by C. T. Rwizi
She suspects he’s trying to rouse some kind of reaction from her. She tries not to give it to him, though it’s incredibly hard to maintain her composure standing only a few feet from the man who took everything from her. “What do you want?”
“The answer to a simple question, Your Majesty: Why do you still cling to a crown you can no longer defend? It is futile.”
At least he’s direct. “You expect me to simply stand aside and let you have your way with my people? I think not.”
“But I don’t wish your people harm, Your Majesty. I’m only stepping in to fill a power vacuum that was torn into our society by the Royal Massacre.” Kola Saai bows his head, tracing a solemn finger across his heart. “May the victims find peace on the Infinite Path.”
Next to her, Dino and Ijiro repeat the gesture, perhaps without thought. She won’t fault them—Kola Saai is a headman, after all—but she will not stand here and pretend that this man didn’t murder her family. “There is no power vacuum,” she says. “I am king.”
Kola’s sober expression melts into a crooked smile. “By what power do you make this claim? Your clan has no legion, and the Shirika, who granted your forefathers dominion over the other clans, have not recognized you. Meanwhile I carry their blessing as prince regent, and my clan has the most powerful legion in the kingdom. If that is not a power vacuum, then I’m afraid to say I do not know what is.”
“I’ve been wondering how you managed to buy them off,” Isa says. “Care to share?” It is extremely dangerous, even for a king, to accuse the Shirika of corruption without evidence. But Isa didn’t speak any names, so she has plausible deniability in her favor.
Kola’s smile widens. “Be my wife, Isa. We would have such beautiful children, you and I, and we would rule the world as king and queen. There’s no need for bloodshed.”
Revulsion coils around Isa, but she lets her mask reveal no emotion. “Last I heard you already had a wife. A pretty young thing from the desert.”
“Bah.” Kola waves that away like it’s a pesky little detail. “She’s just a toy. You would be my first wife—my queen.”
“Yes, except I wouldn’t have any legitimate power because you want my mask destroyed.”
The Crocodile stares at her mask with a hungry look in his eyes. “The Shirika cannot crown me so long as that mask exists. You know this.”
“I do,” Isa admits. “I also know that this mask is the most important symbol of my clan. Without it I cannot claim to represent them. We would become a clan with neither legion nor representative in the Mkutano. We would be at the complete mercy of all the other headmen and their whims.”
“Another mask can be made if you’re that attached to it,” Kola says, like he thinks she might actually be that foolish or superficial. These masks are said to have been forged of gold that came from the moon itself; they can never be replaced.
Isa refrains from reacting to his condescension. “And what of my people? What will happen to them when you disband the Sentinels? Do you think the interclan hatreds you’ve stoked will just disappear? Who will defend them when the genocide begins? You said it yourself; my clan has no legion.”
“Marry me, and my forces will step in to prevent any violence against your people.”
“Or,” Isa says, “you could just leave the Sentinels alone and let them do their job.”
Kola feigns a sad smile. “The Sentinels will be disbanded, Your Majesty, one way or the other. They are a relic of a bygone age; it is time to let them go. Our sons and nephews cannot continue being your hostages.” He glances briefly behind him, where the other headmen are talking in dispersed little groups. “You might have delayed the inevitable tonight, but that little trick you played won’t work at the next Mkutano.” A wicked gleam crosses his eyes. “Unless you choose to attend, of course.”
The next Mkutano will be the first of the New Year and will therefore be held at the Summit, at the foot of the colossus. She would have to leave the temple’s safety to be present. A veiled threat, though not a subtle one.
“You don’t have much choice here, Your Majesty,” Kola says. “I am giving you a way out, a way to save your people. Marry me, and I will ensure no Saire ever suffers ethnic violence. But the Sentinels cannot stand.”
Fury boils in the pit of Isa’s stomach. This man has taken her family. Now he wants to take her Sentinels, her crown, and her body. When she speaks, she makes sure her words are clear as a bell. “I’d sooner marry a devil-sent fiend.”
