by Martha Wells
After a moment, Stone made a thoughtful noise in his throat. “Not fire. Not a mentor’s light, either.”
The color was wrong for a mentor’s light, too white. Not that Jade had had a mentor with her to make one. “We didn’t see that in daylight.” Even the murky green light inside the canopy hadn’t revealed it, and if it had been lit, they should have seen some sign of it when twilight fell. “I don’t think it was lit until some time after dark.” He raised his voice a little to say, “Sage, did you see that light?”
Sage was on watch, on a branch about thirty paces up, where the dim moss-lights wouldn’t hinder his night vision. He answered, “What light?” The other warriors on guard muttered a puzzled agreement. A slight rustle of wings sounded as Sage dropped down beside Moon. “Where–Oh.” He told Moon, “The angle is wrong, we can’t see it from up there.”
Moon tried to visualize where the light was, from his memory of the city, but he hadn’t looked at it long enough to have a strong recollection of detail. He said, “Jade and the others would never have seen this.” They would have approached the city in daylight.
Stone grunted an acknowledgement. “They could have walked up on whatever is making that light, with no warning.”
The Arbora had all drawn closer to listen. Moon heard slight, edgy movement from the warriors. Strike whispered, “But why did they go in at all?”
“Good question,” Stone said, not patiently. “Still don’t have an answer, no matter how many times someone asks it.”
Moon hissed in frustration. “One of them got lured in somehow, and the others followed.”
There was a murmur of agreement from Bramble and Plum and the others. Salt added softly, “Chime likes to learn new things, but he doesn’t want to die, either.”
“Or,” Floret pointed out, “they didn’t go in at all. We don’t know that they did.”
Unexpectedly, Venture said, “Do you really think that? Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that in the last place we know they were, we find this?”
Everyone turned to stare incredulously at her, where she sat beside the hearth with Band and Aura. She drew back in confusion and affront, then said, “Am I wrong?”
Exasperated, Floret said, “You’ve made it clear you thought this whole search was some kind of trick to start a war with Ocean Winter.”
Venture half-sighed, half-hissed. “I’m not a fool.”
Moon supposed that was all the apology they were going to get for Venture’s skepticism over the past days. He got to his feet, and shifted to his winged form. “I’m going in there. If the light goes out by morning, we’ll never find where it was.”
There was an immediate chorus of protest. “Moon, you can’t—” Floret began at the same time as Venture said, “Consort, that’s madness—”
River stood and shifted. “I’ll go with you.”
Drift caught River’s wrist and hissed in alarm. “No! You don’t have to prove anything.” River might be bent on getting back into a higher position among the warriors by risking his life, but Drift clearly wasn’t happy about it. “You don’t have to take such risks when you don’t—”
“I do.” River’s expression was such a mix of impatience and anguish that Moon had to look away.
Stone’s low growl of annoyance cut off the protests. He stood up. “Moon and I will go. The rest of you stay here.”
Venture said, “But consorts shouldn’t—”
Stone turned, stepped across the hearth, and stood over her. Venture shrank back. He had ignored her until now, and he had been mostly asleep during the short times he had been at their camps, and maybe she had made some incorrect assumptions about his temperament. Stone said, “Do I need to repeat myself? Because I don’t like to do that.”
“No, line-grandfather,” Venture said quietly.
Stone looked around at the others. Nobody argued.
Moon walked to the edge of the branch and climbed out on a knoll. Facing away from Merit’s moss-lights, his eyes adjusted rapidly and he could make out more of the city, the elegantly curved outlines of the towers in what dim moonlight filtered through the mountain-thorn’s canopy. He spread his wings and dropped. There was little air movement this far inside the canopy, and he had to flap rapidly to reach the top of the nearest structure. He landed lightly on the sloping surface of a roof, the mossy stone cool under the scales of his feet. Stone’s silent shadow passed over him.
Moon couldn’t see the light anymore, but he had marked the location. It was above his current position, several hundred paces further in. He crouched and leapt into flight again.
