The Black Resurrection

by Nick Wisseman

  “I suppose my word isn’t good enough?”

  He smiled again, but his expression was no friendlier.

  Time for her old fallback. “I don’t see a river nearby. Do you need a well?”

  Several people murmured in the crowd. Isaura couldn’t make out what most of them were saying, but she thought she heard someone say “drought.”

  Jaxat nodded, looking slightly less sour. “We could make use of one, yes.”

  “We could use three,” Bataru stage-whispered to Fara.

  Isaura hid her own smile. People generally appreciated not having to lug their water from miles away, especially up such steep slopes. “Then you shall have them—in exchange for letting me go.”

  Now Jaxat’s smile was genuine. Had this been his goal all along? “Agreed.”

  “Wonderful. I must confess that this unfortunate blow to my head has dimmed my dowsing sight, however. As soon as it returns—”

  “You can start now.” Jaxat tapped the bit of bone at the center of his necklace.

  And Isaura could quench again.

  The water returned immediately. She could feel it all around her—in the ground, in the air, in the Cimarrons—begging to be called forth. To flow and spurt and splash and dance.

  And yet, her access seemed … filtered. Limited. At the same time, the eight-pointed star pulsed coolly on the back of her hand, each vertex emitting a separate, tiny chill.

  Chills of warding.

  The Cimarrons hadn’t knocked the quenching out of her. They’d blocked it.

  More specifically, Jaxat had blocked it. Now that she looked, Isaura could see that each of the shells to either side of the bone centerpiece on his necklace was subtly inscribed with a star that matched the one on her hand. Amadi had probably seen the same marks on the hut. Glyphs of power.

  “Cut me a forked branch,” she said, hiding her shock by falling into familiar rhythms, “and I will find your wells.”

  Jaxat opened his mouth to reply, but a disturbance in the crowd drew his gaze.

  Isaura followed his eyes and found a white man in loose-fitting clothes striding toward the courtyard. He looked Anglo, and he walked with the rolling gait of a sailor.

  Or a pirate.

  Jaxat nodded at the man and then again at Isaura. “You’ll have all the branches you require,” he said to her. “And a week to use them.”

  She grit her teeth at the delay. Her head still ached, but she could walk now, or sit in a canoe. “You have enough hands here to dig all three wells in a day.”

  “We have enough now, but many of us will soon be elsewhere.” He turned to Amadi. “You included, I hope. How would you like to confirm your independence by seizing some Espan silver with us?” It didn’t sound like much of a choice.

  But it was probably why the pirate was here. In Metica City, there had been story after story about Franc and Anglo buccaneers allying with runaways to prey on Espan cargo trains.

  Amadi blinked, and while everyone was looking at him, Isaura rubbed at the dots on her hand. They didn’t so much as smudge. “Three days,” she said, affecting bargaining power she didn’t have. “Do your raid in three days, I’ll dowse your three wells in the same time, and then we go on.”

  Jaxat smiled again, and now he looked positively amused. “We’ll see.” He turned to the seated Cimarrons. “Bataru, Fara: we leave after dinner.”

  “One more condition,” Isaura said.

  The amusement vanished. “And what would that be?”

  “I sleep outside, and you don’t put so much as another thread of rope on me.”

  He studied her for a moment, then shrugged. “Prepare yourselves,” he said to the rest of the palenque.

  Amadi caught her eyes while everyone else stood. His face was pained.

  “Go,” she mouthed. “I’ll be fine.”

  He nodded reluctantly. “Where are we headed?” he asked Jaxat.

  “South,” the King’s Proxy answered, his grin back and fiercer than before. “Toward Panma City.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Torn

  Chase counted in his head as Haru sprinted through the brush to a distant tree and back.

  “All right,” Jie said from the cart. “I had that at fifteen seconds. Chase?”

  He nodded and whistled. “Can’t say I’ve seen faster, even in a clear field.”

  “Me either.” She turned to the short, slender Nippon, who looked far less winded than she had any right to. “Now, when you’re ready, do it again. But this time don’t hum.”

