The gate opened.
The guard’s hands were still shaking when he pulled the latch, and he kept his eyes fixed on the ground the entire ti, not daring to look up. Lena walked through without another word.
The estate grounds were wide and well kept. Stone paths cut between manicured hedgerows, and the main building sat at the far end of a long approach, three stories tall with wide windows and a roof that curved slightly at the edges in the demon architectural style she was still getting used to.
It was a style that favored weight. Everything looked like it was built to last longer than the people inside it.
A servant was already moving toward her from the entrance steps before she was halfway up the path.
"Sir Ollen is expecting you," he said, giving a short bow. "Please follow ."
She followed him inside.
The servant led her through a wide corridor lined with mounted displays, hunting trophies mostly, heads of things she didn’t have nas for yet, and then through a set of heavy wooden doors into a receiving room.
The man standing at the far end of it turned when she entered.
Ollen was older than she had expected. Late fifties at least, with a wide fra that had gone slightly soft at the edges but still carried the posture of soone who had spent a significant portion of his life outdoors doing difficult things.
His hair was cut short and had gone fully grey, and his face had the particular weathered quality of soone who frowned in direct sunlight often. He was wearing a dark green coat over a plain shirt.
He looked at her for a mont when she walked in.
Then he looked at the ceiling briefly, like he was asking sothing of it, and then back at her.
"You’re the one Prince sent," he said.
"I am," Lena said.
"You’re younger than I expected."
"I get that a lot."
He didn’t smile exactly, but sothing in his expression shifted slightly in that direction. He gestured toward the chairs arranged near the center of the room and moved to take one himself. She sat across from him.
A servant appeared with tea before either of them said anything else. Ollen waited until the servant had gone before he leaned forward and set his elbows on his knees.
"How much did Prince tell you?" he asked.
"Almost nothing," Lena said. "He said you had a pest problem affecting your livestock and that it had beco serious. That was the extent of it."
Ollen exhaled slowly through his nose. "Pest problem," he repeated, with the tone of soone who found the phrase inadequate. "Yes. That is one way to describe it."
He picked up his tea, looked at it, and set it back down without drinking.
"It started about four months ago," he said. "Small at first. A few livestock found dead near the eastern grazing fields. Wounds were strange, not clean like a predator kill, more like they had been eaten from the outside in. Dozens of small bites layered on top of each other. We assud it was so kind of vermin in the tall growth out there, sothing that ca out at night."
Lena nodded and said nothing, letting him move at his own pace.
"Then it spread," Ollen continued. "Within a month it wasn’t just the eastern fields. It was moving west. We started losing animals faster than we could account for. And the thing was, you almost never saw them doing it. You’d leave an animal at dusk and co back in the morning and half of it would be gone. Whatever was feeding, it was fast and it moved in the dark and it moved through the tall grass and the undergrowth like it wasn’t even there."
"How many are we talking?" Lena asked. "When they co out."
Ollen’s expression shifted. "That’s the part that makes this different from ordinary vermin." He paused, choosing his words carefully.
"We’re not talking about a handful. The first ti my n got a clear look at them, they counted over three hundred in a single swarm. And that was early on. Now the numbers are larger."
Lena was quiet for a mont. "And what do they look like?"
"The ones we have caught or killed, they look like thick pale worms. The length of a forearm, maybe slightly longer. They move fast for what they are. They don’t have much strength individually, one on its own is not a threat to anything that can fight back, but they don’t co alone." He paused.
"They don’t co in groups of ten or twenty either. We’re talking hundreds at a ti. Pouring out of the tall growth like water. By the ti you see them it’s already too late for whatever they’ve targeted."
Lena set her tea down. "And the bodies?"
Ollen’s expression darkened. "That’s when it beca a real problem. About six weeks ago they stopped limiting themselves to living livestock. They started going for the dead as well. Carcasses we hadn’t yet cleared. Animals that had died of other causes. And that is where the business side of this becos critical." He looked at her steadily.
"Veth’s primary inco is not farming. It is processing and trade. Hides, bones, preserved at, rendered materials. All of it depends on intact carcasses being moved through our facilities quickly and cleanly. These things are getting into the storage areas. They got into the main processing house twice last month. We lost an entire week’s worth of product both tis."
"So it’s not just a livestock problem," Lena said.
"No. It is an economic problem. And it is getting worse every week." He folded his hands together. "My people can manage the symptoms. We burn the grass back, we post guards, we clear the affected areas when we can. But it doesn’t stop. Every ti we clear one area they co from another direction. They’re not sothing you can drive off because there’s always more of them."
Lena looked at him. "Because sothing is making more of them."
Ollen t her eyes. "That’s what my n believe. And there are rumors." He leaned back slightly.
"The workers who operate near the outer edges of the affected zones, the ones who haven’t refused the work entirely yet, they talk about sothing larger. Sothing glimpsed moving deep in the growth, far back where the undergrowth gets dense enough that you lose the light even at midday." He paused. "They call it the Worm Mother."
Lena turned the na over in her head. A breeding creature. It made sense. The numbers didn’t add up any other way. No natural population sustained this kind of pressure on its own without sothing at the center of it producing faster than the losses could accumulate.
"What do your n say about it?" she asked. "The ones who’ve seen it."
"Only that it’s large," Ollen said. "And that it doesn’t move. The sightings are always from the sa general direction, deep in the eastern growth. Always stationary. Whatever it is, it isn’t hunting."
"Because it doesn’t need to," Lena said, thinking aloud.
"The ones on the surface do that for it. It stays hidden and it produces and they spread outward in search of food and bring it back or consu it where they find it." She looked at him.
"You can clear the outer swarms as many tis as you want and it won’t matter. She replaces them faster than you can kill them. The only thing that actually ends this is killing her."
Ollen was quiet for a mont. "And how do you find sothing that stays that well hidden?"
"You don’t search for her directly," Lena said. She was still working through it as she spoke, pulling the logic together. "You look at where the swarms are concentrating. Which direction they’re pulling from, how the patterns shift over ti. She’ll be sitting at the center of all of it. The swarms aren’t random. They’re spreading outward from a single point." She paused. "Find the point and you find her."
Ollen studied her for a long mont. "You reasoned all of that from what I just told you."
Lena said nothing. She wasn’t entirely sure where that had co from either.
She stood, and the chair scraped quietly against the stone floor. She looked toward the wide window at the far side of the room.
"I’m going to need to see the affected area," she said. "Not the estate grounds. The outer fields. The growth. Whatever zone your workers are too afraid to enter after dark."
"Let’s see this problem in real ti."
Reviews
All reviews (0)