The chief intendant had more underlings than could have been reasonably expected, though most of them kept out of immediate sight as we moved through Hitunna. I was caught in a tide of hunters, with the apex predator at my side. He presented an uncaring exterior save for those Jaan eyes flickering at every shifting shadow and angle of potential contact.

I could only wonder at the dedication of Motsa's henchmen to the earlier pretence at being mere academic labourers.

Motsa and I passed through the midday public unnoticed in our voluminous cloaks of ragged fibrewool and dust. The air sweltered with the heat and moisture of a premature pseudovolcanic summer, yet my skin remained snug inside the thermal regulation of the gown-suit. Its muscles flowed with my steps, never impeding in spite of the rejuvenated strength evident in the ancient tissue.

The boat's driver said nothing, as we boarded on, but goaded the beast into the shadowy lagoon. While I didn't enjoy the utter lack of any explanation, I had resigned myself to ignorance. At this point, I didn't dare to be nosy. All mirth had melted from Motsa's expression, leaving behind grim concentration, which might have been unyielding as granite or brittle as antimony, depending on his hidden inner mood.

At the docks of the stone town, a group of familiar men stood waiting for us. They didn't bother hiding their long-arms, and armour plates peeked from under their ranging clothes.

"Pitti", Motsa said. "Anything to report?"

"The fried curds at the market are delicious. Nothing else than that."

"Good. Be on your best behaviour, men. This might be a show of force, but undergunned as we are, it's essential to be smart about it."

"'A show of force'?" I asked.

"Few prefer their allies weak."

"I see your point, to a degree."

"Good. Do keep your wits about you, Nerutaara."

Even if I did, they couldn't have been particularly useful after they had led me to the present situation.

As noon remained some time off, the temple courtyard was all but abandoned, and no crowds barred our way to the Tower of Seven Corners. The miniscule human presence chose to stay silent, leaving the public discourse to the howling wind that ripped at the prayer flags and banners of holy exaltation. By all reason I should have been as safe as I could be in Hitunna surrounded by the vigilance of Jaan sharpshooters, yet my hand kept reaching for the comforting heft of the antique pistol.

"Shall we merely saunter in?" I asked.

"No." Motsa pointed with two-fingers at the open doors. "Aru and Tsamma in front, twenty paces." He turned to me. "You've been inside; any vantage points we should keep an eye on?"

"There are plenty of alcoves, but I don't think the Narshurians deign to use their altars as cover."

Based on the guffaws and amused grunts, few of my companions shared such a sentiment.

Our little vanguard intruded into that holy place. I kept next to Motsa, even though I had closed the cleavage of my gown and let it protect my neck with a ruff of bone spikes.

At the outer doors nothing came to bar our way, but three stout men blocked the passage to the main hall. In the middle, Hrisda stood in such a posture of tension he was almost unrecognisable. On his side he had two scowling guards, easily the biggest Iwunians I had seen, as massive as ant-soldiers. Their ceremonially cumbersome armour gleamed with polished metal, and on their shoulders they held weapons that must have counted as artillery. These two were a distraction to draw the eye, as deeper in the shadowed sanctum warriors with rifles of practical calibre had their sights on us.

"Good morning." Motsa threw his cloak over his shoulder, revealing his gun. The Iwunians jerked in alarm, but a gesture from Hrisda stopped the situation from escalating further into a deadly farce. In spite of almost provoking a shoot-out, Motsa had the back-alley rogue's grin back on his face.

"You are the Jaan who arrived recently to Hitunna", Hrisda spoke in stilted Jaanish. "Pardon the martial welcome. The Lady warned me of danger, and thus we are in high alert. If her chosen wasn't with you, you'd be dead now."

The chief intendant throttled a guffaw into a grunt inside his throat. "Yes, that might be possible." He glanced at me. "'Chosen'?"

I shook my head. "Not if you consider the needles in your gun 'chosen'."

