It's the Salt's Fault

Sorry for the late post! Forgot February is the short month.

This story is set near Far Selantur contemporaneously to More Gods Than Stars, an ocean away from Cambrias’ Wall. It's an odd little slice of life story, overlapping my interests in speculative geology and the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times and places, and I had a lot of fun writing this one. It's also one of the stories that could have come out prior to the release of TCTWETW, so I tried to walk a careful balance of teasing Ishveos without revealing too much of it.

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Amenni longed for a crisis whose resolution wasn’t boring.

For a barren, blasted wasteland, the Honeycomb was uncommonly busy most days— and none of the Honeycomb’s handful of long-term inhabitants particularly appreciated the visitors.

And every one of those residents complained to Amenni about the visitors. And each other. They complained to him about everything, in fact, not that he could do anything about most of it.

Almost all of the travelers came from Far Selantur, only a couple dozen leagues away, at the border of the desert and the sea, but they came for many reasons.

Part of the traffic came from prayer merchants shuttling prayer drudges in to pay for the pit gods’ gifts, or just to mine the salt for industrial purposes— gods knew precious little of it was fit for food. Part of it came from the fossil hunters that wandered all over the Honeycomb. The bulk of the traffic came from caravans bringing supplies out to the mercenary armies at the front, deep into the desert. Least welcome to the pit gods, for theological reasons, were the worshippers of stone gods, investigating the nature of the landscape itself. There was no other place like it on Ishveos— and if there was another quite like it on any world of the multiverse, the inhabitants of Far Selantur didn’t know of it.

The Honeycomb was named for its pits— thousands of them, ranging from a dozen feet in width and depth all the way to giants hundreds of feet deep and thousands across. The overwhelming majority were almost the same size, though— seventy-five feet deep, two-hundred across.

It was thanks to the salt that made up the floor and walls of the pits.

And Amenni was more than happy to blame the salt for every crisis he had to resolve out here, for every problem he had to deal with.

Including his skin issues.

In some unimaginably distant era, an entire sea had dried up and vanished here, covering the land with hundreds of feet of salt. Or maybe the drying had occurred in cycles, or…

Well, there was a lot of debate from the stone gods on that point, and even more on what had caused the drying in the first place. There’d been multiple riots between various stone churches arguing about shifting climates versus tectonic shifts, behavior Amenni would expect more from map or clock gods than stone gods.

They at least agreed about two things— the fact that the drying happened, and the fact that the stone grasses and salt stromatalites thrived during that drying era.

Regardless of the other disagreements, that drying had been followed by millennia of wind blown sand and silt, which was deposited across the deep salt flats, eventually forming fine-grained sandstone capping the whole landscape.

And then the water came back.

Amenni was scratching flakes of dry skin when the day’s first complaint came.

It’s not like he was the only one whose skin reacted like this to the salt— plenty of others were irritated by it— but no one else suffered this level of irritation and still stayed. He could handle the heat, he could handle the biting flies— though thankfully, the bluemidges here didn’t get big enough to have mouths or even digestive systems anymore, in great part thanks to his own work. But the salt never stopped bothering him.

Honestly, the only reason he did stay was the contract. Another three years, with the help of the frequent bribes he received as a mediator here, and he’d be able to afford being anointed a Saint— and not in the poorer end of Sainthood, either.

The contract was not, however, anything to do with conflict resolution in the desert. No, he was here as a contractor for the Far Selantur government, supervising the restoration of the Honeycomb’s mimic population after what must have been millennia of absence.

He was busy trying to coax a stone mimic the size of his palm into rooting on the Honeycomb’s sandstone caprock when the High Priestess of Enoman came storming towards him, followed by an equally irritated salt-fossil prospector, and the stressed-out Prophet of Ghalay.

Amenni sighed heavily, returned the long-bristled paintbrush to its bandolier holster next to his tuning forks, and began screwing the lid back on the jar of nutrient broth.

The stone mimic promptly escaped his grip and latched onto his arm, doing its best to conceal itself against his skin.

It did a terrible job, of course— it wasn’t nearly dark enough to match his skin tone, and it couldn’t quite replicate the pores, and arm hairs were completely out of its league— but he could feel its cilia and fragile bone lattices twitching happily as it settled in.

“This is an unbearable violation of Enoman’s sovereignty!” the High Priestess shouted.

The prophet winced as his own god shouted in his head. “Ghalay commands you to heed: this is, in fact, a violation of his sovereignty!”

