Temper

by Nicky Drayden

  “Is it the voices?” I whisper to him.

  He nods. “They’re getting harder to push back. Almost an indistinguishable blur.” He winces, puts his fingers to his temple.

  Icy Blue has been uncomfortably quiet, but I feel him lurking in the shadows, like he’s hoping I’ll forget about him and lay down the tattered reins I’ve been gripping at so desperately. Between Kasim and me, I’m feeling more and more like coming here was a big mistake. But if we throw away this opportunity, we won’t be getting another. We need to focus all our efforts into the reason why we came here in the first place.

  “Let’s go to the library, then. We can start sifting for answers,” I say, both thrilled and terrified of what we will find there.

  The last breath of the narrow season should have passed by now, welcoming the new year and the spring, but the cold, wet air lingers. Still, I catch a few students brave enough to wear their short cikis, tempting the weather to finally change. Trees are bare, paths are thoroughly swept. Native fine bush surrounds the buildings, and even though it’s been tamed and pruned, I get the feeling that this whole place would be swallowed back up by nature if left unattended for a season or three. We trudge uphill, past a garden of grotesque glass statuaries, and to the last set of rotundas before the campus butts up against the base of the mountain and eases into wilderness.

  “Auben,” Kasim exhales in defeat. The larger of the buildings is the school’s sanctuary, and the smaller by several factors, the library. The place doesn’t look big enough to hold the answers to silence an inquisitive toddler, forget about the answers to silencing the demons that plague us.

  “Well, we’re here anyway. Who cares if they have ten books or ten thousand as long as they have the one we need?” I nudge Kasim forward up a short set of stairs, and under the dark lip of the dome. Double doors greet us, and we step inside. The small room is filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves, eight rows of them, I count, crammed with hundreds of red leather-bound tomes. I pull a book from the shelf, open it.

  The Holy Scrolls

  As Divined by Amawusiakaraseiya

  Transcribed by the Hallowed Hands of Jomealah Attah,

  Third Year, Gabadamosi Preparatory

  1003 S.S., the year of the Adamant Huntress

  I pull another book. Another. And another. The names and dates vary, but they are all hand-written versions of the same text. I look around. At the edges of the room, students sit hunched at recessed desks, quills dipping into gilded ink, filling page upon page with meticulous holy script.

  My mind spins and I go numb all over. One book. A whole damned library filled with a single damned book. A book we could get for free from any sanctuary in the Cape. “I’m sorry, Kasim,” I say with a pained exhale. “We should have taken the money.”

  “What money?” says a familiar, irksome voice.

  I look up, wipe the wet from my eyes, and see Chimwe standing before me, satchel loaded down with books. My heart lurches for my half sibling, so unexpectedly, it’s all I can do to keep the truth from leaping out of my mouth. My eyes dart to eir eyes, nose, lips, lobes, looking for traces of myself, traces of Kasim. My tongue goes dry and sour from realizing exactly what this lie has stolen from me—Chimwe is so close to being mine, tied together by blood and vice alike. “Nothing,” I manage to say, locking my feelings away, and ignoring the ache in my arms from wanting to hug em, and to finally put the bad blood behind us. “Hello, cousin.”

  Ey shushes me, then looks Kasim and me over. Sighs. Chimwe does a maneuver with my jacquard collar that makes it lie flat, then repeats it for Kasim. Sighs again. “Please tell me you two got dressed in the dark. With both arms tied behind your back.” When Chimwe’s taunt fails to rouse us, ey purses eir lips. “What’s wrong? You two look like you got the snot kicked out of you.”

  “Why’d you lie to us?” Kasim asks. “You always brag about how amazing Gabadamosi’s library is. This—” Kasim gestures at the holy books “—is far from amazing.”

  “Well, religious insult aside, this isn’t the library. It’s the antechamber, which houses the largest collection of Holy Scrolls in the world. Some date back over four hundred years, which I think is pretty amazing.” Chimwe purses eir lips at Kasim. “But if you’re looking for the library, I guess I could show you. But you have to promise to forget we’re cousins for however long it takes you to wash out of here. It’s taken me three years to build up the little reputation I do have. No way I’m going to be dragged down by the likes of a blasphemer. False Prophet, Kasim? Really?”

