Shoreseeker by Brandon M Lindsay

Author:Brandon M Lindsay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2019-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 40: Insects

Aswath of daylight fell across Marinack’s wings. The subtle heat from it occasionally caused the skin stretched across them, the color of boiled pork, to quiver, but Marinack didn’t flex her wings as she would’ve liked. She didn’t want to risk waking any of the ferals again. It had been a chore taking care of the last one that had woken up and escaped. Not because she had had to kill it—that brief surge of ecstasy she felt as its blood poured over her claws had been the only benefit of the ordeal—but because she had had to dispose of it and the human bodies it had left in its wake, all without being detected. That was why Marinack was here: to make sure that the Patterner Orthkalu’s plan wasn’t fouled by the unpredictable nature of the feral sheggam hibernating below her.

Their hibernation was the result of some Pattern made by Orthkalu; Marinack had no idea how it functioned. She only knew that the Pattern’s hold over them was tenuous. If it hadn’t been, there would’ve been no problem to begin with. Ferals tended to live up to their name. They were barely more than beasts, hardly capable of conscious thought—they were too overwhelmed by the Song of Pain to function as well as the warriors, or even the smokers. It wasn’t until they created their own harmony was the Song of Pain reduced from a maddening cacophony to a mere susurration of constant gnawing, a constant, endless scraping of the nerves that was as much sound as sensation. Only then could the rudiments of thought form.

None of the sheggam were fully immune to the Song of Pain, though. Sometimes, Marinack herself would have to flex her wings and fly just to fight back against the Song of Pain, scratch the itch that never went away, or risk going as mad as the ferals. That was what had happened the last time, and was why one of them had escaped, but there was nothing to be done for it. She had needed to get out of that cloying pit Orthkalu had sentenced them to.

Comfort, even in the relative sense, was an alien concept for the sheggam, but Marinack was really beginning to appreciate its absence. She was crouched on the cold, wet stone of her perch, completely surrounded by a rough tube of fungus-spotted natural stone—though everything about it seemed so unnatural. It was too dark, its edges too gritty and sharp.

And the constant smell of rot. There were no corpses she could see that would have caused this kind of stench, no traces of any life anywhere in this pit. Nor had they seen any seen any as their army made the long trek through the hot, barren tunnels that led here—had there been, the ferals would have killed it. The stench seemed to come from the very air, or maybe from the stones themselves. The smell had been present ever since they entered the ground back in Sheggamur, wafting up in vents.

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