Eifre Quest

Part 8

The young vesperbanes watch the unconscious defector, mandibles prominent and sharp. You glance back at Maune and bite your maxillary palp.

Still sitting on your mother’s back, you grip her thorax, dactyls squeezing against her chitin. You might’ve made a nervous squeak but you aren’t sure if anyone hears. Spiracles twitching, you wonder if you have it in you speak right now, and say what you mean to say. To berate the vesperbanes for their callousness, to demand that they spare Maune, to tell your mother to say the right words and fix it all, make things simple and pleasant again.

You always had excellent composure, and this is what keeps you from loudly crying out and making it plain obvious just how young you are.

Still, Tlista nods at your wordless squeeze. Does she understand how you feel right now? Do you even understand?

“It’s pitiful.” The words strike out in the silence, and it’s an instant before you‍ ‍—‍ before anyone‍ ‍—‍ realizes who spoke. Tlista continues, “A defect, a missing bane, and yet she’s done your mission better than you children have.”

“What?” It’s not a rebuttal, it’s hardly even an inquiry: the words are pure shock, and at this the green vesperbane’s antennae are frozen, splayed in the air. Internally, you mirror the reaction. Praising a defect? You haven’t even had a vesperbane’s education yet, and you understand how wrong that is.

“You mentioned your parameters earlier, didn’t you?” she asks, tossing her head in the direction of the bulky red mantis. “That you are to render aid to Shatalek if needed? Have you? More to the point, did you not all but state that pursuit of the ambrosia witch is entirely irrelevant to your orders?”

Red is stepping over, forcefully nudging green aside to stand before your mother. “With all due respect madame,” she starts, “you no authorityn. You’ve been relieved of duty for years. We’ve humored you out of kindness, but you really are in no position to be—”

Tlista’s raptorial foreleg snaps out and smacks Red across her face. It was a backlegged strike, so no spines impaled her.

The imago says, “Have you wondered why it is that you were able to pin down the witch, where so many before have failed?”

Green is speaks while Red is rubbing her mandibles and backing away. The smaller bane says, “We assumed she simply wasn’t a priority. There are far too many defects in the heartlands‍ ‍—‍ it’s natural for the weakest not to warrant a waste of our scarce resources.”

“She was coming to Shatalek, to warn us of the danger, inform us that the stewartry would be sending teams to keep control on things.”

The two vesperbanes glance back at the slumped mantis.

“Tell me, why did you take the time‍ ‍—‍ waste the time‍ ‍—‍ tracking down this defect? Time that you could have spent ensuring the safety of my town?”

“Ma’am,” Green starts, “are you acting to shelter this defect?”

It’s a high crime, you remember. One of the highest; unmitigated guilt of such entails execution.

“Do you think,” Tlista’s voice is tending low; rather than the highs of objective command, the tone of her words became something personal and inviting, “it’s a coincidence that I’m stationed in the village nearest to the witch? That she is acting in our interests? She is my jurisdiction.” You don’t let your confusion march onto your face and ruin her ploy.

“If that is the case,” Green starts in a voice making a tangible effort not to call beetleshit, “why would our master tell us of her bounty? Why, if the defect supposedly accounted for?”

“There’s another thing that doesn’t add up,” Tlista says. There’s something‍ ‍—‍ confident about the way she flatly ignores questions, setting her own pace for the conversation. “You said this was a B‍-​rank mission. For world‍-​scar investigation, that part makes sense.” Your mother leans forward, antennae extending out toward the banes. “But you’re wretches. Barely even wretches, banelings. Yet B‍-​rank missions require the presence of a fiend.”

And the banes fall in line with he course your mother sets, Green dropping her inquiry to instead respond, “Our master is working with the vindicators at the mound to secure it. He is an arch‍-​fiend.”

“And just who is your roach‍-​brained master?”

“Dlenam.”

For once, your mother is thrown off balance; she jerks back at the name. “Of course it’d be him.” She gathers herself up, and sets her thorax erect. “Tell your master to knock some sense into you next chance he gets, hear me? Before you fuck up another mission. But for now, go do your jobs, and ensure the syndics of Shatalek are aware of what’s occurring.” A midleg is flung back behind her emphatically. It clips you a little.

The vesperbanes stare at your mother for a beat, Green with wariness written into the angle of her legs, Red with open‍-​mouthed, wide‍-​mandibled indignance. But ultimately, she is right and they know it. Her correctness costs them several hundred claws.

