Tembe’s drummers drowned him out. She danced and spoke. “Hezram conjures with transgressors. Their spirit debt is so high, dying in the huts is a blessing. We’re not to blame for their crimes.”
“We’re all to blame.”
Djola should never have offered Council his map to tomorrow without iron proof. His family paid for this arrogance. Tessa, Bal, and Quint were bone and ash, scattered in the desert where he could not mourn them. Samina walked only in Smokeland. Their suffering was Djola’s fault, yet Samina helped him solve the poison desert mystery and asked him to end torture in the huts, on the sea, in the woods and fields.
“I live for change, not revenge.” Djola smashed an urn in Rainbow Square. Water cascaded down the altar to the ice gods. “You celebrate lies rather than seek truth.”
“What truth?” Hezram shouted.
Djola shoved him onto the crystal sun lines. “Your Amethyst River floods even high farmland during first planting and dries up before first harvest. The mountain god is angry. All will be desert soon. Yet for cool afternoons, scented thighs, and goat cheese, you chop down the mountain and doom your people.” He’d said as much to Council, but now he had undeniable proof—a mound of poisoned turquoise. Xhalan Xhala! They’d have to listen to him.
“Don’t lose faith.” Tembe closed green-flecked black eyes and chanted. “This cannot be real. A demon conjure show.” Good citizens closed their eyes and whispered with her. In a few moments the whole mob refused to look.
Hezram stood up. “We fight with nobody and pay Empire taxes. We are free lands.” He leaned close. “For the secret of the Dream Gates, Emperor Azizi has offered—”
“All the People and the Weeds and Wild Things are free?” Djola said. “No. You lie inside your Dream Gates.”
The Vévés rendered in Lahesh metal-mesh on the gates sparked and shuddered. Hezram clutched a necklace of poison snake heads. His spirit body got sucked to the borders of Smokeland. Djola watched him tumble through jellyfish spitting toxic barbs and fiends sucking heart spirit. Hezram jabbed viper fangs into his own breast. In a spurt of fire, his spirit body escaped the borderlands, but his heart stopped in the everyday. Wheezing one last breath, Hezram passed out at Djola’s feet.
“What have you done, fiend?” Tembe hovered at the edge of the plaza, not willing to desecrate the stone altar square with female flesh even for love.
“Mercy!” Priests and acolytes pleaded with the mountain god to grant their leader sense again. The god was crumbling. No time for mortal woes.
10
Transgressor Carnival
Djola hovered over Hezram’s glassy eyes and motionless chest. Many would die this day. Why save a scoundrel? Samina would never forgive Djola if he let Hezram die for revenge. She’d be furious about Tembe’s mountain crumbling, no matter that Tembe was deluded, a curse to the mountain she served. No matter that bringing down the mountain was an accident.
Djola thrust a cloth soaked in aromatic salts in Hezram’s mouth and pounded his chest until his heart found a steady beat in the everyday. The witchdoctor coughed, spit out the sharp medicine, and stood up. The lie had singed his beard and left a cataract in one eye. Hezram blinked and gestured at Djola’s healing cloth. Even witchdoctors were obliged to pay spirit debts, but no man wanted to be beholden to his enemy. Reluctant gratitude twisted on Hezram’s burnt lips and got mired in a curse.
“I’m already cursed.” Djola tramped across what had been a temple to the sooty flanks of the mountain. Using a diamond-tipped blade from his boot, he sliced chains and kicked in the doors of hovels that had been concealed behind temple walls. Transgressors cowered in the dark, some ancient and white-haired, others not yet full-grown. All were bloodless and feral. Djola bashed doors until his muscles trembled and blood soaked the inside of his boots.
“Stop!” Hezram chased behind him, careful to dodge sparking dust demons from Djola’s bring-down-the-temple spell.
“How much transgressor blood do you drink?” Djola pressed his staff against Hezram’s racing heart.
The witchdoctor sputtered and froze.
Djola smashed in more doors. Samina had died in a hut like this. She’d pulled Djola into her final living journey to Smokeland and urged him to end transgressor torture. Do this for me, she said as they walked a starway over poison desert to mountain forests where evergreen woods and snowfields claimed her spirit body. These cold memories shielded him during Xhalan Xhala, yet tormented him afterward. He knocked the last door open. “How much blood and tree oil?” He hissed in Hezram’s face.
“Those people do penance—” Every hovel door stood wide. Hezram shook his head. “For grave offenses—”
“Singing tree songs? Talking to mountains and dirt? Hush. I might have to break your neck if you talk on. That isn’t part of our plan. Samina told me…” Djola spoke his wife’s name out loud for the first time in two years. His tongue ached. “Samina said change, not revenge, is salvation.”
“Samina? I do know you.” Hezram scrutinized Djola from tattooed skull to booted ankle. “Emperor Azizi banished you. The Master of Poisons?”
“I am changed.” Following another rogue impulse, Djola barged past Hezram. Prostrate priests rolled aside as he strode to the Green Gates. Tall as cathedral trees and wide as the courtyard, the ancient entryway was covered in rust and moss. With both hands bare, Djola pressed against the copper and iron lacework. The massive structure shivered and shrieked.
Nobody had entered the Green Gates from the courtyard in over a decade. Wild green lands were ruthlessly guarded treasure. Priests used secret underground passages to tend livestock or harvest groves. Witchdoctors opened the south gates to the Empire Road from the inside with keys, drummed incantations, and an army of warrior-acolytes.
Hezram chanted a witchdoctor spell calling the Green Gates to full power. Poachers who broke through metal lacework or scaled corral fences first lost control of their bowels, then their hearts beat out of rhythm as jumbled minds wandered. Raving and shitting blood, would-be thieves died of heart failure. Their spirit bodies increased the gates’ power. As Hezram sang the last line of his spell, keening echoed in the courtyard. Djola shrugged at haints drifting through him—his heart and mind were a fortress. Still, challenging the gate-spell, the hairline crack around his heart twanged. He could live with that and a few farts. The gates swung open, tearing apart a snarl of vines and bushes. Rodents scurried from ruined nests, yammering with the good citizens whose eyes popped wide open.
A cathedral-wood corral enclosed a maze of meadows and groves. Fruit trees with heavy crowns nodded in bright sun. Wild flowers scented the breeze. A string of weaver ants bent leaves for a nest. Plump birds from the south splashed in a pond. A fat creature with a pink snout rooted in mud, squealing at worms. The hidden bounty silenced the mob and angered Djola.
“Even Azizi doesn’t feast on ducks and pigs,” he fumed. Would the world ever change? He answered this bleak question by touching his left hand to each side of the wooden corral, and without considering consequences, sent reckoning fire in a circle. He whistled to warhorses scattered about the fields. The fierce beasts gobbled one last bunch of fruit and clump of clover before trotting toward his Green Elder melody. He grabbed the halter of a hefty black mare with a startling red mane and tail. Tall and imposing, when she halted, so did the herd.