The Hundred: Fall of the Wents (9 page)

Copernicus had always remained small. His four sisters and three brothers grew fast and large, and tempted him into antics that amused them and left him in precarious situations. The time that he had tied himself into a small knot in the garden, and had been left there after dark, was a painful memory that had softened with time; he could even laugh about it now. There was also a game they would play called “Whip the Snake,” in which they would grasp his tail in their mouths and fling him around until he shot like an arrow over the hedges.

His parents had been a strangely besotted pair, so concerned with gazing into one another’s unblinking eyes that they failed to notice what their young were up to. Copernicus’ father wrote terrible love poetry to his mother, and she reciprocated by singing equally horrible songs in her hissy, atonal voice. After a dinner of raw Dull Crickets, they would entertain the children with sinuous dances that, often as not, ended in one of the dreadful songs or poems.

One day, Copernicus’ mother had discovered something odd in the nest. It was a book made of papers bound together by reeds, hidden under the soft fluff and leaves that lined their sleeping quarters. She pulled it out with her jaws and flicked it open.

Copernicus’ mother, whose name was Slithellesse, could not read. It was not a shameful thing among the simpler beings. Dualing scholars and scientists were well-read and educated, and could write in the universal language. Slithellesse was a simple sort of creature who kept to herself, not given to worldly knowledge.

Most Dualings did not write nor care to write; everything was passed by word of mouth alone. A universal language allowed them to communicate from species to species, and it was considered the greatest advance of the modern era, for long ago separate languages had flourished. Now only a few small pockets of isolated creatures spoke their own unique languages, and did not know the universal speech.

Among all the species, stories were told, and retold, and there was a common knowledge of what creatures populated the earth, and which ones were dangerous to one’s own kind. Dualings had wise memories that spanned generations, and constructing a code to record their ideas and stories seemed superfluous. Very few could imagine a time when their words would be needed as permanent record, for wasn’t every small snake a bearer of memories of all that had gone before him? Wasn’t every Grout the sum of everything that had preceded her?

Slithellesse did not know what the book was. She barely knew to call it a book. Instead, it seemed a delightfully compact way to construct
a soft nest. She tore it apart with her strong jaws and made scraplets of bedding from the leaves, which seemed to her to have a buttery softness that actual tree leaves did not possess. She liked that the pages were covered with a rich and varied design of black upon white—the only colors that snakes could see—and so stark! Slithellesse was pleased.

But when her husband found out what Slithellesse had done he was enraged and devastated. He came into the nest one night and saw the scraps of paper covered with carefully handwritten words, and flew into a rage. Why had she taken it? Did she know what it was, even? Slithellesse could not answer. “Besides,” she had said, “it is a foolish little thing, and no one can understand what it says.”

Copernicus’ father had told her the book was his. He had made it. He had learned to write the symbols, in secret, using a writing tool clenched in his jaws. And he had made a book. It told his own unique life story. It was to be the genius of the Dualings, and to make him famous and admired. He was but a snake, but he could be bigger and better than his people expected.

“But why?” asked Slithellesse, genuinely puzzled. “Why try to become like the wise scientists and thinkers? Those symbols are theirs, not ours. What use do we have for them?”

“You’re a stupid creature,” he had said, and from then on the mood around the nest grew sour. The poetry and songs ceased. Copernicus tended to think of the time “Before the book” as a happy, playful time, and “After the book” as a time that was dour and filled with sadness. His father was often silent and preoccupied, and disappeared for long stretches at a time. They all assumed he was off working secretly on another book to replace the one he’d lost. He never produced one; or, if he did, he never shared it with them. Slithellesse could never understand why what she had done was so unforgivable, and so she grew petulant and querulous. She harangued the young snakes until, one by one, they left the nest to start their own families. All except for Copernicus. He stayed and took care of her as she grew crabbed and bent, despite his increasing resentment of her demands and moods.

He rarely spoke of his family around his friends, except for Aarvord. Aarvord knew the truth and never mocked or commented, despite the Grout’s propensity for opinionated outbursts.