Green is the one who starts walking away first. When she passes behind your mother, she says, “Your wisdom is quite appreciated, madam Tlista.”

Red passes next, stomping, giving your mother a wide berth.

Last is the quiet one, whom they called Shimare. She leaps from atop the roadside ridge, landing silently on the stone path, standing thin and tall. Her wings flare wetly open. Her forelegs and midlegs come together to form a sign, and then the skin inside of her wings begins to glow brightly red. Why does a nymph have wings?

She begins to walk softly after her teamates, but Tlista extends her left midleg, stopping her.

“Shimare… of clan Brismati?”

A nod.

“Tell me, do you know Alaremu? Has she moved on? Has she remarried?”

Shimare stands still for several heartbeats, and then finally speaks. “Aunt Alaremu is dead.”

And then it is Tlista who stands still while Shimare dashes away toward her team. But mother gathers herself quickly, and she forms a sign with leg legs, and whispers something reverent you can’t make out, even riding on her back.

Looking up, she seems to remember what you’re here for, and she crouches in front of the catalyst of all this trouble, the ambrosia witch.

“You owe me one Maune. You really do.”

A blue antennae shifts sluggishly. Is she awake?

“Mother,” you say, “those vesperbanes, they weren’t very nice.”

“No, of course they weren’t,” she says, and her next words are a mutter, seemingly to herself. “Of course. Give a nymph power over matter and mantis, pile on responsibilities that would crush an imago, and let the vespers have their way with them‍ ‍—‍ and then wonder why vesperbanes are the vile mantes bugs hate.”

A wet cough. “It‍ ‍—‍ a nightmare, isn’t it?”

That sharpens mother’s attention. She looks up. “You’re awake.”

“You.. here. Tlist?”

“It’s me. C’mere.”

When she steps forward, a squawk cuts through the nighttime silence. Faster than an antennae can twitch, a black form is slicing through the air and lighting down between the veteran and the defector.

Experimentally, you reach out and the bird rounds and squawks at you.

It’s Reva, the witch’s familiar.

“Calm it boy. They’re‍-​ they’re help.”

The bird steps to the side, but remains staring between you and Tlista.

“My daughter said you think there is a way to save you.”

“Two ways… But I have a preference.”

Tlista waits. The witch’s breath is slow, and you wonder if she’s slipping in and out of awareness, or devoting all her energy to holding on.

“Reva, show them.”

Mother prods you until you get off her back. Off you go. You’re replaced by the much larger ambrosia witch, slung limp and gracelessly but steadily enough that Tlista begins to walk after the bird.

It’s a journey even deeper into the woods. The stone path turns to gravel and then mere trampled dirt. The soundscape turns to the aerial winds, seeking purchase below the canopy, and sleepless chitterring things.

As you wind deeper (and wind the path does), the trees grow bigger and stranger. Those artful, alien workings of the weevils on the branches of the trees seem to teem and infest your surroundings the deeper in you go.

“Mother?”

“Yes?”

“Does that mean I’m going to become mean if I become a vesperbane?”

She pauses for a moment, considering. “No. You always have a choice, Eifre, remember that. But, if you become a vesperbane, it will try you. You’ll be angry, you’ll be tired, you’ll be very confused, and most of all, you’ll be hungry. It brings out the worst in someone.” She takes your tarsus again, and squeezes it. “But your worst can still be wonderful. You really want to be a hero, don’t you?”

You smile, and say, “Heroes get to read all the best scrolls!”

And your mother gives a single pulse of laughter, and that’s enough.

You walk beside your mother on the left, and you notice the midleg which the nerve‍-​ooze had attacked is darkened and sluggish.

Throughout the woods, there lingers a sweet, spiced smell you’ve always faintly associated with the edge of the ambrosia, and now it grows until it becomes entrenched on your antennae.

You don’t like the smell. It’s not because it’s unpleasant‍ ‍—‍ it’s strange, but almost enticing (as it naturally would be, having heard the stories of ambrosia weevils).

No, it’s that very promise the smell holds that embitters you. You could ignore it while your mother carried you, but now as you’re forced to walk on your weak nymph legs, you realize: you’re hungry. You would have long have eaten dinner on any other night. But today, you’re forced to do more on even less.

You reach out and grasp your mother’s tarsus, and she gives a squeeze. You hold her hand as you follow the crow ever deeper.

