He started with the silver cylinders. They came apart easily when twisted, revealing tiny scrolls of a crisp greenish paper so thin it was translucent. Miniscule black glyphs covered each sheet; one of them held a simplified map that depicted the region surrounding Crackspike. Isiem recognized the script as the tongue of devils, but their arrangement made no sense.
Plainly the missives were written in code. Who was Erevullo addressing in such cryptic fashion? Why? There were spells that did such things much more easily...but perhaps the signifer hadn't known them, just as Isiem had never bothered to learn how to fly.
Or perhaps he'd had some other reason. Until he puzzled out what the scrolls said, Isiem had no hope of unraveling the rest of the mystery.
He spent the remainder of the day working on the cylinders' code and drinking willowbark tea to soothe the pain from his arm. It didn't help much, but it gave him the comfort of doing something to mitigate his suffering. Honey, bored by her human's inactivity, amused herself by flinging sticks into the air, chasing them down, and destroying them.
By nightfall Isiem believed he had broken the code, and by the time Kirii came to visit him the next day at noon, he had nearly finished deciphering Erevullo's message.
"You do not look well," the strix observed as she settled on his roof.
"I had an unfortunate meeting with a landshark."
"The hungry digger? We know of him. He is very old. For days he is eating the bones of your kotarra wood-roosts."
"Yes, that's where I met him."
Kirii blinked, then covered her small mouth with her hands. Her fine claws gleamed white in the sun as she rocked her weight from one foot to the other. It was not a gesture Isiem had seen before, and he did not know how to read it. "What were you doing there?" she asked.
"I was hoping to learn more about Cheliax's interest in Crackspike—and how far the Chelaxians might be willing to go to take it." Isiem rubbed his eyes with his good hand. He hadn't slept much since returning. "I have some answers, if not all of them."
"Yes?" Kirii hopped to the edge of the roof, peering intently at him. "What did you learn?"
"Where they found silver." Isiem had made a larger and more detailed copy of the map in Erevullo's scrolls, and he offered it up to her now. "This shows the known boundaries of the strike—where they believe the silver is most concentrated. These are the lands they will fight hardest to seize."
Kirii accepted the page he held up to her, but she did not glance at its drawing. "They will fight hardest for this. But they will not stop after taking it?"
"I doubt they'll stop before," Isiem said. "They might stop after. If you can bleed them badly enough, and if the silver runs out in the hills."
"If not?"
He wouldn't lie. "It may be the end of your people. In this part of the world, at least. You could move somewhere else in Devil's Perch, maybe to Ciricskree. Others have, haven't they?"
"Yes. They gave up their names and traditions. They joined the Screeching Spire as pitiable refugees, adopted the teachings of Ciricskree's rokoa as their own, and took the lowest of its nests. It is ...a way to survive, but it is not a thing any itarii of Windspire would desire. We are our own clan. One of the last."
Kirii looked away. North, off to the red-black claws of stone that rose sharply over the lesser ridges around Crackspike. Her wings lifted slightly, the feathers raised to catch the breeze. She did not look back. "Your arm. Do you need healing?"
Isiem shifted his arm in its makeshift sling, hoping to ease the ache but only earning another stab of pain for his trouble. "I would be grateful for any medicines you could spare."
"I will ask." She opened her wings to the wind and was gone.
It was not Kirii who returned the next day, however, but four itaraak: tribal warriors in breastplates of bone and tortoiseshell, their faces hidden behind the masks that all the itaraak of Windspire wore. Fierce slashes of charcoal, chalk, and red clay adorned their masks, signifying affiliations and lineages Isiem couldn't fathom. Two leveled their spears at the Nidalese wizard as soon as they touched the ground, while a third circled in the air to watch for other foes. The fourth, whose mask was crowned with double crests of bone, approached the shadowcaller warily.
"Kotarra. You come with us," the strix said in heavily accented Taldane. "Eyes cover. Hands tied. Beast of war stays here or dies."
