by Evan Winter
“It’s not something you talk about.”
“No,” said Tau, recalling his own experience. “It’s not.”
“So, other than shroud yourself,” Zuri said, “you can do everything in Isihogo that I can.”
Tau tried to see if Zuri was teasing him. “I can enervate?”
Zuri tilted her head from side to side, weighing the question. “You can learn the technique, you can take yourself to Isihogo, you can even take energy from the underworld, but you’d die before you had the chance to use it.”
“The demons,” Tau said.
“In part. Time works differently in the underworld. A single breath on Uhmlaba is more than fifty in Isihogo. Also, souls shine brighter when they take on Isihogo’s energy. Without being able to shroud, the demons would find you and tear you apart before you could use what you had taken. Tau, if you are ever in Isihogo, never take energy into yourself. Never.”
“Show it to me.”
Zuri started. “Show you what?”
“I need to know how to resist the enervation.” Tau could tell Zuri was beginning to regret the discussion, but he pressed on. “I got lucky today. We were isolated from the bigger fight and Namisa hit her Indlovu as well as my sword brothers. I won’t be able to keep winning if an Enervator can just point her hands and drop me.”
“Resist enervation?” Zuri shook her head. “If a Gifted hits you with it, you can’t stop your soul from being shifted to the underworld. Anyway, in the skirmishes, we’re not supposed to hold you there.”
“I know, but that’s not the point,” Tau said. “Even if I’m not held long enough for the demons to attack me, I’m still dazed when I come back.”
“Your soul was taken from one place to another. It’s not the kind of thing you shake off.”
“How do you do it, then?” he asked.
“I… That’s different.”
“Maybe… or, maybe having experienced it so often, you’re able to better manage it.” She looked far from convinced by that, but Tau pressed on. “Zuri, I can’t allow myself to be made useless on the battlefield. I need more experience with enervation. I need to know how it affects me, so I can learn to recover faster.”
“I don’t think it works that way, and I’m not going to enervate you.”
“I have to try.”
“Then go to Isihogo yourself,” Zuri said, flicking a hand at him, dismissing the request.
“How?”
Zuri eyes widened.
“No, you’re right,” Tau said. “You said everyone can do it. Teach me how to go to Isihogo?”
“I wasn’t serious when I said that.”
“But you could teach it?”
Zuri licked her lips and looked around at the still empty circle. “You already know how. It’s why we pray, to anchor our souls to this realm. Some of us still drift to Isihogo when we sleep and our defenses are down.”
Tau considered this. “The ones who die bleeding in their beds. The ones who wake and have lost their minds. That’s why we pray? To prevent that?”
“It’s not the only reason. We pray to show faith. To worship Ananthi. She protects us.”
“Of course she does,” Tau said, trying not to sound brusque. “Help me, Zuri. I almost couldn’t keep fighting after the enervation.”
“If you were attacked by a demon you shouldn’t have been able to fight at all.”
“Help me.”
“You want this? To learn how to travel to the underworld?” Zuri asked. “You’ll have no power there. You’ll be hunted the instant you enter.”
“But they can’t hurt me?”
Zuri laughed without mirth. “What do you mean? You’ve already experienced it. They’ll hurt you. They’ll rip you to pieces and you’ll feel everything. Your physical body won’t be harmed, but who knows what it’ll do to your mind.”
Tau was insistent. “But they can’t kill me.”
Zuri pursed her lips. “Not unless you draw energy from Isihogo.”
“Then I just won’t do that.”
“As you wish,” Zuri said, standing.
Tau jumped to his feet, nervous, and wondering just how much of a damned fool he was being. “Now?”
“Isn’t this what you want?”
“Eh… yes, of course.”
“You’re sure?” She arched an eyebrow and Tau caught up to her game. She had thought to scare him off the path by putting his feet to it.
Tau refused to be scared away. “I am.”
Zuri’s eyebrow dropped and she looked tired, like the day had been a bit too much. “Fine. Fine. Close your eyes.”
