The Pathfinder Tales Library

Novels

Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross
Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham
Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones
The Worldwound Gambit by Robin D. Laws
Master of Devils by Dave Gross

Journals

Plague of Light by Robin D. Laws
Prodigal Sons edited by James L. Sutter
The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline edited by James L. Sutter
Hell's Pawns by Dave Gross
Dark Tapestry by Elaine Cunnningham

Short Stories

"Guns of Alkenstar" by Ed Greenwood
"The Ghosts of Broken Blades" by Monte Cook
"The Walkers from the Crypt" by Howard Andrew Jones
"A Lession in Taxonomy" by Dave Gross
"The Illusionist" by Elaine Cunningham
"Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver" by Erik Mona
"The Lost Pathfinder" by Dave Gross
"Noble Sacrifice" by Richard Ford
"Blood Crimes" by J. C. Hay
"Certainty" by Liane Merciel
"The Swamp Warden" by Amber Scott
"The Secret of the Rose and Glove" by Kevin Andrew Murphy
"Lord of Penance" by Richard Lee Byers

"Plague of Light" © 2011 by Paizo Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

Paizo Publishing, LLC, the Paizo golem logo, and Pathfinder are registered trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Pathfinder Campaign Setting, and Pathfinder Tales are trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC.

Story by Robin D. Laws.
Art by Claudio Casini.
Cover design by Crystal Frasier.

Paizo Publishing, LLC
7120 185th Ave NE, Ste 120
Redmond, WA 98052
paizo.com

ISBN 978-1-60125-398-9
PZOTEB0018

Originally published in serialized form in Pathfinder Adventure Path #37–42.

Chapter One: On Glowing Wing

When the jungle speaks, it never tells all.

Others may hear its words, or sense its wants. I read its signs. These are present in the hooting and clucking of monkey troops in the treetops. I find them in the scurrying of insects across the forest’s hard dirt floor. In the chittering of parrots, the crack of woodpecker bills plunging into the trunks of trees. In the shifts of billowing heat in the pressing, humid air. The smells of rotting fruit and crumbling bark.

Dawn comes, trading darkness for morning shadow. Scant light penetrates the jungle canopy a hundred feet above.

There is danger here, the jungle tells me. Whether I determine its nature in time—that is my test. To prosper amid its hunger, I must demonstrate my capacity to sense and survive. To again prove myself the eater, not the eaten.

My eyes seek prowling beasts. As expected, there are none. Only scattered scrub bushes dwell in the blanket of shade laid down by the great sky-seeking trees. They offer poor hiding places for ambushing leopards. A boar or hyena pack would easily yield itself to view. At worst, a dangling liana might conceal a young viper, wrapped around it and sharing its woody coloration.

It is what I can’t hear that alarms: the sound of people. Though faint, I should be able to make it out by now. I am on my way to my adopted village, Ngali. There should be the low murmur of dawn-time conversation. The grinding of pestle against bowl, as the women make pasteroot into flour. Children should be laughing. From the direction of the village I hear only its chickens, and the distressed bark of a dog. And a distant hum.

Flies. It is the buzzing of flies.

Heart quickening, I speed my pace toward the clearing where the Ngali huts and storehouses stand. I overleap an outcrop of rain-smoothed rock, dash through cottony webbing strung between lianas by a fist-sized spider.

When I was exiled from my own tribe, the Ngali gave me shelter. Their great father, M’patika, served me palm wine and told me both their outer and inner myths. Their great mother, Nawapo, ladled out boar soup, and told me my bearing reminded her of her son, before the foreign fever took him. With the Ngali’s senior hunters, Shokamb, Wabara, and Bibaang, I tracked duikers, speared crocodiles, and faced a demon-heart jaguar. Once M’patika offered to perform the ritual of rebirth, and make me new again as a Ngali. Though honored, I could not turn my back on who I had been and what I had done. He said to me, “You are of the wandering tribe now, Xhasi, but later, you will be ready, and we will claim you then.” Then he smiled and placed his rough, firm hand on my shoulder.

And now I rush from beneath the canopy into the clearing and see the Ngali slaughtered. Their bodies lie strewn as if they were taken unawares while performing their morning tasks. Fresh corpses dangle from the thresholds of huts, and from the communal storehouse.

All have been taken. Children, women, and men. No defense was mounted. Spears hang in their racks, shields propped beneath them. M’patika lies face down on the porch of his talking hut; I recognize him by the width of his shoulders and his deep green skirt. Nawapo slumps inside. I see her eyeless face and shudder.

No weapon, Mwangi or foreign, performed this act. This is not the predation of beasts. The bodies of my friends have not been bitten, clawed, or trampled. What was flesh is now red pulp, hanging from the bone. Only magic could have done this—and strange magic, too.

I see the magician step out from behind M’patika’s hut. He carries a wizard’s artifact, a complicated instrument of yellow-brown metal. It is a wheel filled with other wheels, which turn upon and inside one another. Their action confuses the eye.

The man is an outlander, his pale northern skin reddened and flaked by the heat of our nearer sun. He is new to the Expanse: he has yet to abandon his steel armor. Sweat darkens his straw-colored hair, pasting it to his forehead. Hair like the husk of a grobfruit ashamedly hides the lower portion of his face.

When he sees me I have already sprung into the air. He reaches for a blade at his hip, but before sword can clear scabbard, I am on top of him. His device falls into blood-muddied dirt, and my knees pin his elbows. He thrashes his legs, but I am well positioned and strong, and he cannot throw me off.

Through a haze of fury, I behold his protesting face. It sputters pleading words. He babbles in the so-called “common language.” The foreigners credit its words to themselves, even though it was the river otter who invented it, and we Zenj of the jungles the first two-legged beasts to learn it. I could understand him, but do not bother. The thunder of rushing blood is all that I can hear.

The rage is in me, and I raise up my spear, ready for the killing blow. In my mind’s-eye, the act of righteous butchery performs itself. I envision the tip of my blade piercing his winter-born throat. Beneath me, the spell-maker will shudder and die. He will die on Ngali land, and will go to the Ngali ghostlands, to serve the spirits of my friends as a wretched slave, until that nether-realm day when all spirits fade forever.

I tighten fist around spear haft. But the thought of Ngali ways brings to mind the code I was raised with. Despite my exile, I still cling to it. In this adherence lies my last remaining link to my own tribe, the Ara.

A life taken is a debt incurred. This is what Ara, the first hero, taught his descendants, who took his name. When a person takes another’s life, he accepts all of his obligations, and must discharge them until the end of his days. He must live his victims’ lives for them.

The killing price weighs heavily on me already. Twice have I incurred it. Two sets of obligations I must shoulder. The first cost me my place in my tribe. The second forces me to dictate detailed reports and have them sent to people I will never meet, in a dimly imagined land I will never see. Such is the price of taking a Pathfinder’s life.

Of this spotty outland wizard, whose throat I now stand ready to pierce, I know nothing. Of the debts I would bear, I can only guess. I stay my hand.

I’ll find a punishment for him that costs him more than it does me.

Wrath draining from shaking limbs, I find the meaning in his heavily accented jabbering.

“I didn’t do this!” he cries.

I pin him tighter. The buzzing of carrion flies grows louder, more insistent. “If I spare you, it isn’t because I trust the words of foreign sorcerers.”

The northerner grunts in disbelief. “Sorcerer? You spout nonsense, jungle man.”

He follows my gaze to the mysterious instrument.

“That? That was given me by our prophet-for-hire, to figure out what’s causing this.”

“Causing this?”

The northerner stops struggling, letting his head wearily fall back into the mud. “The firefly plague.”

I parrot his words, to be sure I heard them right.

“Yes, firefly plague. That’s what killed these people—a swarm of carnivorous, glowing bugs.”

“Continue,” I say.

“This attack is but one of many. The plague has hit us in Free Station, three times now. I am Thorold of Ulfven. I work for the Aspis Consortium. Let me up and I’ll tell you the rest.”

The name of the Consortium grants me little ease. That organization’s greed has done much to harm the Mwangi Expanse and its peoples. Yet in these words rings the possibility of truth. I remove the sword from his belt and slowly stand. He keeps his hands in view as he weaves to his feet.

“You are up,” I say. “Now tell me of this firefly plague.”

“The insects come from the dark of night, in glowing swarms. They feast on flesh, tearing it from the bone, as you see with these poor souls here. They were your people?”

“In the jungle, heat can be more dangerous than blades.”

“No. Yes.”

The foreigner reaches out a consoling hand, then thinks better and withdraws it. “I came here from Ulfven with two shield-friends, Svadi and Hildir. When the glow-flies first descended on Free Station, Svadi was devoured. Hildir, strong of thew and with sea-hardened flesh, lingered for a horrible day ere he died. Had I not been in Bloodcove at the time, overseeing a shipment, I might now be feasting beside them in the halls of the gods.”

His sadness, I decide, is genuine. “What brought you to this spot, then?”

“Plagues impede the smooth conduct of business. My employers sent a number of us into the jungles, armed with these devices.” He picks up the instrument, to rub the muck from its surfaces. Now accepting his tale, I let him do it. “They’re paying a god-speaker to solve the mystery. She gave them to us in hopes of tracking disruptions in the cosmic balance, or some such. Do not ask me to decode her mystical maunderings. I am a trader and explorer, a man of practical gifts.”

Thorold freezes. His milk-weak complexion turns paler still. He looks over my shoulder, behind me. What he sees terrifies him. I imagine the cloud of flesh-eating fireflies, come back in daytime to finish their meal. He gestures for the return of his sword. I turn to face this soundless threat.

A gorilla shambles from the forest into the clearing, graceful and silent. It is large for its kind, over eight feet high. It walks not on its knuckles, as great apes do, but with upright spine, as a man. It wears a lopsided snarling expression. The left side of his muzzle bears the signs of past injury, partly torn away to expose the gorilla’s upper and lower fangs. The hair around the ruined side of his face is streaked white, as if bleached.

Thorold speaks without moving his lips. “Toss me the blade. I’ll draw him this way; you hit him from the back.”

The great ape pauses. Resigned, but annoyed, too.

“That won’t be necessary,” I tell the outlander. “This is my friend, Arok. We had arranged to meet up at Ngali to hunt with the people there, and share a feast.”

Arok waits while I explain him to the northerner. The Ulfen asks the expected questions. He fears that Arok comes from the city of Usaro and worships the dread demon-ape there. Arok is no ally of the Gorilla King, I assure him, and certainly no demon. I tell him that my friend was born an animal and awakened by a nature-priest.

“As I said,” the outlander repeats, “I am a man of practical gifts. The ways of druids are beyond me.” He stares at Arok for a moment, then at me, then at his empty scabbard. His shoulders slump in grudging trust. Only then does the ape venture close.

Thorold has not inquired about Arok’s scars. That is a question only children dare ask.

Then Arok sees the bodies. Though he came here less often than I, the Ngali were his friends, too. He doubles over in grief. He screams at the sky. He sniffs around the encampment. Falling back to animal habits, he briefly knuckle-walks, then resumes his sky-screaming.

Thorold wants his sword back, I can tell. Arok’s bereaved shrieking damps the fires of my anger, but only a little.

When Arok has finished, I have Thorold tell Arok what he told me. For the first time since his arrival, Arok speaks human words.

“I feel it when coming here,” he says. “Very bad feeling.” His deep voice purrs, like a distant waterfall.

“Evil magic?”

He shakes his worried snout. “Bigger than magic.”

I wait for him to say more. Unlike men, Arok does not speak before he has finished thinking. When he does, he uses an ape word. The apes don’t have many of them. Like any animal word, they are hard to write and impossible to say. Let’s say the word is “urunr.” Urunr means the world, but it also means nature. We humans, along with the dwarves and elves and others of the mortal races, aren’t of urunr. We have stepped outside it.

“Urunr is not right,” Arok says.

I nod.

Thorold is confused. I wonder how I will explain this to an outlander. The Mwangi peoples are closer to being of urunr than others, or so Arok has hinted. But if the word was a fruit, I would only understand the outside peel of it.

“Urunr is angry,” Arok says.

“Urunr killed our friends?” I ask.

Arok unhappily tips forward his crested head. No, that’s not it, he’s saying.

While Thorold watches, the two of us set about digging a pit. It is large enough only for M’patika and Nawapo. Only the great father and great mother are to be buried. They will dig to the ghostlands, and the other spirits will follow in the tunnel they make. It is harmful to the spirit if its body is buried, the Ngali say. The king and queen are strong enough to make it unscathed. Or perhaps their spirits will be extinguished by the effort, as a final sacrifice for their people. One never knows for sure what happens in the ghostlands.

The rest of my friends will be left where they fell, to be eaten as carrion. Hyenas huddle on the forest fringes, snorting impatiently. Vultures wait in the sky above us.

“Urunr didn’t kill our friends,” Arok finally says. “But it is wrong. Part of it is wrong, and must be righted. Until then, urunr doesn’t know what enemy to strike. Blindly it lashes.”

It is decided, without the need for speaking. Arok and I will go with the outlander. It may help this company prophet to hear what Arok’s animal senses have revealed. With spear and fang and claw we may aid them. We will see what can be done to stop this plague.

Gently Arok and I carry M’patika and Nawapo to the grave and lay them in it.

As we push the dirt over our friends with wooden spades, I realize what we are doing. We hold the last Ngali funeral.

We are not far from the village when the hyenas bound in, snarling.

∗ ∗ ∗

The sound of water calls us north, to the bank of the Little Vanji. The northerner wears his fear like a cloak. He leaps into the air, grabbing at his sword, when a shellfruit drops from the canopy above. It lands with a crack on the hard earth. Ants disgorge from the ground in the thousands, as if suddenly born. They swarm across the broken shell of the fallen fruit, carrying its meat away in wet red chunks.

Half a league on we find a beached reed boat. A corpse lies inside, sprawled across a set of jagged fishing gaffs. Fat crocodiles encircle the boat, ready to fight for the carcass. A few yards away, their brethren tear into the remains of three other fishermen. It is not the crocs that killed them. All, including the dead man in the boat, bear the wounds of the firefly plague.

Distracted by the easy feed, the crocodiles pay us no mind. We retreat back into the bordering jungle nonetheless, circling around. Arok curls his lip—the unbroken part of it—anxiously. The two of us are well equipped to fight most hostile creatures we might find out here. Against a cloud of carnivorous insects, we have no defense.

Thorold speeds his pace as the Little Vanji draws nearer its mother river. At the confluence between the two lies the town of Free Station. Its sunburned founders built it to squeeze themselves free of the Consortium’s iron hand. It would be better than Bloodcove, they said, as if there is a difference between one foreign trade post and another. To judge from the Ulfen’s words, the Aspis has burrowed its way in there, too. They are like termites. There is no good trunk on which they will not dine. Yet they might prove useful allies against this plague. Termites are determined, and industrious, and many.

Free Station comes into view. Arok stops and lopes back into the trees, for the ape refuses to set foot in outlander settlements. He will find us when we are done.

The Ulfen grows taller and straighter as we approach his adopted village. Free Station has grown since the last time I saw it. It is half a foreign town, half a Mwangi village. Houses in both styles ring the meeting point of river and tributary. The foreign buildings are made from Mwangi woods—cypress, ironwood, and kiat. Their shingled roofs already rot and buckle, victims of the rainy season. The thatched coverings of the platformed huts, replaced each year, are new and fresh. They are made like those of my people—the jungle Zenj, of which both the Ara and the Ngali are subtribes—but inhabited mostly by ocean-going Bonuwat.

A hush of terror smothers the town. Free Station’s traders and workers stride quickly through Free Station’s sodden, winding streets. They dart from building to building, reading the sky for insect clouds.

“The fireflies come at night,” Thorold says, “Or have so far. This gives us no great courage, not even with the sun high overhead.”

“How many dead in all?”

“Several score. My employers fear Bloodcove will be next.”

We cross a small wooden bridge into the town. At first I am ready: even when accompanied by one of their own, a Zenj man carrying a spear and wearing a boar-fur headdress might not always expect a welcome in such a place. But the furtive traders pay us no mind.

I ask my next question having already guessed the answer. “And this prophet of yours?”

“She communes with a two-faced god.” He pats his pack, where the strange instrument is stored. “Her services are costly, but she is reputed to enjoy strong divine favor.”

