by C. T. Rwizi
But he has money, a corner of her mind says. Money you desperately need. And it’s not like there’s a line of people waiting to hire you, is it? So why not?
She casts an impatient scowl toward the gates. “What’s taking them so long?”
Salo follows her gaze. “I’m sure they’ll be out in a few. Saddling a mount takes time.”
Her skin tingles with awareness; her forehead crinkles up with worry. For some reason she feels hunted, like someone has drawn a bow in her direction and is about to let loose.
She looks around; a rustling breeze stirs her head scarf. The carrion birds are still circling above them, still crowing loudly. But the streets are quiet, perhaps too quiet.
Something is off.
An old beer hall sits farther up and across the street, a place Ilapara knows well. Music and drunken voices should be coming out of that place, even with a hostile mystic in town, if only because alcohol has the tendency to dilute fears.
Today it’s dead silent.
Gripping her spear with both hands, she steps over a murky rivulet and onto the street, straining her ears. But all she detects is the sigh of her own breath and the crowing from above.
“Is something wrong, Ilapara?” Salo says.
She turns around. He looks so unsuspecting, this boy, this naive creature of the Plains, with his straw hat and loincloth and staff and spectacles. He shouldn’t be here.
Ingacha raises his head, flaring his ears. She walks to him and checks the cinch of his saddle. “Where did you leave your mount?”
“Outside town,” Salo says. “I didn’t want to bring him in. Why?”
“We’ll ride Ingacha to wherever you left your mount; then you’ll go as far away from here as you can. Understand?”
He stares at her. “You’re not making any sense, Ilapara.”
“There’s no time to explain. You need—”
A sudden ruckus comes from within the walls of the livery yard. Then she spots something gray and shimmery slipping out the gates: it’s coming up behind Salo and it’s long and meandering and fiendishly fast and it’s rearing its head and it’s about to strike and its fangs are a foot long, so she pushes Salo out of the way—
No, she shoves him with her free hand so forcefully he tips over with a yelp, but her attention is solely on this thing that’s coming, because its jaws are yawning open and its fangs are dripping with venom, so there’s no time to think, no time for anything at all but movement, movement or death.
So she moves. She strikes with her spear, whipping its point down and thrusting forward into the advancing maw, and by the time her mind has caught up to her body, an upper jaw is impaled upon the sleekness of her aerosteel weapon.
A human upper jaw, attached to the body of a giant serpent.
She recoils in horror, pulling her spear out. As the creature falls to the ground, she sees that no, actually, this is really just a horrifically huge cobra with no resemblance to a human at all. Then it writhes on the ground, and the maze of markings on its serpentine head comes back into view. She almost screams because her sight is proven false again, and dear Ama, that actually is a human head on the serpent, complete with a beard and bright reptilian eyes. Familiar eyes.
Terror strikes her as she finally understands what she has killed. This creature could be nothing but an ilomba, a serpent of Blood craft sent by a mystic to kill her. Its master carved his Seal onto its hood so she would see his face when she saw the markings. Now it is writhing and tossing mindlessly on the ground, and he saw through its eyes that she killed it.
Off to her side, Salo is fumbling about for his spectacles on the ground, which were dislodged from his face when he fell. The animals in the livery behind them are still in uproar. Ingacha’s huffing and brandishing his horns angrily, scratching the earth with a foreleg like he wants to charge. A second sinuous horror has slithered out of the beer hall through a first floor window, advancing with its head reared high, its hood spread out, threatening.
Ilapara charges toward this second monster, careful not to look at it directly, and this might be the most terrifying thing she’s ever done, but her heart’s beating steadily, and she’s in total control of her body. The magic of the Seal on the serpent’s head gives it a constant and dizzying shift in appearance; one second she sees a horrible snake with foot-long fangs, the next a human face with reptile eyes. Worse, the two looks seem to merge, and the face unlocks its jaws unnaturally, like it could swallow her whole.
