Evil Honey

“All trades and places knew some cheat;
no calling was without deceit.”

Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive

​

Morlock was about to indulge in another mugful of mead when the bartender began to scream. Morlock waited for him to stop before he placed his order. Say what you will about his manners—and you could say a lot—but he never interrupted people when they were screaming. The bartender’s voice faded to a wail, and then an impassioned gargling. At last, he fell over and was silent except for a buzzing sound. Morlock looked over the edge of the bar and saw it wasn’t the bartender buzzing; there were red-black bees crawling over his legs, arms, and neck. He’d been stung hundreds of times—that was bad for you, Morlock seemed to remember. (Few insects cared to take a bite of him; none tried it twice. That was the destiny of his blood.)

The bartender was clearly dying, and Morlock was more-than-ever reluctant to disturb him. So he courteously reached behind the bar and helped himself to a jar of mead. 

That’s what he thought he was doing. In fact, the jar was empty but for a swarm of sticky red bees.

“Disgusting,” Morlock observed dispassionately. He reached for another with the same result. Finally moved to action, he vaulted over the bar. His search was impeded by the dead bartender, whose bluish skin had expanded to twice its ordinary size. In spite of this hindrance, Morlock swiftly established that there was nothing drinkable left in the whole place. 

A place with no drink was no place for Morlock. He left.

The sun had risen in the west hours ago, so of course Morlock was already drunk. But, since he was able to move around on his own feet, he clearly wasn’t drunk enough. The street outside the bar was half-filled with screaming people, half-filled with luminous, blood-bright bees attacking the people. Morlock didn’t like the look of things.

Well, there was an easy solution for that. Morlock found a sidestreet that was relatively free from dead or living bodies and walked quickly out of town.

Gometown was a little triangle of buildings set in a bigger triangle of bright, bee-laden fields. The fields were bounded on the north by the river Gome and in the west by its tributary, the Sneddle. To the south ran a defensive moat. It had looked like a fairly safe place to get insensibly drunk in. Morlock was annoyed that he’d been misled. 

The guardpost at Gome-bridge was empty, but Morlock found the bridge itself impossible to walk across. There was no physical barrier; he simply could not bring himself to carry his foot from the bridgehead onto the stones of the bridge proper.

“The bees don’t bother you, do they, Morlock?”

Morlock turned to look at the speaker: a curly-haired boy, leaning against the guardpost. His irises were gold-and-black striped, oddly like a bee, and so were his eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair. Apart from that, he looked fairly normal.

“You know my name?” Morlock asked the boy.

“I know everything,” the boy said impatiently. “Everything that crosses these fields, anyway. I am—Snatrec Sumitpo.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes, and—Were you making fun of my name?”

“Not at all.” Morlock, scrupulously honest when sober, lied glibly when drunk. 

The boy didn’t believe him anyway. “It may not sound impressive compared to the god-names you may know in Latin or Ontilian or Wardic or whatever it is you usually speak—“

“I try not to speak at all. It only gets me into trouble.”

“—but I am a god, you know, and it would behoove you to treat me with a certain respect on my—in my—my—Oh, gods damn it all. It is a stupid name.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother gave it to me. Some stupid family name.”

“I have the same problem.”

“She was probably drunk at the time. She often is.”

Morlock had that problem too, and asked with real interest, “Is she around here somewhere?”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk in that obvious way about my mother. All those stories are filthy lies.”

“No offense meant. She sounds like a wonderful woman.”

“She’s not. She’s not any of that. I asked her for advice and she sent me to you. And what good are you, anyway?”

There was a time when Morlock had been useful for one thing or another, but those times were long past. “Not much,” he conceded. “Mind if I leave, now?”

“Only the bees don’t bother you. That may have been her point.”

“They do bother me. They drank all the mead in Gometown, and I’d planned on doing that myself.”
“I know that you know what I’m talking about. I am a god, you know.”

Morlock never discussed theology if he could help it, even with people not claiming to be gods, so he shrugged and waited.

“Yes, I think you’ll have to do. One of my hives has been poisoned.”

“Hence the red bees.”

“Yes, it started some years ago. A hive got hold of the pollen from an evil red flower. It had a bad effect on the honey for that year, and the beelings that fed on it. By then, more of the evil flowers were growing, cross-pollinated by the corrupted bees. I tried destroying the flowers, but the condition in the bees is hereditary: this year’s generation is the worst. The red bees are attacking other hives and stealing their honey. They feed on mead from Gometown and the farms around. And they’ve become meat-eaters, like wasps.”

