"I am their enemy," he said.
His candor earned another sideways hop and blink. "But you are one of them."
"I was. Then I turned against them and fled. The Hellknights do not suffer deserters. Neither does the Umbral Court. If they find me now, they'll kill me. And I would kill them to keep from going back." He hadn't consciously realized it before, but as soon as the words passed his lips, Isiem knew they were true. He would kill his former comrades before he returned to that life.
Again the strix was motionless for several long seconds. Only its feathers moved, fanning gently at the outer edges of its wings. He could almost see the creature thinking.
At length its yellow eyes focused back on him. "You are a traitor to your kin? That is a great sin."
"The Chelaxians are no kin of mine. They are slavers and tyrants. They consort with devils and cause the deaths of honest men." All true, although Isiem had been—and done—far worse. But that grim fact did nothing to diminish the accuracy of his accusations. "And they will not leave you be, not until the last of your kind is dead or defeated."
"Why?"
"They want the silver in your hills." Isiem swept his arm out, encompassing the gray rocks before them and the red-veined spikes behind. "They will not leave until they have it. And they cannot take it safely while your people remain here."
"And you are their enemy."
"Yes."
"You will help us fight them?"
Isiem shook his head. "I don't believe you can. Cheliax is an empire. A great one. They have soldiers, wizards, enslaved devils by the score ...the cleverest spellcaster I ever knew was a Chelish diabolist. I don't doubt that your people are brave and determined. But you cannot stand against them without being destroyed."
The strix trilled in apparent dismay. It stuffed the half-eaten snake back into its belt; evidently his gloomy prediction had spoiled its appetite. "That is an ugly truth."
"I'm sorry." Isiem attempted a rueful smile. He doubted it touched his eyes. "It seems I'm made to tell ugly truths to strix."
"Yes. This ...this new tale will need thinking." The strix flapped its wings a few times, preparing to depart. "I will inform the rokoa. I think the elders will listen. It is good to have an enemy's enemy as guide, and you do not tell us lies. It was a hard truth about Quiet Wings, but you did not shy."
"I'm sorry about that," Isiem said. "Kirraak. What happened to him."
The strix cocked its head in the other direction, ruffling its feathers twice in quick succession. Its yellow eyes seemed to deepen toward a golden color.
"Kirraak is not a name," it said, lifting into the sky. The wind of its wings beat Isiem's hair back in white streams. "It is a cry to be avenged."
Chapter Seventeen
Snakes
After that first encounter, the young strix came to Isiem's cabin more often. Soon she was visiting almost every morning, and their conversations became the centerpiece of Isiem's days. She sat on the roof, and he sat on the doorstep, and they talked until his spell ran out. He had not realized how much he missed the simple pleasures of discourse. Honey was a devoted companion, but it was difficult to carry a conversation with a dog.
Not that the strix's conversations were much like a human's. The more they talked, the more Isiem became conscious of that fact. And yet, for all the strix's strangeness, something like friendship began to develop between them.
Her name was Kirii, and Windspire was her tribe. She was the daughter of the rokoa, the old crone that Isiem had met in the ashes of Crackspike, and it seemed that her birth marked her as a child of destiny. Rokoa seldom bore fertile eggs; most were too old for breeding, and centuries-old custom prohibited them from taking mates. But every winter the rokoa coupled with every male in the clan in a ritual meant to bring them a bountiful spring, and sometimes children were hatched from such rites. Children born in this fashion were considered the daughters of the entire tribe, for it was impossible to know who had fathered them. And they were never sons; as far as Kirii knew, no male had ever been born of a rokoa.
Most of these daughters grew up to become legendary rokoa themselves, but Kirii seemed cheerfully unconcerned about any weight of expectation that might lie on her slight shoulders. Her nonchalance was a far cry from the dread that Isiem himself had felt grappling with much lesser expectations at the Dusk Hall, but then Kirii hardly seemed to know the meaning of dread. She was not what he had expected from the daughter of a dying people.
