Part 2
### Chapter 1: Sunset And A Drink
The warehouse was on fire. The rioters were being mowed down by the guards, dying ugly and clogging up the passages, so some of the soldiers and saboteurs in the crowd started handing out homemade explosives. And, because nobody thinks clearly in a riot, they handed out firebombs too. Everybody runs when they are on fire, right? So set the guards on fire and clear the strong point. It would have been really good for everyone if the people with the fire had connected “Kill the Ma Clan!” to “This warehouse is full of radioactive dust, cores, and devices powered by radioactive cores, because it belongs to the Ma Clan.”
When the guards realized that they weren’t getting out of this alive, they decided that it was time to go out like a Ma. So they rushed the mob, radioactive “hot” weapons melting faces and boiling flesh, leaving the corpses as tumor generating horrors for any that would try to clean the place later. They swung machetes and stabbed with halberds, pistols cracked out, and the whistles of crossbows accompanied them. Whatever the guards could use, they used. And when they were knocked down by the mob, they channeled heat from the radioactive core inside of them, triggering the suicide vests loaded with yet more radioactive shrapnel. They killed hundreds in seconds. But the mob numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The poor and beaten down of Old Radler had risen up, and would kill their overseers today.
The disguised soldiers pulled back from the warehouse, directed by local traitors to the next Clan holding. Didn’t matter which Clan, they all had to go. So they plunged through the endless twisting alleys of Old Radler, always in the shadows of the hundred towers that rose up out of the vast hill it sat on.
The shortest route was never a straight line- one had to run up the ruins of a sky-scraper that had been turned into a farm, then cross a bridge made of a glass no one had been able to recreate into crude adobe shelters clustered on top of a stone ziggurat. These shelters were now considered luxury housing, compared to the lightless, airless closets that were “homes” inside the ziggurat, or a thousand places just like it. The local traitors took the soldiers to just the right hovel, they set breaching charges, blew a wall down, and easy as that, they were in a wide piazza. Rocks projecting advertisements for products that haven't existed in millenia were set amongst the cobblestones, and some little bookstores dotted around a fountain that pumped out flavored water. No one could quite agree what the flavor was supposed to be, though. Some neighborhoods are just boring like that.
The crouching hulk of the Ma Clan house was still some fifteen minutes away. Not to worry, though. There were more than a hundred thousand people trying to kill their way in already. They surrounded the fortified “House” the size of a city block, thick walls layered with defenses against dozens of types of threats. Not impregnable. The Ma would be the first to tell you that nothing was unbeatable. But anyone trying to touch the Ma would pay a hellish price.
The rioters were very willing to pay that price. Other Clans were hated. The Ma clan was feared. Feared for their cruelty, their violence, their disregard for any not of the Clan. Feared for their command of the ever-present radiation. So omnipresent it was just called “heat.” One soldier looked down as he passed. There was a splatter of flesh and blood on the cobblestone. Someone had taken a little spill from high up. Not their problem. They pushed on. Until they exterminated the Ma, the “spontaneous popular uprising” would not be complete.
Mazelton looked down at the departing soldiers from seven stories up. He was bleeding, and his lips were already turning a faint blue from the poison. “We never even kissed.” He said. The fires were spreading across the city. The drums and whistles were coming from everywhere. Safety, today, wasn’t something that existed. Not for the living. A trace of bitter optimism tugged the corner of his mouth upwards. “Good thing I’m comfortable with the dead.”
One hour earlier-
Mazelton wasn’t an incompetent, exactly. The useless did not survive in the Ma Clan. Mazelton was actually fairly talented, just not at anything the Ma Clan really gave a damn about. Mazelton, to the disgust of his parents and confusion of his elders, was an aesthete.
