by Martha Wells
The Cedar-rin made them go first up the path into the jungle. It was Ghatli, Ventl, the other two fishers who had come with him, and Moon. The Cedar-rin had ignored the other fishers and groundlings inside the caravanserai, and Ghatli had signaled them to stand aside and not try to intervene.
The path was wide and had been well-traveled, but clumps of fast-growing grasses were already sprouting in the packed dirt. The tall fern-trees shaded it, along with moss-draped spiral trees and something that had multiple trunks that branched up and wound around in tight curls. It was warmer here, the scents thick and rich, but the insects, birds, and treelings were oddly quiet. There were a great many low flowering bushes and vines that obscured the ground.
Ventl had tried to walk next to Ghatli but she had told him, “You, you I’m not speaking to. Now shoo.” He followed glumly with his two companions as Ghatli walked beside Moon. Now she muttered, “I hate people who use pejoratives. ‘Soft-skin.’ What does that even mean? He’s made it up himself, like a badly mannered child.”
Moon had heard it used before, but just asked, “What are Cedar-rin?”
“They come from west of the lake shore. They have big stone cities over there, very uncomfortable, I should think. I’ve not seen much of them here. I think the talky one is a male and the others are drones.” She added, “They aren’t traders, at least not on these routes.”
If they were mercenaries hired to drive the miners away from the trade route, they could have said so and been welcomed by the groundlings at the caravanserai with open arms. That they hadn’t didn’t bode well. “You don’t know what they might want, then.”
“No. Perhaps the same thing the miners want? It’s a mystery, as no one has ever wanted anything here before except honest trading.” She looked up at him. “I think we are to be friends. What is your name?”
Moon wasn’t willing to commit to friendship anymore. It had proved too painful in the long run. Often in the short run, too. But there was no reason to be rude to Ghatli. “Moon.”
“Ah.” She was still looking at him. “And what are you, Moon? You don’t look like the traders I have seen from Saraseil.”
“I’m from …” East, he used to say. Always east of where he was now. “I’m not going to tell you,” he finished.
“Well, fair enough.” Ghatli made the gesture of flicking something away, apparently dismissing the subject. After a moment, she sighed. “Now I have to talk to stupid Ventl.”
Ventl, who had clearly been listening the entire time, stepped forward and said, low-voiced, “I don’t know what they want. I met them on the Lacessian Way at the far shore, and I thought they were the escort of a big caravan, and I told them of the miners.” Ventl shook his furry head. “I thought they’d fight them to clear the way for trade, but now it seems they want what the miners are digging for.”
“It seems that, does it?” Ghatli made a derisive noise.
Ventl threw an awkward look over his shoulder, having to turn the upper half of his over-muscled body to do it. “But we could work with them, perhaps. Maybe we want what the miners are here for too—”
“You don’t,” Moon said. He thought it was obvious. “The miners will kill to keep it, the Cedar-rin will kill the miners to get it, someone will kill you to take it.”
Ventl went silent. From behind them, one of his companions whispered, “I told you so.”
Ghatli muttered, “I just hope no one kills us before we have a chance to say we don’t want it, whatever it is.”
Ventl said, grimly, “Here we are.”
The path had been sloping upward and curving around, and now it met a wider track large enough to be called a road. It had been cut into the side of the hill and was heavily packed down, and lined with half-buried water rock. A stelae beside the edge of the path displayed a couple of flags indicating the presence of the caravanserai towards the lakeshore. Ghatli explained, “The hill route. This is as far as anyone’s gone and come back.”
There was a pause where Ventl tried to convince the lead Cedar-rin that this was as far as he needed to be guided and got a clout across the skull and another death threat for his trouble. Moon figured Ventl had it coming, so he didn’t intervene.