  Haru snorted. “And this will prove humming is what makes me wu?”

  “Maybe, if you wait until you’ve caught your breath.”

  “I’m fine.” Haru was already behind the starting line Chase had sketched in the jungle floor with his foot. “Are you set?”

  “Yes. Three, two, one, go!”

  The Nippon took off like a shot again, but this time it seemed like she’d been fired from a slightly less powerful bow. She was still quick, faster than anyone Chase had encountered in his days wandering across two—and soon to be three—continents. But she no longer seemed inhumanly so.

  “Twenty seconds,” Jie announced when Haru returned.

  Chase confirmed the total with another nod. “I don’t know how you can run in this heat. I feel like one big, dripping armpit.”

  Haru picked up Bolin, who’d clapped for her the whole way. “Thanks for that … lovely image,” she panted, suitably breathless this time. “I could feel a difference … this time … Didn’t have the same energy.”

  Jie grinned. “And you normally hum, right? I can’t remember seeing you train without a tune on your lips.”

  Chase was thinking the same thing. Haru practiced with her ko-naginata in the relative cool of morning and evening, and whenever he came close to her whirlwind of thrusts and feints, he could hear her toying with one melody or another. “Have you tried singing?”

  She laughed. “I don’t sing.”

  “You might try it. If Jie’s right, belting out a proper ditty might make you so fast you’d be nigh invisible.”

  Haru snorted again. “Sure.” Bolin’s legs started pumping, so she set him down.

  The boy promptly wobbled off towards the tree she’d used as her halfway point.

  Haru smiled. “Oh, I don’t know if I can catch you, little samurai!” She jogged after him and Chase followed, scanning the canopy for thieving monkeys.

  “The train will be ready to move again soon,” he said when he’d caught up to her. “We should bring him back.”

  “Da would like that, wouldn’t he? Us being well-behaved.”

  Chase grimaced. “I’m not sure it has anything to do with ‘behaving’ when we don’t have a choice.”

  Bolin stumbled, caught himself, looked immensely proud, and wandered off at a new angle.

  Haru stayed a step behind him. “The purple fog makes it hard to go against what Da asks, but there’s no reason to do things unasked. Unless you enjoy being a lapdog.”

  “Careful. I don’t like this any more than you do.”

  “Are you sure?” Haru chuckled as Bolin tried to scoot into a patch of plants taller than he was, then swept him up and twirled him about. “I might not be the next thing to a fire kami—”

  “A what?”

  “A fire spirit,” she said once she’d finished spinning the boy and set him down. “But I don’t go out of my way to fetch things for Da or bring them to Jie. I don’t make suggestions about the best route to take. I don’t act like a broken, subservient vassal—because I actually want to be somewhere else.” She nudged Bolin toward the tree and he took off running again, his little body shaking in adorably inefficient ways. “He’s the only good thing about this.”

  Chase knew he should have been angry. Even just a few months ago, that type of tongue-lashing, especially from a colored girl, would have had him burning with rage. Literally. But he found he didn’t particularly care now, not even enough to fake i
t. “You’re wrong. There are two good things about this.”

  “Oh? What’s the other?”

  “We’re helping Jie.”

  Haru laughed at this, but the rest of her response was lost in a wave of battle cries and gunshots.

  “Finally,” she whispered, snatching Bolin and darting into cover.

  Chase crouched low, yet that didn’t stop an arrow from grazing the side of his neck, cutting a searing line through his oldest burn scar.

  “Get in back of something, you idiot,” Haru hissed as she positioned herself and Bolin behind a massive tree.

  Chase didn’t move to a tree of his own, but he did drop to his belly. Doing so let him maintain a full view of the silver train.

  It wasn’t an encouraging sight.

  Hordes of Afrii, originals, and Anglos were pouring out of the jungle, swamping the train and its guards in a flood of bodies, arrows, and bullets.

  “Runaways,” Haru murmured as a particularly enormous one obliterated a guard’s skull with a massive club. “And pirates. I’m surprised it took this long.”

