59 - Encaustic Moths and Mordant Ants

Diryish looked down at the ball of bees, no longer spasmodically convulsing. His hands were gentle as he lifted mats of bees from his arms and head and neck. “Shh. Shh little sisters. You did your job. I’m safe. I’m safe.” 

He felt odd speaking to the bees but even more odd if he did not and he'd been speaking to the bees for many, many years. They responded to his voice and spiralled up in a misty cloud, heading for the outer hive once more.

The room was hot, almost glowing as if someone had lit a brazier immediately beside the bed. The centre of the ball of bees was dead. As the outer layers dispersed, like buzzing fog, the mass fell apart, gems and gold trapped in the centre clinking and chiming as cool air hit them. The abdomen was a melted puddle of goo. The pearl pieces lay scattered, trash in the midst of brittle, disintegrating bees but not for long. The live bees came to clear away their dead, leaving the mess of gem chips, cracked glass, tarnished metal and melted atomizer scrupulously alone on the bedside rug.

He drew in a deep breath and whispered a request. A dozen bees circled up and darted away. As he sat, the hive outside began fanning hot air out of the bedroom, letting in the cold from outside. The temperature in the room had dropped by the time a phalanx of glittering little Mordant ants swarmed in from the balcony, completely ignored by the bees.

On their tiny amber heels, Mariush slipped in from the secret ways that honeycombed the Sunrise Loggia.  She looked a bit green, over her translucent face veil, having been woken up but she was the closest of the investigative programmers.

“Diryish are you all right?”  She knelt on the edge of the rug where the remains of the spider lay, setting her wax lamp to cast its light across the remains of the ruined assassin machine.

“I’m fine.  The hive protected me.  The alarms were set off the instant it moved from innocuous things to that.” He pointed with one knob-knuckled, beringed finger.  “I sent for Shashi as well.”

Mariush nodded, not looking up from where her jewelled ants were hard at work laying the various gems and broken, melted pieces out on the rug.  “Good.  Maybe this time we can find out which owner’s-smegma stain has been trying to kill you.”

“Now, now.”  That was Shashi, bare-faced, in her sleeping gown, ghosting up into Diryish’s bedroom as quietly and secretly as Mariush had.  “Mother would be horrified at your language.”

“Only because she didn’t say it first.”

Shashi sank down to the floor next to her friend, but looked up at Diryish before she opened up to help Mariush try to ferret out the programming behind the attempted killer.   

“You need to stay out of this, Uncle.  Your deenay would contaminate the sample since it was targeted on you.”

He waved a hand.  “I shall be content to watch your expertise.  I’m not a young warrior who insists he can fight all battles all by himself and am resigned to delegating what I am not good at, Niece.”

She smiled at him and called up her programming machines, the tiny black Encaustic moths.  They drifted down to where Mariush’s ants worked.

Where the moths landed, they tasted with their feet and not every gem that had made up the mal-spider hissed or smoked in pin-holes and were hauled to one side by the ants.  At last there were no more reactions and Shashi sat with her arms wrapped around her middle. Mariush held her shoulders and for a moment they rocked together, moths resting on the backs of ants.

Shashi took a deep breath and opened her eyes to find Diryish holding a honeycomb to her.  “It was hard, I take it,” he said.

She accepted the honey and wax and bit into it, slurping to catch the dripping sweetness.  “Whoever it is, is good.  I could follow the programming bits left but they were burning even as I tried to catch them.  No surprise that they are your deenay, Uncle.” She touched a burnt opalene.  “This was a gift from General de M’olf.”  Her finger moved over to a fragment of emerald necklace.  “This was from me, but my protections for you were overwritten with other code to make it part of this.  I am not trying to kill you Uncle.  Daddy would never forgive me.”

Diryish let a trace of a smile cross his face.  “If you were trying to kill me, Chicklet, I’d be dead by now because you are competent.”

“Oh, Uncle...”  But she didn’t smile back, licking her fingers clean and taking a cloth from Mariush.  “This pearl was a gift from General Emrad, and I checked it out as safe myself.  I remember Daddy giving it to me as a test, but Emrad died seven years ago and this isn’t the same programming that my father and I both cleared.  I could tell that even as it’s rotting in place.”  She paused.  “There’s a single deenay sequence driving the whole thing but it is crashed and burned. I can’t tell even the sex of the programmer.”

“It’s all right Chicklet,” Diryish said, and turned to Mariush.  “Did you decode anything, my dear?”

“Two things, Diryish,” she said softly.  “Firstly, the chemical reaction to create poison was out of two separate fluids, neither venomous.  I believe it was two of your perfumes.  It was someone who knows you that well so I guessed and tried to match Zivrush’s signature programming style to it, but it wouldn’t work.  That’s the second thing.  It wasn’t your vizier behind this attempt.  That’s all I can tell.” 

The Encaustic moths flew up like a sooty veil in the wind, settled onto Shashi’s night robe, around the neck and cuffs, becoming only decorative beads and embroidery once more, even as Mariush's ants clambered up and resumed their guise as veil weights.

Mariush pulled a handkerchief embroidered with both Mordants and Encaustics, ants and moths both, out of her sleeve.  “I’m going to give you this, Diryish.  I know the hive is protecting you but let me add ours to that.”

He took the square of cloth softly and kissed it.  “Thank you my dears.”  Then he hung it on the veil hook where so recently she had hung her veil.

“We’ll report to Mother, but you can trust that no one else will know about this, until Daddy does,” Shashi said. "I have a plan or two to try and catch our Eight Hundred Spined snake."

“I am safe in my sisters’ hands,” he said and laid himself down again.  “You and your babies should get some sleep if you can.”

Mariush snorted.  “Shashi is the one being kicked open from the inside.  This little one is still too tiny to be fractious.”

He smiled but didn’t open his eyes.  “Good night.  I believe that is called a hint.”

Shashi had the bedside rug bundled around the spider trash.  Mariush had her lamp. She sighed loudly.  “That Uncle of yours... sleeping, sleeping, sleeping... all the time sleeping...”

“Go, before I hurl a pillow at you.”

“Yes, your Radiance.”

I ache so badly that I almost wish the spider had succeeded.  I’m tired.  But the city still needs me, worn out old mechanism that I am.  The paper is now coming from Trovi.  The problems with free-flowing, non-fading ink are finally being worked out.  We will have printed books soon.  Printed pamphlets.  Libraries.  But not yet.