What the Ripperwing Circles

You want to know the difference between a job that goes well and a job that goes terribly? I'll tell you. It's not the outcome. It's whether you kept your mouth shut while something with no face came close enough to eat your eyes, and you held completely still, and you did not move, and you let it happen, because you understood — finally, after everything — that the job was never about what you were sent to see.

The job was about not being seen seeing it.

This was Burbage Edge, for reference. If you don't know it, it's the high moorland above the valley between Stanage and the crosslands side. Big flat slabs of gritstone, millstones the crosslanders quarried and abandoned half-finished because they got a better offer from the dark matter traders, I expect, or because the murk came down one afternoon and they never came back. The heather grows between the stones and it smells of iron and rain and something else I have come to associate with places where the Dark Peak is thinking about you. I call it murkreck. You'll know it if you've been above the Wisewood tree line at the wrong hour.

I was sent by a nascenti official named Bevel Crook. If that name means anything to you, don't say so in here — the walls at the Rawson Spring are thinner than they look. Bevel Crook ran a private intelligence archive out of a basement off Middlewood Road, and he had been tracking a trade agreement between someone from the upper corridors of Hellsborough — someone whose name, if I told you, you would spit your drink — and the emissaries of Hordrön.

You know Hordrön. Everyone knows Hordrön. The gelatinous one, throne of stainless steel, eats his own retinue when he's bored. The one you enter on your hands and knees crawling backwards, so that if he decides to melt on you, the last thing you see is the door you came in through. Bevel Crook had intelligence that Hordrön's emissary was coming through the crosslands side of Burbage, crossing the high stones, meeting someone at the millstone outcrop above the valley. He needed to know who.

I want to be clear that I am not a spy. I have never been a spy. I am a crosslander with a good memory and a talent for being in places at the wrong time, which apparently qualifies me for this sort of work in Hellsborough, where the bar for tradecraft is set somewhere around "can you stand still for more than two minutes."

I said I would do it. Bevel Crook paid me three hundred and fifty chits. That number will seem either reasonable or insane depending on how much you know about Hordrön's emissaries, and what they bring with them.

I will tell you what they bring with them. They bring morivarid.

This was the part Bevel Crook left out.

I got to the edge in the early murk, before murkneet. You have to understand what Burbage is like at that hour — the light comes horizontal off the crosslands, copper and wrong, and the gritstone outcrops catch it and the millstones lying in the heather look like graves, which some of them functionally are. The murk doesn't sit at ankle height up here the way it does in the valley. Up on the moor it moves. It comes in horizontal off the hills like weather, and then it curls around the stones and then it is everywhere, chest height, obscuring things. You can't see your feet. The organic network has no coverage above the Wisewood tree line, which means the fungi cannot watch you up here. This should feel like freedom. It does not.

The ripperwing was already there. I spotted it before I was even at the track head, which was the first thing that told me this was not going to be the simple observational job I had been promised. Ripperwings don't circle Burbage Edge for fun. They circle when something has sent them there.

If you've not seen a ripperwing up close — and you should thank whoever in this world you thank that you haven't — they have a wingspan of about two metres and they soar on the thermals with the patience of something that has never needed to hurry. It circles. It records. It communicates back to whatever set it loose, through whatever mechanism I have never been able to establish, although the organic network is the obvious candidate. By the time you notice a ripperwing, it's already been watching the area for longer than you've been anywhere near it.

I had one option: stay below the ridgeline, move through the heather low, and do not make any large or sudden movements. The ripperwing registers prey by motion. Fast motion. Slow movement in the heather reads as grass. In theory.

That theory was tested multiple times that murkneet, and it held, but only just, and only because I was absolutely terrified.

I got to the first observation point — a flat stone on the south side of the hollow, low enough that I could lie flat and see the meeting point without being skylined. The millstone outcrop was thirty yards ahead of me. In the murk it looked like a cluster of low ruins. Dark. Cold. Iron and rain and murkreck.

They arrived from the crosslands side. I heard them before I saw them.

Not the emissary — the morivarid.

I have seen morivarid before, at the Hole, and I survived that because I had a lamp and I put it out fast. On Burbage Edge at murkneet, there is no lamp to put out. You have nothing. You have yourself and the stone you're lying on, and the knowledge that morivarid travel in threes, that one is always behind the other two, and that the one behind is already oriented on your soft tissue.

