Last First Snow (39 page)

She worked for hours or minutes, probably the former. Dreamtime could not be laid upon a line, as dream maps did not yield to an alphanumeric grid.

Around her the people of Chakal Square prepared themselves for death, and hungry gods danced.

She finished before the moon set. The map drank and digested starlight. It breathed.

She returned her knife to her heart, laid her hands in her lap, and let her eyes drift shut.

She had done what she could. What she was allowed to do. Now she could only wait and gather strength.

Elayne did not sleep, surrounded by her circles and her mad map and her fellow dreamers. But she rested in a way that was not altogether unlike sleep.

The night passed.

Morning came.

 

58

Temoc woke before dawn, and found the skies above Chakal Square clear.

Dreams contorted in his mind: dreams of Mina, of her hate for him. Of Caleb, who did not understand.

Of Elayne.

That memory shocked him to his feet, on the dry grass mats spread before his altar. A red flaking stain lingered on the table where he had lain the Major. Gone now. He'd burnt the man himself. The husk did not matter, once the feast was done.

Men and women slept upon the mats. Some few early risers drifted among the rest like priests or robbers through the wounded after a battle. Chel stood close by, and watched him stand, stretch, exorcise the night by movement. The sky brightened from amethyst to sapphire. Temoc wished he could stop the sun from rising, stop time from turning, leave them all sleeping here on the morning after their finest hour. No need for a final battle, no need for him to honor his promise. No need to tell them they were doomed, or face the choices he had made. The knife. The flight.

Chel approached him. “Bad dreams,” she said.

“Of course.”

“We're ready, because of you.”

“That is a sentence,” he said, “not a commendation. What did you dream?”

She licked her lips. “You don't want to know.”

“Leave it there and I'll imagine worse. What did you dream?”

Her eyes were deeper than he remembered. They must have deepened in the night, or he had. “My father was a mechanic at Longsands, and I've worked the docks since I was a kid. I dreamed I sailed a ship on fire. Not one of the container hulks, but a real old ship, a tea clipper, burning. Its hull caught, and the decks, and the sheets. Still we sailed. We suffocated, our skin melted, and still. The captain sent me to the crow's nest. I climbed through the heat. By the time I reached the top, my left hand was blistered and my right was bone. I couldn't see. Wind came, and at the last second I thought I saw a flash of green. Then I fell and woke.” Her voice stayed level. “It's not a good dream, is it?”

“Not the best,” he said. “Do you remember who the captain was?”

She hesitated. “No.”

Others woke. They rose in the heat, fathers and mothers, the men and the women and the children. They uncurled from one another, they rolled their sleeping bags, they stepped out of their tents, they blinked in the light. Lines of smoke lay like blades against sky's throat.

Red-arms took up their posts, staring over barricades at empty streets. The wounded tried to stand, and many found they could. By night the gods had walked among them with healing hands. Chakal Square would be ready for the day.

They gathered to hear him. He wondered how many came from faith, how many from fear, how many because they heard the stories and wondered what new miracles today would bring. He did not care. They came, and filled his mats; they came, and stood, and listened.

He bent his head and prayed. Let them hear me. Let all of them hear me.

He was heard.

Hungry eyes watched him watching them.

“This is the last day,” he said, softly, and he saw the ripple of shock as each person in the camp heard his voice at once, clear and direct as if he spoke to them alone. “This is the last day. I have seen the King in Red come. I have seen his weapons, and they are grand.”

“We'll fight!” someone cried from the back, a man, a boy really. He knew nothing.

“We will fight,” Temoc said, not agreeing. “And we must know what fighting means. The battle we face today will be the fiercest we have known. The gods stand at our side, but our enemy grew strong by killing gods. We cannot expect to win. Life is a debt, of which death is our repayment.”

No shouts after that.

“We have flowered here, and now we must seed: we must not perish in this battle, but spread. Ideas, and blood, and determination, all must fly from Chakal Square and take root in rich earth to spring up again, and again, and again, until we cover the world.

