The first thing Riyou did was throw fire.
She had a flask of jellied oil – the kind of thing you carried for weeks without thinking about and then needed in one specific second – and she lit it and chucked it underhand at the man at the front of the wedge. It caught him across the chest. The flame went up his shirt and onto his face and the two men flanking him took the splash and started slapping at their own arms. The lead man started screaming and didn’t stop.
“Don’t come any closer,” Riyou said, taking three steps back. “We’ll call for backup.”
It was a good lie. There was no backup. There were six of them and nine of the bandits and the only thing on their side was that Irulan was Irulan.
Irulan walked into the wedge.
She crossed the ground in three strides and brought the longsword down on the burning man with both hands and the steel went through him at the collarbone and came out somewhere lower. He fell apart. There wasn’t really a body left, just the parts of one.
“I suggest you run,” she said, loud enough that the rest of them could hear. The half-orc voice carrying across the moor like a bell.
The bandits did not run. They came in. Eight of them now, spreading wide, the slingers peeling off to find a stone to crouch behind. One of them landed a club on Irulan’s shoulder before she shrugged him off the way you shrug off a mosquito. Another swung and missed. A third would have caught her across the temple – would have, except Irulan twisted at the last instant and the swing went wide, and Bancroft heard her grunt the small grunt that meant that was close.
He was already moving. He came in from the far side of the burning man – the green one, Irulan had said, go for green – and swung the elvish longsword and felt the blade glance off something hard. Bone or buckle. The man stayed up. Bancroft hated this part. He was a farmer with a cleric’s hands and a sword that was better than he was, and the gap between what the sword could do and what he could do with it never closed.
The trouble started with Berger.
He was the new hireling – the one with the longsword and the half-finished play about Sir Robin in his scroll case. The bandits, for whatever reason, decided they hated Berger more than anyone else on the field. Three of them broke off from Irulan and came at him at once, swinging clubs, snarling something about Carl – apparently Carl had been the burning one – and Berger, who had dragged his sword out of its scabbard with the slow deliberation of a man who’d never killed anyone and now badly didn’t want to start, took two missed swings on his shield and then a third that found a gap in his armor.
It was barely a wound. A nick along the ribs. Any other day Berger might have walked it off, cursed, kept fighting. But Berger was already running on nothing – too tired, too thin, too soft for this work – and the small cut was the one his body had no answer for. He sat down. Then he lay down. Then he stopped breathing, the play in his scroll case spilling out into the grass – pages of dialogue between Sir Robin and his minstrels, ink running where the rain had touched it, ending mid-line.
“Before he died,” Bancroft said quietly, to no one in particular, “the leader said does anyone want to go get a Burger?”
Riyou snorted. It was the kind of joke you made because the alternative was thinking about a man who’d carried poetry into a place that didn’t have any.
After that, the fight broke their way.
Bancroft killed a bandit who was already staggering from a cut to the leg – clean stroke, a good one, the kind he wished he could trust himself to make every time. Irulan killed two more in quick succession. Riyou’s arrows mostly missed but she didn’t care, she was working on the slingers from the cover of a bush, picking at them, keeping their heads down. Anister did the same from a different bush. Eventually the bandits did the math and came up short, and the four still standing turned and ran across the moor and didn’t look back.
Grig had run, too. The morale had broken in him as soon as Berger went down, and he’d dropped his hand axe and fled – or tried to flee. Bancroft caught up to him at a jog and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come back, Grig. They’re done. They’re running.”
Grig came back. He looked at the ground the whole way, mortified, his mouth working around an apology that wouldn’t form. My knees started to buckle, he said when he finally got the words out. I thought they had us.
“It’s all right,” Bancroft said. He healed Irulan first – Sylvanus, mend her, the prayer easier than it had been in weeks, the old well full again – and the green light closed the worst of the gashes on her arms. Then he turned to Grig and said: “I can keep you alive. But only if you’re still here.”
Grig nodded the way frightened men nod, and stayed.
They buried Berger as well as they could in the hard moor ground, took the longsword and the shield off his body for the rest of the band to use, and went back to the dig. The dig was almost done. Another hour of shovels and they’d be inside.
The Outriders showed up an hour in.
