Authors: Michael A Stackpole
for them.”
6th day, Month of the Wolf, Year of the Rat
9th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court
163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty
737th year since the Cataclysm
Nemehyan, Caxyan
They think I’m a god.
Jorim shook his head slowly, which Shimik mimicked with all the
bewilderment Jorim felt. “They think I’m a god.”
It didn’t sound any better out loud, and hadn’t sounded better no matter how many times
he said it. The Amentzutl had a god named Tetcomchoa. His symbol was a feathered
serpent, and he had lived with them over fourteen hundred years previously. He’d led
them through what they called the Ansatl War. As near as Jorim could determine, it was a
war against some reptilian creatures. At the end of the time they referred to
as
centenco,
after the war had been won, he had gotten into a ship and sailed west.
Jorim wished Keles were there, because he could have made sense of everything, could
have found a way to explain to the
maicana
representative, Nauana, how mistaken she
was. Jorim, housed in the chamber atop the pyramid to Tetcomchoa, walked over to the
giant wheel and traced his fingers along one of the circles of figures raised on the surface.
Shimik climbed up on the big stone throne and crouched on the back of the seat.
Nauana had taken great pains to explain everything to Jorim—though whether or not she
was convinced he needed to be reeducated in this incarnation or he was just testing her
own knowledge, he couldn’t tell. The Amentzutl used a cyclical calendar based on lunar
time and the interplay of the red and white moons. While the black moon, Gol’dun, was
not figured into their timing, Nauana assured him that all time began from the birth of the
black moon, which told him just how far apart the Amentzutl and Imperial reckonings of
the world were. Things continued on for a period of seven hundred thirty-seven years with
simple progressions that made very good sense. At the end of a cycle, however, as the
days spiraled down into the center of the wheel, they entered
centenco
.
Centenco
was the beginning and ending of everything. It betokened great crises and
cataclysms and horrors. The previous
centenco
had brought years without summer, and
hideous winters. A savage tidal wave had wiped out the Amentzutl fleet—ending a proud
maritime tradition that had been the reason they’d been able to defeat the Ansatl in
the
centenco
before. The
centenco
before that had seen a horrible plague that killed hundreds of thousands. And still before
that
was the birth of the black moon, whence all time for them began.
Jorim would have liked to dismiss all of this as nonsense, but when he roughly translated
the dates into the Imperial system, glacial melt ran through his bowels. Their years of no
summer matched up with the Cataclysm. The Ansatl war corresponded pretty closely to
the rise of the Taichun Dynasty, which remained in place until Empress Cyrsa created the
Nine and went off to fight the Turasyndi. The
centenco
prior matched the arrival of True Men to beat back the Viruk and establish the first Empire, and the Amentzutlian dating of
the birth of the black moon corresponded to when Virukadeen destroyed itself and the
Viruk Empire started its decline.
To make matters worse, the rise of the Taichun Dynasty was supposed to have been led
by a man who fought under a dragon banner. Prior to that, none of the warlords or princes
had dared use a crest of the gods, and many said that Taichun claimed to be a god, or the
son of a god. He was supposed to have arrived from the east on a ship and surrounded
himself with a cadre of copper-skinned warriors.
Of course, later historians had explained that away as hyperbole. His arrival from the east
was meant to show he was extraordinary, since the sun rose in the east and he was the
light that would banish the barbarism nibbling at the Empire at the time. His bodyguard
was supposed to have been Turasynd, and Taichun’s chief skill seemed to have been to
make alliances with warlords, then betray them to their enemies while keeping the loyalty
of their people. And so he forged a new Empire, created the bureaucracy, and dictated a
book of common wisdom that governed the lives of many down to the present.
It was the Book of Wisdom that caused the most trouble, for as Nauana would offer one of
Tetcomchoa’s sayings, Jorim could complete it as easily as Iesol could quote Urmyr. She
took this as a sign that Jorim was recovering his divine nature, while he was having
trouble dealing with the total revision of history as he knew it.
Jorim sighed and Shimik giggled—an annoying habit he’d learned from the hordes of
Amentzutl children who delighted in his company. Jorim frowned as he looked at the
Fenn. “You’re not helping, you know. Half of this is your fault.”
Shimik’s eyes got big, and he smiled, showing all of his teeth, but did not look wholly
contrite. “Mourna mourna sad.”
The cartographer growled at him. Jorim had tried to explain to Nauana that he was not a
god and not divine, but she merely pointed to Shimik as obvious proof of his godliness.
The Amentzutl did not know of the Fennych, so its very appearance meant Jorim was
somehow special. Shimik had also picked up on the fact that the dragon was important, so
when his fur developed a serpentine pattern, all who saw him were convinced that he was
divine.
In some ways, he could have enjoyed the experience of being thought a god. There were
places in Ummummorar where he was highly revered, especially after slaying Viruk. He’d
been feted and saluted and offered wives by the score to breed more strong warriors like
himself. He’d declined, but only because he had a taste for discovery, not power.
The problem with the Amentzutl was that they actually expected him to
do
something,
because the world was dying. Only he could see them through
the
centenco
cycle. The threat to the world was now the same as when he had been there
before: strangers were invading, and the Amentzutl were not certain how to stop them
without his help.
“My Lord Tetcomchoa, please forgive me.”
Nauana’s voice remained quiet, but filled the stone chamber, softening all edges and
bringing light to even his darkest mood. She remained purposeful—and supremely
confident in him—despite his best attempts to dispel her notions. She had filled his head
with dire predictions about the rise of the seventh god—which could have also been a
tenth god since three of their gods had tripartite aspects. He barely understood what Keles
would have figured out in a heartbeat, and that thought provided him a place to gather
himself.