And you know before Reva slows down that you have arrived.

Thicker, taller, wilder‍ ‍—‍ the trees grow here. But that alone wouldn’t account for this: before you rises a mass of branches and leaves taller than any building in Shatalek. Maybe it’s a massive hill that just happened to form here‍ ‍—‍ you can’t tell, because the growth is so thick the plants are a shroud.

The bird leading you (leading!) begins to circle around the gigantic structure until you come upon a still pond. Or pool? The edge is near‍-​regular, almost circular. Lilypads dot the surface.

And the bird saunters to a stop before it, like its job is done now.

“Maune?” Your mother says, jostling the imago. “Maune, we’ve come to a pool. What do we do now?”

“My demesne is hidden by the ambrosia weevils. My little magical fortress…”

“Yes, yes, but how do we get in? Focus, girl.”

“The weevils require contribution.”

Tlista pauses, before steeling herself, standing taller. “What is the offering, then? Blood? Flesh?”

Maune laughs, and it’s a delirious sound. “No no. The weevils are not the vespers. They do not exact costs. It’s… it’s a… an accord, rather than a pact. Benefaction…” Her words and murmured and slurred.

“Positive sum,” Tlista murmurs. “How does it work then? What, specifically, must we do?”

“Reva, get the combapples should be appropriate for guests.”

The bird hops away in a flutter of wings, and then quite suddenly it returns, carrying a branch in its beak. The sight is almost comical, the fruits swinging from the branch are about as large as the bird itself.

You ask, “What do we do with that?”

“Eat it.”

But they were plants. “Okay…”

The fruits have a hard shell, and the parent branch parents splits many times before its thin subbranches plunge separately into the fruit’s shell. It’s patterned like a honeycomb, and it easily breaks along the line of the pattern.

“Eat the fruit, and if it pleases you, spread the seeds far and wide… That is what they ask.”

“That’s all?”

“Of me? There are many other tasks. But this should be sufficient, for entrance into the vale.”

Almost in response, ripples break over the surface of the pond. You peer, lifting the torch to cast more light. Are the ripples coming from the lilypads?

Maune says, “And there it is. Let’s go. My strength is at its edge.”

Confusion wriggles in your mother’s antennae, but before she can ask, Reva makes a displeased grunking sound, and then the bird dives into the pool.

Tlista sighs, and runs a few tarsi over her bag, ensuring that it’s sealed.

“Hold your breath.”

And then she leaps, crashing into the waters with a mighty splash.

You stare at the water’s surface. You could just remain here. You don’t have to get wet.

And your mother would face alone all the danger and adventure that might still lurk. You dive into the water, torch abandoned.

Sinking into the dark waters, you feel a current that was not apparent on the calm surface. It guides you along the muddy floor, through a tunnel, and you arise into a cave.

Tlista is there, pounding on Maune’s abdomen as she coughs up water. The defector recovers, and weakly climbs back atop your mother.

You’re slow climbing out of the pool. When you’re up, Tlista is waiting for you, and she takes your hand, and leads you into the hidden vale.

Beyond the mouth of the cave is a vista you’ve never expected to see outside of a story‍-​scroll or a fanciful painting. Outside the vale, it may be the blackest night, but vale is lit with a blue ambiance, bright as late evening.

Scattered throughout are small flowering trees whose branches are heavy with odd fruit; the skin is transparent, and the luminescent blue liquid dwells within. Flittering flies buzz around the vale, some of them landing the glowing fruits, piercing the thin skin with a tube‍-​shaped mouth and sucking until their stomach is blue. As they fly away, full, the now‍-​glowing flies attracts a cohort of smaller flies. Mates?

(One of them lands on you, and you notice it resembles a a snailfly. They aren’t bugs, and have jointed shells instead of chitin.)

Tall grass covers much of the vale, but a trampled path leads out of the cave, which you follow. The bird, Reva‍ ‍—‍ was it there when you climbed out of the pool?‍ ‍—‍ is here now, perched on the thorax of its master.

You still hold your mother’s hand, and at this point it’s as much her comforting you as it is her pulling you along. You’re hungry, weak, tired, and thus, slow.

Maune’s voice sputters and wanes as she murmurs in her semi‍-​consciousness. She’s partway into a coherent sentence before you realize it, and she’s talking to your mother.

“—just keep with it. Leave me, leave me by the flower bed. You’ll know it when you past it. Get the potion, and come back.”

