Whatever that meant, it weighed Esha's mind further, weighed her past translation. She only laid there, listening to serpent teeth and the distant hum of shifting earth.
She walked hunched into the Abyssal's chamber some hours later, head throbbing but surely not as dire as the Abyssal's. Sureness and Nimble wound by her sides. All of them needed to show further honour by assisting with the operation: Esha was sure she wasn't translation that word correctly, or specifically enough, but the spokesman serpent had stopped scrutinizing her with every gaze and she had no will to ask questions with.
Another dozen of serpents slithering ahead, like a blue-dappled river with stars winking in it. The chamber was still large as sky, full of the Abyssal's patterns of finlights. They moved in steady flux: the Abyssal laid still but its lung fronds still laboured at the air.
The entering serpents took their places on evenly spaced moss beds; some slithered confident to a place they remembered, others moved slowly, choosing, discussing. Sureness guided Esha with a ropy tug on her arm.
“Statement: that one did well to provide medicinal petals for this operation. Directive: assist the physicians by aiding their chewing, Precious One, and you will further afix good faith to serpent/human relations.”
“Assurance,” Nimble clicked eager, “Truth will be written long-form about Precious One. Additional possibility: once you prepare herb for physicians, there may also be a poem.”
Her presence a block used to found a better life. Her name spoken in years to come — as a memorable poem, no less. That thought was enough to bolster Esha and wind her hands tight around her pestle.
They were given glass bottles of water, and instructed to pour it over their barbels. Since humans didn't have barbels, the venturers decided, Esha's hands would suit the purpose. She washed, trying to place the pungent scent of the water: it was laced with something that wasn't vinegar but smelled like a close cousin.
Everyone in the chamber washed clean and returned their bottles, which disappeared with a symphony of clicking and clattering in the dark.
Then a summoning toothtap rang out through the chamber. The spokesman serpent stood tall on his coils, fins and barbels spread wide — and it surprised Esha with toothtap she could understand.
“Greeting: welcome is bidden to all present. We extend gratitude for your presence this day, and for the gift of your strength.”
Rustling rose in the crowd, a wave of questioning frillsign.
“Apology: this speech of mine is crude. Basis: One of our herb-workers is Precious One of Human Triad. With that one's assistance, we deeplings acquired surface botanicals containing powerful lungta. Ergo: for Precious One's ease of understanding, we make this request. Speak toothtap whenever possible for the duration of this operation.”
Esha couldn't remember the last time she had been so relieved — or so honoured.
“Addition:“ Sureness clacked loud.
Bodies twisted, placing all eyes on him.
“Two phoenixes aided the acquisition of those botanicals. Ceiling of Human Triad, and also the landholder phoenix, Clamshell — a delinquent in the past, now redeemed to us. Statement: the phoenixes' worthiness must not be forgotten. Caveat: they only lack the physical strength to prepare physicians' herb.”
The spokesman tucked his fins humble. “Statement: let record and memory show this amendment. Now, we begin.”
Serpents came along the rows with silver platters of herbs. Esha was given something scaly and richly purple, no doubt more valuable than all the yams she had planted in her lifetime.
“Query:“ Sureness asked her, “that one's lower-legs are troublesome, but your upper-legs are strong?”
“I think so. I've dug fields with these hands for more than thirty years.”
Sureness paused. “Statement: that one looks ideal for this task. Long limbs, adequate muscle mass ... This one holds confidence.”
“Affirmative!” Nimble clicked. “Statement: Precious One cuts bamboo into ( ) units using primitive tools. That one is considerably robust!”
Tired though she already was, Esha smiled.
It was a slow beginning. Someone dropped a vividly purple lichen in Esha's mortar; Sureness advised her to wait. Physician serpents stood gathered near the Abyssal, braiding and unbraiding barbels in a movement too steady to be called fidgeting.
She watched aides milling around the Abyssal's enormity. They applied salves, and spoke nurses' words, and tucked things into the Abyssal's compliant mouth. One serpent looked especially intent, holding barbels to the Abyssal's face right below a glassy eye, bent with concentration.
