Chương 53: The Valley

The mountain does not care about your intentions. It does not reward preparation or punish carelessness with any consistency that would allow you to draw conclusions. What it does is present conditions, and it's upto you how you deal with them." - Common saying among travelling communities in the elevated regions of Area 10 They left at dawn. The settlement was quiet at that hour, the community in the deep sleep of people who had travelled far the previous day and earned the rest.

Only the macaques were awake, tracking Kara and Ren's departure from the rooflines, creatures who kept their own hours. Hana was already at the water system when Kara passed. She looked up, noted the umbrella across his back and Waggy at his side, and returned to her work without comment. Kohaku rode on Ren's shoulder. That was apparently how she travelled short distances - wings folded, body low, her weight settled with the ease of long practice at balancing on a moving person.

In the early light her red-gold fur had a different, slightly deeper quality than it had in the afternoon clearing. Waggy moved at Kara's heel, focused, having understood from the moment they left the path that this was nothing like the previous day's exploration. His nose worked without pause, building a picture of the morning air one piece at a time. The path northeast ran along the settlement's upper edge before climbing through the cedar forest toward the first ridge.

It was a real path - maintained, the footing clear - for perhaps forty minutes, and then it was a suggestion, and then it was simply the direction they were going and the terrain they were going through. The first ridge was straightforward.

The climb was steep enough to be work but the ground was solid, the cedar roots providing reliable purchase, and the top gave a view that was worth the effort - the settlement visible below through the trees, the valley they were heading for a green fold in the landscape to the northeast, the upper peaks still carrying snow that caught the early light with a brightness that made looking at them directly a considered choice.

"Two hours from the settlement," Ren said, looking at the valley.

"My grandfather has made this walk many times."

"When was the last time he came himself?" Kara asked.

"A few years ago. His knees just don't have it in them anymore." He said it plainly, having watched a man he respected work around a limitation without ever complaining about it, and having learned something from the watching.

"He sends me and a few others now. I have been there twice before."

"Any problems?"

"First time, nothing. Second time, we heard things in the gorge walls but they stayed in the walls." He paused.

"The valley was dry both times. The snowmelt had already come through." Kara looked at the peaks. The snow on them was substantial. The season was at the point where the warmth came and went, some days enough and some days not. They descended the first ridge and began the approach to the second. The second ridge was different. The cedars thinned as they climbed and the exposed rock increased, the path running along a traverse that required attention to the placement of feet.

There was also a slight, consistent wind that came across the face of the ridge. Kohaku spread her wings slightly against it, using it for balance on Ren's shoulder, adjusting without thought, wholly at home in altitude and moving air. Waggy stayed close and low, his centre of gravity dropping instinctively on the exposed traverse. His body knew things his experience had not yet accumulated. The top of the second ridge gave them a view of the valley properly.

It was narrower than it had looked from above - the walls steep on both sides, the floor perhaps thirty metres across at its widest, the bamboo grove visible at the far end as a dense stand of yellow and green that was a different shade than the cedars above it, brighter, the stalks catching the morning light. A stream ran through the valley floor, currently perhaps a metre wide, moving with the clear purposeful sound of snowmelt that had been running for some time. The gorge walls were limestone.

White and porous, pitted with the irregular openings of crevices that went back into the rock at angles that made their depth difficult to assess from outside. They were in shadow at this hour, the light not yet reaching the valley floor directly.

"The bamboo is at the far end," Ren said.

"Thirty minutes if the ground is good." They descended. The valley floor was softer than the ridgeline, the soil dark and damp from the stream's proximity. The bamboo at the far end grew with the density of something that had been establishing itself for a long time, the stalks close together, the older ones thick at the base, the newer growth coming up between them in the lighter green of this year's shoots.

Kara could see immediately what Isamu had described - the internode length on the mature stalks was exceptional, the wall thickness visible even from outside the grove. Ren moved to the grove's edge and began examining the stalks, practised, taught exactly what to look for. He ran his hands along several, testing, before selecting one and moving to its base. Kara took the other side of the grove and did the same.

His understanding of what he was looking for was less refined, but Isamu had left no room for doubt: dense-walled, internodes long and even, cut at the base node. He found a candidate and crouched to examine the base. Waggy made a sound. A short rasping cough - higher and lighter than it would be in a few years, but with enough edge in it that both Kara and Ren stopped moving. Kara stood and looked at the gorge wall to his left. The limestone crevices sat in shadow, the openings irregular and dark.

But Waggy was facing that wall with his full attention, every sense locked onto a single point - a crevice, one story up the wall and a little to the left. Ren had stopped. Kohaku was off his shoulder, wings half-open, her amber eyes on the same point. The crevice moved. The thing that came out of the rock was long, the body emerging in sections that kept coming after the point where instinct said it should have ended.

Dark, segmented, the legs moving in the rippling coordination of something that had evolved for exactly this kind of surface. Its head was broad, the mandibles visible even at this distance, the antennae working at the air with rapid precise movements. It was perhaps as long as Kara from head to tail and it moved with the fluid speed of something entirely at home on vertical limestone. Waggy's rasping cough came again, sharper this time. The centipede's antennae swung toward him.

