She screamed.
Many predators on Patji were hard of hearing, but still that wasn’t wise. Dusk didn’t care. He yanked the spike from his skin, unconcerned with the bleeding for now, and checked the other spikes on the drop-rope trap.
No poison. Blessedly, they had not been poisoned.
“Your arm!” Vathi said.
He grunted. It didn’t hurt. Yet. She began fishing in her pack for a bandage, and he accepted her ministrations without complaint or groan, even as the pain came upon him.
“I’m so sorry!” Vathi sputtered. “I found a mating plume! That meant an Aviar nest, so I thought to look in the tree. Have we stumbled across another trapper’s safecamp?”
She was babbling out words as she worked. Seemed appropriate. When he grew nervous, he grew even more quiet. She would do the opposite.
She was good with a bandage, again surprising him. The wound had not hit any major arteries. He would be fine, though using his left hand would not be easy. This would be an annoyance. When she was done, looking sheepish and guilty, he reached down and picked up the mating plume she had dropped.
“This,” he said with a harsh whisper, holding it up before her, “is the symbol of your ignorance. On the Pantheon Islands, nothing is easy, nothing is simple. That plume was placed by another trapper to catch someone who does not deserve to be here, someone who thought to find an easy prize. You cannot be that person. Never move without asking yourself, is this too easy?”
She paled. Then she took the feather in her fingers.
“Come.”
He turned and walked on their way. That was the speech for an apprentice, he realized. Upon their first major mistake. A ritual among trappers. What had possessed him to give it to her?
She followed behind, head bowed, appropriately shamed. She didn’t realize the honor he had just paid her, if unconsciously. They walked onward, an hour or more passing.
By the time she spoke, for some reason, he almost welcomed the words breaking upon the sounds of the jungle. “I’m sorry.”
“You need not be sorry,” he said. “Only careful.”
“I understand.” She took a deep breath, following behind him on the path. “And I am sorry. Not just about your arm. About this island. About what is coming. I think it inevitable, but I do wish that it did not mean the end of such a grand tradition.”
“I…”
Words. He hated trying to find words.
“It… was not dusk when I was born,” he finally said, then hacked down a swampvine and held his breath against the noxious fumes that it released toward him. They were only dangerous for a few moments.
“Excuse me?” Vathi asked, keeping her distance from the swampvine. “You were born…”
“My mother did not name me for the time of day. I was named because my mother saw the dusk of our people. The sun will soon set on us, she often told me.” He looked back to Vathi, letting her pass him and enter a small clearing.
Oddly, she smiled at him. Why had he found those words to speak? He followed into the clearing, concerned at himself. He had not given those words to his uncle; only his parents knew the source of his name.
He was not certain why he’d told this scribe from an evil company. But… it did feel good to have said them.
A nightmaw broke through between two trees behind Vathi.
The enormous beast would have been as tall as a tree if it had stood upright. Instead it leaned forward in a prowling posture, powerful legs behind bearing most of its weight, its two clawed forelegs ripping up the ground. It reached forward its long neck, beak open, razor-sharp and deadly. It looked like a bird—in the same way that a wolf looked like a lapdog.
He threw his machete. An instinctive reaction, for he did not have time for thought. He did not have time for fear. That snapping beak—as tall as a door—would have the two of them dead in moments.
His machete glanced off the beak and actually cut the creature on the side of the head. That drew its attention, making it hesitate for just a moment. Dusk leaped for Vathi. She stepped back from him, setting the butt of her tube against the ground. He needed to pull her away, to—
The explosion deafened him.
Smoke bloomed around Vathi, who stood—wide eyed—having dropped the lantern, oil spilling. The sudden sound stunned Dusk, and he almost collided with her as the nightmaw lurched and fell, skidding, the ground thumping from the impact.
Dusk found himself on the ground. He scrambled to his feet, backing away from the twitching nightmaw mere inches from him. Lit by flickering lanternlight, it was all leathery skin that was bumpy like that of a bird who had lost her feathers.
It was dead. Vathi had killed it.
She said something.
Vathi had killed a nightmaw.
“Dusk!” Her voice seemed distant.
He raised a hand to his forehead, which had belatedly begun to prickle with sweat. His wounded arm throbbed, but he was otherwise tense. He felt as if he should be running. He had never wanted to be so close to one of these. Never.
She’d actually killed it.
He turned toward her, his eyes wide. Vathi was trembling, but she covered it well. “So, that worked,” she said. “We weren’t certain it would, even though we’d prepared these specifically for the nightmaws.”
“It’s like a cannon,” Dusk said. “Like from one of the ships, only in your hands.”
“Yes.”
He turned back toward the beast. Actually, it wasn’t dead, not completely. It twitched, and let out a plaintive screech that shocked him, even with his hearing muffled. The weapon had fired that spear right into the beast’s chest.
The nightmaw quaked and thrashed a weak leg.
“We could kill them all,” Dusk said. He turned, then rushed over to Vathi, taking her with his right hand, the arm that wasn’t wounded. “With those weapons, we could kill them all. Every nightmaw. Maybe the shadows too!”
“Well, yes, it has been discussed. However, they are important parts of the ecosystem on these islands. Removing the apex predators could have undesirable results.”
“Undesirable results?” Dusk ran his left hand through his hair. “They’d be gone. All of them! I don’t care what other problems you think it would cause. They would all be dead.”
Vathi snorted, picking up the lantern and stamping out the fires it had started. “I thought trappers were connected to nature.”
“We are. That’s how I know we would all be better off without any of these things.”
“You are disabusing me of many romantic notions about your kind, Dusk,” she said, circling the dying beast.
Dusk whistled, holding up his arm. Kokerlii fluttered down from high branches; in the chaos and explosion, Dusk had not seen the bird fly away. Sak still clung to his shoulder with a death grip, her claws digging into his skin through the cloth. He hadn’t noticed. Kokerlii landed on his arm and gave an apologetic chirp.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Dusk said soothingly. “They prowl the night. Even when they cannot sense our minds, they can smell us.” Their sense of smell was said to be incredible. This one had come up the trail behind them; it must have crossed their path and followed it.
Dangerous. His uncle always claimed the nightmaws were growing smarter, that they knew they could not hunt men only by their minds. I should have taken us across more streams, Dusk thought, reaching up and rubbing Sak’s neck to soothe her. There just isn’t time…