Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “Wait, wait, wait a second.” Kantu cupped one hand to the back of her skull, the other to her forehead, trying to keep the world in one place. “Just tell me one thing, you demonic curse-spawn of the North. Did we win? Is the city ours? Where is Viceroy Eriphet?”

  “Eriphet?” Mikiel laughed. “Fled or dead. Who cares? Gone. Gone with all his guards. And every lordly wormling of the Audiencia who had a camel worth riding. May they cross Bellisaar in safety.”

  “Safety!”

  “Of course.” Mikiel’s smile was sour. “Let them belly-crawl back to Koss Var with cracked lips and swollen stomachs. Let Eriphet confess to High King Vorst Vadilar that he lost the Empire’s southern stronghold to the desert scum he swore to crush. And then—please the Flying Gods of Thunder—let Eriphet and the Audiencia sip of the High King’s mercy.”

  As familiar as fear was the mercy of the Empire of the Open Palm. The broken treaties, the marches, the massacres, the prison camps and slave labor, the promises that oozed poison through honey-sweet lips. This mercy had the Viceroy Eriphet shown the Bird People during the forty long and bloody years of his reign.

  Kantu barked with laughter. “May Vorst Vadilar show him the same!” Heedless of her throbbing face, a wrist that was surely sprained, a broken toe, and countless contusions, she did a jolly little shuffle, puffing up dust from the gutter. “The Viceroy driven to the Waste! Rok Moris ours!”

  “Kantu.”

  Those two syllables would have flattened a priestess’s miter. Kantu stopped dancing. Every cut burned. Every bruise clenched. She collapsed, panting, against the alley wall.

  “Why grim, Mik?” she gasped, though she knew. “Why, when the city is ours?”

  “Well—” Mikiel gestured to the unnatural darkness. The wind moved with a black glitter, as though a billion tiny eyes traveled on it. Kantu could not smell the air, but she could taste it beneath the copper, all the way down her throat, in the acids of her stomach. The way the air tastes of glass when lightning strikes the sands.

  “It’s the Fa. The streets are overrun with Childless Men. They did not march into our city last night because Eriphet called for help. Nor do they seem interested in pursuing the Audiencia into the desert. But the Fa… When he came, he brought the night with him, and it stays. He has already taken up residence in the Viceroy’s Palace. Um, the parts we didn’t burn. Citizens are being rounded up for questioning. And…”

  By the milky blue light on her shoulder, Mikiel’s eyes seemed wide as windmills.

  “And?”

  “Kantu, a reward has been posted.”

  “For whom?”

  “For the Rokka Mama.”

  Kantu’s hands fell to her sides, too nerveless even to form fists.

  “And for you.”

  * * *

  They flew in slow, staggering stoops across Rok Moris. Once they had to land behind a small branch library to let Kantu alight and vomit, and again after Kantu lost both her consciousness and her grip on the glider’s handholds. She landed on top of a noxious midden out back of the Star and Crescent tavern.

  Mikiel said, worried, “We could walk?”

  “I’m fine. This is faster. And safer.”

  “If that trash heap hadn’t been there…”

  “I’m fine, Mik!”

  They passed the High Temple to Ajdenia, brightly lit against the unnatural night. Its corridors and courtyards teemed with refugees harried from their homes by the invaders and the insurgents and the panicked city guards.

  Kantu sent them a silent blessing. Let Ajdenia hold them, love them, calm them, keep them. Kantu had no quarrel with the Lizard Lady or Her people. But Ajdenia was not her god, and Kantu had her own people to look to.

  They made a final graceless descent over the barren mounds of Paupers’ Grave, at the southernmost edge of the city. After the mounds, the land ended in an abrupt cliff that sheered off into a dark crack of earth. This was the Fallgate, the boundary of Rok Moris, the end of the known world. The black aperture ran across the desert, too wide to cross. Like many a bloodstained altar, this cliff was a holy place. Viceroy Eriphet used to stage his executions there, at the very edge, proving once and for all that without their carpets, Bird People could not fly.

  Beneath the mounds of Paupers’ Grave, the secret burrows of long-bygone builders spiraled down and down into the cliff rock. The labyrinth, the mazepaths, the Catacombs. Where, in secret, the Bird People dwelled.

