“Fight, fight!” I’m roaring, right before the wave crashes over the bridge.
Osun’s massive crocodiles drop out of the wave like falling mangoes in fruit season. The force of the water sweeps some of our men off the bridge and into the lagoon. The crocs, happy to be near so many breathing, bleeding human bodies, catch two, three in their massive jaws. Femi’s band peppers them with bullets.
Shonuga and her band go past me, screaming head-first into the oncoming horde. I whip my chain out and clear a path for them, and they run into burning dust and embers, slashing as they go.
Ogun emerges from the midst of the crawling mass and swings at Oba. My mother’s machete catches the Eyo on one shoulder, ignites her agbada. Oba reels, screeches, and it’s a thousand nails scratching into concrete. Ogun runs, shoulder behind her shield, and checks the Eyo. Oba grabs the shield, and both of them tumble over the parapet into the lagoon.
Kehinde, next to me, claps her hands on the head of a nearby shadow, and the thing dissolves into black sand.
“Osun!” she screams.
I look out to the end of the bridge. The shadows are like an endless loop, always coming. Something is producing them in real time, and no prizes for guessing who that is.
Kill it at the source. If we can take Osun out, there won’t be any new soldiers for Aganju.
“Come with me,” I say.
She shakes her head, slams another shadow into dust. “Taiwo,” she says.
Right. She has to stay by her brother. It seems I am on my own.
I look back at the airport force. Just as we planned, Aziza has engaged Oya and my mother has engaged Oba. Shonuga and Kehinde lead the combat line, while Femi and her shooting gang clean up from behind. The force is working through the shadows like a spear through flesh. Now is the best for me to get to it, before they tire out.
I sheath my machete and track back to Femi, who is taking pot shots and hitting shadows with ebo-tinged bullets.
“I need the horse,” I say.
She dismounts without hesitation, and I heave myself on and charge Aburo forward, past the fighters. I whip my chain left and right as I ride, iron and fire catching the shadows that dare to come close. My insides boil hot, my hands scalding. Sweat stings my eyes like mosquitoes. My tongue is parched and the wind blows concrete dust in my mouth, but I’m no longer in touch with my senses. There is only wind in my ears, and chaos in my head. Embers of fallen shadows settle about me like soot from the sky, and I am a fiery hound burning them to dust, moving too fast to keep pace even with myself. With every shadow fallen, I feel myself slip, overwhelmed with the desire to kill, to destroy.
Ahead, I can see the white of the Eyo agbada through the mass of shadows, the fìlà perched delicately still, despite the fact that out of the bottom of the agbada pours forth an endless stream of shadows, a conveyor belt of evil child-soldiers birthed by the now reversed-fertility orisha, Osun.
One swipe of my machete is all it’ll take.
A few yards from the Eyo, I swing one leg off the horse, slip away and let him run off. I land on the tarred road, tumble and find myself squatting in front of the bowed head of the Eyo, sitting cross-legged, the fìlà lowered over its face, frills dangling like a bamboo curtain. I pull my machete from my sheath.
The Eyo throws its head back and lets the fìlà fall off.
“Boo,” says Eshu.
Every single thing around me pops out of oblivion. The Eyo, the shadows on my side of the bridge, everything. I’m suddenly standing in front of thin air.
My collarbone sings for the first time in a long time. My senses are overwhelmed by a whoosh, a dry, hot breeze as if I’m standing in the desert on a sunny day. I grind my teeth and taste fine dust. Suddenly I’m sweating from invisible heat and I smell burning, but not of the kind that comes from dry fire; I smell ash, choking gas, melting—the kind that comes from a liquid, flowing fire, as of melted iron in a furnace.
I turn around.
