“I prefer to reserve those actions to enhance their effect.”
Frank licked his thin lips. “That’s not all they’re sayin’. They say it can’t be the outlanders who’ve been doing all the chillin’. At least not the butcherin’ and eatin’ part. There aren’t enough of them, and anyway they don’t work that way.”
“And who’s saying this?”
“Pretty much everybody who’s not one of Wymie Berdone’s remainin’ few diehards. And Wymie herself, of course. She denies the existence of coamers. But they’re who everybody else has begun to blame.”
“And has anyone actually
seen
one of these red-eyed, white-haired, naked, screamin’ ghouls out of legend?” Conn asked. “Much less chilled one and brought in the body?”
“Not as far as I know,” Frank said hesitantly.
“Not my boys ’n’ girls, that’s for nukin’ sure,” Potar said. “And I’ve had ’em lookin’ for them.”
“None of which means there might not be somethin’ in the old stories,” Frank said, “old half-forgotten legends and campfire tales though they are.”
Conn thought a minute, then he looked at his lead scout, who squatted across from the fire on her skinny legs, front and back flaps of her buckskin loincloth trailing to the ground. If anything, her face looked more frightened than it had before.
“Thanks, Sairey,” Conn said. “You’ve done well.”
She sat looking at him with huge, silent eyes.
“You can go now, child,” Frank said, not unkindly.
She gulped visibly, nodded and vanished into the night in an eyeblink.
“If we can’t produce coamers,” Conn said, “we have to look elsewhere for the ones who have been assisting the outlanders in their crimes.”
“But you yourself are uncertain of their guilt, sir,” Frank said.
Conn sighed. “At the least, they’re guilty of chillin’ many of our people, robbin’ families of loved ones and breadwinners. And even if the army’s seeking about to fix blame, they’re the ones they signed on to hunt down and exterminate.”
He looked at Potar. “So they must have assistants. That much is generally agreed on—even if it’s not strictly factual, Frank, so you can spare me further objections. So it becomes incumbent upon us to keep our force engaged and at least mollified by producin’ some of these accomplice coldhearts and subjecting them to sufficiently exemplary public punishment, of course.”
“Uh, where exactly do you expect us to look for these accomplices, boss?” Potar asked.
“Why, around. Known bad actors, the shiftless. The rootless and vagrant. People whose downfall will be publicly welcomed. Or who, in any event, shall not be widely missed.”
Potar frowned momentarily, then his vast brow smoothed, and his smile came back, broader and uglier than before.
He may be slow, Conn thought, but he’s definitely not a feeb. It would do well to remember that.
“Take out the trash, as it were,” he said. “Chill two birds with one stone. My, I really am turnin’ into that oldie blowhard Vin. I leave it to your capable hands.”
“How many you want?”
“As many as you and your people can lay hands on, for now. We don’t need any great number, really. Three or four should suffice. For now.”
“But, Mathus,” Frank said, “that is dishonest! What about justice?”
“To quote an old saw that Vin likely never would, ‘There ain’t no justice—there’s just us!’ But seriously. Until we can find the real perpetrators, whoever they are, the mob demands blood. And think about it—if we lose them, what happens? Do you want Wymie back in charge? Or mebbe someone less delusional but also less scrupulous? Or do you want them runnin’ wild, mere anarchy loosed upon the land?”
At that last, his adviser’s dark features paled. Frank was a big believer in order.
Which is well for us all, old friend, Conn thought. Since much as I need and value your candor, there are still limits.
“You see?” he asked, deliberately gentling his tone. “It’s not as if we’re preyin’ on the innocent, after all. And in tryin’ times like these, sacrifices must be made by all of us—for the greater good.”
* * *
“S
O THAT’S HOW
they obtain their light,” Doc said. “The walls in their passageways are dotted with some manner of phosphorescent moss or fungus. I wondered why the cannies, though obviously primarily troglodytic in their habits, had not evolved to be blind, as so many cave-dwellers do.”
“But how do they recharge the stuff down here?” Mildred asked. “It’s as dark as a baron’s heart in these caves. And the growths, whatever they are, need to absorb light at some point to give any off.”
