Íde

All my soreness is gone. I can feel the soles of my feet start to slick with blood. But I don’t care. The bee spoke to us.

She’s almost imperceptible in the underbrush, bumbling in slow, lazy hops between plants and trees. That said, she is tiny, and we are not, and when she arcs gently over a particularly gnarled tangle of brush or a sudden unexpected pool, I’m forced to swerve my attention between not losing her midnight-black body against the darkness of the Bloom and not losing my own footing on the treacherous forest floor.

I trample vines and stones and I do not lose the bee. Branches and vines slap at my exposed face. The Pathfinder is pacing me, breathing heavily.

I can hear her buzzing. She isn’t speaking. But she is expecting us to follow her.

When she had landed gently on my coffee cup, I’d intended to swat her away. Fatigue had sapped my reflexes. By the time I had raised my hand to remove her, the look of incredulity on the Pathfinder’s face had stopped me. I had glanced down at the finger-sized bug, the tiny dark jewel, and had felt the realisation seize me.

She’s a buzzing thing roughly halfway between an oil-slick and a bee, and her edges are malleable and flickering. I can’t quite focus on her flickering edges, even when she had perched on my finger to stare up at me. And after she had taken a tiny sip of my coffee, she had invited us, in a buzzing soprano, to follow her home. First in, I assume, Thalaami. Then in a language it took me a moment to realise was an archaic form of Irdcheol.

We chase her, slowing from a dead sprint to a cautious scamper as we crash deeper into the Bloom. I lose sight of her for a moment, and a fistful of panic wells up my throat. The Pathfinder shoves past me, and I follow him, shielding my eyes with my arms as he charges directly through a thicket of great thorned ferns. His delicate finger points to some inscrutable patch of darkness, and I pray to the Saints that he knows what he is doing. At the edge of my hearing, I can still hear her buzzing.

Now, after bumbling deeper into the midnight depths of the Bloom, I realise it's not quite a buzz. The sound saws across my ears, leaves my eyes watering. My brain feels chapped.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. I let my thoughts syncopate to the rhythm of the bee. Bees? I can see them, suddenly, dazzling midnight bodies flitting through fog and fungal blossoms. We slow to a walk, and follow this steadily building swarm, mesmerised. Through a break in the trees, I spot stars in the sky above us, and the scintillant coils of the aurora.

There! There. In a clearing ringed by surprisingly ordinary looking palm trees. An immense pale boulder. Or, not a boulder, but a skull- cracked and enormous. If it were ten times smaller, it could easily be human. Whatever ape or monkey it belonged to, I’m glad we didn't see one on our march through the Bloom. Bees the size of my eyeballs crawl over its bleached surface, clogging its yawning sockets with sable honeycomb. In this clearing, the bees hum like the air before a tempest, maintaining a pitch just under unbearable. Muted throes of sunlight burst through the canopy at strange angles, catching the glittering swarm as it seethes over their yellowing hive The Pathfinder makes a hand sign when he reaches the edge of the clearing, shaking his head. His nose is bleeding. He doesn’t follow.

Writhing insect bodies scuttle and squirm in rivers over the immense and pitted bones. It's only when I’m within five yards or so of the appalling skull that I realise how many bees there are. The Pathfinder watches, stonily, from the edge of the copse, knuckles white around his machete.

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He had mentioned before, during one of our short conversations in the meat-tree, that the bees wouldn't harm us. I wonder how he could possibly know that. My tongue lies thick in my mouth, dry despite the humidity, and I walk towards the skull and try to get the bees’ attention. I clear my throat and speak.

"Hello?"

The hive bristles, but remains lethargic and imperious. If they heard me, they're ignoring me.

"Hello."

More confidence, this time.

Still nothing.

Well now it's getting insulting.

"Hello."

The bees detonate from the skull in a thousand-strong a humming that envelops me in seconds. Insects coat my body like plumage, drinking the tears from my eyes, scurrying through my clothes and hair. The last thing I hear before the sawing noise of endless buzzing overcomes me is the Pathfinder's frantic shout: "Don't bite! Don't bite!"

