Su was born in Lonjaro Mbo, where his branch of the House Olonori (of the Umbili Kingdom, of the Rate of Brown Millet) had been disowned in a squabble over the most correct and wholesome edition of the Whale Words. Like Baru, he’d been raised in an Incrastic school, and like Baru, Su was a most zealous convert to Incrasticism.

He and Yawa had bonded over their particular races’ superstitions.

For Yawa there were the ykari. When the Maia and the Stakhi slammed into the ancient Belthyc from north and west, three of the sparks that fell from the shield-wall were Himu the virtue of energy, Wydd the virtue of patience, and Devena who stood between them. Olive oil, and cedar, and the flickering flame. Not gods but virtues, and the people who had practiced those virtues so completely as to be subsumed into them.

One of ykari Himu’s aspects was cancer. The excess of life.

Yawa would tell Olonori about the curious and hideous trials she oversaw. There had been, on this day of her story, an alimony trial of grotesque particulars—did the husband have to pay pregnancy support to the wife, if the wife’s “pregnancy” was a cancerous mass which never came to term?

Olonori was disgusted beyond all reason. Yawa asked him why the cancer bothered him so terribly: didn’t he know Aurdwynn was a cruel place, rife with infanticide and miscarriage?

Thus, with the prurient thrill of a son who’d seen his father in bed, he’d told her all about the myth of the ancient and unspeakable Cancrioth.

He said:

“Once, before the Oriati had an Mbo, we tilled the uranium earth and we woke a greater power. And it came to live in us.”

*   *   *

“DO you know the Cancrioth?” Su Olonori whispered. The scrupulous, secretive accountant had dissolved in a bath of whiskey and terror. His pupils were immense in the lantern light. “Have you ever seen a woman in the street who seems amputated from all the life around her? A woman like the woman in your trial, whose pregnancy never ends? Have you seen the passersby make a sign like this—a sign like a horn coming out of their eye?

“Have you heard them whisper:

“‘Ayamma. She bears old life?’

“Have you been to Devimandi, the gate to the uncharted east? Have you gone down into the slithering sewers of the old city and walked among the encysted mothers-of-worms till you find lurking in a wet overflow tunnel a chemist who will sell you a poison in the blood of a living pig? Deliver that pig’s raw blood to your enemy and it will taint their seed, man or woman or laman, it does not matter. All your foe’s children born as a fluid sac with a ring of clubbed arms. Like a starfish of grief and shrieking horror.