III. The Things That Never Were
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“Come on, Mama, help me out here!” Rene yelled.
The great pallicorn thundered in annoyance. She drew in her long tentacles, several of them breaking from the weight they held, then opened her stomach at both ends so that Rene could draw the girl safely through.
She was unconscious, fortunately. A pallicorn’s venom wasn’t under its control; it usually wasn’t deadly to humans, but it could be brutally painful, and her skin was webbed with swollen red welts. He laid her on the floor of Mama’s shell and rifled through his supplies till he found the antidote ointment.
Once he’d waited to see that the welts were lessening, Rene checked under her shirt and rolled up her trouser legs, cursing at the gashes gouged right through the tough cloth. There were only light stings under her clothing, so he didn’t bother undressing her to check further. As he was checking under her shirt collar, though, he froze.
She shouldn’t even be alive.
He ran through the possibilities in his mind, discarding each one as either impossible or preposterous.
His own eklil stone swung on a sturdy leather strap around his neck. It had hung on the wall of his bedroom until he was five, attuning itself to him as his body absorbed low levels of its energy until he could safely wear the stone.
It would be generations before humans could survive without them. Everything responded to magick differently, but only creatures that could survive exposure to magick had ever been able to adapt to Inur.
Well. The old bird wasn’t wrong after all. There was something very special about this girl.
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“There is not a fucking thing special about me!” Zoe yelled. “I’m the opposite of special! And no, I shouldn’t be alive, and no, I do not want to fucking talk about it!”
The big man threw his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry I asked, okay? If you don’t want to talk about it, then—”
“Who the hell are you, anyway? I mean, I’m happy to be alive, but a name would maybe be nice. And why do I feel like I’ve met you before?”
Before he could answer, Mama’s thunder roared, her balloon-like bell flashing above them with crazed lightning patterns, and even the shell they were in began to reverberate.
As a sudden black cloud poured in around them, filling the large central room, the stranger pulled Zoe to the floor, throwing himself over her.
“Stay still!” he barked. “They know me, but they don’t know you!”
Something about him definitely nagged at Zoe’s mind. His dark skin, his bald scalp, the sheer size of him. He let her up just in time for her to watch the last of the buzzing cloud of insects dive out through the fleshy opening in the floor that served as the pallicorn’s stomach.
The hum of the angry bees traveled up, disappearing far above her, and she realized they were attacking something that had landed on the pallicorn’s huge bell.
There was a roar that cut off with a pained shriek, and a shadow passed the translucent shell in a barely controlled fall. Something jerked beneath them, and the pallicorn hissed like particularly satisfied rain. Its inner shell turned a happy pink. Zoe could see now that on one part of the floor’s circumference, part of it edged downward to disappear into hazy shadow.
The softly glowing nacreous walls, the comfortable grumble that sounded like a purring rain, the huge dark man with his warm baritone, all of it left her feeling a confusing familiarity.
Her shoulder gave the echo of a throb, and she rubbed it thoughtfully.
“Well,” the big man said, “let’s see if Mama’s willing to share her catch with us for dinner.”
It appeared she was, as the pink softness in the center of the floor eased open. The bees, mollified by a humming whisper from Mama, spiraled through to vanish above them into pores in her shell.
In their absence, Zoe saw a flash of white fur speckled with gray and a pair of limp wings, and yelled, “Help me get him out!”
With both of them pulling, the lysk was surprisingly light. The thick fur on his body had protected him from both Mama and her bees, but Zoe could see that his poor wings would need plenty of attention.
Again.
“Ow,” he grumbled, opening his eyes. A few stray bees clambered out of his fur and flew off after their sisters.
“You fucking idiot, Tavirr!” Zoe snapped. “What the hell are you doing here? You were supposed to go home!”
“You know this guy?” the dark-skinned man asked.
“Are you all right?” Tavirr groaned at the same time.
“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” replied the man.
Tavirr got to his feet, his rear talons clicking on the floor. The way his ankle came up off the ground had always reminded her disturbingly of a cat. “Zoe, who is this, and why are you inside a pallicorn?”
“Tavirr, this is the guy who saved and kidnapped me. Guy who saved and kidnapped me, this is Tavirr ayv Drusik.”
Tavirr twitched a whisker. “Very odd name for a human.”
“I’m Rene Carrier. The pallicorn,” the big man said, patting the inner shell, “is Mama. And I saved… Zoe, was it? I saved Zoe from the Cathedral of Trees. So what brings you here?”
Zoe crossed behind Tavirr, and took hold of his right wing, ignoring the lysk’s flinching complaints.
