by C. T. Rwizi
Cutting across the overcast skies is a great flying reptile bearing a rider with a horned helmet. Kongamato, her mind supplies, though she did not know that one could grow so big.
Its scales are like silver coins, its wings massive and membranous. The rider sitting astride its long neck has a burning staff in one hand, and Ilapara watches him pull the harness with the other so that the creature banks steeply toward the compound, barely flapping to keep itself afloat. As it swoops by, making a pass along the roadway beyond the gate, Ilapara lives through a horrid, frozen second during which the rider looks down at her and she looks back—and sees that his eyes are red and bright yellow and reptilian and aware of her. Then the moment is gone, and her head scarf rustles with the wind of the creature’s flight.
She shivers, feeling like she’s been marked for death somehow. Beside her, an ashen cast to his skin, the younger Mimvura watches the kongamato carry its rider back into the skies. “How are they already here?” he mutters. “Where the devil is the Cataract?”
Neither Kwashe nor the elder Mimvura has answers for him. Ilapara suspects that they know, like she knows, that if the Dark Sun’s forces have come this far, then this battle is already lost.
“If we barricade ourselves in here, we’ll at least survive until the Cataract arrives,” the elder Mimvura suggests.
A blistering wave of hatred overtakes Ilapara, hatred of him and his whole family, but then she remembers her own choices.
We’re no different from him, Ilira. We might even be worse.
“Warlords don’t fight their own battles,” she tells them. “The Cataract isn’t coming. If his disciples can’t defend the town, we’re on our own.” She glances at Kwashe, who blinks emptily at her. “It might be better to make a run for it.”
The elder Mimvura gets a dark look on his face. “No one’s making a run for it. We stay here and defend this gate, all of us.”
She ignores him, addressing Kwashe. “We could leave. We don’t have to die here.”
But Kwashe shakes his head, his spear planted firmly on the ground. “We both made our choices, Ilira. Now it’s time to live with them.”
She looks away, trying to escape the weight of his gaze, the truth of his words.
A fine rain begins to mist the world, giving the air a biting crispness. She paces the gatehouse while the others patrol along the compound’s walls. All around them the sounds of battle intensify. Blaring horns. An uproar of voices. Shrieks of terror. BaMimvura ventures out of his house to take stock of things but cowers back inside as soon as a distant explosion makes the ground quake.
Ilapara frowns, intensely disgusted. Is this the man she should now die for? This miserable pest who would torture and sacrifice a loyal servant to save himself from the consequences of his greed?
Does she really deserve to die for him?
They’ll smell your master on your clothes.
Ilapara shivers with revulsion and turns away.
Battle cries from a street nearby. Another explosion rocks the ground, this time accompanied by an intensely bright flash of light that briefly engulfs the east like a third sunrise.
Magic.
She blinks from the afterimage it leaves behind when it dies out, and as her eyes readjust, she sees that the kongamato is on its way back—and that its rider has an orb of crimson moonfire he’s preparing to hurl down at them.
“Incoming!” she shouts.
But the orb is surprisingly slow when it launches, like a feather in the wind, and it even arcs away from the compound, falling instead onto the street on the other side of the gates as the kongamato whooshes past.
“He missed,” says the younger Mimvura, sounding incredulous and puzzled.
“He didn’t,” Ilapara says, feeling the blood leaving her cheeks. She has seen this before, spirits unleashed from mind stones in vessels of force, wind, fire, or even light, and sometimes a combination of these. If she had to bet money, she’d say there’s a fire spirit now lurking on the other side of the gate.
Sure enough, the gate shudders.
“By the Blood Woman, he’s going to force it open,” the elder Mimvura says as they all gather in front of the gate.
His younger brother speaks in a trembling voice. “Bloodworm’s sacrament will protect us, right?”
“How the devil should I know?”
“How? You’re the one who suggested it!”
The elder Mimvura steps up to his brother, their foreheads almost touching. “Don’t you dare put that on me!”
