Master of Poisons

by Andrea Hairston

  Nestled below jagged cliffs just beyond Rainbow Square was the only temple to the supreme god and his gang of minions outside of Arkhys City. This spirit house guarded the mouth of the Amethyst River. Water for all green lands in this region flowed a thousand leagues from Ice Mountain to the Salty Sea—a perfect site for reckoning fire.

  The stench of boiling blood and oil hung in the air. How did anybody get used to that? Tapping a crossover rhythm on the bottom step to the temple, a call to death and new life, he proclaimed, “I will bring your spirit hall down. Come to the sundial courtyard and witness defeat.” He loosed a stiff wind to carry his words and awaken Hezram, once a carnival witchdoctor of dreams, now risen to high priest of Ice Mountain and, according to Grain’s last letter, a candidate for Azizi’s Council. Hezram had risen as far as Djola had fallen. Everyone in the city awakened to Djola’s words echoing in the streets. Nobody believed their ears. Only a man wishing death would wield a weapon or weapon-spell inside the citadel’s Dream Gates. Unafraid, folks abandoned cool cellars to go witness the miracle of god striking down foolishness.

  Djola waited patiently for his audience who no doubt saw themselves as good citizens of the Empire. Few men were evil in their own minds, but Djola saw Holy City dwellers as bloodsucking demons destroying green lands. He savored their last breaths. The terror he was about to unleash would force everyone in the Empire and beyond to heed his words and change.

  As feet stampeded through the Dream Gates, Djola called up an image of the spirit house in his mind’s eye. Cathedral tree columns rose five hundred feet, anchoring glass walls and forming archways to the glory of the supreme god. The skulls of martyred saints leered at him from massive porticos. The flags of rich merchants and thief-lords fluttered on iron spires. Water rumbled through culverts and dams to the Amethyst River. The teeth of supposed traitors rattled in glass jars. Djola’s teeth could have been there. Tree oil and transgressor blood bubbled and coagulated in iron pots—food for power-spells and dream conjure.

  Djola’s audience reached the stone altar square with a roar.

  “Every midsummer, savages and fools come to curse the festival.”

  “This clown is too crazy to wait for evening cool.”

  “He’ll be cold as a ghost soon.”

  Djola sucked up their enthusiasm for his imminent demise, removed a silver-mesh glove, and touched the bottom step to the temple with his bare left hand. He took a breath. Blindfolded, he relied on his mind’s eye to dance Xhalan Xhala and show them their future. The mob halted fifty yards from him and hushed. Even men were wary of treading on crystals in the sundial courtyard. Only priests and warhorses were so bold.

  A geyser of flame as wide as the spirit house spurted beyond blue sky to the stars. A chaste fire, it did not spread to nearby trees, but whirled tight against the temple walls. With each twist and turn, it consumed a wooden portico, glass facade, or stone tower. The mob groaned.

  “So much fire. Does the fool burn?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Djola pulled off his blindfold. Coppery skin burnished on pirate ships was salt streaked and taut with contempt. Full lips ran red with blood. His left hand throbbed. His right eye oozed burning pus. He must look like an angry demon. Confusion and disbelief spread through the mob. The temple was now a mound of sky rocks nestled in yards of cloud-silk—toxic baubles, like in Jena City. Brutal deities were trapped in the spidery orange veins of the turquoise. Four afternoon worshippers, three miners, and two acolytes tending transgressor blood in a front chamber were vapor. Only those deep in the mountain on the other side of Hezram’s Dream Gates survived. Djola let out a breath of cold mist. He refused the hapless dead a heartbeat of regret. He hoarded regret for the deaths of his family.

  “The temple didn’t burn, did it?”

  Ashes fell on their heads, but the good citizens resisted the evidence of their senses.

  9

  Witchdoctor

  High priest Hezram, frantic, blue robe tangled, head and feet bare, raced across the sundial courtyard toward the whirling poison master. Hezram swallowed pride and fell to the ground by the mound of turquoise. Dragging silky brown hair and beard in the dirt, he kissed dung-coated boots and begged for mercy.

  Witchdoctors, lesser priests, and groggy acolytes surged past the water altars onto the sundial. Sumptuous yellow robes cushioned clumsy falls as they dropped down behind their leader. Citizens, northern chiefs, and barbarians seethed behind the holy men. Warriors left armor and weapons outside the Dream Gates. They looked naked and foolish. A few howled. Behind the men, women dancers and cooks in festival robes hugged each other at the edge of the plaza. The women were careful not to desecrate the stone altar square with female flesh lest they call down more catastrophe.