They continued on along the trade route. The jungle wasn’t any darker but seemed even more silent. They passed a spring that trickled down the hill through the trees and had been bridged with large flat stones where it crossed the road. A small stone basin had been installed to one side, to collect water for travelers and their grasseaters, and it was obvious this had been a well-traveled and comfortable route before the miners had arrived. Moon tried to taste the air without being obvious about it. The scents of the plants and wet earth still dominated. Unless the miners were unusually rank, he doubted he would be able to … There was movement ahead.
He said to Ghatli and Ventl, “Get ready to run.”
“What?” Ghatli was startled, but Ventl tugged on her arm.
Behind them, the lead Cedar-rin snapped an order and the drones all drew their sickles. Ferns and branches crashed ahead, a frenzy of waving greenery as whatever it was gave up the effort to be stealthy. The Cedar-rin charged forward, roaring. Moon swept Ghatli off the road as Ventl and his friends scrambled out of the way. Moon shouted, “Run!” and Ghatli jumped back onto the road to comply, but one drone had stayed behind to block them. It lifted its sickle menacingly and Moon dove for its legs and knocked it off the road.
He heard Ghatli yell, “Come on, Moon!” and her lighter footsteps merged with the fishers’ heavier thumps as they ran. Moon twisted away just as the drone brought its sickle down. Then he rolled into the heavy foliage and shifted.
Moon leapt upward into the branches before the confused drone could see anything but a dark blur. He swarmed up to the mid-layer of the canopy and leapt from branch to branch, trying to keep the disturbance to a minimum. He wanted a good look at these miners and what they were digging for.
He reached the upper part of the road again and saw the Cedar-rin fighting something big and white that moved too fast to see. Then whatever it was paused for an instant, and Moon got a good view.
It was spider-like, taller than the lead Cedar-rin, covered with long white fur, with a round body in the center and three broad legs on each side. He thought there were limbs under the round center part, and probably a mouth, judging by the drones’ injuries, but he couldn’t see it from here. It leapt at the drones again and Moon climbed further up the tree.
As the branches grew too thin to support him he pushed upward and snapped his wings out, and flapped to get high enough to catch the wind. He wasn’t worried about being spotted; the jungle was too thick to allow for much visibility, and everyone was too busy to look up at the moment anyway.
It was good flying weather, the overcast breaking up toward the east and letting the sun gleam on the lake. There was a town along the shore, in a cove some distance down from the trading dock. The houses were built on stilts, standing in the shallows, boats docked beneath them, and there were berms fencing off shallow ponds for rice fields nearby. That must be the town of the fishers and reed-growers. Moon flew further up the rounded hills, able to spot the path by the lighter color of the fern trees that shaded it, and then to trace the more open channel of the trade route. But he didn’t need to follow it very far; the excavation was obvious.
Not far ahead a series of hills like rounded cylinders surrounded a wide valley, and in it much of the trees and brush had been stripped away and lay in rotting piles. The white spidery miners were easy to spot, moving over the bare ground to and from a crevasse they were carving out near the center. Moon settled into a slow circle, high enough up that he could be mistaken for a large carrion bird.
They were transporting the dirt and rock by using a system of ropes strung across the valley, supported at intervals by scaffolds about ten paces or so high. Big slings or baskets were hauled up from the crevasse on the ropes, and then run along them to the edge of the valley and
dumped. Then the empties were hauled back on a separate system. The rubble formed huge piles of debris at the edge of the jungle. The baskets moved smoothly along the ropes, as if they were on wheels, and it seemed to take little effort to push them along. No, those aren’t ropes, Moon thought, circling again.
On the far side of the valley a group of miners were building a second system, probably because the debris piles at the end of the first one were growing too large. As Moon angled around he could see that they weren’t stringing rope, but extruding it like a branchspider’s web from somewhere beneath their bodies, and knitting it into place with their lower limbs. The stuff must be as slick as glass, and the big baskets and scaffolds were probably made from it as well.
The crevasse itself was about fifty paces long and growing, and he couldn’t tell how deep it was. He also couldn’t see anything of what they were digging for. They seemed to be discarding the rock and dirt and not even sorting through it, the way metal and gem miners did, so perhaps they hadn’t uncovered what they were really looking for yet.
