“Not that I don’t want to—”
“But what would people say, right?”
Niko turns his face away.
“Don’t worry. I understand.” Salo really does, but his voice grows bitter anyway. “You’re risking a lot even talking to me right now.”
He might as well have slapped Niko in the face. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Dear Ama, I’m messing this up. Salo looks heavenward and curses under his breath. “I know,” he sighs. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Compose yourself and start again. “Look, I came here to thank you. You’ve never said a harsh word to me, even when I deserved it. You’ve defended me from scorn, even at the risk of your reputation. You were there for me when Monti died, and you took my side when everyone else blamed me. You’re a good man, Niko. Better than most, and I hope that one day I’ll earn back your friendship. That’s all I wanted to say.”
Salo turns and starts walking away, trying to escape the riptide of emotions, and he gets several paces away before Niko calls his name.
“Salo.”
He stops. Waits. He knows what he wishes Niko would say, and he knows just how unlikely he is to hear it, but as the silence stretches, he holds his breath, and hope fills the cavity of his chest.
“Come back to us in one piece.”
Salo doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t trust that his face won’t betray too much of the emptiness, the sheer desolation, he feels from having his hopes crushed. He nods and keeps walking.
For the first eight years of his life, one of Salo’s best friends was a giant metal cat. While most people feared it, often more than they feared its master, Salo knew the beast would never turn on him, given whom it answered to.
At least until the night its master betrayed him and set in motion the events that would culminate in her death. Then the cat returned to its post by the kraal’s gates, where it would lie in wait for the next clan mystic to rouse it from its slumber.
The suns are high when Salo walks out of the kraal, lugging the sack of belongings he’s packed for his journey. He has worn his leather harness and fastened to it his bow, a half-filled quiver, and a hatchet. He has filled his waterskins, honed his steel hunting knife, and rubbed his witchwood knife with an alchemical preservative.
Nimara follows him out carrying the clan’s totem staff, which she unearthed for him from some shadowy corner of AmaSiningwe’s vacant hut, along with the totem’s ancient leather saddlery. A young boy she recruited is hauling the saddlery in a wheelbarrow; apparently, no one else wanted to touch anything that came out of the hut.
Word travels quickly around the kraal, so a crowd is waiting for them at the gates, with expressions ranging from curious to incensed. A quick scan tells Salo his brothers and a small group of young Ajaha are among the latter. Figures.
Mutters of “witch” and “siratata” ripple across the crowd as he unburdens himself of his luggage. He feigns indifference, but the whispers are like barbs digging into his heart. How will he ever win these people over?
Next to him Nimara proffers the staff. “Don’t mind them. They’ll get over it.”
He doesn’t believe her, but he reaches for the staff anyway, only to freeze when he sees VaSiningwe, Aba D, and a contingent of the chief’s council looking joyless as they walk out of the gates in a group.
“Ignore them,” Nimara says. “Actually, it’s good that you have so many witnesses. It’ll be harder for them to reject you once the totem responds positively. Now claim it already, or I’ll do it for you.”
“Okay, okay.” Salo finally accepts the staff from her, and a strange tingle ripples down his whole body when he touches it. He ignores the surge of unwelcome memories that follows, focusing instead on the feel of the staff in his hands. An old thing, this staff, a serpentine affair of twisting witchwood and red steel, just a little longer than he is tall, though light as air. Like the totem connected to it, the staff has served every Siningwe mystic since the clan’s inception. And now it is his.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Nimara goads him. “You know what to do, don’t you?”
He does, or at least he has a general idea.
Shutting the rest of the world from his senses, he walks toward the watchtower overlooking the gates, where the totem sits on an overhanging beam, looking down at the gathered clanspeople like a proud king. He was named Mukuni the Conqueror after the leopard constellation of the high summer skies, and whatever sorcery that made him and all the other Yerezi totems is a secret guarded in the most impenetrable vaults of the Queen’s Kraal.
A breeze whistles by, and Salo gets the sensation of a shadow stalking him from behind, the cold glint of metal and sharp teeth. He forces himself not to look over his shoulder. He will not harm you if he responds to you.
First, Salo claims the staff. Just one push of essence, and it becomes his, connected to him by an intangible tendril that settles at the back of his mind. The staff’s secrets immediately unravel before him, and he sees that it is actually a mental lens of a kind, with the power to focus the mind onto a single task, thus greatly augmenting spell-casting ability.
He takes a long, uneven breath, trying not to be overwhelmed.
Next, he extends his free hand toward the totem and casts his mystic Seal for the very first time in his life.
The patterns erupt into the skies from his cosmic shards, knitting together before the watchtower into a dazzling arrangement of lines and flickering shapes that quickly resolves into something distinct: a cube of pure diamond spinning rapidly beneath a twinkling red star. Its hypnotic rays reach out to everyone looking at it to tell them of a young mystic born to a house of leopards.
For a fleeting instant the star flares to an almost blinding degree as something rises from the bowels of a deep slumber to answer its call, and when the Seal winks out of existence a second later, the metal cat on the beam has opened his neon-blue eyes.
Gasps and murmurs from the gathered clanspeople. Instant awareness glitters in those eyes. Even the way the cat abruptly rises to his feet is graceful.
He is alive, but the totem is no ordinary tronic beast. He has no flesh to speak of and is completely metalloid. Yet in the blink of an eye, most of his exterior transforms through sorcery from exposed silvery musculature to a glossy pelt as white as soured milk, with spots the color of burnished copper. The cat’s underlying metalloid structure remains visible on his face and legs, however, which, next to his spotted pelt, gives him a rather striking appearance.
All eyes watch as he rustles the mane of sharp erectile metal spines encircling his neck. Then he leaps off his high perch to land on the ground with unnatural grace.
Those watching Salo probably think he’s paralyzed with fear as he stands motionless while the arcane leopard makes for him, stalking around him with his long sinuous tail dancing fluidly in the air. What Salo is actually feeling, in fact, is shock.
Shock because he, Salo, is the cat.
Mukuni might be capable of independent motion, like Salo’s beating heart, and even a little independent thought, like his subconscious mind, but the totem is still him, an extension of his will. He doesn’t have to think much to get him to move—in fact, he doesn’t have to think at all. The cat knows what Salo wants even before he knows it himself.