The Stone Knife

by Anna Stephens

Kux started to protest, but Tika glared her effortlessly into silence. ‘But … we Tokob know our land, and we trust our Yaloh allies to know theirs. We can stay away from the rivers and ponds, and those areas that we know flood through the Wet. It would certainly take the invaders by surprise. It shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.’

  Kux was wild-eyed and grinning, savage in her small triumph, and Lilla realised he should say something, either for and against her proposal, but if he opened his mouth he was likely to throw up. So he sat in stricken silence as the argument raged back and forth for war through the Wet, for no break from the stress and terror and eternal vigilance. His chest was hollow with grief and fear, and at his side Tayan, peace-weaver and shaman, his husband and his heart, had no words of comfort.

  Because Kux was right. Fight or die. Win or surrender. They had no allies and they were out of options.

  TAYAN

  Sky City, Malel, Tokoban

  120th day of the Great Star at morning

  It was deep night when the council meeting finally broke up. No consensus had been reached, and so Tayan had offered to journey to the ancestors and ask them and Malel for guidance. The councils had agreed, though he’d been able to feel Lilla’s disapproval coming off him in waves.

  Now, as they left the council house, his husband seized his hand and dragged him along the side of the building into the deepest shadow. The night was intermittently lit with braziers and moonlight, diffuse through building cloud, though Tayan wouldn’t have cared if they’d been standing on the council-house steps at noon. He let Lilla push him back against the wall and slid his arms around his husband’s waist as his face was seized in a gentle, calloused grip. This kiss was not chaste, not in any possible way, but neither could it go where they both wanted it to. Lilla’s body was firm and warm against his and Tayan stretched up onto his toes to wind his arms around his neck.

  It was a kiss of promise and welcome and more promise, heating until Tayan could feel his cheeks flushing under Lilla’s palms, and his husband felt it too, one of those hands sliding down his chest and around to his back in a long, languid caress that drew a shiver from his skin and a low whimper from his throat. Lilla smiled against his mouth and kissed him deeper, pressing him closer, and after so many weeks apart and despite his exhaustion, he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in Lilla’s hair and body and never come out. Instead, he broke the kiss.

  ‘And you’re really unhurt,’ he demanded when Lilla sighed and opened his eyes. Tayan had to swallow at all the promises they contained, but the shaman stroked his back and flanks, searching for a hint of pain in his expression or a flinch.

  ‘I’m really unhurt, my heart.’ He winced as Tayan’s hands slid along his chest. ‘Ah, except for a small – love, it’s fine.’ He laughed softly and batted away Tayan’s hands as he tried to lift his tunic and examine him. ‘I promise it’s not serious. I promise you can treat it when we get home,’ he added.

  Tayan huffed. Neither of them would be going home for hours. Vaqix had made it clear they needed answers tonight.

  ‘There are other shamans, Tayan. Ones who aren’t newly returned across the salt pans.’

  ‘I am the one who failed,’ Tayan snapped. He took a breath and stretched up onto his toes again to kiss Lilla’s cheek in unspoken apology. ‘This journey must be mine. We need greater wisdom than the living can provide. I am the peace-weaver; it wouldn’t be fair to ask another to make the attempt for me.’

  ‘Then I’ll journey with you,’ Lilla said, fingers tingling down his flanks.

  Tayan smiled and kissed him again and had a deep, powerful urge to just keep kissing him until the world changed for the better. As if the force of his love alone was enough. Lilla seemed happy to try, too, and it was long moments before they came up for air. ‘I need you here in the flesh world, love. I need you to watch over me and bring me out if … You know how this works.’

  ‘I know I don’t like it,’ Lilla grumbled and pressed himself back against Tayan and Tayan back against the wall. ‘I like this.’

  Tayan arched an eyebrow. ‘I like it, too.’

  ‘It’s dangerous.’

  Tayan pressed his hips forward. ‘This? Are you scared of me, warrior?’ he asked in an attempt at sultry spoilt by a giggle. Lilla just shook his head, but the corner of his mouth turned up.

