Story: Cardinal Virtues

“‘A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories,’” quoted my sparrow, Jordie, perched on my shoulder, the sound of human language underlaid with her natural staccato chirps. “‘Doorless. Windowless.’”

Jordie repeated “windowless” a few moments later, perhaps thinking the intense clamor of birds above us, on the perimeter of the building, drowned out the word.

“We’re likely in the right place,” I said, knocking on the structure’s wall. Its corners were unusually precise, the surface of compressed rock and cement smooth and flat as glass. “A building appearing out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, not made by tools.”

“Looks more like thirty-two or thirty-three stories,” Synnove said, face to sky, hands shielding her eyes from the bright spears of the morning sun. “Wonder what has these fellows riled up. They’re imbued, but going in every which direction. Seems purposeless. We all need direction in life,” she said, finally summoning her first personal adage of the day. “You, especially. You have hope for that since you’re with me.”

Jordie and I both had been a patient audience to Synnove’s struggle to determine the inconsequential particulars of our assignment. I wondered how she could count stories without using windows as a landmark, and with such confidence from our vantage point: on the ground at the north-west corner of the building.

Synnove’s own imbued bird, an unnamed, red, angular creature with a black-masked face, mirrored her up-facing posture. The air all around its tiny body warbled and wafted in small swirling waves—evidence of its imbued state.

Still gazing up, Synnove nodded as she mouthed the numbers in a recount. Her hood slid off. She shifted a few inches to the left to evade a bird dropping missiling down from the crowd sky above.

“We should probably start looking for it,” I said.

“Right,” she agreed, finally abandoning her tally. She drew her hood back up. “How is your tellura level?”

I blinked and directed my senses inward to get a gauge on how much of the earthen energy I had in reserve.

“I don’t have much, but plenty to get us through this. Tracking the trail took a lot out of me; whoever did the imbuing did a lot of work to hide their signature. How’s your level?”

“I’m full. I spent half the night in torpor to draw from the confluence at the temple.” She passed an open palm in front of her weary face, then made one eye glare at me. “You should have had temperance in mind before expending your stores; we already knew about the building. Prudence is the first step toward success.”

I fumbled for a diversion to keep from defending my choice.

“What are we searching for again?” I asked Jordie.

“Pocket watch!” she said, before letting out a small sneeze.

Our temple’s head Master Seer had received a request from a local duchess to retrieve a stolen artifact of great sentimental value. Two of the duchess’ garden hands, while working on the manorial grounds yesterday morning, reported seeing a large bird fly into an open window leading into the master bedroom. It flew out moments later with a small metallic object in its beak, and coasted west over the lush treetops of the forest bordering the estate. Since we Seers—those of us who were born with the ability to sense, gather, and manipulate the phantasmagoric currents of energy flowing throughout the world—could use our powers to command the beings of nature, our assistance was sought.

We now made our way east, past the building and deeper into the low grassland valley. The telluric trail I had sensed disappeared around the building, and I wasn’t picking up on it within the valley.

On either side of us were a string of hills of fair but traversable steepness. They met in the middle perhaps a half mile ahead of us, forming a horseshoe around the valley and the building, if viewed high above.

“Plenty of animal activity on the hills,” Synnove noted. “Maybe we should search there. We can split up: I’ll take the south hills. You, the north. Two pairs of eyes in different places would halve our efforts.”

We doubled back to the building and took our respective paths uphill, heading east. The rise was gradual, so it was a task to finally reach the top, flat, part of the range. Only small patches of trees dotted the crest of the horseshoe; most of the ground was covered with scrubby grass like the valley below.

Squirrels, mice, and a few lizards that aren’t normally found on this type of terrain cavorted about. The ground a quarter mile into the length of the hill range was a canvas for a smorgasbord of small tokens of wood, brass, iron, leather, and even cloth. How many of them were also stolen like the duchess’ watch?

Synnove was a dot on the southern side, farther east. I sent Jordie to her with an imbued message: “Lots of items. Animals imbued. No trace of pocket watch. End.”

