53: Nepotism

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“What’s your read on Mia?” Smon asks. “Fairly nervous, if I’m reading her body language correctly?”

“Well, she’s very young. And she and Kemia are in charge of looking after a god, so far as they know. It’s natural to be afraid.”

“You were never afraid of me.”

“Many of the Redstone River Hive were.”

“Not you, though.”

“I saw a clumsy, guileless baby crawl out of her egg alone and in need of help. What was there to be afraid of?”

Smon laughs. “Mia’s young, you say? I can never tell, except when it comes to really old people.”

“You didn’t see Kemia’s wings? Barely full-coloured. His father-colours aren’t at full intensity yet and his own is barely distinct. There’s a lot of variation in these things, but if I had to guess I’d say that they’ve been out of their parents’ burrow a little over a year, perhaps.”

“And they were given this job? Isn’t that… strange? Or maybe not. I mean, you were a lot younger.”

“That was… complicated.” Tyk doesn’t want to explain the whole wandering star thing, about how escorting a star-child falling from the sky had seemed such an obvious destiny for her.

“And is this complicated?”

“This is political, I suspect.”

“Yes, me too.” Smon reaches out to gently touch one of the gems on the wall. “Your women decorate their bodies with these. The Green Hills women, too. For prestige, right? They mark ranks and achievements?”

“Yes.”

“And the Glittergem women carve theirs into their bodies instead. Are visitors and traders commonly received by the hiveheart?”

“No.”

“And the hiveheart’s room is plain. Visitors and traders do see the trader burrow and entrance hall, though. Does the Redstone River Hive use gemstones for anything except decoration and women’s bodies?”

“Not very much. Some types of crushed stones are useful for building certain things, but they’re mostly adornments.”

“And it’s their main export?”

“Well, I’m not sure about that. I mean, the need for gems is pretty limited; they are supplying the whole continent, I suppose, but they must export other things, just like how we export things other than bamboo. It is what they’re known for, though.”

“Enough to name the whole hive after it. So a hive whose signature trade is a luxury good based around prestige hear tell of actual stars falling from the sky all over the continent, and because of their position so close to the Starspire, they are chosen to receive all of these baby stars and guide them home. Something that will most definitely cement their hive, and everyone involved, in lore and legend for… ever, probably. And the ones chosen as liaisons are a nervous pair barely into adulthood? Why?”

“It’s not that strange,” Tyk says. “It had to be someone. My guess is that they forbade anyone with power within the hive from taking the role.”

“What? Why?”

“To prevent major infighting. It’s the normal way of dealing with major honours and privileges. A hive that tears itself apart on the mandibles of a hiveheart all fighting for personal glory is… messy. Mia and Kemia are probably the children of one of the hiveheart, or somebody else with serious influence, as well as showing a lot of promise themselves. Someone very, very powerful who’s forbidden by rank to become your liaison could lean on the hive to get their close relatives into the position; that’s about as close as they’d be able to get without risking their position and the cooperation of the hive. I imagine that there was probably a lot of fighting. A lot of debate, a lot of traded favours.”

“And now the hiveheart has learned that there are no stars down here at all,” Smon says sadly. “I should have predicted this, but I didn’t. I wasn’t prepared to negotiate against disappointment.”

“If they’re disappointed, they’re idiots,” Tyk says fiercely. “You come bringing magic and bringing deep knowledge of the cosmos. That’s a thousand times more valuable than some stupid baby god. If you were a star, what would that tell us? We already know that there are stars. To know more of the nature of stars, as you’ve told us, and to know that there are other people, a whole different kind of people from their own Earth who are beyond anything we could imagine, is a much bigger deal. Besides, they’ll still be recorded in lore forever; being the site where the travellers from the stars collected and became a part of our shared history forever is so much more important than being at the place where some gods gathered to leave again. The hives after the hives after the Redstone River Hive will live next to the hives after the hives after your hive, and both peoples will know the name Glittergem and the names Mia and Kemia, because it will be their history that tells them about the lives they live every day. Had you been a god, then to those people Glittergem would be a name half-remembered by lorekeepers in a story about gods visiting too long ago for it to matter.”

“That’s a good point, I didn’t think of it that way,” Smon says, smiling. “We’ll have to keep that in mind, if it comes up with the hiveheart.”

“Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be too eager for your help with metal to be too disappointed,” Tyk says. “Why did you promise them that, anyway? I thought you were determined not to trade any magic with us. Won’t this hurt the iron trade routes to the South?”

Smon shakes her head. “It shouldn’t affect anyone but Glittergem all that much. Maybe they’ll trade a little bit less or a little bit more with their neighbours, I’m not certain what their current trade agreements are, but I promised them some limited help with my magic; I won’t be trading them any magic. Your continent does not lack metal; the Redstone River is red with it. The limitation is in refining that metal, which needs a lot of intense heat. I haven’t offered to help Glittergem refine their metal, and I won’t. I’ll help them find lumps of it in the mountain, but if they want to purify and shape it, that’s their problem. They’re limited by whatever processes they currently have. And it’s not like I’m creating new metal for them from nothing; they’ll find it in this mountain eventually with or without my help. This generation, or the next one, or the next. There’s only so much mountain. I’m sure they use metal to burrow, because even your people’s claws would wear down quickly when putted against stone, but they spare none of it for their decorations and I’ve seen none of it since we arrived; I suspect that they’re always short on metal. If my finds have any effect on the trade routes, it’ll just be that they can mine and export more gems faster.”

