by C. T. Rwizi
He’s also holding a long spear in his right hand, burnished to a blinding luster, made entirely of the Yerezi arcane metal.
Because what self-respecting Ajaha ranger would ever be seen outside his kraal without his warmount, his spear, and all the red steel he has earned the right to wear?
Salo might be rangy where Niko is strapping, and Niko might be several shades darker than Salo’s coppery complexion, but the two are not completely devoid of similarities. They were born only ten days apart, for example, and have both seen eighteen comets. They both tended the livestock of their respective fathers as young boys, and both grew to be taller than most men in their clan. They both went through Ajaha training and were circumcised in the mountains during the year of their sixteenth birthdays—the same year they met. They even took to cutting their textured hair similarly—sheared low on the sides and left to grow slightly longer on the top.
Similarities indeed, and yet, looking at them now, one would likely fail to guess that Salo was the one born to a warrior chief and Niko to a lowly laborer in a mining village.
A riderless gelding follows timidly behind Niko’s tronic stallion. He brings both quaggas to a stop nearby, staring at Salo and the imbulu in that phlegmatic way of his, even though he’s probably not happy about what he’s seeing.
“Hello, Salo,” he says.
Salo keeps petting the imbulu, staring at a spot on the ground. “Niko.”
To his side, Monti silently admires the tronic stallion. A handsome beast of lean musculature, it is adorned with the characteristic white and golden stripes of a plains quagga, like the gelding behind it. Unlike the gelding, however, its lower legs, snout, tail, and long spiraling horns all catch the grove’s dappled sunlight like steel—the mark of tronic strength. A mount like that will gallop at extraordinary speeds for hours on end before beginning to tire.
“How long have you been hiding this here?” Niko says.
“Three days,” Salo replies, perhaps too quickly.
“The truth, please.”
Salo grits his jaw, unnerved by the calm in Niko’s voice. Insults and an angry outburst would have been easier to defend against. “A week, maybe?”
“So ten whole days.”
“Give or take.”
“I see.”
For Salo, looking at this particular ranger is always an exercise in control. He actually has to force himself to look and not give in to those pesky little instincts urging him to turn away in shame. After a protracted silence, Salo finally lifts his gaze, confused. “That’s it? You see? No lecture? No outrage? Accusations of witchcraft?”
“What do you want me to say?” Niko asks, the slightest hint of frustration filtering into his voice. “You know what that thing can do to a herd of livestock. Surely you don’t need me to tell you. And surely you don’t need me to tell you what would happen if you were discovered like this. I mean, you’re fondling a bloodsucking creature, for Ama’s sake.”
At that word Salo stops petting the animal, but he keeps his hand where it is. “We can’t just kill things because of what they might do. And not every imbulu drinks blood and milk from oxen. Some are different.”
“He’s right, Bra Niko,” Monti joins in. “This one is good. She’s friendly and doesn’t bite. Please don’t kill her.”
Niko scratches his well-groomed beard—yet another thing Salo envies about him, that he can grow a beard like that. The best Salo can do is a fuzzy upper lip.
“I’m not here to fight with you,” Niko says. “Either of you.”
“Why’d you follow me, then?”
“Why?” A flicker of raw emotion in the ranger’s eyes. Indignation perhaps, coupled with the sharpening of his voice. “Why d’you think? For the same reason I had to follow you the last time you ran from the kraal, and the fifteen other times before that. Whether you mean to or not, you’ve made it a hobby of mine, and don’t think for a second I don’t have better things to do with my time.”
Salo almost retaliates with words coated in acid.
I’m sorry, he thinks about saying instead. I only ever feel like I can breathe when I’m away from the kraal. But that would be grounds for more criticism, so he settles for: “What’s broken this time?”
Niko holds his stare for a moment longer, like he has more grievances to express. “The mill’s not working anymore,” he says eventually. “I’m told there were lights coming out of the engine or something.”
Salo blinks. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Didn’t you fix the mill two weeks ago?” Monti says.
For a good few seconds Salo closes his eyes and tips his face heavenward, trying not to fly into a rage. “Those idiot millers probably destroyed another mind stone. I’ve told them so many times not to overwork the machine, but they won’t listen.” He scowls at Niko. “Why didn’t you ask Aaku Malusi for help? He can fix the mill too.”
“We did,” Niko says, grim amusement thick in his voice, “but we found him unconscious in that hovel you call a workshop. Again.”
Salo shakes his head. “That old man will kill himself if he keeps drinking like this. And it’s not a hovel. It’s tidier than your Ajaha barracks and definitely smells better.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Niko says. “Doesn’t make it any less of a shack.”
“That’s what gives it character.” Next to him the imbulu nuzzles at the hilt of the witchwood knife sheathed by his side, blissfully oblivious to the danger standing not far away. “So what now?” Salo says to Niko. “You’re not going to kill her, are you?”
Any other ranger would have already dispatched the creature with a single throw of his spear. But Niko contemplates the imbulu in silence. “I assume you can give it commands,” he finally says.
