Last First Snow

by Max Gladstone

  People thronged Chakal Square. Camp stove smoke curled above circled tents. Flags and protest signs in Kathic and Low Quechal studded the crowd near the fountain where a ramshackle stage stood. No one had taken the stage yet. Speeches would come later.

  A loose line of mostly men sat or stood around the crowd’s edge, facing out. They bore no weapons Elayne could see, and many dozed, but they maintained a ragged sentry air.

  Elayne looked both ways down empty Crow, and crossed the road. The guard in front of her was sleeping, but a handful of others shook themselves alert and ran to intercept her, assembling into a loose arc. A thick young man with a broken, crooked-set nose spoke first. “You don’t belong here.”

  “I do not,” she said. “I am a messenger.”

  “You look like a Craftswoman.”

  She remembered that tone of voice—an echo of the time before the Wars, before her Wars anyway, when she’d still been weak, when at age twelve she fled from men with torches and pitchforks and hid from them in a muddy pond, breathing through a reed while leeches gorged on her blood. Memories only, the past long past yet present. Since that night of torches and pitchforks and teeth, she’d learned the ways of power. She had nothing to fear from this broken-nosed child or from the crowd at his back. “My name is Elayne Kevarian. The King in Red has sent me to speak with your leaders.”

  “To arrest them.”

  “To talk.”

  “Crafty talk has chains in it.”

  “Not this time. I’ve come to hear your demands.”

  “Demands,” Broken-Nose said, and from his tone Elayne thought this might be a short meeting after all. “Here’s a demand. Go back and tell your boss—”

  “Tay!” A woman’s voice. Broken-Nose turned. The one who’d spoken ran over from farther down the sentry line. The guards shifted stance as she approached. Embarrassed, maybe. “What’s going on here?”

  Broken-Nose—Tay?—pointed to Elayne. “She says the King in Red sent her.”

  Elayne examined the new arrival—short hair, loose sweater, broad stance. Promising. “I am Elayne Kevarian.” She produced a business card. “From Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao. I’ve been retained by the King in Red and Tan Batac in the matter of the Skittersill warding project. I’m here to meet with your leaders.”

  The woman’s deep brown eyes weighed her. “How do we know you won’t cause trouble? Last few days, folks have come into the camp just to start fights.”

  “I have no interest in starting fights. I hope to prevent them.”

  “We won’t bow to you,” Tay said, but the woman held out one hand, palm down, and he closed his mouth. Didn’t relax, though. Held his muscles tense for battle or a blow. “Chel, we don’t have to listen—”

  “She look like one of Batac’s axe-bearers to you?”

  “She looks dangerous.”

  “She is dangerous. But she might be for real.” Chel turned back to Elayne. “Are you?”

  And this was the Craft that could not be learned: to answer plainly and honestly, to seem as if you spoke the truth, especially when you did. “Yes.”

  “No weapons?”

  She opened her briefcase to show them the documents inside, and the few pens clipped into leather loops. Charms and tools, instruments of high Craft, were absent. She’d removed them this morning against just such an eventuality. No sense frightening the locals.

  “Who do you want to see?”

  “Anyone,” Elayne said, “with the authority and will to talk.”

  Chel looked from her, to Tay, to the others gathered. At last, she nodded. “Come with me.”

  “Thank you,” Elayne said when they had left the guards behind but had not yet reached the main body of the camp.

  “For what? Tay wouldn’t have started anything. Just acts tough when he’s excited.”

  “If he would not have started anything, why did you run over to stop him?”

  “It’s been a long few days,” Chel said, which was and was not an answer.

  “Aren’t sentries a bit exclusive for a populist movement?”

  “We’ve had trouble. Burned food stores, fights. Folks that started the fights, nobody knew them—Batac’s thugs.”

  “A serious accusation.”

  “Bosses did the same during the dockworker’s strike. Got a lot of my friends arrested. Those of us who lived through that, we thought maybe we could calm things down, or scrap if scrapping’s needed.” She sounded proud. “So we stand guard.”

  “You’re a dockhand?”

