Kress sobbed, and was very still for a while, but nothing happened.
He opened his eyes again. He trembled. Slowly the shadows began to soften and dissolve. Moonlight was filtering through the high windows. His eyes adjusted.
The living room was empty. Nothing there, nothing, nothing. Only his drunken fears.
Simon Kress steeled himself, and rose, and went to a light.
Nothing there. The room was quiet, deserted.
He listened. Nothing. No sound. Nothing in the walls. It had all been his imagination, his fear.
The memories of Lissandra and the thing in the cellar returned to him unbidden. Shame and anger washed over him. Why had he done that? He could have helped her burn it out, kill it. Why...he knew why. The maw had done it to him, put fear in him. Wo had said it was psionic, even when it was small. And now it was large, so large. It had feasted on Cath, and Idi, and now it had two more bodies down there. It would keep growing. And it had learned to like the taste of human flesh, he thought.
He began to shake, but he took control of himself again and stopped. It wouldn"t hurt him. He was G.o.d. The whites had always been his favorites.
He remembered how he had stabbed it with his throwing-sword. That was before Cath came. d.a.m.n her anyway.
He couldn"t stay here. The maw would grow hungry again. Large as it was, it wouldn"t take long. Its appet.i.te would be terrible. What would it do then? He had to get away, back to the safety of the city while it was still contained in his wine cellar. It was only plaster and hard-packed earth down there, and the mobiles could dig and tunnel. When they got free...Kress didn"t want to think about it.
He went to his bedroom and packed. He took three bags. Just a single change of clothing, that was all he needed; the rest of the s.p.a.ce he filled with his valuables, with jewelry and art and other things he could not bear to lose. He did not expect to return.
His shambler followed him down the stairs, staring at him from its baleful glowing eyes. It was gaunt. Kress realized that it had been ages since he had fed it. Normally it could take care of itself, but no doubt the pickings had grown lean of late. When it tried to clutch at his leg, he snarled at it and kicked it away, and it scurried off, offended.
Kress slipped outside, carrying his bags awkwardly, and shut the door behind him.
For a moment he stood pressed against the house, his heart thudding in his chest. Only a few meters between him and his skimmer. He was afraid to cross them. The moonlight was bright, and the front of his house was a scene of carnage. The bodies of Lissandra"s two flamers lay where they had fallen, one twisted and burned, the other swollen beneath a ma.s.s of dead sandkings. And the mobiles, the black and red mobiles, they were all around him. It was an effort to remember that they were dead. It was almost as if they were simply waiting, as they had waited so often before.
Nonsense, Kress told himself. More drunken fears. He had seen the castles blown apart. They were dead, and the white maw was trapped in his cellar. He took several deep and deliberate breaths, and stepped forward onto the sandkings. They crunched. He ground them into the sand savagely. They did not move.
Kress smiled, and walked slowly across the battleground, listening to the sounds, the sounds of safety.
Crunch. Crackle. Crunch.
He lowered his bags to the ground and opened the door to his skimmer.
Something moved from shadow into light. A pale shape on the seat of his skimmer. It was as long as his forearm. Its mandibles clacked together softly, and it looked up at him from six small eyes set all around its body.
Kress wet his pants and backed away slowly.
There was more motion from inside the skimmer. He had left the door open. The sandking emerged and came toward him, cautiously. Others followed. They had been hiding beneath his seats, burrowed into the upholstery. But now they emerged. They formed a ragged ring around the skimmer.
Kress licked his lips, turned, and moved quickly to Lissandra"s skimmer.
He stopped before he was halfway there. Things were moving inside that one too. Great maggoty things, half-seen by the light of the moon.
Kress whimpered and retreated back toward the house. Near the front door, he looked up.
He counted a dozen long white shapes creeping back and forth across the walls of the building. Four of them were cl.u.s.tered close together near the top of the unused belfry where the carrion hawk had once roosted. They were carving something. A face. A very recognizable face.
Simon Kress shrieked and ran back inside.
A sufficient quant.i.ty of drink brought him the easy oblivion he sought. But he woke. Despite everything, he woke. He had a terrible headache, and he smelled, and he was hungry. Oh so very hungry. He had never been so hungry.