Mazelton loved to dance. He loved to make sculptures, draw pictures, paint, recite poetry and his calligraphy was probably the best in his generation. Oh, he could fight, sort of. You didn’t survive childhood if you couldn’t. His internal heat control was excellent, and he could polish cores too. He wasn’t great at smoothing and carving those little radioactive lumps into useful tools, but he was better than most outside the clan. But he wasn’t outside the clan. He was of the main line of the Ma Clan, and for the Ma Clan, art was strictly a tool, and nothing more. It wasn’t what “real” Ma did.
Real Ma, they made things. Great, terrible things. Want to speak to someone on the other side of the world? The Ma would bind the essence of two stones together, and they could call to one another. Wanted to light your home? They could carve that core. Sterilize food, water, wounds? Ma Clan polishers were there and ready to help. For a fee. Slightly bigger fee for weapons that could melt your enemies and ensure that any children the survivors might have would be sickly and die young. Mazelton just liked to party, dance and enjoy the wonders of Old Radler. Was that really so bad?
Yes. Yes it was. But no matter. The Clan had existed for tens of millenia. Any shape of peg could be found an appropriately shaped hole. You just had to hammer it a bit to make it fit snugly.
Mazelton was relegated to the outer yards of the Clan, assigned the role of a Hurricane Lily in the Flower Court. The Flower Court was an affectation the various clans sometimes enjoyed. A fancy garden of “flowers,” for public enjoyment. A Jasmine, night blooming and fragrant, served to make the public more favorable to their clan. Public Relations and “influencers” as we would understand it. Hurricane Lilies did all that too. But those particular lilies had never been associated with anything nice. No, that was the lily that grew on the banks of the rivers in Hell.
This season’s design inspiration were the mists that flooded Old Radler every evening. Mazelton found them fascinating, watching the mist boil from the high towers of the Ma clan and roll down the giant hill of the city, around the ruins and into the deep tunnels. Not the deepest, no one alive could dare claim to have found the true depths of Old Radler, but down into the catacombs, the cool mist winding around the mountains of skulls and femurs left by innumerable plagues and disasters. Then the fog was pushed back up, back into the vast underground condensers, run through sponges so enormous they could double as apartment buildings. The radiation and core dust of the city was absorbed by the mist, carried to the giant underground condensers, filtered out and pressed into the cheap slabs of hot stones that were both stove and radiator for the people of a dozen cities. A civic good provided by the Ma clan, and one that filled their coffiers to bursting. Mazelton understood the mist very well indeed.
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Mazelton wore long, flowing robes, so long that he looked like a little cloud. He sewed tiny cores into it, condensing faint wisps of fog around him, helping him develop the blurred androgynous look he was favoring at the moment. For the last few weeks he played at seduction with a Jasmine of the Cabell clan. The Cabells were a small presence in Old Radler, but looking to rise to the status of a Great Clan.
This Jasmine refused to tell Mazelton their name, or anything about themselves directly. Such things were to be won, in their little game. Their features seemed to shift with the light- harshly masculine, delicately femminine. Insubstantial. In flux. Mazelton was honest about his art, and feared that he was falling in love.
One afternoon in early autumn, the Jasmine called Mazelton out for a walk and a game of poetry. They wandered through the galleries and up twisted spires, competing with vividness of imagery. The shadows under the arches came alive as Mazelton drew out the Ælfflæd with his bare shimmers of light. He had implanted tiny cores into his hands, trusting in his superb internal control to keep the heat from spreading into his flesh. This was generally considered suicidlaly dumb, but he was never very good at listeing to his elders. And it made the Jasmine smile and coo at his drawings, so it was worth it.
Mazelton seized the Jasmine’s hand and ran with them, up one flight of stairs, through a gallery of arches, made a quick cut across a dim courtyard and then through a door that could only be seen if you knew which shadow to look in. He pressed his back to the door, and waved Jasmine towards the empty stretch of wall that once was an elegant window, seven stories above what was once a stylish plaza.
The sun set over Old Radler, the whole sky the color of a maple leaf turning. You could see the proud warehouses of the Ma clan, the roaring factories of the Bo, the teeming rookeries whose rents fed the Cabells and the Pellenoils. The sparkling glass and ceramic towers of the Xia. The whole social tapestry of the city, or all that was fit for the sun to shine on.
