48 - Hissing a Challenge

The chick yard was built high into the canyon wall, with a mix of earthan grass and native stems planted thickly in the niche.  Because it was for the chicks there was no need for mist curtains to filter out the dust and the view up the canyon was crystal clear today.

Dag stood at the outside bulge of the terrace, where the canyon turned.  If she looked upriver, she could barely see the towering spray of mist from Vertical Falls, but even as straight as the flood-carved canyon was, there were enough rock spines to hide the Falls themselves, and the hives.  The terraces all up and down the canyon walls were hard to see, built to be hidden.  She realized now, from the first Emperess’s journal data, that they were built that way deliberately.  Just darkened, sunken bands of natural rock.  She had no idea what the Empress meant by ‘sensors’, but those could only be used from the Owner’s deadly flying machines.

Most of the people of Lainz actually lived in the terraces, dug into the rock, mostly on the south face of the canyon. If they were discovered and if the city were destroyed from the sky, most of them would be fine.  Most of the people would be safe.  She turned to look the other direction, downriver, around the massive bend.

That direction she could just see the white spire of Lainz, the Sun Crystal winking from the top.  It’s a target, she thought.  A decoy and sacrifice.  Did most people even know that his Radiance... and all the working zardukar were actually, usually, tucked safely into the stone where the city pillar touched and became part of the canyon wall?  No.  The story was that the Great Hive was the centre of things.  And it was.  The throne room, the glorious, soaring loggias suspended out over the river...  A long plan of misdirection. The food terraces however were much harder to hide, having to expose their bright green to the sun.  Almost impossible, really.  But hopefully it would never be necessary.

The wind tugged at her full veil, harder now that the outside of it was already crusted from a half-day’s wearing.  A croak and a cheep at her feet and her bird... the red-eye’d one of the three hatchlings, her first hatched tugged at her veil, for attention.

“Yes, yes.  I’m not paying attention to you.  I’ll bet you and everyone else is hungry again.”

She turned away from the outside wall and came inside, her hatchling cheeping around her in circles.  The rest of the flock perked up and came boiling over to see if she were going to feed them.  The noise echoed and re-echoed in the stone as the knee-high warbirds fell over themselves in their urgency.

Of the three eggs she’d hatched, only two had imprinted.  The third had tried to attack her the moment it dried.  The black-eye’d one had imprinted... it seemed, but it acted like a wild animal, never coming nearer than just outside arm’s length and then only when she was filling the stone trough with worms or raw meat or oyucks.

That one had gone to the regular war flock, to be hooded and trained up in the next few months.  They grew so fast.

She knocked on the door of the supply room and the whole chick flock started bouncing and screaming all around her, with eagerness, tearing up grass and orange twigs and dirt in their excitement.  “Worm time.”

Zaru, the supply woman smiled at the noise as she handed the two covered buckets through the slot.  The hatchers took turns now, looking after the whole flock of these new kinds of warbirds.  Dag was still surprised to find these gawky half-fledged chicks clustering to shove their heads under the edges of her clothing every time she sat down, or demanding to cuddle into her lap, by cheeping imperiously at her. There were two flocks of these birds, almost all with red eyes.

She couldn’t hear herself think as she turned and tipped the buckets into their feeding troughs, and the noise level dropped as they tried to keep screaming but couldn’t make the same amount of noise with their beaks full.

Her veil fluttered as she turned way, pulling her hands back inside the cloth and one of the chicks straightened from its crouch by the feeder.  Its head turned toward her.  It turned one red eye toward her, then its black eye.

She slowly reached down to grasp the empty bucket’s upstanding handle.  It was reverting.  She could see it.  Slowly.  Slowly. It swallowed the last bloody segment of worm and as her fingers closed on the metal handle it sprang up towards her face, screaming for her eyes.

Dag swung the bucket hard and it thunked into the hatchling with the sound of a crackle of jumped on twigs, a hissing shriek and scramble of baby sized claws ripped through her veil and scored her wrist as she flung it down against the grass. The rest of the flock scattered like a splintered ants nest.

It tried to struggle up, beak gaping wide enough to take her hand off at the wrist if she let it get hold of her.  She raised the bucket again and it lashed out, driving its fighting claw into the ground next to her foot just as the bucket came down and smashed it to stillness.

“Oh, endarkened.” Zaru said, peering through the hatch. “Not another one.”


Dag dropped the bucket and wrapped the ruins of her veil around her bleeding wrist.  “Another one.  Would you...” She was interrupted by a pathetic beep behind her.  Her chick.  The red-eye’d one... crawled out of the protective cracks in the rock where it had jammed itself, and meeped on its belly towards her.  It rose to its claws as it came around Dag and jumped up, hissing.  It snatched at her veil and she flinched, thinking for a second that it was reverting to wildness too, but it tugged her back, away from the bloody dead chick, then scuttled out to stand between her and it, screeching and flapping a challenge at the corpse.


“Well, now.” Zaru said, as other hatchlings came out to hiss and scratch at the bad, dead chick.

“That’s... wonderful,” Dag said.

 “I’ll get the bandages.”

“Thank you.”