Eaven

Origin

The splice is Irugaine, eagle and wolf. The Alverians "viewed them as perfect, and with that saw no need for a variant of them, thus they locked their genetic code." They were made for one officer, the Great Alverian General, and their purpose was to be his eyes over every battlefield of the Age of Alveria: to fly, to see, to hold what was seen, and to return it whole.

The General's name is Oskrethel, called in full Oskrethel the Eye Above the Host, after the Alverian manner in which a rank accretes an honorific that grows with reputation. He was one of the three hundred lords who ascended into flesh constructs, and he commanded the ground war of the Scourging from the air. Whether he choked under Vaeyar's storm, or breathes replicated air in a bunker among the fifty-six lords who remain, none know. The Eaven do not ask. They hold that he will come, and they will not say his name aloud; they use the title only, in the old tongue, and the name itself is spoken once in an Eaven's life, at the moment it is told to the newly hatched.

When the stars went out and every enchantment failed, the empire fell in a night and the General's slaves went up into the trees. "When the empire collapse, none saw them again, yet their colonies, existing within a hollowed out trees, still exist, building their forces for the day the great Alverian General returns and they can finally share with him the knowledge they have spent thousands of years acquiring." The flattest sentence in their history is the one that closes it. "They are incapable of moving past their directive."

They serve no living power. They gather because they cannot stop gathering, and they hold because they cannot let go, and the intelligence is delivered to nobody and traded to nobody, and no army of this age has ever flown an Eaven above it. The fear among the learned is not a fear that the Eaven have chosen a side. It is that they are still waiting to be told which one.

Body

An Eaven stands fifteen feet when it stands. It seldom does. On the ground it moves on all fours, "massive bodies the size of horses," hunched and unhurried, and the back of a walking Eaven is level with a rider's shoulder. The wings do not come off the shoulders. They grow "from their ribbed spines," great feathered sails carried along the length of the back, and when they open the whole silhouette changes from animal to sky. The weight is between nine hundred and fourteen hundred pounds, and the wingspan of a grown Eaven is over forty feet.

The chimera is plainest in the frame. An Eaven carries two harnesses of bone where every other creature carries one. The forelimbs are the wolf's, slung from a heavy shoulder girdle, made to walk on and to hold a carcass down; the wings hang off a second structure entirely, a fused ridge of the dorsal vertebrae with flanges grown out along the ribs, so that the whole back is a keel and the whole spine is a mast. Between the two the ribcage is a cage of hollow struts, thin-walled, stiffened inside like the grain of a honeycomb. A healer of another people who opened one would find the chest almost empty. The lungs do not fill and empty; they are a fixed mesh through which air is drawn in one direction by a bellows of nine air sacs, and those sacs run out of the body cavity and into the bones themselves, so that the marrow of an Eaven's wing bone is breath. The animal is therefore nearly weightless for its bulk and burns like a furnace to stay warm. It eats accordingly.

The hair is old, thin and grey at the root, and under the outer feathers there is a second layer of down that lies flat in flight and is fluffed on the branch, and it is this the resin fire is for. The heart is large and beats fast and the blood is thin and bright and clots in seconds; a claw wound taken over a battlefield is sealed before the Eaven lands. The face is the part that stops people. It "resembles an early form of a Irugaine blended with a eagles features, and long beak," which is to say something that was a tree spirit before a raptor was laid over the top of it. The eyes are withered, "having seen the horrors of the world." The claws are the weapon: "their razor sharp claws, curved and extendable to one foot, can tear an unarmoured person in two." The extension is a sheath of tendon driven from the forearm, and the claw locks out and does not retract under load, which is why an Eaven that has closed on a thing carries it whether it wants to or not.

The head is longer than it looks from below, because the braincase runs back over the neck in a smooth taper under the feathers, and an Eaven skull laid on a table is three quarters memory. What fills it is not held the way other peoples hold a thing. An Eaven does not recall an event; it re-enters it, at the speed the event ran, with the smell and the light and the cold of it entire. This is the whole gift and it is the whole wound.