  “Festival conjure,” Iyalawo Tembe declared. A wise woman with floating-city ancestors, she was the only woman who’d dare speak in the priestly citadel. “Nothing else burns. Impossible, a mirage, a carnival-spell.” A robust figure, Tembe’s skin was darker than Djola’s, her hair a dusky cloud with streaks of gold. She had green-flecked black eyes, like Djola. A fortress of knowledge pledged to Hezram, Tembe scowled at Djola and calmed the crowd. Those who still wanted to run from catastrophe were jammed in too tight to move.

  “Don’t worry.” She spoke with a musical lilt. “The supreme god won’t turn a blind eye and abandon the faithful.”

  The holy men knew better. The gods—if they existed at all—cared only for power. “Mercy! Mercy!” Hezram and his inner circle chanted, a few in barbarian languages.

  “Mercy?” Djola had ancestors from north and south. Mercy rescued none of them. “What good is mercy or fickle gods or corrupt priests and lapsed Babalawos living on people’s fear?”

  Several books wrapped in Lahesh metal-mesh tumbled down crumbling steps. They landed by Djola’s feet and raised a cloud of sand that stung his shins. The holy men choked on their chants as he thrust scrolls and books into the small bag slung across his shoulder. Vandana’s bag, his bag now.

  “Mercy is salvation in every religion. Why steal ancient books no one can read?” Hezram gripped Djola’s thigh. “We welcome all gods in Holy City. Join us. Surely, Emperor Azizi would—”

  “You’re a pampered, backwater protectorate, sacrificing children.” Djola shook Hezram off and dropped turquoise sky rocks into his bag—proof for Council. “Thief-lords pay tribute but tell you lies.”

  A musician beat her talking drum to say: “Lying in the citadel means certain death.”

  “You’re a stranger, from the floating cities perhaps?” Hezram glanced at the dwindling mound of turquoise and a bag no bigger than a calabash. His mustache wilted and his smile cracked. “Inside the Dream Gates, it’s suicide to lie. Weapons kill the men who wield them.”

  “Yes.” Djola blinked aching eyes. Without a blindfold, he too was vulnerable to void-spells. “Barbarians and northern chiefs don’t lie inside the citadel. They say nothing. They even avoid stabbing each other on the streets of Holy City. Beyond the city, anything goes.” He dabbed his oozing eye with cloud-silk that fluttered back into the small bag of its own accord—Orca’s spell. “Who believes in mercy? Tell me you don’t worship catastrophe and power.”

  “What is this conjure?” Hezram gestured at Ice Mountain. Cathedral trees shuddered down burl-mottled trunks to leagues of roots. Branches flailed in the wind.

  “These steps”—Djola pointed—“they go to the peak?”

  Hezram nodded. “Climbing is prayer. The mountain is the supreme god’s temple.”

  “Literally.” A hairline crack zigzagged around Djola’s heart fortress. Had he gone too far? No change without risk. The mountain quaked in the aftershock of his spell. The steps were shivering, crumbling. The devastation he called up ran deep.

  “I don’t understand what you’ve done.” Hezram was curious despite rage.

  “I only amplify what you do. Xhalan Xhala. What everyone does…”

  “Impossible
. Xhalan Xhala is a Lahesh tall tale.” Hezram burnt his hand on encroaching sand. “Who are you?” Few witchdoctors or masters wielded more power than Hezram and they sat on the Emperor’s Council in Arkhys City.

  “You’ve been blissfully ignorant in Holy City.” Djola barged past Hezram and addressed the crowd. “Floating cities and archipelagos refuse passage to Empire caravans and trading ships unless we hand over half the cargo at each port. Pirates steal what remains and sell our own goods back to us for profit and sport.” There had been no sport in it for him. “Spies slip into our villages, poison wells, and pollute young minds, inciting rebellion for love of this god or that delusion.” He tapped his blind-man staff against a clay urn. “War rages on every border. Tribes fight each other over goats and cheese, over stolen women and wounded pride. Over water and air … Poison desert encroaches on green lands, starving us all.”

  “Poison desert?” Hezram pulled blue robes tight against his muscular physique. “Why punish Holy City for other people’s crimes?”

