The Hundred: Fall of the Wents (36 page)

“The sphere?” thought Tully. He pulled it from his vest and stared at it. It was so small and so ordinary. Yet Hen-Hen had shown an uncommon interest in it, and it had burned him like fire in Snell’s forge, and it had struck the magic box and given him a vision of Hindrance. And she herself had given it to him.

“Take it?” asked Tully. “And do what with it?”

“It is of the same substance as the rock you see below you. It is portal, it is immortality, it is life itself. You must swallow it,” said the voice of Hen-Hen. “You must eat the metal, and be an Eft no more. You will become more powerful than you can imagine. The Hundred will be drawn to you, and follow you, and take you as their living master.”

“Swallow it!” said Tully, astonished. “Why, I would choke, or die.”

“You will not die,” said Hen-Hen. “You will never die. This metal you wear is Hundredstone, and it gives eternal life. It saves you from time itself. But you must do what I say. The Hundred will be on us soon. They will surely destroy the last of the Wents, and destroy you where you now stand, unless you have the power inside you.”

“Why me?” asked Tully. “Why should I be the one to do this thing?”

“Only a Triling Eft may eat the Hundredstone and live. None other can withstand it, for Efts alone bear the strain of the humans within them. You have known all along that you are the one we wanted. You are strong, and wise. Swallow it now, and keep your life. Fail to use it and we all will die. Do not be swayed by weakness.”

Tully tried to ignore the voice of the Frothsome Grout, but Hen-Hen was insistent and persuasive. He stared at the little metal sphere in his hands. Without thinking, he had taken it from its fabric bag and it now lay in his trembling hand. In the dying afternoon sun that peeped through the clouds, he could see the light from his scales dance over the rough metal ball. He stared into its surface and the metal seemed to shimmer like liquid. He thought about choking it down his throat. If he did not die in the attempt, what then would happen to him? He would no longer be himself. Tully Swift would be dead.

Hen-Hen could hear his thoughts.

“You will be born again, to live forever. You will have great strength. Never will you grow sick, or weak, or confused.” Hen-Hen’s voice became wheedling and cunning. “Never will you doubt your own power.”

“And by doing this thing, I will save the Wents that still live?” asked Tully, glancing up at Hindrance on the cliff above.

“You surely will,” said the voice of Hen-Hen. “The things that come out of the rock below must be controlled, and tamed. Without a leader who controls the Hundredstone, they may destroy us all.”

Tully thought there was a lie in Hen-Hen’s speech—he could hear it. Rather, he could
feel
it, somewhere in his antennae that pricked and trembled with anxiety. Surely Hen-Hen meant what he said. Yet he had not given Tully time to consider his course. He had chosen to tell him of the sphere’s power now, at this final moment of danger. Why?

He longed to put the sphere back inside its pouch but it hung in his hand like a hot stone. All he had to do to defeat the Hundred was to swallow the thing, if he could even manage such a strange act. He needed time. He needed to think.

Holding the sphere tightly in his fist, Tully took out his little telescope and sighted the ledge. He could not see within the dark hole, but the lights of the Shrike’s headlamps lit the side of the dark, broken rock and revealed its every crevice and mark. The rock was scarred from many failed attempts to breach it over the years. Tully marveled at its resilience, just as he had marveled at the beautiful song that had finally opened it.

Then his head swam again, for what stepped from the crevice beneath the sundered rock was not the terrible miasma he had expected to see, but the very picture of innocence: Two young beings, bemused and uncertain, dirty and bedraggled. Whatever they were, they were young. They were children. This was the Hundred in their most terrible physical forms? The Shrikes seemed afraid to touch them, so the children staggered forward, blinking in the harsh lights and holding each other by the hand. They made a pathetic picture.

Hen-Hen had told him not to be swayed by weakness. He must be strong. But why? Everything that Tully had believed for the past several weeks was in doubt. He thought back to that day on the great plain of Bellerol, when the Council had met with him and his friends. All of the Council had been Dualing creatures—the Shrike, the Scratchling, the Whiskered Fish, even Hen-Hen himself. Did the Council want him to save the Wents? Or did they have some greater purpose?

