* * *
The next morning he had to walk two miles before he found a stocked grocery store. The market was mobbed but the streets were almost empty. Unnerving. Dresediel Lex was a city of wide avenues. Even the Skittersill, labyrinthine by comparison to other districts, sported streets any other city would call broad. Most days traffic glutted these, but this was not most days. Streetsweeper zombies shuffled along, their occupation gone: no excrement to clean, no dust to remove.
Temoc stopped outside his house to scan the Times he’d bought with the groceries. The front page was an etching of Chakal Square. The artist drew architectural features in painstaking detail but rendered humans as a single featureless mass. Temoc grunted when he read the headline: “Skittersill Rising.” It suggested a war between the people of the Skittersill and of Dresediel Lex, as if these people were not the same; it implicated everyone in the Skittersill in the Chakal Square violence. Perhaps he should find the journalist, correct him. But he, Temoc, did not speak for the movement anymore. He was not their master, not even their priest. Just a private citizen reading the news.
The Times devoted more space to the riots than they ever had to the peaceful movement. Of course. Violence sold. No mention of Tan Batac, just “a man injured in the initial outburst.” Nothing about an assassin. The story focused on the mother and her bloody child, and the Warden’s thrown rock. Even there, the Times shied from the truth. “In the confusion.” “Self-defense.”
“It’s bad to read on the sidewalk,” Elayne Kevarian said. “Someone might run into you.”
He did not jump. She stood before him, dressed in charcoal gray, hands in pockets. He had not heard her approach. “I wondered if you would come.”
“I wondered if you would leave the Square. Happy surprises for us both.”
“Happy,” he echoed.
“Go to the King in Red, Temoc. Stop this.”
“I am not sure,” he said, “that we are talking about the same King in Red. The … man … I saw yesterday did not want to stop the fighting.”
“He’ll listen if you sue for peace.”
“Beg, you mean. And if I succeed, what then? Return to Chakal Square to announce that though I abandoned them, I have dealt on their behalf?”
“If you make a good deal, they will honor it.”
“Any bargain I strike would be a coward’s compromise.”
“The King in Red wants to win,” she said. “Give him a personal victory over you, and you might be surprised how much he’ll surrender in return.”
“I will not show him that force will make me bend. I will not show my people that we should stand up for ourselves only until a sword is drawn.”
“There’s no shame in peace,” she said.
“There’s no shame in general peace. Each specific peace holds its own.” He dropped the newspaper in a trash can. “I want to help, Elayne. I wanted to fight, but I left. I denied the King in Red a target. For that, my fathers turn their faces from me. I can bear their disappointment. But I will not kneel to the man who killed my gods.”
“You’ll let Chel and the Kemals and everyone in that square suffer for your pride.”
“They made their decisions. I made mine. I survived. That was what you asked of me.”
“Fine,” she said.
“I have to go.” He lifted his grocery bag. “Before the meat spoils.”
“Take care of yourself, Temoc. And of them.”
“I will.” He turned from her, and walked inside to his family. She left in a shimmer of insect wings.
They did no work that day. They kept windows closed. Mina set her notes and books aside. They played go fish, and gin rummy, and xaltoc, and a variant on Fight-the-Landlord, which Mina won. Temoc asked Caleb about school, and Caleb told stories of his classmates, and some of the stories were true. At two in the afternoon, their windows rattled and water rippled in their glasses. Caleb ran outside, and Temoc and Mina followed him. Couatl flew west overhead in V formation. Talons glinted in the sun. Temoc’s grip tightened on Caleb’s arm. He did not notice until the boy squirmed and he let him go.
Smoke stained the western sky.
They waited. After a while, they made dinner.
All along, in Temoc’s mind, the city burned.
39
The smoke north of Chakal Square was black as the inside of a mouth, and thick. Sharp winds parted it like curtains to reveal buildings burning. Glass in a high window shattered and shards fell into the inferno. Heat surrounded Chel. The curtain closed again and night returned, swirling and absolute.
