Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  "Perhaps," Ereleth agreed.

  "But I fear that we'll have to be cleverer than that if we're to persuade her to trust us. If we knew more about her relationship with the drago mite queen, we might be better able to devise a seductive offer." She looked around the cell as she spoke, as if she were looking to the bare walls for inspiration.

  "I've seen no drago mite queen," Lucrezia said.

  "ButJume Metra did refer to one, saying that the mound-queen was her voice.

  The mound-people don't seem to be slaves of the drago mites but neither are they masters who keep drago mites as men of our kind keep cattle.

  I can't fathom the exact nature of their relationship 414

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  with the monsters,

  and they're very unenthusiastic to explain it. How closely does their own political organisation match that of the drago mites do you think? Hyry told me that the drago mite queens are mothers of every worker and warrior in the nest, but that surely can't be true of the mound-queen can it? "

  "No," said Ereleth,

  "It surely can't. But it would be useful to know, I think, exactly who and what we're dealing with if we do make a pact with the queen. Queens can be mere instruments, as you and I know very well, and if there is another power behind her throne ... we must be mightily clever, daughter, as well as mightily brave, if we're to come through this ordeal. Perhaps I should have brought Fraxinus instead of that doltish amber but he might not have agreed to come, and there was no time for elaborate discussion. The responsibility is ours, and ours alone."

  Which is cause for satisfaction, in its way, Lucrezia thought. Isn't that exactly why I ran away when I had the chance? I wanted responsibility, as well as adventure and now I have them both, in the fullest possible measure.

  The wall which had opened to let Ereleth into the cell opened again now, to reveal Jume Metra. Dhalla was behind her, and Lucrezia's heart leapt again at the thought of having so many friends who were prepared to risk any and all hazards to be near her.

  There is no time," said Metra, yet again.

  "The carriers are almost ready, and we dare not let them linger in the nest.

  Whatever you have to say to the mound-queen, you must say it now, and quickly."

  "We're ready," Ereleth said, effortlessly matching the mound- woman's colour less tone.

  Lucrezia could only hope that it would somehow become true by virtue of having been said.

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  A.

  12 jacom plodded along in the wake of his new guide, wondering why his legs hadn't turned to water. In fact, he felt quite numb; even when he touched the place where the tack tick had left the greater part of its filthy head buried in his flesh he couldn't conjure up any fierce pain.

  There's something in this steamy air, he thought. Something that saps the will and the imagination. Will I become a mere machine of flesh, like those stupid women, if I stay here long enough?

  He had no more idea now of what the thing in front of him might be than when it had first stuck its weirdly shining head into his cell through an aperture in the dividing wall, but the intensity of that first shock had dwindled almost to nothing. At first he had wondered whether the creature might be some strange chimera compounded out of man and dragomke, with a generous measure of firefly added in, but now he conceded that it was utterly alien, its nature beyond the reach of any theory he could devise.

  It was two-legged and two-armed and it walked upright, but its gait was very strange and quite un human It was extraordinarily thin all skin and bone, with hardly any flesh to muscle its long limbs. Its feet were broad but shallow pads, with a circular halo of toes connected by rubbery webs, while its 'hands' were bunches of slim tentacles, like the clusters which sprouted from the backs of the larger flower worms Its skin was very smooth and luminously dappled in various shades of grey markings which were strangely changeable.

  It was not merely that the patches grew darker and lighter, but that their pattern changed constantly. The flesh of its head was hardened as if by an exoskeleton. Its eyes were large, with twin lids that narrowed to vertical slits. Feathery antennae like a drago mite extended from its forehead, but its mouth was 416

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  not in the least like a drago mite it had lips like a human's and a tongue like a human's but so far as Jacom could see it had no teeth at all.

  "Are you a Serpent, or a Salamander?" Myrasol had asked, when first it had asked them to accompany it into the dark corridor.

  "Come with me," it had replied, lingering over the th sound the way a human with a lisp might have done.

  "Come with me," was its invariable reply to all questions, sometimes repeated over and over in a curiously pathetic way, almost as if it regretted the necessity of asking. Jacom had arrived eventually at the conclusion that it was not an intelligent being at all, merely one which could be schooled to carry messages. If so, then it presumably wasn't a Serpent or a Salamander.

  Perhaps humans were not the only other species able to form close relationships with drago mites and perhaps some others had been so long associated that they no longer existed outside the nests of their hosts.

  He and Myrasol had consented to follow the creature because there seemed to be no alternative. It would have been ridiculous to start a discussion between themselves as to whether the warrior- women knew that they were being removed, and whether they might object if they found out. Jacom was all too well aware of the fact that he was a helpless cork on the sea of fate, ready victim of the slightest eddy of fortune. If walls opened up and monsters beckoned, saying

  "Come with me' in a reasonably polite fashion, what reason or authority did he have to refuse? He was already deep in the bowels of an alien landscape, where he might be seized, crushed, killed and eaten at any moment. What possible virtue was there in resistance? In any case, given their recent treatment by members of their own species what reason had he or the big amber to fear the enmity of mere monsters?

