Malachite’s attention turned to the retreating sac, which was just coming into view again past one of the pointed peaks. The kethel supporting it had finally gotten organized enough to head along the cliffs. Occupied as they were, they didn’t give any sign that they had seen the fate of the kethel or the rulers who had come after Moon. If they had any sense they were looking for a section of beach wide enough to set the sac down so the fire in the bottom could be dealt with. Malachite tilted her head toward Moon. She said, “You’re unhurt?”
“Yes. Did they tell you what happened?”
Malachite’s spines dipped in assent. Still without looking down, she said, “Go to the flying ship, line-grandfather. Guard it with Celadon and the others.”
Stone growled and lashed his tail. Jade said, “She’s right. You’re exhausted.”
Moon didn’t think that would do it. He added, “Song and Root are wounded, with Ivory and her warriors. If the Fell find the boat, Celadon is going to need help.”
Stone’s grumbling response rumbled through the rock. Moon interpreted it as meaning that Stone wasn’t happy, but he knew they were right. Then Stone flung himself backward in a spray of pebbles and loose rubble, caught the rising wind in the gorge, and flapped inland.
Malachite said, “Moon, go with him.”
“No.” Moon didn’t intend to argue this point. “Not until I can take Shade with me.”
Malachite didn’t respond except with a spine ripple that Moon couldn’t interpret. Jade hissed in frustration. She clearly wanted to send Moon to the boat, but the idea of siding with Malachite on any point involving him was too painful to contemplate. Moon got the idea that the only good thing about the frantic pace of the race after the sac was that none of the rescuers had had much chance to speak to each other.
With no warning, Malachite sprang into flight. Jade snarled, “I suppose she wants us to follow her,” and jumped off the ledge to take to the air. Chime grabbed Lithe and he and Moon scrambled to follow.
Moon flew even with Chime to shout, “I can take Lithe. You go back.”
“No.” Chime sounded as if he was holding onto his resolve with effort. “I heard that voice once. Maybe I can help, like what happened on the leviathan.”
Moon thought he was right, but he had wanted to give Chime the option to retreat. None of them knew what they would be facing.
As they drew near the cliffs above the rocky beach, Moon looked for the sac. It was some distance down the coast now, and the kethel were lowering it toward a relatively flat section of beach that was heavily washed by waves. The bulge of the sac scraped against the cliff and it was still releasing a plume of dark smoke. If the Fell managed to lower the sac into the surf, they wouldn’t have long until the fire was under control; depending on whatever orders the progenitor had left, they might come looking for vengeance soon.
Moon heard a shout from ahead and looked toward the sea just as a familiar scent arrived on the wind. A shape with the bright scales of a warrior flew toward them from the array of islands just off the coast. Floret spotted them and circled, indicating that they should follow her.
Floret led them far out into the water to a rocky collection of spires. Moon landed on a damp, salt-encrusted rock below Jade, using his claws to keep from sliding down, and climbed up after the others to an uneven ledge along one of the peaks. Floret said, “Am I glad to see you all!” She pointed. “The Fell went there.”
It was a tall island several hundred paces away, an uneven dome of rock covered with heavy greenery, standing high above the water. It was mostly vertical, made up of cliffs and steep slopes covered with trees and clinging vines. There was no beach built up around it; the waves crashed directly against stony cliffs. At the very top, water gleamed through the fern trees, spilling down one of the cliffs to vanish in the jungle.
Floret continued, “They flew to the top, near where the waterfall comes out, then went into the jungle. I waited a while, then flew over, but I couldn’t get sight or scent of them. It was like they went into the rock somehow, but I couldn’t see any caves.” She dropped her spines in chagrin. “I’m afraid they left, and I didn’t see them.”
“You didn’t have much time to search,” Jade said. “They could be there somewhere.”
Moon said, “Lithe, is this the place you saw?”