“Here?”
“If I can teach you how to enter Isihogo, here is as good a place as any. Fifty breaths there are less than a single one here. You won’t be gone any time at all.”
“As you say.” Tau closed his eyes.
“You need to know how to return. There are two ways.”
Tau saw spots of light behind his closed eyelids.
“Our souls conceive of Isihogo in terms of our experiences in Uhmlaba. You will think of yourself as having one head, two arms, two legs, everything. You will even think and behave as if you are breathing there.”
“Yes,” Tau said.
“The first way to return is to expel all the breath in your body. Breathe it out until you are empty. Let your body, if you want to call it that, remain empty. You will feel as if you are dying, as if you must breathe. Leave your lungs empty, let this false death take you, Isihogo will fade, and you will leave the underworld.”
“That’s it?”
“We are meant for the world of the living, not the world of the demons. Exiting Isihogo should not be hard.”
“And the second way?”
“Let the demons kill you.”
“Ah,” Tau said.
“Ah,” Zuri echoed. “When the demons destroy your soul’s conception of its body, you’ll be forced from Isihogo.” Zuri took a step closer to Tau and put a cool hand on his arm. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I do. I have to get into the Queen’s Melee. I can’t risk letting an Enervator disable me. I can’t risk being taken out of the fight.”
There, he’d said it out loud and it was true. He had to get into the melee. He had to take Scale Jayyed deep enough into its rounds to face Scale Osa… to face Kellan. Men died in the melee every single cycle. Men died there.
“The melee?” Zuri asked. “It’s all on your shoulders, then, your scale’s chances? You know an Ihashe scale hasn’t qualified in over a generation?”
He nodded. “It’s different now.”
Zuri smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “As you say,” she said, taking her hand from his arm. “Then, with eyes closed, I want you to think about a wave of calm rising up through the earth and into you.”
Tau closed his eyes and attended to her words.
“Relax your feet and let the tension flow out of them. Let the muscles go loose and limp and allow this calming wave to rise into your calves, slowly, into your thighs, slowly. Let them go loose, limp, feel that wave continue higher, as you allow this world to slip away.”
Tau was swaying.
“I want you to take deep breaths in and out, in and out.… Yes, like that.… Every breath in lifts the calming wave higher, every breath out moves our world further and further away.… Let go and it’s there… our other home—”
DEMON
The noise accosted him first, the eerie gusting of wind that blew grit into his face and exposed skin. Tau felt it, heard it, and, snapping his eyes open, he saw the permanent twilight of Isihogo.
He was still in the circle in Citadel City, but it was a twisted version of the place. The colors were muted, the sky colorless, the ground soft, like loose mulch, and the underworld’s mists swirled around him.
“You did it.” Zuri’s voice was quiet, like she spoke to him from a hundred strides away, though she was next to him. Tau could hear the surprise in her voice. He looked at he
r. She was veiled in a darkness so deep he had trouble making out her features.
“You’re shrouded,” he said, having trouble hearing his own voice.
“They come,” she said.
Tau had the impression of her turning her head, though it was hard to tell where her face was. He looked in the same direction he thought she might be facing and saw them. His heart seemed to stop and fear had him in its white-hot grasp.
Two demons were running for him. One was twice his size, had a mouth full of teeth and a tongue that hung down past its neck. It came for him on two legs. The other thing ran on all fours. It had pointed ears, eyes on either side of its head, and skin like an inyoka.
Tau sought to calm himself. It didn’t work. He looked down at his body, saw the blinding light he was giving off, and he reached into himself, working to dim it, to hide as Zuri was.
“What are you doing?” Zuri asked. “It’s time. Exhale.”
Tau did not. He focused his mind on the task of dimming his soul’s light. He tried to understand how such a thing could work, and he felt something. It was an oppressive and enormous wall of energy that existed all around him, and the temptation to grab hold of it, pull a portion of it into himself, was intense.
