Chapter 26
The rules of the ballroom may be unwritten and the laws of physics deeply graven, but a library book demanding to be read would cause less scandal than the lady who took a man’s hand unasked.
Debutante or Bust , by Lady Ellinoor FitzGerald
CHAPTER 26
Arpix
Arpix didn’t know what to do with Clovis’s attention, so he did what he’d done in the past when flustered by Carlotte’s teasing and ignored it. He did not, however, cede the job of tending to her injuries to one of her brothers, or to Salamonda, who would probably have done it better now the stitching part was over. It was something he’d started, and he liked to be thorough. The library had taught him that. Master Logaris had taught him. Though the huge teacher had always said that Arpix had been born with the lesson stamped across his bones.
Clovis hissed. She lay on her back, propped against an earth bank, while he knelt beside her with cloth and bucket.
“Sorry.” Arpix moved the cloth away from the wound. “I was thinking about something else.”
“One of your human girls?” Clovis asked, artlessly.
“A teacher of mine. He died—” Arpix stopped himself. Both of them could reel off a litany of crimes that the other’s kind had perpetrated against those they’d cared for. Arpix wrung the cloth onto the thirsty ground. Perhaps the kind of healing they were both part of now was exactly what they needed if the larger, unseen wounds were ever to close. They would still be scars on their memory, but scars were meant to be lived with.
“Tell me about this weapon.” Clovis watched him, drawing a deep breath in through her nose. She licked one long canine tooth.
“You think there’s more to tell?” It had been three days since the cratalacs. Three days since the discovery that they could call Wentworth. Three days since Evar had recognised the great statue as a woman he had seen once, and they had known half their lives. “We’ve looked for it. You and I have looked for it. Or felt for it in the dark, at least. You’ve seen the boundary stones that mark how far the forbidding reaches.” Arpix had been thinking for four years now about whatever it was that kept the skeer from the plateau. He had no answer. Clovis repeating the question wouldn’t change that.
“I’ve seen that you’re the clever one.” Clovis continued to watch him, her grey eyes capturing some of the sky’s merciless blue. “The other humans listen to you even though you speak the quietest of any of them.”
“Because my throat’s sore with all this growling to you.”
“Cleverness is the key.” Clovis carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. “You just need me to turn you.” Her hand came to rest on his thigh. He frowned at it.
“Are you sure you haven’t started a fever?” Her hand felt hot against his leg. Burning, almost.
“It’s like Evar with this Carlotte of yours. He saw what you couldn’t because he looked from a new angle. You’ve looked at this too long from the same place. The Assistant—your Livira—she taught us about science. I didn’t listen. But your teacher, he gave you both the same lessons. I think you listened. Very hard.”
Arpix covered her hand with his own. He’d meant just to move it politely, but somehow his hand stayed on hers a heartbeat longer than it needed to. Two, three, four heartbeats. He lifted hers and set it on the ground. Her smile was small but victorious.
“Science prompts me to ask a series of structured questions. Investigations that will allow the formation of theories that can be tested. I have some of the questions, but the answers would be too difficult to come by.”
“What sort of questions?” The sun had edged their patch of shadow aside and found them. Clovis continued to study him from hooded eyes.
“Can the skeer cross the boundary? I know they don’t want to, but is it a wall to them, or if a giant picked one up could it be carried through? Once they’re in does the effect vanish, like climbing a wall and getting into a garden? Or does the resistance or compulsion grow stronger? Then there’s—”
“That’s a lot.” Clovis sat up a little more, wincing and pulling the remnants of her armour around her. “You’re going to need a skeer.”
“You’ve spotted the problem.” Arpix nodded. “And even if we were able to overcome one of the things, they come in packs and take their dead with them.”
Clovis shrugged then looked as if she regretted stretching her wound. “So, send your tiny monster.”
“Wentworth?” Arpix hadn’t even considered it. The cat had slaughtered five cratalacs to save Salamonda, and he’d brought them a deer and a boar in the past. Who knew what the limits of his abilities were or how likely he was to do requests... The cratalacs had certainly been a deadly foe, but they had come in single file at very close quarters. To retrieve a single skeer, something far too big for the cat in any event, Wentworth would have to kill every other skeer in its pack and every skeer that answered any cry for reinforcements. That seemed like a tall order.
