Master of Poisons

by Andrea Hairston

  Arms turned to Djola. “I meant to tell you both.”

  “You didn’t,” Djola said.

  Arms stiffened. He followed Azizi’s orders even if they were stupid. Maybe he agreed with this one. Azizi waved the masters into their seats. Djola remained standing. Kyrie was essential. How could Azizi dismiss her without consulting him?

  “Masters at your table spoil for war,” Kyrie said. Her fingers sparked as if she’d scratched a rough surface. “They think I’m only good for carnival amusement.” The air above the table burst into flames. Kyrie took each man’s measure in the bright-as-day light while they gaped or fumed at her conjure. She was no better at politicking than Samina. Grain groaned and closed his eyes.

  Azizi ground his teeth at her insolence. “So why do a carnival fire-show at Council?”

  “Emperor Azizi,” she glared at him, “do you no longer wish the Iyalawo of Mount Eidhou to sit at your table?”

  The guards drew swords. Panic sweat made them reek. Kyrie would defend her mountain to the death. If even half the griot tales were true, Council was no match for her. She could burn them all right now and who would hear their screams?

  “Zizi,” Djola hissed a boyhood name in the emperor’s ear. “I beg you, speak to her.”

  Kyrie bowed low, spreading her arms like wings. The flames overhead winked out.

  “Give me a reason to bring your stool back.” Azizi huffed and speared a hunk of goat. “I’d trust whatever gate conjure you’d offer.”

  “Every gate requires sacrifice. I conjure with the willing. No transgressor blood or stolen spirits like in Holy City.” Kyrie spat at rogue sparks dancing on her fingertips. “The bushes, trees, rocks, and haints that power my gates do so willingly, for Mount Eidhou, for—”

  “For love?” High priest Ernold interrupted her for the third time and sucked his teeth, disgusted.

  “You prefer a spirit slave to a lover?” Kyrie glanced at scowling faces.

  Azizi slammed his hand on the table. “Whatever it takes!”

  “On this path, you’ll destroy what you do love.” She nodded at Djola and Grain, then bowed deeply to Azizi again. “I take my leave. I hope Council uses wisdom to guide you away from deadly illusion to a true solution.”

  Azizi trembled as he waved her away. Guards covered her eyes and led her out.

  High priest Ernold grumbled. “We should lock her up.”

  “You fools would have done that long ago if you could,” Grain shouted. “Have you looked outside? We need Kyrie’s conjure book. Who else knows as much as she does?”

  Yari, the famed griot of griots, knew more than Kyrie perhaps. But Yari avoided the stone-wood table. Djola bit his tongue before blurting this. Books and Bones grumbled about jumba jabba. The others joined in. Azizi whistled them silent. “Kyrie never stays away long.”

  Kyrie was bosom close to chief cook Lilot and to Urzula, Azizi’s pirate queen wife. While the men dithered, Kyrie would lose her escort in the cook’s maze. She’d find a way out, fade into the trees behind the citadel, and abandon Djola to the cowards and fools on Council.

  9

  Emperor Azizi

  “Djola, sit down with us.” Azizi slapped his good friend’s back. “Where did you get that basket—Anawanama, ancestor weave. It’s beautiful.”

  “A warning from Chief Nuar.” Djola set the basket in front of Azizi. “He thinks we’ve betrayed the living, the dead, and the unborn.”

  “That bad?” Azizi laughed.

  Djola bristled. “Did you see the storm this afternoon, raising blisters on elephant skin and choking trees?”

  “Chief Nuar’s your half-brother, isn’t he?” Azizi rattled the bones. “Nuar was always so colorful and exaggerated, like a carnival player.” Azizi set the basket at Djola’s plate. “Sit, please, and give calm council.”

  Djola dropped into his chair. Calm was difficult. Without Kyrie’s mountain herbs, Azizi’s health could fail. Without her groves and goats, Arkhys City might starve. Her missing stool meant Djola would have to get Books and Bones on his side or his map to tomorrow would go down from four to three. They needed everybody working together to turn back the poison desert. Did Kyrie think of that before mouthing off? Who listened to a shrill old woman? Djola glanced around the table. The moody librarian scowled at him. Arms had a stone face, still mad about following orders. Grain looked furtive, ready to bolt. Water and Money sniggered with identical contempt. Perhaps today wasn’t Djola’s day.

