Chapter 33

  Buenos días, mi hijo.

  Aquiles woke again in the middle of the night and hurried over to the leather to etch another ‘Uno’. He looked back over the last few entries into his log but couldn’t make sense of the pattern yet. He needed two more days after this one to finish the pattern in total, if it was indeed five days as he expected. Arturo lay on his back, clearly unbothered by Aquiles waking and making his records of the greetings. The only noise he allowed himself were inconspicuous shuffles in the grass, trodden under their horse’s feet were, as much testing how light he could be on his feet as it was being courteous.

  A morning without pain beckoned Aquiles back to sleep, and he looked forward to waking normally with the Mother’s greeting out of the way for the day. It was a good trade, when forced to make it, between agony and slight inconvenience in the middle of the night. He was afforded some brief thoughts in the peace of the Parents’ hour. Aquiles laid back down, staring up at the soft glow of a crescent moon, a small portion of the cloud covered night inundated with a white glow, then its light dissipated into the slow, crawling masses in the sky. He replayed the Mother’s words in his head. “Buenos dias, mi hijo.” He played them over and over, and he felt nothing in them. They seemed to fumble on his tongue despite being the only kinds of words he was familiar with.

  The dog had spoken to him and his twin, and the jaguar had as well. Those words rolled off his tongue as he created the sounds quietly to himself, enunciating the syllables as close to the voices as he could recall, yet they were not so much voices as phenomena of nature, the wind blowing and a river rushing past rocks. The words felt part of him and part of the land, but they weren’t part of La Terra. What did they mean? Where did they come from? The continent wasn’t so large that its people would speak differently from each other without anyone knowing.

  Cities apart from the Capital were barely worthy of that designation. Those cities on the coast and rainforests were more similar to the little pueblos dotting the countryside than they were the Capital, nameless as everywhere but for the continent’s beating heart in the Capital. The people there couldn’t hide these words nor could townsfolk like Arturo. Aquiles would commit himself to learning the meaning, learning the truth of this tongue… if only they could make it past the unscalable wall of fighting the Ministry and learning what they planned with the Parents. So many mysteries. Would any of the monks know? Would their books hold the information?

  Absently, he touched his shoulder where the scout had scored its hit. Nothing but a slight pucker to the skin rewarded his prodding. The cut had healed. Healed so quickly. Words and weird ways about the Greatstorm. They were truly something new.

  Deep in thought, Aquiles’ mind began sinking back to sleep. He did not realize it until he woke again the next morning to Arturo rustling about the camp. Must his brother be so noisy? He was careful not to wake Arturo in the middle of the night.

  ***

  Arturo stomped around the camp making as much noise as he could without seeming too obvious. His brother had been scampering about the campsite to log his greetings in the middle of the night, and Arturo was nice and pretended to sleep so as not to startle the man. Aquiles reacted in a less than calm way.

  Smacking the ground at either side and splitting the dry grass with a small burst of lightning, the Bolt hissed, “Do you have to make so much noise?”

  “Ah, buenos días, hermano. How’d you sleep?”

  Aquiles just scoffed and turned.

  And the following days passed very much the same in very much a blur. Arturo, out of his mind circling the wreck of his childhood, incapable of mourning his losses because he hadn’t even accepted had happened. Greatstorm? Blessings? Valeria dead? It wasn’t possible. Yet, Arturo was able to push from his hands, chest, and back now. He accomplished a full circle of a push on, what, the second day after the attack? Third? Time wasn’t passing at all, and it was racing past him like the flow of dirt with the Queen. He could focus his blasts into thick funnels of pulsing air, blowing away only specific targets. He’d not produced any display such as the enormous shockwave that tore the Monastery’s wall off, but he suspected the right circumstances would allow him to muster that ability again.

  The Mother greeted at her odd times, and Aquiles noted the hour using the sundial and his piece of leather. Arturo didn’t see the point to this. It was more likely the Parents were acting so strange purely because of the brothers’ nature. Why wouldn’t the Mother try to throw them off as much as she could? Maybe he should figure out the pattern, get his mind off things. Not that it worked anyway. He felt fuzzy.

  He felt nothing at all.

  It came to an afternoon, Aquiles already logging his own greeting and waiting for Arturo’s. The monk had four days logged and was giddy at not waking in the middle of the night that morning. He claimed his pattern was holding. Aquiles heard the mother twice in the afternoon then three times in the middle of the night. Arturo’s, on the other hand, seemed a haphazard string of random times. Maybe, maybe not. He wanted to die. Wanted to kill. No, just thirsty. Maybe tobacco?

