Tainted Garden Page 5

He raised his arms and stared at his new skin. Although he noticed flakes of dried blood, his skin was mostly clean. He looked up at the stranger, standing in the anellidicidal foam between Rian and the door. The man gave no indication that he was aware of Rian’s awakening.

  “What happened?” asked Rian. His voice echoed in the small chamber.

  The stranger turned to him and raised his hands, palms outward. “Hurts,” he said, and lowered his arms to his sides. “Hurts.”

  Rian nodded. “I remember. Yes. Hurts. Hurts a lot.”

  “Hurts,” said the man, echoing Rian’s nod. A very human gesture.

  Rian climbed to his feet and felt the rubbery corpses of the boreworms all around him. He shivered in distaste. The foam concealed most of the bloated bodies, but those he could spot were fat with consumed blood and flesh. Their tangled bodies lay in drying pools of blood.

  “Dead,” the stranger said, pointing at the worms.

  “Yes, dead,” Rian agreed. He climbed to his feet and shuffled through the foam. His middle arm automatically checked his gear. He regretted the loss of his sporelance, left outside with the boreworm swarm. But he was not about to go out there and fetch it.

  Outside, even through the thick metal of the obelisk, he could hear the sound of the ool’s passage, the bleating, high-pitched scream of the beast as the boreworm swarm gnawed into its outer husk. He shuddered.

  Why has there been so much ool activity? Were the Bhajong planning a major offensive?

  Rian crossed to a wall covered in intricate glyphs and symbols and touched a precise series. With a sharp click a hidden drawer slid from the wall, revealing a numerical touchkey pad. He punched in his access code.

  Hidden machinery whirred and clanked. A portion of the floor recessed, sloping downward to merge with a stairway. Artificial light sank into the depths of the earth, lost within the darkness.

  “Come,” said Rian, gesturing to the stranger. “Stay close to me. Even here there are defenses. They’ll take you as quickly as the boreworms or the ool.”

  The stranger said nothing, but walked across the small room to stand, waiting. Rian frowned at his closeness. Heat rose from the man’s body, and an unknown, acrid scent.

  Mentally shrugging, Rian led the way down the ramp onto the stairway. Pressure plates triggered the ramp’s closure. It rose ponderously, banging into place with a metallic boom. Thick clamps shot across the narrow stairwell, slamming into recesses on the opposite wall, locking the doorway.

  With the stranger following on his heels, Rian began his descent.

  At the bottom of the stairway they stepped onto a narrow landing where their passage was blocked by an immense door of aged metal. In a corner, recessed in the shadows, a small mirrored scope turned toward them, and Rian knew they were being watched. Several long, tense moments passed, moments that forced Rian to examine his choices in bringing the stranger to this place.

  But what else should he have done? Left the stranger out in the wilderness? Killed him? He shook his head, discounting the idea. The Elders would surely want to study the creature, the anomaly. If not, he could be killed as easily inside the Enclave as outside it.

  He glanced back at the stranger, who stood immobile, staring at the massive metal door.

  The door hissed as its pneumatics triggered. It slid to one side and recessed into the wall. Beyond stood a wide, unadorned room of gleaming metal occupied by a pair of Gagash guardsmen armed with sporelances. One of the guards gestured them inside. He had only one arm, which sprouted from the center of his heavily pelted chest, and ridges of horn protruding from his jawline. The other, a shambling mound of rolled flesh on trunklike legs, held his sporelance ready, trained on the stranger.

  “Blessings of the Father, Rian. You’re late. The others returned hours ago,” the one-armed man said. He eyed the stranger, frowning. “What is this?”

  “Blessings of the Father, Zhaed. You look well,” Rian said. He was pleasantly surprised to discover the others of his cadre already returned to the Enclave. “And . . . Jey, isn’t it?” he asked, addressing the other.

  “That’s right,” Jey rumbled. “I’m surprised you remember.”

  Rian smiled. “I try to remember everyone. Works sometimes. And other times doesn’t.”

  “I’m not exactly forgettable,” Jey said, his flesh jiggling as he chuckled.