Long hops and short flights took him up across the city, an occasional ray of moonlight revealing a roofed terrace with the columns formed into the shape of willowy trees, a sculpted hollow in a plaza that might have been a pool or a fountain, curved bridges between towers still miraculously intact. He landed at the base of a large structure and looked for the light again. It was shining from a jaggedly round opening a short distance down the side of the domed wall of the next tower, throwing a white glow on the heavy coating of greenery below it. He tasted the air deeply, but could scent nothing but mountain-thorn and treelings.
Stone landed beside him with a soft whoosh of air and scrape of scales. He shifted down to his groundling form and tugged on Moon’s frills, telling him to follow. Moon stepped after him, not sure why Stone wanted to be a groundling in this place.
It was too dark to see the shape of the opening against the wall, but Moon felt the change in the air as they passed through it. The slight sounds of their footsteps bouncing off the walls told him the room was cavernously large. Listening hard, he thought it was empty.
Then suddenly it wasn’t. He heard running water and felt a cool breeze. The scents carried on the air were intense and dry and floral, as if it had swept into the chamber over fields of tall grasses filled with flowers, not through the branches of the mountain-thorn. There was movement around him, brushing past him, close enough to detect acrid sweat on skin and sun-warmed fabric and the sensation of falling–
It was gone. The room was dark, silent, filled with the smell of dirt and stagnant water and the mountain-thorn, the air still and heavy and damp. The breath had stopped in Moon’s throat and he had to gasp to get his lungs working again. His arm hurt and it took him a heartbeat to realize it was because Stone was gripping it, so hard even in his groundling form that Moon’s scales were grinding together. Moon managed to whisper, “You saw that?” Except “saw” was the wrong word. It hadn’t happened in front of his eyes, it had all happened in his head.
“Yes.” Stone let go of Moon’s arm, and rustled in his pack. After a moment he pulled out a small rock spelled for light. Its glow lit a floor stained with moss and broad treesnail tracks, strewn with beetles and windblown dirt, but still showing patterns of blues and grays flecked with metallic silver.
“It was the past,” Moon said. “I think.” Those scents came from somewhere else, somewhere far across the Three Worlds from the Reaches. Either that or the city was capable of suddenly shifting to a new location and back in the space of a heartbeat, something he wasn’t quite ready to rule out.
Stone’s expression was more annoyed than awed. He said, “If that keeps up, it’s not going to make searching this place any easier.”
Moon had to agree. He wondered if that brief moment of vision was what it felt like to be a mentor. He wondered what Chime had felt when he had stepped in here.
Stone handed the rock to Moon and stepped away, shifting back to his winged form. They crossed the large chamber slowly, the light reflecting off arches overhead. They passed through two more doorways into two more cavernous rooms, and Moon began to feel cautiously optimistic that they had seen the only vision the city had to offer. Then they reached a gap in the floor, a long deep trough bisecting the chamber and disappearing under the curved wall to the left. It was only about twenty paces across, and Moon assumed it had once held water. He crouched and leapt t
o cross it—
And hit a midair wall like a curtain of air, heavy smoky scent, babble of voices, fear not his own squeezing his heart, and the terrifying sense that something had just rushed past not far below his feet.
The vision vanished when Stone knocked him out of the air and dumped him on the dirty floor past the trough. The light-rock bounced out of his hand and slid across the floor. Moon sat up, shook his spines, and gasped, “That was a bad one.”
Stone grunted assent, warily scanning the chamber around them.
Moon pushed to his feet, still unsteady, and found the light-rock. He looked back at the trough, a slice of deeper shadow in the dark floor, and wondered what he would have seen if he had fallen into it. He had the sense that something had traveled in the dark space, and that something had gone terribly wrong with it.
Stone growled low under his breath and moved on. Moon followed.
They crossed the chamber, slowly and cautiously, then went through a passage that connected several smaller chambers, all silent except for the occasional hum of insects. From the curve of the walls, they were inside one of the larger towers. Then Stone hissed sharply at Moon.
