“They’re certainly more intelligent seeming than those we’ve encountered thus far.” Valla leaned past Victor, peering down the long, gradual slope of the tunnel toward the two huge insectoid guards. Guards they clearly were—standing still, armored, holding weapons as their shiny-carapace-covered heads swiveled left to right, ever alert. Victor had stared at them for a long while, using his excellent Quinametzin vision to discern details in their appearance. He’d convinced himself that the insects, with their four bulky arms and long, scorpion-like stingers, were similar enough to the ivid that they must be the same species.

The similarities were most apparent in their faces and torsos, though the weird metallic nature of their chitin made it a little hard to see. It was the eyes that really made Victor sure; they were identical in shape and number—five slightly ovoid eyes on each side of the “nose,” all of them narrower at one end and getting wider away from the cluster. More than the shape, their eyes had the same weird iridescent shimmer over the predominantly black color. “Do we try to talk to them?” He didn’t see a way to sneak past them, so, in his mind, it was either fight or talk. Or talk, then fight.

“If they raise an alarm . . .” Lesh grumbled, leaving the rest of his concern unspoken.

“So, we can try to murder them quickly or speak to them.” Valla’s choice in verbiage wasn’t lost on Victor. Did her using the word “murder” mean she wanted to try a more peaceful tactic?

He wasn’t one to play guessing games. “You think we should try talking?”

“Yes, but first use your scope.”

Victor snapped his fingers, grateful she’d remembered the device that he constantly forgot. He pulled the little brass and glass device out of his storage ring and pointed it at the ivid guard on the left. Immediately, a soft yellow aura bloomed around the creature. Victor pointed it at the other one, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the yellow aura on that one was a little darker. “Yellow.” He hadn’t used the scope since he’d been on Fanwath, and everyone there gave him green or blue responses. He turned the scope on Lesh, having never tested it on him, and found that he, too, had a yellow aura, though much paler than the two ivid. Victor handed the scope to the dragonkin. “You try.”

Lesh held the little scope, comically small in his big, clawed fingers, to his eye and peered down the ramp at the two ivid. “Orange and . . . dark orange, almost red.” He handed the scope to Valla, and she held it to her eye.

She stared for a long while, then lowered the scope and said, “Deep red.”

“Darker than me?”

“No.” She pointed the scope at him, double-checking. “You’re so red it’s almost purple.”

“Am I to believe this device has determined that those creatures are more powerful than I?” Lesh didn’t sound happy.

“It’s not really that exact. I don’t know what it measures—maybe just total Energy or something simple like that. Still, we can bet these two pendejos are going to be a lot tougher than the bugs we’ve fought already.”

Valla sighed, shaking her head. “We should try to reason with them. If they can communicate, we might save ourselves much trouble.”

Victor nodded, twisting Lifedrinker in his fists while he thought aloud. “It’s not really that I’m afraid to fight two tough guys, but I doubt we could kill them quickly, not before we made some noise, anyway. I’m sure they’d call for help. Could we take on another ten bugs that tough? What about a thousand? Who knows what’s through that archway? Why does it look like daylight?”

“We’ve slain their kin. Will they even speak with us?”

“Good question.” Victor shrugged. “Be ready to try to kill them as quickly as you can. Charge up your best offensive ability. Try to look intimidating.” Victor looked at Valla and Lesh, nodding. “I’m going to take on my full size and cast Iron Berserk. Hopefully, they’ll be more willing to talk if they think we could pose a threat. Ready?”

Valla’s eyes began to shimmer with silvery-blue flashes deep in their depths, and a charged breeze picked up around them, ruffling her feathers. “I’m ready.”

Lesh’s chest expanded as he inhaled and stood up straight. Belagog, gripped firmly in both hands, began to smoke and drip caustic green liquid to the tunnel floor, each drop sizzling and sinking into the hard, smooth stone. “I am ready.”

Victor turned and started walking down the slope. “Okay, chica. Get ready.” He channeled his Sovereign Will into strength and vitality. He cut his connection to his Alter Shape spell, expanded to his full, nearly ten-foot height, and cast Iron Berserk. His body surged with power and hot, potent, rage-attuned Energy. His vision tinted to crimson, and he swelled massively. His armor shivered and clanked as it grew with him, his boots and pants strained against his bulging proportions, their resizing capabilities not quite as robust as his finer gear. The tunnel resounded with his further steps as he, faintly flickering with red, rage-attuned Energy, stalked down the pathway toward the two ivid guards.

