And you carry Mother Death in your heart.
The Mother of the Universe. The Destroyer. How could a god be the embodiment of two such opposing concepts? And if Efra was perfect for Smoking Mirror, what did that say of Nuru? Had the Mother chosen wrong? Could gods make mistakes?
Or did she know something Nuru did not?
Nuru stumbled as Efra yanked her around a corner and into a less crowded street. Her shoulder ached like the joint had been pulled half out.
“Run, you fucking bitch,” screamed Efra, “or I’ll fucking leave you!”
They ran.
They sprinted past streets filled with warring men and women. Growers dragged down Birds with their bare hands, beat them to death with crude clubs. The Guard fought with inhuman precision, killing efficiently, but grossly outnumbered. Piles of refuse burned, further fouling the already wretched air. People lay sprawled in ash, Bird and Dirt alike. Some were still. Others moaned or crawled, sobbing for help.
“Mom!” cried a young Bird, face a bloody mess, one eye a gaping wound, both legs bent awkwardly beneath him. “Mommy!”
A Grower came out of the smoke and crushed his head with a rock.
In the distance, the Grey Wall towered over squat tenements. Though they took whatever streets seemed least dangerous, Efra kept turning them in that direction. If breaking the holy scripture of the Book the first time caused all this, what would happen when they once again passed through into the Crafters’ Ring?
Stumbling with exhaustion, they slowed. On this street, Growers huddled in their homes. There was no open fighting.
Efra pulled Nuru to the next corner and stopped. Peering around it, she swore.
“Birds at the gate,” she grunted between breaths. “Fuck.”
Nuru fell against the wall, let it take her weight. Numb from horror, she said, “Are we on the same side?”
“Of what?” Efra asked, distracted.
“This war.”
Pulling back from the corner, Efra studied her.
Is she deciding, or deciding whether to lie?
“I see you thinking about that,” said Nuru.
A hint of a smile teased Efra’s lips, gone before fully formed. “I thought we were. But the fact you’re asking makes me wonder.”
Better than an outright lie, but less than helpful.
Eyes narrowing, Efra asked, “Why wouldn’t we be?”
Nuru grabbed Efra’s arm, pulled up the sleeve, exposing her tattooed wrist. “Smoking Mirror.” Releasing the arm, she touched her own chest. “Mother Death.”
“So?” Efra’s brow crinkled in confusion. “We make our own choices. If Smoking Mirror thinks I belong to him, he’s a fool. Does Mother Death own you?”
“No.”
“Exactly. It just means one of us might have to betray a god.” Efra winked. “Maybe both of us.” She bit her lip, teeth worrying at the ridge of scar. “The gods made this city to save humanity, but they also built these ringed walls. They trapped the Growers in this life. You think they have our interests at heart? Me either. So fuck them.”
For an instant Nuru imagined a world without gods. If humanity were free to decide its own path, what would it choose?
It was a fool’s dream. It would never work. Bastion would fall without the gods. Even if it didn’t, humanity would still be trapped in here, surrounded by endless desert and the souls of all the world’s dead.
She’s right. We have choices.
But what choices would Efra make? She was self-centred and dangerous, willing and able to do anything if she thought it would improve her situation.
Can I trust her?
Did it matter?
“What do we do?” Nuru asked. “We lost. Everyone is dead. It’s just us. We’re helpless.”
“Lost? Helpless?” Efra barked a harsh laugh. “Maybe we didn’t win, but we didn’t lose.”
Nuru wasn’t so sure. “You said there were Birds at the gate. We’re stuck here. We’ll never get out of the ring.”
“We’ll find another gate.”
“They’ll all be guarded,” argued Nuru.
Hissing through her teeth in frustration, Efra looked up and down the street. “We have to find a Loa church. They’ve been preaching the return of Mother Death for a thousand generations. Well, she’s back, and we have her. They’ll feed us. They’ll get us out of the ring.”
A lone Bird, bleeding from a score of wounds, staggered from an alley. A half dozen Growers followed in pursuit. They caught the woman, pulled her down. Nuru watched as they bent the woman’s limbs until the joints popped, a sick parody of what the Birds did to punish violent Growers.
“We’ll die out here,” she said. “We should wait. We should hide until this passes.”
“This won’t pass,” said Efra. “Not for a long time. Not until a great many Growers are dead. Not until we’ve been crushed back to meek servility. It that what you want?”
Meek servility. That didn’t sound like Efra. She must have heard it somewhere. Maybe from a nahual.
Recalling the Crafter women with their children, Nuru whispered, “No.”
“We tear this down. All of it. The nahual think this is their war. Mother Death thinks it’s hers. It isn’t, it’s ours.”
“How are we going to find a Loa church?” Nuru asked.
Once again grabbing her hand, Efra flashed a quick grin. “Easy. We’ll ask.”
Akachi – A WORLD OF ENEMIES
It is easy to underestimate tecolotl and their pathetic dependence on stones. However, much as many nahualli learn several arts, there is nothing stopping a tecolotl from learning true sorcery. This combination of pure art and foul blasphemy births nightmarish results.
In the third millennium, during the Senatorial Wars, nahualli Raziya, a Loa infiltrator and skilled tecuhtli, intercepted a wagon of sacrificial daggers bound for the Priests’ Ring. Combining the art of the tecuhtli with her tecolotl talents, she used kyanite to force the souls stored in the daggers into the corpses of those she’d sacrificed. Having created an army of undead, she then used hyraceum to bend the trapped souls to her will.
Though Raziya began with only a handful of corpses, each person slain rose to join her army. Within a week, one third of the Senator’s Ring was under her control and populated almost entirely by corpses. Were it not for the intervention of the Turquoise Serpents, the ring would have fallen to the Loa.
—The Book of Bastion
A blood-tailed hawk, Akachi spiralled into the air, powerful wings pulling him higher. Distant fields still burned, adding to the pall drowning the city. If there were nahual out there fighting the flames, they were losing.
Predatory eyes caught every movement beneath him, the crashing war of small men. The hawk didn’t care, but the man at the heart of the bird studied the weft and wane of battle. The Hummingbirds fought with consummate skill, worked in tight formations, but the sheer mass of Grower flesh took its toll. Again and again he witnessed squads falling back, pressed into dead ended alleys, cornered and butchered.
They’re losing.
The Growers fought without finesse, but from this vantage he realized they fought with surprising intelligence. Their movements were too planned for such a chaotic struggle.