by Martha Wells
Moon’s namesake had waned to nothing and the only light came from the stars. It was too dark to make out much but the vague shape of the escarpment. That whole side of the cliff was in deep shadow. But the kethel had settled somewhere over there, and the stench of Fell was intense. This had to be more than just a rest stop. Watching intently, Moon caught flickers of movement and thought it must be dakti, flying above the cliffs. The kethel met up with another flight, or the rest of their own flight. He hesitated, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t fly over there blind. He hissed in frustration, and dumped the heavy waterskin of poison off his shoulder.
Moon shifted to groundling form to conserve his strength; the dried metal-mud settled on his skin and clothes, gritty and itching. Then he tucked himself into a hollow in the rock, and waited, watching and dozing off and on.
Finally the sky lightened with the leading edge of dawn, and the shadows gradually turned from dark to gray, revealing the valley and the cliff face.
The river curved there, gleaming silver in its sandy bed. At the base of the cliff was the ruin of a groundling city. A great city, with two vast levels of pillared porticos that flanked arched gateways, leading back into the rock. Above, the cliff face, hundreds of paces high, swelled out like a ball.
No, I’m looking at it wrong, Moon thought, as the light grew brighter. That’s not part of the cliff. It was two cities, not one. A groundling ruin with a giant Dwei hive built on top of it.
Squinting, he could see the difference between the golden stone of the cliffs and the gold-tinged dust covering the rough material of the hive. The groundling city had been built at the entrance to a gorge. The groundlings must have carved out the gorge for more room, perhaps bent the flow of the river away from it, and used the rock to build their city. Turns and turns later, with the groundlings gone and the city fallen to ruin, the Dwei had constructed their hive, using the sides of the gorge to brace the enormous structure, and sitting it firmly atop the ruined city, filling the gorge from one side to the other.
The Dwei were skylings, something like insects, something like lizards. Moon didn’t know much about them except that they didn’t seem to prey on groundlings or other races. They made their hives with a substance that looked like clay, secreted out of their bodies somehow. He didn’t think they would voluntarily share their hive with Fell, or anything else. The Fell must have kept the hive and ate the Dwei.
Dakti circled above the top of the hive, and one dropped down to vanish somewhere inside it. There had to be an entrance up there; that had to be where the kethel had gone. Trying to follow them would be instant suicide.
Moon had never been inside a Dwei hive before, but he had seen drawings. The inside of the hive should be hollow, with plenty of room for the kethel to fly and climb around in their shifted forms. But the gates and doorways he could see in the groundling city’s long portico looked like they were meant for normal, Moon-sized groundlings. If the hallways and corridors further inside were comparable, the kethel wouldn’t be able to fit down there unless they shifted to groundling. The ruin didn’t have to be attached to the hive, but it might be, and if he could find the way in before Jade and the others arrived, it would save time and argument.
He needed to see how far into the gorge the city extended. If there was a way in through the back somewhere, it would be easier to avoid the circling dakti sentries. And if he got killed in the attempt, he needed to leave some sort of message for the others.
His markers and the scent of the metal-mud would point the way here. This was a good, concealed vantage point, and it was unlikely that the dakti would stumble on it; they didn’t seem to be scouting any distance from the hive. Of course, they wanted us to follow them, and they’re hoping we’ll attack like crazy idiots, he thought sourly, picking out a good flat rock face. The only thing they could do was attack like sane idiots, and hope that worked.
He scratched out a brief message in Altanic, explaining what he was about to do. If he found he couldn’t approach the hive from cover, he would come back here to wait for the others.
Moon shifted back to Raksura, shouldered the waterskin, and started down the slope.
Moon flew the long way around, careful to stay out of sight of the hive, and stopped upriver to renew his coating of metal-mud. Then he found the other end of the gorge, which wound snake-like through the bulk of the escarpment, a long distance from the Dwei hive. He followed it back, staying cautiously low, finding the ruins of small, roofless stone buildings with crumbling walls, the remains of a road, and stairways carved into the cliffs.
