Moon followed Chime down the stairs, finding three levels of large airy chambers, all facing into another central well. The walls were covered with carvings here too, a whole landscape of Raksura, Arbora and Aeriat, queens and consorts, woven in with unfamiliar symbols, plants, animals. Suspended over the well was a wooden ball studded with the white light-shells, in all different shapes and sizes. “This is more room than we ever had before,” Chime said, sounding overcome, his eyes on the glyphs carved above the round doorways. “For weaving, carving, pottery, metalwork…” He moved toward one of the rooms, pausing on the threshold.
Moon stepped past him. Merit was inside, along with a few hunters and teachers. It was a big room, winding far back into the tree, the walls lined with shelves. They stretched up to the curving ceiling, the material a richly-colored green and white stone, like polished agate. “What’s this for?” Moon asked.
Chime turned abruptly and walked out to the well, stepped over the edge and fell out of sight.
Merit watched him go, his face set in a sympathetic wince. He told Moon, “It’s the mentors’ libraries.”
And a too-pointed reminder that Chime wasn’t a mentor anymore. Moon went out to the well and jumped down to the next level, then the next. He found Chime at the bottom, in a central chamber not nearly as grand, sitting beside a large dry pool filled with turns’ worth of dead moss. More doorways led off this level, and from the comments of the Arbora who were exploring them, these were storerooms.
Moon sat down beside Chime, curling his tail out of the way. Chime slumped over, his spines drooping in dejection. After a moment, he said, “We don’t have nearly enough books to fill those shelves. We must have lost so much.”
Moon said, “Maybe they just left a lot of extra room.” But he was thinking about the ruined books he had found on the flying island back in the east. Moving a court as large as this one had been, there must have been so many things that had had to be left behind, or let fall to the wayside.
Chime snorted in bitter disbelief. “Not that it’s any of my business. That’s for the mentors to worry about.”
Moon didn’t know what to say to that. Chime wasn’t a mentor anymore, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He watched the Arbora go in and out of doorways across the chamber, exclaiming over the things they were finding, making plans. “What did you do? Besides being a mentor.”
It was probably the wrong question, but maybe Chime needed to talk about it. Moon was beginning to understand how important their crafts were to the Arbora. There was no pressing need for weapons or any other metalwork, or new crockery, or for Bead to fix the damaged carving. But they were anxious to get the forge running, and had been just as pleased at finding pottery ovens as they had been at finding the herd of grasseaters at the lake. And nobody had turned the inside of this tree into a living work of art unless they wanted to, unless they wanted it as much as Moon wanted to fly.
Chime rubbed his eyes. “I painted. The leather cases for keeping paper, and for holding books together. You harden the leather with a paste, then decorate it.” He took a sharp breath. “I know it doesn’t sound like much—”
“Why can’t you still do it? It’s not like you need to be a shaman to paint.” Just because Chime had lost one ability, Moon didn’t see the use of giving up everything.
Chime sighed, frustrated. “I’ve been afraid to try. What if I can’t anymore, like I can’t heal or augur or anything? At the Dwei hive, when Heart wasn’t strong enough to put you into a healing sleep, I tried. I thought maybe I just had to be desperate to make it work now. But it didn’t. And you could have died.”
Moon shook his head. “You should try to paint. Then you’d know.” Chime grimaced at the thought and looked away. “Yes, that’s the point of not trying.”
There wasn’t an answer for that, either.
A voice above them said, “Moon? Chime?” It was Strike again, hanging one-handed from the edge of the balcony above. “Flower wants you to come see something. I’m supposed to go get the queens and Stone.” That didn’t sound good. “What is it?” Moon asked, pushing to his feet.
Strike waved his free hand. “Nobody knows—that’s the problem!”
Before hurrying up to the greeting hall, Strike pointed them back to the passage that led in toward the center of the trunk, and they found the way by following the trail of lit shells.
Flower and Knell stood in a junction of two passages, and at first Moon thought the dark, irregular blot on the wall was a shadow. But as they drew closer he saw it was something smudged on the wood itself. It stretched all the way up to the curving ceiling, and down to the smooth floor. The scent was like rot, like wood left in water until it softened and fell apart.
“What is it?” Chime demanded, and stepped close to peer at it. “A fungus?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Knell said, giving him a thoughtful glance. “The hunters saw it last night, when they came through here to make certain there was no danger, but they thought it was just moss. Today I saw there were spots of it all down these inner passages.”
Flower had made a small stone glow with light, and held it close to the dark splotch, studying it intently. “Moon, have you ever heard groundlings speak of anything like this? A blight that kills trees?”
“Kills trees?” Moon stepped forward, startled. He had thought this was a curiosity, not a threat. “This tree?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Flower beckoned him closer. “Look. This isn’t a growth on the wood, it’s the wood itself.”
Moon leaned close. She was right. The dark spongy substance still showed the grain. He touched it, pushing gently, and his claw sunk through. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The Hassi had had a problem with fungus in their orchards on top of the link-trees, but it had been a mushroom-like growth that made the fruit turn sour, nothing like this.
Chime stepped down the wall, and picked cautiously at the damaged wood. It flaked away under his touch. “It doesn’t look like blight. It looks like the wood is just dying, for no reason.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Flower stepped back, her face etched with worry. “Because that’s what it looks like to me, too.”
Knell grimaced and shook his head in denial. “But this tree must be hundreds and hundreds of turns old. How can…”
Moon wasn’t sure how Knell meant to finish that sentence. Maybe How can our luck be this bad? that Indigo Cloud had come back to this place just as the ancient tree was finally failing.
He heard movement behind him and caught Jade’s distinctive scent, then Stone’s. He glanced up just as Stone came around the curve of the passage.
Stone’s reaction answered one question. Moon had just had time to form a slight suspicion that Stone might have known about this when he had brought the court here, that he had meant this to be only a temporary resting place, not a permanent home, and he just hadn’t bothered to inform anyone of his plans. But Stone was in groundling form, and as he stopped in the passage, his expression of shock was easy to read. Moon found himself wishing his suspicion had been right. At least then there might have been a plan for what to do next.
Stone put one hand on the wall. “This is heartwood.”
Jade stepped past him, and worriedly looked up at the blight spread across the curve of the ceiling. “What’s heartwood?”
He grimaced. “It’s the core of the tree. It can’t die, because it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t change.”