Seventh of Seven
. . . into a place of deciduous gigantism, the air too rich and stinking of sulfur, of ozone, some unearthly black snow—ash, rather—sifting down: another world, and bright midmorning here. Muttering earthquake, muttering pyroclastic surge, the ground underfoot thrummed. “You near about beat,” Demane said, urgency giving his tone an edge. “Snatch that off your head, and you won’t be.”
Captain glanced over his shoulder at the Road. A few from the caravan, like children standing before a mirror, gaped blindly back at him.
“They cain’t see you,” Demane snapped. “It’s another world from there. And we gotta go—so, right now, Isa.” To stand atop a supervolcano, nine months gravid and about to blow, was nerve-wracking. “Quick!”
Not so quick: just a headscarf, but there have been many shy virgins who shimmied from their drawers more boldly. Uncovered, Captain’s hair flashed once blindingly (Demane—eyes closed, a hand thrown up to shield them further—saw that red flare) and then, gorging widely upon EMR, the heliophages dimmed and darkened past matte, past black, to the fuliginous. Some other time, Demane would have lingered over this sight, for it was wonderful to see how Captain’s eyes, bloodshot and purple-shadowed, instantly clarified, and every sign of fatigue and endurance sloughed from him, exchanged for the fretful antsiness of a superb and rested athlete. But they were standing on a continent that was about to halve in size. Demane rechecked the spoor and trail, seized the captain’s hand, and flung him forward through dense foliage into the next world, himself right behind . . .
. . . pulling the captain second to take point himself, as soon as the leaves snapped closed behind them. “Come here,” he said; Captain came into his arms. “Close your eyes.” Demane’s pores drenched them both, misting aroma herbaceous and evergreen. The air around them cleared, clouds of midge and mosquito falling away.
The captain screwed up his face, blinking away tears. “Ah! Stinks like rosemary.”
Nothing would scent their approach or passage now, either by nose or tongue. They would still, of course, have to watch out, and take care about making noise. And on, to the next world . . .
Had he gone home to the green hills, Demane would have seen men dressed sensibly for the heat, women walking boldly about their business; he could again have expressed himself in the mothertongue, and stopped trying to uphold foreign ways. Going off-Road into the Wildeeps was a joyful homecoming of another kind. Only in the most perilous wilderness could wild power safely unleash itself.
Monsters filled the forest. Twice Demane tore away at a dead run and Captain paced him, half a step behind. Twice again, he held them both flat to the ground, while through the jungle nearby some colossus passed unseen, the earth and trees quaking with fourfooted booms, and they lying under the thickets, with breath held, or scarcely breathing.
Only one of them could perceive the wizard cat’s wake. Only one of them could track the sign under leafy darkness, through mist and rain, and see them safely past every peril. And so no talk, no conflict, entered into who would boldly lead, who meekly follow. The trail took them as much from glade to glade as between worlds. Aunty would have been proud. Demane learned miracles she’d never taught, and learned them on his feet, at speed.
. . . breathing in the minutely floating odorants left by the jukiere’s passage. Molecules mixed on his tongue with secretions of the pineal gland—which, in the Wildeeps, was no longer a rare ichor to eke out in meager drops. Here, his third eye abundantly replenished itself. The wonders he could work! Demane spat. The hot expectoration seethed onto the path ahead, and the way to the next world opened. An effluvious gate . . .
Even in deepest shadow of the understorey Demane was aware when infinities of scent suddenly vanished away, and myriad new odors bloomed over the space of a single step. Families of flora would regress to emergent infancy or advance to atrophied old age. Brethrens of beasts disappeared, and came back anew in strange variants. Nothing remained the same over distances, except the wizard’s vagrant trail. As the worlds changed, so did the times—by leaps of innumerate years: millennia of millennia, if such numbers existed.
. . . careful! There—a toad, beetle-small and searingly green as pond scum, crept on the path ahead. It so reeked of murderous fumes that Demane, though all but unpoisonable, had no wish to touch it. For another man to brush the tiny creature even glancingly would kill him on the spot. With the butt of his spear, Demane gouged the dirt and slung the virid speck, mud-engulfed, off the path where Captain’s foot (half naked in a sandal) would step a moment after his own . . .
. . . and the broadleaf canopy sealed above them. Though late morning, it was midnight on the forest floor—light in plenty, of course, for the eyes of a child of Tower TSIMTSOA. All this while, and from world to world, Captain had dogged Demane’s heels with the same lightly treading mimicry of a shadow. Now, he shook his hand loose; for just ahead the black-on-black brocade of the jungle shredded, with the tatters admitting sunlight. The captain went to this expanse of dappled foliage and, like some man parched with thirst ducking his face into a pool of water, thrust his head through the leaves to take some sun. According to the spoor, the jukiere had also stopped here not so long ago. Demane stepped up to the prospect beside Captain.
