A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  I realized I didn’t truly understand how food got distributed. My understanding of food was that somebody grew it or caught it or raised it and then magic happened and I was able to buy it.

  Clearly something was wrong in the magic stages.

  Since Rölly was busy in the Wellspring, I composed a note to be delivered to him and Föstyr, saying that something untoward was happening and the refugee kitchen wasn’t getting any food. He had probably heard through other channels, but in case he hadn’t, I couldn’t let it slide.

  I went down to the docks to see if I could learn anything, but all I really saw was that fishing boats were in or coming in and they had fish. But I didn’t know if I was looking at normal, elevated, or substandard levels. I also didn’t know who to talk to about the issue.

  I met Fintan at the chowder house and saw immediately that there was something wrong there too: The chowder was extremely thin, mostly clam-flavored broth with a few nubbins of vegetables and very little actual meat. Here, at least, I could ask someone: my server. In the politest possible fashion, since it was not his fault.

  “Sorry—I want to ask about your food supply, since the chowder seems a bit thin. Not being critical, because you have to work with what you got. Is what you’re getting…normal?”

  The server shook his head. “No, we’re way down in most everything. We’re good on salt and pepper and those little crackers and that’s about it.”

  “What happened?”

  Fintan and I were treated to an elaborate shrug and roll of the eyes. “What didn’t happen? The pelenaut mandated a certain portion of every catch had to go to the refugees, so that reduced every restaurant’s available supply right away. The fishermen had to up their prices to make up for the losses they were taking on the refugee sales. Then restaurants ordered less because they couldn’t afford to pay more—or else they passed that cost on to customers. And then last night, some fishermen decided to just leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “Yep. To Festwyf, which is being resettled, or to Setyrön, or even to Göfyrd, believe it or not, because that Raelech stonecutter the bard told us about is basically building free houses for everyone, so why not move there?”

  “Why indeed? They’re guaranteed to sell everything they catch here.”

  “But they don’t want to sell part of it at a discount.”

  “Ugh. Okay, thanks. That makes sense.” When the server left, I shook my head at Fintan. “Money.” I told him how the refugee kitchen had not received anything in the past couple of days.

  “If it’s not getting anything, then it’s not the fishermen who are the problem. It’s money, like you said.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know if this is exactly what’s happening, but I bet it’s something similar: Somebody’s figured out that they can sell fish once to the government for refugees, steal it, then sell it again to restaurants and grocers at an even higher price because they can blame the refugee situation.”

  “Bryn save us. We’re already in the abyss.”

  “You’re a student of history, though, right? You know that whenever terrible decisions get made at the expense of a large group of people, it’s because a smaller group of people stand to profit.”

  “Yes, I know. You’re right.” I felt so sad for Rölly at that moment. He’d tried to help and it sort of worked, but then people sabotaged his efforts. He hadn’t taken greed into proper account. And he had so many decisions to make like that every day.

  When, I wondered, would we get out of our own way?

  With protein on our minds, Fintan’s song was dedicated to fishmongers, though it was a lighthearted look at an occupational hazard. It was an up-tempo strum of a lute, which he’d stop before the last line of each verse and state, a cappella:

  After spending all day

  In the sun and spray

  With the stink of fish

  I have just one wish,

  I have just one hope:

  A bath and a bar of soap.

  Fish guts everywhere

  Chunks of it in my hair

  What do I need, ya think

  To get rid of this stink?

  Only one way I can cope:

  A bath and a bar of soap.

  A fishblade’s knife

  Is a part of my life

  So my friends know well

  I’ve got a powerful smell

  And I wouldn’t ever say nope

  To a bath and a bar of soap.

  It was with some amusement that I observed some people during the applause tilt their noses down to their armpits to check the status of their personal funk. When the bard was ready to continue after the break, he said, “I’ve been waiting to share today’s tales for a long time. It was a day that should rightly be recorded in the world’s histories. Because of Olet Kanek, Koesha Gansu, and Abhinava Khose, the world is much bigger for all of us. What we learned that day—and what we still stand to learn—was made possible by them. Let’s begin with Abhi.”

  We followed a river for a good while, every day seeming to get a bit chillier as we moved north, felling trees in a line that anyone could follow. I didn’t know how rich the land was for farming, but it seemed to support a wide variety of plants and it was certainly abundant with wildlife. The resources would be fantastic if it weren’t for the fact that many of the resources considered humans to be delicious.

  Was this what it’s like, I wondered, to be a chicken? It’s not paranoia if everything really does want to eat you.

  And then one day, as Fintan was telling me that some people in Rael actually like borchatta soup and there were little borchatta huts in a couple of Raelech cities peddling the world’s stinkiest fish, shouts of joy and laughter ahead made us hurry to catch up to the front of the line.

