by Alex Raizman
Light, what does that mean? Surely she couldn’t be implying that…not when she looked like…
His mind shying away from the image, Nicandros was relieved when they reached the top of the bell tower. Relief that was quickly quashed when he saw the cocoon.
It was open. Poz had already emerged. That would be a relief normally, but not with what he saw. The Underfolks’ cocoons would have traces of what flesh they consumed. Dark black fur would cover it for Ratflesh, thick grey for Wolfflesh, scales for Lizardflesh…he’d seen a variety. But this…
“It looks like human skin,” Ashliel said.
“Because it is,” Nicandros said in a hoarse whisper. “Ashliel…Poz has eaten Manflesh.”
Ashliel scoffed. “So he’ll get, what, superior throwing ability and the gift of sweating? He’s already intelligent, so it can’t be-’
“Damn it to Shadow, girl, that’s exactly the problem. He doesn’t just become as smart as a human. He adds human intelligence to his own.”
Ashliel cocked her head in frustration. It was so close to Tythel’s gesture of confusion, it was off-putting. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Nicandros said, “we’re all in terrible danger.”
“We’ve found him!” said a voice over the songstones in their ears. “We’ve got him cornered in a cellar. Moving in.”
“No, damn you!” Nicandros shouted. “Fall back. Fall back!”
“Belay that,” Ashliel said. “Move in and eliminate.” She glared at Nicandros. “You do not give orders here.”
Before Nicandros could even begin to explain, screams filled the songstones. Ashliel froze in shock. “Sometimes, it’s best to put your pride aside,” Nicandros said.
“Hello,” said a voice through the Songstone. It wasn’t the person who had been speaking earlier. This voice was Poz’s, but it was smooth and cold in a way Poz had almost never been. “Right now, I’m certain you’ve found my cocoon and Nicandros has told you what that means. You’re likely formulating a variety of plans to try and detain me. I look forward to your efforts. Based on available variables, there is a eighty-seven point three percent chance that those efforts will fail.”
“I have an army here. You are one man,” Ashliel hissed.
“Correct. That is why it is not a one hundred percent chance of failure.”
“I am a god,” Ashliel responded.
“And I am the smartest being presently on this world. What is a god to a genius? I suppose we will learn. My hypothesis is that you will fail. I look forward to testing that hypothesis. It should yield some interesting data.”
“You-” Ashliel started to say, but Poz cut off his end of the connection. Ashliel shot Nicandros a look. “Well? This is your area. What do we do?”
Nicandros shook his head. “Hope for the twelve point seven percent, I think. Let’s get on the ground. We’re in for an ugly time.”
Suddenly, keeping Poz alive seemed much less important.
Nicandros was much more concerned with surviving to the next sunrise.
***
Poz stood up from where he’d dropped the five men that had found him, sliding the Songstone into his pouch. What if pouches were woven directly into trousers? A sort of self-contained pocket so they could not be cut by sneak thieves? Perhaps sealed by some sort of abrasive cloth – I shall have to investigate the properties of brambles to see if there’s a way to replicate. Poz stepped over a bleeding man. The man would die in another five minutes and thirty five seconds. Poz could end the man’s suffering immediately with a quick strike of the heel to the bridge of the man’s nose, but such an effort didn’t seem important. What seemed far more important, at the moment, was an observation that the blood spatters from the earlier slaughter had produced a fractal pattern on one portion of the wall which implied some interesting things about the air currents in this room.
Manflesh. It was foolish to act like he needed to be reminded of what this state was, but he still felt the need to do so. Manflesh was forbidden for several reasons. The first and foremost of them was, of course, the related decrease in empathy that came with the heightened intellectual state. Most of the Underfolk thought that this decrease was related directly to some inherent property of mankind, an implication that humanity was by its very nature more cruel than any other animal. Having experienced it, however, Poz disagreed with that assessment.
The truth was, suffering was not inherently interesting, and mankind was an inherently curious species. When added to the Underfolks own curiosity and intelligence, things like suffering just had trouble holding Poz’s attention, not when there were so many more interesting things to hold his attention. The interplay of blood on a wall. The theoretical possibilities of sticky fabric on pouches woven into trousers. And, of course, his survival odds over the next twelve hours and thirty minutes.
That timeframe was important. Based on his observation of Alohym ship movements and their proximity, it was the minimum amount of time before a True Alohym arrived with a new deployment of soldiers. Despite his earlier boast to whomever was on the other end of that Songstone, Poz couldn’t actually calculate them that precisely. Boasting that he could however, had a high probability of unsettling has adversary enough into to believe him, especially because he’d convinced Nicandros of that possibility during his last time in Manflesh. However, Poz was quite certain that his odds of survival dropped below twenty-five percent if he was still here when reinforcements arrived.
