A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  Elten Maff was sweating as I made my exit, and I smiled all the way home. Maron was going to be so surprised and thrilled to see me again so quickly. But when I entered, my husband pounced.

  “Ah, excellent, perhaps you can tell me!” he said, gesturing to the gift baskets lining every available surface of our tiny dwelling. There must have been more than what was in my cabin stored in the cargo hold, and Teela Parr’s man had made sure they delivered it all. “What are we going to do with all this mustard?”

  * * *

  —

  Survivor Field laughed as the bard dispelled his seeming.

  “It’s true! You did that!” Fintan said, grinning at them. “Poor Maron! What are they going to do with all that mustard? Goddess help him.” He let them laugh a little bit more, and then he teased them, holding up a new sphere. “Are you ready to find out what happened with Second Könstad Tallynd du Böll and that piece of the Seven-Year Ship hull?”

  The roar of approval was enthusiastic.

  “All right, then. Let’s do it.” He threw down the hollow stone, and our national heroine emerged from the gases.

  I knocked upon the door of the given address, a piece of Eculan flatboat hull cradled under my arm, and an elderly woman answered the door. She had a light-blue shawl draped over her shoulders—closer to white than blue, in fact—and her head had gone all gray, as mine had at the temples. Her skin sagged a bit on her bones, its color a touch sallow, perhaps, but her eyes were still bright. She saw my uniform and smiled, waving thin hands at me to enter.

  “Your friend is in my liquid library,” she said, leading me with a rocking waddle down a hallway. “Hasn’t been this excited since the first time she had some hot sauce on her, heh, ha ha. Anyway, I’m Lamira du Öndsen.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lamira.”

  “I’m a hygienist too, but I don’t practice much anymore,” she said over her shoulder. “Knees are bad, back is bent, and sometimes when I sneeze I shit myself by accident. If you’re planning on getting old, I don’t recommend it.”

  “Sneezing?”

  “Getting old. The one upside is that you can say whatever you want and get away with it. Well, mostly. It is kind of strange to be told by your kids that you’re being rude at family gatherings, but my nephew’s lips really are puckered all the time just like the anus of a sea cucumber, and I won’t apologize for stating a fact. Can I get you some tea?”

  She said this last as we rounded the corner into her liquid library, and my breath caught for a moment before I remembered to respond. “Yes, please.”

  Feryn was there, waiting, but she saw that I was scanning the room and gave me a moment to take in the wonder. I’d seen liquid libraries before—almost all hygienists have one, and of course the University of Pelemyn has the world’s largest—but I’d never seen a private one on the scale or glamour of Lamira du Öndsen’s. I imagined it must be a national treasure, and she had done very well for herself in her long career as a hygienist. Her study was full of Fornish hardwood furniture, from the silverbark desk to a beautiful butcher-block table with a silver sample bowl in the center of it. Behind her desk there was a bookcase, but the rest of the room’s walls were covered in shelves populated with clear stoppered bottles of labeled fluids. These were divided into sections: WATERS, TEAS, POISONS, and EFFLUVIA, and then arranged by color. Some liquid libraries specialized in beers or wines or other potables, but Lamira had clearly chosen to focus on that which could be most salubrious and most deadly when ingested.

  “This…” I began, and trailed off.

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Feryn said. She stepped forward to me with a bottle in one hand and the piece of Seven-Year Ship hull in the other. The bottle was half filled with a dark liquid. “Lamira will let me sample this to confirm my suspicion, but she’d like your promise that you’ll use your kenning to return every drop of it to the bottle. No wastage. This is the only sample we know of, and it’s been handed down for generations.”

  “Generations? What is it? I mean, of course, you have my promise.”

  “Thank you. Will you put your piece of hull over here next to the bowl?” Feryn turned and strode to the silver sample bowl, placing her hunk next to it on the butcher block. I put mine down on the opposite side and she nodded in satisfaction. She uncorked the bottle, sniffed the rim, grimaced, and poured it into the silver basin. She looked up at Lamira. “Will you confirm this with me, Lamira?”

