by David Drake
The cyst wasn’t of the Waste any more than it was of Severin. It could be entered either from the Road or from Croft’s workroom, but until a Maker adjusted the fabric of the cyst it was apart from both. Croft had opened it from Severin, and it was up to me to do the same now where it touched the Road.
“What I want you two to do…” I said to the Aspirants, who’d set the tube down between them, “is just wait until the hole or whatever you call it—” I nodded to the ugly scar “—is big enough for the tube to fit into it. I don’t know how long that will take. Less than an hour, I guess from the glance I took into the structure before, but I don’t swear that. Anyway, when I’ve got the way open, you put the tube into it. Then wait for me to come around.”
Osbourn and Andreas nodded. Both looked puzzled; Osbourn took out his weapon and abruptly put it back in its holster.
I lay down in the Road with my head beneath the scar. Sam whined faintly as he lay down beside me. I dropped into my trance.
I wished Guntram was here and that I was waiting to enter the cyst as soon as he’d opened it. Maybe this would help me get to Guntram. I could hope that, anyway.
The cyst had started to fray open on its own when it no longer had a controlling intelligence—the core, as Croft had called the Female. I guessed that meant that the cyst itself was created rather than something that grew and that it needed a person to direct the way it developed. The Envoy seemed to have been an ordinary village woman, more or less the same as the women I’d grown up with in Beune. I suspect that the Female was from the same sort of background, allowing for the difference between human society and that of Beasts.
I began picking apart the structure of the cyst’s wall, much the way I had disabled the device binding the Female. I moved atoms out of their places and set them in groups all of the same sort, destroying the system without harming the individual parts of that system. It was like removing a man’s heart and putting it in a bowl beside him.
The work went as quickly as I’d hoped, though I found that the opening was closing again faster than I’d hoped. I’d read Croft’s notebook. It was clear that he’d hoped that when he’d removed the core, the cyst would quickly crumble away. Instead, the cyst had a great deal of vitality even without its controlling intelligence.
I hadn’t known that, but I’d been too careful to risk going through the opening until I’d mechanically blocked it from closing. Thus the tube.
I could have sent somebody else through while I held the cyst open. Maybe if I’d fully trusted the abilities of the folks I was with—if I’d come with Morseth and Reaves, say—I’d have chanced that. Probably not, though, because even Champions like them would have been out of their depths in trying to deal with what they’d find inside a cyst.
Mind, Morseth and Reaves were about as able as anyone living to wade in and cut things apart until there was nothing but themselves standing. That might well be what the job required—but it was still my job.
The area I was working on began to change. I first noticed that the walls weren’t growing shut. Only then did I realize that something was blocking my ability to work on portions of the walls.
I finally realized that the tube, switching rapidly from Here to Not-Here, was now in place. I eased out of the trance. I’d been afraid that the Aspirants might shake me awake, even though I’d asked them not to touch me. Maybe I’d found people who actually listened.
I found myself lying on the Road. I lifted my head slightly and Sam began enthusiastically licking my face. I closed my eyes to protect them, then reached up and rumpled the loose skin of his neck.
“It’s all right, boy,” I said. “I’m back. It’s all fine.”
“Sir?” said Osbourn. “Master Andreas has gone through the tube.”
“Then we’d better do that too,” I said. I was too, well, giddy from the trance to feel any particular emotion at the news, but my mind was working fine—which it would not have been if Osbourn had shaken me awake as he might reasonably have done.
I took my weapon in my right hand and stuck my torso into the short tube. It wasn’t uncomfortably tight, but I’d have had trouble getting my hand into my tunic pocket in a hurry.
Sam nuzzled my legs as I wormed my way into the tube. When I slipped free into the cyst I heard him begin to howl back on the Road. Andreas’s dog hadn’t tried to follow him, though the tube was probably wide enough that she could have.
Inside the cyst the light was muted as if it were evening. To learn whether that changed with time of day, I’d have to stay here longer than I wanted to.
