Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (19 page)

Chapter 34: Singing

Atherkula had gone a mile from the palace to pack his belongings at the temple at Lake Trout Swimming Deep. It was an odd thing to do, but he personally wanted to oversee the transfer of his few possessions to Tantos’ old palace. He had three acolytes to help, younger boys who showed little promise as sorcerers. He did not mind using such unworthies as beasts of burden to move his things.

The old sorcerer bent over his dresser, looking at a turtle-shell comb Chulata had worn in her hair as a child. When Chulata’s mother had died, Atherkula had gone to the house the day after to retrieve mementos, and found the comb. He stared at it, wondered now if he could bring himself to part with it or if he should take it.

One of the acolytes passed him, saying, “A storm is coming,” and Atherkula looked out the window, north of the temple. Ugly black clouds blew in the distance like a great wall of dust.

Yet oddly the wind did not seem boisterous outside.

Then the cold hit Atherkula, the profound sense of violation, and one of the boys beside him cried out and held his chest.

Atherkula turned to look at them, and all three acolytes were breathing deeply in exactly the same rhythm. All three of them held their hands out, as if they were clutching something before them, and Atherkula felt his own hands reach out, grasping like claws.

We’re under attack! Sorcery!

He breathed deeply, found that he was breathing in the same rhythm—the deep inhalations. Their eyes were fixed, staring ahead.

Atherkula shouted “No!”

Yet the icy touch held him, tried to pull him down into a kneeling position. Atherkula closed his natural eyes and looked upon the world as a sorcerer. A great light was sweeping through the Land of Shapes, and Atherkula shuddered, terrified. He could see tendrils of light, reaching into the globe of darkness at his belly, could feel their elemental tug.

Atherkula clutched his stomach, trying to bat away the light. In all his years of seeking to control others, he’d never seen the like, and then he realized the truth:
Tull is dying, and he has us all in his grasp.

His acolytes fell to their knees, and all three of them blinked in unison.

Atherkula shouted, “Free yourselves! It is the end of the world!”

He could see only one thing to do.

Atherkula pulled his dagger and slashed his own right lung open, hoping that he would have at least a few moments to fight.

“Adjonai, my ally, strengthen me!” the old sorcerer groaned, and in that moment he was transported into a world where the soft shush of a wind of light whispered through the land, a place where trees were flickering purple flames and the sun a dazzling flower, and his ally was in reach.

Tull heard Atherkula shout in the Land of Shapes.

He witnessed the shadow of Atherkula’s soul rush toward him through the sinister city, a dancing mote of dust.

And for a moment the tendrils of light Tull used went slack as he lost his focus. Across the red plains to the north, a second darkness roared, making the air scream—a sphere as large as a moon.

No light came from it. Tendrils of darkness lashed out from the beast, took the shadow of Atherkula’s soul, and pulled him in, absorbing him.

Tendrils of darkness lashed toward Tull like thick black threads, and touched the shadow of his soul.

Out on the red cracked stones of the Land of Shapes, dust roiled from the ground, billowing up like clouds.

Tull could feel the beast invading him, revealing himself.

On the barren plains, a giant formed and rose from the soil, crouching like a cat ready to spring, one hand in the earth.

His heavy chest was powerfully muscled, like the chest of a Neanderthal, yet his skin was purpled like a vulture’s, and his clawed hands ended in buzzard’s talons.

His great black loincloth hung nearly to the ground in the ancient style of the Pwi and was formed from swirling black orbs—the shadows of souls.

A green light glowered from his eyes, and filth flowed out from his feet like rivers. In his left hand he carried a wooden war shield covered with rattlesnake skin. The shield radiated despair.

In his right—the hand on the ground, he held a shimmering silver kutow with two stone ax heads that radiated terror, and circling his brow was a crown of lightning that wriggled and twisted as it struggled for release—the lightning of captured souls.

“I have seen you before,” Tull shouted, “on the border at the nation of Craal. You could not defeat me then, yet you imagine yourself to be a god?”

Tull’s heart pounded. He had indeed seen the being before, but had not begun to understand it—thought it only a hallucination caused by his fear of entering Craal, not the manifestation of a something from the Land of Shapes.

The creature swung the great silver kutow of terror, and Tull puffed his chest, willing to take its blow. The stones crashed against him, and he felt no fear, received no damage.

“You cannot harm me with that,” Tull said softly.

