Scarlet Odyssey

by C. T. Rwizi

  “Thank you,” Salo says with genuine relief. A quarter hour passes in silence, the shouts outside getting fewer and farther between.

  Then Monti says, “I’m thirsty.”

  A combination of fear, complacency, and misplaced trust clouds Salo’s judgment, and he fails to discern Monti’s scheme until it’s too late. By the time he returns to the chamber with a half-filled earthenware pitcher of water from the parlor, Monti is gone, with nothing but a yawning window to show that he was ever there.

  The pitcher slips from Salo’s hands and shatters on the floor, spilling water everywhere. He races for the door and barges out of the hut. “Monti!”

  The boy is nowhere to be found. He’s probably halfway to his hut by now.

  Salo takes off at a sprint, charging across the chief’s compound. The mystic Seal has disappeared from the skies, but the sounds of battle have not yet ceased.

  Heartbeats later he passes the chief’s apiary, now shrouded in darkness beneath the boughs of ancient gum trees. He spots two young Ajaha spinning and twisting around each other amid a party of angry tikoloshe, their spears flashing with red wards as they dance through the air.

  The duo moves as one, their bones reinforced with the queen’s arcane blessing, their minds and reflexes synced through their red steel. Salo watches a dexterous swing lop off the skeletal arm of a tikoloshe, but the ranger who inflicted the wound is already pivoting to thrust his weapon into the chest of another while his comrade leaps to cleave the first tikoloshe in half. Dusty bones crack and crumble into clouds that disperse with the wind, and the creatures screech, their eyes burning with rage like the white sun.

  The rangers are too fast for them, too strong, too brave.

  Salo keeps running, and soon the battle is behind him. He flies down the stepped path to the first of two compounds on the way to Monti’s hut. Dusk has fallen, so all the huts here are lit like lanterns; their glowvines droop from the thatching and crawl up the brickwork like bioluminescent serpents. Salo doesn’t notice the bodies littering the compound until he almost trips over one.

  He stops, his throat constricting as he recognizes the corpse as Aago Ruparo, a witty old woman with an easy smile, the clan’s most respected beer brewer. Now she’s nothing but a bloody sack of newly dead meat wrapped in a dusty kitenge.

  Tears blur his vision. His breath comes in strenuous gasps. This isn’t supposed to happen. Not in their kraal. Not here.

  A shriek to his right brings him crashing back to his senses, and he looks just in time to see a young boy get slashed across the neck and chest by a talon, his small body flung across the compound like a rag doll. He lands gracelessly on his belly yards away, his neck twisted unnaturally so that Salo gets to see his face—and the shock painted onto it in tears and dust, and the vacant eyes that won’t blink anymore.

  Salo howls and rushes to the boy, crumpling to his knees and cradling him in his arms. Blood slicks them both, its coppery tang thick in the air, mingling with the reek of ruptured bowels, the smell of life tipping irretrievably into death. Salo holds Monti’s limp body in his trembling arms and doesn’t let go.

  He is vaguely aware of a deathly presence drawing nearer, the smell of ruin and burning things. He senses the presence watching him curiously. Hears it growl at him, feels it raise a talon, but he makes no move to escape what’s coming—he can’t.

  The two rangers he spotted earlier approach. The tikoloshe shrieks as it turns to face them, a ghastly sound that might as well be the rusty gates of the underworld squeaking open. Rangers and wraith collide in a battle of red steel against bone. The shrieks die out abruptly.

  Then one of the rangers speaks. “What the devil are you doing out here? Forget that; just get indoors! Now, brother.” Jio or Sibu, one of his brothers, though Salo isn’t sure which one. And though he hears the individual words, they don’t string together into coherent sentences.

  Monti is dead. I let him out of my sight, and now he’s dead.

  A third ranger approaches. His voice is familiar, but it sounds distant, faint. Unreal, just like the rest of it. It can’t be real. “Pits. Is that Monti? Oh, Salo.” A hand settles on Salo’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  Monti is dead. I failed to protect him.

  “Salo, we can’t leave you out here.”

  “You can stay with him, if you want,” says another voice. “That was the last of them.”

