I wanted to ask whether she was sure, but this was Serru and she would not have said it if she wasn’t, so I nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”

  Once we were back on the road, Serru said, “I’m quite sure you found more today.”

  “Ah... not much else about the Moss Queen,” Aryennos said. “I did find a little about the Zombie King.”

  “Yes?”

  “Someone who found the other book in the archives tried to do the same thing about him, but it was much less successful. There was no one who travelled with him at all. People only encountered him briefly. Usually he was remembered for terrible behaviour. Threatening people with his stolen axe, walking into houses and stealing things, putting his hands all over young human women in particur without invitation, ordering meals and demanding ‘real food’ and compining about what they had and then not paying. He brought a dead rabbit to an inn and demanded that they clean and cook it. They were absolutely horrified, understandably. That kind of thing made enough of an impression that people remembered.”

  “I’m sure they did,” Terenei said. “I know I would if anyone came into the shop acting like that.”

  “That did make it possible, with extreme patience, to work out his route and a few other details that are probably more or less reliable but can’t really be verified. But again, we have a better context to put it in because we know more. So, he started in the Highnds, and somehow survived long enough to storm into, hm, Butterfly Falls?”

  “It’s a small settlement,” Serru said. “The falls are quite striking, they’re doubled and mirrored, although not really shaped like butterfly wings. I doubt there are more than five hundred people living there. Most of the local economy involves high quality goat wool and delicious goat cheese. They’re off the primary roads and don’t get company often other than regur traders and a few gatherers.”

  “Then he must have been a very jarring shock,” Heket said.

  “I’m quite sure he was,” Aryennos said. “He introduced himself as Logan, by the way, so we actually have a name for him too, even if no one’s likely to use it. A lmid warden got him on the road to Brightridge, which was the nearest rger town, and they sent a message there to expect him, but they couldn’t spare either warden to show him the way and no one else felt safe. Brightridge was at least somewhat prepared, and the council had alerted a pair of jotun wardens in case there was any danger to anyone. Possibly their presence was some deterrent, although he apparently said some quite rude things to the female warden. Once they actually worked out what was going on and that he was a newcomer, they arranged for a map and a bag of essential supplies like tents and food and a first aid kit, and got him on the road to the Highnds Quincunx site. On his way out of town is when he stole an axe and that became a repeated issue.”

  “I cannot imagine in the slightest why they could not find anyone willing to guide him in person,” Serru said drily.

  “A complete mystery. An interesting detail is that on the other side of the Highnds site, when he went into towns he began to offer small crafted items for sale to shops. Simple things made of stone and wood and pottery, tools like hammers and knives and hatchets, vessels like bowls and cups and ptes, small boxes with lids, figurines that weren’t particurly notable art. Shopkeepers typically bought them for a few coins, as much from kindness as nervousness, and apparently he took it for granted that the prices would be low.”

  He was low-level, just starting a game. Of course any loot would be low value. But this wasn’t loot, was it?

  “He got crafting skills,” I said.

  “That’s what it sounds like,” Terenei said.

  “He was still stingy about spending what he made,” Aryennos said. “And still kept asking where he could buy proper gear, which no one understood. But here’s one of those details that sounds odd unless you know how the Quincunx has been working for Nathan. Anywhere there are descriptions at all, they say or imply that he was a jotun. The only exceptions to that are Brightridge and Butterfly Falls, who mention a young human man.”

  “He got a jotun form and decided he liked it better,” I said. “Bigger, stronger, of course he did.”

  “He went the opposite direction through the Quincunx sites, which doesn’t matter, so he went to the Shallows next. He didn’t take this road, he went down into the Midnds and across. In a school town on the way, someone gave him a portable house that they no longer needed, in hopes that it would help him feel less agitated and be less prone to taking it out on everyone. He referred afterwards to having a camp where his workbenches were.”

  “Oh, he definitely got crafting skills,” Terenei said.

  “That might be the closest the Quincunx could come up with,” I said. “It’s a common mechanic in the games he pyed at home. It couldn’t give him any kind of aggressive abilities so it might have seized on something he had experience with that would be more positive. If he got a complex series of crafting-reted skills anything like my healing-reted ones, he could probably have settled down somewhere and made a really good living at it instead of becoming one of the two scary things.”

  “A skilled crafter would be welcome in any community,” Serru said. “Either with their own shop, or selling what they make to local businesses. You’ve seen the range of items that are avaible in general stores. Someone has to make those, whether necessities or conveniences or luxuries. Some sorts of items are created by specialists, but there are many that are more generalized. Often made before someone chooses a direction to specialize in.”

  “And he had the potential for that right from the start,” Aryennos said. “One thing stood out that was so striking that there was some question whether it was him, but on the whole, I think it was and so did the writer. Right along his known path, there are several instances of a jotun offering to help with building projects as long as he got paid a negotiated amount of coin at the end. He set up a portable house nearby that held several workbenches aside from a bed and a kitchen, and ter instances mention more workbenches, until they practically filled the space. He was noted to work hard and be good at what he was doing. He preferred to be alone while working in his house, and the components and materials he prepared there were exactly right. There were some peculiar moments when they discovered he’d spent time on the building site alone to work on, say, an eborate doorway or a staircase, something requiring precision that could not be done in his house. He said he could concentrate better.”

  “Or,” Terenei said, “his ability to craft small objects is separate from his ability to build rger structures—simir but not identical. It would make more sense for an individual to specialize in one or the other and so the Quincunx might split them. And from what Nathan has said about masculinity, how would he feel about building skills being linked to an aquian form?”

  “Horrified,” I said. “Androgynous without a penis would, I’m quite sure, make him very unhappy.” Personally, I was quite liking being aquian. There was more to life and experience than what was between your legs.

