“In the Time of Great Darkness, all of Zalanatl was engulfed,” the old augur, Yifca, told Quauh. The pair made their way up a mountainside, a great path of uneven stone stairs not unlike the one that Quauh had walked a month before with her lahtli Ayot. Except this one climbed the side of a mountain, ten thousand feet and more, and not the mere five-hundred-foot elevation of the Basin Overlook in Tonoloya.
Looking back, Quauh was amazed at their progress, even from her own youthful body, but she felt strangely energized here, as if something unseen was lifting her feet. To see this augur, who had to be in his sixth decade at least, so easily ascending only made her believe so even more.
She tried not to be distracted by the sounds of the birds and the cold wind blowing down from the mountain through the trees, and the occasional rustle of brush to the side, where a squirrel, a hare, a deer, or even something bigger might be passing by. There were bears here, she had been told, huge and brown and aggressive. But the augur was unbothered and took this trip every week, and so Quauh just tried to enjoy the change of scenery.
She also worked hard to listen to Yifca’s tale, his chant of instruction. She knew the story—or was supposed to, at least—from her childhood studies, but she had never been a good student, and it was nothing that had ever really interested her. As she tried to decipher the last line, she inadvertently spoke her question out loud. “Zalanatl?”
Yifca stopped and turned to her, and Quauh worked to suppress her panic. “It is not a word that you would often hear,” Yifca said, seemingly excusing her. “Zalanatl, the Land Between the Seas.”
“Mayorqua Tonoloya,” Quauh replied.
“A slice of it,” said Yifca. “We now name our empire such. But there is much land north of our northern border, and more still to the south. Great amounts to the south. And that is where we turn our eyes now. Lands you will come to know, seas you will sail. For that is where we have found the gold, and we need the gold.”
“I understand, Augur Yifca,” she said with a bow.
“No, I do not think that you do. I do not think that you can, and that is not your fault, and that is why you were brought here for a few days before continuing your journey to the east.” He turned and looked up at the great mountain looming before and above them.
“Behold Tzatzini,” he said. “The Herald, who holds in the caves near her peak the great magic crystals. For all the Time of Great Darkness, this land was held by the sidhe, who worship Cizinfozza. With the power of Tzatzini, one of their witches destroyed the embodiment of that god, and thus signaled we of Tonoloya to bring light, to this place and beyond, all the way to the Sunrise Sea.”
Quauh nodded. She had heard all of this, of course, for the events were barely a decade old and had shaken her world in the west profoundly. She turned as Yifca turned, to look back down the mountainside, to the great bowl-shaped chasm directly below and the mountain wall to the right—a wall that had been breached top-to-base to the desert below, two thousand feet, when the Xoconai had retaken Tzatzini.
That bowl now housed Otontotomi, the great City of Gold, a place of ancient temples of their god Scathmizzane, a place of power, a place from which the Xoconai had reached out across the continent to the Sunrise Sea. Truly it was the most magnificent city Quauh had ever seen, full of color and power and art beyond comprehension. It wasn’t newly constructed—quite the opposite. Otontotomi had been buried for centuries under a vast mountain lake. A lake drained by the Xoconai by breaching the mountain wall, letting the deep, deep waters flow into a much wider, shallower lake on the desert floor, one full of sails every sunny day, one full of fish to feed the people of Otontotomi.
Yifca closed his eyes and began to recite once more from the ancient text, beginning, as always, “They say and it’s been told, and we Xoconai did wait, and were promised that Cizinfozza would meet his end, and in that moment would Kithkukulikhan rise and eat Tonalli and vomit Tonalli, to tell we Xoconai of the light renewed.”
“The eclipse,” Quauh whispered. She remembered that glorious day, one of her earliest memories, when Kithkukulikhan, the dragon mount of Scathmizzane, ate Tonalli, the sun, and then gave it back.
“I am confused, augur,” she dared to say, and Yifca’s eyes popped open. “Was that day not the signal that the way was cleared?”
“It was, and so we have created Mayorqua Tonoloya.”
“But was not the prophecy the creation of Necu Tonoloya?” She cleared her throat and tried to remember the prayer. “Necu Tonoloya, it will be called, and all of Zal…” She faltered.
“Zalanatl, child,” the augur prompted.
“All of Zalanatl will be Scathmizzane’s,” Quauh went on, “ruled by the Xoconai between the seas. In the east, we will watch Tonalli ignite her fires as she rises from the great sea. In the west, we will watch Tonalli quiet her flames as she goes to sleep beneath the waters.”
