Little Trades

— Taylor —

"Hold it!" Octavio shouted. "Keep that stinger under control! And pull those arms apart! Wider!" Bulwarks had the pet scorpion under control, mostly, with ropes and brute strength. The cursed creature (Could he still call it a monster after learning the monstrosity of Darkmaw?) had all its appendages pulled straight out from its body, forcing it to lay down flat. It shrieked and roared, but after half an hour of fighting, they got the beast under control while a fragment kept the darkness at bay.

Taylor, fully armored and enhanced, put his hand near the featureless eye, above where the massive nerve stem should be. It was the closest thing it had to a brain, and he wanted to test it. Maybe he could force it to sleep. Or, confuse into inaction. Perhaps it could be fooled into thinking food was elsewhere. All morning, Taylor worried at the wires that drove that thing to move and eat and lie still, without the smallest measure of success.

That wasn't to say he didn't learn anything. He found out the scorpion was a gangly puppet strung together with simple goals: to follow movement or vibration, cut living things into pieces, and shove food into its mouth. Not only did it lack consciousness and emotion, it lacked any restraint whatsoever. It didn't fear. It didn't learn. It didn't need motivation. It didn't sleep. What it did have going for it were hunger and the organs of both sexes. The disgusting thing had a nest of young growing inside of it.

Simplicity had its virtues. There was not much chance of messing with a mind that wasn't a mind at all, but a highly effective collection of hard-wired impulses. Was it a wonder that every world seemed to have a variation of the damned things?

"Put it back in the hole," Taylor said, giving up as the suffocating heat of the day crept into them. "We'll try other things tomorrow."

Taylor grumbled to himself as he shoved his body through the wall of heat to Pashtuk. If Darkmaw had been a mammal or one of several birds or cephalopods, it might have been controlled or reasoned with. But Darkmaw's kin were all mechanism and no anima.

The other giant scorpions they'd killed at Pashtuk had been preserved with prayer and feasted on when the refugees returned from Bitter Spring. For such a disgusting creature it was delicious when seasoned with a melange of mild spices and served in a sauce made from appalon butter, with fat wedges of a citrus he hadn't seen before on the side. The returning Pashtuk wept to have their garden back and relished the chance to eat the monsters that drove them out. They didn't even mind the animals they were eating had fed on their kin: Calique routinely composted their dead and then grew new food with them. The most important thing was to return their dead to the garden.

Pashtuk had given them a chapter house, similar to Dagono's, plus a larger residence next door to that. A full cadre was a lot of people to house and feed, but the people here didn't seem to mind in the least. The temple was in sad shape, so Taylor set himself to setting it right. Most of all it needed cleaning, a new holy symbol, and a fragment to light the little dome. The lapis-inlaid dome was beautiful, but the tiles on the floor had been mined through neglectful years, possibly to furnish people's homes. With Mila and Milo's help, Taylor scraped up the scraps of tile and mortar residue until they were down to the hard adobe floor.

He knew it was best not to obsess over a problem, especially when he was out of ideas. His only workable idea so far was to drop her into a hole. It would need to be a very big hole, and to that end he had Farr working on a way to measure her from a safe distance. But he still had nothing to kill her with. There were weapons he could "invent" that might do the job, like a shaped charge of high explosive, but delivery and detonation were technical problems that would take time to sort out. Even that might not be enough to kill their monster. She needed to be dead in the next few weeks, not the next few months.

Irritated, Taylor went to the market and made Mila bring along his bag of boxes. They were piling up, and he'd been intending to distribute them for a while. The simpler ones were made absent-mindedly, in a spare thirty minutes when he had to stop his mind from racing. Those were made from scraps of whatever wood was handy, cut with arts-hardened tools, and assembled without nails or glue. The arts were more effective than glue, if one knew about lignin walls and how to fuse them where one piece of wood joined another. He had a pile of the simple boxes, and his people needed minor goods for the chapter house. Included in the bag were a few of his better efforts, made to showcase a wood's best qualities and given secret compartments.

Also, trading might be fun. He'd seen it done in Pashtuk but had never taken part. Calique traded small articles all the time: a woven hat became a brooch of bright feathers, became a spool of coir thread, which sewed a doll to be traded for something else. Small decorative items were briefly loved and then traded for something new, so it wasn't uncommon to see a hairpin travel, girl to girl, week by week. One had to understand Calique culture to know which possessions were valued long-term and which were momentary fancy.

The market was just getting started when they arrived at a plaza "down the way", which in Pashtuk meant at the end of the garden near the grain fields. It was covered by an impressive bower of trumpet-shaped flowers which lent their heady scent to the proceedings. The sellers sat on the ground or low folding chairs and laid their goods on blankets. Some were collections made for trade: A reed-weaver and his baskets; A potter and his pots; A coir-weaver and her blankets. Other stations were chaotic selections of anything that came to hand.

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People greeted each other and exchanged news, but the business was largely done in silence. Sometimes the parties would talk with their mouths while their hands struck deals, the two conversations seeming independent. The older folks were especially good at carrying the two conversations at once.

