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.