A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  Would he even recognize me? Only one way to find out. There was no benefit to me putting this off any longer. I walked the remaining distance to his door, recovering my wind. I knocked three times, paused, and knocked thrice more.

  “Who is that?” a woman’s voice called. A murmured reply, unintelligible, answered her, and then boots stomped toward the door.

  He opened it and I said, “Hello, Tarrech.” My throat constricted with a lump as he frowned at me at first, but once I tried a shy smile he recognized me, grinned, and the lump dissolved.

  “Tuala!” he cried. “My old friend!” He crushed me in his arms and I closed my eyes, just wanting to remember the feel of it, nothing else. He smelled of cedar and vanilla.

  Then he let me go and asked, “What are you—” He stopped, looking down at my Jereh band and taking in my stained leathers and goggles and my windblown hair.

  “Oh, no. It’s time, isn’t it. This isn’t a social call. You’re here because they sent you.”

  The lump came back. His Jereh band was the gold of a married man; the last time I’d seen him it was bronze. The stones were the ruby, amethyst, and ruby of one of Raena’s juggernauts. Staring at it instead of meeting his eyes, I nodded.

  “No. Not yet. Please don’t say it.”

  “I’m sorry, Tarrech. I have to. It’s my sworn duty.”

  His breath came out of him as if I’d just stomped on his diaphragm. He closed his eyes for a while, and when he opened them they were sad, wobbling at the edges with tears, like mine were. “You and I have such power, you know?” he said. “We can do anything we want, and no one could stop us except ourselves. Except our sense of duty. And the judgment of our neighbors and friends.”

  Too choked up to reply, I only nodded again, but a tear ran down my right cheek and I let it stay there. A tear escaped from his left, mirroring mine, but he wiped it away. He sighed and said, “Very well. I can’t close this door and be at peace. So what is your message, Master Courier?”

  “Temblor Priyit, at behest of the Triune Council, summons you to muster with Raelech forces at Mell, there to march against the Bone Giants occupying Möllerud. We are to liberate the city for Brynlön but also to protect Rael from further threat.”

  He nodded solemnly and shrank a little bit, the weight of it settling upon his shoulders. It was me doing that to him, and I wanted to take it back, but I couldn’t.

  “I’m glad they sent you, at least, and not someone else,” he finally said, his voice quiet. “Can I have this night, please? We’ll leave in the morning?”

  “Of course,” I said. “After breakfast. Midmorning.”

  “Thank you.”

  I gave him the three-fingered salute and backed away, turning once he nodded his acknowledgment. I hurried off his property, since I didn’t want to hear anything once he told his wife that he’d been summoned to war and, as juggernaut, he’d be the proverbial tip of the spear.

  The Randulet temple of the huntress had never seen me before but had played host to other travelers and couriers in the past. Once I showed up and asked for hospitality, one look at my Jereh band was all it took for them to invite me to their cook fire. They had a straw tick in their basement for me to sleep on and it served, though I tossed and turned for at least an hour, worried at how Tarrech would behave in the morning when I came for him. If he didn’t want to go, I couldn’t make him. Nobody could force a juggernaut to do anything. They were force.

  And if he did come with me and changed his mind along the way? Same thing. I couldn’t do anything about it. He had to choose this himself. But the Triune Council and pretty much everyone he knew expected him to make one particular choice.

  In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast and a ritualistic cleaning of my leathers, I returned to his home and knocked thrice. I zipped away to the border of his property and waved at him when he answered the door. He deserved all the privacy he could get in saying his farewells. Besides, I didn’t want to hear.

  The door remained open for a while, and then he stepped out, alone, with a small pack slung over his shoulders. They were still hunched, as I’d seen them last night, his head drooping like that of a doomed man.

  He hadn’t taken twenty steps before his wife cried out his name and ran after him. He turned and they embraced for a long while, and then they pulled apart and he kept his hands on her shoulders and spoke to her. I couldn’t hear them, but I could imagine their conversation well enough.

