Thirty-Six
Thirty-Six
S urur of the cohort Tlassen, regulator-librarian to the Sovran and first among her servants, stood on his bench.
He was the most honored among the hundred and more that had come to witness the meeting of the Sovran with her newest daughter.
The air was awash with the trill and rumble of Carryx voices and the thick weight of their pheromones.
Surur-Tlassen felt his own flesh producing scent, reflexively commanding the space around him.
The excitement of the day was intoxicating and elevating.
He felt his throat thickening with the pleasure of simply being there.
Across the meeting chamber, the benches were empty. They would not remain so for long.
This would be the sixth such meeting Surur-Tlassen had witnessed, and while nothing would ever match the flesh-altering profundity of the first one, every repetition of the ritual had power for him. Each meeting had made him more deeply what he was.
The passage to the private creche clicked softly.
If it had blared like a mating call, it would not have commanded more attention.
The voices of the living Carryx rose and then fell away as the passage opened and the remnants emerged.
The one that had once been Urur-Atlak came first, moving slowly on its withered arms. Its abdomen shifted behind it arthritically.
The pale sticks that had once been fighting arms lumbered forward.
The others followed in order, youngest to oldest, until the last remnant hauled itself slowly out of the dark.
Surur-Tlassen had never known this one in its life before the creche.
It had lost two of the legs from its abdomen, and its eyes were the milky white of blindness, but it had dozens of them.
Whoever it had been, this diminished echo still showed that the ancient thing had been astounding.
Now, the other remnants had to help lift it onto its bench.
When they were all in place, the meeting chamber went silent, and from behind Surur-Tlassen, the Sovran made her way into the chamber.
The scent of her pheromones was overwhelming, even to him.
He had spent every day since he had gained his office in her company, breathing in the air she had breathed out, but the richness of her day-to-day company was mild compared to this overpowering presence.
For the other Carryx—the ones who saw her less, spoke with her less—it would be overwhelming.
At the end of one bench, the supervisor-librarian of the logistical body cried out and lost control of his limbs for a moment, flailing like a newborn fresh from the shell.
Across the meeting room, the remnants and monks of the private creche were unmoved.
The Sovran rose up on her legs. The silver of her crest caught the light, refracting a thousand subtle colors.
Her hundred eyes shifted with a glorious independence.
From where he stood Surur-Tlassen could watch the scintillating patterns beneath the filigree that covered her abdomen.
Her beauty and power softened the organs of his viscera, his body eager to become whatever she might command of him.
A movement came from the passage. At first it was nothing more than a shadow in darkness, but then slowly, carefully, another body hauled itself out to the light.
The daughter was wider than the Sovran, her abdomen almost flat as a table at the back.
Her crest was vivid green with filaments of crimson and indigo woven through it.
Her feeding arms were tucked close to her thorax, and her fighting arms were thinner than her mother’s, but they moved with an agility and sureness that spoke of youth and vigor.
Mother and child considered each other from across the chamber. For a long, breathless moment, neither moved.
The Sovran tucked her feeding arms in close to her thorax, rose up on her abdominal legs, and spread her fighting arms wide.
The call that came from her throat was deep and primal.
Surur-Tlassen didn’t only hear it. He felt it resonating in him, felt the surge of blood flowing to his own muscles, the pain-sensing nerves going numb as they prepared for battle.
The violence in that call was older than most parts of his mind, and what answered it came not only from deep in his body but from far into the genetic memory of his kind.
It whispered into his heart of an ancient time when fields of primitive Carryx hurled themselves recklessly into battle to answer that call. The sound tasted like blood.
The daughter’s response came as the Sovran still sang its war cry.
The new Carryx rose up, fighting arms spread, and screamed defiance that was as sweet and clear as fresh water.
The two voices joined, and the regulator-librarian felt them both, pulling his flesh and his mind to opposing ends.
If he had put his limbs in a fire, the pain would not have been greater.
