by Jay Requard
“I implore you to understand, my good folk,” said the sorcerer, “that Gypian or Juutan, anyone worth their morality, must believe that life is life and death is death and these two forces are both bound and separated by their sacredness. To violate these two things by spell or song is to muddy the edge between what your gods created and mine hold true. Surely we can all agree?”
The folk with the painted faces, the city’s most powerful vodunis, murmured agreement as they toked on the burning bush. All four of them, along with Legbas and Cleon, noticed Manwe when he approached.
“And here’s our man, gods,” said Legbas as he opened the circle for the thief to join.
Manwe stepped into the space allowed, eyes to the ground as he offered his bottle of sugar drink to whomever would take it. “Thank you for coming, vodunis. It is more than kind that you would grant me even a moment of your attention.”
One of these mystics, a woman of middle age and crowned in a headdress made of horns and feathers, took the offered liquor. She smiled, her teeth dyed red. “Ah, the new fire we keep hearing about while we talk about fires we keep hearing about,” she said, sly and silken.
“Voduna Erzuli has been asking many questions since she arrived,” Cleon related to Manwe as she drank deep. “I’ve done my best to answer, but perhaps you could enlighten them a bit more than I can.”
“I’ll try,” Manwe replied.
“Big difference between trying and doing,” said another of the vodunis, a diminutive man who stood at shoulder height with the rest of his brethren and with two white lines of paint smeared under his eyes. His fuzzy hair crusted with salt, he held his joint between hands worn smooth by a fisherman’s callouses. “You either catch the fish or you don’t.”
“Oh just go and ask your question, Agwe,” chided Legbas. “Get to it.”
“All right, all right, god,” Voduni Agwe said, his bare brow furrowed. “All I need to know is this, Panther: did you see Calla raise the things you said he raised?”
Manwe retook the bottle of sugar drink when Erzuli offered it back and gulped down a healthy swallow. “I did,” he got out after a few coughs of the burn. “I saw him stand ankle deep in the coals as he ensorcelled his pot of pitch.” He shuddered as another memory forced another draw of sugar drink. “I saw the faces within that pot—fangs and all.”
The third of their number, a brawny fellow with a series of hard scars scattered across his chest, spoke. “I’m Voduni Ogun, Panther. If what you say is true, I know this ritual.”
“You would,” murmured Voduni Agwe.
The hulking priest glared at his short accomplice. “Either way, such darkness can only be found in dark places. Where he learned it is not near as unsettling that he did it, and if he did commit such evil, we must rise against Calla.”
“To rise against him would bring about a schism between the city and the plains,” said the fourth and final member of the city vodunis, a slender woman who dressed more like a man and had painted images of gods on her arms and face. Armed with a short Gypian sword, she stood as rigid as Voduni Ogun, one hand resting on the hilt of her weapon. “We must be sure.”
“So what would you have your brethren do, Voduna Freda?” asked Legbas.
Manwe looked at the voduna for her answer. She averted her eyes from his gaze, her face set to the black clouds beyond the cloud they had created.
“We’d have to think about,” said Voduna Erzuli said.
“Then let’s get to deeper thinking.” Cleon nodded for Manwe to depart as he took fresh joint from the pocket of his brilliant red robe. “We’ve got all night.”
Manwe wandered from the smoke. Red-eyed and exhausted from the last few days, he slinked down the street in his daze, wondering what ill design fate had in store next.
The answer came with a whisper. “Panther.”
Standing in the mouth of one of Tolivius’ slum alleys, Folami the Songbird emerged from the deep oppression of the night’s shadows, clad in a slip of black cotton and simple leather sandals. Iron knives gleamed from the holsters on her belt. Her black hair, braided in coarse dreadlocks, sprouted from her scalp in the natural crown of a queen too regal for jewels.
“You came,” Manwe said.
“I heard what happened,” she said. “I’ve heard other things as well.”
He checked the bottle and saw that only a few more sips remained. “I’m sure you have.”
