by C. T. Rwizi
She wanders to the edge of the arcade, a hand braced upon her chest. The colorful minnows in the pond below scurry away from her reflection. She can’t stand the fear she sees on her own face, so she looks away. “But what other choice do I have?” she says to the men around her. “I may be safe from him in this temple, but our people are still out there. Anti-Saire sentiment has been on the rise throughout the kingdom. If I don’t give him what he wants, he could orchestrate a genocide, and no one would stop it.”
A memory flashes through her right then: her brother Kali warning their father about the Crocodile’s growing ambitions. She balls the trembling hand on her chest into a fist, locking her kingly chains in a tight grip. “This has been his plan all along,” she says, thinking aloud. “He has stoked hatred against us to prepare himself for this.”
“The King’s Sentinels still stand, Your Majesty,” the Arc says. “So long as that remains true, Kola Saai’s hand will be stayed. We have time to find another way out of this.”
Jomo snorts, his eyes red rimmed with misery and anger. “With all due respect, Your Worship, I don’t want my cousin to marry that excretion of a human being, but what help could the Sentinels offer us? They’re whelps as green as their tunics.” He scowls at the warriors standing stiffly nearby. A fire sparks in his eyes when he sees Obe Saai—specifically, when he sees what Obe Saai is holding in one hand. “And what in the pits is he doing here? He’s a Saai, for the Mother’s sake. Kola’s own nephew! He could be spying for his traitor prince!”
Obe seethes visibly but dares not speak.
Jomo hobbles closer to him, squaring his broad shoulders. “Something to say, crocodile filth?” Jomo has always been the most dissolute and academic of the Saire princes, but he has never been accused of lacking a spine. And one of the first things people often learn about him is that he has a quick temper.
“Cousin, this is unseemly.” Isa places a gentle hand on his arm, then bows to the high mystic. “Forgive him, Your Worship. It is a deeply emotional time for all of us. Might I have a word with him in private?”
The old sorcerer gives Jomo a disapproving glare, then nods to Isa. “Of course, Your Majesty. We will not go far.” And then he leads Obe Saai and Dino Sato down the arcade and out of sight. Elsewhere, she might have begun to fear for her safety, but not in this citadel, not with a dozen Jasiri guardians and the temple’s high priest only yards away.
“I know you’re hurting,” she says to Jomo when they’re alone, in as gentle a voice as she can manage. “Believe me, I know, but Obe has proven his loyalty, and he saved my life. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”
Jomo’s round cheeks flush with shame, and then he looks skyward, eyes heavy with unshed tears. “I’m so sorry, Isa. Dear Mother, what has gotten into me?”
“Nothing you don’t have the right to feel.”
He lowers his eyes to study her and sniffs. “How do you do it? You’re so calm and strong when I feel like my head will explode any second now.”
She wonders why no one can see her trembling hands, hear her racing heart. She’s inches away from pulling her hair out with her bare hands, and yet he sees strength when he looks at her. “I feel the same way. I guess . . . I’m just a better liar.”
“No,” Jomo says. “You’re the King of Chains, dear cousin. You’re Mweneugo’s daughter. You’re brave and strong, and you’ll be a great king.”
She smiles, and even though it’s feeble, the emotion behind it comes from the little corner of her heart where hope still shines. “And you will be as great a herald as your mother was.”
He smiles, too, but the gloom soon returns to his face like rain clouds obscuring the suns. “What are we going to do about this, Isa? We’re the only clan without a legion. We didn’t need one with the Shirika on our side, but the Crocodile bought them off somehow, and now he’s taken control of the City Guard. I’ve been out in the city, Isa, and many Saires aren’t leaving their homes out of fear. It’s madness, I tell you.”
Isa walks to stare down into the pond again. The gold and ivory chains woven into her blue robes seem to mock her reflection. She looks like a girl playing dress up, not a king.
“How’s the palace?” she asks.
