“Right,” Oluth said. “Inconvenience them. Like how?”
“Well, what do we skraws do? We keep the sump working. That means food, water, nutrients for everyone on Umbriel and the fringe gyre-and of course, we bring the newborns into the world. We just need to emphasize our worth by showing what happens if things don’t get done down here-or if things break, clog up, and so forth. Do you understand?”
Oluth nodded vigorously. “I do!” he said. Then his gaze darted past Glim. “What’s that?”
Glim followed his regard to a small embryo sac, nearly transparent, and the thing curled in it. It was still small, but it wasn’t like a baby-more like an unfinished and undersized adult. It had scales and was a pale pink color with huge eyes and tiny little claws.
“It’s an Argonian,” he said.
“It looks a little like you.”
“Soon enough it will look a lot like me,” Mere-Glim said. “I’m an Argonian.”
He’d known it was going to happen, but now that it had, he felt a sort of sick spot in his gut.
He needed to see Annaig.
“I really am sorry I tried to kill you,” Slyr told Annaig.
Annaig blinked and glanced up at the gray-skinned woman fidgeting across the table from her.
“Have you tried again, or is this still about last week?” she asked.
Slyr’s red eyes widened. “I haven’t tried again, I swear.”
“Right. So you’ve apologized already,” Annaig said. “This means you’re now wasting my time.”
Slyr didn’t reply, but she didn’t leave either, just stood there, shuffling her feet a bit. Trying not to let her irritation show, Annaig bent back to her task of emulsifying horse brains and clove oil, whisking the gray matter vigorously and adding the oil a few drops at a time. When it reached the consistency of mayonnaise, she set it aside.
Slyr was still standing there.
“What?” Annaig exploded.
“I-you haven’t assigned anything for me to do.”
“Fine. I assign you to go sit in our quarters.”
“I have to work,” Slyr said. “Toel thinks little enough of me as it is. If he finds me idle-I worry, Annaig.”
Annaig closed her eyes and counted to four. When she opened them, she half expected to see Slyr lunging at her with a knife, but Slyr was still just standing there looking pitiful.
“Go husk the durian,” she said.
“But-”
“What now?”
“Durian is so smelly. ” She waved the back of her hand at Annaig’s preparations. “What are you doing there?”
She’s just spying, Annaig thought. Trying to steal my ideas.
It didn’t matter, though, did it?
“I’m extracting terror,” she said.
“Come again?”
She lifted the emulsion. “Terror, fear, happiness-any strong emotion leaves something of itself in the brain.”
“But if the soul has fled, hasn’t all of that gone with it?”
Annaig smiled, despite the company, and scraped some of the emulsion into a glass cylinder, divided three-quarters of the way down by a thin membrane.
“What’s that?” Slyr asked, indicating the divider.
“It’s the humorous membrane from a chimera-eel,” she replied. “It’s what allows them to change color to suit their emotions. I’ve altered this one to let only terror through.”
“You’re filtering horse-terror through eel-skin?”
“Very specially prepared eel-skin,” she replied. She placed the tube in a small centrifuge and cranked the handle, spinning the vial. After a few moments she detached it and held it up, showing a pale yellow ichor in the bottom.
“That’s terror?” Slyr said. She sounded skeptical.
“Do you want to understand this or not?” Annaig asked.
“I do. Please. I’m sorry.”
“Sit down, then-you’re making me nervous, hovering there.”
Slyr scootched onto a stool and folded her hands in her lap.
“You were right, in a way-terror-or any emotion-isn’t merely chemical. But the substance acts as a vessel, a shaper of soul stuff, just as-at a higher level-does the brain and body.” She opened a small valve on the bottom of the tube and let the liquid empty into a small glass cone. She then sealed a second, identical cone base-to-base with the first to form a spiculum. She shook the container so that the liquid coated the interior surface evenly, then slid the whole thing into a coil of translucent fibers that in turn was connected to a pulsing cable of the same material that came up through the floor and workbench.
“Now we pass soul energy through it,” Annaig said. “The chemical terror will attract what it needs to become the real thing.”
For a moment nothing happened; then the spiculum took on a faint lavender glow, and quite abruptly became opaque. Annaig waited another moment then removed the spiculum and shook it again. The coating inside the crystal sloughed free and settled into one end, a viscous powder. She unsealed the hlzu gum that held the spiculum together with spirits of coatin. Then she emptied a bit of the newly formed substance into a horn spoon and carefully handed it to Slyr.
“And there you have it,” she said.
Slyr blinked at the lavender stuff.
“Am I to taste this?”
“You may if you wish.”
“Perhaps not,” Slyr said, dipping her finger into it experimentally. A bit clung there, and she rubbed it back and forth. “It feels-” But then her face transformed; her eyes became huge, and the veins on her neck stood out as she suddenly began shrieking. She fell from her stool and twisted into a fetal position, fighting for the air she needed to keep screaming.
“Or you can just touch it,” Annaig said. “It’s absorbed just as readily through the skin.”
Slyr’s only response was to quiver uncontrollably-she was past screaming now.
For Annaig, the next few seconds stretched thin and brittle; part of her wanted to continue watching the other woman suffer. Anger was beautiful, because its core was the absence of all doubt. When anger wrapped you up in yourself and you knew that you were right and righteous-that the very universe was in agreement with you-at that moment you were a god, and anyone who crossed or disagreed with you was worse than wrong, they were heretics, apostates, twisted in the very womb. Slyr deserved this. And much, much more.
Then why, beneath the wonderful, purifying rage, did she feel sick? Why did she suspect that she was the one in the wrong?
Because she wasn’t really angry at Slyr. She was angry because all her hopes of escaping Umbriel were destroyed. She was angry at the stupidity of a little girl who thought she could save the world like a hero from the songs, and now was going to spend what little of her life remained in a disgusting place among disgusting people.
And one of those people was Slyr. But somehow she couldn’t watch her lose her mind.
So, with a sigh, she unstoppered the bottle she’d fixed for herself, in case she had an accident during the experiment, and waved it under Slyr’s nose. The other woman inhaled, gasped, gave one great shake, then sagged. She was still breathing hard but her eyes were clear.
“S-Summpslurry,” Slyr managed, her breath still ragged.
She traveled her gaze over her body, as if fearing she was missing limbs.
“You stopped it, didn’t you? You could have let it go on and on.”
“For a few hours, yes.”
“It would have driven me mad.”
Annaig shrugged, still feeling angry and helpless, and now trying not to cry. What was wrong with her?
“I’m not so convinced you’re sane as it is,” she said.
Slyr chuckled harshly. “I soiled myself,” she said.
“I didn’t need to know that,” Annaig replied.
“I guess not.” Her eyes dropped down. “Toel doesn’t care what happens to me. No one does. No one would have even reprimanded you-”
“I’m not like you, Slyr,” Annaig said.
Slyr shakily came to her feet and gathered her clothing around her.