Chapter 46: The Commander
POV: Phoenix Kade
The stone stele stands at the center of the outpost like a declaration.
I stop in front of it without planning to, the way I've been stopping throughout this walk whenever something demands the full attention of my eyes. The words carved into it are in the script of the First World, which the old man taught me to read, and I read them without moving my lips the way he taught me to do it, the internal voice assembling the letters into meaning.
Rules. A short list of them, specific and without elaboration. No theft above a defined threshold. No killing within the outpost walls without sanction. No assault of protected persons. No interference with trade. No unauthorized taking of resources.
The rules themselves are not what holds my attention.
The stakes are.
A row of them, driven into the ground beside the stele, blackened and burnt, each one still holding what's left of someone, the steel chains keeping the shapes in position even after fire has reduced them to the minimum. The smell is old, these are not recent, but the message they communicate does not require freshness to be effective.
One type of punishment. Execution by fire.
I look at the rules again. I look at the stakes. I look at the rules a third time, reading them now not as a list of prohibitions but as a map of what the person who wrote them considers important enough to kill over.
"See that?" Slyfox points toward the far end of the outpost, where a building rises above everything around it with the confidence of something that was designed to be seen. "That place up ahead is the private residence of the outpost commander. I'm warning you right now. Stay the hell away from that place."
I look at the building.
Electric light in the windows. Actual electric light, steady and artificial, not the flicker of fire but the constant illumination of a power source, and the old man told me once what electricity required and what it meant that someone had it, and standing here looking at those lit windows I understand what he meant in a way I couldn't when it was abstract.
Whoever lives there exists at a different scale from the rest of this outpost.
"They'll crush you as easily as a cockroash," Slyfox continues. "And care less."
I file the building. The electric windows. The distance between that building and where I'm standing, not just physical distance but every other kind of distance, and I file the size of it.
"Who is the commander?" I ask.
Slyfox glances at me with mild surprise, the look of someone not accustomed to the people he's talking at asking questions back. Then he shrugs.
"A year ago, this place was ten times as chaotic as it is now. Rape and murder out in the open, slave traders and meat merchants grabbing people with impunity." He looks at the stele. "Ever since the new commander arrived, things have taken a turn for the better. She personally wrote every word on that stone."
She.
I look at the electric windows again.
"What happened to the old commander?"
Slyfox looks at me the way people look at questions that reveal something about the asker's understanding of the world.
"Killed, of course. There's no such thing as a permanent commander. Every so often an old one gets killed and the killer becomes the new one. Eventually she'll be killed and replaced as well. People follow the strong. If you think you're tough enough, you can go challenge the commander yourself."
I look at the building and I feel the wariness arrive, cold and automatic, the same response that fired when Mad Max first turned and looked at me across the truck gate, the same response that fired when the masked man's gaze swept through the mercenary camp. Power at that scale is indistinguishable from danger. It might be power that is currently pointed elsewhere, power that has no reason to notice me, but there is no version of that much power that is safe by virtue of being benign. It is safe only by virtue of not having focused yet.
I look away from the electric windows.
Then the screaming starts ahead of us.
Not human screaming. Something else, a collective sound from the people nearest the disturbance, shouts and the rapid movement of bodies clearing space, and I track the disturbance forward to where a group of outpost soldiers are working together at the edge of the thoroughfare, straining against something heavy.
They're dragging a corpse.
Ten meters long. Half a meter thick. The skin is wet, some kind of mucous coating that drips from the body as they drag it and hits the ground with a corrosive hiss that sends small plumes of vapor rising from the stones. The ground beneath the drag path is already changing color, the stone surface reacting to whatever the fluid contains.
Not too far away, an opening in the ground half a meter across, the earth around it churned and disturbed. The surrounding area coated in that same mucous fluid. And on the ground nearby, shapes that used to be people, corroded past the point of recognizability, the flesh reduced to something that has more in common with melted wax than with the bodies I've been cataloguing all day.
My feet stop moving.
Every recent experience has calibrated me to threats in specific ways, mutabeasts and sweepers and the specific dangers of the Shatterlands I grew up in. But this thing, this ten-meter worm that came up through the ground inside the walls of the outpost and dissolved people with its skin, this is a new category of wrong that my body is receiving and rejecting simultaneously.
"Oh, fuck," one of the mercenaries says conversationally. "Another giant earthworm? That's the second one this month."
I turn to look at him.
He's already looking at something else.
"When you have this many people gathered together in one place," Slyfox says, with the resigned tone of someone explaining a maintenance problem, "if I was a mutabeast, I'd choose this place as my hunting grounds too. The real thing you have to worry about is mutabeast waves. That's what ends up wrecking most outposts."
A veteran mercenary appears at my shoulder, close enough that I can smell the machine oil on his jacket.
"Relaaaax," he says, patting my shoulder with the specific condescension of someone who has decided my fear is entertaining. "Nothing to be scared of. You'll get used to it, if you live long enough."
He moves on.
The outpost soldiers drag the worm corpse through the thoroughfare and the nearby passersby part and close again behind it like water around an obstacle, their attention returning immediately to whatever it was on before, their faces registering nothing beyond mild inconvenience.
I watch them and I feel something walking on thorns, every step uncomfortable, every step landing on something that doesn't yield the way ground is supposed to yield.