by Carol A Park
“Please,” the flaming man said, gesturing toward the table. “Have a seat. You must be tired from your journey.”
Vaughn sat down cautiously next to Ivana, but neither of them dared to eat. Who knew what kind of cursed food was found in the abyss?
The man watched their hesitance, and then sighed. “I supposed it’s only to be expected,” he murmured, as if to himself. He clapped his hands. “Friends, come out. It’s all right.”
And then, out of crevices in the walls, from the doorway, and some, out of thin air, other creatures began to appear. Some were more beast-like, and some more human-like—with orange skin and orange eyes. These joined Vaughn and Ivana at the table and began to partake of the meal.
The flaming man sat himself, but he didn’t eat. Instead, he studied Vaughn and Ivana. “It has been…centuries…millennia, perhaps—it is hard to keep track of time by your standards—since your kind visited us here,” he said.
Vaughn took a stab in the dark. “Xiuheuhtli?” God of fire. God of serpents.
He sat back. “Yes. Yes, that is one name I was known by.” His eyes roved over Vaughn almost greedily, but Ivana he ignored.
Vaughn didn’t like the look. While this…god…had rescued them from bloodbane, Vaughn now wondered if there was going to be a price for his assistance. He had read enough myths to know that he shouldn’t assume these gods were all—or even mostly—benevolent.
“How did you find us…?” Vaughn hesitated. How did one address a god? “Your Worship”? “Your Dieficness”? “Great God of Fire”? He settled on something that seemed safe. “My lord?”
Xiuheuhtli waved his hand. “Oh, the portals have always been under my purview. But it has been so long since one opened, I stopped keeping watch long ago. But I still knew.” He shrugged. “Even so, I was almost too late.” A dark look crossed his face. “Danathalt’s dogs nearly got to you first.”
All right. He wasn’t a fan of Danathalt. That was good, right?
But that spawned a different question. “Isn’t this Danathalt’s realm?” Vaughn asked. “That is where we are, right? The abyss?”
Xiuheuhtli tilted his head again. “Why, yes. And yes.”
“We thought the, uh, portals led to the heavens.”
He seemed confused. “The…heavens?”
“You know. Where…all the other gods live.”
Understanding flared—literally—in his orange eyes, and he stroked the serpent around his neck again. “You mean you don’t know.”
“Know?”
Xiuheuhtli unwound the serpent from around his neck and set it on the ground. “The portals are locked to the abyss—and have been ever since the Great Father’s damn curse.”
Great Father. He must mean Zily.
“Well that would have been useful to know,” Ivana muttered beside him.
Xiuheuhtli flicked his eyes toward Ivana, frowned, and then looked back at Vaughn. “Why are you here?”
“We need to speak to Zily. Uh. I mean, your Great Father. Ziloxchanachi. We, um…”
Ivana nudged him and he turned to look at her. “Perhaps,” she said quietly. “The details might be left for Zily?”
“Oh. Right.” Until they knew if Xiuheuhtli’s interest would help or hurt their quest, it was best not to say too much.
The serpent began to slither toward them. Vaughn swallowed and watched it as it came, its tongue flicking out again and again.
Xiuheuhtli folded his hands across his chest, fingers intertwined. Something glimmered in his eyes. “You wish to see Ziloxchanachi? Not your patron?”
Vaughn blinked. “Thaxchatichan?”
“I’ll send word for her to collect you and your xchotli.”
“My—what?”
Xiuheuhtli looked at Ivana. “Your xchotli, your bound servant. Is that not whom you’ve brought with you?”
“No, no,” Vaughn said. “She’s not my servant, and I don’t know what that other thing is. This is Ivana. She’s my, um, friend. We’re here together. To see the Great Father. I don’t need to see Thaxchatichan at all, actually. Just show us the way to Ziloxchanachi, and we can—”
Xiuheuhtli frowned. “But that cannot be.”
“I’m sorry?”
He was looking at Ivana. “She doesn’t have our blood.”
