That night they pulled up next to a rather nice little lake, tucked between two mountains. They had briefly turned up north again, bending around this free standing mountain, before dropping back south again. Something about the terrain, apparently. The water was sweet, the young brush grew lush around it, and it was generally a very pleasant campsite.

Mazelton had decided to postpone dealing with The Bed Question. He wasn’t going to solve it tonight, anyhow. No, tonight belonged to carving ducks. He had a pretty good first duck, pulling it out of the wood as though he were freeing it from the dross it was trapped in. It was a neat challenge, but it just took way, way too long. He wanted to have a nice little flock of ducks ready on arrival, so he got to carving.

The only really interesting thing about that campsite was that Polyclitus made a point of telling people not to wander off into the woods. Which at this point just came off as quite patronizing and odd. All he would say is that people tended to get lost around here, so… don’t go. No fear of that, Mazelton thought, nothing I want in the woods.

Having gotten the next duck going to his satisfaction, and having made a few cores to build up inventory, he went to his tent. Sleep came fairly easily, which was nice. It didn’t stick around.

At some point during the night, a quiet sound, like a reed flute or wooden whistle snuck into the tent and burrowed into Mazelton’s ear. The music wasn’t bad and it wasn't loud, but it was curiously persistent. Like it was insisting on his attention. He didn’t want to wake up but he did and was then stuck awake, listening to the drone insistence of the music.

He stuck his fingers in his ears. It didn’t seem to help. Actually, was the music louder this way? Mazelton frowned. He was no stranger to witchcraft, nor to technology that could pass as witchcraft. The difference was often academic. Bone conduction? That was an old trick to deliver sound. Not really a good counter to it either, other than choking it off at the source.

Mazelton collected his weapon and walked out of his tent. It seemed like everyone else did too. Polyclitus had someone bang a drum to get everyone’s attention.

“Alright, you aren’t crazy, we all hear it. It’s not like this every time people come through here, but a lot of the time. It’s also why I made a point of saying “Don’t wander off into the woods.” You were thinking about finding the source of the music, right?”

A lot of heads started nodding.

“Yeah, don’t bother. People have found at least fifteen spots where the sound seems to come up out of the earth. Sometimes through hollow tree trunks, or big fungi. Most of the time, it’s just a flat rock that vibrates out some notes. How it makes your bones resonate we don’t know. But it does. So… ignore it, don’t fuck with it, and we can all make it out safely.”

“And if we do?” Someone shouted from the back.

“Then hopefully nothing too unfortunate happens to you. It’s nighttime in the woods. Even if there was nothing… unusual… there, it’s still stupid to wander around for no reason.”

Mazelton was privately certain that Lettie was already charging off. Mazelton charged back to bed. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep, but he would be damned if he couldn’t at least close his eyes a while.

“Mazelton, get your ass up! We gotta go check this out!”

He had barely laid back down in bed before Lettie was whisper/shouting by the flap of his tent. She too had the great good sense not to barge into his space. It was kind of a thing in the Clans.

He tried to pretend to be asleep.

“I know you are awake Mazelton, get your ass up! There is something underneath us. We gotta check it out.”

“We do not. I, in particular, do not. I don’t care what it is. I am here to sleep, not investigate ancient horrors.”

“Oh will you stop being so dramatic? It’s almost never ancient horrors.”

Mazelton rolled onto his back, determinedly keeping his eyes closed.

“Last five major prospects, how many ancient horrors?”

Lettie paused.

“I would count recovering the seed cache as a major prospect, so-“

“So we found evidence of what we now know to be serious Nacon incursions and resource collections there, and your participation was looking at a box. And dancing with me, which let’s face it, is a real blessing for you.”

“Vain much?”

“Tell me I’m not the best dancer you've ever met. Go on. I dare you.”

“I mean… mechanically it was good, I guess.”

“Fuck you, twice. Let me guess. If the dance is not hugely muscled, thoroughly oiled men going through a bodybuilding pose-off, it’s worthless to you.”

“I respect the cultural value of dance. It’s just, you know, if we are talking personal enjoyment here-“

“You are banished from my tent.”

“I’m not in your tent. That’s the point, lets go dig up something awesome.”

“You are banished from a thirty foot, no a thirty meter, no a thirty Smoot radius of my tent. And don’t think I forgot about the horror/tomb ratio. You've been real quiet on that one.”

“Look, sometimes things are buried for lots of good reasons, and it dosen’t help anyone if we bring our cultural baggage to the dig. C’mon! Look, I promise that if it looks like it’s going to be a whole big thing, I’ll come back after you get to New Scandie, OK? We leave with the rest of the wagons.”

“In, like, six hours.”