  ‘You know what I mean. A journey now, when you’re already exhausted …’

  ‘Ah. So you stop fighting when you’re tired, do you?’ he asked and Lilla blushed and stood back up. Tayan didn’t blame him for worrying, but that sounded suspiciously like he didn’t trust him. ‘You walk the jaguar path with honour, my love, but mine is a spiral and I must journey it. Tonight. Please.’

  Lilla let out a noisy, resigned sigh and kissed Tayan’s knuckles in silent apology. ‘The womb?’ he asked.

  ‘The womb,’ Tayan confirmed.

  They’d stopped back at home to collect Tayan’s ritual tools before making the long climb uphill out of the city to the womb. Unlike the two large healing caves dug into the bones of the city, this system was different: tunnels of dark rock leading to a small cavern made from a paler stone and flecked with tiny crystals. Malel’s womb. The birthplace of the world and all the creatures within it, and the place from where the Tokob first children had sprung.

  The birthplace of the shamanic magic, the shamanic ritual.

  Tayan knelt on a square blue mat facing the rows of spirit carvings, representations of ancestors and the gods in their many guises. Carefully, he mixed the dried herbs and fungus into the small clay vessel containing the drops of diluted frog-venom, adding a little water before grinding them into a thick paste. He breathed deeply and set out the drum, the idols of his spirit guides and ancestors, and his paints. In the wavering candlelight, Lilla used a thin feather to draw vision symbols on Tayan’s brow, black against the blue.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  Tayan nodded and licked his lips, then began the drumbeat that would bind heart and mind and spirit to the realm of the ancestors. Lilla nodded in his turn, made sure the gourd of water was at hand, and then rose to stand behind him, a familiar, beloved pillar of strength and protection who would guard his flesh. The warding of his spirit, Tayan would have to see to himself.

  The drum was the rhythm of life itself, of Malel the mother, who was at once the world, its goddess, and the hill inside which he knelt. She was home and judge and the route to rebirth. She was ancient and new, mother of gods and all the creatures that lived upon her skin. She was life and death, the bringer of disease and its cure. She was all things, and Tayan strove to connect the tiny wisp of his being, brought to life through Malel’s magic, to her immensity.

  His spirit vibrated to the drum’s rhythm and the walls of the womb seemed to take the sound and double it and feed it back to him, as if the stone itself breathed. When his spirit was prepared, he swallowed the paste that would spark the journey-magic. It was bitter, sucking the moisture from his mouth and clinging to the insides of his throat, but he fought it down, fingers never faltering as they tapped the beat.

  It didn’t take long for the magic to pull him into its grip; the flesh world began to glow and then disappear, the spirit realm, over and within and around it, fading into view. At his feet lay a wide trail, spiralling gently upwards. Innumerable others twisted around, above and even through it. Only one path was true: the others would take him to the Underworld, even as they seemed to lead upwards. If he concentrated, Tayan could see the flesh world too, his hand on the drum and the idols laid on the mat before him. But the flesh world could not answer his questions and so he let it sink and vanish.

  Tayan changed the beat, calling on his spirit guides for aid. Something brushed his senses: a presence hot and volatile, a barely contained volcano. A huge black cat appeared on the path before him, tail lashing and fangs bared. Tayan allowed himself no unease, despite the fact that, of all his usual guides, this was the least predictable. Young Jaguar was oft
en filled with caprice and sometimes with malice. More than once he had sought to trick Tayan’s spirit onto the wrong path for his own amusement. And yet his power was undoubted, and if he chose to stand with Tayan’s spirit and defend him, none could harm him.

  ‘Young Jaguar, I honour your presence here and offer you my thanks. I seek wisdom from the ancestors on the spiral path. Perhaps even from Malel herself. Will you show me the way to them as you have before?’

  The spirit guide crouched lower, as if to spring, his eyes glowing with inner fire. Then his lips covered his teeth and he spun on his haunches and bounded away. Tayan spared a single glance down at himself: the golden thread connecting spirit to flesh was strong and anchored within him. It would lead him back to his body. He set out after Young Jaguar, hurrying in the giant cat’s pawprints. The spirit guide leapt onto a particular path and didn’t bother glancing back; Tayan ran after him, stepping off one trail onto another, questing outwards with his senses and his magic to see whether he had been led false. He had not.