  “Born and raised. About half the Skittersill works the Longsands port, or has family there.”

  “And your employers gave you leave to come protest?”

  A heavy silence followed her question, which was all the answer Elayne needed. “I guess you’re not from around here,” Chel said.

  “I lived in DL briefly awhile back. I’m a guest now.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear about the strike, then. This was last winter. We faced pay cuts, unsafe working conditions, long hours. People died. We took to the picket line. Turns out strikes against you people don’t work out so well.”

  Elayne recognized that tone of voice—heavy and matter-of-fact as a rock chained around an ankle. She’d spoken that way, once, when she was younger than this woman. Come to think, she’d had the same walk: hands in pockets, bent forward as if against heavy wind.

  “We didn’t take leave,” Chel continued. “Things have been hard since the strike. We read the broadsheets, same as everyone. If this deal goes through and our rent goes up, we won’t be able to live here anymore. Moving costs. Traveling to work costs. Worse if you have a family. This was the best bad choice. You know how that goes, maybe.”

  “I do,” Elayne said, though she hadn’t planned to say anything. “What do you mean, broadsheets?”

  Chel plucked a piece of newsprint from the ground. The headline ran: “Cabal Plans District’s Death,” over caricatures of the King in Red and Tan Batac. Elayne read the first few lines of the article, folded the sheet, and passed it back to Chel. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw more copies pasted to the sides of tents. No bylines anywhere she could see, nor any printer’s mark.

  The camp woke around them. Eyes emerged from sleeping bags, peered out of tents, glanced up from bowls of breakfast porridge. Some of those gazes confronted Elayne, some assessed, some merely noted her passage and dismissed her. She heard whispers, most in Low Quechal, which she did not know well enough to suss out, but some in common Kathic.

  “Foreigner,” they said, which didn’t bother her, and “Iskari,” which was wrong.

  “Craftswoman,” she heard as well, over and over, from women stretching, from men crouched to warm themselves at fires, from children (there were children here, a few) who stopped their game of ullamal to follow her. Others followed, too. They gathered in her wake, a sluggish V of rebel geese: a gnarled man covered with scars who might have fought in the Wars himself, on the wrong side. A pregnant woman, leading her husband by the hand. A trio of muscular bare-chested men, triplets maybe; she could tell them apart only by the different bruises.

  As they neared the fountain, she felt a new power rising. These people had made themselves one. The air tinted green beneath their unity’s weight.

  Angry masses. Torches, pitchforks, and blood.

  No. Approach the situation fresh, she told herself—these aren’t the mobs of your childhood, just scared people gathered for protection. And if what Chel said was true, about fights and arson and strikebreakers, they had reason to fear.

  Chel led Elayne past tents where volunteer cooks gave food to those who asked, past signs scrawled with crude cartoons of the King in Red as thief and monster, past the stage and around the fountain and its faceless god. Behind the fountain lay a stretch of square covered by dried grass mats upon which men and women sat cross-legged and rapt.

  Elayne’s heart clenched and she stopped breathing.

  An altar rose before the gr
ass mats, and on that altar a man lay bound. A priest, white-clad from waist down and bare and massive from waist up, stood with his back to the congregation. Intentional and intricate scars webbed the priest’s torso. A long time ago, someone had sliced Quechal glyphwork into his skin.

  The priest raised a knife. The captive did not scream. He stared into the dawning sky.

  The knife swept down.

  And stopped.

  There had been no time for questions or context. Elayne caught the blade with Craft, and wrapped the priest in invisible bonds. Glyphs glowed blue on her fingers and wrists, beneath her collar and beside her temples.

  The crowd gasped.

  The sacrifice howled in terror and frustration.

  The priest turned.

  He should not have been able to move, and barely to breathe, but still he turned. Green light bloomed from his scars and glistened off the upturned blade of his knife, off his eyes.

  His eyes, which widened in shock, though not so sharply as her own.

  “Hello, Elayne,” Temoc said.

  3

  In a respectful universe, crowd, parishioners, sacrifice, and guards would have all kept still, but of course they didn’t. The faithful cried out. Temoc stepped toward her, but he was a less immediate concern than Chel, who tackled Elayne to the ground.

