by Jim Grimsley
For a while she ignored him and he could tell then that she was feeling some kind of opposition. Distantly he himself was aware that the tower Cueredon was her problem, that Eshen, Seris, and Faltha were putting up a better fight than the rest of the Ten Thousand. In fact, Vekant realized, with the same feeling of abstraction, there were no longer anything like ten thousand of the Ten Thousand alive.
She had come ashore south of Feidreh; that first taste of her singing had been the killing of the Hormling Eighth Army and the choirs of Prin who were defending that part of the city perimeter. Following her lead, the rebel armies and their creatures had begun to fill the twin cities and to destroy them.
She could reach her hand wherever she liked. Alone and unaided she could take the continent apart.
She showed him so many things. Time drained away so fast.
Construct troops lumbered forward, trundling behind the mantis-monsters, who smashed through buildings and vehicles and Enforcement defensive barricades. Ahead, where Enforcement divisions were trying to form a line, the swarms of bird-shades flew through them, swarmed around them, sliced the people and machines to shreds, tore the defenses of the city to dust. Not a sign of a single Prin left to defend even a city block, not at the perimeter, at least. Not the hint of the Prin chant or the voice of a single cantor.
Over the city, white-hot blasts ignited in midair, sometimes in mid building: shattering waves of ignitions, awful for an instant before the concussion ripped the city to shreds; overhead the sky serenely blue except where smoke was already rising. She was making explosions, ripping steel frames of buildings into tatters. She spoke that ragged language of hers, and the world convulsed with fire.
In the Citadel, construct troops poured into the building, bound the helpless Prin, most of whom were still knocked senseless in the choir hall; some were dead but many were alive, and she meant to capture all of them if she could. She felt glee at the image of her troops binding the Prin in some kind of hood and shackle, carrying them out of the choir to a column of transport flitters. Beyond them the twin cities burned, a column of black, the air full of debris.
Most awful of all was the silence of the streets, for not a soul survived now except the few Prin and Enforcement who were in the Citadel. She had not moved much ashore at all, she had simply planted her feet on the ground and reached out with those sounds she was making. She showed him this much, she wanted him to know. In what she showed him there was no hint of gloating or victory; the notion that any other outcome might have been possible had no place in her thinking at all.
In the mind-space she kept Vekant, the notion of time lost to him, but he knew it had been a long time. Without the Choir to support him he was humble as a rag, almost cringing. As for what had happened to his body, whether he himself had been hooded and handcuffed, he had no real notion. He felt so distant from his flesh he might have left it for good.
Numbers. She wanted him to know she was singing in numbers. Or, to be more exact, she was willing for him to know; the notion of “wanting” was not exactly the thing, she had no true inkling of desire. She was a creature of numbers making her chant in numbers; there was no notion of words in her. What she knew of meaning came from some other direction. She had no inkling of words, she found the idea of them curious, nearly useless.
The beaten magician in the stories struggles and rises and makes an attempt, at least, to fight. But a single Prin is hardly better than a poet for making things happen. This was too much for Vekant—he had felt it from the moment the gate closed and he was left to his own devices.
The tower gave her trouble for a while; she planned to leave the twin cities as soon as she had broken the back of the opposition, which meant she could ill afford to leave Cueredon standing. Malin had built that tower and the voice of Irion was in it, even though the operators could not make much of it. Even she would have to take the tower in a body, no matter how weakly it was held. Were these her thoughts or his thoughts? She held him so close now, he could hardly tell where she stopped and he began; this was not a pleasant feeling, more like being digested than being loved; curious to feel engulfed by someone and to feel nothing of the expected intimacy. Even the bitterest human enemy would have felt warmer than she.