  He considered gathering his family and following Kyrie and the elephant to the Mountain Gates. No master or witchdoctor in the Empire could breach Kyrie’s conjure and enter the mountain realm without her permission. Nuar had stormed Djola’s secret hideaway and urged him to take his family to Kyrie’s compound. Samina repeated this grand idea, but why run from Council at the height of his power?

  “You’re worrying, Djola—I can feel it.” Azizi nibbled a few berries. “What?” Two rats gobbled goat haunch, muttering rat pleasure. “They eat for their whole troupe. See the pouches in their jowls.” Azizi pointed. “They risk angry cooks and wily jackals to carry a feast home to hungry mouths. Rat solidarity.”

  The rat nibbled Azizi’s finger and he laughed. Then all the masters except Djola spoke at once. They lied, whined, and argued. They blamed fickle gods and anybody except themselves for poor tax revenue, thief-lord raids, and dwindling tree-oil harvests. They offered nothing new. Council was at the same standstill as last year, last week, ten minutes ago.

  “Fatazz! We’re lizards chasing our tails.” Grain tapped a story on a two-headed talking drum with leather strands connecting the heads that he squeezed to change pitch. Ernold frowned at a Kahoe woman’s instrument, but Grain was not afraid to play:

  An Anawanama-hero of old was surrounded by the enemy. A veson, neither man nor woman, vie was the last soldier protecting the land. The enemy held the high ground. The hero refused defeat and rigged branches to beat fifty war drums as the wind blew. Vie strung the shields of fallen comrades across a waterfall so that metal surfaces banged and clattered, then sang in many voices, high, low, and in-between. Echoes across the water sounded like a fearsome horde, an army risen from the dead. The enemy retreated in fear. The hero was the first shadow warrior. Vie turned death into victory.

  Arms cheered. He appreciated a good warrior saga, Grain’s sagas especially. Shadow warriors preferred cunning to spilling blood. Money squirmed at an Anawanama tale about a veson. Books and Bones blinked and yawned. He and high priest Ernold pretended to be bored. Water tinkered with a tiny wind-wheel contraption: a circle of reed paddles on a stick. Hot air from a candle made it spin.

  “You’re still worrying, Djola.” Azizi rubbed his eyes. “Over Kyrie? You brought her back before, you’ll do it again.”

  “Zst!” Djola cursed. “I only masquerade as a master of the impossible.”

  Azizi nodded. “Sometimes illusion is a good solution.”

  Sky windows above the Council chamber shifted to the blue-violet of Samina’s eyes, the sun a threat of pink at the edges. The endless night had passed. The roast smelled rank. Rats shat in the gravy. Chief cook Lilot shooed the creatures away, laid out a fresh meal, and lingered in the shadows spying for Queen Urzula. She kept Azizi’s wife well-informed. Bleary masters dropped their heads into honey cakes and cream. Not even Arms was hungry. Djola ate for the coming battle. Losing Kyrie need not mean defeat.

  Azizi quashed a tremor in his hand. He chewed bark that dulled pain and held fever in check. He was the age his father had been when assassins struck. His father, mother, older brother, and sisters died sweating blood and spewing their guts right in front of him. Djola reached Azizi with an antidote just in time. Djola foiled countless assassination attempts before finally talking ruthless warriors to the peace fire. From a boy of sixteen, Azizi saw every shadow as danger, every kiss as poison. Yet he gathered the best masters from across the Empire and listened to Council before taking action. Azizi never desired power but wa
s proclaimed supreme ruler of the Arkhysian Empire at nineteen.

  For twenty years he worked to make one map of many people. He’d been cautious and neither cruel nor foolish. He outlawed slavery and transgressor huts in the capital. Southern barbarians, Green Elders, pirates from the floating cities, and even wild northern tribes were welcomed. Azizi opened the library to the poor, to women too, if they could read. He worked for order and peace, and took every raid, betrayal, and massacre to heart. Each new wasteland or dead water zone had him vomiting in the night. He loved the Empire, its people, fields, and creatures, its forests, rivers, and mountains too.

  “Morning. Time is short.” Azizi glared at them. “I need plans to stop poison desert. Why else call Council? I can agonize alone.” He was ready to listen.

  Djola scratched the whisper of beard on his cheeks. He shook his bones and stretched achy muscles. “A wild elephant was in the back court last night, at sunset,” he said.

