Possibly it is some mind-affecting poison, something like the ergot that once grew on wheat. I may be able to send back to the outpost via the satellite, for a rudimentary chemical analysis. Perhaps that will lead to a cure, or at least some vaccination to stop the business spreading. I may yet be able to do some good, even though I am no magician and there is no demon to be slain.
I show Allwerith the claw that Esha obtained, and he confirms with a flinch that, yes, it is a thing of the demon. The base material is the mandible of a shreeling, which are common around Farbourand, but the greenish-black encrustations are the demon’s mark. The next night, some way west of Watacha as we camp, I do my best to dissect the nasty little thing and find some organic material under the scales and plates of the infection. There seems to be nothing, though. I force my eyes to a higher magnification than their specifications recommend, and find no internal structure in any of it, just solid pieces as though the whole mess had been glued onto the mandible as a practical joke or a bizarre craft activity. None of this is exactly something I was trained in, anthropologist second class as I am, and eventually I give up on it. A living specimen will obviously be necessary to get anywhere.
*
Two more days of good progress through the forest; little conversation; Esha and Allwerith—no, Allwer the others call him now, which I think is an indication of his changed status—ranging ahead much of the time. We came near two small communities of forest people, both nominally within the fiefdom of Watacha. The first was on high alert, with archers and spears at the palisade wall. The people there said they had seen sign of the demon’s creatures in the trees. I expected Lyn to tell them the same line about bringing her magician to fight the demon, but she glanced at me and simply said we were here to see what we could do. I fear that many of the watchers saw me and drew their own conclusions anyway, but at least I was not knowingly being oversold.
The second community we came to was abandoned, though there was no sign of violence nor of any evident infection. The locals had obviously gone to that large camp about Watacha. Or else, as per Allwer’s cheer-inspiring suggestion, the demon had simply taken them all, all at once and without the chance to fight.
I ask him questions to try to determine a kind of vector of infection, in case we are dealing with some novel plague. How does this “demon” select and take over its victims? Allwer says many of those who went close to the demon’s place near Farbourand were chosen, as were others who had been injured by demon-tainted fauna and flora. But some simply fell to it, exhibiting the marks of its influence without obvious prequel. Similarly, others had exposure but never took up the infection, including Allwer himself. I take the liberty of extracting a sample of his blood, which he is unhappy about but too wary of supposed magical retribution to refuse. It is possible that he has a resistance that can be spread through the population. Again, I lack the tools, but I send information to the satellite and await more data.
The same day we passed the empty settlement, we see the mark of the demon.
There is a kind of creature the locals call a vermid, which is a direct descendant of the old Earth English word “vermin” and suggests that they were an unintended escapee from the early colonial breeding programme. They are augmented rodent stock, very at home in trees, about half the length of a human arm plus twice that in prehensile tail. Their mélange of artificial, Earth and native biochemistry makes them voraciously omnivorous, a pest in multiple ways.
There are worse plagues than vermids, as we find. We come across some that carry the “demon” infection and it is a profoundly disquieting sight. They are certainly sick with something, and I am immediately put into mind of parasitic Earth fungi whose life cycle involves making profound behavioural and physiological changes to their hosts.
The vermids are all together in a kind of a spire. I count twenty-seven of them, but I may be mistaken because they are partially merged together into a single living mass, limbs, heads, tails all fused at various points to make a single body at least four metres tall. We see individuals, or parts of individuals, moving, though more so towards the structure’s tip; the lower members, partially fused into some root system below, are still. The whole is mottled over with patches of the infection, eruptions of chitinous-looking pustules and little nests of beads like black eyes, odd stiff fibres or hairs, patches of scaly hide as though the vermids had been the victims of some inconclusive transformation into some other, even less savoury, creature.
I tell the others to stay back and receive no arguments. I approach only with caution myself, setting my immune system on high alert to repel anything even vaguely inimical to my system. I start feeling hot and uncomfortable immediately, but that’s just telling me my precautions are active. Everything will bring me out in a rash right now, but I hope that will also let me fight off any pathogen that tries it on with me.
I sample some of the vermid-thing, cutting a twitching toe off one luckless beast and then stepping back in case the whole decides to retaliate. No response from it, whatever it is. My best bet is some kind of fruiting body, like a mushroom, which presupposes that the infection distributes itself via airborne spores.
Except my other internal instruments are picking up curious trace signals There are electromagnetic fluctuations about the grotesque spire that are definitely not present in the wider forest. They go . . . nowhere I can tell. Another step back and they are no longer detectable, from present to absent without any moment when they are simply less. Measuring a wide spectrum in the spire’s vicinity, I find a series of wavelengths in use, some a little past the infrared range, some in the spectrum used for shortwave radio communications, others around the level of X-rays. It’s all so scattershot that I likely wouldn’t have picked up on it save that there is a rhythm to the activity, not simultaneously on all bands but passed from one to another. A rhythm that lacks regularity, but which has repeated sections, almost a call and response, that I can track from wavelength to wavelength. The signals are not strong, and the radiation is less dangerous than direct sunlight. They seem to be in dialogue with something, but they are undetectable just a few metres from source. Which I cannot account for. It’s as though they’re vanishing into a hole, or I’m detecting them as bouceback from somewhere, via some atmospheric trick.
My analysis of the vermid toe, that night, reveals no unusual microbial life within it, neither Earth-style nor the simpler local analogues, nor the engineered hybrids of the two that the colonists worked up.
I find nothing that accounts for the odd electromagnetic activity.
We leave the vermids behind, heading for Birchari, which Allwer says was taken by the infection only ten days ago. I don’t believe in demons, but given what we’ve seen, I don’t blame these people for using the word.
Lynesse