New Suns Read online

  The wisewives head to a dark corner of the barracks, passing crowded bunks full of women chanting softly. As they walk by, the women fall silent and then resume praying after they pass, an exhalation that carries them aloft like a murmuration. Citlal is glad that they haven’t reached the portion of the rites where they’ll sing of the Obsidian Butterfly.

  Once the three women reach the vacant bit of floor against the western wall that Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal have claimed as workspace, they sit down in a triangle, propped on knees bent, legs underneath them. They are as alone as they can be in the stuffed barracks; the women berthed in the near bunks have all moved away to the other side of the building to give them respectful privacy, or out of fear of their power.

  Ce-Mishtlin pulls a sheet of soft brown codex bark-paper out from underneath her grey smock and places it between them. The camp sub-commander had drafted her to be his secretary and bedwarmer. Unwelcomed but useful, the positions give Ce-Mishtlin access to some supplies and news from outside the camp, which is how they learned that the purge was coming.

  Yoal lays three steel pins next to the sheet of paper. They’re mismatched hatpins stolen from the sorting lines. One has a brass butterfly for a head, another a coral bead, and the third has a cloisonné sun in blue-green, a turquoise solar disc worked against a black background. A symbol of the People’s faith, it must have belonged to a pious woman. Citlal opens the blue silk purse and sets it down next to the other items, careful that the earth and ashes don’t spill.

  They prepare the sheet of the bark-pulp paper first, taking turns with a small, sharp letter opener that Ce-Mishtlin stole to create a lacy cutout frame a couple of finger’s breadth from the edge of the sheet. Then, they join hands and wills to charge the sheet with potential and promise, and link it to the other items. It’s the simplest part of the magic, linking an object to another so that they entwine fates. It’s legitimate, even sanctifying, as when the lawspeakers write out the marriage contracts for a new couple. The paper will bind whatever contract is written upon it with the other items.

  The pins are next. Ce-Mishtlin takes up the red-beaded one, Yoal the butterfly. Citlal’s lips compress briefly in hollow black humor at picking up the devout woman’s hatpin. Her grandmother, who was pious and god-fearing, had an obsidian pendant marked in the same way. Citlal accepts her own apostasy.

  The women murmur words of binding, followed by a kitchen prayer of blessing, and each pricks her wrist with her pin, a minor bloodletting so the red blood beads up and coats the steel stem. A moment later, the pins gleam bright again, the blood absorbed into their metal hearts. Each pin is now an instrument of the will of the wisewife who fed it her blood. This magic is ambivalent in the eyes of the lawspeakers...and as such, forbidden.

  Moving quickly to slay doubt or fear, Citlal commits to the next, darker working, and stabs her still-bleeding wrist with her pin to make the blood flow freely. She grits her teeth against the pain and places her wrist above the purse to let the blood stream into the thirsty earth and ashes. Yoal and Ce-Mishtlin do the same. This willing sacrifice of blood and life force is deeply profane and terribly unwise outside of the safe and sanctified bounds of the destroyed Temple Major. They keep their wrists there until the blood stops flowing. When they remove their wrists, their skins are whole and clean; each bears only a faint scar.

  Inside the silk purse, the earth and ash and blood are liquid, a black ink that smells incongruously of hearth smoke and mortuary incense as it slowly churns with the power the women channel from the death of the year and the dark between the stars and their beating hearts. What’s writ in this ink will be inscribed upon the world. The stories the wisewives teach one another say that this knowledge was shared by the Tzitzimimeh when they danced out of the void. It happened long ago, before the Bone Women gave up their lives so that their stillborn younger brother could become the Living Lord. The magic is grim, and all the more so for the ashes of those who were once their kin.

  Citlal chants the first line of the wise-work, and Ce-Mishtlin repeats it as Citlal starts the second, and Yoal joins the round as Citlal reaches the third line.

  Each chants the song three times through, and as Yoal’s voice finishes ringing out on the last phrase, the three jab their pins into the night’s blood. There’s a small glimmer like faint starlight and slowly the inky stuff is absorbed by the pins in the same way as their blood was. The hatpins can write in the language of the world now, each stylus an instrument of dark and needful magic. Outside, the night wind howls, in fury or approval, and then shushes as if silenced.

