Author's note: this takes place a few years before Dyemonger. Sorry about it not being finished- it got away from me in length. Happy Yuletide!
The speck of black in the sky didn’t move with the motion of Orpek’s eyes. It wasn’t his ageing sight playing tricks on him. There was something up there.
Orpek maintained the painfully still posture he’d kept the moment he detected that movement and pushed out a silent curse through his teeth. Raven? Crow? Jackdaw? Blackbird? Kite? He couldn’t tell. Right now it was just a darkness.
Could it- no. No, surely.
The sun, which half a minute before had imparted a calming warmth in the brightness of the cloudless day, began to itch.
He was in the middle of a meadow. He had thought the grass long enough, and the path he had been assured was trodden if not often then sometimes safe enough to travel through.
Hot grass. Pollen. Dust. A grass root digging into his left foot.
It was circling.
Not circling. Circling him.
Bright light. Clear skies. A trail of grass pushed aside behind him. He may as well have painted himself red and yellow and worn a coat of glass beads.
The shape stopped moving.
Orpek slipped out of his pack, drew his nail and threw himself into a run, the grass whipping and cutting at him as he fought to find a balance between erratic panic and covering the ground between him and the tree- barely a shrub, a miracle something hadn’t eaten it already- a yard, yard and a half in front of him. No canopy to hide behind. No roots to crawl into. Just a trunk almost thin enough to hug right round.
He could hear it diving. A second away.
The beak glinted in the light. Big. Blunt.
Raven.
Then the sky was roaring black wings and he dived and rolled, back cracking painfully on a stone, and he stumbled to his feet, slashing out with the nail. The raven hit the ground an inch away from where he had been standing and Orpek saw everything in an instant. That huge back, roughly feathered with quills strong enough to turn any slash into a scratch (stabbing it would have to be, a task made twice as hard by the bend at the end of his nail), a tail fanning above two feet, thick, grey skin and little nubbish claws, the cracks caked with dust and grease. This bird had not preened in what must have been weeks and it stank, a nauseating force in the hot summer’s air.
It stood there. Facing away from him, wings held half-out, talons curling into the circle of grass flattened by its descent.
“Pick new prey,” growled Orpek, heart buzzing. Reason was always an option, especially if food was on the line. He was hard prey.
It could not be. It could not be her.
The raven turned its head towards him slowly, drawing itself together slowly.
“Wan, derer,” it cawed, voice like a rancid choir. “Wal, ker. Nail, bearer. Do, you not, remember, me?”
“Oh, bugger,” said Orpek. “You.”
“You, killed, my, children,” the raven cawed, wings shaking and talons clenching with anger, and Orpek turned, jammed the handle of the nail in his teeth, and sprinted on all fours as fast as he could away.
No negotiation, then. Not this time.
SIX DAYS EARLIER
“Are you sure you can manage it?” The cricket asked, peering sceptically at Orpek’s ageing frame.
Orpek assumed an expression of dead-eyed annoyance that he hoped would cut any future critique of his body short. “I am perfectly fit and healthy,” he said. “I have climbed things before, you know.”
“You look old,” said the cricket, apparently unswayed by Orpek’s blistering gaze. “And you’re not going to be afforded do-overs, you hear?”
“I do this manner of thing regularly and am still alive,” said Orpek in what he hoped was a conversation-ending tone. “I am effective.”
Somewhere behind him, someone snorted.
The cricket rubbed at her mouthparts and gestured for Orpek to give way to the next in line. The burrow had called far and wide for anyone who would join a last-resort militia to rid them of their latest problem and a variety of ne’er-do-wells, bounty hunters, would-be monster slayers and overconfident farmers with sharpened sickles had turned up for the chance to share in the glory, fame and a small but still substantial prize for any participant.
Blood, gloating and gold. The usual motivators.
Two weeks ago a lone raven had taken up residence in a tree directly above Spiralholt, a burrow close to this one. According to what he had been told by the crier at the burrow he had been passing through it had promptly eaten the party sent to find out what it wanted and was cutting off both access to their watercress paddies and any caravans attempting to supply them food. If they were not relieved, they would starve. Out of his way though it was Orpek had smelt something… off about the whole affair. There was more to this, or would be, or had been. He could feel it, a twinge in his gut telling him that the rallied torches and spears at the crier’s call were treading a narrow and winding path with bitter darkness to either side.
