by C. T. Rwizi
“Salo, please.”
“I’m working right now, Salo,” she says, “but my lunch break is in an hour. If you can wait that long, I’ll take you to the best caravan company in town. I think their next convoy sets off later tonight, so you won’t have to stay here for long. I wouldn’t stay here overnight if I were you.”
“Oh? I guess I’ll defer to your wisdom on that front.” He steals a glance at a scowling BaChando. “I’ll wait for you outside, or maybe I’ll take a walk around town. There’s so much to see.”
“It’s your prerogative,” Ilapara says. “Just . . . be careful.”
He nods and leaves the store, and she shakes her head, watching him go. A creature like him should be hunting antelope in the tranquil Plains, not wandering the sordid streets of Seresa, just a stone’s throw away from the meat market.
Still, she can’t quite shake off the sense that there’s something . . . not quite right with him.
23: Musalodi
Seresa, along the World’s Artery—Umadiland
For a time he wanders due south, staff in hand, drinking in the foreign sights and smells. Being so close to the World’s Artery feels like standing at the edge of the Redlands and watching them spin like thread on a reel.
Over there, a behemoth of the wild, a colossal four-tusked elephant, pulling an impossible wooden fortress on wheels. Faces peer out from within, and as it passes by, a child with flowers in her braids leans out to wave down at him; he waves back like a man in a waking dream.
Behind it a clunky, rusty, slow-moving machine drives past on articulated tracks, and by Ama, it’s moving on its own accord. Salo senses multiple spirits possessing its gears, tronic oxen and buffalo, and together they draw a train of wagons piled high with timber, sacks of grain, and other mysterious goods.
He sees riders on creatures both familiar and strange: fast-running ostriches; muscular zebroid creatures with glossy ivory horns and flowing manes; nimble tronic antelope; ponderous mules; humped, long-necked beasts with braying calls; giant lizard creatures with fat, stocky legs; and the occasional predator for the bold.
As he watches, a company of proud riders in hide skins passes by on thickset feline beasts, each with massive protruding upper canines. A woman whose short hair is dyed the color of gold rides at the fore, and who knows, she might be a warrior or the daughter of a chieftain; she takes a passing glance down at him and gifts him a smile so haughty and worldly it seems to say: What are you to us, oh wanderer, oh coward of the Plains? We come from lands far beyond your tiny horizon of oxen, kraals, and grainfields. We have seen things you cannot dream of.
It’s one thing to know that the world is bigger than you could ever comprehend. Quite another to see it with your own eyes. Marvelous and terrifying—terrifyingly marvelous—and the blend is intoxicating.
Salo turns onto a dusty byroad when his nose catches the wafting scent of grilled meat and his stomach growls in response. He figures he might as well grab something to eat while he waits.
He smiles, thinking about his encounter with Ilapara. He wasn’t quite honest with her. Yes, he heard about her from her cousin Birosei when he stopped over for the night at the Sikhozi kraal, but he didn’t seek her out for help finding a caravan—he could do that on his own if he wanted to. He sought her out for another reason entirely.
Biro was one of the few Sikhozi boys who would talk to him without curling his lip, an outcast of sorts who bonded with him over their mutual love of nsango and matje. They smoked well into the early hours of the morning, and at some point during their time together Biro leaned closer and whispered about the kraal’s renegade daughter who had run away to live alone in the Umadi town of Seresa. Apparently she’d done so because VaSikhozi wouldn’t let her go to the Queen’s Kraal to earn her steel and become an Ajaha.
“She’s a bit like you, no?” Biro said, and Salo nodded quietly, even though he vehemently disagreed, because this girl sounded incredibly brave and self-motivated, not at all like him. He vowed to find her and see her for himself—because what would a girl so brave be like in person?
Like a smoldering fire, it turns out. Seething passion wrapped in a steely red exterior. Burnt umber eyes hidden beneath kohl like torrid mysteries. She tries to disguise what she is, but Salo knows an Ajaha when he sees one, and what he saw guarding the entrance of the general dealer’s was an Ajaha far from her clanlands.
