Kanmi froze. “Wait. I thought that the towers were what was holding what’s here in the Lines under control.”
Trennus shook his head. “I’ve had a lot more time to study the energy now, Esh. The towers form a binding circle, and they focus the energies coming from the towers inwards, yes. Into the land itself. The power here in Nazca? Points outwards. Imagine a soap bubble. It can only hold its shape so long as inner and outer pressure are about the same, right?”
Kanmi paused, picturing it. “So they trap spirits here. Trap gods here, with raw ley energy. Convince powerful ones like Mamaquilla to put themselves into human avatars, or . . . jars . . . .”
“Statues, probably,” Trennus replied, distantly. “Would work better if there’s a physical resonance between their ideal form and the form of the container.”
“Tren, that doesn’t work. You’d still need more power to start with . . . .”
“Yes. Which suggests that at least one god is helping the humans with this. Perhaps this Supay.”
Kanmi stared at him. “Well, you’ve got this all figured out, now don’t you?”
He has unraveled a surprising amount of what has been veiled from me. The voice spoke in their minds, like a wash of waves under moonlight, silver on black.
___________________
Trennus’ head rose, and he stared as Cocohuay walked out of the main room where they’d been questioning the captives . . . but then his eyes shifted to the figure beside her. Nearly eight feet in height, the woman’s form was larger than life, and she was built on curves. She wore nothing but a short kilt, unashamed of the beauty of her body . . . and her skin was covered in iridescent peacock-blue scales, like a fish, shimmering with silver highlights. She had long black hair, braided intricately around her scalp, like a crown, and her eyes were identical to Cocohuay’s, luminous white irises against black schlera. The feeling of her presence was overwhelming. Cool, as deep as the sea and as remote as the moon. Alien and terrifying, and yet motherly, in a strange way. Cocohuay’s lined face was wet with tears as she looked on the face of her goddess, and Mamaquilla spoke in all their minds once more. I am glad that you will release those bound here, summoner. I might be able to shatter the Lines, but my manner of doing so would cause more destruction to this earth than I can bear to deal. I have searched for my husband-brother Inti, and I can find he who is the sun, as I am the moon, nowhere. He is gone from the sky. His voice is not even a whisper on the wind. All the voices that should be a chorus in my mind are no more than shadows now. If Supay is involved in this, then today, death will die.
Trennus lowered his head, in respect, but watched out of the corner of his eye as Kanmi’s head rose. The Carthaginian cleared his throat, and asked, in a far more subdued manner than usual, but also without any preface, and without honorifics, “If you’ll forgive me for asking . . . if you’d appeared an hour ago, couldn’t you have just looked into these men’s minds and told us where to go? Without our having had to rack them for answers?” Kanmi’s tone warmed into anger. “You’re a goddess. Aren’t gods supposed to be omniscient?”
Trennus winced. This wasn’t outright defiance, but Kanmi definitely bordered on . . . insolence. Then again, he was Carthaginian by birth, and more or less worshipped Carthaginian gods. Quite a bit less than more, really.
The luminous eyes of the sea-goddess regarded Kanmi steadily. We are powerful within our realms, and powerful among those who give us allegiance and worship. But the man that you questioned was blood-bound to Supay. That binds him as a servant to the death-god. I cannot meddle with the servants of others. I cannot see into their minds . . . often, I cannot even see them at all. The more tightly someone is bound as a servant, the less another god can touch them, in this way. A scaled hand reached out and rested on the shoulder of the god-born woman beside the goddess. Cocohuay, my beloved granddaughter, is my bound servant, by blood and by choice. No other god can see into her mind, not truly. They can attempt to command her. Trick her. Harm her. But they cannot read her thoughts, nor easily find her on the surface of the world, unless she stands directly before them. Some god-born are brighter presences than others. Depending on the nature of their powers, and their degree.
Trennus’ eyes widened. It was far more of an answer than he’d anticipated, and it meshed with why Lassair was usually unable to see many Judeans. He’d thought Kanmi would be slapped for his presumption. He glanced at Kanmi, who regarded him, wide-eyed. “Do you think Caetia realizes that?” Kanmi asked, dryly. “Baal’s teeth. Ben Maor should be damned near invisible as well. He goes to temple a lot more often than I do.”
