by Nisi Shawl
“Come to bed?”
“Have I…? Have I been a asshole?” he said.
“What?”
“Did I ignore you?” he said. “Did I get too wrapped up in my shit?”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I reached out to him, and he took a step toward me. I don’t know. It can’t be as simple as he bumped into it. It must be more than that. We bump into them all the time. We must.
Do—Did you ever draw? You know how you’ll make a mistake and go to erase it right away, but you’re using a shitty pencil eraser instead of one of those good ones? And you’re kind of mad at yourself for making the mistake in the first place, and you’ll do a shitty, hasty job? It was like that. There was no blood or anything, it just smeared him into the air.
He tried to scream, but he didn’t have a mouth anymore. Not quite. He reached for me.
I didn’t move. I didn’t make a sound.
It bore down harder, and then he was gone.
SO, HERE I am, for all the good it’ll do. I came to you because it was a thing I could still do. I’m sorry to unload like this, but there’s nothing else—what else can I do? It’s okay that you don’t believe me. There’s not going to be any trouble. The cops aren’t after me. The world has already altered itself so that Johnny was never anything or anyone. My memories of him are fading. I probably won’t remember his name by the time we’re done here.
When it happens to me, you’ll forget me, too. Everyone will. I’ll make a wrong move, and one of them will erase me, and the world will reorder itself, and that’ll be it. I’m telling you this because I think I know what the thing in my dream was trying to tell me. They see us, and they—they—they don’t know what to make of us one way or the other. We’re here and they’re here, and it’s like whatever. But Juh—Juhh—my boyfriend—my fiancé—? He did something one didn’t like, and it decided about him, and it removed him. It could happen to any of us any time. It does.
What will we do if they all decide at once?
Burn the Ships
Alberto Yáñez
THERE ARE NO obsidian blades in the camp. The Dawncomer guards have learned enough to make sure that no ritual knives get smuggled in. Without obsidian, Quineltoc can’t spill blood properly—he can’t keep the law, can’t observe the rites of the Living Lord as a man of God must. The ghost-colored invaders who came from beyond the rising sun trust in their vigilance and in their cold technology to protect them. It does.
The People make do. They’ve had to, for over a decade now—ever since the Dawncomers laid aside any pretense of friendliness and openly usurped the Emperor’s power. But there is always the Lord.
Quineltoc keeps faith.
It’ll be enough.
Surely.
But tonight, need drives him, as relentless as a snakedriver’s whip. He sneaks into a tight corner between the latrines, hidden from the sight of the guards. The stench of watery shit and piss is thick despite the cold, dry winter night. It’s long after curfew and he’ll be shot on sight, but Quineltoc is alone for the first time in months. In an overcrowded hell, solitude itself is almost worth the risk.
The wind picks up and moves the clouds across the blue-black sky, revealing stars glinting like frozen tears on the bruised face of night. The waning quarter moon gives little light, and Quineltoc shivers as he contemplates the dark between the stars. His copper brown skin, sallow from poor rations and exhaustion, tightens and prickles as he shivers. The Tzitzimimeh dwell in the vast emptiness.
He doesn’t precisely fear the dark goddesses, orthodox man that he is. God’s sisters made willing sacrifices, he reminds himself. The Bone Women gave their lives for the Living Lord, for His law. The law itself keeps the People safe, and he keeps the law.
Their blood, their flesh, to nourish Him.
The grey hair on the back of his neck stands up. He tells himself it’s the biting wind that makes him feel small and naked under the pitiless stars.
Quineltoc steels his faith and straightens his back, ignores the cold, and starts to softly chant the bloodletting prayers. He takes a shard of bone out of the pocket of his thin grey pants. Carefully, he doesn’t think from who that bone came, and focuses on the prayers he uttered as he honed the shard’s point, whetted on hope and dismay. He shivers again, harder—shudders—and pulls the sleeve of his dirty smock back, slicing the flesh of his left forearm. The red blood is black in the shadowed starlight.