Hanging on to Chime, Lithe shaded her eyes to study the island. She grimaced. “I saw trees growing on cliffs, saltwater and rock, and crashing waves. But that description fits most of these islands.”
“Where is that water coming from?” Chime muttered.
Jade asked, “What do you mean?”
“If it’s fresh, there has to be a spring, a well, pushing it up through the rock. If it’s saltwater, what’s pushing it?” He glanced around and saw the queens staring at him. His spines flattened defensively. “I just think it looks odd.”
But Malachite said, “As if it’s not natural.”
Chime nodded, relieved that she understood. “Yes, that.”
Malachite crouched and sprang into the air, her claws leaving jagged scrapes in the rock. Jade protested, “We need to talk about—Damn it!”
Moon twitched with the urge to hurry, but made himself wait for Jade. Chime groaned and said, “I hope I’m not wrong.”
Jade just growled in her throat and followed Malachite, and Moon, Chime, and Floret leapt after her.
Malachite had already circled over the island once and now dove down to land near the source of the waterfall. The foliage was so thick, Moon and the others had to land in the palms or ferny tops of the trees and clamber down. This surprised a number of large colorful tree crabs, which clacked their claws menacingly and skittered down the trunks, but Moon didn’t catch sight or scent of anything larger. There were traces of Fell stench on the leaves, caught when the Fell had brushed against them. He couldn’t pick out Shade’s more subtle scent.
The ground was covered with thick, low grass and flowers with heavy succulent stems. The waterfall was fairly narrow, only about twenty paces across at this point, and emerged from a slot in the bluff just above their heads. It tumbled across a mildly sloping space where there was barely room between the trees to walk, then dropped off the edge of a cliff to catch on another slope further down and disappear into the jungle again.
Malachite perched on a rock at the edge of the drop. “Floret, where did you search?”
Her voice blended with the falling water, pitched to cut through it but not be heard above it. Floret pointed toward the bluff. “Up there, because I thought they must have gone into a cave. But their scent was already faint.”
“As if they weren’t here long,” Jade said under her breath, and ducked under the low-hanging palms to scan the ground. Moon searched out from the waterfall, poking at the dirt under the grass and matted flower stems. The sea wind was blocked by the trees and the bluff, so if the Fell had lingered here at all, their scent should be much stronger. They didn’t just stop here briefly and leave, or Floret would have seen them. They might have climbed down through the jungle to the lower part of the island, but he thought the scent trails would indicate that.
Behind him, toward the waterfall, he heard Chime say, “This is fresh water. And that opening in the rock where it’s coming out is too square. Someone must have carved it.”
Moon started to turn back, but a flash caught his eye and he froze, focusing on it. It was a copper disk, lying amid the tree roots. Moon eased forward and picked it up. The incised image of a flower was clearly Arbora work and would have told him everything he needed to know, but he also recognized it. It had come off the anklet that Shade had been wearing.
He reached the waterfall again in a few long bounds, and held up the disk for Malachite to see. “Shade left a trail.”
They followed the path of scent traces and strategically dropped copper disks through the thick jungle. It led down the slope and around, toward the lower reaches of the rocky bluff behind the waterfall. Playing weak coddl
ed young consort, Shade must have pretended to stumble and fall, long enough to snatch a handful of disks off the anklet.
Following the others through the greenery, Moon realized it might not have occurred to him to do the same in Shade’s position. Shade obviously took it as a given that Moon, or the warriors, or Malachite, or somebody would come after him, whether they arrived in time to save him or not. Moon would have just accepted the gut reaction that they would all think he was dead, dooming himself and leaving the queens no way to figure out where the Fell had gone and what they had been after. You have to work on that, he told himself.
The trail wound down through a nearly vertical gulley, shadowed by trees and heavy growth along its edge. The jungle was curiously quiet; insects hummed in the undergrowth but the birdcalls were distant, and Moon heard only a few rustles and clacks from the tree crabs. At the bottom of the gulley they went through a curtain of vines touched with Fell stench, and came out at the base of the rocky bluff that supported the waterfall.
