Aldric had been in the lower ways eleven minutes when he hit the first body.
Not a body in the normal cut. What sat there was stacked by rules that normal rot didn't run—the live stuff turned instead of torn, the shape it had taken pointing not to dying but to flipping. He knelt by it and chewed it without laying hands on it.
He didn't have the glasses. He didn't need them. What his eyes told him was enough: something had put a burn into this body that the body hadn't walked away from, and the burn had kept chewing after walking away quit meaning anything.
He wrote it. Stood. Kept on.
The second body lay thirty meters deeper. The third sat at the mouth of what the way opened onto, and the third locked him longer than the first two had.
The size locked him first. Then the shape of what had grown from it. Then the catch that whatever had done this had done it fresh—the live burn still running at the edges.
Someone had walked through here with something that didn't leave breathing things in its tracks.
He slid into the room past it.
The front hall of the temple opened around him with its cold and its size and its tools on the walls, and Aldric ate through it with the tight eye of someone chewing a fat load of word and picking what to bite first. The tools he wrote. The wall-writing in the second room he wrote. The marks of fresh cut-through all over both rooms—things shifted, skins scratched in the sharp print of someone moving fast and grabbing with aim—he wrote hardest of all.
Someone had been here before him.
Someone had pulled from this place with the step-by-step speed of a working job, and had been cracked into, and had left through the only way out.
He'd crossed that way coming in.
He swung and went back through the rooms toward the tunnel.
The shape stood forty meters under the gate, climbing, when the lamp caught it.
Aldric stopped.
He'd hit sharp things in eleven years. The shape in front of him didn't sit clean in the box.
The face-piece first: where a face should've been, nothing locked. Not hiding, not dark. Gone—the sharp gone of something the head asked for and wasn't getting, the eye-field handing stuff that the head-bits for face-catching couldn't chew and were spitting wrongs trying to chew.
The bag over the shape's shoulder: fat, carried with the aimed balance of someone holding real weight over long ground.
The blood on the left arm: real, fresh, coming from a rip something had thrown.
The hold: the sharp still of someone who'd chewed him and was hanging to see what he'd do before picking what they'd do.
He spoke.
"You walked out of there hauling something. And you're bleeding."
The shape didn't shift.
"Tell me who sent you," Aldric said. "And tell me what's down there. In that order. And do it without moving your hands."
Two breaths of nothing.
Then the shape turned light.
The send-box gift Aldric carried was speed shoved to its bone-edge: his body and its tie to time splitting from the world's, the world chewing its own speed while he moved at a speed that made the world's speed look like a stall. What he threw was enough.
The gap between him and the shape swelled as he ate it.
Not from the shape moving. The ground between them turned into more ground—twelve meters blowing to forty in the time he ate three, the bones of the way putting on a size it hadn't been a blink ago. He shoved through it at sped-up speed and the ground kept swelling ahead of him, the shape keeping its spot against him though his speed should've shut it.
Then the second thing hit.
The space around him split from the way around it. A rule-wall: a bubble of shape now chewing different rules than the shape outside it, the edge leaning on his reach to touch anything past it.
He threw his counter.
The send-box weight was bone, not swing: the power to say flat space and time against whatever was saying different, to push the world back to its own rules. It asked time to stack. It didn't fire all at once.
Before it locked, his own speed dropped.
His chewing and moving hit with a drag that his send-box meat felt as push with no body, the in-head clock he rode squeezing while the world around kept its own beat. He was being slowed from inside.
He shoved the counter at both pulls at once.
The rule-bubble cracked.
The way above him sat empty.
He stood in it a beat, chewing.
Then he pulled his book and started writing.
The write-up ate four hours to stack.
To: Bishop Armandel, Inner Lamp Ring, Vhal-Dorim ground
From: Sent Demigod Aldric Voss
Box: Locked, your eyes only
I'm writing to hand up finds of the heaviest house-weight dug up while on the Vhal-Dorim hunt.
The deep under-skin beneath Vhal-Dorim's port quarter holds an under-ground knot of real age and size. The oldest cuts sit before the new Republic by at least eight hundred years. The knot is stacked around a dug-out bowl holding a city—a spread of live-spots and work-spots stacked in rings dropping toward a middle temple.
The knot has been in steady live use the whole time it's been here.
The temple holds three rooms. The front room and second room hold tools and machines sewing body and arcane bits. The tools work as feelers, checkers, and hold-cells. The writing wrapping the second room sits steady with Church papers of a rite-tongue tied by story to high-level hands of the Loop Lady. Papers name this tongue Serpenthar, written as ash for over two hundred years.
