As he entered the stream, his visions of death finally vanished. No more corpses bobbing in the water, lying on the banks. Sak had realized what was happening.
She gave a final chirp.
He started to run.
One of Patji’s Fingers, growing right next to the mouth of the canyon, was blooming.
“Wait!”
He should not have stopped as Vathi yelled at him. He should have continued on, for time was so slim. However, the sight of that flower—along with her yell—made him hesitate.
The flower …
It struck him as it must have struck Vathi. An idea. Vathi ran for her pack, letting go of Kokerlii, who immediately flew to his shoulder and started chirping at him in annoyed chastisement. Dusk didn’t listen. He yanked the flower off—it was as large as a man’s head, with a large bulging part at the center.
It was invisible in this basin, like they all were.
“A flower that can think,” Vathi said, breathing quickly, fishing in her pack. “A flower that can draw the attention of predators.”
Dusk pulled out his rope as she brought out her weapon and prepared it. He lashed the flower to the end of the spear sticking out slightly from the tube.
Nightmaw screeches echoed up the cavern. He could see their shadows, hear them splashing.
He stumbled back from Vathi as she crouched down, set the weapon’s butt against the ground, and pulled a lever at the base.
The explosion, once again, nearly deafened him.
Aviar all around the rim of the basin screeched and called in fright, taking wing. A storm of feathers and flapping ensued, and through the middle of it, Vathi’s spear shot into the air, flower on the end. It arced out over the canyon into the night.
Dusk grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back along the river, into the lake itself. They slipped into the shallow water, Kokerlii on his shoulder, Sak on hers. They left the lantern burning, giving a quiet light to the suddenly empty basin.
The lake was not deep. Two or three feet. Even crouching, it didn’t cover them completely.
The nightmaws stopped in the canyon. His lanternlight showed a couple of them in the shadows, large as huts, turning and watching the sky. They were smart, but like the meekers, not as smart as men.
Patji, Dusk thought. Patji, please …
The nightmaws turned back down the canyon, following the mental signature broadcast by the flowering plant. And, as Dusk watched, his corpse bobbing in the water nearby grew increasingly translucent.
Then faded away entirely.
Dusk counted to a hundred, then slipped from the waters. Vathi, sodden in her skirts, did not speak as she grabbed the lantern. They left the weapon, its shots expended.
The calls from the nightmaws grew farther and farther away as Dusk led the way out of the canyon, then directly north, slightly downslope. He kept expecting the screeches to turn and follow.
They did not.
* * *
The company fortress was a horridly impressive sight. A work of logs and cannons right at the edge of the water, guarded by an enormous iron-hulled ship. Smoke rose from it, the burning of morning cookfires. A short distance away, what must have been a dead shadow rotted in the sun, its mountainous carcass draped half in the water, half out.
He didn’t see his own corpse anywhere, though on the final leg of their trip to the fortress he had seen it several times. Always in a place of immediate danger. Sak’s visions had returned to normal.
Dusk turned back to the fortress, which he did not enter. He preferred to remain on the rocky, familiar shore—perhaps twenty feet from the entrance—his wounded arm aching as the company people rushed out through the gate to meet Vathi. Their scouts on the upper walls kept careful watch on Dusk. A trapper was not to be trusted.
Even standing here, some twenty feet from the wide wooden gates into the fort, he could smell how wrong the place was. It was stuffed with the scents of men—sweaty bodies, the smell of oil, and other, newer scents that he recognized from his recent trips to the homeisles. Scents that made him feel like an outsider among his own people.
The company men wore sturdy clothing, trousers like Dusk’s but far better tailored, shirts and rugged jackets. Jackets? In Patji’s heat? These people bowed to Vathi, showing her more deference than Dusk would have expected. They drew hands from shoulder to shoulder as they started speaking—a symbol of respect. Foolishness. Anyone could make a gesture like that; it didn’t mean anything. True respect included far more than a hand waved in the air.
But they did treat her like more than a simple scribe. She was better placed in the company than he’d assumed. Not his problem anymore, regardless.
Vathi looked at him, then back at her people. “We must hurry to the machine,” she said to them. “The one from Above. We must turn it off.”
Good. She would do her part. Dusk turned to walk away. Should he give words at parting? He’d never felt the need before. But today, it felt … wrong not to say something.
He started walking. Words. He had never been good with words.
“Turn it off?” one of the men said from behind. “What do you mean, Lady Vathi?”
“You don’t need to feign innocence, Winds,” Vathi said. “I know you turned it on in my absence.”
“But we didn’t.”
Dusk paused. What? The man sounded sincere. But then, Dusk was no expert on human emotions. From what he’d seen of people from the homeisles, they could fake emotion as easily as they faked a gesture of respect.
“What did you do, then?” Vathi asked them.
“We … opened it.”
Oh no …
“Why would you do that?” Vathi asked.
Dusk turned to regard them, but he didn’t need to hear the answer. The answer was before him, in the vision of a dead island he’d misinterpreted.
