Date Point 10y8m2d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
All Vemik could taste was ash, and this close the wrongness of that ash was a physical, disgusting force that was giving him a crisis of confidence. There was a searing, caustic edge to the scent unlike anything he’d ever sampled before and it was turning his stomach and disturbing his thoughts.
The worse part of the scent, however, was cooked flesh. Not the healthy warm mealy smell of Werne, or the delicate perfume of roasted root-bird. This was person flesh, scorched black and ruined where the fat had melted and burned, cremating them even as they died.
He knew because he could see the bodies. Poor, twisted, desperate things that had stiffened from death and the heat into frantic clawing poses… all facing the same way. All fleeing something.
And worst of all… many of those bodies wore the blue beads of his tribe’s given-away daughters. He was ankle deep in the charred corpses of his sisters.
Tracking what had happened would have been easy even for a beginner boy. For a man of Vemik’s tribe the very landscape screamed of what had happened. Something huge, far bigger than even the most legendary Yshek, had clawed its way out of the deep forest coming from the south. It had sliced through trees—literally cut them with awful flat precision. There was no frayed and splintered wood, just clean flat surfaces where whatever-it-was had decided that a tree was in its way, and had calmly sliced it as cleanly through as a man with a good flint blade might butcher a steak.
It had been so heavy that its six round-footed legs had crushed and sunk into hard dry earth, and as it walked it had thrown fire ahead of it with enough force to blast huts apart and scatter their burning wreckage, and with enough heat to ignite people and pulverize their bones.
The survivors had scattered, fleeing into the forest. North, east, west, they had gone every which way like root-birds, which at least ensured that some of them must have survived.
The death demon had pursued the largest band northwards, uprooting and cutting trees as it went with terrifying force. In Vemik’s imagination it looked like a Skithral, a palm-sized stinging creature whose venom could kill a child and make a man gravely ill, and whose segmented body could cover the ground with shocking speed. He envisioned the destroyer writhing and twisting as it barged between the trees and shouldered huts out of the way.
Moving quickly and quietly he grabbed what evidence he could, and was fortunate. A set of blackened blue beads from one of the bodies (he tried not to wonder which of his cousins and sisters she had been), the village Singer’s scrying bowl, cracked and blackened by the fire that had ruined her hut. He found the other half of the peace totem he was carrying—the shaped ends fit together easily and without force.
He was scavenging for one last item to truly support his tale when a familiar thrumming made him flick an ear. He looked up, then darted for the cover of the treeline on the south of the village. It wasn’t the closest but Vemik was thinking like a Trung, which never ran toward their nest when threatened.
He made it into the bushes and up a tree as fast as he could go, clambering up it hands, feet and tail in an efficient instinctive scramble. A cleft where two sturdy lengths of trunk had grown together and merged offered him a place to hide and watch.
Two of the wingless birds swept into the ruins of the village. They fanned out and darted back and forth among the bodies and wreckage with rays of red light gleaming out of their eyes, probing and searching. Vemik, who had never even conceived of seeing such a thing, shrank into his hiding place and watched with wide eyes.
One of them paused over the body of the woman whose beads he’d taken. It scrutinized her twisted corpse from several angles, and then drifted across the ground, carefully studying the mud as it floated over to another body… the one he’d claimed the peace totem from.
Very, very carefully and slowly, Vemik slipped his bow off his back. His tail reached up and coiled around a branch, lifting him enough to he could use both his hands and his feet. He braced his feet against the trunk, giving him three points of stability and slipped a bird-spear from its sheath.
The wingless bird inspected the totem-bearer’s remains, then aimed its rays suspiciously in Vemik’s direction. Mapping the ground, it turned and drifted towards his hiding place.
Vemik notched his bird-spear and, scarcely daring to draw a breath, he drew. The eye. The eye was always a weak spot on everything, even Yshek.
He whistled loudly. The odd bird-thing and its companion both immediately turned their large black eyes toward him and he shot.
The bird-spear flew true and crashed into the thing’s eye with a noise—and an effect—not dissimilar to flint breaking. Sharp little bits of what must have been incredibly pure but thin quartz went everywhere and the oddbird reeled drunkenly in the air. Lightning of all things snapped inside it and it jerked, dropped, rolled and lay there smoking.
The other shot after him making an angry beeping sound and Vemik ran.