  Citlal looks at her sister-magicians and sees the exhaustion she feels mirrored in their faces. Yoal’s face droops, wrinkled more deeply than before. Ce-Mishtlin is greyish, the dark brown of her complexion sallow and drained, the bruise on her cheekbone a vivid purple.

  There’s one more major part to the wise-work that’s left, which will have to wait until after the purge.

  It’s that portion of the wise-work, Citlal knows, that will damn them.

  Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal accept it, and so does she.

  THE PURGE IS quick.

  The Dawncomers are nothing if not efficient. In the late morning sun, old men, howling women, the remaining small children, girls who don’t look at the guards, boys who glare, men who aren’t broken quite enough—they all are chosen and pushed forward into ranks. In every camp, the Dawncomers form a line, raise their rifles, and shoot. Most of the soldiers aim for the head or heart, but a few enjoy taking gut shots.

  The prisoners don’t run—where would they hide, what darkness would cover them?

  Some of the People are defiant, looking straight into their murderers’ eyes. Others wail in despair. A few sing, the ancient doxology their last words:

  Hear the Living Lord: the Living Lord is God. The Living Lord lives!

  Thousands die.

  It cuts Quineltoc to watch, but he does it. He looked away once, and he can’t do so again. It’s part of his duty to bear witness, to acknowledge the beauty of the People’s faith and the Living Lord’s plans, even as it hurts his soul. Most of the People never speak directly with God, never hear His terrible reply, but every child of the People grows up believing that God will always hear that prayer.

  Hear the Living Lord: the Living Lord is God. The Living Lord lives!

  Quineltoc wills himself not to question, and repeats his prayer.

  AS THE RETORTS of the rifles sound across the camp, Citlal and Yoal and Ce-Mishtlin are mostly alone in Citlal’s barracks. Facing each other with hands linked one to one to one, the blank contract and the charged hatpin styluses in the middle, the three women raise their arms and sing out, capturing the power of the deaths of their murdered people and adding it to their joined will.

  In other camps, other wisewives do the same.

  None have any pretense that this is anything other than necromantic abomination, perhaps even an invitation to the skeletal Dead Sisters to come and claim them all. But it must be done if any of the magebloods—the sacred heart of the People—are to survive and make the People whole again.

  The Emperor has abandoned them, and the Living Lord has abandoned them, and the lawspeakers would rather the magebloods die unprofaned than take this step. But the women all spoke together through the night wind and the power of their own blood, and although a few wisewives dissented or abstained from condoning the plan, they concur: if God will not understand, what good is God?

  The power streams like silent black lightning, rising above them in a column of energy holding up the stars. Their faces are skull-like in that light, the littlest dead sisters. With a final unison shriek, they bring their arms down, and the power slashes down, too, concentrating on the paper and the pins.

  Written in a hand not any of theirs, the glyph for night appears on the sheet of codex paper. It’s the glyph of the Tzitzimimeh.

  Nodding in grim satisfaction, Citlal kneels to pick up her pin and wields it to write a word on the signed
contract. It’s the glyph for fire. It means life. The dry hatpin stylus leaves rich black ink behind, fathomless in its depth.

  The other wisewives write out the same glyph, Ce-Mishtlin in careful block marks as neat as a printed sign, Yoal in spidery, old-fashioned scribe’s hand.

  They based their wise-work on the story of Lotli, the lawspeaker who centuries ago defended the People in the outland jungle city of Braj against the persecution of a mad king. The People were wanderers then, having not yet reached the Land Between the Waters. Lotli animated a man of clay and wood to fight the king’s soldiers.

  Braj was a small city, the quarter assigned to the People easily defended by one protector. There were trees and plenty of clay on the shores of the river that ran through the city’s heart.

  The bare prison camps are each much larger than Braj, and have no clay.

  But the wisewives have other material at hand.

