It was not long before one of them, more sharp-eyed—or more acquisitive—than the rest, spotted a bright sparkle on the net, bounced his way out to it, and brought it back to be passed around among the others
“Jewels,” shouted Byle. “Dah, it’s jewels. Laying there on the net like so much flopper flub. See yonder, there’s another sparkle.” The gems, in glittering clusters, had been glued onto the grid with rootsap to form a twisting path. They were stones like those Mavin had discovered in the cave—gizzard stones from the small oozers, polished to a fine, high shine by the tumbling of the creatures’ great guts. All the stickies who spoke human language had been at the labor of placing them until moments before the Banders arrived. Now the stickies crouched upon the net, and their shiny tops camouflaged with nonsticky bottom membrane, half-hidden with bits of root hair and leaf. The trail of gems wound out across the chasm; some of the younger Banders were already following it and collecting them.
Slysaw bellowed at them. “You all get off there! I didn’t say go, and you don’t go till I say. Now get back here and let me look at those. Well, well, what a wonder. So this is what the Birder and the Beedie wench were after. I’ll be dropped off a bridge by my ears if this isn’t something ...”
There were mutterings from the others in the band. One or two looked as though they were going to disregard orders, but these were c uffed into line by some of Slysaw’s close kin.
“Now, boys. Now then. Think what a shortage of saw gravel there’s been lately, and all the time pots of it here in the Bottom to be picked up by the pocketful! And won’t we have fun taking all this back and showing it around. All this secret stuff the high and mighty Beeds and Chafers and Birders never told us about. Let’s be orderly, now. Byle, you and your cousin get out there first, and the rest of us’ll come after.” And soon the hundred were moving across the net in a long line which undulated from side to side as jewels were found and picked and popped into pockets—though some were hidden in shoe tops or behind ears in the expectation of avoiding the eventual sharing out.
Up-chasm, others waited. Roges and Beedie were upon the net; Roges at the root wall, securely anchored to the mainroot, Beedie more or less at the center of the chasm, on the up-chasm side of the steamy place above the boiling pool. Before her, and to either side, stickies lay upon the net, almost invisible in the steam, their ears carefully extruded between bits of leafy litter as they listened for the signal.
Mavin, hovering high above, peered down through the veils of steam. The mists made seeing difficult, but she had planned for it to be difficult. She did not want the Banders able to see clearly. They must be greedy, angry, and with obscured vision. She lifted a bit higher to see farther, then dropped down to whisper. “Beedie, are you ready?”
Beedie waved her away impatiently, trying to remember her lines. At her direction, the largest, brightest stones had been placed in the steamy place. Now she could hear the result of that placement; raised voices, argument, the sound of blows. She heard Slysaw’s voice as he intervened, his own greed making him half-hearted. “Doesn’t matter who finds ‘em,” he shouted at his men. “We’ll share alike when we’re done. Just keep gatherin’ ‘em in, and soon we’ll come to the source of it all ...”
The group tumbled on, stooping, grabbing, pushing one another in their haste.
“Stop right there, Banders!” Beedie cried in a fine, trumpety voice.
The men stumbled to a halt, their eyes widening in surprise, searching through the steamy veils for the source of the voice. Then o ne of them glimpsed her, pointed, shouted. Behind him, others pushed close.
“Stop!” she cried again. “You have no business here, Byle. Nor you, Slysaw. The rest of your ruffians should be back at work on the bridgetowns that pay them. I give you warning, you are at peril of your lives, so take care. Go back to the stairs and up where you belong.”
“And who’re you, wench?” Slysaw thrust through the pack, leaning on Byle’s shoulder. “Who appointed you head of chasm council, heh?” The Banders heaved and pushed at one another, drawing into a smaller, tighter group. Behind them stickies moved across the net.
“Yeah,” interrupted Byle Bander, bouncing and posturing on the net. “Who’re you, Beedie? I’ll tell you. You’re gametime for me, that’s what. And after me, as many of these kin of mine as are interested in your skinny body.”
Cheers and animal howls rose at this sally. Mavin, hearing this from above, recalled old, bad memories of Danderbat Keep, and boiled with fury. Still she hovered, close above the place Beedie stood.
