Twenty #4
And then it burst. The pale, whitish pus spattered onto the Rak-hund, and it reared back screaming.
It thrashed its body, trying to wipe the caustic splatter off its carapace, but the one remaining guard was straddling it now, pulling its head backward.
The stink of the dead made Dafyd’s eyes water, but none of the poison was on his skin.
Secret. He didn’t know how to say secret in the Carryx language.
The closest he had was an enclosing volume in yellow that indicated privacy.
The Rak-hund’s spine snapped like a gunshot. It went limp, falling to the stone paving of the garden with a sound like someone had dropped an armful of kindling. The remaining Soft Lothark sighed and turned to Dafyd.
And the sentence glowing before him, drafted and ready to send to Ekur-Tkalal and from it to its superior and up and up to the Sovran.
Soft Lothark keep private reports sent as food .
It was almost nonsense. It might be enough to make the Carryx investigate.
Dafyd’s hand rested above the control that would impress the report and send it to the archive.
The Soft Lothark looked from the symbols to Dafyd’s eyes. It didn’t move forward. The moment stretched out longer than any moment should, but it didn’t pass. If he backed away from the message, he would die. If he sent it, he would die. Dafyd’s whole life existed in the moment of uncertainty.
The voice that broke everything was Llian Andermus, arrived for her meeting. What the fuck is going on? Dafyd kept his eyes on the Soft Lothark. The translation half-mind was still around its neck.
“Stay back. There’s poison. It’s not safe,” Dafyd said. He had to be careful now. He had to pick his words carefully. “There was a mistake . There was a misunderstanding .”
The Soft Lothark shifted its gaze from him to Andermus and back. Its long-fingered hands balled into fists and relaxed again.
Dafyd went on. “Tonner was giving his report, and I made him angry. He started yelling at me. The Rak-hund thought it was an attack, and it went for Tonner to protect me. The Soft Lothark tried to stop it. They tried to save Tonner . Do you understand?”
Andermus was a ghost in his peripheral vision. He didn’t look at her. “This is a mess,” she said. “We have to get medical for Freis. There may be—”
“There isn’t. Tonner is dead,” Dafyd said. “But it was a misunderstanding. No one is at fault. We just need to understand each other better. Does that make sense?”
There was a pause as long as lifetimes. The Soft Lothark smacked its wide, thin lips and coughed. The half-mind said: “We will understand each other better.”
Dafyd felt sick. He felt frozen, unable to do even the simplest thing. Unable to move his wrist and erase the glowing symbols of the report before it could send.
And then he erased it. And he stepped back. The Soft Lothark shifted its weight from one foot to another, craning its neck like it was looking for someone. It knelt and began eating its fallen dead.
Andermus moved away from it and closed her eyes. Her body convulsed as though she were gagging. Her face was suddenly covered with sweat.
Dafyd walked to her, taking her by the elbow and turning back toward the archway. The loose sheets of Tonner’s last reports shifted and swirled like autumn leaves. His body lay on the garden stones almost like he was only asleep.
“When it’s finished, we’ll need all this cleaned,” Dafyd said. It wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was all he could manage.
Andermus’s expression was grim, but her eyes were open again.
She seemed calm now, businesslike. Focused.
“I’ll see to it,” she said, and ran one hand across her face to wipe away the sweat.
After, there was no sign she’d been disturbed at all by the things she’d just witnessed.
He wondered what she had seen and experienced before they came here that this was her reaction.
Dafyd walked away like his body was a puppet that he was operating from a distance.
One foot reliably in front of the other.
There was something he should be thinking about.
Something that had just changed profoundly ( Yes, Tonner died ) but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.
Still, he was calm. He wasn’t shouting or screaming.
He wasn’t shaking. From the outside, he probably seemed perfectly normal.
He made his way back to his private room. He opened the door.
“This isn’t their original homeworld,” Jellit said. “They came here six… maybe seven thousand years ago. It’s the center of everything now, but the place they first evolved was—”
Jellit turned to look at him.
“Dafyd. What happened?”
“Tonner is dead,” Dafyd said. And then, like the words had been caught in a queue and re-sent, “Tonner is dead. Tonner is dead. Tonner… Um.”
What happened? was the next question, and then he would say He found a secret that the Soft Lothark are hiding, and when they heard him talking about it, they killed him. But I was able to tell them I wouldn’t reveal it. So I’m alive.
All Jellit needed to do was say What happened?
“Are you all right?”
“I am,” he lied. “Yes, I’m all right.”
Jellit stood and walked toward him. The man’s eyes were wide and frightened. The tightness that came with the spy’s efforts to reach the archive was gone. Whatever it was—Jellit, the spy, Else—it was fully in the room with him now. There was only the two of them.
“Shit,” Dafyd said. “I forgot to bring you food.” And then he remembered the sight of Andermus fighting back her gag reflex and his own stomach began to empty itself all over the front of his shirt.
Oh, I’m throwing up, that’s funny. The thought felt vague, distant, disconnected from the physical reality of the act.
Jellit helped him to the toilet. The noise inside Dafyd’s head was a soundless roar, like a wind tunnel or a waterfall. It washed away thought and what it left behind was distress without time, without ending, just misery and duration and the spasming of a body wracked by too much. Just too much.