“Why not destroy the red bees?”

The boy-shaped god looked at him with grim, bee-striped eyes. “I suppose if I kill you, I may never solve my problem. But if you say something like that again, I’ll risk it.”

Morlock shrugged.

Snatrec Sumitpo bent his stripey brow in a boyish scowl. “I’m the god of bees, Morlock,” he said eventually. “I act in accordance with my nature. Destroying bees goes against that.”

Gods, Morlock knew, could not act against their nature; it offended the powers that granted them their power. Trading power for freedom seemed like a bad deal to Morlock, but he never was much of a businessman. “And the other bees?” he asked. “Don’t you need to look out for them?”

“Yes. I have to protect both. That’s where you come in.”

Morlock nodded glumly. “I can burn out the infected hive, or freeze it. Bees—“

“I said I’d kill you. I mean it.”

“I don’t give a honey-dipped damnation if you do,” Morlock snarled. “I speak as I choose. I am Morlock Ambrosius. Do as you will.” The liquor was dying in him; that always made him surly.

The boy-shaped god looked on him with an approving smile. “I’m starting to see it. You can’t be threatened and you can’t be bought, but you don’t like restrictions on your freedom. Well, listen to me, mortal. I’m restricting your freedom. You won’t be allowed to leave these fields until you’ve solved my problem with the red hive. And you may not destroy the hive. If you do, you will never leave this place, dead or alive. I have spoken.”

The boy-shaped god seemed newly impressive. In fact, he was towering against the sky. Morlock didn’t realize what was happening until he was punched under the chin by a dandelion.

“Hey, wait a second!” cried the increasingly bee-sized Morlock.

“No more waiting!” boomed the gigantic boy with bees in his eyes. “This will put you on a footing to deal with the situation.”

“God Avenger slay you, you insolent son of a swamp!”

Snatrec Sumitpo made a warding gesture to fend off the name of the alien god, but smiled down gigantically at Morlock. “You are under my protection now,” he boomed. “Nothing in the Gore of Gome will harm you now, except another bee. I had better give you some protective coloration.” He waved a gigantic golden-brown hand, and Morlock’s clothing was all red striped with black.

“How about some wings?” Morlock shouted. Travel on bee-length legs was going to take some time. But Snatrec Sumitpo was gone from Morlock’s sight.

The argument or the transformation had burned the drink straight out of him and he was sober. His head was throbbing, he was about as big as his own thumb (on a normal day), and he was faced with an unsolvable problem, but he was sober. On top of everything else.

Morlock drew the cursed sword Tyrfing from the baldric across his bee-sized shoulders and began hacking his way through the gigantic grass, walking step by minuscule step, back to Gometown. 

If the god wouldn’t give him wings, he’d just have to make his own.

* * *

It took the rest of the day and most of the night, but in the morning he finally had a pair of serviceable wings. He made the frame from sticklike pieces of straw; he stretched a skin of rose-petals, stitched together with shrew’s hair, over the frame. Then he imbued the whole with metallic phlogiston, which he harvested from a farmer’s abandoned plow.

Phlogiston is the element in matter that burns, and it made Morlock’s wings extremely flammable. But metallic phlogiston has negative weight: only by using it could he get the lift necessary for flight.

Morlock caught an hour of sleep under the eaves of a farmhouse, then took flight in the gray-gold light of the cloudy summer morning.

Other bees were already at work in the fields, carpeted with bluish-purple honeywort and pale-petalled, soft-scented savory. The bees drifted from bloom to bloom in the apid paradise of the Gore’s green, flower-flecked fields. Morlock flew past them without pausing. He wasn’t looking for paradise.

The infernal hive was not hard to spot. It was surrounded by a field of brittle, reddish-gray flowers whose petals clanked together like tiny, ill-tuned cymbals. The hive itself was a turreted, rust-colored hump at the foot of a leafless black oak.

It was under attack. Two men, with bags over their heads and heavy clothing on their limbs, were swinging smoky censers, the kind that Anhikh priests use in their rites. But instead of incense or mind-sculpting drugs, the censers issued a foul-smelling, oily black smoke. The men were using it to drive a horde of golden bees against the evil hive. Trapped between the smoke and the red bees swarming from the hive, the golden bees fought desperately. Many died for each of the enemy they slew, but deaths were occurring on both sides.

