Delin twisted to speak to someone she couldn’t see. “What is this? What has happened?” He sounded frightened. Bramble had never heard Delin sound really frightened before, and it turned her insides to ice.
A Hian stepped in to lean over her. It was Lavinat. “It was the weapon,” she told Delin. “It affects the Raksura as well as the Fell, as we expected. I think we will find it affects other races, any who descend in some way from the foundation builders or forerunners. There was a good reason why they chose to hide the weapon instead of use it.”
“This I suspected,” Delin said impatiently. “But Bramble was so far from it . . .”
Lavinat made a gesture of dismissal. “Vendoin knows less of it than she believes. She hoped the scholar who lives here could tell her more.” She added bitterly, “Aldoan obviously discovered how to get some use of it in a moment of extremis. If she lives, she can tell us.”
Delin looked down at Bramble, his face etched with fear and anger. “I don’t understand. Why this concealment, and abduction, and violence? If it is a weapon against the Fell surely no one could object to obtaining and using it? If it is carefully directed, the Raksura would not be harmed. There are no Fell flights near Raksuran colonies.” He glared up at Lavinat again. “Why did the foundation builders fear using it?”
Lavinat eyed him. “You haven’t guessed? Vendoin feared you had. The artifact is only one component of the weapon. The bulk of it lies somewhere else, somewhere nearby on the coast, if Vendoin is right. It is meant to kill on a large scale. Our scholars believe if this artifact is united with the rest of the device, it will destroy all the Fell on this part of the continent, from the far west to the eastern end of the Abascene peninsula.”
Bramble couldn’t take it in. It was like listening to a story read from a book. Surely this couldn’t be real. She was Bramble, an Arbora hunter of great skill from the Indigo Cloud Court. People like her hunted and worked and made art and had sex with their friends and at some point had a clutch or two or three on their way to old age. They didn’t become witnesses to the end of their world.
Delin’s face flushed a dark gold in distress. “That includes all the Reaches. All of Kish. The Jandera think they descend from the foundation builders . . .”
“As do other races within and outside the Imperial Kish borders.” Lavinat tilted her head in wry inquiry. “Would you have helped Vendoin if she had asked?”
“No.” His lips curled in revulsion.
“Then she was right,” Lavinat said, as Bramble saw the world go dark and drop away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Moon and Stone flew, the cloudwall still didn’t seem to change, except with the play of light and shadow. The rolling hills of the forest under them began to grow wider and deeper, like the swells of a sea of trees.
Then Stone abruptly turned, slipped sideways, and dropped down toward the ground. It was so abrupt, Moon’s heart went tight with dismay. Stone had said he was recovered from his injuries, but Stone lied a lot.
Moon followed him down, already mentally scrambling for alternative plans, and dropped down onto the rocky ground beside him as Stone shifted to groundling. “What is it?” Moon demanded. “What’s wrong?”
Instead of answering, Stone climbed the nearest outcrop. A large tree with fringed leaves perched atop it and birds clacked angrily at them from the branches. Stone tasted the air and said, “Fell and death, from upwind.”
Moon furled his wings and bounced up onto the rock beside him. “I can’t scent it yet.”
“It’s coming from the south.” Stone shifted and leapt, his wings brushing the tree branches as he flapped upward. Moon shook the stirred moss out of his frills and leapt after him.
After some hard flying, Moon started to catch the scent too. Stone was right, it was Fell stench, a taint on the clean wind, and growing steadily heavier. But it was accompanied by the growing sweet-sour stink of rot. So much that it almost overpowered the Fell stench. It was odd. In Moon’s experience, the strength of the scents should be reversed. Fell ate most of their kills. The remnants they would have left behind wouldn’t have an odor this strong.
The sky was mostly clear, with some clouds gathered toward the west where a small rainstorm fell. Moon scented wood smoke before the rising trails of it became visible. They were approaching a groundling settlement. Or what was left of one.
Finally he caught sight of it, built atop a series of steep hills overlooking the wide bends of a shallow river. Two different trade roads wound through the forested hills toward it. The roads had been elevated some twenty to thirty paces off the ground, supported by large carved stone blocks, similar to those Moon had been familiar with in the east. It meant this spot had been a major nexus of travel for more turns than anyone could remember.
Stone leading the way, they dropped out of the air while they still had a hill and tall forest for cover. Approaching on foot and in groundling form was a frustratingly slow necessity, though at least when they reached the first raised, stone-paved trade road they were able to run without wading through brush and high grass. The stench of Fell and death-rot was almost choking the air now, and scavenger birds circled overhead.
The road took them over two bends of the river toward the settlement. Tall, evenly rounded hills dotted the river valley, the slopes covered with low buildings, the pathways and staircases winding upward shaded by trees. On the valley floor between the hills it was all tents and light wooden structures. Flags and other symbols, some variants of ones that Moon was familiar with from the east, hung from poles along the road and near the river docks, telling travelers everything they needed to know, from what shelter and food were available to which kinds of goods trading was done here.
The wind brought the faint sound of agitated voices and Moon saw groundlings still moving among the tent pathways and up the stairs on the hills. Most were short, hairless, with a dull green skin tone. There were far too many groundlings still alive for the aftermath of a Fell attack. This doesn’t make sense, Moon thought.
Then Stone stopped, staring at something. Moon caught up and looked down to see a black scaled arm lying in the dust on the ancient paving stones. His first horrified thought was that it was Raksura, but the scales and claws were wrong. “It’s a Fell ruler’s arm,” he said.
Stone’s brow was furrowed. “Right.” He looked up and tasted the air again. “Come on.”
Next it was a join with a leathery dakti wing still attached, then a ruler’s torso, then more dakti limbs, then a kethel’s foot, and more, all rotting in their own congealed blood, surrounded by buzzing insects and the small ground-scavenging lizards. It was impossible to tell what had killed them. Some groundlings had weapons that could cause things to explode, but it was usually accompanied by fire, and Moon couldn’t scent any burned flesh. There was no sign of damage from Kishan-style fire weapons.
“A little more than a day,” Stone said, judging the time the bodies lay on the road by the carrion insects and the smell of rot. “Maybe yesterday morning. Must be the flight that was ahead of us.”
Moon hadn’t seen any remnants that suggested this was the flight controlled by the Fell-born queen. He felt a little relief about that. Seeing dismembered Fell was puzzling but not horrific. He didn’t want to see dismembered Fell-Raksuran crossbreeds, no matter how mad he was at them.
They reached a place where a ramp had been constructed to allow travelers to leave the trade road. As they climbed down, it was clear the exploding Fell phenomenon was not confined to the old road. Groundlings gathered dead Fell pieces and dumped them in piles in the city’s outskirts, clearly making ready to burn them. Many of the groundlings stumbled with exhaustion, and others carried jugs of water for the workers. Everyone was busy and no one paid attention to the two astonished travelers. Moon said, “What did . . . How did . . .” That was all he could manage.