It was fast. Of course it was fast, it was a bird! A bird made of quartz and lightning somehow, but anything that flew was always going to be faster than anything that merely ran and brachiated.
He sprinted along a thick branch and launched himself off the end, using the wood’s natural flex and bend to give him a little extra spring. Desperation gave him the wings he needed to reach a branch he might have ordinarily missed and he swung on it. The young bough bent with his weight, and a bolt of brilliant, evil blue flame punched past him and singed the tuft of his tail as it smacked into a tree and left a scorched crater.
He yelped and let go of the branch. A second blast of fire would have incinerated him had he held on, and the death-bird’s speed carried it over his head. It banked and whined and twisted between trees and branches, howling for his blood as it looked for a clean run-up.
Vemik landed sure-footedly on a lower limb and sprang forward to briefly grip the side of one tree trunk before springing off at an angle, landing, leaping, landing again in a zig-zag that carried him from tree to tree and denied the death-bird a clear line of attack.
He prayed to every god, even the evil ones, and to Dancer’s magic that his memory of the forest was accurate….
He scuttled up a Bathrak tree’s smooth bole and flung himself into space just before the bird, which had somehow grown wide wings that glowed like fire at the edges, plunged towards him. It missed by a hand’s width or less and should have crashed into the tree, but instead those fire-blade wings sliced cleanly through the wood, sending a two-hundred-year-old forest monster crashing and groaning as it fell.
Vemik’s memory had been true. He snatched in mid air, caught one of the long beard-like vines of the Forestfather tree he’d been aiming for and swung in a long arc around its trunk.
The death-bird shot at him again, but Vemik had already let go, diving through the Forestfather’s outer curtain of vines.
It followed. Its wings clipped the ancient tree’s beard, sending dozens of vines coiling like ropes to the leaf litter below, but what Vemik knew, and what the death-bird apparently hadn’t, was that this particular Forestfather had grown at the base of a short cliff.
Those wing-blades did it no good at all when it charged blindly into solid rock.
It took Vemik several long minutes to get his frantic breathing under control, and to dare to descend the cliff to examine the wreckage. When he did, he found his fourth and final evidence of the attack among the debris in the form of one of the death-bird’s wing blades. Although the fire had died on the edge of those wings, when he picked one up and tested its edge it turned out to be sharper than even the best Werne-knife or sharp flint. He tapped it against a rock and cocked his head at the alien ’Tink!’. Whatever it was made from, it was light, strong, sharp and durable. Even ramming into a stone cliff much faster than a man could sprint hadn’t deformed or broken it. A fine trophy.
He also took the death-bird’s eye. Then, after dusting his hands he scaled the cliff and headed for home, making the best speed he could.
His people were going to have to run.
Date Point 10y8m2d AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space
Major Owen Powell
The SOR had set up in what had once been Mrwrki’s hydroponics laboratory. According to the station’s records, the lab’s glass dome and forcefields had originally worked to channel and filter the sunlight of whatever distant sun it was that Mrwrki had orbited, until unexpectedly leaping tens of thousands of lightyears across the galaxy and crashing into a moon had slightly disrupted their operational effectiveness.
The entire hydroponic crop had died starving for energy from the too-distant, too-dim red star that was still, as yet, unnamed. The Techs and the Lads seemed to have endless fun trying to out-geek each other to produce the nerdiest possible name for it. So far the frontrunner seemed to be ’Silmaril’, edging out such worthy contenders as ’Vulcan’ (too obvious), ’Jita’ (too copyrighted), ’Yavin’ (too famous) and ’Starry McStarFace’ (which had received the eloquent rejection ‘lol, no’).
Powell might have ventured ’Giordano’, but had decided to stay out of it. A little friendly competition between Techs and Operators was something to be nurtured, not disrupted by the CO blundering in with his unsolicited ha’penny-worth.
Instead he was catching up with Kirk over his carefully managed dinner. Fearsome as he tried to be, there was no way he was going to get back to Cimbrean and explain to Sergeant Arés that he’d screwed up his meal plan. The young man had proved disarmingly talented at giving his CO exactly as much of a telling-off as their respective ranks permitted. He could wield the word ’macronutrients’ like a claymore, and the words ’interval training’ were written above the gates to a special hell of his own devising.
“Nope,” he was saying. “Not a peep these seven years. Like they dropped right out of the fookin’ universe.”