To this, Kola Saai grins, showing that his teeth aren’t entirely perfect—his canines are a little protuberant. “Observe true power.” He turns to the headmen and shouts: “Your Highnesses. You are all invited to welcome the New Year’s Comet at the Summit next Tensday night. I expect all of you to attend in person.”
The headmen grumble, but none of them dare refuse the command.
Kola Saai turns back to Isa, his grin triumphant. “You are invited, too, of course.”
“Maybe some other time,” Isa says. When you’re dead.
“Very well, then.” He gives a gracious bow. “It was lovely to see you, Your Majesty. Until next time.”
As he walks away, Isa glares at his back, feeling angry at herself and at how impotent she is. She is king, and yet she’s powerless to mete out justice to her family’s murderer. He should not be drawing breath while the ashes of her family litter the earth.
“One day I will kill that man,” she whispers.
“Yeah. He’s an asshole.” Next to her, Dino places a gentle arm on hers. “Come, Your Majesty. Let’s get out of here.”
She reclaims her composure, considering the two warriors next to her. “Will you not speak to your fathers?”
They both shake their heads, Ijiro more forcefully than Dino. “No need,” Ijiro says.
Dino shrugs. “I’ll speak to him when he comes to the city for the New Year’s Feast. Right now we should get you out of here.”
She gives him a smile, grateful and relieved that she can still call him a friend, that she has not lost his respect. She feels like she’s fumbling her way through the dark, but at least she’s not making a mess of everything. It gives her hope.
After a deep breath she wills her mask to obey and whisks the three of them back to the temple.
PART 6
MUSALODI
ILAPARA
KELAFELO
THE MAIDSERVANT
ISA
Void craft—magic of space and time
Harnessing the moon’s essence to exploit the many facets of the metadimension. The most versatile craft, though by far the least practiced. Kinetic barriers, telekinesis, shape-shifting, clairvoyance, teleportation, long-distance telepathy: all are possible through the Void. However, because of the vast differences in how they each use the converted arcane energy, specialization is required.
—excerpt from Kelafelo’s notes
“Aba says I’m wise for my age but too curious for my own good. I think he’s disappointed in me. Maybe we should stop with the lessons.”
“But my child, don’t you see? If you are wise, then you must be curious as well, for wisdom without curiosity is stagnant. It is curiosity that drives the explorer deeper into the abyss, where her wisdom is expanded once she sees what dwells there.”
“What is the abyss, Aago?”
“It is everything we don’t know, and it is larger than we can ever comprehend. But with wisdom and curiosity, we can make it that much smaller.”
34: Musalodi
Lake Zivatuanu
A kiss like fire on his lips. A pair of the brownest eyes. A wicked smile. Strong arms pinning him down and a gentle nibble on his neck, teeth against skin, laughter like a feather tickling his ear. He arches his spine, breathless from the movement and the exquisite pressure, and in his core an electric heat builds. He doesn’t know what it would feel like exactly, but in the quiet hours of dawn, when the possibilities of the day ahead still hang in the balance, Salo allows hims
elf to imagine. Perhaps it would hurt at first, but then it would become . . . then it would feel . . .
Cold. Suffocating. Salo opens his eyes and takes an instinctive breath only for a torrent of water to pour into his mouth. He chokes, because somehow, inexplicably, he is now underwater. He tries to remember how he got here and sees images of an avian ship, of falling asleep on its main deck while he sailed across the longest lake in the world. Was there an accident? Did the ship sink?
Am I going to die here?
He thrashes violently, his lungs drowning in the water. The lake’s cold embrace surrounds him on all sides, and it chokes him until he dies, or at least he thinks he dies, because for some reason his need for breath begins to subside, until he stops needing to breathe at all.
He blinks, ceasing his flailing. The water is cold and impenetrably dark, but a shimmer of dawn light dances on the surface above. He looks up and sees a looming shadow floating somewhere not far away. The ship!
