If it has nothing to do with the head, Lucrezia thought, it might be for my benefit, for the sake of the challenges I laid out, the promises I made. The drago mite queen has a mind, and the mound-queen was her ears as well as her voice. She is saving us because we did indeed persuade her that she needs us desperately, because we are the only chance she has left to save . . .
herself?
"Not herself," she murmured aloud.
"Her children. Her chimerical children. She thinks them uniquely precious, as all mothers do."
"Highness?" the captain said uncertainly.
Lucrezia opened her mouth to give him a fuller account of her hypothesis, but she was breathing too hard. Long inertia had exacted a severe toll on her strength. The muscles of her legs would have had difficulty coping with the uphill course even at the best of times; at present they were simply not up to the task.
Her guide realised that she was exhausted, and stopped. She was aware of his fumbling as he tried to re-sheathe his sword. Did he intend to pick her up and carry her?
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"Keep moving!" she gasped, intending it as a command.
"And keep your sword in your hand."
He obeyed her, but he didn't climb as quickly as he had before.
Within minutes the darkness opened up before them to let in what seemed at first to be a veritable flood of light. In fact, though, the corridor into which they were discharged was very dimly lit. The air seemed cooler and fresher, though, and Lucrezia was grateful for any light at all. She was able to look her companion in the eye at last. She had seen him before, but only in the distance, and never as dirty.
"Thank you, captain," she said.
"Don't thank me yet," he said, with a calculated grimness which was almost pompous.
"The drago mite queen brought us here, but now we have to make up our own minds which way to go, and the open air is still a long way off."
Lucrezia looked hesitantly to her left and her right, but it seemed obvious enough which direction they should take. The corridor was not level, and they were upward-bound. She pointed. He nodded agreement, and set off again. She had no need to hold on to his skirt now.
Within minutes they came to an intersection where a chain of drago mite workers was trekking from left to right, following an uphill gradient. They shrank iback, but the workers made no aggressive move towards them and the procession soon passed.
"Do we follow them?" the captain asked.
"Yes," she said, judging that they too must be trying to escape, and hoping that they knew the best route.
"Stay close behind them, if you can. If they belong to this nest, there's no need to fear them."
He obeyed her without question, as a good guard-captain was honour-bound to do.
She began to wonder whether she had made the right choice when they came into a much larger open space, which must have been used in better times as some kind of food store, where 'crops' harvested from the slopes had been brought for sorting, processing and redistribution. Far the greater number of the remaining stockpiles were mere rotten heaps, but there were still a few stacks which had not been spoiled. The column of workers she and Jacom had followed were evidently involved in the task of collecting the useful foodstuffs for removal which might have 458
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suited their own purpose very
we)! " had it not been for the obvious fact that these workers had come too late. As the workers advanced moving past hundreds of empty exoskeletons which were the relics of their dead sisters- the tunnels through which they would presumably have made their exits were already discharging warriors which fell upon them with awesome ferocity.
Some of the workers attempted to flee, but no matter which way they turned they could not find an escape-route. Others attempted to fight, meeting the gigantic jaws of the warriors with their own feebler ones, rearing up on their four back legs so as to use the front ones as if they were arms. Some actually took up crude weapons of one kind of another with which to thrust and stab.
Lucrezia looked behind her into the mouth of the tunnel from which they had come, but there was no longer room for them to move back into it. Lucrezia wanted to shout a warning to the creatures which were coming through it one by one, to tell the whole procession to turn about and go back, but she knew how futile such a gesture would be. As Lucrezia and Jacom moved sideways out of their way, the workers kept coming forward, one after another, delivering themselves into a trap from which none would escape.
The captain politely pushed her back so that she was stationed against a wall. He took up a position in front of her, ready to mount what defence he could, if and when it should become necessary.
There seemed to be no immediate danger, although more and more warriors were spilling into the cavern. They soon outnumbered the workers, so that they had little difficulty in cornering and slaughtering their adversaries, and that was the work to which they devoted themselves; if any of them saw the captain and the princess the sight did not distract them in the least. The two humans had nothing to do but watch the carnage.
The workers were by no means impotent to hurt the warriors; when it came to
'hand-to-hand' combat the workers were only a little weaker and considerably more dexterous. They could land telling blows, and had they had more room to manoeuvre they might have been able to give a better account of themselves but the cavern was too cramped and too crowded, and the warriors had those murderous jaws, whose outer edges operated like 459
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massive clubs and whose
inner edges could be brought together like huge pairs of sri ears slicing'
through limbs or pal ps and sometimes cracking skulls like eggshells.
Without warrior sisters to defend them the workers could only delay their own destruction. The battle was lost from the moment it was joined, but still it had to be fought and finished.