He should call out, proud, happy at an offering given, voice ringing like a bronze temple bell to proclaim his bloodletting, but the guards would hear him. After a long moment trembling in the cold, Quineltoc is able to focus. The year’s count is ending soon, and with the power of time turning behind his prayers, Quineltoc hopes that the Lord will listen despite the lack of incense and obsidian.
Maybe provide a different answer.
The wind dies down and Quineltoc hears nothing beyond himself and the blood surf, deafening, in his ears. The pounding of each heartbeat one more note in a space where experience and grace have taught him to expect to hear the voice of God.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Silence.
Ba-dum.
Even with no incense to carry his pleas surely God will hear him? Answer! he thinks deep inside himself, and then stifles the demand.
Ever since he was newly a man and became the youngest lawspeaker of the People of the Starry Codex, the voice of God has answered him at prayers. More than forty years. Now, with the scent of misery the only incense, Quineltoc dreads the reply.
Silence.
Ba-dum.
Exhorting the Lord is difficult, but hopelessness is harder. Quineltoc prays, silent words shaping his cracked lips in curves of agony and devotion.
Ba-dum.
He lets out a mangled cry, barely remembering to muffle his despair with his dirty, chapped hands. A dog barks on the other side of the camp.
The lawspeaker, who had been called to walk before the Living Lord, falls to his knees in the icy muck. In fragmented silence between heartbeats, Quineltoc hears a small, still voice, giving him the answer he has heard before:
Guide the People to Me, Quineltoc. Help them be willing. I am so hungry. Nourish Me.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
“NO.”
Citlal has heard that word from her husband more times in the last week of arguments than in the nearly forty years spent together before it. She can tell that the argument feels ancient, endless, to the both of them.
“What other choice do we have?” Citlal demands. Her voice is thick with stowed rage writhing like a fire axolotl in her guts, with the tears that she’s refused to shed since she watched a Dawncomer guard shoot their daughter Shochi four months ago. Her dark eyes are dry in her prematurely-lined brown face. Three decades since the massive invasion fleet turned their world inside out on a fine spring dawn. The new sun had been huge and red, staining the sky, the Sunrise Gate opening from an old, strange world.
The Empire of the Land Between the Waters had grown accustomed to the almost random trickle of small refugee boats over the previous century, their half-drowned sailors bedraggled like mangy golden rats fleeing chaos from an unfathomable somewhere behind the sunrise. The Dawncomers had just been pale, yellow-haired jetsam on the eastern shores, easily welcomed curiosities. But then they came in great blazing ships teeming with their survivors, unwelcome arrivals with guns and plague and their foreign god, slowly taking over everything.
Citlal has lost almost everyone she’s cared for in a long and fortunate life except her husband, her godly man who refuses to understand what must be done. They are in one of the warehouses the Dawncomers use to keep up the pretense that these are work camps. The other captives ignore their whispered argument out of respect and familiarity. The scent of old boots and cloaks stripped off at gunpoint makes the chilly air musty as the stolen goods move down the conveyer belt with typical Dawncomer ef
ficiency. The usurpers brought cold mechanical technology with them, and it was impervious to the living magics the People use. Their casual illnesses had killed multitudes throughout the Empire, hitting magebloods the worst, eviscerating the effectiveness of the People’s priests and magicians. Centuries of order toppled, the Emperor’s power turned into empty ceremony and yea-saying.
“So we just wait for God to save us?” Citlal is so beyond frustration with her husband that it’s hard work to remember anything but her anger. “How long do we cling to prayer? Do we just wait for God to kill the Dawncomers? We could act—”
“And if we were to do it... if we commit that sin, what will we be?”
“Alive.”
Quineltoc closes his eyes. Citlal’s point is sharp, like all of the cactus spine reasoning of her arguments across their lives. As sharp and relentless as her anger is, she knows that he argues reasons—truths—that he devoutly hopes she’ll accept. She fights the urge to count them off on her fingers as he repeats himself, his tone a perfectly logical hammer to knap away the flint of her resolve. “The face of the Living Lord would turn from us! The Sunset Gate would be closed shut to everyone we would ‘save.’ No reunion with our people in the next world beyond the west! The Tzitzimimeh will eat our souls!”
