“Why do you need to prove that?”
“I will draw a lot of soulstuff through these circles tomorrow. The powers I invoke will use every loophole to keep from honoring their agreement—including claiming I am not myself.”
“Why do you need us?”
She looked up from her knife’s trail. Tay alone stood within the circle. Others had gathered outside: red-arms mostly, some she remembered from that first day when they tried to bar her access to the camp. A withered and scarred man. A giant who made even Tay look scrawny. A woman with short hair dyed shocking red.
“Come in,” she said. “Step across the line.”
“It’s fine,” Tay added.
They entered, each by each, the red-haired woman most decisive and the giant the most hesitant.
“You’re friends of Chel’s.”
“I am,” the giant rumbled. “Zip.”
“That’s your name.”
“It’s what they call me,” he said. “My name’s Andrew, really.”
“Not all of us know her,” the red-haired woman said. “She asked for people from all over. I used to work with the Kemals, up by Market and Slaughter.”
Elayne let her work-knife fade and her glyphs dull to pale tracks on her skin. Even the shadows of her suit grew shallow. She looked almost human when she was done. Normal enough, she hoped, for them to believe her.
“I need your dreams.”
* * *
Elayne’s deals gave her power to preserve the Skittersill. Now she only needed to explain, in precise and Craftwork terms, what the Skittersill was. The insurance contract stipulated which properties it covered, yes, but tomorrow Aberforth and Duncan would fight those definitions. This building on fire could be any building on fire. Why should we save it?
She had maps, but maps were poor echoes of reality, their accuracy open to attack. She had to feel the Skittersill as if it were her own flesh. She needed a lifetime’s walking of its streets.
No way to get there in a night. Fortunately, she could cheat.
They sat cross-legged around her, the first twelve: Tay and Andrew-called-Zip and the red-haired woman named Hannah, and scarred Cozim. With a fine brush and silver ink she drew a glyph-eye on each one’s brow. Others joined, and sat, and had their brows inscribed. Tay flinched at the bristles’ touch. “It tickles.”
It would burn, soon enough.
“Eyes closed,” she said, and sat in the center of her innermost circle.
Zip spoke first. “How long you want us to sit like—”
She closed her eyes, and they fell through sleep into nightmare.
Which nightmare didn’t matter: so many to choose from, and knowing each she could find the next most basic terror and follow it down into the marrow-fears of the race. Love itself could be a nightmare—a laugh, a touch, a feeling of contentment and loyalty to block out life and light and even her own name, love become one of those old Iskari prisons where they threw men and women to rot without light or sky or anything but the crush of the jailer’s boot heel on hands thrust through the slot in the door through which they slid tin plates of bad food, and she followed that nightmare further down to burial, her body stiff, dead maybe, as shovelfuls of earth fell into her mouth, onto her eyes, weight that grew and grew and grew and she could not breathe or move or see as they packed it down, dragged heavy rocks over the distant surface and smoothed it and struck it with their shovels and she felt nothing but heard the impact and no matter how she strained she could not move and then the worms came and the bugs that burrowed and the whole host of crawling hungry things, and still further down she fell into that single sharp terror, I am being eaten, but so basic that there was no referent to I, only the chewing, the tearing of flesh, the self swallowed, to—
There.
She hung in the central fear, tangent to all human minds at once. There was no geography in this place that was not a place, but topology, yes, a web of minds each of which contained its own webs of minds, a billion-dimensional space all but impossible to navigate untrained and unwarded.
But Elayne was trained, and warded, and knew the secret ways of fear.
The drawn glyphs called to her, the eyes she’d scribed herself, and she reached out with a hundred hands, each one a mercy, like a sage from the mountains west of the Shining Empire, generous and omnipresent.
She found Zip screaming, chained to an anchor that fell to crushing depths, and took his hand and broke his chains. She found Cozim sobbing in bed beside a woman’s skeleton that still wore scraps of rotting flesh, and lifted him from his failure. She found Eleanor tearing at worm-flowers that sprouted wriggling from her belly, pulling each up by its roots only to draw forth gobs of her own meat and corded nerves—until Elayne tore her free of herself.
As she wandered the nightmares, to her surprise she found another, without her eye-glyph but of immense gravity: Temoc, who stood over an altar where his son lay bleeding.
She did not hold out her hand to him. He did not ask for it. But he reached into his chest, drew forth the Skittersill in miniature, and passed it to her.
“Thank you,” he said, and turned from her back to his own private fear.
They hung together between dreams, Elayne and Tay and Cozim and Zip and Hannah and the rest. “Show me your city,” she said.
And their city took shape.
There was no single Skittersill, as there was no single sun, no single moon, no single god. But a city grew around them nonetheless.
