She walked toward the balcony’s edge. The railing exploded, and stone splinters rained onto the city.
Mal stepped out into empty air. Fire quickened within her, and in the black spaces of her soul, she was no longer alone.
Caleb, Temoc, and Teo walked down Sansilva Boulevard, past upturned carriages and carts. Tzimet quivered and recoiled when Temoc turned his gaze upon them. They feared the Eagle Knights of old. Unfortunately, the Tzimet were not the only obstacle between the trio and their destination.
Caleb heard the mob first—bellowing terror, voices cracked with thirst. Then he saw it. Heads and bodies pressed together, rippling and roiling like the sea at storm, overflowing the boulevard to spread out down side streets. The Cantor’s Shell curved above them all, bluer than the parched sky, taller than the tallest pyramids. Its reflection captured world and crowd.
Approaching from the ground, Caleb found the protesters both more and less intimidating than they’d seemed from the sky: less, because the black mass of hair and clothes and noise resolved into individual men and women, and more, because those men and women were near enough to hurt him.
Teo stopped on the sidewalk. “Can we go around?”
“No,” Caleb said. “I flew by here earlier. The crowd surrounds the pyramid.”
Temoc removed a pouch from his belt. Coils and claws pressed against the leather from the inside. “The Gods’ power will cow the masses.”
Caleb thought he heard the pouch growl. He shook his head. “You’ll attract the Wardens. They’re almost as scared as the mob, only they’re armed. Give them something to shoot at, and they’ll shoot.”
“We will fight them, and they will fall.”
“If the Wardens open fire, they’ll hit the crowd, too, and we’ll be trampled in the panic—unless you plan to burn through all these people. We’re here to avoid killing, right?”
Temoc did not reply, but he returned the pouch to his belt.
“Okay,” Teo said. “Optera?”
“The bugs are unclean. Their existence offends Gods and man.”
“Don’t the ends justify the means?”
“A sacrifice demands purity of intent and form. If we use the bugs, we will have neither.”
“You just suggested we fight our way to the pyramid.”
“Battle is holy. Craft-twisted beasts are not.”
“You can’t be serious.”
No response.
“Caleb?”
“Crowd’s thick. Dangerous to force our way through. Unless.” He groped in his jacket pockets until he felt something smooth and fiercely pointed, which he drew out into the light. The shark’s-tooth pendant lay dull in his palm, its surface broken and burned. “I took this off Mal months ago. It helped her sneak into Bay Station, and Seven Leaf. Hid her from anyone without a priest’s scars, including Wardens.”
Temoc took the pendant from Caleb, turned it, lifted it to the sun. “Broken.”
“I know, but the glyphwork is old Quechal style. Can you see what’s wrong?”
“The bonds between the two symbols, here, the seeing and the not, were burned away. Overtaxed.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I would require a week of fasting, preparation, meditation, to repair this link. In four days I could make a new talisman on the same model.”
“We don’t have a week. Or four days.”
“Or four minutes,” Teo said. “I don’t like the looks the crowd’s throwing our way.”
“A glyph-combination like this consists of two pieces: the seeing-not and the not-seeing.” Temoc drew a line from each end of the negation glyph to each corner of the stylized eye. “The first link directs attention from the wearer. The second suggests to others that the area where we walk is occupied. Without the one, we will be seen. Without the other, we will be crushed by those ignorant of our presence. These links are severed now, but I can re-forge them in my mind, using the amulet as a focus.”
“Great.”
“But I cannot do so and extend this protection to all three of us at the same time.”
“So much for that idea.” Teo tipped her hat brim down over her eyes. “Do we fight our way through?”
“Dad,” Caleb said. “You can’t hold the links alone. Could we do it together?”
Temoc looked from the amulet, to Caleb, and nodded.
They advanced, and the crowd parted before them.
Caleb’s left hand, and Temoc’s right, wound through the amulet’s leather lace. Caleb’s right hand clasped Temoc’s left wrist, and Temoc’s left clasped Caleb’s right. Teo walked in the circle of their arms.
Seeing not, Caleb repeated to himself. Look anywhere but here. A closed eye shone in his mind, surrounded by billowing clouds. No, not closed—stitched shut.
“You must empty this space in their minds,” Temoc had said. “We become a moment of distraction, a daydream. I will fill the gap that remains.”
Look elsewhere. Keep your head down. Nothing new about that. Kopil had been right, months ago. Caleb did not want the world to notice him. Everyone the world noticed, it burned.
Poker worked this way. Bet aggressively, and others will respond in kind. Play as if you have nothing to loose, and you will lose everything. Play quiet, play calm, and win.
Men and women stepped aside for them, and closed after they passed. In the heart of the crowd, someone struck up a chant, and a few hundred others joined: “Hear us! Hear us!”
The shark’s tooth glowed blue. Caleb gripped a line of ice, of fire. His scars cracked and burned, casting shadows into the crowd, and onto Teo.
Don’t look. Don’t see.
They closed half the distance to the Canter’s Shell, and half that distance again.
Hide. Live a good life, safe. Guard against disaster. Wrap yourself in cotton.
Mal’s voice in his ears, flying north to Seven Leaf Lake.
We cushion ourselves against death. We live in ignorance.
The closed eye in his mind pulled against its stitching.
Twenty feet.
Ten.
The crowd thinned as they neared the shell. Only the strongest protesters had reached this point: thick men and determined women, daring to approach eternity. On the other side of the blue shell lay piles of ash that had once been human.
In the crowd near the shell’s edge Caleb saw a yellow smiling face tattooed onto the back of a shaved scalp. He looked again, and saw Balam, the old cliff runner scowling and shouting at the pyramid. “Cowards hide! Cowards run!” Of course. Where else would Balam be as the city fell apart? Sam was here somewhere, too, or else rioting in Skittersill. He did not mention this to Teo. She knew already. She had to know.
They passed within feet of Balam; his drill sergeant voice boomed in their ears. Caleb shivered as the man raged at him, and through him, unseeing. He did not break stride. “Cowards!” Fair enough.
Temoc stopped beside the dome, and released Caleb’s wrist. Caleb did not let go of Temoc’s arm. His father took a leather ribbon from his belt and draped it around Teo’s shoulders like a stole. The leather stank of herbal unguents.
“Dad,” Caleb whispered, as Temoc produced a second ribbon. “What is that?”
“God-bearer,” Temoc replied, and reached for him. Caleb pulled back.
Gods lived beyond the mortal world, beside, above, below, permeating it with their presence. Yet deities had anchors: statues, idols, prayers, and god-bearers, relic holders made from cured human skin.
He tried to find a better way to phrase the question, but settled for: “Who was it?”
“One of the lesser corn gods.”
“I wasn’t talking about the god.”