Smoke and Stone

by Michael R. Fletcher

  Happy grunted agreement.

  “Dying at your side is about the best death I can imagine,” said the Finger. “But I’d still rather not die, so don’t make any stupid decisions.”

  Chisulo glanced at Happy and the big man nodded.

  He turned to Nuru, and she said, “What Happy said.”

  “If you had any idea how scared I am,” said Chisulo, “you’d run screaming instead of following.”

  “That’s why we follow,” said Happy.

  Bomani is dead because of me. She wanted to say it and couldn’t.

  Chisulo ate the mushrooms. “These taste like sweat-soaked donkey balls.”

  Nuru gestured at Efra and the girl took two nuggets of mushroom.

  “I’m getting tired of you drugging me,” Efra said.

  Again, everyone laughed that polite laugh. She looked confused like she hadn’t meant it as a joke.

  “I’m pretty sure I can trust you,” she said. “Except Omari. He doesn’t like me.” The Finger shrugged and grinned. “What I don’t know is if you can trust me. I’m so used to being alone, to being all that matters. If I stay like that, I’ll die. I have to learn to change.” She sighed, picking at the stone floor with a ragged fingernail. “I’m going to make this gang a lot bigger. We’re going to take the Wheat District and then, if we’re not dead, the Growers’ and Crafters’ Rings. We’ll see how far we get before the Birds come to kill us all.”

  “Kill us?” asked Chisulo.

  “Smoking Mirror showed me. He said the gods are at war. I think Bastion is dying, stagnating. He wants to stir things up. He wants change. We’re going to do it. If we don’t, we’re going to die.”

  “I told you she was crazy,” said Omari.

  “You’re going to lead the gang,” said Efra, ignoring the Finger. “You’re going to lead two rings by the time I’m finished.” She showed no hint of uncertainty.

  “Me?” Chisulo glanced at Nuru and she nodded. “I can’t even lead this damned gang!”

  Efra turned fierce eyes on Chisulo and for an instant Nuru thought she was going to crawl across the floor like a hunting tigress and attack him.

  He wants her to.

  “I think,” Efra said, “I’m going to have to teach you to be a little more like me. But I also need you to teach me how to be more like you.”

  “You can do it,” said Chisulo.

  She stared at him, unblinking. “Maybe.”

  Efra ate the mushrooms and sat chewing. Her eyes never left Chisulo.

  “That was very honest,” said Nuru.

  “I planned all of it,” said Efra. “Is it still honest, or does forethought make it manipulative?” She smiled that scar twisting smile. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “I change my mind,” said Omari. “She’s way past crazy. I like her.”

  Laughter passed through the room, a ghost sweeping away tension and leaving unity in its path.

  Or a semblance of unity. Nuru felt more outside her group of friends than ever before.

  A buzzing like a swarm of bees ran from deep inside her forehead, down the base of her skull, and followed her spine to her tail bone. Isabis woke up and stared at her. It winked and blew her a kiss.

  “Mushrooms,” Chisulo said.

  Everyone nodded, grinning.

  Efra looked up, met his eyes. “Later,” she said, “I am going to fuck you.”

  “Your Uncomfortable Truth is over,” said Omari. “You can stop now.”

  Efra, who’d been focussed on Chisulo, suddenly turned to stare at something behind Nuru. “Who is that?”

  AKACHI – SMOKE, EPHEMERAL AND FREE

  The Bankers are responsible for overseeing the distribution of wealth and goods—including everything made in the Crafters’ Ring—in Bastion. Among their responsibilities is seeing that the Growers, who are neither intelligent nor educated enough to understand even the most base concepts of economics, are provided with food, water, and clothing.

  —The Book of Bastion

  I am smoke.

  The blend of narcotics infused Akachi. His chambers faded, unreal, a dull dream of ancient stone rounded by unimaginable time. There were sketches of the city in the oldest copies of the Book of Bastion. They showed sharp corners, defined edges. Doorways and windows looked smaller. The bloody desert ate Bastion one grain of sand at a time. It wouldn’t stop until she’d been devoured. Would the gods make a new city for man? Could they? Did they still have that power? Certainly they hadn’t shown anything like it in tens of thousands of years.

