Rhengar led her down through narrower utilitarian tunnels. Here, the lichen light became less frequent. Despite promises of safety, Edith began to feel uneasy.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You are a nurse,” it replied.
“Yes,” she said cautiously.
They arrived at a small, unremarkable plant door at the end of a passage.
“Do you have a patient you want me to see? Are they in here?” she asked.
“Here, yes,” said Rhengar.
Edith suddenly became afraid. She wanted to turn and flee, but where was there to flee to in this nest of insects, when every denizen could be turned upon her in an instant with an insubstantial chemical alarm?
She gripped her haversack tighter and tensed as Rhengar breathed on the door. It opened, and Edith found herself pushed through.
“No, wait,” she pleaded, but Rhengar was already striding back up the passage and the plant door was blooming shut.
Oh, how she wished Nellie were here.
Edith found herself confronted by a small chatt, its carapace a smooth pale white. It wore no silk garment like Chandar and its caste, or like the scentirrii. It stepped forward as its antennae investigated her. It seemed satisfied that all the required scents and aromas were in order and scuttled off down a ramp, stopping only to see if she was following.
Very well, she thought. She straightened her back, lifted her chin and turned to face her fate with a very English decorum.
As she descended, the passage opened out. The gloom beyond was filled with the scuttling and clicks of hundreds of chatts. As her eyes grew used to the low light, she was able to make sense of the space. She realised with a shiver of revulsion that she had been here before. It was the Khungarrii nursery.
No wonder Rhengar thought she would be safe here. It would be the last place Sirigar would think to look. It was also the last place she wanted to be.
She looked around and saw no signs of the battle that had raged there months before as a platoon of Pennine Fusiliers fought their way out of the edifice. The great hole in the wall, where the Ivanhoe had smashed through, had long since been repaired, as if they had never been there.
Around the walls of the chamber were recesses where the grubs pupated into nymphs. Only a quarter of the cells were sealed and occupied. The rest lay open and empty. Running across the floor of the chamber were long sinuous channels where urmen women and nursery chatts fed blind, wriggling grubs.
She noticed precious few eggs about the nursery. Surely, these things should be like factories. But there was no time to contemplate the problem, as her guide walked on down a large side passage. It curved and Edith could make out something huge and worm-like at the end, to which chatts were attending.
As she came closer, she realised that it was only part of some larger creature; the rest lay in a chamber beyond. Edging alongside the worm-like protuberance, she entered the chamber. Her mouth went dry and she could feel her heart pound in her chest. Occupying almost the entire space, as though they had built the chamber around it, was what she guessed to be the Khungarrii Queen. Its abdomen was a pulsating sac, twenty or thirty feet high, and grossly distended, to the point where the taut, glistening pale skin verged on translucency. Whatever limbs the Queen once possessed had withered or been swallowed by its vast bulk. Atop of that, dwarfed by its body, its head and thorax were of normal chatt size, making it all the more grotesque. It was incapable of moving, grooming or feeding itself.
To that end, the chamber wall ran with a spiralling gallery, and slung across the huge corpulent form were bridges and gantries, so that its attendants could groom every inch of its body. Even now, chatts scurried across it, licking up sweat. While others laboured in trenches dug beneath the vast bulk, removing excreta, a continual procession wound up the spiral gallery to a gantry level with the Queen’s thorax and head. There, attendants supplied the Queen with an endless supply of bowls of some sort of substance which they first masticated and then fed to it, like some sort of royal jelly.
However, this obese creature was more than just an egg-laying machine. It controlled the state of the colony through unspoken chemical decrees. Above the Queen, in the roof of the royal chamber, were a cluster of vents that drew the royal scent commands up into the edifice, where they were circulated on the air.
Edith stared up in horror at the creature.
The whole machinery of attendance ground on around her, with chatts ignoring her, until one touched her on the shoulder, making her yelp in alarm. It directed her back to the tunnel where the appendage from the distended belly ran.
She realised what was wrong. There should have been a steady stream of nursery attendants carrying eggs from the ovipositor, the egg-laying tube, to the nursery chamber, but there were none to be seen. Was that what Sirigar had been referring to when it was talking about the future of Khungarr?
A chatt spoke, struggling with the language, its exalted position not needing much interaction with urmen.
“Queen. Ill. Sickness. No eggs.”
Whatever was wrong, it was beyond their abilities to heal, and they were desperate. That was why she was here.
That changed things. With a patient, Edith was able to focus. Slowly, the terror she felt being surrounded by these creatures receded. She had a job to do. This was why Chandar hadn’t blessed her. In a euphoric state, she would have been in no position to help.
“Light. I need light,” said Edith, sharply.
The chatt chittered a command, and within moments, a blue-white light bobbed toward them. It made Edith think briefly of Tinkerbell. Her aunt had taken her to see a performance of Peter Pan and Wendy many years earlier with her young cousins. And she’d clapped; how she’d clapped to save poor Tink. If only saving the Queen were as easy, she thought.
Edith rolled up her sleeves as a dozen or so more chatt attendants arrived clutching bunches of luminous lichen, their light bathing the tunnel.
She set about examining the appendage. The tube was inflamed and swollen, with several large sores, two of which were open and suppurating. The translucence she’d found so awful also proved to be a great aid, almost like an x-ray. She could see that the tube was swollen and not allowing the eggs to pass. They were backing up, impacting on the side of the canal. Somehow, they would have to be released.
She knelt before the opening of the ovipositor and gently inserted her hand, feeling her way up the inside of the lubricated tube. Her shoulder was almost touching the ovipositor sheath by the time she felt the constriction. The swelling had all but closed off the canal. Slowly, she withdrew her arm to find it coated with mucus. She tried to hide her disgust as she flicked creamy opaque strings of it at the tunnel wall before hurriedly wiping her arm down with a length of silken cloth provided by the chatts.
After her internal exam, she returned her attention to the infected wounds. If the infection had got into the bloodstream, then there was no hope of saving the creature.
“Water!” she demanded. “And bandages.” They brought water and more fresh silk almost immediately. She sluiced out the sores as best she could.
The open wounds needed debriding, the dead infected matter cutting away, but she had no knife, no scalpel, no way to do it. She looked around and met the inquiring eyes of the chatt. She looked at its mandibles. They would have to do.
“Here!” she said pointing at a wound. “Here!” she mimed snipping mandibles. The chatt understood, and under her direction, it chewed away at the dead matter.
When she was satisfied that the wounds were clean, Edith opened her haversack, sorted guiltily past the sacred scent and petrol fruit juice, to retrieve two precious ampoules of iodine. She broke one into each wound.