“Esha has it,” she says bleakly. “When the demon-slaves attacked, you destroyed the one that struck you with fire, and we fell on the others, all three of us, and hacked and beat them till they were nothing. But after we carried your body—carried you—from Birchari, she . . . the mark appeared on her.”
“Help me up, please. Take me to her.”
Allwer lends me his arm, the one without fingers at the end of it, and I can get myself to my feet with only a little leaning on him. His eyes are very wide, at least half as scared of me as he is of the demon. Putting one foot in front of another is still something of a complex piece of logistics, and every step throws up a few more laggard error messages I have to deal with, but he gets me over to where Esha is lying.
She is still herself. Her face is full of the awareness of what is happening to her. The scaly stuff is growing on one side of her head and there are patches of raw skin there where someone tried to just abrade it away until she bled, only to find that it sprouted from the wounds just as readily. A few of those glinting black beads are scattered along the line of her cheekbone. Sense organs, but not actually eyes, I think. I am wondering if the controlling force actually perceives the physical world as we do, even vicariously through its minions.
My systems throw up another gout of errors, like a half-drowned man coughing up the last lungful of water, then start doing their job. I can detect that electromagnetic signature, just like before. It comes from nowhere, goes nowhere. If I step back there is no sign of it, impossible to intercept, just . . . there at the point of infection. Like hearing the sound from an open door as you pass it. My mind hooks on to that idea. An open door . . . to where, though? And this is impossible. This is not how the electromagnetic spectrum works. You can’t just have a signal that appears at its destination point without travelling through the intervening space from its origination. I don’t know what we’re dealing with here.
But I know about how it does what it does. I kneel by Esha, seeing her eyes track me. Tears trickle down her cheek, and I see a whip-like filament grope towards them from the scabbed infection.
“Do it,” she gets out. “I asked Lynesse, but she wouldn’t. But you will, won’t you? You don’t feel like we feel. You can’t regret.”
“I will later,” I tell her. “There are a great many things I will regret later, and perhaps forever. But right now I don’t have to feel.”
“Then do it, please,” she says, and closes her eyes hard, gritting her teeth.
I do it. I extend the field my systems generate until it encompasses her.
A ripple passes across the patch of corruption growing on her, and I see dozens of hair-thin arms stretch from between the scales and wave about blindly as though reaching for something. I get my instruments out, but I fear my hands are not going to be steady enough for the work. I have limited reserves of physical energy, given the prodigious self-repair efforts currently underway.
“Lyn, Allwer, come here.” I give them my multitool, demonstrating how it can be adjusted from one shape to another, a task they pick up more swiftly than I did the first time I had to use it. “Remove the infestation from her, as carefully as you can.”
It comes off more easily than I’d thought, and I think that I am interfering not just with the communications signal but also with some interaction between the parasite and its substrate. Even so, it is an hour’s hard work to pry everything off Esha’s face, and then attend to the other patches of it on her body, that I can track down from its frustrated attempts to reconnect. Esha will bear the scars forever, more from the removal than the actual infection, but I honestly don’t think she’ll care.
In the end I let down the field again and wait to see if I detect any of the demon’s ethereal chatter. Only silence, blessed silence. I pronounce her cured, and then reinstate the field strongly enough to cover all four of us, setting up a battery of subsystems to maintain it no matter what.
I’m very tired, after that, and sit down on the blanket, back against the fallen tree. There is a long silence, and eventually I open my eyes to find all three of them staring at me.
“What?” I ask, somewhat irritably.
“I owe you my life,” says Esha simply. “I need to repay that debt. How does one do that, with one such as you?” Almost peevish. Because, in saving her, I’ve cut through all manner of traditions that are trying to reattach around the mess I’ve made, just like the demon-infection. And, because I’m not a part of their world, their ways can’t accommodate me and there will be a social scar forever from my meddling.