“How long have you been hiding this here?” Niko says.
“Three days,” Salo replies, perhaps too quickly.
“The truth, please.”
Salo grits his jaw, unnerved by the calm in Niko’s voice. Insults and an angry outburst would have been easier to defend against. “A week, maybe?”
“So ten whole days.”
“Give or take.”
“I see.”
For Salo, looking at this particular ranger is always an exercise in control. He actually has to force himself to look and not give in to those pesky little instincts urging him to turn away in shame. After a protracted silence, Salo finally lifts his gaze, confused. “That’s it? You see? No lecture? No outrage? Accusations of witchcraft?”
“What do you want me to say?” Niko asks, the slightest hint of frustration filtering into his voice. “You know what that thing can do to a herd of livestock. Surely you don’t need me to tell you. And surely you don’t need me to tell you what would happen if you were discovered like this. I mean, you’re fondling a bloodsucking creature, for Ama’s sake.”
At that word Salo stops petting the animal, but he keeps his hand where it is. “We can’t just kill things because of what they might do. And not every imbulu drinks blood and milk from oxen. Some are different.”
“He’s right, Bra Niko,” Monti joins in. “This one is good. She’s friendly and doesn’t bite. Please don’t kill her.”
Niko scratches his well-groomed beard—yet another thing Salo envies about him, that he can grow a beard like that. The best Salo can do is a fuzzy upper lip.
“I’m not here to fight with you,” Niko says. “Either of you.”
“Why’d you follow me, then?”
“Why?” A flicker of raw emotion in the ranger’s eyes. Indignation perhaps, coupled with the sharpening of his voice. “Why d’you think? For the same reason I had to follow you the last time you ran from the kraal, and the fifteen other times before that. Whether you mean to or not, you’ve made it a hobby of mine, and don’t think for a second I don’t have better things to do with my time.”
Salo almost retaliates with words coated in acid.
I’m sorry, he thinks about saying instead. I only ever feel like I can breathe when I’m away from the kraal. But that would be grounds for more criticism, so he settles for: “What’s broken this time?”
Niko holds his stare for a moment longer, like he has more grievances to express. “The mill’s not working anymore,” he says eventually. “I’m told there were lights coming out of the engine or something.”
Salo blinks. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Didn’t you fix the mill two weeks ago?” Monti says.
For a good few seconds Salo closes his eyes and tips his face heavenward, trying not to fly into a rage. “Those idiot millers probably destroyed another mind stone. I’ve told them so many times not to overwork the machine, but they won’t listen.” He scowls at Niko. “Why didn’t you ask Aaku Malusi for help? He can fix the mill too.”
“We did,” Niko says, grim amusement thick in his voice, “but we found him unconscious in that hovel you call a workshop. Again.”
Salo shakes his head. “That old man will kill himself if he keeps drinking like this. And it’s not a hovel. It’s tidier than your Ajaha barracks and definitely smells better.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Niko says. “Doesn’t make it any less of a shack.”
“That’s what gives it character.” Next to him the imbulu nuzzles at the hilt of the witchwood knife sheathed by his side, blissfully oblivious to the danger standing not far away. “So what now?” Salo says to Niko. “You’re not going to kill her, are you?”
Any other ranger would have already dispatched the creature with a single throw of his spear. But Niko contemplates the imbulu in silence. “I assume you can give it commands,” he finally says.
Admitting to this would mean acknowledging that he has delved deeper into magic than is proper for any self-respecting Yerezi man. But Salo figures that if Niko respected him before today, surely that respect has just turned to dust. “What do you have in mind?”
“Get it to leave the Plains and never come back. Either that or I put it down right now; then you can recycle the mind stone if you want. But I can’t let you keep an imbulu here like this.” Niko shakes his head. “Too dangerous.”
“She’s really not, though. And she’s not ready to leave just yet. She’s still recovering from an injury.”
“I’m being reasonable, Salo. You know this.”
Salo does, but the sting of disappointment still makes his chest feel heavy. He exhales with resignation, looking down at the creature. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye, friend.”
Getting the imbulu to leave is the simple matter of changing several lines of the cipher prose running in its mind stone. The talisman projects the prose into the air as a window of luminous arcane scripts—ciphers—that Salo can add to, erase, and change with thoughts and gestures. He proceeds to give the creature instructions to move during the night, avoiding villages and grazing lands, and to keep going until it has traveled two hundred miles north of here—well into Umadiland and out of the Yerezi Plains. When he’s done, the mirage winks out of view as the talisman goes dormant.
No ceremony to the creature’s departure. It simply turns and slinks away, its scales shifting color so that they seem to melt into the trees. Salo and Monti watch it side by side until it vanishes from sight.
“I wish you’d shown her to me sooner,” Monti whispers, a film of tears making his eyes glitter.
Salo gently squeezes his shoulder. “I’ll show you my next secret as soon as I get one. That’s a promise.”
Niko watches them silently from astride his stallion. Eventually, Salo nudges the young boy to the gelding, and together they ride for the kraal.
When he was twelve, Salo broke into his dead mother’s vacant hut in the chief’s compound and stole her journal. He was a cowherd back then, one of several young boys responsible for the chief’s herd of oxen, so he took the journal out with him the next day and opened it only once he was in the privacy of the grazing fields far from the kraal. His hope was to find some sort of closure within its pages, some explanation for why she turned against him during those final months before her death.
The journal’s pages, however, were almost black with magical ciphers he did not understand. Indeed, they spoke of things no Yerezi boy had any business understanding. Custom demanded that he let it go.
Yet he knew in his heart that the scripts in that journal were what had corrupted his mother, and his need to understand them burned hotter than his fear of getting caught dallying with the womanly art. So he broke into her hut again and stole something else.
He knew it only as the Carving: an ancient soapstone sculpture his mother had left hidden in plain sight like an ordinary wall ornament. He’d barged in on her once to find her sitting cross-legged before the sculpture, her eyes glazed over as she stared into the mysterious grove of trees it depicted. Later, she would tell him that the Carving whispered secrets into her ears whenever her mind roamed its woods, and that maybe one day it would do the same for him.