“You raid the future for trinkets.” Following a rogue impulse, Djola touched the flagship and danced Xhalan Xhala. Reckoning fire engulfed the hull before Pezarrat could scratch the beads of hair on his sun-bronzed head. When the fire subsided, colorful baubles floated on dark water. Djola felt no joy, thrill, or even relief at Pezarrat’s demise, still blank and jumbled. He paddled from one ship to the next and turned the fleet into pearls and glass beads. Those who jumped into the sea and left treasure behind survived. They avoided his canoe. In the morning, beads and pearls washed up on Jena City’s beach. Survivors left these trinkets in the sand.

Djola wasted no time celebrating a hollow victory. He thanked the behemoths, turned his back to the sea, and, not quite right in his mind, paddled upriver to inland strongholds. Cutting a swath of reckoning fire through thief-lord realms, he handed out the poison-death the barbarians deserved, till he reached the borderlands and protectorates of the Arkhysian Empire.

On his march north, Djola called on Samina’s chill but shunned Smokeland journeys to see her. Samina would think he sought revenge and try to argue him out of his plan—an awful plan, yet he had no choice or that’s the lie he chanted. Word of his deadly conjure reached Arkhys City. A letter from Grain was full of his exploits—exaggerated by griots, but true enough.

Xhalan Xhala showed the disaster barbarians and good citizens made of their world, and finally, the People listened—to the conjurer who turned Pezarrat’s fleet into trinkets and thief-lord cities into sky-stones. They cheered the master who promised a new world was coming. Yet, every day silvery haints cursed at him from mountain mist, sounding like Tessa or Quint. They asked who Djola had become.

“A clown,” he told them. “Tricking people to their right minds.”

Grain reported that enemies on Council babbled lies to Azizi. With no more pirate booty to fill Empire coffers, Azizi finally gave in to corrupt masters. He gathered mercenaries to protect grain and oil stores. He barred non-citizens from entering Arkhys City except on festival days and called for Hezram’s Dream Gates around the capital. Illusion solution. So, Djola planned a carnival of destruction at the temple hall of the mountain gods during the Sun Festival.

What better place for reckoning fire than inside Holy City’s Dream Gates?

3

Sentinels

Awa was barely awake, sleepwalking through the morning, a sunny day in Holy City, but on the forest floor, chill and murky as twilight. A splash of sunlight caught ferns and moss by surprise. Cathedral tree leaves rustled, pleading for mercy. Awa closed her heart to leaf-song. With hammer and blade, she chopped thick roots that anchored soil to Ice Mountain’s rocky shanks. Interlocking roots ran from the edge of snowfields down to the Amethyst River. Ice Mountain was a family tree, twenty thousand years old according to Iyalawo Tembe.