by Jim Grimsley
“You can’t make it any different by brooding about it,” Dekkar said, stepping up behind him.
“Where’s Keely?”
“In your bed. I took Nerva to her room. She won’t be bothering anyone.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Listen to her. Until I know what she knows.”
Figg laughed, softly. “I told you I could spot you for what you were. The fallen Drune is not so fallen after all.”
“I’d never have blown my cover if it could have been helped, but I draw the line at letting monsters eat my friends.”
“I’ve never been so frightened. I didn’t know a person could feel so much fear.” He looked at Dekkar, the man’s hard, dark eyes. “So what are you, really?”
Dekkar had a face that could be described as neither gentle nor harsh; he had mastered a kind of blank draw on all expressions. This was one of his charms for Figg, who was very old and easily wearied by the shallow and easy. “I work for the over-mage in Iraen.”
“You work for Great Irion? I met you all those years ago when I traveled to Iraen and tried to meet him.”
Dekkar laughed at the memory. “Yes. I remember. You know, in all these years, I’ve never asked you what possessed you to think you could simply walk into Iraen and ask for an interview with Great Irion himself.”
Figg shrugged. “I heard a story once when I was a child, just after the Conquest. When my mother brought me to your country for my first visit. As the story goes, any villager there could ask for a meeting with Great Irion once in his or her life, once upon a time. I don’t know whether it’s true or not.”
Dekkar smiled. “I wouldn’t know. I spent most of my time in the deep south. That would be a custom for the northerners, maybe.”
“But you know him. Irion.”
Dekkar shook his head. “Not well. I work for him, that’s all.”
“You’ve never even given me a hint in all these years.”
“It would limit my usefulness for people to know.”
“Then why tell me now?”
His face went into its mode of tight control and he turned aside from the wreckage of the pond to view the crater where the mantis had collapsed and died. “Who knows how much longer I’ll be of any use to anybody?” he asked. “I’m in the mood for the truth, I suppose. This crater is getting bigger. What is this black sand? Don’t touch it.”
“My God, what a foul smell.”
“This thing turns into something else when it dies.”
“I’ll have to have someone dig it out of the ground when I rebuild, I suppose.”
Dekkar looked at him and shook his head. “This crater is still getting bigger, Figg. There may be more to dig out than you’re reckoning.”
He knelt and saw what Dekkar meant. The layer of black was seething, eating the topsoil and the remains of the garden and creeping up one of the support posts that remained after the mantis demolished the pavilion.
“You and Keely ought to get ready to come with us,” Dekkar said.
“What?”
“Kitra and I will be leaving very soon. I spoke to her a few moments ago. She should be close to the farm by now. You should come with us.”
He was looking around in a daze. He knew that what Dekkar was saying ought to make more sense than it did. “I can’t think right now.”
“Figg, they’ll be back for Keely if he stays. If you come with me I can at least try to take care of you both.”
“You want us to go with you to Greenwood?”
“I don’t see what choice you have. These monsters are all over Aramen, now, and if they’re looking for Keely using the kind of tricks I know, they’ll find him wherever he is. If you stay with me there’s a chance I can protect you until this is over, one way or the other.”
“Those things are in Greenwood,” Figg said, shuddering.
“Those things are everywhere. As far as we know, they may be on Senal, too. Or maybe they’re the reason Great Irion closed the Anilyn Gate.”
Figg shook his head. “The God Rao. Who is that?”
“I don’t know. But I do know he’s north of us, and I do know he can’t be allowed to stay here. I have to go north, I don’t have a choice.”
The puncture wounds on Figg’s face were sore and aching suddenly. He almost reached fingertips for the tenderest, which felt as if it was oozing, but he forced himself to resist the impulse. “I was so frightened of that thing that tried to eat me. I don’t want to go.”
“Those wounds will make you sick. I don’t have time to purge them now.” Dekkar paused. “If I leave you here, do you really want to face one of those monsters again, alone?”
