish. Others were from father places, and it could be found in their hair, their words, and their skin. But now they all wore the same kind of rags, and now they all sweat for the parts of another man, and now they all could be nothing but silent, seen, and told.

  They arrived at the papersquare. The key spot of the koropole was tall, with angling, fissured walls. The other papersquares De knew had been dark and quiet, but Teller's was a home for what he was, and it glowed and breathed.

  Round fires much bigger than a man shot up light and plumes of smoke, boiling through pits dug out and laid with stone especially for it on the doorstep of this laboring place. These were surrounded by Pivots, the thin crowd of people from middling purses and medial respect. The women of that way kept in scarves of white and red, and a few delivered themselves to the spot without partnership. Sellers fed the crowd and brought up jugs of water from large wells, and their Tjeni dragged drag-carts full of bread and meat and spicy flakes to the feeders and water-fetchers. Curtain-and-hat dressed players made sounds with pipes and air. Taut flaxen wires stretched between hollow wooden frames were plucked, so as to sting a shimmering noise in the ear of the revellers; thin sheets of metal were curved and shaped and struck with rough metal balls, ringing out across the gathering. Shoots of wood, freshly slain, cut, piled, and carried from the cantfowkat, were hauled to the hearths by the rumbled shambling of twelve more Tjeni porters, who laid them down in their burping flames.

  De and the rider canted through this scene and arrived at the foot of the papersquare, where the song was cut short by its heavy beams and doors. It was sunk partway into the soil, and both sat at the top of a short descent into its facility.

  The Cane dismounted his animal, leaving it rigid, and the rider watched as he walked the steps that lead to the receiving room of the papersquare. The doors swung shut behind him, closing out the light and laughter and sky and leaving him alone.

  The reception was an ovular spot, with large openings on each side that fed into a pathways and staircases. De's only company was statues, seats and pots built from shining, sun-shaded metals, fumed by unique scents from faraway places, and their purpose all exposed by a sculpture of Pointer: the invisible wellspring that could see all, and into the minds of people. Above him were the fingers of Sett, wrapping over his hair.

  He watched the two figures in silence and shaking. This was interrupted by the arrival of a Tjeni servant, who padded up a set of steps near the end of the reception with its hand open, still, and in front of him.

  This Tjeni had been subjected to the whim of the house, which liked to go inside its inhabitants, so that it would contain only those which reminded it of the right Larunkat and the price it contained. He blabbed at De in in Firm Sprak, a performance that would have brought a smile to him if his Freeman ear could walk outside its lines. It could not.

  De did not wait for the servant to finish blabbing before he began to hand the servant his cloth, which was ragged and old. It displayed a woven image of a crossed bone and arrow.

  The servant looked down at it and handed it back. It chittered two more words in Sprak before it turned, extending its arm forward.

  The servant lead him down the steps. They passed a floor where rows of functionaries stood quietly, inking messages onto hanging sheets of white fibre that were then rolled into canisters and brought away by waiting Freeman couriers.

  At the base of the papersquare was a landing, where was a white-gold with sketches of wingless birds, and Sprak offerings to Detsom Blirsett on its face. De's escort unlocked the door and let him step through first, into a long hallway, whose light was wrapped up in a series of orange covers beside each chamber it contained. The rooms they passed were large, with no doors, all filled with beds, basins and many-threaded clothing, swatched with dark blue and silver dyes laid out, creaseless, on each platform.

  At the end of the hallway was Teller.

  He sat within another chamber there, enclosed by an arch. De could already see his face. They grew closer with each step.

  The room where the koropole's Firstpoint sat was filled with others. All circled around a large wooden table in which each place petalled out, separating it from the others. It was cut from deep green wood. It smelled such that De's pain was relieved, and covered in an oil that made it shine.

  He and the Freeman reached the threshold, and did not cross it. His escort shut his eyes, and De looked down, and tried to shut his ears and his nose and the ripples of the air their movements cast on his skin.

  Teller's properties were young boys, girls, and two women. They sat at each place, eating from garnished platters of meat and roots. The Firstpoint sat as their head. His eyes were covered up by a white blindfold, whose smooth surface glittered without any crystalline shape. His neck and body were long, rearing up from the snowy garment that swaddled him. He was not the largest man De knew.

  Everything Teller was reached out at the breath and bits of heat De could still contend. Even from a distance, he felt his spine and legs engorge in response, as he did not wish them to. His body and words twisted and contort, and he knew them shift his most virtuous characteristics into smiling and size. All others the laws forbid were pushed away into faint incoherence.

  De saw that Teller was also a man whose hair had grown thin and grey. He saw the skin on his face mould and striate. He saw need in his seat, not preference.

  The two women in stead beside Teller picked at very small parts of their food, and this was done too by his daughters. The boys ate with separate utensils that they used to spoon great hunks of wheat and loin into their mouths. One of them took a deep breath after swallowing.

  The groups were unite in their silence and care. Teller's blindfold directed itself at De's escort.

  "Bring in my son," his voice said. "And then go."

  The Freeman did. De lifted his head. His cane clacked on the floor as he stumbled past the threshold.

  Teller clapped his hands once. A Goal with a shaved head, part with the back of the room, where Teller was, and where light did not reach, brought up a tripod stool and set it next to Teller. The Firstpoint beckoned to De. "Let me chew on you," he called.

  De hobbled over to his place lumbering past the children's side of the table. Their gaze did not move away from their work, but two shifted when he went by. The breath of each quickened, and the hair on their neck stood up. One shivered. Vapor fell from their nostrils when he was at his closest point.

  He sat down. Teller moved his seat out, linking their gaze, and the meal continued.

  "What have you seen?" Teller asked.

  "Y-you. F-firstpoint."

  "I wish it were right." Teller's blindfold looked past him. The light viciously illuminated every part of his expression, and De could see the bending snarl of his nose, mouth, and cheeks. "But we have kept out our talks too long, son. When did you last venture to my roots?"

  Behind his mask, De's mouth twitched. "I see it. F-Firstpoint."

  Teller nodded. "But there is a wrong in me, too," he said. "We are, we two, caught by business. I have not ever offered my table to you. Will you eat?"

  His stomach sat still. "Y-yes, F-Firstpoint."

  Teller nodded at the Goal again. The waiter in the dark retreated to a short gap in the wall beside the diners, out of which steam rose and quiet chatter could be heard. A metal bowl was brought out. De snapped off his mask's mouthpiece and began to eat.

  As he did so, a woman on Teller's left flicked her eyes toward De. When he moved to take his first bite, she moved to take a bite of similar proportion, and De had grabbed largely and without care.

  "No," Teller said. The clatter of utensils stopped.

  He turned to the woman.

  "Harvest," Teller said. "Have you been taught?"

  Harvest placed down the bite. "I have, housepoint. The arrival of a new one-"

  "I provide the word," he said. "I permit the parts-bite. It is my privilege, my tell. Not a rule."

