COO-EE! Pause. COO-EE! Pause. COO-EE!

Ugh.

COO-EE!

Kylara rolled over in her bed, fully awake. It was the dead of night and Kookaburra Creek’s most annoying bird had apparently decided it was time to mate.

Fucking koels.

She rolled over in annoyance and glanced outside. The Grandmother Moon was beginning to wane in the top right of her window, and the Grace Moon was not to be seen. Judging by their position, it would be another two hours before the sun rose. This was early even for a koel.

COO-EE!

Kylara glared daggers at the ceiling, then groaned, turned on her side, and pulled her blankets up to her ears as tightly as she could. She would not be able to go to sleep anytime soon. Not while the koel was croaking outside her window. When the birds got started, they kept at it for hours.

She glanced over at Yalmay, who had not moved. Probably still asleep then. It was too dark to properly tell.

COO-EE.

How Yalmay could sleep through that harsh shrieking was a mystery for the ages, but Kylara did not think she was waking up anytime soon. Her sister slept like the dead.

Kylara glanced out of the window again. Their house was one of the older ones in Kookaburra Creek, built before Warrung had discovered glass magic and made the stuff cheap to buy. When the glazier had set up shop in Saltsbury twenty years ago, many of the open air windows in Kookaburra Creek had been covered or replaced, but their size and location was still designed with the old way in mind. It was the reason there was such bad lighting in the room.

The entire house had been cleverly built with the the winds, weather, and shade in mind. In Kookaburra Creek, the path of the sun was to the north. That meant north-facing rooms received daylight for the longest. So the bedrooms of the house had been built to the south and the living areas built facing north. The window closest to Kylara was angled to face east and catch the prevailing breeze. It was a nice design, but it also meant she could not see the trees. The tree the koel was most likely residing in.

The sound of flapping wings came from the window, and Kylara sat up on an elbow to try to see the blasted bird. Judging from the sound, it was on the nearby ficus tree. Kylara was familiar with the spot. She had scared the blasted birds off of that particular tree before. Koels liked ficus.

She got a glance of it about half way up the tree. She glared at it.

It cocked its creepy little head sideways and stared at her, as if daring her to come outside and challenge it.

Then it screamed and flew out of her sight.

Bloody hell.

That was the final straw. Kylara pulled herself out of bed and hurriedly threw on some clothes, careful to avoid waking Yalmay.

Her sister would not approve of the planned bird murder. She had even once told Kylara that she even liked the sound of a male koel. Something about how romantic it was that it stayed up all night hoping to find a girlfriend. Kylara was fairly sure she had used the words “lonely plight” in describing it. Kylara disagreed. The bird was a harasser and did not deserve poetry.

Kylara slipped on a jacket. She didn't bother with shoes or even a proper shirt. This would be quick. She just needed to scare the thing off. Careful turning the squeaky doorknob, Kylara opened the door, stepping over the gwiyalas that usually slept on the porch. They had five of the creatures as pets, but only two were on the porch. Most of the time, gwiyalas were nocturnal. None of them woke up.

The air was cool and crisp as though it was about to rain again. She was glad she had had the chance to give Multhamurra the advice on the rain. This was more rain than they had had in months. It would be good for town. They had had a dry patch the last few weeks, and the grass was brown and parched.

Rainbirds, they sometimes called koels. They were always more annoying before a storm.

COO-EE. Pause. COO-EE.

Koel’s had a few different types of cries, and usually the two-toned piercing whistle that this one was screeching was only heard in the beginning of the summer. She wasn’t sure why this one was so behind the times. It was February. Usually by this time of year the males had found a female. Mated koels were annoying, but not nearly as bad. Those cries were a mix of wurroo-wurroo for the males and keek-keek-keek for the females.

That was bearable.

COO-EE. Pause. COO-EE.

This was not.

The pause was the worst bit. The timing between screams was just enough to not give your ear time to adjust. It tricked you into thinking you were safe–they cry was done–and then it betrayed you by repeating its next sequence of ear pain. And the pitch always seemed to increase. Even when it stopped, it tricked your ears into thinking you could still hear it.

Kylara muttered a curse under her breath as she walked around the house to find it. Why hadn’t the damned thing just stayed in her line of sight? If she could just see it from her bed, she won’t have needed to get up.

It did not take her long to spot it. Koels were all black, but this time of the annual cycle, both moons waxed and waned at approximately the same time. Both were nearly full now. It gave her a lot of light to see.