Jomo lets out a harsh laugh. “The bastard’s turned it into a motherforsaken whorehouse. You should have seen the way he welcomed me like a guest—into my own home! The filth already fancies himself king.”
Just as well, a part of Isa says, the part that never wants to see the palace again, not after what happened there, what she saw there . . .
. . . blood on the floors, blood drenching the tapestries. Her mother slumped by the wall like she was taking a rest, except for her dry, vacant eyes; the grimace; and the congealed blood from the mortal gash on her temple. Kali sprawled on the floor with his head halfway severed, Ayo gutted in his own bed, Zenia floating in a bloody bathing pool, Suye’s little golden shoe upside down by her cot, a shape lying facedown on the crimson-stained sheets. Isa didn’t look; she couldn’t . . .
Isa shuts her eyes. They say that when her father was enthroned, years before her birth, the Mother sent slow, gentle rains to shower the city for an entire week, signifying that his would be a peaceful, prosperous reign. Today a violent storm tore through the sullen skies, rattling the temple’s shutters and threatening to tear them off their hinges.
She has never been one for omens, but Isa needs no omens to know that the mask-crown will kill her. She knew it the moment she saw her father lying dead in his own blood.
“His Worship might be right, you know,” she says. “The Sentinels are a thorn in Kola’s side. He can’t touch our people so long as they stand.”
“What’s to stop him? The Shirika are on his side. The City Guard won’t obey me anymore. He has the Bonobo in his pocket, and together they command the kingdom’s two most powerful legions—and by the way, those legionnaires are all older, far more experienced, and a lot more committed to the cause than our dear Sentinels. What chance do we have?”
“It’s not about strength or numbers, cousin.” She turns to face him. “Yes, if it came to a fight, the Sentinels would perish, and us along with them. But every headman, including Kola himself, has sons and nephews bound to the Sentinels. Heirs, future vassals, young men who’ll command and fill the ranks of their clan legions in the future. He’d be foolish to risk a confrontation that could kill them off. The other headmen would soon turn against him, even those who’ve stayed neutral thus far.”
Jomo sighs. “I understand that, Great Elephant, but you’re operating on the assumption that Kola Saai is a rational man.”
“I know he’s a rational man,” Isa says with enough venom to surprise herself. “Coldly rational. A man who can turn high mystics—gods—to such a bloody cause can’t be anything else.” She takes a deep breath and slowly exhales. She can’t allow herself to lose control. “Kola Saai is chipping away at our power to force my abdication. He has taken the Shirika from us. Now he’ll seek to disband the Sentinels so he can put pressure on our people. It has to be his next move.”
The irony. Isa has always hated the Sentinels, what she’s always seen as hostage taking disguised as military training. Every year hundreds of sixteen-year-old boys are plucked from their homes and brought to the capital, where a curse is cast on them so they can barely even think a traitorous thought without suffering extreme pain. The Sentinels are a stick the Saires have always held over their sister clans: Play nice, because we have the Shirika on our side and death bonds coiled around your young men. Start a war with us, and it’s their blood you’ll be spilling.
She used to argue with her brothers about the injustice of the custom, how it only bred further hatred for the Saires and didn’t guarantee continued loyalty once the curse was lifted. And yet here she is, making plans to preserve it. She feels covered in dirt she can’t ever wash off.
“I suspect he’ll petition the Shirika to vote on the matter,” she says. “If and when they a
gree, he’ll need the support of at least five other headmen for the vote to go his way. We mustn’t let that happen.”
Jomo scratches the bristles on his cheeks and shakes his head slowly. “But he has the support, Isa. They elected him regent, didn’t they?”
“Only because no one else wanted to contest the position.”
“Even so, you know as well as I do that they’ve always hated the Sentinels. How hard do you think it’ll be for Kola to convince them to vote his way?”
“Kola has enemies among the headmen, cousin. We need to capitalize on that. We’ll have to appeal to them. Buy their allegiance if we must. So long as the Sentinels stand, we’ll . . .”
