“No,” you say, certain it would just go into Hjarka and do the same thing. Tongues were harder to carve than arms.
Ykka barks, “Knife!” at the Strongbacks—the one with the wireglass knife. It’s sharp but small, meant more for cutting rope than as a weapon; unless you hit a vital area right off, you’d have to stab someone a million times to kill them with it. It’s all you’ve got. You keep hold of Tonkee’s wrist because she’s flailing and growling like an animal. Someone puts the knife in your hand, fumbling and blade-first. It feels like it takes a year to get it repositioned, but you keep your gaze on that jerking, moving lump in Tonkee’s brown flesh. Where the rust is it going? You’re too quietly horrified to speculate.
But before you can put the knife in place to carve the moving thing loose, it vanishes. Tonkee screams again, her voice breaking and horrible. It’s gone into the meat of her.
You slash once, opening a deep cut just above the elbow, which should be ahead of the thing. Tonkee groans. “Deeper! I can feel it.”
Deeper and you’ll hit bone, but you set your teeth and cut deeper. There’s blood everywhere. Ignoring Tonkee’s pants and hisses, you try to probe for the thing—even though privately you’re terrified you’ll find it and it’ll go into your flesh next.
“Arterial,” Tonkee pants. She’s shaking, keening through her teeth between every word. “Like a rusting highroad to—sessa-ah! Fuck!” She claps at the lower half of her bicep. It’s farther up her arm than you expected. Moving faster now that it’s reached the larger arteries.
Sessa. You stare at Tonkee for a moment, chilled by the realization that she was trying to say sessapinae. Ykka reaches over you and wraps a hand around Tonkee’s arm just below the deltoid, squeezing tight. She looks at you, but you know there’s only one thing left to do. You’re not going to be able to manage it with the tiny knife… but there are other weapons.
“Hold her arm out.” Without waiting to see whether Ykka and Hjarka comply, you grip Tonkee’s shoulder. It’s Alabaster’s trick that you’re thinking of—a tiny, fine-spun, localized torus like the ones he used to kill the boilbugs. This time you’ll use it to burrow through Tonkee’s arm and freeze the little iron shard. Hopefully. But as you extend your awareness and shut your eyes to concentrate, something shifts.
You’re deep in the heat of her, seeking the metallic lattice of the iron shard and trying to sess the difference between its structure and that of the iron in her blood, and then—yes. The silver glimmer of magic is there.
You weren’t expecting that, here amid the gelid bobble of her cells. Tonkee isn’t turning into stone like Alabaster, and you’ve never sessed magic in any other living creature. Yet here, here in Tonkee, there is something that gleams steadily, silverish and threadlike, coming up through her feet—from where? doesn’t matter—and ending at the iron shard. No wonder the thing can move so quickly, fueled as it is by something else. Using this power source, it stretches forth tendrils of its own to link into Tonkee’s flesh and drag itself along. This is why it hurts her—because every cell it touches shivers as if burned, and then dies. The tendrils get longer with every contact, too; the fucking thing is growing its way through her, feeding on her in some imperceptible way. A lead tendril feels its way along, orienting always toward Tonkee’s sessapinae, and you know instinctively that letting it get there will be Bad.
You try grabbing onto the root-thread, thinking maybe to stall it or starve it of strength, but
Oh
no
there is hate and
we all do what we have to do
there is anger and
ah; hello, little enemy
“Hey!” Hjarka’s voice in your ear, a shout. “Wake the fuck up!” You jerk out of the fog you weren’t aware of drifting into. Okay. You stay away from the root-tendril, lest you get another taste of whatever is driving the thing. That instant of contact was worth it, though, because now you know what to do.
You visualize scissors with edges of infinite fineness and blades of glimmering silver. Cut the lead. Cut the tendrils or they may grow again. Cut the contamination before it can set hooks any deeper in her. You’re thinking of Tonkee as you do this. Wanting to save her life. But Tonkee is not Tonkee to you right now; she is a collection of particles and substances. You make the cut.
This isn’t your fault. I know you won’t ever believe it, but… it isn’t.
And when you manage to relax your sessapinae and adjust your perception back to the macro scale and you find yourself covered, absolutely covered in blood, you’re surprised. You don’t quite understand why Tonkee is on the floor, gasping, her body surrounded by a spreading pool as Hjarka shouts at one of the Strongbacks to hand her his belt, now, now. You feel the jerk of the iron shard nearby and twitch in alarm, because you know now what those things are trying to do, and that they are evil. But when you turn to look at the iron shard, you’re confused, because all you see is smooth bronze skin streaked with blood and a scrap of familiar cloth. Then there is a sort of twitchy movement, weight making itself known in your hand, and. And. Well. You’re holding Tonkee’s severed arm.
You drop it. Fling it, more like, violent in your shock. It bounces just beyond Ykka and the two Strongbacks who are clustering around Tonkee and doing something, maybe trying to save her life, you can’t even wrap your head around that, because now you see that the cut end of Tonkee’s arm is a perfect, slightly slanted cross-section, still bleeding and twitching because you just cut it off, but wait no that is not the only reason.
From a small hole near the bone you see something wriggle forth. The hole is the cross-section of an artery. The something is the iron shard, which drops to the smooth green floor and then lies amid the splattered blood as if it is nothing more than a harmless bit of metal.
Hello, little enemy.
INTERLUDE
There is a thing you will not see happening, yet that is going to impact the rest of your life. Imagine it. Imagine me. You know what I am, you think, both with your thinking mind and the animal, instinctive part of you. You see a stone body clothed in flesh, and even though you never really believed I was human, you did think of me as a child. You still think it, though Alabaster has told you the truth—that I haven’t been a child since before your language existed. Perhaps I was never a child. Hearing this and believing it are two different things, however.
You should imagine me as what I truly am among my kind, then: old, and powerful, and greatly feared. A legend. A monster.
You should imagine—
Castrima as an egg. Motes surround this egg, lurking in the stone. Eggs are a rich prize for scavengers, and easy to devour if left unguarded. This one is being devoured, though the people of Castrima are barely aware of the act. (Ykka alone, I think, and even she only suspects.) Such a leisurely repast isn’t a thing most of your kind would notice. We are a very slow people. It will be deadly nevertheless, once the devouring is done.
Yet something has made the scavengers pause, teeth bared but not sinking in. There is another old and powerful one here: the one you call Antimony. She isn’t interested in guarding the egg, but she could, if she chose. She will, if they attempt to poach her Alabaster. The others are aware of this, and wary of her. They shouldn’t be.
I’m the one they should fear.