Morlock’s sympathies lay with the men and the golden bees. But this looked like a stalemate. A stalemate was no use to him. He pumped his wingset up to attack speed and plunged into the fray.

Bees could fights bees all day long and twice on New Year’s, as far as Morlock was concerned. The real threat was the men with the smoke. Morlock aimed his flight towards one of the men. He drew the accursed sword Tyrfing; the weight of it in his right hand sent his flight into a spiral. He kept his head—this was not much worse than trying to cross a crowded bar while drunk, really—and landed atop the closed hood over the man’s head. It was no more than burlap or some other coarse cloth: Morlock’s shrunken eyes could clearly see the man’s sweating scalp through the gaping, loose weave. Morlock unhooked both his arms from the wingset and, taking the sword in a double-handed grip, stabbed downward into the man’s head.

The man squawked and danced wildly; blood welled up from the pinprick wound: a trickle to a man, a knee-deep stream to bee-sized Morlock. The man dropped one of his censers and slapped at his head. Morlock leapt into the air, using the wingset pedals to power his wings, keeping the sword in a two-handed grip. The man’s elephant-sized hand missed him. He slashed the man’s hood down its side, revealing a stretch of the terrified, sweating face within. A bulging eye lay conveniently at hand; Morlock slashed it with his pin-sized, darkly crystalline sword.

The giant’s scream shook heaven and earth. He dropped his other censer and fled, slapping at his face wildly with both hands. Morlock was already away, floating through the air.

The other bag-headed, smoky-handed giant turned to watch his partner go. Morlock dove at one of his gloved hands. The material there was tougher than the burlap bags over the giants’ heads, but it broke like stale bread when Morlock slashed it in passing. Morlock spun in the air and dove back, slashing at the expanse of sweating brownish skin exposed by the tear.

Now it was the second giant’s turn to squawk, to drop his censers into the green grass, to slap at his attacker with a gigantic, but fatally slow, hand. But Morlock had sheathed his sword and, working the wingset with hands and feet, spiraled out of the giant’s reach.

By now the curtain of smoke was breaking up. The golden bees, seeing their opportunity, fled from their enemies through the gaps.

Morlock released his hands to wield his sword again. He pedaled the wingset fiercely and headed straight into the swarm of golden bees. Their stings glistened like a cloud of spears.

“Khai, gradara!” he screamed. He didn’t know what bees said as they plunged into battle. Most of the golden bees avoided him; a few who didn’t spiraled down, with shattered wing or severed limb, to disappear among the clanking, metallic red flowers.

Then the battle was over. The clouds of smoke were gone; the swarm of golden bees had fled; only the swarm of red bees remained, coalescing with a triumphant buzz on the mud-red hive.

Morlock didn’t see how he could pass as a red bee, but that seemed to be what Snatrec Sumitpo had intended. He swooped down toward the side of the hive, braked, and dropped feet first onto a ledge.

A red bee landed next to him. “Cruel extruder!” she buzzed. “Ruthless murderer! Deranged consumer of innocent larvae!”

Morlock raised his sword to ward off attack, then realized that these were words of praise. “You, too, are irresponsibly violent,” he said, hoping the other understood him.

“Spoken like a female. Certainly, I would have done my part if called upon. Sadly, my responsibilities keep me supervising battle arrangements from a suitable distance. But to see you attack those lumbering, smoky giants! Well. It set my antennae quivering. You certainly have a remarkable set of ovaries, you vicious and intemperate queen-killer!”

Morlock decided that he’d had enough pleasantries. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The other made a buzzing quack that sounded like Zirruck but (Morlock somehow knew) meant “copulates with dead ants”. That was when he realized that he was hearing bee-sounds (and seeing bee-gestures) that he understood as human language. Obviously Zirruck understood his speech also. This must be the gift of Snatrec Sumitpo—a small favor, in light of the great inconvenience of his geas.

“I’m Morlock,” he said.

Zirruck clacked her mandibles in amusement. “Mrrrluck!” she said at last, adding “Sticky!”—apparently in approval.

“Your name is also viscous and crusted with sugar,” Morlock ventured.

Everything— the tendrils, palps, labia and mandibles—on Zirruck’s complicated face seemed to move simultaneously in a ripple of pleasure. “Stop!” she said, and Morlock was more than willing to do so.

When the storm on Zirruck’s face subsided, she continued, “You are from another hive, of course? I’m sure I would remember you.”

