The journey to the strix’s roost was less torturous than Isiem had feared, although it did not begin that way.
For the first stretch—less than an hour, he guessed, although it felt ten times as long—they kept him stumbling blindly along the rocks and gullies. The blindfold smelled of old blood and, after a while, suffocatingly of his own sweat. Isiem stubbed his toes so many times that he was mildly surprised they didn’t break off. Twice he fell hard enough to skin his good elbow and his knees.
He heard the itaraak exchanging comments around him. His translation spell had worn off long ago and the inflections of the strix’s tongue were far different from those of Taldane; still, Isiem could tell that they were increasingly impatient with his clumsiness.
But what was he to do? He couldn’t see, the ground was littered with loose rock, and they offered him no help. Grim-faced, he pressed on.
After leading him up a particularly steep rise, the strix stopped for a while. Isiem felt a chill gather around him as they waited, and understood that he was standing in shadow, not sun. Is there anything tall enough to cast such a shadow in the hills?
He heard the rattle of bones knocking against one another and the rasp of coarse rope unrolling. Then the strix were ushering him across a bridge that swayed and creaked at every step, and he was listening to the wind howl underfoot. Only a thin guide rope told him where to go—and Honey didn’t even have that. The dog had her eyes, though, and somehow she followed Isiem across.
On the other side, mercifully, the walk came to an end.
“Sit,” the leader of the itaraak told him in strained Taldane. The other strix parceled food out among themselves—Isiem could hear them cracking open sealed gourds and unwrapping brittle dried leaves, could smell smoked meat and herbed yams—but they offered him nothing. Hands bound, broken arm ablaze with pain, he could do nothing but swallow his hunger and wait.
After a seeming eternity the strix began to move again. One of them uttered a word of magic; Isiem’s ears pricked at the familiar syllables, although the accent was different and the strix spoke quietly, so that he could not identify exactly what was said. But he was not surprised when, a moment later, he felt a new, larger presence loom upon the rocks nearby. Stone groaned in the grip of powerful claws; the wind rilled over stiff flight feathers. Isiem heard no breathing, though, and he felt no warmth radiating from what was surely a massive body perched above.
One of the strix untied the shadowcaller’s hands. “Ride.”
The enormous thing they had summoned came down from its rocky perch. Its movements creaked audibly, like the rope bridge had. A sun-baked, dusty smell surrounded it, along with the scents of crushed pollen and dried meat.
The strix took Isiem’s hands and guided him, still blindfolded, onto the creature’s back. Under its feathers he felt hard bone, with no muscle or fat to pad it. His foot slid as he climbed on, and his toes caught in an empty space between two of its naked ribs. There was no sign that the creature felt any pain at his slip, or that it even noticed. He clung to it weakly with his good hand, unable to maintain a grip with the other.
“What is this thing?” Isiem asked. Whether it was an enchanted construct or undead, he knew for a certainty that it was not alive.
“Gift of our ancestors,” the masked itaraak answered. “Hold on strong.”
“What about my dog?”
“Tokoaa will carry it in claws. No hurting.”
“I don’t think—” Isiem began, but then the unliving thing under him lurched off the ground and the wind stripped his words away. The speed of their ascent ripped at his blindfold, allowing him to glimpse just how quickly the earth was receding—and how sharp it was. The red-veined spikes of stone that gave Devil’s Perch its name looked like an army of readied spears beneath them. The shadowcaller squeezed his eyes shut, lowered his body against the bony steed’s, and held on for his life.
Hurtling blind through the sky on a mount he could not control and could barely grasp was one of the most terrifying experiences Isiem had ever endured. The wind was frigid, the height unknowable, the strix unfriendly … but most frightening of all was his complete lack of power. Nothing was under his control in this journey, and for Isiem there was no greater horror.
He collapsed in relief when they finally landed. It was a lurching, jaw-jarring stop that smashed his tongue between his teeth, but Isiem hardly noticed the sudden taste of blood. All the strength seemed to have been drained out of him by the flight. Honey bounded up and licked his face, pausing occasionally to worry at the leather band covering his eyes. The dog seemed unfazed by her own sojourn through the sky.
The itaraak removed his blindfold. Already the thing that had borne him to their home—the tokoaa, he supposed—was gone, presumably returned to the place from whence it had been summoned.
But the strix remained, and their city was of such strangeness that it soon drove the mystery of the tokoaa from his mind.
It wasn’t really a city, Isiem realized after a moment. The crimson spires and crooked black claws of Devil’s Perch gave Windspire the appearance of a city crowded with towers, but most of those stony perches were empty. If they had ever been settled, they were desolate now.
