“What are you talking about?”
“I heard my father and Phylomon talking. They’re afraid of you. My father plans to take another Spirit Walk to look into your future.”
“And if he doesn’t like what he sees, what then? They plan to kill me?” Tull’s voice was remarkably calm, Fava thought, remarkably controlled, and she realized that it was only because Tull understood why it might seem required.
“That was their first thought, but I have another plan. If my father finds that he does not trust you, then you must promise not to become a Spirit Walker. Maybe you could become a carpenter or a fisherman. I was thinking that if my father is afraid that you will hurt other people, then we will go someplace where there aren’t any other people. We could go to the south of Hotland to make a home, and I would still love you, and I would be happy forever. This town is just a place. We don’t have to stay here!”
“That wouldn’t be enough for me,” Tull said. “I would not be able to stop thinking of all the other people in the world. I would have to help free them.”
His animal guide is the sea serpent, Fava thought, and she could perceive the serpent in Tull—restless, vigilant, ferocious in its attacks.
She looked at his ankles, at the ugly scars where his father had shackled Tull to the bed. All those years Tull had pulled against the shackles, trying to break them, and even though he had freed himself, his heart was still captive.
He would have to keep breaking those chains, over and over again, until there were no more chains left in the world to break, and Fava hoped that such a day would come.
Fava said, “You won’t rest. I think my father will find only honey in your soul, as I have. But you’ll never be happy. You can’t, and I feel sad for you.”
“I’ll rest,” Tull said.
Fava shook her head. “Between battles? Just as a sea serpent rests between feedings? You’ve been home from Craal for less than a month, and already in your heart you are out fighting other battles, already you are frenzied.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Tull said. “Fighting battles is what I do.” He let go of her hand. “I am going down to the blacksmith’s shop, to work on a gun.” Tull wrapped his cape around his broad shoulders and stepped outside.
Fava stayed in the house and fumed, found herself shaking while tears poured down her face. She could understand Tull, even sympathize with him, but she could not protect him, could not persuade him to turn away from his self-destructive path.
Like a lone sea serpent battling plesiosaurs in the open sea, Tull would keep attacking, preferring to die rather than succumb or retreat.
Later that afternoon a cry rose from town that a serpent had entered the bay. For years it had been a cry of terror, a warning to stay back from the water, but since the serpents had died off, this was a cry of rejoicing.
Fava raced down to the redwood bridge, and saw the serpent there, lying on the shore with its head out of the water. Its great dorsal fins rose forty feet in the air, and its head was as wide as a house, while its huge teeth were each longer than a man.
The coloring of the serpent’s body changed with its environment, and this one was a sandy brown with black speckles, the color of the ocean floor in the bay. All in all, the serpent was at least two hundred feet long, with red eyes as large as war shields, and everyone stood looking at it in awe: a serpent to guard the bay, a serpent to stand between the town and the dinosaurs that otherwise would swim over from Hotland.
Fava was so enthralled with the creature that it took her a moment to notice its odd behavior, the way it lay with its head on the beach. Blood flowed from its gills and the gill flaps were so mangled, it looked as if the serpent had barely survived a great battle.
Fava wondered if the serpent had come here to die, then she saw Tull. He was in the monster’s mouth, working among the gills, slitting open the bodies of long gray lampreys that clung to the serpent’s gills, then tossing them back to shore.
Fava recalled the serpent she’d seen in her dreams in the south of Hotland, the blood pouring from its gills, and how she had wakened to hear Tull promise: “I can heal you.”
The promise seemed to wash through her now, as if Tull had spoken the words just for her hearing. The act of cutting the lampreys away, of stripping them was gruesome. Yet Tull carried it out tenderly, almost lovingly.
He seemed absorbed in his work, single-minded, eager to please the serpent. The beast widened its gill flaps, almost as if at Tull’s command, and Fava looked into the serpent’s huge bloody eyes, saw rage and pain there.
She saw something of Tull.
