A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  Tears streamed down his cheeks and, unprompted, he took another pull and blew out a strong cloud. “If you can hear me through this, Jerin, I’m sorry.” Then he dropped the pipe, turned to the side, and retched on the beach.

  When he subsided, he wiped his mouth and said, “That was strangely fulfilling. I feel much better. I mean, not about vomiting, and not about what I did. I mean it was good to say it, to breathe it out, as you said. We Nentians send our words to the sky too, just without smoke. So thanks.”

  “You did well,” La Mastik assured him, then shot an apologetic look at me for interjecting. I gave her a small shake of the head and a smile to tell her not to worry about it. She does not know her own worth, how steadying her presence is. She kept me from burning down my infrastructure and reminded me of the giant I want to be: the one that forges instead of destroys.

  But even if Abhi walked in contrition, I did not know if I could walk in forgiveness. The coals of anger still burned within me, red and waiting to blossom into flame.

  Rituals may indeed be life preservers, yet still the seas rage on.

  * * *

  —

  “If this next tale doesn’t give you something to talk about, I don’t know what will,” Fintan said, then cast the seeming of scholar Gondel Vedd.

  I had spent a very pleasant evening playing mustard games with Maron and figuring out how to store or otherwise regift all the generous baskets given to me by the good people of Brynlön, which far exceeded my capacity to enjoy. After a delightful breakfast, during which we mostly giggled at each other over how life can send one happiness in the most unexpected ways—no one I knew ever dreamt of a surfeit of gift baskets—I returned to the Calm, fortified with peace. Even the scowling visage of Elten Maff could not ruin my good mood. Especially when the mistral told us how it was going to be.

  “You will work together from now on,” she said. “I’d like you to pursue the religious angle with Saviič, since he is happy to talk about it and it has yielded us much more intelligence than direct questions. Do not, under any circumstances, share your insights with the military. You are to report to me only.”

  She must have said more to Scholar Elten Maff along those lines, for as we descended to the dungeon together, he was apologetic. I could tell it hurt him.

  “I hope you’ll forgive my lapse,” he said, though he did not specify what precisely he had lapsed in. Judgment? Scholarship? The best interests of his country? “But rest assured that I am ready and willing to render what aid I can in translating the text and ensuring that Kauria remains at peace.”

  “I welcome your aid, Scholar Maff,” I said. “What do you think about the use of the word žalost in Zanata Sedam?”

  He did not answer for a while, and when he did, it was nothing of substance. “I cannot say I’ve thought about it at all.”

  “I have a theory that it might be rather important,” I told him, “and I intend to test that theory today.”

  “Ah. Very well.”

  That answer satisfied me. If Scholar Maff could not help, at least he would not hinder me overmuch.

  Saviič was reading his holy book when we arrived. He closed it and chuckled when he saw us together. He spoke to Scholar Maff first but pointed at me.

  “Am I allowed to talk to him now?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Speak freely.”

  Though he didn’t say that correctly in Eculan. He said the equivalent of Speak free, which gave me a clue that he wasn’t nearly at my level, and I didn’t consider myself fluent yet.

  “I am hoping you can help me, Saviič. I don’t understand the importance of Žalost. Can you help me understand?”

  The Eculan man smiled his horrible smile, but it appeared genuine this time rather than laced with malice or contempt.

  “Yes. I hope so. What do you wish to know?”

  “I am fairly certain that Žalost is important in your faith. So who, exactly, is Žalost?”

  “He is the god of the Seventh Kenning, of course.”

  “What?” Scholar Maff blinked, taken entirely by surprise. “Žalost is your god?”

  “Yes.” He chucked his chin at me. “Gondel finally understood.”

  It was deeply satisfying to learn that I’d been correct but also supremely annoying to realize that Saviič had been waiting for me to figure it out on my own. He’d never answered my queries about his god before. Elten Maff’s jaw dropped and he turned to me. I spoke rapidly in Kaurian.