And then he saw Elutia. She climbed from the hidden cave. She was unsteady and slow, but seemed unharmed. She climbed up to join the children. Tully’s heart leapt. She was alive! She looked directly up as if she could see Hindrance—and perhaps she could—for Elutia’s face glowed with happiness and relief. Tully could see Hindrance also. Her face showed wonder and recognition. Hindrance would never jump now.

“These are emissaries of the Hundred!” roared Hen-Hen. “They will come within the instant! Swallow the Hundredstone now, before it is too late.” There was an element of surprise in the Frothsome Grout’s voice; clearly he had not expected the arrival of these small beings.

“These things will destroy us if you do not act,” said Hen-Hen, and Tully knew then that he was lying. Elutia and these children were not creatures of evil, but of innocence. Tully would not do this thing that Hen-Hen commanded. There was something wrong in it, something evil. He would not give himself away to become a thing of darkness.

“No,” thought Tully, aiming the thought directly at Hen-Hen, wherever he was hidden. “I will not do it.”

“You must,” insisted Hen-Hen. “Those are human children that you see. The humans and the Hundred will become one and the same.”

Tully felt sick, but he would not be swayed. “I will never do it,” he said stoutly. “I would throw myself into the darkest pit, and the sphere with me, rather than become the thing you want me to become.” Carefully, with trembling hands, he placed the little metal ball back inside its fabric bag. He wished that he could fling it away from him into the sea, but that might cause more danger.

“I will never do as you say,” said Tully. “For I believe that your words are a lie.”

“Then you are a fool,” said Hen-Hen, in such a loud voice that sparks of pain shot up Tully’s antennae. Hen-Hen’s voice grew to a great roar, without sense or meaning, and Tully was nearly deafened by it. He swayed on his ledge of rock as the blast of sound buffeted him—so different from the song of the Wents, so full of rage and power.

As if they had been blown in by Hen-Hen’s voice from a mighty distance, a swarm of bees emerged on the horizon, skimming over the crest of rock. From a distance they made a black and fearsome cloud. There were so many of them that they darkened the air. They were headed straight toward him.

And then Tully had a horrifying, sickening revelation: The bees, clung so tightly together that they made a black shadow. The bees of his dream, spinning in a dark ring around the moon. The bees that had come together to make a craft that had borne them north, all at Hen-Hen’s command. The buzzing cloud that had flown over the Shrike stronghold, and the shadow that had swept away like a mist from the place where the Boring Bees had supposedly died in the snow.

The shadows that had haunted their time on Earth and who had stolen the Wents had never been the Hundred. The shadows had been the bees, all along.

There were no Hundred loose in the world at all. Only a sick old Eft’s fantasies and hopes, the concoctions of the Shrikes, and the machinations of the malevolent Hen-Hen had made them real. No wonder he had never seen them. They were an invention bred to fuel his fears and his wild imaginings. Had he wanted them to be real? Yes, indeed he had. He had wanted to fight a fierce enemy and win against it. But his real enemy was the Dualings.

The bees had controlled everything, he realized. They had mastered it beautifully. The Shrikes, with their dull hive mind, had been engulfed by the much more intelligent hive mind of the Boring Bees. It had been easy for the Bees to make the Shrikes believe anything they wanted. The foolish and evil creatures had not even known that they were answering to the Bees. Deressema and her band of traitorous Ells had been equally fooled.

But the Bees had clearly conspired with another: The Council of Dualings. And Hen-Hen himself.

The Shrikes had served the Dualings well in their quest to bring back the Hundred, for they had done the work of gathering all the Wents in one place—where they could be forever destroyed. And with them, the race of the Trilings. For without the Wents the Trilings would not go on.