Motsa nodded and took an audacious step towards Hrisda. "We are here to talk."

"Yes, that we must do." Hrisda pointed at me and Motsa. "But only you two. The rest stay here. Not because we're any safer with only you, but because more minds are a distraction."

"Fair enough. Rest of you, do behave yourselves, while I'm away."

Though my suit helped my legs, I felt the strain of our ascend in my neck, where it radiated into a skull-splitting headache. While I tried to figure out how to coax the gown into injecting a dose of sedatives without knocking me out, Hrisda paused to smile at me.

"I take you aren't Annu from Vythis?"

"No. My name is Nerutaara. I am sorry for lying."

"It is understandable. Think nothing of it."

We continued upwards. The stairs ended, and we were in the room with the strange statue of the Jaan-but-not-Jaan woman.

Hrisda had chosen to take only the pair of massive guards up with us. He stopped at the middle of the room and turned towards Motsa. I didn't care to pay much attention. The back of my eyes throbbed, and it took all of my concentration to walk outwardly calm and collected to bench.

"Have your men disarm themselves", Motsa said. "Or they shall die."

His ridiculous audacity failed to faze me through the dull agony saturating my head. Motsa wasn't flippantly reckless, but deadly serious. For an unarmed man, Hrisda maintained an admirable composure, but barely bridled rage shattered the rigid posture of the guards.

"You are our guest", the cleric said.

"If we are kept at gunpoint, it hardly makes us more than prisoners."

Hrisda took a deep breath. "You do remain armed yourself."

"With mere toothpicks compared to the grand weapons of your men."

Motsa's charade of humility hurt my brain. I wanted to tell him to stop, but my throat remained relaxed. My tingling hands didn't move either.

'You fool!' The statue had screamed at me. My surprise couldn't wrench my face into any expression. I continued to see the still statue, yet I also sensed a scintillating shape of a living, flowing woman in its place.

'Do you know the attention I have to keep on you now, just to keep them from subverting your limbic system?' Her voice was an ear-splitting wail, coming deeper than my eardrums. The discussion between Motsa and Hrisda had muffled into incomprehensible noise.

'What?' I tried to say.

'Those receiver particles! You moronic dullard! Do you want to be possessed? At least that damned auxiliary skin is of degraded pedigree.'

'What are you talking about?'

'You, my dear little soldier, shall in a moment be puppeteered by the Bellicose Measure, like your friend here.'

'No.' It hurt to think, to admit to myself I had made yet another massive mistake. 'Motsa is himself.'

'For the most part, yes. But he is very receptive to the serenade of conquest. The Bellicose Measure only needs to nudge your friend towards its goals. Now he is about to provoke an all-out war.'

'Why?' Even thinking that word hurt my mind.

'For his own part, glory and bloodlust . Typical behaviour from your kind, yet the tendency is enhanced by the whispers of our foe. He's also being pushed towards already inborn instinct for endogamy to maintain the fine-tuned genotype of our martial servitors.'

My guts plummeted into a knot around themselves. We were mere beasts no higher than Narshurian reindeer; Motsa a mindless stud out in the pasture; I myself nothing but a means to an end.

I found myself standing, the handcannon primed at the chief intendant. He had his own gun pointed at Hrisda, whose guards had petrified in the process of bringing their unwieldy weapons to bear.

'Pull the trigger!'

Motsa turned his face towards me. His grin was his own. One of the guards took the opportunity to move. An explosion filled the room, blasted into my eardrums, and by startling me like an animal, gave a modicum of control back to me. My cousin had killed the guard without ever turning his ravenous gaze away from me.

"Care to tell me, what you are doing?"

"Stop this, Motsa, please."

"I shan't kill your friend, as long as he remains useful."

Hrisda stopped the still living guard's rage with a gesture, and crouched to check on the corpse. "We might forgive your transgression, Jaan, but the Lady won't tolerate this imposition on her."

"Your foul ghost-queen shall beg––"

"Motsa! It's the Vad. Can't you see that? It's controlling you!"

