Case in point: BaMimvura, Ilapara’s current employer. Or as most people in the town know him: that greedy moneylender and mercenary boss who joined the Cataract’s loyal army of minions in exchange for having his competitors killed or threatened out of business.
She crosses a street and walks past an old monolith with the hypnotic symbol of a gushing waterfall carved onto its faces. That symbol is on banners and plaques all over town, proclaiming to everyone who looks at it the identity of the town’s lord and master.
The Cataract.
Mystics of the Umadi tribe have a rather pesky ancestral talent; generally, their arcane power grows with the size of territory under their control, and the more important this territory is perceived to be, the greater the power it provides. As a result, every stopover town along the thousand-mile strip of the Artery running up Umadiland is prime real estate for any Umadi warlord.
For many comets the Cataract was a powerful and well-established warlord with a solid grip on the heart of Umadiland, through which the Artery traverses. His power drank from Kageru and many other stopover towns, and it seemed for a long while that no one would unseat him from his throne. BaMimvura figured, therefore, that the warlord would be able to defend his hold on these lands indefinitely, and that currying favor with him was a worthy risk in the long term.
He was wrong.
Everyone in town is whispering about a new and mysterious warlord they call the Dark Sun. According to what Ilapara has heard, he’s been steadily creeping upward from the south, eating away swaths of the heartland from the Cataract. Just recently he took Seresa, the next stopover town south of Kageru, and now there are whispers that Kageru is next.
As she skirts the edge of the town’s main market square, Ilapara lets her eyes sweep the muddy streets around her. Travelers from a caravan that stopped over last night can be seen all along the market stalls, buying, selling, bartering. Most are Umadi, the women in colorful veils and billowy robes, men in dashikis and kikois wrapped around their waists, but a number of them are from other, more distant tribes, judging by their foreign garments—boubous, djellabas, kitenges, and capulanas, all sewn in a thousand different styles. Everyone’s going about their business as usual. The merchants too. Not at all what would be happening if the town’s season was about to change.
Mama Shadu is just being paranoid, Ilapara tells herself. This town is too important for the Cataract to let fall, and these people know it too.
All she has wanted since joining Mimvura Company a comet ago is to be part of the company’s caravan security crew. The pay is far better for mercenaries who tour the Artery, and their valued experience guarding caravans from raiders and dangerous wildlife makes it easier for them to find other lucrative employment, should they wish to. Leaving now, when she is so close to being chosen, would mean she spent the last comet as a glorified goon for nothing. That won’t do.
By the time she reaches the iron gates to the Mimvura premises, she has talked herself out of her anxiety. Mama Shadu is no sibyl. I can’t just leave town because she said so.
Several stopover towns have a Mimvura office to facilitate the smooth movement of the company’s caravans along the Artery from one end of Umadiland to the other. The one in Kageru also doubles as the boss’s residence, a walled compound built along a wide street branching off the Artery, larger and steadier than most properties in the town and clearly belonging to a man who has grown comfortable with his position in the order of things.
The main structure, BaMimvura’s colorfully painted three-story mud-brick house, is a rejection of the town’s aesthetic of utilitarian decrepitude. It has stained glass windows and a roof clad with shingles. A neat driveway of waterworn pebbles leads up to the house, lined by grand outdoor carvings. He even installed an expensive system of tanks and indoor plumbing, all imported from distant tribelands. Gold-feathered peacocks hold court near a spouting rock fountain, and a stable houses the boss’s enviable collection of prized tronic antelope and zebroids.
Warlords exist whose homes aren’t nearly as splendid.
As she walks past the gatehouse shack, she nods at the guard posted there, a young man with a pronounced overbite dressed in a shiny breastplate over a brightly colored dashiki.
“Hello, Midzi,” she says in greeting.
He nods back. “Ilira.”
“Is the boss around?”
“They’re all in the backyard,” Midzi says. “All of them.”
She slows to a stop and then doubles back. What was that in Midzi’s voice? “All of them?” she says, watching him carefully.
His eyes gleam with significance. “Yes. The boss, his whole family, Bloodworm.”
Alarmed, Ilapara moves closer and lowers her voice. “Bloodworm is here? Why?”
“No clue,” Midzi says, eyes wide. “Rode in an hour ago with two servants. You could go look. You have the perfect excuse.”
Ilapara was planning to deliver Mama Shadu’s debt to the boss or his eldest son, but now she shakes her head. “I take over your shift in twenty minutes. You can go look yourself.”
“Kwashe passed by some time ago. He went to look, and he still hasn’t come back.”
She bristles at the mention of Kwashe in this context. “Why would I care what he does?”
“I thought you’d want to know,” Midzi says.
“Why would I?”
“Because . . . well, I thought you two had a thing—”
“Had. Past tense. Not that it’s any of your business.” When Midzi raises his palms, looking genuinely intimidated, Ilapara realizes that she’s perhaps being unnecessarily aggressive. I am not my emotions, she tells herself, and she takes a calming breath. “Sorry. I’m a bit on edge today.”
Midzi drops his arms, offering a weary smile. “I understand. We live in rocky times. I can barely sleep most nights.”
Something she understands all too well.
She looks toward the boss’s residence, biting her lower lip. Might be her imagination, but the air feels a little too still today. And if Bloodworm is here, whatever’s going on behind that house can’t be good.
Finally she comes to a decision. “I’ll go look,” she says to Midzi and leaves her spear leaning against the gatehouse shack.
“Good luck,” he says. “Just be back before the shift change. I need to get some of that sleep I’ve been missing.”
The scene in the backyard reveals itself slowly to Ilapara.
It is a reflex she acquired under the tutelage of a beloved uncle in the open wilds of her homeland, a trained but visceral reaction to danger. Her heart beats faster, her senses sharpen, and time seems to crawl to a standstill as her mind opens to—
A backyard of barren earth, a latrine in the far corner, an outdoor cooking shed in another, thick smoke billowing from the dying fire beneath its corrugated iron roof. Not far from it, two men in hide skins beating large drums. A dozen people kneeling in a circle, heads bowed. BaMimvura, his protuberant belly hanging bare over a leopard-skin loincloth. His three wives, all bare chested and unveiled. Their children, the youngest a girl of six and the oldest a bearded young man, all with tearstained cheeks. A naked wraith standing in the center, his skin rubbed bone white with chalk, the whiteness marred only by the cosmic shards singed onto his arms, which glow crimson like lit coals, and the putrefying wound on his belly, a ghastly thing boiling with worms, pus, and foul poisons. He looms, with a bloodstained witchwood knife in one hand, over yet another kneeling figure, this one a Faraswa man with the characteristic obsidian skin and curling metal horns of his people. His face is the picture of silent agony, a river of red flowing from where his right ear has just been shorn off—