Lords of the Seventh Swarm (22 page)
Read Lords of the Seventh Swarm Online
Authors: David Farland
So Maggie studied much of the day, seething. Zeus had been playing games with her. From the moment she’d met Felph, she’d campaigned for him to free his children. Zeus knew how important she held her freedom.
So last night, she realized, as he spoke to me, it was not escape he wanted, it was a liaison. She remembered how he’d fondled her, how he’d pressed his kisses upon her. Love me, free me, he’d pled.
And I was fool enough to take him seriously.
In the early afternoon, Maggie felt tired, so she returned to her room to nap. The child in her womb seemed to be of a different mind. He did not kick so much as merely stretch, pressing his feet against her ribs, turning somersaults till she imagined he’d go mad from dizziness. Such internal gymnastics did not allow for decent sleep.
So Maggie was not in a good mood when her door chimes announced a visitor.
She opened the door. Zeus stood, one elbow casually resting against the doorframe. He wore an elegant silvergray dinner jacket over midnight blue pants, and he carried a yellow rose in his teeth. As mad as she’d been all afternoon, Maggie looked into his smoldering dark eyes and found—she wanted to laugh in his face.
She could not look in those eyes and see a hint of deception, only of passion. She restrained herself from laughing, and only smiled.
“For you,” Zeus said between clenched teeth. He leaned at the waist till he planted a kiss on her lips. Opening his own lips, he nudged the rose into her mouth.
He knows how his kiss affects me
, she realized. Maggie grinned, holding the rose in her mouth, thinking,
I’ll get even with you, you ass.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
Maggie decided to play his game. “I planned to ask you that question myself.”
“Does the hummingbird miss its morning nectar?” Zeus asked. “Would the moon miss the sun if it refused to shine? No less than I missed you.”
“You’re so sweet,” Maggie said. “Where did you ever learn to say such sweet things?”
“You inspire me. I find myself rising to the occasion.”
Maggie smiled thoughtfully. Zeus stood close to the door, as if begging entrance, but she didn’t want to let him in.
Maggie hadn’t seen the genetic records yet, but she suspected Felph had twisted his son’s genome. Felph was rich enough to create any kind of child he wanted: why a sociopath like Zeus? Felph said he wanted leaders, people strong enough to defeat the dronon. But what kind of man would that take?
In that moment, it came clear to her: a violent man, a man who abhorred authority and would rebel against any who sought to rule him. A controller who desperately needed to be in charge. A passionate man, one who craved to create, to leave a legacy. At the insight, Maggie drew a breath in surprise.
“Ah,” Zeus said, “I take your breath away!”
“I suspect you have that effect on all the women.” Maggie sought to recover.
“I wouldn’t know. Outside my sisters, you’re the only one I’ve ever met.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Maggie said. “You handle yourself so well.”
Zeus hesitated slightly, wondering at hidden meanings. “I understand you had a long talk with Herm this morning?”
Maggie didn’t know what he was talking about, but if Herm wanted to pretend they’d talked, she decided to play along. “Yes, it was a fascinating conversation.”
“You talked about me?”
“Nothing could be more fascinating.” Maggie laughed.
Zeus smiled, waiting for her to go on, but Maggie didn’t give him the pleasure.
“So, you will be meeting me tonight, in the garden?”
“No,” Maggie said.
“But, Herm told me you would?” Zeus countered.
“I… I wanted to,” Maggie said, “but I have a lot of work, more than I’d first imagined. I may have to work late.”
“Shame on my father,” Zeus said, “working a woman in your condition so. We should punish him.” He smiled pleasantly.
“Seriously,” Zeus said, “you must eat, and the garden is pleasant. If my father complains about your lack of performance, I’ll assure him you performed quite satisfactorily.” At this, he gazed longingly into Maggie’s eyes, licked his lips.
“All right, I’ll meet you,” Maggie said, wondering what game Herm had been playing at. It seemed everyone here played games. Zeus played Maggie, Herm played Zeus. Where did it end?
“I admired the dress you wore last night,” Zeus whispered passionately.
