He inspected the faint flickering light on the distant bluff. “Do you think Blue Heron’s crazy notion that those people were sacrificed in an effort to recall a soul is correct?”
“It sounds like the ritual I saw when Morning Star was recalled to fill my brother’s body. Although smaller, with fewer people sacrificed. But the savaging of the woman’s genitals and face the way the Clan Keeper described it smacks of sacrilege. No wonder Piasa is stirring within me like a wounded snake.”
“Maybe the assassin perverted the ritual?”
She shrugged, continuing down the steep and dark steps. Fire Cat curled his fingers, arms half lifted. All it would take would be the slightest shove. From this height, in the cloud-blackened darkness, with the wind sawing at them in irregular gusts, no one would expect treachery.
He smiled crookedly at her dark shape as turbulent air whipped strands of her hair back to slap at him. He made a face and let her get another step ahead, having no desire to share even that little contact with her.
“So you watched your brother become the god? What was that like, seeing him try to change himself into another person?”
“My brother’s souls were devoured when Morning Star took possession of his body.”
“Of course.” He rolled his eyes as he felt his way down the squared wooden steps.
“Why do you find this so hard to believe?”
“Lady, do you mean to tell me that after they conducted that perverted ceremony, killed all those women and men, and buried their bodies in the mound, that after that divine moment, your brother never slipped? He never gave you that old familiar wink? He didn’t move the same way? Use a secret phrase that only the two of you shared? Maybe give you that special smile a brother gives to his sister?”
“He became the god,” she said flatly. “Just like our grandfather before him.”
“Just like? No variations?”
She vented an irritated sigh as they reached the flat on the first terrace. “Red Wing, are you so jaded that you simply cannot find it inside yourself to accept a miracle? Is that why you and your kind were driven into exile? Because you had all the imagination of frozen winter stones?”
“Maybe we found the company of the overly gullible too oppressive to bear.”
They passed the guard at the lower palisade gate and started down the stairs that led to the plaza. She asked, “Do you think all Power is a sham? Or just the Morning Star?”
“After what your people did to mine? I’m beginning to wonder myself.”
She stopped short as they reached the foot of the stairs, her attendants coming forward with her litter. Field Green ordered it placed on the ground for her to mount. Four warriors took positions around the porters, wary eyes on the other parties waiting at the foot of the stairs.
Facing Fire Cat in the darkness, she slowly shook her head as she said, “I wish, for once, that I didn’t know the truth. How lucky you are, Red Wing, not to have Piasa’s shadow sharing your souls. I could almost wish I were you.”
“You wouldn’t like being me, Lady. You’d find yourself an angry knot of rage and fury. Your thoughts would be about your wives, the women you loved, now little more than bed-slaves to strange and uncaring men. You’d know that your children were murdered, and beloved relatives are dead and unmourned.”
She huffed softly, saying, “Then we are much the same, you and I. We’ve each murdered the other’s happiness.”
With that, she stepped onto her litter and seated herself. A gust of wind whipped out of the night, carrying the mixed scents of water, smoke, and the sour taint of human waste. Her gesture was but charcoal in the darkness as she waved to her porters. “Take me home.”
Maybe I do believe in Power, Lady. Only a divine presence could find humor in the fact that you and I are bound together in such a manner.
He chuckled softly as the wind batted him with bits of grass and debris. Then he took his place beside the litter as it was lifted and the party began feeling their way west along the dark avenue toward Night Shadow Star’s high palace.
“The value of a man’s word is only as good as the man who gives it.” The saying had been Uncle’s. He had most emphatically impressed it upon Fire Cat’s souls from the time he’d been a boy. And it meant what, exactly, in this new and worrisome circumstance?
Thinking back to the Morning Star’s palace, he wondered. How had he been able to kneel there, just back from the fire, while his absolute hatred pooled and boiled? All the while he’d watched the Morning Star where he sat on his raised dais, looking ever so thoughtful, eyes half-lidded, face so perfectly painted. The human-faced maskettes that covered his ears had given the man’s head a grotesque shape.