by C. T. Rwizi
“Dear Ama, yes.” Salo relinquishes his ward and puts more weight onto his staff, sighing with relief. His shards are still pulsing furiously with magic, though. “Is everyone all right?”
“Just a scratch,” says Tuk.
“Do you know this Asazi?” Ilapara says, still watching the stranger.
“I do, actually.” Salo straightens and drifts closer. He grimaces at the sight of Tuk’s injury. “I’ll need to dress that, Tuk. You might have been poisoned.”
“I’m not worried about it.” Tuk nods at the Asazi. “I’m worried about her.”
The Asazi finally decides to break her silence. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard more fluent Sirezi coming from a foreigner. That makes you very interesting.”
“Interesting people make the world go round,” Tuk says with a smile. His eyes, though, are still gloomy. “You say you know her, Salo?”
“Yes, so everyone can calm down.” Salo puts himself in front of the Asazi with a raised palm. “I don’t think she means us harm. She wouldn’t have helped us if she did.” He raises an eyebrow in the Asazi’s direction. “Am I wrong?”
In answer, the Asazi returns her knives to the Void and clasps her hands demurely in front of her. “It is as you say, Yerezi-kin.”
With those knives out of view, Ilapara allows herself to relax a little. Not that she thinks the Asazi means Salo harm, but something about her presence here smells wrong.
Salo seems to study the girl like he’s thinking the same thing. “Tell me, Si Asazi, why are you spying on me?”
The Asazi raises a well-groomed eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m a spy?”
Ilapara cuts in before he can answer. “The fact that your ravens have been tailing us from Seresa, for starters.” She looks curiously at Salo. “Doesn’t the queen have a spell like that?”
“She does, in fact,” he says, still staring at the Asazi. “And I’d recognize it anywhere. Not to sound ungrateful that you stepped in when you did, but did you really think you could follow me all the way up here without me noticing?”
The Asazi’s sharp eyes briefly peer down at his arms, where his shards won’t stop dancing with lights. A hint of something shimmers in her gaze, but she doesn’t betray her secrets. “Maybe I let you notice me.”
“Doubtful. If AmaYerezi wanted me to know about you, I think she’d have told me.”
“Then why do you think I’m here?”
“She probably told you to reveal yourself only when necessary. My near death was probably a necessary condition. Clearly she wants me to get to Yonte Saire. But that begs the question . . . why didn’t she just tell me about you? More to the point, why didn’t she just send me with the protection I needed? Why all the secrecy?”
“Why do you think?”
“I think you’re avoiding the question,” he says, “but I’ll take a guess. Either she mistrusts me, or there’s something I haven’t been told. Which one is it?”
Ilapara exchanges glances with Tuk, and he seems just as intrigued as she is. Why does Salo think the queen would want to hide something from him? What’s really going on here?
“Do you think I’d tell you if I knew?” the Asazi says with a synthetic smile.
“I’d hope so,” Salo replies. “The more I know, the better I’ll do the job she sent me to do.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Ilapara says, deciding she can’t deny her curiosity. “I thought you were walking the Bloodway, but now it sounds like you have another agenda.”
“You know everything you need to know,” the Asazi says, and Ilapara gets the feeling those words are meant for her too. She looks at Salo, expecting an answer to her question, but he stares at the Asazi for a beat and then nods.
“I see. So what happens now? Do you disappear and stalk me from the Void, pretend I don’t know you’re there?”
“We all have our roles to play, don’t we?”
“A suggestion, then,” he says. “You want to spy on me, and I don’t want a shadow, so why don’t you just . . . travel with me? Stop being so mysterious. That way you can watch me as much as you want to, and I don’t have to get nervous about it.”
The Asazi’s eyes glimmer with smothered laughter. “Knowing I’m watching you won’t make you nervous?”
“Oh, it will,” Salo admits, “but if you’re with me, then I can watch you too. It’s the unknowns I dislike.”
The idea of traveling with the Asazi goes wrongly down Ilapara’s throat. “Are you sure you want her with us?” she says to Salo, then looks the Asazi over with suspicious eyes. “I mean, how much can you really trust her? She’s the queen’s Asazi, for Ama’s sake. An assassin to boot. Probably as devious as they come.”
