Flossa said, “We’ll watch for the signal, like this.” Her hand capped her beacon, on and off.
“Then we tug the rope,” said Spinel. “For the sisters above.”
“And we make sure not to wait too long for air, since there is no airbell and only one hole. And we never, ever, touch a shockwraith arm,” Flossa concluded.
“Even with gloves,” agreed Lystra. “Right.” She took up her grappling pole, patted the knives at her belt, pulled at her rope once more, then started to climb down.
It was a long vertical tunnel, dank and gloomy. Light was at only one end—the receding end. The sudden touch of black sea chilled her.
With a few last breaths, she plunged below. Her beacon faintly penetrated the gloom. She tugged the rope for Flossa and Spinel to descend.
Already, three other beacons loomed around her and light flashed from grappling poles. Yinevra swam over to clasp her hand, an infinitely welcome reach from the darkness.
The net of bait fish hung, several scissor-kicks away. Spots flickered past, tiny creatures with glowing photophores, but no sign yet of that dread creature of darkness. Lalor and Kithril with their beacons waited patiently. A glance over her shoulder showed Lystra two more beacons beneath the airhole, their pale glow embracing the silhouettes of Flossa and Spinel.
Spinel the Valan. The enigma of him elicited reactions as ambivalent as they were extreme. A hateful malefreak, and a shaper of stone, he was also hardworking and infectiously eager to please. And he had the nerve to share witness with stonetraders, an act which deeply moved her. Even Nisi had not done this, for all that her own mothers were traders. Though admittedly, Mother was always hardest to defy. Merwen, now—why did Lystra’s own mother insist on complicating their world so, at a time when complexity brought worse threats than any shockwraith? If that shockwraith got hold of one Valan, now, that would simplify—
But this thought, and her brief wish for it, made her shudder all over. The grappling pole slipped from her hand and floated upward; she darted up to snatch it back. She swam to the airhole and smiled encouragement to both watchers. Spinel nodded and went on watching the bait, his mouth small and his eyes ever so earnest above his upturned nose. Lystra could have cursed him forever for his lack of any cause to curse, or any sign of what Yinevra judged of his kind.
Lalor grabbed Lystra’s arm and pointed. In the distance grew a pale haze, faint as a cloud in the night sky. It rolled forward beneath the tangle of dead branch roots. The haze brightened and resolved into blue spots. Those spots were the stomach bulbs, which by their glow would attract hungry things, to burst open at a touch.
The hunters gathered immediately at the airhole, just in case the shockwraith chose them over the bait fish.
As it drew near, hundreds of the blue spots delineated the invisible arms. It seemed to pause between fish and humans, then it decided on fish. It settled beneath the hung net and swung several arms around: five, six, seven…out of perhaps twenty.
Yinevra handsignaled to Lalor, who pulled over another bundle of fish buoyed with airblossoms to float almost freely. Lystra helped her tug it halfway within reach of the beast, then propelled it further with her pole. Several more arms twined ponderously around this unprecedented feast. Six lines of blue dots still hung free, of which one was a specialized arm for sensing and mating which must not be touched at all.
Now Yinevra glided toward one line of dots that looped apart from the rest. She swung the tip of her pole to the base of the arm. A knife sprung; the arm slipped away. The rest of the beast remained still, unaware, because the cut had come just at the proper spot. Yinevra retreated, away from any trail of acid.
Lystra knew she must be turning white, for urgent need squeezed her lungs. No time for that; she kicked and headed for the cut arm, extended her pole, and sank a hook just below one of the bulbs. The bulb seemed to watch her, a baleful eye. She pulled the arm away, and Kithril tied a rope to secure it. When the hunt was done, and all the hunters safely up, the arms would be hauled up to the surface, where the stomach bulbs could be emptied without trouble.
Now she darted to the airhole and gasped for breath. Yinevra’s head poked up beside her, cramped in the vertical tunnel. Yinevra gave Lystra a rough hug, saying, “There, sister, one’s in the bag. But no heroics, please; your breath comes first. If we lose one arm to the deep, that’s nothing, but if we lose you, who’ll grab the next one?”