The ichor of the drago mites Lucrezia saw, was not so very different in colour from human blood. Its odour, though not identical to the reek of human blood, was sufficiently similar to imply a kind of kinship.
What would a drago mite spectator think, Lucrezia wondered she had stood on one ofXandria's quays, watching an army trying to scale the wall of the citadel? That too would have seemed like slaughter, the only exception being that it was the slaughterers who were penned in, while the slaughtered had only to give up and retreat. Perhaps the drago mite would have understood the madness of it better than a human observer, for the drago mite would know what irresistible compulsion there is in certain kinds of instinct and certain kinds of command.
It was not as horrible a sight as she might have imagined. It was, in fact, rather fascinating. Although she had lost her initial horror of drago mites and had even begun to cultivate a certain perverse empathy with their kind she was not yet capable of pitying their destruction.
As she watched the titans struggling, one to one or in groups where several warriors would tear apart a single worker, they seemed entirely mechanical.
They could hot scream, and did not offer any evidence convincing to human eyes that they felt pain or anguish.
Lucrezia suddenly became aware that no more workers were pouring out of the tunnel-mouth beside her. The rearmost member of the column had come forward to meet her ugly destiny. She stepped forward to tap the captain on the shoulder and bring this fact to his notice. Cerri nodded, both to confirm that he understood and to indicate that the princess should lead the way while he guarded against the possibility of pursuit.
The princess moved into the tunnel, walking as quickly as she could.
Her legs were p
ainfully weak but she concentrated her attention on striding without the least trace of a limp. She went forward boldly, determined not to falter until she could not take 460
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another step but it never came to
that. She had gone less than fifty paces before she met a drago mite coming the other way.
This one was not a worker. This one was a warrior.
Lucrezia had no way of knowing whether it was one of the nest's defenders hurrying to the relief of its sisters or yet another attacker hastening to take part in the massacre, but she had no reason to suppose that it would make a great difference to the monster's reaction to finding her in its path.
She stopped, and tried to meet the drago mite stare with all the courage that her own pathetically tiny eyes could contain.
Cerri moved awkwardly past her, and raised his steel blade, as though he too were a warrior drago mite stunted and crippled in the body but equipped nevertheless with a single fearsome jaw.
The warrior had paused too, but confrontation with a sword- blade was enough to provoke it to action. It darted forward with alarming alacrity, and used its jaws with astonishing precision to pluck the sword clean out of the captain's grip. He had aimed his own thrust for the eye, but it never landed. As soon as he was disarmed the monster struck at him with one of its antennae, which lashed out like a whip to swipe him about the forehead. He staggered sideways and slumped against the tunnel wall, dazed but not unconscious.
Amazingly, and with truly heroic stupidity, the young man used his arms to thrust himself away from the wall, so that he lurched back into the path of the drago mite placing himself directly between the princess and those horrid jaws. He spread his arms wide as though to make a barrier.
It seemed to Lucrezia to be a noble gesture, however futile.
The drago mite reached out its ugly head, and picked the soldier up in its jaws. Lucrezia didn't doubt that it could have cut the man in two now that it had seized him, but it didn't. Instead, it held him off the ground for a moment or two, and then simply set him down again, placing him carefully to one side.
She's on our side! Lucrezia thought. She's one of us! Even so, she backed away reflexively, and kept on backing up, without once daring to look behind her. The warrior followed her, matching its paces so exactly to hers that its staring eyes remained precisely the same distance from her own. She could hardly bear the awful scrutiny of that black stare, and when her legs gave out it was as if 461
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the eyes had hypnotised her and commanded her to fall. So extreme was the treason of her body that she fell very heavily, barely able to use her arms to cushion the impact. She felt sick and dizzy, but she fought desperately to retain consciousness.
Her eyes filled with tears and she lost sight of everything. When she felt the touch of something on her body she couldn't connect the sensation to anything visible, and for an agonisingly long moment she was convinced that it was the touch of a drago mite warrior's jaw.
Then, with a sudden shock of relief, she realised that she could feel fingers trying to grip her waist, hands trying to help her to her feet. She knew that it couldn't be Jacom Cerri, because the drago mite had moved smoothly past him, so she spoke the first name that came into her head, which was:
"Ereleth!"
Then her eyes cleared slightly, and a head loomed into view. She was so disorientated that she didn't know whether she was standing or lying down, or which way was up, but she could see all too clearly that the head didn't belong to Ereleth, nor to any other human being.
She tried to scream, but couldn't.
"Iss ssafe now, prinssess," 'said a quaintly un human voice, struggling with the pronunciation of words which were evidently ill-fitted to its vocal apparatus "Iss ssafe. Iss very, very good."
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i8 andris had only one thought in his head as the two warriors closed in on one another, and that was to discover some slight chance of survival for Merel. When he saw the wall open to swallow Princess Lucrezia and Jacom Cerri he tried to follow them but the wall closed behind them, seamlessly, before he had a chance to execute his plan.