“Thank you,” Maggie said.
“Leave it home tonight. Our skin will be warm enough.” Zeus leaned forward, kissed her. “Until tonight, then.”
Maggie stood in the doorway, watching him leave, heart pounding. When he’d passed down the hall, she returned to the technical wing, to the computers in Felph’s revivification chamber. For three hours she studied Zeus’s genome, found it to be all she’d feared. On the Rand scale, his violent tendencies measured a perfect 8.2 on a scale of ten. Any higher, and he’d be a threat to society. Any lower and he wouldn’t be capable of the cold-blooded murder required of a dictator.
His Parcher indicators put him at four thousand in creative impulse—levels one would expect to find in a great composer. But Felph had also raised Zeus’s testosterone levels unnaturally high, and had boosted the number of nerve endings in his genitals, accompanied by a hypothalamus design that craved stimulation. Zeus could not help but crave sex, enjoy it more than others.
Manipulation was Zeus’s art. He could play a woman’s emotions the way a great violinist played the violin.
Of course the genetic manipulations went far beyond this—Felph left virtually nothing to chance with Zeus. But the most arcane changes had to do with Zeus’s nervous system. There were some distinctly odd modifications, including seven genes on the twelfth chromosome that totaled some fifty-three thousand pairs of amino acids in total length.
This change in particular baffled her. It suggested Zeus’s nervous system had been hijacked to fulfill some secondary purpose, yet the information in Maggie’s mantle was insufficient to name that purpose.
Could these modifications be nonhuman in origin?
she wondered.
“Affirmative,” her mantle whispered.
“Can you check with Felph’s AI and find out what these modifications are for?” she asked her mantle.
A moment later, the mantle whispered, “The information is classified. Felph’s AI cannot release that information. However, by cross-referencing these genes with information found in Felph’s library, the genes seem to be a modification of those found in an extinct earth life-form, the
electrophorus electricus
—a breed of carp which emits a powerful electric shock.”
“Zeus is a chimera?” Maggie wondered. A creature part human, part animal. A dangerous one.
“Yes,” her mantle whispered.
A loud hissing erupted from the far side of the revivification chamber. A gray polka dot on the wall popped free. For half a second, Maggie wondered if she’d inadvertently tripped a switch that would animate a clone, but realized she had done nothing. A tube slid out, displaying the sleeping form of a man in his twenties, with deep brown hair and a hawkish nose. It took her a moment to recognize Felph, but she could see it in the contours of his face. At each leg, sinuous tubes were inserted into Felph’s ankles.
One pumped blood from some hidden recess in the cryochamber into Felph’s body. The other tube drew away a clear liquid, the artificial blood used in cryosleep.
The lights on the clone’s Guide blazed a pure white as the artificial intelligence downloaded Felph’s memories into the younger body. Maggie’s heart began thumping. Felph has died, she realized, and now he is being revived. But what of Gallen?
Gallen had gone into danger; but he couldn’t get hurt, could he? He was the one who slew the Lords of the Swarm. He was the Lord Protector who had brought down the Inhuman on Tremonthin. Yet in her mind, she recalled the sight of Veriasse, his face half-burned away, flailing about wildly as the dronon Vanquishers sliced him to ribbons. Even Lord Protectors die.
Gallen believed so much in his own invulnerability that Maggie wanted to believe it, too.
And this was just the kind of place where Gallen would die, blindly charging into some situation hotter than he was prepared to handle.
Felph had been killed out in the tangle, fighting who knows what. He’d been with Gallen, and Gallen hadn’t been able to protect him.
Maggie’s heart pounded. But if Gallen were dead, it did not matter much. In a few weeks, his clone could be raised, its memories restored. But something important could be lost. Orick and Tallea weren’t cloned.
Don’t worry, don’t worry
, she told herself. Maybe nothing bad happened. Maybe Felph slipped and fell. It could have been as easy as that. But Felph had been a spry codger, Maggie knew. She doubted it would have happened so easily.