  Yes, he could stay. He could tell me to eat dirt, have me tell the Triune Council the same, and I’d never be back. No one would come after him. He could stay and grow old with her in the slow march of time.

  But no one would meet his eyes after that, and he wouldn’t be able to meet theirs. He’d be judged a coward and a traitor. All the respect and esteem he had as a juggernaut would be forfeit. Guilt would settle over him in great shovelfuls whenever he went to town, and it would bury whatever happiness he had in remaining home. He would be miserable. They would be miserable.

  Not that going through with it was a prospect filled with joy. Once he used the full potential of his kenning, he’d be significantly older no matter what. There might be plenty of regrets down that path—doubtless there would—but there would be no guilt. Instead, there would be pride and honor and the country’s gratitude for his service.

  Aevyn didn’t like hearing any of that and was vocal about it. She even pounded him on the chest a couple of times, and I didn’t blame her a bit. The reality was that she was losing the man she loved right now and she knew it, and if she had been able to be cool about it, then I would have wondered if she really loved him at all.

  Maybe Aevyn and Tarrech had managed to have everything good for a while. I supposed it could happen, for a brief time. But something or someone like me will always come along and wreck a perfect thing, because the world cannot seem to turn without struggle.

  His kids came out then, cute little tykes about four or five. He hugged them, and hugged his wife again, and told them all, no doubt, that he would love them forever and hoped to be back as soon as possible.

  And then he said he must go. He backed away, and blew kisses, and waved, and Aevyn held the kids back as they cried and tried to cling to him. They probably didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but they knew something huge was happening, because their mother was crying too.

  Reluctantly, he turned and walked to where I waited. Neither of us had dry eyes when he greeted me.

  “Good morning, Master Courier.”

  “Good morning, Master Juggernaut. Ready and willing to muster?”

  “I’m ready and willing. But not wanting.”

  “I understand.”

  He spun around to see if his wife and kids were still there, and they were. He waved to them and they waved back, a final farewell.

  “Ah, well,” he said, wiping tears from his cheeks as he turned his back on his home and his family, perhaps never to see them again. “We all know that blessings have a curse waiting on the other side of them. There’s always a dark shadow behind the pedestal in the shrine, right? You and I have known each other too long and seen too much to pretend otherwise. It is a stone cold truth that you can’t have it all. Can you, Tuala?”

  I smiled at him fondly and shook my head. “No, you can’t.”

  He visibly straightened and stood tall. “But we have our loves and duties.”

  “Yes. Yes, we do. We have those always.”

  * * *

  —

  Fintan promised more of Tuala later and then said it was time to catch up with Abhi and Olet from a slightly different perspective. He transformed into the version of himself we’d seen earlier on the trail in Ghurana Nent, in his own set of red leathers.

  The master bard who taught me was a kind old woman named Aerin. To
look at her when I first met her—frail and stooped with the weight of her years, a soft smile usually playing about her wrinkled lips—one would think she had never done anything more violent than wrestle a batch of cookie dough into shape. Her fingers were gnarled with arthritis and she could barely play her harp anymore. But she knew so very much, had a wealth of experience that her kenning would not let her forget, and she taught me well. More than just music or languages, though she taught me all of that too.

  As part of my journeyman training, we traveled to Jereh to visit the mines in the Poet’s Range, where they very gently extract the gaseous spheres of brittle rock that I use to take on my seemings and dispel them. We were staying in a visitors’ cabin then, and Master Aerin was in a room next to mine. The walls were thin and sound carried easily. That’s when I heard her moaning and crying out in her sleep, and I hurried to wake her.

  She gasped and blinked in the candlelight until she focused on me, propping herself up on her elbows.

  “Here’s a lesson for you, Fintan. A hard one you won’t know the truth of until later,” she said. “At some point in your life, the nightmares are going to begin. If you think you’ve had one already, well, congratulations. But those were like celery compared to the nightmares you’re going to have, which are like a rich swamp duck basted with a piquant orange glaze. By which I don’t mean to say they’re delicious and nourishing. They’re just heavy, thick, and intense. And once they begin, they don’t really ever stop.”