  “I suppose there are other species in the Shallows...” Serru reflected.

  “Aquians are the best at adapting to nd,” Terenei said. “The less common Shallows species are, to the best of my knowledge, all much more aquatic. Probably they both got aquian.” Heket nodded agreement.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can’t see him liking it. Or felid, for that matter, if he got that.” I wasn’t going to mention being pretty sure his aquian form was grey-skinned with red hair he’d hacked off to get out of his way. Would he use a form he disliked in order to walk unnoticed into Whalesong Landing? It certainly looked like he was willing to.

  “I think he did,” Aryennos said. “And, again, so does the writer, although they had less to go on and were less sure. And you may be wrong about whether he liked it. Along the same route, after the Forest Quincunx site, there were a few encounters with a strikingly tall and muscur male felid—and keep in mind that unusually tall for a felid is still likely to be at most average height for a human. He was also stronger than expected, and one te reference after the Grassnds says that he was surprisingly fast. It seems to have all been the same felid, more than one would be unlikely at all but he’s always described as bck-furred with no white markings where there’s any description. And there’s that same behaviour showing through. But I can’t pick out any specific details about abilities linked to that form, unless the strength and speed are reted. And then after the Grassnds, and sightings of that felid very close to the Axis, there are actually something like four years of reports of that wandering jotun crafter. Not going anywhere in particur, just turning up in random locations that took some searching to track down. He was, apparently, very good at finding pces where his skills would be useful, and very good at leaving and coming back with materials that had been difficult to source. The biggest problem was persistent rude behaviour towards women, but even that started to become less pronounced after a while.”

  “So what changed?” Heket prompted, as Aryennos paused to flip a page.

  “No one knows. The wandering jotun craftsman just disappears. Nearly a decade ter, the first zombies showed up in the Highnds, causing mass panic. For a few years they raided towns in no clear pattern but spreading out from the Highnds, especially school towns, stealing people and items, but then that stopped for no known reason, and it settled down to the same kind of threat as the Queen, mostly dangerous between settlements to lone...” He bit his lip hard.

  “To lone travellers,” Serru said calmly. “Yes. So he was actually on a path that would have been... constructive, so to speak. He’d found a niche that suited him. He was having more trouble adapting culturally than Nathan has but he was in the process of doing so. And then for some unknown reason, that all changed and he began to make zombies and terrorize everyone.”

  “But how do you get from crafting skills,” Heket said, “expanded into building skills and maybe some sort of search abilities, to zombies?”

  “Oh no,” I said, as the pieces clicked. “Crafting was probably his first and core skill set. Once he finished the Quincunx he could have had some pretty advanced abilities. I mean, look at the way my healing skills jump each time. He started with stone and wood and pottery but I bet he was working metal and gss and things like that ter, right?”

  “Uh... probably,” Aryennos said. “It’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t, all things considered.”

  “What if he tried crafting on a person?”

  That got dead silence around me, finally broken by Aryennos’ incredulous, “What?”

  “That is beyond horrifying,” Terenei said slowly. “But a zombie is a body that is animated but not alive. I... it’s hard to get my head around the idea, but I suppose you could see it as a body being treated as a crafting material and not as a person.”

  “It doesn’t expin his control over them,” Serru said. “Or how he can pce himself in their minds and manipute them directly, but the answer might lie in the abilities we aren’t sure of. Was he trying to compete with the Moss Queen? Or did something simply go wrong in his mind?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to guess,” I said. “Maybe he thought he was adjusting but suddenly realized he was actually just going through the motions and trying to force himself to be someone he wasn’t. Maybe he had an encounter with someone and that had an impact on him. Maybe he tried making a meaningful connection with a woman and she wasn’t into him and he took it personally. There are a million possibilities. Okay, so, the three of us all started in different pces and have gone two different directions but neither of those things matters. We are almost entirely sure that she did all five sites and we have decent reason to believe that he did, but they’re both still here. That’s arming, but I’m suspending panic until I find out for myself, there are still a lot of possible unknown factors. They seem to have actually had a simir process, with the Quincunx giving them a new form and new abilities at each site but the abilities are all built around a core theme. They just didn’t have friends they were honest with who stayed with them on the whole journey, they did it ultimately alone even though she had people around.”

  “They made no effort to really learn about their environment,” Serru said. “Both made an initial assumption and clung to that in the face of all evidence, expecting the world to conform to that assumption even if it needed to reshape itself to do so. You are forever asking questions and interested in learning and trying new things as they are. You go out of your way to help others you encounter as you travel, which has meant deys but also rewards of several kinds. I am unsure whether they would.”

  “Oh, he might have seen that kind of thing as side quests. Secondary goals that typically mean a reward at the end, maybe a special item or a lot of money or a lead on something you can’t find any other way. For that matter, given her delusion, she might have seen it as her responsibility to be everyone’s saviour, whether they wanted it or not. So, there are structural simirities but I’m interacting with my surroundings in a different way. That’s good. I absolutely do not want to ever end up being a third terror in this world.”

  “I doubt you ever could,” Serru said. “That runs too much in opposition to who you are. So. Anything else, Aryennos?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her how much evil could come from good intentions.

  He flipped through pages, checking. “Um... only more recent information about healers who have been able to unmake zombies or mosslings one way or another, or protect from them, or otherwise annoy those two. Otherwise, nothing else. But I really am going back there. If I’m putting together a book about everything we’ve now learned about adult newcomers through Nathan’s experiences, I need the background too, and that is clearly the pce to find it.”

  “Then your timing is supertive, because I see the turnoff for the music festival ahead. The rest can wait. Here, the rest of us found this delicious. Eat what you can before we get there, without choking, please.”