by C. T. Rwizi
“I have already felt the worst agony of my life,” Kelafelo says. “I am not afraid.”
For a moment the mystic’s opaque eyes seem to stare back, probing her, and Kelafelo gets the impression they see a lot more than she first assumed. “Very well.” The Anchorite reaches into her cloak and produces a thick ring of pale wood, holding it out for Kelafelo to see. “Do you know what this is?”
Kelafelo leans forward to examine the ring. Its color is that of bone, like the witchwood tree looming over them. Mysterious symbols have been carved all over its surface. “A soul charm, except the mind stone is missing.”
The Anchorite nods in approval. “Anyone can make one of these provided they know what ciphers to carve and in what order. But those who know the secret have wisely kept it within our tribe; should I teach it to you in the future, I will expect you to do the same.”
“Yes, Mamakuru,” Kelafelo says, though the tronic centipede has stolen her attention again as it crawls up to the Anchorite’s shoulder, its carapace shimmering like a film of oil on water. She fails to hold in a gasp when the creature rears up, extends a pair of metal fangs, and bites into the old woman’s neck.
The Anchorite doesn’t flinch. She holds out her arms as the centipede sinks its fangs deeper into her neck. Then there’s a change in the air that makes Kelafelo’s ears pop, like she has climbed to a place where the air is thinner. The old woman’s cosmic shards appear, six rings pulsing scarlet with magic on each arm. Kelafelo watches, mesmerized, as the soul charm lifts off the mystic’s palm, floats into the air, and stops to hover above the basket in front of her.
“We all know what these little things can do for a warrior in battle,” the Anchorite says, her centipede still lodged in her neck. “But precious few understand that these charms are nothing but vessels of information. Just as they imbue warriors with tronic skills, they can also transfer knowledge from one mind to another.”
Particles of dust begin to rise in a circle, lingering in place unnaturally around the witchwood tree. Kelafelo gives the dust a nervous glance as the Anchorite continues to speak.
“With an important limitation, of course. The more complex the knowledge transferred, the higher the risk that attempting to assimilate it will drive you to madness. Literacy in ciphers and multiple scripts will be pushing this limit. Are you still willing to continue?”
Kelafelo looks away from the wall of dust that has risen around them and meets the Anchorite’s stonelike gaze. She wants to sound confident, yet this display of power has left her trembling. “Whatever it takes, Mamakuru.”
“Then reach forward and accept the soul charm.”
Swallowing down her fear, Kelafelo obeys, and as soon as she touches the charm, the dust begins to dissipate with the breeze, and the pressure she felt in the air relents. She notices also that the Anchorite’s shards have stopped glowing and that the centipede has finally retracted its fangs. A thin trickle of blood is all the old woman has to show for it, not that it bothers her, judging by the inexpressive look on her face.
“As you noticed,” she says, “the charm is missing a mind stone. To access the knowledge I have infused into it, you must place a mind stone into the hollow and possess yourself with its spirit.”
Kelafelo frowns at the charm in her hand. “But where am I to find a mind stone?”
A chill in the air. A whisper of the breeze. The slightest of smiles on the Anchorite’s face as she drops her gaze onto the basket sitting between them.
Kelafelo looks at it, too, a shiver climbing down her spine. She braces herself and reaches forward to lift the lid, only to fling it away and recoil when a red mamba rears its head from within, hissing at her. Its eyes are soulless voids. Its scales shimmer in the dusk like it was dipped in blood. Kelafelo takes in sharp breaths, wrestling with the instinct to flee, careful not to make any sudden moves.
“You may be wondering why I would place such a trial before you,” the Anchorite says. “And you may come to the conclusion that I wish to see you dead. But the first thing you must learn from me is that Red magic is a language of the body and soul. To truly grasp it, one must become acquainted with the most immediate consequence of having both in a chaotic universe. Do you know what that is?”
Kelafelo shakes her head, still staring at the hissing serpent.