This only seems to amuse the Asazi. “Quite the team you’ve assembled. A she-warrior and an outworlder. I must say they have proven rather capable, but I wonder what your chief and clanspeople would make of them.”
“Don’t forget the big cat,” Ilapara says, moving her weapon from one hand to the other. “And call me a she-warrior one more time, and I’ll make you eat this spear.”
“Wait, how do you know I’m an outworlder?” Tuk says.
Salo quickly intervenes. “I was given discretion to find my own traveling companions, Si Asazi. In fact, I was forced to do so. No one has any right to be upset about who I’ve chosen.”
“Of course,” the Asazi says. “I meant no offense.”
“That’s good to know. Now what will it be? I have nothing against you for doing your mystic’s bidding, even if it’s spying on me, but I’d rather you did your spying where I can keep an eye on you.”
“And if I refuse?”
Salo smiles without humor. “That is your prerogative, of course. But remember: I wield the Void now. I may lack experience with it, but eventually I’ll find ways of making your job very difficult. If you come with me, however, I’ll cooperate; then we can both do our jobs quickly and return home. What do you say?”
Schemes and machinations glitter behind the Asazi’s eyes as she considers the offer, but then she shrugs, like it all means nothing to her. “All right. I’ll come with you.” And then her voice sharpens. “So long as you remember that I’m not one of your guardians. I am an Asazi apprenticed—”
“Yes, yes, I know how this goes,” Salo says. “You’re an Asazi apprenticed to the queen, and you won’t stoop so low as to serve one such as me, and so on and so forth. Let’s pretend you’ve said all of that so we can get to patching our wounds.” Salo shoots a worried look toward the ship’s bow. “And looking for the sailors, who I think are hiding somewhere belowdecks.”
This makes the Asazi chuckle a little. “As you wish, Yerezi-kin.”
“Ah, a sense of humor,” Tuk says, listing his head appraisingly. “I suppose I can learn to like her.”
“You better watch yourself, Asazi,” Ilapara tells the young woman. “Because I’ll be watching you.”
The Asazi shrugs again. “I expect no less from a pilgrim’s guardian.”
That response annoys Ilapara, but she bites her tongue.
“Now that we’ve cleared that up,” Salo says with fake cheer, “allow me to formally introduce you to the team, Si Asazi.” He goes on to do exactly that, and then he says, “As for me, you can call me Salo. And you are Si Alinata, are you not? I remember you from my awakening. You were one of the queen’s honor guards.”
“The most riveting awakening I have ever attended,” she tells him. “Alinata is fine. You outrank me, after all.”
“Old habits,” Salo says. “All right, then. Welcome to the team, Alinata. Even though you’re a spy and you’re not really part of it. But welcome anyway.”
The Asazi’s presence will not be easy to tolerate, but Ilapara vows right then not to let it unsettle her.
But that doesn’t mean I should let my guard down, she tells herself. After all, if the queen’s intentions are pure, why would she send an assassin to spy on us?
36: Kelafelo
> Namato—Umadiland
Akanwa is what she names the Faraswa girl. It means “she who was found” in Izumadi and is typically reserved for children abandoned when they are still too young to speak their own names.
Granted, the girl has seen six comets, so if she once had a name, it’s likely she knows it, but a slave takes whatever name their new master gives to them, and the girl knows to accept hers without question.
In the first weeks after Akanwa’s arrival, Kelafelo treats her as the Anchorite commanded. She makes sure the girl is fed and bathed. She sleeps next to her every night. She even grows to tolerate her quiet, lamblike presence and the way she’s always looking down at her fidgeting hands. She is outwardly gentle and kindly with the slave girl, but deep in her heart she allows no true affection to bloom, because no one will ever replace her daughter.
Urura was a spirited and curious soul, always running her hands over everything as if she could understand the world only if she touched it. Kelafelo even had to scold her on several occasions for attempting to touch the embers of a crackling fire. She was everything good in Kelafelo’s universe, the source of her joy, her purpose for living.