Then a second crevice opened further along the wall. Kara had his umbrella open before the second centipede had fully emerged, the canopy between himself and the nearer wall, his feet finding the spacing Instructor Ken had drilled throughout the semester. The valley floor was slightly tilted toward the stream, the surface between him and the wall covered in damp ground that offered unreliable footing. The spacing kept his weight where it needed to be.

Ren had his umbrella out as well, moving fast to put himself between Kohaku and the second centipede, a man who had clearly thought hard about this situation without ever having been in it. The first centipede came down the wall fast and crossed the valley floor toward Waggy, target selected. Waggy moved. Toward and sideways simultaneously, cutting across the centipede's line.

His body contorted mid-movement - the spine twisting at an angle that would have been wrong on most animals and was apparently entirely natural on this one, his hindquarters continuing in the original direction while his forequarters redirected, so that he arrived somewhere the centipede had not predicted and hit its mid-section with his shoulder.

The impact knocked the front portion sideways without stopping it, the legs finding new purchase immediately, the head swinging back toward Waggy with the mandibles opening. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. In the same continuous motion, Waggy sprang clear. Kara felt the air move when he jumped. A distinct displacement, more than a creature Waggy's size should have produced, as if something had pushed from the other direction at the same moment.

He registered it and kept moving, the umbrella ferrule finding the gap between the centipede's segments as it reoriented, buying Waggy the half-second he needed to land and reposition. The centipede reared. In the moment of its rearing Waggy came in from the side - the same contortion, the same impossible redirect mid-approach - and got his teeth into the junction between segments. He held.

The centipede came back down and the impact took Waggy with it, the creature's legs raking across his side in the uncoordinated way of something in pain, lines opening across his ribs. He held through the force of it. The centipede whipped sideways and Waggy lost his grip and hit the valley floor. He was up immediately. His left side carried a change in his movement, a hitch in the stride that had not been there before. But he was up, and already circling for the next approach. Then Kara heard it.

The stream's voice changed before anything else did - the pitch rising, the volume climbing. He looked upstream without stepping back from the centipede. The stream was the same width it had been. Then it was not. The water came around the upstream bend with urgency, and the stream's banks became irrelevant in approximately four seconds. The valley floor took it the way it was shaped for - quickly and completely, the soil absorbing what it could absorb and the rest moving fast and cold across the ground.

Kara's boots went under. Cold was the first thing, the cold of snowmelt that had come a long way fast and had not had time to warm. The current was stronger than ankle-depth water should have been, the valley floor channelling it with the efficiency of terrain that had done this before, and his next step found less ground than he expected and his weight shifted wrong.

His Water Resistance skill was doing its best, he could feel it, the way he could feel it in the ocean, but the current was directional in the way the ocean was not, pushing consistently at the same angle against his leading foot, and the valley floor under the moving water was not what it had been without it. He fought for his footing and kept the umbrella moving, the ferrule work becoming rougher as his base became less reliable. The centipede had no such problem.

It moved through the rising water with the fluid indifference of something that had more legs than it needed and had distributed the problem accordingly, reorienting toward Waggy, entirely undeterred by the flood. Waggy was moving through the water differently. This was the thing that took a part of Kara's attention even in the middle of everything else. Waggy was moving through the rising current with a sureness that his injured side and his tier should not have allowed.

He changed direction in the water with the same contorting redirect he had used on dry ground, the current seeming to catch him less than it caught everything else. When he pushed off from a submerged rock, the air moved again, a brief but distinct displacement around him, the same thing Kara had felt during the jump. Waggy landed more cleanly than the water should have allowed, and came in at the centipede's flank from an angle that the water's push should have made unavailable.

Kara drove his ferrule down between segments again, the centipede rearing in response, water spraying from its legs. His rear foot slipped. The ground went from under him and the current took his weight for a fraction of a second - enough to kill his leverage, enough to put him sideways when he needed to be upright.

He got one foot back under him but the umbrella angle was wrong and he knew it and the centipede's head was already swinging down toward Waggy who had come in tight, too tight, the mandibles opening at a range where Waggy had nowhere to redirect to. Kohaku came out of the sky.

She hit the centipede's head from above with both sets of claws, her wings driving her down with a force her size did not predict, and the centipede's strike went wide - the head driven sideways by the impact, the mandibles closing on water and valley floor rather than on Waggy. She released immediately, wings hammering hard, climbing before the centipede could reorient, and from above she screeched - a single sharp sound that carried over the flood noise with clarity. Waggy cleared away cleanly.

Kara had his footing back. He drove forward with the full weight of his arms behind the ferrule, finding the same gap between segments he had found before, the precise location of it now known rather than searched for, and this time he stayed on it through the centipede's rear and the centipede's drop. It moved for several seconds and then it stopped. He looked across the valley floor.

Ren was standing over the second centipede in water past his knees, his umbrella's ferrule still in contact with it, his breathing audible over the flood. Kohaku circled above, watching both of them, her wings working the air with the steady efficiency of something that had done what it came to do and was now keeping watch. Waggy stood in the water beside Kara, his injured side heaving from the effort of the last few minutes. He looked at the centipede, cataloguing and revising several things about himself.