A flitter was crossing the distant hills. It was only then that Figg looked through the gash in the forest near the house, saw the ruined fields below, the smashed wreckage of the distant management building. The destruction had the look of caprice; some of the buildings in the distant management campus were intact, others smashed to bits, a couple burning slowly, sending up thin trails of smoke.
His heart sunk low. “We’ll go. Are we taking the Nerva-thing, the woman?”
“Yes. We have to. I want to know what she knows when we’re inside the forest. I want to know what she is.”
“Keely will be terrified.”
“I hope not. I mean to have a long talk with her now. If I’m successful, she won’t look much like herself when I’m done.”
Figg felt a kind of breaking inside, a rush of emotion like those he had known when he was young. The ache of it shook him. “Can you tell what exactly she did to Keely?”
“No. And I can’t tell if it’s over.”
“But I thought—”
“She faked his regression. She used it to hide what she was teaching him.”
“Right under my nose. What was she teaching?”
“True language,” Dekkar said, quietly. “The kind she was using to control you all. He was learning it from the math box he talked about. Were you listening then?”
Figg nodded. He had heard Keely dimly, through his own immense terror.
“It’s a teaching device like the ones we use in Prin universities. I have it from her bag. If my suspicions are correct, he’s well on the way to becoming a novice operator of a true language. He won’t forget what he knows unless I make him, and I think he’s been tampered with enough.”
Figg shook his head. “I can’t believe what I’ve done.”
“I don’t think you should blame yourself.”
“I thought I’d rescued him from poverty, and what I brought him into may be worse.”
“She engineered most of this, Figg. She lured both of you into it. You weren’t acting out of choice. There’s no question that what she did to Keely hurt him badly. You can feel his terror. But she’d have had control of him one way or the other, Figg, with or without you. She’s like me: she’s single-minded. When she sets herself to a purpose, she marches to it.”
Figg tried to listen. He was thinking of himself more than Keely. There was a need he had to do right for Keely that had nothing to do with the child at all. But that wouldn’t work anymore. “All right. I’ll do whatever I can to protect him.”
“We’ll have to watch him. He may need the math box again—he may have no choice but to keep studying it. And you have to be aware of something, too. We’re taking him to the place where this Rao creature wants him to go. I have to go to Greenwood because that’s where Rao is, and I have to come as close to Rao as I can.”
Figg stood in the ruins of his house, the wreckage of his new life, looking Dekkar in the eye. “Things can’t get much worse.”
“Don’t tell yourself anything of the sort. Things can get much worse for all of us.” He started to say more, then shook his head. “Let me go and do my job with this Nerva creature. Keep your eye on Keely while I’m in there.”
Kitra had landed the flitter and came into sight at the edge of the garden. She was walking toward what was left of the h
ouse with a look of awe. Someone followed her, a tall, broad-shouldered man with an easy swagger. He studied the wreck of the garden and the many piles of lumber and paper that had once been a house, his expression, if anything, bemused.
Kitra pulled off her sunglasses and looked at Figg, and he was conscious of the swellings on his face, their tenderness. “What happened?”
He told her quickly and briefly. Her companion was Pel Orthen, a riverboat pilot from Jarutan, an Erejhen, a strapping fellow with long red-brown hair and a heavy, square chin who looked more like an actor playing a rugged river navigator than like the actual article. Figg showed them the mantis that had survived, deactivated in the backyard, folded into a tight knot of needle-sharp legs and razor-sharp mandibles and teeth, looking so lethal that they studied it only from the distant balcony. “I’ve seen bits and pieces of those things in the news-frames,” Pel said, his voice surprisingly musical and mellow for his bulk. “How big is it when it’s standing up?”
Figg shuddered. “Big. Too big to think about.”
“What killed the other one?”
“Dekkar.”
Kitra looked surprised. “Then I suppose his secret is out.”
“Which is?” Pel asked.
“That he’s not really an ex-Drune at all.”
Figg almost said, “No, he works for Great Irion,” but caught himself and let her think what she wanted.
