Sixth of the Dusk
Page 6
Dusk turned back to the fortress, which he did not enter. He preferred to remain on the rocky, familiar shore—perhaps twenty feet from the entrance—his wounded arm aching as the company people rushed out through the gate to meet Vathi. Their scouts on the upper walls kept careful watch on Dusk. A trapper was not to be trusted.
Even standing here, some twenty feet from the wide wooden gates into the fort, he could smell how wrong the place was. It was stuffed with the scents of men—sweaty bodies, the smell of oil, and other, newer scents that he recognized from his recent trips to the homeisles. Scents that made him feel like an outsider among his own people.
The company men wore sturdy clothing, trousers like Dusk’s but far better tailored, shirts and rugged jackets. Jackets? In Patji’s heat? These people bowed to Vathi, showing her more deference than Dusk would have expected. They drew hands from shoulder to shoulder as they started speaking—a symbol of respect. Foolishness. Anyone could make a gesture like that; it didn’t mean anything. True respect included far more than a hand waved in the air.
But they did treat her like more than a simple scribe. She was better placed in the company than he’d assumed. Not his problem anymore, regardless.
Vathi looked at him, then back at her people. “We must hurry to the machine,” she said to them. “The one from Above. We must turn it off.”
Good. She would do her part. Dusk turned to walk away. Should he give words at parting? He’d never felt the need before. But today, it felt . . . wrong not to say something.
He started walking. Words. He had never been good with words.
“Turn it off?” one of the men said from behind. “What do you mean, Lady Vathi?”
“You don’t need to feign innocence, Winds,” Vathi said. “I know you turned it on in my absence.”
“But we didn’t.”
Dusk paused. What? The man sounded sincere. But then, Dusk was no expert on human emotions. From what he’d seen of people from the homeisles, they could fake emotion as easily as they faked a gesture of respect.
“What did you do, then?” Vathi asked them.
“We . . . opened it.”
Oh no . . .
“Why would you do that?” Vathi asked.
Dusk turned to regard them, but he didn’t need to hear the answer. The answer was before him, in the vision of a dead island he’d misinterpreted.
“We figured,” the man said, “that we should see if we could puzzle out how the machine worked. Vathi, the insides . . . they’re complex beyond what we could have imagined. But there are seeds there. Things we could—”
“No!” Dusk said, rushing toward them.
One of the sentries above planted an arrow at his feet. He lurched to a stop, looking wildly from Vathi up toward the walls. Couldn’t they see? The bulge in mud that announced a deathant den. The game trail. The distinctive curl of a cutaway vine. Wasn’t it obvious?
“It will destroy us,” Dusk said. “Don’t seek . . . Don’t you see . . . ?”
For a moment, they all just stared at him. He had a chance. Words. He needed words.
“That machine is deathants!” he said. “A den, a . . . Bah!” How could he explain?
He couldn’t. In his anxiety, words fled him, like Aviar fluttering away into the night.
The others finally started moving, pulling Vathi toward the safety of their treasonous fortress.
“You said the corpses are gone,” Vathi said as she was ushered through the gates. “We’ve succeeded. I will see that the machine is not engaged on this trip! I promise you this, Dusk!”
“But,” he cried back, “it was never meant to be engaged!”
The enormous wooden gates of the fortress creaked closed, and he lost sight of her. Dusk cursed. Why hadn’t he been able to explain?
Because he didn’t know how to talk. For once in his life, that seemed to matter.
Furious, frustrated, he stalked away from that place and its awful smells. Halfway to the tree line, however, he stopped, then turned. Sak fluttered down, landing on his shoulder and cooing softly.
Questions. Those questions wanted into his brain.
Instead he yelled at the guards. He demanded they return Vathi to him. He even pled.
Nothing happened. They wouldn’t speak to him. Finally, he started to feel foolish. He turned back toward the trees, and continued on his way. His assumptions were probably wrong. After all, the corpses were gone. Everything could go back to normal.
