Chapter 31: The Selok
"Shall we walk through it one more time, my lord? It’s a lot for the boy to remember."
Although its fingers caressed the hilt, the Selok resisted the urge to plunge his dagger into the well-rounded human who stood before it in the Overlord’s throne room. Or what these animals thought was a throne room. The Selok had long since recognized it as a breeding chamber. If this ceremony went as it had planned, it would be such again.
Assessing the damage done by generations of humans, it knew it would take much work to restore the chamber. The great bubble of gleaming black, some two hundred and fifty meters in diameter, had been partially filled to form a flat, circular floor across the bottom third of the lower chamber. The laying chambers had been filled in, too, so that they formed a walkway around and above the central area. Worse yet, they’d tiled the floor with glass tiles in a hideous mélange of different shades of blue that made it look like an enormous, round pool. They’d hung lights from the dome, huge concoctions made up of chains of those silver beads that the rulers of Shadriss were so fond of; supposed to symbolize water, and utterly hideous. It would strip all of that away and return the chamber to its pristine simplicity.
That was assuming that it could forestall the danger created by the bungling of the immature human personality developing in the Bolon body. It had put all the selves in danger. The Terran woman was still alive, and so was that creature called Jak.
"My lord?"
Annoyed, the Selok turned its attention from the future to the present. It couldn’t remember what this human standing before it called himself. The family and clan names that were so important to them meant nothing to it. Yet, it had tasked the man with managing the ceremony. It needed him for a few days longer. After that? It might celebrate the Joining in its own way.
"Yes," the Regent answered, brushing at the irritating fall of silver beads that hung from its wide-brimmed hat, "let’s do it again."
"As you wish, my lord." With a rustle of brocaded silk, the man bowed and turned to the waiting rows of priests.
This was a complete waste of time. It had memorized the steps of the ceremony years ago, when it first had planned to access the God Core. It had intended to connect the device directly to its current primary host. It hadn’t realized at the time that it needed a host with the specialized connector embedded in its neck. Then, even after forcing the priests of Nish to add a connector to the neck of its youngest self, it had been made to wait another four years before the priests would bring out the God Core. Despite promises made to the High Priest, it vowed that the priesthood would be one of the first obstacles it removed from its path.
Of course, the majority thought the young host was their Prime, the abomination Luan n’Chall. But it had destroyed the last two bodies of that disgusting, crippled Selok years ago when it had ordered the Prime and his younger brother killed. Briefly, it switched more of its attention to the child body on the throne. Fortunately, its youngest self seemed undamaged by the failed attempt to take over an adult human. Once this ceremony was over, it would have full access to the enhancer through that self.
But everything had taken so much longer than it had anticipated. From the first moment it had decided to take a human host body until now had been nearly two hundred years. But there’d been little choice. Condemned for stealing host bodies intended for another Selok, it had been reduced to a single self and forced out of the hive to die. But it had been alive still when the human explorers found it.
Even better, one of the females had been pregnant, and the Selok had found a new source of host bodies. Once it had incorporated a reasonable number of human embryos into its meld and waited while they grew into adulthood, it had withdrawn from the original form and allowed it to die. Unfortunately, humans were more fragile than the original Selok host bodies, and now it was down to only three. One of those was damaged, and the other a child. Still, after the Joining, it would have as many bodies as it chose, and then it would withdraw from the damaged host. Withdrawing would be uncomfortable for the Selok, but not as traumatic as a sudden death of the body.
It stirred uneasily as it watched its youngest self, seated across the enormous room from the primary body on an overblown mass of gold that depicted all the gods and goddesses of Shadriss: the Overlord’s throne. Of late, the Selok had noted faint but disturbing stirrings of individuality in the Prime body. Was it the result of contamination from the human called Jak, or was it the insidious spread of the human under mind? In either case, it would have to keep a close watch on how the young body developed. It did not want another fiasco like the Bolon body.
But the priests were in their places; rows of green robed priests of the Lady Ur surrounding the red robed priests of Nish who clustered close to the throne. Smoothly, it flowed into the body of the false Prime and prepared to give the appropriate responses for the ritual.
Omniphage Invasion Page 31
