His face was aching, his head aching, but when he put on the headset and played the math box he felt better. Lately he could play the hardest level and still focus on the rest of the world at the same time. He had the feeling this was not supposed to happen, in the same way that the bites from the Nerva-thing were not supposed to heal. Dekkar had done something to Keely to change him. So when he saw Father so clearly he had a feeling he was not supposed to; he had the feeling he was supposed to see something altogether different.
The mantises came up to the rocks with their jaws clacking, rubbing two legs together to make another sound that ranged from rasping to screeching. The needle-mouths walked among them, sometimes touching the mantises as if with affection. Other needle-mouths stood closer to the rocks, where Pel had disabled his shoulder guns. What use were two guns against so many?
Soon the rocks were surrounded with other creatures—more needle-mouths; stingers with wings; something like rats on two legs, packs of them—and lumbering through the host one lurching step at a time came a mantis big as a hill. Father was there, on that queen of mantises, or, rather, inside the glowing light it carried in its pincers. The mantis brought the light close to Keely, set it lightly onto the rocks, held it steady.
Inside the light was the shape he had seen in his head, the thing he had dreamed so many times, a globe of metal membrane, tentacles of metal, wires of light, inserted into the decaying flesh of a child’s corpse. What he understood, watching, was that it was a machine, that it carried data inside it, that the data was not Rao but how to make Rao inside a host body, which it had tried to do inside this host. But this attempt had failed.
Still, the machine that carried Rao preferred to be housed inside a body, even a dead one.
Kitra drew back from the light in fear, as if she knew what it was. Pel was standing below Keely, watching. Something invisible snatched the guns from his shoulders, sent them skittering down the rocks. Something else took Kitra, quieted her, stilled her on the ground.
The syms were cowering or could not move. Binam lay face forward on the ground near Kitra’s feet.
A voice said, “I haven’t come to harm you, child. Whatever you’ve been told.”
The voice sounded sincere, truthful, earnest. Keely tried to smile through the green face, as if he believed, but behind it he was seeing the truth, that the figure within the light was a child harnessed to the machine he had seen in his dreams, tentacles wrapping the neck, wires inserted into the skull and abdomen, the child putrid, its flesh dark, skin flaking off in patches, membranes from the machine sliding into the nose, mouth, ears, into a slit in the neck. The body was so far gone in decay it was not possible to see what gender it had been.
“Welcome, Father,” Keely said, feeling fear in spite of himself, but facing the light and the thing inside it.
“Welcome, child,” the voice said. “You’re only the fourth to arrive.”
“Yes.” His heart was pounding.
“But we don’t have time to wait to test the rest.”
Keely nodded, swallowing.
“You see I’ve already tried the third vessel,” Father said. “She had not been prepared to the proper level and could not sustain me.”
The tentacles slid into a new configuration around the wasted throat. Keely swallowed. He was afraid now. Through the green face he breathed, trying not to shake.
“I believe I’m the right vessel, Father,” he said. Remarkable, he thought, that his voice sounded easy. Inside the light cage he was glimpsing other shapes, what looked like a console, other kinds of machinery. “I’ve been trained and prepared.”
“I believe the same, child.”
The sphere-machine was withdrawing its parts from the body. It was compacting to that sphere from his dreams, wires licking into its core, membranes wrapped around them, tentacles compressing to a hard shell. The corpse of the little girl collapsed; the mantis’s jaws opened, flanged around the meat, swallowed it and crushed it with a few motile waves of the metal esophagus. The sphere was no longer visible, it had grown so small.
A hand knocked Keely flat, close to the dirt and patchy grass between the rocks. The light grew brighter. He heard Pel’s voice, Kitra’s, then silence.
Keely could taste Rao’s greed. He had used up the girl-child’s body in the fight with Dekkar. He hardly examined Keely at all. Metal slid down his head, around his throat, fine wires piercing; Keely’s body shuddered and wrenched. He felt it enter him from all orifices, not pain but the sweetest pleasure, tendrils of Rao inside him, and he started to tremble, rose on his hands and knees.
It was as if he were being threaded through with light; at moments such an ecstasy coursed through him that he could hardly be still. The voice of it was inside him now. He had no more need to speak to it; he knew it from inside.
This code was what had come to Aramen from somewhere, from Earth; this device was all that had traveled to Greenwood. From this tiny sphere had come the maps to make all these other creatures.
Was Rao inside, too, or simply another map? The answer came back simply as puzzlement at the question; what difference could there be?
He stood, the green membrane pulsing over his ruined face, the tentacles of the machine shifting from one position to another. For another moment he was erect, conscious, himself, Keely, high on windy rocks looking over a sea of monsters, clacking jaws and rasping wings.
Then he was Rao. He was so old, so many. Voice after voice of him cascading, that river of numbers, of the sound of numbers and relationships, that music of the math box, grew large and engulfed Keely but never entirely swept him away.
Rao could never be killed. This piece of him was only a piece of him. But it was the piece that mattered; it was all of Rao that had come to Aramen.
