A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  “Hey, Gerstad,” he called from the back of the train, his brow furrowed and his nose scrunched up. “Might want to hold up and have a look and listen. Something’s dead.”

  I held up a fist to bring the train to a halt, the clop of hooves and the rolling crackle of wagon wheels on gravel trailing away into a silence so profound the hairs on my neck rose. There was the soft gurgle of the Gravewater River ahead and nothing else. We should have heard noises from the city, the low bustle and hum of community, of farm animals and children’s voices and people dickering in the market. I took a deep breath, trying to smell what Gyrsön smelled, but since my nose has been broken so many times and suffered some damage, it’s about as useful as a plantar wart. Not that I doubted Gyrsön for a second. If he smelled something dead, then it was so. It was certainly silent as the grave, an awful silence like the kind that falls when you’ve disappointed your parents and they take time to stare at you with hooded eyes, consciously reminding themselves that you’re their spawn and they are supposed to love you.

  We couldn’t see the river yet, for it was still obscured by trees, but it would be in view soon and the city walls with it. I turned around in the saddle to my corps, my dangerous dozen, and drew my lance out of its holster. They did likewise, angling points to either side for defense. There could be a gravemaw nearby. They tended to smell like death and quiet the forest around them. But no gravemaw would have rendered the city across the river silent.

  The raspy call of blackwings sent a chill down my spine. I liked to keep things light, and normally I’d be joking before we headed into blood and guts, but this time not a single quip came to mind.

  Using hand signals, I told my rapid and four mariners to follow me, leaving Mynstad Luren, Brön the hygienist, and three others to guard Gyrsön and the wagon in defensive formation. Once my split squad pulled away, I signaled that the two mariners immediately behind me and the rapid should ready bows while the others kept their lances out.

  We moved slowly forward, casting a wary eye to either side and keeping watch on the branches above as well. It could be a scurry of meat squirrels up there that had everything spooked.

  We were all spooked. Having the forest go quiet and still like this was expected deep in the trees. It was often a response to our presence, but the sounds of birds and other creatures always returned once they realized we were just passing through. This was not one of those quiets that fell into the spaces between trees and then returned. It was persistent.

  I caught my rapid’s nostrils flaring as my eyes darted to the left. He turned to catch my gaze and hold it. “I smell it now,” he whispered, and he gave a nod to confirm what Gyrsön had already told us, a curl of disgust rippling one side of his mouth. “It’s bad.”

  Sören du Hyller had been my rapid for ten years, and I had never seen that expression on his face before. He was a deep-running sort, the currents of his emotions flowing unseen beneath the surface. But they were no less powerful for being invisible. On the few occasions I’d made him crack a smile, I knew I’d told a pretty good joke. If he was openly showing his revulsion, then this mystery smell must be profoundly disturbing. Once we cleared the last curve of the trail and saw the bridge and the walls of Grynek over the river, I finally smelled it: rot and shit and the clammy sense of disease like wet wool in the nose.

  Blackwings circled over the city and perched on the walls. No watchers stood on them or in the towers. No, the watchers were all dead, their corpses draped over the battlements or lying in broken heaps at the base of the wall. A wide trail of blood smeared the side of the watchtower, the mariner who left it behind crumpled at the base. I recognized him even from a distance: That was Ewan du Wyndyl, who’d grown up with me and been my friend for forty years.

  Our breathing grew heavy as the horrible truth registered: The city had been sacked while we were away. That explained the silence and the smell.

  “Check the banks,” I said. “Look for scouts. Whoever did this might still be around.”

  But, of course, they were not. Once we confirmed that we were the only ones walking in the area, we crossed the bridge and I checked on Ewan du Wyndyl. He’d not been pierced with arrows or a spear but hacked open from above his shoulder—a cause of death that was highly improbable for a man alone in a watchtower. He’d been dead for some while, a few days at least, perhaps as much as a week or more. And the fact that he’d just been left where he fell all this time did not bode well. A week ago, we’d been in camp at the base of the Poet’s Range, skinning a den of striped murder weasels and using the guts to lure in something bigger. We got it: A hinge-mouthed bearcat came after us and got itself got. And its death in turn attracted still more hungry things, until we had ourselves a pile.

