Farewell to the Liar

by D. K. Fields

  They proceed this way, Newsands a good few paces in front and neither of them saying a word, for another upward winding street, another vertical ropebox, and two more streets besides. One more ropebox and they’re nearly there. It is a good thing that watching bats involves a lot of sitting down – Berklum finds the journey more taxing than he cares to admit, even to himself.

  ‘Is that so?’ he mutters.

  Come now, you know the most powerful lies are those we tell ourselves.

  He refuses to waste any more precious breath on the matter.

  This high up in the spire the streets and pathways are quiet. The houses are bigger, with more solid rock between them, and the shops sell more and more specific wares: whole businesses trading in duck down, or sweetbreads, or a kind of modification oil he’s never heard of before. This is where anyone with a few marks to their name lives on the spire. Of course, being the spire, it means those folks don’t have that much money – otherwise they wouldn’t be here at all. They who top the spire are merchants. Successful, Seeder-connected merchants; but purveyors of this, that and the other, nonetheless.

  All that means very little to Berklum. He has neither the imagination nor the natural bile to turn bitter. Perhaps he has been rescued from such petty feelings by his craft? A busy bonesmith has no time or need to ponder the lot of others. Except those lying on his tabletop, that is. No, it is simply a happy coincidence that at the height needed to watch tatterwing bats on the spire, the streets are quiet and the people generally keep to themselves.

  It will surprise none of you to know that Berklum has a favourite spot for tatterwing watching. Nor will it be a great surprise to know he recalls the route even after all these years. This being the Rusting Mountains, and not a fancy Perlish manor house, there’s no designated area for taking one’s leisure as one enjoys the surrounding natural beauty. Berklum’s spot is a wide connecting pathway that is open to the elements at the front and above, facing south, and is twenty or so feet below a tatterwing roost. It just so happens that, on the upper end of this pathway, the rock curves into a natural ledge to sit on, with a full view out into the Tear.

  Perhaps other such enthusiasts have found other, similarly accommodating places, but Berklum wouldn’t know. There’s no Rustan association or guild or group for the watching of bats and birds. Such an idea has never even occurred to Berklum; the Rustans are a less tribal people than others in the Union.

  ‘I just like the peace and quiet,’ he says, easing himself onto the rocky seat next to Newsands.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘I can be patient when I need to.’

  He doubts this somehow but keeps that to himself. She’s clearly still annoyed about the laughing. So let her be annoyed, he decides. He’s here to watch bats and maybe, just maybe, learn something about wings.

  Were you perhaps wondering what this was all about? Or had you, like Berklum, managed to put the pieces together for yourself? When he helped Newsands with the door of his workshop, he had no idea where she was going or what she wanted. And when she pushed his field glasses into his hand, the idea had just come to him, hadn’t it? But why? Why had he gone from a feather floating over his hearth to watching bats at the top of the spire?

  Yes, you understand, clever thing, you. This isn’t your first story, after all.

  The bats use the hot air of the Tear to fly.

  Berklum raises his field glasses to his face. They have an arm on each side that slots directly into his temple. This is one of the bonesmith’s few personal modifications, and it helps in all manner of ways with his work. Whether he needs his vision protected, or magnified for close work, everything is designed to click into place just above his ears. Helpful too, it is, for his old hobby.

  The vista beyond the ledge is not unique, but no less impressive for that. You’ll recall the spire sits at the northern edge of the Tear, it being the northernmost of the Rusting Mountains. So, to look south from the spire is to see the great chasm that is the Tear in all its broken glory. The ground – what can be seen of it through the thick clouds – is a rucked and buckling two-toned blanket. Those tones are the grey of cold rock and the piercing thread of Wit’s Blood. From such heights, even large floes of the blood appear thinly stitched through the great Tear. Then there are the other peaks and mounds; few so tall as the chain that makes up the Rusting Mountains, but they make their own claims on the sky well enough. Too tall for the burrowing Torn, and too short for the Rustans, they’re home to firecats and other creatures that prefer to be left well alone.

