Scarlet Odyssey

by C. T. Rwizi

  With four disciplines of Red magic at her command and a well of power as boundless as the skies, the queen is the most fearsome mystic any Yerezi will ever encounter and the only metamorph in the Plains. Witnessing her sorcery with one’s own eyes is something of a privilege.

  Her discerning gaze quickly finds Salo standing nearby. He bows to her in deference. “Irediti Ariishe.”

  “It is the full moon tonight,” she says. “An auspicious time to awaken. There can be no turning back once we begin.”

  He briefly wonders if she’s actually giving him a way out, and if so, if it wouldn’t be wise to take her up on her offer. These thoughts must be playing out on his face, because the brawny Ajaha on her left curls a lip in muted disgust. The Asazi’s expression remains impenetrable.

  “I am ready, Your Majesty.” He’d never redeem himself if he gave up now.

  “Then come closer and face your clanspeople. One way or another, tonight you will make history.”

  He stands with the queen and her honor guards, the four facing the clan with their backs to the altar. His stomach does a flip when he notices the earthen bowl of clear, oily liquid in the Asazi’s hand. She catches him staring, and her eyes gleam at him with something unreadable.

  Averting his gaze, he lets his eyes roam the sixty-odd rowboats floating in the shallows. He catches VaSiningwe’s looming silhouette, backlit against an oil lamp burning somewhere behind him. And if that’s VaSiningwe, then Aba D must be the man in the boat with him. Jio and Sibu aren’t with them, though, which they would be if they’d come at all. Nimara probably couldn’t leave the bonehouse, and Niko might not have returned after their exchange on the boat.

  Salo is annoyed with himself when his eyes begin to sting. He slams them shut until the wave of emotions ebbs away.

  “Behold Musalodi, your clansman!” The queen juts a finger toward Salo, and all eyes follow it. “He has gazed upon Ama Vaziishe and coveted her embrace, and against all tradition, he has asked us to let him reach for it. There are good reasons, Yerezi-kin, to condemn him for this aberration. After all, our people have thrived for centuries by knowing their allotted places in society, and it would seem that Musalodi does not know his.

  “But what, Yerezi-kin, are convictions, if not blind dogma, unless they are tested against fact? We know as a matter of course that no men are suited to serve as Ama’s intercessors, that they are not nurturing enough, that they are too prone to tyranny to wield her power, but how much of this knowledge is preconception, and how much of it is based on objective observations of our world?”

  The queen scans her audience, perhaps waiting for someone to answer her questions. No one does.

  “Some of you might point me to the Umadi warlords and the Dulama god-kings and say, Here is objective evidence for the unsuitability of mankind, but how can we be certain that their manhood is the true problem? Could their tyranny not simply be a by-product of their flawed but extrinsic understandings of Ama’s will? Would that not explain why so many women sorcerers throughout the Redlands turn to tyranny as well? How do we know that a man raised in Yerezi tradition, who has seen firsthand the warmth and benevolence of Ama at work—how do we know that such a man would not be different, as his Foremothers were different from their tyrannical sisters?

  “Musalodi poses all these questions, Yerezi-kin,” the queen continues, “and I believe that we must answer them sooner rather than later, lest they fester in our minds and destroy the fabric of our society. Let his success or failure be the test of our convictions; let us know that we believe what we believe because it is true, not because we want it to be true—starting now.”

  She motions to her Asazi honor guard, who nods and makes for the altar with her earthen bowl. Salo is pretty certain the liquid inside is an alchemical solution of false fire. While the queen continues her speech, the Asazi begins to sprinkle the altar with the liquid.

  “For every Red mystic,” the queen says, “the path to Ama Vaziishe begins with a simple question: Can your mind prevail over agony? The answer will determine whether you are worthy to continue, or whether your journey must end before it has begun.”

  The altar dramatically increases in brightness as it erupts into a blaze of crimson false fire, illuminating all the faces watching from the boats with a red glow. Salo has known what was coming all along, and he’s tried to harden himself, but now he finds his limbs so crippled by fear he can barely breathe.