Is he talking to me, or to the bees? They're inside my mouth, perched on my tongue. They sample the words that die in my throat. I retch, helplessly, feel them cover my eyes and ears. There’s a moment of panic when I realise that there’s nothing keeping the bees from crawling down my windpipe and nesting in my lungs. Then they start talking.

I’m expecting some sort of higher thrum, a glimmer of falsetto foreign syllables like those of the bee who had spoken in earlier. As a chorus, the swarm speaks with a human voice. At first it’s hard to pick it out from the twitching flight, but the buzzing finally ebbs from a crescendo to a drone. They’ve moved away from my ears, and evacuated my mouth. But they cover me completely. Every second I feel tiny convulsions as my body is covered in a twitching, quivering mass of armoured wings and oily, segmented legs. Antenna tickle my eyelashes.

"Outsider! Remarkable! It’s been a long time. You taste gorgeous." They sound so satisfied. "Why are you here?"

I reflect that I am not entirely prepared for this question. I’m hardly in a position to lie.

Honesty seems as good an option as any other, and I’ve never been very good at bending the truth. All I omit from the story, told falteringly as little skittering legs brush my lips, ears, and eyes, is Colt & Tumble’s motive, or what they did in the past. I really don’t want to lie to the bees.

After I finish, the buzzing swells to a crash before dissolving into a bearable hum. A markedly different voice emerges from the swarm, somewhere around my nose. Are there perhaps different factions in the hive?

"Debt! Bizarre. You keep much from us. Hidden things? Give us hidden things?"

Its words chime my flesh. Meaning bolts into my heart. When I gasp, a bee flicks from my lips, irritable. Their bodies form a mass around me that pulses, once, and I understand for the first time how strong they are. Strong and ravenous.

They’re starving for secrets. I thought I told them the entire story, but they want something from me, something else. I’m reminded of stories of Yvreathe’s Saints. Conversations within conversations, performance pieces that have little to do with the discussion at hand, yet mean everything. I wonder if these bees, these talking miracles of the Shorn Peak, are descendent from the Saintly epoch, and if they too are drenched in myth. If so, I hope they don’t share the same detached, pathological mercilessness of the Saints. Or their sad, doomed destinies.

I couldn’t hide anything, even if I wanted to. When the bees chatter and thirst, I don’t just hear them in my ears. It’s like they’re living in my head as well, chasing my thoughts. I tell them the only secret that I can think of. That I don’t think I’m good enough.

The swarm thrums, like a beating heart. Sated bees depart from my shaking body. The ones on my lips are the last to alight, word-drunk, and these stragglers sag woozily in the air. I’m quivering, suddenly free of the weight of thrumming chitin.

Then they return.

This time, they don’t settle on any part of my body. They land on my hands and alight instantly, and a tiny, slick wetness grows on my palms. A black droplet has appeared, deposited from the first of a twisting queue of patiently waiting bees. They descend upon me, and minute by minute fill my cupped hands with oil and sable honeycomb.

Just before they are done, a pair of bees land on both of my ears. I stiffen.

“Outsider! Thank you. Not a very well hidden secret. But from the heart. Take heart. You are mistaken. Take heart! Cousin covets and keeps the sojourner. Egregious. A boon for you. A boon from us. We taste greatness on your heart. Take the boon. Be careful. It will come if you need it, in dark and drowning places.”

They end their speech with a pair of smouldering syllables. I hear the first, but cannot say it. The second one they say with their blood, or their skins.

I convulse, stomach suddenly inverted, biting in a scream as that word chars my ears and thoughts. My skull creaks, then smoulders under the weight. Thinking is like burning. My flickering heart swells like tallow.

Tears evaporate from my weeping sockets. When I shudder my eyelids open, the acrid sting of the faint light is blinding. At first, I can only see the black muck clutched in my splayed hands, and the smoking corpses of two thumb-sized bees. Violet sparks crackle gently on their bodies.

The swarm is gone, retreated inside the enormous skull. My vision sharpens until I can see the Pathfinder, gawking from the forest’s edge, blood trickling from his nose. I give him a weak smile and take a single stumbling step towards him, cradling the honeycomb with my hands.