Balam calmly stepped forward and slid the knife into the man’s belly. He jerked upward until he hit bone. The thief gasped, the purse falling from his hands. Cacao scattered across the stone floor, cascading down the altar steps. The thief beat feeble fists against Balam’s chest. He ignored it, lifting the man to lay him on the altar. He stepped back and watched as that brazenness that he had admired drained from the thief’s eyes.
Then he got to work, first collecting the fresh blood in his clay cup. When he had enough, he dipped his fingers into the bowl and painted vertical lines on the bottom half of his face. Then his palms and the soles of his feet. When he was ready, he placed the mirror on the ground and poured blood across its surface. He chanted the words to call forth the shadow. A circle opened before him as if reflecting off the mirror. The gateway was a bubbling darkness, frost sizzling and cracking along its boundaries. He hoped he was correct, and the thief’s blood would ease his way through the shadow world and, if not, that the offering of the thief on the jaguar altar would make his ancestors look kindly upon his journey. He slung the sack over his shoulder, whispered his destination, and stepped into the darkness…
… and out into his own private rooms, gasping. He dropped the sack and collapsed. His skin was glazed with a thin layer of ice, and his breath puffed white before him. He dragged a nearby blanket from his bed and wrapped it around himself. He lay there, shuddering, unable to do more until, finally, he began to thaw.
Once he felt himself, he made his way to an adjacent room where a steam bath already awaited him. He cleaned the blood and shadow from his skin and donned a simple pair of pants cut in the northern style. He called for a servant, who came immediately.
“I am not to be disturbed,” he explained, as he arranged the table in front of him: an abalone shell, a brick of copal, a small wooden box, and, next to it, his new acquisition. “It is very important. Do you understand?”
“Of course, Lord.”
“Not by anyone,” Balam insisted. “The other lords, my mother, and certainly not my damnable cousin.”
His cousin, who had once been called Tiniz but had kept the honorific Powageh as xir name since returning from Obregi, had been haunting his doorstep. Balam was not interested in what his cousin had to say, what case xe wished to plead on Saaya’s son’s behalf. Frankly, he thought his cousin compromised, addled by age and sentiment. Powageh had always loved Saaya to unhealthy extremes, and it seemed now xe had transferred xir affections to her son. Understandable, he supposed, if a bit shortsighted. Powageh had waxed on about guilt, of all things. How the boy didn’t deserve his fate, how in the end Powageh had had second thoughts.
Balam had listened to his cousin that day as long as he could before exasperation forced his tongue. “Have you forgotten what we do here? We are breaking worlds, realigning the very course of the heavens. We manipulate powers not seen in three hundred years, no, a thousand. Against all odds, all reason, Saaya rebirthed a god, and now you wish to insult him with your mawkishness?”
“We raised him up only to die for our schemes.”
“Would that the whole of humankind had such divine purpose!”
“But we did not even ask if it was what he wanted.”
Balam had scoffed. “We made him a god, Cousin. He is not a maiden deciding which dress best suits her eyes. He was a weapon, and a fine one at that.” And by now, he would have slain the Watchers, thrown the sun from its course over Tova, and ushered in a new era.
Yes, Serapio had done his part. Now it was time for Balam to do his.
He opened the book and began to read.
The dreaming minds of all human beings are open to you, but the dreams of the creatures—furred, finned, and feathered—will remain closed. They dream in a different world from ours.
“Well enough,” he murmured. He had not thought to manipulate birds and beasts, anyway.
You may eat the godflesh whole, but it is better to make a tea of it. One cup may keep you in the dreamworld half the day and will exhaust you upon your return. It is best only to Walk when another spearmaiden can watch over your corporeal form.
Ah, yes. The spearmaidens who practiced this forbidden magic had always been paired. Well, that was not an option now. He read on.
It is best to begin with inquiry into the victim’s mind. Once you are confident, you may begin to plant thoughts and desires and return again and again to cultivate their growth. You cannot kill outright in a dream, but you may convince the victim to harm themselves or others because their dream demands it. Beware! It is a delicate thing to manipulate minds. Do not get entangled.
He read all day and well into the night, not eating or sleeping, and his household did as instructed and did not disturb him. So many warnings of death and madness coupled with promises of power beyond imagining. Balam suspected the author had been quite mad herself by the time she committed the magic to writing. But the text was all that was left of the practice; no dreamwalkers were known to have survived the purge that came after the signing of the Treaty of Hokaia.
He would be the first in an era, and he was ready.
He lit the copal and fanned it until it burned steadily, filling the room with sacred smoke. He donned the regalia of his station, similar to what he had worn to the temple, but now his cloak was rare white jaguar skin, and he wore white shell around his neck and in his ears and nose. He extinguished the lanterns, leaving the room in semidarkness, the moon through high windows the only light.
He took the godflesh from the small wooden box he had set on the table. He ate a piece the size of his fingernail and settled himself onto the cushions to wait. He did not wait long. The dreamworld opened to him. He marveled at its beauty, and at its terror.
And Balam went hunting.
CHAPTER 2
CITY OF TOVA (THE CROW ROOKERY) YEAR 1 OF THE CROW
Within even the smallest act of love lives the potential for a miracle.
—The Obregi Book of Flowers
The Odo Sedoh dreamed, and in his dreams, he was legion.
He was black-winged murder flying over a vast sea. He was the bloodthirsty havoc of beak and talon. He was the stately flock that wheeled over a city stained by injustice.
He became the shout of a thousand prayers on a thousand lips. He became a prophecy of revenge. He became the blossoming shadow that engulfed a sun.
He was Crow who then became the slaughter.
Serapio screamed and screamed and screamed and—
Gentle hands shook him, and his eyelids involuntarily fluttered open. But all was shadow, as it had been since he was twelve. His nose filled with the scent of crows. He felt the rough scratch of quills against his back. A voice called out concern for the Odo Sedoh.
I’m alive!
And then he was falling, falling… back into his dreams.
Dream morphed to memory, and memory took on shape and form.
He remembered speaking his true name under the black sun, and how it had shattered him.
He remembered that he had gone forward with staff and blade and become the whirlwind.
His remembered his hands had grown slick with blood, and his ears had filled with the cries of the dying. And standing amid the chaos he had wrought, he had exulted.
And then he remembered he had been thwarted. The Sun Priest who was his nemesis, her death his very purpose, was not there. She had been replaced by an impostor. Some fool wearing the mask and vestments of priesthood but lacking the essence of a god. The Odo Sedoh had slain the deceiver, his rage so dark that he barely registered the sweep of his knives separating neck and head.
And then the crow god had fled, and his body had begun to fail.
As it was meant to.