34
SARINE
At the Base of a Cliffside
Erhapi Land
I first ascended to the Seat sixteen cycles ago, from the Tenadaan schools of the Jukari. Back then the path was different. Smoother. We knew the precepts and studied the mysteries of the kaas before we even knew to whom they would grant a bond.”
“Hold on,” Sarine said. “What is the ‘Seat’? And a cycle?”
Axerian reclined against his hands, sprawled out on the trampled grass. “I still forget you aren’t her. It’s strange, to me, speaking to you of such things when she was my teacher.”
“So the Veil was a master at your school?” The question felt odd even as she shaped it—thinking of a Goddess as a schoolteacher—but they had to start somewhere.
“Not that sort of teacher. Let me start over. It’s been ages since I delivered this lecture, so I’ll need your patience if I am out of practice.”
She waited while he made a show of gathering his thoughts, and he leaned forward, tucking his legs into a crossed position.
“It begins with darkness,” Axerian continued. “A world where the sun struggles to shine through clouds of ash and smoke. Plants die. Fire rains in place of water; the seas roil with storms. Caves and dwellings belowground are the only refuge, and they are never safe, between magma leaks, ash vents, earthquakes, and fumes rising from the depths.
“One child in a hundred lives to die of age and infirmity. Most breed as soon as they’ve flowered, and count themselves blessed to meet their grandchildren. Philosophy and religion are preserved only by dedicated schools: The greatest luxury of every civilization, and no few peoples go without. A terrible world. Can you picture it?”
She nodded, not wanting to interrupt. He gave her a wry look, and spoke again.
“Understand,” he said, “I don’t have to imagine what that world is like. I was born into it. I remember the last days of shadow. Only two others living can say the same—three, perhaps, if you count the Regnant.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean the world was once as you describe?”
“Yes,” he said. “In some ages, it has been as you see it now. Light, and life. Knowledge, growth, succor from the wild.” He held his hands up, cupped together, and rotated them, moving one hand below the other. “In others, Death holds sway. A ‘cycle’ is all the years between the choosings—at the end of each age, when the time is right for ascension, champions are chosen to fight for Life, or Death. Then whichever is victorious makes the world in their God’s image: poison, gas, and blight if the Regnant’s champions win. And this”—he gestured to the grass and dirt around them—“if the Veil’s do.”
She weighed his words in her mind. It sounded more like a creation fable, the sort passed down by provincial elders outside the earshot of any Trithetic priests. But then, d’Agarre had vanished at the height of the battle in the city. And she’d heard Axerian—and the native spirits—speak of ascension, and Gods, before.
“Ascension,” she said. “Champions. What precisely are they?”
“There are three ascendants on each side. The God and Goddess each bond three warriors to fight for the Soul of the World. For the Veil, they are champions of Order, Balance, and the Wild. The Regnant preserves more schools, and settles things in his own way. Last cycle his champions were Crab, Crane, and Fox. They could be entirely different this time. No way of telling before the day arrives.”
She nodded slowly. “That’s what happened, in the city. When d’Agarre vanished.”
“That’s right,” Axerian said. “He gathered enough power to ascend, and take my place. For sixteen cycles I was champion of Balance. And now no longer.”
“How many years in a cycle?”
A sudden weariness appeared in his eyes, and grief, mixed with his usual mirth.
“Thousands,” he said. “Too many to count.”
The emptiness of it stretched in front of her. Too vast to consider. He was sixteen thousand years old, maybe older? But Axerian spoke again, leaning toward her as he did.
“We spent most of it sleeping. No need for champions to watch as civilization sprouts from ashes. We wake to guide the world into the next war. But I’m still technically old enough to turn the head of your most ancient graybeard. And now I’m mortal again, picking up life where I left it, after my first ascension.”
“So what happens? The champions face each other. Then what?”
“The God and the Goddess abide by the victor. I’ve only ever witnessed a transformation once, from one state to the other. It was beautiful. The clouds cleared, the seas calmed, the sun flared gold and bright in the sky.”