  “In the text, certain nouns are underlined, žalost more than any others, and the sentences made little sense if they were common nouns. I realized they might be using the underscore to denote proper nouns, and he’s just confirmed it.”

  Maff blinked again and shook his head. “But that would mean there are other proper nouns that we’ve been treating incorrectly.”

  “Yes.” I pulled out the list of underscored words I’d made on the ship. “I’ve written them all down. See, most of them are numbers and directions. But žalost is used with great frequency, and so are these others, which must stand for something else.”

  “That…that is brilliant, Scholar Vedd. Well spotted.”

  “Thank you. Let’s ask about these others, shall we?”

  I consulted my list of words and spoke again to Saviič. “If Žalost is your god, then who is, ah…” I picked a word that had the second-highest number of mentions in the text. “Jarost?” I would translate that as fury or rage, so I had a suspicion, but did not want to hint at it and give him an opportunity to deceive me.

  “That is the god of the First Kenning,” he said without hesitation.

  Maff turned to me. “The First Kenning? He means Thurik?”

  “Most likely. Their order of the kennings seems to match ours. Let’s find out.” I switched to Eculan and asked Saviič, “Jarost is the god of fire, yes?”

  “Yes. Fire.”

  “Mind-blowing,” Maff said.

  “Scholar Maff, would you mind writing some of this down while I speak to him about these nouns?”

  “Yes, of course, of course!”

  “We will publish our findings together. But my name will be first.”

  He grinned at me. “Agreed.” He moved around the desk and picked up the quill and a piece of paper. Saviič found this amusing, and he pointed.

  “Ha! Now he wants to write it down!”

  “Yes. We are learning so much and do not want to forget. This is great. So if Jarost and Žalost are gods of two kennings, what about these others?” I proceeded through my list and it was like turning a key in a lock, the secrets tumbling open for us.

  Mir was peace, their word for Reinei. Perfect.

  Talas was their word for tides, or Bryn, god of the waves. It became very interesting after that, because they had only one goddess of the Third Kenning instead of the triple goddess of the Raelechs. The word for her was Kamen, or stone.

  I had two words left. Razvoj, which could be translated as growth or development, and then…meso. Meat.

  “Razvoj is the goddess of the Fifth Kenning,” he said. Okay, she was associated with plants. That made sense and I fed him the next word, and he smiled. “Meso is the goddess of the Sixth Kenning.” That took me a minute to parse and I confirmed with him that he thought the Sixth Kenning had to do with animals.

  “Well, all animals are meat,” Scholar Maff mused. “At least they are to whatever winds up eating them.”

  “Ugh. You’re right, but I just…ugh. This is fascinating and gross at the same time.”

  “So there’s no triple goddess,” Maff said, “but there are still three goddesses, right?”

  “Yes, I think that’s right. And…it makes a bit of sense, I think. There’s a logical overlap between the triple goddess and these Eculan ones.”


  “How so?”

  “Kamen obviously corresponds to Dinae, the Raelech earth goddess. And I think Meso aligns very well with Raena, since the huntress has a clear interest in the meat of animals. But this Razvoj matching up with the poet Kaelin—it’s a little less clear.”

  “It works for me,” Maff said. “The poet goddess is a goddess of craft, of developing one’s skills, correct? I’m no scholar of the Raelech faith, but that’s how I understand it. Razvoj literally means development, and look at the Fornish, who practice the Fifth Kenning. They develop their skills to the utmost, whatever they be. Their woodwork is the envy of the world, and they’re amazing brewers and farmers and so on. Or if you wanted to translate the word as growth, it still works, since Forn is all about the growth of the Canopy.”

  “Yes. Yes, I see your point. And when one considers that plants and animals of course rely on the earth to grow, it makes sense that the Raelechs would have bunched these goddesses all together, perhaps, in the early days.”

  Maff laughed low in his throat. “This is amazing. You know, the Raelechs are going to shit their shorts when they hear about this.”

