He’d find the Staff of the Fifth Sun and resume his hunt for Nuru and Efra.
The more he thought about it, the more confusing everything became.
How can the Hearts of two competing gods travel together?
Did the women not know? They were ignorant Dirts, after all. Maybe they didn’t understand what was at stake, didn’t realize that, in the end, only one of them could survive to be Heart’s Mirror. Perhaps they used each other, plotting betrayal when the other was no longer of use. The small scarred one, Efra, seemed capable of such behaviour.
Nuru, the beautiful one, clung to some desperate code of conduct. Closing his eyes, he saw her. She was stunning, the kind of impossible beauty that hurt. Then, when the god came, she was terrible. Jagged legs, barbed with obsidian. Spider’s body, bulbous and glistening. And yet still Nuru, the same long hair the colour of rich loam. Flawless skin, the limitless black Akachi imagined only blind people saw.
She’ll learn or she’ll die.
Seeing the irony, Akachi quirked a sad smile.
The two women couldn’t be more different. Efra, Smoking Mirror’s Heart, would never let a thing like friendship stand in the way of what she wanted.
Scooping up the narcotics, he shoved them into his mouth and chewed.
Seeing Akachi looking for something to drink, Jumoke said, “The church well is full of ash.” He winced a shrug. “Sorry.”
Akachi waved it away and choked down the blend. “Stay here until I return.”
“I shall protect the church with my life,” swore the acolyte.
“No. If the Growers come, I want you to flee.”
Jumoke flashed a quick grin. “Yeah, I’m going to loot the church and run away.” The boy studied Akachi, mouth set at an odd angle, like he was trying to decide whether to speak further. “Try not to get killed. Again.”
Akachi grunted a laugh. “How did I end up with you as an acolyte?”
“Probably crapped in the Bishop’s breakfast.”
With a nod, Akachi exited the church.
Even through an impenetrable haze of smoke and ash, the sun’s heat crushed him. Falling ash collected on his head and shoulders, dusting his hair grey, staining his vestments. Guessing the time was impossible. One patch of sky, a smear of blood, seemed slightly brighter than the rest.
Akachi coughed, spitting.
Ash-choked wells.
Burning fields.
Is it already too late?
Was Bastion doomed?
The gods would never allow that.
And yet Cloud Serpent said that both Efra and Nuru had the potential to destroy Bastion.
The narcotic mix coiled in his blood like an angry snake, twisting reality, thinning the veil between worlds. There, through the smoke and ash, he saw his spirit animals prowl, awaiting his call.
Fetching the carving of the blood-tailed hawk from its place in his belt, Akachi focussed on it, let it become his world.
The screams and sounds of violence faded.
The smell of burning fields was replaced by another, deeper odour.
Death. Sun-rotted meat. Ash-thickened blood.
Colours dimmed as his peripheral vision shrank to a narrow predator’s focus.
With a scream, Akachi took to the air.
Nuru – MIRRORED BLACK
Just as Father Death rules the underworld, each god possesses its own reality. Once populated by trillions, the gods stripped them clean of life in their eternal hunger. Now, only those hoarded souls, harvested from Bastion, remain.
Farmed.
Rationed.
The hunger of the gods is never sated.
Only Mother Death, the last of the Rada L’Wha, the one god truly of this reality, has the wisdom to save humanity.
—The Loa Book of the Invisibles
Nuru lay on the floor in the dim basement of an abandoned Grower tenement. The grit of filth and ancient stone stabbed through her threadbare thobe.
How long had she lain here, afraid to close her eyes, yet praying for sleep?
Exhaustion left everything dreamlike, unreal. Giving up, she pushed herself into a sitting position. Though the last of the night’s chill pimpled her flesh, the day’s heat trickled down the shallow steps. Throat dry, she coughed.
“You’re awake.” A shape moved in the dark. Efra.
“Yeah.” She felt parched, cracked like sun-baked mud. “Can’t sleep. Every time—” Her chest tightened.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw them.
Bomani, murdered by Fadil’s gang, his blood staining the street.
Omari, gaunt and sunken, dead in a basement, broken by that Cloud Serpent nahualli.
Happy, a sacrificial dagger shoved into his heart.
Chisulo, shattered, his chest caved-in fighting a nagual monster.
Over and over she watched him step between Efra and the Cloud Serpent sorcerer. ‘Get behind me,’ he said. No hesitation. He could do no less, make no other choice. He would protect his friends no matter what it cost. And she saw herself kneeling in the street, the carving of Mother Death before her, as her friends died.
“We have to move,” whispered Efra, as if she feared the Birds might hear.
And go where?
Nothing mattered. Why continue? Everyone was dead.
Everyone, except scarred and murderous little Efra. In a single week she spilled more blood than Bomani managed in years of gang-related violence and drunken street brawls.
Not just blood. Deaths, too.
Quick as Bomani was to violence, he had no taste for murder.
Efra killed without hesitation.
Your own hands are hardly clean.
Using her nagual power to become a deadly viper, Nuru had killed Sefu to rescue Efra.
And you helped her kill. You held down helpless Crafters while she choked the life from them or smashed their skulls.
Efra stood motionless, an outline, waiting. She bore Smoking Mirror’s mark, a black rectangle tattooed into her wrist, and yet she hinted at a willingness to betray the god.
He’s a fool if he thinks he owns her.
Of course, if he offered Efra something she truly desired—security, safety, control, or power—then perhaps Nuru was the fool for thinking she might still turn on him.
“You ready?” asked Efra.
“What’s the rush?”
“We are hunted.”
“The priest who hunted us is dead. Everyone is dead.”
Mother Death ran him through twice, vicious barbed legs tearing great holes in his chest. Nuru remembered the glory of the moment, feeding off the nahualli’s blood, the contempt with which she cast aside the ruined remains of him. They left the priest bleeding out in the street. No way he survived such wounds.
Efra grunted dismissal. “He was just a priest.”
Nuru blinked at the shape of her. The sun must be rising. She could now make out hints of detail. Efra stood with her arms crossed protectively over her chest, impatience writ in the set of her hips.
“Just a priest? He was a temple-trained nahualli of Cloud Serpent, Lord of the Hunt.”
“Just a priest,” repeated Efra. “Just a man.” She snorted. “A boy. It’s the god we should fear. He will send more priests.”
As always, Efra was right. That young priest—she didn’t know his name—was nothing. Another corpse. They were hunted by an entire priesthood. They were hunted by a god.
There were nahual more terrifying than the priests of Cloud Serpent. The nahualli of Father Death tore souls from people, tortured their victims for an eternity in The Lord’s underworld. She once heard that a Sheep District rose up in rebellion and a nahualli of Sin Eater brought plagues upon them. A dozen streets of bloated corpses and not a single death beyond. The nahualli of every god, even one as seemingly benign as Precious Feather, were capable of terrible sorcery.