Sin and sorrow, p.1
Sin and Sorrow, page 1
Contents
NURU – THE PERCEPTION OF VULNERABILITY
AKACHI – SYMMETRY OF DESTRUCTION
NURU – HEART OF THE STORM
AKACHI – THE BEAUTIFUL MOMENT
NURU – BLOODSTONE AND OBSIDIAN
AKACHI – FROM SLIVERS TO SYPHILIS
NURU – PLAYING AT SCARCITY
AKACHI – DREAM WORLDS OF NARCOSIS
NURU – MOTHER VENGEANCE
AKACHI – PENANCE TREES
NURU – A POEM TO PERMANENCE
AKACHI – NARCOTIC LOGIC
NURU – THE FIRST MOTHER AND THE LAST LIGHT
AKACHI – FAITH IS WHAT REMAINS
NURU – THE NOTHING BEFORE TIME
AKACHI – HUSKED CARCASSES
NURU – NIGHTMARES AND DOORS
AKACHI – GUILT AND DISGRACE
NURU – FEATHERED FIRE
AKACHI – THE QUIET STONE
NURU – SEVEN SERPENT
AKACHI – SUCH BLASPHEMY
NURU – OWLS AND OMENS
AKACHI – GUIDANCE AND STRENGTH
NURU – WITH EBONY AND OBSIDIAN
AKACHI – STARVED FOR BLOOD AND REALITY
NURU – IN YUMEN XIBALBA
AKACHI – THE WORM OF DOUBTS
NURU – THE BROKEN
AKACHI – GRANDFATHER COYOTE
NURU – PAIN AND UNDERSTANDING
AKACHI – THE GODDESS OF THE CAVE
NURU – THE SILENCE OF THE STALKING PREDATOR
AKACHI – HEART’S MIRROR
NURU – THE CRUSHING WEIGHT OF DESPERATION
AKACHI – ONE LAST GRAND FAILURE
THE END
GLOSSARY – THE GODS OF BASTION
GLOSSARY – NAHUALLI (SORCERERS)
GLOSSARY – SORCEROUS NARCOTICS
GLOSSARY – TECOLOTL – STONE SORCERY
THE WALLS OF BASTION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
City of Sacrifice #3
By Michael R. Fletcher
For my tribe
Books by Michael R. Fletcher
Smoke and Stone (City of Sacrifice #1)
Ash and Bones (City of Sacrifice #2)
Sin and Sorrow (City of Sacrifice #3)
Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path #1)
She Dreams in Blood (The Obsidian Path #2)
An End to Sorrow (The Obsidian Path #3)
Beyond Redemption (Manifest Delusions #1)
The Mirror’s Truth (Manifest Delusions #2)
A War to End All (Manifest Delusions #3)
Swarm and Steel (Manifest Delusions Standalone)
The Millennial Manifesto
Ghosts of Tomorrow
Norylska Groans (Co-written with Clayton W. Snyder)
A Collection of Obsessions
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, Dyrk Ashton or otherwise, or actual events is mostly coincidental. Has the author done a butt-ton of drugs? Well, his lawyer says he prolly shouldn’t answer that. The real question though: Is this the place for such rambling?
CITY OF SACRIFICE – SIN AND SORROW Copyright © 2023 by Michael R. Fletcher
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, eaten, smoked, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Editor: Sarah Chorn
Cover Art and Typography: Felix Ortiz
NURU – THE PERCEPTION OF VULNERABILITY
Four gods, each in turn, rose to claim the sun as their own. Their deaths heralded ages of apocalypse, the undoing of worlds.
Mountainheart was first to claim the sun. Smoking Mirror dragged him from the sky, murdered him with foulest deceit, and devoured the god, taking on many of his qualities. For one thousand years terrible storms wracked the world.
Next, The Lord of the Wind took the sun as his own, sweeping away nations. His worshipers built great cities of stepped stone pyramids and spilled blood in daily sacrifices. Jealous of his power and rank, the Enemy of Both Sides betrayed the god. The resulting cataclysm saw winds lay waste to the world.