The third room holds the part-body of a god-box thing.
The head of what I read as the Loop Lady Medusa is kept in the temple's deep room on a bed built just for it. The body is near seventy percent whole. The top of the skull has been opened with aim—pointing to a taking of insides, not a smash.
In the third room, at the foot of the bed-frame, I saw seven things of their own make. Two were grown, not built—their stuff part-matching god-box live-matter sewn with human live-bits. The other five sewed body and arcane bits of the same cut as the tools in the outer rooms—shrunk for one-hand use.
These things worked as touch-tools between workers and the body. The order has kept working touch with the dead flesh of their god as the floor of their kept work.
This is how the Children of Medusa have held working push though their god is dead. They've been pulling from the body.
There was another body in the knot while I was digging.
I hit an unknown hand at the gate-floor, heading toward the way out with a grab-bag that had been fresh-filled. This hand wore a hide-mask that kicked face-catch-fail at the head level, and held deep guns and bladed steel of off-standard box. The hand was cut but working.
When I tried to hold for talk, the hand threw three tied space and time pulls in quick order. The first stretched the gap between us as I ate it. The second locked me inside a cut of ground chewing different shape-rules than the way around it, blocking me from touching anything outside. The third squeezed my in-head chew-speed while the out-world kept its own clock.
None of these pulls match any show in the Church's normal sorting box, and none threw a knowable ghost-sign.
My send-box counter-gift cracked the shape-lock, but the hand had burned the bought time to hit the way out and was past reach.
The hand pulled stuff from all three rooms before I got there.
What I can lock is this:
The Children of Medusa aren't a sleeping old-bone order. They're a live body keeping straight touch with the hard body of a god—pulling working push from that body through ways that have run without break for ages.
The gather I cracked into held things I couldn't box inside normal Church frames. At least two not-human shapes stood at the temple mouth with body-signs eating the human line by fat cuts.
I'm asking for the green light to stretch the dig, more hands, and straight word-pipes that step around the normal road.
Aldric Voss
Sent Demigod, Eleven Years in the Harness
Armandel read the paper twice.
He read it the way he read everything that came through the Ring's locked pipes: whole, without front-guess, stacking his grip on the shape from what the words actually said. First pass he was putting the hard bones together. Second pass he was chewing what they meant.
The hard bones were this: under Vhal-Dorim, an order the Church had boxed as an old shell with no working push had been running for ages with straight touch to a god's dead flesh. They'd been pulling from it. They'd been fat enough to keep not-human things as part of their gather. And they'd just been cracked by a hand whose gifts put them in the same ring as Voss himself—who had walked off with their sharpest stuff.
Everything the Church had guessed about the Children of Medusa was off, and had been off a very long run.
He put the paper down.
Looked at it a beat.
The slow-hand road was open. He could burn two days checking alone, stacking a room-say before laying this in front of the full house. That was the road that cut down house-shake and kept his grip on the frame tight.
It was also the road that handed the Children of Medusa two days to chew the size of what had been pulled from them and swing back. It was the road that handed the unknown hand two days to chew the stuff they'd grabbed and move on it. It was the road that had let an order holding a god's dead flesh under a fat city work unseen for ages.
The Storm Sit wasn't the slow road. It was the right one.
He called for his desk-hand.
"Write a call," he said. "Storm Sit. All bishops. All high hats. The Pontiff." He stopped. "Use the mark that says no shove-off is let."
The desk-hand's face didn't twitch. He'd worked under Armandel nine years and had learned that faces at words weren't in the job.
"That mark's only been burned twice," the desk-hand said. Not as pushback. As locking that he got what was being asked.
"I know," Armandel said.
"First time was the Clean of the Pleasure Camps. Second was the Curse of the Inner Order."
"I know what the first two were for." Armandel folded the paper and slid it in the in-house carry-pouch that went straight to his own lock-box. "Write the call. Today."
The desk-hand left.
Armandel sat a beat in the sharp still of someone who's picked a road and is letting it settle into hard before the machine of the doing kicks.
The Storm Sit had been called twice in the Church's story.
Both times, what chased it had cracked the house-ground in ways that had eaten lives to full swallow.
He was about to call it a third time.
He hoped—with the sharp kind of hope that wasn't sun-thinking but cold weighing of okay ends—that what chased this time would chew through faster.
He didn't let himself lean that it would.