about but he knew
better than to freeze up sulkily now that her presence was an accomplished fact. Three or four times he turned around to whisper comments about their winding course and the depth to which they were descending.
They had come into the mound on a hillside, but Andris judged that they must now be far below the level of the gully in which the caravan had come to rest. They frequently passed branching side passages but these were usually empty as far as the eye could see.
The first time he caught sight of the head of a drago mite worker his heart leapt into his mouth, but it made no move towards him; it was waiting patiently for the humans to go by. The second time it happened he reminded himself sternly that in a drago mite nest one could hardly expect to avoid meeting drago mites This reminder served its initial purpose well enough, but it didn't prepare him for the sights that greeted his eyes once the tunnels through which they passed had broadened out, giving them periodic access to larger chambers.
Here there were drago mites and their parts in great profusion, but all but a few were, indeed, in parts and all but a few of those which remained whole were dead. The walls to either side of the procession were dark, not because no light-providing fungus grew there but simply because the stripped-down exoskeletons of workers and warriors were heaped up there in such profusion.
In the largest chambers of all, the piles were even higher, infinitely more macabre as they bathed in the light of vaulted ceilings. There were heaps of human bones too, including skulls by the hundred many of them not full-grown.
It was possible for the humans to walk two abreast in this region intermittently at least and there was plenty for them to talk about, although their escorts still remained stubbornly silent. Merel fell into step with Andris as often as she could, and Jacom Cerri took the opportunity to move up behind them to a position from which he could attach himself-albeit loosely to the thread of their discourse.
"Is this their charnel-house?" Merel asked Andris.
"Are we being treated to a tour of their cemetery?"
"They are prudent folk at the best of times, so Phar says," the captain put in.
"They cannibalise their own, for the meat of their flesh and the materials of their exoskeletons. I presume they treat their human recruits in like fashion."
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Phar had said the same to Andris, but he was never sure how much of what was' rumoured about these creatures was mere superstition. He noticed, though, that in spite of the warmth and moistness of the air the stink of decay was not particularly pronounced. Indeed, the air seemed cleaner than the air he had been breathing for the last few days on the exposed surface of the drago mites underworld, which reeked of rotting vegetation.
"This plague must have overwhelmed their capacity to deal with the dead,"
Andris said. They remain slaves to the habit of storing chitin and bone, but they have fallen far behind in the work of recycling their materials. Did they starve, do you think? Has the blighting of their fields wiped out such legions of workers that there is food for queens and warriors alone? "
"Look there, and there," said Cerri, pointing to empty eyeless skulls which showed unmistakable signs of battery and breakage. "According to Phar, drago mite nests fight fierce wars against one another even when resources are plentiful. What awful conflicts shortage must precipitate! Before the blight came, every slope of these hills must have been swarming with live drago mites tending their unearthly crops."
There was such fascination in the soldier's voice that Andris wondered briefly whether he really had been enthusiastic to see the inside of a drago mite nest when he volunteered to take the place of one of Ereleth's victims but it was easier to believe that he was talking so earnestly now to cover up his confusion and his fear.
Andris had every sympathy with that. i "Have the humans adopted the same cannibal habits as their allies, do you think?" Merel asked.
"Do they think of us as meat, perhaps?"
"If they too have been involved in fierce battles for survival, that massacre they carried out in the forest becomes more understandable,"
the captain said sombrely.
"I doubt that the making of treaties comes naturally to them," Andris said.
"This invitation which they have extended to us might well be a new departure for them. Let's hope that they have turned a significant corner in their history."
"If this body-armour can be worked by metal tools," Cerri mused, 'it might be a useful resource. It can hardly be incorruptible, but if they can trade it while it remains fresh . . . can that 400
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be why they have decided to
talk to us? " It was clear from his voice that he thought it unlikely; he was still talking for the sake of talking.
"I can't imagine what they want from us," Merel replied acidly, 'but I doubt if Fraxinus would sell them what metal he has for a cargo of gargantuan insect-parts. "
"I think they have taken some care to show us that they could take our metal very easily," Andris put in.
"Whatever the mound- queen wishes to say to us, it will not involve any commonplace haggling. I fear . . ."