But Akanwa . . . the poor girl is almost a nonentity, quiet and unobtrusive to a fault, as if someone beat into her the compulsion to leave as little a footprint in the universe as possible. She plays no games, asks no questions, never speaks unless directly spoken to, and even then replies only with one-word answers.
She quietly shadows Kelafelo as she performs her chores, but not so close as to loom. When Kelafelo sits outside the hut with quills, gourds of ink, and sheaves of parchment, outlining her Axiom in carefully arranged ciphers, Akanwa lurks inconspicuously in the background. Kelafelo almost worries that the girl will trip and fall into some crevice in the fabric of space and disappear entirely.
Months after her arrival, on a rainy afternoon, Kelafelo finally glimpses the hint of a person buried somewhere inside the girl.
The Anchorite has left for the newly revived village of Namato to offer her healing services—as she used to do before the attack—and Kelafelo is seated by the table beneath the south-facing window, reading through one of the Anchorite’s volumes of sorcery. She lifts her gaze and notices the girl sitting cross-legged by the door, watching as fat raindrops burst on the compound’s barren earth.
Something in her crimson eyes catches Kelafelo’s attention, a certain yearning she’s never seen there before, as if the rain has taken the girl to some distant memory from a life she knows she’ll never see again. That look breaks Kelafelo’s heart.
“Do you want to go outside?” she says before she can think to leave things be.
The girl immediately withdraws into herself like a snail retreating into its shell, and whatever light Kelafelo saw dancing in her eyes snuffs itself out. Patent fear replaces it, like the girl thinks she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t have been. “No,” she says, shaking her head with force.
Kelafelo closes the book she was reading. “It’s all right if you do. I used to dance in the rain as a child myself. It can be a lot of fun.”
Akanwa’s gaze slides back outside, a hint of the yearning returning to her eyes.
That decides things for Kelafelo. She stands up from the table. “Come. I’ll go with you.”
The girl’s eyes widen. “But Mamakuru!” The Anchorite barely acknowledges the girl’s existence; Akanwa is still terrified of her—understandably so, Kelafelo would say.
She puts on a reassuring smile. “Mamakuru isn’t here, is she?” Kelafelo holds out her hand. “Come, before the rains decide to stop.”
Akanwa regards the hand like it might turn into a viper and lunge, but slowly, she reaches out and takes it, and then together they go outside and let the rain soak them to the skin.
There is no drastic change in the girl’s behavior, no sudden epiphany that makes her less timid, but in the rain the thick wall she hides behind cracks somewhat, and she even seems on the verge of smiling, though she doesn’t quite get there. Her hands wander to her wet veil like she wants to lift it off her hair, but she hesitates.
“You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it,” Kelafelo says, and to prove her point she takes off her own patterned veil and lets her dreadlocks free. She laughs and tilts her head toward the rainy skies, checking herself when she realizes that this is the first time she’s laughed since she lost everything.
Akanwa lifts her turquoise veil off her head, letting her hair fall in luxuriant curls. Were it not for the metallic hornlike appendages curling out of her temples, which shimmer now with raindrops, Kelafelo might have thought her pretty. As it is, they are too much of a reminder of the girl’s otherness to simply ignore.
She almost changes her mind, however, when the girl finally lets herself smile as she spreads her hands to capture raindrops with her fingers. She sees something innocent in that smile, something pure, and so fragile Kelafelo knows she could crush it with a single harsh word, and it would never surface again.
In that moment, Kelafelo realizes something about herself: she will never love the girl, not like she did Urura. The part of her that could love—truly love—feels like a dead thing inside her chest, bloated and full of maggots, like her daughter’s corpse on the day she finally had the strength to trek back to her old village and bury her. She will never love the girl, that much she knows, but she can certainly like her.
They stay together in the rain until it dies down, and from that day onward, caring for Akanwa is no longer a chore.
She comes to discover that she is most comfortable with the branch of cipher prose dealing with Void craft. It intimidated her at first, but as she grapples with it, she comes to realize that the principles underpinning the craft are beautifully simple. Inevitably, this is where she decides to take her Axiom.
