Black Sun

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  The balcony was where she would find her brother, but she wouldn’t get up there without an invitation. She needed to draw some attention, and the best way to do that was to start winning. She knew the game favored in here and in every gambling house in Tova was patol. She hadn’t played patol since she was a dedicant playing for chore duty, but she remembered the rules well enough. It was a game of luck, and risk, and she’d always had both on her side.

  She took a deep breath, straightened her spine, and sauntered down the steps of the Lupine.

  She had to pick a table, and one that answered to the right boss. But which would be her brother Denaochi’s in this place? She weaved through the room, looking for something that would give it away. And then she spotted it, and knew it for her brother’s domain immediately. A table marked by a rough drawing of an eagle hanging from a noose, its eyes turned into crude X marks. It was crass, and no doubt controversial, which sounded like Denaochi, too.

  She picked the dead-eagle table closest to the center, the resin lamps bright around the board. Two men played, one pale-skinned and chestnut-haired, a foreigner, no doubt, likely from the trade cities to the north. Her old skills for spotting gulls came back to her as she sized him up. His clothes were a few seasons out of style. His hair was too long around the ears compared to the others in the hall. She guessed that he was a tourist, or a tradesman in town for some business, come to the gaming house to catch some local color. Naranpa imagined that the man had planned to drink a few rounds of beer, try his luck at the gaming tables, and, after losing a little cacao, probably head topside to a moderate but respectable travelers’ inn to sleep off his adventure.

  But that wasn’t how he looked now. Sweat had gathered at his hairline, he tapped the fingers of his left hand nervously on the edge of the table, and his eyes kept darting between the board, the game pieces, and the dice as if they marked the difference between his life and death. And perhaps they did.

  The other player was Tovan, brown-skinned and black-haired. Nose sharp and eyes slightly tilted, hands quick and competent with the dice like he played for a living. A professional, Naranpa noted. One of her brother’s sure things, here to reel in the gulls and line his boss’s coffers.

  She moved closer to watch the inevitable, and when the foreign man groaned and swayed in his chair and the dark-haired man swept a hand across the table, she knew the gull had been properly fleeced.

  She shuddered, revolted. For a moment she had been caught up in the thrill of it, the danger, just like the old days. But seeing the look on the man’s face, the utter despair as the runners came and took what looked to be his last cacao, all she felt was pity.

  “Who’s next?” the winner asked. Murmurs circulated around the gathered crowd as spectators worked up the courage to become participants.

  “I’ll take the wager,” she said quickly before someone could beat her to it, and before she could lose her nerve. She watched the man size her up, taking in the cost of her coat, her obviously pampered face and hands, even the way she moved as she took the seat across from him.

  She met his eyes, and he gave her a lopsided grin, no doubt seeing through her basic disguise.

  “Slumming it, scion?” he asked, his voice a low cocky drawl. “How much did you bribe the man up top to let you in?”

  She heard a few laughs from the crowd.

  “I’m Maw born and bred,” she countered. “What’s wrong? Are you scared I’ll win?”

  A few oohs and ahhs rippled around them. The player glanced up at the balcony. Naranpa followed his gaze. She stared into that nothing, long and pointed, and imagined her brother’s shock at seeing her. Would he even recognize her?

  Whatever the man across from her saw seemed to be satisfactory, and he gave a sharp nod to the runner who hovered at his elbow.

  “Set the board,” he commanded, and the young boy scurried to do his bidding. He set three small carved figures on the square table. The table itself was divided into sixteen quadrants called houses. Lines called rivers ran at the cardinal points. Naranpa examined each figure in turn before deciding on a small obsidian bison. Her opponent chose a turquoise antelope. Together, they placed their game pieces in the first house.

  The runner took the third, unused figurine away and replaced it with a set of bone dice. Naranpa scooped them into her hand, shaking them against her palm. The rattle of the bones seemed loud in her ears. She remembered the words used to start the game, murmured, “May fate be revealed,” and threw the dice, hitting them at a sharp angle against the table.