  And while we made that pile, someone was doing the same thing in Grynek. Our people were sprawled all over, their bodies being gnawed on by blackwings, cats, and dogs, and always slashed rather than stabbed or punctured. There was no evidence of who had done this or why. But we scattered and searched anyway, searched the city for the perpetrators and also survivors, and found the people we loved dead with all the rest but no clues about who was responsible. We may as well have been looking for summer moths in the snow.

  My parents were already gone, eternally disappointed that their firstborn had written an embarrassing collection of poems and become a sword for hire. But I found my brother and his family cut down in their home. My aunt and cousins. My friends. My lovers, both old and new. My favorite bartender, whom I’d never seen exist anywhere except behind his bar, died as he had lived, in that space.

  The tap still worked. They had left the beer.

  The Wellspring was littered with bodies, including those of the quartermaster and his rapids, but its treasures were left unspoiled. There was some blood and brains in there that did not belong to any Brynts, and some smeared puddles through which bodies had been dragged, which told me at least that the killers could be killed in turn and that they had dragged their dead away.

  They had not come for riches; perhaps they had come because they were hungry. Though they’d left the beer alone, food stores had been raided, sheep and pigs butchered. Otherwise, they had swept through and moved on.

  “Was it Raelechs?” Sören asked me when we reconvened in the public square. His mouth was carved in a straight line above his dimpled chin, whereas my face couldn’t seem to rest or find an expression that was appropriate to such horror.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense. Raelechs use blunt weapons or spears, and everyone here was killed with a sword. And the Raelechs have plenty of food; they wouldn’t need to come through here and take ours.”

  “But who else would come through?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said, “but we’re going to find out.”

  The other members of the band trickled back. We were known—or used to be known—as the Rapid Woodsmen, a double entendre that I thought funny for the first couple of days after we registered it but which grew embarrassing as soon as some women rotated into the band, and even more so as we got older and we found that we couldn’t shake it. The quartermaster had tasked us with keeping the wood across the river free of gravemaws and other large predators, to make sure they didn’t get ideas about crossing and snacking on the farmers’ livestock, with an eye to eventually making that side of the river habitable. In return for this we kept any furs, meat, horns, or hides we brought back for sale, and it sure beat standing watch on the wall. Besides me, the core team was Gyrsön, the cook; Mynstad Luren, the master of horse; Brön du Massyf, the hygienist; and our rapid, Sören du Hyller, who pulled water out of the brain tissue of anything that got too close to our throats. We filled out the team with a rotating stock of seven mariners for each trip, to spread the wealth around a little bit. On this particular rotation, four of the seven mariners were women. Most of us were still in the shock sta
ges of grief, the foyer to a mansion of pain in which I knew we’d dwell for many years. Just beyond, however, a red room beckoned, a spacious expanse for rage, and I had little doubt the entire band would step in there with me for an extended period.

  “All dead,” Brön muttered when he returned, not really addressing me or anyone in particular. His eyes kept darting around at the buildings and bodies nearby, adding sums in his head and arriving at the same conclusion: “All of them.”

  Gyrsön staggered up to us, weeping, his nose and eyes red and puffy, snot dribbling down his mustache. “We should’ve been here. If we’d been here, we could have—”

  “We’d be dead like everyone else,” I told him, and swept my gaze around at the others to make sure they received the message. “The rapids and the mariners who were here did everything they could, and still they fell. They were obviously overwhelmed. And we would have been overwhelmed too, no question. As it is, we can still do something.”

  Mynstad Luren snorted, the old pale scar lining the left side of his face almost glowing as the rest of his face flushed in anger. “What? You think we can balance the scales?”