The Rain of Flint Blades, once a weather god, was third to lay claim. Father Discord cast him down, drowned him in lies. Centuries of rain flooded the world, toppled civilizations.
Loved by all, She Who Shines Like Jade was the fourth god to call the sun her own. The Obsidian Lord betrayed her in the night, fed her heart to his jaguar nagual.
And so began the Fifth Age.
—The Loa Book of the Invisibles
Bastion is dying.
Nuru staggered down the street, a blend of unknown narcotics smashing through her blood. Efra and Kofi kept her upright, one under each arm. Some of the drugs she’d ingested intentionally in preparation for her journey to the underworld. Others Subira, the nahualli of Father Death, had prepared. Only too late had Nuru learned that the seemingly kind priest was an agent of Smoking Mirror.
I’m dying. She poisoned me.
The wind kicked up red sand, spun it in tight spirals, scattered it across the once pristine Senators’ Ring. Bloody clouds occluded the eastern horizon, a massive sandstorm raging against Bastion’s outermost wall. The sun, a dim smear of hate, baked Bastion dry as bone. The heat leached the strength from Nuru, sucked her dry of will.
Subira’s church faded into the distance behind them, a reminder of Nuru’s failures. She’d found Chisulo in the Underworld, seen his soul destroyed by the Cloud Serpent nahualli. She glanced at her hand, remembered the feeling of her friend coming apart, sliding through her fingers.
Gone.
Incinerated by the Fifth Sun, he’d never be reborn.
My fault.
For all the howling wind and the grit rasp of sand on stone, the streets felt haunted, as if all Bastion died while she and Efra were in the Underworld.
Not dead, she told herself. Hiding indoors.
The fear she’d fallen prey to manipulation beyond her understanding festered in her belly. Seeing the Cloud Serpent nahualli call the sun to Father Death’s realm, she suddenly understood the scale and cost of a war with the gods. That great battle between Face Painted with Bells and Southern Hummingbird had been but a distraction. Somehow, Smoking Mirror tricked the two gods into warring for the underworld just to get them both in the same place so they could be destroyed with this staff. Smoking Mirror cared nothing for the hundreds of thousands of souls that had been snuffed in an instant.
I brought Mother Death there too.
Nuru had believed the idea entirely her own. Now, she was less sure. If not for Efra, three gods would have died that day.
Kofi cursed under his breath, suddenly pulling them in a new direction. Eyes clenched against the blowing sand, Nuru stood on something sharp. Squinting down, she saw the blackened husk of a dead snake, flesh curled back to expose a long line of sharp ribs. A curl of white bone showed through the top of her foot, blood welling around it. Numb from narcotics, she felt nothing. No pain. No fear. Instead, she found herself thinking about Isabis, her snake.
Is she still alive?
She’d left the viper back in the Growers’ Ring.
“My foot,” she mumbled.
Efra yanked Kofi to a stop and then knelt to pull the bones free.
Nuru studied the woman. Efra’s red silk Senator’s dress clung to her, accentuating what curves she had. Soaked in blood and caked in sand, Efra looked like a demon from beyond the veil. Kofi, waiting impatiently at Nuru’s other shoulder, kept twitching. Shielding his eyes with his free hand, he searched for danger.
“I can heal that later,” he said, the wind whipping his voice away, stretching his words thin. “But now we have to move. Someone is following us.”
He sounds like a ghost.
Though he’d lost weight, his face sunken and angular, he was still larger than any Dirt.
Tossing the desiccated snake aside, Efra rose. “We need to get out of the storm!”
“We have to lose whoever is following us first,” he shouted back.
Efra bared teeth in a snarl. “We don’t have time for that.” Leaving Nuru’s side, she jogged off into the wind-whipped sand.
Kofi looked from Nuru to Efra’s fading form. “She’s going to kill them, right?”
“Them?”
“I think there’s at least three,” Kofi admitted.
“She might need your help,” Nuru said.
Worry crumpled his handsome features. “I can’t leave you.”
“Go help her.” Nuru left no room for questions.
“Stay here,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you in the storm.”
Nuru glanced at the blood pooling around her foot. “Not going anywhere.”