  Chase couldn’t see Jie in the cart, but that was probably a good thing—hopefully she’d hidden in the back. Da had been at the head of the train. Where was he now? “You expected this to happen?”

  Haru didn’t answer, but he remembered how she’d urged the Han to follow the silver train’s path, then smoothed the way so they could join the train proper. “No, you wanted this to happen.”

  The enormous runaway smashed down two more guards before Haru replied. “As long as Da lives, I can’t make a move against him or leave. But if someone else takes care of him …”

  Chase considered this as an Anglo pirate used a pistol to kill a guard before falling to a bullet himself. “Why didn’t you let your friends fire on him, then? Behind the cart. Eita, Loth, and … the third one?”

  “Mingli.” Haru paused to say some soft words to Bolin. “Da had you by his side,” she whispered after a few seconds. “And it was only three on two. They didn’t stand much of a chance. But in this big a fight …”

  Chase watched Eita fend off a spear thrust with his musket and slam its muzzle into his assailant’s face. “You’re not worried about them? Your friends?”

  “This is what they signed up for. They would have been ambushed whether we were with them or not.”

  “Fair enough. But why aren’t we over there? Why can’t I move?”

  Yet again, Haru didn’t reply right away; she spent almost a minute humming a lullaby to Bolin. The battle still raged when she finally spoke, but its conclusion was no longer in doubt—the guards were doomed. “You haven’t tested the fog’s boundaries enough. What were Da’s primary commands to us?”

  “Protect him, Jie, and Bolin. Don’t go out of sight of the cart without permission. Don’t tell anyone what we’re doing.”

  “Well, now the first two orders conflict. We can’t protect Da and Jie without abandoning Bolin or taking him into danger, and we can’t protect Bolin without being out of sight of the cart. We’re being tugged in multiple directions, so here we stay.”

  It was an apt description. Chase felt like one cord of purple fog was yanking him toward the train while another held him anchored to the ground. And he couldn’t fault the Nippon for sounding smug. She’d found a way free faster than him, and it didn’t require them to do anything but hide.

  While leaving Jie alone in the cart.

  “You couldn’t have planned this part—following Bolin away from the train just before the attack. If he’d been down there, you would have been compelled to fight the runaways and pirates with every last bit of your humming madness.”

  Haru snorted. “A stray bullet still might have done our work for us. And we were due for some luck. Now shut up and let it happen.”

  Except he wasn’t sure he could. Not with the enormous runaway advancing on the cart, his titanic arms dripping with the blood streaming down his upraised, tree trunk of a club. Only one guard stood in the way, and he dropped his sword and raised his hands after seeing what was coming for him.

  A wise decision, because sprinting with a crooked gait from the front of the train was an even more terrifying specter.

  “Amadi,” Chase breathed, causing Haru to inhale audibly—had that been a gulp? “He’s here.”

  The Afrii’s target was obvious. He was making a beeline for the cart … and Jie.

  “Stay down,” Haru muttered, but Chase was already up and charging. For a moment, he couldn’t see past the purple cords playing tug of war with his mind. Yet the one pulling him onward grew stronger with each step, and soon enough the cords vanished entirely. Maybe the imminent danger to Jie had tipped the balance. Maybe he’d acted irrationally enough to throw it out of whack. Either way, he was free to race Amadi now.

  Several runaways took aim at Chase as he closed on the cart, but he stayed low and raised his forearms, suddenly grateful for the disgusting grafts Da had subjected them to. It worked: the two shots that didn’t miss ricocheted off his reinforced forearms. Ignoring the pain, Chase kept running.

  He was too slow.

  Amadi leapt onto the front of the cart and dove inside at the same time the enormous runaway slid to a stop in Chase’s path, club drawn back and ready to strike. Hating that he couldn’t just ash the runaway with a thought, Chase fumbled for his blunderbuss.

  “Drop it, Chase Harper,” Amadi ordered in Anglo. “Or I’ll pop this Han girl’s head off.” A second later, a dark hand emerged from the cart—the same hand whose fingers Chase still felt on his forehead.

  But this time they were wrapped around Jie’s neck.

