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Chapter Thirteen

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“Stop!”

Indrajit didn’t immediately recognize that a voice had spoken. It was dry, and clicked, and the stops in it sounded too similar to each other, as if it were being made with a primitive mouth . . . or something that wasn’t, in fact, a mouth at all.

It had come from the wasp.

“I’m not releasing my bow,” Munahim muttered.

“Who are you?” Indrajit asked.

“And what have you done with the Girdle of Life?” Fix added.

The wasps retreated a step, cloaking themselves in the shadow of the adjacent room. They eased forward and backward, giving the impression that they rode a swing in and out of visibility.

“We are the hyperarchegoi,” a wasp said. The smaller of the two wasps, Indrajit decided. “You are invading our home.”

Indrajit released Fix’s hand; Fix continued to hold the lamp ready to throw. “I don’t understand. Does that mean you’re the ambassadors?”

“From the Paper Sultanates, yes. Do not kill the archegos.”

Indrajit looked down at Frick. He lay dead, his abdomen a gaping ruin. Wingless wasp nymphs swarmed over his flesh, plucking at it with tiny jaws, opening pockmarks on his face and legs and shoulders.

“I’m pretty certain he’s already gone,” Indrajit said.

“You are deceived by the veil of flesh,” the smaller wasp said.

“What is this?” Fix muttered. “Does the Epic tell you nothing of these creatures?”

“Sailors from the Sultanates, stealing men and gold,” Indrajit recited. “No, I have always understood them to be pirates. Frankly, I made something of a connection in my mind between the Paper Sultanates and the Paper Sook. I thought they were all piratical adventurers, named after paper because of the intrinsic evils of the material. Did you learn nothing of this as a young Mote of Salish-Bozar the White?”

“A Trivial, not a Mote,” Fix said.

“Your language has so many synonyms.”

“We sought to master and therefore preserve useless knowledge, for the sake of knowledge alone.”

“For the beauty,” Indrajit suggested.

“I know nothing of a race of insects in the islands of the north.”

“We are men much as you are,” the wasp said.

“You may be men,” Indrajit said. “You are not men much as we are.”

“That is true,” the wasp said. “For instance, we would not murder the young of other men. And we would not break into their homes to commit such a murder.”

“You haven’t asked,” Munahim pointed, “but I also know nothing of giant insect-men.”

“Thank you,” Indrajit said.

“And this, of course, is the strange smell I detected earlier.”

“Yes, that seems clear. You might have told us that it smelled like insects.”

“I didn’t recognize that it smelled like wasps. The strength of the smell confused me.”

The larger wasp surged forward two paces and crouched. The wasps had wings on their backs, but Indrajit saw now that they could walk on six legs, bellies parallel to the earth, or shuffle in a crouch on the rear two legs only. “You have already killed some of the Archegos Frick.”

“You killed him.” Indrajit kept Vacho between himself and the wasps, but tried not to look as if he was threatening them with it. He pointed at the mangled body. “There he is, right there, dead.”

“There he is.” The larger wasp inclined its head, and Indrajit realized that it was pointing with its antennae. “Right there, dead.”

Indrajit shook his head. “What?”

“It’s pointing at the smashed nymphs,” Fix said.

“We are not sexless,” the smaller wasp said. “Do we look like Gunds to you? Like Grokonk Thirds?”

“We are men,” the larger wasp said. “I am Hyperarchegos Chach-shazzat and this is Hyperarchegos Kak-chandad. We are the envoys of the Paper Sultanates.”

“I hear more feet,” Munahim murmured. “Wasp feet. Big wasp feet. Many of them. I’m not sure which direction.”

“You go in and . . . you have conversations with the Lords of Kish,” Indrajit said. “About . . . fishing rights, or whatever.”

“Of course not,” Chach-shazzat said. “We send the hyparchegoi.”

“Until the hyparchegoi, by their long service and personal merit, have earned the birthing.” Kak-chandad crouched, rubbing his forelegs together. “Then they must be replaced in their menial labors.”

“Sometimes they earn the birthing,” Chach-shazzat clicked. “Sometimes, we run out of other options, and a lucky archegos is promoted in spite of himself.”

“I don’t understand why we’re having this conversation,” Munahim murmured.

“If you mean, why have we not killed you,” Chach-shazzat said, “perhaps it is because we are civilized men, not given to casual murder.”