When sober, Morlock preferred to tell the truth. “Snatrec Sumitpo sent me,” he said.

“Praise him (though he be male), who guides us and guards us all!”

Morlock, whose feelings about the god in question were quite different, shrugged politely and said nothing.

“Let’s go in, Mrrrluck. The Self-Selected Old Females will wish to see you.”

“And I them.”

They passed through the dusty red arch of the hive entry. A cadre of small females was on duty there and they buzzed, “Intruder! Intruder!” when they sensed Morlock’s presence.

“Back!” cried Zirruck. “This brave warrior is sent to save us by no one less than Snatrec Sumitpo, praise be to his name (though he be male)!”

“Praise be to Snatrec Sumitpo!” buzzed the guard-bees piously. “We love him like our maggots!”

“He feels the same way about you,” Morlock said. To his sorrow, he knew this was true.

The guards crowded around him so thickly that he felt their coarse fur on his hands and arms. They all had questions about Snatrec Sumitpo. Was he really a male? Did he have a harem of female drones, as in their favorite pornography? Was he going to help them kill the strangers, the invaders, and the bears?

Morlock had no answers for any of these questions.

Zirruck clacked and buzzed and tried to pry Morlock loose to no avail.

Then a voice drowned out every other sound. It came from overhead, via an airshaft that ran through the core of the hive. The voice was coarse and fuzzy, almost incoherent.

“This is your real queen,” said the voice. “Watch out for bears. They may come to you with the mandibles of a friend, the antennae of your sisters, the voice of your very queen, but they are sick disgusting traitors and hive-destroyers and we must destroy them or… or the bears. They’ll take your honey. Your larvae will have nothing to eat except each other! The hive is great, and must be greater! We must build a sacred, scary barrier around our hive to keep the bears away. Let everyone know you agree with this! Unless you hate your larvae or something.”

The guards and all the other bees within Morlock’s range of vision broke up in groups to discuss the queen’s utterance in hushed tones. Could bears literally assume the form of bees? Was it really the bears’ agents in the hive who needed to be feared? Or was it all a metaphor for searching out the treason in our own hearts?

Zirruck’s left foreleg looped about Morlock’s right arm. “Come with me,” she said. “The fools will be talking about this until the queen speaks again. I suppose it’s the same in your hive?”

Morlock said nothing to this, and presently Zirruck said, “You’re right. We should wait until we can talk in safety.”

They passed swiftly up a waxy corridor, lined with cells on either side. In one of them, a golden bee was being tortured, her right wing slowly torn from her body by a team of torturers clinging to her wings with their mandibles.

Morlock couldn’t tear his eyes away from the hideous sight, and Zirruck also wanted to watch. 

“I am your sister!” the golden bee screamed. “I am loyal to the hive! The redhoney does not change my color—I don’t know why!”

“That’s what traitors always say!” the torturers hummed in fuzzy harmony, their mandibles clenching in rage.

Zirruck buzzed in Morlock’s ear. “There’s no escape from the Peace and Safety Squad. She won’t last much longer. Come along: the Self-Selected Elders await us.”

They passed onward. Work was resuming in the hive: workers plastered up a cell full of ruby-red honey as they passed. Then the queen’s voice was heard again.

“This is your queen. But I say. You all know what I mean. It’s the bears or the barrier. The bears are indeed disgusting, and they will destroy us, but they can’t. The real—the real enemy is not the bears, but those who do the bears’ will in our hive. They hate our great barrier. That is the. Every true bee, who is one of us, is good. But the bears’ bees are evil. They hate the barrier and they hate the hive. Destroy them if you. If you can’t, you must be evil too. The hive is great and will be greater, and if some bees don’t like that, well then.”

The workers stopped what they were doing and began to discuss the queen’s last utterance in nervous undertones. Were the bears dangerous, or were they not dangerous? Was the hive safe or not safe? Was there a barrier, or wasn’t there? No one could say. 

“I wish we could do something about that,” Zirruck buzzed quietly in his ear. “Every time she says stuff like this, everyone stops work; they stop everything, and… Are you here to help us with the queen?”

Morlock didn’t know. He shrugged.

They came to a rose-red wax barrier with a bark door built into it. Morlock looked at it with interest; the hinges on the door, in particular, were beautifully made. They passed through the door and Zirruck shut and latched it behind them.

The chamber beyond the door was a white oval room at the top of the hive. The roof was a transparent substance; Morlock itched to know what it was. 