“Agony,” the Anchorite says. “Intimate knowledge of agony brings you closer to the Blood Woman and the secrets of her magic. It is why I did not ease your recovery when you first arrived. Because of your ordeal, the grief and suffering you have known, you have already begun the path to your Axiom. Now you must face this serpent if you wish to continue.”
As though it has understood the Anchorite’s words, the red snake lunges at Kelafelo threateningly, forcing her to crawl back a few paces. She shakes her head forcefully. “No, Mamakuru. This is a red mamba. One bite will kill me in seconds.”
The old woman shows no sympathy. “Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. You said you were willing to go to the ends of the earth. Now we will know the worth of your words. There is a hatchet in the basket; use it to kill the snake and take its mind stone, then possess yourself with its spirit.”
The serpent makes as if to strike again, and Kelafelo almost gives this whole thing up right then, an impulse that quickly mutates into scorching anger.
You would give up on vengeance for Urura? You would cower from the first trial thrown at your feet? How dare you even consider it!
A deathly calm settles over her, and her limbs stop shaking. She eyes the serpent and sees through it to the reason her belly aches every time she moves.
The reason she wakes up shouting every night.
The reason she is sitting here right now, in front of this loathsome creature, and not with her daughter.
She needs no further motivation. She takes in a deep breath, gathers all her hatred, and lunges forward.
11: Musalodi
Khaya-Siningwe—Yerezi Plains
Silence. Stillness.
Salo’s aago, avid spinner of tales that she was, once told him that when a whole group of people falls silent at the exact same time, it’s because the devil has walked by. That is how Salo feels when he announces his guilt to his clanspeople: like Arante herself has drifted by on a gust of wind and planted a deathly kiss upon his cheeks.
As she sits on the wicker throne in front of him, the queen’s eyes burn with interest.
He swallows and continues. “My ama, the late AmaSiningwe, killed herself because she thought she was saving me. I don’t understand it. Perhaps she was ill—I will not speak of it. All I will say is that her death robbed this clan of a mystic and plunged us into the depths you have spoken of, Your Majesty, and I know that I am to blame.”
The words pour out of him from a part of his mind he didn’t even know existed, and it shocks him just how much he believes them.
“And I will be the first to admit that I haven’t done much to make up for it,” he continues. “I have shirked my responsibilities. I have failed to gain entry into the esteemed Ajaha, and I have consistently failed to live up to my aba’s name. I am most unworthy, Your Majesty. I know that.”
He risks a glance at VaSiningwe. The deep worry he sees there makes him draw in a shuddering breath. The emotions that come with it sting his eyes. Thank Ama no one can see them.
“But this union you have decided on calls me to action, Your Majesty, because accepting it would mean living with the knowledge that I am the reason my clan has fallen to the hyenas.” AmaSibere sneers to his side; he ignores her. “But how can I? How can I face my clanspeople knowing I am the cause of their shame? How can I face my own aba?”
Salo shakes his head in answer to his own question. “I cannot, Your Majesty, which is why I have risked sacrilege to stand before you now. And here is what I beg of you, Irediti Ariishe, and I do so for the sake of my clanspeople, for my aba, and for the sake of my own soul. Your Majesty, allow me to commune with the redhawk and receive my shards, and should I
be successful, allow me to serve my people as clan mystic.”
Laughs abound, all of them mirthless. Salo’s clanspeople are laughing in their shock at the temerity, the sheer insolence that he could suggest such a thing.
“Sacrilege!” AmaSibere hisses, baring her teeth like she would rip him to pieces right there.
When his eyes flick to VaSiningwe this time, his blood chills at what he sees. The man’s jaw is clenched. His eyes hard as stone.
Salo turns away from him and the queen to face his clan, and the anger he sees on their faces weakens his knees. This is not at all what he was hoping for.
Then he spots Nimara sitting on a reed mat somewhere among the crowds, and she nods at him, the only friendly face in a sea of hostility. “Khaya-Siningwe may be small,” he says, finding the courage to continue, “but it is still one of the wealthiest clans in the Plains. Our lands are abundant in iron, gemstones, and moongold. We have rich hunting grounds, a bountiful network of rivers and streams, and fields so fertile we don’t need a mystic to keep ourselves fed. Shall we give all this up to the hyenas, who have always coveted our wealth? Shall we betray our forebears, who fought for this land and left it for us as our birthright? Is it not worth a temporary break in tradition to save their legacy?”