“Or perhaps it is because you are armed,” Kak-chandad added, “and pointing your weapons at us. Perhaps it is because you have killed some of the archegos, and we do not wish you to kill the rest of him.”

“Frick told me he didn’t want the birthing,” Indrajit said.

“At the last minute, many grooms have feelings of reluctance,” Chach-shazzat said. “Many mothers worry that they will not do a good job after they are already pregnant. This is natural, and the way of the world.”

Indrajit felt ill. “You killed him. You implanted eggs into him and you killed him.”

“We implanted eggs into him,” Kak-chandad said, “and he has given birth. Now he is in many nymphs, and will live on in their lives.”

“I look forward to welcoming him to adulthood,” Chach-shazzat said. “Giving him names.”

“So he’ll be a hyperarchegos now,” Indrajit said. “Or is the archegos major one of you?”

“The archegos major is a man such as you,” Chach-shazzat said. “The hyparchegoi are the archegoi major and minor.”

“So the archegos major hasn’t merited the birthing yet,” Indrajit said. “Does he know about it?”

The wasps were silent.

“He knows about it,” Indrajit guessed. “He doesn’t want it, so he hasn’t earned it.”

“An archegos major who deliberately shirked his duties would merit a different fate,” Chach-shazzat said.

“What, you’d kill him?” Indrajit pointed at Frick’s corpse. “That sort of sounds like the same fate.”

“I remember my former life as a man with two legs,” Chach-shazzat said. “I was a Yuchak tribesman. I hunted across the steppes. Hunted the dog-headed men, Kyones, such as your companion.”

Munahim growled.

“I was enslaved by Ukelings,” Chach-shazzat continued. “I pulled an oar for five years as we raided Karthing villages, and the monasteries and chapels of Ildarian saints. I killed two Ildarian soldiers with my chain, an act of valor which earned me my freedom from my Ukeling masters. I had grown fond of the life of a raider, so I did not return to my former home, but continued, no longer at the oar but now leaning against the gunwale and leaping into victims’ ships or upon their wharves. Until one day we made the mistake of attacking another raider, a ship from the Sultanates. We were not expecting the beautiful horrors that climbed from belowdecks. We fought them as monsters. Many of us fell. I was defeated and became again a slave.”

“This is more than I wanted to know,” Indrajit said. “So you remember some of the life of the man in whose belly you hatched.”

“I am that man,” Chach-shazzat said. “I am transformed.”

“And I am a Pelthite lochagos, who fell in battle against the soldiers of the Sultanates,” Kak-chandad added. “As a boy—”

“Stop,” Indrajit said.

“Sometimes,” Fix murmured, “I wonder whether you should have more curiosity about such things. As your people’s Recital Thane, I mean.”

“I do not intend to add the life story of this wasp-man to my people’s Epic,” Indrajit said.

“You can see, surely, how the enhanced perspective of having had two lives enriches our understanding,” Chach-shazzat said. “How it makes us wise in ways you cannot possibly understand.”

“I don’t need to have been a parasite in another man’s belly to understand his life,” Indrajit said. “I am guided by the Blaatshi Epic, which captures the wisdom of hundreds of generations of my ancestors, and not just one.”

Chach-shazzat rubbed his forelegs together, looking at Indrajit. “So much wisdom. You would make an interesting archegos.”

“He doesn’t have the right temperament,” Fix said.

Indrajit snorted. “What do you mean? I have an excellent temperament!”

“Oh, yes?” Fix said. “So you’d like to continue auditioning to replace Frick?”

Indrajit looked at the dead man and bit his tongue.

“You have the wisdom of hundreds of lives,” Chach-shazzat said. Had he hunkered down, slightly?

“Yes,” Indrajit said.

“That’s nothing,” Fix said. “You should try reading a book.”

Indrajit snorted again.

“Do you have the wisdom of many lives?” Munahim asked the wasp-men.

They hesitated, drifting back slightly into shadow.

“That wouldn’t make any sense,” Fix said. “It’s not cumulative. What do you think, the Yuchak hatched from the belly of a Karthing before him, bearing his memories?”

The hyperarchegoi said nothing.

