New Decameron Thirty-Six: Yves Meynard (Patreon)

Her Venom

by Yves Meynard

Long, long after she had left him—it seemed like days, like weeks, and therefore must have been several hours—Logan managed to stand up and stagger towards the sea. His body felt loose, disjointed, as if it threatened to fall to pieces, shattered by the hammer of his pulse. He still saw palaces of flame in the distance, cool fortresses of eternal marble in the clouds. Triumphant chords swelled in time with the movement of his limbs.

When he reached the edge of the surf he fell to his knees, his hands digging into the flesh-colored sand. Seawater rushed up the beach, the color of diluted blood, and foamed around his wrists, burning, burning. He remembered coursing across a plain of bones, seated on a reptile charger, couching a lance of whorled metal, and knew it for a dream. He retched, and a thin stream of bile dribbled out of his mouth into the pink surf.

There was a buzzing sound in the distance; this puzzled Logan because the sound was so ugly, so grating. He had seen and heard marvels and not a few horrors, but all of them magnificent. What was this annoyance? He raised his head; the sun danced in his vision, like an urn brimming with flames, carried by a little girl who swung it at the end of a strap. She had the face of his dead daughter; tears filled his eyes and coursed down his cheeks. He coughed and spat, suddenly chilled, wondering if he would cry and sweat and puke out the remnants of the fugue.

The buzzing grew louder; a roving dot in his vision swelled and acquired wings and a tail. Landing skids flashed silver in the sun. So his plane’s call had been heard, then. Another wave came, higher than the ones before, and wet his knees. He grew aware then that he was naked, that his skin was reddened and peeling from sunburn. He shifted his position and tilted his head to look behind him. Had he erected a lean-to? He saw nothing but sand up to the very edge of the forest. He would not go back under the trees. Wounded Cass would still shelter him, but she lay halfway across the arc of sand that embraced the pink water. How had he wandered so far from her?

With glacial slowness, he turned himself parallel to the beach and began to crawl towards his plane. A rumble of kettledrums punctuated the start of his journey, then cellos and violas wove a sad melody—a dirge, really—to accompany his steps.

The other craft circled the island; Logan tried to wave to the pilot, but he could not manage to sit up. He gave up on the effort, directing his waning strength into the crawl forward. Sea-ants had built a nest near the tideline, and for a day he roamed the complex, ascended its stairs, fought among its plazas, took a red six-limbed warrior princess for a bride, was nearly murdered by a rival suitor, and just as the crown descended on his head, he heard the plane as she passed low above him.

Logan looked at her from the corner of his eye as she roared overhead, wings tilted back to scoop the air and lose speed. He kept crawling forward, desperate to reach the shade of his plane, as if this was an enemy coming down upon him instead of a rescuer. As the fugue left him agony seeped in to replace it. He should have remained underneath the canopy of the trees. But there had been a war, hadn’t there? A years-long war, a rebellion of the tree-folk to put down, and throughout it all his love had been at his side, until she was abducted by the desert nomads, and Logan had raced off in pursuit, across the dunes into the burning heart of the desert. He had found her in the end, had saved her life, had laid his head into the pillow of her lap and felt her fingers soothe his fevered brow. He dreamed he was reliving his youth as he rode on the back of some desert beast that carried him through the powdery dunes. But he knew he was the desert beast; it was his hide that baked and cracked in the glare of the sun; it was his bones that would lie bleached on the sand once life had fled him.

The other plane came in over the water, touched down delicately, one leg then the other, flexed her ankles and glided almost to a stop with a spray of water, gleaming in the light of the declining sun. Logan watched her edge forward, until her feet found purchase in the sand. Ungainly on land, she took two or three steps until she had gotten free of the tide, then came to a stop. Logan saw the form of the pilot get out of the seat; moments later, the door opened and the stiff ladder came out to plant itself in the sand. The man who climbed down had red hair that blazed like a banner in the sunlight, and by this single sign Logan recognized his nemesis. For a few heartbeats he dreamed of a swordfight in the jungle-choked ruins of a palace, but the venom had nearly run its course: the illusion fell to tatters after a few weapon passes and he was returned to the beach where he lay dazed and dying.

He heard the crunch of sand beneath Walsh’s boots, and then he was cast into blessed shadow as Walsh’s frame blotted out the sun.

“Logan, man…” Walsh was bending down over him. “What happened to you?”

