A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  “Right.”

  “And the quartermaster wasn’t acting weird or anything?”

  “No. He was perfectly fine with us leaving the city. He was hoping we’d find a good batch of murder weasels, in fact. Said he’d buy the furs.”

  “So either he didn’t know the attack was coming, or…” Sören faltered, his brow furrowing.

  “Or what?”

  “Or…I don’t know. I didn’t know the quartermaster well. I don’t know how he’d behave in a crisis.”

  “I don’t either. Biggest crisis I ever saw him face was a lack of cake one night. That seemed like it chapped his ass pretty hard, but I don’t think it really tested his mettle.”

  The rapid snorted, as close as he could get to a laugh. And then, almost too quietly to hear over the soft gurgle of the river, he said, “We had it good for a while, Daryck.”

  I matched his tone, not wishing our conversation to carry to another boat. “Yes, we did. We surely did, and we should remember that. We may never have it so good again. But we need to remember that good is possible, without letting those memories drive us mad.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “You run pretty deep for a gerstad whose chief claim to glory is a collection of penis poems and fighting with goats.”

  “That was one time, and it was just an argument! Everybody keeps making more out of it than there was.”

  “Well. They won’t anymore.”

  “No,” I said soberly. “I’d much rather have them here getting the story wrong. Or telling me my poems are terrible.”

  “I won’t tell you your cock sonnets are terrible. If anything, you should be proud. I think they stand tall.”

  I whipped my head around. Sören’s face was blank, as if he’d done nothing but comment on the weather.

  “Stand tall? Did you just make a terrible pun?”

  “I don’t think my puns are terrible either.”

  I laughed for the first time since the day before. Sören remained expressionless, but I think his butt chin relaxed a tiny bit.

  When we got to Fornyd, we feared at first that it had suffered the same fate as the other cities, but longshoremen emerged on the docks and waved at us, and we pulled in. One of them, an earnest young lad, took me directly to the Wellspring to see the quartermaster. The city seemed very quiet, half empty.

  “Were you attacked?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  “We evacuated ahead of the invasion. The Bone Giants passed through, taking some food but leaving the rest of the city alone. Most of the city is still down at Tömerhil, but more and more are coming back every day.”

  “The Bone Giants? That’s who did this?”

  “That’s what they’re calling them.”

  “What do they want?”

  The longshoreman shrugged. “They’re killing machines, like bladefins. That’s all we know right now.”

  I saved the rest of my questions for Quartermaster Farlen du Cannym. She stared at me, unblinking, her mouth pressed into a thin line, as I reported that Sturföd and Grynek were total losses, that I had confirmed the deaths of their quartermasters myself, and that the Granite Tunnel was collapsed, with no sign of the invading army.

  She closed her eyes for a few seconds and then let out a long sigh of exhaustion and took a seat. When she spoke, however, a hand curled into a fist and her voice trembled with rage.

  “So they ignored my warnings.”

  “I beg your pardon? What warnings?”

  “Gerstad, I sent a rapid upriver to warn both Sturföd and Grynek that the Bone Giants were coming and that they should evacuate their cities and let them pass through. That rapid returned to me and confirmed that the messages were delivered. But obviously neither quartermaster chose to act to save their people.”

  “That was the only choice? Evacuate?”

  “Yes. They were unstoppable, clearly. You know that Festwyf is also lost? And Gönerled, Göfyrd, Möllerud, and Hillegöm? The Raelech city of Bennelin?”

  I was gobsmacked. “…No.”

  “The tidal mariners saved Pelemyn and Setyrön; Tömerhil was never attacked, and we survived by taking the tidal mariners’ advice and getting out of the way. But that’s all that’s left of our nation.”

  I felt dizzy, light-headed. “…Why?”

  “Why what? Why did they attack?”

  “No—well, yes, that too, but why didn’t the quartermaster do anything? He could have saved everyone.”

  Farlen du Cannym shrugged. “It’s not an easy thing to convince people they need to run from an invisible threat. Plenty of people fought me on the evacuation order. Some refused to evacuate, and they died. They chose to die rather than sacrifice a moment of comfortable routine. The danger wasn’t real to them until it arrived in their faces, and then it was too late.”

  That sounded like the quartermaster of Grynek. He’d been so comfortable for so long that danger was something abstract, something the Rapid Woodsmen dealt with for him, out of sight, across the river. I liked that this quartermaster was smarter about it. I liked that she had saved her city and was first back, trying to patch things together.

  “Quartermaster, I find myself without a city or a contract. Might the Grynek Hunters and I work for you but remain a unit under my command?”

  She tilted her head. “You have a rapid, correct?”

  “Yes. And a hygienist. A mynstad specialist in weapons and horse, a cook, and seven mariners proficient in horse archery.”

  “A fine company. But if you’re looking for revenge, I haven’t any to give you. There are no Bone Giants around. The work I have is repairing damage and making trips to clean up the other cities. That’s the pelenaut’s priority: burial of the dead and resettlement.”