He could tell that by looking at her? “Well, no. But—”
“Then she’s your xchotli,” Xiuheuhtli said firmly. “No mere human can pass through the portals. It’s impossible.”
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” Ivana said, speaking directly to Xiuheuhtli for the first time. “But I am not a servant or a xchotli, I am most definitely a human, and I passed through the portal.”
The serpent had drawn closer to them. It slithered up Ivana’s arm and tickled her ear with its tongue. To her credit, though her eyes shifted to look at it, she didn’t flinch.
“Look, Xiu—can I call you ‘Xiu’? I think that maybe some things have changed since Banebringers last visited you all. But what I need—”
“Banebringers?”
“Yes. It’s what the non-Banebringers call us. Because…our existence draws bloodbane.”
Xiu exhaled. “Ah. Of course. What a nuisance Great Father’s curse was all around.”
Good gods. A nuisance? That was all they saw it as? “I’d call it more than a nuisance—”
The serpent hissed. It had coiled itself around Ivana’s shoulders, and in so doing, had covered half her body. Its head was level with hers, looking into her eyes.
“Um…your snake isn’t going to eat my friend, is it?”
Xiu ignored him. Instead, he rose and lifted the serpent off Ivana. It hissed again, and Xiu tilted his head. “Interesting.” He looked at Ivana, something glimmering in his eyes again.
“What’s interesting?” Vaughn was becoming frustrated at getting so few answers.
Xiu waved his hand. “You say you want to see the Great Father?”
“Yes!”
“That may be more difficult than you imagine. My brothers and sisters can travel back and forth between his realm and the abyss at will, but you will need an invitation. And if you get there, he will not see you.”
“But…don’t you all—other than Danathalt—live there? Didn’t our kind used to go there?”
“We do, and they did,” Xiu said gravely, giving him a straight answer for the first time.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Fighting,” Xiu said simply. He rose. “Thaxchatichan is currently at her residence in the Great Father’s realm. I will send a message that one of hers is here. If she wishes to claim you, she will issue the invitation.” Again, he eyed Vaughn, and again, Vaughn’s skin crawled. “As much as I would like to keep you, you are hers; therefore, I cannot.” He strode toward the door. “Until then, you may eat and rest here.”
“Wait,” Vaughn said.
Xiu paused and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Why doesn’t my magic work here?”
At that, Xiu laughed. “You amuse me, teotontl. You can only claim divinity in your own world, I’m afraid. Here, that spot is already taken.”
And then he left.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Xchotli
After Xiu departed, his “friends” departed too, filtering out one by one until Vaughn and Ivana were left alone.
“This went from being one of the worst days of my life to one of the strangest,” Ivana said. She looked out over the table. Much of the food was gone, but there were still platters of meat, fruit, and sweets enough to tempt anyone.
Her stomach grumbled, but she still hesitated.
Vaughn seemed to have lost any previous qualms. He helped himself to a thick cut of beef—or what looked like beef, anyway—and a sprig of grapes. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I question the wisdom of that,” Ivana said.
“Me too,” Vaughn said, cutting a piece of the meat off and popping it in his mouth. “But I figure we can starve t
o death for sure, or we can eat and maybe not die.”
She gave the food a suspicious look. “Where did it come from? It certainly doesn’t look like anything could survive around here.”
“Ivana, we’re literally eating the food of the gods, and you’re going to question how they farmed it?”
She sighed and finally filled her own plate.
“So I was right,” Vaughn said around the mouthful of meat.
“I’m sorry?”
“They do exist.”
Ivana grunted and tentatively tried a grape. “Fantastic. The psychopathic deities found in all those myths are real, and we’ve met one of them. That’s reassuring.”
“I didn’t say it was reassuring, I said I was right.”
She shook her head. “Look, I don’t even know why I’m here or how it happened. Even Xiuheuhtli seemed mystified. But I’m here, and I doubt I’m getting home without you, so let’s just do this thing.”
“I think to do it, we’re going to have to figure out what’s happening here. There’s a lot we don’t know, it seems. It sounds like some things have changed. Some things that aren’t reflected in the myths.”