  “I’d be delighted, because I wouldn’t believe it otherwise.” Waddling over so that she stood across from Feryn and me, the old woman placed a couple of fingers in the small puddle of dark liquid, next to Feryn’s own fingers, and then spread the palm of her other hand across the stained piece I’d brought from the flatboat. Feryn mirrored her, with her other hand on the Seven-Year Ship piece. They closed their eyes, no doubt running a comparison of the tiny structures in that liquid to the structures in the hull varnish.

  “Believe what?” I asked. “Will one of you finally tell me what’s going on?”

  “Read the label,” Lamira said without opening her eyes, so I picked up the bottle and examined the fine script, written in a dark blue-gray ink. KRAKEN BLOOD, PELES OCEAN, it said.

  “Clams and tentacles,” I said. “How in Bryn’s name did you get hold of this?”

  “Tell you in a minute, Tallynd. Let me do this.”

  It was a full minute of me waiting in tense silence as the two hygienists quivered and squeezed their eyes and lips in concentration, occasionally grunting and muttering about protein chains. It gave me the chance to think about supply: If we’d managed to secure only a half bottle of the stuff over generations and the Eculans had enough to paint fleets of ships with it, then they had figured out a way to kill a whole lot of krakens. I remembered those barrels of goo that Nara had mentioned being in the hold of the Seven-Year Ship: That might have been the varnish.

  “Confirmed,” Feryn said, and Lamira nodded in agreement.

  “Mine too,” the old woman said.

  Feryn turned to me and pointed at the hull. “The sealant used on these boards is made with kraken blood. Generous amounts of it too. Kraken blood all over the hulls means that, to grown krakens, those ships near the surface would look like baby krakens. Or smell like them, anyway. We know from survivor tales that they often attack in packs and work together, so they’d never attack their own. That’s how the Bone Giants safely crossed the ocean: kraken-blood sealant on the hulls.”

  “Hold on, that’s way too much. You’re saying a fully grown kraken would sense a fleet of a hundred ships passing overhead and think, Oh, never mind, that’s just a hundred baby krakens, and never investigate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do krakens even have that many babies?”

  “We are fairly certain they do. It’s a popular theory, anyway. We believe they have many children and only a few survive to adulthood, as with most sea creatures. The young would be preyed upon by full-grown specimens of bladefins, lion whales, that sort of thing. You’ve never heard that?”

  “I’ve heard the theory but never put stock in it. I’ve never even seen a juvenile kraken, much less a baby one, and certainly not hundreds of them. I’ve never heard of any tidal mariner seeing a baby kraken.”

  “Well, you don’t spend a lot of time in the deeps either. Most of your time is spent in coastal waters, right? And the babies have to exist, or else how’d we get the full-grown ones?”

  I recalled from Gondel Vedd’s briefing that the Eculans were supposedly looking for something in the north called “the Krakens’ Nest,” and I supposed that a spawning ground far out of our normal sea-lanes was plausible. And hunting a baby kraken might be little different from hunting a whale. Dangerous and cumbersome, but doable.

  “Still, I don’t buy that the adults would never swim up to investi
gate. If they smell a lot of other krakens around and they like to work together, why not join the party?”

  Feryn shrugged. “I don’t have these answers,” she said, but it occurred to me that maybe some adults did investigate one of the fleets. There were only thirty-five boats in the Mistmaiden Isles, after all. A pair or trio could have surfaced for a look and discovered that those boats that smelled like babies from a distance really weren’t krakens at all. “I know two things: Those fleets crossed the ocean, and the hulls are sealed with a kraken-blood mixture,” Feryn concluded.

  “Which means we can do the same thing,” Lamira said, and cackled.

  “Clams and tentacles, you’re right! I think we actually found some of the stain on one of their ships. We just need to make more—a lot more. I have to tell the pelenaut.”

