Beasts of the Walking City (43 page)

I jerk as if I’ve been struck. My face hardens and my nostrils flare, and what fur I have that’s not burned off goes black. “
I had no such expectations
.”

“
So why are you here
?”

“I’ve come back to see my people, Clarinda.
My tribe
. I’ve come to help if I can, at least a little.”

“
Your tribe
?” My aunt huffs. “
Your tribe
!
You left us a long time ago, nephew. You’re off running around the world chasing stories. Your ‘tribe’ has worked the fields each and every day. They have gone into the woods to hunt, and up to the
Bakarh’s
house to grovel and beg for his charity. A ‘tribe’ stays together, nephew. It has no place for someone who turns his back and runs away. Where were you when the frosts came each year? Where were you when the plantings needed to be done, when the well went dry, when the treecats broke through the new fencing and slaughtered thirteen of our hens on one night? It’s not like those cities you like so much, nephew. We work for our livelihood out here. Don’t talk to me about ‘tribe’
.”

I sigh. I had been hoping for something, whether I had admitted it to myself or not. I realize I should have known better. “I have something to show you, Clarinda.”

I unwrap Te’loria from my arm and lay it on the floor of the kiva between us. The low sound of it seems to echo in the small room, a quiet hum that draws strength from the earthen walls and floor, from the rounded shape of the ceiling, the way a spark will catch strength from tinder and begin to burn warm and red.

“I have no interest in your toys,” my aunt says. But as the hum of the flower reverberates around her small room she turns her head, and then she slowly worked her way up out of her chair.

She is tiny, I realize, when she turns toward me at last. Small and ancient, gnarled with an arthritic stiffness that makes me wonder if she ever leaves her kiva now. How had she grown so old? Her fur is patchy and matted, and in places where her hide shows through it’s scabby and peeling. Her tunic is stained down the front with weeks-old food. Her teeth are yellow and black from the
khar
, and her wide eyes are bloodshot and red as they stare down at the flower.

She sets her pipe down and places one hand on her chair for balance, and she lowers herself to her knees next to Te’loria. She reaches out one hand tentatively toward the stem and pauses. She seems to be considering something. And then she grasps the flower in her arthritic claw and lifts it slowly in the air before her and watches it glitter and spark in the light from the hearth.

Her breathing is fast and shallow. She has eyes only for the flower, and she turns it first one way and then another, studying it from each angle, noting the intricate shimmers of the layers of the folded metal stem, the leaves, the living jewel of the blossom.

At last she puts it down and works her way back to standing. She turns away from me again to stare at the fire. “
You are deeply evil to bring this here, sister-son
,” she says at last. Her voice is low and fierce.

“
Evil, Auntie
?”

She spins on me, her bloodshot eyes on mine for the first time. Her face is twisted up with rage and she spits at me. “
You have no understanding, Blackwell. You have never known how much we ran, how much we hid, and how it felt when we were discovered again and again and hunted down by those world stealers. What’s left of our tribes now? My dear husbands, my sister, my own glorious son?
”

She spits again into the dirt. “With this flower, I could have stood between all of us and destruction! If I were younger, I could have raised such an army of our people that I would have torn their heads from their puny bodies, ripped down their towns, burned their very cities to the ground around them.

“
This was
our
world, Blackwell. Our world first, our world always. Every Human, every Stona, every dirty frog and Kruk have stolen this from us and with this one tool I could have taken it back.

“
And you stand there clueless and preening, and you lay this weapon at my feet. You want me to tell you how brilliant or insightful or mighty you must have been to find it?
” She makes a slashing gesture with her hand in my direction, claws extended, as if to slice off my head.
“You can think again. So what are your plans for this mighty weapon, then, Blackwell? What will you do with this great flower?”
Her voice is dripping with scorn.

Her words sting. I open my mouth to speak, and realize I don’t actually know what I’ll do with it.