I am about to say more when I see someone I do not wish to be seen by. I shrink back behind an abandoned foreign-style hut. Built on a poor foundation, it sinks already into the Mwangi earth.

The undesirable quickly traverses the town’s wide main laneway. His wary gaze travels from side to side, not skywards, as if he has more to fear from his fellow man than from flesh-stripping fireflies. A Bekyar headdress of flowing linen covers his head. Its simple cord headband has been stripped of clan symbols. His white tunic and leggings are dirtied and worn, but he wears a new pair of northern boots. He mutters as if rehearsing a grudge.

Thorold proves himself wise; he waits until the man has passed to inquire. “Who is that?”

“A non-person. Take me to your Nethys priestess.”

It is no surprise that the Consortium counting house is the largest of Free Station’s buildings. Thorold escorts me inside, past nervous Bonuwat guardsmen in Aspis livery. We creak up a cocked staircase to a third-floor room. Incense colors the air: sandalwood, burnt nutmeg, cockatrice oil. Hesitantly he knocks on a battered door, its paint peeled by humidity.

“Enter,” commands the voice inside.

Thorold steps in, head half-bowed. “Milady priestess, I met someone in the jungle, who—”

“Look who the cat dragged in,” says the woman inside.

“Obai,” I say.

She perches, posture arrow-straight, on the edge of a padded wooden chair. She is of the weird and ancient Mauxi people. Her cheekbones are high, her complexion tinted with ash. Draped and interfolded robes enlarge her skeletal frame, wrapping it in deep-dyed reds and purples. Around her mouth are raised ritual scars, a series of dots, each the size of a delicate fingertip. Those on the left side of her lips curve up, extending her mouth into a smile. Those on the right curve down, giving that side of her face a frown. The scars declare her oneness with the great god Nethys—distant and inscrutable guardian of arcane secrets, maintainer of cosmic balance. Her frown-smile says that she is, like him, always her own opposite. “Where’s the ape?” she asks.

“In the forest, waiting.”

“Of course.”

“You know each other,” Thorold says.

He has allowed himself to give voice to the obvious. Obai judges him for it. The left side of her face is amused, the right side condemning.

Thorold continues. “Then the two of you—you are both of the Scarred Ones.”

“There is no such group,” I say.

Obai smiles and frowns.

The Ulfen can’t help himself. “And the man-ape as well.” With his finger in front of his face, he traces the pattern of Arok’s scars. “You are all Scarred Ones.”

“Have you the sextant?” she asks him.

He removes the instrument from his pack. She places it in a stand on a wide table, among five identical objects. The devices whirl and click, and Obai studies them intently. With a distracted wave, she dismisses the northerner from her presence. He meekly withdraws.

I tell her what Arok sensed, about the urunr.

Obai nods. “His perceptions align with the sextant readings. Thorold got closest to the imbalance. Its resonance partakes of both the divine and the natural realms.”

“A nature god, then.”

The tilt of her head suggests agreement. “Local, but powerful, and angry. We must do what must be done when gods are displeased.”

“And what is that?”

“Appease them, naturally.” Her words lilt with the usual amused contempt.

“Your god does not mind you pleasing another?”

Obae stares at the instruments again. She neatly inscribes a line of Mauxi hieroglyphics across the surface of an unfurled papyrus scroll.

“Nethys, in his totality, contains and circumscribes all other gods, which are but contesting manifestations of his sublime balance. To please the displeased, or to distress the contented, is to pay my twin-faced master homage.”

From her robe she produces a folded booklet, its pages dark and brown. “A codex of the Kembe,” she says. “Made from the pressed bark of a fig tree, which has not grown there for a thousand years.”

The Kembe are a long-departed people. Their ruined civilization lies in the jungles to the east.

“By Nethys’ grace, I have decoded its odd pictographs and rendered them into speech.” She holds up the booklet.

A drawing shows a firefly hovering over a stepped pyramid. Hunters sometimes stumble across such structures, buried under mounds of choking vine. They are to be avoided, as wells of bad magic.

“This is Kitumu,” she says, “the firefly goddess. Quite carnivorous, when awakened. Like many of the jungle godlings once known to the Kembe, a voracious demander of human sacrifice.”

I shiver; she turns her smiling side my way.

“If we are detecting unstable mystic energy of a divine and natural resonance, and our problem consists of devouring firefly swarms, it is reasonable to conclude that Kitumu, mother of fireflies, has awakened and is hungry.”

“We must find the goddess and feed it?”

“Dicey work, certainly. Local gods are trouble. They let you get so close to them.”

I don’t like where this is going. “And have you chosen an adequate meal?” I ask.

Her face grows grave; only her scars lend it expression. “I’d hoped the readings would lead me elsewhere. There’s a boy who lives in the jungle outside town. A member of an orphan band.”

Such child-tribes are too common now. Their parents interfered unwisely with foreign trade, and were extirpated.

“He comes occasionally to beg for scraps,” Obai says. “The other children mistreat him. They say he’s cursed. Apparently the curse’s sign is a birthmark over his heart, in the shape of a fly.”

“A firefly?”

“We will need to see it more closely. It’s been several days since he was last in town—when the first of the attacks began. The other orphans don’t share with him, so he’ll grow hungry soon, and come in.”

“And his name?”

“The orphans call him Mwonduk.”

It is a Zenj word I know all too well. It means “accursed one.”

∗ ∗ ∗

“Obai seeks only balance.”

For two days, the priestess and I, along with Thorold and his fellow Aspis traders, fan out through the town, waiting to catch this Mwonduk. We know him only by description, and accost many orphans, none of whom bear his mark.

On the third day, Obai and I hear a boy-child’s screams of protest. They come from the patch of scrubland west of town, and I bound forward, the priestess lithely following.

Bekyar slavers surround the boy. Other children rush from the scene, unpursued. The slave-takers want only this single scrawny orphan.

There are seven strong-shouldered men, and a fat captain, armed with a whip. Without warning or preamble, Obai corrects the imbalance of forces, scourging them with divine fire. The men shriek, their clothes and flesh consumed by Nethys’s ire. The men holding the boy stand outside the bursting flame, and one of them hoists the child high on his hip as the others turn to fight. I plunge among them, my weapon striking high and low. They fall, squealing and groaning, like the cowards slavers so often are. I am not a cruel man, but their pain is one I exult in. They flee my hateful spear.

The boy is running, too. Obai faces the fat, whip-wielding one, and I leave her to it, veering to intercept the boy. He stops, stunned, as he watches the priestess lay hands on the fat man. The heavens howl as the big-bellied slaver is reduced to dust and bone.

On the boy’s chest, I see the insect birthmark. It is a firefly.

“You are Mwonduk?” I ask.

He nods.

“We’ve rescued you,” I tell him. This is not the same as saying that we are his rescuers, and so is not quite a lie.

Obai and I dash him to the Consortium counting house, before more slavers appear. Once there, we sequester the boy in a room and converse privately.

“The Bekyar are involved,” she says.

“I know.”

“They were interested only in the boy.”

“Yes.”

“If the Bekyar are involved...”

I shake my head.

“He’s in town.”

“I know. I saw him, coming in.”

Obai smiles and frowns. “Nethys moves his pawns. He provides tools to restore balance.”

“No,” I say, but the battle is lost, and I know it.

“If it’s slavers against us,” she says, and her words have the ring of finality, “we must fetch Verkusht.”

Chapter Two: Friends and Other Enemies

Verkusht is as I had seen him a few days before, when I first came to Free Station, seeking an end to the firefly plague. I shrank back, then, so he would not see me. Now I, along with the balance priestess Obai, stand before him, seeking his favor.

With a ragged fingernail, he picks at a morsel of food lodged between his small, uneven teeth. “I saw you, you know.”

We stand in the back parlor of a drunkard’s den. Here northern liquors are served, along with palm wine and the strength-sapping mash of the garuti plant. Free Station overflows with such places. It is one thing for the foreigners to poison themselves. That is their custom. But it is not the Zenj way, not in a place that smells of blood and vomit, away from friend and kin and the safety of the feasting circle.

Verkusht repeats himself. “I saw you try to hide from me. I didn’t confront you, because you know how I hate embarrassment.” His sharp-ended beard, waxed in the manner of an outland dandy, bobs up and down, agreeing with him. As it always does when he’s aggrieved, Verkusht’s left hand absently strokes the raised red scar encircling his right wrist. If you ever look closely at his right hand, you will see that the lines of his arm do not quite match up with those on his hand.

“It is right to dislike embarrassment,” I say. “So let us speak no more of it.”

“Not so fast.” He leans forward in his wooden chair. His linen Bekyar headdress lies over its back, exposing the black hair slicked tightly to his skull. “After all we’ve been through together, you hide yourself from me?”

“What we have been through together,” I repeat. “That includes the time of the Moon People?”

“I explained that a thousand times already. My seeming betrayal was merely a ruse.”

“At the ruins of Shopar?”

“I meant to come back for you.”

“In the Vault of the Locust?”

“Again: seeming betrayal, merely a ruse.”

The priestess shrugs. “In that instance, arguably the truth.”

Verkusht removes a dagger from his boot. With its razor tip, he expertly pries lodged dirt from beneath his nails. “Let me waste no more time with this ungrateful loghead,” he mutters to Obai. “That I regard him as a brother evidently means nothing to him. Tell me again what I stand to gain by keeping company with those who do not value it.”

“The Consortium generously rewards me,” she says.

“Even though you’re really in it to strike the balance of Nethys. Double loyalties.”

“I thought you’d approve.” She gestures toward his ragged attire. “Clearly you could use the silver.”

“You complain of my fickleness, yet seek my aid in betraying my people.”

“I said nothing about fickleness.”

“You say it with your gaze, priestess. Always with those damned eyes of yours.”

“You are still an outcast from your people, as Xhasi here is from his.”

“Helping keep them away from this child of yours won’t exactly get me back in their graces, will it?”

“Tell me what you want the Aspis to pay, and I’ll see they pay it. We need to know why the slavers sought the boy specifically, and neither Xhasi nor I...”

“Neither of you are effective sneaks and betrayers?” He breaks off mid-chortle, suddenly righting himself. The legs of his chair bang against tavern floorboards. Foreigners pour in through the doorway and a pair of windows. They carry short swords, cutlasses, and clubs with nail-covered heads. More than half a dozen of them fill the drinking hall.

“You will pay what you owe,” growls a towering half-human, whose other half might be orc or ogre. “You will pay in gold or blood!”

“My good friends here dispute the justice of your claims,” says Verkusht. He seeks the smallest of his adversaries and kicks him between the legs.

Verkusht vanishes into the scrum. The meadhall becomes a whirl of grunting flesh and swinging swords. Three of them are upon me. With difficulty I find room for my spear and push them back. Obai, her best spells expended against the slavers earlier in the day, lays harming hands on one opponent, who falls back groaning. She takes up her double-edged sword, its hilt decorated with the masks of Nethys, and lays into the debt collectors. Steel rings against steel. The weaker foes fall back while the stronger rush in. The half-human lumbers toward me, his enormous club clearing his path. He strikes a comrade, who sinks to the floor, head bleeding. If the mishap troubles him, he shows no signs of it.

I duck beneath his club, though it comes close enough to dislodge my boar-fur headdress. I stab at him with my spear, but he deftly sidesteps. A glancing blow tears at my flesh; the tips of the club’s jutting spikes carve a raking pattern across my shoulder. I connect my spear haft to his bony jaw. Though the blow is a solid one, he shakes it off, hardening his face into an idiot grin. I step aside from his next blow, then slash his fingers with the spearhead’s edge. He bleats out what is undoubtedly a curse in some outland tongue as his hand unclenches, dropping the club. When he ducks down to retrieve it, I direct a haft-blow to his temple. It judders across his thick skull to little effect. His great hands are upon my throat, thumbs pressing deep.

The half-human’s eyes roll back in his head. His grip loosens, and I step back to let him collapse. A curving Bekyar dagger handle protrudes from his back. The blade has pierced his heart from behind. Verkusht admires his handiwork approvingly, then ducks an enraged blow from another creditor. He arranges his fall so that it pulls his enemy with him. Then they are on the floor, with Verkusht behind the man, Verkusht’s garotte tight around his neck and the debt collector clawing vainly at it.

Verkusht breathes a harsh whisper into the man’s ear. “Order your men to stand down, Zenes, or you’ll lose more of them today.” A slash of a smile incises itself on Verkusht’s face. “You’ve picked on more than just one bedraggled gambler. Today you face the Scarred Ones.”

Zenes, an olive-skinned man with oiled beard and hair, tries to speak but hasn’t the air. He waves his hands in a gesture of surrender.

Two broad-armed men in motley armor step back from Obai, whom they had pushed into a corner. Spread across the floor are three men, their throats slashed. One still lives, a whitening hand pressed hard to keep the vein closed.

“Go, then,” Zenes wheezes.

Verkusht is first to leap up, leaving us to bear the brunt if his debt-holders choose to charge. With a determined pull he retrieves his dagger from the big man’s corpse. We follow him, eyes fixed on the men still capable of fighting. We walk backward and ready from the drinking house, but the men remain within.

The Bekyar strides merrily down the road. “Sorry to keep dragging out the argument like that. I thought Zenes and his bunch would never arrive. It goes without saying that I’ll go along on this mission of yours. Assuming the Consortium bargains fairly for my services.”

It is fruitless, but I cannot help myself. “You owe them a gambling debt?”

Verkusht shrugs. “There are two sides to every story.”

“Verkusht has an unusual definition of friendship.”

“You could have offered them the fees you’ll earn for the mission.”

His face ovals in shock. “And be left with nothing? Your judgment wounds me, Xhasi. You may well be a man of the jungle, content with nothing more than trees over your head and an overflowing basket of grobfruit and areca. I, however, am a person of civilized virtues, ill suited to deprivation or indignity. Now on to the important question: these slavers who were attempting to take your god-cursed boy—I don’t suppose you saw the clan markers on their headbands?”

I shake my head.

Noticing that his beard was blunted by the fight, he restores its waxen point. “Never mind. Most likely they are of the Rostoun.”

“Your clan,” Obai says.

Verkusht loses some of his flamboyance. “Indeed, priestess. You remember details well.”

“Have they seers and magicians among their number?” she asks.

“We are not inclined in that direction. Aside from a few minor magics of obedience and coercion.”

“So they are unlikely to have stumbled across the boy’s mythic significance on their own?”

The Bekyar frowns, as if wondering whether offense should be taken. “If it’s the Rostoun, they’ll be led by a cousin of mine, Tarood. A man of tenacious cruelty, and I say that admiringly. His usual preference is for low-quality merchandise. That way if you lose a few along the way, because of rough handling, it’s no matter for concern.”

“So if it was he who sought Mwonduk in particular, he was likely hired by someone else.”

Verkusht considers her words for a moment. “It’s possible, but there are many ifs and guesses at play. Surely you desire a first-hand investigation. And before that can occur, there are terms to be struck.”

We reach the Aspis counting house. Shedding his air of sudden gravity, the Bekyar bounds across its threshold.

∗ ∗ ∗

The glee is still in his step after he has made his pact with Thorold, the Aspis man. The two of us wend through the puddles of a muddy back lane. Numbers glitter in his eyes.

“I knew it,” he says. “I knew my luck would turn. Wait long enough and it always does. And I have waited, my friend, oh how I have waited.” He waggles his fingers, cracking each joint. “Yes, when I look back on it all, today will mark the turning point. The time when it all changed, and Verkusht began to get his due.”

I have already told him of my friends, the Ngali, every one of them slaughtered by the firefly plague. I remind him again. And of the many others killed so far.

His triangular features arrange themselves into a frown. He is annoyed at me for ruining his joy. “Xhasi, my friend, the jungle devours. Devouring is its reason for being, and its sole intent. It falls to us to pick its scraps. Along with the hyenas, the vultures, the lions, and the other scavengers.”

We head to the north side of town, where its oldest buildings lie. Or sink, to tell it more completely. The rebel traders who made Free Station were explorers, robbers, and gamblers, not builders. Their first storerooms and winehouses were built to hug the Vanji’s bank. They meant to shorten the number of steps between the landing of a riverboat and the unloading of its cargo. To see that no more than a few steps separated a thirsty riverman from his fresh jug of grog.