  The trees thinned, the river’s mouth revealed itself, and there it was: the Northern Yawn, miles and miles of cold blue sea that would soon ice over—or so we imagined, anyway. Facts about the Northern Yawn were scarce, apart from the fact that it was there.

  “We made it, kid!” Olet said, beaming an enthusiastic smile down at me. I think it might have been the first time I’d seen her truly happy, and it was infectious.

  “We sure did.”

  We stood on a berm perhaps four or five lengths above a rocky beach; the river had fallen down somewhat steeply to the sea about a hundred lengths upstream before lazing the rest of the way, leaving us on something that wasn’t exactly a cliff but wasn’t a gentle slope either.

  “I’m thinking this might be a pretty good spot—we have fresh water and we should be able to sail upriver to those falls, make a sheltered harbor there. Plenty of timber to work with. But I don’t know. What do you think? Plenty of fish in the sea and critters around for us to eat?”

  “I’d have to go down to the sea and put my feet in the surf to tell you about fish,” I replied, “but as far as wildlife, yes, it’s teeming around here, like everywhere else we’ve been.”

  “Would you mind dipping your tiny little toesies in there and doing that? I imagine everyone would like to know what we might find out there, since so little is known about the Northern Yawn.”

  “Only if you promise to never utter the phrase ‘tiny little toesies’ again.”

  “It’s a deal, kid. I’m going to scout upriver by the falls a bit more closely and get your countrymen excited about building a city here. And naming it!”

  I wondered when she’d decide I wasn’t a kid anymore. Fintan said he’d head down to the shore with me, and a couple of the Hathrim wanted to come along. They had been fisherfolk back in Harthrad, before Mount Thayil erupted, and then again at Baghra Khek. They’d be fisherfolk here as well, they figured, as soon as they got a boat built. Their names were Karlef and Suris Burik, yello
w-haired and blue-eyed folk with their pale skin tanned and wrinkled from spending years in the sun. They were perhaps a foot shorter than Olet, but that was still five feet taller than me. To them I guess my toesies really were tiny.

  It took us a decent while to pick our way downhill and cross the beach, with Karlef making plans out loud to carve some steps into the hillside and fortify them with beams of wood so everyone could get to the beach easier.

  The tide was out, revealing a large oyster bed and some tidal pools full of little creatures either trapped there or happy to remain even when high tide rolled in. Some nice-sized green-shelled crabs I’d never seen before skittered sideways away from us. They were probably super tasty. Suris commented on them and added them to a list of things she’d like to try. The oyster bed was a welcome discovery and would no doubt be visited soon. We finally got to some sand and surf and I pulled off my boots to wade in. Murr and Eep declined an invitation to join me, neither of them wanting to get wet. They remained safely outside the range of the surf.

  “Ah, Kalaad!” I cried out as the first wave washed up on my legs.

  “What is it?” Fintan said.

  “Cold!”

  The bard and the Hathrim laughed at me, but I ignored them and shivered, working my toes into the sand. Not wanting to get overwhelmed, I reached out with my kenning to just a few lengths, inquiring about what fish might be present. There were only a few, because my range was still in the shallows. I asked a bigger fish to jump out of the water just so we could see it, and it did, a shining silver wiggle that the Hathrim appreciated.

  “Did you do that?” Karlef asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are there more of them?”

  “Probably. I need to look around some more.”

  Careful to limit my search to only fish and not other kinds of marine life, I tripled the area and discovered that there were plenty of fish in this cold sea. It dropped off a shelf and deepened quite quickly, in fact, where there were some huge species that a Hathrim would find difficult to wrestle aboard.

  Crustaceans, check. Bladefins, check—several kinds.

  Karlef interrupted me to say that there was a blur on the horizon to the right, which could be land.

  “That might be an island over there,” he said. “Could be a great place to build a fishing village. Might have an inlet or something for a proper harbor.”

  I turned to Eep, who looked so very out of place on the rocky beach. “Eep, feel like scouting a little bit? There might be an island over to the right. The northeast. Whatever. We’d like to know more about it. I’ll ask you questions when you get back, like if you see any animals there.”

  She chirped an affirmative and took off. That let me return my attention to surveying this chunk of ocean. Next on my list: longarms.

  There were a good number of them, yes indeed. Nothing remarkable there, until suddenly there was. Something ridiculously huge and sort of but not exactly like a longarm was moving to the west and rising from the depths at the same time.

  “That’s not normal,” I thought, but apparently I said it out loud.

  “What’s that?” Fintan asked.

  “This can’t be real. Longarms don’t get that big…unless. Unless it’s a kraken. Could it be a kraken?”

  “A kraken? There’s a kraken out there?”

  The Hathrim spat some kind of curse in their own language and I made a note to ask them what that meant later, because it sounded exactly like what I was feeling.

  “I think so. It’s in a hurry. Moving to the west and surfacing. And wait—there’s another one coming!”

  “You said it’s surfacing? Krakens only surface for one thing, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know, Fintan, I’m a hunter from the plains!”

