by Del Law
Kjat loves and hates this time. She loves the smell of the wind, the open sky, all of it so different from the damp and stink of Tamaranth. She loves the feel of the horse underneath her, the sun on her face, the vast expanse of so many stars and moons spinning in the sky over their heads, and the fact that she gets her own tent to sleep in and doesn’t have to lie next to everyone else on some dirt or stone floor, all of them grunting and farting in their sleep, rats and worse creeping around the corners.
And the dreams aren’t as bad out here.
She can unzip the roof of her tent, lie awake and watch the stars spinning late into the night, and when she does drift off they’re off on the edge of her mind.
She can actually get some rest.
One night she even saw one of the wild walking cities off in the distance. It was backlit by setting moons, all of it's lights bright and wrapped in steam, striding across the horizon in complete silence like a giant mechanical whale.
What she hates is being the center of attention for so many people. The Disciples themselves know her, treat her as they would anyone else in their group when they’re alone. But once the other groups come together, she’s again the Doorway, the Anointed One, and a lot of other titles too that turn her into a figure rather than an actual person.
Many of the pilgrims stare at her in awe. Some of them fear her and back away, mumbling and stuttering, when she gets into the meal line. Some of them follow her around and want to ingratiate themselves with her for their own spiritual or financial gain—hoping maybe to become a Disciple themselves someday, as if she really had anything to do with that. (Gokl keeps all of the order’s money. Fyrtobl-byre plans all of the complex logistics needed for a group as large as they are. Bhupen, the Baptist, still runs the ceremonies and is the leader of the order and has been since she was a girl.)
But it’s her they’ve really come to see. They’ve been waiting for her for three hundred years, Pokh says, and here she is, the foretold Doorway, so she has to expect the adoration, the fear. And yes, even the politics.
But it makes her feel hollow, worthless.
It’s the blackjackals and the featherwolves they really want. She’s just a way for them to get here.
This night, Pokh shakes her awake. It’s very early, before dawn. The Lover’s moon is just transiting the Assassin’s moon, and the moonslight across the grasses is deep and blue. She’s been asleep no more than an hour, but then some nights she doesn’t even get that. She’d been dreaming of the ocean for once. The endless stretch of dark grey, ebbing and flowing with the pull of the moons. It was a wonderfully calm dream, almost erotic in the push and pull of the water, without end, a calm eros with no man or woman and definitely no feathers to be seen anywhere.
She blinks the damp from her eyes. Pokh, her tutor, the Stona with the brown beak, is excited. His soft eyes are watering the way they do when he speaks of the Great Burning and the Time to Come After.
“Kjati,” he says. “Come quickly! Something wonderful!”
She groans, slides out of the sleeping bag, finds her heavy boots. She follows Pokh over toward the cooking tents and the center of the clearing, where a number of riders have just returned from their patrols. Six or seven of them are dismounting horses, two of the three-wheeled jeeps still have their engines running. They’re all smiling and highclapping each other. Someone is passing around a flask. When they see she and Pokh approaching, they grow quiet, but she can still sense their excitement.
Bjarkl, a Talovian and one of the patrol leads, steps eagerly forward and tips an ironic bow. “Teacher, Anointed,” he croaks. Strange, she thinks, to hear a Talovian with such a thick Kro accent. “I’m very glad you’re here to see this!” He motions them over to one of the jeeps. Each of the vehicles has a large cage in the back of it, and this one is covered over with a tarp.
He pulls the tarp aside, and for a minute Kjat sees nothing—the plain grey of the back of a rusting jeep, nothing more.
Then she sees the eyes.
Bright green eyes hovering in the middle of the cage, blinking at her.
As she’s trying to figure out what’s going on, the full creature shimmers into view.