The riverbank did not sympathize with its colonizers. Its soft banks hungered. They took these interloping structures and dined on their foundations. The taverns sank. The warehouses filled with disgorged mud. Abandoned, they stood tilting and wheezing, the river slowly advancing on them. Patiently devouring.

Verkusht squints at the collapsing buildings. “If Tarood’s hiding—and if he weren’t we’d see him and his clanmates all over town—he’ll be holed up here. There’s an old counting house he used last time I, er, ran into him. If not there, the back rooms of the Funeral Ship.”

The Funeral Ship is the only remaining tavern in the town’s sinking quarter. Its patrons imbibe at an angle. To take a seat there, the drinking men say, is to feel half-drunk already.

“He won’t be in the jungle?” I ask.

“He won’t be in the jungle,” Verkusht confirms.

We advance. I follow Verkusht, who sneaks well along laneways and between buildings. The counting house is empty, save for a fat constrictor and a scurry of heedless rats.

To the back of the tavern is the chancier approach. A wide avenue offers little cover. Its muck sounds a wet alarm every time we set a foot down. Finally we reach the back of the tavern, and Verkusht presses an ear against its gray, weathered boards. He nods and points to his ear. He hears them, inside.

A boiling, squealing thing erupts at my ankles. My spear is ready. It rushes past me—a piglet, one of the foreign kind, foolishly screaming. It circles around, momentarily intent on nipping my ankles. It reconsiders and veers off.

Shutters slam open. A Bekyar slaver leans out. I am seen. I look to my side for Verkusht.

He is gone.

Slavers leap from the windows. They pour from the porch. I turn to run. My feet slide beneath me. I right myself before succumbing to a painful, humiliating fall, but put scant distance between myself and my pursuers. One, propelled by some kind of leaping charm, is upon me before I can move further. The haft of my spear catches the bottom of his jaw, sending him sprawling into the muck. Then I am surrounded.

I wait for Verkusht’s counterassault to begin. For daggers to appear between shoulder blades. For arrows to zip from nowhere to thin out my foes. The wait is in vain.

I topple a second slaver, wind a third, clout another so hard he falls to his knees, retching. It is not enough. They outnumber me. Slavers shoulder in past my spear. They wrench it from my grip. Thudding blows dance over my ribs to graze my kidneys. The gray day blackens and twists. As I slip into a daze, I realize that they at least intend to keep me alive. This grants me faint solace as a dim awareness of floating seizes me. They have lifted me up. Are carrying me into the back of the Funeral Boat.

Verkusht has gone to get reinforcements, I tell myself. It cannot be that he has betrayed me yet again.

∗ ∗ ∗

Water awakens me. Thrown into my face, it rushes up my nose and into my gaping mouth. I return to life, choking. It smells like river mud.

I am lashed to a chair. I test my bonds and find them tight. This is expected, when captured by slavers. Old memories, never buried deep, surge to the surface. The fury rises in me. If I get loose, I will have to fight not only my captors, but also the siren urge to kill.

There are a dozen of them, more or less. Muck spatters their white robes. Bruises color the undersides of their eyes. They rub unhappily at throats, arm muscles, legs—places I have hit them. They sulk in corners, pick at their teeth, pace small circles on the floor. Because of who they are, the cruel trade they conduct, I take satisfaction in their pain. I wish only that they felt it a thousandfold.

The man who has thrown the bucket of river water into my face looks to his superior for permission to back away. As if I were capable of snapping the wet leather straps that bind me to the chair, of flying at him and twisting his neck until it snaps. He can sense my desire, but overestimates my capability.

The man who nods to him is a Bekyar like himself. He is taller and thinner than the others. The family resemblance is easily seen. Were you to flatten and elongate Verkusht’s head, to extend his nose outward into a majestic slope, and then douse him in a spring of youth, you would have this man. It can only be Tarood. His robes are impeccably clean; he took no direct part in my capture. His mouth opens like a snake’s. The quivering tip of his tongue peeks out to sample the air. Tarood is excited. A coiled whip hangs from his hip. He holds his left hand curled into a fist. Across his knuckles are looping lengths of barbed wire. Not a fighting weapon. A torturing weapon.

How long have I been unconscious? It shouldn’t be long before Verkusht arrives, with Obai and a troop of Aspis guardsmen. My words must keep me alive until then.

It is not Tarood who speaks. A foreigner steps from the gloom. His garb and accented speech describe him as an outlander, but of what sort I cannot tell. Later I will be told that he is a Taldan.

He tilts his head slightly. Tarood takes a disappointed step back.

This man is in command, not the slaver.

His skin is nearly as dark as the Bekyar, though light compared to mine. The crown of hair wreathing his head shines like sunset. It is darker near his scalp—dyed. I judge him a once thin and handsome man, newly encased in rich folds of flesh. Threaded with silver, his garments sparkle and dance. Heavy rings of yellow metal cover each of his fingers. A medallion, big as an outlander tea saucer, hangs from his neck. Its golden face glowers, a grimacing, angry sun.

None of these decorations are as striking as the man’s eyes. One is brown. The other iris is doubled: a light blue ring is imprisoned within a partner of deep violet. The strange eyes look me over, as if I am for sale. As a prisoner of slavers, some might say that I am.

“The boy,” he says. “Tell me about the boy.”

I look again at Tarood’s fist of sharp-edged wire.

“The boy is needed to reverse a deadly plague.”

The man contemplates, his face still. “You get to it, don’t you? I expected to waste some time before coming to the nub. First you would deny you knew what I was talking about. Then Tarood here would hurt you...”

“Why invite injury?” I ask.

“You are an intelligent man, then. A man I can deal with.”

I am not that last thing, but in the interest of delay I let his charge go unanswered.

“What is your name, Zenj?”

“What is yours?” I ask.

Again he thinks before speaking, his features empty of intent. “Brachantes,” he finally says. “It is not a name that will be known in these parts.”

“I am Xhasi,” I allow.

“Xhasi, formerly of the Ara tribe, occasionally of the Scarred Ones, improbably a Pathfinder,” Brachantes says. “Tell me what business you have with the boy.”

“The boy, Mwonduk, is accursed by Kitumu, the firefly goddess. If you have heard so much about me, you are doubtless also informed about the firefly deaths.”

Brachantes nods.

“To end the plague, the boy must be delivered to the goddess.”

“And you have a strong desire to end the plague.”

“My friends were slain by it. Many more will be if no one acts.”

He comes too close, peers into my face, as if reading a text written on my skin. “It does not trouble you that the child will be sacrificed?”

“The price of many lives is one life,” I say.

“A cold-blooded thought,” says Brachantes.

“The jungle devours,” I reply.

He seizes a wooden chair, finds a safe position for it on uneven floorboards, places it a few feet from me, and sits down. “Instead of letting a god devour him, I propose to purchase him. Name your price. No blood need be shed.”

“Except for that eaten by fireflies.”

Brachantes adjusts one of his golden rings. “Perhaps if I take the boy far from here, the goddess will forget her prize, and return to her slumbers.”

“I do not know about your homeland. Here in the Mwangi, gods and goddesses are never forgetful.”

He points a meaty finger into the air. “You cannot be sure it is so. Your seer says it. My seers, who sensed this boy’s presence from afar, whose visions brought me all the way to this rotting riverbank, predicted merely that I would find a boy touched by the gods. You say cursed, I say blessed.”

“Your prophets will be proven right,” I venture, “if we take him to the goddess and she chooses not to take him.”

Anger wells in his face. “Unlike you, I will not see him harmed. He’ll while the rest of his days in comfort.” Brachantes softens his tone, forces a benevolent smile. “He’ll not labor, nor will he want. Far better than life here. Even if he weren’t held by Consortium hirelings who mean to sacrifice him.”

It is cleverest to seem tempted. “What do you want with him?”

His round face widens, excited. “I am a collector of marvels, Xhasi. My menagerie is famed throughout the northeast. Housed in its golden cages are chimeras, basilisks, minotaurs. I include in my collection the great sphinx of Samun, even the black dragon Éirma.”

“How does the dragon like it?”

“She has resigned herself to her lot. Like most beings on this earth.”

“And now you wish to collect children, too?”

“As the Bekyar here can attest, there is no race of person that cannot legally be regarded as property. As a young connoisseur, I started with objects—paintings, jewels, arcane artifacts. Then I realized that only living wonders are worth owning.”

I realize too late that I am seething. Unlike Verkusht, I have never been a good liar.

Brachantes laughs. “You would let this boy be devoured, yet fume when I propose to establish him in permanent splendor? He would grow up in elevated company. My permanent guests include Oedes, poet of the shadow quatrains, and the former adventurer Strodai, who learned to breathe fire on the elemental planes.”

“They too are resigned to their fates?”

“Perhaps not. The occasional escape attempt keeps an inmate vigorous, that’s what I say. It is essential that the mind remains alive.” He steps up out of the chair, kicking it aside. “Yet I sense that moral argument, as one-sided in my favor as it might be, is taking us nowhere. Tarood?”

The Bekyar advances. Brachantes gestures to his fist and shakes his head. Tarood petulantly removes the barbed wire from his fist. It is with bare knuckles that he strikes me. I reel backward. In quick succession he hits me again, and again. I feel blood trickling from my nose, resolving into droplets, and falling onto my chest.

My eyes swell shut. The outlander’s reedy voice comes from somewhere behind me.

“You will agree to the following, Xhasi. You will choose a rendezvous point in the jungle. This way we will not have to fight our way through an entire counting house of Aspis Consortium guards. We will be waiting for you there. We will take the boy off your hands. And the Bekyar traitor Verkusht, too. He is nothing to me, but Tarood says that he owes a debt to his people, which must finally be discharged.”

Tarood’s smile is that of a serpent.

Brachantes continues, still where I cannot see him. “I regard myself as a fair dealer. Within reason, I am prepared to compensate you for your efforts on my behalf. I pay better than the Pathfinders, that is for certain.”

“How do you ensure my cooperation, once you let me go?” My words wheeze through bloodied lips.

“Let’s say that you don’t want to find out, and leave it at that.” He steps into view, wincing at whatever Tarood has done to my face. “Do you agree?”

With effort, I raise my head. “You know that I can’t.”

“Strong drink is Sunasuka's blessing-and her curse.”

Brachantes shrugs. Tarood places his barbed implement back in his fist. A whining giggle traps itself in his bobbing throat.

The back door slams open.

It is not the rescue party I have been expecting. No Obai, no Verkusht. No squadron of Aspis enforcers.

Standing silhouetted in the doorway is a single halfling. Her hair is a matted and tangled mess. Her nose lies flat across her face, the result of multiple breakings and healings. She wears a tattered tunic and leggings of antelope hide, in the manner of the halfling tribes of the jungle interior. A powerful stench of stale breath and palm wine accompanies her entrance. The spatters of mud on her face and arms are lighter than her gleaming skin.

“This is a drinking establishment,” proclaims my old friend Sunasuka the halfling, “and by the forgotten gods and all the shrieking apes, I will not be barred from it!” The booming roar of her voice contradicts her tiny frame.

She sees me in the chair, bound and bleeding. A howl of drunken indignation escapes her throat. Sunasuka rolls into the room, caroming unpredictably on her oversized, jungle-hardened feet.

The slavers are startled and surprised.

I am startled, but not surprised. My friend makes a habit of unlikely appearances and fortuitous blunders.

She utters commands in the universal tongue of beasts. At her bidding, vermin drop from the ceilings, roil up through the floorboards. Rats drop onto the slavers like water over the Korir Falls. Wasps, each as thick as a thumb, swarm around them, stinging. Roaches fly at their faces, buzzing and vomiting gluey spittle.

The few slavers missed by nature’s onslaught advance on Sunasuka’s position, but her wobbly path confounds them. Their scimitars slash the air where she should be, but isn’t. Her double-headed club catches and sweeps them aside, the screams of its carved monkey faces adding to the chaos. Ducking crazily under a swung scimitar, she kicks my chair, toppling it on its side. Its damp-rotted wood crumbles on impact and I am free.

Sunasuka calls up a flaming wall to separate us from my captors. She helps me to my feet. Together we lurch from the scene. Behind us the Funeral Boat is consumed by spreading flame. The halfling looks back regretfully at the loss of yet another favorite drinking establishment.

“So something’s going on, then?” she asks.

Chapter Three: The Condemned

We stagger quickly through Free Station’s muddy lanes, the halfling nature priestess and I, ready for pursuers to appear at our heels. She owes her uneven tread to palm wine; I, to the beating delivered by Brachantes’ hired slavers.

Sunasuka scratches her mane of matted hair, withdrawing a fat nit. She frowns at it, quizzical. “What did I tell you?” she asks. She is speaking to the insect. A hundred black dots emerge from her scalp, gather on her neck, and crawl obediently down her arm. She leans against a stray sapling jutting boldly from the roadside. The nits exit onto it. She zigzags back to me. Taking note of my injuries, she mutters and waggles her fingers.

My mangled lip knits back together. In an instant, my bruises lighten, turn green and yellow, then vanish. The pain in my ribs goes away, followed by the dull throb in my gut.

I nod my thanks and return to what I’d been saying before. “You aren’t joking then.”

She blinks, as if seeing through a fog. “About what?”

“You weren’t sent to rescue me.”

“Sent? By the others? The others are here?”

I explain again about the mission, and Verkusht, and how he left me to be captured. How my coming accounting with him might be gentler if it turned out that he had found Sunasuka and sent her to get me.

“The others!” she exclaims.

She is drunker than usual, I think.

But then I see she is looking ahead, and here they come—Verkusht, and Obai the balance priestess, and a small legion of guardsmen lent by Thorold, our Aspis Consortium patron.

And one other.

Katiiwa strides toward us with her usual grace. Never a movement or gesture that is more than required. Her jagged harpoon, cast in an unknown metal and gleaming azure blue, rests confidently over her shoulder. Incised arcane symbols cover its surface. Katiiwa wears the coral-colored garb of her seafaring people, the Bonuwat. A patterned head wrap gathers her coiled hair into a crown atop her serene features.

When she turns toward us, the ear with the torn, missing lobe becomes visible. Pale trails, left by a barracuda’s teeth, rake down the side of her neck.

Katiiwa embraces Sunasuka, undeterred by her coating of filth. The others keep the halfling at bay.

Verkusht approaches. I glower.

“Naturally,” he explains, “I had to be careful not to be seen on the way back. Couldn’t allow an ambush at the counting house. Securing the boy was crucial. And not a scratch on you, I see, so all has turned out well. I trust you learned something while you were there.”

We turn back to the counting house. I tell the others about Brachantes, of his intention to make the boy a trophy in a distant menagerie. We do not speak of our plans for him.

Nor do I ask how or why Katiiwa has joined us. It is always better not to know.

Aside from Arok, who waits for us still in the forest, now all of us are here.

“Come to think of it,” Sunasuka suddenly blurts, “it’s quite a thing that the place that refused to serve me anymore had our Xhasi prisoner in the back, isn’t it?”

Obai is amused. “Quite a thing indeed.”

“Coincidence follows you around, doesn’t it?” Verkusht says. He fidgets with the folds of his linen headdress.

Sunasuka produces a gourd from her reeking pack and takes a happy swig. “Someone once said to me that coincidence doesn’t follow me. I follow it.”

“I said that,” says Katiiwa.

“There you go then,” replies the halfling, as if all has been explained.

“There is no coincidence,” Obai says. “Only the actions of Nethys, god of balance, acting invisibly.”

“Everything is coincidence,” says Katiiwa.

“Including your presence here?”

“Especially that.”

There is more of this, all the way back to the counting house. Once there, I approach the boy’s room. An Aspis guard unlocks the door.

Sunasuka follows. Her interest in the boy might bring trouble, but I can’t see how to keep her out. The rest of us are hard, each in our own way. We will be ready to consign Mwonduk to his fate. Of the drunken nature priestess, I can’t be sure.

The room is large and well furnished, though the shutters are nailed shut and the door barred and manned. The boy does not sit on the bed or in any of the chairs, but has instead lodged himself in a corner. The Aspis have given him clean, fine clothes in the outlander style. He has not thrown them off, at least. The tunic is open, displaying the firefly birthmark on his chest, red and unmistakable. The mark of his ancestral curse. Cradled between his hands is a cooked yam. It is barely touched, a few nibbles taken off the top. He holds it as if for comfort.

“Are you well, Mwonduk?” I ask.

