A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  “No, you were right about that. But still, you lied to me.”

  “There was no point in asking for a nonexistent resource.”

  “Oh, I beg to differ. The point was to keep your promise to me. You said you would ask. You said!” His face darkened with rage for a moment, but then he stepped back, the effort taking something out of him.

  “You’re right. I apologize. I should have followed through.”

  “Funny how people apologize so quickly when they’re tied up outside the city walls. You know what this animal is?”

  “I do. That’s a cheek raptor.”

  “Very good. You know what they do?”

  “They use their talons to tear off the cheeks of larger animals, including humans, and eat them.”

  “Excellent. And then what?”

  “And then nothing, as far as they’re concerned That’s all they eat. They let their prey bleed to death or, more likely, get eaten in the last moments of their lives by other animals of the plains, who are drawn to the scent of their blood and probably their screaming.”

  Melishev blinks rapidly. “That’s…that’s very good. Yes, very good. This one here, you see,” he says, waving clumsily at the one on his arm, “is trained. You can tell because he hasn’t eaten my face yet. But at a word from me, he’ll eat yours.”

  “I understand. I hope you understand that my death will not improve your relationship with Forn.”

  “They’re not going to know you died. You’re just going to disappear.”

  “As many others, no doubt, have disappeared during your time as viceroy.”

  “Oh, my, yes. So many I’ve lost count.” He grins nastily, a look I’ve seen before.

  “But my staff knows it was you who sent for me,” I remind him. “They’re going to know that you made me disappear.”

  “Nonsense. Rogue elements of Hennedigha’s army spirited you away! Nothing to do with me. No.” He blinks, slowly this time, and shakes his head to clear it. He looks like he needs a bed more than anything else. “No, it was someone who has a serious issue with the Fornish. Maybe they were mad at you for planting a huge tree in the city and spoiling their view of majestic ash heaps. We’ll have to hunt for the scoundrels for sure. Conduct a very thorough investigation, eh?” He laughs, and the soldiers take their cue and laugh along.

  Shaking my head, I say, “I don’t see the benefit, Your Majesty. Killing the ambassador of an ally because they failed to secure something they could not possibly secure seems counterproductive. I helped you defeat Gorin Mogen, and I can help you in the future. How does my death do anything for you?”

  His cheeks redden again, and spit flies out of his mouth as he clenches a fist and shouts, “It’ll fucking give me pleasure!” He takes a step forward, but he’s unbalanced by the act and he tries to compensate by leaning backward. It quickly turns into a flailing attempt to stay upright, which ultimately fails. His arm waves, he lets go of the raptor’s tether, and it launches itself into the sky as he falls heavily on his ass.

  Curses fly after the raptor as a couple of soldiers move in to help the king. Now that he’s down, he can’t get up. He’s angry and embarrassed but incredibly weak. I say nothing as he’s pulled upright by his arms and steadied. The cheek raptor doesn’t look like it’s ever coming back; it’s flying directly away from me, out to the plains.

  “But perhaps,” Melishev says, as if he hadn’t just fallen over and lost his weapon of choice, a string of drool dangling from his lower lip, “I will defer my pleasure until later. Take her to the dungeon. If I must rot, then she can rot with me. Throw her in the cell next to Lieutenant Mukhab. Maybe the rats will get her. Maybe she’ll get a nasty infection of the lungs. She won’t smell so sweet anymore, that’s for sure.”

  There is absolutely nothing I can say to change his mind, so I say nothing. Speaking, in fact, might serve only to provoke him to order my death by other means. Remaining mute will give him the sense that he has won. Begging for my release won’t make a bit of difference but might make him feel good, and I don’t want that at all. He’s clearly suffering, and I’d rather not interfere with that. Especially since I’m to endure plenty according to his whim.

  Back into the carriage I go, to be ushered to a pseudo–death sentence in the dungeon, a sort of euphemistic end that would allow people to say later, She died in the dungeon, as if it were dying of natural causes. As if it couldn’t be helped.

  I rely on my training to reveal nothing during the trip, knowing that anything I do or say will be reported back to Melishev later. He will want to hear that I cried. They may very well lie to him, knowing he wants to hear that, but that’s out of my control. I control what I can and give them nothing to report.