  “I could not agree more with those priorities. We brought three funeral barges down from Grynek, carrying our friends and family, and would like to see them home to the sea.”

  “I’ll have someone else see them home. I’d like your company to rest for a few days, and when the barges return, you can take them and many more back to Grynek; your company can lead cleanup efforts there for me.”

  “Thank you, Quartermaster.”

  I did not relish the duty but saw the necessity of it and felt it was the least I could do. We did rest, then we made a trip up to Grynek to make sure the Gravewater was not getting any more polluted and loaded all the bodies we could on the barges to take them to the ocean.

  But upon our return to Fornyd—expecting another run for more, since there was so much more to do—Quartermaster du Cannym summoned me to the Wellspring and surprised me with new orders.

  “Pelenaut Röllend believes for some reason that there might be a large force of Bone Giants somewhere on the northern coast. He’s requested that we try to find out somehow if this is true, and it occurred to me that the Grynek Hunters might be uniquely suited to the mission. Naturally, I’m anxious to confirm this. If the Bone Giants are indeed to the north of us and capable of attacking, I’d prefer to know sooner rather than later.”

  I frowned at her. “Is there a trail leading from here to the northern coast?”

  “No. We had no company such as yours here. You would be blazing the trail. Alone in uncharted stretches of the Gravewood.”

  I nodded, understanding her. She did not want to order me to do this, for it sounded like a death sentence to her. She wanted me to volunteer but did not think I ever, as a sane individual, would volunteer for such duty. It would be better to distract her from the question.

  “What does the pelenaut wish us to do, specifically?”

  “Strike north until you reach the Northern Yawn. Search for a force of Bone Giants—they may have a fleet. You are to scout only. The pelenaut wants numbers. How many of them are there? Where are they headed?
How are they armed? Simple facts. He does not want you to engage them. He does not want you to do anything that may prevent an accurate report returning to me, and thereby him. It is reconaissance, nothing more. Is that clear?”

  “Clear as a freshwater lake. But how do we know that there are Bone Giants up there?”

  “The pelenaut managed to get hold of some of their internal communications, and a Kaurian scholar was able to translate their language. There may be a force up there somewhere as large as the one that destroyed the river cities. Based simply on timing, we believe they would be west of us now, but we don’t know, and we need to know. Is this a force that could threaten us again, or are they intent on invading Rael, or crossing the Northern Yawn, or what?”

  Without a solid trail we couldn’t take a wagon of provender, which annoyed Gyrsön no end, but once we got going, we had no trouble finding enough meat to fill our bellies. We moved north without trying to establish a trail of any sort; we did not want to be tracked in turn and lead anyone back to Fornyd.

  We got attacked, of course, by gravemaws and the usual sorts of hungry things that wound up feeding us, but we also ran into a small pack of meat-eating simians that we’d only heard tell of in legends: fir apes, with reddish-brown pelts and arms like tree boughs. We hated to kill them, since we suspected there were few of them left, but they were rather intent on killing us; they took out one of the rearguard mariners, roaring and backhanding him with such power that he flew bodily through the air and burst his skull open on a tree. Three of them reconsidered and retreated after Sören dropped four others, pulling water out of their brains.

  Having no choice, we built a cairn for the dead mariner and promised to take him home to the sea later.

  Once we reached the northern shore, still a bit chilly even in the warm months, we turned west. At a freshwater stream that emptied into the ocean, we found large footprints churning up the mud.

  The Bone Giants had been there, refilling water barrels for their fleet. There was evidence of a massive camp too, the ashes of many fires indicating the army had taken advantage of the freshwater source and had rested for a day or so.

  “Good,” Mynstad Luren ground out between his teeth. The pale scar glowed again with his anger. He was the biggest of us, and his granite jaw tended to break knuckles rather than the other way around. “They’re careless and we’re going to find them. These won’t be swallowed up by a mountain.”

  * * *

  —

  The immediate demand from the crowd was to know when we’d hear more of the Grynek Hunters. They were already heroes in my mind, and I wanted to give them all a gift basket. Something aromatic for Gyrsön, the cook. But what about the others? Fintan needed to help us out with their tastes, because we desperately needed to make plans for our baskets. And more regarding this Bone Giant army: Did we have anything to fear? Were they already crushed somehow? Or were they still out there?

  It was so precisely the sort of thing that Rölly had tasked me to learn that I congratulated myself on waiting a day to ask Fintan anything. Now that the bard had brought up Daryck himself, I had an opening to ask him about the north tomorrow without it seeming suspicious.

  “I promise to reveal all,” Fintan reassured everyone. “But let’s switch now to Abhinava Khose, who was also in the Gravewood, albeit on the Nentian side.”