  And then, beyond these peaks, is the horizon. A simple enough notion, but in the Tear simple things are the most complex of all. The southern edge of the Tear is a distant, hazy line that belies the pitted caverns and precipitous gullies that make a maze of it. And should you manage to navigate a way through such a nightmare landscape, what awaits you? Your map might claim there lies The Great Southern Desert or The Shifting Sea or, more simply, Desert. Simple, but complex.

  This, and more besides, greets the roaming eye of Old Man Berklum, who is a bonesmith and that is what he is. He sees it all, and none of it, because he’s looking for bats, remember? The ground and the horizon are no places to look for flight. The tar-black clouds are what fill Berklum’s field glasses. Watching for tatterwings is like gazing at the night and hoping for a distant spark, a flicker of a lantern or the fleeting pulse of a star. No wonder it isn’t a popular pastime.

  ‘Well, we’re here, and so are the bats,’ he says, spotting a pair of large males in a break in the clouds. ‘What now?’

  Newsands, sweet little thing she is, has shuffled to the front of the ledge and is concentrating enough to furrow her lineless brow. ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘how do you think they do it?’

  ‘By being born to it,’ he says, still watching them.

  ‘You weren’t born to being a bonesmith.’

  ‘My palla disagreed.’

  ‘Just tell me what you see, all right?’ she says. She can sound stern when she wants to. It’s disconcerting. Best do as she says, Berklum.

  ‘Two male bats, big ones, rising through the clouds.’

  ‘Rising how?’

  ‘Just ris—’

  Something cuffs the back of his head, like his palla used to, and he loses the bats for a moment. How did that feel, Berklum? Different, wasn’t it? When your palla cuffed you it was with rough, calloused fingers. This was a soft, dull thud. This was a wing, and she did it without even moving.

  ‘Rising how?’ she says again.

  ‘They’re not moving. At least, that’s how it looks. They don’t flap. They… circle,’ he says, adjusting the focus of his glasses. ‘It’s small, but they tilt. The line of the span stays the same, but the angle changes as they come round.’

  ‘There’s more to a tatterwing though, isn’t there,’ she says – it’s not a question, but an order to look closer.

  He does so, picking out one of the males in particular. And in this way, with nothing else filling his vision, with no other distractions, he can finally see it. Something he’d not noticed in all his days of tatterwing watching. Or maybe he had and not considered it consciously, not thought it important, not cared for its significance. But if he’d ever had a tatterwing on his tabletop, like one of his recipients, he’d have seen it immediately – if not understood right away.

  ‘Their wings, they’re whole. Not in tatters.’

  ‘Have we named them wrong, for so long?’ she says.

  No. He knows their wings have holes in them. He knows. But he sees them now, whole.

  Until one of the males decides to stop rising. Then it turns to tatters.

  *

  They watch for hours. The comings and goings of bats. Their rise and fall. Mostly males at this time of day, but the occasional female too – darker in the wing and harder to see in the clouds. They feed on the Picknicker’s own winged delights, those also caught in the hot airs of the Tear. This makes the bats popular with your averag
e Rustan: each insect eaten is one fewer biting and buzzing in the middle of the night.

  Not so long after the first sighting, Newsands nudges Berklum. He turns, forgetting his field glasses for a moment and sees nothing but red stone wall. The glasses don’t come away easily. They catch in his temple, the mechanism thickened by lack of use. Still, nothing a little brute force can’t clear. With his eyes his own again, he looks down to find Newsands offering him one of his small notebooks and a nub of charcoal. Now, just where does she keep these things?

  Berklum ignores the question in favour of his notebook. He marks down, in a system only known to him, the different tatterwing bats circling in and out of the clouds. He has a keen eye – simply having field glasses is not enough – for the details that set individual tatterwings apart from one another. Scars are common, especially on the wings. As are damaged thumbs and fingers. Nips taken out of ears, the shapes and sizes of their noses, and much more besides.