Taylor needed uttar for the women, refined oil for makeup, and tea for guests. He set his sights on a local potioner and was greeted with two-handed reverence. Taylor gave the only graceful response he could, a sign for, you're welcome, although a better translation would be, it's my pleasure to give.

He sat before her blanket of goods and produced a variety of boxes from Mila's bag, while Milo watched on in amusement. The potioner was a woman in her thirties, with thick black hair braided down her back and an expressive black tail.

"How's the market today?" Two pots of uttar, for this box?

"It's the first market after coming home." Do you have others? "People are at home, with their families."

Mila produced two more of the mid-tier boxes. Good uttar wasn't quick to make, after all.

Any one of these. "Understandable. Things are not quite the same as before. I'm sure it's hard." He was thinking of all the grieving families.

"It's thanks to you we can come home at all." These two, for two pots. "Everyone wants to know when you will kill Darkmaw."

One of those, and two of these. "I thought she was taboo."

"The circle says you'll receive khartang. You're one of us." This, this, and this, she pointed at her selections. "You even act like us." She eyed Mila, dressed as a man and a hunter. All three of them wore Red Tower's colors proudly on their faces.

Deal. "We value similar things to the Calique, so it isn't that far to travel."

Two simple boxes and one mid-tear one were transferred to the potioner's blanket, and she handed him two pots of uttar. "Our breadfruit for your blood melons."

"Exactly."

"So what about Darkmaw?"

Taylor looked around him. All trade around had stopped, and people were openly listening.

"I got my first look at her last night, without her aura. I'd be lying if I said she doesn't scare me. She's bigger than anything anyone has faced in hundreds of years."

A voice from somewhere in the market shouted, "So what are you going to do?"

Taylor stood to address them. The truth was he didn't have anything concrete to tell them. He had a concept of a plan, a plan to make a plan, but they wouldn't see that as any kind of plan at all. He meant to tell them, 'we're working on it,' but that wasn't what came out of his mouth.

"I'll tell you what we're not going to do. We won't repeat Enclave's mistakes. We're not going to walk up to her with lots of arrogance and no plan. We're not going to dump her onto another Calique garden. I don't want even one more person to die to her. She's taken enough disciples, and she's taken more than enough Calique." Heads were nodding.

"But, she's too big to stick a blade in her. Her armor is too thick and she's," he spread his arms like a hunter bragging about the animal he killed, then spread them wider, and then as wide as they would go. "Well, she's just too big. Whose blade would be long enough!" He got wry laughter for that stunt. "Nobody is going to walk up to her and stick with a spear to kill her, not even Nexus disciples. Fortunately, there are many ways to kill something."

"You don't know how to kill her, do you?" The heckler was shushed and shouldered around. Hadn't Nexus killed the monsters that had killed their hunters? Let the young maul speak! What do you know, you're a builder!

"Yet!" he said, pointing at the offending man. He looked bitter and thin, his bony shoulders showing through his sand-colored fur. "We don't know how to kill her yet! But we do know she can be trapped! We can put her in a hole and keep her there for as long as it takes to kill her. Darkmaw doesn't have to die right away to set Sand Castle free; she only needs to be contained. It doesn't matter if it takes a week to finish her off or if she starves for a year. It's all the same to us, as long as she's in her hole. Right?

"Now, who has tea to trade!" He'd said too much, and he was eager to change topics. He got the tea and oil he needed, then set out his own blanket with the remainder of his boxes. He took the names of all his visitors and almost any offered trade for the simplest boxes. In return, he received a collection of things from petty to utilitarian, all of them pretty. He traded one box for a kiss, from a girl about as old as he was. He accepted because he was excited and intrigued. How would such an exchange even take place?

She hauled him up by his hand and pulled him behind the bower, then put his hands where she liked them: around her waist, near her hips, fingertips hooked beneath the edge of her keratin plates. Thus anchored, she proceeded to kiss him greedily until his breath ran out and his head spun. She slipped away from him and ran to her clique of giggling girlfriends, box in hand.

His best box, the one with hidden compartments that sprang open at a secret touch, bought him a wide tin serving dish with intricately hammered designs of running appalons. He could feed a dozen guests from it without shame.

Taylor was happy with his haul of wares for the chapter house. They unloaded everything and put them in the built-in cubbies in the storage room. The serving platter was displayed in the main room, as Taylor had seen other families do. Alice and Inez entered for the shift change as he was admiring his acquisition.

"Someone is happy," said Alice, "did you get a good deal?"

"He did," Mila informed her, "but that's not why he's grinning. It's all the kissing he was doing."

"Really? Details!"

"It wasn't all the kissing," Taylor groaned, "it was just one girl."

"Sure," laughed Milo. "But she kissed you a lot. I think she kissed you for as long as it took you to make that box."

"Mmmmm. He was gone a while." Mila nodded approvingly.

"Stop it." Taylor realized he was grinning so hard he couldn't stop, and his face was starting to hurt. "Milo got everything he needed for spiced havendish. And we got the other things from your list. So it was productive."

"That's lucky," said Alice cheerfully, "because Anisca has invited doyennes for dinner."