“You said this Yute of yours sent him for a reason. Why not this reason?”
Arpix looked across the hollow to where Salamonda was weaving bean leaves into storage baskets. He wasn’t entirely sure that Yute really had sent Wentworth. The cat might just have had a soft spot for the woman who’d fed him for so many years.
It was a good time to approach Salamonda. Jost was still down at the mine entrance poking pieces of cratalac around with a stick. The creatures horrified her, but she seemed unable to leave their remains alone. Jost would object to what he was about to do, and perhaps she would be right to, though her objection would not be moral or scientific, just born from fear and from fearing to make any change. The same fear that had paralysed all of them for too long.
He hung his cloth on the side of the bucket and went across to sit beside Salamonda.
“You’ll be wanting Wentworth .” She growled his name the way the canith said it.
“I might,” Arpix agreed. “I only met him a couple of times. I didn’t really pay him much attention, if truth be told. But it’s hard to imagine him as something made rather than something born.”
“The world’s a strange place, right enough.” Salamonda kept up with her deft weaving, the dry leaves threatening to crack and break at every opportunity. She looked up at Arpix, her eyes seeming much brighter now that the sun had burned her face to a nut brown. “What do you need from him?”
Arpix pressed his lips into a narrow line. “When he saved you from the cratalacs, what happened? How did he... do that?”
Salamonda hadn’t spoken about it yet, not even to Jella, that Arpix knew of. She’d hidden behind the trauma of it all, which was fair enough in Arpix’s estimation. He would have soiled himself, stuck in that tunnel with those nightmares advancing on him. The screams alone were enough to loosen anyone’s bladder... But now he needed to know.
Salamonda nodded, as if he’d explained himself in words rather than written it out in his expression. “It was dark. And those things... they’re complicated... I didn’t know what I was looking at really. All legs and jaws. So, I didn’t see it clearly. But it seemed as if he... got bigger. As if he filled the corridor. Though he was still the same size, which makes no sense, I know, but that’s how it was. He hooked the first one forward like he’d caught a mouse. His back feet started tearing at it and... it just got torn to pieces. I can’t say it clearer than that. He was as big as he needed to be.”
“I think we need him to be pretty big,” Arpix said. “I need a skeer brought inside the circle.”
—
“We should wait until Clovis is better.” Evar seemed as nervous about the whole plan as Arpix was, which wasn’t encouraging since he was their best warrior by a very large margin.
They stood at the perimeter, facing west towards the mountain where the skeer hive clung at the library entrance. Evar, Arpix, Meelan, Salamonda, Jella, and Sheetra, the youngest and most daring of the bookbinders.
“She might not get better.” Arpix hadn’t said it so clearly before, but Evar needed to understand. He’d left Clovis in Kerrol’s care. Despite his efforts, poison had got into the wounds, or stayed there. He’d picked two dozen of the short black cratalac hairs out of the cuts, but others might have evaded him. “She needs someone with more skill at healing than I have.”
A blood-curdling growl rumbled deep in Evar’s throat, and he showed all his teeth, but Arpix didn’t feel as if he were the target, simply the witness to canith distress. Evar gave a curt nod and drew Clovis’s white sword from his belt. “Do it.”
Arpix turned to Salamonda. “Do your best.”
Salamonda called Wentworth. She could have been in her kitchen five years ago calling with a bowl of fish heads in hand. As before, it seemed as if he would ignore the summons, only for him to be found sitting behind them as they turned away, disappointed.
“I’ve nothing to give you, fat lad.” Salamonda ruffled the cat’s head apologetically. “Just beans.”
Wentworth eyed her dubiously, as if expecting some juicy treat to be dangled before him momentarily.
“What we need, Wentworth, what we really need, is a skeer. A whole one. Brought right here. Do you think you can do that? Safely, mind. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
Wentworth stalked around her as if she hadn’t spoken, headbutting her legs in the same way he would in her kitchen to coax a meal out of her.
