I. Scrivener
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The hastily tanned hide roof of the tent fluttered above them, and Tavirr ayv Drusik wished yet again that he hadn’t chased that tu’yet into the teeth of the storm. Vengeance, though attractive, wasn’t worth the injury—or being grounded so close to a kriuulu forest.
His wrenched wings still ached a bit, though he knew he would be flying again soon. The tiny watchers the human unknowingly brought were ensuring it.
Outside, birds sang. Tavirr loved to listen to them. They were descended from the survivors of Inur’s most recent cataclysm—native to what remained of Earth—and they had flourished, thanks to the magick of the world. Though they hadn’t yet moved into the peaks Tavirr and his clan called home, other lysks living on the lower slopes had been enjoying their musical antics. Their enchanting songs had been keeping him company during his convalescence.
The birds fell abruptly silent. A moment later, they all took flight as one. A pair of shaggy melk, antlers spread like a canopy, bugled as they lumbered toward the lake in the plateau’s shadow. Tavirr took a breath, scenting the information in the air. The white fur on his wings quivered.
A minor quake rumbled across the landscape, then settled.
The human woman sitting across from him never looked up, busily filling a blank page in her little book with tiny, careful words that were still a mystery to him. He could see that she was nearing the end of her available pages, but had no idea what they contained. Tavirr could read every burchar language and Common as well—though reading made his eyes ache—but human script was as difficult and as frustrating as humans themselves. Especially as, judging by what he had seen, the shape of Zoe’s writing seemed to have change over time
Since meeting the young woman, he had begun to wish his clan had a human enclave to care for. Fascinating beings, endlessly infuriating though they were. Tavirr had never truly learned to decipher the tiny scribble-scrawl that humans called writing, though Zoe had taught him the letters.
Letters, he thought. Sound-signs. But also, missives sent from afar. Why use the same word for both?
The scritch-scritch of writing stopped only long enough for Zoe to dip her quill tip in her inkwell, but it gave Tavirr an opportunity to indulge his curiosity.
“What write you, Zoe?” he asked.
She paused, sticking her quill between her teeth, and flipped all the way to the front of the thick book, frowning in what looked like unsettled contemplation.
Tavirr wondered what it might be like, flipping through memories as easily as Zoe flipped through pages.
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Hello, first page of my very own journal!
Grandma says I should introduce myself since someday, someone will probably make copies of this book the way I’m learning to copy our old books!
Mom’s gone to the Cathedral, so it’s just Grandma and me now. She says I don’t have to just copy that one boring old book over and over again anymore. She gave me this journal for my Cathedral Day present, for my very own. She also said the best way to polish my handwriting for good scribing work was to write my own words for a change!
It doesn’t make up for Mom being gone, but it’s awfully nice to think my words might last forever.
So just in case someday someone does make copies of this, I’m supposed to introduce myself.
Here goes.
My name is Zoe, I’m nine years old, and pretty soon I’ll be making such good copies of books that I’ll be able to trade them to the other plateaus! When I earn the right to be a professional scribe, I’ll get to take the name of Scrivener, which is the old-timey word for scribe.
I learned to read from some of the old stories that other scriveners have copied, but Mom wouldn’t let me read most of them (Grandma doesn’t, either). And she never let me use any for writing practice, in case I got ink on them. Most of them are too important, all about what human life and civilization used to be like, back when Earth was a whole world, not a few plateaus around Inur. There aren’t a lot of humans, but our little town sometimes feels crowded anyway.
Grandma says there used to be billions of humans!
But it’s a big world out there—way bigger than Earth used to be if the old stories are true! There’s plenty of room for us to grow and spread.
Grandma even owns three books from Before—not just keeping them for the town, either, they’re really hers! They’re not actually from Before, of course, they’re copies of copies of copies, but she traded for them herself.
I have to learn to copy books because the Cataclysm was so long ago, the original writings that survived it no longer exist. And because someday, a long time from now, another one will probably happen.
By the time everyone had been rescued and whatever things had been salvaged (like books and stuff), the stories say that no one knew how long it had been.
Earth years used to be really short—three hundred sixty-five days—but now they’re five hundred seventy-three days. Our days now are longer than old Earth’s, too, thirty hours.
I used to not believe all those stories. I’d say, well, you’re trapped wherever, so if you haven’t starved yet when they finally get to you, it can’t have been that long. But the more I thought about it, with the days suddenly being longer, and then the seasons getting messed up, too? Maybe time really did get away from them.