“That is… a shame. Miss Delaney seemed exceptionally resourceful.”
“So did Saunders, for all the man’s nickname was well fookin’ deserved.” Powell shrugged. “Who knows, though? We’d just about written you off… They might pop up yet. I’d like to see her again at least.”
“Yes. She made quite the impression, as I recall.” Kirk snorted, an amused gesture that Powell knew his species and humans had in common.
Powell laughed. “Aye! Hah! ’Which one of you eejits wants to hand me a feckin’ towel?!’” he sipped his juice and laughed again. “Ah… What a woman. I’d have loved to be the one to tell her she managed to shit a whole planet to death. Can you imagine her face?”
Kirk snorted again as Powell finished his juice. “I imagine she would have been in two minds about it.”
“Aye… Heh. I should tell Rylee that story sometime. She’d bust a gut.”
“Rylee? Your FTL test pilot Rylee Jackson?”
“The very same. Don’t ask me what she sees in a bald bell-end like me, but we’re, mm… involved.”
“I believe the term is ’a bit of rough’.”
Powell laughed again. He’d forgotten how well he got along with Kirk—there weren’t many people of any species who could get him to genuinely laugh out loud, but alien body language had blessed Kirk with an absolutely flawless deadpan. “Aye, that’d be it,” he agreed.
“We missed so much…” Kirk mused. “I would like to see Cimbrean again. It sounds very different.”
Powell paused in tearing a meal pouch open with his teeth. “…I tell you what, mate. I’ve never loved a city more, an’ that’s the fookin’ truth,” he said. “It’s…It makes me wonder what’d happen if we just hit the reset button on all the governments on Earth, y’know? Told ‘em ’Right, piss off the lot of yer, we’re gonna write up a new constitution from scratch and start over.’ I wonder how much better the world would be if we did that?”
“Forgive me, are you not sworn to protect the constitution?” Kirk inquired.
Powell shook his head. “That’s the Americans.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s not realistic… but summat tells me that if this deathworld colonization moonshot of your mate Lewis’ works, a lot of those colonies’ll turn out to be much better places to live than Earth.”
“It sounds like you believe in the human frontier spirit.”
“Well isn’t that just beautifully Star Trek? ’Frontier spirit’?” Powell scoffed. “Sounds like a fookin’ car! Look, mate, do you know what building Folctha cost us? I’ve seen shit that still gives me the shakes years on. Do you know what a little girl sounds like when she dies?”
Kirk raised his head, shocked. “Powell-”
“I do.” his voice broke on the second word, and he cleared his throat. “That city has her blood in its mortar, and by God we’d better make summat that’s fookin’ worthy of her.”
Kirk, wisely, said nothing and instead gave him space and time to arrive at his point.
Powell backed down a bit. “…It’s not about frontier spirit, or adventure or any of that sappy ’what’s-over-the-next-horizon’ bollocks,” he declared. “It’s the simple fact of humans that we go stir-fookin’-crazy unless we’ve got summat important to do. Summat to fight for. And if we can’t find owt that’s important, we start fighting over unimportant shit instead.”
Kirk nodded slowly. “And Cimbrean is something important.”
“Fookin’ right it is! Because maybe, just fookin’ maybe, if we can claw out a future for ourselves, if we can give people an actual life’s work rather than leaving ‘em as meat in the grinder, the day may yet come where there’s no poor bastards left who think the only future they have is blowing themselves up for God, or whatever.”
He took a deep breath, ran a hand over his scalp and shook his head, snapping back into a more normal frame of mind. “Christ, that was heavy of me. Sorry.”
Kirk tapped his plastic fingers on the tabletop, thoughtfully. “It sounded,” he opined, “like something you have wanted to say for a while.”
“You’re a sympathetic ear, mate.”
“And a confidential one. You are not the first human to, ah, ’offload your baggage’ on me.”
“That wasn’t baggage, just… frustration. It’s been a pressure cooker on Earth for years, and we’ve maybe finally got the chance to let some of that pressure escape. Even for a stone-faced twat like me that’s exciting.”
Kirk nodded his understanding again. “So that is why you have been counselling Lieutenant-Colonel Nadeau to go ahead with the Coltainer project,” he surmised.
“Aye. Should buy us a few centuries at least.”
“And after those centuries are up?” Kirk asked.