“I ask you now, if you are strong enough, to walk away. If you have children here, take them and go. The hero's path today is to leave. Be the seed that flies from the fist of the King in Red, and floats away to bloom where he does not expect. Tell the truth of Chakal Square: of human beings defending their beliefs, their homes, their ways of life, from an enemy who gave no quarter. If you accept this burden, you will prove yourself stronger than those who stay. It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.”

He waited, savoring the pause in his speech—a beat as near as he could come to timelessness.

“I will fight,” he said, “because I was born to fight. That is my path, but it need not be yours. If you leave now, know your brothers and sisters love you. Know they respect you. Know they trust you to build the world we seek in the years that come.

“It is time for sacrifice. It is time for the gods to know us by our gifts. I will not perform the bloodless rite, in respect for one who gave himself last night to help today. But I will give my own blood. I encourage you all to do the same. Feed the gods on yourselves. Join them in body as you do in faith. Join together so no man can tear us apart.”

He held his arm high where all could see, and his knife, and drew a cut between two scars on his forearm. Blood wept, gathering at his elbow. A drop formed, and fell, and splashed against the altar stain.

A tongue lapped the blood from his arm, a talon held him, and he felt himself lifted. His eyes opened, and they stood in the sky surrounding him, miles tall and minuscule at once, grounds of being, and he was with and within them, was the Spider spinning and Ixaqualtil gnawing the bones of the dead, was winged Ili who spread her sails through the sky, was the Hunchback burdened with the weight that is the future. He was the corn and the mortar stone and he was the mouth that consumed; he was the giver and receiver of the great gift.

And then he was himself again, weeping.

He lowered his arm.

The sun rose.

The congregation came, one by one. Their blood wet the altar, and the gods drank, and they left. He did not count how many came. Hundreds perhaps. Time seemed slow that morning.

But before long it was done, and he stepped back from the altar and felt himself complete, and spent, and filled with power.

“Do you believe what you said, about seeds?” That was Chel, beside him. Always.

“I think so.”

“Hells,” she said. “I never was that strong.”

He clapped her on the back. Above, the sky glittered with new-risen sun. “Neither was I.”

*   *   *

Some left Chakal Square. Not all. Not as many as Elayne hoped. Not as many as Temoc hoped, either. But some.

Many were parents, families. A couple who brought their two children to a demonstration that started peacefully and became something else. The woman whose boy Temoc had healed when he fell—she left, holding her son's hand. They were not cowards. Their lives were not their own to give. It was a sacrifice, of a kind, to reach this point and step out of the river of history. To be the seeds.

Kapania Kemal stayed, and her husband Bill. They had a daughter. She was twelve, she was living with an aunt in Fisherman's Vale. She was cared for. And they asked themselves how they could look in her eyes, later, and say they left the people they fed and guided and protected because danger neared. They did not know whether this was the right decision. They hoped to survive. They hoped Temoc was cautious, as a leader should be, but that in his heart he believed they might triumph.

Some left to accept Temoc's challenge: because they were strong, and they could bear their scars in secret, and teach the many meanings of Chakal Square. To a bent wiry man with the first strands of gray in his beard, Chakal Square was the resurgence of the Quechal nation, decades crushed beneath a foreign heel. To a young woman with flames couched behind her eyes and a rippled burn scar on her face, Chakal Square meant the gods, meant the rebirth of faith in the face of danger. To a journeyman poet come with his notebook to write the movement's history, the Square was a dream made real. To a Longsands union worker it was one fight in the war between men and the undead powers that sought to rule them. Chakal Square was a beacon. Chakal Square was the moment everything went wrong. Chakal Square was the future. Chakal Square was the past, Chakal Square was the path between. Chakal Square was birth, and death, and all these meanings followed those who walked away.

Some left because they were afraid. They glanced nervously at the sky. They recoiled from the rapture of those who saw the gods. They quailed from the divine call. A red-arm who just the day before had crushed a Warden's skull with a brick, who roared atop a barricade, looked into her future and saw only a simple, short struggle, and then death. So she went.