Their dreams were grand and old and private and new, their roots deep and facets many, held together by memory, analogy, and metaphor rather than logic. For Tay the Skittersill began with the smell of dust and fried plantain, with streetcorner sweetness and cheap drink, with street dances each lunar new year, brawling and turning cartwheels to the rapid beat of a brass band. For Hannah it began with fear and a breath of air from the distant sea, the feeling of sudden freedom. The images slid through Elayne’s mind, fast and fluid. And she added her own memories, her own dreams, and Temoc’s: the city seen by a preacher to deserted rooms, through ten years of depression and alcohol, two decades more of search and prayer and hunger, followed by twelve years of love. Ten thousand sunrises give or take: some found him streetside with feet in gutter, head hanging sickly between his knees, some streamed through glass windows as he donned priestly regalia and raised false knife before a sparse but curious crowd, some called him from feathered sleep to wake in Mina’s arms. Sunsets too, and music: horse hooves and rain and three-string fiddle, the song of soapbox politicians, drums on stage and in dancer’s veins, drums in his wife’s flesh and his own chest.
These dreams would take years to infiltrate her waking mind, years she did not have. But there was another way.
Her eyes drifted open, and her hand rose to her chest, drew her work knife from the glyph above her heart. Dreams weighed down her arms. The stars above thronged with all the monsters Quechal myths had planted there. Spiders the size of trash bins skittered around her, spinning webs. Chakal Square was a charnel house, an orgy, an inferno. The city crumbled into ash, built itself again, was knocked to pieces by flaming serpents taller than the tallest building, perished in a single blinding light, towered black and invincible above. A Craftswoman’s mind was an edge for cutting her will into the world, but an edge could scrape as well as cut, and this she did now, scraping away years of judgment to dream and wake at once.
She touched her knife to stone and drew the first line. Then she drew another, crossing it, and a third.
A map unfolded from her blade. Set beside surveyors’ charts this map was warped and imprecise, streets crossing at the wrong points—if the lines she drew were streets at all. She cut a long curve sharp as a sickle, and lines like rays from it, that might have been the Forty-first Skyway. This was no navigational aid, nor was it art exactly. But it was useful, it was real. Working, she saw the city, each crossing and square painted with memory: this corner good for afternoon preaching, that all
ey where migrant workers slept if they’d stayed in town too late to risk the crossing back to Stonewood, this the square Mina painted three times in watercolor, that the rooftop with the hammock where Tay and Chel slept in good weather and happier times.
She worked for hours or minutes, probably the former. Dreamtime could not be laid upon a line, as dream maps did not yield to an alphanumeric grid.
Around her the people of Chakal Square prepared themselves for death, and hungry gods danced.
She finished before the moon set. The map drank and digested starlight. It breathed.
She returned her knife to her heart, laid her hands in her lap, and let her eyes drift shut.
She had done what she could. What she was allowed to do. Now she could only wait and gather strength.
Elayne did not sleep, surrounded by her circles and her mad map and her fellow dreamers. But she rested in a way that was not altogether unlike sleep.
The night passed.
Morning came.
58
Temoc woke before dawn, and found the skies above Chakal Square clear.
Dreams contorted in his mind: dreams of Mina, of her hate for him. Of Caleb, who did not understand.
Of Elayne.
That memory shocked him to his feet, on the dry grass mats spread before his altar. A red flaking stain lingered on the table where he had lain the Major. Gone now. He’d burnt the man himself. The husk did not matter, once the feast was done.
Men and women slept upon the mats. Some few early risers drifted among the rest like priests or robbers through the wounded after a battle. Chel stood close by, and watched him stand, stretch, exorcise the night by movement. The sky brightened from amethyst to sapphire. Temoc wished he could stop the sun from rising, stop time from turning, leave them all sleeping here on the morning after their finest hour. No need for a final battle, no need for him to honor his promise. No need to tell them they were doomed, or face the choices he had made. The knife. The flight.
Chel approached him. “Bad dreams,” she said.
“Of course.”
“We’re ready, because of you.”
“That is a sentence,” he said, “not a commendation. What did you dream?”
She licked her lips. “You don’t want to know.”
“Leave it there and I’ll imagine worse. What did you dream?”
Her eyes were deeper than he remembered. They must have deepened in the night, or he had. “My father was a mechanic at Longsands, and I’ve worked the docks since I was a kid. I dreamed I sailed a ship on fire. Not one of the container hulks, but a real old ship, a tea clipper, burning. Its hull caught, and the decks, and the sheets. Still we sailed. We suffocated, our skin melted, and still. The captain sent me to the crow’s nest. I climbed through the heat. By the time I reached the top, my left hand was blistered and my right was bone. I couldn’t see. Wind came, and at the last second I thought I saw a flash of green. Then I fell and woke.” Her voice stayed level. “It’s not a good dream, is it?”
“Not the best,” he said. “Do you remember who the captain was?”
She hesitated. “No.”
Others woke. They rose in the heat, fathers and mothers, the men and the women and the children. They uncurled from one another, they rolled their sleeping bags, they stepped out of their tents, they blinked in the light. Lines of smoke lay like blades against sky’s throat.
Red-arms took up their posts, staring over barricades at empty streets. The wounded tried to stand, and many found they could. By night the gods had walked among them with healing hands. Chakal Square would be ready for the day.
They gathered to hear him. He wondered how many came from faith, how many from fear, how many because they heard the stories and wondered what new miracles today would bring. He did not care. They came, and filled his mats; they came, and stood, and listened.
He bent his head and prayed. Let them hear me. Let all of them hear me.