Indrajit might need to add these wasp-men to the Epic, or prepare the epithets so that his successors could compose the incidents. Especially if he encountered them again in the future, and they became significant in the course of his own adventures. “Hyperarchegos is a title, isn’t it? ‘Elevated leader,’ or something like that?”

“It is a title,” Chach-shazzat agreed. “It doesn’t come from our own language, but from the tongue of the men who lived on our islands before we did, the men we came to rule. They are a Pelthite people.”

“Frick and Larch are from that stock,” Indrajit said.

“Yes. A hyperarchegos is the head of something. We are heads of this diplomatic mission. Another hyperarchegos might be head of an army, or of a fleet, or of a trading caravan.”

Indrajit nodded. The point of his sword had drooped, and he reminded himself that he was still talking with giant wasp-men, who might at any moment decide to kill him. He tried to be subtle about it, but he raised the tip again. “What do you call your own race?”

“We are Kattak,” Kak-chandad said. “You have not heard of us because we prefer to remain in the shadows.”

“Perhaps I have heard of you,” Indrajit mused. “There is an epithet that goes, ‘Hornets of the northern isles, eaters in waste places.’ But I think my people didn’t understand that you were men. Or at least, the recital thanes before me didn’t understand that you were men. So you are sung in the Epic as monsters.”

Chach-shazzat hissed.

“That’s neither here nor there, really,” Fix said. “The question is, really, where do we go now?”

“You are intruders,” Kak-chandad said. “We would be within our rights to kill you, even if you hadn’t killed some of the archegos minor.”

“Lysander Frick,” Indrajit said, “but you’ll rename his . . . the Kattak that came from him. They’ll have Kattak names. Or will they all have the same name?”

“You will agree,” Chach-shazzat said, “that we have been very civilized. We have treated with you, when we might have attacked.”

“True,” Fix said. “And you will agree that we have been very civilized. We have refrained from destroying the nymphs, once we learned what they were, and we have held discourse with you.”

“Civilized trespassers,” Kak-chandad said.

“I thought we were finding common ground,” Indrajit said. “Why say such hurtful things?”

“We would forgive all trespass,” Kak-chandad said, “if you gave us the Kyone.”

“What?” Munahim took a step back and raised his bow.

“It would be valuable to us to incorporate his experience,” Chach-shazzat said.

“We’re not going to give him to you,” Fix said.

“Then you must be preparing to leave.” Chach-shazzat crept forward, rising onto his hind legs. “Our patience has already been tried.”

“We came here to find Philastes Larch,” Fix said. “The other archegos minor. You tell us where to find him, we’ll have our conversation, and then we’ll leave.”

“We’ll trade you Larch,” Kak-chandad said.

“We won’t give you the Kyone.” Fix shook his head.

“We’ll trade for the Blaatshi.” Kak-chandad also rose onto his hind legs and shuffled forward. “We very much want to have the advantage of the wisdom of four hundred twenty-six generations.”

Did the Kattak have stings? Indrajit studied their scythelike mandibles, glistening darkly in the lamplight, and peered past their bodies in the gloom, looking for sharp, stabbing points. How did they implant their eggs? Without meaning to, he tightened his stomach muscles and gritted his teeth.

“I’ll come back and recite for you another time,” Indrajit said. “Maybe out on the front lawn. At noon. With an audience. But I won’t bear your eggs.”

“You might not have a choice.” Kak-chandad made a rattling sound. “Kishi? Kyone? What say you?”

Munahim growled.

Fix brandished his lamp. “If you lay eggs in my partner, I’ll light him and you both on fire.”

“We were having such a peaceful negotiation,” Chach-shazzat said.

“Yes,” Fix agreed. “Then you tried to buy my partners.” He knelt and plucked a nymph off the dead archegos’s body with a sucking sound. He held it up, revealing a row of wiggling legs and a moist underbelly. “I’ll take this with me.”

Indrajit quickly grabbed a second nymph. It felt like a roll of fat in his hand and it squirmed. He held its nutcracker-like pincers away from his own flesh. “Tell us where to find Philastes Larch,” he said. “We’ll have our conversation with the archegos minor and then we’ll leave.”

“I hear more feet,” Munahim murmured again.

Chach-shazzat lowered himself onto his six legs and crept forward a pace. He stood in shadow, behind the mostly wrapped reclining couch and the paper husk that had held Lysander Frick. “You have taken hostages. You are kidnappers now.”