A burning heart sets,
And all I can see is the mountain.
Ah, where are the small flowers and sweet grasses?
Mazelton invited the Jasmine to finish the verse. They paused, and as drums began to sound in the rookeries, smiled.
Perhaps, they lie ‘neeth dilapidated stone.
Perhaps, they call to the sun,
Their tiny hearts thundering like war drums.
Laughing happily, the Jasmine produced a beautiful antique glass flask. The liquor within was heather and lilac. They offered it to Mazelton, and he happily sipped it.
The drink uncoiled across his tongue. Syrupy, sweet, violets followed by bitter herbs. His escaping breath felt like a winter blast, and his nose was filled with the lingering scent of… Aconite. Mazelton let the flask tumble from his hand, bouncing on the stone floor wishing it would break like his heart was.
“What’s my prize, oh Jasmine?”
“What have you guessed?”
“The Cabell’s are in half a dozen cities, and looking to climb in all of them. Old Radler could be their ticket to Great Clan status, and their “loyalty” to the North Sea Confederation would give them time to firm their foundations. And yet, for some reason, the Cabells decided I must die. Why? I must be far more useful alive, seduced and pliant.”
The Jasmine smiled, a little sadly, a little coldly, as the drumming grew louder and whistles started to cry from around the city. Mazelton pulled a silver whistle from the sleeves of his robe, toying with it. A single blast, and every clansman and city guard within earshot would pile in, killing the Jasmine without question.
“No prize, you missed the key point.” The Jasmine slid a black glass blade from a hidden pocket in their flesh. “I’m not sorry, but I am regretful. I had hoped the poison was enough. You weren’t bad company, for a parasite.”
The whistles blew more urgently, and the drums spread. Smoke shot up from the north, where the Bo clan school was. The Jasmine stepped between Mazelton and the door.
“A coup?”
“Time for a change. Goodby, Mazelton.”
The Jasmine lunged, the knife piercing from under their heart towards Mazelton’s. Mazelton froze a half beat, shocked by the sudden violence. He staggered back before the blade, towards the empty hole of the former window, flinging his whistle at the Jasmine. It bounced off, ignored. The Jasmine recovered their lunge and closed to grapple.
The Jasmine reached with their left hand, right holding the blade close to their chest. Mazelton swept his vast sleeves, countering their left with his, a small circle looking to foul their line of attack. Instead, the Jasmine grabbed the sleeve of his robe and yanked him into their boot. Mazelton’s gut exploded in pain, putting him down, hard. The Jasmine swarmed in, moving to mount and finish him on the ground. Mazelton flailed, his legs and hands trapped by the robe and the Jasmine’s technique. The Jasmine straddled his waist, brought the dagger into line, swiftly blocking the one hand Mazelton had worked free a few inches from their temple. She had won, and he was dead. Then Mazelton ignited the cores in his hand, burning an entire season’s worth of heat into the Jasmine’s face.
The Jasmine screamed, their eyes boiling and the flesh sloughing off the side of their skull. They flailed the dagger around, cutting him, as Mazelton bucked and tried to fight free. They clung to him, screaming, screaming, screaming, as they rolled towards the window. Mazelton managed to kick the Jasmine off, scrambling away as they howled and cut, trying to find and kill him. He scooped the flask from the floor where he had dropped it. Heavy, solid thing. He whipped it at the Jasmine’s head. The Jasmine was exquisitely trained, starting to doge even when they couldn’t see what was coming. Their well trained feet moved back and to the side, a perfect dodge- right out the ruined wall that once held a window. The Jasmine fell for a long time before the screaming stopped.
Mazelton dropped to his knees, his fingers digging into his thighs. The asinine thought- “I can’t throw up, Father would be furious.” repeated again and again in his mind, putting a little paper bag around the leaking sick of what just happened. Of the Jasmine’s lovely face rotting away.
