A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  “I don’t know. I’m so sorry.” Belatedly, I realize I should have used my kenning to blow the birds away in a gust of wind. It simply hadn’t occurred to me in the pressure of the moment, and I feel as though I’ve failed them. “Look, we have to get you back to the ship to stop the bleeding. We’re leaving this place, getting water only.”

  “Good call,” she says.

  I sheathe my daggers and turn to Baejan. “Watch everything. Shoot anything that moves that isn’t us. We’re headed back.”

  The scout relays these orders to the others as I bend down to pick up a couple of the dead birds. Examining them up close, I see that their plumage is black, white, and gray, with black heads and beaks that are hooked cruelly at the tip. Not exactly ideal for camouflage against the pines right now, but probably excellent in the snows.

  “These look like shrikes,” I say, “but obviously different from the ones back home. Shrikes are normally solitary birds.”

  “Call them pine shrikes,” Leisuen says, pointing with the tip of her Buran to a tree nearby with a few of the birds in the branches. “See how they’re perched only in the pines? None of the other trees.”

  We hurry back to the ship, not only because Haesha and Leisuen need attention but because there are some new howls and grunts coming from the forest, and they sound hungry. I’ve already taken casualties, but I don’t want any dead. If the birds on this continent are so aggressive compared to what we’re used to seeing, then we might be in for much worse.

  My mind strays into language questions as we march downstream, eyes roving for danger. What would I call those birds in my log? A flock seems so inadequate. They need a collective noun that fits their nature. A butchery? No: An abattoir. An abattoir of pine shrikes. Had Haesha and Leisuen not been able to defend themselves, or had we not been nearby to give them a warning, the birds might well have been able to tear into something vital—an artery in the neck, for example. As it is, both women will be permanently disfigured.

  And the responsibility for that is mine.

  It’s an easy decision to leave without chiseling my name into that rock. All those zephyrs never returned. I want to make it home.

  But I also need to know more. I can’t simply return and report that my journey yielded nothing more than a monument to our country’s failure. It is a central tenet of our faith that Shoawei encourages exploration and rewards it with great bounty.

  Except, of course, she had clearly not rewarded any of the ships that came this way before us, including Maesi’s. I am quite sure Haesha and Leisuen do not feel rewarded right now.

  I send them back to the boat immediately and stay behind with a few others to get the water barrels filled. We get attacked twice while that’s happening, once by some strange weasel-like creatures and once by some hopping, fanged monstrosities that are nevertheless vulnerable to arrows. The hoots and calls of forest creatures intensify. The scent of blood among the pine needles has roused the locals.

  As we get the barrels loaded into the landing craft and push off, there’s a crescendo of crashing in the brush and some screams of small creatures suddenly cut off. Something huge and armored lumbers out of the cover onto the beach, obviously eyeing us. It opens its mouth full of jagged teeth and roars, and I am pretty sure we all scream in response, for it is a thing of nightmares.

  Baejan mutters a stream of curses, nocks an arrow, and lets fly as it rumbles down toward the water. She’s on target, but the arrow pings off the creature’s armor as if it were stone. It looks heavy, and the creature can’t possibly be a good swimmer—everything about its dense musculature suggests that it would sink like a lead weight. This is a land-based predator, perhaps the deadliest we’ve ever seen, but not a creature of the seas. I’m thinking we have to be safe until it opens its mouth wide once more, but not to vocalize this time. An obscenely long tongue erupts from the cavern of its maw and extends, and extends, and keeps extending, until its tip wraps around the prow of our skiff and holds on. And then…pulls.

  That earns a fresh chorus of screams, for against the strength of our rowing, this creature is using its tongue to pull us back to shore and into its giant mouth. If it had the strength to pull a boatload of us in, it could handle any single one of us easily.

  I draw my Buran and attack the tongue, hoping it’s not as invulnerable as its exterior seems to be. The serrated edges manage to cut into it, but it’s much tougher than normal flesh and it’s not severed, nor even cut particularly deeply. Still, it’s enough to make the creature let go. The tongue unwinds and flops into the surf as some internal retraction reels it back into the mouth. The creature roars again as we surge away, frustrated that its lunch is so uncooperative.

  “Thank the goddess,” Baejan says, a sentiment echoed by the others. “I was disappointed we weren’t staying to bathe, Zephyr, but leaving quickly was definitely the right call. If that thing had caught us on land…”

  She doesn’t have to finish. We’d all rather be dirty and alive than freshly washed immediately prior to being digested.

  Once on board, I order the anchor brought up and sails unfurled. I summon winds to push us north. Haesha and Leisuen waste little time coming to see me in my cabin, bleeding through their new bandages.

  “Zephyr, where are we going?” Haesha asks.

  “North, as planned. We agreed to fifteen days of exploration. We still have thirteen to go.”

  “Don’t you think we’ve seen enough? There’s no one living here. They can’t possibly survive with all those creatures prowling about.”

  “No, I don’t think we have seen enough. We have more questions than answers. We need to see more and return with as much information as possible. Because as dangerous as this land is, it didn’t destroy a single ship that came here or chisel those names in that rock.”