Keely felt numb, distant, but still aware of his body, and Rao appeared surprised at this. Keely could, in fact, still move his body, and Rao was very disturbed. A pain went through Keely’s head.
“Kitra,” he said, and looked at her. He blacked out then, and slid to the ground.
For a moment the triumphant thing inside him felt its weight, relished the moment.
A crashing sound began, amplified, became thunder; around Keely and the rocks the world began to shake. Glass shattered, a screeching deafened him, and someone pulled him to the ground.
3. Kitra
Keely collapsed in Kitra’s arms just as an immense shrieking rose in the distance, setting all the mantises close by to skittering and seething. Keely’s head and torso were encased in wires and flexible arms that had appeared out of nowhere; he was motionless, lips moving aimlessly. She checked his forehead, (warm), his breathing (regular), his pulse (strong). Binam bent to watch her. “Is he all right?”
“I don’t know. He’s got this thing inside him.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Something happened in the distance, some commotion that made itself felt like a wave through all the ranks of Rao’s battalions. The huge mantis raised its head and turned. It carried the light-cage hanging from its jaw; the cage swung back and forth. Keely was barely breathing, pieces of that metal membrane hanging onto him; if he was supposed to take Rao inside him, was that what the machine wrapped around his head was for? Was it Rao she was protecting?
From the rocks below, Pel gestured.
“Help me,” Kitra said, and she and Binam lifted Keely.
The mantises shrieked and the needle-mouths shattered into their component flocks; something was attacking them or they were attacking something. Kitra and Binam clambered down the stones as fast as they dared; Pel gestured them to follow as the mantises began to climb over one another in their haste to move forward; Pel led them into a man-made cave a few measures deep. The mantises, the flocks, the packs of man-rats, all avoided coming too close to Keely as they carried him; some of the other syms who straggled were cut to pieces.
As if the sun had gone out, the sky darkened suddenly.
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Kitra sat with Keely in her lap. When he shivered, hands moving as he were using a keyboard, she pulled him close to warm him.
“Is he cold?” Binam asked.
“He doesn’t feel cold to the touch. But he’s shivering.”
From shelter they watched the chaos, mantises leaping, the sky clouded with winged shapes. In the distance no flashes of light, nothing at all to mark the battle.
“Cover your ears,” Pel said, “this lot is loud when they die.”
She covered her own, figuring Keely had the Rao-thing to take care of him. The shrieking sound tore at her nerves, even with her hands to muffle it.
When Dekkar had fought with the other true-language operator, columns of light had been visible for kilomeasures.
Now even though she had a view of the dumb-trees and the forest, even though her eyes adjusted to the new darkness, she saw nothing like light, not a glimmer. Leaping mantises, stingers in swarms, packs of the ratlings, other shapes less recognizable she saw once her eyes adjusted to the dark, but nothing of what was fighting what.
His army was acting as if it had no leader, she thought, and she looked at Keely and wondered whether this were true.
He had come into the clearing to take Keely as soon as he had killed Dekkar. He thought he had finished with his enemies.
Keely trembled, mouth open, eyes open. He grasped her arms and looked at her. “Kitra,” he said.
“Yes, Keely.”
“What’s happening? He wants to know what’s happening. He can’t see.”
“There’s an attack,” she said. “What do you mean, he can’t see?”
“He’s blind inside me. He’s panicked.” Keely broke into a sweat, wiped his brow, face flushed. When she touched his forehead, he was piping hot.
“You be still,” she said, “you have a fever.”
“It’s him. He’s fighting for something. I don’t know what it is.” His eyes were glazing. She shook him a bit, made him keep his eyes open, watch her. She moved him to the edge of the cave where the air was better, next to Pel, who was watching the dumb-trees and the forest beyond. The shadows were still moving, but there appeared to be fewer of them.
“That’s better,” Keely said. “I’m cooler.”
“What does he want?”
“Me. He’s supposed to have control of me.”
“How do you know?”
He focused on her, managed to show impatience in spite of the blind look of his face. “I know,” he said. “What that needle-tooth thing tried to inject into my face, that was to change me for Rao. But Dekkar altered it.”
“He protected you.”
“Yes. It can’t control me yet.” He was sweating, trembling.
“Take a deep breath, try to be calm,” she said, and he did.
“The thing can’t come out of me,” he said. “It’s too soon. It can’t risk wasting me. What’s happening?”
“Should I tell you?”
“It can’t know what I know unless I tell it. That scares it, too. I can know what it knows, but it can’t know me.”
“Something is attacking. We can’t see anything. Can you?”
After a moment he shook his head. “I can’t see much of anything other than him. Father.”
She started to correct him, faltered.
That sound again, unearthly.
Flocks and flocks of the shadow birds spiraled in and around the rocks, never close. Suddenly, like a cloud dissolving, they were gone.
A form took shape like a shadow whirling inside a shadow, one dark and one darker; another form took shape the same as the first. The willow-wait had grown still. The black hung over them like night gone solid, but even in that ink the shadows were darker.