  IT’S WOMEN’S WORK to prepare the dead amongst the Dawncomers, just as it is amongst the People. No one notices that Citlal, Ce-Mishtlin, and Yoal are late to join the other women, and no one comments as they mark the bodies with their styluses. The black ink is just another stain, one more splatter, before it sinks past the skin and into the bones of the dead.

  The men keep laboring in the warehouses. A few are ordered to help the women drag the bodies into stacks. As thin as the corpses are, they pile comfortably, like cordwood.

  The dead lie there.

  One of the men, a young dropout from a kalmekak, the traditional schools of the law and magic, does notice Yoal marking the body of a half-blood musician who used to play trumpet in the capital symphony. He objects: “What are you doing? That’s—” but a look and a whispered word from Yoal render him mute. He may never talk again.

  The power the wisewives now carry is awful, equal parts terror and glory. Each might destroy a battalion with a gesture and four words, but she would die doing it. That could leave the Tzitzimimeh dancing free across the flesh of the land, limitless, and the magebloods would stay in the camps until the Dawncomers killed them all. And there are no guarantees: the Dawncomers integrate their tiny mechanisms into their bodies, their technology leaving them mostly spell-proof.

  Citlal knows that they are all a little drunk with the power. It’s headier than agave liquor after a fast. She could make the Dawncomers pay a steep blood price right now, but she knows that the power will grow if they wait. Each day that draws nearer to the Last Night before the Day of New Fire will increase their strength. Each night, unseen by human eyes, the Bone Women dance with greater frenzy. Pinpoint blooms of light burst and die in the wisewives’ dark eyes, and even the fiercest old women in the camps, who long for blood and vengeance, avoid meeting their gaze.

  Meanwhile, the dead lie there.

  THE DAYS PASS quickly, the weather turning colder. The thin barracks walls whistle when the wind blows. The chill keeps the stacked bodies from bloating, although watchful eyes would note that there has been no decay.

  Listening ears might hear a susurrus coming from the piles of the dead.

  The sound is a prayer.

  Any of the People could tell them it’s the song of the Obsidian Butterfly, but none of the Dawncomers notice it.

  “IT’S DONE, QUINELTOC,” Citlal tells him. Her voice is a little hoarse with strain.

  He’s not looking at his wife. He’s trying to take in the quality of the light. The sunlight is golden in the hour before sunset. Standing in the open gravel lot in the middle of the camp that the Dawncomers use for ranking up the prisoners, the light is beautiful. It’s the exact color of the dress Quineltoc’s daughter was wearing when they were herded onto the train cars, and it lends the dirty pall of the killing ground an unexpected dignity. Seen in a reflection of Shochi’s beauty, even this place is momentarily transformed for him.

  Then he understands Citlal’s words.

  A hole in the world opens under him, the shape of his faith, of his heart, of his daughter. He could feel the power moving on End-Year night, enormous, but he couldn’t read it. He recognized it as wisewife magic, beyond the bounds of orthodox knowledge.

  The power raised from the executions of their people had gone unnoticed in his own grief. Necromancy was so foreign to lawspeaker magic that he couldn’t have discerned its shape against the glare of souls departing.

  There is no way for him to stop it. The power Citlal has used is outside the scope of the law. The pact between the Living Lord and the People of the Starry Codex is broken. It must be.

  He blinks back tears—the light is still golden and is in his eyes—and says, “Thank you for telling me, Citlal.” Then he walks away back to the men’s barracks on the east side of the camp.

  The light remains golden until he reaches the barracks.

  LAST NIGHT FALLS; the Day of New Fire will begin with sunrise. The Living Lord will affix His divine glyph on the lists of the living and the dead after haggling with the Tzitzimimeh. The Dead Days will be over. Once, the new year’s first holy fires would have been kindled atop the Temple Major with crystal lenses under the noon sun.

  Citlal huddles for warmth with Ce-Mishtlin and Yoal in the twilight. They exchange tired hugs, then walk down the path to where the bodies of the murdered remain stacked. Ce-Mishtlin read orders that tomorrow the Dawncomers will make the prisoners take the corpses to the mechanical pyres. For so many reasons, tonight is the time to act.