“Who sets a godsdamn building on fire in the middle of a heat wave?”
Tay, beside her, shook his head. “The Major’s people?”
“I’ll open him like a tin can.”
A large man barreled toward them out of the darkness; Chel jerked Tay to one side and the runner swept past. Screams rose with the smoke. She recognized one voice: “Gather close!”
The Major. “Come on.”
She choked on smoke, and so did Tay. The crowd thinned as they ran north. Most of those still standing were the Major’s troops, their faces smeared with ash.
The Major stood among his followers, armored despite the heat. His men crouched around him like sprinters, grim and tense, aimed toward the flames that consumed tents and buildings at the Square’s northern edge. “Charge!”
“Hells’ he doing?”
“I have no idea.”
The Major and his people sprinted toward the blaze. Chel tried to follow, but could only guess their paths in the billowing black. Smoke scraped her eyes.
Shapes approached: inhuman silhouettes first, red-lit lurching ghosts, many-armed and triple-backed. No. Not ghosts. Human beings: the Major’s people returning. They bore others across their backs, wrapped their arms around limping women and unconscious men, old and young alike, hobbling out of the fire.
The Major came last, slower than the rest. One man over his left shoulder, a woman under his right arm. His armor glowed in places, and not with sorcery.
They helped him: Chel took the fainted woman, and Tay the man, and together they ran for safety, or at least for air.
They found an empty space to set the wounded down. The Major knelt. His armor pinged and hissed as it cooled, and the man inside that armor hissed too, from pain. He could speak, though his voice was tight: “Thank you.”
“What happened?”
“A camp near the northern border. One of the tents caught first.” The Major pressed his gloved hands against the ground, but could not force himself to his feet. “Or maybe the buildings caught first, I don’t know. Bad luck either way.”
“You didn’t do this?”
“What kind of person do you think I am?”
She didn’t answer that question.
“My people are in the fire, helping those who can’t escape. Where are yours?”
“Getting folks out of the border zone,” she said. “Breaking down camps to keep this from spreading.”
He panted. “And the others?”
“Wardens are pressing on the eastern front. The Kemals’ people ran to the Skittersill for supplies. Bandages. Medicine.”
“The resource war,” he said, and she heard his scorn.
“Their medicine will save lives.”
The Major heaved himself to his feet, and staggered north.
“Where are you going?”
“Back in.” The smoke parted again. Flames shone off his homemade armor. “Come with me if you’d like.”
Then he was gone.
“Dammit.” She stood. Tay grabbed her hand. She pulled away, but he didn’t let go. “If there are people there—”
“We go together.”
“Fine.”
They ran north into a foreign hell.
* * *
The next several hours melted into a slag of memory: heat and sweat and heavy breath through wet cloth, the weight of unconscious human beings, gods!—flesh could drag yo
u down—straining muscle and the sting of hot metal against skin. She coughed ash and spat black. Shouted directions. Cried for aid. Unfamiliar faces took shape from the smoke, a new pantheon of gods and saviors forged in this dark hour.
Someone contained the northern blaze: Wardens, maybe, or the fire department. Tents near the border burned until they scarred the stone beneath.
When the camp was safe, Chel and Tay collapsed side by side. Neither spoke at first. Breathing was enough. Somewhere, the fight continued. Wardens circled, wingbeats heavy.
“We can’t do this,” Chel said. “Not alone.”
“We did it,” Tay replied.
“This time. Things will only get worse—the Major saying the Kemals let people die, the Kemals claiming he set the fire. And we still have our hostages.”
“Who do you think started it?”
“I don’t care. We need to pull together, and we can’t do that alone.”
Tay’s hand fell onto her stomach. She held it in silence. Overhead, smoke and sorcerers’ clouds closed out the stars.
40
The next day Temoc took a stroll.
He told Mina he was going to the store, which was true, but he took the long way round, toward Chakal Square.