  My temper swells. It is bad enough I have to deny ey is my sibling. Now I have to deny all traces of our bloodlines? I send Chimwe a tight scowl. “I’d disown you for a dozen lesser reasons.”

  “Do you want to see the library or not?”

  “Fine.”

  “This way,” ey says, leading us back through the stacks. We come to a meticulously carved wooden wall. A massive door, I realize, when I see the enormous brass knocker, threaded through the cast of the chimeral beast that adorns Gabadamosi’s crest. Chimwe knocks twice, the action taking both eir hands and a significant amount of body weight put behind it. Nothing happens for a long while, then the door swings open. A pair of armed guards in dark robes greet us. Each wields an impressively ornate scythe with what looks like a human skull at the base of the blade. I know these are meant to intimidate, but they spark me with infinite hope. There’s something in here worth protecting. Maybe that something will help us.

  “I bet all of their books get returned on time,” Kasim says to me.

  The guards’ beet-red eyes turn on Kasim. Their scythes slice the air inches in front of his face.

  “They’re okay, Yomelela. They’re with me,” Chimwe flashes an embossed leather badge.

  One of the guards grunts, but they both slowly pull back their weapons. We push our way through a short dank hallway and steer well clear of the scythes. Then the hall opens up into a cavernous room brimming with shelves several stories high. The air is dry and dusty, and upon my first full breath, I begin to cough. My eyes water. I quickly rub them clear. It’s like a whole city excavated from the mountainside. Long thin windows are set into the earth. A prism of color shines through the stained glass, motes dancing about the beams. Hundreds of students bustle about, flipping delicate pages of leather-bound tomes, chattering in hushed whispers. Lithe librarians dressed in lavender-colored linen frocks expertly scale precariously high shelves, fingers grazing along leather spines, pulling books, slipping them back into place.

  Chimwe spreads eir arms out for us to behold. “This is the library. Some of the books date back over eight hundred years. The library houses the largest collection of ancient texts, not just from the Mzansi, but from all over the world.” Ey wafts eir hands in front of eir face and breathes in deeply. “What you smell is literally knowledge—tiny disintegrated paper particles adrift in the very air we breathe. Of course, you can also have the librarians pull actual books for you and read them. I find the knowledge sticks better that way.”

  “Thanks so much for getting us in here,” I say. Then the awkward silence begins.

  “So, uh, your teacher’s already given you homework?” ey asks.

  “We’re here for personal reasons,” Kasim says, trying to be helpful, but sometimes his half-truth vagaries just bait additional questions.

  “Personal reasons?” Chimwe asks. “What kind of personal reasons? Are you looking for anything in particular? The books are stacked according to the Anikalopi Numbering System of Ratios. ANSR for short. Give me the category at least, and I can point you to the right ANSR.”

  I have no doubts in Chimwe’s ability to do so, but I don’t really see a way to tactfully broach the subject of demon possession and superhuman abilities. “I think these are the kind of answers we need to seek out on our own,” I say. “You know. Alone.”

  “Oh!” Chimwe says, surprised at first, then a scowl settles upon eir face. “And here I was thinking you two
had changed. You can take the boy out of the comfy, but you can’t take the comfy out of the boy.”

  “We’re grateful, really!” Kasim pleads.

  Chimwe shrugs us off. Footsteps echo softly before ey starts up a ladder tall enough to reach Grace.

  “Well, that went about as well as it always does,” I say.

  “We really could have used a point in the right direction,” Kasim admits, chin up, overwhelmed by books shelved up to the rafters. “There are millions of books. Tens of millions. Where do we even start?”

  “On the ground, preferably,” I say, my neck straining. “How many accidents do you think they have here every year?”

  Kasim hangs an arm around my shoulder. “They have to get their skulls from somewhere,” he says with a grin.

  And so we pick a stack and start to browse, too intimidated to ask anything from anyone and desperately trying to act like we know what we’re doing. The first stack is filled mostly with texts written in Sylla. Curiosity gets the best of Kasim, and he pulls a book so tall, it is shelved lying down on its side.

