The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Rare had left Maeve and the portmanteau of goods at the crossing a half block down from the hill. She approached the hothouse alone, carrying one of the bundles from Maeve’s precious luggage under her cloak, wondering if there really was a useful place to put a blade into a lanyani, should business turn ugly. Knives were made to kill creatures with blood coursing through a proper circulatory system—things with veins and muscles and tendons to cut. Long ago, the Old Bear had shown her a sample of the lanyani’s fibrous flesh under a microscope. She’d been small enough to need a stool to see through the eyepiece. The sample showed cells diffusing the fuel of photosynthesis through a dense lattice. No. The knife would do little good. Rare doubted the alley pistol belted beside it would prove much better.

  The best strategy is to avoid needing either.

  The hothouse doors steamed in the autumn air. There was no need to knock. The housekeeper was on duty.

  The Crystal Hill’s housekeeper was an aigamuxa female with shoulders as broad as Rare was tall, and dugs little more than fists of flesh on a knotted, seal-gray chest. It opened the great glass doors and loped up to her, its saw-toothed, eyeless face tilting to the side. It sniffed. Breath like turned earth hung in the air.

  Then the aiga swung into its pedestal position, heel-mounted eyes glaring suspicion. Watching an aigamuxa’s hulking body twist into that strange shape—hands on the ground between its legs, crouched low, legs swung behind and over the shoulders so that the pink eyes winked like shards of spinel in the mountings of their heels—always left Rare’s stomach in a tumult. The creature’s lips parted over jagged teeth, ready to pronounce the human visitor unwelcome.

  “I’ve come to see the Pit Masters,” Rare said, as if her call were altogether ordinary.

  A snort. The pink eyes narrowed. “What do you know of the masters?”

  “Enough to make them an offer.”

  “And you are?” The aigamuxa’s voice was surprisingly expressive, even feminine, under its heavy timbre.

  Rare smiled sweetly. “A friend, perhaps. Here.” She reached under her cloak and offered the aiga a leather-wrapped parcel the size of a small brick.

  For ogrish beasts, the aigamuxa had exquisite balance. In a blur of motion, it lifted one arm from the ground, took the parcel, and swung back to its feet without so much as a wobble. Its four-jointed fingers lingered over the parcel, exploring it carefully. It inhaled, pressing the object to its eyeless face. Then the aigamuxa leaned close, breath flaring against Rare’s cheek. Its face wrinkled as it sniffed for traces of lye or turpentine or chlorine, poisons that could harm its masters and pollute the house’s soils. A few vials of the right substances could wither an entire copse in mere days.

  The fact that it did not paw Rare over to find the knife or the pistol whose powder it must have smelled, or snatch the hand-length, steel-tipped hairpin from her bun, or slip the strangling wire braided innocently about her wrist, said how much good those weapons might do here.

  “I’m clean,” Rare promised.

  The housekeeper tilted its head, considering. Then it nodded, thrusting the parcel back into Rare’s hands. “I will ask if they will see you.”

  The aigamuxa leapt straight into the air, grasping the vines woven through the hothouse’s thick canopy. “Follow.”

  It swung steadily along, heel eyes blinking down at Rare.

  The hothouse was nearly a hundred yards long, glass roofed and walled, its panels tempered as strong as steel. The outer walls and inner walkway’s dense foliage offered all the privacy of slate and limestone. Sensible humans dared not trespass here. Every soul in Corma had heard stories of folk gone off in the company of the wandering trees, never to return.

  The stories, Rare knew, were seasoned with more than a little truth.

  Rare spied movement amid a clutch of rhododendrons. She didn’t turn her head. Good eyes spotted everything they needed, even in fleeting glimpses, and Rare had very good eyes.

  Lanyani children. They were small, willowy things, with limbs scarcely thicker than her thumbs, their roots freshly raised from the loam. Seedlings, they’re called. Or cuttings. There was a difference. Rare had known it once, but the nuance was lost under all the years since the Old Bear shared his stories.

  Rare followed the aigamuxa’s shadow, speaking as if it were quite a regular thing for her interlocutor to swing in the branches overhead.