  The pain each morning was a welcome catalyst for lucidity. It too, passed. All of Arturo’s friends were dead. The men in the tavern, and the girls he used to chase in his teens. Valeria too was dead. The ice had seeped through every fiber in his being, through the muscle, through the blood, into his eyes and tongue. He couldn’t think past making his shockwaves, eating, and preparing himself to get revenge.

  Arturo desperately hoped the Stranger would meet them in his pueblo. When that thing was dead, he would be satisfied. He could hide in the pueblos of the plains and the coast and forget his old life and these twisted weeks and days held up with his brother. His brother. Arturo looked to Aquiles now, gnawing on the leg of another rabbit they caught. Arturo had made soup from a turtle he killed as well. Aquiles did like food, but only certain kinds. Chile?, crema, and queso didn’t interest him.

  It was a strange thing having an identical twin, seeing his own face looking back at him, too often with transparent scorn. That was ok. Aquiles had a hard life living with the monks, and Arturo understood. There was just something so annoying about the man. Arturo couldn’t put his finger on it. They bickered like five-year-old boys over the rules of a made-up game. Aquiles was clearly jealous of Arturo’s life, agnostic of his agony despite the man’s prior recognition, though the mind is a funny thing, but he let him have his own beliefs. The man had a right to be upset.

  Buenos días, mi hijo.

  Jarring and tearing sensations tugged at Arturo’s mind. His hands became his own again, his feet took steps at his whims, not some other force. His skin tingled with regained control. “There. She sent it.”

  Aquiles dropped his food and jumped to his feet. “That’s the last one.” He tripped over himself scrambling to the leather to log the time. “Diecise?is,” Aquiles noted out loud.

  Arturo trudged over, “So, what great epiphany have you found.”

  The man shook his head and didn’t respond. Once the log was made, he sat back and read out his findings. “Alright. The first day, I got it at the fourteenth hour then you at the sixteenth. Then the next day you got it first at the thirteenth hour, then me at the twentieth. The next three days I got mine all on the Parent’s hour, the first hour to be precise, and you got it on the twenty-first, nineteenth, and fourteenth hours respectively.”

  Arturo forced an impressed expression on his face now that he had the presence of mind to control such things. “Wow, well. I’m glad you figured it out.”

  “I didn’t figure anything out, I just have all of the information now.” Scowl and scorn too. Nothing if not consistent.

  “Well, you let me know when you have it,” Arturo sighed.

  Aquiles ignored him and studied the leather.

  He left the monk studying the leather and went to one of the snares set with a dagger he’d taken off one of the dead scouts. They were now ash several hundred paces toward the town. Arturo kept his eyes off the piles of ash that would stand in the pueblo even now. Valeria was not watching him from there, wasn’t thinking about him. Couldn’t. Would never again. He slipped away. Cut his finger taking the rabbit off the blade. He’d gotten there quickly, not remembering the walk… The town’s stench was gone, replaced by the smell of burnt wood. The bodies took nearly three days to burn with Aquiles constantly relighting the flames.

  Arturo couldn’t mind the fire. Couldn’t mind himself.

  Blood dripped down his fingers.

  ***

  Aquiles studied the hours he’d logged. This was a pattern. It had to mean something. His brother seemed convinced the Mother just set up a way to destabilize their efforts, but Arturo was wrong. There was something wrong with the Parents, something the Ministry was doing, something perverted, unnatural.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Then there were these supernatural animals and the words they spoke. Whatever had happened with that jaguar, it was not a vision. It was something more visceral, and yet, it was ultimately surreal. Aquiles had felt the wet spot from where it nosed him after the meeting ended. What did they want? Chico had protected Arturo, going so far as to kill a man. Aquiles was glad the beasts seemed to be on the brothers' side, but now, the animals were nowhere to be found. A giant jaguar would do wonders helping them defeat the coming soldiers. And whatever the Ministry sent with the soldiers.

  The likelihood of the existence of more Strangers, past the one that assaulted the Monastery and the companion of which Arturo spoke, was very high. Some higher power had to be influencing the gods, submitting them. Was a Greatstorm really a match for something like that? He saw the raw strength in the Stranger, and he hoped his own was greater. If it wasn’t… “No importa,” he whispered to himself. “Figure this out.”

  Arturo had gone off on a walk, more rabbits to skin. Aquiles didn’t like the man going off alone, but it was highly unlikely the soldiers could have made it all the way to the pueblo by this time based on the length of the brothers’ own journey. “What was the Mother trying to do with this pattern?” Aquiles talked to himself, hoping to catalyze some discovery. He had nothing.

  A sinking feeling distracted Aquiles’ mind from his brainstorming. What if the Mother hadn’t done this at all? Less direct than even Arturo’s theory, what if the Mother had simply snapped like the Father and had no control over her greetings to them? Perhaps them being a Greatstorm exacerbated the issue and led to a manifestation of her decline in this pattern. Her normal greetings were regular, ritualistic even. This was just the same, a constant repeating pattern. But Aquiles couldn’t accept that. He had to believe the Parents retained some autonomy. They were too powerful to be completely controlled. Weren’t they?

