It could work – it would. She’d devoted her life to this study, to learning how to build these smaller things into a larger and true meaning. But what if it didn’t? What if Krishanjit was wrong? She’d tried everything. She’d even made herself a god to spark the runes to life. And suddenly she found that she didn’t want to know if she’d failed one final time. ‘I can’t test it,’ she told Vordanna. ‘Not now, I’m too tired.’
‘Rest then.’ Vordanna turned to go, but Olufemi reached out to grab her hand and held her fast, until the other woman grudgingly turned to face her.
‘I’m …’ The word ‘sorry’ stuck in her throat like a fishbone. She had nothing to be sorry for, and a mage would never apologise to a slave. ‘I’m sorry, Vordanna,’ she finally said. ‘It was only that I thought you were gone – you and Jinn both lost. I thought everything was lost and there was nothing to be done about it.’
It was unsettling to be studied by those too-knowing, too-awake eyes. But whatever Vordanna found in her face seemed to soften her. She swiped the pad of her thumb across the wrinkled back of Olufemi’s hand before releasing it. ‘Go to sleep, Femi. We’ll show Lord Krishanjit what you’ve found in the morning.’
Krish was sandy-eyed with sleep when Olufemi woke him. The sun hadn’t yet risen and the sky outside his window was a deep pink, but he took one look at her face, tight with excitement, and didn’t protest.
She and Vordanna led him outside the bounds of Mirror Town as the day dawned, to the dusty, lifeless fields that bordered the city on its landward side. He didn’t think he’d ever grow used to the heat here. In this place, it was easy to believe the sun was his enemy. It seemed determined to suck every drop of moisture out of him, parching his skin as dry as the land it had robbed of its virtue.
The grand buildings of Mirror Town shimmered on the horizon behind them, a trick of the heat that seemed to reduce them to a delusion. He was afraid that Olufemi’s discovery might be no more than a mirage too. The old woman looked older than ever, stooped with tiredness, eyes sunk deep in her face. He worried that he’d set her a challenge she was incapable of meeting, and without her magic, he had nothing. He was nothing.
He took a gulp from his water bottle and was dismayed to realise it was already empty. He never brought enough when he wandered the scorched desert. A part of him could never quite believe how unforgiving this land was. He’d thought the land of his birth was harsh, but here the line between life and death seemed thinner than he’d ever known. One mistake, and you’d cross it.
There was more water, hefted in large flagons between ten sweating slaves, but Olufemi had told him it must be saved for the magic. ‘Couldn’t we have done this back in the mansion?’ he asked her.
She shook her head, eyes scanning the barren ground. ‘For a true test, we need to see the extent of the power. Small magics will avail us nothing against your father’s army. But this is far enough, I think.’ She drew a parchment from the sleeve of her tunic and uncurled it. ‘Yes, these were once sun-pear orchards – there was fruit here even a hundred years ago. The roots should still be there. Buried and long dead, but there.’
Krish kicked at the sand, which flew away in a yellow cloud. It was hard to imagine it had ever supported life. ‘How can an army cross this?’
‘When the autumn rains come, the desert will bloom for a few brief weeks.’
‘But you’ll stop them,’ Vordanna said brightly. ‘You’ll save Lord Krishanjit.’
‘I will,’ Olufemi said, looking at Krish. ‘I will save you, Yron.’
It was the first time she’d seemed certain about the runes, and the first time she’d ever called him by that title. It startled him even more when she dropped to her knees in front of him, her joints creaking audibly.
She clasped his hand and bent her head until her forehead touched his knuckles. ‘Yron, will you give me your blessing to act in your service?’
He laughed in discomfort and tried to pull his hand away, but she held it fast. Her expression seemed at war with itself, respect fighting to subdue her usual irritation. ‘I must serve you in this,’ she said, and he remembered what she’d told him: the use of the runes was only given to those who worshipped the sun and the moon.
‘I give you my blessing,’ he said, feeling like an idiot. Dae Hyo would have scoffed if he’d heard him, but he hadn’t seen hair nor foot of the warrior for three days.
