The Roach God

The six were where the courier had said they would be, and Sacha had the column moving inside the hour.

He did not consult on that one.

There was a version of the arrival that involved holding underground another day and scouting the wet ground properly, and it was the version he would have chosen a month ago, and he rejected it in under a minute for reasons he could state cleanly:

the courier had walked four days on a bad leg to deliver a position, the six holding it had been holding it for four days without relief, and the nine young had not eaten in eighteen hours.

Sixty-one bodies came up out of the ground into wet air at the third hour before dawn, in blocks, nursery in the middle, and did not stop moving until they were under brick.

The position was better than he had any right to expect, and he understood why within a minute of reading it, and the understanding was not comfortable.

It was a collapsed section of old wall — brick, not concrete, fallen in a way that had left a wedge of dry space beneath it perhaps twenty lengths deep, with three approaches, all narrow, all readable from inside.

The seep ran along the outer face.

The rot was thirty lengths west.

It was, in other words, exactly the kind of ground Sacha would have chosen, selected by somebody who had spent three months watching him choose ground and had then gone out and done it alone, faster, in unfamiliar territory, with seven people and no time.

I taught it that, he thought, and then, because he had been getting more honest with himself lately:

No. I did that in front of it forty times and never once explained why. It worked out the why on its own.

The six were thin and functional.

They had held three approaches for four days with six bodies by simply not sleeping in any pattern an observer could read, and two of them had the specific flattened alertness Sacha remembered from the back end of double shifts.

He put them off the line before anything else, over the objection of one of them, and had the Essaim take the approaches.

The objecting one was the senior — a Cerci from the sharpened deep-ground generation who had been running the north approach for four days and did not want to hand it to somebody who had arrived that morning.

Sacha had never named her.

He had never named any of them except Khrr, and the reason was not sentiment or oversight: naming sixty individuals is an act with consequences, and he had understood from the first week that a god who names a thing has decided that thing is a person, and that he could not afford sixty of those.

He had been telling himself that for three months.

Standing in front of a roach who had just refused to simply agree with him, he recognised it for what it had always been, which was a policy that made his own arithmetic easier.

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Vek, he decided, and did not say it aloud, because there was nowhere to say it and no one to say it to.

He put it in the same place he kept the eleven-day-old and the two soft Carapace:

a private ledger of things he had done that nobody would ever read.

Sacha overruled her and then, because he had been getting slower to leave things unexplained, did something he would not have bothered with a season ago:

he laid out why, in scent, badly, in the four or five marks the drill grammar allowed.

You have held four days. The Essaim have held none. If something comes at hour six, I need the tired ones rested and the fresh ones in place, not the reverse.

She read it.

She held position a moment longer than compliance required — long enough that Sacha understood he was being assessed rather than obeyed — and then went off the line.

He filed that.

His people had started checking his reasoning.

He was fairly sure that was the single best thing that had happened to the colony since the fold, and equally sure that it was going to make his life considerably harder.

Then he went and looked at where Khrr had been taken.

It was forty lengths north of the brick, in the open, and there was almost nothing to read.

Almost.

He worked it for two hours with the two best Cerci and assembled what there was.

Khrr had gone north alone.

That was the first thing and it was not in dispute — the six had been under the brick and had seen it go, and the outbound trail was single and unhurried. Sacha filed that and did not let himself have a reaction to it yet.

Second:

the meeting had not been an ambush.

There was no scatter, no defensive circling, none of the churned substrate that a fight leaves.

Two sets of marks approached from the north, stopped at a distance Sacha measured three times because he did not believe it — nine lengths, which is a conversational distance, not a hunting one — and stayed there long enough to leave a settled impression in the damp.

Third: Khrr had walked toward them.

Its own trail closed the gap.

Nobody had come and got it.

Fourth, and the reason Sacha spent the second hour on his own after sending the Cerci back:

the return trail north carried three sets of marks and one of them was being carried.

Not dragged.

Carried, in the balanced two-bearer configuration his own nursery relays used, by two bodies that knew what they were doing.

So it went out to meet something, it talked, and then it stopped being able to walk.

He turned the four facts over and did not like any of the stories they made.

The best one went:

Khrr went out to meet something, established that it was not hostile, agreed to go north, and was carried because it was injured or exhausted rather than compelled.

That story had one hole in it and the hole was fatal — Khrr would have left a mark.

Nine nights of laying legible scent forty lengths out, and it had not written a single line to the six under the brick before going north with strangers.

Khrr, who had written a full set of contingency directions on a wall fifteen days before anybody could possibly have needed them.

Which left the worse stories.

That it had not been given the chance.

That it had been given the chance and had judged that leaving a mark would endanger the six.

Or that it had left one, somewhere, and Sacha had spent two hours reading the wrong forty lengths of ground.

He went back out at dusk and read the ground again.

He found nothing, which proved nothing, and he made himself write that distinction down properly instead of letting the absence settle into a conclusion.

What did it go north for, he asked the senior of the six that evening, in the flat grammar of a report rather than an accusation, because the last thing this colony needed was a god who arrived and started assigning blame in the first day.

The answer took a while, and it came in pieces, and the pieces were worse than a clean answer would have been.

It went every night, the six’s senior marked. Nine nights. Out forty, sometimes sixty. Back before light.

Doing what.

Marking.

Sacha stopped.

Show me.

What it showed him, on the underside of a fallen brick where nothing casually passing would read it, was a scent-mark in Khrr’s hand — the drill-grammar, the private one — laid in a careful, legible band.

It was a border.

Khrr had spent nine nights marking a perimeter around a piece of ground it had chosen for a colony that had not yet arrived, in a private language, forty lengths from the Ninefold Mother’s outer markers.

It had been claiming.