Finally, as the gorge curved again, Moon found the beginning of the main ruin. He landed, blending into the shadows at the base of a rock fall. This could work, he thought, encouraged.
A sloping wall blocked the gorge from one cliff to the other, carved with worn figures of giant grasseaters. It had a gate, blocked by piles of old rubble and guarded only by two slim obelisks. Beyond it was a long, mostly-intact colonnade, and a maze of crumbling walls. Over the top of the cliff, he could just see the rounded dome of the Dwei hive where it sat further up the gorge. Dakti still lazily circled above it.
Moon slipped forward, moving quickly over the dusty ground, between the obelisks and over the rubble of the gate.
The partly-intact roof of the colonnade provided cover from anything flying overhead. The shade sheltered sand-colored lizards and green beetles that fled as he ran past. The colonnade ended in a long rambling building, still mostly roofed over, and he went from it to the next, and the next. Among the ruins were empty pools and fountains choked with sand, broken statues, and thornvines shrouding empty archways. The inner walls were painted with scenes of barges moving along a broad river, and desert plains, all in delicate faded colors. Some rooms were still packed with large clay storage jars, each taller than he was. At any other time, this place would have been a pleasure to explore, to poke into all its secrets.
Soon he passed through the sandy corridors of buildings darkened by the shadow of the hive. Then he reached an archway blocked by a solid wall of dusty gold-brown stone. He ran his hand over it and realized he had found the outer wall of the hive. The texture of the material was grainy, rubbery in places and stiff, almost brittle in others. All right, you got here, now look for a way in, he told himself.
He worked his way back through the building, finding steps that led down to what might have been a large, open plaza at one time, littered with broken stone columns. Now the hive sat atop it, forming a heavy roof over the paved space. They must have used this building to brace the hive, Moon thought, moving forward cautiously.
Small holes punctured the bottom of the hive, but he could see a much larger one ahead, maybe twenty paces across. Dim daylight fell through it to illuminate a circle of the worn paving.
That opening might be for ventilation, or to give access to the ruin as an escape route. Or to dump trash, because as he drew closer he could see the section of plaza beneath it was littered with big shells.
He reached one and crouched to examine it. It was curved and nearly four paces across, the iridescent surfaces scarred with recent claw marks.
Oh. I think I found the Dwei.
Moon had only seen Dwei from a distance, but he knew they had shells like these across their backs. He sniffed at the inside and winced. It smelled of recently dead flesh, and it had been scraped out with claws. Unless the Dwei ate their own dead and cast the remnants away like trash, which was possible but not likely, then the Fell had cleaned out the hive.
From somewhere far above his head, up inside the shaft, he heard a low, reverberating grumble. Moon froze until it faded into silence, then carefully eased back away from the pile of shells. Somewhere at the top of that shaft, a kethel lay sleeping.
So that’s not going to work, Moon thought, retreating quietly. But if there was one shaft up into the hive, there might be others.
After a little searching, he found one toward the far side of the plaza
. No daylight fell through, but no Dwei shells littered the stone beneath it either. Moon jumped up to catch the edge and hoisted himself up.
The climb was much longer than he had expected, and also uncomfortable, with the waterskin bumping heavily against his side. The shaft led up a long distance, maybe a fourth of the way into the hive, then finally opened into a dark chamber.
Moon crawled out of the shaft to crouch on the edge, all his senses alert. The cave-like space was empty of anything but dust, and smelled of Fell mixed with a musty acrid odor. Dark openings in the far wall led deeper into the hive’s interior. He stood and crossed the floor to investigate.
Halfway across his foot slipped, and he stumbled on a suddenly uneven surface. It was a grate, a big one, made of the same material as the rest of the hive. Moon crouched and tasted the air. The acrid odor was stronger here.
Then a large clawed hand shot up through the grate to wrap around his lower leg. Moon nearly yelled in panic, managed to turn it into a low hiss, and tried to wrench free. The hand yanked at him, hard enough to drag him down between the bars. The waterskin of poison slipped off his shoulder. Desperate, he scrabbled for purchase on the bar, but the weight dragging him down increased a hundredfold and his claws slipped off the slick surface.