  Kantu dropped from the glider with a wrenched groan, massaging the death grip out of her fists. Mikiel tumbled after but regained her balance in an instant, shifting her feet lightly until once again her sandals settled like petals on the dirt. Kantu shook her head in fond disgust, but Mikiel did not notice. She was busy shrugging the contraption off her shoulders and folding it back into her pack. She stroked the patchworks and ribbing, murmuring sweet thank-yous.

  “Good old thing,” she said. “Clever wings, clever threads, clever souls.”

  From beyond the glowing circle cast by Mikiel’s blue button, Kantu spoke sourly.

  “The rest of us get rugs. Rugs are good enough. They do the job. Only you would think of wings.”

  “And you call yourself Bird People.”

  “Know what kind of bird you are, Mik? A snowbird. Northern fluff flying south for winter.”

  “Caw,” Mikiel deadpanned.

  Kantu blew a sore but profoundly wet raspberry at her.

  Laughing softly, Mikiel touched the blue button on her shoulder. The light winked off. For a moment, the two friends stood together, blind to each other and silent in the darkness. Something cold and fierce seized Kantu’s hand. She gasped.

  “It’s just me.”

  “Mik, you’re freezing.”

  “Nerves.”

  “Come here, my quivering ice maid. You and your thin Skaki blood. Put your arm about me. You can hold me up, and I’ll warm you up. You’ll find there’s a distinct advantage to having feverish friends. Better than bonfires, really.”

  Mikiel twined her arm around Kantu’s waist. Kantu leaned in heavily, close to collapse.

  “Easy on the ribs, Mik.”

  “Lighten up, dead weight.”

  They were used to doing this part of their work in the dark, for only thus had the Bird People kept the Catacombs secret from their enemy all these years. They counted their paces across Paupers’ Grave, the tombs and mounds and trenches that stretched along the entire southern border of Rok Moris, until they reached a certain burial mound. It was wider in circumference but lower to the ground than the others. The first and the oldest tomb. Their doorway underground.

  As they reached it, Kantu’s knees buckled. Only Mikiel’s tightened grasp kept her from falling flat on her smashed face. Cursing, Kantu jerked to right herself.

  Mikiel grunted in sympathy. “No rest for the recalcitrant.”

  Kantu laughed, said, “Ow,” and sighed.

  “Kantu?”

  “Mmn.”

  “What is the Fa?”

  Kantu’s stomach lurched. Pretending a distraction she did not feel, she knelt before the mound, patting around for the trapdoor. Her hand caught on the round wooden dial, which, dried and splintered from centuries in the sun, scraped her fingers. Dust and sand fell away.

  There, proud, the etched sign of the Thundergod, the Rok of Rok Moris, with her ragged wings shedding raindrops, and the diamond, bright upon her horned skull, shooting out lightning like a crown. The diamond needed no light to scintillate. It was older than the door, older than the tombs, the treasure of the Bird People. No thief could pry it loose from the dial, nor could even the sorriest beggar sell it for her gain. The diamond had some magic in it, deflecting attention and desire from the doorway. When the Bird People had fled to Paupers’ Grave in their hour of need, the diamond and the door had responded.

  Kantu closed her fingers around the dial, turned it, and started to haul.

  “The Fa,” she answered Mikiel on a heave, “rules Sanis Al.
That’s the desert at the bottom of Bellisaar, east of here, hugs the coast. Not much plant life there—not even succulents. Very duney. We call it the Red Crescent for the color of the sands.”

  “Yes, but…”

  The door creaked open.

  “I’ll go down first,” Kantu interrupted. “Since I seem to have a habit of falling on people tonight.” Grasping the top rung of the hidden ladder, she swung herself into a hole she could not see, that she knew by touch and memory alone, and climbed down three short rungs. Then she dropped.

  The drop was not a long one, but Kantu fell hard and forgot to roll. For a while she lay inert, breathing in short, painful gasps as her eyes tried to focus on the triple entrance to the mazepath.

  The first door led, eventually, to a hole in the ground that went down a mile and had bones at the bottom. The second, to a tunnel that wound around to nowhere for as long as you had strength to walk it, then stopped. The third braided its way into the rest of the maze, and thence to the heart of the Catacombs.