Five of them, coming over the rise from the west – five that Bancroft could see, anyway. The leader was a half-orc the size of a small barn, plate mail polished to a hard shine, a warhammer at his hip and a holy symbol on his chest that Bancroft recognized after a moment as belonging to Krom. A dwarven fighter walked at his right shoulder. An elven woman in spell-robes walked at his left. Behind them, two men with the deliberate quietness that Bancroft had learned to read – henchmen, Irulan said under her breath, and the kind that don’t carry your bags.
These were not desperate men with sticks. These were a real adventuring party. Leveled. Equipped. Confident the way only people who had won fights before could be confident.
“Looks like someone is about to open up a new barrow,” the half-orc said. He had a pleasant baritone – the voice of a man who didn’t have to raise it. “Mind if we get first crack at it?”
“Yes,” Irulan said.
Bancroft kicked one of the bandit corpses still scattered around the dig site. “Somebody else thought of that first.”
The half-orc smiled with one side of his mouth. “Yeah, they’re like rats, those ones. Listen – the name’s Grak Bloodshield. I’m not an unreasonable man. Let me pay you for your time digging. Then you can let us in. You can go off and dig another barrow.”
“How much?” Riyou asked.
Grak whispered to the dwarf. The dwarf whispered back. “Ten gold.”
Three days of digging. Two henchmen dead. A man burned alive in front of them this morning. Ten gold.
“That’s way too low,” Riyou said, “for the amount of work and the bullshit we had to do to dig this up.”
“The people who dig don’t usually get first dibs on the spoils,” Grak said. He said it the way a man states a fact he doesn’t expect to be argued with. “I’ve watched you dig for, what, days now? We just stepped in at the very end. Are we really going to come to blows over this? I’m giving you ten gold.”
“No, bro,” Riyou said. “If you want to do us a favor, you give us a hundred.”
Grak laughed once and didn’t bother to laugh twice.
What followed was the kind of conversation that Bancroft had been in before and would be in again, where two groups of armed people stood twenty feet apart and pretended for a few minutes that words might still solve it. They wouldn’t. Anister tried to bluff. Irulan threw insults that were mostly accurate but didn’t help. Bancroft, looking at the half-orc’s plate and the elf’s robes and the way the two henchmen had drifted slightly apart from the main group, did the same math Irulan had already done and came to the same answer.
They could not win this fight.
“How about this,” Irulan said finally, with the elaborate calm of a woman who had decided she wasn’t going to die today. “You let us open it. Give us half an hour. Then you can take whatever we can’t handle.”
“No deal, sweetheart. This was more of a formality. We’re coming to get it regardless of whether you’re there or not.”
Irulan turned and walked away.
Anister followed. Bancroft followed. Grig, who had developed an instinct for which way the wind was blowing, followed too. They left the half-finished barrow behind them and started across the moor toward town, and behind them the Outriders moved in to take what they hadn’t earned.
Riyou had a different plan.
She caught Anister’s elbow as they walked. “Give me your whistle.”
“What for?”
“I’ll go back,” she said. “Invisible. Get close. Blow it loud. The whole moor will hear it. Maybe a wandering monster turns up before they get the door open. Maybe it eats them. Either way.”
It was the kind of plan Riyou made when she’d been pushed too far – clever, spiteful, riding the edge of something dangerous. Bancroft opened his mouth to say don’t, and didn’t, because Riyou wasn’t asking permission. She was telling them what was about to happen.
She took the whistle. She went invisible – a small ripple in the air, a halfling-shaped absence – and she went back.
They made it two hundred feet before they heard the whistle.
It was loud – louder than Bancroft had expected, a thin shriek that cut across the moor and echoed off the low hills. Long blast. Then nothing.
He stopped walking. So did Anister. Irulan kept going.
“Wait.”
“For what?” Irulan said, without turning. “She did her stupid thing. She’ll catch up. I’m not going back to die for a stunt I told her not to pull.”
Bancroft looked at the place where the whistle had come from. He couldn’t see Riyou. He couldn’t see anything – there were hills between them and the dig site now, and the half-mile of moor in between. He heard no second whistle. No shouting. Nothing.
He took his holy symbol off the inside of his cloak and prayed Sylvanus, do you want me to do this, and felt the answer that had been coming more often lately – not warmth, but a kind of attentive yes, the way a master craftsman nods when an apprentice picks up the right tool. The shield of faith bloomed around him like a thin film of green water and clung to his skin and the prayer had cost him nothing.