Mazelton looked out the window, his brain screeching to a halt. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. This was Old Radler. His home. It was on fire, convulsing, slaughtering his kin. His home wanted him dead.
Mazelton staggered towards the door. The poison had started kicking in. He might have some resistance (thank some kind ancestor for buying superior kidneys and livers for their descendants) but he wasn’t immune. No way he could make it to the Clan House. All the shops would be a target too. No healers or apothecaries would see him. Had to go to ground. Well. He had his own little home- down amongst the dead. On the banks of the rivers in Hell.
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### Chapter 2: Beginning At The End Or Ending At The Beginning
Mazelton tried to think through his escape route. Between him and his hideaway in the catacombs was near half a mile descent, and three miles horizontal travel. He drew the map in his mind, ignoring the numbing of his lips. He would edge out along the ledge of the window to the next room. The next room had no floor, but there were pipes that ran for some eight or nine floors. Then he would have to try and cut through the street- except he musnt. That was Soi 43, any young bravo looking to blood their lance would be running their chev up and down 43’ nice long straights. If he couldn’t cross the street, could he go down again? He couldn’t recall. Old Radler was practically nothing but hidden paths and abandoned rooms. He was sure he could find something.
Once across the street, it was three alleys till the Rat Trap, and from there another drop into what were once sewers. Some great parties there. Then it was but a hop skip and a jump through several partially collapsed tunnels, doubling back a mere six times, until he made it to the Catacombs and his hidden nest.
Mazelton grinned mirthlessly. The faster he moved, the faster the poison would work, but the sooner he got his remedies, the more likely he could cure it. He stripped off his robes, tearing them, wrapping his hands and face in the cloth. He hadn’t been cut too badly by the Jasmine. Physically, anyway. He went.
The ledge was no problem. How many hours had he spent climbing the city? Since he was old enough to crawl, seemed like. He could see smoke starting to rise from the Clan’s warehouses. He devoutly hoped that whatever moron started the fire did so after they removed all the radioactive cores. Otherwise fire would be the least of everyone’s problems.
Mazelton made it to the pipes in moments- not the first time he fancied a dangerous shortcut. He wrapped a strip of twisted cloth around the back of the pipe, and walked down the wall. It went well, until the poison kicked the legs out from under him. Mazelton slid down the pipe, bashing his face against it, tearing a gash on his chest. He only just managed to slow down before he would have followed the Jasmine into a messy death.
That cut was definitely going to get infected, but what could he do? A quick wipe with a cleaner bit of cloth and hope that the swelling on his face would be minor. Just… had to get to the nest.
Mazelton staired blearily around the bottom of the shaft. There were no obvious exits, but there was an impressive amount of bits of pipe and stonework. He imagined making some sort of sledge hammer, realized that was dumb, thought of using the old “Brick in a piece of cloth” trick for bashing walls, realized that there was no such trick, and with immense reluctance, concluded that chipping away with a pipe was the best choice.
Unfortunately, while Mazelton might have remembered which wall lead to the street under other circumstances, between the poison, attempted knife murder, fall, head trauma, and emotional trauma, he was completely turned around.
Mazelton spun a likely length of metal up into the air. It came down pointing to the wall to the left of the risers. He picked up the pipe and stabbed it into the wall, chipping a hole in the crumbly concrete. Progress was quick. In what seemed like no time at all, a jet of high pressure sewage shot out of his brand new hole in the wall, slammed into his chest and splashing all around the room. It was that awful, penetrating sort of smell that you can taste. It was textured, a slimy, burrowing, maggoty thing with notes of cabbage, your worst bowel movement and, horribly, bubblegum. And the sewage wasn’t draining from the room.
Mazelton started digging at another wall with manic haste. The concrete seemed to be in as much hurry to get out of there as he was, and he quickly knocked out a tiny hole. The sewage was up to his ankles now, and rising fast. By the time he dug a hole big enough to escape through, the sewage was waist high, lapping at the edge of the hole. From the sound outside, the public was starting to notice. He did his best to wiggle through the hole, the fermenting sewage greasing the way.