Adjonai hissed, “Behold, the great wheel of evil,” then turned the round shield to Tull, holding it forward.

It throbbed with power, and the rattlesnake skins seemed to crawl in a circle so that the snakes ate their own tails. Tull watched the diamond patterns of darkness and light, realized then that the snake scales were moving—tiny images moving in the distance. “Behold!”

Suddenly Tull recognized the shield for what it was—a globe crawling with people, endless herds of them milling in circles.

It drew him. He floated up toward it, mesmerized, ready to take his place. One scale caught his vision, and as he focused on the black dot, an image flashed in Tull’s mind, pulsing, vibrating—a crippled Thrall woman begging for sex from a Blade Kin in hopes that she might be treated to better food.

And as Tull beheld it, he tasted the woman’s desperation, felt the tightness in her belly that would make her do anything, anything.

The scale next to it showed the Blade Kin using her like an animal so that she hardly dared show her face to others.

A third scale showed a child born of the union into such destitution that his mother begged him to steal, and Tull felt the young man’s hate for his mother, his sadness at what he was becoming.

Upon a fourth scale, the same young man at age twelve, earned the right to become Blade Kin by culling his own grandfather, slitting the worthless old man’s throat. The boy watched the knife do its work, and felt somehow free, knowing what he had purchased.

Upon the next scale, in fear of his own mortality, the Blade Kin spawned a child named Chulata.

Linked to the next scale, Tull saw himself kill the sorceress in desperation at wanting to be free, then saw Atherkula seek to exact revenge, until in despair Tull beat his own head against the bars in the Cage of Bones.

The scales linked together, one by one, becoming part of the magnificent tapestry that was the shield of despair.

Tull could feel the timeless heft of years upon it, the eternal weight of the thing.

Tull saw himself from far away, just another glint of color in the endless tapestry, and he floated toward it, drawn.

“I own you.” Adjonai whispered. “You will adorn the shield of despair. You will take your place upon the wheel of evil, and share in my power.”

Adjonai held his shield forward, as if bestowing a gift, and closed his green eyes. Tull floated upward helpless to resist.

Across the world, tendrils of light connected Tull to sixty million people. People who were loving and living, unaware of the beast, uninvolved in its plans. Tull reached out, touching them all, and his damning sense of hopelessness diminished.

Adjonai shook the shield, rattling it, as if commanding Tull, and Tull’s mind went numb. The shield flashed in the sunlight, beckoning. “I own you. You died in despair.”

Tull tried to resist.

Despair struck him like a fist, and he could not withstand the inevitable force that drew him forward.

His mind blacked, as if all the connections had been severed.

Tull tried to seek refuge in his past, tried to recall a soft moment with Fava, hoping that Adjonai would lose his grip. Yet Tull could not bring Fava to mind, and found only blackness.

I am a worm,
he thought,
struggling in the beak of a bird.

Almost unbidden, he recalled the dream of his ancestors, the ancient Pwi, singing their song to bring the spring. He was dancing around the campfire with ancient Pwi who leapt in joy and discussed their crops.

Hope welled in Tull. He looked across the fire to a young girl who twisted and smiled. The music of panpies and drums and flutes sang through his veins and Tull cried out, “Thunatra! Help me!”

With a shout, an old woman appeared between Tull and Adjonai.

Thunatra Dream Woman held a sheaf of green wheat in one hand, a blazing taper in the other, and she danced before the shield, singing in the tongue of the ancient Pwi. “
Tcho-fethwara, tcho-fethwara,
The grass lifts its face up to heaven.…”

The riveting call of the shield grew distant, and for a moment both Tull and Adjonai stared at Thunatra.

Adjonai shouted in rage, raised his kutow to crush her, and Thunatra cried, “Help! I cannot fight him alone!” then she resumed her chanting.

Tull raised his voice, sang his true name. “Laschi Chamepar, Laschi Chamepar” he sang lightly, “I am Path of the Crushed Heart.
Tcho-fethwara,
no more darkness.”

Tendrils of light blazed from Tull, and the beast staggered.

Tull plunged the lightning of his soul into the the dark beast, grappling, searching for something to attack within the icy darkness.

The lightning of Tull’s soul blazed, and with fingers of light he touched the people of Anee, with fingers of light, he touched the Eridani on their distant star. With fingers of light, he stroked the hearts of the Hukm on the snow-covered plains, hoping to soothe them.