  Elayne hit hard, taking the fall with shoulders and arm, but she kept her Craft locked around Temoc. Chel pinned her arms and grabbed her throat. Chel’s teeth flashed white, and in the trembling of her whole body Elayne read shock and shame and anger. Mostly anger.

  “Chel,” Elayne croaked. “Stop.”

  A circle of faces formed above and around them, staring down. Breath came slow and thin.

  “Let her go,” Temoc said from somewhere far away. The circle broke into a U, though Elayne could not see the man himself.

  Chel looked up, confused.

  “I am not in danger. Elayne is an old friend. She does not understand our work.”

  He entered her field of view. Dawn broke through the mist and scissored his silhouette from the sky: a chthonic figure, a cave painting strong enough to burst free of the wall. Temoc Almotil, last of the Eagle Knights, priest of the old gods, looked better than she remembered. Green light from his scars cast the faces of his gathered faithful a weird pale jade. Chel released Elayne, sat back on her thighs, and stood. “Sir.” That word held devotion, awe, curiosity, a little reproach.

  Elayne examined Temoc’s face.

  Planes and angles composed him, like always, like she remembered when they’d first met under flag of truce when she was seventeen and he was twenty—and not long after, when he’d almost bled out in a Sansilva backstreet, impaled by a spear of ice, as a war raged overhead. Eyes of the deepest, roundest black, and a mouth an Ebon Sea sculptor might have immortalized in marble as the one honest detail in an otherwise flattering portrait: too broad, too sharp, like the rest of him. Muscular didn’t begin to cover it. A man built on a different scale from other men.

  Built, then scarred. He moved slowly, laboring against her bonds. He hadn’t tried to break them; then again, she hadn’t tried to break him, either.

  He offered her the hand that didn’t hold the knife. Mindful of the crowd and of her mission, she accepted, and used him as an anchor with which to pull herself upright. His arm did not twitch when he took her weight.

  The sacrifice sat upon the altar, loose ropes trailing from his wrists, perplexed. Most of the faithful remained in their rows. The watching U retreated from Temoc, from them both.

  “A long time,” he repeated.

  She nodded to the knife. “I thought you didn’t kill these days.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You have a knife, and there’s a man on that altar. What do I not understand?”

  “We’ve changed the sacrament.” He gestured toward the altar with his blade. “The ceremony must be done at sunrise. Will you join me?”

  “I won’t let you kill him,” she said.

  “I pledge that this man will be alive, as you recognize it, at the rite’s end. My blade will not pierce his flesh.”

  “Your specificity does not inspire confidence.”

  “Trust me.” That smile had not changed. Neither had his teeth. “See how we remake ourselves.” His voice brimmed with clerical assurance, a priest speaking for the groundlings. Not so different from the voice Elayne herself adopted at court. A priest was a man who made his face a mask.

  Her presence by his side would confer legitimacy, which he knew as well as she did. But she’d come to parlay, at least ostensibly, and by his side she would be in a better position to stop him if he needed stopping.

  She shot her cuffs, and swept the dust from her suit with a quick web of Craft. A small tear in her jacket rewove itself. Wasteful parlor tricks, dry cleaners and tailors being more efficient on the whole than sorcery. But there was value in impressing the locals. “I’m glad,” she said, “you stepped in when you did.”

  “Chel wouldn’t have hurt you.” Temoc walked between his faithful toward the altar, under the pressure of their gathered gazes. His scars glowed, and shadows slicked his skin. His people did not see this side of him often, she expected.

  She kept pace. “I was not concerned for my own safety.” This, too, pitched to be overheard.

  What Temoc said next, wasn’t. “Would you mind letting me go? Your heathen magics sting.”

  “But you look so impressive lit up like a solstice tree.” She smirked, and canceled her bonds upon him. The light dimmed first, the shadows after.

  The erstwhile sacrifice spread-eagled again on the altar, which was not stone at all but a squat, sturdy table propped with four stone panels. Makeshift, make-believe.