  Zhaed pointed to Rian’s silent companion. “Who is this? Why have you brought a Bhajong here?”

  Rian shook his head. “He’s no Bhajong.”

  “What is he, then?” Jey pressed. “He’s not Gagash, certainly.” His voice rumbled from deep within his massive form, emerging as if through a hollow tube.

  Rian shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I found him in a gully a few miles from here, in the ool-wake.”

  The two stepped back from the stranger. “The ool-wake?” Zhaed echoed. Jey jerked on his sporelance, staring at the stranger.

  “He doesn’t say much,” Jey said.

  “I don’t think he can,” Rian answered. “He hasn’t said much of anything since I found him.”

  Jey shambled forward and reached out to touch the stranger. Rian’s silent companion stared at Jey, a blank look on his face. He did not move as Jey’s short, stubby fingers traced across his cheek, his shoulders. Then the stranger raised his hand and touched Jey’s arm, running his fingertips along the mottled, jiggling flesh. Jey shuddered and stepped back, slapping down the stranger’s hand.

  “Hurts,” the stranger said. He turned his hand over and stared at it.

  “That’s one of his few words,” Rian said, smirking.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Zhaed asked.

  “Me? Nothing. Turn him over to the Elders, and Father, I suppose. Let them make of him what they will.”

  Zhaed grunted, shrugging. “You bring a lot of strangeness back with you, Rian. Not only an oddity, but the ool. We haven’t had an ool cross over the valley in decades, but recently there’s been three in two days.”

  “Three?”

  Zhaed nodded, jerking his horned chin toward the periscope mounted on one wall. “The first the night before last—the one we downed. The second came during your passage of the boreworm pools. And another swept in just after you pulled this . . . thing into the obelisk. The boreworms have driven those off now. Though I worried we’d have to break out the heavy weapons.”

  Rian frowned. Two more ool? So close on the heels of the one the boreworms had downed. Decidedly odd, that. He could not remember similar circumstances. And the heavy weapons had not been used in so long he wondered if they still functioned.

  “Truthfully, we worried we’d be cleaning your remains out of the obelisk in the morning,” Zhaed said. “How did you survive? You were both covered with boreworms.” He eyed the circular holes in Rian’s leather harness, the dried, flaking blood that covered his exposed skin.

  “I don’t really know,” Rian answered truthfully. “The foam helped. It killed the worms, at least. As for the rest—” He shrugged.

  Zhaed frowned. The expression tightened his jaw muscles, standing his ridges on end, flaring them out into a series of needle-sharp spikes.

  “I’ve got to see the Elders,” Rian said. He avoided eye contact with the guards. He had the same questions they did. “When is your shift over? Perhaps we can take dinner together.”

  Zhaed shook his head. “I’ve married, Rian. No more nights in the cups for me, I’m afraid.”

  “A horrible, beastly woman,” Jey said. “With a foul temper. And quick with kitchen utensils.”

  Zhaed snorted, waving the joke aside. “Jey’s just jealous. She’s a fine woman, and she keeps the bed warm.”

  Rian chuckled and slapped Zhaed on his upper arm. “Congratulations, Zhaed. And good luck,” he said, with a wink toward Jey.

  The guardsmen ushered Rian and his silent companion to the vacuum-sealed door that led from the guardroom into the cavernous warren of the Enclave. Zhaed punched buttons on th
e touchkey pad to the right of the door and it hissed with released air before swinging open on well-oiled hinges.

  Zhaed scrawled a hasty note on a scrap of dried landskin parchment and passed it to Rian. “When your business is concluded, come by our house. I’ll see you decently fed, at least. Jazrin’s a wonderful cook.”

  “She is that,” Jey agreed, patting his considerable stomach.

  “I’ll try, I promise. If time allows I’d like that. It’s been too long since I’ve had a home-cooked meal. Trail rations and landskin grow tiresome.”

  Rian took the stranger’s elbow and led him into the narrow corridor cut into the bedrock. The door banged shut behind them. Exhaust fans mounted above it sighed, vacuum-sealing the door once more. Rian glanced at his companion. The man just stood there, face slack, staring with unblinking eyes straight down the corridor.

