3.

THE GATHERING GROVE, CRYSTAL HILL, CORMA

Two seasons past, the lanyani of Corma had called the great edifice of glass and iron towering over the northernmost reaches of the city “Crystal Hill.” But much could change in two seasons. It could bring about an ordinary wilting—or an uprooting. It was a matter of perspective.

Dor knew a great deal about perspective. More than she had known two seasons ago, for certain.

The copse clans had gathered, filling the place lanyani now called “the Gathering Grove” to its limit. Even the volunteer tribes had made the trek in from the foggy, wooded mountains north and east of Corma. With no loam left in the hothouse for their roots, they vined up the glass ceiling’s skeleton beams, their bodies drawn into fibrous lengths like wool on a skein, dangling beards of moss, their eyes distributed across buds that winked down into the shaded grove, fringed by petals half-wilted in the summer heat.

“The count?” Dor asked Lir.

Her lieutenant reviewed the space with his eyes, but it was his feet, rooted deep in the hothouse soil, which did the real census-taking.

“Three hundred nine . . . ten . . . eleven. We had expected two hundred.”

“News travels,” Dor mused. “If I had sent the call earlier, we would have twice as many. We would have had to gather in the Commons.”

“The Men and their Constabulary—”

“They no longer matter.” She reached to the twiggy bundle growing from her right hip. A latticework of slender branches held close the book that had begun her quest to muster the lanyani of western Amidon.

Dor looked back into herself, feeling in her body’s new layer of rings and sap the time that had passed. Winter had been an utter loss. She had gathered her people by the dozens and preached to them, not as the Men did, from lecterns and laboratories and street corners, but through the air and the soil. So much had been planned, but the branch-snapping cold of a bitter season kept her intentions as dormant as her rallied troops.

But as soon as the frost melted, they were ready. As the summer swelter intensified, they turned the earth of the Pits, added new bodies, fed them to worms and fungi. In another month, their numbers would be doubled. The cuttings her people had made in the fall were nearly ready to uproot, and then—

“Let us begin,” she said.

Lir raised his spindling arms high above his head. A haze of pale, golden pollen sighed from his fingertips. The digits, imitations of human anatomy adopted for convenience’s sake, wore away like so much dust in a wind. The bark of his arms rippled, grew dense, and crawled forth to replace the fast-disappearing matter of his fingers.

Through their connection in the grove’s deep, black earth, Dor felt the furious hunger of Lir’s body sucking at the soil. She had to fight to keep the area around her own roots warded from his ever-reaching twiggings, lest his powerful need to build and disperse and rebuild endanger her own strength.

Thus, the colloquy began—not with words, but with air and essence. The pollen settled on the plants of the grove, settled in the cracks and fissures of the lanyani ringing all around. There, it quickly infused the tree-people, making them ready for the message that was to come—a message more complex and nuanced than their shimmering language of leaves and boughs could easily muster, and one more vast than a single speaker could transmit through the earth to a crowd such as this.

Conversations of this size demanded a hive.

Dor lifted her hand from the bundle at her hip that held the book and let it rest instead on the slatted ceiling of the wood-framed beehive. She had been rooting beside it for hours, meditating on the book, turning its pages, letting her body flourish with blossoms and be touched by countless, tiny insect feet come to her on paper-fine wings. Now, the hive knew her plot as well as she knew herself. Lured by the bounty of Lir’s pollen cloud, the bees surged forth from the hive, spiraling out to every plane and angle of the hothouse. They landed on lanyani, danced along their keeper’s fibrous skin, skirled and turned in the air, kissed wooden flesh and brushed themselves deep into crevices, humming and pirouetting Dor’s message to every tree-person they touched or passed. And so the message ran:

“My friends, you are welcome here, in the home of my roots, at the core of my being. The seasons have been bitter and we have suffered for it, thinking the land had forsaken us.

“It has not. But it has forsaken Men and their houses of stone and metal, their cities built not by the strength of their matter, but by tools and forges. They have mistaken knowledge of natural law for permission to break it. They have mistaken the practice of science for the worship of a God.

