“They’re dead!” Monti cries. “There’s no way she can heal them. You’re just saying that because you think I’m a dumb child.”
“I don’t think you’re dumb, Monti, but I’m telling you, I have faith in our rangers. They’ll save us. Just you watch.”
Monti falls quiet for a while. Salo can almost hear the thoughts churning inside that little brain of his. “Why aren’t you out there?” he finally whispers.
The heat of shame works its way up Salo’s cheeks. For a child to ask him such a penetrating question, the exact question he’s been trying not to ask himself this whole time . . . it makes him wonder if maybe his shame is painted all over his face in stark colors.
Niko and my brothers are somewhere out there fighting tikoloshe for their clan while I’m cowering like a child in my aba’s bedchamber. Why aren’t you out there, Salo? Why aren’t you a man?
How to answer? “I’m not a ranger. I wouldn’t last a second out there.”
“But why aren’t you?”
“Why aren’t I what?”
“A ranger,” Monti says. “Why aren’t you?”
“Does it matter?” Salo winces at his own tone. “Look, not all of us can be . . . brave like rangers. Bravery is . . . their talent, I suppose. But some of us have other talents that are just as valuable.”
Silence stretches painfully in the chamber, punctuated by rangers shouting in the distance. “So it’s true what they say about you,” Monti says after a time. “That you are a siratata.”
Salo retracts his arm from Monti’s shoulders and leans his head against the wall. “That’s not a nice word. And just because I’m not a ranger, it doesn’t mean I’m . . . that.”
Salo can’t even say it, can barely think it. Siratata. The Yerezi term for a man so misguided he does not know his place in the world. An ineffectual man. An impotent man. A worthless, cowardly man. All rolled into one nasty word: siratata.
“Lots of men aren’t rangers,” he goes on. “Matter of fact, most men aren’t rangers. Your aba isn’t a ranger, is he?”
Monti raises his chin defiantly. “He’s a stonemason, but he can fight. And I bet he’s out there right now, fighting beside the rangers like the other men. I saw them. They are brave, and so am I.” With a determined glint in his eye, Monti rises from the floor. “I’m going.”
Salo stares up at him, not believing his ears. “Are you mad? Sit back down! I’m not letting you go out there!”
“I need to make sure my ama is all right,” Monti says. “She left the kraal in the morning. I need to know she’s safe.”
“I’m still not letting you go, Monti. You saw what’s out there, didn’t you?”
By the way Monti narrows his eyes, Salo knows he’s about to say something mean. “I’m not asking for your permission, coward.”
Salo represses his rising temper. Monti is just frightened. That’s all. He’s a frightened child who has just seen people die. Take a deep breath. Start again. “Monti, sit down, will you? Please. I’ll take you to your ama when this is over, I promise. But I’d be a bad friend if I let you go out there right now. Are we not friends?”
Some of the heat in Monti’s expression mellows out, but he scowls as he sits down.
“Thank you,” Salo says with genuine relief. A quarter hour passes in silence, the shouts outside getting fewer and farther between.
Then Monti says, “I’m thirsty.”
A combination of fear, complacency, and misplaced trust clouds Salo’s judgment, and he fails to discern Monti’s scheme until it’s too late. By the time he returns to the chamber with a half-filled earthenware pitcher of water from the parlor, Monti is gone, with nothing but a yawning window to show that he was ever there.
The pitcher slips from Salo’s hands and shatters on the floor, spilling water everywhere. He races for the door and barges out of the hut. “Monti!”
The boy is nowhere to be found. He’s probably halfway to his hut by now.
Salo takes off at a sprint, charging across the chief’s compound. The mystic Seal has disappeared from the skies, but the sounds of battle have not yet ceased.
Heartbeats later he passes the chief’s apiary, now shrouded in darkness beneath the boughs of ancient gum trees. He spots two young Ajaha spinning and twisting around each other amid a party of angry tikoloshe, their spears flashing with red wards as they dance through the air.
The duo moves as one, their bones reinforced with the queen’s arcane blessing, their minds and reflexes synced through their red steel. Salo watches a dexterous swing lop off the skeletal arm of a tikoloshe, but the ranger who inflicted the wound is already pivoting to thrust his weapon into the chest of another while his comrade leaps to cleave the first tikoloshe in half. Dusty bones crack and crumble into clouds that disperse with the wind, and the creatures screech, their eyes burning with rage like the white sun.
The rangers are too fast for them, too strong, too brave.
Salo keeps running, and soon the battle is behind him. He flies down the stepped path to the first of two compounds on the way to Monti’s hut. Dusk has fallen, so all the huts here are lit like lanterns; their glowvines droop from the thatching and crawl up the brickwork like bioluminescent serpents. Salo doesn’t notice the bodies littering the compound until he almost trips over one.
He stops, his throat constricting as he recognizes the corpse as Aago Ruparo, a witty old woman with an easy smile, the clan’s most respected beer brewer. Now she’s nothing but a bloody sack of newly dead meat wrapped in a dusty kitenge.
Tears blur his vision. His breath comes in strenuous gasps. This isn’t supposed to happen. Not in their kraal. Not here.
A shriek to his right brings him crashing back to his senses, and he looks just in time to see a young boy get slashed across the neck and chest by a talon, his small body flung across the compound like a rag doll. He lands gracelessly on his belly yards away, his neck twisted unnaturally so that Salo gets to see his face—and the shock painted onto it in tears and dust, and the vacant eyes that won’t blink anymore.
Salo howls and rushes to the boy, crumpling to his knees and cradling him in his arms. Blood slicks them both, its coppery tang thick in the air, mingling with the reek of ruptured bowels, the smell of life tipping irretrievably into death. Salo holds Monti’s limp body in his trembling arms and doesn’t let go.
He is vaguely aware of a deathly presence drawing nearer, the smell of ruin and burning things. He senses the presence watching him curiously. Hears it growl at him, feels it raise a talon, but he makes no move to escape what’s coming—he can’t.
The two rangers he spotted earlier approach. The tikoloshe shrieks as it turns to face them, a ghastly sound that might as well be the rusty gates of the underworld squeaking open. Rangers and wraith collide in a battle of red steel against bone. The shrieks die out abruptly.
Then one of the rangers speaks. “What the devil are you doing out here? Forget that; just get indoors! Now, brother.” Jio or Sibu, one of his brothers, though Salo isn’t sure which one. And though he hears the individual words, they don’t string together into coherent sentences.