  “Return the blood to the bottle first, if you please?” the old woman reminded me, and I quickly used my kenning to pull the gunk off their fingers and out of the bowl and guided every drop back into the bottle.

  “You were going to tell me how you got this,” I reminded them.

  I was looking at Feryn but Lamira answered. “I didn’t get it myself. My grandfather did. He was a tidal mariner like you, five pelenauts ago or something like that. Fishing boat went out too far and he was sent to try to save them but didn’t get there in time. Kraken took it apart, all hands lost, but on a piece of the foredeck, someone had chopped off the tip of a tentacle. He had the wits to bring it back with him in a waterproof sack for analysis, and that’s all that’s left.”

  “Not a word of this to anyone until the pelenaut sees fit to make it public,” I said, and remembered to thank them before I left.

  As I made my way to the palace, with questions swirling in my head—how did the Eculans figure out how to do this, and so on—I kept coming back to that brief story of Lamira’s grandfather, the tidal mariner. He’d gotten old and he’d passed on. But he obviously had left some family behind. And on one particular day of his life, when he thought he’d failed—when he had failed, in fact, to save people—he’d done something vital that helped us, years and years in the future.

  I wish we could see the ripples of good we do in the future. It would make us sure of our purpose and value in the wider world. But all we are allowed is to do good now and trust that some ripples of it will go forward, expanding.

  * * *

  —

  “Well!” Fintan said. “Obviously the pelenaut has seen fit to make the news about kraken blood public, so discuss amongst yourselves! Tomorrow we will hear from Mai Bet Ken, Bhamet Senesh, and Hanima Bhandury. Until then, friends.”

  It took me a few minutes to realize that Fintan had made a huge error. He hadn’t said anything about Feryn or Lamira receiving gift baskets from the pelenaut. That meant they were free to be thanked. They were about to be inundated.

  I stayed in bed for a while the next morning, thinking. Tallynd du Böll’s words were on my mind—the ones about the ripples of good we do spreading into the future. It made me wonder if I was doing any good or perhaps if I wasn’t doing enough. Surely providing the time and space for Elynea to get herself on track again was a ripple that would pay off in her children, Tamöd and Pyrella. But what else could I do? My knee kept me from doing most hard labor, but perhaps I could return to help at the refugee kitchen. It would be better for my spirit than seeking revenge for Sarena.

  Resolved, I got dressed and ate a hurried breakfast before heading outside the walls and presenting myself to the kitchen as a regular volunteer. “I only have a few hours in the morning,” I said to the chef, “but surely there’s a potato that needs peeling or something.”

  The chef, a thickset woman named Höna du Rödal, who was armed with a spotless knife and a stained apron, gave me a wry smile. She used to own and run a restaurant in Festwyf but had lost everything in the invasion. Rölly had hired her to run this operation for the government in hopes that, after the crisis passed, she’d be able to use her pay to open a new place, perhaps with another investor joining in. Perhaps that investor would be Rölly.

  “Okay, honey,” she said. I am not remotely like honey, so I wondered if she was one of those people who call everybody honey so they don’t have to remember names.

  There was a potato that needed peeling. More than one, actually. And onions to be chopped. Carrots too. Plenty of vegetables that kept well, all going into a soup. Though I wouldn’t say they were the pick of the harvest. They were lumps about which one might say, Well, I guess that’s a tater, awarding it only reluctant status as a starch. We were scraping the bottom of someone’s barrel here. I didn’t see any protein being prepared, but maybe that would be coming later.

  I didn’t know that volunteering for a few hours made a huge difference or whether it would tomorrow. I’m sure nobody knew I was doing it except the head of the kitchen, so I couldn’t imagine what ripples I was creating. But the Chef du Rödal knew I cared and wanted to help, at least, and her burden had been eased a tiny bit. Maybe that was enough, proving to someone with small acts of kindness that the world isn’t entirely awful.

  And maybe it wasn’t enough after all. But I was going to keep doing it until I got a better idea.