It requires being the bound servant, the goddess corrected, sternly. Consecrating oneself to a god.
Trennus raised his head. “If that’s the case . . . then why can Asha . . . the spirit I’m soul-bound to . . . see their spirits?”
For that you are bound to them, they love her, and she loves them. The goddess’ tone was calm. And not every servant of a god or goddess has bound themselves utterly to his or her service. Some give lip-service only. She turned and looked at Trennus, expectantly. I cannot, for example, see deeply into your mind. You serve another. You are bound to her, heart and soul. She glanced at Kanmi. You? You are not. You are open.
“. . . and suddenly, I feel a need to get religion,” Kanmi said, dryly.
No. You do not. That impulse does not exist in you. You would stand alone. You would stand apart. It is in your nature.
Kanmi twitched. Trennus might have laughed, had it been any other day. Instead, he looked around. “Please. Everyone. We need to remove the men from this tower, if I’m to release the entities bound here.”
The various men were all Tawantinsuyan by birth. They knew their goddess by sight, and, as she released them, seemed to regard her as their savior and deliverer . . . until she began to chastise them. Angrily. Trennus, already at work inside the tower, wasn’t the focus of that godly wrath, but when the floor shifted underfoot, he could feel it with his ley-senses down into the bedrock, and looked up, hastily, and put a hand to the window-frame as the tower rocked like a boat. Outside the window, the Nazca valley had no lights. No cities. No people, beyond those charged with protecting the Lines.
The whitefire gleam of moonlight suddenly suffused the landscape, turning the men around the goddess into black shadows. In that glow, Trennus could see the land outside actually bulging up, rolling and undulating like waves. Tidal forces, he thought, numbly, feeling the strain and pressure in the earth below his feet like a bellyache. She’s a moon goddess. She can use the effect of gravity on the ground, as well as on the sea. Let’s hope she doesn’t set off an earthquake till I’m ready in here.
Cracks radiated out from the goddess’ feet like a spider web in the desert pavement, following the ripple of the earth. The various men dropped to their knees, as the whitefire crawled towards them, along the cracks . . . and then water fountained up along those lines. Trennus winced. There was an aquifer, about a mile below the surface here. He could feel it. Boiling hot, and dense with salts and minerals, and the goddess had just reached down through the earth and brought it up. Some of the men screamed and danced, trying to get away from the scalding water spraying them. Others stood still, clearly terrified, but untouched by her wrath. The dancing, screaming men were suddenly shoved down by another wave of gravity, their faces pressed into the boiling pools of watery mud . . . and pushed down, into the ground, still struggling.
The water receded. Some of the men still stood, gasping and shuddering, and Trennus wouldn’t be surprised if some of them had wet themselves. On the ground . . . ten perfectly preserved statues of men’s bodies. Like something from the original city of Pompeii. An object lesson, clearly illuminated, as the full moon rose above.
The guilty parties have been identified and judged, Trennus thought, numbly. He thought, given the amount of ley-energy in the valley, that he could have done the same thing. But he was also terrified, at the same time, that the subsi
dence as the water was released on the surface, would make the valley shift before he was ready. It would change his calculations.
He went outside and drew his protective circle carefully, using ley-energy to carve the desert pavement into the protective lines, and infusing them with power, and told Kanmi, “Get in here with me. Just in case.”
Kanmi looked at him askance, and noted, dryly, “One of these days, I’m going to make you a technomantic device that can flash-cut those damned things. Save you a lot of time and worry.” Then he stepped over the lines, and stood out of Trennus’ way as the summoner and ley-mage got to work.