  Usura nidu nke Mzansi ani ohya, the title reads.

  He stifles a cough as he cracks the book open to the middle. There are several disturbing hand-drawn illustrations of an eviscerated elephant. Skin and muscle pinned down to the sides, revealing the bone structure beneath. It is both foul and mesmerizing at the same time. Kasim flips a few hundred pages and a similar image greets him, this time that of a caracal. My gut stirs.

  “We’re in the biology section, I guess,” I say.

  “Ha, look.” Kasim points to the inset diagram of the cat’s reproductive organs, skin of the scrotum flayed away from a pair of impressive testes. The only familiar word on the page jumps out at me. Apka. Sack.

  I laugh. “Looks like we’re well on our way to being fluent in Sylla,” I whisper.

  “Ahem,” comes a voice from behind us. I turn and see one of the librarians standing there. She holds a pair of thin leather gloves out for each of us. “These are required for all encounters.” Her words are scratchy and faintly audible, but her mouth moves plainly as if this were her regular tone of speech. I notice a small scar on her neck, right about where her larynx is.

  “To protect the books from the oils in our hands,” I say, removing my finger from the cat’s ball sack. I grimace at the smudge left behind.

  “Yes, and sometimes to protect you from what lies within the books.” She folds her arms across her chest and waits for us to don our gloves. When she is satisfied, she pads off, and scales the nearest ladder like a tree-bound primate seeking security among the leaves.

  Three stacks over, we’re greeted with titles such as: A Brief History of Malted Toure, Eighty-five Unique Ways to Serve Goat, The Complete Guide to the Chocolate Delicacies of Pre-War Rashtrakuta. I heave a sigh. Culinary section. No wonder there are so many books here. Nearly every title reaches deep into some obscure microniche of a topic. I throw my hands up in surrender twenty minutes later when I come across A History of Tines: A Four-Century Examination of the Dining Utensils Used by the People of the Lalam Province. “Come on,” I say to Kasim. “We’re going to be late for our next class.” Kasim doesn’t answer. He’s got his nose buried in a book. “Did you find something?”

  “Something,” he says flatly.

  I look over his shoulder. On the page, an illustration of a man battling a cat-like demon. The man doesn’t appear to be winning.

  “Nothing about powers or exorcisms as far as I can tell, but there are dozens of personal accounts of the people of a small Pre-wars tribe in Nri being possessed by demons.”

  I perk. Kasim allows me to read the text on my own. We’re huddled together, like we used to do over the penny pages Mother brought home when we were younger. I’d learned to read a full year before Kasim got the hang of it, and would read the stories to him, and we’d laugh at the comic illustrations together. The closeness is nice, but there is nothing to laugh at among these pages.

  The Personal Account of Omehia Sebiko

  I was bundled up one night against the cold of the narrow season, when I heard a scream from the sty. The hogs were riled, and that happened sometimes when a wild dog preyed about, so I didn’t think much of anything when I went outside in my sleep clothes and an old coat thrown over me, wielding a Long Knife while barefoot and still half asleep. A set of blue-white eyes snapped me out of my fog. I stuck the knife out in front of me. From the corner of my eye I saw all nine of my hogs lying dead, guts torn out of their stomachs, but not eaten. It was then that I realized that this was not a wild dog, and the hogs were not the intended prey.

  The demon pounced upon me. Slipped inside me. Made me rape and murder my wife, while I watched from behind my own mind. I kept praying and praying for him to murder me as well, but then he left as quickly as he came. Left me kneeling there in her still-warm blood . . .

  I tear back from the book, trying to wipe my mind of images that feel closer to memories than they should, with unnamable cravings tugging at the roots of my teeth. “What happens?” I ask Kasim. “Did the demon return?”

  “Didn’t get the chance. Omehia Sebiko was beheaded shortly after his statement was given. As were all of the people in this book.” Kasim flips the cover for me.

  Confessions at the Scimitar’s Blade, An Account of Nri’s Possessed

  I must look as faint as I feel, because Kasim grabs me by the shoulder. “It’s just an anthropology book. It’s not the answer we’re looking for. We’ll find it, Auben. Just maybe not today.”

