Asgard's Heart

33

As the monstrosity hauled its ugly body through the gap I saw that it wasn’t a centipede after all. The abdomen was rounded, a dull orange in colour and very hairy, and there were only a dozen legs sprouting from the segmented thorax. The creature had huge wings that gleamed brilliantly in the light of my headlamp; they were translucent save for the ribs that patterned them, and the way they refracted and reflected the light gave them a multicolored sheen. Under other circumstances I might have taken time out to appreciate their prettiness, which contrasted markedly with the extreme ugliness of the body that bore them, but things being the way they were my attention was monopolised by the great gawping eyes and vicious jaws. The jaws were glistening with some kind of mucus, and the palps on either side of the mouth were writhing like white worms.

I struggled reflexively, but I was wrapped up so tightly that all I could do was rock gently back and forth, like some pendulous fruit stirred by the wind.

I didn’t scream, but I think I may have whimpered a bit.

The last thing I wanted was to attract attention to myself, so I stopped struggling. I wondered whether I ought to switch off my headlight—I could still reach the control with the tip of my tongue—but the idea of being in total darkness with the monster wandering around was unbearable.

The thing made straight for me. It didn’t waste a single glance on any of the other prisoners. Despite the sense of imminent doom which I had, I was paradoxically glad that I wouldn’t have to watch it eat something else, anticipating my own fate while I watched it rip some moth-like thing apart with those slavering jaws.

The jaws in question reached up toward my face as the thing scrambled over the giant eggs which littered the floor of the nest. The horrid head was level with my chest, and as the jaws came apart I formed a dreadful picture in my mind of my head being squashed between the pincers, the skull-bones crumpling about my brain.

But the jaws reached on a little further than that, and snipped like a pair of scissors—with surprising delicacy—at the threads by which I was suspended. Before I had time to fall the creature reared up on half a dozen of its back legs, and grabbed me with the four front ones, hugging me to its chitinous bosom as though I were its long-lost child miraculously recovered from evil kidnappers. Then, without delay, it turned back on its tracks and scuttled as fast as it could— which was not very fast, given that I was such an unwieldy burden—for the doorway.

“Rousseau!” said Susarma Lear, her voice sounding very loud in my ears. “Rousseau, for Christ’s sake, what’s happening?”

“I’m alive,” I told her, though I was unable to muster an appropriate tone of exultation. “I guess I’ve just become the prize in a little game of rob-the-larder. I’ve been scavenged.”

The nest-robber hustled through the opening in the wall of the chamber and hurled itself out into space, still cradling me in its forelimbs. I tried to turn my head, because the light reflected from the polished golden plates of its thorax was dazzling me. I wished I hadn’t. The robbery hadn’t gone unnoticed, and beyond the thin neck of the creature that had snatched me was a great tumbling shadow. My headlamp wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate it all, but I got a fleeting impression of enormous size and of a spiderlike head even uglier than the head of the beast that had me in its grip.

I suppose we flew, after a fashion, but it felt like falling, as if the nest-robber were diving as steeply as it could to avoid its vengeful pursuer. As my head twisted I caught brief glimpses of other shapes hurtling past—the trailing tips of the branches of the gargantuan trees which grew on the shell that surrounded Asgard’s starlet. We came too close to some of the branches, reeling in mid-air as the wings of my captor touched them. It swerved to avoid them, but not very successfully, and I treated myself to a brief moment of macabre humour by wondering if the giant fly which held me had qualified for its pilot’s licence.

For fully fifty seconds the scavenger out-dived its pursuer, and I had just about decided that perhaps it had got away with its raid when our barely-controlled fall was rudely interrupted. It wasn’t the pursuer that got us, though—it was something which had been waiting on one of the tree-branches, ready to catch anything which happened to be passing. When I recovered from the shock of the collision I saw immediately that something had wrapped itself around one of the segments of my captor’s thorax, less than ten centimetres away from my helmet, between the fourth and fifth limbs.

The something was thick and wet and very rough, and I guessed immediately what it was. It was a tongue, and it was hauling my temporary custodian into a mouth so vast that it seemed to my befuddled brain that one could easily lose a whole microworld down there. But I only got the briefest glimpse of the pink wet throat and the dark tunnel that presumably led to a vastly cavernous stomach and an acid ocean of digestive juices.

Mercifully, the thing that had stolen me from the nest chose that moment to drop me. I didn’t for a moment suppose that it had done so for any altruistic reason, and I credited my release to its instinctive urge to concentrate all its resources on a hopeless effort to save itself, but I thanked it anyway—or would have if I could have mustered the breath to speak. My throat was so tight I couldn’t even whimper any more.

Susarma Lear and 673-Nisreen were both trying to attract my attention, complaining—politely, in the Tetron’s case; but with some asperity on Susanna’s side—that I was letting them down by not taking the time to tell them what was happening. But I really didn’t feel capable of offering them an adequate running commentary.

I fell—and this time there was no doubt that I was falling as freely as anything could, with no wings at all to bear me up. I wondered, absurdly, whether the stuff that was wrapped around me was elastic enough to let me bounce, provided that I didn’t fall on my head. I was under no illusions about what would happen if I did fall on my head. Low-gee or no low-gee, the most important bit of me would be a sticky red smear on the surface of the starshell.

