A Wisterun Welcome

"It's all under control," Yanseno says, his harness lifted off him with a single swipe of his aura-wreathed tarsus. It drops to the smoked conk platform beneath them, forgotten. "I sensed Makuja moving, chi-nrv burn suggestive of active bloodletting. Mending, or her myxokora are out. I signaled Boleheva to tail her." "Is she okay?" Ooliri asks. "Why not tell her to help?" "Your girl's agitated. Don't trust that brute to handle a sensitive situation, not when it's her fault." Yanseno glances at the gray nymph. "I get the impression she isn't the most stable of your group, is she?" He thinks of Awelah. "Well, it's more..." "Of a competition? Yeah, I could see that." Yanseno shifts his eyes to the distance as he slips a raptorial into his trenchcoat. A moment later, he's palming a dark ball. Ooliri wants to call the material glass --- it has all the trappings of vague translucency, the only problem is the images suggested in refraction were unlike anything actually present. A dark plain without trees, without clouds in the sky, the scape dotted with twisted scleritomes. Ooliri doesn't even need to ask before the bane is explaining, "Sensor ball. Easier, cheaper than doing it with endowments." "Could I use it?" "Nope." "Erm, is that no as in you won't let me, or no as in it wouldn't work?" "Both. Don't want to clean your umbra sig off the glass, and you don't have the control needed to sense much of anything, nor the training to understand what you could sense." A chill comes, underscoring the words, and the glass darkens. Yanseno looks out in the direction of the tower. Fringing the town is foliage whose consistency of height and spacing suggest they were planted. The expanse is like a second wall around the town. Yanseno peers into it. Paths aside from the big main road out of town were winding affairs cutting through the arboreals --- ants were fond of mazes and he supposed this is another. Meant he couldn't see Boleheva or the kid coming through. But he's a sensor. He waves to the boy. "Let's go face the mess coming this way." Ooliri's about to ask what's wrong, but as the sensor is stepping directly over the fence (rather than going through the gate), an ant clad in dark blue and green rags is scuttling up. Little feet kick gravel out of the way as the ant approaches. That one pokes Yanseno with an antennae. There's a high-pitched stridulation. One leg taps a sheet held by mandibles. "Not now." Ooliri comes up behind him to give the ant a look. Seeing Ooliri, this one turns and presents the sheet. Slips of cloth are pinned to it and strings are drawn between the clothes. Each of the tag-like bits of cloth has a word sown onto it. As Ooliri peers, an antenna taps on a word, and then rides a string to another tag, taps that, and so forth. This one is rubbing legs against its gaster all the while, stridulation pitched higher than a diamantid voice --- and after a moment, Ooliri realizes it sounds almost like words. So different from a mantis's palps, the ant must be unable to pronounce most words of Panthecan, only simple articles. The words on the cloth are all nouns, and parsing them together with the chirps, Ooliri realizes it's communicating, as simple and odd as the implied sentence is. "Hi! \[Vesperbane\] has \[attention\] for \[\[pleading\]\]?" It taps vesperbane one, the other antennae pointing at Yanseno. Attention is tapped twice, and it repeatedly taps pleading as Ooliri stares. "I think he's busy right now. He might be able to speak with you soon?" This one continues fiddling with the strings as Ooliri speaks, rearranging the tags with a speed he can't quite follow. Ants have awful eyes, he recalls, so he isn't sure how they could use the tags if they could even see the sheet in front of them, which they can't. Unless --- those words are sown onto the fabric. Is it feeling the bumps and telling the words apart like that? While Ooliri muses, a new sentence is readying, and interpolated with more chirps. "Buh, buh. \[Inquiry\] of \[smallness\] with \[promptitude\]." A quick and simple question? "Our friend might be hurt. I think he's worried about that right now." "Hmp. \[Mirror\] of \[colony\]." What? Mirror... the same? Did colony mean 'us'? "Your friends might be hurt?" Ooliri asks, even as it clicks. "Oh." He glances to Quessa, the green nymph with antennae drooping and a growing frown. "Do you think they're..." "That one expected an arrival?" Quessa asks, looking at the blue-ragged ant rather than Ooliri. "Uu. \[Emptiness\] of \[knowledge\] as \[\[delivery\]\] to \[fullness\] of \[knowledge\] as \[\[returning\]\]. Not \[returning\]. So \[emptiness\] as \[return\]. So \[attention\] for \[scouting\] and \[foraging\] of those ones who \[return\]." Before Ooliri can tease out what that means, Yanseno calls. "She's here." Even without the sensor to confirm it, the energy of the ants crowding and passing the gates changes. The first to react are the ants