He turned and reached out to scratch Shimik behind an ear. “Rise, Nauana. I will not have
you on even one knee before me.”
“As you desire, my Lord.” The raven-haired woman rose slowly, her breath still coming a
bit quickly given the exertion of the climb. “I have come to tell you that the Mozoyan Horde
has come.”
“From the northeast? As we expected?”
“As you
predicted,
yes, my Lord.”
“And the defenses have been prepared?”
“As per your instruction, my Lord.”
Jorim nodded and gathered Shimik into his arms. “Very good. Call the people.”
Nauana nodded, then looked up. He caught fear in her dark eyes and for a moment
dreaded it was fear of him. “My Lord, you will wish to see. They are as fog.”
He nodded, then walked past her to the pyramid’s flat top. He gazed north. To the
northeast, slowly emerging from the jungle and filling the fields, hundreds upon thousands
of small creatures became visible. He could see no banners nor crests—nothing that
marked an organization, nor any leaders on horseback to provide direction. It heartened
him that no giants or other monstrosities lumbered among them, but this horde of child-
sized creatures was frightening enough.
The Mozoyan were not, as he had first supposed, barbarians like the Turasynd.
“Mozoyan” did not mean from outside land, it actually meant from no land. The Amentzutl
had no idea whence they had come, though refugees from Iyayan, a northern city akin to
Tocayan, had said they had emerged from the sea almost like turtles coming up on the
sands to spawn.
At Jorim’s request, Tzihua had gone out on one of the smaller ships in the fleet, slipped
into the area through which the Mozoyan were traveling, and brought back dead bodies.
He’d not had to kill anything, just harvested cadavers from what had been the Mozoyan
line of march. He’d gotten them back two days previously, then Jorim and some of the
scholars from the fleet had conducted dissections.
From the very first, Jorim realized these were not the sea devils they’d seen, but he could
not dismiss some relation between them. They had rudimentary gill slits, and while their
flesh was not scaled, it did resemble shark leather. Their heads were not as narrow as sea
devil heads, but they did have mouths full of shark’s teeth, with several layers ready to
pop up in place when one was lost. They still had webbed fingers and toes, though their
feet were better suited to movement on land than were the sea devils’.
It looked to him as if these were distant cousins of the sea devils: as if the sea devils had
mated with sharks and with frogs, then those offspring had been bred together.
Eyewitnesses had reported that the creatures could leap prodigiously, and even their
emergence from the forest showed signs of that. Their fingers ended in claws, but scratch
tests on small animals showed no sign of venom, whereas the teeth could clearly deliver a
nasty bite. They did use weapons, after a fashion, but only sticks and stones. They went
without armor. Their numbers were their strength.
What disturbed Jorim most was that they reminded him of creatures that used to haunt his
nightmares as a child. He had been two years old when his father had been lost at sea.
When adults were discussing his father’s death in his hearing, they said little, but a clever
boy can hear things he might only partially understand.
And such things thrive in nightmares.
He’d had them off and on for years. His mother would comfort him when he was young,
listening to his nonsensical babbling as if it were revealed wisdom, then lie down with him,
holding him until he fell asleep. In later years he would awaken alone, drenched in sweat,
and would huddle in his bed praying for dawn.
He finally confided in Keles when, at the age of ten, he’d fallen asleep in the Anturasikun
garden and been awakened when a frog had snapped a fly from his face with its tongue.
Once Keles had stopped laughing at his utter terror and Jorim had explained, Keles had
been everything an older brother should be.
“Jorim, you are strong and fast, and they are amphibians. They are suited to water and
swimming. On land you will outrun them. And their endurance? They will have none.”
Keles had tousled his hair. “Do what you do best, and you will beat them, Jorim. You’ll
beat them in your dreams and they won’t bother you anymore.”
“You’re wrong there, Keles, because they are bothering me a lot right now,” he muttered
aloud.
“I beg your pardon, my Lord?”
Jorim smiled and turned back. “It is nothing. I was talking to my brother.”
“I see.” Her voice had all the conviction of someone agreeing for the sake of politeness.
She understood he had a flesh-and-blood brother, and she accepted that, but also knew
he had no divine brother. Everyone knew
that
. Since his brother was mortal, he could not hear such a spoken comment, so speaking aloud was just another idiosyncrasy she would
have to endure.
“Nauana, you must understand something.” Jorim pointed to the lines of the trenches that
cut from the northwest edge of the jungle down to the southeast and the base of the
escarpment. “My advisors and I have shaped the best defenses we can think of. Your
warriors are going to fight hard, and I know the
maicana
will do all they can to contain the
oquihui
. There are no guarantees of victory, however.”
She smiled in a way that made him want to take her face in his hands and kiss her
senseless. Her faith in him could not be broken, and when she looked at him like that, he
didn’t want it to be.
“Your will shall be done, my Lord.”
Down below, horns sounded and those few people who remained in the lowlands—save
the soldiers—retreated to the causeway and began the long ascent to the heights. The
last to leave had lit fires in the buildings—all of which had been emptied of supplies well
before the retreat. The breeze coming in from the ocean blew the smoke back onto the
Mozoyan, and Jorim hoped that neither their gills nor their lungs would function well under
that assault.
The horde came on, angling down to reach the breastworks close to the middle of the line.
The trenches themselves had been excavated with magic—the
maicana
working at night
both so enemy scouts could not see them, and so their people would not be terrified by
the power they wielded. Their magics would have been enough to cast the Mozoyan back