Pokh has talked about them, but it’s the first time she’s actually seen one. The face is vaguely leopard-like, with a thick skull and wide ears that swivel in her direction. It has thick, wide shoulders, a large rib cage. Its fur is blushed white across face and neck, down onto its chest and out onto the arms, that end in heavy claws. Elsewhere its coloring shifts between the exact color and patterns of the back of the jeep and a mottled brindle. Its wearing a ragged, dirty wurf hide across its loins.
It’s a Hulgliev, though a small and old one compared to the pictures Pokh has shown her, where they’re dressed in full armor, all fangs and claws and heavy weaponry. It backs to the far end of the cage, bares its yellowing fangs at her, and growls deep in its throat.
Kjat was always perceptive, though. Behind those fangs she sees an older man, frightened and starving.
“An auspicious day,” Pokh says, clapping Bjarkl on the shoulder. “The first Beast in a decade! An auspicious day for us all.”
She and the Hulgliev stare at each other between the bars. His eyes study her, evaluating. Passing judgment. She wonders if he can see the featherwolves in her, because they are certainly aware of him. Deep inside of her, she can sense something from them that she’s never felt in the eighteen years they’ve been with her.
Fear.
In all of their blackfeathered fury, they’re very afraid.
It makes her think.
She likes them afraid, these monsters of her nights.
More people join them, with torches and lights, and the Hulgliev changes color again as they pass, flickering gold and red.
“He’s beautiful,” she whispers. She’d reach out and touch him, if she didn’t think he’d take her arm off at the elbow.
“Yes!” Pokh is clacking his beak in excitement and knocking his talons together. “The beautiful Beast of the earth! And tonight Kjati, you will kill him!”
The Hulgliev goes all black, snarls and throws itself against the bars over and over again, rocking the jeep on its springs.
• • •
Though she knew it was coming, there’s a feeling in the pit of her stomach like she swallowed one of her boots, and it doesn’t go away all of that day. Killing this Hulgliev is the last thing she wants to do. It’s a long day of prayers and fasting that seems to flash before her eyes now in this memory. At high speed and in quick succession, elders of the different congregations come up to congratulate her, to wish her well. Others coach her on how to use the ancient ceremonial spear they call Longinus. It’s gigantic, carved with elaborate runes, and painted a brilliant red. Overhand, they say. Underhand. In the side, in the chest, in the throat. Pokh drills the ceremony’s chants and responses with her over and over again until she can say them backwards.
The red-robed Disciples themselves erect the stake up on a low rise. They attach the crossbar, stopping to chant with every nail.
Too soon, the sun has set. Darkness lowers itself like a hood across the grasslands and then the moons bloom out in full to light them up again. Kjat is starving, and the smell of roasting wurf from the camps makes her mouth water, though you’d think she’d be used to fasting by now.
Bhupen convenes the circle, and the twelve disciples array themselves around the rise. All of the congregations from all of the tent cities have donned their scarlet hoods and they gather in a great ocean before the mound.
Pokh wraps her in the scarlet vestments and hands her the red spear. It’s surprisingly light in her hands. He leads her up the rise. The Hulgliev is there, tied naked to the stake with his arms spread out to either side. He stares at her, struggles against the bindings but its no use. He’s tied too securely and he’s too weak—from the bruises on his face, across his body, they haven’t treated him well.
From the rise she can see out over th
e crowds. There are bonfires here and there, and many in the congregations hold up torches or knives, glowing with their own light. Over the Hulgliev’s shoulder, off on the very edge of the horizon is another walking city, lumbering along under its own power, and she’s the only one who sees it.
She hears herself start the chanting. She hears the crowd roar back its response. The blackjackals spin and churn within her at the sounds. She watches herself step closer to the crucified Hulgliev, dreading to see what will happen next even though she knows exactly what will take place, and all the things that will come to pass afterwards, too.
She does not want to do this.
She places the tip of the spear up against the Hulgliev’s chest.
The Hulgliev stares back at her with a flat, angry look. He growls, and shows his yellowing fangs again, but he’s not submitting, not begging her the way she thought he might. He’s not giving away any of himself to them.
She’s not sure if him begging would have been better or worse.