With a grunt of frustration, the young tecolotl dug several stones from a pouch and ran after Efra.
Suddenly alone, Nuru sank to her knees. Dim shapes moved at the edge of sight, blurred forms in the sandstorm. The dress did nothing to protect her from the abrasive flurry and she wished for the thicker itchy cotton of a Growers’ thobe.
I’ll be raw bone if they take too long.
A woman screamed, a sob of agony.
Blinding light lit the world red for an instant, followed by a crack like shattered stone.
Nuru blinked purple afterimages. Shambling nightmare forms moved in the tempest. Wrung out by Subira’s narcotics and exhausted from fleeing the church, she waited for them to find her.
“That was easier than expected.”
Nuru flinched awake.
A nahual of The Provider, dressed in unevenly stitched robes meant to represent the flayed skins of sacrifices, stood over her. Fat and soft, soaked in sweat and caked in grit, he looked a thousand times stronger than she felt.
He scowled at her exposed arms, laced with tattoos. “How vulgar.” He sniffed in appalled disgust, looking her over. “Leaving the Grower’ Ring, fifty lashes.”
Nuru had witnessed older Dirts die from fewer.
“Wearing clothes inappropriate to your birth ring,” the nahual continued, “thirty lashes. Decoration of the flesh, punishable by flaying of the inked areas. Study of sorceries unsanctioned by the church, sacrifice on the altar. Murdering gods…” Grimacing, he plucked at the sodden robe clinging to his belly. “Is there an official punishment? Banishment from holy Bastion at the very least.”
Nuru stared at him in confusion. Was this priest planning on punishing her for all her many sins?
“I see that you are confused. I am Udom, High Priest to The Provider, chosen Heart of Chaac, the Lord of Rain and Thunder.”
Too tired to feel awe, Nuru laughed. He’s The Provider’s Heart.
Udom raised an eyebrow. “A Grower should know her place.”
Stall until Efra and Kofi return. “And what’s my place?”
“Well, it’s not in the Senator’s Ring.”
She darted a look in the direction Efra had disappeared.
Udom drew a finely crafted flint dagger, hilt wrapped in soft leather. It didn’t look like it had ever been used. “Your friends are dead. My compatriots will have dealt with them by now.” He shrugged with dismissive disdain. “A Dirt girl and a tecolotl?” He spat the last word. “The blasphemers are no match for temple-trained sorcerers.”
A bloody apparition appeared behind him, whip thin with muscle, gore sodden clothes showing near emaciated limbs.
“I’m going to carve the stone from your chest,” the nahual stated as if it were nothing. “I’m going to send that sliver—”
He pitched forward to land beside Nuru, gasping into the sand. A dent deformed the back of his skull, blood welling from the wound.
Efra lifted the Staff of the Fifth Sun and struck him again, stone crushing bone. Teeth bared in a snarl of savage rage, she growled, “You don’t touch my friend,” at the nahual as she smashed in the side of his skull.
He didn’t move, stared blindly at the ground with a single bulging eye.
“You found her,” said Kofi, materializing out of the blowing sands.
Efra’s expression changed in a heartbeat as if suddenly embarrassed at her show of emotion. Pretending to notice the dagger, Efra muttered, “A girl can never have too many knives,” and bent to collect it.
“That was the Provider’s Heart,” Nuru said.
“Kill the gods,” Efra said, “and the Hearts don’t matter.”
Killing the High Priests of Bastion’s gods is nothing now.
Tucking the knife into her belt, Efra pulled Nuru to her feet. “Let’s get her inside.”
“The nahual’s friends?” Nuru asked.
“Dead,” Kofi answered. “Efra got one. I killed the other two.”
Efra snorted a laugh. “Don’t brag.”
Kofi took his place at Nuru’s other side. Squinting into the storm, he pointed at a nearby home. The windows shuttered, the oak door closed, it could be abandoned or filled with cowering Senators. With a priest’s lack of doubt, he set off, pulling the two women into motion.
Nuru allowed herself to be dragged in the new direction. Shapes flitted through the swirling sand, sinuous and twisting, hulking and terrifying. Inhuman. Demonic.
