Monti is dead. I let him out of my sight, and now he’s dead.
A third ranger approaches. His voice is familiar, but it sounds distant, faint. Unreal, just like the rest of it. It can’t be real. “Pits. Is that Monti? Oh, Salo.” A hand settles on Salo’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
Monti is dead. I failed to protect him.
“Salo, we can’t leave you out here.”
“You can stay with him, if you want,” says another voice. “That was the last of them.”
“All right. You should go check on your aba and the general. Let me know if they call a meeting.”
“Will do.”
Salo doesn’t know how long he stays in the compound after his brothers leave. Long enough for people to start trickling out of their huts, ululating in grief, covering the bodies with sheets, and carrying them away. Long enough for Monti’s tearful parents to come and weep over their son’s body. Long enough for Niko to have to pry Salo’s hands from Monti so that his parents can take him back to their hut and prepare him for committal.
Once they’ve left, Niko puts a hand around Salo’s nape. Grief shimmers in his earnest brown eyes, as well as cold fury, the kind only vengeance can quench. “I know Monti was like a brother to you. We’ll make the Umadi pay for this; do you understand? We’ll avenge Monti and all those who died here today. I swear it.”
Niko doesn’t know yet, but he will soon. They all will. Salo already knows it as well as he knows that he is a coward, yet another stain that will come to define him, the thickest and ugliest to date: Monti is dead, and it’s because I didn’t protect him. Monti is dead because of me. I killed Monti.
6: The Maidservant
Lake Nyasiningwe—Yerezi Plains
Somewhere across the lake, a swarm of flies enters a dank cave and slowly gathers into a vortex from which a woman emerges, a woman who was once someone else before she was the Maidservant.
Black tattoos mark the entirety of her body; she has worn them for years, but the self-inflicted spells they hold ensure that she still feels as much pain as she did on the day they were scored onto her skin. Her every step, her every gesture, sends ripples of agony down her spine, but she embraces the pain, revels in it, for it is the cornerstone of her power, the fuel that feeds the hatred keeping her sane and focused.
Inside the cave, the Maidservant finds a mystic in black garments flipping through the pages of an old book by a slab of rock carved into the shape of a table. A few torches mounted on the walls sputter with flames, casting a trembling light across the range of sorcerous paraphernalia housed in the cave—from alchemical apparatuses to dark shelves overflowing with tomes.
Her pet, a monstrous hyena more metal than flesh, doesn’t move from the ledge of rock it is lounging on when it spots the Maidservant. It twitches its three metal horns and gives her a grotesque parody of a smile, complete with a low, rumbling growl. The Maidservant is assessing the threat it poses when the trap springs around her, so quickly she can do nothing but watch.
To the naked eye, nothing has changed, but the wards of Void craft that have suddenly gone up around her—designed specifically to confine a Void mystic—might as well be walls of barbed wire. She can neither touch them nor call upon the Void while trapped inside; if she did either, the Void would warp wrongly around her shards to lethal effect. She stills and waits for her captor to make her next move.
The mystic closes her book and fixes her with a cunning gaze. “I take it you were successful. I could hear the screams from here.” She speaks in the Maidservant’s native tongue with a thick accent. Her voice is cold, smooth, like a ghost eel in water.
“I’ve done my part,” the Maidservant says, maintaining her composure. “Now it’s time to do yours.”
“Ah, but loose ends tend to unravel, do they not? And you, my little Umadi witch, are a very loose end. Tell me: What would you do in my rather precarious position?”
Hot anger spreads beneath the Maidservant’s skin and makes it burn like she has painted herself with fire. She grits her teeth, harnessing the ensuing wave of hatred to bolster the door in her mind—that door only she can see, to a realm of such power it makes her tremble every time even a granule of it flows through her veins.
The door shudders violently and groans from the force battering against it from the other side. Sometimes it’ll creak open, and the power will lick out like a flame, blackening her soul with the desire to just let go and become its vessel and thrall.
Maybe I should give in, she thinks now. I could let the door burst open, let every fell beast from the other side come out and tear the flesh off this presumptuous mystic.
You will lose yourself to it.
The Maidservant summons her hatred and pushes back against that last stray thought. “If you try to kill me, you’ll find that I’m not easy prey. In any case, I took certain measures to make sure you’d pay dearly for betraying me.”
The mystic tilts her head, amused. “Measures?”
“One wrong move, and your whole tribe will know about our arrangement, that it was you who orchestrated an attack against your own people.” An empty threat, but the Maidservant puts enough of a bite in her words to make it sound real enough.
“And just how would you manage that?” the mystic says, her eyes sparkling.
“Make a wrong move, and you’ll find out.”
On the rock ledge, the hyena emits another low growl. Its master stares at the Maidservant from across the cave for a long time.
The Maidservant doesn’t flinch from her gaze. She knows she could die here, and she curses herself for walking so blindly into a trap, but she doesn’t flinch. For a moment, the air in the cave seems charged, poised to turn against her.
The mystic smiles. “Well then. I suppose there’s no reason for us to part ways on a sour note.”
The Maidservant says nothing. Still watching her, the mystic picks up a scorpion pendant lying on her table and approaches. Her skirts sweep the cave’s floor as she walks. “Your payment, as agreed. An unbound Yerezi talisman of the highest quality.”
She tosses the scorpion talisman into the air, and it slips through the Void wards. The Maidservant catches it effortlessly and holds the object up to the torchlight.
A finely crafted artifact. Red steel and silver, its carapace chased with moongold, a clear crystal serving as the sting. Currents of complex sorcery throb away from it in rhythmic pulses. “How do I get it to answer to me?”
The mystic shows her teeth in a disparaging smile. “How else? You claim it with blood, of course.”
“Of course.” With a single thought the Maidservant spreads her left palm and causes the tattoos singed there to inch apart and split her skin so that it wells with blood. While the mystic grimaces, the Maidservant relishes the spike of pain. Only after she has rubbed every inch of the scorpion over her bleeding palm does she command her tattoos to knit together again.
Then the scorpion stirs, and lights strobe out from its crystal sting, sweeping the cave. A presence rises from the pendant and tries to enter her mind; she lets it. For a fleeting moment the presence explores her knowledge of ciphers, which it quickly uses to establish a telepathic system of communication that will allow her to control the talisman with her thoughts. Its first message is a ripple of power that reveals to her the extent of its capabilities. The Maidservant allows herself a smile.