To learn what had happened, all she needed to do was ask the clone. Maggie held her breath as the download continued.
Gallen wasn’t the type to let his charges die. He’d never lost someone entrusted to his care. So he must have fallen into some heavy combat, and hadn’t been able to save Felph. That was all Maggie could think. It could take hours for the clone to revive fully. Maggie sent Gallen a message, calling him with her mantle, hoping for the best.
Chapter 21
Cooharah and Aaw flapped their wings, struggling desperately in the thin air to climb a ridge of angry red mountains, the evening sun just touching the peaks, painting them shades of crimson and rose.
“Oasis to the east,” Aaw whistled. Cooharah looked down at a cliff beneath him. An ancient diagram painted dark green showed the way,
“Can we trust it?” Cooharah asked, weary of chasing promises.
“What choice do we have?” Aaw asked, chuckling low tones of despair.
In three days, he and Aaw had eaten little food. A few insects, a rodent. In these wastes, nothing could be found. The barrenness of the land surprised even Cooharah. All along this route, their ancestors had left ancient glyphs painted on the rocks, signs for their children to follow. The signs read, “Fly east forty kilometers for food,” or “Oasis past mountain to west.”
But the land had changed over centuries. The oases where Cooharah’s ancestors watered so long ago had long since dried. The promises of food were all empty.
Cooharah had begun to lead Aaw north in hopes of finding a nesting site, an oasis where they might raise their chick. Now Cooharah feared they would die.
It was not just the lack of food. True, they’d eaten little in three days, but if they were safe in an aerie, where they could rest, a few days of hunger would not have been so bad. But this ceaseless flying, the almost frantic zigzagging over the desert, had worn them, was affecting their senses.
After winging so far over the desert, Cooharah felt dizzy. The hot wind ruffling his feathers seemed to suck the breath from him, and his body felt disjointed. It was as if his wings flew of their own accord, without conscious thought.
They veered east, circling a mountain, and hope filled Cooharah. Before them a ragged pink mountain soared, fluted in strange and magnificent shapes.
Cooharah had never seen aeries like this: his people had no names for minarets and citadels, crenellations and vast gardens. His people had never imagined fluted columns, or strangely arched windows that made such odd entryways. Yet the sight before them was magnificent: waters cascading over palace walls in splendid silver threads.
“Oomas, oomas!” Cooharah whistled, using the Qualeewooh word for humans. Neither Cooharah nor Aaw had ever seen the aliens—odd, stubby creatures, with hair like rodents. It was said that they built machines to fly between worlds, and that they were far wiser than even the wisest of ancestors.
Yet they wore no spirit masks, and therefore had no souls.
It was widely known that oomas stole the spirit masks of ancestors, and some of the stubby creatures even killed living Qualeewoohs, tearing off the precious masks. Cooharah could not condone such madness, even though he understood it. If the humans did not have spirits, what extremes might they go to gain one? Killing a Qualeewooh, robbing it of its spirit mask, could not give a spirit to the humans, but despite all their learning, humans did not know this.
“Shall we go? Shall we drink?” Aaw whistled.
Water. The oomas had water flowing from their aerie. At the least, Cooharah and his mate would drink. In this desert, water might keep them alive for another day or two.
“We drink,” Cooharah replied. “Watch for food.”
As they dipped over the ridge, Cooharah let himself glide down the hillsides into the shadows of the coming night, buoyed by the brisk updrafts from the valleys. The fields below were green in the evening. Often, the plants had strange, colorful growths.
Silver things wandered along the ground on tedious legs. Cooharah suspected these were not living beings, yet he wondered. Could they be the stubby-legged oomas his mother had taught him of? Certainly their bodies were silver-like-reflected-water, not tan-like-the-hair-of-desertdiggers. Cooharah did not approach the silver creatures, fearing they might be dangerous.
And how should we treat oomas, if we find them?
Cooharah wondered.
Should we flock with them, or flee from them?
Some Qualeewoohs would flock with oomas, gaining profit thereby, while other Qualeewoohs found death at the aliens’ hands.
