“Our God stands with us. He will suffice. Surely.”
She had spoken.
A religious cult.
In spite of his certain knowledge that he was following the God’s commands by being here and, eventually it now seemed, destroying this world—and in spite of his attempts over and again to educate her about his God—she had held onto some secret soteriology.
No wonder she had been so calm.
And no need to waste time on any more questions.
He didn’t care which of the infinite permutations of belief her god might take. He didn’t care what natural, physical manifestations the Cwrth had misunderstood as miraculous, magical, mystical. He didn’t care to debate with her.
His God was waiting.
He had seen her, had spoken to her.
For Her sake, he had mated with her on that single never-to-be-forgotten flight.
His knowledge was absolute.
He did not care to hear the minutiae of this... this creature’s faith.
He shifted into command mode. He was after all, the Chaptain, the possessor of all power on this world, the single individual who would decide whether this creature should live or die, whether her entire world would be allowed to exist or would become what parts of it already were—lifeless, dust-and ash-ridden wastes.
“I have power you cannot understand. My ship sits within the sky. I can order it to incinerate you, yours, everything you hold dear. I could incinerate the planet if I so chose, reduce it to a glowing ball of cinder.”
He stopped. The trans-comm chittered away, although Torq thought he heard more rigidity, more authority in the sounds that emerged from it.
The Cwrth did not change her position, her mien. Nor did she answer.
“My numbers—my warriors—carry weapons you cannot imagine. We are many, almost infinite; you are few and fragile. You cannot withstand us. Do not oppose us.
“Do not place hope in an impossibility.
“I have already shattered worlds.” As he spoke those words, he realized that he had made up his mind. He knew how his God would want him to act. “I shall shatter yours as well.”
***
As the trans-comm stuttered out Torq’s warning, he stared without moving out the window.
Silent, impervious, unassailable—the epitome of the Koleic.
His gaze rover over the impossibly slender spires of the enclave, often canted at angles that made his head seem to ache, as if at any instant they might shiver into fragments, and then—perhaps even before the fragments struck the ground—into dust.
He stared at the stark, barren mountains. They surrounded the plain where the enclave was situated, he knew, but were much closer here than further south. He could see their lofty ramparts, their razor-like ridges. As far as he could tell there were no cuts in the chain of peaks, no exit from here into the wastes that were the rest of the world.
From there he looked into the sky. His element now. His universe. His memory flickered through the planets he had visited... and conquered... and destroyed.
As was his Destiny!
The Cwrth began humming in her typical, monotonous way.
He turned to watch her now, instead of the landscape.
Her mouth was... was twisted. Elongated somehow. The ends where the two mouth-flaps joined were slightly raised. Vertical creases deformed her face there and elsewhere. It was hideous, the way their boneless flesh manipulated itself. Never had Torq felt prouder of—or so protected by—his unmoving ventral plates, his glossy chitin, even the thin, barbed lengths of his tarsi. Everything about him, about the Koleic, was immeasurably superior to this... this...
Her voice stopped, and the machine began.
“We have heard this before.” Even through the metallic translator, Torq thought he could detect the thrumming of strong emotion, something the Cwrth had not yet shown. She had always remained patient, gentle, even resolved to her obvious fate. And the fate of her people.
She repeated the first phrase, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps for clarification: “We have heard this before. Not often. Twice. Perhaps three times in our long, long history. None alive remember such things, even though we also live long, long lives. But the stories have been handed down.”
The machine pause, sputtered meaningless hisses and gurgles, almost as if it were sentient and did not want to say the next few lines.
“Such invaders”—she had apparently used a different word than “visitors” and in doing so made her attitudes toward the Koleic clear for the first time—“such invaders did not succeed. They died. As will you. Our God will succor us. He will suffice.”
Torq clicked his tarsi. He had tried to prepare himself for such a moment, given the reports of earlier Chaptains. He had never had to speak the words; the first worlds he had conquered had not risen to the sophistication of religions, even such a patently absurd one as was practiced here.
Stand up to the might of the Koleic, indeed!
Yet in spite of his preparations, he felt... unquiet. Even numbers died for reasons. They might forget themselves and curl. They might disobey a name. They might even have been born to supply nutriment to the Gods who even now were questing through the depths of space, scattering their seed far and wide.
But to die for an imaginary guardian.
Still, the needs—the requirements—of the Koleic came first. No one could circumvent Destiny.
He spoke a harsh command. The three stationed at the exit to the chamber hastened forward, its carapace glistening and burnished in the evening light. It carried a comm in one first hand. The second was outstretched toward Torq.
“Report.” Torq’s voice was rougher than usual, not because of anything the three had done but because of his frustration with the Cwrth, the one standing stock-still before him and all of them on this pitiable ball of dust.
The three clicked nervously, chitin against chitin.
