Serpent's Reach

by C. J. Cherryh

  My being here is a danger to the Mind, she thought suddenly, with a deep pang of conscience. Maybe my coming here has done what they’ve always feared, shifted their chemistry and affected them. Perhaps I’ve trapped them.

  There were azi, human Workers…the majat lived closely with those, unaffected by chemical disturbance.

  Are they? she wondered; and then, more terrifyingly: Am I?

  The song deafened, quivered in the marrow of the bones. Mother began it, and the Workers carried it, and the Warriors added their own baritone counterpoint, alien to their own species, the killer portion of the partitioned hive-mind Drones sang but rarely…or perhaps, like much of majat language, the Drone songs were seldom in human range.

  Raen rose, walked, tested the strength of her limbs. They had given her cloth of majat spinning, gossamer, the pale web of egg-sheaths. She did not wear it, for it disturbed them that she muted her colours, and nakedness no longer disturbed her. But she considered it now.

  “I am ready,” she decided. Workers touched her and scurried off, bearing that message.

  A Warrior arrived. She informed it directly of her plans, and it hurried off.

  Soon came the azi…humans, marginally so, though majat did not reckon them as such. Lab-bred, sterile, though with the outward attributes of gender, they served the hives as the Workers did, with hands more agile and wits more suited to dealing with humans, the new appurtenances the hives had taken on when they began to associate with humans, a new and necessary fragment of the hive-mind. Betas made them, and sold them to other betas…and to Kontrin, who sold them to the hives, short-lived clones of beta cells.

  They came, bearing blue lights hardly brighter than the illusory fungus, and gathered about her, perhaps bewildered by the chitin on her hand, the realisation that she was Kontrin, though naked as they, and within the hive. They were not bred fighters, these particular azi, but they were clever and quick, bright-eyed and anxious to serve. They were much prized by majat and must know their worth in the hive, but they were a little mad. Azi who dwelled among majat tended to be.

  “We’re going outside,” Raen told them. “You’ll carry weapons and take my orders.”

  “Yes,” they said, voices overlapping, song-toned, inflectionless as those of the majat. There was a certain horror in these strangest of the azi. They came here younger than azi were generally sold; they acquired majat habits. They touched her, confirming her in their minds. She returned the touches, and gathered up the clothing she had been given. She wrapped it round and tied it here and there. It had a strange feel, light as it was, the reminder of a world and a life outside.

  A Warrior came then, sat down, glittering in the azi-lights, chitinous head and powerful jaws a fantasy of jewel-shards. It offered her a pistol. It carried weapons of its own, besides the array nature had provided it: these items too majat prized, status for Warriors…empty symbols: humans had believed so. Raen took up the offered gun, found it shaped to a human hand. The cold, heavy object quickly warmed to her grip, and she took keen pleasure in the solidity of it: power, power to make Ruil pay.

  “Azi-weapon,” Warrior said. “Shall we arm azi?”

  “Yes.” She thrust her free hand against its scent-patches, reaching between the huge jaws. “Are you ready?”

  A song hummed from Warrior. Others appeared, shifting from unseen tunnels into the meagre light. They bore weapons, some belted to their leathery bodies; others went to the azi. The azi’s human eyes were intense with something other than humanity. They grinned, filled with excitement.

  “Come,” she bade them.

  Her word had Mother’s authority behind it, the consensus of the hive. They moved, all of them, down the tunnels. Other Warriors joined them, a great following of bodies strangely silent now, songs stilled. They went in total blackness, azi-lights left behind.

  Then they reached the cool air of the vestibule, and poured out under the night sky. Raen shivered in the wind and blinked, awed to find the stars again, to realise the brilliance of the night.

  Warriors gathered silently about her, touching, seeking motive and direction. She was nexus, binding-unit for this portion of the Mind. She started away, barefoot and agile among the rocks.

  vii

  Starlight glistened on the lake, and bright artificial lights; danced wetly at the farther shore, where Sul had never put lights. Raen stopped on the last rocky shelf above the woods and snatched a look at sights to which majat eyes were all but blind. For the first time her wounds hurt, her breath came short. Kethiuy-by-the-waters.