Esha rubbed at her neck. The headache was crawling downward.
Suddenly, the intent serpent looked up. “Command: ( )-sleep has begun. Commence operating.”
And the physicians all burst to action, taking pulped herb from a stone table, swallowing and darting quick as falling rain to the Abyssal's head. Some held glinting tools in their barbels; some didn't; all of them were suffused with light like their finlights were spreading, and that light leaked into the Abyssal with every flesh-parting touch.A muted lungta sound filled the chamber, like the lull in a forest's wind.
There was no blood that Esha could see. Her stomach flipped anyway and she focused on grinding.
Attendants circled the rows, bringing herb, taking herb, offering water. Flower-speckled pond weed was dropped into Esha's mortar, then tsupira, then something she didn't recognize at all but it was spongy and resilient under her pestle. Esha threw her back into the crushing. Sureness and Nimble worked circular beside her; serpents shook with effort all around.
She couldn't work fast enough to calm her racing heart. Serpents' bellies hushed against stone and tools scraped against lungta plants while and the surgeons shone with the rattling power of their magic.
While waiting for her lichen mash to be collected, Esha chanced another look at the procedure. The Abyssal's head spread open like a cut cabbage but still nothing bled, nothing oozed: the physicians scooped around an outline that must have been a serpent. The many-personed Abyssal was having persons removed.
The material Esha had to grind became more resistant, more fibrous. Her heartbeat was thudding in her ears and drinking water only made her stomach roil. Keep going, she told herself. This was important; this was beyond herself.
The Abyssal thrashed — one snap of their body length, familiar in a gut-deep way that scared Esha. Surgeons clicked hurriedly and slithered over one another, placing their lungta-lit barbels. The Abyssal shivered, and stilled.
Time kept moving like sludge. Attendants took mashed plants from Esha and gave her never-ending replentishments.
Something rolled in her wobbling vision. Esha looked up sharp — fearing someone falling, tripping — but it was a dark body supported by several straining surgeons. They had removed a serpent entirely. Whoever they were, they were limp as death: aides wrapped the body with pond weed leaves in the plant-grinding silence.
Esha looked back to her mortar bowl. Stringy mushrooms laid there, needing her muscle effort. The headache roared louder; her neck echoed it.
She tried to watch the operation but her vision wouldn't move where she aimed it. She wanted to push on her tools, wanted to grind one more batch of physician's herb but the pestle wasn't sturdy enough to lean on.
The next thing Esha knew, she was slumped on the pestle with her heartbeat rattling; her nose shrieked where she had hit it. Esha tried to place her arms underneath her, tried to rise but barbels gripped her under the arms and picked her up, gathered her up like a child.
“Query: you are ill?”
It must have been Sureness. Esha couldn't tell past the swimming of her senses, but the serpent was strong and his toothtap came rapid and worried.
“I just— I lost my strength all of a sudden. I'm sorry.”
“Statement:“ he clicked, “Precious One needs assistance. We must forfeit.”
She wondered if she would be cut open like t
he Abyssal, if there were broken parts or goat-infested pieces those skilled serpents could excise from her. It was a thought that wafted on wind: in Sureness's grasp, feeling her bones throb, Esha could only let the goat come.
Chapter 25
In the days that followed, Esha laid on piled moss with Rooftop's feathered body curled under her arm. Serpent faces drifted over her, their fins pinned back with worry.
“This is how humans shift— how we transcend,” Esha told Sureness and Nimble one day. She couldn't open her eyes: the right one had blurred and trying to see through it made her stomach roil even worse. She laid there, face up in the darkness, and stroked Rooftop's neck. “I'm near the tipping point, I think.”
“Query: humans transcend into ... other creatures?”
“That's right. Mostly furred beasts. Sometimes birds. I'm going to be a goat, a four-footed meat beast.” She yanked in a breath. “G-Going to eat gumgrass and climb the cliffsides. On these hooves.”
A barbel laid on her forehead. Maybe Sureness's, maybe one of the kind-clicking nurses, Esha couldn't say. She swallowed, and went on.