  “No. I don’t think there’s a scale left for this. The scale’s been melted into slag at this point and there is no way, no way, we will ever be able to measure out what’s due. But we can survive, mourn, and remember, and tell whoever will listen what happened. Because whoever did this wanted no one saying a word.”

  Sören nodded, his face impassive. If he had wept or punched a wall or done anything to express his grief at the slaughter, I could not see it. All I could perceive was a tightening of his features, a tautness of every muscle, perhaps the deepening of a few lines on his face. His voice, too, was tight and controlled, as if he were speaking past a sob he had gulped down. “Is that all?”

  “No. That was me speaking to you all as a friend. And I have one more thing to say along those lines before I speak as a gerstad: Cry when you feel like it and as long as you wish. There will be no judgment from me. But don’t let it impair your duty or the need to act. Because as your gerstad I will require you to act. We should be on leave now, but obviously the situation’s changed. In a moment I will give orders. Before I do, does anyone wish to say anything amongst friends?”

  Gyrsön raised a shaking hand, his great nose trembling. “I just want to say to you all that I feel your grief as my own right now. And I will always love you. That is all.”

  We grunted assent and wept in silence after that, having nothing to add but the occasional sob. Eventually, I cleared my throat and said we should get down to business.

  “First: For many reasons, which I hope are obvious but I will explain if you wish, I do not think we should be called the Rapid Woodsmen any longer. I do not wish to change it, however, without your thoughts. Are there any objections to discarding that name?”

  There were none. There were some sniffles and glazed eyes and some shakes of the head but no objections.

  “Good. From now on we will call ourselves the Grynek Hunters. For that is what we will do: Hunt for answers first. Who did this, and where did they go, and how many of them can we kill?”

  Fire blazed in the band’s eyes at those words, and fingers curled into fists. We were all going to step together into that red room of anger inside the mansion of grief.

  “Yes. We will hunt them down. And we must report what happened so that the pelenaut can respond; the entire country may be unaware for all we know. We will need to move fast. So: Gyrsön, Brön, and you two,” I said, pointing to the two largest mariners, “I need you to find provisions for us and load up a couple of boats down at the docks. We’ll leave as soon as possible. Let the horses go. Find some crossbows and plenty of bolts but also lots of arrows for the conventional bows. And see if you can find a boat that will serve as a funeral barge. Everyone who would like to see their loved ones buried properly at sea, we will take them downriver with us.”

  Fresh tears sprang at the mention of that, but Brön nodded and said, “Aye, Gerstad.”

  “The rest of you are going to come with me to the Granite Tunnel, and we’ll see if we can find any clues there. Everyone with bows ready and eyes sharp for watchers. If they left anyone behind, they’ll be stationed near the tunnel entrance.”

  We moved out and headed for the western gates, which were thrown open. The ground was churned by large footprints and wagon ruts heading west. The invading army had exited this way. There were a few farms nestled between the city walls and the great tunnel that passed underneath the Poet’s Range, and off to the south a fume of blackwings circled over a charred patch in a bean field. Sören wrinkled his nose again.

  “Cooked meat,” he said. “They burned their dead over there. Should we have a look?”

  “No. That looks like a mess of ash and bone. I’m glad we got some of them, but it clearly wasn’t enough. I’m more interested in where the living ones went.”

  We saw no one on the way to the tunnel. When we got there, we found that the entrance wasn’t guarded because there was, quite simply, nothing left to guard.

  “Aw, well, here’s a crooked swamp duck dick,” Luren said, one of his favorite idioms to indicate he’d just been surprised by something unpleasant, but he hadn’t said it until now, even though the entire day was filled with such surprises. “What happened?”