“Yes. Well done, child, to recall the prayers of the Last Augur of Darkness. Those words have great meaning to us, and to you, now that you have been summoned to aid in the fulfillment.”
“But Necu Tonoloya, not Mayorqua…”
“When we expand north and south to hold all the lands will the prophecy truly be fulfilled, child,” Yifca explained. “That will be beyond our lifetimes, I am afraid, but know that you will play your part in this great cathedral we are building to Scathmizzane. We are blessed. We have conquered the lands of Honce and own the seas about her, and with that, we have found new and greater sources of Scathmizzane’s—of Glorious Gold’s—precious metal, which brings to us power that our sidhe enemies cannot resist. We do not yet have the numbers of macana footsoldiers and mundunugu cavalry to sweep the dark forests and cold mountains of the northlands, and the desert land to the south is filled with fierce warriors and ruled by a great queen who rides a true dragon. Impatience would cost us all. We watch. We grow, in number and in power. And we wait. Everything in its time, child.”
“I hope that I see it,” Quauh remarked. “Some of it, at least.”
“See it? Young Quauh, you will be a part of it. You will chase the sidhe away and perhaps, if you are lucky enough, you will see the fall of Queen Brynn and her desert lands.”
Quauh nodded and recalled her lahtli Ayot’s words to her about their less-than-human enemies. Do not ever lose that quality of mercy, but neither misplace it. No mercy to the sidhe monsters.
The two continued on their way up the long mountain trail. Even with the magical energy lightening their steps, it took them two full days to finally near the summit and come to a small plateau lined with stone houses and holding a pine-encircled lea on its far end. Yifca led Quauh straight across to those pine trees. As they neared, the young woman could hear the singing of many women. Then, as they moved through the tree line, she saw them dancing, a dozen sidhe, dressed only in light, flowing shifts, moving circles within their larger circle as they lightly stepped about the grass. A thirteenth sidhe woman stood in the middle of that ring, beside a single gigantic crystal protruding from the ground, angled back toward Otontotomi.
“I do not understand,” said Quauh.
“This is the God Crystal,” Yifca explained. “Once for Cizinfozza, when the sidhe ruled this land, but now for Scathmizzane. Below us are caverns of magical crystals, and through this God Crystal, their energy is being sent down the mountainside to the golden mirrors in our city. Their magic flows across the lands. This is how we are able to step through the miles, mirror to mirror. You are but three days out of Tonoloya, already hundreds of miles from our home. In five days more, you will view the Sunrise Sea.”
“Because of the magic of the crystals.”
“It is essential, yes.”
“But why are sidhe dancing about it?”
“Because they know how to best bring forth the power. Scathmizzane himself used this power to destroy sidhe cities, to drop a cliff and the monastery upon it into the sea. But he is not available to us now, his corporeal form destroyed—and who knows how long it will take for him to reconstitute it properly and make a glorious return? Even now our scholars are poring over the prophecies to determine—”
“And so we must use the sidhe?” Quauh asked, and she bit her lip when Yifca scowled at her, a clear reminder that she must never interrupt an augur.
“Yes,” he answered curtly.
Quauh knew that she should let it drop, but still she asked, “Why do the sidhe so serve us?”
“Because if they do not, we will slaughter their children before them. Slowly, until they change their minds. It has already been done once, and so will be again.”
Quauh swallowed hard. The words hit her as solidly as a clenched fist. In her day in Otontotomi, she had been shocked to learn that there were as many sidhe in the city as Xoconai, performing all the menial tasks, never lifting their eyes to look at her or anyone else.
She had convinced herself that this was due to Xoconai mercy—they weren’t killing the wretched creatures, at least.
“How long do they dance?” she asked, needing to change the subject.
“When one tires, another will take her place. We have scoured the lands for many miles around, even from the cities far in the east, to find suitable dancers who are attuned to the magical vibrations of the crystals. The dance never slows.”
“Could not Xoconai dancers…”
“This is Cizinfozza magic!” Yifca snapped at her. “Ours is gold. We steal the magic of the dactyl Cizinfozza, but would you have us pray to him to beg for it?”
“Of course not, Augur Yifca. My apologies.”
He spent a long while just staring at her, his face a mask of disgust. “You are young, and so you are ignorant. You will learn much in your travels, so I will forgive you this time.”
