Today I’m posting a work-in-progress. Not because I’m lazy and it’s not done (or at least not only), but to show a bit of progress when it’s eventually updated. Hopefully I’ll remember to link back to this when that happens.
The point is, I already have notes on some changes I want to make to this story. It was drafted out as more of a worldbuilding exercise/excuse before I had any actual plans for the characters, either in this story or beyond it. So I’m curious to see if you notice the same issues I did.
Orrum is a nation spread across an enormous plain occupying much of the center and east of Syfandr. Its people are semi-nomadic, aided by some of the most incredible domesticated beasts: lizard-like creatures long extinct on my side of the world. Even more incredible: Orrians bond ritualistically with their mount companions to share their life span. Thus, Orrian life and culture are centered around riding and close, family-like relationships with their companions.
Excerpt from the Traveler’s journal
The captain seemed surprised that Khulan took to the water so easily, but Khulan took no pleasure in it. He took pleasure in very little, these days, since Altan’s passing. Vacation was more bitter than sweet when it came at the cost of Khulan’s bonded companion, and even more so when the only place he could think to vacation was a place his grandfather never found the time to visit before he died.
Altan was the reason Khulan had no trouble balancing on the riverboat, but Khulan felt no particular desire to tell the captain about his years growing up with the allosaur and learning to ride together, their time as scouts in the Orrian horde, and the reason Khulan now traveled alone.
The captain – she called herself the captain, though she was the only crew aboard – pushed off the dock, and the long narrow barge caught the current and began to drift downstream. A human captain. Khulan chose her over the many crews of black-scaled dragonborn, their saurian heads and tails reminding him too much of Altan.
He watched the strange moss-people working the docks. They gave him the creeps, and he’d chosen a small barge so he wouldn’t have to be near any of them. With a shake of his head and one last suspicious glance at the people-shaped mosses, Khulan took a step up on the edge of the boat, did half his habitual motion for Altan to follow, and watched the warm golden plains of Orrum recede through the tunnel formed by the thick, spidery trees of the swamp-forest.
“What brings you to Nyja?” asked the captain as she poled the barge to the center of the river. Her tone was friendly and light. Falsely, Khulan suspected.
“I’m on leave. I lost my…” He paused, unsure the Nyjan would understand. “Someone very important to me died recently, and I…” How to explain… “I haven’t been able to work.”
The captain squinted and sniffed. “No need to be vague, Orrian. I know your type.” She leaned on the pole again, and her pale bare arms grew hard with tensed muscle.
“My type?” Khulan asked, innocent as he could manage.
“Outrider,” the captain replied. “Like the ones who’ve been burning the forest to expand your precious grassland.”
“That wasn’t my job,” Khulan said. Was he in danger? He wasn’t sure, but he also wasn’t sure he cared. He sat on the edge of the barge and took off his boots.
The captain rested her pole on twin hooks and leaned against the railing, powerful arms crossed. She watched Khulan remove his boots, then his socks, and slide closer to the edge. “I wouldn’t recommend that,” she said.
Khulan paused. “Why not?”
“We’re probably too far north, but there’s a reason we call our part of the river the Crocodile.”
Khulan leaned forward, looked down at water murky with dust from the plains, dirt and mud stirred up at the North Treaty Port, and silt disturbed by the captain’s pole and others. Carefully, he withdrew and donned his socks and boots.
Well, if the captain was warning him to keep safe, she either wasn’t out to get him, or was out to get his whole purse. Either way, he’d be all right until he went to sleep at least.
Khulan leaned against a crate and watched the forest go by. Trees weren’t foreign to him, but even at this northernmost edge of Nyja, the woods were thicker, wilder, and darker than the more managed forests where his people farmed wood. Khulan could already imagine all kinds of wildlife lurking in the brush. He was used to the colossal beasts that the horde raised for war. You could see those coming. Smaller predators and venomous critters were the scary ones.
“So, outrider. Why’d you choose the Crocodile River cruise for your vacation?”
That light, breezy tone again. Khulan turned to focus on the captain. Now that he was paying attention, he realized she wasn’t wearing an apron – it was a blue dress. How could he have missed that? She’d let her dark hair down, and it cascaded over one shoulder. He tilted his head, reevaluating her.
“Well?”
“Oh,” he said, and straightened. “Well, my grandfather used to like watching birds.”
“Birds,” she repeated, voice flat but eyebrow raised.
Khulan nodded. “I mean, not seriously. He didn’t go out looking for them like a, a, some kind of… you know, someone who studies birds.”
She nodded, clearly amused.
“Do you know the indigo swamp finch?”
“Not by that name. What’s it look like?”
