by Jean Johnson
An oil lamp, made from brass and glass, could last its owner for decades, provided it was refilled on a frequent basis and the wicks occasionally replaced. River eels had a good oil for that, once their abdominal fat was rendered—though the smoke smelled like a mixture of burned fish and mud if the wick wasn’t kept trimmed every few hours. It also took the oil rendered from twenty eels to fill just one of her father’s four lamps.
Lightglobes lasted only a handful of years by comparison, but they never had to be refilled. The light they produced could also be adjusted. A soft tap produced a soft glow, while a harder rap brightened the globe. Two swift, sharp taps shut it off, conserving its magic. That these Shifterai had not one or two, but four of them—the last of which the shifter Tedro hooked into place and rapped into life before shrinking back down to his normal size and shape—spoke of just how wealthy these men were.
Someone touched her elbow. It was Torei, the stutterer. He gestured toward a canvas-slung chair, which had been assembled to one side of the brazier, indicating she should take it. No sooner did she sit in it, enjoying the comfort of the fabric seat and back as they bent under her weight, than someone else flicked a blanket over her legs, warding off some of the rain-brought chill in the air.
More light danced up, this time from the flames in the brazier pan. The two men tending to it added more slivers of wood and twists of dried grass, then increasingly thick sticks. The heat was nice, but they didn’t add larger chunks of wood, as Tava might have done. Instead, they continued to add thin branches. The faint hiss of water sizzling told her why; thin branches were more likely to dry out and burn better than thicker, wetter limbs. Not until they had a full bed of bright-glowing embers did they add thick rounds of fallen branches to the edges of the fire. It cut off some of the heat from radiating into the rest of the tent, but concentrated that heat into the center of the broad iron pan.
They also fixed a metal grille over the brazier, supporting it on forked iron spikes. Someone else brought in another strange, wrought iron contraption, a pole with a zigzag near one end and tiny figure eight loops at the other. The man stepped on the horizontal part of the zigzag, embedding the pole in the ground. Dangling from his elbow were a pair of metal loops where the ends met and then stuck down perpendicularly like little tails. The little tails fitted into the figure eight loops, and someone else settled a pair of bowls into the broad hoops, then poured a bucket of water into both pans.
A strangely shaped bit of metal sort of like an arm was added between the two bowls, hooked and twisted into place somehow. The small hoop at its end was fitted with what looked like a pot of softsoap, while the arm itself was draped with a bit of linen, forming an instant, portable washstand. The last two nights, they had camped by streams and simply dipped their hands in the running waters to clean their fingers. Tava wanted to ask questions about the washstand and the other clever aspects of their constantly camping lifestyle, but there were male bodies moving all around the tent, still doing things to make it a temporary home. She wasn’t sure if she had been gestured into this chair for her comfort, or simply so that it would get her out of their way.
Someone stretched up and hung a trio of sheets, stretching the middle sheet between two of the four poles and the two outer ones from the poles to the lattice walls. It formed a sort of room, behind which four of the twenty men in the warband vanished, carrying what looked like their bedrolls. Siinar came over then, pointing at the curtain as he stooped to murmur in Tava’s ear.
“Those men have the middle-night watch. They will go to sleep now and will eat when they rise near midnight, scout and guard the camp for a few hours, then wake the early watch and return to their beds. Out of respect, we will try not to be too loud tonight, but as we have put up the tent, we will probably hold some entertainment while supper cooks. Since you likely do not know much about Father Sky and Mother Earth, our Patron God and Goddess, I will suggest the others choose the stories of how the world was created by Their love, and how Sister Moon and her two Brothers were created.”
“Two Brothers?” Tava asked, confused. “But there are only two moons in the sky, not three. Just Brother Moon and Sister Moon, no less and no more.”
Smiling, Siinar patted her shoulder. “A lot of people have forgotten there was once a second Brother Moon, but we have not. The story was found in one of the sub-basement ruins of the old Palace shortly after we reclaimed the City, following the Shattering of Aiar. While we do not worship Brother and Sister Moon directly, we do worship Their Parents, Mother Earth and Father Sky, so we do our best to remember all of Their Children as a way to further honor Them.
