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Act III: A Land of Dry Canals and Dusty Avenues
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An arid dryness persisted in the Plainslands. The air was slightly thinner here, and the environment incapable of supporting the lush vegetation of the southern shore. Likewise, the sun was ever so slightly closer on this high plain.
The plains here were vast, stretching far into the distance. A second, smaller barrier range separating the central valley from the metal-rich north shore existed out there somewhere ahead. Even with nothing but prairie in their way, it was still too far away for a human eye to make out the distant rocks against the emerald skies.
Sam insisted his Elvan eyes, perfectly built and accustomed for the plains, could see the whole mountain range for three hundred and sixty degrees around.
“Physically unlikely,” Rita said. “Even with a flat world-plain, there’s a physical limit to how well an eye can see. Condors? Eagle-eyed. Elvan are still ‘human’ – close enough to intermingle, certainly. In short, Elvan eyes are no doubt more consistently better than Outlanders. Still, can’t be that good.”
“Well, I know what my Elvan eyes see,” Sam said.
Maat brought Sam aside. “Might want to pick and choose your battles. I doubt she gets much in the way of conversations. Might be relishing an argument for just the chance to speak.”
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Rain in the central valley was about as frequent as it was on the southern shore. Despite this, the fiercest storm on the plains was a drizzle compared to even the lightest rain of the Stormheaths. The group didn’t even need ponchos on the long walk towards a copse of trees.
Each individual tree would’ve been considered a behemoth had the group not grown up amongst whitewood forests. Still, these plains oaks were tall enough so that the top disappeared into a towering point when looking up from the base.
“Always shelter in a copse, if possible,” Rita said, sweeping a bit of debris off the paved path. “Goanna want to be behind the tree line when the winds pick up.”
The largest trees were arranged around a natural well bubbling out from a fissure in the ground. Indeed, this was the only free-standing water they’d seen since they entered the valley.
Branches were carefully pruned into stairwells winding up the oaks. Midway up their structure, before the trunk narrowed considerably, an elaborate carve-and-burn craftwork had hollowed out a living space. Other branches further up interlocked the living trees together to create a rural, treehouse manse that put any motte or carved cavern in the Stormheaths to shame.
“Branches could use pruning.” Rita picked some brownish leaves out of one of the steps. “Stairs will hold. Don’t have enough time to prune them by myself. Still, built to last.”
The interlocking tree-mansions contained enough rooms for all the children of Secondhome. An elaborate pulley system siphoned water from the spring directly up into the center of the trunks. Just like that, they had their own redoubt, far removed from the recent chaos amidst the Stormheaths. Lloyd’s suggestion of naming it Thirdhome was swiftly rebuffed.
“Please stay away from the western tree line,” Rita said. “Explosives practice.”
Beyond that, the near-adults had freedom to explore however they wanted. Most of the first day was spent convincing the children to share rooms. After that was settled, they mostly just lounged around, exhausted from the journey of several days and the near-misses from the pursuing Warden.
As evening approached, Maat heard a faint crackle from the west. It was coming from within the copse.
Walkways through the trees allowed for a looping path above the ground out to the perimeter. Many of the paths were old, having gone fallow, withered, or collapsed years ago. There was enough of a path left that, with a little climbing and improvisation, Maat could travel to the edge of the trees to investigate without ever getting his boots dirty.
Rita was groundside, kneeling behind a stone barricade. Odds and ends sat in a small glen amidst the forest. She was plugging her ears with her hands.
Without warning a scatterburst of sparks erupted from down in the glen. Every color imaginable zigged and zagged before sputtering out. In their wake the light show left only a cloud of black smoke that lingered in the still air of the copse, drifting up and to the west at a snail’s pace.
“Keep away from the western tree line,” Rita repeated. “I use this place for weapon’s testing. Some of the larger cannisters will shake the trees.”
“I’ll be careful,” Maat said.
“That’s what they all say. If you fall while I’m on babysitting duty, Michael will kill me.”
Rita went about scribbling something on a leathery bit of parchment.
“Hmmm. Fireworks. Need to work on greater blast force. Still, useful as a distraction. Passable signal flare.”
“Are we… allowed to stay here?” Maat asked.
“What?” Rita rubbed at something near her ears. “Oh, the manse? It’s been abandoned for thereabouts twenty years.”