A flicker of confusion trembled Motsa's expression. The muscles of his trigger-finger prepared to squeeze again.

"You are playing into its plan, like a puppet", I insisted, yet the barrel of my gun failed to have the convincing effect I desperately hoped for.

Motsa's wrath poured through his composure into an icy scowl. "I'm not a savage."

My mind saturated with the urgent need to shoot him, but I couldn't know if that was my own volition or the pressing influence of the Vad.

"Listen, Motsa. I'm trapped in its... their influence. Pushed to kill you. We both must act with care."

Hrisda stood up. "I agree––"

I had anticipated Motsa's move, but even without the assistance of a combat suit, he had been terrifyingly fast. In that moment of instinctive terror, the Lady might have been able to force me to pull the trigger, but I wrenched my gun away and ducked.

Twisting like a manic ballerina, I launched myself towards Motsa. To have any hope of besting him, I needed every ounce of surprise. Instead of trying to tackle him, I kicked high at his gunhand, the gown shifting aside in a rather elegant manner. Momentum carried me, and the boot of my other leg slid on the polished floor.

The man struck with his fist like a steam piston. My parry was a sloppy but instant. The bestial glee on his face branded my conscious mind, while reflexes had the control of my body. Passingly, I remained aware of my gun, even though I had dropped it from my hand. The gown had caught it and now held it firmly against my thigh. I wasn't rid of the pistol yet, but at least the Lady of the Vad needed to pull more of my strings than only one finger.

With a bellow of unrestrained belligerence, the remaining guard charged at us. His foolish attack was rewarded with the kiss of a heavy needle in between his eyes. That lapse of Motsa's attention attention gave me the fleeting moment to grab his gun. With a tackle and wrench, I tried to relieve him of his weapon, but his hold remained firm as steel.

"Run!" I wailed.

Hrisda weighted more than me and Motsa combined, yet he had the good sense not to involve himself in our wrestling. Motsa tried to turn the gun towards the cleric, but that only allowed me to push my advantage into a better leverage. Once Hrisda had slipped behind the lock of a sturdy door, I could focus on Motsa.

"Stop this!" I screamed into his face.

"You let the prey go", Motsa growled between a clenched mirthless grin. "Very un-Jaan of you."

"'Prey'? That turgid man? Where's your pride?"

Motsa smashed his fist into the centre of my ribcage and took a step away. Instead of shooting me right there, he let his gun-arm drop. He regarded me with an arrogantly open posture.

"Your brain is addled, Motsa", I wheezed. Once my breath recovered, and I had backed a few paces, I continued: "Consider, if you had your wits still, could you even consider laying with me? Bedding that runt Ekku Luttami?"

The man licked blood from the lip I didn't remember splitting and smiled. "Frankly speaking, this little show of spunk has only grown my appetite." He holstered his gun, but I didn't sigh from any relief. In fact, a quick shot to the head would have been the easy way out. At least the Lady didn't hammer my brain now that I did her bidding, to an extend.

"We could have used this temple as allies", I said.

"Jaan have no allies. Only our kin and subjects."

"And that arrogance justifies this futile belligerence?"

His smile widened. "I expected you to have caught a bit of physiology from your physician. This continent is a living system, and I aim to provoke an immune response. A fever, strong enough to kill the host."

The man was beyond reason, if he thought to kill a continent. Escape down the stairs would only lead me into the hands of Motsa's men. Besides, the Lady would try to stop me even at the cost of my life.

If the Jaan had been forged as tools of the Vad, then our sharpshooter's ecstasy must have been one also. After all, through perfect focus, it acted as a pathway from conscious thought to the involuntary drives and reflexes. The cerebral route could have been intended to be hijacked as means to goad us along the designs of our masters.

By succumbing to wild animal instinct, I might slip from the shackles intended to my kind. It was a long shot, but if I didn't intend to kill Motsa, there was little other choice than to try. Not that I had high hopes of besting my cousin even should I give my all to the attempt.

