by Kevin Hearne
In the morning Madhep was still gone, my family was still gone, and I wept silently before anyone was up to see. But once it was daylight and I had to be the leader again, I spoke to the Seekers with Tamhan behind me, Murr by my side, and Eep perched on my shoulder.
“I wish to emphasize that you don’t need to seek this kenning and that you may change your mind at any time,” I said. “There is absolutely no obligation here. And there is also no shame. None of us is a judge, and none can decide for someone else what they should do with their life. After those who seek the kenning are finished, I will escort everyone else back to Khul Bashab so you will be safe.”
They stared at me in silence and a few of them nodded, but there were no questions. No challenges, either. They merely followed me, and some of them talked with one another through prior acquaintance, but none spoke with me and none made an effort to make new friends. No one knew if they’d still be alive to continue a friendship in a few days.
None of them volunteered their names after Madhep died, and I didn’t ask. Without Murr and Eep and Tamhan around to keep me company, it would have been a very lonely time. Tamhan spoke to me about what he had learned about business from his father: colluding with the viceroy and essentially bribing him through politely labeled methods ensured a tidy profit. The viceroy’s cronies became wealthy that way, the other merchants just got by, and all the rest subsisted if they were lucky. The unlucky ones—well, they met a bad end in the river or outside the walls, or they were walking with us to an uncertain future. He shared so much more, and I think some of it might have been important, economics and politics and so on, but I admit that much of it barely registered. I just liked to hear him talk and encouraged him to keep going.
That ended when we arrived at the nughobe grove in the afternoon of the third day. Murr went ahead to rejoin his nest. I told him that all the people with me had come to seek the Sixth Kenning and I would send them into the grove one at a time. Using my new abilities, I sensed that there were thirty bloodcats in the nest, and it was only a quarter-mile walk from where we stood on the northern edge of the grove.
He padded into the shade while Eep remained behind with me. I got out my journal and ink pot. The sun made me squint at them as I spoke.
“And now you must decide. You may go to seek a kenning, one at a time, or remain here with me. A nest of bloodcats will determine whether you are blessed, and they are waiting a quarter mile ahead, south of here. Give me your name before you go so that if you are not blessed, I can give your name properly to Kalaad in the sky. And if you are blessed, why, then, come back and tell us!”
There was a pause while they looked at one another, waiting for someone to go first. There were no well-kept statistics on the likelihood of success in the early days of a kenning’s discovery. But a man stepped forward after about ten beats and gave me his name. He gulped and looked uncertain despite being the first one to summon the will to go through with it. I smiled reassuringly at him and wished him well.
After five minutes I sent the next person willing to go after him, a girl who might have been my age but looked older. She had been worn down by life already, and her gaze was distant, seeing something from her past that spurred her forward into this desperate future in which she was willing to lay down her life for a chance at power. She half mumbled, half slurred her name and I asked her to repeat it, but she ignored me and stalked off into the grove. She had not been gone a minute before we heard distant cries of terror from the first man. Eyes flicked back and forth as the Seekers wondered if everyone else heard it.
“Making some noise is almost unavoidable,” I said. “One way or another, blessed or not, you’re going to get bitten. So we cannot assume an outcome from what we hear.”
I kept sending them in until only Tamhan remained—no one else refused, the desperation that thick in their minds—or rather, the despair. I remembered well the hopelessness I had felt and the welcome I had given to death. I hoped now the screams we heard were one last encounter with pain before a better life began rather than a moment of fear before death. The two of us waited until we heard the last cries from the final Seeker before walking together into the nughobe grove that had changed my life. Eep flew from my shoulder, unwilling to let the sky go, and screeched as she arrowed into the grass. He’d be fine until my return.
We came to the same clearing I had stumbled into the day my family died, and there we saw bloodcats at supper, tearing flesh from splayed forms in the undergrowth. Tamhan gasped behind me and began muttering prayers to Kalaad. I winced at the sight but had prepared myself for the reality of it. Every kenning took a steep toll, and I had seen plenty of dead in my time as a hunter. A few of the bloodcats looked up at us, but most of them didn’t bother.