The water was at their knees and rising.

"The bamboo," Ren said, already moving. They moved as quickly as they could. The grove was close and the water was all around them, flowing steadily and insistently. Kara kept Waggy in his peripheral vision. Waggy was running with his left side carrying the adjustment of the injury, compensating without slowing, his path through the current straighter and smoother than it should have been. The understanding arrived without ceremony, somewhere between the second step and the third. It was the pores.

The spots along his coat, the skill the interface had named Elemental Pores when Waggy was still blind and new to the world. Air and possibly water passing through them when he moved, when he pushed, when he needed traction or redirection. Instinctive, unrefined, clearly not something Waggy had decided to do. The body finding what it had available and using it before the mind knew to ask. They reached the grove as the water reached their thighs, Waggy now being carried by Kara.

"Let's climb up," Ren said, already moving.

"We can cut the stalks later." Kara didn't argue. The current pulling through the gorge had turned brown and thick with things that had come loose further upstream, and the sound of it filled the grove's interior in a way that made thinking difficult. Some of the bamboo stalks were mature enough to hold weight. Kara went up first, the climb clumsy for the first stretch before his hands found the rhythm of it.

Waggy went up beside him with a naturalness that wasn't surprising, the panther heritage moving through the body naturally, the claws finding purchase on the bamboo culms with precision. His injured side was noticeably affecting him, but the little fellow persisted. Ren went up on the other side, Kohaku landing on the highest available stalk above him and folding her wings, position found, entirely satisfied with it. The water rose a little more and held there.

Waggy was on the culm beside Kara, his wet coat dark, his injured side rising and falling with each breath in a way that was visible but not alarming. He was looking across the grove toward Kohaku on her high stalk. She looked back at him with the amber attention she had been giving him since he arrived, the attention of a creature content to let things take their time. Waggy made a sound - the softer register, the one that was neither growl nor purr. Kohaku made a sound back.

Kara sat in the bamboo with water moving below his feet and felt the air shift in a small pulse from Waggy's direction, faint, like a breath from somewhere it should not have come from. He looked at the spots along Waggy's wet coat and thought about what he had seen in the water on the way in - the redirects, the footing, the current that had caught everything else and caught Waggy less. The body finding what it had and using it.

Ren, settled two metres away, looked across at Kara, still assembling the last hour into something he could make sense of. Neither of them said anything. The water dropped another hand-width, then another, the urgency going out of it in stages.

"Now," Ren said, and started down. They cut once their feet were back on solid ground, the water at ankle height and moving slow enough to ignore. Ren was at his selected stalk immediately, the cutting tool working at the base node with the speed of someone grateful for having been taught properly. Kara found his candidate and did the same, less efficiently, the cut taking longer but getting the job done. The stalks came free within a minute of each other.

"We need to tie them," Ren said, pulling the cord from his pack. He demonstrated quickly - one particular wrap around the cut end, the cord taken twice around his torso and cinched.

"Like this. Tight enough that it does not shift on the walk back." Kara did it, less neatly, tightening until the stalk was properly secured. The gorge walls were wet till around hip height, the limestone darker where the flood had reached. The centipedes were gone. Whatever the water had done with them, it had done efficiently. They walked back through the valley with the cut stalks secured across their backs.

Waggy moved at a pace that was more considered than his morning pace but steady, his left side carrying its adjustment without complaint. Kohaku flew in short sections above them, landing on Ren's shoulder between the open stretches, and twice descended to fly level with Waggy for a few seconds before climbing again. The second time, Waggy did not adjust his path away from her. He walked with her presence registered and accepted, which was different from simply tolerating it.

The ridge climbs were harder with the bamboo, the secured stalks long enough to catch on overhangs and require adjustment. Kara's back knew about it by the top of the second ridge. The settlement came into view below as they crested the ridge, the evening lights beginning to come on in the early dark. The smell of the kitchen reached them on the downslope, cedar smoke and something that had been cooking for a long time. Waggy pressed briefly against Kara's leg on the descent.

The checking-in contact, the one that had been happening more since the forest. Kara put his hand down briefly and Waggy rubbed against it. Isamu was in the square when they came through the entrance. He looked at the two stalks, then at both of them with the sharp deliberate attention he brought to everything. His eyes went to Waggy's left side, where the centipede's raking was visible in the evening light, and then to the water stains on their boots and their clothes, and then to the bamboo.

He took the stalks from Kara. He examined the cuts at the base, running his thumb along the edge of each one, checking the node, the wall thickness. He held each one at arm's length and sighted along it. He examined the cord work on Kara's stalk, learning something about the person who had tied it. He set them down carefully and looked at Kara.

"Tomorrow morning," he said.

"After breakfast." He picked up the stalks and went inside. Ren looked at Kara. He had grown up around Isamu Tanaka, and he knew exactly how much those words were worth in that man's vocabulary. Kara looked at the door Isamu had gone through, and at the umbrella across his back, and thought about the distance Instructor Ken had described and what it might look like from the other side of it.