She can feel the featherwolves rising up inside her, now, pushing against the thinning wall that separates their world from hers. Hungry, always hungry, they work their way with her with their spectral teeth and cutting wings. Their anxiety and fear rises in her, their loathing fills her throat with bile. She swallows, but up it comes again, choking out her own voice.
The chants from the Disciples rise in pitch and the crowd growls and slavers at her back.
And she watches, helpless across the intervening two years, as the pawn she was then leans in with all of her muscle and drives that huge red spear home.
17.
It’s been two years now, two years of running, two years of hell from that time on the grasslands, and yet even as she runs from all of them, the creatures of that dark other world get closer to her. They are infinitely stronger now, just on the other side of her mind, cawing and barking, howling through her head and gut. Every day they carve away at her will, and now here in the alley behind the warehouse of the tiny port they are ready to push through. Pokh never told her it would be like this. They have her beautiful mother’s face, calling Kjati, Kjati! They have those terrible blackfeathers made from stone and fire, claws and talons and teeth as sharp-edged as a knife is sharp, ready to draw her blood. They have Pokh’s voice, now, repeating to her the endless names of demons. They have the strength of a hundred mages both alive and dead.
She has used them and now they have her.
They have waited for three centuries, and they are coming through at last, and in her exhausted dream state, they are strong, stronger than she ever could be and she means nothing to them. She never has.
She feels her strength waning, feels her mind on the verge of collapse.
This, she thinks, is the end.
But then: a buzzing sound in her ears now.
A humming hive of golden bees. It had been growing quietly, as she lay in her fever dream, creeping up on her.
What is it?
She doesn’t know. She tries to resist it, too, as it crawls up her back, rests itself around her shoulders.
But as the back of her neck grows warm she understands that this is not the darkness, the blackjackals, this is something entirely different.
Whatever this is, it’s helping her, giving her weight and substance. Giving her leverage that she can use to hold her own against them. Her shoulders and arms grow warm, too, and strength like hot air pours into her chest and lungs, reaching down into the muscles of her abdomen.
She presses the warmth downward against those sharp feathers and the beaks and the claws and teeth and talons that are clawing at her innards, against their awful tendrils, and the warmth responds.
The humming flows through her, down and out, and all of the featherwolves and the blackjackals go with it until it’s shockingly quiet in her head in a way she can’t remember it ever being.
• • •
Kjat shakes her head to clear it. She opens her eyes. There, in front of her face, is the double-irised goat-eye of a Buhr. She looks around. She’s in the alley, behind the warehouse. Blackwell, she thinks.
“What the hell did you do?” she says. The Buhr blinks and then burps at her, and then takes two of its hands from her shoulders.
CHILD, it shouts into her mind, making her wince. THIS WILL HELP YOU, FOR A TIME. It reaches out and touches her with a furred finger at the base of her throat. She looks down to see a carved, oblong piece of bone there, hanging from a silver chain. She holds it up to look at it. The glyphs are round and fluid, not at all like the sharp ones that cover her skin.
“You don’t have to be so loud,” she says.
OLD CRAFT, the Buhr shouts. VERY OLD. FROM THE WASTES. FROM BEFORE THE CITIES.
The Buhr’s thinking leaves behind the taste of blood in her mouth, as though she’s bitten her tongue. Maybe she has.
CHILD, YOU SHOULD FLEE NOW.
She looks around. How long has it been? Minutes maybe. The closer the featherwolves get, the more space and time are beginning to seem fluid, filled with eddies and backwaters. Events seem to lose their proper sequence. Though her hand still burned, the cut across her palm has sealed, covered over with another glyph written into her skin. Zxyis, she thinks automatically, recalling Pokh's teaching. Demon of the river Thoke, near Karandelh.
Shadows flicker at the far end of the alley. Blackwell is nowhere to be seen. She reaches for the knife at her chest, but it’s gone. The three Kerul were gone, too, but that was good—at least she didn’t have to keep her mouth shut around that tramp of a woman anymore, the one hanging all over Blackwell.