  They spiked, just as they were supposed to, at a respectable seven. She moved her figurine accordingly, her opponent watching. Once her bison was in place, he picked up the dice, shook them quickly, and spiked them against the board. A fourteen. The crowd clapped. His first try, and he was two houses from completing a rotation.

  Naranpa frowned. It was unlikely she would catch him. She had to play defensively. She picked up the dice. They were warm against her palm. She said a small prayer to the sun out of habit, although the game they played was an ancient Dry Earth one and the gods who ruled it had no truck with the sun. She threw.

  Five!

  Those among the crowd who understood the game gasped, and Naranpa grinned. Five wouldn’t catch her opponent before he circled, but it would allow her to reverse direction and knock him from the board. She did so, to applause.

  A rush of adrenaline made her flush. She understood why that gull had stayed and played his last cacao, why people went to the workhouse to cover debt run up at the table. Her earlier disgust evaporated in a wave of pleasure at her own win.

  The dark-haired man across from her dipped his chin in acknowledgment as a runner swept in to clear the board and move the small pile of winnings to her side.

  “Again?” the man asked.

  She nodded vigorously and dug into her purse for her wager. But before she could pull her cacao out, a hand came down on the table. She looked up to find a young man blocking her. He looked Tovan, but his hair was bleached and dyed a brassy bright gold. Green stones dangled from his ears. Crescent Sea fashions, she thought to herself. Cuecolan, then, perhaps.

  “Boss says take a break,” the newcomer said to her opponent. The man slipped off his bench and vanished into the crowd without hesitation.

  “Boss will see you,” he said to her, his earrings swinging as he turned to her.

  She started to protest that they’d only played one round and a proper game required twelve, but then she realized what she was doing. The whole point of playing had been to get her brother’s attention, and she had.

  She let her bag of cacao fall to her side, glanced briefly at the still-shadowed balcony, and stood to follow the golden-haired man.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE OBREGI MOUNTAINS

  YEAR 320 OF THE SUN

  (5 YEARS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

  We have become a place of long weeping

  A house of scattered feathers

  There is no home for us between earth and sky.

  —From Collected Lamentations from the Night of Knives

  It was Serapio’s seventeenth birthday, and the Obregi soothsayer had come to divine his fate. He was outside, hiding under the great pine on the edge of the cliffside. The late-winter grass was brittle under his feet, but the first frost had not yet come. The ground still yielded under his heels as he rocked back and forth, but the icy breeze that sliced across his cheeks told him it was only a matter of time before Obregi would be hunkering down for a mountain winter, everything frozen solid.

  “Where is he?” he heard the soothsayer complain, their high warbling voice echoing down from the terrace above. “I’ve come all this way. Does the boy not want to know his destiny?”

  “The boy already knows his destiny,” Serapio whispered to himself. “He only needs a way to fulfill it.”

  His father’s voice cut across the field, as clear as if he was standing only a few paces away. “Find him!” he sho
uted. “And drag him back here if you must. I will not be defied!”

  Serapio sighed and dropped down cross-legged under the tree. The day had turned frigid, and he pulled his wool cloak tighter around him. He settled his bone staff across his knees. It would be at least another hour until they thought to look for him outside.

  He hoped Powageh found him first. The crows had told him that they had seen an old man traveling the roads alone, and while it could be anyone, he hoped it was his third and last tutor. After all, he was seventeen now. Surely it was time.

  He sat for a while, listening to more shouting and scurrying, trying to feel the winter approaching.

  A crunch of leaves behind him alerted him to a presence. His body tensed, but he immediately released it, keeping his shoulders and limbs loose like Eedi had taught him. He slid his staff down to his side, gripped the end, and listened. Another crunch, closer. Someone approaching and being careless at the noise they were making.

  Powageh, as he had wished? Perhaps, but he could not be sure.