He cupped his hands. “It’s a small bird, about this big. Shiny purple-blue feathers, but only in mating season, here on the river. Thick pale beak. I’m told it cracks open nuts on a certain tree after it’s been struck by lightning.”
“Oh! You mean the purple toast-eater.”
Khulan blinked. “Toast?”
“Well, not bread,” clarified the captain. “What do you call it when you brown a food by heating it?”
Khulan smiled. “I see. Toasted nuts.”
He watched the river and the woods whisk by as the current carried the barge south-ish. Here the river wasn’t as wide as it would be later – the canopy closed overhead, and sunlight was visible only as rays penetrating through layers of clumpy, hanging, vine-like leaves. Despite the occasional clunk of the barge and the murmur of the river, Khulan felt like he was in his childhood crawling through a tunnel of wild grape vines at sunset with little Altan.
His smile faded as he felt the emptiness beside him again. Altan was the fiestiest little runt allosaur his community had ever known, and also the most loyal and protective. Altan would have picked right up on the captain’s little verbal probes and jabs, would’ve shut them down with a growl and the slightest hint of bared teeth, looking over Khulan’s shoulder.
He sighed and slid to the deck, hugged his knees to his chest.
The journey down the Crocodile River to the coast could take several weeks, depending on the rains to the north and the mood of the current. Khulan booked passage on a single-crew barge because he’d meant to be alone with his thoughts to mourn Altan. The captain allowed Khulan to pitch his small rain-cover near the bow, behind a crate, where she wouldn’t see it from her pole position at the stern. He’d promised he would keep to himself, feed himself, never get in the captain’s way. In turn, the captain said she’d leave him alone unless he needed warning about anything.
It took only a couple of days for Khulan to regret isolating himself. He’d never had much interest in other people and was perfectly content to be on his own with Altan. She’d been the only company he needed, and his freedom: of a line bred for endurance, she would carry him steady for days without rest or complaint.
By comparison, riding the barge wasn’t enough. The rocking of the barge was gentle, requiring no active balance or weight-shifting, no leaning into turns, no gentle course corrections, none of the rhythm of Altan’s feet and breath and heart. Khulan tried to stay alert for the indigo swamp finch, scanning the banks and branches with his ranging scope, but it was difficult when one section of the river looked like any other.
He perked up whenever he spotted a lookout tree: tall, straight, light-barked trunks with patterns that looked vaguely like ears. They tended to be the tallest trees in most regions, or in other words, good places to look out over the landscape. They also tended to be struck by lightning more often than any other, which would weaken and, yes, toast the nuts, to be cracked open by the strong-beaked indigo swamp finch.
He’d seen some of the trees, but none of the finches.
As Nyja’s northern forest transitioned to low, wet, reedy, buggy swamp land, Khulan began to find that without Altan, he did crave human company. He wanted to talk – not about Altan, but almost anything else. In fact, he began searching for opportunities and excuses to ask questions, but allowed himself to be thwarted.
When he worked himself up to ask the captain how a barge with no sails, oars, or other means of propulsion would return upstream, they passed another barge being towed north by a couple of trihorns and some moss-things. Khulan nearly asked how they could manage that from only one side of the river, and then noticed the road behind the reeds, the arms that connected the barge to the huge animals to keep it straight and at the correct distance.
He thought to ask whether their barge was slow, average, or fast, they were passed by a sleeker barge with a team of mossy rowers. He didn’t bother to ask whether that kind of trip would be more expensive than a single-crewed barge, because that was rather obvious. Then they rounded a corner and the captain poled around a larger, wider, slower barge, whose pole teams waved to the captain.
Khulan’s hunger for conversation grew until he simply said aloud the first thought that came to mind. “I haven’t seen any crocodiles yet.”
The captain ceased her single-note whistling and eyed him for a moment. “You’re an outrider. You should be fine at picking out movement and details. I think you don’t know what to look for.”
She raised the pole out of the water, held it level, and eased it toward the reeds. She gave a quick poke to a ridged mossy log; it thrashed and dove under the surface.
Khulan frowned, and with fresh eyes, scanned the river banks. The captain was right: there were several crocodiles within pole-poking range. Small and motionless, Khulan had thought them broken branches trapped in the mud. “They don’t seem very dangerous,” he said.
“Those ones are hoping to catch little herons that perch on sticks to fish.” She slipped the pole back into the water and pushed off the bank. “The big ones know how to hide. You often don’t see them until it’s too late.”
“What’s the biggest you’ve ever seen?” Khulan asked.
The captain smiled. “I used to have a co-captain on this boat. A big croc jumped right -” She stopped, shook her head. “Sorry. That’s not true. Poor taste for a joke right now. The biggest one I’ve seen was… almost half the length of the barge.”