Which doesn’t explain how the Cedar-rin knew what it was, Moon thought. No, as far as Ghatli knew, no one had seen the excavation and if they had, they hadn’t survived long enough to talk about it. But the word from the fishers that a strange species they called miners was inexplicably digging in the hills had been enough to bring the Cedar-rin. There had to be more to it than that.
Moon judged that he had run out of time for sightseeing. He turned away, caught the wind again and arrowed back down to see if the Cedarrin had killed the miner yet and how Ghatli and the others were doing.
He flew above the path until he saw rapid movement in the canopy, as something large—maybe two somethings—climbed through it. A little further down, faint twitches in the foliage told him something was running. The gap between the two spots was narrowing rapidly. Uh oh, Moon thought. He shot ahead and dove down into the upper canopy.
Moon climbed down the branches until he heard the pounding of running footsteps. He shifted to groundling and dropped out of the trees onto the edge of the path. Several figures came into view, Ghatli and Ventl, Ventl’s two fisher friends, and two of the Cedar-rin drones bringing up the rear. One of the drones had its armor half-ripped off, bloody streaks torn through the flesh and clothing beneath. Moon yelled, “Don’t stop! It’s getting closer!”
“Moon!” Ghatli panted in protest as she passed him. She was pushing Ventl along; none of the fishers were particularly fast on their feet.
“Keep going,” he told her. They passed him, the limping drone grimly determined to keep its wounded companion moving.
The fleeing groundlings pounded away, down the slope and out of sight. A moment later, two miners crashed into view. They didn’t hesitate, but charged toward Moon. They knocked down small saplings and tore through the fern trees. Their motion was fast but odd, all six legs moving in a concert that was strangely not awkward.
Moon waited, thinking about distance and relative strength and how these things were supposed to be sentient and maybe a smart predator might have taken alarm by now. Or maybe they just assumed he was frozen with terror. The first one drew close enough to crouch and leap.
Moon had a moment to see the mouth, which was round and huge and lined with what must be hundreds of scissor-like projections. The two additional limbs to either side were long and slender, with at least six agile fingers.
Then he surged forward and shifted.
He sliced one arm off with the first sweep of the claws of his right hand, grabbed the other arm and used it to pull himself up and rip both sets of foot claws across the softer skin around the mouth. It happened too fast for the creature to know it was in pain; its teeth snapped at him as it tried to extend the musculature around the mouth. That was when its guts started to fall out.
Moon flipped up between one set of legs and landed on its back as the creature collapsed under him. The second miner was still coming at him though that was mostly momentum; it flared its legs to try to halt itself.
Curious about how to kill one from the top, Moon pounced onto its back and dug the disemboweling claws on his heels into its fur. The skin was tougher up here but his claws still sunk into it. The miner stood up on the three legs of its left side to try to bash him into a tree trunk. Moon sprang up onto one of its extended legs, wrapped himself around it, and twisted.
He felt the joint pop as the miner flipped around and grabbed for him. The creature realized a moment later why that wasn’t a good idea as Moon ripped open its underbelly before it could extend its mouth.
As it collapsed into a steaming heap, Moon bounded up the path. He wanted to see where the other surviving Cedar-rin were.
He reached the road and slowed down as he neared the site of the initial attack, prepared to shift back to groundling if he sensed movement.
But bodies were scattered along the road and the torn-up ground to either side. Some were bitten nearly in half, some had limbs missing, blood pooling on the mossy ground and drawing clouds of buzzing carrion insects. There was only one dead miner; it lay to one side of the path, on its back with its vulnerable underbelly slashed open. The other two miners must have arrived unexpectedly, while the Cedar-rin were still busy with the first. Moon could tell from the way the bodies lay that they had been trying to retreat in order, but had become separated. Singly, they had been easy prey.
He found the male sprawled on his back across the body of the smallest drone, as if they had died back to back, or the leader had tried to protect it. Moon sat on his heels to check the drone trapped under him, hoping it was alive, but the torn flesh at its throat was already cooling.
