Chapter 7
In Which I Have Possibly Become an Atheist, because What Loving God Would Allow This to Be Done to a Man? I Mean I Remain Exceedingly Grateful Not to Be Dead, Not Meaning to Discount That, but This Is Otherwise a Completely Reprehensible and Fiendish Response to a Single Accidental Erection.
The sorcerer turned me into a fucking vulture.
“This is so mean,” I wanted to say, but birds can’t talk.
Bastard that he was, the sorcerer relished having a construct bring me my first rabbit, its head dangling loose on a broken neck.
He brushed off a dusty seat, dragged it screeching across the floor for a prime viewing angle, then sat, pointed chin in his hands, with an open-toothed grin that would have delighted Benedict.
Considering my hunger, there wasn’t much inhibition to break through.
If the sorcerer expected a show of ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly eat a bunny rabbit with all its skin and fur still on,’ he should have transmogrified an elf.
Admittedly, using the beak took some practice, as did learning the entry points of the body where meat would prove most accessible—pro tip, it’s the soft, gummy organs of the face.
Merulo grew paler than usual watching me gore out the rabbit’s eyeballs, and for my subsequent feeding sessions, he was absent.
At least the sorcerer didn’t immediately boot me out of the castle.
Not until I’d proven I could fly, on my admittedly majestic new wings.
Now here I was, a bird in my prime, soaring over the sunken fog of the escarpment.
From above, the sharp delineation between roiling white and normal forestry looked distinctly unnatural.
Past the fog line, the view became spectacular, a toy set of bushy treetops and the tiny black movements of animals.
With the sun warming my back, the swelling of thermals beneath my wings, and the scent of a fresh carcass in my nostrils, life was good.
It could almost be great, if not for that stupid, insidious question: What was the lifespan of a vulture in the wild?
A man could live seventy, maybe eighty years, if he had good teeth or someone to chew for him.
My brother’s fancy-feathered hens, however, had been lucky to live half a decade.
Foxes took them, or bad weather, or they simply collapsed into a feathered puddle, having succumbed to one of an endless assortment of chicken maladies.
This body had the mass and nobility of a grown bird, so I was what, already halfway through its lifespan?
How many years did that leave me? The Fear that once lived politely in my periphery had more of a presence than ever before, churning my gut, spoiling my food, fattening into a tumour of such nauseating weight that sometimes I felt my wings might give.
A passing crow shot me a look as I hovered and trembled. ‘What, you’ve never seen a vulture with anxiety?’ I wanted to shout back.
I had to get out of this body. Step one would be re-learning speech. Step two would be to find a magic-user willing and able to restore my humanity. Scrawny, slouching assholes like Merulo couldn’t hoard all the power, now, could they?
Circling downward, my telescopic vision locked onto a suitable perch.
Surely, a selfless and beautiful mage waited for me in the great beyond, someone with a heart of gold and a convenient fount of magic.
I pictured her—with her kindly eyes, and her willingness to do a bird a solid—and I knew that she existed.
Thus absorbed, I overshot the branch. My wings slapped at the air, a second tree was narrowly avoided, then the ground slammed into me.
I lay stunned, a feathery bundle staring up at the distant interlocking canopy.
The forest floor, with its shifting shadows, felt dangerous in a way that it never had as a man.
Any manner of beast might be stalking closer on gently padding paws, ready to sink sharp teeth into the clumsy, grounded morsel I’d become.
Shaking off dirt, and definitely not in a panic, I launched myself and, flapping frantically, managed to seize a branch. Time for practice.
“Herrrraaaaooo,” I squawked, vibrating the cords of my elongated neck. “Hehhh, hehh, heerraooooa. Healllrrooo. Hello.”
Did the sorcerer understand what he’d done in granting me this form? I’d had the misfortune of encountering Strix vultures in the aftermath of battles, picking at whomever had bad enough luck to be lying around dead, and laughing in their voice.
My hope, carefully nurtured away from the twig-limbed sorcerer, was that Strix mimicry didn’t start and end at malevolent chuckling. And, after days of frustration, progress was beginning to show.
“Heelllrraaaoo, mah, my nnnennnnnaaa naewk, my nayme is Camraahhhwk.” I shook my bald head, talons shuffling along the branch. “Hello, my nahyme is Cameroawn and I betrawyed humanity!”