Jordie returned with Synnove’s reply: “Same here. Keep going. See the building and birds? End.”

I hadn’t thought to look back at the building. The imbued birds flew down into it from the top. There was no roof.

Synnove’s bird, a red dart weaving around a trio of geese headed west, landed on my shoulder, next to Jordie.

“Birds leaving items in building,” the red bird chirped. “Keep going. Have faith. Due diligence is the cornerstone of excellence. Continued.”

It immediately flew back to Synnove, received another part of the message, then flew back to me again, landing on the same shoulder.

“This feels wrong. Something’s not right. End.”

“Will think on it. End,” I told the bird, as my response.

The bird coasted away, and I went farther along the hilltop, and the presence and movements of imbued animals slowly increased into chaos. Creatures of all kinds scurried or dove to the ground on either side of me, dropping off small bits of trash or items, others picked them up and headed down into the valley and toward the building. A pair of seagulls dropped a small wagon wheel a yard in front of me. A team of Siberian Huskies in the valley pulled a sled with a chest, nestled in the cargo bed, overflowing with items. There was no driver.

Countless birds, now inexplicably silent, poured into the featureless structure through the roofless top, leaving whatever pieces they ported from the hills. They swarmed out to return to the hills for another delivery.

Thunder cracked from somewhere across the valley. A circle of animals burst out and away from Synnove in a skittering, squawking frenzy. Some of the larger creatures had exploded or tumbled down the side of the hill from the concussive blast of the stored tellura at Synnove’s command.

Was she being attacked? The attack command was easy and not tellura-hungry, so forming a small army of animal soldiers wasn’t a massive undertaking.

The scared, dazed animals scattered. Synnove’s form lay prone and unmoving on the ground. A series of tree roots sprang up all around her and criss-crossed themselves into a cocooning dome of nearly-solid wood. Synnove was being attacked.

Her aegis wouldn’t last long. My best hope was to imbue enough formidable, swift animals and send them over to as purely physical protection until I could make it there.

A new pack of feralized animals surrounded Synnove and reinitiated the attack, biting, clawing, and slamming against her aegis. An adult elk leaped onto the aegis’ top and skidded off unceremoniously into a clowder of cats ready to pounce.

I turned and began running back. A blue-gray wolf loped into view from behind a small cluster of trees. Good; imbuing line-of-sight animals was easy and required less tellura. While still running, I shackled its front paws with tellura, sent a protection command between its eyes, and released it. It darted in front of me and made swift headway to its destination to the hills on the other side of the valley.

I began to imbue Jordie with a message when Synnove’s red bird flapped next to my ear.

“Animals tried extracting tellura,” it said, “I won’t last. Listen carefully, final orders. Continued.”

Synnove’s bird flew away. I imbued Jordie with a command to let Synnove use her to relay messages, and off she went.

I swore after a few moments of considering the implications of Synnove’s situation. Tellura extraction from an actual Master Seer like Synnove was difficult enough, requiring physical contact. To command animals to extract and store it required a high level of skill and a will to outright cruelty as it would drain the losing Seer of all life energy. We don’t normally keep tellura reserves in animals unless we are doing something big—physically big—that doesn’t involve living things, as establishing control of inanimate objects requires enormous stores of tellura.

The slope down at the end of my line of hills was approaching, and my imbued wolf, faithful to its prescribed course, disappeared around the corner of the building. There were no other animals within reach of my tellura, as most of them were involved high up with the building or engaged with breaking Synnove’s aegis.

I stopped to catch my breath at the northwest corner of the building. I pondered my next move to possibly save Synnove, all the avenues my mind explored were dead ends.

Jordie came around the corner, tight against the building, and flapped right onto my shoulder. I had forgotten Synnove’s message wasn’t finished.

“All a trap, a Seer imbued animals to steal our gathered tellura. Continued.”

Again, her bird departed, but where was Jordie? My confusion was replaced by a stab of shame. Synnove’s diligence in maintaining a full store of tellura made her a target. The tellura gathered by a Seer was highly potent and concentrated, much more so than its raw earthen form. My laziness spared my life, but for what purpose would a Seer need so much tellura?

