Last First Snow (17 page)

Still had a lot to learn about pita bread, though. He ripped one of his halves while filling. “The bread is too fragile.”

“Be careful of the browned bits. They break.” She finished her own sandwich, built her second. He ate slowly, and licked his lips. “You look pleased with yourself.”

“The judge is on board, as is Chakal Square.” He stood, took a handful of napkins from the service counter, and returned, wiping hummus off his hand. “We are doing well.”

“I'm worried about the broadsheets.”

“We have stopped some distributors,” he said, “but the papers that remain are passed more swiftly through the camp. With luck they will not interfere with the deal.”

“What if you went for the source?”

Temoc curled one fist inside his opposite hand, and watched her over his knuckles. “What have you learned?”

“I don't have time to investigate tonight,” she said. “I need to draft this agreement. But I have a name for you, and an address. I'll give you both, if you listen to my advice.”

“Go ahead.”

A group of office workers stumbled out into the heat. As they left, a gaggle of schoolchildren entered. Hot wind whirled through the open door. “You have a good family. They love you. If this goes south, take care of them.”

“Why this sudden concern?”

“You're part of a movement now. You don't know what that's like.”

“I fought in the Wars.”

“To defend your city, not to change the world. Causes have a gravity that's hard to resist. I never told you what I did in the Semioticist's Rebellion—why they took me off the field and sent me to the King in Red, before I met you.”

He shook his head.

“I burned down a forest to kill one man. It didn't work. So I followed him across a mountain and a desert into another jungle's heart. I killed five gods hunting him. Small gods, but still. I should have died myself. I almost did. He hurt my friends. Someone I loved tried to turn me from the hunt, and I didn't listen.” A shawarma joint was the wrong place for this conversation. There was no right place for this conversation. “I want you to take care of your family, not end up bleeding out in a back alley.”

“Okay.”

She took a notebook and pen from her briefcase, and wrote the name she'd been given, and the address. Tore off the paper, and set it folded between their plates. “Take care, Temoc.”

She stood, brought her empty plate to the dish bin, and walked past the children, out the door, into the wind.

 

26

When Temoc returned to Chakal Square, he felt a change. Beneath the peoples' excitement, beneath the hope, grew weeds of suspicion and fear.

A woman narrowed her eyes as he walked past. Two men in newsboy caps crossed their arms. An old man lit a cigarette and blew smoke. Maybe Temoc was paranoid, disturbed by the name in his breast pocket, by memories he had ignored for years.

Chel caught up with him by the food tents. There was a new furrow in her brow, a pinch around her mouth. She carried a rolled-up broadsheet like a baton.

“Sir,” she said, and fell into step with him. Distracted, he did not correct her. “The commissioners presented the agreement. People support you. The Major's troops took it hard. But we're ready.”

“And the judge approves of our deal.”

“Good.” She did not sound happy.

“What's wrong?” Unless he was making it up. Unless Elayne had him jumping at ghosts. He thought of Caleb, and Mina, and tried to think of anything else.

She passed him the broadsheet.

A picture of the commission meeting the King in Red, sketched yesterday morning. Caption: “Deal, or Treachery?” He scanned the article for key phrases. “Allowing Craftsmen to seize our land. Details unclear. What aren't we being told.” He handed back the paper. “We've told everything.”

“I know,” she said. “The article's wrong. But some believe this stuff and, well, I'm glad you came back for the sacrifice. Lots of angry people tonight.”

“I will reassure them.”

They came to see the sacrifice, the angry and confused side by side with those of unblemished faith. They listened to his tales of the Wandering Kings, of Old Quechal suffering in the desert, of the peoples' confusion before they found a home. “In the desert,” he told them, “we fear, and we lose hope. But we must stand together. We must not be less than what is gold in us.” And at the end, drawing from their faith, drawing from the gods, drawing from the woman splayed upon the altar who screamed rapture as he struck her breastbone, he wove them together—guided them through death and rebirth.

They followed, for now

That was enough.

He walked the camp, healed the sick, fed the hungry. He prayed, silently and aloud.

When that was done, he left, and caught a carriage north to the address Elayne had given him.

