Before the Birds Flew
Session: 2024-09-25
The Bass Crab had a house cat.
This was the first thing Vath confirmed the following morning, moving through the common room before anyone else was properly up. It found him by the hearth and sat down three feet away and regarded him with the total disinterest of a creature that would very much like to be acknowledged but had decided to appear indifferent to the matter.
He offered his hand. It assessed the hand and walked toward the kitchen instead.
He asked it — quietly, while the question was still available — whether anyone had come through recently who'd given off the wrong kind of feeling. Bad temper, furtive movement, something that set fur on end.
The cat looked back at him from the doorway. Communicated, with impressive economy, that there were some. Gave him a slow blink and left.
He hadn't expected a report. He had started asking, and he intended to keep asking — the same way he talked to Deathbringer and Prudence each night while the party settled in for sleeping. The conversations didn't always produce anything useful. They were still worth having.
Yalme's chowder settled the morning properly. She set it down before he'd finished sitting and moved on without waiting for thanks.
By the time the rest of the party had come down, Becklin was already at a corner table.
Vath didn't know the man, but Zephyr did — or rather, Zephyr had heard of him, and was finding the subject difficult to leave. Becklin was Knights of Solace. The Knights kept watch from towers spread across the land, positioned at intervals Vath didn't know the reasoning behind but which Zephyr seemed to find significant. Becklin had been working with a man named Derrit on rebuilding Thornwall Keep, east of town, and had something in progress at one of the numbered positions — a ballistae, maybe, or the start of one.
Zephyr asked questions about the Knights with the specific attentiveness of someone storing answers for later. Vath listened without interjecting. Some subjects were clearly Zephyr's ground.
A few tables over, a handful of men ate quietly — large, thick through the shoulders, the particular look of Land Ho folk. The Taurin weren't unusual in themselves, just the kind of travelers the road moved through any given season.
Pedro was across the room negotiating something with a man of impressively broad shoulders. The shape of it — leaning forward, hands out, familiar timing — looked like a match arrangement. Whether here or somewhere down the road, Vath couldn't be sure. The shoulder man looked less confident than when he'd started.
Someone at the inn had also pressed coin into the party's hands — ten gold, in advance — over the matter of finding someone. A man looking for his kin, who'd gone east and hadn't come back. Vath was not clear on all the details. The inn had been full of different voices.
Cain, at some point in the morning, mentioned mildly that Pedro had spoken with the mayor the day before. Mayor Raven — half-orc, six years in the position, a powerhouse by Cain's accounting. Pedro had spoken to her in Orcish. Cain said she had been impressed.
Vath had not been there for it. He thought about it for a moment.
That'll open doors, he decided, and set the thought aside.
He walked east before they left.
Thornwall Keep was visible from the road — thick stone, still in pieces, sounds of work carrying through the morning air. He didn't approach the gate. He moved through the brush along the base of the eastern rise, slow and unhurried, checking the ground the way he always checked ground.
He had to go back and look at it twice.
An acorn, sitting in the brush not far from a tall oak. Ordinary in every way except that it was substantially not ordinary — the kind of thing you picked up expecting to put back down, and then didn't. He turned it in his hand. He had been thinking, for some time, about what came next in his work. This was something that was going to need different preparation. An acorn like this, worked over by the right hands, gilded properly — it would do for what he was reaching toward.
He put it in his pack.
He saw Nathaniel before they left.
He hadn't been sure what he wanted from the visit — only that leaving without one felt wrong. The man had been frail the day before, and this morning he was the same man: same chair, same grin, same careful way of getting upright without making anything of the effort.
They sat together for a while.
Nathaniel talked the way he'd been talking the previous day — with gaps, and then filling the gaps, and sometimes the new thing connected to what had come before and sometimes it circled without landing. He mentioned Darrian. He mentioned the salt. Then he said a name Vath hadn't heard before.
Gemerwid.
Gemerwid was looking for you.
He said it with his eyes somewhere past Vath's shoulder. Then — without bridging it, without making the link explicit — he said that he was sorry it had happened.
Vath waited.
Nothing else came.
He asked, plainly, the way he asked things. Nathaniel looked at him with what might have been comprehension and might have been its neighbor, and said something that didn't resolve the sentence. He put his hand over Vath's for a moment. He looked genuinely sorry.
The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable, just unfinished.
I'll think about it on the road, Vath decided. He stood, put a hand briefly on Nathaniel's shoulder, and left.
The road east hardened after the gate.
Rocks through the dirt, then more rocks, the path narrowing as it climbed slightly. At about half a day's walk, it forked — one branch low and slow, the other drier and uncertain. They took the drier way and kept moving.
Deathbringer communicated his opinions about the rocks. Vath walked alongside him for a stretch and listened.
They made camp when the light said to. Harrod's Wood on both sides of the road here — the canopy had already taken the last of the western light and replaced it with something darker and green.
He was not asleep when the ground moved.
It came without introduction — a low groan first, deep enough to feel in the chest before the ears, and then the earth itself moving with a steadiness that didn't stop. He was on his feet. Around him: the others, also rising — Zephyr watching the treeline with the specific attention he gave things he didn't say aloud; the animals, unsettled in the particular way animals go unsettled when the ground itself becomes untrustworthy.
The shaking continued.
That was the part that was hard to hold onto. A tremor came and passed. This one kept going — a full minute, or close enough that it was hard to account for, and long enough for every bird in earshot to decide the situation had exceeded reasonable tolerance and leave. He watched the sky fill briefly with the shapes of them: wings in every direction, gone.
Then it stopped.
He stood in the sudden quiet. No visible damage — no slope shifted, no ground cracked underfoot, nothing obvious to point at. Whatever it had done, it had done it underground. Just the absence of every sound that had been there before.
The skeletons came after dark.
He didn't know what this stretch of road had done to earn them, or from where they'd come. They arrived with a purposefulness that didn't feel like wandering, and the fight was fully awake before anyone had said anything coherent about it.
Zephyr put an arm off one of the larger ones — clean, the way he sometimes did, elbow socket to nothing, and the arm went one direction and the skeleton kept going the other way without seeming to register what had changed.
There were more of them still moving.