Admitting to this would mean acknowledging that he has delved deeper into magic than is proper for any self-respecting Yerezi man. But Salo figures that if Niko respected him before today, surely that respect has just turned to dust. “What do you have in mind?”
“Get it to leave the Plains and never come back. Either that or I put it down right now; then you can recycle the mind stone if you want. But I can’t let you keep an imbulu here like this.” Niko shakes his head. “Too dangerous.”
“She’s really not, though. And she’s not ready to leave just yet. She’s still recovering from an injury.”
“I’m being reasonable, Salo. You know this.”
Salo does, but the sting of disappointment still makes his chest feel heavy. He exhales with resignation, looking down at the creature. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye, friend.”
Getting the imbulu to leave is the simple matter of changing several lines of the cipher prose running in its mind stone. The talisman projects the prose into the air as a window of luminous arcane scripts—ciphers—that Salo can add to, erase, and change with thoughts and gestures. He proceeds to give the creature instructions to move during the night, avoiding villages and grazing lands, and to keep going until it has traveled two hundred miles north of here—well into Umadiland and out of the Yerezi Plains. When he’s done, the mirage winks out of view as the talisman goes dormant.
No ceremony to the creature’s departure. It simply turns and slinks away, its scales shifting color so that they seem to melt into the trees. Salo and Monti watch it side by side until it vanishes from sight.
“I wish you’d shown her to me sooner,” Monti whispers, a film of tears making his eyes glitter.
Salo gently squeezes his shoulder. “I’ll show you my next secret as soon as I get one. That’s a promise.”
Niko watches them silently from astride his stallion. Eventually, Salo nudges the young boy to the gelding, and together they ride for the kraal.
When he was twelve, Salo broke into his dead mother’s vacant hut in the chief’s compound and stole her journal. He was a cowherd back then, one of several young boys responsible for the chief’s herd of oxen, so he to
ok the journal out with him the next day and opened it only once he was in the privacy of the grazing fields far from the kraal. His hope was to find some sort of closure within its pages, some explanation for why she turned against him during those final months before her death.
The journal’s pages, however, were almost black with magical ciphers he did not understand. Indeed, they spoke of things no Yerezi boy had any business understanding. Custom demanded that he let it go.
Yet he knew in his heart that the scripts in that journal were what had corrupted his mother, and his need to understand them burned hotter than his fear of getting caught dallying with the womanly art. So he broke into her hut again and stole something else.
He knew it only as the Carving: an ancient soapstone sculpture his mother had left hidden in plain sight like an ordinary wall ornament. He’d barged in on her once to find her sitting cross-legged before the sculpture, her eyes glazed over as she stared into the mysterious grove of trees it depicted. Later, she would tell him that the Carving whispered secrets into her ears whenever her mind roamed its woods, and that maybe one day it would do the same for him.
She was right. Years after her death, and in the strictest secrecy, Salo began to wander through the Carving’s magical grove in search of arcane knowledge. Each visit was an immense risk, and he came close to dying on one occasion, but the Carving ultimately honed his aptitude for ciphers until it cut sharper than a razor, until he could finally read that damned journal and understand why the scripts inside had been so important to his mother—so important that she would betray him in a most profound way.
He did not anticipate everything else the Carving would teach him. He got the answers he wanted, to be sure, exciting, horrifying answers, but the Carving also opened his eyes to the greater world of magic, forever stoking his interest in talismans, mind stones, cosmic shards, and spell theory. And once he’d gotten a taste of that world, once he’d seen through that veil, there was no turning back. He became like an addict, a starved prisoner of magic, taking what little he could find wherever he could find it, and still it would never be enough.
Looking back now, more than half a decade later, as he rides to the chief’s kraal alongside Niko’s stallion, he can’t help but wonder how much simpler his life would be had he never set foot into that hut in the first place. Surely he wouldn’t be quite so miserable.
“Nursing a bloodsucking tronic creature back to life,” Niko says just as the lake appears in the northeast. “Sometimes I think you want people to hate you.” He looks over at Salo from his warmount. “Is that it? Do you like the way people look at you?”
Salo tightens his grip on the gelding’s reins. Monti, sitting in front of him and holding on to the saddle’s pommel, says nothing. “Of course I don’t like it. Why would you think that?”
“Then help me out here. I’m trying to understand.”
The suns have moved past their meridians in the skies, with Isiniso, the whiter sun, hanging slightly lower in the west than Ishungu, its smaller, yellower companion. Their combined light cuts through the low smattering of clouds and strikes the lake so that its waters dance like liquid opals. A few reed rowboats loiter just offshore, carrying silhouettes with straw hats and fishing nets. The chief’s enormous herds of uroko and domesticated antelope are a sea of humps and dark muscle in the foreground, grazing along the lakeside. Salo shudders to think what the man himself will do once he finds out what Niko now knows.
“I found the imbulu bleeding out by a brook,” he says. “Someone had hit it repeatedly in the head with a rock, I think. But they’d left it alive so it could suffer.” Anger stirs inside him. “Nothing deserves that.”
They enter a narrow road cutting through a field of millet near ripe for the New Year’s harvest. Niko says nothing for a full minute, the silence between them filled by the pitter-patter of hooves on gravel. Then: “I agree with you.”
