Lessons in Birdwatching by Honey Watson

Author:Honey Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915202543
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

XV

Gris Caralla considers herself to be in possession of many bad habits. She is indulging one of them now, sitting at her office window. She really does enjoy smoking.

It is the dead of night, quiet enough that she can hear the tobacco burn.

The window protrudes from the rest of the building, suspended over the metal canopies below. They could be real in this light. Towering ferns arch fanlike between the bubbling heads of coniferous fakes, parasitic mistletoe erupts from webs of metal bark. It’s all too still. She exhales. The smoke joins the mist.

She cannot sleep. She would take something for it, but it is clear to her now that time is running out. None to waste. She had once thought that she might survive Apech. No longer. The only thing that really makes her understand the fact of her death is imagining all the cartons of long, thin cigarettes which will go unsmoked in the embassy’s attic. She does not examine why this image makes her feel so melancholic, why it pulls her heart into her throat. That would be to let fear – or, worse, sentimentality – get in the way of her task.

A task eight years in the making. Too slow and now too fast. Part of her suspects that the reason it has taken so long is that she knew it would take her with it. The black hand possesses her, the responsibility will consume her. But it cannot take from her the enjoyment of a cigarette.

She watches the embers twirl into the darkness below, lights another.

Hers is a thankless task, because nobody else can know.

Sometimes she allows herself to wonder whether she would have come here had she known what she does now. She had volunteered to go into that room, observe the recordings from this strange planet. Somebody had to, it may as well have been her. She had been the first to suspect that the scouts’ madness could be contagious, was transferring in some way however small to those who had been interviewing them. It was then that she had enlisted a deimancer. They had been able to feel it. Something there. Some grim sentience lurking on the edge of reality, changing it, playing with time and disrupting causality. This could not be allowed.

Gris Caralla understands the creatures or sources of power which Crysth terms ‘deities’ to be flaws, mistakes in the rhythm of the universe. She believes them to be manmade. She knows that they can be weakened and battered into powerlessness through the destruction of their corporeal bodies – altars, satellites, icons, words. Sometimes people. The deaths of the polluted. Crysth is a genocidal empire. Smash or grab.

Gris Caralla had thought that she might survive, for a while. Take the secret to her natural grave and kill it there with her. The deimancer had thought this possible, that the god of Apech was already so weak from the ravages of its own people’s war that it may simply expire, that it was nowhere near strong enough to spread.

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