Some clanspeople grow silent and thoughtful. Salo presses his point. “I am not putting myself forward as a permanent solution, Siningwe-kin. I only want to buy us more time. Perhaps in a few comets, our own mystic will awaken and take her rightful place. I will gladly step aside. But our clan’s integrity is at stake—right now. The hyenas are outside our borders—right now. And if we let them in, they’ll destroy us. They’ll stamp out any trace of what makes us Siningwe, and the Yerezi will be weaker for it.”
AmaSibere raises a long finger in warning. “Remember, Yerezi-kin! Our Foremothers barred men from sorcery for a reason. Men do not possess the control and poise necessary to safely wield such power. They are too susceptible to their passions and their pride and their desire to dominate. Allow him to awaken, and he would soon become a tyrant. Just look at the rest of the Redlands. Was it not a man’s Seal that burned in your skies only a week ago? Male sorcerers are abominations. We must not allow one within our borders.”
Many shout in agreement. Salo can’t think of a defense against her words except to say, “I have no will to dominate, AmaSibere, only the will to see my clan free of your clutch.” A few cheers arise.
AmaSibere smiles dangerously. “You say that now, but once you’ve tasted power, you will want more. It is in your nature; you cannot escape it.”
“With all due respect, you don’t know me. You can’t tell me what my nature is and what it isn’t.”
“That may be so, but what you ask for is still sacrilegious. More to the point, it is impossible. You cannot just commune with a redhawk and become a mystic. You need at least a decade of schooling in the language of ciphers. You need to discover your own key to the moon’s power. You need years of experience as an Asazi apprentice. You have none of these.”
“Why don’t we let Ama be the judge of my worthiness? I’m prepared to take that risk.” Salo turns back to the queen, whose little smile is somewhere between wry and cruelly amused. “Your Majesty, would you say that someone who has derived an Axiom is ready to face the redhawk?”
Now the smile wanes, her head tilts, her eyes narrow in suspicion. “Perhaps,” she says.
“Could I press you for a more definite answer, Your Majesty?”
The queen sits back in her throne and crosses one leg over the other. “All right,” she says. “Yes, I would agree with that claim. But why do you ask?”
“Because I derived an Axiom, Your Majesty.”
Gasps. Whispers. AmaSibere laughs. “Take him for flogging. The boy lies.”
“I speak the truth,” Salo says.
“Explain yourself,” says the queen. No amusement now, only intense scrutiny.
“My ama . . . AmaSiningwe wrote about a certain Axiom before she died,” Salo says. “I used her teachings to devise it.”
The queen rises to her feet, and the rest of the world seems to disappear, like she’s sucked all the light from the compound and spooled it around her crown. The shock on her face is so terrifying Salo finds his knees buckling to the ground. He bows his head and braces for the worst.
“You derived your mother’s Axiom? The Elusive Cube?”
It takes him a moment to recover from the fact that the queen knows about the Axiom, then another to shudder at the implications of this, and then he finally says, “I did, Your Majesty.”
“You lie!”
“I tell the truth! By Ama I swear!”
“Look at me,” the queen commands. Salo looks up and is awed once more by the wondrous sight before him, this malaika made flesh. What foolishness to think that he could ever be anything like her. What utter madness.
In the compound’s tense silence, she walks down the porch toward him, the long train of her skirts trailing behind her. The metalloid shards on her arms begin to glow a furious red as they fill up with the moon’s essence, and even more terrifying are the six complete rings encircling either forearm—the indisputable proof of her power and preeminence.
“I will rip the truth from your mind if I have to,” she says and then splays a hand toward him, and suddenly—
Pain. Intense, unholy pain like a fire burning just beneath his skin. Salo crumples to the hard earth and curls into a fetal position. The world goes dark. He can’t cry out because his throat won’t let him, so all he does is choke and wheeze.
