‘Evenhands?’ Mesri’s face nearly burrowed back into his skull, so fiercely did it screw up. ‘How is that-’

‘ Mesri! Mesri!’

The priest’s attentions were seized by the young, dark-skinned man that came barrelling out of the poor district. He did not even look at Bralston as he rushed up to the priest.

‘Another fell ill,’ the young man panted. ‘Swears it was shicts.’

‘Of course,’ Mesri sighed. ‘It’s always shicts … or ghosts … or whatever fell spirit has been thought up.’ He turned to Bralston. ‘Sir Librarian, please-’

‘Time is limited,’ the Librarian replied curtly, shoving past young man and priest alike. ‘Those endeavours that cannot be pursued must settle behind those that can.’

Mesri was calling something after him, he realised, as he walked toward the warehouse. But he shut his ears to the sound, all the same. It was foolish to have offered; a stipend would require paperwork, endorsements, evaluations. He had a job to do.

One that led him into a dark, dank place.

Twenty

Shicts were created from Riffid, the Huntress. Shicts had been birthed from Her blood, given Her voice in their ears and nothing more. Shicts were created. Shicts were born. Shicts were meant to be here on this world.

This was fact.

Naxiaw knew this.

Humans were born from no gods, despite the misguided fanaticism they tried to justify their infectious presence with. Humans, instead, began as monkeys that learned how to pick up swords. Humans adapted. Humans evolved. Humans did not belong here on this world.

This was fact.

Naxiaw was convinced of it now.

From their humble origins when the first monkey stabbed his brother and called himself human, the round-ears had shed their body hair, built houses over stone and birthed the corruptions of politics and gold and found more productive uses for their feces. They had evolved.

Logical, Naxiaw told himself. Sickness is a predator. It mutates, learns to resist medicine and bypass immunities to spread its infection. That the human disease should learn to become more efficient at killing and destroying should be no surprise.

And truthfully, he admitted, when he had been brought amongst the longfaces and witnessed their brutal devastation, their efficient destruction, their utterly gleeful murder, he had not been surprised.

Shocked, of course.

Horrified, naturally.

And, he thought as he peered through the bars of his cage, ever more curious …

From high atop the crumbling stone ruins upon the sandy ridge that overlooked the valley in which they crawled, he watched them. For the past six days, he had studied them as they crushed the earth beneath their iron-shod feet, as they blackened the sky with their forges, as they broke their scaly, green servants with whip and blade.

Horror and repulsion for the purple-skinned brutes had long ago faded. He scolded himself now for wasting time on indulgent loathing. What he was watching was no longer something disgusting, something vicious and cruel to be loathed. What he was watching was something ominous, something miraculous, something wholly terrifying.

He had thought them to be one more aberration on an already-tainted world, one more threat for the shicts to destroy, one more disease to cure. But as he continued to watch them, to study their cruelty and monitor their rapaciousness, he realised they were no new illness. They were merely one strain of the same sickness he had been attempting to purge since he could first carry his Spokesman stick.

They might have been purple instead of pink, thicker of bone and harder of flesh, long of face and white of eye, but he recognised them all too swiftly. And the more he watched them as they spread across the island, purple patches of disease contaminating a pure and pristine land, the less ridiculous it seemed.

After all, he reasoned, if humans could evolve once, they could surely do it again.

More aggressive and violent than the human strain had ever been, the longface infection continued to amaze him, even after six days of being held prisoner by them, watching them boil across the sands.

The females were the dominant infection, the true ravagers of flesh and blood. That much was obvious from watching them, tall and muscular, chewing the earth beneath their feet, staining the sand red with the blood of their slaves and themselves, filling the air with the iron challenges and grinding snarls they hurled at each other like spears.

They were the sickness that drove the green lizard-things to do what they did, the fever that boiled their minds and forced them to act in ways unwise. Under the cracks of their knotted whips and the threats from their jagged teeth, the pitiful, scaly creatures worked with broken backs and dragging feet as the females drove them forward. They hewed down the trees from the forests that flanked the beach, dragging the logs to feed the forge pits and build the great black ships that bobbed in the roiling surf.

The land was thick with iron, the sky was thick with smoke. Those females who worked the forge pits, fire-scarred and shorn-haired, relentlessly thrust and pulled glowing iron rods from the embers, tirelessly hammered them into cruel-edged wedges and vicious-tipped spikes, eagerly sharpened their edges to jagged metal teeth.

Not a grain of sand remained undisturbed amidst the activity. The disease swept across the land as the females worked tirelessly. They drilled in tight, square formations under the barking orders of their white-haired superiors. They brawled and attacked each other in impromptu displays of dominance that quickly turned fatal. They hauled the bodies of those scaled slaves too exhausted to work to a pit ringed by iron bars, tossing them in and filling the air with screaming as the denizens of the massive hole let out eerie cackles through full mouths.

And through it all, Naxiaw watched, Naxiaw studied, Naxiaw noted.

This was not the first time he had witnessed such a scene. Voracious greed, heedless industry, the smell of blood and sweat so thick the violence was a collective hunger in the belly of every female present. He had seen these sensations in the round-ears many times before, if never to such an extent.

He knew a war when he saw one.

For what, he did not know. For why, it did not matter. These things, these evolutions of disease, were preparing to spread their infection.

The sole comfort he took was in their numbers. He had counted no more than two hundred since he had first been thrown into his cage. Theirs was nothing like the teeming masses of the smaller, pinker strain.

And, he thought as he lowered his head and raised his ears, it falls to the shicts to make certain that they never will have such numbers.

He closed his eyes. His ears went rigid. Through the carnage below, he attempted to hear.

It began quickly, as it always did, with a sudden awareness of sounds without meaning: feet on sand, breeze in sky, air in lungs, snarls in throats. This awareness amplified, sought specificity in noise: trees shuddering under blunted axes, black-bellied ships bobbing in the surf, muscles stretching and contorting under purple flesh.

Close to its goal, the awareness pressed further, reduced the world to nothing but those few sounds that bore significance, the essence of life. Splinters falling in soft, pattering whispers in tiny droplets of sweat-kissed blood. Breezes colliding with clouds of smoke. A crab’s carapace scratching against grains of sand as it stirred in a hibernating dream beneath the earth.

And then, silence: the sound with the most meaning, the sensation of his own mind blooming into a vast and formless flower within his head. No more sound, no more thought. The flower stretched out silently, instinctually, reaching out, muttering wordless sounds, whispering unheard speeches. Somewhere beyond his mind, he felt something stir.