Lystra gulped air and plunged downward again.
The next arm she cut herself, with Yinevra’s hand to guide her pole. The cut sent a shock to her own flesh, for she knew well enough the feel of a blade. Shockwraiths did not seem to feel as humans did, but who could say for sure? At any rate, this beast would survive with the arms that remained, and with such a fine meal provided, it would soon grow back the rest.
Two more arms yielded to the knife, and two free ones remained, one the sensing arm, which could not be touched. Yinevra approached the last arm to be cut.
Inexplicably, this one came alive, undulating like a watersnake. The blue string danced in random waves, moving perilously near the airhole. Flossa streaked up the airhole quick as a minnow, but Spinel hung below.
Lystra waved her hand across her beacon, then again, urgently. Spinel just stayed there, staring, as if in a dream. What was the matter with him? Could he not see the whip of lights, drifting ever nearer the airhole? Already the beam of his beacon merged with the blue at his feet.
A few swift kicks sent her to his side. She grabbed him by the arm and lunged upward. She had not quite reached the airhole before her mind cut short.
Spinel awoke. Pain pried his leg, a thousand stonecutters chiseling at him, shaping a tomb in Cyan’s basement. But I’m not granite, he insisted; you can’t make a tombstone of me. I’m only a poor stonecutter’s son…
The pain receded slightly, a mixed blessing since now his awareness was more acute. Two faces hovered above him, Usha’s and Merwen’s, long and somber as the day he fell from the firemerchant’s netleaf tree. What are you going to do with me? I am hurt, Usha, this time.
“You’ll get better.” Usha’s voice was oddly distant. Her face was a moon, dipping to the horizon, touching his leg. Spinel was floating on a watery cushion, weak all over, and his legs would not move.
“Did I…?” He stretched his neck. “What happened?”
“One burst just at your ankle.” Usha was doing something to his leg, he could not see what, but he saw the vines trailing down.
Merwen leaned over him, her face etched in detail, her round cheekbones, gold settings for her eyes. “You will be whole again. I know.” Her head turned slightly, exposing the scar, a ribbon that streaked her neck. Spinel thought, How much closer death once touched her. He raised a trembling finger to trace the thickened skin.
She clasped his hand. “How is the pain?”
“Not…so bad.” Spinel remembered her promise. “Not so bad as…the…alone.” He squeezed her hand to his chest. Sudden tears were flowing, unstoppable. For the briefest time but nearly too long, when the blue lights had wandered near, he had wanted death more than anything, to make it all easy, for good. How strong he had thought he was, before, when he had first turned amethyst; yet still, to go on in this world, or in any world, felt impossibly hard at times.
Within a day Spinel was out of the chamber of lifeshaping, to rest his leg in the silkhouse. He lounged luxuriously in seasilk and gazed over the panels that swooped above, some of which he had helped to install. The house was never quite the same after it was rebuilt; old nooks and turns were lost forever, and new unexpected twists had appeared. And the “painted” surfaces, a wall carpet of gold and green with intricate red lines that tantalized him to name their forms, were ever-changing as the fungi grew.
Usha came to inspect him. She kneaded his ankle critically. Already it was mottled with scarring. “The scar is too shallow.”
“Did it heal wrong?” How had a scar grown so fast, anyhow? “You won’t h
ave to…cut it open again, will you?”
“Cut open? What kind of creature do you think I am?” She scrutinized the scar, rather as Cyan would examine a gem on the lap wheel. “Cut, indeed,” she muttered. “You want a bright mark, don’t you, brave as a stretchmark after childbirth. Thus your sisters will see and respect your experience of life.” She looked up again. “Your flesh is not what I’m used to. I’ll do better next time” Abruptly she left.
Later, Lady Nisi was less modest about Usha’s handiwork. “Even Hospital Iridis could not have done better,” she assured him, “and it would have taken weeks to heal.”
“Weeks in the hospital? My folks could never afford that.”
That took her aback. “Well, I would have paid for you.”