Life became an uneasy game of waiting for Fava after that—waiting for the snow to clear in the north, waiting for Phylomon to return from Sanctum, for her father to return from his Spirit Walk.
She watched her husband Tull, with his nervous energy. By setting a target dummy behind the house and dressing it in a shirt of Craal armor, Tull discovered that their black powder was not very effective. Their bullets could barely pierce the thick lacquered mastodon-hide armor worn by Blade Kin.
So on the forty-seventh day of the month of White, he made new bullets, pointed bullets with steel tips that could pierce a Blade Kin’s leather armor.
As Tull fretted and labored, Chaa finally starved himself to the point that he passed out. On the verge of death, he took his Spirit Walk.
News of it leaked out slowly. No one needed to tell Fava. During the night it rained, and when Fava woke to a cold touch, she saw a blue haze in the shape of a man form in the air of the room, then slide into Tull.
Long ago, Fava thought, this is how the Spirit Walkers began, as Truthsayers, shamans who looked into the hearts of suspected criminals, in order to learn the truth of their crimes, passing punishments.
But Chaa’s deliberation would be something more, a meditation on the worth of Tull’s potential, a judgment of what he might become.
For years Fava had known that her husband was different from other men. He found it hard to love, and could be swayed by righteous anger. Fava feared what her father might find.
“Father,” she whispered. “My husband tries so hard to be a good man. He wants to be good. Do not be hasty in your judgments.”
***
Chapter 18: The Play
Chaa’s Spirit Walk did not end that night, or even the next day. Fava felt so restless, ready to break. She tried to work to relieve the stress, but felt that she was like a coiled viper, angry and ready to strike at the first thing that moved.
All day she waited for her father to return from his walk, and yet he did not. She had begged him to take his time, to be sure of Tull, and so she knew that he might take a long walk, perhaps even a legendary seven-day walk.
So she prepared herself for the wait. That night, on the forty-eighth day of White, the Pwi of the Rough had a celebration, for it was on that day, three hundred and sixty-seven years earlier, that Phylomon had overthrown Bashevgo during the Talent Wars.
By custom, each family held a great feast, and in the evening Scandal put on the play of The Pirates’ Hand at Moon Dance Inn, where beer and rum flowed freely.
Fava and Tull had helped with the play for years. Fava tended the footlights, and Tull moved scenery and props.
The play told of greedy men who sought pirate treasures. The hero, struggling to overcome his own greed, eventually found a great chest containing a fortune, but it also held the corpse of the evil pirate king himself, along with one hand from each of his crewmen.
At that point, the evil pirate king, slithered from the grave and uttered curses while the hands of his long-dead crewmen fluttered around him, attacking those who sought their treasure.
Tull worked the marionettes to make the hands dance as Scandal rose from the dead, sporting a flaming sword, while thunder crashed behind him.
Fava studied the crowd, saw fear etched in the faces of children. She smiled, wondering if they’d be as terrified by a real pirate.
“By
all that is unholy, unsightly, untrue,” Scandal roared, “I’ll wield a cursed cutlass to disembowel you!”
In trying to project his voice, he spat out over the crowd.
Poor old Byron Saman, who sat in the front row because his hearing was going and he could hardly see, stood up and said loudly, “We best get out of this storm, before lightning strikes us all dead!”
Everyone in the crowd broke into laughter, and at that point the story’s spell was disrupted, and Tull’s special effects could do nothing to instill terror in the audience.
The play continued to its happy conclusion, when the penitent grave robber donated his treasure to aid the poor of the city, breaking the pirates’ curse, and everyone laughed and clapped.
After the play, Tull and Fava talked with friends, had a few drinks, then Tull carried Wayan home asleep in his arms. Fava felt more lighthearted than he had in weeks, just a little drunk. She walked at Tull’s side, smiling up at him and laughing.
On the outskirts of town, a mere quarter mile from Tull’s little cabin, they stepped off the road, walking the narrow trail along the hillside to Tull’s house.
