by C. T. Rwizi
Jomo blinks tiredly, then covers his face with his big hands, shaking his head. “We need more time, Isa. I’m telling you, if in two days the Sentinels no longer exist, there will be blood, whether you’re still king or not. We need to at least delay this vote; then maybe afterward we can negotiate something that will guarantee our continued safety.”
Her eyes briefly fall onto the flyer, and she shivers again. “Have you heard anything from the headmen?”
“I’ve sent missives to the friendly ones, but they haven’t replied. I think they’re all spooked and would rather wait and see which way the wind blows. Can’t say I blame them, though. Life’s a lot riskier with an unpredictable Shirika.”
Isa’s gaze follows the line of maps displayed along the walls of Jomo’s office, each one outlining a different province. She is supposed to be king of all those provinces and their peoples, and with the Shirika on her side she would be. Without them, however, she is weaker than the headmen and an ineffectual representative of her clan.
What power do I have that the headmen don’t?
“You know,” she says, a half-formed idea taking shape in her mind, “if delaying the vote is all we need to do for now . . .”
Jomo stares at her, waiting, and then his lips stretch in a sardonic smile. “You’re welcome not to leave me in suspense, Your Majesty.”
“The orators who stand in the streets and market squares,” Isa tries to explain, “spouting whatever opinions they are paid to spout. Do you know why no one ever argues with them?”
“Ha! Because they never give you a chance to speak . . . oh.” He tilts his head in thought, a slow smile spreading across his face until he’s beaming from ear to ear. “My dear cousin, that’s brilliant!”
She sits back into her chair, the walls of reality closing back in around her. “But it’d be temporary. Delaying the inevitable, if anything.”
“But Your Majesty.” Still grinning like a fool, Jomo reaches down, unearths two clean glasses from somewhere behind the desk, and places them on the table. He proceeds to fill both halfway with golden Valausi rum. Isa doesn’t refuse hers when he hands it to her. “Every minute we buy is one more minute we can use to buy another. And so long as I have you, I’ll keep buying minutes until the Mother has no choice but to give me all the time I damn well need.”
His enthusiasm is deeply encouraging, and as they sip on their rum together, another plan forms in a corner of Isa’s mind. The Arc dangled something in front of her today, unwittingly perhaps, but it could be the key to solving the woes facing her clan.
Central to acquiring this key, however, and perhaps to understanding how Kola Saai managed to bend gods to his will, is the answer to a question she suddenly can’t get out of her head: What do gods want? What could a mere mortal offer a god to gain favor?
30: Musalodi
Approaching the Southern Tuanu Borderlands
They flee across the savannas at a moon-powered gallop, each pace featherlight on the muscles and easy as breath. Broad-leaved woodlands crop up around them the farther north they travel, which slows their pace a little, but they still cover great distances each day.
He keeps his senses cast outward for much of the time, unable to move past the suspicion that there are multiple pursuers converging on their position from many directions. He has no spells of any craft to augment his powers of observation, yet his shards keep thrumming with faint ripples of distant magic that keep pace with them as they race toward the Tuanu borderlands.
Surviving the encounter with the dingoneks and their master has given him some measure of confidence in his abilities and those of his companions, but beneath that fragile confidence is a current of terror that won’t subside. Tuk insists they’ll be safe once they cross into the woodlands bordering the Tuanu lake, claiming that they are heavily patrolled and that whoever is chasing them likely won’t continue their pursuit past that threshold. But when Salo asks why crossing the borderlands would be safe for them and not for their pursuers, Tuk smiles and hedges at the question, begging that they trust him.
Reluctantly, they do.
When they stop to rest on the third evening of their journey together, Salo takes his bow and goes hunting while the others tend to their beasts. He returns with two bush fowl, which he skins and guts with his steel knife before rubbing them with spice and setting them to roast on spits. Tuk eats heartily, then calls it a night after a few hours of lighthearted conversation, leaving Salo and Ilapara to exchange stories about their overnight hunting trips in the Plains.