Khulan nodded, looked down the boat. That would make the croc longer than Altan was, and probably a similar weight class despite the difference in distribution. Fighter though she was, he wouldn’t have wanted Altan to be surprised by something like that.
“They say the biggest crocodile ever seen was longer than the big barge we passed, and could have broken mine in half with a bite-and-roll,” the captain continued. “They called him Rusty, said he went brown from swallowing too many nails and swords and shields.”
That would be… of a size to take on the Orrum horde’s most powerful tyrannosaurs. Terrifying. Khulan swallowed. “You’re… talking about the past?”
The captain shrugged. “A Brass Company captain was hired to stop Rusty from eating boats twenty-some years ago. Cost him his entire squad, but the Brass Company always fills its contracts, and there hasn’t been one confirmed attack or even sighting of Rusty ever since. Still… no one ever saw a body, either.”
For the rest of the day, Khulan was occupied by trying to keep himself from watching the water for signs of Rusty when he should be watching for indigo swamp finches.
When the Crocodile River wasn’t passing wide and slow through open marsh land, fields of swishing reeds dotted by open ponds full of fishing boats and waterfowl, it wound through low trees, many of them willows or vine-choked dead trunks, the lookouts standing tall, but none of them lightning-charred. No finches.
Over the next few days, Khulan learned about local wildlife from the captain – less interesting tidbits about animal behaviour, more how to spot the dangerous ones, which to avoid touching, and which were delicious when prepared correctly. The captain alleged that a certain kind of flat, wide-bodied frog tasted terrible to predators, but delicious after a cook fire charred its skin off. And a fist-sized lanternfly used to be mistaken for swamp ghosts due to the mournful sound of its wingbeats, but actually its glow fluid made an excellent dressing when squeezed out onto field greens, and great for meals after dark.
Khulan decided to take her word for it and stuck to the dried fruits, cured meats, and hardtack he’d brought with him. The captain indicated where it was safe to draw water, filtered by the peat bogs, but Khulan filtered his own anyway.
“Coming up on the quarantine zone.”
Several days of small talk and touristy questions had gotten Khulan accustomed Khulan to the captain speaking casually. Now there was a hard edge to her voice, a shadow of concern in her eyes shaded by furrowed brows, which banished Khulan’s restlessness at the absence of indigo swamp finches.
Khulan stood at the front of the boat and gripped the rails. “I heard it was secure. Should I be worried?” Even before she’d said anything, he’d already found the swamps to feel more ominous here. Drained of colour, no bird or frog song, no mosquitoes or flies to swat. Or was he now seeing what wasn’t there, projecting onto his memories?
“It is secure,” the captain called up to him. “Nothing’s escaped from there in centuries.” She didn’t answer his second question, and Khulan felt a strongly implied as far as we know dangling from the end of her statement.
The barge came upon a small collection of other boats, tied together and anchored in the center of the river. The biggest at the centre was an oddity: a true sailing vessel, its masts down, useless in the narrow sections of the river where trees grew dense. Secured to its sides, smaller boats, some commercial and some private. Many bore the flags or marks of the Crocodile Trade Treaty.
The crews seemed to have been preparing to raise anchors, those unsettling moss people hauling lines. Someone called a pause, invited the captain’s barge to join up.
“What’s going on?” Khulan asked. “Are we stopping?”
“Not really.” She hung up her pole and worked the ropes, tossed one up to another boat. “People like to cross the quarantine zone together. Just in case.”
“You said nothing’s ever come out, though.”
“No.”
“So we could go through on our own?”
“We could.”
The captain’s tone seemed to end the conversation. Khulan would not push back against that kind of reluctance, despite looking for any excuse to avoid the moss things, moving very much, but not entirely like, people. He tried not to look at them, and found that the only way was to sit on the other side of the barge behind a crate, where instead he had to look at the walls of the quarantine.
Here the banks of the river were overgrown with massive, ancient trees, so enormous that a ship could have been carved from a single trunk. The trunks grew edge to edge, having at some point merged into a wavy but solid wall. Each tree bore, somewhere in its knobbed and venerable bark, a faintly glowing spiral sun, its rays like the fingers of the hand – the symbol of Saint Posse. Securely fastened to the trunks on both sides of the river were the sturdiest boardwalks Khulan had ever seen – continuations of the riverside roads, dwarfed by the scale of the quarantine trees.
The barge began to move and the trees scrolled past. Despite the collection of boats lashed together, progress was near-silent, interrupted only by the occasional soft splash or muted cough. Khulan supposed that the moss-things didn’t breathe like people did.
The captain vaulted lightly over a crate and sat down beside Khulan. Her elbow touched his. “You all right?” she whispered.