  In just a few minutes, Kantu promised herself, this blackness will end. I will see my friends. I will see Manuway. And Crizion. And the Rokka Mama.

  Mikiel dropped through the darkness beside her, irritated.

  “For once in your life, go slowly! Clodkin! If you haven’t noticed, you’re hurt.”

  She hauled Kantu to her feet, slung an arm about her, and propelled her toward the correct entrance.

  “Thanks, Mik. I’m just about done, I think.”

  “I know. Kantu?”

  “Yeah, Mik?”

  “I know who the Fa is.”

  “I just told you.”

  “No, I mean—” Mikiel stopped and sucked air, as if breath were her prayer for patience.

  Half of Kantu wanted to watch her friend’s face. Half of her feared Mikiel once again igniting the blue light: its source, its possible sentience. Cowardice won. Kantu waited in the dark.

  “I mean, Kantu,” Mikiel said slowly, “I’ve been to Sanis Al. It was a year ago, on a scouting mission for the Rokka Mama. It’s not nice—they’re in a drought; their crops and animals are failing.”

  “Yeah,” Kantu muttered. “The rivers dried up when the rain stopped.”

  Mikiel pressed on. “The Army of Childless Men exist to protect the Fa and his wives, to guard the Shiprock and drive marauders from their borders. They’re peacekeepers. They have never been interested in expanding their territory. Sanis Al was ceded to them by the gods. The Fa himself holds godright to the land. It’s in his blood. He never leaves it. So why is he here in Rok Moris? With all his soldiers around him? Why did he bring the wizard night? That’s what I was really asking. Not who the Fa is. What he is. What is he here for? Why did he post rewards for you? My question is, Kantu… What is Fa Izif ban Azur to you?”

  “No one.” The lie sat like a live coal on Kantu’s tongue. She wanted to spit it out, that it might light her way through the ’Combs. But she swallowed instead. “I’ve never met him. He’s just a story the Rokka Mama used to tell me, when I asked what made the sun rise every dawn.”

  * * *

  Within minutes of entering the heart of the ’Combs, Kantu left Mikiel to the tender mercy of the Carpet Keepers. The twins immediately started scolding Mikiel for running off with their ragbags.

  “Miss Athery, you know better!” Vishni reproached her with a sorrowful mouth. “You, who’ve flown with us these eight years!”

  “No carpet,” Ranna spluttered, her color high, “even tatty old ragged ones that no longer fly, is to be treated lightly! They deserve respect. More than respect—reverence!”

  But scolding turned to gasps of awe when they saw Mikiel’s glider.

  “All those pieces!” Ranna exclaimed. “Working together!”

  “It flies?” Kantu heard Vishni ask.

  “Sort of,” Kantu murmured as she turned to go, smiling with raw lips. By the time she reached the threshold, Mikiel was flashing her stolen blue button around, chattering away about Crizion’s design for the glider’s construction and Mikiel’s own daring rescue of Kantu.

  Kantu limped down the corridor to the surgeon’s cell, hoping to be scrubbed, rubbed, bandaged, and sent to bed without further ado. She had not gone far before she started tripping on the cots and bedrolls lining the halls, and wading through the wounded to get to Rahvin’s cell. When she did, she found the surgeon gone, either on his rounds or for good, and his supplies scanty.

  The Rokka Mama, however, was there, tending a long spear score down Manuway’s chest. His back was to her, so he did not see Kantu at the doorway, and Kantu saw only the bones of his spine and the sharps of his shoulder blades, the blood that had dried his curly hair to spikes. The Rokka Mama, bending to swab out his wound, did not see Kantu either. Her bramble of frosted black hair had been tied back in a braid and covered with a kerchief. Her round face, usually dominated by a radiant and implacable serenity, had gone haggard.

  She looks, Kantu thought with a rush of shock, old.

  The realization almost repelled her back into the hallway, back through the mazepaths, back up into the enchanted darkness and the blood-soaked city above.

  “Surprise!” she croaked instead, too tired for tact.

  Something in the Rokka Mama’s rigid posture cracked. Her gaze flashed from Manuway’s wound to fix on Kantu in the doorway, but the expression in her eyes did not change. Ghosts swam in the deep brown depths.

  She thinks I’m dead, Kantu realized. She thinks I’m a spirit sending, a terrible shadow thing, coming back one last time to tell her I am no more.

