A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  “I don’t know,” Suris growled from above us, “but thinking about all that, I already don’t like this man, whoever he is. I know there’s four of us and Haesha has some pretty great knives, but I find myself wishing I had a squad of houndsmen at my back right now. This is all wrong.”

  “Good point,” Fintan said. “We should not be going into this meeting unwary. But we shouldn’t be rude either. Technically, we’re the trespassers here.”

  Seen up close, the house was still beautiful but clearly not quite up to date in its maintenance. There were gardens and flower beds that had not been planted this year. The windows were filthy. There were cobwebs around the front door and along the eaves of the front porch. It appeared to be abandoned, except we knew that it was not.

  Circling around to the back, we saw that the grounds were much better kept, though still not up to what anyone would consider top shape. There was a series of square garden beds, and in a distant one knelt a man wearing a kind of hat to shade his head from the sun. He was harvesting a variety of squash or gourds I couldn’t quite identify, using a small knife to cut off the stems. The hat unfortunately cast his features in shadow, and he was wearing gloves and was otherwise covered completely by his clothing, so I couldn’t even guess at his origins.

  “I’m glad he’s got something going on back here,” I said. “I was about ready to conclude he must live on fish and seaweed. I can’t sense much that’s edible on the island in terms of animals.”

  “Maybe he’s got a ton of dried meat in his basement,” Suris speculated.

  “Don’t call out until we get a bit closer,” Fintan said to us quietly. “I want to see his reaction. In fact, is it all right if I do the talking?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re the one who speaks all the languages anyway. If he doesn’t speak Nentian, I’m out of luck.”

  Haesha pointed. “Bad man?”

  Fintan shook his head. “We don’t know.”

  She nodded but walked differently after that, with her knees slightly bent, ready to spring to either side or perhaps charge forward, knives drawn. It was not perhaps the friendliest of approaches, but he might not be the friendliest of hermits. I tried to appear unconcerned and unthreatening.

  Fintan eventually called out to the man. His head jerked up from contemplating his squash plants, and he froze except for his face. A curl of a snarl rippled along his lip until it fixed in a hateful grimace that promised he’d use the knife in his hand to harvest our organs if only we were close enough to do so.

  “Uh,” I said, while my mind screamed, Run! because that was my instinctive reaction to his expression.

  Fintan kept saying things that I realized meant hello in every language he knew. He eventually said it in Nentian, but the man didn’t react to that one. He reacted to a greeting in Brynt. Which was extremely odd, since he didn’t look like any Brynt person I’d ever met or seen from afar. He was protecting his skin from the weak northern sun because his skin was as pale as milk, and Brynt folks tended to be the opposite of pale.

  As if he’d just realized or remembered that we could actually see his face, his features smoothed out and his snarl flattened into something noncommittal. Then he stood and tried on a transparently fake grin as he took off his hat so we could see him better. He had a head of fine white hair and enough wrinkles on his face to indicate that he’d passed sixty years a while back, maybe even seventy. He said the Brynt word for hello and then exchanged some words with Fintan.

  “Don’t trust him,” I told the bard in an undertone. Just because he hadn’t spoken Nentian yet didn’t mean he couldn’t understand it. “Don’t tell him I have the Sixth Kenning or how we got across the channel.”

  “I won’t. But we can get closer and introduce ourselves.”

  “If he asks about Eep,” I said, since she was now perched on my shoulder, “tell him I’m a hunter who’s into falconry.”

  Since Fintan was the only one among us who spoke Brynt, it was an awkward meeting, and I didn’t understand anything except what Fintan chose to translate.

  “His name is Lorson” was the first scrap of information we received.

  Lorson was a strange new thing to my eyes. He was sort of like a stunted Hathrim—that is, pale skinned and taller than most humans, but shorter than Suris, Olet, and their folks. He gave a friendly nod to Suris as if they were of a kind, but if that were the case, why didn’t he speak the Hathrim tongue? And why was his jaw clean-shaven if he had any cultural kinship with the Hathrim?

  “He wants to know how we got here,” Fintan said.

  “We should ask him the same question. He’ll say the same thing we say to him, no doubt: by boat.”

  Fintan gabbled with him some more, and eventually Lorson’s eyes dropped to consider Haesha. His brows climbed up his head and remained there as Fintan continued, and once the bard stopped talking, he responded in a short sentence, and it was Fintan’s turn to look surprised.

  “As you thought, he came here by boat from across the ocean, but he spent some time in Brynlön. He wants to come see our camp.”

  “He’s not going to invite us in for tea?” Suris asked as Lorson sheathed his knife on his belt. I found the belt unusual, because it was made of cloth instead of leather, and I noticed that the rest of his clothing did not look especially Brynt or Raelech or like anything familiar. His tunic was a long-sleeved sort, with the sleeves hugging his arms much more tightly than I’ve seen, and if I wasn’t mistaken, it was made from undyed cotton threads. His pants were made of tougher material—hemp, I guessed—and his shoes were made of the same fabric, with no soles to speak of. These were also undyed, so far as I could tell. For a man who lived in an extremely fancy house, his clothing was very plain. Or maybe these were just the threads he wore while gardening, and he had a closet full of silk robes in the house.