  The dungeon smells just as foul as it did earlier, but Lieutenant Mukhab is not so sane as he was when I first met him. That had been his first day in the cell, and he spoke robustly, lucid and hale. Now his desperation to be freed is raw and keening. His voice is a scratchy wheeze through a phlegm-coated throat, moist coughs interrupting his cries for freedom.

  “Pleeease,” he whines. “Let me out. I’m sorry. For the thing. I won’t do it. I didn’t do it. Won’t do it, though. Again.”

  “Brought you a friend, Lieutenant,” one of the soldiers said.

  “A friend? To get me out?”

  “To keep you company. The lady who put you in here.”

  “What lady? The viceroy put me in here. The king. The shitsnake.”

  “The lady who wanted you in here. The ambassador.”

  “Ambassador? The green one? Unsmiling? Not my friend. Never my friend. My friend gets me out. Hey, be my friend? Are you my friend?”

  The jingle of the keys in the lock is obscenely loud, as is the groan of the hinges. A hand shoves me into the dark, and the door clangs shut behind me.

  “Kalaad,” one of them mutters. “Remind me not to get locked up. It’s not good for your health.”

  Lieutenant Mukhab’s cries echo off the walls for a seeming hour after they leave. I have no way of knowing how long it truly is, though. Eventually he dissolves into weeping and sniffling. I have, by that time, long since found myself a dry spot in the inky black in which to sit and brood.

  I’m cut off from the sun, and I must face the prospect of never seeing it again. Even if someone were to come looking for me, all Melishev has to do is lie and claim he doesn’t know where I am, and they’ll have to move on. Maybe someone on my staff will look for my bones outside the city. Maybe the Canopy will send a new ambassador in a few months, and maybe they’ll be clever enough to figure out where I am, but by that time I will most likely be dancing on the precipice of madness, if I haven’t already fallen off it. The lieutenant’s condition does not suggest the mind is capable of enduring this darkness for long. I have, in all likelihood, reached the end of my story.

  At least I had that stolen season with Mak Fin ben Fos. Those memories should keep me stable for a while at least. And even if I have no hope for myself, I can nurture a hope for those kids down in Khul Bashab. With the king distracted by rebuilding Talala Fouz and by his own failing health, they might actually have a chance at winning.

  “Hello? Is there anybody there? Someone who can hear me? They said someone came in, but I’ve forgotten already. Forgotten who they said. They said, ‘Brought you a friend,’ but I don’t know who. Who’s my friend? Welcome to the dark. It’s just like this, day and night. It’s really all night, all the time! Except sometimes it’s wetter and there are rats. They bite if you try to eat them. Word to the wise. Hello? Hello-ooo?”

  It stinks in here and it’s cold and damp and miserable, but the worst part about this is that the only company I’ll have for the foreseeable future is the mad murderer next door.

  * * *

  —

  Fintan dispel
led his seeming and dragged a finger down from his eye, simulating a tear’s track, but made no other comment. I hoped that wasn’t the end of Mai Bet Ken.

  “To complete today’s tales in Ghurana Nent,” he said, “we’ll move eastward to the colony of Malath Ashmali.”

  I was expecting Abhi or Olet, but instead the bard took the seeming of Koesha Gansu.

  Baejan asks for our attention around the fire when it’s time to share. I’ve come to treasure our nightly fires, when we can speak in our native tongue and relax. Before we begin, though, I always make sure that Fintan isn’t around; I think he would understand quite a bit of what we’re saying now, and while I don’t think we’re saying anything especially private, privacy is nice to have anyway.

  My soldier grins widely at our faces circled around the fire.

  “You may remember, sisters, that I volunteered to go first. Well, tonight I ride!”

  Spontaneous cheers erupted and some hoots and ululations.

  “I do this as a service to my country, of course. I won’t enjoy myself at all.” She rolls her eyes with a tiny smile on her face and we laugh. Then her eyes fly wide open at a sudden thought. “Oh, Shoawei save me, what if I don’t enjoy myself at all?” That only makes us laugh louder. She beams again and waves, backing out of the circle. “Good night, sisters! I shall tell you what comes of it later! Ha ha. See what I did there?”