waiting on top of the wall, bigger bugs tightly clad in black, with bulky mandibles distinct even from this distance. They stand on four legs, antennae stretched out into the sky, and, with a twitch as if catching a scent, drop to sixes and move. Meanwhile, the ephemeral flow of ants in lines up and down the trails slows, changes direction. Grouped in threes and fours, those who carrying bags or carted wheelbarrows stop and look around, while the ants with empty backs don't dawdle, gathering into a massed crowd. A wall-mounted ant has traversed to a wider platform and, half obscured by a railing, it takes a mallet and strikes it twice against a small gong. The sound carries farther than their stridulation would, yet near enough only those outside the gate clearly hear. Around them, they can see the ants who had pushed barrows reach into them, and retrieve farm tools, passing them around. Big, black mandibles lift the tools as improvised weapons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ At first, Boleheva's acrobatics had been impressive. The staid banes of the Asetari clan were much more inclined to walk at speeds that could only be called a procession, and even in duels, it played out so much more like a game of sworder draughts. Awelah grits her teeth as the thought of her clan leads to its inevitable end point. But she wouldn't cowardly deter her thoughts to spare herself. She wouldn't forget this pain. "Holdin' on real tight there, aintcha?" Awelah only grunted. At first, Boleheva's acrobatics had been impressive. But with every creek or pit leapt across, every metataxite kicked off of, Awelah had to hold on tighter to not fly off. She was a vesperbane now --- why force her to clutch tight like a child to their mommy? (Though if Awelah were still that child, would she ever let go?) When the acrobatics stop and Awelah need no longer cling, her first thought is that she wants to keep going. "Why did we stop?" She doesn't see Makuja anywhere near her. "Looks like someone needs our help. Lift yer eyes." Awelah sees it, then, up in one of the ferns. An ant clutches its topmost fronds, bending them toward the ground yet still hanging meters above it. Some of the branching stalks look to have slipped in between loops and ribbons of cloth that all spinners wore, holding it there. The ant is wriggling a bit now, having seen them. They hear dissonant chirps --- distress. "I got ya, little one." Boleheva pick Awelah up and sits her down --- with some difficulty, as Awelah twists and pushes away her tarsi. "We don't have time for this," the nymph says. "Shouldn't take more than a wee minute. Longer if ye argue." "Makuja might be hurt. This ant looks fine." Awelah looks around, then glances for prints in the mud. "It has friends in the area, doesn't it? It'd have too. Ants are a hive race." "Think a bit before you speak, eh? We saw where your girl fell. Ain't there --- means she must've gotten up and moved. Can't be too hurt, and this anty might have seen her. Now quiet." As she gets closer, grabbing hold of the fern, a pronounced size difference is highlighted --- the ranger's foreleg is longer than the ant, and only a bit thinner. Jostling the fern a little, the yellow bane looks the entrapping plant up and down. "Hold tight a moment, friend. I'll get ye right down." Awelah hears a bit of fern stalk crushing as her grip tightens, and her other foreleg is drawn back. Boleheva exhales, and the foreleg shoots forward, slamming into the fern below her grip. The thing shatters, hard green splintering and brown oozing out. The ant cries out, jolting, as Boleheva lifts the whole giant fern with her other foreleg, bearing the weight just a moment before the other foreleg turns it to a two tarsi grip. Steadied now, Boleheva carefully rotates the severed stalk, so that the ant is right side up, and lowers it to the ground. "There ye are, right as ye wish. Before you go, can I ask how ye got like this?" Simultaneous with speaking, Boleheva is waving at the pale nymph, dactyls curling to beckon her forward. The ant chirps slowly, eyes downcast. "Wugh. \[Bat-bug : red, black\] who \[screams\] had \[threat\] and \[command\]. Urm. This one who \[hides\] in \[fern : big\] has \[expense\]. The ones who \[read\] have now \[duration : longer\] for \[arrival : later\]." "You make much of that, girl? Don't know much formic myself --- Ruby usually handles things with the locals." Awelah's family'd had a few spinners; they'd woven their robes. She didn't know them well --- hard to talk to spinners if you can't read --- if you couldn't read for years after than your agemates could. When older, she had dealt with them formally, at the point where playing with the servants would only lead her to long evenings in the sitting room with father. (Awelah waits for the stab of loss, and this time it does not come.) To the imago, Awelah only clicks her mandibles, palps curved in a downward frown as she scrapes, "