  He put the piece of leather down to clear his mind and return to the mystery later. He wanted to find Arturo and get some more training in. Aquiles rolled the ledger up and stuffed it into the bag with the vials of sweet ichor. Tomorrow would be the day he faced that column of soldiers with a belly full of the sickening stuff. Aquiles didn’t look forward to that moment, but he did look forward to seeing his bolts branch out before him, wiping the Ministry’s force from La Terra.

  Their abilities had come along splendidly. Aquiles kept his praise of his brother minimal, but in truth, Arturo was progressing without Aquiles’ direction. Doubt still lingered as it always did, but yes, his confidence grew with each session, a confidence in their ability to take on a great many soldiers. But soldiers and other Storms. He never had a chance to practice dissipating the attack of another Bolt. Would it come naturally, or would he get to revisit the feeling of a stopped heart staring up at a fading sky?

  Arturo was walking back now, two dead rabbits in hand, when a rumbling sound shook the earth. Aquiles cast his eyes about, expecting to see the great mass of soldiers crest the hill to the east, but no men showed themselves. The other man broke out into a full sprint to cover the several hundred paces between them, and that cord of anxiety was clearly cut for the man, his body ready to fight.

  Another rumble reverberated in Aquiles' chest. “Vamos! Ma?s ra?pido!” He shouted. Arturo held the rabbits out front to manage them better than flopping at his sides. Why didn't he just drop them?

  A cracking sound seemed to fracture the very air, an epic thunderclap that made Aquiles press his hands to his ears. He now understood why Arturo complained about that. The man had a hundred paces to close still.

  Arturo disappeared in an eruption of dirt and thunder.

  Aquiles held his hands out to where his brother had been. The air was empty there, the dust settling. A sound tickled at his ears in the absence. Arturo was gone. That sound became a whistle, the tip of a branch swished through the air, a fast-moving sword. Something was attacking them. The whistle turned to a screech and pounded at his skull from above. Aquiles looked up.

  And found Arturo.

  The man sailed over the ground, wind whipping his hair and robes, rabbits still somehow in hand. Just before Arturo hit the ground, a round barrier of solid white air shot towards the earth, ricocheted and caught Arturo as it flew back towards him. The man slowed in an instant, the sound evolving into cataclysm before it cut to silence, and landed on his feet with the rabbits, still, in hand. Aquiles’ ears were useless in the aftermath.

  “What in all the Father’s hells was that?!” Aquiles screamed, not hearing his voice.

  His brother looked around with wild eyes, knuckles white and his hair twisted into a matted mess. “It- I don’t- I- It just felt natural!”

  Aquiles looked to where Arturo had first… well… presumably shot into the air, and yes, it was a full hundred paces away. A small crater in the burnt remains of the grasslands surrounding the pueblo was there, dust mushrooming into the air. The same where he landed. “You blasted yourself into the air?”

  Arturo’s scared expression turned to that of glee, a smile Aquiles realized he had been missing these past few days, and Arturo laughed. “

  Yes! Yes, I did!”

  “Something other than blasting people away, verdad?”

  “I can fly!”

  Aquiles furrowed his brow. “Alright, let’s not get carried away.”

  The rumble came again, and Aquiles looked to the east, worried to see the tip of spears poking over the hill. Spears didn’t come, but rushing clouds did. The heavens above blew across the sky in blurs, and the sun shot over the horizon like Arturo through the sky and halted directly overhead. The heat from the first meeting with jaguar returned. Aquiles met Arturo’s eyes, and they walked back to the campsite together.

  The massive jaguar was waiting for them, lounging among a clearing made larger as the vegetation disintegrated and blew away. It yawned, and the rumble came again, Aquiles realizing it was the beast purring. “Still friendly?” he asked, walking cautiously closer.

  Ts? jong

  “Still friendly,” Arturo confirmed. The jaguar eyed the rabbits in Arturo’s hands and licked its lips. “You like these too?” The jaguar’s tail flicked in response. Arturo tossed one of the rabbits over. The jaguar sniffed at it then took the prey in its great maw and bit down, severing it in two. It licked up the two pieces then yawned and laid its head down.

  Tsa ma jmóh hning má?

  That sounded like a question. What did these words mean? Aquiles could not get over this question. He needed to know like he needed to breathe. The words had the very same effect as the first time he’d heard them, hearing the truth after being lied to for so long. The jaguar seemed frustrated that they didn’t understand. Its tail flicked back and forth like a common cat angry at a person holding up its food.