"What should I be?" she scoffed when he mentioned his surprise. "The chief of the Black Crags is greatly stoic. He and his tribe have accepted their doom. Our young itaraak let their anger eat their pride and power. They have accepted theirs. Many have abandoned their masks, saying that killing kotarra is not a sin, so they have no cause to hide their faces. They flee to Ciricskree, the greatest aerie of our people, and kill all who approach, even the birds and the beasts, fearing they might be spies for kotarra. It is a life of bitterness and fear.
"If I am not like them, not what you expect, it is because I accept no idea of doom. That idea is not useful. Fixing one's eyes on it makes one blind to all other possibilities, and a rokoa must never be so blind. It is like eating snakes."
"Eating snakes?" Isiem echoed, nonplussed.
"You find snakes in your sleeping place. Immediately you fix on the most obvious thought: they will bite you, and you will die. So you think only of being rid of them. But there are other thoughts you could have as well: they are good meat. Good skins. By thinking in this way you are still being rid of the danger, but also you will have a full belly. And pretty things for your head," she added, touching the band of braided viperskins that she had taken to wearing around her brow.
Kirii paused, then held her long, slim hands up in a fan toward the sun. The little spikes of her claws were translucent against the light. "Then, too, you think always of what you must do, and despair eats you if you fail. If you think instead of what you can do, then if you fail—what does it matter? This was but one choice among many. You have others. And my people have many choices, whether they see them or not."
"What choices are those?" Isiem asked. "You can't fight all Cheliax, and the Chelaxians will not give up. Don't be lulled into complacency because they haven't marched yet. Only the snow in the passes—and their contempt for your warriors—delays them. They'll come in their own time, but they will come."
Kirii gave him that small, sharp-toothed smile again. She lowered her hands. "I do not know all our choices yet. That is why I talk to you: to find them. But it is not useful to accept this idea of the inevitable, this thing that cannot be changed. Many of my people would see you as our enemy, and think this inevitable. They would kill you. But you are not our enemy, and in killing you they would lose the chance to learn much about the kotarra who come to the ground-roosts. This would be foolish. One must always be curious."
"Some would say that curiosity is itself foolish," Isiem said.
The strix made a derisive trill. "Not foolish. Undignified. This is not the same. To be curious is to admit that you do not know a thing, and some find that frightening. But I am young and there are many things I do not know. I find no shame in admitting it."
"But what if I were a threat?" Isiem pressed. "What if I had attacked instead of talking when you tried to steal my focus?" At his side, Honey perked her ears, lifted her head, and stared at the strix for a moment. Then the dog sighed and settled back onto her blanket, pushing her head against Isiem's leg and curling her tail out into the sun.
"You were no threat." Kiriii blinked sideways several times in rapid succession, the nictating membranes blurring across her yellow eyes. The soft feathers at the base of her wings flared and settled in a gesture that Isiem had learned to interpret as laughter. "I watched you before I approached. You stopped praying to the god of chains and you kept a beast that cannot hunt." She pointed to the sleeping dog, and Isiem felt a flash of guilty amusement at the strix's assessment.
It was true that Honey made a poor hunting dog. She was older than Isiem had originally guessed, and her idea of a glorious afternoon was lying on her blanket in the sun while he prepared their dinner. While she could be roused to ferocious barking if she heard something untoward at night, and she insisted on accompanying him every time he left the cabin, Honey was not and would never be much use for catching game.
But he kept her, because the dog was a friend, and Isiem needed friends.
"Fair enough," he conceded. "I suppose it's obvious I'm not much of a danger. But what if I had been?"
"Then we would have killed you or driven you away, as we did the black riders who came after you."
"Ah." Isiem hesitated, not sure he wanted to know, but asked: "What became of them?"
"Itaraak Fierce Spear and his warriors attacked them. The black riders did not stand to fight. They fled by some magic, vanishing into the air, and their horses turned into smoke behind them. The warriors killed none and lost none."