  “Apparently tea is not on his agenda,” Fintan replied.

  “We know from Eep that he has a boat, and we saw him in it the other day. You should ask him where it is,” I said.

  After Fintan relayed the question, Lorson spoke and pointed to the east, where Eep had reported seeing watercraft.

  “Yep, east side. He says he’d be happy to follow us in his boat so that we don’t have to ferry him back after the visit. He says he’s delighted to have new neighbors.”

  He certainly looked delighted now. He was beaming at us and nodding and trying to look as pleasant as possible. I might have believed it if I hadn’t seen that flash of pure hatred earlier.

  Bringing him over for a visit was something we’d discussed prior to coming out, and Olet was prepared in case that happened, but something about this didn’t sit well with me.

  “Doesn’t he want to bring along some friends?” I asked.

  “Ha. Good one.” Fintan spoke at length with Lorson before pausing to translate. “He’s here alone for the moment but will be joined by some companions before the ice comes. He asked if we have kennings and I told him I’m a bard, since that’s obvious from my Jereh band anyway. That’s all, though.”

  “Why does he live here, of all places, with or without companions?”

  Fintan’s translation, when it came, caused Suris and me to snort in disbelief, and I am sure Haesha would have done the same if she had been more proficient in our tongue. “He says he’s a simple man with simple tastes.”

  “That house does not display the simple tastes of a simple man,” Suris said.

  Fintan traded words again and said, “That’s his master’s house, and since he’s gone, Lorson can’t invite us in.”

  “So he’s the gardener?”

  “He says yes, he’s the gardener, among other things.”

  I didn’t believe it but said nothing. Fintan told Lorson we’d wait for him to come around to the south side of the island and we’d
row across together to the budding city site. Lorson waved and immediately set off to the east, not pausing to grab any supplies from the house or to take anything with him. We had no choice but to return to our boat if we were going to remain polite, but once he was out of earshot, I voiced my doubts.

  “He didn’t behave like a man who has a master,” I said. “That little tidbit came out later.”

  “And where exactly is he from?” Suris wondered aloud. “He’s not Hathrim, I can tell you that for sure. We don’t make them that small.”

  “He said it was either east or west, it didn’t really matter which way we sailed. It’s on the other side of the world from here. He didn’t question the idea that Haesha’s crew came from across the Larik Ocean, so I think he’s telling the truth about that.”

  “Bad man? Good man?” Haesha asked, since she couldn’t understand much of what we were talking about. She wanted just the essentials, and I had to shrug with one shoulder since Eep was on the other.

  “We still don’t know,” I replied, though I was privately pretty sure of the answer.

  The bard took a breath and waggled a contemplative finger in the air. “I have to say this, with the caveat that I can’t be sure, but he appears to fit the descriptions I’ve heard about the Bone Giants who invaded Brynlön and Rael. I haven’t seen one of them yet, but they’re supposed to be a couple feet shorter than Hathrim and possess pale skin.”

  “But don’t they also wear bone armor and have their faces painted like skulls?” Suris asked.

  “That’s what I’ve heard about the invaders, yeah,” Fintan agreed. “But maybe Lorson is what they look like when they’re at home.”

  “I don’t like him,” the Hathrim woman said.

  “Me neither,” I chimed in. “He snarled first and then never stopped smiling. Which one was fake, do you think?”

  “He might have simply been startled,” Fintan said. “We did surprise him, and maybe he doesn’t like surprises.”

  “That is one way to look at it,” Suris agreed. “Another way is to admit that he’s clearly a lying creep.”

  Fintan stopped and threw up his hands. “What do you want me to do? Chase him down and say, ‘Sorry, you can’t come over because you’re too creepy, so just stay here and pretend we’re not over there’?”

  “No. I want you to not trust him. Don’t give anything away.”

  “Done. I’ve given him the absolute minimum. I’m not an idiot.”

  “I don’t think you are, Fintan. You might be unguarded, though. Give him too much information and he can use it against us.”

  “How? He’s unarmed and wearing cloth.”

  “He has that knife. And he could have weapons in his boat.”

  “If he brings any out, we’ll tell him to leave them. But let’s not be rude.”

  “I have no plans to be rude. I’m just going to be wary.”

  “Fine.”

  A silence descended then, the kind that often falls when someone says that something is fine when it is obviously not.

  Haesha scanned our faces, then nodded once, having come to a conclusion. “Bad man,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Fintan dispelled the seeming and held up another sphere. “Skipping ahead a short while into the future, here’s the steward of the new colony.”

  I didn’t want to be watching from a window when our visitor came calling, but La Mastik had insisted. The lodge we’d constructed served as sleeping quarters for many of the Hathrim at night and a community space by day. It was going to be the city hall and haven of the city we were calling North Haven, or at least the equivalent of that in the Nentian tongue: Malath Ashmali. The Nentians had voted upon the name from about ten different submitted suggestions, and I liked it. From the windows spaced along the eastern side of the lodge—more like holes in the wall, since we didn’t have glass in them yet—one could see the top of the path leading down to the riverside dock. That path was going to need widening and shoring up for the transport of cargo, and that was on the ever-growing list of things to do for the Raelech stonecutter who’d come to stay with us.