So he’d diverted three days’ walk south and now here he was, having his credentials examined by a rather rude insect.
He was about to make his way out of the town hall when a finger prodded him in the arm.
“Hey, stranger,” said the owner of the finger, a young mouse standing in line, and prodded him again. “Syr Effective.”
Orpek resisted the urge to smack her ears flat. “My name is Orpek,” he said, patiently, feeling like a veritable saint.
The mouse was short and lithe but well-muscled under her pearly-grey fur, a mocking smirk sliding across her face. A cape of mottled brown feathers- wren, if he guessed correctly- shrouded her figure and half-concealed the shape of a large, boxy sheath slung at her left hip which she supported absent-mindedly with her arm, fingers tapping on the wood and metal. She prodded him yet again and laughed when he snapped his arm up to catch her wrist, dancing back with a speed he’d have expected to see in a mantis, not a mouse.
“I would be Arallai,” she said, and grinned even wider. “Are you that tramp with the beat-up nail I’ve heard is on some great journey west? Or are you another tramp with a beat-up nail?”
Orpek wrinkled his nose, baring his teeth a little. His mood was becoming progressively fouler. “I may be,” he said, courteously. “Some tell stories that precede me. My journey west, great or not, is slow.”
“That’d be because you walk it,” said Arallai. “You do know mounts exist, right? Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter,” she added, cutting Orpek off before he could rise to the barb (which he would not have done anyway). “I’ve got an offer to make you, actually. Proper shiny one, if you’ll just… hold back on the grandstanding for a second. You listening, Syr Effective?” Her eyes gleamed.
“No,” said Orpek. “You lost me in the slew of nonsense dribbling from between your teeth.”
She grinned, nodded, and Orpek couldn’t help but feel that by retorting he had yielded ground to her. “I’m gathering a… group, a party, of like-minded individuals dedicated to solving this what-have-you of a situation,” she said, fingers tapping absentmindedly on the sheath at her waist. “Split the reward. And despite how frankly geriatric you seem the fact that you’re not dead yet seems to indicate some level of not-dying talent on your part so…” her paw traced lazy circles in the air before landing on Orpek. “You in?”
Orpek considered her offer for a moment. A very short moment.
“No,” he said. “I hope that the best suited of us get the contract. Good day.” He turned away, busying himself with adjusting the straps on his pack, but before he could fully escape Arallai spoke again.
“It’s me,” said Arallai. “I’m the best. Reconsider.” Her gaze hardened.
“I do not work with hired blades,” said Orpek, focusing his gaze on the ceiling. “Good-”
“Why?”
Orpek turned back and looked over Arallai again. The clean fur. The lack of scars. The cloak, the sheath, some kind of mechanism exposed beneath the lacquered wood. And that cocksure, smarmy grin.
“You look like a sellsword,” he growled.
Arallai blinked, her whiskers twitching in a way that would have been endearing on a litterling but that made Orpek want to flatten her snout. “I might be,” she said. “I might also be a great hero.” She snickered. “Maybe less the hero bit.”
Orpek’s reply was flat and sterile, the long-kept anger he felt at those who exploited the desperate and afraid for coin at worst and were often dangerously amateur at best tightening his jaw.
“I am not a bounty hunter,” said Orpek, each word leaving his mouth with the measured force of a knuckle crack. “I do not look for pay.”
Arallai blinked again and Orpek felt a rancid pleasure in the way she faltered.
“Well I gotta fucking eat somehow,” she said as he turned away. The eyes of the line of would-be heroes flickered between him and Arallai, unsure whether to look at him, her or at the floor.
The room he rented for the night was too small. He banged his head on the doorframe going in and he just knew he’d bang his head waking up in the morning.
Two days until the militia assembles, he thought, lying in the low dark with the sound of the metropolitan busyness of burrow echoing into the night, small torchlights and raised voices echoing under the bottom of his room’s door in all the merriment and rage of nightlife. The cot was too small, his back slightly hunched.
Tomorrow I will know if I am among their number.
He shifted, then dragged the thin pillow from beneath him and gave it a firm plumping before jamming back beneath him. His neck hurt.
Orpek sighed and rubbed at his furred brow. Perhaps he was getting on in years after all.
Sleep came slowly. He did not recall his uncertain dreams in the morning.
The hairs on the back of his neck stung with a flicker of air pressure and he rolled left just as the raven’s beak smacked into the ground right where he had been, the raven hopping, wings half-stretched, after him. That sapling was seconds away but he didn’t have seconds.
