Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(3)

“How will I know when I need it?” he asked, worried. He didn’t want to fail her.

“You will learn, Serapio,” she said, voice gentle but firm. “And once you have, you must go home to Tova. There you will open your eyes again and become a god. Do you understand?”

He didn’t understand, not really, but he said yes anyway.

“Will you come with me?” he asked.

Her breath hitched, and the sound scared him more than anything else she had done that day.

“Mama?”

“Hush, Serapio. You ask too many questions. Silence will be your greatest ally now.”

The needle pierced his eyelid, but he was only distantly aware of it. He could feel the stitches sealing his eyes shut, the pull and lift of the thread through his skin. The panic that had failed to rise earlier swelled up larger now, made him twitch in his chair, made the wounds on his back pull and sting, but the cords held him tight and the drugs kept his muscles lax.

A sudden pounding at the door made them both jump.

“Open the door!” a voice yelled, loud enough to shake the walls. “If you’ve touched that boy, I’ll have your head, I swear it!”

It was his father. The boy thought to cry out to him, to let him know that he was okay. That the crow god’s will must be followed, that he wanted this, that his mother would never hurt him.

She returned to her work, ignoring his father and his threats. “Almost done now.”

“Saaya, please!” pleaded his father, voice breaking.

“Is he crying?” the boy asked, concerned.

“Shhh.” The corner of his left eye tugged tight as she tied off the last knot.

Her lips pressed briefly to his forehead, and she ran a gentle hand through his hair.

“A child in a foreign place to a foreign man,” she murmured, and Serapio knew she was talking to herself. “I’ve done everything required. Even this.”

Even this was what he had suffered today, he knew it. And for the first time, a tendril of doubt crept through his belly.

“Who, Mama? Who asked you to do this?” There was still so much he didn’t understand, that she hadn’t told him.

She cleared her throat, and he felt the air shift as she stood. “I must go now, Serapio. You must carry on, but it is time for me to join the ancestors.”

“Don’t leave me!”

She bent her head and whispered in his ear. A secret name. His true name. He trembled.

And then she was moving away, her footfalls heading swiftly toward the open terrace. Running. Running to where? There was only the terrace that ended in the open sky.

And he knew she was running so she could fly.

“Mama!” he screamed. “No!”

He struggled to open his eyes, but the stitches held, and his lids did not budge. He thought to claw at his face, but the cords held him tight and the drink made time feel strange.

“Son!” his father screamed. Something huge hit the door, and the wood splintered. The door was coming down.

“Mama!” Serapio cried. “Come back!”

But his begging did no good. His mother was gone.





CHAPTER 2




CITY OF CUECOLA

YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

(20 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

A Teek out of water swims in wine.

—Teek saying



The early-dawn fruit sellers walked the streets of Cuecola, enticements to purchase the day’s brews ringing from their lips. Their voices flowed through the narrow streets and wide avenues alike, past the modest oval-shaped, thatch-roofed homes of the common citizens and up through the more lavish multistoried stone mansions of the merchant lords. They wove around the jaguar-headed stelae that guarded the great four-sided pyramids and across the well-worn royal ball court that sat empty in the predawn darkness. Across tombs and market squares and places of ceremony and out past the city walls, they filled the morning with their cries. Until even Xiala, blissfully unconscious until moments before, heard them.

“Somebody please shut them up,” she muttered, cheek flat against the cold dirt floor on which she had slept. “They’re giving me a headache.” She waited, and when no one acknowledged her, she asked again, a little louder.

For answer, someone kicked her in the ribs. Not hard, but enough to make her grunt and crack an eye open to see who had done it.

“You shut up,” the culprit said. It was a skinny woman twice her age with a drag to the left side of her face and an ominous scar across her neck. “You’re making more noise than them.”

“—mmm not,” Xiala mumbled, giving the stranger her best glare. Dirt stuck to her lip. She dragged a hand across her mouth to wipe it away. Only then did she get a good look around at the room she was in: dark wet walls and a wooden-slatted door where an open entrance should have been. Too many women reeking of body odor and fermented cactus beer sprawled on the floor, a lucky few huddled under threadbare cotton blankets in the cold. Someone was softly weeping in a dark corner.

“Fuck,” she said, sighing. “I’m in jail again.”

The skinny woman, the one who had kicked her, cackled. She was missing teeth. The two front and another lower one. Xiala wondered if they’d rotted out or she had sold them. She looked like someone who might have sold them.