  The queen turns to face him and infuses an unforgiving bite into her voice. “I assume you are satisfied with your Axiom and that it is an original work of your mind. If not, this is your last chance to say so.”

  Unconsciously he rubs the red steel serpent clinging to his left wrist. “I am satisfied, Your Majesty.”

  “Then the time has come for you to call down your redhawk.” She gestures at the altar. “Place your arms into the fire and prove yourself worthy before your clan and before Ama herself.”

  Salo might have asked to call the whole thing off were it not for the queen. His fear of her is the only thing that gets him moving toward the burning altar.

  False fire is an ingenious blend of Earth, Mirror, and Blood craft—alchemy, illusion, and sensory manipulation—and now the altar has become a shadowy outline wreathed in its red flames. A forbidding wall of heat presses against Salo as he approaches.

  A mirage, he tells himself. A hollow imitation of the real thing. Can’t hurt you. Just do it.

  So he forces himself to stop thinking. With a shout he steps up to the altar and thrusts his arms into the inferno.

  An old tome of magical theory Salo once read claimed that the deepest truths of the world can often be glimpsed at the height of agony.

  But in the first few excruciating heartbeats after he touches the fire, heartbeats that each seem to stretch to infinity, Salo gleans no truths from his agony but that of his own stupidity and imminent death, for there is no possible way he can survive such consuming heat.

  His shout rises several octaves into a full-blown scream. The stench of burning meat fills the air around him, his vision clouds over, and the sum total of his existence condenses down to a sensation of pure, unadulterated torment.

  By some miracle, however, he finds a fragment of sobriety floating somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, a place conditioned through years of gambling with a mental artifact. With every ounce of willpower he can summon, he gathers all his thoughts onto this fragment, clinging to it like a drowning victim to a piece of driftwood.

  The world is immeasurably old, he tells himself. Larger than I can ever imagine. What is my pain to such a world? What is my agony when it isn’t even real? I am insignificant, and so is my pain.

  And yet he can see his flesh sizzling and smoking, and every part of him wants to pull out before the fire consumes him.

  His whole body trembles. Tears pour down his face. Bone appears beneath the ruins of his burnt flesh, and still he keeps his arms in the flames. He’s about to reach the absolute limit of what he can take when something stirs in his blood. Then a slow explosion of ecstasy spreads from his core to the rest of his body, joining the pain to overload his senses.

  He instantly knows in a way he could not have known before, he knows, that this risen thing, this intangible spark, is what gives mystics the ability to draw power from the heavens and unleash it upon the world as magic. The spark was dormant in his blood, but now that he has come face-to-face with it, now that his agony has pierced the veil of his ignorance, it has awakened.

  Salo feels the altar, though he does not know how—he feels it reaching up into the heavens and announcing his presence, his awoken power, and he feels something responding to this call, something that catches fire as it begins to descend . . .

  The pain abates while the euphoric sensation spreads to his extremities. He gasps like a newborn taking its first breath.

  “You may retract your arms from the flames, Musalodi,” the queen says behind him, and Salo slowly obeys,
inspecting his hands with speechless wonder. They are tingly and cold to the touch but otherwise unharmed.

  The island stews in crushing silence, save for the waves breaking on the rocky shore. As he rejoins the queen to face his clan, she gives him the barest nod of approval, just the slightest incline of her head that, from someone like her, might as well be glowing praise. An unfamiliar wave of pride makes him stand taller before his clanspeople.

  “A young redhawk learns to fly when its mother casts it into a ravine or over a precipice,” the queen shouts, “where, faced with impending doom, it must quickly come to terms with its true nature or perish. And many do perish. Those who fail to challenge themselves are dashed upon the rocks and forgotten, their carcasses left for maggots and scavengers.”

