“A baby? But it’s so big!”
“Oh, they get bigger.”
While Monti gawks, Salo turns to examine the circular discoloration on the imbulu’s head and is satisfied to see that it has continued to diminish. When he first came upon the creature only a week ago, that discoloration was a frightful wound that would have surely proved fatal without his intervention.
“I need to take another look at her mind stone,” he says, standing up. “In the meantime, you could feed her if you want. She hunts rodents mostly, but she also loves the taste of milk.”
“What if she bites me?” Monti says. “I could get sick. My aba says their bites can infect a whole herd with sickness.”
“She won’t. She knows I’m helping her. And if you’re with me, then she knows you’re my friend.”
Monti keeps staring at the beast, curiosity and fear once again warring openly on his face. “You have the milk?”
“I do.” The quiver on Salo’s back is part of a leather harness strapped around his bare chest, to which his bow, waterskin, and utility pouches are fastened. He unfastens the waterskin and offers it to Monti, who warily steps forward to accept it. “Trust me—you’ll be best friends by the time that skin is empty.”
“If you say so,” Monti says.
As he squats down and slowly brings the skin to the lizard’s mouth, Salo considers the little serpent bracelet of enchanted red steel curled around his own left wrist: his talisman. Obeying his silent command, the talisman stirs, its crystalline eyes projecting beams of prismatic light that sweep over the lizard’s body.
A mirage of superimposed waves subsequently takes shape above the talisman, displaying the energy state of the mind stone inside the imbulu’s head. The illusions look somewhat ethereal through the round lenses of his reflective spectacles.
No one knows why, but in the wilds of the Redlands, the arcane essence of the moon can sometimes weave itself into certain life-forms, giving rise to tronic beasts—exotic machine-organic hybrids with metalloid features and mind stones inside their brains. People figured out long ago that with finesse, these stones could be manipulated to control the beasts and, if recovered intact, could be harnessed as sources of arcane energy potent enough to animate machines or even cast spells.
Salo had been out searching for energy signatures emitted by dead tronic beasts when his talisman detected a faint but live signal. At the end of that signal was the imbulu dying next to a brook, its mind stone thrown so far out of equilibrium that most of its tronic abilities, such as self-healing, had been corrupted. He went on to spend many hours searching for errors in the cipher prose governing the mind stone, trying to repair what he could with his talisman to keep the imbulu alive.
He was reasonably successful, though he’d never repaired the mind stone of a live animal before. In fact, the energy waves shown in the mirage are still somewhat out of sync. But this is nothing the creature won’t survive.
He glances away from the mirage and down at Monti, who’s now cooing at the imbulu while he strokes its neck. Having guzzled a full skin of cow milk from his hand, it obliges him.
“So,” Salo says, trying not to smirk, “what do you think of my secret?”
“I think she’s beautiful,” Monti gushes, and it’s like he’s a completely different person. Gone is the frightened boy of minutes earlier; this is the wise and annoyingly curious boy who tailed Salo from the kraal. “Dear Ama, I wish we could take her back with us.”
Salo smiles, seeing in Monti the same transformation he felt when he first discovered the creature. He was wary of it at first, but the simple act of feeding it quickly changed his perspective. “That’s why you can’t tell anyone about her. If you do, they’ll kill her.”
“I’ll tell no one, I swear,” Monti promises, and Salo believes him.
Crack.
The loud snap of a twig somewhere off in the distance.
Monti shoots up to his feet. Salo almost gets whiplash when he jerks his head to look, and what he sees makes him temporarily forget not to curse around children.
“Shit.”
Monti’s wide eyes stare up at him, full of panic. “What do we do?”
“It’s too late. He’s seen her.”
“She could run.”
“He’d just catch her, and then she’d die.”
The imbulu registers no alarm as it flicks its tongue curiously in the air, perhaps figuring that another one of Salo’s friends means more milk for its belly. A wave of protectiveness washes over him, and he sends his talisman to sleep with a thought, snuffing out the illusions. He crouches next to the lizard and hooks a gentle arm around its neck.
“How does he keep finding me?” he complains to Monti. “Do I leave a trail of pheromones and glitter where I walk or something?”
“He’s a ranger,” Monti says with a shrug. “My aba says a ranger could track a fly across the lowvelds if he set his mind to it.”
“How wonderful.” Salo pets the imbulu worriedly, praying to the moon to preserve the poor beast. Hasn’t it suffered enough?
The moon must not be listening, however, as Aneniko continues to trot down the hill toward them astride the tronic quagga stallion he captured and subdued shortly after becoming a ranger two comets ago.
A ruff of thick fur sits around his bare shoulders. Armor pieces of polished red steel adorn his arms and legs, each piece expertly engraved with magical ciphers. His loincloth—long enough to wrap in loose folds around and between his thighs, reaching down to his knees, as is customary—isn’t the ordinary white worn by Salo and most other Yerezi men but the deep-red hue of blood reserved for warriors of the highest caliber, those who carry the blessing of a mystic inside their bones.
He’s also holding a long spear in his right hand, burnished to a blinding luster, made entirely of the Yerezi arcane metal.
Because what self-respecting Ajaha ranger would ever be seen outside his kraal without his warmount, his spear, and all the red steel he has earned the right to wear?
Salo might be rangy where Niko is strapping, and Niko might be several shades darker than Salo’s coppery complexion, but the two are not completely devoid of similarities. They were born only ten days apart, for example, and have both seen eighteen comets. They both tended the livestock of their respective fathers as young boys, and both grew to be taller than most men in their clan. They both went through Ajaha training and were circumcised in the mountains during the year of their sixteenth birthdays—the same year they met. They even took to cutting their textured hair similarly—sheared low on the sides and left to grow slightly longer on the top.
Similarities indeed, and yet, looking at them now, one would likely fail to guess that Salo was the one born to a warrior chief and Niko to a lowly laborer in a mining village.
A riderless gelding follows timidly behind Niko’s tronic stallion. He brings both quaggas to a stop nearby, staring at Salo and the imbulu in that phlegmatic way of his, even though he’s probably not happy about what he’s seeing.
“Hello, Salo,” he says.
Salo keeps petting the imbulu, staring at a spot on the ground. “Niko.”
To his side, Monti silently admires the tronic stallion. A handsome beast of lean musculature, it is adorned with the characteristic white and golden stripes of a plains quagga, like the gelding behind it. Unlike the gelding, however, its lower legs, snout, tail, and long spiraling horns all catch the grove’s dappled sunlight like steel—the mark of tronic strength. A mount like that will gallop at extraordinary speeds for hours on end before beginning to tire.