“I am Small Hellishomar the Cutter,” it said quietly. “You, Lioren, would call me a surgeon.”
Chapter 16
Hellishomar concentrated its attack on an area where the skin was thin and the underlying tissues soft, tearing into the flesh with all four blades until the bloody crater was large and deep enough to admit its body and equipment. Then it closed and sealed the flap of the entry wound behind it, switched on the lighting and eye-cover washers, checked the level of the flammables tank, and resumed burrowing.
This Parent was old, old enough to be the parent of Hellishomar’s parent’s parent, and the gray rot that afflicted the aged was already well established all over and deep within its gargantuan body. As was usual with Parents, it had concealed the early symptoms so as to avoid the days of severe pain and violence that surgery would entail until the visibly growing cancers had left it unable to move, and one of the passing Smalls had reported its condition to the Guild of Cutters.
Hellishomar was old for a Small as well as large for a Cutter, but its extensive knowledge and unrivaled experience more than made up for the damage caused by the size of the entry wounds it was forced to make; and here the deeper tissues were soft so that often he was able to squeeze through a single incision rather than hacking a bloody tunnel into perfectly healthy flesh.
Avoiding the larger blood vessels or heat-sealing those that could not be avoided, and ignoring the severed capilliaries which would close naturally, Hellishomar cut rapidly and accurately without waste of time. During deep work the compressed air tanks had to be small, otherwise the entry wound would have been larger, the damage greater, and the progress slower.
Then suddenly it was visible, the first internal evidence of the growth, and precisely in the predicted position.
Lying diagonally across the newly deepened incision there was a thin, yellow tube whose tough walls and oily surface had enabled it to slide away from the blade tentacle. It pulsed faintly as it drew nutrient from the gray, necrotic growth spreading over the Parent’s surface tegument to the heart-root, or roots, deep inside the body. Hellishomar changed direction to follow it down.
Within a few moments there was another yellow tube visible on one side of the tunnel, then another and another, all converging towards a single point below him. Hellishomar cut and squeezed through them until the heart-root itself lay exposed like a veined, uneven globe that seemed to glow with its own sickly yellow light. In size it was only a little smaller than Hel-lishomar’s head. Quickly he excised a clear space all around and above it, severing in the process more than twenty of the rootlets and two thicker tubes which were the connections to secondaries. Then, taking up a position which would allow the heat and bloody steam to escape and disperse along the entry wound rather than stewing the Cutter in his own body fluids, Hellishomar attacked the foul thing with his burner turned up to full intensity.
Hellishomar did not stop until the heart-root was converted to ash, and then he gathered the ashes into a small pile and flamed them again. He followed the connector to the secondary, burning it behind him as he went, until he found another heart-root and removed that. When the external Cutters had completed their work, the fine root connections to the surface growths, severed at both ends and starved of nutrient, would wither and shrink so that they could be withdrawn from the Parent’s body with the minimum of discomfort.
In spite of the wipers that were laboring to keep the eye-covers clear, there was an increasing and irregular impairment of Hellishomar’s vision. His movements were becoming slower, the strokes of his cutting blades less precise, and the quality of his surgery diabolical. He diagnosed the condition as a combination of heat exhaustion and asphyxiation and turned at once to begin cutting a path to the nearest breathing passage.
A sudden increase of resistance to the cutters indicated that he had encountered the tough outer membrane of a breathing passage. Carefully Hellishomar forced through an incision large enough to allow entrance to his head and upper body only so as to minimize bleeding from the wound, then stopped and uncovered his gills.