The Don Head Relay

The thing about the upper Don moors is that they're not supposed to be there at murkneet.

I know how that sounds. Everything is supposed to be somewhere. But if you've spent any time above the Don treeline after murkfall, you'll know what I mean. The moor has a texture during the day -- peat and tussock and that Yorkshire quiet that's actually quite loud if you listen to it. After murk falls, it gets another texture entirely. A texture that communicates: you are in the wrong place. Not the way a locked door communicates it -- more the way a room does when everything in the room is facing the same direction and you were not expected. Something about the flat sky and the open ground and the way the murk sits at head height on a still evening, so that you're moving through the world with your eyes just above a dark grey sea and nothing visible on any horizon except more dark grey sea. At head height, where the murk surface sits, there is sometimes a faint phosphorescence -- not bioluminescence, more like the residue of something that was recently alive and hasn't entirely finished. The moor animals do not move at that height. They know what lives in the surface. The stars don't help. The murk catches the starlight and distributes it evenly in every direction, no shadows, no depth, no sense of scale, and you could walk twenty minutes toward what looks like a boundary wall and never arrive.

I am telling you this because I want you to understand the operating conditions before I tell you what I agreed to do in them.

The job came through someone I'll call Bev, because that's not their name and they'd be uncomfortable if I used the real one. Bev had contacts in the DPDC -- the Dark Peak District Council -- which sounds bureaucratic and dull unless you know what the DPDC actually does, which is mostly make sure that nobody looks too closely at who's running what, that the network infrastructure stays operational, and that certain people who ask certain questions have very quiet accidents on the high moorland. They are not your friends. Bev was not working for the DPDC. Bev was working against the Xin -- specifically against the Mentiloth silk relay network that the Xin run their communications through. Someone had reasons -- reasons Bev was not going to expand on -- for wanting certain nodes in that network to go dark. Whether the DPDC would care about the disruption was a secondary question that Bev was also not going to answer.

The Mentiloth built the infrastructure. That's the thing most people don't know, or don't think about if they do know. The Xin use the network, direct through it, administer by it -- the dark net is how the Xin run things without appearing to run anything. But the original silk, the actual fibre that carries whatever carries through the dark net -- that's Mentiloth work. Old silk. And silk, however old, however thoroughly integrated into the hex and the murk and the architecture of The Dark Peak's nervous system -- burns.

The relay node was at the Don Head. The source of the river, where the peat gives up the water it's been holding all winter and lets it run south. Not a place you'd choose to be at the best of times. At murkneet, in the squall season, with the weather coming horizontal off the high ground and nothing to break it for thirty miles in any direction -- less appealing still. And when you're also carrying a clay flask of dark-reactive accelerant that you've been told not to let get damp, in a squall, on the highest point of moor above the Don. The ¢hits were good. I'm not saying they were good enough, in retrospect. But they were good.

I went up from Outibridge on the back path, past the reservoir at Langsett where the water sits black and flat even on bright days, and struck north-east along what I generously call the old drove road and the moor generously calls a slightly firmer section of peat. Murk was down to waist height on the approach -- manageable with a lamp, if you keep your eyes forward and your thoughts simple.

The problem with simple thoughts in Mentiloth territory is that the Mentiloth are attracted to active cognition. Not movement, not noise -- thought. Strong intention, strong emotion, strong concentration. Anything with a shape to it, mentally. The standard advice is to blank yourself out. Count backwards from a large number in sevens. Register as nothing of interest -- a rock with legs.

I cannot do mental arithmetic. I've tried. It makes me anxious, which when you're trying not to radiate a detectable mental signature is the opposite of useful.

What I did instead was think about a pub. The Blue Ball in Worral, which I mention only because it happened to be the pub I'd visited most recently and which had made enough of an impression that I could reconstruct it faithfully. Low ceiling. Tim Taylor on the tap. The light at murkfall through the leaded windows, which is a dirty amber that sits well with a pint -- you know the kind. I just put myself there and stayed there. I walked across four miles of high moorland in a squall and I was, mentally, at the bar.

Whether this worked or whether the Mentiloth were simply patrolling elsewhere that evening, I couldn't tell you. Nothing flickered at me from the murk on the approach. I'm calling that success.

The relay node was harder to miss than I'd been led to believe.

I'd been told it would look like a natural feature, that the Mentiloth silk integrates into the environment so thoroughly that most people walk past relay infrastructure without ever registering it as anything other than root systems or bog moss. What I found was about four feet of something that pulsed. Not visibly, not with light -- with the kind of pulse you feel rather than see, a low throb that came up through the soles of your boots if you stood within a certain distance. The silk came up from the peat like a root system but it was pale, almost white, and where it branched and branched again the murk moved differently around the junction points. Thicker. More organised. Less like weather and more like signal.