“Humans become ... less complicated animals. When we change. I suppose no one transcends into phoenixes, then — or serpents. I never thought about it before.”
“Query: you don't have long?” Nimble chattered “Dismay! This one wanted to share more food gardens. And see the great libraries, and the waterfall chronicles. And the orchids! Statement: two orchids were left unused by the Abyssal's procedure. They are wilted from the skylight air, but I believe they will recover.”
“You got my care and growing directions?” Bravery had sat by Esha's side for a day, documenting everything she could remember about temperature and air flow and soil aeration.
“Affirmative. Engineers have installed light stems—“
Which Esha knew as hollowheart bamboo.
“—for the sole use of that flower species. We Deeplings will devote study to it; our physicians will benefit, surely.”
Ordinarily, keeping the orchids swathed in moisture was the most difficult part. But in the care of serpents, growing by pools and passages and water seeping down cave walls, that would be less trouble than keeping soil dirty. The Kanakisipt orchids were rooted in a new garden and they didn't just belong to nobles anymore. All serpents within Tselaya mountain would be helped by these few plants. It was a warmth that shone in Esha's chest. She only wished Atarangi could share in it.
“You found my digging spade, Nimble? In my things?”
“Query: you wish to hold it?”
“No, no — keep it. It might help you aerate that sesame plant, or ... I don't know, yams or something. Gods damn it, I wanted to show you everything, Nimble.”
“I can teach them to grow yams,” Rooftop creaked soft. “You showed me; I remember.”
“Good. Good.”
They went ahead and learned to plant yams while Esha was present in herself, and while the yam from her packed things was still viable. Nimble and Sureness planted slices of it in a wheeled basin, under Rooftop's attentive eye. Such a ridiculous sight it was, those enormous serpents bending to pat yams gently into soil beds with their fins spread with concentration. It cheered Esha even as her right eye's vision went muddy, then dark, then muddy again.
The serpents brought her a glass mirror. Here was the goat eye Esha had been dreading, a stranger's shade of brown with an oblong pupil. The pupil looked wherever she aimed it. The goat eye was well and truly hers.
She wasn't scared anymore; she simply didn't have much time.
“Thank you,” she told Sureness, giving back the mirror with her hoof-hobbled fingers. And to Nimble, she said, “There must be more I can show you. Have you ever grown lentils?”
Rooftop was all too glad to help. He left and returned with his stringfeathers laden with morsels, dangling straight down while he flew, and sacks in his claws as well. And with him came Clamshell and her chick — fledging now, a few siren-bright feathers poking out of his brown motley.
“Brought leaf-food to the watersnakes,” Clamshell told her. “Also red-long-berries.”
Maybe a chile pepper, Esha wondered. “I hope you didn't steal them.”
She croaked, like scoffing. “Human trade-makers don't orange-speak to phoenixes. You know that.”
“Hey,” Esha told the chick, “you keep your mother honest.”
In a clear voice like morning, he peeped, “Alright. Maybe.”
She laid there for further days, an eon passing within her own skin. Nurses moved her onto new moss and cleaned the smell of piss off her. Each time she turned over on her bedroll she found a new soreness in her joints, a new stiffness as her body refused to move like a human would.
The headache returned. It crept down her jaw, along her nose, into the roots of her teeth. The goat worked on her bones and next time Esha rose from her bed, it would be onto four feet.
“Esha? Oh, great tides!”
Atarangi's voice. And her footfalls on the stone, and her hands warm on Esha's mess of skin and fur.
“Thought you weren't coming back.”
“I'm sorry,” Atarangi said. She rubbed one of the goat's ears, a feeling both distressing and blissful. “Oh, dear friend, I didn't mean to take so long.”
Esha forgave her. She couldn't possibly grudge.
“The Abyssal's last fit was a powerful one,” Atarangi told her. “Many properties were damaged, homes destroyed ... Many people moved to Empire-granted shelter. It's a terrible thing to see. But a tree that survives the storm will give fine wood. I bought seven property tokens — most of them like yours, small farmers' homes. It's more steps on my journey, it's more trade goods to bring me up-mountain.”