“Kodan,” Siinar called out, catching the attention of his elder son, who was just entering the tent. “Come and tell Tava the story of the Murder of Elder Brother.”
Caught with a bag of flour in his hands, Kodan looked around for a moment, then passed it to his brother, who gave him a dirty look. Ignoring it, Kodan dusted off his palms and approached Tava. “The tale of the Murder of Elder Brother?”
Siinar nodded. “She knows nothing of our legends, and you tell that one very well.”
Setting the bag down on a table one of the others had assembled, Kenyen snorted audibly at that.
Kodan rolled his eyes at his brother. “My father exaggerates . . . but I will do my best.”
Detouring, he fetched a rolled-up bundle of blankets, untied them, and arranged them as a sort of folded-up cushion. A gesture got Tava to stand, and he adjusted the chair so that it faced the cushion instead of the brazier. Once she had settled herself again, blanket re-draped across her lap, he dropped cross-legged onto his impromptu seat and began, giving Tava his full attention.
“As we have read, and so we were told,” Kodan began, “a very, very long time ago, there were three moons in the sky. Elder Brother, Younger Brother, and Sister Moon. The one we know of as Brother Moon was Younger Brother Moon, and he was big and new and bright. Sister Moon was born the middle child, and was middle-sized, and middle-bright.
“Elder Brother was, strangely enough, the smallest and dimmest of the three,” he explained, continuing. “This was because the astronomancers had determined that Elder Brother, being the eldest and given the most freedom, had roamed the farthest from Mother Earth, deep into the realm of Father Sky. And just as someone in the distance gets smaller the farther away they are, so it was with Elder Brother. The three siblings sailed through the heavens, with Elder Brother at a stately pace, surveying the skies once a year, Sister Moon four times a year, and Younger Brother twelve times a year.”
“That’s because the youngest child usually has a lot of energy to spend,” Siinar interjected, pulling over another bedroll and turning it into a mat. “Just ask any parent which of their children is the most exhausting to tend.”
“Yes, but now we must turn our attention from the Moons to the land of Fortuna,” Kodan said. “You may or may not know about Fortuna, but it is the oldest continually ruled Empire in all the world. Even today, it is still going strong, at least according to all that we have heard from the various people we trade with. But the time of this story was many, many years ago. Maybe as many as four thousand years, maybe a little more.”
“Four thousand?” Tava asked, bemused by the number of years Kodan was claiming.
“Around that many,” Siinar confirmed for his son, nodding. “This was shortly after the First Convocation of the Gods, which took place a very long time before Aiar ever hosted it, let alone lost it. This, the scholars of Shifting City have managed to piece together over the years. When Aiar Shattered a hundred and eighty years ago, our ancestors lost most of what they used to know, and we have been slowly rebuilding that knowledge ever since.”
Kodan cleared his throat, recapturing Tava’s attention. “This is not a story about the Convocation. Not just yet. The story is set in Fortuna, yes, but it is about a group of mages, who called themselves the Dimensionars. They were exploring how to transport people instantly fro
m one region to another. This was long before glass mirrors were invented, and so their experiments in creating Gates were not very controlled, and no one had yet figured out how to make the Portals that led to the destruction of most of Aiar.”
“I know about the Portals being destroyed, laying waste to the lands around them for miles, and contributing their damage and chaos to the Shattering of Aiar,” Tava said. She shivered a little. “I’d hate to think how much damage was wrought back when they were still figuring out such things.”
“Not as much as you might think,” Kodan pointed out, “since they clearly continued in their experiments . . . but I am told there is a difference between opening a tunnel between two points in this world and opening a tunnel between this world and the other universes that are out there. As you may know, we live in the world of Life. It is surrounded by the Dark, where the dead roam between the mortal realm and the immortal one, and beyond the Dark is the Afterlife, the home of the Gods. But, that is only in one direction.
