Lissandra gave another order. Her operative discarded the laser, primed an explosive, and darted forward. He leaped over the smoking corpse of the first flamer, landed on solid ground within Kress’ rock garden, and heaved. The explosive ball landed square atop the ruins of the black castle. White-hot light seared Kress’ eyes, and there was a tremendous gout of sand and rock and mobiles. For a moment dust obscured everything. It was raining sandkings and pieces of sandkings.
Kress saw that the black mobiles were dead and unmoving.
“The pool,” he shouted down through the window. “Get the castle in the pool.”
Lissandra understood quickly; the ground was littered with motionless blacks, but the reds were pulling back hurriedly and re-forming. Her operative stood uncertain, then reached down and pulled out another explosive ball. He took one step forward, but Lissandra called him and he sprinted back in her direction.
It was all so simple then. He reached the skimmer, and Lissandra took him aloft. Kress rushed to another window in another room to watch. They came swooping in just over the pool, and the operative pitched his bombs down at the red castle from the safety of the skimmer. After the fourth run, the castle was unrecognizable, and the sandkings stopped moving.
Lissandra was thorough. She had him bomb each castle several additional times. Then he used the lasercannon, crisscrossing methodically until it was certain that nothing living could remain intact beneath those small patches of ground.
Finally they came knocking at his door. Kress was grinning manically when he let them in. “Lovely,” he said, “lovely.”
Lissandra pulled off the mask of her skinthins. “This will cost you, Simon. Two operatives gone, not to mention the danger to my own life.”
“Of course,” Kress blurted. “You’ll be well paid, Lissandra. Whatever you ask, just so you finish the job.”
“What remains to be done?”
“You have to clean out my wine cellar,” Kress said. “There’s another castle down there. And you’ll have to do it without explosives. I don’t want my house coming down around me.” Lissandra motioned to her operative. “Go outside and get Rajk’s flamethrower. It should be intact.”
He returned armed, ready, silent. Kress led them down to the wine cellar.
The heavy door was still nailed shut, as he had left it. But it bulged outward slightly, as if warped by some tremendous pressure. That made Kress uneasy, as did the silence that held reign about them. He stood well away from the door as Lissandra’s operative removed his nails and planks. “Is that safe in here?” he found himself muttering, pointing at the flamethrower. “I don’t want a fire, either, you know.”
“I have the laser,” Lissandra said. “We’ll use that for the kill. The flamethrower probably won’t be needed. But I want it here just in case. There are worse things than fire, Simon.”
He nodded.
The last plank came free of the cellar door. There was still no sound from below. Lissandra snapped an order, and her underling fell back, took up a position behind her, and leveled the flamethrower square at the door. She slipped her mask back on, hefted the laser, stepped forward, and pulled open the door.
No motion. No sound. It was dark down there.
“Is there a light?” Lissandra asked.
“Just inside the door,” Kress said. “On the right hand side. Mind the stairs, they’re quite steep.”
She stepped into the door, shifted the laser to her left hand, and reached up with her right, fumbling inside for the light panel. Nothing happened. “I feel it,” Lissandra said, “but it doesn’t seem to…”
Then she was screaming, and she stumbled backward. A great white sandking had clamped itself around her wrist. Blood welled through her skinthins where its mandibles had sunk in. It was fully as large as her hand.
Lissandra did a horrible little jig across the room and began to smash her hand against the nearest wall. Again and again and again. It landed with a heavy, meaty thud. Finally the sandking fell away. She whimpered and fell to her knees. “I think my fingers are broken,” she said softly. The blood was still flowing freely. She had dropped the laser near the cellar door.
“I’m not going down there,” her operative announced in clear firm tones.
Lissandra looked up at him. “No,” she said. “Stand in the door and flame it all. Cinder it. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
Simon Kress moaned. “My house,” he said. His stomach churned. The white sandking had been so large. How many more were down there? “Don’t,” he continued. “Leave it alone. I’ve changed my mind. Leave it alone.”
Lissandra misunderstood. She held out her hand. It was covered with blood and greenish-black ichor. “Your little friend bit clean through my glove, and you saw what it took to get it off. I don’t care about your house, Simon. Whatever is down there is going to die.”
Kress hardly heard her. He thought he could see movement in the shadows beyond the cellar door. He imagined a white army bursting forth, all as large as the sandking that had attacked Lissandra. He saw himself being lifted by a hundred tiny arms, and dragged down into the darkness where the maw waited hungrily. He was afraid. “Don’t,” he said.
They ignored him.
Kress darted forward, and his shoulder slammed into the back of Lissandra’s operative just as the man was bracing to fire. He grunted and unbalanced and pitched forward into the black. Kress listened to him fall down the stairs. Afterward there were other noises—scuttlings and snaps and soft squishing sounds.
Kress swung around to face Lissandra. He was drenched in cold sweat, but a sickly kind of excitement was on him. It was almost sexual.
Lissandra’s calm cold eyes regarded him through her mask. “What are you doing?” she demanded as Kress picked up the laser she had dropped. “Simon!”
“Making a peace,” he said, giggling. “They won’t hurt god, no, not so long as god is good and generous. I was cruel. Starved them. I have to make up for it now, you see.”
“You’re insane,” Lissandra said. It was the last thing she said. Kress burned a hole in her chest big enough to put his arm through. He dragged the body across the floor and rolled it down the cellar stairs. The noises were louder—chitinous clackings and scrapings and echoes that were thick and liquid. Kress nailed up the door once again.
As he fled, he was filled with a deep sense of contentment that coated his fear like a layer of syrup. He suspected it was not his own.
He planned to leave his home, to fly to the city and take a room for a night, or perhaps for a year. Instead Kress started drinking. He was not quite sure why. He drank steadily for hours, and retched it all up violently on his living room carpet. At some point he fell asleep. When he woke, it was pitch dark in the house.
He cowered against the couch. He could hear noises. Things were moving in the walls. They were all around him. His hearing was extraordinarily acute. Every little creak was the footstep of a sandking. He closed his eyes and waited, expecting to feel their terrible touch, afraid to move lest he brush against one.
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 bod
ies 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 god. The whites had always been his favorites.
He remembered how he had stabbed it with his throwing-sword. That was before Cath came. Damn her anyway.
He couldn’t stay here. The maw would grow hungry again. Large as it was, it wouldn’t take long. Its appetite 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 space 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 mass 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 clustered 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 QUANTITY 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 glassy 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. Damned 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.