Moon shifted to groundling, tied the light rock up in the tail of his shirt, then shifted back. In the renewed darkness ahead, he saw the shaft of dim light, a white glow shining from below.
They crept forward, until Moon saw that the light shone up from a hole in the floor, a good fifty paces across. From the cracks and crumbling pavement around it, the shaft wasn’t meant to be there. He looked up to see it mirrored the jagged hole in the curved roof he had spotted from outside.
Then Stone whispered, “There.” A moment later, Moon saw it too.
Something small lay crumbled on the floor, its shadow etched by the glow from the opening. Not a body, was Moon’s only thought as he started forward.
Stone caught his arm and jerked him back. Moon realized Stone was right and hissed at his own stupidity. The thin layer of moss and dirt on the floor might show tracks, though Moon couldn’t see any in this strange light. Stone shifted to his winged form, stretched out one long arm, and hooked the object with his claw. As he lifted it, Moon saw it was a bag with painted designs on the tough fabric, the kind with the tie-down flap that most of the Raksura in Indigo Cloud used.
Stone brought the bag toward them and dropped it into Moon’s hands. The flap was already open, and Moon dug through the contents. There was some food, dried fruit and berries, and a cake of tea, all of which bugs had gotten into. But there were also a couple of copper and leather bracelets, a roll of pressed paper, a wooden pen, and a cake of ink wrapped in leaves.
“It’s Chime’s,” Moon said. None of the other warriors would have brought writing materials to give them something to do during a visit to another court, and he knew Chime had planned to try to get access to the Ocean Winter libraries.
Stone, just a dark shadow against the light, stretched further, extending his wings slightly to balance himself, and craned his neck to look down the opening.
The light went out. Stone flinched back with a startled growl. Moon shifted to groundling just long enough to untie the light-rock from his shirt tail. He held it up, heart pounding, but nothing leapt at them out of the opening.
After a moment, Stone hissed, and held out his hand. Moon put the rock into his palm. Cautiously, Stone stretched forward again and dropped the rock into the opening. Moon couldn’t stand it a moment more. He jumped up, caught hold of the scales under Stone’s right wing and climbed up to his collar flanges. Hooking his claws on them, he twisted around to look.
The light-rock fell, its glow giving Moon heartbeat-long glimpses of shattered tile and crumbled stone floors and walls, some covered with encroaching vines. It was impossible to tell if something had burst up through the ruined island or had tunneled down. Then the rock tumbled into overhanging leaves, broad and deep green, and vanished.
Stone grunted thoughtfully, and Moon climbed down his back and dropped to the floor. Stone eased away from the edge, then shifted to groundling. In the now complete darkness, he said, “Should have brought more of those rocks.”
“We can go back, get Merit to make more,” Moon said, then remembered that Merit was probably still unconscious. He thought of the vines and foliage half-glimpsed below, and said, “This is old. I mean, nothing tunneled up here from below just to come after them.”
Stone said, “We have to wait for daylight.”
Moon felt a growl build in his chest, and suppressed it. There was no other choice.
Moon and Stone retreated back to the camp, told the others what they had found, and then withdrew to talk over what they meant to do once dawn broke. The others seemed determined to sit up through the night talking. At least they were quiet, mostly because Moon told them if anybody woke Merit, he would personally beat them into unconsciousness. He was hoping Merit would be recovered enough in the morning to use the bag in his scrying.
Sitting near the hearth with Stone, Moon went through the contents of it again, feeling the corners carefully to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. He doubted Chime had had time to leave any clues about where he had disappeared to, but he unrolled the paper anyway.
He was expecting to find the sheets blank. Chime shouldn’t have had much time to write anything down during the journey; Moon had been assuming he had brought it along to give him something to do at Ocean Winter. But the pages were covered with notes.