He nods, his eyes deep and wet.

On a table sits a bowl, full of fruits. Beside it, a round loaf of mashbread. No sign that he’s eaten any of it.

“Is there anything you’d like, that we could get you?”

He shakes his head.

“We’ll be leaving soon. Taking you into the jungle with us. Did Obai explain this?”

A nod, smaller than the one before it. Finally he speaks. His voice is a whisper. I guess that it is not much used. “She said you were taken by the men who tried to take me.”

“I was, but my friend came to save me.”

“Like you saved me,” Mwonduk says.

“Yes. Eat some food. We’ll be leaving soon.”

“Before they come after us?”

“Yes. Eat some food.”

He puts the yam in his pocket.

∗ ∗ ∗

We leave Free Station soon after—the five of us, and the boy. Offered the aid of a small party of Aspis explorers, we refuse. They would slow us down. Some would die.

When Free Station is out of sight, Arok appears beside us. Mwonduk’s face widens in wonder. He is surprised to greet a talking ape, but shows no fear of him.

Our route will take us across the grasslands. We will traverse Rechiend’s Plains, then enter the jungle. The openness of the vast savanna puts me on edge. I would sooner be under the shade of the high forest canopy. Arok shares my unease.

Wide swathes of the jungle escape claim by any clan or tribe. One may travel through them without trespassing. The grasslands clans, whose ways are different from ours, claim between them most every inch of the plains. Negotiation is always required. To move through them, one must seek permission, if not a grant of hospitality. The clans guard their borders jealousy, against their neighbors most of all. Between the six of us, we have nearly enough friends to patchwork our way across the great plain, connecting the lands of one friendly tribe to another. But we may have friends among two tribes who distrust each other. We may arrive on the borders of one tribe only to find that it has changed its Great Mother, or that its Women’s Council now bars entry to strangers. The boy will pose a problem, too. Their spirits will smell the curse upon him, and tell their spirit-talkers.

“Katiiwa does what must be done.”

My friendship with the Sabudu allows us passage through their lands. I warn them to steer clear of the boy. They reward us with gourd milk and cured antelope meat. Obai invokes the eighth taboo of the Budii, earning their reluctant passage. We are warned not to eat a blade of grass or step upon a spider and sent on our way, watched from a distance. The Budii watchers whoop and brandish arrows as we near Charpa territory, and come upon a hunting group on the opposite shore of a contested watering hole. The Charpa whoop and threaten back, until Arok beats his breast and screams, drowning out both parties. This seems to satisfy their code of aggression, or at least confuse them, and both withdraw. The Charpa allow us passage by ignoring our presence. From there we dash across a spur of land claimed by the Unnameable Tribe, who are not flesh and blood but are made of shadow. The sun is high, so they do not molest us.

Then we are feasted among the Walakuf, for whom Verkusht once performed a deadly favor, which neither he nor they will name. There Sunasuka becomes drunk and performs an obscene dance, winning her recognition as a huyo, or holy fool. When she passes out they drape an amulet around her neck, and tell us that it will also earn us passage across the lands of their sister tribe, the Jumvi. Night has come and Sunasuka is immovable, so we rest. The Walakuf anoint the boy with protective oils; the protection is for them, not him. They tell us that the fireflies came last night, for their hated neighbors to the east, the Kesh. We would be killed if we venture into the Keshlands, but it is not on our route. In the morning we are joyfully escorted to the Walakuf’s northern reach.

It is there that the troubles start. To the west live the Salipat, who offer outsiders hospitality in the wet season and death in the dry. It is the wrong time of year, so we cannot go there. Our other choice lies to the north, where dwell the lion riders of Kuta. None of us know them. We must dare to enter their lands, wait to be accosted, and hope they respond favorably to the Stranger Greeting.

Finding them is a matter of being found by them. If we head to the nearest of their watering holes, we can be sure they will appear to challenge us. I look for animal runs. A warthog trots calmly past us, his hooves kicking up dust on an ancient trail. I beckon the others to follow. Long before any sign of water, dots appear on the horizon.

It is the Kuta. According to the protocol of the Stranger Greeting, we go no further. I hold up my shield in the customary position, then make a show of setting it down. We wait, arranging ourselves around the boy.

Verkusht’s twitching fingers wander near the hilt of his dagger. I scold him with a look. A bead of sweat grows from the furrows of his forehead to slide down his nose.

Nearer they come: eight warrior women and their male entourage, astride their riding lions. The Kuta are outfitted in fine regalia, decorated in gold, zebra hide, and ostrich feathers, but it is the beasts that seize my attention.

They are like the lions I know, but taller and longer. Long, blockily muscular legs replace the lithe springing limbs of an ordinary big cat. Their feet widen into broad, hardened paddles, armed with wicked yellow claws. I have never seen a lion that would weigh half as much as these. Fiber saddles hold the proud-shouldered Kuta on their backs. The women ride lions; the men, lionesses. The beasts twist their heads, snarling, as if asking for orders. They’re hoping that their riders will let them tear us apart. It is scarcely a leap to imagine that they have done so before, to petitioning visitors who displeased their mistresses.

Though I have not seen the Kuta lions before, I know the myth. The first of the Kuta people, of course also called Kuta, gathered her starving family around her, unable to make her way in the harshness of the world, back when it was all one vast grassland. She went to the toad goddess, who could not bear her wailing and burrowed away from her, into the sand. She went to the bird goddess, who taunted her and flew away into the sky. Then she came by accident upon the proud lion goddess, who saw no threat in this spindly, starving creature. Driven by hunger and love for her children, Kuta wagered that she could wrestle the lion to the ground. In her desperation, she won out, and so the lion goddess gave her the weakest of her brood, transforming them into beasts of burden. In exchange for this, Kuta agreed that no member of her people would ever slay another, no matter how fearsome the crime.

As they advance, I see that we stand before the Kuta queen herself. The seven gold rings in her ear and the tattoos on her brow proclaim her royalty. In her right hand she holds the feathered crop of authority. In the left she grasps a leash. It leads to a pathetic and naked prisoner, covered only by a layer of sandy dirt. This battered wretch must run alongside the queen’s lion, the tallest and most powerful of the lot.

Obai steps forward to perform the customary half-bow, which neither claims superiority nor admits submission. “I am a stranger, and I greet thee, queen of the Kuta. I present my true name to you: I am Obai, of the Scarred Ones, a clan of the clanless. I am a stranger, and request naught else but passage through your goddess-granted lands.”

The queen replies. “You have spoken correctly and so will not be slain. But passage will not be granted.” A horsefly lands in her mount’s thick mane. The queen swats the fly with the tip of her crop, and her lion snarls its annoyance. The bug drops, smashed, beside its paw. On her fiber saddle, the queen straightens, rising to her full height.

Obai lowers her head ever so slightly. To abase herself to a tribal matriarch is not an easy thing for her; I see it in the tautness of her wiry frame. “May I ask why, Lion Queen?”

“We are lions. That is all the explanation you require.”

Katiiwa makes a barely audible clucking sound. Obai notes it and withdraws, in favor of the sorceress. Katiiwa leaves her harpoon behind before stepping forward, sticking its sparkling blue haft into the dry savanna soil.

∗ ∗ ∗

“I am Katiiwa. I offer you the solution to a problem.”

A rattle-shaking woman, painted from head to toe in the swirls and whorls of a grassland spirit-talker, leans to the queen’s right. She sniffs the air, frowns, and whispers something into the monarch’s seven-ringed ear.

“You are a demon,” the queen says.

Katiiwa is unfazed. “Only by distant descent, Queen Lion. The Kuta subscribe to a killing code, do they not?”

“The customs of my tribe are not your concern.”

“My comrade Xhasi was of the Ara, and knows well of killing codes, though his is surely different from yours. One Kuta may not slay another. Even a queen may not, not even when the crime is the gravest possible. Is it so?”

The queen shifts in her saddle. “What if it were?”

“The outcast. Her ear bears seven holes, where once the rings of queenship rested. Is it so?”

“Your eyes see well, demonkin.”

“Her crimes would be terrible indeed, to see her stripped of her crown. Paraded like a dog.”

The queen spits, nearly missing the outcast. “The dog is a wretched beast.”

“Were it not a worse crime than hers, you would surely wish this dog’s life ended.”

Queen Lion shudders. “This dog committed the worst crime. First, she kept food back when all were starving. Gave it to close kin only, even after granted the lion’s share. When discovered, she slew her own, to hide her shame.”

Without looking back, Katiiwa holds out her hand. I step forward, placing her harpoon in it. “Then today is a fortunate day for the Kuta, good queen. For my weapon and I perform the dirty work of justice.”

The bedraggled outcast silently weeps—from terror or relief, I cannot say.

“You are not of our people,” the queen says.

“Nor bound by your code.”

“I may not command you to do it, which is like doing it myself.”

“You have no authority to command me, good lion. If I choose to mete justice, it is not your doing.”

The queen drops the leash.

Sunasuka takes Mwonduk, wraps her arm around him, and pulls his head into her shoulder, so he won’t see what happens next.

The former queen stands quaking for a moment. Then she turns and runs, stumbling, exhausted, kicking up a cloud. Katiiwa strides evenly after her. The outcast stumbles. Katiiwa raises, then lowers, the azure harpoon. It is done with a stroke, with hardly a gurgle. The dry sand instantly drinks down the deposed queen’s blood.

Katiiwa turns her back on the slain woman. Her harpoon has cleaned itself of her victim’s gore. When she passes me to return to the group, dread skitters spider-like down my spine. Though I do not wish to, I am sensing the demon part of her. Fed, it resumes its slumber.

The lions champ at their grass-fiber reins. They quiver in frustration while the queen and her retinue slowly dismount. Finally they have completed their dignified clamber, allowing the lions to pounce on the corpse. The maned lions of the women’s retinue are allowed to feast, while the lionesses ridden by the men look on in envy.

This is a Kuta funeral. Were the victim not dishonored, toasts and ceremonies would precede the eating. The lions are considered part of the tribe, and like its two-legged members, may not kill its members. The divine law does not, it seems, forbid them from eating those already dead. When a person dies, the lions feed. When a lion dies, it is the people who consume its roasted meat.

The beasts tear apart flesh and break into bone. Of our party, all but Katiiwa and Arok turn away.

It is over in moments, the meal finished to the marrow. When we turn around, only scraps of reddened bone remain. The queen and her aides climb back onto their mounts. Assembled tribe members, human and feline alike, regard us and our discomfort with haughty amusement. They say it in the way they hold their heads: they are lions.

The queen and her attendants depart, lion tails switching behind them. We are left in the company of the lesser functionaries. They ride their lionesses toward a bare knoll to the north of the Kuta lands. We follow them—to Guest Hill, they tell us. Along the way, the ridden lionesses growl lowly at Arok, and he huffs threateningly back. Apes and lions have never liked one another.

Guest Hill reveals itself as a barren jut of stone and sand. Aided by an energetic Sunasuka, Katiiwa sets to work erecting a canvas shelter. I walk around the hill. White grains and pebbles of uneven shape rise between my toes.

Bone shards. Most guests here, I realize, remain on the hill, though not in recognizable form. I review the words exchanged between Katiiwa and the queen. Hospitality was granted with all the proper terms and observances. It is unlikely, I decide, that the Kuta will break the rules of hospitality and fall upon us in the night. Most probably those taken as prey on Guest Hill are exploring outlanders, who do not give the Strangers Greeting in the right way, and thus deserve only false promises.

I share this judgment with Katiiwa. It has been a long time since all six of us traveled together, so she reviews our customary sleeping shifts.

Before we turn in, I see Sunasuka huddled with Mwonduk. She has called a pair of bright red finches to whirl and dive in the air before his eyes. The boy watches, entranced. When the birds tire and fly away, he lapses back into his dull quiet, staring at nothing.

The halfling rises. She brushes dirt from her hide breeches, somehow getting them more dusty than when she started, and ambles toward me.

“Tell me again,” she says, none too quietly, “what crime the boy has done.”

I lead her away, down the side of the hill. “Ask Obai.”

“Obai will talk complicated nonsense and I will know less than when we started. I ask you, Xhasi.”

“Don’t make trouble.”

“Me? Trouble?”

“It is not a crime, but a curse. An angry goddess calls. You are a priestess. I should not need to explain.”

Sunasuka spits. “The world comes before the gods.”

“Ask Arok. He will tell you the world is out of joint.”

“I know that!” She looks up at the boy, silhouetted before the last purple light of the evening sky. “If the ape feels it, don’t you think I can feel it too?” The halfling uncorks a gourd. It releases the sharp reek of fermented mash, refilled at the Walakuf feast. She offers it to me; I shake my head. “It doesn’t sit right. There must be another way.”

“If there were, one of us would know it.”

“He’s just a boy.”

“Don’t make it harder.”

She drinks deep. “Every now and again, it should be fair.”

There is nothing to be said to this, so nothing is what I say.

Darkness settles over the plains. As if in answer to her complaint, a glimmer appears in the far distance. A yellow-green pinpoint shimmers and resolves into a cloud.

Fireflies.

At first they seem to be coming our way, but as the swarm gathers, it settles and stops in the distance.

On the flatlands, sound travels faster than an antelope. We hear shrieks, groans. Drums pound out, then go silent.

“Is it the Kuta?” the halfling asks.

By now the others are at our side.

“Too far away. A neighboring tribe.”

“The Salipat?” Katiiwa asks. It would be best if it were the Salipat, whose lands we do not intend to enter.

I shake my head. “The Latari. Their first queen dug up the gourd goddess when she was buried under the hot earth and could not get out. Latari breathed her last breath into the goddess, who then revived her and gave her people life.”

The shrieks rise and echo across the grassland, then taper off. Soon they are replaced by mourning chants.

Mwonduk has joined us. He takes Sunasuka’s hand. “What is happening?” he asks.

Sunasuka looks at him. “We’re being told to hurry.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Dawn comes too slowly. As we leave Kuta territory, we see lion riders from afar, making sure that we go. If we turn back, it will be as prey.

The soil grows richer as we intrude deeper into Latari territory. Thick green vines appear amid the dry brown stalks of grass. Yellow blossoms sprout from curls of leaf. By harvest time they will be gourds, heavy with the ancestral blessings of the Latari goddess. We take care not to uproot the vines as we enter a sea of grass. Arok towers above the tips of the stalks, but the rest of us are enveloped.

Not long after, Verkusht hisses a warning. “Visitors.”

Arok and I sense it too. The rhythm of the wind on the high grasses around us has altered, barely. They’re coming at us from all sides.

Obai calls out. They can’t see us, but she performs the visual rituals of the Stranger Greeting.

A woman’s voice, grief-ravaged, rings out to the left of us. “Surrender the accursed one, and the rest shall live.”

“Neither he nor we pose a threat to you,” Obai responds.

“Dozens of us already lie dead, slain by the cloud of glowing death he sent against us in the night.”

“Your spirit-talkers divined this?” Obai asks.

“Delay us not with lies. Convey him to our justice, so that no one else may die.”

“Mwonduk is a solemn child, old for his years.”

“For that to happen, the boy must be taken to the goddess who has cursed him.”

A second, deeper voice, also a woman’s, comes from behind us. “You are unshakeable in this?”

“Your thirst for justice is understandable, yet cannot be quenched through the means you propose.”

“Then all must die!” cries the second voice. War-whoops rise up from the obscuring grasses. Leaping Latari warriors are all among us. The fight is joined.

Three Latari jump my way. I parry the lunges of their three spears with my one. A Latari screams as Arok lifts him high overhead and hurtles him out of sight. Verkusht has a warrior from behind, his blade poised to cut a red furrow into his throat. Katiiwa summons a cloud of sickly poison vapors, ready to roll its death into the grass and over our foes. Obai prepares her own fatal god-calling.

These people cannot take the boy, but to want to is not wrong. For these actions, they should not die. I utter the Cry Of Ara, turning lethal blows to a gift of slumber.

Arok’s rending hands turn indistinct as they pass through his opponents. They drop, breathing lightly. Verkusht’s knife, shrouded by the hero of my birth-tribe, passes into flesh without tearing it. Katiiwa’s venom cloud sends those trapped in it to the realm of sleep.

The retreating Latari regroup. Sunasuka has fallen, a gash from a spearhead traversing the length of her thigh.

