The Inferior

by Peadar O'Guilin

  ‘You think!’

  ‘Sssh! Remember what I said about their hearing!’

  They were standing right at the front door. Behind them, they could see men nearing the base of the towers. The pursuers halted their advance, each looking at his companions, hopping from foot to foot.

  ‘I’ll go in first,’ Stopmouth said. ‘Stay at your side of the corridor.’

  They lashed the guide ropes over the centre part of the sled, using them to secure anything that might fall off. Then, with Stopmouth at the front, they tilted it sideways and carried it into the hall, careful not to touch anything. The interior was utterly silent, the only movement flecks of dust dancing in the Rooflight of the doorway. Blinded by the daytime glare, Stopmouth imagined all sorts of shapes hiding in the blackness; in particular, the smooth, weaving head of a Longtongue, opening its mouth in readiness to strike.

  Once inside, they lowered their burden to the floor and Stopmouth indicated that Indrani should climb over the sled to join him. She’d had a long day for somebody so recently ill. As she clambered across, her foot caught on a joint of cured flesh and she fell forward, her hands grabbing at his shoulders. He caught her, and the two of them went down together, winded, but with neither of them uttering a sound. Stopmouth’s head finished no more than a handspan from the wall, with its curtain of translucent moss. It vibrated ever so slightly under his breath. Indrani saw it too. She slid off him, eyes wide, and he had to clamp a hand around her wrist to stop her retreating too far in the other direction.

  It was then that he noticed the two hunters in the doorway.

  ‘Runaway lovers!’ said the first, a man of Rockface’s generation known as Redtooth. He boasted precious few teeth now, but his frame was still lean and muscular and his hair, spiked with grease, gave him a fierce, alien appearance.

  ‘Shut up!’ said the other man, skinny and jerky in his movements. ‘These things have pretty good hearing.’

  Redtooth ignored him and strode into the hallway. Stopmouth was amazed the man hadn’t been killed long ago, but he bore no obvious scars and several elaborate tattoos curled around the bulging muscles of his arms.

  He advanced into the room and casually raised a spear.

  ‘Redtooth!’ cried the jerky little man. ‘I can’t move my arm! Redtooth! Call the others!’

  ‘We don’t need the others, Flimfodder. The chief has offered us wives if he doesn’t have to come in and do the job himself.’

  ‘Redtooth! Please!’ The little man known as Flimfodder had made the mistake of struggling, and now both arms and the leg he’d tried to push away with were fatally entangled. As Redtooth looked back, distracted, Stopmouth hopped to his feet and took out his sling. When the big hunter turned round again, he let fly with a stone. It hit Redtooth’s hand with an audible snap. The man howled and dropped his weapon.

  ‘You should leave, now, Redtooth,’ said Stopmouth. He had already fitted another stone into the sling and he spun it lazily. ‘I’ll hit a leg next time. Then I’ll pin you to a wall and leave you stuck there like your friend.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Redtooth, but he picked up the spear with his uninjured hand and retreated, careful not to touch his pleading companion on the way out.

  ‘You’re trapped too, Stopmouth!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We can wait outside for you. You won’t beat five men!’

  ‘Please, Redtooth,’ said Flimfodder. ‘Please!’

  Redtooth left.

  ‘Why did only two come?’ whispered Indrani.

  ‘I’d say Redtooth offered,’ replied Stopmouth. ‘And Wallbreaker was only too glad to accept. He’s frightened at the best of times. Besides, he’s already lost one hunter chasing us and he’ll find it hard to justify that.’

  ‘I can hear you!’ Flimfodder shrieked, filling the house with the noise of his struggle. ‘I’m not dead! Help me!’ He continued to pull and fight until the moss covered most of his body. Then he just hung there, weeping, ready to be eaten. Stopmouth tried not to listen to him, but it became increasingly difficult as night approached and still no Longtongue came.

  ‘We must help him,’ he whispered to Indrani.

  ‘No! We’ll be killed! You said we could just wait until the hunters had gone.’