“Murr?” I called. “Are you there?” I couldn’t pick him out from the rest.
“Murr,” a voice replied, and then I spotted him lazing on one of the tree branches ringing the clearing, his tail dangling below it. His muzzle was clean. Perhaps he hadn’t participated. Or perhaps he had gone first.
“Did any of the Seekers get blessed?” I didn’t know what answer I expected, but it wasn’t the hand suddenly raised out of the clearing or the two others that followed it.
Heedless of the danger—I supposed there was no danger for me—I rushed to help. The blessed had been bitten numerous times as I had, but unlike the others, it wasn’t fatal.
“Congratulations,” I told the first one I came to, speaking so that the others would hear. “You’ll heal quickly. You’ll feel better in the morning and be amazed at how well you feel the day after that.”
The man at my feet shifted his eyes to the left and right. He was about my age as they all had been, and I remembered his eyes and his unusual hair if not his name. He had shaved the sides of his head and left a broad stripe down the middle, which he had dyed with yellow poppy powder and fixed with beeswax. “Is it safe to move?” he asked.
“Yes, it is.” I extended a hand to help him up, and he groaned as he grasped and pulled. “Remind me of your name again?”
“Sudhi Khorala,” he said.
“All right, Sudhi,” I said after escorting him to the edge of the clearing, “stay here and I’ll get the others.”
The other two were women, though I supposed one was more of a girl. She had been the youngest of the Seekers and reminded me of my sister. She had blood on her face and streaks through it where tears had fallen.
“I’m still alive,” she whispered.
“You’re blessed,” I said. “Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you now,” and I helped her up.
She sniffed and wiped at her cheek, looking around at all the dead. “I thought I’d end up like the rest of them, nothing to care about anymore.”
“There’s still plenty for you to care about,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Adithi Ghumaal.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.” She took a couple of experimental steps. She had to limp, favoring her left leg, but she joined Sudhi and Tamhan while I visited the third person. She was already sitting up, staring at the bloodcats in outrage. It was the girl with the distant stare whose name I’d never heard correctly. She appeared quite lucid now.
“Damn it,” she said. “I was supposed to die!” She picked one bloodcat nearby and pointed at her. “Hey. Why didn’t you want to eat me? Do I smell bad or something? Gah, that stings!” She sucked at her teeth and looked down at her chest, which was covered in blood. Belatedly I realized she was missing a piece from her tunic. And she realized she was missing something else, and her angry voice rose to fill the grove. “One of you shits bit off my nipple! What am I supposed to do with only one tit?” She swung around to me. “Is this going to grow back? Did you fully heal?”
“Well, yes, I healed fully, but I didn’t lose anything either, besides blood.”
She surveyed the damage to the rest of her body, wincing. “You know, this is a messed-up way to get
a kenning.”
“Well, next week it’s spiders, so I think this is pretty good, all things considered.”
“Spiders? How do you know that?”
“I just feel it. And can kind of see it in my head. You might be able to as well now. Think about it. These bloodcats won’t be the source of the kenning for much longer, will they?”
Her eyes drifted up to the sky as she thought about it. “Oh. Oh! Euuhh! Nasty!” She shut her eyes tightly as if that would rid her mind of the mental image. “I’ve never seen spiders that big before. You’re right; this is better.” She cocked her head at me. “What did you say your name was? I didn’t pay attention.”
“Abhinava Khose.”
“I’m Hanima Bhandury. You know what’s amazing—besides being alive? I’m talking and you can understand me. I didn’t expect that at all! I mean, damn, everything hurts, but my mouth is working again, and that feels good.”
“It wasn’t working before?”
