Chartomancy

Chapter Fifty-one

2nd day, Month of the Hawk, Year of the Rat

Last Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

737th year since the Cataclysm

Nemehyan, Caxyan

Though the Witch-King’s continued absence worried Jorim a little, he really didn’t mind the solitude. His ordeal had exhausted him to the point where something as simple as wandering into the rain forest to harvest fruit left him staggering back to the chambers. For every two hours awake and active, he required six hours of sleep, and that sleep was far from restful.

Accepting the fact that he was a god took a lot of adjustment-even though Nauana’s unwavering conviction had certainly pointed him in the right direction. It struck Jorim as rather ironic that he’d not been at all devout earlier in life. While he had worshipped Wentiko, it was more because the Dragon was the state deity of Nalenyr than due to any true belief.

In fact, his grandfather had been part of the movement away from religion. Qiro had stressed veneration of ancestors-clearly because he wanted that tradition continued after he passed away. Actually, he saw himself as a god, so none of us had to leave our home to worship. Perhaps that had been the root of his problem with Qiro: here he was a god incarnate, dealing with a human who believed himself a god.

But, as fascinating an idea as that was, Jorim knew that wasn’t the whole of the truth. Qiro brooked no insubordination because he had a need to be dominant. Jorim had no idea what he might have been afraid of, but that need to make all acknowledge him as supreme was one of the consistent notes in the man’s life. When his son and grandsons rebelled, he sent them all off on expeditions meant to kill them.

But Keles is not dead. Jorim concentrated and tried to reach his brother. He would have known if Keles had died, and he did get a dim sense of him, but there was no contact. Keles was concentrating on something else, and all Jorim got were fleeting glimpses of nightmare images. He tried to send a calming message to his brother, but had no idea if it got through before the contact faded.

Dreams interrupted Jorim’s sleep, and he awoke multiple times, his head bursting with images. Some of them seemed hauntingly familiar, and others had obviously been drawn from stories he’d heard about the Heavens and Hells. He recognized gods and goddesses, but they would shift in his vision. Sisvoc, the beautiful goddess of love, would flow from being a woman wearing a robe with eagle embroidery to an Amentzutl woman in a loincloth and gold pectoral, each of them worked with eagle symbology. And then she would change again and again into other shapes he barely recognized, but could guess at belonging to the Viruk, Ansatl, and Soth.

Most disturbing of all were dreams that paralleled stories about the gods. He’d always listened to them as mythology, but now he was living them, remembering them. He would live through bits and pieces of stories that had been lost or-more likely-edited out to tailor the story to whatever moral the teacher wished to emphasize.

In some cases, the omissions reversed the lessons that might have been learned. The omissions also limited the gods, because the gods drew life from the nature of their people’s beliefs. If the gods were reduced to one aspect and revered for that aspect only, they would slowly grow into that shape. Tetcomchoa and Wentiko, because they had worshippers from two cultures that revered them for a multitude of aspects and virtues, became more than simple abstracts.

And what must it be like to be Grija, worshipped and hated because he would sort good from bad, consigning the evil to his Hells and sending the good on to the Heavens? Jorim shivered. The gods may well have created the mortal races, but they found themselves in the same trap as parents who produce children, then become dependent upon those children for sustenance in their later years. They become powerless to govern their own beings, and are at the mercy of whatever charity their children give them. If a family were to tell its patriarch that he would only be fed if he wore a mask and sang songs before supper, the old man would become a masked singer.

Are the gods in their dotage?

That idea scared him. It seemed unfair that here he had discovered he was a god, then had to contend with the fact that he was already failing. Moreover, he had the inherent sense to know that his mortal body limited his ability to wield divine powers. While he might well have been able to destroy the Mozoyan force, his body had paid a price. He could die using the powers that were his, and Jorim had neither the knowledge to be able to catalogue those powers, nor the experience to figure out how much he could use them without perishing.

Jorim spent the next couple of days recovering his strength and enduring the dreams. He gradually grew stronger, and decided that waiting for the Witch-King to come back was an exercise in futility. He decided to return to Nemehyan to complete any training he still needed to do, then head back to Nalenyr to help oppose the rising of the tenth god.

Jorim packed up what little gear he’d brought with him, wrapped some fruit in leaves, and filled a waterskin. At the entrance to Maicana-netlyan he shifted the balance of rock from solid to fluid and let it seal the entrance. He had no doubt the Witch-King would be able to reverse the magic to get back in, and secretly suspected the man had more than one way into his sanctuary anyway.