“We figured,” the man said, “that we should see if we could puzzle out how the machine worked. Vathi, the insides … they’re complex beyond what we could have imagined. But there are seeds there. Things we could—”
“No!” Dusk said, rushing toward them.
One of the sentries above planted an arrow at his feet. He lurched to a stop, looking wildly from Vathi up toward the walls. Couldn’t they see? The bulge in mud that announced a deathant den. The game trail. The distinctive curl of a cutaway vine. Wasn’t it obvious?
“It will destroy us,” Dusk said. “Don’t seek … Don’t you see…?”
For a moment, they all just stared at him. He had a chance. Words. He needed words.
“That machine is deathants!” he said. “A den, a … Bah!” How could he explain?
He couldn’t. In his anxiety, words fled him, like Aviar fluttering away into the night.
The others finally started moving, pulling Vathi toward the safety of their treasonous fortress.
“You said the corpses are gone,” Vathi said as she was ushered through the gates. “We’ve succeeded. I will see that the machine is not engaged on this trip! I promise you this, Dusk!”
“But,” he cried back, “it was never meant to be engaged!”
The enormous wooden gates of the fortress creaked closed, and he lost sight of her. Dusk cursed. Why hadn’t he been able to explain?
Because he didn’t know how to talk. For once in his life, that seemed to matter.
Furious, frustrated, he stalked away from that place and its awful smells. Halfway to the tree line, however, he stopped, then turned. Sak fluttered down, landing on his shoulder and cooing softly.
Questions. Those questions wanted into his brain.
Instead he yelled at the guards. He demanded they return Vathi to him. He even pled.
Nothing happened. They wouldn’t speak to him. Finally, he started to feel foolish. He turned back toward the trees, and continued on his way. His assumptions were probably wrong. After all, the corpses were gone. Everything could go back to normal.
… Normal. Could anything ever be norm
al with that fortress looming behind him? He shook his head, entering the canopy. The dense humidity of Patji’s jungle should have calmed him.
Instead it annoyed him. As he started the trek toward another of his safecamps, he was so distracted that he could have been a youth, his first time on Sori. He almost stumbled straight onto a gaping deathant den; he didn’t even notice the vision Sak sent. This time, dumb luck saved him as he stubbed his toe on something, looked down, and only then spotted both corpse and crack crawling with motes of yellow.
He growled, then sneered. “Still you try to kill me?” he shouted, looking up at the canopy. “Patji!”
Silence.
“The ones who protect you are the ones you try hardest to kill,” Dusk shouted. “Why!”
The words were lost in the jungle. It consumed them.
“You deserve this, Patji,” he said. “What is coming to you. You deserve to be destroyed!”
He breathed out in gasps, sweating, satisfied at having finally said those things. Perhaps there was a purpose for words. Part of him, as traitorous as Vathi and her company, was glad that Patji would fall to their machines.
Of course, then the company itself would fall. To the Ones Above. His entire people. The world itself.
He bowed his head in the shadows of the canopy, sweat dripping down the sides of his face. Then he fell to his knees, heedless of the nest just three strides away.
Sak nuzzled into his hair. Above, in the branches, Kokerlii chirped uncertainly.
“It’s a trap, you see,” he whispered. “The Ones Above have rules. They can’t trade with us until we’re advanced enough. Just like a man can’t, in good conscience, bargain with a child until they are grown. And so, they have left their machines for us to discover, to prod at and poke. The dead man was a ruse. Vathi was meant to have those machines.
“There will be explanations, left as if carelessly, for us to dig into and learn. And at some point in the near future, we will build something like one of their machines. We will have grown more quickly than we should have. We will be childlike still, ignorant, but the laws from Above will let these visitors trade with us. And then, they will take this land for themselves.”
That was what he should have said. Protecting Patji was impossible. Protecting the Aviar was impossible. Protecting their entire world was impossible. Why hadn’t he explained it?
Perhaps because it wouldn’t have done any good. As Vathi had said … progress would come. If you wanted to call it that.
Dusk had arrived.
Sak left his shoulder, winging away. Dusk looked after her, then cursed. She did not land nearby. Though flying was difficult for her, she fluttered on, disappearing from his sight.
“Sak?” he asked, rising and stumbling after the Aviar. He fought back the way he had come, following Sak’s squawks. A few moments later, he lurched out of the jungle.
Vathi stood on the rocks before her fortress.
Dusk hesitated at the brim of the jungle. Vathi was alone, and even the sentries had retreated. Had they cast her out? No. He could see that the gate was cracked, and some people watched from inside.
Sak had landed on Vathi’s shoulder down below. Dusk frowned, reaching his hand to the side and letting Kokerlii land on his arm. Then he strode forward, calmly making his way down the rocky shore, until he was standing just before Vathi.
She’d changed into a new dress, though there were still snarls in her hair. She smelled of flowers.
And her eyes were terrified.
He’d traveled the darkness with her. Had faced nightmaws. Had seen her near to death, and she had not looked this worried.
“What?” he asked, finding his voice hoarse.
“We found instructions in the machine,” Vathi whispered. “A manual on its workings, left there as if accidentally by someone who worked on it before. The manual is in their language, but the smaller machine I have…”
“It translates.”
