I was one of the first people on Earth to have seen a mud wraith, but that didn't make them any easier to kill.
"Did you see which way it went?" Clem hissed through gritted teeth as he lay on his belly in the mud next to me.
Fool! Losing the beast was one thing, but even a child knew not to make a sound when there was a wraith around.
I rolled away, avoiding the footsteps that would let the wraith track my speed and direction. Behind me Clem's hissing became more insistent.
"Williams, Williams... where the hell are you going?"
I switched to a low crawl, half-swimming through the bog, letting the brown, peaty water soak my clothes. Winters had been getting steadily colder since the infestation and a crust of ice lay over the deeper pools of standing water. I relaxed my muscles against the urge to shiver and sank deeper into the bog. It was too late in the season to worry about helix worms, but a few minutes of this and hypothermia was a real possibility.
I could hear Clem trying to follow. Even without the wraith's preternatural senses I could tell Clem was going the wrong way: disorientated, circling, sticking to the dry ground and crushing through the heather, cursing all the while. If I could tell that much then the wraith would certainly be able to home in on Clem. That was if it didn't already have different prey in its sights. The thought made my hands clench around the hilt of my makeshift sword and brought back the shivers. The wraith could be stalking Clem, or it could have left the area, or it could be right under me, sensory stalks and breathing snorkels all around me, barely visible above the mud, its dorsal claw submerged centimeters from my belly in preparation for the killing blow. There would be no way of knowing until--
Clem screamed. The sound cut short by muffled, watery thrashings as he was dragged under. That was quick; he must have crawled right into it.
I clawed my way free of the sucking mud and sprinted towards the sound of Clem's weakening struggle: long diagonal bounds between the patches of soft gorse I knew indicated the firmest footing. Behind me the rest of the hunting party had heard the attack and was crashing through the heather, but they would be too late.
Suddenly I was on it. Clem was face down and thrashing, half submerged in the bog, enveloped by a segmented spider web of gnarled thorny branches: black as bog water and nailed and knuckled by obsidian spines as thick and as long as my thumbs. It looked as if a huge, skeletal, many-jointed hand had reached up through the bog and was trying to pull Clem back under.
The mud wraith.
I drew my sword and reversed the blade, raising it above my head like a giant two-handed dagger. I slammed it down through the wraith's prothorax just under the first thoracic joint and heaved on the blade, working it back and forth inside the beast’s body. It spasmed as its thoracic ganglion was severed. Its arms burst open, throwing Clem out of its embrace in an explosion of dirty water and clods of peat.
It was a big one. Even half paralyzed, the remaining section of the prothorax above my first, paralyzing cut was as big as a man and far stronger despite its skeletal appearance. Blind from the waist down, it thrashed in search of me: arms branching fractally off each other whipped around me like tree limbs in a storm. I hewed into the spastic, flailing creature as if I was clearing bush with a machete. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Clem sprawled and unmoving.
I dodged the more directed attacks of the upper limbs; I had to get to the forebrain before the wraith submerged again.
Pain ripped through my leg. I looked down and saw a second, smaller wraith clamped against the meat of my upper thigh, spindly arms like ebony chopsticks wrapped around my leg and mouth parts scissoring through flesh. The rear segments of its thorax were still embedded in its parent.
I drew the hunting knife from the small of my back and swept the blade down my leg, straight through the juvenile’s soft chitin and then stabbed the serrated blade deep into the parent wraith. It screeched and dropped two of its remaining arms to the knife, trying to pull it free. I saw an opening and thrust with my sword. The wraith gave one last convulsion, knocking me back with enough force to throw me to the ground and then lay still.
Clem raised himself on one elbow and vomited black water. “You bastard,” he spat through threads of mucus. “You left me for it.”
I shrugged and started to saw at the miniature severed wraith head still clamped onto the meat of my thigh. I had just about got it free when the rest of the hunting party arrived.
IN APPREHENSION HOW LIKE A GOD
I watched the jet black ball roll across the room under its own power. Easy, I thought, just a motorized weight held off-centre inside the casing. Then it reached a wall and started to roll vertically up it to join a dozen or more rolling across the barrel vaulted ceiling twenty meters above. I had seen my share of dead bodies before, but none in a place like this.
The Academy’s visitors’ centre combined the bustle of an airport departure lounge with the cavernous silence of a library. People moved to and fro between the transport terminus and the fortified gates that led into the campus. Most were dressed in the color-coded robes of Academy staff but a few, like me, wore western suits or traditional Ugandan dashiki. And through and above the crowd rolled the black spheres, the æthernet nodes.
One of the beach ball sized spheres rolled up to me. It was completely featureless: a huge black pearl. It may have slid rather than rolled for all the visible cues it gave to its motion. My æthernet feed told me it was a Class III node: a sub-sentient, chattel-class intelligence designated Stromboli. A table of figures specifying size, weight, role and location (both physical and metaphorical within the organizational structure of the Academy) scrolled down my vision and I slapped more data filters in place leaving only its name hovering in dull red letters above it.
It stopped a respectful distance away and I heard its voice through my feed.
Mister Detective Conroy, welcome, it sent.
I spoke aloud and hoped the thing had auditory pickups of some kind on its flawless surface.
"Just, Detective, will do fine," I said, disturbing the silence and drawing disapproving looks from nearby Academy staff.
Yes. Detective designation not name. Apologies.
"No need to apologize. Just show me the customer."
Customer? Ah yes, customer... client requiring services of a homicide detective. Idiom. Slang. Jargon subsection, humor: corpse, body, cadaver, stiff. This way please...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Johnson is the award-winning author of In Apprehension, How Like a God (Gold Award: Writers of the Future 2011) and Taking the High Road (Grand Prize: Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest 2012). And the Lion Said Shibboleth was first published in Abyss & Apex Magazine.
Born in Botswana and raised in England he now lives in Melbourne, Australia where he works as a structural engineer and writer.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RPLJohhnson
Blog: www.RPLJohnson.com
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