  She raises a finger and smiles. “But those who succeed, Yerezi-kin, those become undisputed rulers of the skies, ferocious and fearsome, because they have met death and survived. It is said that the great Empire of Light, those sun worshippers beyond the endless seas of the Dapiaro, have buildings and machines that can defy gravity, but not even they can soar as high as the redhawk. Not even they can reach the heights it surpasses as easily as it breathes.

  “And so it is with those who claim kinship with Ama Vaziishe. Greatness awaits in the folds of her embrace, but the path there is treacherous. Musalodi, your clansman, must now be judged by the redhawk. If he has been honest in his work, he will receive his cosmic shards. If he has not, then he shall die, as many others have died before him. But none of you here shall pity him, for he has made his choice freely. Ajaha, into positions. Everyone else, remain still and silent. You will not move without my permission.”

  The armed Ajaha who are present start wading to shore with their heavy shields and shiny spears in hand, faces grim, red steel secure and shimmery. It’s Salo’s first visual reminder of what’s coming, and he knows that if the Ajaha end up having to use those weapons, he’ll already be dead.

  “A word of caution,” the queen says for his ears alone. “Run, and you shall surely die; but look death in the eye, and you might just live to see another day. Now wade into the water, and keep going until I tell you to stop.”

  They say he’s a coward, and he thinks they might be right, but he knows he’s no fool. He knows that the queen speaks the truth: to run now would be suicide.

  So he does as he’s told, and the cold water is up to his knees when the queen finally commands him to stop. Then the longest wait of his life begins.

  When the redhawk first appears on the horizon, it is little more than a brilliant point of light, a falling star advancing from the east.

  Then the star becomes a streak of red fire and smoke descending with a terrible rumbling that grows and grows until Salo can barely hear the gasps and cries of shock behind him. The approaching entity soon resolves into a definite shape shrouded in a red glow and lowers itself to almost skim the surface of the Nyasiningwe, parting the waters beneath it in a turbulent wake.

  The first thing he makes out as it draws nearer is a wingspan as broad as a house. Then a maliciously hooked bill and a crest tapering into a horn. And then the redhawk arrests its flight with a mighty flap of its four wings and is suddenly there.

  But what is it, this extraordinary beast? The malaika of rage, perhaps, come down on his chariot of fire and smoke? Or maybe a wrathful spirit of pure evil sent by Arante herself?

  Looking up at the redhawk, Salo finds it almost impossible to believe that the beast isn’t some such metaphysical being, even though he knows that it is actually just a species of astrobird—one of those inexplicable creatures with plumage that can burn so fiercely they can propel themselves in and out of the world’s atmosphere. They live in the clusters of floating rock in low orbit around the world, in the deep black void beyond the skies, and come down in dazzling balls of fire to breed or to pillage livestock and inattentive cowherds. The terrible boom of their hypersonic flight is often a warning to seek shelter, or, for those not wise enough to do so, a portent of a grisly end.

  In the silence just after the redhawk lands in the water in front of him, Salo envisions his clan watching as the bird devours him. He imagines the horrified looks on their faces—or maybe they’d just cluck their tongues and say, Most unfortunate, but he did ask for it.

  In the silence and stillness when he first looks death in the eyes, these thoughts are what keep his feet rooted in the water when his instincts are begging him to run.

  The beast before him stands at nine feet tall, peering down its beak with the pride of an emperor, as if the whole world is its domain. Upon closer inspection, much of its body is metallic, even its feathers, which aren’t feathers at all but scaly red plates burning with an inner fire. They give its four wings a nefarious serrated look about them, as if the bird could cut through the toughest bone with a well-placed swipe.

  It probably could.

  Salo kneels down before the beast, shivering as the water rises up to his waist. Its pupils are red points of light in whirlpools of darkness. Their inhuman gaze enthralls him, because if death has a pair of eyes, then surely they must look like this—deathful eyes, shining with startling intelligence.

  The redhawk cocks its head curiously, then takes a step toward him on equally deathful black talons, creating ripples in the water that make him shiver as they lap against him. Another step, and then another, until its massive hooked bill is so close it could probably take Salo’s head off in one motion.