“Now, I am not a mage, and what few we do have on the Plains are mage-priests, but from what I understand, there are as many different directions to open a Gate as there are directions in the world. To open one upward is to tap into the Dark, in the hopes of reaching the Afterlife. Only the Convocation of the Gods has ever managed that task,” Kodan reminded her. “Opposite that direction, downward, opens a Gate to the Netherhells. To aim inward is to aim across the skin of Mother Earth, which is the kind of Gate you may have read about. And to aim outward is to tap into other universes with other worlds and skies and people of their own.”
“A mage aims inward, to travel outward across the land?” Tava asked, confused by that idea.
Kodan shrugged expressively. “I am a shapeshifter, not a mage. This is just what I have been told.”
“The directions are metaphysical, not physical,” Siinar explained. “One does not literally dig down through the soil to get to the Netherhells. The only thing one finds when one digs down is earth, rock, and eventually magma at the hot heart of Mother Earth. And then one finds rock and earth and eventually the far side of the world, since we all know the world is a huge ball shaped by the hands of the Gods and set in the arms of the stars. From there, it flies around the heart of Father Sky every year, which is of course the sun.”
“Am I telling this story, or are you?” Kodan challenged his father.
His tone was mild, but the look in his light brown eyes was pointed. Tava bit her lower lip, trying not to smile too obviously. Siinar lifted his hands, backing off from the tale.
“To continue,” Kodan said, “these things are known today, but had not yet been discovered back then. And while the Dimensionars were careful as they could be in their experiments, other mages in a neighboring land had obtained some of their research and were not quite so cautious in following it. And they opened the Veil between this world and one of the Netherhells. This drew the attention of a powerful, clever demon-princess, who pretended to be the Goddess of this other realm. Through lies, trickery, and deceit, she managed to convince many of the people of this other land to worship her, and thus gained power in this realm. Enough power to act.
“Her intent was to destroy the other Gods and set herself up as the sole Patron of this world, to receive the faith of all the people and thus make herself into a terrible, unstoppable power,” Kodan told Tava. “To do this, she used her mage-priests to open another hole in the Veil between worlds, this one set deep among the night stars, and launched a massive rock from her world to this one.”
“It was a rock a thousand times bigger than the biggest boulder you may have ever seen,” Siinar added.
Kodan gave his father a stern look at the interruption. Tava tried not to giggle, but some of it escaped as a soft snort. Between the noise of the rain on the tent roof and the sounds made by the men preparing what looked like biscuits, baked vegetables, and dried fish cooked in goat’s milk, she hoped it hadn’t been overheard. The dry look Kodan turned on her let her know her humor hadn’t passed completely unnoticed, but he didn’t seem angry at her mirth, unlike a Mornai man.
Sighing, he continued. “As I was saying, she caused a great, massive rock to be launched at the world. The astronomancers wrote in the records we found that, after painstaking observation, this giant boulder was set to aim straight at the heart of Fortuna and would land—or rather, crash catastrophically—in the middle of the great temple that hosted the Convocation of the Gods, just three days into the Convocation. Unfortunately . . . the astronomancers uncovered this news with less than a day to do anything about it. Mostly because the rock was obscured by a cloud of darkness, and they had been forced to track it as much by the way it blotted out the light of the stars at night as by any other means at their disposal.
“I must remind you at this point in the story that no one outside of her high priesthood knew that the Goddess Zundi had originally been a demon-princess from the Netherhells,” Kodan told her, slashing his hand through the air. “In fact, she had grown so powerful in just the few years since her first appearance in this world, proclaiming herself a deity, and the start of the very next Convocation, that she managed to Manifest through the Gateway of Heaven during the Naming of the Gods.”
“Or it could have been just an elaborate trick performed by her high priests,” Siinar interjected. “No one actually knows.”
“Father,” Kodan protested.
The gray-and-brown-haired shapeshifter shrugged eloquently. “I’m just saying, no one truly knows!”
