by C. T. Rwizi
Such is her state of mind when, on one rain-soaked afternoon, an unusually tall man veiled in shadows rides into the hut’s compound on a great sable antelope and waits beneath the witchwood tree. She feels him before she sees him, a presence that seems to shift the earth beneath her feet and coil wrongly inside her mind, compelling her to go outside and meet him.
A single eye shines scarlet through the darkness swirling around his face, and even in the rain his tronic mount releases tendrils of black smoke from angry, flaring nostrils. He is armed with a long black spear that also emits shadows and wears a robe the color of a starless night.
She recognizes him. She has never seen him before, but she recognizes beyond a doubt that here stands her enemy, the warlord whose men stormed her village and killed Urura, the focus of all her murderous intent. A profoundly venomous sort of rage burns beneath her newly scourged skin, and her shards crackle with power as she prepares to attack, but her limbs refuse to move. She calls on the deadliest spell she knows, a spear carved entirely from Void craft, but it fizzles out in her hands before she can strike.
By the way his head tilts to one side in apparent amusement, he must understand what is happening.
“I sensed my old mentor’s death,” he says in a voice like rumbling thunder. “Even from miles away I sensed her power exerting itself one last time, searching, reaching out to me. Do you want to know what it told me before it vanished?”
That this warlord was a student of the Anchorite’s is a deep betrayal she feels like a knife twisting inside her guts. All this time, she knew and said nothing. “You’re not welcome here. Leave.”
“It told me that she had left a parting gift of a sort, the most promising student she had ever taught, handed to me on a platter.” The red eye strobes in the rain. “You must be truly remarkable if you could inspire such emotion in her.”
“I will never serve you.”
“Kneel.”
An irresistible force pulls her down to the earth, and she sinks to her knees before the warlord. She roars in hatred, fighting her own body from the inside. It refuses to obey.
The warlord watches silently until she stops struggling against herself. “I am here to offer you a position, maidservant of the Anchorite, a position in the fief I’m building.”
“I’m not interested,” she spits.
The warlord is unruffled by her flat rejection. “You may have survived out here beneath our old mentor’s shadow—after all, she was deeply respected and feared, even by the most hardened of us. But she’s gone now, by your own hand. You will soon find that you are defenseless.”
“I can protect myself.”
“Perhaps I misspoke. I tolerated the Anchorite’s presence out of respect for her, and so did those who ruled this land before me. But now that she is gone, I am here to claim what is mine. I would be glad to share it with you, of course, and if you prove as useful as I think you are, I will share much, much more. But only if you come under my wing.”
“Why the devil don’t you just compel me?”
“I would rather you served me willingly, knowing that if I had to compel you, I would make you do terrible, terrible things. I lose nothing either way, but the cost of disobedience to you would be great.”
Still on her knees, she forces herself to think rationally, to see through the thick mist of hatred fighting against her body. You will lose yourself to it.
No. She refuses this. Her dead mentor will not win. She will act the thrall to this man, serve him as a loyal disciple, but she will look for a way to break this vile curse and free herself. And then, when he least expects, she will have her vengeance. “I don’t have much of a choice.” She lets her head hang. “I will serve you.”
Whatever expression steals across the warlord’s face is hidden behind his veil of shadows, but she senses that he is satisfied. “A wise decision. What shall we call you, then, maidservant of the Anchorite?”
She thinks for a second, and the answer comes to her as if it were whispered into her ear by a breeze. “You shall call me precisely that. I am the Maidservant.”
“Once our old mentor’s helper, soon to be mine. A fitting name.”
In her heart she thinks: And I shall stand over your corpse just as I stood over hers, even if I have to call on the powers of hell.
42: Musalodi
Bonobo Province—Kingdom of the Yontai
The ground seems to go out from under him, and Salo almost collapses, his ears ringing with Tuk’s and Ilapara’s screams as they fell into the Void.
Across the clearing a cloud of flies drops to the forest floor like a solid weight and congregates into a woman with black markings covering the entire expanse of her body. Her hair stands wild like horns on either side of her head, and there is a hungry look in her eyes.
The Maidservant.
At the sight of her, rage clouds Salo’s vision, and he grips his staff so tightly he feels the blood leave his knuckles. He was afraid before, and he still is, but anger and vengeance have set his mind on fire and outshine everything else. This is the woman who killed Monti. This is the woman he hates more than anything in the world, and now she has taken his friends from him.
“Your quarrel is with me,” he says in her forsaken tongue. “Fight me and leave my companions out of it.”
The Maidservant tilts her head curiously and starts to edge along the clearing’s perimeter on lissome legs. “I remember you,” she says, her filed teeth glistening as she speaks. “I saw you that day. You really are newly awoken, aren’t you?”
Salo starts to move, too, matching the Maidservant’s progress around the clearing’s perimeter. “I’m not afraid of you, witch. You will pay for what you did to my people.”
“Perhaps I will,” she says. “But first, you will tell me about this power you wield, this . . . Elusive Cube. I had my doubts, but I have seen that yours is no ordinary Axiom. How did you know to build it?”