“Stung,” Logan croaked. “I fell for a lure. Red-haired girl… under the trees. I ran after the girl—then the shai dropped down from the branches. A full imago.”

Walsh laid something that crinkled atop him; then the world upended itself, the glare of the sun came back in flashes; Logan nearly screamed from pain and confusion. Carrying Logan in his arms, wrapped in a reflective blanket, Walsh started walking back to his plane. 

“Not an imago, Logan. Not at this latitude,” Walsh was saying.

“Yes, an imago. Because if that was only… only a nymph, Walsh, then in ten years… we’ll all be dead.”

“Don’t talk. Let me get you inside.”

Walsh put him down on the floor of the plane, came up the ladder, then carried him to the bunk at the back of the hold, with a delicacy at odds with his strength. Inside the plane, it was so dark that Logan felt he had gone almost blind. He could see Walsh’s red mane dimly, but the man’s dark skin did not register on his retinas. It was like being cared for by a ghost. There was a click and a trio of bulbs on the ceiling began to glow.

“Sweet Mother, Logan!” gasped Walsh, his face twisted in horror. Logan glanced down at his abdomen, saw the black swollen mass, big as his own head, that he harbored above the cradle of his pelvis. Multiple puncture wounds on the skin still oozed blood and lymph.

“I told you,” he gasped, “full imago. I have a theory, Walsh…”

“Don’t exhaust yourself, Logan. You need water. Here, drink up.”

Walsh held a tin cup to his mouth; Logan swallowed a mouthful of warm water. For a second it was unspeakable bliss, then he was seized by nausea. His throat tightened almost to closing. Walsh forced him to his side until the spasm had passed. Then he tried again to make him drink, but Logan could only swallow a few drops.

He lost consciousness for a moment. When he came to, Walsh had spread gel onto his hands and was gently coating Logan’s peeling skin with it. It brought some relief from the pain, but Logan felt his very muscles and bones were burning up, and no amount of ointment could stop that process.

“My theory,” said Logan. “If I tell you what it is, you’ll give me credit at the Redoubt, won’t you, you half-abo bastard? Pilot’s honor?”

“There are no autochthons; you know that,” Walsh said. “My father was an outlander, that’s all, and his red hair was precisely why my mother chose him. You’re too smart to believe the legends, Logan.”

Logan let Walsh smear more gel below his chest, almost brushing his swollen abdomen. Then he continued, his voice a harsh whisper: “I think the shai have been breeding, down amongst the atolls. Closer to the equator. They don’t migrate like dumb beasts. They plan. They concentrated on breeding first, for a few decades, and now they’re moving north in force. One day—soon—the Redoubt will be overrun. We’ve grown overconfident. We played at being romantic adventurers, while they plotted to exterminate us.”

“They’re not that intelligent, Logan. You’re sunstruck, and the venom is still poisoning you. You need to rest. I’ll give you some more water in a while, then we can take off and fly back to the Redoubt.”

“Damned liar. Think I couldn’t see you… activate the sound-recorder? You know I won’t survive. You’ve won, Walsh. You can go home and court Florimel with a clear conscience…”

Logan fell to coughing, his dessicated throat scraped raw by his words. Walsh held his shoulders while the fit lasted, then dribbled a few drops of water into his mouth.

Logan wanted to say more, but his throat hurt too much. He panted, every breath bringing a brief flaring of pain. He was going to die; he had known this for an eternity, yet now the knowledge had grown bitter. To pass away in a blaze of glory, even if it was a venom-borne illusion, he could accept. To die of exposure and thirst, in the plane of his enemy, like a prey animal hunted to exhaustion—he wanted to fight it, to make some grand gesture. He tried to rise from the cot, to gain his feet. In his head the last of the venom smoldered, and he heard a faint wash of cellos, with a lone piercing brass wail two octaves higher, as he strained his treacherous muscles, bent forward… The tumor at his crotch sent a peal of agony ripping through him and he fell back, darkness and silence wrapping themselves like a velvet cloth around the bright golden wire of a pure tone at the limit of his hearing range.

