Redemptor

  Too late I saw them—several bins, perched in eaves above the marketplace. Before I could shout a warning, distant figures overturned the bins . . . and waterfalls of cold, stinking blood filled the square.

  My Guard warriors wheeled in confusion, temporarily blinded. I gagged and spat, slipping on the slimy, wet ground. Horrified shoppers formed a clumsy stampede, leaping over ruined piles of pelts and separating me from Kwasi. All too soon I was alone, nearly crushed by a stall as a mob of vigilantes overturned it and set it aflame.

  I scrambled backward, only to press myself against a wall as shrieking, blood-soaked people roared past. Bile rose to my throat as one man fell and was crushed immediately by the exodus. Breathing hard, I pushed my way to an upended stall and climbed on top of it, hoping to avoid the fray. People and pack animals crashed into the stall’s sides. I swayed and cried for help, hanging on for dear life—and then a figure flew toward me from above. He dangled from a rope, riding the rows of pelts like a zipline: the Crocodile.

  I turned around and tried to duck. But he reached my stall, seizing me across the waist. I yelped but held on to him reflexively, air knocked from my lungs as we whizzed over the crowd, through the market square, and into a quiet alley. When we stopped, I wrenched myself from the Crocodile’s sinewy arms. He did not resist, setting me gently on my feet.

  “Don’t move,” I panted, whipping out the knife I kept always in my wrapper. “Don’t . . . don’t you dare touch me.”

  “Thank Am.” To my surprise, the Crocodile only chuckled, tutting with his hands on his hips. “My dear empress . . . I was beginning to think you’d never force me to do anything.”

  Then the man pulled off his mask, and I stood face to face with the grinning king of Djbanti.

  CHAPTER 22

  “We should get moving,” Zuri told me then, seizing my hand and towing me along. “The district guard will come trampling through soon enough, and they tend to slash first and ask questions later.”

  “What? Where are you taking me?” I sputtered, managing to snatch my hand from his grasp. “And why should I trust you? You just destroyed a marketplace!”

  “I prefer to think I revealed its true nature,” he said blandly. “And we’re going to my villa. Unless you’d like to find your way back to the palace in a crowded city, with no guards, looking like that.” He gestured at my gore-stained face and shoulders. When I glanced down at my wrapper, soaked in crimson, my stomach turned.

  “It’s only pig’s blood,” he said, then winced. “I’d try not to swallow it, though.”

  I needed, very badly, to be clean. I sighed, lowering my knife. He wore several weapon holsters, and we stood in an empty alley. If he was going to kill me, he would have done it already.

  So I followed him, stealing through the district. He cut through streets like someone who had done it many times, and before long, we reached the wide, fountain-dotted streets of the Ileyoba District.

  Imperial Guard warriors flanked the villa assigned to Djbanti delegates, and high, smooth plaster rendered the walls unscalable. But before the warriors could spot us, Zuri took my hand, muttered feverishly, and tensed in pain—just like he had done at Olojari, when he vanished into thin air. My limbs hummed, in sync with his vibrating form . . . and then the wide street disappeared.

  We stood in an elegant, citrus-scented bedchamber. The brick pattern matched the building we had just seen on the street—we were inside the Djbanti delegate villa. I dropped Zuri’s hand, stomach lurching with nausea and confusion. “I—how did you—”

  “What?” Zuri strolled casually to an end table and offered me a towel. “Never traveled by lodestone before?”

  I took the towel gingerly, swabbing at my gore-covered face. “Of course I have,” I wheezed. “That is not what that was.”

  “Stomachache feels about the same,” Zuri countered, and then peeled off one of his leather bands. With a jolt, I realized it was the same arm on which he always wore his wide gold cuff. There in his skin, encased in festering, veiny flesh, were two hunks of stone.

  Zuri was using ibaje—the same deadly Pale Arts as the deformed assassin from that night in the square.

  The largest rock embedded in his skin was metallic gray, dotted with tiny ashen symbols. The second made my breath catch in horror—a multifaceted emerald stone, glinting with malevolent light.