For a moment it looked like a dead end. Then Moon realized the shadowed fold in the rock was a cave.
Jade reached it first and hissed with surprise. Moon arrived at her side in one bound, barely behind Malachite, with Floret, Chime, and Lithe after him.
It wasn’t a cave so much as an arch, curving to lead into an open well in the rock. In the well hung heavy chains supporting what had been a system of metal stairways, suspended out over the shaft. Several of them descended a hundred paces down to the deep shadowed entrance of a cavern at the bottom. Time and weather and maybe something else had broken a few of the chains and left some of the sections of stairway to hang in various precarious positions. They would have been unusable now by any species that weren’t skillful climbers. The verdigrised metal had been silvery at one point and chased with elaborate curling designs. An overhang shielded the shaft from overhead view, but let in daylight to gleam off the metal and the mineral streaks in the rock.
“So there were groundlings here at some point,” Moon muttered. It was another indication they were on the right track, but the right track to what?
Jade cocked her head to listen intently, and then tasted the air. “There’s seawater down there. But I don’t hear waves.”
Chime leaned out to look down the shaft. “So these were for bringing groundlings up from a harbor, somewhere down through there? But there’s nothing up here.”
Malachite caught one of the chains and swung out onto it. “The metal stinks of Fell,” she commented, and started to climb down.
Jade growled under her breath and sprang for another chain. “Floret, stay up here.”
Floret made a noise of protest in her throat, but quelled it at a dark look from Jade. Floret said, “If you don’t come back by nightfall, I follow you?”
“No, you find the flying boat and tell Stone what happened.” Jade began the climb down.
Lithe’s legs were a little too short to safely make the leap, so Moon leapt for a chain and then swung one of the others into her reach. She caught it and started down. With a worried shiver of his spines, Chime sprang after Moon. “At least we’re not in the sac anymore,” he said as they started down.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Moon said. He didn’t think the Fell had been called here by groundlings, even groundlings with the ability to get out to this island and construct these stairs.
“Be careful,” Floret said, leaning out to watch their progress.
They climbed down rapidly, following Malachite’s lead.
The opening to the cave was dank and cool, the air heavy with salt and the faint scent of rotting sea wrack. The sides were steep for some distance but then opened up gradually.
The chains stopped at a wide ledge in the wall, augmented by a rusted metal platform that had been attached to the rock with a complicated series of buttresses. Malachite already stood on it, and Jade dropped from the chain to land beside her.
Moon swung down off his chain, trying to take it all in. The faint daylight fell down on a series of ledges that stood out from the rock walls, studded by metal ladders, stairways, chains, all apparently designed to allow access further down into the cavern. Leaning out over the ledge, Moon saw dark water lap against rocks at the bottom. But he didn’t see any opening to the outside.
He also didn’t see, scent, or hear any sign of the Fell. They had apparently passed through this cavern on their way to somewhere else.
Lithe collected a couple of small rocks and concentrated until they emitted a soft glow of light. She handed one off to Chime to carry. Malachite leapt down to the next ledge, avoiding the rickety platform attached to it, and they followed her.
“There are carvings on these walls,” Jade pointed out, as she landed on another ledge.
Moon had noticed that too. They were too old and worn down to make much out of, but he could see straight lines and ovals and sharp angles that didn’t look at all like the curling floral designs on the rusted metal. “I think these used to be stone stairs, or something, that collapsed. The groundlings must have built all these metal ones to replace them.”
Lithe used a chain to help her swing across a gap that was a little too wide. “But how did these groundlings find this place?” she wondered. “If Floret hadn’t seen the Fell go to the island, if Shade hadn’t left a trail, we might never have found it.”
Chime said, “Maybe there was a city on the surface once, and the jungle grew over it.”