That timeframe was also important for the second, lesser known reason Manflesh was forbidden to the Underfolk. The Underfolk had evolved to adapt the traits of any animal life they consumed. They had not adapted alongside humans, dragons, or Sylvani. Now that Poz was again in Manflesh, he’d come to the same realization he had during his last bout in this form. Increased intelligence had a byproduct – increased energy required. The Underfolk brain had not adapted to handle the temperatures required to sustain this level of intelligence. In twelve hours and thirty minutes, he would begin to experience critical internal organ failure as the proteins in his body denatured from the heat. In sixteen hours that organ failure would result in permanent damage. In twenty, he would be comatose, and two hours after that he would only be producing heat from the various organisms generating it as they caused his body to undergo decomposition.
I think there must be another actor to produce those heats besides insects. The ‘invisible demon’ theory of hygiene has some merit, although invisibility is unlikely. Perhaps they are as small to insects as insects are to us, and thus invisible to our eyes. Also, you’ve now wasted twelve minutes in contemplation, which is decreasing your survival chances further.
Poz shook his head. That was another problem of Manflesh. The difficulty in prioritizing focus. Objectively, his survival was more important than the exact mechanisms of decomposition, especially since the decomposition would only directly impact his existence if he failed to survive. Yet part of him was imagining these too-small-to be seen creatures, ones constructed of simple proteins that could be controlled through the same heating mechanism that would slowly turn his brain into a liquid over the next several hours if he failed to shift out of Manflesh before the heat became overwhelming.
Also, while he was thinking this, his hands had taken out the songstone and began to open it. Another subconscious action, trying to tinker with an Alohym device that was millennia more advanced than anything humanity, Sylvani, or dragonkind had managed to produce. Or is it? The Sylvani have shown remarkable adaptability to Alohym technology, perhaps it isn’t as unfamiliar as you previously believed. They were the ones to create the first arccells after all, and Sylvani physiology isn’t quite like any native to Alith, sharing more in common with deep sea life than it does with anything of terrestrial origin. Given that, there’s a high probability the Sylvani are, like the Alohym, beings not native to this world. Therefore it would follow that…
That train of thought was derailed by two simultaneous occurre
nces. The first was that he’d managed to work the back off the Songstone. The second was that three Alohym soldiers burst into the cellar where he’d taken refuge.
Human reaction time allowed them to respond to external stimuli in about a quarter of a second. Underfolk reaction time allowed for a reaction within a similar window of time. When those were amplified by each other, Poz was able to react in a quarter of a quarter of that time. Therefore, while the impending attackers were still taking in the carnage they were witnessing, Poz had already identified their presence, the threat the likely posed, and how swiftly he would have to react to be able to survive before they could begin opening fire with their unlight arcwands. At the same time they were raising their arcwands, Poz was calculating trajectories and force applications. Because, in addition to being exceedingly clever, there was one other things that humans could do better than any other native-born species of this world.
They could throw.
Poz whipped the back of the songstone between two fingers and let the disc fly directly towards the throat of the leading Alohym soldier. It crushed his trachea with a sickening squash of flesh. The man’s hands were flying towards his neck, but Poz was already moving out of the most statistically likely path of the remaining two’s arcwand fire. Their bolts followed their predicted path, bisecting the air Poz had just vacated, and his hand lashed up to snatch the disc out of the air on the rebound. He dropped into a crouch to avoid the next two bolts and hurled the disc again, this time aiming for the bridge of the soldier’s nasal cavity. It cracked the delicate bones there upon impact, and Poz followed its path to jam the heel of his hand into the base of the soldier’s nose. Shattered bones were driven directly into the cranium. For this particular soldier, death would be instant.
The third soldier took a step back, as Poz had predicted, and his action followed Poz’s expected models – to whit, he tripped over the corpse of a man Poz had stepped over earlier, falling on his back. Poz was able to catch the disc from the songstone again and hurled it forwards. It struck the man in his crotch, forcing him to reflexively remove his hands from his arcwand and bring them to the injured member.
Which meant there was nothing to protect him when Poz brought his heel down on the man’s face.
Seventeen seconds. I probably could have reduced that by three seconds if I’d dipped to the left instead of the right to reduce the distance between myself and the third man.
Poz mentally noted that last action and began to look at the exposed back of the Songstone. Metal cables, lenses, and an unlight arccell.
Perfect. I think I can survive what comes next.
And then there was the egg. It had taken Poz exactly three minutes upon emerging from his cocoon to collate the available data and figure out exactly what the egg’s primary purpose was, what the Alohym wanted to do with it, and why it was both essentially it be kept out of the Alohym’s hands without being destroyed.
However, if it came down to it, the egg’s destruction was preferable to Alohym acquisition.
He’d just have to make sure it didn’t come to that.
Whistling a tune he was composing on the fly, Poz began to work on the back of the Songstone.