  Rian sighed. “Come on,” he said. He set off down the long corridor toward the heart of the Enclave, the stranger in tow.

  Worked by the Gagash for an eternity, the hub of the Enclave was a mammoth cavern more than a mile in diameter. In the center of the cavern floor yawned a pit that seethed with volcanic activity. Core-fires cast deep, red shadows across the intricate latticework of girders, beams, and heavy pipes that squatted over the pit like a nesting spider. Smoke roiled in billowing clouds from a dozen refineries situated around the pit’s perimeter, and hundreds of Gagash scurried about the infrastructure like industrious insects.

  The walls of the cavern rose in gigantic steps, each riddled with passages, chambers, and halls, the dwellings of the Gagash. Networks of pipes, venting gouts of hissing steam, sank into the bowels of the cavern. The level of noise was deafening.

  Rian and the stranger emerged onto a busy avenue halfway up one of the walls. Passing Gagash stared at the stranger and hurried along. Conversation died around them. Even the few pedestrians Rian knew gave them a wide berth, avoiding eye contact and hurrying along.

  He guided the stranger toward one of the angled lifts and boarded. The other passengers stared, moving to the corners of the caged platform. Rian ignored them, though he felt their hostility, and the spines on his head stood on end. He could smell their fear, their loathing, like rancid waste oozing from their pores.

  The stranger’s mouth hung open, his eyes wide. His gaze swept across the boiling tide of Gagash in seeming fascination. Gagash turned away from him, though a few bristled, their muscles tensing.

  The breakman, who had a second vestigial head protruding from his shoulder blades, watched them with sneers on his faces. He jerked down the brake lever in the center of the platform while the eyes in the partial head stared at them. From the throat embedded in the man’s back came a warbling moan.

  Steam billowed from the pipes that fed the small engine mounted on top of the cage. Gears tumbled into motion, and the lift surged. It dropped rapidly at an angle toward the lower levels of the city.

  Exiting the lift on a lower floor, Rian led the stranger toward the yawing mouth of a large hall. Hump-backed sentries bearing sporelances blocked their entry. Rian explained himself again and flashed his credentials to the guards. Reluctantly, eyeing the stranger with open hostility, the sentries stood aside and allowed them passage. Rian led the stranger deeper into the Enclave, toward the Elders’ chambers.

  Images built up slowly in He’s mind: words, concepts, abstracts. He absorbed the flow of information, unconcerned with its source, and held on to the knowledge, storing it.

  He was not whole. He knew that now. Something was missing. Something vital. Something essential. He should know more; he needed to know more.

  He watched the men—?—the three-armed man thing took him among, wondering at their diversity. No two were exactly the same. None seemed like him.

  Mutation.

  The word came, and its meaning, and he stored it for later use. For now, he opened his senses—wondering what was missing, what vital piece of him was absent, and why—and absorbed input. He sensed black smoke that smelled of heat and tasted of fire. Red shadows that danced and sounded like silence. Drops of liquid leaking from tiny pinprick holes in these creatures’ skins, carrying chemical triggers—pheromones—that stank of fear and alarm and curiosity.

  The three-armed man’s designation, his name, was Rian . . . Did he not need a name? All of these creatures seemed to have them, as if such things defined them, made them real. Without a name, was he any less real? He should have a name, a designation. To make him real, to give him solidity, definition.

  He recalled, almost recalled, a name . . . But no. The memory evaporated, gone as he reached for it, leaving only a painful absence in its place.

  Rian spoke to him, and He understood most of what Rian said. He stored words away, building language. That was another word that came to him . . . language. Rian wanted something. Wanted something from him—an action? A response? But he was not ready. His data was incomplete.

  Rian spoke again, and He listened, but the concepts were unclear, and he stored the words away for later. Confusion.

  These men—Gagash—were different.

  The confusion grew. There was too much to see, too much to hear, too much to process. He could not control the intake. He pulled awareness back from his ears and nose and tongue, limiting his perspective. The raw data continued to stream in, but he shoved it back and away. He would open the knowledge conveyed later. Perhaps then he could understand it.