"Beast of war?" Isiem repeated blankly, then followed the strix's motion to Honey and blinked. "She's not a beast of war. She can barely kill a rabbit." Seeing that the itaraak was lost in the thicket of unfamiliar words, Isiem reached cautiously for his clay ziggurat and cast his spell of translation. He did not want to be misunderstood.
When the magic had taken hold, he repeated: "Honey's just a dog. A pet. She isn't a war beast. She doesn't even help me hunt, really."
The strix on the ground exchanged glances. Openly incredulous, their bone-masked leader made a feint with his spear at the dog. Honey jumped back in surprise, her tail bushed out, but did not snarl or lunge; instead she looked at Isiem, confused.
"Why do you keep this beast?" the strix's leader asked, as confused as the dog was.
"She's a friend," Isiem replied. "Why are you here? I only asked for potions."
"We have not come to heal you." The strix gestured to the itaraak on his left, who shouldered his spear and came forward with a wide band of deerskin in his hands. "We have come to take you to the stone-roosts. Do not resist."
Isiem didn't. He stood motionless as the itaraak blindfolded him and tied his wrists crossed in front of him, then bound them again to his waist. The bonds sent agony shooting through his injured arm, but he hid the pain with well-trained stoicism. "Why?" he asked, proud that no hint of agony came through his voice.
"The black riders have returned," the strix said, "and this time they have come in strength."
Chapter Nineteen
Windspire
The journey to the strix's roost was less torturous than Isiem had feared, although it did not begin that way.
For the first stretch—less than an hour, he guessed, although it felt ten times as long—they kept him stumbling blindly along the rocks and gullies. The blindfold smelled of old blood and, after a while, suffocatingly of his own sweat. Isiem stubbed his toes so many times that he was mildly surprised they didn't break off. Twice he fell hard enough to skin his good elbow and his knees.
He heard the itaraak exchanging comments around him. His translation spell had worn off long ago and the inflections of the strix's tongue were far different from those of Taldane; still, Isiem could tell that they were increasingly impatient with his clumsiness.
But what was he to do? He couldn't see, the ground was littered with loose rock, and they offered him no help. Grim-faced, he pressed on.
After leading him up a particularly steep rise, the strix stopped for a while. Isiem felt a chill gather around him as they waited, and understood that he was standing in shadow, not sun. Is there anything tall enough to cast such a shadow in the hills?
He heard the rattle of bones knocking against one another and the rasp of coarse rope unrolling. Then the strix were ushering him across a bridge that swayed and creaked at every step, and he was listening to the wind howl underfoot. Only a thin guide rope told him where to go—and Honey didn't even have that. The dog had her eyes, though, and somehow she followed Isiem across.
On the other side, mercifully, the walk came to an end.
"Sit," the leader of the itaraak told him in strained Taldane. The other strix parceled food out among themselves—Isiem could hear them cracking open sealed gourds and unwrapping brittle dried leaves, could smell smoked meat and herbed yams—but they offered him nothing. Hands bound, broken arm ablaze with pain, he could do nothing but swallow his hunger and wait.
After a seeming eternity the strix began to move again. One of them uttered a word of magic; Isiem's ears pricked at the familiar syllables, although the accent was different and the strix spoke quiet
ly, so that he could not identify exactly what was said. But he was not surprised when, a moment later, he felt a new, larger presence loom upon the rocks nearby. Stone groaned in the grip of powerful claws; the wind rilled over stiff flight feathers. Isiem heard no breathing, though, and he felt no warmth radiating from what was surely a massive body perched above.
One of the strix untied the shadowcaller's hands. "Ride."
The enormous thing they had summoned came down from its rocky perch. Its movements creaked audibly, like the rope bridge had. A sun-baked, dusty smell surrounded it, along with the scents of crushed pollen and dried meat.
The strix took Isiem's hands and guided him, still blindfolded, onto the creature's back. Under its feathers he felt hard bone, with no muscle or fat to pad it. His foot slid as he climbed on, and his toes caught in an empty space between two of its naked ribs. There was no sign that the creature felt any pain at his slip, or that it even noticed. He clung to it weakly with his good hand, unable to maintain a grip with the other.
"What is this thing?" Isiem asked. Whether it was an enchanted construct or undead, he knew for a certainty that it was not alive.
