47.

18^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

CRYSTAL HILL, CORMA

Surrounded by lanyani eyes shining white as struck lucifers, Haadiyaa Gammon did what came to her most naturally. She squared her shoulders and set her jaw. It’s no different than a meeting with the Governor’s cabinet, she thought. Surely those gentry had wished their hawkish City Inspector would kindly disappear into a shallow grave, given how often she’d caught them with their hands in a pot, sticky with graft. It’s no different, she thought, trying to force herself to believe it was true.

Dor’s voice cut the murderous silence.

“Monster,” she hissed.

Gammon shrugged. The lanyani gathered around recoiled as one, their irisless eyes fixed on her palm, terrified of her movement making even a single seed fall. She took a slow, composing breath.

“One thing I’ve learned recently is that aigamuxa and humans have an equal capacity for acting rashly when provoked. I came very near to following Nasrahiel here when his people attacked, but I held back. We needed better weapons.” She nodded toward Jane and Julian, tense beside her with their fire-throwers held ready. “Better even than these, which a competent engineer can put together in a few hours. We needed something that would do lasting harm.”

Dor’s bark flesh quilled with rage. “It is illegal even to possess those seeds. Impossible to find.”

“Fortunately,” Haadiyaa continued, “my colleagues have been minding shop for a certain alchemist with shockingly little regard for what violates international environmental regulations. Imagine my surprise when I found this loosestrife seed in his storeroom. A whole shipping crate of it. One of the very last orders fulfilled by New Vraska Imports. I assume it requires no introduction.”

Finding the crate in the Stone Scales’s basement had been a miracle they had nearly overlooked. Bess’s search for useful supplies had turned up little more than an array of incendiaries, which posed as great a risk to Gammon and her allies as the lanyani. It was luck alone that made Haadiyaa look twice at the label her torch-beam revealed.

She had learned of loosestrife years before. The story had made an indelible impression. A farmer in the Midlands north of Longmeadow had asked his local grocer for a type of seed that would discourage volunteer tribes of lanyani from making groves of seedlings on his property— essentially, for an environmental prophylactic against nomadic lanyani reproduction. The grocer, perhaps confusing one plant’s biological name with another, placed an order on the farmer’s behalf from a supplier curiously slow about filling the request. It had taken weeks longer than expected because it was so unusual. What middle-western farmer needed five stone of a ground-adaptable pond planting? It seemed an absurd request. But, as it was a very profitable one, the supplier made no effort to double-check the order.

Less than a year later, ten thousand acres of land once teeming with good planting and hemmed in by healthy forest was choked out by a sea of purple loosestrife, waving in the plains-driven winds. Nothing else would grow there now, and every effort to pull, tear, or cut the loosestrife away only dispersed more of its pernicious seeds. They would germinate in hours, grow to maturity in days, and cover a field before the moon turned a full cycle. Only flash-burning solved the problem, and even then, the soil where loosestrife once had grown couldn’t be trusted not to burst open later with a generation of dormant seed.

A bag of loosestrife scattered in the dirt of a lanyani hothouse—or worse, in its Pits—was as certain a doom as a shot of bodkin to a man’s heart.

“I don’t want to throw what’s in my hand,” Gammon called. “But I will, if I must.”

She meant it, too. Gammon wasn’t fool enough to release something that could kill what little other plant life thrived in Corma’s coal-choked haze.

The newest Pit Master, a tentacular tree like a willow gone mad, whipped its branches in fury, slicing out sounds almost like words. “Where is the girl who came with you?”

Gammon smiled thinly. “I promise she carries no loosestrife. She’s coming round to check on your captives.”

It wasn’t a lie. Or at least, not entirely.

A lanyani some yards away from Jane snapped a hefty branch from its body, oozing sap. It held the severed limb like a club, thorned and brutal.

Jane adjusted the fire-thrower on her hip and clucked her tongue. “No, I think you should just stay where you are.”