  The tunnel along which the creature led them would have been utterly dark had it not been for the light radiated by the creature itself, and that light was hardly bright enough to illuminate the walls. All Jacom knew of these surroundings was that the walls were warm to the touch, and noticeably sorter than the walls of the corridors through which he had earlier been led. The lacuna which contained them seemed to be opening in front of their living beacon and closing again behind them as they passed. It was as 4i7

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  though

  they were carrying a tiny air-bubble with them as they tramped through the fleshy bedrock of the Dragomite Hills but the moist air remained breathable enough.

  "How much further?" growled Myrasol, who was bringing up the rear, when they had been moving for fifteen minutes or so. Jacom relayed the question forwards, but their guide didn't deign to turn around as it answered

  "Come with me."

  "As long as it takes," he said, voicing the inference he had picked up.

  "It can hardly know or care that I'm bound to Ereleth by the threat of early death," the amber said, with a sigh.

  "So I suppose there is no point in trying to persuade it that I'm not free to wander wherever the whim might take it, even to the remotest depths of the world."

  "Probably not," Jacom agreed.

  "On the other hand," Myrasol said, 'the mound-women are convinced that time is pressing, and it might well share their anxiety. Perhaps it is taking us to the true queen of this dark empire: the drago mite queen. "

  "Come with me," said the
luminous one, without turning its head.

  "Be patient," Jacom said, trying hard to make light of it all with a cavalier attitude and an ironic tone.

  "All will doubtless be explained in the fullness of time." He did not believe it; he had lost faith in the explicability of the world.

  Their patience was not tested to an unreasonable limit; soon afterwards they came into a different system of caverns, which were unmistakably permanent.

  Jacom was aware of new spaces to either side of him, and less featureless walls, but the gloom was intense and it was difficult to see anything except for their strange guide. Such streaks of light-broadcasting fungus as there were in these caves seemed distant and sickly. The floor was uneven here, and their route became very indirect. For the first time since they had come into the underworld they encountered abrupt corners.

  Jacom perceived, though not without difficulty, that the walls of these tunnels were neither smooth nor plain, but had complex sets of chambers let into them at regular intervals. The apertures were arranged in vertical rows of four; each one was broad enough for a man even a man of Andris Myrasol's bulk to crawl through.

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  Jacom tried to see what might be inside, but their summoner hardly ever paused. Although he had the poorer view, by virtue of being in rear, it was Myrasol who ventured a hypothesis as-to their nature.

  "I think they're egg-chambers," he said, 'but all but a few of them are empty. "

  They were not all empty, but if the stink was anything to go by, most of those which weren't no longer contained healthy eggs. Jacom avoided the ones which reeked of decay, but he put his hand briefly into several of the apertures as he passed by, until he felt the surface of a smooth and rounded object. It had a waxy quality about it, and he concluded that Myrasol might be right.

  There were drago mite workers hereabouts; Jacom could hear them moving, and occasionally caught a glimpse of reflective eyes in a side passage, but the creatures made no move to interrupt the progress of the guide.

  "If this is where her eggs are stored," Myrasol said, 'we might indeed hope to see the drago mite queen herself, in all her glory.

  Perhaps that is where we are being taken. "

  Curiosity as an antidote to fear, Jacom thought but the judgment was too harsh. How could one not be curious? He could hardly claim that he was witness to sights that no human eyes had ever seen before, but he was certain that no Xandrian had ever seen them. If ever he were fortunate enough to return to his father's estate, he would have such tales to tell that. . .

  Given his luck, he realised, no one would believe a word of it.

  "What a monster she must be," he said, in answer to Myrasol's speculation.

  "It will be a rare privilege to have an audience with her," Myrasol said, stoutly maintaining his determination to treat this nightmare lightly, 'but we will need a better interpreter than our palely lit friend if we're to make much sense of what she has to say. "

  How brave me are! Jacom thought. True courage is not the capacity to lay about oneself with a sword until bloody corpses pile up about one's feet the frenzy of terror-stricken panic suffices for that.

  True courage is to be meekly led into the deepest heart of a nightmare, remaining calm the while.

  He was calm, but he wasn't sure that it was courage made him so. If he was wrong about there being some tranquilliser adrift in 419

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  the cloudy air,

  the likelihood was that he and the amber had simply exhausted their resources of anxiety.

  When Phar had told him all that he knew and suspected about drago mites Jacom had imagined the drago mite queen to be a worker writ enormously large with a vastly distended abdomen. Having some slight familiarity with the life of honey-bees he had assumed that she would lie in state in the very heart of her hive while her loyal workers fed her constantly. Now, he imagined being taken to stand before her huge head, to be inspected by the biggest and blackest eyes in the world. When they entered a broader tunnel slightly less gloomy than the rest he thought such a meeting might be imminent, and that expectation inhibited and delayed his understanding of what he actually saw.

