A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  “I’d like to try the sunchuck if you have it,” Fintan said. I noticed that he had gripped the edge of the table and his smile was somewhat forced. “And the cocktail for sure. What makes the sunchuck your specialty, if I may ask?”

  Hollit beamed. “They have a wholesome vegetarian diet and it makes the natural flavor of the meat delicious. We get up early in the morning to brine the sunchucks for three hours, and then we roast them in a dry rub of herbs and spices at an even temperature for another three hours. The meat falls apart with a fork, and we serve it with flatbread, sprouts, and apples and a rich mushroom sauce for dipping.”

  Fintan’s fingers relaxed and his shoulders visibly dropped. “That sounds amazing.”

  “We hope you enjoy,” Orden said. “And thank you for singing that smoke meditation a few days ago and mentioning us. It’s made our week.”

  Once they’d left, I said, “I saw you tense up and then relax. What allowed you to let go?”

  “The words mushroom sauce did it.”

  I just blinked at him.

  “Look, if I could explain how my system works, I probably wouldn’t need help managing it, would I? I just find mushroom sauces deeply comforting, and now I’ve associated that with a couple of Hathrim. That’s a good thing. Coming here was a great idea. And I’m glad to see them so busy.”

  “Me too.”

  “But you do know they’re spies, right?”

  “What?”

  “Even if they’re not active agents, they’re spies. Come on, they’re the only two Hathrim in the capital city of the kenning that cancels theirs. Even if they weren’t sent here to be spies originally, they’ve certainly been recruited in the years since they arrived.”

  “Recruited to do what?”

  “Nothing serious. But certainly reporting everything to someone. There’s not a Hathrim embassy here—that’s down in Setyrön. So most likely they report things to the ambassador there.”

  I shrugged my indifference, but I was beginning to wonder who wasn’t a spy in Pelemyn. And then I realized that most people weren’t. It was just that I was trapped in a nest of them somehow, despite my best efforts.

  The roasted sunchuck was delicious and Fintan made happy moaning noises at the mushroom sauce, and we got all caught up on the tales.

  And then, once we went to the wall and while he performed an instrumental song to warm up the crowd, I found a mariner and relayed an urgent message for the pelenaut: Gondel Vedd was in Fornyd. Relaying information like that didn’t seem so bad. But I still felt like I’d need to take a bath afterward and scrub myself twice. I hated being a dirty spy.

  The bard began his tales for the day by returning us to Khul Bashab.

  There is time enough for honey. That makes my heart full, and sometimes I think the way that feels is better than a full stomach. My bees will be able to survive the winter.

  The ants of the city will likewise be okay, unless someone poisons them. Same with the wasps.

  But Adithi, Sudhi, and I are far from safe. Tamhan posted those broadsides he promised and the city watch swarmed the streets, tearing them down as soon as they could and demanding to know who put them up, who printed them, and how did someone so stupid as to post such dung manage not to misspell anything? They got super shouty in people’s faces and slapped them around to scare them into giving us up—or, failing that, giving them something else. It was the same old shakedown but with the kind of intensity that nearly made you ruin your pants, like waking up with a flesh eel burrowing into your rib cage. So people talked: They knew a guy who knew a guy who did a bad thing once, something real bad, and they could find him at this sour suckhole on the other side of the River District most every day.

  Nobody tells the city watch where to find us, though. They can’t. Adithi and I trust no one, talking only to Khamen Chorous and being careful even with him. But even if he’s turned against us, he can’t give us away, because he doesn’t know where we’re staying either. We stay somewhere new every night, now that I have my many thousands of eyes looking for unoccupied spaces, and we’re telling Khamen where he can crash safely too as long as he touches nothing but the bed. My plan is to help everyone sleeping in alleys and riverbank mudflats to find a soft place to spend the night, when I can get the hang of processing all this information. I see so much and can’t keep up; I’m scared of making a mistake and putting someone’s life in danger.

  “Somebody’s going to find out,” Adithi warns me. “Someone won’t be careful. They’ll steal something, wreck something, leave a clue, and then the swells in their fancy boots will be after us. And eventually someone will talk and say you told them where to break in and sleep.”

  “That doesn’t matter if they don’t know where we sleep.”

  “I’m just saying it’s going to make things more dangerous for us. For everybody.”

  “The city watch can squeeze Khul Bashab all it wants, but we will slip through their grasp, Adithi. You know what we are like? We’re like a fart you try to strangle into silence in polite company but it makes a defiant, triumphant squeak as it escapes the tyranny of your ass.”

  My friend cocked her head. “Okay, Hanima? No. I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but that’s not a very heroic comparison. I don’t want to be a cloud of smelly gases.”

  “I thought it was appropriate, as the authority we’re thwarting in that scenario is literally an asshole. Or metaphorically an asshole. Whatever, it was clever assplay.”

  “Yes, all right, I’ll admit that part was good, but you made us into a poot. And not a particularly strong or robust one either.”

  “How can you say that? It was determined and won its freedom despite intense pressure.”

