She eased open the door and descended into the hushed space. The gambling tables below were empty, but the square firepits still smoldered, enough to warm the large room. The rich scent of tobacco lingered, too, sweetening the air. She felt a flutter of despair. What if Denaochi wasn’t here? What if she had been wrong?
She found him on the interior balcony. He was sitting on a bench, his back against the wall, hands gripping a long-handled club that lay across his lap. He looked as he had before: thin, to the point of gaunt, black hair razored to skin above his ears and greased back above the temples. An old knife scar ran from ear to nose across one cheek, and thick chunks of jade pierced his ears and below his bottom lip. Bands of coral and turquoise encircled his neck, and his porcupine mantle was slung across the bench beside him. Dark eyes stared at her, and she hesitated.
But she had come so far, and he had put her through so much. She did not hesitate for long.
“I passed your test, you damned monster,” she growled.
His eyes focused, and she realized he had been asleep. Asleep with his eyes open. He yawned, and then his mouth tipped in a genuine grin.
“Nara,” he said, his voice rough. “I never doubted.”
She did not strike him as she wanted to, but when she spoke, her voice shook with rage. “You left me there for dead, and then you made me crawl through all seven hells to reach you.”
He gestured dismissively. “I needed to make sure you wanted it.”
“Wanted what?”
Now she moved toward him, hand balled into a fist. She swung. He caught her intended blow before she could connect.
His voice was a resentful hiss. “Life! If I did it, I knew you could, too.”
It took her a moment to understand what he meant, and when she did, it stopped her anger cold. “Why? Who?”
“It doesn’t matter now. It was long ago.” His laugh was low and haunted. “You made the crawl in half the time it took me. You have always been ambitious.”
The way he said it did not sound like a compliment, and she let it sit between them.
He dragged himself to standing and limped over to a nearby table. He seemed tired, the energy that had animated him on her previous visit reduced to dregs. He poured water from a clay vessel and proffered a cup. She drained the mug. He poured her another, keen eyes watching, but this one she sipped, feeling greedy under his judgmental gaze.
“Where is Zataya?” She looked down at her arm. Zataya’s blood still clung to her skin in flaking patches. “You would think she would be here to celebrate how well her witchcraft fared.”
“Not witchcraft,” he corrected. “Blood magic, she told me. Southern sorcery.”
Revulsion slithered up her spine, and for a moment she heard that voice again, the one that belonged to the man in the jaguar skin who had interrogated her in her dreams. Not a dream but a spell. Magic. Naranpa was so stunned at the insight that she could only gape.
“Your eyes. They’ve changed.”
“What?” She instinctively held a hand to her face, as if she could somehow feel what he meant.
“The brown is flecked with yellow. They weren’t like that before.”
“A trick of the light.” She sounded glib, but the place in her chest burned, and fear clawed at her belly. Was it magic that caused the burning feeling beneath her heart? Magic that made her palms glow and her eyes shine in the dark?
“Perhaps a trick of the light… or perhaps the aftereffects of the sorcery.”
She grimaced at how casually he articulated her fears.
“Tell me what’s happened in the world while I was buried in that tomb,” she said, desperate to talk about anything else. She did not want to consider the possibility that magic had transformed her. It scared her in a way she could not quite vocalize. “Was Eche invested as Sun Priest? Does Golden Eagle outright rule the celestial tower now? What of the other Sky Made? Have any asked about my absence?”
He looked at her a long moment, black eyes unreadable. “The Watchers are dead, Naranpa. The pretender and his allies were all slaughtered by an agent of Carrion Crow. Their betrayal of you is the only thing that kept you from the same fate. Your precious tower is no more.”
She stared, uncomprehending. She set her cup down, as if it were to blame for the miscommunication.
“Dead, Nara,” he repeated. “Your whole damn priesthood is dead.”
She swayed on her feet. “Impossible…”
“Not impossible if someone did it.”
“You misunderstand, Brother. How dead if I planned to kill them myself?” She meant it as a joke, but it was bitter and dark in her mouth, a poor substitute for the irrational grief that was building like a tidal wave inside her. The exhaustion that the stimulant had been holding back flooded over her all at once, and she hunched over, head in hands.
“Who?” she asked.
“It wasn’t the Odohaa. Oh, the other clans say it was. They blame the cultists, and the matron for not controlling them. They even blame the Shield captain, her brother. But there were witnesses who saw what happened on Sun Rock.”
“Who?” she asked again, more urgent.
He shrugged, a sharp jerk of one shoulder, and Naranpa realized he was scared. Here was the reason he slept with a club in his hands and his eyes open.
“They say it was a single man, but the details differ, as such stories always do. They say he was twice as tall as a normal man, and great black wings rose from his back. That he bore the haahan, and they crawled with shadow. Shadow that he commanded like you or I might command a pet or a child. That he wept blood and darkness, and he killed many with only a word.”
“Shadow magic?”
“Some flavor of magic. They say god magic.”
“I always thought of magic as a form of trickery,” she admitted. “An herb that paralyzes or confuses, some sleight of hand done with lights and mirrors. Oh, I know the theories well enough. Magic comes from the remnants of the gods left behind. It emanates from their very bones and fossilized flesh. But this? A living, breathing god, not the remains of ones gone a thousand years. Do you believe it?”
He nodded, his face grim.
“It sounds like a fool’s tale.”
Some emotion passed over his face that she couldn’t read. “Then call me a fool, Sister, for I believe the crow god has been reborn.”
Things were moving very quickly. She wasn’t sure how long she had been in that tomb, or how many hours it had taken to crawl her way out, but she knew she had been rebirthed into a world very different from the one she had left. She still had not quite processed Denaochi’s ill tidings, but she understood enough to realize the Tova she knew was no more. And she did not know what to make of the Crow God Reborn, if that truly was what he was. If he lingered in the city, was he still a threat? Would he come for her, too? And if he did, what defenses did she have? She needed allies. It would not do to alienate her only one, no matter how she felt about him at the moment. And yet…
Her voice held all the weariness and grief that weighed upon her. “I am not so sure, Ochi. Perhaps I am not ready to be called a fool.”
His eyes widened, and she knew exactly what he was thinking. He already considered her foolish. She could not stop the laugh that escaped her lips, sharp and slightly hysterical, because he was right. She was a fool. An exasperatingly naive, overly trusting, and entirely lucky fool. The memory of her naivete in believing she could convince the other priests to do better, to be better by virtue alone, was almost comical now but no worse than what had truly happened. She would never have characterized her betrayal as luck, but what else could it be? She had survived, and they had not. A fool’s blessing disguised as a curse.
Denaochi was staring at her as if she were mad.
Very possibly, Brother. Very possibly.
He shrugged. “Time will tell which of us is right. In the meanwhile, there are beds here, and water to wash yourself. Why don’t you rest? Afterward, I’ll take you to Zataya. We will devise a way to survive the storm. We have already beaten the odds.”