Quauh nodded, then bowed appreciatively. But deep inside, she feared that she had already learned a lot, and she knew to her very soul that she did not like that which she had learned.
Quauh went back down to Otontotomi the following day with a different escort, a mundunugu warrior riding his brilliantly green, golden-collared cuetzpali, and Quauh uncomfortably astride a second lizard mount. As she was used to the rolling waves under the deck of the small boats she had so often sailed, Quauh thought it would be easy enough to adapt to the gait of the mount, but with the awkward seating position, half-reclined to keep her feet from dragging beside the short-legged creature, and with the lizard’s wildly side-to-side shimmying, she wasn’t sure whether she would be thrown off or throwing up first.
Still, they made fine time, the lizards moving swiftly down the mountainside, and that same afternoon, Quauh descended the two thousand stairs into the bowl that held the City of Gold.
After the revelations atop Tzatzini, she viewed the place differently, noting the brokenness of the sidhe, their despondence and their slumped shoulders, many limping from too many hours of hard labor. For all the glorious shining and brilliant light, Otontotomi was a depressing place, she thought.
She was happy to be out of there that very night, sailing across the wide lake formed by the breach in the mountain wall, arriving at the first pyramid set with the golden transport mirrors.
“When first we marched east, we could send you in the dark of night,” one of the augurs manning the magical portal told her. “But now, magic is diminished, Scathmizzane has gone home to the southern lights, and we need the sun to properly enact the journey.”
Early the next morning, the rising sun gleaming blindingly against the polished gold of the structure, Quauh entered the empowered pyramid. She heard the augurs chanting for just a moment before their words morphed into the sound of an ocean gale, a rushing and whooshing noise, and though she couldn’t feel any wind and couldn’t see the land speeding past her, Quauh sensed that she was moving faster than the fastest ship, faster than the fastest dolphin, faster than the fastest bird. So much faster, indeed, that when she stepped through a similar structure only a few moments later, she knew, she just knew, that she was hundreds of miles to the east. That led to a long march, some fifty miles, to another portal, and so it was repeated four times over the course of a week, until Quauh stood within the great Honce city of Ursal, the seat of power in the land for several centuries—only now, these last eight years, that power had been in the hands of Xoconai.
She found Ursal crowded and stenchful. A place of too much noise and too little light, with tall, hard buildings crowded together and hordes of people, Xoconai and sidhe alike, crowded together, and the stink of urine omnipresent no matter which way the wind was blowing.
Quauh couldn’t wait to be out of there, and fortunately, she didn’t have to delay for long. Her journey the rest of the way would be by wagon, and a caravan departing Ursal set out later that same day she had arrived. They made fine time along the well-guarded roads, and within a week, Quauh stood on the docks of the southwestern Mayorqua Tonoloya port city of Entel, looking out at the dark waters of the Mirianic Ocean—the Sunrise Sea of Tauilueyatl, in her native tongue.
It proved to be a disorienting moment for the young woman. When her escort mentioned Freeport isle to the south, she looked left.
“South,” the woman repeated.
Quauh looked back at her with puzzlement.
“South,” the woman said again, pointing to the right.
“But that is…” Quauh stopped and realized her error. When she stood on a beach in Tonoloya, she was facing west. Here, the ocean was east of her.
Here, on this coast, south was opposite.
She spent the next few months proving her skills to the armada commanders by day, and training with instructors in the ways of this new land—socially, politically, and militarily. She learned of Freeport, and what she could and what she must not do there. She learned of the kingdom of Behren and the Chezru Chieftain, the famed Brynn Dharielle. She pored over charts and maps showing the seasonal winds, the currents, and the typical track of great swirling storms that were very rare on the western coast, but all too common here.
After all the work, however, Quauh often still had to laugh at herself when she stood at the coast and had to pause and think about which way was north, which south. That habit, that reflex, of looking left for south, right for north, proved a hard one to break.
By the end of that summer, Kueyi Xiuitl of Mayorqua Tonoloya, which the sidhe of Honce considered God’s Year 870, Quauh was commissioned as first mate on the carrack Uey’Lapialli, the flagship of the Tonoloya Armada’s mercantile fleet, becoming the youngest officer in the Tonoloya Armada in modern times.
Lahtli Ayot had told her that she was special, that she had a gift that was very rare.
In that moment, the ceremony where she was awarded a double-braided golden tassel, for perhaps the first time in her life Quauh wondered if those glowing accolades so often put upon her by her family were true.