Folami tilted her head to the side, her full lips curved downward. “Who is this man before me?” She stepped from the alley, letting the muddy light of the few torches ensconced nearby gleam in the oiled knots of her hair. “This is not the man who would rob a lord with less than a shred of luck and wit alone. This is not the man who paid me kindness when I rightfully had lost the game we played.”
“Maybe I’m not that man anymore.” Manwe started to bring the bottle to his lips.
Iron flashed in the darkness. The glass bottle shattered in Manwe’s hand before he could move from the small blade’s trajectory, his drunkenness destroying his reflexes.
“Maybe if you stop wallowing, you can be, Panther,” she said, resolute against his baleful gaze like a goddess undeterred by an expression he knew she had spent her life having to accept without response. “There is enough going in this city to give you purpose if you stopped being so blind.”
His glare turned to confusion. “What do you mean?”
Folami turned back to the alley she had arisen from. “Come and see.”
A hot rain fell upon nighttime Tolivius as Manwe and Folami sprinted through the allies and cross-streets of its urban decay, their pounding feet silent against the tat-tating of the showers upon the soupy roads and tin roofs. His heart pumping, Manwe almost smiled as he chased after the Songbird, at the edge of a laugh and sob as his drink-addled brain cleared with every beat in his chest. Thunder boomed and lightning flashed in the great black vault above, a divine drummer who’s beat only the gods knew.
This was how it should be, he thought, as he tried to keep pace with his competitor, his equal. They raced to the other end of the western market district, the same place where Manwe had met Legbas earlier that day. Folami, as nimble and light as her namesake, leapt to the low edge of a nearby roof, pulling herself up. He followed her path, his hands finding the same holds she grabbed on her way to where there would be no shield from the storm.
The run went on, harder and more frantic than it had on the ground. At every roof’s edge, Manwe’s breath caught when he flew after the Songbird, landing only a few inches behind her as she jumped to and fro, crisscrossing the broken paths they traversed. She came to a sudden stop a moment later, crouched down on a small parapet overlooking a wide alley sandwiched between the building they stood upon and the city’s great wall.
Below, in the muddy row, dozens of young boys and men gathered around a small square platform. Upon it stood a muscled youth draped in a patchwork of iron and hide armor, armed with a short spear in one hand and a collection of dried, severed heads attached by hooks to a rope.
“I know him,” Manwe said to Folami, his voice low against the rumble of the thundering skies. “He’s one of Voduni Calla’s men.”
“He’s been coming to the city every night for the last week to this very alley,” she said. A droplet of water fell off her wide nose. “He pays Legbas’ toughs behind the old man’s back to gather street urchins and broken souls who will come for stolen hardtack. More leave with him at the end of his show.”
Manwe scanned the crowd below and the roofs around them. “Follow me. I want to hear what he says.”
Leading the way, Manwe skirted across the roofs once again, leaping from one edge to the next as he and Folami crossed atop the hovels. Finding a spot where they could drop to the street below, they weaved through gutters and alleyways until they neared the junction where Voduni Calla’s man had set up his stage. Beneath the broken rhythm of the rending skies and the patter of the rains, his voice carried upon the city’s
stinking air.
“Hearken to the beat of your Juutan hearts, you truest of men,” cried the armored speaker. “For though you live in the squalor of the invader’s shadow, the light of Anyanwu nears to wash away the filth of the long centuries.” He lifted his collection of shrunken heads, misshapen by the moisture they had collected. “You have heard the victorious roars of the rebellion out in the hills, like lions on the hunt, while the jackals of the olive lords who oppress you hide within flimsy halls, neither willing nor able to meet us on the honorable field!”
The youths clustered before the stage paid little fanfare to this speech, their hands on their hungry bellies while the older men, tired souls too unlucky to find work in a city of slaves, stared forlornly at the severed heads with lifeless gazes.
“Are these the only ones Calla’s man gathers?” Manwe asked Folami from their hiding spot in the shadows. “There are not the people who should be made to war—not when they already have so little.”
