43.

18^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

CRYSTAL HILL, CORMA

It was a haze of pain, scented with blood and earth, which told Rahielma she was still alive. She opened her eyes, relieved to find herself curled tight, knees to her forehead, ankles tucked together to protect her eye-heels. That she had taken that position meant nothing was broken—or at least, nothing beyond mending. Stretching slowly, she worked her way into the pedestal position and found, as her clawed hands reached and made purchase below her, the limits of her cage.

We can teach you, she had threatened Dor.

Creator save me, what a fool I’ve been.

Dor and her clan of many clans had been good enough to let the aigamuxa chieftain share her prison—a culvert of dirt and rootwork dug into Crystal Hill’s mossy hillocks—with her mate. And they had been cruel enough to transform him into the cage itself.

“Oh, my love, what beasts they are,” she whispered, her heels gone damp with tears.

Nasrahiel was still alive. Rahielma could smell the heat in his blood. He hung upside down, head and shoulders and dangling arms swinging like a chandelier in her chamber’s center. His mechanical eye was cracked, its glass spidered and its iris jammed half-open by an errant shard. The intricate pistons and cables and rods of his man-made legs, though . . .

Rahielma turned her feet to the earth, murmuring prayers neglected since childhood.

They had made their raid, and when all seemed lost, Nasrahiel had shot from the hothouse ceiling like a monstrous arrow, lancing into the earth, claws and teeth and arms swinging. Rahielma remembered his attack as a blur of blood and bark and brass darting past the narrow field of vision provided her at the bottom of her prison pit. The column of dirt and roots coming up from its center trembled with the screams of kidnapped young, mid-slaughter. The lanyani did not themselves scream, but their bodies did, fibers shredding and limbs popping, as if a threshing machine had broken loose in their midst.

Rahielma and her warriors had whooped for joy, cheered Nasrahiel with lines of old poems and songs, pounded their fists on the dirt, scrab-bled up the crumbling walls of their prison, stepping on one another’s heads and shoulders in a mad rush to join him and pull the treacherous weeds up from the very earth of their stronghold. She had given her body as a ladder to others and accepted the same in return. In the lanyani’s fury to slay the children and destroy Nasrahiel, they had neglected to keep their captives contained.

She had expected the sight on the surface to bring her joy. Instead, she only saw the dozens—no, hundreds—of tendrils shooting up from the hothouse’s pine-needled floor, binding Nasrahiel and tearing through his scarred flesh with vines wreathed in thorns and burrs. Two lanyani crawled out of the center pit, caked with gore, the second of them carrying the dead aiga children in a bulging sack.

A sack, Rahielma saw to her horror, made of one their bodies, broken and gutted and turned into a sling.

Nasrahiel had done what he could to free Rahielma and her warriors and had still been choked on the spot before he could reach the children. It was not the aigamuxa who gave lessons, after all.

The howling aigamuxa, their pink eyes streaming tears and jagged mouths foaming rage, could scarcely react as a lanyani yards away plunged into the earth as they might have plunged into water, disappearing without a ripple or splash. Four more followed suit. An instant later, they breached the earth on which the invading aiga stood, behind and below, their bodies spears and arrows, quilling the warriors like shrike’s prey.

All the while, Dor stood on the Pit’s seeping surface. The smallest Pit Master, the one who had once been Lir, convulsed behind her in something that might have been laughter.

After that, there had been pain and blood and darkness.

And now, Nasrahiel.

Though the lanyani had no use for Men’s machines, they knew more than enough about how to dismantle them. Nasrahiel’s mechanical legs had been peeled like a fruit, divided into parts and splayed in all directions, bent and warped into a dome of bars and cables over Rahielma’s prison. His torso still attached, its spines twisted by the Trees’ handiwork, he swung like a piece of meat from a tendon, the metalwork suspending him groaning at his pendulous weight.

A lattice of ruddy sunset passed through the weave of Nasrahiel’s body and the canopy of trees. Rahielma saw Dor approach her cell.

One corner of a mouth like a lightning gash turned in mockery. Rahielma put her heels to the ground, shutting the world away. Her skin itched. She scratched at her throat, scouring as if it had wronged her. Something under her nails made her pause.

She touched it to her nose and sniffed. She recognized the smell.

Cordyceps. Rahielma struggled to smear the offending powder from her hand, plunging it into the dirt. But the smell was everywhere, especially her face and hands. A strange taste lingered in her throat, heavy as wet mulch.

“You didn’t imagine I was finished with you, did you?”

Dor’s words drifted down like dead leaves. Snarling, Rahielma curled into the pedestal position and glared at her through burning tears.

“What have you done to me?”

Dor paced the perimeter of the prison hole, appearing and disapppearing behind the broken pieces of Nasrahiel.

“Nothing you did not force me to do. I had little interest in keeping aigamuxa touched by the cordyceps before, but your boldness persuaded me you still had use.” She drew in another breath, played a slow measure of answer, a sinister pianissimo. “I require obedience, chieftain. I will have it from you however I must.” She gestured to the tangle of metal capping Rahielma’s prison. “Your mate fought bravely. He would never have survived in even this many pieces without the human doctor’s work making him so strong. Most interesting. I fear, though, that the cordyceps will not take for him. Too much inorganic material in his nervous system. Nothing for it to . . .” She paused, considering. “. . . grab on to. It won’t matter. We have no gift for rebuilding in the manner his body now requires. Death will be a release for him. I am sure you will look forward to it yourself, before long.”

