by Martha Wells
Stone took a passage toward the interior, flowing down it like a dark cloud. His tail whipped back and forth, and Moon hung back to avoid being struck.
Then Stone stopped abruptly in front of a large hollow in the wall. Moon slid to a halt and backed up hastily, out of tail range, just in case Stone hadn’t wanted to be followed. But Stone shifted to groundling, and stepped forward into the hollow.
Now that the bulk of Stone’s other form wasn’t blocking the way, Moon saw there was a plaque at the back of the hollow, large enough to be covering a doorway, with a carving of intertwined branches with leaves and fruit. “The bolts are broken,” Stone said, and touched the carving.
As the others caught up, Moon shifted to groundling and stepped forward to look. Broken pieces from the side of the plaque lay on the floor near the wall, as if they had been kicked out of the way. He hissed under his breath, the realization making him cold. Like the carving in the stairwell. Like the broken bins and jars. He looked at Stone, whose face was still with suppressed fury. Someone’s been here before us.
From behind them, Pearl said harshly, “Stone, what is this? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know yet.” Stone shoved at the plaque, and with a raw creak it swung open, revealing a dark opening. It released the strong scent of stale air laced with a faint sweetness. Stone snarled and stepped inside. “Flower, make a light!”
Flower hurried forward, lifting the spelled rock she had used to examine the rotting wall. Moon moved aside for her, and she slipped through the doorway after Stone.
The light revealed an oval chamber, the walls rough and unworked, just dark, warm wood. There were no light-shells mounted anywhere either, as if no one was meant to be in here. Then Moon looked down at the floor. It was covered with white tendrils, like the exposed roots of a plant. The resemblance to something that lay in wait on the ground to whip up and grab unsuspecting passers-by made Moon jerk back, and he bumped into Jade.
She took his shoulders and moved him aside, and said quietly, “Stone, talk to us. What is it?”
Stone hissed, passing a hand over his face. “Someone’s been in here and taken the seed. It should be there, in the cradle.”
Moon craned his neck to look. In the center of the tendrils was an empty space, round, not much bigger than a melon. The tendrils around it were cut and had turned dark with rot. Stone continued, “The seed is what changes an ordinary mountain-tree into a colony tree, that lets the Arbora shape the tree and change it. Without it, the tree is rotting from the inside out.”
For a stretched moment the room was silent. He said something was wrong, Moon thought. Up in the consorts’ bowers yesterday, Stone had been uneasy. Not because of old memories, or seeing the place in this empty state after so long away. Because the tree itself must have felt different, wrong.
Flower groaned under her breath. River twitched uneasily and looked at Pearl, who stood like a statue. Then Jade let out her breath in a low hiss. She said, “Can you tell how long it’s been gone?”
Stone scrubbed a hand through his hair in frustration. “No. I’m not a mentor.”
Everyone looked at Flower, who lifted a hand helplessly. “I’ll have to look through our histories. I’ve never even seen a mountain-tree before, and I can’t augur the past.”
“They wouldn’t have taken it with them?” Jade persisted. “The court, Indigo and Cloud, when they left?”
“No.” Stone sounded certain about that. “There’s no other use for it, and it has to stay with the colony tree, or the tree dies.” He looked at her, his gaze sharp. “It can’t have been missing long. I came here two turns ago, to make sure nothing had happened, that the tree was still livable. It didn’t feel wrong then. And I think the blight would be worse if the seed had been gone for turns and turns.”
“It could be worse.” Chime sounded sick. “We haven’t had a chance to look at the roots yet.”
Everyone stared at him, and River growled.
“What did the seed look like?” Moon asked. Everyone turned to him, and he clarified, “Is it covered with jewels or metal? Is there any reason to steal it besides making another colony tree?” He was wondering if other Raksura had taken it, though that didn’t make much sense. Why take a seed to make a colony tree when there was a perfectly good colony tree, uninhabited and ready to occupy, right here?
“No, it looks like a seed,” Stone said. “Like it’s made of wood.”