They’ll what? The Crocodile won’t be going away without bloodshed, and if it comes to bloodshed, he has every conceivable advantage on his side.
“We’ll have hope,” Isa finishes, covering the hand on Jomo’s cane with her own. “We’ll have time to find another way, and we will find another way. You and I, we’ll make it out of this; do you understand me?” Isa knows that these words are as good as lies, but they’re what Jomo needs to hear, so she speaks them without compunction.
Jomo blinks away the moisture in his eyes and nods. “I won’t give up so long as you keep fighting, Isa. You’re all I’ve got left.”
Above the towering pylon of the innermost courtyard, peeking over the temple’s bamboo rooftops like a small red sun, the Ruby Paragon begins to strobe brilliantly, signaling the turn of the hour. Isa and Jomo bask in its cold light, hand in hand, until it strobes six times and then falls silent.
“Come.” She forces another smile. “I won’t have us be miserable at my coronation feast. After all, there’ll be no one to tell us we can’t drink the cider.”
His laugh is sad and gravelly, but his shoulders seem lighter as they walk to rejoin Itani Faro and the two Sentinels. Isa counts this as a minor victory, the first of her reign.
PART 4
THE MAIDSERVANT
ILAPARA
MUSALODI
Blood craft—magic of the flesh
Converting the moon’s essence into the energies of life to manipulate flesh and minds, both living and dead. Wielded by healers, hypnotists, beast masters, necromancers, and monster makers.
—excerpt from Kelafelo’s notes
“Aago, why do so many bad things happen in the world?”
“A very difficult question, my child, and the sad truth is that no one really knows. The way I see it, we are creatures who thrive on order and predictability living in an inherently chaotic universe. That leaves us exposed to any forces beyond our ability to control, and in such a universe, there are an infinite number of these.”
“So . . . if we controlled more things, then less bad things would happen?”
“Perhaps. But it would depend on who wields this control, for in the wrong hands, control—power—can be a greater agent of evil than chaos.”
21: The Maidservant
Southeast Umadiland
Agony. Hatred. Whorls of fire dancing across her skin. A door shaking violently until it bursts into a million splinters, revealing a yawning abyss that sucks her in while letting terrible things rush out and take over her body, monsters with gnashing teeth.
You will lose yourself to it.
In a cold sweat the Maidservant emerges from a fitful dream to the sound of an old wooden door creaking in its frame as the wind beats softly against it. A raw stench clings to the air, faint but sickly, like bile and dried blood.
She sits up in her pallet, letting the woolen blanket covering her fall away from her naked body. The soft glow of dawn has leaked in through the gap beneath the door and around the rickety shutters, casting a diffuse light on a starkly appointed room with an earthen floor and walls covered with grass tapestries.
A hut. Somewhere in a remote valley of the southeastern Umadi savannas, if memory serves her right. A body too. Not the warm, hefty one curled up on the pallet next to her, snoring like a veldboar, but the crumpled lifeless form across the hut. That body is the source of the stench.
You will lose yourself to it.
The Maidservant quietly rises from the pallet, suppressing a groan when waves of searing pain lap and purl across her body: her tattoos bidding her a good morning. She doesn’t fight the pain; she lets it wash over her. The agony chases away every vestige of sleep and fills her to bursting with hatred, which she uses to fortify the rattling door in her mind.
Enough of this weakness.
She drifts to the table across the room, draws up a chair for herself, and sits down.
After a glance at the slumbering form on the pallet, she draws magic to reach into her Voidspace and summon two items: a scorpion pendant on a beaded string and a shiny spherical mind stone. She places both gently on the table.
Like a key lying just out of the reach of a caged prisoner, the mind stone has tormented her for years with the things she knows it holds, truths that would break the mental shackles binding her if she could only access them. But no more. Now those truths will be hers, and she will finally be free.
Free to bathe the world in blood until her hatred is sated.