Everything around me was dead.
I was in a village of huts made out of palings as slim as my fingers. In front of me was the corpse of a Beast. The hide had vanished, but ropes of dried flesh connected sinews that reminded me of the flexible pens of squid. I didn’t see any bones.
The body was covered with white fungus which at a distance looked like fur. Everything—huts, objects on the ground; corpses—had fuzz on it, the way moss grows on wet rocks. There were many more corpses.
I’d forgotten Andreas in my shock at the dead Beast. I heard him call out, but even then it was a moment before I saw him at the doorway of a hut thirty feet into the village. What seemed to be a rope of the fungus had circled his torso.
Why did he go inside like that? I thought as I switched my weapon on and ran to him. I left my shield in the other pocket. I thought I might need my hand free more than I needed the shield.
I slashed through the rope of fuzz and grabbed Andreas by the shoulder. Only when I pulled did I realize Andreas’s right wrist was held by another rope; I reached past him and cut it. The fungus cut as easily as if it’d been braided from milkweed fluff, but the wisps of smoke stank like rotting flesh.
“It grabbed me when I walked past the hut!” Andreas said, massaging his right wrist with his left hand. “It was dragging me in!”
I glanced past Andreas into the hut. The ropes had extended from patches of fuzz: the first from a doorjamb, the second from the floor which seemed to have been made from battens like those of the walls. There were at least three corpses inside, all of them covered with the fuzz which hid outlines. The clump of bodies might have contained more than three.
Osbourn walked swiftly past us with his weapon live, his head swivelling as he tried to look in all directions. He jumped backwards and slashed at a rope which suddenly began to advance on him from the foot of one of the Beasts sprawled in the street.
“Behind you!” Andreas called. Osbourn spun and cut down, gouging the dirt street beneath another rope, this one coming from the side of a hut. The severed length dissolved gradually into smoke.
The huts were closely placed on both sides of a central corridor about eight feet across. I wondered how far the ropes could stretch if they had to.
“There’s something!” Osbourn said. He strode toward a hut well down the street. “It’s the jewel!”
Andreas and I both started to follow, but Andreas cried out and cut furiously at the ropes suddenly holding him. The bloody things could strike like snakes!
I’d paused to help Andreas but that wasn’t needed. I wondered how his weapon was responding to continuous use—a Maker’s question. It was a better than average piece of equipment, but it still must be getting warm.
Osbourn slashed a half circle in the ground at the lintel of a hut, then reached down and lifted something. The sun caught it; the flash seemed brighter than the light around us. It was a crystal the size of a monkey’s skull.
Osbourn backed away. I saw patches of fungus hump up on a corpse in the street beyond him and on the side of the hut he’d approached, but neither shot itself out toward him.
“Sir, can we leave now?” Osbourn said as I joined him. Andreas reached for the crystal, but Osbourn blocked the other Aspirant with his shoulder and handed the crystal to me.
It was heavy—heavier than steel, it seemed to me. It was clear and perfectly smooth; the flash hadn’t com
e from a facet as I’d assumed.
“Keep them off me,” I said. “I want to take a closer look.”
I went into a light trance and probed the crystal. It wasn’t a diamond or even a crystal; it had no structure. I knew of only one thing so untouchably homogenous as this: the Road. No Maker, not even Master Guntram, could find a pattern or component pieces in a stretch of Road.
“Men, this isn’t a diamond,” I said. “It isn’t anything. And it doesn’t feel right.”
“Look, it’s got to be a diamond!” Andreas said. “Look at that fire! And even if it’s something else, it’s worth a fortune.”
I thought about that, about what things were worth. Andreas meant worth in money and what he said was true; but if I hadn’t believed there were other things to count, I wouldn’t have become a Champion.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, “but this thing isn’t right. It isn’t from Here and I won’t let it come to Dun Add. Or anywhere else that people might want to be. Let’s get back to Severin, fast.”
