Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology

by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler

  Vathi scrambled down the pegs behind him, her pack with the strange tube in it over her shoulder. “You have two Aviar,” she said. “You use them both at once?”

  “My uncle had three.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “They like trappers.” So many questions. So much talking. Could she not think about what the answers might be before asking?

  “We’re actually going to do this,” she said, whispering, as if to herself. “The jungle at night. I should stay. I should refuse . . .”

  “You’ve seen your death if you do.”

  “I’ve seen what you claim is my death. I don’t know anything. A new Aviar . . . It has been centuries.” Though her voice still sounded reluctant, she walked after him as he strode down the slope and passed his traps, entering the jungle again.

  His corpse sat at the base of a tree. That made him immediately look for what could kill him here, but Sak’s senses seemed to be off. Impending death was upon them all, and it was so overpowering, it seemed to be smothering smaller dangers. He might not be able to rely upon her visions until the machine was destroyed.

  That worried him. If he was going to cross the island at night, her aid would have been invaluable. The thick jungle canopy seemed to swallow them. It was hot here, even at night; the ocean breezes didn’t reach this far inland. That left the air feeling stagnant, and it dripped with the scents of the jungle. Fungus, rotting leaves, the perfumes of flowers.

  The accompaniment to those scents were the sounds of an island that did not sleep. When the Aviar slumbered, much of the rest of the island came alive. The deeper Sixth went, the more omnipresent the sounds became. A constant crinkling in the underbrush, like the sound of maggots writhing in a pile of dry leaves.

  The lantern’s light did not seem to extend as far as it should, and Vathi pulled up close to him behind. “Why did you do this before?” she asked. “The other time you went out at night?”

  More questions.

  “I was wounded,” Sixth said. “We had to get from one safecamp to the other to recover my uncle’s store of antivenom.” Because Sixth, hands trembling, had dropped the other flask.

  “You survived it? Well, obviously you did, I mean. I’m surprised is all.”

  She seemed to be talking to fill the air. Homeislers did that.

  “They could be watching us,” she said, looking into the darkness. “Nightmaws.”

  “They are not.”

  “How can you know?” she asked, voice hushed. “Anything could be out there, in that darkness.”

  “If the nightmaws had seen us, we’d be dead. That is how I know.” Obviously. He shook his head, sliding out his machete and cutting away a few branches before them. Any could hold deathants skittering across their leaves. In the dark, it would be difficult to spot them, and so brushing against foliage seemed a poor decision.

  We won’t be able to avoid it, he thought, leading the way down through a gully thick with mud. He had to step on stones to keep from sinking in. Vathi followed with remarkable dexterity, for a scribe. We have to go quickly. I can’t cut down every branch in our way.

  He hopped off of a stone and onto the bank of the gully, passing his body sinking into the mud. Nearby, however, he spotted a second corpse, so translucent it was nearly invisible. He raised his lantern, hoping it wasn’t happening again.

  Others did not appear. Just these too. And the very faint image . . . yes, that was a sinkhole there. Sak chirped softly, and he fished in his pocket for a seed to give her. She had figured out how to send him help anyway. The fainter images—he would have to watch for those.

  “Thank you,” he whispered to her.

  “That bird of yours,” Vathi said, speaking softly in the gloom of night, “are there others?”

  They climbed out of the gully, continuing on, crossing a krell trail in the night. He stopped them just before the wandered into a patch of deathants. Vathi looked at the trail of tiny insects, moving along their path. They were practically blind, but stumble into them . . .

  Well, they weren’t the greatest of Patji’s dangers.

  “Sixth?” she asked as they rounded the ants. “Are there others? Why haven’t you brought any chicks to market?”

  “I do not have any chicks.”

  “So you found only the one?” she asked.

  Questions, questions. Buzzing around him like flies.