Kress knew it was not his own stomach hurting.
A white sandking watched him from atop the dresser in his bedroom, its antennae moving faintly. It was as big as the one in the skimmer the night before. He was horribly dry, sandpaper dry. He licked his lips and fled from the room.
The house was full of sandkings; he had to be careful where he put his feet. They all seemed busy on errands of their own. They were making modifications in his house, burrowing into or out of his walls, carving things. Twice he saw his own likeness staring out at him from unexpected places. The faces were warped, twisted, livid with fear.
He went outside to get the bodies that had been rotting in the yard, hoping to appease the white maw"s hunger. They were gone, both of them. Kress remembered how easily the mobiles could carry things many times their own weight.
It was terrible to think that the maw was still hungry after all of that.
When Kress reentered the house, a column of sandkings was wending its way down the stairs. Each carried a piece of his shambler. The head seemed to look at him reproachfully as it went by.
Kress emptied his freezers, his cabinets, everything, piling all the food in the house in the center of his kitchen floor. A dozen whites waited to take it away. They avoided the frozen food, leaving it to thaw in a great puddle, but they carried off everything else.
When all the food was gone, Kress felt his own hunger pangs abate just a bit, though he had not eaten a thing. But he knew the respite would be short-lived. Soon the maw would be hungry again. He had to feed it.
Kress knew what to do. He went to his communicator. "Malada," he began casually when the first of his friends answered, "I"m having a small party tonight. I realize this is terribly short notice, but I hope you can make it. I really do."
He called Jad Rakkis next, and then the others. By the time he had finished, nine of them had accepted his invitation. Kress hoped that would be enough.
Kress met his guests outside the mobiles had cleaned up remarkably quickly, and the grounds looked almost as they had before the battle and walked them to his front door. He let them enter first. He did not follow.
When four of them had gone through, Kress finally worked up his courage. He closed the door behind his latest guest, ignoring the startled exclamations that soon turned into shrill gibbering, and sprinted for the skimmer the man had arrived in. He slid in safely, thumbed the startplate, and swore. It was programmed to lift only in response to its owner"s thumbprint, of course.
Jad Rakkis was the next to arrive. Kress ran to his skimmer as it set down, and seized Rakkis by the arm as he was climbing out. "Get back in, quickly," he said, pushing. "Take me to the city. Hurry, Jad. Get out of here!"
But Rakkis only stared at him, and would not move. "Why, what"s wrong, Simon? I don"t understand. What about your party?"
And then it was too late, because the loose sand all around them was stirring, and the red eyes were staring at them, and the mandibles were clacking. Rakkis made a choking sound, and moved to get back in his skimmer, but a pair of mandibles snapped shut about his ankle, and suddenly he was on his knees. The sand seemed to boil with subterranean activity. Jad thrashed and cried terribly as they tore him apart. Kress could hardly bear to watch.
After that, he did not try to escape again. When it was all over, he cleaned out what remained in his liquor cabinet, and got extremely drunk. It would be the last time he would enjoy that luxury, he knew. The only alcohol remaining in the house was stored down in the wine cellar.
Kress did not touch a bite of food the entire day, but he fell asleep feeling bloated, sated at last, the awful hunger vanquished. His last thoughts before the nightmares took him were of whom he could ask out tomorrow.
Morning was hot and dry. Kress opened his eyes to see the white sandking on his dresser again. He shut them again quickly, hoping the dream would leave him. It did not, and he could not go back to sleep. Soon he found himself staring at the thing.
He stared for almost five minutes before the strangeness of it dawned on him; the sandking was not moving.
The mobiles could be preternaturally still, to be sure. He had seen them wait and watch a thousand times. But always there was some motion about them the mandibles clacked, the legs twitched, the long fine antennae stirred and swayed.
But the sandking on his dresser was completely still.
Kress rose, holding his breath, not daring to hope. Could it be dead? Could something have killed it? He walked across the room.
The eyes were gla.s.sy and black. The creature seemed swollen, somehow, as if it were soft and rotting inside, filling up with gas that pushed outward at the plates of white armor.