The figure before me, his back to the ongoing battle between the real shadow horde and the airport force, is robed in red, in the same manner as my mother was when I first met her; except his is only a half-robe, with the front open and displaying black armour, built for a warrior that is not him, so that it seems ill-fitting. He holds two swords—not machetes like me or my mother, but short, narrow swords with blades that look like they’re constantly in a hearth, as if magma flows within them. When he breathes, smoke comes from his nostrils, like a dragon’s on a misty morning. Energy crackles about him in the same manner as Sango, and I taste metal in my mouth. Unlike Sango, he is not bald; his hair is woven up to the back of his head in traditional shuku cornrows, decorated with cowrie shells in the same way Olokun’s was, so that it makes him almost normal, almost human, almost not a monster.
Aganju’s signature is too familiar for me not to remember it. From the touch on Fati’s fingers at the palace last year, to my battle with Ajala at the barracks; I remember it all.
But I have no time for nostalgia.
Aganju turns away from me, lifts up both swords, and plunges them into the tarmac of the Third Mainland Bridge.
There a string of little explosions, like bombs under the bridge breaking apart the concrete. At first it creaks, then slowly cracks appear, snaking from where his swords have entered the ground. The fissures hiss and liquid fire flows from the blades into them, and they crumble, a yawning gap opening up in the tarmac.
The third mainland bridge severs into two.
Half the shadow horde falls through the hole, but so do half of the airport force. Before my eyes, another huge wave crashes over the top. More of the airport force topples into the water.
The horde descends on those left. I can’t see my mother or Kehinde. Shonuga creams for her men to retreat, retreat, and then Femi is trying to reload and shoot at the same time, and she’s screaming for Aziza to open the portal and get everyone out of here, but Aziza is nowhere to be found, in the flurry of arms and blades and black sand and blood and grey skin.
Aganju faces me again, grinning, and I realise this was his plan all along.
“I told you we will meet again,” he says, then moves. I ready myself, chain wound tight around my fist, gripping my machete.
Aganju rolls both his swords, takes one step, two steps, then disappears into thin air.
What the—?
There is the heat of fire on my face, like a blacksmith’s hearth, and before I can think, Aganju materialises before me and brings down a sword. I have enough time to parry it with my machete, but the second sword comes too fast, and sinks into my ribs.
My whole body sets on fire.
I should know fire. I exist as fire. But the fire that consumes me now is not mine, is an impurity, like a fever tearing through my body. I feel the sting of Aganju’s magma flowing within me, threading through me like it did the tarmac. I grit my teeth and fall to my knees.
My vision dims. I see the shadow horde overrunning our airport force in the distance. Grey and black, sucking the life out of everything they touch and consuming every last ounce of life Lagos has left.
Aganju kneels before me, his face right in front of mine.
“You should’ve minded your business,” he says, clicking the back of his tongue.
That stupid smirk on his face and the unnatural pointiness of his canines are the last things I remember before it all goes dark.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I’M IN LOVE with the darkness, but the darkness does not love me back.
This is the first thought that pops into my head as I wake up, my forehead split across the middle by a migraine. It takes a lot of blinking to realise I’m somewhere completely dark, very much like my overhead luggage compartment back at the airport. There is a running sting in my left side, as if I have a burst appendix. I feel terribly hot and cold at the same time, sweating as if with a fever. My stomach burns in the pit, like the embers of a night fire left into the morning, unquenched.
I try to move. I cannot.
I’m not bound. For a moment, I’m taken back to my time of in captivity at Ajala’s palace. I know Aganju would not stoop so low as to use a wizard’s rituals when he can charmcast liquid fire forth from himself. Yet there is so much familiar about this: I’m unable to move any part of my body, save to blink and lick my lips. There is a stiffness in my neck that I cannot creak to solve. My esper is not only unreachable, it is completely absent, inaccessible. The déjà vu is too strong to ignore.
The first thing I try to do is not get delirious. But the passage of time in the dark is a tricky thing, and a few seconds, minutes, hours or days after, I feel like I am a bodyless entity spinning in an endless vortex of darkness, and I soon lose grasp of which way is up or down and I think I puke on myself a bit, and I smell urine before I realise I’ve pissed on myself too.