  Adithi struggles to keep a straight face and ultimately loses the battle. She chuckles a couple of times before continuing. “Look, I’m just saying you could have picked a nobler metaphor. Like a baby stalk hawk hatching from its shell—or maybe a fledgling taking its first flight, fighting gravity.”

  “Yeah, that’s noble and makes us sound good, but that’s not how the viceroy or the city watch thinks of us. I’m not saying they want to strangle baby birds—I hope they don’t—but they also don’t treat us like a protective eggshell would, and they definitely don’t treat us equally, the way the steady pressure of gravity does. To them, we’re something that needs suppression.”

  “Kalaad,” she mutters, shaking her head. “I’m glad Tamhan is writing the broadsides, because you’d be telling people to rise up like a belch.”

  “That wouldn’t be bad. People pay attention to belches.”

  “Let’s move to wherever we’re staying tonight,” she says, changing the subject. “While the swells are out to lunch and talking about us and the watch is too busy protecting them from beggars to be looking for us.”

  Hoods pulled down over our features, we move through alleys until we find an empty house near the river that some ants told me about—food left out in the kitchen and nobody caring if they ate it all. It smells a bit ripe, but the rest of the place is in good condition. The bedrooms are pristine. Whoever owns it will be back, but it should be safe for a night or two.

  We crash through the afternoon and wake up after dark, our new custom, and I reconnect with the hives while Adithi checks in with the horses.

  The hives see plenty, but they haven’t seen Sudhi yet. Wherever he’s hiding, it’s not where bees, wasps, and ants roam. I wonder if he’s doing that on purpose. Nobody else thinks to hide from passing insects. They wear masks of civility so long as they feel human eyes upon them, but when they think there aren’t any witnesses…well. I’ve heard stories. Back when I couldn’t talk, I learned to listen real well. I heard that the city watch made people disappear sometimes. Almost always poor people, but occasionally someone more prosperous who’d managed to draw the ire of the vice
roy. But I’d never seen the black tar pits of their souls until recently. It is…unpretty.

  After sundown, most of the hives that talk to me during the day are quiet, but there is a single nocturnal species of bee that thrives on night-blooming flowers, competing only with moths and the occasional bat for nectar. And there are burrow wasps galore outside the walls that hunt along the river and stray a short distance onto city shores while they’re at it. They’re the ones that tell me something’s up. Them and Adithi.

  “The horses aren’t in the stable. I mean, most of them aren’t,” she says. “They’re down by the river for some reason.”

  “So the watch is at the docks?”

  “No. The west-side mudflats. Where the water’s dirtiest, where…”

  “Where I used to live.”

  “I wasn’t much better off. I was in a shack near one of the gates. Noisy and liable to be robbed as not.”

  “Are they in the shantytown where you were?”

  “No. On the shore.”

  Only the poorest of the poor live there. If they don’t get out when the floodwaters come each year, they just get swept away. I’m pretty sure the viceroy counts on it as a way to control the population of the poor. That’s why Tamhan had no trouble finding seekers like me. When he came, we had a lean winter and a flood to look forward to, nothing more, so why not take a chance? But I still know plenty of the folks living there. It’s a strange and filthy place, where everyone wears an exquisite veneer of kindness and manners over a core of desperation.

  The docks are on the east side, boardwalks and some guarded warehouses reaching out to where the river flows year-round, all safely out of the squelching mudflats that teem with insects and the homeless who don’t even have an alley’s worth of shelter. There is a deep wall sunk at either end of the city’s boundary to protect against flesh eels, but that is the only courtesy the city extends to the unfortunate. The flats lead up to the many arched gates guarded with portcullises; the east-side gates are always open, always monitored by the watch, and we aren’t always welcome to travel through there. Of the four west-side arches, only one remains open regularly for our use, and passing through is always an opportunity for harassment, since it is never used by the moneyed people.

  “Do the horses know what’s going on?”

  “Lots of angry humans. Trampling some things. They don’t like it.” Adithi has more of an emotional connection with the horses than a visual or auditory one. Hives aren’t into emotions, so I get more sensory information.

  “Okay, let me see if I have any eyes there….”

  The burrow wasps show me what’s going on. The city watch is rifling through the few possessions the river folk have and beating them because they can. No one will fight back. No one will ever get their revenge. Maybe this is a response to the broadsides; I don’t know. I can’t tell what anyone is saying, if anything. The burrow wasps can share what they see, but language is just a mess of noise to them and they don’t process sound well, so I can’t pick anything out. I tell Adithi all this and say, “We have to help.”

  “We can’t go down there and deliver ourselves to them.”

  “No, but you can make the horses ride away, right?”

  “Yes, but that will give us away too, won’t it?”

  “How? We’ll be right here.”

  “It’ll tell them we’re nearby and watching. It’ll teach them that this is how they get us to respond, and they’ll do it more. And it will confirm the rumor that I have the ability to control horses, when Tamhan wants people to be uncertain about that. If I do anything, it’ll just make them come back on foot and push those poor people harder.”

  “What, so we do nothing?”

  “No, we get back at the watch on their behalf. But we make it seem like it’s in response to something else.”