“They call her the Maidservant,” she says after a lull in the conversation. Salo can’t read her face from across the campfire, but her nose ring shimmers in the wavering light. “The witch I’m pretty sure attacked your kraal? Yeah, she’s one of the Dark Sun’s favorite disciples, helped him expand his territory quite a bit these last few years. No one knows where she came from, but people are terrified of her.”
Salo tastes bile on his tongue, the bush fowl beginning to sit heavily in his stomach. “What do you know about her?”
“Only what they whisper in beer halls, and none of it’s good.” Ilapara picks her teeth with a splinter of wood, a distant glimmer in her eyes. Her voice holds a note of hesitance when she speaks next. “Did you . . . lose anyone in the attack? It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it. It’s just hard for me to accept, you know? In my mind the Plains are impenetrable.”
He considers brushing her off or changing the subject but then remembers Monti’s ama and the promise he made. He has no right to shy away from this. “I know what you mean,” he says. “And yes, I lost a friend.” Salo takes a heavy breath to compose himself. “His name was Montari, a charming kid, always moving, small for his age, intelligent. He pestered me into teaching him matje until I had to sweat to beat him. I’m sure he’d have grown into a master given time.” Salo smiles at the memory. “Monti was a lot smarter than I was at his age.”
Pensive silence drifts and settles around the campfire. Salo twists Monti’s wristband, lost in thought, and he can almost hear Monti’s bright laugh, see his impish grin.
Then the memories turn to ash, leaving Salo trembling with anger. “He was a good kid. Far too young to die. And to a tikoloshe, no less.”
Ilapara’s eyes glimmer in the darkness, and she seems to mull over her words. “I’m sorry for your loss. Forgive me for bringing it up.”
“No.” Salo takes his spectacles off to wipe his eyes. “I want to talk about him. It’s the least I can do.”
They let the rest of the night pass in silence. Before they set off the next morning, Tuk sits on a fallen tree trunk, pulls out a map from his knapsack, and studies it. “I can’t believe how fast we’ve traveled,” he says at length. “If we keep up our speed, we’ll reach the borderlands by afternoon today. Although”—he tilts his head, a blue light flickering in his eyes as he roams the map—“if you want, Salo, the sixth waterfall along the River Fulamungu is maybe a day away from here. We could take a detour so you can commune with the Grootslang spirit that resides there.”
Salo drifts closer to take a look at the map because it’s not like any map he’s ever seen. Rivers, lakes, and mountains of the Redlands are inked onto the glossy paper in brilliant colors that seem to shift with the light. Names are written in artistic script, cities marked with stars and the Primeval Spirits with stylized glyphs. Tribal borderlands have been left deliberately fuzzy, however, to show how they shift and change like the sands of a beach.
A charm was woven onto the paper, and it marks the map’s location with a throbbing red light. Right now the light is somewhere south of a large body of water a great deal longer than it is wide. The lake’s southernmost tip lies in the interior of Umadiland, and it stretches northward for almost a thousand miles—well into the jungles of the Yontai—terminating just south of the continent’s second major roadway: the World’s Vein. It’s a blue snake on the map, cutting the Redlands in half in a general east-west directi
on and intersecting the red Artery in Yonte Saire, the heart of the continent.
“What do you think?” Tuk says, snatching Salo’s attention from the map. “Do we detour and visit the Grootslang of Fulamungu, or do we continue? Your choice.”
Salo is practically looking over Tuk’s shoulder, standing close enough to catch the whiff of his sandalwood musk. A mystery how the guy can still smell this good after all the traveling they’ve been doing.
“That’s one incredible map, Tuksaad,” Salo says. “But I think we should keep going. No detours.” And if he’s going to commune with a spirit at all, it certainly won’t be the Grootslang. He shudders at the idea.
“Just so I can prepare myself,” Ilapara says. She has just finished saddling her kudu; now she’s standing next to it with her hands on her waist. Salo has yet to see her without that head scarf of hers. “So you are planning on communing with the Lightning Bird of Zivatuanu when we sail up the lake?” She gives Tuk a pointed look. “If we even sail up the lake?”