“And probably make dresses out of our bones, too!” she retorts, childhood story truths made glib and fierce by the effort not to yell. Quineltoc stops sorting dead women’s shoes for a moment, breathing hard at her. As a wisewife of the People, Citlal knows the laws that bind magic since the Living Lord rose. She understands the way order limits chaos, like the stars fixing the dark sky. She knows, bone true, the reasons for the laws that forbid the action she urges. Invoking the Dead Sisters is dangerous, especially with the Temple Major—the place where the divine presence of utter night could safely touch mortal earth—now rubble under Dawncomer boots.
Quineltoc sighs and enunciates clearly at her, as if to a foreigner: “Every one of us lost.”
“What good is salvation if the spirit of the People is dead, Quineltoc?” she counters. She sorts a feathered green hat out of the hodgepodge, twiggy fingers nimble but aching in the cold. “They captured every single mageblood on orders from their Hierophant.”
“The Lord saved us before. We need to trust and obey.” His earnestness is painful. It reminds her of the kind young man who won her heart with marigolds and poetry during the first years of their marriage.
“Quineltoc, it isn’t half-dead refugees begging for sanctuary!” She repeats her own list of inarguable facts. “All of the Dawncomers remaining have come now, and they’re tired of us living in their new home. They burned all their ships. They can’t go back through the Sunrise Gate. And there’s only room for themselves in their vision of the world,” Citlal spits the words out like cactus gall. “And God doesn’t care.”
“Of course He does, but it’s not for us to decide how He shows it! We made a pact: He gave men magic, and we swore that we were His! If the Lord chooses that we die here... we’ll sing hymns to His light as we do it.”
Citlal knows that her husband’s faith is straight and true. He’s heard the voice of God. He knows what certainty is.
Doubt is new, and grown bitterly familiar.
It’s ash, she thinks. Black ash falling from the sky on the days when the People’s corpses are burnt, ash on her tongue that God says nothing to her husband now.
“We can only do it during the Dead Days, Quineltoc. End-Year comes in two days, and we won’t last another year. If you help, all the People will rise up!” She takes a breath and then she whispers, “Please.” He purses his lips together so tightly that they almost disappear and looks away, pretending absorption in sorting stolen shoes.
Citlal counts to five, and five again, and exhales. Her anger settles, like a pot of chocolate moved off—but still near—the flame. She continues, admitting to heretical magic, “I used women’s blood and the night wind to speak to the wisewives in the other camps and reservations.” There are so few of us left. She continues. “The Dawncomers are planning another purge in three days, through all of the camps. They won’t burn the bodies for at least a few days after that. They dole out our misery to feed their own god, damn them. I think they’re offering us as a sacrifice, but we can appeal to the Tzitz—”
He shakes his head no, grey hair a scraggly storm about his head. “Citlal, no. The other lawspeakers in the camp agree with me.”
She snorts, and throws a fine turquoise spidersilk shawl into a sorting bin. “You mean none of them dare disagree with the great lawspeaker Quineltoc! We will all die.” She pauses, deliberate. “They killed Shochi. And if they are feeding us to their god, do any of our souls even make it past the Sunset Gate to the next world?”
He throws out his hands, negating the possibility. “Shochi is in God’s keeping,” he says, almost reasonable. Then his voice hardens. “And I refuse to be the one to keep us apart for eternity.”
Citlal’s shoulders slump and her head dips, lank black hair streaked with silver-white obscuring her face. She knows that tone in her husband’s voice. He won’t countenance the magic that could save them, not if it embraces the dark between the stars.
She reminds herself that he’s a good man, a godly man. The Living Lord has spoken with him. The People use his name as another word for rectitude, for devotion, for wisdom.
She reminds herself.
A good man who only sees God.
She will not be so blind.