They meet in the middle of the street, and it lunges for her with its jaws wide open, its face rapidly shifting between cobra and man and a horrid hybrid of both. She rolls to her right just in time to avoid its lethal fangs, and quickly she whips her spear outward, gritting her teeth when she feels its cutting edge biting into the ilomba’s side. It hisses in anger and flings its tail toward her, but she’s already ducking and pivoting on her feet to bring her spear around for another blow. She feels the slightest resistance before her weapon pulses with Storm craft from its enchanted witchwood core, and then a chunk of the serpent’s head is parted from its body in a spray of blood—only for the rest of it to twist around so fast she doesn’t notice its long tail lashing through the air until it has smashed her across her chest, knocking her back.
She flies and then hits the ground with the grace of a flung doll. She gasps for breath. Wet mud clings to her head scarf as she forces herself to keep moving, stumbling up to her feet while using the blunt end of her weapon for balance.
“Ilapara! Watch out!” Salo cries.
She looks, and along the crescent street of beer halls, shacks, and the livery’s wooden paling, the largest ilomba yet is closing in from the west.
Her heart sinks into the pit of her stomach, and her knees almost fail her, but not because of the snake; she has killed two of these things already, and she would face another without fear. But another monster has drawn her gaze westward along the same road, a galloping blue-eyed abomination of a cat with a mane of metal spines flared out in anger, and this she knows she cannot oppose.
“Get out of the way, Ilapara!”
Somehow her feet move just as the cat leaps into the air. She raises an arm, bracing for death, but death does not come. Instead, the giant cat has pounced upon the ilomba, not her. Then she notices the saddlery attached to the cat and understands.
By Ama, that’s the Siningwe totem in the flesh. Salo really is a mystic.
The fight between totem and serpent is brief. The ilomba attempts to coil itself around the cat, but the cat bats it away with its metal paws—and gets punished for it with several quick bites laced with deadly venom, all of them to the neck. But they only seem to anger the cat further, for it snaps its jaws into the serpent and twists, severing the spine. The ilomba goes limp in the cat’s maw and is promptly tossed to the ground.
When something bursts out of the gates to the livery right then, Ilapara whirls round with her spear, ready for anything.
Then she lets herself breathe a sigh of relief. “A rather convenient time to show up, Tuksaad.” She begins to stride toward Ingacha, who didn’t run away even when he should have. “Where’s your mount? We need to leave—now. There could be more of these things.”
Tuksaad’s eyes are black as ink and cold as steel. Pearls of blood spatter his face. He’s wearing that little smile of his, but it’s dispassionate, coolly calculating. Ilapara’s sure he went in unarmed, but he’s carrying a long blade in one hand, slim and slightly curved, with a golden gleam. Might be her eyes are playing tricks on her, but it looks somewhat translucent.
Ilapara braces her foot on one of Ingacha’s stirrups to mount him. “The disciple who rules this town controls these things remotely. That means he’s nearby. We don’t want him finding us.”
“I sensed them.” Salo’s straw hat is askew on his head. His eyebrows are arched high with panic, and dust now covers half his body. “I sensed them, but I wasn’t paying attention. I thought they were people or . . . somet
hing else, something harmless. I didn’t think—oh, dear Ama, there were two in the yard, weren’t there.” He looks to Tuksaad. “Are they dead? Where’s the liveryman?”
“Don’t worry,” Tuksaad says. “I took care of them.”
“Then we must leave.” Salo visibly gathers himself. “If you don’t have a mount, Tuk, you may ride with me.”
But Tuksaad grins and turns his head toward the gates. “You can bring her out, friend,” he shouts. “I need to get going.”
A visibly shaken Kudi comes out of the gates, pulling tensely at the reins of a muscular zebroid warmount with a jet-black coat and metallic stripes. By its size and the two great horns that curve like sickles from its head, the creature must be an abada. Its lower legs are all exposed metal musculature, with hooves so bulky they could probably pulverize bone. Looking at the warmount, Ilapara figures it is probably worth the whole moongold coin.