“It must be a powerful artifact, though.” Flower bit her lip as she leaned down to touch one of the cut tendrils. “There are many magics something like that might be used for.”
Moon stirred uneasily. Like the way the Golden Islanders used the rock from inside flying islands to make their boats fly. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. If someone had stolen the thing for magic, it could have been cut to pieces, destroyed, anything.
“Maybe they stole other things.” Chime turned to the others. “We saw a carving that was damaged where the inlay had been pried out. Whoever did this must have passed that way.”
Jade nodded, her expression grim. “We’ve seen other things broken, in ways that didn’t make sense. As if someone was searching.”
Moon added, “They didn’t get as far up as the Aeriat levels. The stones are still in the carvings there.” The inlay was all up and down the main stairwell; the intruders couldn’t have missed it.
Stone’s eyes narrowed. “If they left other signs they were here—”
Pearl snarled suddenly, furious, and the sound echoed off the walls. Everyone but Stone twitched, and even he barred his teeth. Her voice a growl, she said, “These thieves left a trail! Find it!”
The trail might be old, but last night the hunters had been looking for predator scat and traces of recent occupation, not signs that intruders had searched the tree within the past couple of turns. Now that they knew what they were looking for, it wasn’t hard to find.
There wasn’t enough dirt or moss on most of the floors to show tracks, but on the level below, off a main stairwell, two hunters reported finding a room with more smashed storage jars. Others found several more carvings, on passage walls and the pillars supporting a lower stairwell, where inlaid stones had been pried out. “They were in a hurry,” Moon told Jade as they climbed down the well in the Arbora levels. “They could have checked every carving in the tree for inlay, but they didn’t.”
“It’s as if they knew exactly what they wanted, and didn’t waste any time once they found it,” she agreed grimly, and swung down onto the next balcony.
The trail led to a level far below the Arbora’s workrooms and the storerooms. This part of the tree had smaller passages and wells, narrower stairs woven through and around thick folds of wood. The floors were lumpy and the walls had been left rough and undecorated. Moon and Jade followed a passage toward the tree’s outer trunk, and found Knell and a group of soldiers and hunters there.
As Stone and Pearl arrived, Knell said, “All the doors down here are sealed from the inside, so the hunters assumed no one had used them since the court left.” He ran his thumb along the seam where the door met the wall. “But the other doors have a thick crust here, hard as rock, from turns of wind and rain forcing dirt through the cracks from the outside.” He glanced up. “This one doesn’t.”
Pearl hissed. “Open it.”
“Wait.” Stone frowned at the door. “Let the Aeriat scout it from the outside first.”
Jade regarded him doubtfully. “You don’t think whatever took the seed is still out there?”
“I don’t know what I think.” Stone’s voice was dry. “I just know I’m against the idea of opening any convenient passages to the ground at the moment.”
“Very well.” Pearl sounded as if it was an effort not to growl. Her spines twitched with impatience. “Hurry.”
With Stone, Chime, Vine, Root, and a few other Aeriat, Moon went up to the knothole entrance to take flight, making a cautious spiral dow
n the outside of the tree.
They dropped past more platforms, through the spray of the waterfall. Some of the overgrown foliage was still flattened from the rain, but Moon spotted berry bushes, yellow vines that might be whiteroot, and tall slender nut-trees. They dropped further, until the sun was dimmed to a deep green twilight. The ground was thick with fern trees, their fronds spreading like giant parasols. The mountain-tree’s roots were huge, great ridges of wood sloping down from the massive wall of the trunk and running out and away. Moon didn’t sense any large animal movement, and the air tasted of the musk of small treelings. A whole tribe of greenfurred ones fled shrieking as Stone dropped down to perch on a root.
The run-off of the tree’s cascade formed a shallow marsh. Much of it was choked with weeds and lilies, but there were flat rocks arranged in a way that looked deliberate, and a lot of white objects that from this distance looked like flowers.