Salo can’t help his surprise. “How do you—” he starts but immediately cuts himself off. “I will tell you nothing!”
The Umadi witch keeps walking. “Believe it or not, but I don’t want to hurt you. This isn’t personal. If you force my hand, however, you will regret it. All I want is information. Tell me how you knew to build that Axiom of yours, and maybe I’ll let you go.”
“I will die before I confess anything to you.”
The witch’s eyes flash threateningly. “I don’t need your consent to get what I want, but have it your way.” In the next split second, magic crackles in the air, her shards flare with power, and from the Void she launches a spear of warped space in his direction.
Salo doesn’t flinch. His mind is still connected to his talisman, which sees the projectile even before it has covered half the distance, judging it hostile to him based on its trajectory. Through its vastly accelerated logic, he is able to know precisely how much Storm and Void craft to draw and where to cast a simple barrier of tessellated hexagons that winks out of existence as soon as the spear crashes against it.
A loud peal and a flash of red lightning, and then the spear flakes away into nothing.
“Impressive,” the Maidservant says. She keeps moving around the clearing, and so does he.
Then her eyes incandesce with moonlight, and she spreads her arms wide. When she slams her palms together with a loud clap, a hundred Void arrows fly out of thin air and converge upon him.
He lenses his mind with his staff, letting his talisman guide his release of magic. An instant later a half dome of Void hexagons and lightning takes shape from the ground up and covers him like a giant parasol tipped on its side. The hail of arrows shatters on its surface with sparks of lightning, and the shield blinks away a heartbeat later, replenishing his flow of magic.
“You Yerezi are very talented,” the Maidservant says. “I have always envied and respected your depth of knowledge.” Finally coming to a stop, she considers him with interest. “I’m going to give you one last chance to tell me w
hat I want to know. No one has to get hurt. I’ll even return your friends to you unharmed.”
That last part makes Salo second-guess himself, but he doesn’t take the bait. To expect the witch to keep her word would be foolish. He firms his voice. “I won’t bargain with a mass murderer.”
“Then you give me no choice.”
He knows what’s coming even before he feels the corruption stirring in the air, an unpleasant oiliness that inspires an opposing surge in his shards.
The first time he watched her use Black magic, summoning tikoloshe from the underworld to kill his people, he saw nothing but plumes of dust that appeared from nowhere and coalesced into the fell beasts. But now that he can sense magic with his shards, he sees the horrid truth as it unfolds: her mind is connected through the Void to the devil’s domain, and this connection manifests itself as a portal she can open whenever she wishes to summon spirits from the other side.
He senses her open this portal and summon a tikoloshe, not a hulking skeleton this time but a spirit in the form of pitch-black slime. With a thrust of her hands the slime leaps onto his face much faster than he can react. It instantly starts crawling beneath his glasses and into his eyes, his nostrils, and even his ears, burrowing into his head.
He tries to summon power into his shards, but it’s like they’ve been poisoned or disengaged from the source, leaving him defenseless. Dropping his staff, he falls to his knees with a silent cry, scratching at the profane webs infesting his face, but they only dig deeper into him, somehow melding with his thoughts, stealing them. He chokes as they enter his mouth and curl themselves around his throat, then falls to his side, gasping for breath.
Footfalls sound nearby. To Salo it feels like there’s a long tendril of black ooze leading straight from his mind and into hers, continuing deep beyond the profane portal.
“I used to believe that Yerezi supremacy in magic was due to your virtuousness as a tribe,” she says, “how you worked together despite your clans, how you were better than us.” She crouches next to Salo’s choking form. “Imagine my disappointment when I learned that you’re no different. That in fact you are possibly worse. At least we know what we are and don’t pretend otherwise. You smile at each other and act like one people while plotting each other’s destruction. Hypocrites.”
The slimy webs infiltrate his mind. Their corrupted ciphers shift and multiply at the speed of his thoughts, too fast for him to neutralize.
“Don’t fight it,” the witch whispers. “It’ll only prolong your suffering.”
As he lies on the forest floor, some part of him notices how hard she’s straining to keep the mind-stealing tikoloshe under her control. In fact, the more he pays attention, the more he realizes that her hold on her own power is tenuous at best.
He could tip the balance, turn her Black magic against her . . .
Salo tries harder to draw power from his shards, but the profane spirit tightens its grip around his throat, cutting off what little breath he had left. His back arches involuntarily; his fingers curl into his palms, grasping fistfuls of wet earth. He wheezes in desperation, feeling consciousness begin to slip away from him, and yet he redoubles his efforts to reach for his shards, expending all the willpower he has left. He reaches and reaches until something breaks—
Power comes surging back into his arms, and the witch loses complete control of the tikoloshe, falling back with a cry.
With nothing to stop it, the spirit draws more power from beyond the portal, deepens its hold around Salo’s mind, and pulls.
43: The Maidservant
Bonobo Province—Kingdom of the Yontai
When she first knocked on the door to hell, it was because she was curious.