The node itself was at the centre of four converging lines. A knot of silk about the size of a large dog, half-buried in the peat, wet-looking but not wet, with a skin to it. And it pulsed. Every few seconds, a low resonance moved through your sternum and your molars simultaneously -- not looking, nothing that visual, more like the way a tongue finds a loose tooth before you've decided to look for it. I did not want to get close to it. But I had not come four miles across open moor in a squall to stand at a respectful distance, so I got close to it.

The accelerant flask uncorked with a sound like a soft pop. It smelled of nothing. Bev's contact had said it would smell of nothing, and I'd taken that as a technical reassurance rather than a warning, which I think was my mistake. Things in The Dark Peak that have no smell are doing something. You just can't tell what from the outside.

I poured it onto the node. The silk took it the way old fabric takes water -- absorbed it, drew it inward along the capillary lines. And then nothing. No sound, no reaction. Nothing you could point to and say: there, that's it starting.

Bev's contact had said I'd have roughly two minutes.

The job announced itself in about forty-five seconds.

The silk lit the way a signal lights -- cold blue-white, spreading outward from the node along the branching lines in both directions simultaneously, moving at the speed of something electrical rather than something burning. Heat and light but not fire exactly. The node at the centre went bright and stayed bright, and that light was visible for at least a mile in every direction on that open moor.

And from somewhere behind me in the murk, a bass hum started. Low, chest-deep, the kind of sound you feel before you identify it. Two sources. Then three.

Mentiloth.

They don't make sound when they approach, that's the thing. By the time you hear them you are already inside their awareness radius. The wing-hum is the only noise they generate, and you hear it when close is already the wrong word. In the burning light of the node the Mentiloth cast no shadow -- what you saw was a hole in the illumination that had already moved.

I went north-east.

Not the direction I'd come. The burning node lit everything behind me and I didn't want to be running back through that light with the Mentiloth between me and the drove road. Which meant going deeper into the high moor, toward the Don's source. Don bog beast country.

This was not the plan.

I want to tell you that I moved quickly and efficiently and that I had a secondary route planned. I did not have a secondary route planned. I ran across open peat in the dark with my lamp bobbing and the murk streaming past my shoulders, and somewhere behind me the Mentiloth were flickering through their positions -- there, not-there, there again -- and I could hear the hum getting less directional, which means they're repositioning, which is exactly what you don't want.

The ground got wetter. I was at the Don source. The peat becomes almost liquid there, black and cold, and you have to watch your footing or you go in to the knee. I slowed. You have to slow. The alternative is losing a boot and your dignity in the middle of a Mentiloth engagement, which is an injustice the moor will offer you without hesitation.

I heard the don bog beast before I saw it. A wet dragging sound. Something large moving through saturated peat with the unhurried confidence of something that has no predators at this altitude and is constitutionally incapable of being in a hurry. The don bog beast does not scavenge in the same way as a barker, or hunt like a scratcher, it moves through territory and things in that territory make decisions based on its presence.

I made my decision. I went flat into the peat. Face-first. The lamp went into the moss and went out.

The beast passed within six feet. I know this because I could smell it: river mud, cold water, old blood, and something underneath all of those things that your whole body catalogues before your brain gets involved -- reads as do not move, do not think, do not be anything. Not a smell. A category. The thing that is older than running, older than the word for running.

It did not stop. It did not slow. It went past me and into the murk toward the burning node, which was, honestly, a favour -- the light and the Mentiloth activity presumably registered as more interesting than one person flattened into the peat pretending not to exist.

I lay there for three minutes. Then I got up. Walked south by a route that took me wide of the node and the Mentiloth and the don bog beast and everything else on that moor that had been activated by forty-five seconds of burning silk, and I came down through Langsett in the last of the murkneet and I was in Outibridge by first murklight and I found a pub.

The node was dark by morning. Bev's contact confirmed it before I'd finished my second pint. Three adjacent relays on the eastern Don network had gone intermittent -- cascade effect from losing the junction point. Whose communications that interrupted, and what they were saying when the silk burned, is not information I have or want.

The job was: get there, pour the accelerant, get out before anything took you apart.

Two of those three things went cleanly.

The third one -- well. You've heard the third one. That's why we're in here and not somewhere with more windows.

The Mentiloth went quiet once the node was dark. They stop patrolling when the thing they were protecting stops existing. Whether that means they're following orders from the Xin, or whether they just lose interest, I genuinely cannot say.

The don bog beast was still out there when I left. I could hear it from the Langsett path. Moving without urgency through its country, doing whatever it does at the Don source, entirely uninterested in the whole affair.

Probably not the most dangerous thing on the moor that murkneet, in the final reckoning. That was me, as far as I could work out. The Xin tend to disagree about who initiated what, but then they would.

-- Pip Rippon, field notes. Somewhere with poor visibility and a decent enough pint. You know the one.

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