  “All right. You should go check on your aba and the general. Let me know if they call a meeting.”

  “Will do.”

  Salo doesn’t know how long he stays in the compound after his brothers leave. Long enough for people to start trickling out of their huts, ululating in grief, covering the bodies with sheets, and carrying them away. Long enough for Monti’s tearful parents to come and weep over their son’s body. Long enough for Niko to have to pry Salo’s hands from Monti so that his parents can take him back to their hut and prepare him for committal.

  Once they’ve left, Niko puts a hand around Salo’s nape. Grief shimmers in his earnest brown eyes, as well as cold fury, the kind only vengeance can quench. “I know Monti was like a brother to you. We’ll make the Umadi pay for this; do you understand? We’ll avenge Monti and all those who died here today. I swear it.”

  Niko doesn’t know yet, but he will soon. They all will. Salo already knows it as well as he knows that he is a coward, yet another stain that will come to define him, the thickest and ugliest to date: Monti is dead, and it’s because I didn’t protect him. Monti is dead because of me. I killed Monti.

  6: The Maidservant

  Lake Nyasiningwe—Yerezi Plains

  Somewhere across the lake, a swarm of flies enters a dank cave and slowly gathers into a vortex from which a woman emerges, a woman who was once someone else before she was the Maidservant.

  Black tattoos mark the entirety of her body; she has worn them for years, but the self-inflicted spells they hold ensure that she still feels as much pain as she did on the day they were scored onto her skin. Her every step, her every gesture, sends ripples of agony down her spine, but she embraces the pain, revels in it, for it is the cornerstone of her power, the fuel that feeds the hatred keeping her sane and focused.

  Inside the cave, the Maidservant finds a mystic in black garments flipping through the pages of an old book by a slab of rock carved into the shape of a table. A few torches mounted on the walls sputter with flames, casting a trembling light across the range of sorcerous paraphernalia housed in the cave—from alchemical apparatuses to dark shelves overflowing with tomes.

  Her pet, a monstrous hyena more metal than flesh, doesn’t move from the ledge of rock it is lounging on when it spots the Maidservant. It twitches its three metal horns and gives her a grotesque parody of a smile, complete with a low, rumbling growl. The Maidservant is assessing the threat it poses when the trap springs around her, so quickly she can do nothing but watch.

  To the naked eye, nothing has changed, but the wards of Void craft that have suddenly gone up around her—designed specifically to confine a Void mystic—might as well be walls of barbed wire. She can neither touch them nor call upon the Void while trapped inside; if she did either, the Void would warp wrongly around her shards to lethal effect. She stills and waits for her captor to make her next move.

  The mystic closes her book and fixes her with a cunning gaze. “I take it you were successful. I could hear the screams from here.” She speaks in the Maidservant’s native tongue with a thick accent. Her voice is cold, smooth, like a ghost eel in water.

  “I’ve done my part,” the Maidservant says, maintaining her composure. “Now it’s time to do yours.”

  “Ah, but loose ends tend to unravel, do they not? And you, my little Umadi witch, are a very loose end. Tell me: What would you do in my rather precarious position?”

  Hot anger spreads beneath the Maidservant’s skin and makes it burn like she has painted herself with fire. She grits her teeth, harnessing the ensuing wave of hatred
to bolster the door in her mind—that door only she can see, to a realm of such power it makes her tremble every time even a granule of it flows through her veins.

  The door shudders violently and groans from the force battering against it from the other side. Sometimes it’ll creak open, and the power will lick out like a flame, blackening her soul with the desire to just let go and become its vessel and thrall.

  Maybe I should give in, she thinks now. I could let the door burst open, let every fell beast from the other side come out and tear the flesh off this presumptuous mystic.

  You will lose yourself to it.

  The Maidservant summons her hatred and pushes back against that last stray thought. “If you try to kill me, you’ll find that I’m not easy prey. In any case, I took certain measures to make sure you’d pay dearly for betraying me.”

  The mystic tilts her head, amused. “Measures?”

  “One wrong move, and your whole tribe will know about our arrangement, that it was you who orchestrated an attack against your own people.” An empty threat, but the Maidservant puts enough of a bite in her words to make it sound real enough.