*   *   *

Temoc hadn't returned to Sansilva in years. The sacred precinct he knew was gone, and the people who prayed and sacrificed there gone as well, dead or retreated to waste away in suburbs. Only artifacts remained, pyramids and broad streets adulterated by modern monstrosities of crystal and steel.

He found the building he sought, a black tower beside the old New Moon Temple, studded with ghostlight logos and Kathic signs rather than High Quechal glyphs: Hyperion Sporting Goods, Osric & Croup Fine Clothiers, Scamander's Deli. Higher floors advertised more arcane Concerns: Alphan Securities, Grimwald Holdings, CBSE, banks and trading firms, scars carved in dead gods' flesh.

Before the cataclysm children and sorcerers called Liberation, incense and sandalwood had lingered on this air. Chant and praise echoed from sandstone walls. Priests prayed to present gods.

We are not gone, the gods whispered. But in forty years they had not overwhelmed him, never surged through his veins with tidal-wave force as they did in the heat of his youth. They did not like his bloodless worship.

So much for memories. There was work to do, tonight.

He reread the slip of paper. The address written there belonged to the penthouse on the tower's twenty-seventh floor.

Temoc opened his scars. He found a current in the air, a stream of coolant Craft. One of his parishioners, an architect, described skyscrapers as furnaces. People, lights, and machines radiated heat. If the cooling Craft failed, these buildings would stew their inhabitants alive. There was poetry in that, a fable he might have told to Caleb when the boy was younger: “Once a man lived in a glass box.”

He seized the Craft, and soared.

Gravity bowed. City lights stretched to lines. Fresh wind whipped his face, stung tears from his eyes. Roads shrank to strips. Stars hung hungry overhead, so clear in Sansilva where Craftsmen let them shine. The penthouse balcony approached. Vines trailed over its edge: vines on the twenty-seventh floor, fed by water pumped up twenty-seven stories so a man could live in the sky and still grow grapes.

Temoc landed on the balcony's edge.

He stood on a hardwood floor in front of a glass-walled penthouse. Craftwork dulled the wind he should have felt at this height; the night was calm and cool and smelled of the sea.

The room behind the glass was all cream leathers and plush carpet. False flames flickered in a brick firepit. An old man sat in a leather chair beside the fire, reading, bare feet propped on the brick. His small toes curved inward; his big toes were long and thin and twitched as he read. His skin was dark, his hair long since silver. He still had his teeth, and they were white as his eyes were black.

The old man looked up from his book, saw Temoc, and smiled. He waved to the glass wall, which parted like a curtain brushed aside. Cold, scentless air puffed out. “Temoc!” the old man said. “Good to see you. Come in.” He spoke High Quechal. His accent had not soured in the last forty years.

“Alaxic.” Temoc wished he could smile as cheerfully as the old man. He entered the room, and the glass poured shut behind him. “What are you doing?”

“I'm hurt,” the old man said. “Was this how we taught you to behave? Straight to business, even when meeting old friends? Let me fix you a drink.” He raised his tumbler, empty but for a sheen of amber at the bottom.

“Tea,” Temoc said.

“Of course.” The penthouse living room blended seamlessly into its kitchen. The old man filled a kettle and set it on the stove to boil. “No liquor on duty?”

“Life is duty.”

Alaxic drank the last of his tequila. “You look well. Active life agrees with you.”

“More active than I'd like, the last few weeks.”

“Well,” he said. “That's to be expected. The family's healthy?”

“Yes.”

“A son, you mentioned when we last met.”

“A son.”

“Only the one?”

“So far.”

“The gods have been kind to you in other ways, I suppose. You barely look thirty-five.”

“I feel older.”

“But you don't feel sixty, either, and you should.” Alaxic examined his tile floor through the amber-tinted bottom of his glass, then rinsed the glass and set it on the rack to dry. “Do you ever wonder why you stay young while the rest of us age?”

“Not really,” Temoc said. “The gods keep me in good health.”

“Meaning they've abandoned the rest of us, or we've abandoned them.”

That was not a question, so he did not answer it.

