Then a door opened, opposite the clamshell mouth that bit through the Dream. It was a smaller portal, barely offering clearance for two demons to emerge, one at a time.
They were horrible-looking, six-legged beasts, with horizontal bodies longer than a hoon is tall, flaring wide in back and bulging up front with huge, glassy bubble-eyes, black and mysterious. They stamped into the chamber, awkwardly crushing both Uriel’s depth gauge and Ur-ronn’s compass underfoot, looking like waterbugs, whose spindly appendages met along a tubelike body that glistened and flexed with fleshy suppleness. Smaller limbs, dangling in front, looked like mechanical tools.
All right, I’m describing a lot of stuff I couldn’t have seen all that well at the time. It was dark until the spider-things entered, except in the sharp glare of two beams cast from opposite walls. Also, I was half conscious and in shock, so nothing I write can be taken as reliable testimony.
Especially my impressions of what came next.
Waving their own dazzling lanterns, the two shadowy forms began inspecting their catch, first pausing to illuminate and stare at Pincer and Ur-ronn, then poor Huck, wheeling vainly on her side, and finally me. I tried to move and nearly fainted. When I fought to speak or umble, I found my bruised throat sac would not take air.
Funny thing, I could swear the monsters talked to one another while they looked us over, something they never do now, when they enter my cell in teams to tend me. It was an eerie, trilling, and ratcheting kind of speech, totally unlike GalTwo or any other Galactic language that I know. And yet something about it felt familiar. Each time their lights fell on another of us for the first time, I swear the beasts sounded surprised.
When they reached me, part of my terror was eased by the sudden appearance of Huphu. Somewhere in my addled mind, I’d been worried about our mascot. Abruptly, there she was, rearing in front of me, chattering defiance at the towering spider-things.
The creatures rocked back, amazement now so evident that I might have been watching them with perfectly tuned rewq. One of the things crouched down and murmured hurriedly, excitedly, either talking excitedly about the little noor or right at her. I couldn’t tell which.
Can I trust that dreamlike impression? At this point, as they say in some Earthling books, I was fading to vacuum, fast. In retrospect, it seems an illusion.
One thing I know I fantasized. Something that comes back now more as notion than memory. Yet the image clings, flickering the same way consciousness flickered, just before dimming out.
Without warning, a final figure crept into view, crawling from under a slab of our poor shattered bathy. Half-flattened and deformed, Ziz regathered its conical shape while the two monsters staggered backward, as if they had seen something deadlier than a poison-skenk. One of them swung a gleaming tube at the battered traeki partial and fired a searing bolt that blew a hole in thepoor stack’s middle ring, flinging it against the wall near Huck.
My overtaxed brain shut down about then. (Or had it done so already?) Yet there is just one more vague, dreamlike impression that clings to me right now, like a shadow of a phantom of a ghost of stunned astonishment.
Somebody spoke, while the midget traeki oozed sap across the sodden floor. Not in the trilling whistles the creatures used before. Not in GalSeven or any other civilized tongue — but in Anglic.
“My God—” it said, in tones of disbelief, and it struck me as a human female’s voice, with a strange accent I never heard before.
“My God — all these — and a Jophur too!”
XXVIII. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
It is said that we are all descended from unlucky races.
According to many of the tales told by the Six, there is endless war, persecution, suffering, and fanaticism amid the Five Galaxies. But it this really were typical, that civilisation could not have lasted even a million years, let alone a billion or more.
If it were typical, places like Jijo would be teeming with countless sooner infestations, not just half a dozen.
If it were typical, worlds like Jijo would have been used up long ago.
Other accounts tell that the vast majority or star-faring races are relatively calm. That they manage their interests, raise their clients, and tend their leased worlds with serene attentiveness to good manners and the ancient codes, while trodding the Upward Path toward whatever transcendence awaits them. They see the abrasive antics or jealous, fanatical alliances as tasteless, immature — but why intervene when it is simpler and safer just to keep your head (or heads) down and mind your own business? Clients lucky enough to be adopted into such moderate clans grow up peaceful and secure, except during those intervals — legendary Times of Change — when upheaval overwhelms even the cautious and discreet.
Then it is the hardy that tend to thrive.
Those toughened by scrappy interactions in the back alleys of space.
Those alleys claim victims, though. It is said that we Six count among the bleeding refugees who slunk away from lost causes and broken dreams, seeking a place to hide. To heal. To seek another path.
To search in quest of one last chance.
Sara
It was a muddle, any way you looked at it.
The stun-bomb had driven the pack animals into hysterical flight, yanking free of their tethers to run wild through the maze of stony spires. Someone would have to go search for them, but only after the wounded were tended with what skill Sara possessed.
Those humans who were blinded — perhaps temporarily — needed to be calmed, then fed by hand. Later, the dead must be dragged to a flat spot where a pyre could be raised, to sear their corpses down to ineluctable dross — a neat, transportable pile to be gathered and sent to sea.
There was an added complication. Several dead Urunthai had been carrying husbands or larvae. Sara herded together the strongest that crawled out of pouches — those with any chance of surviving — into a makeshift pen where the diminutive males took charge of their offspring, chewing and regurgitating small bits of meat for the pasty, caterpillarlike, pre-infant urs.
In tales praising the glory of war, they never talk about the hard stuff that comes after a battle. Maybe people wouldn’t fight as much if they knew they’d have to clean up the awful mess.
Kurt and Jomah finally got her to sit down around sunset, to eat and rest for a while. By then the day had dimmed, and the campfire’s glow flickered across two ranks of sullen captives — human and urrish — who stared at each other, sulky, half-blind, and petulant. None seemed more melancholy than the former sage, the scholar-turned-prophet who had argued with Sara so confidently half a day before. Dedinger glared calculatingly at Kurt, who cradled the pistol carefully, never letting any of the prisoners out of his sight.
Before sitting down, Sara first checked Prity’s stitches, which still oozed enough to worry her. It had been difficult sewing the wound, with the chimp understandably twitching and with Sara’s eyes blurry from the stun-bomb. After she had done all she could for her little assistant and friend, Sara looked around for the Stranger. He had been a great help all afternoon, but she had not seen him in over an hour, and it was past time for his medicine.
Kurt said, “He went off thataway” — indicating southward, into the rocks — “to try catching some donkeys. Don’t worry. That fellow seems to know how to take care of himself.”