"Gift of our ancestors," the masked itaraak answered. "Hold on strong."
"What about my dog?"
"Tokoaa will carry it in claws. No hurting."
"I don't think —" Isiem began, but then the unliving thing under him lurched off the ground and the wind stripped his words away. The speed of their ascent ripped at his blindfold, allowing him to glimpse just how quickly the earth was receding—and how sharp it was. The red-veined spikes of stone that gave Devil's Perch its name looked like an army of readied spears beneath them. The shadowcaller squeezed his eyes shut, lowered his body against the bony steed's, and held on for his life.
Hurtling blind through the sky on a mount he could not control and could barely grasp was one of the most terrifying experiences Isiem had ever endured. The wind was frigid, the height unknowable, the strix unfriendly ...but most frightening of all was his complete lack of power. Nothing was under his control in this journey, and for Isiem there was no greater horror.
He collapsed in relief when they finally landed. It was a lurching, jaw-jarring stop that smashed his tongue between his teeth, but Isiem hardly noticed the sudden taste of blood. All the strength seemed to have been drained out of him by the flight. Honey bounded up and licked his face, pausing occasionally to worry at the leather band covering his eyes. The dog seemed unfazed by her own sojourn through the sky.
The itaraak removed his blindfold. Already the thing that had borne him to their home—the tokoaa, he supposed—was gone, presumably returned to the place from whence it had been summoned.
But the strix remained, and their city was of such strangeness that it soon drove the mystery of the tokoaa from his mind.
It wasn't really a city, Isiem realized after a moment. The crimson spires and crooked black claws of Devil's Perch gave Windspire the appearance of a city crowded with towers, but most of those stony perches were empty. If they had ever been settled, they were desolate now.
The ones still occupied held tangles of rope, netting, and vines, all woven into nests suspended beneath their arches and between their crags. Long, pale bones served as supports here and there, as did leg-thick poles of braided grass stiffened with reddish unguents. The nests were carefully concealed from aerial view; any foes flying overhead would see only the surrounding rock. Isiem saw a few ladders and bridges linking some of the smaller nests in the heart of the settlement, but most were unconnected. He presumed that the very young and very old lived there. The other strix, able to fly from home to home, had no need of ropes to help them.
Despite the chaos of materials used in the settlement's construction, there was a peculiarly unified beauty to the whole. Just as a robin's nest spun order out of jumbled twigs and straws, so the strix had built something verging on elegance from their scavenged scraps.
"Kotarra," the masked strix said. "This way." He hopped down a crooked ledge, gripping the uneven stone with clawed toes and spreading his wings for balance as he walked toward a tented nest. The sides of the tent were made of stitched deerhides, lavishly adorned with geometric designs in bone beads and clay paints. A trickle of bluish smoke escaped from a hole near its top.
Isiem picked his way slowly along the ledge, wishing too late that he'd told Honey to stay back until called. The dog trotting cheerfully at his heels was likely to knock him down to his death—and, indeed, once her nose jostled the back of his knee, causing a black flash of panic. It was a long fall to the bottom of Devil's Perch.
But he kept his balance, and he soon came to the covered nest's entry flap.
"In," the masked itaraak said, standing to the side.
"You're not coming?"
"The rokoa asked for you alone."
"Very well." Isiem was acutely conscious of how disreputable he looked. Between his lonely stay in the miner's cabin and the dishevelment of the ride to Windspire, he looked like a sorry vagrant indeed. No good house in Westcrown would have admitted him; in Pangolais he would have been swept quietly off to the Umbral Dungeons to await sacrifice. He had to hope that appearances mattered less to the strix, at least where kotarra were concerned.
"Honey, stay," he told the dog, having no idea whether she'd listen. Quickly, before his furry companion could follow and offend the strix, Isiem pushed the tent flap aside and stepped in. The flap fell shut behind him, closing him in smoky darkness punctuated by the filigreed glow of small, scattered bone braziers.
A winged form shifted in the gloom. As his eyes adjusted, Isiem recognized the rokoa sitting on a raised cushion fashioned from a tumbleweed padded with felted hair and feathers. She gestured for him to take a similar cushion facing her.