She’d tucked her legs up, and her body language was closed-off and withdrawn. Very unlike what Khulan had seen of her so far. Her question… was she projecting? He nodded and looked down at her elbow, still touching. He didn’t pull back; perhaps she needed that contact.
He couldn’t help whispering back. It felt necessary, somehow. “Everyone’s so quiet.”
“No matter how safe it seems, no one likes passing through the heart of the undead quarantine. Most prefer to tie up and be scared together, instead of alone.” She tried to smile, but she couldn’t.
Khulan watched the tree-wall pass slowly by. Every so often, he glanced at the captain. She seemed so much smaller, her powerful arms occupied with holding herself together. Khulan felt far from ready to connect with anyone after losing Altan, but the captain needed connection more than he needed to avoid it.
Khulan reached out and took her hand. She kept her head down, but she took a deep breath and relaxed her posture, just a little.
The passage through the quarantine zone took most of a day. What an enormous territory to have isolated and contained – the followers of Saint Posse must have found this monumental wall to be a more practical solution than rooting through dense swamp to find and kill all the undead.
Khulan held the captain’s hand until the lashed-together river caravan rounded a corner and placed the quarantine wall out of sight behind them. The captain stood, released his hand almost regretfully. Before she moved to recover her vessel’s ropes and push off to continue the journey, she told Khulan, without looking back: “My name is Makaya.”
Their barge traveled alongside some of their companion vessels for a time, until their differing styles and crews rebuilt some distance between them.
Somewhat against his will while watching for lookout trees and examining them for indigo finches, Khulan watched the moss-things in the shape of people assisting the human and dragonborn crews. The unwilling proximity, and the passage through the undead quarantine zone, brewed some thoughts and comparisons in Khulan’s mind.
“Makaya,” he said, his tongue still getting a feel for the name, “Can you tell me about the moss things?”
“Can I?” she asked, eyebrow up, nearly back to her old self as she poled the barge around a shallow corner. “It’s not a state secret. Nyja isn’t even a real country, not like your Orrum. I can tell you whatever I choose.”
Khulan’s lips crept to the side, and Makaya laughed at his exaggerated annoyance. “I mean, would you please tell me about these moss things. We passed through the quarantine and I couldn’t help comparing them to zombies.”
Makaya frowned and stuck out her lower lip. Khulan laughed, and then paused – was she actually offended? “We have a coming of age ritual. When we become adults – there’s no specific age or criteria, just when we and our friends and families agree we’re ready – we swallow a piece of memory moss.”
Khulan did his best to keep his mouth shut and let her continue.
“The moss merges and grows with the body. It doesn’t do anything while we’re alive, but once we die, it spends some time replacing the body’s functions with its own, which creates what we call a mossim: a sort of continuation of the dead person, with most of their memories and skills, and even some of their personality. It’s not the original person, more like… I guess some other type of magical construct, like an elemental or a golem. But more familiar.”
Khulan nodded. Okay, so, not mindless reanimated husks driven only by basest instinct. “So on the docks at the north outpost, and on the boats we’ve seen on the river. All those… mossims… used to be people?”
“Yes,” Makaya nodded.
He frowned. “So you have to keep working even after you die?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. It’s more like… my grandmother died, but the essential parts of her stuck around to help my mother raise me. I learned to pilot a barge from my great-great-grandfather’s mossim, since the rest of my family is so terrestrial.”
“Oh.” When she put it like that… Khulan sort of wished he had a mossim of Altan.
Makaya racked the pole and stepped over to Khulan. She touched his shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking. You’ve talked… around her a lot.”
Her other hand on his other shoulder. Makaya stood behind him. Haltingly, gently, at each step waiting to see if he would stop her, she reached to his chest, wrapped her powerful warm arms around him like a suit of armour with a soothing blanket inside. She held him, and he felt her breath on his neck.
Abruptly, she stepped away, the comfort of her body withdrawing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re not… You’re mourning, I shouldn’t…”
Khulan didn’t know what to say or feel. He spent the rest of the day at the front of the boat, sitting on a crate, watching the lookout trees and the broken patches of reeds and marsh and bog. After sunset, he lay on his side and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t – until he felt Makaya settling behind, her arms wrapping him in her tender warmth.
They didn’t speak about that night, but neither did they avoid conversation or contact. The next day, Khulan felt energetic and alert, more whole than he had since losing Altan. And he noticed that Makaya seemed to take more interest in his personal mission, pointing out some more distant lookout trees, even hauling the barge to a stop to wait for Khulan to inspect them for finches with his scope.
“Strange,” he said after another disappointment. “Isn’t this supposed to be storm season? Not one of the trees looks like it’s been struck by lightning recently.”