Despite her forced calm, Krysty grimaced as one of the five albino cannies holding her above their matted-hair heads jostled her kidneys. Otherwise, it was a remarkably smooth ride; though not much larger than children, the creatures were surprisingly strong.
It’s a good thing my friends can keep their spirits up enough for discussions like that, she thought. Or is it their way of dealing with the fear?
They had had no chance. Even though they had to have chilled at least a dozen of the stinking, naked white creatures, the cannies never faltered. They swarmed the companions and powered them down by weight of numbers and ferocity. Krysty heard Ryan calling her name, and steeled herself for the first kiss of fangs.
Instead her Glock was wrenched away, her arms yanked behind her back and her wrists bound with something that felt like rough vegetable-fiber rope. Despite the strength and fury with which she kicked them away, caving in at least one snouted, red-eyed face in the process, they managed to tie her ankles together, too. She might have summoned the strength of Gaia, who felt so near to her as Krysty was here in the Earth Mother’s bosom, but the onslaught just happened too quickly.
And it was just as well. As she was hoisted aloft and saw her friends raised up likewise, she saw they were surrounded by what looked like a throng of hundreds of the slight, stooped, yet deadly creatures. Even had she fought them with all the mad strength Gaia sometimes gave her, she would still probably have been overwhelmed after the Gaia power left her, as she would have been depleted and helpless.
There’s not much reason to think they’re letting us live out of kindness, she thought.
She was as stunned by the fact their animalistic attackers had tied them, and with brisk efficiency, as that they refrained from eating them alive. It seemed so…human.
They were being carried along a relatively straight and oddly uniform passageway about fifteen feet in diameter. On both sides Krysty glimpsed small groups of coamers, mostly female, taking clumps of blue-green glowing moss from a piece of plank on one side, and what had to have been a scavvied cast-iron kettle on the other, and somehow sticking them to the walls.
They looked somehow different from the cannies they’d seen before, including the unwashed horde that carried them now to an uncertain but no doubt unpleasant fate. But she didn’t get an ace look at them. She had other matters on her mind, much as she would have liked to drown her fears in detail.
“Why haven’t they chilled us yet?” she heard Ricky ask. He sounded as if he was trying to be brave.
Evidently their captors didn’t mind them talking.
“They got plans for us,” Ryan said gruffly.
“Wh-what sort of plans?”
“We’ll know it when we find out.”
The walls and ceiling fell abruptly away, and they were bundled into a vast subterranean chamber awash with light from a thousand fragrant pine-scent torches.
“Too bad the smell’s not enough to drown out the stink of these bastards,” Ryan commented.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll piss them off?” Mildred said.
“Do they understand speech?” Doc asked.
“We didn’t think they used rope, either,” Mildred pointed out. “Or tactics.”
“I don’t care if I piss them off,” Ryan said. “They’re pissing
me
off.”
He was mostly mad at his own powerlessness. He wasted not a second on regret, and less feeling guilt at them all being captured so quickly. They hadn’t even had the chance to fall on their swords, so to speak, much less fight to the death. It had been that sudden and complete.
Despite himself, he was impressed at their surroundings. Turning his head this way and that, he could see the chamber was a good two or three hundred feet across, with big clumps of pillow-like flow rock and thick stalagmites sticking up from a mostly level floor. The ceiling was high enough even the tips of the longest stalactites were lost in the impenetrable shadows beyond the reach of even so many torches.
But mostly he was impressed by the fact there were hundreds of the unwashed, red-eyed cannies thronging the place. From the midst of the bad-smelling crowd rose a hump of melted-looking stone that had had a sort of
seat carved out of the middle of the top of it, and on it sat a single figure who looked, even at this distance, far more human than the rest.
Their bearers carried them beeline toward the stone throne. The hordes of cannies melted away on either side before them. Looking down past his boots—Ryan was being carried on his back and headfirst—he saw that many of the huge but lesser horde that had swarmed them were spreading out to join the assemblage.
As they were borne into the avenue of living, death-reeking flesh, the cannies threw their clawed fists into the air and began to chant: “Muh-tha! Muh-tha! Muh-tha!”