  ‘We can’t leave another human like that! Think of the Tribe!’ She looked at him blankly. ‘You’re the one who always says she doesn’t like to kill!’

  ‘This isn’t killing,’ she said, as if offended by his implication. ‘We will be watching a man pay for past crimes. It is not for us to interfere.’

  Stopmouth decided she was joking. She had to be.

  Finally night fell, and something stirred in the front room of the house. Flimfodder, who’d been silent for several tenths, began to weep again and beg for help. Stopmouth wanted to tell him to shut up and above all not to make the moss vibrate with his struggles. But he kept quiet for fear of alerting their ‘host’.

  The trapped man could see through the doorway into the front room. His eyes widened and he thrashed.

  ‘Be still, my dinner!’ said a voice.

  ‘Please!’ cried the man. ‘Please!’

  ‘You are not a Longtongue, much as I wish you were. I have been too long without challenge. And yet you speak! I am happy to hear speech as I feed!’

  The skittering grew closer. Stopmouth couldn’t see the moss without daylight from the doorway to help him, but he thought he could sense it shaking with the creature’s approach.

  ‘What species are you?’ asked the Longtongue from the next room. Stopmouth gripped his spear with his left hand. The right held a loaded sling. He could feel Indrani’s frightened breathing fast against his shoulder.

  ‘Please!’ said the man again.

  Before Stopmouth could react, a dark line shot from the door of the front room and smacked Flimfodder in the stomach. It sent him bouncing madly in the moss and elicited still more screams.

  ‘What species, dinner?’ said the Longtongue again.

  ‘Human,’ cried the man.

  ‘How do you speak our language, human?’

  ‘A thing of metal…I don’t understand how it works.’ Stopmouth expected Flimfodder to give away his and Indrani’s position at any moment, and yet the man, for all his terror, still thought of them as Tribe and would bear pain to keep them safe.

  ‘Thing of metal…?’ mused the Longtongue. ‘Ah! You mean technology! How I miss it in this place! Once my body pulsed with such devices as you describe. We only had to call for food and beasts like you would come walking into our moss. And then the delicious struggle! Technology! We will die without it in this place. You are only my second meal, though I have called and called in my dreams.’

  The creature skittered closer. Stopmouth thought he could detect the shadow of its head in the doorway. He didn’t dare send a slingstone after it until he was sure of his target.

  ‘Tell me, where is the translator of which you speak? Tell me before I enjoy your pain.’

  The skinny hunter’s voice turned to a whisper. ‘Will…will you let me go if I tell you where it is?’

  The creature didn’t answer for some seconds, as if the man had uttered something particularly cryptic. Finally it said: ‘You do not understand, human. I will hurt you very much before I eat you. First I want you to tell me where the translator is.’

  The man laughed hysterically. He tried to bang his head against the wall in what might have been an effort to kill himself, but the moss held him firm.

  The creature poked its head out of the doorway and Stopmouth spun the sling and released. He heard a soft thwack! But instead of falling, the head pulled back.

  It’s dazed, thought Stopmouth. He ran to the door of the front room, Armourback-shell spear in hand, and dashed through, careful not to touch the sides.

  To his horror, he discovered that the moss didn’t have to stay near walls, but could also be stretched across the middle of a doorway like one of Wallbreaker’s traps. He was stomach-deep
into the stuff before he’d stopped running.

  ‘Another human dinner!’ said the voice. ‘It fights as the food beasts fought our ancestors. It has learned to hurt.’

  The Talker translated the creature’s words, but they weren’t words of sound, so Stopmouth had no idea where in the darkness his enemy lay. He did know, however, that it could strike with its tongue at any time. Would Indrani help if he called out? The creature would understand his words and he didn’t want to give her position away. From the corner of his eye he saw her stepping closer, a knife in her hands.

  Stopmouth strained to hear his enemy over Flimfodder’s whimpers. A little light was seeping through the room’s one window, but revealed nothing except that the creature wasn’t near it. The moss began to vibrate around him.

  It’s walking towards me at stomach level.

  ‘You will feel great pain now, human dinner,’ the beast said.