I might’ve cried a bit too, who knows? Me, David Mogo, godhunter of Lagos, son of Ogun, heir to the mantle of god of war: I’ve lost my powers twice within a year, been captured as many times and pissed myself in the process. Some god of war, that.
I sleep and wake several times, seeing nothing but my mother falling over the bridge with Oba, me calling out her name. Seeing the airport force overwhelmed, the airport community destroyed by shadows, seeing Fati looking for her knife right before the life is sucked out of her by the horde. I wonder if I’ve had the essence sucked out of me by a shadow, and my useless human husk left behind as punishment, to almost taste true power and then have it yanked from beneath my nose.
I sleep, and the next time I wake up, it is because I am yanked out of the darkness and dipped into liquid fire.
IT STARTS AS a sensation in my side. Pain bites hard into my consciousness and I snap awake, straight into a throat-rending scream.
“Welcome,” Aganju says.
The State House is no longer the State House. The place that once used to house the governor and his administration has been remodelled into a semi-palace. I kneel in front of Aganju in what used to be a massive boardroom. The large meeting desk is still right there with its accompanying swivel chairs, coffee corner, floor-to-ceiling remote-controlled blinds and lights embedded in the ceiling. There is air conditioning, working perfectly, something I have not felt on my skin in a very long time—I get goosebumps instantly. Save for the throne at the far end of the room—a real throne, cut from a glittering, unrecognizable stone, igneous in nature, shaped like a mountain with a seat within it—this could literally be any Upper Island office after The Falling.
There are faces cut into the throne’s stone, many faces I cannot recognise, and they seem to move, blink; their eyes flicker every now and then. The room has a very high ceiling, and I can see the pale squares on the walls where the photos of the president, governor and everyone else has been taken down. In a few places, splashes of black soot surround white human outlines on the wall.
Aside from rolling my neck, I’m still unable to move of my own accord. I struggle to get up, gritting my teeth. Aganju, who sits in the throne, says nothing, watching me. Standing next to him are the three Eyos, still and watchful.
After a while, he raises his hand and flicks it at the wrist, and immediately, my side starts to burn again. I grit my teeth, my joints stiff as stone. I feel warm fluid trickle down my side and patter on the floor.
“David, David, David,” Aganju says, shaking his head. He’s not a terrible-looking fellow at all; his form is much better off than his brother Sango’s. He is dressed almost in the exact same way Ajala was—in a long, flowing jalabiya, except his is not white, but a flowing red with black stripes, which makes him look like a priest. Maybe that’s what he considers himself: some sort of priest, saviour, messiah.
“Stop struggling,” he says. “Painful to watch you do that, like a fly in a closed fist.”
“Then free me,” I say, gritting my teeth. “See if you can take me when we’re the same size.”
He laughs, a schoolboy chuckle. He sounds quite refined, almost like Taiwo, but with a lot more edge, something that tells me this is the kind of person who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
“You think I care about fighting you?” he says. “I’m not my brother, you get? I’m not you or your kind. I’m not concerned about battle, just about winning. The less stress winning costs me, the better.” He waves his hand at the Eyos. “Besides, I have people to do the fighting for me. And I have this.”
He balls his hand into a tight fist and my side burns. My body doubles over, struggling to contain the pain. Aganju chuckles again.
“Where are they?” I manage to ask, licking my lips, spittle dripping down to the marble tiles in front of me. “What have you done with them?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he says.
“I’m going to kill you. You know that, right? One mistake, and you will not last another minute.”
He chuckles again. “Don’t overestimate yourself, David. There’s a lot of me, and so little of you, you know?”
“What do you want?”
“Now this is the kind of question I don’t like,” Aganju says, and he sounds genuinely angry. “How can you be asking me this, David? After all this time we’ve spent dancing about one another, you’re asking me what I want? You know what I want, David. You’ve always known.”