  But really his notes have a different focus: the wings. And in that focus, he begins to understand their workings. The outer wing membranes are peppered with holes. This is what gives the bats their name, tatterwing. Most Rustans assume this is a result of flying in the Tear – the hot rocks and ash in the air, the Jittery Wit’s gift to the sky, must take their toll. It’s a tale that makes enough sense to satisfy. But it doesn’t explain why the inner membranes are not so affected. Watching them now, Berklum sees the truth of it. That every bat’s membranes are only tattered on the outer, and not the inner, is too unlikely a coincidence. So he watches the ends of each wing closely and finds that they move in and out in a very clear, deliberate way – when the bat climbs, the outer membranes close in on themselves. When the bat descends the membranes open.

  Yes, yes, you say, all very interesting for those interested in bat wings. But what does it mean for our story?

  ‘They don’t need to flap their wings,’ Berklum says.

  They don’t need to flap. Understand now? No? Tell them, Berklum.

  ‘Not having to flap the wings solves a great many problems.’

  Newsands hops down from the seat. ‘I knew you’d start to see it,’ she says.

  ‘Then why not just tell me?’ he says, still looking to the sky. ‘Could have saved us coming up here.’

  ‘No, Berklum, you misunderstand. I knew being here would show you the way, not what that way was.’

  Well then, the way seems simple enough: wings that catch the hot air to go up, and have holes that can be opened to go down.

  ‘The saying is simple, the doing is something else.’

  ‘That’s wrong,’ Newsands says. Her small, earnest face is tilted up at the old man. ‘Don’t underestimate how hard it is to say what has never been heard, to think what has never been dreamt.’

  She turns to the open vista, to the clouds of the Tear, and the tatterwings circling.

  ‘Enjoy your last days of dominion,’ she tells them. This is what the little girl with rainbow wings tells them.

  You’re right to look worried, Berklum.

  *

  What follows is the work of the thing – what Berklum calls the doing. It begins again with paper. The rolls Berklum had filled and then discarded are suddenly blank – just as Unun found them – and ready to be covered in charcoal once more. Wing – size and shape. Mechanisms for opening and closing the outer membranes. Weights, measures, materials. Everything is considered, noted down, changed, improved.

  Berklum does all this hunching over his tabletops. Candles burn down, sputter and fail, are replaced. Newsands comes and goes. Sometimes she sits on the high shelves, sometimes in his slipdog hide chair, and sometimes she is up on the tabletop with him. She doesn’t interrupt. She doesn’t fidget or play with anything. She isn’t the nuisance she’s named after. Her presence is as reassuring and companionable as the lit hearth, nothing more, nothing less.

  And where, you may wonder, is Unun during these days back at the paper?

  In exile, isn’t that right, Berklum? Your own apprentice. Your own daughter.

  He mutters something incomprehensible.

  It was not a pleasant conversation, was it? He doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to remember. But it is a part of the story worth telling, so you just carry on with your work, and we’ll sate ourselves with familial conflict and tension.

  *

  Unun knows you’re home. She heard the workshop door close behind you – not a door capable of closing quietly, that one. You’re back from watching tatterwing bats, which is something you haven’t done for years. She isn’t sure what to make of that. But she’s equally unsure what to make of you lying. The irony being that you haven’t lied in years either, but she can’t know that as we do. Hard as it may be to believe, you’ve had no reason to lie since your wife died. But back to Unun and her worrying.

  She’s biting her nails now, sitting on the edge of her bed. Everyone is picking up old hobbies. She knows you’re home, but she doesn’t want to see you. Instead, she’s recalling the awkwardness at the house door earlier – she sneaking back in the house, you sneaking out of the workshop. She could barely look at you through the haze of guilt over Hassi’s loan. Her friend’s terms were reasonable, and she now has the money to pay off all your debts. It’s stashed in the usual place, waiting to be distributed as necessary and with discretion. She doesn’t want you to know what’s happening until it’s too late: too late for you to do anything about it, and too late for her to lose her nerve.