Without knowing how he knew, Tau realized that this was the prison that kept the demons in Isihogo. It was also the field of Ananthi’s energy from which the Gifted drew power. He resisted the impulse to draw in the energy. That was death. Instead, he did all he could to mask his light, to hide the glow of his spirit.
“Tau?” Zuri shouted.
He looked down at himself and saw, to his astonishment, that he glowed bright as ever. He looked up. The demons, snarling and slavering, were almost on him. His bladder felt overfull and fear thickened his blood.
He hated that they made him feel this way. He hated that the underworld, these creatures, and the fear of it all could disable him in his world. It could not continue.
Tau inhaled, drawing in as much of the underworld’s fetid air as he could. He had come to learn how to defeat enervation. He would not leave until he had done so.
He snarled at the products of Ukufa’s evil and placed his hands on the hilts of his swords, which had come with him. He drew them and faced the beasts.
“What are you doing?” Zuri screamed.
“They can’t hurt me!” he told her. “You can’t hurt me!” he roared at the demons. Zuri fled and Tau fought.
The thing on all fours got to him first, and Tau brought his strong-side sword down on its snout with as much force as he could. The creature was dashed to the ground, tripping over its feet and rolling. There was no time to appreciate the small victory. The other demon, a thing twice the height of a Lesser, loomed over him and swiped for his guts with a black claw–tipped hand. Tau threw himself back, but he’d underestimated the demon’s reach. Its claws raked across his stomach, tearing him almost in two.
Tau fell to the murky ground and felt his insides spilling out. He looked down and cried out in pain and horror. His intestines were exposed to the air, ropes upon ropes of them. He reached down to try to push them back. The pain was indescribable, and then the demon was on him.
He tried to swing his swords but had lost them when he fell. He tried to beat the beast back, but it ignored him as it feasted. The thing on all fours, recovered from the sword strike, joined the feasting, and Tau lost his mind to pain. He tried to exhale, as Zuri had taught him, but it was too late for that and he suffered more than he’d believed possible as the two demons tore him apart.
“You hateful cek!” Zuri slapped him across the face. “What is the matter with you?”
She had tears running down her face and was crouched next to Tau on the dirt of the circle in Citadel City.
“By the Goddess, that was worse than I imagined,” Tau whispered. “So much worse. How can a place like that exist?”
“Are you well?” Zuri asked, before recoiling. “I shouldn’t even ask. You are undeserving of concern. How could you do that? Why would you do it?”
“I can’t be afraid of them. I can’t let the Gifted stop me when I fight. I can’t be afraid.”
“Are you trying to become demon-haunted?”
“I’m well.”
Zuri stood up and Tau thought she might kick him. “What if you had died?” she asked.
Tau made himself sit up, and though he was uninjured, he cradled his stomach. “You told me the demons couldn’t harm me.”
“What if I was wrong?”
“You weren’t. Zuri, I felt the energy there. I could have taken it. I didn’t.”
“Obviously.”
“I tried to hide myself.” Tau forced a smile. “It didn’t work.”
“Omehi men cannot be Gifted!” she hissed, leaning in as if proximity would make the point more clear.
“Doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
Zuri threw up her hands. “Why do I bother with you?”
“Help me up?”
“I’m done helping. Get yourself up.”
Tau struggled to his feet and shuffled over to the bench. “I can’t fight like this.”
“Fight?”
“I thought, maybe, if I faced the demons, I could come out of Isihogo and still be ready to fight. It doesn’t… That won’t work. I still feel the claws.” Tau brushed his fingertips against his stomach and the muscles there spasmed, anticipating the pain from wounds that did not exist.
“You had to fight demons to learn that?”
“I thought I could win.”
Zuri shook her fists at him. “You’re an idiot.”
Tau tried to stand and fell back onto the bench. He was exhausted and his body was shaking. His plan, in retrospect, seemed foolhardy, the act of an impulsive child. There were large forces at work in the universe and he did not understand them.
