Master of Poisons

by Andrea Hairston

  Pirates, captives, and the cook claimed ignorance, but they lied. Djola burst into Pezarrat’s cabin. The walls glowed in the light of many lamps. Ten swords and two bows were aimed at Djola, and still the guards stank of fear. Maps and velvet throws were strewn about the chamber. Two naked women shivered on the bed. A hot pot under a messy table warmed Pezarrat’s feet. Djola dropped the Jena City map on the table next to a knife-catapult from the floating cities. Pezarrat, wrapped in a dead black bear, looked up from his fish eggs and oysters, his face a mask of cool. A lie.

  “They told me nothing of use,” Pezarrat declared. “Well, Orca said you’d lost your wits trying to master Xhalan Xhala, but the spell of spells would not yield to you. Vandana said you’d finally found what you were looking for, right when Mama Zamba hosted spring.” An eyelid and a nostril twitched. “Somebody had to be lying.”

  Djola shook his head. Vandana and Orca spoke truth.

  “Either way, one betrayed you and one betrayed me, so both deserved death.” Pezarrat scratched beads of hair on a sun-bronzed scalp—what he did when fearful. “I sold that Mama Zamba healer bitch. A snake in my house, like you. She was worth a new ship. Orca said I would choke on my treasure and die.” He swallowed an oyster. “What captain allows that from a useless fat whore? I cut his uppity head off.” He laughed.

  The women on Pezarrat’s bed clutched each other’s bruised arms. The guards trembled. Pezarrat was lying, testing, joking, and telling awful truths. Distractions.

  Despite waves of revulsion and rage, Djola kept his face blank.

  “Feeding Orca shark stew and floating-city scrolls”—Pezarrat smirked—“your fault he’s dead, you arrogant son of savages.”

  “Why should I care what you do to your spies?” Djola danced his mind still. With each spin and stomp, Samina’s chill filled him. As the temperature dropped, the women scrambled to cover themselves with velvet. The guards lowered swords and bows, entranced. Pezarrat fingered his knife-catapult. Djola squinted his right eye at the Jena City map and touched the corner with his bare left hand. “Xhalan Xhala.”

  At the crossroads of crossroads, he imagined Pezarrat’s future rising from the flames. There were many futures; Pezarrat’s was easy to render. White flames flared then a gold nugget materialized. Everyone gasped. Djola’s breath was cold mist. He pushed the nugget toward Pezarrat. A cloud of void-smoke, of possibilities lost, gusted out the window.

  “I’ll raid Jena City and pay off the last of what I owe you.” Djola smiled.

  “You’ll join a raid?” Pezarrat fingered the gold. “What of your mission for Azizi?”

  “What remains in the Arkhysian Empire for me?” The truth was the best illusion. Pezarrat clutched the gold. Greed warred with reason on his face and greed won. Djola would feel no remorse when Pezarrat died. “If it’s a trick, you can set your guards on me.” The guards trembled. Djola leaned close to Pezarrat. “Or we can get rich enough to retire to the floating cities. I’ve mapped Jena City’s wealth.”

  “You speak truth.” Pezarrat prided himself on reading men’s hearts. “Our last raid.”

  2

  Trickster

  Dawn. The sea was gray glass. Thick fog tasted sour in Djola’s mouth as he and Pezarrat’s guards headed out in six large supply canoes. Muscular rogues with pirate pants cinched at the ankles, they all looked like Pezarrat: tight knots of hair, beady dark eyes, a greedy sneer on full lips. Men like this dragged Samina to a transgressor hut and abandoned his children to the desert without blinking. Men like this could sell Vandana and chop Orca’s head with a chuckle and a fart. They deserved a poison-desert death.

  The canoe slid onto a golden beach as fog burned off. Djola and the pirates strode along a boardwalk into Jena City. Nobody patrolled the sea entrance to the city, not even a dog—lazy arrogance. A cluster of mud-brick buildings was surrounded by warrior-statues carved from black lava rock. Flying beasts died on the warrior’s blades; naked women were curled at their feet. Deserted merchant stalls swayed in the sea breeze. A stone well inlaid with crystals dominated the market square.

  “Water is life—the greatest treasure.” Djola touched cool wetness to his forehead.

  Captives huddled in their own filth by the well. They waited for a dousing and sale. Women, men, and young ones were locked together, but not guarded. They observed Djola with dull eyes. Thief-lords did swift trade in human flesh. They deserved a poison death too. Railing at the crossroads gods for their indifference, Djola touched the captives’ chains.