The door had been a wound whose silent presence had always haunted her in the Void, an ancient malignance carved forcefully into the metadimension by something unfriendly to the moon—and she could tell this because the power that seethed off it was nothing at all like the moon’s power. It was colder, darker somehow, wrong, and it promised her great things if she just opened the door, made her wonder if maybe the key to her freedom didn’t lie beyond.
It did not, as it turned out, but the power that rushed out from the other side was great nonetheless.
Now she feels it turn against her. The spirit she used to steal the boy’s thoughts entangles his mind with hers and pulls, and the connection forged between them is so total it’s as if his soul has been laid bare before her so that he has no secrets left to her. She sees every facet of him so that she knows him as well as she knows herself. She sees his life the way he lived it, the scars he survived, the horrors he’s endured.
She sees it all, and so does he.
For Musalodi, it began shortly after his seventh comet, on the night his ama poured acid onto his eyes, making them melt right out of their sockets.
That night she locked him in her drystone hut and told anyone who came inquiring about the screams that he’d contracted a rare infection and she was trying her best to treat it. In truth, she was torturing herself by watching her beloved son writhe on the floor in pain from something she had deliberately caused.
The act was a ritual, the first of many she planned to perform, in which she caused herself great spiritual pain by tormenting him, the one she loved most in the world, thereby forging the deepest connection possible to the source. The rituals would grow in intensity until they culminated with his violent sacrifice at the altar of her spiritual agony, and this would grant her the insights she needed to build the thing that was her obsession: the All Axiom.
She already wielded the power of the moon and served her clanspeople as their mystic, but she would face the redhawk again, for the All Axiom was the most important thing in the world.
That night, however, as she watched her son toss and turn on the floor of her hut, screaming her name and clawing in agony at his bleeding eyes, as the guilt of the crime ate away at her soul and she wept inconsolably, she realized that her carefully laid-out plans had turned against her. The boy she had conceived precisely to love and coddle before sacrificing him to her All Axiom had grown too dear to her. She could not bring herself to hurt him any further.
Instead, she used her sorcery to replace his devoured eyes with unnatural ones, whose interiors were faceted and multicolored, like opals in the sunlight. She convinced everyone, even her son, that what had happened had truly been the result of a rare disease. Years passed before the boy would come to terms with the truth.
Even so, his mother continued her work, for it was far too important to set aside. The object of her efforts would be different now, however, and who better to wield the All Axiom on her behalf than the one whose blood had been shed for it?
In a way, she had already begun to prepare him for the role. His ordeal with the eyes, though it had been meant to provide her insights of spiritual agony, had done the same to him, too, priming him for the ciphers of Red magic. If she paved his way to the All Axiom, then his pain wouldn’t have been for nothing. It would be her penance for the crime she had committed.
Knowing that she couldn’t be discovered teaching a boy the secrets of magic, she did just enough to stoke his interest in the mystic arts, securing all the things he would need to teach himself when he was old enough. He was his mother’s son, clever and curious, so she knew he would prevail so long as he asked himself the right questions. All he needed was a push in the right direction.
And so, when it was time to give him this push, her last gift to him, the agony that would open his eyes to the greatest secrets of Red magic, when it was time to give her life to the cause, she did not hesitate. His victory would be hers. What would have been a mother’s betrayal would become the greatest gift she could ever give him, the crown he would wear on her behalf.
The Maidservant sees how, on the night Musalodi would have died beneath his mother’s blade, it was she who bled instead, victorious in the knowledge that her son would complete her life’s work.
&nbs
p; The Maidservant sees it all.
She sees how he killed his own mother.
They appear standing side by side in a stone hut lit by luminous vines, a construct of a memory he’s buried so deep it surfaces only in his nightmares. In front of them a beautiful woman gives a much-younger version of the boy a choice in the form of a witchwood blade.
Next to the Maidservant, the older boy watches his younger self shake his head with force. “No, Ama. Please. I can’t.”
In the background, two younger boys are huddled together in a corner, identical twins, it seems. By the way they are leaning against each other and the threads of drool hanging from their mouths, the Maidservant can tell that they have both been bewitched into insensate stupors. A large feline shadow looms over them, its teeth bared in menace. It growls, making the walls shudder.
“Do you love me, my sweet?”
“You know I do, Ama.”
“That is why you must do it. This isn’t just for you. I am sick, you see. I’m in so much pain. I need you to help me stop the pain.”
“But you can be healed!”
“I can’t. It’s too late. But Salo, if you don’t help me, my sickness, my pain, it will make Mukuni kill and eat your brothers. You don’t want that, do you?”
The shadow growls again, and the boy starts to cry.
“Take the knife. Use it many times—that’s important, Salo. Many times, or Mukuni will do it. You must not stop until he leaves. Do you understand? Please. Help me. Stop the pain.”
In front of them, the younger version of the boy the Maidservant came to kill cries in a pool of his mother’s blood while his insensible younger brothers watch with glazed eyes. Their father is the one who finds them like this.
“I killed her,” the older boy says while he watches his father pry the witchwood blade from his younger hands. Later, the man will conceal the truth of what transpired here to protect his children. “I remember now.”
