Page 62 of The Book that Broke the World

Three other skeer made slower impacts, the chitin spikes of their feet tearing gouges in the baked mud as they tried to stop in time.

Wentworth turned and, with a casual swipe of his paw, hauled one of the fallen runners through the barrier. Arpix couldn’t describe it any better than Salamonda had. The cat was somehow huge, so that the skeer was a mouse in his grasp, but also... just a cat. The two competing realities coexisted in Arpix’s mind long enough for the skeer to be pulled through.

The insectoid disintegrated in the process. Rather as if it had been pulled, or pushed, through the bars of a prison cell. The mess of armour fragments and ichor, along with pale, flopping internal organs that resembled fish guts, fell in a noxious heap, with pieces spreading a few yards into the forbidden zone.

Jella dry-heaved, and the sound, combined with the sight that had prompted it, caused Arpix to do the same.

“Another!” Clovis called weakly. “Again.”

Evar came to stand beside Arpix. “What did we learn?”

Arpix straightened up. He wasn’t sure they’d learned anything of use. They knew for certain now that it wasn’t just a compulsion, and that breaching the perimeter had almost immediately fatal physical consequences. Which was good, since otherwise the skeer could simply have catapulted unwilling members of their hive into the encampment. Though whether any of it was any use...

Jella came to stand beside them, hugging herself. “Did that skeer die for a reason? We shouldn’t just be killing them for nothing.”

“Sometimes you just have to ask questions,” Arpix said, “and hope that the answers reveal something unexpected.”

“What answers are you going to find in that lot?” Salamonda came across, both arms full of dusty, purring cat. She looked disapprovingly at the scattered remains.

“I’m not sure.” Arpix forced himself to look at the mess he’d made.

“It will make them hate us even more.” Jost’s voice carried a cracked note of hysteria, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. “They’ll bring more horrors to hunt us out of our tunnels. Like men use ferrets to core a rabbit warren.”

Arpix didn’t think the skeer hated, but Jost could well be right about the result, hate or no hate.

“Is it me?” Evar loomed over the humans, his growls silencing anything else Jost had to say. “Or does that skeer look different now?”

“Of course it looks different, brother.” Kerrol corralled the humans from the other side. “It’s been turned inside out.”

“I mean the heap, idiot.”

Arpix narrowed his stare. For a terrifying moment he saw what Evar meant and thought that somehow the skeer was piecing itself back together. But it wasn’t that. Though something had changed.

It was the oldest of the bookbinders, a hunched and grey-haired man called Nortbu, who seldom made any comment, that saw it. “It’s drifting,” he said.

He meant drifting like sand was said to, out where the dust grains put on weight and got to be called something else. And, unlikely as it seemed, it appeared that Nortbu was right. It was as if the remains were being very slowly swept up by an invisible broom or powerful unfelt wind.

“It’s being pushed back towards the boundary,” Arpix whispered.

“Good.” Meelan gave a small shudder of revulsion and turned away.

“Don’t you see?” Arpix looked around at the others.

“I do see.” Sheetra turned away too with a shrug. “It’s ugly.”

“Get me the bowl!” Arpix barked it as a command. The others, unaccustomed to his tone, all moved to obey, though it was Jella who hurried all the way to the hollow and returned breathlessly with the largest of the precious bowls they’d recovered from the workings.

Arpix went forward, holding the fragile dish of fired clay in both hands. He felt painfully aware of the shifting ranks of skeer only yards ahead of him, a multitude of emotionless black eyes focused on him, all of them coldly wanting his destruction. He found himself trembling, and at the same time glad that the skeer, despite their collective cleverness, never seemed to have adopted missile weapons, since any of them should have been able to crack his skull with a thrown rock.

Arpix knelt and, trying not to retch, scooped the most juicy-looking chunk of the pallid internal organs into his bowl. The skeer had a dry, unhealthy reek to them under normal circumstances; when torn to shreds they had an acrid pungency that kept trying to turn his stomach inside out.

“Arpix!” Salamonda called out. “Not the food bowl!”

“Sorry...” Arpix backed nervously away from the thronging skeer. With ten yards between them he turned and hurried back to kneel at Clovis’s side. “I’ve got it!”

Clovis eyed his gift dubiously. “A bowl of offal? Is this a traditional love token among humans? A canith would at least have brought something he killed himself. But you are small and—”

“It’s not a love token. It’s a key.”

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