Kudi’s jaw drops when he sees the giant cat, even more when he sees Salo approaching and then mounting it. He shakes his head in horrified disbelief. “What the devil is going on, Ilira? What did you do—did you give me stolen money?”
What Ilapara has done is defy the will of a warlord’s disciple, and in Umadiland, there is only one way that can end. But now’s not the time for regrets.
“Go home, Kudi,” she tells him. “The money’s clean. Go home and stay there until this is over.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice. “I want no part in whatever this is.” He quickly hands Tuksaad the abada’s reins and makes himself scarce.
“Follow me and stay close,” Ilapara tells Salo and Tuksaad, then spurs Ingacha down the crescent road and leads them west toward the boneyards.
The implications of what she’s done don’t hit her until moments later, when she has to weather a powerful surge of sorrow that wells up inside her without warning, the deeply discomforting realization that this will be her last time in this town, for there is no way she could ever return.
The boneyards rest upon a mountain sited in the west such that its shadow creeps over the town like a pall every dusk as the suns sink behind it. To the wise of Seresa, this deathly shadow is always a reminder of what can happen to those who forget their place, those fools who think they can get away with breaking the rules.
Ilapara once vowed that she’d never be counted with such ill-advised company, and yet in the end, all it took for her to break that vow was a desperate Yerezi boy.
And it just had to be a Yerezi tribesman, didn’t it. So much for leaving the past behind and forging a new future for herself.
A rocky path skirts the boneyards on their northern boundary. Ilapara has never used it before, but she’s heard the route’s the best way to get over and behind the mountain and hence the quickest way to disappear from town.
So she leads Salo and Tuksaad due west of Seresa, first at a canter through the poorest, most desperate part of town, where the shacks are cramped together and the streets are winding. Then they fall into a gallop when the town ends abruptly, giving way to massive rubbish heaps.
The incumbent authorities never care enough to dig pits for the proper disposal and recycling of rubbish, so it all ends up piling up at the edge of town to putrefy or get scavenged by rats and the utterly destitute, a vile sea of refuse sloping westward, a pervasive shroud of noxious stench, and the mountain is like an island rising out of it.
They ride in silence. To keep her thoughts from spiraling into depressing territory, Ilapara focuses on moving her weight in tandem with Ingacha’s fast lope, on the clatter of his hooves as they race away from the life she worked so hard to build. Even when the ascent grows steeper and they slow down to a trot, the town quickly falling away beneath them, no one speaks, and Ilapara is grateful for the silence.
They almost crest the mountain in this manner, and Ilapara’s certain she’s seen the last of the town, and a part of her wants to break into a gallop again just to get it over with, but then Salo gasps loudly behind her and says, “The coins.”
A fork in the rocky path just ahead, right next to a gnarled acacia tree. The path branching right and upward must lead to the boneyards, so the one going left and downward must be the one they need to take. Ilapara doesn’t stop.
“The coins! One of them is back! I can feel it.”
Ilapara stops, takes a moment before she looks back, takes another moment to realize that she’s furious—furious with Salo, this boy who’s taken everything from her with his recklessness. She breathes in deeply, breathes out.
I am not my emotions.
She looks back.
Salo has come to a complete stop. His expression is pure distress. “Why is it back?”
Behind Salo, Tuksaad reins in his abada. Concern puts wrinkles on his forehead; his strange eyes are tinged rich brown like a dusky sky. “What about the other one? Can you tell where it is?”
“Still on its way to the Plains,” Salo tells him. “But the other one . . . oh no.”
Salo’s leopard bounds up the path unexpectedly, and Ingacha almost bolts away with Ilapara, but she manages to rein him in. She strokes his neck and coos into his ear, glaring at Salo’s retreating back.
“Where are you going?” Tuksaad says, spurring his abada to follow. “We can’t afford to stop.”
