5: The Echo Stone

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Smon steps back out of the egg. Kesan immediately hovers, clearly wanting to retreat but refusing to leave his daughter alone. Smon stops, stares at him a moment, repeats that mandibles-up gesture of hers, and retreats slowly back into the egg, watching Kesan settle back onto Tyk’s horns.

“I have to report this,” Kesan says. “Precious, you should go back to the hive. Or retreat to the river, at least.”

“I’m not a child,” Tyk grumbles, childishly.

“You are, but that’s not the issue. Gods are unpredictable. So are newborn larvae. She might hurt you.”

“She hasn’t tried so far. You’re not seriously suggesting we leave a newborn alone in the middle of nowhere until the rest of the hive get here. She could die.”

Kesan shifts uneasily on her horns. “Well just… be careful. Don’t get too close.” He takes off into the sky, heading for an altitude that will allow his wingsong to carry to other scouts.

As soon as she figures he’s out of sight, Tyk heads straight for the egg. It’s so much bigger, compared to Smon’s body size, than a person’s egg, and she keeps going back to it. Is something else in there?

Smon, to Tyk’s surprise, steps aside and lets her right in, and Tyk immediately wishes she hadn’t. The inside of the egg is full of strange growths and protrusions in materials as unfamiliar as the shell, an egg grown like a geode. Tyk supposes that she should stop being surprised by things. Why would a god-egg be the same as a normal one? She’s already been told that strange stones sometimes fall from the stars; perhaps they have all sorts of rocks out there beyond her capacity to imagine, perhaps their eggs and bodies are made of special things that resist being on fire. They’d have to be. Why shouldn’t gods be born from geodes, even if the crystals in those geodes are dull and pale and round-edged, metallic in some places and silky in others?

But this is a background observation. Because the thing that immediately grabs Tyk’s attention is that stars are apparently born like sandgrubs; multiple larvae per egg. Smon has two twins, still in the shell, still in their birth silks and stuck by more silk to soft protrusions within the shell. Both have the same defects as Smon, missing the back half of their bodies.

Both are very clearly dead.

They had had big, round bubbles of crystal over their heads, both with the tops smashed in. A third such bubble, also broken, sits next to them on the protrusion that Smon probably cut herself free from. Now that she knows what to look for, Tyk sees a piece of bright white egg silk stuck to Smon’s head has something red-brown seeping through it, as red-brown as the blood dashed across the interior of the egg behind her twins’ clearly caved-in heads. A large, clearly very heavy branch is the obvious culprit, lying loose on the bottom of the egg with blood on it. Tyk has seen support strut collapses before. She’s never seen an egg that grows support struts inside it, but it’s obvious what has happened here; a strut came loose and did what falling struts do while the egg fell from the sky, and the larvae were killed before they had a chance to even start hatching.

“I’m sorry, Smon,” Tyk says. She gently touches each of the bodies with her mandibles; Smon watches her closely, but doesn’t stop her until she starts trying to cut the corpses free, at which point Smon gently pushes her away. Tyk can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a twin; twins are very rare among her kind. Half-twins are somewhat common, but that’s not the same thing. Is it like losing a normal sister? Is Smon feeling what Tyk would feel if Dahm were to die? Or is it like losing a truebrother? Tyk feels a thrill of irrational panic at that, even though Ketyk isn’t born yet.

Smon looks at the bodies, her mood unreadable to Tyk, and doesn’t disturb them. She watches them a moment, then gives herself a little shake and breaks something pale and oddly shaped off the inside of the egg. She affixes it to the side of her head, like a carapace gem, except that she’s far too young to earn such a thing and even if she were old enough, it would be foolish to place one so that it partly covers one’s eye as Smon has done. Then she looks at Tyk.

And speaks in Tyk’s voice.

“One,” Smon says.

A thrill of fear runs through Tyk as she wonders, briefly, if her father was right, because who knows what the gods can do, apparently they can steal her voice, how –

And she leaps back, and squeaks in fear, and immediately calms down because she still has her voice, obviously it wasn’t stolen, that’s ridiculous; what is she, a larva herself? Smon is mimicking her, like the echoflies in the North that mimic wingsong and make things hard for the long-range messengers out there.

Smon gathers a handful of small objects from a silk pouch in the egg, and places one on the floor. “One,” she says, in Tyk’s voice. Another object; “two.” She places eleven objects, one set and three, and says “eleven,” again in Tyk’s voice. Then she adds more, one set and seven; fifteen objects, more than they’ve counted yet. She says, in Tyk’s voice, “fifteen.” The mimicry is choppy; Tyk has never said that word to her, and she’s had to repeat parts of other numbers to make it. But it’s correct.

Seeing that Smon was waiting for a response, Tyk gives an affirmative mandible gesture, which Smon repeats excitedly in her strange fashion, pressing her mandibles to her mouth and using just one little protrusion. Tyk is more interested in the magic rock than in teaching a larva to count. She’s noticed that Smon isn’t repeating her words; the rock that she’s put on her face is. Children’s stories about the gods are full of odd things, magic among them – they are gods, after all – and the idea that the gods have rocks with magical properties is fascinating.