They had paused near the gallery that led to Nerva’s room, the last of the pavilions standing other than Figg’s central one. Figg could hear nothing of what was going on inside the paper walls. He had asked the Herman to pack him a bag and went to the room to check to make sure the drone had not lapsed into stillness between tasks, as sometimes happened. The Hilda was sitting next to Keely on the bed. Zhengzhou was on the balcony outside, wary eye on the pile of the deactivated mantis and on Keely, for whom she had a liking. Keely had his pale hand on the Hilda’s artificially warmed skin and lay there with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and evenly. Penelope sat in his lap, still stunned by whatever Nerva had done to deactivate her. She was a cyborg with an enhanced brain for a spider and without emotion, as Figg knew; but he would have sworn she was taking comfort in her nearness to Keely, who petted her back tenderly at moments.
“How will we travel?” Figg asked.
Kitra looked at him in surprise. “You’re coming?”
“We have to. They’ll send another one of those things after Keely if we stay here.”
She frowned. Pel stood with his arms folded.
Figg said, “I’ll pay. Whatever it takes.”
“It’s a big boat,” Pel said, scratching his head, looking indifferent.
“You do know how far we’re going?”
“Yes,” Figg said, feeling suddenly weary, wishing for nothing better than to crawl into an empty bed himself, to lie there peacefully wrapped in some nice sedative. “There’s no help for it.”
Kitra still looked suspicious. She was thinking about her brother, most likely, about her chances to find him and how this new angle figured into that. He studied her without much interest. “I’ll talk to Dekkar,” she said.
You do that, he thought, and felt unpleasant. One more moment passed in which the clear morning settled into its deceptive calm.
Suddenly the roof of Nerva’s pavilion exploded upward and shade-birds flew out of it in a whirling funnel. The sound was enormous, like a charge of dynamite, and the dark things were shrieking, changing color, some deep hues of red, a few a dirty white, shimmering from hue to hue.
Zhengzhou leapt into the pavilion at Keely’s back, and the Hilda hovered over him as if she would ward off any attack with her own body.
Keely kept still as if he heard and saw nothing.
The walls of the pavilion burst outward in a boom, revealing Dekkar defending himself at the center of the platform. Figg watched, heart thumping, as the flock of black-wings dived at Dekkar over and over, beating him to his knees. His face and arms and torso were covered with blood. He bent for a while and then straightened, and the things lashed at him and sometimes appeared to slice into him or fly through him; the funnel convulsed and shook. The flock collapsed hard into its center and took form again, a sharp crack like a whip and then a shriek from the thing that was standing in front of Dekkar. His bleeding had stopped and most of the bloodstains had vanished, but he looked a fright. He was breathing evenly and calmly, and the thing in front of him—the Nerva-thing—resolved to a form that looked like a middlewam, almost; there was no means to determine gender, and it had a mouth full of the same teeth as the man-thing. The Nerva-thing fell to the floor and lay there. Dekkar looked over his shoulder, curiously, at Pel Orthen. Some charge passed between them, as if they knew each other. “I need rope or cord for a binding.”
Pel registered only a moment of surprise, then nodded his head once, sharply, and loped off through the pavilion and into the garden.
Dekkar was still standing over the Nerva-thing. “We have come to an understanding, she and I. She’s mute. She’s forgotten her own language and she can’t speak ours without reeducation into this form of hers.”
“My God under heaven,” Kitra said.
“Hello, Kitra. You made good time.”
“I see you weren’t joking.”
He blinked mildly, inclining his head. “We’ll need to head north immediately. We’ll have more passengers.”
“We can get eight in the flitter,” Kitra said. There was no trace of argument in her at the moment, no doubt due to her having seen the Nerva-thing’s mouth. Watching the creature stretch its mouth and flex its teeth made Figg’s face ache more. “Nine, if someone holds Keely.”
Figg said, “We’re only seven, eight if I take the Hilda.”
Kitra looked at him sharply.
“For Keely,” he said. “The Hilda at home could always calm him down.”