He knows the pain isn’t real, nothing but a distraction. The queen is a powerful Blood mystic with the ability to read thoughts, but to reach them she has to flood his senses with pain so that his mind is powerless to resist her intrusions. Indeed, his mind opens up to her like the pages of a book.
In the distant background, he feels her sift through his memories with an aggressive searching spell. His mind is cut in half, then those halves into halves, on and on until eighteen years’ worth of memories yield the one truth she’s looking for.
Surprise blooms in her mind as she plunges deeper into his; he senses this. She’s shocked at the nature and structure of it, the deep pathways reordered for pattern manipulation and mental multitasking. This is so far from the mind of an ordinary boy she spends entire seconds wandering through its restructured synapses, aghast.
Here is the mind of a boy so foolish, so thoroughly reckless, he spent years—years!—gambling with a high-risk mental artifact, a forbidden artifact, and so stupidly lucky that he survived every encounter with it. His mental pathways even offer minor resistance to her probes, and while he should be delirious with pain, he’s actually aware of what she’s doing.
Still, his mind yields to hers, and she sees, and she sees, and she sees . . .
And when she mind-touches the memory of a certain cache of ciphers locked within the red steel core of his talisman, and when she follows the memory all the way to its root, she recoils from it like a hand from boiling acid. She retreats from his mind altogether, so quickly it leaves him convulsing and temporarily paralyzed.
The pain goes away slowly, like fog clearing away from the lake at first sunrise. When he struggles to pick himself up from the ground and return to a kneeling position, he finds the queen standing with a hand pressed against her chest. Shock, disgust, and fear wrestle on her face. Behind her, VaSiningwe has risen to his feet. His eyes are wide, and he seems, rather uncharacteristically, at a loss for what to do.
“Abomination,” the queen breathes. “Fool. What have you done? I . . . I didn’t think it was possible. I thought she was mad . . .”
“Your Majesty,” AmaSibere says, and the urgency in her voice scares Salo more than anything else right now. “Asanda’s work was evil. She was in league with darkness. If he recreated it . . .” Her staff begins to pulse with cold energy. She eyes Salo with murderous intent. “We can’t risk him bringing it into this world.
He must die.”
“Don’t even think of it.” VaSiningwe takes a step toward the hyena. He’s one of the tallest men in the kraal, and his spine-maned leopard headdress turns him into a giant. He looms over her. “How dare you!” The anger in his voice is almost a physical force.
“VaSiningwe,” she says, standing her ground, “you of all people know I do not speak lightly. You know firsthand the wickedness of Asanda’s work.”
His jaw ripples with anger, but he has nothing to say to that. To Salo this feels like splinters of glass slicing straight through his heart.
“Aba?” he says.
The man faces him, endless anger in his eyes. “What the devil were you thinking, boy? I should have barred you from that cursed shed a long time ago. I have been far too lenient with you.” Endless anger and guilt and contempt.
For him.
“But Aba, I—”
“Silence! Don’t make things worse than you’ve already made them.”
Salo bows his head to hide the rivers of shame flowing down his cheeks.
The queen, though, takes things along a different tangent. “This changes everything,” she says, more to herself than to anyone else. The world spins on her words like a ceramic ewer and then stops by the edge, waiting for the wind to tip it either way.
She addresses the chief. “VaSiningwe, your clan’s sacred altar. It is on the island in the lake, is it not?”
“It is, Irediti Ariishe,” he answers, looking visibly confused.
“Tonight, at Heaven’s Intermission,” the queen announces to the whole compound, “you, Musalodi Siningwe, will commune with the redhawk and receive your shards if Ama deems you worthy.” Her eyes glint with a grave warning. “But if not, then you shall die. That is the risk you have taken.”
Not a peep from the whole compound.
Salo looks up in shock. Not because of the death—that goes without saying—but because the queen has actually granted him his impossible request.
“You cannot be serious, Your Majesty!” AmaSibere cries. Her staff might snap in half if she grips it any tighter. “Your Majesty, you cannot entertain this sacrilege! You cannot—”