But before he can swim up to his salvation, a presence reaches up from far, far below and coils around his shards. With it comes a great sense of age that presses down on his mind, along with the uneasy feeling that this presence has a message for him, a pivotal message he needs to see before the first sun crests the horizon and seals the day. The presence grows and becomes irresistible, snaking up his spine, begging him for permission to use his shards, to show him something. So he lets it, and he feels like he has touched electricity.
The skies above him ignite with red lightning. He looks up through the shimmer of the surface and sees within the lightning the contours of a great bird with its wings outstretched in flight. They extend from one edge of the sky to the other, dwarfing the world with their astonishing size, and when the bird looks down at him and he sees into its eyes, he immediately knows that what he is looking at is a sliver of the long-forgotten past and yet another affirmation that there are things far greater than he in this world.
The Lightning Bird of Lake Zivatuanu.
He was the Great Impundulu, king of a world whose people feared and worshipped him, and his story unfolds around Salo as brilliant mirages that swim in the water like memories, a story Salo both sees and feels as if he were there.
His essence was hedonism. He feasted on the blood of his enemies and seduced many women and men. His was an age of boundless wealth and hope, of grand cities and immortal empires, and though his domain was vast and splendid, it was but one of a multitude scattered across a milky, starry expanse.
From his throne he witnessed the turn of millennia and the birth and death of stars. He watched mountains rise from oceans and continents sink beneath the waves. He thought his rule would see no end, not until every soul to have ever lived had ventured into the infinity beyond the gates of heaven.
But then the extinctions began. A corruption rose from a far-flung arm of the milky expanse, determined to destroy the gates of heaven, and it waged a war unlike any ever fought, a war of shooting lights and fireflies zipping across empty black skies, stars blinking out of the cosmos in cataclysmic explosions. Death and loss on an untold scale, and the Impundulu’s domain was not spared.
Helplessly, he witnessed its destruction, how his people were corrupted into vile parodies of what they once had been. He could not bear the sight, so when the chance came to escape, he took it.
He joined an immense convoy, a gathering of survivors who took the gates of heaven with them and fled toward a great princess of the stars, in whose arms they hoped to find refuge. But there were traitors in their midst, and their plans were given away.
The Great War resumed when the corruption gave chase, but this time there would be no winners. Curses were cast and Veils erected, and in the aftermath, the Great War was forgotten, and so was the Impundulu. Now he roams this lake restlessly, waiting to deliver a message no one can ever understand.
The visions in the water around Salo begin to cycle through different landscapes. A city in the jungle, where a red beacon flashes high above a citadel. Another city, this one preserved beneath glass domes and towers, sitting on the ocean floor. A truncated pyramid half-buried in the desert.
Then the visions hurtle up, up, up to the rock clusters in low orbit around the world, onward to Ama Vaziishe, pausing to look down at the blue-and-green marble the Yerezi call Meza, onward to the Morning Star, then the dancing suns, then the asteroids, then the four giant worlds of the deep black, and finally stop at the Star of Vigilance, also known as the fastest-moving object in the heavens, or the comet that marks the New Year when it slingshots around the world in a streak of blue fire.
It’s a sleek pebble wrapped in a smoky shroud of ice, bright blue against the deep black like cobalt, or like a shard of the high summer skies, or like a blue flower on a quilt, blue like lapis lazuli. Salo wonders at it for several heartbeats before the bewildering visions wink out. In the ensuing darkness a voice reaches out to him from the lake’s deepest crevice and says: Listen, for the Veil shall be weakened until the rising of the second sun. Only those who remember the gifts given to them shall live to see its first ray.
Then all goes silent. The presence retreats, and in the skies above him the red lightning fizzles and disappears.
Something is different, though. A vein of power has opened in his shards, a path that was previously inaccessible to him. He runs a little essence through it to probe its nature and is surprised when his Axiom responds not with Storm craft but with a different arcane energy altogether. Whatever it is, it makes him shiver like he’s standing at the edge of an abyss, or maybe like there’s an alternate dimension just out of focus, and if he tilts his gaze just so or leans a little closer, he’ll see it.