Isiem obeyed. The rokoa held a faded, yellowed page in one hand. It had been folded into a frayed blossom. He couldn't make out any of the page's lettering, but when she motioned for him to give her his hand, he understood that it was some sort of spell talisman. Again he did as he was bidden. The rokoa touched his palm with a single wrinkled fingertip, and he felt a spark of magic pass between them.
"Welcome," she said. There was no twinning of voices with this spell; he understood her perfectly, but he only heard the clicks and whistles of strix. "We are grateful you came."
"I had little choice in the matter," Isiem replied.
"Not true. You could have gone with the black riders when they first came to visit the ashes. Instead you chose to run, and so my daughter found you. That was a choice. That choice brought you here." The rokoa blinked sideways, nictating membranes sliding across her eyes, but only the movement told Isiem that she had blinked. The aged strix's eyes were so rheumy that they appeared perpetually lidded. "Always there is a choice."
Isiem shrugged. "Whether that is so or not, I am here now. Why did you summon me?"
"My daughter says you are a traitor to the kotarra. Is that true?"
"The Hellknights would tell you so."
"I did not ask that. I asked if it were true."
"I've learned to be cautious of absolutes," Isiem said. "What is ‘true' depends on perspective. Fly above Windspire, or walk on the ravine floors below, and it might be ‘true' that no nests exist—but from the perspective of your people, perched among its ledges, the city is easy to find. When it comes to questions of loyalty, truth is equally a matter of perspective."
"Cleverly said," the rokoa acknowledged, "but that is not an answer." She reached for a triangular clay pot and deftly poured two small cups of a steaming, musky-smelling brew. "Do you wish for tea?"
"Thank you." Isiem accepted a cup but did not drink. He cupped it in the palm of his good hand, letting its warmth spread across his skin. "I'm sorry if it seems that I'm evading your question. I have no better answer to give. I believe that I have become a traitor in the eyes of Cheliax and Nidal. In my own eyes ...I don't know that I was ever loyal. I've wanted to escape for as long as I can remember.
I just never believed I could."
"Have you escaped now?" She extended a wizened hand, indicating that he should give his own to her. Reluctantly he put his cup on the floor—the rokoa's nest had no tables—and complied. The rokoa wove another spell, tapping the jangling mass of necklaces knotted around her wrinkled neck, and a soothing coolness flowed from her hand into his. Bone scraped against bone as Isiem's broken arm knitted; the fever that had begun to take hold in his flesh vanished.
He bowed his head in gratitude. But he still answered bluntly, and truthfully. "I don't know. Maybe not. The Chelaxians seem determined to bring Devil's Perch under their control."
"But that would not be in your interest," the rokoa said softly. She picked up the cup she had set aside and drank her tea in a single long swallow.
"My interests are not yours. You want to drive the Chelaxians out of the west. I have no particular reason to care. I only need to avoid them. I don't need to hold land against them. Leaving would suit my ends just as well—and much more safely."
"Yet you stayed. You told my daughter what you could about their secrets. Why, if it is not in your interest to see them driven from our roosts?"
"Well, for one, I hear you help people get to Pezzack," Isiem replied with a wry smile. The rokoa's expression did not change, and after an awkward pause he abandoned his weak attempt at levity.
"I don't much like Nidal," he confessed. "Faced with death, my people chose to cling to their land at any price...and with Zon-Kuthon's blessing, they did. They kept their land, and they lost their souls. I feel they chose poorly.
"The Chelaxians made a similar bargain. The death of their god threatened their empire, and so their greatest house sold itself and all its kin to devils. They held their lands and their power at the expense of whoever they were before.
"To be sure, Cheliax has not fallen as far as Nidal, or as completely. It is an empire at war with itself, riven with rebellion and conflicted down to the last strands of its soul. But the greater part, the stronger part, made an infernal bargain just as my people did, and paid a similar price. Whether they wish to believe it or not, we Nidalese know better. It is no accident that the Umbral Court sends so many advisors to Cheliax."
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