Lawrence Schoen: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

Castleman tried to intercede but the Bos hit her again, a pair of blows that sent the human sprawling. The other committee members hung back, useless.

Bish smiled and took a step closer. Jorl shook his head and scrabbled backward. He tried to unravel the Bos’s construct and failed. This wasn’t like ending a traditional summoning. He hadn’t simply gathered the particles of a dead conversant, he’d tethered the nefshons of a living person to himself. He needed time and focus to untie that connection, and he had neither.

The Yak grabbed at him, hauling him up, his powerful hands closing on Jorl’s head, bracing the Fant against his own body. In a panic, Jorl gave up on the tether and instead pushed at Bish’s nefshons. His awareness sharpened, blocking out every particle that didn’t come from the Bos. He reached out for them, shoved at them with the full force of his mind, trillions and trillions of particles, far more than could be part of the construct. They would not budge.

“This is a great moment. You will be the first person to die in a summoning. A pity no one will ever Speak to you and learn of this event.”

As Bish began to twist, Jorl stopped pushing the Yak’s nefshons and instead began to pull them.

All of them.

Many were part of the strand that trailed back to the blanket of particles surrounding the senator’s physical body and the resistance on these was the same as he’d felt when he’d first summoned him. But others stretched across space and lay embedded in the experiences of tens of thousands of individuals spread throughout the galaxy. These offered less resistance, and as the first came loose and sped toward him others followed. A faint drizzle at first, almost hesitant, then a heavy rain of nefshons which expanded into a storm, then a downpour, a flood, and finally a deluge as even the particles racing back along the strand to Bish himself gave way.

Jorl’s vision had grown black around the edges. Knowing that the construct of himself wasn’t actually real didn’t matter. He crafted it with the constraints and logic of the real world’s physicality and Bish had taken full advantage. In seconds, the senator would succeed in twisting his head off and everything would end.

Instead, the man was gone. He hadn’t stopped, he’d completely vanished. The Fant crashed to the ground, gasping for breath.

Castleman staggered to Jorl’s side. “Are you all right?”

He looked up at the human, and shook his head. “Something’s … wrong. Different. What have I done? Oh, Arlo, why didn’t you tell me?”

PIZLO’Snew friend had fussed with him for a bit, draping her long sleeves down both sides of his head and causing tiny bits of glass in her clothes to light up and change colors. Both she and the senator had acted like this was important, and then he had sent her out of the room to check something.

The Yak, meanwhile, kept talking to him. It was overwhelming really, to have someone he’d only just met go on and on, sounding so friendly like he and Pizlo had traveled all over the Shadow Dwell together and knew all of each other’s secret places. Only none of it was true. Nothing the man said meant what he intended, or nothing he intended came out in his words. Maybe it was just that Senator Bish didn’t know how to say what he meant. Or maybe it was part of being an abomination-in-waiting and not knowing it.

Some of it was hard to follow, over and above none of it being true. A lot of it was what Jorl would have called “abstract,” all about duty and responsibility and the greater good. Pizlo listened hard. He could focus his attention better than most, but it didn’t help much.

Senator Bish just stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, the last words mumbling from his lips with little air pushing them out. He’d drawn Pizlo to him and held him in place with one hand on the boy’s shoulder as if delivering a benediction. His right arm had been raised in the midst of a dramatic gesture that it never completed and instead it swung slowly down like a flutter of leaves letting go of a common branch all at once. The other hand had fallen from Pizlo’s shoulder, fingers spreading limply. He’d been in the midst of a lecture about the importance of reporting clearly and without embellishment the precise details of a precognitive event, stopping just short of accusing Pizlo of making up nonsense. Then all at once he wasn’t.

Pizlo scrambled away from the Yak when the grip on him had changed, aiming toward the door. He slammed against it with both of his bandaged hands, but didn’t dare to look away from the senator. The door wouldn’t open. The room was big but had no other exits. Pizlo hammered against the door, his small hands striking it to the rhythm of his pounding heart.

After half of forever, the door opened and admitted his new friend, the Sloth. With a whimper, Pizlo buried his face in the folds of her kaftan, clinging to her with his trunk, his useless hands trying to hold on as well, there in the open doorway.

“It’s about to happen!” he sobbed.

She dropped a hand to lightly touch one of his ears but otherwise focused all her attention on the senator standing in a passive slump deeper in the room. Her mouth executed a flat, frowning line on her face as she said, “Sir? Your biosigns have jumped to a pattern I’ve not seen before. Do you feel all right?”

The Bos made no reply.

“Don’t look at him. Please, we have to go. It’s too horrible. We shouldn’t be here when it happens.”

“What are you going on about? Is this something you saw? Your own readings are peaking again.”

“I can’t tell you. I mean, I can, but it won’t help. It won’t make sense to you now, and later it still won’t make sense but in a different way. But it’s horrible.”

“Is he hurt? Did he have a stroke?”

“No, no, please, can we just find Jorl? They’ll be able to help us. I know they will.” He lifted his head from her clothes to dare a quick look back at the Yak. “Please, he’s going to get too quiet. No one should get so quiet.”

“Quiet? Who, Jorl?”

“No, no, Senator Bish. He’s going to go all quiet. Quieter than anybody ever.”

She pulled him a half-step into the room and did something to the threshold. The door closed tight again, with them still inside. Pizlo wailed in terror.

“Hush, Little Prince. I know you don’t want to stay here, but you’re too important to leave roaming on your own, and I have to take care of the senator. Just sit here by the door. Close your eyes. It won’t take long to run a full scan on him. Shh.” She disengaged his trunk from her clothing, patted it twice, and crossed the room to the senator, her long arms wide and the many shiny bits on her clothes blinking as she began her work.

Pizlo curled up, knees to his chest. He tucked his bandaged hands around his ankles as best he could and draped his trunk over his crossed wrists, looping up behind them. He squeezed his eyes tight and rocked in place, ignoring the soft sounds of the Sloth’s questions, knowing the Yak couldn’t answer. The part of him that talked had left. Pizlo knew that, even if he didn’t understand it. That wasn’t the scary part. Right now the senator was just like a man walking in his sleep. But all the bits and pieces the moons had shared with Pizlo were coming together now. When Bish woke up everything would be wrong and different.

And then he remembered he had to do one other thing first.

“Druz? Can you pick me up?”

“Can I … Be still, Little Prince. I’ll come get you in a moment. I’m still trying to determine what’s happened to the senator. He seems entranced, but it’s more than that.”