Page 48 of The Inheritance
Fifteen minutes later, Bear departed to poop in the corner by some rocks and came back.
“Good to go?”
The dog wagged her tail.
Maybe we could take a breather…
The cave wall by Bear’s poop moved.
“Come!” I barked.
Bear ran over to me.
The wall trembled and broke apart, cascading to the floor.
I jumped over the stream. Bear leaped with me. We cleared fifteen feet and landed on the other bank.
Chunks of the wall streamed to the stalker carcass. I flexed. Bugs, about a foot across, with a chitin carapace that perfectly mimicked the stone.
I backed away.
The bug whirlpool broke open, revealing a bare skeleton. Not a shred of flesh remained. If we had fallen asleep here…
“I fucking hate this place. Come on Bear. Before the cave piranha bugs eat us too.”
I headed into the gloom, my loyal dog trotting at my side.
I crouched on a narrow stone ledge protruding above a vast cavern. Bear lay next to me gnawing on a stalker femur.
Long veins of luminescent crystal split the ceiling here and there and slid up the walls, glowing like overpowered lamps, diluting the darkness to a gentle twilight. My talent told me it was jubar stone, a breach mineral that shone like a floodlight. The biggest jubar stone I had seen until now was about the size of my fist.
Two hundred and sixty-two feet below us, at the bottom of the cavern, enormous lianas climbed the stone wall, bearing giant flowers. Each blossom, shaped like a twisted cornucopia, sported a funnel at least ten feet across and fifteen feet deep, fringed by thick, persimmon-colored petals that glowed weakly with coral and yellow. It was as if a garden-variety trumpet vine had been thrown into the chasm and mutated out of control into a monstrous version of itself.
Strange beings moved along the cavern floor, clad in diaphanous pale robes. Their torsos seemed almost humanoid, but there was something oddly insectoid about their movements. They strode between the flowers, carrying long staves and pushing carts.
As I watched, one of them stopped at the opposite wall far below and tugged on the long green tendrils dripping from a large blossom. A spider the size of a small car slid from the flower. It was white and translucent, as if made of frosted glass.
The being checked it over, prodding it with a staff topped with a large chunk of green glass or maybe a huge jewel. My talent couldn’t identify it from this distance. The spider waited like a docile pet.
The being dipped a slender appendage into their cart, pulled out a glowing fuzzy sphere that looked like a giant dandelion, and tossed it to the spider. The monster arachnid caught it and slipped back into its flower.
The spider herder moved on to the next blossom.
It was surreal. I’d been watching them for about two hours and my mind still refused to come to terms with it. There were hundreds of flowers down there, and most of them held spiders. The herders had been clearly doing this for a long time – their movements were measured and routine, and they had made paths in the faintly glowing lichens sheathing the bottom of the cavern.
I was watching an alien civilization tend to its livestock.
“Do you know what this is, Bear? This is animal husbandry.”
Bear didn’t seem impressed.
If I had to herd spiders, this would certainly be a good place. From this angle, the cavern looked almost like a canyon, relatively narrow with steep, mostly sheer walls. They had a water source – the narrow ribbon of a shallow stream twisted along the cavern’s floor. I couldn’t see any other entrances, although there had to be some, probably far to the left, behind the cavern’s bend. If stalkers or other predators somehow invaded, they would be easy to bottleneck. It was an ideal, sheltered location except for one thing.
Another spider herder emerged from behind the bend on the left. My ledge ended only a few feet away on that side so I couldn’t quite see where they came from. This one was pushing a larger cart.
“Here we go,” I murmured to Bear.
She flicked her ear.