When she lifted him from the floor and the mosaic of the floor rose with him, streaming through his legs now, he understood he was with her in the flesh, that she was standing over his body somewhere, that he was hers. She had a mouth now and began to bite off pieces of his face. She kept the wounds from bleeding because she planned to eat the blood with all the rest, but she had no concept of pain and therefore spared him none; without the chant he could not hide himself from the agony, especially since she ate the soft parts of him only. He had no voice, not even in the body, certainly not in the mind-space, only the racking agony, the feeling of that razor maw ripping through him, her body quickening with the food in a way that was palpable to him. She ate him for a long time but not enough to kill him. Then she threw up paste onto him and it burned and clung to him; she smeared the paste onto his half-eaten surface. He had no voice, but he was shuddering. Some of him faded but some of him remained.
He was no longer sure who he was or why he was here suffering this agony. If he had a name there was no way to tell what it was or had been. Something was chewing through the top of his head now, that was all he could think about; he had combed his hair so carefully this morning and now some creature was eating through the top of his head. Funny that he had no memory of who he was or what kind of creature he had ever been but he had a clear memory of having combed the hair on the top of his head. He could not have pictured what the hair looked like or what any of the rest of him looked like but that was just as well now, because he was a snack for some kind of horrid creature. His nerves were so overloaded he could hardly feel anything. He flickered and vanished, not into death but into something else that came out of the paste she was spreading over him. She was eating away enough of him that she could replace him with herself; she was making a copy of herself. His feelings ebbed away and he understood what it was simply to replace wanting with something more like planning. He felt the way numbers shaped her, the way her thought was different, and that kind of thought filled him. He had no need to do anything or learn anything; he was simply a kind of carrier wave for her presence.
The pain had disappeared and the goo had hardened and he was feeling what she felt and seeing what she saw. He was standing with her on a devastated wasteland, a hell of fire stretched to the horizon, so much soot and ash in the sky that there could be no notion of anything but one long night. He was at the foot of the ruins of the Colony Bridge that crossed the Trennt River to the island of Avatrayn. She had eaten him at the foot of the Colony Bridge. Beyond, in Avatrayn, nothing stood except the tower, dimly lit.
The Eater would soon depart. The Eaten would walk forward, still in the hand of the Eater, still under her control. The Eaten would enter the tower and take it in his body, but using her voice.
Wind was rising. One by one, she was bringing hurricanes ashore all along the coast. Soon she was gone in her flitter with the remnants of her army, and he was standing in the high wind, planted more firmly than he had ever been in his life, beginning to walk across the wreckage of the bridge toward the island and the tower.
Out of the Forest Comes a Rider
1. Keely
Keely woke with a hurting head and sore scalp, forgot where he was at first, then remembered. The new house with the paper walls. He sat up. He felt as if he had forgotten some things again. Last night was a blur, the way it was when he forgot things; he couldn’t remember which toys he had played with or where he had left them, when usually he could see them exactly as they had fallen from his hands wherever they had landed. He remembered getting into bed early and pulling up the covers, hoping it would soon be dark. He had dreamed about the sphere with the tentacle arms again, but only for a little while. That was all.
Nerva had lai
d out his clothes for him and he pulled them on, looking around the sparsely furnished room. The hour was early and the light had a pink color, like dawn in Uncle Figg’s penthouse windows at home on Senal. Keely pulled on the clothes and yawned and felt sore all over his head. Nerva had never made him use the number box last night, had she? He had no memory of it. But there was a lot of blur.
Once, in the penthouse on Senal, he had found a note written in his own hand that said, “I bet you don’t remember writing this, do you? But you did. And guess what? There are a lot of things you don’t remember.” He had kept the note, then one day it had disappeared, too.
“Do you remember where you’re supposed to come when you’re ready for breakfast?” Nerva stood in the open panel wearing a gray dress over gray leggings and boots.
He shook his head. She was using her calm voice. Her eyes were placid. Had she been angry at him last night? Surely he would remember that. But if she hadn’t been angry at him, why was his head hurting? Did his head hurt, as Nerva sometimes said, because he was defective, because he came from the Reeks, where people were all bad?