A third shadow formed near the first two.
“Come out of the rocks,” said a voice, a woman.
“You might as well,” said another.
“Nothing to be afraid of now,” said a third. “Wretched creatures they were, but they had no one to drive them.”
Pel bowed his head.
Three women stood near the water, one of them leading a mule with a pack on its back. In the smoke it was hard to see them, but they were distinctly women, heads wrapped, long gowns, brown or gray or both, veils pulled back but faces still masked by shadow.
“If you’re afraid, we certainly understand,” said one of the women.
“You’ve been through quite a lot, I expect,” said another.
“But you can trust us, at least, not to eat you,” said the third. “Quickly now, before the creature takes hold inside the child.”
Pel gestured with his head. “Can Keely walk?”
“We can carry him,” Binam said.
“Are you sure?” Kitra asked. “Should we? Do you know them?”
“What choice do we have?” Pel asked, but refused to meet her eye.
Keely stood on his own, however. Kitra took one hand, Binam the other. “Are you sure?” Binam asked. “You don’t have to walk.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
Kitra touched his cheek again. “You’re cooler.”
“It’s them,” he said. “They’re helping.”
“Who are they?” Kitra asked, but he was carefully stepping from one grassy stone to the next.
Pel had reached the clearing by then and stood there, blood on him from Figg or Zhengzhou, clothes torn, ponytail twisted out of shape.
“Light, Sister,” said one of the women.
“Certainly, Sister,” said another, and the clearing filled with light.
The light somehow failed to render their figures more distinct. They might all have been the same woman, wrapped in brown-gray stuff, faces hooded and difficult to see. Pel stood there, blinking, and waited a moment. He looked from one to the other, a bit defiant by the end. “I take it you’re not surprised to see me.”
“No. Should we be?”
He shook his head, after a moment. “It’s just it’s been a while and I came so far.”
“You were called back,” said the third woman. “You have no idea why, I expect. But you will.”
“Where is the child?”
“There, Sister. Plain as dirt in front of you.”
They stood as if guileless, barefoot, as if they were Keely’s country aunts come to fetch him home on the back of the mule one of them was leading.
“What’s that thing on him?” asked one of the women.
“Never mind what it is. Get it off.”
“Not so easy,” said the third, and they took each other’s hands and one of them scratched the mule’s ear and suddenly the tentacles fell away from Keely’s neck.
One of the women gestured to Kitra. “You, there. Take those wires and pull them out of him. He won’t feel it.”
“That’s a good idea,” said another. “She has a steady hand.”
“She’s nervous.”
“She’ll be able to do it.”
Keely was watching her, took her hand for a moment. “Do what they say. It’s all right.”
She took a deep breath. Tears stung her eyes, maybe fear or maybe because she was beginning to understand. Taking the wires in hand, she pulled; each slid easily out of him, skin closing up at all four points of entry.
“There’ll be no escaping now,” said one of the women.
“Not likely.”
“Rao will have to learn to live with you, young man,” said the third woman. “A neat trap.”
“Clever of the boy to set it.”
“I didn’t set it,” Keely said. “It was Dekkar.”
“We don’t mean you, don’t be vain,” said the tall woman. “And no, it wasn’t Dekkar. Dekkar was only a copy, you know.”
Kitra felt a sob rise in her, from so deep it made her shake.
“A copy?” Keely asked.
“Yes. Of him.” This was the tallest of the women. She let go the mule’s reins, reached for the rope on the bundle, pulled it to loose the knot. Like some magic trick the ro
pe uncoiled.
A corpse slid to the ground, a man, naked, badly beaten, face crushed. He was covered with bruises and what at first looked like scabs.
The stiff tarp that had wrapped the body slid to the ground.
“Who is it?” Keely asked.
Pel made a low sound, once, brief.
“Great Irion,” said the tall woman.
“Pity,” said another.
“We enjoyed his company at one time. Much as we shall enjoy yours.” The tall woman was speaking to Keely directly.
“Did you kill him?” Keely asked.
“Good heavens, no. He was our friend.”
Hard to believe, Kitra thought, the way the body had tumbled so carelessly off the horse.
“Then who did?”
The women looked at one another.
Kitra could see the scabs more clearly now. Covering the corpse, head to toe, was some kind of writing burned into the skin.
“May as well say he died here fighting Rao,” said the tall one. “It’s as close to the truth as anything.”
“Agreed,” said another.
“It can’t do any harm,” said the third. “It’s what he should have done.”
“Setting such a clever trap as this, he might even have won,” said the tall one.
They looked at each other in mild surprise, as if this was a new thought.
Pel went to his knees beside the body.
“Come, Keely,” said one of the women. “It’s time to go.”
He started forward and Kitra grasped at him, Binam stepping in front of him. “What are you doing?” Kitra asked.
“Going with them,” Keely said, that green membrane pulsing on his face.
“Why?”
He became very still for a moment. His voice no longer sounded like a child. “Rao’s still inside me. I can’t live around other people, I’m not safe for them.”