We can see the Latari now. Fear plays across their faces, but is overcome by determination. Mighty as we may be, the six of us cannot fight our way through an entire tribe.

The boy pushes his way through his defenders. He faces the Latari.

“I am the Accursed One,” he says. “Hear me speak.”

Chapter Four: I Must Die

The boy stands before the Latari, who seek his death. He unlaces the northern-style tunic given him by the Aspis Consortium. Marked on his chest is the firefly birthmark that heralds his curse—the curse that has claimed the lives of these plainsland tribesfolk.

“I am called Mwonduk, and I am the one you want. Kill me if you want, but don’t hurt my guardians. They mean only to prevent harm.”

This is the first time I have heard the boy speak above a whisper. His head is no longer bowed, his shoulders now straight. He stands with his chest thrust out, as if daring a Latari warrior to throw a spear through it. Some appear to be contemplating it. I envision the boy impaled on the spot, the sharp edge of the spear obliterating and penetrating the birthmark.

Verkusht, crouching, catches my eye, silently asking if we shouldn’t leap on the boy, clap hands over his mouth, let Obai resume her role as talker. With a twitch of my head, I warn the Bekyar to stand down.

A leather-skinned, white-haired woman stands. Her crown is fashioned from a gourd, the goddess object of her tribe. “Harm has already been done. Your insect minions descended last night. My husband, my children, murdered. There are none of us standing here who did not lose kin. In agony they shrieked, torn to shreds before our eyes. Kill you we shall, young demon. Your death is ours by right of blood.”

Mwonduk gets down on his bony knees to bow his head before the Latari queen. “I didn’t send the fireflies. I would never hurt anyone. The fireflies are sent by a goddess—the one who put her mark on me. I don’t know why. Long before I was born, my ancestors did something wrong. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe there’s no fairness in it.”

“There is no fairness in our kin being killed.”

The boy prostrates himself, touching his forehead to the dirt. “No, there isn’t. This goddess is not fair. She is hungry. She hungers for me. So I must be sacrificed, and die.”

The queen retreats to confer with her spirit-women. When she returns her attention to the boy, he continues:

“I don’t know anything about this goddess. I am ignorant. My whole life has been fear and an empty stomach. I have no kinsmen to mourn me when I die. So please let me die the right way.”

The spirit women break away to argue among themselves. Annoyed by their harsh whispering, the queen calls a halt to it with a shrill whistle.

The queen’s manner has softened. “We know our own goddess well, child. She is benevolent, but demands that we avenge wrongs against us.”

Mwonduk rises, steps toward them. “So whatever you do, you will anger a goddess.”

The queen steps back. The spirit women step back. The Latari warriors, too.

“Is the gourd goddess forgiving?”

“All life springs from Chuaka.”

The boy rubs at his dripping nose. “Kitumu, the firefly goddess—I don’t think she is forgiving. Without a reason, she hurt you bad. What would she do if you gave her a reason?”

The eldest of the spirit-women shakes her rattle, to get the queen’s attention. Anger rises in her face as the queen ignores the gesture.

“Please, Latari queen.” Mwonduk clasps his hands together and shakes them toward her, the gesture of a child beggar. “Let my death mean the end of the plague, and not the worsening of it.”

The queen brandishes her royal staff, both at us and at her quivering spirit-talkers. “Go then. Move quickly through our lands. Do not stop to sleep or rest or drink.”

The boy bows again.

“But boy, if we hear that you live, that you escaped your sacrifice, my warriors will track you down and cut out your heart. They will find and kill all of your companions. They will hunt you until the last Latari is dead.”

She sweeps into the nearby grass. We stand still as her people follow her.

When they are gone, Sunasuka, whose leg has been badly speared, lets herself moan. She performs a healing spell on herself, and separated flesh folds back together. The skin crawls over the gash and seals itself, leaving a tear in the halfling’s hide breeches as the only sign of her injury.

Mwonduk goes to her and extends a hand to help her up. “You worry about me,” he says to her. “But don’t. I understand what you all must do.”

∗ ∗ ∗

The Latari lands are the last we pass through on the savanna before reaching the jungle. Once under the canopy, I find a stream. We drink, fill skins with water, and rest. From here, we will head north, skirting the Aerie of Bloodletting Songs. I describe the route to the others. Were there any point in it, I would draw them a map. If I fall, Arok can take them the rest of the way. Should the group lose both of us, no sketch or scribble will help them.

Verkusht now feels free to complain. “Who was it who said we should tramp through the lands of these mad plainsmen, instead of boating up the river and across the jungle?”

Everyone remembers, including Verkusht. It was him. Whitebridge Station, where the river meets the jungle, crawls with Bekyar. Tarood would have ambushers on the river route. Verkusht wants us to tell him that, as difficult as the plains walk was, we were still better off, and he still indispensably right. None of us have the energy to humor him.

We lie on flat rocks and Sunasuka, exhausted by her wound, lapses immediately into a snoring slumber. Arok and I collect fruit as the others take shifts and nap.

As we lope silently through the jungle shade, I sense the gorilla’s disquiet. It is a worry I should share, this close to the Aerie. Concern for the boy has distracted me. Now that Mwonduk has spoken of his willingness to die, I somehow feel worse for it.

But I must clear my thoughts. The Aerie.

Arok freezes. A litter of bush pigs springs from a nest of brush near our feet. He sniffs the air. Its mother will be near. A meat-feast will nourish us well for the hard trekking to come.

A snuffling snort and the fast rustle of hooves announces her charge. Arok frowns. I ready my spear and pierce the beast as it comes at me, tusks outthrust. It falls and slides.

Arok hangs back. Game taken so close to the Aerie must be carefully checked. It falls to me to do it. I open its dead mouth, check its tongue and teeth. Its eyes are the proper color—no pulsing flakes of red or green. The boar’s feet are cloven as they should be, in two parts, free of extra toes or protuberances.

These tests are made necessary by the actions of a forgotten people, taken back in the vague Beyond Time. In the jungle to the east of here, they summoned demons and ate the flesh of men. Heroes unknown wiped them out, but even now the lingering residue of their grisly rituals remains. Madness rolls across the Aerie like mist. Men cannot live there without losing their minds. Beasts dwell within the Aerie, their forms warped and corrupted. There, nature has been reduced to one law—predation.

If this boar wandered for too long into the Aerie, its blood will be poison. Those who eat its meat will succumb to visions of torture and depravity.

Judging the boar edible, I nod to Arok. Though he will eat only the fruit we have gathered, he hoists it on his mighty shoulder without complaint.

Seeing us approach with our game, Katiiwa removes spades from her pack. She and Sunasuka dig the pit, while I gather wood for the fire. The boy comes with me, finding dried branches. We do not speak. There is nothing to say.

∗ ∗ ∗

“The Bekyar have perverted nature itself.”

Rested and fed, I lead the party north into the jungle. When the music of the trees changes, I slow our pace. The barks of gibbons and trillings of finches give way to discordant shrieking. It is birdsong, deformed into a keening, clattering wail. The fur on the back of Arok’s neck stands up. Unseen parrots chorus together to produce a groaning chant. They are imitating a language, but not a human one. It clicks and chitters and scratches.

Obai tenses. “Those are the names of demons,” she whispers.

“I thought you said we’d be safe here,” says Verkusht.

“I’ve never seen the creatures so far from the Aerie before,” I reply.

“Unnatural creatures gain in strength when balance is disrupted,” says Obai.

Then they dive at us from everywhere, the blackened, gnarled birds of the Aerie. In their forms are hidden the recognizable shapes of wild creatures: parrots, swallows, vultures, hawks. They are striking us, raking exposed flesh with razor beaks. With a thump, I am knocked to the ground. I sense only a swoop of feathers, and a bird heavier than any flying animal ought to be. My spear lies on the ground, out of reach. I withdraw a knife from my belt as another of the creatures dives at my face. The bird swoops sideways to avoid the waiting blade.

I regain my footing, swiping at the air with my knife. Wherever I strike, there is a distorted bird to hit, but for each one that falls another flies in to replace it.

Arok grabs at the swooping horde, plucking one of the birds after another out of the air. Each he crushes, then tosses aside.

Chanting a nature spell, Sunasuka attempts to quell the creatures. Stripped of their animal instincts, they ignore her commands.

Verkusht watches the rhythm of the swooping birds, matches it, evades them as they drop dizzyingly toward him. His dagger remains in his belt; there is no more point in killing these things than in exterminating raindrops in a storm.

From Katiiwa’s sigil-incised harpoon leaps a cone of frigid air. The birds caught in the blast plummet, frozen, to the ground. Each makes a tiny thump as it lands. Then more sweep in, and the space cleared by the Bonuwat’s magic is filled again.

I look for the boy. A funnel cloud of dark birds sweeps down toward him, and he gasps in pain as beaks bore into him. They seem drawn to him most of all. Seizing my shield, I leap, diving into the stream of feathered beasts. They rattle against my shield, nearly knocking it from my grasp.

“Gather together!” Obai shouts. With shield held uncertainly overhead, I wrap an arm around Mwonduk and carry his underfed body toward her. The attacking birds grow denser as the others converge on Obai’s position.

The balance priestess chants to Nethys. A half-globe of blinding white light appears around us, but the birds smash through it, pelting against us. Mwonduk yelps as they dart beneath my shield to slash at him. Obai’s chant, first airily beautiful, shifts to a grinding dirge. A second half-globe of swirling darkness appears. It settles into the white light. Light and darkness battle, then settle into an accommodation, blinking and ever-shifting.

Inside the globe are a few of the carnivorous birds. Arok catches them as he can. The remaining birds batter against the inside of the doubled globes, knocking themselves out. We stomp them until they no longer move.

Demon birds outside the sphere rattle a thundering percussion against it. Necks break and thin bones fragment as the creatures hurl themselves at our shield. After a few thundering instants, the creatures relent and the onslaught subsides. Obai leaves the spheres in place for a good long time. When she allows them to fade, I prepare for the birds to resume their attack, but there is no sign of them. Even the dead ones have resolved themselves into a sick-smelling paste. These remnants leach into the soil, leaving behind black smudges.

Katiiwa casts an admiring glance over the decaying fruits of Obai’s handiwork. “You twinned a circle of destruction with one of protection,” she says.

The priestess tilts her head, acknowledging the sorceress’s admiration. “Only in combination do they evoke and restore the balance that is double-faced Nethys.”

“As beasts cut off from their essential natures, you reckoned that they could not abide the contradiction.”

“That is broadly correct.” She turns the side of her face with the tattooed smile to Katiiwa.

Their talk of spells and spellcasting grows impenetrable. Sunasuka heals the deep cuts crisscrossing Mwonduk’s head and arms.

“Were the birds trying to kill me?” the boy asks.

“They were hungry for us all,” Sunasuka answers.

“But more of them came at me,” Mwonduk says.

Sunasuka shrugs. “They weren’t really birds, but had turned into something else. So their actions are beyond me.”

Unsatisfied by this reply, the boy turns to me. “Will everything in the jungle try to kill me?”

I don’t know what to say, so I say this: “You must be brave. Like you were with the Latari.”

“But the birds did try to get me, more than anyone else.”

“It happened very fast. There will be more dangers.”

Frustrated, he kicks at one of the greasy spots left by a decaying demon bird. “They felt the curse in me, and wanted to rip me apart.” His strange dignity has deserted him. For the first time, he seems like an ordinary child. “I already agreed to die. Why can’t I be let alone till then?”

I look to the others. They are the talkers, not me. None come forward.

“You must be brave,” I stupidly repeat.

Finally Verkusht rescues me, by clapping his hands together and saying that we must be on our way. “We can’t stay around here waiting for those things to come back,” he chatters. He ducks down to mutter into Mwonduk’s ear.

I am not meant to overhear, but my senses are keen. The ex-slaver says this: “Nothing shameful in being scared. I’m scared all the time.”

∗ ∗ ∗

We move deeper into the jungle, the air growing hotter and wetter as we go. Our movements are quiet, and that is good. The boy, used to going unheard, is better at creeping than the priestess or the sorceress. He watches his steps carefully, never stepping on a crackling leaf or snap-ready twig.

Hours pass. We stop by a stream to drink and rest.

Murmuring voices echo from the tall trees. Our weapons leap to our hands. We array ourselves around the boy.

Zenj hunters appear at the edge of the hollow. They halt as they see us. There are eight of them, bruised and bloodied. Quilled headdresses mark them as Indta, a wandering tribe. Over their shoulders they carry the carcasses of rat-like porcupines. There are more of the brush-tailed beasts than they can eat themselves. The main group must be nearby.

The Stranger Greeting of the forests differs from that of the plains. No one owns the jungle. When parties meet, each must show his peacefulness, or be ready for war.

In our clicking language, the Indta hunt leader signals that he is neither predator nor willing to be preyed upon. I step forward to do the same, identifying myself as tribeless.

“We are—” I begin.

“We know who you are,” says the hunt leader, who has introduced himself as Antemba.

The Indta fear us.

“We will not harm you.” In saying so, I am repeating myself. By giving the Jungle Greeting, I already promised not to prey upon them.

Their weapons are down, as called for by the protocol of the greeting, but their muscles remain tight, prepared for flight or for battle.

“You are hurt.” The slashes on their bodies come not from the teeth or claws of jungle beasts but from blades. “Who did you fight?” Although they bear the injuries of defeated men, I do not shame them by implying they lost.

“They were as him,” Antemba says, pointing to Verkusht. He means that they were Bekyar.

“Slavers?”

“Garbed as slavers, yet they took none of us prisoner, even when we were helpless.”

“They attacked you?”

“They did not give the proper greeting, and so we were justified in falling upon them. They were greater in number than we first knew.”

“How many were there?”

“More than ten, less than twenty.”

“These men you fought are our foes.”

“We wish you good fortune against them.”

“What more can you tell us?”

“There was a pale man with them—an outlander. And they carried strange cauldrons that reeked of bad magic.”

“Cauldrons?”

“They were of a copper metal. Inside bubbled some terrible liquid. As if they were heated by flame, yet no flame could be seen.”

Further questions yield little. I offer them healing. Antemba takes time to weigh his fear of us against the condition of his men. He nods. Sunasuka and Obai move slowly up the rise toward them. They lay on hands and chant their flesh-mending chants. The Indta nod their thanks and melt into the forest.

“Could it be anyone other than Tarood and Brachantes?” Katiiwa asks.

It is not really a question, but Verkusht answers anyway: “What other Bekyar would win a fight and take no cargo?”

“How did they know to come here?” says Sunasuka.

“Brachantes claimed to have seers,” I say. “Perhaps he knows where Kitumu’s temple lies. Perhaps he has magic that lets him find the boy.”

Mwonduk reads our concern. “This is bad?”

“The men who tried to capture you before in the village, they are nearby.”

“They want me dead, like everyone else?”

The answer catches in my throat. Brachantes wants to put the boy in a golden cage. He may be the only person who does not want him dead. I want to give the boy a choice—go with us and perish, or accept imprisonment in Brachantes’ menagerie, and live. But I cannot. The plague must end.

Obai lies, so that I don’t have to: “I’m afraid so, my boy.” She turns the frowning side of her tattooed face toward us. “Shall we take the hunt to our hunters?”

Katiiwa hefts her arcane harpoon. “I’d be willing.”

Verkusht massages cramped fingers. “Tarood’s tough, and a seasoned slave-taker. These woods are his hunting grounds; he knows them as well as Xhasi or Arok. If there’s a chance of not meeting up with him, I say we take it.”

Sunasuka says, “I’m with the Bekyar. I get into enough fights by accident. No point courting them on purpose. ”

I am unsure. We will meet Brachantes again, of that I am certain. And it is tempting to put the battle on our terms. But then, fighting men often overrate the benefits of surprise. In such matters I have come to rely on Arok’s animal wisdom.

The ape shuffles uncomfortably. He folds his upper lip up over his yellow fangs. “Fight and kill only if you have to. Better to sneak.”

It is decided. Sneak we will.

I plot a twisting course. We avoid the best streams, the flattest approaches, and any place with good forage. Along rocks we drag ourselves. We move when the air is hottest and rest when it cools.

Still, after two days of stealthy trekking, they find us.

Arrows snick through the air behind us. We turn, drop prone, look for better cover. Sunasuka has pushed the boy down and now lies half on top of him.