  “I’m sure krakens were responsible,” Leisuen says. “There’s no question about what destroys ships, so let’s not pretend it’s a mystery. And this extra time you’re taking only increases our risk of being destroyed. If we return now, we’ll be coming back with more information than any other ship before us. We’ll earn our reward, our futures secure.”

  “That will also be the case if we continue. I’d like to know more. Shoawei exhorts us to explore.”

  “Then at least explore to the south,” Haesha pleads. “Because we can be sure everyone went north just like you’re doing, searching for the northern passage. And that way is death.”

  “I disagree. We don’t know that everyone went north or that the south is any safer. We know only the span of days that krakens retreat from the seas. We have thirteen days. We’re going to use them. And then we’ll turn around.”

  They both scowl at me and I hope my face is projecting utter confidence, despite my own doubts. If they push me further, there’s not much room for me to maneuver. So I try to stifle any wind they have building in their lungs to object.

  “You have my word. We push for thirteen days and then head home.”

  Their lips tighten and then Haesha gives me a curt nod. “Thirteen days. Your word.”

  I exhale slowly once they leave. If you are out there, Maesi, I have only thirteen days to find you.

  * * *

  —

  “And now, as promised, our favorite Kaurian scholar, Gondel Vedd!” Fintan threw down a seeming sphere and became the disheveled older gentleman with mustard stains on his tunic.

  I know all the modern languages, and the ancient one too, but there’s no word in any of them for a mixture of euphoria and dread. A good measure of relief as well, but the euphoria and dread mean I’m not getting enough sleep.

  I’m relieved that I don’t need to continue to witness the aftermath of the Eculan invasion. I’m euphoric that I get to see my husband, Maron, and be amongst my familiar things and walk in the land where Reinei b
reathes peace. But I dread the same, since I’ll doubtless need to spend time in a windless dungeon with Saviič again and face Maron, who will almost certainly be incensed at my absence and the letter I sent not five days before, saying I’d be staying in Pelemyn awhile longer.

  I had thought that circumstance demanded I stay in Brynlön to help them decipher the intelligence they were collecting from the Eculans. But two days after I posted my letter on a southbound ship, a letter arrived from the mistral, ordering Ponder Tann and me back to Linlauen. I was to take the next ship home. I had to make my farewells and apologies.

  Thus it is that I’m crammed in a tiny cabin, made smaller by the overwhelming number of gift baskets from grateful Brynts. They seem to have heard that I enjoy mustard, so I now have more than I could possibly consume in a year.

  Though I think I’ll have a go at it. I find the challenge attractive. And I do adore the Brynts and their customs.

  Perhaps I can have cheese parties and say to my guests, This is the hot whiskey mustard the pelenaut gave me, and this honey and tarragon number is from his lung, and that saucy whole-grain job is from the Könstad du Lalland, and, oh, that delightful red wine and garlic mustard? Why, that is from Second Könstad Tallynd du Böll, the tidal mariner who saved Pelemyn.

  My, my, wouldn’t that be fancy. We’d all wear bibs and I would manage to stain my tunic anyway because I am highly skilled at acquiring food stains; I believe it rivals my skill with languages. It would be perfection to be chided by Maron once again for an unsightly blotch upon my person, for then I would be at home, where I am loved.

  Apart from sending me home with a gift basket, the second könstad has provided me with momentous news: I’ve been entrusted to share the intelligence that the Brynts have found the Seven-Year Ship in the Mistmaiden Isles, though they have yet to discover its secrets. But its mere discovery is a relief for Kauria—it means the Eculans will have no cause to invade us, since what they seek is elsewhere.

  Ponder is very happy also to be returning without stressing his abilities as a tempest to their fullest. He does help speed us along our way, filling our sails, but it is still a journey of weeks, during which I will be completely useless on board. I have no seamanship whatsoever. But I am determined not to let the time go idly by. There is still work to be done on Zanata Sedam, and for this brief while, at least, I can look forward to no interruptions.

  Carving out space to work was an exercise in moving gift baskets from the desk to my bunk. I needed to reexamine the text after taking some weeks off from it; sometimes a gust of understanding can follow a calm. It would be nice to understand something here, since the mistral’s letter raised more questions than anything.

  It said my presence was required to address some things that Saviič had said to my replacements in Linlauen. These unnamed scholars she’d brought in were making claims that she wanted confirmed or denied. What claims? All I could assume is that they were serious enough to warrant sending for my return but not serious enough to warrant asking Ponder to bring me back immediately on the wind.

  That would have to wait until my arrival, and there was no use letting it weather my peace now. The Eculan holy text awaited. I laid it open to a random page on the left and placed my translation on the right, open to the same page. I looked at them superficially to note differences and recalled my early decision to use upper and lowercase letters for my translation. The Eculan text was in a single stylized case.

  I still thought it was the proper move, but now I worried that I might have capitalized proper nouns that were never intended to be such. The Seven-Year Ship, for example. By the same token, I might have missed something that should have been capitalized.