The jewel was in my left hand. I tossed it underhand toward the hut it had come from. I missed the doorway, but it hit the wall and clung to the fungus for an instant before dropping to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Andreas screamed.
“Come on,” I said. I took a step toward the pipe. Ropes of fungus stretched toward us from all directions.
“Run!” I shouted. Our best chance was to get back onto the Road. There was nothing here for us.
Fungus lifted from a sprawl of dried flesh and sinew. I went straight at it and cut it in half before it could touch me. Another rope grabbed my left ankle from behind. As I turned and slashed through it—I couldn’t feel the contact; it was like cutting gossamer—a rope from a hut to the right caught me around the waist.
First things first: I finished freeing my ankle, then turned to my right and cut the rope on my waist. Insubstantial though the fungus ropes were to my weapon, they gripped like steel cords around my body.
“Andreas, this way!” Osbourn shouted from just behind me.
I looked over my shoulder. Instead of following us, Andreas had run back and scooped the jewel up from where it had fallen. The fungus hadn’t caught him, though that hut—the one Croft had cut the core out of—was solid with fungus, as we knew from the window in the Maker’s workroom.
I remembered that I’d almost removed that barrier instead of just making it transparent. My caution had been the difference between life and a death which now seemed likely to be slower and much more horrible than I’d guessed at the time. The cyst wanted to replace its core with another suitable subject—human or Beast.
I didn’t know how far the fungus could extend from its base, but I’d just proved that walking between the huts meant that ropes could reach me from both sides. Instead of trying again to reach the pipe, I leaped toward the nearest hut on the right and carved at the patch which had just spat a rope of fungus toward me. At full intensity my weapon ripped the hut’s battens as it would have a wattle-and-daub wall in Beune.
Ropes lashed at me from the huts to either side of the one I was attacking. I cut to the right, then left, severing the fungus and wrenching myself free.
Andreas ran past me, down the middle of the lane. He held the jewel in his left hand and his weapon in his right. The fungus didn’t reach for him.
Andreas was a problem for another time. I jumped to my left, bringing me a step closer to the pipe. I cut the two ropes that caught me from behind—right thigh and left arm. Ahead of me the corpse of a long-dead Beast lay across my path. It was now a writhing mass of fungus. I plunged into the middle of it, slashing furiously.
This time a fungus rope curled around my right forearm. I twisted my hand and the tip of my weapon flicked past my eyes dazzlingly. The edge closer to the hilt cut though the fungus and the touch fell away, freeing my arm. I hacked into the ground at my feet and the ropes gripping my legs vanished also.
I lurched forward again. Osbourn was beside me. His weapon had very little cutting ability but thank the Almighty! the fungus had less resistance than even the thin poles of the hut walls would have provided.
Side by side we advanced another two steps. The fungus patches from the huts across the way couldn’t reach us, but bodies sprawled out of doorways did, and the nearer huts were festering masses. The cyst—the fungus it contained and which probably had created it—had been asleep when we entered, but it was fully alert now.
I didn’t know whether the cyst could actually think. Perhaps not, perhaps that was why it needed a thinking creature at its core. It could strike wildly, though, just as a headless chicken could run about the farmyard.
“Sir, you go through the hole first and I’ll follow!” Osbourn said.
“No, you bloody fool!” I said. “I’m the Champion and I’ll keep us clear till we’re both through!”
I thought I might be able to crawl into the tube backwards but I wasn’t sure. I was sure that I wasn’t going back to Dun Add and explain to May that I’d left her cousin in a mass of pustulent fungus.
We had to get to the pipe before the order we went through it mattered. For a moment, I didn’t think that was going to happen: a separate rope of fungus looped each my ankles and a third gripped my right shoulder. I cut the one from my shoulder first, realizing as my weapon flashed past my nose that I could very easily kill or cripple myself in trying to cut myself clear.
That was a problem for later also.
Osbourn broke free of the ropes he was battling. I cut the fungus holding my right foot, but my right leg jerked backward and I lost my balance. I flopped on my face. Osbourn stepped back and neatly severed the rope dragging me into a hut.