Copernicus wondered if his mother was thinking of him now, and if she felt abandoned. Maybe in his absence his father was being kind to her again, although he doubted it. The old snake was hardly the type to change his mind once he’d set it. He was unusual among his kind for this lack of forgiveness—a trait that no one had suspected he had until the moment when the book was discovered destroyed. But why a book? What had his father intended to say with it, that he could not say out loud or through the gifts of memory?

Copernicus found himself thinking of that long-ago rift within his family as he clung close to the wall in the Shrikes’ stronghold. He was not given to fond recollections of his brothers and sisters, and he rarely saw them. His greatest bond had been with his friend, Aarvord. A Fantastic Grout, not a snake. And now lost to him.

*

Aarvord woke and he was stiff with cold, and still a prisoner. His sister lay beside him. It had been a dream, then—the Shrikes marching him away down the long corridor, and the darkened execution room. Here they had released a Bonedog, its blindness mitigated by the hood of dark emerald beetles atop its shell. The Bonedog had come for him with its terrible mandibles and sniffing mannerisms, and Aarvord had transformed his right paw into a sword, which he swung in defiance at his enemy.

But it was all pointless. The Shrikes had never intended to end his life, only to torment him. Aarvord knew that every night would be this way, and every morning. That was the way things went when one was in the power of Shrikes. He looked at Justice and wondered how she had stood it for so long.

She woke up, too, and looked at him with pity and what he thought might be a trace of anger. He’d been fool enough to come here and think he could help her, and for that she was doubly punished knowing that her own brother had to suffer.

What came out of her mouth, then, surprised him: “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been alone for so long.”

“I can’t imagine how it’s been,” said Aarvord gruffly.

“It’s like how they describe the Hells,” she said. “One of the Hells, at least. The one that’s cold and terribly lonely.”

Aarvord had never believed in such things as the Hells—mysterious underground chambers in which it was said the dead were sent if they did not obey the instructions to come into the great nothingness of nature and find their way again. But Justice’s expression was very grim, and he did not launch into his usual tirade about “falling for Shrike-rot and nonsense.” It was not a joke now. He knew that the Shrikes were enemies in earnest.

“Have there been other prisoners?” he asked her. “Here—whom you’ve seen?”

“Only a few,” said Justice. “Mostly Trilings. Sometimes I’ve seen a group of prisoners or one or two pass by, always with their Shrike captors hurrying them along, but I don’t see them again. There was one I shared my cell with for a few days only. A sad little Ell; I can’t imagine what they wanted with her. Her name was Felswah. I can only imagine that we shared a cell to give us both a taste of companionship, so that they could snatch it away again. They don’t seem to want to allow their prisoners much company.”

She and Aarvord looked at each other as the full import of what she had just said sank in. It could be that Aarvord’s stay with his sister was very short. It could be that they would come to get him at any time, and he would be alone for years to come, with only his Shrike captors for occasional company.

“Tell me anything,” said Aarvord suddenly. “Any weakness. Anything you’ve seen that can help us stop them. Everything you remember.”

“There isn’t anything…” Justice began helplessly, but Aarvord grasped her by her paws and squeezed them tightly.

“Think,” he said. “Think of anything.”

Justice frowned and pulled her paws away to rub at her eyes.

“There was something that Felswah said; that the Shrikes didn’t have much time,” said Justice. “They were running out of time. She told me that the Shrikes were trying to find something that would save not only them, but their master.”

“Who is this master you’ve mentioned?” asked Aarvord. “I thought they only served themselves and their own cruel intentions.” He knew in his heart that this master must be the one whom Hen-Hen had spoken of: The Hundred. He did not wish to say the name aloud in this place. He did not even wish to think it, lest he give away their mission.

Justice shrugged. “If there is a master, I never saw it. I see only the Shrikes.”

“If time was running out then,” mused Aarvord, “then it is surely slipping away now, more fierce than ever. Do the Shrikes seem agitated?”

“No more than usual,” said Justice. “They are calmer, in fact.”

“Then perhaps they believe they have found what they’ve been looking for,” said Aarvord, and he sank into thought in a corner of the cell.

“They have found and made and taken many things,” said Justice, and her tone was dead.

“Taken what?” asked Aarvord, sensing that there was something else she was keeping from him.

“Yes,” said Justice, musingly. “They took something away from me. The only thing that was mine. They took it away. They seemed to think it would solve some of their problems. Perhaps it has.”