They stood atop a forested bluff, which commanded a view of valley, river running through, and surrounding ridges. At their feet the abrupt slope dropped off into depthless tangles of weed that overgrew the valley from end to end. This world or time was far ancestral to their own, Demane judged. Infusing the scent-drenched air was not one whiff of plant or animal known to him. Across the lush weedfields, in the middle distance, flowed a sludgy river. Sheersided crags, facelike, closed the valley in: the cliffs as smooth as cheeks, the dark bosky heights suggesting hair. One sight held both men captive. Sized so as to beggar comparison, some great vast beast extended its sinuous neck from the muddy waters of the river. If not the whole, could a much smaller part of its body be likened, then? The head was elephantine, and swept up to tree height in order to chew, and then down, to snatch immense tracts of greenery from the riverbank. And the beast’s head was minute beside the forehaunches which rose tremendously above the water’s surface.
“Something’s strange, D.” Captain murmured so softly he must have guessed the range of Demane’s hearing. “Have you seen how the forest keeps changing . . . ?” He took a step almost into full sunlight.
“Yeah—” The breeze shifted: charged with carnivorous reptile. Demane lunged, seized the captain, and drew him back under good cover.
“Tiger? Nearby?” He asked almost without sound. But Demane fiercely shook his head, and covered the captain’s mouth. He lifted his little finger to point down toward the river.
The leviathan fed. Hard by, some new prodigy erupted from the depths of weeds. This, by teeth and claws, was no eater of plants! From subtle creeping the monster launched upwards into the air. That leap could not have spanned half a league, surely, however far it seemed—some great distance, though: powered by hugely muscled legs many times the size of its short withered arms. Off the shore of the river there was a muddy island. . . . Ah, no: that was the weed-eater’s back! There, the other landed, claws furrowing through flesh; the fanged jaws snapped down for a mouthful that could have champed a rhino in two. An unspeakable live butchery commenced.
Here, it would help to have seen the Assumption of the Towers. Such a cataclysm! Tongues of fire licked the clouds; eruptions of steam such as the gods in bright ascent saw blot the sphere below them; tsunami, worldwide; and the isle itself dissolving as does a clump of wet sand, held in a child’s cupped palm which she then ducks, open, under the froth of an incoming wave. Or it would help to know as much of shock and awe as those farflung few, survivors of the long night of dragons, when the Assassin of Cities, Rain of Fire, Lightstorm, Death from Above, Utter Ruin, and Torrent of Thunderbolts brought low the empire of Daluça, capital and colonies, burning and blasting the flower of mortal civilization. But without a cheek or brow brushed by edgefeathers of the archangel’s wings, while you stood a witness to somesuch enormity and from so near, what hope of understanding what they felt?
This is what they saw:
The excavations of the carnivore sent up blasts like storm surge against a rocky headland. Oceanic and salty: though these waters were scarlet blood. Honks of the leviathan cracked back from the cliffs of the valley, echoing, and the outflow of its gore purpled the brown river. The breeze ripened, coating Demane’s tongue and filling his nose with odor and savor of snake’s blood, snake’s meat. He could hardly make out the captain’s mélange of earthling and stardust, though in his very arms. From roosts in the basalt visages—from eyes and nostrils—shadows of greatwinged manikins launched into the upper void.
The sky was cloudless and the river without fog, but throughout the valley a misty pall floated in the middle of the air. Those huge birds wheeled down from the cliff faces, down through suspended vapor, down into the lower clarity. There, they took shape as feathered crocodiles. Half the monstrous flock was bigger and more gaudily colored than the other. One by one the raptors, sized like little men, alighted on the bountiful carcass. Soon dozens of them sawed away with barbed bills. The flux of the river foamed pink and white around the behemoth as submerged scavengers began to feed.
Lord of them all, the twolegged dragon glutted itself, and lesser monsters scattered whereverfrom it wished to bite. Even the rocs, scaly titans, and river sharks couldn’t strip the meat off that mountain in the time the two of them stood watching; still, substructures of skeleton, like support beams of a palace under construction, began to come into view.
The primordial awe ebbed from Demane first. His hand still lightly cupped the captain’s mouth. When he slid it away Captain turned vague, astonished eyes on him. They were the last shade of brown before black, color of coffee, and just now neither grim nor sad but wonderstruck. He was all soft-side-up for a change. And unplucked there on his mouth were kisses like lowhanging fruit, ripe and deeply pink. But the beloved too has extraordinary senses; he scents importunity. “The tiger,” Captain murmured and, blinking himself fully alert, spoke a word chilling even to the hottest lover: “Cumalo.”
Demane turned back to the depths of the forest. “Well, come on with you, then.”
• • • •
A season ago, Demane walked in low spirits through the market of Philipiya. On that afternoon, rather than pass by, he stopped at the mercenaries’ post. There was a man crying as usual: “Warriors! Brave men! Wealth!” Beside the crier stood another man, who smelled richly of extraterrestrial heritage. Demane went over. The one who cried put questions to him; Demane answered, his eyes on the other all the while, addressing him. Alumnus of many wars by the beads round his neck, and speechless in a black robe, black headscarf, there was no reason to believe the man other than mute—not deaf, though, for he attended Demane’s answers closely. Then they sparred for a brief bout. Demane spoke. “You staying over in a travelers’ barracks? They kind of nasty, ain’t they? You ought to come with me.” However this man answered, Demane knew his life was about to change. “I got good rooms in the amir’s palace. What’s your name, anyway?”