  My hands ached from gripping a knife by the time I had to leave to meet Fintan, but I felt that it was a good use of my morning and promised to return the next day.

  “Do you know how they did it?” I asked Fintan when I saw him. “Got all that kraken blood?”

  “No idea,” he said. “I heard plenty of theories last night about how it could be done. Didn’t think any of them presented a decent chance of surviving.”

  We stayed safely away from awkward topics as we worked, for which I was grateful. Not every day had to be a situation that gave me a case of stress sweats.

  Since the day’s tales would all take place in Ghurana Nent, Fintan shared a Nentian song with his audience.

  Across the dark wide river croaked a randy muddy frog,

  That was answered in a chatter of a young and sleek wheat dog,

  Which spurred a word or two from an angry prairie hog,

  Who muttered darkly to a bluetip sitting on a log.

  The frog, well, he was single and he croaked with hopeful lust,

  He yearned and burned with love and hope for a woman he could trust

  He’d called for weeks with no luck and he figured he was bust

  But he kept on croaking through the nights because he felt he must.

  The wheat dog, she was pregnant and her pups were coming soon,

  She stayed awake at nights in conversation with the moon

  She said, I know my litter will be a blessing and a boon,

  But till they’re born I’ll have to sing this lonesome sadsome tune.

  The bluetip thought the prairie hog was like most bitter men,

  Who groused and made pronouncements on things far beyond their ken,

  She said, You’d understand more if you ventured from your den,

  He said he would be et before he listened to a hen.

  And then the hog got et and the pups got born,

  The frog found a woman he could trust one morn,

  The hen flew away, don’t know where she went

  It was life and death and love in Ghurana Nent.

  Mai Bet Ken was the first narrator for the day, dressed in the same formal green robes but her hair adorned with different flower blossoms—reds and yellows this time.

  That murderous lieutenant sailed away with Tactician Hennedigha and Viceroy Lohmet, safe for now under the aegis of powerful men. But I will not give up; I need to turn up the pressure somehow. There are many steps to war, and they have just taken a big one. They can still step back, and it is my job to convince them to do so.

  In the meantime, I am in such a flutter that
I can feel petals dropping from my bloom, and I’m losing sleep as I try to do the thousand tasks that must be done before I can move. I am to be Forn’s ambassador to the new Nentian king; the current ambassador in Talala Fouz survived the burning of the city, but the embassy itself did not. He will move upriver, acquiring land in the other cities on behalf the Red Pheasant Clan, and someone will come to replace me, a net gain of a single diplomat when we need so much more. But my clan, at least, has agreed to send a greensleeve to establish our presence in every Nentian city and thereby ensure a close relationship with the newly blessed people of the Sixth Kenning. The Red Pheasants will serve the Canopy’s interests and our own at the same time, and I am so pleased the elders have approved this. I even got a note from one who’d thought a former field worker wasn’t qualified to hold such an important post despite my education, saying he was wrong about me and apologizing. Well, maybe I was wrong about him too.

  My replacement knocks smartly on the door when I’m in the middle of packing up documents for the journey. He enters at my call, a young dark-haired man in the mustard robes of the Yellow Bats instead of the green I’ve adopted to represent all of Forn. This is most likely his first post outside the Canopy. He’s had a week or so on the ship from Pont to grow a beard but somehow hasn’t managed it.

  “Ambassador Ken? I’m Ambassador Kav Mit Par, your relief.”

  I promptly drop everything and walk over to him. “Ambassador Par. Welcome to Ghurana Nent! I didn’t realize your ship had come in, or I would have prepared a better reception. My apologies.”

  “None necessary. Your staff is excellent, and we’ve already been shown to our rooms and been made comfortable.”

  “How was your journey?”

  “Plagued by a profound lack of trees, I’m afraid, but otherwise fine.”

  “You must have a forest full of questions for me. Please, won’t you take your ease and I will answer what I can?”