  They passed into a corridor which seemed to be lined with huge bulbous warts, some projecting at right-angles, others hanging limply down. Some were distended and some were not; many gave the appearance of being shrivelled.

  Jacom did not immediately realise that the puckered mass at the tip of each one was a huge closed sphincter.

  There were at least forty of them, perhaps more.

  He did not begin to guess what they might be until he saw one of the sphincters gaping wide, discharging with difficulty an elliptical object the size of a man's torso. At first he assumed that some kind of excretion process was under way, but that seemed too absurd, i "What is that?" Myrasol asked, crowding close to peer over his shoulder and share the benefit of the light cast by their luminous guide.

  The question triggered the answer.

  "It's an egg," Jacom said.

  He stopped dead as he said it, but quickly had to hurry on, partly because their guide hadn't hesitated and partly because he realised that a drago mite worker was behind Myrasol, impatient for them to move on. He looked wildly about him, although it was now too dark to see anything.

  "Filth and corruption!" Myrasol said, in an awed tone.

  "You're right.

  Don't you see, captain the very walls are alive! We're not being taken to see the drago mite queen, we're inside her! She's built into the structure of the mound! "

  Jacom felt sure that the amber was right. The bulbous organs which they had passed by, he realised, must function in much the 420

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  same way as the

  'teats' which had formed in the wall of the cell to discharge 'milk'. These caves were the ovaries of the drago mite queen, pumping out eggs by the score or perhaps, when all was well, by the hundred. As each egg fell a drago mite worker was presumably supposed to come forward to take it and carry it away.

  It seemed, though, that egg production had slowed dramatically and many of the chambers where eggs were stored were empty or possessed by decay. But how were the eggs fertilised?

  "Is this how Ereleth's worm would feel, if it were sentient?" Myrasol whispered.

  "This whole place is alive. We're strolling through the guts of a creature the size of Xandria's citadel a creature whose myriad daughters move constantly back and forth between the world and the womb from which they sprang. The drago mite queen is the nest, the surface of the mound is just her outer tegument, her exoskeleton. The blight is in her as well as on her it's sinking into the very core of her being. How long has she lived, do you suppose? How long might she have lived, had the blight not come?"

  Again, Jacom judged that Myrasol had guessed correctly. The blight which had come to the Dragomite Hills was no mere crop failure. The threat which it posed was much more profound.

  "Come with me," urged their attendant phantom, hurrying them on into the gloom.

  What, Jacom wondered, could possibly lie at the far end of this procreative corridor, beyond the womb of the drago mite queen a womb within a tomb, if Myrasol's intuition could be trusted. He stepped forward more rapidly in reflexive obedience to the summons.

  They soon emerged into another cave, not quite as gloomy as the ones through which they had passed.

  "Here," said the phantom.

  It stood still at last, and immediately began to fade. The light within its skin died away to complete darkness, explaining by its absence how bright it had been. Perhaps the fungus growing on the ceiling and walls of the cave grew brighter in r
esponse, or perhaps it was simply that Jacom's eyes adapted to the gloom, but their destination revealed itself to him by slow degrees.

  The floor was very uneven, pitted with craters with raised rims, 421

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  which

  cradled whatlacom was immediately able to see as eggs but these eggs gave mS

  impression of having been generated where they lay, and of still being connected to the flesh which cradled them.

  Unlike the drago mites eggs, which had been grey-white and opaque, these were red-veined and almost translucent. . . and they were watched over by guardians far stranger than drago mite workers.

  Here, the faintly luminous walls had eyes and mouths, and ears . .

  and even, occasionally, limbs, or at least the bare outlines of them.

  It was as if half a hundred living beings had been filleted, and their boneless flesh spread out upon the inner surface of the cavern, as some preserve might be spread on a slice of bread . or as if their flesh had been half-consumed by the flesh which lay behind and beyond it, to form a horrible mosaic.

  Jacom had no doubt that some of the eyes could see, and that they were staring at him. Perhaps they could all see or would have been able to, had disease not struck so many blind.

  He had no notion of what this place should have looked like had the queen which contained it been healthy, but he was convinced that this was a nightmare in reduced circumstances. The processes of corruption which had attacked it seemed palpable in the humid air and in every apparition decking the walls. It made no difference where he looked: there were faces in distress dying faces.

  He did not doubt, either, that the faces in the walls had brains behind them, contained within the flesh of the drago mite hive within the flesh of the drago mite queen. It took him a little while, though, to take hold of the notion that those brains were brains of a human kind, and that the summoner which had brought them here might also be a kind of human in spite of all its alien embellishments. And yet, all of this was part of the body of the drago mite queen; everything which presently surrounded them was bedded in her flesh, and must be part of her.