The man dismissed the crier with a glance. And then for the first time Demane heard Captain’s voice:
“I’m Isa of Sea-john, Demane. But if you come with the caravan, you must call me Captain.”
Wait, now: hush, Demane thought to himself. He’s bitterly ashamed of his voice. So you’d better not say, ‘Your talk is like a song. I never heard anything so beautiful in my life!’ “Where’s Sea-john at, Captain?”
“It’s the borough where foreigners live, down in Great Olorum. Call me Isa when it’s just us.”
“I don’t know that place, Olorum, either.” Demane said. They were crossing out of the market. The crowd among the vegetable stands convulsed, women with baskets fleeing toward the wharves: the late fishermen were coming in. Demane caught the captain’s hand and even when the jostling rush had passed kept hold of it.
“Look, Isa, I don’t get how you all do it here,” he said, “but I want to . . . love you. Understand me?”
The captain looked sideways at him and did not quite smile. But the handclasp lost neutrality and became erotic, a sign of something sure. For this man, Demane decided—on the spot, at that moment—he would stick it out, cross continents, do whatever love required. Captain said, “I understand you just fine.” The sublime low throb of his whisper!
Day after next, midmorning, he departed Philipiya with the caravan of Master Suresh l’Merqerim—without a word of goodbye to either the amir, or that harried ruler’s spoiled son. Menials know all that happens in a palace, however. And so two marble-swabbers, some laundresses, and a run-fetch boy were able to variously report having seen him leave in the company of an Olorumi mercenary, quite thin, unusually tall. And though Demane left behind emptied room, abandoning not one fine rich robe, nor the smallest gaud his patron had given him, the reports of all these menials coincided: as he’d shown up, so did he leave—in the altogether, and carrying just that same ratty little bag.
• • • •
Demane waited until he drew a breath smacking of carrion, and then said, “Let me see the point of your spear.” Captain presented his spear. Demane pulled the shaft lower and pricked a finger on the tip, smearing his blood so that it glazed the spearleaf entirely.
“Demane . . . ?” the captain sang low.
“With the magis’ greatwork, any knife, spear, rock or whatever can hurt a creature spinning on the Towers’ left while you’re on the Road. But off-Road, you need, uh . . . a sorcerer’s blessing. As long as you can see me, or me you, that spear’s good against the jukiere. All right?”
Captain nodded. And soon thereafter, in his nostrils too the reek of putrescence began to bloom and burn. A dull buzzing roar began to rise: countless thousands of flies, still at some distance. The captain’s face assumed its severest aspect, braced against a stench that could be little short of emetic for him.
Demane whispered, “If you need some help standing the smell . . .”
Manfully—foolishly—Captain shook his head.
A clearing. Flies frenzied in the air. The sun shone down upon a massive stump, truncated by lightning-strike about ten feet above their heads. The cataclysmic fall of this adolescent redwood had smashed a long glade through the jungle. The gap in the canopy admitted light by which all the boneyard’s horrors could be seen: several dozen bodies, human and swine.
Some butcher had not judged them different meats. For with intimate promiscuity cadaver of man and carcass of pig lay strewn together, in every attitude and condition of death. A few freshkill, some fallen to bones. Most bodies in intermediate states: well and thoroughly dead—liquescent, bloated, purpling—and yet quick with life too, such were the worms, the seething coverlet of flies. Disjointed limbs were littered round about; and everywhere underfoot, clots of errant pork, strange gobbets, ribbons of flesh. Bad as these sights were, for Captain the smell could only be worse. Breathe by mouth if he liked, but the gases of decomposition would be stinking to point of savor. Every breath over his tongue would taste of vile broth.
Cravenly, Demane invoked arts to which Captain had no recourse. He kept raw emotion at bay, his sensibilities more nearly animal than a man’s.
As Aunty had once with him, he murmured and gestured: “. . . see how the wizard’s two-times picky? Us or pigs: nothing else. Ah, look at that one there. The way the jukiere take only two or three good bites? It won’t fill up on just one body, they always waste. It is a [mainstay of entropic necromancy] . . . part of their bad juju . . .”
And there was Cumalo. The cat had kicked sticks, leaves, dirt over the body. Out from under this mess extended their brother’s legs and sandaled feet. Demane and the captain approached. A half-dozen crows saucily dawdled, gouging out last bits, cawing complaints at them, before at last taking to wing and scattering down to other feasts. With the butt of his spear Demane knocked aside the shoddy cairn. Facedown, Cumalo lay atop swatches of his clawed-apart robe. The rigid fingers of one hand clenched about some final treasure, which Demane crouched to recover: a knucklebone die. Iridescent flies resettled along the white and red-gummed exposure of his pelvis and femur bones. The back of the body, apart from the mauled shoulder, and the neck, lolling askew—“You see, Captain? They kill by choking”—remained whole. Demane swung the butt of his spear toward bushes a few long strides away, under which were heaped the ropes and bags of their brother’s entrails, pulled out whither the taint couldn’t turn the meat faster. Demane paused doubtfully. Did he belabor? Was he speaking with strange dispassion? Both of these? He peeked sidelong.