  “Forgive us. We don’t know these words.”

  The jaguar rumbled in response then looked over its shoulder. Chico padded up to it, panting and squinting its eyes at the heat. The canine flopped down beside the jaguar, dwarfed by the monolithic cat.

  “Are you here to help us?” Arturo asked.

  The jaguar purred.

  Aquiles thought of his own question, “Are you here to tell us something?” The jaguar purred again. “What do you want?”

  Ts? jong

  And the sun returned to normal. The jaguar disappeared. The dog still lay in the clearing, unfazed by the change in scenery. “Damned beast!” Aquiles yelled and dropped to his knees. “Can we just get clear answers?”

  Arturo stood motionless, tears in his eyes. He said, “I needed to hear the words again. That was a good enough reason for me to see that beast.”

  A clear-headed Arturo would prove more helpful in the fight to come. “I’m glad you feel better,” Aquiles said in an awkward tone.

  “Gracias. Plus, I can fly.”

  “At best, you can jump pretty far.”

  “What’s the difference?” They laughed and built a fire to cook their remaining rabbit.

  Aquiles sat by the fire, stomach full of succulent meat. It was amazing how many of those little creatures lived out here. He pondered the Mother’s pattern and the words of the beast. His palm was pressed to the sundial. Maybe touching all the informative things would help him figure it out. The jaguar’s and the dog’s words seemed like they should make sense. He wondered how they might look written out. Aquiles wasn’t sure his alphabet could reproduce those sounds with the rules of grammar and phonetics the monks taught. That would take many hours he didn’t have. He needed to figure out the problem of the Mother first. His thumb ran along the lip of the sundial. He felt the marking of the numbered hours etched into the small stone. There would be the first, the second, and the…

  Aquiles paused.

  His thumb ran over the engravings of the hours. Only the hours. He yanked his hand up to his eyes and studied the sundial. The hours were marked there… but not the accompanying letters. That big damned beautiful jaguar had done it for him! He didn’t need to worry about letters for the unknown words.

  He needed the letter for each of the hours on the sundial.

  Furiously, Aquiles pulled the logged hours and started assigning the respective letter. The sundial in the Monastery had the hour-letter combination cut into the stone together in its ornate decoration. This cheap stone maker settled for just hours. How had Aquiles missed it? This was so obvious.

  With that intense marking, Arturo stood and watched him curiously. “Hermano? Did you find something?”

  “Hush.”

  Arturo held up his hands, “Alright, alright. Lo siento.”

  Aquiles looked down at the fabric and the paired hours and letters. Ten numbers and ten letters total. On the first day, ‘Catorce’ and ‘Diecise?is’ became ‘N’ and ‘O’. On the second, ‘Veinte’ and ‘Trece’ became ‘M’ and ‘S’. On the third, Aquiles got ‘A’ and ‘T’, and on the fourth, he got ‘A’ and ‘R’. On the final day, the fifth day of the pattern, Aquiles wrote ‘A’ and ‘N’. He looked over the result.

  “N, O, M, S, A, T, A, R, A, and N? That doesn’t spell anything,” Arturo commented.

  “The Mother is consistent, and so is this. Most of the days, I received the greeting first. It stands to reason that she meant for them all to have my letter first. I told you she still had agency.” Aquiles reordered the letters and read the words that seemed to burn a fire in the leather.

  He breathed out the Mother’s message, “Nos mataran.”

  They will kill us.

  Aquiles looked at the words, horrified. This was not some helpful message as he secretly hoped, nor some mundane way to trip them up. It was foreboding and impossible. A warning. A threat? A cry for help. He wanted to vomit. Arturo matched Aquiles’ own horrified expression. “That can’t be true. Surely the Ministry wouldn’t…”

  Aquiles couldn’t breathe. Killing the Parents? What else could the Mother mean but the Ministry would kill her and the Father? This was a desperate plea for help. A plea to the only two with the power to help. How could the Parents be so weak as to be vulnerable to the meager power of men? He would run on his own legs the hundreds of miles back to the Capital over this. He would rip these animals apart for this.

  “The Father must be working with the Ministry to save his and the Mother’s life,” Arturo gasped.

  Aquiles nodded in response.

  “We can’t let them do this.”

  Aquiles nodded.

  “Can they even do this? Son dioses. The Ministry are but men.”

  Aquiles shrugged. The stories told of Greatstorms ruining the world the Parents built for their children. The stories were close. It turned out they were meant to ruin the world of tyranny holding the beloved gods hostage.

  Aquiles found the will to speak, “I will burn each and every man and women residing in that damned pyramid to ash before they lay a single finger on our Mother.” His voice grated with the menace and destruction of a sword cutting into bone and sinew.

  Aquiles wouldn’t lose again.