For a time, nothing moved. Gammon held her breath, hoping things had not gone so still that Bess’s movements would be easily heard. She had wanted to send Julian or Jane along for protection in case a lanyani found her creeping close to the caged aigamuxa. But Jane was no small woman. The kerosene pack loaded on her back did little to improve her chances of moving easily through the close-grown hothouse foliage. Julian was slender enough, but as well made as it was, his false leg tended to stumble over uneven ground. Between that and the awkward counterbalance of his own fuel tank, it was clear Bess had to go it alone.

At last, slow as a creeping vine, Dor moved. She hovered a scissoring hand over the bundle of twigs hugging the book to her side. The fingers rounded, shortened, posing less of a threat to the pages as her body passed the book to her hand, riding up a fusillade of fingers growing and disappearing as quickly as thought. Dor regarded the book coldly, turning it in her hand.

“You may take the book,” she hummed, “or the aigamuxa. Not both.”

Gammon closed her fist a little tighter. “You’re sure of that?”

“Quite.”

Gammon turned her hand so her closed palm faced the ground, her fingers dusted with seed. Two tiny loosestrife specks drifted from her grip, disappearing in the pine-needled floor.

The hothouse exploded with the roar of clattering branches and hissing leaves, a shimmer of greens and grays and browns and sudden wind trembling everywhere. A cloud of dirt swirled around the three humans.

Gammon looked back at Jane and Julian. “Trigger discipline, please.”

“Sure. Discipline.” The boy offered her a strained smile.

Jane’s eyes narrowed. She panned the mouth of her weapon across the clamoring field of lanyani, but kept her finger resting over the trigger guard. “Haadi, you and I,” she sighed, “have a very different idea of when discipline is a desirable character trait.”

“It’s desirable until Bess makes it back to us in one piece.”

“Well,” said Julian. “Hopefully she’ll be about that soon.”

Bess suppressed a yelp as another prickling juniper swatted her face, blurring her vision with tears. She’d been bullied and cajoled into giving up one of the lovely skirts she’d taken to wearing since starting on as the Stone Scales’s minder—leftovers from some other girl of around her height and size, though the Alchemist had been mum about whom. Now she was grateful she’d accepted a pair of Gammon’s trousers. They had become a pelt of briars and branches during her adventure, but she at least didn’t have to worry about getting tangled in the brush.

Beyond the narrow, winding path she followed near the hothouse’s glass wall, Crystal Hill buzzed like a hornet’s nest. Bess froze, waiting for the sound to pass. It only built, layers of rage rolling in upon itself, thickening into a palpable mass.

Keep going, Bess.

She shoveled fear aside and crept on, faster as the explosion of noise gave her cover enough to risk crashing through tighter spaces. At last, the far edge of the composting pits came into view, its shore hillocked with dugouts capped by lattices of broken, bleached bone, or—

Bess blinked, squinted, and recoiled.

She knew those lengths of metal and cable too well—had spent weeks wheedling and grandstanding to get them.

Getting Gammon her pet monster back was one thing. Getting it back when it had been woven into the framework of a cage, though . . .

Bess scrambled toward the dugouts.

Nasrahiel’s body nearly occluded her view of what lay at the prison pit’s bottom. She made a guess.

“Rahielma?” she called.

Something stirred, shifting position. The pinpricks of two bloody, milky eyes gleamed in the darkness below.

“You’re the girl from the Scales.”

“I’m here to check you’re still alive,” Bess whispered. “And to give you this.”

She lay on her belly and passed a hand through the web of warped metal, trying and failing to thread her hand through so it made no contact with Nasrahiel’s bloodied body. A small sack, no larger than a pincushion, dangled from her fingers. The eyes below disappeared, turned to the ground, and a long, clawed arm reached up, snatching the parcel away.

Snuffling sounds. A snort, and a cough.

“What do I need this foul thing for?”

“It’s a gift we’re leaving for the lanyani. Just put it at the bottom of your cell. How many of the others are still alive?”

“A few. They have been given the cordyceps, though. They will not be themselves for long.”

Bess said nothing. Gammon had warned her that might be the case. And she had orders about what to do if it proved to be true.

“What about you?” Bess demanded.