#

Walsh bent his head close to Logan’s face, heard the thin rasp of breath still flowing through the other man’s throat. He wiped his fingers, still damp with burn ointment, on a corner of the blanket. He opened a medpack and injected Logan with both adrenaline and a syringe of antivenin, holding as little hope in the latter as in the former. He tried to make the other man swallow some more electrolyte fluid, but most of it dribbled out, along the sunburnt cheek. Logan’s flesh was eerily cold. Only the mass on his lower abdomen showed any warmth. It radiated heat, in fact. Walsh had not dared smear ointment on it. Neither did he dare lance it: he feared it would kill Logan should it rupture.

Yet Logan was dying still. Walsh glanced with a measure of guilt at the recorder still busily scribing the sounds the dying man made, the style scraping its fine lines on the silvery wing-case. It was pilot superstition that a man dying of a shai sting would know a brief period of clarity, during which pearls of wisdom, prophecies and transcendent insights would fall from his lips. To activate the recorder was tantamount to pronouncing a death sentence.

He ought to have been pleased, perhaps, at this turn of events: to watch the man he hated die. But it was not a pilot’s way. Not his way, at any rate. In this moment he felt his kinship to Logan overwhelm all other emotions. This was his brother pilot who lay there, and Walsh would do all in his power to save him. Even when Logan had called him once again half-abo—a slur which had, the first time, led them to fight with drawn knives—it had seemed to Walsh a term of endearment.

He would do all he could—which was precious little. They were at the very western edge of the territory claimed by the pilots, over three hundred kilometers from the nearest outpost, well out of comm range. It was sheer luck that his craft had picked the wail of distress coming from Logan’s wounded plane. If he tried to return to Port Emzon, he would have to abandon Logan for the full duration of the flight, which would most likely kill him. Logic argued he must remain grounded until he could stabilize the other man, but Logan’s condition was so severe it called for immediate drastic measures, which lay beyond Walsh’s powers. And the sun was setting. At this latitude the dusk would last a while. Walsh tried to gauge his options. It seemed to him that he could afford to stay grounded one hour. By then, if Logan seemed to improve, then Walsh would remain by his side and keep hydrating him through the night. If Logan’s condition remained the same or worsened, then the risk of a return flight would be the best choice.

Walsh tried again to moisten Logan’s mouth with electrolyte fluid. The plane rolled gently in the swells. Logan moaned brokenly. Walsh brushed his fingers in his enemy’s dark hair and whispered encouragements.

And then he remembered that he had walked Lauria up the slant of the beach, well clear of the reach of the surf.

He managed to control his shudder; he half-turned toward the front of the plane, leaning against the curve of the hull. The beach was bright through the windows of the cockpit, burning in the glare of the sun.

“Who’s there?” he asked. And after a second or two of silence, added an enticement, as the lore advised: “Show yourself. I won’t hurt you.”

There was a faint scrabble, and a face peeked out from behind a seat. Walsh caught his breath. The lure was beyond perfect. Tangled reddish-blond hair, huge eyes, chubby cheeks, with a smattering of freckles under the eyes. Native girl, the lure radiated. Sweet mystery, harmless companion, female child to be protected. The illusion was so powerful Walsh felt his resolve weaken. His emotions were being whipped up by the lure, and his reason was a fragile thing in the face of his feelings.

It’s not possible, he heard himself think. She has to be real. She can’t not be.

It was Logan who saved him then, drawing a stertorous breath. Logan who had fallen for the lure, followed it under the trees and been stung. Logan who believed in autochthons, while Walsh knew very well there had never been anything like humans on Rosamunde before the exile ships had reached her four centuries ago.

A pair of hands, ten slim fingers with charmingly ragged and dirty nails, grabbed the edge of the seat. Walsh knew that when the lure pulled itself in sight it would be half-clothed, its childish form keyed to incite both prurience and paternal feelings, to create a guilty fascination. He turned himself fully to face it, still crouching down. He leaned on the other arm, as if to steady himself, and very gently reached for the weapon at his belt.

“Who are you, girl?” he asked the lure, his eyes flicking around it, trying in vain to discern the shai. She had to be aboard the plane; it was her weight he had felt rocking the craft as she climbed inside through the door Walsh had stupidly left open.

The lure rose further from behind the seat. Its shape was exactly as Walsh had anticipated. His glands reacted to the illusion and sent a tumult of feelings rushing through his bloodstream. His reason kept its grip on his mind by the barest fraction. If you took a photograph, an inner voice said in desperate tones, you know the girl would not appear in the frame. There would be no one there—no one but the shai. The lure breathed and cooed, as if in mingled wonder and dread. The sound was almost more than Walsh could bear. He opened his mouth to speak a further enticement, but words failed him. The lure opened its mouth in a half-smile; Walsh raised the weapon, dialed to maximum dispersal, and fired.