Olufemi rested her forehead against his hand a moment longer and then creaked back to her feet. He wanted to help her, but wasn’t sure if he should. Did a god serve his servants? He watched instead as she gestured to one of the slaves and held out the parchment to show the man. ‘Ten paces wide at least,’ she told him. The slave studied it, smiling, and then began to hack at the ground with his hoe, carving out a deep furrow.
‘He’s drawing the rune?’ Krish asked Olufemi.
She nodded, not taking her attention from the slowly emerging design: a swirling spiral that seemed to join back with itself so it never began or ended. The slave consulted the parchment again and added complex curlicues spinning away from the top and bottom of the design like twirls of smoke.
‘Wouldn’t it be better if you did it?’ Krish asked.
‘I’m not—’ she began heatedly, and then seemed to recall that she was supposed to be treating him with respect – worshipping him, even – and snapped her mouth shut. ‘A mage’s skill is needed to devise the rune,’ she said with gritty politeness. ‘Drawing it is an artisan’s job, and Iestyn was a scribe of Smiler’s Fair before he was snatched in a raid by the Janggok.’
‘And that’s it?’ Krish said dubiously, as the rune seemed to take its final shape. ‘You just draw it and then …’ he raised his hands in a formless gesture of summoning.
‘And then I must meditate on its shape – hold it whole and perfect in my mind and call your power into it. You’ll pour the water in as I do and the magic will flow through the water, as life itself is carried by it.’
‘That sounds easy enough.’
She laughed, a sharp sound. ‘Easy? It took me a year of training until I could hold even the simplest rune in my head. Until I could see it, and nothing but it in my mind’s eye. Tell me, have you ever thought of nothing?’
‘Yes, when I’m asleep.’
‘And do you not dream?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Our minds are never silent and never empty. Learning to silence them, to empty them of all thought, all worry, all images but the rune itself – this is the true meaning of a mage’s gift. Now, please, I must have quiet for this.’ She waited until Krish had nodded and then sank to the dusty ground, sitting cross-legged to one side of the carved rune. The position looked uncomfortable, feet folded over her thighs, but she seemed to assume it with ease. She took a deep breath, nodded at the waiting slaves and closed her eyes.
The slaves lifted the tubs of water and carried them closer. Krish thought Olufemi must have meant them to pour slowly, setting the water running round the shape of the rune, but the slaves tipped over the barrels and let the water go in one big wave. He saw Olufemi wince at the noise of it, her eyes flickering open before she forced them shut again. The water cut through the dry earth like a knife, breaking open the carefully carved shape of the rune and then soaking through it to turn it all to mud.
He watched it sink into the parched earth, disappearing with startling speed and leaving only a messy swirl behind. The rune was gone and his brief surge of hope with it. He’d been stupid to think it could work. Better to find his prow god, hidden in some corner of his room, and pray to her.
He leaned down to Olufemi, meaning to shake her out of her trance. But as he leaned towards her, he saw something in the earth around her, green where everything else was a golden brown. And then he saw another, and two more beside it: tiny shoots, poking their heads through the mud.
It wasn’t much; it might have been caused by the sudden deluge of water. He leaned back, his heart pounding with the fear
that this was nothing, that he was allowing hope to return only to suffer the pain of losing it again.
He felt a shifting beneath his own feet and looked down to see a green spear pressing upward hard enough to rock him back on his heels. He stepped aside – and on to another shoot, already two inches tall. It snapped beneath the heel of his sandal, but as he watched in fascination, the little broken stump began to sprout again, a furled green leaf rising from its centre and expanding until it was larger than the one he’d killed.
There were scores of them. Hundreds. Everywhere he looked was green instead of dusty yellow, seething with life. Some of the shoots were growing into grasses or flowers and others into saplings, reaching out their limbs towards the perfect blue sky.
He was forced to hop from foot to foot, dancing to avoid the reckless growth of the tallest plants. He found himself pushed into the one stable area, a grassy, flower-sprinkled meadow centred on Olufemi. All around it was an orchard. With the trees reaching far above his head, it was impossible to tell how far it extended.
