Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

‘ Where ?’

‘Down there.’

The Vermiform snapped its mask back into the trunk and started retracting. It carried me down, still stretched out-I saw the mud rushing up closer and closer. It brought me to the Emperor, though San didn’t give me so much as a glance. It stopped, jerking me to a halt a metre off the ground.

The top of the curving trunk overhung San’s head but the surface nearest him extruded its mask and brought it close to his face. He returned its gaze equably, without moving a muscle.

Lightning aimed at the mask and loosed. His arrow passed harmlessly through it-the worms parted again. The arrow whistled past me and through a sudden gap in the trunk. With the slightest ripple the holes closed and the mask regained its composure.

‘Comet,’ San said, without moving his gaze from the female visage. ‘What is this?’

‘It’s the Vermiform. And arrows are no good against it.’

The Vermiform addressed the Emperor: ‘So you are the one whom Dunlin has told us about?’

San tilted his head as if asking the Vermiform to continue. It said, ‘Ourselves in the soil see that larvae are already coming out of the lake. Why? Why did you do it? Do you all have a suicide wish? Do you even know what you’ve done?’

‘What have we done?’ the Emperor said emotionlessly.

‘Created a breeding pool for Insects in this world! Was there a mating flight? Do you know they lay a hundred eggs a minute? Have you any idea how many more are to come?’

The Emperor said nothing.

The Vermiform threshed, furious. ‘Are you going to miss this warrior?’ and slowly drew my bonds tighter and tighter. I tried to pull back but it was hopeless: agony flared straight through my shoulders-my arms and legs were riving out. I started screaming-I could feel the suck of the cup-joints in my hips stretched to the point of dislocation.

The pauldrons of San’s armour moved infinitesimally, as if he shrugged. He did not look at me, only at the mask.

The Vermiform said, ‘Dunlin is a better commander than you ever were, San. He is marshalling an army in several worlds that is much better than anything you’ve managed to establish here.’

San said, ‘I thought that would happen.’

‘Dunlin will be infuriated when he hears it’s come to this.’

‘That is the least of my concerns…Could you put my Messenger down, please?’ he added, although he said it as if my shrieking was irking him rather than if he cared that I was being torn limb from limb. I was released abruptly. I fell in a loose tangle, hit the ground heavily and curled up in the cold mud, hugging my shoulders.

‘These are just the first nymphs emerging,’ the worms choired. ‘There will be hundreds more of these waves. Larvae are so ravenous that if they all hatched together they would devour each other for want of food. Countless worlds have fallen this way.’

The Emperor said, ‘It is an extremely long time since I was last in the Shift.’

The Vermiform continued, ‘The older larvae will shed their skins and become Insects, and begin dropping food in for the new larvae. Five moults later, those adult Insects will take flight too-and you’ll have yet another generation of millions of larvae emerging. Once that started happening in the Somatopolis we didn’t have a chance. You certainly don’t have one, with the stupid pathetic weapons you still wield. We can taste saltpetre, aluminium, tungsten, uranium in the earth yet you still fight using wood and iron! You’ll be overwhelmed. Every body of standing water in your whole continent will soon become a hatching pool. Every pond, every lake-’

Lightning nocked another arrow to string.

‘Dunlin is more active than you are!’ the worms said. ‘He understands that Insects are a mortal threat, but you don’t seem to!’

‘We are doing all we can.’

‘Even when Insects were building bridges here, you did not respond seriously enough. They have overrun our world completely, and many others we have seen. Worlds take thousands of millions of years to form and Insects can destroy them in a decade! But you…it is as if you were deliberately trying to keep a stalemate with them. You never take an inch against them. We know why: without their outside threat, the Fourlands wouldn’t need your Circle, your rule, or you . But your plan for keeping the Insects at a manageable level has all gone wrong. First there were swarms, then bridges, now they’re breeding! The balance has tipped. You will never hold them in check now.’

The Emperor bridled at the accusation. ‘We keep the front and push them back when we can. There are far too many to defeat. This is a stalemate of necessity, not intention.’

‘No. Dunlin told me this was a world where a few Insects appeared at first. When that happens, the residents can easily exterminate them. Awia could simply have wiped them out. When they began to spread you could still have made a concerted effort and killed them all. But you let the situation get out of hand in order to get into power, didn’t you? They needed you as a leader once the swarms started. And you kept them needing you ever since.’

San shook his head. ‘False. We were all ignorant of war before the Insects arrived. We had no way to fight them. They are more difficult to kill than you say. We had no knowledge of their habits. We didn’t know they were going to expand so quickly.’

‘And when they did start spreading, you let them so the people would put you into power!’

For the first time ever, I saw the Emperor lose his temper. ‘We fought tooth and nail! Yes, when Insects first began to proliferate, if we had made a concerted effort we might, might , have killed them all, but more were always following! We were embroiled in a civil war-’

Which you ended by dividing the Pentadrica as a prize, I thought.

‘-It was all I could do to stop three countries tearing a fourth apart and then turning on each other. We had no proper weapons, no strategies; we had no idea how to kill Insects.’

The Vermiform fermented with fury. Eight thick worm-pillars thrust out of the ground in a two-metre circle around San’s horse. Like the first trunk they tapered towards the top. As they rose, the main trunk thinned, worms disappearing into the earth to shoot up as the new pillars. They grew to its height, bending over San and his horse. They looked like gigantic octopus tentacles waving around a boat. His stallion reared, but he rode it.

The tentacles joined together above him, caging him in. The mask extended into thin strings and pushed towards San’s face. Worms separated and flowed onto his skin, spreading to crawl all over him.

They snaked down his breastplate collar, under his helmet, into his hair, in the folds around his eyes, circled his lips and slithered into the wrinkles on his neck. The Emperor did not move as worms turmoiled out of his armour’s joints at armpits and waist, from his wrists to slip between his fingers holding the reins. They wriggled under the plates on his thighs and shins to the shining laminae on his feet. Lines of worms formed a moving, living pink net all over him.

Lightning yelled. He spurred his horse over to me, dismounted and helped me from my Jant-shaped hole in the ooze. I poked around among my sodden letters, found my hip flask and took a long swig.

‘What’s happening?’ Lightning said wildly. ‘What are these maggots attacking San? What must we do?’

‘It’s the Vermiform. From the Shift.’

‘How can I kill them?’

‘You can’t.’

The worms stopped writhing over the Emperor, poured up to his breastplate and webbed its surface. From the centre, a rope of worms spouted out and dived at the ground. They pooled on the mud and gathered themselves into a semblance of a man, building from the feet up. All the worms peeled off the Emperor, and onto the man’s shape. It gained height, thinned, worms represented hair hanging down to the shoulders, pinched cheeks, a thin nose, a body flanged or curved, closely portraying plate armour. It became a perfect imitation of San.