The wash of energy dazzled him and the report sent spikes of pain into his ears. He fired again, one arm raised to shield his eyes. When he brought it down and opened his lids, for an endless moment he remained blind, sheets of pulsing light obscuring his sight. Then his abused retinas recovered, and at last he saw the shai, her many-limbed shape blotting out most of the light from the cockpit windows.

She had been burned and stunned, but she was still alive. Even as Walsh brought his hand to the gun’s controls, she gathered herself, folding her legs back to spring. Walsh twisted the dial halfway around and fired a third time, shooting a lance of plasma into the shai’s chest. Her weakened carapace burst; the lance drilled through her primary motor node and one of the twinned hearts. She flattened herself against the front of the cabin, a pure reflex action. Walsh kept the gun going, impaling the shai on the shaft of energy until he had burned out all remaining charge in the power cell, as Lauria shuddered and bucked and a wash of smoke, harsh as chlorine fumes, filled the air. 

Once the beam cut out, Walsh retreated and huddled against the curve of the hull, coughing in distress, once more half-blind, ready to use the gun as a club, to strike with his fists, to bite and claw, to scream in desperate rage. Nothing came at him. After a long moment he unfolded himself and stepped slowly forward. The shai lay inert across the control panel, her mouths and stingers quiescent, her body ravaged and charred. Walsh took a good long look at what he had only ever seen in books, his flesh crawling in reaction. The shai’s tail alone was as long as he was tall. In death, the ovipositor was half-extended, venom beading at the tips of the crown of spines that surrounded the main conduit.

He stepped back carefully, went to check on Logan, keeping half of his attention on the shai’s corpse. There was every reason to think the creature was dead; still, his hindbrain warned him she was about to spring back to life.

Logan had stopped breathing. Walsh dragged him to the doorway, went down the ladder and pulled Logan’s body down to the sand, into the clear air outside. There was no muscle tone; it was like wrestling with a sack doll, a heavy too-ripe fruit sewn at its crotch. Walsh coughed and spat out a clot of phlegm. He knelt in the sand, put his ear to Logan’s chest and heard neither breath nor heartbeat. He dutifully massaged the man’s chest, pounded it with his fists until his arms ached, and then, with an inarticulate cry, he gave up. He rose to his feet, looked down at the pitiful, deformed corpse with a mixture of loathing and anger.

Lauria was smoldering where the energy from the gun had ignited her fuselage. The cockpit windows were cracked, though not blown out. Still, she would never fly again. Walsh’s final shot had worked disaster on her CNS, the plasma lance passing through the shai’s body to cripple the controls. He had killed his plane as finally as he had killed the shai. He was alone now with three corpses: Logan, his craft, and the shai.

The sun was about to touch the ocean; he was losing the light. Walsh climbed back aboard Lauria. The shai still lay slumped against the control panel. Walsh searched in the shadowed body of the craft, located his camera, then moved forward and took pictures until he had exhausted the roll of film, keeping the lens opened to maximum for half and adding the flash for the rest, from closer up.

He took some more equipment from the hold, including a spare power cell for his gun, and the sound recorder. He could see the blast of his weapon recorded by the style as dark spikes on the silvery wing-case, and since then only the thin fuzzy line of background noise. He switched off the machine and secured it inside his bag, next to the precious roll of film.

He crossed the beach in the diminishing light that turned the ocean to the color of cherries and venous blood, and went to Logan’s plane Cass. He hoped to find her repairable, or even, miraculously, undamaged, her distress call spoofed by Logan for some mad purpose. It was the kind of story a pilot would tell around a fire. They lived their lives like knights-errant in the tales from abandoned Earth, questing for the mysteries of the world. Once, they had been explorers and conquerors, in the great flowering of cultures that spread across the world and jostled with one another. This was a later age, of slow consolidation and the souring of the early dreams. There had been no shai when the Redoubt was established and its pilots wove together a demesne, claiming rulership across five hundred islands from the tropics halfway to the pole. The shai had stolen in, like ghosts in a crude story meant to frighten the gullible.

