“Repaying a debt, as an old friend of Elijah.” His dreadlocks had grayed, and his face looked more leathery. A man who always braved the elements. A man who had always stood by her father. “You go listen?”
Dihana bit her lip. This was irregular. “Okay. Go ahead.” She did her best to ignore the death by her feet.
Haidan turned to the mongoose-man by the inside of the door. “Bring them two we got over here.” He folded his arms.
Dihana shook her head, impatient with his cryptic approach. “Last time we met, Haidan”—just after Elijah had died and she’d been struggling to handle her new responsibilities with no time for grieving—“you said you’d honor the contract between the city and the mongoose-men. That you always would protect us. Why couldn’t you have just asked me what you needed done in the city. It’s suspicious when mongoose-men start just showing up in the city in numbers.” A mongoose-man pushed two men with burlap sacks over their heads through the door.
“Shut the door,” Haidan ordered. The door squealed and slammed shut. Dihana flinched. She’d made a mistake, gotten trapped. The Haidan she knew as a child would never have done this. But things changed. Hundreds of mongoose-men had actually come inside the city tonight. Maybe alliances were being made in the dark behind her back.
“The ragamuffins know where I am,” Dihana said. Haidan had encouraged her when she’d struggled to run the city after Elijah had died. She wanted to say she felt sorry he no longer felt she was the best choice for prime minister. She hoped this new Haidan would exile her somewhere pleasant, and that the bush hadn’t changed him enough for him to kill her.
Haidan frowned. His locks swayed as he shook his head. “Don’t be silly,” he growled. She’d read him wrong. “Them man can’t even test with me mongoose. I don’t want the city, we protecting it. Me and you, we go have to reason things out. Things happening.”
Dihana almost shuddered with relief. Deep inside, she hadn’t believed, couldn’t believe, that Haidan would do such a thing. The mongoose-man stopped in front of them and ripped the burlap sacks away from the two men’s heads. Dihana stared at them.
“You’re familiar,” she whispered. She hadn’t seem them since she’d become prime minister. Councilmen. They’d all abdicated the Council, disbanding it when she came to power, leaving her confused and without any help except for Haidan. They’d hoped she’d fail, she knew, and that they could return to run Capitol City.
But she hadn’t failed. And they’d remained in hiding all this time.
Dihana looked down more closely at the corpses. Two she recognized as other Councilmen from her father’s circle. The other three: poorly dressed farmers. Or maybe shopkeepers in work clothes. Haidan caught her eyes when she looked back up. The two Councilmen shuffled nervously.
“Them two claim they was here to meet a Vodun priestess,” Haidan said.
“She a trap for we,” the nearest man said. He glared at Dihana, and she looked back at Haidan.
“This ain’t no Loa doing.” Haidan shook his head. “Is Azteca.”
“They don’t look like Azteca,” she said.
“When you promise a desperate man gold, land, woman, power, whatever, he would do anything. Even against his own people. This ain’t the first Councilman we find dead. Seen many more outside Capitol City.” Haidan looked at the two nervous Councilmen. “More go die if them keep try hiding.”
“Why?” The Councilmen had hidden themselves well enough all this time.
“Azteca activity like nothing before. And we lose communication with Mafolie Pass. Them dead quiet. Street whispering say any Councilman head go be repaid in it own weight in Azteca gold. So them Councilmen need you, Dihana. They ain’t go say so, but they need you bad.” He looked at her.
Dihana let the pause hang between them all. Let them stand and fidget for a few seconds, she thought. Haidan folded his hands over his belt buckle and waited. He could be fully trusted, she thought, though she wondered why he hadn’t come to talk to her before any of this. Dihana turned to the two Councilmen. “Get to the Ministry building. We have space for you. Call all the other Councilmen you can in.”
They stood still. Maybe they thought there was some negotiation to be hammered out between them.
“If you smart,” Haidan ended any such thought, “you go do it.”