  We send her off with a fresh round of cheers, and I hope we haven’t misjudged the Nentians on this. Some cultures have prudish ideas about sex, and we haven’t learned enough of their language to have a discussion about it. Faster to find out the hard way, so to speak.

  But we have prepared as much as one could reasonably expect before sticking our faces into the wind. We have shelters built now—lodge houses, mostly, of human and giant sizes, and of an architecture totally foreign to us. But they’re warm and keep the rain off, so I like them.

  The fishing-boat design we’ve been working on is also strange, but I’ve enjoyed learning something new. And I’ve contributed some tweaks for efficiencies, since fishing boats are the lifeblood of Joabei and we have learned a thing or two in our centuries of fishing. I think the Nentians respect my skills and will be open to working on a Joabeian design for us next. I just have to convince Olet and the council of nine to approve the labor for it.

  There is no currency here yet; there is only labor and a cooperative spirit. Olet and the council are basically setting priorities at the moment, but they do plan to issue a currency eventually or, more likely, adopt the Nentian one. They’ve completed their glass forge now, and they are working on a steel forge next, and a kiln will follow soon after. That’s the one I’m waiting for. I want a proper memorial erected on the beach for our crew, with a howling wind tube on top to mourn their loss forever.

  The kiln would come sooner, they claim, but it’s low priority since we don’t have a ready source of clay nearby anyway. That might need to be something we import; the Raelech stonecutter who came here and decided to stay claims there is a source several leagues away to the southwest, but the question remains whether we want to go get it ourselves, penetrating into a portion of the Gravewood that hasn’t been rendered safe by Abhi, or just put “clay” on our list of items to trade.

  We have taken a few small test rides on the fishing boat to prove it seaworthy—up and down the river, and out into the shallows only. Abhi accompanied us each time to make sure no krakens attacked, and now he is in the process of enchanting the hull, so he won’t need to be present going forward.

  That is such a source of hope for us all. If he can successfully enchant a hull, then we can sail home regardless of the season, without fear of krakens.

  We are going to test his enchantment soon. The giant woman, Olet, is intensely interested in Abhi’s reports of a man living on the island to the north, since his stalk hawk reports that he is tall and pale like the Hathrim. That disappointed me at first, since I’d originally hoped that the hermit might be a shipwrecked Joabeian from some earlier exploration of the Northern Yawn. But as details about the island kept developing with successive airborne scouts, that hope was dashed.

  “Is he lavaborn?” Olet asks aloud, and often. She is worried he might be a former hearthfire or might want to be the hearthfire of this community and ruin the fragile government she has built.

  I hope in concert with her that he is not. He might be a fire demon, unlike Olet and La Mastik, who have proven to be mild-mannered people in defiance of all our culture’s tales of the First Kenning. I’m not sure we should be going to the island at all; Olet’s determination to confront this mysterious person seems to carry all the risks of poking a porcupine.

  Speculation abounds regarding his presence there. “Maybe he’s someone powerful who got exiled for doing something horrific,” Haesha suggests. That’s my favorite theory at the moment. Other ideas are more or less lurid, but no one is putting forth the idea that this is a perfectly normal, harmless fellow. His mere existence on that island is not normal and is therefore dangerous somehow.

  Haesha reports to me that the man shot some arrows at the stalk hawk and the creature was understandably outraged. He missed, thankfully, but she complained loudly when she returned to Abhi’s shoulder, and it took him some time to figure out what happened. When he did, Haesha saw him pass judgment.

  “He didn’t like his friend being in danger. First time I ever saw him look upset. I think Abhi is a good man.” She sighs. “I saw him first! But he hasn’t seen me yet. Maybe I’m not his type.”

  I laugh at that. Some of the other crew are thinking of pairing off with Nentian men now that Baejan has decided to blow that door open. But Haesha has yet to find one she likes besides Abhi.