“Follow along this gallery,” she said, gesturing. “Don’t be long. We don’t want to keep your uncle waiting.”
He pulled on his shoes and fastened the straps. When he walked outside he saw his suitcase, closed and upright, next to Nerva’s, standing at the foot of her bed. Were they packed again?
The pilot lady had flown away in her flitter, the pad was empty, and Keely looked at it forlornly.
He was feeling a kind of fluttering in his stomach. Something made him wish he could run back to his room and hide but if he did…if he did, what would happen? Why did he feel such dread?
Uncle Figg was already awake, as usual, standing at the balcony in his robe sipping coffee. The pavilion was mostly open to the freshness of the morning, the priest fellow sitting at a low table on a cushion, his legs crossed. He looked as if he was sleepy, a bit, the way Keely felt. The priest was drinking the dark stuff in a cup and said, “Good morning, Keely.”
“Good morning.”
“Do you remember my name?”
After a while, he nodded. “Dekkar. You’re my uncle’s friend.”
He smiled, patted Keely on the head. Nerva was watching this and pretending not to. Keely listened but never heard her use the voice, as she sometimes would when she grew irritated in a crowd. She could use it silently so that other people were never aware of it, but Keely always knew; and she appeared to be wary of exposing herself to danger for the most part. Nerva must be afraid of Dekkar. Keely felt as if he ought to remember something about that, something that had made him afraid, too, and his head started to pound again. He felt all mixed up today; he was remembering some things when he shouldn’t, and he had the feeling this was because the priest had spoken to him the day before, had touched his forehead. But if Keely said anything Nerva would make him regret it later. She was the one who made him forget, she told him so, and tried to make him forget that, too, but sometimes her tricks didn’t work so well and Keely still remembered. Like this morning. He remembered enough bits and pieces to know that his fear of her was because of something real.
“I don’t think he’s feeling very well,” Dekkar said, looking at Keely.
Uncle Figg knelt next to him, looked into his eyes. “Your eyes don’t look right, Keely. Are you in pain?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you sure?”
“My head was hurting a little,” Keely said.
“Is it still hurting now?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure he would have told me if it were anything serious,” Nerva said.
Dekkar stood behind her, watching her. Keely felt Nerva still waiting behind him. “I feel fine,” Keely said.
Uncle Figg was sitting on a cushion, reaching for a piece of fresh bread.
The side of the pavilion lay open to the morning. No one was in the house except the grown-ups and the new Hilda and Herman, who were even more grim and silent than the old ones. It would take Keely a while to invent personalities for these. The food was eggs and fish stuff that Keely hated, so Herman brought some cereal and Keely ate that. He took his cereal cup to Uncle Figg’s bed platform and sat there to look outside.
A huge creature stepped into the garden, shaped like one of Keely’s Disturber toys, one of the big bugs, but the one in the garden was much bigger than the toy, so huge it stood higher than the pavilion. When it moved there was hardly any sound at all. Behind it the trees were shaking, as if the bug had just stepped out of them, or over them. The bug monster had a black shell so dark it drank light and its tiny head swiveled back and forth, assessing the garden and the terraces leading to the house.
Another creature exactly the same as the first stepped into the grove of trees on the other side of the pavilion. That bug monster had forelegs like needles and was rubbing them together with a rasping sound.
Uncle Figg stood suddenly and looked stricken. Penelope fell off his head and collapsed to the floor, inert.
Nerva was using the voice on Dekkar and he was curling up on the floor, in pain.
The monsters in the garden were moving strangely fast, in blurs, with a sound that was sometimes like a buzzing, other times like a note of music. One of them was tearing away part of the house and the other was uprooting shrubs and trees in the garden. The sound made Keely’s head hurt. Nerva was still using the voice. The black bug things slowed and stepped one jointed leg at a time toward the pavilion; they were looking into the pavilion, their big jaws snapping from side to side.
Uncle Figg huddled on the floor next to Dekkar, not moving.