“It is,” Makaya agreed. “We’re making better time down the river than I expected. Normally we’d have to stop for half a day every so often to let a storm blow over. We’ve had some rain, but no real storms.”
Together they checked out several more lookout trees, and tried to evaluate the wind and weather to guess whether any storms might be on the way. Makaya pointed out the first hint of salt in the air, and the first appearances of the meaner brood of saltwater crocodiles.
They were nearing the end of the river, the south coast, the ocean. Tree roots grew wider, taller, like cages or too many spider legs. Mangrove forest, Makaya explained. Trees tougher against storm surges, though still no storms. In the distance, through the trees, reflected light.
“What was she like?” asked Makaya.
She didn’t have to explain who she meant. “Imagine a… What do you ride here? Imagine a horse who -” He paused. “Well, I guess not much like a horse at all. More like a really big dog, I guess. Shaped like a bird with teeth. Imagine a, a bird-shaped dog -”
Makaya laughed, but drew up her pole and leaned toward him.
“A companion who can run for days without stopping, has the eyes of a falcon and the nose of a vulture. Who lives with you, fights with you, hunts and eats and sleeps with you. Who always knows what you’re thinking, who you feel closer to than anyone else alive, even your own family. You grew up together. She carried you around when you broke your leg, and when she broke hers, you… well, you tried. She pulled you out of the fire that… She liked meat, and cheese, but she loved sweets, especially those maple sugar sucks we’re not supposed to get from up north, but she’d be happy to take me all the way there just to… She was the smallest of her sisters, like I was the smallest of my siblings. No one ever took either of us seriously until we could run longer and further than anyone else. They couldn’t stop us when we followed grandfather to the giants’ tyrannosaur grounds and saw…” Khulan sighed. “Especially after losing grandfather, she was always there for me. Always.” He wiped his nose. “Until she wasn’t.”
Makaya sat with him and held him in her arms as Khulan cried for the first time since losing Altan. The barge languished in the reeds near the sandy mangrove banks; crocodiles and small boats drifted past.
“What…” Makaya began, hesitated, and tried again. “What happens when someone loses their bonded companion?”
That was it. That was the question, the thought, that Khulan had really been avoiding. Something had changed, though; he felt now like he could talk about it with Makaya. A bit. “It depends on the person. Some can’t adjust to being unbonded, and either find a new bond as soon as possible or withdraw and become shells of themselves. Or worse. Others take some time to reflect on who they are alone, whether and what kind of bond they might need in the future. Some can’t bring themselves to make a new bond for fear of losing another.”
Makaya nodded and considered in silence for a moment. “Which are you?” she asked finally.
Khulan shook his head. He’d only just now been able to speak of Altan to another person, weeks after her passing. “I don’t know yet.”
They sat together in silence, listening to the soft sounds of the river churning at the banks and the breeze in the reeds. Every so often, a few more tears rose unbidden.
“Khulan. Look.”
He lifted his head and wiped his eyes, followed Makaya’s pointing finger to the sound of tapping. There, gripped firm to the single large nut hanging from the blackened limb of a lookout tree that reached over the river, was a lone indigo swamp finch. With each peck of its large beak, the iridescent feathers on its slightly-tufted head flickered between deep blue and rich violet.
The tough nut fell unbroken from the branch and splashed into the river below. The finch hung from the branch and gave a single sharp chirp that Khulan could only interpret as distress.
“That was the last nut. I have to help it,” he said, and stood. He marched to the front of the boat.
Makaya followed, trying to hold him back. “Even if you know how to swim, the river is full of crocodiles. The saltwater crocs are more aggressive than the ones up north.”
Khulan leaned over the railing, watched the nut bob and the finch stare at it. “Do you have a net?”
She shook her head, but stepped toward the back of the boat. “I don’t, but maybe we can use the pole.”
She handed the pole to Khulan and he extended it out into the river, hoping to catch the nut before the current swept it away. It wasn’t long enough; he couldn’t quite reach. “Hold on to my belt,” he said, and climbed the railing.
“Khulan!” she shouted, but she grabbed him and anchored her legs on the posts of the railing.
He leaned further, his trust and possibly life entirely in Makaya’s arms. He shimmied the pole further, to the tips of his fingers, his grip weakening. He hoped she had another, in case he dropped it. Above, the finch watched.
Khulan tapped the nut with the tip of the pole. It submerged, then after a moment bobbed back up. He tapped it again, and this time it rolled along the pole, just a little closer than it was. “Yes,” he whispered, and tapped again.
Slowly he teased the nut toward the barge, against the current. Several times he thought he’d lost it and had to begin his work anew. Several times he felt a tremble in Makaya’s arms as he leaned almost horizontal over the water. He tried to ignore the ripples below him, the shadow in the murk.
