The sky darkened, and stars by the thousands emerged from the deepening blue. The high roofs, palaces, and temples loomed like darker silhouettes, while beneath them, internally lit buildings cast yellow light from doorways, and along cracks in the walls.
Teaming Cahokia was a noisy place at this time of night, with wooden dishes being knocked together and ceramic pots clinking. The conversations around fires and evening meals made a constant, rising and falling cadence as he passed in the deepening gloom.
All this could vanish, torn apart by Walking Smoke and his perversion of the Spirit World.
But a half moon past, the notion would have seemed ludicrous. Cahokia had projected itself as eternal, invincible, and immortal due to its very size, and the sheer momentum of its existence. Like a giant rolling boulder, how could it be stopped? Any obstacle, Spiritual or physical, would be overwhelmed, inundated and smothered by the mass of the population and the flow of goods and energy.
Can Walking Smoke really resurrect Piasa’s souls inside his body?
The notion was a perversion of everything Seven Skull Shield considered to be right. Even seeing the Morning Star—if indeed that was the reincarnated god—didn’t contradict the inherent wrongness of Walking Smoke’s plan. Morning Star had been born human, or at least human shaped. But the Water Panther? Part lion, part snake, part bird? How did you stuff and entire Underworld Spirit creature like Piasa into a mortal human body?
It smacked of perversion unlike anything Seven Skull Shield had ever known. And, well, he’d known of a lot.
As he passed the guardian posts that marked the boundary of River Mounds City, he touched his forehead with a new-found reverence.
Despite the darkness, he turned off the Avenue of the Sun. He knew by heart the way through the mad warren of dwellings, society houses, granaries, and workshops. His only worry was tripping over something in the darkest shadows. He cut behind the Snapping Turtle Clan charnel house and surprised a pack of dogs that growled over some kind of carcass. They ran at his shouts and clapping hands, dragging their prize away.
Winding among houses and cramped gardens, he rounded River House’s hickory oil warehouses and ducked under their elevated corn granaries. A thousand mice—all right, maybe a hundred—skittered away in the darkness.
He called greetings and waved as he made his way around small evening fires that flickered beneath ramadas attached to craftsmen’s houses, and sidestepped the latrine screens out back. Cutting past a firewood warehouse, he stepped out onto the winding main trail that wound along the levee crest. Enough people passed here, coupled with light from the occasional fire, to allow a quicker progress.
A crackling fire burned outside Crazy Frog’s large, three-room, two-story house. Before it, on one side, in ranks according to status, sat Crazy Frog’s four wives, seven sons, and eight daughters. Across from them reclined no less than six tattooed, athletic-looking men. Oiled skin reflected in the light, expensive aprons on their waists, and their hair was coifed and pinned with shell, copper, and colorful feathers.
These were the lucky chunkey players who had been fortunate enough to be invited to Crazy Frog’s nightly feast. Just behind them, kneeling in the shadows, sat a line of well-dressed and—though Seven Skull Shield couldn’t make out their features—undoubtedly beautiful women. Such attractive and ornamental young females swarmed around successful chunkey players like moths around a blaze. Some could almost be classed as professionals, the others just opportunistic.
“Greetings, all,” Seven Skull Shield called, stepping into the firelight. “The best of the evening and Morning Star keep you.” He produced the chunkey stone. “I have some business with Crazy Frog.”
The oldest of the wives, Mother Otter, a tall woman wearing a white-fox cape Traded down from the far north, rose, studied him thoughtfully, and tilted her head toward the dark passage leading behind the house.
“My husband is in the back. Announce yourself at the storehouse door. You know the way, Seven Skull Shield.”
He touched his chin respectfully, giving her a private wink. For years he’d tried unsuccessfully to wiggle his way into her bed; she’d never given him anything more encouraging than a mocking smile.
Entering into the darkness between the buildings, he cocked his shoulders to clear the narrow walls, and stepped into the back where a small triangular space was bounded by Crazy Frog’s house on one side, his storehouse on another, and the rear of a stone carver’s workshop on the third. The storehouse looked dark, a mere shadow in the night.
Seven Skull Shield walked up to the door, and softly called out his name. Moments later, the door was lifted aside, and a shadowy figure told him, “Step in.”