Tuk smiles confidently and starts folding his map. “We will.”
Salo spies a flight of ravens in the east right then. Ilapara notices, following the line of his gaze.
“What is it?” she says.
He watches the birds until they disappear into the horizon. Perhaps it’s time he had a conversation with the queen.
“Give me a minute,” he says and walks away from the camp for some privacy.
Leaning against a tree just out of earshot of the others, he extracts the queen’s medallion from a pouch on his waist. The Seal carved onto its faces strobes at him unpleasantly, two colorful suns setting over a flat horizon.
Am I really doing this? But what choice do I have?
Now that he has awoken, his connection to his talisman feels stronger and more intuitive. Some of the inner workings that were once a mystery to him are now open secrets; for example, he now knows that he can use the talisman to aid and modify spell casting on the fly. He also knows how to entangle it with another talisman using a mystic Seal.
And that’s what he does. With a thought he rouses the red steel serpent on his left wrist and commands it to seek out the one who cast the Seal on the medallion. The serpent obeys, and lights flash from its crystal eyes as its core transcends distance and forms a link with another talisman far away—
Reality shifts around Salo, an endless plain of golden grass taking shape around him, spreading out for as far as the eye can see. Two prismatic suns can be seen sinking into the horizon, bathing the grasses in varicolored twilight, while across the plain, the moon is rising full and red in all her glory.
Salo knows instinctively that this plain isn’t real; it is merely the false mental construct AmaYerezi created for her talisman—her construct and not his because he hasn’t yet created one for himself. A part of him remains aware of his real surroundings: the woods not far from the Tuanu borderlands, an hour just after daybreak. But the detail woven into this false world is so true to life he doubts his senses.
In front of him the queen appears as the shapely outline of a woman made of golden-red light, a dazzling silhouette almost too bright to gaze upon. He executes a bow, and when he speaks, his words come out differently, though in a strangely familiar way. “Your Majesty.”
She watches him for the longest time, and the weight of her faceless gaze is almost too much to bear. “Hello, Musalodi. It is good to finally hear from you, though I’m surprised it has taken you so long to contact me.”
Salo struggles to find a worthy reply. “I wasn’t sure what I’d say, Your Majesty. The emissary’s commands were clear.”
“I take it you have something to say to me now.”
He swallows nervously as he thinks of how best to couch his current circumstances. “I have encountered trouble, Your Majesty. When I passed through a town along the World’s Artery, I . . . provoked the ire of a local mystic. He pursued me and the pair of warriors I’ve enlisted to accompany me, and while we managed to deal with him, I fear I’m still being pursued by other parties. I’ve had to take an alternate route; I’ll be traveling north to the World’s Vein and then east to the city.”
Salo suspects she already knows all of this. If she does, however, she gives nothing away, though the amusement in her voice is hard to miss. “I wonder: Does your predicament have anything to do with the wagonload of Faraswa refugees that entered our borders recently?”
“They arrived safely?”
“I hear your father has agreed to take them in, though it was quite presumptuous of you to send them here without consulting me first.”
Salo closes his eyes, overcome with emotion. He doesn’t think he’s ever loved his father more than he loves him now. “I apologize, Your Majesty. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“No more unnecessary risks. I need you alive and well in Yonte Saire. And be swift; the longer you dally, the fewer avenues we will have to take action against whatever threat is mounting there.”
Salo feels his heart begin to gallop. “Action, Your Majesty? What sort of action do you mean?”
“That’s what I’m sending you to find out. A great tempest is brewing on the horizon, with Yonte Saire at the epicenter. We need to find out what’s going on there and prepare ourselves, or it will be our undoing.”
This does nothing to help Salo’s nerves, so he broaches the subject he’s wanted to discuss from the beginning. “Your Majesty, I have to ask, did you send someone to watch me?”
The faceless silhouette smiles. Salo doesn’t see it, but he feels it in the air between them. “Your mother and I grew up together in the Queen’s Kraal. Did you know that?”