  Don’t be foolish, he told himself, shoving down his annoyance. You would ask the same, if you saw someone with a new Aviar. He had tried to keep Sek a secret; for years, he hadn’t even brought her with him when he left the island. But with her hurt wing, he hadn’t wanted to abandon her.

  Deep down, he’d known he couldn’t keep his secret forever. “There are many like her,” he finally said, in answer to those buzzing questions. “But only she has a talent to bestow.”

  Vathi stopped in place as he continued to cut them a path. He turned back, looking at her alone on the new trail. He had given her the lantern to hold.

  “That’s a mainlander bird,” she said. She held up the light. “That’s what I knew it was when I first saw it, but when you said it had a talent, I assumed I had been wrong. I wasn’t. It is a mainlander bird.”

  Sixth turned back and continued cutting.

  “You brought a mainlander chick to the pantheon,” Vathi whispered behind. “And it gained a talent.”

  With a hack he brought down a branch, then continued on. Again, she had not asked a question, so he needed not answer.

  Vathi hurried to keep up, the glow of the lantern tossing his shadow before him as she stepped up behind. “Surely someone else has tried it before. Surely . . .”

  He did not know. He had not heard it spoken of, however.

  “But why would they?” She continued, quietly, as if to herself. “The Aviar are special. Everyone knows the breeds and what they do. Why assume that a fish would lean to breathe air, if raised on land? Why assume a non-Aviar would become one if raised on Patji . . .”

  They continued through the night. Sixth led them around many dangers, though he found that he needed to rely upon Sak’s help even more than he would have during day. Do not follow that stream, which has you corpse bobbing in its waters. Do not touch that tree; the bark is poisonous with rot. Turn from that path. Your corpse shows a deathant bite.

  Sak did not speak to him, but each message was clear. They seemed more clear than normal, actually—though these images were faint, almost invisible. When he stopped to let Vathi drink from her canteen, he held Sak and found her trembling. She did not peck at him as normal when he enclosed her in his hands.

  They stood in a small clearing, pure dark all around them, the sky shrouded in clouds. He heard distant rainfall on the trees. Not uncommon, here.

  Nightmaws roared, one then another, in the night air. They only did that when they had already made a kill, or when they were seeking to frighten prey. Often, Krell herds slept near Aviar roosts. Frighten away the birds, and you could sense the Krell.

  Vathi had taken out her tube. Not a scroll case—and not something scholarly at all, considering the way she held it as she poured something into its end. She held it like one would hold a weapon. Beneath her feet, Sixth’s body lay mangled. Not one of the visions Sak was trying to send him, but one of the ones from the danger.

  He did not ask after Vathi’s weapon, not even as she took some kind of short, slender spear and fit it into the top end. No weapon could penetrate the thick skin of a Nightmaw. You either avoided them, or you died.

  Kokerlii fluttered down to his shoulder, chirping away. He seemed confused by the darkness. Why were they out like this, at night, when birds normally made no noise?

  “We must keep moving,” Sixth said, placing Sak on his shoulder again and taking out his machete.

  “You realize that your bird changes everything,” Vathi said, joining him, shouldering her pack and carrying her tube in the other hand.

  “There will be a n
ew kind of Aviar,” Sixth said, stepping over his corpse.

  “That’s the least of it. Sixth, our entire understanding of them is wrong. We assumed that chicks raised off of these islands did not develop their abilities because they were not around others to train them. We assumed that their abilities were part of them, like men have the ability to speak—innate, but requiring help from others to develop properly.”

  “So, that can still be the way,” Sixth said. “Other species can merely be trained to speak.”

  “And your bird? Was it trained by others?”

  “Perhaps.” He did not know everything Sak had done in her life.

  Of course, he suspected something else. He did not say it. It was a thing of trappers. Beyond that, he was stopped by something. A body on the ground before them.

  It was not his.

  He held up a hand immediately, stilling Vathi as she continued on to ask another question. What was this? That body was relatively fresh—though the meat had been picked off of much of the skeleton, the clothing still lay strewn about, ripped open by those that feasted upon it. Small, fungus-like plants had sprouted around the ground near it, tiny red tendrils reaching up out of the ground to enclose parts of the skeleton.

