“Your soul was taken from one place to another. It’s not the kind of thing you shake off.”
“How do you do it, then?” he asked.
“I… That’s different.”
“Maybe… or, maybe having experienced it so often, you’re able to better manage it.” She looked far from convinced by that, but Tau pressed on. “Zuri, I can’t allow myself to be made useless on the battlefield. I need more experience with enervation. I need to know how it affects me, so I can learn to recover faster.”
“I don’t think it works that way, and I’m not going to enervate you.”
“I have to try.”
“Then go to Isihogo yourself,” Zuri said, flicking a hand at him, dismissing the request.
“How?”
Zuri eyes widened.
“No, you’re right,” Tau said. “You said everyone can do it. Teach me how to go to Isihogo?”
“I wasn’t serious when I said that.”
“But you could teach it?”
Zuri licked her lips and looked around at the still empty circle. “You already know how. It’s why we pray, to anchor our souls to this realm. Some of us still drift to Isihogo when we sleep and our defenses are down.”
Tau considered this. “The ones who die bleeding in their beds. The ones who wake and have lost their minds. That’s why we pray? To prevent that?”
“It’s not the only reason. We pray to show faith. To worship Ananthi. She protects us.”
“Of course She does,” Tau said, trying not to sound brusque. “Help me, Zuri. I almost couldn’t keep fighting after the enervation.”
“If you were attacked by a demon you shouldn’t have been able to fight at all.”
“Help me.”
“You want this? To learn how to travel to the underworld?” Zuri asked. “You’ll have no power there. You’ll be hunted the instant you enter.”
“But they can’t hurt me?”
Zuri laughed without mirth. “What do you mean? You’ve already experienced it. They’ll hurt you. They’ll rip you to pieces and you’ll feel everything. Your physical body won’t be harmed, but who knows what it’ll do to your mind.”
Tau was insistent. “But they can’t kill me.”
Zuri pursed her lips. “Not unless you draw energy from Isihogo.”
“Then I just won’t do that.”
“As you wish,” Zuri said, standing.
Tau jumped to his feet, nervous, and wondering just how much of a damned fool he was being. “Now?”
“Isn’t this what you want?”
“Eh… yes, of course.”
“You’re sure?” She arched an eyebrow and Tau caught up to her game. She had thought to scare him off the path by putting his feet to it.
Tau refused to be scared away. “I am.”
Zuri’s eyebrow dropped and she looked tired, like the day had been a bit too much. “Fine. Fine. Close your eyes.”
“Here?”
“If I can teach you how to enter Isihogo, here is as good a place as any. Fifty breaths there are less than a single one here. You won’t be gone any time at all.”
“As you say.” Tau closed his eyes.
“You need to know how to return. There are two ways.”
Tau saw spots of light behind his closed eyelids.
“Our souls conceive of Isihogo in terms of our experiences in Uhmlaba. You will think of yourself as having one head, two arms, two legs, everything. You will even think and behave as if you are breathing there.”
“Yes,” Tau said.
“The first way to return is to expel all the breath in your body. Breathe it out until you are empty. Let your body, if you want to call it that, remain empty. You will feel as if you are dying, as if you must breathe. Leave your lungs empty, let this false death take you, Isihogo will fade, and you will leave the underworld.”
“That’s it?”
“We are meant for the world of the living, not the world of the demons. Exiting Isihogo should not be hard.”
“And the second way?”
“Let the demons kill you.”
“Ah,” Tau said.
“Ah,” Zuri echoed. “When the demons destroy your soul’s conception of its body, you’ll be forced from Isihogo.” Zuri took a step closer to Tau and put a cool hand on his arm. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I do. I have to get into the Queen’s Melee. I can’t risk letting an Enervator disable me. I can’t risk being taken out of the fight.”
There, he’d said it out loud and it was true. He had to get into the melee. He had to take Scale Jayyed deep enough into its rounds to face Scale Osa… to face Kellan. Men died in the melee every single cycle. Men died there.
“The melee?” Zuri asked. “It’s all on your shoulders, then, your scale’s chances? You know an Ihashe scale hasn’t qualified in over a generation?”
He nodded. “It’s different now.”
Zuri smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “As you say,” she said, taking her hand from his arm. “Then, with eyes closed, I want you to think about a wave of calm rising up through the earth and into you.”
Tau closed his eyes and attended to her words.
“Relax your feet and let the tension flow out of them. Let the muscles go loose and limp and allow this calming wave to rise into your calves, slowly, into your thighs, slowly. Let them go loose, limp, feel that wave continue higher, as you allow this world to slip away.”
Tau was swaying.
“I want you to take deep breaths in and out, in and out.… Yes, like that.… Every breath in lifts the calming wave higher, every breath out moves our world further and further away.… Let go and it’s there… our other home—”
DEMON
The noise accosted him first, the eerie gusting of wind that blew grit into his face and exposed skin. Tau felt it, heard it, and, snapping his eyes open, he saw the permanent twilight of Isihogo.
He was still in the circle in Citadel City, but it was a twisted version of the place. The colors were muted, the sky colorless, the ground soft, like loose mulch, and the underworld’s mists swirled around him.
“You did it.” Zuri’s voice was quiet, like she spoke to him from a hundred strides away, though she was next to him. Tau could hear the surprise in her voice. He looked at her. She was veiled in a darkness so deep he had trouble making out her features.
“You’re shrouded,” he said, having trouble hearing his own voice.
“They come,” she said.
Tau had the impression of her turning her head, though it was hard to tell where her face was. He looked in the same direction he thought she might be facing and saw them. His heart seemed to stop and fear had him in its white-hot grasp.
Two demons were running for him. One was twice his size, had a mouth full of teeth and a tongue that hung down past its neck. It came for him on two legs. The other thing ran on all fours. It had pointed ears, eyes on either side of its head, and skin like an inyoka.
Tau sought to calm himself. It didn’t work. He looked down at his body, saw the blinding light he was giving off, and he reached into himself, working to dim it, to hide as Zuri was.