HUMMINGBIRDS
“Imprudent?” Grant demanded of the Eletians. “You’ve
let everything in the forest know we’re here and it’s just
imprudent?”
“Your shouting,”
Graelalea replied, “will only serve to attract further
attention.”
“Oh, so you lower
yourself to speak to me now?”
Karigan couldn’t
help but smile seeing someone else bridling at Graelalea’s haughty
ways. She turned away from the discussion, gazing down the road
into the forest. She spotted the glow of another of the lumeni many
yards away, on the opposite side of the road, its light ghostly in
the mist.
Yates joined her.
“Barely into this thing and they’re already trying to start a
war.”
Behind them, the
discussion had grown sharper, louder, with Lhean joining in with
exhortations in Eletian, his derisive tone
unmistakable.
“I hope not,”
Karigan replied. “We need each other to get through
this.”
“Look,” Yates said,
pointing.
Karigan heard it
before she saw it, a buzzing sound like a bee. It was not a bee,
however, but a hummingbird flitting in front of them, its rapid
wing movements creating the drone. In the light of the lumeni, its
green feathers shimmered with iridescence, a ruby patch at its
throat. It looked just like the hummingbirds back
home.
“I wonder if it’s
lost,” she said. If creatures from Blackveil strayed into their
world through the breach, then surely the reverse occurred as
well.
“Look, another,”
Yates said.
A second darted at
the first and chased it away. Karigan wondered what it was being
territorial about since there were no flowers in sight. A nest or a
mate, maybe?
As the hummingbirds
zipped around the group, a third appeared and hovered in front of
Yates’ face.
“They’re like little
jewels,” he said, mesmerized.
A blur of
pearlescent motion, an Eletian moving faster than the eye could
follow, swept his sword before them neatly slicing the bird in two
in the air. The halves dropped to the ground. Karigan and Yates
gazed in shock at what remained of the hummingbird, its blood
trickling between the cobblestones.
“Five hells!” Yates
exclaimed. “What did you do that for? It was a
hummingbird!”
“You cannot trust
anything here,” the Eletian said. It was Spiney, the lumeni
sparking a silvery glint in his eyes.
“But—” Yates
began.
A droning grew in
the forest around them, grew in a crescendo into a deafening roar
that throbbed through Karigan’s body. The limbs of trees vibrated
with it, causing the collected rainwater to shower down on
them.
“What is it?” Grant
demanded.
“Prepare
yourselves!” Graelalea cried.
A shimmering cloud
of hummingbirds emerged from the woods and hovered around the
company, their wings working furiously, the noise of it
overwhelming. They skimmed overhead and darted between them. There
were hundreds—no, thousands of them.
Ard screamed.
Karigan whirled to see that a hummingbird had impaled his shoulder
with its long beak, wings fluttering to drive deeper. Its throat
pulsed as it drank, the ruby patch on its throat deepening to a
dark crimson.
Graelalea swiftly
yanked the bird out of Ard’s shoulder and smashed it onto the road
where it remained limp and unmoving, blood streaming from its
beak.
“It is not nectar
they seek,” she said.
The hummingbirds
attacked. Beaks pinged on Eletian armor and pinned Sacoridian
flesh, yielding cries of pain. Swords flashed through the air and
birds were cut down simply because there were so many of them.
Otherwise they were too quick, their movements too erratic, to be
fought off. Only the Eletians seemed able to cleave them out of the
air with intention.
Karigan batted them
away with her staff, but her efforts lagged in comparison to the
sheer speed in which the birds maneuvered around her. She kept them
off her, at least, and she was grateful her pack protected her back
though it slowed her own movements.
Yates screamed. A
hummingbird stabbed his thigh. She followed Graelalea’s example and
grabbed it out, its body nothing in her hand. It flicked a long
thread of forked tongue at her and she smashed it onto the paving
stones of the road.
She ducked just in
time as another hummingbird soared for her eye. One jammed its beak
into the leather of her boot. She kicked it off. Another scored the
back of her hand, leaving a trail of blood.
Private Porter
called out as he wobbled precariously on a loose cobble, his arms
flailing. The cloud of hummingbirds paused as one, hovering, wings
beating, waiting. Porter crashed to the ground, and before he could
even attempt to rise, the hummingbird cloud swarmed him, a moving
mass of green and silver and crimson blanketing him. He flailed and
thrashed but could not dislodge the birds.
“Quickly!” Graelalea
cried.
Several of the
company fell to their knees beside Porter grabbing handfuls of
feathers and beaks from his convulsing body, while Karigan and the
others tried to bat away airborne birds around them. Porter’s
screams rang through the forest and curdled Karigan’s blood to her
toes.
Soon the screams
weakened, and then stopped entirely. The swarm of birds lifted
away, slow and ungainly with engorged bellies, and flew back into
the woods. Karigan turned away from Porter’s gruesome
remains.
“The life is gone
from him,” Graelalea announced. “He should be put to rest in
whatever manner your customs dictate.”
“What of those
birds?” Ard demanded. He bled from numerous wounds. “What if they
come back?”
“They shall not
return. Not for the time being, for they are sated.”
Porter’s cloak was
laid over his body, and a cairn of loose cobblestones pulled from
the roadbed was raised over him. Meanwhile, the Eletians, who
escaped the ordeal largely unscathed, tended the wounds of the
Sacoridians with their evaleoren salve. Karigan’s mind eased as the
Eletian woman Hana spread the fragrant salve into the wound on her
hand. Compared to her companions, Karigan had fared
well.
Once the wounds were
treated and the cairn finished, Grant stabbed Porter’s sword into
the earth near where his right hand would be and mumbled a few
halting words asking the gods to receive the good private into the
heavens. When he finished, the Sacoridians made the sign of the
crescent moon while the Eletians looked on as curious
bystanders.
While Grant took
time to sort through Porter’s belongings, discarding most things
but keeping tools essential to the mission, Karigan gazed away from
the grave and down the road. She had hardly known Porter, but did
not doubt he was a good, brave man. Otherwise he would not have
been chosen for the expedition. His fate could have just as easily
been hers or Yates’—any of theirs. It still could be.
She picked dainty
iridescent feathers from her clothes. Hummingbirds, she thought with a shake of her head.
She’d expected confrontations with one of the other horrid
creatures that dwelled in the forest, but hummingbirds? She would
never regard them in the same light again, even on her own side of
the wall.
When wings flashed
in the branches above, she thought that despite Graelalea’s
reassurance, the birds had come back for another
attack.