“But you’ll purify the metal that you use?”

“Of course. The metal will need to be pure and strong for the Rayjo Tau. It will take practice; I’ve never done it before. I don’t think I will need very much, though, and I will have time to get it right.”

“But don’t you want to contact your hivemates as soon as possible?”

“Yes, but I don’t need the whole tower for that. Rayjo Tau will give us stable, permanent communication, but I have Rayjo with me.” She taps her echo stone. “I just need to get on the other side of the mountains, and very high up. Stronger magic would be much better, but I don’t have stronger magic, so I’ll have to work with what I have. If I can get high up, I can tell everyone where I am and what I plan to do, and anybody nearby can all gather to help build Rayjo Tau and find those further away.” She bites her lip. “If I’m very lucky, I might be able to call someone who knows more about Rayjo than I do. I’m using what the magic stones know, and what Myn and Haidn knew, but we don’t know a lot about the… the air movements, higher up, on this Earth. There will be some luck involved, especially before Rayjo Tau is up.”

“So the plan right now is… ?”

“Convince the Glittergem Hive to let us build a hive in their territory, get to the other side of the mountains – that part shouldn’t be hard, looking at the stones they have I think Glittergem’s tunnels extend that far anyway – and send a message to my hivemates from high up,” Smon says. “Provided I can stay alive long enough to do it, we will succeed if we can convince Glittergem. And with what you said about how prestigious this will be for them, the most important piece of our shared history forever into the future, I think we have a very good chance of that.”

Mia and Kemia return, bearing fresh water and efin-glazed sweetroot. Tyk is impressed. So far as she knows, nobody has managed to properly cultivate efin; it’s a spice that grows sporadically among grasses in rare, tiny clumps, and the only way to obtain it is to spend time and energy searching aboveground. (Boys and particularly adventurous girls like Tyk, too young to be busy with full work shifts, who like to wander about aboveground when not at work or lessons, were the Redstone River Hive’s main source of it.) Efin glazing is delicious, but the rarity of the spice means that it’s usually reserved for important hive celebrations, and once glazed, the sweetroot doesn’t keep for long; perhaps a day before it becomes unappetising, and a few days before it becomes inedible. Glazing and cooking the sweetroot can take up to a quarter-day.

All of this means that there is simply no way that the Glittergem Hive had efin-glazed sweetroot on hand just in case a baby god happened to show up, and it’s incredibly unlikely that they had it made for something else. They must have gotten to work preparing the best food they could once their scouts saw the trio approaching the hive.

Cognisant of how much work she’s cost the hive, Tyk thanks Mia and Kemia with sincerity and appreciation and settles down with Ketyk to indulge in the rare treat. (Tyk takes a certain amount of joy in knowing that Ketyk’s first cooked food is something so fancy. Perhaps this will make him a little less shy of the hive.) Smon thanks them with equal appreciation, and after a brief conversation with Tyk to determine that the glaze is made of something that she’s already tested and found that her farm can handle, puts her share into it. Mia and Kemia look on curiously, but seem too cowed to ask what’s happening, so Tyk explains.

“Smon’s people cannot eat our food as it is,” she says. “Smon must first put it through a process to turn it into her kind of food.”

“It is some sort of blessing-chamber,” Kemia says quietly to his sister, so quietly that Tyk can barely pick up what he’s saying and Smon surely won’t. “To imbue earthly food with the divine and make it worthy of a star! Amazing!”

Tyk isn’t sure how to correct that without causing problems, so she pretends not to hear it.

“The hiveheart wish to speak to you again tomorrow morning,” Kemia says to Tyk and Smon. “Until then, they welcome you to enjoy the pleasures of our hive.”

“Any advice for speaking to the hiveheart?” Tyk asks. “You two seem very perceptive, do you have any tips to share?”

Mia looks away shyly. “I don’t know about that.”

“Of course you are. You were chosen to be Smon’s liaisons, you must be good at this sort of thing.”

“My truesister is Pyrrah-marked,” Kemia says, not bothering to disguise his pride. “And she is good at this sort of thing.”

“W-well, I’m not… I mean, they’ll mostly all listen to Mal. If you can get her on your side, then it’d be very unlikely that you wouldn’t get the rest of the hiveheart.”

“Mal… she was the eldest one, right?”

“Yes. Very well respected, very influential. Yar always comes across as resistant and aggressive to anything, but you just have to not let her scare you. She’s very straightforward, she wants facts and reasonable arguments. If you can convince her of something with logic, then you’ll have her. The one to really worry about is Kesal.”

“Kesal… I don’t think he spoke, last time we were in there.”

“He wouldn’t.” Mia hesitates.

Kemia instead flies over to land on Tyk’s horns and say conspiratorially (but loud enough for Smon to hear), “Kesal is a sneaky one, always looking out for himself. He’ll keep quiet until there’s benefit in it for him for speaking up, and then he’ll either help or harm you depending on how it benefits him. He’s very unpredictable if you don’t know what he wants. For some reason, Mal really respects his opinion, so you’ve got to watch out for him.”

“Sounds just like someone I know,” Tyk mutters to herself, thinking of Ayan.

Tyk glances at Smon, who doesn’t look worried. She feeds efin-glazed sweetroot to her farm, smiling slightly, and looks more relaxed than she has in a long time. She clearly thinks that this last important step, getting the cooperation of the hiveheart, shouldn’t be much of a problem.

But Tyk isn’t so sure.

Getting the help of Green Hills Hive wasn’t supposed to be much of a problem, either.

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