They noticed him almost immediately, and though something like half a mile of tunnel separated the insects from the trio, they stepped toward each other, crossing their long, metallic polearms, clearly signaling their intent to stop anyone from passing through the archway. As Victor approached, despite the rage smoldering in his chest, held in check by his iron will, he felt heartened not to hear any outcry. It seemed the guardians would wait and see what sort of threat Victor and his companions posed.

As he descended and the ivid grew more prominent, he began to realize the perspective he and the others had enjoyed, looking down the long sloping tunnel, had been misleading. The tunnel grew gradually wider, and Victor realized the archway leading into the brightly lit area was much bigger than he’d thought. He was still a few hundred paces from the ivid, and he could tell the tunnel opening was something like a hundred feet high, making the ivid standing before it nearly his fully berserk size.

“They’re huge,” Valla whispered, walking behind and to the left of him. Lesh was on his right side, and he could feel the tension in the dragonkin’s posture—if there were hundreds, thousands, or millions of ivid like these two, then the adventurers were in way over their heads. It was hard to see beyond the two guardians through the bright opening; some kind of haze hung in the air behind them, making the air translucent but blurry, obscuring whatever was in the brightly lit space. Victor thought it must be some kind of magical warding, something to keep prying eyes, mundane or magical, from seeing what the ivid were up to at the heart of their hive.

The guardians’ posture became more and more threatening the closer they got. By the time Victor was a few dozen yards away from the giant insects, they were hunched forward, their polearms—long metallic bars with enormous, triangular spear tips on one end—held menacingly high, ready to be swept down or thrust forward. Their many eyes were trained on Victor, and he could see a kind of Energy pulsing in them, a smoky gray, shimmering aura that hinted at deep wells of power. Victor stopped thirty yards from the enormous, bright archway and cleared his throat. “We seek an audience with your rulers.”

He still held Lifedrinker in his hand, and he made a show of lifting her to his shoulder and allowing his harness to snatch her out of his hand so she sat snugly against his back. As soon as he did so, the two ivid noticeably relaxed, their posture straightening slightly, the angle of their weapons moving away from Victor. “Put your weapons away,” he said. He heard Valla’s sword slide into her sheath and the clunk of metal on stone as Lesh lowered Belagog. The two ivid straightened further and moved their weapons back together, forming an X before the archway but no longer threatening the trio. “Can you speak?”

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His query was met with silence as the two insectoid guardians continued to stare. Lesh spoke, his voice rumbling softly in the enormous passageway, “Perhaps they simply respond to threats. Could we pass if we don’t exhibit any hostility?”

“We could try . . .” Victor took a step forward, but then something happened behind the crossed polearms of the two guardians. The air shimmered, and with a soft pop like a large soap bubble bursting, a much smaller ivid stepped out of the archway. This one was similar to the “hive attendants” they’d seen on their way down through the endless tunnels. There were significant differences, however, starting with the fact that it was clothed in shimmering gray, silky robes and carried a long rod of transparent rose-colored stone.

In a clicking, rasping voice that made the hairs on Victor’s neck stand up, it addressed them, “Do you understand this one?”

The statement took Victor by surprise. He’d expected many things, hostility being the most likely in his mind, but this hadn’t been on his list. “I understand you.”

“This one was created to speak to you.” It stopped speaking words and clicked and hissed oddly for several seconds. After staring at Victor through its ten eyes for several seconds afterward, it said, “You cannot understand our language, but it is far superior. Can you not learn?”

“Um,” Victor glanced at Valla and Lesh, neither offering him any help. “Not easily. Can we keep using this language, please?”

“This one can speak this language. Why do you trespass?” The smaller ivid, about the size of Valla, stepped forward directly under the arch of the two giant guardians’ polearms.

“We didn’t know our presence wasn’t allowed.” Victor figured he wasn’t exactly lying—they knew the ivid would attack intruders, but he hadn’t known they were smart enough to understand trespassing. He thought it was just an automatically defensive posture.

