Beasts of the Walking City

by Del Law

  Ercan was on the ship now, she says, working as a tailor. Fehris was working in the ship's maintenence bay. She has seen no sign of Kjat.

  She also asks me questions that get me to open up in ways I haven’t with anyone beside Kjat.

  I tell her about Hulgliev naming ceremonies and the elaborate wedding festivals, though I’d only hear of them and never actually attended one of either. I tell her how the birth of a female Hulgliev is a rare, singular event in the life of a tribe, and how all the tribe would come together for that girl-child, adorn her with gifts and vows of protection. She seems to like the idea of that.

  I describe the kivas and the dances, the warm comfort of a dirtnest, the songs elders will sing on the nights when the moons all come together in a line. And I talk some about my own childhood, too, about how it felt to wander the northern woods and fields while my aunt smoked and schemed and plotted fruitless revenge, while my secondfather worked in the fields and my thirdfather drank and then drank some more.

  I’d like to say that it’s the way she listens that draws me in. It’s not. It’s the sex.

  But as I talk, as she listens and talks, I found myself becoming more and more fascinated and, yes, obsessed with her. When I find her, she is dressed in Akarii finery of one sort or another—pale, spiral wrappings of gossamer white, trimmed in silver, or elegant feathered cloaks covering a pale underlining of silks or woven wool as soft and light as a bird’s down.

  Where she acquires the clothes, I don’t know. I don’t know where she sleeps when she’s not with me, and I don’t know where she eats.

  But I want to. I want to know everything about her.

  When I’m tossing restlessly in that human bed of mine, I dream of her. When Semper is introducing me to various Akarii functionaries, walking me through the markets, quoting some Akarii history text or pointing out yet another detail in carving or tapestry, my mind wanders inexorably to her.

  I’m making a poor impression on the Akarii, I’m sure, but I really can’t get myself to care much. All of them seem stiff and over-mannered, well dressed and glittering in all of their finery and yet entirely devoid of life. I’m sure they see me as some strange rural creature without the ability to make conversation, who shows up late and disheveled to meetings, and who stares out of portholes at passing sea birds. The Hulgliev really are nothing more than trained beasts, they’re thinking, paraded around in the robes of the better races and trained to be passingly polite.

  But I can live with that. The scent of Mircada’s oils is in my fur. The flesh of my palms remembers the heat of her smooth skin. My tongue can still taste her. I am lost, and I know it, and I want to stay that way for as long as I can. The rest of the world can destroy itself, and I’m not sure that I will notice.

  • • •

  Much of my time is spent waiting. After breakfast one morning, a note comes by a courier. I’m to meet her in the evening, after dinner, on the sixth deck up near the bowsprit. An isolated chamber used for storing spare sails and rigging will likely be deserted, she says in her elegant script. Instantly, the endless hours of the day stretch before me, and I spend the morning wandering aimlessly on my own.

  We are still nine days out of Tamaranth, I'm told. The ship passes over rough seas, and the parts of the fleet that can’t rise up on the lei struggle to keep up. I pass through the markets without seeing them, walk through residential stretches. After some time I think I’m being followed—men dressed again in fedoras and suits that seem all too new eye me at intervals and trail me some distance back, but then they fall off and I’m alone. When I check the time, it’s barely close to noon. I get a plate of fish from a vendor and make my way up a viewing area close to the uppermost deck, where I find a chair close the rail.

  I eat, staring at the water. I’m thinking of Mircada, and it takes me awhile to realize I have company. There’s an old Stona sitting to my left, and an echo in my head of something he may just have said.

  “I’m sorry?” I say. “Are you addressing me?”

  “The apology is mine,” the Stona says.

  He pulls his stool closer and is studying me curiously, his head cocked to one side. He speaks quickly, and each crisp consonant precisely enunciated. “You are concerned about the upcoming war. As well you should be. I am rude to interrupt you with my own unworthy thoughts.”

  This will tell you something about how far gone I am with Mircada: it takes me a minute or two to realize what war he’s talking about.

  I feel a quick wave of guilt, and shake my head. “Not at all,” I say. “I’d appreciate your thoughts.”

  The Stona nods with a sharp dip of his long beak. “I was speculating about the nature of Retrievers,” the Stona says. “Hypothetically, now. What would you conjecture would drive a professional to engage in behavior that would damage his own artifacts and reduce their value? Would you not expect someone to undertake the task of bringing something up from the past with a good deal of care and planning?”

  The Stona is older, with gray-tipped red feathers lining his face and neck. He has a distracted, bemused air to him that reminds me of a poet I drink with sometimes in Tamaranth, someone so precise and ironic and pretty much broke, so he never hesitates to tell you exactly what he's thinking. The Stona’s wrappings and feathers show considerable signs of wear.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” I say.

  To be honest, I was expecting to get lectured about the death of the Tel Kharan marine again. Every time I’ve seen a Stona in the market, and there are many on this ship, it'd snap its beak at me and narrow its eyes menacingly.