“I was a priest before you were born,” Alaxic said. “I made a hundred sacrifices with these hands.” He held them up, fingers crooked, knuckles swollen. “When war came I fought Craftsmen under the sea, in the sky, on the earth. My Couatl was killed beneath me and I fell and fought on. In an alley five blocks south and west of here I strangled a wizard with his own robe. Do you think I have given up on the gods?”

“Do you praise? Do you pray? Do you lead?”

He laughed, dryly. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who's to say, anymore.”

“We are.”

“Do you praise them, then, in your squat bloodless church, with your followers who pretend to die as you pretend to kill them?”

“That is not pretense,” Temoc said. “It is faith.”

“Faith,” he repeated, and the kettle cried. “What tea would you like?”

“Mint, if you have it. It's late, and I must wake early tomorrow.”

Alaxic found a box of tea, scooped some into a tea ball, dropped the tea ball into a mug, poured the water. “Honey?”

“No, thank you.”

He slid the mug across the counter. Steam rose from within. Alaxic took a tequila bottle from a cabinet and poured himself a splash. “To the balcony?” He limped over; the glass parted, remained open for Temoc, and closed behind.

“You have learned the heathen Craft.”

“We lost the Wars because we underestimated them. Only a fool makes the same mistake twice.”

“They taught you?”

“They teach anyone. Their innermost secrets, can you imagine, are published in codices any idiot can check out of a library. Once you learn those, their schools will teach you more, for a fee. It is a different way. Alien to my mind. To see as Craftsmen do, there is much you must unlearn, or learn doubly. Sometimes I think that's why the Wars lasted so long. Not because either side showed mercy. The first necromancers had to learn, as I have, to think in two worlds at once: they were born in a world of reciprocity, of divine fervor, of sacrifice and glory, and they had to learn a new world of tools and of control. The second generation grew up knowing only that new world—and so their every act shored it up. They could best impose their will when they did not realize it was will. To them, conquest felt like sight.”

Temoc dipped his finger in the tea, shed a drop on the hardwood floor, and spoke the blessing under his breath. The tea warmed him after the cold of Alaxic's house. “The Craft is no mere point of view. It works.”

“It does, but the way it works depends on perspective.” He raised his eyes. “I used to fear the stars, you know.”

“We all did.”

“Demons spin webs out there in the black. True demons, I mean, not the creatures Craftsmen summon—monsters who trap worlds in their nets. They visit us to eat, and the gods and Serpents stand against them. To us the Craftsmen, feeding on starlight, seem servants of those hungry mouths at the end of time. Yet Craftsmen see stars as sources of energy, nothing more. They hope to leave this globe one day and stride through the heavens, free at last. This difference springs, I think, from the fact that their first magus, Gerhardt, was an Easterner, Schwazwald-born, Iskari trained—both maritime mercantile cultures, star-revering. But any Craftsman will tell you his beliefs about stars are experimentally verified truths, not perspectives.”

“And that is why you want to start a war.”

Alaxic chuckled. “Not the most elegant segue.”

“I did not come here to talk philosophy.”

“Without clarity of principle, our discussion will have no meaning.”

“You always were a priest at heart, Kal—one who thinks and talks. I was trained to be a soldier, too. Why have you spent the last month driving the Skittersill to rebel?”

“I'm trying to explain.”

“Then speak plainly, and speak of deeds. Leave ideas for wiser men.”

“No,” he said. “Our first responsibility—as human beings—is to see the world around us. If I do not look in shadows, if I flinch from pain, I abdicate that responsibility. And to whom?” He swirled his glass toward the obsidian pyramid that towered over the skyline—Quechaltan, high temple to the old gods, forty years usurped. “The King in Red. Tan Batac. Your friend Elayne. The fine doctors of the Craft. Those people in Chakal Square have abdicated all their lives, because they were trained to do so. They've lived with a dull ache where their sense of right and wrong should be, stuck in someone else's bad joke. How many worked every day on the docks, or cut lawns or swept streets or added numbers in a cubicle farm, and drank or screwed that unease into oblivion? When I learned of Kopil's and Batac's scheme, I knew I could use it to open the people's eyes. So I spent my fortunes. I wrote broadsheets and had them printed. The King in Red lit the fire; I showed the Skittersill it was burning.”