She turns back to the fire. “
As I expected. If you were truly mighty, sister-son, you would stand up for your true heritage and you would drive all of these world-stealers back to where they came from. You would unite our people and make a war that the Hulgliev could be proud of.

“
But I know better what to expect from you, Blackwell. You’re a dreamer and a failure. Mark my words, you will squander this thing that has come to you. You will be hunted down and they will kill you, and there may be no one left to pick up after you, and this great tool will fall into someone else’s hands. And the Hulgliev will pass from this world through the wells and will never be seen again. So yes, Evil. You mock me to my face with my own people’s destruction. My brother named you well. Blackwell. Dark death. Little cunt.”

She turns on me again, her bloodshot eyes glittering malevolently.
“Shashoi died because of you, you know.”
She grins to herself, seeing my face react. Shashoi was my secondfather, the name I couldn’t pronounce as a kid. “
Yes, he went looking for you, down through the grasslands toward the city. He was sure he would find you, and yet the Hunters found him there. I expect they ran him down. How does that feel, nephew? Some son you were to him, eh?”

My mouth works, but I have no words that will come out of it. I’m sure all the color has drained out of me, though it’s the last thing I’m thinking about. My mind is spinning in on itself, and I’m thinking of that big red spear, sticking out of my secondfather’s chest. 

I might as well have put it there myself.

My aunt turns away, knowing she’s hit her mark, and huffs up into her chair again. She picks up her khar pipe. “
Now get out of this home, this little thing that I have left to me, and go back to your indulgences. You are no obligation of mine any longer, and I have much to do that is far more important.”

My face is burning, and I can feel my heart pounding.

I pick up Te’loria. I climb out of the kiva.

I walk straight out into the woods, then, and I keep walking until the pines rise up tall around me, hundreds of them reaching toward the sky and the air is thick with their sap. Deer scatter before me, and I flush a herd of wild boar, several of which turned to charge me with their thick tusks but then reconsider after taking a looking my face. Instead they turn tail and run.

I walk all night, all the next day and the one following, heading north into the great Akarii reserves. I walk high up onto the mountain peaks and across their summit, above the tree line, and then down into the trees again on the other side. The khytelwinds haven’t really begun yet, but frost cakes my fur anyway, and there is thick snow here on the other side of the peaks, thick and heavy and nearly to my waist. 

I push on relentlessly, unsure of any destination, only knowing that I will keep moving until something, anything is able to stop me.

I come at last to a clear mountain lake, set down into a bowl of a small valley rimmed with steep cliffs, where the waters shine a bright, unfrozen emerald blue. It’s familiar to me in a way I can’t place. 

And then, I get it. I lived here once with my tribe. 

There, on the far shore, I think, though there is no sign that he could see from here.

I make my way around the lake and stand on the beach at the water’s edge. It’s a beautiful place—the sun reflects clearly off the still waters here, and the trees are tall and majestic. The wind wends through their boughs with a clear voice, and somewhere in the distance a hawk calls. I turn back toward the trees, and there at the edge of the woods is a series of humps beneath the snow, old kivas now ruined and buried.

Which one of them had been ours? I can’t remember. My memories are nothing but fragments. My mother swimming. My firstfather carving me a small totem from a branch I’d brought out of the woods. Eating a grilled, rainbow-striped fish my secondfather had caught with his own hands.

This, too, was where it had all come to an end. 

The red-cloaked riders had come out of the woods on horseback—Human and Stona, some Talovian, carrying long and wicked knives and jagged spears. They had ridden down on us at dawn and had caught us utterly unprepared. He remembered his mother struggling to don her armor, his firstfather rushing from the family kiva naked, a drawn knife in his hand. His mother talking swiftly to my aunt, something about me, and my aunt bundlingme off into the woods, away from the noise and the shouting and the chaos, away from my mother and firstfather and the screaming until there is nothing but the sound of her panting as she runs through the woods, not letting me look back.