“I will be released,” Rahielma hissed. “But not by my death.”

“By your tribe, you suppose? Soon enough, they all will serve me, too. You will walk out of this city with my scouts to hunt down each and every one of the Nine. You will raze them from the earth. That is the way of life in the wild. The way things are meant to be. Fire burns the forest down so it may rise up stronger. Rains wash out the weakest roots. We must purge. We will begin by showing the Creator that we are above judgment, His first and final survivors.”

Dor’s shadow turned like a cloak, covering the ruddy sunset. She strode away, leaving Rahielma to the darkness, staring up into her husband’s broken face and reaching for his eye that would not see.

Dor crossed the surface of the Pits, stepping past the dry, flaking shards of the dead Pit Master and toward Lir.

It had been only a few days since he rooted and already he swelled with new life, covered in buds that winked like countless eyes, spying from all directions. His limbs had widened, split, and stretched outward in long, willow-like whips. They caressed Dor, countless lovers’ hands, as she passed between them, trailing whispers of devotion in their pale yellow pollen.

It is such ecstasy, my leader, he sighed through the earth. The mud all around him teemed with the sharp tang of blood. I wish you could join me.

As do I, Dor lied. She stroked his trunk, pregnant with possibility, touching with hands above the earth and her long, reaching roots below. She had no desire to sink herself to one place until the end of her days, perfecting the soil for her people in exchange for own slow demise. True, the Pit Masters grew vast and mighty. But eventually, they would benefit all they could from the first fruits of the best soil, becoming sponges, filters, canaries in a cave of acids and bases. There was much Lir had not understood of the honor offered to him. He would have many, many years now to reflect on it—years that would teach him to accept his fate, or regret it. They were years Dor was happy to leave him to.

I am needed here, she continued. That was not a lie. Tell me of our progress.

All the aigamuxa who lived have been given the cordyceps. I sense it will root well in them. The message you sent over the waters to Fog Island has been received.

Dor straightened, as if drawn up in a wind. How do you know this?

There is so much the Pit Masters never tell us, my leader, my love. That made Dor worry, until he continued. The ocean touches the earth which touches even the stones of this city. If I draw down deep, I can feel their answer to your call, even from so far away.

Dor’s body prickled, a wave of burrs and bark that smoothed like a fur settling back into place. And their answer?

The hunt has already begun. The girl is in Nippon, as the book has said. There was an attack, an effort to claim her alone. It has failed, but it was only a first sally. Our kin will still claim the child and the ones who protect her. Have no doubt.

You were my best choice to succeed the fallen master, Lir. You do not disappoint.

Something like a face broke through the surface of Lir’s peeling-paper bark. It smiled, toothless and euphoric, opened to speak in words—

Then a ring of eyes opened amid the buds surrounding it. Then another. And another.

Dor recoiled.

The ends of Lir’s willow-whip branches rose, each a fusillade of budding eyes, their pistols and stamens wildly rolling irises.

INTRUDERRSSSSS, Lir hissed, the soil rippling with his call.

The lanyani crouched amid the hothouse’s shadows and branches emerged, bristling saw-edged leaves and wicked spurs.

Dor pressed a hand to the bundle of branches growing from her hip, clutching the book and its secrets. She turned in the direction Lir’s branches had pointed and saw for herself.

Just inside the hothouse’s great glass doors, the cordyceps-hollowed housekeeper aiga lying dead at their feet, stood four humans—three women and one man.

Dor reached into the Pit’s earth for purchase and strode to its shore. She spread her arms in mock welcome.

“Strangers! To what do we owe the honor?”

A copper-faced woman, slim as a riding crop, stepped to the side, clearing a path for a short woman, round-cheeked and heavyset, to step to the fore. The young man plucked at the girl’s sleeve, tugging her backward, though she seemed to need little encouragement. She disappeared behind the spindly youth, eyeing the large, cylindrical object the fat woman held.

Dor examined the woman’s burden more carefully. The fat woman tossed her head to clear away a kink of dark hair, and raised the object to her shoulder.

It was Lir who understood first. You cannot let them! No one brings fire to the Gathering Grove!

Dor’s face collapsed in fury. “No!”

The young man looked to the copper-faced woman. “Actually,” he said, “I’m thinking yes?” He rolled his shoulder, shrugging the fire-thrower strung across his own back into view.

“I’m looking for the one called Dor,” the slender, darker-skinned woman called. Their leader. She walked forward slowly, hands raised for parley. “My name is Haadiyaa Gammon. We need to talk.”

“You,” Dor snarled, “need to leave.”

“Not without the book or the aiga.”

Dor looked down at her hands. They splintered into scissoring knives. “Then you will be disappointed.”

Gammon nodded toward the girl who had cowered behind the young man just a moment before. Then she was gone, the brush just to the side of the entrance path rustling with her passage.

“That,” Gammon said, unbothered by the girl’s disappearance, “is a terrible shame.”

Lir rustled like a swarm of locusts at Dor’s back. “Whyyy?” his limbs ground out, the word barely recognizable as speech.

“Because we didn’t only bring fire-throwers,” Gammon said.

She reached into a trouser pocket, withdrawing a handful of tiny, pill-like objects threatening to spill over her cupped palm.

Dor had no heart to skip a beat and no blood to run cold. But the sight of loosestrife seed made every lanyani creeping forward with fury written in their tangled faces draw up short.

“Very well, Haadiyaa Gammon,” Dor snarled, “We are listening.”