She counted three of them. Only one had been human. Of the others, one was a cerkitt, a long-bodied, short-limbed beast the Bircharii had kept for hunting. It still had its collar, although the flesh of its neck was puffed out in bulbous blisters so that the strap was almost lost within. One side of its body had moulted its feathery pelt, revealing a hide erupting with sores and more of those hard black eyes. The second non-human figure was made of sarkers, a pest from here all the way to Lannesite. Lyn knew the hand-sized six-legged creatures because there was a bounty on them each Storm-season’s End and people queued up at her mother’s palace to claim the reward, sticks over their shoulders from which the little bodies swung. At first she thought she was seeing a malformed sarker the size of a man, lurching along on oddly joined legs, but then she realised she was seeing a sarker made of sarkers, a hundred of the beasts just mashed together into the right general shape, lumpen body, twisted limbs, but all of it made from still-living animals whose free limbs and mouth parts writhed in constant agony.
Between these two prodigies was something that had been a man, once. He stood on two legs, profoundly lopsided. He still wore a forester’s hard-wearing clothes, though the seams had ripped down one side to the waist where his back and shoulder had bloated out with hard plates and jags, between which protruded long frilled filaments. On his other shoulder was an extra arm and part of a head, as though someone had been huddling close to him and then most of her had been taken away, leaving only those parts. The single remaining eye was closed, and Lyn was thankful. His own head, canted at an odd angle, was three-quarters obscured by a thick growth of the demon-mark, including both eye sockets. Five gleaming discs winked at them from within the shaggy mass.
“Ancestors preserve us,” Esha said frankly. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No,” Lyn said, because if they left now, they’d never stop running until they got to Lannesite, and then where would she be? And where would Watacha be? And how long before the demon spread its corruption across the Barrenpike and into her homeland?
And Nyrgoth said, “There is a voice.”
There was no voice anyone else could hear, and the three monstrosities were still lurching forwards, impeded by their own mutations. Nyrgoth did seem to be concentrating, though. He had a hand up and cast it about, as though it was some new form of ear he could use to track down what he heard.
“Within them, and within all the patches of sickness,” he said. “There is a voice that speaks, all to the same rhythm. And it speaks to . . . elsewhere. It calls elsewhere and hears commands, but I cannot tell how the voice is brought here or how it leaves. Most curious.”
“I hear no voice,” Lyn said. The things were getting close and she wanted to pluck at the sorcerer’s sleeve.
“You wouldn’t. It is not a voice made by the throat, but I hear it still. And I can speak in that same register.”
“You can talk to these things? Or to the demon, through them?” Esha asked him incredulously. “Can you banish it?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t think there is anything to talk to, not an intelligence. But if this voice is a part of its life, that binds its parts together, perhaps I can use a like voice to break it apart.” He sounded absurdly calm in the face of the oncoming horrors, and Lyn felt her own nerves grate between her teeth and on the inside of her skull. She could not stand this much longer. She could not maintain a hero’s proper reserve.
“Do it!” she told him.
“Yes, well,” he said, and the three things stopped and shivered abruptly. There were not even words of command or magic gestures, simply the will of the magician holding them in thrall.
Allwer let out a long, tattered breath. He was behind Esha, Lyn saw, but he hadn’t run and his cudgel was at the ready, which spoke well for her trust of him.
“Have you mastered them?” she asked.
“Not so much.” Nyrgoth was frowning. “I am shouting over the voice it uses between its different parts, so it cannot hear itself. And, not hearing its own commands, these parts of it stand idle. . . .” His eyes narrowed. “It speaks.”
“You said that.”
Nyrgoth Elder was very still. “It speaks to me.”
Lyn felt physically sick. “You are a sorcerer. You can resist it.”
“Not like that.” Horror did not move him, but some dire revelation had plainly touched him. “It is aware of me, I have spoken as it speaks. And so it questions me. I don’t understand. What have we met here?”
“What does it ask?” Lyn could not push past a whisper.
“Nothing, no words I know, but I’d guess it wants to know what I am. I think I’m probably the first thing it’s met here that is real to it.”
“The people of Farbourand, of this place,” Allwer pressed.
“A resource.” The coolness of his voice was almost as dreadful as the demon-slaves before them. “Your demon does not hear human words. Perhaps does not exist as a material being at all. But it exists in the speech it uses, between its parts, and now so do I.” A change in tone as he considered. “So what are you, precisely . . . ?”
The monsters all jerked at the same time, puppets sharing strings. Lyn saw their limbs twist in ways that must have torn up the tissues of their joints.
“I think I have an understanding,” Nyrgoth said lightly. “Not what it is, but how it works, at least. I can create a region that will exclude the demon’s voice. Which will hopefully protect us from falling prey to the thing ourselves.” He glanced at her and there was even a small smile on his face, as though the whole hideous business had just been a word puzzle posed to the company over supper.
“Watch!” Esha yelled, right on the heels of his words, and then the Coast-woman lunged in, yanking Lyn back hard enough to spill her on the ground. Nyrgoth Elder whirled round, focused more on Esha than the monsters, and something unfolded out of the corrupted man’s chest: a barbed, four-jointed arm that must have filled most of his chest cavity. It snapped forwards, farther than a spearman could have lunged, and drove itself into Nyrgoth’s gut in a spray of blood.
Nyr
OW.
bloody
stabbed me.
*
The problem with pain is that
while it is in theory a good warning light on the control panel of the mind to warn you to take your hand out of the fire—
it’s—
just—
that—
*
When all the lights go on like a fireworks display they get in the way of pressing the right buttons.
*
Which is why I have the option of
turning it off,
transmuting all those
irritating
attempts at the body to save itself into
calm little reports and readouts and memos from my internal systems.
but
when things get to this state
(when some infected bloody monster shoves its fucking ovipositor into my stomach)
the stately march of little reports becomes a blizzard of warnings and error messages, until I cannot see. Until sensory information from my actual senses has been entirely shunted out of the way by my rich internal technical life insisting that I click through all the windows and menus. I’d take it up with the manufacturers if that were in any way a realistic proposition.