As Stone and Pearl arrived, Knell said, “All the doors down here are sealed from the inside, so the hunters assumed no one had used them since the court left.” He ran his thumb along the seam where the door met the wall. “But the other doors have a thick crust here, hard as rock, from turns of wind and rain forcing dirt through the cracks from the outside.” He glanced up. “This one doesn’t.”
Pearl hissed. “Open it.”
“Wait.” Stone frowned at the door. “Let the Aeriat scout it from the outside first.”
Jade regarded him doubtfully. “You don’t think whatever took the seed is still out there?”
“I don’t know what I think.” Stone’s voice was dry. “I just know I’m against the idea of opening any convenient passages to the ground at the moment.”
“Very well.” Pearl sounded as if it was an effort not to growl. Her spines twitched with impatience. “Hurry.”
With Stone, Chime, Vine, Root, and a few other Aeriat, Moon went up to the knothole entrance to take flight, making a cautious spiral down the outside of the tree.
They dropped past more platforms, through the spray of the waterfall. Some of the overgrown foliage was still flattened from the rain, but Moon spotted berry bushes, yellow vines that might be whiteroot, and tall slender nut-trees. They dropped further, until the sun was dimmed to a deep green twilight. The ground was thick with fern trees, their fronds spreading like giant parasols. The mountain-tree’s roots were huge, great ridges of wood sloping down from the massive wall of the trunk and running out and away. Moon didn’t sense any large animal movement, and the air tasted of the musk of small treelings. A whole tribe of greenfurred ones fled shrieking as Stone dropped down to perch on a root.
The run-off of the tree’s cascade formed a shallow marsh. Much of it was choked with weeds and lilies, but there were flat rocks arranged in a way that looked deliberate, and a lot of white objects that from this distance looked like flowers.
Moon landed on the upper ridge of another root, as Chime and the others lighted around him. He crouched for a closer look at the marshy water below and saw the white objects weren’t flowers; they were the elaborate spiraled shells of snails, some as big as his head, with blue and green speckled bodies. Chime climbed down beside him, and said, “They must have cultivated these for food. I don’t think we need any more lights, but we could use the shells for jewelry.”
Moon gave him a look. “Because you all need more jewelry.” From above them, Vine called out, “I think the door is through here!” Moon glanced up. Vine had landed higher on the root, where the ridge sloped up toward the bulk of the tree, looming over them like a giant cliff. He leaned down to peer into a cave-like opening in the living wood.
Moon hopped up to join him; the others scrambled to follow. The opening extended back into the tree, festooned with vines and stained with moss. He tasted the air, but there was no predator scent, and he couldn’t sense any movement. He looked back at Stone, who climbed up the broad root, then shifted to groundling. He brushed past Moon to walk into the cave.
Moon swung inside and dropped down beside Stone. Only dim light made it this deep into the crevice, but Moon could see that a path had been formed in the wood, leading in toward the trunk. The path was heavily coated with dead fern fronds and beetle husks and seemed to dead-end in a flat wall of rough wood. Then he saw the steps cut into the wall, and the round shape of the door, about ten paces up.
Stone stopped so suddenly Moon brushed his shoulder. Stone looked down at a hollow in the side of the path. Leaf mold had piled up in it, washed there by rain. He knelt suddenly and dug through the detritus. Moon realized the mold covered a huddle of yellowed bones, still wrapped in disintegrating cloth and leather.
“What is it?” Vine asked from behind them.
“Bones. Looks like one of them didn’t make it far.” Moon crouched down for a closer look as Stone dug out the body, which had fallen or been shoved into the hollow.
Moon asked him, “It’s not there?” He didn’t think there was much hope that the seed had been left behind. It wouldn’t be that easy.
“No.” Stone stood, his jaw set in frustration.
Chime slipped past Vine and Stone and crouched down to poke at the remains. Root and the others crowded around to see.
Moon picked up the skull, but without flesh there wasn’t anything to tell him what species it was. In shape it didn’t seem much different from his own groundling form, but it could have bare skin, fur, scales, feathers.
Still digging through the leaf mold, Chime pulled out a handful of small metal disks, badly tarnished. “I think those are buttons. There’s some thick leather down here, maybe a belt… There’s more than one here. There’s too many bones, and this.” He held up another part of a skull, this one with the jaw sheared off.
Moon heard a thump and twitched around, then realized it had come from the sealed door. Root bounced up to the doorway and knocked on it. After a moment it creaked, cracked, and then slid open, releasing a shower of dead bug shells. “We found groundlings!” Root reported.
Stone growled, irritated. “Groundlings that have been dead a turn.”
The others spilled out of the doorway, and Jade landed beside Stone. She looked down at the bones, frowning in dissatisfaction. “Well, at least we know it was groundlings, and that they came here about a turn or so ago.”
“This door doesn’t open from outside, and it was still sealed with a bar,” Knell said as he climbed down the wall. “They must have had help, someone who could fly up to the knothole, to get inside, and then let the others in down here.”
“One of us?” Song wondered. “A Raksura?”
“Or something else that could fly or climb.” Moon put the skull back on the pile of bones and stood. “It doesn’t have to be a Raksura.”
“Or they got some solitary to do it for them—” Root began, then twitched his spines in confusion. “Oh, sorry, Moon.”
Moon controlled his annoyance. Even during a crisis this serious, nobody forgot who had been a feral solitary.
Chime flicked his tail at Root. “The question is, how do we track them?”
Knell edged past Stone to examine at the groundling bones. “It’s been too long. We can’t track them.”
“We should search anyway,” Jade said, and looked up to where Pearl sat crouched in the doorway. “If they left their dead behind, they might have left other traces, some sign of where they came from.”
From Pearl’s expression and the angle of her spines, she had already gone from righteously angry to depressed. Moon didn’t think that was a particularly good sign. One of the problems at the old colony had been Pearl’s growing apathy; necessity, and being away from the Fell’s influence, had shaken her out of it. Now would be a terrible time for her to slip backward.
The moment stretched to an uncomfortable point. Then Pearl settled her spines, and said, “Go and search. Maybe they were careless.”
Moon felt the others’ relief. Their chances of finding something didn’t matter; the important thing was that their reigning queen wasn’t giving up. Or at least if she was, she was managing to hide it.
Jade acted as if she hadn’t noticed the lapse, and told Knell, “Send someone for Bone. We need all the hunters.”
Chapter Four
They started the search through the strange twilight world of the mountain-tree’s roots, finding their way through the hanging moss and vines, the forests of fern trees, and the marshes. The teachers and the rest of the Aeriat had been told to keep searching the inside of the tree and up into the branches, on the chance that some trace of the thieves had been left inside.