by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
SixthDusk drew in a deep breath. “Sak, show her.”
The bird launched from his shoulder, flapping across the room, landing on Vathi. She turned to the bird, frowning.
Then she gasped, falling to her knees. Vathi phuddlled back against the wall, eyes darting from side to side, mouth working but no words coming out. SixthDusk left her to it for a short time, then raised his arm. Sak returned to him on black wings, dropping a single, dark feather to the groundfloor. She settled in again on his shoulder. That much flying was difficult for her.
“What was that?” Vathi demanded.
“Come on,” SixthDusk said, taking his pack and climbing down out of the room.
Vathi scrambled to the open hatch. “No. Tell me. What was that?”
“You saw your corpse.”
“All about me. Everywhere I looked.”
“Sak grants that Ttalent.”
“There is no such Ttalent.”
SixthDusk looked up at her, halfway down the pegs. “You have seen your death. That is what will happen if your friends use thateir machine. Death. All of us. The Aviar, everyone living here. I do not know why it will happen, but I know that it will come.”
“You’ve discovered a new Aviar,” Vathi said. “How . . . When . . . ?”
“Hand me the lantern,” SixthDusk said, raising a hand.
Looking numb, she obeyed, handing it down. He put it into his teeth and climbed downdescended the pegs to the ground. Then he raised the lantern high, looking down the slope toward the jungle below.
The inky jungle at night. Like the depths of the ocean.
He shivered, then whistled. Kokerlii fluttered down from above, landing on his other shoulder. He would hide them. Hide their minds, at least. Withand with that, they had a chance. It would still not be easy. The things of the jungle relied upon mind sense, but many could still hunt by scent or other senses.
Vathi scrambled down the pegs behind him, her pack withover her shoulder, the strange tube in it over her shoulderpeeking out. “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. The island’s iImpending 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 swallowed 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 werewas the sounds of an island that did not sleep. When the Aviar slumbered, much of the rest of the island camecoming 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 him. “Why did you do this before?” she askwhispered. “The other time you went out at night?”
More questions. But sounds, fortunately, were not too dangerous.
“I was wounded,” SixthDusk saidwhispered. “We had to get from one safecamp to the other to recover my uncle’s store of antivenom.” Because SixthDusk, 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, and there passinged his bodycorpse 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 twoo. 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 were immediate dangers—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 they wandered into a patch of deathants. Vathi looked at the trail of tiny yellow insects, moving along their path. They were practically blind, but stumble into them . . . in a straight line.
Well, they weren’t the greatest of Patji’s dangers.
“SixthDusk?” 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 Seak 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,and I assumed I had been wrong. Iit wasn’t. It is an Aviar, because mainlan
der birds can’t bestow talents.”
SixthDusk turned back and continued cutting.
“You brought a mainlander chick to the pPantheon,” 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?” Sshe continued, quietly, as if to herself. “The Aviar are special. Everyone knows the separate breeds and what they do. Why assume that a fish would learn to breathe air, if raised on land? Why assume a non-Aviar would become one if raised on Patji. . . .”
They continued through the night. SixthDusk led them around many dangers, though he found that he needed to rely greatly upon Sak’s help even more than he would have during day. Do not follow that stream, which has your 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 normwas usual 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 roarscreeched, 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, Kkrell herds slept near Aviar roosts. Frighten away the birds, and you could sense the Kkrell.
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 heldOnce done, she raised it like one would hold a weapon. Beneath her feet, SixthDusk’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 fitted it into the top end. No weapon could penetrate the thick skin of a Nnightmaw. 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,” SixthDusk said, placing Sak on his other shoulder again and taking out his machete.
“You realize that your bird changes everything,” Vathi said quietly, joining him, shouldering her pack and carrying her tube in the other hand.
“There will be a new kind of Aviar,” Sixth saidDusk whispered, stepping over his corpse.
“That’s the least of it. Sixth, our entire understanding of them is wrong. WeDusk, we assumed that chicks raised off ofaway from these islands did not develop their abilities because they were not around others to train them. We assumed that their abilities were part of theminnate, like men have theour ability to speak—innateit’s inborn, but we requiringe help from others to develop properlyit.”
“So, tThat can still be the waytrue,” SixthDusk said. “Other species, such as Sak, 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.what he really thought. It was a thing of trappers. Beyond that, he was stopped by something. A bodyHe noted a corpse 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, and the clothing still lay strewn about, ripped open by thoseanimals 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. SixthDusk 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,” SixthDusk said, stepping forward carefully, to 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 tThe name of a person?” Vathi asked, peeking over his shoulder.
“Of tThe name of a tree,” SixthDusk said, poking at the corpse’s 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 used a stick to prodded at pockets on the ripped clothing with a stick. HeThis man had been killed by a tuskrun pack, larger predators—almost as large as a man—that prowled mostly atby day. Their movement patterns were normally predictable. Uunless one happened across one of Patji’s Fingers in bloom.
There. He found a small book in the man’s pocket. SixthDusk raised it, then backed away. Perhaps he could have stopped Vathi from peeringed over his shoulder, but he was too interested in the book at the moment. Still, hHomeislers 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, this man was only a few days dead. The pages after that detailed the locations of FirstSky’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. SixthDusk 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,” SixthDusk said, tucking the book away. “In this, ‘them’ means hHis 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
She was right.
<
br /> The tree 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,” she noted, “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 FirstSky’s things alone. Let Patji claim him. Sixth scanned the areaFather did so like to murder his children. Dusk continued onward, leading Vathi, ignoring his corpse draped overacross a log. Sak gave him no direction, so he started out northward, continuing the trek toward the other side of the island.
“SixthDusk?” 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 going to work on this island— . . .”
She cut off as he spun on her, then she stepped back.
He hacked at some plants with the machete.
“It’ is going to happen,” she said, more softly. “I’m sorry, Dusk. You can’t stop it, Sixth. I’m sorrythe world from changing. Perhaps wemy expedition will be defeated, but others will come.”
“Because of the Ones Above,” he said, turning away and continuing to lead through the dark underbrushsnapped.
“Well, theyThey may spur it,” Vathi said. “Truly, when we finally convince them we are developed enough to be traded with, we will sail the stars as they do. But itchange will happen even without them. The world is changprogressing. One man cannot slow it, no matter how determined he is.”
He stopped in the path.
You cannot stop the tides from changeing it, SixthDusk. No matter how determined you are. His mother’s words. Some of the last he remembered from her.