A searing flash burns in my left calf. Then the leg goes numb. An arrow protrudes through the flesh. I reach down, snap off the feathered end and bloody head. The shaft will have to wait.

The archers are Bekyar. They’ve abandoned their usual robes for those better suited to jungle hunting. Flowing whites give way to a mottle of greens and browns. Metal clips secure their sleeves and headdresses.

A second volley of arrows falls ahead of us. The archers have compensated too heavily for our prone positions, cutting off their range.

Katiiwa, Verkusht, and Obai crouch-walk upward, skitter behind thick-trunked trees, and return fire. Verkusht releases flying daggers; they fly, tumbling through the air, toward their targets. One lodges in a trunk, sending shards of bark into the air and forcing the archer behind it out of sight. Another strikes an archer’s hand, pinning it to the bow it held. The man drops, shrieking. A third dagger, hanging behind the first pair as if waiting for the opportunity, then seeks and finds his neck. He dies gurgling.

To the dead man’s left, demonic tentacles, conjured from the void by Katiiwa, seize his fellow archers. As Obai summons a wasp swarm to drive off the rest, the tentacles hold their trapped archers out for Verkusht. His second round of flying daggers easily finishes them.

Having proved our superiority from a distance, I expect a second wave of close attackers to charge us. I ready my spear.

The wind shifts, bringing a terrible stench upon us. At first I fear the cloud spell I have seen Katiiwa cast, but the source is behind me. Arok booms out anxious ape-talk. I turn on my heels.

Another dozen Bekyar huddle in a grove of trees, just out of thrown-spear range. Strapped to their bodies, as if pregnant with metal bulges, they carry the cauldrons the Indta described. Though clearly cool to the touch—or else the slavers would be burned by them—a boiling black liquid bubbles from their ornate rims. The Bekyar each pour the contents of their cauldrons onto the base of a separate tree. They’ve chosen the tallest of them.

The tarry liquid sinks immediately into the trees. From the roots up, the trees tremble. Beneath their layers of bark, they writhe. The ripple of movement starts at the roots, making its way up to the canopy leaves a hundred feet up.

The roots wrench themselves from hard-packed soil. They resolve themselves into wide, clawed legs. Corrupted and oily, the trees thunder toward us.

“Arok is beautiful and terrible in his rage.”

The air is filled by Arok’s mournful howls.

The trees bend down, lashing us with branches turned sharp and scaly.

Sunasuka bellows as a tree seizes her and hurls her through the air into the whip-sharp limbs of another.

A distorted obeche tree charges me on wide-rooted feet. I leap to avoid it, jabbing uselessly upward with my spear. I dive and roll, narrowly avoiding a stomp that would have crushed my bones. Regaining my footing, wobbling on my wounded leg, I hop to find shelter behind a closer tree, one not despoiled by the Bekyar cauldrons. The monster tree produces a furious rattle, shaking what remains of its leafy top. Already its leaves, exquisitely shaped to capture and funnel the jungle rains, have dried to brown, dead curls. The corrupted tree wraps its branches around the one sheltering me and uproots it with a savage tug. I fall back, loosed dirt spraying in my face. Wiping frantically to clear my eyes, I barely evade another stomp.

Near the point where its trunk sprouts into a vast head of branches, I see a bulbous, heart-like shape pulsing under the bark, and make a choice. As the next stomping root-foot comes toward me, I reach out and grab hold. The obeche tries to shake me off. I clamber up its monstrous leg and onto the trunk. It lashes down at me with its branches, attempting to dislodge me. I wince at each hit, but its angle is wrong, and it strikes with only a fraction of the force it could otherwise muster. I’ve dropped my spear—there the closeness works against me—but have my dagger in my belt. Shimmying up, I see brief flashes of the others as they struggle against the monster trees. Sunasuka, with her nature powers, seems to have turned her tree on its makers. Obai has ignited the dead leaves of another with divine fire; these flames now spread to the trees threatening Arok and Verkusht.

I have reached the throbbing knot-heart, and now draw my dagger to stab into it. Before I can aim and land my blow, the tree shudders. Its greasy bark turns to slime.

The magic of the cauldrons has expired. The tree falls apart, rotted to sludge from the inside out. I leap out of it as it collapses, into the waiting branches of an untouched tree.

We sprawl amid piles of smoking mire, which moments ago were majestic, healthy trees, towering high above the jungle floor. A dozen others lie uprooted by the onslaught.

Arok gazes at the holes left by their absence.

He looks at the slavers, who now regroup, scimitars in hand, braced for the next engagement.

What he growls next in the ape tongue can’t be rendered for a scribe to write. It speaks of nature despoiled, of the righteous guardian, of surrender to berserk wrath.

Before any of us can move, Arok is upon them, leaping in sudden, shocking bounds. Shielded by anger, he shrugs scimitars aside. The ape-man hits the formation of Bekyar like a flash flood. Those not caught in his grasp stand stupidly staring, until he reaches them. When he does, they are disassembled. With bare hands, with terrible strength, he tears through them. In seconds, each man becomes a mangled corpse. He tears limbs from sockets. Twists necks from torsos. He bites his fangs down into skulls and tears open rib cages as if flinging open pairs of shutters. He feeds the forest on the blood of its enemies. No longer is he merely Arok, awakened ape. Nature has entered him, made him an extension of its wrath.

Moments later, there is not a living Bekyar in sight.

As the ape’s rage crests, as he dances with the entrails of the slain wrapped around his neck and arms, I look to the boy, to ensure that someone shields him from this sight.

He is gone.

Their slavers may now all lie dead, but Brachantes and Tarood have what they came for. They have taken Mwonduk.

Chapter Five: Justice in the Ruins

We approach the ruins of Kembe. I have tracked Mwonduk’s kidnappers to its boundaries of crumbled stone.

Brachantes and Tarood have lost their retinue—torn to shreds by Arok, for their trespasses against nature. Stripped of servitors, they seek shelter here while they plot their next move.

Their weakened position cannot be taken for granted. Tarood’s cousin, Verkusht, testifies to the slaver’s abilities. His men used weird magics. We assume these were provided by Brachantes, and that he has other arcane surprises in store for us. If nothing more, he’ll likely possess supernatural means to contact more of Tarood’s men and effect a rescue from this place. This may be why they have chosen it: compared to trackless jungle, the ruins will be easy for reinforcements to find.

Even if we are lucky, and their threat has been spent, we must still retrieve the boy quickly. Every extra day we spend here is one in which the firefly plague continues to rage. There is no saying how many lives Brachantes will have cost, by delaying us as we take the boy to the temple of Kitumu.

There is no thinking of the fate that awaits him there. The boy is resigned to it. We serve nature, and this season it thirsts grimly for blood.

We will think, then, only of our task.

Only of our task.

∗ ∗ ∗

It is our good fortune that Tarood made his escape from us alongside an outlander. A hardened slave-hunter, he knows movement in the jungle as well as any Zenj. But Brachantes errs as he journeys, leaving footprints in the soft mud and breaking the stems of low bushes. Mwonduk may have tried to leave clues in his wake. Along the path I find shavings from a yam, which he had on him when he was taken. Most of these would be carried away by ants within moments of hitting the ground, but a few remain to keep us on the path.

And now we reach Kembe, hours behind them. We lost time as the spellcasters restored their magics. I would rest easier if I’d persuaded them to forge ahead regardless, but I have yet to hear an argument that would prompt a magician to head into danger without her hexes.

A sensible person does not head into Kembe on a whim. All the tribes know it as a place of bad luck and sudden doom. Yet I have been here before. So has Tarood, or so Verkusht claims.

“He sometimes keeps a holding pen here, when he captures more slaves than he can take home in one trip,” the Bekyar says. “The locals don’t like to come here, so that’s good for, uh, slaving operations.” He winces. Looks at me from the corner of his eye, to see if I could tell what he was about to say.

I can. He was about to say that’s good for us. Had he a choice, he would still be a slaver.

Lianas and edgevines cover Kembe’s gray stone walls. Great blocks of stone, hauled from distant quarries by means unknown, lie like fallen soldiers across its grassy landscape. Crumbled clods of masonry attach to them still. We pass through a stone gate, the top of its archway more than twenty feet above our heads. Vines reach down to brush at us; we part them like a curtain.

Kembe’s remaining walls stand in three circles. The inner circle is the tallest, scaled for giants. We venture toward it, hacking our way through clinging bushes and dense stands of spear thistles, and come upon the second ring, the bones of a city built to human proportions. If we turned around and searched, I know, we would find the third ring that we passed over without noticing—a tiny version of the inner two cities, fading from halfling size into miniatures too small for use. You might think it an idol or model of the real cities, except that its crumbled hearths show the soot of ancient flames. Shattered pot shards, sized for beings no more than a foot in height, cover the floors of these tiny buildings.

Fragments of tile cling to the walls of all three cities—the giant, the man-sized, the shrunken. Some bear a script found only here. Figures appear on a few. They have the shapes of men, though with fewer fingers and curious heads. The heads may be headdresses; the hands might be drawn that way because it is easier than making four fingers and a thumb.

Some say that they were not human, nor were they elf, dwarf, or any other race still known. From these broken images, men have made a story to explain Kembe and its vanished builders. They say that the Kembe came from the sky, riding silver chariots. Once here, they could not leave. Perhaps they lost the magic that propelled their sky vehicles. More likely, they broke taboos and were punished by the gods. Foreigners assume it was the Kembe’s own gods the giants transgressed against. The locals say it was ours.

Either way, the Kembe shrank. They stopped being giants, and became merely men. They rebuilt their city to suit their reduced stature. For many more years they must have survived at this height. Then they shrank again, to become the beings occupying the last, tiny city on the outer edges.

They shrank one last time, the story says, until they fell between the cracks of this earth, into another, smaller world, where perhaps they dwell today. Sometimes you’ll hear that they came not in silver chariots from the sky, but fell like rain, having lived once in another, larger world, where they were bigger than anything this one could hold.

When this tale is told, it is always as a warning. Behave rightly, it says. Obey the gods, upholding their taboos. Do not be like the Kembe, or you and yours will shrink to nothing and vanish from sight. People like the story this way. The Kembe deserved what they got, it says. We can avoid their fate through rightful action.

But when I see the Kembe ruins, I think they were like any people. Some good, a few bad, most in between. Yet still they were doomed, because the world devours.

They were doomed as Mwonduk is doomed. Through no misdeed of his own, and for reasons we can never exactly find. When it is over, Obai will try to make sense of it. She will talk of balance restored and cosmic this and cosmic that.

That is, if we succeed in getting him back at all. If not, there will also be doom. It will be of a different sort, and suffered by many instead of one. Still, the world will devour, and from a big enough distance—from the giant height of the original Kembe, perhaps—it will be the same one way as the other.

My dark thoughts seem to leap across to Sunasuka. Or perhaps it is her melancholy, dimly sensed, that sets me to brooding. The halfling has a gourd of mash—how she saved it for this long I cannot guess—and now swigs deep from it, muttering. “I don’t like this place,” she says.

“Put that down,” Katiiwa hisses.

“I don’t like this mission,” Sunasuka says, a little louder.

We cling to the sides of an ancient wall. Above us jut the remains of broken steps, and atop the wall is a high walkway. As Sunasuka stomps and grumbles, I wrestle with a thought: if the Kembe were giants, who did they have to build giant walls against?

“What are we doing?” the halfling grunts. Without our noticing, she has made herself very drunk. “We aren’t hunting the evil ones. We are the evil ones!” She spins to face us, face red and bleary. “They’re saving the boy. We want to take him to his death.”

Obai holds up placating hands. “You know why we must.”

Sunasuka turns away. “I know why we have to, but none of you can make me like it!” She finishes the rest of her gourd and tosses it aside. It lands on a fallen stone with a resounding crack. “If we’re to be slaughterers of children, let’s at least do it quick and get it over with!” She bounds heedlessly through the choking vegetation and around eroding blocks. Her voice bounces off the walls, collides with itself, growing louder as she forges on.

We have no choice but to chase our drunken druid. We bound after her.

Behind us, in the spot where we had just been standing, lands a vast chunk of stone. Its impact throws up a shower of dirt and pulverized vine leaves. A fine snow of powdered mortar dusts down after it. The stone occupies a wide crater.

“When Tarood dies, not even his wives will mourn.”

Had we not run after our impetuous ally, all of us would have been crushed.

Above us, behind a fresh, yawning hole in the wall defenses, lurks the slaver captain, Tarood.

Verkusht launches himself at the wall. Deftly grabbing at its ragged handholds, he scampers up toward his kinsman. “Snake! Betrayer!” he cries. “Too much the coward to meet us face on?”

The Bekyar captain laughs. “Coward? You’re one to talk, Verkusht! When did you ever kill a man, except when his back was turned?” With slow confidence he draws a bow from his pack.

“Whatever I may or may not have been forced to do, I have done to survive.” Verkusht clambers sideways, zigzagging up the wall with surprising speed. “I’m not the one who extracts a thick, greasy thrill from the infliction of pain.”

Tarood speeds his actions. He fumbles his arrow as he draws it. “I do what I must to enrich our clan,” he snarls.

Verkusht pauses, hanging precariously from one hand, to whoop and chortle. “Is that how you think others see you, Tarood? Everyone knows you’d sooner stick a knife in a man than bed a woman!”

Tarood fires an arrow. Despite the seeming ease of the shot, it flies far wide of the mark. “You dare speak to me thus? I am clan-captain. You stole from your own.”

Verkusht has taken the time to zip several yards higher. “Yes, Tarood, and were I to return, they’d take more than my hand this time.”

Another arrow flies. It hits closer to the mark, but is still a wild, careless miss. “You made yourself doubly a pariah when you had it reattached!”

Verkusht crabs his way closer to his target. “Indeed, and if I did go home, as our kinfolk burned me alive or had me quartered by galloping horses, they’d shed a tear at my demise. Whereas you, for all the gold you bring them, the perfumes you douse them in, all the glory and wealth—no one likes you, Tarood.”

He swings wide to dodge a third arrow. For a moment, he seems suspended in air, then finds his handhold again. The creaking sound of bending cartilage accompanies him as he retains his hold on the wall. “The day you die, all due ceremonies will be held in your honor. You’ll be remembered as a hero and a shrewd man with a coin. But no one will weep for you. Your brothers will vie for your title. Your wives will drink tea and wipe their brows in relief.”

Verkusht has nearly reached the top now. Tarood drops his bow and quiver. He draws his scimitar. It flashes angrily in the sunlight.

“You’ve flung your last insult, clown,” Tarood says, through clenched teeth.

Verkusht reaches the crumbled battlement and struggles to find purchase.

“That’s you, Verkusht. Full of defiance and bravado, until the time comes to win. Then you falter.”

Mortar turns to sand under Verkusht’s clawing fingers. Tarood raises his scimitar, ready to chop at them.

Tarood’s tongue darts snake-like between salivating lips. “Wheedle and beg, Verkusht. Do as you always do. Wheedle and beg.”

Verkusht hugs the battlement, wincing. “Listen, there’s something you need to know about the boy.”

Tarood leans back to enjoy his victory. “Always something to offer at the last moment, eh, Verkusht? Well, this time it will avail you not. Let’s start with that hand which is supposed to be severed.”

He raises his blade.

The blue point of Katiiwa’s jagged harpoon pricks the back of Tarood’s neck. She commands him to drop the scimitar. It rattles to the stone catwalk.

Verkusht stoops to seize it up. He pauses to admire the expensive giltwork on its curved pommel before stashing it in his belt. “That’s the difference between you and me, Tarood,” he says. “I have comrades. They may not respect me, and half the time they don’t trust me at all. But they are friends and I can count on them nonetheless.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Someone must guard the prisoner; Katiiwa claims the right. Verkusht agrees with surprising ease. “Couldn’t trust myself with him,” he mutters.

“I can restore your position in the clan,” Tarood says to him. “Pronounce you redeemed, as is my captain’s right.”

“Who’s the clown now, always with the last humiliating negotiation?” says Verkusht, his tone curiously flat.

“Brachantes has the boy?” I ask him. “Tell us where.”

“What consideration will you grant?” Tarood asks.

“When I was the prisoner and you the captor, I was tortured and threatened with worse,” I observe.

Tarood shrugs. “He is in the place that it would make sense to be.”

“In a building in the middle circle?”

