Falcon of the Night

Still, I refuse to believe that he would leave me for dead like this. There has to be something more behind everything, and the journal must be the key. I reopen it, flipping through its pages again and again and reviewing its format. After a moment, I have it figured out. The introduction is not just a message for me. It is a cipher.

This is the first one Karsa ever taught me, very simple and quite easy to overlook. There are four sentences in the introduction, and the journal itself is divided into four sections. The number of letters in each sentence denotes that order of word in the corresponding section. The resulting message should therefore be four words.

The first sentence has eighty-seven letters, so the first word is the eighty-seventh word in section one: falcon. The second sentence is sixty-one letters: of. Fifty-nine for section three: the. Forty-six for the fourth section: night. Falcon of the night. That is the message, but how is it supposed to help me?

Perhaps I made a mistake. I go back over the text and try to see if I can decipher something clearer by using the words surrounding the code words. A course be night. A course the fading. Falcon is one fading. To course one night. To course one fading. They’re all gibberish.

From the types of codes we’ve used in the past, falcon of the night is the only one that sounds right to me. It has to be the message Karsa intended. That is unless there is no message and I’m reading into something that has no underlying meaning. That no hope remains.

“It’s time,” a familiar voice calls out to me from the hall.

The door unlocks and swings open as I turn around. I brace myself thinking to fight back, but two guards quickly seize me by the arms and hold me firmly while a third one, the one from last night, places a dark bag over my head and binds my wrists behind me.

At this point, I reconsider my impulse to resist. There is nothing to say and little I can do. Fighting will only delay the inevitable. I have failed to grasp whatever Karsa needed me to understand to get through this alive.

My escorts lead me down stairs and through hallways at a deliberate, casual pace, and my mind wanders back to the journal. There was so much there I wish I could think on, even for such a brief sketch of Karsa’s life. A lot about how he was makes sense with what I read. But as I think about it, there are also things that make no sense at all.

Elsu, for instance, was not found in the wild like he wrote, which tells me that Elsu wasn’t who he was writing about at the end of his journal. It was me. I was the wanderer, an orphan in the forest scrounging for food after my father was killed when our village was raided.

“What was that?” one of the guards holding me says, bringing our movement to a stop.

I hear the hiss of an arrow flying through the air, and the guard to my right falls down, groaning in pain. Heavy footsteps then rush in our direction, followed by the clashing of swords. I carefully step away from the noise of fighting until my back bumps up against a stone wall.

As the swordfight continues, I crouch down and try to free my hands from behind my back, but before I can make any progress, the conflict in front of me resolves itself, ending with the unpleasant sound of metal slowly penetrating armor and flesh. I am then grabbed and pressed up against the rough surface behind me.

“For you to be true, you must answer me this,” a deep-voiced man says. “If you were a bird of prey hunting fowl without light—”

“Then I would be a falcon of the night,” I finish, immediately grasping the import of the phrase.

“It is you then,” he says, ripping the bag off of my head. “And what of your master?”

The look I give him is one of sorrow as I put things together in my mind. Karsa knew what we were getting into and planned an exit for me. Why wouldn’t he also provide a means for his own escape?

“I see,” he says, discerning the answer from my eyes.

I am about to ask a question when the echo of distant footsteps interrupts us.

“This way,” he instructs firmly, cutting my bonds and then pulling me out of the long hallway we are in and down a dark set of stairs.

We make our way swiftly through a number of unlit tunnels and corridors. Light peeks in where it can between cracks in the walls and ceiling, providing a faint outline of my rescuer. He is tall and built heavy, but there is something to his frame that makes him seem youthful, perhaps the agility and energy with which he moves.

There is also something about him that makes me a little wary of just who he might be. I didn’t recognize him when I first saw him, which didn’t initially trouble me, but now that I think about it, I don

’t know if I should be willing to trust him once we get beyond the city walls.

After a few more bends and turns, we reach a collapsed section of flooring exposing an underground waterway beneath it. The man prompts me to jump right in.

“Swim to the end of the tunnel. There is a doorway right before the water pours off into a canal that runs through the city. I’ll be right behind you.”

The water feels like ice as I plummet into it and then resurface, but it doesn’t bother me. I’ve always found it refreshing for some reason, that sensation of cold numbness. I like to imagine that this is how birds feel when they fly among the clouds in a wintry night sky.

“Now what?” I ask once I reach the door.

“We walk through there, and we’re home free,” he answers, pulling himself up on the ledge of the waterway.

His comment makes me anxious, so I wait for him to be the first to exit the room. Everything about this has been almost too easy.

“After you,” he says slyly.