But the room was cluttered with junk, dusty old debris, heaped on the floor and the table and piled against the walls. Yet it wasn’t junk, not quite. The people of the forest were always short of stuff, because everything they had was either brought from the Datum Earth or the Low Earths, or they had to make it themselves, and either way cost a lot of effort. So if something broke, a bow or a bronze machete or a digging stick, and you couldn’t be troubled to fix it, you dumped it here in the swap house, the theory being that somebody else might make use of it, or at least bits of it – the bronze for melting down, a busted bow as a trainer for a little kid. There was a useful store of bits of wire and relays and coil formers, the kind of stuff you needed to make or repair a Stepper box or a ham radio. There was even a heap of fancy electronic goods from the Datum: phones and tablets, all black and inert since their batteries or solar cells had finally failed, their inner parts too fine and fiddly to be reusable. Even these were sometimes taken away to be worn as jewellery, or as shiny gifts for the forest trolls.
And there were always clothes, especially children’s clothes: underwear and pants and shirts and sweaters and socks and shoes, much of it brought from the Low Earths, some made here. The adult stuff was generally too worn out to be useful, but Nikos picked out a few colourful scraps for the latest quilted blanket his mother was making; even rough shreds could be used to pack bedding and the like. The kids’ stuff, though, was often barely used before the child in question grew out of it. The people of New Springfield were a mobile, nomadic people, and carried little with them. They certainly weren’t going to carry around baby shoes for twenty years, on the off chance of some grandchild coming along some day to wear them for a couple of months. And it was baby shoes that Nikos was particularly looking for today, for the benefit of Angie Clayton’s unborn.
After some rummaging he found a pair of beautiful little moccasins sewn from the scraped hide of some unfortunate furball, shoes that sat on the palm of his hand like toys.
That was when he heard Rio yelp, and a sound like wood cracking, and a rush like a heavy mass falling into a hole.
4
NIKOS DASHED OUTSIDE and ran around the house, the way his dog had gone. ‘Rio! Rio!’
At the back of the house, facing uncleared jungle, a row of poles had been driven into the ground, a half-finished stockade, intended to keep sheep in and big birds out. Nikos pushed his way through the tea plants and saplings that choked the once-cleared space between house and stockade – and he almost fell into a hole in the ground.
He took a cautious step back and peered down. The hole was maybe six feet across, and had been covered by rough-cut planks of wood that had evidently softened, made rotten by time. He could see from the remaining planks that they had been buried under soil, with a heaping of forest mulch on top of that. There were even a few hardy ferns sprouting in that skim of earth. But one of the planks had broken now, and fallen into the hole, revealing a deep black space.
Nikos scratched his head. The whole thing was kind of puzzling. Was this a cellar? It could be. As well as a place to store food and other stuff, a cellar was a sensible precaution against attack by bandits and others with nefarious purposes. If you had a Stepper box no wall could keep you out, after all; you just needed to step sideways into a world where that wall didn’t exist, walk through the location of the wall, and step back again … Nobody could step into a cellar, however. Not with the same location in neighbouring worlds blocked off by soil and bedrock and tree roots. There were even shallow cellars under some of Nikos’s family’s larger, better established encampments, dotted stepwise across the worlds.
Yes, you’d expect a house like this to have a cellar, or at least the beginnings of one. But why plank it over?
And while all this crud on top of the planks might have just gathered there with the years, it looked like the hole had been deliberately concealed. Why hide it? Was it actually some kind of trap, rather than a cellar? But a trap for what? Only a big bird or a croc, or a big dog like Rio, or a human, would have been heavy enough to smash through those planks – and maybe not at all, back when the planks weren’t so far-gone rotten as they were now.
None of this mattered. Rio was missing.
He hesitated, there in the unshaded sunshine. Enclosure underground would be even worse than in the Poulson house, because his primary defence, stepping out of any danger, wouldn’t be available to him. He nearly backed away. But Rio … Carried all the way from Datum Earth as a pup by a trader, she was a Bernese mountain dog, bred, it was said, to pull carts laden with cheese. She was strong, with good lungs, but slow.
She was Nikos’s dog. If he had to climb down into this hole he would.
He got down on his hands and knees, cautiously, and peered into the hole, through the broken plank. All he saw was darkness, even when he shone in his flashlight.
‘Rio!’
At first he heard nothing at all, not even an echo. Then came a bark, undoubtedly Rio’s, from out of the hole – but it sounded remarkably far off – not like it was from a dog trapped just a few feet down. ‘Rio! Rio! …’
And then he heard another sound. A kind of scraping, almost a whispering, like some huge insect. It seemed to move away, as if burrowing deeper down. All the legends and scare stories in his head came bubbling back to the surface. Again, he almost backed off. But his dog was down there.
Feverishly he began to pull away the remaining planks, carelessly tipping dirt into the hole. ‘Rio! Here, girl! Rio! …’