“There is a beast that has hounded me down the centuries,” Nyrgoth told her. His hand lifted, and she shivered and leant back in case he should touch her again. His words filled her with a sense of creeping dread.
“It is always at my back,” he continued, “and sometimes it grows bold and its teeth are at my throat. It drags me down, and if I did not carry a shield against it, I could not get up from beneath its weight. But perhaps it is the same with you, or some of your people, though maybe they have never told you. Such beasts hunt in secrecy; even their prey are loath to speak of them for fear of showing weakness.”
“My uncle was killed by a cerkitt, a wild one,” she said uncertainly, but she knew it wasn’t the same thing. A beast that hunted sorcerers would doubtless savage a thousand men like her uncle and barely pause. She shuddered and returned to the fire and slept very poorly.
Nyr
I WAS TRYING TO be reassuring, but I evidently failed and now I’m not entirely sure what she made of my words. She seemed so solicitous, though, and I was trying to bleed off the build-up of sentiment that the DCS was keeping at bay, just like the operating manual says you should, to avoid unhealthy hormonal build-up. You can’t put it off forever, basically, but you can tap into it when circumstances allow, feel things when you have leisure to, and keep everything under control.
And so she wanted to know why I looked sad, and I explained it was basically a long-term mental state and that it was all under control, but that didn’t seem to be what she heard. And of course they don’t have a precise word for “clinical depression” or anything like that.
I did set her mind at ease about the mining robot, anyway. Not even an old colonial model, that one, but something left over from our own mission, gone wrong in its mechanical brain over a few centuries of inaction. And she nearly lost both hands at the elbow to it. It wasn’t trying to attack us, although it would have killed her on its way to me if I hadn’t had the codes to reset its priority queue.
And she stood in its way, when it was plainly going for me. Astresse would have, as well. In fact, she did, when Ulmoth sent his reprogrammed machines to destroy me. She almost died, too. We both did. But we prevailed: the white of her grin as they patched her wounds; her musician, extemporising the saga of the fight; she leant in to me and touched foreheads, her diadem rasping against the base of my horns. Meaning respect; meaning camaraderie, shared hurts and healing. Meaning intimacy. Good times. Good times three lifetimes gone, and here I still am.
And it’s time I re-established the DCS, feeling the beast standing behind me, sour breath on my neck. It fades as the system shields me from myself. I know it’s still there, but its teeth cannot pierce my armour.
Lynesse Fourth Daughter sleeps by their fire while Esha Free Mark keeps watch. I adjust the temperature settings of my underclothes and lie down over here on my own, feeling simultaneously noble and foolish for being so.
*
After another day coming down from the mountain, stepping up our pace to make the walls before nightfall, there is a town. Progress has been brisk, and I have had to step up my metabolic augments and mute some pain and fatigue tells to keep up with the two women. However, reaching the walls of the town with some remaining spring in my step prompted a spike of positive emotion that I was able to tap off and experience. Thus avoiding my dissociative system from becoming overwhelmed.
I have seen satellite images of this place, and sent unobtrusive drones to record the goings-on here, in the name of scholarly study. When I worked out where we were going, I thought the place would seem familiar. It’s very different when you’re actually there, stepping through the gates scarce moments before they’re closed for the night. Meeting the stares of the locals.
When I had the outpost facilities fabricate these clothes for me I fondly imagined passing incognito amongst the locals, to keep contamination to a minimum. They were made to replicate the colours and styles of the local dress, but now I see that everything is somehow wrong. I feel like an actor in a poor historical reproduction, or some tourist who has bought cheap tourist trash from the tourist shops, and now imagines themselves very cosmopolitan and multicultural. The cut is wrong, and the way the garments hang off me is more wrong, and everything is sealed where it should fasten and vice versa. And I am a full thirty centimetres taller than anyone else here. And I have horns. I’d thought the hood would help, but my roving camera drone shows me that the very way the cowl sits shouts out their presence. In the end I just accept that anthropological training, second class, does not make me a master of disguise. I pull down the hood with something like disgust, and just let them stare. The DCS keeps my embarrassment and awkwardness at bay, and I pass through them with a neutral demeanour, as befits an academic.