Elder Race(25)

“Within them, and within all the patches of sickness,” he said. “There is a voice that speaks, all to the same rhythm. And it speaks to . . . elsewhere. It calls elsewhere and hears commands, but I cannot tell how the voice is brought here or how it leaves. Most curious.”

“I hear no voice,” Lyn said. The things were getting close and she wanted to pluck at the sorcerer’s sleeve.

“You wouldn’t. It is not a voice made by the throat, but I hear it still. And I can speak in that same register.”

“You can talk to these things? Or to the demon, through them?” Esha asked him incredulously. “Can you banish it?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t think there is anything to talk to, not an intelligence. But if this voice is a part of its life, that binds its parts together, perhaps I can use a like voice to break it apart.” He sounded absurdly calm in the face of the oncoming horrors, and Lyn felt her own nerves grate between her teeth and on the inside of her skull. She could not stand this much longer. She could not maintain a hero’s proper reserve.

“Do it!” she told him.

“Yes, well,” he said, and the three things stopped and shivered abruptly. There were not even words of command or magic gestures, simply the will of the magician holding them in thrall.

Allwer let out a long, tattered breath. He was behind Esha, Lyn saw, but he hadn’t run and his cudgel was at the ready, which spoke well for her trust of him.

“Have you mastered them?” she asked.

“Not so much.” Nyrgoth was frowning. “I am shouting over the voice it uses between its different parts, so it cannot hear itself. And, not hearing its own commands, these parts of it stand idle. . . .” His eyes narrowed. “It speaks.”

“You said that.”

Nyrgoth Elder was very still. “It speaks to me.”

Lyn felt physically sick. “You are a sorcerer. You can resist it.”

“Not like that.” Horror did not move him, but some dire revelation had plainly touched him. “It is aware of me, I have spoken as it speaks. And so it questions me. I don’t understand. What have we met here?”

“What does it ask?” Lyn could not push past a whisper.

“Nothing, no words I know, but I’d guess it wants to know what I am. I think I’m probably the first thing it’s met here that is real to it.”

“The people of Farbourand, of this place,” Allwer pressed.

“A resource.” The coolness of his voice was almost as dreadful as the demon-slaves before them. “Your demon does not hear human words. Perhaps does not exist as a material being at all. But it exists in the speech it uses, between its parts, and now so do I.” A change in tone as he considered. “So what are you, precisely . . . ?”

The monsters all jerked at the same time, puppets sharing strings. Lyn saw their limbs twist in ways that must have torn up the tissues of their joints.

“I think I have an understanding,” Nyrgoth said lightly. “Not what it is, but how it works, at least. I can create a region that will exclude the demon’s voice. Which will hopefully protect us from falling prey to the thing ourselves.” He glanced at her and there was even a small smile on his face, as though the whole hideous business had just been a word puzzle posed to the company over supper.

“Watch!” Esha yelled, right on the heels of his words, and then the Coast-woman lunged in, yanking Lyn back hard enough to spill her on the ground. Nyrgoth Elder whirled round, focused more on Esha than the monsters, and something unfolded out of the corrupted man’s chest: a barbed, four-jointed arm that must have filled most of his chest cavity. It snapped forwards, farther than a spearman could have lunged, and drove itself into Nyrgoth’s gut in a spray of blood.





Nyr


OW.

bloody

stabbed me.

*

The problem with pain is that

while it is in theory a good warning light on the control panel of the mind to warn you to take your hand out of the fire—

it’s—

just—

that—

*

When all the lights go on like a fireworks display they get in the way of pressing the right buttons.

*

Which is why I have the option of

turning it off,

transmuting all those

irritating

attempts at the body to save itself into

calm little reports and readouts and memos from my internal systems.

but

when things get to this state

(when some infected bloody monster shoves its fucking ovipositor into my stomach)

the stately march of little reports becomes a blizzard of warnings and error messages, until I cannot see. Until sensory information from my actual senses has been entirely shunted out of the way by my rich internal technical life insisting that I click through all the windows and menus. I’d take it up with the manufacturers if that were in any way a realistic proposition.

And you know how it is when you’ve got some device on which you depend for all manner of little tasks that, perhaps, once you could have done without but which is now entirely essential to your well-being. You know how it is when that starts to go wrong, throws up its warning signs, groans and shudders, slows down, won’t start? The sense of aggrieved helplessness that, oh no, I’m going to have to get this fixed now, or I won’t be able to do all the stuff I need to get done. That sense of sick, yawning horror because, despite you being such a civilized sophisticate, you don’t really understand how any of it works to the extent that it might as well be magic? Well, that, basically, except the computer is you, the warning signs and fatal exception errors are you, and if it shuts down and won’t reboot then that’s all she wrote.