The new Held rose, bowed ironically, and began to speak, setting forth the changes that were already made.
iv
Raen lived.
She discovered this fact slowly, in great pain, and on the verge of madness.
That she was Meth-maren, and therefore no stranger to majat at close quarters . . . this saved her sanity. She was naked. She was blind, in absolute darkness, and disoriented She suffered the constant touches of the Workers the length of her body, wetness which worked ceaselessly on her raw wounds, and over all her skin and hair; an endless trickle of moisture and food was delivered from their mandibles to her mouth. Their bodies shifted above and about her, invisible in the dark, with touch of bristles and grip of chelae or mandibles. They hovered, never stepping on her, and their ceaseless humming numbed her ears as the dark numbed her eyes.
She was within the hive. No Kontrin had ever gone within a hive, not since the first days. The Pact forbade. But the blues, the peaceful blues, so long Kethiuy’s good neighbours—had not cast her out. Tears squeezed from her eyes. A Worker sipped them instantly, caressing her face with feather-touches of its palps. She moved, and the humming at once grew louder, ominous. They would not permit her to stir. Raw touches on her wounds were constant. She flinched and cried out in agony, and they hovered yet closer, never putting full weight on her, but hindering each movement. The struggle, the needed co-ordination, grew too much. She hurt, and surrendered to it, finding a constant level for the pain, which finally merged with the sound and the sense of touch. There was neither past nor future; grief and fear were swallowed up in the moment, which stretched endlessly, circular.
She was aware of Mother. There was a Presence within the hive which sent Workers scurrying on this mission and that, to touch her and depart again in haste. In her delirium she imagined that she sensed the touches of this mind, that she was aware of things unseen, the movements in countless blind passages, the logic of the hive. She was cared for. The dark was endless, the touches at her body ceaseless, the sound only slowly varying, which was like deafness, and the touches became numbness. It was, for a long time, too difficult to think and too hard to struggle.
But from the latest sleep she wakened with a sense of desperation.
“Worker,” she said into the numbing sound, on a delicate balance of returning strength and diminishing sanity. “Help. Help me.” Her voice was unused, her ears so long assaulted by majat-song that human words sounded alien in her hearing. “Worker. tell Mother that I want to speak with her. Take me to her. Now.”
“No,” said the Worker. It sucked up more air and expelled it through chambers, creating the illusion, if not the intonations of human voice. Other sound fell away, Workers pausing to listen. Worker harmonised with itself as it spoke, the chambers all working in intricate combination. “Unnecessary. Mother knows your condition, knows all necessary things.”
“Mother doesn’t know what I intend.”
“Tell. Tell this-unit”
“Revenge.”
Palps swept her face, her mouth, her body, picking up scent. Worker could not comprehend. Majat individually had their limits. A Worker was not the proper channel for an emotional message and Raen knew it, manipulated the Worker with confusion. She had been cautioned against it from infancy, Workers going in and out of the labs, near at hand: never play games with them. Again and again she had beard the dangers of disoriented majat. It might call Warriors.
It drew back abruptly: she suddenly missed that particular touch. Others filled the gap, constantly feeling at limbs and body.
“It’s gone for Mother?”
“Yes,” one said. “Mother.”
She stared at the blind dark, hard-breathing, euphoric with her success. She moved her hand with difficulty past the hindering limbs and palps of Workers, felt of her wounds, which were slick with jelly . . . tested her strength, moving her limbs.
“Are there,” she asked, “azi within call?”
“Mother must call azi.”
“I shall stand,” she declared, rationally, firmly, and began to do so.