“I’m going back,” he said. “Halfway. Just to see.”
Anister came with him. Irulan stopped where she was and stood, arms folded, refusing to take another step in either direction. Grig drifted between them, miserable.
It took a few minutes of fast walking to get within sight again. By the time they could see the dig site, the Outriders had already done it.
There was a tight knot of figures on the far side of the barrow – five of them, and now two more appearing from the bushes Bancroft hadn’t known had anything in them. Hidden rogues, Bancroft thought, with the dull recognition of a man learning a lesson he was too late to use. Of course there were hidden rogues. They had something in the middle of their circle. He couldn’t see what. He could guess.
“Excuse me,” Bancroft called, walking forward at a casual pace. A hundred feet was a long way to make conversation. “Have you seen a small child? We seem to have mislaid her.”
Grak’s voice came back across the distance, half-amused. “Give us a few shakes of a lamb’s tail and we’ll tell you for sure.”
A heartbeat, Bancroft thought. He means about as long as it takes to swing a sword.
“Have you found our missing halfling or not?” he called.
“I suggest you stop walking.”
“I don’t think we want to fight,” Bancroft said, and kept walking, slowly, the elvish longsword sheathed on his hip, his hands open at his sides. “I just want to see her. Let us see her, and we’ll go.”
“If you keep moving, we’re going to shoot.”
He kept moving. Anister stayed at his shoulder. They got another twenty feet closer before Grak whispered to one of his people and Bancroft saw two of the figures slip behind the bushes again and stop being figures at all.
“Yep,” Grak called, almost cheerfully. “It’s a halfling.”
“We’d like our halfling back,” Bancroft said.
“No.”
The elven mage said something low and quick, and one of the rogues – visible or not, Bancroft couldn’t tell – said something back. Then Grak again, the tone shifting into something Bancroft had heard from auctioneers and tax collectors and men telling farmers what their wheat would sell for this year:
“Listen. I know what kidnapping is. This isn’t kidnapping. Let’s just say she’s going to do some work for us, and you can mosey off. You’ll find her in the town sometime. Just leave. Unless you want to help work also.”
Bancroft stood at a hundred feet and looked at the place where Riyou was supposed to be and could not see her at all. He couldn’t reach her. Not in time. He could close the distance in a long sprint and the rogues would be on him before he was halfway, and even if he made it there would be five of them and the elf had spells and Grak had plate, and Anister was a thief with a longbow and a body that couldn’t take more than a club’s worth of trouble, and Bancroft was a cleric who couldn’t outrun a child.
He thought about Sylvanus and how the god had answered the shield of faith and wondered if the god would answer anything else. He didn’t try. He could feel the answer already. That’s not what I do.
“Can we just see her?” he called. “Real quick. Just to know she’s all right.”
“She’s not in a position to talk,” Grak said. “If I don’t see you turn around in the next breath, things are going to happen.”
“Whenever you guys decide to go do some adventuring,” Anister said, very flat, “just wake me up.” And he turned and started walking back.
Bancroft looked at the half-orc one more time. We’ll remember your faces, he thought, in case you don’t remember ours. He said it out loud for good measure. Then he turned and walked back to where Irulan was waiting.
The halfling thief Riyou kneels small and defiant in the center of a circle of leveled adventurers on the open moor, the half-orc Grak Bloodshield in plate mail looming over her with his warhammer at the ready
They got back to Helix without trouble. It was the only mercy of the day.
Anister took them to the Grey Company first – the mercenary guild that registered adventuring parties and pretended to keep the peace between them, or at least kept records when peace failed. The clerk at the front desk was a young woman named Petronella who had a stamp the size of a fist and an air of complete bureaucratic neutrality. Anister told her about the dig, and the bandits, and the Outriders, and the demand for ten gold, and the kidnapping. She wrote it all down in a careful, square hand. She nodded in the right places. She put the stamp on the report and slid it into a stack of other reports that, Bancroft suspected, would never be read by anyone who could do anything about it.
“I will speak with Grak Bloodshield,” Petronella said. “He is the leader of the group.”
“He’s not going to tell you the truth.”
“No,” she said. “Probably not. But it gets put in the file.”