With a deep breath, I focused my mind on nothing, and from nothing let my focus dissolve altogether. The surface of my gown wavered in an aposematic disharmony.

Motsa's dash towards me herded my scattered thoughts into a stampede of panic. As his hand reached for me, I felt the handle of my knife in my grip. With a feral slash, I severed the man's main hand from his wrist.

Before I had a moment of awareness again, I had ran to the door leading outside. Motsa bent over clutching his arm, though no blood spilled from the wound. The suit ––faintly throbbing with black and crimson–– must have tourniqueted the limb. At the sight of his cold hatred blatant in his sneer, I didn't need anything else to stoke my mindless terror.

I ran through the door to the rope-bridge and unclasped my cloak and let the greedy wind take it away wailing in its victory. The circular structure would offer no sanctuary. Before my better sense forced me to reconsider and thus tarry with fatal consequences, I vaulted the rail and plunged into the rushing embrace of the air with my hands held wide.

Beyond vague tales of ancient heroines, I had no grounds to expect survival. Nevertheless, my gown twisted its hem to connect my arms and legs with insectine membrane. I smashed into the air, and portion of my momentum shifted forward instead of the lethal downward surge.

With an opportunity to actually practice, I might have been able to steer my descend. Now I could only do my best to point myself towards Lake Hitunna. My suit apparently didn't consider my chances all that great, as it forced the thick bone shell around my skull.

The fall gave me enough time to realise what massive error I had made. The cane-forest charged to fill my field of view. My arms shot up to protect my face, and with a deafening crack, my flank crashed into a tree-stalk.

The total lack of pain was concerning, though not as worrisome as the tons of water on all sides. With a sluggish mind, I rationalised that I was indeed in the lake and that the suit had injected me with a hefty dose of sedatives.

I took a deep breath from the mouthpiece pushed between my teeth, pointed my arms towards the wavery light and swam. My gown helped me by pulsing the hem in an odd but effective treading motion of some eerie creature from the oceanic abyss.

Once back to breathing unfiltered air, I clung to a stalk and checked if I had broken any bones. Either my suit had means to protect me from impacts in a manner I couldn't figure out, or I had crashed with much less velocity than I had thought, because beyond the mild throb on my side, my body appeared to be fine. Maybe it was the narcotics saturating my blood making me comfortable in such delusions.

My swim to the town of Hitunna was rather relaxing. At the shore, I had my gown hide its elegant aspects, by folding the skirt and retracting decorative elements, though the pigmentation had already faded into a demented sepia.

I felt no compulsion beyond the urgent need of a huge protective arms around me, so a befuddled brain clearly protected me from the Vad. Thus I stumbled into the first dockside bar and collapsed at the counter.

A quick glance showed the establishments was empty save for a couple eating their dishes of steaming fish. I smiled at them and turned towards the oddly bulging host.

"Strongest things you have", I slurred in Iwunish and dropped the bits in my pouch on the counter.

"It's mighty early to start drinking, miss."

"Oh, doesn't feel like it. I've had plenty of this day already."

"Right then. Let none say the 'Roe-Scoop' turns away paying customers."

"Yeah, yeah. Get the liquor flowing before I sober up."

The dark purple liquid I received was indeed vile, especially after having so recently reconnected with the taste of kitkerekas.

"Maybe this should be your last one", the host said as he pushed my third glass in front of me.

I lifted my eyes up from the swirling patterns infesting the countertop. "Maybe, might be, mighty..." I stood up, or more accurately, the suit pushed me standing. "Keep the change."

"Right then. Have a pleasant day, miss."

Distastefully obvious intoxication gave me additional protection from the curiosity of the locals. I made my way towards Mirra's home. Now that I was pursued by all of the players in the game, that course of action was rather foolish. There was nothing else I knew to do, and a part of me still refused to lay down and wait for death, like I had chosen to do so many a time when I still considered myself Luttami.