I jogged down the length of the western face of the building and peeked around the corner. Synnove was too far down the hilltops and too high up to be seen. My wolf was also somewhere up there, out of my senses’ range. Perhaps it was already killed.

Synnove’s bird came flying down the hillside. Close behind it was Jordie, an object held within her beak.

“Pocket watch, building, follow, follow, pursue justice,” her bird relayed, on my shoulder. “Have fortitude for what’s coming. I’m gone. End.”

Jordie dropped the pocket watch at my feet and flapped up up to my shoulder to perch next to Synnove’s bird. I kneeled down. The air around the watch undulated. This was probably Synnove’s last use of tellura before her final blast. She undoubtedly thought it important enough to do, but what purpose does its imbuing serve?

I opened the watch. Its glass face was cracked but intact, though the hands dangled down uselessly. What good would this be to me now? How could a watch be of any use right now, besides that?

Another loud crack of thunder sounded out from up on the hill. One last burst of telluric energy to destroy any animals that would attack after the aegis dissipated. Synnove was gone.

Her bird shivered. Soon, its imbuing would wear off.

The circumstances left little time for me to mourn: another noise, now a boom overhead.

I looked up to see debris tumbling down the pristine sides of the building. I leapt back before it crashed down onto the grass, sending up dust, dirt, and splintered wood all around me.

The birds that had been perched on the building’s edge darted away in frightened umbrage. A piece of warped metal, about the circumference of an ox-cart and perhaps long enough to nearly touch the ground, had crashed through the side of the building and dangled there, unmoving, at a shallow angle to the ground, bent near its visible center, like an elbow.

Another similar-sounding crash boomed out, from the opposite side of the building.

A brief gust of wind cleared much of the floating dust that hung in the air. That dangling piece of metal was not a monolithic object, but an agglomeration of much smaller bits, bound together by an undulating membrane of tellura. The wagon wheel carried by the seagulls earlier on the hill was attached near the limb-like object.

The object swung up and rose, grinding up against the side of the building and tearing through, all the way to the roofless top, causing the back quarter of the building to peel off lengthwise and curl down like dried paper. I backed away even further to escape the falling debris pouring down like blood from a slow cut.

The wholly-artificial beast now emerged from its womb, kicking down without effort the still-standing parts of the building in front of it: a mechanized gargantua, imbued with the power of tellura, a measure of that pilfered from Synnove’s own stores and who knows from where, and whom, else.

With the mass of objects making up its rudimentary facial features grinding, scraping, and gnawing against each other, it turned its head this way and that, completely ignoring me and the birds down below.

The imbued pocket watch, still in my hand, twitched and vibrated. I opened it. The tellura gathered around the watch’s broken hands and pointed them both in the 10 o’clock direction, right at the gargantua. I sidestepped to the left and the hands moved slightly clockwise to keep themselves trained on the newly-formed enemy.

The giant’s aspect seemed to come to a realization. It turned and marched through the remnants of the destroyed building, to the east. Its head swiveled in all directions, clockwise and counter-clockwise, as though scanning the horizon for a target: south-south-west, south, south-east, east….

This was submitted for the 2020 Literary Taxidermy contest, where entries must use the first and last line of a famous book as the first and last line of an original story. I have no aspirations of being traditionally published, but I thought the concept fun, and someone else in my writing group was submitting. I didn’t place at all in the contest, but most didn’t place as there were hundreds of entries. The book of chosen stories is 34 STORIES / 124 BELOVED. By the way, the “34 Stories” in the title refers to the first line of one of the books used in the contest, from Huxley’s Brave New World, which is the book I “taxidermied” for my story.

I think I did okay, given the word count guidelines. I found a lot of my words were spent on demonstrating the mechanics of the magic system, and I had to cut out a lot of backstory details about the seers in general, the duchess’ motivation and plan, and the emerging creation. I am glad I was able to retain the nameless protagonist’s character development; “Cardinal Virtues” as a title has three meanings, and the literal sense is closely related to his arc and the path on which he is placed at the end.