He turned the roll into a scramble, pushing himself off the ground and grasping the hilt of his nail as he took a stance. The raven lunged at him again but he dodged and slammed the edge of the blade into her beak near the , the hard glistering blackness flashing in the noonday sun. It left only a scratch.
Time blinked, and he remembered.
The first time Orpek had killed a bird of prey he had been a younger rat and he had simply dropped a rock on its nest from higher up the clifface where it had thought itself concealed and fought the injured kite. The second had been in a cave, the falcon, mindless with hate, following him deeper and deeper until the pitch-soaked bonfire concealed there the day before lit and the sudden light blinded it long enough to drive his nail through its breastbone. The third had been an owl, and it had watched, eyes lustrous in the waning moonlight high in the branches of a dead chestnut tree, as he stood alone in the silence and said no more dead from this burrow, and left with the sound of silent wings. But here, he had a nail and a back sore from walking since dawn.
“Yield,” he wheezed, the word a hoarse outtake of breath, the rebound of his nail already turning into motion as he sprinted the last half-metre to the tree. The raven shook her head, dazed, before snapping free of the throb of pain and lunging at him again. The grass whipped at Orpek’s sides as he ran, the edges made sharp by his frantic speed, but the fwumph of her half-furled wings as she hopped after him drove him on. Then he reached the sapling and swung clumsily around it, almost barking the skin off his palm.
The raven spread her ragged wings, feathers flexing as a cloud of dust raised from the dry earth, forcing Orpek to blink furiously. Her eyes fixed on his. In them Orpek saw rage, and behind that rage a slew of emotions too many to count.
“Yield, when you, took them? Yield, when you took, my second, heart?”
Orpek took a stance behind the shrub and raised his nail into a neutral stance, breast heaving, shifting to line the thin trunk up with the raven’s beak. “They are safe!” he called, shifting as the raven spread her winds and feigned left and right, eyes green flecks in the black of her plumage, black that had lost the depth and lustre that raven feathers usually possessed. “Safer than they were with you!”
“LAIR!!! LAIR!!! LAIR!!!” She cawed. “LAIR RAT!!! LIES!!! LYING!!! LAIR!!!” She surged forward beak-first in like a spear of ragged dark, Orpek deftly sidestepping her. She shrieked, beak turning back to him, serpentine, as she lunged again and missed again. Under the thin branches there was less space for her to dive from above, a paw on the scales in Orpek’s favour. Now was the time to play the long game, where each move drew from a finite reserve of energy. He just had to wait for the raven to make a mistake.
He banged his head waking up in the morning. Dirt fell down into his eyes.
Through the narrow connecting corridor of the inn’s rooms, down the stairs and offering a half-nod of acknowledgement to the innkeep Orpek stepped into the waking light of the morning.
Orpek took the quiet streets at a brisk pace, wide and airy thoroughfares braced with arching beams of copper-studded spruce below hard-packed earth the colour of old hessian. The early-morning bustle of the city- Needlewefven- washed around and over him, the dawn light that filtered through the ventilation lighting the cobbles with a dull, grey glow. Though every colour and pattern of cloth and fur and scale was present even at such an early hour and the sounds of life continued on as they no doubt always did they was a sickly pallor in the air, an expectant miasma. Orpek took note of the eyes that strayed toward him and his nail. It wasn’t fear that was in the air, it was… trepidation. The future was closing in on this burrow.
After wandering for a quarter-hour, taking in the thousandfold minutia of this living place, Orpek turned to a passer-by and asked them for recommendations of a place to eat. The cockroach, shell flecked with tiny glinting stones, directed him to a place two streets away that she had heard good things about from other rodents before hurrying off busily to her place of work.
Orpek missed the final turning twice before he realized his mistake. At the corner of a small square and almost completely obscure by the front canopy of an exuberantly glass-fronted textile shop was a tiny and mostly unadorned arch leading to a dingy alleyway that was more accidental fissure than public walkway. But as Orpek watched a group of two mice and a vole hurried out, talking over each other rapidly as they bid each other farewell for the day. The wanderer stood aside for them and, after they had passed, noted that the stones of the small archway were worn dark and smooth by years’ worth of the brushing of fur and scales.
However.
Orpek sighed. For a burrow as large and cosmopolitan as Needlewefven they had a horrible penchant for making entrance-ways slightly too short for him. He stooped uncomfortably, bracing a hand against the hilt of his nail, and squeezed his way into the alley.