  2:00 p.m. Elementary Defting

  For the first time today, Kasim leaves my side. The exercises in our Elementary Defting class require groups of students, and we’re separated and put into two smaller established groups. I find myself in a group with a familiar face—that too-cute girl from our Sylla class.

  “Oh, perfect. We get the good one,” she says to me as I sit down. She rolls her eyes, then pulls her defting sticks from a black velvet sachet. My dealings with defting sticks involved exactly the twelve minutes that it took to pick out the cheapest set from the store, but even I can tell the quality and care that went into crafting hers. Each stick is hand carved from a bone sliver, just thick enough to inscribe with gold encrusted lettering down each side. My own are chunky and an offensive shade of blue, with flaky white lettering. My set came with twenty-four, hers with thirty-six.

  Unlike the other classrooms, the defting room is completely enclosed, devoid of freely circulating air. It’s dusty and stuffy and claustrophobic, and my eyes keep darting to the door, counting down the minutes until I can escape. Our instructor, Msr. Bankole, is a bit more on the flitty side than what I’d expected from a teacher at Gabadamosi: ostentatious gold loop earrings, colorful dyed yarns weaved through eir chunky braids, and a haphazard wardrobe that looks like it was pulled blindly from the bottom of a Saintly’s last chance bin. Ey is bright-eyed and kind, and goes into detail for Kasim and me, explaining things many instructors would have assumed we knew without shaming us for our secular background. Ey even sells me on the concept—balancing the sticks, and trying to get them as high as possible without falling. The closer to Grace the sticks rise, the more detailed His message is, deciphered by constructing words from letter pairings at the intersections where the sticks meet.

  “Sesay, could you please demonstrate?” Msr. Bankole asks the too-cute girl.

  Sesay lights up. Her nimble fingers clear a spot on the packed dirt in front of her and she lays the sticks script side down. She takes two and balances them on their narrow ends without a thought. She places another across their tops, then builds two identical structures so that a triangular base is formed. She continues up, four stories, before her placement becomes nervous and more deliberate. The structure is precarious, and Sesay stops shy of placing the next to last stick.

  “There,” she says. “If I am deft enough in hand and in spirit, let the words of Grace be told.” She backs up, barely breathing. Chalk and scratc
hboard in hand, she notes down the letter groupings at the intersections starting top down. Finally, she looks upon the scratchboard, filled with her perfectly penned script. A smile curls her lips.

  “You can share Grace’s message with your cohort if you deem it appropriate,” Msr. Bankole says.

  “Greatness will soon knock. Be prepared to answer.” Sesay turns the board to us, as Msr. Bankole spot-checks the work against a few of the deft tower’s indices.

  “Excellent work, Sesay,” Msr. Bankole gushes. “I am positive greatness will soon be knocking at your door. Let’s all take a few practice builds before we start the incantations.”

  I’ve built quite a few stick forts in my childhood, so the concept isn’t completely foreign. I am interested to see what Grace has to say to me. An apology, perhaps, for not coming to my rescue that night on His mountain.

  I open up my cloth sachet and pour out my sticks. I lay them facedown as Sesay had done, then choose the first ones to form my base. I notice that I am the only student to have such chunky sticks. I catch a few chuckles cast in my direction. Defting Trainers, I see embroidered up the side of my sachet. Ages 5–12. I frown. I bought toys. No wonder they were so much cheaper than the others. Still, I try not to let it bother me as I set the first sticks vertical. They stand for less than a second before falling. I try again. And again, with no more success.

  “Perhaps Grace has nothing to say to you,” Sesay says through the windows of her new tower.

  “I bought the wrong sticks,” I say, sweeping them back into a neat pile. “Sorry if I don’t come from the kind of family that can afford bone and gold like yours.”

  Sesay laughs. “My family is from Lesser Poloko. I earned these by working evenings sweeping up slaughterhouse floors with my mother for a year straight.”

  I’m surprised to hear Sesay is comfy stock. Maybe a little more rural than ours, on the other end of Grace Mountain, but she is more like me and Kasim than any other student in this room.