Captain sweated copiously. His face was drawn taut, immobile but for his upper lip quivering in a nauseated sneer. Abruptly he staggered back, bowed forcibly: retching forth a mouthful of water, and then heaving dryly several times. There was no reckless courage in this world—no hardihood, no manful strength, no mad feats on fields of battle—that would keep down the gorge in the boneyard of a jukiere. Demane allowed bitter citrus attar to flood his mouth. He pulled the captain upright and forced a deep strange kiss. The agile mollusc of his tongue lapped over and under Captain’s, and then around and up into either nostril. Once let go, Captain sucked in a long breath and rubbed at his nose, while the tart potency stunned his sense of taste and smell. He grunted—hornlike, tuneful—and nodded ungracious thanks.
The men this side of the continent didn’t like their weakness watched, so Demane turned away, studying the ground. He wandered, and hunkered down next to prints lately pressed into bloody muck. The noisome airs and flies’ whining roar blunted the fine acuity of his nose and ears; but sight had all its sharpness. Something was bothering him about the sign, these prints; what? When Demane next glanced over, Captain had found the remains of the merchant Iuliano. Demane looked down again, trying to grasp what eluded him. Jukiere tracks, no doubt about that: the spread and shape of toes, the forefoot polydactyl where the claws didn’t retract . . . And this was sure enough the boneyard of a jukiere, all the waste of half eaten bodies, and yet, something—
A dry stick cracked, nearby.
“Here it come!” Demane shouted.
The great cat roared, just out of sight in the trees. Closer to the noise, Captain bolted toward it, spear in hand. Demane had followed only three steps when the jukiere broke cover and streaked across his path, crashing westward into the brush, though the captain had gone north. “West, Captain, west!” Demane shouted, while turning to give chase.
His attention narrowed to matters of pursuit. The great cat surged around the trunks of trees, plunged through black densities of brush. Demane held his best sprint without tiring; but faster over the short distance, the jukiere kept easily ahead. The ground began to grade upwards, and there Demane found himself gaining with every step. He burst into sunlight where the slope cleared to treelessness between thickets. Only a short lunge away up the embankment, the tiger whirled at bay. It leapt back downwards.
Male. The bearded ruff, those thickly gnarled foreshoulders. Downcurved tusks a full foot long—
Demane moved with instinctual speed. Planting his spear’s butt against the ground, he leveled its point toward the cat, and braced for impact. The shaft jarred deeply into leaf-rot. Demane ducked from scrabbling claws, yanking with all his might. Impaled, the jukiere vaulted overhead and on down the embankment. The spear tore loose from his grasp, he himself somersaulting downward one time, before arresting his descent with a snatched handhold of rank vine.
Only in movement could the jukiere be seen. When still, the creature’s brindled coat merged with the jungle’s greenish light and shadow. The fur of its flanks and back was mature evergreen, dark-stippled as if muddy. Its fur hung thick and longer along throat and underbelly, new-grass-color, white with age at the fringes. The spear had broken the joint of the great cat’s left foreshoulder, and there was lodged. The cat stepped its right forepaw and great weight onto the shaft, but the wood held, unbending. Not would it ever break, so long as Demane lived. Batting at the shaft, the jukiere worried at it until the spear fell free.
Demane kicked against slick crushed greenery and mud. His hand clutching at vines, his feet gaining purchase neither to move upwards nor to stand. Wind rose at his back, blowing to the jukiere and past him came a windborne power spinning counter to his own, TSIMTSOA. The hot air became foul with maneater’s funk, with bowels torn bloodily open; the wind rang with such cries as quarry gives when caught, when eaten alive: the squeals and screams, a rare decipherable word, help. As the jukiere pulled strength from the Wildeeps, this shrieking miasma whipped about it. The red hole in the tiger’s shoulder ceased to bleed, and fleshed over, and the nude flesh furred. That fourth paw came down gingerly. The cat put confident weight on it.
He could do the same, Demane saw: spinning the power as TSIM rather than TSOA. A chrism of bright sun poured down, and humanity dropped off him like a cloak. His imperfect flesh ripped itself inside-out with the rise to perfection, Not piece by piece, all at once: metamorphosis is like death, as he welcomed the change he’d fought off since crossing over into the Wildeeps in that it ruptures mind from body. By grace of the blood, though, your consciousness can cohere into flesh and bone after transformation. If you’re strong enough, if you don’t vanish into the void. Only you can judge whether the gods’ heritage is enough expressed in you to bring you back past throwing off human shape. No one can tell you that; only you will know. For a talisman, gather thoughts of what matters most to you.