Alright, so maybe I wouldn’t use that line.
It took a few more days to get the consonants down, in between prying at the ribcages of rotting deer and pointedly ignoring the odd construct that loped through the woods beneath me. Once I had a good grasp on vowels, my first point of order was returning to the sorcerer to bother him.
He wasn’t on the battlements, casting his daily spell to renew the fog. Inside, then.
The castle windows, which had proved too narrow for my muscular man-body, suited my bird form perfectly. I wriggled through the aperture and, dislodging dust with each flap, began my hunt through the various lonely corridors.
The rooms that served as storage for bizarre metal objects, I ignored, as they had never in my time here been occupied. The dust lay thick and grey, with the only sign of life being exploratory vulture footprints from days prior.
I considered checking the cavernous library, with its imposing rows of shelving, but he’d gotten so angry the last time I fluttered in. Couldn’t disturb his precious texts. If the mad sorcerer was in there, I’d have to wait for him to exit of his own accord.
After a few dead ends, and a surprisingly tricky descent down a spiral staircase (I ended up hopping, rather than risk the tight space with my wings), I found him.
The sorcerer sat shaving branches by a roaring fireplace, a stack of stripped wood piled at his feet.
He rose to leave as I flapped in for a landing, forcing me to take off again and follow his imperiously retreating form.
We arrived shortly in the castle’s kitchen, where small humanoid constructs rolled dough and stoked the flames of a brick oven.
Herbs hung from the rafters, tickling my back as I swooped to avoid them.
Plucking a handful of fresh scones from a tray, Merulo leaned against a wall and gestured for me to land, which I did with an extravagant flap and shuffle.
I didn’t bother trying for a scone. Not that I had any teeth left for Benedict to examine, but the sorcerer was clearly baiting me with some other torturous scheme in mind, and rabbits were good enough, thanks.
“Why a vulture?” I squawked as he chewed. “Honestly, I’d rather be an eagle. One of those brutes could nab me right out of the sky, if it wanted, and I’ve seen how the other birds respect them. Lovely feathers, too!”
I braced myself, anticipating shock, and yes, even begrudging admiration for my new vocal abilities. Instead, the sorcerer continued his slow mastication, a slimy sneer settling over his face.
“Why a vulture?” I asked again.
“An idiotic clown bird,” Merulo spat. “A virtue-less animal that feasts on refuse. I think it’s quite appropriate.” He bit aggressively into the scone.
“Did a vulture fuck your mother or something?” I squawked, then ducked as a high-velocity baked good flew past my head.
“Now, how come you’re so scrawny, if you’ve got all this food to chuck around?” I asked, and caught the next hurtling scone in a talon grab that was more luck than skill. Cackling to myself as only a Strix vulture could, I flapped from the room before the sorcerer could do anything more.
It took a couple of too-tight turns and some scuffed flight feathers before I found a window to squirm through. It was only then, out in the open air, that I realized nothing had pursued me.
Settling atop a battlement amid swirls of white fog, I ate my scone in peace.
I pinned it with a taloned foot, prying with my sharp beak, until the inner bread, warm and fluffy from the oven, was at my mercy.
Between beakfuls, I shat carelessly down the castle wall, another smeared white gob to join the rest. A construct flapped by, and I mantled my wings warily about the scone, but it didn’t so much as glance my way.
If any started trouble, outmaneuvering them would be simple; these half-alive constructs flew with less grace and intelligence than an arthritic sparrow.
Less certain, however, was my ability to outpace them, as something told me that mud and leaf wings didn’t tire like flesh.
A shiver of dread put my feathers on end.
“Why should he be mad? He’s the one who fucked me over,” I grumbled, then winced, hoping the construct circling some distance below hadn’t caught my words.
Another swallow, then I was off again.
It took some questing wing flaps to find the billow of a thermal.
Soaring high, I returned to my musings about that hypothetical mage.
‘Limited’ was the best descriptor for my magical knowledge.
‘Humble.’ Children from all but the most isolated homes had their magical reserves tested at an early age, and I, like the majority of humans, had exceedingly little. I could barely levitate a pebble.