The Black Resurrection

by Nick Wisseman

  Sinking to a crouch, Urcon wondered if he could have done it—could he have pulled the rope and erased not just his appearance, but another person’s existence? He’d only known the Han for a little while, but it had been long enough to hear him threaten terrible things. And Isaura had summarized some of his actual crimes. Still … was that enough to deserve execution? Or was it suicide, since he’d gone willingly?

  Haru tapped her foot on the ground. “How much longer?”

  “Any second,” Huitaca said, her lips twitching in anticipation.

  She’d spent all night tying—looping and threading and tightening—but there couldn’t be many knots left to undo. The air was heavy with accumulated power, the chain reaction the old woman had set in motion with that first tug.

  “Are we far enough away?” Isaura asked, shifting so that Shoteka, asleep in her arms, faced away from the mine.

  Huitaca grunted.

  Urcon traced a small rock with his finger. What would be left of the mine when—

  “I don’t regret trying to save my sister,” a wispy voice said.

  He looked around and saw Haru and Isaura doing the same thing.

  “But I do regret much of what I did in the attempt,” the voice continued. “And for that I’m sorry.”

  No speaker was visible. Urcon wasn’t even sure the words had been spoken out loud.

  “It’s Da,” Haru muttered. “He’s using Shoteka’s ability—the thought messages Jie exchanged for the spirit armor.”

  Isaura scowled.

  The Han’s next words seemed like a private message: “Be careful with my jing,” he whispered. “Stick to plants. Avoid living creatures.”

  Before Urcon could ask for clarification, a seismic tremor rattled the mountain, and the Mine of Death imploded.

  * * *

  Amadi’s cairn seemed small and plain by comparison. Where Da’s grave was a rippling network of rubble, rising and falling as if the burrows of a giant rabbit’s warren had grown brittle and collapsed, only a few stones marked the Afrii’s final resting place.

  Yet Isaura couldn’t seem to leave it.

  Urcon had already said his goodbyes, as had Haru and Chase. But the Espan had been kneeling in front of Amadi’s cairn for more than an hour while Shoteka napped across her lap.

  Haru finished wrapping her knee with the canvas she’d found in the overseers’ storeroom. She stood to test her makeshift brace, grimaced, and turned to Chase. “Where will you go?”

  The Anglo continued staring at the mound he’d dug for Jie last night, and the candles and bowls of rice and water he’d ringed around her grave. When he spoke, his voice sounded … wrong. Empty and heavy at the same time. Broken. “Overseas maybe. Someplace no one’s heard of the Firebrand.”

  “Callao, the port city near Lima, has ships that go to Manila.”

  “We’ll see. What about you?”

  “I need to deal with the quicksilver I inhaled in the refinery. I wasn’t in there long, but … Chasca said if you drink enough and work hard, you can sweat some of it out?”

  This last was aimed at Huitaca, who chewed her coca leaf a moment before answering. “A little, perhaps.”

  Urcon knew the old woman was being polite. Haru’s raised eyebrow suggested she did too. “I’ll try it,” she said anyway, and picked up her bone weapon. “Then it’s back to Bayano to settle things with Jaxat.”

  Chase grunted. “I’d help you, but the Espans have him. He was on parade in Lima, wearing chains and dodging fruit.”

  “Ah. Well, there’s a stash of silver ingots in Panma to see about, and my little samurai in Metica City.” She glanced at Urcon. “You’re welcome to come. It’s a long way, but if you’ve nowhere else to go …”

  Urcon smiled, shook his head, and gestured at Huitaca. He’d travel with her to Quilla, then make his way home from there. The mine had taken his brother and father, but no one else needed his help here anymore. And he had a mother and sisters to return to.

  Haru started to say something else, but Chase cut her off with an explosive cough.

  “That’s from Da’s purple haze?” she asked quietly.

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “Does the coughing get worse?”

  “It did while Da was playing puppet master with us. But it’s better now, even if it doesn’t sound like it. He said it came from ants originally. Probably needed his magic to keep it working in people. I don’t think you and Isaura have anything to worry about.”

  “That’s something, at least.”

  “A small something. It’s not like the ague needs the help.” Chase glanced at the sky, as if hoping to see something there. He looked less feverish than he had the day before, but another cycle of the disease couldn’t be far off.

  “I think it’s time,” Huitaca murmured. She pointed to Amadi’s cairn, where Isaura had finally stood up.

  “Are you ready?” Haru asked when the Espan approached.

  “Ready?” she echoed, pausing to survey the wreckage of the mine, her eyes lingering on the nearly unrecognizable, completely impassable entrance. “Six months ago, I stood on another plateau, before the grave of another brave man whose death was part of the price for accomplishing a ‘greater good.’ I’m ready to be done with this, ready to go home and lead a quiet life.”

  The Nippon nodded. “Was that Quecxl? The healer with the spirit gull?”

  Isaura switched Shoteka to her other arm. “Yes. I hope his canoe is still where we left it.”

  “I bet it is. We hid it well.” Haru motioned toward the trail that led down the mountain. “But we should go find out.”

  A smile slashed through Isaura’s sadness. “I suppose we should.”

  Haru tried again to convince Urcon to come with them, but he declined. After they’d said farewell, he watched as the Nippon, the Espan, and her child began descending the trail, Chase following a few steps behind. All three adults looked back at the mine—and the many graves they’d dug—before passing out of sight.

  “Are you ready?” Huitaca asked in Quecha some minutes later.