He drew the nut close enough to grab. Khulan withdrew the pole, flung it down the deck. Makaya cringed and kicked it to safety, but held on to Khulan. He lay on his belly, eased his eyes over the edge. The nut floated there, knocked gently against the barge. It would stay there a moment, but eddies in the river would soon grab it and pull it away again.
A pair of nostrils eased silently out of the brown water, followed by a pair of eyes, which flicked open to reveal narrow black slits in pools of primitive yellow. Not alert and intelligent like Altan’s eyes; more primordial, patient, hungry.
The indigo swamp finch called again. To Khulan’s ears, a cry of distress. Perhaps starvation.
Khulan eyed the nut, and then the croc. It wasn’t the largest they’d seen on the journey, but it was, relatively, the most dangerous. If Khulan reached for the nut, the croc could lunge and catch him. If he didn’t, the only indigo finch he’d seen on this entire journey would go unfed.
Makaya held his belt with both hands and spoke not a word. Khulan wondered what she thought of this scenario. Did the finch matter to her? It was a small thing, perhaps meaningless in the grand scheme. Could she understand what Khulan was feeling? Could he?
“Pull me back when I have it,” he muttered, and he hurled himself at the nut.
The water was warm at the surface for perhaps a handspan, and chilled below. The palm-sized nut bounced between Khulan’s fingers and he struggled to enclose it.
The crocodile’s tail thrashed and the animal surged toward Khulan’s arm. He saw its mouth open, a wake streaming from its jaws.
“I have -” No! Too early. A powerful pull on his belt that cut his breath. Khulan flailed – there!
He flew backward, smashed his head against the underside of the railing, saw flashes and stars. The crocodile thunked against the hull of the barge and disappeared into the murk.
“Are you okay?” Makaya asked, breathy. Her fingers touched his neck, his jaw, but hesitated at his hairline.
“No,” Khulan groaned. He touched his head, light as he could, and flinched with a sharp hiss.
“Did you get it?”
He uncurled the fingers of his other hand. There was the nut, with a few drops of bright blood where its sharp edges had pierced his palm and fingers.
Makaya cast a rope over a nearby stump and dropped an anchor. Khulan looked up to find the finch still watching from the lookout branch. He placed the nut atop the tallest crate on the barge and stepped back. He let Makaya clean and bandage his cuts, then, together, they held hands and watched the nut.
The indigo swamp finch cocked its head back and forth, hopped up and down the branch, and chirped several times. It flitted down to the rail on the front of the boat, eyed the two humans, then flew back up to the branch. It waited, then came back down. The finch fluttered to the crate, still alert. It took one small hop toward the nut, then another, then a larger one.
Then, finally, it pecked and pried at the seam of the nut, forced the shell apart until one half popped off and rolled away. Alarmed, the finch retreated to the rail, but soon returned to peck at the meat of the nut.
Khulan smiled. The little bird was so cautious, so careful, so wary of being near people. It was used to the things it needed being far overhead, out of reach. It had taken some patience, but Khulan watched the beautiful colour-shifting of the finch’s feathers until it ate its fill and flew off to chirp somewhere in the forest out of sight.
Khulan wondered whether he should say something about how Makaya never asked why he needed to help the finch, or why it was so important that he risk being eaten. He wondered about it until the barge emerged from the mangrove tunnel into bright sun and the soft roar of ocean waves breaking against shore, and nearby cracks of thunder.
“What.” Makaya’s eyes went wide at the extent of the sprawling city built on the shore and rocks.
Khulan, unsure of why she was surprised, looked around. The city was built from the bones of ships and whales: many homes and businesses hosted inside boats, and multi-residence dwellings in larger beached ships, most of which stood straight. The places that weren’t made of boats directly had been assembled from stripped parts or constructed around partial frames or pieces. Between it all ran wooden boulevards of surprisingly tight and even proportions, like large fancy boardwalks. There was a sense of ordered chaos in the haphazard and salvaged buildings surrounded by perfect, smooth planking. The actual ships lined the mouth of the river and the seashore on hundreds of docks and piers sheltered by piled stone-slab breakwalls.
“Is this new?” Khulan asked, unable to find anything that jumped out at him as shocking, through all the jumble and planks and flags.
“I haven’t been this far south in years,” she said, and her only elaboration was: “It’s all just… bigger.”
Further offshore, on small islands connected by amazingly sturdy floating wooden roads – no, suspension bridges – were two stone towers, both far taller than anything else in the city. One was a lighthouse, unusually wide, flying the flags and colours of the Crocodile Trade Treaty.