One of the monsters moved out of sight of Keely and started to wreck the garden, slashing through shrubs and trees with its forelegs, raising two more legs off the ground and using them to heave whole trees out of the ground, roots shivering and raining down dirt. Keely gaped, drawing back against the nearest wall.
“Nerva.” Uncle Figg could hardly get his breath, but she had not even used the voice on him.
“Don’t worry about the pets,” she said, indicating the monsters. “They aren’t hungry right now. They just want to play with the house and the yard a bit.”
“What’s going on?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked.
She gave him a smile that Keely recognized; he could feel the words she was using, the language, the numbers spinning in his head. Nerva spoke the same sounds as he heard in the math box, dizzying. She was focused on Dekkar, trying to control him, having a hard time. Keely felt dazed himself, flooded with memories, from last night and all the nights compounded, watching Nerva, frightened.
“You brought these things?” Uncle Figg was gasping.
“Yes, I did. And I have more friends on the way. Here we are.” She looked up, smoothing back her hair. She had an air of expectancy, like when she was talking to her friend on the communicator.
The priest, Dekkar, appeared to be twisted in the most horrid shape, and it looked as if his arms were broken; but there was something wrong with the space around him, and his image was not altogether clear. He was silent, voiceless, his face puckered in a way that made Keely queasy as he watched.
A lot of shadows flew into the room and took a form, first a funnel pouring down into a tight spiral, then a man with slick, dark hair, a wide mouth, and sharp teeth that looked like needles at the tips. He had a body like Keely’s pop-together superhero, and he wasn’t wearing anything, showing his privates like a jackass, the way Sherry used to say about naked people in the Reeks. Sherry was his sister, whom he could only remember at times and in pieces. But in the case of this toothy man, the teeth made him look hard and his eyes make him look harder, all black like buttons. “I headed south as soon as you called,” he said. He was speaking a language based on the math box sounds; Keely could understand most of it, though it made his head hurt. The size of the man-thing’s teeth made his voice sound funny.
He was watching Nerva with a strange look in his eyes.
“You’re a welcome sight,” she said, speaking the same language.
The man-thing leaned over Uncle Figg and sniffed him with flared nostrils, slowly and carefully, all over the face. Uncle Figg held still as if he were in somebody’s grip. Nerva was still using the voice on the priest, who was on the floor and looked like he was movie dead or vid dead, sprawled with his legs tangled, not breathing.
“You made good time,” said the man-thing. “Your candidate is only the third to arrive.”
“He’s a good recruit, this one,” Nerva said, running a finger through Keely’s hair. He wanted to pull away from her but knew better. “He’s up to level six on the math box.”
“Six?”
“For his age, that’s impressive.”
“The God Rao will be pleased. I know I am.”
The man-thing walked toward Nerva, touched her like he liked her. She moved toward his hand pliantly, and something sickening happened along her body, as if the skin had become unglued and her edges blurred. The look on her face was young like a girl. The man-thing looked down at Uncle Figg. Now the creature was speaking in Alenke, his accent heavy but understandable. “Which of my appetites do I satisfy first?” he asked, grinning, those needle-teeth splaying a bit, and Uncle Figg started to shake. “Do I eat you or do I have sex with my friend here? What do you think?”
After a while Uncle Figg said, in a forced voice, “Go for the sex.”
The man-thing laughed and moved toward him, mouth opening. Keely’s heart started to pound and he tried not to watch but could scarcely stop himself. The man-thing opened the mouth wide, impossibly wide and pressed those needle teeth partway into Uncle Figg’s face, all around the edges of it, that’s how wide the mouth opened. Blood poured down Uncle Figg’s face and neck. He shuddered, his legs thumping the floor. The man thing drew out the teeth again and licked the blood with a long, pointed tongue. The blood slowed then, but continued to ooze. Uncle Figg was shuddering and shivering. The man-thing drew back. “Just a taste,” he said.
