She keeps going even after the inkanyamba spirit expends its power and its stealth field weakens and fades, and only when she reaches a place miles away, where the Artery begins to dip after having climbed a gentle knoll, does she slow down and bring her buck to a halt. A chill from her rain-soaked garments has begun to work itself into her skin. She shivers and turns to look.
In the distance, the town of Kageru is a hazy smudge. Explosions and black smoke can still be seen even through the rain. She knows they won’t continue for much longer.
While she watches, a sphere of black, shimmering light balloons above the town with multiple arcs of color whipping around it in a vengeful cloud. Its rays seem to twist her eyes into seeing a lord of shadows whose power is so glaring it brings tears to her eyes. Many will die beneath its light in retribution today—many have already died, and maybe she deserved to be one of them.
Maybe what she deserves will catch up to her one day.
Ilapara prods her buck into motion and rides southward.
5: Musalodi
Khaya-Siningwe—Yerezi Plains
A shriek from the devil herself trails them, but Salo and Monti do not stop to look back at the thing that emitted it or to find out whether it is pursuing them. They run.
Down a bushy shortcut to the chief’s compound. Through a cabbage patch when the shortcut isn’t short enough, trampling newly sprouted seedlings with their sandals. Screams come from all over the kraal, rangers shouting at the edge of Salo’s hearing. The foreign Seal keeps writhing above the kraal like a black sun. Salo doesn’t let go of Monti’s hand.
A cloud of dust bursts up from the earth near a borehole to their far left, where a clanswoman has just finished filling a ewer with water. Salo hears a deafening screech, then sees through the dust a skeletal figure heaving itself out of the ground like a rotted corpse from the grave. The woman squeals and starts to run when she sees it, too; like lightning, the thing bolts forward and catches her before she has moved even three feet. It lifts her struggling form toward the Seal like she weighs nothing—only to dig into her flesh with its talons and rip her apart in an explosion of gore.
Shock. The world slows down for a moment, and Salo’s ears ring with the echoes of the woman’s last screams and of Monti’s screams and of his own screams, and the horror of what they’ve just witnessed almost pulls him down to his knees.
Somehow, he manages to keep running. But Monti trips over the irrigation channel at the edge of the cabbage patch, and his matje case slips from his hand as he falls, rattling to the ground and spilling its contents into the channel and all over the tilled soil. He should leave it be; instead, he crawls to his case and tries to gather his scattered pebbles. With a muttered curse, Salo backtracks, sweeps the child into his arms, and promptly gets back to the business of running.
“My board!” Monti cries.
“Leave it.”
Monti squirms in Salo’s grip. “Put me down! I can run on my own.”
“Not as fast as I can.”
By now the suns have dipped beyond those brooding mountains in the west, staining the sky a vibrant ocher that matches the glowvines coming to life all over the kraal. The Seal is a foreign entity above the kraal, a stark black orb against the heavens.
As the large musuku tree just off center of the chief’s compound comes into view, its boughs laden with half-ripe yellow fruits and creeping glowvines that make it look like it’s on fire, a dense swarm of flies buzzes overhead, and Salo thinks he hears a shrill laugh coming from within the mass.
Then a flash of red in the bushes off to his right makes him freeze. Monti gives a smothered cry as the bushes shake on their stems, but to their relief, three spear-wielding men clad in red loincloths emerge, each bearing an elliptical shield of hide and spears of enchanted red steel.
Ajaha rangers.
Panting, Salo puts Monti down, but the boy clings to his trembling hand. “Aba D,” Salo says, addressing the ranger in front. “What’s going on? We saw tikoloshe!”
As VaSiningwe’s younger brother, and a general who commands the five-hundred-strong regiment of Siningwe rangers, Aba Deitari is the most important member of the chief’s council of advisors. He is also quite intimidating, if only because he’s always frowning at something. The taller, darker man with him is Aba Akuri, his equally standoffish husband and lieutenant, and the third ranger is a young man Salo knows as Jaliso.
“An Umadi witch flew right past our defenses,” Aba D says. “Those creatures are her work.” He searches the surrounding forests with his coldly determined gaze. “We’ll handle her, though. You should get to shelter. Now.”
“Is she alone?” Salo asks. “Are there others?”
Aba D brushes past him without answering. “Get that child to safety, Salo. Don’t make me ask you again.”
“My name’s Monti,” Monti says a little petulantly. Aba D isn’t listening, though. He and his men are back to searching for something in the woods around them.
“She’s here somewhere,” he says. “I can feel it.”
Instead of running the rest of the way to the chief’s compound, Salo and Monti watch with morbid curiosity as the three rangers fan out into the woods, treading softly on their feet like skulking predators. They all stand rigid when the swarm of flies reappears above, moving through the air like no flies Salo has ever seen, like they’re of one mind. They hover in place for a wavering moment before they swirl into a funnel and swoop downward.
“Watch out!” Salo cries, but Jaliso doesn’t turn around in time to raise his shield. The swarm slams into his side with surprising force, knocking him back several yards. He hits the trunk of a tree with a crack so sickening Salo doubts he’ll ever get up again.
While Aba Akuri rushes to check on the fallen ranger, Aba D starts shouting at Salo and Monti to run, which they promptly do, but the swarm veers in their direction and drops right in front of them, reconstituting itself into a woman.
A naked woman. Every inch of her lithe body is a swirling canvas of black tattoos, even her face. But the cosmic shards pulsing on both of her arms, an elaborate network of lines with a metallic sheen, are aglow with the moon’s power, and so are her eyes, which burn in the dusk like fluorescent rubies. Her thick braids stand on either side of her head like curved horns. She snarls, exposing an array of teeth sharpened to needle points.
It’s Salo’s first encounter with a foreign mystic, and he knows just by looking at her that she is a disciple of the one whose Seal is terrorizing the skies, that in fact she is the one who cast it on his behalf.
Salo puts himself in front of Monti, his eyes never leaving the witch, this monster who would harm his people. “Why are you doing this?” he demands in the Umadi tongue, guessing she will understand. “What have we done to you?”
She cocks her head to one side, surprise briefly registering on her heavily marked face. Then her eyes dart behind him, and the next thing he knows, Aba D is slamming into her with his shield.
The Yerezi ancestral talent—awakened exclusively in the blood of Yerezi mystics—is the ability to share with the nonmagical a portion of their arcane power, thereby endowing them with either mental or physical magical abilities. While the former, reserved only for women of the Asazi, turns them into a sort of subordinate mystic, the latter transforms even what would be a warrior of average ability into an unstoppable brute with supernatural strength, exceptional reflexes, and resistance to harmful sorcery.