1

As he walked down the steep trunk-roads, which generations of his people had bored through the living wood, Ven could hear the great tree creaking, shifting, muttering. He hated those noises. He hated the shadows that the dim bio-lamps on the ceilings cast. These deep places had always made him uneasy. But someone had to go there. Someone had to check the central trunks for canker and seek out the honey-hives and meatberry bushes, which the people needed to supplement their food supply. Ven was fifteen now – in the first year of his manhood. Even the Justiciar’s son had to take his turn among the inner branches.

Nervously he made his way along the twisting passages, shining his glow-beetle lamp into crevices, listening out for the buzzing of the small black bees that might lead him to a honey-hive. He found an out-sprouting of woody shoots that would soon block the road if they were left to grow: he marked the place with a red thread and made a note in his bark-book to report them to the pruning squads.

The creaking of the tree grew louder. It was restless tonight, Ven thought, grumbling in its sleep. And then – just when he had almost made himself believe that those noises were nothing to be frightened of – a new one reached him. A roaring, snoring sound, like some vast saw tearing at the tree: a wheezing that grew louder and louder, as if some terrible thing was rushing towards him out of the Heartwood.

Ven dropped his lamp and covered his ears with his hands. One of the lamp’s precious glass panes broke and the beetles inside escaped, circling his head in a storm of dizzy little lights before scattering away into the shadows.

The noise grew louder and louder and … stopped.

Ven took his hands from his ears and listened. The mumblings of the great tree were all that he could hear now. They seemed quiet and comforting after that terrible new sound.

His first thought was to run back to the out-branches. But what would he say when they asked him why he’d left his work unfinished? That there had been a scary noise? He could imagine how the others would tease him about that. He was the Justiciar’s son. It was his duty to show courage, and to set a good example.

So instead of hurrying away, he went towards the place where the noise had come from, around a bend of the passage and down a flight of shallow carved stairs to where a hollow space opened among a mass of vast trunks.

Ven had been to this place before. It was directly above the digestion chamber, and was used for funerals. He remembered, as a small boy, watching the shrouded body of his grandfather being lowered down through one of the dark openings in the floor to become one with the tree. The place had been empty then, nothing but the ring of mourners. Now something waited in the dim, silvery light. It was more than man-high, and a colour that Ven had seldom seen before; a rectangular thing, with windows and a door, like a small, lost room. Or a box …

Ven’s mouth felt dry. It can’t be! he thought. Not now, not here! Not appearing to him, after all the years of waiting …

Yet here it stood, solid, impossible and terrifying: the Blue Box.