—All mine shall live so long as I do: I spear these desperadoes in defense of my brothers. For clumsy little Walead; for Faedou who took a knife to the leg; for Ca—
Join together these precious lights as a beacon, and the gathered shining of your treasures will call you back from the fall into death.
—Aunty needed one of us to pick up the burden. Somebody has to. I’m not leaving the green hills to hurt you, whom I love. I go because I’m the last one left who can—
Becoming the stormbird is as easy for me as you put on your mantle for holidays; I’ve got the trick of it. I think you can get it too. But don’t hurt yourself, Mountain Bear. A heart like yours or mine works miracles best doing for others. So wait on your cause. Or on love. His talons, rootlike, sank lengthily into the mud. Demane came back within a heartbeat: winged and leatherskinned, now. He was no longer a couple inches shy of six feet but just past seven, with hands and maw full of knives.
The tiger made to spring, low and hunch-shouldered. Its sooty lips curled up, the ribbon of its tongue lolling. Fiery pinpricks glowed in its wizard-eyes.
Demane fell back a step, and another man’s last thoughts became his own:
Four lines of black ice slit his belly to tatters. His first scream owed more to fright and surprise, not yet wholly to pain. Hot wet weight slopped down his lap and legs, the living burden of his body suddenly lightened. He thought only to—run! But already too weak, he fell sprawling about to shout Help! Captain! Sorcerer! But agony forestalled any such outcry: fingerlength spikes drove through his shoulder. The socket burst, collarbone crumbled, and bony wing of his back shattered. Great rough strength slung him through the mud. The bonfires on the Road went dark. He saw nothing, felt only the scratching smack of leaves, and weird soft loops entangling his legs. He could scream, he could kick—there was nothing else left to do. A gamey fetor lunged at him, hot, faceward. Last act in life, he got up his elbow, somehow, into the way. Almighty teeth savaged that arm, and folded it down throttlingly around his own throat. There was no breath and no breath and still there was none, and still none. You could count these last slow final blinks on the fingers of one hand, nor need all five. Drugged sleep dampened the fires of his terror. This world ebbing, the enigma burgeoned . . .
Cumalo died. Demane woke, toppling backwards under the weight of the wizard. Claws raked down his chest unable to score his hide. Fangs closed on his impenetrable throat. Stronger, he tore himself free of the crushing maw. The evil wind blew again, and the wizard’s green brindled coat went black and bright as a thundercloud, its fur blazing and freezing in restless patches. Crackling flashes snapped between the hot and cold spots. Demane struck again and again, with all his strength, but his bladed fingers turned on the jukiere’s flesh, and frost bit his hands. Fire scorched them. Where was his spear? The absent gods had left that spear for this very purpose: killing jukiere. Where was it? Neither talon nor claw drawing any blood, they traded blows, impervious to each other. The cat snarled, and Demane husked the strange roar that bespoke his anger in this shape.
And still the Wildeeps went without master, its numina inexhaustible and unclaimed: so draw again. Drink!
Demane drank. His galled and ashen hands blackened, sleek and whole. When I was even younger than you, my mother came back from a long time away—but not in the flesh. She came as light, only to say goodbye. I think she’d gone too far or too deep working some great miracle, and so lost the route back to humanity. He batted the jukiere off its feet and against a great tree, which burst to flinders, the splintered wood into flames. Back broken, the jukiere tried to rise, front paws scrabbling. Time to finish it. Laying his talons point-on-point to make spears of his hands, Demane winged toward the cat. Which drink would be one too far? When was the last line crossed? Already?
In unison Demane and the wizard reached to partake of the Wildeeps—and neither could. Back and forth, they wrestled for ascendancy, the jukiere winning. It surged to its feet. On patches of its fur the action of minute particles ceased, or nearly so; but the hot patches blazed with diametric heat. When Demane speared down a hand to impale the cat, his hand burst into flames. The talons shattered on contact. Seething eruptions of blisters went up his arm. Body and wings: his whole self began to smoke. He crashed to earth. Trees—all the vegetation roundabout—crisped to black, the cinders falling to white ash, and the ash too burning. In another moment, some patch of the jukiere’s fur, infinitely cold, would meet parallel fires, and the resulting discharge . . .
One last drink, then: nothing measured, as much as he could hold. Everything. The talons that had broken regrew, the intact hardened to adamant, and then tapered finer than a hairsbreadth. He flung that hand around, knifing into flesh, cleaving between ribs. The wizard halted the talons’ plunge with its whole visceral will; its stormy fur went dark. They strained against one another. And still Demane drank, as the river below drinks when the dam above has broken. “The gods travel as light,” she said. “I’m joining the Tower in the purissime. You and the children come up when you can.” A star falling the wrong way: that’s how she left me. It is possible for one to win and yet lose—or the other to lose, and die, but take out the enemy too. The jukiere stopped its struggles and instead lunged, with jaws fully agape, forward onto the impaling talons. The tiger’s fangs and tusks, death-limned and aglow with every mustered erg of necromancy, would for a last act snap shut upon Demane’s head.
