“Have you mastered them?” she asked.
“Not so much.” Nyrgoth was frowning. “I am shouting over the voice it uses between its different parts, so it cannot hear itself. And, not hearing its own commands, these parts of it stand idle. . . .” His eyes narrowed. “It speaks.”
“You said that.”
Nyrgoth Elder was very still. “It speaks to me.”
Lyn felt physically sick. “You are a sorcerer. You can resist it.”
“Not like that.” Horror did not move him, but some dire revelation had plainly touched him. “It is aware of me, I have spoken as it speaks. And so it questions me. I don’t understand. What have we met here?”
“What does it ask?” Lyn could not push past a whisper.
“Nothing, no words I know, but I’d guess it wants to know what I am. I think I’m probably the first thing it’s met here that is real to it.”
“The people of Farbourand, of this place,” Allwer pressed.
“A resource.” The coolness of his voice was almost as dreadful as the demon-slaves before them. “Your demon does not hear human words. Perhaps does not exist as a material being at all. But it exists in the speech it uses, between its parts, and now so do I.” A change in tone as he considered. “So what are you, precisely . . . ?”
The monsters all jerked at the same time, puppets sharing strings. Lyn saw their limbs twist in ways that must have torn up the tissues of their joints.
“I think I have an understanding,” Nyrgoth said lightly. “Not what it is, but how it works, at least. I can create a region that will exclude the demon’s voice. Which will hopefully protect us from falling prey to the thing ourselves.” He glanced at her and there was even a small smile on his face, as though the whole hideous business had just been a word puzzle posed to the company over supper.
“Watch!” Esha yelled, right on the heels of his words, and then the Coast-woman lunged in, yanking Lyn back hard enough to spill her on the ground. Nyrgoth Elder whirled round, focused more on Esha than the monsters, and something unfolded out of the corrupted man’s chest: a barbed, four-jointed arm that must have filled most of his chest cavity. It snapped forwards, farther than a spearman could have lunged, and drove itself into Nyrgoth’s gut in a spray of blood.
Nyr
OW.
bloody
stabbed me.
*
The problem with pain is that
while it is in theory a good warning light on the control panel of the mind to warn you to take your hand out of the fire—
it’s—
just—
that—
*
When all the lights go on like a fireworks display they get in the way of pressing the right buttons.
*
Which is why I have the option of
turning it off,
transmuting all those
irritating
attempts at the body to save itself into
calm little reports and readouts and memos from my internal systems.
but
when things get to this state
（when some infected bloody monster shoves its fucking ovipositor into my stomach）
the stately march of little reports becomes a blizzard of warnings and error messages, until I cannot see. Until sensory information from my actual senses has been entirely shunted out of the way by my rich internal technical life insisting that I click through all the windows and menus. I’d take it up with the manufacturers if that were in any way a realistic proposition.
And you know how it is when you’ve got some device on which you depend for all manner of little tasks that, perhaps, once you could have done without but which is now entirely essential to your well-being. You know how it is when that starts to go wrong, throws up its warning signs, groans and shudders, slows down, won’t start? The sense of aggrieved helplessness that, oh no, I’m going to have to get this fixed now, or I won’t be able to do all the stuff I need to get done. That sense of sick, yawning horror because, despite you being such a civilized sophisticate, you don’t really understand how any of it works to the extent that it might as well be magic? Well, that, basically, except the computer is you, the warning signs and fatal exception errors are you, and if it shuts down and won’t reboot then that’s all she wrote.
And so here I am, just getting rid of the errors, just swiping them off to the left side of my mind’s eye, trying to get to a point where I’m in at least nominal control of my own mind. And I almost miss the big one. Really, they should have made it twice the size of the rest.
Final warning: Ultimate Anti-contamination Measures activated.