The Thirteenth Incarnation

Stanton materialized before the teocalli, seeming to form from the resonant syllables of the words he had spoken. His form glittered, half opaque; he was nothing more than an illusion, Emily realized. To truly enter this place, he would have to obtain her express permission …

Destroy us? The Goddess trilled amusement as she regarded Stanton’s spectral form. On our own hallowed ground? You have grown more powerful since last we saw you, but no less foolish.

“Let me enter,” Stanton repeated.

“Don’t do it, it’s a trap!” Emily screamed. “The Liver … it’s yours! Zeno almost killed it, but now they need your blood …”

A flick of Utisz’ wrist, and the knotted cord around her throat tightened like a hangman’s noose. She staggered forward, choking. Seizing her, Utisz twisted her arm behind her back and forced her to the ground, slamming her head hard against the cold slick stone. He placed a knee on her neck, pinning her immobile.

Stanton did not look at Emily. His ghostly eyes remained fixed on the Goddess’ impassive mask.

“Let me enter,” he said a third time.

Enter then, she commanded diffidently, and Stanton’s ghostlike image became heavy and solid, magic flying away from him like smoke from a blown candle.

“Fool,” Emily rasped, her face still pressed against the cold stone. Utisz had released the ligature around her throat to allow her to continue breathing, but his knee pressed heavily on the back of her neck. “Oh, Mr. Stanton, you damn fool.”

Kneel, the Goddess commanded.

Stanton dropped to his knees heavily, as if his long legs had been kicked out from under him.

Bow, she commanded.

Stanton lowered himself in a deep, slow bow. He let his forehead rest against the stone at her feet for a long time. She did not command him to rise, but after a while he did, kneeling stiffly, staring straight ahead, his jaw clenched.

“Why did you come?” Emily moaned, despair washing over her.

“Because I love you,” he said very softly. “And because I have to save the world.”

“You could have saved the world if you’d stayed away!”

Nothing could have saved your world, the Goddess said. This is destiny. This is fate. She paused, gently running her fingers through Stanton’s hair. This is true love conquering all.

Then, in a movement of dark smoke and obsidian sheen too quick for the eye to comprehend, the Goddess flayed the shirt from Stanton’s body. Strips of cloth fluttered to the ground around him; he was not even scratched. Emily sucked in air involuntarily. On Stanton’s slender white chest, over the place where his heart was, blazed a garish red birthmark. A birthmark in the shape of a woman’s outstretched hand.

The mark of our claim. Did you never see it? The Goddess traced a glass-knife finger over the birthmark. How did this truth escape you? The truth that he could never be yours? He was always ours. From the time he was born and from all the times he died before.

“I am not yours!” Stanton’s face twisted with angry confusion. “I am not Xiuhunel, or even a piece of him! I’m nobody … I ran from you!”

“Would she have let you come back if you were nobody?” Emily said softly, the words catching in pain as Utisz twisted her arm harder.

“Let her up, you sadistic bastard,” Stanton hissed.

Utisz made no move to comply. Instead, he twisted Emily’s arm further—slowly.

“Stop it!” Stanton shouted. “Please!”

Emily clenched her jaw to refuse Utisz the satisfaction of her pain, but it was no use. First she whimpered, then she begged. Then she screamed.

Stop.

The word resounded through the Temple, ringing off the walls of black glass, making the ground shake and the braziers clatter. But this time, it was not the Goddess who spoke. It was Stanton.

Breathing hard, Utisz released Emily’s arm, staggering to his feet. Emily pushed herself to kneel, arm limp and throbbing. She looked for Stanton … but when her eyes found him, she could not believe what she saw.

He was standing waist-deep in the Calendar’s widest channel of Black Exunge. Tendrils of the black tarry substance slithered up his body like baby adders, plunging into his flesh—but he did not expand as he should have, as an Aberrancy would have. Instead, the Exunge spread itself out over his skin in a black shining film.

“My body is in contact with all the Black Exunge you have collected,” Stanton said. He was trembling as if bearing a great weight. “Every drop of it.”

Is this how you hope to destroy us? The Goddess was circling him, head tilted with fascination. We know that your body can filter Exunge, it is the gift of the burned—but even with a hundred years and a hundred lifetimes you could not hope to work a magic large enough.

“I don’t need to work a large magic,” Stanton whispered, ligatures of Black Exunge strangling the sound in his throat. “Sometimes smaller weapons serve better.”

Then Emily saw him move the hand that hung at his side. He pressed his thumb and forefinger together.

She had seen him do it a hundred times. Snap his fingers. Summon flame.

“No!” Emily screamed. She threw herself across the few feet of distance that separated them.

“After I left the Academy, I told Zeno I would give my own life to destroy her.” Stanton’s eyes, glossy black, shone with oily tears as he looked down at her. “But you, too, Emily? Why does it have to be you, too?”

Stop, Thirteenth! It was clear that the Goddess suddenly understood what Stanton intended. Relinquish this foolishness, and we will spare her life. She will live forever in the world remade. We swear it to you.

“I’m sorry, Emily,” he whispered. “I can’t save you and the world, too. I have to choose the world.”

It was a horrible choice. But it was the choice of a decent man. He was decent, she realized. With that truth to bolster her, Emily felt others flooding in behind it. It was why he hadn’t taken the cure … why Zeno had wanted him to leave her … why they had exiled him to Lost Pine, treated with hatred and scorn and contempt … because he was something bad to be used against something worse. He was the desperatus. He was their weapon.

I can give him one last chance …

Zeno had cursed the Liver because it was the only way Stanton would be allowed back into the Temple. Zeno knew the Goddess would need Stanton’s blood to cure the Liver they had taken from him, and that would give him one last chance to deploy the desperatus. Stanton would snap his fingers, cleanse the Temple in flame—the Temple, and all the other places around the earth where the Goddess had collected Exunge in preparation for temamauhti: San Francisco, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Japan and China and Java and all the other places Emily had read about in the newspapers … exploding in a vast unimaginable conflagration …

A smaller apocalypse to forestall a larger one.

Fire to fight fire.

Now she understood. Now Ososolyeh understood.

“No,” Emily said. “This is not the right way.”

Grabbing his hand, Emily threaded her living fingers through Stanton’s Exunge-slimed ones. He gave an agonized cry, tried to pull his hand away, but she held on to it tightly. She felt the funguslike tendrils of Exunge burrowing into her skin. Ososolyeh turned them back.

“It’s all right, love,” Emily whispered to him. “Trust us.”

There was a ferocious rumble that made the ground shake. It was the scream of the Goddess of Black Glass. She flew at Stanton, a blur of black and smoke.

Razor-edged fingers slashed his flesh in a hundred different directions. Blood blossomed all over his body. Stanton sagged, gory streams bright against the slimy black that covered him.

Utisz had Emily by the throat again, was yanking her backward. She tried to hold on to Stanton, but his fingers slackened in her grasp.

The Goddess gathered Stanton’s bleeding form in her arms. She picked him up as easily as if he were a hollow shell of paper. Turning, she carried him toward the sickened Liver, one white foot sliding before the other, her steps making the ground shake.