Katharine Kerr - Snare

As he was tapping his way along, the mist swirled to reveal a darker grey. Ahead stretched one of the lakes, a flat rippled sheet of shallow water, disappearing into the white drift. Red rushes grew sharp and dark, like strokes drawn with a scribe’s pen. Among them stood a grey flying creature of the species called cranes. With a squat body, a long slender neck, and enormous wings of naked skin, furled close to the body at the moment, it perched on one thin, pink leg and looked at him with beady yellow eyes.

‘Little brother,’ Zayn said. ‘Ask the gods to bless me.’

Even as he spoke, Zayn wondered why he’d say such a thing – him, a rational man, educated at the best school in Haz Kazrak. The crane, however, bobbed its head to him, then spread great wings to reveal the pair of vestigial arms that dangled underneath. It flew off with a slap against the heavy air, its pink feet and lashing tail trailing awkwardly after. Zayn followed as it circled the edge of the lake, but soon he lost it in the mist. He began to wonder how many boys camped right here and never dared to go further into the unnerving not-quite-silence.

He stopped at the place where the lakeshore bulged out in a muddy spit of land, pointing to a hummock out in the water. Testing his way with his staff, Zayn stepped off the spit and into the lake. He nearly cried out in surprise: the water was warm. So was the muddy bottom as it clung to his bare feet. He slogged his way out to the hummock, and from this higher ground, he could see a good ways out into the mist-shrouded lake.

Lumps of sodden land lay like a chain of tiny islands and seemed to lead to deeper water. He was debating whether to go further when he saw the crane, perched on a hummock just at the limit of his sight. He stepped off and began making his way towards it, going from hummock to hummock, but spending most of his time in the turgid water, which grew warmer and warmer the farther in he went. It was hard going, fighting the water, testing every inch of muddy ground, clambering from one soft lump to another. Every time he grew close to the crane, it would fly off again, leading him further. As the water grew warmer, a strange kind of slimy plant, dark red and no more than half an inch high, replaced the purple grass.

What felt like hours passed before Zayn paused to look back. The shore had disappeared, wrapped in mist. Ahead, the water stretched out smooth and empty, rippling in the light wind, but to his left stood a hummock big enough to qualify as a tiny island. Zayn splashed his way over and climbed onto the stretch of slimy moss-covered rock, about fifty yards long and maybe twenty at its widest point. On the far side grew a huge stand of a different sort of reed, of a mottled purple-brown colour, each one about as thick as his wrist. Zayn knelt down and cupped water in his hands; it tasted medicinal and sharp, full of mineral salts, he supposed. He drank it sparingly.

When he looked up, the mist swirled and lightened, and this time, he did cry out. For a moment he thought that he was seeing a city looming out of the endless fogs: shining towers, great mounds of houses, some pale green, some horizontally striped in browns and tans, but most as white and shiny as salt. Huge billowy domes, edged in opaque icicles, loomed over flat terraces. Crazy-tilting roofs hung, caught in mid-fall over what seemed to be open squares while rope ladders and twisted balconies marched down glittering walls. Far larger than even Haz Kazrak, on and on this broken cityscape stretched, reaching back into the surging clouds and walls of mist, reaching up into the temporary gilding of the sun beyond the fog. As he stared in open-mouthed awe, he found himself remembering every old tale or fable he’d ever heard as a boy about the wondrous cities and huge flying ships of the Ancestors, lost forever, or so everyone said, in their ruined homeland.

Then, when the entire wrapping of mist blew sideways for a few brief moments, he realized that water was trickling out of the towers and sheeting down, that the supposed buildings were vast deposits of minerals and salts, accreted over the Lord only knew how many endless centuries or aeons, from the outlets for the mineral springs under the Mistlands. He grunted aloud in sheer disappointment as the mists came back, a blanket raised by the wind’s hands and just as quickly dropped.

His reason reasserted itself. The hot springs would boil up inside those deposits, he supposed, to produce the huge quantities of fog when the steam hit the cooler air. The moisture would then run down its own accretions, leaving a further residue of salts. How far the travertines stretched he couldn’t see – a long, long way, far beyond the limit of his mist-shortened view. For a moment he considered wading over to explore, but the crane came flapping back. It settled, plopping into the water, and turned to block his way. When it opened its beak, he saw tiny spikes of teeth.

‘You want me to stay, don’t you, little brother? All right. I’ll make my vigil here.’

The crane tucked up one leg and began to study the water, head a little to one side, long beak ready. Zayn sat down on the rocks nearby and shivered in his soaked clothes. He looked at the spirit staff in his lap, ran his hands along it and found it comforting that Ammadin’s hands had bound the thread and tied the talisman. Just beyond the mists, she and the members of the comnee were waiting for him with food and warm blankets. He wondered how long he was going to have to stay out here to prove his manhood to the comnee.

‘They have a hard way with their boys, these people.’

The crane bobbed its head as if agreeing.

‘My father had the usual ceremonies done over me. Now, my uncle – he took me to a whore-house when he figured I was old enough. The old man was furious enough to kill us both, but my uncle was bigger than him. Good thing, too.’

Zayn found himself remembering his father’s face, but as a young man, not as he was now. He jumped to his feet and swore, because it seemed Father was standing in front of him, vivid and solid. The vision lasted only a moment, but Zayn saw the anger in his eyes, the sharp twist of a mouth that was about to spit curses on his son. Then the vision faded, leaving only the rock, the water rushes, and the crane, raising its head to look at its restless neighbour.

‘I saw that look on his face the whole time I was a child,’ Zayn said. ‘And you know what the worst thing was? I agreed with him. I knew it already, you see, that there was something wrong with me. I was just too young to know what.’

The crane seemed to be considering all this seriously. Zayn started to laugh at himself for talking to a bird, but with a sharp cry, the crane leapt and flew away, leaving only silence and empty water behind it.

‘Come back!’ Zayn called. ‘I’m sorry I laughed at you.’

Well, he’d driven away everyone else who’d tried to befriend him, hadn’t he? He’d always been terrified of letting anyone close. After all, he might have let something slip in some relaxed moment. They might have come to see what he was, barely human at all, an outcast and a pollution.

‘What are you doing?’ he said aloud. ‘Letting your mind run this way!’

You’re just tired and hungry, he told himself. Men do see things when they get that way. Perhaps. There was a cold ripple down his spine that had nothing to do with the damp air. Suddenly he was sure he felt spirits all around him. He knew it, couldn’t talk himself out of it, felt them circling him like a cold wind. He held the spirit staff up like a weapon and stared out into the mist.

In a pale, translucent progression, drifting like bits of torn cloud, they came walking across the water towards him. Smoke-shapes with human faces, they drifted nearer and nearer, staring at him with demon-slit eyes. In the rippling water he heard voices.