Not real.
Or maybe they were. Whatever narcotics Subira gave Nuru still pulsed through her. The veil sang a high, keening note of pain as if it were about to tear at any moment.
Nuru grinned teeth at the shape of a monstrous cat prowling around them, sniffing as if to decide whether they were prey. A score of writhing tentacles reaching from its spine, this was no animal spirit. It was other, something beyond. Demon. Dead god. The ghost of a sorcerer from some distant reality.
The thing lifted its nose to Efra, turned, and fled.
Neither Efra nor Kofi showed sign of noticing it. Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe it was nothing more than the hallucination of a drug-addled mind.
Be funny if Subira’s drugs killed me in the end.
After all, Smoking Mirror must surely have wanted both her and Mother Death to die in the underworld. That must have been his plan.
Is he angry that Efra saved me?
Did he even know?
Nuru looked over her shoulder. The red prints of her bleeding right foot disappeared into the blowing sand. Tripping over the first step, she fell, knees slamming into the stone corner. Kofi lifted her and she left behind two red smears.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled. “No pain.”
Then she vomited on him.
The world stepped sideways, left her behind.
Stone on her right, all of Bastion laid out to her left, Nuru climbed the steps of Bastion’s outermost wall. Patchwork fields, their borders blurred and indistinct, as whatever grew there merged into the neighbouring crops. Roadways of exposed stone wound and twisted through the rolling fields. Wagons pulled by teams of oxen followed the roads, distance reducing them to miniscule insects. Sprawling forests claimed much of the outer ring, their shapes hinting that once, long ago, they were structured, maintained. The orderly fields and forests gave way to a wild tangle of vegetation, which in turn became dunes of red sand.
Nuru’s legs burned, the tops of her thighs aching from unaccustomed effort. The Sand Wall cut the sky in half, forever blue on one side, endless grey rock on the other. As if the world ended here. Cresting the top of the wall, she found Efra waiting for her. The girl wore robes of sable silk, long sleeves covering the bruises and scars of her arms.
“You are slow,” said Efra.
Ignoring her, Nuru marvelled at the colossal depth of the wall. There were buildings up here, an entire second city hidden from those living below. Every surface had been scoured by millennia of blowing sand, no hint of colour or sharp angle survived. Stone looked thin and stretched, like a threadbare thobe worn too long. It was impossible to tell if this had once been luxurious, like the Bankers’ Ring, or simple and unadorned like the Wheat District.
She weaved between unadorned stone structures, making her way to the far side. Nuru stopped several steps from the edge, looked out over the bloody desert. Red sand. Forever. The blood of billions, the nahual said, baked dry by a raging sun. A world of death. Heat wavered the air, rippled reality like the lingering aftereffects of an aldatu dose.
Dry wind blew in from the desert, ruffled her hair, stole the moisture of her breath.
Stepping closer to the edge, she looked down. The red became a tangle of bright white, like warring vines. The white followed the near imperceptible curve of the wall, disappearing in the haze.
“Bones,” said Efra, standing at her side.
Nuru flinched in surprise. She hadn’t heard the girl’s approach.
“They’d have us believe it’s from twenty-five thousand years of throwing unwanted souls from the wall.” Leaning out, Efra spat over the edge, watched the spittle fall and disappear long before it reached the ground.
Where does she think those dead came from?
Inching closer to the edge, Nuru stood beside her friend. Her only friend. Her last friend.
“One left,” said Efra. “One last god.” She took Nuru’s hand, gave her a sad smile. “You must decide what is more important.”
More important? Nuru squinted at the bones and sand far below. Would it hurt?
Stupid question, she decided. Better to ask if it would hurt for long.
Efra squeezed her hand. “You can rule Bastion. I’ll guard you with my life. With no other gods, there will be none to challenge Mother Death. You’ll be Heart’s Mirror forever, the High Priest of all Bastion. You can make the city whatever you want.”
Or she could step from the edge, fall to her death taking the god with her. The Queen would live on after Nuru’s death, but she’d be trapped beyond the Sand Wall.
