“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 what 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.