  He placed a hand on De's shoulder without looking at him. "This is a niv I have. A finger. He was already here when we sat down. He is never away from me."

  Harvest averted her gaze. "Yes, housepoint."

  "It is a feurkun thing. Recall anatomies. Soon you will deliver my tells."

  They ate again. Harvest ate less.

  De stuffed food in his mouth with his hands. Most of it fell back into the bowl. One of De's boys, whose eating was giving him trouble, watched this. On taking an especially large bite, he retched, and a mouthful he could not swallow went back on the platter. Teller wiped his mouth and the table stopped again.

  "Son De," Teller said. He held out his arm. "Bring me to the other."

  The boy looked between them. "I'm sorry, housepoint."

  De got up from his place, put down his walking stick, and hoisted Teller to his feet.

  He helped Teller over to the boy.

  "Housepoint, I'm sorry," Rock said.

  Teller reached out a hand picked up Rock from his chair. He released him onto the floor and stood freely.

  "Use my weapon," he told De.

  De looked at him.

  "My weapon," Teller echoed.

  De extended his arm, putting out his cane.

  Teller shook his head. He took De's wrist and swept the metal in his hand across the boy's cheek. He fell to the side, spilling atop the foundations.

  "Use my weapon," Teller said again.

  De raised his arm, with Teller's wrist wrapped around it. He struck his son twice more. A red fleck grew on Teller's chin.

  Teller released his wrist, and he brought his hand down. He reached out for a cloth from Rock's dining place and wiped his chin.

  He turned to the shadow in the corner. "Bring Son Rock to the Aldir, feurkun," he said. "And a holder, for me and this one. We will continue our bites with the weavings. The rest should be returned to their positions."

  The women and Rock's siblings hurried forward and began to crowd around his injuries when Teller had moved from the room. De saw them pat his cheeks and bring him up. Their cries were slight and restrict, and they peeked at him as he lingered.

  All these did except for the Goal, who did not restrict himself. He rushed over and collapsed, cradling the little one in his arms. He pressed his head to the boy's chest, and looked up at De. De saw.

  -

  Teller and De ascended the steps of the papersquare. A Freeman carrying a tray of food, cups, and a pitcher chased after them. They walked back up through the floor of writing and came to another door, which was heavier and barricaded. A guard, a Freeman-of-Arms whose size rivalled it, knocked on the gate and whispered to a man inside. A thump and gust of air created passage, and they went inside.

  The walls of the chamber, which was carved from gentle, porous Larun whitewood, were marked with sheets of glass stained blue and grey. Most let in the day, but not the sky or the clouds. Only one, at the rear of the hall, did so. It was angled down, and a half-cone, that one might look on the activities of the koropole.

  De guided Teller through the hall, which was filled with weavings suspended from the ceiling, and this itself was slopes building to the square's great pointed crown. Some pictures stood small alone, but many were sequential; moreover, they were not offered in lines or rings, but a whole of images with continuity and disconnect between each segment. Larun children danced through the fields and disappeared from them. A freeman danced in front of Larun and Goalish children. In one scene, the Goalish children were filled with a gray color, and to its right, they were filled with many different ones, as they would be drawn from life.

  "How was your journey?" Teller asked. He held out his hand and the Freeman shadowing them put a cup in it. "Tell me what I should know."

  "Q-quiet," De responded.

  He looked out at the koropole. He could see the roads still teeming with nivmen.

  "N-new men," he said.

  “Yes,” Teller replied. “Their carts were brought in five nights ago. You could not be found.”

  “W-working.”

  “I know.”

  De’s cane stopped rattling.

  “Your next piece is here,” Teller said.

  De shivered.

  Teller thumbed his chin. “Did you ever speak to a Third called Whiteeye?” he asked. “His piece was in the Silaif.”

  De’s grip flexed. “O-old.”

  “He was.”

  They stopped at a weaving near the end of the hall. Teller halted their movement and turned to it. He let go of De's hand.

  The cover over his head did not keep De's gaze from the squares of it. Each produced a scene of fighting and delight. Men stabbed one another with shafts of iron, forced down women in the open air, and set fire to walls and dwellings. A squad of them set cattle over fires, cut them apart, cut off their horns and whittled them into earrings, and ate them with sloshing bowls of water and milksit. The animal had been drawn with wide eyes and a screaming mouth.

  "This is our newest," Teller said. "This weaver is a young man. He comes from the mass. He has never seen a fight there, but we do many, so he has heard much of us. He has heard it from fragile and bitter men."

  “They take our fights, and change them.” Teller touched his finger to the thread. “We should know what they have become.”

  "W-where is T-Third?"

  Teller paused. “The skies have been empty of their papers for forty days or more, and none will speak of where they are. So there is falseness, and from many who have no cause to it, or there is a problem.”

  “P-problem.”

  “A problem,” Teller said. “A problem of stabs, of waters thrown. They were put there to punish. We try to take them, but the hillkind still have weapons, and always use them.”

  De’s gaze declined. Teller took notice.

  “Do not mistake my trouble,” he said. “A fight is needed, yes. Cuts are needed, yes. And new sons too. But this is not needed. This was a Third, Son De. A sturdy Third, tied to my water, good for right tasks. The Goals run out such men from our gathering.” Teller snagged one side of the weave and tore it in half.

  "They are a kind all of tippers, this feurkun sort. The wombs too, and the smaller ones. I have not known so many tippers elsewhere, even in the To-Light hills."

  He dropped the destroyed image. "I must give men to it, while it takes them out of me. It is a need. But it is a taking need. And so, we shall take from them."

  "How m-many are s-sent?"

  "You, and another."

  "W-who?"

  "My best. He is injected."

  De shivered.

  "Put out your words, Son De."

  "Old."

  Teller hung his head. He placed his hands together.

  "A t-turn," De continued. "L-less." He rested on his cane, gripped it, and briefly knew still.

  "Is your edge still sharp?"

  He shook further.

  "Then you will go," Teller said. "You are not the one of this path. Others can walk past you. Your I is partsfull with works and doings, more than any I can tell. These tippers are hard. Their trail is wet, with fallen water. I would like to use yours for it, that we should have no more burials. But if there is no way, your hand will point well the ones who do."

  De inclined his head. Teller stepped up to him, and reached down. He laid a hand on the brow of De's mask.

  "You have worked well, son," he said. "I can see you. You are the last and precious seed of Girdan's brood. His gaze carries on by your waterlines. These turns last have sent you claim to our kind. That cannot be changed. Not by word, nor breath foul or final."

  His hand dropped further, and pushed down on De's shoulder. De shuddered and fell to the ground. His cane bent at his side and scraped against the floor.

  Teller pulled back the cowl concealing De's scalp, revealing the mottled, crusted firm of him, where teeth, nails and fingers sprouted up from the flesh. Teller bent down and kissed the hesigns that scratched and crowded every inch of it.