In the center of the chamber was a great couch on which the queen bee lay. Before the couch was a trough into which ran streams of golden and red honey. The queen was immersing her labial palpi into the orange mix and slurping it up. Her red was fainter than the other bees of the hive, almost an ocher color.

Nearby were a dozen or so red bees somberly drinking yellow honey from cups made of wax and flower-petals.

When the queen saw Morlock she buzzed air into the honey-trough, making an ugly, piglike sound, and then screamed, “Zirruck! Who is that stranger? Is she a bear? Does she lean pro-bear in her opinions?”

Zirruck and the other bees in the room ignored the queen. “Most potent, grave, and reverend stingers,” Zirruck said, “my very noble and approved good mistresses, this is the bee that won the battle against the giants today.”

The Self-Selected Elder Females buzzed their welcome. Their antennae perked up, and Morlock thought they looked less despondent. They explained to him that they admired warriors very much, even though the pressures of administration in the hive kept them from the joys of battle and personal danger.

Zirruck added, “She says she was sent to us by Snatrec Sumitpo.” 

The Self-Selected Elder Females all laughed; Zirruck joined in heartily. Even the queen giggled a little, although her mandibles were slack and all five of her eyes were pointing in different directions; it wasn’t clear she was following the conversation.

“We weren’t born yesterday, you know,” said one of the elders. “Snatrec Sumitpo is a myth—strictly for the common people.”

“He may have once existed,” said a second, “but by now he is long dead.”

A third stated authoritatively, “He was the egg out of which the proto-queen hatched, originating beekind.”

“Snatrec Sumitpo is inside all our hearts,” insisted a fourth.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” said a fifth. “But what about this stranger? You’re not an invader, are you?”

“No,” said Morlock.

“Did you bring any honey with you? We’re almost out of the good stuff, and we may have to eat that red crap along with everyone else.”

“The hive is filth,” said one of the Self-Selected Elder Females. “Its honey is filth. I wish I belonged to another hive. Stranger, could I come live in your hive?”

“You couldn’t cross our barrier,” said Morlock. An idea was taking form in his mind.

The queen snorted bubbles of honey and said, “Barrier! That’s what I said! All the hives have barriers, except ours! That’s why our honey is so bad. They take advantage of us. We are nice and make the best honey but they are disgusting.”

“You really succeeded in making a barrier?” one of the Self-Selected Elders asked.

“Yes,” he said.  Morlock’s long-lost homeland was guarded by magical barriers. He told his sober conscience that he wasn’t really lying.

The Self-Selected Elder Females stepped away to discuss the matter. Zirruck was not included, nor was the queen. She rolled with great difficulty off her couch and walked wobbling on all six legs to what looked like a great oval table in the middle of the room. It was actually a hatch with a detachable lid. The queen threw the lid back and screamed down the hatch. Booming echoes carried her words all through the hive.

“Barrier will be big and new. Soon, too. The bears will be sad when they see it. Believe me. I am your queen. The bears are big, but not as big as the wall in our hearts. We scare scary bears. Scare. A bear.”

The queen slumped over on the floor, apparently unconscious.

The Self-Selected Elder Females turned to Morlock, their carefully aligned mandibles indicating agreement.

​

“Stranger,” said one, “we hope you will help us.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

“Our queen is obsessed with this barrier. She keeps screaming down the hive about it. It frightens the workers, some of whom are ignorant enough to believe that bears actually exist.”

They all clicked their mandibles in amusement at this absurd belief.

“If you could help our makers create a real barrier for the hive,” the spokesbee continued, “we’d be eternally grateful.”

“There’d be some pollen in it for you,” another added.

“A good deed is its own reward,” Morlock remarked. “Where do I find your makers?”

“At the bottom of the hive, with the other workers,” the spokesbee said, her antennae curling with disdain. “Zirruck will show you.”

Zirruck took to the air, and flew down the open hatch. Morlock shook out his wings and followed.

The shaft at the core of the hive was wide enough for Morlock to glide in a long slow circle downwards. He saw more than he wanted of the hive’s life. The further they got from the light at the top of the hive, the more crowded and violent the levels became. He passed within arm’s reach of a dozen murders, where gangs of bees savagely stung one helpless victim. Some workers were building cells and filling them with red honey. Others were breaking open nests and eating wriggling larvae with quick predatory snaps of their mandibles. In one cell, beelings were learning a song in praise of the queen and her wisdom. In the next one, bees wore brown, bearlike masks and made grunting sounds, obscene to Morlock’s bee-sized ears. Level after level was dark and silent—but not empty: red ocelli gleamed in the dark; chamber after chamber full of bees that were motionless, silent, waiting for something, for some sign.

