Hellsborough Exposed — van-hallam

Van, lost in milting country and having just taken the arm off a white-haired stranger with his tusk sword, tried a bluff:

"Who are you, white man? You are not from The Dark Peak, but you are not of us either!"

"I is from the Temple of Dunlockslyn," said Van.

"You are not. I know all who are from there, and you are not. Your hair is the wrong colour -- we all have hair the colour of mine -- you are an imposter! I will unleash the hounds on you again."

"Aye lad, tha needs to be careful with us dark 'aired miltin'," Van said to his corpse.

Faster than a ripperthroat snuffs a wooltard.

Onetoes look like horses built by someone who'd only ever had a horse described to them — closer inspection shows a single hoof per leg that doesn't divide, punching a straight line into the mud instead of leaving an oval print. They stand in fields watching the road and don't graze in any way I've confirmed; when something interests them, they simply start considering it, and the considering can go on far longer than seems reasonable for an animal that size. An onetoe that's decided you're worth its attention won't chase — it matches your pace field for field, wall for wall, the weight of being looked at pressing on you the whole way, and it clears a drystone wall clean without a run-up if you try to use one as cover. Van doesn't file things away twice as a rule; he either remembers or he doesn't. Three pages of his notes on the onetoe exist regardless, most of them crossed out, and what survived to the last line is a single word, underlined once: classified. I've read that page more times than I'll admit, and I still don't know what an onetoe decides about a person once it's finished deciding, only that whatever it was, Van didn't want it on paper.

"I sail tha brackish waters to the Ripperthroats, to the end of the infinite."

It's the effing zeitgeist, Pip, everyone is reyt doin it now!

There is no forgiveness in this world, so it is better to forget.

Van said this to me across a Hellsborough bar after a brutal day in the off-world, and it strengthened my resolve, despite itself:

"These quacker mards don't deserve a moment more of your time. You're trying to take them forwards, to improve their lives, and all they give scratcher turd about is protecting their own arses."

"Loyalty?" I managed.

"Those rooter licking critter-mards don't give a grizzler's jiz about your loyalty. You have a lot to learn, young one."

Van is almost always already in the bar when I arrive, which implies either impressive foreknowledge or simply a great deal of time spent in bars - and my research suggests the latter is not wrong but not the whole story. He asks questions about places I've been the way you ask questions when you already know the answers and are interested in whether someone has noticed the right details: about the bunker in Beacon Wood, the ash tree growing through it, the wires I couldn't trace against the trees. He always asks if Shad kept me safe, phrasing it as though the alternative is not a real category he's willing to consider. He refers to the Chronicles as "the project" and when I bring him a completed section he is - genuinely, without performance - excited in the way only someone who has been working seriously at something for a very long time can be excited by incremental progress. He is nothing if not a slave driver. The man exhausts me.

By the stinger of dunlockslyn these jellyheads must be off of their faces on rockcrust!

Van's preferred method of entering a guarded building — drainpipe, rooftop traverse, grappling hook, and if the hook slips while you're a thousand feet above the pavement, that's just one of those things — remains a source of what I can only call professional admiration. He threw the roof sentry over the eaves with the practised economy of someone returning a library book, then had the audacity to pour me a rhum while I was still processing the anecdote.

Van Hallam's argument against nascenti governance of The Dark Peak is that jellyheads queue at ballot boxes every four years to elect figureheads who hold precisely no real power while the organic network logs their every utterance on the hivemind. "Them fools has no idea they is votin' for a dictator," he told us in that cellar bar, before slamming his pint down hard enough that I lost about a third of my own. Dirty Leaves clicked sharply at this, and Van went quiet, which is the closest I've witnessed to a parliamentary point of order since arriving in The Dark Peak.

Van's approach to unidentified objects is to handle them immediately and establish terms. By the time I had finished categorising the blinking steel sphere as a probable bomb, Van had already picked it up, looked it in the eyes, named it Sinclair, and sent it back to the bitterfinger with a standing order for rockcrust delivery. Sinclair was a gutterball — Made class, messenger function — and I confirmed this against the hivemind afterwards, less because I doubted Van and more because I needed somewhere to put the information.

Van spent an entire night paralysed face-down on the Wisewood floor while demonspawn circled, waiting to skewer him. Something in the shadows routed them before dawn. He describes the episode as a predicament.