On the evening of the second day Aeryn took them up.
Not into the central tree — that required a separate permission that she said she would consider — but to the high platform on the outer canopy level, accessible by a staircase that wound up through three of the largest ironwood trunks in a sequence that took twenty minutes to climb and produced, at the top, a view of the forest that was different from anything they had seen from the air.
From the air the forest was a surface. From here it was a depth.
The canopy spread in every direction in the late-day light, and the specific quality of an old forest at this hour — the way the light came through it and the way the air moved in it and the smell of something that had been alive for a very long time — was present in a way that flight did not give you because flight put you above it rather than in it.
Saya had been quiet most of the day. She had spent time with the elves who had historical contact with the fox tribe and had some sparring matches with soldiers.
She stood at the platform railing and looked east, in the direction of her tribe.
'They knew each other,' she said. 'Our tribe and the elves. Three hundred years ago there was regular contact. Trade. The older elves remember our grandmothers' grandmothers.' She looked at the canopy. 'I didn't know that. My grandmother's stories don't go back that far.'
'They will now,' Lyra said. She had three pages of notes from that afternoon's conversations. 'I got the full account from Elder Caras. I'll write it properly when we're back.'
Saya looked at her. 'You are going to write the history of my tribe.'
'I'm going to write it down,' Lyra said. 'It already exists. I'm just making sure it doesn't get lost again.'
Saya was quiet for a moment. Then she said: 'Thank you.'
Lyra wrote something. She did not look up. 'It's interesting,' she said. 'I would have done it anyway.'
Arthur looked east from the platform. Past the visible canopy, past where he could see, toward the canyon that was two days' flight in that direction and that he had been thinking about since Lyra's three words in the archive.
He thought about Shadow.
◆ ◆ ◆
They left on the morning of the third day.
Aeryn walked them to the gate. She had given Lyra copying rights to twelve documents from the archive — a significant thing, she had said, that had not been granted to an outside visitor in over a century — and Lyra had been awake until very late the previous night using them.
At the gate Aeryn looked at Arthur.
'You will come back,' she said. It was not a question.
'Yes, and if you are ever in need of help - use the devices I gave you to contact me and I will come running,' he said. He had given the elves several communication devices that connected with himself, the Fox Tribe, the Oni tribe and several extra to use amongst themselves.
'The remaining four indicators — when they appear, I will be sure to send word.' She looked at him steadily.
He set the shadow anchor at the gate post, quietly, while she watched.
She looked at the post. She looked at him. Something in her expression that he would not have been able to read two days ago was now readable — it was the expression of someone who had been carrying something alone for a long time and had just found someone to share the weight with. Three centuries of watching the forest and knowing what was in the books and having no one to tell who had both the capacity to understand and the capability to matter.
'Seven years old,' she said, one more time.
'For now,' he said while scratching the back of his head.
She almost smiled. 'Safe travel,' she said. 'All of you.'
They cast their wings and rose through the canopy and turned east.
◆ ◆ ◆
He sent Shadow down on the second evening of the return journey.
They had made camp on the high branch above the canyon — the same branch, or close to it, where they had stopped on the way out and looked down into the dark and heard the sounds from below and kept flying. He had been thinking about this stop since the archive.
The others were settled. Clara was asleep with Kiiro on her feet. Lyra was writing by cold-light, cross-referencing her archive copies against the monster biology volumes with the focused intensity she brought to research that had become urgent. Saya was awake, sitting with her tail around her feet, watching Arthur.
'You're going to send her down,' Saya said.
'Yes,' he said.
'How deep.'
'As far as she can go.'
Saya looked at the darkness below the branch. The sounds were there — lower tonight than they had been on the way out, or perhaps he was more attuned to them now. The resonance that Aeryn had described as having deepened over the past eight months.
'Be careful,' Saya said. 'Whatever is down there likely won't be friendly.'
'I know,' he said. 'I'm only mapping.'
She accepted this and looked back at the dark.
He closed his eyes and pushed Shadow over the edge.
◆ ◆ ◆
The first three hundred feet were ironwood roots.
He had expected this — the canyon walls were root systems, exposed by whatever had carved the gap, descending from the living trees above. Shadow moved through them in the spider form, small and quick, descending the vertical surface with the ease of a construct that had been navigating complex terrain for two years. The root material changed as she went deeper — drier near the surface, then damper, then wet, a change in the ambient temperature that registered through the connection as a steady drop.
At three hundred feet the roots ended and the canyon wall became raw stone.
At five hundred feet the darkness was complete — no ambient light from above, no bioluminescence from the walls, nothing. Shadow's ember-eyes, the inverted thermal vision, showed the stone and the air and the specific heat signatures of things that moved in the dark below her.
Things that moved.
Not one. Several. Large, slow-moving heat signatures at what his depth estimate put at approximately eight hundred feet below the rim, distributed along the canyon floor in a pattern that suggested they were not moving randomly. They were — he looked at the pattern more carefully — positioned. Settled. The way creatures were settled when they were in a place they had chosen rather than a place they had arrived at randomly.
He held Shadow at five hundred feet and watched.
The heat signatures were large. Very large. The largest was the size of the dragon they had fought, possibly larger. And they were not the only kind of signature present — there were smaller ones, faster, moving between the large ones in patterns that might have been feeding or might have been something else entirely.
He pulled a diagnostic pulse through Shadow's position. The magical density at five hundred feet was three times what he had read from above. At eight hundred feet, where the large signatures were, it would be higher.
Shadow went to six hundred.
At six hundred and forty feet the connection signal degraded — not lost, but weakened, at the edge of the reliable range. He held her there for sixty seconds, recording everything the feed could capture at this distance.
The largest heat signature below moved.
Not randomly. It moved toward the point directly below Shadow's position, slowly, with the specific deliberateness of something that was aware of a presence above it and was orienting toward it.
He pulled Shadow back immediately, fast, up the root wall and over the rim and back to the branch in thirty seconds. She settled beside him and he felt the connection restabilize at full strength and did a damage check — no injury, no detection at contact level, the descent and ascent had been clean.
He sat with what he had seen.
Lyra looked up from her writing. She had been watching him with the peripheral attention she kept on him during Shadow operations. 'Well,' she said.
'Large,' he said. 'Multiple. The biggest one noticed Shadow at six hundred feet.' He looked at the dark below the branch. 'They're not in distress. They're settled. They've been there a long time.'
'Waiting,' Lyra said.
'I don't know,' he said.
She looked at him. 'The book said the Deep Waking. Not the Deep Arrival.' She closed her journal. 'They're already there. They've always been there. Whatever the cycle triggers, it's not bringing them from somewhere else.' She paused. 'It's waking up what's already in the ground.'
Arthur looked at the canyon.
The sounds from below were the same as they had always been. Low, resonant, carrying the specific patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time and was not in any hurry.
He thought about three of seven indicators.
He thought about four years and how this canyon is related to the north where the dragon came from.
He thought about an eleven-year-old version of himself standing at this canyon rim with four years of preparation behind him and whatever was at eight hundred feet below about to wake up and come out.
He thought: I have a great deal of work to do.
He closed his eyes and started planning.