The climbing went on, more setting of hooves and heaving up onto them, trying not to stumble and land on Nimble's tail fin. The algaes spilled down the walls now, bright as a blue dawn, and after a final great step upward they were on a plateau. A plateau that was the mouth of a cave, filled with halcyon water and shining with the light of a mushroom forest.
“These are—“ Esha breathed. “These are serpents?”
“Correction:“ came Sureness's soft clicking, “these ones were serpents.”
She walked toward a mushroom, mouth agape and her hands clutching one another to keep out of trouble. Its curving stem and wide-fluted cap — which jutted toward Esha, chest-high on her, looked more like glazed statuary than any fungus she had ever seen.
At the water's edge, Nimble clacked a greeting — to the serpent swimming toward them. She straightened tall as she left the water and Esha couldn't catch her gasp before it left her mouth: this serpent glowed bright because her head fins weren't tendrils at all, but bulbous strings of luminous mushrooms. Her eyes glowed, too, as pale as sky.
Sureness spoke to her immediately. He gestured with fins and braided barbels came rapid; the old serpent listened, squinting mild.
“Request:“ Sureness clicked, “given the situation, this human, Precious One, must be given all possible accommodations. Elaboration: Precious One can only comprehend toothtap. Request: speak in basic forms, and forgive her returning in kind.”
“Affirmative,” the old serpent said. Then, turning her unearthly gaze to Esha, she circled her barbels. The sight settled wrong in Esha's gut and, hoping to dislodge it, she gestured namaste. The two movements were nearly the same, said the lungta's hazy grasping: the old serpent clicked delighted.
“Salutation:“ she said, “I know your vibration! Be at peace here, guest. I am named Fathoming. Query: what accommodation does this one require?”
Under that glowing gaze, the plan stuck in Esha's throat.
“Request:“ Sureness clicked, “this triad-of-circumstance must travel to the highest altitude possible. But being human, Precious One cannot breathe water, not even one breath. Query: can you spare some lungta toward the task, mentor?”
“Revelation: what a pulse this is! Assurance: this one will assist.”
Turning back to the water, Fathoming hunched and touched barbels to the stone. With an earthshifting tremor, she summoned stone in a current like pouring molasses, a path that stretched over the water. She slithered onto it, pushing the path farther and farther onto the blue-limned water.
Earthshifting was still a miraculous art, no matter how many times it was performed before Esha's eyes. Nimble and Sureness followed Fathoming. On hesitating feet, Esha took one step and found the path solid as any other masonwork. So, she followed.
“Delight,” Fathoming clicked up ahead. “A not-serpent with a reverent heart, fit to see the Stillwaters! This one hoped to see it while I still have eyes. Statement: eyes are only one sense, however. Suggestion: compassionate barbels will hear these transcended ones humming the secrets of life.”
Looking around at the crowds of mushroom caps and lichen boughs, Esha could nearly believe it. “I don't have barbels, though ...”
Sureness jerked to a halt, so Esha stumbled to avoid his backside barbels: at the front of their procession, Fathoming stood tall on her coiled self, craning back at Esha.
“Query: the filaments behind that one's head-nodes and horns — are those not barbels?”
“No,” Esha stammered. “No, they're hair. They're ... yaah.” She had never even considered how to explain hair to a fish. “They're ... limp things. They sense a little but only when something directly touches them.”
“Truly?!” Nimble stood and craned, too. “So many filaments! They have such limited use?”
“Yes, they do. Ask the gods why, because I don't know.”
Fathoming slithered closer. She raised a barbel to touch something Esha couldn't feel and assumed to be a single wafting hair, and she scraped teeth, astonished. “Statement: the elders said this one would learn something soon! I was correct not to question them.”
After winding around corners and through mushroom-caked passages, the water deepened black and Fathoming's path reached a wall.
“Assurance: this one will forge a new path. Have patience.”
Fathoming slipped into the water with one consuming splash, and swam mercurial into the depths.
They waited. Nimble slipped into the water, too, and swam circles to inspect every mushroom. Time dragged on; Esha's knees were free of pain and she had nearly forgotten what that felt like, but the tension of it all chewed harder at her.