THERE ARE FIVE Dead Days between End-Year on the night of the Festival of Gates and the start of the new year. Five days when the doors between the worlds of the living and the dead are open and the skeletal Dead Sisters of the Living Lord stride unhindered across the living world. Then, with the sunrise start of the Day of New Fire, God sets the divine glyph on the lists of the living and the dead after making the year’s bargain with His sisters, and shuts the gates.
One of the prayers the People sing to guard them in the dark tells of the grim and beautiful bat-winged Obsidian Butterfly, the Lady of the Knife, eldest of His sisters. She is set to mark down all the living and list, as God so decides and the Tzitzimimeh agree, the deaths in the coming year: who by fire, who by water, who by old age...
They are the Living Lord’s People, praying and keeping God’s laws with the magebloods to guide them. Who by falling, who by plague... Citlal has never liked that prayer. She doesn’t find comfort in its cosmic certainty.
The People have kept the laws as best they can, watching the Dawncomers abandon slyness and rise to real power over the past decade. They’re the strangers now, forbidden to rebuild the great pyramid Temple Major in the heart of the old capital. Still, the People have adapted.
Who by strangulation, who by thirst, who by willing sacrifice...
Quineltoc hid his face when the guard shot their daughter Shochi, and murmured the prayer recited upon receiving news of a death in the stillness after the gunshot: Blessed be the Living Lord, the keeper of life.
The guards tossed their daughter’s body on a pile with others: grandmothers, the gold stolen from their teeth to make wire for machines; children, stomachs distended and arms stick-like with hunger; lame men, who could not work fast enough, bludgeoned to death with rifle butts... A daughter, beloved.
Who by gunshot... she whispers, adding a new death to the ancient litany.
She will never forgive Quineltoc for looking away.
END-YEAR GATHERS ITSELF in the rising dusk, the prayers of the magebloods exhaling softly into the night. Across the Empire, the rest of the People—less devout and free enough, if burdened and afraid—accommodate the usurpers’ orders for no public ceremonies. But in every camp and reservation where they have been packed into across the Land, the magebloods of the People of the Starry Codex observe the rites as best they can, makeshift and brave.
It’s a ragged chant. Voices falter as physical weakness from short rations and exhaustion robs their breath, yet the
chant is kept. The guards don’t bother to forbid them song with so many voices unable to ring out.
East-facing, the barracks’ door is in direct sight of the guards, so Citlal crawls out under the women’s barracks on the west side of the camp.
A few of the other women have guessed at Citlal’s plan. Some of the mothers and elderly nanas even approve. One, an old kitchen witch from a fishing village on the sunset coast, gave her a blue silk purse smuggled out of the sorting line so that Citlal could gather the earth and ashes she needs.
Citlal clings to the shadows and makes her cautious way to the women’s barracks on the north side of the camp, carrying the full purse next to her heart. The remaining wisewives in the camp have berths in the northern barracks. In the other camps across the Empire, every wisewife left gathers as well. They hope to accomplish the task, together.
Borrowing a sliver of the rising power of the first night of the Dead Days and retracing the initial steps of the Tzitzimimeh’s dance, Citlal says a word and cloaks herself in a bit of darkness and misdirection. The guards don’t look her way; their dogs whine, but don’t bark. She passes through the northern barracks’ door and it doesn’t creak. As thin as she’s become, she doesn’t have to open it very far.
The cutting night wind blows her along. Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal, the other two wisewives still alive in their camp, are waiting just inside the door. Ce-Mishtlin is short, dark brown, pretty, an aquiline-nosed young woman from one of the southern tribes of the People. Her spectacles are wire-rimmed, and the right lens has a small asterisk crack flaring in from the outer edge. The cheekbone underneath is bruised and inflamed. Citlal recognizes the marks left by a heavy fist and is careful to kiss a greeting on Ce-Mishtlin’s other cheek.
Yoal is several years older than Citlal, with the pale fawn skin and plaited black hair of the northern tribes, and her skin sags, missing pounds. She had once been tall, beautiful and fat, but now Yoal is deflated and slack from six months in the camp. Citlal meets Yoal’s agate-dark eyes and takes her hand, nodding her respect. Determination glints like starshine in Yoal’s eyes.
