2. Things Left Behind: In the Time of Indigo Cloud's Return to the Reaches

Note: This is set between The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths

"We knew there was a block somewhere around here," Snap said as he led Moon and Chime down the spiraling ramp.

Moon was willing to look at whatever it was, but Chime appeared to be suspicious of Snap's motives. Chime said, "You better not be dragging us down here to look at a drain."

Moon had been through this part of the colony tree before, but not recently. It was below the Arbora's work areas, but still some distance up from the roots. The wood of the floor had been smoothed down but the only carvings were flowers and plants above the doorways. The lights, snail shells that had been spelled by the mentors to glow, were only sporadically lit, as if someone had been renewing them but hadn't gotten around to finishing the job yet. This section had never looked as if it had been much used, and the current size of the Indigo Cloud Court was so small that much of the space down here wasn't needed for anything, not even food storage.

"Not just a drain," Snap protested. "It's good, I promise."

"Wait, you said it didn't involve drains at all," Moon said. Mountain-trees drew far more water up through their roots than they needed, and expelled it through fissures in their trunks that created the marshes and ponds on the platforms of the suspended forest. The Indigo Cloud colony tree had been altered to use the excess water to fill bathing pools and waterfalls, and flush the latrines. With the tree unoccupied for so many turns, the drains had become blocked and a group of Arbora now spent all their time crawling around, covered with mud and slime, trying to get the whole system working again. And it was all they wanted to talk about. Moon had seen and heard about enough lumps composed of dead beetles and rotted wood to last the rest of his life.

Snap took a turn off the ramp and down a sloping passage. "It's only sort of related to a drain."

Moon started to catch the scent of plant rot, but it was old and faint, barely perceptible amid the sweet scent of the colony tree. The passage made two turns then opened into a series of interconnected chambers. From the large empty bathing pool in the first, they were meant to be bowers. The carving was all plants and flowers here too, but there was more of it, vines winding up the walls to the ceiling and around the doors. But much of it, especially in the lower part of the rooms, was stained and worn down.

Rill and Bark were in the next connected chamber, poking around at a pile of debris against the back wall. They were in their groundling forms and covered with moss and dirt, and too occupied digging through the debris to notice. "Was there a flood here?" Chime asked, looking around, baffled. Moon still didn't understand what they were doing here either.

Rill stood up, brushing her pants off. "The water to this section was completely blocked off, but before that happened there was a block below it and that pool overflowed. It washed everything in these rooms back here, so no one noticed it."

"No one noticed what?" Chime asked again, not patiently.

"This stuff!" Snap pointed.

Next to a pile of disintegrating fiber and what might have once been fur, lay a collection of random objects. Moon went over and sat on his heels for a better look.

There was a knife, the blade made of a predator's tooth, the handle curved like a wing, with tiny blue stones in each feather. A scatter of loose stones, blues and greens, and badly tarnished metal pieces. Moon leaned down and picked up a cup from a tea set. It was a clear pure blue, shot through with traces of gold. Part of the pot was here too, the side with the angled handle and a broken piece of the spout, shaped like a bird's mouth. "This was all there in that pile?"

Bark picked out a bracelet, so crusted with rust it was impossible to see more of the shape. "We're still finding things."

"What's strange is that I'm sure this rotten stuff is blankets and clothing," Rill said, now elbow deep in the debris again. "We didn't find anything like that anywhere else."

Snap spread his arms. "This might have been storage, maybe for the things they didn't take?"

"Why would they store things in a set of bowers and not in the store rooms?" Bark asked.

Moon didn't get it, either. The rest of the tree's chambers had been mostly empty, except for storage bins and other things too big to move, broken fragments of pottery, and the occasional forgotten or lost object.

Chime sat down on the floor beside Moon, trailing his fingers through the polished stones. "It's strange. You don't think it was Rift, do you?"

Moon managed not to hiss in reflex at the name. They knew the solitary warrior Rift had camped at some point in the colony tree before Indigo Cloud had returned. It was how he had known to lead Ardan and the other groundlings here to get the tree's seed.  "Maybe.  But why stay all the way down here? And not up by the knothole, or in the Aeriat bowers?"