I scrambled a couple paces on all fours until I could get my feet under me again. Osbourn had offered me a hand but I didn’t need it.
Andreas’s feet vanished through the pipe. Splotches of fungus rose from the ground he’d just run across untouched. Osbourn and I cut our way through them; but as we did, additional ropes stretched from behind to wrap around us.
I was bleeding in several places where the fungus had rubbed me raw. I wondered if the torn skin made me more likely to be infected by the fungus. Though I couldn’t be sure it infected people at all: it might just strangle them or tear them apart.
Osbourn’s weapon was beginning to fail, but mine ripped a line through the soil behind us and cut the ropes rippling swiftly toward both of us. Stumbling forward, we reached the hole in the wall of the cyst.
It was closing. Andreas had pulled out the pipe from the other side.
CHAPTER 16
Aftermath
I’m dead now, I thought. That was just something I was aware of—not a tragedy, not an emotional concern. The weather was mildly warm, and I was going to die shortly.
Before then, I could get Osbourn free. You do what you can.
“Osbourn!” I said, slashing at a rope of fungus that stretched from a clump of russet foliage that looked like a man’s bushy beard. I suspected there was a dead Beast hidden in the vegetation. “I’m going to open the passage while you keep the fungus off as best you can. Here, take my weapon.”
I pressed it into his hand. The hilt wasn’t even warm; it was a wonderful piece of art. I was prouder of having helped rebuild it than I was of any other thing I’d done in my life.
“Get through as soon as you can and don’t try to drag me in after you. That’d wake me out of the trance and the cyst will close on us. Don’t do that. Tell Baga to get you to Dun Add and bring back Louis or one of his people as quick as you can.”
Osbourn was saying something but I ignored him as I lay down on the ground beneath the scar. The soil felt damp. “Just shut up and get help quickly.”
I heard my weapon sizzle on the wet soil. I supposed it would go to Osbourn when they decided I was dead. I dropped into a trance despite the tension I was feeling. By this point in my life it was as natural as holding my breath when I ducked beneath the surface
of the water.
The walls of the cyst were more active now than they’d been when we entered. The creature—plant or animal or whatever it was—was fully awake.
I worked on the edges of the cavity, much as I had when we first prepared to enter the cyst. It was easier this time around. That was partly because the wound hadn’t fully set after I’d expanded it the first time, and partly because I was more experienced in what I had to do.
Normally a Maker worked to extend an existing pattern. I usually knew what I was making before I started, but a couple of times I realized that I’d been wrong when I got a little ways into the task. An artifact throws a shadow of its original self onto the mind of the Maker, sometimes clearer than at other times. I was pretty good at interpreting that, but Guntram was better by far; Louis saw not only what a weapon had been but how it could become better than its Ancient creator had built it.
The wall of the cyst used various elements for its crystalline structure—generally calcium carbonate, but there were patches of silica where that had been in the ground in sufficient quantity to incorporate. I was able to see—well, interact with—only about half of the structure, because the remainder of it was Not-Here. I couldn’t affect those atoms—I was only aware of them because of their absence from the structure—but I could disrupt the cyst simply by concentrating on what I could affect.
One of the rare earths—I thought polonium, but my discrimination wasn’t sharp enough to be sure—acted as the cyst’s communication route. It used impulses through that network to repair itself and probably to grow and whatever else it did. Perhaps there were cyst scholars and priests.
When I removed the rare earth from its place in the crystal, the wall began to crumble. I redeposited the material, atom by atom, on the outside of the crystal. If I’d been looking with my eyes, I’d have seen a growing discoloration when the light was right.
I felt ropes of fungus touching my body, but they didn’t bring me up from the trance. My perceptions grew sharper. I began to understand the cyst’s construction better and to make faster progress. I didn’t have to remove all the atoms from a pathway to block it; I could shift only certain combinations of atoms. That became as clear to me as sunrise, though I didn’t know why.
