The Blackfeather Sea

  J Boothby

  Edge of the Knife: Episode 2

  The Blackfeather Sea

  A Note to Readers

  The Blackfeather Sea picks up immediately from Episode 1 in the series, The Blasted Wastes.

  If you haven’t read that yet, you may want to start there. On a budget? (Who isn’t?) The full series is also available for less as a boxed set, Edge of the Knife.

  Also, be sure to click to the end of the book for a deleted scene that’s exclusive to this Episode!

  -JB

  1

  Kjatyrhna

  It’s a memory. She knows it’s a memory, but then she forgets and she’s a girl again—living it in realtime, holding her mother’s sweaty hand tightly as the big door swings open before them.

  It’s in a back alley somewhere, who knows where, but she remembers that door because of the small red bird painted on it, low down, almost at her eye level.

  Inside, the hall is filled with fragrant smoke. A man dressed in red leads them into a courtyard where there are more people in red—red cloaks, red hoods.

  She sees the fire in the center of the courtyard that’s making all the strange blue smoke, and people in a loose circle around it, talking, but what she really notices is how nervous her mother is.

  She can feel her hand shaking, and that makes Kjat nervous too.

  Her mother is the one who comforts her after the dreams—what could she possibly be scared of?

  The man from the door has them wait. The people in the red circle are talking in a rhythmic way, one of them chanting and the rest repeating.

  It goes on for a while; Kjat is tired and she has to pee. The smoke is making her nose itch. It’s very late, past the time when she’d normally be in bed, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, not wanting to sleep.

  She starts to whine, but her mother jerks hard on her arm and hisses for her to be quiet; Kjat is so shocked at this—her mother is usually so indulgent—that she quiets down and tries to watch.

  The chanting goes on. They pass around glasses of wine and sip from them. Finally, the man from the door gestures them forward into the circle of people. (Twelve of them, she’ll learn later. Always twelve.)

  Her mother draws her forward. The circle opens, and they walk up to the man in the red hood who was chanting. Kjat thinks he looks weird with that red, pointed hood over his head. All she can see are his dark eyes.

  They don’t look like nice eyes.

  “The girl will show her gifts,” says the man loudly.

  He looks at her mother, who looks down at Kjat nervously. The man looks at her too, then. Kjat’s not sure what they want.

  “Show them the bubbles, Kjati,” her mother hisses.

  Kjat looks at the man, and then back at her mother. She shakes her head.

  The man sighs from underneath his hood, and motions to someone else in the circle.

  One of the red-robed figures comes over and takes off its hood, and there’s a woman inside, a pretty woman with long golden hair and violet eyes like Kjat’s.

  She kneels down next to her.

  “Hello, Kjatyrhna,” she says in that happy-happy voice some people without children use with them. “What a beautiful girl you are, just like your name. Did you know your name means Beauty? Clearly your name suits you!”

  The woman holds out her hand. “Kjatyrhna, I can do something special. Can I show it to you?”

  Kjat nods. The woman closes her eyes, lets out her breath, and in her hand appears a tiny bubble.

  It’s small, no more than an inch across, and it rests there on her hand. Inside of it is some black stuff that’s all swirly, like smoke.

  “I can make bubbles, Kjatyrhna. Your mohma says that you can make bubbles too. Can you?”

  Kjat nods nervously.

  “Can you show me?”

  Kjat nods, lets go of her mother, and holds both of her hands out, palms up.

  She closes her eyes and reaches.

  Suddenly there’s a bubble there, floating above her hands, but it’s a much larger one than the woman made, larger than Kjat’s head even.

  It floats there for a minute.

  It’s filled with black things, too.

  Kjat looks up at the woman’s face for approval, and the woman’s still smiling, but the smile looks kind of stretched, and her eyes have gone not-nice, like the man in the hood.

  There’s a gasp from somewhere in the circle behind her, and Kjat pulls her hands back, shy again. The bubble drops to the ground and bursts into a pile of sharp black feathers.

  There are gasps from the circle.

  “Blackfeathers!” someone exclaims. “They’re blackfeathers!” Someone else steps up and takes the feathers, passing them around the circle, one to a person.

  They’re sharp, Kjat wants to tell them. She cut herself on one once.

  But she keeps quiet, not sure if she should say anything.

  The woman looks at the hooded man, and then back to Kjat. “That is wonderful, beautiful Kjatyrhna!” says the woman after a minute, but Kjat can tell that she doesn’t mean it. She sounds like Marta saying she likes Kjat’s dress when Marta’s dress isn’t as pretty and her mohma doesn’t have the money to buy her a nicer one.

  But the woman leans closer to Kjat, and says more quietly, “I have dreams sometime, too, Kjatyrhna. Do you have dreams?”

  Kjat nods silently, and bites her lower lip.

  “I dream about swimming in the ocean, and playing in the sand. Is that what you dream about, Kjatyrhna?”

  Kjat shakes her head.

  “What are your dreams, sweetie?” asks the woman through clenched teeth.

  Kjat can tell the woman is getting angry, and she’s not sure what she said wrong.

  She looks up at her mother, who has tears on her face.