I pace restlessly from the kivas to the lake and back again, and then strike out along what might be a faint path through the trees beneath the blown snow. It winds back into the deeper woods again and slants slightly uphill until it emerges in a clearing tucked against a steep side of the surrounding ridge.

In the center of the clearing is a statue. Somehow, I’d known it would be here. It’s nearly as tall as I am, and after I clear off the snow from the head and the neck ridges and the shoulders, I know it’s a statue of my mother.

I dust off the rest of the blown snow. She’d been carved from a single tree by my firstfather—I can remember now when I would visit him here, at work. The carving has faded, but I can still see that she was fierce and beautiful and intelligent, and that when he’d carved this she was no older than I am now. 

She stands as if ready for battle, the thick armor around her shoulders and chest, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet, the two mage-knives held upright before her, one in either hand.

I want to remember what happened when my firstfather had shown the statue to us, but I can’t. 

It might have been painted out in full Hulgliev war paint. I imagine my mother would have been surprised and embarrassed, and that my firstfather would have been pleased and proud, but I really don’t know.

A small brown bird lands on one of the upright knives and studies me, then launches itself back into the air again. 

I unwind Te’loria and go down on me knees here. I study her face from below.

More snow begins to fall, thick white flakes of it.

I bow my head then, listening. As if the statue of my mother, like a Sister, will speak or maybe the spirits of all the dead that I’ve called friends and lovers will speak through it and tell me what they want me to know.

All I hear is the sound of the wind through the old pine trees. The snow covers my shoulders and neck ridges.

Soon they will speak. It might be any minute now.

46.

I
t’s like this that Ercan finds me days later—stiff and nearly frozen, but still kneeling at the statue’s feet with Te’loria before me. Ercan unstraps his backpack, unfastens his new snowshoes and approaches me slowly. He kneels by my side and places a hand on my frozen shoulder.

“You, um, pulling a Nadrune?” he says. “Staring at that thing, I mean.”

“Leave me the fuck alone.”

“Here,” he says. He hands me a flask. I sigh and take a drink, and it burns going down. A good kind of burn.

“Thanks.”

He waits. There’s more wind through the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a treecat howls.

I sit back in the snow. “Sorry I left you in the truck.”

“It’s ok. Your guy Sartosh makes some good grilled tofu.”

“You ate that stuff?”

“I was being polite.”

I take another drink from the flask. “Solingi?”

Ercan shakes his head. “American? Someplace called Khentuki.”

“It’s not bad.”

“That’s what I thought. Look, you should probably come back with me, Blackwell. Your guy Capone is getting a little out of control, and there are these Akarii people? In boats?”

I stand up and shake the snow off. I open my mouth, but Ercan cuts me off. “You don’t need to say it,” he says.

Blackwell shook his head. “Say what?”

“Whatever you’re about to say. Something about honor. Something about commitment.”

“But I
do
need to say it.”

“All right.” Ercan watches me. “Go ahead.”

I open my mouth and, after a minute, close it again. “Fucking 
skeck
. You spoiled my whole speech.” I sit down again.

Ercan grins. “Good. Look, I’m not Nadrune. You don’t need to sign over your soul. What do you
want
to do?”

“My aunt would have me unite the Hulgliev tribes and wage war on you.”

“I heard she was kind of tough.”

“Then I was thinking I’d bring all of the races, all the families together. I’d forge a new Winged Crown and find a head to wear it, and I’d seat the Lunar Council in Tamaranth again to govern over a glorious new age.”

“Ambitious.”

“I know it.”

“You might need a little help there. A couple of armies. Some really big knives and things.”

“Details,” I say. I hand him the flask, and he takes a drink. “And then I realized that all of those things are things that other people want. They might even be things that
you
want, Ercan. The crown, that is. Not the war thing.”

“It’s interesting to think about,” Ercan says, his eyes twinkling. “But I’ll ask you again. What do
you
want, Blackwell?”

“I want a small house by the Old City,” I say. “In a place where there aren’t any dogs.”