  In the midst of murky tomorrows, he glimpsed a free future: people stepping off a waterwheel boat in the floating cities, enchanted by garden barges and sky windows. Locks burst open in a flare of light. Crystals in the stone well swallowed void-dust. Djola barely had time to register this. The captives shrieked. Djola used a Lahesh blade to slice through shackles. “Run!” He pointed at the beach. “Today we’re free.”

  They gaped at his oozing eye and smoking hand. Nobody moved. Djola couldn’t reach the locks on their spirits. Shrugging, he danced Xhalan Xhala around the market square and called to the future of the thief-lord city. Whatever merchant house or abode he spied with his right eye and touched with his left hand burst into white-hot flames. After a blast of heat, cool treasure glittered: a humble bakery became ten gold nuggets; a merchant’s palace turned into a bloody garnet; a spirit house dissolved into yards of cloud-silk. Reckoning fire swallowed one building after another. Samina’s chill kept him frosty. The spell of spells had finally yielded to him.

  “Run!” Djola shouted again at captives who trailed after him. They squealed at flames roaring through Jena City’s towers and humble abodes. Djola shouted in Anawanama then Zamanzi. This time many captives headed for the water. Pezarrat’s crew wanted to dash away too. “To me,” he commanded. The pirates fell in behind him.

  Terrified barbarians abandoned their homes and market shops. White-hot flames seared those who were too fascinated, too slow, or too dazed to escape. Half-naked folks, lugging children or an armload of possessions, stampeded out of Jena City into the sweet desert. The city watch ran ahead of everyone, drunk, but swift.

  Pezarrat’s men gathered the precious metals, noble crystals, and numinous cloth that appeared when the flames winked out. “Throw a bit of fire, and thief-lords puke and piss themselves.”

  “Don’t waste time laughing at cowards,” Djola said. Void-swirls appeared from shimmer. “When this noxious air disperses, only toxic ground will remain.” A small price to pay. Or that’s what he told himself.

  The pirates hurried back to the beach, weighed down with Jena City booty. Djola trotted behind them. His right eye ached; his head throbbed. His mind was a jumble, but Samina’s chill eased pain. The sun was setting, the day over so quickly. Dancing Xhalan Xhala, Djola felt blistered inside. Relieving himself, his piss burned.

  The pirates launched the canoes and paddled through choppy waves, glaring at him. Blood dribbled from his right eye as he glared back. Nearing the fleet, the guards fingered weapons. Djola sang a lament, and geysers of seawater erupted around them. Behemoth eyes glowed below the surface. Two giants breached, grinning and flapping fins. The pirates stared at shell-encrusted maws and froze.

  “Hold your weapons. My friends jump at the flash of iron,” Djola said. “Pezarrat wanted to assure the arrival of his booty, so, you have orders not to skewer me before I set foot on deck.” Four behemoths circled the boats. “My large friends would be sad if you spilled my blood, so I’ll stay in this canoe.” A cloud broke apart and ice fell from the sky, stabbing everyone but Djola. One pirate bled from his eyes. The others cursed Djola for the storm. “Take the booty. Tell Pezarrat, I keep my word. Our last raid. I’ll find my own way in the storm.”

  The pirates shook slush from their hair and scuttled up the ladder onto the flagship. Djola felt blank. Xhalan Xhala had hollowed him out. He bobbed in the water, free yet dazed, like the captives in the square. He’d found what he sought, but perhaps lost everyo
ne he loved.

  The behemoths ferried him up a river of ice to Bog-Town’s docks. Nobody pursued him. Instead, pirates celebrated victory with music, wine, and the bodies of slaves. If Orca was dead, at least he wouldn’t have to endure the victory party.

  * * *

  In the night, a high tide of hot seawater melted the ice in the Bog River. Djola paddled back to open sea. Seeing his canoe, captives jumped from the flagship and swam to shore. Nobody knew what had happened to Vandana and Orca. The women from Pezarrat’s cabin insisted, “If he cut off Orca’s head, he’d put it on display. If Vandana wanted to go to home, who could stop her?”

  Djola wanted to imagine escape or a quick death for his friends. Not knowing was worse than seeing a body. Haints and restless spirits wandered the fortress he had made of his mind and heart.

  Samina said: End torture in the huts, on the sea, in the woods and fields.

  “Captain, I come to pay my debt,” Djola shouted in Anawanama.