They landed at last in the workshop. It was lit only by the sullen glow of a forge and by the sparks flying from hammers as bee-smiths beat out the edges of blades.

A bee buzzed angrily at them from the shadows. “Who are you? Why are you here?” Her buzz was faint and harsh, a whisper.

The bee-smiths stopped their hammering and turned toward the newcomers, their complex faces masked by complex shadows.

“You know me, Vluvoeev,” Zirruck buzzed pleasingly. “I’m your old friend Zirruck.”

“Yes,” said the bee in the shadows, “I know you. You are a mocker and a striver. You left here and rose high in the hive. Do they welcome you up there in the light? Or do they still turn their palps away, smelling the stink of darkness on you?”

The bee approaching them was shockingly mutilated: her wings were ripped to tatters, her ocelli gouged out. Over her major eyes she wore great lenses, like spectacles, in a frame hooked over her withered antennae.

“This isn’t about you and me, Vluvoeev,” replied Zirruck, a sterner, more martial tone in her buzz. “We are here for the safety of the hive.”

“What is the hive, except you and me, Zirruck? The hive is not a shell of mud and spit and wax. It is the bees who make up the swarm. Even the queen is only a bee.”

“Praise the queen!” cried the bee-smiths, who were now encircling them. “Praise the hive!”

“Right you are,” Zirruck said placatingly. “Right you are. I bring you a bee from another hive, sent to us by Snatrec Sumitpo himself, praise be to his name (though he be male).”

The bee-smiths all cried, “Praise be to Snatrec Sumitpo!”

But Vluvoeev remarked dispassionately, “You mock Snatrec Sumitpo, like all the strivers in the light. And, like them, you will be destroyed. Anyway,” she added, adjusting her spectacles to look at Morlock more closely, “this thing is not a bee. It is a mammal of some kind—male, I think. Its blood is hot, hot, as hot as our forges.”

“Of course she’s a bee!” snapped Zirruck, offended on behalf of her friend. “And don’t call her male! Her name is Mrrrluck.”

“Mrrrluck?” Vluvoeev looked over the top of her spectacles at Zirruck. “Mrrrluck Ambrrrziuz? The master of all makers?”

“I am Morlock Ambrosius,” he said.

“And you’re a male?” Zirruck buzzed in wonder. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Zirruck said loyally, “I never would have guessed it.”

She obviously meant this as a compliment, so Morlock said, “Thank you.”

“And you being a maker is very good for old Vluvoeev. Hey, you bees have been busy down here since I left. What are all those things stacked against the wall?”

“Weapons of war,” Vluvoeev whispered. “Ambrrrziuz, is it true you were sent by Snatrec Sumitpo, or is that just one of this mocker’s jokes?”

“It’s true,” Morlock admitted. “I wasn’t sure why. But now I think it may be to help you build your barrier.”

“You were sent as a sign. A sign. My sisters, it is time.”

“Time for—?“ Zirruck began to ask. But in an instant she was stabbed through by many steely points. She fell sighing to the ground, and never moved nor buzzed again.

Morlock drew his sword and faced the thicket of metal rapiers, sticky with Zirruck’s blood.

But Vluvoeev said, “Sheathe your blade, Ambrrrziuz. You are no mocker, but the messenger of Snatrec Sumitpo.”

“I mocked your god to his face.”

“Then that is between you and him,” whispered Vluvoeev. “Sisters, burn the body of this mocker in the forge. Do not eat her fleshy parts. Remember that she also was our sister.”

The crowd of murderous bees dragged the corpse of their victim away.

Morlock did not sheathe his sword, or lower it.

“Come, messenger; help us,” Vluvoeev buzzed winningly.

“Why should I?”

“You were sent for this purpose. And it is a great purpose. We will be able to defend the hive from the threat of bears forever!”

“There are no bears on the Gore of Gome.”

“I don’t know what that is, but you admit that bears exist?”

“Yes.”

“And they eat honey?”

“Yes.”

“Then it is reasonable to devote every resource to protect the hive from this existential menace.”

“What shuts the bears out may also shut you in,” Morlock said. “Had you thought of that?”