“Maybe you should—” But somehow on his third pass around Salamonda’s legs the cat didn’t reappear, and Arpix swallowed his suggestion. “I guess we’ll wait and see.”
—
Wentworth didn’t reappear until the following afternoon. Evar spotted a large dust cloud in the direction of the mountain. Arpix came to the perimeter and estimated it to be a band at least as big as the one that had chased the canith to the plateau. “It has to be skeer.” There weren’t enough of anything else in the area to raise such a cloud.
Within a quarter of an hour, all the plateau’s residents were out on the western edge, ten yards or so behind the perimeter. Kerrol remarked that a clever skeer would use a long stick to move the perimeter stones out an extra twenty yards and tempt the incautious into their clutches. Arpix didn’t translate that, but he did thank a broad swathe of gods that the skeer didn’t appear to have Kerrol’s initiative.
Clovis had to be carried out. Arpix hadn’t wanted her to be moved, but she insisted, saying she demanded to meet the enemy at the gates. Arpix had pressed her back onto her bed of dry leaves when she’d tried to rise. “You’re not well enough.”
Clovis had grabbed his arm, but her grip lacked the strength that she’d nearly strangled him with on her arrival. “You’re just worried about your stitching, human boy. You can always do it again. It’s not as if you have much else to do other than farm beans.”
“You should lie dow—”
“I should have died in battle. I’ve no intention of rotting here. I’ll walk out to meet them before I die lying down.”
In the end they’d settled for carrying her out to watch.
Jost had been among the last to arrive and had stared in horror at the approaching dust cloud. “You did this!” She advanced on Arpix. Starvation and the sun had aged her over the last four years, streaking grey into once lustrous red hair, setting wrinkles around the corners of eyes that had a bright, unhealthy glitter to them. She raised hands that seemed more like claws, both darkly stained with the life juice of cratalacs. “You!”
Arpix refused to defend himself. He had done it and he wasn’t sure it had been right. Jost came on, but even from what might be her deathbed, Clovis’s growl proved enough to make the woman stumble to a halt, a puppet with cut strings.
—
“Definitely skeer. Can’t see what they’re chasing.” Meelan had the best eyes but even he didn’t spot the insectoid’s quarry until they were so close that the edge of the plateau nearly stole them from sight.
Several score of skeer runners were hot on Wentworth’s trail. He showed a surprising turn of speed as he bounded ahead of their thundering advance, but it seemed impossible that he could outpace them. Unlike the warriors, the runners were all legs and built for speed. Of the various skeer castes, the runners were closer to the cratalacs, their arachnid-like knees higher off the ground than Arpix’s head.
As the runners closed on Wentworth, he vanished through a small portal very similar to the ones that the assistants used. It opened just before him and closed immediately after his tail vanished through it. Two hundred yards on he reappeared out of a second portal and paused to lick his paw. The infuriated skeer charged on, relentless.
The chase vanished below the plateau’s edge, and a short while later Wentworth appeared at the top of the steep climb, peering down to torment his pursuers. He arrived at the perimeter with the leaders of the pack just moments behind him. The foremost one proved so intent on its quarry that it ploughed headlong into the boundary... and recoiled as if it had met a physical barrier.
Three other skeer made slower impacts, the chitin spikes of their feet tearing gouges in the baked mud as they tried to stop in time.
Wentworth turned and, with a casual swipe of his paw, hauled one of the fallen runners through the barrier. Arpix couldn’t describe it any better than Salamonda had. The cat was somehow huge, so that the skeer was a mouse in his grasp, but also... just a cat. The two competing realities coexisted in Arpix’s mind long enough for the skeer to be pulled through.
The insectoid disintegrated in the process. Rather as if it had been pulled, or pushed, through the bars of a prison cell. The mess of armour fragments and ichor, along with pale, flopping internal organs that resembled fish guts, fell in a noxious heap, with pieces spreading a few yards into the forbidden zone.
Jella dry-heaved, and the sound, combined with the sight that had prompted it, caused Arpix to do the same.
“Another!” Clovis called weakly. “Again.”
Evar came to stand beside Arpix. “What did we learn?”