  Home.

  She felt more grief than she had yet felt. She had been out of human reference; and now the deaths became real to her again. Mother, cousins, friends…all ashes by now. Ruil would have spared no one, least of all eldest, so that there would be no possibility of challenge to their claim. Even yet the Family had made no move to intervene: Ruil still held here, or the hive would have known, would have told her, Red-hive remained here: of that they were sure.

  Bile rose in her throat, bitter hate. She swallowed at it, and wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand, the gun clenched in her chitined right.

  “Meth-maren,” Warrior urged her. She scrambled down, reckless on the rocks, half-blind. Her limbs trembled with the strain, but Warrior caught her, its stilt-limbs strong and sure, a single downward stride spanning several of hers, joints bracing easily at extensions impossible for human limbs: its muscles attached to endo- and exoskeletons. Azi too swarmed back up the rocks and took her arms, helping her, handing her down to other Warriors, who urged her on in their turn Worker-fashion: most adaptable of majat, the Warriors, capable of independent judgement and generalised functions.

  “This way,” she bade them, choosing her way through the forest, along paths she knew. They went with hardly a crack of brush, walking as fast as she could run.

  Red Warrior. It started from cover in the thickets and misjudged its capacity for flight. Blues sped after it, brought it down and bit it. The group of combatants locked into statue like quiet for a few moments, blue bowed over their enemy, mandibles locked with majat patience. Then the head came free, and blue Warriors came to life and stalked ahead, some on the trail and some off, passing taste in weaving contacts, one to the other.

  “Strong red force,” Warrior said to Raen, and nervously touched palps to her mouth as they walked, a curious backward dance in the act. It interpreted aloud what taste should have told her, a mere breathing of resonances. “Roil humans. No sense of alarm. They do not expect attack.”

  The blue Warriors were elated; their movements were exaggerated, full of excess energy. Some darted back, urging on those who lagged; a dark flood of bodies in their wake tumbled down the rocks and through the trees. The azi, touching each other and grinning with joy, would have loped ahead. Raen distrusted their good sense and hissed at them to hold back. She was hurrying as much as she could. Her side hurt anew. Her bare feet were torn by the rocks and the thorns. She ignored the pain; she had felt worse. An increasing fear gripped her stomach.

  I’m too slow, she thought in one moment of panic. I’m holding them back too long. And in another: There are grown men down there, used to killing; There are guard-azi, bred for fighting. What am I doing here? But they were not expecting attack: the blues read so; and they would not be expecting majat. She looked about her at her companions, at creatures whose very instincts were specialised toward killing, and drank in their enthusiasm, that was madness.

  They were nearing the end of the woods, where there were only thickets and thorn-hedges. “Hurry,” Warrior urged her, seizing her painfully by the arm. Majat were not like men, who respected a leader: hive-mind was one. She pressed a hand to her throbbing side and started to run, spending the strength she had saved.

  There were ways she knew, paths she had run in other days, shortcuts azi workers took to the fields, places where the hedges were thin. She ran them, dodging this way and that with agility that only tine azi matched
in this tangle. A wall loomed up, the barrier to the inner gardens by the labs, no obstacle to the Warriors, who living-chained their way up and made a way for the azi. Azi swarmed over, togging and pulling at her to help her after, climbing over their naked and sweating bodies. She made it. The chain undid itself. The last Warrior came over, a stilt-limbed prodigy of balance and strength, pulled by its fellows.

  They were pleased with the operation. Mandibles scissored with rapid excitement. Suddenly they broke and raced like a black flood in the dark, majat and azi, moving with incredible rapidity.

  More red-hivers. Bodies tangled on the lawn, roiled; the wave-front blunted itself, knotted in places of resistance. There were crashings in the shrubbery, the booming alarm of Warriors, flares of weapons. Raen froze in shadow, panic-stricken, everything she had planned slipping control, Then she adjusted her grip on her gun, swallowed sir and ran, to do what she had come to do.

