Rial's chest was fire as he pushed himself up and took in his surroundings.

He was laid out on a bed richer and softer than anything he had felt before. It stretched out either side, further than his arms could reach, blankets of some smooth, exotic fabric shining in the light of the lanterns set around the room. Sheets of the same fabric lay on the floor besides the bed, stained with the blood he must have been shedding when brought here.

The room itself was not much bigger than the bed, an entire side taken up by a large hard-wood closet into which the most ornate patterns had been carved. He stared at those patterns from where he lay; they told the story he had heard so many times before, carved in images of men and women carried by the gami from the star-strewn heavens, of their treks across the land until they reached the bountiful, protective mountains in which the village began. A figure led them at every step, his long, serpent-bedecked robes somehow rendered to a detail finer than the eye could see.

Rial knew that were he to look inside the closet he would find sets of those very robes.

So he was in the Kotaku's room. But why?

He attempted to swing his legs over the side of the bed but bolts of agony shot up his spine and forced him, panting, back against the soft pillows. He stared up at the ceiling as his hands grasped at the pain in his chest.

His wounds had been bandaged. Long white cloth wound tightly around his body, layered close and even. Even so, Rial could feel their dampness where blood had slowly seeped through; he was not healed yet.

The front wall slid sideways, opening onto the corridor outside. Rei stood there, knives slung at her side, bleeding from numerous cuts across her arms and face.

"He's awake," she called out to someone down the corridor. The courtyard was a little further down, he knew.

Voices grew as they came up the corridor, full of urgency. Rial pushed himself up onto his elbows as Rei stepped into the room, to be followed by...

"Eselwol? Shaleigh?"

Shaleigh was much as Rial had last seen her, sword strung at her side and a look of wrath on her face that promised to bring ruin to anything that stood in her way. Her armour was battered and dusty, her cheeks muddy and bruised.

Rial's chest tightened when he saw Eselwol's face. Three livid red lines cut across it, deep scars a reminder of their encounter with the khiladri. One line cut across his left eye, which no longer fully opened. He, too, showed signs of recent fighting, bruises and smears of blood scattered across his body. Rial's sword hung at his side.

"Hope you don't mind," said Eselwol, following Rial's gaze to the blade. "You weren’t using it." He grinned wryly.

Rial couldn't help but return the grin, relieved as he was to see the man alive and... well, not well, but alive.

A heavy weight landed on his lap. Mead, tossed there by Rei.

"Use it," she said, staring with her usual fierceness. "Trian says you can make it help us, so do it."

Hazy memories of the past night surfaced.

"What... What time is it? What happened to Trian, the others?" More questions than he could verbalise filled his head.

"It's morning, though you wouldn't know it. This fog is like nothing I've ever seen," said Eselwol. His expression became serious as he touched his sword. "We're surrounded by khiladri, the Kotaku has abandoned us, and the dead themselves have decided to come by for a visit. We're more stuck than a kroon to a handmaiden's leg."

"What's a kro..."

Rial's question faltered at a withering look from Rei.

"Now," she said.

Rial looked down at the weapon laid on the sheets in front of him.

"Mead," he said.

Rei's eyes turned down into a glare as Eselwol and Shaleigh gave murmurs of surprise at the response.

"Yes, Rial? I have been monitoring the conversation. It is good that you have survived your injuries."

"No thanks to you," said Rial, carefully watching the reactions of the others from the corner of his eye.

"I informed you from the outset that I would be unable to take any action against the Kotaku, and once you were rendered incapable of giving instructions I became functionless."

"You couldn't have inferred what I wanted?" snapped Rial. Anger was bubbling up inside his chest.

"I am specifically designed not to infer. I require clear, unambiguous instructions in order to prevent unintentional death."

Eselwol stepped forward, eyes wide as he looked at Mead.

"What is that?" he asked incredulously.

"This," replied Rial, "is Mead. It is an it, not a someone, not alive, though sometimes I suspect there is more to it than that. It is a weapon, and one more powerful than anything you can imagine."

"A weapon?" breathed Shaleigh, stepping up beside Eselwol.

Her hand intertwined with Eselwol's and squeezed, much to Rial's surprise. He wondered when that had begun.

"Can it get us out of here?" asked Rei. "I've had it with this stinking village. Trian's right; everyone here’s gone mad."

Rial was surprised to feel a pang of jealousy at Rei's mention of Trian. They had been talking?

Seriously? he thought to himself. The world is ending and you're wasting time worrying about a girl who would neutralise you as soon as look at you?

"Mead," he said aloud, refocusing his mind. "What's going on outside?"

"A count of at least 60 khiladri remain within a short distance of the village and an extensive network of the animals continues further into the mountains. The pack is spread out in such a way as to surveil the maximum potential area whilst allowing for the maximum number of individuals to convene on any one location in as short a time as possible. It is quite beautiful," answered the machine.