"They'll lose some soon enough," Isiem said grimly. He had warned Kirii that the strix should stay away from the trio of signifers—and he was sure now that they were signifers rather than shadowcallers, as the Chelaxians would be in no hurry to admit their failure to the Nidalese. Watching from a distance would have been prudent, but engaging them would only show the Chelaxians that the strix were still a threat to their interests. He had guessed that the signifers were scouts, not raiders, and had been equipped with some means of retreating swiftly in the face of danger. It seemed his guess had been correct, but it gave him no satisfaction to be right. "I told you not to let your kin attack."
"My mother is rokoa, not I," the strix replied testily. "I have no right of command. I told them what you said, and they chose not to listen. All passed as you foretold. Perhaps next time they will heed what you say."
"It won't matter," Isiem said. "Next time the Chelaxians will send a war party."
"We killed the last one. When you came."
"That wasn't a war party, and you had the advantage of a collaborator in Crackspike." He noted a slight stiffening of Kirii's neck, betraying her surprise, and smiled inwardly. Strix had their tells, just as humans did. "What happened to that collaborator, anyway?"
"Pezzack." Kirii garbled the word, turning it into a rooster's crow. "She wished to go to a place of freedom. It was worth the burning of all her kin for her to go." The strix trilled again in disapproval, digging her clawed toes into the cabin's roof deeply enough to leave gouges in the weather-beaten shingles. "Very human. But we honored our bargain and showed her the way."
"In exchange for what, exactly?"
The strix released her grip, took a hop to the side, and sank her claws into the wood again, harder this time. "Cricscaara poison, flint, and steel. This woman, she was a slave. It was her duty to cook. It was for her a simple thing to slip the poison into their food, and simpler still to pour oil under their beds as they slept their cricscaara sleep. Some were elsewhere and did not eat, but they were few. The itaraak slaughtered them."
Isiem said nothing. An unexpected weight of guilt had settled on him during the strix's explanation. He'd had no part in the collaborator's betrayal, but nevertheless he felt that he was, somehow, at fault in some way for it.
Pezzack had been his own dream, and while he hadn't been willing to burn the whole world for it, he had been willing to abandon Oreseis, Erevullo, and all those Hellknights to their deaths. They were soldiers. They invited their risks. And standing aside in a fight between capable opponents was a far cry from burning helpless civilians alive as they slept.
But the temptation was the same, and perhaps even the betrayal itself was only a difference of degree, not kind.
Even if he let himself believe that his own choice was different, and his own betrayal somehow less, it did not change the fact that he was free only because of the monstrous thing that the collaborator in Crackspike had done. Isiem's liberty had been bought in blood. And in his heart of hearts he knew, uneasily, that even if it were somehow possible to trade the innocent Crackspikers' lives back for his bondage, he would refuse that bargain.
Kirii canted her head to one side. "This troubles you?"
"No," Isiem lied. He wasn't the only one learning to read cross-species tells. Stupid to have forgotten that, even if he felt they were friends. And wasn't that another betrayal, in its way? He had befriended the very same creatures who had massacred the civilians of Crackspike. Not soldiers. Miners, traders, whores—ordinary people trying to scratch better lives for themselves out of the hardship of Devil's Perch.
They aren't just creatures, and this is their homeland. It is natural that they should want to defend it. But that only made the bloodshed more wearying. In Nidal he had believed that he was trapped by his nation's curse, and that if he could only escape from the spiritual chains of Zon-Kuthon, he'd find the world a brighter place. Instead he had discovered that good men were just as capable of engineering disasters as bad ones, and that the little people suffered and died just the same, either way.
"Why did you butcher the dead?" Isiem asked. He'd never mentioned it before; he had been afraid of offending Kirii, or of hearing an answer he didn't want to know. But now, suddenly, it seemed important to know the full cost Crackspike had paid for his freedom. "Were they dead when you cut them?"
"Yes." Kirii's head tilted slightly. There seemed to be more curiosity than offense in her answer, but Isiem was not sure. "All dead. The itaraak cut them to show their shame."
"I don't understand."