  He looked up at the great tree, at the foot of which rested the corpse. The flowers were not in bloom. Sixth released his breath.

  “What is it?” Vathi whispered. “Deathants?”

  “No. Patji’s Finger.”

  She frowned. “Is that . . . some kind of curse?”

  “It is a name,” Sixth said, stepping forward carefully, inspecting the corpse. Machete. Boots. Rugged gear. One of his colleagues had fallen. He thought he recognized the man from the clothing. An older trapper named First of the Sky. Sixth’s uncle had known him.

  “Of the person?” Vathi asked, peeking over his shoulder.

  “Of the tree,” Sixth said, poking at the clothing of the man, careful of insects that might be lurking inside. “Raise the lamp.”

  “I’ve never heard of that tree,” she said skeptically.

  “They are only on Patji.”

  “I have read a lot about the flora on these islands . . .”

  “And you know little, still. Here you are a child. Light.”

  She sighed, raising it for him. He prodded at pockets on the ripped clothing with a stick. He had been killed by a tuskrun pack, larger predators—almost as large as a man—that prowled mostly at day. Their movement patterns were normally predictable. Unless one happened across one of Patji’s Fingers in bloom.

  There. He found a small book in the man’s pocket. Sixth raised it, then backed away. Perhaps he could have stopped Vathi from peering over his shoulder, but he was too interested in the book at the moment. Still, homeislers stood so close to each other sometimes. They had a whole island, mostly to themselves. Did she need to stand right by his elbow.

  He checked the first pages, finding a list of dates. Yes, this death was fresh, only a few days old, judging by the last date written down. The pages after that detailed the locations of First’s safecamps, along with explanations of the traps guarding each one. The last page contained the farewell.

  I am First of the Sky, taken by Patji at last. I have a brother on Suluko. Care for them, rival.

  Few words. Few words were good. Sixth carried a book like this himself, and he had said even less on his last page.

  “He wants you to care for his family?” Vathi asked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Sixth said, tucking the book away. “In this, ‘them’ means his birds.”

  “That’s actually kind of sweet,” Vathi said. “I had always heard that trappers were incredibly territorial.”

  “We are,” he said, noting how she said it. Again, her tone made it seem as if she considered trappers to be like animals. “But our birds might die without care—they are accustomed to humans, and are no longer part of their flocks. Better to give them to a rival than to let them die.”

  “Even if that rival is the one who killed you?” Vathi asked. “The traps you set, the ways you try to interfere with one another . . .”

  “It is our way.”

  “That is an awful excuse,” she said, looking up at the tree. It was massive, with drooping fronds. At the end of each one was a large closed blossom, as long as two hands put together. “You don’t seem worried, though the plant seems to have killed that man.”

  “These are only dangerous when they bloom.”

  “Spores?” she asked.

  “No.” He picked up the fallen machete, but left the rest of First’s things alone. Let Patji claim him. Sixth scanned the area, ignoring his corpse draped over a log. Sak gave him no direction, so he started out northward, continuing the trek toward the other side of the island.

  “Sixth?” Vathi asked, raising the lantern and hurrying to him. “If not spores, then how does the tree kill?”

  “So many questions.”

  “My life is about questions,” she replied. “And about answers. If my people are to work on this island—”

  She cut off as he spun on her, then she stepped back.

  “It’s going to happen,” she said, more softly. “You can’t stop it, Sixth. I’m sorry. Perhaps we will be defeated, but others will come.”

  “Because of the Ones Above,” he said, turning away and continuing to lead through the dark underbrush.

  “Well, they may spur it,” Vathi said. “But it will happen without them. The world is changing. One man cannot slow it, no matter how determined.”

  He stopped in the path.

  You cannot change it, Sixth. No matter how determined you are. His mother’s words. Some of the last he remembered from her.