Down at the bay someone fired the cannon. Fava smiled at Tull, imagining that someone had fired it to celebrate his drunkenness.
Then a second cannon fired, and from the woods around town a shout rose, a long ululation like nothing Fava had ever heard, the sound of ten thousand Blade Kin voices raised in a war cry.
The sound nearly froze Fava’s blood, so that she fought to keep from fainting.
Wayan leapt awake in Tull’s arms, cried, “What’s that?”
Fava and Tull raced up the trail toward home, and Fava’s joints felt loose, wobbly.
They were well off the main road that led to town, but she could hear Blade Kin on the hill above, running toward them through the woods.
They ducked into the cabin. Tull grabbed his gun, strapped on his leather cuirass and his sword of pure Benbow glass, sharper than any steel.
Fava grabbed her short spear, and Wayan stood on the floor crying, grasping Fava’s legs.
A small fire in the hearth shed light, red coals glowing, and down in town gunshots peppered the night air.
Tull said, “Go out the back door! Hide!”
He shoved Fava and Wayan toward a small door that led up a seldom-used path, where thick blackberry vines grew as tall as the house. Deep inside the thicket would be a perfect place to hide.
Fava grabbed Wayan’s hand and led him toward bushes. She put one hand over Wayan’s mouth and whispered, “Don’t speak. Don’t even whisper. We are going to sneak into the blackberry thicket. The thorns will prick you, but we must not cry out. Tonight, we must be as quiet as stones.”
Tull rushed out the front door, heard shots as Blade Kin ran for town. Uphill off the road, hundreds of men were marching through the woods toward the cabin, snapping twigs and swishing brush.
Tull tried to gauge the town’s ability to withstand such an attack. People were scattered, drunk. The Pwi had been practicing with weapons, but there were far too many foes. The town only had twenty-five guns to defend itself—too few to ward off a full-scale attack by slavers, and most of the bullet would not penetrate a Blade Kin’s armor.
Flames suddenly leapt forty feet into the air, casting an eerie light. A warehouse was going up in fire.
Tull realized that the Blade Kin had set the fire, a giant torch for them to see by. Townsmen scurried like ants, racing from building to building, and Blade Kin in black armor and capes charged among them. They wore strange masks for this battle, and carried long guns made of Benbow glass.
Tull recalled his first visit to the Land of Shapes, the Blade Kin he had seen dressed in Black above the house, and realized his mistake. Tull had never gone back to learn if the man posed a threat.
Where is Chaa, Tull wondered. Why didn’t he warn us? He realized then that Chaa was still on Spirit Walk. Had he secretly awakened during the day, gone into hiding?
At a commanding shout, the Blade Kin in town all raised their guns and fired into the town. The large barrels issued smoke instead of bullets, but their effect was much the same.
Tull’s people choked and screamed, began to stagger, and in seconds fell to the ground.
The tubes are weapons, Tull realized, weapons that shoot poison air.
A few Pwi had guns, and they returned fire, but fewer and fewer were shooting, and all across town Tull could hear the Pwi shouting, gasping, crying for help.
Tull watched dozens of Blade Kin swarm to Moon Dance Inn, then suddenly Tull heard someone nearby.
He whirled.
A Blade Kin was rushing up the trail toward him. By his size, the man appeared human, too narrow in the chest and shoulder to be a Pwi, and he wore a strange mask with a short trunk like a mastodon’s, with glass windows over the eyes. The man raised his long dark tube, pressed a button, and Tull raised his gun and shot him in the chest.
The Blade Kin warrior was blown backward, and Tull rushed forward to dispatch him with his sword. A geyser of steam hissed from the tube, shooting through the air. The smell of it numbed Tull’s nose.
He realized that the man’s strange mask kept the Blade Kin from breathing the poison.
Tull pulled the mask, found that it was a black hood made of leather and wood that fit snugly over his head. Tull put it on.
Up by the road, a commander shouted for someone to go toward Tull’s house. They had heard his shot.