A long pause. Too long. She heard a shuffle below, Rahielma positioning herself again, eyes pointing through the ruin of her fallen husband’s body.

“Not me,” the chieftain said.

Bess looked to the other hillocks, one after another. She rose, dusting at herself, feeling with nerveless fingers for her other pouch. Seven little spheres of tempered glass, two chambers inside, thin-walled but separate until sufficient impact shattered them. They were intended to refill the security system installed above the Stone Scales’s front door. Not fatal, if one could escape the fumes . . .

If one could escape the fumes.

“We’ll have you out soon,” Bess said, though she had already wandered too far from Rahielma’s prison for there to be any hope of her words carrying back.

She stopped over each of the prison dugouts, crouching only long enough to drop a glass sphere and dart away to the next. In less than a minute, a pale, yellow gas plumed through the bleached-bone cages above the pits, sizzling faintly. Another eruption of enraged lanyani covered the coughs, raw and bloody, of a half-dozen dying aiga. A suspension of mercury in something else, something that accelerated its rising temperature and conversion to a mist. Bess didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

She spun away, meaning to run. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied something, turned her head for a better look, and felt her stomach flip.

The fingers of a submerged hand peeked from the shallows of the Pit. One of them curled slowly. Almost beckoning.

Bess staggered backward, her back slamming into a linden.

“What is happening? Where are you going?” Rahielma demanded, her voice deadened by the earth.

“I have . . . I have to go,” Bess shuddered.

She scrambled back the way she’d come, making no effort to be careful.

“Remind me,” Jane shouted over another wave of lanyani fury, “why I let you talk me into coming here?”

Gammon reached into her coat, unholstering the huge pistol that resembled nothing so much as a hornet reimagined by an armorer. She checked its magazine as well as she could without dropping more seed.

“I asked for Julian’s help. After he’d agreed, I used your mother’s instincts to strong-arm you into coming, too.”

“When this is done, I’m going to make love to you, then kill you.”

“At least that’s the right order.”

“Before you do too much planning,” shouted Julian, “we’ve got Bess.”

Gammon peered through the tangle of trees, sentient and otherwise, and spied Bess running at the Pit’s far edge. She waved her arms, throwing signals that filled in grim details.

“Shit,” Gammon said. “Only Rahielma and Nasrahiel. And I think Nasrahiel is going to be complicated.”

Julian shrugged one shoulder. “Then it’s time to get their attention again.”

Jane whirled on him. “Julian, no!”

He pulled the trigger just once. Flame knifed through the canopy overhead. A thicket of acacia crackled and blackened, its branches curling like a swatted spider.

The lanyani fell silent as stones.

“That worked pretty well,” Julian observed cheerfully.

Dor’s irisless eyes opened wide, fathomless holes in the sky of her face. Then the clouds rolled in.

She looked to the book spread open in her hands and seemed an instant away from tearing it asunder. Something stayed her, though. The lanyani nearest her turned, staring, pulling closer to her.

Dor turned a page—the final page of the book—and her face rippled like water.

“You may have the book,” she announced. “And the aigamuxa. They are yours, much good may they do you.”

Julian blinked. “What just happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Gammon answered. “Nothing good.”

A knot of lanyani turned toward Bess. The girl jerked to a halt, trembling, a hart under the hunter’s gaze. Dor nodded to her people and they disappeared into the earth, the dirt rippling in their wake. They appeared again on the opposite shore, surrounding Bess.

The girl screamed. Gammon raised the wasp and trained it on Dor’s head, knowing it would do little good but hoping a sizeable hole would deter something untoward happening.

Whatever harm she meant to prevent, it didn’t happen. The lanyani surrounding Bess peeled away, moving from place to place near her, just out of view, as if surveying something buried in the earth.

“Dead!” one called, all vibrato. “All but the chieftain and the metal one. The cordyceps must have killed them.”

Gammon exchanged a look with Jane. For now, at least, it seemed they had gambled right. If the aiga had been wounded beyond healing, or infected with the cordyceps, Bess was to finish them off. A gas was ideal, as the lanyani had no sense of smell. Soon, though, the gas’s residues would settle as particulate in the greenery around them and the Trees would sense the truth.