  Stopmouth steadied his spear and held it directly in front of his chest with the long spearhead vertical to his body. A sudden impact drove the shaft into his stomach and knocked him sprawling in the moss.

  Screams filled his head. The spear was ripped out of his hands and the screams redoubled. Stopmouth felt sure that the creature’s neighbours or relatives would come running at any moment. But this wasn’t Man-Ways and nothing came. Finally there were no more screams for the Talker to translate and he hung in his moss cradle, bouncing gently.

  ‘Indrani,’ he called. ‘I think it’s dead. Bring the Armourback-shell knife, but don’t come too close.’

  It took the best part of a tenth to cut himself out and another tenth to free Flimfodder. The man stank of dung and collapsed as soon as he’d been released. Stopmouth wondered if Flimfodder’s experience this night would make him turn out like Wallbreaker or if only a man with his brother’s imagination could be destroyed by such a thing.

  Outside in the darkness, Longtongues scurried up and down the street, their black skins glistening with droplets of Roofsweat. Each kept its distance from the others, and if they exchanged greetings, the Talker didn’t see fit to translate them. At one point they saw one Longtongue chasing another, two patches of black running across the night. ‘Be my mate!’ cried the chaser. ‘I will bring you pain! Be my mate!’

  The two shadows skittered out of view.

  None of the humans dared sleep. As the night wore on, they watched the comings and goings of the area with growing fascination. Sometimes there were fights, carried out to the death and in utter silence, started for no reason that any of the humans could perceive. More often the creatures simply streamed past each other. Many left through the perimeter gates. These returned towards morning, with moss-wrapped burdens on their backs that writhed and twitched. Stopmouth wondered if Rockface had followed along as he’d threatened to do. Perhaps he lay now in one of those cocoons.

  By dawn the streets were empty again and enough light shone through the windows for them to get their first clear picture of one of the beasts. The body lay in a pool of blood in the front room. Its long, shaft-like tongue had split in two around the tip of the spear. Tiny limbs gripped the tongue, as if the creature had been trying to stem the bleeding. The sight upset Stopmouth, though he couldn’t say why. Then he noticed something strange.

  ‘There’s no moss on the blood!’ he cried. Nor had the blood dried as human blood would surely have done by now. Stopmouth asked the others to move out of his way. He took two steps back and dived across the room towards the corpse.

  ‘Are you mad?’ shouted Indrani.

  The moss caught him no more than half a man’s height from his target and held his lower body immobile. He stretched out with one hand and just managed to dip a finger into the pool of blood. It tingled but didn’t hurt. When he touched his finger to the moss, the threads parted as though made of water. He freed himself in seconds and proceeded to melt the rest of the moss between himself and his companions.

  ‘Help me butcher the Longtongue,’ he said.

  Flimfodder cleared his throat. ‘I should go.’

  ‘No!’ said Stopmouth. ‘Not without your share of flesh. We can’t carry any more than we’ve got now. You could take some of the organs perhaps…’

  The two men worked on the corpse, while Indrani stood back uncertainly. When they’d finished, the hunters shared what might have been a liver between them. Stopmouth knew Indrani was squeamish about blood and besides, internal organs had always been the preserve of hunting men and pregnant women.

  Flimfodder slung a full third of the flesh over his shoulders. But Stopmouth wouldn’t let him go until he’d cut the man a square of hide and soaked it in the beast’s blood.

  ‘Keep this with you for the way back. I’m sure they’ve put moss around every tree between here and home.’

  Stopmouth felt a little catch in his throat as he said the last word. He pushed it aside as Flimfodder thanked him profusely and promised to speak well of him to the Tribe.

  With three full tenths of the day gone, they set off through the eerie streets of Tongue-Ways. The houses became steadily larger, moving from four rooms to five, and soon to eight or ten. Some houses had balconies, others roofs that sloped or resembled upside-down bowls. The designs varied widely from one area to the next, and once the two of them walked down a street where every house differed from its neighbours and where all of them had extra walls that enclosed, in addition to the building, a large empty space.

  ‘People used to grow things in those spaces,’ said Indrani when he asked her. ‘Things like moss and trees.’