  “Do the Pit Masters speak Amidonian?”

  “They speak not at all, in this season. I will translate.”

  “And I can trust that you’ll represent the masters’ intentions honestly?”

  There was a straining sound, the groan of a bough bearing weight. The aigamuxa vaulted to the ground, landing hands-first to protect its eyes.

  “You came here speaking of the Pits. You must know something of them.” There was a note to the aiga’s voice—something almost like sympathy. From an aigamuxa, sympathy was almost as menacing as its double-rowed teeth. “You forget that I have as much to fear from them as you.”

  The light from the glass ceiling seemed very far away. The aigamuxa turned, speaking into the heavy, moss-bearded trees all around.

  “There is an offering for the Pits, Old Ones.”

  Two of the largest trees stirred and lurched slowly forward. Rare held her breath and straightened her back.

  The lanyani Rare had seen in the city were lithe, supple creatures in the summer and spring, and silent, creaking shades come autumn. They disappeared on winter winds into the households that could afford to take on exotic servants, or otherwise to the hothouses of their copse clans. They did not grow large, and they always kept a human shape, their limbs and digits moving like Men’s.

  The Pit Masters were altogether different—hunched, knotted giants crawling with lichens and long robes of moss. They kept the hothouses rich in resources, secure against outsiders. Dwelling in that fertile clime all their lives made them vast. Strong. Monstrous.

  The bark of one Pit Master split near to the top, where the eyes of a more human creature might have been. Two white slits gleamed fiercely down at Rare. The masters’ backs were quilled with leafy branches bristling with thorns. They shivered all at once. It was the sound of a thousand locusts thrumming.

  The aigamuxa listened. “They wish to see this package,” she said at last.

  Rare lifted the parcel in her hands into clear view and parted her skirts to fetch her knife. She, Rare realized as she slit open the brick’s wrappings. I thought of the aiga as a she.

  The lanyani ancients were too little like humans for her to give them whatever gender they might once have owned. Were those knots the shadows of breasts? Was that bulge at the trunk’s fork the shape of its forgotten sex? Or did the lanyani ever have such structures in the first place? Rare had thought so, but perhaps she was wrong. You left too much of what the Old Bear taught you behind, when he left you. Everywhere, the Pit Masters sprouted things and smelled of soil. One loomed over her, waiting, a spider dangling from its slash of an eye like a hideous tear.

  You’re more cousin to the aiga ape than these creatures, Rare reminded herself. That’s what makes this deal possible.

  She unfolded the leather, revealing a tarry brick. Heated, it would burn with a heady, sweet perfume, all sticky buns and poppy seeds and sins.

  The lanyani giant drew a gnarled finger slowly down the opium block.

  The other master’s leaves trembled, its eyes wide.

  Rare pretended distraction as she scanned the hothouse’s wild interior. She spotted a space between the honeybushes. It was too tight for the giants to pass without trampling and lacked any hanging limbs from which the aiga might pursue. Yes. That would be her way out, if she needed one.

  The housekeeper’s brow furrowed. “What need do the lanyani have of your human concoctions?”

  Rare smirked. “You feign innocence badly.” She addressed the Pit Master directly, then. “We had the hottest summer in almost a tenyear. But I’m sure you know that.
The EC’s Meteorological Society predicts this will be the earliest winter in many years, too—and one of the longest. Harsh climes make for hard use of the hothouses, don’t they?”

  One Pit Master’s gnarled head tilted toward the other. A moment of uncertainty.

  Rare pounced upon it.

  “I’ve lived in Corma most of my life. There are four hothouses in the upper eastern districts, this the largest, home to seven copse clans. Eleven volunteer tribes wander through between seasons. This summer, you’ve had more lanyani coming here to use your soil and water and warmth than in the last four seedling cycles combined. The soil is nearly exhausted. Your composting Pits must be, too.”

  A rattle in the branches, brief and brittle. Rare did not wait for a translation. She knew assent in any language.