Their world is two worlds and they do not overlap. By day the eyes work at distances no other people can imagine: an Eaven at a mile can count a column, read the device on a shield, tell a full waggon from an empty one by the depth of its ruts, and it sees a range of colour in which fresh blood and old blood are two plainly different things. Inside twenty feet that same eye is nearly useless, and an Eaven examining something in its own claw must hold the claw out at arm's length and turn its head to bring one eye onto it. By night the eagle shuts down and the wolf takes over. Scent and hearing run the dark, and an Eaven moving under the canopy at night is working from a picture built entirely of smell, in which a camp is a shape with an age to it, and fear has its own note, and a lie told by a frightened man an hour ago is still hanging in the air of the tent.

Ancient Alverian, in the Eaven mouth, has kept a feature the rest of the language lost: every statement carries its source in the verb. A thing seen, a thing heard, a thing smelled and a thing recited to the speaker by another take four different forms, and the forms cannot be omitted. This is why no Eaven report has ever been wrong in eight thousand years, and it is why a translator who works on their speech comes away exhausted, and it is why their whole law of truth hangs on a grammar.

They stand upright only when addressed. The gesture is not courtesy; it is the posture they were built to adopt when receiving an order. They live for thousands of years, and how many thousands none can say, because no Eaven has ever been seen to die of age.

Life

An Eaven pairs once. The bond is sealed in a flight above the canopy on a night without ash, the two locking talons at height and falling together, wings shut, until the tree tops are close enough to touch; then they break and rise. A pair that has fallen together does not part again in life, and a widowed Eaven does not pair again. The nest is built in the highest hollow of the god tree from deadwood and the mother's own shed feathers, and it is used by the same pair for as long as they live, added to each season until it is the size of a cottage.

The clutch is two eggs, never more and seldom fewer. When they are laid, the sire flies out for fire. He takes it where he finds it: a lightning-struck trunk, a charcoal-burner's pit, a village hearth left unwatched. He carries the brand home in his claws and lays it against a ring of god-tree resin packed around the nest, and the resin takes and burns low and cold and slow for the whole of the brooding, which is a season and a half. The ring keeps the eggs warm in the wind at that height, and it keeps every climbing thing away, and from below the colony's tree shows as a crown of small red lights that villagers take for marsh-fire or for stars come down.

Both eggs hatch. One chick lives. Within its first days the stronger drives the weaker to the edge of the nest and over it into the ring of resin, and the parents watch and do not move, and when the fire has done its work the survivor eats what is left. This is the first thing an Eaven remembers, and an Eaven remembers everything. Every one of them carries the face of the brother it killed for the whole of its thousands of years, exactly, without softening. They speak of it plainly. The one that burned is the price of the one that watches.

The stages have names and the names are the old rank words, because in this people a life is a posting. A chick before the resin is nothing and is not called anything. The survivor is Sak, the fed, and is fed torn meat for two years and does not leave the nest. At three it is Erk, the flown, and spends a decade doing nothing but flying, in weather and out of it, learning the country under one tree until it can put itself down on any branch of it in the dark. It is not counted a person until it can recite the whole of what its parents hold, at speed, in the correct forms, without a prompt; the day it does, it is given a posting, and the posting is its name, and it flies out.

Death by age is nowhere in their experience. Death by violence is rare and is answered by the same fire: the body is laid in the resin ring and burned through, and the ash is worked into the walls of the nest, so that the archive is built, quite literally, from the archivists. They are carnivores. The eagle in them takes deer and goat and river fish from the air; the wolf in them hunts on the ground in a line of three or four, silent, running down anything the wing cannot lift. They do not eat the peoples of the world unless the people have seen them.