It was all in Raksuran, of course, in the red-brown ink the Arbora made. The oiled skin wrapped around the roll had protected the pages from the insects that had attacked the food. Moon thumbed through it all, frowning, trying to pick out something he recognized. He could read Altanic and Kedaic and bits and pieces of other groundling trade languages, but his knowledge of Raksuran was rudimentary at best. It didn’t help that it was insanely complicated compared to the symbols of a trade language. He knew all the letters now, and could read the names of most of the people he knew, and pick out a number of simple words and sentences. But nothing Chime had written here looked simple.
He glanced up to see Stone watching him with an ironically lifted brow. Moon hissed in frustration and shoved the papers at him. “Fine, you read it.” No one knew Moon couldn’t read Raksuran, except maybe Thorn. But perhaps Stone had guessed. Or if he had ever had a suspicion, this had confirmed it.
Stone took the sheaf of papers. “You should have that little scrap that Pearl took teach you. At least then he’d be good for something.”
“Leave Ember alone,” Moon said, by habit.
“Quiet.” A line of concentration between his brows, Stone sorted through the papers, turning so the light from the nearest moss bundle fell on the pages, reading sections here and there. “Most of this isn’t recent. He’s been writing down everything he’s found out about changing from an Arbora to a warrior.” He looked more closely at one page. “Looks like he’s been copying things out of court histories, but I don’t recognize these names.”
That made sense. “I know he spent some time in the libraries at Opal Night while we were there. He’s been looking for stories about other Arbora who turned into warriors.”
“Hmm,” Stone commented, and kept reading. After a while, he handed the papers back to Moon. “I can’t see anything there about this city, or even this whole trip.” Stone sighed. “He thought he could talk his way into the Ocean Winter libraries?”
“Yes.” Moon rolled the papers up again and carefully tied the protective skin back around them. Going through the motions, as if he was certain Chime would eventually get these back.
Stone glanced at the shelter, then across the hearth where the nearest Arbora and warriors were talking quietly. He lowered his voice. “You’ve thought about why they might have gone into that place.”
It was an oblique reference to the creature at the forerunners’ city, and the way it had drawn groundlings and Fell to it. “Yes. But … if there was something here that could trick, or
force, Raksura to come to it, why hasn’t it done it before? And why can’t we hear it?”
“Because no Raksura ever camped close enough before. Or no Arbora-turned-Aeriat who’s been able to hear and see things others can’t for the past turn.”
Moon growled under his breath, because he wanted to argue and couldn’t. “You think a creature made that light? And if it did, why did it stop making it?”
“Stop asking questions that start with why.” Stone looked toward the dark shape of the city again. “I don’t know. If it called Chime to it and the others followed …”
“Why is the light still lit? Why didn’t we find the creature, or find their bodies, or—” Moon ducked Stone’s slap at his head.
Stone growled, “Go to sleep.”
Moon retreated away from the hearth, knowing that Stone had reached the limit of his patience for speculation. But Moon was too jumpy to even try to sleep, and ended up going to sit with the others and rehashing all their theories with Bramble and Salt. If he got any sleep that night, it was purely by accident.
As soon as dawn started to lighten the gloom under the canopy, Moon sent the Arbora to gather hanging moss and make bundles of it using the cords from the shelter tarps. They also needed to eat, so he sent Drift, Sand, and Aura off to hunt on the platforms of the nearby mountain-trees. It took all his patience to wait, but by the time the light had brightened into full morning, they had four grasseaters to share, several bundles of hanging moss, and Merit had stumbled out of the shelter. Moon explained the situation while Merit was eating his share of the meat, and Merit spelled the moss bundles into light for them.
Moon divided the group, leaving two of the Arbora, Salt and Strike, and two warriors, Sage and Aura, to guard Merit while he scryed over Chime’s bag. The others he and Stone took to the city.
They landed on the balcony Moon and Stone had found last night. In daylight, they could see worn carving under the coating of moss and greenery, but the encroaching vines had bitten into the stone and obscured most of it.