The oomas’ reaction to Qualeewoohs seemed to arise from the proximity of other oomas. If many comas flocked together, they would not kill a Qualeewooh. But lone oomas were dangerous.
Cooharah found it odd that the actions of an individual depended on whether others of its kind hovered near. Cooharah found this so incredible, he dared not believe it. Better to avoid the oomas altogether, to flee from them.
“If we see oomas, flee,” Cooharah whistled.
“Agreed to the second level of fervency,” Aaw whistled back.
They flew to a stream flowing through the green fields, then dived headlong into the shallows, washing themselves.
The water stunned them, for it was icy so high in the mountains. For a long moment, both Qualeewoohs waded, dipping their mouths into the water, then raising their heads high so the sweet, clear water flowed down their gullets.
The foot of the mountain before them was bathed in sunlight, and Cooharah spotted the natural purple of wild plants from the tangle. Though the humans raised their own strange herbs, an oasis of sorts still survived here.
Above the tangle, a flock of skogs rose, wheeling over the twisted vines like black bullets, dodging between the uppermost branches of trees. It was a strange sight, for skogs seldom flew so high above the tangle. These skogs had not been hunted in a very long time.
“The chase begins!” Cooharah whistled, leaping into the air. He chose a path low to the ground, in the shadows, barely skirting the odd alien vines. Aaw flew at his tail.
They swept into the tangle, winging up through shadows, veering through the branches. Down here, they kept hidden from the skogs above them.
Both Qualeewoohs prepared for the hunt while on the wing.
The silver teeth inlaid into Cooharah’s spirit mask had been filed to perfect sharpness earlier in the morning, and he’d not had a chance to make a kill since then. With a flick, Cooharah used the small hands at the apex of his wings to retrieve a long, thin blade from his weapon belt, then dropped it and caught it in his talons. The blade—the chosen weapon of his flock—was designed for midair decapitations.
In a moment, Cooharah spotted dark skogs pinwheeling above. His belly grumbled; the sight of prey made Cooharah see red. He was so famished, almost the sight of food drove him into
acrahas
—the frenzy.
But Cooharah reigned his passions. To let himself fall into the hunting frenzy would be dangerous. One did not mindlessly attack a flock of skogs, with their sharp tusks. So Cooharah fought the hunger madness, yet doubled his speed, till his body became a blurred shadow beneath the creepers and branches of the tangle. The best angle to attack a skog was from behind and beneath, rising unseen to slice at a soft belly or to slash a throat. Cooharah had practiced his techniques since he was a chick.
But behind him, Cooharah heard a rattling, a throaty chuckle that spoke of desperate need. Aaw’s hunger had become too terrible to face. She’d fallen into the
acrahas
. Though Cooharah flew fast, Aaw burst past him, winging up through the trees, the need in her rising from her throat in the closest sound to a growl a Qualeewooh could approximate. Cooharah thought fast. With Aaw mindless from hunger, she’d need his protection in case the skogs circled back to attack.
With the sound of Aaw’s need rising from the tangle, the skogs broke ranks, flying distractedly in every direction, wings flapping loudly. Aaw burst up from the foliage and caught one young hen skog in her mouth, ripped off its left haunch in mid-flight and gulped the bloody meat, tossing the body up and away. Half a second later, Cooharah caught the carcass as it dropped, tore off flesh with his own teeth. He shot up above Aaw in that moment, preparing to toss the bloody remains back to her, when something huge swooped past him.
Cooharah realized that just as he and Aaw had risen from the tangle to attack the skogs, some larger predator had dropped from above for the same purpose. Cooharah dropped the body of the skog in surprise and twisted, wheeling sideways, then flapped his wings hard to slow, and gazed down. He wheeled in a semicircle, watching. He had never seen a creature like this one: the beast was part mammal, part bird. It had vast, speckled wings that rose from the shoulder, and in this respect it reminded Cooharah of a whipparoong—but in no other respect. Instead of antlers on its head, it had long wavy hair, but that seemed to be the only part of its body that had hair. Its face, long arms, and legs were all hairless. It hid its body beneath some cloth much softer than the leather harness that adorned Cooharah’s own torso.