“To go home?”
He claps. “See? Smart little people, all of you. Yes, it’s that simple. We”—he waves his arm at the whole room—“just want to go home, David. Just like you. We all want the same thing.”
“No, we don’t. You are a mass murderer and I’m trying to save Lagos from being obliterated by your stupid quest for power.”
“Power?” He sounds as if I’ve accused him of stealing meat from a pot of stew. He looks to the Eyos. “Look at this man, talking about power. What power? I said, we all want the same thing, David. I’m trying to save my people, and you’re trying to save yours.”
He rises from the throne. “Tell me, Mr Saviour, what is it that I have done that you haven’t? I’ve been locked out of my own home, and the first thing I tried to do was get into a corporeal realm; this one, to be exact. I was trying to use a proxy to do just that, but you killed him. You killed him to save your people. You, David, started the killing here. You are the murderer.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I say, my anger roiling. “That you’re just trying to save your people?”
“All I’ve ever wanted is just to find home here. But then came you, chasing after me with everything you had. And your band of police too, who made it their duty to not only round up my project—creatures I spent half my life working on—but also to thwart every effort I made to get back into this realm, and to bring all my people here, in one place. Your Lagos just happened to be the place, that’s all. Most of us were already here, anyway.”
“What are you saying?” I scowl. “This is our home, and you came and destroyed it. Why don’t you go to your home?”
“I didn’t destroy your home. It was Obatala—you should meet him by the way, you two would love each other; big on saving the world, you two. He cast all of us here, including all my creative projects you guys made meat of. We did not choose to come down here of our own accord, my friend. Orun was sealed off from us the minute we popped out of it and were thrown into our different realms. If I know Obatala, he really wants to keep us out of it forever.”
He paces for a beat. “Tell me, David, if it was you, wouldn’t you try to get your people settled into a new life too? Wouldn’t you want to make things better for them, try to stop them from getting killed by hostile forces in the land in which they have found themselves? And tell me, if you had the advantages I had, wouldn’t you have used those advantages, to prevent the oppression of your people, even at the cost of others?”
I’m speechless, stunned at how he has rationalised it all for himself. In his story, we are the enemy. I am the villain.
“So, what do you want with me, now?” I say.
“What do you want with us?”
He shrugs, returns to his chair. “You’ll see. Maybe you’ll figure it out for yourself, if I show you how your people can suffer when you’re not there to help them; maybe then you can understand what I want. And after that… maybe you will even help me.”
He balls his hand into a fist, and my side sings, and I find myself on the floor. One of the Eyos comes up to me then, places a hand on my head, and I’m suddenly plunged back into the prison of darkness in my head, with only the pain of fire in my side to remind me I’m still human.
Chapter Thirty-Five
AGANJU TAKES ME on a rollercoaster ride of pain.
First stop is Aziza. I wake up in the prison in my own head, a place that I have by now made my own, somehow familiar. I hear the scream of the whirlwind deity, a grating, throat-rending sound. First, a whimper that pulls me out of sleep (or not sleep, which is something you do on purpose, but unconsciousness, slipping into the void) and I find myself listening to something like a dog in suffering. Then there’s a scream.
It sounds like someone losing a finger. First, the yelp of surprise, then the scream of disbelief, then the wail of resignation and horror. I want to rise, but I cannot. I’m unable to move, to help, to do anything.
“No, no, no,” the whirlwind god is saying. “No, no.” Then, another long piercing scream.
I don’t know what they’re doing to him, and I’m not sure I want to know.
Before long, I find myself weeping for Aziza, whimpering with him. And before I can find respite from this, it suddenly stops, and I’m back alone with myself. But rather than be grateful for the silence, I find myself craving his voice, wishing to hear something, anything that tells me he is no longer suffering because of me.
David Mogo Godhunter Page 24