Despite the work she puts into the Axiom, however, the final result is never one she is satisfied with. For some reason she can’t quite achieve a desirable rate of conversion. Her Axioms either rapidly convert a vanishingly thin stream of essence into Void craft or convert a thick stream at a dawdling pace. Neither type would allow her to perform the effortless spell casting she has seen the Anchorite perform on many occasions. She loses count of how many times she writes the last cipher of a new Axiom on a parchment only to throw its pages in the fire upon a thorough analysis. The task becomes a drain on her soul.
She doesn’t allow herself to give up. She keeps wrestling with the problem, and only after many moons without a solution does she decide to approach the Anchorite for advice. She knows the old woman can’t help her with the Axiom’s specific architecture but wonders if there is something basic she’s missing and if maybe the Anchorite can help her identify the problem.
She later wishes that she’d never asked.
“I was wondering when you’d decide to come to me.” The Anchorite breathes out a cloud of smoke and shakes her head. She’s smoking her calabash pipe beneath the knotted witchwood tree, watching Akanwa chase chickens around the compound. Kelafelo has seated herself on a mat in front of her with a quill and parchment in hand, in case she needs to take notes. “Why did it take you so long?” the Anchorite says.
“Devising an Axiom should be a lonely journey,” Kelafelo says. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”
The old woman grunts in contempt. “Don’t go using my own words against me, young girl. I was beginning to grow impatient with you.”
“I wanted to make sure I’d exhausted every option before approaching you, Mamakuru.”
“And? Have you?”
Kelafelo looks down at the outline on the parchment. “I’ve tried everything I can think of, but I can’t find a good balance between the flow speed and volume of conversion. I always have to sacrifice one for the other. It’s almost as if . . .” Kelafelo tilts her head and taps her cheek with her quill.
“Yes?” the Anchorite prods her with obvious interest.
“I feel like there’s a
missing piece somehow, but I can’t see it because I don’t have the necessary framework to see it. Does that make sense?”
The Anchorite prolongs Kelafelo’s suspense by dragging on her pipe, and when she exhales, a little smile lifts one side of her wrinkled face. “It makes perfect sense. You feel that way because there is something missing, and you do lack the necessary faculties to see it.”
“But . . . why?”
“I once told you about spiritual insights of agony and how they enrich our understanding of Red magic, did I not? Well, my dear girl, you have reached the threshold of your spiritual insights. To achieve a higher level of understanding, you must subject yourself to more agony. Only then will your eyes be opened.”
The first currents of discomfort roil in Kelafelo’s belly, making her old scar throb. She knows of mystics who disfigure themselves in their search for power, some who gouge out their eyes, carve scars all over their bodies, or give themselves wounds that never heal. Is this what she must now do to herself?
Not long ago, she wouldn’t have hesitated, but now the idea sends uneasy chills down her spine. “How far do I need to go?” she says, dreading the answer.
“A single brutal act of violence will do the job.” The Anchorite speaks with such blatant callousness the air seems to freeze around her. She lifts an eyebrow upon seeing Kelafelo’s startled look. “You thought I was going to ask you to mutilate yourself, didn’t you?” She smiles, shaking her head. “No, dear girl. You’ve already suffered enough physical agony. The scar on your belly is proof of that. What you need now is to stain your soul so deeply the secrets of the moon will crack open right before your eyes. That is why you need your humanity; there has to be a soul to stain, otherwise no amount of agony will help you.”
Kelafelo tries to remind herself that she came to this place for a reason, but right now that reason is hard to remember. “What sort of violence, Mamakuru?”
“The sort you would be incapable of perpetrating without help.” The Anchorite’s forehead creases with intent. “There is an elixir of Blood craft I will give you, born of the most powerful compulsion magic in existence. Before you drink it, you must think of the thing you wish to do but are incapable of doing because it is too heavy on your soul. Once you drink it, however, the elixir will take control of your body and compel you to do this thing anyway, and your mind will remain aware the entire time—this is important.”
