Fandour went over his connection in the Rogue Plane like knots in a fishing line, finding none broken until he tried to touch those vectors, then … nothing.
He was patient. He still had his foothold. And the Rhythanko was near.
FOOTHILLS OF THE CURNA MOUNTAINS, BEASTLANDS
1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES
The heat of the day still lingered, cloying and oppressive in the still air. In the tall, dry grass, a few insects chirped wearily. Now and then a birdsong sounded from the low trees that clustered in deep, stream-cut ravines that threaded the foothills.
A figure trotted through the dry grasses, casting a long, thin shadow diagonally over the ground. It was a human boy. He had the scrawny frame of a child, but his face, gaunt and anxious, hinted that he was older. He was clothed in worn leggings and a thin shirt, and his feet were bare and calloused.
The Boy-he had had a name once, but his masters had called him nothing but “Boy” for so long, he’d forgotten it-cast a worried glace at the sun, reddening low over the foothills of the Curna Mountains. If he didn’t find the runaway swarm and capture the queen by nightfall, one of Lord Mahijith’s hives would be lost.
The Boy didn’t think that Skreetchu, the raven-headed kenku overseer that supervised the lord’s outlying estates, would show mercy to a slave who lost a valuable swarm.
For one thing, busy with the extra task of changing out soiled straw in the stables, he’d been late going out to the hives. Despite the heat and his weary shoulders, he enjoyed the walk to the outer fields. A rare, refreshing breeze tumbled past him, cooling his sweat-soaked shirt, and the wheat was ripening in great golden knots on top of swaying stems. The Boy strode down the worn path between one furrowed field and the next, spreading his fingers at his sides to touch the stiff stalks on either side. Past the thick rows of grain the world fell away in gentle curves, humping and mounding in the distance until the foothills reared up and became the Curna Mountains, with their sharp, white-capped precipices and knifelike, purple-shadowed sides. He paused and breathed deeply, fancying he could feel the mountain’s icy breath in the hot air.
Sometimes he pretended he came from a cool climate and would someday return to a place where a handful of chilled snow could cool a hot face after the labor of the day. Perhaps he did. He had been sold into Lord Mahijith’s household as a child, and he remembered little before that. He didn’t know if his dim impressions of a protective father and a gentle mother were real or simply products of his imagination.
The haystack-shaped hives were arranged in two even rows. His first task was to check the perimeter to see if the wards that protected the combs and their sweet treasure still held. Only Skreetchu knew the cantrips that would keep bears and other hungry animals from scenting and tearing apart the hives, but the charmed crystal in his pocket would tell him if they needed renewal.
The Boy frowned. In the distance, a black cloud hovered over one of the farthermost hives, a cloud that flexed and compacted into a black ball and then spread out until he could see its component parts. Bees-thousands of bees, hovering over their hive, when they should be returning from their labor and settling in for the night.
Giving the quieter haystacks a wide berth, he trotted toward the cloud, keeping his breathing in check. That was one of the first things he’d learned after Skreetchu assigned him to care for the hives-it never was wise to panic around bees.
The contented buzzing of sated bees, always an undertone in this section of the fields, changed as he approached the golden speckled mass. The sound was higher, not threatening, but excited, and the hive in question was not, as he feared, smashed by some marauding animal whose craving for honey had overcome its fear of being stung. The woven straw dome on its stand was whole, and bees still crawled in and out. Some perched in rows near the entrance, cooling it with their furiously vibrating wings.
The cloud of bees over his head swooped left and right, looking for all the world like a single entity rather than a disparate swarm.
Realization struck him like a sharp blow to the belly. The hive was swarming, half its inhabitants splitting off from its mother and old queen, and this was the new queen’s mating flight.
The Boy had not expected such a thing-bees swarmed in spring and early summer. If the queen led her followers and mates into the hills now, just at the point when summer was turning into autumn, they’d be lost to Mahijith’s estates. They might even die. Bees that swarmed out of season often died.
In the spring, Skreetchu would have been prepared with new hives and tools-smoke and instruments-to capture the queen, to create a new hive and increase production, and there would be more honey for the master’s stores. Now, however, not only would they lose the nascent colony, but the honey production from the mother hive would be halved for the season.
The pitch of the swarm rose, shrilling in the autumn air, and the cloud started to move. Individuals broke apart and rejoined, but the center of the mass remained compact. The new queen was somewhere in the middle.
He kept the crystal inside a crude box he had hacked out of a chunk of wood that fell from the pile by the fireplace in the cold of winter, knowing the punishment would be dire if he lost the magical trinket. If he could track the swarm and capture the queen, he could use it to return her to one of the empty hives.
Should he follow them now, or let Skreetchu know what had happened? He risked a beating either way.
The Boy made up his mind. He drew a deep breath and ran, leaving Mahijith’s estate behind him, following the black cloud of bees into the reddening sky.
Hewn blocks carved with worn runes lay scattered, half-buried in the sandy soil. A lizard ran across the rough surface, pausing with its tail lying half in the depression made by an ancient sigil. It lowered its blue-sheen belly to the hot surface of the stone and up again.
Before it, between the rocks that were tumbled carelessly across the sand, the air began to shiver. As if someone had cast a stone into the still surface of a pond, ripples formed and spread from a turbulent center located a man’s height from the grassy sand. Like glass heated and pulled this way and that in a glassblower’s kiln, the air took transparent shape.
The only witness was the lizard, which pushed up and down a few more times, flicked a pale pink tongue, and vanished in a quick scuttle between the slabs of stone.
In the still heat, the column of air warped and flexed. There was a smoky smell like green sticks burning. Slowly the ripples took on a humanoid shape, as if a figure made of glass moved underwater, all but invisible in its transparency.
Something small and yellow-brown buzzed heavy-bodied through the air, making a lazy circle around the coalescing transparent figure. Then came another, and another, until a dozen bees were making their drowsy sound between the ruins.
The Boy stopped, catching his breath, bent with his hands on his thighs. He reached down to pull a burr from the hem of his leggings and paused. On the ground by his boot a disoriented bee crawled, falling from one thick blade of grass and crawling up another. Bigger, more elongated than a worker, it was a drone, dying after a mating flight.
They couldn’t be far. He plucked the burr away and started off again in an efficient jog-trot, instinct telling him to follow the faint breath of a breeze that freshened the unseasonable evening warmth. His foot almost turned against a half-buried stone block, too regular to be natural. There must have been buildings here once, long before Lord Mahijith and his ilk had laid claim to the Durpar lowlands. He scanned the landscape constantly for the blur of the swarm, aware he had ventured farther from Skreetchu’s domain than he ever remembered having done before. The tall grass thinned here, and the soil looked to be mixed with sand. What had stood here, and what happened to the builders? Had a town grown here once, and died over time like an out-of-season swarm? Or had a conquering race like Mahijith’s destroyed them?