  He considered whether to strike. Another step, and the stranger would be close enough that he could sweep them off their feet. Have them helpless on their back in seconds.

  The leaves crunched again, and Serapio decided.

  He moved, pivoting and rolling onto his hip and thrusting his staff wide, sweeping the perimeter until he hit something solid. He shifted his grip to two hands and swung. A voice cried out, and he heard a body strike the ground. Serapio was on his feet, moving low, dagger out, when the stranger cried, “No, please! Spare me!”

  The boy stopped. He could hear the stranger breathing hard, air moving too quickly through lungs that sounded feeble. Old. Serapio straightened and sheathed his blade, but he held the staff ready. He extended it until he hit flesh. He jabbed hard, and the stranger grunted, the staff digging into his stomach.

  “Are you the old man the crows saw on the road?”

  “Am I the…?” They sounded bewildered, confused. “Perhaps? I-I-I do not know your crows.” The stranger sounded ancient, a white-hair for sure. “And I am not a man, or a woman, for that matter. But I am old.”

  Serapio didn’t understand what that meant, neither man nor woman, but he let it pass. It was not relevant.

  “Is your name Powageh?”

  A moment of hesitation, and then, “Powageh is my title, not my name. But yes, I am the third tutor to the crow god. Which”—the stranger chuckled, still short of breath—“must be you. Well met, Serapio.”

  The boy mused on that for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to him that Paadeh and Eedi were not names but titles. Meaning he had never known their names in truth. It sat strange with him.

  He circled back around to the easier question, the one that didn’t make him feel like he had been deceived.

  “If you are neither man nor woman, what are you?”

  “A third gender, one I don’t believe you acknowledge here in this little backwater country. I am bayeki. But what should concern you more is that I am a Watcher.”

  “A Tovan priest!” Serapio growled, and his hand slipped back to his dagger.

  “I am not your enemy, Serapio,” Powageh said. “Far from it.”

  “But you are from the celestial tower.”

  “I was. Past tense. Very, very past.”

  “And now?” he challenged.

  “I am its enemy.” The stranger sighed, as if the memory was a burden. “Once I was very much a part of the celestial tower, a member of the Society of Knives, even, sworn to defend the Sun Priest.”

  “My enemy.”

  “Both our enemies. We are united in our hatred.”

  “Why?”

  Powageh hesitated. “Let us sit and talk properly, Serapio. Not with me on my back and your weapon in my belly. We haven’t much time, but I will tell you everything I know.” The stranger’s voice caught with emotion. “We have kept you hidden for so long, as long as we dared, but the time draws near for you to be revealed.”

  * * *

  They sat under the sheltering eaves of the great pine tree. Powageh had laid out a small lunch, foods brought from a hotter, waterier clime that Serapio did not know. Tiny salted fish, skinless and boneless, that slid quickly down his throat and left a salty wake behind. Nuts spiced with hot pepper that burned in his mouth. A strange spiky fruit that Powageh opened with a knife to reveal soft, juicy flesh. And, most astounding of all, a thick and creamy drink that started bitter on Serapio’s tongue and blossomed to a pleasing peppery heat. He could only describe it as the taste of pleasure.

  “It is kakau in the Cuecola language. They call it the drink of the gods,” Powageh said, after Serapio’s exclamation. “Fitting for you, crow son.”

  Serapio thought at first his new tutor was teasing him, but xir voice sounded completely sincere. The crows had come to join them, no doubt curious about the stranger, and Serapio fed them bits of the new food, but they only liked the drink. Typical.

  “The Night of Knives,” Powageh said as xe slurped from xir cup. “Did Saaya tell you of the Night of Knives?”

  “When I was five,” Serapio acknowledged. It was one of the first stories his mother had told him, and the one she told him most often after. “She told me that the Watchers led an army to slaughter all who followed the crow god. She said assassins murdered my grandmother and my cousins and aunts and uncles.”