  “You bleed even children for your power,” Djola shouted. “Children!”

  Tembe’s drummers drowned him out. She danced and spoke. “Hezram conjures with transgressors. Their spirit debt is so high, dying in the huts is a blessing. We’re not to blame for their crimes.”

  “We’re all to blame.”

  Djola should never have offered Council his map to tomorrow without iron proof. His family paid for this arrogance. Tessa, Bal, and Quint were bone and ash, scattered in the desert where he could not mourn them. Samina walked only in Smokeland. Their suffering was Djola’s fault, yet Samina helped him solve the poison desert mystery and asked him to end torture in the huts, on the sea, in the woods and fields.

  “I live for change, not revenge.” Djola smashed an urn in Rainbow Square. Water cascaded down the altar to the ice gods. “You celebrate lies rather than seek truth.”

  “What truth?” Hezram shouted.

  Djola shoved him onto the crystal sun lines. “Your Amethyst River floods even high farmland during first planting and dries up before first harvest. The mountain god is angry. All will be desert soon. Yet for cool afternoons, scented thighs, and goat cheese, you chop down the mountain and doom your people.” He’d said as much to Council, but now he had undeniable proof—a mound of poisoned turquoise. Xhalan Xhala! They’d have to listen to him.

  “Don’t lose faith.” Tembe closed green-flecked black eyes and chanted. “This cannot be real. A demon conjure show.” Good citizens closed their eyes and whispered with her. In a few moments the whole mob refused to look.

  Hezram stood up. “We fight with nobody and pay Empire taxes. We are free lands.” He leaned close. “For the secret of the Dream Gates, Emperor Azizi has offered—”

  “All the People and the Weeds and Wild Things are free?” Djola said. “No. You lie inside your Dream Gates.”

  The Vévés rendered in Lahesh metal-mesh on the gates sparked and shuddered. Hezram clutched a necklace of poison snake heads. His spirit body got sucked to the borders of Smokeland. Djola watched him tumble through jellyfish spitting toxic barbs and fiends sucking heart spirit. Hezram jabbed viper fangs into his own breast. In a spurt of fire, his spirit body escaped the borderlands, but his heart stopped in the everyday. Wheezing one last breath, Hezram passed out at Djola’s feet.

  “What have you done, fiend?” Tembe hovered at the edge of the plaza, not willing to desecrate the stone altar square with female flesh even for love.

  “Mercy!” Priests and acolytes pleaded with the mountain god to grant their leader sense again. The god was crumbling. No time for mortal woes.

  10

  Transgressor Carnival

  Djola hovered over Hezram’s glassy eyes and motionless chest. Many would die this day. Why save a scoundrel? Samina would never forgive Djola if he let Hezram die for revenge. She’d be furious about Tembe’s mountain crumbling, no matter that Tembe was deluded, a curse to the mountain she served. No matter that bringing down the mountain was an accident.

  Djola thrust a cloth soaked in aromatic salts in Hezram’s mouth and pounded his chest until his heart found a steady beat in the everyday. The witchdoctor coughed, spit out the sharp medicine, and stood up. The lie had singed his beard and left a cataract in one eye. Hezram blinked and gestured at Djola’s healing cloth. Even witchdoctors were obliged to pay spirit debts, but no man wanted to be beholden to his enemy. Reluctant gratitude twisted on Hezram’s burnt lips and got mired in a curse.

  “I’m already cursed.” Djola tramped across what had been a temple to the sooty flanks of the mountain. Using a diamond-tipped blade from his boot, he sliced chains and kicked in the doors of hovels that had been concealed behind temple walls. Transgressors cowered in the dark, some ancient and white-haired, others not yet full-grown. All were bloodless and feral. Djola bashed doors until his muscles trembled and blood soaked the inside of his boots.

  “Stop!” Hezram chased behind him, careful to dodge sparking dust demons from Djola’s bring-down-the-temple spell.

  “How much transgressor blood do you drink?” Djola pressed his staff against Hezram’s racing heart.

  The witchdoctor sputtered and froze.

  Djola smashed in more doors. Samina had died in a hut like this. She’d pulled Djola into her final living journey to Smokeland and urged him to end transgressor torture. Do this for me, she said as they walked a starway over poison desert to mountain forests where evergreen woods and snowfields claimed her spirit body. These cold memories shielded him during Xhalan Xhala, yet tormented him afterward. He knocked the last door open. “How much blood and tree oil?” He hissed in Hezram’s face.