Tully believed now that swallowing the thing around his neck would have wrought some greater evil he could not yet fathom—and he had come perilously close to doing it. Of one thing he was sure: Hen-Hen’s cloud of Boring Bees were coming to him now. They would surely sting him and crowd him so that he could not breathe, and mold their bodies around his own and drive him, with the bauble around his neck, into the foaming seas that beat against the broken rock. Or they would fly down his very throat and bore through his body entire.

He cowered down and ducked his head. The bees were coming in a swarm, larger and more terrible than he could have imagined. Something caught his eye and he glanced up, his attention turned again to the rock and the crowd of Shrikes that had scattered in confusion and terror. The two children still stood, holding hands. Elutia stood behind them, a thin and pale form on the rock. No one had dared to touch them. From beyond them, out of the dark cavern beneath the rock, something new and more terrible than even the bees coiled and whispered.

The dark cloud rose, and its whispers turned to screams, and it began to stream upward in a steady and unending miasma of doom. Whatever it was, it had come through the newly-opened portal from that other world, the older world. Tully had heard Copernicus describe this thing in the Bathysphere, when the snake could not sleep. He had heard Deressema’s frightened babble, talking of this thing, before Pomplemys had cast her into the fire. Yet nothing had prepared him for the sight of the swirling and agonized souls, locked into a dance of rage and loneliness as they bled skyward. This, Tully knew, was the true Hundred. They had been a pretense. But now they were here.

In the wake of the Hundred’s fury several Shrikes lay dead on the rock. The others had scattered, shrieking, into the cold waters. The children and Elutia clung together tightly, crouching down as low as they could to evade the shadow. It seemed to ignore them, so eager it was to escape the rocky portal through which it flowed, unceasing, like a black river.

The bees that had so recently impersonated the dark horde of the Hundred seemed to stop in mid-air, as if they had hit a wall. Thrown into apparent confusion, they began to split apart. A few of them shot past Tully’s ledge, their large and metallic bodies shimmering in the few remaining rays of sunlight. He shuddered as they passed.

The rest were not so fortunate. The cloud of Hundred whirled and encircled the dark swarm of bees. There was a whining and buzzing noise, as if the bees had been thrown into a machine. Then the bees and the Hundred were one great dark thing. The bees had been swallowed entirely. But, Tully could still see them, swept along in the Hundred’s currents like tumbling silver specks. The cloud was even larger and darker now, blotting out the sun, with the buzzing of the trapped and miserable bees adding to the dreadful noise that filled the air.

Tully heard Hen-Hen’s voice in his mind: The Frothsome Grout made a great keening noise of surprise and despair. The very thing he had brought into the present time, into their world, had captured his bees. His plans had come to naught. But there was still time for him to make a last plea to Tully:

“Now! Now you must indeed eat the Hundredstone,” cried Hen-Hen. “The great Hundred do not appear as we had imagined. We had thought they would be of great intelligence and power, and tha
t you could lead them with the Council at your side. But they are not what we wanted them to be. They have come, indeed. You must swallow the Hundredstone, and control them. Or we will all be ruined.”

“And become one with that terrible thing?” asked Tully scornfully. He spoke it aloud. “You know that it will not listen. It is not a living thing. It has no sense or love or reason.”

Hen-Hen was silent.

“What should I do, oh great one?” shouted Tully. “Guide me now, if you will.”

“We are ruined,” said Hen-Hen quietly.

“It’s too late for that,” said Tully cruelly. “You have brought it here, and killed almost all of the Wents to have it. I hope it was worth it. I hope the Hundred will give you what you most desire.”

Hindrance and the surviving Wents had shrunk back from the cliff and were quivering like flowers in a high wind. They all had their faces turned upwards. They were watching the Hundred.

The black cloud had turned its attention to the three small forms that were still crouched on the rock. Tully could feel its malevolent energy. The H
undred and the bees together were now a hive mind of greater strength and power than either alone could have been.

Tully remembered a piece of the prophecy, spoken so many weeks ago on the Plain of Bellerol. It came to him crystal clear.

For they have waited in the dark

For centuries, and more