The passageway followed the winding of a root that formed its ceiling, the walls quickly widening so that Orpek could walk without brushing both sides at once. Past a lamp hanging above an absolutely tiny shopfront, the whirr of a potter’s wheel sounding from within a cramped room with walls obscured with teetering walls of earthenware and a rather menacing half-open door marked with the symbol of a book and a scroll Orpek came upon the final widening in the tunnel.
A warmly-lit space at the confluence of several branching roots formed the roof of a small cavern, a brick-and-mortar front to an establishment a sign above the door proclaimed to be…
Orpek squinted and struggled through the lettering. Em… Oh… Arr… Ih…
Morimi’s Soup.
The door was open, a warm tide of conversation spilling out. Orpek stooped and squeezed through.
The inside of Morimi’s Soup was warm and thick with the smell of cooked vegetables. The tables and chairs of various sizes packed around the room were almost all full, the early morning rush apparently in full swing. Orpek noted that many had the tools of trade hung on their waists and backs, likely labourers who had stopped here before heading to their work. The threads of their stories hanging around them seemed to light the air brighter than any rainbow. Sickles and scythes and hoes and crooks and copper-blade shears and climbing hooks and hammers of half-a-dozen makes- it was all there, sharpened and oiled, ready for the day.
From the back of the room a voice bellowed, Orpek slightly taken aback by the sudden assault of good cheer. “Hail there fellow!” it called, and Orpek met the gaze of a very large and very cheerful rat. Behind the counter at the back of the room several pots boiled over a long range, the copper darkened by use. Smoke and heavy, scent-laden steam billowed around the snouts of two mice heaving at spoons. Orpek squeezed through the tables and stood at the counter, offering a polite nod to the be-aproned rat as the customer in line before him was cheerfully but promptly pointed to a table, a bowl of soup in her hands.
“You’ve just about caught us before the morning rush,” she said as Orpek stood at the counter. “You’re in luck, aye.”
Orpek looked around the packed room. There hardly seemed to be a table spare anywhere, though more mice were finishing their soup even as he watched. ”Before?” he said, slightly incredulous.
“We keep people moving,” the rat said, wiping her hands on her apron before leaning on the counter. “What can I get f’ya?”
“I take it your establishment can furnish me with breakfast,” Orpek said, finding himself smiling a little as the digging worry became a little more distance.
The mouse laughed. “My, ye have a manner of speech!” she said, delighted. “We can indeed. Beet, turnip or blackberry, any allergies? Two coppers a bowl.”
Orpek froze for a second before forcing himself to make a decision. “I have no allergies and turnip soup, thank you.”
“All right-” the rat turned her head halfway toward the two mice fussing over the pots- “ONE TURNIP SOUP!- I’m Morimi, by the by,” she continued.
“Orpek,” he replied.
“So, Orpek, you here for that-” Morimi’s voice dropped to a lower register as she leant forward, Orpek stepping back slightly as she got a little too far into his space- “bird?”
“Regrettably,” said Orpek, nodding seriously. “Regrettably.”
“Well,” said Morimi, eyes moving around the room “sure needs doing something about, and seems that plenty are willing… one can hope. ‘Scuse my nosing, but do you know anything-”
But Orpek was already shaking his head. “Nothing more than anyone could tell you.”
The bowl of thick, creamy soup was set on the counter by one of the mice and Orpek placed the two small coins down.
“Fair enough,” Morimi said. “I’d expect you’ll want to be sitting with those other fighter-types, there’s a free chair in your size. Hope to see you again before you leave, all right now.” She pointed to a spot at the far side of the room and Orpek picked up his bowl and spoon and strode off through the crowded tables as Morimi began greeting the customers behind him.
As he squeezed through the bustle, the nail at his waist attracting a few looks of interest as he made his apologies, one mouse squawking as she was almost tipped from his chair by a careless misstep on Orpek’s part. She waved away Orpek’s apologies good-naturedly and he made his way deeper, into an alcove at the far back of the restaurant. The room curved around the kitchen,
Then, as Orpek approached the table as it sat at the back of the room, half-obscured by the crowd, a prickling took residence at the base of his spine, a strange sense that more often than not meant nothing but on occasion coincided with events that, in retrospect, were crossroads. The places where the river of… fate, or perhaps simply chronology, met hardened strata and diverged. Here, he thought, was such a place. Something was going to happen.
