Suspecting an insult, Barath said: “What?”
“It is a couplet from an epic poem beloved of my people, words spoken by a despairing hero who has given up everything in a fruitless quest to find a villain who once committed a great crime against him. He wanders for years, goes hungry more often than not, suffers every indignity a traveler can suffer, becomes a ragged beggar and then an embittered ancient, only to find that all this time the object of his hatred has lived a rich and full life overflowing with bounty. Cheated of the justice he craves, he collapses in physical and moral exhaustion, shouting those words at the night sky. They mean, ‘The Heavens always favor those who would reduce the heavens to ashes.’ It means that circumstances often conspire to free monsters of the consequences for their crimes… while those who hunt monsters destroy themselves by searching for justice. It’s a charming fable that has provided no end of comfort to me through the years.”
Furious, Barath said: “Because it means your hunters may never find you.”
“Exactly. I take my victories where can I find them.”
Once, there was still ample life in our human’s aging bones—enough life, at least, that he still offered conversation to those few of us willing to oblige him. He cursed the bastards who were hunting him with a rage that made his eyes glow bright, and turned his voice into an open flame that would have seared any of them unlucky enough to stand exposed to its terrible heat. “Bastard” was of course a Human word, one of several harsh-sounding terms he used interchangeably with the far more reasonable vocabulary of our people. When I first heard him speak it, and the terrible hate he imbued it with, it conjured up a vague image of a terrible monster, like Our Human, only larger and blacker and better armed with claws and scales and teeth; a creature which could only inhabit the foulest of caves or the most monstrous of afterlives. As a child, the idea filled me with an infinite formless terror, and at night the spirits sent me terrible dreams about slavering Bastards come to get me. It did not make me afraid of Our Human, though. It made me feel sorry for a creature who had lost so much to such monsters. It was several seasons until Ctaas, who would become the Firstmother of my Grouping, but who was then a child as formless as I, heard him curse the bastards. In my presence Ctaas asked the Human the question I had been neither brave nor smart enough to voice: What Is A Bastard? Our Human had made that perverse coughing rasp that for his kind indicated vast amusement, and told us: A Bastard is a Human Being born without a Firstfather. It was even more alien than most of his answers, for we had never imagined that such an unnatural thing could happen, even among a species that only mated in Pairs. Our human brings so much wonder, so much terrible strangeness, into our lives.
Barath didn’t want to sleep that night, but as he curled up for what should have been a few hours of alert rest, Mukh’than arranged and set fire to his bowl of precious herbs. The vapor was usually no more than an acrid tang, no fouler than the smell of the Riirgaan himself. But tonight it seemed stronger. Tonight the air around Barath turned as thick as the clouds in a blind thing’s eyes, and something like unconsciousness came to claim him despite his intentions. His limbs grew heavy, his thoughts turned to crippled stumbling things, and his sense of time and place bubbled with contradictions. One part of him knew he was in a tent, among potential hostiles in a wretched village well beyond the few pockets of civilization that dotted this horrid world with no name. He felt the simmering fever at the base of his skull, the maddening itch where the scaleworm had gotten him, and the thousand and one smaller pains that came with any journey into places so inhospitable that the smallest steps exacted their price in blood. He even saw Mukh’than bending over him, murmuring words nothing like the prayers he had spoken every other night; and he experienced a moment of unease as the Riirgaan left him alone in a sleepcube filling up with intoxicating mist. He noticed, too, when Mukh’than returned with a rag over his face, carrying a knot of wriggling things at the end of a stick… and when Mukh’than left again. But another part of him was parsecs away, in the palace he would have built for himself upon returning home a success—a curtained place where a Kurth of distinction could luxuriate among his sycophants and slaves, inflating the victories of his youth into blessed lies.
It was such a joyous dream that he might have surrendered to it and died thinking it was his actual fate, but then the palace around him seemed to fill with smoke, and he found himself back in the sleepcube in Irkiirish, tasting his foul dinner of the night before as it burst from his mouth in an explosion of bile.
That was how he found out, before too late, that he couldn’t breathe.
The air inside the sleepcube was now a gray mist that scoured his eyes—a lot like the Riirgaan’s ceremonial intoxicants, only worse. Barath’s lung was a burning ball of flame in his belly; his head a drum pounding out a song of imminent suffocation. He spat out the rest of the terrible taste in his mouth, rolled onto all fours, noted with distant rage that Mukh’than was nowhere to be seen, and for one queasy moment almost succumbed to the apathy that afflicts those so close to death that sinking all the way into that darkness seems less trouble than continuing to fight for life. Then anger took over and he drove himself forward, knocking over Mukh’than’s stool and hammock, stumbling over his own pack, and ultimately finding himself trapped against the cube’s flexible wall.
Once again he almost gave up, thinking gray thoughts of how little he had to live for anyway. He was a pauper. He was dead to his people. He was a friendless alien working subsistence wages for human beings on a world so forsaken that even its natives hadn’t bothered to name it. There would never be any future for him, never any glory, never any redemption: just a wretched life and anonymous death.
Then the distant awareness that this wasn’t just a stupid accident of some kind, but something else, ripped free a last defiant snarl. He popped his claws and punched holes in the soft canvas, carving stripes that his addled mind insisted on interpreting as wounds slashed in the flesh of an implacable enemy. Then he drove himself forward through the fresh exit, falling flat on his face in the mud created by a raging torrential rain. He vomited some more, tasted blood, and lay there hyperventilating as black fires burned at the edges of his consciousness.
It seemed a long time before his mind blazed with a single-word explanation.
Mukh’than.
He must have added something poisonous to his vapors.
Barath pushed himself off the ground, almost stumbling, but was able to rise to his hind legs, allowing the knuckles at his forelimbs to take the weight since his spine lacked the strength to support the far more awkward bipedal stance. His head lolled. He saw something white pulse between scales on his chest, and recognized it as a scaleworm, already growing fat on his blood. And there, further down, was another. And another.
Barath remembered the glimpse of squirming things at the end of Mukh’than’s stick. Mukh’than had told him, just a few days earlier, to watch out for the males. Mukh’than would know what the males looked like. A Mukh’than turned malevolent—or, rather, revealing that he’d been malevolent since the beginning—would know just what to look for. How many had he found? Ten? Twenty? How many males in that many? And how long before they laid their eggs?
Barath’s belly lurched. He spasmed, tried to expel whatever remained in his belly, and failed: there just wasn’t anything left to bring up. For just a moment, thinking of the pain in store for him, he wished he could return to the apathy of near-death that he had just fought off at such cost and once again enjoy freedom from caring. But there was no reclaiming such a lost opportunity. As much as he might wish for death soon, right now he could breathe. He could think. He could hate.