Elder Race(23)
There are worse plagues than vermids, as we find. We come across some that carry the “demon” infection and it is a profoundly disquieting sight. They are certainly sick with something, and I am immediately put into mind of parasitic Earth fungi whose life cycle involves making profound behavioural and physiological changes to their hosts.
The vermids are all together in a kind of a spire. I count twenty-seven of them, but I may be mistaken because they are partially merged together into a single living mass, limbs, heads, tails all fused at various points to make a single body at least four metres tall. We see individuals, or parts of individuals, moving, though more so towards the structure’s tip; the lower members, partially fused into some root system below, are still. The whole is mottled over with patches of the infection, eruptions of chitinous-looking pustules and little nests of beads like black eyes, odd stiff fibres or hairs, patches of scaly hide as though the vermids had been the victims of some inconclusive transformation into some other, even less savoury, creature.
I tell the others to stay back and receive no arguments. I approach only with caution myself, setting my immune system on high alert to repel anything even vaguely inimical to my system. I start feeling hot and uncomfortable immediately, but that’s just telling me my precautions are active. Everything will bring me out in a rash right now, but I hope that will also let me fight off any pathogen that tries it on with me.
I sample some of the vermid-thing, cutting a twitching toe off one luckless beast and then stepping back in case the whole decides to retaliate. No response from it, whatever it is. My best bet is some kind of fruiting body, like a mushroom, which presupposes that the infection distributes itself via airborne spores.
Except my other internal instruments are picking up curious trace signals There are electromagnetic fluctuations about the grotesque spire that are definitely not present in the wider forest. They go . . . nowhere I can tell. Another step back and they are no longer detectable, from present to absent without any moment when they are simply less. Measuring a wide spectrum in the spire’s vicinity, I find a series of wavelengths in use, some a little past the infrared range, some in the spectrum used for shortwave radio communications, others around the level of X-rays. It’s all so scattershot that I likely wouldn’t have picked up on it save that there is a rhythm to the activity, not simultaneously on all bands but passed from one to another. A rhythm that lacks regularity, but which has repeated sections, almost a call and response, that I can track from wavelength to wavelength. The signals are not strong, and the radiation is less dangerous than direct sunlight. They seem to be in dialogue with something, but they are undetectable just a few metres from source. Which I cannot account for. It’s as though they’re vanishing into a hole, or I’m detecting them as bouceback from somewhere, via some atmospheric trick.
My analysis of the vermid toe, that night, reveals no unusual microbial life within it, neither Earth-style nor the simpler local analogues, nor the engineered hybrids of the two that the colonists worked up.
I find nothing that accounts for the odd electromagnetic activity.
We leave the vermids behind, heading for Birchari, which Allwer says was taken by the infection only ten days ago. I don’t believe in demons, but given what we’ve seen, I don’t blame these people for using the word.
Lynesse
LYN HAD GOT HERSELF out of sight of the others before losing her breakfast. One more reason to envy the sorcerer his ability to set aside his emotions until some more convenient time. She had heard the tales, but tales are exaggerated in the telling, everyone knew. Except this was worse than anyone had said, as though the demon had spent the intervening time devising new amusements for itself.
It was not the plight of the vermids themselves that had overthrown her stomach, but the thought that, somewhere in the forest, there might be a similar spire twenty feet tall and built of writhing human beings, fused together in the same abominable way.
Esha woke her halfway through that night, a hand to her shoulder and an urgent murmur in her ear. She clutched for her sword, envisaging . . . Except the horrors she could imagine surely paled compared to what was actually out there. But there was something out there, Esh’ said. Something large, but being quiet. Not a comforting combination.
They woke the others, even Nyrgoth Elder. Weapons to hand they stalked through the midnight woods, jumping at every cracked twig, backing into one another, their hoarse and frightened breath jagged in one another’s ears. Lyn saw the thing move ahead, a great angular mound of a creature squatting over the rotted bole of a fallen tree. For a long time it was no more than a shadow, shifting position occasionally on its many legs. Then . . .
“It’s the wizard’s monster,” Esha said. Her eyes were better in the dark. Allwer, of course, was leery enough about a wizard, let alone any attendant familiar, and had to have the story recounted to him. The thing that had devoured Lyn’s sword back near the Elder’s tower.
Nyrgoth just stared at them blankly. “Where is the demon?” he asked, obviously expecting a continuation of their hunt. Because, apparently, he’d known the monster was here all along, as they stealthily crept up on it. He just hadn’t thought to mention it.
“It won’t harm us,” he told them, still not really understanding. “It hears my voice. I am most of what it can hear in the world, and so it follows me. But it will not break my forbiddances. Soon, most likely, some part of it will fail and we will leave it behind.”