Walsh opened the door then climbed aboard Cass, though not before using the camera as a torch to scan the inside. It was empty. He shut the door behind him, sat at the controls. A telltale glowed a sad yellow, pulsing in time with the distress wail the plane was broadcasting. Walsh squinted at the dials and indicators, reading the state of the craft. Then, with a curse, he went to the wing shoulder and opened the access panel. The governor cable had indeed snapped, crippling the wing. It could not flap for takeoff, could not even stay extended for powered flight. Cass could no more fly than dead Lauria. It was the kind of freak accident that technology and genetics aimed to prevent, but that did occur, always at the worst possible time.

It was also, of course, the exact kind of accident someone wishing to sabotage a plane would simulate. A pilot might choose to die in many ways; very few died of old age in bed. Some vanished over the trackless ocean, others met their end on a remote island, stranded by misfortune.

And some might choose to die of shai venom, going willingly to a death more glorious than anything real life could provide. Walsh had hated Logan all these years, but he had never held him in contempt. Never thought the man who had won Florimel’s favor in marriage might stoop so low, even after the death of their child and his self-exile from the Redoubt. Even now, he had no proof that this was true; he did not believe it, but he could not tell if it was because he did not want to. And why, of all people, would it be he who picked up the distress call from Logan’s plane? The twin sisters Luck and Destiny played with the lives of pilots and raised them high only to bring them low again.

Now Walsh was alone on an island with a dead pilot, a dead plane and a crippled one, three hundred kilometers from the nearest base. And wondering very much whether shai in the imago stage were as solitary as their nymphs.

He did not wish to spend the night inside Logan’s craft, listening to the cries from the forest inland and fearing the moment when they might go eerily silent. He exited Cass, walked quickly back to his own craft. The sun was drowning now, and it was completely dark under the trees. Walsh could no longer see Logan’s traces in the sand, that marked his journey back from the realm of the shai into the sunlight and a miserable death.

He did not plan to meet the same fate. No matter the distance to succor, Walsh was not one to seek the easy end. Logan had mocked him when he’d said he could now court Florimel. She had been rid of Logan for years and yet still walled herself in cold grief, over the death of her child. Walsh held no illusions on the matter. But there was precious data here: the photographs, his account of the incident. The Redoubt had to be warned that mature shai had reached this latitude. To bring back the knowledge or die in the attempt: this was a task fit for a pilot.

He worked at the fuel tanks in the belly of Lauria for a long moment; when he had drained off half the fuel, he made one last scan of the interior of the craft. He felt a coldness rush down his spine when it appeared that the shai had shifted position, as if one arm had been slowly reaching for the door. He could barely admit to himself that what he had expected was to find her utterly gone when he returned from Logan’s craft. After a moment’s hesitation, he dragged the corpse of his rival back into the hold.

He stepped a safe distance away from the corpse of his plane, then with a long, thin needle of plasma from the gun, ignited the spilled fuel. It caught with a rush of air, sending up billows of yellow flame.

The whole of the beach became painted with lurid colors, and for a long while the chatter and hooting from the forest went quiet. Walsh sat on the sand with the funeral pyre at his back, scanning the darkness under the trees. This was summer: the night would not last long. The carcass of Lauria should burn until the dawn. Once the sun rose again there would be work to do. He would build a raft, gather supplies for a long journey by sea. He felt confident in his ability to travel across the archipelago until he was either rescued or reached Port Emzon; but first he had to survive this night.

He swept his gaze across the firelit beach up to the edge of the forest, alert for the sight of a dream-girl that would break his heart. Again and again he looked over his shoulder, thinking to see the shai clamber out blazing from the carcass of Lauria; yet nothing of the sort happened.

After a long while, he tried to whistle a song he had learned some years back in a tavern of Port Emzon; but the sounds he made faded into the night, under the uncaring stars.

*************************************************************************

They sit silent for a moment. "That was really powerful, but really awful," Maya says at last. "Do you think he got back?"

"I hope so," he says. 

"Is there a word for stories that are really good but really uncomfortable?" Maya asks.

"Cathartic?" he asks, as if he's asking himself. He shakes his head. "Let's read something else right away. Unless you need water or a cookie?"

"I'm all right," Maya says. She pulls the next book off the pile. "Arkady Martine. Oooh! I loved Memory Called Empire. I think it'll win all the awards this year, sweep them like Ann Leckie did a few years ago."

"She deserves to, certainly," he says, "But this is an unrelated story."

And they read.