“Anyway,” his eldest son stressed, returning his attention to Tava. “The usual homages were set aside by a hasty petition of all the priesthoods toward their Patrons to save the people of the world, and in particular the people of Fortuna, who would have been destroyed with as much certainty as the people of the capital of Aiar.
“Since the giant rock had been flung through the stars, it was determined that the three sibling Moons should catch it in a net of Their powers during the night, before it could get close enough to strike during the day. They would do this augmented by the energies of the other deities. The demoness Zundi, having been proclaimed the Goddess of Night, volunteered to track the rock’s trajectory and guide the siblings in catching it, for it was dark and thus difficult to see in the depths of the sky.
“The only problem was, she used her powers to further obscure the rock from the astronomancers who were tracking it, and so she betrayed the Moon Gods as to the rock’s exact location,” Kodan said. “Equally unfortunate, the sibling Moons had to actually change Their paths and paces in the heavens to place themselves appropriately to cast Their net. And, rather than the rock missing the net and going on to smash into our planet . . . it smashed into Elder Brother instead, destroying the third moon. The only good that came from His death was that the rock itself was also destroyed by the impact.
“Younger Brother and Sister Moon scrambled to reshape Their net, catching most of the shards of Their slain sibling before those, too, could crash into the world and destroy it that way,” Kodan told the raptly listening Tava. “Instead, They cast the pieces of Their sibling’s corpse deep into the night, all the way into the Dark itself, since there was no way to repair the damage that had been done to Elder Brother’s physical, tangible anchor, that being the farthest-out moon.”
“No doubt Zundi expected the worshippers of Elder Brother to falter and weaken, perhaps even for their kingdom to collapse, which bordered her own claimed lands. But the High Priestess of that land was said to not only have worshipped Elder Brother, but to have been in love with Him, too, and bound her soul to His, keeping Him alive for his people . . . after a fashion,” Siinar amended. “He is the only Dead God in the whole pantheon of the world that we know about, and His high priestess is the only mortal made into a Goddess. His people’s faith in both Him and His high priestess were so strong, she was made into a Goddess herself, since she had literally bound her life eternally to the existence of Elder Brother.”<
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“It was this same high priestess who probed for the truth of the whole matter,” Kodan continued, apparently giving up on quelling his father, though he did give his parent a somewhat annoyed look as he continued the tale. “It was she who discovered that Zundi was not a real goddess—an honest manifestation of the will and faith of her people—but was instead a power-thieving impostor from a Netherhell. And it was this same high priestess who uncovered the plot of Zundi and her followers to destroy the Gods by destroying the Convocation, with the intent to survive and proclaim herself High Goddess of the world by the right of having survived the cataclysm caused by her own secret attack.
“Once the Gods had dealt with her—destroying her powers, breaking her people’s faith in her, and scattering her priesthood—they cast her back into her Netherhell and sealed the Veil. And with His people still worshipping Him firmly, and giving great honor unto His high priestess for her devotion to Him, the God of Elder Moon became the God of the Dead, and His priestess became the Goddess of Lost Souls . . . or so we have read, and so we were told,” Kodan concluded.
Siinar wasn’t the only man in the tent who clapped his hands as his son finished the tale, though all of them clapped softly, mindful of the men trying to sleep beyond the makeshift curtain. Enjoying the story, Tava joined them after only a moment of hesitation. It was more of a habit from the Mornai custom where women weren’t supposed to draw undue attention to themselves, but when she patted her hands together, showing her pleasure in the tale, no one protested her actions. In fact, Kodan blushed a little, ducking his gaze.
“I liked that tale,” she praised him, venturing to actually speak her opinion, as he had claimed Shifterai women were allowed to do. When neither he nor his father told her to be quiet, she added, “I’ve never heard anything like it before . . . but then, Five Springs doesn’t have a lot of books. I think, now that my and my father’s things are gone, if there are more than six books in the whole of the village, I would be surprised. Um . . .”