Moon landed on the upper ridge of another root, as Chime and the others lighted around him. He crouched for a closer look at the marshy water below and saw the white objects weren’t flowers; they were the elaborate spiraled shells of snails, some as big as his head, with blue and green speckled bodies. Chime climbed down beside him, and said, “They must have cultivated these for food. I don’t think we need any more lights, but we could use the shells for jewelry.”
Moon gave him a look. “Because you all need more jewelry.” From above them, Vine called out, “I think the door is through here!” Moon glanced up. Vine had landed higher on the root, where the ridge sloped up toward the bulk of the tree, looming over them like a giant cliff. He leaned down to peer into a cave-like opening in the living wood.
Moon hopped up to join him; the others scrambled to follow. The opening extended back into the tree, festooned with vines and stained with moss. He tasted the air, but there was no predator scent, and he couldn’t sense any movement. He looked back at Stone, who climbed up the broad root, then shifted to groundling. He brushed past Moon to walk into the cave.
Moon swung inside and dropped down beside Stone. Only dim light made it this deep into the crevice, but Moon could see that a path had been formed in the wood, leading in toward the trunk. The path was heavily coated with dead fern fronds and beetle husks and seemed to dead-end in a flat wall of rough wood. Then he saw the steps cut into the wall, and the round shape of the door, about ten paces up.
Stone stopped so suddenly Moon brushed his shoulder. Stone looked down at a hollow in the side of the path. Leaf mold had piled up in it, washed there by rain. He knelt suddenly and dug through the detritus. Moon realized the mold covered a huddle of yellowed bones, still wrapped in disintegrating cloth and leather.
“What is it?” Vine asked from behind them.
“Bones. Looks like one of them didn’t make it far.” Moon crouched down for a closer look as Stone dug out the body, which had fallen or been shoved into the hollow.
Moon asked him, “It’s not there?” He didn’t think there was much hope that the seed had been left behind. It wouldn’t be that easy.
“No.” Stone stood, his jaw set in frustration.
Chime slipped past Vine and Stone and crouched down to poke at the remains. Root and the others crowded around to see.
Moon picked up the skull, but without flesh there wasn’t anything to tell him what species it was. In shape it didn’t seem much different from his own groundling form, but it could have bare skin, fur, scales, feathers.
Still digging through the leaf mold, Chime pulled out a handful of small metal disks, badly tarnished. “I think those are buttons. There’s some thick leather down here, maybe a belt… There’s more than one here. There’s too many bones, and this.” He held up another part of a skull, this one with the jaw sheared off.
Moon heard a thump and twitched around, then realized it had come from the sealed door. Root bounced up to the doorway and knocked on it. After a moment it creaked, cracked, and then slid open, releasing a shower of dead bug shells. “We found groundlings!” Root reported.
Stone growled, irritated. “Groundlings that have been dead a turn.”
The others spilled out of the doorway, and Jade landed beside Stone. She looked down at the bones, frowning in dissatisfaction. “Well, at least we know it was groundlings, and that they came here about a turn or so ago.”
“This door doesn’t open from outside, and it was still sealed with a bar,” Knell said as he climbed down the wall. “They must have had help, someone who could fly up to the knothole, to get inside, and then let the others in down here.”
“One of us?” Song wondered. “A Raksura?”
“Or something else that could fly or climb.” Moon put the skull back on the pile of bones and stood. “It doesn’t have to be a Raksura.”
“Or they got some solitary to do it for them—” Root began, then twitched his spines in confusion. “Oh, sorry, Moon.”
Moon controlled his annoyance. Even during a crisis this serious, nobody forgot who had been a feral solitary.
Chime flicked his tail at Root. “The question is, how do we track them?”
Knell edged past Stone to examine at the groundling bones. “It’s been too long. We can’t track them.”
“We should search anyway,” Jade said, and looked up to where Pearl sat crouched in the doorway. “If they left their dead behind, they might have left other traces, some sign of where they came from.”
From Pearl’s expression and the angle of her spines, she had already gone from righteously angry to depressed. Moon didn’t think that was a particularly good sign. One of the problems at the old colony had been Pearl’s growing apathy; necessity, and being away from the Fell’s influence, had shaken her out of it. Now would be a terrible time for her to slip backward.