  “And just how would you manage that?” the mystic says, her eyes sparkling.

  “Make a wrong move, and you’ll find out.”

  On the rock ledge, the hyena emits another low growl. Its master stares at the Maidservant from across the cave for a long time.

  The Maidservant doesn’t flinch from her gaze. She knows she could die here, and she curses herself for walking so blindly into a trap, but she doesn’t flinch. For a moment, the air in the cave seems charged, poised to turn against her.

  The mystic smiles. “Well then. I suppose there’s no reason for us to part ways on a sour note.”

  The Maidservant says nothing. Still watching her, the mystic picks up a scorpion pendant lying on her table and approaches. Her skirts sweep the cave’s floor as she walks. “Your payment, as agreed. An unbound Yerezi talisman of the highest quality.”

  She tosses the scorpion talisman into the air, and it slips through the Void wards. The Maidservant catches it effortlessly and holds the object up to the torchlight.

  A finely crafted artifact. Red steel and silver, its carapace chased with moongold, a clear crystal serving as the sting. Currents of complex sorcery throb away from it in rhythmic pulses. “How do I get it to answer to me?”

  The mystic shows her teeth in a disparaging smile. “How else? You claim it with blood, of course.”

  “Of course.” With a single thought the Maidservant spreads her left palm and causes the tattoos singed there to inch apart and split her skin so that it wells with blood. While the mystic grimaces, the Maidservant relishes the spike of pain. Only after she has rubbed every inch of the scorpion over her bleeding palm does she command her tattoos to knit together again.

  Then the scorpion stirs, and lights strobe out from its crystal sting, sweeping the cave. A presence rises from the pendant and tries to enter her mind; she lets it. For a fleeting moment the presence explores her knowledge of ciphers, which it quickly uses to establish a telepathic system of communication that will allow her to control the talisman with her thoughts. Its first message is a ripple of power that reveals to her the extent of its capabilities. The Maidservant allows herself a smile.

  “Just out of curiosity,” the mystic says, watching her, “why this? You could have asked for anything else. Coin, perhaps. I know how much you Umadi love coin.”

  The Maidservant commands the talisman to go dormant and clutches it in her bloody palm. “That is no concern of yours.”

  “I suppose it isn’t. Though I should warn you, in case you were planning on deconstructing the talisman to learn its secrets: Don’t bother. I took measures to ensure you’d never succeed. Those secrets belong to the Yerezi. If the Umadi want to start making talismans, you can figure out how for yourselves.”

  But I have no intention of deconstructing it . . . “Consider me notified. Now, if you would let me go. Our business is concluded, and I have places to be.”

  The mystic takes her time to comply, slowly drawing magic into the cosmic shards branded on her forearms. Finally she waves the wards away. “Let our paths never cross again.”

  Without another word the Maidservant bursts into a cloud of flies and swarms out of the cave and into the twilight skies.

  7: Musalodi

  Khaya-Siningwe—Yerezi Plains

  The day the Carving almost took his life was the first time he encountered the blue apparition.

  At first it was just a ghostly outline lurking within the Carving’s ancient forest, a cold presence hidden beneath a veil of blue mist, watching him silently. Nothing had ever followed him into this realm before, so he initially dismissed the vision as a product of his nerves; after all, losing track of the Carving’s shifting paths could mean being stuck there forever.

  But the mist seeped out of the trees, and Salo glimpsed therein an exceedingly tall blue-skinned man wearing only a hide loincloth, like a man from centuries past. He held a long spear of the strangest blue metal in his right hand, and what Salo could see of his face was unnaturally angular and sharp. His eyes, too, were unsettling, old and unforgiving things that shone through the misty haze like enchanted sapphires.

  Salo stopped, feeling his heart begin to thud in his chest. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Remember. He doubted the apparition had moved his mouth, and yet he heard his voice all the same, something like the whisper of wind or an echo in a vast chasm.

  Was this another of the Carving’s tests? “I don’t understand,” he said.

  A woman appeared behind the apparition right then, dark skinned and coldly beautiful, with ocher-smeared dreadlocks and a little red snake looped around one wrist. The floral kitenge covering her body was drenched in blood, and so was the glass vial in her right hand. A large feline shape skulked in the trees by her side—all Salo could see of it was a cold metallic gleam and neon-blue eyes.