  Ce-Mishtlin has had proud, sleepy word from the man whose bed she’s been forced to warm that the Hierophant himself is touring the camps and the reservations. The wisewives will be glad to receive him.

  QUINELTOC THE LAWSPEAKER stands in the entrance to his barracks, the wood-framed building creaking loudly in the sudden wind. He recognizes that the wind isn’t natural, that it’s the movement of numinous power reflected in the physical world. The Dawncomers claim that their cold technology prevents such things, but there is power and then there is power.

  Nothing in the course of the bitter years between their peoples would have prepared the Dawncomers for what is about to happen. They do not know the Tzitzimimeh.

  He hears the high sound of a single sustained note from across the camp. It shouldn’t carry that far, but it does. It’s the trained voice of a wisewife in full exercise of her magic. It’s Citlal, singing in a high, clear soprano. Quineltoc hears another voice join in, an alto harmonizing; Ce-Mishtlin, he thinks. Then, the crystalline clarity of Yoal’s voice, slightly deeper than Citlal.

  Wordless, the voices braid power between them. Quineltoc can’t see the energy the way he can see the glow of the lawspeaker script he uses to write his own magic, but it would be impossible for a trained magician not to register some sense of this. He crosses the threshold and walks toward the singing.

  He thinks he knows what to expect, but there’s no being ready for the sight of the corpses of their people rising and moving as if with their own volition. Each one, he can see, has been giving a bit of life, marked with the glyph for fire. He thought that Citlal had hoped to get him to animate protectors from whatever materials they could find or steal, but this...

  Quineltoc spies Citlal and her companions standing together, a sheet of codex bark-paper glowing to his lawspeaker’s vision. Even at a distance, he can read “fire,” life, inscribed upon it in three different hands. He stumbles when he sees the glyph for night. He recognizes the contract, and understands how the wisewives have been able to animate so many. The part of him that’s a scholar admires his wife’s genius. The part of him that insists he trust the Living Lord is afraid and wants to beg forgiveness for Citlal’s transgression.

  Dawncomer soldiers arrive in confused clumps, and don’t notice the three women in the midst of the chaos. When they realize that the milling crowd is made up of the murdered, they close ranks and ready their guns.

  The women’s song changes and shifts into the wordless melody of the song of the Obsidian Butterfly—the litany of deaths. It sounds like the music of s
keletons dancing.

  The animated People begin to walk toward the Dawncomers, their dead eyes shining with a cold starry light. The faces of the dead are grim: there is no burning revenge in their expressions, no glint of justice. There’s only enough life in them to make clear the certainty of death for the Dawncomers before them. Somewhere in the silence between heartbeats, a teasing ribbon of skeletal laughter is heard by everyone in the camp.

  Quineltoc wants to clamp his hands over his ears, but he knows that won’t stop the sound. He hears a frightened soldier call out to his foreign god and another cry out for his mother. Another starts to shoot at the closing crowd, releasing them all to do the same. They yell obscenities as they fire.

  The bullets do not stop the dead.

  One of the guards, a tall red-bearded man whom Quineltoc recognizes as a mostly decent man, for a killer, shakes his head in denial at what’s happening. The guard shoots the animated corpse of a woman marching toward him, but the bullets don’t stop her, nor does his wildly hammering rifle butt once he runs out of bullets. When she closes with the red man, she grasps him by the shoulder with one hand and throws him down. Rising up on his knees, the man keens in fear, but with a hooked strike, the woman rips his jaw away and his cries are lost in blood. A revivified child aids her with little hands that rip clothes, skin, intestines. Quineltoc wants to look away as his murdered folk begin tearing the soldiers apart, but he doesn’t. Eyes open, he focuses on his wife singing, audible to him over the soldiers’ screams.

  Lifetimes later, once the sounds of tearing flesh stop and the screaming ends, the raised dead move on, swifter now perhaps that they’ve tasted blood. They head toward the stream of Dawncomers attempting to get away. The usurpers don’t get far before the dead catch them.