“Sergeant Tracer at...,” she said. There were violent noises. She watched something off-screen. “Under attack,” she said. “Groups of... hundreds, fucking hundreds...”
Her transmission ended, the picture spasmed and was replaced by a view rapidly diminishing as the cam flew up. Tracer was lying on her back, among human dead. She tugged off her aeoli mask, an unthinking spasm of dying fingers. Images strobed. A great company of Ariekei, moving quite unlike the farmhands. They galloped, they swung giftwings, they trailed blood, liquid drizzled from weapons, a spray of dust. None of them spoke—they shouted wordlessly, voicing only attack-meanings, without Language.
They beheaded a minor Staff-man I’d once known a bit. I held my mouth closed. One kicked him down, gripped him with its giftwing, another swung a blade worked out of some coralline stuff. They had biorigged weapons they turned on the farm walls. One Ariekes shot our women and men with a carbine, wielding the Terre weapon with surprising precision. We saw them murder Terre without weapons at all, send jags of their own bone into human innards, or yank masks away, suffocating our people in alien wind.
Bren sped up the footage. He brought us up to live shots. Carnage was ongoing. The officers were vastly outnumbered. They were trying to reach the corvid, and were taken down. PorSha was shouting Language to the attackers. Wait, wait, no more of these actions, they said. Please, we ask you not to do this— We lost that cam, and when it came back PorSha were dead. Bren cursed.
All the speakers we had placed in the farmland started suddenly to shout, in EzCal’s voice. The god-drug had found each other, here in Embassytown, and were yelling down the line. Stop! they said, and things stilled. I leaned towards the crude picture. The carnage, all the motionless Ariekei.
“Jesus,” I said at the numbers. I held up my hands. Bren said, “What are they doing?”
Stand still, the god-drug shouted across the kilometres. Come forward, stand in front of the dead Ambassador.
For seconds there was no motion. Then an Ariekes stepped out of the crowd, took careful hoof-steps into the cam’s view. The others watched it. Its back, its extended fanwing, stretched open, listening to the voice from the speaker, turning into and out of the light as it listened to EzCal’s voice.
There were no other fanwings in the crowd of killers.
“That’s a farmer,” it’s said. “It’s not one of them.”
A large Ariekes slapped two of its companions with its giftwing and pointed at the enthralled on-comer. It arced its back to display a wound. EzCal continued to speak.
“They saw the buildings hearing, and that one,” I said. “That’s why they stopped. Not because they had to.”
One by one at first, then countless at a time, the murder-squad of Ariekei arched their backs. I saw the quivering of scores of fanwing stubs. I heard Bren whisper, “God.” The Ariekei displayed their wounds. Some made wordless sounds I’m certain were of triumph.
“They know we can see them,” I said.
Following speechless giftwing-jabbed instructions from their larger comrade, self-mutilated Ariekei stood either side of the entranced farmhand, and held it. It didn’t even notice. Stop what you are doing, release your grips, we heard EzCal say. Their Language petered out. The farmer raised and opened its giftwing repeatedly, obeying the instruction not intended for it. Those it was intended for ignored it, did not hear it, kept hold of their quarry.
The big Ariekes tugged the biorigging-farmer’s fanwing. I winced. It twisted. Its victim screamed doubly and tried and failed to get away. Its tormentor’s giftwing moved like a human hand uprooting a plant. The fanwing wrenched free: roots of gristle and muscle parted and with a burst of blood came finally away, pulling fibres out of the quivering back, trailing them.
Fanwings are at least as sensitive as human eyes. The traumatised Ariekes opened its mouth and fell, stupefied with pain. It was dragged away. The deafener held up its grotesque dripping bouquet. It made a loud wordless noise. Triumph or rage.
EzCal were speaking again, I realised. They issued orders and were ignored.
22
THAT WAS THE START of open war. We called it the First Farm Massacre though it was the only one we then knew of—a horrible perspicacity. It took us days to understand what was coming.
That final mutilation, by one Ariekes of another, was a recruitment. If the victim survived the shock and pain, it was made another soldier, on the enemy side. “How does it receive orders?” I said, but no one could answer me. Perhaps there were no orders, only rage stripped of language. Can they think? If they can’t speak, can they think? Language for Ariekei was speech and thought at once. Wasn’t it?
We didn’t know whether to roll back our presence from the outlying farms or bolster it, so we tried both. More visceral pipelines blew. The pictures were the same in different settings: in a copse of trees like organs; in a dustbowl; in scree; each time a burst of flesh and a litter of ruined cargo. Our stores depleted.
Infrastructure wasn’t the only thing attacked. After the Farm Massacre the fanwingless swept into an encampment defended by other, hearing, Ariekei: this became the Cliff-Edge Incident. We had troops there with them equipped with rare out-tech, and they were able to shoot several of the attackers. But half our officers were killed by the time the marauders suddenly left, galvanised by some signal we couldn’t understand. Perhaps by an empathy to tides we couldn’t sense, like birds circling and become one organism.
We didn’t become inured to the footage. EzCal called the committee together, and brought 
, Pear Tree, with them. EzCal told us they were making changes in the way the city was administered, as if that might help. Cal talked about making allegiances against “bandits”. I tried to listen, to understand the shape of politics now. From Bren’s scorn I knew that where there wasn’t anarchy or secret renegacy in the city, there were strange comprador authorities like that of .
We had to witness absurd joint patrols. Under EzCal’s orders, our constables policed outlands beyond the city accompanied by Ariekei dragooned into militia. An Ambassador had to be present, of course, to transmit instructions, on what EzCal stressed was god-drug authority. They took weapon training: career bureaucrats attempted to transform themselves.
The missions disaggregated, failed, as orders relayed by disorientated Ambassadors were interpreted differently by Ariekei and Terre. The Ariekei were not even resentful, so far as I could see—and I knew now that there was such a thing as Ariekene resentment—only bewildered. The first three such patrols achieved nothing and the fourth was attacked. When we reached the site the rescue squad found our Terre people dead and their Ariekei colleagues mostly gone, inducted no doubt by brute surgery into the rebels. The joint patrols were ended.
“WHAT IF THEY don’t want to fight? Even after they’ve had their fanwing taken? Or what if they want to fight the ones that took their fanwing?” I, traitor, was at the secret liars’ club in the city, again, so Spanish Dancer’s comrades could consider me. They contemplated urgently. As urgently as Bren had brought me back through the city. Spanish Dancer itself wasn’t there.