  “Some of the copse clans are due to plant their cuttings. Clan Moss-down was already told to wait for the spring, and they’re not happy. Clan Rootwater will ask next, and if they are deferred, too, you may see an uprising. The volunteer tribes will take advantage of the unrest to insinuate themselves into Crystal Hill. They could even claim a place in the Grove. Propose one of their own to grow into a new Pit Master.” She dropped the parcel of opium with a thud and picked at her fingers daintily. The looming creatures seemed a little wilted. “Perhaps I’m wrong, though. After all, it’s none of my affair.”

  Silence. Rare smiled down at her hands, plucking tarry blackness away. She was not wrong. She’d spoken to every walking tree she could corner, from the exotic housemaids to the buskers on the streets. Sounding the politics out, confirming, denying, exploring. It had taken three weeks, and she’d been exquisitely thorough. Even the Old Bear would have been proud of her prudence. She’d earned her way to a coup of knowledge, a confirmation of those nightmare stories, and now she could turn it all into a tidy profit.

  The aigamuxa bitch was right. The Pits meant something very different to the flesh-born than the tree-born. Rare had been counting on that.

  The Pit Masters began rattling and hissing at one another, the aigamuxa’s head turning rapidly, taking in the argument.

  Rare found a mossy stone and sat, smoothing her skirts. The Pit Masters had much to consider, and the lanyani were not known for acting swiftly. As she listened to the susurrus of debate, she imagined its progress.

  Of course the Pits were depleted. The lanyani survived by photosynthesis, and the city offered their people precious little on which to survive. The hothouses were the lanyani’s alehouses, inns, and common spaces—the place they could come to settle into good loam and find warmth and wetness, no matter the season. A hothouse was the difference between life and death for city-dwelling lanyani.

  An overused hothouse meant death closing in on the copse clans.

  The Pits that enriched the hothouse soil needed to be replenished—needed organic matter, and heat, and time. The lanyani were plants, after all. Sentient and mobile, they needed all the things their dumb, still cousins did, but in far greater shares. Brutal weather demanded even more nutrients to ensure survival. Bad climates drove the migrant volunteer tribes out of the battered wilds and into the cities, seeking safe haven in the hothouses. The lanyani needed strong soil, and strong soil needed strong matter to enrich it.

  Blood and bone meal were powerful amendments. Powerful and, in a city ruled by humans, hard to come by, without a little ingenuity.

  The Pit Masters studied Rare, their eyes gleaming with hunger and distrust. She maintained a theatrical interest in her nails, made perhaps less than ladylike by the application of her blade to her cuticles.

  “If it helps you make your decision,” she offered, “the constabulary knows about the opium shipment from which this was taken. They’ve already done the accounting on the bust. It’s clean. All of it.” Rare sheathed her knife slowly, revealing a long leg and the buckles of her hose. “I know your arrangement with the law is a delicate thing. Cleverly made, though. Bravo.”

  It was the aiga housekeeper who asked the question this time. “And what do you know of the arrangements?”

  Rare rolled her eyes. “Please. The masters send the lesser clansmen out to kidnap people, slit their throats, and bleed them into the hothouse composting Pits. You bury the rest under that mound.” She waggled a fine-fingered hand toward the shadowy copse from which the masters had emerged. “The worms strip away the flesh, and then the bones are ground back in with the rest. The constabulary gives you no grief over the disappearances as long as you confine yourself to orphans and vagrants and convicts released from the hulks. They prefer you picking off human refuse over animals, in any case. Even the greenest gendarme draws a deal more clink a week than a dogcatcher.” The silence continued, damp and heavy. Rare looked up at the towering Pit Masters. Their shadows fell over her. She rose to shrug off the fear that threatened to pin her in place. “You can’t afford your fertilizers making a fuss, so you drug them. But it has to be with something that won’t harm the soil. So, opiates. Perfectly natural. Half your marks are addicted to opium already. The rest would happily take it to escape their lives for a moment.”

  The Pit Master with the spider hanging from its eye slit rustled softly.

  “How much?” the aigamuxa translated.

  “I have a dead stone’s worth in four packets. The other three are being held against my safe return.”

  The Pit Masters hissed among themselves. Rare thought it might have been more than her ego hearing a certain admiration in their discourse.