She wears no red steel, but the training is there in her posture, in the way she assesses her surroundings and carries that spear of hers. Definitely no Asazi dagger; that’s an Ajaha’s weapon, unwieldy in untrained hands.
She is everything he was hoping for and more. Now he just has to figure out how to convince her to come with him.
The merchants and buyers on the byroads are lurid rivers of color and textiles fashioned into all manner of clothing, very much in contrast to the desperation clinging like a miasma to the rows of decrepit shacks and the vile waters muddying the streets. A lively place, to be sure, but certainly no place of leisure or peace. This is a cradle of money, its pursuit the town’s heartbeat.
“Two pebbles for a cold beer,” cries an Umadi woman in a bright, flowing veil and a nose ring that invites his eyes to linger.
“Come, my friend, the finest hides and leather you’ve ever seen, starting at two stones each.” That’s a gruff, thickly bearded man in a blue tunic, with red dreadlocks so long they reach down to his waist.
Salo keeps going until he reaches a rickety stall displaying a selection of spicy grilled meats on skewers. He stops to inspect them.
“Are you hungry, my child?” says the bright-eyed vendor behind the grill, and she’s already preparing a leaf to dish onto. “Four pebbles for one, but just for you, I’ll make it six pebbles if you take two.”
The cubes of skewered meats sizzle with fat and aromatic spices. Salo’s mouth waters at the sight. “These look delicious,” he says to the vendor, “but I don’t have pebbles with me. Do you have change for a mountain?”
By the way her eyebrows shoot up, one would think she has just watched his brain crawl out of his skull. “Change for a mountain, my child! But where would I find so much money?”
He’s about to tell her to forget about it when someone brushes past him so violently he almost bumps into the grill. He whirls around to look, anticipating an apology, but his assailant has already slinked away.
The vendor gasps. “Thief!” She points at a figure retreating into the bustling crowds.
Salo rights the skewed spectacles on his face and looks again. “What? Where?”
She wags her finger furiously. “There! He’s getting away! I saw him steal your purse!”
Salo looks down and sees that his leather purse is gone. A complete stranger has singled him out from the crowds for exploitation and robbed him. Instantly the most galling thing that has ever happened to him.
“Hey, you!” Salo shouts at the thief. “Stop!”
No such luck. The thief is a light-footed teenage boy in dirty rags scuttling away on bare feet. His hair is hidden beneath a threadbare woolen hat. For a split second Salo considers letting him go—it’s not like he doesn’t have more money stashed away—but indignation prevails, and he decides that no, he won’t be victimized in this town, and starts chasing after the boy, shouting at him to stop.
The boy is a fast runner. He weaves through the busy streets like he knows them well, keeping up a good pace despite the heavy foot traffic.
Too bad for him he picked an even better runner to steal from. Salo might not be much of a warrior, but he was a cowherd of the Plains: running is in his blood. So he closes in on his quarry, eating up the distance between them with a swift, easy gallop.
The boy tries to lose him by taking a series of confusing turns, but it’s not hard for Salo to keep him in sight. Moongold is a little like red steel in the way it radiates faint ripples of power; the coins shine to Salo’s shards like mirrors catching sunlight.
He pays no hee
d to the worsening character of the streets as they race away from the World’s Artery—the thickening stench of raw meat, the sudden change in what’s inside the caged wagons parked by the wayside, from livestock and tronic beasts to human . . . to human beings?
He stops. He looks around. He turns, he blinks, he sees.
Wrongness is like grease or tar. It washes over you slowly and thickly, and when you try to rub it off, it only clings harder. Salo blinks his eyes as if to rub off the nightmare that has reared its ugly head all around him, but the sights burrow deeper into his mind. They take root and solidify, and he knows that they will haunt him until the day he breathes his last.