A surge of hate wrenched her gut, foreign for all it felt as though she’d summoned animosity for his words.
“The three of us,” Axerian continued, “the Veil’s champions, decided that day we would never again see the world transformed back into shadow. It was her intent to see us discarded, left to die as mortals once our fight was over. We refused. We knew we had the skill to best whatever the enemy sent to face us. We used her power to preserve ourselves, and for sixteen cycles, we fought the Regnant’s champions, and won. We kept the Death God from ever remaking the world into the nightmare we’d destroyed with our first victory.”
Memory sparked, to one of the first visions she’d seen. Those visions hadn’t been her memories; they were the Veil’s. A battlefield, with three champions victorious. The world transformed by her power. A betrayal, and her imprisonment.
“You imprisoned her,” she said.
A sober look passed through Axerian’s eyes. “Yes. No more than you and your kaas have done to contain her now. I used the kaas’ powers to bind the Goddess, and we drew Life magic from her. Enough to sustain ourselves, and keep the champions of every age suppressed.”
Another flare of rage from deep within her gut. Another emotion from the Veil. She fought it down.
“So why am I here?” she asked. “If she’s the Goddess, what does that make me?”
“I don’t know. None of us have ever understood the full extent of her power. But her prison was destroyed some weeks ago, and so far as Paendurion could tell, the Veil was dead. I expected it meant she’d taken control of your body.”
“I think she tried to,” she said. “Zi protected me. And Anati.”
Axerian nodded. “The kaas are strong. But the Veil will try again. She was ancient long before I ascended. I can’t think she would let herself be defeated so easily. Even our attempts at containing her were temporary; I think we all knew it, even if we feared this day would come.”
“So what happens next? You’re trying to hunt down the … champions? Is that why you attacked Erris d’Arrent, Arak’Jur, Corenna?”
“Yes.” He said it unflinching. “And why I’ve been using Green to help Ad-Shi with the Vordu people. I know what we do is terrible. We all know it. But the alternative is the world returned to shadow. None of us are willing to let that happen.”
Quiet fell between them, and she watched as Anati climbed a blade of long grass. Her kaas raced up its stalk, almost sniffing the grain heads before skittering back down. She knew from experience the kaas were lightweight, perhaps even weightless, but it was strange to see a creature of Anati’s size balanced on a stem no thicker than the nub of one of her charcoal pens. And Anati was evidently all that stood between her and a Goddess, trapped and roiling inside her belly.
It was too much to keep in her head. She almost laughed at the absurdity of it. The Veil, a Goddess, and not only a Goddess in the manner her uncle might have taught. Axerian revered her as something else, some primal force responsible for sunshine and blue skies and kindness and damn near everything good in the world. She wasn’t that. She wasn’t anything more than an artist gifted with enough tools to survive the Maw, to stay hidden and avoid getting herself caught up in the wrong kind of trouble.
“What happens,” she asked abruptly, “when the champions fight and win and suddenly I’m ex
pected to keep the sun shining? I don’t have her memories or her knowledge. She’s nothing more than a stomachache as far as I can tell.”
Axerian let the quiet linger a moment more, studying her.
“I’m more afraid of what happens if we lose,” he said. “If the Regnant claims the Soul of the World. Will you survive until the next age, to be there to change it back? I know this is the last cycle for me, but I’m terrified it will be the last cycle for all of us.”
“What are you saying? I should let her out? Let her be in control?”
“She’d kill me at once, if you did. But wouldn’t that be a price worth paying, if it meant preserving this?” He gestured to the plain, to the cliffside, the city above them, the summer sky and the sun shining overhead. “I don’t know if it will come to that. But I’ve already been unseated, and we have a madman championing Balance for this cycle. Ad-Shi has given in to despair; she’s left the Seat early, and all but sealed her fate to join with mine. Paendurion alone might not be enough. Everything is at stake, Sarine. This isn’t some miniature battle for the fate of one people, of one city. Everything you know and recognize as this world will be gone if the Regnant wins, and it might well be gone forever, if you take the Veil with you into death.”