Ivana paused in buttering a roll. “Yes. It does sound that way.” She frowned and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Xiuheu…” She sighed. “Xiu made it sound like once upon a time, there were no bloodbane coming through at the sky-fire. And that the reason they do now is because of Zily’s curse.”
“I’m beginning to think that a lot of things are because of Zily’s curse,” Vaughn said. He rubbed at his jaw. “The portal connecting to the abyss. The other gods, apparently, aren’t living full-time in the heavens, but are waging some sort of war here in the abyss?”
Ivana mulled on that for a moment. “What if the part of the curse that led us to discover how aether interacts with its rival is more than what we thought? What if the curse was that the gods would literally fight with their rivals? What if that’s why the aether works the way it does?” She stood up and started pacing. “What if, all along, the curse had nothing to do with us, except that Banebringers are affected by what their patrons are doing?” She stopped pacing and looked at him. “What if we don’t need to get Zily to intervene—what if all we need to do is get him to lift his curse?”
Vaughn frowned. “But…doesn’t that free Danathalt up to try his tricks again? Why would Zily do that?”
She shook her head.
They tried to take Xiu’s advice and rest. Ivana was certainly exhausted, but any sleep she found, curled up in the corner on cushions stolen from the table, was restless. Given Vaughn’s tossing and turning, she guessed he fared about the same.
Even so, she was startled out of a half-wakeful state by a boom from outside, which vibrated the shrine.
She sprang to her feet. Vaughn rose as well.
There was another thud, and then a shower of dust.
That didn’t bode well.
The next thud shook the ground so hard, she staggered to the side. Vaughn caught her arm, and they stared at one another.
She was out of her element. She had no idea what was normal or not in the abyss, and she had a feeling that even what was normal could kill them in an instant.
Before they had a chance to say or do anything else, Xiu rushed back into the room. One of his almost-human, orange-skinned companions trailed in his wake.
“You must leave—now,” Xiu said, his voice stern and brooking no argument.
“What’s happening?” Vaughn asked.
Xiu’s eyes flashed—literally. Sparks flew out of them. “Chiquoxetlaz found out you’re here and is using it as an excuse to attack my base directly.”
Chiquoxetlaz. Ivana racked her brain. The patron of charmbloods, perhaps?
Xiu gestured toward his orange companion. “Azaz will take you to the river, where you may apply for entrance to the Great Father’s realm.”
The walls shuddered again.
“Go!” Xiu said. “Now!”
Ivana didn’t trust Xiu or his servant, but they didn’t stand a chance out on the plains of the abyss on their own, so they had little choice.
They followed Azaz.
Azaz silently led them through a winding passageway, not the way they had entered Xiu’s home. The booms and thuds continued to shake the walls and vibrate the clothes on their back. It was unnerving, and Vaughn was relieved when they emerged on the backside of the shrine.
Until, of course, he realized that meant they were back out on the plains.
Against the backdrop of the blood-red sky, giant fiery boulders flew. So far, most seemed to land outside Xiu’s “camp,” but one came too close for comfort, knocking Vaughn off his feet again.
So that was what had caused the pits in the terrain.
Up until now, Azaz hadn’t spoken a word. Now, he hissed at them—his voice the sound of a fire being quenched with water. “Get up,” he said. “Hurry.”
And with that, he hurried on, away from the camp, in the direction opposite the one they had come from.
Vaughn glanced back to see Xiu marching out of his camp onto the plains, wreathed in flame again. Another figure came from the plains to meet him, just as tall as he was, but Vaughn couldn’t get a good look before Xiu lifted his enormous fiery sword and brought it down toward the other figure’s head. The other figure lifted a staff and caught the strike. Flames erupted from the sword and encircled both of them, and the impact of the block sent a shockwave through the earth under Vaughn’s feet.
Maybe Ivana was right to be concerned about any potential intervention by Zily destroying the world…
“Hurry, hurry!” Azaz said, glancing back. “We’re almost there.”