  A Warrior appeared by her, and another, half a dozen more, and some of the azi. She raced for the main door, for an area visibly guarded by red-hive. Fire laced about them, and from them. Warriors beside her fell, twitching, uttering squeals from their resonance chambers. In sanity, she would have panicked. There was nothing to do now but keep running for the door…too far now to retreat. She reached the door and Warriors tangled in combat about her. She burned the mechanism, and struggled with the door; azi and then a Warrior used their strength to move it. Azi and Warriors flooded behind her as she raced into Kethiuy’s halls.

  “Exits all covered,” Warrior breathed beside her; and then she realised where all the others had gone—majat strategy, efficient and sudden. The main corridor of the central dome lay vacant before her…what had been home. Rage hammered in her in time to her pulse.

  Suddenly, far off down the wings, there was crashing and shrilling of alarms, from every point of the budding: blue. hivers were in. A domestic azi darted from cover, terrified, darted back again, up the stairs—and screamed and fell under a rush of majat down them.

  Red-hivers. Raen whipped the gun to target and fired, breaking up their formation, even while blue-hive swarmed after them.

  There were human cries. Doors broke open from west-wing: Ruils burst from that cover with a handful of blues on their heels. Raen left majat to majat, steadied her pistol on new targets and fired, careful shots as ever in practice, at the weapon’s limits of speed. Her eyes stayed clear. Time slowed. They fell, one after the other, young and old, perhaps not believing what they saw. Their faces were set in horror and hers in a rigid grin.

  Then a baritone piping assailed her ears and the blues in all parts of the corridor signalled each other in booming panic, regrouping to signals she could not read. From east-wing came others, reds, golds, a horde of armed azi.

  Raen stood and fired, coldly desperate, not seeing how to retreat. Some of the Kethiuy azi and the surviving blues attempted to rally to her, but fire cut them down and a rush of majat came over them.

  Warrior fell almost at her feet, decapitated. The limbs continued to struggle, nearly taking her off her feet. Naked azi sprawled dead about her. She spun then, catching her balance, and tried to run, for there was no other hope. The blues, such as survived, were in full flight.

  Something crashed down on her, crushing weight.

  viii

  A second time Raen lay quietly and waited to live or die; but this time the walls were stark white and chrome, and the frightened azi who tended her kept their eyes down and said nothing.

  That was well enough. There was nothing she particularly wanted to hear. She was not in Kethiuy. That told her something. Drugs hazed her senses, keeping her from wishing anything very strongly.

  This continued for what seemed days. There were meals. She was fed, being unable to feed herself. She was moved, bothered for this and the other necessity. She said nothing in all this time, and from the azi there was no word.

  But finally the drugs were gone, and she waked with a majat guard in the room.

  Red-hive. She recognised the badges, the marks they wore for humans, who could not see their colours. Red-hive Warrior.

  She knew then that she had lost, lost more than Kethiuy.

  The majat gave her clothing, grey, without Colour. She put it on, and found the close feeling of it utterly strange. She sat afterward with her hands in her tap, on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. The majat guard did not move and would not move while she did not.

  There was shock attendant on regaining the human world; there were realisations of what she had lost and what she had become. She was very thin. Her limbs still hurt, although she bore scars only on her side. She held her right hand clenched in her left. feeling the beaded surface of the chitin which was her identity: Raen, Sul-sept, Meth-maren, Kontrin. They gave her grey to wear, and not her Colour. There was no way to remove the other distinction save by massive scarring. A scale lost would re-grow. She had heard of Kontrin deprived of identity, mutilated by assassins, or by Council order. That prospect frightened her, more than she was willing to show. It was all she had left to lose. She was fifteen, going on sixteen. She was mortally afraid.

  It was a very long time before the call she anticipated came.