“What was this thing?” pressed Aarvord.

“I cannot speak of it,” she repeated, and swayed her big head back and forth. Aarvord was dismayed to see fat tears clinging to her cheeks. More and more tears fell, and as her head swayed in misery they scattered from her face to the floor. Still she made no noise. She wept in silence until she was done.

“Justice?” asked Aarvord, as gently as he could.

Her tears were gone now and there was only a cold, hollow rage left in her expression.

“They took the only thing I have ever loved here. It was a child. My own child,” said Justice.

Separated from his friends, Tully felt as bereft as he had ever felt throughout his young life. He missed Hindrance and the other Wents more than ever, and he missed the warm light of the afternoon on the shores of the Windermere. With every step the Shrike guards took down the cold stone corridors, the echo seemed to whisper, “home, home, home, doom,” until Tully longed for just a morsel of heat and daylight. He
trudged along, chivvied by the Shrikes’ rough feathered limbs.

He should have stayed at home. But had he stayed there, he would still be lonely, and something would be wrong in the world. The Wents had been taken, and he could not sit by and let that happen. He remembered again with a little shock that their absence would, in fact, mean the very end of the Trilings. Trilings needed the Wents, or they would eventually vanish from the Earth. It would mean the end of Ells and Efts. It would mean that there would be no more creatures like Tully at all.

“Why three?” Tully had once asked Hindrance and the others. “Why should Trilings need three? Copernicus has only two and Aarvord has only two.”

“Your friends are Dualings, much as Scratchlings, Snapfish, and most creatures that swim or crawl,” explained Hindrance at the time. “Trilings are special. They are difficult to make. But they are smart. We may be outnumbered, Tully, but we will survive on our knowledge.”

Special. Tully had heard that suggestion many times since then. Many Trilings still thought of Dualings as inferior, and Dualings bore their own seething resentment of the Threes. That hatred had erupted into the Small War, when the Twos and the Threes had fought to no real purpose. The Trilings had nearly been destroyed then, but they had survived. Tully, led deeper into the Shrike’s stronghold, tried to consider a world in which the Trilings were no more. But it was like trying to imagine no sun in the sky.

Trilings were made differently than Dualings. Dualings were made in the old way, with two parents. But Trilings were made much as insects, and required three parties to carry on life: Ells carried pollens from the antennae of the Efts and delivered it to the Wents, who then bore the children. In the distant past, Wents had been flower creatures, rooted in the soil, before they slipped the bonds of earth and began to move. Ells had evolved from long-ago insects. Efts were strange. No one knew quite where they had come from.

Hindrance had suggested that the intricate biological system developed to protect the world’s population from overcrowding. “Just enough to carry on, but not enough to ruin things,” she mused.

“It was overcrowding that done in the humans,” asserted Sarami, but Bly jumped in and corrected her.

“No,” she whispered, “Humans killed one another. In The Great Cataclysm. They blew each other up, for certain. With great black flying ships and hot rocks!”

Kellen spoke up solemnly: “They were victims of a sickness that scarred them and left them hollow wanderers. Or a volcano exploded and there was winter for one thousand years.”

Bly said: “Some speak of the great fallen stone.”

“None of you know, and that’s a fact,” said Hindrance impatiently.

Tully had retained little of the scientific facts, but he knew he was the one to blame for his lack of knowledge. What should he care about the business of biology when his friends—Twos though they were—were waiting for him to explore the waters of the Windermere or the forest glens? Trilings were not made for such wonderings. They lived and breathed, and that was all.

He wished for that innocence again, when a Shrike was just a dream or a fairy tale meant to scare little ones. He had come to this cold place without a plan, without guidance, and without any knowledge of how he was supposed to save Hindrance and the rest of the Wents. How could he defeat something as powerful and unseen as the Hundred? He couldn’t even save himself from Shrikes.

Tully was taken down a long dark hallway, and he again longed for the sun. It seemed ages since he had seen it. He thought with a stab of real fear of what it would be like to be removed from its glow forever. He had always thought of himself as a creature of water; it was Wents who relied on the sun. But there was something of his parents in him as well. He had a little bit of everything that made him what he was, an Eft.