The salt-fossil prospector crossed her arms. “Look, I followed every rule about digging out here, this isn’t my problem.”

Amenni groaned, and scratched at his dry skin again.

When the water returned, it should have just cut through the sandstone caprock and carved canyons through the salt. Oh, some sinkholes should doubtless have formed, but not thousands of them in an irregular grid.

It was the stone grasses and salt stromatalites that changed things.

The stone grasses weren’t grasses at all, of course— not even before they’d fossilized. They’d been long, root-like colonies of tiny creatures too small to see with the naked eye, stretching from the water of the drying sea down into the anaerobic crust of the salt layer precipitating onto the ancient seabed.

They sure look like grasses now, though.

Strangely, the stone gods rarely fight about the stone grasses. They fight about what they mean for the origin stories of the salt layer, but not often about the stone grasses themselves.

One part they agree on is how the stone grasses lived— they gathered nutrients and oxygen from the dying ecosystem in the oversaturated saltwater, then took advantage of complex chemical reactions that ran all the way down the length of the colony for their metabolisms, utilizing the differences in chemical environment at either end.

Amenni could mostly follow those arguments— mimic exterminators and trainers like himself required extensive educations in geology and biology, among other subjects.

The stromatolites were much simpler to understand— they were mats of the same invisible organisms that spread across the shallows of the salt-crystal seabed, interlinking to form a thin blanket absorbing sunlight. Normally, fish or other animals would destroy the mats through grazing, but few to no animals could survive in the extreme salt of those ancient seas.

Then, as more salt precipitated out of the hypersaline water on top of the stromatalites, the bacterial films grew right over the top of the new salt, forming a whole new layer. The process repeated, again and again, until they formed lumpy layered stones jutting out of the seabed— topiaries made of salt.

And the stone grasses and the salt stromatalites forged the Honeycombs.

The pit wall collapse was absolutely and entirely the fault of the fossil miner, of course.

“I followed the rules to the letter!” she protested. “I kept my dig walls precisely five feet away from the edges of any pit wall, and reinforced appropriately!”

Amenni groaned and itched at a patch of dry skin on the back of his neck. “Five feet, unless there is reason to suspect structural instability. And this was clearly not the most stable pit wall.”

The pits of Enoman and Ghalay were precisely average in size— seventy-five feet deep, two hundred feet wide. They were only unusual in their proximity, with their dividing wall being only twenty feet wide at its narrowest point, with plenty of cracks and hollows where old salt-falls had happened.

And this salt fossil hunter had decided it was a good idea to dig down right in between the two, resulting in a gaping crack in the rim, descending nearly twenty feet.

“I wish I could offer you better news, but this is clearly and entirely your fault. You’re going to need to clear out before nightfall,” Amenni said.

He did regret it, too. The fossil hunter was quite pretty, in a dirt-streaked, outdoorsy sort of way— and when young fossil hunters had been out here for more than a few months, they didn’t have many dating options. Most of the older fossil hunters were weird, antisocial loners, so the dating pool was just Amenni, plus a bunch of crazy priests, prophets, and Anchorites.

And no one of sound mind wanted to romance an Anchorite— they didn’t tend to be the most stable of Divines. Nor were Anchorites often interested in romance themselves.

There weren’t any other long-term residents in the Honeycomb— lots of travelers passing through, lots of worshippers and godgift merchants trading with the pit gods, but for the most part, this was a waystation for the higher quality salt mines to the east and the warfront to the south, where Far Selantur’s mercenaries were slowly clearing the desert of bluelife.

Not for the first time, Amenni considered transferring to the front, where he could work with other mimic trainers. The pay was better here in the long-term posts, though.

Looked like his dating options would be restricted to crazy priests and prophets as well for the near future.

“What, you think you’re going to evict me?” the fossil hunter said challengingly.

“I’m not doing anything to you,” Amenni said. “I’ve got absolutely no power in the Honeycomb. The pit gods have just decided on me as a neutral arbiter.”

“So what…” the fossil hunter started, but was interrupted by Enoman’s priestess flaring her soul.

And when a Saint that powerful flares their soul, you pay notice.

“If you are still in the camp tonight, the gods will take notice. They do not tolerate those who violate the sanctity of their domains.”

“You can’t…” the fossil hunter started, but Amenni shook his head.

“Best you clear out in a hurry. Ask one of the older fossil hunters what happens to outlawed folks who are still in the camp after sunset, if you want, but do so on the way out.”

She glared at him, but strode off to her tent site in a hurry.