Then I was caught again—grabbed in mid-air with an abruptness which shook me up badly. It wasn’t as bad as hitting the ground, but it was enough to jar my brain inside my skull and knock me dizzy. For several seconds I wasn’t in a position to see or feel anything at all except the kinaesthetic display of my own miserable discomfort.

When I could see again, I thought I was right back to square one, because the thing that had me in its grip now was the monster that had pursued the nest-robber in that lunatic helter-skelter dive. I could see all of its hairy spiderlike head, which had black eye-spots here there and everywhere, and vast hairy mouth-parts. It clutched me tightly between two foreshortened forelimbs, with four great fingery tentacles wrapped tightly around my trussed-up torso.

“Rousseau!” complained my two-man audience, avid for news. “What’s happening?”

“I fell out of the frying pan,” I yelled—not knowing quite why I was yelling—"and now I’m in the fire!”

And then, abruptly, my stomach turned over again. It wasn’t because we had changed direction again, but because we had actually stopped. We were quite still, not because we were hovering, but because we had landed. Beyond the ugly head I could see the edges of the vast wings, which were vibrating gently. I tried to crane my neck around, to see if we were on the ground, or merely perched on a branch, but I couldn’t turn far enough.

I looked up into that huge unfathomable face, wondering which of those many eyes were focused on me. I didn’t know whether or not dinnertime had finally arrived, or whether the monster was just taking a breather before flying back up to return me to the larder, but I was just about past caring. It didn’t really seem to matter much any more.

The tentacles placed me very carefully on the ground, feet downwards, but didn’t let go. If they had, I’d have fallen over. Then something very weird snaked round the side of the monstrous head, and poked at me. It was long and thin and silvery, and for a moment I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what it might be. Then it began to slice through the threads that bound me, neatly and with awesome efficiency.

“Zut!” I whispered, in sheer amazement. “I think the bastard’s friendly!”

“What?” said Susarma Lear. She wasn’t shouting any more, and neither was Nisreen.

“I think I made it,” I told them, realising as I was cleverly released from my uncomfortable confinement that I really had made it. The pursuer that had pounced on the nest-robber hadn’t been an outraged victim of theft—it had been a would-be rescuer. No doubt it had been a predator among predators when first it got involved in the little melodrama, but it must have been the one predator that was taken completely by surprise by its prey. This beastie had managed to snatch the agile box which was carrying the Nine’s most versatile daughter, and instead of a square meal it had bought itself an artificial parasite which had run half a hundred synthetic nerve-lines through its chitinous hide to hijack its entire nervous system. The stupid monster had never had much of a mind of its own, but now it was under the dominion of a brain far superior to any other in this entire ecosystem.

Within a couple of minutes I was free, though the circulation to my feet had been inhibited and I found myself temporarily unable to stand up. I sat down on a woody ridge of some kind, and rubbed my ankles enthusiastically.

I explained to Susarma Lear and Myrlin what had happened, and told them to find a safe place to wait. “She’s got some way of homing in on us,” I said. “She can hear us even though she can’t talk back. She’s still in control of the situation. The monster’s taking off again now, Nisreen—I think it’ll come after you, this time. Don’t panic when you see it. Just let it bring you down. In no time at all, we’ll all be together again. We made it. It was a close one, but I think we made it! Hell and damnation, I think we’ve made it!”

My exultation died as quickly as it had come when I remembered, suddenly, that some of us hadn’t made it. Urania, who had been carrying Clio when she jumped, hadn’t been as lucky as me. Whatever had grabbed her had been looking for an instant meal instead of something to save for the little ones. Even Myrlin, whose giant size had presumably made him the tastiest morsel of us all, had found his fighting prowess inadequate to the slaying of such dragons as inhabited this vile region of Asgard’s inner space.

I looked around then, more soberly. I could still savour the triumphant sensation of having reached the legendary Centre, but there was a bitter undertaste that spoiled the experience. I also looked around for a place to hide. The flying spider which had Clio’s brain-box perched on its back couldn’t stick around to look after me, because it had more urgent work to do. It had saved me from two nasty fates, but there might be any number of greedy things lurking in the woods at ground zero, and I hadn’t so much as a dagger with which to defend myself.

There wasn’t much in the way of undergrowth down on the forest floor, and there didn’t seem to be anything too big or too terrible wandering around between the radiating root-ridges of the trees, which extended in every direction, fusing together wherever they met. The impression I got when I shone my light around was that the actual surface of the starshell was covered in a deep carpet of woody tissue, interrupted by very many pits and crevices of unknown depth.

I found a flat place that was as far from holes and cracks as I could manage, and crouched down, trying to keep a lookout in every direction. What I would do if anything hungry and vicious emerged from one of the pits I wasn’t entirely sure, but I was certainly ready to fight. Having come this far, I wasn’t about to be intimidated by any humble vermin from the local Underworld.

I waited patiently for the party to be reassembled. Although we had lost Myrlin and Urania, Clio was still in the game, fighting with all her electronic might. Even if 994-Tulyar and John Finn had made it past the flying nightmares, we were still four-to-two superior, and we had the cleverest player on the field. We still had to find a doorway into the starshell, but in the space of half an hour I’d come all the way back to the land of the living, having earlier been written off as so much sandwich meat stored in readiness for a birthday party. I felt as though I was on a miraculous winning-streak.

The Centre of Asgard, where the answers to all the puzzles in the universe were waiting to be discovered, seemed to be mine to possess, and I was irrationally convinced that nothing could stop me now.