He needs no one to tell him that this is his first taste of Void craft.
Even more, a cache of information now tickles the back of his mind, like a word on the tip of his tongue. He concentrates and is almost overwhelmed by the answering surge of cipher prose that floods his thoughts without warning.
A spell. An immense array of prose that marries Storm and Void craft to produce powerful lightning barriers. Such a thing would have taken him decades to compose on his own and months to learn from a spell book, but its secrets unfold to him in the twinkling of an eye. An explosion of knowledge so intense and unexpected he’s left reeling.
Something moves in the water beneath him. No, to his far left. Or is it his right? He can almost taste it. A sorcerous rancidness grasping for him, inching closer by the second. In a blind panic he floods his right arm with essence and sinks it into the witchwood ring on his middle finger, activating its charm.
A sunrise in the lake. Salo has to turn his gaze away as the ring’s citrine stone flares to life with a dazzling golden glow. Rays of Mirror light explode away from it and penetrate the lake’s gloom farther than the eye can see, giving him perfect vision and a frighteningly vivid sense of the sheer depths beneath him.
And of the horde of pale figures swimming rapidly toward him from all sides.
They are a multitude, a sphere of grasping talons and empty eye sockets closing in, and they bring with them an unpleasant tingle that offends his shards, like a fetid wound or an oily rot.
Black magic.
Acute terror gets Salo moving. He kicks upward with as much power as his limbs will allow, and when his head finally breaches the surface, he gasps in his first breath in minutes. His arms flail as he tries to keep himself afloat. A thick layer of mist has blanketed the lake, and he can’t see through it. “Help!”
“There he is!”
“Salo! Salo, over here!”
He quickly reorients himself toward the voices and launches into a powerful stroke. Soon the stalled waterbird appears out of the mists just ahead, and he sees Tuk and Ilapara gawking down at him from the main deck. Mukuni has his paws on the gunwale and is watching, too, his neon-blue eyes beaming like torches in the mists.
“Help!”
“Grab the rope, Salo!” Tuk shouts.
He has alre
ady thrown the lifeline overboard. Salo reaches it in several strokes and immediately tries to use the rope to climb up the hull, but his feet can’t find purchase. “Pull me up!” he shouts. “Pull me up!”
“We’re on it. Come on, Ilapara.”
Around him the mists thicken, and the unpleasant thrum inside his shards grows stronger. He feels tension in the rope, and soon it starts to lift him out of the water. He uses his legs the moment his toes can grip onto the hull, until finally Tuk and Ilapara manage to haul him over the bulwarks and back onto the main deck.
He sprawls on his side, trying to catch his breath, trying not to vomit. Isiniso, the white sun, has just risen, and its rays make the mists enshrouding the waterbird appear incandescent. His traveling companions stare down at him, both worried, though Tuk appears confused while Ilapara is clearly furious.
“What the devil were you thinking?” she says.
“What actually happened?” Tuk says.
Salo tries to explain, but his lungs won’t let him.
“I was sleeping,” Ilapara says, “then I opened my eyes to see this idiot standing right over there. And then he jumped! I mean, who does that?”
“Danger!” Salo finally rasps, getting up to his hands and knees. “We’re in danger! They’re coming!”
“What’s coming, Salo?” Tuk says, even more confused now.
“The . . . the things in the water. Look!”
At last they take their eyes off him and notice the shroud thickening around the ship. Tuk cranes his neck in a futile attempt to see better through it.
“I don’t know about you, Ilapara,” he says, “but I don’t think this mist is a good thing.”
“No kidding, Tuksaad.” Somehow Ilapara has already found her spear. She turns her worried gaze toward the bow. “And what the devil happened to the sailors?”
“They weren’t there when I woke up,” Tuk says, then offers Salo a helping hand, his eyes blue and curious. “Were you communing with the Lightning Bird, perchance?”