The bravos and their long lances couldn’t get away from him fast enough, as he ran screaming across Soi 43 and into the alleys. The swearing over the sewage was profound. It seemed like a tiny crack in the universe had opened, the contents of a fecal dimension invading our world.
Mazelton ran unseen through alleys for the Rat Trap, the wide channel that surrounded the old Grand Counsel Hall of three epochs back. Yesterday, he would have described the waters as brackish and foul. You needed a hidden glass elevator to cross. Today, Mazelton didn’t even break stride as he dove straight in and swam for the bottom. Across the mucky channel bed, up the hidden gap in the wall and then, lungs bursting, back up into the air in the fifth sub basement of that old wreck of a building.
He lay on his back, sobbing for breath. The poison had gone to work on his kidneys, he could feel it stabbing and punching away in there. His balls hurt, which he couldn’t explain, but they really did. His chest burned. He smelled like shit and pickled fruit. One eye was starting to swell shut, he must have hit the pipe harder than he thought. And the entire city was tearing itself apart.
He had to lay low. Regroup. If the clan survived, he would swan back in, none the worse and with a kill to his credit. If they didn’t… Not many knew more ways to escape the city than him. He would make for Uncle Matele’s place in Lone Pine. They hanged Confeds on sight up there, on the lamp posts and city gates.
Mazelton rolled onto his belly, then made it up to his knees, then, on the third try, made it to his feet. Just… down a flight of steps into the old sewers of the Seventh Republic, then you are practically in the catacombs. One foot in front of the other.
Mazelton didn’t know how long he slept- hours, certainly. The antidotes, hangover cures and buckets of water seemed to have helped. The wound purification core had dumped a full charge in, and the healers always swore blind that more than that would cause the flesh to rot and tumors to grow. He was in a mood to test that theory, as the herbal remedies the Clan healers came up with could only do so much to treat infection from the inside.
Some civilizations, in epochs past, had apparently found ways to cure infection from within, medicines that could kill the tiny invaders without radiation from cores. Without the omnipresent “heat.” So far, no recovered cache has explained how. Mazelton was quite prepared to give the left testicles of his very closest friends and associates for a nice big jar of however it worked. Even grafting testicles on to those who didn’t have them to begin with, if necessary. His piss and shit were bloody. That was probably fine.
Mazelton’s little nest was very Ma. Using bone as wicker, he had woven a domed hut within a vast mound of rib bones. Light cores were half concealed within the roof, lending the perfect, dim, romantic atmosphere to the place. The small platform bed was made from femurs, carefully knotted together with… leather..., and the mattress was burial shrouds stuffed with human hair. He had had some amazing sex here. Come to think of it, it was where… What was her name? Pazira? Pazimi? Someone from the Pa family. She got him to convert, turn Dusty in this little hut. Who would have guessed that he would actually start believing? She… moved? To Landowe Green? Would she let him hide there if he had to run that way?
Probably not.
Mazelton ran his eyes around the hut- his bed, a chest holding some clothes, snacks and drinks along with a double handful of cores and diadems and his remedies. In the middle of the room was a wide basin, a genuine treasure of the Intoqui civilization. It harvested moisture, condensed it, purified it and let it seep upward into the basin. He had no idea how it worked, no one did, but it had been working for some six hundred years uninterrupted. He won it in an insult contest. Too big to run with. Against the wall opposite the bed was the little work table he had built. He had scavenged remnants of an altar so ancient that he couldn’t even guess at the religion, smoothed the top, and set powerful light cores over it. A thick roll of dark green cloth lay honored in the middle of the altar.
