“Both are?” This louder, as if they were hard of hearing. It shifted back, cracking a support beam. “Both are?”
“Yes,” Enris told it. He shrugged at his father. It was answer, or risk damage to the building.
“Goodgoodgoodgood.” The body stilled again, but the tapping accelerated. “Metalworkers. Best are?”
Like a customer preparing to haggle, he thought, dumbfounded. “Yes.”
“Goodgoodgoodgood.” A small bundle wrapped in the same cloth as its body appeared at floor level, then was passed rapidly forward from limb to limb until it reached the cluster with the voice. “What is?” the Oud demanded, turning the thing around and around. “What is?”
“I can’t see it like that,” Enris protested.
The bundle was thrust at him.
He didn’t need his inner sense to know Jorg was horrified. No Tuana engaged in direct trade with an Oud, if that’s where this was going. Though having broken the conversational taboo, he found it worried him less to take the thing.
And he was curious.
Metal, by weight. He parted the wrapping, conscious of the huge creature’s rapt attention, if perplexed how it could watch him without eyes.
Seeing what he held, Enris pursed his lips and whistled.
“What means?” The Oud reared, knocking its head on the skylight, which rattled but didn’t break. “What means?”
“Don’t be alarmed,” Jorg said quickly, holding out his hands as if calming a child. “It’s a sound of—of—” he faltered.
“Surprise.” Enris lifted the object, holding it within its wrap. “This is—I’ve never seen anything like it. What does it do?”
“What is,” agreed the Oud. “You best.” Seemingly satisfied, the creature lowered itself to the floor. With a deft hump and thrust backward, its rear patently as adept at leading the way as its “head,” the Oud left the shop.
When it was gone, Jorg came back. Enris had already laid the object on a turn plate on his bench and sat to examine it. He pulled a work light close.
“ ‘What is,’ ” his father repeated, leaning over to take a look. “Does that mean what it’s made of—or what it does?”
Enris grunted something noncommittal, busy making a sketch. The outward details were straightforward. The stubby cylinder, two hands long, was metallic, its golden surface brushed rather than shiny. A row of small indentations marked one side, with another, larger, on the opposite. Its inner workings were visible, a mosaic of tiny crystals, but not by intent. “See here?” He indicated the ragged edges to that opening. “Some of the casing was removed by force—or broken.”
Jorg spun the turn plate a quarter and adjusted the light. After a moment’s inspection, he said, “Looks more as if it had been attached to something else, then snapped off.”
“Have you seen anything like it?”
Bringing over a stool, his father sat beside him. “No. This metal—those crystals? It’s not Oud.”
“Or Tikitik.” They traded somber looks. What had the Oud left them? “The work is incredible,” Enris added, almost wistfully. Answering to impulse, he picked up the cylinder in one hand.
His fingers and thumb covered the indentations exactly.
“Impossible,” Jorg whispered. “It can’t be.”
Enris raised his eyes to meet his father’s.
This is Om’ray.
Chapter 11
THE BRIDGE CROSSING THE VAST spans within the Sarc grove had never looked so welcoming. Aryl lowered the nets to its wood slats before climbing down herself, vaguely pleased to be able to stand. She’d thought she’d known the limits of her body; training with Bern—competing, to be more honest—had spurred them both to wilder and more dangerous climbs.
This was different. She stretched, hissing between her teeth at the sharp aches that answered. Not far now. She picked up the nets with their precious contents, ignoring the pain of blisters under her gloves as she secured her grip.
Aryl counted the bridge slats touched by her shadow. Eight. If she wasn’t quick, she’d be outside the Yena glows at firstnight. There would be sufficient light to see her way.
Just not enough to see what might be out for an early hunt.
“Faster it is,” she told herself.
The bridge system through Sarc consisted of five major sections, each meeting at the greatest rastis of the grove, and three lesser, leading to nekis used for the Harvest. They were convenient passageways for more than Om’ray, and Aryl kept watch for anything not on two legs as she walked. She didn’t bother with her hood, preferring to see her best. Biters were an accustomed torment, and there were fewer in the open, where the M’hir still stirred the air. The bridge swung gently underfoot, its soft creak no more than strong rope and wood welcoming her confident steps.
Until she started across the third span. Despite the need to hurry, Aryl found herself slowing, her free hand seeking the rope rail. She looked up and saw only the undersides of fronds and branches, the tips of hanging vines, but she knew.
Here.
It had been here.
Involuntarily, she stopped, leaning to shift some of the pods’ awkward weight from her shoulder to a hip.
And below.
She wouldn’t look down. That much grace she gave herself, in this place where Bern had stood to watch Costa and the others fall to their deaths.
Where she’d sent him.
The wood was improbably solid underfoot; the braided rope taut under her fingers. It might have been a dream, except for the lives lost that day and threatened now.
Except for the Dark. Aryl could see if she looked just so, a place that billowed and surged and snapped as if the M’hir had wings of its own . . .
... Like the great wind, the Dark had no boundaries, only irresistible force. Like the M’hir, it stole the breath from her mouth and hammered against her skin until . . .
Aryl shuddered and blinked herself free.
Free of what?
Her fingers still gripped the rope, the knuckles white. The grove filled her nostrils when she inhaled, redolent of ripe fruit and rot. She hadn’t gone anywhere.
Had she?
“Enough,” she told herself, letting go. It had been a long day. Her body said so; as for the rest—the less thinking about that the better.
If all this was her fault, Aryl vowed, the only way to atone was to stay away from the Dark and, she gave the nets a settling heave, help those she still could.
The lights of Yena were in sight between the stalks, the inner glow of her kind a magnet, when Aryl first heard the sound.
No, she decided, stepping into a shadow and holding still. She’d heard it before, when she’d stopped on the bridge within the grove. The canopy was a noisy place, day or truenight; experienced climbers learned to ignore what wasn’t a threat. But hearing it again, she knew what it was.
The hissing Tikitik made to one another.
Sound bounced from wood, softened against frond, carried over water. It was why Om’ray Scouts and Harvesters relied on mindspeech. Aryl listened as intently as she could, but over the ambient squawks, whirrs, and buzzing, couldn’t make out a direction. Not close, she thought, unless the faintness was an effort to speak quietly because they were close.
Which meant they could be right below her.
Aryl felt the weight of the pods on her shoulder. Her mother had warned her not to let the Tikitik know. They’d demand their share of what she held, that at least. Or they could want it all. She didn’t know or care what they used dresel for—she only knew they couldn’t have what she’d carried all this way, what Bern had left.
Six fists of life.
Weary and sore, she assessed her options. There was the path ahead, the one she’d planned to take. Straight along the wide bridge, around the platform ringing the next rastis, down the ladder to this end of the village bridge, from there, a handful of steps to where the glows marked safety. There might be a Scout on the platform, certainly one at the ladder’s base. At truenight, once all Yena were safe, they would remove several rungs and replace them with false steps, some coated with poison and spikes, others weakened to the breaking point. No friend to Om’ray climbed in the dark.