Powell shrugged, and picked up his meal pouch again. “Let’s worry about this bridge for now, aye? We‘ll worry about the next one once we’re across.”
“You know, only humans think like that…” Kirk pointed out. Powell just shrugged.
“It’s worked for us so far,” he said.
Date Point 10y8m3d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Julian Etsicitty
Now that they were through selection, Kevin Jenkins had taken a personal interest in guiding the three Misfit crew through their last two months of training. It was a pretty basic change to their schedule—he met them first thing in the day to give them a potted summary of the day’s news and developments.
This time was different. All they’d found waiting for them was a note inviting them to join Kevin at the tactical obstacle course at the back of the facility, in a shallow natural valley that had been deepened and banked up to catch stray bullets. It was a maze of spraypainted MDF walls, oil drums, pallets and crates, tractor tyres and a couple of shot-up SUVs, overseen by a fleet of quadcopters with holographic emitters that could zip around above it generating targets.
The course was Allison’s turf, and she made use of it every day before coming home under the watchful eye of a retired SWAT officer called Jason Hammond. She called it “good relaxation”. Julian had watched her run it one time, in an efficient bustle of move, shoot, move, shoot, shoot, move, swap weapon, and had wondered what she could possibly find relaxing about it.
Kevin and Hammond were conversing in the course’s armory when they arrived, joking and getting on like old friends.
They chorused their variations on the theme of “hello”, and Julian asked the obvious question.
“So, what’s with the change of scenery?” he inquired.
“Got a new toy for y’all.” Kevin chuckled, “or rather for Allison.”
Allison stood up straighter. “For me?”
Kevin grinned fiercely—he was the only Abductee any of them knew who did so bare-teethed and openly—and indicated the black plastic case that Hammond had just heaved onto the table.
Allison lit up like three Christmases had come along at once. “Oooh! Guns!”
“Not just any guns.” Hammond popped the latches. “The SOR just put in an order for a couple dozen’a these. Take a look.”
Julian laughed quietly to himself and shared a knowing smile with Xiù as Allison dived in like an eager kid. She came up with a rifle that she turned this way and that with increasing bemusement.
“Sexy!” she enthused. “But…weird action. Where’s the brass come out?”
“It doesn’t. You’re holding a gauss rifle.”
Allison lowered it. “You’re shitting me! Somebody made a working gauss rifle?”
“Yyyup. It’s called the GR–1d, and pretty much every magazine, blog and YouTube channel’s billing it as the next SCAR. The SOR just ordered a bunch…What you’ve got there is the marksman variant.”
Allison put it down and produced the intro booklet which she dived into. It didn’t take long before she gave an impressed low whistle. “These are some big promises…”
“Mr. Williams checked them.” Kevin said.
“And?”
“Y’know, he may even have actually smiled…”
Julian snorted. They hadn’t met Byron Group’s security chief often, and the impression he’d given, while polite and professional, was that while he knew all about smiling he didn’t really see the appeal.
Allison turned and beamed at him, lifting the gun. “Whaddya think?”
“You’re never sexier than when you’re armed, Al,” he told her. Beside him, Xiù laughed and nodded.
“Hot,” she agreed, maybe a touch sarcastically.
“Glad you think so!”
Kevin grunted a small laugh. “Before your harem get too enthusiastic…”
“Hey!”
“…how about you actually shoot that thing?”
Allison looked to Hammond for his permission. At his nod she bounded toward the door with an expression of feral enthusiasm. Hammond followed with an air of avuncular amusement.
“We are not a harem!” Xiù complained as the door closed behind them.
“Ah, Hell,” Kevin turned back. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
Xiù stared at him for a second, then relaxed. “…Okay.”
Kevin gave her a strange look, then met Julian’s eye and wisely decided to just nod and drop it. He elected to join Allison and Hammond out on the course, and Julian watched the three of them put on hearing and eye protection before they lined up some static targets to start out.
Julian put his arm around Xiù’s waist and stood close to her. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah…” she sighed, “just another reminder that my brain doesn’t work properly any more…”
“It works fine!” Julian objected. She shook her head.
“A Gaoian would have had her claws out at that ’harem’ thing,” she explained. “And… the doctors said I’m probably never going to stop thinking a bit like they do.”
“You don’t mind when we tease you,” Julian pointed out. “And you tease back!”