"Maybe he felt safer down here?" Chime lifted the tea cup, holding it up to the light so the gold veins glinted. "Or--"

Moon heard someone make a noise, a faint sound of distress. He turned, and had a moment of pure nonplussed astonishment. Stone was standing in the doorway.

The Arbora had all gone still, staring. Rill said, uncertainly, "Stone? What's--  Are you all right?"

Stone looked at the pile of rotted debris, and back to the scatter of found objects. His expression gave away nothing, but it was more set than usual.

Then he turned and walked out of the chamber.

All the others took a breath, and Moon realized he had been holding his, too. He also realized that his groundling skin had gone cold, because he hadn't ever heard Stone make that noise before, not even when he had been injured almost to death.

Chime's eyes were wide. "Do you think--"

"Yes." Moon pushed to his feet. "Don't follow me."

Chime nodded. "Come back and tell us what happened?"

The Arbora all nodded hopefully.

Moon did a half shrug and sort of nod that he felt didn't actually commit him to anything, and left to look for Stone.

***

It took a while, but Moon finally found him down at the bottom of one of the long spiral ramps, where a fall of water dropped past that was part of the sluicing system for the colony's latrines. The water was mostly clean and any bad scents were faint, and Moon had gone to ground himself there before. He had had the hope that Stone might want to be found.

Stone sat on the flat part of the ramp's turn, looking out over the falling water and the curve that followed the outer trunk. Moon sat beside him, moving slowly in case Stone didn't actually want to be talked to. When he was settled, and Stone hadn't growled at him, he said, "What's wrong?"

Stone didn't answer for a time, then said, "Not everyone left." His voice was rough and hesitant.

Moon didn't understand at first. "Left..."  Then it hit him.  Left the colony. When Indigo and Cloud led the court out of the Reaches into the east.  "Not everyone left when the court did."

"Some couldn't make the journey. Others stayed to take care of them." Stone took a deep breath. "When we left, most of us thought we'd be able to come back, or bring them to the new colony at some point.  That didn't happen.  None of us had ever been on a journey that long. We didn't know what it would be like. My queen was dead and I was a line-grandfather before I made it back here, and I was the only one from that time who was ever able to return."

Moon tried to imagine it. Raksura hated to be alone. And they would have needed a mentor for healing and to make light and heat, and Arbora hunters, if not soldiers and teachers. Warriors, to help guard the tree and transport the hunters' catches. And he had never heard of Raksura living without queens. Indigo Cloud had gotten along without consorts for a while, not counting Stone, but he wasn't sure a court could function without a queen. And he found he didn't want to ask who had stayed behind. "They were all dead?"

Stone shook his head. "I don't know what happened to them. I searched the tree, but those rooms were flooded like Rill said. I thought they left, went to another court."

So they were gone long before the flood, Moon thought. The drains wouldn't have become blocked while there were still people here to take care of the tree.  And the Arbora hadn't found any bones.  At least, not yet.  "Maybe they did go to another court."

For an instant, Stone's expression was all cold misery. "And left behind those things?  No."

Moon wanted to argue. He could imagine a number of scenarios where the last group of inhabitants might have decided to leave their belongings behind, if there was too much for the warriors to carry. Whatever court they went to would have

everything they really needed anyway, and Moon had noticed by now that no matter how prickly Raksura were about some things, they had no notion of trading for necessities among themselves, and would share things like bedding and clothing and food without a second thought.

But there was the jewelry, and the tea set. The knife handle was clearly a work of art.  All of it was light and portable and personal. And it was odd that it was down in that one section of bowers, separated from all the others. Moon felt it spoke of a withdrawal to the most insulated section of the tree. So that even if another court had come to look for them, they might assume the tree was deserted.

It still wasn't evidence of anything. Moon said nothing, because he knew Stone didn't want to hear it right now. And they had the Arbora to over-analyze the situation, which they were probably already doing.

Moon sat there for a time, not really certain what to do or say. He wasn't particularly good at this. Finally, tentatively, he leaned against Stone's shoulder. After a while, Stone's arm went around him and pulled him more firmly against his side. They sat like that for a long time.