Vesija might not be able to help, but if I had to die, I needed to speak to him first.

With a gun on my hip and my blood positively saturated, I didn't exactly feel vulnerable on my way through the town. I knocked on Mirra's door, and straightened my posture. As the door slowly opened, my hand remained close to the pistol grip, but I sighed in relief.

"Neru?" Mirra asked. She didn't quite move the door from between us, and her eyes wandered far behind me.

"Yes. It's me. Good old Neru."

"Are you hurt?"

"Just drunk. Look, I shan't take your time for long. Do you know, where Vesija is?"

"Yes! He told me how you can find him." Mirra grabbed a coat and pushed outside. "Let's go."

My suspicions flared. "Where is he?"

"Hiding. Come on." Her beckoning gesture was exaggeratedly urgent, so I didn't vex her with any more delays.

The thorough complexity of the maze that was the less savoury residential district put my mind on a bit of ease in terms of anyone following us. The stench of unfiltered waste-water and rotting wood masked our scent, and all the narrow and sharply turning alleys made tailing us without notice more than impractical. Well, the place wasn't really a district, more of a clump of ancient tents abandoned to wanton growth and other similarly decrepit yet thriving buildings.

"Who could even live here?" I whispered. "Can't they just, I don't know, flee to the steppe?"

"And do what? Starve? The city has work, always, even for cripples and orphans, and renegades and criminals."

This must have been the last cesspit in the drain for human refuse that was Narshur. Fitting, that I should find myself there, drunk, lost and disgraced.

"Here." Mirra stopped at an intersection. "The place is still a good way off, but Vesija only gave me the directions." She repeated a clearly rehearsed litany of twists and turns that lead to stairs down into the earth. "Do you remember that?"

"Yes, yes." My mind had cleared a little, but I needed to repeat the list in my mind to make sure it didn't escape. "Mirra, I think you and Orti should take another vacation."

The woman frowned, but only a moment, before smiling. "I think so too. Shame it had to come to this. You made such a cute couple. Goodbye."

"Goodbye."

She patted my shoulder and hurried out of the stinking warren before the sunlight ran out. I took a few relaxed steps towards my destination and broke into sprint. No sound of rapid pursuit followed, but I didn't let that slow me down.

My mind floated on the speed allowed by my suit. I vaulted over a railing, leaped over the causeway and ducked into the small space below the main buildings. It seemed I was in the right place, so I followed my directions deeper into the gnarly under-passages. Faint phosphoresce from the roof mildew kept me from stumbling in complete darkness.

Underneath the feral utility roots were glimpses of smooth stone similar to that of the far shore ruins. These tunnels were as old as anything in Narshur, yet now they served as a makeshift sewer. I was glad of my boots. However, the the suit did little to protect my nose from the marshy odour.

The passages were marked with carved numbers and letters, seemingly at random, though I suspected it was in fact a now outmode numeral system. Fortunately I didn't need to understand, only follow my directions.

I came to the spot that had to be the last intersection mentioned by Mirra, but the lightless passage to the right ended in a knot of plant stems. The subterranean thicket offered no clear way of ingress, only thorns in the darkness.

This black recess had to be the correct place. I shouldn't have taken a wrong turn. After failing everyone, I couldn't possibly have failed Mirra too. Well, at least she wouldn't care if I rotted in this place of discarded refuse. Perhaps nobody would.

The thick cellulose of the walls muffled my scream. Powered by inebriated rage, I charged the hanging vegetation. The strands ––thick as arms–– refused the budge. Though the thorns were like the needles of a rifle, my suit thwarted them. As the spikes approached my unprotected face, my determination to break through only grew. Tip of a dendroid stiletto approached my pupil. A failure didn't need to be seen, or see.

A spike pressed against my cheek. I drove myself into the pinprick of pain and did my best to rip the vines apart. Liquid warmth seeped down to my jaw.