. . . Normal. Could anything ever be normal with that fortress looming behind him? He shook his head, entering the canopy. The dense humidity of Patji’s jungle should have calmed him.
Instead it annoyed him. As he started the trek toward another of his safecamps, he was so distracted that he could have been a youth, his first time on Sori. He almost stumbled straight onto a gaping deathant den; he didn’t even notice the vision Sak sent. This time, dumb luck saved him as he stubbed his toe on something, looked down, and only then spotted both corpse and crack crawling with motes of yellow.
He growled, then sneered. “Still you try to kill me?” he shouted, looking up at the canopy. “Patji!”
Silence.
“The ones who protect you are the ones you try hardest to kill,” Dusk shouted. “Why!”
The words were lost in the jungle. It consumed them.
“You deserve this, Patji,” he said. “What is coming to you. You deserve to be destroyed!”
He breathed out in gasps, sweating, satisfied at having finally said those things. Perhaps there was a purpose for words. Part of him, as traitorous as Vathi and her company, was glad that Patji would fall to their machines.
Of course, then the company itself would fall. To the Ones Above. His entire people. The world itself.
He bowed his head in the shadows of the canopy, sweat dripping down the sides of his face. Then he fell to his knees, heedless of the nest just three strides away.
Sak nuzzled into his hair. Above, in the branches, Kokerlii chirped uncertainly.
“It’s a trap, you see,” he whispered. “The Ones Above have rules. They can’t trade with us until we’re advanced enough. Just like a man can’t, in good conscience, bargain with a child until they are grown. And so, they have left their machines for us to discover, to prod at and poke. The dead man was a ruse. Vathi was meant to have those machines.
“There will be explanations, left as if carelessly, for us to dig into and learn. And at some point in the near future, we will build something like one of their machines. We will have grown more quickly than we should have. We will be childlike still, ignorant, but the laws from Above will let these visitors trade with us. And then, they will take this land for themselves.”
That was what he should have said. Protecting Patji was impossible. Protecting the Aviar was impossible. Protecting their entire world was impossible. Why hadn’t he explained it?
Perhaps because it wouldn’t have done any good. As Vathi had said . . . progress would come. If you wanted to call it that.
Dusk had arrived.
Sak left his shoulder, winging away. Dusk looked after her, then cursed. She did not land nearby. Though flying was difficult for her, she fluttered on, disappearing from his sight.
“Sak?” he asked, rising and stumbling after the Aviar. He fought back the way he had come, following Sak’s squawks. A few moments later, he lurched out of the jungle.
Vathi stood on the rocks before her fortress.
Dusk hesitated at the brim of the jungle. Vathi was alone, and even the sentries had retreated. Had they cast her out? No. He could see that the gate was cracked, and some people watched from inside.
Sak had landed on Vathi’s shoulder down below. Dusk frowned, reaching his hand to the side and letting Kokerlii land on his arm. Then he strode forward, calmly making his way down the rocky shore, until he was standing just before Vathi.
She’d changed into a new dress, though there were still snarls in her hair. She smelled of flower
s.
And her eyes were terrified.
He’d traveled the darkness with her. Had faced nightmaws. Had seen her near to death, and she had not looked this worried.
“What?” he asked, finding his voice hoarse.
“We found instructions in the machine,” Vathi whispered. “A manual on its workings, left there as if accidentally by someone who worked on it before. The manual is in their language, but the smaller machine I have . . .”
“It translates.”
“The manual details how the machine was constructed,” Vathi says. “It’s so complex I can barely comprehend it, but it seems to explain concepts and ideas, not just give the workings of the machine.”
“And are you not happy?” he asked. “You will have your flying machines soon, Vathi. Sooner than anyone could have imagined.”
Wordless, she held something up. A single feather—a mating plume. She had kept it.
“Never move without asking yourself, is this too easy?” she whispered. “You said it was a trap as I was pulled away. When we found the manual, I . . . Oh, Dusk. They are planning to do to us what . . . what we are doing to Patji, aren’t they?”
Dusk nodded.