The two Councilmen looked down at the dead men by their feet. “We accept,” the one nearest Dihana said, the words forced. “But we expect to stay in the East Wing rooms.” The best rooms in the Ministry.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Dihana said as Haidan shouted orders to reopen the doors. Two mongoose-men and some ragamuffins led the Councilmen down the street from the door.
Haidan turned to Dihana. “Still got time?”
“Yes.” Dihana looked down at the bodies. “But not here.”
“Fair enough,” Haidan said. “Ministry?” Dihana noticed, for the first time, the powder marks on Haidan’s right hand. He looked down, rubbed the hand against his thick pants, and shrugged.
“Yes. Yes, that would be good,” Dihana said.
Capitol City’s walls towered above the rooftops, taller than anything anyone in the city could build. A reminder, always, of the secrets Dihana’s ancestors died with. Only they could have built something like Capitol City. The great amphitheater-shaped city perched on the rocky peninsula’s end created a natural harbor inside its protective walls and housed Dihana’s hundred thousand fellow city dwellers. Just outside, an ever-shifting population tended to farms and grain depots that supplied Capitol City. To secure a fast and constant supply of food, Dihana had presided over the construction of train tracks, the Triangle Tracks, that extended out 250 miles from the city. She wasn’t sure how many villages or towns had sprung up along those tracks, but one of her projects included a new census that would start among the towns and villages along the tracks and into the bush, all the way down the dirt roads and coasts to the Wicked Highs. But the planning for that was just beginning.
The Ministry building had the only real park inside Capitol City, a long, rectangular green spit that extended until it stopped in front of the waterfront warehouses. Dihana and Haidan walked the road back to the Ministry building, the park with its shadows and shifting trees on their right. On their left the city’s buildings blazed with lights from their windows, supplied from the proliferation of electric cables that draped between them like jungle vines.
They walked two blocks in silence. Haidan’s mongoose-men remained at the warehouse taking care of the bodies, and Dihana had ordered the ragamuffins back to their nightly patrols.
Haidan nodded at the two ragamuffins standing watch when they passed through the Ministry’s gates.
“Someone waiting for you,” the ragamuffin on her right said. “By the step them.”
“Mother Elene,” Haidan said, pointing out the Vodun priestess who sat waiting for them.
Mother Elene stood up, her shaved head gleaming in the light as she raised her chin. Gold earrings flashed near the knotted handkerchief around her neck. “Thank you, General, for your warning.”
Haidan nodded, then stepped back, watching both Dihana and Mother Elene with interest. “Me, Mother Elene, and them Councilmen were invite to come talk at that warehouse.”
“We think the Azteca were hoping to set we against you, Dihana,” Mother Elene said. She smiled and glided past Dihana with a rustle.
“And now you’re leaving, just like that?” Dihana had clenched her hands into fists. She opened them.
Mother Elene paused just behind her. “Maybe time come for we speak again. The Loa wish it. You?”
The city’s gods, the Loa, had opposed Dihana’s leadership along with the Councilmen. Only instead of hiding as the men had, they had continually critiqued and opposed her decisions through their priestesses all throughout the city. They had opposed the expedition she’d created to explore the north lands, and they’d resisted her creating the Preservationists, who scoured the city a
nd the lands for insight into their past, and the past’s technologies.
“Why the change?” Dihana finally asked, but got no answer. Mother Elene had left.
Haidan put a hand on Dihana’s shoulder. “Come.” Instead of heading for the large steps up to the storm doors, he turned right. “I want show you something where the light don’t shine so.”
“I used to do that with Dad.”
“Yeah. Back then.” Haidan followed the hibiscus bushes inside the wrought-iron gate. “A lot change since then.”
Dihana sighed. “You don’t think I did things right?”
“Dihana.” Haidan shook his head. “The airship you sell me mongoose, that alone worth all the trouble you stir up.” He stopped. “You know Elijah and I disagree a lot, back then?”