He didn’t enter the Square, so it wasn’t even a lie of omission. He just drew close enough to hear the crowd.
The city was dead. Trash lay discarded in gutters. Airbuses and civilian traffic had deserted the sky. Only Couatl swooped above, so high up they seemed small as birds. In darkened shop windows decal monsters advertised new low prices. Chicken breast, six thaums a pound. New cheap combo platter.
Faith and hunger drew him like gravity. Though the sidewalk lay flat beneath his feet, walking toward the Square he felt as if he walked downhill.
Long after he should have turned away, he came upon the fight. Wardens, inch-high black silhouettes at this distance, manned a wall of sandbags at the end of the road. Cries rose beyond the barricade. A red-banded arm crested the wall, and the first rioter lurched over.
The kid was young, clad in browns and blues save for that red band. He slipped the dismount, fell hard to the street, and as he tried to stand a Warden beat him down again. A swarm of red-arms followed the kid, rained on the Wardens from behind. The red-arms fought bravely but not well, and with merely human strength. The Wardens seemed frantic, angry: beat cops, out of their element.
They were strong, though. A woman—Temoc guessed she was a woman from the long hair—ran at a Warden, who kneed her hard in the ribs. A burly man tried to lift a Warden in a bear hug, but the Warden lifted him instead, and threw him down. Some red-arms fell and did not rise again. Dots of white and red stained clothing: blood and compound fractures, broken bones jutting from torn skin.
Temoc’s scars itched. Gods growled half-thoughts and broken sentences in the caverns of his mind. For the fallen. Against all enemies. Unceasing and eternal. In defense of the weak. In service of the holy.
He could help. Twenty Wardens might be a stretch, but he could manage. Strike from behind without warning, hit the commander first and move through their ranks as a whirlwind. Chant the blood chants; his enemies’ pain would feed the gods. As each Warden fell, Temoc would grow stronger—and with the red-arms at his back he could roll on to Chakal Square, to his destiny. They would cry the gods’ names and the heavens would open. The demon wind would break and rain would wash his shriven city.
What then for Mina? What then for Caleb?
He watched the fight.
The Warden commander signaled retreat. The red-arms laughed when the Wardens fled. Foolish. Wardens unhooked slender cylinders from their belts and threw them underhanded. One bounced off the cobblestones, and a second.
Then came the noise.
A god cleared his throat. A goddess screamed. Metal horses galloped through a steel jungle. An enormous insect chewed through a fat man’s gut. Temoc clapped his hands to his ears. The Wardens’ masks protected them, but when the sound faded the red-arms lay writhing on the street. Blood leaked from noses and ears. A woman retched on a sidewalk. Long white cracks marred a Muerte Coffee window halfway up the block. From this distance Temoc could not hear the people moan.
He left them fallen, and walked to the store, where he bought vegetables, rice, beans, and two pounds of chicken at eight thaums a pound—demand, the butcher said with a shrug, what you gonna do. Eggs, tortillas. Tequila. Newspaper.
Mina was waiting for him when he came home. She sat in the courtyard with a cup of coffee and yesterday’s news spread on her lap.
He should have said something about the barricade, about the noise, about the chicken. He didn’t.
41
“You mean to tell me,” said the King in Red as he paced the war room under the glow of ghostlights and centipede screens, “that with twenty-four hours and practically infinite resources we haven’t been able to find a handful of hostages?”
Elayne sat back in her chair and watched. She’d talked her way into the war room without a fight, but getting Kopil’s attention was another matter. The Deathless King had not stopped grilling his Wardens since her arrival. How he expected them to get anything done while he asked so many questions, she did not know.
She wondered if it would be ethical to bill for this time.