“We didn’t want to be,” Indrajit said. “We just wanted to be trespassers, really. Maybe burglars, slightly. And only because we didn’t think we had a choice. You’re the ones who want to impregnate our Kyone.”

“I don’t want to be pregnant,” Munahim said. “Especially not by a bug.”

“The sooner you tell us where to find Larch,” Fix said, “the sooner we get what we want from him, and leave you your lovely little baby Kattak, and go away.”

“We could kill you,” Chach-shazzat said.

“You kill me,” Fix said, “I drop the lamp. In this room made of paper.”

“The archegoi sleep in rooms beneath us,” Kak-chandad said. “Larch is the younger man.”

“You will leave the nymphs here,” Chach-shazzat said.

“No,” Fix said. “Munahim . . . Indrajit . . . let’s go.”

Indrajit needed no further urging. He ducked into the hall outside and headed for the stairs. The entrance by which they’d come into the building still showed darkness on the outside; how long until dawn? Surely, it must be imminent.

He waited until Munahim and Fix had both come out of the Kattaks’ chamber before he headed down the stairs.

“Keep your eyes open.” Fix drew his falchion. “I don’t want to be surprised by the other Kattak Munahim keeps hearing.”

“Still hearing them,” Munahim said. “Not sure how many, not sure how far away.”

“We also don’t know what other stairways or passages there might be in this building,” Indrajit pointed out. “Those same two Kattak might creep around and attack us from behind.”

He kept his eyes open. At the bottom of the stairs was a square, high-ceilinged chamber with multiple exits. Most were open and a quick glance revealed where they led: to a kitchen, to storage rooms, to a lounge with reclining couches, to a greenhouse, to a passage leading to the front doors. A short hall was punctuated with four shut doors.

Paper covered everything. Pillars were wrapped in it. Walls were covered with it. Indrajit wasn’t sure he was seeing all the doors, and he was nervous at each step that he might fall through paper into a concealed pit.

“The Pelthites of the Paper Sultanates,” Fix wondered out loud. “What do they know about the Kattak?”

“Just keep the light high.” Indrajit shuddered. “Remember that I have more oil, if you start to run low.”

Listening for the crisp sounds of insect feet or mandibles, he began opening the doors. The first contained a bed, table, and shelves, but the bed was empty. This room was blessedly paper-free.

The second was a latrine.

The third contained a table and shelves, and a bed with a man in it, under a light sheet. “Watch the hall,” Indrajit told his partners.

The man wore a long sleeping tunic. Indrajit sheathed his sword and grabbed him by the front of his garment with one hand, shaking him roughly. “Philastes Larch!”

The man jolted to a sitting position. He had the large nose and curly dark hair of a Pelthite. “Don’t hurt me!”

“You’re in no danger.” Indrajit tried to sound calming and peaceful, but realized he was holding a squirming Kattak nymph in one hand. He checked the ceiling, looking for cracks or chimneys by which a Kattak might enter. “I’m looking for Philastes Larch. Is that you?”

The Pelthite shuddered and said nothing.

“Listen, Larch,” Indrajit said. “I have no time. You bought something from Zac Betel, the Gray Lord. A girdle. Like a chest harness. I need that, and I need it now. I don’t want to hurt you, and I won’t take anything from you other than the Girdle.”

“Are you carrying eggs?” Larch asked.

“What?”

“Kattak eggs?” Larch spun on sit on the edge of the bed. He shook visibly. “Are you bound for the birthing? Have you been to the . . . embassy parties?”

“No,” Indrajit said. “We have a . . . Wait, why are you asking that?”

“Frick kept muttering about parties, too,” Fix pointed out.

“Why do you want the Girdle?” Larch asked.

“Just tell me where it is,” Indrajit said, “and we’ll have no more trouble.”

“I didn’t get it for me,” Larch said. “Or at least, I’m not the one wearing it now.”

“The archegos major,” Indrajit guessed. “He sent you to get it. What’s his name?”

“Yes,” Larch admitted. “Thomedes Tunk. He’s next door.” He pointed.

“Thanks.” Indrajit turned to leave.

“But you’ll take me with you?” Larch asked.

“Why do you want to leave?” Indrajit asked.

The Pelthite’s eyes bulged and he trembled. “Why do you think?”


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