As the brothers start shouting at each other, neither notices the red-hot glow quickly distorting the shape of the gate. Ilapara points and speaks over them. “The gate! It’s melting.”
Men howl on the street just outside, and the gate’s solid iron begins to bubble and warp like molten rock. By silent agreement, Kwashe and the brothers reach into pockets on their shoulder belts and withdraw white disks of witchwood marked with little glyphs, each holding a mind stone at its center—Umadi soul charms. Their eyes briefly glaze over as they palm the disks and possess themselves with whatever spirits were infused into the charms, borrowing some of the abilities the spirits wielded in life.
Ilapara considers using one of her charms, too, but the single jackal spirit in her possession would give her little beyond superior hearing, while the inkanyamba would be best left for a direr situation. Might as well hold on to them.
She braces herself, falling into a defensive stance as the gate trembles on its hinges. Then solid iron gives way like stretched paper before a knife, if the knife were an inferno of pure moonfire in the shape of a dread rhino horn. The beast the horn belongs to is so large its head fills the now-exposed gateway, a monstrosity of magical fire. It emits a ground-shaking screech and charges into the compound, pulsing out waves of unbearable heat.
Ilapara dives out of the way, evading instant death with only inches to spare. She springs back up to her feet just in time to see the fire beast tread over the younger Mimvura, leaving his corpse a charred black thing on the driveway.
The beast keeps going, as unstoppable a force of nature as the winds, rapidly shedding size as it expends itself. Upon reaching BaMimvura’s house, it comes to a fiery end in a great explosion that makes the world bloom with heat and light, almost knocking Ilapara off her feet.
Beyond the ruined gate, the Dark Sun’s militiamen howl in celebration and begin to pour in.
Ilapara’s maternal uncle was a small, quiet hunter most people didn’t take seriously, the butt of many jokes who couldn’t convince a woman to settle down with him even at thirty years of age—that is, until the night Umadi raiders attacked his hunting party in the open savannas, and he bested six of them with his spear. Alone.
Ilapara had always gotten into spats with anyone who spoke ill of him; after all, he was, and still is, dearer to her than her own father. Yet she’d underestimated him like everyone else and never expected to learn more from him than compassion, human decency, and the art of hunting.
But that night, as she watched him dance with his spear like a moon-blessed ranger, fighting to protect her and the others in their small party, she learned that size and strength in battle were only half as important as pure skill and fast reflexes. She learned that anyone, even a wisp of a man, could hone themselves into a deadly weapon with enough determination. Above all else, she learned that she had the teacher she’d secretly yearned for all along, one who would not refuse to help her become what she truly wanted to be. She needed only to ask.
And so she did, and he taught her all the things he knew whenever they were alone in the wilds, secrets of combat he confessed to having learned from sitting in front of a magical cloth of some kind, an artifact he’d picked up illicitly from an Umadi trader while bartering skins in the borderlands. She wouldn’t believe him when he told her, and she still has her doubts, because how could a mere cloth contain such intimate secrets of the body?
What she couldn’t doubt, however, was that the
secrets were real. Secrets for gaining a deep level of control over the body to draw more strength from each breath and decelerate one’s perception of time. Secrets for packing the muscles with latent strength. Secrets that made her a nuisance to all the Clan Sikhozi boys who thought a girl had no place in the Ajaha training pits.
In the split second militiamen with faces painted a ghostly white pour into the compound, Ilapara calls up her training. Time slows. Her senses grow keener; her reflexes accelerate.
The spear she wields fits into her grip like it was made for her. High-grade aerosteel from the Yontai with an enchanted witchwood core, it is light as a hollow twig, widening slightly somewhere two-thirds along its length into a thin double-edged blade, tapering sharply at the end into a savage spearpoint. She moves with it just in time to dodge an invading militiaman’s spear thrust.
Kwashe yells something over the din. The elder Mimvura roars. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and the rain starts to pour heavily. Ilapara’s world narrows down to the militiaman in front of her. The pupils of his wild eyes are dilated like he smoked something. He snarls as he thrusts his weapon, exposing yellowed teeth. She quickly pivots away and whirls her weapon round in a blow that catches him on the collarbone.