He broke off as they reached a new place, where the winding corridor was flanked on either side by a series of short, blind tunnels and near-spherical cells. The vast majority were unoccupied, and most were very badly lit, but there were a few in which small groups of human women or drago mites were at work with many kinds of tools. Some were spinning cloth or sewing clothes, others shaping bowls and implements. Here, for the first time, they saw live human children- all girls, to judge by superficial appearances and here too they saw several new kinds of drago mites Some, Andris assumed, must simply be immature workers of the kind frequently seen on the external slopes, but others were presumably specialist artificers of various kinds whose labour was confined to the nests and which never had cause to look upon the light of day. Certainly their eyes were large and prominent, and their limbs were adapted for manipulation rather than motion. Some, he suspected, never moved from the situations in which they had been placed, their bodies resting like huge rounded pots while their spidery limbs reached out to perform various tasks upon materials ferried back and forth by general purpose workers or humans. Had all the cells been occupied, Andris realised, there would have been many thousands of individuals at work here instead of a hundred or so.
The air was full of new odours, all of them strange and some rather unpleasant--but after trekking so far across the rotting hills Andris did not find them significantly uncomfortable. Ereleth must have paused to look around, for the procession came to a momentary halt- but the mound-women must have hurried her onwards. The visitors were given no opportunity to make a detailed study of the chambers they passed by; they had to make 401
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do with
a series of brief glimpses, perpetually interrupted by the jostlings they were forced to undergo as the inhabitants of the sprawling factory tried to carry on their business regardless of the awkward presence of strangers.
Andris soon abandoned any attempt to count the many different kinds of labour in which the humans and drago mites were engaged, and had to accept that many of their endeavours were unidentifiable. It was easy enough to see what those who were working with saws and mortars were doing, and those who were finishing weapons, bottles and jars, but many were working with more mysterious agents. He looked for evidence of the customary technologies of human towns the pastes used for dissolving or cementing stone, metal and glass, and so on- but the conditions were so strange that it was very difficult to estimate the degree to which the lore of
the mound-people and their alien co-workers overlapped the lore of more familiar tribes.
Andris did, however, observe two striking differences which made the activity of the mound-people different from all the other human cultures he had encountered in his travels. Firstly, they worked entirely without the aid of fire; he saw no sign whatsoever of cooking or smithing. Secondly, they were remarkably parsimonious in their use of speech; although they did talk to one another they seemed to do so in painstakingly utilitarian fashion. There was no evidence of any idle chatter, nothing resembling gossip. They were not incurious about the strangers' filing through their workplace- hardly anyone failed to look up to watch them pass but they never seemed to turn to one another to say: "Look at the giant!" or
"What strange clothing they wear!" or
"Isn't that one pale!" or any of the thousand other things that any other human crowd would have wanted to jabber about.
"Do you suppose they murder all their male children?" Cerri asked.
"Or do they have some trick which assures that ninety-nine births in a hundred are girls?"
"Perhaps the mound-women only give birth to girls, as giants do,"
Andris said.
"But the fact that they called us drones suggests that they have males somewhere. If two is the number which they naturally associate with a queen, perhaps two is all they have."
"If one queen is enough," Merel commented, 'then one drone 402
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ought to
suffice but if all the mound-women can bear children, two would surely be inadequate. "
"I've met men who'd be glad to volunteer, were the latter the case,"
Cerri observed drily.
It was a very feeble joke, but Andris recognised that there was a certain courage in being able to make any jokes at all in such gloomy and alien surroundings.
"They're not nearly pretty enough," he responded.
"And the fact that they talk so little doesn't necessary imply that they're not inclined to shrewishness. No sane man would ever volunteer to serve as stallion to such a herd as this."
"Some of these captive drago mites have such clever hands I wonder they need human assistants at all," Merel said, pointedly changing the subject.
"I can't see a single human doing anything that a drago mite couldn't do as well or better."
Andris looked for evidence to contradict this allegation, but could find no certain falsification before they passed yet again into a narrower and gloomier corridor which wound so tightly around and so steeply down that it reminded Andris of a spiral stair. There were fewer side-branches here, and when it delivered them into another chamber of some considerable dimensions he thought at first that it might be completely sealed. He realised quickly enough, however, that here were doors: a phenomenon he had not knowingly encountered before in the drago mites realm.
The doors were not hinged, like those human used; they were like vertically set mouths or drago mites eyelids or he couldn't help making the comparison, although it embarrassed him to think of it women's sexual parts. In response to some signal which he could not detect, lenticular slits opened up in the walls to allow the newcomers to pass through. The whole party passed through four such apertures, each of which closed behind them.
Now, Andris thought, we are most certainly prisoners, and helpless ones, closed off from the outside world by barriers we cannot break.
He knew, though, that it was absurd to think that they had not been prisoners until such solid barriers had been placed across their exit route. If nothing else, they were utterly and hopelessly lost; they had not the slightest chance of remembering the route they had followed had they been required to retrace their steps.