  Total silence. Unnatural stillness.

  The redhawk bends its long neck and lowers its head. Salo feels heat as its scales brush against the side of his face, but strangely, the heat doesn’t burn him. Stranger still is the powerful wave of calm that pervades him. He closes his eyes and waits for his cosmic shards to appear on his arms.

  But an intruding presence uncoils from some corner of his mind like a serpent lunging to strike. He could not have known that he harbored such a thing inside him; now it pours out of him and into the redhawk. Salo feels the bird’s mounting confusion and then anger, and then it raises its head and belches out a horrible screech right into his face.

  Smothered cries come from somewhere behind him, but Salo ignores them—rather, his whole body has grown so rigid he can’t even breathe, let alone flinch. All the calm he felt before recedes, and warmth spreads down his groin. They stare at each other, beast and man—or beast and coward, because a man certainly wouldn’t piss himself so quickly.

  The redhawk shrieks like Salo has personally offended it. The next thing he knows, it’s raising a talon out of the water. He falls back with a cry, but not fast enough to escape the pain.

  Drowning, thrashing pain. Salo’s chest is transfixed upon three long claws and pinned down to the lake bed. The cold water rushes into his mouth and nostrils. The pain is infinite.

  Commotion erupts behind him. Cries. Shouts. Screeches from the angry god impaling his chest. None of it changes the fact that he’s dying.

  How peculiar, then, that while he chokes on the bloodied water around him, he still has the presence of mind to wonder what he could have done differently during his short life. Maybe he could have tried harder to be more like Niko instead of just giving up. Maybe he should have never opened his ama’s journal all those years ago. Maybe he should have . . .

  Maybe he could have . . .

  Oh, but what does it matter now? The time for maybes is over. The world around him blackens, and that’s the end of it.

  Except for a glade somewhere in the middle of a grove, where the sky is a lavender canvas spattered with many suns and ringed moons. Salo opens his eyes to find that he is standing barefoot in the glade on crimson earth, hemmed in by old gnarled trees with darkly luxuriant foliage. Their branches droop with their own weight; their thick roots twist into the ground in strangely familiar patterns.

  Recognition strikes him like a ray of light. As sure as fate, this place is the realm of the Carving. And yet . . . something is different. A dreamlike esse
nce always colored the Carving’s woods, an amorphous not-quite-there-ness he couldn’t put his finger on. But these trees, this here and now, it feels all too real.

  There is great power here, something tells him, though what, he cannot say. He only knows that this is the same intrusion he felt earlier, and when he quests after it with his thoughts, searching the trees, whatever it is retreats deeper into the shadows.

  How long I have waited, it says from the darkness, its voice like the hiss of a biting wind. How long I have hoped. And now, to finally be here . . . I shall not squander this chance. This time, things will be different.

  “Who are you?” Salo says to the trees, but he thinks he knows. That voice is unmistakable. Cold and cavernous and unfathomably distant. He has heard it before. “Please, tell me who you are.”

  The thing ignores him, flowing like smoke in the shadows around the glade. He tries to track its motion, but it continues to elude him. Then he looks down at himself. He has three bloody punctures on his chest, but when he touches them, he feels no pain. Still, his trembling fingers come away stained crimson. “Am I dead?” he wonders aloud.

  Look up, the thing says. Behind you.

  Startled, he turns around, and there, descending from above the glade, is a great sphere of red fire. Unexpectedly it flares with a brilliance so glaring he has to raise an arm to shield his eyes. As the light washes over his face, he thinks he glimpses a thousand sunsets all at once, a panorama of fiery red suns sinking over myriad horizons.

  Something whispers into his ear that this burning globe is the fire at the heart of the moon, the source of all Red magic, and that it is actually a star—no, thousands of stars scattered across the deep black.

  But how can this be? What does it mean?

  So much has been lost. So much forgotten. You must remember.