Брендон Сандерсон: Sixth of the Dusk

“You survived it? Well, obviously you did, I mean. I’m surprised, is all.”

She seemed to be talking to fill the air.

“They could be watching us,” she said, looking into the darkness. “Nightmaws.”

“They are not.”

“How can you know?” she asked, voice hushed. “Anything could be out there, in that darkness.”

“If the nightmaws had seen us, we’d be dead. That is how I know.” He shook his head, sliding out his machete and cutting away a few branches before them. Any could hold deathants skittering across their leaves. In the dark, it would be difficult to spot them, and so brushing against foliage seemed a poor decision.

We won’t be able to avoid it, he thought, leading the way down through a gully thick with mud. He had to step on stones to keep from sinking in. Vathi followed with remarkable dexterity. We have to go quickly. I can’t cut down every branch in our way.

He hopped off a stone and onto the bank of the gully, and there passed his corpse sinking into the mud. Nearby, he spotted a second corpse, so translucent it was nearly invisible. He raised his lantern, hoping it wasn’t happening again.

Others did not appear. Just these two. And the very faint image… yes, that was a sinkhole there. Sak chirped softly, and he fished in his pocket for a seed to give her. She had figured out how to send him help. The fainter images were immediate dangers—he would have to watch for those.

“Thank you,” he whispered to her.

“That bird of yours,” Vathi said, speaking softly in the gloom of night, “are there others?”

They climbed out of the gully, continuing on, crossing a krell trail in the night. He stopped them just before they wandered into a patch of deathants. Vathi looked at the trail of tiny yellow insects, moving in a straight line.

“Dusk?” she asked as they rounded the ants. “Are there others? Why haven’t you brought any chicks to market?”

“I do not have any chicks.”

“So you found only the one?” she asked.

Questions, questions. Buzzing around him like flies.

Don’t be foolish, he told himself, shoving down his annoyance. You would ask the same, if you saw someone with a new Aviar. He had tried to keep Sak a secret; for years, he hadn’t even brought her with him when he left the island. But with her hurt wing, he hadn’t wanted to abandon her.

Deep down, he’d known he couldn’t keep his secret forever. “There are many like her,” he said. “But only she has a talent to bestow.”

Vathi stopped in place as he continued to cut them a path. He turned back, looking at her alone on the new trail. He had given her the lantern to hold.

“That’s a mainlander bird,” she said. She held up the light. “I knew it was when I first saw it, and I assumed it wasn’t an Aviar, because mainlander birds can’t bestow talents.”

Dusk turned back and continued cutting.

“You brought a mainlander chick to the Pantheon,” Vathi whispered behind. “And it gained a talent .”

With a hack he brought down a branch, then continued on. Again, she had not asked a question, so he needed not answer.

Vathi hurried to keep up, the glow of the lantern tossing his shadow before him as she stepped up behind. “Surely someone else has tried it before. Surely…”

He did not know.

“But why would they?” she continued, quietly, as if to herself. “The Aviar are special. Everyone knows the separate breeds and what they do. Why assume that a fish would learn to breathe air, if raised on land? Why assume a non-Aviar would become one if raised on Patji…”

They continued through the night. Dusk led them around many dangers, though he found that he needed to rely greatly upon Sak’s help. Do not follow that stream, which has your corpse bobbing in its waters. Do not touch that tree; the bark is poisonous with rot. Turn from that path. Your corpse shows a deathant bite.

Sak did not speak to him, but each message was clear. When he stopped to let Vathi drink from her canteen, he held Sak and found her trembling. She did not peck at him as was usual when he enclosed her in his hands.

They stood in a small clearing, pure dark all around them, the sky shrouded in clouds. He heard distant rainfall on the trees. Not uncommon, here.

Nightmaws screeched, one then another. They only did that when they had made a kill or when they were seeking to frighten prey. Often, krell herds slept near Aviar roosts. Frighten away the birds, and you could sense the krell.

Vathi had taken out her tube. Not a scroll case—and not something scholarly at all, considering the way she held it as she poured something into its end. Once done, she raised it like one would a weapon. Beneath her feet, Dusk’s body lay mangled.

He did not ask after Vathi’s weapon, not even as she took some kind of short, slender spear and fitted it into the top end. No weapon could penetrate the thick skin of a nightmaw. You either avoided them or you died.

Kokerlii fluttered down to his shoulder, chirping away. He seemed confused by the darkness. Why were they out like this, at night, when birds normally made no noise?

“We must keep moving,” Dusk said, placing Sak on his other shoulder and taking out his machete.

“You realize that your bird changes everything,” Vathi said quietly, joining him, shouldering her pack and carrying her tube in the other hand.

“There will be a new kind of Aviar,” Dusk whispered, stepping over his corpse.

“That’s the least of it. Dusk, we assumed that chicks raised away from these islands did not develop their abilities because they were not around others to train them. We assumed that their abilities were innate, like our ability to speak—it’s inborn, but we require help from others to develop it.”

“That can still be true,” Dusk said. “Other species, such as Sak, can merely be trained to speak.”

“And your bird? Was it trained by others?”

“Perhaps.” He did not say what he really thought. It was a thing of trappers. He noted a corpse on the ground before them.

It was not his.

He held up a hand immediately, stilling Vathi as she continued on to ask another question. What was this ? The meat had been picked off much of the skeleton, and the clothing lay strewn about, ripped open by animals that feasted. Small, funguslike plants had sprouted around the ground near it, tiny red tendrils reaching up to enclose parts of the skeleton.

He looked up at the great tree, at the foot of which rested the corpse. The flowers were not in bloom. Dusk released his breath.

“What is it?” Vathi whispered. “Deathants?”

“No. Patji’s Finger.”

She frowned. “Is that… some kind of curse?”

“It is a name,” Dusk said, stepping forward carefully to inspect the corpse. Machete. Boots. Rugged gear. One of his colleagues had fallen. He thought he recognized the man from the clothing. An older trapper named First of the Sky.

“The name of a person?” Vathi asked, peeking over his shoulder.

“The name of a tree,” Dusk said, poking at the corpse’s clothing, careful of insects that might be lurking inside. “Raise the lamp.”

“I’ve never heard of that tree,” she said skeptically.

“They are only on Patji.”

“I have read a lot about the flora on these islands…”

“Here you are a child. Light.”

She sighed, raising it for him. He used a stick to prod at pockets on the ripped clothing. This man had been killed by a tuskrun pack, larger predators—almost as large as a man—that prowled mostly by day. Their movement patterns were predictable unless one happened across one of Patji’s Fingers in bloom.