“No. Got hit on the head a couple of years back, and it did some damage. Kept me from speaking properly. I’d know exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it, but it never came out right. Everyone thought I was stupid and it wore me down till I was ready to make my exit, you know? No one would help and no one seemed to care, so I thought I might as well join my family. They all got crushed by the same building that messed up my head. But now listen to me go. I’m never going to shut up!” She grinned at the same bloodcat she had scolded earlier. “You can have my nipple. It’s not like I was using it. I’ve got my voice back, and that’s all I ever wanted. This is the best!”
Strange words to say amid all this death. But she wasn’t thinking about what was going on around her. I extended a hand to her to help her up. She grasped it, groaned, and then threw her bloody arm across my shoulder. “Help me out of here, will you? My ankle’s messed up, too.”
Leaning heavily on me, she hopped over to the others at the edge of the clearing. They all introduced one another and shared smiles; Tamhan congratulated the blessed, and then they all looked at me expectantly. I got out my journal and turned to the page where I’d written down the Seekers’ names.
“Four blessed out of thirty-three seekers, including myself,” I said. “That’s a pretty low success rate if that holds true.” Their smiles disappeared. “Let’s give them all to Kalaad in the sky.”
We turned to the fallen, and I read their names one by one. Our bodies are no more than meat that falls on the plains one day and feeds some other meat, but I wished their spirits peace because I think they were all seeking that more than anything else when they followed me to the grove. Certainly Hanima had, and maybe Adithi, too. I suppose all Seekers are after peace of some kind, and make the calculation that one way or another—in death or blessing—they’ll get it.
But I wondered if peace was possible for us. Even though we called ourselves blessed, I didn’t see a future of bliss and contentment waiting ahead.
Plenty of chatter ensued once Fintan dispelled his seeming. Increased strength, speed, and healing as well as a connection to animals? The Sixth Kenning was truly a blessing even if it had a high mortality rate in those seeking it—the people nearest me were murmuring excitedly about Hanima’s recovery. If her brain injury could be healed with a blessing, then what other infirmities might be cured?
It certainly made me wonder if my old knee injury could be fixed after all this time. I imagined so. What trouble could mere tissue be compared to the complexity of the brain? I mean, except the very large drawback that you most likely would die trying to get yourself healed. No thanks. I was fine. I had lived with my bad knee for longer than I had enjoyed a stable one, and coping with it was neither good nor bad, just a fact of my existence.
I also found it interesting that seeking the Sixth Kenning, like the Fifth, involved potentially being consumed with the trade-off of some kind of symbiosis and new physical abilities. For perhaps two seconds I marveled that this was the first time we were hearing about this, and then I realized the Nentian government would have tried to keep it quiet if they didn’t control the source of the kenning. If there were still only four of the blessed and they were roaming the plains rather than spreading the word in the cities, then it was no wonder that we hadn’t heard more of them. And we’d had our own problems to occupy our attention.
The bard let people talk for a while then held up his hands, a seeming stone in one hand. “Let’s check in with Viceroy Melishev before we finish for the day.” He cast it down at his feet, and the sour leader of Hashan Khek materialized, this time in a muted, somber tunic of black and dark blue.
I miss Dhingra. This new man, Khaghesh, who bubbled up from the cesspool of the bureaucracy, seems competent, but I do not enjoy the same rapport. He smells like onions and sweat. And he has an unsightly boil or mole or something growing on his face below his right eye. Perhaps it is a reservoir for his evil thoughts. Or it’s a spider egg sac and one night soon the creatures will burst out and eat him in his sleep. One can only hope: I’m fairly certain he is a spy for Talala Fouz, so everything I do and say could all be reported later in writing to an unsympathetic pair of eyes. I don’t know when I will find someone to confide in again. I never should have sent Dhingra away.
That Raelech courier returned today with news of what was happening to the south: two thousand burned conscripts, Ghuyedai laying a toothless siege, and the juggernaut doing nothing about it.
“Tell me, Master Courier, has Gorin Mogen, in your view, violated the Sovereignty Accords?”
