145 - Wrath Shall Rise Up Stinking

There was a whistle from the road in front before Ky could follow up on that.  “Oh good,” da said as he and Ky straightened up to make the birds slow down to a walk. “It’s very hard to have a conversation like that with every word getting ripped out of your mouth.”

Ky was glad to hear the whistle calling for a rest from up front, the acknowledgments from behind and behind and to the side.  Side riders, having to slog along through sand off the road always tended to lag.

There was a terran patch of scrub showing alien green that would provide enough shade for everyone to get down and let the birds rest.  The ribbons of terraforming all along the roads were clear as a whistle to anyone with eyes.  Grass was a human plant and all its varieties of greens were both strange and restful to human eyes, though the birds absolutely adored it and tended to wallow in it if allowed.

Da passed Ky a water bottle.  “You were saying?” he said.

Kyrus sighed.  “I don’t know.”  The stop had knocked some of his concerns clean out of his head. His new bird flung itself on its belly, swinging its beak back and forth over the striped grass, making tiny purring noises; silly sounds for a bird that big.  “This is so weird.  Da, I just wanted an honourable life and now I’m going to Lainz with the da I thought was dead, who is married to the guy I hated for supposedly killing him... the guy who is now my stepda.  We’re both somehow transformed into siwion of Lainz and all of a sudden we’re being attacked by people we don’t know because we’re too close to his-dying-Radiance, a great grand-da I never in my wildest dreams thought of...”

Da’s veil twitched.  “Me either, son.”

Kyrus flung his hands up.  “Da, what are we going to DO?  We aren’t trained to be siwion or kraganzh! What the owner’s diseased left testicle are we going to DO?”

**

Frobert, chatting to himself, stopped on a cliff-edge and regarded the road cut.  The ancient engineers had left the road fairly level and had apparently melted the rock down to the plane of the road. "Lovely, lovely death all around... very thick here, close to the wadi."

It turned just after a pinch-point where the walls narrowed, a perfect place for debris to have naturally built up.  A rock fall just there would make things all but impassible, especially until his darlings arrived from their hiding places.

A dead lizard... a stink-tight or something like that... rose out of death and wiggled over into a crack that could never have accommodated its living body.  A bit of rock vanished out from under the boulder and even as the lizard burst itself apart pushing, the cliff groaned and granite smashed down dragging a jumble of pine, yucca and creosote down to jam across the road. An orange splash of broken bloodburst had somehow managed to tangle itself through, scattering thorns down the road from the rockfall.

“Excellent,” he said to himself.  “A few rolling sages to make it look less raw...”  He enjoyed talking to himself when he was creating.

“I have a few big darlings to call and thankfully one of them flies.”  He clicked through his mnemonic beads to remind himself of the corpses he’d catalogued with desert bugs all through the early night walk.  “My beloved targets will just be fresh from the wadi... from sleeping... other travellers will be nicely mixed in... no one will realize that they were my patron’s target.  Hmmm. Hmmm. Oh, yes there’s a lovely, wrathy nest of dead peacock snakes.  Their venom will have dried but still enough to drive people and birds nice and tight against that charming pocket of mine... hmmm hmmm.  There’s a half a dozen pieces of sand sheets buried along behind me... oh lovely... I’ll be able to get those spike mice bones to make some walking bloodburst plants... hmmm.”

He scratched along the edge of his loin cloth where cluster fleas had bitten him.  “I’ll call up my lovely bones up out of the sand, shells and bits and teeth and fangs!” He laughed to himself.  “I’ll have claws and jawbones and yes, cluster flea larvae all of it all of it, all of it!”  He glanced around at the suddenly wiggling ground all around him.  “Right here, my darlings, I will be right here to direct your rage at being dead!”