  Sixth continued on his way. The woman followed. He would need her, though a treacherous piece of him whispered that she would be easy to end. With her would go her questions, and more importantly, her answers. The ones he suspected she was very close to discovering.

  You cannot change it . . .

  He could not. He hated that he could not, but he could not. Killing this woman would accomplish nothing. Besides, had he sunk so low that he would take a helpless scribe and murder her in cold blood? He would not even do that to another trapper, unless they approached his camp and did not retreat.

  “The blossoms can think,” he found himself saying as he turned them away from a mound that showed the tuskrun pack had been rooting here. “The Fingers of Patji. They attract predators like a wounded animal, which has thoughts full of pain and worry. The predators fight one another, sometimes, and the tree feeds off of the corpses. That is what you saw growing beneath the man’s body.”

  Vathi gasped. “A plant,” she said, “that broadcasts a mental signature? Are you certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need one of those blossoms.” The light shook as she turned to go back.

  Sixth spun and caught her by the arm. “No. We are not here to collect samples. We must keep moving.”

  “But—”

  “You will have another chance.” He took a deep breath. “Your people will soon infest this island like maggots on carrion. You will see other trees. Tonight, we must go. Dawn is approaching.”

  He let go of her and turned back to his work. He had judged her wise, for a mainisler. Perhaps she would listen.

  She did. She followed behind, walking quietly for a time.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said.

  “It was not dusk when I was born,” Sixth said, hacking down a swampvine, then holding his breath against the noxious fumes that it released toward him a moment later. They were only dangerous for a few moments.

  “Excuse me?” Vathi asked, keeping her distance from the swampvine. “You were born . . .”

  He looked over, meeting her eyes in the frail lanternlight. “My mother did not name me for the time of day. It was not dusk, not in the day of my birth. I was named because my mother saw the dusk of our people. The sun will soon set, she often told me.” He turned
, looking up toward the dark canopy. “I guess it has finally done just that.”

  He looked back to Vathi. Oddly, she smiled at him. Perhaps she realized he had shared something personal. He had not spoken those words to his uncle; only his parents had known. He was not certain why he’d told this scribe from an evil company.

  A nightmaw broke through between two trees behind Vathi.

  The enormous beast would have been as tall as a tree if it had stood upright on two legs. Instead, it leaned forward in a prowling posture, two clawed forelegs ripping up the ground as it reached forward its long neck, open beak on the end razor sharp and deadly. This was the closest he had ever seen one. It looked kind of like a bird, in the same way that a wolf looked like a lapdog.

  He threw his machete. An instinctive reaction, for he did not have time for thought. He did not have time for fear. That snapping beak—as tall as a door—would have the two of them dead in moments.

  His machete glanced off of the beak, actually cutting it on the side of the head. Sixth leaped for Vathi, to pull her away, to—

  The explosion deafened him. Smoke burst into the air from Vathi, who stood—wide eyed—having dropped the lantern, oil spilling from the ground. The sudden sound stunned him, and he almost collided with her as the Nightmaw slumped and fell, skidding, the ground thumping from the impact.

  Sixth found himself on the ground. He had tripped. He scrambled to his feet, backing away from the twitching Nightmaw mere feet in front of him. The light was already dying. He couldn’t look toward the fallen lantern, though. He stared at the beast in front of him, all leathery skin that was prickled and bumpy, like that beneath a bird that had lost its feathers.

  It was dead. She had killed it.

  Vathi said something.

  She had killed a nightmaw.

  “Sixth!” her voice seemed distant.

  He raised a hand to his forehead, which had belatedly begun to prickle with sweat. His body tense, he felt as if he should be running. He had never wanted to be so close to one of these. Never.

  She’d actually killed it.

  He turned toward her, his eyes wide. Vathi was trembling, but she covered it well. “Well, that worked,” she said. “We weren’t certain it would, even though we’d prepared these specifically for the nightmaws.”