After everything, Atarangi still wanted to walk among the humans of Tselaya Mountain.
“Did you ... talk to anyone's animals?”
“Shh, save your strength.”
Esha's eyes were closed but behind their lids, she saw Atarangi's thinking smile melting over her wide lips.
“I mostly translated human troubles, in fact.”
Esha hummed mild. “I'd like you to do something for me. Call it part of the khukuri deal, if you'd like.”
Atarangi scoffed low in her throat. “I think we're beyond that, friend.”
“Just take this down. My confession. About all of it — Gita's end, the traps, stealing the orchids, everything. You're a diplomat — if you bear witness, it'll be as good as law.”
“Esha, you don't have to—“
“No, I do. Someday, someone will cut a hollowheart and they won't run away, they'll look down into the darkness and they'll see a serpent in the middle of watering a damned flower garden. Or a miner will find their tunnels, or something. The serpents can't hide forever. Even if you help them, even if phoenixes help them, they can't hide forever. So ... they can't take the blame for my crimes against the Empire. I need to speak the truth. Even if— Even if I can't speak anymore.”
For a long moment, Atarangi was silent.
“Have you got enough paper, and ink? I have a lot to confess.”
She rustled in her supplies. “I'll make it fit.”
In Esha's last days, everything she tried to think about turned slippery. Time escaped her; thoughts were a labour to string together. She found herself thinking more and more about gumgrass, the succulent crunch of the stems.
Movement slithered and fluttered and walked around her. Esha's friends were gathered — and since they were her friends, they could see her sweat-clumped goat fur, and know her tale of lies and misdeeds and hard work. In the end, Esha found that she didn't mind, not at all.
Epilogue
The new diplomat on Rice Plateau was bizarre even for a Manyori, the whispers said. Wore a mask in public. Kept a noble's menagerie of pet phoenixes. Some farmers even said they saw her by the rice paddies at night, kneeling by the water's edge — like she was talking to something in the mud.
But Atarangi Te Waaka had paid a generous price fo
r a quake-ruined piece of property, and she was just as free with her money when someone had a trapped phoenix to trade — if it was alive. Only if the vermin bird was clearly, thoroughly alive.
Bhuwan considered cobbling some fuel sticks together into a cage. Seemed like a prudent idea, but also like a waste of time. He settled for just tying the phoenix's feet together with twine and tucking the flapping, screaming thing under his arm.
That was how he walked to the animist's house. Leaning heavy on his walking stick, ignoring the phoenix's sidelong attempts to peck him, hoping for a high enough price to buy some greens for his family's dinner. Maybe new sandals for his youngest. Maybe even a visit to the physician for himself: his quake-crushed leg was healing but so damned slowly. He didn't want to get his hopes strung too high — but this phoenix was worth a few extra rupees.
There was no mistaking the diplomat Atarangi's home, even before the house flags came into sight. Tagged phoenixes flocked on the shingled roof like crows on a carcass — and with arrow-sharp gaze, one bird spotted him. It opened its wings and took flight, swooping straight at Bhuwan.
His arms flinched upward but he couldn't drop his captured phoenix, didn't have time to change grip and so he merely hunched and braced for claws tearing at him. None came. No pain and no wing-wind — just a trilling song from in front of him.
Bhuwan lowered his guard. The phoenix stood, head tilted, regarding him. It was a handsome animal, as orange as sunset with red streaks lining its crests.
Suddenly, it jerked its head — an eerily human movement, an echo of someone saying this way. And it walked away.
Some people said that phoenixes were demon birds, cousins to windsickles. Reasonable people knew that phoenixes were animals — if thieving, nuisance animals.
Whatever its nature, the phoenix was disappearing around the house's corner. Pushing through unease, Bhuwan moved his feet, and followed the dragging stringfeathers and the shine of the diplomat's ownership tag.
The diplomat had purchased a property near the worst-broken edge of Rice, perched fifteen long strides from the precipice. The thought of living near such fresh devastation made most folk nervous. But when Bhuwan first laid eyes on her, she looked nothing but serene.
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