Out at the very perimeter of the wooded manse, and with the benefit of elevation, Maat made out the dividing lines of ancient stone walls intersected with some straight-as-an-arrow roads stretching as far as the plains would allow. Even in the low light of sunset the years-dead remains of water-starved orchards made themselves obvious. Dead runt trees sat, gnarled and stillborn.
Collapsed stone longhouses sat out at the intersection of every four-square clearing. They were far from the protection of the tree line. Sound traveled for miles in the plainslands. Indeed, the evening wind that was picking up outside the wooden windbreak howled as it passed through the hollowed-out huts.
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The next morning, Rita barged into the shared living space. Maat, Lloyd, Sara, and Kur had taken an open-air parlor of sorts, as it seemed the easiest place with the most vantage points to ensure kids didn’t wander out of the treehouses at night. Sam'ien was off in some other room; mostly, they suspected he knew of some preferred plainswalker sleeping quarters to hog for himself.
“Word came in from Secondhome. Got an alliance forming out of some rump Laval clans, the bird herders, and whoever else is still alive down there. They’re on the march north as of yesterday.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Maat rubbed his eyes, having been unceremoniously awoken. “How? It took a week to march up here. In what way could news move across the mountains faster than that?”
A simple Stormheath tropical sparrow sat perched on Rita’s gloved arm. These sparrows were common sights south of the mountains, but they hadn’t seen one since they passed the fumaroles.
“Messenger pigeon,” Rita said.
“Where did you get a messenger bird?” Lloyd asked. “And what’s a pigeon?”
“Raise ‘em here. Raise a few back at home. They travel back to the place of their birth on instinct. Going to need to use this place to operate an organized resistance. And to do that, going to need a steady communication network.” Rita exhaled abruptly through her nose. “Takes too long to raise a brood and transport them elsewhere. But hey, signal flares are ready to go for more immediate messages.”
The little bird had delivered an entire multi-page letter in the old Outlander script. Rita explained the gist of it. Beyond the simple report of where the mobile Secondhome denizens were on the move, there were also reports of enemy troop movements. Jean’in claimed the entire river from delta to the highland narrows. Rapids made further progress up the river impractical, though with an elaborate complex of pre-fabricated metal and steel now spanning the river, the invaders could move material up to the highlands with ease.
That left the mountains – and the fumaroles – as the primary barrier keeping the Jean’in from moving further into the isle.
“Don’t seem to be many people here,” Maat said. “Are there allies on the highlands?”
Rita shrugged. “Eh, there may still be some sympathetic voices. Would certainly help. But the entire remaining population of the plains could be marshalled and only bring us another thousand fighters. Recruiting allies here is secondary to establishing a base of operations. Guerrilla warfare leaves a massive toll on the local civilian population. We’re going to need some place to stash those who can’t fight. Going to need to commandeer a few abandoned tree-top manses.”
“How are we going to sneak back?” Kur asked. “There’s three passes through the mountains, not counting the fumaroles.”
“Leave that to me,” Rita said. “Until then, sit tight. I’ll get this compound ship-shape.”
With no further answers from Rita, Maat and company rounded the children up for breakfast. Their host slunk back groundside just as soon as she was done eating. The younger children were still enraptured enough by the treehouse to continue exploring their new home. Breakfast complete, Maat went looking for Sam.
Sam'ien was waiting in an outward-facing nook of one of the quieter hollows. The wood grain here was thin and threadlike. A narrow window for ventilation may have been carved by accident.
“You’re missing breakfast,” Maat said.
“Reading,” Sam said, dismissively.
A stack of bound tomes sat in carved-out crannies in the wall. Sam sat on a bump by the window, a set of three books at his feet and one in his hands.
“Well, what’re they about?” Maat snuck a peak over Sam’s shoulder.
Paper was made from dried palm leaves common to the plains, bound in bird skin. Hundreds of pages were hand-written in a local plainswalker script.
“History of this manse,” Sam said. “Every plainsmanse has one. Everything is recorded here: births and deaths by year, number of servants, crop yields. Information is a little dry, but it’ll tell us when the house was founded, when the crops started to fail, and by inference from when the last entry was written, when this place was abandoned.”
“All that, huh?” Maat whistled. “What about those other three?”
“It’s a history in three volumes. This book covers the time the trees were first planted, over a thousand years ago. This place was a tropical forest, then. Riverside property.”
“Books, eh? Sound handy. Just like those ancestral tomes my father kept teaching lessons out of.” Maat nodded to himself, pensive.