  He put a hand on De's chin and crouched down.

  "Go in to the cantfowkat," he said. "This fellow of yours. He is young, not old. His water loose… and his bites. Give these your eye. Use your days. Restrict these to those without sign. Show him the tipper, and go to Herdetopp."

  He stepped away from the weaving, dragging a half with him. "Speak to them again. My Goals. Tell them who rules the rulersland."

  -

  De departed the Papersquare.

  He made for Partition Hill’s skyshade house. It was a complex of banners and stone surrounded by nivmen, a square diamond appended to rays of rock that rolled down from the center, marked with all the colors of morning, noon, and twilight. Carved Sprak phonograms marked a a plaque above its entrance.

  COMANTRIES

  HOUSE OF THE SKYSHADE

  OFFER

  He was entered into an ovular receiving area lit by caged and covered fires raised up from the ground and suspended from the ceiling. Three dozen men sat there mingling, munching pierceleaves, nursing glasses of milksit and whispering quietly. Freemen guards stood dutifully with their arms crossed in the shadows, their arms at the ready. Gazes twisted and chatter hushed as the noise stumbled into De’s senses.

  He went up to a Goallandish woman, writing on papers at a doorway guarded by nivmen that lead further in to the Skyshade House. She wore a robe, a billetted gown tinted and lined by a fine mixture of pigments like blood and grass sourced from shells and rendered roots born distant.

  She looked up when she heard the wracked, shuffling body draw up to her. The muscles in her face tensed. “It’s so good to see you, kontor,” she cheered. She spoke in Sprak; her tone was practiced and her accent metropolitan. Her features, small and parallel and pouting were those desired by men like Peerless to install their pictures and their clay bodies, but even these had begun to sprout lines and spots, and so De expected that this was the way she had arrived in this one. “What have you come to offer?”

  “Water,” he breathed. “And p-parts.” He shakily extracted a silver coin from his belt and set it on the table. “L-let me s-stay, p-producer. B-bring me f-friends, p-producer.”

  She looked at the part and brushed it with a finger. Her brow furrowed. “You will have to be cleaned,” she said. "All of you."

  He removed his mask.

  -

  De’s effects were taken and removed to the inner cells of the skyshade house. He was lead inside by women wearing flowing dresses of pressed pink linen, dressed with petals and honeyshade and flecks of gold. Farther within, Laruns, Rootcliff men, and Freemen-of-Arms had their bodies itched apart by women with brushes, who dug out dirt and biting creatures from their skin, cut out their hair with knives, and covered them in ointments that smelled of flowers and fresh air and the deep sea. He was laid down on a cold stone slab of his own. His head was placed on a pillow at the end of it, and the whole fixture was adorned by a small grey ring. He closed his eyes.

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  Older women of the skyshade house came. Their hips were wide. Their skin wrinkled and spotted, and spun shadowing vines that twisted their hands and arms. They peeled away the layers of fabric dividing De's skin from the air.

  The women tried not to turn their noses as they dredged him up, but the smell that they uncovered drove them back. He shivered harder than he had before. They dipped sharp brushes in hot water and scrubbed them on his body, over each half-formed lip, nostril, tooth and scalp that pressed up from his canvas.

  After scouring and cleaning him, each part of him was shaved. A blade was taken to three heads of hair on his abdomen, back, and thigh. The women applied oils, spreading salt and slimy, sucking shells all over his skin, which had a harsh grating texture, and blooming spots that shifted from red to yellow to red. Swathes of it wrinkled and unwrinkled.

  When their instruments were placed back away, he was lead to a wide stone bowl. Water was heated over fire and poured inside. Steam rose off its surface, and as he entered, his shivering subsided.

  In the shadows of the corridor beyond the bath, a Goalish woman was brought to him by the elders.

  “This one wants to be held,” they whispered to her. "He has given parts for it. That is what you will give to him. So take his water and provide this work. This work is an offering; the Points will surround you. Your breath will keep.”

  She looked to each of her handlers and hesitated.

  They let her go, she entered the tub and sat next to him. He did not look at her, but he could feel her eyes, and he shivered. They began to run over and ingest his discolored, signmarked flesh, anticipating the grisly labor that lay before them. He lowered himself into the water.

  “What will you from me, Firstpoint?” she asked in a soft, lilting voice.

  He stewed in the tub, unblinking.

  She looked over his frame, which still shook a bit in the balm of the baths. “I have not been handed your shade, Firstpoint,” she said. “Have you ever been here before?”

  “All have my shade.” He retched, and hugged his knees to grow warmer still. “In every place I have not been.”

  Her spine straightened slightly, and her voice deepened. She watched his eyes flicker and his knuckles shift. “Have you ever offered water?”

  “No.”

  She waded over to him and laid a hand on his arm. “Have you ever been touched?”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated.

  She made to remove her hand. His hand snapped out and wrapped around her fingers. He forced them back where they were, and then released her.

  He kept her there, long enough that his shaking increased. Less steam was rising from the surface of the water. More was poured in, and he slowed again. His chest rose and fell, pulling in air that it did nothing with.

  “Do you ever hurt for it?” he asked.

  “Being touched?”

  “Being seen.”

  She took back her hand a second time.

  “Will you take my breath?” she asked. “If I say something that you dislike?”

  He shrunk into the water. “I have taken noone’s breath.”

  “I have your shade. So that word is false.”

  “It is not,” he said. “The tell is written. That makes it me. Without the tell, there is nothing. And their work is nothing. I believe.”

  She continued to watch him, for shouting, or a tense of the muscles. No such thing came out, and her brow lifted. “I am given parts to eat with,” she said. “If I am not seen, I am without parts. So they take their sight of me that way, and without my happiness. It does not hurt me. Not like other things. But if I had plenty, I would keep mine to myself, and the ones I prefer.”

  De contemplated her words in silence. “What unsteadies you?” she asked. “Cane? What do you lack? Why would you ask?”

  The water around him rippled. “I believe," he said. "it may hurt. Me.”

  “You are not a skyshade woman.”

  “No,” he said. “I was not.”

  De’s fingers curled up and clenched. He dropped his head down onto her shoulder and pressed himself into her body. She swallowed and her knuckles gripped the side of the tub, but he demanded no further work of her. She let down a tentative hand to his scalp and felt its thin, weeping strands.

  She eked water from him. Then she carried him out of the bath, for he was small and very light. She brought him into his room in the skyshade house, and put him on the bed there, and wrapped him in thick blankets. She laid alongside him and held him in her arms.

  De did not know what he was. He knew that he would not be cut or grasped. He relished the illegible, and made to be taken in by it.

  He could feel the grasping in his sleep. It snatched and tore at him. Chunks fell away from his hands, chest, and abdomen. In all of his senses he felt some reduction, and that the gaps produced were being replaced with a foreign material.