Kylara picked up a stick off the ground and threw it at the bird. Well, not directly at it. She didn’t want to hurt it, just scare it. The stick landed about a metre below where the koel was perched. The bird did not move. Instead, it cocked its head slightly, beady red eyes staring straight at her. She could almost her its thoughts–look, you missed. hehehe.

Kylara searched the ground for something else he could use as a projectile. The stick had been too small and light. A rock would be better, although it had to be light enough for her to throw far. The koel was perched at the very top of the tree.

It took her a second, but she found a rock in the garden. It was about the size of her palm and oval in shape. She tested it weight, tossing it between her hands, then threw it towards the bird, concentrating on a spot directly below it. The bird did not move, and the rock fell in the forest.

She groaned in frustration. Back when she had warding, she could have built sky wards to stand on and just walked up and scared it. But now she was stuck with just rocks.

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She shouted at the bird, then threw another rock at it. But the only thing that happened was the bird lifted off, flew around in a circle, then settled back on the branch, closer to the house than it had started but still too high for her to reach.

It opened his beak wide and screamed again, made even more annoying by the fact it was right above her head.

COO-EE.

It was louder than before.

Kylara felt like crying. She was tired. She usually awoke with the dawn, and trusted her body to stay fairly consistent with the same schedule, but she had not slept at all. That was two sleep deprived days in a row. And now this bird seemed to personally hate her.

“Shoo!” she shouted again. It flapped its wings at her, taunting her. It was insulting.

Kylara had always felt like birds acted awfully cocky for creatures with hallow bones.

She picked up another rock, and stared at it. Despite her fantasies, she would not be able to throw it up high enough to hit it. Neither could she materialise behind it and strangle the thing. It was time for a different approach.

Her Uncle Don had once made a mirror that reflected sunlight. Sometimes he used it to scare birds. It was a fun way to pass the time, and although it did not catch the birds on fire like Kylara sometimes fantasied about, it did scare them off. Unfortunately, the device was all the way across town at her grandad’s house. Not to mention the fact that it only worked in the daytime. So that wasn’t an option.

Wawiriya had an even odder way of keeping them away. She could imitate their cries in a way that no human could come close to. Koels were territorial and would fly off because it believed another koel had the spot already. Kylara had tried a few times, and she was not quite good enough to do it. So also not an option.

But perhaps she had an idea.

Kylara backed up slightly until she had a good eye of the thing. Then she switched to the Sight. The slightly cold feeling, which was always there but only something she noticed when she thought about it, washed over her. It was not like her vision got any sharper, but at the same time, somehow it did. It was impossible to describe. It was like two pictures, overlaid on top of each other, two completely seperate fields of vision, but still so completely intertwined you could not distinguish between them. One was colourful and bright–normal vision, and the other did not have any colour at all, just the feel of lines and shapes. But it was still vision. You could still see with it.

Kylara had tried to describe it once to Yalmay and been unsuccessful. Then Yalmay had made fun of her for a solid three days for trying. Personally, Kylara thought the concept was laughably simple, although perhaps that was because she had grown up with it.

All Sight did was give warders perfect spatial perception. That exactness was what warding equations were tied to. Everything had to be tied to exact coordinates–you could not simply will a ward to appear somewhere over ‘there’. You needed to manual calculate exactly what shape and how big you wanted it. It was what warding equations were for.

Kylara looked back at the bird and could tell exactly how far away it was–about 14.3 metres up and 8.1 metres in front of her.

Perfect spatial perception wasn’t good for much other than cheap tricks. Kylara once freaked out her sister by drawing perfect circles, which lasted all of ten minutes until people asked her how she was doing it. Not being able to lie was no fun sometimes.

But it was useful for one other thing–the summoning. You needed to have a good sense of space to summon something from the warren. A very good sense. Sight helped with that, and was one of the primary reasons people trained for it.

Apparently normal people did not have a good sense for distance or numbers. Oh, they could approximate how far something was, but it was a guess in the dark unless the object was very close or they had a reference in comparison. A hundred metres away for most people was the same as two hundred metres. It baffled her, but apparently that was how normal people saw the world. It was like distance meant nothing to them.

That meant that most people could usually only summon things close to their body–a few metres away at the most. Kylara, on the other hand, could discern exact measurements anywhere. She could easily get a sense of where something was, say, 14.3 metres up and 8.1 metres in front of her.