“Thank you, my lady.” But his irony escaped her.
To pass the time while his leg strengthened, Spinel puzzled over a pair of clickflies that perched splaylegged on his arm or spun webs from wall to wall when he clucked commands he had learnshared in the evenings. All the while they rasped back at him with their violin mandibles. They could spell out whole books and even diagrams across their webs, guided by the coded clicks that Spinel haltingly produced. They could put what they heard into extra chromosomes and pass it on to their offspring; that was how volumes of news got spread, limited only by clickfly flight. “Chromosome” was a word for which Spinel had no Valan equivalent in his eight years of schooling, but he envisioned something like Oolite’s string of alphabet beads.
Lystra came in, carrying a spinning wheel that she stood nearby. This was odd, for he knew that she hated the indoors, and himself even worse, though not as badly as she used to. He watched her thread the spindle and chose his words with care. “Were the shockwraith arms recovered?”
“Yes.” Lystra nodded over her work. “Treated with enzymes, they’ll make a starworm harness in no time.”
One harness? There would have to be more hunts, lots more.
She set her foot at the pedal. A broad streak crossed her foot and toes, where a web scallop was shriveled back. “You too!” Spinel exclaimed. Something pricked his memory.
“It’s all right.” She wrinkled her nose. “They won’t let me back at the starworms yet. I have to spin—I can’t bear to sit still.” She adjusted her seat, an elevated part of the apparatus, the only sort of “chair” Sharers seemed to have. The drive wheel whirled, and the spindle purred. At the spindle head, her fingers alighted like a butterfly folding its wings. Her left hand fed fibers to the thread, while the right maintained a delicate twist between thumb and forefinger. Her hands were in precise control, while her muscular leg pumped the pedal.
Something came over Spinel, and he hastily cast down his eyes, as if too close a stare might drive away a wild bird. He looked again at her stricken foot and had an indescribable realization. “That was for me.”
Lystra’s spindle purred on; she seemed not to hear. Or perhaps he had not spoken aloud.
9
THE SEA HAD begun to swallow. Not yet here in Per-elion, of course, but sisters on the northernmost rafts had sighted whirlpools.
The news came overnight by starworm song. The starworm song could not actually be heard by human ears. It was detected by a raftweed whose taproot reached into the sea, covered with pressure-sensitive hairs. The root hairs picked up the subsonic vibrations of the song; in response, the blossoms of the raftweed opened and closed. Thus Sharers could watch the “signal blossoms” at the appointed times for news from their sisters across the globe.
From Lrina-el came word of a boat fallen to one of the whirlpools, and nine lives reclaimed by their First Namer. Lystra shuddered when she took that message from the signal blossoms. Mourning songs were sung, and Merwen and Usha entered whitetrance for one of the dead, whom they had known.
That same day, traders informed the witnessers at their doors that all “prices” would fall to one-fifth and that no more stone would be shared with those whom the Gathering had Unspoken.
Lystra flung off the hapless clickfly that told her, but it recovered to soar away to the next silkhouse. Why now, just when Sharers had begun to stop depending on traders? Hard times were ahead, when everyone would be tempted most.
Something must be done—quickly. But Merwen and Usha were in whitetrance, no telling for how long, and Lystra herself could not get them out. Only a small child could reach someone in whitetrance without fear of triggering death. “Weia! Wellen! Where are you minnows when I need you?”
At the water’s edge, Wellen and Flossa lay wrestling in a fury, hands grasping chins in a grip that could suffocate. Lystra wrenched them apart. “You ‘trollbrats’! What’s this about now?”
“She tore the net,” was Flossa’s shrill accusation.
“But she…overfilled it!” Wellen gasped.
“Flossa.” Lystra’s voice was barely audible. “Only days ago, lives of shockwraith hunters depended on you.”
The girl winced and averted her eyes. With a finger she raised a corner of the torn net. “I’ll mend it.”
“And Wellen, if you’re still an infant, then you can bring your mother out of whitetrance.”
“No, I’m too old.” Wellen looked as if she would burst into tears, but she plodded silently back to the silkhouse.