“I—ouch! Please do not bother with—ow!”
She had hold of his left wing now, combing through the smooth fur to gently remove a stray bee. Her sure fingers moved over each joint of his three wing fingers, then the wrist and elbow, and finally the wing shoulder just below the abbreviated upper scapula, noting how warm and swollen both were.
Finally, she slapped the back of his head. “What the hell were you thinking?” she bellowed over his grumbling complaint. “You were supposed to go home and rest your fucking wings, but instead, you’ve overflown so bad that every damn knuckle and joint is inflamed!”
Tavirr gave her a crestfallen look. “I, er, taked your journal,” he said in his broken version of Human.
“Took.”
“I took your journal.”
“Good. Rene, have you got liniment anywhere in your stores?”
Rene cocked an eyebrow at Tavirr, then looked to Zoe. “Hot stuff, cold stuff, or kill me now stuff?”
Zoe just smiled at him.
“Kill me now stuff it is.”
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“Listen to me. What did you do with the journal? Please tell me you didn’t try to give it back!”
“No, I…” Tavirr took a deep breath. “I took your journal to my h’adba.” At her look of confusion, he explained, “My burchar mate. I have—what? Why that look?”
“You took my journal, the book I gave you to keep it secret, to a burchar? Are you insane?”
“What is the meaning of—”
“It means thinking of the best thing you could do, and then doing the exact opposite!” Zoe realized that she was pointing and jabbing at him; he was watching her finger with a bemused expression. “Tavirr!”
He looked at her obediently.
“Why did you take it to the people most obsessed with spreading every bit of writing around every last corner of the world?”
“The world is a globe. No corners.”
Running her fingers through her hair, Zoe sighed. “Shit. I’m sorry for yelling at you. It’s not like I can ever go back home, anyway.”
Tavirr took her hand. Shocked, Zoe almost yanked away from him, but the lysk, pupils rounded, began to study her fingers.
“Five,” he mused. “How odd.”
Zoe chuckled. “Congratulations on your first pun,” she said.
He twitched an ear. “Why have you no claws?”
“I don’t know, why do you have them?”
“For the killing of prey.”
She shivered, thinking again of cats. “Cheerful thought.”
“Yes, I find it so as well.”
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“Augh! Mercy!”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Nope. You earned this.”
Tavirr lay on his stomach, trying not to flinch or writhe as Zoe applied the liniment to his wings. The ointment she had used before had created a warm, numbing feeling on the sensitive joints and muscles.
This?
This one sent shards of ice stabbing into his wing muscles, while the joints and skin burned with impossible heat. And yet, somehow, by the time her treatment was done, he felt like he was melting into a puddle on the floor of the pallicorn’s shell, and he couldn’t resist the contented purr that rumbled out of his chest.
Footsteps sounded down the sloping ramp from the level above, and Tavirr found himself idly wondering how many levels there were in this great beast’s shell.
“How’s he doing?” asked Rene.
“Mmrph,” Tavirr replied, which in his opinion contained all the important information.
“He’s not as bad off as I was afraid of. Most of the swelling is going down. Seems like it was primarily strain. If he controls himself,” Zoe pointedly added, “he might live to fly another day.”
“Huh. So how exactly does a girl from a vo’ai kriuulu forest wind up knowing how to treat a lysk wing injury?”
Zoe snapped her fingers. “That’s where I remember you from! You’re the carrier who visits New Providence! And you’re the one who got me home after I got shot!”
Rene nodded acknowledgment, and Zoe continued. “So—along with all the mail and merchant goods, how many books do you transport on your route?”
“Well, it depends on whether or not I’m carrying burchar texts, human texts, or a mix of the two. When I do carry burchar texts, though?” He let out a low whistle. “The entire lower half of Mama’s shell will be crammed with ‘em.”
“And me being a scrivener, you’ve probably carried some of the volumes I’ve copied. Including some important burchar ones translated into Common. You think I don’t read what I copy? One of them was a medical text by someone named h’Goshi Naman’h.”
“Winds save me,” groaned Tavirr in Common, “from such horrid pronunciation.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll bite,” said Rene. “How do you pronounce it?”
Tavirr said the name for them.
Zoe threw her hands up in frustrated despair. “So, what, the aitches are just silent?”
Groaning, Tavirr sat up. As he bent his wing knuckles to furl his wings behind him, he winced slightly, holding out hope that Zoe hadn’t caught that. Her sharp gaze, though, told him she knew how much pain he was still in.