  The Rokka Mama’s body shuddered and pitched forward. Manuway reached to steady her, turning slowly to look over his shoulder. His eyes widened at the sight of Kantu, and he whispered something swift and low to the Rokka Mama, who had hidden her face in her hands. At last, the Rokka Mama nodded. She raised her face and looked again at Kantu.

  Kantu surged into the room, making the formal sign of the Thundergod with her fingers. Her words burst from her lips, as if she were a child.

  “You’re not hurt, momi?”

  Of all the Bird People who called the Rokka Mama mother, only Kantu was hers by blood. Usually it made no difference.

  Her voice ragged, the Rokka Mama replied, “Sore grieved, pili. But sound.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “You’re whole? Still of one piece?”

  “More or less. Finish up with Manuway. I can wait.”

  Kantu propped herself up against a wall while the Rokka Mama finished dressing Manuway’s wound. Manuway watched her, his eyes tracking Kantu’s gradual slide to the floor, where she slumped, eyes slitted with exhaustion, knees crooked to her chest. He was not a man to smile often, but he smiled now.

  “Last I saw you,” he said, “you were hurtling through the air.”

  “Had to meet a man about a net.”

  Kantu never could manage long sentences whenever Manuway smiled.

  “I saw what you did. Thank you.”

  “It was little enough. How many dead?”

  Grim again and therefore easier to look at, he answered, “Hard to say. More than half of us are missing.”

  He recited the roll of absentees. Kantu felt each loss in her own skin, a thin slice of lightning.

  “And Crizion jhan Eriphet,” he finished.

  “Crizion?” Kantu’s mouth went dry.

  If Mikiel was her right hand, Crizion was her left. The daughter of Viceroy Eriphet, a princess of the Audiencia, Crizion had grown up watching the Bird People fly, both on their carpets and off the cliff. She had come to the Rokka Mama in secret one morning, clothed like a beggar.

  “I offer myself as blood ransom,” she had said. “Cast me from the Fallgate and have your vengeance.”

  And the Rokka Mama had kissed her sad face, on the bridge of her nose, between big brown eyes as wide and wary as a wild antelope’s. And she had said, “My vengeance is to love you. Can you bear it?”

  “Cri
zion,” Kantu repeated, swallowing. The floor moved beneath her like water, and before she could reconcile her own matter to this new consistency, she was on the table beside Manuway with the Rokka Mama’s broad arms wrapped about her.

  “Oh, Kantu. Drink. Drink! I don’t know what you were thinking, jumping carpet.”

  “Noble self-sacrifice, Rokka Mama.” Kantu swallowed the infusion, which tasted of mint and a mild stimulant. The latter summoned the specter of her usual swagger. “With Manuway captaining, unaware we were doomed for net meat, and Elia leaning so far off the fringe with his slingshot that a whisper would’ve flattened him, it was left to yours truly to act. You can’t say I was wrong. Only look at Manuway. Alive. Whole. Our favorite weaver, bigger and beautifuller than ever.”

  Like most Bird People, Manuway was small, with a short torso, wide chest, and a large, shaggy head that sat like a stone gargoyle upon his burly shoulders. He was too thin for his frame, and his skin was laced with scars. Though his features were unsubtle, his black eyes rarely betrayed a gleam of the thought behind them. He had watched his wife Inilah step off the Fallgate while Eriphet smiled on. Her spirit, woven into thread by her widower, animated one of the swiftest, smartest, toughest carpets from which no careless rider could idly tumble.

  It had taken some clever maneuvering before Kantu could jump untrammeled by that carpet’s protests. It kept trying to buck her back to safety.

  They had been good friends, Kantu and Inilah. Since Inilah’s death, Kantu had striven not to love her widower too dearly.

  Manuway stood now, squeezing the Rokka Mama’s shoulders with his battered brown hands. She gave him a tired smile, scratching at her hairline beneath the kerchief. An unspoken question passed between them.

  “If you can,” she answered. “Don’t overtax yourself.”

  “It is owed,” he reminded her.

  Sighing, the Rokka Mama stepped aside. Kantu was given no chance to concur or demur, for she did not realize his intent until Manuway had stooped close to cup her face in his palms.