He thought of Desidere and Skakell now in this dank and cold prison. Although he could barely recall their faces, he knew that they had loved him well. It had been several years since they had left, and he had little belief that he would see them again. Yet his hope had not been extinguished. Whenever a breeze blew, he liked to shut his eyes and imagine that it was the small win
gs of Desidere beating with fierce urgency as she hovered over his bed at night. Ells could beat their wings, which were lapped in brilliant scales, one hundred times per second. Desidere’s had been of the brightest blue, he remembered.

As the S
hrikes led him down silent corridors, Tully could see into rooms where other creatures were kept prisoner. One room held a group of turtles, pensive and morose as they dipped their heads to eat some greens that had been tossed in for them. Another seemed to be backlit in greenish-blue, and Tully saw that it was a pod of mature Efts in their sea change, swimming in a watery tank. Two of them came to the glass and pressed their hands against it, mouthing something that Tully could not hear. He wished that he could speak to them. But he feared he would have had nothing encouraging to say.

In the next room he saw something that made his heart race: a chorus of Wents. He searched their numbers but did not see any of his own. They were curiously statuesque; they stood limply, without any indication that they even noticed his passage. He saw that their faces were turned toward a tiny, glassed window high on the wall, where some wintry light shone through. There was a table in the room piled with the raw stuff that Wents used to make their cakes and breads. Perhaps these were the slaves who had made the food he had so recently eaten. Tully coughed and sneezed, hoping to catch their attention, but all he got for his pains was a Shrike-stick in the ribs.

“Get along!” shrieked his captors as one.

Next came the room that had been prepared for him. It was depressingly small and sparse. There was a bed of water there, and that was all. The Shrikes shoved him in, closed the barred door, and left him without a word. Like the Wents’ prison, Tully’s room had a small window high up on the wall, and he craned his neck to see out of it. All he could glimpse was a whisk of snow blowing past, and the gloom of an overcast day. Surely the sun shone here sometimes.

The Shrikes had left him a bucket of water with a small dipping-cup, and he drank from it thirstily. It tasted stale. He crouched on the floor, the Kepper-Root robe spread about him, and pulled from the inner lining of his vest the items the Shrikes had not bothered to search for and recover: his dream-day box from Hindrance and the small telescope and seeing-glasses. Stupid things, the Shrikes. He slipped the box and the other gifts back immediately, worried that they might be seen and confiscated. They were too precious to share with his enemies. He did not need to use the seeing-glasses to show the truth that the Shrikes were nasty things. But he thought ruefully that he wished he’d looked at Aarvord through them when the Grout had betrayed his friends. What might he have seen? Deceit and lies?

A slight buzzing noise interrupted his reverie, and he rose to his feet quickly. By craning his neck against the barred window he could just get a glimpse of a vague shadow, passing above high in the air. Something besides the Shrikes was free above the stronghold. It was something sinister; he could sense its energy and size. Then it was gone and the curious buzzing noise abated. Tully felt quite cold inside. He pulled his robe tighter around his body.

Hours later, he slept, with his head tucked against a scratchy reed pillow in his shallow bed of water. His robe lay on the floor beside him, with his secret things tucked beneath it.

*

Tully thought that he was awake, but something about it did not seem right. The light, somehow, was all wrong—it had a metallic cast, and a sense of falseness. He knew that he was in a dream, and he was filled with fear. The Shrikes were known to cause terrible dreams, worse than anything the sleeper could devise from his own imagination.

In the dream he was not in his watery bed. He was curled on the floor. He was dry and cold. Light was streaming through the window, and his father-Eft Skakell was standing above him. Tully sat up abruptly. Skakell was speaking, as if they had been having a conversation for some hours.

“It is only through a happy accident that we are here at all,” said Skakell. He turned from the window, where the sky beyond seemed to be expanding as the clouds broke and drifted northward. “Think upon that for a moment. Not only you, but your kind as well. Each one a remarkable chance, one in a billion chances. We could have died out before we acquired the gift of speech and memory.”

Tully wondered what parts of the conversation he had missed before the older Eft spoke. He sat up slowly. He had not remembered how Skakell’s voice had sounded until now.

