The Moldy Dead Read Online Free

him
suddenly, laughing.  “Maybe you’re right.”  He glanced back at the mold.  “But
I’ve spent so much time out here—I know it’s not the Geuji killing my boys.” 
He absently began to draw lines in the glistening surface of the Geuji, symbols
spiraling outward from a single point in the Congie style.  In moments, he’d
written the Ooreiki proverb, “ Trust thyself, and thy works will soar. ”
    Quietly, Nirle repeated it to himself.  Then,
“Emissary, I caught the Huouyt making a call off planet, short-wave.  I thought
we were supposed to be alone out here.”
    “We are,” Esteei said, frowning.
    Suddenly, Nirle’s writing vanished,
the surfaces of the Geuji tightening into a glossy blackness.  To Esteei’s
amazement, the Ooreiki proverb appeared again a couple rods away, and it was
not a copy.  The words were bigger, with more flourish, and a tighter spiral. 
It was, in truth, better than Nirle’s writing.
    Esteei sank back to his stomach,
stunned.  “You can communicate with it?”
    Nirle looked as shocked as he was. 
    Emissary instincts taking over,
Esteei said, “Let me try.”  Esteei leaned forward and wrote a simple note, “ Do
you understand us? ”
    Nothing.
    “Speak it aloud,” Nirle whispered. 
“They’ve heard me and the boys chatting enough…maybe they understand our
speech.”
    Though skeptical, Esteei did.  “Do
you understand us?”  He drew the words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
    “Yes,” was the immediate reply. 
“Yes, yes.”  Insistent.  Like it wanted more.
    All around them, the land was
rolling again, like it did when the Tafet and Gratii disappeared.  The sight of
it made Esteei tense.  Is this where it eats us?
    Yes, yes, yes…
    Esteei wanted to run back to the
ship, but now duty bound him to stay.
    Nervously, Esteei began his
Emissary duties, introducing them and their purpose, but before he could
finish, his medium went stiff, erasing his work.
    In an enormous, acre-wide spiral,
the Geuji wrote, “ No trust Huouyt. ”
    Esteei stared.
    All around them, the Geuji was
rolling waves of insistency, flashing patterns that only now began to make
sense.
    “I knew it,” Nirle growled,
tentacles tightening over his rifle.
    “How pretty,” a cold voice said
behind them.  “And they did it with such flourish.  Almost makes you think
they’re sentient, doesn’t it?”
    Even as Nirle was swiveling, rifle
in hand, Bha’hoi fired an energy burst point-blank into the Ooreiki’s meaty
head.
    Nirle collapsed without a sound,
his body pooling on the ground in a gelatinous, boneless huddle.
    “Well,” Bha’hoi said, lowering the
gun.  “I can’t say I haven’t been looking forward to that.”
    The Geuji began to flash its
message, angry, defiant.
    “ No trust Huouyt.  No trust…”
    The Huouyt fired into the center of
the Geuji’s warning, and the Geuji flinched away from the wound, in obvious
pain.
    Esteei stared at the gun in
Bha’hoi’s grip. 
    The Huouyt could change form.  They
could take patterns of other creatures as it pleased them, as long as they had
water to negate it afterwards.
    It was him all along.
    “The Geuji didn’t kill the
Ooreiki.  You did.”
    Amusement wafted over the Huouyt’s sivvet as Bha’hoi looked at him.  “What gave it away?”  When Esteei did not respond,
the Huouyt’s amusement increased.  “Because I really want to know.  Was it all
the suicides?  Was it the Geuji flashing warnings these last few days?  Or was
it the fact I just shot your friend in the face?”
    Glancing at the corpse, feeling
shamed and scared, Esteei backed away.
    “Now, little Jahul, don’t run off. 
You have a report to make to the Planetary Claims Board.  Come with me.”
    “ NO, ” the Geuji flashed,
over and over.  “ No, no, no, no… ”
    Bha’hoi shot the Geuji again, but
this time the message kept flashing.  “ No, no, no… ”
    Esteei hesitated, caught between
the urge to run and the fear of being