Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(68)
Wind caught at her clothes and hair, a gentle but insistent reminder that to fall now would mean broken bones at the least, death if she was unlucky. But she wasn’t unlucky, and soon enough her feet touched solid ground.
Naranpa laughed breathlessly. Part of her, that part that was all too aware of her failures, couldn’t believe she had done it. She dusted off her lightly scraped hands and shook her head. A swell of pride bubbled in her chest. It was a simple thing, but it felt good. She had had a problem and she solved it. It wasn’t so hard. A manageable danger rather than the precipice of future decisions that lay ahead. A little risk on a rock wall was much more favorable than what she had to face next.
The bridges leading back and forth from Otsa were not guarded, so it was easy work to cross the grounds of the celestial tower and make her way across the bridge to Tsay. The streets were empty, the curfew still in effect as far as she knew, so her greatest worry was being spotted by a roving guard. She pulled her hood up and kept to the corners, picking alleys over wide thoroughfares as she worked her way toward Titidi.
It was a long hour before she crossed the bridge into Water Strider territory, and another two hours across the district, but she finally found herself standing cliffside in an open-air park looking across the canyon at the Maw. She wasn’t sure how long she stared across at the place of her birth, her childhood, as a swirl of emotions warred within her. Coming here had been a desperate decision, one she felt compelled to make. But now, facing the place, knowing what came next, she hesitated. Was this folly? Surely. Would she even be welcomed? Recognized? All her doubts loomed large, but so did her desperation.
“There is only one way to know for sure,” she murmured, and made herself move.
At the edge of the park the only transportation to and from the Maw from Tova proper waited. She had used it once, at thirteen, and had never looked back. Now, at thirty-three, she would use it again, unsure of what she would find on the other side.
Rather than an easily accessible bridge, the way across to the Maw was a gondola. Although the term gondola was generous. The transport was more of a platform, maybe thirty paces wide and twenty paces deep, made of wood and connected to a thick cable of ropes that arched overhead to attach to a similar pier on the other side of the crevasse. The crevasse itself was narrow, no more than fifty paces where the airlift crossed, but the drop was three, perhaps four, times that. All that separated her and the other passengers from certain death was a flimsy wooden waist-high rail.
She paid her toll in cacao from a small leather pouch tied to her belt and crowded onto the gondola with the other passengers. Most were Dry Earthers, people who lived in the Maw or the Eastern districts farther out. They had all no doubt spent the day as servants in the Sky Made houses and were now trudging their way home, something she had witnessed her mother do countless times. There were a handful of colorfully dressed scions of the Sky Made clans in their recognizable clan colors, obviously unfazed by the curfew. They were the loudest, shouting and laughing and passing clay bottles of imported xtabentún between them. They were undoubtedly headed to the Maw for the debauchery it offered, gambling houses and pleasure dens and enticements that the more respectable parts of the city banned.
Naranpa frowned at the scions. Fools lining other fools’ purses. All for a taste of oblivion, be it found in drink or risk or between someone’s willing thighs. Such things had never appealed to her, perhaps because she had grown up seeing the ruin it made of people’s lives. Now, as the last person who could fit squeezed onto the gondola and she stood cheek to jowl with so many strangers, she felt it even more deeply. A pang of homesickness, not for the Maw but for her spacious and well-scrubbed rooms in the celestial tower, washed over her.
The gondola lurched forward, some inebriated scion screamed in delight, and Naranpa focused on maintaining her balance as she crossed into Coyote’s Maw.
CHAPTER 23
CITY OF TOVA
YEAR 325 OF THE SUN
(13 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)
Beware, beware the bitter Crow
The Knives dealt them a bloody blow
Crows hope to bring the Sun down low
A plot that surely ends in woe.
—Children’s rhyme heard in Tova
It was chaos on Sun Rock. He had only meant to grip the Sun Priest’s arm in respectful greeting, as unlikely as that had seemed at the time. But then someone had struck him from behind, and his foot had slipped, and that damned Knife was there, an open blade in their hand.
Okoa had flung an arm out, enough to throw the assassin’s aim off and stop the knife from burrowing into his heart where the Knife was no doubt aiming, but the blade had still sliced across his jaw, opening him up. The pain had burned, shocking and immediate, and Okoa had screamed.
His scream had brought the Shield and the Knife and their tsiyos, and before he could quite grasp what was happening, it had descended into violent chaos.
Chaiya was there, throwing Okoa out of the line of attack.
“To your matron!” he shouted. “Get her safe.”
Okoa’s instinct was to argue, to push his way back into the fight, but his training took over, and he ran back to his sister, calling two Shields to his side as he did.
Esa stood stunned mere paces from the sky bridge. She had been about to cross when the fight broke out.
“What is happening?” she shouted, alarmed.