Seven Tides

14 Where You Finish, I Continue

 Tutlenac throws his head back and laughs. Crusted, wrinkled skin sags from his neck and hangs off his cheekbones. The whites of his eyes glare out from sunken cavities, forming the macabre specter of a living skull. "At last! Here is the cowardly mongrel who would run from his king," he snarls through yellow teeth. "Pathetic fool! Bow before your king!"

"You were never my king. You will never be the Manyan's king."

"Then you and everyone with you will die here tonight, and I shall suck the life from your beating heart." He glares at Yanca, his face seething with rage. Yanca doesn't flinch, his own eyes becoming pools of swirling blue light.

"So, old man," he hisses, "the Mountain dogs have shown you a few tricks," — He turns and walks a few steps to the side —"but they won't be enough to save you. I will steal your magic and feast on your flesh until your bones are bare."

Yanca's eyes grow brighter. "Unlike you, I do not steal magic. I receive it freely by asking."

"Ha! You pitiful fool, 'given' magic is no magic. It is weak! It has no strength!" Tutlenac raises his huge arms, flexing his muscles, the veins swell into ugly snaking rivers. "Where is your strength? You have none! You can't defeat me!"

"Not me, the one who comes," Yanca simply states.

"The Mountain People? Hah! They hide on their mountain, afraid of the great Tutlenac. And their prophecy of the light-skinned people coming from across the water? Where are they?" He lowers his voice, his gaze intensifies, "they are all dead, except for the dogs you hide, and the one I made my slave!" He motions to the gateway behind him.

Two warriors enter the plaza, dragging a limp, mangled body by its ankles. They drop the battered carcass in front of Tutlenac. He reaches down and grabs a handful of hair, and yanks the man to an upright position. His head rolls from side to side, his face beaten to a red pulpy mush, strips of skin torn away from his arms and chest with red muscle showing below. We recognize Captain Cabral only by the ragged bits of his uniform!

"So tell me, old man," — The shaman looks down at the raw bleeding face he yanks up by the hair — "who is going to defeat me? "

Yanca's liquid blue eyes grow brighter. "Have you forgotten the Sasqua?" He raises his arms, holding the spear above his head. The light from his eyes strikes the spearhead, and it glows. "They haven't forgotten you, Tutlenac." Yanca motions towards the jungle, "Listen!"

Outside the walls of the plaza, an eerie silence has swept over the jungle. The night creatures have stopped calling to one another. Even the crickets and frogs have fallen silent, sensing the approach of a creeping beast. I sense it too, not through sight or sound, but by a pressure that weighs heavily in the air. It is a pressure that has been building for years, waiting, searching. Now called, it shakes the trees, rustling through the upper branches as it draws ever closer to where we are.

"The Sasqua?" he scoffs. For the briefest of moments, an almost undetectable nervous flinch flashes over his face. "Those feeble-minded monkeys? Are there any still alive? I will collect their skins as well."

"Like the one you wear? The one you took from a mother giving birth, weak and unable to defend herself? Even then, she almost killed you."

"Enough!" Tutlenac shouts and heaves one of the deadly spears, then another, and another. Yanca slips to one side, then the next, ducking and weaving, moving closer to where the shaman stands. He heaves another spear full force, barely missing Yanca, but impaling a warrior against a stone wall far across the plaza. Yanca uses his own spear to vault the remaining distance, lands running and thrusts it hard at the shaman who shifts, but not quick enough. The spear drives deep into Tutlenac's shoulder. Tutlenac howls in anger. He reaches out and grabs Yanca by the throat, lifting him off the ground.