“There’s the rub, Panther,” said Folami. “It’s never the powerful who actually march out to the battlefield.”
The answer struck Manwe, and returning his attention to the crowd, the events of the day crashed in. These were the people he had been warring against, never noticing that they, too, were victims of a war of circumstance, victims of a society that thrived off subjugation and a society too lost to remember what it lost in the first place.
“Everlasting glory, everlasting life is the prize for those who would bleed for their folk—for their land.” Calla’s man thrust his spear into the rain. “And power that your masters will never give you.”
Manwe knew what lay behind that veiled promise as another scene entered his mind’s eye. Pitch-covered, the burnt flesh of the slain rebels filled his nose as they shuffled towards him with groping hands, their eyes rolled to white as they came forward, forward, ever forward. He drew his iron blade.
“Ready?” he asked Folami, glancing to her for any hint of hesitance.
She drew one of her smaller daggers. “If you’re the Panther I know, will it matter?” she asked with a dangerous grin.
They exited the alley into the cross-street, headed for Calla’s man and his stage. The toughs noticed the Panther and the Songbird first, pulling their small shivs out as they advanced to meet them. The crowd shifted their attention from their host, a hushed awe coming over them when they remembered Manwe, the hope in their eyes spoke that they had not forgotten.
Folami flicked out one her small daggers first, bringing the closest tough down when it buried in his bare kneecap. Meeting the wounded fighter on his march toward the stage, Manwe leveled him to the ground with an elbow to the jaw. The other man, younger and more agile than his fellow, grunted in surprise as he charged, thrusting forward with a hard stab at Manwe’s abdomen.
Manwe evaded the blow with an easy tilt to the side, letting the thug’s momentum carry him forward until he tripped. Rolling head over feet, the thug leapt and rose, red with embarrassment as he faced off with Manwe a second time.
“Just go home, boy,” said Folami. “It isn’t worth it.”
“Fuck you,” the thug cried. Turning to attack Folami, he slashed wide. She caught his arm before the rough iron blade could score her neck. Spinning him about in a wide swing, she sent the thug back to Manwe in a heap of flailing limbs.
Manwe brought the thug over his hip and tossed him onto his head. The last thug’s head cracked with ground with a rattling thud.
“Heretics!” Calla’s man pointed his short spear at Manwe. “Look, you forgotten and enslaved,” he cried with the thunder, the tip of his black iron weapon gleaming dull in a flash of lightning. “Look upon those who have fell from the grace of revolution! Look upon a hero who lost to the vices of servitude!”
Standing before many witnesses, Manwe let his knife hang at his side as he stared back at the hopeless and the lost. To kill this man, this mouthpiece of a greater evil, would mean nothing to them. He looked over his shoulder at Folami.
Her black eyes gleamed like obsidian, sharp in a goddess’s way. The Songbird stared questions into him, a chaos of opportunity, risk, and reward if one dared survive.
Manwe reset his concentration on the zealot. “Tell them what paradise costs them.” He brandished his knife at the armored man.
Calla’s man leapt down from his perch. His held his spear in both hands, the honed muscles on his forearms knotted. A wiry body lay beneath his scrapes of armor, scraps Manwe was sure he had earned. “The way to paradise is in the heat of the sun.”
“You mean burned in tar, dead but never done.” A hush at Manwe’s words elicited a cruel smile from him, his gate steady as he and his foe circled. He saw how Calla’s man moved. His were the steps of a fearless man, and fearless men were stupid, lazy with their power. So much of it gave the feel of a show.
Manwe did not give shows. “Your master seeks to imprison not just the sacredness of our past, but corrupt the future. You would have these poor and weary, tired yet hearty, carry on in an unnatural state, never allowed into the earth to find heaven or rebirth.”
The crowd murmured. No man, no woman, no person of Juut would forfeit their souls in such a way. Calla’s man roared in defiance as he charged. The two combatants stabbed for the hearts and minds of the future. An iron blade sliced a throat, a spray of wine-red blood. A body thudded face first into the muddy crags of a broken street.