The dark, rich brown of a wren-feather cloak appeared at the back of the crowd of bodies.
He froze mid-stride.
Ah, bugger, thought Orpek.
It was the mouse from yesterday. A- Alar… An… Her name escaped him.
Orpek looked around hastily for another spot but all were full and he could see more patrons entering even as he deliberated. Morning rush. Orpek put a carefully neutral face on and made his way toward the one empty chair.
The wren-cloaked mouse was involved in intense discussion with a companion, a brown-furred field-mouse in a shift dress. Orpek’s mind whirred for a moment. Morimi had said other fighter types, not type. Perhaps this rodent was the other, though she certainly did not look it. Behind them a long-legged, tawny-furred rodent
“That’s what I’m saying,” the wren-cloaked mouse- Arallai, that was her damned name- was telling the other two, “it’s not a good idea to use fire in a burrow with wicker walls, I was trying to get them to understand that my first suggestion was-” she followed the gaze of the other two and came face-to-face with Orpek.
Orpek set his soup on the table, adjusted the spoon next to it, and, with great gravity, pulled the one remaining chair out and sat down.
“Good morning,” he said.
There were granite blocks with more life in them than those two words.
Orpek began eating his soup with a gravity usually reserved for being executed by pyre.
“…Ge’mornen,” said the tawny rodent, eyes flicking to Arallai’s growing baffled expression and back to him, “Me namen Oritennin, ayne. Ye?”
“Orpek,” said Orpek.
He continued eating his soup through the stiff silence that followed.
“Well well well,” said Arallai, eyes digging a hole into the table just in front of her soup, “if it isn’t Syr Effective. What a surprise.”
It was the dress-wearing mouse that spoke up next, her voice measured and mediated. “Um. I’m Edin, nice to meet you. Are you, uh, here for the militia?” she asked.
“I am,” said Orpek. He decided to allow Arallai’s companions the benefit of the doubt.
Arallai herself finally managed to break out of her apparent state of bafflement. “And there I was, thinking you hated me, Orpie,” she said, leaning back in her chair and blowing out a lungful of air. “Have you decided to take me up on my offer? It still stands, regardless of how you-” her hands went to her breast- “injured the poor lady so.” She snorted at her own joke.
“My apologies,” said Orpek. He let his eyes burn into Arallai’s for a moment but he needn’t have worried about conveying his sincerity for Arallai’s grin hardened and she leaned forward, the front to legs of the chair hitting the ground with a tunk.
“So,” she said, conversationally, “are you planning on dying any time soon? Feeling creaky in those bones?”
The table held their tongues.
“No,” said Orpek, chuckling and feeling something that he normally would have pushed down rising in him. “No I plan on doing much good yet. And I am sure you, too, have much coin you wish to make.”
“Unfortunately I live in a material world and cannot buy food with false humility,” Arallai said, leaning across the table. Her grin split wider. Orpek could see her teeth through her cleft lip.
Orpek gestured around him with a look. “These people seem humble enough and yet survive.”
“These small people play small games,” said Arallai.
“Arallai,” said Edin, warningly, but she was silenced with a raised finger from Arallai.
“These people built a city,” said Orpek, feeling the bile in him rise higher and higher. “These people carved a city out of the earth and clay and rock. They are greater than you-”
“Reicradel,” said Arallai, “Wasselden, Archunder, Turnbrook. Needlewefven. What’s the common feature here, Orpie? Tell me. Fucking tell me.”
Orpek watched her, calculating the next thing to say.
“Cannae we all bein’ calm, now,” said Oritennin, raising her hands in an attempt to pacify the two, but both Arallai and Orpek ignored her.
”TELL ME!” screamed Arallai, kicking the chair back and standing in a burst of force. “SAY HER FUCKING NAME, ORPIE!”
“I don’t know,” said Orpek, fighting down a flinch. He would not lose ground to the sellsword.
The eyes of the other costumers turned to them as their chatter stilled.
Arallai spoke again. Her eyes were unflinching. “Arallai, of House Wrenfall,” she said, voice half a growl. “Me. Here I killed shit. Here I saved lives. But oh, no, I took payment! Doesn’t count!”
“An interesting arrangement of priorities,” returned Orpek, slow and vicious. “I, personally, save lives first.”
He stood, soup finished.