Trennus spread his awareness down into the rock. Found where the shelves of the continents were pressing against each other. This line of magma, upwelling, to the south . . . one of the many volcanoes in the region. This fault line, over here . . . how it could echo and resonate and trigger that one, miles away. And, interwoven with his understanding of the land, was his awareness of the ley. There was so much trapped energy here, both in potential, in the rocks, and in the lines, that tripping one could trigger the other. Understanding ley, and how one line could make another resonate, was good practice for understanding fault lines. They were all interconnected, a vast system, and touching, even lightly, in one place . . . moved everything else. The ultimate chess and puzzle game, combined, and making one wrong move in a place like this? Could bring down a city a hundred miles away. He didn’t think he could level Cuzco or Machu Picchu from here, but Ica? Certainly possible. So he prepared places for the energy to go. Set up paths of least resistance, so that the spirit and divine energy sunk into the ley-lines could discharge safely. It took almost an hour before he was satisfied.
Kanmi had long since taken a seat on the ground, and was evidently doing mental work of his own. Tingle of the sorcerer’s will in the air. “I’m ready,” Trennus said, his voice distant again.
“You sure about this?” Kanmi asked.
“They have no right to imprison most of these spirits. You imprison the maleficent ones, if you can’t kill them. You don’t bind the good ones. You don’t destroy them. Yes. I’m very damned sure.” All of Trennus’ rage at Lassair being imprisoned was behind his words.
“All right. I’ve got contingency barriers around us. Hopefully, we won’t need them. Go ahead.” The sorcerer from Tyre crossed his arms over his chest, and remained prudently seated.
Trennus nodded, and reached down into the earth. And redirected the main ley-line directly into the earth around it, bleeding off energy into his pre-determined paths.
The valley shook underfoot. Sharp, snapping sounds, like gunfire, went off in the distance, as fault-lines cracked open. Ground past each other. A rumbling, undulating flow as a transverse fault, deep underground, began to move against the rest of the flow, and Trennus sweated and poured more energy into the system, directing it, delicately, away from that dangerous transverse. He needed that rock to go there.
Seventy feet in front of them, the tower began to dance to the rhythm in the earth. The walls cracked. Shattered. Trennus, his breathing labored now, redirected the ley energies, again and again. Dim awareness that to the north, cracks had formed in the Spider. That the Lizard was pulling apart. The Monkey, with its infinitely spiraling tail, shattered. I’m defacing works of art over a thousand years old, and I do not care, Trennus thought, grimly. Because no one has the right to use them for this.
The tower fractured as the ground itself tore asunder. The walls split apart, like the petals of a flower, flinging themselves to the trembling earth, and a rain of debris flew out. Old, shaped stone fragmented and struck Kanmi’s shields, which flared into life on impact, stealing the kinetic energy of the rock, and redirecting that power into the shields themselves. A brilliant golden light exploded from the center of the tower itself, rising like a star, and a scream filled the air around them, wordless and joyous and fierce, all at once. Ley-energy, tied to the center of the tower, rebounded. Five pre-disposed paths, radiating outwards to five towers, and a shockwave pulsed along each, traveling hundreds of miles in an instant. What they’d do when they reached their destination, Trennus didn’t know. Any man-made system should have safety protocols. Backups. But the primary systems might fail.
Trennus couldn’t focus on any of it. At the moment, he was the earth. He was part of the ground, and the ground was buckling. Heaving. Twisting. Trying to move more. Further. Half the valley wanted to be two miles further south than it currently was, and the other half wanted to be two miles further east, and he couldn’t let them take the paths that should, by rights, require millennia to unfold. He dispersed the seismic energy, poured ley into it, and flattened the sine-wave that was the motion in the ground before dropping to his knees, panting. “I think,” he told Kanmi, wiping sweat off his face, “that I may . . . just have wrestled with the earth.”
“Did you win?” Kanmi asked, looking around, wild-eyed.
“. . . not sure. I . . . think I accounted for everything. There might be aftershocks for a while. A couple of months. Gods. I . . . “ Trennus sagged back now, dizzy. “I’m . . . tired.”
The lights, which had lifted into the sky, red, blue, green, yellow, and violet, circled. Swayed. Formed patterns together . . . and then descended, lazily, as Mamaquilla and Cocohuay moved to the edge of the protective circle in which Trennus and Kanmi huddled. Trennus looked up, dazed, registering the lights, and his eyes went wide.