She focused.

Another benefit of the Sight–summoning many moths at once. Most people could only judge and visualise relatively small sets of numbers, about five or six unless it was in a pattern they recognised. The textbooks called it the subitising range. That meant they could only summon about five or six moths at once. Kylara had no such limitation.

She focused on the bird.

Its red eyes stared at her, evil incarnate in the night.

“Burrud-dyara,” she muttered. Ninety-nine moths appeared in the sky just above it and fell on the bird.

It startled and few to the nearest branch, looking confused. Then, noticing the fatty moths, it flew back decided to eat them.

COO-EE.

Seriously?

Kylara almost threw her hands into the air in frustration.

All she had accomplished was feeding it?

Usually the birds did not like the summoned moths, only the live ones. She wondered why this bird was different, then remembered that it was trying a mating call in the middle of the night, no female koels in sight, and that it was three months past when it should have found a mate.

There was not a single thought between that bird’s eyes.

“Please,” Kylara pleaded. “I just want to go back to bed. Just get the hint.”

Grabbing another rock, this time an odd looking one with black stripe, she threw it, aiming for the top of the thing’s head. It arced high through the air, directly at the bird.

The bird, startled, took off.

The rock hit it anyway. Both of them fell some distance from where she stood and vanished into the forest.

I actually hit it, Kylara thought, slightly stunned. She felt slightly bad about it now. There was a certain deniably she had in the violence before. That deniability had vanished the second she had actually hit it.

Well, just in case, she threw another rock in the direction it had landed.

“And stay gone,” she shouted.

Bastard bird.

She was about to walk back into the house when she saw Glob-glob, Jack’s gwiyala. It was unusual for it to be awake this early. Glob-glob usually woke with the sun, which was somewhat unusual for a gwiyala. She must have disturbed it.

“Hey boy,” she said. “Why you up this early?” Jack insisted it was a boy. You could never tell with gwiyalas, but she respected his choice.

Glob-glob was large for a gwiyala and, in Kylara’s opinion, especially ugly for one. Like all gwiyala’s, he existed because of the warren. You could see bits and pieces of various moths in the design of his body–vestiges of wings, the fine shiny scales that looked almost like dust. It looked like someone who had never seen a moth and only a vague idea of what they looked like had tried to create one.

Glob-glob in particular had eight eyes and a face that looked like someone stretched a face over another face. But Glob-glob had a good temperament and did not hurl itself into the nearest fire (like some gwiyalas did), so they had kept him. Most little kids had gwiyalas in Kookaburra Creek, because they were easier to care for than dogs.

Glob-glob made a weird coughing sound and jumped up in what Kylara always imaged was some memory of flight. It’s wings were too small and delicate and its body was far

too fat for actually flight, but it seemed to still have the instincts for it.

“What’s up?” she asked.

It hopped a few steps in the direction of the woods.

“You barking over nothing or is something over there?” It always amused her to refer to the gwiyalas as if they were dogs. Some of them acted like it, but they looked anything but. Kylara had never met a gwiyala whose yelp could be described as a ‘bark.’ Still, she thought the contrast funny.

Glob-glob kept coughing. She stood back up and walked down the steps. It was looking in the direction of the woods, where she had hit the bird.

“What’s over there?” Kylara asked.

Glob-glob jumped again and coughing at nothing. It was a strange sound. The way it came from him sounded almost like words. She knew that gwiyala couldn't talk, but sometimes they sounded like they could.

“Something wrong?” It started whimpering and shaking its head back-and-forth. Kylara followed its gaze to the forest. The wind whistled through the trees, sending leaves spiralling through the air, their papery voices whispering in the darkness.

A branch snapped in the distance, startling Kylara.

It was rare for animals to come this close to the village, but it was early enough in the morning that it was still possible. Still, she would’ve assumed they would be scared off by the commotion Kylara had made with the koel.

She walked towards the edge of the forest. Kangaroos were often active at night, perhaps it was one of them? They weren’t typically afraid of humans, but they usually weren’t aggressive either. Kookaburra Creek did not have any other big or dangerous animals. There was nothing that Kylara was afraid of, only things that would be afraid of her.

Something moved in the shadows of trees, just a glimpse in the corner of her eye. It did not look like a kangaroo.

“Hello?” she said, “is someone there?” Her voice echoed back at her, but this time distant and monotone.

The silence did not seem to like being interrupted.