With a thought she awakens the talisman; it responds immediately, curling its tail and setting its crystal sting alight with multihued beams that sweep over the mind stone. An illusion of Mirror craft appears above the crystal a moment later, displaying to the Maidservant an image of the mind stone. In this image a thick layer of protection surrounds the stone, an enchantment that manifests as countless lines of semitransparent neon-green cipher prose, each line swarming around the stone along a different orbital path, like insects around a crystal lamp. Together the ciphers bar access to the information stored within the stone’s lattices.
The Maidservant sits back in her chair, staring intently at the mirage. The secret to her freedom is buried somewhere behind that moving layer of prose. She has tried to break through with her mind, but the prose mends itself so quickly she can’t keep up, not even with spells that slow her perception of time or elixirs that speed up her thoughts.
But now, with this Yerezi talisman and its vastly accelerated logic, she will be able to analyze the prose and chip away at it, widening the cracks until the enchantment collapses. This is only her third session with the talisman, and fractures have already appeared. She focuses on such a place now, unraveling the prose faster than it can self-repair, and several minutes pass in silent productiveness.
Then a hoarse male voice calls to her from the pallet across the room. “Come back to bed, my little fly.”
Everyone else calls him Black River, for he shed a river of blood upon his awakening with spear and magic to prove his allegiance to their warlord. She just calls him River, or the man with whom she sometimes spends the night. A diversion, really. A constant nuisance.
At the sound of his voice, a strong current of distaste makes her wonder why she tolerates him at all. She returns her attention to the mirage. “I have work to do.”
River collapses back onto the pallet and sighs. “You’re always tinkering with that stupid thing these days.”
“If by ‘stupid thing’ you mean one of the most valuable repositories of arcane knowledge in existence, and if by ‘tinkering’ you mean inching closer toward breaking the powerful charms protecting it, then yes, I’m tinkering with the stupid thing.”
Anyone else, and she would have had to kill him after divulging such information, but the man across the room, mystic though he may be, is an idiot. He wouldn’t know true magic if it exploded in his face.
“That’s a flashy new spell,” he says dreamily. “I didn’t know you could work illusions too.”
“I can’t.”
“No? Then what am I looking at?”
“Something you wouldn’t understand if I explained it to you a thousand times.”
River snorts with low-pitched laughter. “You’re probably right.”
The Maidservant isn’t looking his way, but she ca
n picture him relaxing on his back with his head resting on interlaced hands, staring up at the rafters with a crooked grin while his chest heaves with laughter. A tingle of arousal and something else stirs inside her at the image, but she kills it quickly with a well-aimed spike of hatred. “You should get rid of the body.”
“What body?” River asks from the pallet.
“The old man you killed last night. I believe this was his hut. The stench of him offends me.”
“I killed him? Huh. That’s not how I remember it. Then again, we did have a bit of a wild night, didn’t we?”
You will lose yourself to it.
The smugness in River’s voice irritates the Maidservant, and she grits her teeth. “Get rid of him.”
“Why bother? It’s not like we’ll be coming back here again.”
“Just do it, River.”
The man emits a loud groan before fumbling around the pallet for his kikoi. “As you wish, my little fly.” She hears him get up, wrap the kikoi around his waist, and pad toward the old man’s body.
He must study it because he’s quiet for a while. “Why’d we kill him again?”
“Why d’you think?”
“Can’t remember. I’m guessing we had to torture him for information on our free agent. But are you sure it’s me who killed him, because . . . you know what? Never mind. Doesn’t matter anyway.”
While she continues deciphering the mind stone’s protections, River hauls the body out of the hut and returns minutes later with the whiff of smoke and burnt flesh hanging about his person.
He’s a man of simple dress for a warlord’s disciple. Nothing ever covers his heavily tattooed torso save for a cascading necklace of beads and bones, and he’s always in a red-and-black kikoi.
He’s a broad-shouldered silhouette when he stands by the door, blocking the light from the rising suns. “Speaking of our free agent, I say we pay him a visit soon. The big man hasn’t summoned us in more than a month, and I have a feeling he’ll do it today. I don’t want this assignment delaying us.”