There’s another, deeper metamorphosis, I think. No, I can’t tell you anything about that one. We’ll learn it by ourselves, if we ever do. You and me both.
Demane spat forth a black glimmering particulate which unmade everything it touched. Each annihilative spark vanished in the instant of unmaking until, headless, the jukiere fell—stormbird triumphant! Demane roared as strength upon strength poured unstoppably into him. His skin took light, sublimating off his bones, and they themselves began to glow, turning to hot gas. Up or away he was carried at great speed across darkness into some dense, rushing, many-layered radiance. In the tidal light he found his tier among winged brethren, who gladly made room for him. And having gathered him up, glory deepened to sweep him from the shores of Earth back toward infinity, but she caught his arm. The woman had the quiet poise of Demane’s elder sister, a muscled shape like his own, Aunty’s stature, the ageless looks of his parents: so that they all must share close blood, though who this stranger was Demane couldn’t guess. “Stay longer than a moment, boy, and there’s no going back. Will you let that jukiere take over the Wild Depths?” Hard to care about terrestrial trivia when the gods of TSIMTSOA called from only a little farther upstream . . . “Wait, boy—wait! Didn’t you leave somebody behind? What was it you kept meaning to say to him?”
—But you hate this life, Captain; you know you do. So if you promised ole Suresh this last journey, then come away with me after we get to Great Olorum. All this is so easy in the green hills. There, you and me could—
Demane broke from the light, and fought his way back down toward mortality.
• • • •
“Ha!” Demane laughed; the sonority was palpable in his belly, his bones, his teeth. “I can feel that one. My teeth jumping.” Next, Isa gave a rich whistle too high and fast to credit from human lips, except that Demane lay there watching the feat, listening rapt. It was like a bitty songbird’s welcome to the sunrise. “Now that one’s pretty, right there. But say again? It went by so fast, I couldn’t catch one word.” Other voices too, none of them any strain at all for him, every one equally his own. And at last Demane exclaimed, “No, no, no: that one! I like that one best.”
“This is a woman’s voice, you know.”
“Is it? Beautiful on anybody. Just seem like it fit you, that’s all. But I could see a man or woman, really.”
“No, it’s a woman’s voice. Deepwaters,¹ we say in Sea-john. Men’s start just a little bit deeper, and not so rich. I like this one, too. A long time ago, I used to . . . well, that stuff doesn’t matter now. All right, pop—for you. But only when we’re alone, you hear? On caravan I have to speak much lower; for respect, so brothers will follow. This one’s still too high.”
• • • •
The weight of the jukiere towed him to his knees, and from there sprawled facedown in its clammy fur. Just a man again, with little more than any man’s strength, Demane couldn’t shift it. The wizard was heavy. Its eyes had turned to glass, its flesh to a quarter ton of clay. He braced his heels to the headless carcass and, pulling back against the wet-suck of the wound, dredged forth his arm. It came free badly scored along its length, all gashed and chewed by splintered bone.
He cradled his torn arm to him. A sip of power from the Wildeeps would heal these injuries. But could he hold himself to that, just a sip, or would another apocalyptic binge rapture him beyond the sky, newest and least godling of the radiant pantheons? Well before noon on the day he decides to go dry, the drunkard already finds himself trembling. That Demon whispers: You can handle it. A little taste. Just get your lips wet.
No . . . he’d better let the wounds stand.
Captain was nowhere in sight, and nowhere close by: must have gotten turned around. He’d know to go back and wait at the boneyard. And just how long would he abide there before striking out alone? In space, it was only a quarter league east to reach the Road, but there were several millennia to cross in time . . . Demane cut off that thought. He fetched his spear from where it had fallen. The captain, no fool, would wait longer than the short while that had passed.
Demane jogged back the way he’d come.
Just a man again, child of TSIMTSOA? Knifesharp leaves struck him always flat-side, never edged; thickets thinned for him, and fanged thornbrakes, pulled aside, whipped back and missed, points always angled to his advantage: the briars caught by greenery, or broken off or blunted. Any other man—just a man—would wonder that all the rotten bits of debris, the sticks and rocks underfoot, kept presenting only soft or smooth-side-up to his soles. But His Majesty, thinking deep thoughts, was oblivious to the scramble of his countless servitors. Demane had yet to learn he’d never be quit of godhead having now put it on.
Ahead was a tree. Approaching it Demane’s step slowed, his knees made weak by sudden understanding. Jukiere piss-sign had splashed all over the tree’s roots, wet only a day ago: at most two. But the scent didn’t belong to the jukiere cooling stiff and flyblown on the embankment behind him. There was another, nor aged nor male. She was in fresh youth, just a few days from throwing a litter of fiends. Demane ran.
• • • •
Soft fingers held him, a damp cloth wiping. He blinked sleepily.