“No,” Dihana said. “It would have been nice to have heard that, at some point.” Haidan sat down on a stone bench. Dihana sat next to him and folded her arms. “You left me just like the Councilmen did. But at least you didn’t hide.” Haidan had continued taking the mongoose-men defense taxes, purchased weapons from the city, and sent telegrams from wherever he hid in the bush. The Councilmen had just disappeared. “I had to deal with the Loa alone—”
Haidan interrupted with a snort. “Dealt? You cut them out of any chance to direct the city. Instead of keeping them close, you push them away. Now they doing everything from deep in the dark where you blind.”
“They lied to my father, Haidan.” She’d had every right to deny the manipulative Loa their demands that she cease building airships, or their order that she stop helping fund a fishing fleet, or that she shouldn’t allow villages and farms to grow along the tracks. The Loa agenda was to keep them stuck in a fallow state.
“You think he didn’t know that? Girl—”
“I am no girl, mongoose-general.” Dihana glared at him. Haidan rubbed his nose and looked down at the ground. “The Loa promised him things they could not deliver. Could never deliver. And they strung him along with those promises.”
“I know, Dihana.” Haidan stood up with a grunt. “I tell him so, often enough. But Elijah say that using old metal technology would doom us, like it had doom everyone in his time. He insist the only way for we survive is for we adapt the Loa organic knowledge. We had to grow we weapon, not hammer out the metal.”
“I changed that.” Dihana had created the Preservationists, a society of people who dug up everyone’s past and investigated it, found things. “It was not a mistake. We have better rifles, better airships, steam, all no thanks to the Loa.”
“I know. I had ask you dad for something like what you doing now.” Haidan took her arm and she stood up. “Even though I was Elijah’s closest man, he never agree with me there.”
“Dad’s closest man.” Dihana closed her eyes. “How come you were never mine?”
“Trust me, Dihana, you did fine. I had mongoose-men to look after, I had to make sure we was strong, that Azteca couldn’t cross the Wicked Highs, couldn’t mess with the city. I couldn’t be here the same for you as I had for you father. Until now.”
“Now?”
Haidan put his arm around Dihana’s shoulder and turned her around, pointed up into the sky at the Spindle. “It’s changing, Dihana. Did you father ever tell you about that? What that mean?”
“Yes.” Dihana looked down at the grass. Her father had taken her out on this same piece of lawn once and told her about the Spindle. “The two jets that come out of either side have stopped. No one can see that with their naked eye yet.” When Elijah had taken a young Dihana outside, he’d explained that no one in Nanagada understood the stars anymore. All that knowledge had been lost and he couldn’t re-create the science. The Loa had counseled him not to.
But he’d been insistent that she understand something about the Spindle. It wasn’t just something pretty in the sky, he said. It had been the path to Nanagada from all the other worlds, as legend hinted.
“Elijah tell me if the Spindle ever shrink, all hell breaking loose,” Haidan said. “He said Azteca believe gods go come through it when it ‘stabilized.’”
Dihana nodded. “He told me that too.” That was why she had Preservationists scanning the Spindle with telescopes.
“I been preparing all the mongoose for fighting.”
“I increased the size of the ragamuffins.”
Haidan looked back down at the garden. Dihana looked around at the hibiscus bushes and their shadows. They seemed to hide dangerous things now, and she wanted to go back inside.
“I go stay here in the city.” Haidan walked her back toward the building. “We all need to work together. We go need to figure out what the Azteca doing. What trouble they causing.”
“I’ve been ordering more things built,” Dihana said. “Airships, larger guns … ever since I realized.”
Haidan gave her hand a brief squeeze, and Dihana remembered Haidan picking her up and holding her in the air when she was a girl. “I should have come and talk to you sooner.”
“Yes,” Dihana said.
“We probably need the Councilmen too. See if we can figure out what they have the Azteca want.”
“We need more of your men back here in the city. If you can’t contact Mafolie Pass, that might mean Azteca are trying to attack it right now.”
“I know,” Haidan murmured. “Trust me, I know.”
As they reached the steps, Dihana looked at Haidan. “Are you worried?”