  The entrance to the Granite Tunnel, created generations ago by Raelech stonelords and connecting Rael to Brynlön’s river cities, was completely caved in. The mountain had settled down into it, not merely covered the entrance—a line of trees above it had tumbled or sunk up to their lower branches, and the first of many ventilation chimneys was missing completely. It meant that our trade with Rael would now be limited to the sea, since very little, if anything, passed over the Poet’s Range. Wolves, meat squirrels, and murder weasels made it too dangerous without heavy protection, and by the time one paid for mercenaries like us, the profits were all gone.

  “The Raelechs must have got them,” I said.

  “What? Got who?” Luren asked.

  “The blasted crab cakes we’re hunting! Whoever they were, they swept through Grynek and right into the tunnel, headed for Baseld. Not too hard to figure the Raelechs wanted no part of an army that could wipe out a city. So they dropped the mountain on top of them.”

  “I hope they did,” Sören said, and something like the shadow of a snarl passed across his face. “Much as I would like to personally pull their brains out of their ears, I’m glad it’s done.” He spat a glob of phlegm and then used his kenning to push the water in it toward the cave-in, so it splattered on the army’s tomb. “But it does make me wonder who they were and how they got here without us hearing about it ahead of time.”

  We were out of Grynek by sundown, because we had no wish to stay there during the night. I doubted any of us would ever return in the flesh. We’d visit it often in nightmares, no doubt.

  Finding a funeral barge was easy, since the actual funeral barges used by the city’s undertaker were tied up at the docks. We needed all three of them for our loved ones. I tied up in burlap bags my brother and his family, my aunt and cousins, my old friend Ewan du Wyndyl, and my bartender. I figured he’d spent enough time behind that bar and he’d like to go home to the sea. We also took the keg of beer. Didn’t seem right to leave it behind, unappreciated. And we had many sorrows to drown.

  Sören helped me haul my people to the docks, and I helped him with his family. I let my tears flow freely, and a good bit of snot besides, and fought to breathe past the lump in my throat, which choked me as if I’d tried to swallow a sea scallop whole. Sören remained silent throughout, even while we were wrapping up his wife and children. But he did look up once and catch me staring at him. The dimple in his chin looked different somehow. Normally it resembled a relaxed if bony ass, but now it looked like the cheeks had clenched.<
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  “I don’t grieve openly, Daryck,” he said. “But I assure you that I am grieving.”

  “Oh, of course,” I replied, nodding, but that wasn’t sufficient for him.

  “As you said you would judge no one for their tears, I hope you will not judge me for my lack of them.”

  “No. I wouldn’t. I don’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  We wound up taking five boats from the docks, two each of our company on the barges and three each on the light cargo craft that Brön’s crew had prepared. We could have all fit on one of them, for they were decent-sized boats that had bunks for twelve, but Brön quite sensibly thought it would be prudent to allow room for rescues we might find along the way.

  Normally we would have sung songs or told stories or played cards—something! But we wrapped ourselves in silence like blankets and felt no urge to crawl out from under them for the days it took us to pole down the river to Sturföd. There was a dawn of hope as we neared it and saw the walls in the distance, all of us anxious to see other people and not feel like we were the only Brynts left in the world. We’d seen no one on the Merchant Trail on the way down, no campfires or wagons.

  And then, drawing closer, we saw that Sturföd had suffered the same fate as Grynek. Everyone had been put to the sword. But it had happened earlier, and the bodies had lain there longer. The smell was powerful, and a cloud of blackwings rose up at our appearance, startled that something was living nearby.

  We stopped only to confirm that there was no one alive in the Wellspring, and then we moved on downriver, stunned. I took my turn on one of the funeral barges with Sören du Hyller.

  “All right, Gerstad, let me think something through out loud,” he said as he poled us away.

  “Go ahead.”

  “People in Grynek had been dead about a week when we got there. Presumably the people here in Sturföd died a few days earlier than that. And if it holds true downriver—Bryn preserve us, I hope it doesn’t, but if it does—then they would have died well before we left on our trip and in time for someone to come on up and warn us. But you didn’t hear anything about raiders or armies or anything on their way, am I right?”