Moon felt a chill that had nothing to do with the deep still water. He paused and looked around again at the abandoned metal devices, the rusted tools scattered on the pathway. He realized the disintegrating leather oval that lay near his claws was a groundling shoe, cast aside in headlong flight. He said, “Or the groundlings were called here, like the Fell. And they ran away. Whatever they found, they ran away from it.”
They all went still for a moment, absorbing that idea. Even Malachite paused and tilted her head to consider it.
Jade hissed low under her breath. “After all the trouble they took to build these stairs... It must have been something terrible.”
“It can’t have killed them all,” Lithe said, her spines flicking uneasily. “We’d find more remains.”
Malachite leapt down to the next ledge. But she said, “Tell us exactly what you saw and heard from the Fell.”
As they climbed, Moon told them everything he remembered, trying to repeat it as close to verbatim as possible. When he was done he gave Chime a prod, and Chime nervously described what he had heard of the strange voice.
They were getting closer to the bottom of the cavern. The water didn’t smell stagnant, and there was enough movement in it to show that it was connected to the open sea somewhere. But the faded carving and the remnants of the original stone stairs went all the way down past the dark surface, the water lapping against them. Maybe the sea was shallower when they were built, Moon thought.
The last rusted metal stair curved into a deep alcove cut into the wall, ending on a smooth stone platform with steps that led down to vanish under the water. The Fell-stench was pronounced here, as if the Fell had spent some time on this platform.
Hanging from the curved roof of the alcove, suspended from more of the heavy chains, were several bell-shaped metal huts. The rock-lights Lithe and Chime carried reflected off the rusted metal, throwing huge shadows onto the cavern walls. Moon looked around, baffled. The trail clearly ended here.
He turned back to the huts. They looked a little like cargo lifters but were too small to take much of a load at one time. And the round sealed doors were too narrow for boxes and bales, but just right for an average-sized groundling to step through. He had a bad feeling about this.
Jade crouched to examine the edge of the platform, searching for traces that someone had passed this way. “So the Fell swam from here?” she asked, keeping her voice low. Chime and Lithe searched the dark corners of the platform, and Malachite stood still, listening for telltale splashes.
&
nbsp; Moon saw the huts were suspended from a heavy metal beam that had been mounted to the old stone walls, and that it held chains and wheels and gears and other strange machinery, so verdigrised it was hard to tell one piece from the other. There were also dark green vines, twining around the chains, and growing down and through the roofs of each little hut. They all came from an odd plant covering the ceiling of the alcove. It looked like a fungus flower, covered with tiny white petals, spread to catch sustenance out of the damp air. This is new, Moon thought, baffled. It looked like the groundlings who had built the huts and the stairs had deliberately placed the vines this way.
Several sets of chains and vines led from the beam straight down into the water, as if those huts had dropped or been lowered below the surface. Some of them looked like they had been that way for turns, the chains encrusted with salt, the vines white and withered. But three sets of chains had had the rust scraped off in patches, as if they had recently been cranked along the beam, and the vines... Moon leaned out over the water to touch one. It was vibrating and making faint hissing noises.
Oh, you have to be joking... Moon stepped around and caught hold of a metal handle on the nearest hut. Jade came to help him, and Chime and Lithe stopped their futile search to watch.
With Jade holding the hut by one of the protrusions on its ribbed metal surface, Moon twisted the wheel-shaped handle and pulled. The door came open with a puff of displaced air and revealed a molded, rusted interior. Moon tasted that air, and then coughed. It smelled of mold and rust and salt but it wasn’t stale. A small window in the opposite wall was set with a heavy piece of faceted crystal, spotted with white stains.
Lithe came over to peer through the door. She said, “There are handholds inside.” She looked up at Moon, startled, as she came to the inevitable conclusion. “Groundlings ride in this?”
It seemed incredible, but that was how everything added up. Moon nodded toward the three sets of recently used chains and vines that led below the surface. “I think the Fell took those down into the water.”