“The hive is for ivid. Many hiveless have entered, only to be consumed and added to the record. From those memories, we have constructed this one to speak to you. Would you like to join the hive? Would you like your memories to live in the record?”

“No!” Valla said before Victor could wrap his head around the weird question.

“Then why do you come? It would benefit the hive to add you to the record.”

“We seek an artifact and will trade in kind,” Lesh rumbled, stepping forward.

“Knowledge, not artifacts, makes the hive stronger. We can take knowledge with your memories. Why will you not join the hive? There is no strength in the individual, no continuance.”

“While your hive is glorious,” Lesh said, “We owe our memories to others on a distant world. There is no threat to your hive here.” He gestured to Victor and Valla, then to himself. “We will leave, and you will be stronger for our visit.” Victor had to hand it to him; he seemed to have grasped the idea of how to talk to the hive emissary rather quickly.

“What artifact do you seek? Only recently have we begun to clothe and arm these ones.”

Lesh looked at Victor, raising his scaled eye ridge in question. Victor shrugged and spoke up, his voice booming in the tunnel, “We want one of your eggs that never hatched, one of your dreamers.” The insect didn’t react but stood unmoving for several long moments. Victor was starting to wonder if he should say something more, but then it lifted its crystal rod, tracing a strange pattern in the air. A disc of shimmering light appeared, floating in the air before the ivid. It lifted one three-fingered hand to the disc, shifting it so its eyes could peer through it at Victor and the others. Was it examining them somehow?

“We will trade one of our sleeping children for one of the female's eggs and a sample of the males’ seed.”

Victor felt his rage flare, felt his fists clench, and he gathered his breath, ready to tell the damn bug-man off, but then Valla’s cool fingers gripped his wrist, squeezing, reminding him that he wasn’t there alone. Before he could speak or react further, she said, “May we discuss your proposal?”

“Yes. Hiveless must communicate with sounds or script. This, we have learned.”

Valla tugged Victor’s wrist, leading him down the tunnel further from the three ivid. When they’d put another fifty feet or so between them, she said, “We have to think about this rationally.”

“I don’t like the idea that these insects will have my seed to experiment with,” Lesh growled.

“I mean, same here. But worse, how the hell will they take one of your eggs, Valla?” Victor hissed, trying to whisper but struggling to contain his emotions. He contemplated dropping his Iron Berserk to push the rage out of his pathways.

“Victor,” Lesh said before Valla could answer, “use your scope on the speaking insect.”

Grimacing with frustration, Victor did as he asked, summoning the scope from his ring and pointing it at the diminutive ivid between the two hulking, metal-plated guardians. At first, he thought something was wrong, that the ivid wasn’t showing up, but then he realized what it was—the hive representative had an aura so thick and dark that it looked like a shadow, a hole in space between the two guardians. Dread crept into his chest, pushing the rage back, summoning tendrils of fear-attuned Energy from his Core. He didn’t have an instruction manual for the scope, but something deep in his gut told Victor all he needed to know—this thing was an order of magnitude more potent than he was.

He pushed the scope back into his storage container and, with a cold shiver threatening to cancel his Iron Berserk before he was ready, said, “That thing’s a lot more powerful than the others.”

“What color?”

“Black. Like a hole in the universe.”

Lesh grunted. “So, we should eschew violence. It seems willing to bargain. Perhaps we can negotiate different terms.”

“Any ideas?” Victor glanced back at the ivid as he waited for Valla and Lesh to think it through.

Lesh rubbed his chin, tapping a sharp claw against one of his hanging canines. “I have some treasures from my various conquests. I have a Kothid ravager pincer. Perhaps it would be interested in another insect species.”

“I have some things, too.” Victor’s mind went to Dunstan’s crown, still sitting in the hotel room back on Sojourn. He might have killed two birds with one stone if he'd brought that along. He reached to his chest where the key hung, the one with the silver globe that would expand into a room, its purpose unknown to him. It seemed stupid to bargain with things he didn’t understand. “I have the hide from the lava king I was awarded. I think it’s worth a lot. Also, the legendary magma-attunement gem.”

“They may be interested in such things.” Lesh nodded, then looked at Valla. Victor followed his gaze, looking into Valla’s distant eyes. She realized they were looking at her, and she smiled, shrugging.