“Report!”
“My lord!” Several of its compounds just might have flickered toward the pouch where Torq carried the thin metal rod. But it said nothing more.
“Report, I said.” And this time the anger in his voice—in his whole demeanor—was indeed directed at the three.
“My lord, they have... they have... disappeared.”
“What? Who?”
“My lord, scanners onboard the lander indicate that virtually all life forms in this enclave have... have... disappeared?” It was as if the guard had searched for a different word, a better word, and finally gave up in defeat.
“But when we landed, there were hundreds, thousands clustered around this building.”
“My lord, yes. But as the time has passed, and no order being given from you to the contrary, they... withdrew, yes, withdrew into their domiciles. Guards posted outside reported that we were being watched, observed, but none of the creatures made any gestures or overtures that we could read as threats. And...” The three stopped abruptly, as if it were afraid of the consequences of what it had already stated and was terrified to continue.
“And!”
“My lord, when we checked a few breaths ago, guards discovered... Well, my lord, they discovered that the habitations seem cluttered with mounds of combustibles. Several thought they saw movement in the deepest shadows within the domiciles, but none of”—it gestured toward the Cwrth with a movement of the tarsi that in any level of polite society would have been not polite—“none of them were visible.”
Torq stared. The guard—even though a three—showed imminent signs of curling. Torq did not care.
“Cretin! ‘Mounds of combustibles,’ and the creatures had vanished? Didn’t you think to...?”
No, they hadn’t thought. The numbers outside were mostly eights. They did not think. They followed orders explicitly. Or died.
With a gesture suspiciously like drawing a tarsus across a vulnerable ventral plate, Torq dismissed the three.
He scuttled heavily toward the center of the chamber, where the Cwr
th stood silently. She seemed sad, her angles canted slightly earthward, her dorsal surface curved just as slightly in what in a Koleic would have been interpreted as the first signs of curling.
Yet something in her orbs—those loathsome twin balls of moisture—told him that she was not in fact defeated. She might be sad, although he could not understand why. But she was still not defeated.
“What has happened? Where are your people?”
He cursed the delay as the machine translated each sound he had made.
She spoke, and there was another delay.
“They are gone. Into the mountains, following trails known only to us. And you”—Torq shuddered at the venom in the word—“you will not destroy this place. We will. It is ours, and we will destroy it, if our God requires our sacrifice.”
“You will die...”
She began that eerie, eldritch twisting of the mouth-flaps even before the trans-comm had begun. It was as if she already understood what Torq would say next and was ready to respond.
The trans-comm chittered and whistled at her, however; and she chittered and whistled back.
“Of course I shall die. That is why I am here. I am the least, the”—the trans-comm nearly ground to a halt before spitting out a long sequence of words—“the one-who-sheds-ichor-willingly-in-order-that-all-others-may-survive. I am the distal-appendage/female-that-has-not-yet-given-birth. Through me my people will survive.
“If my God wills it.”
“I do not so will,” Torq screamed. “I do not so will! I am your God! And she”—here he gestured toward where the ship had just become visible through the top of the tallest window—“she is my God!”
The trans-comm struggled but it had not been designed to communicate such intensities of emotion. Gears ground in the effort, and whiffs of smoke appeared around the speaker. The chittering and twittering and musical tones sounded distorted, gravelly and harsh.
Even before the trans-comm fell silent, he snapped a gesture toward the nearest guard.
“Order the ship to prepare all force beams. As soon as the lander rises, destroy this place!”
“My lord, yes!” The three clicked a sharp salute.
Torq glared at the Cwrth... or rather, at the place where she had stood an instant before. During his outburst, even as the trans-comm had begun translating his command, the Cwrth had silently moved to stand immediately next to the wooden column. One of her hands touched the surface of the hideous carving, caressing it as if it were the most gorgeous thing in existence. The facet stone at her breast shone with its own internal light.
And she was speaking, whispering in a tone so low that through all of his screaming, Torq had not heard a thing.
He started to moved closer to her, infusing his bodily stance with all of the subtle signals of hatred for her stubborn, presumptuous species that he could—tarsi fully extended, as if he would rip her body covering from whatever structures supported it; carapace divided just enough to reveal the ichor-green of his wings; mouthparts quivering with suppressed rage; eyen glistening as his compounds flared toward her.
He almost began to speak.
Then he stopped.
There was something about her voice, about the words she was obviously uttering. He concentrated.
This was not the language she had been speaking to him!
Her words now contained almost none of the flighty high-pitched twittering, none of the rhythmical whistles that he had become accustomed to hearing and that at times he almost felt he could understand on his own. No, these sounds were harsh, guttural, her mouth-flaps quivering in tight little movements, up-down, up-down, nearly faster than his eyen could follow.
And she had altered physically.