He fell down into a dark space and landed hard on rubbery ground. Something slammed down top of him, a big hand pinning his chest. A creature with a large round head with bulbous, multi-faceted eyes loomed over him. Its skin was dull green, with a soft slick texture.
A deep, raspy voice from somewhere to the left said, “What is it?”
“It’s a Fell,” another voice replied.
“I’m not a Fell!” Moon glared up at the creature looming over him. They were speaking something close to Kedaic, and he answered in that language. “I’m a Raksura, a consort. Look at the back of my head!”
There was a startled pause. His eyes adjusted, and he could see they were all around him, looming shapes. One said, “There are Raksura to the south.”
“Still shifters, still dangerous,” another replied.
“It smells strange,” someone else added.
“You stink, too,” Moon said, suppressing a snarl. They meant the metal-mud, but at the moment it was adding insult to injury.
Then the first voice said, “Let it up.”
The creature let go of him, and Moon rolled away, getting to his feet. He looked around, but there was nowhere to go.
The big chamber was full of the creatures. They were all taller and broader than he was, with heavy iridescent shells across their backs. Their wings were thin and fine, nearly translucent, and folded back along their bodies. Moon rubbed his chest where the creature had pinned him. They were strong, too. “You’re Dwei?”
The one that seemed to be the leader loomed over him, demanding, “Did you see others? Others like us?”
“What?” Then he remembered the shells. “I saw shells, down below in the groundling city. The Fell ate what was in them and threw them down into the ruin.”
It jerked back as if Moon had struck it, then turned away. A noise rose up from the others, like wood rattling, that resolved into a raspy groan. The sound conveyed dismay, disbelief, grief. It made Moon’s scales ripple uneasily.
Still facing away from him, the leader said, “Every two days, they took five of us away. They said they took them elsewhere, that if we did not resist, we would see them again.”
In the sense that eventually you’d all end up dead, Moon thought, swallowing down a hiss. The Fell were using the Dwei as a convenient food source while the flight stayed here. Some of the dakti could be left to fend for themselves or eat each other, but the kethel and the rulers had to feed at regular intervals. It made it even stranger that they hadn’t done this to the Raksura at Indigo Cloud, that they had left even the dead intact. But this was typically Fell behavior, dangling hope the same way they did to their groundling prey. He just said, “They lie.” The Dwei groaned again, more faintly this time, pain and grim acceptance. “What is this place?”
The leader didn’t answer, but one of the others, he wasn’t sure which, said hesitantly, “We kept our crops here, the dorgali and matra we grew in the cliff tunnels. The Fell forced us in here and blocked the door. They only come to take some of us away.”
The leader swung back around, staring accusingly down at Moon again. “Why are you here?”
He didn’t see any reason not to answer. “They attacked our colony. We drove them off, but they took some of our people. I followed them here.”
One of the others held up the waterskin. The leader said, “What is this?”
Moon hesitated, but what were they going to do with it, tell the Fell?
“It’s poison. It only works on Fell.” He wasn’t going to tell them it worked on Raksura, just in case they decided a test was necessary. “It makes them sick, keeps them from shifting.”
“That doesn’t exist.” The leader looked at the waterskin. “No one has heard of this.”
“It exists,” Moon said. “Groundlings made it.”
With deep skepticism, it said, “And the Fell drink it.”
“No.” Moon held onto his patience. “The groundlings drank it and the Fellate them, and died. That was the only way they knew to make it work. We put it in the water in our colony.” He then admitted, “I can’t use it that way here. The rulers would have passed on a warning about poisoned water before they died.”
The leader blinked slowly, milky membranes sliding up to cover its eyes, then sliding down again. “You killed rulers with it?”