  Out on the water, a large fish jumps into the air and is caught in the beak of an even larger sea bird. The Stona gives me a curiously knowing look, head still cocked to one side and the slitted pupils of his eye wide and black. “I cite you one ship, as an example,” he says. “A single ship that will testify to the failings of an entire class of our population! A podship that was brought aboard at the Framarc colony where we recently conducted Family business? It came aboard in such a state! It was immediately placed under my care. I don’t know who the Retrievers were, mind you. I’m not privy to that sort of information, nor would I want to know. But I’d never seen such sloppy and unprofessional work. Someone had tried to wake the ship on the sands of the Wastes! Some mage had forced a knife right through the primary control unit and rewrote some of the most simple, essential functions with temporary, crude gibberish just to get it airborne.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” I say, cautiously. I’m getting the sense that this meeting is not exactly coincidental.

  “I tell you no falsehood, khalee! I have never seen a retrieval job performed so poorly. But it’s a wonderful artifact under all the damage. Given time, it will restore quite nicely. Now I ask you. What would drive a man or a woman of any race to do such a thing?” The Stona doesn’t move as he speaks. He has that absolute stillness a heron has, scanning the water below him for prey. The pupil of the eye facing me grows larger until it nearly fills the whole of the socket.

  “You see, khalee, it was suggested to me by, shall we say, an acquaintance of mine," he says, "that you might have a philosophical perspective on this issue.”

  “I suspect there are many possible reasons,” I say, cautiously. “Maybe they were just in a hurry?”

  The Stona swivels his head to look out to sea. “A hurry? Perhaps. We often hurry now. Everything is done quickly, under deadline, to the demands of one’s many stakeholders or it is not done at all. One hesitates to even speculate on how far we have fallen from our pasts, where a job was done well for its own sake.”

  “Was there ever really a time like that?”

  The Stona studies something in the water that I can’t see. “There was,” he says simply. “I remember it. And some of us hope that there will be such a time again. The things we could learn! For example, khalee, I truly wish I’d have more time to study the depths of this particular ship. I’m an engineer by t
rade, you see. I follow my director who follows his division lead who works for the Fleet Captain. I keep Nadrune’s machines in careful order so that she might do as she wishes. But I’m from a long line of scholars and artists stretching far back into the dark branches of our own lost home world. And this ship—such a fascinating artifact! One with, well…” The Stona looks back and me for a minute, and then back out to sea. “One with a good deal of secrets to reveal, I’d think, if one would have the time to study it. Not that I would have, you see. As I stated, I have a job to do, khalee. I am asked to complete a specific set of tasks and deliverablea and I complete them in a certain amount of time, and I am compensated adequately for my delivery. A standard agreement. Nothing unique in that.”

  A few Akarii pass by, talking and eating. They go silent when they see me, and look at us strangely. The Stona is quiet until they pass. When they’re out of earshot, he leans closer to me. “Khalee, might I indulge you with more details about this project? We are to bolt some weapons onto it, to make it ready and in three days we will assign a pilot. In nine days we will push it out the door at Tamaranth to fly against the Family’s adversaries. The Fleet Captain wants everything in the sky that can be in the sky because we are at war, khalee. And war requires sacrifices of everyone, sacrifices of lives of course …”

  The Stona pauses and I get that he is, finally, referring to the other Stona, the one that had died in that warehouse.

  But the Stona continues “…but also sacrifices of the past. We must step away from beauty and knowledge that might enrich us all as citizens of the greater world, and we must focus on the achievement of our tangible political objectives. For better or worse, khalee. For better or worse, worse or better. What must be done must be done, I am told.”

  “I think I see,” I say, hesitantly. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “Do you, khalee?” The Stona blinks slowly, first one eye and then the other. “Do you understand what costs we incur? Few do, I think. We excavate what we need from the past and place it into our current age, and then we ask it to suit our own small, limited ends, not the possibly greater goals it was created to accomplish.”

  The Stona sighs. “I am truly sorry for burdening you with this, khalee. I talk too much, as I have always done. I suppose I am truly growing older, much as I find that hard to believe. But as one ages into a long life such as the ones my people often live, one begins to question one’s beliefs and values. One begins to think even farther into the future and begins to ask oneself, ‘What must I do now, so that I will be able to tolerate my own existence for many years to come?’ And then one needs to act, you see.”

  The Stona reaches out and places his clipped talon on my shoulder. “I will regret having not acted in the past,” he says. “But today I act. Do you understand me, khalee?”

  On the Stona’s wrist, just below the talon and before the feathers begin, I see a thin silver bracelet, glinting there in the light of the sun. I recognize it immediately: it’s one of Mircada’s, I’m certain, with that crisscrossed pattern etched into the surface.

  The Stona watches me looking at the bracelet, and one of his eyes closes in a very precise wink.

  I take a deep breath. “Do you suppose, engineer, that I might take a look at it sometime? The ship you mention?”

  The engineer gives a sharp nod, and sits back in his chair, pleased. “Why yes, khalee. I’m happy that you would ask. In fact, you can see it right now, if you like.”