  Temoc raised his knife. Its black glass blade caught the sunlight. The audience sat in a rustle of grass mats. Chel watched from beyond the mats, and others watched with her, their numbers swelled by the commotion.

  Worshippers fell silent. Gathered faith crystallized the air, arrested light in its passage, riveted this moment to a million others stretching back through eternity, that were not a million separate moments at all but a million reflections of the same moment in time, or its facets, revolving.

  She was the only person here, she wagered, who understood the Craftwork that underpinned the scene: the faithful giving pieces of their soul to the performance, to the priest, to the sacrifice transfixed in the ecstasy of his role, eyes open as he saw the faces of god. She was the only one here who could describe, in six pages perhaps with three figures and a few mathematical sidebars, the mechanics of Temoc’s worship.

  And she was the only one outside it all. So she watched.

  Sun glinted off a raised blade. She tensed, remembering torchlight reflected in hunters’ eyes. The knife fell.

  Its pommel struck the sacrifice’s chest with a rich echo like a knuckle’s knock against the sound box of a guitar. The man twitched once. A small sigh escaped him.

  Elayne closed her eyes to watch the sacrifice as a Craftswoman. Small distortions stitched through the lightning-lit spider world beyond her eyelids, like darting fish in seaweed: tiny gods. With eyes opened, she saw green ghosts rise from the altar to lick the sacrifice’s skin. The spirits lingered where the wound in the man’s chest would have been, if this was a sacrifice in truth as well as name. Spectral tongues lingered at the hole Temoc would have carved to draw his heart.

  As the godlings drank their fill, their joy pulsed through the web of faith Temoc wove, to quicken his congregation’s hearts and touch them with eternity—a sliver of bygone days and glories, a lingering aftertaste of ancient bloody history. The blood sacrifice was no more. The old gods were dead.

  All as it should be.

  But still, the crowd rejoiced.

  The moment passed and the godlings faded back into ether. Temoc lowered his knife and spoke in High Quechal to the sacrifice, who nodded, unable to answer through his tears. Temoc addressed the faithful in
High Quechal first, then Low. Said, at last, in Kathic, “the Miracle is Accomplished,” so that Elayne heard the capitals.

  And they repeated it to him, the hundreds here, words rippling through the gathered crowd and those beyond still waking.

  Temoc slipped the ropes from the sacrifice’s wrists and ankles. The man stumbled into his embrace and wept.

  I am an outsider, Elayne repeated to herself.

  She did not know why she felt the need.

  A winged shape crossed the sky, heavy subsonic bass to complement the cheers: a Warden come on Couatl-back to watch the outlaws below.

  To watch, like her. And wonder.

  4

  “To what do I owe the honor?” Temoc asked after the ceremony. The sacrifice’s friends helped him, staggering, sobbing, off to breakfast. The congregation bled out into the crowd. Elayne listened to their chatter: the word “Craftswoman” featured often.

  “Can’t you guess?” Elayne said.

  “You might have heard about my work here. Come to see what I’ve done with my life, or even to join us. Wishful thinking, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” she said. And: “How did you convince your gods to accept a mock sacrifice?”

  “With difficulty. Most refuse. The great Lords and Ladies are dead, and the hungriest of those who survive, sleep. A few lesser corn gods and household spirits join us, though to them the bloodless rite feels like drinking from a dirty sponge. But it’s this or nothing, for all of us.”

  “Must be hard.”

  He knelt behind the altar, and from the empty space beneath removed a towel with which he wiped himself down, and a white shirt he buttoned across his chest. “Our ways will not survive unchanged. The old sacrifice bound my people together. The celebrant whose heart we drew participated in godhood. Here, the celebrant acts out the sacrifice, and through that enters the community of gods. But he cannot stay—he must return bearing knowledge of what it is to die. Deeds once done are done forever. I’ve taught this to men and gods for twenty years. Someday they’ll listen.” The small buttons slipped under his thick fingers, and his muscles strained against the fabric. His hands did not shake. They never had, not down all the years she’d known him. Clean living, he’d said decades before, when she asked his secret. They had both been younger then.