"Beautiful?" said Rial with a jolt of surprise. "You're admiring the beasts?"

"From what I understand of beauty," Mead replied. "At least, there is a mathematical symmetry that fulfils what I believe are the criteria of 'beauty.' It is hard to credit a conglomeration of non-sentient life-forms devising such a strategy."

"Does anybody understand what they're saying?" asked Eselwol, looking for support from the others.

Shaleigh shrugged, but Rial could see from the look on Rei's face that she understood. He swallowed nervously and addressed the machine again.

"Can you deal with them?" he asked.

"With ease. The population of the creatures in the local area can be decreased substantially or completely eradicated at your command," replied Mead.

"And what is the 'local area?'" interrupted Rei.

"Using arbitrary landmarks, an area extending from the salt lake west of here to the tallest peak of this range in the north-east would use approximately three quarters of my remaining charge."

The others gasped. Mead had just described more than half the mountain range in which the village was located, a stretch of land further than any of them had ever trekked. Only Trian had experience of the lands to the west, and the north-eastern peaks reached higher than any had yet climbed.

"You can just... kill them?" whispered Eselwol.

"Mead could neutralise far more than that if he wanted," said Rial.

"'Neutralise?'" asked Shaleigh at the alien word.

Rial hesitated.

"Kill, yes," he said eventually.

"And the... others?" said Eselwol.

Rial remembered violet eyes in the dark.

"It was real?" he asked. "They’re really...? I saw Brin!" he said, crying out at the sudden recollection.

"It was real," replied Rei, paying no attention to Rial's distress. "They're out there now, attacking anyone they can find. I saw one force a man to the ground for the khiladri to tear to pieces."

"But... how? How can this be happening?" asked Rial.

"Ask your weapon," she said, nodding towards Mead. The distaste was evident in her face.

"Mead, how many of those things are out there, and what are they?"

"Unknown," came Mead's reply, flat and neutral.

"What do you mean? Those... dead people, what are they? How can they be here, and why are they attacking us?" Rial asked.

"Unknown. Parameters of question unclear."

Rial blinked. That was a new one.

"Parameters?" he breathed out a frustrated sigh and tried again. "Mead?"

"Yes, Rial?" answered the weapon.

"Last night. We were attacked." He spoke slowly, separating each word as if speaking to an ill-behaved child.

"Yes," came the reply.

"By khiladri..."

"Confirmed."

"And by some... things. By the dead."

There was only silence.

"Mead?" said Rial.

"Yes, Rial?"

This was the strangest Rial had seen Mead behave.

He tried addressing the machine in different ways, he rephrased questions in as many forms as he could, but the machine would not react to anything asked about the violet-eyed corpses of the night before.

The fruitless questioning went on for some time before Rei cut in.

"How does this thing work?" she asked, interrupting Rial in his attempts to draw some sense from the weapon.

"Um, well..." said Rial.

"I am bound through genetic locking to Rial and operate at his command," said Mead.

Rei looked blank for a few seconds as she processed the strange words, discounting those she couldn't understand.

"But what do you do?" she stressed, turning to address the machine directly.

"As explained, I am a weapon. I neutralise threats."

"You keep using that word, 'neutralise.' We don't have such a word. What does it mean?" she asked.

The machine paused for a while, as Eselwol shifted nervously.

"I determine that which can be killed, and kill it."

Rei did not break stride in her questioning.

"And what can be killed?" she asked as the others looked on, mystified.

"That which lives," answered Mead.

Rei looked up at Rial.

"It doesn't see them. It can't see them, because they don't live."

Rial stared in wonder at the girl. She knew almost nothing of the machine, had next to no experience with the thing, yet she understood its workings better than he.

"Have you never worked with tools, Rial?" she asked. "Have you never had the lathe bite at your skin or the hammer crush your finger? Never smelled your flesh burn from the spitting of hot steel?"

She shifted a short sleeve up and over her shoulder, showing the many scars etched into her skin.

"When it happens you curse worse than an old maid in a kagema house."

Shaleigh tutted at the language and glared a warning.

"My point is," said Rei, taking no heed, "tools can seem to have wills of their own. I remember my father warning me to watch out for certain ones in his little forge. The old smith too, when we visited his. He swore his peen-hammer would try to blind the unwary handler. We credit our machines with a consciousness that makes you want to reason with them, to fight with them, to punish them. But they're not alive; they just seem so."

She stared at Mead.

"This one is very good at that."

"I have reiterated that point a number of times," said Mead in agreement.

Rial growled at it.

"So it can't see the dead and there's nothing I can do about it?" he said.

"It is possible to use tools for purposes other than their intended one," replied Rei. Rial thought she sounded like Mead. "We just need to figure out how."