He became a mother suckling her daughter. He became a farmer plowing the black soil of his field. He became an old woman stroking the liver-spotted hand of her lover, and he touched Adjonai with those images, funneled them.

Everywhere—Tull clasped the lightning of their souls, entwined them with his own, pulled their tendrils of light into him, pulled the Eridani and the beast toward him.

Thunatra’s voice raised in a frenzy of song, climbing in power.

Tull found that his spirit knew what to do.

Clasping the world by the lightnings of their souls, he bid them to dance over the shadow of his own soul. He forced them to touch him, and with Thunatra Dream Woman, he sang the new world into being.

***

Chapter 35: Okanjara

After weeks of hiding, the Blade Kin had rousted Vo-olai from the woods and forced her into a muddy pen. She’d been waiting now for days, hoping for a chance to escape, but the Blade Kin had come—dragging her, Wayan and the others to their ship.

I could run,
she thought, but her legs seemed locked, too frightened to run. She couldn’t muster the energy, and she resolved to let the slavers carry her to Bashevgo.

Then, the strange thing happened. The Blade Kin and all the slaves around her fell to their knees, and raised their hands as if clutching something. They breathed together, in unison, and though her heart thumped frantically, Vo-olai could not break away.

Vo-olai beheld a vision: She was in a great dark palace where sconces burned some bitter-smelling yellow powder, and an old Neanderthal stood before her in red robes. She knew his name, Atherkula, and the sorcerer was boasting of his power. He would become a Slave Lord, he said. The Neanderthals no longer needed the humans to keep them in chains.

Vo-olai spat on his feet, and cursed him, striking an ineffectual blow, knowing she might die for doing so. And the rage she felt at that moment, the unabashed hatred for this man, charged through her veins, making her want to leap up and strike out.

Lord Hamoth and Lady Tenebar had been preparing for a party across town in Denai. Hamoth had spent a happy afternoon in the market, purchasing slaves fresh from the Rough, and he was weary.

He let his servants clothe him for the party. He would be a cloud, dressed in orchid-colored silks decorated with diamonds and amethyst.

His costumer had somehow come upon the most fascinating design for a hat. It was a glow ball, fiercely bright, and it would shine out over a silver brim, as if the sun were just rising above his cloud costume. He held a staff of golden lightning in one hand. Lady Tenebar, on the far side of the room, was dressed in a bird-of-paradise outfit, a charming blue.

They were admiring their costumes when the curious compulsion came upon them to fall to their knees, dropping to the floor.

Their rage at Atherkula had barely subsided when a giant appeared—their father, Jenks Genet, stood a dozen feet tall, with shoulders of iron, shouting and spitting, glaring with dark eyes. “Try to run from me, will you, you little shit! I’ll chain you to the wall! Chain you to the wall!” and cold terror bound them in place so that their legs could not move, their tongues could not speak, as Jenks wrapped the cold cutting leg irons on them.

They fought the irons with clumsy, childish hands, bleeding, breaking their legs in the process. At a young age, they had learned to fear cold iron.

Scandal the innkeeper from Smilodon Bay writhed on the floor of his Lord’s house. His belly was full from tasting the many delicacies he had baked during the day, and he’d been contemplating a plump young maid that he hoped to seduce that night. He had just poured icing on the tarts when the visions started. He had barely recuperated from the irons when he found himself in the White Mountains outside Denai.

He walked in the mountains, late in the summer night, and the dry forest burned with more than the season’s heat.

In a little hut woven from twigs, sprawled naked on the ground, lay a Dryad—a woman formed by the Creators to maintain the forests.

He knew this Dryad’s name, Tirilee. At fifteen, her mating frenzy had come upon her. Scandal stroked her shimmering silver hair, and skin as white as aspen bark, mottled with dark spots.

In the heat of the forest, Scandal tasted the aphrodisiac perfume of the Dryad’s scent blowing upon him, tasted her burning lips.

In the moonlight, he gazed into the pools of her eyes where he felt sure that the color green had been perfected. His chest ached. He yearned for her, and knew that he could never get enough.

Mahkawn had leapt off the Death’s Head Train outside Pirazha’s house.

He’d been stalking the crowded streets, blood on his dagger, sure that Atherkula’s spies would find him, when the compulsion took him to kneel.

And on the packed streets around him, ten thousand slaves and Blade Kin and Lords all fell to their knees in unison, reaching out as if to grasp something. Then the visions came, pounding like a flood, over and over.

