“What’s going to destroy the thing?” asked Abasio.
“You don’t need to know until later,” said Precious Wind. “Those who need to know do know.”
The thing that had been the Old Dark Man had made itself a lair in an old mine tunnel, almost at the top of the rise, south of the river Wells. The falls was only a short distance away, and the thunder of it shook the place where he spent the daylight hours but the sound did not disturb him. Nothing could disturb him. The part of him that thought was caught in an endless loop. His body, his self, required that he do procedure A. Each day his body, his self, would try to do procedure A. Hours would be spent trying to do procedure A. His body, his self, was unable to do procedure A. His body went by default to procedure B, and more hours would be spent without doing procedure B. Default to procedure C, to procedure D. . .
The list of procedures numbered over a hundred items, but the error feedback mechanism did not allow the loop to get any longer than five items, the same five, over and over. When one was done, the loop would go back to the first one. The only thing he felt was a hideous, weakening hunger that demanded to be fed, but he couldn’t be fed. His body was unable to recognize “feed,” though the creature recognized it as something Mirami and those who had come before her had done. They had had to be fed. After he grew them as infants, he required a thing called a wet-nurse to secrete food and put it into their mouths The Old Dark Man had not done it himself, but back then, when he had been created, he had been given the instructions, he had observed the procedure. Later he had observed the making and feeding of solid food.
When the hunger began, when he could not find the Old Dark House, when he could not find his cocoon—that was what it was called in the schematics: his cocoon—he had tried the procedure as he had seen it. He had taken flesh, his usual nourishment, and instead of putting it into one of the maintenance tubes as he usually did, he had put the flesh into his mouth. His mouth was a weapon. It had no way to swallow, to digest, to nourish. It could bite, tear, but it could not swallow. If he could find the Old Dark House, he would find his cocoon. If he could find his cocoon, he could find Mirami or Alicia, he could rip flesh from one of them and put the flesh into a certain place in the maintenance tube and put the tube in his cocoon. Then he could lean back into its embrace and be fed, satisfied, comforted, maintained.
Each time the loop got to that place, he tried again to find the Old Dark House, find the cocoon, find his flesh providers, Mirami, Alicia. There had been others, before them, but all the ones before them had died. Gone. Without the Old Dark House he could not create others. Failing to find their flesh, he tried to put other flesh directly into the receptacle in his side where the tube connected, but it did not work. The flesh hung there and rotted. Either the flesh was wrong or the device was needed. It was the same when he tried to drink. There was no way out of the cycle. He had not been given a way out of the cycle. He could only follow it through to the end. Procedure E.
Procedure E required him to kill something. That he could always do. Killing was the only procedure he could achieve, the only satisfaction that momentarily stopped the hunger. For a moment. Only a moment. But once he had killed, he was back at procedure A again. The hunger started over.
He had observed Alicia. She had been like him. She was more like him than any of the others had been. She, too, had used killing to stop the hunger, but killing had never stopped her hunger for long. How many others had there been? He could not remember. Many. Many. Most of them like Mirami. Adequate to use for food.
Most frustrating of all was the presence of another program. He knew it was there. He could feel the program like a pressure, pushing on him. It was readying itself for use when the situation warranted, when an optimum target presented itself. Optimum target. Priorty One target. Data concerning the optimum target still came in. Data was still processed. The time was growing shorter. When that time came, the loop would stop. He would come out of the endless hunger into reasoned action! For a time he would not hunger, would not thirst, would not feel all that painful strangeness that was now his daily life. When that time came, he would be himself again. Utterly invincible.
Until then, he hungered. The hunger possessed him. He put back his great head, dropped his huge jaw, and howled. The howl went out across the world and everything with ears heard it, collapsed, and shook with uncontrollable terror.
The three wagons from Woldsgard followed the pattern established by the single wagon that had gone before. They traveled quickly almost to Riversmeet. They stopped there. In early morning when the creature rested (two red rockets) they moved out, went quickly onto the road and as fast as possible to Eastwatch Tower, arriving there before the creature moved again. At two rockets in the morning, the wagons moved out. Precious Wind and Xulai walked beside the wagons, dropping things along the way, things that smelled of Tingawa, of themselves, of the warriors who had attacked the creature in the Old Dark House, who had destroyed that house.
“Dead birds,” cried Xulai, moving a feathered body away from the road with her foot.