Bancroft asked about consequences. Petronella said there were none, really – there had been some cases in past seasons, fireballs through windmills, that kind of thing – but no formal way for the guild to do anything other than make a note. The Outriders had a file. The file was getting longer. This is what we do with bad neighbors, her tone said. We write it down.
Bancroft watched her work and thought of Oscar.
He had never met Oscar. Nobody who walked into the Grey Company office for the first time ever did. But you heard the name within a few minutes of being inside, the way you heard the name of any saint. Oscar was the priest of paperwork – somewhere in the back of the building, behind a door nobody pointed at, presiding over the files and the stamps and the tall ledgers in which every grievance ever lodged against an adventuring party in the region was preserved in its proper column. People said he could smell a freshly stamped report from across the building. People said the rustle of new paper was his favorite hymn. Bancroft had no way of knowing if any of it was true. He looked at Petronella’s small, square handwriting and her perfectly aligned stamp and decided that wherever Oscar was, in his back room or on his lunch break or off filing something else, he would have looked at this report and approved.
They went to the Brazen Strumpet to wait. Bolo charged a gold for the three of them, and Anister paid for Bancroft because Bancroft was down to one gold to his name and Anister had the gemstone he’d been carrying since the carousing. They sat in the common room and didn’t talk much. Irulan watched the door. Anister stared at his hands. Bancroft prayed quietly, the formal way and then the informal way, and got nothing back either time. Not because she doesn’t want to be heard, he thought. Because there’s nothing here for me to do.
Riyou came in at ten.
She’d been in the rain. Her clothes were torn at the shoulder and the hem, her hair was a wet ruin pulled to one side, and there was a darkening bruise the size of a man’s fist around her left eye. She walked the way you walked when something hurt that you weren’t going to mention. She came over to their table without a word and sat down.
“Great,” she said. “I hate everything. I hope they die. I hope there’s ghouls in that damn barrow. Also, good news – barrow’s open. Bad news – it’s a fucking normal barrow with no door.”
“They made you dig,” Irulan said.
“Of course they made me dig. They knocked me out, put me in manacles, stole sixty gold off me, and gave me back thirty. Said I had to finish digging the rest of the hole and they’d let me go. And I did.” She touched her cheekbone with two fingers and winced. “Then they let me go. And kept the gold.”
“Anister already paid for your room,” Irulan said.
Riyou closed her eyes. “Thank you.”
She didn’t drink anything. She picked at a piece of bread for a while and then asked to go to bed, and Bolo showed her up the stairs. Bancroft watched her walk and tried not to count the limps.
They slept. The bruises faded the way bruises always faded in this place – too fast to be earned, just slow enough to feel real. By morning Riyou was on her feet and the black eye was a smudge instead of a wound, and Bancroft had a full reserve of prayers and Irulan’s grip on her longsword was steady again.
Riyou wanted to go back to the barrow.
“They left an hour ago,” she said over breakfast. “They’ve already had their crack at it. Whatever they didn’t take is ours. And I want to see what they didn’t take.”
It was a halfling answer to a halfling problem, and Bancroft could not argue with it. They took Grig – who, after some quiet persuasion from Riyou, agreed to keep going for another day’s pay – and they walked east across the moor.
D28 was empty when they got there. The entrance had been dug out the rest of the way and propped open with a flat stone. No guards. No watchers. The Outriders had gone in, taken what they wanted, and gone somewhere else.
The crypt inside was a small one. A throne in the back, cobwebbed and spilled – a skeleton that had once sat on it now scattered across the floor in a wide circle, as if someone had kicked the bones for the satisfaction. A corpse near the door, torn apart in the way that didn’t suggest a sword. Tables that had once held things and now didn’t. Dust disturbed everywhere. Someone had been thorough.
“They cleaned it out,” Anister said.
“They tried,” said Riyou. She crouched by the throne and ran her fingertips along the back of it the way she ran her fingertips along anything she didn’t trust.
The four of them spread out and searched. Riyou checked for traps first – a slow ten minutes, watching her work the way Bancroft had learned to watch her work, with the patient respect you gave a craftsman who knew her tools. Nothing. Then a wider search of the room. Anister picked at piles of dust. Irulan stared into the corners with the methodical patience of a half-orc who had been told corners were where things hid.
Bancroft went around the back of the throne.