Dor turned back toward Gammon. The book was still in her hands, bending under her grip.

“Let the chieftain take what is left of her monster mate,” she thrummed. “Perhaps you can put it together again, humans. It will be like one of your nursery rhymes. You may build him of stick or stone or brick next. It is no matter to us. Now put the seeds away.”

Gammon put the hand in her pocket. She did not release the tiny seeds thorning into her palm. Not yet.

“I’ll put them away properly once the girl is here with me.”

Dor smiled. “That can be arranged.”

Three lanyani were busy prying a ruin of metal and cables from a hole just at the edge of Pit, nearly out of Gammon’s vision. Two others closed in on Bess, clamping her between them. She howled, kicking, and threw her head up to gasp for breath only a moment before they disappeared into the ground, hauling her with them.

A path scored like lightning across the surface of the earth, slashing through the Pits, crashing across its margins and into the clearing beyond. Dor let her hands fall as it stormed between her spread legs. She dropped the book into the furrowed earth to be swept along with the rest, as casually as Gammon might drop a smoldered lucifer.

The ground before Gammon exploded, raining dirt and gravel and a filthy, rag-limp Bess. Julian dropped his fire-thrower, catching her before she could sink into the morass again. The girl’s eyes were bright, blue moons, waxed with panic. Just visible under her white-knuckled grip, the book looked all but perfect, its plain, unlovely bindings disturbingly clean.

Jane joined Julian in looking Bess over. The girl shook, lips blue, stammering noises Gammon was certain weren’t words in any language.

“Haadi, we have to go. Now,” Jane urged.

Gammon held Dor’s gaze a moment longer. Just past the lanyani leader’s shoulder, she spied a battered Rahielma clamping Nasrahiel’s ruined legs around her waist, twisting what remained of them in a rude knot. Then she hauled his body against her back and clutched his arms like a rope in one clawed hand. She wore the wreckage of him like a mantle. Her eyeless face turned, nostrils flaring, fixed on the humans’ scent. Without a word, Rahielma sprang into the canopy, climbing, and disappeared, bound for the shattered glass of the ceiling and the starry night beyond.

“We’ll see her again soon,” Gammon murmured.

Jane scowled. “Too soon. Now come along, before they change their minds.”

Gammon shrugged under one of Bess’s shoulders. Julian took the other. They carried her from the hothouse of Crystal Hill, walking into the darkened streets under a cindered umbrella of acacia.

Gammon wondered how long it would be before the whitefly eggs Bess left behind hatched, and how soon the larvae would grow wings and feast on the Pit Masters there.

She had only promised not to release the loosestrife, after all.

The hothouse air remained silent once the humans had gone, but its earth sang with battle-cries and lamentations.

Why? Lir moaned through his swollen roots. Why did you give up our people’s birthright? Are you not our prophet?

Dor stared at herself, examining her hands and arms admiringly. Oh, indeed. More now than ever before.

The Pit Master’s thousand eyes opened, their buds blinking, then fixed upon her.

Dor’s mane of leaves spread down her back, a carpet of glory spilling over her shoulders even as her bark sloughed away like a discarded cape. She ran long, twigging fingers down her arms, peeling them bare. The fresh fibers below wept gently, sap bleeding forth . . . In shapes. Sigils. The markings, familiar as sun and rain, wound up her hand and around its wrist. Down each finger. They marched slowly, creeping like a skin of moss, the sap darkening and hardening in the warm air. Dor tore her bark away, bare and bleeding, laughing with triumph as the words of the book appeared upon her, a suit of armor made of truth.

There was no space left in the book, she explained. But there is space unending upon me.

Lir reached for her, willow whips caressing, winding her in an embrace.

Prophet, tell us what happens next.

Dor beamed up at him. Even her eyes filled with the dark ink of glyphs and words, rolling in on waves of syllables unspoken. Lir read the present in them, watched it rise up like crocuses from the snow.

There is so much to tell my people, Dor replied. Now the story changes forever.