  Eyes threw themselves against his body and held him in one place. There existed a space in the knowing of them. It was a space where something could be: a presence so adorable as to be offered to,, or an agent that terrorized and repulsed. He was nude, and there were lights all around, immanentizing him with their look and throwing him back into everything.

  He felt his mouth being opened, against his own will. He knew there was something there too. It was in that prospect he had discovered fear.

  -

  De’s eyes blinked open.

  He untwisted himself from the arms of the skyshade woman, stood up and wrapped a blanket about himself. The shivering had come back. He wandered around the room he found himself in, until he discovered himself in a polished mirror atop a table.

  The voice couched itself low in his ear, drooling noises.

  He will not speak to me with eyes, it slavered. He will not speak to keep his breath.

  He will not speak with a nose. With a cheek. With a lip.

  He is the invincible man.

  The skyshade woman awoke to De demolishing the mirror, spraying the room with biting shoots of splinters and glass. She reached for a long heavy blade hidden beneath the bed, and made to withdraw it, but De stopped. His body heaved and drew in breath that groaned and wheezed. He dropped the last hunk of debris from the table, and it clattered to the ground.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For your company. You can go.”

  She released the weapon. She got up and left, trailing a blanket, leaving the voice to murmur bile in his ear.

  De leaned himself against a nearby wall and sat down. He wrapped his cloak around himself.

  He took a long fluted tube from the side of the bed, next to his mask. It had eight holes, and an oil sheen, and a shape that was cut by an artist. He gripped its sides and tried to quit his rocking.

  He blew through it and a note pealed. A second one did, and a third and a fourth, and he continued to work from memory. That took up the last piece of his time.

  He must go out again, the voice said. He must go to places. He must go to eyes.

  De blew another note through his eighthole. He breathed and it went away from his mouth.

  His head tilted, and he looked at the mask sitting on a raised plate beside the cushion, where his robe was kept. The frames for his look looked back at him.

  Quit your quiet, the voice. Your call has come. And we are told.

  -

  On his white twentytithe, De rode out from the koropole, on a road trailing South.

  The large doors of the koropole and their blocks were retracted, pulled back onto the walls by teams of Larun Tjeni pulling on systems of long, draping cords. There were no Goals among them.

  At the base of the arrangement, a pair of horned tithes were harnessed, which dragged the doors open. They swung out, exposing Harmony; the sky was orange, but no rays proceeded in, and De remained in darkness. He never urged his animal. It had a tell to proceed, which it did, trotting past the walls of the place and its couth.

  The Cane heard the doors shut up behind with a crash. He bent his head and shut his eyes.

  The mass of roofs and bodies which persisted after these soon grew short and receded, and in leaving the Hill, the road rose up. By this, De began to see the Goallandish cantfowkat, the ranging green-and-white mumbles of its surface, sprouted from the weaving of some very young roots and branches that netted the hills and flats. The territory yawned, and its covering of snow frayed and streamed where the wind hit.

  The cantfowkat; the rounds. There was a rustling and a rumbling to be delivered from those trees, too distant to be seen or heard, produced by an unseen member of that place and its hungry, senseless society. The huge tithe and gathered blades of the great Otiseran and her One of all knowing Left-Handed forces had still not fetched them into knowledge or satiety.

  The road's paving soon became wound and cuddled by the first of the young roots. Their stalks lifted the beginning of branches, rising and feathering like a wing's, and others starting the wrap of the thick bulges in their center which had made their name. All of these, most of which were still far from the road, bore the bites and scrapes of snacking done by gangs of lanky, walking beasts, with horns that spread out like flowers. In the soil were the marks of long-toothed, long-haired runners, run free beneath the dark and the rest of sentries. If he had proceeded very far, the road's stone would have given ways to grass and frosting, salted sand. A flock of wings flapped under clouds of white drifting North; there, the plains became smooth, sat of a pooling sky and spiring black mixtures that spanned it, flat and soulless, slugging on to a place where they could hand out their shake and searing.

  A tithechest of the Partition entered view, and did many voices, and his tithe moved toward them. The tithes of the tithechest were kept in tight wooden pens with locked half-doors, assembled side by side. Its roof and beams were cut of a far Western wood, whose surface smattered with accents of green and emerald. Beneath and between them sat the tall, snorting twentytithes from Larunkat; Goal's stonehoofs, which were taller still, and priced more cheaply; and fivetithes, which bashed their horns against each door, and otherwise blew smoke and knocked against their confines.

  The chest was one story high, and very wide. The group it kept cacophoned many screams, yarks, and jicks, each of which could be taken from down the road. Its brown masonry was covered up by layers of gray, which itself had been turned by a dark brown tinge hitching itself to posts and spatters, which dressed the walls and floors. Its wards' pens contained bowls of yellow stalks and grain, which were set aside bowls of dusty water. The whole array smelled like poop, mould, and iron. Every surface was covered with stalks and loose grain that had been blown or shaken free from their containers. The square opened into a yard, where a large camp swarming with figures and carts gathered and moving quickly.

  He rode through the middle of the men, who parted for him. They were not grown. Some stood only as high as De himself, and they were very quiet. It was a gathering of tall boys, tending mounts and knives and fires, brushing shields, and swinging hacks in bunches and unison.

  De's brow rose. There were Goals among them, without the Tjeni sign, and some others from the Eastern country. His brow rose further when it found them groomed and not only bearded, but sporting the prestigious cheek favored by The Base, and carried by their Western partners. Many of their mounts were larger than them, heavy tithes whose height, silver color, and strong frame would have asked a big price in work, food and time. The knives, stickers, and shields carried by the host all carried the bloom of Totalling, which produced the shape of a flower budding, flowering, and flowering from its flower in an unbroken line that stretched past the end of its canvas.

  No Freemen in the entourage carried arms. The only to be seen were Freemen-of-weight, their heads and face bald, their bodies covered by woolen shawls bound by string. Those slung bags of roots, grains, clothes, and rope onto carts and pack animals on the road beside the chest.

  "Ha, point!"

  De's tithe turned to the voice. There was a man among the nivman, a Larun dressed in a bryst. A metal wreath wrapped around his neck and shoulders, made of red gold. He had light brown eyes and a wide smile. He called out in a booming note as he approached.

  "Are you our kontor?" the man asked.

  De looked down at the man. "S-sign," he said.

  The wreathed man removed a fold of cloth from his breast pocket and held it up at De between two fingers. De's hand reached out, shook and took it. He lifted it up into the light.

  "I am glad to be seen by you, Firstpoint," the wreathed man said. "I have heard your name. We all find your work very precious."

  De tossed the sign back to the man, who caught it between his fingers. "W-who?"

  "Mine is Joyborn," the man said. "Partless Joyborn, Firstpoint De. And these are my powers, which are assigned me by paper."