Haidan tapped his boots on the stone. “Wicked nervous. Something dangerous going on. I feel that in me bones. But at least we ain’t go work across each other.” He sighed. “Got a lot of thing for me arrange, moving headquarter back this direction, getting more fact-them out the bush, but I go be in close touch, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And, Dihana?”
“Yes?”
“You know me long enough to call me Edward, you know?” Haidan turned around and walked off toward the gates.
“You haven’t quite earned that back just yet,” Dihana said. But he was too far away to hear her.
CHAPTER SIX
Jerome was having trouble getting to sleep, so Shanta sat by his bed. “A tale? Is a tale you want?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
She smiled. John melted back into the kitchen and made a sandwich.
“Okay then,” Shanta said. “I see, I bring, but I ain’t responsible.” Her voice dropped, and her accent thickened a bit. The way Brungstunners spoke was fluid. It changed depending on whom they talked to, and how they felt. John sounded different. People in Brungstun called him northsounding, yet that wasn’t it. Up north in Capitol City everyone still sounded like people in Brungstun, just not as heavy, whereas John sounded as if he’d grown up away from them all. Though, the longer he was around Shanta, the more he sometimes tried to sound like her. Usually it was when he was relaxed, not trying to.
Shanta began her tale.
“A long time ago, all we old-father them had work on a cold world with no ocean or palm tree. It was far, far from this world. It was far, far from them own world, call Earth! They had toil for Babylon. In return, Babylon oppress many people. And eventually them Babylon-oppress people ran away looking for a new world, a world far from any other world so they could be left alone.
“All sorts of people left. Some pale-looking man like Frenchi and Bridish come. And there was Afrikan. And there was Indian. Carib. Chinee. All of them had join up for the long, long voyage. All color of skin leave. Year and year and year them travel till they had discover this sweet world we live on, just like all the original island on Earth. Here were some cool wind and easy sun.
“Them old-father had some massive power. They find a worm’s hole in the sky between all them other world to get here. And when they wiggle through them hole, they had fly down from the sky to land here and begin a new life, free from oppression.
“But the evil Tetol come in from other worm’s holes that had been all around for long time. You see, the Tetol is d
angerous, nasty things, who want to rule and own we all. But some other great being, the Loa, weren’t evil, but help and guide we against the Tetol …”
The original ragamuffins would save the day, John knew. The ancestors of the ragamuffins of today who policed towns and kept civil order. The ragamuffins flew out in giant airships to destroy the worm’s holes and cut this world off from further Tetol invasion. Yet the ragamuffins had not been able to destroy the Tetol on the ground. The Tetol created the Azteca and made them a fearful warrior race.
Thinking about the Azteca’s masters wandering unchecked over the world disturbed John. It reminded him of their airships flying near Brungstun. He stepped out onto the shaded porch and watched the sun slip behind the brown boulders.
Shanta tiptoed out behind him and lit a lamp. “Good day?”
John nodded and slipped an arm around her waist. “Yeah. Looking forward to carnival tomorrow.”
Shanta chuckled. The final sliver of sun slipped behind the boulders in time with a faint scraping noise from behind the house.
“Thunder?” John asked. The eaves blocked their view.
Shanta shook her head. “No.” She stepped off the porch and lifted her skirt above her ankles. “Something different. Come.”
John followed her out and around behind the house, where the Wicked Highs loomed large over the tall trees. The sound got louder. Branches snapped and cracked. Three seagulls flew away with loud protests. John wondered if he should get a machete, or maybe one of his guns from the cellar.
“Shanta,” he yelled. She’d already reached the edge of the bush around the house. Her determined form stepped barefoot around the pricker bush and hibiscus. “Damn.” He picked his way around the same bush. Mud oozed up between his toes.
“John. Up in here.”
He followed her voice to a large mango tree and looked up. Silver fabric draped between the branches. A small airship lay spread over several mango tree canopies, the tip poking out through the tree closest to their house. A harness dangled from between a nook in the branches farther back, a man struggling in it.
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