  Cluuuuph.

  Another fingernail falls victim to this story.

  She needs to do something. She needs a distraction. Standing, she makes her way through the narrow corridor from their bedroom to the kitchen. A Rustan house is really a series of small rooms connected by thin corridors that the mountains begrudgingly tolerate. They are hewn painstakingly from the softer rock, which means rarely is a wall straight or a floor flat. Corridors slant up or down, kink one way or the other, as necessary. To Rustans this is entirely normal, so they are quite perturbed by northern homes with their characterless right angles and smooth planes.

  Unun rushes about a kitchen she barely knows anymore. She finds oats, a little goat’s milk, salt, and dried mushrooms bought from Seeder traders. This, and numerous variations of this, is evening porridge – a mainstay of the post-meiter, pre-Nibalt years when Unun and Berklum took turns to inadequately sustain each other. She heats the mixture until it starts to stick to the bottom of the deep pan and then spoons it into two bowls. Nibalt does not eat evening porridge.

  She carries the bowls down the slanting corridor to the workshop.

  ‘Palla?’ she calls.

  All noise beyond the internal door stops. She calls again, but you still don’t answer. Putting one of the bowls down, she tries the door, but it’s locked. She doesn’t like that, never has, not since she was a little girl when she would howl from the high shelf to be let in. But this locked door has taken on a lot more significance since then.

  ‘Palla, open the door,’ she says, as she rattles the handle.

  ‘No,’ he says, muffled, small.

  ‘You open this door at once!’

  ‘No,’ he says, firmer this time.

  It’s no good. She knows how stubborn he can be, so she tries a different approach. ‘You have to eat, Palla. I have some porridge for you – mushrooms, how you like it.’

  ‘Leave it there.’

  ‘I will n—’ She stops herself. She knows this is not a battle she can win. He has all the keys and can go days without eating when he’s working. ‘Whatever you’re doing, let me help,’ she says.

  ‘I … can’t.’ He’s close now, standing just on the other side of the internal door. ‘Not until it’s finished.’

  ‘Palla, I’m your apprentice. Let me help. Let me learn.’

  ‘You can’t see her. You can’t know. Not this time.’

  Her? Is that the recipient? Unun wonders. If it’s a sensitive commission, she can be discre
et. Far more than her palla. This little slip will give her much to think on in the coming days.

  ‘Palla, please—’

  ‘No, Unun. You have to go away now and leave me to work. You’ll understand when it is all over.’

  ‘You’re sending me away?’ she says, her voice thick with hurt.

  There is a pause, a silence, in which every heartbeat feels like a dagger.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  She stares at the heavy panels of the door. She can picture everything that lies behind it: the tabletops, the racks of tools, the hearth, the slipdog hide chair, everything. This is not just a room that is being denied to her, but a part of herself.

  When she turns away, one bowl of porridge still on the floor, she doesn’t flee. She strides away with renewed purpose – a purpose forged in the crucible of her palla’s betrayal.

  She may be exiled from the workshop for the time being, but it will be hers in the end.

  Both of you know this. Both of you cling to this to justify what happens that evening.

  *

  My, my, you’ve been busy, Berklum. When we left you, there was just paper, but now look at this! This is… you’ve made a…

  What is it, Berklum?

  ‘A test,’ he says.

  Oh, of course. A test. But what is it? All we can see is a long stretch of material, many metal rods and something lumpy in the middle.

  ‘It’s not finished,’ he mutters. He runs a hand along the material – hide, that much we can tell now. ‘These, wings. This here? Weight. About that of a Rustan adult.’

  It really is something, Berklum. A test. A step on the way to Rustans in the sky. It is auspicious, even if it’s not so much to look at. But tell those listening, those who may not be so comfortable and experienced with such matters, what are you testing?

  ‘Hot air and holes might work for the bats, but that doesn’t mean the same will hold for us.’

  But why ever not?

  ‘First, the air might not be hot enough.’

  The Tear not hot enough? Come now, we struggle to believe that!