The involuntary whimper that escaped his beak was inaudible in the storm.
The daughter struck first, lashing out at the Sovran’s thorax.
The concussion of the strike was a blow to his ears, his eyes, but he didn’t respond to it.
The Sovran’s counterstrike had already begun as she rushed forward, trying to push her new daughter back and force her to expose her vulnerable legs or throat.
When the daughter danced sideways to avoid the rush, the Sovran’s fighting legs snapped forward, and the daughter’s right abdominal foreleg shattered in a spray of chitin and pale blood.
A blow that for any Carryx other than these two would have meant the end of the fight, dominance established.
Even for these titans, the nature of the injury looked like an advantage that would end the meeting in the Sovran’s victory.
For a moment, it truly looked like an advantage.
The daughter spun on her three remaining legs, her fighting arms snapping out, not at the Sovran’s head or abdominal legs, but at the fighting limbs themselves.
The blow landed at the juncture of the Sovran’s left fighting arm and her body, and the limb sagged.
He could see blood sheeting down the Sovran’s side as she tried to lift her now-uneven arms for a fresh strike, but the attack was awkward. It only pushed the daughter away.
The daughter shrieked again, her fighting arms hammering forward twice, then a third time.
The Sovran’s ornate crest cracked. Her feeding arms rose up and out, a dying effort to fend off the blow that would crush her throat.
The daughter hit, and the Sovran’s abdominal legs gave way.
Again and again, the daughter struck the dying Sovran, screaming rage and joy as her mother died before her.
The light went out of the Sovran’s many eyes.
The arena went quiet, the last echoes of the battle cries fading into silence.
The scent of her death was as deep as turned earth and fresh blood.
The others would smell it too, experience it in their own ways.
But Surur-Tlassen was the regulator-librarian.
The connection point between the Sovran and the empire.
He had felt the deaths of the previous daughters, been lifted by their mortal waves, and returned to himself.
This time was different.
Even as the new Sovran towered over the corpse of her mother on the meeting room’s floor, the remnant that had been Urur-Atlak looked across.
All of its eyes were focused together on Surur-Tlassen, not because it lacked the intelligence to see other things but because no other thing was as interesting to it.
Surur-Tlassen felt a wave of calm wash over him, and then a profound and beautiful falling away.
His gender, his responsibility, the burden of his office.
A banked and unacknowledged lust that had underlain everything he—it—had done since achieving its goal deflated in a kind of holy fatigue.
It was as if a lifetime of torture it hadn’t known it was suffering had suddenly stopped and left it at peace.
The new Sovran lifted her head and began her song. For the first time, Surur only heard the sounds. Its body didn’t reshape to it. Nothing in it answered her. The relief was unexpected and joyful.
As the others who still lived under the Sovran lifted their own voices, as they sang her song and tuned themselves to her peculiar cadences, the thing that had been Surur-Tlassen walked across the meeting room and took its place with the other remnants.
Soon, its new cohort would lead it to the private creche where it would spend the rest of its life crafting new daughters for the new Sovrans.
Its old life—all its old lives—were behind it, and it was embarking on this one last incarnation.
The ambitions that had driven it, the pride that had buoyed it up, the furious effort of distilling the reality of the endless empire into a daily summary all belonged to a new regulator-librarian now.
Soon, the council of eight that had attended Surur would be fighting each other for the honor of taking its place.
The smell of blood and pheromone wafted through its nasal chambers and triggered nothing. The acclaim of the Carryx to their Sovran filled its ears and shifted no part of its body or its blood.
The remnant that had been Urur-Atlak leaned over, its beak coming almost close enough to touch skin.
“Welcome home,” it said.
The Sovran stood on her mother’s corpse, drenched in both of their bloods, and the empire moved on as it should, in perfect harmony.
“The new crop of grasses have met the requested nutrient densities,” Dafyd said. “The levels of phosphate and unfavorable saccharides are within the tolerances you requested, but the team believes another round of modifications will be able to reduce them further.”