  Azizi squinted at him. “I thought the wild ones were long dead.”

  “Not yet.” Djola saw hope in an elephant’s waddle into the trees.

  “Hezram, Holy City’s high priest, offers Dream Gate secrets to protect us from poison desert. I hear you’re against his blood conjure.” Azizi gripped Djola. “Bleeding the people, even transgressors, is a high price.… Yet you’ve offered nothing else, except elephant tales.”

  Djola grinned. “Fighting the enemy, you must avoid becoming one.”

  Azizi rubbed bleary eyes. “Give me an answer, not Green Elder jumba jabba.”

  “Not enough tree oil or blood for Dream Gate conjure, unless we sacrifice our forests, our people, and our children.”

  Azizi licked cracked lips. “You know this witchdoctor spell?”

  “Lahesh conjure. I know enough to steer clear.” Djola lied with half-truth.

  “The Lahesh, a bold people … Everyone craves their wisdom…” Azizi stroked the arms of his Lahesh waterwheel chair then glanced at Kyrie’s empty place. “Even the Iyalawo fears Dream Gate conjure.” He sighed. “Foul winds blow through our streets. What else do we see?”

  Good vision takes many eyes looking every direction. Green Elder words had been plaguing Djola all night, but he didn’t let this slip. He unfurled his scroll of spells.

  10

  Wild Child

  Isra led the Elders and Sprites deeper into the forests, deeper into Anawanama territory. Nobody tracked them, and Yari sang, eerie melodies in Lahesh. Awa stumbled along, edgy. Good Empire citizens told horror tales on thieving, murdering savages who sold their own children—or anybody’s—to slavers. Mother had rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth at nonsense. Kenu said Mother’s family was part Anawanama. In a good mood, Father teased Mother about being a wild woman; if he was mad, he cursed her savage heritage and Awa, her wild child. Kenu said farmers were suspicious of savages who roamed the forests and never settled down. “Rootless demons living at the edge.” The edge of what? Kenu never said.

  Elders ferried the Sprites across a swamp on a barge made from tupelo tree trunks. Hungry eyes looked up at Awa from water thick as mud. She jumped from the barge onto springy ground. A sour decay smell stung her nose as they hiked through cypress, tupelo, and other swamp trees. Yari sang to shy birds and bold bugs. Awa walked close to vie where the bugs were too enchanted to bite.

  They came upon soot gray fields, farmland devastated by poison dust storms. Even wrapped in turbans and veils and wearing barbarian boots, the poison seeped in. Lungs burned and skin blistered. Isra cursed foolish farmers. Yari grew quiet and charged ahead, leading them up into a cloud forest. The misty air was a relief on scalded skin, but the climb was rough. Downhill in the gathering dark was worse.

  Awa was ready to fall over and not get up when smoke from cook fires made her stomach howl. The smell of nut bread, yams, and fish brought water to her mouth. A clearing surrounded by houses on wooden platforms was a welcome sight. Palm-leaf roofs dripped water from a recent downpour. Brawny men in clown masks brandished rattles and spears. Warriors.

  “Greetings!” Yari spoke—she recognized vie’s voice if not the shadow-warrior face. “Anawanama are never lost. They find each other in the dark, in a storm. They feel a heart beating in a prison cell and reach out with comfort. I need a story to guide me.” Yari hugged the warrior-clowns.

  “I was in Arkhys City yesterday. Council sits.” One clown took off his mask, a gray-haired man with a blade chin and a deep voice like a djembe drum. He wore luxurious mudcloth robes, a chief perhaps. “A sad spectacle.” He looked from Yari to Awa. “You bring new Sprites into an enclave. Djola wastes himself at Council, wrangling thugs and cowards, and every day more poison dust blows through our lands.”

  “We do what we can, Nuar,” Yari countered.

  “We must do more.” A woman spoke. She wore mudcloth and a beaded headdress decked with feathers. “Azizi has no women at his stone-wood table. How can you chew your food with only one tooth? How can you speak truth with half a tongue?”

  “No vesons since you walked away, Yari,” Nuar added. “Azizi says you abandoned them.”

  “Azizi could follow me,” Yari replied. “Why should I decorate his Empire table?”

  “You could persuade Djola,” Nuar insisted. “He’d listen to the griot of griots.”