  Her mother gestures with her chin. “Tell them, Kjati.”

  “Birds,” Kjat whispers. “Birds at the door.”

  Another murmur runs through the mages. The woman jerks to her feet, spins, and looks at the man in the hood. “She’s been coached,” she hisses, looking accusingly at Kjat’s mother like she’d love to slap her.

  But her mother says nothing. More tears roll down her face.

  Her mother looks beautiful in the firelight, Kjat realizes.

  Beautiful and sad and immortal.

  “Not necessarily, Meghna.” The figure to the right of the man steps forward and takes off his hood. Underneath it he’s a Stona, a bird-man.

  He kneels next to Kjat. He has a brown beak and light-brown feathers speckled with white and gold.

  His eyes are big and soft. “Are they nice birds, Kjati? Nice birds like me?”

  A tear streaks Kjat’s face, too. She wants to hide herself in her mother’s sparkly skirts, but doesn’t want the man to think she’s a baby.

  She shakes her head. “Not nice,” she says.

  Her voice echoes a little in the courtyard, since all the people in the circle have gone quiet.

  “What are they like, Kjati?”

  She looks at all of the hooded figures around her. They’re all bent forward, waiting for her to answer.

  “Hungry,” she whispers. “Very, very hungry.”

  They’re always hungry.

  They’re hungry now, climbing up inside her with all of their blackfeathers and razor claws, ripping parts of her insides away to devour and digest in their efforts to get through.

  They want to take that memory from her, to make it their own, and if they get enough of her there will be no one standing in the way, but Kjat won’t let them.

  She fights for it—it’s the last time she ever saw her mother—and she buries it somewhere deep, where they can’t find it.

  Here’s another memory that is grasped, pulled to the surface. It’s many years later, after she was anointed. She’s been living with the Disciples for a long time now, and can’t really remember what it was like to be in her mother’s city house anymore.

  The Disciples in Tamaranth move around the city, from one abandoned building to another. Every one of them has a small red bird painted on the door, to let other believers come and worship with them.

  And then, once a year, they leave the city, travel off-lei to a place north of Tamaranth, north of all of the fords, into the vast stretches of grasslands, where they meet up with other groups.

  There are thousands of Red Robes here, from all parts of the known world. Some of them journey for weeks to arrive.

  Kjat loves and hates this time.

  She loves the smell of the wind and the open sky, all of it so different from the damp and stink of Tamaranth.

  She loves the feel of the horse underneath her, the sun on her face, the vast expanse of stars and moons spinning in the sky over their heads, and the fact that she gets her own tent to sleep in; she doesn’t have to lie next to everyone else on some dirt or stone floor, all of them grunting and farting in their sleep, with rats and worse creeping around the corners.

  And the dreams aren’t as bad out here.

  She can unzip the roof of her tent, lie awake, and watch the stars spinning late into the night, and when she does drift off the dreams will stay distant, off on the edge of her mind.

  She can actually get some rest.

  One night she even saw one of the wild walking cities off in the distance.

  It was backlit by setting moons, all of its lights bright and wrapped in steam, striding across the horizon in complete silence like a giant mechanical w

hale.

  What she hates is being the center of attention for so many people.

  The Disciples themselves know her and treat her as they would anyone else in their group when they’re alone.

  But once the other groups come together, she’s again the Doorway, the Anointed One, and a lot of other titles too, which turn her into a figure rather than an actual person.

  Many of the pilgrims stare at her in awe.

  Some of them fear her and back away, mumbling and stuttering, when she gets into the meal line. Some of them follow her around and want to ingratiate themselves with her for their own spiritual or financial gain—hoping maybe to become a Disciple themselves someday, as if she really had anything to do with that.

  (Gokl keeps all of the order’s money. Fyrtobl-byre plans all of the complex logistics needed for a group as large as they are. Bhupen-the-Baptist, still runs the ceremonies. He is the leader of the order and has been since she was a girl.)

  But it’s her they’ve really come to see.

  They’ve been waiting for her for three hundred years, Pokh says, and here she is, the foretold Doorway, so she has to expect the adoration, the fear.

  And yes, even the politics.

  But it makes her feel hollow, worthless.

  It’s the blackjackals and the featherwolves they really want. She’s just a way for them to get here.

  This night, Pokh shakes her awake.

  It’s very early, before dawn. The Lover’s Moon is just transiting the Assassin’s Moon, and the moonslight across the grasses is deep and blue.

  She’s been asleep no more than an hour, but then some nights she doesn’t even get that. She’d been dreaming of the ocean for once. The endless stretch of dark grey, ebbing and flowing with the pull of the moons.

  It was a wonderfully calm dream, almost erotic in the push and pull of the water without end—a calm eros with no man or woman—and definitely no feathers—to be seen anywhere.

  She blinks the damp from her eyes.

  Pokh, her tutor, the Stona with the brown beak, is excited. His soft eyes are watering the way they do when he speaks of the Great Burning and the Time to Come After.

  “Kjati,” he says. “Come quickly! Something wonderful!”

  She groans, slides out of the sleeping bag, and finds her heavy boots.