"It is forbidden to eat the flesh of the dead who were true-people. But kotarra are not our people. In Ciricskree it is taught that you are the worst of our enemies, for you have driven many tribes away from their homelands and forced them to seek refuge upon the Screeching Spire. You are cruel and treacherous and more savage than beasts. To them you are not true-people but half-people, like goblins and ogres." She held up her slim, clawed hands, showing empty palms. "I say this not to insult but to explain. These are the beliefs of the itarii.
"There is much dispute over whether the killing of kotarra is a sin. If it is a sin, the itaraak must wear masks to kill, lest their faces be seen and known for breakers of taboo. If it is not, they may go bare-faced. The rokoa of Windspire says it is a sin, as you are true-people. The rokoa of Ciricskree says it is not, as you are half-people. The tribes differ on this.
"Also they differ on the taboo of kotarra flesh. When an itarii dies, his body is taken to a place of honor and given to the worms. The worms clean the bones so that they may be returned to the tribe and made into useful things. In times of great hardship, the worms themselves may be eaten, for they have purified the flesh of the dead with their own flesh. In this way, as bones and fodder, we help our kin after death. But the vilest sinners, the outcasts from the tribes—they are not afforded this honor. Their bodies are left to rot after they die, for as they were exiled in life, so they remain exiles in death. We do not take their bones.
"If kotarra are not true-people, it is no taboo to eat their flesh. This is what the tribe of Ciricskree teaches. For them it is acceptable to eat your dead. Half-people are not appetizing, but they make acceptable meat. But if you are true-people, as the rokoa of Windspire says, then the worst insult is for your bones and flesh to be left on the ground to rot. The itaraak cut them and leave them to show contempt. You may be true-people, they are saying, but you are so worthless, so defiled by sin, that the worms reject your flesh and the itarii discard your bones."
"That's what they believe?" Isiem said, incredulous.
"It is."
A long silence fell, broken only by the whistling of a dry winter breeze through the ridges and spires of Devil's Perch. Ripples of yellow and white shone on the wind-carved red rocks, each outcropping as vivid as a sunset made stone. Isiem gazed at their desolate beauty, trying to remember whether this was what he had imagined all those years ago in Nidal: a land where the earth held brilliant colors, and yet was no k
inder than Pangolais.
Kirii interrupted his musings. "What are you thinking?"
"Snakes." Isiem forced levity into his answer, hoping to convince himself as much as the strix. "I'm trying to find some to eat, but all I see are big fangs hissing at me."
Once more Kirii's feathers fanned up and settled in peculiar mirth. She warbled low in her throat, a sound she had started making to approximate laughter. "It is often so in the beginning, before you learn to hunt."
"I'd rather not make too many mistakes while learning. Those fangs are very big."
"A common wish," Kirii agreed, "but one the world seldom grants. You face what comes into your life."
"Thank you, wise one." Isiem made a face. The strix's feathers fluttered in amusement, and she bobbed her head in a birdlike gesture that seemed more human each time she did it.
Learning to mirror human gestures. She wants to build rapport. Isiem knew from his own interrogator's training that such mirrored gestures were highly effective in establishing a sense of empathy between questioner and subject, and that most often people did not even realize that it was being done.
Far from making him suspicious of Kirii, however, Isiem's awareness of her techniques made him trust her more. If she was trying to master that kind of mimicry, it meant that she intended to use diplomacy instead of spears—and, further, that she meant her efforts to be as persuasive as possible. He couldn't say whether she would succeed, but the attempt was worthy of respect.
"I brought you more dungpatty," Kirii said, when it became evident that awkwardness had suffocated their conversation. She hopped down from the roof and unshouldered her pack, pulling out strings of dried meat, cakes of rendered fat and dehydrated berries, and the round blocks of fuel that the strix called "dungpatty"—the dried ordure of ruminants, mainly deer, rock sheep, and the small fork-horned antelope that thrived impossibly on bristles and brambles and coarse brown grass. The strix gathered it, mixed it with unguents of their own devising, and pressed it into sun-baked rounds. In a land where wood was too scarce to be relied on as fuel, dungpatty served in its stead.
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