A bolt of red lightning arcs along the blade as it makes contact and cuts him, instantly blackening his flesh. He convulses as he falls, electrocuted by the weapon’s live charm of Storm craft. But this is just the beginning. A militiaman with a long scar on his right cheek steps over him and rushes her with a sword; she holds her spear like a staff, parries two blows, sidesteps a third, lowers her spear, and strikes.
His blood flows with the rain. The stench of death closes in around Ilapara. She shook and cried herself to sleep on the day she killed her first man, months ago now, but today each kill blurs into the next, her victims leaving only the faintest scars on her soul.
To either side of her, Kwashe and the elder Mimvura move with the savagery of dingoneks, skewering, maiming, and cutting down the militiamen without mercy. Kwashe catches a militiaman in a choke hold and squeezes, and blood erupts between his fingers as he crushes his victim’s trachea. Nearby, the elder Mimvura is a flash of movement as he impales a trio of militiamen with a series of rapid-fire thrusts. Whatever charms they used must have been of the highest quality, because they are relentless.
But to what end? Ilapara finds herself wondering when she begins to tire. What happens when the spirits possessing them expend themselves? Do I really want to fight to my death here?
Is this really what I deserve?
They have managed to hold the militiamen by the gate so far, but they are beginning to give ground. She thrusts her spearpoint toward a militiaman, intending to electrocute him with her weapon’s Storm craft, but he has protective charms on his armor, so the bolt leaves him unscathed. He grins, lifting his weapon, but Kwashe falls upon him before he can charge.
A chance, one Ilapara does not waste. She retreats from the melee and sprints across the compound for the stables, passing the younger Mimvura’s charred corpse.
The spirit’s explosion blackened much of the main house’s facade and shattered every window, and some parts of the wall are still glowing red with embers of moonfire. She passes a clothesline still holding up brightly colored nappies despite the rain. Screams come from inside the house, women and children wailing in grief and fear. Ilapara puts them out of her mind and keeps going.
In the stables she finds only a pair of zebroid mares and a kudu buck with rather fearsome spiraling horns of tronic bone. Each animal is in a separate stall, and the ruckus has left them visibly tense; the zebroids have their ears stiff and pushed forward, and the buck won’t stop grunting and tossing his head back and forth. She curses when she notices that he’s the only mount already saddled; she’s ridden antelope before and managed just fine, but this particular species can be too willful.
He flicks his ears suspiciously when he sees her approaching, so she coos and puts out a placating hand to show that her intentions are peaceful. She is relieved when he allows her to run a gentle hand down his neck.
He’s a bit taller than the zebroids, if a little leaner. She knows he’s a red kudu, given the size of his horns and the hue of his smooth coat—a rusty red like the temperate woodlands of Valau, the birthplace of his species, where the trees and grasses are said to mimic the colors of a full moon sunset. Several metallic stripes run vertically down his back, and those strong, willowy legs of his, which gradually lose their coat as they terminate in metal hooves, should sustain a swift, loping gait over long distances.
“I want to be your friend,” Ilapara says to the buck. “I want to get us out of here, understand?”
She quickly runs her eyes over his tack and tests his stirrups, and once she’s confident he won’t cast her off, she mounts him, holding her spear tightly in her right hand. He grunts in a manner that might be indignant but seems to accept her as his new rider.
“I’m going to need you to run very fast today,” she says to him. “Can you do that for me?”
She doesn’t expect an answer, and she doesn’t get one, but when she rocks her hips forward, the buck leaps into motion like he’s been itching for it all day. She spurs him into a full gallop as soon as the gate comes within sight.
The possessed young men defending the gate are still in the thick of battle, but she can tell that their spirits are beginning to fade. It won’t be long before they have lost their inhuman strength, and when that happens, the floodgates will open. As she reaches the fray, a militiaman with bloodshot eyes charges toward the buck’s left flank, ready to run it through with his spear. Without hesitating, she thrusts with her right hand, skewering his neck with the tip of her weapon.