  She follows Pokh over to the cooking tents and the center of the clearing, where a number of riders have just returned from their patrols.

  Six or seven of them are dismounting horses; two of the three-wheeled jeeps still have their engines running.

  They’re all smiling and highclapping each other. Someone is passing around a flask. When they see her and Pokh approaching, they grow quiet, but she can still sense their excitement.

  Bjarkl, a Talovian and one of the patrol leads, steps forward eagerly and makes an ironic bow.

  “Teacher, Anointed,” he croaks. Strange, she thinks, to hear a Talovian with such a thick Kro accent. “I’m very glad you’re here to see this!”

  He motions them over to one of the jeeps. Each of the vehicles has a large cage in back, and this one is covered with a tarp.

  He pulls the tarp aside, and for a minute Kjat sees nothing—the plain grey of the back of a rusting jeep, nothing more.

  Then she sees the eyes.

  Bright-green eyes hovering in the middle of the cage, blinking at her.

  And then as she’s trying to figure out what’s going on, the full creature shimmers into view.

  Pokh has talked about them, but it’s the first time she’s actually seen one. The face is vaguely leopard-like, with a thick skull and wide ears that swivel in her direction. It has thick, wide shoulders and a large ribcage. Its fur is blushed white across the face and neck, down onto its chest and out onto the arms, which end in heavy claws.

  Elsewhere its coloring shifts between the exact color and patterns of the back of the jeep and a mottled brindle. It’s wearing a ragged, dirty wurf hide across its loins.

  It’s a Hulgliev.

  Though it’s a small and old one compared to the pictures Pokh has shown her, where they’re dressed in full armor, all fangs, claws, and heavy weaponry.

  It backs to the far end of the cage, bares its yellowing fangs at her, and growls deep in its throat.

  Kjat was always perceptive, though.

  Behind those fangs she sees an old man, frightened and starving.

  “An auspicious day,” Pokh says, clapping Bjarkl on the shoulder. “The first Beast in a decade! An auspicious day for us all.”

  She and the Hulgliev stare at each other between the bars.

  His eyes study her, evaluating. Passing judgment.

  She wonders if he can see the featherwolves in her, because they are certainly aware of him.

  Deep inside of her, she can sense something from them that she’s never felt in the eighteen years they’ve been with her.

  Fear.

  In all of their blackfeathered fury, they’re very afraid.

  It makes her think.

  She likes them afraid, she realizes. These monsters of her nights.

  More people come to look, with torches and lights, and the Hulgliev changes color again as the glow passes, flickering gold and red.

  “He’s beautiful,” she whispers.

  She’d reach out and touch him, if she didn’t think he’d take her arm off at the elbow.

  “Yes!” Pokh is clacking his beak in excitement and knocking his talons together. “The beautiful Beast of the earth! And tonight, Kjati, you will kill him!”

  The Hulgliev goes all black, snarls, and throws himself against the bars over and over again, rocking the jeep on its springs.

  Though she knew it was coming, there’s a feeling in the pit of her stomach like she’s swallowed one of her boots, and it doesn’t go away all that day.

  Killing this Hulgliev is the last thing she wants to do.

  It’s a long day of prayers and fasting that seems to flash before her eyes now in this memory. At high speed and in quick succession, elders of the different congregations come up to congratulate her, to wish her well. Others coach her on how to use the ancient ceremonial spear they call Longinus. It’s gigantic, carved with elaborate runes and painted a brilliant red.

  Overhand, they say. Underhand. In the side, in the chest, in the throat.

  Pokh drills her with the ceremony’s chants and responses over and over, until she can say them backwards.

  The red-robed Disciples themselves erect the stake on a low rise. They attach the crossbar, stopping to chant with every nail.

  Too soon, the sun sets.

  Darkness lowers like a hood across the grasslands and the moons bloom full to light them up again.

  Kjat is starving, and the smell of roasting wurf from the camps makes her mouth water, though you’d think she’d be used to fasting by now.

  Bhupen convenes the circle, and the twelve disciples array themselves around the rise. All of the congregations from all of the tent cities have donned their scarlet hoods and they gather in a great ocean before the mound.

  Pokh wraps her in the scarlet vestments and hands her the red spear. It’s surprisingly light. He leads her up the rise.

  The Hulgliev is there, tied naked to the stake with his arms spread out to either side. He stares at her and struggles against the bindings, but it’s no use. He’s tied too securely and he’s too weak—from the look of the bruises on his face and across his body, they haven’t treated him well.

  From the rise she can see out over the crowds. There are bonfires here and there, and many in the congregations hold up torches or knives, glowing with their own light.

  Over the Hulgliev’s shoulder, on the edge of the horizon, is another walking city, lumbering along under its own power, and she’s the only one who sees it. It sparks and crackles on the horizon.

  She hears herself start the chanting.

  She hears the crowd roar back its response.

  The blackjackals spin and churn within her at the sounds.

  She watches herself step closer to the crucified Hulgliev, dreading what will happen next, even though she knows exactly what will take place, and all the things that will come to pass afterward.

 

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