I still think about that a lot whenever I can’t sleep. If it happened tomorrow, I’d have to get used to how ordinary things would be so different. Maybe time would get away from me, too.
I mean, I can get lost for hours just reading some old story, how weird it all was. I’ll read about things like cars and elevators, and I have no idea what they were. I can tell that people traveled in them, but since there were no tseys or pallicorns on Earth, I don’t know if they were even real. Plus, there’s no pictures of them in our town’s books. I would know!
But all I have to do is write the words, I don’t have to know their meanings, or whether they were ever real. That’s what Mom used to say, before she was chosen last Cathedral Day.
Maybe the vo’ai will let me see her next Cathedral Day, but I don’t know anyone else who’s gotten to see relatives who got to go, not unless they go, too.
I just have to wait for my chance to be chosen. I really miss her.
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“Zoe? What write you?” Tavirr repeated.
She looked up at him, brushing a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “What are you writing?” she automatically corrected. Then she paused and closed the book with a sigh.
“I’m a scrivener. My whole job is to write letters that other people dictate to me, or to copy our books for trading with other human compounds who have other books. And since I can’t take anything archival out of our compound, I’m working on my journal.” She thumbed over the ragged first few pages, the ones Tavirr guessed she must have written years before.
“Hm,” he rumbled, musing.
Archival, he translated. Having to do with archives. His h’adba had told him about the many-tongued archives of the burchar, a different language for every occupation. He wondered why the humans were so reticent to freely share their writings with other peoples, the way burchars did.
“What meaning, ‘journal’?” he asked.
“What is the meaning of ‘journal’.” She waited.
Tavirr sighed. “What is the meaning of ‘journal’?” he obediently repeated. Deceptive, the human tongue. Every time he thought he had a phrasing down, Zoe corrected him again.
“It means a record of what I do every day. It’s important to be able to read over what others have done and experienced in the past so we can build on our knowledge.”
So, humans used writing for much the same purpose as the burchar.
“And do you write of nursing the wing aches of a poor fool lysk?” he asked with a chuckle.
Zoe’s face went blank, and Tavirr’s heart sank as he realized that he had gone somewhere forbidden.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I have to write my life, so my knowledge isn’t lost. But…”
She closed the journal and dropped it at his feet. “But no one knows you’re here, and no one’s ever going to know.”
“Zoe—”
“I have to go.” She pulled out several packages of cured meat for him. “That’s all I could take this time. Make it last. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out here again.”
She gathered her pencil, her rifle, and the liniment she kept insisting would help (it stank abominably, though it was pleasantly warm on the wing joints she had tended to), stuffed them in her pack, and ducked out of the tent.
Stolen novel; please report.
The soft sound of her footsteps receded.
Tavirr eyed the journal lying on the ground, uneasy.
The birds began to sing again.
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Journal, Tavirr thought. Journey, to travel. Sojourn, a stop along the way. Journal. Writing about a journey—or about the stops along the way?
Careful of his long talons, he rifled through the pages, imagining that he was looking at the lonely mountains beyond clan Drusik’s territory, the stark word-peaks above the blank cloud layer of the page speaking of things only the wind could hear. The ranges beyond Drusik pulled at his heart, and he wondered if words on a page did the same for Zoe, keeper of history.
Like Tavirr, Zoe never traveled far.
Very few humans did, as yet. The vo’ai, the local race of kriuulu, were the keepers of this human plateau, and they were zealous in herding their charges.
Did she not travel, though? She did—to visit a poor, wing-wounded lysk she had spotted falling from the sky. What a risk she had taken. Did she tell the kriuulu guarding her home of poor Tavirr ayv Drusik? He rather expected not.
Perhaps she traveled through the memories of Earth-before, the scraps of what was left of her ancestors’ writings. Better, he thought, to keep the stories in the heart and mind, to tell them and retell them so often that no one ever forgot. There were so many tales left over from Inur-before that were still sung at the fires of a cold night.
For the first time, he wondered how many more had been lost, and he wondered whether Zoe would ever like to write them in a little book.
Something buzzed by his ear, and Tavirr snatched it out of the air.
A tiny, feathered form no bigger than one of his fingers struggled in his hand, hissing in outrage. It could have been a small bird, except for the tiny hands, those sharp little hooked fingers jutting from the delicately feathered wing-arms.
So, he mused. Another one. They had their uses, these small spies. Zoe journeyed—not far from home, of course, but these journeyed with her, nearly unseen. Hidden from her, but not from him.