Locked inside these cages like wild animals are actual human beings. Dirty, filthy human beings, some naked, some young, some haggard, some strapping, some crammed together like swine, some alone—all of them looking out of their cages like ghosts, people who know they are already dead.
Most are lithe and swarthy, with eye colors ranging from startling sunset ambers to full moon crimsons, and all of them have tubular metallic-looking appendages curling out of their temples . . .
By Ama, these are Faraswa people. It is said they were once a deeply spiritual tribe who relied on magic in almost every aspect of their lives, much more adept than average at drawing and manipulating the crafts of Red magic due to their ancestral talent, which gave them tensor appendages and eyes that could see magic. It is said that during their golden age, their empire extended across much of the continent’s western seaboard, and the inflow of tribute from their conquered lands allowed them to build great cities across the arid regions of the Faraswa Desert.
That was, so the legend goes, until they grew proud and allowed many of their number to forsake the moon and practice solar magic. The moon forsook them in turn, and soon they began to lose their ability to awaken, gradually and irreversibly.
Now ruins are all that is left of their once-glorious empire, and their people are hunted and enslaved throughout the Redlands for their essence-rich blood, which supposedly offers stronger effects when used in blood sacraments.
The wagon directly in front of Salo holds an emaciated Faraswa girl in a dirty brown habit leaning limply against the iron bars. He would think she were dead could he not feel the faint glimmer of her soul with his shards, so faint the slightest wind could snuff it out. The wagon next to hers holds even more tensored figures in various stages of frailty, some so gaunt he can’t tell whether they are male or female.
A pair of olive-skinned men in orange robes is standing next to the wagon. One of them says something to Salo in Izumadi, but whatever it is fails to pierce through the fog of horror that has clouded his mind.
By Ama, this is the true face of the Redlands, isn’t it? This is why the Yerezi Foremothers isolated themselves in the Plains. It finally makes sense to him, grotesque, horrible sense. Oh, these poor people.
“Two pounds of human liver for a silver rock. Six pounds of lung for the same. It raises an interesting question, doesn’t it? How much is a human life truly worth?”
A young man of short stature has sidled up to Salo unnoticed. He’s chewing on a pastry, looking at the slaves in the wagon like they are curiosities on display. Not knowing what else to do, Salo blinks at him.
The young man stuffs the rest of his pastry into his mouth and says, “I just purchased this tasty treat for two copper pebbles, and it says here that each of these Faraswa slaves is priced at—let’s see . . .” He leans forward briefly to better read the placard affixed to the wagon. “The penmanship leaves much to be desired, but I believe this says one mountain, or four golden hills, which I know is equivalent to a thousand pebbles, so that means each of these slaves is worth, what, five hundred pastries?” He turns his dark eyes on Salo, one cheek dimpling in a lopsided smile. “Think about it: five hundred fried balls of dough will get you your own sentient being to do with as you please. Isn’t that something?”
His skin is the color of pale river sand, suggesting he might hail from a tribe in the distant north. Dark shoulder-length hair frames his lightly stubbled face. Save for the rather conspicuous silver gauntlet gleaming on his left hand, he is dressed entirely in black, from his formfitting sleeveless dashiki to his pants and boots to the leather knapsack clinging to his back.
For whatever reason, it takes Salo a moment of blank staring for the stranger’s words to register, and then a hundred questions spring to his mind as sense returns to him, the most pressing being: “How is it you speak my tongue?”
“I speak many tongues,” the young man says, once again in perfect if slightly accented Sirezi. He extends a hand for a handshake. “Tuksaad at your service.”
Salo stares at the hand, doesn’t take it. “But you are not Yerezi.”
The young man keeps the hand there a moment longer before he retracts it with a shrug, his eyes twinkling with amusement. They are actually a mossy shade of green, not dark, as Salo first thought. “One need not belong to a tongue to speak it,” he says.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. Your tribe isn’t exactly one of the big five, but I’m on a pilgrimage of sorts, you see. My mission is to speak to people from as many Red tribes as possible, and you are the first Yerezi tribesman I’ve ever met. When I saw you running past, I knew I had to come and speak with you.” The young man named Tuksaad tilts his head when he notices Salo’s earring. “Forgive me if I’m being rude, but you are a prince, are you not? I know that copper is a signifier of royalty among your people—or am I mistaken?”
