60: Sunseekers

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The proposed Rayjo Tau site is very high above the ocean, but it’s not nearly as high as Tyk was expecting. Despite all of Smon’s talk about height being important, there’s still plenty of mountain above them as they walk out from between two sharp, steep peaks and onto a broad, mostly flat expanse of solid grey stone. Cracks and dips in the ground are filled with rubble and dirt, accumulated and packed down over time, which serve as small oases for tough mountain grasses to dig into in sparse clumps; between them, the ground is broad, flat, and easy to move on. Probably easy to pull a cart on. Probably easy to build on.

At the far edge of the wide ridge, the ground drops off sharply, not quite a cliff, but close, a dizzying drop that shows Tyk just how far the accumulated upward climb of the last few days has brought them. It drops off directly into the sea, which looks essentially as the traders have always described it to Tyk; just water, near the coast, and then a little way out, a tangle of white, thorny vines growing thickly out of the churning water all the way to the horizon.

Tyk knows that they’re not really vines. They look like that, from this distance, but if she braved boat travel and went out there, she’d see a huge network of winding, twisting tubes wider than a farm tunnel, stretching many times her height out of the water, made of crumbling white stone – seastone. Like a reverse tunnel system, where the tunnels are stone and what should be stone or earth is air. The mass is full of sharp edges and dangerous shards, both from the ‘vines’ themselves breaking due to wear and the ‘thorns’ of seastone that were on them, jagged spikes of seastone that jut out at random angles, longer than a mandible. Taking a boat out there, trying to guide a fragile vessel through rough, churning waters between the ancient morass of pillars and spikes, is incredibly dangerous, and one of the reasons that nobody would travel to another continent without very good reason. Looking out at it all, Tyk wonders if anyone, even sky people, could make a home in such a place. Maybe everyone that Smon wants to summon is already dead.

Smon doesn’t look distressed, though. She just frowns at the steep slope.

“Problem?” Yar asks.

“No. Just that it will be difficult for people to make this climb from the ocean. But that will be true of any mountain. Once we start building, we’ll have to make a path up.”

“If you look to your right,” Kesal says, “do you see that dark mountain over there?”

Smon looks. So does Tyk. There is indeed the very edge of a dark mountain visible behind the other mountains, looking strangely out of place in the range, like it had been poured on top of them. Although she can only see part of one side, she gets the impression that it’s probably taller than the others, less worn down by time.

“That,” Kesal says, “is the Starspire.”

Ketyk flies out a little way off the ledge to get a better look. “It’s huge!”

“Well, yes; it is said to be the path to the sky.”

“It would be so much more poetic to built Rayjo Tau there.”

“More poetic,” Smon says, “but less practical. Can you imagine hauling materials all that way, through so much unstable and unknown terrain, up and down the mountains? No; this is probably a good spot, at least to start. If we get some air lorekeepers who know things that I don’t and day wee need to be higher, or somewhere else, then we can worry about that then.”

“There’s another advantage to this site,” Kesal says. “Yar, you’ll like this.”

“Why will I like it?” Yar asks, warily.

“Practicality.” He flies a little way along the ridge and ducks into a crack in the mountain.

Everyone, of course, follows. (Well, Smon and Tyk and Ketyk and Yar follow. The rest of their group, who have been too shy and awed to say a word to Smon and barely a word to Tyk on the whole journey, busy themselves unloading and tallying their travel supplies.)

The crack opens into a cave. No; a tunnel. Tyk can see the work of Glittergem’s metal tools on the walls. It’s not very wide (the tunnels in the stone tend to be dug as small as possible, since the stone is so hard to remove) but it’s dry, and has good airflow, and the floor is flat. It trails off into the mountain.

“Did the hive dig this?” Tyk asks.

“Oh, no,” Kesal says, “it’s far, far older than Glittergem. We think it’s the very edge of a network dug by a hive who settled in this area last cycle, or perhaps an earlier cycle. There’s a valley to the Southeast that’s full of deep, diggable soil, with evidence of having sweetroot tubers; not nearly enough to support a hive, but we think it probably did in a past cycle.”