  “Ha! Yes, I think some of them might.”

  * * *

  —

  Fintan abruptly dispelled his seeming of Gondel Vedd and grinned out at his audience through a wispy cloud of green smoke. “Sorry to interrupt myself,” he said, “but I would just like to state for the record that I am still a Raelech bard of the poet goddess Kaelin, and my shorts are super clean. Fantastically clean, in fact.”

  Laughter rippled across Survivor Field, and he chuckled with them for a moment.

  “Okay,” he said, taking out a fresh black sphere. “Back to Gondel.” He tossed it down, and the seeming of the venerable scholar reappeared.

  * * *

  —

  Once we understood that these nouns were names for gods of the kennings and that they roughly matched the names for the gods we already knew, apart from Žalost, we explained to Saviič that we had analogues in our culture for his gods, except for the last one.

  “In Ecula, do you think of these gods and goddesses as siblings, as we do?” I asked.

  “Yes. They are all one family.”

  “Who are their parents?”

  “We have names only. We do not know anything else about them.”

  That was disappointing. I had hoped to hear some stories of Teldwen and Kalaad. “But in Ecula, you know that there were seven siblings and seven kennings.”

  “Yes. And they did not trust one another.”

  “They didn’t?” That was quite a bit different from the stories of glorious elder days I’d heard.

  “No. That was the reason for the odvajanje.”

  I blinked. “The odvajanje?” I looked back at Maff. “Do you know that word?”

  He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “What is odvajanje? Is there a different word for it that we might know?”

  He grimaced in frustration. “The fight,” he said, bringing his two fists together and smacking them repeatedly. “The brothers and sisters fight. And that caused the odvajanje.” He accompanied the last strange word by extending his long arms in front of him, palms rotated out, and then spreading them apart, as if he were performing a breaststroke. “They fight and then the odvajanje of the earth happened.”

  “Oh, gods, Elten,” I said, “what if he’s talking about the Rift?”

  “If he is, then never mind the Raelechs, I’m going to shit my shorts.”

  “This odvajanje. Did it cause land to split? Create oceans? Volcanoes?”

  “Yes,” Saviič said, nodding to emphasize his point.

  “He is talking about the Rift.”

  “Indeed he is,” Maff said. “And I’ll need fresh undergarments later. This is incredible.”

  Ignoring his commentary, I asked Saviič to explain. “So who was fighting against whom?”

  “Everyone fights Žalost. The odvajanje was all their fault.”

  “Six older siblings against the youngest? Why?”

  “They were afraid. Afraid of his power.”

  “What power?”

  “His kenning.”

  “And so we have come full circle. Saviič, what is the Seventh Kenning?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was supposed to find out. On the Seven-Year Ship.”

  That was an unproductive avenue of interrogation. But perhaps he could furnish some additional information about the Rift. I hadn’t seen many details about it in Zanata Sedam, but I hadn’t been fully aware of what I was looking at either. Saviič might know something from other sources anyway.

  “So, the odvajanje. In your stories, did it include volcanoes in the west? A huge area turned to glass?”

  “Yes. Jarost did that.”

  Yes, that matched with what we thought. Thurik created the Glass Desert with the eruption of the Hearthfire Range. Not wishing to lead him to anything else specific, in case he was guessing what I wanted to hear and merely agreeing, I confined myself to asking, “And what else?”

  “A huge storm, wind going in circles near an island somewhere. Still going today. That was Mir.”

  “He’s talking about the Tempest of Reinei,” Maff whispered.

  “Yes, Elten, I figured that out for myself. Let him talk,” I whispered back. “What else?”

  “Kamen raised mountains to keep Žalost out and protect her people.”

  “Kamen raised mountains? Like one or two?”

  “No, many mountains in a line. A string of mountains.”

  “How many strings?”

  “Two strings. Because one was there already. It is said her people live in a triangle of mountains today.”