  “That gem,” I bleated, brushing my chin in the sign of the Pelican. “It was in Melu’s cuff. My mother used that to enslave an alagbato. Are you—Are you a djinn? An ehru?”

  “In a way. To my own ambition.” He smiled wryly. “That stone is known as idekun—a mineral that grows only in the Underworld, though it’s available up here for a . . . generous price. It is said to amplify the wearer’s natural power, but it also binds the wearer to a person—or a cause. Until that person is satisfied, or that cause is fulfilled—idekun torments you.” He grimaced as the green stone flashed, seeming to lash him. But he shook off the pain and pointed to the larger stone. “I’m sure you recognize this one. It’s a piece of lodestone. The lodestones scattered throughout the empire originally came from the Underworld—did you know that? Alone, this piece lets me travel to other stones. But the idekun magnifies its power, allowing me to transport anywhere.”

  “And that’s why you haven’t been caught,” I murmured. “How you’ve been waking alagbatos all over the empire as the Crocodile, while still making appearances at court.”

  “You’re quick. Though it’s still hard to lead revolutions when I can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of being poisoned?” I sputtered. “That’s Pale Arts. Ibaje never comes without a price.”

  “Of course I’ve paid a price.” He chuckled, replacing the arm band, and his eyes looked bright and manic. “But at least, unlike the rest of my family, I got to pick my poison.”

  My vision spun. The empty-headed king of Djbanti—the gambling drunkard who couldn’t tell one end of a scepter from the other—was the Crocodile. The name whispered in the streets and written at the top of my security reports. Leader of the most organized vigilante group in Aritsar, responsible for disrupting industries across the empire.

  “Should be a bath ready,” Zuri said, nodding at a corner of the chamber. Behind woven screens stood a carved wooden tub, perfumed steam curling into the air. “It’s for me . . . but I think we can agree you need it more than I do.”

  Am’s Story—even his voice sounded different, low and resonant, rather than the nasal drawl he had used at court.

  “How?” I squeaked. “How can you be the Crocodile?”

  He poured himself a drink from a tall, fluted carafe. “You mean, ‘How can a man you can’t stand turn out to have a brain after all?’ ” He smiled, a white flash against midnight skin. “Sorry. That’s unfair.” He swirled the drink in his hand—herb water, not wine as I expected. I wondered again if I had ever seen Zuri drink at all. At court functions, he slurred and stumbled around, but his cup was always full. “I’m good at playing an idiot,” he said. “I have to be.”

  “Who knows?” I demanded. “Your servants, obviously. But the other rulers? Your government? All of Djbanti? Did everyone know about this but me?”

  “With a few exceptions, my servants believe I sneak out to brothels. As for the other monarchs and my warlords”—he took a long swill from his chalice—“they think I’m an even bigger halfwit than you do. Even the revolutionaries who follow the Crocodile are uncertain of his identity, though I’m sure some of them have guessed.”

  I crossed my arms. “Then the only people in the world who know you’re the Crocodile—who know the real you—are a couple servants . . . and me?”

  He smirked, slipping back into his court drawl. “Bold of you to assume I’m not really an idiot.”

  But something grim lurked in his expression. The longer I watched him, the more I realized I had stumbled upon the only person in Oluwan as lonely as I was.

  I turned away, snuffing out
the sudden kinship between us. “Why tell me?” I said. “I could expose you to the world. People might doubt the word of a servant, but they would listen to an empress.”

  He opened his mouth, then shut it. “You’re staining my rug,” he observed, and turned to pour himself another drink.

  I glanced down. Red muck dripped from my legs, and my sandals had left gruesome smears on the carpet. My face and neck had grown stiff with filth.

  “Enjoy the water while it’s fresh,” he said. “I’ll send for some clothes you can wear back to the palace.” Then he crossed the room to be as far as he could from the screened bath, busying himself with papers at a kneeling desk. I sucked in a breath. The only thing I wanted more than to leave that room was to be clean.

