“I will go. I have unfinished business with Sogolon.”
“Venin?” Mossi said.
“Who is that?” Venin said.
“What? You are who. Venin is what you go by since I met you. Who else would you be if not her?”
“It is not her,” I said.
The him in her looked at me.
“You been thinking so a long time,” they said.
“Yes but I could not be sure. You are one of the spirits Sogolon write runes to bind, but you broke from her.”
“My name is Jakwu, white guard for the King Batuta who sits in Omororo.”
“Batuta? He died over a hundred years ago. You are … no matter. Leave the old woman to the bloodsuckers. She is like them in company,” Mossi said.
“Do all the spirits want what you want?” I asked.
“Revenge against the Moon Witch? Yes. Some want more. Not all of us died by her hand, but in all our deaths she is responsible. She drove me out of my body to appease an angry spirit, and now she thinks she has appeased me.”
His voice was still Venin’s but I have seen this in possession. The voice remains, but the tone, the pitch, the words he chooses are all so different that it sounds like another voice. Venin’s voice went hoarse. It came out like a rumble, like the voice of a man long gone in years.
“Where is Venin?”
“Venin. She the girl. She gone. She will never be back in this body. Call her dead. It is not what she is, but it will do. Now she is doing what I did, roam the underworld until she remembers how she came by that place. And then she will seek out Sogolon, like all of us.”
“She could barely ride a horse and now he wields a club. And you? You can barely stand,” Mossi said.
At the end of the road, round the bend came yells. Noblemen and noblewomen of Dolingo walking swift, thinking that was enough. Looking back, walking faster, the men and women at the front not yet seeing the people behind them, then running, and the running crowd, maybe twenty, maybe more, pushing some out of the way, knocking down some, trampling some, as they ran this way. Behind them came the rumble. Mossi and Sadogo and Venin took places all around me and we readied our weapons. The screaming nobles ran around us like two rivers. Behind them, with bats, sticks, and clubs, and swords and spears, slaves, who ran and staggered like the zombi but were gaining. Eighty or more, chasing the nobles. A spearhead went through a noblewoman’s back and out her belly, and she fell to the ground. The rebels stayed clear of us as they ran around us, save for one who ran too close and was kicked in two by Sadogo’s boot, and one that ran into Mossi’s sword, and two whose heads met Venin’s swinging club. The rest ran past us, and soon swarmed the nobles. Flesh flew. Sadogo in front, we ran back the way they had all come, and one battle cry from Sadogo kept trailing rebels out of our way.
The caravans had all been stopped, many with people trapped inside, but the platforms took us down, those slaves not infected with freedom yet. On the ground, as we scrambled off the platform with me still swaying and tripping and Mossi still holding me up with his hand, Mungunga broke out in explosion and fire. Fire bit into some of the ropes and ran across to one of the caravans and coated it in flame. The people inside, some already on fire, jumped. At the foot of Mungunga a door the height of three men and ten strides wide broke at the hinges and fell down, shooting up dust. Naked slaves running out slowed to a stagger, some with sticks and rods and metals, all hobbling at first, blinking and holding up their arms to block the light. Cut ropes around necks and limbs, and carrying whatever they could hold. I could not tell men from women. The guards and the masters, so used to no resistance, forgot how to fight. They ran through us and past us, so many of them, some dragging whole bodies of masters, others carrying hands, feet, and heads.
Slaves still ran when from above fell elegant bodies. From terraces above ropes fell, and slaves pushed masters off. Noble bodies fell on slave bodies. Both killed. And more fell on top of them.
At Mwaliganza, the platform took us to the eighth floor. Quiet all around, it seemed, as if nothing had spread this far. I rode the buffalo, though I was lying on him, holding on to his horns so I did not fall off.
“This is the floor,” I said.
“How are you sure?” Mossi asked.
“This is where my nose is taking us.”
But I did not say my eyes, and that when the Bad Ibeji pushed his claws up through my nose, I could see the unit where the old woman lived, the gray walls wearing away to show orange underneath, and the small windows near the top of her roof. They followed me and the buffalo, as nobles and slaves jumped out of the way. We turned left and ran over a bridge to a dry road. The boy was in my nose. But also a living dead smell that I knew, well enough for me to jump in horror and such total disgust that I thought I was sick. But I could not name it. Smell sometimes did not open memory, only that I should remember it.
A small swarm of slaves and prisoners ran by, pulling the bodies of noblemen, naked and blue and dead. They paused at a door I had never seen and yet already knew. The old woman’s door hung open and loose. In the doorway were two dead Dolingo guards, necks at an angle that necks do not bend. Right at the doorway, steps that climbed up past one floor to another, and from up there screams, crashes, metal on metal, metal on mortar, metal on skin. I made it to the door and fell back into Mossi’s hands. He didn’t ask and I didn’t protest when he carried me over to the side, near a window, and sat me on the floor.
Then he, Sadogo, and Venin-Jakwu ran past me up the stairs, as two more men landed on the floor, dead before their bones broke. Men shouted orders, and I looked up and saw how wide the floor was. The torch above me flickered. Thunder broke in the room and everything shook. It broke again, as if a storm was a breath away. The ceiling cracked and dust came down. I was on the kitchen floor. Food already cooked was also on the floor, with fat thickening in a pot and palm oil in jars near the wall. I pulled myself up and reached for the torch. Dead guards spotted the entire floor, many of them husks, drained of all juice and coarse like a tree trunk. A balcony hung over the floor and dead men hung from it. Blood dripped down. A boy, hands to his side and still, flew over the balcony and rode the air. He hung there, eyes open but seeing nothing, flies swarming, and movement all over him. I raised the torch as all over his face, all over his hands, his belly, his legs, all his skin popped open holes big as seeds. The boy’s skin looked like a wasp’s nest, and red bugs covered in blood burrowed in and crawled out. Flies flew out his mouth and ears and fat larvae popped out all over his skin and plopped on the ground, flipped out wings, and flew back to the boy. Soon it was a swarm of flies in the shape of a boy. The swarm gathered into a ball and the boy fell, landing on the floor like dough. The swarm circled tighter and tighter, dropping lower and lower until it rested right above the floor, six paces from me. The bugs and the larvae and the pods squeezed and squashed into each other, shaping into something with two limbs, then three, then four with a head.
The Adze, bright eyes like fire, black skin that vanished in the dark room, a hunchback with long hands and fingers with claws that scraped the floor. He stomped his hooves and approached me, and I dodged back and waved the torch at him, which made him wheeze a laugh. He kept coming, and I stepped back and kicked over an oil jar. The oil started spreading on the floor and he yelled, skipped, and jumped back, broke up into bugs, and flew back upstairs. I heard the Ogo yell, and something crashed and broke wood. Mossi jumped up to the balcony, swinging one sword, spun and chopped off the head of a guard infected with lightning. He leapt back onto the floor and ran back into the fight.