They gaped at his oozing eye and smoking hand. Nobody moved. Djola couldn’t reach the locks on their spirits. Shrugging, he danced Xhalan Xhala around the market square and called to the future of the thief-lord city. Whatever merchant house or abode he spied with his right eye and touched with his left hand burst into white-hot flames. After a blast of heat, cool treasure glittered: a humble bakery became ten gold nuggets; a merchant’s palace turned into a bloody garnet; a spirit house dissolved into yards of cloud-silk. Reckoning fire swallowed one building after another. Samina’s chill kept him frosty. The spell of spells had finally yielded to him.
“Run!” Djola shouted again at captives who trailed after him. They squealed at flames roaring through Jena City’s towers and humble abodes. Djola shouted in Anawanama then Zamanzi. This time many captives headed for the water. Pezarrat’s crew wanted to dash away too. “To me,” he commanded. The pirates fell in behind him.
Terrified barbarians abandoned their homes and market shops. White-hot flames seared those who were too fascinated, too slow, or too dazed to escape. Half-naked folks, lugging children or an armload of possessions, stampeded out of Jena City into the sweet desert. The city watch ran ahead of everyone, drunk, but swift.
Pezarrat’s men gathered the precious metals, noble crystals, and numinous cloth that appeared when the flames winked out. “Throw a bit of fire, and thief-lords puke and piss themselves.”
“Don’t waste time laughing at cowards,” Djola said. Void-swirls appeared from shimmer. “When this noxious air disperses, only toxic ground will remain.” A small price to pay. Or that’s what he told himself.
The pirates hurried back to the beach, weighed down with Jena City booty. Djola trotted behind them. His right eye ached; his head throbbed. His mind was a jumble, but Samina’s chill eased pain. The sun was setting, the day over so quickly. Dancing Xhalan Xhala, Djola felt blistered inside. Relieving himself, his piss burned.
The pirates launched the canoes and paddled through choppy waves, glaring at him. Blood dribbled from his right eye as he glared back. Nearing the fleet, the guards fingered weapons. Djola sang a lament, and geysers of seawater erupted around them. Behemoth eyes glowed below the surface. Two giants breached, grinning and flapping fins. The pirates stared at shell-encrusted maws and froze.
“Hold your weapons. My friends jump at the flash of iron,” Djola said. “Pezarrat wanted to assure the arrival of his booty, so, you have orders not to skewer me before I set foot on deck.” Four behemoths circled the boats. “My large friends would be sad if you spilled my blood, so I’ll stay in this canoe.” A cloud broke apart and ice fell from the sky, stabbing everyone but Djola. One pirate bled from his eyes. The others cursed Djola for the storm. “Take the booty. Tell Pezarrat, I keep my word. Our last raid. I’ll find my own way in the storm.”
The pirates shook slush from their hair and scuttled up the ladder onto the flagship. Djola felt blank. Xhalan Xhala had hollowed him out. He bobbed in the water, free yet dazed, like the captives in the square. He’d found what he sought, but perhaps lost everyone he loved.
The behemoths ferried him up a river of ice to Bog-Town’s docks. Nobody pursued him. Instead, pirates celebrated victory with music, wine, and the bodies of slaves. If Orca was dead, at least he wouldn’t have to endure the victory party.
* * *
In the night, a high tide of hot seawater melted the ice in the Bog River. Djola paddled back to open sea. Seeing his canoe, captives jumped from the flagship and swam to shore. Nobody knew what had happened to Vandana and Orca. The women from Pezarrat’s cabin insisted, “If he cut off Orca’s head, he’d put it on display. If Vandana wanted to go to home, who could stop her?”
Djola wanted to imagine escape or a quick death for his friends. Not knowing was worse than seeing a body. Haints and restless spirits wandered the fortress he had made of his mind and heart.
Samina said: End torture in the huts, on the sea, in the woods and fields.
“Captain, I come to pay my debt,” Djola shouted in Anawanama.
Pezarrat opened a porthole. “What jumba jabba are you talking? Have you come to kill me?” He was sober. Good. “Trickster, I don’t know why I didn’t kill you long ago.”
“Greed,” Djola said. The years on the pirate ship were vivid in his memory:
Buildings and ships dissolved into sludge.
Young boys drowned in their own blood.
Battered captives and pirates begged for a miracle in this life or mercy in the next.
On barren shores, old women pulled out hair and wailed over the bones of the future.
“You raid the future for trinkets.” Following a rogue impulse, Djola touched the flagship and danced Xhalan Xhala. Reckoning fire engulfed the hull before Pezarrat could scratch the beads of hair on his sun-bronzed head. When the fire subsided, colorful baubles floated on dark water. Djola felt no joy, thrill, or even relief at Pezarrat’s demise, still blank and jumbled. He paddled from one ship to the next and turned the fleet into pearls and glass beads. Those who jumped into the sea and left treasure behind survived. They avoided his canoe. In the morning, beads and pearls washed up on Jena City’s beach. Survivors left these trinkets in the sand.
Djola wasted no time celebrating a hollow victory. He thanked the behemoths, turned his back to the sea, and, not quite right in his mind, paddled upriver to inland strongholds. Cutting a swath of reckoning fire through thief-lord realms, he handed out the poison-death the barbarians deserved, till he reached the borderlands and protectorates of the Arkhysian Empire.
On his march north, Djola called on Samina’s chill but shunned Smokeland journeys to see her. Samina would think he sought revenge and try to argue him out of his plan—an awful plan, yet he had no choice or that’s the lie he chanted. Word of his deadly conjure reached Arkhys City. A letter from Grain was full of his exploits—exaggerated by griots, but true enough.
Xhalan Xhala showed the disaster barbarians and good citizens made of their world, and finally, the People listened—to the conjurer who turned Pezarrat’s fleet into trinkets and thief-lord cities into sky-stones. They cheered the master who promised a new world was coming. Yet, every day silvery haints cursed at him from mountain mist, sounding like Tessa or Quint. They asked who Djola had become.
“A clown,” he told them. “Tricking people to their right minds.”
Grain reported that enemies on Council babbled lies to Azizi. With no more pirate booty to fill Empire coffers, Azizi finally gave in to corrupt masters. He gathered mercenaries to protect grain and oil stores. He barred non-citizens from entering Arkhys City except on festival days and called for Hezram’s Dream Gates around the capital. Illusion solution. So, Djola planned a carnival of destruction at the temple hall of the mountain gods during the Sun Festival.
What better place for reckoning fire than inside Holy City’s Dream Gates?
3
Sentinels
Awa was barely awake, sleepwalking through the morning, a sunny day in Holy City, but on the forest floor, chill and murky as twilight. A splash of sunlight caught ferns and moss by surprise. Cathedral tree leaves rustled, pleading for mercy. Awa closed her heart to leaf-song. With hammer and blade, she chopped thick roots that anchored soil to Ice Mountain’s rocky shanks. Interlocking roots ran from the edge of snowfields down to the Amethyst River. Ice Mountain was a family tree, twenty thousand years old according to Iyalawo Tembe.