Surprised, Salo tries to read his face, but Niko is staring at the road ahead. “You do?”
“Yes,” Niko says. “But Salo, you can’t do this again. Maybe your creature wasn’t a threat, like you said, but many people have lost livestock to others just like it. You’d only be making enemies by consorting with one. Understand?”
“I guess,” Salo says, realizing just now that he never really considered how his clanspeople might have legitimate objections to what he was doing. But should a whole species be condemned for the actions of a few? “Will you tell on me, then?”
“Maybe not,” Niko says, “but on one condition.”
“Extortion, is it? And here I thought the great Aneniko was beyond reproach.”
Niko smiles a particularly wicked smile. “What can I say? I see a rare opportunity; I take it. From tomorrow morning onward, you’ll come to the glade and train with the Ajaha. And then early next year, you’ll enter the bull pen and earn your steel. Those are my terms.”
Monti starts laughing, and Salo groans. “Oh, come on. You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t see what the problem is. Most boys get weeded out before the bull pen, but you were right there. You were so close. If you hadn’t run, you’d be donning the red right now.”
“Maybe I don’t want to don the red.”
“You’re the son of a chief. You can’t be tinkering with machines and flirting with magic all your life. It’s not worthy of a man of your station.”
What if it’s me who’s unworthy of my station? Salo almost says. What then?
“We also need more rangers,” Niko goes on. “There are whispers of unusually powerful warlords sweeping across Umadiland. If true, it’s only a matter of time before they start testing our borders. We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“There are five hundred rangers in Khaya-Siningwe alone,” Salo objects. “I’d hardly make a difference.”
“You are the chief’s firstborn. It’s important that you be one of us. And you will be one of us, starting tomorrow. Take it or leave it.”
Salo sighs. “Fine. I’ll come to your precious glade if it’ll buy your silence. Even though I’d rather scrub myself with sandpaper.”
“It’s about damned time.” Another smile breaks on Niko’s face, and he spurs his stallion a little faster. “Your aba will be pleased.”
Salo doubts that quite a lot, but he keeps his opinion to himself.
The chief’s kraal is the largest and most important village in Khaya-Siningwe, sprouting out of a plateau west of the lake. From below the plateau, only its drystone outer walls and conical guard towers are visible, the face of a stronghold as formidable as it is ancient. Behind this face is a vibrant network of compounds—clusters of drystone buildings with reed thatching and a common open space between them. Gravel roads connect these clusters to each other, snaking through gardens and landscaped woodlands. A great circular enclosure at the heart of the kraal houses the chief’s herds of livestock.
The quaggas trot toward the plateau across grassy plains, millet and sorghum fields, and musuku groves. Soon they ascend the plateau along a wide road and see the kraal’s main gates ahead of them.
As they arrive, Salo’s eyes wander up the watchtower rising near the gates. Perched at the top on an overhanging beam is a giant metal sculpture of a leopard with a mane of metal spines flaring out of his neck like a crown.
Mukuni the Conqueror, the Siningwe clan totem.
The totem is inanimate, but every time Salo looks up at him, he can almost imagine the large cat snarling down in distaste.
He looks away with a shudder, urging the gelding to a stop by the gatehouse.
Mujioseri and Masiburai—Jio and Sibu to everyone in the kraal and Salo’s younger half brothers by two years—are among the four rangers on sentry duty today. They pause their game of matje to watch as Salo and Monti dismount the gelding, barely concealed sneers stretching their lips.
Salo and his brothers all inherited VaSiningwe’s big ears, light complexion, and prominent tooth gap. All three wear little copp
er hoops on their left ears as a mark of their parentage. But the twins are shorter and brawnier. They didn’t run when it was their turn in the bull pen, and they don’t need enchanted spectacles just to see because she never—
Don’t go there, Salo. Don’t think about that.
They all got along once upon a time. Then Salo became a disgrace to the family.
Ever the comedian, Jio says, “His Highness finally graces us with his presence,” and gets chuckles from the three other rangers seated on low stools around the matje board. “Where did you dig him up, mzi?” he says to Niko, using the affectionate term for cousin—what all rangers call each other. “Was he getting high with the cowherds again? Or was he hunting for spirit balls this time?”
Sibu, Jio’s right-hand man in all things, says, “He seems to like doing that, doesn’t he? Hunting for balls.”
More chuckles.
“Lay off him, will you?” Niko says, glaring from his stallion. “What did we say about disrespecting your older brother?”
Niko can talk like that because they actually respect him. He became the de facto leader of the kraal’s younger rangers within a moon of moving here.
“We’re just joking with him, mzi,” Jio says. “No harm done.”
“Your jokes are getting stale,” Salo tells them. “You should try thinking up new ones.”
The twins whisper something to each other and laugh.
Rolling his eyes, Salo starts making his way through the kraal’s open gates. He half expects Monti to follow, but the boy is obsessed with matje and has already scampered off to inspect the rangers’ game board.
“Don’t forget your promise,” Niko says behind Salo. “I expect you at the glade tomorrow at dawn.”
