Pearl flicked her spines in acknowledgement, but for once she seemed more excited than annoyed. She turned to the warriors. “Go back and tell Knell and Bone to choose a group of soldiers and hunters as guards and scouts, and have the rest of the Aeriat fly them over. We need to make certain there’s nothing dangerous before we bring in the clutches and the rest of the Arbora.”
Everyone scrambled to obey.
Chapter Two
Moon helped fly the first group of Arbora, including Bone, Knell, forty or so other hunters and soldiers, and the two young mentors, Heart and Merit, from the boats to the tree’s knothole entrance. With all the warriors joining in, it didn’t take long, though the steadily increasing rain drumming on their wings and the deepening gloom under the canopy reminded them that time was limited. The other Arbora still stuck on the boats weren’t happy with the delay, but they had to make certain the tree was safe.
Once they were assembled in the greeting hall, Pearl told them, “The Aeriat will search upwards, the Arbora will go down. Move quickly, make certain there’s nothing dangerous here. You can stop and gawk at it all later.” She jerked her head at Knell. “You stay here with the soldiers and make certain this level is safe.”
Flower turned to Merit and Heart, both bouncing with barely restrained excitement. “One of you go with Chime, and light the lamps for the Aeriat. The other stay here with Knell and light the rest of this hall and the passages around it.”
“I’ve never done shells before.” Merit looked anxious. “Just moss and wood.”
“You’ll learn as you go,” Chime said firmly, and caught Merit around the waist. He sprang up after the warriors who were already climbing the central well.
Moon hissed to himself in frustration, torn between wanting to join the warriors who were heading upward, and wanting to be a good consort. Stone had already disappeared and was unavailable to give advice; possibly he was making his own search or getting reacquainted with the place. Not wanting to admit to insecurity, even to himself, Moon followed Jade, Flower, and the Arbora exploring party down the stairway that led below the greeting hall, to the section Stone had said they should make their camp for the night.
They followed the curving stairs down into another large, central chamber with a high domed roof and round doorways leading away. Only a little light from above fell down the stairwell. The room was a dark pit, even to Raksuran eyes. But the only scent was of must and leaf rot, and the space felt empty. Moon ran his hands over the wall as high as he could reach, feeling for light shells. Groundlings would have brought a candlelamp or a torch, he thought, frustrated. The hunters went down the steps, spread out along the wall in the dark, searching, until someone said, “Here’s one!”
After a moment, a shell further down the steps started to glow, revealing Flower standing on tip-toes to reach it. Jade and the hunters turned to look around the room.
The light crept up the wall onto carvings of trees that curved up across the ceiling. It was a forest, picked out in detail, with plumes, spirals, fern trees, many others Moon couldn’t name. Their branches entwined overhead, and their roots came down to frame the round doorways that led off to different rooms, as if you were standing in an enclosed and protected glade. The hunters murmured in appreciation, and Bone said in a hushed voice, “If every part of this place is as beautiful…”
Flower nodded, amusement and awe mingled in her expression. “If this is just the teachers’ gathering hall, I can’t wait to see the queens’ level.”
“We’ll see it later.” Jade stepped over the edge of the stairs to drop down to the floor. “We need to find all the approaches to this section, make certain we can guard it tonight.” She turned to Bone. “And there have to be more passages outside, and a better place to land the boats and unload them.”
“We’ll find it,” he told her. He turned for the nearest doorway and made an abrupt gesture. The other hunters scattered, and Flower hurried after them to light the shells. Moon and Jade followed more slowly, lingering to look. The other doorways led into an interconnected, multileveled maze of rooms, smaller stairways winding up, with balconies extending out over the wells. Without the sound of moving water it was too silent, haunted, much of it lost in darkness. Moon tried to shake off his uneasiness as he followed Jade through the empty place.
In one of the first rooms, they found something hanging from the ceiling, a big wooden thing like half a nutshell, only it was nearly ten paces across. It swayed gently when Jade pushed at it. “It’s a bed,” she said, sounding startled. “Stone’s right—I think they grew this. Or made the tree grow it.”
Moon felt the thick rope supporting one end of the bed, and realized it wasn’t rope but a heavy vine. It joined the wood seamlessly, with no knots. The basket beds made for the old colony were obviously an attempt to duplicate this.
As they wandered through the level, they found more beds hanging from the ceiling or extending out from the walls. There were also shallow metal basins set into the smooth wood floors. Flower scratched experimentally at one, and said they were probably for the stones that mentors spelled to give off heat. She added, “I hope it means they had a forge, somewhere lower down.”
“Did they bring the anvils?” Moon asked, remembering there had been some concern about that at the old colony.
“I left with Stone before they settled all that,” she told him, looking around distractedly. “Niran thought they would plummet right through the ship’s hull, and he may have been right.”
Moon kept finding bits of debris, things left behind that hinted at the life once lived here. A spill of beads in the dust, each carved like a tiny flower; a curved wooden comb, some of the tines missing; a scrap of faded fabric caught on a carving; a white-glazed bowl, set aside and forgotten on a ledge.
Finally one of the hunters called Jade to come and look at another entrance on a lower level. It was a large round doorway closed by a heavy wooden panel that slid into place and sealed with bolts. After some tugging and pushing, they had got the panel open, and found the doorway sat just above a big branch nearly forty paces across, that lay nearly atop one of the old garden platforms. The Arbora thought it would be a good spot to secure the two boats, and would make it easier to unload them. Moon followed them out the doorway into the rain and picked his way across the big muddy expanse. It felt like solid ground, barely trembling in the wind, and was covered with rambling root vines, probably all that was left of the crop that had once been planted here. He watched as, with careful maneuvering and a lot of shouted instructions, Niran and Blossom brought the two ships close in to the massive trunk. Arbora scrambled under Niran’s direction to cast ropes over the huge branch at both ships’ bow and stern.
As the Arbora finished fastening the ships into place, Pearl and some of the Aeriat flew out of the knothole entrance above them and spiraled down to land nearby. To Jade, Pearl said, “The upper levels are empty.” Chime came over to Moon, squelching in the mud, his tail twitching with excitement. “It’s the best colony we could ever have,” he said. “There’s so much room!”
Bone came out to report that he and Flower and the other hunters had ventured nearly down to the roots, to the bottom of the habitable areas, and found no sign of anything big enough to threaten them. “There’s a lot of dirt and beetles, and tiny treelings that eat beetles, but that’s all,” Bone finished, the rain dripping off his spines. “The roots and the ground may be a different story, but the doors down there are sealed, and we didn’t want to chance opening them without more help.” Lightning cracked somewhere overhead, and everyone ducked and winced. Jade said, “Even if there’s a Ghobin colony down there, we still need shelter now.”