Jacob's Children, Part 2: Nymphs

NYMPHS

Krine, alone among the hidden people, was born with her wings formed. In her first memory she tastes the fear of the onlooking swarm. She hears the voices saying she will die, that her first moult will claim her, snagging on her freakish body’s soft protrusions. Dripping gossamer folded along her dorsal ridge. Now a chiliad is past and she soars easily above the waste, scanning the map of its thousand canyons and the spiral knotholes of its boards. In the corners of the firmament are the weaving people’s silken palaces, some swagged and freighted with dust and mummified corpses, others shining and pristine.

The lesser peoples go to the houses of silk to die, or else no know better than to set a limb against those beautiful threads which cling like a lover to whatsoever but their weaver touches them. Krine does not touch them. She and the others know better. It is light. The hidden people sleep. Not Krine. She banks over the hot air rising from the mountain’s ruin, through the charnel stench of his updraft, and toward the waterfall plateau beneath the oculus, spotted with grease and other stains, through which the light pours over the waste and its people. Her brother Lak is teaching her what he knows of the plateau’s secrets, but for now she has no need of his arcana.

She backs air with her wings as she comes in to land beside the fire fountain. Sugar suspended in oil. Fat and glucose sucked up into greedy mouthparts as her chellae click together and her forelimbs stroke fastidiously to keep oil from building up around her head capsule. Throbs and moteys watch her from a dozen surfaces. Waxed cardboard and stained pyrex. The great vertebral discs of bone stacked side by side within a steel scaffolding beside the waterfall. They cannot take her sugar, though they want it. The oil is poison to them, clogging probosci, coating and crippling their veinous teardrop wings. They would wrest it from her body, burn her open with their acid vomit and dissolve her insides into a sweet slurry, if they dared, but she has the scent of Lak upon her, and they fear it.

Beyond the scavengers the great half-eaten draperies hang dank and dusty to the oculus’s either side, sleeping angels hidden by the hundreds in their folds. She finishes her drink, scrubs herself clean against her roughened chitin limbs, and turns back to the precipice and to the wilderness below. For how long will it remain untamed and strange? Lak is making maps. He is always making things. Sometimes Krine understands, and sometimes he is veiled to her and too impatient to explain. For today she decides not to worry. She has scouted long enough. She has fixed the paths and character of the waste’s canyons in her mind. All that is left is to report.

She spreads her wings and lets the sugar coursing through her burst into white flame.

                                                                                   ***

“Go and see about the trouble at the Seal,” Lak had told him. When he asked his brother what this meant he received only a spray of terse chemical exasperation. “Where seams run down the cliffs and jointed metal bridges them. There, at the base,” he snapped, and turned back to his maps and to the other papers he so coveted. “You've seen the works. My project. Just go, will you? Krine is out and I’ve no one else.”

“Then how do you know there’s trouble at all?” he’d asked.

Lak rubbed his forearms against his head capsule as though in extreme weariness. “Just do it, Aca.”

So now Acaron travels. He is larger than the others. Stronger. The other hidden people he meets in the canyons — which even now in his fourth instar are growing tight enough to worry him — flatten themselves against the worn and weathered walls to let him pass. He thanks them, always, though they seldom answer. They are frightened of him, and of his siblings. Especially Lak. He tries not to feel sad about it.

There are scars in the cliff face where the Killing Ghost has clawed it. She is angry, wrathful, though Acaron has heard it wasn’t always so. When she finds them she kills the hidden people and she eats them, though they make her vomit. Perhaps, he thinks, she kills as Imi did. For fun. His little sister is gone, vanished long ago into the dark Between, but still he thinks of her.

The scars are probably not Lak’s concern. The Killing Ghost goes where she will — they could not stop her if they wanted. He comes up out of the canyon, shaking himself and buzzing his underdeveloped wings to scour away the grime adhering to him. He wants his olfactirs clear in case a dust lion should try its luck against him. With the forewarning of its musk on the wind he has already killed a small one just a triad ago, scurrying flat under its snapping jaws to rip its belly open with his mandibles, but a grown lion demands more than caution.

