Nightjar

To Surus Feiçois, the banks of the Kayili never in his travels seemed at all inviting. They were thick in gnarled vegetation and dense with sounds echoing with the warn and threat of prey and predator even this close to the harbor boroughs of Gareen.

The cold mist drifting low on the river gave all things captured within a silvery presence. Even a mundane appearing raptor flying above, in and out of the envelope of vapor, glistened iridescent as it soared.

The raptor shrieked in a pitched staccato that seemed to Feiçois' ears to be mocking laughter. A wounded groundhog plopped down hard on the deck behind him. In a limping scurry the badly scuffed creature dived into the waters. Surus stood with his arms folded hunched along a rail on the top deck of a riverboat named the Midnight Tryst.

He turned back to the sky once his amusement waned.

He could on occasion make out the crescent moon but with the stars veiled and the river twisting, shifting Surus's position in relation to firm terra, time had become as hazy as everything else.

His only certainty being the hour was in the early evening. From the angle of the foremast, he best reckoned, he could catch a glimpse of the harbor lights when they came into sight.

The riverboat would follow the concourse where the Kayili poured from the sound that served as the town's bay, meander along the eastern bank and she would circle around until the river carried her to port on the northeast end of Gareen.

If everything went well, he could get the task completed in the early morning and catch another boat back to Nevespora by noon. Otherwise, the random chance to encounter someone from his past grew exponentially more likely if he had to walk her streets in the daylight hours.

Surus took a pipe out of his wool jacket. His thumb settled between the ivory breast of an engraved nymph figurine. The other fingers of his hand fidgeted with the pipe as he began to pack it with tobacco.

The steady sound of the oars below him waned slightly.

He glanced down the length of his right shoulder to find himself looking into a pair of white eyes set in a stone-like gray face. Like a gargoyle's conticent stillness, the giant oarsmen appeared inanimate until he spoke.

"You. Where hail you, stranger," the oarsman asked.

The big, gray-skinned man scrunched, sitting in an outboard galley the size of a Sgoëthe dragon ship, on the end of a row of other giants. There were two of these ships attached on each side of the riverboat.

The brand on the side of the galley slave's face displayed prominent in the light of the lantern fixed above the giant's head. Stone giants captured in the Bloody Seven were marked with an insignia consisting of a pair of red-painted hands sifting through black gravel representing their betrayal of humanity and the very granulate of the earth when they took the side of the beasts of the Abyss.

'I'm from Gareen, but this is my first time back in twenty-odd years," he answered.

"That explains your fidgeting and the fear that marks your gaze. Why do you act so curious?"

His arms, as well as those of his fellow giants in a row of four behind him, were enormous. How the red metal collars and chains were durable enough to restrain the barbaric giant tribesmen of the western plateaus of lands bordering the Imperium, Feiçois could not fathom.

"I wonder if they remember me."

"Your tone of voice and quivering jawline tells me you're hoping that they do not."

That was an uncanny trait of the western stone giants, to read the body language of people and gauge from it knowledge imperceptible to most others. Surus smiled, though unnerved.

Both man and giant jerked their heads up to the clasping sound of wings beating in a volatile change of direction. A small bird arched around the riverboat, dodging another bird out of their line of sight.

Before it had the chance to shift its path of flight once more, the raptor swooped down and caught the bird by the scruff of its neck and ripped its vertebrae in two before dropping its prey into the water.

Surus could see the birds corpse floating as it bumped into the river boat's hull, becoming stuck on a barnacle cluster. The broken bird was a carrier pigeon with a message pouch sewn into its breast.

"Most curious," Surus commented.

"The red-tailed hawk up there is not mundane as you seem to have assumed as I gathered by the complacent slope of your brow. Men tend to be unnerved by fell beasts, and this one is quite fell", the giant answered. "The familiar of a witch, perhaps. It has been killing all of the carrier pigeons and not bothering to eat them. So I assume it has some purpose in doing so."

"You can't discern which passenger it belongs to?"

"I've heard the light-footed patter of a lithe-bodied woman on the steps above. A petite creature she has to be with soft quiet feet. She avoids us, I suspect."

When the bird's corpse wrenched away from the barnacle it loosened ajar, it jetted flotsam between the outboard where the oarsmen sat and the main hull. The last giant on the row team reached out and grabbed it. He passed the dead bird down the line to the giant with whom Surus conversed.

The giant opened the pouch with his thumb, displaying more finesse than Surus expected him to be capable. To his surprise, the bird's rib cage did not collapse in on themselves as the giant held it.

The giant studied the message and he casts a purposeful frown towards Feiçois.

"It is like the last one I tried to read. Made of a metal as limber as papyrus. I read Imperial well, but I know not what to make of this. Perhaps you'll have greater success."

The giant offered the note to Surus by steadying it on his oar and passing it up to him. Surus pocketed his unlit pipe as he took the message in his hands. He realized what it was as soon as he felt its metallic surface. It had an ink marking that only became visible when its phosphors were held to a white-hot fire.

"I have the means to decipher this back in my cabin."

"If you do figure it out, come back, and tell me what you learn. I would like to know what is going on on our boat."

Surus gazed back into the giant's unreadable face. Did the giant know as he did who commonly used the phosphorus markings in their ciphers?

Obisvyrre, the Fiery Abyss, in Old Nin. A society dedicated to decadence and forbidden prophecy. A society of which Feiçois attempted to locate and join in his own misspent youth.

"I'll do that," he said with a nod as he turned to leave.

"One more matter", the giant asked. "If you could abide by my curiosity."

"Yes," Surus said in a hesitant tone that granted permission with reluctance.

"You have been in my place before, haven't you, man of Gareen?"

"How could you possibly know that," Surus asked, exasperated.

"I see it on you. There is memory never grown placated just beneath your skin."

Surus tapped on the rail and cleared his throat.

"I served a sentence of nine months on a war galley for a crime of trespass."

"It was a trespass of a certain sort, correct?"

"Yes," Surus's tone cold. He specialized in common property trespass, but that wasn't the trespass to which the giant alluded. How could the giant discern the more flagrant kind?

Surus cleared his voice.

"What else do you see?"

The other giants along the row team looked around and grunted at their companion's response of laughter to Surus's question.

"Are you of want for me to say amongst all creation in the upper sphere?"

"No," Surus confirmed with a shake of his head. "I suppose not."