  “Anything else? Nothing of a tsiyo turned to protector?”

  Serapio frowned. “She did mention a young priest whom she found crying over the body of a child. The priest was covered in their own sick, begging for forgiveness.”

  “Yes, well…” Powageh sighed. “I suppose that’s not inaccurate.”

  “She said the priest helped her escape the city and took her to sanctuary.” He lifted his head toward Powageh. “Was that you?”

  “It was. Many years ago.” Xe cleared xir throat. “After we escaped, well, neither of us could go back, so we went to Cuecola, my birthplace. I had family there still, good family, and very wealthy. And a cousin who offered to employ me in his import-and-export business. For two years I worked for him on the docks, a boss at one of his warehouses. Your mother and I talked of marrying, but she was still very young. No older than you. But I was smitten with her, you understand, and indulged her tremendously.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Saaya was single-minded. Grief is one thing, obsession another. All she thought about was revenge against the celestial tower, death to the Sun Priest. It was all she wanted. More than a comfortable life, certainly more than me. And she recruited others to her cause. There was a Dry Earth Tovan, a master woodworker, who had emigrated to Cuecola and had a grudge against the priesthood; a disgraced spearmaiden driven from the war college at Hokaia for crimes of insubordination; my cousin, Balam, a proper and polished lord who found her just as enchanting as I did. He was the one who provided her the means to do it.”

  Balam. The name meant nothing to him. The wind rustled the pine, sending needles raining down around them. “Do what?”

  “Balam had an affinity for divination and blood magic, which is not uncommon in Cuecola. But what made him special is that he had plenty of wealth to spend pursuing his interests. Soon he and Saaya were spending all their time together. I was jealous at first, oh, was I jealous. My cousin is quite charming.”

  “But you were wrong? They weren’t lovers?”

  “Oh, they were lovers,” Powageh confessed ruefully. “But I did not find that out until much later. It’s unimportant now. I’m old and the fires of jealousy have long banked within my heart.”

  “Then what?”

  “Saaya told me that she and Balam were looking for a way to raise the crow god into human form using blood sacrifice.”

  Serapio shivered.

  “Yes, I was horrified at first, too. And then intrigued. Blood magic is forbidden by the celestial tower, and all peoples of the Meridian have banned human sacrifice. It is considered uncivilized, barbaric.�
��

  “Dangerous,” Serapio said, instinctively.

  “Powerful,” Powageh added, voice soft. “Too powerful for humans. Best we stick to sacrificing people the old ways, with wars and famine and despot rulers.” Xir voice was thick with bitterness.

  “What did you do?”

  “I joined them,” xe said simply.

  “And the others joined, too?” Serapio asked, the story coming together in his mind. “Paadeh and Eedi? For common cause?”

  Silence at first, and then a small laugh. “Yes, I suppose that’s obvious now. Paadeh and Eedi were the other two schemers in our plan, but it was me she needed the most—the one with the gift of reading the stars, the trained priest who understood the movement of the heavens. I am ashamed to say it gave me joy, to usurp my cousin and his wealth in her hierarchy, but there it is.”

  “So what happened?” He had become enthralled by Powageh’s story, the tale of his own making, his origin story.

  “We still needed a vessel to contain the god, one that met some very specific and arcane specifications that Balam had found in an ancient glyph book, but Saaya had an answer for that, too.”

  “Which was…?”

  “You,” he said. “I divined the next time and place where the crow god would be at the height of his power, Balam provided the funds to get your mother here, and Paadeh and Eedi promised to aid her in whatever way they could. She made us all swear blood oaths under a moonless sky. There are no bindings more powerful to your god.”

  “And my father? What role did he play in all this? Did he know?” He couldn’t imagine it. He knew his father had once loved him, but after what his mother had done, his father had never recovered. Never accepted Serapio again. To hear Powageh describe his mother, he wondered if Marcal’s problem was not Serapio’s blindness but that he reminded his father too strongly of his lost wife.