“From you?”
“From us, Vol. From us. You need me and my power to protect you from being slaughtered when the Last Day comes, and I need your mouths to communicate with the sacbrood. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”
“Y—y—yes.”
“Good. Then we understand each other. Now you listen, Vol: I’m going to let you go. But don’t try running off. If you do I won’t take kindly to it. You understand?”
“I—I—I understand.”
“Good. So…let’s see what our allies look like up close, shall we?” he said. He let Leeman Vol go. Vol didn’t attempt to make a run for it, even though his soles itched to do so.
“Shield your eyes, Leeman,” Carrion instructed him. “This is going to be very bright.”
He reached into the folds of his robes and took out perhaps a dozen of the luminous tops. They flew in all directions, spinning and blazing brightly. Some rose up into the heights of the Pyramid, others dropped away through holes that had been opened in the floor of the Pyramid, still others flew off left and right, illuminating other chambers and antechambers. Of the Kings and Queens who had been laid to rest here in the Pyramids with such panoply, there was nothing left. The sarcophagi that had housed their revered remains had gone, as had the holy books and scrolls that contained the prayers that were written to soothe them to paradise; nothing was left. The slaves, horses and sacred birds slaughtered so that their spirits might escort the royal souls on the Eternal Highway had also gone. The sacbrood’s appetite had devoured everything: gold, flesh, bone. The great devouring tribe had taken it all. Chewed it up, digested it.
“Look!” Carrion said as he surveyed the occupants of the Pyramid.
“I see,” Vol said. “Believe me, I see.”
Even Vol, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world of insects, was not prepared for the horror of these creatures’ forms; nor for the limitless variety of those forms. Some of the sacbrood were the size of maggots and surrounded by great puddles of stinking life, their bodies hissing as they writhed against one another. Some seemed to have a hundred limbs and scuttled in hordes over the ceilings, occasionally turning on one of their number and sacrificing it to their appetite. Some were flat as sheets of paper and slid over the ground on a film of slime.
But these were the least. There were sacbrood here the size of obese wrestlers, others as huge as elephants. And in the shadows behind these enormities there were greater enormities still, things that could not be comprehended by a single glance of the eye, because their vastness defied even the most ambitious gaze. None seemed afraid of the lights burning in their midst, even after being so long in darkness. Rather they sought out the brightness with a kind of hunger, so that it seemed as though the entire contents of the Pyramid was moving toward the door, revealing their terrible anatomies with more and more clarity. Limbs snapping like scissors, teeth chattering like maddened monkeys, claws rubbing together like the tools of a knife sharpener. There was nothing in their shapes that suggested kindness or compassion: they were evildoers, pure and simple.
“This is greater than I imagined,” Carrion said with a perverse pride. “What terrors they are.”
As he spoke, a creature the size of ten men emerged from the great mass. Numberless parasitic forms, like lice, crawled over its restless body.
“Do they want to kill us?” Vol wondered aloud. The insects on his head had taken refuge in his collar. He looked strangely vulnerable without their darting company.
“It will tell us, I daresay, when it has a mind to,” Carrion said, watching the great creature with a mingling of respect and caution.
Finally it spoke. The language it used, however, was not one that Carrion knew. He listened carefully, and then turned to Leeman Vol for assistance; Vol, whom the Brood-beast seemed to recognize as one who would comprehend it. Indeed he did. He began to translate, a little cautiously at first.
“They…it…welcomes you. Then it tells you: We are growing impatient.”
“Does it indeed?” Carrion said. “Then tell it from me: soon, very soon.”
Vol replied to the Brood-beast, which went on immediately to speak again, its voice thick and undulating.
“It says that it’s heard there are trespassers among the islands.”
“There are one or two,” Carrion said. Vol’s three mouths provided a translation of this. “But nobody will get between us and our Great Plan.”
Again the Brood-beast spoke. Again, Vol translated.
“It says: Do you swear?”
“Yes,” said Carrion, plainly a little irritated that his honesty was being called into question by this monster. “I swear.” He looked defiantly at the creature. “What we have planned will come to pass,” he said. “No question of it.”
At that moment the Brood-beast revealed that it knew more about the craft of communication than it had been displaying, because the creature now spoke again, but in a recognizable fashion. It spoke slowly, as though piecing the words together like the fragments of a jigsaw; but there was no doubting what it said.
“You…will…not…cheat…us, Car-ri-on,”
it said. “Cheat you? Of course not!”
“Many…years…in…dark-ness…we…have…waited.”
“Yes, I—”
“Hungry!”
“Yes.”
“HUNGRY! HUNGRY!”
The chorus was taken up from every corner of the Pyramid, and from the tunnels and hives many thousands of feet below, and even from the other Pyramids of the six where sacbrood had also bred over the years, and awaited their moment.
“I understand,” Carrion said, raising his voice above the din. “You’re tired of waiting. And you’re hungry. Believe me, I do understand.”
His words failed to placate them, however. They moved toward the door from all directions, the horrid details of their shapes more apparent by the moment. Carrion was no stranger to the monstrous—the pits and forests and vermin fields of Gorgossium boasted countless forms of the ghastly and the misbegotten—but there was nothing, even there, that was quite as foul as this loathsome clan, with their fat, wet clusters of eyes and their endless rows of limbs clawing at the rot-thickened air.
“Lord, we should take care,” Vol murmured to Carrion. “They’re getting closer.”
Vol was right. The sacbrood were getting far too close for comfort.
Those overhead were moving the fastest, skittering over one another’s bodies in their unholy haste and shedding living fragments of their bodies as they did so, which twitched on the ground where they’d fallen.
“They do seem very hungry,” Mendelson observed.
“What do you suppose we should do about that, Mr. Shape?” Carrion wondered.
Shape shrugged. “Feed them!” he said.
Carrion reached out suddenly and caught hold of Shape by the nape of his neck. “If you’re so concerned about their well-being, Mr. Shape, maybe you should sacrifice your own sorry flesh to their appetite, huh? What do you say?”
“No!”