Back from bathing, Isa looked up from these ministrations. “It’s true, what you said. But you don’t know the brothers yet, Demane. Somebody’s got to look out for them.” He tossed the cloth aside, beyond the sheets. “It’s in you to learn fast. So after we come to Great Olorum, take over the captaincy if you want.” Isa smiled. “I’d follow you. You’d be ten times better at it than I am.”
Demane sat up, caught him, pulled him down. “You just now met me in the market. Where do you get all this?”
“I’m telling you, D., you’ve got a hero’s shine on you. Just as bright as anybody I ever knew. I know it when I see it.”
“Me? Naw; I’m no hero. You got me mixed with yourself, maybe. You been in big battles, ain’t you? And wasn’t you over there in that war?” Demane tapped the red coral and white shell necklace Isa wore, one among many, and many-colored. Isa gave him no reply, only a glance that said too much, or said it too vaguely, for interpretation (his finger tracing vascular bulk and striation of Demane’s shoulder and arm). Over there, yes: and marshal of the campaign, too. But Demane would only learn this much later on, when the knowledge could make no difference. “Me, I don’t know nothing about big combat or command. You the one.”
“I know what I’m good for. Believe that, Demane. And I know that if you keep up your wandering, this whole continent will know your name one day.”
Demane smiled peaceably, settling deeper in the pillows; his fastidious new lover sprawled half on, half beside him. If the point was to please him, then Isa could just as well have lain beside him until morning, smelling funky and used. But during two days in bed, with only a quick step out here and there to wolf some meal in the market, Isa always found an imperceptible moment to slip off and bathe, between each time they made love and next. And he never spoiled the afterglow, nor lingered long enough to be missed. What timing! A supernatural gift for love, you’d almost have said. So off south—tomorrow morning!—over the burning rocky hills, across the weeks-wide desert, and finally to some distant, meridonal city called Great Olorum? Sure, all right. This man’s reverent touch, his vox seraphica; the beard that looked to be coarse, but was downy to the touch . . . what was there to complain of here?
“I was wrong about one thing, though.”
“Yeah, whas that?”
“I thought you were going to be a hard man. You know—mean to me.”
“What?” Demane frowned. “But why would you go with somebody like that?” He sat up on an elbow. “Why—?”
“Aw, don’t get upset, pop. I’m glad you’re kind.” If you’d distract a lion? Throw some bloody steak. “Hey!” Captain slipped a smooth long leg across Demane’s lap to straddle him. “Ready to go again? Uh huh, I see. We’ve got to make sure you get plenty now, because I can’t let you have it like this on the road . . .”
• • • •
Overcast warred with blue in the windy firmament. It was sweltering, not long past noon. Two heaps of ash remained of the night’s bonfires, red cinders winking in the white powder. A half dozen burros wandered on the black earth verge, heads in the green while they stood in the mud of the Road. The caravan had decamped, all save for a few brothers—three, four, or five—prayerfully huddled at center-Road. Past the distortion of the veil, the brotherly shapes wavered as if seen through heat shimmer; only the faintest trace of their wet and unwashed humanity came to his nose, their voices remote echoes in his ears. He tossed his burden onto the Road. The grisly decapitation of the monster struck the ground not far from where they knelt in strange vigil, and the head rolled closer still. Five dim forms rose, making noises that were murmurs to him, too faint to make sense of. Walead?—yes; it was Walé who crouched down again to poke at the gore, the tusks, the tongue lolling over the sharp teeth of the gaping mouth.
Xho Xho ran up to the edge of the Road where Demane stood like a revenant on the threshold.
“Where the captain went?” the boy asked. “Why you don’t come out of the trees, Sorcerer?”
“I cain’t, Xho.”
“Hey, you watch out,” Kazza called. “Hear me, Xho Xho? Watch out now!”
The other brothers kept a warier distance. Something wasn’t right. The Sorcerer was barked over with half-dried mud, jellied gore, twigs, and bits of leaves. Blood slathered his left hand and arm to the elbow, the right one lacerated and ensleeved with blood right to the shoulder. He looked to have gathered up some man’s spilled wet insides and tried, by hand, to restore them to the voided cavity. Invisible yet bright, heatless but unbearably hot, he bore a corona any fool could feel. Xho Xho alone was unawed, hanging back from fear of the forest, not of the Sorcerer.
Demane knew them by turban, shaggy hair, narrow shoulders. Kazza, Wilfredo, Faried. He called. “I’ma do my best to meet up with you down south. Go on! Catch up with the caravan. I see you when the caravan cross that other stream southside of the Wildeeps, all right?”
Kazza crept a little closer. “You dead, Sorcerer? Come back some kind of haint?”
Demane chuckled. “No, baby.” A grim noise, for a chuckle. “I just made a bargain, became what y’all been calling me—a sorcerer. It ain’t easy for me to get on the Road or leave the Wildeeps anymore.” Demane put a hand back against the nearest trunk and leaned, taking seat at the roots. He rested his hands on updrawn knees. “I want to see Sea-john down in Great Olorum. Y’all go run after the caravan. I see you down at other end of the Wildeeps, Godwilling, as Faedou say. Take that jukiere head to show Master Suresh and them.”