He took a breath.
“So yes,” he said. “It may be prudent for you to at least prepare yourself to make that sacrifice.”
“No,” she said.
Axerian gave her a pained look. Even Anati seemed to have gone still, watching, her balanced atop a wheat-stalk blowing in the wind.
“No,” she said again. “You said you were trying to assassinate the ascendants from this cycle, right? Arak’Jur, Corenna, High Commander d’Arrent? To keep your places as champions?”
“They’re not the only prospects, but yes.”
“Why limit it to the Veil’s champions? Why not attack the other ones, the ones fighting for … the Death God, or the Regnant, or whatever you called it? Aren’t they just as vulnerable?”
Axerian frowned. “I’m sure they are, but we have no way to reach them, prior to the last ascensions.”
“Why not?”
“There’s a Divide, between East and West. Your maps show it, in this age: the blackness on the far side of your globes. We’d thought the Regnant’s champions might have found a way through, but it turned out to be your influence. So far as we know, it is impenetrable.”
Her mind worked quickly, chewing on the idea like she might have planned to sketch a difficult angle or form. She’d seen globes marked with blackness on the far side, but that was no more than undiscovered country, as the New World had been, waiting for explorers to sail and find what lurked there.
“It can’t be,” she said. “If the Veil can bring the champions together, then she can find a way through. Or at least she has the power to do it, and that means I do. I’m not going to surrender myself to her. But I’d rather start with the problem of breaking through some artificial Divide than the problem of keeping the sun shining, if I’m going to learn to use her power.”
“It might work,” Axerian said slowly. “Killing the Regnant’s ascendants, before they’re ready. If you could get us through the Divide.”
“Why not?” she said. “If the Veil’s power is responsible for all creation, it’s responsible for this Divide, too. Better to win this war, or whatever it is, before it starts. I can do it. I can learn. And I won’t give in to her.”
A violent lurch of anger spiked through her, as fierce as she’d felt since Anati was bonded. It only redoubled her resolve. Zi had been willing to die to keep the Veil from taking control, and seen to it Anati was put in place to continue what he’d started. She could trust in that, even if every word Axerian said terrified her beyond any conception she’d had of the world.
Zi had believed in her. That was enough.
35
ARAK’JUR
A Rock Overlooking the Swamp
Lhakani Land
Bleak nothing extended to the edge of his vision. Gray haze settled over the top of the peat, broken trees looming through the fog with branches like teeth of a predator, circling him from all sides. It felt wrong to be here, so long in one place, exposed, when the spirits had warned him of the Uktani’s intent.
“Mushrooms,” Ka’Urun said, climbing up the side of their rock looking almost like a beast himself. Wrong to think it; he was still a man, whatever his deformities. “Yinala found a patch, growing with those bushes over there. Want some?”
Arak’Jur waved him away, and the shaman shrugged, spread himself atop a rock, and began eating.
No other sound made it through the bog, and so he listened as the shaman bit and chewed the caps and stems of his meal. Even the usual hum and croaking of toads, beetles, and birds was absent, leaving near-total silence as they lingered close to Moru’Alura’Tyat. That was Ka’Urun’s plan. They would linger close, but not so close that the sacred place would blind the vision-spirits’ glimpses of where they were. To a hunter gifted with a shaman’s power, it would appear as though they had tried to use the sacred place for cover, and made a mistake, leaving them exposed. Then, if the hunter came, they would fall into the Lhakani shaman’s trap.
The shapes of the six Lhakani warriors were visible through the fog, but only if he already knew where to look. One of the men pressed himself against the branches of a tree. A patch of moss and debris floating in the bog masked another hiding under the surface. The Lhakani tribe knew the secrets of their marshland home, their shaved heads and black echtaka paint serving to blend them into the wild. Only their shaman shattered the illusion, sucking hungrily as he devoured another handful of white-capped fungi.