“Zuri, it’s dark out. I have to leave the city. Will you help me?” Tau felt weak; that was true. It wasn’t the only reason he asked, though. He didn’t want to go alone.
Zuri’s face softened. She’d seen through him. “Lean on me. I’ll walk with you until you feel more yourself.”
“Thank you,” Tau said.
“Don’t say another word. If I didn’t feel…”
Tau very much wanted to hear what she’d been about to say. “What’s that?”
“Nothing. Here.” She slipped his arm over her shoulders and helped him stand. “You’re bigger than you were in Kerem.”
“They feed us more than in Kerem.”
“It’s muscle.”
“I swing swords all day.”
“Mhmm,” she said, grunting under his weight.
Tau tried not to lean on her, but he was shaky and might have fallen over otherwise.
“Thank you,” he told her again.
“Don’t talk,” she said, but she watched him with worry. She didn’t hate him, and for that Tau was grateful.
Zuri walked him within a hundred strides of the city gates.
“We shouldn’t be seen together,” she said, stopping.
“I know.”
“You can make it?”
“I have a lot farther to go than the gates,” he reminded her.
“Yes.” Zuri kissed him.
Her movement had been sudden and the demon’s attack had not left him. He almost jerked away from her. Her lips calmed him, eased his mind. “Your kiss. It’s healing.”
“Mmmm,” she murmured, biting her lower lip. “Is it?”
“Another one would make me stronger, for the journey.”
“No, you should remain weak. It’ll remind you that we must all live with the consequences of idiocy.”
The edges of his mouth drifted upward. “One more? To help me sleep?”
“Do your prayers, that will help you sleep,” she said, slipping into his arms and kissing him again. “You have to go,” she told him, stepping away. “Come back to me.”
“Always,” he told her, watching as she left the way they’d come.<
br />
When she was lost to sight, he walked through the gates of Citadel City to join his sword brothers. He was late, but after an afternoon of celebration, he was not the only one. It took another span before every man could be accounted for and the marching could begin. Men stumbled, a few couldn’t hold their drink and, when the mood hit, they sang marching songs.
Hadith, Yaw, Chinedu, and Oyibo found Tau. They marched with him. He was glad for the company, but it worried him that, even surrounded by his sword brothers, he kept seeing strange shadows in the tall grasses.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GAMES
Tau was on the practice field before the sun rose. The rest of Jayyed’s five found him there, lathered in sweat. He’d been running and had not slept.
He’d tried. He’d performed the evening prayers three times, steeling his will and mind against Isihogo, but he did not know whether his nightmares were dreams or something else. Whatever the case, he’d come to the practice fields. He was too afraid to sleep.
Along with Hadith, Yaw, and Chinedu, Tau saw Oyibo. The boyish-faced warrior spoke to Tau, unable to meet his gaze. “During last night’s march, Jayyed told me to join you.”
He said it as if he needed Tau’s permission, and, not knowing what else to say or do, Tau clapped Oyibo on the shoulder, as he imagined Hadith would have done. “Welcome, brother,” he said. “I wondered what was taking Jayyed so long.”
Oyibo’s face brightened and he raised his head. “I won’t let you down.”
Tau wasn’t sure why Oyibo needed to worry about letting him down, but he was glad his words had bolstered his sword brother’s confidence. Hadith nodded at Tau. He approved as well. Good, thought Tau. With that out of the way they could begin.
Tau paired with Oyibo and trounced him ten touches to none. It was odd, Tau thought. Oyibo managed to look both pleased and frustrated.
“It’s an honor,” Oyibo said when their match was over. Tau clapped Oyibo on the shoulder again, since the gesture had worked the first time. Oyibo went off to find water, looking happy.
Tau wasn’t tired and paired up with Hadith. “What’s going on with him?” he asked as they crossed blades.
“Worship,” Hadith grunted between breaths, retreating under Tau’s offense.