At the fork Salo branches up toward the boneyards, heedless of what lies ahead. Tuksaad follows him, and reluctantly, Ilapara coaxes Ingacha into motion and follows them, too, because she’s with them now; this is the choice she’s made.
Lining the winding path up to the boneyards on either side are the severed heads of those who most recently angered the rulers of Seresa for one reason or another. They’re all affixed to pikes so that they stand at eye level and face anyone walking up the path, like a horrid caricature of a welcoming party.
The stench is devilish. It worsens at the summit, where the path flares into an open space overlooking the town of Seresa—open save for the fetid, headless corpses littering the place among black clouds of buzzing flies. A feral cur with a mangy coat growls as it retreats behind a bush at the edge of the clearing, a partially masticated arm caught between its jaws.
Ilapara grimaces. She’s no stranger to death, so the horror doesn’t quite pierce through the mental barriers she’s learned to erect around herself, but when she sees the maggot-infested head of a young Faraswa woman grinning at her from across the open space, it’s a little too much.
She covers her face with her head scarf, leaving only her eyes open to the world because she doesn’t trust what her face will reveal.
Salo and Tuksaad have stopped by the east-facing ledge of the boneyards, where the mountain falls away and spreads into the town below. She brings her nervous buck to a halt next to them, thankful to turn away from the sights around her, though she thinks she can feel the gazes of the dead crawling up her back.
In the distance, the World’s Artery is a wide gravel snake cutting the shantytown in half, stretching from south to north for as far as the eye can see. An ugly thing, this place. She’s always known this to some extent, and maybe she’s deliberately ignored it, but seeing the view from up here, the ugliness is hard to escape. It’s alive. A real, tangible thing she can reach out and touch. Something she can smell.
As she tracks the column of smoke rising from the center of town, she begins to realize why Salo and Tuksaad are both still as death next to her. She can just about see it; there, on the World’s Artery, just a stone’s throw from the general dealer’s, a wagon stands caught in a storm of raging moonfire. Among the figures standing around the wagon is a man in a horned helmet.
I know you are watching, interloper.
Magic rattles her inner ear and slices into her soul, carrying with it a disembodied, sibilant voice that makes her think of giant serpents or mountains of ice grinding against each other.
Your business here was profitable for us, so I’ll let you escape. But you broke our laws, and a price must be paid. I have claimed half of your p
urchase and sacrificed it in my lord’s name. Consider it . . . compensation for the trouble you caused. Now be gone, and never show your face here again.
“But why would he do such a thing?” Ilapara hears herself say. “It’s bad for business.” And her words sound so foolish and inadequate, even to her own ears.
“I killed them,” Salo says. “I did this. Everything I touch turns to dust. And I thought I was being so good.” Tears glitter on his cheeks, something torn and jagged in his voice. “I’m a blithering fool.”
She was angry with him, furious that he could come here and ruin the life she was trying to build for herself with his well-intentioned naivety . . . and yet now, listening to the sorrow in his voice, she can’t help but hate herself for ever becoming so comfortable with evil that she could live in its shadow and not do a thing about it.
That she would be angry with someone who did in a day what she never found the guts to do in three years.
“We must go,” she says. “We must leave this place and never come back.”
25: The Maidservant
Southern Umadiland
The shadow of dusk is thickening over the savannas of Umadiland when the Maidservant emerges from the Void just outside the gates to her warlord’s umusha. Riding the currents of her metadimensional sorcery, River emerges, too, spear in hand, and for the first few seconds they both stare mutely at the gleaming mystic Seal hanging weightlessly above the umusha, an impossibly black sphere spinning in place as it spills out a sea of colors from its brilliant halo.
River is tense as he stares up at the Seal. “Do you feel it?”
She knows exactly what he’s asking. The power rooted to this land has always been dazzling in its strength to any mystic attuned to the earth; today it is so overwhelming she can almost feel her tattoos vibrating. A shiver of worry makes them throb with pain. “I feel it,” she says, and River sniffs.