  “When? I can’t just sit here and not help.”

  “We can’t help anyone if we’re caught. Look, tomorrow we’ll get a message to Tamhan. We’ll pick a target on the watch—or he will—and we’ll blame what we do on some rich guy, for an extra helping of justice.”

  “Let’s at least go down there and help when they’re done. Find out what started this.”

  Adithi agrees to that, and we make our way down to the flats by going out the western gate, leaving our new hooded tunics behind. We look like we’re headed to our patch for the night, since we’re dressed in the torn and bloodstained clothing we had from the seeking. It’s easy to keep our eyes lowered, and the watchmen, having fun recounting the whupping they doled out earlier, aren’t interested in harassing us.

  I realize I haven’t been back here since I left for the seeking. I recognize some of the faces in passing, but I don’t make eye contact and I don’t say anything; when they last saw me, I was mute.

  “You should do the talking,” I tell Adithi.

  “Okay, fine, but who do we talk to?” she says. The flats are a chaotic churn of people in the aftermath, some trying to take advantage of the chaos and some trying to reestablish order.

  In the middle of the worst damage there’s a boy I know—or a young man, I suppose. He’s kneeling in the ruin, staring despondently at a bedroll that’s been trampled and torn, some personal effects scattered around it. One eye is swollen shut, and blood from a scalp wound is caking up in his hair. His clothes are the same rags I’ve seen him wear for the past couple of years.

  I wouldn’t say we are friends, exactly. We’ve never even shared our names with each other. But he’s never tried to steal from me, and he gave me a heads-up a few times about dangers coming my way. Whenever I scored more food than I could eat in a sitting, I sought him out and gave him some. That’s about as close to an alliance as you could find down by the river without joining an actual crew. We were, I suppose, a psuedo-crew of two, but we had no desire to join a crew otherwise. They indulge in the same petty cruelties that the swells do.

  Adithi and I squat next to him and wave. It takes him a moment to register that we are there and another few beats to recognize me.

  “Oh, hey. You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

  Asking after my safety first. That’s a sweet guy. I shake my head and point at his with a concerned grimace.

  “Yeah. They got me pretty good. And my bedroll is now just so much stuffing.”

  I frown but then clap Adithi on the shoulder, smile, and give two thumbs up, establishing her bona fides.

  “Hi, I’m Adithi,” she says.

  “Hello. I’m Jahi.”

  “Good to meet you. We were in the city and so we missed what happened. What was the watch after?”

  “They’re after these kids that they say have powers over animals. Three of them. If we rat them out, we get paid. If we don’t, they’ll be back to run over us again.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Yes. Knocked down by a man on a horse.”

  I want to talk to him but don’t feel like we have privacy here. There are people nearby who can hear us, and I don’t want to start talking and have to explain that I’m one of the people the watch is looking for. That would be unwise. I don’t think Jahi would ever give us up, but I can’t count on the rest of these people to keep our secret. With some gestures and expressions, I indicate that Jahi should come with us into the city. I want to help people, so I might as well start with him.

  At the gate, we get questioned on why we’re coming into the city so late, and Adithi explains it’s to help Jahi get cleaned up and bandaged.

  “You have a place to do that, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  They search us “for weapons” and are disappointed that we’re not carrying anything they can confiscate.

  Once we’re through and I confirm with a few of those nocturnal bees that we aren’t being followed,
I speak.

  “Hi, Jahi. I can talk now.”

  He blinks his one unswollen eye rapidly. “What? Since when?”

  “Since I got blessed.”

  “You? You mean you’re—”

  “Yes. I’m Hanima, the hivemistress. One of the beast callers they’re looking for.”

  “Kalaad’s sky-blue balls!”

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t help while they were doing this to you. We couldn’t give ourselves away.”

  “Well, no, I should think not!”

  “We can help you now, though. We can find a place for you to sleep each night in the city, if you’re not above breaking and entering but then leaving everything alone.”

  “I’m not above much at the moment. I’m barely above the grave.”

  “Good. I’m working with Khamen Chorous to get everyone inside. It’ll work as long as people don’t steal stuff. Do you know him?”

  “Sure. Three brown teeth, horrendous digestive issues.”

  “That’s him. He’s a good guy, though.”

  “How are you getting people indoors?”

  “Ants have been finding vacant spaces for me. We coordinate through Khamen. You can help him if you want. We need to scale up and get more people to safety. The goal is to make it so the city watch can’t do what they did to you tonight. We don’t want anybody sleeping on the riverbank.”

  We take him to see Khamen and introduce him, explaining that Jahi will help out as needed and he’ll be staying with Khamen in a new place.

  Then we escort them both to a little two-bedroom house I’ve just learned about, which has been vacant for a couple of months at least. I was going to move there myself next with Adithi, because it would probably mean we didn’t have to relocate for a while, but it’s going to be better for Khamen and Jahi.

  It’s a wee place but pretty clean and still inside the River District; the ants took care of whatever food was there days ago. Jahi lights a candle, looks around, then looks up at the ceiling.

  “A roof,” he says. “I’m going to sleep under a roof.”