  Fear unlike any he’d ever known took hold of him. He shook his head, taking a step back each time the woman stepped forward. This was a vision lifted straight from his nightmares. “No. It can’t be. Not this.”

  Remember, the apparition whispered, still a distant echo, though it sounded a little closer now.

  “No!”

  He turned around to flee, but the ground erupted with thick roots that lunged upward to ensnare his arms, pulling him down to his knees. The restraints would not budge no matter how much he struggled.

  “Let me go!”

  He was helpless as the woman approached, and it was almost exactly like that first time all those years ago, except back then he was a boy and knew nothing of what was to come.

  The woman watched him with mournful eyes. Guilt sat in those eyes, too, but her determination weighed heavier, and it was this that pushed her forward.

  “No!” Salo thrashed around in his prison. “Please, don’t do this!”

  Tears flowed down the woman’s cheeks, yet she continued to advance. “I have to, my sweet. Don’t you see?” Her voice was thunder, making the ground shake. “I have looked to the edge of time, and I know what awaits there, the great and terrible things that will one day part the skies and shatter the world. It is why I must do this.” She opened the vial in her hands, and Salo felt roots curling around his neck so that his face tipped upward. “Your pain and your tears, even as they destroy me, will build me anew, and your blood will be my victory over the coming darkness.”

  Behind the woman, the slinky feline shape finally stalked out of the shadows, its glistening canines bared, eyes gleaming hungrily. Blood stained its metallic leg muscles as it padded around its master.

  Salo’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Please, Ama. Please don’t do this. It will hurt.”

  The woman’s voice became something feeble and broken. “Forgive me,” she said. “Forgive me. Forgive me.” And then she tipped the vial and poured its acidic contents onto his eyes.

  Sal
o screamed. His eyes became live coals in his skull, and scarlet flames filled his vision. He screamed until his throat tore itself open, until the world shifted around him and the roots disappeared.

  Then he could see again, but now he was kneeling in a pool of blood with the woman lying in front of him, trembling in silent pain as she bled out from the mortal wounds on her belly. A witchwood blade lay discarded nearby, stained crimson.

  “No.”

  The sight was like a jagged splinter boring a hole into Salo’s skull, another crack in the dam holding back painful memories he did not wish to revisit.

  “Ama, no!” He crawled toward the woman and gently cradled her head. “Oh, Ama, what have you done?”

  Her head tilted so she could look up into his eyes. “Help me,” she said in a weak voice. “Stop the pain.”

  The blue apparition was still there, standing in the background, watching with his unforgiving eyes. “Why are you doing this?” Salo shouted.

  Remember.

  He couldn’t do this. Salo let the woman go and got up to flee. The apparition’s voice echoed behind him, repeating that same word, but he wouldn’t stop. He fled across the forest’s twisting paths until his feet started to bleed. He fled until he woke up in the workshop to find Nimara hovering above him, trying to resuscitate him. That day he wept in her arms until his eyes ran dry as dust, though she would never understand why.

  That was the last time he used the Carving, but the woman and the blue apparition would continue to haunt him in his dreams.

  Not until the suns have risen over the kraal the next day does the fog of shock begin to burn away and the scale of loss become clear. The witch came, she fed her lord’s Seal with the blood of twenty-seven clanspeople, and then she fled, leaving gaping holes in the lives that survived her onslaught.

  The committals are scheduled for the moonrise that day, as is customary, which occurs around high noon for a waxing half moon. Ten of the chief’s fattest uroko are slaughtered—an offering of a kind never seen in the Plains before, one not even a chief would merit at his funeral. The Ajaha perform their tribute dance twenty-seven times, honoring all who fell, not just those who donned the red. Twenty-seven burial rafts are carried down to the lake’s western shores, not just one. Mourners from the rival Sibere clan across the lake come in their numbers—a first in Salo’s memory—and their genuine sorrow surprises him with its intensity. He comes to understand that this was a crime committed not solely against Khaya-Siningwe but against the whole Yerezi tribe.