David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

“I-uh-it wouldn’t be proper to eat those dirty beggars.”

“Why ‘dirty beggars’?” the dove cried. “Look you, I washed them myself just last week. You’re not so much cleaner than them. You eat worms, don’t you? And slugs and snails and dead things you find by the roadside? These are no more dirty than that. Be a good bear. Go ahead, eat one of ’em!”

Orick peered forward into the hairs of the florafeem. A little crablike thing scuttled away with knowing glances, but a languid girl Orick had known back on Tihrglas stood at the edge of a small, clearing in the fuzz. She held a bottle of ale in one hand, and was staggering about drunkenly. “Eat me, Orick!” she called with a giggle. “What ‘arm can a little soot do ya? Wheeeeee!” She tumbled drunk on her butt into a puddle of mud.

Indeed, as Orick took a closer look, he saw that all the creatures wandering the florafeem’s back were sooty, stained, ruined; There were lewd women caked with rotting food. Smelly old men with greasy hair. And the dronon.

Orick could smell the biting tang of their stomach acids. Chewing one would be like eating a nest of ants in one bite.

Orick felt his stomach turn at the sight. The smell alone made him want to retch.

“Clean them, did you?” Orick complained to the dove. “I’ve never seen such a stinking conglomeration of ambulatory refuse. You could boil them in rainwater, and never get the first layer of muck off. I’ve seen hog’s snot cleaner than that!

“Come, my friend,” the dove cajoled. Orick looked up.

The dove blazed like a green sun. “No matter if they’re filthy. Pick up one of the slimy things and swallow. You can even hold your nose as you do! Chase it down with whiskey afterward, and you’ll hardly rue the bad taste!”

At the dove’s words, some little people came from the woods at Orick’s feet. One dirty little man turned as backwards and farted at the poor bear while others laughed. and made rude noises. Qualeewoohs stuck out their foul purple tongues and rolled their orange eyes.

Orick’s stomach was in knots, he felt so famished. He felt light-headed. Still, he couldn’t abide the thought of eating one of those stinking aliens. “Look, you,” Orick said, “it’s not me that will be eating one of those malodorous pieces of animated offal. If you think I’m that hungry; you’ve got another think coming!”

“Ali, Orick,” the fiery dove whispered, “what a thick head you’ve got. How can you say these poor brutes are dirty? What God has cleansed, how can you call, it unclean?”

Orick looked back up to the dove, and suddenly the whole currant bush burst into flames. The flames were more than warm, they were a comfort, a blessing. They burned Orick to the core.

He woke gasping and looked about. Tallea slept beside him, and the hoverlamps above glowed dimly, still drifting up near the roof, so much like moons.

Orick lay wondering at his dream, filled with awe. The warmth he’d felt in his heart remained, the burning.

Always before when Orick had imagined entering the priesthood, he’d thought he would perhaps live in a quiet monastery, devoting his days to quiet contemplation of God’s word. Now, though, he suddenly understood how mistaken he had been, understood why he’d never felt that his personal desire to enter God’s service was quite the right thing to do. For months now he’d waited for God’s spirit to confirm to him that his offering was acceptable.

But now a thrill ran through Orick, and he gazed up at the arching window, staring out at the stars: All of those worlds, all filled with heathens both human and alien.

Orick’s eyes filled with tears of gratitude for the sudden realization that flowed into him. God had a glorious calling for Orick, more glorious than Orick could have ever conceived. It was a calling that would require all the labors of his heart, all the days of his life: Missionary to the Cosmos.

All the past night, the bright star guttered, like a white flame in the sky, outshining the moon and all other stars. Cooharah stared from his roost through the night, measuring the diameter of Brightstar against the width of Ruin’s single small moon with its three bulges. It would have been difficult to roost on such a bright night. The stars themselves seemed dim under the dome of heaven. But Cooharah was not awake without cause. His was a quest that night, an attempt to discover direction from the stars.

Late in the night, near dawn, the path of the moon finally crossed the path of the distant bright star, and Cooharah saw the blazing white corona around the moon where light from the star leaked beyond the horizon of the moon. Cooharah let out a trill of triumph that split the air and reverberated off the rocks below his aerie, blasted over the tangled jungles below. Then he sang softly an ancient Qualeewooh teachsong,

“Bright star flies larger than the moon hurry the day, the hot drenching day. The bone years lie broken, forgotten, like fragments of shell amid our nests.”

Cooharah leapt from the circle of stones where he roosted, and for a while he floated out over the valleys below. A rich tangle of purplish, bush lay far below him, and in the half-light he saw steam seeping up through the vegetation from the warm waters beneath.

A mistwife broke through the tangle, raising her long white tentacles a hundred meters into the air. From high above, the tentacles were beautiful, almost luminous things, waving in the breeze, tenderly probing the upper limbs of trees. But down in the tangle they would be deadly to anything that slept. The mistwife’s strangling grip would pluck razor-fanged slogs from the trees as easily as Cooharah plucked boring weevils from his feathers when preening.

Indeed, as Cooharah wheeled lower over the tangle, he could hear the whistling cries of a hive of sfuz as they scurried over their webs from tree to tree, seeking escape.

Their cries chilled Cooharah, for their whistles of terror were no different from their whistles of hunting, and all Qualeewoohs feared the sfuz. Crafty creatures, deadly hunters with their webs and snares and their quiet stalking. In a few moments, once Cooharah had circled his aerie a few times and was certain that no sfuz were climbing the treacherous cliffs, Cooharah winged his way to his clog; then dived, flapping his wings twice as he neared the opening, then dropping down to grasp the stone lip of his home with his heavy claws.

The cave was dark inside, but Cooharah could smell the warm spicy scent of decaying trammitroon leaves. Beneath it he detected the rich scent of his mate, Aaw, asleep in her nest. Her soft breathing resonated from the stone walls.

Cooharah tenderly went to his love and tapped her forehead, between her eyes, three times with his lower jaw.

It was a gesture of love that he’d never permitted himself to perform before, in all his long life. Aaw’s eyes snapped open, and Cooharah could see them, large in the darkness, a pale salmon in color. She stared at him in surprise.

He tapped her forehead again. “Open, open,” he trilled the ancient words of ritual. “Two become one.”

If Aaw had not been so surprised, she might have lowered her head and nipped the spirit mask on both Cooharah’s cheeks, playing her part in the ancient ritual.

“Are you certain to the fourth degree?” she trilled instead. “The land lies wasted. The dew trees are drying, and we have only rocks to eat.”

It was true. Both Qualeewoohs were starving. The ancient Take where their ancestors had hunted above the tangle was now dry, and the Qualeewoohs’ prey, the skogs, were dying. There might be food aplenty in the tangles out over Ruin’s shallow seas, but such food was impossible to reach-for the skogs that fed in the tangle above the ocean were so far from safe roosting sites that Cooharah and Aaw dared not hunt them.