  He stands abruptly, inclines his head, and offers the three-fingered talon at the end of his non-functional wing. “Gravhnal,” he says. “I’m always happy to share knowledge with those who take an interest in the mechanical, khalee. As time permits, of course. We do have a schedule to keep!”

  “As time permits.” I stand and shake his talon, the rest of my lunch forgotten.

  He leads me down through the ship’s decks to a holding chamber on the port side, halfway between the waterline and the upperdecks. It’s a large, high-ceilinged space with a huge, engraved metal door on the outer hull, and a complex, lei-powered apparatus that must raise and lower it. Several podships rest in a line down the center of the chamber. They’re in various stages of repair, and people of several races and some mechs move around them with tools and devices that I don’t recognize.

  Second from the end of the line is the podship we’d pulled out of Tilhtinon. It’s a lot cleaner, and many of the dents have been worked out, though a large one still remains just to the starboard of the bow. Several areas have makeshift patches of metal skin riveted across them. A new hatch has been fastened into place, and a Krukkruk with a welder’s torch is attaching a line of hooks along the starboard side to hold nets that will probably carry cargo, weapons, or even mages into battle.

  Two other men stand to one side, watching the Krukkruk work, and as Gravhnal and I approach, I realize that the human is Bakron Akarii, that Tel Kharan marine I’d seen from the Fleet Captain’s quarters, and from the controls of this ship. The other figure is a younger Stona, with quick gestures and bright, brilliant feathers patterned in turquoise and aquamarine.

  The Stona calls out and gestures us over. “Gravhnal! There you are. We’ve been looking for you, you know! The marine wishes to understand the status of your upgrades, and I told him that you would best be able to speak to the details. Who is this?” He nods distractedly in my direction. “Really, Grav. We don’t have time for you to bring all of your friends through here. We have a great deal of work to complete in a very short time.”

  Bakron studies me. “This is the Fleet Captain’s pet,” he says. “Hulgliev,” he nods his head. “I’ve anticipated our meeting for days now, though I understand you have been… otherwise engaged, I suppose I must say,” he says.

  I feel my ears go back and the hair on my neck ridges goes up. “Khalee,” I say, carefully.

  He’s dressed in an elegant set of Akarii wraps in blue and silver, with a heavily jeweled knife in a silver sheath on his chest. His long, black hair is bound back in a topknot, and his beard is cropped close to his face, not covering the long white scars there that stretch from his eyes down to his throat on either side of his face. He has a long, crooked nose that looked like it’d been broken once and had healed badly. His eyes are chocolate brown and they flash in the light slanting in through the windows in the ship’s hull, watching me.

  We stand there in silence, taking each other’s measure.

  He takes in my collar, my robes, and my lack of a knife in a glance. He snorts, derisively, leans his weight forward on the balls of his feet as though he could spring at me at any moment. I find myself leaning forward too, my fur going black and my claws itching to come out.

  I should say something else, I suppose, but I’m not feeling all that verbal. There’s a growl that wants to start in the back of my throat, but I keep it quiet. For now.

  A mech rolls past, carrying too many tools at once.

  The younger Stona squints and takes a step between us. He stares up nearsightedly at me. “The Hulgliev?” he says. “Well, Gravhnal. You really will talk to anyone, won’t you.”

  Gravhnal clears his throat and says, “I was led to understand he had an interest in our work, Director. As you have said repeatedly, it is important that we help leadership understand the value of the investments they make in our services.”

  “I am sure he is quite interested,” Bakron says carefully. “In this craft in particular, am I correct?” He nods toward the podship. “It was in the warehouse, after all, where you killed one of my best men, one of these citizen’s worldmates. Am I right, Hulgliev?”

  “Regretfully,” I say, though my tone implies anything but remorse.

  “I’m sure you regret it now. But I find myself curious, gentlemen.” He turns to the two Stona. “What is it about this ship that would make someone take such a risk? Why forfeit your very existence for a piece of Retriever trash?”

  “The ship is nothing unique,” Gravhnal shrugs. “
Standard large podship, though the design of the carapace is more advanced than what we normally see. Late Third Transcendency, I’d say, when the power infrastructure was more sophisticated than what we have now. The ship has few weapons, and the power reserves aren’t significant as a result. Engines are minimal. It was probably used largely for city to city cargo transport.”

  “So you tell me, Gravhnal. So you tell me,” Bakron says. He studies the older Stona with suspicion. “And yet one of my marines gave up her life for this ship. How do I know I can trust your assessment?”

  “He is one of my best, khalee,” the director interjects. “Despite his taste in companions. But don’t you let that go to your beak, Gravhnal.”

  Gravhnal tilts his head to the side. “We’re installing the standard complement of accretion mechanics and targeting schematics, along with the netting. It will be ready to fly when you need it, khalee.”

  “It better be,” Bakron says, frowning. He turns to me. “So then what is it, Hulgliev? What is it about this ship that brings you back here?”

  “I suspect I’m at fault for that,” Gravhnal says again, with a restraining claw on my shoulder. “I have a hope—and perhaps it’s a futile one—that a greater understanding of what’s involved in engineering will drive a greater caution across the Retriever population in the field.”