He laughed in shock and joy. The sound was deadened by the seconds-old vegetation all around, but in front of him Olufemi’s eyes snapped open. For just a second, she looked like she meant to chastise him. And then she saw what she’d made.
He thought she was going to speak, but though she opened her mouth, no sound came out of it. Her seamed face tightened and then she sobbed, loud and convulsively, hiding her face in her hands.
‘Lord Yron’s power has returned,’ Vordanna said as she put her arm round the older woman and hugged her tightly.
‘Yes.’ Olufemi’s tears glistened along her dark cheeks. ‘Yes. The runes have truly woken.’
To either side of them the slaves were wide-eyed, as if the strangeness of what they’d witnessed was enough to cut through even the numbing effect of bliss. Krish felt as if he’d taken the drug, light-headed with happiness and with relief from a fear he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge even to himself.
The walk back to the city took far longer than the walk out. They had to pick their way through the tangled undergrowth, stamping the woody stems of brambles beneath their feet. Everywhere there was the rich smell of new leaves.
Vordanna stopped to pluck one of the golden fruits from a tree and when Krish did the same he found that it burst with juice and sweetness in his mouth. Olufemi had made this. She’d made something from nothing, like the mages of old when they’d first built Mirror Town.
It was a shock when they came to the outer limits of the rune’s effect and stepped from lush greenery back into the normal dusty fields. When they’d walked a little further Krish couldn’t resist turning round to check that it had really happened. The orchard was still there, stretching out of sight to left and right. It was eerily silent, no wind to rustle the leaves and no birds or insects to populate its branches. It occurred to him that the flowers might die without bees to pollinate them. But Olufemi could summon bees into being too, if they needed them.
Even on the borders of Mirror Town the orchard was visible, a green shimmer on the horizon. He turned to look at it one last time, and when he turned back he saw that a haze hung over the city too, a large dust cloud near its centre.
‘What’s that?’ he asked Olufemi but the mage, turned back towards the orchard, only shrugged, her eyes still on the distant evidence of her success.
They walked on, through the low stone buildings of the poorest of Mirror Town, mages without ties of kinship, and then through the broader streets and larger mansions of the lesser families. They passed a red-painted cube with carved lizards climbing its sides, a long hall twisted into a double spiral a little like Olufemi’s rune and a strange triangular-sided building that rose to a pointed peak. Everywhere they saw the flashes of the mirrors and heard the ceaseless shouts of the mirror masters as they turned them.
Not far from the centre of town, beside a marble-fronted mansion ringed with trees, a party of mages waited for them. He recognised two members of Olufemi’s family – a niece and a cousin, or maybe two cousins – along with several others who’d visited the mansion occasionally. They watched Krish approach in silence, their expressions severe.
‘Wasola, you must come and see!’ Olufemi said.
A thin-faced young woman replied, ‘See what?’ in a tone so icy that even Olufemi seemed deflated by it.
‘The magic has returned, Wasola,’ she said. ‘Our power has returned to us.’
‘So it’s true then?’ That was one of the old men, frowning so heavily the wrinkles had wriggled halfway up his balding head. ‘We didn’t think … It didn’t seem possible.’
‘It is – I’ve made the earth bloom again. I’ve brought life where there was only death. I’ve done it, I’ve proven it can be done. Come, you can see for yourselves.’ Olufemi turned back in the direction of the newly grown orchard, but the other mages remained unmoving.
‘No,’ Wasola said. ‘Olufemi, you should see. You should see what you’ve done.’
‘I know what I did. I don’t … Wasola, what is it?’
‘It’s our home. Or it was.’
Wasola looked towards the centre of town, towards the cloud of dust still hanging above it. Krish realised he could hear faint shouts coming from that direction, and what might have been screams of pain.
Olufemi ran and he sprinted after her, down the broad avenue and across a square filled with fountains, the tinkle of their water no longer loud enough to drown out the sounds from ahead. He ran on towards the dust cloud in the sky and the wreckage of the Etze mansion beneath it.