A strange man in an even stranger place. But before Salo can think up an appropriate reply, sudden commotion up the street draws his attention, and when he looks, he feels his grip tightening around his staff.
The thief. Except now he’s caught between two armed men in black dashikis, and he’s wailing and struggling against their iron grips as they haul him down the street by his shoulders. A third man leads the party, and it seems they are headed Salo’s way.
“You there,” says the leader when they stop several paces away from him. The man uses a deliberately loud voice to attract attention, presenting a leather pouch held solidly in one meaty hand. “Is this yours?”
Distracted by the horror of the meat market, Salo had forgotten all about the thief. He feels a small flicker of anger seeing him now, but more than anything he feels pity. The boy’s face is now covered in a sheen of snot and tears. “Yes, that’s mine,” Salo says, albeit cautiously. “It was . . . taken from me a short while ago.”
Tuksaad’s eyes have dimmed again. He’s maneuvered himself next to Salo so that they look like they are traveling together. Salo finds that he doesn’t mind too much.
“The victim has confirmed that this is his coin purse,” the guard says, raising the purse for all to see, and again his voice is loud enough for the whole meat market to hear. Salo notices with unease that a crowd is gathering around them. “The stolen purse will now be returned to its owner.”
The guard tosses the purse at Salo, and he catches it. He doesn’t have to open it to know that all his money is still there.
“As for our little thief . . .” With a malicious smirk the guard walks to the weeping boy and unceremoniously divests him of his tattered woolen hat. Salo’s heart lurches when he sees the bronze-like tensors growing out of the boy’s temples. “Faraswa filth,” the guard spits. He reaches down and pulls the boy’s hair back so that his face is upturned. “How did you escape the pens, filth? No matter. We will put you to good use now.”
To the watching crowds he shouts: “By the Dark Sun’s decree, the punishment for the crime of theft is death by dismemberment. All thieves are to be immediately offered to the Blood Woman in our lord’s name, in payment for the injury done to him, for all theft in this town is theft from him.” With callous ease the guard unlimbers the machete tied to his belt—and offers it to Salo.
At the same time, his two comrades shove the Faraswa boy to his knees and stretch his right
arm so that it is taut and ready for butchering. Salo’s breath pauses momentarily.
“As the wronged party,” the guard says, “you have the right to exact punishment. Will you exercise this right?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Very well.” The guard turns to face the boy, whose wails have become spine chilling.
“Wait!”
The guard stops. Turns around. A heavy frown darkens his face. “Would you like to exact the punishment?”
“No! I mean, I don’t want any punishment exacted. Certainly not this.”
Next to Salo, Tuksaad steps close enough to whisper. “What are you doing, friend? It is not wise to interrupt them.”
“Your coin purse was found in the Faraswa thief’s possession,” the guard says. “A witness reported the incident, and you have confirmed that the coin purse is yours. The law is clear: he must be dismembered.”
The crowd is thicker now. The slavers are watching with ghoulish curiosity next to their wares. Salo’s words come out as a stutter. “B-but . . . you can’t just kill him! Not for money!”
The guard shares puzzled frowns with his comrades, like Salo has said something nonsensical. That’s when his new friend steps in. “What he means to say, my good man, is that the boy is no thief.”
“I don’t follow,” says the guard, and neither does Salo, but he nods in agreement anyway.
“All just a misunderstanding,” Tuksaad explains with a smile and his palms raised in a gesture of peace. “They were playing a game, you see. My friend here”—he gestures at Salo—“gave the boy his purse and told him to run so he could catch him. It’s a variation of hide-and-seek, a popular game where he comes from.”
“Very popular,” Salo says, nodding in fervent agreement. “We play it all the time.”