“The manual details how the machine was constructed,” Vathi says. “It’s so complex I can barely comprehend it, but it seems to explain concepts and ideas, not just give the workings of the machine.”
“And are you not happy?” he asked. “You will have your flying machines soon, Vathi. Sooner than anyone could have imagined.”
Wordless, she held something up. A single feather—a mating plume. She had kept it.
“Never move without asking yourself, is this too easy?” she whispered. “You said it was a trap as I was pulled away. When we found the manual, I … Oh, Dusk. They are planning to do to us what … what we are doing to Patji, aren’t they?”
Dusk nodded.
“We’ll lose it all. We can’t fight them. They’ll find an excuse, they’ll seize the Aviar. It makes perfect sense. The Aviar use the worms. We use the Aviar. The Ones Above use us. It’s inevitable, isn’t it?”
Yes, he thought. He opened his mouth to say it, and Sak chirped. He frowned and turned back toward the island. Jutting from the ocean, arrogant. Destructive.
Patji. Father.
And finally, at long last, Dusk understood.
“No,” he whispered.
“But—”
He undid his pants pocket, then reached deeply into it, digging around. Finally, he pulled something out. The remnants of a feather, just the shaft now. A mating plume that his uncle had given him, so many years ago, when he’d first fallen into a trap on Sori. He held it up, remembering the speech he’d been given. Like every trapper.
This is the symbol of your ignorance. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Vathi held hers. Old and new.
“No, they will not have us,” Dusk said. “We will see through their traps, and we will not fall for their tricks. For we have been trained by the Father himself for this very day.”
She stared at his feather, then up at him.
“Do you really think that?” she asked. “They are cunning.”
“They may be cunning,” he said. “But they have not lived on Patji. We will gather the other trappers. We will not let ourselves be taken in.”
She nodded hesitantly, and some of the fear seemed to leave her. She turned and waved for those behind her to open the gates to the building. Again, the scents of mankind washed over him.
Vathi looked back, then held out her hand to him. “You will help, then?”
His corpse appeared at her feet, and Sak chirped warningly. Danger. Yes, the path ahead would include much danger.
Dusk took Vathi’s hand and stepped into the fortress anyway.
POSTSCRIPT
The original version of this story had Dusk referring to himself as “Sixth,” which was super confusing to readers. I liked it because it was so different, but in the end I relented to the feedback I was getting—because it was the right thing to do. Not only is “Dusk” more important thematically than “Sixth,” it’s way easier to keep track of in a sentence.
For those who don’t know, this story was brainstormed on an episode of Writing Excuses. We did four episodes where we brainstormed together, then one of us took that idea and wrote a story on it. The initial brainstorming session we did for me ended up failing; I just wasn’t excited about the story. So we tried again, and this was the result.
This is the only story in the anthology where the world wasn’t built into the original Cosmere plan. I did, however, leave myself room in my Cosmere outline for a handful of worlds I hadn’t defined yet—as I knew I’d eventually have stories I wanted to tell that didn’t fit on a planet with a Shard. Our brainstorming session on air wasn’t specifically for a Cosmere story, but as I worked on the outline, I was intrigued by the idea of using symbiosis (in a new way) for a Cosmere Investiture.
I quickly fell in love with the idea, and the resulting story. You’ll likely see more from the people of this planet, though there are no plans for another story or novel in the world. If you can’t tell from the Alcatraz books and the Horneater culture in the Stormlight Archive, I have a f
ascination with Polynesian culture. The concept of wayfinding through the lapping of waves is just one of those things that won’t leave me alone, and the ability to write about a character out on his own on the ocean—isolated in multiple ways—was intriguing to me. Also, considering how many talkative characters I do in books, it was a pleasure to try something new in someone like Dusk.
This is the farthest forward, timeline-wise, of any of the stories in this collection. So, at the time of Khriss’s writing of the introduction to the system, the events of this story haven’t actually taken place yet.
If you’d like to read the original brainstorming sessions in print form, along with early drafts of this story, they’re available (along with the three stories written by the other hosts of Writing Excuses: Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler) in an anthology called Shadows Beneath.
THE
ROSHARAN
SYSTEM
THE ROSHARAN SYSTEM
ROSHAR (which—characteristic of the dominant confidence of its people—is the name of a planet, a system, and the main continent on the planet) is a busy place. As empty as the Scadrian system seems, this one always feels crowded to me. A series of enormous gas giants crowd the outer reaches of the system, though nobody has been able to observe them directly, as their manifestation on Shadesmar is minor.
There are a whopping three planets in the habitable zone, all of which are inhabited to one extent or another. There is Ashyn, the burning planet, which suffered a cataclysm long ago. People here live in very small pockets of survivability, including the famous floating cities. Farthest out of the three is Braize, which despite being cold and inhospitable to men is home to an ecosystem of self-aware Splinters. (The local parlance would call them spren.) I believe it’s possible some of these are actually Cognitive Shadows, but research here is difficult and dangerous, so I will hold back on theorizing for the moment.