It was impossible to understand what had happened, only that it had been utterly destroyed. As Olufemi staggered to a halt beside him they both stared at the tumbled marble blocks, some scorched as if by fire even though no fire blazed. The roof was gone entirely, fallen into and obliterating the mansion’s interior. The intricate maps that had surfaced its walls were shattered into a thousand meaningless fragments of colour. Pitiful cries came from the wreckage and slaves were crawling over it in search of their owners. They pulled out one body, red streaked over its broken limbs.
Olufemi gave a choked cry of horror. ‘What happened?’
‘It was you, Olufemi,’ the old man said. ‘Have you forgotten why we were driven from our homeland? Magic has a price, and your family has paid for yours.’
‘I … I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘I would never – I would never have chosen this.’
‘But you did,’ Wasola said. ‘You did this – for him.’ She stared at Krish with more hatred than he’d ever seen on another person’s face, even Uin’s.
‘He must go,’ the old man said. ‘We’ve heard the Ashane King is hunting for him – would you see our whole city burn? He must go.’
‘Not now!’ Olufemi said. ‘Not when I’ve—’
‘He must leave,’ Wasola cut her off, ‘and so must you. We want you gone. If the sun rises to find you in Mirror Town tomorrow, you won’t live to see it set.’
‘You can’t …’ Olufemi began, but another desperate scream came from the ruins and she trailed into silence.
The scream came again and Krish felt his heart lurch. ‘Dae Hyo! Where’s Dae Hyo?’
Dae Hyo woke to pain and darkness. It didn’t surprise him – he’d fallen asleep with more than a bottle of whisky inside him. But when he groaned and tried to turn, he found that he couldn’t move. He tried again, struggling against some unseen weight, and cried out as his arm twisted and the bones grated agonisingly against each other.
He blinked his eyes, which were full of dust. It wasn’t entirely dark: above him there was a sliver of daylight. He strained towards it and felt something shift, the grinding sound of stone moving on stone and then an almost unendurable weight pressing down on his chest.
He groaned again and in counterpoint heard other groans all around him. His head was full of muddy water that his thoughts struggled to swim through. He’d fallen asleep in the Etze mansion, he was sure of it. Was he still in
the mansion? He tried to move again and felt a sharp pain as something splintered beneath him. Something wooden – his bed. And all at once he understood: he was where he’d always been, but the mansion no longer was. The vast stone structure had fallen in and he was trapped beneath it.
He lost some time to fear and panic. He thought he might have screamed. He certainly gasped and struggled against his confinement until the pain of his movements grew too much. After that there was despair at the thought of such a death, not even in battle, not even under the light of the sun. And then there was only boredom and the growing discomfort of thirst, somehow worse than the fiercer pain of his injuries as the long hours stretched by.
His eyes had dried along with his mouth and he shut them and tried to let his mind move elsewhere, to remember better times and people. When he died here, would he join his ancestors on the plains? Could his spirit travel so far? He tried to sing a song to cheer himself, a ballad to his mother’s ponies that he’d composed when he was a child, but his throat was rough with thirst and the song faded into silence.
When he heard the voices, he thought perhaps his ancestors had come for him. But his ancestors had never spoken the language of the mages, as these voices were speaking, and so he forced his gummed eyes open. There was daylight above him, a circle of it as broad as the sun, and a face framed in it. It smiled when it saw him. Hands reached down and lifted, until a block of stone was gone and more light could slip through.
Time seemed to crawl past, as slow as the beetle lumbering from broken slab to broken slab above him. After a while he shut his eyes again and only listened, sometimes crying out in pain as the lifting of one block above caused others to shift and the pressure against his legs or chest or arm grew worse. At last he felt the weight lift and it seemed that he’d survived.
He blinked and found that Krish’s face was above his own, his brother’s sweat-streaked and desperate. And despite everything, he felt joy that Krish had saved him as a brother should.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 38