Still, the waste is empty here in the shadows of the cliffs, the mountain Lak calls Jacob rotting to the west beneath a living carpet of dark throbs and their wriggling white offspring. The silent people come and go in the new way, a few chivvying columns of the slaves who carry food for all back to the colony in the Between. The slaves make Acaron sad, somehow. Their chemicals taste strange and listless when they try to speak to him. Where? is the sense he gets. Where? Where? and sometimes Mama? in a way that makes him think of a dark, warm place and the smell of meat and lightning.

He nears the Seal, Lak’s great project to close their kingdom off from the Beyond. Acaron doesn’t know what the Beyond might hold, but he trusts Lak, and this great work has gone on nearly for a chiliad, Lak’s devices employed by slaves and overseers to melt the dark rubber at the base of the cliffs until it seals flush with the metal beneath it. Lak has tried to explain the reason for this, but his words only confuse Acaron further. Sometimes he misses their first instar, when he helped Lak moult and guarded him, compelled by some strange force to set his brother’s safety first among all things.

The walls of wood chewed out of the Between and joined together with hardened secretions are intact around the site, but no silent folk guard the open gate. Acaron passes on into the works. The great cables taken from the dark and joined together to produce arcs of the killing light have been abandoned, left separate and silent. The air smells flat here. No chemicals linger. If the Killing Ghost had come, or dust lions, the works would be a ruin. If a plague had struck there would be bodies.

Acaron scents at the drinking troughs. Stale, but not sour. He runs his antennae over the food stores. Nothing. I would like to tell Lak what has happened, he thinks, frustrated. Or else he will only send me out again, or call me stupid and send Krine.

Something strikes the ground behind him. He turns, wings rattling. Something else strikes to his left, but his attention is with the slave now coming toward him, its antennae brutally sheared off, its mandibles slavering at empty air. Another impact. Dark bodies hurtling from the firmament to plink against the earth. A dozen of them. Twice a dozen.

With a hiss, Acaron throws himself at them.

                                                                                      ***

Krine enters the colony near its crown by the Gate of Rot, flying through streamers of yellowed wallpaper and between mighty slabs of spongy, sodden wood and on into the fungal farms where Lak has contrived with the use of slaves and burning juice to make a thousand minute holes in the brass serpents that throb in the dark. A fine mist, lukewarm and constant, hangs in the air. Krine plunges between shelves of fungus tended by the slaves, angling herself to fall down through the laying grounds where in the new way females go to hatch, tended by the ones that Lak has trained to clear their ovaries of feces and debris and guide the nymphs out into safety, and pulling up to glide over the seething birth and death and stink below across a vast, dark gulf where a narrow span of wood bridges a chasm in the black Between, beyond which is Lak’s study. Light glows here from little prisms of scorched glass.

Lak is working when she lands among his papers at the bottom of the slot. He is always working. Neither she nor Acaron quite understand what he means when he says their time is short, but lately Krine has begun to perceive a subtle change in her chemical exchanges with her brothers, a softening of the tone of their quiet clicks and hisses. It frightens her. A moult will come soon. Another instar. Perhaps this is what he means, that like their brothers Nil and Pata they might smother in their own dead skin.

She scuttles up toward him through his dazzling, incomprehensible hoard, taking slats of wood and steps cut into the stuff of the Between among the tendrils of rubber-sheathed fire which sing to her antennae, between the burning lanterns and strange devices. Shreds stolen from the great slabs of leather and paper in the hinterlands above the forest, dark symbols dense upon the pulp. Oddments of glass and metal. A thing he calls a needle sheathed in a scabbard made from a dust lion’s hide. And there, draped in a cloak of the same beast’s fur, her little brother pores over more shreds of paper wedged between the boards of the Between, shuffling them back and forth as though in search of a particular constellation of black smears. These don’t look like the others. Scratcher. Thinner. Smaller. Has he made the shapes himself? “We had another sister,” he says as she draws close. “Do you remember her?”

“No.” She wishes to tell him what she saw while flying, but there is no need. He will take it from her. They can speak of something else while he digests her experiences.

“I do. She was small and quick and came out next to last from mother’s ovary.”

“Where is she now?”

He turns from the papers, dragging his bad leg, his long antennae sweeping over Krine, his cloak dragging in the dusty clutter. “While Acaron cleaned me, Imi pulled our sister back into the birthing place.” He limps past her and takes another bundle of dried papers from its crevice. “She ate her alive.”