  There are unseen wonders beneath our feet. In the trees and in the grasses, in the brambles and marshes, wherever we tread, there are creatures hiding or ignoring us completely, consumed by their struggle for food and shelter and the urge to mate. Once we crossed north of the Gravewater River, these creatures were almost entirely new to me. The Gravewood was a vastly different environment from the plains, and I spent most of my time agog at the wonder of it, identifying new insects, spiders, carnivores, and herbivores of a startling variety, and airborne citizens of a different variety as well. There were no cheek raptors in the Gravewood. No blackwings either. Other creatures performed the carrion duties.

  I could quite happily—and profitably, I imagine—spend my life doing little else than cataloging the creatures of the world. The journal I was keeping would no doubt be prized material at any university interested in forest animals. Perhaps I could write volumes broken down into beetles, spiders, things that will eat you, and so on: The Khose Catalog of Creatures. That would be a much better legacy than a paragraph in a history book that ended with “He tragically died young as his kenning burned away his life.”

  Running away from my problems feels good right now. I know they’ll still be there when I return, but maybe I’ll be in a better position to face them after some time to myself. Maybe I’ll be able to maintain my independence from the government and live to a proper old age. Maybe I’ll forgive myself for the deaths of my family. Maybe I’ll tell Tamhan how I feel, even though it carries a risk of failure even greater than seeking a kenning.

  Or maybe none of that will happen. I’m probably trading one set of problems for another. Regardless, I’m going to enjoy the run. And worry about Eep and Murr.

  “Look, I know that in the plains you two were at the top of the food chain, but here in the Gravewood, that’s not necessarily true.”

  They just blinked at me.

  “Do you know what a food chain is?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “When you’re at the top of a food chain, you eat animals lower on the chain and nothing eats you. When you’re at the bottom of a food chain, pretty much everything eats you. Now, I’m not saying you’re at the bottom here, but neither are you necessarily at the top. There are some critters out there that would eat you if they could. So I want you to let me know when you’re hungry and let me scan for danger before you go hunting, okay?”

  “Murr,” the bloodcat said, and the stalk hawk followed up with “Eep.” That could mean “okay” or it could be them telling me to buzz off. The communication doesn’t work so well in my direction, but at least they understood me. They knew that I was their friend.

  One other thing worried me: I was discovering animals that my kenning didn’t warn me about. There was this ten-legged hairy lizard living under a bush that Eep found and showed me. She might have just wanted me to see this weird thing, but I think maybe she was asking me if it would be okay to eat.

  The legs were short and the body was quite long, and upon closer examination the hair was actually feathers. They would be well camouflaged against the trunks of the pines and blend in with needles on the forest floor as well. Fintan said he’d never seen anything like it, and neither had anyone else in the group, so I named it a pine-feathered mega skink, because I could. And after that, I was able to sense them around me. But I’d never sensed them prior to that, and I thought that was quite disturbing. It suggested that my kenning had blind spots. What else wasn’t I seeing?

  It happened again a couple of days later, with these bounding creatures that jumped out of the forest and attacked a wart ox at the front of the train. Once I saw them, I could tell them to cut that out and hunt something else, but they did take a nibble out of the ox and it had to be calmed down.

  There was a pack of nine, and they waited patiently while Olet, Fintan, and I examined them.

  “Do you know what these are?” I asked Olet.

  “No. They look like these things called roos, but those are not pack hunters. And they’re marsupials.”

  I asked the tawny animals, after teaching them body language for yes and no, “Do you use pouches for your young ones?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Are they born live?”

  Again, no.

  Half joking, I asked, “Do you lay eggs?”

  They nodded.

  “What strange creatures,” Fintan said.

  “Yeah. Hey, open up your mouths, will you? I just want to get a
good look at your teeth.”

  They complied, and Olet made a tiny sound of surprise. “Okay, that’s a lot. I thought they were cute until they did that, and now that’s going to haunt me.”

  “They’re like meat squirrels,” Fintan observed. “They look harmless, but watch out.”

  “We’ll call them toothy roos,” I declared. And then I searched for more of them with my kenning and discovered there was another pack not far ahead, coming in our direction because they smelled blood. I had to send them away disappointed as well, and we got that ox patched up as best we could. I walked alongside her to make sure nothing finished her off and apologized for not stopping the toothy roos sooner.

  It worried me, though, and I think Olet as well, because she asked me about it.

  “How we doing here, plaguebringer? We have the animal situation under control?”

  “Yes. I think. At least I’m sure I can protect against everything I know about.”

  “Everything you know about?”

  “Right. I mean, I know what insects are and I know what mammals and reptiles are and so on. I can protect against all of those, even if I haven’t personally seen the species before. I already have! There were some murder weasels stalking the rear, but I shooed them away.”

  “Murder weasels?”

  “Yeah. They’re like weasels but bigger and with more teeth, like these toothy roos and like most everything in this forest. I’d heard of them before. There was a huge bear too—not sure what kind, but it doesn’t matter, because I know what bears are—and I protected some goats from a flock of bloodsucking bats. Those animals are all at least somewhat familiar. But a carnivorous roo that lays eggs? A pine-feathered mega skink? I have no frame of reference for those!”

  “But you do now.”

  “Yes. They won’t bother us down the road.”