The wounded bee chuckled in the rosy darkness. “I am counting on it, Mrrrluck. We are all counting on it. When the hive is free from outside dangers, we can turn our thoughts to the danger within. We have been readying for a great war against the mockers and strivers of the upper levels. They keep the light from us. They keep the very wisdom of the queen from us. Somehow, by their evil magic, her words are twisted into nonsense and insanity.”

“Hm.” Vluvoeev was in for a disappointment when she met her queen, but that was not Morlock’s problem. “Maybe I can help you,” he said grudgingly, and sheathed his sword.

Vluvoeev and her bee-smiths had already decided that a material barrier would be insufficient, for no bee could build something to withstand the honey-mad rage of a bear. They were attempting various kinds of magic, including primitive but powerful force wefts.

With Morlock’s help, they quickly drew up plans for a Total Occlusion that would seal off the hive from the world. Morlock volunteered to place the force-weft anchors outside the hive: none of the bee-smiths had ever been outside, and the idea seemed to frighten most of them.

Vluvoeev, however, insisted on coming. Her wings would not bear her, but she and her bee-smiths crafted a kind of glider that Morlock could pull behind him by a chain of spider-silk. They climbed together up to the lowest exit of the hive and jumped together off the edge, into the light.

Vluvoeev buzzed wildly with excitement or fear. Her spectacles fell glittering to the mud-gray earth beside the mud-red hive. Morlock flew over the pale oval at the hive’s peak and placed the topmost anchor for the occlusion. Then he flew back down to where Vluvoeev’s spectacles had fallen. Once the mutilated, sun-dazzled bee had recovered her glasses, they proceeded laboriously on foot, placing force-weft anchors for the occlusion every ten bee-lengths.

Before they placed the last anchor, Morlock stepped across the border, out of the zone of occlusion.

“I am grateful to you, stranger,” Vluvoeev said. 

“No need. Vluvoeev, you may meet your queen soon.”

“If Snatrec Sumitpo wills it, yes.”

“When you meet her, think of what you did to Zirruck. She was your sister and my friend. I do this for her.”

“Well—“ Vluvoeev began to say.

Morlock placed the last anchor, activating the Total Occlusion.

The red hive disappeared. Not even the absence of the hive was visible: the places on either side of where the hive stood drew together, giving the world a distorted, puckered look.

It was below him now, as if he were flying up from the ground. But he was not flying and his wings were shrinking—no, he was growing. His artificial wings fell away in tiny fragments and he stood over the place where the red hive had been—where it still was, even though no one would ever see it again. Morlock had carefully placed all of the anchors on the outside of the zone, so that it could not be disrupted from within.

“They are safe now,” a woman’s voice said behind him. “It’s what they wanted.”

Morlock turned to look at her. Her face was uncomplicated by antennae, palps, mandibles or sheathed glossa. She had only the two eyes. It was strange.

“They will kill each other,” Morlock said harshly.

“It is what they wanted,” she repeated. “Their nature made it so. We cannot go against our natures, Morlock. Speaking of which: my son releases you from the geas, although he is too angry or embarrassed to come and tell you himself. Go in peace, if that is how you go.”

Morlock rolled his eyes. His clothes were still red striped with black. It was parts of two different days since he’d had a drink. He was so sober that he was getting hungry. That’s how bad it was.

“I do think we owe you a drink, at least,” said the woman, who was not exactly a woman. Her skin was greenish and clear like the surface of a stream. She held out a golden cup full of red mead. 

Morlock took it. He was not the man to turn down a drink. It tasted sweet but harsh, like a honey-flavored poison.

“I made this mead with the red honey from the poisoned hive,” she whispered to him. “There is much more in my house beneath the water. I am Kurena or, as some call me, Sneddle. The days are long; the river runs downhill; I have so little to do. Come with me, if you will.”

She turned away toward the Sneddle. Its waters opened a doorway to let her pass. It stayed open invitingly after she disappeared.

Morlock drained the golden cup and shrugged his crooked shoulders. It seemed unlikely he would have a better offer that day. 

He descended through the dark door in the bright water. It closed behind him. The water ran, clear, bright, and untroubled then by man or bee.

 

 

 

About the Author

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James Enge lives with his wife and a philosophic dog-detective in northwest Ohio, where he teaches Latin and mythology at a medium-sized public university. His stories have appeared in Black Gate, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. You can catch up with him on BlueSky (@jamesenge.bsky.social‬), on Facebook (@james.enge), and on his website (jamesenge.com).

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