Chapter 57
The Songstone sprung to life again in Ashliel’s hands. What came out wasn’t the normal speech Nicandros was used to, but the clipped mishmash language the Alohym had taught their human soldiers. It was where terms like ‘flath’ had originated. The speech was terrible for conveying complex information, abstract ideas, or anything resembling artistry. It was, however, ideally suited for relaying hard data concisely.
In this case, it took the speaker on the other end just fifteen words to inform Ashliel that another squad, a group of three men, had fallen off the song in the same general area as the last five. Squads were preparing to cut off the streets leading into and out of that area, and the soldiers were already starting to search the homes along those blocks to try and flush out the aggressor. Skimmers were en route to begin patrolling the skies above the block to locate any sign of Poz from above.
“He is just a single being, yet he’s already killed eight. This is not some half-dragon or man clad in plate. It is a cave-sucking grub-eater.” The words came out in a hiss from Ashliel’s mandibles, and she whirled to face Nicandros. “Stars forsake us, what is happening?”
Nicandros didn’t look at her directly, instead scanning the ground around them. They were in a courtyard, and with the break of dawn people had begun to spill out into the streets. They all gave the Alohym soldiers a wide berth and curious gazes, but they were still present. Edgeminster was a large enough city that the presence of this many soldiers was not cause for alarm – at least, not yet. “We have to get the civilians out of here,” he growled.
“That’s impossible,” Ashliel said with a dismissive wave of her hands. “A city this large, at this time of day? We’d have to put the entire place under Quarantine.”
“Then put it on Quarantine,” Nicandros said.
“Nicandros, I know you’re new to our way of doing things, but right now no one can leave the city. These people might hide your little friend, but he cannot escape the city. The moment we enforce quarantine, we are going to be faced with possible riots. He could use the chaos to escape – and more importantly, we’ll lose our biggest advantage.”
Nicandros’s eyebrows furrowed. “Advantage?”
Ashliel nodded. “Surely you’ve noticed. Your resistance – apologies, your former resistance – relies heavily on support from the populace. Whenever their action results in the deaths of civilians, it reflects poorly on them. Their allies begin to withdraw. Their support begins to dry up. In the meantime, if we enforce quarantine, we are labeled as tyrants and dictators. By allowing the population to engage in normal activities, we are seen as the reasonable actors. If people die…it doesn’t make us look like the antagonistic force.”
If Ashliel had not been so potentially dangerous, if Nicandros hadn’t needed her so badly, he would have tried to drive his blade through her chest just for that sentence. “So you put people’s lives at risk to win a popularity contest?”
“Yes.” The word was as blunt as it was direct. “Revolutions aren’t won on battlefields or in back alleys. They are won in the hearts and minds of the people. And, by the same token, that’s also where they are lost.”
Nicandros clenched his fingers into fists for a moment, then forced himself to loosen them. “Girl, the normal rules don’t apply here. Poz has eaten Manflesh. He was not exaggerating when he said he was the smartest being on the planet currently. The more things there are out there for him to work with, the greater the risk to us. He can exploit any loophole we leave him to grab ahold of. If he has to, he’ll kill thousands of people – morality means very little to him right now.”
“I’m not interested in questions of morality,” Ashliel buzzed the words harshly. “Nicandros, it’s very important you pay attention here. These people are disposable. Our soldiers are slightly less disposable. The only three beings that matter, in this entire city, are myself, you, and the Underfolk. There are millions to replace even the thousands that might die here. This isn’t a police action to protect the citizens, and I swear by my Father’s Holy name, if I must burn every living being in this city to ash to achieve victory, I’ll do so with a smile and a laugh.”
Nicandros did look at her now, fixing her with a glare that carried the full force of his rage. “You…”
“Want nothing more than you do, Nicandros,” Ashliel said, her voice now smooth as silk. “Tomah returned to us. We don’t get what we want if the Underfolk escapes. What was it you said when you were brought before my father?” One of her segmented fingers came up to her chin, and she tapped the space between her mandibles as if in thought. Something in the motion told Nicandros it was a mockery, that she knew exactly what he had said and was merely trying to score some kind of petty point. “I believe it was…yes. ‘Burn the resistance, burn the prince
ss, burn my very soul to ash if you have to. I know you offered her father if she served you. Give me back my son, and I’ll be your creature until my last breath.’ Does that sound familiar?”
Nicandros turned away and began to scan the crowd again. The words hit him like a blow to the stomach. He’d been drunk at the time, drunk and desperate with grief and fury. He hadn’t even known it was Daemryon he’d been speaking to – just that he’d been hauled before an Alohym and thrown on the floor. He’d expected death, and had intended to go out with one final shout of defiance…but then he’d remembered the offer the Alohym had made to Tythel. The rebirth of Karjon. If they could give her that, couldn’t they also give him the same?
