by C. T. Rwizi
He has never been good at saying no to people he likes, and Nimara is one of the few people in his life he can call a true friend. She has certainly kept his secrets, some of which could have gotten him banished many times over. There was also that incident with the Carving when she found him writhing on the floor and saved him from choking on his own vomit.
He pushes up his spectacles and sighs, clasping his hands together on the table. “For your information, not all shortcuts are bad. But fine. Show me what the problem is, and I’ll help if I can.”
She doesn’t need further prompting. Following her silent command, the red steel spider on the table releases a stream of brilliant light from the clear crystal set onto its back, producing a mirage in the air above it.
Nimara gives the image an exasperated glare. “That’s the thing. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I thought I was ready for the next stage, but what am I supposed to do with this? It would take me hours just to summon enough energy to mend basic flesh wounds. Don’t get me started on internal injuries and viral infections. What good would I be? I can’t use this, Salo. I need your help.”
Salo takes a look at the mirage, a monochromatic graph of golden light. He knows that the displayed curves are a measure of how effectively Nimara’s cosmic shards will perform given the Axiom she has built for them. Should she proceed to awaken, her shards will behave according to this Axiom, and in general, the better the Axiom, the more finesse she will be able to employ in her spell casting.
Based on the luminous graph in front of him, Salo understands why she’s so upset.
“Let’s see your prose,” he says, and she performs a slight gesture, summoning a different mirage from the spider talisman. This time the vision appears as a projected scroll of green and blue ciphers drawn in neat rows as if on a perfectly transparent window. Flicking his finger sends the ciphers rushing up the scroll. Each row describes an arcane instruction—just one of thousands that collectively make up the prose of an Axiom.
Nimara has explained her steps in the margins, so it’s easy for him to follow her reasoning. Her prose is enviably succinct and elegant, keeping simple what could have easily become bloated and dauntingly complex. A cursory inspection tells him she’s focusing solely on the disciplines of Blood and Earth craft, a typical combination for an aspiring healer.
Altogether, it would have been an acceptably effective Axiom, were it not for a few major flaws.
“I would definitely hold off on awakening if I were you,” Salo says. “This would be a criminal underuse of your shards.”
Nimara gives him the look of a predator about to pounce. “Explain yourself.”
Shifting on his stool to face her, he says, “The thing is, you’re ignoring one vital quality of cosmic shards: they are absolute beasts at multitasking. Literally nothing does it better. But this Axiom of yours would have your shards execute every operation in series, one step at a time, in chronological order—a terribly slow and wasteful way of doing things.”
Nimara exhales through her nostrils, clearly frustrated. “What am I missing?”
A pity he can’t be detailed in any explanation, since that would only render her Axiom nonviable and likely get her killed during her awakening. That’s the first rule of Red magic: the moon does not suffer aspirants who did not devise their Axioms entirely by themselves. He can discuss the broad strokes of her Axiom’s architecture with her, but never specific details of her prose. Those are for her and her alone to figure out.
How to explain? “Let’s think this through, shall we?” he says. “So casting a spell, any spell, is a multistep process. Correct?”
She frowns like she’s thinking it over. “I guess.”
“First, your shards assimilate the moon’s raw essence from the environment; then they convert this essence into any of the six arcane energies—in your case, just two, which, by the way, I don’t know why you’ve limited yourself to two when you could easily do at least three if you tried—”
“Stay on topic,” Nimara cuts in. “We’ve discussed this. Two disciplines are all I need. They’re giving me enough trouble as it is. I don’t think I could handle more.”
“I disagree completely, but anyway. My point is, the shards take in raw essence, convert it into useful arcane energy according to the rules of your Axiom, then allocate this energy to a particular spell or spells. A process that must be carried out sequentially, one step at a time. Correct?”
“Correct,” Nimara agrees.
“Wrong,” Salo says, and he has to fight against a crooked smile. He’d never admit it to her, but he enjoys it when they discuss the intricacies of the arcane art. “Shards don’t experience time and causality as a linear unidirectional flow, like we do. You can actually have them perform all parts of a multistep process simultaneously by assigning each step to a different operating block. That way, there’s virtually no wait between assimilating essence, converting it, and casting spells. They are all performed at the same time.”
She begins to drum her fingers on the table, frowning at him in thought. “Huh.”
“This is especially useful for multidisciplinary spells,” he explains, “where you need to handle multiple forms of arcane energy at the same time. You could even turn the process on its head if you need to. Say it’s an emergency, and you need more energy for a spell than your shards can draw. Well, with nonlinear causality you can borrow this energy from the future, a bit like harvesting grain you haven’t planted yet. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Borrow from the future?” Nimara studies the ciphers of her Axiom for a bit, then tilts her head toward him with a dubious look. “Is that how most people do it? Because I feel like I’d know if it was.”
“It’s not,” Salo admits. “But to be fair, writing prose for parallel and nonlinear operations isn’t exactly easy. Most people just do everything sequentially, relying on clever tricks and tweaks to eke out more efficiency where they can. Use enough of them, and eventually you get something passable. Lucky for us, however”—he beams at Nimara—“you are not most people, so you won’t be doing that.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, like she was distracted and wasn’t listening. “So you’re saying I could use these clever tricks and tweaks to improve my current Axiom without changing its entire structure. Which took me months to figure out.”