The ones still occupied held tangles of rope, netting, and vines, all woven into nests suspended beneath their arches and between their crags. Long, pale bones served as supports here and there, as did leg-thick poles of braided grass stiffened with reddish unguents. The nests were carefully concealed from aerial view; any foes flying overhead would see only the surrounding rock. Isiem saw a few ladders and bridges linking some of the smaller nests in the heart of the settlement, but most were unconnected. He presumed that the very young and very old lived there. The other strix, able to fly from home to home, had no need of ropes to help them.
Despite the chaos of materials used in the settlement’s construction, there was a peculiarly unified beauty to the whole. Just as a robin’s nest spun order out of jumbled twigs and straws, so the strix had built something verging on elegance from their scavenged scraps.
“Kotarra,” the masked strix said. “This way.” He hopped down a crooked ledge, gripping the uneven stone with clawed toes and spreading his wings for balance as he walked toward a tented nest. The sides of the tent were made of stitched deerhides, lavishly adorned with geometric designs in bone beads and clay paints. A trickle of bluish smoke escaped from a hole near its top.
Isiem picked his way slowly along the ledge, wishing too late that he’d told Honey to stay back until called. The dog trotting cheerfully at his heels was likely to knock him down to his death—and, indeed, once her nose jostled the back of his knee, causing a black flash of panic. It was a long fall to the bottom of Devil’s Perch.
But he kept his balance, and he soon came to the covered nest’s entry flap.
“In,” the masked itaraak said, standing to the side.
“You’re not coming?”
“The rokoa asked for you alone.”
“Very well.” Isiem was acutely conscious of how disreputable he looked. Between his lonely stay in the miner’s cabin and the dishevelment of the ride to Windspire, he looked like a sorry vagrant indeed. No good house in Westcrown would have admitted him; in Pangolais he would have been swept quietly off to the Umbral Dungeons to await sacrifice. He had to hope that appearances mattered less to the strix, at least where kotarra were concerned.
“Honey, stay,” he told the dog, having no idea whether she’d listen. Quickly, before his furry companion could follow and offend the strix, Isiem pushed the tent flap aside and stepped in. The flap fell shut behind him, closing him in smoky darkness punctuated by the filigreed glow of small, scattered bone braziers.
A winged form shifted in the gloom. As his eyes adjusted, Isiem recognized the rokoa sitting on a raised cushion fashioned from a tumbleweed padded with felted hair and feathers. She gestured for him to take a similar cushion facing her.
Isiem obeyed. The rokoa held a faded, yellowed page in one hand. It had been folded into a frayed blossom. He couldn’t make out any of the page’s lettering, but when she motioned for him to give her his hand, he understood that it was some sort of spell talisman. Again he did as he was bidden. The rokoa touched his palm with a single wrinkled fingertip, and he felt a spark of magic pass between them.
“Welcome,” she said. There was no twinning of voices with this spell; he understood her perfectly, but he only heard the clicks and whistles of strix. “We are grateful you came.”
“I had little choice in the matter,” Isiem replied.
“Not true. You could have gone with the black riders when they first came to visit the ashes. Instead you chose to run, and so my daughter found you. That was a choice. That choice brought you here.” The rokoa blinked sideways, nictating membranes sliding across her eyes, but only the movement told Isiem that she had blinked. The aged strix’s eyes were so rheumy that they appeared perpetually lidded. “Always there is a choice.”
Isiem shrugged. “Whether that is so or not, I am here now. Why did you summon me?”
“My daughter says you are a traitor to the kotarra. Is that true?”
“The Hellknights would tell you so.”
“I did not ask that. I asked if it were true.”
“I’ve learned to be cautious of absolutes,” Isiem said. “What is ‘true’ depends on perspective. Fly above Windspire, or walk on the ravine floors below, and it might be ‘true’ that no nests exist—but from the perspective of your people, perched among its ledges, the city is easy to find. When it comes to questions of loyalty, truth is equally a matter of perspective.”
“Cleverly said,” the rokoa acknowledged, “but that is not an answer.” She reached for a triangular clay pot and deftly poured two small cups of a steaming, musky-smelling brew. “Do you wish for tea?”
“Thank you.” Isiem accepted a cup but did not drink. He cupped it in the palm of his good hand, letting its warmth spread across his skin. “I’m sorry if it seems that I’m evading your question. I have no better answer to give. I believe that I have become a traitor in the eyes of Cheliax and Nidal. In my own eyes … I don’t know that I was ever loyal. I’ve wanted to escape for as long as I can remember. I just never believed I could.”
“Have you escaped now?” She extended a wizened hand, indicating that he should give his own to her. Reluctantly he put his cup on the floor—the rokoa’s nest had no tables—and complied. The rokoa wove another spell, tapping the jangling mass of necklaces knotted around her wrinkled neck, and a soothing coolness flowed from her hand into his. Bone scraped against bone as Isiem’s broken arm knitted; the fever that had begun to take hold in his flesh vanished.