“You’ll die out there,” said Arallai, watching him go, sniggering under her breath. “Enjoy your day, Orpie. For once in your life you won’t be getting a second serving.”
“I have not died thus far,” returned Orpek, pushing his chair back in. “Oritennin, Edin. A joy to meet you.”
Oritennin spoke up just as he turned. “She ent’ fabricaten’ that, Orpek.”
The wanderer paused.
Edin spoke up, her voice hesitant, glancing constantly at Arallai. “The militia isn’t supposed to succeed,” she said. “It’s political.” She weathered a searing gaze from Arallai. “This is the second attempt and the first was far better armed than this one is. Needlewefven is using the raven as an excuse to get rid of ‘undesirables’.”
Orpek “Is this true?”
Arallai hissed through her front teeth.
“Fuck you, Orpek,” she said. “But I’m the better person.” She clicked her tongue on her teeth. “Yes. I overheard the mayor saying exactly that, even that they’re forewarned the raven in the hopes of getting a truce between them at Spiralholt’s expense. We’re going ahead of them. We’re going to kill this bird alone. You are welcome to join us because I know you, Orp- Orpecker.” Another snigger. “You’ve killed birds before. I’ve heard the stories.”
Orpek watched her for a sense of deception.
“And your payment?” he asked.
“There won’t be any,” said Arallai. “Not this time.”
Orpek looked through Arallai’s eyes into the creature beyond.
He could not make head nor tail of it.
Against all his better impulses he stretched a hand across the table. Arallai grasped it and clenched.
“Alright, Orpie,” she said. “Orit, Edin. Gentlefolk.”
Her hollow, shit-eating grin widened.
“Murder time,” she said.
The raven lunged, claws tearing at the dry earth, Orpek’s swift and measured steps around the shrub’s trunk taking him out of their range.
“Yield,” he yelled again, throat raw and dry in the midday heat.
“NEVER,” screamed the raven. “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER!”
“I will kill you if I must,” said Orpek, his voice a rasp battling its own weakness. “And killing me will not give you back your children.”
The raven screeched in return, wet, red throat distending in an endless tunnel to nothingness.
The sun shone above.
Watching.
Arallai’s goad about Orpek using a mount hadn’t been empty posturing, it turned out. A blackbird (not a wren, as Orpek had been expecting) waited outside Needlewefven. He could take all four of them at once, Arallai explained through her usual obnoxious sarcasm, but would be a little slowed. They’d still be their days before the militia was intended to arrive, however.
On the way Arallai explained her plan.
“It’s simple,” she yelled over the howling wind and the beat of the overburdened blackbird’s wings. “Lovely Edin here is a black powder specialist. We blow up the raven’s nest and, hopefully, take the branch with it too. The raven won’t have anywhere to come back to. If we time it right we could injure the bird in the explosion and she’ll be forced to move on to find somewhere else to recover. We just need to get up there without the bloody bird noticing.”
It was, as Orpek considered, a solid plan. He, for one, had acted on less.
Though mainly he was focused on not falling off the bird.
They arrived at spiralholt just after midday, Arallai setting the blackbird to ground some distance away from the curving checkerboard of watercress plantations. As Orpek disembarked, his back aching from the rough ride, he saw beyond the bush-covered mound of Spiralholt a great and twisting oak tree, bare of leaves except at a single branch near the peak. Half-dead but still clinging onto life.
As he watched a black shape passed across the sun and he ducked, nail clenched in his paw.
It settled down in the branches of that tree. Orpek took note of the distant shape that must be the thing’s nest.
“Well there it is,” said Arallai. “Everyone take a minute to rest and prepare, then we go in. No sense waiting around. Orpie, maybe you’ll want a nap.”
Orpek ignored the jab.
“Luck be wit’ us,” said Oritennin. Her long, bushy tail twitched, her uncommonly long legs taking strides as she worked the journey’s soreness from her limbs. Two black-bronze knives hung from her belt like long eyes in her fur, a nasty-looking crossbow slung over her back. She had clad herself in leather armour before leaving, copper studs in the metal
Orpek sat and began tending to the edge of his blade.
Edin, who was wearing a complex netting containing dozens of small clay vessels over her dress, sat down and began fiddling with a flint striker.
Orpek watched her critically. “Have you no armour?”
“I’ll, uh, I’ll be fine,” Edin said. “I’m good at hiding.”
Orpek shook his head firmly. “You will need protection. Let me-” he rummaged through his pack before pulling out what, to the others present, looked like nothing but a flat plate of wood. Orpek pulled carefully at two points and it unfolded into a small helm.