“I don’t think he’ll be afraid of this thing, not as much as he was of Nerva,” Dekkar said. “The river man and I will bind it and put something over that ghastly mouth. At any rate, we can tell him truthfully that Nerva is gone.”
“This was her?” Kitra asked, aghast.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know whether I want to travel with that thing.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Dekkar said. “I can’t release her, and I won’t leave her here—she’ll only escape and come after us. I won’t kill her until I know as much as she can teach me.”
“How do you propose to make her do that?”
Figg felt as if he was overhearing an argument he shouldn’t. Dekkar looked at Kitra sharply. “You don’t get a choice in this. Get that through your head. Go or stay.” He wiped the blood from his face. Pel was loping across the garden with a cloth bag. He walked coolly onto the platform that was all that remained of the pavilion and knelt and started to bind the Nerva-thing, starting with a complex of knots to keep the jaw closed. Then a network of cords to bind the hands at the back, not a single loop of cord but an elaborate weave, knotted carefully to allow circulation but still to bind her, without much other regard to comfort. Dekkar touched each of the knots as Pel worked, fingers moving quickly.
“I need to clean up a bit and then I’m ready to leave,” Dekkar said, when they were done.
“I’ll watch this pretty bit of monster,” said Pel, and sat in a chair near the bundle of the Nerva-thing.
Figg was surprised to note their ease with one another. He had never thought of Dekkar as having any kind of sexuality.
“We should load whatever we’re taking in the flitter starting now.” Kitra shook her head as if to free herself of what she had seen and moved off the balcony with a determined step. “I need to get a clearance for a route to Dembut.”
Penelope climbed out of Keely’s lap onto the balcony railing, taking in the sun. Figg stood near the big spider and stroked her back fur with his fingertips. She clambered onto his head and flattened herself there, slipped her legs into their sock
ets, embedded in his skin. The contact gave Figg a low rush of pleasure, a sense of well-being that soothed him. His hair was false anyway and adjusted itself to the spider-cyborg’s contours. He’d paid a fortune to the capilliologist for this particular kind of wish-configurable hair.
He woke Keely and sent him to the car with the Hilda and the bags. Pel and Kitra were loading the Nerva-creature into the storage compartment of the flitter, at the back, where Pel would keep an eye on it.
The black pit where the garden used to be was still growing, getting deeper, spreading along the wreckage of the nearby pavilion and up the remains of several trees. It was as if a shadow were eating the garden and house.
Dekkar went out to the garden once he’d cleaned himself up, stood beside the heap that was the shadow mantis, unfolded it, let it stretch those needle-limbs, and sent it gliding silently down the hillside.
Figg waited for him by the car, watching.
“Did you think to pack food?” Dekkar asked, walking up as the mantis moved easily down the road. “I never ate much of my breakfast.”
“Yes. Herman put together what we had.”
“We’ll get real supplies in Dembut,” Kitra said, settling into the pilot’s harness. “Everyone in?”
Keely sat in front next to Kitra, holding himself stiff as if he was still frightened; Figg had hoped it would make the boy happy to sit next to the pilot. Keely looked back at Figg and tried to smile. “You like your seat, son?” Figg asked.
Keely nodded. He looked his age again, the younger behavior completely vanished. His calm eyes resembled those of his sister, whom Figg had briefly known.
The flitter sealed itself, rose, and swooped in a curve over the shadow mantis, which lifted its head momentarily as it slid into the river David and disappeared from sight.
“What did you tell that bug-thing to do?” Figg asked. He had slid into his own seat next to the Hilda, who was sitting still as usual, running a protocol that enabled her to simulate looking out the window.
Dekkar had clambered to the back pair of seats with Zhengzhou; beyond them was Pel in the cargo space beside the Nerva-thing, still motionless. “I told it to wait for us in Greenwood.” Dekkar shrugged. “We’ll see. If my control doesn’t hold, it’s just one more of the monsters to deal with later. If it actually comes to Greenwood and waits for us, we may find some use for it.”