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The corridor through which they now moved was the warmest so far, and Andrisifeund himself sweating freely. The air itself seemed wet and vaporously hazy, and the odours it carried, though less complicated than those in the factory-tunnels, were somehow more cloying. The walls were still as firm to the touch as they had been higher up, but they were made of some exoskeletal substance very similar to that with which the drago mites were armoured, and they were decorated with spirals and whorls very similar to those which ornamented certain parts of the drago mites own bodies. The patches of luminous fungus were much more precisely arranged here, in a pattern which might have been perfectly regular had it not been for the fact that some were missing and others broken. Andris had wondered before whether the gloom had been unnaturally deepened by the effect of disease upon the light-producing organisms; now he became certain of it. The blight which had devastated the surfaces of the mounds had also penetrated their most intimate depths.
The procession stopped again, its ranks closing up in spite of the relative narrowness of the tunnel. The mound-woman who had been walking in front of Andris all this time abruptly turned and said: "Drones are to be quartered here."
Where? Andris thought, just as another aperture gaped open in the wall, in response to some invisible stimulus. The mound- woman indicated that he should step through it, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do so nov that there was no one to give him a lead. It seemed too much like stepping into the living maw of some avid monster. Attention was deflected from his own hesitation, however, by Merel's protesting voice.
"You can't separate us!" she said.
"I'm staying with Andris."
"No," the mound-woman said flatly.
"Drones here. Warriors have separate quarters. It is the way. No harm will come to you."
"We don't operate like that," Merel said pugnaciously.
"We don't have drones and warriors and a dozen different kinds of workers.
We just have men and women, sometimes coupled together. Andris and I are together. Captain Cerri can share with the giant."
"Thank you," muttered the soldier but he made no protest of his own.
"Do as she says, both of you!" The command came from Ereleth, who had elbowed her way back from the front of the column. She 404
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fixed Mere!
with a stern gaze and added: "You weren't asked to come, girl, but now you're here you'll do as you're told."
"It's all right," Andris assured his cousin.
"If they meant to do us harm they'd have done it long ago. While we're here, I guess the captain and I are drones and you're a warrior."
When he said all that, it became much easier for him to step through the un welcoming threshold. Cerri followed him meekly through. The 'lips' closed behind the soldier, sealing the two of them into an elliptical space which was some two and a half mets high and broad, and four long.
The light was dim but tolerable. There were two parallel ledges which were ominously reminscent of pallets in a cell. Opposite the point where they had come in was another ledge, set much higher, bearing two bowls and spoons.
Beneath it there was a dark hole set at an angle, at a height adapted for a normally-sized man to lean against in a half-sitting position.
"I hope that's what it looks like," Andris said.
"I really should have gone before we set out." He peered into the hole uncertainly for a moment or two before shrugging his shoulders and getting on with it. The sound of the urine hitting the wall of the conduit must have brought on a similar urge in his companion, who was quick to follow as soon as he had finished and moved aside.
"Isn't it uncanny," Andris observed, 'how prison cells always look like prison cells no matter where you are. Even in this rotting underworld, where the people think they're ants, the facilities are the same as they always are. I expect the hole has to be set at a different angle in a
warrior's cell, though. That one's definitely just for drones. I'm sure I can feel Ereleth's worm wriggling around in my entrails. Do you suppose we'll get fed soon? " Now he was talking for the sake of talking, to stave off full awareness of the awfulness of their predicament.
"A drink would be welcome," the captain replied, taking over readily enough.
"Even that disgusting firewater the dark landers brew. I have a feeling that we're superfluous to this whole business. I suspect that drones might not get involved in serious discussions here.
Perhaps we're only here to make Ereleth seem more of a queen than she actually is. "
"That's fine by me," Andris said, sitting down on the ledge where he was presumably supposed to sleep, 'provided that she can 405
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handle matters to
hgr own satisfaction. If she can get the princess back, she just might decide to poisbn this damned worm. Checuti must be sweating, up there with all those warriors, not knowing whether Ereleth will ever come back. In a way, it'll be worse for him than for us. You weren't really doing anyone a favour, you know, when you put your hand up that way. Not that I don't appreciate the attempt, mind but it really was a wild move. "
"Maybe waiting up above would be worse," Cerri said defensively.
"Maybe I was just being selfish." He didn't sound as if he meant it, and he certainly didn't expect to be believed.
"Except that you don't have a worm which needs regular doses of contraceptive from Ereleth," Andris pointed out.
"If you were up above you wouldn't necessarily give a damn whether Ereleth or I ever came up again and you'd have a chance of evading the warriors even if they did attack, simply because a horse can outrun a drago mite What's the betting that your sergeant and the other guardsmen are making contingency plans right now? "
"He's not my sergeant any more," Cerri replied distantly. He was pretending to be past caring but Andris wasn't fooled.
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