Stormlanders didn’t care much for books. They could write things down on fern-based papyrus. But their family histories were told orally, and the subalterns didn’t even have family stories to pass down.
On the highest shelf, stuffed between bird leather binding, was a weathered tome with a slick, brightly colored cover of unknown make. The text along the spine was still unintelligible, but in the distinct straight lines and looping curves of Outlander script.
“Speaking of my father’s tomes…” Maat picked up the hefty book. “Huh, one of the ancestral texts.”
Maat picked up the book and checked inside. He could make out little of the ancestral script. There were pictures, though – perfect images of people and objects. And the text was too uniform to be written out by hand.
“Dad had an exact copy of this in the chief’s room,” Maat said.
There were books brought in by Jean’in from off-island on occasion. They had similar uniform text. Plenty of images too, though those were often hand-drawn. Still, with no audience to read the foreign text, there was no one else on the isle to read them aside from Secondhome elders. The wide-open plains had a unified-enough language from manse to manse for the family histories to be at least mutually intelligible. Still, with every book handwritten, there wasn’t much reason to keep books beyond personal family history.
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Maat took the Outlander book for himself. Midmorning and a long afternoon were spent trying to puzzle out its many intricacies to no avail. Before supper he consulted Rita.
“Alchemy textbook,” Rita said with a shrug. “Used it to make my first concoctions. Nearly blew my face off once. Feel free to keep it if you, y’know, can read.”
Even as an ally, the witch proved maddeningly eccentric. Left to his own devices, Maat patrolled the perimeter. With the spyglass and a bit of elevation, he could see effectively indefinitely. Only the twin mountain ranges hemming the valley in were a barrier.
Broken longhouses could be seen from the relative comfort of the interconnected tree fort. Individual bricks of jagged stone could be made out, stacked on top of each other.
Further out, there was a subtle dividing line of long-dead hedges designating territory governed by this manse from those in the far thickets. The remains of that long-extinct riverbed formed a sunken indent off to the west, a rare divot in the otherwise preternaturally flat valley.
Even the tree-top houses of a far copse could be made out in detail. The trees there were dying, devoid of leaves. They still had interlocking walkways and carved-out stairwells. And sure enough, there was a figure there – an orange-complected plainswalker, struggling to carry baskets of water up rotted steps.
“Huh, guess we’ve got neighbors,” Maat said to himself.
It appeared that some still lived on the plains. Their once-grand manses had fallen into disrepair, though. And there were still those stone longhouses, poorly maintained even in comparison to the faded glory of the dying palm thickets…
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With an hour left before night and the dry heat of the plains not too hard on his squishy Outlander constitution, Maat solo-hiked out to the nearest longhouse.
The stones were just simple rocks, like those you’d find half-embedded in the soil anywhere. Rocks in the valley lacked the whitewashed color that gave the island its name; these were grey, red, or occasionally obsidian black.
No roof could be found, and a quick look inside revealed why. It must’ve been made of thatched palm, long since either decayed or burnt away. A thin layer of ash on the interior floor evidenced the latter.
Wood would’ve been a luxury reserved for those in the treetop mansions. Pity, they had plenty of wood just south of the mountains. More than they knew what to do with. Maat wondered why nobody ever arranged for a trade in more prosperous times.
What’s more, the interior was cramped. Maybe twelve people could stay there with ample living space, but there were shallow depressions in the floor meant for thirty or more. And with the building longer than it was wide, there would scarcely be room to lie down.
Something gleamed amidst the ash. Maat leaped into a shallow bunk to investigate. What he found was a manacle adorned with glittering runic text along the inside. Metal had long since turned a brittle, rusted red, but the runework endured.
Footsteps outside caused Maat to reach for the family war bat. He peeked around the corner, only to find Rita the witch, having kicked up a mighty dust cloud in the dry soil.
“Guys who lived in the treehouses didn’t work the fields,” Rita said, deadpan.
“Huh?”
“The manses couldn’t maintain their, uh, labor force. Fell into infighting amongst themselves. And that was before the rivers dried up.”
“Well, how’d this manse become abandoned?” Maat asked.
Rita shrugged her shoulders. “Your father ran ‘em off.”
“Of course.”
It always came back to the Quarterchief.
“Speaking of Mike.” Rita offered up a second messenger bird. “Might want to get some sleep. Confirmed a rendezvous time. How are you with cave diving?”
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