At last Lystra found Weia behind the house, playing giant-steps by herself. The toddler let herself be coaxed into waking her mother and mothersister from their trance.
Her fingertips still pale, Merwen heard Lystra out. Then she said, “For this you break my peace with the dead? If traders share reason, it’s all to the good.”
“But, Mother! We can’t just go back to the old way.”
“The Gathering will decide.”
Lystra took a deep breath. “Yes. And this time, I’ll be among them.”
At that, the sun might have dawned. Merwen glowed all over, and Lystra felt a webspan taller for having spoken. She hugged Merwen as tightly as the day her mother came home. Then a sadness flowed out of her as she thought of Rilwen, and of how she had waited that they might take their names together. Their love could wait forever; but the Door of the Selfname, like the Last Door, could never really be shared. It had taken the touch of a shockwraith to remind her that a life postponed too long might never be lived.
Part III
WHEN
THE SEA
SWALLOWS
1
IT WAS THREE months since Merwen had come home when the first seaswallower came within sight of Raia-el.
From a spire of the silkhouse, Merwen watched through binoculars. In the distance a thumbprint depressed the sea, its whorls lined by raft seedlings, spiraling into a white vortex. Unseen below, the grandmother of cephaglobinids sucked at all that dwelled in the sun-drenched upper waters, from myriad plankton to an occasional free starworm, as well as hosts of raft seedlings that would otherwise choke the ocean. Yes, the seaswallower had its place in the web.
When the Gathering next met, there was the question of trade to thrash out, on top of the familiar hardships of swallower season. But first of all came Lystra with her selfname.
A fine rain was falling, little more than mist, and the air smelled of damp weeds. The cloud cover was white with a touch of the olive hue that Merwen had once seen in Spinel. Lystra sat apart, glistening with beaded raindrops, roughly halfway between her mother and Yinevra.
It was Trurl’s lovesharer, Perlianir, who put the Three Doors before Lystra, the same three that Nisi had named when she came to share the Gathering. The Names of the Doors were the oldest tradition known, older than genetic records, as old as the lips of Shora herself: the First Door of the Sun, the Last Door Unshared, and the Door of the Self. It was said that Shora would live forever, so long as the Names were remembered.
To the Door of the Self, Lystra responded, “Intemperate One.”
Merwen kept a straight face, but Usha smiled. Usha had forecast accurately the selfname of their firstborn. Elsewhere there was a tumult of cheers an
d hugs for Lystra, and Merwen beamed with joy, though she also felt keenly for Nisi the Deceiver, whose selfname had met less of a welcome.
The rest of the agenda was more sobering. No fishing disputes or family quarrels, but the treacherous explosion of fleshborers that came in swallower season. “Let everyone watch where she swims,” Usha cautioned, “even outside the known nesting holes. Fleshborers grow as numerous as raft seedlings, and mad with hunger; no repellent can turn them back. Just yesterday a youngster was half eaten alive, before we fished her out and got her below for lifeshaping.”
It was enough to share fear with the most fearless. There was much talk of stronger repellents and parasite infestations to cut down the numbers, but from long experience they knew that patience and vigilance worked best. Fleshborers too had their place in the web and would bring an end to their own season.
Many sisters shared a similar judgment of the Valan stonetraders. Yinevra, though, did not yet agree. “Valans have no place in the web. The question is this: When will Shora expel that which Shora never brought through the ocean door?”
“Do they eat us?” Merwen whispered. Yinevra’s head turned, and Merwen wished her words unspoken. She and her old friend were like stormclouds now; the slightest spark set off lightning between them.
“Valans eat fish, and they call us fish.” Yinevra scanned the Gathering. “Who will they eat next?”
The allusion to death-hastening drew fewer scandalized reactions than usual. From all that Merwen and others had reported, the fact of widespread death-hastening on the Stone Moon was common knowledge, but the potential for it here was dismissed as something Shora would not allow. Merwen sensed this dismissal and worried over it, despite the recent trend toward harmony. In this she agreed with Yinevra; but beyond…
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