What the Ceiling Let Through

The records lose the party at the obelisk. When they pick it up again the jungle is behind them and the ground has turned to ruin: crumbling buildings, a haze of spores thick enough to wade through, and some number of days that nobody accounts for. The records don't say how they got from the one place to the other, and I won't guess.

What survives of that stretch is two short pages, both written in a hurry. I have set them down in order, ahead of the longer page that follows them.

The first opens at mid-morning, with the party wading through spores. They came on a campsite that already had a map. His note on it is the driest thing he wrote that year: never good when your campsite has a map. Someone had been there before them, and that someone had needed to know the way out.

Then there was a fight, and it didn't go his way. His shots went wide, twice, and for a stretch he was shaken and stayed shaken. The page doesn't say what shook him.

By the seventh day the place had begun to work on them. The page lists it plainly: painful welts, and an elf, though the line is too short to say whose welts they were or which elf it meant; hair corroding; buildings crumbling. Spores do this. They don't attack. They settle and wait, and the body that carries them pays a little more each day.

I have read that line more often than any other in his notes from Castrovel. He wrote it the way he wrote a weather reading.

Then, on a line to itself: Remember to look up!

The party had come to a place he calls the Pain Warden. The records don't describe it, and no source I know of does either. Something blue came at them there. He struck it cleanly, once. The page doesn't name it, but the next one names a sky fisher, and the colour fits. Castrovel's sky fishers are blue-skinned aerial hunters. They can thin themselves almost to glass and hang above a path, letting down sticky threads that numb whatever they catch.

The page closes on a note for later, as practical as a shopping list: they needed to be able to set traps.

The second scrap is three lines. A sky fisher was trying to escape. He reached out with his mind and found a thought sixty feet up, on a statue. The notes don't say whose thought it was, though the fisher was the thing in the air. Qwitch had been poisoned by it. The fisher's venom had gone into his strength, and he was weakened.

That is everything the records keep of those days. The Field Canon, which doesn't usually bother with stories, has built a section out of them.

ON PREDATION — hunters from above (later additions)
In ruins, the high ground is not empty. Assume it is occupied.
A hunter that can go clear will not show against the sky. Do not rely on sight.
Look up on entering. Look up again before resting.
Where the eye fails, reach for the mind. A thought can be found at sixty feet.
Wounded, such a hunter flees upward. It does not stay to finish the fight.
Its venom takes strength, not breath. The poisoned can walk, and cannot carry.
Do not count the encounter ended because the hunter has left.
A camp already mapped is a camp already used. Ask by whom.
Spore ground works slowly. Count the days in it. Check skin and hair each day.
A party that cannot set a trap must always walk into one. Learn to set them.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Castrovel.)

— the Field Canon, on Predation, later additions

The Canon makes a whole section out of four words of his and an exclamation mark. I suspect he would have minded the exclamation mark more than the section.

The longer page begins inside the statue.

The first room held a basin. Its ceiling was a map of the sky: constellations, with holes cut through so that light came in where the stars should be. Below them were pictures of elves washing. Pipes gathered water and fed it down to keep the basin full, and the basin sat in the middle of the floor like a well. The water was clear, with moss and algae growing in it. Around the room stood pots, decaying.

He took pictures of the ceiling and of the elves.

I want to stay here a moment, because he did. Moss and algae in clear water are not decoration. They mean light reaching the water, steadily, for a very long time, and water that is never allowed to stand stale. The builders were long gone and the pots were rotting where they stood, but the system they had built was still running. The ceiling still let the stars through, the pipes still carried water, and something green was still living off both.

Note the water that is kept, and the hands that made it kept.
Do not drink until you know who still tends it.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Water

From the basin room they moved into a gallery. Twelve elves were figured there, each stylised, each with starbursts and each with different tattoos.

The gallery wasn't empty. Lashunta were waiting in it, wearing fetishes, with scars and marks on their bodies. The records don't say who they were or what they wanted. They say only what happened next, and it happened quickly.

Taeon opened fire on one of them. His first shot struck and his second went wide. One of the lashunta was held fast for most of the fight, unable to join it. The notes don't say whose doing that was. Clay killed their fighter with a single gunshot. Bren hit the second of them, and Taeon missed. Bren's next shot went badly astray. Taeon turned his mind on the lashunta and struck hard. Bren missed again, and Taeon brought the man down with his azimuth laser pistol.

Then a grenade came into the room.

The page ends there, with the grenade in the air. I would like to tell you where it landed, and who threw it, and whether the man held fast was ever let go. The records don't say. What they do keep is a starlit ceiling, a basin that still fills itself, and a fight that was nearly won.