Gods & Thieves ✔

37. Jeans and Cake

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I overreacted.

Once I step onto the dusk-bathed, clean Tik'al street surrounded by flower beds like a well-groomed crypt, I realize that doubts are beginning to overwhelm me again.

It's always like this in Tik'al. A thousand-year-old temple complex, which, thanks to its notorious magic, never changes, and requires you to do the same: look at it today or through a photograph taken a century ago, but honor the traditions. If you don't look closely, everything is cozy, beautiful and right, but if you think about it... it's a crowded mausoleum. And Tayen is sleeping in it somewhere? I've never intended to get this far away from Loretto since the day we met.

Sighing, I return.

Peeking into Tayen's bedroom, I make sure that my sleeping mentor is still too healthy for a mausoleum exhibit. That our one remaining dagger, which, after washing, I carefully put under its usual corner of the mattress so that Loretto could reach it in case something bad happens, is intact. Having drawn a verification rune in the air, as I'm taught, I check if the enchantment locks on the doors and windows are flickering steadily and have not failed.

Everything is perfect.

And still, I have a bad feeling, it hurts and aches somewhere deep in my soul. I always screw things up, why did I suddenly decide that today was my hour?

No, I'm learning to take action, I remind myself, going out into the hallway again. Still, I anxiously tug at the cuffs of my shirt. It's better to try and regret it than not to try and be executed proud and young.

The Empress's spies can still keep an eye on me, so I wander through the Tik'al's parks for more than an hour. In the darkness that has already set over the world, I devour an unripe and terribly sour mango fruit picked at the fruit greenhouse. I'm pissing in the bushes behind a stone bust of some long-nosed god named, as it says, Chin.

If someone had been watching me, after all this they should have already decided that I was just languishing from idleness, and left me to piss alone.

After walking a couple more blocks and making a few chaotic turns, I go to the same broken tower that adjoins the walls enclosing the perimeter of Tik'al. Through which Kofi and I always sneaked unnoticed to the shamans to steal aura.

I walk stealthily, I look around every now and then, I don't see or hear anyone else, not a sound other than the rustle of leaves and the buzzing of insects. I'm filled with confidence to the very tips of my fingers.

The evening is suffocatingly warm, windless and motionless, and at some point, I start to feel like I'm alone in this whole world. That there are only dark bushes and prickly weeds everywhere, and they are all under my control.

When I finally make out the outlines of the cracked tower walls, my path to freedom, I almost rejoice in my soul. A step and another, and...

And suddenly, I realize that next to the ruins, on a stone left from an old column, and sheltered from the moon by a branch of a spreading cashew tree, someone is sitting.

My heart skipping a beat, I freeze. In the darkness, only a blackening silhouette is visible--hunched and thin, but the head of this silhouette is clearly turned in my direction, which means that the scout knows that I am coming. Waiting.

The hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Did they figure me out? Were they just waiting for me to come here? And if I say I got lost, wandered here by chance? Of course, everyone goes to these outskirts by chance... They won't believe it.