“There’s less sweetroot there than there used to be?” Smon asks. “Is that bad?”

“No, it’s perfectly normal. The areas with the densest sweetroot change every cycle. It takes a long, long time for the land to recover; letting it sleep creates enough time for new sweetroot patches to mature but any given hive location can take multiple cycles to recover, depending. Once the land has slept a couple more times, people will probably make a new hive there. But they’ll have to find something to trade other than jewels, because I don’t think there’s many of them left here, if the old hive was digging through rock this far away. But these tunnels, though too small to house your kind if they’re all as large as you, would make excellent storage while getting things set up.”

“They sure would,” Smon says. “This looks great.” She has to crawl to fit in the tunnel, but does a cursory inspection of it, not going too deep, sets her packs inside, and scoots back out.

When Tyk leaves the cave, she finds Smon crouching over a tuft of grass, staring at something with fascination. She goes to have a look.

It’s some sort of bug. Tyk’s not familiar with it (there are a lot of bugs in the mountains that she’s not seen before), but it appears to be made mostly of wings, just a huge set of black and white patterned wings with a tiny body holding them together.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“That’s a sunseeker,” Yar says.

“It looks a lot like a bug that we have on our Earth. Well, not exactly; the body’s different, but those sorts of wings… are there a lot of these on your Earth?”

“Sunseekers are common on this side of the mountain range, where the sun warms the rocks for most of the day,” Yar says. “They’re a good indication of whether there’s a lot of flowering plants nearby.”

“That’s how we found the valley that would’ve housed the diggers of the tunnels,” Kesal says. “You’ll see a few sunseekers on most sunny rock areas, but if there’s a lot of them, it means you’re near a large patch of fertile ground.”

“I’ve never seen this wing pattern,” Yar says. “Though I tend not to leave the hive, so I don’t see a whole lot of sunseekers in general.”

“None of my scouts have seen it anywhere else either,” Kesal says. “We think that this specific type of sunseeker might just live here.”

Smon freezes. “Just here? On this ridge?”

“Well, in this general area. They’re all through the valley. Nobody recalls seeing them anywhere else, though.”

“Ooh, a special sunseeker just for Rayjo Tau!” Ketyk exclaims. “You could call your hive the Sunseeker Hive! Wait, no. Star Hive still sounds cooler.”

“Is everything alright?” Yar asks Smon, who still hasn’t moved.

“Yes.” Smon stands up quickly, clapping her hands together in that special way that she uses to knock the dust off them. “The cliff placement behind us is good, for the Rayjo Tau. It’ll shield it from the wind. And the tunnels will be invaluable storage until we get proper facilities up.”

The echo stone, speaking only in recorded words with recorded tones, sounds normal. But Tyk gets a glimpse of Smon’s face as she stands, and sees an expression that she’s only seen Smon wear once before.

It’s her expression from all the way back at the Redstone River Hive, when she’d seen the men incapacitated by the pollen storm and thought that her presence had killed them.

“So we should build here?” Yar asks.

“Perhaps,” Smon says. “I need to look around a bit more.” She looks at the sun, sinking toward the horizon. “How about we get some sleep, and make the decision in the morning.”

They shelter in the old tunnel, the whole team packed in. Despite how narrow it is, it’s longer than any of them have had the time or inclination to explore, so there’s plenty of room. The women pack in at the far end, ready to wake and protect the group if anything inside the tunnel proves to be a danger; the men and Smon, uncomfortable with the darkness and the confined space respectively, stay near the entrance. Tyk and Ketyk, being young enough not to want to sleep without each other yet, find themselves between the two groups.

The night itself is uneventful. No unknown mountain beasts attack from the tunnels, no drastic weather events attack from outside. They sleep. They wake.

The morning is rather more eventful, because when they wake, Smon’s not there. Not a big deal; she probably woke up a little early, and is out inspecting the Rayjo Tau site. But no; when they crawl out of the cave, she’s not there, either. They wait. She doesn’t return.

Smon is missing.

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