  Something was missing. Something that kept him from being whole.

  Rian took him to a big piece of shining rock—metal, processed ore from below the landskin—that ended the tunnel. Two creatures, men, stood there and spoke with Rian. Rian spoke back, but He could not understand the words, not yet.

  The metal plate opened, and Rian took him into another room, a cube, with twelve wrinkled men inside. They stared at him, and He stared back.

  He needed a name.

  Chapter 7

  A sound awakened Dersi. She sat up, the cilia falling away from her skin and writhing as they receded into the surface of the bed. The usual momentary disorientation faded quickly away as she focused, waiting for the sound to repeat itself. It did not.

  Dream fragments of soothing, warm liquid currents shattered and fell away from her mind like broken chitin.

  She leaned toward the mound alongside her bed, hand outstretched to caress the light-tumor there.

  “Don’t,” came a voice, low and whispery.

  Her hand froze, and she jerked her head toward the voice. In the darkness she could see nothing. She swallowed, pulling her legs up toward her chest. Her hands clenched in the spongy surface of the bed. Cilia squirmed away from the aggressive touch.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “A friend,” came the response from the darkness.

  Dersi focused on the sound of the voice. It seemed familiar, but she could not identify the speaker. Her vision sharpened, drinking in the ambient, residual light in the room. A dull hump of deeper darkness stood near her, at the end of her bed. A man-shaped outline.

  “A friend?”

  “If you would have me for one,” came the gruff response.

  “A friend wouldn’t crouch in the darkness of my bedchamber. A friend wouldn’t interrupt my sleep, uninvited.” She edged closer to the mound at the side of her bed. She slid her hand across the bed toward the light-tumor. A hidden recess in the mound held an acidbulb. If she could reach it . . .

  “Don’t. Don’t call the light.” She heard shifting movement, uncertain steps in the darkness.

  “Why? If you’re a friend, you’ve no need to hide in the darkness.”

  “Yes, I know. But it remains unclear if you’ll have me for your friend, Lady Dersi.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I know you’re to receive Meloni’s seed tomorrow at council,” the masculine voice said. He was older, with the rough edge of cells on the verge of atrophy. “I know you’re to be veiled soon after.”<
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  “Yes,” she said, hesitant. Erekel? Yes. She was certain of it. “What of it?”

  “We don’t think you want that,” he said.

  “We?” She slid her hand toward the concealed drawer. “You said, ‘we.’ ”

  “Yes, I did,” came the reply. “Please don’t, Lady Dersi. I’m sure you have a weapon of some sort near you. Don’t force me to do something I’d rather not do.”

  She jerked her hand away. “What do you mean?”

  The shadowy head shook. “I don’t have much time, Dersi. They’ll know you’ve awakened soon, and send someone to investigate.”

  “Who?”

  “The Veil Lords. I can’t say more than that now. It’s too dangerous to me, to us.” He paused, and she sensed he wanted to say more. She kept silent, and he continued. “You haven’t answered me. Do you want to be veiled?”

  “Of course. It’s my duty, my responsibility. My honor.”

  “I think you lie. There is no need to fear the truth with me. I’m not an agent of your father’s, or the council. I have only your best interests in mind. Yours, and the best interests of our people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got to go now. If you truly want the veiling, you won’t see me again. And don’t try to follow me. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.

  “But if you feel as I suspect you do . . . Then, Lady Dersi, find a means of separating yourself from your escort tomorrow. On the way to council. We’ll find you. We’ll keep you safe. You need not face the veiling.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, moving toward the shadowed man. He retreated quickly. Her door opened, and in the light that spilled into her room from the corridor outside, she saw a figure clothed in billowing garments. The man pulled a hood over his face. “Wait!”

  But the man ignored her, darting away.

  She sat back on her bed, watching as the door sphinctered shut once more, blotting out the light. She frowned, knowing she had seen, in the brief flare of the man’s shirt as he swept from her room, features that confirmed her suspicion. Master Erekel, the harvester, slipped away.