He’d tasted a lust so powerful that it threatened to unmake him, and he began weeping in terror of what the next moment might bring, when he found himself lying in the bottom of a boat with a Crimson Knight sitting astride his chest, using him for a chair.

Beside him lay Fava, and he loved her more deeply than he’d ever allowed himself to love anyone else. He loved her more than Pirazha even, and as Mahkawn lay in the boat, he secretly relished the sensual touch of Fava’s leg against his as she clasped his hand.

The fulfillment, the communion in that single touch from the woman he saw as his other self, warmed him like the rays of the sun. It was not a frantic thing, not an endless longing. He felt only security. True loveliness.

Fava lay on the ground outside the cage of bones, the bodies of the Blade Kin sprawled around, overwhelmed by Tull’s love for her, awed to think that anyone could desire her so fully, could relish her so completely. She closed her eyes, found that she knew how to send the lightning of her soul across space. She danced over the shadow of Tull’s soul, wanting to know all of him.

Across the length and breadth of Craal and Bashevgo, every creature that could call itself human or Neanderthal or Hukm found themselves trapped in the cage of bones, watching the Blade Kin cut into Fava’s arm as they prepared to rip out her ulna and radius, and add those parts of her to the cage.

They slammed their heads into the ground, as if against bars, wishing for death, and one of the Blade Kin lunged at them, bringing his spear within easy reach, providing the means to commit suicide.

Among the stars, the Eridani had long forgotten their war with the humans, yet now they felt the alien mind of their enemies touching them, warping them.

The billions of Eridani cried out with one voice, hoping for destruction, and suddenly they were in a prison cell far below the arena at Bashevgo, and their friend Mahkawn stood with his sword, shoving it into their lungs so that they could not breathe.

Blood poured down the runnels of the sword, staining the floor’s yellow straw red, and the sword filled them with … cold metal … an endless swelling … a feared and longed-for death … an endless swelling. Peace, swelling inside. An eternal river of light. Love.

The island of the Creators thundered and groaned from within as the old volcanic cone blew away. The concussion from the explosion raised mountainous waves that swept over the bow of Phylomon’s coracle.

Smoke billowed up, an endless obsidian plume, blanketing the sky with ash so that even five miles out to sea, darkness reigned. Lightning flashed at the mountain’s crown, and Phylomon forced himself to watch, to take it all in. Rocks the size of rabbits plummeted from the sky.

Overhead, the gray birds flew into that black wall of ash, mindlessly obeying the summons they had heard before the Creators died.

The blood eaters floundered on the beach, stunned by the ultrahigh frequencies of the harmonic resonators. The worms on the mountainsides were crushed in slides, boiled beneath lava flows.

Phylomon watched, almost unaware of what was happening, and he could not rise from his knees. Darrissea sat in the bow of the boat, wracking sobs tearing from her throat, trying to cope with the visions, but as the last vision ended, Phylomon sat peacefully, savoring a life that somehow seemed far lustier and more satisfying than his own.

On the plains south of Bashevgo, Apple Breath rose from a thin crust of snow. Hundreds of Hukm had wakened from their faint and lay panting on the ground. She stared, dazed, to the north, unable to fully comprehend what she had just seen, what she felt, but knew that a new love for and understanding of the Meat People had blossomed within her.

A warm south wind blew across the plains, thawing the snow so that here and there, green clumps of sweetgrass rose from the ground.

The smell of the rich soil and sweetgrasses made her mouth water, but Apple Breath sat on her rump in the snow, the wind ruffling her white fur, and pulled out her great wood flute from its sack, then played a song that spoke of the peace she felt within.

Tull released the world and the Eridani—let go the lightning of their souls.

He heard crowds of tens of thousands lamenting, felt their wounds, felt their strength.

Thunatra Dream Woman still danced in a circle, singing, but a storm seemed to blow across the Land of Shapes.

The wind hammered the beast, snagging his shield of despair and kutow of terror. Dust blew across the beast’s broad back, as if wind were carving a sand dune, blowing portions of the creature away.

Beneath the unrelenting wind the giant diminished, pared away until only a Pwi boy stood on the plains in the Land of Shapes, frightened and alone.

Tull still caressed the boy with one tendril of light. He looked into the child’s green eyes, watched as light erupted from the shadow of the boy’s soul.