  Pezarrat opened a porthole. “What jumba jabba are you talking? Have you come to kill me?” He was sober. Good. “Trickster, I don’t know why I didn’t kill you long ago.”

  “Greed,” Djola said. The years on the pirate ship were vivid in his memory:

  Buildings and ships dissolved into sludge.

  Young boys drowned in their own blood.

  Battered captives and pirates begged for a miracle in this life or mercy in the next.

  On barren shores, old women pulled out hair and wailed over the bones of the future.

  “You raid the future for trinkets.” Following a rogue impulse, Djola touched the flagship and danced Xhalan Xhala. Reckoning fire engulfed the hull before Pezarrat could scratch the beads of hair on his sun-bronzed head. When the fire subsided, colorful baubles floated on dark water. Djola felt no joy, thrill, or even relief at Pezarrat’s demise, still blank and jumbled. He paddled from one ship to the next and turned the fleet into pearls and glass beads. Those who jumped into the sea and left treasure behind survived. They avoided his canoe. In the morning, beads and pearls washed up on Jena City’s beach. Survivors left these trinkets in the sand.

  Djola wasted no time celebrating a hollow victory. He thanked the behemoths, turned his back to the sea, and, not quite right in his mind, paddled upriver to inland strongholds. Cutting a swath of reckoning fire through thief-lord realms, he handed out the poison-death the barbarians deserved, till he reached the borderlands and protectorates of the Arkhysian Empire.

  On his march north, Djola called on Samina’s chill but shunned Smokeland journeys to see her. Samina would think he sought revenge and try to argue him out of his plan—an awful plan, yet he had no choice or that’s the lie he chanted. Word of his deadly conjure reached Arkhys City. A letter from Grain was full of his exploits—exaggerated by griots, but true enough.

  Xhalan Xhala showed the disaster barbarians and good citizens made of their world, and finally, the People listened—to the conjurer who turned Pezarrat’s fleet into trinkets and thief-lord cities into sky-stones. They cheered the master who promised a new world was coming. Yet, every day silvery haints cursed at him from mountain mist, sounding like Tessa or Quint. They asked who Djola had become.

  “A clown,” he told them. “Tricking people to their right minds.”

  Grain reported that enemies on Council babbled lies to Azizi. With no more pirate booty to fill Empire coffers, Azizi finally gave in to corrupt masters. He gathered mercenaries to protect grain and oil stores. He barred non-citizens from entering Arkhys City except on festival days and called for Hezram’s Dream Gates around the capital. Illusion solution. So, Djola planned a carnival of destruction at the temple hall of the mountain gods during the Sun Festival.

  What better place for reckoning fire than inside Holy City’s Dream Gates?

  3

  Sentinels

  Awa was barely awake, sleepwalking through the morning, a sunny day in Holy City, but on the forest floor, chill and murky as twilight. A splash of sunlight caught ferns and moss by surprise. Cathedral tree leaves rustled, pleading for mercy. Awa closed her heart to leaf-song. With hammer and blade, she chopped thick roots that anchored soil to Ice Mountain’s rocky shanks. Interlocking roots ran from the edge of snowfields down to the Amethyst River. Ice Mountain was a family tree, twenty thousand years old according to Iyalawo Tembe.

  Tembe wandered through the grove as too many transgressors climbed three-hundred-foot trunks to harvest seedpods or hack boughs. Freckle-skinned, yellow-haired Meera climbed higher than anyone and lopped off new red leaves for high priest Hezram’s dream conjure. Meera was tough. Nobody caught her off guard and pinched her seedpod sack. She’d have kicked them out of the tree. Besides warhorses and bees, Meera was Awa’s only friend in Holy City. Who could count trickster crows?

  Iyalawo Tembe urged Meera on. Tattoos on Tembe’s dark face lit up. She had northlander and floating-city ancestors, yet turned against her mountain, her people, herself. She urged everyone to climb higher for Hezram. Middle-aged trees fell over and rotted, a catastrophe for the soil, crows, and bees. Muddy mountain streams ravished fields in the valley. The Amethyst River complained, groaning day and night. Tembe ignored the wailing river and trees. She loved Hezram more than her mountain. Love was strange.

  Cathedral tree oil for most of the Empire and beyond came from Holy City. The spirit debt for chopping and draining healthy trees to death was high, so this work was forced on transgressors who faced torture to the edge of death if they refused. Shrieks echoing inside mountain cells kept transgressors awake at night and hard at work killing trees in the day. Awa, with only one strong arm and a crooked leg, siphoned oily resin from the roots. After breathing tree-oil fumes for hours, she passed out. Meera hauled her to the temple for bleeding, and the afternoon shift took over root work.