She sat down. After another eternity, Sureness set the wheeled chair aside and coiled comfortable. Waves lapped against the cave walls in time with Nimble's tail. Mushrooms bobbed as the waves touched them — hundreds of mushrooms at the waterline alone, Esha guessed. Thousands upon thousands in the entire cave. After moments spent trying to count, Esha rested on the thought that untold serpent lives came to rest in this peaceful catacomb, with Fathomless watching over them. It sounded like a fortunate end.
It grew harder to think as rumbling stirred a familiar panic in Esha. She watched the wall past Sureness's light-tipped fins. Tremors gathered, earthshifting focused — and the rock melted away in the wrong place, metres to the right of the path.
Fathomless snaked her head out. “Happenstance ... Query: is this located near enough?”
“Assurance: it appears serviceable!” Nimble swam over, the rush of his tail rattling off the walls.
Esha's breath caught as she looked down into the water. The bottom wavered indistinct, looking temptingly near but Esha had witnessed Fathomless winding down and down. “I— I've never swam in this much water before ...”
“Assurance:“ Sureness said, “terrestrial paths are best suited to that one's needs.” And without another tapped tooth, he put barbels to the path and pushed its stone perpendicular along the wall, to meet Fathomless's opening. With Esha's chair replaced on his back, Sureness continued on — and tapped Nimble's nose with a barbel as he passed.
Esha wanted to laugh, at the way Nimble scrunched his face and flailed, splashing. The laugh couldn't leave her throat, though. She was remembering the goal again, and feeling the weight of her patched-together plan.
Fathomless had opened a worm's path through solid rock, a dark, stifling corridor that grew darker as Sureness's breadth blocked it. They crept through, and ended up in an open cavern the size of a mid-caste's house. Metal mesh held soil but not enough to block every mote of light: the cavern was suffused with daylight faded as if by time. Water trickled down one wall, feeding a pool full of leafy weeds. Esha wondered if Fathomless lived here, or if she was as eternal and unsleeping as the mushrooms.
“Affirmative. We stand now at the edge of serpent territory.” Fathoming cocked fins. “Hypothesis: this is a holy place for humans, as well. Query: that is correct, Precious One?”
“It's ... it's a revered place, you might say,” she managed.
Taking his considering gaze off the ceiling mesh, Sureness eyed Esha. “Query: Nimble, are you prepared? Precious One, you as well?”
“I ...” She couldn't possibly answer that. The glare on mountaintop snow, washed pink and blue and silver with lungta was more than Esha was prepared for.
“Reminder: the phoenixes must be signalled! Addition: consuming more lungta would be prudent!”
“He's right,” Esha said with the weight of relief.
After the serpents earthshifted a small shaft to the surface, Esha gave them her broken khukuri blade to lay on the ground. It would be innocuous not to draw guards, but reflective enough to catch a bird's eye — and Rooftop would recognize the blade Esha had used around all of their evening fires.
Esha's meal was her last gob of rice wrapped in a chapatti stale as dust, topped with enough crumbled lungta herbs to nearly hide the taste. Such scraps wouldn't let Esha speak with the choral lungta
of a diplomat, but she might at least sound like she belonged on High Plateau. The millet meal, rice and herb might shore up her body long enough to carve some kind of mark onto the world.
They finished eating, and waited. Then a croaking rang down the shaft:
“Precious One? Deep-hiding?”
“I'm here, Rooftop! Wait for me to come up.”
“Am your kin!”
She put on her disguise. Cloak, headwraps, cowl, socks, footwraps and a checker-textured woven mask: everything layered over the clothes she was wearing, and Esha tugged and settled the assortment until it felt unremarkable. Stifling her horns and goat ears again was an old familiarity, one that didn't easily move.
“Alright,” she told Sureness. “We can go. Ah, Fathomless? Gratitude: thank you.”
It was a redundant thing to say and Esha only noticed as she spoke it. Still, Fathomless gave a bright smile of fins. “Assurance: this one wasn't troubled by the concession. Depths guard you.”