The thin stalk that divided her head from her thorax stiffened. Thick ropes of tissue swelled from within, moving up along each side and pulsating as if with a life of their own.
The twin lumps of flaccid tissue on her thorax—Torq could imagine no possible use for such protrusions—tightened, the cone-shaped tips rising slightly in defiance of even the weak gravity.
She had spread her two body-supports until they were farther apart than the widest part of her body. In doing so, she had revealed even more of the unsightly swelling just below the tissue-lumps. The covering was visibly tighter, shining and beginning to turn a faint red. The earlier random movements within the swelling had become rhythmical, repetitive, as if a dozen tarsi were probing the tissues from within. He nearly retched at the sight.
Painfully he brought his eyen up to concentrate on her upper features; what was happening below was horrendous beyond all words.
She was still caressing the horrible carving, but now her tarsi were flitting so rapidly over the surface of the stone that it seemed as if the stone itself were moving, shrugging pleasurably beneath her touch.
And her voice dropped even lower, rumbled almost, as it reached depths that would have ripped at a Koleic’s speaking organs with their throbbing, ragged intensity.
The words became more rapid, running into each other until they became a litany of horror unbroken by breath.
Torq strained to recognize something—anything—in the confusion of deranged sounds but could not. His first hand dropped to his carapace pouch.
The monstrous carving seemed to wriggle obscenely beneath the Cwrth’s hands.
Her swelling expanded, contracted, expanded again, and Torq realized with horror that its movements were somehow connected with—controlled by—the rhythms of her unknowable, unspeakable words.
His tarsus touched the thin metal rod and began to withdraw it.
“My lord!”
The voice of the three—strained and dismayed as it was—calmed Torq for an instant. It was familiar; its rhythms were of his species, within his experience. Then he registered what the three was saying. Screaming.
“My lord! Something... a... it comes!” And with a final shriek that Torq would have thought beyond the capacity of a Koleic to utter, the three curled!
Torq glanced back at the Cwrth.
She had not left her place near the pillar. She was still stroking the stone creature, still muttering in that strange, uncanny tongue.
He turned and approached the window at the farthest side of the chamber.
And stopped. Stunned.
Beyond the distant mountains, a cloudy mass—billowing, roiling, lit from within by preternatural flashes of unnamable hues—a cloudy mass, such as had been charted elsewhere on the planet, descended, grazed shadowed heights, undulated across fields as if it were alive, and hungry, and angry.
As it approached the buildings of the enclave, it spread murkily, thinning but in the process becoming opaque and—if such a thing were possible—even more threatening as its lower surfaces bubbled and boiled, touching and shattering the thin spires, hiding the horrible angles of building after building.
The unnamable colors increased, joined with others familiar to Torq’s eyen—red, yellow, bile-green.
Part of his mind dissociated instantly. It began dispassionately, and entirely irrationally, to consider the curious modifications in wave lengths as the lights—the colors—filtered through the crystal panes.
Another part of his mind registered amazement and horror at his objectivity at such a moment.
This cloud, this... thing... could not possibly exist.
But it did.
It approached rapidly.
And stopped.
It contracted, compressed itself into a mist, a fog... thick, impenetrable but still motile. It now approached slowly. Frighteningly slowly.
Within the grey-blue fog—still lit, though less brilliantly—by the flashes of abominable color—lay a central core of absolute blackness that even Torq’s numberless compounds could not penetrate.
***
The Cwrth’s voice patterns had changed again. Though the sounds were still those of the strange language—and to Torq it felt immeasurably ancient—they were slower, more distin
ct.
They now held notes of command.
The first wisps of mist settled lower outside the chamber.
Torq watched with horrified amazement as the tendrils solidified, became tentacle-like, then solid, questing tentacles that stretched and expanded—even though the central core of darkness remained stationary.
They twisted in and over each other, curled and straightened as if they were feeling their strength for the first time, then dropped.
In an instant, they had encircled the lander.
Torq had just time enough to notice that the ground between the building in which he stood and the lander was littered—was covered by a chaos of small black nodules. It took him a breath to figure out what they were.
His entire squadron had curled.
Threes, fives, sevens, nines... all drawn tightly into themselves.
All lost.
Then, even as the magnitude of the disaster settled into his mind, the grey-now-black-now-midnight-purple clenched. Once. Convulsively.
And in a monstrous shower of flames and smoke and consumption, the lander was no more.
***
Torq pulled the thin metal rod from his pouch as he swiveled away from the window.
He raised it and pointed it toward the Cwrth.
And stopped.
She suddenly seemed to catch fire, to flame and glow, her white dress transformed into a living column of opalescent majesty. Her voice shifted again, grew even more intense, as if before she had only recited but now she saw and knew.
The trans-comm made a single attempt to begin translating, and the statue—just as had the lander—exploded.
Space Eldritch Page 8