He almost missed it. He was looking at the wall above the throne – at the painted plaster, at the cracks where damp had crept in – and he glanced down at the right moment and saw it. A small lever, set into the stone behind the throne where a sitting king’s left hand would never have reached. Pushed sideways to the left. Designed to slide right.
“I have something.”
Riyou checked the lever for traps – another patient ten minutes, hands moving over stone the way a doctor’s hands moved over a wound – and pronounced it safe. Bancroft put two fingers on the lever and pushed it sideways, slowly, the way you’d push a stuck door.
The wall behind the throne rumbled.
A panel of stone slid open from the left to the right, dragging across something gritty, and a small avalanche of rocks and broken brick spilled out into the room around their feet. The party stepped back. The opening kept opening until it stuck. Bancroft put his hand on Riyou’s shoulder to keep her from walking forward.
The passage beyond was packed with stone. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall – a deliberate fill, the kind that someone had spent weeks putting in place to keep something on the other side from being reached. It wasn’t dirt. It was rocks the size of Bancroft’s fist and bricks the size of his head, mortared in places, loose in others, the whole mass leaning forward into the room and threatening to settle further if anyone touched it wrong.
“That’s a week of work,” Anister said. He was a dwarf. He knew. “Sledgehammers. Pickaxes. Two people working at once, and you can’t fit more than two abreast. A week. Maybe more.”
“Or,” Riyou said, “I could squeeze through.”
Bancroft felt his stomach do a small, slow turn.
“It’s a bad day for that,” he said.
“It’s a bad day for everything,” she said. “But I’m small. There are gaps. Halflings and goblins, that’s it – nothing else fits. I just want to see what’s on the other side. Then we know if it’s worth a week of digging or not.”
“Riyou.”
“I’ll be careful.”
She was already shedding her pack – dropping flasks, dropping the iron rations, dropping anything that would catch on a rock. She kept the lantern. She kept the candle Anister handed her. She kept the flint and steel, and one short blade, and the brass whistle she’d taken back from Anister and hadn’t given up.
“If you come back,” Anister said, “you can have this.” He held up the gemstone – the sardonyx, the forty-five gold piece gem he’d been carrying since the carousing. Real reluctance in his voice now, finally. “You come back, the gem is yours.”
“Hold it for me.”
“I will.”
She turned to the gap in the rocks. She went in.
The halfling Riyou squeezes between massive stones in a tightly packed rubble passage by lantern light, leaving the party behind in the crypt
Bancroft sat down on the broken throne to wait.
Anister stood by the rubble line for a while and then sat down too. Irulan paced. Grig hovered at the door of the crypt with a torch and tried not to look like he’d rather be anywhere else.
The first ten minutes were the easiest. The lantern light from the gap in the rocks moved a little – Riyou working her way in, finding the angle, the grunt of small effort that meant she was past the first squeeze. Then the light steadied. Then it dimmed. Then it was gone.
After that, there was nothing to listen to.
Bancroft tried to listen anyway. He heard Grig breathing. He heard Irulan’s boots scuff. He heard the wind on the open moor outside the crypt and the slow drip of rain that had started somewhere up there and was finding its way down through cracks in the stone above them. He did not hear Riyou.
“How long has it been?” Anister asked, eventually.
“I don’t know.”
“Should we call?”
“She’d hear us. She isn’t answering, so either she’s too far in or she’s busy.” Bancroft tried to keep his voice level. “We don’t want her looking back at the wrong time.”
“Yeah.”
Time worked strangely in the dark. He did not have a clock. He had a sense, the farmer’s sense, of the sun moving outside and the slow weight of an hour passing – and he thought maybe twenty minutes had gone, and then half an hour, and then he was certain it had been longer than that, and then he was certain it hadn’t been long at all and he was just panicking.
Anister talked, in fits and starts, the way people talked when they needed to fill silence and didn’t know what else to put in it. About other thieves he’d known. About a dungeon he’d been in once where someone had been separated from the party in the dark and had run alone for two whole sessions, the kind of detail you remembered when you were trying not to remember a worse one. Irulan said almost nothing. She paced and stopped and paced again.
Bancroft prayed without forming words. He just held the holy symbol and held the silence. If you’re there. If she’s still down there. Just enough for her to find the gap back. No answer came. He hadn’t expected one. Sylvanus did not reach into rocks. Sylvanus was the forest and the field and the slow turn of seasons – the god of things above the soil, not below it. If Riyou was below the soil now, she was in a place his god had no claim on.