Arpix straightened up. He wasn’t sure they’d learned anything of use. They knew for certain now that it wasn’t just a compulsion, and that breaching the perimeter had almost immediately fatal physical consequences. Which was good, since otherwise the skeer could simply have catapulted unwilling members of their hive into the encampment. Though whether any of it was any use...
Jella came to stand beside them, hugging herself. “Did that skeer die for a reason? We shouldn’t just be killing them for nothing.”
“Sometimes you just have to ask questions,” Arpix said, “and hope that the answers reveal something unexpected.”
“What answers are you going to find in that lot?” Salamonda came across, both arms full of dusty, purring cat. She looked disapprovingly at the scattered remains.
“I’m not sure.” Arpix forced himself to look at the mess he’d made.
“It will make them hate us even more.” Jost’s voice carried a cracked note of hysteria, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. “They’ll bring more horrors to hunt us out of our tunnels. Like men use ferrets to core a rabbit warren.”
Arpix didn’t think the skeer hated, but Jost could well be right about the result, hate or no hate.
“Is it me?” Evar loomed over the humans, his growls silencing anything else Jost had to say. “Or does that skeer look different now?”
“Of course it looks different, brother.” Kerrol corralled the humans from the other side. “It’s been turned inside out.”
“I mean the heap, idiot.”
Arpix narrowed his stare. For a terrifying moment he saw what Evar meant and thought that somehow the skeer was piecing itself back together. But it wasn’t that. Though something had changed.
It was the oldest of the bookbinders, a hunched and grey-haired man called Nortbu, who seldom made any comment, that saw it. “It’s drifting,” he said.
He meant drifting like sand was said to, out where the dust grains put on weight and got to be called something else. And, unlikely as it seemed, it appeared that Nortbu was right. It was as if the remains were being very slowly swept up by an invisible broom or powerful unfelt wind.
“It’s being pushed back towards the boundary,” Arpix whispered.
“Good.” Meelan gave a small shudder of revulsion and turned away.
“Don’t you see?” Arpix looked around at the others.
“I do see.” Sheetra turned away too with a shrug. “It’s ugly.”
“Get me the bowl!” Arpix barked it as a command. The others, unaccustomed to his tone, all moved to obey, though it was Jella who hurried all the way to the hollow and returned breathlessly with the largest of the precious bowls they’d recovered from the workings.
Arpix went forward, holding the fragile dish of fired clay in both hands. He felt painfully aware of the shifting ranks of skeer only yards ahead of him, a multitude of emotionless black eyes focused on him, all of them coldly wanting his destruction. He found himself trembling, and at the same time glad that the skeer, despite their collective cleverness, never seemed to have adopted missile weapons, since any of them should have been able to crack his skull with a thrown rock.
Arpix knelt and, trying not to retch, scooped the most juicy-looking chunk of the pallid internal organs into his bowl. The skeer had a dry, unhealthy reek to them under normal circumstances; when torn to shreds they had an acrid pungency that kept trying to turn his stomach inside out.
“Arpix!” Salamonda called out. “Not the food bowl!”
“Sorry...” Arpix backed nervously away from the thronging skeer. With ten yards between them he turned and hurried back to kneel at Clovis’s side. “I’ve got it!”
Clovis eyed his gift dubiously. “A bowl of offal? Is this a traditional love token among humans? A canith would at least have brought something he killed himself. But you are small and—”
“It’s not a love token. It’s a key.”
“A key to good health?” Clovis showed her teeth. “Because if I have to eat this shit to get better... I’ll do it.” She reached for the bowl.
“A key to a weapon.”
Kerrol came up behind them, Evar at his side. “So, it is a love token then.”
“It’s like he’s known her for years.” Evar nodded.
“I don’t understand.” Clovis struggled to sit up and managed it.
Arpix pointed to the pale beads of skeer ichor already crossing the bottom of the bowl and starting up the gentle curve of the side. It was as if he were blowing on them with all his strength. “Just on this side. Away from the centre. Away from whatever’s doing this.”
“It’s like a compass!” Evar exclaimed.
“Exactly,” Arpix said. “This will find the source for us.”