  He held out his hands to the young. De looked at him.

  "You do not need to worry about these, kontor," Joyborn said. "Against that- they are a base of joy. These are my Seeds; my little growing ones. And they are a power well past any Left Handed shape you have ever known. Once, they were feurkun all, and yet, planted in good soil, and given the care of He's children, they stand before you here. They will follow us quickly on this ride, and all the works of which they are able sit beneath our word. But neither are these some Freemen kind, kontor: they need no tell to cross a gap but that of Sett, and the seven orders by which we breath. They swing a craft as well as blades, with which they have cut many men to parts. When we are returned from this concern, these will be sent back to my place, where there are others like them, that they might inspire others to their heights of consideration."

  "When?" De hissed.

  "If you've arrived, the time has come to produce our journey," Joyborn said.

  The Seeds kicked their feet over their stonehoofs, as did Joyborn, who guided his beside De's.

  De lead them back onto the road, the carts and the train of fifty, beyond the Partition and beyond all mass. The trees rose over them, and the howls scattered from their tumbling.

  -

  The company moved swiftly into the cantfowkat. The wheels of their supply spun and rattled to keep up with the Seeds' charge. As the sun fell, those at the front, rear, and centre struck up fire as they rode, snuck it into lanterns, and fit it to their mounts. Thy formed a thin, rushing, candled wall between two sides of the same Wild.

  Each night, this man Joyborn set aside an hour of starlight, to give offerings to Sett, and to read from papers containing words of the Base (to which an entire cart was devoted). A week of it, and passage, moving on the place where Third Whiteeye had been sent.

  Deep in the Eastern cantfowkat, near the lines which started Longfur, ran a river, and by the river a feurkun mass, filled with their thatched, mud-brick coverings. In their ride down to the shell, they encountered an array of cloth cells, a Larun standard pitched before them, and a smell.

  Meat. It was in the wind, raw, and even the Seeds could learn of it without De’s talents. Joyborn pointed to two of them from atop his tithe. “Go into that belonging,” he said, waving at the Goalish shell. “Bring us three young men.”

  He spoke to the others. “When we arrive, take stock of their faces. And please look for written figures. We will need to discover if there is anyone who breathes.”

  They nodded. One pair galloped off toward the roundseats, which were silent. The rest of them trotted among the Larun tents, and there found the remains of Whiteeye’s gathering.

  The bodies of the Freemen were frozen. Many of the dead had been submerged, and arms, legs, and heads peeked out from the white. Some were dragged up by four-legged eaters of the rounds, who squealed and snapped at one another, brewing fevered debate over the distribution of this priceless plenty. Two-legged wings swooped down and picked at what was visible when this conflict grew heated enough for their glean to go unnoticed. The temperature had sewn their brysts into the flesh, and the scavengers often pulled off metal and fabric when they tried to rip something free.

  De and the Seeds dismounted. The Seeds shooed the wings and shouted away the howls. They popped out slates and lengths of rock in order to learn and calculate. De walked forward among his destroyed kind.

  Joyborn’s eyes moved through the dead. They looked at the depth and character of their wounds. He saw the jag of the cuts and the anger that had made them. He smiled.

  “What is there to learn, kontor?” Joyborn asked. “It seems unknowable.”

  De crouched down. He swept aside the snow and shot his fingers into the soil, pulling up a clump of icy dirt. He lifted it to his nose to smell it.

  “Shaminkat,” he whispered.

  (rewrite-it-2) “A Shamar in Goal?” Joyborn shook his head. “They will be far from home, whatever company made this wrong.”

  The riders that had been sent into the shell returned. Joyborn frowned at them.

  “What stops you?” he called.

  “The belonging is empty, kontor,” the Seed said to Joyborn. “There are none left to bring. It has been left totally.”

  “Totally!”

  “There is not whispering, or a footstep even.”

  Joyborn then shouted to the counters. “And you! How many faces?”

  “Thirty, kontor,” they shouted. “Now thirty-one, kontor. Thirty-two.”

  Joyborn unbuckled his langniv from his hip and tossed it up to the rider. “Fire,” he said. “Give the belonging into it.”

  De stood up and brushed the dirt from his hand. He looked at the howls yapping ineffectually at the talons of the wings. They began to tear apart a torso whose sheer mass identified it as the kontor Whiteeye’s. It had been severed from its lower body.

  A few moments later, they were dead. Joyborn went to his side. “They were hungry,” he said. “You could have told them to stop.”

  “T-they – c-cannot- hear.”

  -

  They passed on from the Houses. They followed the trail South and West. A gate stood in their way.

  Wellkat Couth was tall and square, with a high wall of wooden stakes through which traffic was channeled. They approached it along a thin mountain path, and the entry nearest them stood adjacent to a mass of dark soil. There, longknifes had cut open the ground. Atop the wall were Freemen carrying bows, with missiles notched. When they came into view the gaze of each Seed narrowed. De could feel some of them tremor.

  Joyborn and De approached the gate.

  "What have you seen, Firstpoints?" a shooter called down. "Please bring in your friends. We have been alone here for a long time."

  "Bring out your man," Joyborn called back. "Besides drinks and food, we will need a look at your name papers."

  "We have no man," the shooter said. "We have a talker. What names shall we take to them now?"

  Joyborn tilted his head while De removed a cloth from his robe. The Freemen peered down at it. They looked at De and their mouths opened.

  The gates were dragged apart from the inside, allowing De and Joyborn to canter in. Another Freeman stood by the gate as it opened, walking out from gap of its nivhouse as they dismounted their tithes and surveyed the Couth. The Salon, pens, wells, store-shacks, and other facilities were intact, but the travellers and the Freemen walked among each and lone with an easiness that drew a swerving eye from Joyborn. De looked at it too, but he made no pronouncement.

  The Freeman hobbled out to their mass with the help of his cane. "You are Seen, Firstpoints," he said.

  "Where is your kontor, brightman?" Joyborn asked. "We are in a chase, and cannot linger long. Tippers have passed through this spot."

  The Freeman's brow lowered. "Our kontor is gone. We gave him a face outside these walls."

  "H-how?" De asked.

  "He was eaten by a tipping thing," Joyslip replied. "It ate many of us. Another went out to fight it, and we have not suffered since. Is there a way we can help you, Firstpoint?"

  "Who did you tell of the empty space?" Joyborn asked.

  "The men in Herdetopp. But it is cold. This is The Wild. We have seen no replacement." He put both hands on his cane. "I was Joyslip Fifthpoint. The others do not know how to speak. But I know how to speak."

  "You have no other men for the work?"

  "No, Firstpoint."

  He rubbed his chin. He gaze fell on Joyslip's walking stick. "That is a shining thing."

  "It is for a Seenblade," Joyslip said.

  "A Seenblade?" Joyborn arched his brow.