  When they reached the Gate of the Ancestors, tall and imposing, blocking their advance, Young Jaguar let out a roar that knocked Tayan back a step and then vanished, not waiting for the shaman’s thanks or offering. He provided them anyway, his empty body picking up the carved stone idol of the jaguar from the mat and spitting on it. ‘My body and breath, Young Jaguar,’ he murmured in both the flesh and spirit worlds. ‘My thanks and adoration.’

  The Gate of the Ancestors swung open and the path continued on through it. A single path now, the true path, for the lords of the Underworld had no power to confuse here. Tayan checked the golden thread of his life again and stepped forward. From the mists, ancestors began to coalesce, drifting towards him, their translucent outlines shimmering and ragged, motes of light swirling deep within their forms.

  The shaman strove for calm as dozens and then scores pressed in around the bright, life-filled shape of his spirit with its golden thread leading back to his body. The ancestors lusted to live again, even though only spirit could animate flesh and the ancestors were what remained when a spirit ascended to rebirth.

  Still, if one of them could rip the thread from Tayan and follow it back to his flesh, it would possess the shaman’s body, leaving him formless on the spiral path, neither living nor dead and unable to ascend to Malel for rebirth or return to his form. Eventually, his wanderings would lead him to the Underworld and eternal torment. He would not be the first shaman lost in the spirit world.

  And while he was lost, the ancestor would do its best to live again, even though it was but a memory. A half-life in a hollow shell, Tayan’s body stumbling around unable to communicate, food sickening in his belly until he fell down in the dirt and the ancestor was expelled with his flesh’s final breath.

  Malel, guide my steps and my words. Malel, watch over me.

  ‘Ancestors, I honour you. I am Tayan, shaman of the Tokob, called the stargazer,’ he called, drumming faster now, louder, to better tie his spirit to his flesh. Young Jaguar had been one potential danger; the confusion of trails another; but this was the greatest. ‘I come for wisdom about the war, about the Empire of Songs. I come to ask what we must do for peace. Will any advise me?’

  Anit, Tayan’s two-times distant father, drifted closer, the shape and feel of him familiar to the shaman. While Anit’s spirit had been reborn more than once since his death, the memory of him, the shape made of light and shadow, remained as an ancestor able to impart wisdom to his people.

  Yet Tayan hesitated. Anit was one of the Tokob elders who had rejected the Chitenecah call for aid fifty sun-years before. He had been there when the Pechaqueh began their insatiable expansion and he had let Chitenec fall and its people be taken into slavery.

  A low, disturbing chuckle rose from Anit’s form and Tayan realised he’d been lost in thought for too long – and that the ancestors could read strong emotion. ‘You wonder what help I can be, yes? And yet, how are we unalike, stargazer? You let Xentiban fall four sun-years past. You let Quitoban be overrun eleven years before that. Time’s circle turns and old mistakes are made anew. How Malel must grieve for us.’

  Tayan let himself hear the beat of the drum in the flesh world. His way home. ‘Then your advice remains the same as it did when you lived: to abandon all others until the might of all Ixachipan is arrayed against us?’

  The ancestor chuckled again. ‘Perhaps it is time for the first children to end,’ it said. ‘What have the Tokob ever done with such a gift anyway? Shouldn’t the first children have educated those who came after? Shouldn’t we have shown them the balance so that they might live within it? No, perhaps falling to the Pechaqueh is best.’

  Tayan’s spirit shuddered at the words. ‘Malel has a plan for us,’ he began, more harshly than anyone should ever address an ancestor.

  ‘And who is to say that that plan is not for us to end? For the Tokob to return to her womb and be reborn as a new tribe? Quitoban and Xentiban have both fallen during your lifetime – what have the Tokob done about that?’

  The words sawed at the golden thread connecting Tayan’s spirit to his flesh, filling him with shame and regret. He had argued they help the Xentib, had begged the council of elders to listen, but his had been one of few voices. Now their selfishness was returning to haunt them. The Tokob had thought themselves so noble, so secure as the goddess’s firstborn, that they had ignored the plight of others. Anit was right; they should have been teachers and shamans and advisers. Perhaps the people of Pechacan would never have started down this bloodstained road if they’d taught them Malel’s wisdom from the beginning.