“But we know the truth. We knew it ten thousand seasons before Man rose up from his jungles and valleys. We serve no God but the skies above and the earth below.”

The grove itself seemed to rally, stirring as if a gale tore through it. The earth thrummed with her people’s approval.

Dor’s bees spoke for her again, spinning and alighting, spreading her words by the brush of their delicate feet.

“You have come here because I promised to share something that would give us all new power. Something that shows our place in this Man-ravaged world. This.”

The branches lacing her thigh opened, became like the arms of a spider, passing the book upward until it settled in her outstretched hand. She held it aloft. Low-hanging volunteer tribesmen vined downward, drawing as near as they could without tearing their far-reaching forms to splinters. The grove became a coiling mass of twigging eye-stalks, broad-lensed parasites, leaves the size of palms that flashed open and shut, surrounded by fringes of moss, gathering pollen hungrily and drawing Dor’s bees to them for a share of that second sight.

Nearby, a Pit Master of the old Crystal Hill rumbled darkly.

Dor tilted her face toward her elder and nodded. “You speak true. It’s a blasphemy to bring this pulp of our people’s flesh before you, and yet—look.”

She fanned the pages, paused at the proper place, then reached higher and higher, her arm twining upward.

A shudder of leaves. A gasp. Or the nearest thing to one a people without lungs might muster.

A line of serif-heavy script marched like ants across the page. As little as the lanyani used the written word—scrawled on hides and scraped, gently, into fallen wood—they had their own language. The words on this page came from that language.

Something that almost passed for a smile tugged at Dor’s face. “For years, reverend doctors of the humans’ so-called Ecclesiastical Commission struggled to translate this text. I have read its pages many times over in the months since the book . . .” She paused. The bees hovered uncertainly for a moment. Dor focused herself. A little omission. A small lie. “Since it was given to us. Who can guess if the Men who held this book for so long know half of what I saw in a single afternoon? Each day, the book grows, and I learn more.”

A shimmer and rustle of birch. Dor glanced at the cousin looming there. “More of what, indeed?” she echoed, hearing its question. “More of the people the Creator has made us to find. The Vautneks. The Nine.”

One of the vining volunteers hanging above wound itself into something like a pair of pseudopods with a taut cord of tuberous flesh between. The pseudopods inflated, then deflated, pushing air through a crude bellows.

“The Nine are an invention of Mankind,” the pseudopods moaned. “They are an excuse to hold our world in fief.”

“You are right in your second claim, if not the first, brother. They are a legend used to prove how precious human lives are—how any one of them might be the cornerstone of the world. But we are lanyani! We have no need for cornerstones or buttresses or columns or walls. We have roots. And this book calls on us to make them grow.”

The brother lanyani’s pods deflated in answer. “You have not looked around this place, if you believe we have no use for walls. What do you mean?”

“What I say.” Dor’s swarm of bees clustered over the book now, as if to emphasize the tie between her message and her matter. “It’s time we left the hothouses and seedling groves. They are crutches we lean upon so we can dwell among Men and feed ourselves through their appetites. But this book proves the Creator means to speak to us directly—to show us the places we must go to grow.” The bees’ buzz transformed from a sonorous drone to a jagged roar. “And to show us the lives we must prune to find our place.”

Dor nodded to Lir. He had spent himself sending out all that pollen, and so he pushed air through the crevices of his craggy face, his words piping out in piercing, dagger tones.

“We send emissaries of our people tonight to the quayside below Old-temple Down. We start there. Our partners will be waiting for us.”

And with that, the colloquy ended, lanyani vining and twining back into themselves in their dozens and scores.

You are sure this is wise? Lir asked Dor through the soil. Remember what became of the last messenger we sent to these . . . partners.

Of course I am sure.

In truth, Dor could only hope her claim that the aigamuxa would be waiting was true. Rahielma’s response to her last communique had been

. . . not entirely what she had hoped. But if what she understood of the chaos that marked the Old Cathedral months ago was even half-true, it could still be more than enough to have thrust the hot coal of vengeance down the aigamuxa chieftess’s throat.

Rahielma was a widow now, and she knew very well whom she had to blame for it.