  "Our Seenblade." His cane shook. "The one who did the work for us. She bested what we could not. She helped us into breath."

  He gripped the stick and held it up, displaying the face of it. It showed a hatted figure wearing a cloak. "She has put herself beneath our feet. She is our firm."

  Joyborn's mouth opened. De mask turned from him slightly, to the Freeman.

  "N-name," De said.

  "She is Hill-Measure," Joyslip replied. "The one who helped us."

  "I would like to meet this one. What way did she go?"

  She ventured to the Silaif. Her and the smaller one."

  "Smaller one?"

  Joyslip nodded. Joyborn looked to De.

  -

  They rode away from the Couth with their aim descript, and their path directed.

  "Another Seenblade," Joyborn said. "Or he has posed himself as one. Did the Firstpoint speak of it?"

  "S-she."

  "What?"

  "H-he ss-said," De hissed, "'s-she'."

  Joyborn twirled his hair.

  They continued into the Southern cantfowkat. A storm that had already raged blew past them, pouring down quiet heaps of snow, and blotting out the sky.

  “How do you respect it, kontor?” Joyborn asked, as they rode around a frozen lake. De turned to him.

  “The papers and words,” Joyborn continued. “The fit we are given. What is it that you receive?”

  De turned back toward the road.

  Joyborn smiled. “I receive much from it. I am given the right word in the service of my Points. I am made holy by all expedition of most favored activities, his and mine.” He laughed. “I receive right! Can you believe it is a thing receivable? How wonderful that was to discover. I had received little in my life – not from my sons or any firespun producer. It is the will of Sett that my I receive parts and approval and deeds. The item of it is a celebrated part. Before it had emerged, you could not have seen me.” A candle lit behind his eyes and burned, shaking and eating up its wick.

  “A ragged type was mine,” Joyborn said. “It wandered pits and gaps where no one could see. It was needed, to stab men for my bread, and to grab women who I could give myself into. It was parts for which I plead and fought. I had no right to anything in the world. There was no rule that offered me property, of water, sons, or milksit. Before I was seen… before the Firstpoint saw me, and would lift the day’s filth from atop my back. And would give me into the eyes of He.”

  Joyborn raised his voice. “I was feurkun once. I could not see the world desired one of mine. Now, it has found itself inside my heart. And I am no longer alone.”

  De saw.

  “Telling,” he said.

  Joyborn looked at him. “Telling?”

  “I receive telling.”

  Joyborn raised his brow.

  De’s mask looked forward. “A breather,” he said, “is – s – told. I – am-m – a – breath- ther.”

  Joyborn’s tears had slithered away. He shrugged. “I’m not sure about that, kontor,” Joyborn said. “I can tell a twotithe to fetch.”

  “Yes,” De said. “But it-t c-cannot t-tell – you.”

  They rode forward.

  -

  Soon, the ground dipped down. All became possessed by heavy stone shards that divided the soil. They found the slopes shape a great bowl on which trees had grown and dirt had covered up.

  They passed in view of a shell. Joyborn held up his hand and his men fanned into divisions that swept through the gap in each roundseat, with De, Joyborn, and his best going up the middle.

  The Goals there looked up at the men on Stronghoofs in disgust. They came up to the Speaking Place and the orderstone there, bathd in a pool of sand. There, a gang of Goalish men lounged, covered in fabric that wrapped up cuts, and cinched limbs.

  "This promises," Joyborn said.

  He leapt off his hoof and De followed. Before they could speak, they were seized by the advance of the Goals' tallest. He strode up to them, brought out an iron blade, to the hilt of which was affixed a paper fan, and pointed it at them.

  “We have had enough business with outmen,” he growled. “Leave now, or you will be thrown out.”

  Joyborn watched the Goal's metal exit its sheath. Its glint and the shade of it put a law in De's sight, and it all curled up the corners of his mouth. He chuckled high.

  "'Outmen?'" He laughed happily. “Little feurkun. This place – it is yours and mine. We are in it. There is nothing that can keep us out.

  Then the Seeds moved on the Shell. They took the weapons back, and screams were created.

  At the end of the assault, Joyborn seated himself before the same Goal, beaten and subdued by the Seeds, in the Speak-Chair outside the Lodge of the Unders. The Larun's brow was free of sweat, and his hands were full of blood.

  "Now we approach the matter, feurkun yonbrother," Joyborn said. "And no longer any little wrong of yours. My name is Partless. What's yours, friend?"

  The warrior did not speak. His face was black and blue and blood flowed from his nose.

  Joyborn beckoned to one of his Seeds. The boy came over and Joyborn whispered in his ear. He litened and ran off.

  Joyborn laid one leg over another. "Please hear it, yonbrother. I do not expect less of you than to hold down your mouth."

  Another Seed brought forward a cloth and a ceramic bowl that Joyborn dipped his hands in. The red soaked off, clouding in plumes that billowed throughout the pool. "But a tithe is set in place here. We carried in our tells with us, which follow the rules of our words-ruler. That is how we become a virtuous kind."

  Joyborn wiped his lips and looked at the piles of dead men his Seeds were dusting with silver. Others beat back and restrained the Goals who remained. There was still a great effort needed to keep from dying, and most the Seeds cowed only with death after death. Children leapt at them, baring tooth and nail. These were thrown down and metal laid across their eyes. Joyborn's jumped up and down.

  He looked back at the warrior. He placed his palms together. "This is the first part, yonbrother. The first part of our rules. It may seem the last, but we are Laruns. We can see more in one night than you can in ten – your kind is not as virtuous. It does not have the words."

  He removed a knife from his belt and wiped it off on his leggings. A smear followed. "The parts differ, yonbrother. The ones we have. I have a part I prefer, because I do not like hurting others." He shook his head. "This part of mine, this second one, would hurt others, yonbrother. But it is necessary. And it leaves a place for smiles where others would leave silence."

  A heavy metal basket, filled to the brim with hot coals, was brought forward. They were black and yellow and smoking, and their vessel had thick handles covered with fur that their bearer grasped tight. He crouched down and set it before Joyborn, seating it in the sand of the Place for Hearing. His grip made imprints when he let go, and he rubbed the sweat from his hands.

  Joyborn placed his knife inside.

  -

  They left Our intact. Joyborn rubbed the new ornament around his neck, which had begun to shrivel. "These really are good ones, Kontor," Joyborn said. Knowing nothing – sets them in an easy place. That is good."

  They came upon a group of Goals. There were women among them. All were clothed in rags. Their hands and feet were covered with dirt, and their eyes howled. As they moved around the pack, the Laruns found a great many Tjeni signs burned and unfilled. The law entered De's sight.

  De did not reply. The Goals were surrounded by the Seeds, whose horses shook and reared. “Stop moving!” Joyborn said in Goalish. “Stop moving! All you little ones, become quiet and come! Become quiet! We are good men! We make no killing! We adore you!” He sighed. “We do adore you!”