“Here,” he said. “I picked up this curiosity a some weeks ago.” He examined the small brass hinges, finely wrought yet solid. The lacquered spruce was light but strong enough to at least mute a blow. “Take it,” he said.
Edin took it hesitantly. “…thanks?” she said.
“You are welcome,” grunted Orpek. He returned to sharpening his nail.
Arallai looked up from her fussing with her sheath to the exchange. Her eyes narrowed but she said nothing.
Some quarter-hour later Arallai squinted at the sun and shrugged. “Weather could be better for this,” she said, eyeing the clouded grey of the sky, “but we need to make the tree before night falls and the bird goes to roost. She’s not expecting us, far as I know, so we have the element of surprise.”
Orpek grunted. “Why not move at night?”
“That’s what the first attempt tried,” said Arallai, impatiently. “I expect she’s a particularly light sleeper given that the last time she had an uninterrupted nap two dozen mice tried to kill her. Well climb the trunk when she isn’t there. Keeping up?” Arallai swung her sheath into place, nail still in it, and strode off. The others picked up and hurried after her.
Orpek took a look at the nest, a tiny dark blotch in the tree.
That feeling of standing at a crossroads had not left him.
It festered inside him, tugging at his veins, tightening his muscles and ligaments.
He breathed, set his nail in his belt and followed the others.
“DIE!”
Orpek did not reply. The raven’s breast heaved.
“DIE!”
She lunged again and Orpek dodged, lashing out at her beak with his nail. It left a thin line in the beak and she screeched in shock but instead of reeling back she lunged again. Orpek swung his blade out but the blow impacted the metal squarely and he was sent stumbling. The earth hit his back and the raven heaved forward in a rush of feathers and eyes and dust and stench. Orpek rolled and tried to scamper away but there was a sharp stab of pain in the stub of his tail and he found himself dragged backwards, his scrabbling paws cutting themselves on the grit of the earth and gaining no traction as the wanderer watched in horror as a great wind pushed past him and the ground began to receede.
“DIE, RAT!” the raven screamed, and the scream split the sky sevenfold as Orpek’s last grasping finger lost contact with the world.
“Time to find out if you were lying, Orpie.”
They were soaked from their trek through the cress paddies, the thick, silty mud they grew in coating their legs and arms.
“About what,” said Orpek, voice low.
“Climbing,” said Arallai.
Orpek decided to let the comparatively minor insult slide and instead pushed past to the trunk. The base was marked with the ash of pyres that had failed to light the tree and the marks of the previous climbers. Orpek stooped as the others busied with beginning the climb, brushing his paw over a darker stain in the earth.
His palm found a tuft of fur.
He stood, raising it into the wind.
It drifted off, soon invisible.
He hitched his belt to the rope Arallai had left and dug his claws in, hauling himself up after the others.
His arms and legs began to steadily burn little more than a halfway up the trunk but Orpek was, despite what might be thought of him, strong and very determined.
He steadied himself, breathed, and pushed for another handhold.
A moment later a chip of bark hit him in the eye as Edin slipped, tumbling back and away from the tree, off the rope- must have done the knot wrong- falling past where Orpek could grab her.
Somewhere between the instants Orpek paused to wonder where the sensation of gripping the tree had gone-
His reaching paw snatched at the back of her dress, dragging them close enough for him to wrap his other arm around. They slammed into the bark, Orpek’s paws grabbing ahold of Edin’s harness as he fought for purchase with his feet.
They stopped.
“Mind yourself,” said Orpek mildly.
Edin wheezed frantically as Orpek adjusted his grip and looped her back onto the rope with a few deft knots on her harness. “I fear my helm would not protect you from such a fall,” he said, Edin’s pulse quick under his palm.
Knowing that if she stopped now she would not start again Orpek looked her in the eyes and clicked his tongue.
“Look at me,” he said. “At me. In-” he inhaled- “count of four-” held- “out-” exhaled- “count of four. Nothing more to it. Now climb.”
Edin nodded and started climbing again, her breathing coming under control.
Orpek caught Arallai’s eyes from above him, already closing in on the peak of the tree.
The rat knew that he could be standing right before her and be able to make out no more of the expression that was set in her dark brown eyes.
Arallai, Daughter of the House of Wrenfall, adjusted her sheath and began climbing again without a look back.