“Skakell?” said Tully. “Are you really here? Where is Desidere?”

But his father seemed not hear him at all. The Eft was addressing an
other creature, not Tully. There was a Shrike beyond the barred door of the cell. A small Shrike, with a black mark above one eye. It was watching Skakell in silence.

“My life is no happy accident,” said the Shrike, finally. “I was made, not born. No accidents take place here.”

“You have not listened to me,” sighed Skakell. “At all.”

“But I have,” replied the Shrike. “I have listened, yet I fail to understand.”

“You can understand,” said Skakell. “You are different.”

“Why trouble me?” said the Shrike. “Take the food I bring and do not speak to me again.”

“Then go away,” said Skakell, turning his back to the Shrike. But the Shrike did not leave.

“They think you are the prisoner,” said the Shrike after some time. “But we are the true prisoners, are we not?”

“Only if you wish to be,” said Skakell quietly. “The prison is in your mind.”

“The prison is my bones,” said the Shrike. “What I am made of denies me joy.”

Skakell had nothing to say now in response. He shivered and rubbed at his antennae, and he seemed very old and tired. Tully longed to throw his Kepper-Root robe over the shoulders of the Eft and warm him. He reached out for it.

“Skakell?” said Tully, but again his father-Eft did not hear or see him.

“You will remember me one day, after they have perhaps destroyed me,” said Skakell. “You alone may remember me. You will be different because you knew me.”

The Shrike nodded silently.

Tully stood and reached out to touch Skakell. His movements seemed as if they were flowing through water, not air. He had to know if this was merely an apparition, or if Skakell was indeed with him in the cell. Tully’s fingers groped but before he could touch anything solid the vision of the older Eft shifted and changed and grew, larger and larger still, until he was gone and Hen-Hen stood in his place, the great beard of bees rippling as he spoke:

“The Hundred bring great power,” Hen-Hen said. “Do not underestimate it.”

This time there were many Shrikes watching beyond the barred door of the cell, their tiny black eyes fixed on Hen-Hen. Were they real, and watching Tully as he slept, or was this part of the dream?

“Their secrets destroyed them, but those same secrets also gave them life. And they bear those secrets with them. Powerful secrets indeed. They are dark shadows now—but they want to live again. They will live again. They will find a way. Life always finds a way.”

Hen-Hen strode back and forth across the cell as he spoke. The little pod of Shrikes followed him with their eyes intently, saying nothing.

“See here,” said Hen-Hen. “They are with us now. They have come. Look now upon their power.”

As Tully stared, the entire cell began to swarm with moving shadows, circling eagerly around the perimeter. They burst out and widened into the room, growing larger, encompassing Tully and Hen-Hen within the circle, and blotting out the watching Shrikes. A buzzing noise erupted in the room. Tully’s head seemed filled with shadows and confusion, and he bent low and tucked his head down to his knees, willing it away. And then the great, dark circle was whisked away, as if by a heavy wind. Tully noticed that Hen-Hen was puffing his great cheeks out to blow away the black circle, and then he saw some of Hen-Hen’s bees flying out the window as if pursued. The Shrikes shivered and murmured with a throaty and appreciative
clack clack clack
sound.

“Yes. A small demonstration only,” said Hen-Hen. “The Hundred are waking. Shall we talk of these things further?”

“Yes, tell me,” said Tully, willing the Grout to look at him and not at the watching Shrikes. He hated their eyes upon him, and feared that at any moment they would turn this dream into a darker nightmare. “What am I supposed to do? Why won’t you see me? How am I to destroy these things?”

“Trust me,” said Hen-Hen. “What I have said is truth; I give you the surety of my life and my promises.”

“Why don’t you tell me what to do!” shouted Tully. Hen-Hen suddenly turned his great red eyes upon him and, as the bees began to fly off his cheeks in great numbers, Hen-Hen began to dissolve as well—into nothing but bees, as if his dream-body had been made of bees entire. He broke apart like a mist, and the bees whined out of the small cell window like black bullets. The last word that Hen-Hen had spoken, “promises,” whispered through the room sibilant and echoing, until it blurred into a “shh…shh…shh” noise and Tully was silenced. The dream ended and he sank into the blackness and blankness of a deep sleep.