Green Eyes

  He rolled her over with his foot, and her arm followed her shoulder with a herky-jerky, many-jointed movement. Broken capillaries webbed her face and neck, and blood seeped from the orbits of her eyes. She had not died quickly, and he marked that against the candidate. He ripped down the bodice of her dress and saw the seal of the Aspect tattooed upon her right breast. She was of the cultus. Though she had been a fool, he could not withhold the grace of Ogoun. He touched her lips with his forefinger, loosing a black spark to jitter and crawl inside her mouth, and he sang the Psalm of Dissolution.

  ‘I am Ogoun, I am the haze on the south wind,

  The eddy in the river, the cadence at the heart of light,  The shadow in the mirror and the silence barely broken.  Though you may kill me, I will crawl inside of death

  And dwell in the dark next-to-nothingness,  Listening to the tongues of dust tell legends  Until my day of vengeance breaks.’

  Since she was a mere kitchen drudge, he chanted only the one verse.

  Lagoon-shaped shadows from the forest crowns spilled onto the street. He shifted forwards, streaming from darkness to darkness, materializing beside walls carved into the faces of forest animals and spirits. What had the old man said? Sorry past and grim future pressing their snouts against the ebony grain of the present. The Aspect poured through the streets, a shadow himself, until finally, near Pointcario’s Inn, his favorite spot in the town because of the carved figure of a slender woman emerging from the door, her face half-turned back to someone within, there he found the candidate: a big man with a face half spider, half toad set into his suit. Without hesitation the Aspect attacked, and soon they were locked in combat.

  Their beams crossed and deflected, their misfires started blazes on the roofs, and sections of nearby walls were lit by vivid flashes into rows of fanged smiles. The candidate was incredibly strong but clumsy: his patterns of attack and parry were simple, depending on their force to overwhelm the more skillful play of the Aspect’s beams. Gradually, their fires intertwined, weaving above and around them into an iridescent rune, a cage of furious energy whose bars flowed back and forth. After having fully tested the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, the Aspect disengaged and shifted toward another district of the town to consider his strategy and rest, though truly he felt no need for rest. Never before had he been so battle ready, his suit so attuned to his reactions, his rage so pure and burning.

  He sat down on the porch of Manyanal’s Apothecary and stroked the head of the ebony hound rising from the floorboards. The beauty of the night was a vestment to his strength and his rage, fitting to him as sleekly as did his suit. It seemed to move when he moved, the stars dancing to the firings of his nerves. Talons of the purple aurora clawed up half the sky, holding the world in their clutch and shedding violet gleams on the finials and roofpeaks, coursing like violet blood along the wing vanes of a roof demon. The stillness was deep and magical, broken now and then by the hunting cry of an iron-throated lizard prowling the Mothemelle.

  A door creaked behind him.

  He somersaulted forward, shifting as he did, and landed in the shadows across the street, playing his fires over the front of the doorway. A scream, something slumped on the porch, flames crackling around a dark shape. He shifted back. Beneath the web of broken capillaries was the face of Manyanal, his eyes distended, smoke curling from his stringy brown hair. Had everyone gone mad? One fool was to be expected, but two… Manyanal was a respected citizen, accorded the reputation of wisdom, a dealer of narcotic herbs who had settled in Badagris years before his own Election. What could have driven him to be so foolhardy? The Aspect had a notion something was wrong, but he pushed it aside. It was time to end the combat before more fools could be exposed. He would harrow the candidate, engage and disengage, diminish his fires and lead him slowly by the nerve-ends down to death. Still vaguely puzzled by the constancy of his strength, he started off along the street, then stopped, thinking to bestow the grace upon Manyanal. But he remembered that the apothecary was not of the cultus, and so left him to smoulder on his porch.