  “Master Aerin, forgive me, but I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I know you don’t. I’m just giving you a warning so that when they come, you won’t be able to get mad at me for never saying anything. You’re going to have horrible nightmares, Fintan. Nothing you can do about it. I’m sorry.”

  “But why?”

  “Because something terrible is going to happen.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s different for everybody. But terrible things happen. Somebody kills their wife or husband. Someone abuses an animal. Maybe there will be a war, and you’ll see more horrors than you could ever imagine. Regardless, once you’re a master and something terrible happens, the Triune is going to send you out to take a good look so you can note every detail, tell them all about it, and maybe write a ballad or two. They’ll get a song and maybe a lurid story they can tell their friends. They’ll forget about it the next day, in most cases. But you won’t. You’ll have that terrible thing in your head forever.”

  “Oh. I guess I see. What was your terrible thing?”

  She gave me a sad, patient smile. “Oh, Fintan. You’re going to have your own soon enough. Why would I give you mine? That would be unkind of me.”

  “Right, right. Thank you for that. Is there nothing we can do, then?”

  “Persist. Persevere. Bring some beauty into the world and remember that not everyone has to suffer the same way. Were we not blessed, we’d have defenses against those terrible things. Our brains would find ways to forget them or, failing that, cope somehow. But we bards are not allowed to forget. Which means our brains have to wrestle with those terrible things, over and over, to try to make sense of them, to try to change things and make them right. But sometimes what you see can never be made right. You’ll just see it again and again.”

  I fumbled for something to say or do in response and wound up asking her if she’d like some tea.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m not going back to sleep now.”

  So I made us tea and Master Aerin taught me some Brynt Drowning Songs there in the mountains, in the quietest hours of the night.

  Master Aerin passed away some years ago, but I never forgot our conversation, of course. I was reminded of it forcefully the night after we made our escape from Talala Fouz. I was sleeping on the boat and was seized by the most powerful nightmare featuring Hathrim. It wasn’t Winthir Kanek or his fury Pinter Stuken, though, at least not that first night. No, it was Gorin and Sefir Mogen. All the people that I’d seen them kill by fire, axe, or sword, or in the jaws of one of their monstrous hounds—I dreamt that they were all me. I saw the original event in its accurate form, but then the face of the victim became my face, and I felt their pain and terror.

  Until someone woke me up, telling me that I was screaming in different voices and made everyone think we were under attack. It was Abhi, and he looked worried.

  “You’re sweating,” he said.

  “Well, I thought I was on fire,” I said between gasps, “so that makes sense. Never seen a fire get put out by sweat, but I figure a body needs to try.”

  I spent much of the remaining trip upriver preparing reports for the Triune Council in conjunction with the ambassador, so that they would be informed of the upheaval in Ghurana Nent and of my best guess that the void would be filled by Viceroy Melishev Lohmet, since the king had no heir.

  It kept me busy and exhausted me into a dreamless sleep, which I have since preferred to all other kinds of sleep.

  Ghuli Rakhan still displayed large wealth disparities, like other Nentian cities, but they seemed less severe than elsewhere, perhaps owing to its position as a trading hub with Rael. Viceroy Naren Khusharas did not make us wait long before he gave us an audience; having a Raelech ambassador with us, as well as a letter from King Kalaad, probably did much to smooth the way. That, or the large number of Hathrim we brought in on glass boats might have made him a tiny bit curious.

  Abhi came with Olet and me to see the viceroy but left his bloodcat and stalk hawk on the Raelech boat. He wasn’t going to let them know he was a plaguebringer at all, since the letter Olet had from the king predated that information. Khusharas knew who I was by reputation—he’d met my lifebond, Numa, on multiple occasions in her role as a courier for the Triune. He gave me a tight smile; he was a wiry man with a narrow, angular face that he’d tried to make look fuller by growing a mustache and giving his hair as much body as possible. His voice was a high tenor and he spoke rapidly from his throne, as if he’d had five to ten more cups of tea than anybody else. After reading Olet’s letter, he laughed nervously and smiled, shaking it at us.