He was heard.
Hungry eyes watched him watching them.
“This is the last day,” he said, softly, and he saw the ripple of shock as each person in the camp heard his voice at once, clear and direct as if he spoke to them alone. “This is the last day. I have seen the King in Red come. I have seen his weapons, and they are grand.”
“We’ll fight!” someone cried from the back, a man, a boy really. He knew nothing.
“We will fight,” Temoc said, not agreeing. “And we must know what fighting means. The battle we face today will be the fiercest we have known. The gods stand at our side, but our enemy grew strong by killing gods. We cannot expect to win. Life is a debt, of which death is our repayment.”
No shouts after that.
“We have flowered here, and now we must seed: we must not perish in this battle, but spread. Ideas, and blood, and determination, all must fly from Chakal Square and take root in rich earth to spring up again, and again, and again, until we cover the world.
“I ask you now, if you are strong enough, to walk away. If you have children here, take them and go. The hero’s path today is to leave. Be the seed that flies from the fist of the King in Red, and floats away to bloom where he does not expect. Tell the truth of Chakal Square: of human beings defending their beliefs, their homes, their ways of life, from an enemy who gave no quarter. If you accept this burden, you will prove yourself stronger than those who stay. It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.”
He waited, savoring the pause in his speech—a beat as near as he could come to timelessness.
“I will fight,” he said, “because I was born to fight. That is my path, but it need not be yours. If you leave now, know your brothers and sisters love you. Know they respect you. Know they trust you to build the world we seek in the years that come.
“It is time for sacrifice. It is time for the gods to know us by our gifts. I will not perform the bloodless rite, in respect for one who gave himself last night to help today. But I will give my own blood. I encourage you all to do the same. Feed the gods on yourselves. Join them in body as you do in faith. Join together so no man can tear us apart.”
He held his arm high where all could see, and his knife, and drew a cut between two scars on his forearm. Blood wept, gathering at his elbow. A drop formed, and fell, and splashed against the altar stain.
A tongue lapped the blood from his arm, a talon held him, and he felt himself lifted. His eyes opened, and they stood in the sky surrounding him, miles tall and minuscule at once, grounds of being, and he was with and within them, was the Spider spinning and Ixaqualtil gnawing the bones of the dead, was winged Ili who spread her sails through the sky, was the Hunchback burdened with the weight that is the future. He was the corn and the mortar stone and he was the mouth that consumed; he was the giver and receiver of the great gift.
And then he was himself again, weeping.
He lowered his arm.
The sun rose.
The congregation came, one by one. Their blood wet the altar, and the gods drank, and they left. He did not count how many came. Hundreds perhaps. Time seemed slow that morning.
But before long it was done, and he stepped back from the altar and felt himself complete, and spent, and filled with power.
“Do you believe what you said, about seeds?” That was Chel, beside him. Always.
“I think so.”
“Hells,” she said. “I never was that strong.”
He clapped her on the back. Above, the sky glittered with new-risen sun. “Neither was I.”
* * *
Some left Chakal Square. Not all. Not as many as Elayne hoped. Not as many as Temoc hoped, either. But some.
Many were parents, families. A couple who brought their two children to a demonstration that started peacefully and became something else. The woman whose boy Temoc had healed when he fell—she left, holding her son’s hand. They were not cowards. Their lives were not their own to g
ive. It was a sacrifice, of a kind, to reach this point and step out of the river of history. To be the seeds.
Kapania Kemal stayed, and her husband Bill. They had a daughter. She was twelve, she was living with an aunt in Fisherman’s Vale. She was cared for. And they asked themselves how they could look in her eyes, later, and say they left the people they fed and guided and protected because danger neared. They did not know whether this was the right decision. They hoped to survive. They hoped Temoc was cautious, as a leader should be, but that in his heart he believed they might triumph.
Some left to accept Temoc’s challenge: because they were strong, and they could bear their scars in secret, and teach the many meanings of Chakal Square. To a bent wiry man with the first strands of gray in his beard, Chakal Square was the resurgence of the Quechal nation, decades crushed beneath a foreign heel. To a young woman with flames couched behind her eyes and a rippled burn scar on her face, Chakal Square meant the gods, meant the rebirth of faith in the face of danger. To a journeyman poet come with his notebook to write the movement’s history, the Square was a dream made real. To a Longsands union worker it was one fight in the war between men and the undead powers that sought to rule them. Chakal Square was a beacon. Chakal Square was the moment everything went wrong. Chakal Square was the future. Chakal Square was the past, Chakal Square was the path between. Chakal Square was birth, and death, and all these meanings followed those who walked away.
Some left because they were afraid. They glanced nervously at the sky. They recoiled from the rapture of those who saw the gods. They quailed from the divine call. A red-arm who just the day before had crushed a Warden’s skull with a brick, who roared atop a barricade, looked into her future and saw only a simple, short struggle, and then death. So she went.
Those who remained did not ask one another why. They had passed beyond words, would be one way to write it—a poet’s lie, almost true. They stayed, that was all. Whether from fear or hope, for fellowship or isolation, in joy or sorrow, did not matter. They stayed. Reasons were for those who left.
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