  ‘People?’ asked Stopmouth. ‘You mean beasts, surely.’

  Her voice rasped in her throat. ‘I mean people. The Deserters lived here, before any beasts came.’

  ‘Deserters,’ he repeated. She’d made the word sound like the worst curse she knew–almost the way a man of the Tribe would say ‘waster’ or ‘hoarder’.

  ‘Who were they?’ he asked, wondering how he couldn’t have heard of other humans living so close to home.

  ‘I need water,’ said Indrani. She refused to look at him as she drank, wiping her lips slowly afterwards.

  ‘Won’t you answer my question, Indrani?’

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ she said.

  ‘Indrani!’

  ‘Oh, Stopmouth, what do you care now? It was long ago, long before your time, all right? The Deserters were…just greedy people who got what they deserved. Now, please can we move? I hate this place.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure.’

  Even so, they made slow progress. Every few minutes they had to stop to let Indrani rest. She was breathing too quickly and her face shone with sweat.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll get out of the area before nightfall,’ he said. ‘We should pick another house. As long as we stay quiet, we won’t have any problems with our hosts.’

  ‘No!’ said Indrani. ‘I can see the last towers now. I won’t stay in a building with one of those!’

  Stopmouth didn’t blame her. They’d been lucky last time, and the idea of going through it all again made him sick in his belly. He just didn’t want to be in the street when night fell and every Longtongue in the vicinity came looking for its breakfast.

  But by the time they were struggling up to the base of the last set of towers, a full tenth of daylight remained.

  Here they found huge skeins of moss blocking their exit.

  ‘Strange,’ said Stopmouth. ‘I thought that Longtongues, by their nature, would want other creatures to come into their Ways.’

  Indrani nodded, too exhausted to speak. She watched as Stopmouth cleared a way through the moss with a piece of blood-soaked hide.

  Beyond, a dusty path led to a Wetlane bridge made of stone. The path became a road on the other side, which was bare of houses and ran all the way to an enormous building on the horizon. It looked as if the whole of Man-Ways could have fitted into its spiky vastness. Thousands of small flattened mounds lay between it and the two travellers, as if a
giant had stepped on all the other buildings of the area and draped them with thousands of days’ worth of vegetation and rotted tree trunks.

  Indrani took one glance at this and looked like she wanted to bolt back into Longtongue and beg one of the beasts to invite her in for the night.

  ‘We’re staying on this side of the Wetlane,’ she said shakily. ‘We’ll travel parallel to Longtongue until we find the river.’

  Stopmouth saw no reason to disobey her as there was no cover on the far side anyway. So they moved into a stand of trees near the Wetlane, where Roofsweat hung on the edges of every leaf. Indrani flopped onto a green bed of moss and fell asleep.

  The young hunter took a few moments to stare at her beauty. She was so sweet, he thought, her body curled up, her hands in little fists next to her face. She’d fallen from the Roof: a land of spirits and miracles; of adventures to make even those of the Traveller seem poor. How pale this world must look to her. No wonder she sometimes gave in to bitterness. No wonder at all.

  He turned his attention back to Longtongue. He expected the beasts to come out hunting here the way they’d gone towards human territory the night before. However, only a few arrived and these started running to and fro between the towers. Stopmouth didn’t know how they did it, but he felt sure they were making new moss and blocking up the road again. The road home.

  He felt a sudden upsurge of loneliness. To distract himself, he watched the Longtongues and wondered what could make such solitary creatures co-operate. Why were they so eager to block off this entrance into their territory? But he hadn’t slept properly in days, and before he could answer his own question, he too fell into a deep sleep.

  14.

  DIGGERS

  Stopmouth woke to find Rockface poking through the contents of the sled. He had blood all over his face and half of the Longtongue flesh looked like it had already been eaten.

  The big man grinned to see Stopmouth awake.

  ‘Those Longtongues are delicious, hey? You made quite a discovery. We should hunt a few more of them before moving off.’ He licked his lips and threw over a lump of fresh meat to his young companion.