  He’d spent them studying the mine one last time, remembering … and preparing. What would his mother say when she saw his skin? Would his sisters run away in horror? Or laugh at him when he tried to speak? Then again, how proud would they be when they saw him use Shen Da’s jing to grow the biggest harvest they’d ever had?

  Maybe it was a good trade after all.

  “Yes,” he mouthed to Huitaca. “I’m ready.”

  The fierce old woman grunted. “Then let’s hurry up and become the last Huancas to leave the Mine of Death.”

  Urcon swallowed, took a deep breath, and headed for the trail.

  He didn’t look back.

  * * *

  On the other side of the world, at roughly the same time Isaura, Shoteka, Haru, and Chase stepped off the mountain that shouldered Huancavelica, the Red Wraith stepped onto a beach.

  To get a better vantage of Naysin’s first steps on the new shore, Quecxl flapped his wings and spiraled up into the sky. Or were they still Xihuitl’s wings? He’d yet to figure out how his consciousness had migrated to the gull’s body after he’d died on the earthen pyramid. Or how he’d become the eyes for Naysin’s otherwise-blind companion Tay.

  But he’d also never understood why Xihuitl had been his nahualli to begin with. Why a dirty gull for an animal twin? Couldn’t it have been something majestic, like an eagle? Or something powerful, like a jaguar? Or at least something funny, like a monkey?

  Even so, being a gull was probably better than being dead. And as he glanced back to note the position of the statue-like spirit that had pursued them since the earthen pyramid—the giant was still straddling a board a half-mile off the coast—the only other thing Quecxl was sure of was that the world was about to change again.

  For the Red Wraith had come to Europa.

  Afterword

  The historical elements in The Black Resurrection were primarily inspired
by Charles Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Created by Columbus. Of course, my alternate version of the Americas isn’t as chronologically accurate. For example, Cortez and Pizzaro conquered the Aztecs and the Incas respectively in the early 1500s (more than a decade apart). The Cimarrons of Panama were most active in the mid-to-late 1500s. The Tokugawa Shogunate instituted its isolationist Sakoku policy in the 1630s. The Ming Dynasty fell to Li Zicheng’s rebels in 1644. And the Chincha Islands weren’t a colonial guano-mining operation until the 19th century.

  But while I didn’t always slot these settings and events in the proper context, I tried to represent them as faithfully as my fantasy-heavy story allowed. And aside from adjusting the timeline, I didn’t exaggerate the early Asian presence in Latin America. The impetus was the establishment of the galleon trade between the Spanish and Chinese in the Philippines. The Chinese wanted silver (which the Spanish mined mainly from the New World); the Spanish wanted silk and porcelain (among other goods). As the relationship grew, sailors, indentured servants, and slaves from China, India, Malaysia, Burma, Sri Lanka, and other Asian countries made the trip from Manila to New Spain. Many stayed (or escaped) to start new lives. “Known collectively as chinos,” Mann writes in 1493, “Asian migrants spread slowly along the silver highway from Acapulco to Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. Indeed, the road was patrolled by them—Japanese samurai perhaps in particular.” When I read that section and learned how Sakoku stranded many Japanese expatriates, I knew I wanted to write characters like Da, Jie, and Haru.

  I was also horrified by Mann’s account of the Santa Barbara mercury mine at Huancavelica. The Spanish used its “quicksilver” to refine real silver from Potosi, but the cost in Native American lives was monstrous. In addition to the usual dangers of pre-industrial mining (cave-ins, deadly carbon monoxide pockets generated by candles and torches, etc.), the mostly conscripted laborers risked their lives to extract a substance that was deadly on its own. As Mann notes, “Heat from the earth vaporized the mercury—a slow-acting poison—so workers stumbled through the day in a lethal steam.” Conditions improved somewhat with the later installation of a walkable ventilation shaft, but the mine remained a toxic environment until the tunnels were shuttered, and the mercury released by the refining process troubles the Huancavelica area to this day. I wish I could have destroyed La Mina de la Muerte for real, and not just on paper.

  Besides 1493, other sources I consulted included the following:

  “Workers’ Health and Colonial Mining at Huancavelica,” by Kendall Brown

  “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image,” by Edward Slack

  “Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth-Century Panama,” by Ruth Pike

  “A Primitive Export Sector: Guano Production in Mid-nineteenth Century Peru,” by W.M. Mathew

  Daily Life in the Inca Empire, by Michael Malpass

  China, by Patricia Ebrey

  On the fiction side, the story was whipped into shape by the insightful critiques of my writing friends, especially Karyne Norton, Caroline Sciriha, Brook McKelvey, Derrick Gaetke, Mikhaeyla Kopievsky, Cesar Montufar, Mel Williams, and Julianne David. And of course, none of it would have been possible without the support of my lovely wife and partner Ginger.

  If you liked The Black Resurrection, would you mind leaving a review? Even a few words would be awesome—it really helps. Or, to get a free short story and updates about new releases, subscribe to my monthly newsletter. I promise not to do anything nefarious with your email address.

  Stories in the Red Wraith Series

  Prequel 1: The Battle Dancer

  Prequel 2: The Ascenders

  Book 1: The Red Wraith

  Book 2: The Black Resurrection

  Book 3: The Amber Revenant (forthcoming)

  About the Author

  Nick Wisseman lives in the woods of Michigan with his wife and daughter, ten dogs, sixty cats, and forty horses. (The true number of pets is an order of magnitude smaller, but most days it feels like more.) He’s not quite sure why he loves writing twisted fiction, but there’s no stopping the weirdness once he’s in front of a computer. You can find the complete list of oddities on his website: www.nickwisseman.com.