  “Those people do penance—” Every hovel door stood wide. Hezram shook his head. “For grave offenses—”

  “Singing tree songs? Talking to mountains and dirt? Hush. I might have to break your neck if you talk on. That isn’t part of our plan. Samina told me…” Djola spoke his wife’s name out loud for the first time in two years. His tongue ached. “Samina said change, not revenge, is salvation.”

  “Samina? I do know you.” Hezram scrutinized Djola from tattooed skull to booted ankle. “Emperor Azizi banished you. The Master of Poisons?”

  “I am changed.” Following another rogue impulse, Djola barged past Hezram. Prostrate priests rolled aside as he strode to the Green Gates. Tall as cathedral trees and wide as the courtyard, the ancient entryway was covered in rust and moss. With both hands bare, Djola pressed against the copper and iron lacework. The massive structure shivered and shrieked.

  Nobody had entered the Green Gates from the courtyard in over a decade. Wild green lands were ruthlessly guarded treasure. Priests used secret underground passages to tend livestock or harvest groves. Witchdoctors opened the south gates to the Empire Road from the inside with keys, drummed incantations, and an army of warrior-acolytes.

  Hezram chanted a witchdoctor spell calling the Green Gates to full power. Poachers who broke through metal lacework or scaled corral fences first lost control of their bowels, then their hearts beat out of rhythm as jumbled minds wandered. Raving and shitting blood, would-be thieves died of heart failure. Their spirit bodies increased the gates’ power. As Hezram sang the last line of his spell, keening echoed in the courtyard. Djola shrugged at haints drifting through him—his heart and mind were a fortress. Still, challenging the gate-spell, the hairline crack around his heart twanged. He could live with that and a few farts. The gates swung open, tearing apart a snarl of vines and bushes. Rodents scurried from ruined nests, yammering with the good citizens whose eyes popped wide open.

  A cathedral-wood corral enclosed a maze of meadows and groves. Fruit trees with heavy crowns nodded in bright sun. Wild flowers scented the breeze. A string of weaver ants bent leaves for a nest. Plump birds from the south splashed in a pond. A fat creature with a pink snout rooted in mud, squealing at worms. The hidden bounty silenced the mob and angered Djola.

  “Even Azizi doesn’t feast on ducks and pi
gs,” he fumed. Would the world ever change? He answered this bleak question by touching his left hand to each side of the wooden corral, and without considering consequences, sent reckoning fire in a circle. He whistled to warhorses scattered about the fields. The fierce beasts gobbled one last bunch of fruit and clump of clover before trotting toward his Green Elder melody. He grabbed the halter of a hefty black mare with a startling red mane and tail. Tall and imposing, when she halted, so did the herd.

  “Listen,” he shouted at transgressors still hovering in dank doorways. “Now is your chance for escape. Leave Holy City as fast as a horse can run.”

  “No,” Hezram shouted. “These horses belong to Emperor Azizi, for his farms and armies. They’re long-lived and tireless, priceless. I can’t allow you to steal them.” He raised a hand as if to cast a weapon-spell.

  “I’m no lapsed Babalawo to be felled by common conjure. Within your Dream Gates any weapon-spell you chant will target you first. I don’t wish your death, but I won’t save you again.”

  “A true Babalawo, a wise man, claiming the power of ancestors?” Hezram glared at Djola. He couldn’t figure a way around his own conjure. “You planned this well.”

  “Actually,” Djola said, grinning, “kicking in doors was an impulse.”

  “Transgressors are well-marked.” Hezram smiled too. “They’ll be slaughtered on sight or they’ll starve. Sane people won’t shelter them.”

  “I’m not sane.” Djola heaved a large chunk of turquoise at Hezram’s feet. “Payment for their freedom.”

  Nobody in the hovels moved even as Ice Mountain crumbled behind them. Djola heaved the last five rocks at Hezram. What else to do? Prisoners and slaves did not always welcome liberation. Samina set fire to her hut rather than leave it. Her ashes scattered—no memorial place to grieve her. Regret was where Djola buried his family. Cliff faces trembled and the supreme god wept icy tears. Cathedral tree roots wouldn’t hold the temple mountain much longer. The Green Gates and corrals crumbled inexorably into toxic sand. Holy City was doomed.