Crystal Rain Read Free Page B

the north seas John had found nothing but death, and some fame as he navigated the single surviving ship back to Capitol City. He’d been forged into a captain and a leader during that horrible trip back to Capitol City from the icy north. Or maybe that had been something always in him. “I came back, right? I’m here now.”
    Shanta shrugged. She spun away from him. “No excuse for all that.”
    “Let’s quit being glum. Carnival’s almost here.” He turned around with a large grin.
    Shanta sighed. “You and carnival. Look at you. You like a little boy, all excited.”
    John extended his good arm and danced a quick circle around her. “Just a couple days.” He smiled.
    “Come on.” She smiled back and pulled him along. John followed her down the hall to their room. Shanta paused at the doorway. “It really cold there up in the north, like you say?”
    “You could see you breath.” John imitated her accent to make her laugh and, at the same time, remembered that the cold had almost killed him. He helped Shanta unstrap the hook. She didn’t need help with his loose shirt, and by now he could undo the back of her dress with one hand.
    “Please don’t go adventuring north again,” she whispered.
    “Once was enough. Never again.”
    They made love. She chased the chill out of him.
    For the night.

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    Oaxyctl ran through the jungle toward Brungstun in the double-shadowed light of the twin moons that peeked out from between a break in the rain clouds. He was so close to safety since making it out of the mountains, skirting well wide of Mafolie Pass and a few mongoose outposts along the way. He’d come too far not to make it now.
    The padded cloth strips wrapped around his feet pulled loose. Round trellis leaves slapped him and left conical stickies and dripping sap down his chest. Oaxyctl slowed down and hopped, pulling one foot up to his hands. He tore the last piece of dirty white cloth off his right foot and threw it into the trees. The movement tripped him up, and Oaxyctl pitched forward.
    He threw his hands up and slid through sweet-smelling, half-decayed leaves. He scrambled over a root, caught his balance again, and wiped away dirt stuck to his forearms.
    He knew he was easy prey. He left tracks. Tracks all over the place: the footprints, the cloth, the broken twigs, and the dirt falling from his arms. Even if he left nothing to betray him, it would still follow. This was a desperate dash for freedom. Oaxyctl leapt over vines twining themselves over the ground and twisted past tree trunks he couldn’t put his arms around.
    Any magical abilities inside the tall, domelike ruins he’d stumbled on a few hours back had failed centuries ago. The men who had grown the buildings’ rock outer shells had died not long after, and no one would think to occupy a building of the ancients this deep in the jungle. Oaxyctl had hoped just to shelter from the rain for a night in them. But when he’d pulled himself over the glassy, slick stone and looked down, he’d seen flesh and metal hanging from a hook forced into the wall beneath him. A wall that he could have shot a gun at and not chipped. Two hearts lay tossed in the mud underneath. Oaxyctl had looked at the broken saplings and torn vines throughout the courtyard, claw marks in the mud, and known exactly what he saw.
    A Teotl, a god, was surely here.
    He had let go and slid down the side, not even noticing as he banged his chin against the lip, and run back into the forest.
    Now Oaxyctl burst out of the steaming, cool rain forest and into a copse. Mud stretched out before him for two hundred yards. Beyond that he could see tamarind trees waving in the gusting wind. Rain fell, and then poured down, in sheets. It spattered into tiny pools that collected in kidney-bean shapes across the sea of brown.
    He looked down at his bare feet. Cold freshwater rushed in to encircle them as his feet sank down into the mud.
    Footprints, Oaxyctl gibbered to