“We’ll lose it all. We can’t fight them. They’ll find an excuse, they’ll seize the Aviar. It makes perfect sense. The Aviar use the worms. We use the Aviar. The Ones Above use us. It’s inevitable, isn’t it?”
Yes, he thought. He opened his mouth to say it, and Sak chirped. He frowned and turned back toward the island. Jutting from the ocean, arrogant. Destructive.
Patji. Father.
And finally, at long last, Dusk understood.
“No,” he whispered.
“But—”
He undid his pants pocket, then reached deeply into it, digging around. Finally, he pulled something out. The remnants of a feather, just the shaft now. A mating plume that his uncle had given him, so many years ago, when he’d first fallen into a trap on Sori. He held it up, remembering the speech he’d been given. Like every trapper.
This is the symbol of your ignorance. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Vathi held hers. Old and new.
“No, they will not have us,” Dusk said. “We will see through their traps, and we will not fall for their tricks. For we have been trained by the Father himself for this very day.”
She stared at his feather, then up at him.
“Do you really think that?” she asked. “They are cunning.”
“They may be cunning,” he said. “But they have not lived on Patji. We will gather the other trappers. We will not let ourselves be taken in.”
She nodded hesitantly, and some of the fear seemed to leave her. She turned and waved for those behind her to open the gates to the building. Again, the scents of mankind washed over him.
Vathi looked back, then held out her hand to him. “You will help, then?”
His corpse appeared at her feet, and Sak chirped warningly. Danger. Yes, the path ahead would include much danger.
Dusk took Vathi’s hand and stepped into the fortress anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks go to my Writing Excuses cohosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler. And to my writing group: First of the Olsens, Danielle Olsen, Alan Layton, Kaylynn ZoBell, Kathleen Sanderson, The Inserted Peter Ahlstrom, Karen Ahlstrom, Isaaç Stewart, Kara Stewart, and Emily Sanderson. I’d also like to give a special thank you to Kekai Kotaki. I’ve always loved his Magic: The Gathering art, and I asked Isaac to contact him first on my list of potential artists for this illustration. Having a Polynesian illustrator for this story is distinctly cool.
Brandon
Thanks go to this volume’s community proofreaders: Aaron Ford, Alice Arneson, Aubree Pham, Bao Pham, Bob Kluttz, Brian T. Hill, Gary Singer, Jakob Remick, Lyndsey Luther, Maren Menke, Mike Barker, Steve Godecke, and Trae Cooper.
Peter
Each of the artists deserves a special shout-out for working with us on such a tight deadline and for providing top-notch illustrations. Many thanks to Jorge Jacinto and Kekai Kotaki.
Isaac
Also by BRANDON SANDERSON
Novelettes
Firstborn
Defending Elysium
Novellas
The Emperor’s Soul
Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell
Legion
Legion: Skin Deep
Infinity Blade: Awakening
Infinity Blade: Redemption
Novels
Elantris
Warbreaker
The Rithmatist
The Stormlight Archive
The Way of Kings
Words of Radiance
The Reckoners
Steelheart
Mitosis: A Reckoners Story
Firefight
Mistborn
Mistborn: The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
The Alloy of Law
Alcatraz
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones
Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia
Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens
The Wheel of Time, with Robert Jordan
The Gathering Storm
Towers of Midnight
A Memory of Light
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SIXTH OF THE DUSK
Copyright © 2014 by Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC
All rights reserved.
Cover art copyright © 2014 by Jorge Jacinto
“Sixth of the Dusk” illustration by Kekai Kotaki
Edited by Peter Ahlstrom
Cover design and art direction by Isaac Stewart
Electronic book design by Peter Ahlstrom
A Dragonsteel Entertainment Book
Published by Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC
American Fork, UT
BrandonSanderson.com
ISBN 978-1-938570-07-0
First electronic edition: October 2014
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
SIXTH OF THE DUSK
BRANDON SANDERSON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY BRANDON SANDERSON
COPYRIGHT NOTICE