“That’s . . . not even remotely close to what I said.”
“Because I know there are good Axioms built the way I’ve done it.”
“Sure, there are good ones. There might even be a few very good ones. But never great ones.” Salo folds his arms, lifting an eyebrow. “Which would you rather have?”
Nimara opens her mouth to say something, but a frustrated noise comes out instead. She drops her face into her palms in defeat. “I can’t start over, Salo. And what you’re suggesting sounds so complicated—”
“It is complicated,” he says. “But it’s by far the better way, and you’re more than smart enough to figure it out.”
Doubt shows in the pools of her eyes as she raises them to search his face. “You have too much faith in me.”
“I have just the right amount of faith. And if you want to speed things up, you could always do what I did.”
A pained shadow darkens her face. “Please,” she says in a quiet voice, “don’t tempt me.”
Salo is instantly ashamed of himself. Nimara watched him almost die because of the Carving—he would have died had she not found him. And then she had to keep it a secret. Of course she wants nothing to do with any of that. “Sorry,” he says. “You don’t need it anyway. Take your time, and don’t ever underestimate yourself. Just, let’s not make a habit of coming here and asking me things that could get me in trouble, okay?”
A slow smile spreads across her face, and Salo catches a glimpse of the young girl who used to chase after him back in the day with sweets and dolls since he was the only boy who would play house with her. That girl grew up way too quickly.
&nbs
p; She banishes the mirage with a gesture and picks up her spider talisman. “Thank you, Salo. I’ll be back if I have more questions.”
He shakes his head and can’t help returning her smile. “Why do I even bother?”
To the uninitiated, the Carving might seem an innocuous, if particularly detailed, soapstone sculpture of a grove in high relief, something to be hung on a wall and occasionally admired.
Stare at it for long enough, however, and the woods come alive. The leaves rustle with the wind; the branches sway. Paths appear and disappear between the trees, leading to secret places. Keep staring, and the world will finally vanish as the mind is sucked into a dreamscape of dense forest. Here the trees are ancient, and the rich crimson soil underfoot is steeped in the knowledge of ciphers and Axioms and the secrets of their power.
During his first excursion into this realm, Salo wandered the woods for what felt like many hours before he understood that the entire grove was a continuously shifting pattern, and that successfully navigating its treacherous twists and turns to the glade at the heart was what imbued the mind with arcane secrets.
And so began his trysts with the Carving and its forbidden knowledge, trysts he managed to keep secret until the day he almost died and Nimara forced him to confess everything.
Salo hasn’t used it again since.
He’s trying to catch up on the backlog of work an hour after her departure from the workshop when a whirlwind of energy and excitement barrels through the door. “Bra Salo. You owe me a game of matje.”
Salo doesn’t look away from the patterns of the water pump’s unstable mind stone, projected above his worktable from his serpent talisman as a mirage of superimposed waves. Getting the talisman to subtly manipulate the stone’s energy and restore it to a state of equilibrium is a delicate task that requires practice and a great deal of patience. One faulty move could ruin the mind stone forever. “Go away,” he says. “I’m busy.”
Predictably his guest makes himself comfortable on a stool across the table. Salo looks up when he hears the clatter of pebbles; the boy is already setting up the game of matje they didn’t finish two days ago.
“What did I tell you about barging in without knocking?” Salo says. “Can’t you just knock for once in your life?”
Monti gets an impish look in his eye. “Are you doing something naughty, Bra Salo?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“That’s what my ama says. People want others to knock when they’re doing something naughty. That way they have time to hide whatever it is they’re doing.”
Salo rolls his eyes, though he fails to restrain a laugh. “Go away,” he says. “I don’t have time for your antics right now, and your aba made it clear he doesn’t want you spending time with me. I’m probably already in trouble because you followed me this morning.”
“He won’t find out.”
“That’s what you said last time; then he almost breathed fire into my face.”
“Just one game, Bra Salo. Please?”
“Go play with kids your own age.”
“But they aren’t any good,” Monti whines.
“The rangers on gate duty, then. Ama knows they’ve got nothing better to do.”
“I’ve already beaten them.”
“Then go beat them again.”
“I brought these.” The boy dips a hand into the leather pouch strapped to his hip and produces a paper-wrapped bundle of stick-shaped toffees. “I’ll share them with you if you want.”
Salo eyes the toffees despite himself. He never outgrew his fondness for sweet foods, and Monti knows this. “You’re the essence of evil,” he tells the boy. “All right, one game.”
Monti punches the air in excitement. “Yes!”
One game turns into three. By the fourth, the sunlight streaming in through the windows has gained a lazy golden hue, and the glowvines coiled around the shed’s exposed rafters have begun to give off a soft yellow light, like embers in a grate.
As they begin to set up the fifth game, a shriek makes both their heads swivel toward the windows.
“What was that?” Monti says.
“I don’t know,” Salo replies.
Then another elongated scream rattles their ears before ending abruptly.