Things are exploding off in the distance. Something is burning. All the air smells of smoke.
She needs to see what’s going on to know what to do. She needs to know what’s happened to Blackwell. Kjat lets the Buhr help her up and over to the wall of the warehouse. The thick wood is hot—it might be burning on the inside. She stands and pats its barrel-shaped body awkwardly at the base of its feeding tube.
“Thank you,” she says, touching the amulet. “Thank you for your kindness.”
The Buhr blinks at her, buzzes for a moment—was it embarassed?—and it then scuttles down the alley and is gone.
Kjat moves to the warehouse next door to the burning one, reaches up and finds a handhold. She pulls herself up, finds another hold in-between where the boards come together, and then finds holds for her feet. It’d be easier without boots, but she thinks she’ll probably be needing those. She levers herself up onto the roof, crouching low to stay out of sight.
It’s good that she does. The street is full of Tel Kharan, up and down the street, all in the flaming white armor.
Twenty or more tracers stretch back to the harbor, probably back to their warship. They’re in a complex matrix that someone has sketched out in chalk, and at the peak of it is the Talovian from the warehouse. She’s holding five conduits on her knife, her helm is pushed back, and she licks her eyes with a long pink tongue while she argues with a man, some older mage in elegant Akarii wrappings, with a bright red topknot that is starting to go grey, a silver mesh skullcap, and long sideburns.
The two are shouting at each other fiercely while the rest of the Tel Kharan look on. Kjat can’t make out the words. The older mage gestures toward the docks and makes a sharp chopping motion with his left hand. The marine shakes her head. The older mage steps up and begins pushing other marines physically out of the formation. It’s not easy to do with that heavy armor, but he just needs to get them a little out of position. Matrices of this level are pretty delicate. He does. Conduits start to blow, and the matrix collapses around them.
The Talovian turns and hisses, and then leaps toward the older man with her knife held high. But the older mage turns, darts nimbly out of the way and slaps the Talovian across her thick frog face as she passes him. She rolls as she lands and throws up some warding. He shouts at her and she backs down into a crouch, and he calls up two other Tel Kharan to stand beside him, w
hich they do, with their knives in hand—though even from here Kjat can see they’re not happy about it.
Kjat can’t tell if the Talovian is getting ready to spring again or not.
But apparently the man gets his point across. She slams her knife into its scabbard and turns and stomps away into the night, hot steam shooting from all of the crevices in her armor.
The older man shouts orders at the rest of them. People scurry to respond. Four mages enter the warehouse and carry out a large body, which they lay on the pavement before him.
Its Blackwell’s body, and Kjat doesn’t want to look at it, but she can’t turn away, either.
He’s charred all over, and where there is any fur left it is black and singed.
Her heart lurches, and an emptiness washes over her. Another beautiful Hulgliev, dead at her hands.
Josik had loved and trusted him like a brother, and she’d quickly seen why. The way he spoke to his team, calm and patiently, reminded her of her father—at least what she could remember of him. Though he was gangly and awkward sometimes, he had a good sense of humor, he was selfless in trying to make life better for his team. He’d treated her well, too, even though she’d basically wormed her way into the group without really being asked.
She enjoyed how the blackjackals had churned whenever Blackwell was near.
Their fury put them off balance, distracted them from their relentless focus on her. Being around him gave her more leverage to hold herself together for another day.
But it was more then that, too.
She’s thinking of that ride down from the mountains, was it just last night?
There was a deep sadness that was in Blackwell, underneath all of his careful smiles, and his willingness to make jokes at his own expense—she got a glimpse of what he and his people had been through in their long talk.
And then, he’d fallen asleep curled around her. She wasn’t sleeping then, though she’s sure he thought she was. She lay awake, listening to his deep breathing, enjoying the immense warmth coming off of this good man that she’d been watching for more than a month.