“It matters little what my views are, but I think he has.”
“Then by the terms of those accords, Rael is required to help us repel his invasion, is it not?”
“I am certain the Triune Council will act once I make my report. However, we were not sent here with the freedom to attack and may not act beyond the scope of our orders.”
Preposterous. “Why send a juggernaut if he’s not to attack?”
“A show of force is sometimes as effective as force itself and is often less bloody. And he was dispatched to safely retrieve the Raelech stonecutters who had been duped by Gorin Mogen.”
“Were they retrieved? Because they still owe me work.” And we’d need to have them do even more now that we had serious cause to believe we might have to defend against Hathrim.
“They were. They are en route under an honor guard of your forces handpicked by your junior tactician, Nasreghur. In the meantime, the juggernaut remains on site awaiting further orders from the Triune. And he did ruin the crops they’d sown.”
“They’d sown crops?”
“Yes, but they’ll have no harvest now.”
That isn’t the point at all. The fact that Mogen would be so brazen as to farm the land like it was his sends a much clearer message of his intentions than putting up walls. He intends to make his “refugee camp” a permanent settlement.
Nothing I can do except cry for help at this point, which does little for one’s sense of personal self-worth. Yet it is my only option. I send the courier on her way to beg the Triune Council to intervene, and I ask the Fornish to do the same and even send word to the Brynts and Kaurians that the Sovereignty Accords have been triggered. We will see who responds first. I think the Fornish will do something before my own king does. Certainly the lily-white tree lovers will act before the Senesh cousins will. Bhamet Senesh, who likes to sit in his tower and squat on a chair like he shat the whole city of Khul Bashab out of the dank bog of his ass, sent a man asking me for military aid because he had some unruly half-naked teenagers he couldn’t seem to tame. Incompetent tit.
Determined to get some satisfaction out of a frustrating day, I summon my worthless healer for another attempt at treating my condition. A greasy man with a fondness for mediocre boots, Malhama Poresh comes to me with his bag of stinking plant potions and remedies he claims are the latest medicines out of the healer community at Tel Ghanaz. He has given me unguents and oils and salves and numerous he
rbal teas to drink, smiling all the while and saying, “Try this!” but nothing cools the burning fire whenever I piss. And it has been getting worse. I have been getting fevers, chills, and sweats.
“Feeling better, I hope?” he says, flashing his teeth at me even though it should be obvious I’m not better.
“No.”
“Ah! Unfortunate. Well, I have something here that might do the job,” he says, already clawing in his bag.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you? Have you ever healed anyone with these concoctions of yours?”
“Oh, yes, many people, Viceroy! Your particular affliction is just proving stubborn.”
“It’s more than that, I’d say. I’d say it’s eating me alive. I was with a sexitrist last night and she refused to touch me, and I can’t blame her. It looks like it feels—painfully inflamed.”
“Apologies, Viceroy. I’m sure we can do something about it.”
While he rummages about, I call over some soldiers and order him bound and gagged. We go down to the stables and get two horses. I throw him over the saddle of one and lead him out, alone, to Kalaad’s Posts. It’s a bit of work to tie him to one myself, but once I’m finished, I fetch a whip from my pack and give him a lick across the chest just to get the scent of his blood in the air. Then I remove his gag and let him scream a bit until he asks, “Why?”
“If you can’t do your job, Malhama, then you’re tonight’s meal for something hungry out here.”
“No! You can’t just leave me to be eaten alive—”
“I most certainly can. I have been in pain for months, and it’s your fault. So I think you should feel all of that pain today.”
The healer’s face twisted in fury. “How is it my fault? Maybe if you didn’t fuck so many gut goats your cock would work just fine!”
“What?”
“You heard me, you deviant! Everyone knows where you stick that thing. Goats are just the beginning. You like gharel hens because of the way they squawk and wriggle. And then there’s the legendary sessions with wart yaks.”