Kress reached out a trembling hand and touched it.
It was warm hot even and growing hotter. But it did not move.
He pulled his hand back, and as he did, a segment of the sandking"s white exoskeleton fell away from it. The flesh beneath was the same color, but softer-looking, swollen and feverish. And it almost seemed to throb.
Kress backed away, and ran to the door.
Three more white mobiles lay in his hall. They were all like the one in his bedroom.
He ran down the stairs, jumping over sandkings. None of them moved. The house was full of them, all dead, dying, comatose, whatever. Kress did not care what was wrong with them. Just so they could not move.
He found four of them inside his skimmer. He picked them up one by one, and threw them as far as he could. d.a.m.ned monsters. He slid back in, on the ruined half-eaten seats, and thumbed the startplate.
Nothing happened.
Kress tried again, and again. Nothing. It wasn"t fair. This was his skimmer, it ought to start, why wouldn"t it lift, he didn"t understand.
Finally he got out and checked, expecting the worst. He found it. The sandkings had torn apart his gravity grid. He was trapped. He was still trapped.
Grimly, Kress marched back into the house. He went to his gallery and found the antique axe that had hung next to the throwing-sword he had used on Cath m"Lane. He set to work. The sandkings did not stir even as he chopped them to pieces. But they splattered when he made the first cut, the bodies almost bursting. Inside was awful; strange half-formed organs, a viscous reddish ooze that looked almost like human blood, and the yellow ichor.
Kress destroyed twenty of them before he realized the futility of what he was doing. The mobiles were nothing, really. Besides, there were so many of them. He could work for a day and night and still not kill them all.
He had to go down into the wine cellar and use the axe on the maw.
Resolute, he started down. He got within sight of the door, and stopped.
It was not a door any more. The walls had been eaten away, so that the hole was twice the size it had been, and round. A pit, that was all. There was no sign that there had ever been a door nailed shut over that black abyss.
A ghastly, choking, fetid odor seemed to come from below.
And the walls were wet and b.l.o.o.d.y and covered with patches of white fungus.
And worst, it was breathing.
Kress stood across the room and felt the warm wind wash over him as it exhaled, and he tried not to choke, and when the wind reversed direction, he fled.
Back in the living room, he destroyed three more mobiles, and collapsed. What was happening? He didn"t understand.
Then he remembered the only person who might understand. Kress went to his communicator again, stepping on a sandking in his haste, and prayed fervently that the device still worked.
When Jala Wo answered, he broke down and told her everything.
She let him talk without interruption, no expression save for a slight frown on her gaunt, pale face. When Kress had finished, she said only, "I ought to leave you there."
Kress began to blubber. "You can"t. Help me. I"ll pay..."
"I ought to," Wo repeated, "but I won"t."
"Thank you," Kress said. "Oh, thank..."
"Quiet," said Wo. "Listen to me. This is your own doing. Keep your sandkings well, and they are courtly ritual warriors. You turned yours into something else, with starvation and torture. You were their G.o.d. You made them what they are. That maw in your cellar is sick, still suffering from the wound you gave it. It is probably insane. Its behavior is...unusual.
"You have to get out of there quickly. The mobiles are not dead, Kress. They are dormant. I told you the exoskeleton falls off when they grow larger. Normally, in fact, it falls off much earlier. I have never heard of sandkings growing as large as yours while still in the insectoid stage. It is another result of crippling the white maw, I would say. That does not matter.
"What matters is the metamorphosis your sandkings are now undergoing. As the maw grows, you see, it gets progressively more intelligent. Its psionic powers strengthen, and its mind becomes more sophisticated, more ambitious. The armored mobiles are useful enough when the maw is tiny and only semi-sentient, but now it needs better servants, bodies with capabilities. Do you understand? The mobiles are all going to give birth to a new breed of sandking. I can"t say exactly what it will look like. Each maw designs its own, to fit its perceived needs and desires. But it will be biped, with four arms, and opposable thumbs. It will be able to construct and operate advanced machinery. The individual sandkings will not be sentient. But the maw will be very sentient indeed."