“I tell you to go back. You are meddling in things that are none of your business. “You do not belong here. You are in danger here. Don’t be stupid, standing there threatening me. Just turn yourselves around and go!” Beedie no longer needed to remember lines she had rehearsed. She was now so angry that they came of themselves. Beside the root wall, Roges heard her anger and sizzled with protective wrath.
“We’ll see, Beedie girl. We’ll see ...” Byle plunged toward her through the rising steams, the entire pack pressed at his back. Slysaw was carried along in the rush even as his native suspicion made him try to stem the stampede. They came in all together, individually sure-footed yet stumbling against one another, so intent upon their own beastly mob noises they did not hear Mavin’s scream.
“Stickies. Now. Now. Now. Now.”
Roges at the root wall began to echo the sound, through Mavin’s amplified voice could have been heard by any creature not deafened by its own howls. Beedie, too, cried out, and the three voices rose together. “Now. Now. Now. Now”
Stickies had moved into a circle around the Banders, a circle that had already cut many of the main grid roots supporting the mesh above the boiling pool. Abruptly, with a loud, tearing sound, the fabric ripped to one side of the close-pressed mob. The flap of net they stood upon dropped to one side, throwing many of them flat, dropping others so quickly that arms and legs broke the finer meshes and dangled below, waving frantically at nothing.
Those at the rear of the pack nearest the torn edge were first to realize that there was nothing below but the sound of seething water, occasional glimpses of its bubbling surface appearing through the gusts of steam. Those who saw what lay below tried to climb over the bodies of those above them on the net, shouting and kicking. Those above them retaliated by kicking and pushing in return. Two or three men toppled through the hole and fell, screaming only for a moment before striking the water with a splash, a final agonized gargle and silence.
The entire pack was silent, only for that moment, not realizing what had happened but aware that something was wrong, that the net was no longer horizontal, that Beedie was moving away from them in the veiling mists, her face drawn into an expression of—what was it? Sorrow? Horror? At what? Even as shouts and howls arose once more, Byle, with his usual sensitivity, let voice follow wonder.
“Whatcha starin’ at, bone body? Heh? Run if you like, Beedie, girl, but I’m faster then you are ...” Slysaw was grabbing at his shoulder, but the boy shrugged it off, blind and deaf to any needs but his immediate desire to do violence. Slysaw dropped and was trampled under the climbing hands and feet of a dozen others, kicked downward, beneath half a hundred struggling bodies, to lie at last half-dazed upon the very edge of the tear, clinging with both hands to a mesh of root hair.
The stickies had continued with their work. The tear widened, the finer lacework ripping with an audible shriek, ropey roots breaking under the increased weight with repeated, snapping sounds which made Beedie think of a drum rattling, faster and faster. “Go back,” she screamed, unheard in the general din. “Go back.” It was too late for any of them to go back, and she knew it only briefly before they did.
Now a second tear opened, across from the first. Those who remained upon the net were caught now upon a kind of saddle, l ow at the sides, high at the ends, with those ends growing more narrow with each breath they took. Beedie stood just beyond one end so that she looked straight into Byle’s face when the far, narrow strip broke through and the entire flap of net hung down for an instant’s time, laden with clutching forms, shedding other forms amid shouted words she could not understand and some she could, old threats and obscenities, all ending in a liquid gulping, diminishing echoes, and quiet.
Beedie stood at the edge of the torn net, unable to move. Seeing her safe, Mavin dropped from her guardian’s post through the roiling steams, past fringy edges of torn net and the quivering stickies poised there awaiting her word, down to examine the simmering surface of the pool. Nothing floated in it. She had not measured its depth, but now knew it must be a vast cauldron to have swallowed so many without a sign remaining.
Above, where Beedie stood, the net bounced from some weight hanging below it which jiggled and fought against felling. She looked between her feet to see him hanging upon a remaining shread of root just as his hand took her by the ankle. Byle Bander. She screamed his name.
And Roges drew his knife, cut the root hairs which fastened him safe at the root wall and ran upon the gridwork, sure-footed as any Bridger, not looking down, not remembering to be afraid, thinking of nothing except the sound of her voice. He came to her while she still struggled against the hands that were pulling Byle Bander upward on her body while he cursed at her and called her filthy names.