He unrolled the cloth,and looked down on his polishing tools, the only really valuable thing he owned. And the clan would dispute ownership. All the diadems and cores and art, even the substantial stash of drugs, were pocket change in front of serious wealth. The Ma clan’s wealth. Even the everfull basin was a “valuable antique” that would have gotten lost in any one of a dozen Clan houses filled with “valuable antiques.” They were all just... stuff. Stuff never lasted. The tools were power and legacy.
Mazelton glanced over at the auroch skull over the door, as he walked his fingertips over the tools. He was fourteen again. Out of the six hundred and forty eight children in the Zel generation of the Old Radler Ma, he was one of just sixty from the main Ma family line. His initiation was a matter of serious importance to the clan- the eighteenth to be called. And perhaps the fifth to die.
The blood is thinning, the elders muttered. Maybe they were right. He barely hung on through the two weeks of fasting. He would have died in the steam purification, if an unknown uncle hadn’t discreetly shoved him into the cold bath. At the end of the weakening rites, he was called before the Matriarch, Hag Malima. The last phase of the ritual was in an empty stone room with a bare stone table. Hag Malima and the core elders of the Clan sat calmly in their seats around the table, looking at the one empty chair. Leaning against the chair was a long handled hammer and a heavy knife.
“Hungry, child?”
“My hunger has passed, Grandmother.”
“You are starving. You will die soon.”
“What must I do?”
“In times of prosperity, eat fruit and vegetables. When there is just enough, eat grains. In the bad times?”
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“In the bad times, Grandmother, we must eat,” Mazelton suppressed a shudder, “carrion. We must do anything to ensure our survival and the clan's survival.” He recited by rote, having heard the phrase since he was weaned. The Hag nodded, once, and rang a small bell.
An auroch was led in, a bull in its prime. It was painted with whorls in ocher and black, a white circle drawn on its brow, and a red circle on its chest. It snorted and bellowed, its long, black tipped horns thrashing, frightened by the smell of blood that had long since soaked into the floor and walls.
“To live, you must eat. To command your core, you must steal another's. What will you do, child?”
“I will do what is necessary. I will grow up.” To a starved mind, some matters are very clear. So he picked up the hammer and rested it on his shoulder as he awkwardly held the knife in his teeth. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to make two trips. The auroch bucked its head, but it was pretty well held down by some of his uncles and aunts. Mazelton walked up and smacked the hammer as hard as he could into the circle between its eyes. It wasn’t hard enough. He was too weak from the fasting. It took six blows before the bull stopped screaming and finally fell down for the last time.
“If you puke during the initiation, if you shame me, I will skin you alive.” His father had growled at him, before he was led into his cell to start his fast. Mother had just looked at him like he was already dead. She wouldn’t mourn him.
He didn’t puke. He pulled the knife from between his teeth and started hacking into the bull’s chest. The still hot blood poured out, covering his nakedness. The rib bones were too hard for him to hack through with the knife. Using the last of his strength, he snapped a few ribs with the hammer, pulled out the pieces, and cut his way to the heart. His wet hand wrapped around the slippery, warm, huge organ, the core stone hanging just below it. He cut both away, having to saw a bit to sever the thick, rubbery hoses of the veins and arteries. The smell was unreal, metallic and sweet and foul all at once. The core popped loose with a pinch, a muddy silver lump the size of his thumbnail. He brought both back to the elders.
They nodded. He put the core and the heart on the table. He lifted his bloody carving knife, cut off a piece of the heart, and placed it next to the core.
The Hag waved, and the elders bent Mazelton backwards over the table. Practiced hands wiped him clean, while other hands took up knives and hooks and brushes and paints of strange and ancient composition. A sharp blade ran across his sternum, and the elders opened his chest like a book. He was permitted to bite down on the heart to muffle his screams. It was the Hag herself who carved the ancient patterns on his heart, linking them to his nerves, his spine, his brain. So fine was her work that one would need the best microscopes to see even a hint of it. When her work was done, she took the unpolished core, its terrible, poisonous energy slowly saturating the air, and forcibly jammed it under Mazelton’s own lentil sized core.
