Motif · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

The hunters

Tourists on the sixth floor, the Hunting Grounds, as Mordecai first describes them on the third: 'brave and insane' people who pay to go down and hunt crawlers — expensive and dangerous, with no protections for the hunters, so that 'every season a handful of rich dumbasses get themselves killed.'

Segment appearances

Progression

Released

Sequestered in Zockau, bumped to level 50 in the spirit of fairness, released in thirty hours (ch. 1): the first pets are invisible weasels that hunt by smell (ch. 2); thirty-four die before the gates open (ch. 6); by the third day there are over a thousand and they spread from the city like a cloud (ch. 9). They have slot inventories and Levitation potions (ch. 14); they have divided the floor on a children's menu and claimed crawlers by colour (ch. 15); five hundred crawlers are dead in a week (ch. 21). Their outside contact is cut by injunction, and Quasar's second trick is harder: some are here on a licence, first crack at the top ten (ch. 25); some were paid to come to a fantasy camp that 'was supposed to be easy' (ch. 22).

Stranded

After Alucarda the Hive retreats (ch. 39); after the brambles they cannot hold towns and are trapped in clubs with credit chits (ch. 58); their families sponsor them with pulse rifles and anti-air guns bound to the individual (ch. 60); their casualty rate goes from a two per cent average to over twenty-five (ch. 56), and 290 remain (ch. 60). One is tricked into a church to birth a god (ch. 62). At the party 264 stand sullen at the buffet (ch. 64, ch. 67); an Atoll named Zabit, whose weasels paralysed Carl on the first day, explains that he hunts to keep his people's habitat alive, and other hunters snap at Vrah that they 'just want to go home' (ch. 69); the nymphs in the walls are their colleagues' children (ch. 70). Costumed raptors take them (ch. 75); in the pit their cards list home planets that are refugee camps, and the last of seventy-five, Zabit, dies by his own trap (ch. 76). Carl's promise from the fifth floor is kept.