ediy at the mouths of their tubes; everything was as ft should
be, as it bad always been; the army was a fantasm, the attack
a failure before it had begun
Then they were spied.
The Flosc vanished instantly, contracting violently into
their tubes. The placid humming of their continuous feeding
upon everything that passed was snuffed out; spared motes
drifted about the castle in the light.
Lavon found himself smiling. Not long ago, the Flosc would
only have waited until the humans were close enough, and
then would have sucked them down, without more than a
few struggles here and there, a few pauses in the humming
while the out-size morsels were enfolded and fed into the
grinders. Now, instead, they hid; they were afraid.
“Go!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Kill them! Kill
them while they’re down!”
The army behind him swept after him with a stunning
composite shout.
Tactics vanished. A petalled corona unfolded in Lavon’s
face, and a buzzing whirlpool spun him toward its black
heart. He slashed wildly with his edged wooden splinter.
The sharp edge sliced deeply into the ciliated lobes. The
rotifer screamed like a siren and contracted into her tube,
closing her wounded face. Grimly, Lavon followed.
It was pitch dark inside the castle, and the raging currents
of pain which flowed past him threw him from one pebbly
wall to another. He gritted his teeth and probed with the
splinter. It bit into a yielding surface at once, and another
scream made his ears ring, mixed with mangled bits of words
in Lavon’s own language, senseless and horrible with agony.