“Yes.”

Mazelton groaned. His eyes were still shut and the music was still piercing his eardrums. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep, was he?

“I want you to know that if we encounter danger, I am shoving you into it and running away.”

“That’s the Ma spirit!”

Mazelton brought his weapon this time. Just in case. He also brought some very high powered light cores, because he wasn’t going to twist his ankle on a root or something dumb like that.

“You are just ruining your night vision, you know.”

“Mmhmm. So where are we going exactly?”

“Oh, well, I found the source of some of those sounds. It’s right over this way.”

It was an odd little spot, a wide flat rock surrounded by what looked like fungal flutes a meter and a half tall, tucked away amongst all the young trees. The music was notably louder here.

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“So… are those… some kind of weird greensmithed fungal horror that will kill us all?”

“Not that I can tell, no.”

“Although that does lead me to a, yanno, a point. This whole region was pretty literally terraformed by a bunch of elderly Dusties. People who spend the last few years of their life getting to know, close to literally, every inch of the region.”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“How could they miss a secret bunker in a planned forest next to what would be a river?”

“Yeah.” Mazelton stifled a yawn.

“It’s not always secret bunkers. Ever wonder if those beacons did weird stuff when they started shaping the environment?”

“No.”

“Well. It can happen.” Lettie looked irritated by Mazelton’s lack of enthusiasm.

“Gonna try and lift up the rock?”

Lettie rapped on it with a big stick. It sounded solid.

“Nope. Let’s check the fungus.”

“No heat sources that I can see. Which is pretty usual for a place that recently underwent a renaissance.”

“Nothing nanotech either. Which is pretty usual everywhere.”

“I thought that stuff persisted almost forever?”

“Nah. The stuff it’s made of, often. But your actual nanotech widgets are so freaking small that plain old sunlight can do them in, with time. Not even going to talk about water or whatever.”

Lettie frowned.

“This is why I hate talking about nanotech with people who don’t really know the field. It’s such a broad term that I can immediately think of a dozen things that contradict what I just said.”

“Fun. But we aren’t dealing with that here?”

“If nanotech were used around here, it was used as part of the building process and then it either dissolved or was incorporated into the whatever this is.”

“Assuming that it’s not some natural formation.”

“Unearthly music that can resonate in our bones? How is any of this remotely “natural?”

“Oh easy. Singing stones are actually pretty common. There was a spot a couple of hours from Old Radler, someone had set up a whole damn instrument, about six foot by three, that was just stones scattered on the ground. You could whack them with a stick and they would ring out with a lovely tone. It was awesome. Someone would bring drums, someone else a flute, everybody would just get high, play music and eat. It was really fun.”

Mazelton felt a stab of sadness. They were all dead now. It would be a generation or more before someone new played on those stones.

“Still dosen’t explain this. Why is it making music now?”

“Changes in heat cause large stones to minutely shift and grind against each other, resulting in noise that our brain is interpreting as a distant ringing, with enough of an infrasonic bass line that our bones resonate with it?”

Lettie pulled up with a jerk. Then shook her head.

“No way. No way. This is not some natural phenomenon, I can feel it. My “Weird Bullshit” sensor is tingling. Come on, lets try someplace new.” She charged off into the bushes.

Mazelton gave her a long look, sighed, and scooped up some random pebbles. As they traipsed through the scraggly, foot snagging, bug infested forest, Mazelton did some haphazard damage to the pebbles. You couldn’t call it carving, really. More just irradiating strange patterns on the rock. Invisible to the naked eye, and likely to soon fade. But to a Pi clan member on the hunt, enough traces would remain to be discoverable.

A few pseudo runes here, a recipe for his favorite cocktail using only the first two letters of each word, oh he could do a whole series of partial stick figures couldn’t he…. Lettie kept him in the woods for hours, until the cook fires were lit and Mazelton officially fucked off for breakfast.

All the little pebbles were scattered around the woods, thrown gently away from where they walked. Lettie had sworn that she would spend the rest of the day here and catch up to the wagons later. He wished her a good, productive day.

Everyone was pissy on the trail that day, and everyone knew why. The humans were miserable, the aurochs, the cheve, every living thing wanted out of that damned wood. They rolled along the trail, and not even an hour later- they were out. It was the oddest thing. The forest didn’t look any different, but in some undefinable way, they were out. Like a sudden shift in air pressure, releasing you from an ear pain you didn’t realize that you were suffering.