“I trust you and I love you.” Xiù watched Allison fire off some practice shots at a holographic Hunter then smile broadly with an enthusiastic nod and an ’oh yeah!’ as they formed a surprisingly tight and neat grouping, and not far off center-mass either. “Both of you,” she added.
Julian put his arm round her waist and she rested her head on his shoulder. “Fuck Nervejam, huh?”
“Yeah. And then sometimes something like that happens and reminds me that I really can’t relate to anybody else but you nowadays.”
He kissed her on the cheek, then got a better kiss when she turned her head. “But you’re okay, right?” he asked.
She nodded and gave him a smile. “I’m great! I’ve never felt so positive in my life, I promise!” she turned toward him. “Are you?”
He smiled and nuzzled her neck. “I sometimes have bad days where I only feel like, oh, the second luckiest guy in the universe…”
She laughed musically. “So, pretty good, then.”
Julian nodded and kissed her again. “Pretty good,” he agreed.
He caught Allison watching them through the glass—she gave him a wink and a warm smile and returned to testing her new toy.
“It’s good to see her smiling again,” he said.
“Yeah. I didn’t like making her so stressed…”
“You didn’t.”
Xiù nodded. “Just…I mean, ever since I was little I dreamed of being a famous actress. This feels a lot like I’m making that dream happen, and she hates it.”
“Deep down, Al cares too much about what people think,” Julian suggested. They watched her enthuse over the rifle, then smile even broader as Hammond introduced her to a pistol that had the same sleek look. Presumably a gauss pistol? Whatever it was, Allison looked happier than she had in weeks as she looked it over, loaded it and swiss-cheesed a target with tight groupings to its emaciated chest and toothy face.
“Damn she’s a good shot!” Xiù said, admiringly.
“Way she tells it, she fired off a box of nine-mill every lunch break for four years,” Julian recalled. “And you should have seen her on…Izbrk? Think it was called Izbrk. Same place I lost my foot.”
“And Hammond’s been tutoring her for months…”
“Yyyup.”
Outside on the course, Allison nodded and Hammond loaded up a scenario of some kind. He placed the rifle inside a blue water drum halfway down the course then stood behind her and counted down with his hand on her back. Allison took some preparatory breaths and…
Julian and Xiù watched their girlfriend turn into a punchy package of mobile murder. There was nothing flashy about how she moved, just fast, sharp and intense. Weight forward, weapon snapping from angle to angle, servicing hostiles the very instant they appeared as she advanced toward the rifle, which she retrieved after holstering the pistol.
The rifle was a different business altogether. Once retrieved, she got low in cover and started tapping down her targets. Up, move, kill, move, cover the angles, kill, then put the rifle in another drum and finish the course with her pistol again.
The final step was to prove to Hammond that the weapon was empty and safe. He took it off her then gave her a huge congratulatory slap on the back, pointing at the clock at the end of the course, which was flashing a proud “1:18”.
Xiù spoke first. “…Wow.”
“Yyyup.”
“That’s actually scary.”
“Yyyup” Julian repeated. “Hot, ain’t it?”
“Yeah!” Xiù shook herself back to reality then blushed. “Um… yeah.”
Julian was still laughing when Allison bounded back into the armory with animated enthusiasm. “Oh my God did you see that?!”
“That was amazing!” Xiù told her.
“Uh-huh! I got within ten seconds of my best time!”
“With a completely unfamiliar weapon, too,” Hammond said, setting the weapon in question down on the table. “I actually managed less than a minute with this beauty.”
“It’s incredible!” Allison enthused. “You spend so much less time reloading!”
“Sold, then,” Kevin observed.
“Hell the fuck yes!”
“Right. We’ll order a couple with their role conversion kits for ya.” Hammond said, packing up.
“And you three’d better get to your sessions for the day,” Kevin added.
“Thanks Kevin. I take back every mean thing I said about you.” Allison joked.
“Well shucks, I better start making you say NEW mean things about me.”
Julian chuckled, and led the way out. Allison gave them both a kiss and bounced off in the direction of her engineering instruction, clearly enlivened.
“Hot, eh?” he asked, as soon as she was out of earshot. “Thought you’re ’basically straight’?”
“Aargh, don’t start,” Xiù warned him. “My head’s confused enough without questioning my sexuality as well.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
Fortunately, their morning sessions were in adjacent parts of the building, so they had a few minutes to talk as they walked.