  Joyborn held his hands up to the Goals, who recoiled in fear.

  “Who is it that sent you out?” he asked.

  “The Dry Man!” one of the Goalish women said. The Goals nodded among themselves.

  “A fighter,” a Goalish man said. “A blade with outborn words!”

  De looked at Joyborn, and the Goals shifted and grew closer to each other and their gazes flickered between the Seeds. Joyborn maintained his feeling and grinned; a hand went behind his back and turned into a fist. The Seeds flanked the Goals and the eyes of each turned to the ones with weapons.

  “Tell us more, good men,” he shouted. “And smile. Your help enters you into our company, and we are all your friends. Our provision is your provision. We shall give you many things!”

  -

  De saw. When night fell, it came. It usually came at night; the whooping and the screeching and the hit-hollering. The snatching and the grabbing and the stabbing. The bashing and the bleeding and the boastoff laughing stole in from the lights outside his tent. He heard every muscle drive and retract as the Seeds shoved themselves inside those they had found woman enough to swallow. There was screaming and fire from the Goals. A thud sounded and these fell silent. Their heartbeats continued to rupture the air, skipping and trembling and trying to escape. But it was night and they would not escape. That creature which the men assembled would hold and contain them. It would perch itself in their place and demand to be seen and there would be no peace until its living let them die. De saw.

  Joyborn swaggered inside De’s dim and cushioned cell. He pushed open the leather flap and spewed out breath that stunk of blood and bitter unguents and what resided in the skin attached to his hip. An amber hue smeared his smiling chin. His eye was black and a long cut flowed red with blood.

  “Why won’t you join us, kontor?” he asked De. “The dark is cold, but one is right to take refuge inside these feurkuns, who are so warm and sweating. You could bathe in them like a house, and cure all your shakes. What a wonderful name we inhabit, that our kind was made to be happy! Let us praise the Otiser with it! Let it praise the Girding One!”

  De looked at him. Joyborn planted the skin between his lips and sucked out the liquid. The muscles in his throat rippled and convulsed as he gorged himself on it. “You should know,” he said, wiping his mouth and chin, “I do leave the preferred ones. I leave them to my unders, and to the workers accomplished of my day. I leave them the apportioned ones, whose skin is without marks or pustules, whose breast is young and soft, whose descent has not yet been slumped by childbirth. The ones most like children, who with a crack of the nose will become faithfully in whatever way they are told. For when one’s station has enabled him towards more, as mine has, he should go into the more developed kinds – even if it does not taste as well. Wouldn’t you say?”

  De looked at him.

  “I prefer it myself,” Joyborn continued. He reclined on the tent floor with a banging thud, flopping out his arms. He threw back the drinking skin, letting its contents drip over his mouth and the cloth underneath. “These women are so old. So beyond use and direction. Their men are dead, or they are not as shaded as ours. I like to give, kontor. I have always been a giving kind. It is the form of our firms,” he slurred.

  Behind De’s mask, unwelcome awe sprouted against the organ that sat before him, fully regarding its vulgar presentation and simple delight. Joyborn yawned lazily, itched his member, and dozed off.

  The noise and firers faded, and whatever kind had been eating outside retreated into its den to sleep. The fire between their tentposts burned down to a cinder nest.

  De stumbled to his feet and stood over Joyborn. He took out his cane from his robe.

  After a while, he put it back, and retreated to his own sleeping spot. Joyborn’s eyes opened, clear and alert. He moved to his sleeping spot and covered himself with a shawl. He licked up the blood that fell to his lip.

  -

  That night, De ran among his relations. They watched from behind a curtain in the dark, with faces of detail that turned and churned and long black hair that waved in the wind.

  He called out names that had ceased to be names, and had only become words that his tongue did not know. His eyes moved and knew free of the killer proconscious. They could see him too, but what he was was different and unknowable. They would not speak to him, and neither would they speak to his eyes. He yearned for both in vain.

  He could feel black hair flow down his shoulders. He could feel a leather over clasp to his skin. He could feel the ridge of his nose bend and contort.

  The self he saw burrowed into that feeling, and sent up thanks to rulers. Again he felt himself snatched and jerked off his feet. The darkness faded. He was brought into a place after the end of light, and swallowed by it.

  The Seeds hung the Goals from the trees and they continued, following the scent De had picked up.

  “A man,” Joyborn said. De turned to him.

  “It was a man they spoke of.” Joyborn whipped his tithe and scratched his chin. “In every condition.”

  “A m-man,” De said, “is a c-coat.”

  “Perhaps,” Joyborn said. A fire burned in his eyes.

  They passed into Goal's lower country, where they encountered many other bands of Goals, and were directed otherwise. Joyborn continued to amuse himself with their number.

  The path they created guided them to a destroyed complex of stabs. They surveyed the ruins of Eighty, the destroyed pens and wells and houses. The bodies of Freemen and Laruns, left untended, had become buried in a wave of snow that had buried the soiled trenches, cracked heart-pens and fired nivhouses. They searched out men to speak with in the digger holes and the frames the fire had emptied, and the stocks where there would've been mounted gleaming pails of gold and silver, where the only people they found had been charred and displayed, their chests cut open, and their center pulled out.

  They walked up to the ashen husk of a papersquare on a hill overlooking the slopes that led down into Eighty's cavity. Its walls and everything inside had been bashed and remade by fire, which had joined in state the furniture to any bodies that they might have extracted from the rubble.

  De walked past the ashes and went down to the cliffs, looking down. Far away, on the other end of the complex, a person had fallen to the ground, or he head been thrown. The rocky descent had managed to cut away the robes it had been clothed with, and the skin that was beneath, and still they had not managed to divide it from the sense it had that formed it as a body in the eye of De. It was a seen one, and not a red mound of soil that the workers had abandoned.

  He turned his gaze from it towards a spot farther out among the carts and black mouths that had been pulled apart in the Goalish firmament, and then back toward the shanted plateau of Goalish quarters, surrounded by the high rock walls that fixed the bodies there in place. He looked at the plummetting distance that drove him back from the rocks below. A soothing vigor came into his heart, and the whisper in his ear did not hurt as much.

  "Do you like the fall, kontor?"

  Joyborn appeared in De's peripheral vision. He peered down into the same place. "I believe you do," he said. "I can see it in your frame. Maybe you wish to jump in." De shook and did not reply.

  "It is a thing all men do," Joyborn continued. "See a gap, and we seek it out – thrust ourselves inside. That is our aim. It is our only condition." He kicked a clump of pebbles into the gap, and they clattered down the peril until they lost their shape. "There are gaps that can swallow men. They can eat us completely." He shook his head. "We will not let them. The points of the firm do not prefer it."

  De turned his head to look at him. Joyborn's eyelids shivered and De could hear the muscles in his throat twitch and retract as they pulled bile back into his belly. His look was eaten up by the huge gap.