They travel with Hordrön's emissaries as cleaners. That's the right word for what they are — they sweep the air of anything that shouldn't be there. Insects, mostly. Small creatures. The murk-wraiths give them a wide berth. They loop around the emissary in long slow spirals, and they eat whatever they find, and what they find includes eyes. That last part is not a footnote. It is not incidental to the morivarid's function. It is the function. Whatever the emissary requires to pass in security, the morivarid ensure by making the immediate vicinity hostile to soft-tissue life.

I am, among other things, soft-tissue life.

I lay on the stone and I did not breathe. I watched the emissary arrive at the millstone — it was wrapped in something the colour of the crosslands dark, a gelatinous shimmer to the fabric that I recognised as material from Hordrön's household — and I watched it stand at the agreed meeting point and I watched the morivarid circle the area in those long easy spirals and I identified the radius of their loop and I understood that I was inside it by about four feet.

Four feet. I was four feet inside the zone that three morivarid were sweeping for soft tissue.

The one I needed to worry about was the third. The one I couldn't see. I knew it was somewhere behind me, orienting. I knew that it had been orienting for as long as I'd been lying on that stone. I knew that the only reason it hadn't committed to the approach yet was that I wasn't moving, and that if I moved even once — if I shifted weight, if I turned my head, if I breathed hard enough for my ribcage to rise against the stone — it would come.

Then the Hellsborough contact arrived.

I cannot tell you who it was. I was paid for the information, which means Bevel Crook has it and presumably anyone Bevel Crook has sold it to in the years since, and none of those people are in this pub, so the name is moot. What I can tell you is that the contact was senior, that the trade involved something sealed in a canister that caught the murk-light in a way organic materials don't, and that the transaction took four minutes. I counted. Four minutes, then the contact was gone, back toward the Hellsborough side, and the emissary turned and went back toward the crosslands, and the morivarid tightened their loop and followed.

The third one — the one I hadn't been able to see — came from my right and passed me at a distance of about eighteen inches.

I know it was eighteen inches because I felt the air move off its wing. I felt it on my cheek. I know what morivarid look like at distance. Up close, in the dark, at eighteen inches, they look enormous. The big eyes catch what light there is. The teeth, which are at the front of the jaw and not tucked back the way most animals arrange them, were open. It was going for something. For a half-second I thought it was going for me, and the only reason I stayed still was that I could not make myself move, which is a different thing from discipline, but I will take it.

It took a scrufftail that had been sheltering in the heather about two feet to my right. There was a sound — a wet cough, if you know what that means, and I hope you don't — and then there wasn't. Morivarid do not waste anything. The heather where the scrufftail had been sheltering looked undisturbed afterwards, which is a brutalism I had not encountered before and have no desire to encounter again.

The morivarid flew on. The loop tightened. The emissary disappeared into the crosslands murk.

I lay on the stone for approximately six minutes after they were gone. I know it was six minutes because I counted, the same way you count things when you are trying not to think about the sound a scrufftail makes.

Then I moved.

The ripperwing found me on the way back down.

I won't say I didn't see it coming — I saw it change its circuit when I crested the ridgeline, saw the arc tighten, saw it drop fifty metres and recalibrate. Ripperwings do three passes. If you've spent any time above Stanage you'll know them: reconnaissance, test, commitment. I knew this. I also knew I was on the open moor with two hundred yards of heather between me and the Wisewood tree line, and that I was going to have to move fast, and that moving fast was exactly what the ripperwing was waiting for.

I moved fast anyway. Sometimes fast is the only option.

The first pass came over low and clipped the air about a foot above my head. I felt the pressure of it — the displacement, the draught off those two metres of wing. I did not stop. The second pass came from the side, testing, and I went down into the heather on my knees and let it go over, and that was the eighteen seconds that cost me, because by the time I was up again the third pass was already committed.

I made the tree line. The ripperwing pulled up at the Wisewood boundary. They don't cross into the Wisewood. Whatever lives in the Wisewood has decided it is not worth testing, and I have never been more grateful for the obscure territorial boundaries of Dark Peak predators than I was at that moment.

I delivered the face to Bevel Crook at murkrise. He paid me the other half. He didn't ask how I'd done it, which told me he'd expected to lose me on that job and was pleasantly surprised by the alternative.

I still don't know what was in the canister. I've thought about it. You do, don't you. You lie awake and you think about the thing that was traded in the dark on Burbage Edge, the thing that caught the murk-light in a way organic materials don't, and you think about who ordered it and what they wanted it for. And then you stop thinking about it, because that way is the other job, the one you don't come back from.

The ripperwing circles, is the thing. It was there before you arrived. It will be there after you leave.

Don't look up.

Free eBooks & Games

COMING SOON

NEW

NEW

NEW