Serpent's Reach

“He should go somewhere,” Yls said softly to Del, “where be can find full occupation for his humour. Meron, perhaps. Wouldn’t that satisfy him?”

“He goes,” the Hald said in a thin voice. “Morn goes with him. I understand you.”

“A temporary matter,” Eron said, and clapped his hand to the Hald’s shoulder, pressed it as they walked toward the bar, Ros and his daughters trailing them. “My affection for the fellow. You understand. I don’t want trouble right now. We can’t afford it. Older heads have to manage this.”

And when matters were more settled, Eron thought, Pal might come to some distant and inconspicuous end. Pol’s wit was not all turned to humour…a child of the last great purge, Pol a Ren hant Hald, and participant in a more recent one, when Meth-marens had done some little damage, Pol Hald and Morn: Pol whose jokes were infamous, and Morn who never laughed—they were both quite apt to treacheries.

Eron thought this, and smiled his engaging smile, among others who held their drinks and smiled most earnestly…anxious folk, appropriately grateful to be invited here, admitted to the society of power.

With the Halds and the Meth-marens, the Ren-barants and other key elders here, with Thon and Yalt decimated, and their bloc decimated…this gathering and the blocs they represented constituted the majority, not only of raw power on Cerdin, but of votes to sway all the Reach.

vi

“Night,” said a Worker.

Raen had sensed it. She had learned the movements and rhythms of the hive which said that this was so: the increase of the traffic coming in, the subtle shifts of air-currents, the different songs. Inside the hive, the blackness was always the same. She had wished a piece of the fungus to provide light, and Workers had brought it, establishing it on the wall of the chamber that was hers. By this she proved to herself that her eyes still functioned, and gave them limits against which to work. But that was only for comfort. She had learned to see with touch, with the variations of the constant song of the hive; and to understand majat vision. Beautiful, beautiful, they called her, entranced with the colours of her warmth. You are the colours of all the hives, the attendants told her, blue and green and gold and red, ever-changing; but your limb is always blue-hive.

Her hand, covered with blue-hive chitin: they were endlessly fascinated by that, which was a secret toward which majat had contributed. Kontrin genetic science and majat biochemistry…the two in complement had spawned all the life of the Reach. Majat were capable of analyses and syntheses of enormous range and sensitivity, capable of sampling and altering substances as naturally as humans flexed limbs, a partnership invaluable to Kontrin labs. But the hive, she realised, the hive had never directly participated. The majat Workers who came into the labs to stay were always isolated from Workers of the hive, lest their chemical muddle impress the hive and disturb it. They never returned, but clung forlornly to human company and direction, dependent on it, patterned to the few humans who dared touch them: seldom resting, sleepless, they would work until their energy burned them out. Afterward, humans must dispose of the corpses: no majat would.

My being here is a danger to the Mind, she thought suddenly, with a deep pang of conscience. Maybe my coming here has done what they’ve always feared, shifted their chemistry and affected them. Perhaps I’ve trapped them.

There were azi, human Workers…the majat lived closely with those, unaffected by chemical disturbance.

Are they?she wondered; and then, more terrifyingly: Am I?

The song deafened, quivered in the marrow of the bones. Mother began it, and the Workers carried it, and the Warriors added their own baritone counterpoint, alien to their own species, the killer portion of the partitioned hive-mind Drones sang but rarely…or perhaps, like much of majat language, the Drone songs were seldom in human range.

Raen rose, walked, tested the strength of her limbs. They had given her cloth of majat spi

“I am ready,” she decided. Workers touched her and scurried off, bearing that message.

A Warrior arrived. She informed it directly of her plans, and it hurried off.

Soon came the azi…humans, marginally so, though majat did not reckon them as such. Lab-bred, sterile, though with the outward attributes of gender, they served the hives as the Workers did, with hands more agile and wits more suited to dealing with humans, the new appurtenances the hives had taken on when they began to associate with humans, a new and necessary fragment of the hive-mind. Betas made them, and sold them to other betas…and to Kontrin, who sold them to the hives, short-lived clones of beta cells.

They came, bearing blue lights hardly brighter than the illusory fungus, and gathered about her, perhaps bewildered by the chitin on her hand, the realisation that she was Kontrin, though naked as they, and within the hive. They were not bred fighters, these particular azi, but they were clever and quick, bright-eyed and anxious to serve. They were much prized by majat and must know their worth in the hive, but they were a little mad. Azi who dwelled among majat tended to be.

“We’re going outside,” Raen told them. “You’ll carry weapons and take my orders.”

“Yes,” they said, voices overlapping, song-toned, inflectionless as those of the majat. There was a certain horror in these strangest of the azi. They came here younger than azi were generally sold; they acquired majat habits. They touched her, confirming her in their minds. She returned the touches, and gathered up the clothing she had been given. She wrapped it round and tied it here and there. It had a strange feel, light as it was, the reminder of a world and a life outside.

A Warrior came then, sat down, glittering in the azi-lights, chitinous head and powerful jaws a fantasy of jewel-shards. It offered her a pistol. It carried weapons of its own, besides the array nature had provided it: these items too majat prized, status for Warriors…empty symbols: humans had believed so. Raen took up the offered gun, found it shaped to a human hand. The cold, heavy object quickly warmed to her grip, and she took keen pleasure in the solidity of it: power, power to make Ruil pay.

“Azi-weapon,” Warrior said. “Shall we arm azi?”

“Yes.” She thrust her free hand against its scent-patches, reaching between the huge jaws. “Are you ready?”

A song hummed from Warrior. Others appeared, shifting from unseen tu

“Come,” she bade them.

Her word had Mother’s authority behind it, the consensus of the hive. They moved, all of them, down the tu

Then they reached the cool air of the vestibule, and poured out under the night sky. Raen shivered in the wind and blinked, awed to find the stars again, to realise the brilliance of the night.

Warriors gathered silently about her, touching, seeking motive and direction. She was nexus, binding-unit for this portion of the Mind. She started away, barefoot and agile among the rocks.

vii

Starlight glistened on the lake, and bright artificial lights; danced wetly at the farther shore, where Sul had never put lights. Raen stopped on the last rocky shelf above the woods and snatched a look at sights to which majat eyes were all but blind. For the first time her wounds hurt, her breath came short. Kethiuy-by-the-waters.