When his stomach was empty, he heaved for a while.
The waves of pain and effort started to come more slowly.
Jellit was humming to him, petting his hair like he was a dog or a child.
For half an hour, maybe, they sat on the floor.
Dafyd’s arms rested on the toilet. Jellit sat with their legs almost entwined.
The roar didn’t go quiet, but it did grow softer.
“Thank you,” Dafyd said.
“It’s all right,” Jellit murmured so gently Dafyd could almost believe it was Else. “Come on. You’ll want to brush your teeth. And that shirt is finished.”
Like a tired child, Dafyd pulled off the vomit-flecked tunic, went to his sink, and rinsed his mouth. The water tasted cleaner than usual. Jellit led him to the bed, laid him down, pulled the blanket over him, and sat at his side.
“Andermus saw the body but she’s tough. I think I can count on her.”
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t there to watch them kick Tonner to death.”
“I’m sorry that you were,” the spy said.
“It was… I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to. You can just be here right now. You don’t need to rise to any occasions.”
“Someone has to take over for Tonner. I have to make sure that Ekur-Tkalal hears my version of the story. I have to talk to the guard…”
“And you will. But later.”
Dafyd’s mind grabbed the word like it was permission.
“Later,” he said, and closed his eyes. He felt Jellit’s hand on his forehead like the man was checking for a fever.
For a moment, the two of them were still.
The madness and terror of the universe retreated, not banished but pushed back for a moment by the magic of Later .
Dafyd shifted, rolled to his side, curling in on himself.
Exhaustion pinned him. Shock, he realized.
He was moving through shock. Minds are something that bodies do.
They’re not just connected, they’re different ways of looking at the same damn thing.
Who had told him that? It seemed like something he should know, but he couldn’t remember…
The spy shifted. The angle of the mattress changed, and then the other body was against Dafyd’s back.
The spy’s arm moved over Dafyd’s the way Else had done sometimes, and its forehead pressed gently against the back of Dafyd’s neck.
It had been so long since anyone had touched him.
Had held him. Had offered him comfort or consolation.
Since any of them had looked at him and seen something besides the voice of the Carryx in human form.
“It’s all right,” Jellit whispered. The spy whispered. “Dafyd, it’s all right. You’ve done so much. You’ve carried so much. It’s all right.”
Then it kissed him on the nape of his neck, Dafyd felt the stirring of Jellit’s erection against his thigh, and just like that the moment was over. Dafyd was a little surprised by his own regret.
“You need to go,” he said.
Jellit pulled back, propped himself on one elbow. Dafyd rolled onto his back. Jellit’s expression was embarrassed. Dafyd shook his head, no. Not angry, just no.
“I’m sorry,” the spy said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine. But you need to leave now. I need to be alone.”
Jellit stood, looked around the room like there might be something there he’d forgotten. Like the moment that had passed might still be there, lying half broken on the floor. “That was crossing a line. I misunderstood what was happening.”
“I understand,” Dafyd said. “It’s been a bad day. We can start working again tomorrow. Go get some food.”
Jellit left and closed the door gently behind him. Dafyd lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. There were cool patches at the corners of his eyes. Tears that had half dried. He rubbed them away with his palm.
He was in a place of calm that felt like dissociation.
If he thought about it, he was aware of the tumult and grief, the longing for comfort, the loneliness, the horror.
When he looked inside his heart, it was a shitshow.
He wasn’t all right, and he didn’t know what would come of not being all right.
But he also found he could choose not to think about it.
The ongoing damage remained, but it faded from his awareness.
Good enough.
He got up, waited for a moment to see whether the nausea was coming back, then showered, toweled off, put on a fresh tunic. There was work to do.
Andermus had taken control of the garden like it was a battlefield, and she was ready to die defending it.
Tonner’s body was gone apart from a dark spattering of drying blood.
The Rak-hund was gone. The dead Soft Lothark was gone, but Dafyd could still smell the faint acid of its death.
Humans crowded the archway like a flock of sheep with Andermus nipping them in place.
“Sir,” she said when she saw him.
“Is the guard here?” he asked. And when she nodded, “Bring it to me.”
Dafyd sat under his tree. The sky was starting to shift into evening.
The wide grid that stood between him and the stars like the iron bars of a prison caught the falling light.
It was almost beautiful. He pulled up the symbols of the Carryx language, wrote a short report about the death of Tonner Freis and Dafyd’s plan to replace him (Tonner was dead but put that aside), and once the report was sent, composed a simple line.
Three symbols, floating in space, taking their meaning by their shape, their color, their spatial relationship to each other.
Humans and Soft Lothark can help each other.
The Soft Lothark came, and five more of its kind were with it.
Andermus only let one through. Dafyd thought it was the one that had been there before, but he couldn’t be certain.
The guard looked at him, looked at the symbols.
Neither of them spoke. The translation half-mind might be the ear of the Carryx.
It sat across from him, collapsing down like its legs had given out.
It seemed confused, distressed. It put its hand to its wide mouth, gnawing at its own skin for almost a minute before shifting the symbols, adding an affirmative modifier and then changing the shade and shape of the symbol for Lothark.
Humans and the Deep Lothark can help each other.