“What do you see?” he asked the shaman.
“Patience, guardian,” Ka’Urun said between bites. “She’s coming.”
“And what of the Uktani?”
“Again you ask of them, and again I say they are not here, Arak’Jur,” Ka’Urun said. “Only her. Only the nightmare.”
He fell quiet again, returning to watch the haze pooling over top of the marsh. He’d meant to leave Lhakani land, and instead found its bleakness suited to his mood. Corenna was out there, somewhere. Perhaps she’d drawn the Uktani away. A sacrifice he’d never asked her to make, but then, Ka’Inari had spoken to her at length after Ka’Ana’Tyat. Perhaps that was why she’d stolen away, saying nothing, fading into the morning. Emotion burned in him at the thought, at the dreams of their child’s future and all the love he thought they’d still held between them. Stolen by the spirits’ whims. Cursed.
A hissing sound went through the bog, like a snake. Yinala. They’d agreed to make such a call when there was sign of danger.
His senses cleared, and he lowered himself closer to the fetid water’s surface.
“She comes,” Ka’Urun said, whispering loud enough to sound like a snake himself. “She comes!”
The other Lhakani were shifting in their hiding places, visibly readying spears and arrows now that he knew where to look to find them. He stayed low, near the shaman’s rock. The ways of moving quickly through the marsh were foreign to him, but una’re or ipek’a wouldn’t care for subtleties. He prepared to draw on both, leaping strength and electrified claws outweighing unfamiliarity with the swamp.
A silhouette cut through the haze, approaching.
Then another.
Two. Before he could weigh what it might mean, spears flew through the mist. A gurgling sound, caught between a startled yelp and a scream, and both figures went down.
Yinala stood, revealing herself, and he joined her in moving toward where they’d fallen. The rest of the Lhakani stayed hidden.
“She is dead,” Ka’Urun said. “They’ve killed her!”
Yinala reached the bodies first, hefting them from the surface of the peat.
“Not women,” she called in quiet tones. “These are men. Foreigners.”
Arak’Jur forced himself to scan the horizon as far as he could see through the
mists, satisfied nothing else was approaching by the time he reached her side.
A spear protruded from one man’s chest, a clean strike through the heart. The other throw had punctured the second man’s jaw and neck, careening off to land in the peat but no less sure a killing blow. He took no time admiring the precision of the Lhakani’s attack. Feathers and paint showed on both corpses, stuck with tar from where they’d fallen but no less clear in their origins.
“Uktani,” he said. “These are Uktani scouts.”
He rounded on Ka’Urun, the shaman still in the throes of celebration despite Yinala’s call that neither slain attacker could be the woman he’d foreseen.
“You swore the Uktani were not here!” he said in heated tones, only the need for caution keeping him from bellowing it across the swamp.
“She is dead,” the shaman repeated. “Ad-Shi is dead. We are saved.”
Disgust overpowered his senses. This was no true shaman. He’d been deluded by the ravings of a fool.
He turned, heading west, away from the shaman’s stone.
“Arak’Jur!” Yinala called to him.
He ignored her and the shaman both, though she took nimble steps where his were slow and trudging, and soon appeared beside him.
“Arak’Jur,” she said again. “What are you doing? Why do you leave?”
“The Uktani are coming,” he said. “Your shaman’s visions are clouded, if ever they were true.”
“No,” she said. “Ka’Urun’s gift is strong. He foresaw our people’s destruction.”
“Ka’Urun saw it in the waning of his own gift,” he said. “Your tribe is broken. Leave here, Yinala. Find a man to make children with. Find another tribe.”
“Arak’Jur has fallen under her control,” Ka’Urun said behind them, his voice raised and cutting through the swamp. “She has him. She made him lure us here.”
“Ka’Urun saw your coming,” Yinala said. “His gift is still strong.”
“How long would you have waited in the swamp, for someone to come? It is no vision, to claim someone would visit a sacred place. If not me, it would have been another.”
Blood of the Gods Page 31