The moment stretched to an uncomfortable point. Then Pearl settled her spines, and said, “Go and search. Maybe they were careless.”
Moon felt the others’ relief. Their chances of finding something didn’t matter; the important thing was that their reigning queen wasn’t giving up. Or at least if she was, she was managing to hide it.
Jade acted as if she hadn’t noticed the lapse, and told Knell, “Send someone for Bone. We need all the hunters.”
Chapter Four
They started the search through the strange twilight world of the mountain-tree’s roots, finding their way through the hanging moss and vines, the forests of fern trees, and the marshes. The teachers
and the rest of the Aeriat had been told to keep searching the inside of the tree and up into the branches, on the chance that some trace of the thieves had been left inside.
Moon searched the ground with the hunters, but he didn’t hold out much hope. Unless the groundlings had camped for a long period while trying to find a way into the tree, the damp and time would have wiped out any sign of them. And if they did find old evidence of a camp, it wasn’t as though there would still be tracks to follow.
But there just wasn’t anything else they could do at the moment. Casting over the ground in a stand of reeds, he passed a clearing where Jade, Stone, and Flower were talking. He heard Jade ask Stone, “Does it have to be that seed? Can we get another?”
Stone didn’t sound hopeful. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Flower wasn’t as discouraged. “I told Heart and Merit and the others to unpack the court’s library. The answer should be somewhere there. I’m going to join them now.”
Moon continued through the reeds, working his way further out. If we could get another seed… It was a hope to hold onto, at least.
As the roots spread further away from the mountain-tree, they grew smaller, only as big around as the trunks of the big fern trees. Some roots arched up off the ground, forming fantastic shapes, supporting curtains of moss and vines.
Then Bramble, one of the hunters, slipped out of the brush and made a faint clicking noise, beckoning Moon. Startled, Moon ducked under the foliage to follow her. He had been so convinced they wouldn’t find
anything.
They came to a tall thatch of big green flowers with brilliantly red centers. Bramble crouched in its cover and pointed.
Not far past the flowers was a shallow pond, barely more than a widened section of stream. It was home to a collection of snails with dark brown shells. And there was something crouched over the pool, watching the snails.
It was a groundling, but of a kind Moon had never seen before. Its legs and arms were skinny as sticks, lightly furred, and its torso was narrow and flat, and seemed to be all ribs; its stomach and bowels must be tiny, and he couldn’t tell where it kept its sex organs. The head was squarish, eyes and mouth round, the nose just a slit. It had vines draped around its body, or maybe they were growing on its skin; it seemed to wear them like clothes.
Moon would have been half-inclined to think it was just a big treeling, but it had a bag slung over one shoulder, made of braided grasses, and a couple of sharpened sticks lay beside it on the rocks. Moon also thought a treeling would have noticed them by now. He looked inquiringly at Bramble, who shrugged to show she had no idea either.
It didn’t look at all like the dead groundling, but if it lived here it might know something about the theft. Moon eased forward, and made a clicking noise in his throat.
The groundling glanced absently around, saw him, and froze. Then it shrieked, bounced up, and splashed across the pool to dodge off between the ferns.
“Go get the others,” Moon told Bramble, and lunged after it.
He caught up with it in two bounds, landed on top of the curve of a root as it ran beneath. He could have caught it, but he was afraid if he dropped on it his weight would crush it like a bundle of sticks.
It ran through another stand of trees and he jumped to the ground to follow. Several hunters caught up with Moon just as he reached the end of the copse and slid to a halt. He had found a village.
Big round structures, huts made of woven sticks, hung from the undersides of the tallest roots, connected by elaborate webs of vine rope. There were dozens of them, strung all back through this part of the roots, as far as Moon could see. More of the strange groundlings gathered on the ground below. They sat on grass mats, weaving vines or sorting through piles of vegetation. They stared in blank surprise at Moon and the hunters. Some leapt to their feet or called out, but none made threatening gestures.