Amenni sighed heavily.

Only partially at the pretty fossil hunter’s departure, though. He was mostly sighing because the easy part was over.

Now he had to deal with territorial negotiations between two particularly jealous loner gods.

The honeycombs existed because of two facts about the fossil ecosystem.

First, because the stone grasses were far more resistant to being dissolved by water than the salt stromatalites; and second, because the stone grasses and the salt stromatalites were competitors who never grew in the same place.

The stromatalites tended to grow in huge fields, rising up close together. The biological films and mats that formed them tended to outcompete the stone grasses when the water was calmer.

So the stone grasses tended to rise up in channels in between the patches of salt stromatalites, like rivers of short grass rising from the salt crystal bed of the shallow sea.

The stone gods claimed that such an ecosystem would have struggled on other worlds with greater tides, but the paltry suntides of Ishveos’ oceans seldom raised or lowered the sea more than an inch or two.

And when those seas vanished, and the salt-beds were buried with wind-swept sand and dust that itself became stone over the dry eons, that ecosystem was preserved in the salt.

And when the water returned, the stromatalites put up only token resistance to being dissolved. The long strands of the stone grass, descending deep into the salt, were laden with quartz and other non-soluble minerals, on the other hand, and helped shield their salt.

So as the floods rolled over the salt, they dug great potholes in-between those ancient rivers of stone grass. You’ll find their like in most any river that flows directly over bedrock, smooth underwater cauldrons where swirling stones slowly grind the bowl deeper.

The last of the floods was itself eons past when humanity first arrived on Ishveos, leaving a wasteland inhabited only by mimics, bluemidges, and occasional biting flies. 

The negotiations, as always, got off to a poor start. It took nearly fifteen minutes to convince the priestess and the prophet to move their discussion to the shade, because they couldn’t agree on which shade to move to.

Once that was finally taken care of, Amenni got out the map, and the proper arguments began.

Not all gods could tolerate the presence of other gods very well. Some gods could handle being crowded into dense temples with hundreds of shrines, or dwelling inside the soul of a Divine alongside dozens of other gods, but the gods that lived in the Honeycomb weren’t among them. No, they settled out here because the Honeycomb offered the perfect balance of privacy and traffic.

Each jealous loner god could have a pit to themselves, while pretending that the other pits didn’t exist as best they could. They weren’t necessarily very good at it— hence Amenni’s frequent role as negotiator— but they tried.

None of their godgifts were powerful enough for them to be true loners, to expect supplicants to travel long leagues out into the desert to buy their boons with prayer, but most were still reasonably powerful.

Enoman, The Merchant’s Eye, offered several useful vision boons, including a cure for nearsightedness, but that was common enough among the gods of Far Selantur, and wouldn’t attract customers so easily. No, his most prized boon was a subitizing boon— he allowed you to instantly count objects you saw. Most people could already do so with four or five objects, but even the weakest version of Enoman’s boon tripled that. Subitizing boons weren’t unknown in Far Selantur, but Enoman’s version was unusually powerful— his priestess claimed she could instantly count three thousand objects at a glance, and lump that together with other groups of similar size.

Amenni was skeptical of her claim— she was one of those priests who was always ready to act the salesman for her god— but he couldn’t help but respect the sheer number of merchants, scouts, and others who paid for Enoman’s boon. Far Selantur’s military had a standing contract with the god to bestow his boon on several dozen scouts a year, and the numerous mercenary companies working for the city dwarfed that number several times over.

Ghalay’s blessing was much simpler, and even more in demand.

He could physically reshape the human body more resistant to heat stress.

Amenni didn’t fully understand how it worked, but it apparently had something to do with the circulatory system, and routing blood flow to and from the skin more efficiently. While heat resistance godgifts were common enough, most that altered the body itself could be clustered into a small number of strategies, which Ghalay’s fell outside of. It was even compatible with other blood flow altering godgifts. Ghalay probably took in twice the yearly prayers as Enoman— and Enoman was by no means a small god.

They weren’t even close to the biggest gods in the Honeycomb, but they were both in the running for proudest.

To make things worse, Amenni had received godgifts from both of them, and at a discount, for that matter. He could subitize up to thirty objects at a glance, and his heat tolerance was way better than it used to be.

So two wildly prickly gods were both completely convinced he owed them, and there was a hole in the wall between their pits. Worse, the debris had managed to lightly damage both of the stairwells descending into their respective pits.

Amenni wasn’t getting any work done today.