While you walk, to keep up your excitement, you leave your gaze wander, lighting on all the myriad flowers and oddly‍-​shaped bushes, and the birch trees with every branch arranged in a weevil‍-​working.

There are puddles dotting the vale. If you have passed their like on the way here, you would have entirely missed them: they are black. You’re reminded of the nerve‍-​ooze that attacked you, so much so you jump back at the first one you see.

But it doesn’t move or even ripple; it’s just a black puddle. In most of them, a growth emerges from the center, what could be a flower or a fungus. It looks sickly and half‍-​dissolved.

By the fourth one you pass you’re inured to them, and reach down to touch it. Your mother yanks you bodily back. “Do not touch enervate.”

As you start walking again, she’s pulling you harder, keeping you closer to her. After a chagrined moment, you return to staring in wonder at the vale. There are trees that move. You start, and stare skeptically until you catch one in the act. It pivots forward on stubby, root‍-​like limbs. You gaze travels upward, and higher up, its interlocking complex of branches seem disparate and alien, like conglomerations of many different kinds of trees.

The blue lamp‍-​fruits grow dense along the way, and the ambiance brighter. The mobile trees become more common too.

Maune soon stirs. “Don’t mind the ents… they get restless after a clear day feeding in the sun.”

Your legs are burning before you reach the flower bed. The bed itself rests between of roots of a massive tree, and the flowers are arranged in a swirling mosaic of three colors. They sit like a congregation before a tall white flower which sways.

Gingerly, your mother lays the ambrosia witch on the flower bed, Reva still perched on her. You sit while she does this, laying on your abdomen, weight off your legs.

“Maune, what ‘potion’ is it you need to recover? I assume this trail continues to your cabin?”

“Yes, yes it does. It’s… bat blood, you know. The healing potion. You know I’d have it, right? In my study.”

Your mother nods.

“And don’t, don’t go looking around, messing with things. You won’t understand everything you see, okay?”

Mother turns to you. “Come on, Eifre. It can’t be much further now.”

You hear her, but you just want to lay there, keeping resting and gathering your strength. It’s been a long walk. You wonder if you’d slip right to sleep if you leaned back.

“Eifre?”

You open your spiracles to make a sound, but your stomach betrays you first, give a deep rumble. You’re sure your mother can hear it a few pace away.

She sighs. “This is why I told you to go back, dear.” She reaches out, patting you on the head. “You can rest here, I won’t be long.”

Beside the two of you, Maune coughs, and writhes and stretches, shifting into a more comfortable position on the flower bed. She says something.

“Repeat that, Maune?”

“I have fruit in the cupboard, and little raptors in the pen. The bug can eat.”

“Then let’s go.”

You follow on down the path in a haze. You encounter nothing new, and your grip on consciousness seems a little more tenuous since you sat down.

The cabin of the ambrosia witch is a tiny affair, one floor that looks like it can’t hold more than four or five decent rooms. Your house could eat three of these houses for lunch. Lichens and vines grow all over it, and you can’t decide if this makes it appear bigger or smaller. In front, it has what could be called a porch, two chairs aside the door and flatten dirt around them.

First of all, you loop around to find the pen she mentioned, which holds half a dozen scaly raptors that stir at your arrival, the lot of them either stepping back or staring, making quiet grunting sounds in their throats.

Tlista glances back to gauge how tired you are‍ ‍—‍ dead on your feet‍ ‍—‍ and then she personally reaches in, snapping up one of the raptors for you in an instant, bloody and screaming.

She hands it to you and walks off, anxious to get this matter over with.

A few minutes later, you follow after her, viscera on your maxillae and blood dribbling down your mandibles. She’s already inside the cabin.

You step in. Four rooms: to your right is a sitting room with a shelf of scrolls and a dresser crowned with a glowing fruit. Both are adjacent to the corner, but neither reach it. Two chairs sit in the room, around a table, atop which sits a clean white rope with a loop on one end and a clip on the other. Door breaks the wall opposite you, ajar, and it must lead to Maune’s study.

To your left is a kitchen, a table with two chairs at one wall and the rest claimed by counters and cupboards. On the table, two glasses, a half‍-​eaten fruit and the stem of another. An open doorway leads into a bedroom, and you make out a bed perhaps twice as wide as yours.

Tlista glances out from the study at your entrance, waving for you to approach.