Simon Kress was gaping at Wo"s image on the viewscreen. "Your workers," he said, with an effort. "The ones who came out here...who installed the tank..."
Jala Wo managed a faint smile. "Shade," she said.
"Shade is a sandking," Kress repeated numbly. "And you sold me a tank of...of...infants, ah..."
"Do not be absurd," Wo said. "A first-stage sandking is more like a sperm than an infant. The wars temper and control them in nature. Only one in a hundred reaches second stage. Only one in a thousand achieves the third and final plateau, and becomes like Shade. Adult sandkings are not sentimental about the small maws. There are too many of them, and their mobiles are pests." She sighed. "And all this talk wastes time. That white sandking is going to waken to full sentience soon. It is not going to need you any longer, and it hates you, and it will be very hungry. The transformation is taxing. The maw must eat enormous amounts both before and after. So you have to get out of there. Do you understand?"
"I can"t," Kress said. "My skimmer is destroyed, and I can"t get any of the others to start. I don"t know how to reprogram them. Can you come out for me?"
"Yes," said Wo. "Shade and I will leave at once, but it is more than two hundred kilometers from Asgard to you, and there is equipment we will need to deal with the deranged sandking you"ve created. You cannot wait there. You have two feet. Walk. Go due east, as near as you can determine, as quickly as you can. The land out there is pretty desolate. We"ll find you easily with an aerial search, and you"ll be safely away from the sandking. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Simon Kress. "Yes, oh, yes."
They signed off, and he walked quickly toward the door. He was halfway there when he heard the noise a sound halfway between a pop and a crack.
One of the sandkings had split open. Four tiny hands covered with pinkish-yellow blood came up out of the gap and began to push the dead skin aside.
Kress began to run.
He had not counted on the heat.
The hills were dry and rocky. Kress ran from the house as quickly as he could, ran until his ribs ached and his breath was coming in gasps. Then he walked, but as soon as he had recovered he began to run again. For almost an hour he ran and walked, ran and walked, beneath the fierce hot sun. He sweated freely, and wished that he had thought to bring some water. He watched the sky in hopes of seeing Wo and Shade.
He was not made for this. It was too hot, and too dry, and he was in no condition. But he kept himself going with the memory of the way the maw had breathed, and the thought of the wriggling little things that by now were surely crawling all over his house. He hoped Wo and Shade would know how to deal with them.
He had his own plans for Wo and Shade. It was all their fault, Kress had decided, and they would suffer for it. Lissandra was dead, but he knew others in her profession. He would have his revenge. He promised himself that a hundred times as he struggled and sweated his way east.
At least he hoped it was east. He was not that good at directions, and he wasn"t certain which way he had run in his initial panic, but since then he had made an effort to bear due east, as Wo had suggested.
When he had been running for several hours, with no sign of rescue, Kress began to grow certain that he had gone wrong.
When several more hours pa.s.sed, he began to grow afraid. What if Wo and Shade could not find him? He would die out here. He hadn"t eaten in two days; he was weak and frightened; his throat was raw for want of water. He couldn"t keep going. The sun was sinking now, and he"d be completely lost in the dark. What was wrong? Had the sandkings eaten Wo and Shade? The fear was on him again, filling him, and with it a great thirst and a terrible hunger. But Kress kept going. He stumbled now when he tried to run, and twice he fell. The second time he sc.r.a.ped his hand on a rock, and it came away b.l.o.o.d.y. He sucked at it as he walked, and worried about infection.
The sun was on the horizon behind him. The ground grew a little cooler, for which Kress was grateful. He decided to walk until last light and settle in for the night. Surely he was far enough from the sandkings to be safe, and Wo and Shade would find him come morning.
When he topped the next rise, he saw the outline of a house in front of him.
It wasn"t as big as his own house, but it was big enough. It was habitation, safety. Kress shouted and began to run toward it. Food and drink, he had to have nourishment, he could taste the meal now. He was aching with hunger. He ran down the hill towards the house, waving his arms and shouting to the inhabitants. The light was almost gone now, but he could still make out a half-dozen children playing in the twilight. "Hey there," he shouted. "Help, help."
They came running toward him.