They’ll smell your master on your clothes.
Ilapara shivers with revulsion and turns away.
Battle cries from a street nearby. Another explosion rocks the ground, this time accompanied by an intensely bright flash of light that briefly engulfs the east like a third sunrise.
Magic.
She blinks from the afterimage it leaves behind when it dies out, and as her eyes readjust, she sees that the kongamato is on its way back—and that its rider has an orb of crimson moonfire he’s preparing to hurl down at them.
“Incoming!” she shouts.
But the orb is surprisingly slow when it launches, like a feather in the wind, and it even arcs away from the compound, falling instead onto the street on the other side of the gates as the kongamato whooshes past.
“He missed,” says the younger Mimvura, sounding incredulous and puzzled.
“He didn’t,” Ilapara says, feeling the blood leaving her cheeks. She has seen this before, spirits unleashed from mind stones in vessels of force, wind, fire, or even light, and sometimes a combination of these. If she had to bet money, she’d say there’s a fire spirit now lurking on the other side of the gate.
Sure enough, the gate shudders.
“By the Blood Woman, he’s going to force it open,” the elder Mimvura says as they all gather in front of the gate.
His younger brother speaks in a trembling voice. “Bloodworm’s sacrament will protect us, right?”
“How the devil should I know?”
“How? You’re the one who suggested it!”
The elder Mimvura steps up to his brother, their foreheads almost touching. “Don’t you dare put that on me!”
As the brothers start shouting at each other, neither notices the red-hot glow quickly distorting the shape of the gate. Ilapara points and speaks over them. “The gate! It’s melting.”
Men howl on the street just outside, and the gate’s solid iron begins to bubble and warp like molten rock. By silent agreement, Kwashe and the brothers reach into pockets on their shoulder belts and withdraw white disks of witchwood marked with little glyphs, each holding a mind stone at its center—Umadi soul charms. Their eyes briefly glaze over as they palm the disks and possess themselves with whatever spirits were infused into the charms, borrowing some of the abilities the spirits wielded in life.
Ilapara considers using one of her charms, too, but the single jackal spirit in her possession would give her little beyond superior hearing, while the inkanyamba would be best left for a direr situation. Might as well hold on to them.
She braces herself, falling into a defensive stance as the gate trembles on its hinges. Then solid iron gives way like stretched paper before a knife, if the knife were an inferno of pure moonfire in the shape of a dread rhino horn. The beast the horn belongs to is so large its head fills the now-exposed gateway, a monstrosity of magical fire. It emits a ground-shaking screech and charges into the compound, pulsing out waves of unbearable heat.
Ilapara dives out of the way, evading instant death with only inches to spare. She springs back up to her feet just in time to see the fire beast tread over the younger Mimvura, leaving his corpse a charred black thing on the driveway.
The beast keeps going, as unstoppable a force of nature as the winds, rapidly shedding size as it expends itself. Upon reaching BaMimvura’s house, it comes to a fiery end in a great explosion that makes the world bloom with heat and light, almost knocking Ilapara off her feet.
Beyond the ruined gate, the Dark Sun’s militiamen howl in celebration and begin to pour in.
Ilapara’s maternal uncle was a small, quiet hunter most people didn’t take seriously, the butt of many jokes who couldn’t convince a woman to settle down with him even at thirty years of age—that is, until the night Umadi raiders attacked his hunting party in the open savannas, and he bested six of them with his spear. Alone.
Ilapara had always gotten into spats with anyone who spoke ill of him; after all, he was, and still is, dearer to her than her own father. Yet she’d underestimated him like everyone else and never expected to learn more from him than compassion, human decency, and the art of hunting.
But that night, as she watched him dance with his spear like a moon-blessed ranger, fighting to protect her and the others in their small party, she learned that size and strength in battle were only half as important as pure skill and fast reflexes. She learned that anyone, even a wisp of a man, could hone themselves into a deadly weapon with enough determination. Above all else, she learned that she had the teacher she’d secretly yearned for all along, one who would not refuse to help her become what she truly wanted to be. She needed only to ask.
And so she did, and he taught her all the things he knew whenever they were alone in the wilds, secrets of combat he confessed to having learned from sitting in front of a magical cloth of some kind, an artifact he’d picked up illicitly from an Umadi trader while bartering skins in the borderlands. She wouldn’t believe him when he told her, and she still has her doubts, because how could a mere cloth contain such intimate secrets of the body?
What she couldn’t doubt, however, was that the secrets were real. Secrets for gaining a deep level of control over the body to draw more strength from each breath and decelerate one’s perception of time. Secrets for packing the muscles with latent strength. Secrets that made her a nuisance to all the Clan Sikhozi boys who thought a girl had no place in the Ajaha training pits.
In the split second militiamen with faces painted a ghostly white pour into the compound, Ilapara calls up her training. Time slows. Her senses grow keener; her reflexes accelerate.
The spear she wields fits into her grip like it was made for her. High-grade aerosteel from the Yontai with an enchanted witchwood core, it is light as a hollow twig, widening slightly somewhere two-thirds along its length into a thin double-edged blade, tapering sharply at the end into a savage spearpoint. She moves with it just in time to dodge an invading militiaman’s spear thrust.
Kwashe yells something over the din. The elder Mimvura roars. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and the rain starts to pour heavily. Ilapara’s world narrows down to the militiaman in front of her. The pupils of his wild eyes are dilated like he smoked something. He snarls as he thrusts his weapon, exposing yellowed teeth. She quickly pivots away and whirls her weapon round in a blow that catches him on the collarbone.
A bolt of red lightning arcs along the blade as it makes contact and cuts him, instantly blackening his flesh. He convulses as he falls, electrocuted by the weapon’s live charm of Storm craft. But this is just the beginning. A militiaman with a long scar on his right cheek steps over him and rushes her with a sword; she holds her spear like a staff, parries two blows, sidesteps a third, lowers her spear, and strikes.
His blood flows with the rain. The stench of death closes in around Ilapara. She shook and cried herself to sleep on the day she killed her first man, months ago now, but today each kill blurs into the next, her victims leaving only the faintest scars on her soul.
To either side of her, Kwashe and the elder Mimvura move with the savagery of dingoneks, skewering, maiming, and cutting down the militiamen without mercy. Kwashe catches a militiaman in a choke hold and squeezes, and blood erupts between his fingers as he crushes his victim’s trachea. Nearby, the elder Mimvura is a flash of movement as he impales a trio of militiamen with a series of rapid-fire thrusts. Whatever charms they used must have been of the highest quality, because they are relentless.