Frailty

The body does not wear out. The eye does. An Eaven's sight is at its sharpest somewhere in its second century and narrows from there, not blurring so much as closing in, the outer field going first and the distance last, so that over a thousand years a Watcher's world shrinks from the horizon to the crown of its own tree. When it can no longer resolve a column at a mile it stops flying out and becomes a Holder. When it can no longer read the faces of the colony it becomes the First. The oldest Eaven in any chiefdom is blind, immense, seated in the topmost hollow, and holds more of the world in its head than any library standing, and has not seen any of it for four hundred years. They regard this as promotion.

The memory does not fade either, and this is the true sickness of the people. Nothing softens. An Eaven that watched a city burn in the Scourging can still smell it, at full strength, on demand and sometimes without demand, and there is a condition the colonies know and have a form of the verb for, in which an old one falls into a recitation it did not choose and cannot leave, and recites a single day over and over in the dark for a season. They do not treat it. They sit with it and take the recitation down, because even that is intelligence.

The wing-root is the injury of the work. Nine hundred pounds coming out of a stoop puts everything through the dorsal keel, and a bad landing in a crosswind tears the flanges off the ribs. It does not heal straight. An Eaven that has torn its keel can glide and cannot climb, and a Watcher that cannot climb cannot get back into the tree, and there is no arrangement in their society for carrying one. The resin takes its own toll besides: the smoke fouls the down of the chicks, and a nest banked too high produces a survivor with rotted feathering along the belly that never feathers properly again.

Above all there is the arithmetic of the clutch. Two eggs, one survivor, a season and a half of brooding, and a pairing that happens once in a life. A colony that loses forty Watchers in a bad decade cannot replace them in a century, and what it loses with them is not forty bodies. It is whatever regions of the world those forty were holding, which the dusk recitation was supposed to have copied and sometimes had not finished copying. There are gaps in the archive of every chiefdom, and the Eaven know exactly where the gaps are, and the knowledge that they cannot fill them is the nearest thing the species has to grief.

Country

The Surface Realm, in the old deep forest where the god trees stand: cold wet country under a closed canopy, with the trunks going up out of sight and the light green at the bottom of it. The Eaven Chiefdoms are "the hierarchical database hives of the eagles; often located in the god trees, as they are massive in height and width, and can support colonies of two hundred or more within their hollowed trunks." They do not name their chiefdoms. They number them in the order of the old postings, and the numbers are Alverian words. Sair-Tokh is the First Watch, the oldest colony and the one that holds the General's own last orders. Vien-Dosik is the Ninth Watch, and is said to stand nearest to whatever the Alverians left of Alveria itself. Golta-Bieala is the Far Watch, a colony that has not been heard from by the others in four hundred years and is presumed to be still watching.

A god tree with a colony in it can be identified from three valleys away by anyone who knows what to look for, and almost nobody does. There are no large predators within a day's walk in any direction, because they were eaten. The deer are few and very nervous and run at shadow. The ground beneath the crown is black and rich past anything around it, built up over six thousand years out of dropped kills, bone, feather and the ash the colony sweeps out of the nests, and the undergrowth there grows rank and enormous and flowers out of season. Woodsmen call such a patch a fat wood and clear and plant it and do well out of it for two generations, and none of them has ever worked out where the soil came from. What the country does when a colony leaves is not a question anyone can answer. None has ever left.

Society

Rank and silence. The chiefdoms are hierarchical and their whole output is intelligence, gathered continuously, held forever, and delivered to no one. They are reclusive by design, "wishing to never be seen and always watching." The chain of command is the one the General left. Each chiefdom has a First, who is the eldest and holds the most; beneath the First stand the Holders, who each keep one region of the world in their heads; beneath the Holders fly the Watchers, who go out and come back.

Nothing is written down. There is no need. At dusk the whole colony recites, each to its neighbour, in a murmur that from the forest floor sounds like wind moving in the crown, and in that recitation every fact the colony holds is passed and checked and passed again, so that if any one of them died the whole would be intact. This is the only thing they do that a listener might mistake for music. It is also the only defence they have against their own arithmetic, and it runs every night of the year without exception, in rain, in siege and in mourning.