  De brought out his cane from the folds of his robe and pegged it into the ground, bursting apart a jagged stone. Joyborn quivered, and De felt a warmth stir down his chest.

  He turned around and hobbled back to the tithes.

  -

  They went along the road. Joyborn's vision clung preciously to everything they saw: the trunks and cracked bark, the galloping rootheads, and the stars. De saw Joyborn take it in, and De tried to make sense of it. He wondered what the man saw. He gained no answers before they struck upon the woman.

  De looked into the brush as the Seeds gave chase. There was shouting and bragging as they wrenched her up from it. She was covered in the rocky broon hide of a tusk that had been torn at the sides and waist by their assault. Her face and eyes were covered up by a layer of dirt and clay. She had amber irises and her hair was cut short and thin. Her skin was rough and burnt by sunshine. Shot black tufts adorned her arms and shoulders.

  Joyborn slid down from his tithe and approached her as she roared and beat at them. “An eye, kontor!” one of the Seeds shouted, his voice a hissing wire of pus and bile. “An eye crept in from the cantfowkat!”

  “Hold her there,” Joyborn said. “Hold her in that place.”

  Joyborn dismounted his tithe and approached her. They forced her to the ground.

  “Knh-knower,” De repeated. “W-walks alone.”

  Joyborn knelt down and ran his hand over the woman’s face. She gave up no words. “You’re in a bad spot, birthwoman,” he said to her in Goalish. “Won’t you speak to save your own life?”

  He breathed on her, and she gave up no words.

  "You are now ours, birthwoman," he said. "Can you hear it? And you are an adorable thing." He looked at her eyes. "You are something good to eat."

  She did not turn from, nor look to his eye, and her brow did not roll up. She gave up no words, sweat, or shaking breaths. After a moment, her gaze swept across the ground, and this bore out little more than boredom or an absent mind. It was an open question to De whether or not she could even hear what the Laruns were saying regardless of the words they took.

  Joyborn smiled.

  -

  The day ended. The Seeds enjoyed themselves with the woman, and what was seen, De had already saw.

  The morning had brought in a new world of its own, and the thing De had been seeking was there. Their residence, set between trees and within snow stabbed with long spines of hill-grass, was frosted white. Wingtrees standing over them formed a tall perch with their twin stems. Flesh had been burned, reaching up De's nose and giving him the pungence of breathing fire. And there was a boy.

  Between the greengolden lights which shined off the clouds and over the snow, a new face had been wedged beneath its crust. A branchlogge fallen to the ground from one tree in their spot had been torn apart by wind or beasts. A bundle of thin hairs, some still colored by their extraction, had been laid on a cloth in the center of the round. A Seed washed them with water, and bent down, hashing it up with a knife. De watched as all the Seeds, Laruns included, cued and went to the cutter, smearing a fine paste over their cheeks and dressing their cheeks in the remains.

  A larger bundle of hair, which was long, sat atop the head of Joyborn. One Seed combed it, and rubbed water into it, and another wove it, who slipped his fingers in and out of seven long braids. The boy's fingers made their work an offering.

  Flames began to roar. There had been logs made from wingtrees, and there were flames among them and sparks flying up from those and smoke above it. The body was being remade between its stakes.

  Partless, sitting with at the center of his friends with a cup and a shining dish, brought a piece of it to his mouth, and took parts-bite. Its water ran down his chin, and he wiped it out with a piece of cloth. He bit it again, as did the other Seeds.

  Joyborn looked up from his meal and saw The Cane stood up from his cover, looking down on the display. He saw the eye walk across him and his mouth, and he smiled.

  He took the meat in both hands, bowed his head, and raised it up to De.

  -

  The thing, it concluded by midday.

  Joyborn's hair was moved into the bags on his hoof, and the new set threaded in. One of the Seeds stitched it to his skin, which was smooth and hairless beneath. The others among them chatted as fine and with as many smiles as they had the time before their food.

  They drove their column and seized a final ridge, as the sun emerged from its place on the rim of their firm. Houses and planted fields found the seat they needed in the countryside, all buried in snow.

  "There it is, kontor," Joyborn said. "Send up your wishes, friends! Again, we turn to a mass-shaded place. A stone-shaded place. A parts-shaded place, and our moves from Sett are all ended!"

  There was laughter and mirth. In Joyborn’s gaze, De could hear the rattling of bones. In his eyes, he could taste a raging of thin and beaten infancies. The eyes and the rapist gobbled up the houses and Little Houses of Partplant and beyond, swallowing the laughter and blowing and blue of the breathers’ horizon. In his gaze, De could see bodies cracked and burning homes, and all the animals were striking and shouting and gnashing their teeth, and nothing could be done. The thicktrees and wingtrees and ringroots and skypetals were assault by steel then the dirt they need was eaten back to dust. De was afraid, and the fear made him hateful. The rapist’s gaze feared nothing and wanted all. De gave thanks for his hate.

  De saw. He could see Joyborn and hear the pulse of his throat and the draft of his chest and the swab of his tongue. The heat he had named, which they were steeped in, sought out his body, which was icy and starved of it. He gobbled it up with neither choice nor regard.

  De knew Joyborn. His mind had been built out of one huge consequence, and he cut apart its layers and wished to die for the sight of it. The wish must have meant that he was still alive.

  That was his only discovery.

  The ruined shell grew quiet and moved away the rain. The fire took itself back. It was doused by the clouds, cloaking the climb of hills in a thick moist sheen, and it too was black. Black was the face of silence.

  Warmth crept from the sky into the shell, onto the field of howls and stompers and tusks. They lay where the Dry Man had beaten them.

  It was endless. Many would see it this way. Because their limbs were snapped and twisted, their hides splintered, and all rotted with the water of each other. Every one had given out its water to its peers and to the grass. The grass came back and ate of it, and showed out the end that way. So it was like a battlefield, or one wound.

  A heart with breath ran out from the Wild. It was a long-eared jumper, with round, dark eyes, and a smooth white coat.

  The heart snuck among those bodies and into the shell. It hopped through the ashes of it and became white and black. The orderstone of the Laruns, whose top half had been disintegrated, and whose own words had been completely scratched and scoured and destroyed, was there too. It hopped atop the stone, where it could look around the shell, and found another body.

  The jumper crept up to the mass. It was half. It had long clutches of arms and digits that fell away from its main, and its surface had been crisped.

  The jumper reached its goal. After it did so, it fell down, and its body turned to ice.

  Eyes on the face of the mass opened. They looked out and saw a shadow in the light with a thick jaw and blue eyes. The Beast that could see him and keep him.

  "A…"

  The flesh of it had no lips, but its mouth could move.

  "A…"

  "At…"

  "Ti…"

  The cold washed over it. The eyes shut down again.

  The sun was growing hotter.