The other was an ominous tower of wet shale and polished copper bindings, surrounded by swirling black clouds, heavy pennants flashing blue and copper, metal spines and vanes struck by regular bolts of lightning. A storm drew toward shore from the sea, but it merged with the spiral above the tower, and the lightning strikes grew more frequent, and no wind nor rain could penetrate to the sunny wooden city. Above the tower’s gate hung a rippling banner of a blue winged serpent and someone riding atop it.
“Is that why no storms came up the river?” asked Khulan, pointing. “What is that?”
Makaya shook her head. “I’d heard a priest of the Rider set up a temple, but this is ridiculous.”
“The Rider?” Khulan echoed.
“Yacinth’s lightning god,” she clarified. “Supposedly rides a great winged serpent and creates lightning. Or controls lightning. Maybe both? I’m not sure. Anyway, I heard Yacinth has lightning storms all the time, and priests of the Rider are trying to spread their god’s storms.”
Khulan frowned. “If this priest is supposed to spread storms, then why haven’t we seen any of them during storm season?”
Makaya stabbed the pole into the sandy river and hauled to the side with a grunt, pivoting toward the nearest open dock. “Good question. Why don’t we go ask?”
He swiveled, cocked his head. “What about all your cargo? Isn’t that why you came all this way?”
She shrugged, tossed the pole onto the boat and a pre-looped rope onto a post. “Yes, but the mossims do the unloading. All I have to do right now is check in with the dockmaster for the fees and to hand over the manifest.”
She did, and it only took a few minutes. Khulan eyed the mossims with less suspicion than at the beginning of his trip, searching for hints of the personalities of whoever they were before rather than just finding them creepy. He still did, but not quite as much.
Makaya led Khulan toward the sea and the temple island, and Khulan quickly felt claustrophobic. He was used to being the only human around in open grassland. He’d visited large settlements before, back home, including busy markets – but in Orrum, streets were wider, not so closely packed. There had to be room for everyone’s bonded companions, many of which were quite large. Altan wasn’t small, roughly comparable to a large horse with a longer tail, but there were plenty of animals near that size, and many in the horde had bigger, tougher bonds like trihorns or ketzals.
Here, there was a press of crowd and narrow lanes that Khulan wasn’t accustomed to, that made him feel restrained and penned in. His instinct was to look for and move toward open areas, to places he felt he could breathe. And through all of it, he had to watch his footing: avoid bumping into unexpected railings or falling off the raised walkways to fall into tidal pools. He wiped sweat from his nose and brow, tried to tell himself it was only the humidity. Then, remembering how humid the river and swamps were, told himself it must be the sun, which he’d seen in the relatively brief open marshes.
Makaya took his hand and squeezed. The pressure grounded and steadied Khulan; he took a deep breath and realized he hadn’t in a little too long. She guided him through quieter areas, where still he was a bit too on edge to pay much attention to their path. After… he wasn’t quite sure how long, Khulan and Makaya stood at the foot of the suspended bridge leading to the rocky island where thunder and lightning circled wildly above the spiky, vaned tower.
Khulan pushed on the heavy wooden doors, and despite their weight, they swung open smoothly, bearing the symbol of the Rider inside with him. From the temple came a low, steady buzz, a hum, a sense of power. Khulan expected his eyes to take a moment to adjust, but the ceiling was a great glass dome to view the storm above. The temple was illuminated by the regular flashes of lightning, and by harnessed currents of tamed lightning inside glass tubes: the source of the humming.
The tower was quite simple: no rooms or partitions, simply an open space with circular seating, all facing the centre, where inlaid rails of copper merged into a large, polished plate of the symbol of the Rider. The symbol was roped off with caution signs indicating lightning.
A man in blue robes sat speaking with an older woman. He had light streaks in dark hair, and a demeanour of patience stretched too thin. “Excuse me,” he said, “I have new guests to attend to.”
The priest approached Khulan and Makaya, the coppery serpent and rider now visible on his chest. “Welcome to the temple of the Rider. Have you come to pray, or to learn of the blessings of lightning?”
Makaya reached out a hand, but Khulan held her back. “Actually we’re here to ask why we haven’t seen a single storm the entire length of the Crocodile River during storm season.”
“Ah!” The man’s eyes lit up and he smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t the conversation he’d hoped for, but he was excited nonetheless. “Through an agreement with the Crocodile Trade Treaty association and the powerful magic and technology granted to me by the Rider, I collect the sea storms here, before they travel up the river. The Treaty agrees that this is a great benefit to commerce and travel, as river boats and caravans no longer need to stop -”
“What about the birds?” Khulan yelled, his fists tight.
The priest’s smile faltered. “The… birds?”
“The indigo swamp finches,” Khulan said, emphasizing each syllable with a jab of his finger. “They need lightning to open their food source during mating season.”