“I know not how the multitudes of burchar tongues represent their subsonic undertones, but in Common—and now, I presume, in Human, those characters simply show that certain words or names are burchar in origin—and they remind ordinary burchars reading Common texts that other peoples are simply deaf to over half the sounds of burchar speech.”
Zoe frowned at him peevishly. “You could have just said, ‘Yes, Zoe, they’re silent’.”
He stood, his long tail twitching in irritation, and said, “Where does your route take us next, Rene? And more importantly, my friend, may we share your hearth, your prey, and the shelter of your home?”
“You have my hearth, my prey, and the shelter of my clan,” Rene responded in Common with a short bow—then, motioning around him, he added, “such as my home is. If you’re hungry now, I have plenty of preserved game, as well as dried fruits, bread, and cheese for those of us who aren’t obligate carnivores. And we’ve got several stops along the coast to visit, then we’ll head inland to Gebrim.”
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Tavirr’s hunting reflexes caught it, the way Zoe started—her skin breaking out in sudden little prickle-bumps, eyes staring into the shadows above—right before the pallicorn lit up the larder section of her spiraling inner shell.
“What is it?” he murmured, but Zoe waved him off as the light revealed stores upon stores of every sort of food. There were barrels of blue witfruits, still fuzzy with pollen. Mats of something dried dark and flat, with a rank odor that made Tavirr sneeze. Crates of tree-grains already hulled, some twitching with tasty grubs too late to hatch from the tough, dry kernels. Racks and racks of—Tavirr’s mouth watered—smoked fish and game, butchered and preserved. Over and around it all hung the smell of salt, and he realized the rough floor was coated with layers of the precious stuff.
“It’s on the ceiling,” Zoe said in a hushed, quavering whisper. A moment later, something rustled behind a group of boxes stacked on the floor. A tiny squeal ended in a shriek, and Tavirr caught a faint aroma of fresh blood.
“That’s just Simon,” Rene assured them. “His job is to catch the little stowaways that always come wi—are you okay, Zoe?”
Zoe was still looking upwards, though, her eyes fixed on a patch of empty shell above them.
“I see nothing up there,” Tavirr said, then looked at Rene.
He shrugged. “Me neither.”
“It’s on the ceiling,” she insisted.
Tavirr’s eyes hunted every curve and shadow above them, but there was still nothing. He was about to say so when he realized that whatever was not there, it was most insistent in its absence. It was his own hide’s turn to prickle.
His eyes slid away from where the nothing hid. “Look away from it.”
“Look away from what, exactly?” growled Rene.
Mama’s shell brightened around them, and they all heard the soothing purr of rain.
“Come, friends!” Tavirr exclaimed. “My belly aches, and soon I may decide to eat one of you.” A crack of thunder made him yowl like a cub. “It was a joke!”
“All right, let’s eat before we have to beat up the fuzzy guy.”
Tavirr laid a hand on Zoe’s shoulder. She jumped, giving him a wide-eyed stare, and nodded.
“Best not to dwell on it,” he murmured. “Such things are dangerous when seen, terrible when hunted.” She was pale, though, soaked in fear-sweat that made his whiskers twitch. “We will speak on it later, you and I—but only once, and then it will be put aside.”
They chose their dinner, the three of them, Tavirr putting on a forced cheer that Rene imitated as he hauled down a huge side of melk ribs for Tavirr to carry, handed a basket of redkern to Zoe, then shouldered two wineskins himself. Zoe headed towards the upward curve of the shell, but stopped suddenly.
Something hissed a warning from behind a nearby trio of untapped casks, and what Tavirr had thought was simply a wide base of one cask uncoiled into a long stretch of scales. An unfortunate rat struggled weakly from between its unhinged jaws.
“That’s Simon,” Rene said quietly. “Mama seems to like him, but don’t go thinking he’s friendly.”
The snake stared balefully at them. A patch of shell further back darkened, and the creature slithered into the shadows to finish its meal in privacy.
Zoe gave one last fearful glance behind her, but the presence from earlier had vanished.
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“Have you ever been outside during an equinox?”
Dinner sat heavily in Zoe’s stomach. Rene had disappeared into his own sleeping quarters after eating, sensing his passengers’ need for privacy, and suddenly the room that had seemed too open for dining seemed too close for speaking.
It had been an exercise in patience, listening to Tavirr and Rene’s easy, fluent chatter in Common. Listening to what she had eventually figured out was a ritual of hospitality. The weather, the hunt and harvest, trade and relations. An exchange of promised favors.
The intricate courtesy of it all had been mind-numbing.
