"Very impressive."

"Thanks!"

The old man picks a lower bunk to nap on. Torn, now that he's up and not otherwise busy, asks Cam what else has changed overnight.

"Nothing else changed much, I just learned some things."

"Like?" he asks, getting some writing implements ready.

"Ottsels are members of the Precursor species! Which comes in two color schemes and they are probably having a war out there in space somewhere. The Precursor Stone is an egg and the metal heads' original planet is gone presumably as a casualty of their original conflict with the Precursors. Things attributed to Mar were done by several people. Metal heads don't actually like eating humans but this planet isn't very well suited to them and any other food I could have made them might have been potentially usable as poison to local creatures so now they have a bunch of human meat nobody had to die for to tide them over while things are in flux."

"Wow. I didn't know I could get less religious. Ottsels." He shakes his head. "If the metal heads aren't going to get in the way, we can either leave or depose Praxis. The Shadow will rather the second one."

"He seems like he sucks! What's the deposition liable to look like?"

"Best case scenario: kill him, make a deal with his daughter and have her act as regent for the heir, put Erol on trial and probably execute him, probably have a mass amnesty for everyone still alive in the fortress prison. That could go wrong if he got away. Or if Erol got away. Or if anything happened to Ashelin. Or if it turned out the KG wouldn't work for us. Or if it turned out anyone in the prison was there for a good reason. Or if the metal heads attacked while we were all busy."

"Erol and Ashelin and KG are...?"

"KG is short for Krimzon Guard, Erol is their commander, Ashelin is the baron's daughter."

"Got it. Why is the baron being dead as opposed to locked up the best case?"

He laughs bitterly. "Can't say he doesn't deserve it. Still. Better to be sure he's gone and not have to waste space keeping him around, especially if we're about to empty out the prison aside from him."

"Are you sure he didn't ever bother to arrest non-political criminals? I did have a mugging attempt on my way back."

"I've already talked that over with the Shadow and a friend of mine in the Guard. We aren't going to hold anyone who was convicted under Praxis and we aren't going to lock anyone up until we've had a chance to make a new facility - we don't have blueprints drawn up yet but we've talked it over some and I can tell you what we've already decided it should have. But we're not locking someone up who I'm sure didn't hurt you or take anything you can't replace."

"- no, no, I broke his knife and gave him a limon, I don't want to go after the guy, I'm just pointing out the rate of actual crime is not zero. The jail itself is a problem here?"

"We could probably do a lot better with the same building. Could do ten-hour workdays, visits twice a month, allow paper books... but the Shadow thinks it's important they get to see outside."

"It has salutary effects on one's health," Cam agrees. "Okay, I'm not going to bat for the Baron, he's an asshole and a politically complicated one."

"Yeah. If we don't have metal heads to worry about we can pull it off on our own but it might be easier with help and easier might mean lives saved. Or, we can run. I'll have to talk with the Shadow about that and I'm thinking we should loop you in, you know what you can offer us and you can get us information that'd make it easier to choose."

"What kind of information?"

"If we do run, we're leaving his current prisoners behind and don't know how many of them there are. If we move somewhere we'll need to know what else lives there now. We need to know if Praxis has any plans for what to do about it if a hundred air trains materialize and start flying people away. We need to know if he's booby-trapped the palace or the fortress or if he has anything destructive on a dead-man switch. We need to know how much of the countryside Kras claims and where."

"Okay. I can do some of that easily, like number of prisoners - what's the building called?"

"The fortress. - Not everyone in it is a prisoner or a guard, it's also the armory and a lot of other things."

"Order of magnitude on expected number of occupants?"

"It varies but probably more than fifty and less than two hundred."