Are you trying to distract me from the fact that you have a spy tailing me? “I did, Your Majesty.” The two of them were once more than good friends, according to some whispers.
“We had much in common, Asanda and I. But what really drew us to each other as we grew into young women was our shared resentment for the Asazi old guard and their mystics. We found their ways suffocating. Too conservative. We looked to the mystics of our sister tribes and envied them their freedom to explore, to just . . . immerse themselves in the arcane without rules or restrictions. We saw the incredible things they did and wondered why we couldn’t do the same. But then I grew up, and she did not. And when the council of chiefs chose me as their queen, it was the end of our friendship. She couldn’t forgive me for it—I doubt she ever did.”
The queen gazes at the eternal sunset in the distance, lost in the past. “Asanda was too ambitious for her own good. I tried to rein in her forays into the darker side of magic, to reason with her, but the wedge between us only grew larger with time, and her thirst for power was insatiable.”
Why are you telling me this? Salo wonders, waiting for the queen to make her point.
“I don’t know where she found the framework for that Axiom of yours, but I know she consorted with a certain cult of apostates in Yonte Saire during her pilgrimage, and I know that upon her return she summoned an ancient spirit of immense darkness, by way of a blood sacrifice on the eve of a New Year. The spirit changed her, inflamed her desires, made her obsessed.” The queen turns her faceless gaze on Salo, and there is boiling acid in her next words. “Then she seduced a young warrior from a powerful line of chiefs and bore him a son. I knew she was up to something, but she was smart; she knew how to insulate herself from the consequences of her sacrilege.”
It is never easy for Salo to reconcile the power-hungry megalomaniac everyone else remembers and the woman he knew—save for those last few months before her death. Maybe he never knew her at all.
“Let your mother’s demise be an example to you of what can happen to the overly ambitious. Shortcuts to power will always take you through the mire, and sometimes, you never come out.”
Salo suspects there’s a second, deeper warning somewhere in these words, though he fails to parse its exact nature. He suddenly regrets this conversation altogether. “I understand, Your Majes
ty.”
“Travel well, Musalodi. I expect to hear from you once you reach Yonte Saire.” Then the queen disappears into the prismatic sunset, leaving Salo to emerge from the talisman feeling like he has a solid weight sitting somewhere deep inside his chest.
Strictly speaking, when he touched Ingacha and Wakii, blessing them with portions of his arcane power, he weakened himself by reducing the flow of essence he can draw into his shards. In practical terms, however, all the two animals needed to become as mighty as any moon-blessed quagga of the Ajaha cavalries were the tiniest slivers of his power, so tiny he can barely perceive their absence.
If he concentrates, though, he can sense two other tethers besides Mukuni’s pulling at his mind now, both in their own unique way. Ingacha is a proud, defiant presence, while Wakii is an excitable thrum. Both are weaker than Mukuni’s tether, but if he wants to, he can project his will across them, communicate with the minds on the other side, or even feed them more of his power.
Now he understands why his tribe’s ancestral talent is so potent. He could bless an entire regiment and their warmounts before he started to feel the drain on his power.
Hours after his conversation with the queen, as they trot through a light drizzle, a strong sense of unease besets him across all three tethers. Mukuni starts growling at the surrounding woodlands. Ahead of him, Wakii slows down, neighing and tossing her head nervously.
Tuksaad brings her to a complete stop and looks back at Salo and Ilapara, biting his lips like he’s fishing for the right words. “Listen,” he says, “I’m pretty sure we’re about to get ambushed, but everything will be all right if you don’t panic. Just let me take the lead, understood?”
Behind Mukuni, Ilapara reins in her buck and draws her spear from its harness by Ingacha’s side. She scowls at the woods first, then at Tuk. “What the devil are you talking about? What ambush?”
“I need you to put that away, Ilapara,” Tuk says, eyeing her weapon. “We need to be as nonthreatening as possible. That’s the only way we’ll get out of these woods in one piece.”