  As for the man on the island, I think that if he is dangerous, Abhi will be able to handle him. Haesha reports that his kenning has granted him some extraordinary speed and healing and that he has a background in hunting. The boy is potentially as lethal as he is pretty.

  Everyone seems to have forgotten that I admitted we are a people of the Second Kenning on the day the kraken attacked. That’s good. So far I haven’t had to reveal my powers, and I like it that way. But I figure if this man from the island winds up coming here and causing trouble, I can do some subtle things before I do something obvious like taking his breath away.

  With any luck, this encounter will be fruitful and we’ll get started in earnest on our ride home. I can’t wait to hear the bells chiming in the harbor of Joabei again, Shoawei reminding us that there is music and poetry in the faintest stirrings of wind.

  The chowder house had reopened, and their speciality was of their previous high quality, since they’d finally enjoyed a restock as well. However, when I met the bard there after my shift at the kitchen, he looked absolutely terrible, his eyes half closed and dark circles underneath them.

  “Are you ill?” I asked.

  “I didn’t sleep more than an hour.”

  “Oh. Nightmares again?”

  Fintan nodded. “Really bad. I thought that visiting the Roasted Sunchuck was helping. It was, I think. Just…last night was rough.”

  “The Hathrim burning people?”

  “Yes. But only me. They all took turns melting me down. And something else horrible too. You’ll hear about it later. Today’s stories are the kind I’ve been waiting to tell to unburden myself, in hopes that it will give me some peace.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it didn’t exactly work out the way you hoped the last time you told such stories. But I do hope you’ll be able to get a good night’s rest soon.”

  We sat in silence for a while because I didn’t know what else to say, and he was slow to respond. In such situations it’s best to be patient. Finally, after drinks arrived and he’d taken a sip, he spoke.

  “I used to wonder why Master Aerin lived in relative seclusio
n, but I think I’m beginning to understand. She had to fill her days with peace and order to balance out whatever it was that plagued her mind at night. I think I’m going to need that too, when this is over. Like, me and a big green field and some sheep or goats or something.” A small smile played on his lips as he imagined it. “Yeah.”

  “Maybe the Fornish have a potion to help you sleep?” I ventured.

  “Maybe. You know, I should ask. Never really thought about how lack of sleep can mess you up until recently.”

  “Definitely ask.”

  “Yuhh.” His eyes drooped, his head lolled, and within seconds he appeared to be unconscious in his seat. I ate quietly, not wishing to wake him. When he began to dream, I was worried at first, but then he began to mumble.

  “Sheep,” he said. So it was a good dream, as long as no Hathrim showed up to incinerate them. He cheered on his ovine heroines in his sleep. “Yeah. Go for it, sheep. Eat that meadow…eat it all. It knows what it did. No mercy.”

  I felt bad about waking him when it was time for him to perform, but after a few minutes of recovery he was alert and ready to go.

  “You just sat here and watched me nap? That must have held all the thrills of watching a rock sit in the sun,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  He looked much better for the rest, and I didn’t regret it.

  He played an instrumental and then spoke to everyone in a loud whisper after the break. “I’m going to tell you a secret. Just between us tens of thousands.”

  Laughter from the field greeted him.

  “Today you’re going to learn something that’s been a long time coming. Three tales, starting with Abhinava Khose.”

  The little wooden stakes I enchanted and drove into the ground surrounding camp appeared to be doing their job. No one had suffered an attack from the ground since I established the perimeter.

  A definite limitation of the enchantment was that the warning was confined to the medium of earth. Nothing airborne was affected—though I think that’s a good thing. We wouldn’t want to repel birds and insects, since they’re vital pollinators. It does, however, mean that people need to worry about the occasional airborne attack. The Joabeians warned us of some birds that they call pine shrikes, which were apparently responsible for Haesha and Leisuen’s injuries. I hadn’t seen or felt any in the area, but that didn’t mean an abattoir of them, as Koesha called it, wouldn’t show up later. We lost one of the Hathrim to a scurry of meat squirrels that fell on her from the trees. The trees may be rooted in the earth, but they do not conduct the warning to anything living in their branches. Olet didn’t want me enchanting the trees themselves, because there was no telling how soon they might need to be cleared.