Heavens, depths — Esha didn't care what guarded her. She simply climbed the laddered ledges Nimble has earthshifted into the shaft's side. As long as something remembered that Esha Of The Fields existed, and granted her a pinch of luck this day, she would be content.
The shaft led up into freezing air, windy enough to push under the edges of Esha's clothes. She emerged into a stand of bamboo, a tall and pristine one unmolested by fuelcutters and probably tended by a groundskeeper in addition to a ranger. Rooftop and Clamshell perched in the thickest bamboo leaves: both creaked greeting. The cold was invigorating and Esha's kin were here, and her nerves drifted away like snowflakes.
“Stay here,” Esha told Sureness. She knelt beside the climbing shaft, looking down at his fin-framed face, knowing what chaos would take hold if such a massive serpent were sighted on High Plateau. “Be ready for temperature-sensitive lungta plants. And don't give away any Deepling secrets for my sake.”
“This one pledges it,” Sureness clicked.
With a squirming of dappled serpent colours, Nimble took Sureness's place. Small as he was, he would be an easier presence to hide — and he had shown cleverness in evading human sight, besides.
“Alright, Nimble. You recall that kilometre measurement I told you about?”
He clicked affirmative, eyes alight.
“The Kanakisipt home is— how far, kin?”
Rooftop creaked considering in his throat. “One and one-half kilometres, north direction.”
“It's one and one-half kilometres, that way.”
Staring at Esha's pointing finger, Nimble clacked agreement. “Determination! This one will wait for the signal and be prepared for surface access!”
Surface access — what an appealing way to refer to it. Like Nimble was simply opening a hatch underground and finding himself in a noble's backyard.
“Good. Well, then close this shaft over — unless you want a ranger stepping on your nose. Clamshell?”
Esha stood, and held open her cloak. It was time to, in a manner of speaking, go home.
Clamshell resented being under the cloak, resented it with tight-pinned crests and a peevish gripping of her own stringfeathers. But she was intelligent enough to keep her grumbling within her head. She made fine stuffing, filling out the cloak like a meatier woman was inside — not someone named Esha Of The Fields, not at all.
Esha kept her arms loose, her stride steady, her gaze aimed down through the mask holes as she walked the High Plateau streets. Lungta flurried down steady, gone immediately into the glazed tile streets. Embroidered masterpieces passed by on pant legs and sari hems; gemstone beads and gold trim glinted; footsteps faltered, silk-socked toes pointing toward Esha before carrying on. They could stare at the poor, shifting wretch if they damned well wished; Esha only needed to avoid guards. Which would hopefully be simple, since it wasn't against the law to walk while looking elderly, not even in this place.
The Kanakisipt wall rose up ahead. It sang its owners' praises with pink quartz orchids emblazoning each section and orchid leaves topping the wall towers. The orchids were tradition, and Kanakisipt nobles were more interested in tradition than subtlety.
No one barred Esha. She kept measuring out slow steps and reached the corner of the Kanakisipt wall, following it edgeward. Pink quartz blossoms flashed by on one side, groomed bamboo on the other, and up ahead the wall's back corner crept closer. There would have to be servants' quarters, or a waste chute, or glass windows or something else Esha could use.
“Hail, citizen.”
The voice behind her was obsidian-hard; Esha stopped, and measured herself in turning around. The guard's boots were worn but well buffed with grease: she didn't want to raise her sight any higher.
“Hail,” she said, and offered a hunched namaste. Esha hoped her voice came out convincingly wizened: it wasn't a sound she had ever tried to make before.
“Your sigil is not visible — you ought to know better, mother. Kindly produce it.”
Her caste sigil. Realization crashed down on Esha, knowing that her farmwoman's sigil was buried under the cloak — but she certainly couldn't present it. She could have forged a loftier sigil, could have asked the serpents to lend her metal or wood but Esha simply hadn't thought.
“I ...” She patted her clothing, a feeble mimickry. Clamshell's soft bulk compressed under her palm and she could feel the feathers contracting, furious. “I-I seem to have ... dropped it.”
The guard's silence hung. Clamshell's claws tightened to fist Esha's shirt.
“Then present your nameplate, citizen.”