It was a bit strange that Far Selantur hadn’t been settled before five hundred years ago— despite the harshness of its desert, it was one of the best natural harbors on the whole moon, it was right on several trade routes, and the offshore fisheries were incredibly rich.

There had been some exploration of the Honeycomb in the early years of Far Selantur’s settlement, before the deeply stupid decisions that had led to the desert’s mimic population being accidentally wiped out, and the resulting crisis in the desert they were still repairing centuries later. Best estimate was that it would take at least three centuries yet to fully repair the desert.

Amenni was deeply skeptical the merchant princes and trade gods would manage to keep to such an ambitious restoration project all the way to completion, when the ancestors of the merchant princes— and many of the same trade gods— had caused the crisis with their shortsighted greed.

Back then, in the early days of the city, it was just the salt and fossils that were of interest. The salt quickly proved to be a bust— despite the easier access in the Honeycomb, there were too many impurities, too many fragments of stromatolites films and stone grass tendrils.

The fossils, though, always sold. Not the stone grasses and stromatolites, they were simply too common, but the more complex organisms that had died in the waning years of the hypersaline sea— and nowhere had more than the Honeycomb.

Most of them were barely comprehensible to the human eye, archaic mimic ancestors that far predated mammals, fish, or other more stable life arriving on Ishveos, let alone humanity. Their logics were arcane, the crumbled bone lattices and crystalline membranes barely possible to follow with the eye.

But hells, did they sell for a lot. The few fossils surviving from old times before the desert crisis cost more than a nice house— and when the mercenary armies had advanced past the Honeycomb, the fossil hunters were close in their path.

Too close, at times— many of the gods of the Honeycomb had been born from too-eager fossil hunters.

After decades of being accessible again, the fossil craze had died down a little in Far Selantur— but they were still a prized export for a city that, for all its vast trade and banking wealth, lacked many other exports beyond salt and fish.

So the Honeycomb gods had no chance of getting the fossil hunters banned, even though the fossil hunters were the cause of half the disputes and conflicts among them.

Unfortunately, there were no clever solutions when negotiating between Honeycomb gods.

Stories about negotiations always involved brilliant schemers, judicious use of espionage, and amazing compromises that somehow satisfied everyone involved.

Amenni just had to slog through hour after hour of complaints and petty arguments.

Enoman and Ghalay argued about every single detail of how the repairs were to be done, whether they should mimic the natural wall or build a patch of obvious masonry. They argued about the proceeds from selling any fossils found during the repair process, whether they should be split evenly or go to whichever god’s pit was closer. They argued about what schedule the repairs should happen on, whether they should do an open bidding process, whether they should prioritize speed or savings in construction.

They regularly traded positions with one another in debates, jumped back to previous settled arguments, and argued the hardest the closer any given topic got to resolution.

And most of all, of course, they argued about who should pay, and how much. Enoman claimed that Ghalay should pay more because Ghalay was the bigger god, while Ghalay claimed that Enoman should pay more because the destruction was worse on Enoman’s side.

The worst part was that Amenni knew from the start that they would settle on an even split. The pit gods always settled on even splits in these situations, save when there was a truly gross size difference between the gods, and one simply couldn’t afford half.

It was a dull, miserable affair, as it always was. He had to deal with negotiations like this at least once a week for one border conflict or another, though actual damages were thankfully rare.

There was nothing sweet about the Honeycomb, if you asked him.

His skin itched, the flies bit as much as always, and the mimic still attempting to settle down on his forearm was absolutely giving him a rash that would be tender for days.

Just three more years, and he’d be a Saint, and he could return to Far Selantur. He could date women that weren’t half-mad priestesses or half-feral prospectors with speckled, probably criminal pasts. His skin would finally stop itching all the time. He could have food that wasn’t too salty.

He could finally, finally stop having to deal with these horrid negotiations all the time.

Part of Ameni knew, of course, that higher ranked mimic trainers and exterminators regularly had to deal with complex negotiations, and that the bureacracy eagerly recruited those like him that had held down the restoration post here at the Honeycomb. That part knew perfectly well he was probably in for a future of even more mind-numbing, miserable negotiations over mimic populations in the city.

The rest of him was completely willing to ignore that fact, though.

Just three more years left until life would be good again.

Just three more years, and Amenni would be out of this salted wasteland.

Amenni itched at the flaking skin on the back of his neck, and turned his attention back to an argument about whether to install a proper footpath atop the new wall patch, and if so, whether it should have cobbles, flagstones, or just beaten earth.

Just three more years.