“Yes, beautiful, gorgeous creatures, children of the Rider, perfectly in tune with the Rider’s -”
“There is no lightning!” Khulan shouted. He stepped toward the priest and jabbed him in the chest. “You’ve taken it for yourself! The finches -”
Makaya took Khulan by the upper arms and pulled him back. Her grip was gentle, but inescapable. She squeezed until he stopped shouting. He struggled to move toward the priest, but she wouldn’t let him, and he forced himself to settle.
The priest held out his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m not pleased – I have great affinity and care for creatures close to the Rider, and my mission is to spread the Rider’s lightning, not to stop or contain it. This is a diplomatic solution, a show of good will to demonstrate to the Treaty and the people of Nyja that the Rider cares for their concerns. I hope that as I teach the people here of the Rider’s good will and the benefits of his storms, in time, I will -”
“You’d better hope the finches have that much time, or you’ll be personally responsible for the deaths of your Rider’s beloved creatures.” Khulan spat at the priest. He missed; his saliva sailed to the copper symbol at the centre of the chamber, sparked and sizzled briefly when it touched the charged metal.
Makaya hauled Khulan out the front gate and toward the bridge. “Sorry,” she called back to the priest, who merely ducked his head. She shoved Khulan onto the gently-swaying suspension. “What in Order’s name were you thinking?” she shouted at him over quiet thunder.
Khulan shrugged, looked down at the churning shallows below. He’d been wondering that himself. Why did it bother him so much that the finches might be at risk? He’d never thought much, one way or the other, of wildlife’s survival. He’d only come down the river to see the indigo swamp finch, and he’d done it. Even fed one up close, got a perfect view of its behaviour and colour-shifting feathers.
It was loss, he decided. After his grandfather, then Altan, and now the finches, Khulan felt he’d lost much and gained nothing, that the loss would not cease, only grow.
No, he’d gained one thing. He reached one tentative hand toward Makaya –
She pulled him into a fierce hug, nearly crushed the breath from his lungs, but Khulan returned her grip with as much strength as he could manage. They held each other, swaying on the bridge above the murmuring crash of ocean breaking on shield rocks.
“Come on,” Makaya said, and pulled Khulan by the hand toward shore. “I want to show you something.”
He followed, and as they wove through crowds across high or floating boardwalks, Khulan felt as though something had loosened. The press of strangers was not quite so stressful and restraining as it was before, the proximity of driftwood homes and shops not quite as tight.
She led him to a floating market, a colossal barge held in place by ropes as thick as Khulan’s legs, stalls and bridges set up haphazard, the area so wide and steady that it felt almost like being on solid ground. A smaller square near the center of the barge hosted several stalls full of eggs of all sizes and colours, sitting on or under enchanted heatrocks or elemental lodestones.
“What’s all this?” Khulan asked, his eyes unable to find a place to rest. So many eggs. Some the size of his thumnail, others the size of his thumb, his fist, his head.
Makaya bit her lip. “Now that we’re here, I’m worried maybe it’s not the right time, but… I thought, maybe, if you wanted to take a chance, and I don’t know the bonding process, but maybe you might want to start again. I mean, you only just – I wouldn’t want to disrespect Altan -”
Khulan squeezed her hand. His reflex was to say no, to turn and leave, to find somewhere quiet and be alone. Was that what Altan would want, though? He cast his eyes over the eggs, ignored the labels and the vendors’ conversation. Maybe it was the right time. Maybe he was ready.
He squeezed again. “The bond is a special magic that creates a soul link, a… predisposition to loyalty, I guess, in both directions. Not mind control, more like how a newborn can develop a connection, but for both of us. And it links my life force to a partner’s, so that if it would have a shorter life than me, instead it will live as long as I do.” He saw an eyebrow lift, and he preempted her question. “No, it doesn’t work on people, or extend life the other way around. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath that tasted of sea salt and damp wood. He handed his coin purse to Makaya. “Could you… choose one for me? I should have enough money.”
If she gave him a look, something significant, he didn’t see it. But she squeezed his hand and took the purse.
Khulan opened his eyes only briefly, to find a place to lean out of the way of traffic pushing past. Then he closed his eyes again, and he waited.
“Hold out your hands,” came Makaya’s voice beside him.
Khulan obeyed, and a warm, slightly textured, stone-like oval lowered gently into his hands. He looked and found a cream-coloured egg, perhaps the size of a large root vegetable, dotted with pale blue-grey flecks. It was enclosed in a fine net woven with tiny lodestones, evenly spaced to keep the egg warm.
“What is it?” Khulan asked.
“You’ll have to wait and find out,” Makaya replied.
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