It hissed again, and Tavirr crushed it. No use letting it go back to its larger elders, but—much use for him.
He felt the tiny feathers dissolve on his tongue as he chewed, their potent, unspent magick entering his blood, finishing the repair of his wings.
Zoe must love the creatures, of course. Kriuulu were very good at that. The lysks had loved them too, once, until his ancestors had finally escaped. The tale was still told, how a caravan of h’adbani had insisted on renewing their ancient alliance. Even the kriuulu were helpless to deny a caravan of determined burchars immune to kriuulu charms.
Adba was rising, the largest of the moons, the one who often seemed to love spending more of the day with Inur than the night. It made him think of his own h’adba, h’Jasse. He missed speaking to her, though she wouldn’t be able to make the journey all the way to his clan again. Like Adba, she had grown too large to come so close. Well, that was why Inur had given lysks the wings burchars lacked. One or two of her many offspring gotten by her many, many burchar true-mates would begin their own Drusik orbits in time.
Peace wore the face of a burchar, it was said.
He would visit h’Jasse as soon as his wings could bear the long flight, Tavirr decided. She would read Zoe’s words to him, and then he would carry those words back to his clan.
As Tavirr fanned his newly healed wings, he packed away the food Zoe had brought him. Fastening his travel strap around his shoulders and across his jutting keel bone, he hooked the pack of food on one side and the bundle of papers with human writing on the other, checking the buckles.
If he saw Zoe again, he would return her journal.
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It was exciting, at first, to meet a lysk. Now it’s just confusing.
Way back, who knows how long ago, before the world of the lysks and burchars was mangled the same way Earth was, the most lethal creature wasn’t one of the enormous monsters roaming the deep plains the burchars call home. It was a tribe of pissed-off lysks.
The kriuulu keep telling us that lysks are dangerous predators, and they’re not wrong. But burchars trust lysks; they evolved on the same world. Their weird ceremonial intermarriage thing they’ve got going on with lysks, though? I just don’t get it, but it seems to work. Kriuulu and lysks will tangle sometimes, but burchars and lysks? Never.
There are a lot of human settlements on Inur, basically set up wherever parts of Earth’s mantle—and life—survived. On the New England continental plateau, our ancestors were saved by the vo’ai kriuulu. And, well, they’ve kept us safe. Kept us from dying out from a million alien diseases.
Kept us, for the past millennium, from moving on, rebuilding our civilization.
Tavirr ayv Drusik. Dangerous? With those saber teeth and three-inch talons, he’s every bit the predator, the “ice demon” people tell their kids cautionary tales about. But he’s also curious, smart, funny, and kind.
The vo’ai kriuulu? Not very kind. If there’s a kriuulu in the room, you’d better pay attention to it. And you’d damn well better do what it says.
Once upon a time, I believed in the kriuulu. I used to hope every Cathedral Day that I’d get to see Mom again.
I know better now.
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Zoe hiked back towards town with a brace of rabbits slung over one shoulder and a melk calf on the other, but without the journal she’d “misplaced.” Not that anyone would know it was gone—she’d been keeping it secure in her pack for years, waiting for a chance to smuggle it out to someone—anyone—from outside of New Providence.
Fucking parrots couldn’t read it, she thought gratefully. But there were enough humans who could read and who still ate egg-flesh…
She shuddered, remembering what it was like, the numb contentment, not caring what the basic rations the vo’ai distributed were made from. Where the wood of her own house had come from, or how those dead logs would still resonate with the strange music of the singing trees.
Build your own house, Zo, her mother’s memory whispered.
The ancient oak came into view, and Zoe dropped her burdens with a grateful sigh. She sat heavily on one of its huge roots and patted the trunk. This was what a tree was supposed to be. There was an illustration, drawn many times over by generations of scriveners, in the biology textbook Zoe had inherited. Acorn to seedling, earth and rain and sunlight and time. Oak to acorn again.
A new copy sat in her house, freshly bound and waiting to be delivered. Its pages had come from the pulp of wood cut from the limbs of other trees like this one.
It made sense. All the books she copied and traded made sense, a human kind of sense for a human kind of world.
She let out a long whistle, then leaned back against the huge trunk to wait.
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Zoe dreamed that she was the only one crying, even though none of the other kids wore gloves, either. They all had to sort the eklil stones barehanded, and it must have stung all the other kids’ hands, too, but she was the only one who cried.