Manwe the Panther walked onward, ready to rebel for justice. He stopped before the awed masses. “Go home,” he told them. “Let the free and the damned fight from now on. Just stay alive to enjoy what treasures we leave in the ruins.”
Manwe walked the street of where Bacchs stood, drenched from the warm rain. He found Cleon on a stool beneath the tavern’s tattered awning, wrapped warmly in his red robes as if cocooned under a mountain of cloth. The sly enchantment, illusion or not, surprised Manwe when he considered how intense the sorcerer seemed. His piercing gaze, a pair of burning agates, lifted to meet his.
“You seem better,” observed Cleon. His reddened eyes blinked lazily, bloody after hours of inhalation of a guardian spirit. Love filled them then, relieved and tired. “You look better.”
Manwe stepped under the awning. “The Songbird will join us. We’ll hear from Sophicus soon if you haven’t already gotten word.”
Cleon shrugged in his mound of red. “Where we go from here, it may not matter.”
“Why?”
“The vodunis of the city suspect that Voduni Calla’s power lay beneath the world.” The sorcerer’s grin bore little comfort. “Interestingly enough, both your people and mine have similar ideas of the underworld—full of true magic and deeper secrets. Of darkness and necromancy.”
“Be clear, Cleon,” said Manwe. “What did the vodunis tell you?”
“They said you would know better.” Cleon the Sanguine gleamed like a ruby in the night, his robes reflecting the grandeur of the stars, the mysteries of the universe. “Tell me, Panther, what was it like to climb down into The Maw?”
THE END
Part III
Thief of Nations
7
Design in Malice
Called “The Maw” by the Gypians long after they had conquered the savannah, Manwe stood at the edge of this hole in the earth, solemn against the solid darkness of its depths.
No matter at what angle the sun sat in the sky, it never lightened, its shadow ever-present to whomever gazed upon it as a hard reminder of what it was: this opening was the entrance to another world, a world that had harsher costs than the one above it. Manwe the Panther had gone once into the underworld and learned that truth the hard way.
Now he readied to go again.
The two people flanking him checked their packs for a second time, making sure they had brought enough food to last however long they needed to be down there. Cleon the Sanguine, an embodiment of Gypian sorcery wrapped in crimson, cinched tight the belt around his lithe waist. A copper wand hung f
rom a holster sewn with multiple compartments. They shared a smile before Manwe glanced to Folami.
The thief known as the Songbird slipped the last of her spare daggers and throwing darts into the bandolier built into her leather chest plate, though he knew she did not have enough for what lay beneath. She made up for the eventuality with a wicked fighter's knife strapped across her armor, a shaped layer of hardened hide tied to a powerful form with strong leather thongs.
Manwe felt naked next to them. He would enter The Maw like he had the first time—armed with his iron knife, clad in his loincloth and sandals, and his hands wrapped in strips of undyed canvas. His pack hung light on his wide shoulders, stuffed with little more than food and a blanket to keep away the shadows' constant chill in those moments where he felt safe enough to sleep—moments that would be few and far between.
"Ready?" Cleon asked.
Folami nodded in the affirmative. "Let's get to it."
Manwe understood the lack of muster to her voice. The three walked down the grassy knoll toward The Maw, unraveling the length of rope he had cut long to lower them to the bottom. After they pounded a stake in the earth, they fixed their line between worlds, forsaking the last opportunity to turn away.
"Now," Cleon said as he took hold of the line, "the city vodunis said that most of their kind usually go east to the channels, but it is also known that the necromancers using these passages go to the west, or the 'warrens' of the underworld. I suggest we avoid those and go eastward first to search out what information we can among the vodunis that sit in meditation. They might be able to assist us and save us a trip the other way."
"You hope, at least," Manwe replied.
"Come up with a better plan, Panther," said his lover. Cleon leapt of the earth's edge, down into the deep. His voice echoed as he fell. “And we’ll follow that one!”