The story of my life, he thought bitterly. At the critical moment, magic doorways open up for princesses and soldiers, but never for ex-princes and soldiers of fortune.
Carefully, he laid Merel down on the ground, shielding her body as best he could without actually resting his weight upon her. She still hadn't stirred, but he knew that her heart was beating because he had felt it when he picked her up. He reached out to pick up the disembodied head which Jacom Cerri had abandoned, and looked over his shoulder to see what was happening in the middle of the cave.
The two warriors drove hard at one another and their hugely- jawed heads clashed brutally above the mound-queen's recumbent form. The jaws locked together like the antlers of rutting stags fighting over a harem of hinds, and the warriors twisted their armoured necks fiercely as if they were trying to turn one another over. Although they made constant adjustments to their position they hardly moved from where they were, each one reluctant to yield a met of ground.
Over to the left, where the first warrior had fallen, the giant was still trying to recover her spear. She was having difficulty because the warrior was not yet inert, and she did not want to be struck by a thrashing leg or caught by one or other of the jaws by virtue of a convulsive movement of the drago mite head.
Andris had once watched a battle for the dominance of a herd of 463
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deer
fought by two antlered stags. The contest had been fierce and violent but he had been conscious- of a certain reserve, as if the combatants had known that what they were involved in was a test of strength in which defeat might be conceded at any time without further injury being inflicted. It was apparent to him from the outset that this fight was different. This was to the death, and could have no other possible outcome.
Braced by all six of their legs, each fully determined not to retreat, the two warriors clubbed and stabbed at one another with their massive jaws, actually striking shards of chitin off the leading edges. The two heads were moving so quickly that several heavy blows were being struck in every second, yet neither one flinched. A severed antenna fell, still writhing, from the head of the nearer warrior. Its impetus carried it close to where Andris knelt, and he flicked it away with his booted foot, as if it were a snake about to sink its fangs into his fleshy calf.
He became conscious that Mere! was stirring beneath him and immediately reached out to her. As if seized by a sudden claustrophobia she began to struggle against his solicitous hand, and he soothed her as best he could.
"It's all right," he hissed.
"It's? me Andris."
"Andris?" she said, ceasing to struggle the moment she heard the name.
"What the . . ." , He saw her eyes widen as she saw what he held in his free hand, and widen again as she looked past him to see what was happening beyond his protective shoulder. She sat up abruptly.
"It's all right!" he said, painfully aware of the absurdity of the reassurance.
"Can you get to the tunnel-mouth?"
She didn't reply, but she put her hand to her dizzy head. She didn't close her eyes, because she didn't dare. He half-turned to follow her gaze. The chitinous jaws of the warrior drago mites were still hacking at one another and at the armoured heads behind, making an appalling rattling sound. One of the monsters must have sustained a serious injury because red ichor was jetting in ragged spurts from one of the clashing hea
ds. Andris could see it falling like rain into the still-widening pool of blood in which the mound-queen's body lay. He supposed that the mound-queen must have life in her yet, else her heart could not continue to pump the blood out of her body, but her prostrate form had been 464
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buffeted several times by the fighting
drago mites and it was obvious from the awkward angles at which her limbs now lay that her long bones had been broken. The drago mites ichor seemed to mingle and mix readily enough with her human blood- a fact which could no longer surprise Andris.
Suddenly, the uninjured drago mite shifted its position, scuttling round as if to catch its opponent off guard- but the move was a desperate reflex rather than a cunning stratagem, and Andris saw almost immediately what had occasioned it. A third drago mite had entered the chamber, enthusiastic to dive headlong into the fray.
It's all over now! he thought. Whichever of the fighting drago mites had received the support of a nest-mate would now be certain to win.
In this kind of fighting, two heads were far better than one.
For a few seconds the drago mite which had been winning the contest only moments before danced upon its six limbs, hurling itself this way and that to avoid being cornered by two sets of jaws, but every instinctive move met an equally instinctive countermove, and it required less than a minute for the two warriors working in concert to position themselves diagonally to either side of their opponent, and then to move in for the kill. The fact that one of them was hurt made little or no difference. The eyes of the lone fighter were savagely pulped and the hinges of its jaws disabled. It was then an easy matter for the victors to finish their work, cutting and slicing at the limbs and body-joints of their erstwhile opponent.
Andris was glad to see that Dhalla had recovered her spear, but not so happy to see her warily working her way towards the nearest portal. It seemed that she had no intention of trying to help him. He felt an impulse to call out, begging for aid, but something stopped him: pride, perhaps, or simple stubbornness. She had saved his life once already, but only because Ereleth was in danger too, and because he was Ereleth's creature.
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