  So I ducked behind the screen, peeked over it three times to make sure Zuri was staying away, and peeled off my soiled clothes. I kept on my mask and sunstone pendant, unwilling to part with them in such strange territory. Then I climbed into the tub.

  It was pleasant at first. A selection of oils and ash soaps rested within reach on a stool, and leaves floated on the water. Lemongrass steam rose around my ears. But the longer I soaked, the thicker and redder the water became. I blinked, entranced by my arms and knees, dark brown hills in a sea of blood. The scene from the marketplace repeated in my head, only now it mixed with the night before my coronation, when monsters tore an assassin apart. Then I was back in that palace hallway, Thaddace dead at my feet, and a child pointing, wailing, Empress Redemptor.

  My heart slammed in my chest. I gripped the edges of the tub. I was naked in some stranger’s villa, and there was blood everywhere, and it was on my skin and in my hair and undead children hovered in every corner and in less than two years I was going to die and—

  “Tarisai?” Zuri’s voice floated from beyond the screen. I realized then that my breaths were audible, coming in loud, hard sobs.

  “L-Lady Empress to you,” I gasped, trying not thrash in the water. “And don’t you dare come in. I’m—”

  I’m fine faltered on my lips. I had said those words to so many people. Even to myself, late at night, as my fingers trembled from writing notes and passing edicts. But the truth?

  I hadn’t been fine in a very long time.

  Zuri’s steps padded closer, and his shadow appeared near the screen. “You’re having an anxiety fit,” he said quietly. “It happens to some of my best men after missions go wrong. You feel like you can’t breathe, but you can.”

  “Are you sure? I—”

  “Work through it.” His voice was stern, which made me angry. To my surprise . . . that helped.

  I hiccupped. “There’s so much blood.”

  “Close your eyes. Wash as well as you can. Then get out of the tub and don’t look back.”

  I gulped but followed his advice, feeling blindly for a soft lump of soap and scrubbing until my skin felt raw. Then I fumbled out of the tub, taking care not to slip on the damp stone floor, and donned a furry pelt robe that lay draped over the screen. It smelled of him—agave and spear polish.

  “There’s probably still blood in my hair,” I muttered. “My attendants will have a lot of questions.”

  “I—” Zuri’s silhouette hesitated behind the screen. “I could help you wash it out. If you like.”

  For a horrifying, fascinating moment, I imagined being beneath him, awash with his scent as I sat against the tub, head tilted back as he ran his strong, dark fingers through my hair.

  “Or not,” he said at my stunned silence. “There’s a turban on the stool. Should be clean.”

  I retrieved it and wrapped my coils, which had fallen out of their twists in the water. When I stepped from behind the screen, Zuri sat before an elegant luncheon. While I had bathed, servants had come and gone, leaving a tureen of peanut stew, a platter of doughy fufu, and a steaming pot of tea.

  “Your clothes should arrive soon,” he said, gesturing to the seat across from him. “Nothing too obviously Djbanti. It could be . . . complicated for the court rumor mill to know you were here. Bathing.”

  I cringed and nodded, hugging his robe closer around me.

  “You should eat,” he added, filling two polished wood cups with tea and offering one to me. “You’ve had a shock.”

  I accepted the cup after a pause, sinking down onto the cushion. “You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out. “Why trust me with your secret? In fact—why have secrets in the first place?” I frowned down at my tea. “I understand concealing the Crocodile’s identity. But you live a lie every moment of every day—even among your own people. What kind of king makes his own subjects think he’s a fool?”

  “A king who survives,” he replied, handing me a bowl. “How much have you heard about the Wanguru—my family?”

  I dipped a piece of fufu in the stew, chewing thoughtfully. “I know your older brothers died. Hunting accidents. It’s why you came to the throne so young. Your parents died too . . .” I trailed off, a chill racing up my arms. “Am’s Story. Was your family—”

  “Murdered? Yes. Though my father might have killed himself. Too proud to live as a puppet, you see. I, on the other hand . . .” He flourished a hand, then smiled tightly. “Djbanti has long been controlled by merchant-warlords. Their riches outweigh my treasury, and if it were up to them, they would erase my family altogether. But the common people of Djbanti revere us, and so we remain. The warlords could snuff out a peasant uprising, of course, but civil wars are expensive, and would interrupt what they love most: their precious supply lines.”