There were hundreds of them. Some, no more than amorphous balls of wispy light, like Lassair had been, with shadows that might have been the impression of eyes. Others were far more unambiguous. A stout, dwarf-like man with twisted, monkey-like features and moon-silver eyes threw back his head and laughed like a hyena, giving Trennus chills—he sounded like an alu-demon. A small, squat woman, with hair and eyes that were the green-brown of pond-water, and whose footprints were damp, no matter where she walked. Another woman, who, like Diana of Ephesus, had dozens, if not hundreds of breasts, as she danced free of the ground. Coniraya, Copacati, Mamallpa! Mamaquilla cried out. Trennus put a shaking hand to his face. These were gods. Lesser gods, certainly, but still orders of magnitude more powerful than ordinary spirits. And the others . . . he could feel them, outside the protective circle. Many were beneficent. A chorus of voices in his mind. Each telling him their story, till he thought he might go mad of it.
. . . they worshipped me, they loved me, they bound me here hundreds of years ago, and then they forgot my Name and came no more to dance along my Lines . . . I am Ozcollo, the spirit of the great hunting cat, and I owe you a debt . . . call my Name . . . .
. . . they sang my Name and gave me praises when the winds were good and the rains came, and then the land dried up and the crops failed and the people left, and left me here, alone, trapped. They did not take me with them, even in their hearts. They left me imprisoned for so long, and now you are here, and I thank you, human. I am Taruca, the deer, who roams the crags . . . know me, say my Name, and I will requite you for your service . . . .
. . . free, free, free, I danced too close to the Lines, and then they caught me, I thought I would go mad, cut off forever from the Veil. I am Aquana, water-spirit, and I will repay you. Know me! Know my Name!
. . . I would kill the ones who imprisoned me, I would spin webs of fire around them and lay eggs in their bellies that they would birth screaming, but they are all long since in their graves. But why should I not take my vengeance on their descendants—
I forbid this! Begone, Lilka!
On and on and on like this. Trennus fumbled out his grimoire, and, his hands shaking too much to write, burned each Name onto the pages with a whisper of ley-energy. Each time promising the spirits, I will remember you. I will remember you. You will not be alone. I will remember.
Trembling with exhaustion, as the last spirits dissolved once more on the wind, Trennus looked up. Lassair would rejoice, to know so many of her kin have been freed, he thought. No. She will rejoice. But we have to get to
her. “We need to go,” he said, dully. “We have to get to the others.”
Yes. Inti was not among those trapped here. He was not at the hub.
“Who was in the center tower?” Kanmi asked, sounding wary.
Mamallpa . . . goddess of crops and fertility. They wanted me, as a water goddess, in one of the other towers. Rage in that silver-black voice, like waves crashing. If he is anywhere, and I would have felt his death, for we two are bound . . . he must be where I cannot feel him. This tower to the south, where your others are bound? May hold him. The place is blank to my senses.
Trennus shook his head. Releasing the spirits was what Lassair would have wanted him to do. Now, all that mattered was getting to her. “How do we get to them?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. “Esh and I can’t fly.”
Kanmi helped Trennus to his feet, and out of the protective circle. Outside of its confines, Mamaquilla actually reached out and touched Trennus’ forehead with one large, gentle hand, and Trennus felt as if white light flooded through him, arcing from his head to his feet. Almost more than he could bear, and it touched the place in him where his soul tied to Lassair. Peace, young one. The one whom you serve still lives. And I will take you to her. I will take us all.
A part of him wanted to protest the word serve, but it wasn’t important now. A moon-white pool coalesced around their feet, at first as evanescent as a cloud, but as Trennus and Kanmi both shifted uncomfortably, the energy seemed, somehow, to solidify. Became material, though Trennus could feel energy in it, still. “Ah . . . what’s this?” Kanmi asked, uneasily, as the circle’s edges pulled up, encircling all of them, sealing them inside a perfectly white, opaque orb. Kanmi reached out and put a hand to the soft, faintly yielding, glowing surface and asked, again, his eyes going a little wild, “What’s this?”
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