  Akachi pushed aside the distraction. Cloud Serpent, show me.

  He stood in the Growers’ Ring, surrounded by identical tenements. Even so, there were enough markings—Grower efforts to personalize their homes in some pathetic way—for him to know where he was.

  I’m a few streets from my church.

  The warring Hummingbirds and Dirts of his previous vision were gone. Night, Smoking Mirror’s domain. The great ocean of stars punched holes in the sheet of night. An owl call shimmered the air. All else was silence. The storm he dreamed on that first night was gone too, like it had never been, like it was nothing more than the hallucination of a smoky mind.

  No, it was more.

  The sky was clear like it had been every day of Akachi’s life.

  A murmur of voices tickled his awareness, more imagined than heard. Ahead, the entrance to a Grower tenement beckoned. The voices, too low to understand, came from within.

  Akachi hesitated. It’ll stink. He imagined the stench of sweaty Growers, flavoured by whatever they ate, crammed into too small an area. How many lived in there? Even though there were empty tenements everywhere, the Dirts huddled together like rats.

  You have to go.

  Akachi stepped toward the entrance and stopped when he noticed the blood runnels lining the edge of the street. He turned a complete circle, looking down every lane, every litter-strewn alley. Gutters everywhere.

  No, they’re gutters for rain.

  It hadn’t rained in centuries. The gods filled the wells from underground springs, pulling water from the very deepest bowels of this dead world to wet the crops and fields. Rain was something near mythical.

  And they weren’t for waste or effluent either. The Growers, like everyone, shat into holes in the floor of their tenement. The waste fell away into the sewers beneath the city. What became of it, Akachi had no idea. He’d never given it much thought. Except for the ubiquitous red sand, the gutters were clean. Well, as clean as anything in the Growers’ Ring.

  Holding his breath, Akachi entered the Grower home. Daring a tentative sniff, he released it.

  It doesn’t stink at all. At least no more than any place where people congregated. He stood in the first room. Windows, perfect circles in the endless stone of Bastion, let in enough starlight to see the room in a monochrome of greys. In any other ring, this would have been the kitchen, but Growers were too stupid—too helpless—to prepare their own food. A raised segment of stone provided them with a surface to eat the food provided by the Crafters. Overturned boxes surrounded the table, no doubt stolen for the lazy Growers to sit on. This alone was enough to earn whoever lived here scores of lashes.

  He passed through the kitchen into the room beyond. Mattresses of straw stuffed into crudely sewn-together thobes, lay on the stone bed. Taking anything from the fields for personal use was forbidden. More lashes. Misuse of supplied items, such as clothes, was forbidden. These people will be lashed to the bone. Assorted detritus and knick-knacks, badly carved shapes depicting voluptuous women, littered the floor. Several men shared this room, he guessed.

  Again, he heard voices.

  They’re downstairs. He glanced to the nearest window, saw the stars beyond. The basement would be pitch black. Unless they had candles. More whippings.

  Akachi moved to the top of the stairs. Down below he saw the wavering yellow of tallow candles. The basement stunk of burning fat. He paused to listen. Several men and women conver
sed in hushed tones. A thrill of fear ran through him. He was here alone, facing an unknown number of Growers. He blinked and laughed, though he was careful to keep it quiet.

  This isn’t real.

  The vision was so detailed, he forgot he was hallucinating. The nahualli who taught him the art of the pactonal to control his narcotic-induced dream travels would have smacked him in the back of the head. He focussed on his lessons.

  I am in the dream world. I am the master of this reality.

  Akachi stood motionless, felt the cold night air blowing in through the window. He centred himself.

  I am smoke, ephemeral and free.

  He rose up off the floor until his feet hovered a hand-span above the stone. He hung there, existing and not existing, building the reality he desired in his thoughts.

  I am the will of the gods given flesh.