  “So they made the Wanguru puppets, instead.” I tried to hide the pity in my voice.

  Zuri nodded once. “We look the other way as the warlords seize every mill, mine, and quarry that the Kunleos don’t own already. And if any king dares show a hint of backbone, he’s eliminated. When I was still a boy, I learned to keep my temper quiet, and my words pretty.” He ran a calloused hand through his locs, which fell in sheets over his dark shoulder. “The warlord system was initially well-intended. Their merchants were supposed to compete with each other, keeping prices low for the people. Then they realized they were stronger together. They united and made pacts to drive up the price of basic goods, like rice and palm oil. My people were driven to desperation.”

  I put my bowl down, jaw tightening. “It’s not just Djbanti,” I said bleakly. “I’ve read every report I can. Nobles in Mewe and Biraslov practically enslave their poor, all to make a profit on wool and ice blocks.”

  “And so I invented the Crocodile,” he said, leaning closer. “Hit the nobles in their profits. No point using cheap labor if your product’s covered in blood. Or if your customers are afraid of getting doused when they buy it.”

  I made a face. “Is it always blood?”

  He grinned. “Depends. We use ground itchwort for wool. Live beetles are fun for rice, though that sometimes can go awry.”

  I laughed, though my smile faltered. “You should be careful about tainting food. It may belong to greedy nobles, but those who buy it are probably poor—especially if it’s the cheapest option.”

  His head tilted in thought then remorse. “You’re right. I didn’t even think of that. You were right about Olojari, too. If Malaki had truly destroyed that mountain, the damage would’ve been insurmountable.” He pierced me with a look that made my pulse skip. “That foresight—that attention to detail, the way you solve puzzles no one else sees . . . it’s why I want you, Tarisai.”

  I nearly spit out my stew. “Excuse me?”

  He shrugged, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Is that a problem? Don’t you want me too?”

  “As a council brother,” I said slowly. “To fulfill my treaty with the abiku.”

  “Yes, of course. What did you think I meant?”

  My cheeks heated, and his grin spread like the crocodile he was. “I’d also like to be partners in crime,” he said. “It’s why I trusted you with my secret.”

  “Partners? Doing what?”


  He sat back, appraising me. “I want to dissolve the government of Djbanti,” he said at last. “The warlords, the Wanguru monarchy. All of it. I want to tear it down and replace it with something new.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “You want to depose . . . yourself? From being king?”

  “We did not always have kings in the central realms,” he said, suddenly restless with excitement. “At least, not in the way we see them now. Before the time of Enoba the Perfect, leaders were merely the hands of their people. Oluwan, Nyamba, Swana and Djbanti were ruled by nkosi—chiefs of small states, where even the poorest maize farmer had a say.”

  “The rulers shared power,” I said, remembering the fantasy I had described to Dayo. “And made sure it flowed to everyone.”

  “Yes, exactly.” He beamed at me. “And the foundation for change is already in place. The peasants of Djbanti are planning a revolt, selecting leaders among themselves. I’ve armed them when I can, though it’s hard to sneak weapons into warlord territory.”

  I shook my head, impressed. “That’s incredible. But what do you need me for? Won’t it look suspicious for imperial forces to arm peasants?”

  “I don’t need your weapons. I need—” He paused, considering his words carefully. “Your influence. You’ll be addressing my warlords when you hold the Pinnacle in Djbanti. Somehow, I think you’ll be very . . . persuasive.”

  I frowned. “Meaning?”

  “That we want the same thing. For poverty to be a thing of the past.”

  A bit of his courtier smoothness returned to his voice. He was keeping something from me, and I didn’t like it.

  “I know you don’t trust me,” he said, after a moment. “But we’ll be spending plenty of time together soon enough. I’m going to be your council brother, aren’t I?