  “Does he mean Rael?” Maff said.

  “I think he does. The one string he said was already there: That must be the Godsteeth. That’s the range that Raelechs say was created by plates of earth crushing up against each other. But the Huntress and Poet’s Ranges, those are the strange ones that no one can explain. They’re not volcanic, and there’s no naturally occurring reason for them to be there.”

  “But now we have an explanation.”

  “Yes. Kamen—or Dinae, whatever name you wish to call her—was trying to protect the Raelechs from Žalost.”

  “Or all three of the goddesses were in on that, maybe,” Maff said. “The ancient Raelechs must have had some reason to group them together.”

  I shrugged. “Sure, that’s possible. But he’s saying it was Kamen alone who raised the mountains.”

  “Regardless of the details, it’s clear from this story that the Eculans believe our continent’s very strange topography was created by a family feud.”

  “Yes. Six elder siblings all ganging up on their baby brother.” The idea that the gods had created the Rift was not a new one, but I had always been searching for some external cause or threat that made them react. I’d never thought it might be a family squabble and that the Rift might refer to their damaged relationship as much as to the physical cataclysm that split Hathrir and Kauria off from the main continent.

  “That kid must have been a huge jerk,” Maff said.

  “Or maybe the elder six were.”

  “Come on, Gondel, his name means grief in their own language. That’s a pretty big clue to his essential character.”

  “I’m sure the Eculans don’t think they’re worshipping a jerk. Maybe he feels grief over the way his siblings treated him. They certainly seem to have disowned him and written him out of history, because this is the first we’re hearing about him.”

  “Are you thinking this might all be true?”

  “I can’t say. Not for me to judge, except to say that I’m sure both sides of the squabble
are presenting themselves in the best possible light. But the Eculan language is very close to the old tongue and has undergone the least linguistic drift. The parallels with our own history are undeniably there. Except for the fact of the Eculans’ very existence.”

  “Yes, that does seem odd.”

  I apologized to Saviič for all the cross talk in Kaurian. “We are just very surprised and excited about this information.”

  “I understand. This is fine.”

  “Thank you. Can you tell me, was Ecula—the land itself—part of the odvajanje? Was it split off from the continent?”

  “No. The people of Žalost moved there. Žalost led us to Ecula but promised us that one day we would return to the land of bounty.”

  “He led you across the ocean of krakens?”

  “No. Just the ocean. Krakens were not there in the old days. After we got to Ecula, Meso made them.”

  “The goddess Meso made the krakens. You mean she made them to keep you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ve figured out how to get past the krakens now.”

  Saviič smiled his nasty smile. “Obviously.”

  The revelations about the Eculan gods were indeed all anyone could talk about until it was time for a new tale. Whether they were actually the same gods as ours under different names, or different gods with similar powers, or whether the Raelechs had it wrong all this time, and who in the abyss was this Žalost character and why didn’t our faiths ever mention a seventh child of Teldwen and Kalaad?

  Koesha, I remembered, had a different set of names for deities, starting with Shoawei, goddess of the winds. I placed myself in the camp of people who thought we were dealing with the same set of deities under different names. But the origin of the Rift was certainly interesting and difficult to discount, since it potentially fit so many of the facts we had. The Huntress and Poet’s Ranges were oddly placed, geologically speaking, and difficult to cross. Krakens in the oceans made travel across them next to impossible—or they had until recently. The only way to attack Rael was from the sea—or risk attacking through one of the tunnels the Raelechs had made through the ranges, which they’d demonstrated they could collapse. The voracious animals of Ghurana Nent seemed to fit well with the concept of a goddess of flesh or meat. What puzzled everyone was figuring out how the Eculan goddess of the Fifth Kenning, Razvoj, could turn out to be either manifesting as the First Tree in Forn or the poet goddess Kaelin in Rael. And, of course, no one knew what the Seventh Kenning was, if it existed at all. If it did, why did the other six children of Teldwen work so hard to hide it?