She thought for a few steps. “It’s like… No, I think I’ve got it pretty much figured out. For a while I worried whether it was another symptom of the nervejam, and I worried about what might happen if I, uh, ’healed’…”
“But…?”
Xiù shrugged. “But… look, my brain likes to worry about stuff.” They reached the elevator and she pressed the call button. “I’ve always had this jabbering monkey on my shoulder constantly freaking out about everything. That’s why I meditate, it helps me love the moment and tell the monkey to go focus on the important stuff.”
“And worrying about what the nervejam did to you isn’t important stuff?”
She giggled as the elevator arrived. “I mean… yes, okay, permanent brain damage, yaaay! That’s kind of a big deal, sure. But can I do anything about it?” she asked, pressing the button for the top floor. “No, I can’t. And it’s not stopped me from learning how to fly a ship, brushing up on my language studies, and having a pretty good love life. It got in the way of my sex life a bit, but I’m working on that…”
She turned a bit pink, then rallied. “So…yeah! I’m always going to worry about stuff but if an alien brain grenade didn’t stop me then an invisible monkey on my shoulder doesn’t stand a chance.”
Julian laughed, reflecting admiringly that Xiù had an absolutely rock-solid core behind her quiet facade. But of course, that’s what had attracted both him and Allison in the first place. “Attagirl.”
She laughed with him. “When you think about it? Straight, gay, bisexual, Allison-sexual, us-sexual… or whatever? They’re just labels. They don’t matter, not really.”
“I guess if you’ve spent your whole life practicing to know what matters and what doesn’t…” Julian nodded.
“Right! And… God, there was one boy at school who was just… he came out and overnight he was suddenly the gayest, you know? Fuh-lay-ming!” she flipped her hands extravagantly to sell the point. “…And most of us were just like, ’Okay, we get it, you like guys! Cool! Whatever! You’re making a bigger deal of it than literally everyone else!’. You know? Does there have to be this whole culture attached to it, or can you just carry on as if it’s not a big deal? Because it’s not!”
“Wow,” Julian commented, as the door opened. “I’ve never heard you go on a rant like that before.”
“…Sorry.”
“Guess it’s a subject that cuts close to the bone, huh?”
“…Maybe a little. The monkey keeps bugging me to pick the right label, and I want to focus on improving other things.”
“Like what?”
She went bright red, which he suspected answered his question, but that iron core showed itself again when she glanced up and down the hall to make sure they were alone and unobserved. “Like… well, like having a proper sex life. That’d be nice.”
“Hmm. You know, I think I might know somebody who can help there…”
She licked her lips and smiled nervously, clearing her throat. “You do, huh?”
Julian gave a deep chuckle low in the back of his throat. “I can think of one or two…”
She shut her eyes and shivered. “Um. I’d, um, better get to class.”
“Okay…” he slipped his hand round her waist and kissed her. “We’ll talk about your sex life later.”
“Ssssure. Okay. Later.”
He kissed her again, and deployed one of the Chinese words he’d secretly rehearsed with Allison recently. “Love you, bǎobèi.”
“Mm… Wǒ yě ài nǐ…Um, I mean-”
“I know what it means, shǎguā. ”
She licked her lips again, nodded and slipped away.
Julian watched her go, then turned towards his own lessons. A plan was forming in his mind. All he needed was to recruit Allison, and he suspected he knew just the thing…
Date Point 10y8m3d AV
Uncharted Class 12 planet, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-thinker
No more death-birds had followed him at least, but Vemik was under no illusions whatever force controlled them was aware of him and must have at least a vague sense of the direction of his village, which was why it came as a profound relief when he finally laid eyes on the thatched huts of home.
There was the thrum of a shouting-stone in a nearby tree. Two beats, welcoming a returning member of the tribe. He raised a hand toward the sentry and dropped to ground level to cross the open ground around the village.
His father came running out of his hut and looked at the sun for a moment, thanking the gods. The old man must have been worried.
Vemik didn’t let him ask stupid questions. “Dead!” he shouted, breaking into a run. “They’re all dead!”
“…What?”
Such an extraordinary shout had the tribe coming out to see what was going on, and Vemik soon found himself surrounded.
