Outside the gates of Rok Moris, a white sun blazed. Rattlesnake basked. Sandwolf slunk to fit inside the meager shadow of a sarro cactus.
Inside the gates, blackness. Frost glistened on brick, boardwalk, dirt path, temple column. Quiet canals formed ice at the banks. Olive branches silvered and verdy bushes withered, and each blood-pink bougainvillea shed its papery petals to show the thorns.
In the hottest, driest month of the year, to the hottest driest city in the Empire of the Open Palm, a long and endless winter night had come.
Fa Izif ban Azur and his Army of Childless Men marched upon Rok Moris.
“Kantu!”
Kantu groaned and rolled. A moment for the past to catch her. Ah. There it was. Like Lady White Skull, who calls you to the canals with her song and begs a ride upon your back. And halfway across the water, her bony claws dig in, and she drowns you.
“Kantu!” The voice was nearer now, almost familiar.
Her nose was clogged. Something congealed and unpleasant. She started to touch the mess of her face, but it felt strangely spongy, with a deep throb that reached the back of her brain.
“Is it winter?” she muttered.
It was dark and cold, a darkness and a coldness that ate at you. Not a desert darkness. Not the clean, crisp, starry dark of Bellisaar’s nightfall. Wizardry.
“The Fa,” Kantu remembered aloud. Gooseflesh sprang to her arms. She made herself say it again. “The Fa came. And we fought.”
The Bird People had fought—but not against the Fa. Their battle was, and had been for years, against their occupiers, the Empire of the Open Palm.
The Fa’s arrival in Rok Morris had been an inadvertent blessing; his dark spell upon the city, their call to arms. No more desperate acts of midnight sabotage. No more skirmishes or staged protests. The time had come for the Bird People to rise, rise up from the middens, up from the Pimples, up from the Catacombs beneath Paupers’ Grave. They rose up, armed with cudgels, torches, oil bombs. Three to a carpet they flew, bombarding the Grand Palace of Viceroy Eriphet with fire and rage, taking out the houses and offices and barracks of the Audiencia lordlings. They flew, and they fought the rulers of the city, their invaders and oppressors. At last, at long last. After so many weary guerilla years!
And the Viceroy’s guards engaged them in the streets, bringing down the carpets with their nets, and the Gate Police came with their spears…
“Kantu!”
Kantu tried to answer, got as far as a croak. Her lips felt fat, crusted together, a pulsing purple ache.
A quick breeze rushed overhead, along with her name in an urgent whisper. Kantu groaned louder, trying to be helpful.
Rokka Luck! A matter of seconds, and the sound of a velveted landing. Footfalls. Then a soft blue light, and Mikiel was there, with a ghost of a grin on her long, bony face, helping Kantu to sit upright.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” hissed Mikiel. “Manuway said you jumped carpet.”
“Guy with a net,” Kantu murmured. “Taken us all down. You’d’ve done the same.”
“I would have dropped a brick on his head,” Mikiel answered, “not myself.”
“Heat of the moment.” Kantu paused. “What’s that light?”
Mikiel touched the glowing blue button on her shoulder. It flickered off. At another tap, it blazed up again.
“Kipped it off a Childless Man. Once the Fa marched in, his soldiers were everywhere. I just sort of swooped down and plucked it off one of them. Figured the Fa had plenty more in his chest of wonders. Why not ward the dark with borrowed wizardry?”
Because, Kantu thought, the wizard is a god, and all gods are vicious.
She rubbed her bruised eyelids and tongued wincingly at the crusted coppery bits in her mouth. The weirdness of the witch light transformed Mikiel from best friend back to the alien thing she once had been. Her red hair seemed black as Kantu’s own, but her skin, paler than quartz, turned almost transparent, and Kantu thought she could see to the bone.
Mikiel did not hail from Rok Moris—nor any city, village, town, or tent of the Bellisaar Desert. She had been born in the north, farther north than the fountains and flowers and silver opulence of Koss Var the King’s Capital. North, even, of Leevland where the fjords ran deep as the mountains rose high. She came, she said, from the top of the world, from a land called Skakmaht, where demons made their homes in flying castles made of ice.
Mikiel’s wanderings had taken her to every land imaginable. But it was in Rok Moris she decided to stay, eight years ago, when she found the Bird People and allied herself with their suffering. Kantu knew many of Mikiel’s secrets, but not this first and deepest: why Mikiel had remained. Only the Rokka Mama knew that.
The Rokka Mama had adopted Mikiel into their raggle-taggle tribe, bunking her with Kantu in a subcell of the ’Combs.
“Why?” Kantu had thundered. All the sullen rancor and blistering jealousies that characterized the age of seventeen roared in her words. “She’s a stranger. She’s too tall. She talks funny.”
“Because, Kantu, you are of an age and very alike. Yes—very! Both of you are headstrong and preposterous. Both of you,” she sighed, “still believe in justice.”
“Well. She looks dead. Drowned. She’s so white.”
“Then she’ll complement you well, my dark one. Be kind. She’s come a long way.”
So Kantu, grudgingly, had taught Mikiel to walk the mazepath of the Catacombs, how to weave a carpet with thread that could fly, and finally, how to take to the skies. In turn, Mikiel showed Kantu how to dance with a knife strapped to her thigh, how to use a slingshot and flirt in twelve languages. For eight years they lived and fought alongside each other. As unlike her in looks as Rok Moris from Koss Var, Kantu came to consider Mikiel her sister. Their hearts beat a twin tattoo on the Thundergod’s drum.
And now, in all the chaos of the uprising, Mikiel had not forgotten her.
She found me, Kantu realized. Even in this darkness, she found me.
As if Mikiel caught the thought, she grinned again, and her eyes sparkled. They were a limpid, pearly blue in color, almost white. Despite the witch light, she became herself again.
“You’re dreaming, Kantu,” she said. “Too many blows to the head.”
“Just the one. Didn’t improve my nose, I’m afraid.”
“That meat hook? The gods could not improve it.”
“Got any salt, Mik? Want to grind it in a little?”
Mikiel made to throw her arm around Kantu’s shoulders. Her movement cast a strange shadow onto the crumbling alley wall. The shadow was taller and boasted more angles than even lissome Mikiel could account for. Leaning back, Kantu glanced from the shadow to the thing casting it, and whistled through her teeth.
“Huh.”
“You like? Crizion helped. She wanted to come, but it never would’ve carried three. So she went to scavenge food instead. Supplies are low.”
“Mikiel Maris Athery, you are such a goddaft show-off!”
Her friend shrugged, the mass on her shoulders bobbling. “It’s just—we’re all so scattered down in the ’Combs. The Rokka Mama had no carpets to spare for finding your sorry carcass. I had to do something.”
Her something had been to fashion a collapsible glider from the magic tatters and raveled rags of carpets too threadbare and patchy to carry riders. The contraption jutted up and out from Mikiel’s shoulders like the Great Raptor Rok mantling her prey.
“It flies,” she assured Kantu. “Sort of. You just have to talk gently to it. Lots of encouragement, that’s the way.”