Your mother bars you from entering fully into the study, but it’s enough for you to see its contents. Shelves piled and squeezed with scrolls, except where instead there’s petri dishes and beakers. There are contents of every color, and half have forms floating inside: the shiro of a fungus, or its fruiting bodies. A wrinkly gray thing you’re almost tempted to associate with the medical diagrams you’ve seen labeled ‘brain’, if only it weren’t so small. There’s a heart with blood vessels floating freely, and even as you watch occasionally it pumps.

Finally your eyes settle on Tlista. She doesn’t smile, and simply looks down analyzing.

“Eifre.”

“Yes?”

“You want to be a vesperbane, don’t you? You’ve just entered the lair of a defect. What have you noticed?”

“Um.” You wiggle your antennae. “Do you want a list of everything I saw…?” No, that can’t be it, although you could absolutely do that if it were.

Tlista looks impassively on. Moments pass, and then she says and adds, “Suggestive details, hints. There’s more to everything than the appearance, and you can glimpse that if you pay attention. Look underneath, Eifre.”

You didn’t know there was anything important to be gleaned, or else you would have exhaustively searched the place. But Tlista didn’t, couldn’t have, searched exhaustively, and evidently she must have found something. What?

“The bed is empty,” you start. It’s not a question, but you find your confidence after your mother nods. “And yet, in all the rooms, there’s two chairs. There were two glasses on the kitchen table. Why, if she were living alone? The bed is big enough for two, but it’s empty, and it’s nighttime.”

“Good, Eifre. You’re almost there.”

Was there anything else to notice?

“There was a rope on the table… Does that mean anything?”

She regard you for a moment, but then she seems to give up with the cool analytic look, and says, “It’s exactly the leash you’d clip onto a animal’s collar.” She curls an antennae. “It’s one of the details that shifts this from unremarkable to suspicious. The double chairs with no other inhabitant could have been a quirk, a sentimental reminder of someone gone, perhaps. But that rope is newly‍-​woven, which only makes sense if it’s a replacement, which only makes sense if it’s something you constantly use and wear down. And the glasses? There’s still droplets in them.” Then, she waves a foreleg indicating the mess of beakers and glasses in this lab/study. “I don’t expect you to recognize any of this by scent, at least, not yet. But there are hallucinogens. Some of them alchemically produced, and recently.”

She pauses for a moment, letting you catch up with everything she’s said.

“There’s one last thing. Did you catch it, Eifre?”

“No..?”

Tlista frowns, but she doesn’t look surprised. “The shelf and the dresser. Neither of them are pushed to the corner. It compelled me to take a peek.”

“What did you see?”

“There’s a trapdoor hatch, leading to a basement.” Tlista leans closer, and brings a tarsus to either side of your face. “Do you understand why I’m asking you these questions, Eifre?”

“To test my skills as a vesperbane?”

Her maxillae twitch. “There’s something my master used to say. Intuition can’t be taught. He said, where intuition is concerned, you’re as good on your first day as you’re ever going to be.”

“That sounds…” You can’t think of a word that isn’t disrespectful to her former master.

“There were six of us. Six banelings, and only two of us‍ ‍—‍ only one of us survived to become a fiend. It’s dangerous work, Eifre, and exceeding tricky. It is, difficult to say with confidence what vespers can’t do, what you can rule out. Some of the greatest arch‍-​fiends, and the oldest scourges? They say it’s impossible to say what’s impossible.”

She steps back, and turns to pick up a bottle with a viscous red liquid inside. It bubbles and sloshes, and you’re hardly surprised that it keeps wiggly long after it’s momentum should be gone.

“I want you to be prepared for that, for a world where everything has excessive depth, and anything might secretly be your demise. When you’re on a mission, your every breath should be caution. You need to be on the look out always.”

“Was this…” Was Maune trying to…?

“No. Well, I don’t know. I’ve seeing these signs, but I don’t know what they’re point at. But we’ll find them if we step into that basement, I’m sure.”

You watch your mother, expectant, even hopeful. You’re not sure of what.

“So, Eifre, my little hero. Pretend this is your first mission. I want your judgment as a vesperbane. Do we take this,” she sloshes the red potion again, agitating it, “back to the defect immediately to heal her, or should we investigate what’s in her basement?”

You never forget anything important. You remember what Maune said.

Don’t, don’t go looking around, messing with things. You won’t understand everything you see.