147 - Go Fetch The Others

Frobert was actually giggling to himself as he sat in his hole on the cliff.  It was so much fun.  He could ‘see’ and ‘feel’ his little rats – not a true terran animal, but a native species that was coated with a fuzz of feathers instead of fur.  Frobert’s rats were his programs, scurrying along, sniffing carrion all the way, snatching up code and devouring it, making it part of themselves... “Rats, rats, rats!” Frobert rocked back and forth as he coded, remotely, his programs spread in a lovely delicate spiderweb all around the rock-fall he’d created.   

“Come home to me, be mine! Let us make more of ourselves!”  Remote parts of corpses wiggled in the sand till they rose to the surface and Frobert, as if he had remote access, drew them together and put them into one lovely shell after another.

A half of a sandsheet, with great, gaping holes in it became a wing membrane for a mass of bird bones to cobble together a hundred skeletal flying things, some with beaks, some with teeth, some with razor talons or flakes of stone or better yet scales.  “Yes, yes, razor sharp scales that will cut disobedient flesh down to where I can talk to it!” The sandsheet's digestive juices were long dried and dead but it would still be acid, once their blood started hitting it.

He had eyebleed being walked in, in the basket-like claws of dead sickle-makers and the long jaws of war-robbers.  They didn't care that the plants ate more holes in them.  It just gave him more room to move and to create.

“Details, details!”  His masterpiece would be so lovely when it was finished.  Oh there was another weakness in the stone, his clinery could sense the gaps and flaws in the rock.  Another rock fall to trap them?  Oh, that would be so elegant!  He sent four more dead stink-tights, dragging their odour after them, into the faults, to wait for the perfect... what was this?  There were two birds on the road.

Frobert pulled his attention away from some of the finer details of his magnificent trap design to glare over the lip of his hidey hole.

“Two!  Two!  No, no, oh no, they can’t get back and warn the others oh oh you are bad!  You are so bad!  You weren’t supposed to be here yet!” He pounded his hands on his leather cushions.  “You weren’t supposed to be here until tomorrow, or even the next day!  I was told wrong.  It’s all wrong, wrong, wrong!”

Still partly under his command and half functioning, the lizard carcasses twitched, writhing in their crevasses and the secondary deadfall he’d been creating, sending the rock plunging into the canyon, right in front of the riders, making their birds panic, backing and screeching, bolting back the way they came.

“No! No! That’s wrong!  That’s BAD!” Frobert stood up, frantically pulling at his web but they were already outside it, fighting their birds to a standstill.  He stopped suddenly, hands clenching and unclenching, wanting to launch his traps at them for ruining his beautiful, beautiful set up. He struggled to control himself.  “No, no, shhh, softly... It will look natural... shhh.” He stood, trembling, soothing himself down like a rogue rat, petting and massaging the code into stillness under his thought.  He didn’t move.  If he didn’t move, they wouldn’t see him.  They’d bring the rest of the party up and start clearing the road.  That would have them nice and busy till he could close his trap, softly as a pitter’s jaws closed.

“Shhh.  Shhh.” He told himself.  “A wise pitter waits.” His breath puffed his veil out but not enough to move it, invisible on top of the canyon, in his hole.  They were talking, waving arms.  Milari.  They weren’t Lainz, even if they were dressed as Lainz.  They moved like Milari.  “Shhh.  Go and get the others,” Frobert told them. “Get the others to fix this calamity and get you through to the city.”