All Zoe could think about was the thing she hadn’t seen, but had somehow known was there. Every time she took a bite that should have been delicious, she felt she was swallowing a scream.
Zoe looked at the lysk in confusion. The equinox? “No, of course not!”
“I have, every year since I was seven.”
“They let a seven-year-old kid—”
Tavirr held up a finger. “Use you the Earth calendar still?” he asked in his stilted Human.
“Oh. Yeah, everyone back home still adheres to the old calendar. They’ve been teaching the new calendar in school forever, but it never has caught on.”
“A thousand Earth years later? Ha.” He switched back to Common, making Zoe’s brain switch gears again.
How the hell can Rene keep up so easily?
“In your years—foolish tradition—I was twelve and some,” Tavirr said. “That is when children of clan Drusik begin their hunt training, and the first thing we do is sit, each alone, under the open sky at the equinox.”
“Holy crap,” she breathed. “What… what was it like?”
“Quite beautiful. The auroras robed the sky in wonder.”
“Then you didn’t see… them?”
“No.”
Beside Zoe, his tightly furled wings tucked against the wall, Tavirr stretched his odd legs out before him; his tail wound around to drape over his lap, the tip twitching against one long ankle. Zoe looked at the long, fine quills along the tail’s edges that stiffened into webbed spines at the end.
“Not that year,” Tavirr continued.
An uneasy shiver ran down her spine. “When?”
“Not that year, nor the next. Two years from my first equinox. My sister looked up to me, and though our women choose often to be crafters, most enjoy the occasional hunt. Not Vala, though. She wished the full initiation.” He chuckled. “I learned that year that initiates are not, in fact, each alone on the equinox, under the open sky. Watching over her some distance away were my father and I. She jumped at every nighttime noise—as, indeed, had I on my own first equinox.
“As with every equinox, auroras robed the sky in wonder. Then, halfway through the night, the curtained stars tore open. A creature came—immense, like a living barrel, many pairs of wings flapping about like clapping hands. Its flanks were scarred with eyes, staring in their thousands; gaping jaws of savage fangs it had before and behind, and auroras hovered within its empty hunger.”
What happened, Zoe wanted to ask, but her throat was suddenly too dry, and the rhythm of his voice wouldn’t let her interrupt.
“Vala and I saw it at the same time, saw the spindly arms snatching, and we screamed, the both of us. Our father saw nothing—or, perhaps, merely swore to himself there was nothing to be seen. He did not scream at all.”
He sat quietly for several moments. Then he said, “Vala and I were mostly alone after that. No one wanted to hear, to admit, that our father had been taken, consumed by some beast from behind the sky. But I had been blooded for a year by then, so I promised Vala I would do so for her when she was ready. First, I had to teach her how to soar and dive, to disguise her scent against the wind, to hide her shadow in the shadow of the clouds. Ha, I had little to teach her! Born to the hunt, my sister was. Once our clan became our friends again, they shouted that I should take up pottery.” He held up his heavy, sharp talons with a wry expression, and Zoe smiled at the absurdity.
“We never said as much, not even to each other, but we both were hunting the creature that had hunted our father.” He sighed. “The equinox, uneventful, came and went. A few days later, I flew to find prey for Vala’s blooding—nothing deadly or dangerous, a drake calf, perhaps. I wanted her to stay home and wait, but she loved flying so. She decided to pick the prey herself that I would take for her.”
As his story halted, Zoe watched Tavirr’s jaw muscles bunching, ears laid flat, blue eyes slitted in pain, and she put her hand over his.
“It came with the clouds, melting from the morning wind. Tu’yet, wind-beasts, we call them, and we tell ourselves they do not exist. And perhaps they do not—not as we do. But its claws, Zoe! Its claws were cruel enough. Vala was always a fast flier, and that saved her life, but nothing could have saved her wings.”
They sat, Tavirr simply breathing, Zoe squeezing his hand.
“To this day,” he finally said, “our clan—even her mate!—believes that I did it, that in the grip of wind madness, I was the monster I saw mauling her. To this day, she is my Vala, my beloved sister. To this day, she is the only one now who does not shun me. Because—her son—my nephew—has had his blooding, and now?” Tavirr’s voice broke. “Now, he also must shun me.”
A weeping lysk shed no tears, Zoe found, but his breath hitched and his chest shuddered all the same.
“And that is why, my Zoe,” he finally whispered, “that is why I know you speak the truth of what you see.”
Zoe fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, his taloned fingers interlaced with hers.
She did not see what hid in the shadows as they slept, but her dreams were haunted by a lonely, voiceless sorrow.