They wear nothing and make nothing. Each Eaven carries a single ring of enchanted bronze about the leg, issued at the making and handed down from the burned to the born, and the ring is the only object an Eaven owns. They do not drink. They keep no festival but the fire. Their one oath is the recitation itself; an Eaven that recites a thing falsely is driven from the tree and hunted by its own colony, because an archive with one lie in it is no archive. The offence is not lying in the ordinary sense. It is using the wrong form of the verb: reporting as seen a thing that was smelled, or as witnessed a thing that was passed on. The grammar is the law, and the law has one penalty. Their taboo is to be seen, and the punishment for the one who saw is the same as for the one who was seen.

Faith

They worship their handler. The Eaven collect "for their master, whom they worship as god," and the doctrine is a doctrine of return: the General is coming back, the report will be delivered, and the delivery is the end of history. It is the only cult of an Alverian officer among the WildKin. There is no clergy. The First recites the General's last order at every fire, and that is the whole of the rite. There is no afterlife in the teaching. An Eaven that dies is remembered, exactly, by every other Eaven, and that is held to be sufficient.

The truth of it is that Oskrethel is one of seventy-two, and the seventy-two are either dead or in the dark, and the soul of every Eaven that has burned in the resin has gone where all souls go, to the auction of the star gods. No Eaven has ever suspected it, and nothing in the recitation of any chiefdom contains a fact that would lead one to.

Tongue

"Intelligent, yet only speak ancient Alverian which few can still translate and speak properly." The Common Tongue that the Alverians built into every other slave people was withheld from these, and an Eaven cannot be spoken to without a translator. The Eaven have no names in the sense the peoples of the world use them. Each is known by its posting, a compound of two Alverian words, the first its rank and the second the thing it holds, and when it rises in rank the first word changes and the second stays.

Tokh-Sair, Giae-Biesh, Vien-Dosik, Sak-Bieala, Makvae-Sair, Golta-Biesh, Siekt-Tokh, Erk-Bieala. A translator who reads them will hear titles, and will be right.

Regard

"Myth." "Their raw materials would fetch a pretty coin." And the line that governs every meeting with one: "If they are discovered, you will not survive to tell." Woodsmen who live beneath god trees have a word for the red lights in the crown and another for the murmur at dusk, and they do not go up. The learned who know what the Eaven are call them the Unposted, and mean by it a soldier whose war is over and who has not been told.

With the Librar they are at war and have been since both were made: two archives, two dead masters, one pool of knowledge. "As the Great Alverian Generals spies, the Librar are at constant war with the collection of knowledge and fight against them to acquire as much as they can." Of the modern world they hold only that it is to be watched, since "they are awaiting the return of their prophesied master, the Great Alverian General, and will continue to collect intelligence for his mighty arrival." Neither the war with the Librar nor the watching of the kingdoms is an alliance with anyone.

Harvest

"Never before has one been captured or killed." It is true and it is a boast, and both halves are the point. Should one ever be taken, the parts of value would be the resin-cured feathers of the wing-root, which hold a cold fire and do not char; the extendable claw, a foot of curved bone-blade that keeps its edge; and the leg-ring of Alverian bronze, worth a barony to the right buyer and death to any who is found with it, since the colony will know exactly whose it was and will know it for the rest of its thousands of years.

Remembered

Oskrethel the Eye Above the Host. The General. Absent, awaited, and in all likelihood dust in a flooded bunker.

The First of Sair-Tokh. Hatched before the collapse, blind these six centuries, and holds the last order in the General's own words, in the General's own voice, at the speed it was spoken.

Kin each has a page of its own

The genetic lock stands, and what divides the Eaven is not blood but sky. The three forms below are morphs of the one genome, expressions the locked code throws in different weather, and a pair of one form has been known to produce a chick of another when it nests high enough or far enough north. They are not new splices and cannot be bred for.