Beedie’s cry had summoned Mavin back in that instant. She was too late. Her great bird’s beak was too late to strike those climbing hands away. Roges’ knife had already done so, and he stood with Beedie wrapped in his arms on a net which shook and shivered and threatened to collapse beneath them at any moment.
“Come on, young ones,” she said quietly. “There’s other time for that, and better places.” And she led them back to the root wall and down, not letting either of them go until she was sure they were safe.
Later, when they thought of it, they went looking for the Thinker. They could not find him. Mavin was suspicious of the stickies for a time, but they convinced her of their innocence at last. He had g one, gone as he had come, into some other place, through some wall only he could see or understand.
“Now I’ll never know how I do it,” Mavin thought with some disappointment. “I really thought he’d figure it out and would explain it to me.” The disappointment was not sufficient to keep her from curling up upon the cave floor and sleeping for a very long time.
CHAPTER TEN
It was some days later that they sat in the small commons room of Bridgers House on Topbridge. Beedie and Roges were unpacking a small bag they had brought from the Bottomlands, laying the contents upon the table before Rootweaver’s interested eyes. Old Quickaxe sat in one corner where his blanket-wrapped body could catch the last of the day’s light through a grilled window. Mavin sprawled before the hearth, playing with a stick in the deadroot fire which burned there to warm their supper.
“And you think all the great oozers are dead?” asked Rootweaver, fingering the gems on the table. “Though you did not see them killed?”
“We saw the first two killed,” said Mavin. “The first time wasn’t very efficient. The stickies hadn’t quite figured out what smells were most attractive to the beasts, so the first one tended to wander about. The second time—”
“The second time was perfect,” said Beedie. “They stretched a net-road right over the Stew Pot, that’s what we named the boiling pool. Then they laid stink all over it, to attract the oozer. Then more stink to where the nearest oozer was, and it wasn’t close at all. It must have come a long way. Then, when it went out on the net-road, they cut the net, and down it went. Stewed beast. That didn’t smell very good either, but eventually it will all wash away.”
“The stickies will have killed them all by now, ma’am,” said Roges, “even the one we saw on the root wall above Bottommost … The Bridgers from Bottommost were driving it down into the chasm with torches when we came that way. Evidently there was only the one who climbed that high, and both they and the stickies were very eager to have the beast gone.”
“Why now?” quavered Quickaxe from his corner. “What brought the huge beasts into the chasm? We have never had a nything eating the roots before.”
Mavin nodded in time with the dance of the flames. “I knew you would want to know, so I went down the chasm to see. There had been a rock fell there, just beyond the bend of the chasm. Evidently, a few of these very large beasts were trapped on this side of the fall. There are many of them further down, where it is even wetter and warmer and where a different kind of vegetation flourishes.”
“But you say there are small ones below us?”
“Not the same kind,” said Mavin offhandedly. “The little ones are a different beast entirely. They don’t eat the roots deeply, for one thing, and they stay away from the stickies, for another. The stickies have been killing them off with rootsap as long as any one of them can remember—certainly long before they ate the people on Watertight.”
“And it was gizzard stones they traded with the Waterlight people long ago?” Quickaxe asked.
“Gizzard stones, from which our saw gravel is made, yes. And our supply of it had been laid up since that time. Even hoarded and used thriftily, as we did, it would soon have been completely used up ...” Rootweaver sighed. “Now there is enough of it we may deck ourselves in gems as in the old stories.”
“They traded different kinds of fungus, too,” offered Roges. “And fish lanterns. Things like that.”
“We made a treaty with them,” said Beedie. “I hope the chasm council will ratify—is that the word, Mavin?—ratify it. The stickies won’t hurt us if we don’t build a bridge below the level of Bottommost, because it isn’t wet enough for them that high up in the chasm. And if we aren’t silly, like poor Mercald, and try to touch them, they can’t do us any harm.”
Mavin nodded in agreement. “I think you can act on that assumption, ma’am. But take my warning. There are thousands of them down there that still speak in stinks, and they would really like to have living, thinking humans to eat. I don’t think they’re evil, but I don’t think they’re holy, either, and I’d continue to be careful.”