He put another bullet in his gun, rushed back into the cabin. Fava was trying to coax Wayan through the blackberry brambles behind the back door, but the boy cried and would not go.
Tull took off the mask for only a moment, shouted for Wayan to be quiet, then moved a cabinet to hide the back door.
Someone rushed into the cabin. Tull whirled and fired, hit a Blade Kin in the abdomen. The Blade Kin just stood, looking down at his gut. Tull leapt forward and decapitated the soldier.
Fava banged at the door.
Tull shouted, “Leave! Hurry! I’ll meet you up the hill!” but he lied.
Far too many Blade Kin were closing in. He could hear them up the trail, outside his front door. Neither of the two men he had met so far were armed with anything other than the poison gas sticks and swords.
Tull swore to himself. Chaa must have seen this. Chaa must have known the Blade Kin would attack tonight.
Yet he had warned no one.
Tull leapt out his front door, hoping to lead the Blade Kin away from his little house, and in the bay a huge iron ship five times longer than any wooden ship Tull had ever seen was sailing into the harbor, guided by the light of the burning warehouse.
None of the town’s cannons fired on it.
All over Smilodon Bay, the Blade Kin now scurried, picking up fallen townspeople.
Across the harbor Tull saw flames suddenly spray from a building in a great arc, forming a fiery rainbow that raced toward a man who was shooting with his rod of gas. The container of gas erupted in a ball of pure white.
Around the inn the gas was so thick that for a moment it glowed like plasma, and then every nearby rod of poison gas suddenly exploded.
Tull smiled. The slavers hadn’t tested their new weapon, he realized. They’d never exposed their poisonous gas to flames. He had a slim hope that the fire and confusion might work to his benefit.
The Moon Dance Inn erupted in a flaming ball, and a great mushroom cloud flowed from the inn up into the sky, lighting the hills, as if the sun had just shone from behind a cloud.
Until that moment Tull had hoped to escape in the dark, but as he peered into the low brush around his house, he spotted dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Blade Kin gazing at the ball of flame.
Tull wouldn’t be able to sneak through that crowd.
He ducked back into the house, glanced at the fallen Blade Kin who lay on the floor. He thought about rushing out back, trying to sneak away with Fava and Wayan, but dared put them at greater risk. He’d killed an enemy, and
the Blade Kin would hunt him all the harder.
His only hope rested in disguising himself.
He wrestled with a body, pulled off the man’s cape, and started to untie the man’s cuirass. Someone suddenly filled the door above him with shadow. Tull swung his gun up, fired. The intruder gasped and dropped, and Tull saw two more men outside.
He didn’t have time to reload so he rushed forward, met the Blade Kin in the dark.
Tull swung hard with his sword of Benbow glass, and the man tried to parry. Tull’s blow broke through the parry, sliced cleanly into the Blade Kin’s shoulder.
I am a wall, Tull thought, protecting the small things of the world, and the thought calmed his racing heart.
The second Blade Kin called for help and jabbed with a spear. Tull was grateful that Smilodon Bay was afire, for the towering flames gave him enough light to fight by, and he grabbed the shaft of the spear, turned it aside with one hand, slashed the Blade Kin.
But two more sprang up behind him, spraying a cloud of smoke from their tubes. The whole hillside was filled with smoke, which rose from the ground like a fog.
Tull began to feel light-headed, realized his helmet did not fit snugly.
Suddenly there were men behind Tull, men jumping from Tull’s rooftop, men who had just come downhill. Tull shouted, turned to face them, found himself surrounded.
A woman jabbed with her spear, and Tull judged the blow to be inexpert.
He’d heard rumors of how the Blade Kin trained, yet this woman couldn’t even match Fava. Tull jabbed and she leapt away, tossing her spear.
Tull barely had time to dodge, realized he should not let himself be taken in by such an easy ploy.
He leapt forward, swung his shield, knocked one man down, brought his sword up beneath a second man’s guard and gutted him, slammed his sword into the fallen Blade Kin, and spun just in time to forestall an attack from behind.
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