  Akachi floated down the stairs. At the bottom he found the basement lit by two tallow candles. Five Growers, three men and two women, sat in a circle. The guttering candles turned their faces into demonic pits of ever-changing shadow. He watched them talk and eat mushrooms, and understood. This is a crude version of a huateteo’s spirit trance. One of these Growers was a street sorcerer with at least one ally. The woman with the snake tattoos and the long tatty hair wound with rat skulls seemed to be leading the group, though looks could be deceiving. He listened. She’s binding them together, strengthening their bond. So close to his church. When he woke from this vision, he could have the Hummingbirds here in minutes.

  His own narcotic-shaped reality intruded upon that created by the street sorcerer and shared by these Dirts. Untrained, she couldn’t hope to match him. I’ll trap them here in the dream until I can send Yejide and her squad to collect them.

  Akachi wrested control of the reality from the street sorcerer without her noticing. It was easy. In this hallucinated reality Akachi was god. As long as he controlled his thoughts, as long as he remained focussed, he could do anything. Though dream walking hadn’t been the focus of his studies—he would never qualify as a true pactonal—he had no doubt he knew a thousand times more than this ignorant Dirt street sorcerer. The rest of them would be utterly helpless.

  I am master of this reality.

  A sputtering candle flared, illuminating the group and he saw the jagged scar dividing the face of the girl at the back.

  Akachi grinned. I have her.

  NURU – HISTORY WILL DEVOUR US

  The Book of Bastion is a much censored, much rewritten, history. Entire chapters have been carved from the text, their pages burned and forgotten. New chapter are written, added as gospel. The names of the rings change as the city changes. The lives of those in each ring change as we sink deeper into an idea gone wrong. We weren’t always this fractured civilization.

  Forgetting the past doesn’t change it. Dead gods wait beyond the Sand Wall, billions of damned souls, ghosts of the Last War.

  Our history will devour us.

  —Loa Book of the Invisibles

  Efra stared over Nuru’s shoulder, brow wrinkled. “There’s a man,” she said. “But he’s not really there.”

  “Hallucination,” said Chisulo. “It’s normal. Can’t hurt you.”

  Omari glanced past Chisulo and laughed. “I see him too.”

  “Shared hallucination,” said Nuru. She’d created this alternate reality with her allies in the mushrooms. She ruled here.

  Happy looked up from his hands. “I see him too. Made of smoke. His feet don’t touch the ground.”

  Nuru turned, the need to look crushing her confidence that there was nothing there. At least, nothing real. A wiry young man wearing the red, white, and black banded robes of a nahual of Cloud Serpent, hovered at the bottom of the stairs. Tangled in snake skulls and tied back in tatty braids, his hair hung to his knees. Tattoos of entwined snakes wreathed thin arms.

  Not nahual, nahualli. A sorcerer priest.

  Nuru stood. “Everyone get away from the stairs!” She slid Isabis from her neck, lowered the snake to the ground. Her eyes never left the nahualli.

  “We’re dead,” said Chisulo, standing. “They found us.”

  “We have to stop him from leaving,” barked Nuru, unsure how to do that in this dream world. While she’d created this reality, unlike this church-schooled nahualli, she had no training in sorcerous combat.

  Omari, surprising everyone, leapt to his feet and charged, roaring. No hesitation.

  Just like Bomani would have.

  The nahualli collapsed, smoke swirling and twisting, and became a massive viper banded in red, black, and white. The snake filled half the basement, coils writhing, spilling down the steps.

  The viper struck Omari. Fangs, dripping smoke, sank into his flesh. It lifted him from the ground and tossed him aside. The Finger spun into the wall. He hit like a wet rag hurled at stone and slid to the floor.

  Once again, the young priest stood at the bottom of the stairs. He advanced on the Growers, calm as death.

  I can’t do that! I can’t fight him!

  She had an idea: In this world thought and perception were reality. If she robbed the nahualli of one of those, it might weaken him.

  “Back!” screamed Nuru. “Snuff the candles!”

  Happy rolled over and tried to crawl toward a candle. He moved like his limbs didn’t work. Nuru crushed the nearest one in her fist and smelled burnt flesh.

  Time slowed.

  The nahualli’s presence filled the basement, choking Nuru’s lungs, suffocating her thoughts.

