"There is no time to spare," the mound-queen said.
"The drago mite queen is dying, and the nest with her. The subject nests are already dead, and all their nearer neighbours, but the race to occupy the Corridors of Power is begun and the invaders will come soon enough.
An empire is falling. You understand what that means, I think. "
"We understand," Ereleth agreed.
Perhaps we do, Lucrezia thought. IfXandna's centre fell-if the city wall broke and the citadel crumbled the fringes of the empire would simply fall apart, becoming independent states again. Would-be conquerors would rush inwards from all directions, vying for the privilege of taking the centre, the heart from which a new empire might grow. However bizarre this empire of men and drago mites is, its Corridors of Power must likewise have a heart .
. . and when the heart fails, chaos comes with a headlong rush.
"We could take your wagons and your horses," the mound- queen said.
"We could kill you all, if we were inclined to do so.
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That is not what we desire or intend. We shall take you safely through the hills, guarding you against the warriors of other nests, if you will help us thereafter. We will need to carry a number of eggs, and certain other materials, which are not your concern. "
"We agree to that," Ereleth said promptly, 'but we must go south and not north. We could not guarantee your safety in the Forest of Absolute Night. "
"Could you guarantee our safety in the Soursweet Marshes?" the mound-queen demanded impatiently.
"They extend at least as far as the forest, and they are no less dangerous.
We can no longer afford to care which way we go, as long as we go but we need more from you than promises which you might break at the first opportunity."
Now we get to the heart of it, Lucrezia thought.
"How much more?" Ereleth asked, without beating about the bush.
"One of you, at least, must become one with us."
Ereleth had been forewarned of this, and she had a reaction ready.
She half-turned, and flicked a casual finger in the direction of Mere! Zabio.
"Take her," she said.
"She's yours to do with as you will."
Lucrezia watched the thief's expression as it grew incredulous, and then thunderous but she was not surprised when the mound-queen said: "No. We need a high-born. We need a queen. It would be wise, perhaps, to have a princess too."
Ereleth showed commendable resilience in the face of this statement.
"That is not acceptable to us," she said.
"We will not bargain with you on such terms as those."
"You are not in a position to make bargains," the mound-queen said.
"The price set upon your lives is that you must do everything in your power to help the nest. You are a queen among your own people, but you can only be a servant here."
"What exactly do you mean," Ereleth was quick to counter, 'when you say that I must become one with you? What are you proposing to do to me? "
"You need not be afraid," the mound-queen said although Lucrezia had never heard such a hollow assurance.
"We offer you long life and renewed strength. We offer you a chance to be more than you are, more than you could ever have hoped to become."
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This is bizarre, Uy:rezia thought. They have the power to do exactly as they wish.
"Why do they need our consent? It was clear, however, that the mound-queen not only felt that she needed Ereleth's consent, but that she expected to get it. The only compromise which had been offered related to the inclusion or exclusion of Lucrezia. The princess wondered whether her mentor loved her well enough not to turn around and say
"If you need a high-born, take her, but let me alone."
What Ereleth actually said was: "I ask again, what exactly do you propose to do to me?"
"The drago mite queen will give you armour to wear," the mound-queen said.
"Living armour. We shall work together, you and I. We shall speak with one voice, and we shall be of one mind . . . but you should not be afraid, for we shall take the greatest care to conserve every vestige of your lore and your wit. You shall be Ama-Ereleth, just as I am Ama-Metra. We have lost too many sisters to the plague, but we shall surely find more. In the fullness of time, we shall surely find more."
Lucrezia's hand went to her belt, and she began untying the knot securing one of her pouches. She felt that it was time to make her weapons ready but Ereleth's hands were still resolutely folded.
"If you do this," Ereleth said calmly, 'my people would no longer regard me as a queen. They would no longer follow my orders. They would regard me as an alien, to be killed. If you want my help and I still offer it you must let me be what I am. There is no alternative. If you need a hostage I will give you the girl, but the mere fact of my offering her to you is proof that she is of very little use. If you try to do what you have threatened, you will prove yourself an enemy, and you will be treated as one by all my people.
If you try to make me one of you, you will throw away your only chance to obtain the help you need. "
The mound-queen stared at her captives, with resentment seething in her darkly rimmed eyes. She is human, Lucrezia thought, but not quite human enough.
The drago mite drones were waving their antennae so rapidly that they were mere blurs. The human workers and warriors who came and went continually back and forth through the chamber were moving very swiftly, with panic in their expressions. Lucrezia judged that there really was no time, and that the mound-queen 442
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must decide now whether to make good her threat or whether to capitulate.