The winged beast flapped hard and soared just above the tangle, looking up at Cooharah and Aaw in frustration. It screamed some loud war cry and shook its fist in the air, angered that they had wrested away its prey.
For her part, Aaw still chuckled, her blood hunger, securely under the sway of
acrahas
. All the skogs had fled, dispersed in several directions, too shocked from the triple assault to form a counterattack. Cooharah watched several of them dive into the tangle, where in moments he knew they would be so far beneath the sunlight he would never catch them again before nightfall.
With nothing left in sight to eat, Aaw shrieked with need, and dived at the strange creature.
The beast rose to the challenge and flew straight up at her, beating its wings furiously. It held something in one long hand, a weapon that discharged with the sound of thunder.
Something flew from the creature’s hand, hitting Aaw’s wing, so that several pinion feathers blew off. Aaw cried out in rage, dived, twisting just to keep aloft.
With fear pumping his heart, Cooharah whistled for Aaw to be patient, so together they could face this beast from the realms of the oomas worlds. With a blinding dive, Aaw hurtled at the strange beast. Their foe pointed its weapon at her, discharged, but at the last second she twisted away. Their foe moved too slowly, and his missiles sailed harmlessly past Aaw’s tail feathers.
Cooharah knew of flocks who used missiles to hunt prey, but he’d never heard of any alien creature that did so, except for oomas.
Aaw managed to spin on her back as she passed, raking the beast’s soft underbelly with her talons. The surgically inserted nails of metal in her talons flayed the beast from chest to groin, so that on second it was roaring and a waving its weapon menacingly, and the next it faltered, trying to hold its own guts in with one long arm.
Distracted by the sight of its own blood, the creature glanced down. Cooharah struck.
Cooharah dived from above and behind, aiming between the beast’s wings, slashing forward with all his might. When his blade struck the beast’s neck, Cooharah was unprepared for the thickness of its bones. He’d never met a foe so strong. The blade nearly ripped from his talons, and Cooharah flapped his wings frantically for half a second, trying to draw it out.
Fortunately, just when Cooharah feared the blade would tumble into the tangle and become lost, the beast’s head severed from its body and tumbled.
The beast itself rolled over through the air, dropping slowly, till it landed with a thud on a worm vine.
Aaw dived to feed. Cooharah followed.
They tore flesh from the creature and gobbled it as the last rays of sunlight illuminated the upper brush of the tangle. They did not speak as they ate. Their hunger was too great; besides, Cooharah feared that predators from the lower reaches of the tangle would be making their journey up for the nightly hunt. He wanted to be away, winging over the plains in the starlight, before they arrived.
In a few moments, they finished feeding on the strange beast. Cooharah and Aaw flew off, heavy from their meal.
They did not speak for a while, but eventually Aaw’s sanity returned enough so she managed to trill, “That was a beast from the world of oomas. Will the oomas be angry with us for killing their beast?”
Cooharah did not know. It was said that the oomas kept some animals for food. Cooharah suspected they had just stolen food from the oomas, but he did not know. If he had stolen food, he owed the oomas a debt; that would be a bad thing. Still, Cooharah could not be certain. The Qualeewoohs did not keep flocks and herds in this way, so there was no correlation between the two species, no way for Cooharah to categorize such a debt.
On the other hand, he and Aaw were not responsible. Aaw had been suffering from acrahas. In ancient times, his people had eaten chicks from one another’s nests when driven by such need. Such things were understandable, though disappointing. All things must be forgiven one who suffers acrahas.
“Perhaps the oomas will be angry,” Cooharah said, “but we must be forgiven if we have killed their beast. Still, it would not be wise to tell them what we have done. We do not know these oomas. They have no souls. Perhaps they would use this as an excuse to try to steal ours. We must leave.”
“Agreement to the third level,” Aaw trilled.
The Qualeewoohs winged their way beyond the palace, heading south, back toward the great desert.