The slaver nods.

“Is there a landmark?”

He looks at Verkusht. “If I were a betrayer who wheedles to survive... but find it yourselves. Then boasts will be tested, and true measures taken.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Tarood says nothing else.

∗ ∗ ∗

We find Brachantes waiting for us, outside one of the few intact Kembe buildings of the middle city. The structure is round and topped with a conical roof, like a curing hut of the Ikihing or Hatangu. Where theirs are made from reeds and planks, this is built from piled and mortared stone. Even the odd sloping shingles on its roof are of solid rock.

Brachantes stands amid a circular patch of browned and flattened vegetation. Acrid steam rises from the freshly cleared earth. He has used the magical liquid Tarood’s slavers used to array the jungle trees against us, or something like it, to clear the ground for battle. Yet he carries no weapon, either in his hand or in his belt. Feet apart, head cocked, he greets us, smiling like a child with a secret.

Mwonduk kneels nearby. A leather collar has been wrapped around his neck. A short length of leash attaches the collar to a wooden stake, which has been driven deep into the ground. The boy could not stand if he wanted to. His arms are tied behind his back. Relief strikes me when I see that he bears no signs of injury. His head is bowed in shame. At the sound of our approach, he looks up. Hope comes suddenly upon him.

Brachantes offers him slavery; we, death. The boy has chosen us.

“You have Tarood?” Brachantes asks.

Having met the northerner before, I am the one who speaks for the group. “Yes. Give us the boy, and we will help you to a place of safety, if you desire it. Or we will leave you supplies to wait for more of Tarood’s men to come and get you. Whichever you prefer.”

“I present a counteroffer. Turn your backs now, admit yourselves outmatched, and I will not harm you.”

“You speak confidently for a weaponless man.”

“My weapons are far away from here, on my island. Yet if you take one further step against me, you will feel their sting all the same.”

“Your threat is unconvincing.”

“Trust me when I say this, jungle man: you do not want to see a demonstration.”

Verkusht reaches for his dagger, Obai for her double-faced holy symbol.

Brachantes addresses the others. “The Zenj is a stubborn man. I sense that he nurses a grudge against me, because he dislikes the company I keep. Fair enough. Also, he lost friends in the so-called plague, and thus lacks perspective. The rest of you, I will assume, are sensible persons and open to a fair offer.”

“Talk as long as you want,” says Obai. She means for him to reveal more of the invisible weapons with which he threatens us. Or so I trust.

“Balance priestess, what is it to you that a few have died from this firefly plague, and that a few more might do so until the boy is well away from here? These jungles are a place of rot and pestilence. In the cosmic scheme of things, what matter is one more plague?”

Obai presents him with both sides of her mouth, the frown and the grin, and remains inscrutable.

“Verkusht, with your cousin a captive, it seems that the position of captain might be made available to a man of ambition.”

The Bekyar snorts. “Maybe he didn’t tell you, but my clan and I are not on friendly terms.”

“Your clan is a family, but also a commercial enterprise. They will present no objections that money can’t fix.”

Verkusht strokes his beard as if contemplating a deal. “Let’s imagine that their vision of profit and loss aligns with yours. You have no similar inducement to offer my friends here.”

“Then step away. Or better yet, fight by my side when they prove intransigent.”

“That would be my last chance with them, I’m afraid.”

“Who counts for more? Your clan, or these mighty ragamuffins?”

Verkusht chucks his head from side to side. Weighing options.

“Halfling. I didn’t know what to dangle before you, until I saw you gaze upon the boy just now. You don’t want him dead. Still you hope for his salvation. Yet he lives only if I am allowed to take him. You’re on my side already, you just haven’t admitted it to yourself. Fight for his life, world-priestess. Follow your heart.”

Sunasuka wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Brachantes turns to Arok. “Ape-man, of all the so-called Scarred Ones, only you are of genuine interest to me. I offer you what I offer the child—a place in my sanctuary. All the fruit you can eat. Or meat, if that’s what you fancy. A life led in comfort and free from fear.”

Arok charges him.

The outlander braces for the impact as the gorilla barrels his way. Around him, the air pops and shimmers. A crackling hiss rises from Brachantes’ flesh, and the taste of metal hangs in the back of my throat.

Arok swipes at Brachantes. Between the launching of the blow and its landing, Brachantes changes. His skin turns to stone. A terrible crunch resounds as the bones of Arok’s mighty fist break against his granite flesh. Brachantes’ stone fist catches Arok under the chin. The ape staggers back. Brachantes seizes him, hurling the gorilla who outweighs me by double or triple dozens of feet behind us. Arok lands with a thud on the collapsed remains of a Kembe wall.

“What is he?” I ask Obai, as we run toward the outlander.

“I don’t know,” she says, calling the dark touch of divine death-dealing into her hand. Her fingers curl into a claw, wreathed by swirling brimstone.

The ripple of disturbed space again surrounds Brachantes’ body. Stone flesh melts back into skin and bone. Leather wings sprout from his shoulders. Obai swipes at him with her deathly hand, but he rises into the air, leaving her leaping fruitlessly up at him. I poise my spear for throwing.

A tail appears to twist itself around Brachantes’ rising body. From its bulbous end sprout dozens of spikes. The bulb points at us; spikes fly through the air. They hit both Obai and me. We lurch back, pierced in the arms and chest.

Flying daggers volley at Brachantes, slicing the membranes of his freshly grown wings. He judders down. Again comes the rippling air, the crackling hiss, the tang of metal in the back of the throat. New wings replace the old; black reptilian scales rise to blot out mammalian skin. He opens his throat. A belch of acid rains down on us. The stink of vomit coats my burning, bubbling skin. I glance back; Verkusht and Sunasuka have been hit, too.

I look to the boy: Brachantes has aimed his spray to miss him. Mwonduk hides his face in the crook of his arm. He weeps, shaking.

Arok has also been spared, but lies unmoving on his pile of old stones.

Sunasuka, her hide tunic still smoking, steps forward to invoke nature’s power. The flying, reptilian Brachantes shudders in midair. He shrinks, transformed by her magic into a shrew. As a small gray rodent, he drops to the ground.

The halfling surges ahead, ready to stomp the shrew with her pan-like feet. An electric crackle surrounds it as Brachantes shakes off the forced shape-change. He rises as a column of flame and wraps burning limbs around Sunasuka’s throat.

I dash around this new fiery form to plunge a spear into the back of its head. Heat radiates from it. The hairs on my arm withdraw into curls and drop off, singed.

Obai swings at the fiery Brachantes with her iron-shod club. Its head, cast with Nethys’s mocking and mourning faces, swipes deep into the flame-form. It reels, momentarily dissipated. As it comes back together, the crackling aura returns. When Brachantes reforms, it is no longer as a creature of flame, but as himself—except that now patches of his skin are carpeted with a tiger’s striped fur.

A lightning bolt bursts forth from Brachantes’ palm, which is half hand, half paw. It arcs into me, knocking me back, then sizzles into Sunasuka, who has dropped to her knees, and to Verkusht, behind her.

Obai is left as the only combatant standing against him. “I know what you’re doing,” she shouts, as she aims a club blow against the outlander’s head. It bounces off, striking a shimmering helmet of translucent arcane armor.

“Congratulations!” Brachantes roars, baring tiger fangs.

“Your distant menagerie—you’re drawing power from the creatures imprisoned there,” Obai says, as she and her foe circle one another, seeking openings to strike. Claws descend from the outlander’s partly furred fingers. “You have a dragon there, yes? And a stone golem, a fire elemental, a rakshasa...”

Brachantes’ answer is a feline grin. “Wait till you see the next one.”

“This is why you want the boy?”

I stagger forward, chest blackened and blistered.

Obai scoffs at him. “Idiot! What power do you hope to leech from one cursed by a god?”

“You are the fool, priestess.” Brachantes rakes her with his claws. “The boy isn’t accursed. He is god-touched. Through him I can gain the power of a god. Perhaps, in time, become one myself! And none of you pathetic specimens will interfere.”

A square-cut boulder of Kembe stone comes crashing onto the back of his skull. Arok stands behind him, having crept silently up as Obai’s words distracted his target.

Brachantes’ legs buckle. His tiger features blur into something else as he weaves over scorched ground.

Arok raises a paw to smash at him again, but I give the signal and he follows—we are all badly hurt. Only the spirits know what powers the outlander will next summon. We will take the boy and flee, while Brachantes remains addled.

Verkusht slashes Mwonduk’s leash. He dips to lift the boy into his arms, but Mwonduk runs ahead, faster than any of us. I pull Sunasuka to her feet. She blinks, dazed; the lightning strike has left a spreading bruise across her chest.

With an eye cast back to Brachantes and his still-changing form, we cut a maze-like path through the confusing shelter of Kembe’s walls.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Brachantes' arrogance knows no bounds.”

Katiiwa hears us coming. When she tells it later, she will say that she hears Mwonduk’s voice. It tells us that the rest of us have no further need of Tarood, and that she may now do what she has come for.

“Do you know of me?” she asks Tarood.

Her voice startles him. She has stood silent watch over him since we left. “Know of you?”

“Your clan has been searching for Verkusht. Have you learned about those who sometimes travel with him?”

“The so-called Scarred Ones?” he laughs. “You flatter yourself. There are more profitable occupations than seeking gossip on misfit mercenaries.”

“I thought as much.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“If you knew of us, you’d be nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“To be left with me.”

He sweats the same way his cousin does. Beads of it bloom on his forehead, a mass of them all together. “What should I know about you?”

“That I am Katiiwa, of the Azure Harpoon. That the blood of a demon flows in my veins. That it hungers, and that I feed it on the souls of the justly slain. That the world needs executioners, and I am one.”

His fine complexion turns to mottled ash. “The name... is familiar now that you say it.” He turns to face her, begging with wrists bound. “There is no justice in slaying me... a helpless prisoner... in cold blood...”

“Four years ago, you ordered an attack on the village of the Waliyo people. You took their young men. You took their young women. Your clan stole their prince, their princesses, their apprentice spirit-talkers. Those who opposed you were slain. So were children, and old people, who merely annoyed you. Or who you thought it pleasurable to harm.”

“Do not listen to my cousin’s lies about me.”

“It is not from Verkusht that this testimony comes. It is from those who were once Waliyo. Who can no longer call themselves by that name, because so many of the Waliyo were taken that their tribe cannot continue. The few survivors have toiled ever since to afford my modest fee. You slew an entire people. Now, in their name, I do the same to you.”

He is still imploring when the Azure Harpoon pierces his throat.

Katiiwa throws her head back; the demon inside her drinks its fill.

Chapter Six: Sacrificial Rights

We limp through humid jungle air. Brachantes, who can draw on the powers of any number of great beasts and mortal slaves, held captive on his distant island, may be pursuing us. Planning to hit us before we are fully healed. Or he may wait, to ambush us at our destination. He knows that the boy is cursed—god-touched, he calls it—so we must assume that he can also find the pyramid of Kitumu. His ability to track the boy, Obai muses, must be a stolen power, too, taken from an enslaved seer or prophet.

She and Sunasuka have healed as many of our wounds as their magic will allow. The halfling nature-talker is the worst off of any of us. We ache, and still bear the cuts and bruises of our battle with the outlander, but our open wounds have been healed, our burned and melted skin restored. We consider stopping, to rest and regain the healing favors of Nethys and nature. Instead we forge on. The best way to defeat Brachantes will be to beat him to the temple. To deliver the boy to his destined sacrifice, as we have intended since the beginning. Robbed of his quarry, Brachantes might resign himself to the loss and depart. Or he may still try to kill us. If he does, and if we die, it is better to do so having completed our mission and saved the people of the Expanse from the firefly plague.

As we plunge closer to the reputed site of the firefly temple, I look to the boy and to the others. Anger still flushes Arok’s face. He has worn a resentful silence ever since we pulled him away from Brachantes. The outlander killed the trees. He told Arok he belonged in a menagerie, as if offering him a gift. I have seen this look on the ape’s scarred face before. My friend does not easily give himself to murderous rage, but when it seizes him, it does not let go.

Katiiwa seems at peace, her task accomplished. Tarood the Bekyar is slain, the demon in her blood content with its meal.

Obai, as unreadable as ever, both happy and sad.

Verkusht watches me watching the others. He had the chance to betray us and did not take it. I tell him I am proud. He waves my words away, for once not wanting the praise he typically seeks.

Sunasuka, who has been warmest toward the boy, proceeds with features bleak and haunted. She won’t look at him now. I guess that she has resigned herself to his fate.

I wonder who among us is most likely to falter. To balk at the last moment and try to rescue him from his appointment with the divine.

As if struck again by a bolt of Brachantes’ lightning, I realize who it is.

Me.

I, Xhasi, who take pride in my acceptance of the jungle’s demands, cannot abide the thought of what must unfold. The boy has been brave. Has assured us that he is ready to do what is asked of him. He will step into the goddess’s maw, so that many others might live. It is this that cannot be borne. Were he petulant, if he sought to thwart fate’s decrees, I could reluctantly usher him to the bloody altar.

Would I go so readily? Would any of these others? No, we would scream and scheme and kick and find a way out. Were Arok god-doomed, I would risk anything to save him.

I will think of something, I decide. But what this might be, I cannot envision. And now the temple heaves into view.

In my mind’s eye I had pictured it in a clearing, proudly jutting to the sky, the forest gathered around it at a fearful distance. Instead we find it amid the trees, choked entirely by bushes, trees, and vines. The temple appears as a conical mound of vegetation. Only a stifling tranquility marks this nameless patch of jungle as different from any other. Bird song is absent. So is the screeching of canopy monkeys. I scan the trees for signs of animal life and see none: no snakes, no mice. I drop a crumb from my ration pack on the hard forest floor, waiting for ants or termites to swarm around it. It stays unclaimed.

In other circumstances Obai might lecture us on the hidden ruins. She would tell us what extinct people built them, and when. Today she respects the weird hush that blankets this place.

It is Verkusht who speaks. “Are you sure this is it?”

Obai ponders, but the jungle-priestess and the ape both nod. Nature is strong here.

As if to confirm it, a glow arises from the mantle of trees obscuring the goddess’s pyramid. It is soft and green. A cloud of fireflies.

This is why there are no other creatures here. This place belongs to them, and them alone.

Verkusht is the first to freeze. The rest of us do the same.

Is this how it will happen? Will the fireflies descend and devour the boy, as they took my friends the Ngali, and so many other innocents?

The beating of my heart becomes a pounding drum. Will they eat his deliverers, too?

And if they do, will it not be fitting?

As the glowing cloud of fireflies drifts slowly toward us, I see no course of action. No way to save the child.

“Mwonduk...” I begin.

The boy steps forward, shushing me with a gesture.

The fireflies float toward us. They settle first on Verkusht. They land on his forehead and drink from the sweat pooling in its furrows. Others cloak the priestesses, then Katiiwa, then Arok and me. I lose my caution and slowly move my arm. They follow it, forming a glowing garment.

Rejecting us, they swarm onto the boy. I wait, ashamed of my inability to prevent this, for the devouring to begin. I feel like the giant builders of Kembe, falling between worlds.

The moment extends agonizingly as the luminous veil lingers over the boy.

As one, the fireflies glide back to the pyramid, leaving Mwonduk unscathed.

“That can’t be it, can it?” Verkusht asks.

The ground rumbles. There is movement at the pyramid’s apex. Trees topple from it. Clouds of soil dislodge from their exposed roots as they tumble down the sides. A fissure appears in the topmost blocks. The fireflies swarm into it.

Comprehension dawns: the insects came to see if we had the sacrifice designated by the goddess, who dwells inside. Now she will come out to devour the boy herself.

I have heard spirit-talkers say that none may look on the face of a god and survive. Depending on the story, the foolish watcher may be struck dead, or driven mad. But of course I have never met anyone who has beheld a god, except in dreams and visions. The wise action will be to turn my head, and wait until it is over. The sounds of the devouring will be bad enough. I decide otherwise. I will force myself to look, even if it courts destruction. If I cannot save him, I will at least bear witness.

Like a pair of separating hands, the top of the pyramid parts into two.

A voice bellows out to shatter the scene’s solemnity.

“No, you mindless, petty godling,” it booms, “this one you cannot have.”

