The people of Chakal Square slept, and gods walked through their dreams.
Temoc knelt before the altar, and listened.
By Bloodletter’s Street, a boy armed with a nail-studded stick stood at his post and drank tequila from a brushed steel flask. Fire quickened in his throat, and down. “Don’t hog,” said the man beside him—massive, tattoos peeking from his ragged shirtsleeve. “Pass it down.” The boy drank again, and thought of his sister, who had warned him against joining the Chakal Square protest, who said the family needed him, only death could come of standing against the King in Red. He finished the drink, taking more fire into his stomach. He had died tonight, almost: a shattered spar right through him, blood seeping from the wound. But then the Couatl turned back, and the skies opened, and the earth as well, and he heard a voice like his father’s only bigger, older, deeper, words in a language he did not know but to which his body answered, calling him to rise, to stand, to serve. He was one wave in an ocean that had learned to speak. He passed the tequila, and the man beside him drank too, and when the man finished the light in his eyes was the same as the light in the boy’s, and they were brothers.
Bill and Kapania Kemal lay in their tent together, stewed in sex. The bandage around her arm smelled of aloe. “You felt it,” she said, awed. And he, who never was a religious man, answered, “Yes,” because when Temoc’s knife went in he’d somehow shared the Major’s body, one with him, staring up at the invisible sky. And when the heart rose he’d risen with it, and the clouds ripped away to reveal starlight and the risen gods. “He shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “Temoc.”
“Could you have turned the Major down, if you were in his place?”
“Maybe not. But we’re all in this together now. The gods are watching. Before, we could have run.”
“Would you run?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. But we can’t, now.”
She touched him, rolled on top of him, kissed him, and they spoke no more.
“Gods’ blessings on you,” said a woman who walked the lines of the dead with a statue of Ixchitli in hand. “Gods’ blessings on you,” to a man whose blank gaze reflected stars. “Gods’ blessings on you,” to a woman burned to death. “Gods’ blessings on you,” to an old man who bled out when his broken thigh nicked his femoral artery. “Gods’ blessings on you,” over and over, though Ixchitli Himself was dead, and the words she spoke only words, not prayers.
Above and beneath them all, the gods moved, and Temoc heard their footsteps. The Hunchback capered among the fallen, raked his fingers through dreams as a man on shore might rake his fingers through wet sand. Ili of the White Sails spread her wings and breathed over sleepers and quick alike, stirring them with raincloud fragrance. Ixaqualtil Seven Eagle panting dagger-toothed chased dreamers through his hells, long tongue lolling, and his breath stank with the devoured. The seven corn gods grew, praise be to them, blessings upon us all who die that we may be ground to powder and that powder used to make new worlds. Gods and goddesses of thunder and of the demon wind, of rivers and mountains long sunk beneath the waves, of war and healing, of death and rebirth, of games and the players of games. From Chakal Square’s faith they wove themselves, from the instant’s glory of the sacrifice.
You could not see them with the naked eye. If you walked through Chakal Square that night you might not even feel them, without having paid as its people paid, suffered as they suffered. To feel the gods sift the sand of mind for the pearl of you, you must stand with one foot already in their world.
Not the world of the dead. The world of story.
Temoc listened, and prayed the prayers he knew in silence.
He did not look up when Chel joined him beside the altar. What she had to say, she would say. What she could not say was not his responsibility to force from her. Nor his right.
“You came back,” she managed at last.
“I could not let you die.”
“But we will, now,” she said. “The Wardens won’t stop.”
“Nor can we, now the gods are here.”
“They’re terrifying.”
“They always are,” he said, breaking off his prayer. They heard him speak, and drew near to listen. “They are more than us, but they are us too. And we terrify.”
“What I did today,” she said. “Coming to get you. I had no right.”
He did not reply.
“I’m glad you came, though.”
He nodded, knew the nod was not enough.
She touched him on the arm. That was the first and only time she touched him, and he did not touch her back. He wished he could have told Mina that, somehow. He had not left her for another. He had left her to die. Which was, he supposed, no better.
An apostate at the last.
Chel let him go, and left him. The gods’ breath washed over him like water, and he feared that they were laughing.
* * *
A voice in the night cried Chel’s name; she thought at first it might have been a god, and realized too late that it was Tay. He forced through the faithful, smiling broken-mouthed. She braced herself, but not enough. He hit her like a train, caught her in his arms, and lifted. “Gods, Chel. When they hit us, I thought…”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
“They pressed our eastern flank the whole time.” He set her down. She reeled on her feet. “The guys would have folded if I left. And then we had the wounded, and then—”
“It’s okay,” she started to say, but he was kissing her. He tasted sweet, and in that dark hour it was almost enough.
He must have tasted something else in their kiss, because he broke it off and drew away. She followed his gaze over her shoulder. Temoc knelt there, shining. “He’s back.”
“Yes.”
“I heard things out in the camp. Blind men can see. The lame can walk. They say the gods are awake. They say Temoc killed someone.”
“He’s killed before.”
“You know what I mean. On the altar. For real. With a knife.”
“The Major was about to die. He wanted to go the old way.”
“Gods.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“They won’t let us go,” he said. “Not after this. Riots, I mean, whatever, just some poor folks in the Skittersill, right? Dockhands and schoolteachers and shit. But they can’t let us do things different from them. Not this different.”
“They might.” Even she did not believe that. She had said as much to Temoc. But he needed some hope.
He pulled her close. He smelled smoky and unwashed, and so did she. “Let’s go. Before it gets worse. Slip out into the night. Bring the dockside guys. There are enough red-arms left without us to hold the camp together.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I brought him back.”
“You said this was bigger than people. That we were fighting for ideas. Well, the ideas have changed. This isn’t why I came.”
“I know,” she said. “But I can’t leave.”
“Then I’ll stay, too.”
“No, Tay.”
“Shit.” He broke their embrace. “If you can die for someone, so can I.”
“We won’t,” but she could not finish that sentence. The firelight caught his skin all bronze and ochre and gold, and his eyes chips of jet, the broken and reset nose that made his face the face of an old soldier on a monument, all courage and loyalty and too few brains.
“You want to stand, we’ll stand together.”
“We might die.”
“We’re too pretty to die.”
“Speak for yourself.”
He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, pondered them, and put them back. “That’s settled, then. We stay.”
“Yes.” Gods, why did that sound like passing sentence? She grabbed his wrist, thick-roped with muscles. He was sweat-slick and sooty and very real. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find an empty tent.”
He followed her into the night of the gods.