  She went with the azi guards, unresisting.

  ix

  They were the authority of the Family, the available heads of the twenty-seven holdings and the fifty-odd sub-grants, with their outworld branches. They wore the Colours of House and sept, and glittered with chitinous armour…ornament, little protection, for most was for right-arm only; and weapons in Council were outlawed. Old men and old women inside, although the faces did not make it evident… Raen scanned the half-circular array, the amphitheatre of Council, herself in the low center, and realised with mixed feelings that no one present wore Kethiuy blue. She saw Kahn, once the youngest in Council; at seventy-two, senior of assassin-ravaged Beln sept of the Ilit; he looked thirty. There was Moth, who showed her age most, incredibly wrinkled and fragile…going soon, the Family surmised. She was beyond her six hundredth year and her hair was completely silver and thinning. And Lian, Eldest of Family…to him Raen looked with a sudden access of hope; Lian still alive, uncle Lian, who at seven hundred had been immune from assassination perhaps because the Family grew curious how long a Kontrin could live and remain sane. Lean was one of the originals, old as the establishment of humans on Cerdin, first in Council.

  And he had had friendship with Grandfather. Raen had known him from her infancy, a guest in her home, who had noticed her at Grandfather’s feet. She tried desperately now to meet his eyes, hoping that about him still gathered some power to help her; but she could not. He nodded away in his own thoughts, placid, seeming elsewhere, and simply old, as betas grew old. She stared past him at the others then, altogether out of hope.

  There were Eron Thel and Yls Ren-barant, allies, some of Ruil’s friends. Sul had detested them. And there were others of that ilk. She had deepstudied the whole Council and all the Houses of greatest import to Sul Meth-maren, so that she knew every name and face and the manners and history of them: but the faces she should have seen were not there, and others wore their Colours. There were new representatives for Yalt and Then, young faces. Her skin went cold as she reckoned what must have happened throughout the Family—many, many Kethiuys, in so short a time. New men had come into power everywhere, on Cerdin and elsewhere, a new party in power, and from it only Ruil Meth-maren was missing.

  Eron Thel rose, touched his microphone to activate it, looked at Council in general, sweeping the banks of seats.

  “Matter before the Council,” he said, “the custody of the minor child Raen a Sul Meth-maren.”

  “I am my own keeper,” Raen shouted, and Eron turned slowly to stare at her, in the silence, the consent of all the others. Of a sudden she realised in whose keeping she was intended to be, and what that keeping might be. The thought closed on her throat, making words impossible.

  “That you tried to be,” Eron Thel said, his voi
ce echoing from the speakers. “You succeeded in wiping out Ruil-sept. All perished, down to the youngest, by your action. Child may be a misnomer in your case; some have argued to that effect. If you held the Meth-maren House, you would have to answer for its actions; and I don’t think you’d want that, would you? Council means to consider your age. You’d be wise to remember that.”

  “I am the Meth-maren,” she shouted back at him.

  Eron looked elsewhere, signalled. Lights dimmed. Screens central to the room leapt into life. There was Kethiuy. Raen’s heart beat painfully, foreknowing in this prepared show something meant to hurt her. I shall not, she kept thinking, I shall not please them.

  There was the garden, by the labs. Bodies lay in neat rows. The scene came closer, and she recognised them for the azi of Kethiuy, most merely workers, inoffensive and innocent of threat to any, face after face, all of them slaughtered and laid out for inspection, one body upon another. The line went on and on, hundreds of them, most strange to her, for she had not known all who worked the fields; but there was Lia, there were others, and those faces suddenly appearing struck at her heart. She feared they would show her the bodies of her kin next, but they should have been long cremated and beyond such indignities. She hoped that this was so.

  The scene shifted to the hills. Majat swarmed everywhere, reds, greens, golds. She saw blue-hivers dead. The lens approached the very vestibule of blue-hive. There were white objects cast about the entry, eggs, their fragile wrappings torn, half-formed majat exposed to the air. Blue-hive bodies were stacked in a tangle of stilt limbs, Workers as well as warriors, and naked human limbs among them, dead azi.

  Then Kethiuy again. Fire went up from it. Walls crumbled to great heat. Candletrees went up in spurts of flame.