Anister was the one who heard it.
A faint noise from the rocks – a scrape, maybe, or a stone settling. He stood up. Bancroft stood up. Irulan crossed the room in two strides and put her hand flat against the rubble.
“Riyou?”
Nothing.
“Riyou, can you hear me?”
The rubble didn’t answer. It never had. It was rock.
Bancroft did not know any of what came next. He would imagine it, in the days that followed – would build a version of it in his head out of the faint sounds that had reached him through the rubble and the things Riyou had said before she went in and the awful familiar shape of how halflings died in places they shouldn’t have been. He built the story because not building it was worse.
She had gotten through the squeeze. He was sure of that – the long minutes when nothing had moved, the silence stretching, then the small renewed scrape of her working her way deeper. He guessed she’d had to grease herself with the last of her oil to get through the worst of it. He guessed she’d been pinned for a while at the tightest point and had nearly given up.
There had been a passage on the other side. She had walked it. She had been looking for treasure or a door or some sign of what the rocks were hiding, and the lantern in her hand had been throwing weak light against weak walls, and she had stepped wrong.
There had been a pit. The kind a halfling sees too late.
She had fallen, and at the last possible second something – the small mercy she’d been hoarding, the one favor she’d been saving for a worse moment – had caught her hand on the lip of the stone. She’d hung there. She’d been about to climb. The noise of the fall had reached down whatever was on the other side of the dark, and what was on the other side of the dark had been giant scorpions, and they had come fast.
The rest was venom.
Bancroft did not see any of that. He sat in the throne room and waited and watched the gap in the rubble. When enough time had passed that enough time had become a different kind of word – a word that meant too much – he stood up and walked to the rubble and put his hand against it the way Irulan had. He felt the faint, slow chill of stone that had been undisturbed for a long time.
“Riyou.”
His voice fell into the rock and didn’t come back.
He prayed, finally – not for an answer, just to mark the moment. Sylvanus. She was a friend. The forest god heard him in the way a forest hears anything. With the great impartial silence of a thing that has seen this happen before, and will see it happen again, and grieves for none of it because grief is not in its language.
Riyou the halfling thief hangs by one small hand from the lip of a stone pit deep underground, her fallen lantern lying broken beside her, two giant scorpions emerging from the dark passage above
There was no body to recover.
That was the part that took the longest to settle. Not the death itself – they had all watched companions die before, in the ordinary ways. But the unreachability of it. Riyou was in a place none of them could go. Dwarves were too stocky to fit through the squeeze. Half-orcs were out of the question. Bancroft was a man with a man’s shoulders and there was no version of the next hour where any of them could follow her down to where she had stopped.
She was just there. Past a wall of rocks they couldn’t move in less than a week. Past a pit they couldn’t see. With creatures around her that the party had no way of fighting from this side of the stone. Whatever Riyou had been carrying – the dagger, the lantern, the candle Anister had pressed into her hand, the brass whistle she had used to try to ruin a bandit’s day – was hers now, in the way that things in a tomb belonged to the dead.
The tattoos on her arms, too. The cult information she had been carrying around like a folded letter she would not open. The thing the wizard Mazzah had wanted from her so badly that he had been willing to threaten what he was willing to threaten. All of it was gone. Sealed in.
“Mazzah’s going to be furious,” Anister said quietly, after a long time.
“Yes.”
“He’s going to come asking.”
“Let him ask.”
Bancroft pulled his hand off the rubble. It was cold. He turned and walked back across the crypt past the broken throne and the scattered skeleton and the corpse the Outriders had left behind, and out into the rain that had started in earnest now, drumming on the moor in long gray sheets.
Anister still had the gem in his hand. He looked down at it once and put it back in his pouch.
They walked back to Helix in the rain. Three of them and a hireling and the longsword on Bancroft’s hip and the empty space at the front of the line where the small one had always been. Bancroft thought about Riyou’s face when she had asked for the whistle yesterday morning – clever and angry and sure of herself – and could not get the picture to settle. He thought about the oath he hadn’t been able to keep about keeping people alive. He thought about Sylvanus and the silence and the dark under stone.
The forest god had no jurisdiction down there. The forest god had never claimed otherwise.
He walked. It rained. Helix was a long way off and he had nowhere else to go.