Xho Xho stepped into the forest. The rest cried out in alarm. The smeared apparition of the boy wobbled as if seen through rheum or tears, and became clear once off the Road, by the tree where Demane sat. “Faedou all of a sudden just up and fell out. You better come see, Sorcerer. He dying, I think.” Xho Xho took hold of a filthy hand and tried to pull Demane to standing: budging him not. “And where’s the captain?”
“I told you, little man,” Demane said. “I cain’t get onto the Road.” On both cheeks he bore a delta of rinsed skin.
Willy called. “Ehtá a punto de morir, Sorcerer. I seen his leg, and it look about rotted off already. How he come this far on it, I don’t even know. Tell you this, though. If you don’t work some kind of sorcery on him quick, Faedou will be stone dead fore the night come.”
Demane looked out onto the Road. Someone lay there stretched out on blankets just where the brothers had knelt. It was like peering down into deep running water, trying to see across the veil between the Road and Wildeeps. From here, he couldn’t make out who lay there, or whether that brother stirred, or his chest still rose and fell.
Demane stood and wiped either eye with a wrist. “Let me see what I could do. Y’all carry him to me. The Wildeeps won’t hurt none of you. This whole place is my house now.” Afraid, the brothers dithered. Demane spoke again, in tones to get them jumping. “All right! Don’t just stand there stupid! Bring him here.” As they moved to obey Demane gave Xho Xho a little push back towards the others. “Help em carry, little man. You and Walead can lift one corner of the blankets together.”
Like a son too often told before, Be patient, your father’s coming back soon, Xho Xho clung to the Sorcerer’s hand. “Wait. Tell me something, though,” the boy said. “What happen to the captain?”
Demane might have answered, but a fit of palsy took his face. His mouth worked soundlessly. He shook his head.
• • • •
The shroud of leaves frays and a brightness ahead dapples the jungle. There are glimpses of the jagged stump rising into sunlight. He can hear but not yet see the jook-toothed tiger growling, the captain and his harsh, controlled pants. All while Demane runs, he shouts too, I’m coming. Hang on. There was another one. I killed it. He bursts out into hot glare. Captain and the tiger are a hundred long paces up, tangling where other trees overshadow the compost of leaf and woodrot remaining of the felled tree’s canopy. Captain has lost his spear and fights with a sword. It’s always been sheathed across his back, although he but rarely draws it. A sword’s very much the wrong weapon, requiring far too close quarters, for the power and claws of a jukiere. Captain’s spear must have broken. He wouldn’t just throw it aside, he wouldn’t.
First one paw and then the other bats at him. As sails of a ship belly in the wind, when tacking hard off one course to another, Captain bows deeply over the claws, and as fast again, bows at a slightly altered angle. His robe’s much slashed but person still unscathed. As if down some abyss in freefall, Captain drops. The tiger leaps over and misses pinning him flat. He’s up off the ground, afoot when she wheels on him with chops snapping. He skips back blindly from the fangs and bringing around his sword twohanded, all his might in the blow, arrests the jukiere’s whirling lunge. This lays another thin red stripe through the cat’s darkbrindled fur. She flinches, though not much. That cut and the others are weirdly shallow. The wizard won’t be killed without a better weapon than the one Captain holds . . . Demane should have been at his side all along. Isa. Hang on, Isa. Captain’s attention splits for an instant. He must see Demane coming through the light and hear his shouts. That much he’s almost sure of.
Demane turns an ankle in foul grease: Some meatstuff or slick runoff, once a pig or man. He springs up and hobbles on. If delayed at all, it’s half an instant, if hurt he’s hardly slower than before: still, these charges will figure among those he tenders against himself on nights hereafter, when once more sitting up in sleepless reverie. The man you could have saved if you’d gotten him sooner under your care lies struggling in his agonies. And now, only at the very end, he turns to your voice and chooses to trust. There you kneel and whisper, urging him toward the one choice life still offers. He takes it. There’s a look to that, as grace suffuses a wracked visage. Let go, Faedou. It’s all right now. Let go. Even the best of healers come to learn this look. It steals then over the captain’s face. He quits his brilliant efforts and stops moving within easy reach of teeth and claws. The sword slips from his hand. Demane shouts. The distance is chancy, his throwing arm badly wounded, but still he hurls the spear.
¹ Tiefer alt. A voice to sing the pale sour out of lemons, sing them luscious orange; as much the sensations of eros on the body as mere sound in the ears.
Kai Ashante Wilson’s stories, “Super Bass” and “The Devil in America,” can be read for free online at Tor.com; and his story, “Kaiju maximus®,” at Fantasy-magazine.com. His novella A Taste of Honey is available for purchase from all fine e-book purveyors. His novelette, «Légendaire.», can be read in theanthology Stories for Chip. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards, with his novella The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps winning the Crawford Award for best debut novel of 2015. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.