  “Amadi, you son of a bitch, if you so much as—”

  The Afrii’s grip tightened. Jie gasped.

  “Damn you, Amadi, you’re using her as a shield?”

  He’d stepped out of the cart holding Jie before him, one arm wrapped around her middle while the other continued to tighten on her throat. “I don’t need a shield, Chase Harper, but you can burn this one if you like. Otherwise, drop your little gun and tell me where Shoteka is.”

  Chase hesitated another moment, but when Amadi squeezed Jie again, and her eyes began to bulge, he let go of the blunderbuss.

  The enormous runaway immediately took a step forward.

  “Not yet,” Amadi barked in Espan, and the giant contented himself with smashing Chase’s blunderbuss instead of Chase himself.

  Amadi hauled Jie forward a few more paces, until they were even with the runaway. Despite everything, she looked incredibly, beautifully calm.

  “Let her go.”

  The Afrii tightened his grip yet again, ratcheting up the pressure like an avenging winch.

  “Shoteka is the boy?” Chase asked, his voice low and hot. There was so much fire in him now, surging and swirling, aching to be released. Yet without his blunderbuss to act as a focus …

  Amadi inclined his head, but it was a sharp motion, more like a headbutt than a nod. “Where is he?”

  Chase couldn’t respond: the purple cords were back, one trying to tear the words out of his mouth while the other coiled inside and clogged it. If he gave away Haru’s position, he endangered Bolin. If he didn’t endanger Bolin, Amadi would kill Jie.

  There was no worse time to be paralyzed.

  Yet he’d shaken the cords off a minute earlier, when he’d run to the cart. He could do it again. Jie’s danger had only grown, and Amadi wouldn’t hurt Bolin—the Afrii wanted to take the boy to Isaura.

  Chase grit his teeth. He didn’t even have to speak. He just had to turn, raise his arm, and point a single, solitary finger … there. Never mind that he felt like he’d been drawn and quartered, ripped down the middle by the opposing purple cords. He’d done it. “Let her go.”

  Amadi didn’t release Jie, but after giving him a quizzical look, he motioned for the enormous runaway to check the patch of trees Chase had indicated.

  Haru popped up when the runaway came within arm’s reach, her eyes hal
f-glazed, half-furious. The blade of her ko-naginata was lined up with his jugular. One thrust and the battle would resume, with the outcome just as inevitable and Jie sure to be the second casualty.

  Chase tried to cry out, but it was Da who spoke: “No, Haru. Drop your weapon. There are too many.”

  The Han emerged from the brush as the Nippon, eyes completely furious now, let her ko-naginata fall to the earth.

  “Shen Da,” Amadi murmured, sounding eager. Triumphant.

  Predatory.

  And from behind Haru, Bolin began to wail.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bad Faith

  It happened almost exactly how Amadi had pictured it.

  Isaura’s face lighting up at his words. “You found him?” she repeated, skeptically, hopefully, desperately.

  Isaura’s body bursting into motion. “Take me to him!” she begged before he could finish explaining.

  Isaura’s hand gripping his forearm, his skin tingling at her touch. “Hurry,” she insisted as he supported her up Bayano’s treacherous southern slope.

  Isaura’s eyes shining like the sun when she finally saw her boy. “Shoteka,” she whispered as Amadi slowed to let her take the last steps on her own, judging that her headwound had healed sufficiently to allow her this moment. The moment she’d come so far for, fought so hard.

  Then Jaxat’s men grabbed her.

  * * *

  “Your ‘freedom fighters’ overreacted,” Amadi spat, his toes digging into the mosque’s earthen floor hard enough to carve a row of little furrows. “Isaura dowsed your wells. While recovering from an injury your scouts gave her. She proved you can trust her. Let her see her child.”

  Jaxat rose and brushed off his knees. “Not until the matter is resolved.”

  “Then resolve it.”

  The Cimarron King’s Proxy raised an eyebrow, but his tone didn’t suggest he’d taken offense from Amadi’s. “If, despite appearances, the Espan is truly the original boy’s mother—”