“I don’t think they’ll want objects. If it’s an egg they’re after, is that so much to ask? We want the same from them, after all. If it will save Edeya, I’ll give one up.” She pressed a hand to her abdomen, and Victor could only imagine what was going through her mind. The idea of some weird, powerful insect hive wanting her genetic material, wanting to take an egg from her ovaries . . . He shook his head, hating the thought of it.

“Just a minute.” Victor turned and stalked toward the ivid emissary. He knew Valla’s bloodline was special; he knew Lesh, too, had potent ancestry. Victor was Quinametzin, though, and if the bugs had to pick one of them to sample, his pride wouldn’t let him believe they’d choose either of his companions. He stopped a dozen paces from the ivid and, with a deep, firm voice, said, “We want one egg. You can choose one of us to sample.”

“A moment.” While the ivid stared into space, Victor felt Lesh and Valla step beside him. Valla took his thumb in her much smaller hand, holding it. Thanks to his constant inner heat, her skin always felt cool, and he felt his rage slipping further from his pathways at her touch. Some part of him knew he wasn’t going to fight, and it was harder and harder to keep his Iron Berserk stoked. As he wrestled with the urge to let the spell slip away, the ivid began speaking again in its unsettling, clicking, hissing voice. “This one will guide you to the queen. Your companions will be fed and housed during your absence.”

It didn’t wait for a response. In perfect unison, the two guardians lifted their polearms and sidestepped away from the center of the bright, shimmering passage. At the same time, the emissary turned and walked back through the hazy curtain of light. “Chingado,” Victor hissed, looking down at Valla and then at Lesh. “Do we go in?”

Valla sighed, shaking her head. “We must. Thank you, Victor, for being protective of Lesh and me, but I hate that you’re once again risking yourself for me.” She didn’t look happy as she let go of his finger and stepped into hazy air.

“My thanks are without caveat, Lord Victor,” Lesh rumbled, stepping after Valla. Victor, frowning, annoyed that Valla was annoyed, followed them. The air felt normal. The haze didn’t smell, wasn’t moist, and didn’t sting his eyes—it had to be some kind of magical screen. The bright flare of light forced him to shield his eyes as soon as he’d stepped through. As they adjusted to the brightness, he couldn’t help the exclamation that slipped through his lips.

“What the fuck?” He stood atop a hillside with a long stretch of smooth, glassy-brown roadway leading down toward a massive, sprawling city of smooth, stone towers. A yellow sky with a glowering orange sun hung overhead, and beneath it, as far as he could see, stretched roads and buildings. He could see thousands and thousands of the ivid moving around down there, traversing the streets, walking in and out of the buildings. Most of them were bipedal, though there were quite a few variants of the six-legged ivid they’d seen up in the hive.

The foliage was strange—everything was sharp and angular. The trees and shrubs beside the ivid roadway reminded him of desert plants—cacti and thorn bushes, with very little green. A weird, rumbling buzzing sound overhead grabbed his attention, and Victor looked up to see a great, bulbous insect with huge, buzzing wings floating by lazily, a colossal platform hanging from its long, black legs. He could just make out the tiny forms of bipedal ivid crowding the metallic railing of the platform. They were using another insect for transportation.

None of what he saw explained how a world, complete with sky and sun, could be twenty miles beneath the planet's surface. Had they gone through a portal? Were they in yet another different world? He couldn’t contain the questions. “Where are we?”

“You are in the hive world. Follow me, individuals. You will not be harmed by the hive if you do not threaten these ones.” The emissary gestured left and right with its crystal rod, indicating everything below the hill.

“How many?” Valla licked her lips and spoke a little louder. “How many of you are here?”

The ivid didn’t answer right away as it started down the hill. Victor and the others followed, and after a short while, it turned to look at Valla. “This one cannot answer that question with words. Our memories of other outsiders indicate that the best way to reply is to ask you how many cells are in your body?”

“Cells . . .” Valla breathed, shaking her head. Victor had learned from his time on Fanwath that the people there were quite familiar with the world of microscopic things, from cells to bacteria to concepts very much like DNA. Valla knew what the insect was implying—it, or the hive speaking through it, didn’t see its individual ivid as “people” but as parts of itself—tiny, replaceable parts, too numerous to count. It was a frightening concept, considering the apparent power of the emissary.