Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Twenty-One: Signs of the Divine

The ape-creatures knew how to tie knots. They were pretty good knots, even. Wrapped around Hawk's wrists, they were, in fact, the best knots she'd ever seen. Given the context of captivity, this was something of a troubling discovery.

Of greater concern was the care with which those knots had been applied. The ape-creatures had grabbed the quartet of humans, yes. But gently. Every touch had been nearly reverential, as if they were afraid to give offense. The hoots and guttural sounds the apes made were even soothing in their own way. Hawk was starting to get a feel for rank among these creatures, first in that they had some sort of system, because as soon as they were bound, their captor's small party of four immediately sat down while one of their number went away and came back with one of the apes in the priest-like robes. This creature grunted with surprise, then vanished back into the monkey house. 

Hawk was pretty sure this encounter had been complete chance. Two of the ape-creatures held baskets filled with dead insects. The large alates, some still twitching in the recesses of a basket woven from honeysuckle vines, had been very efficiently butchered. One of their captors even pulled out one of the broken ant-Queens and popped the gaster off with a knife. It ate the contents with some relish, offering it to its fellow with a near universal gesture, want some? The negatory signal the other ape gave seemed just as universal. They both glanced at their captives, who watched back. In Hawk's case, it was with a combination of fear and intense interest. After an exchange of hand-signals, she, Alex, Em and Dyson were all shepherded by spear-point into the building, hands were bound with ropes made of woven vine-bark, and then several baskets of dead bugs were set all around them as the apes stepped away, resting their spears on the ground as they watched their first humans watch them back.

"Those spears do not look like something you'd pick up at the gift shop," Em said. They sat between Dyson and Alex. Hawk sat to Alex's side.

"They also don't look all that primitive to me," Alex said.

"It's a spear." Dyson said. "That defines primitive."

Hawk watched her husband expend a great deal of patience in not lecturing Dyson about observational bias. Instead, he just said, "Yeah, but it looked forged to me. You wanna tell me a bunch of apes can figure out how to forge a spear head in twelve hours?"

"Or that a zoo had a bunch of them on a shelf in the monkey house?" Em sighed. Paused. Began to look a little horrified. "But what if you're right, Hawk, and they're from fucking Narnia?"

"What?" Hawk said, though she felt she knew where Em was going. She'd had the same thought, peripherally. She just had never managed to grab on.

"It's fucking Narnia. Nothing that's come out of the fucking hole has followed physics as we understand them. Why we assume time is working the same way inside the rifts as outside is beyond me." They sighed and began thumping a heel against the ground, as their ape-captors looked on with concern. Hawk took the moment to really look at them. Yes, they stood upright, like a human, with elongated legs like a human. But their arms were the same length as their legs and their fur came in patterns, because one of their captors was brindle-patterned, like a tortoiseshell cat in some ways. The other was patched over with white. Both wore loincloths, but these were more elaborate than expected, multi-layered stuff, a luxuriant thick fabric over something that seemed made of nearly transparent leather. And now Hawk recognized what the apparent "baubles" on their belts were.

"Gasters," she whispered. "They're using alate gasters as containers."

And then something more thrilling, more shocking, than any other thing Hawk had seen so far. The brindle-patterned guard turned to the patchy one and began moving its hands through intricate patterns. Almost like...