He sat there for a time, twitching his spines to drive off the insects. He could have prevented this if he had shifted to fight the miners with them, but they would have turned on him next. He was fairly certain they would have. It was what had happened every time he had done something like that in the past.
He was tired of looking at dead groundlings, tired of feeling sorry for them. The Fell had hunted them through the streets of Saraseil, dug through the walls of their houses. There was a raw lump of emotion in his chest, boiling and expanding until it felt as if it was going to burst out through his scales.
He wanted to make somebody else feel sorry.
Moon sensed movement and lifted his head to see three more miners standing on the road, watching him. He bared his fangs and flicked his spines. “Just in time,” he growled.
Moon returned to the caravanserai a short while later, as the sun moved into afternoon somewhere behind the heavy clouds. He had had to take time to wash the blood off his scales in the stream, and he had caught a big flightless bird in a clearing and eaten it down to the bones. With his belly finally full, it was hard not to just find a good spot to curl up and sleep, but he wanted to know what was happening at the caravanserai.
He walked into the house to hear anxious voices and found the main room crowded with fishers and a scatter of other groundlings. The badly injured Cedar-rin drone lay on the floor on a bed of blankets, its bloody armor in a discarded pile and its wounds being tended by a green skinny groundling who looked like a stick insect, complete with large multi-faceted eyes. It had two sets of hands branching out from its forearms, more like feelers than fingers, delicate but adept.
The other drone sat nearby, its shoulders slumped in exhaustion. It was still wearing its battered armor, but had removed the shoulder and arm pieces on one side and was pressing a cloth to the ragged scratches there. Then Ghatli turned away from the round stove with a bowl of steaming water in her hands and nearly dropped it. “Moon!”
Everyone stared at him, startled. The upright drone made an abortive reach for its sickle, then just slumped in despair again. Ventl said, “We thought you were dead!”
Moon shook his head. “They chased me, but I lost them in the jungle.” He stepped around a couple of gaping fishers and took a seat on a reed stool someone had just vacated. He nodded toward th
e Cedar-rin. “Did they say what they were after from the miners?”
“Not yet,” Ghatli said. “Perhaps they will.” She handed the bowl to the insect groundling and lightly touched Moon’s forehead. “You’re bleeding. Did you fight them?”
He managed not to flinch away. “No, I fell down a ravine trying to get away.” He had cuts across his scalp, and bruises rising on his arms and legs and chest, blue-purple against the dark bronze, visible through the tears in his already ragged shirt and pants. Any injuries he suffered in his scaled form transferred to his groundling skin when he shifted. The damage was minor, but three of the creatures at once had been a bit of a challenge. Invigorating, but a challenge.
The insect groundling focused its glittering eyes on him, a concentrated stare that made his insides twitch and almost activated his prey reflex. In a deep buzzing voice, it said in Altanic, “You require aid?”
“No, thank you,” he told it.
As the insect groundling turned back to the unconscious drone, Ghatli said, “Moon, that is Physician Iscre. And these two are An, and its relative Na, who are of the family Tskkall of the Rin of Cedar.” An ducked its head, apparently embarrassed. Ghatli added, “Moon delayed the pursuit of the miners so we could all live. Perhaps An will tell us now what the miners are digging for that the Cedar-rin were so curious about. No one here will say where we heard it.” She glanced around the room and got nods and various gestures of assent from the others.
In a voice lighter than the male Cedar-rin’s, An said, “It doesn’t matter if you tell anyone. My kin …” It hesitated, but then lifted a hand in despair. “We came to see if the miners were really digging in these hills. I don’t know why they want what is there. But it is the resting place of our ancestors.”
Moon hadn’t been expecting that. Neither had Ghatli, evidently, or anyone else. She said, “Your people are buried there? Since when?”
An said, “More than two hundred turns ago the Rin had a city there.”
Everyone still stared in blank astonishment and disbelief. Ventl said, “Why don’t you live there now?”