"I can save you," Ereleth said boldly evidently feeling that there was no need to be parsimonious with her promises.
"I can force Carus Fraxinus and Aulakh Phar to help to find a home for the nest, and I will but it is you who are in no position to make bargains. If you do anything to injure or displease me, you will die. The drago mite queen will die. The nest will die."
They cannot believe it, Lucrezia thought. But have they any recourse at all save to take the risk? They dare not seize her and claim her.
They dare not take the risk that she is right. They have to accept what she says, for there is no time left for prevarication.
"What Ereleth says is true," she said aloud, speaking as boldly as her mentor.
"You need us, if you are to have any real chance of building a new nest elsewhere in the world, and it is our knowledge you need, not our status.
You do not need Ereleth because she is a queen, but because she is wise and that is why you need Carus Fraxinus and Aulakh Phar too, and Andris Myrasol.
How you have conserved your own lore I don't know, but we have divided ours between us, and we make use of it by joining together by agreement, free and yet united. If we are to be of use to you, those are the only terms we can offer, the only terms on which our help can be bought."
She was aware, in saying this, that it would sound hideously ironic to Merel Zabio, who knew only too well what terms Ereleth had offered her cousin and her friend the thief but the girl knew better than to object here and now; no matter what resentments she might be harbouring, she wanted to get out of here.
The mound-queen didn't turn her head to look at the drago mite drones, but their antennae dipped to touch her about the head and shoulders, and there must have been some meaning in the signal. Lucrezia looked around the walls of the vaulted throne room. Was it her imagination, or had the light grown fainter? Was the odorous air more deeply tainted with the reek of decay?<
br />
Had the throne itself changed its shape, so as to sag a little to one side?
The drones moved forward slightly as human workers came to them, signalling frantically. This time, one of them turned to face the queen and to demand her attention. She sat up straight, scowling.
Jume Metra came to stand before the throne too, reaching up to touch the
'hand' of the drone.
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"Your drones are
"Do you imagine that I'm responsible for that?" Ereleth asked. "You must look to your own people for an explanation."
Even in a drago mite hive, Lucrezia thought, with a thrill of wry amusement, the right hand of authority does not always know what the left is doing. How reassuring that is! There is disorder wherever humans are, even when they form alliances with drago mites She became aware, though, that Merel Zabio had reacted to this news with evident dismay.
The mound-queen looked around again, first at one drone and then the other.
"There is no time at all," she said, her capacious flesh shaking as if it had been seized by a sudden agony of dread.
"You must flee as best you can. The queen still lives, but the scavengers have come ahead of time, to feed upon her living flesh. Take them, daughters! Save them if you can, and accept whatever help they will condescend to give us. Go! Go/' Jume Metra had hesitated, but now the message got through. She seized Ereleth by the arm, saying
"Come!" and pointing to one of the tunnels leading out of the throne room.
The two drones were already moving towards another, and there were workers running this way and that in what seemed to Lucrezia to be utter confusion, i It was Dhalla who came; to the princess, saying
"Quickly, highness!"
as she offered a helping hand. The princess immediately moved to go with her, following Ereleth but Merel Zabio grabbed her left arm and held her back. ' "Wait!" the girl said anxiously.
"What abourAndris? You can't leave him here."
"That's none of my concern," Lucrezia said, trying to struggle free but the girl would not let go, and in spite of her slenderness she was considerably stronger in the arm than the princess. Lucrezia felt a flood of anger, and lashed out with her sharpened fingernails. She felt slightly ashamed of herself as she did so, not because she feared to hurt the girl but because she could not help wishing that she had had time to anoint her nails with some deadly poison.
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been allowed to do so. She
wasn't. Dhalla, who was far more powerful than she was, reached out a long arm in an insultingly casual fashion and slapped her backhandedly across the face. The blow knocked the girl off her feet, and she let go of Lucrezia's arm as she fell backwards in an untidy heap, seemingly unconscious.
"Run, highness!" the giant said, pointing to the tunnel into which Metra and Ereleth had already disappeared.
Lucrezia wanted to run, but she didn't look towards the tunnel or at Dhalla's anxious face, because her attention had been caught by the sight of the mound-queen, still sitting on her foolish throne. She had not begun to run, nor even to raise herself up from her station.
The agony of her dread had passed as quickly as it had come, and she was very still now . . almost lifeless. The expression on her face spoke of defeat and despair. Whatever she had hoped to save of the nest and might still hope to save it was not her own flesh or her own mind. She saw Lucrezia staring at her, but she hardly seemed to have the strength of will to respond. She said nothing, and her gaze fell, as if she could no longer meet the eyes of a truly human being.