Already caught, already finished. Esha stood dry-mouthed and hammer-hearted, fisting and unfisted her hands, and the guard repeated himself in a threat-edged voice but Esha drowned him out by snapping, “Clamshell, now!”
An explosion of feathers and Clamshell was out, shrieking, beating her wings at the guard's rage-bent face and kicking his helmet away. This was Esha's one chance, her one reserve. Now she was fear-strung and near failure and had nothing left but to run.
Such a bizarre sensation to spring from one hoof-tipped foot to another but Esha took it, she ran until the wind tore tears from her eyes — around one brick-edged corner, then another, into a recessed crevice deep enough to hide her.
She had never seen gaps like these in manor walls. It might have been a place for soldiers to fortify, from blood-darkened times past. A noble child wouldn't know. Whatever it was, Esha needed to climb in it but there were no metal spires to grasp, no earthshifted ledges meant for her, nothing but a wall of bricks. Bricks with prayers' words carved from their faces. In front of Esha's face was a brick with the heaven character rendered large enough to look like a cliffside fingerledge — crevices that goats climbed on every day of their lives.
Maybe she should keep running, Esha thought. Maybe she ought not to trust the goat. But her hands were moving, pulling off her socks and wraps and stuffing them down her sari, and she unwound her selfrope and began tucking her stupid, useful hoof edges into the wall's welcoming niches. Stepping up was terrifying, feeling nothing underfoot, but the wall's top edge drew closer.
Something flashed in the sky. Esha looked up and saw nothing more solid than clouds. Then the flash came again — rufous feathers, from Clamshell wheeling down to sit on the manor wall.
“Red-white danger! The enemy comes! Why are you here, this place has no escape!”
“I think I can get over this wall,” Esha gasped in shaking voice. She climbed down before she could fall, hooves finding toeholds as natural as rain fell. “My rope might help. Is there something on the other side you could tie the end onto?”
Her crests spreading surprised, Clamshell turned. Her dark eyes swept the wall behind her, and then she leaned toward Esha, beak open and grasping. She caught the thrown rope and dragged it farther, then reappeared to creak, “Knot tied, tight-tugged.”
It didn't tear loose when Esha tugged. She simply needed to trust her kin. This time with her selfrope to hold, she again
slotted her hooves into carvings and climbed.
She was nearly at the top, just another arm-length and she might throw fingertips over the wall's edge at Clamshell's feet — but footfalls thumped around the property's outer corner. Esha would be caught before she could make it over; her limbs were leaden with effort already.
Clamshell took wing and dove out of sight. The guard shouted again, more shocked than before and this time spiced with cursing.
It was a gift Esha took gladly. Fear blazed in her blood as she pulled hand over hand to the top, swung one leg up and levered her own weight up onto the wall. She jumped over — onto planks too smooth and level to be real — and pulled her selfrope after, and dropped into a ball.
Her own gasping roared loud as death in her ears but she made out the sound of boots on dirt down below. Footsteps scuffed past and away and she still huddled there, still alive and full of racing blood.
She just needed to catch her breath, Esha told herself. Moments gathered and gradually, gradually, her breathing slowed and her pulse stopped feeling like catastrophe.
That was when Esha heard voices behind her, echoed across a vast and stony space.
“All I mean,” said a woman speaking smoothly native Grewian, “is that we won't have time for both. The wheel-cart has to be back there in, ah, a little less than an hour — Nugah needs it, remember?”
“Yes, yes.” Another female voice, heavy and awkward with a Sherbu accent. “Let me lift it. Let me.”
They were calm-voiced servants and surely, they hadn't managed to see Esha. She kept still, still as one of the wall bricks except for her incessantly hammering heart, and she listened.
There was muted movement. The liquid sound of someone sliding into water. Splashing. The Sherbu woman grunting, more splashing and then a rock clunking, rolling, settling onto a cart. More splashing and talking in colleague voices, and the cart wheels blessedly clacked away. Door hinges like a phoenix's voice.
The wheels stopped short — and booted feet clunked muffled, as soldiers hurried, somewhere in the building's depths. The servants wondered in half whispers and through Esha's thundering heartbeat, their sounds faded into the Kanakisipt mansion.
Tinder Stricken Page 27