  ‘What of the Zellih, honoured ancestor?’ Tayan persisted, vaguely aware of the sting in his palm as he drummed, hard and relentless, its cadence showing none of the alarm he felt.

  ‘It is Ixachipan the Pechaqueh want, not mountainous Barazal and its scattered tribes. The Zellih know this and they have already refused you. Do not tempt them to anger by begging them again.’

  ‘They offered aid during the days you walked Malel’s skin,’ Tayan tried and Anit’s form swirled and blew apart, then coalesced a little darker, the motes within agitated.

  ‘They did. They do not now. Not even Malel can turn back the sun and make it those days again.’

  ‘And yet without Zellih aid, we will fall.’

  Anit’s shade dissipated again, and this time re-formed directly in front of Tayan, close enough to touch. Its hands rose, clawlike, towards the golden thread of the shaman’s life. Tayan stepped hurriedly backwards. ‘Revered ancestor, how may we survive the storm to come?’ he tried for what he knew was the last time.

  Anit was growing in size and density, preparing to fight for possession of Tayan’s flesh. Even more were gathering, drawn by the golden light of life until he was surrounded by swirling blackness. ‘How do we defeat the Empire of Songs?’ he shouted even as he backed further towards the gate. Ancestors blocked his advance up the spiral path – the way to Malel was closed to him.

  ‘Only a Pecha can defeat the Pechaqueh.’

  Anit made a final lunge through the closing gate and Tayan turned and fled, racing back along the golden thread of his own being. In the flesh world, he raised the ancestor idol to his lips and licked it, not having enough saliva for more. ‘Honoured ancestor, I thank you for your guidance. Rest in your realm in peace and seek not to return to life.’ His voice was a croak but it held none of the bitter disappointment – or curdling fear – in his heart.

  The thread of connection grew thicker as Tayan drummed the recall beat and his flesh urged him home. He fell into his body and was lost inside it for a time, overwhelmed with sensation, with everything pressing in on him, the weight of his flesh and the rush of blood in his ears. He panicked as he felt his chest move, ragged and too fast, before remembering what breathing was. He concentrated on his hands, one drumming, the other still clutching the idol, observing the sensations from a distance before making cautious contact with them.

  G
radually, reluctantly, the spirit world sank back beneath the surface. Sound and sight and smell returned, the weight and presence and solidity of his flesh cocooning him, holding him safe. Smothering the great expanse of his spirit and crushing it down small and tight inside until it flowed into every line and curve and corner of his body. His spirit; not Anit’s. The drumbeat stuttered to a stop and Tayan placed the idol back on the blanket with a shaking hand, focusing in order to make his fingers unclench.

  A figure appeared in the corner of his vision and although their movements were slow, Tayan flinched hard and then recognised Lilla. Familiar. Beloved. Husband. Lilla didn’t touch him, instead waiting for him to settle and reconnect with his body.

  Thirst was a predator chewing at Tayan’s throat and he fumbled for the gourd; Lilla snatched it up and handed it to him. The shock of their fingers touching rocked Tayan, a contact he struggled to understand and one that wrenched a gasp and then a whimper from his throat. Still, he brought the gourd to his lips. The water was warm and washed the residue of the journey-magic from his mouth and throat, and by the time it was empty, he was almost himself again.

  Lilla watched him with forced calm so as not to startle the spirit back out of him. The magic was weakening, but he could still feel his husband’s emotions as if they were his own. He rode them, focused on his breathing.

  ‘Only a Pecha can defeat the Pechaqueh,’ he said when he had remembered how to speak.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Tayan shrugged, his spirit sloshing within him, and then packed away his ritual tools with shaking hands. ‘It means I take the peace-weaving to Pechacan and try to convince them to end the war.’

  Lilla argued hard once Tayan was able to think and move again, but even he couldn’t deny the logic and the truth of it. There were simply no other options. Someone had to go, and Tayan and Betsu had been appointed by their respective councils.

  Tayan was stumbling by the time they got back downhill and into the city, twitches from the aftermath of the journey-magic in his eyelids and fingertips. Lilla wrapped an arm around his waist and supported him through the streets and home. Tayan glanced once at Xessa’s house, which was next to theirs, but there was no candlelight this late and as much as he wanted to see the friend of his heart, he was too exhausted to even think about waking her.