  The only variation in the text that the Eculan copyist employed was the occasional underscoring of words. I assumed that these were for emphasis, especially since the most-often-underscored words were numbers, and that fit with the Eculan obsession with numerology. But perhaps an analysis of underscored words as a set would yield some pattern heretofore unseen.

  I set about recording every word underscored in the Eculan text, putting hash marks next to them for each time they were repeated. The most-oft-repeated words were indeed numbers, and seven was most prominent among these, as expected. But the kennings were underscored as well, as were directions like east and west. That would suggest that the underscoring might serve in lieu of capitalization, except for several oddities, and one in particular: The noun žalost—a word in the old language that was often translated as grief, sorrow, mourning, even regret or chagrin—was often (but not always) underscored in the text. There were some other anomalous nouns like that, but žalost was by far the most frequent.

  My next task was to examine the use of that word, combing through the text to find every instance of it and writing down the entire sentence for syntactical analysis. What leapt to my attention in this process was that in every case where the word had been underscored, it had also been placed in the syntactical slot where it might function as a proper noun. I’d been translating it as a common noun in every case, but it had resulted in some strange-sounding passages—primarily a preoccupation with grim and contradictory feelings for a religious text, such as “Only through grief may one experience the fullness of life,” or “Grief is the answer to all questions.” If I reevaluated it as a name, however, it made better sense.

  “Reinei bring us peace,” I said into a cabin full of gift baskets. “That is the answer: Žalost is their god.”

  The talk in the town after that was the Eculan belief in a deity named something close to Grief, and lots of conclusions got leapt to about their society and what kind of people they must be. I refused to join in such speculation. Their invasion already told us plenty about what kind of people they were, and I wasn’t interested in hearing how they might justify or rationalize their actions.

  I was, however, interested in learning more about the pine shrikes Koesha described, as they sounded remarkably horrifying. And I was much more interested in knowing how Fintan had heard of Gondel’s story if he’d sailed to Kauria, as he and the pelenaut said.

  After a night of blissful sleep in my own bed and a morning of proper toast and relaxation, I met Fintan earlier than usual to catch up on the tales. When we reached Gondel’s, I asked Fintan how he knew of the story.

  “I mean, he was sailing to Kauria while you were in Ghurana Nent. So was that all fabricated?”

  “Oh, no, I talked to Gondel later.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t you want to wait and find out? It’ll be in the tales.”

  “No. I definitely do not want to wait. This is something I need to know now, for my own ease of mind.”

  “All right. He did go home to Kauria, but now he’s back in Brynlön, doing something up in Fornyd.”

  “He’s in Fornyd right now?”

  “So far as I know. As of a few weeks ago.” I couldn’t tell him the real reason—that we needed Gondel’s skills to translate the Wraith’s letter—but this was precisely the sort of thing that Rölly needed to know in order to protect us. Whoever the Wraith had been writing to was still out there, after all. I’d have to wait to tell him, though, and be sneaky about it. Which meant, damn it all, that I was doing spy shit.

  “Why is he in Fornyd?”

  “Ah, now, that is something I’ll need you to wait to hear. Can’t go spoiling things, can we?”

  I wanted to say yes, we could and damn well should spoil things, but I choked it back and said instead, “I guess not.”

  Fintan smiled. “You seem in better spirits, Dervan. Everything all right with your toast this morning?”

  “It was lovely. Did you sleep well?”

  The bard’s grin faded. “No. The nightmares have been getting worse.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear. Hasn’t it been a few days since you’ve seen Hollit and
Orden? Maybe practicing presence in their restaurant was helping a little.”

  Fintan cocked his head to one side, thinking about it. “Maybe it was.”

  “Shall we decamp and move our business there? You said you wanted to try the sunchuck, right?”

  “Do they have any?”

  “Yeah. No shortage of sunchucks yet, I don’t think. Their populations weren’t hit by the invasion. Hunters keep bringing them in from about ten huge colonies inland that can afford to lose a few.”

  “Are there really so many out there?”

  “Well, there are enough for this one restaurant. They’re practically the only one to offer it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, have you ever seen a sunchuck?”

  “No.”

  “They’re like extra-large groundhogs with a ray of yellow quills around the neck, making them look a bit like a rising sun when they flare them out. The tips are poisoned. So it is delicious but infamously difficult to prepare. Most people don’t want to go to the trouble.”

  “And these two Hathrim did?”

  “Well, I think that’s what they’re used to. Hathrir is full of animals that aren’t easy to prepare. Sand badgers, lava dragons, glass scorpions, you name it.”

  “What makes sunchucks so difficult compared to a glass scorpion?”

  “Besides the poisoned quills, you have the venom sacs and the scent glands. If you don’t remove them properly, the whole carcass is ruined.”

  “Yeah, glands will get you every time.”

  When we got to the Roasted Sunchuck, the place was hopping. There was a line out the door. Fintan’s endorsement had done wonders for business, apparently. Still, once we got a table, Hollit and Orden came out to see us—Fintan, really—welcomed us personally, and wondered if we’d like the bladefin steak and a craft cocktail.