Even the ultra-laconic J.B. was moved to shout, “I thought they couldn’t talk!”
“They’re just full of surprises,” Ryan called back.
Still, he thought they were barely a step above animals, and not a long one. But that they had some degree of human intelligence was becoming more and more obvious.
As, he thought, was the fact they followed direction from some single, greater intelligence. He hung his head back to get a better, if inverted, look at the solitary person on the throne.
Even with her sitting down, Ryan could tell she was tall, gaunt to the point of emaciation, and though dead pale, and though the hair piled in a swirl atop her head was also white, it wasn’t clear to him that she was an albino. She was definitely old, he thought, as the lines of her narrow, high-cheekboned face came into monocular focus.
Her eyes, which regarded him steadily, were of a pale color, green or blue or even white. But one thing they surely weren’t was
red
.
“Down,” she called in a clear, sharp voice as the captives were carried near her throne. The rock was a good ten feet tall, without steps in the front. Ryan briefly wondered how the nuke she got up in it. “Put them down!”
The reverential chant died away. Hundreds of cannies went to their knees all around, in a ripple effect that emanated from the smooth rock as if it had just been thrown into a pond. As Ryan was lowered to his feet with precision and gentleness, alike amazing, it occurred to him she could get them to form a human—or cannie—pyramid and climb up them to her seat, if she ordered them to.
He shook his shaggy, sweaty black hair from his face and stared at her with defiant arrogance. He realized that around her skinny neck she wore a bracelet of strung-together finger bones, adult-human-sized. As a pendant, she wore a small, bizarre skull, with a cranium like a human’s, if lower and longer, but a snout like a baboon’s. He realized it had to have belonged to a coamer infant.
That’s cold
, he thought.
“You’re not a coamer,” he told her.
“Ah, but you’re wrong,” she said. “I am Angela McComb. I am, you might say,
the
coamer. And these—” she spread elegant, spider-leg hands “—are my children!”
“Mutha!” the cannies cried, surging to their feet as one, each thrusting his or her right fist in the air.
Do they
practice
this shit? Ryan wondered.
“And you,” she said, leaning forward with her hands on skinny thighs covered in a mostly clean white linen gown, “are Ryan Cawdor, and these are your friends.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know many things,” she said. “I have eyes and ears
throughout the region. You have reason to know how stealthy my children can be.”
“But they scarcely seem capable of forming coherent speech, madam,” Doc said. “Hardly enough to convey even the rudiments of such intelligence—to call it that—as they gather in their reconnaissance. Much less convey our names and descriptions in detail.”
“It’s true they do not speak frequently, nor well. Much of the power of speech was lost in the…changes that have made them as they are today. As to how I know what I know…” She smiled thinly at him. “You will allow me my secrets, surely, Dr. Theophilus Tanner? Especially since you don’t have any choice.”
“You don’t talk like most people in the Pennyrile,” Ryan said. “Much less these things.”
“I am different than they,” she said with a haughty sniff. “I am above them, as befits a queen.”
That brought out another joint shout of “Mutha!” so out-of-nowhere that it was all Ryan could do to keep himself from jumping in surprise.
She’s got some means of signaling them, that’s for sure, he thought. Or, more likely, she’s got helpers who do. He suspected the caste system of this bizarre cave society had more layers and complexity than was apparent. On admittedly short observation.
“So they aren’t actually your children,” Krysty said.
“Goodness, no,” McComb the Mother said. “Not of body. Figuratively, yes. They are actually birthed by specially chosen breeders in dorm caves below.”
Ryan frowned. Krysty was usually too sensible to waste what might yet prove to be some of the last of her air yapping about random bits of information with this demented freak, who was somehow all the more freakish
for looking so normal, here surrounded by her “children,” with their stooped postures and their fang-filled, doglike muzzles.
Then he pushed the thought aside. While Krysty had a sentimental streak Ryan mostly lacked, and definitely her own perspective, at base she was no more likely to talk to hear the sound of her own voice than Ryan was. He realized such information did have value—any fact about how these twisted creatures lived, and more to the point kept living, could prove vital to their survival. Potentially.