Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(108)

“Serapio,” she whispered. She knew without a doubt they were running from him.

She shoved her way into the crowd, fighting against the flow as best she could. But there were too many people. She didn’t make it far before she was pushed back, farther away from the Rock and back to Titidi.

No! She would fight. She reached for her Song, and it came, wild and fierce, to her lips. She lashed out, a sharp weapon to drive her way through the crowd.

The people around her halted as if suddenly frozen in place, but her Song didn’t reach far enough through the stampeding throng, and those who couldn’t hear her trampled the others. They went down without complaint, crushed underfoot.

She choked, horrified, and modulated her Song, softening the command, lowering the pitch to soothe, not wound. She thought of gentle waters and star-filled nights. She thought of laughter and good food on a sandy cay. She thought of childhood stories shared with a captive audience of one. And it worked. People slowed, calmed. She raised her voice loud as she could, and everywhere she reached, people quieted.

She pushed through pliant bodies, still Singing. Made it back to the bridge and well onto the bridge itself. She smiled around buoyant notes. It was going to work.

Suddenly, the air shifted. A dark gale, shards of ice like glass, hammered down across the bridge. It whipped her hair, stinging, across her face. Sliced her skin open, sharp as obsidian. Froze her from the inside like ice crystals on a lake, deadening nerves and thought.

Her Song faltered and died.

Everywhere around her, people were falling, stumbling, wracked by the same unnatural wind. She was on her knees, clutching the thick rope of the bridge, sure the gale would throw her off into the canyon below.

And then it stopped, but it was all she could do to hunch down against the railing, gasping, reeling from the pain, and trying to breathe. Panic rolled through the crowd like a rogue wave, and what calm she had been able to Sing drowned on a fresh wave of terror. The crowd surged around her, dragging her to her feet and back toward the landing. Someone kicked her, an accident, and then an elbow struck her cheek. Another blow, this time to her back, and she stumbled. A man hauled her up, and it was all she could do not to go down underneath indifferent feet.

Ground beneath her again, slippery and churned by a hundred boots and shoes. Hands pushed her, tore at her sleeves, shoved her directionless through the streets of Titidi. People shouted and pointed. She couldn’t understand their words, but she lifted her head enough to follow where they were looking.

In the sky above Sun Rock, the sun hung suspended. It was an enormous disc on the horizon, neither rising nor setting. The moon had stopped, too. It cast its shadow across the sun, eclipsing it entirely. A black sphere now rested where the sun had once been, only the barest slivers of light showing along its edges.

Everything else was darkness.





CHAPTER 41




CITY OF TOVA (COYOTE’S MAW)

YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

(THE DAY OF CONVERGENCE)

Today Saaya discovered a working in one of the forbidden volumes that is meant to bring back the dead. She brought it to me as eager as a child who had found a stray puppy and hoped to keep it. I read the text and was not persuaded. I encouraged her to focus on the more promising theory of divine transference and leave these ideas of resurrection behind. To harness the latent powers of a god into a single human vessel. Surely this was the highest of magics that would make even the Sun Priest in his high tower break with envy.

—From the Notebook of Lord Balam of the House of Seven, Merchant Lord of Cuecola, Patron of the Crescent Sea, White Jaguar by Birthright



Zataya used a long pole, the same kind the river monks used, to fish the body from the Tovasheh.

“Foolish woman,” she muttered as she waded out into the slow-moving tributary to haul Naranpa from the water. “What did you do to end up in the river?”

The witch motioned the two teenaged girls with her to grab the once–Sun Priest by the armpits and drag her the rest of the way to shore. They dumped the naked and waterlogged body on the barren muddy riverbank. They were tucked well under a heavy rock overhang away from the eyes of anyone who might be traveling the river. Not that anyone was. Solstice celebrations raged on as they neared the hour of the eclipse; all eyes were focused upward, not down into this fissure in the earth.

Naranpa looked surprisingly fresh. Her face was slack, but her skin had not taken on the waxy coating or gaseous bloat of bodies that lingered in the water. Zataya guessed by her appearance that she had not been in the river more than a few hours, and perhaps had not even been dead when she entered the water. She ran rough hands over Naranpa’s body, inspecting her chest and back and probing her head under her hair, looking for wounds. But there was none. The woman had not been dumped in the river but had gone in alive and intact.

“A small blessing,” the witch muttered, lowering Naranpa’s head gently to the rocky ground.

Zataya’s two apprentices had kindled a small dugout fire. They huddled around it, trying to warm themselves after their wade into the river, but Zataya grunted and pushed them out of her way. Down here in the deep canyons, they were well away from the winds and frosted air at the top of the cliffs; Zataya thought it almost warm.

She retrieved a bag of herbs from a string around her neck. She reached in, scooping out a handful, and dumped them into the fire. They crackled and hissed, sending up a fragrant white smoke. She fanned the smoke toward Naranpa and then motioned the girls over to take up her task.