  “Be still,” the priest said.

  And they were still.

  The other candle was a thousand strides away, and no matter how hard Nuru tried to convince herself it wasn’t true, that the candle was right there within reach, her body refused to move. It was too far. She’d never make it.

  No point in trying.

  He beat me. The fight drained from her. He came into my reality and crushed me. She wanted to cry, to curl up on the floor and hide away from her failure. She brought her friends here, made them vulnerable, and then failed to protect them.

  This is all my fault.

  Bomani was but her first failure.

  “Growers obey,” said the nahualli. It was truth. They were helpless in the presence of his sorcery. He was the eyes and fists and will of the gods.

  Efra rose to her feet. Hands raised in an awkward fighting stance, wrists turned to face the nahualli.

  “No,” said the priest.

  Nuru, immobile and helpless, watched her scream and charge the incarnate will of the gods. As Efra passed, Nuru saw that rectangle of perfect black tattooed on the inside of her right wrist.

  “It can’t be,” said the nahualli, seeing Efra’s wrist.

  Then he was gone.

  Efra stood where the nahualli had been, face distorted in a scar-twisting feral snarl.

  Whatever held Nuru came apart like ash in the wind. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “Before he comes back for real.”

  “We’re dead,” said Chisulo, climbing shakily to his feet. “We’re smoky and hallucinating. No one escapes the nahualli of Cloud Serpent. They are the Hunters.”

  Rising, Happy went to collect Omari. He scooped him up, held him like a sleeping baby. Shards of dust ran from somewhere within the Finger’s robes.

  His flint dagger. It shattered when he hit the wall.

  Everyone, Nuru included, turned on Chisulo, desperate for leadership.

  The walls pulsated, the very stone of Bastion breathing. I am a living rock, it seemed to say. The city was alive; she felt its laboured inhalations in her bones. She looked at the steps leading out of the basement, worn and shallow. Bastion grows old. The floor beneath her sighed with the weight of millennium and Nuru wanted to lie down and sleep. She wanted water.

  “I can’t,” said Chisulo, shaking his head, pupils huge. “I am so fucking smoky.”

  “We’re only a few streets from the church,” urged Nuru. “We have to go.” />
  No one moved. Everyone waited for Chisulo’s order.

  He stared at Nuru, eyes pleading. “It’s too much. I can’t do this.”

  “We should go to Fadil’s,” she said.

  “No,” said Efra. “We can’t trust them. They might turn us in so they can get Fadil’s turf as well as ours.”

  Ours. And just like that she was in the gang for real. Chisulo liked it, Nuru could tell by the grateful smile he flashed Efra.

  “Did you promise to make me the leader of the entire Grower’s Ring, or did I hallucinate that?” he asked Efra.

  “We have to go,” Nuru said. “We’ll find an abandoned tenement.”

  Everyone stood frozen.

  Omari, cradled in Happy’s big arms, made a wounded, broken sound and everyone moved, all talking at the same time. What was that? Was it real? What should we do? We have to help Omari. We have to run away.

  Nuru, frustrated, pulled the group together. “We’re only a few streets from the church. The Birds will be here any moment. We’re leaving now.”

  Efra twitched and flinched at the things that were no doubt moving and darting in her peripheral vision. Nuru was accustomed to the hallucinations, but remembered what it was like the first time. Even now she felt like someone watched out for her. As if on cue, millions of tiny eyes opened in the stone, followed her every movement. Catching sight of the hand she burnt snuffing the candle, she realized it didn’t hurt. Pain, she knew, would come later.

  Nuru met Happy’s eyes. There was something tender in them she never saw before. The way he carried his friend. He nodded at her.

  Efra, standing on far side of the big man, said, “You’re not as dumb as I thought.”

  “You scare the shit out of me,” he answered

  “An Uncomfortable Truth is over,” cut in Nuru, holding her burnt hand to her chest. “Focus.”

  After finding Isabis and draping the viper around her neck, she herded them up the stairs and through the house. She remembered the crèche nahual doing something similar when they were children. She had to stop Happy from trying to bring his box even though he carried Omari.