Those who remained did not ask one another why. They had passed beyond words, would be one way to write it—a poet's lie, almost true. They stayed, that was all. Whether from fear or hope, for fellowship or isolation, in joy or sorrow, did not matter. They stayed. Reasons were for those who left.

Across the city, Wardens yoked new weapons to their mounts. Chains glittered with silver glyphs. Upon the serpents' skulls they rested crowns, and each crown glowed with the light of a fallen, captured star. To Couatl bellies they bound big metal drums that sloshed when shaken, because even black magic relies sometimes on chemistry. One Warden's grip slipped as he levered a drum into position. The drum tumbled from his partner's hands, and struck stone. Wardens dove for cover. The drum did not explode. It was a good and patient soldier. Its time would come.

 

59

Captain Chimalli had not slept well. He'd sought Dr. Venkat in the hospital, and found her with blood-soaked hands, too busy to do more than shoot him an angry, delaying look. He lay alone on his hard, simple bed in his hard, simple room, and thought about the morning. Sleep must have come eventually, but he remembered only the first blue threat of sunrise.

He stood on the summit of the 667 Sansilva pyramid, the hub around which his world revolved, waiting as the King in Red drank coffee. His boss, sort of. There were many councils in Dresediel Lex, many overlapping guilds of Craftsmen and Concerns, and laws emerged from their grinding gears. But there was only one King in Red. “We're ready, sir. Airborne on your command.”

“Thank you, Captain,” the skeleton said, and finished his coffee, and set down his newspaper. “How do you think the papers will report what we do today?”

“Sir. I think they will report whatever's in their interest to report.”

“You mean I should tighten my grip, I should control them.”

“No, sir. I mean that we all do what's in our interest, most of the time.”

“Even the people in Chakal Square?”

“I suppose so, sir. On some level.”

“I have many interests. What if they compete?”

He thought about that for a moment. “One wins. That is the one which was more in your interest. Or else it wouldn't have won. Sir.”

“You live in a deterministic universe, Captain.”

“With respect, you don't pay me for philosophy.”

“Is it in my interest to attack Chakal Square this morning?”

“You seem to think so.”

“And yet I could stop it all now. I could order the men to stand down. I could extend an amnesty to any who left the square by nightfall, and order Lieutenant Zoh to reveal his face, and stand trial for the girl's murder, as an act of good faith. I could end this peacefully.”

Talking with a Deathless King played strange tricks on the mind. Without all the subtle facial cues fleshy humans gave—cues even a Warden's mask offered if one knew how to look—one could not tell when a person was sincere. Every word might be a trap laid by a man with a perfect poker face. Fortunately, with Deathless Kings, every word tended to be a trap, so there was little risk of guessing wrong. “Will you?”

The King in Red examined the stain at the bottom of his mug. “I suppose not,” he said. “Let's go. I've ordered Lieutenant Zoh to lead the raid. Seems appropriate, don't you think?”

Chimalli said nothing.

“Come, Captain. We have a long day ahead. No sense starting all morose.”

The King in Red dug in the pocket of his robe for a second, finding at last a toothpick that, when he shook it three times, became a brass-shod staff taller than he was. Walking jauntily with staff in hand, he passed through the crystal dome, raised his hands to the newly risen sun, and called for his ride.

*   *   *

Elayne woke and sat, and watched the people of Chakal Square ready themselves. Around her the circle members opened their eyes. “Is that it?” Tay asked.

“No. When the fire comes, I'll need you: living dreams, in living minds. If you want to go, you can.”

He looked back toward the fountain, toward Temoc's camp, toward Chel. “I'll stay. If it will help.”

“It will,” she said.

The crowd thinned. Those that remained fanned out to fill the space.

She had warned them. And the King in Red had warned her. No aid and comfort to the enemy. Save the Skittersill if you must, but leave the people to me. And she said yes.