Brazil tried to recross the circle of toadstoals, found he couldn’t. He idly kicked at one, but it proved to be more rock than toadstool, and his hoof met with a clacking sound but nothing else.
He looked at the inhabitants of the circle. All, like Wuju, were frozen, like statues, although he could see that they were breathing. There was a monotonous, yet pleasant, hum from the Faerie, marking place.
Many of the other creatures were vaguely humanoid; all were small, a few monkey-like, but all were distorted, hellish versions of their former selves.
Brazil remembered the encounters on Old Earth. Since the Faerie created their own press to suit themselves, they had a pretty good reputation in folklore and superstition. He had never discovered how they had managed to get in. Oh, some representatives of many other races had—some as volunteers to teach the people, some because their home worlds had closed before they personally had reached maturity and Old Earth had the room and a compatible biosphere.
He wondered idly if those primitive peasants who told such wonderful stories of the Faerie would still like them if they knew that these folk doubled as the basis for witches and many evil spirits. Once created by some Markovian mind, they could not be wiped out; they had to run their course and survive or fail as the rules said.
They had done too well. They worked their magic and dominated their own hex, using the collective mental powers of the swarm directed and guided by the Swarm Queen who was mother to them all, and tried to spread out. They managed to interfere in thirteen other Southern hexes where the mathematics did not forbid their enormous powers, before the Markovians finally moved to limit them to their own hex.
Here they were in their own element, and supreme. How many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of swarms existed in this hex? Brazil wondered. I beat them outside of their own element once, but can I do it here?
About an hour passed, with Brazil, the only moving thing in the ring, getting more and more nervous; yet he held onto a streak of optimism deep inside. If they couldn’t succeed with Vardia before daybreak, these nocturnal creatures would go back to their tree burrows, Swarm Queen included. How long to dawn? he wondered.
A sudden thought came to him, and he started carefully to draw a pentagram around the circle. He tried to be casual, so it didn’t look as if he were doing much of anything; but his hoof managed to make the mark in the grassy meadow. This was a long shot, he knew, but it might stall the Swarm Queen until morning.
He was about halfway around when brush crackled and he saw Vardia walk onto the knoll and into the circle, the Swarm Queen resting on her sun leaf. There was a shadow above, and Bat landed back in the circle. As soon as Vardia was across the toadstool ring, the Swarm Queen flew back over to her seat under the tree and resumed that casual and unnatural sitting position.
Too late, he thought, and stopped the pentagram. I’ll have to accept the spell and break it.
The Swarm Queen looked thoughtful for a few minutes. Then, quickly, she looked at the circle. “Be free within the circle,” she said almost casually in that tiny, old-woman’s voice.
Bat staggered a few seconds, then caught himself and looked around, surprised. He saw the others and looked amazed.
“Brazil! Vardia! Wuju! How’d you get here?” he asked in a puzzled tone.
Wuju looked around strangely at the assemblage. She saw Brazil and went over to him. “Nathan!” she said fearfully. “What’s happening?”
Vardia looked around and barely whispered, “What a strange dream.”
Bat whirled, spied the Swarm Queen, and started to walk toward her. He got to the circle, and suddenly couldn’t make his feet move. He flapped his wings for a takeoff, but didn’t go off the ground.
“What the hell is this?” Bat asked strangely. “Last I remember I was flying near the shoreline when I heard this strange music—and now I wake up here!”
“These creatures seem to—” Wuju began, but the Swarm Queen suddenly snapped, “Stand mute!” and the Dillian’s voice died in midsentence.
The Swarm Queen glanced up at the barely visible sky.
“There’s a storm coming,” she said more to herself than to anyone. “It will not be over until after dawn. Therefore, the simplest thing should be the best.” She looked up at the buzzing swarm, then flipped over and walked into the circle. Brazil could feel the power building up. The Swarm Queen flipped again lightly, and sat on the side of a toadstool, inside the ring, forelegs behind her to steady her.
“What shall we do with the interlopers?” she asked the swarm.
“Make them fit,” came a collective answer from the swarm.
“Make them fit,” the Swarm Queen echoed. “And how can we make them fit when we have so little time?”
“Transform them, transform them,” suggested the swarm.
The Swarm Queen’s gaze fell on Wuju, who almost withered at the look and clung to Brazil.
“You wish him?” the Swarm Queen asked acidly. “You shall have him!” Her eyes burned like coal, and the humming of the swarm intensified to an almost unbearable intensity.
Where Wuju had been, there was suddenly a doe, slighter smaller and sleeker than Brazil’s stag. The doe looked around at the lights, confused, and then leaned down and munched a little grass, oblivious to the proceedings.
The Swarm Queen turned to Vardia. “Plant, you want so much to act the animal, so shall you be!”
The buzzing increased again, and where Vardia had stood was another doe, identical to the one that had been Wuju.
“It’s easier to use something local, that you know,” the Swarm Queen remarked to no one in particular. “I have to hurry.” She turned her gaze on Cousin Bat.
“You like them, be like them!” she ordered, and Bat, too, turned into a doe identical in every way to the other two.
Now she turned to Brazil. “Stags should not think,” she said. “It is unnatural. Here is your harem, stag. Dominate them, rule them, but as what you are, not what you pretend to be!”
The swarm increased again, and Brazil’s mind went blank, dull, unthinking.
“And finally,” pronounced the Swarm Queen, “so that so complex a spell, done so hurriedly, does not break, I bequeath to the four the fear and terror of all but their own kind, and of all things which disturb the beasts. They are free of the circle.”
Brazil suddenly bolted into the dark, the other three following quickly behind.
There was the rumble of thunder, the flash of lightning.
“The circle is broken,” intoned the Swarm Queen.
“We go to shelter,” responded the swarm as it dispersed. The other creatures came alive, some gibbering insanely, others howling, as the lightning and thunder increased.
The Swarm Queen flipped and walked quickly over to her tree and into the base.
“Sloppy job,” she muttered to herself. “I hate to rush.”
The rain started to fall.
Even though it was a sloppy spell, it took Brazil almost a full day and night to break it. The flaw was a simple one: at no time during the encounter had the Swarm Queen heard him talk, and it just hadn’t occurred to her that he could. The input-output device on the translator continued to operate, although it did little good for the rest of the night in the storm and throughout the next day, when the nocturnal Faerie were asleep.
When the creatures emerged at nightfall, though, they talked. The conversations were myriad, complex, and involved actions and concepts alien to his experience, but they did form words and sentences which the transceiver mounted in his antlers delivered to his brain. These words, although mostly nonsense, gave a continual input that banged at his mind, stimulated it, gave it something to grab onto. Slowly self-awareness returned, concepts formed, forced their way through the spell’s barrier.