“Don’t be afraid,” Tull whispered to Terrazin. “We are brothers, you and I.” The two were still connected, and Tull let his love, his peace, flow into the boy. “We are Pwi.”

Across the Land of Shapes to the south, the arcane structures of the Blade Kin toppled, and everywhere over the vast red plain the stones cracked and splintered as a new world of possibilities formed.

The earth shook until the very soil seemed to roar. Tull tried to open his physical eyes, but it was hard. His physical ears could hear a rumbling. The very earth seemed ready to crack open.

Across Bashevgo, people were screaming, and Fava was rushing toward the Cage of Bones.

Tull felt a great sense of peace wash through him. He drifted upward, looked down at the clot of his soul, at the thin gel lying in the Cage of Bones, hand outstretched.

He drifted higher toward a sun that beckoned him, a great iridescent purple flower. The fiery spirits of birds shot through the sky as a flock of starlings passed beneath him. Gazing down, he saw the world roaring, the ground buckling as if it were a sea at storm. Sixty million people shouted in pain, trying to cope with the vision.

Far below, Fava wept and pulled at the bars of Tull’s cage. She grasped his hand, shouting, “Don’t die! Don’t die! Don’t let yourself die!”

Yet Tull was already gone from his body as he considered the request. He looked down on the world of flesh.

He’d touched them all, felt their lives, learned to love them. That was all he had come to this world for, and the clot of his soul had begun to turn opaque, the same red hue as the stones around it.

As the clot of his soul darkened, it reminded Tull of a door to a house, closing, shutting off the light that gleamed from the comfortable fireplace within. It was a door that would bar him from ever entering again.

Fava was shouting for help, pulling on the chains to the Cage of Bones, grasping Tull’s hands, pleading with him not to die.

Blood flowed from the vertical slit in her right wrist, but she ignored it, felt numbed to the pain.

The visions had come to her so quickly that even now she could not comprehend them all. Her ankles seemed to ache from the night that she/Tull had been sentenced to death in Craal and had been hung by the feet and whipped. Her lips still burned from the aphrodisiac kisses of a Dryad. She still suffered the shock of watching her brothers be slain in the wilderness, eaten by Mastodon Men. The joy of her wedding day. Fascination with clocks. The full emotional force of a lifetime all crashed in a tumult around her, and she knew that it would take days, even years, for her to recover.

All across Bashevgo people were crying out, trying to cope with the visions, and down on the Street of Dissidents, the spectators who had come to watch her execution all crawled about on their bellies blindly.

A massive black cloud rose to the north as a volcano blew. The earth shook as if Bashevgo might split apart. Fava could hear buildings toppling in the city, and some of those who shouted might have been dying. Fava barely managed to crawl to Tull.

Her father Chaa wrested the keys from a dead guard and managed to stand upright as he unlocked the cage.

Fava struggled through her tears to look into Tull’s face. His eyes were the color of dying grass. He stared up at the sun blindly, with rivulets of blood running down his forehead. His face was pale, his skin bloodless. He had stopped breathing. Yet beyond that, Fava felt that his spirit was gone. He had emptied out his body. He had left.

She closed her eyes, panting. A spasm of grief washed through her, and she wondered if the grief belonged to her or to Tull.

Am I grieving for my dead brothers, Ayuvah and Little Chaa?
she wondered.

Fava’s head and whole body ached as if someone had pummeled her, or as if a fever wracked her.

Chaa slipped the chain off the Cage of Bones, threw the door open, and dragged Tull out.

Fava clutched Tull’s waist and cried. Chaa said softly, “He is not here.” Chaa pointed to Tull’s body. Then he nodded up toward the sun. “
Pawethwa
,
Fava
.” Call his name, Generous.

Fava gaped at her father, and a powerful earthquake struck hard. The hill of bones beneath them felt as if it were rolling. Fava had never practiced the women’s magic, but she understood: “Summon him, Fava.”

Tull had made Spirit Walkers of them all.

Fava knew how to connect.

And then she felt something in her womb—the first stirring, the first fluttering movements of her child. Its body was preparing to open, to accept a spirit.

Fava heard a building collapse in the distance, and hundreds of people cried out in dismay. She did not turn to look. She closed her eyes, closed her ears, and stilled her breathing.

She held Tull’s cooling hand. His body was so far gone, she did not know if Tull could ever reenter it.

But she imagined another way to save him, if he needed it. She could hold onto him.