  “Well, I’m a bard from the mountains, but even I know what brings krakens to the surface!”

  “A ship!” Karlef cried, pointing to the west. “See the sail just off the coast? It’s headed for the ship!”

  “Oh, Kalaad.”

  “You’ve got to stop it, Abhi! It’s going to kill those sailors!”

  “Who in the world is sailing up here?” I said. That ship hadn’t been there when we first looked around from the top of the hill. It must have just sailed into view while we were making our way down to the beach.

  “Save their lives and then you can ask them!”

  “Right, right.”

  I shut my eyes to concentrate and tried to latch on to the mind of the huge thing that was similar to a longarm. It slipped through my efforts and kept moving toward the ship, because it wasn’t exactly a longarm. It was the same trouble I’d had with gravemaws and toothy roos: Until I actually saw it and could attach some mental descriptors to it beyond “something like a huge longarm,” my kenning was powerless. I was dealing with something unknown, and only its distant relationship to longarms had allowed me to sense its presence at all.

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? You have to! Those people are going to die!”

  “I mean I can’t! I’ve never seen a kraken before. But once I do see it, maybe then I can do something.”

  “By the time you see it they’re going to be dead!”

  “Maybe.” I took off running through the surf, trying to keep my footing and my eyes on the sail. “Maybe not.”

  Murr kept pace with me; he probably didn’t know what was going on, but if I was running somewhere, he was going to come along.

  Fintan chased after us, and then Karlef and Suris followed. Suris said, “Can we help? Our stride is longer, and we might be able to carry you.”

  “Thanks, no,” I called. “I need to keep my feet in the water to have a chance at making this work.”

  Though I could not have said what this was, exactly, except for a creeping sense of dread that I was about to watch a whole lot of people die in terror.

  And judging by their ship, those people weren’t from around here. That wasn’t a Nentian craft, and it wasn’t a Hathrim or a Fornish one either. I wasn’t really used to seeing ships from the eastern lands on the river, so maybe it was Raelech.

  “Is that a Raelech ship, Fintan?”

  “That’s no ship I’ve ever seen or heard of before,” he said.

  Something was bothering me about it—besides the fact that a huge creature was heading directly for it—and eventually I figured it out: The wind was at my back, but the ship’s sails, coming at me from the opposite direction, were full to bursting. How was that possible, unless they had one of the Kaurian blessed on board?

  It was a large craft, oceangoing for sure, and the hull was what gave it away as entirely foreign. It was painted or stained black—or perhaps the wood was naturally that color?—and swirling designs in red and white flowed back from the bowsprit on either side. It suggested that these people considered their watercraft to be works of art, not merely utilitarian transport.

  I couldn’t really see the people, however. Between the distance and the railings of the ship, I couldn’t see a single sailor, except for one high up in the crow’s nest. They wore clothing in dark blues and reds, but I couldn’t tell much else. I had the merest hint of what they must be like, an incomplete picture not unlike the one I had of the kraken.

  The beast introduced itself by shooting three incredibly long and slick black arms out of the water, smooth on the top and packed with purple round suckers on the bottom. I saw those arms for only an instant, as did the sailors on the boat, before they slammed down across the deck.

  The effect was immediately devastating. Anyone under those tentacles had to be instantly crushed, since the actual lumber of the ship splintered. The vessel was effectively quartered and then torn up further as the tentacles withdrew; they didn’t pass completely through the hull
, but it was no longer a functioning watercraft.

  And I was no longer playing with a blindfold of water. Those tentacles gave me an idea of the scale of the thing, a solid mental image, and my kenning finally recognized it as a kraken and not a sort-of longarm.

  “No! Stop!” I shouted, and even though my words couldn’t possibly be heard by the creature, the sentiment nevertheless carried through the water, as my commands to creatures of the land carried through the air. The tentacles writhed above the ship, ready to slam down again, but instead they paused and then curled silently back into the deep. “Do not hurt any of the humans in the water!” I didn’t see any but knew there had to be some—the person in the crow’s nest, if no one else; they had been thrown out and fallen into the freezing ocean. “In fact, help them!” I said. “Get them to the surface, where they can breathe!”

  Fintan and the Hathrim were saying things, and maybe some of them were to me, but I think most of it was curses of surprise and awe, the same sorts of words that were circling around in the back of my own mind.

  “Help the people. Get them to the surface,” I kept saying, and the tentacles emerged again, even as the remnants of the ship sank. This time, however, the arms were wrapped around flailing human forms, who were lifted out of the water and then dropped back into it, except that now they were closer to shore and they had a chance to take a deep breath of air. This process repeated itself as we kept running toward them, and I made sure to tell bladefins in the area not to eat any of the humans either. The second kraken arrived, and I recruited its help as well, so there were even more arms plucking people out of the sea and then dropping them closer to shore.