  “Perhaps. But who would listen to him? Too much fear in the air.”

  Awa looked around, fascinated more than afraid. Village dwellings were tucked into a hillside. Naked children and old people came out with the stars. Women dropped from branches. Men stepped from under bulging tree roots. Brown people with sculpted features and black waterfalls of hair. They did Empire talk at first then switched to Anawanama. The Elders used savage talk too—words that never stopped rolling into one another.

  Awa was dazzled by the musical language and carnival clothes, by parrot and orchid people and a moon girl with a star headdress. A boy in a hawk mask gave Awa mushrooms stuffed with something that tasted like fishy bird meat. Cooks must have roasted a big lizard from the swamps. Mother said swamps were disappearing and big lizards too, so northlanders starved. People in this village looked well-fed and they shared a feast with the Elders and new Sprites. Mother worried about everything before it happened.

  Awa sat in a house for wanderers, a refuge on stilts for anybody on the way to somewhere. If you knew how to find this clearing, you were welcome. Dense palm-leaf roofs kept the downpour out. Awa ate until she couldn’t swallow another bite. Young Anawanama sat around her giggling and teasing each other. They smelled funny—unfamiliar spices on their breath and strange oil in their hair. They looked at her sideways. She wrapped herself in their rippling words and a mudcloth blanket. The former acolyte sat behind her wrapped in a blanket too. They could have climbed down the stilts and run away. Shadow warriors might have been anywhere, yet Awa suspected, nobody would stop them.

  Yari gave Father sacks of jewels, but Awa wasn’t a prisoner or a slave.

  Yari’s voice rustled with the leaves. “These people will take you in if you don’t want to travel on with us. They have a good life.” In the stilt house next to hers, young women sang softly and twisted sweetgrass into ropes. Yari played a talking drum, squeezing the leather strands that connected the heads and tapping just so to mimic Anawanama words. “Whatever you want,” Yari whispered.

  “I don’t know what I want, besides—” going home. Awa couldn’t imagine staying with savages, even friendly, beautiful ones, her mother’s tribe.

  Were Green Elders any better than savages?

  “Don’t worry. When you know what you want, you’ll do it.”

  “I draw a map every night in the dirt, to remind myself where I’ve come from.”

  “Good. You aren’t lost.”

  Awa fell asleep to the talking drum and bees buzzing in her ear. In the morning she thanked the villagers, touching their hands to her forehead. They were puzzled by the gesture of respect a daughter made to relatives, but touched their cheeks to her
palms. Yari and the other Elders slipped into a cave passage through the mountains without looking back. Awa followed, going the direction she wanted to go.

  11

  Djola’s Map

  The Master of Grain persuades northern tribes to share desert conjure: bunchgrass seeds that grow with little water; black aromatic rice and tough red beans that can survive a flood; midnight berry bushes that hold a hillside, bring light to the eyes, and turn sand back to soil.

  Emperor Azizi closes mines that poison rivers. Tainted metals are illusion treasures. Azizi opens the dams and frees lakes and rivers. The Master of Water lifts the ban on mud and silt masquerade. He takes charge of waterwheels and oversees wind-and fire-works. He uses ancient Lahesh tinkering to reclaim deserts.

  The Master of Arms makes sure no children go hungry. Food is rationed as during the last war—everybody lives on the same portions. Back taxes are forgiven. Arms runs the market. Who doubts his fair-mindedness? On market days, griots sing his praises and recall sacrifices of old.

  High priest Ernold reminds people that tree oil is sacred and bans clear cutting for the glory of the forest and mountain gods. Kyrie and other mountain Iyalawos join Council and organize tree planting ceremonies under Ernold’s guidance. Trees hold the mountains and the rivers. Tree song soothes us all.

  The Master of Money works with weavers, planting basket trees and fields of sweetgrass. Revenue from sweetgrass baskets, rugs, boats, and bridges will fill the Empire’s war chests.

  Emperor Azizi asks every library from the Golden Gulf to the floating cities for wisdom. The Master of Books and Bones hosts griot gatherings on the steps of the Arkhys City library to recall old traditions and collect new ideas. Crossroads festivals are held during the scar moon. Griot storytellers and carnival players spread the word that change is coming and earn good fees. With fewer empty bellies, riots and rebel uprisings decline, and the People write their own spells for change.