  “Wow. I mean. Really. This is. I mean, holy Kalaad’s sky-blue balls, you know? This is wild. You want food for the winter for, like, all the people ever, and I just have to produce that now because you’re in a hurry and the king must think I’m sitting on vast stores of grain and salt and an actual ton of dried meat. He wrote it down, did you see? It says, ‘Dried meat: one fucking ton!’ I added the ‘fucking’ because it seemed like an appropriate time to curse, because there are so few times when someone tells you to give away a ton of food to a stranger, and you know why? Because it’s inappropriate!”

  “He did seem confident you had sufficient supply, Viceroy,” Olet said.

  “Oh. That’s lovely to hear! I’m glad he seemed confident. That’s perfect. Do I have sufficient supplies for you? Yes. I do. I probably even have a ton of dried meat, because you can’t ever have enough of it, as my father always used to say. The problem is, if I give you everything listed here, I won’t have sufficient supply for me. For my city. And winter’s already knocking on the door. You can tell because everyone’s nipples are puckered up and they smile at each other in the street and notice how bloody nippy it is outside. So I know how you’re going to survive the winter as long as the animals don’t eat you. You’ll be surviving on my supplies. How are my people supposed to survive the winter? Hmm? Didn’t see that detail in the letter. Kind of important detail to leave out, don’t you think? You have a plan for that?”

  The Raelech amabassador saved us from answering by saying that Rael could easily bolster any shortfalls that the city might experience due to outfitting the expedition.

  “Ah, that’s great! And I’m sure that won’t be free, will it? No. So first I’m out food, then to make up the difference I’m out mon
ey. One way or another, this deal cuts out my liver and feeds it to the blackwings.”

  “You might have fewer mouths to feed after we recruit some people in the town to come with us,” Abhi pointed out.

  “Oh, yeah, pretty boy? Who are you, anyway?”

  “Abhinava Khose, sir. A hunter.”

  “Khose? I know all the hunting families here and that’s not one of them.”

  “No, sir. I’m from the south, and I’m going along to help protect the colony in the Gravewood.”

  “Where in the south are you from, Abhi? Can I call you Abhi?”

  “That’s fine, sir. I’m from Khul Bashab.”

  “No kidding? I hear they have some wild stuff going on down there. Kids talking to animals or something like that. You heard anything along those lines?”

  “I’ve heard some rumors, sir, but I haven’t been down there in quite some time.”

  That was a sharp answer, and it was so difficult not to smile. Abhi hadn’t lied, because of course he’d heard rumors. But he didn’t volunteer the fact that he was the one who’d been talking to animals either. Olet wasn’t going to let the viceroy probe any further on that point, proving that she was quick on her feet too.

  “I’d like to point out, sir, that the boats we are giving you in this deal are worth thousands each. It may not completely wipe out the expense of replenishing your supplies, but it should lessen the sting a little bit, and I will also happily enchant some items for you while we wait for the supplies to be loaded and recruit some colonists.”

  “Ah. There! There, you see? That’s a nice gesture right there from a daughter of the First Kenning. I got all this stuff lying around and I wish it was on fire all the time. Can’t tell you how often I’ve been wanting to see some shit go up in flames. Praise Kalaad for my wish fulfillment! All right, all right, I’ve complained enough. That’s all it is, because I got my orders here from the boss and I have to follow through. Thanks for listening, okay, and I wish you luck, because you’re going to need it. Get some nipple warmers because, damn, I would not want to be you when winter hits up there. All right, Chamberlain? Do all this work for me, okay? Give them the food and sell their boats, then buy more food for us from Rael, and give that redheaded giant lady a bunch of shit to enchant for us. Thanks, you’re a good guy. We’ll have a beer later, yeah? Okay, kids, that’s it. Move along. I have like ten more meetings and people are waiting. Thanks. Bye now.”