Almost where? Vaughn thought. While the battle behind them was retreating, in front only seemed to be the same, dreary, trackless plains of before. Azaz knelt on the ground.
Vaughn and Ivana came to an abrupt halt behind him.
He threw Ivana a glance, and she just shrugged.
Azaz pressed his hand into the ground, and when he lifted it, the ground began to rumble again, and then the dirt cracked, and a hole gaped in the ground.
Vaughn backed away, his heart pounding. What in the—?
A giant rock unfurled itself, ten-, twenty-, then thirty-feet high—even larger than the other one.
Vaughn’s neck craned to look up at it as it stretched and stepped out of the hole it had come from.
Even the otherworldly Azaz seemed small and puny.
“Uh, not that I want to question your methods,” said Vaughn, “but the last one of these we ran into—”
Azaz swatted his hand in the air, as if to smack a pesky bug, and cut Vaughn off. “This is one of ours,” Azaz said. “Not all the creatures in the abyss belong to Danathalt.”
The rock looked down at them and rumbled, and that was when Vaughn noticed that the rock’s eyes were glowing orange, not white.
“We require transportation to the river,” Azaz said.
The rock rumbled again and slowly bent down. It placed its hand flat on the ground, and Azaz climbed up into it. Then he turned to look expectantly at Vaughn and Ivana.
“This is a dream,” Ivana muttered, climbing up first. “I’m going to wake up and find out this was one long, insane dream.”
Vaughn climbed up after her and then pinched her arm.
“Ouch!” she cried. “What’d you do that for?”
“Not a dream.”
The rock hand rose. Vaughn braced himself against what he supposed was a thumb. When the rock creature had stood erect again, it began to move: slowly, at first, and then more quickly, until the plains moved by in a blur in its long strides.
Azaz stood perilously close to the edge of the hand, bracing himself on the thumb, looking out over the plains. His fire-orange hair whipped out behind him like flames—in fact, it was possible Vaughn saw a real flame or two.
“You realize that a pinch hurting doesn’t mean something’s not a dream, right?” Iv
ana said.
“What? No. Because unless you pinch yourself in your sleep—”
“You’ll just dream that it hurts. Trust me.” She turned her face away from him. “I know.”
Her hair had been tied back, but the loose strands whipped around her face as well.
She said nothing else, just stared across the broken landscape.
Vaughn glanced at Azaz. The creature didn’t appear at all interested in Vaughn or Ivana, but perhaps it would answer some questions.
He edged closer to Azaz and cleared his throat.
Azaz turned his head to look at him, unblinking.
“So,” Vaughn said. “Would it offend you if I asked what you are?”
Azaz blinked at him. “I am a xchotli of Xiuheuhtli.”
Vaughn waved his hand. “Wait. That’s what Xiu thought my friend was.” He nodded toward Ivana. “And she looks nothing like you.”
Azaz studied Ivana. “If she were a xchotli, she wouldn’t reveal her true nature in your world,” he said.
Vaughn frowned. “There are beings like you in our world?”
“I would say no, not any longer,” Azaz said. “Xiuheuhtli is so old, he loses track of time, but I know that it’s been too long since the portals have been used. We are not immortal.”
It took Vaughn a moment to digest that, and then he moved on to the next question Azaz’s comment had spawned. “You can change your appearance?”
“After a fashion. We can change to match your expectations of us.”
“Like…you’d look Setanan if you were in Setana and a Xambrian if you were in Xambria?”
“Possibly.”
Vaughn thought about that. “So…do you really look like what you look like right now, or do you look like that because I think you ought to look like that?”
“Yes,” Azaz said, then turned away.
Vaughn was starting to get a headache. “All right, let’s backtrack. I can assure you Ivana is human, not a…xchotli.”
Azaz glanced at Ivana, who could surely hear their conversation, and was choosing to ignore them. Or at least choosing to pretend to ignore them. “Agreed. She’s human. I would know if she weren’t. Which is curious, since those who have not been gifted of the blood have never been able to cross into our world.”