The room smelled of sparks, sweat, and bone. Captain Chimalli ran his fingers over the map of Chakal Square. In the last hour crayon and colored pencil had crowded out the printed lines. Soon they’d need a new map; they’d gone through three already. In the basement of the squat building that served as Warden headquarters, a print shop churned out charts by the hour, engravers and cartographers on overtime pay. Gallons of acid spilled onto lead plates. Printing presses hammered ink onto paper, fixing scouts’ reports into reality. “Since our first attack almost captured the Major, the Chakal Square crowd’s grown wary. The hostages are held in the central camp.” He waved his hand over a dozen tents, the fountain, and the mat chapel. “None of our people know where. Scrying yields limited results.”
“What about the captives we’ve taken?”
“They refuse to talk.”
“Don’t you have gentlemen who specialize in that sort of thing?”
“Are you asking me to torture these people?”
Kopil waved vaguely beside the hole where his ear once was, as if a gnat buzzed there.
“My men might object.”
“Don’t use those men.”
“The captives’ information may be out-of-date already. And every time we send Wardens in on a snatch-and-grab, there’s more risk the crowd will seize one of our guys. At the moment they’re scared of us. What happens if that changes?”
“Then it changes.”
“Which will encourage aggressive factions in Chakal Square, leading to more loss of life on both sides. Sir, we don’t know what they plan to do with the hostages. They’ve made no ransom demands. Maybe they don’t want to be seen as terrorists.”
“Bastards hold my city hostage, and we’re wasting time. Do you understand how much this siege costs, Captain? I do. And so does the Chamber of Commerce, whose jackals gnaw at my heels even as we speak. What’s happened with Temoc?”
“He’s remained with his family. Playing the model father. We have him under observation, not so close he’d notice.”
“Without him, Chakal Square’s defenseless against Craft, or close to it. Maybe we’re thinking too small.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Stun the Square. Arrest everyone. Sort the hostages out from the guilty.”
“We don’t have the jail space for so many.”
“Send them to prison, then.”
“Again, where? Our prisons are twenty percent above max occupancy.”
Kopil’s hand balled into a fist.
“Your Majesty,” Elayne said before Kopil could continue. “A word, please. Outside?”
Kopil wheeled on her, and she bore his wrath without blinking. His skelet
al menace might cow theists and underlings, but she was neither. “Captain,” he said, at last. “When I return, give me plans. Outside the box, inside the box, burn the box, I don’t care. I want Chakal Square back, and this movement broken. Everything else is negotiable.”
Chimalli nodded. Elayne wondered if the captain had seen Dr. Venkat since his letter, and what he would have said behind closed doors about Kopil’s commands.
The King in Red set his coffee down and swept from the room. Elayne followed. The doors shut behind them.
42
They rode the lift in silence to the roof, which was broad and flat and mounded with feathered serpents. Couatl slept here, coiled. Scaled sides swelled and shrank with their breath. A tail-tip twitched. Wings shivered. Wardens paced among the sleepers, stroked their sides, soothed them.
“Do they dream?” Elayne asked.
“Animal dreams,” the King in Red replied. “Flight and food. Hunting.”
“Is that all?” A crocodilian head peeked out of a ten-foot-tall coil. Its mouth could have swallowed her whole.
“Of what else should they dream?”
“They belonged to the gods, before the Wars.”
“Yes.”
“Do they remember them?”
“I don’t think so.”
They reached the low wall at the roof’s edge. The King in Red climbed up and offered her a hand, which she accepted though she didn’t need his help.
Behind them, to the north, stood the Sansilva pyramids where the gods had died. Here, downtown, most of the buildings were modern, with slanted walls and bas-relief flourishes to evoke old Quechal architecture. Liberation laid waste to these streets forty years ago—they’d been lined with civilian structures of plaster and wood, less durable than sandstone and obsidian temples. Conquerors built the modern city on the wreckage.
They faced south, toward the Skittersill. If Elayne craned her neck she could see the district’s houses: low and street-mazed with adobe walls and brightly painted wood. “You wanted to ask me something,” Kopil said.
“End this. Drop the barriers. Let everyone go home.”
Last First Snow Page 19