A magic stone that can echo voices. Even in the stories, Tyk has never heard of such a thing.

Smon, excited, heads for the hole in the egg, and waits there for Tyk. Clearly, she doesn’t want Tyk in the egg without her. Tyk follows her out, and Smon dashes away, stops, looks around, and snatches up a rock and a stick of bamboo, torn from the ground with her bare hands. She dashes back. Points at Tyk. “Tyk,” she says, as best she can. Points at herself. “Smon.” Points at the bamboo. Waits.

“Bamboo?” Tyk guesses.

This makes Smon even more excited. “Bamboo?” the echo stone asks, which is a little jarring to hear; now that Tyk knows the task, she’ll have to be careful about using a more neutral tone for the words. Smon gathers her words for stone, and grass, and dirt, and water, and puts them in the echo stone.

This is good, but there are things that a newborn needs more than language. Tyk takes a quick look around for predators that might be big enough to threaten such a large larva (nothing, obviously; nothing taller than the grass lived anywhere within sight) and goes looking for something edible.

A few minutes later, Tyk returns with an armload of river grass. Smon is right where she left her, pulling apart a piece of bamboo and inspecting the fragments closely. Tyk doesn’t think a larva would be able to digest bamboo, and she doesn’t have any sweetroot or anything with her, so river grass will have to do. She drops the pile in front of Smon, and steps back.

“Grass,” Smon says, with the echo stone.

“Yes, grass. Also, food.” Tyk eats some to demonstrate, then lifts some towards Smon’s mouth. Smon takes it and lifts it to her own lips, miming eating.

“No, don’t just mimic me, eat it.” Tyk eats some more. Smon does not. What’s the problem? Newly hatched larvae are usually ravenous; it’s a chore to stop them from eating anything dangerous. One refusing to eat food is new. Is this because of Smon’s injuries, missing the back half of her body? She might be missing a stomach. Very bad news, if true.

Smon gets up and goes back into the egg for just a moment, returning with something small and shiny. Only when she starts peeling the crackly, shiny skin off to reveal something brown and soft and dull beneath does Tyk realise it must be some sort of fruit, or beetle. Smon eats it, and Tyk relaxes a little. It would make sense that stars would eat different things than people. They catch fire, after all; maybe Smon has to eat something really really flammable. But different food raises another concern – there’s only so much room in the egg. Smon can’t have all that much star food with her. If Tyk can’t feed her, what happens when she runs out?

Smon snatches up some of the grass and dashes back into the egg, closing the hole behind her. There are some bugs that build their homes out of discarded eggshells; Tyk is beginning to think that perhaps stars, apparently abandoned at birth, might use their own shells for a similar purpose. The egg is certainly very large and very strong; abandoning it would be a waste. And it would make sense for stars to have a clever life cycle like that.

She stays shut in the egg for a long time, and Tyk considers going back to the hive, but there’s no real point; a large chunk of the hive should be on its way over by now. And sure enough, it’s not long before she sees advance scouts hovering above. The hive must be very cautious, because the scouts don’t land; they stay safe in the sky, waiting for their women to arrive. And the women are not far behind, traipsing over from the riverbank. They must have come in a hurry; it’s obvious from the sheer distance between the leaders and the laggers. Nobody waited for the slower people.

It’s mostly the young and the large out front, as expected, but little old Bette is keeping up, apparently fuelled by sheer determination to keep an eye on her daughter and new son. Ayan is surrounded by a gaggle of her friends, a couple of them with truebrothers of their own but most still too young. Keyan dozes, far too young to understand what’s going on, or understand much at all beyond the soothing wingsong of the men of the hive and the safety of his truesister’s horns. He looks fine. Ayan shoots Tyk a glare of pure venom, and for once, Tyk has to admit that this glare is justified – this was supposed to be her big day, hers and Keyan’s, and the discovery of this egg has stolen it from her. Still, it’s not like Tyk called the egg down from the sky. It’s hardly her fault. If anything, Ayan should save her glaring for Smon.

Tyk feels a sudden rush of anger at that very thought. Maybe it’s best that Ayan does hate her instead of Smon. If she goes about starting trouble with Smon, Tyk will probably bite her again.

Tyk’s family are among the first arrivals, too, and swarm around her, her father and brother checking her over while her mother keeps one eye on the egg and her sister bombards her with questions. Even her half-father drops in briefly to make sure that she’s alright.

Then, the egg opens again. Reactions are somewhat mixed – Bette leaps forward with eager curiosity before checking herself, and San puts herself between her daughters and the egg – but on the whole, the hive shrinks back as Smon steps down onto the ground.

Smon looks them over, lifts her mandibles up in that strange pacifying gesture of hers, and sits down in front of the egg. Waiting.

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