There was a tall figure in the corner. She knew it was somehow the kriuulu who ran the schoolhouse. The real one had white-gold feathers, though, and this one looked like just… a boiling pillar of shadow.
Then she was in her crib, watching her mother loop a string with a shiny stone on it over a nail in the wall nearby.
Her mom hummed a lullaby, stopped to look at her in surprise, and told her she was far too young to remember this. But Zoe didn’t care. Her chubby little hands reached out clumsily, trying to catch the white stone dangling at the end of her mother’s necklace, the afternoon light shining through the thin curtains to spark delightfully off the little cracked spot on the bottom.
“You know perfectly well you didn’t get to wear yours till you were five, honey,” she said, taking Zoe’s tiny hands in hers. A sound like a snap made her turn her head to look, but there was nothing to be seen at all now hanging from the nail where the string with the little stone had hung.
Then she was a few years older, and crying helplessly as her mother put a pretty stone on its woven string around Zoe’s neck.
Another little snap, and this time the dream changed.
She heard her child’s voice screaming as the wall abruptly bent somehow, like it was being inhaled, and then the wall abruptly became a door. It opened with a click and a creak, and a long, impossibly thin leg began to climb out.
Then another.
And another.
Soon, the room seemed to be full of nothing but the scratching and scraping of spidery legs.
“It wasn’t your fault, Zo,” her mother said. “Dream something better, and build your own house.”
Then the door cracked, shattering.
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Zoe gasped and woke. She hadn’t had that dream in years.
Something snapped like the crack from her dream, and she looked around, realizing that the sun was already dipping towards evening.
A few yards away under the canopy of another oak stood a large chameleon wolf. A second one, a bit smaller, melted from the dappled shadows beside it, clapping its jaws playfully.
Zoe’s breath caught in delight, and tried to look like she wasn’t staring.
The pair sniffed the ground with an air of deliberate distraction, ears relaxed, tails easy. Their coats shifted from dappled gray to ochre, and Zoe relaxed. The smaller one curled her tail up, the black tip becoming white, and Zoe heard a small chorus of excited whimpers as three cubs tumbled clumsily into view.
The little ones weren’t yet old enough to have mastered the small muscle twitches that controlled which color layers their fur showed, but their patchy flashes of bright and dark seemed to blend into the random shadow motions of light and shade around them.
Like a lot of Earth life, they had been changed by the Cataclysm and the magick of the compound world of Inur.
Zoe fingered the necklace that had been around her neck since she’d turned five, just like everyone she knew wore one so they wouldn’t get sick. The edge of her nail caught against the chip on the bottom.
She thought about the book sitting on her writing desk, the only one of its kind in New Providence. Before that book’s arrival, the town had owned no biology texts at all. A book of history, several novels, a few newspaper pages copied and recopied over generations, and the single math book that Zoe had trained for writing on, since it included letters and numbers both.
That biology book was special, though.
Zoe remembered a chapter about inherited traits. There must have been a page or more missing, because it had started out talking about peas, ended abruptly mid-sentence, and then talked about eye color. What had caught her first was the illustration, painstakingly hand-copied by a scrivener on the other side of the world, of a wolf. The text had talked about coat color changing very little, other than seasonal variations—and that was when she’d run all the way to Henry Miner’s house to tell him and his wife, Mary Shepherd, what she’d found.
Change over time, but not the slow change the book had talked about, not change that took millions of years.
Mary had demanded that Zoe teach her to read and write on the spot so she could start putting down her ideas about how quickly sudden changes had begun to happen. Zoe had laughed and told her how many years it had taken before Zoe’s mother had let her copy her first real book (the one with all the magick stories, not the damn math book yet again), and Mary had hired Zoe to take dictation instead.
And then Mary had died of a sudden lung fever before Luna was visible again. Henry had gotten taken out by a cat along with half of his herd, and Rhonda Weaver had changed her surname to Hunter just in time for six lean months of winter.
Thank God for the wolves, Zoe thought. Cats feared very few things, but wolves were one of them. She’d been bringing them kills when she could to let them know she appreciated them, even if others didn’t.
Thank God for the wolves, she thought again, just in time to see the adults’ coats go solid black as the small pack retreated, low-slung, toward the woods.
A shot rang out, then another, and the cubs began whimpering in confusion as the big male stumbled and fell.
“No!” Zoe yelled, but then she was on the ground, too, pinned there by hot pain in her shoulder.
Thunder rumbled overhead and lightning flickered, but Zoe didn’t care. She just stared at the body of the wolf as his fur slowly turned white in death.