  “Like it or not, Olet, you’re too important to risk to a stranger with unknown sympathies and abilities,” Mirana said. “So you’re going to stay out of sight until we’re sure of him.”

  “But I need to hear what he says.”

  “I don’t think you need to, but we’ll invite him to sit at a hearth outside the window. You can see and hear him easily from there. Assuming he even speaks a language we understand.”

  When the stranger arrived, La Mastik had already set up a hearth in a ring of rocks and had a friendly blaze going. Stumps were arranged around it to sit on, and I thought it was a welcoming if rough setup. Koesha was watching with me from the window, and when she saw Haesha, she went outside to talk to her and get updated. Suris came in and said she didn’t trust him. My eyes flicked to my sword, standing just inside the door. Hopefully I wouldn’t need to use it.

  La Mastik was dressed in her priestess clothing, the lava dragon hide and the glass chains and everything, but she hadn’t lit her scalp on fire. She was standing so that I saw her left side in profile. The newcomer, then, came to stand at her right and was more or less facing me. He glanced at the window, but if he could see anything at all, I doubted he spied much detail; I was standing in shadow.

  He was a strange old fellow, white-haired, wrinkled, and wiry, perhaps two full feet shorter than La Mastik, but two feet taller than Abhi. Though his skin was papery and bore signs of advanced age, his posture was good and he appeared to be strong. His clothes were little better than rags, though; I wondered how he’d deal with the cold.

  Abhi took up a position across the fire from La Mastik, his stalk hawk perched on his shoulder, and the Raelech bard stood between him and the newcomer. Koesha and Haesha were conferring behind them. The bard made introductions in Brynt, which was annoying. I didn’t know much of that language, except to recognize how it sounded. The man’s name was Lorson, and the bard presented my friend as Mirana La Mastik.

  “La Mastik?” the man said, then spoke in Hathrim. “Does that mean you are lavaborn? I see you wear the fireproof hide of the dragons.”

  “I am,” she said.

  “You speak Hathrim?” Fintan said, blinking in surprise.

  “Yes, I picked up a little a long time ago,” the man said, and though he spoke with an accent, it sounded faultless to me. He was either being modest or deceptive, and I thought it might be the latter, since Fintan was surprised he spoke it at all.

  “But when I said hello to you in Hathrim on the island, you didn’t respond. What other languages do you speak?” the bard asked.

  “A couple from across the ocean. Nothing you would know,” Lorson replied.

  “So, to be clear, you don’t speak Nentian, Raelech, Fornish, or Kaurian? Or Joabeian?”

  “No. Just Brynt and Hathrim.”

  “That’s an odd combination, since those countries are not even remotely close to each other.”

  “From my home they’re almost equidistant, just opposite directions across the oceans.”

  “Do your people cross the oceans often?”

  “No. But neither do yours, I imagine.”

  “No.”

  Lorson twirled his finger around in a circle. “So this camp is mostly Nentians and Hathrim?”

  “Mostly, yes,” La Mastik said. “It’s called Malath Ashmali.”

  “You have the Third Kenning here with the bard,” he noted. “And you’re of the First Kenning. How many other blessed are there in Malath Ashmali—did I say that correctly?”

  “Yes. I’m not actually sure how many blessed there are. We know our shipwrecked friends, for example,” she said, pointing at Koesha, “are of the Secon
d Kenning, but we don’t know how many are blessed. We’re still learning to speak with them.”

  “Ah, I see. But no Brynt water breathers, like a rapid?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re the only one blessed by the First Kenning?”

  La Mastik tilted her head and paused just a moment, and because I had known her for years, I knew what that meant. She didn’t trust him and she was going to lie.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good,” Lorson said with a pleasant smile, right before it turned into a nasty leer and his hand shot out to grasp her forearm.

  “What—ow! That hurts! Let go—”

  La Mastik flailed at him with her free arm and he caught it with his other hand, his face now a full-on snarl. I could see she tried to spark his hair and failed. She screamed, and while I didn’t know what he was doing to cause such a reaction—he seemed only to have grabbed her forearms—I knew something terrible was happening. Lorson’s hair was visibly growing and coming in dark at the roots instead of white. His wrinkles disappeared, replaced by smooth planes, and his sagging jowls firmed up into a sharp jawline. Meanwhile, Mirana was aging before my eyes, deep grooves etching her face. First Fintan and then Abhi tried to pull him off her, and though Abhi moved much faster than I thought anyone could, Lorson kicked them away as if they were toddlers.

  A knife hilt appeared in his side, thrown with deadly accuracy by Koesha and quite likely doing some damage to his intestines or maybe even a kidney, but he didn’t so much as flinch. That’s when I knew Lorson wasn’t fully human and I needed to kill it with fire.

  “I knew it,” Suris ground out next to me. “You should kill him now.”

  I nodded and lit him up from head to toe. His clothing was nicely flammable, but once that was all ignited, I kept pouring it on to his head, turning up the heat and doing my best to melt his face.