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Save Point: He Who Has Seen The Deep

The Age Of Worn Bronze

Inside the hut, Cleo is baking bread.

It's not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect of her, knowing where those claws have been, but she seems to have mastered a technique whereby she uses them to dextrously manipulate the dough, keeping the flour out of her claw sheathes, and then uses the pads of her fingers to knead the mixture with superlative force and authority. Life is time enough to pick up strange habits.

The hut is not exactly a hut, either. It's a small square wooden structure, quite compact, but has two floors to make the most of the space and is superlatively well-built. The lowest floor is supported just slightly above ground by cornerposts driven into wells filled with gravel, and a square firepit made of clay dominates the centre of the floor, surrounded by a couple of chairs, a cooking frame made of some sort of scrap metal and a sort of small hand-driven quern that simplifies grinding the grains for the flour. A nearby bowl with a small towel over it is presumably where the dough lives, growing and breeding in the warmth of the fire, added to and extracted from once a day.

She finishes shaping today's effort, works it into a circle and places it on the flat metal tray suspended in the middle of the cooking frame above the fire. It will be ready in a while, there's no reason to feed the flames up higher when it's merely a matter of waiting a little longer.

"I've put the bread on," she calls in the general direction of the upstairs, rinsing her fingers in a second bowl placed for that purpose. "I'm going out hunting birds."

"See if you can get one of those herons," Terrowne calls down. "They're ridiculously delicious."

As she heads outside, she straps the Elder compound bow and a sheath full of arrows over her back. Most of the arrows are now simple homemade wooden ones, rather than the slender steel points she started off with, their grey metallic feathers arranged in a spiral, but it's not worth wasting the good ones on bird-hunting and there's no easy way to fix them when they break. Her own efforts have a fascinating range of bright plumage from previous kills braided around the back end just before the notch, to try and make them more sturdy and provide a certain degree of aerodynamics. A bow with this much pull was never designed to be used with arrows so fragile, and they bend astonishingly at the moment of launch, sometimes shattering into a spray of small flinders instead and scaring away the target with the resultant cracking sound.

The good news is that, thanks to her big tits, she's always obliged to practice a sort of floating shot at a certain distance from her body anyway, so she's mostly safe from the resulting shrapnel and/or hitting herself in the wrist with the string. Well, there was the one time she accidentally pierced her own nipple with a toothpick sized splinter at a random angle, but she left it in to show Terrowne and he kissed it better, so that hardly counted.

Outside, the small but comfortably homely hut is dwarfed by the much vaster yet equally cubical building that rests, half-submerged and tilted sideways, a few hundred yards off to one side where the field of dry land slopes off into the swamp. It looks like it's made of marble, some sort of vast imposing temple sinking into the ground, but a closer inspection would reveal polished concrete and assorted fittings, the novel design consequences of a structure designed to both support the weight of a small office building, act as part of a functioning research complex, and float itself to safety in an emergency with all the doors and hatches closed. It certainly casts an imposing shadow late in the day, but fortunately away from the nearest patch of crops.

The whole thing sinks a little more each day, mud flowing slowly in and swampy water filling the interior corridors. Marks on the doorways suggest that in a decade or less it will be entirely gone. Cleo mostly ignores it these days, as she heads out to hunt herons and other low-flying birds.

In the upstairs floor of the hut, which accommodates space for the stairs and a simple wooden bed-frame, sewn animal-skins stuffed with a surplus of bird-feathers to make it comfortable, Terrowne is talking with Gilga-meshaya, who is much older now but still firmly built. He looks like a stereotype of a village smith, grey-mane and all, who should be casting blades and grinding metal in a spray of sparks. The number of his scars is disturbingly impressive.

"...that thing outside is pretty much the proof that the old man made it out alive and intact. It's the exact same design as one of his research facilities, with a few modifications to make it airtight and able to float when all the hatches were closed, once the water rose high enough. And he didn't just save himself, either, he seems to have bought along all sorts of Azatlani plants and animals, either as live specimens or ready to be grown when required. The whole area is full of them, and they're breeding and spreading outward from the source. The wheat you saw planted outside when you first came in? Azatlani variety, extensively modified for a much greater yield and far less maintenance. We make bread every day here and there's still almost too much for us to use. Cleo soaks the crusts in water and feeds the birds with them to keep the population up, despite all her hunting."

"The student of urdu-snakes," observes Gilgamesh, after thinking about it, "the kid I pressured into giving me a ride here? The one with the flat-bottomed boat? He said that he was studying the urdu-snakes, that they'd never seen ones like that before. I wasn't really paying much attention, what do I care about a bunch of snakes? But they must have come from here."

"Could be. There was a type of large brightly colored water-snake indigenous to Azatlani estuaries, which no-one killed off because it was mostly vegetarian. It ate water-plants, certain types of reeds, the occasional unlucky lizard or frog, that sort of thing. I don't know how well they'd survive here though, the plants are probably mostly wrong for them. The shed skins from them had medicinal value though, you could grind them up to make a sort of folk remedy that actually worked quite well. I suppose the old man thought it was worth a shot."

"I don't suppose there's anything left inside that's useful?"

"He seems to have used up all the stuff in the lower levels first, or moved it to the top. Unless it was something that could grow or thrive underwater, of course. There are growth tanks and stuff down there that have been left in place. The top couple of levels still have enough power to run the pumps that kept most of the water out, and operate the machines, but all the spare resources have been used up. He seems to have spawned as many creatures and plants as he could as soon as it was possible, then set them loose to propagate themselves. While we were traipsing around the known world, he was making birds and fish and plants and who knows what else."

"If he's not here anymore, do you know where he went?"

"I'm guessing he probably just left, carrying as many packets of assorted seeds as possible and the knowledge he had in his head. That lot out there is useful but hardly mobile, and one person can only carry so much, even with a couple of pack animals of whatever sort he might have decided to create. He's as immortal as I am, or maybe just a little bit less, so I'm sure we'll run into him again eventually. Just follow the tracks of incipient civilization and he'll be there somewhere."

"Yeah, now about that whole immortality thing..."