  “And how much for the lot?” the aigamuxa asked.

  “Seven thousand sovereigns.”

  By rights, the lanyani should have been in the early stages of their winter torpor—slow and silent, leaning on their translator. But the Pit Masters exploded in a frenzy of rustling, jerking limbs, showering leaves broad as dinner plates. Rare took a step back, darting a wary look between the thorny figures.

  “That,” the aigamuxa hissed, shark teeth smiling, “is too much.”

  “I gathered that. Call it six thousand, if you like.”

  The Pit Master with shoulders like a cantilevered roof creaked round so fast Rare could hear the fibers of its body groan and tear. Strange words crackled from its branches.

  “That is also—”

  “Unacceptable,” Rare finished. “I gathered that, as well.”

  “You will leave here alive. That is something,” the aigamuxa volunteered. It seemed that she was making an inference, though—not a promise on her masters’ behalf.

  “Fifty-five hundred,” Rare countered. “Or nothing.”

  The Pit Masters seemed to settle, the locust hiss of their animate limbs dying down. They conferred in brief crackles, and then, Rare saw the spider-eyed master nod.

  “Fifty-five hundred and a gift.”

  Rare raised an eyebrow. “A gift?”

  “Yes.” The housekeeper had uncoiled from her pedestal position, obscuring her eyes. Even so, Rare could read her expression.

  She smiled. “Of course. A gift.”

  Maeve waited, folded in the shadows of an alley at the bottom of Crystal Hill. Rare let the heels of her dress boots click-click on the cobbles, announcing her arrival. The fox-faced woman slackened at Rare’s approach, finger uncoiling from her alley pistol’s trigger.

  “Bless me, Rare, I thought you were filling one of their Pits by now,” she breathed. “What news?”

  “Never hold the trigger while you stand guard,” Rare snapped. “If you’d pulled a shot at some passing carter out of nerves, we’d have had a deal of trouble.”

  Maeve looked hurt. She reached under her muslin skirts, fumbling the gun back into its holster. “This is your sort of business, not mine. And you wouldn’t have gotten this far if I hadn’t slipped into Brietney’s bed while you slipped into his shipyards.”

  Rare looked up and down the street. “That may be.” She smiled. “Ready to hear your cut? You’ll be pleased.”

  Maeve’s eyes glittered. “G’wan.”

  �
�Five hundred.”

  The eager spark snuffed. “Five hundred? You told me you lifted about two thousand’s worth.”

  “Negotiations,” Rare said, spreading her hands. “We need to get rid of the goods as badly as they need to buy them. It’s five hundred you didn’t have before. It’s a gift, really.”

  Maeve stepped over the portmanteau on the ground behind her. Her hand was back at her skirts, reaching for the pistol.

  That decided matters.

  Rare pulled the steel-tipped pin from her hair, thick around as her little finger. She lunged inside Maeve’s reach and drove the pin into her throat. For an instant, there was resistance and a gurgling cry. Rare twisted the needle. Then there was only the blood running down her hand.

  Maeve blinked at Rare, glass-eyed. Her hands drifted up, fingers plucking the hairpin’s gilded tip. She sagged to her knees. Pink bubbles frothed her wordless mouth. Maeve’s body pitched forward, twitching. Then it fell still.

  A shadow dropped into the alley from the gangways between apartments.

  Rare tugged the portmanteau from under Maeve’s body. She flung it to the housekeeper, who snatched it midair and tucked it under one massive shoulder. How the beasts did such things with their eyes planted on the ground, Rare didn’t know—and didn’t want to.

  “A gift,” she announced, gesturing to Maeve’s body. Rare tossed back one of the coin purses newly filling her cloak pockets. “And this, too. Her share.”

  “The lady is most generous.”

  Rare smiled sweetly. “I hope we can do business again.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps soon, even.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The clansmen bring the masters news of the conference your people have called.”

  “The Ecclesiastical Commission,” Rare corrected. “Not really my people. What should it concern you?”

  “You find things. The copse clans can find buyers for them. Eager buyers.”