“If you would live, child. If you would become an adult who can do what is necessary, eat carrion. Take the power that is killing you, and make it your own.” The elders began a wordless, pulsing, droning chaint. They ran their own core power down into the naked boy on the table, the energy pulsing along with the chant.
Mazelton was delirious with starvation, with pain, with the horror of killing, of eating carrion. The auroch’s core burned through all that. Mazelton could feel the invisible fire rotting his heart, killing the flesh and leaving disease and tumors in its wake. He had spent two weeks in his cell, starving, rationing his water as he memorized what to do during the initiation. He felt the path the Elders’ energy was following. And once he had the trick of following the energy, he reached out with his mind, and for the first time in his life, made the energy within him follow his will. He pulled from the auroch’s core. He pulled the core heat, the invisible fire from out of his heart.
The heat flowed easily over the bridges and roads carved by the Hag. From them, it flowed through the channels that already existed in the body, like tubes of flexible glass so clear, he had never noticed them before. He pulled, and when the energy came full circle, he pushed the heat into his own core. He felt it grow, fast, too fast. Fast to the point of bursting, but the elders were there. The Hag was there. They showed him how to spin down the energy, to smooth out the core. To polish it into a perfect vessel to contain this new power. Tracing along after them, he carved the patterns on his core with his own power, making it forever his.
Someone slapped the reserved piece of heart into his hand. He roasted it with an invisible flame, shoved it in his mouth and ate it. His body could strip out this little bit of heat, now. His teeth ground through the tough muscles, fighting for every sickening calorie. He hated this flavor, the way the smell rose like sick up into his nose. He hated it. Staring straight up into the bright lights over the dinner table, lacking the strength to move even his hands, he wrenched his lips into a bloody smile.
“Seconds, please.”
His performance was deemed adequate, meeting but not exceeding expectations. He was given a roll of polishing tools to bind and use, each tool’s tip shaped out of the core of a dead clan member. A polisher wasn’t just a member of a clan, they were a living legacy, a legacy they were expected to pass on. Mazelton was quiet and withdrawn after the ritual.
“An auroch. Pathetic innovation. Personally, I think it’s why the Zel generation is so weak.” His mother had pulled him aside for brick red tea, drunk from the flowers of now extinct plants preserved in glass. Not her favorite cups, Mazelton knew.
“No, if the clan had real expectations of you, it would be a human prisoner, an enemy of the clan. Much bigger core, and you need much bigger guts to pull it off.”
Mazelton stared into his six lobed flower, trying not to take her words to heart.
“I ate the heart of Bolansi. The Bo family still hunts for her, you know. Sometimes I leave hints that she is held captive here or there.” Mother smiled fondly, then let her smile slip away. “By taking her core I strengthened our Ma clan and weakened the Bo. To think my son would merely be a… meat eater.”
Mazelton came back to the present. He sat bonelessly on his little work table and tried to think through what to do next. Go home? Home was under siege, literally, and even if he knew the hidden ways of Old Radler, the Cabells knew them too. They were probably attacking through those same routes. No, any Ma property in the city would be marked and attacked. The mist plant would be as heavily defended as the clan hall, and as heavily attacked. So that was out too. Allies? The Ma clan had subordinates and rivals with varying degrees of hostility. It had no allies. No one would be willing to hide Mazelton.
Stay in the catacombs? He smiled. The vengeful ghost of the Ma clan that stalked amongst the bones, feeding on bad Confed children who didn’t listen to their parents. Mazelton shook his head. People avoided the Catacombs, but with all the violence up top, they would be stuffed full soon. He could hide for a while, but it couldn’t last. And what kind of life would it be even if he could?
Flee the city? He did have family in Lone Pine. Uncle Matele was a force in the clan and the city. His looks had been a bit too appreciative when he last visited Old Radler, but, as the infection burned in his chest, Mazelton thought he could put up with that. Flee west? Keep going until he was far, far from old Radler, crossing the inland seas and even the Grand Redoubts to the far west? Mazelton just shook his head. He learned how to sail a little pleasure boat during summers at the lake. Occasionally rode a chev through the clan timber holdings as part of a group outing. Not exactly an outdoorsman.