“And kethel and dakti. I saw a kethel drink the water and die. Another kethel ate its corpse and died.” He couldn’t read any emotion in the Dwei’s faces, couldn’t tell if they believed him or not. “Show me where the door is. I’ll go up through the grate and let you out.” It would be easier to find where the Arbora were kept with a lot of angry Dwei rampaging through the hive.
Someone in the back said, “The door is sealed only with a stone, but a kethel guards it.”
That didn’t sound encouraging, but Moon wasn’t ready to give up the idea of a massive distraction that would let him get further up into the hive. “Maybe I could find a way to—”
Something moved in the chamber above. Moon went still. He heard the faint clicking of dakti climbing across the grate. The Dwei made that sound again, the rattling groan. The leader cut them off with a sharp clack of its jaws. Then it called up toward the grate, “The Raksura is here!”
Moon stared at it, incredulous. “No!” He scrambled back, hissing, but the Dwei surrounded him. He made a wild leap, trying to reach the wall, but hands grabbed his legs, yanking him down again. Thrashing wildly, he clawed at their hands, flared his spines. His claws tore their thick skin, but they slammed him down to the ground. Pinned face down, heavy Dwei hands on his back, he growled, “Are you stupid? You think they’ll let you go for this?”
He could already hear grating stone from the far end of the chamber; the kethel must be moving the rock away from the entrance. The Dwei in front of him moved away, clearing a path for the kethel. The leader leaned over him, saying in a raspy whisper, “We know they will not.”
The floor vibrated as the kethel entered the chamber. Blood from the Dwei that he had scratched dripped on Moon’s back; it was clear and smelled like jasmine. Past their legs, he caught a glimpse of the kethel, its dark armor streaked with sand, lowering its head to menace the Dwei with its horns. The Dwei scattered away, releasing Moon, but as he pushed himself up, the kethel shot out a hand and grabbed him.
Moon hissed in furious terror, digging claws into the finger that was like an iron band across his chest. The kethel stared down at him, eyes dark with malice, and Moon knew it meant to eat him right here. He bitterly promised himself to do as much damage on the way down its gullet as possible. Suddenly, pain shot up his back, his neck, snapping his head back. He yelled, heard his voice drop and change as the pain washed over him and he s
hifted to groundling.
The kethel dropped him, and Moon landed in an awkward sprawl, no chance to catch himself. Panting, he rolled over, suddenly hyperaware of the cool damp air clinging to his clothes and his far more vulnerable groundling skin. He braced shaky arms to lever himself up. It was the same force the mentor-dakti at the colony had used, but far more violent. They’ve got another one here, he thought, looking up blearily. A ruler, still armored in Fell form, now stood beside the kethel. It seemed smaller and younger than Kathras, but no less dangerous.
The ruler tilted its head. “A consort. Just what we wanted.” He hissed out an order in the Fell language; Moon had heard it before but it had never sounded so close to Raksuran, as if he could understand it if he just listened hard enough.
A score of dakti raced around the kethel. Moon snarled, flailing away, but they swarmed him. He kicked one, managed to smash its kneecap, then got slammed back to the ground, three or four on top of him. After a second stunning clout to the head, the world swung out of focus.
The dakti lifted him up above their heads, their claws caught in his clothes, his hair, scraping at his neck, at his back where his shirt was pushed up. The oily texture of their hands on his groundling skin made him want to scratch himself bloody, fight until they killed him. He forced himself to stay limp, to play dead, and keep his eyes slitted.
They carried him out of the chamber, and he could hear the grating sound as the kethel rolled the rock back into place. It was dark. He couldn’t see anything but a ridged roof overhead. He knew they were going up, through a tunnel or passage that went up in long spirals. He memorized the route as best he could.
Finally they passed into a place with fresher air and daylight. Moon let his head flop to one side, and saw one wall of the passage was open to a vast space, lit by wan daylight falling from somewhere high overhead. It had to be the open center well of the hive.
Then the dakti stopped. He caught a glimpse of a round opening in the floor, right before the dakti flung him down into it. He fell a short distance, struck the rubbery ground, and rolled to his hands and knees, prepared to be swarmed again.