An immense, distorted creature that speaks with Brachantes’ voice breaks through the underbrush to charge at Mwonduk. He is as tall as a giant, as grotesque as a demon, as ponderous as a mokele-mbembe. The features of his face swirl and scud across the front of a misshapen skull. His flesh is in places furred, or scaled, or plated, or dripping and gelatinous.

Verkusht gasps. “What in the name of...?”

“He has overtaxed his powers,” Obai says. “Before he drew on only one creature at a time. He has mixed them, and is lost.”

Brachantes’ monstrous eyes bloat into one, then separate into several, obliterating the rest of his face. A spray of brilliant color blasts from them, raking the ground at our feet, then striking us down. Obai is lifted from the ground and hurled into the pyramid. Verkusht is stopped in mid-stride, encased suddenly in stone. A thundering blast sends Katiiwa and Sunasuka sprawling, the azure harpoon and screaming monkey club flying from their grasps. Arok yips, seized by madness, and bounds away into the shadows.

“Brachantes' passion is all-consuming. And consume him it has.”

I am inside a column of flame, groaning as it licks away my flesh.

Fire follows me as I leap toward the monstrous interloper. He lunges at Mwonduk, grabbing him in a giant’s grasp. The boy wriggles partially free, and Brachantes lifts him further up, leaving him dangling by one leg. I reach the monster’s nearest foot and plunge my spear into it. It roots him to the ground. I throw myself onto his thigh. Suddenly it is covered with hairy spines like those of an enormous insect. They jab and scrape at my blistered skin. Wracking pain tells me to stop, to drop away and lie in a heap in the dirt. I ignore it, until suddenly I feel no pain at all. The loss of sensation tells me that I am gravely injured, but this thought I also dismiss. I keep climbing up as Brachantes bucks and weaves to throw me off.

Knives thunk into his chest above me, where he is covered in coarse brown fur. Hanging with one arm from the ripped remnants of clothing wrapped around Brachantes’ waist, I seek his kidneys and plunge my daggers in deep. Blood gouts from the wound, black and bubbly. It sprays into my face, blinding me. My grip on him turns slippery.

He flings me away. The trunk of a tree ends my flight. Mwonduk is on the ground again, running for shelter behind the priestesses, who themselves have found cover behind the foot of the pyramid. Brachantes has either dropped the boy or let him down, realizing he needs both hands for the fight.

Sunasuka wills a thorn wall into being, arraying it around Brachantes like a hedge. He pulls both foot and spear clear of the ground and steps over it easily, but this action leaves him off balance. Katiiwa pops up to point her harpoon at him. A bolt of blue lightning arcs from it to strike him in the chest. The electric bolt zigs between the metal dagger hilts jutting from his pectorals. The force of the strike knocks him down and into the jabbing thorns ringed behind him. He brays in protest and for an instant seems to be down for good.

Moments later, he rises again, his body encased in gleaming steel. He laughs, until the transformation of his head into a serpentine shape muffles the sound. He blows a cloud of choking gas at us. I run forward and grab Mwonduk, tumbling with him into the woods.

The spellcasters reel as the gas surrounds them.

Verkusht, broken free of his prison by the women, has run up the side of the pyramid. He shouts down into the fissure. I realize that my ears are ringing, and wonder which of Brachantes’ assaults has stolen my hearing. From his gestures and the few words I can make out, the Bekyar seems to be exhorting the goddess supposedly lurking inside the pyramid. He demands, or so I imagine, that the goddess come out and smite the one trying to steal her sacrifice from her.

If she intends to intervene on our behalf, Kitumu gives no sign of it. It is the way of gods, to stand distant while mortals act for them. Were I to ask Obai about it, she would give a long explanation, one of balance and the turning of the cosmic wheels. What is clear is that, with Brachantes, we are on our own.

Verkusht reaches the same conclusion, and with unusual bravery leaps onto the monster’s head, knife outthrust. It lands in the back of his skull, which is now elongated and has sprouted a spiraling horn. Verkusht swings from the hilt until swatted down by a jellied, fingerless limb. He lands on his back, howling, as a soapy residue left from Brachantes’ strike attempts to crawl down his throat and choke him.

I feel small hands on me; it is Sunasuka, healing my wounds.

She sees that I’ve left my spear behind, and hands me her double monkey club. Its wooden faces yowl. They
seem afraid.

“We’re running out of spells to throw,” she says.

Brachantes has a spear in his foot, and knives sticking from his chest and the back of his head. As he looms over Verkusht, I watch for signs that these injuries have left him vulnerable. When fighting an animal, or sometimes an unnatural beast, it is possible to judge the harm you’ve done. Observing this ever-shifting monstrosity tells me nothing.

With Sunasuka following close behind, I scuttle to the pyramid, to Katiiwa and Obai. We need a plan.

But then, we must also help the Bekyar.

Verkusht rolls away from a stomping foot, planting a serrated skewer in Brachantes’ ankle. The monster kicks Verkusht like a man shooing aside an annoying dog. Verkusht lies dazed on his back, a line of blood creeping from his nostril.

I’m ready to charge over to assist him when Arok, recovered from the fear ray, leaps down from the canopy. He plots his point of impact expertly, so that Brachantes topples face-first to the forest floor. Arok pounds percussively on the back of his neck, then yanks out a Bekyar dagger. He uses it to saw at the veins of Brachantes’ neck.

Brachantes responds by changing again. The slashed jugular reseals itself as his form shifts to something fishy and hellish. He slams Arok. The crunch of shattered bone echoes through the trees.

Obai’s thin lips purse together. Her tattooed frown-smile lends her an air of deranged detachment. “He draws power from the creatures of his faraway menagerie, yes?”

“That is what he claimed.”

“Then there must be unseen channels of arcane force, spanning the miles between himself and his island. They are the source of his might.”

“You are the one who knows such things.” But already I am following her logic. “Your globes, from the Bloodletting Aerie.”

She nods. “It is not how the magics are supposed to work. But perhaps, with Nethys’s favor, the conflicting energies may sever the bond between Brachantes and his menagerie. When I do this, all of you must hit him hard and fast.”

“Will it cut him down to size?”

“So I hope.”

I dash into the fray, swinging Sunasuka’s monkey club, rallying my allies’ attentions. The strange, carved weapon yammers in panicked ape speech. Arok and Verkusht array themselves around Brachantes, forcing him to defend against blows from all sides. Katiiwa orbits from a remove, firing arcane darts from her harpoon. They materialize as orbs of acid, each bearing a demon’s grinning face. Where they land, they scourge and pucker his writhing hide.

Obai’s twin circles shimmer into being around him—the light first, then the dark. Unlike the perfect orb summoned at the Aerie, this one buckles and is instantly malformed.

Brachantes’ features become recognizable again. Four eyes resolve into two. A set of yellow-brown tentacles retracts into his jaw. Annoyance gives way to dread as he seems to understand Obai’s scheme. He lashes out at the combined globes of light and dark, and they lose their shape, threaten to dissipate.

Obai cries out to Nethys. “Maintain the balance, O greatest god!”

The circles reform and stabilize. Brachantes seems to fold in on himself, rapidly losing height and heft. Within moments, he has shrunk from a giant’s size to that of an ogre. He is still bigger by far than any of us, even Arok, but for the first time I believe we can beat him.

No longer does his form change. Where before he took on the traits of creatures I know or have heard of, now he is at once all and none of them. He is a colorless, misshapen mockery of a man, his muscles puffy, the skeleton beneath them warped and improbable.

Arok tears at him. Verkusht sticks a long knife into
his spine.

With a great glob of a fist, Brachantes strikes me. I feel my teeth rattle in their sockets. Backward I spin, landing on my shoulder in the hardened dirt. The club goes flying. I try to get up, but my feet won’t go where I tell them.

There is still fight in our enemy yet. Arok rears back, surprised by a similar blow.

Verkusht kicks at Brachantes’ back, hitting the hilt of his dagger, driving it further in. He ducks a swiping return clout, yelling in disbelieving protest: “Don’t you realize, you Taldan excrement, that I’ve severed your stinking spine?”

I wobble up, head still ringing, to wade back in. Arok does the same, his jaw hanging at an alarming angle. Katiiwa, out of spells, staggers to join us.

Brachantes spots my abandoned spear, its head and haft still wet with his tarry blood, and seizes it, parrying jabs from the sorceress’s harpoon.

Behind us, Sunasuka mouths the familiar chant to summon a swarm of stinging wasps. Her call to nature yields no result. As I bash at Brachantes’ rearing, unstable form, I realize why it has failed: Kitumu allows only fireflies here.

Then the leaves and vines reflect a soft green glow.

In a teeming mass, Kitumu’s insect hordes reemerge from the pyramid. They surround Brachantes, tearing into his flesh as they did to my friends in the Ngali village, to the traders of Free Station, to the Latari tribesmen of Rechiend’s Plains. The firefly plague now visits itself on Brachantes. The luminous bugs find the parts of him that are fleshy and human. They burrow deep, boring through him like termites through wood, ants through the pulp of fallen fruit. A blood rain falls as his flesh is torn from him. He opens his throat to scream out his agony, but no sound comes.

He staggers, falling to one knee. Brachantes is smaller again now, perhaps returned to his native shape. It is hard to say for sure, with so much meat pulled away from his bones. I can see rib cage, and a patch of exposed skull above his left eye.

“You are beaten, Brachantes,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says.

The spear is still in his hand. He drops to the ground, mustering one last reserve of strength, and hurls it. The shaft sails through the air. I dive at it, meaning to deflect it from its course, but the gesture has surprised me, and I strike only empty air.

I hit the ground, roll, and look up to its destination.

Mwonduk stands staring dully at the spear that has pierced his chest. The head protrudes from his back, gobbets of heart muscle hanging from its sharpened tip. The color drains from him as he collapses. Sunasuka runs to his side. The slump of her shoulders confirms it: he is dead, and nothing can be done.

Then I am on Brachantes, knees digging into his ruined chest. I shout at him, stupidly, uselessly repeating the one question that never has an answer. I am asking him why. Why did he have to kill the child?

Blood foams from the outlander’s ruined mouth. “If I can’t have him, no one can.” He says it simply, as if no statement could make more sense. There is no mockery, no gloating in it. He has acted according to his code. Defeat for Brachantes must be defeat for all.

Time stops. There is no one in the world except for me and this creature helpless beneath me. I think of how close we have come to reaching our goal. Of the deaths to come from the firefly plague, which we have lost the means to end. Of the boy, and how he was willing to die for the good of others, but not like this, not pointlessly.

My hands close around the gore-slicked neck.

His wounds could easily prove fatal, even without my intervention. But I want to be the one who kills him. Who squeezes the last breaths from his lungs. Presses shut his windpipe, until his soul flutters from him and departs for whatever hell awaits it.

I consider my own code, which forces upon me the obligations of those I slay. What debts does this man carry, that allowed him to construct his island of cages, to collect so many captive creatures? At this moment, they do not seem so unbearable, not compared to the two life-prices I already pay each day of my life. I will go to his island, I decide. In discharge of his responsibilities I will fling open his cages. Grant freedom to his slaves.

My fingers tighten.

Then relax.

I rise and step back. The Code of Ara is not a trader’s ledger sheet, with costs weighted against gains. The life-price is a punishment for a crime, for breaking the holiest of ancestral edicts.

“Let him die on his own,” I mutter.

Sunasuka calls my name. I turn to see the boy’s body convulsing from within. At first, my heart leaps, as I think him miraculously saved. Then I see that he is coming apart. Brachantes killed him with more than a thrown spear. Some baneful magic now destroys his remains. The sight of it numbs me. Limbs wizen and shrivel. A fissure opens in his chest. The head lolls off.

The pyramid, which stood on the verge of opening before Brachantes appeared, resumes its rumbling. The gap, arrested before, widens. A crimson glow escapes from it, bathing first the canopy directly overhead, then the entire jungle.

From the opening, a vast, blood-red form arises. It is shaped like a firefly, its beetle wings spanning hundreds of feet. The goddess has come to punish our failure.

She hovers above us, the buffeting force of her wings throwing up a cloud of dirt and leaf-dust.

A creature stirs inside Mwonduk’s corpse. It crawls from his torso, leaving the remainder emptied out and hollow.

It too is a crimson firefly, a reduced counterpart to Kitumu, overhead. The insect is at most three feet long, from the tip of its searching feelers to the glowing bulb at the end of its body. It opens up its hard outer shell to reveal the wings hidden beneath. Tentatively, it buzzes them back and forth. It lifts itself into the air and circles around us. The creature stops in front of each of us, starting first with Verkusht. It waves its antennae gently, almost caressingly, at each of us, as if making a farewell. Its circuit ends with me and finally Sunasuka.

Then it spirals down to Brachantes. Now he laughs, but the joke is rueful and aimed at himself. “This is why... wanted him. Not cursed,” he gasps. “A god. A young god. I could have had the power of a...”

With red, segmented legs, the insect that was once a boy seizes Brachantes, piercing down into the outlander’s remaining flesh. Brachantes registers the pain as a soft exhalation. The Mwonduk bug tugs his squirming body up into the air. Straining at his weight, it buzzes up to its mother, Kitumu, who circles above. It flies over her beetle face. Kitumu clicks her mandibles and opens her gullet. Her child drops in the sacrificial offering. Brachantes musters one last wail as he is consumed.

The Mwonduk bug circles its mother as she retreats into the pyramid. Without a gesture of divine gratitude, or the merest acknowledgment of our presence, she vanishes into the temple depths. The smaller insect seems to pause, to flutter wings at us, before following the goddess inside.

The ground rumbles as the temple seals itself up.

As mortals, we have done what was expected of us. We served the goddess. That she slew hundreds of people simply to attract our obedience is of no consequence to her. Mortals are disposable, especially
to nature’s devouring gods. Despite my wounds, my still-spinning head, the sickly feeling of having come too close to an ancient and indifferent divinity, I feel a lightness.

In my marrow, I know it: the plague has ended, and will not return.

“Who can say whether a newborn god remembers his friends?”

Verkusht claps his hands together. “My, my. That went better than expected.” Seeing that no one else shares his jollity, he tries harder. “For example, none of us tried to kill any of the others. Surely that’s a first.”

Without warning, Sunasuka hurls herself at Obai, spitting unintelligible accusations. Arok comes at her from the left and I from the right. We wrest the recovered double monkey club from her grasp. Obai interrupts the spell she’d been preparing.

“Why fight now?” I say. “All is for the best!”

Sunasuka, still struggling to free herself of our combined grip, shouts: “You said the child was accursed!”

“I was not wrong,” Obai says, the contradictory scars on the sides of her mouth frowning and smiling. “The child was accursed.”

Sunasuka looses a stream of profanities, both foreign and Mwangi.

“I grant,” Obai says, “that I was imprecisely informed as to the curse’s true nature.”

Hot tears stream Sunasuka’s cheeks. She can see only the balance priestess. “You had us thinking we’d have to murder the child!”

“Of all of us here, nature priestess, you know that great forces speak to us, but never reveal all. And clearly, the boy was cursed. Rather than a mortal cursed to be devoured, he was a deific being, cursed to eke his first miserable years in mortal form. Much like an actual lightning bug, spending its earliest days as a glowing, toxic worm.”

Sunasuka takes a fresh lunge at the Nethys priestess; the ape and I tighten our hold on her. “The entire journey, my heart has been a cold fist in my chest!”

“We were never going to kill the boy. We were merely instruments of cosmic balance, allowing a god to work her will. And this she did.”

Sunasuka calms herself. We let her storm to a nearby brook, where she splashes water on her face.

A pensive look crosses Katiiwa’s face. “Do you think Mwonduk was born mortal, so that he would understand our fears and cares?”

Obai chuckles, musical and cold. “Nothing so romantic, I’m sure. What does a godling of fireflies care about
mortal existence?”

I gaze upon the pyramid of Kitumu, now closed, and wonder.

About the Author

Robin D. Laws is the author of the Pathfinder Tales novel The Worldwound Gambit and six other novels, as well as various short stories, web serials, and comic books, plus a long list of roleplaying game products. His novels include Pierced Heart, The Rough and the Smooth, and the Angelika Fleischer series for the Black Library. Robin created the classic RPG Feng Shui and such recent titles as Mutant City Blues, Skulduggery, and the newly redesigned HeroQuest 2. Those interested in learning more about Robin are advised to check out his blog.