Feeling the first stirrings of anxiety, Salo rises and walks to the windows but sees nothing untoward beyond the gum trees surrounding his shed. What’s going on out there?
“Come. I’ll walk you back to your compound.” The shed’s isolation doesn’t feel like such a good thing anymore.
“All right.” The boy picks up his case while Salo raises a long hand to agitate the glowvines so that they start to dim. He locks up, and they step out of the shed together, chewing on their toffees.
Only to stop dead as soon as they spot it.
There, in the skies above the kraal, a writhing mass of inky patterns that tricks the eye into seeing an infinitely black sphere with a prismatic corona. Salo immediately recognizes it for what it is: a mystic Seal.
Every mystic, upon receiving their cosmic shards and coming into their power, acquires a unique, hypnotic visual signature that can be cast at will—a Seal. To anyone who looks at it, the Seal will announce the nature and identity of its owner. The one above the kraal twists Salo’s mind into seeing the outline of a terrible mystic warlord sitting on a throne draped in shadows. His left eye glows scarlet with the intensity of moonfire. His army of disciples has plundered many towns and villages in his name.
A cold wind rustles through the gum trees around the shed. Monti sidles up to Salo, his voice quavering as he speaks. “What’s that, Bra Salo? Who is he? Why is he here?”
Salo tries not to let his fear show. “I don’t know. Best not to look at it. Come, your ama will be worried about you.”
They’ve reached the main gravel road that meanders toward the gates when, just ahead, a dense, swirling plume of dust begins to rise from the earth as though on the currents of an unnaturally slow whirlwind. Salo and Monti watch it, paralyzed, even as it gathers into a horror straight from a fireside tale. Crouched at first, then slowly rising to stand at almost seven feet tall.
A human skeleton. Human, yes, but its arms are twisted and disproportionately long, and those bony fingers dangling by its sides might as well be talons. A pall of dust lingers about it like a gauzy cloak, effusing from its bones, though never drifting far from them. The reek of loamy earth and decay chokes the air around it, and a white fire suddenly ignites in its skull, flames licking out through the eye sockets.
All vocabulary vanishes from Salo’s mind at the sight of it, all except for one word: tikoloshe. A devilish creature of Black magic, summoned from one of the underworld’s many realms.
Monti makes a feeble noise as the tikoloshe’s burning eyes pivot toward them. For the longest second of his life, Salo’s heart becomes a still, frozen stone inside his chest. Then he grabs Monti’s hand and runs.
4: Ilapara
Kageru, along the World’s Artery—Umadiland
On a normal day, Ilapara would find standing sentry by the Mimvura gatehouse rather dull and torpid, a chance to let her mind wander to better places. But today something raw keeps nagging at her, a chafing sense of guilt and anxiety that feels like a dog gnawing at her ribs from the inside.
At some point Bloodworm and his two servants ride out the gates on tronic zebroids with metallic hooves that thunder as they strike the pebbles of the driveway. An image of the Faraswa man they used for the muti ritual flashes through her mind—resigned and helpless on his knees, ears shorn off, rivers of blood on his face—and she recoils, sickened to her core.
She tries to restrain herself, but her body rebels against her. Her heart pumps like it’s preparing for a fight. Her ears listen for signs of trouble. She gets to the point where she’s brimming with so much anxious energy she can almost feel her skin vibrating, and it doesn’t help matters when the skies grow overcast with the promise of an afternoon storm.
An hour after Bloodworm’s departure, one of BaMimvura’s house servants brings her a lunch of fermented cassava bread and roasted bush fowl. Her stomach revolts at the thought of food, so she leaves it to the attention of buzzing flies.
Every now and then she’ll look toward the residence and shudder at the thought of what might still be going on. Why Kwashe is still here. Why she is still here.
She paces in front of the gatehouse. A harsh grating whisper grows inside her mind, becoming louder and harder to ignore.
Get out, it keeps saying. Get out now!
Ilapara grits her teeth and picks up her spear, staring at the open gate. She could leave. She could just walk out and never come back. She has no debts and no sworn oaths; no one would waste time coming after her. She would be free of this place and its horrors.
Get out now!
She takes a step forward but stops when she hears the mournful bellow of a battle horn coming from somewhere east of town. At first she thinks she has imagined it, but then three more horns blare out the same alarm ceaselessly.
A chill grips her bones, seeping deeper the longer the horns continue to blare, until she feels like she has dipped herself in ice water. This isn’t the kind of warning given when trouble has been spotted hours in advance; this is the warning given when trouble is already here.
A squad of the Cataract’s local militiamen streaks past the gates in a clatter of galloping hooves, riding to join the town’s defense. BaMimvura’s two eldest sons emerge from behind the residence, both now wearing breastplates over their dashikis and carrying expensive pole arms of aerosteel and witchwood. Kwashe trails silently behind them with his own spear.
“Close the gate!” the elder Mimvura shouts, jutting a long finger toward Ilapara. “Close the gate now!”
By reflex Ilapara moves to comply, and as the heavy iron gate slams shut, she catches sight of a glittering shadow sailing past directly overhead. She looks up, and her lips part in awe.