She was looking in the direction of MerelZabio's fallen body, but she was not looking at it. It was as if she had no capacity left to be interested in such a petty tragedy.
The chamber was almost empty now; even the drones had gone but the mound-queen remained where she was.
She can't get up! Lucrezia thought. She really is bound to her throne, like a flower in its cup. Her flesh is fused with alien flesh, like the armour she promised Ereleth. She's not human at all. She's a chimera!
"Princess!" cried Dhalla, reaching out as if to seize her and carry her away by force but it was too late. In one of the openings beyond the throne the head of a drago mite warrior appeared. There was red blood on its jaws, and Lucrezia was in no doubt that it was human blood.
The mound-queen screamed as the thing came forward, with appalling speed, avidly reaching out for her with its awful bloody jaws.
Dhalla grabbed Lucrezia then, and hauled her back but not to bundle her into the tunnel into which Metra and Ereleth had gone. Perhaps they could have reached it, provided that the warrior had concentrated its attention solely on the helpless mound-queen, but
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Dhalla wasn't prepared to turn her
back and take that chance.
Bracing her hugely muscled legs, she threw back her right arm to its fullest extent and hurled her spear with all the might of which she was capable.
It flew through the air with awesome velocity, and struck the drago mite between its great black eyes.
No ordinary arm could have hurled the weapon with force enough to penetrate a warrior drago mite armoured skull, but Dhalla's was no ordinary arm. The spear smashed through the chitin and embedded a full met of its shaft in the softer flesh beyond.
Any earthly creature would have fallen dead on the instant, its brain ruined but the drago mite wasn't an earthly creature, and it didn't fall. It did, however, turn away from the mound-queen who had been its first intended target.
Instead, it came scuttling over Merel Zabio's supine form heading straight for Dhalla, and for the princess who was cradled once again in the giant's protective arm.
Come with me! " said the guide which had brought Jacom ^
"I think it's getting anxious," Jacom said, hoping to bring his companion back to reality.
"There's a definite note of urgency in its voice."
Myrasol continued to stare down at the head. Its eyes had fallen closed, and the expression on its face was curiously peaceful, as if the promise he had made to the intelligence which had animated it had provided a desperately desired reassurance.
"Come ow," Jacom urged, tugging at his sleeve.
"For Goran's sake let's get out of here!"
The amber allowed his legs to be urged into action by Jacom's insistence, but he hardly seemed conscious of making his exit from the grotesque chamber whose walls were plastered with living human flesh or, to be strictly accurate, with dying human flesh. Nor did Jacom pause or turn aside for any more detailed examination of the drago mite queen's inert birth-canals; he couldn't wait to be gone from there now that their guide seemed anxious to take them.
In the gloomy but more spacious cave byond the chamber of horrors there was a great deal of activity. Dragomite workers were running this way and that, many of them bearing bundles of eggs which had been glued to their backs in transparent en casements like the spawn of enormous toads. The luminous humanoid had to 447
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duck and dodge aS^tt weaved its way between these hurrying workers; Jacom had little difficulty doing likewise but his dazed companion was much clumsier.
The vertical slit which eventually opened up in one of the smoother walls, in response to their guide's impatient urging, was one of many. The burdened workers were exiting in like fashion, although others were still entering in order to receive their own quotas of eggs.
"They're abandoning the nest," said Myrasol faintly, as he finally looked up from his contemplation of his own egg-like burden. "Why?
What's happening? "
"I don't know," Jacom said, still pulling hard on his companion's sleeve, although he had neither the stature nor the musculature to impose his will on a man so much bigger than himself, 'but one way or another, this place is falling apart. Let's just get out of here, shall we? "
Myrasol began to move a little faster, encouraging their guide to scuttle even more rapidly. As soon as they were in the newly opened tunnel they began to climb steeply, and for a moment or two Jacom felt relief at the thought that they were heading for the surface and the sunlight with all possible haste but only for a moment or two.
Myrasol had no sooner started moving at a sensible pace than he stopped abruptly, and said: "What about Merel?"
Jacom turned, but the luminous creature (hurried on, leaving them in near-darkness.
"She'll be taken care of," Jacom said, with sudden anger in his voice.
"Come on, damn you!" He didn't know whether it was true or not, and he didn't care. He just wanted to get out but he couldn't abandon Myrasol.
That wasn't because of any bond of friendship that had sprung magically into being between them: it was a simple desire not to be left alone with the thing that had been sent to fetch them and now seemed intent on getting them out.
Myrasol took the head into his left hand, gripping it by the bald pate, so as to set his right arm free.
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