He didn’t bother repeating himself. He just produced the set of glazed and blackened giving-away beads he’d taken from the unidentifiable corpse of one of his sisters. Vemet stared at it, then took it with shaking hands, and began to make a soft mourning sound in the back of his throat. “…I made these for Yetta.”
Vemik nodded and put his arms round the old man for comfort. Yetta had been his favorite daughter and while it was every father’s burden to eventually say goodbye to his daughters and send them to another tribe, the beads were an important blessing of safety and long life, the fond hope of a parent wishing his child the very best.
Vemik could not have found a worse thing to hand him.
Vemet just kept staring at them as he sat slowly down on his backside in the dirt. His brother, Vemik’s uncle Jaran, put a hand on his shoulder and began to sing softly, the old words of the funeral song. The whole tribe took it up, even Yan and his sisters, who went grim-faced as Vemik handed over the two halves of the peace totem.
The Singer took her eastern counterpart’s ritual bowl with shaking hands. “Not even their strongest magic protected them…” she mused.
“Whoever did this can make birds out of stone and lightning,” Vemik told her, producing the eye and blade he’d taken as trophies. She shook her head uncomprehendingly as she studied them. “The enemy’s magic is more powerful,” he concluded.
She shook her head. “Magic can’t make rock fly,” she declared. “It can bring good fortune, strong babies, cure sickness, but… making a bird out of lightning? That’s impossible.”
“I know what hunted me, grandmother.”
“…Whatever power can make a bird out of stone, what can we do?”
“It can make far worse than just a bird. I only saw its tracks but there’s something else out there, a skithral as big as a hut or bigger and I would bet my knives of manhood that it can spit blue fire, just like the birds.” Vemik became aware that the tribe was staring at him. “It hunted them down,” he added. “They scattered like root-birds, but I saw its tracks and the trees it smashed as it hunted them.”
“But you killed them,” Yerak pointed out. “Didn’t you?”
“Two of the birds, but…” Vemik presented his tail-tip for inspection. The burn from where blue flame had barely missed him throbbed and he had doubts that his fur would grow back. He looked to the Dancer. “You cast a spell for me?”
She nodded. “…I danced until I fell down.”
“Then you saved my life.”
Vemet stood, shakily. “So. We have to run.”
“The Dancer’s strongest magic barely saved me from just one of those birds. If the other thing finds us… Only the gods could help us, and they didn’t help my sisters.”
Several members of the tribe squinted at the sun. The home of the gods was suddenly a much less comforting thing.
“When?” Somebody asked. Yan’s oldest sister, Hetro.
“Their village is only a day’s walk from here,” Vemik pointed out. “We should really go right now…”
“We don’t have the supplies prepared,” Yan pointed out. “And the sun is already past peak.”
“…Then we go at dawn.” Vemet decided. “Everybody. Get ready. Prepare food, water and whatever you can’t bear to leave. Be sensible about it.”
He turned to the Singer. “Where should we go?”
She harrumphed. “Don’t you remember your own words of manhood, Stone-tapper?”
Vemet tasted the air as he remembered. “…’The song of the setting sun’,” he recalled. “West, then?”
“Trust the magic, Stone-tapper. It can’t make birds of stone and lightning or skithrals that spit blue fire, but it will do what it can.”
Vemet looked at the beads in his hand, looking like a man having a crisis of faith, then slipped them onto his wrist and headed for his hut.
“Sky-thinker,” the Dancer said, touching his arm.
“Hmm?”
“You’re covered in death. Let me wash you, and put something on that burn.”
Vemik looked down at himself. He was absolutely foul with mud and ashes, he realized, and now that he came to notice it he itched all over.
“That sounds good,” he admitted, “but… do we have time?”
The Singer trilled the filthy laugh universal to all grandmothers. “Sky-thinker, if you can’t make time for being washed by a pretty girl then there is hardly any point in running away because you’re already dead,” she told him mock-sternly.
Both Vemik and the Dancer laughed, and the Dancer took his hand. “Come on,” she said.
“You two will have many strong babies,” the Singer predicted.
“Grandmother! Is now really the time?”
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” the Dancer said as she pulled him away. The Singer was still cackling to herself as she bustled off to gather her things. “Let’s just get you cleaned up.”
Vemik nodded and allowed himself to be led. “…You’re right.”
She trilled her musical laugh. “The babies can come later, when you’re in the mood for it…”
She always knew how to make him feel better.