He set out for the camp where he’d left his maicana guides. He reached it without incident but found it deserted. There were ample signs that the men had been there, but the fire’s ashes were cold and had been flattened by rain. The rain also erased any footprints that might have given him clues as to what had happened there. It could have been nothing but…

He reached inside and viewed the site through the mai. The rain and time had almost restored the balance, and had he been six hours later, he never could have detected anything wrong. As it was he just got the barest ripple of trouble-Zoloa, the destructive aspect of the Jaguar god, was slipping away quietly.

There was a fight here. The Mozoyan must have…

Before he could complete that thought, something heavy and hard slammed against the back of his skull. Jorim pitched face-first into ashes. His mouth filled with them and his world collapsed to black.

As consciousness returned, pain wracked Jorim, ankles, shoulders, wrists, and head. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious, but his mouth and throat tasted of the bitter narcotic draft he’d been forced to drink. Fingers slid along his temple ripping away his blindfold, and a wave of nausea hit him as he opened his eyes.

Above him a cloud of skulls reached to the heavens, and the sky had taken on a burned brown color that he’d never seen before. His hands reached to the heavens, but he couldn’t move his arms, and his fingers felt bloated and stiff.

Then, from the right, a Mozoyan smacked him across the stomach with a stick. Jorim jerked and began to sway. The Mozoyan warrior somehow defied gravity because he stood with his feet on the skull cloud. Nothing made sense.

An angry cry from the distance focused his attention. He looked in that direction and saw crowds of people holding a mountain up with their feet. And then, out in the bay, the Stormwolf and other ships lay with their hulls in a sea-green slice of sky.

Reality slammed into Jorim more heavily than the stick. The Mozoyan caught me, brought me back to Nemehyan, and are attacking the city.

The cloud of skulls didn’t exist. After the last Mozoyan assault on the Amentzutl capital, the people had severed the heads of all the dead Mozoyan. They piled them into a tall pyramid. Jorim hung from a gibbet planted at its apex. His ankles had been bound together and to the crosstree. A sapling eight feet long had been bound to his wrists and he hung there upside down, slowly swaying with the breeze and beatings.

Around him, on the plains before the city, the Mozoyan horde surged forward. In the previous battle, the Mozoyan had been primitive creatures incapable of much thought or planning. This time they had arrayed themselves in formations and marched forward in good order. They maintained discipline until they reached the Amentzutl lines, then concentrated their attacks at one particular point.

The Mozoyan attacked with the same ferocity as their predecessors, but being heavier and stronger, they couldn’t be fended off easily with the thrust of a spear. While arrows and spears had killed many before, he now watched Mozoyan bristling with arrows leap across the defensive trench at the mountain’s base. Those who fell short impaled themselves on stakes, but more than one wrenched the stakes loose and clawed his way up the breastwork.

The Amentzutl and Naleni troops responded. Flags waved, trumpets blared, and troops shifted from one point to another. Black clouds of Naleni arrows rained down, momentarily breaking a Mozoyan charge. Brave archers mounted the breastwork, picking specific targets, and drove arrows through shallow Mozoyan skulls. Amentzutl warriors wielded their obsidian-edged war clubs in vast arcs, lopping off limbs and flaying the Mozoyan. The dead reeled back, drawn away by their comrades, and more surged forward.

And then, when the battle was fully engaged at one point in the line, Mozoyan formations would split and drive at another point. More flags would wave, calling reserves forward. The Amentzutl opposed the crush of Mozoyan, but quickly enough the last of the reserves had been called up.

And the edge of the Mozoyan formation has not been dulled.

High atop a pyramid, two Naleni trumpeters blew a retreat. Warriors began to pull back, starting with the edges of their semicircular formation. The warriors in the middle then withdrew through them and the first Mozoyan caught volley after volley of arrows. Yet still they pressed on, and the archers pulled back to the causeway that snaked up the mountain’s face to Nemehyan.

The causeway would have been the perfect place to defend against Mozoyan, but their ability to leap forced the Amentzutl and Naleni to pull back. The Mozoyan surged up the causeway, but the warriors stopped them, and only, very slowly, gave up more ground.

Then, from the city itself, a volley of fire arrows rained down. Some struck Mozoyan, but more hit their intended target. They struck the trench the Mozoyan had breached and ignited whatever fluid had been poured into it. The flames licked up, consuming Mozoyan. The rear ranks halted, though those closest were pushed in by their fellows. Those on the other side still thrust forward toward the causeway, but without the crush of numbers, the causeway assault slowed.

Then a drumming began at the skull pyramid’s base. A slender Mozoyan, closer to a man than anything he’d seen so far, with grey-scaled skin that flashed with rainbow hues as the sun caught it, appeared at his left side. He held out his right hand, then hooked his fingers, letting Jorim see his talons. He slapped his hand down over Jorim’s stomach, right below his navel, then dragged his claws down to Jorim’s breastbone. The quartet of furrows bled freely and little rivulets of blood flowed down to drip onto the skulls.