Kwashe looks up at Ilapara as she passes the gate, and she glimpses in his eyes something of the young man she once knew, something that rends her heart into little pieces.
Then the buck carries her onward, and that’s the last she sees of him.
Fire. Rain. Two militias clashing in a town-wide skirmish. Columns of smoke rising from all over town. Visceral screams, too many to count. The season changing violently in Kageru.
Ilapara doesn’t go to the hostel west of town to get her things. She bounds southward on her new mount, following the Artery’s wide gravel roadway out of town. A fierce battle is raging in the market square when she passes it, two mystics hurling spells at each other among the smoldering ruins of market stalls. She squints to look and sees the flash of chalk-white skin and glowing cosmic shards, but then her eyes bulge as a stray lance of moonfire shoots out of the smog and toward her.
She ducks. The lance sails over her head, yet she feels a rush of heat so intense it comes close to setting her crimson veil on fire. The lance crashes into a two-story building across the street, and its thatched roof immediately ignites. Ilapara thinks she hears wailing coming from inside.
She spurs her buck faster and keeps going.
In the skies above her, the kongamato is still circling the town, barely visible through the rain. It banks toward her just as she spots it, and she shivers from the chilling memory of its rider’s brilliant reptilian eyes—eyes that seemed to look specifically at her.
Eyes that will surely see her when the kongamato comes near enough.
With a prayer to the moon, she reaches into one of the pockets on her shoulder belt, takes out the soul charm Mama Shadu gave her earlier this morning, and palms it.
Please don’t be a dud, please don’t be a dud, please work . . .
Something cold and slippery and intangible rises from the disk and explodes into her, suffusing her core, causing her to almost fall off her saddle. A flood of images rushes through her mind, disjointed snippets of a life spent swimming in fast-flowing waters and hunting prey while wrapped in an impenetrable stealth field.
And just like that, the powers of the inkanyamba, dreaded ghost eel of the rivers and freshwater lakes of the Redlands, are hers.
Ilapa
ra has used Mama Shadu’s charms before, but she has never felt a merge so intense it demanded she take a moment to recover her balance. She quickly reaches for the stirring of power now sitting at the edge of her mind, waiting to be set loose. As it responds, a cocoon of lies takes shape around her and around the buck, weaving fields of false light and sound so that she becomes a phantom in the street, invisible and inaudible, like a hunting inkanyamba.
From her perspective, little has changed. The sorcery now cloaking her movements creates a mild distortion of her peripheral vision, a shimmer flowing like waves over the ground and making the sky sparkle with false stars. To everyone else, she and the buck are the air itself, nonexistent.
The kongamato darkens the road with its vast shadow as it flies by. Then it banks away, its rider none the wiser.
Ilapara doesn’t let herself breathe a sigh of relief; she coaxes her tronic buck into running faster along the roadway, and they hurtle into the rain at speed, leaving the battle and the circling kongamato behind. At the edge of her mind, the inkanyamba frolics and swims, reveling in its new vessel, but she can already feel its power fading.
She could flee north, deeper into the Cataract’s fiefdom and away from the Dark Sun. But the north is foreign to her, while the south is where she first established herself in Umadiland three comets ago. She has contacts there, in Seresa in particular, and a modest reputation she could leverage to get herself a job. The region is also closer to home, her real home, though she is annoyed that this should be a consideration after all this time away. But the heart wants what it wants, so south she goes.
She rides around the militiamen barricading the town’s southern entrance. They don’t even look in her direction. She rides until the shacks of Kageru grow fewer and farther between and then vanish behind her altogether. She rides past a caravan that has stopped on the roadway, where it will wait for the season change to run its course before venturing into town.
She keeps going even after the inkanyamba spirit expends its power and its stealth field weakens and fades, and only when she reaches a place miles away, where the Artery begins to dip after having climbed a gentle knoll, does she slow down and bring her buck to a halt. A chill from her rain-soaked garments has begun to work itself into her skin. She shivers and turns to look.