Without thinking too much, he swept the tool roll and what supplies he thought he might need into a pillow case. The pillow case was then twisted inside a sheet and tied to his back. He jumped and wiggled around to make sure it was snug. Out of instinct, he looked at his reflection in the basin. The left side of his face was a swollen mess. His eye was bloodshot, it’s lids puffy. The skin was reddish, peeling and blistered in places. His lips looked like… well like he had kissed a pipe repeatedly and at speed. His clothes were vile smelling rags. He had managed to smear some wound paste over the cut on his chest, but it was still purple and turning black around the edges. You could almost see the infection pulsing outward. A perfect disguise- he couldn’t even recognize himself.
He panted out a silent, humorless laugh. One last piece of preparation, then he would be ready. He fished a bottle of liquor out of his chest, spiked it with azamanth powder, and set it square upon the altar.
“Ælfflæd, I call you. Ælfflæd, I pray you hear me. Ælfflæd, I bring you gifts and seek your favor. By the ancient contract, by blood, bone and fire, by the generations of our lines, Ælfflæd, I call you.”
Mazelton paused to think. The Ælfflæd had short memories for favors, but long ones for grudges. And they were easily offended.
“Clan blood has been spilled. The extinguishment of my line is at hand. I will eat carrion to survive. So I beseech you and offer this gift- grant me your favor. Brush away my tracks, and let the sight of others slip off of me. Grant me this, and I shall repay you with a life.” Mazelton shuddered, feeling the weight of the oath settle into his gut.
“Ælfflæd, thank you for listening. Ælfflæd, thank you for your favor. Ælfflæd, please watch over me. A drink, to warm you on your way.”
He pushed some heat into the bottle, sticking his finger down the neck to do it. The little stabbing rays slammed into the azamanth powder, lighting the drug and making the whole bottle into a flaming lantern. The red and green flames danced around each other, growing longer as the brandy turned into fuel, then air. A whirl of smoke spun for a moment in the bottle, and before it could escape, Mazelton inverted the bottle over his lips and sucked it down.
Holding the smoke in your lungs was a test of devotion. The invisible fires tore up the soft tissues, blistering them. A polisher could control the damage, if they were quick and their lineage strong. For most, the ritual demanded your life. You had to be really desperate to summon the Ælfflæd. Or ruthless. The Ælfflæd respected ruthlessness- if you were desperate enough to drink ælfsmoke, be ruthless enough to hold it till the end. Or ruthless enough to force someone else to do it for you. Mazelton held his breath until his vision dimmed and he couldn’t keep the fires at bay.
Mazelton forced the smoke out of his lungs and into the dim light of his bone hut. It formed the barest outlines of a beautiful form- inhumanly beautiful, like sunlight bouncing off a stream or the wind in a field.
The Ælfflæd came with music- the sounds of the city, it’s cries and creaks and rumbles and squeaks and the roars of the angry mob all coming together beneath a steady beat- onetwo threefour onetwo threefour onetwo threefour onetwo threefour … The Ælfflæd began to sway and twist around the bone hut, dancing to the music of the city. It flicked an appendage- a smokey hand? towards Mazelton, and invited him to join the dance.
Mazelton danced. They danced his life away, as the ecstasy of the ritual barely hid the pain from his wounded flesh and lungs. They danced until his limbs could barely hold him, until his lungs could hardly catch a breath and his eyes blurred from sweat and tears. The last he saw of the Ælfflæd, it gently waved him to the door- and vanished.
Mazelton, obedient to the spirits of his clan, staggered for the door. At the threshold, as he was never that obedient and considered himself a good Dusty, he scooped some grave dust from the floor and rubbed it across his third eye, lest others use witchcraft to find it. Having taken all sensible precautions, Mazelton began his escape.
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