  After being bled twice in three days, Awa was no good for an evening shift siphoning oil. Hezram sent her to the fruit groves beyond the Green Gates to tend warhorses. These temperamental beasts were two hands taller than ordinary horses, strong as elephants, and fast as cheetahs. They stomped everybody—priests, acolytes, transgressors, but never Awa. The ancient Master of Horses was grateful for help the warhorses tolerated. Awa buried her face in Fannie’s red mane—a shock of color against shiny black. Fannie nickered, happy to see her.

  Cleaning hooves and brushing out burrs was the delight of any day. Fannie and the others enjoyed Awa’s calm strokes, Green Elder songs, and occasional gush of sentiment. Nobody else dared to hug Fannie. Why not gush? The Sun Festival was coming. On this feast day, fickle ice gods might smile on anyone, even transgressors. Awa could hold on that long.

  As the sun set, she whispered her hopes to Fannie, then limped unnoticed through twilight gloom to the mango grove for lookout duty. Her horses would wander back to the corrals on their own. Fannie would nose the latch shut. Awa scrambled into a squat tree, barging through waxy leaves and pendulous green fruit. One arm was useless for climbing, the other worn out, and she almost fell. Flailing, she squished a banana rotting in the crotch of the tree. Pulp spurted into her nose and eyes. With no time for an antidote, she was flying toward Smokeland for the first time since barbarians brought her to Holy City forever ago.

  The border-void was endless, longer and denser than she remembered. Even holding to fear was hard. Finally, the cathedral tree forests of her first trip appeared. Smoke-walkers, with dull hair and empty eyes, stumbled about, bashing into each other. Their breath smelled of rotten eggs; their hearts were feeble embers, barely beating. They left a trail of rot and ruin in their wake. Awa almost choked. Her home region was crawling with spirit slaves in the thrall of a witchdoctor or priest.

  Cathedral trees yanked up roots and raced away from creeping rot. Awa followed them, sliding into another region, then another and another. Devastation greeted her. Ashes clogged every wind, and the seas were putrid swamps, choked with rubble. Worst of all, spirit slaves overran the six regions of her heartbeat. Awa retur
ned to her home territory and huddled behind a giant elder tree that sheltered a beehive the size of an elephant. Her first Smokeland hive, it buzzed with life. Tiny bee hearts made a cloud of sparks around Awa’s face. The banana smell of alarm almost suffocated her.

  “What can I do but run back to the everyday,” Awa told the bees. “No escape there.”

  Spirit slaves grabbed any sentinel who flew too close and sucked down the tiny spark. Void-smoke drifted from vacant eyes as the fiends fed feverishly. Awa swallowed a shriek. This was how the border-void increased! Yari never told her that. She called the bees close. Spirit slaves shuffled toward her, nightmarishly slow, yet tracking the bees somehow. She tried to squash panic. Too much fear or fascination and she’d lose the speed of thought. Bal was not there to save her, but—

  A conjure woman with purple dawn eyes and sandy skin tinged green, marched through Awa like a cold shiver, a strange sensation even for Smokeland. The woman’s silver hair was streaked with red mica. Intricate tattoos snaked around her eyes. She smelled of buttery raintree blossoms. Her heartbeat was silver lightning bolts. Awa trusted that over embers. “Greetings…” Awa’s tongue knotted up on words she’d rehearsed for Mother.

  “Your breath body lies in Holy City. Dangerous.” The woman spoke Empire vernacular with the musical accent of the floating cities. Her breath had the tang of a lightning storm. Cold radiating from her skin cut into Awa. “We should leave this region.” She scanned the surroundings. Spirit slaves lumbered toward them. “Now.”

  “They’ll devour the hive!” Awa balled her fists. “I won’t abandon the bees without a fight.”

  “You’d die for bees?”

  “Green Elders say, I am the bees and the trees, I am the wind and the songs, the rocks and the dew, I am me and also you,” Awa replied. “Many bees have died for me.”

  “You’re bold,” the conjure woman said, “but no need to die.” A spirit slave lunged from stink bushes, granite teeth bared. The woman jabbed something through transparent skin into an ember heart. Indigo sparks filled the fiend’s body. Color returned to a kind face; the heart beat lightning bolts and brown eyes filled with tears. The fiend hugged a heaving chest, perhaps a fiend no more.