The cuts burned, but Jorim ignored the pain. The bloody-handed Mozoyan priest-Jorim sensed the creature could be nothing else-reached down and grabbed a skull onto which his blood had dripped. Obscene and blasphemous-sounding words slithered from his mouth and the skull began to glow. The priest tossed it down to a waiting warrior at the pyramid’s base, then that Mozoyan leaped with all speed through formations to the front lines.

Fear pulsed through Jorim because, as weak as he was, he sensed the play of the mai in what the priest was doing. It wasn’t magic the way he’d learned it. There was no gentle balancing of elements. This magic twisted things, and that should have required far more power than the priest could muster.

But he is drawing the power from my blood, a god’s blood.

Jorim shifted his senses to the realm of the mai and almost vomited. Each of the skulls-for a dozen had already headed toward the lines-burned with destruction. Zoloa stalked the battlefield and raked his claws through the Amentzutl ranks.

The first skull made it to the causeway. A Mozoyan clutched it tightly to his chest, then leaped forward. He soared over the front lines. Arrows flew, piercing him again and again, splashing more blood over the skull. The dark power it contained flared. And when the Mozoyan corpse landed, the skull exploded.

Amentzutl warriors pitched off the causeway and fell into the writhing grey mass that was the Mozoyan army. The lucky had been slain by the blast. The others were rent to pieces by claws and teeth. A defiant roar from the Mozoyan troops muffled any screams and Jorim chose to believe the men went bravely and silently to their deaths.

Destruction gained momentum. More skulls arced upward, some just thrown, others held tightly by suicidal Mozoyan warriors. As each of them exploded, bodies flew and blood splashed. Men retreated quickly. One Mozoyan leaped for the causeway, but an Amentzutl tackled him in midair. Together they fell into the Mozoyan army and the explosion opened a hole in their ranks.

But it quickly closed, and the Mozoyan surge pushed farther up the causeway.

People at the top began to throw stones and burning pots of oil. The projectiles flew into the Mozoyan ranks, but for every warrior killed, nine more took his place. The Amentzutl warriors retreated more quickly, but as they reached the causeway’s first switchback, they faced being flanked again. Skulls arced and burst, men screamed and fell, and the retreat quickened.

Jorim’s blood flowed and skulls enriched with it streamed away from the pyramid. He hoped that the whole pyramid might collapse, but it wouldn’t make any difference. The Mozoyan had momentum. Destruction had momentum. Nothing could stop them.

But perhaps the key is not to stop them.

Gritting his teeth, Jorim tried to pull his head up. He tensed his stomach muscles and blood flowed anew. The Mozoyan soldier slapped his stomach again with the stick and the priest raked his talons over Jorim’s chest. Fire blossomed anew in his body, his shoulders ached as the sapling dragged at his arms.

Jorim reached inside and touched the destruction within him. The Mozoyan intended that he die and they were using his death to hasten the deaths of all those who believed in him. Jorim had unconsciously been opposing them, but now he stopped. He touched the mai and tipped the balance in favor of the twist. More magic poured into the destruction, entering the world through his blood.

He pushed the mai out, feeding it into Zoloa’s aspect. The shadowy Jaguar god became more voracious. Its snarls encouraged the Mozoyan who had their spirit steeled by the other god’s silent calls. Jorim watched the shadow cat’s muscles bulge and its fangs grow longer.

Not enough.

He pushed harder, drawing all the mai he could into himself, and pulsed it out faster. Zoloa gorged on it and swelled. Swelled like a leech tapping an artery.

Zoloa tried to pull away, but Jorim clamped a hand-a dragon’s taloned claw-over the god’s muzzle. He made it drink, pumping more power into it, taking his own life, twisting and rebalancing it, forcing the Jaguar god to accept it.

Does a god have a limit as to how much magic it can control?

Its brave snarl having been reduced to a puling mew, the obese god of destruction burst. Havoc flooded out in a black cloud of mai that washed over the battlefield. Its power gouged the ground, then crested in a dark wave that lifted successive Mozoyan ranks. They curved up the inside of the wave, then dissolved in the foam that curled downward. Where it touched a skull, where it merged with his blood, the skull exploded, vaporizing Mozoyan.

The Mozoyan priest either sensed the magic or knew Jorim had something to do with his army’s destruction. He slashed down with his claws, opening Jorim’s throat. Blood gushed, splashing over the priest’s hand and leg. The blood burned and in a heartbeat turned the priest into a torch.

And then the wave hit the pyramid of skulls.

It snuffed out the priest.

It carried past and spread, killing everything in its wake from the plains below Nemehyan, outward for the next fifty miles. It spread in a cone leaving nothing alive, not an insect or plant, bird or fish, animal, Mozoyan, or man.

It did not even spare a god.