The grass was sparse, barely knee-high. Trees as slender as rods stood as much as two hundred paces high. Their canopies fanned out like round sunshades, the light green leaves providing little barrier to the eyes of anything flying over. The rocky streams were nearly flat too, barely a few fingers deep, the water glittering in the sunlight. It would be a perfect hunting ground for the major kethel.
Moon landed long enough to make another arrow out of rocks, pointing the way across the plain.
By late evening, the stench of Fell was heavy on the wind, and Moon thought the kethel must be close to their destination. The streams winding through the plain had coalesced into a broad river running toward a series of ridges and the foot of a distant escarpment. Moon spotted some hopping grasseaters near the river and made a snap decision to take one. He had no idea how much longer the kethel meant to fly, and he couldn’t keep up this pace on an empty stomach.
He stooped on a hopper before the herd knew he was there, killed it, and ate nearly fast enough to make himself sick. Then he flew to the river to drink and quickly wash the blood off. There, he discovered the banks were dark with what looked like metal-mud. Hah, finally, a little luck. Moon scraped his claws through the mud to make certain, then dropped and rolled in it, wincing at the metallic odor, extending his wings to thoroughly coat his whole body.
Once it dried on his scales, the odor would disguise his natural scent. The fact that it also burned easily was worrisome, though he would have to pass close to a flame for the dried mud to catch. Though he suspected that once he found the kethel’s destination, accidentally burning to death would be the least of his worries.
He quickly made two more rock arrows, one pointing in the direction the kethel had taken and the other toward his mud-wallow; he hoped the others found it and got the idea.
He took flight and, after a burst of speed, came within sight of the kethel again. He settled in for a long steady haul.
The sun set, and the kethel continued more than halfway through the night until they reached the rocky outline of the escarpment. Moon had been flying so long by that point that he stared in shock when the kethel suddenly banked and circled for a landing.
Moon dropped toward the ground, seeking cover in the rocky hills on this side of the river. He landed amid boulders and old rock falls covering a steep hillside, under the partial cover of tall spreading trees, and crept up to the top to try to see where the kethel had gone.
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.