He bowed his head in gratitude. But he still answered bluntly, and truthfully. “I don’t know. Maybe not. The Chelaxians seem determined to bring Devil’s Perch under their control.”
“But that would not be in your interest,” the rokoa said softly. She picked up the cup she had set aside and drank her tea in a single long swallow.
“My interests are not yours. You want to drive the Chelaxians out of the west. I have no particular reason to care. I only need to avoid them. I don’t need to hold land against them. Leaving would suit my ends just as well—and much more safely.”
“Yet you stayed. You told my daughter what you could about their secrets. Why, if it is not in your interest to see them driven from our roosts?”
“Well, for one, I hear you help people get to Pezzack,” Isiem replied with a wry smile. The rokoa’s expression did not change, and after an awkward pause he abandoned his weak attempt at levity.
“I don’t much like Nidal,” he confessed. “Faced with death, my people chose to cling to their land at any price … and with Zon-Kuthon’s blessing, they did. They kept their land, and they lost their souls. I feel they chose poorly.
“The Chelaxians made a similar bargain. The death of their god threatened their empire, and so their greatest house sold itself and all its kin to devils. They held their lands and their power at the expense of whoever they were before.
“To be sure, Cheliax has not fallen as far as Nidal, or as completely. It is an empire at war with itself, riven with rebellion and conflicted down to the last strands of its soul. But the greater part, the stronger part, made an infernal bargain just as my people did, and paid a similar price. Whether they wish to believe it or not, we Nidalese know better. It is no accident that the Umbral Court sends so many advisors to Cheliax.”
“All very interesting, these troubles of kotarra,” the rokoa interrupted, “but what has this to do with us?”
“I saw the slaves that the Chelaxians sold in Pangolais,” Isiem answered, letting as much of the old anguish show as he dared, “and I saw what became of the rebels in Westcrown. I know what happens to those who defy Imperial Cheliax and lose. I dealt some of those punishments with my own hand. I cannot stand silent in my cowardice and watch it happen again.”
“Do you hope for atonement?” the old strix asked. Her face remained a mask of wrinkles, her eyes opaque and unrevealing as opal cabochons. Nothing in any word or gesture betrayed the slightest hint of her thoughts.
Somehow, that very opacity freed Isiem to speak more frankly than he would have imagined possible. He felt that she would not condemn him, whatever he said. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what atonement would be. But I see how badly your people are outmatched, and I do not want you to suffer as you will if you fight and fail. And I see, too, that you are faced with the same choice that Nidal was, and that Cheliax was. Both of them, I believe, decided wrongly.”
“Ah,” she said. “Yes. The choice between land and soul.” The rokoa reached into her hollow tumbleweed cushion and brought out the copied map that Isiem had made for Kirii. “My daughter showed me this. Your drawing. The places that the black riders claim.” She ran a wizened finger over the paper, sketching out a smaller, jagged shape within the larger one Isiem had drawn to mark the silver strike. “Our summer roost.”
Isiem inclined his head in acknowledgment, saying nothing.
“You suggest we should cede these grounds to them? Risk losing Windspire and retreating to Ciricskree in dishonor? Consign our children to the lowest nests, give up the teachings of our ancestors for those of the Screeching Spire? My daughter told you true: our kin would take us in. The itarii do not abandon their blood. But we would live among them as beggars. Is that the fate you would have for us?”
“Yes,” Isiem said. The word tasted bitter on his tongue; he could not imagine how much more so it was to hear. No doubt the rokoa regretted her kindness in healing him. But the answer, he believed, was clear. “If you fight them, your warriors will die—on the battlefield, if they’re lucky; on the altars of Pangolais, if they’re not. I don’t believe the Chelaxians have any interest in the remainder of Devil’s Perch. This land is impossible to farm, too dangerous to hunt. Windspire itself holds nothing of interest to them. All they want is the silver. Were I you, I would let them have it, and protect the lives of my people.”
“This land holds our bones,” the rokoa said calmly. “We hunt here, we raise our young here, we die here. The bones of a thousand generations of itarii, all the way back to the first dread storm that carried us from the world of gods. You suggest we abandon all our traditions.”
“I suggest you abandon dirt and rocks. The dead are dead. What do they care? Anyway, you will not lose them all. Your people carry the bones of your dead; I’ve seen them, and Kirii has explained the custom to me. But even if you were to abandon them, every last one, I ask you: Which matters more? Protecting your ancestors, or your descendants?”
The rokoa trilled a sharp little hiss through her teeth. “That is our choice? Dishonor or death? Over a shiny metal that kotarra women hang from their ears?”
“Over silver, yes,” Isiem said. “Over silver and Cheliax’s dreams of glory. I’m sorry.”