Amazing how that perked people up. Still punchy from the lack of sleep, but a lot more cheerful. Mazelton found that he could sleep sitting up for short periods. It was hardly restful, as any time he seriously began to snooze, the wagon would jolt and force him back to consciousness. Lettie had yet to catch up by lunch time. Whatever could be keeping her…

The day rolled past, the mountains remaining their slyly deceptive selves. It was the way they stood back that fooled you. You thought you were looking at something not that steep or not that tall, until you forced your brian to understand what it was seeing. The mountains were bigger than you thought, but the angle of the slope changed. It flattened out at the bottom before getting dramatically steeper. They were huge. You were an ant, scurrying around their base.

That afternoon saw the caravan rolling through a suddenly widening valley. The mountain rose near sheer on their left, but on their right, it stretched almost perfectly flat for five miles, crossed a speedy little river, then rose with deceptive speed back up into the towering monument to tectonics that it was. Flat, good source of water, not a ton of sunlight from the south but on the north side of the valley you got plenty. Mazelton kept a close eye on the land. The signs were subtle, very subtle after a renaissance. But unless he was wilfully finding things where they didn’t exist… people had lived here. Farmed here on big lots. Perhaps they had slaves, or machenery. It seemed like the plots were too big to be worked by one family. Maybe if it was a really big family.

His mind drifted away again. What would they be growing up here? Cereals, given the size of the field and the climate. He didn’t see any evidence of orchards, but what evidence could there be after so complete a destruction. All he could do was look at geography and try to deduce what life had been like here. Presumably people built in this valley for defensive purposes. Perhaps it was a group of religious exiles, or a dissident and rebellious faction. They came deep into the mountains and found a place with high walls, sweet water and plenty of wood. They built their little paradise here, between the snows.

Or it was a fucking gulag. Ain’t history grand? Mazelton snorted and tried to at least half doze. He had just about got there when they stopped for dinner. Nice, scenic spot for it, right by the river. It was a real question as to whether sleep or food was more appealing. Food won, barely. It was a hearty barley stew, packed with rehydrated vegetables in a dark brown, mushroomy soup. It was surprisingly great, and he made sure Cookie knew it.

Lettie came storming up to him while he was setting his tent.

“We have to go back.”

“We don’t. I am strictly going forward these days.”

“We do. This goes so much deeper than I thought, and I think that this ties directly to your Clan.”

“How do you figure? I don’t know of any old Clan outposts this way.”

“Lets go into the tree line, I don’t want these things out in public.”

“Oh no, not twice in a day you don’t. Help me set up my tent if you want to talk somewhere private.”

Grumbling mightily, she did so.

“Alright now look at thi- did you tune the light on your cores in here? It seems kind of… sunlight-y.”

“Yep. I find it’s easier on the eyes.”

“Huh. Any chance of selling me one cheap?”

“Sure. I’ll dig one out for you. Now, what exactly has you so bothered?”

“Alright, so, the Third Great Extinction of the Athropocine era.”

“Are all words that I know, yes.”

Lettie waived him to shut up.

“Look, a ton of things went extinct then, I mean, definitionally, right?”

Mazelton nodded.

“Well one of the things that survived best were some classes of fungus. In fact, building the Mycorrhizal layer in the soil is one of the key first steps of any renaissance.”

“Yes, with you there.” Mazelton said, privately determined to look up the word “Mycorrhizal.”

“But the fungal networks are always some of the most ecologically complex. So many nodes and connections. There was always a theory, never popular but never quite going away, that some of the ancient, well established networks might be so wide spread, and have so many nodes, they could develop a form of sentience.”

“I do not like where this is going.”

“I think it might have happened, Mazelton. I think that we have finally found a mutation that is capable of recognizing outside stimuli, and wants to communicate with it.”

“Called it.”

“Oh stop being a wiseass! This is huge. So freaking huge. Look! Look at these stones. Clearly meant to be some kind of pictographic representation of… something. Maybe phonetics? God, some of these even look like letters.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Use your heat senses and focus, they are there.”

“Huh. Kinda-sorta like a stick figure without a head? Or, I guess it could be some kind of rune if you rotated it.”

“Right. Right. Way too soon to assign meaning.”

“Where did you find it?”

“I found a half dozen of them scattered across the area where the music was. Whatever is there, it’s been doing this for a while.”

“No I mean, exactly where? Because it sounds like you think they were just thrown around or something. But that’s not what most people do, is it? There is a meaning to a thing in a particular place, and we get a much better sense of that meaning by examining it in it’s context. Like, if you keep finding chairs next to tables, you might start thinking that most tables are used by people sitting in chairs, that kind of thing. So, where, exactly, did you find each of these pebbles? You did write it down, right?”

Lettie looked stricken, was clearly making a furious effort to remember.

“Here’s the core. Pay me back tomorrow. I’m off to bed.”

Mazelton slept like a happy stone that night.