Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

green gloom that passed for night in the Nursery. She hopped deliberately across the luminescent scum-smeared surface of the vonduun crab bog, her attention on her footing as though she scavenged tide pools.

Jacen’s jaw locked.

He looked down again at the wound in the slave’s belly: a long curved gash, not too deep. The slave’s skin was pink, shading angry red at the lips of the wound; the slave shuddered when Jacen pulled the lips apart. The wound was superficial, only seeping blood—he could see soft tallow within, not hard red muscle or the webbed bulge of gut, and he nodded to himself. “You’ll be all right. From now on, stay away from the amphistaff grove.”

“How—how can I?” the slave whined. “What choice do I have?”

“There’s always a choice,” Jacen muttered. He scratched his head: his hair had grown out enough to start to curl. It was caked with greasy dirt, and it itched—though not as much as the thin, patchy teenager’s beard that roughened his cheeks and neck. He glanced back up at Vergere.

She was closer now, weaving through the fungal colony mounds of young oogliths. He hadn’t seen her since his first day in the Nursery. That had been, by his best estimate, weeks ago.

Possibly months.

He teased open the mouth of a bulging sacworm that lay on the ground beside him, and stuck his hand inside. The clip beetles that filled the sacworm’s belly attacked his hand savagely; Jacen waited until twenty or thirty had clamped their mandibles into his skin, then pulled his hand out and let the sacworm’s mouth snap closed once more. The clip beetles bristled like a knobbed insectile glove. He used his beetle-gloved hand to pinch the slave’s belly wound together. With his free hand he tickled the head joint of a clip beetle until its jaws opened; then he pressed the beetle along the wound until its mandibles engaged once more, clipping the wound together. A quick twist of his fingers snapped off the beetle’s body; its head remained in place.

It took twenty-three clip beetles to close the slave’s wound. He gently disengaged the living beetles that still clung to his hand and returned them to the sacworm, then tore strips from the lower edge of the slave’s robeskin to tie around his middle in a makeshift bandage. The robeskin and the strips alike bled milk from their ripped edges: a sticky resinous blood that glued the strips together and healed them in place.

“Try to keep it dry,” Jacen told him quietly. “And don’t go anywhere near the amphistaff grove until it heals. I’m pretty sure they can smell wounds. They’ll cut you to ribbons.”

This amphistaff grove was very different from the one he had found on the worldship at Myrkr; those had been shaped, altered, domesticated. Tamed. The amphistaff grove in the Nursery was the original, the baseline. Nothing about it was tame.

The amphistaff polyps in this grove ranged from one to three meters tall: deep-rooted mounds of leather-fleshed tissue, each with two to five muscular nodules from which sprouted triads of juvenile amphistaffs. Amphistaff polyps are sessile carnivores; the juvenile amphistaffs act as the polyp’s arms and weapons, spearing, envenoming, and eventually dissecting a polyp’s prey into chunks small enough to be swept into the polyp’s fist-sized groundmouth. They will kill and eat any living thing. Only the vonduun crab, the amphistaff polyp’s sole natural enemy, can approach them in safety, protected by the shallow curve of their impenetrable topshell.

“But—but if I’m sent,” the slave moaned. “What then?”

“The slave seed-web is only hooked into your touch-pain nerves. The worst it can do is cause pain,” Jacen said. “The amphistaffs will kill you.”

“But the pain—the pain—”

“I know.”

“You don’t know,” the slave said bitterly. “They never make you do anything.”

“They don’t make you do anything either. They can’t. All they can do is hurt you. It’s not the same thing.”

“Easy for you to say! When was the last time they hurt you?”

Jacen rose, looking away toward Vergere. “You’d better get some sleep. They’ll turn the sun back on soon.”

Muttering, the slave dragged himself away, moving toward the rest of the slaves. He didn’t say thanks.

They rarely did.

Except when the slaves brought their wounds for him to treat, they barely spoke to him at all. They avoided him. He was too strange, too unlike any of the others, and he wasn’t easy to talk to. He walked among them in a permanent bubble of solitude; no one wanted to get too close. They feared him. Sometimes they hated him, too.

Jacen bent down and swept up a handful of the headless beetles. While he watched Vergere approach, he cracked their abdominal shells one by one between his thumb and first knuckle, scooping out the pale purple flesh. Clip beetle flesh was high in protein and fats, and tasted like Mon Cal ice-lobster.

It was the most appetizing thing he ever got to eat.

Vergere picked her way among the sleeping slaves. She looked up and met his eye, smiling, and gave a flickering wave with one hand. Jacen said, “That’s close enough.”

She stopped. “What, no hug? No kiss for your friend Vergere?”

“What do you want?”

She got that wise smile and opened her mouth as if she was about to give one of her cryptic nonanswers, but instead she shrugged, sighed, and the smile faded. “I am curious,” she said plainly. “How is your chest?”

Jacen touched his robeskin over the suppurating hole below his ribs. His robe had healed weeks ago. Even the bloodstain was gone. He suspected that the robeskins lived on the secretions of the creatures who wore them: sweat, blood, sloughed skin cells, and oils. His was large and healthy, even though he continually ripped strips from it for bandages, both for himself and for the wounded slaves he treated; it always grew back to the original length within a day or two.

His chest, though—

Looking at Vergere, he could feel it happen once more: the bone hook slicing in below his ribs, curving up to