“That was almost verse.”
“I am a poet among prefects.”
I thought to say something about wind rippling on the river.
“This boy, what is his name?” he whispered.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone bothered to name him. He is Boy. Precious to many.”
“And yet nobody named him? Not his mother? Who has him now?”
I told him the story up to the perfume and silver merchant. He raised himself up on his elbows.
“Not this Omoluzu?”
“No. It wasn’t the boy’s blood they followed. These were different. The merchant, his two wives and three sons all had their lives sucked out of them. Just like Fumanguru. You saw the bodies. Whoever they are, they leave you worse alive than dead. Did not believe it until I saw a woman like a zombi with lightning coursing through her like blood. I came to Kongor to find the boy’s scent.”
“I see why you need me.”
I knew he smirked, even if I didn’t see it.
“All you have is a nose,” he said. “I have an entire head. You want to find this child. I will find him in a quartermoon, before the man with wings finds him.”
“Seven nights? You sound like a man I used to know. Do you care what we do when we find him?”
“Pursuit, Tracker. I leave capture to others.”
He stretched out on the grass and I looked at my toes. Then I looked at the moon. Then I looked at the clouds, white and shiny on top, silver in the middle, and black underneath as if pregnant with rain. I tried to think of why I never think of this boy, not what he might look like, or sound like, even though he was the reason we were here. I mean, I thought of him when I tracked all that happened, but I was more taken with Fumanguru, and the lies of Belekun the Big, and the game both Sogolon and Bunshi were playing with information; taken by all who sought this boy more than the boy himself. I thought of a room of women all about to fight over a dull lover. Even this Aesi wanting the boy sparked something brighter in me than the boy himself. Though I was sure that it was the King himself who wanted him dead. This King of the North, this Spider King with four arms and four legs. My King. Mossi uttered something, somewhere between a sigh and a moan, and I looked over. His face was to me but his eyes closed and the moonlight moved up and down his face.
Before first light something floated on the breeze, a smell of animals far off, and I thought of Leopard. Anger burned in me, but then it left in the quick, leaving sadness and many words that I could have said. His laugh would have bounced all over that cliff. I did not want to miss him. I had gone years without seeing him before we met at that inn, but until then I always felt that he was the one soul who if I ever needed him would appear without me even asking. The detestable Fumeli crowded my thoughts and made me want to spit. Still, I wondered where he was. His smell was not unknown to me; I could have used the memory of it to find him, but did not.
We set out before sunrise. The buffalo kept nodding to his back until I climbed on, lay down, and went fast to sleep. I woke up to my cheek rubbing against the coarse chest hair of the Ogo.
“The buffalo, he grew tired of carrying you,” Sadogo said, his massive right hand cradling my back, his left in the hook of my knees.
Ahead, Sogolon rode with the girl and Mossi rode alone. The sun, almost gone, left the sky yellow, orange, and gray, with no clouds. Mountains far off on both sides, but the land was flat and grassy. I didn’t want to be cradled like a child, but I didn’t want to ride with Mossi either, and I would have slowed everyone down on foot. I pretended to yawn and closed my eyes. But then he ran across my nose and I jumped. The boy. I almost slipped from Sadogo’s hand but he caught me and put me down. South, but heading north, just as sure as we were north heading south.
“The boy?” Mossi said. I didn’t see him dismount, or that everybody had stopped.
“South. I can’t say how far. Maybe a day, maybe two days. He’s heading north, Sogolon.”
“And we are heading south. We will meet in Dolingo.”
“You seem very sure,” Mossi said.
“I sure now. Not so sure ten days ago until I go and do my own work, just as the Tracker go and do his work.”
“Here is good trade. You tell me how you come by your knowledge, and I will tell you how I come by mine,” I said.
“Yes, the boy run hot, then it run cold. Hot for one day and then cold just like that. Never fades, no? Not like a boy who run too far, he scent just vanish, like he dip himself in the river to throw off wild dogs. This not a riddle, Tracker, surely you know why.”
“No.”
“A house with a man who owe me many things up ahead. We stop there. And … house of a man …”
Wind knocked her off the horse, kicked her high in the air, and dropped her flat on her back. Breath burst out of her mouth. The girl jumped off the horse, ran to her, but a nothing in the air slapped her. I heard the slap, the sound of wet skin on skin, but nothing to see, the girl’s face twisting left then right. Sogolon raising a hand to block her face, as if somebody came at her with an ax. Mossi jumped off his horse and ran to her but wind knocked him back as well. Sogolon fell to her knees and clutched her belly, then screamed, then yelled, then said something in a language I didn’t know. All of this I saw before, right before the Darklands. Sogolon stood up but air slapped her down again. I drew my axes but knew they were no use. Mossi ran to her again and the wind knocked him down. On the wisp of air came voices, a scream one blink, a laugh the next. Whatever it was disturbed the Sangoma’s enchantment, and I could feel something on me and within me trying to flee. Sogolon shouted something in that language again, as the wind gripped her neck and pushed her down in the dirt. The girl searched around for a stick, found a stone, and started drawing runes in the sand. The girl marked, and scratched, and dug, and brushed dirt with her fingers, making runes in the dirt until she made a circle around Sogolon. The air howled until it was just wind, then nothing.
Sogolon rose, still trying to catch her breath. Mossi ran over to help her up, but the girl jumped between them and swatted away his hand.
“She not to be touch by no man,” she said.
Which was the first time I was hearing such news. But she let the Ogo lift her up on her horse.
“These the same spirits from outside the Darklands?” I shouted at her.
“Is the man with the black wings,” Sogolon said. “Is this—”
I heard it too, along the path, on both sides, a cracking as if earth was breaking apart. The buffalo stopped and swung around. The girl, standing by Sogolon, grabbed her staff and pulled it apart to show the tip of a lance. The earth kept cracking, and the girl grabbed Sogolon to help her back on her horse. The buffalo started to trot and Sadogo was about to pick me up and put me on his shoulders. From the cracking earth came heat and sulfur, which made us cough. And the cackle of old women, louder and louder until it turned into a hum.
“We should run,” Mossi said.
“Wise counsel,” I said, and we both ran to the horse.
Sadogo put on his knuckles. The cracking and the cackling grew louder, until something burst out, right in the middle of the path, with a scream. A column, a tower that bent, and cracked, and split pieces off. Three others burst through the ground on the right, like obelisks. Sogolon was too weak to rein the horse, so the girl pressed her knees into him. The horse tried to gallop but the shifting, cracking column unfolded itself, shaped itself, and it was a woman, larger than the horse, below the waist dark and scaly and still rising from the earth as if the rest of her body was a snake. She rose as tall as two trees, and spooked Sogolon’s horse, which jumped up on her hind legs and threw both of them off. Her skin looked like the moon, but it was white dust floating in the air like clouds. On the two sides of the path rose four more, with thin rib bones pressing against their skin, and breasts plump, faces with dark eyes and wild locks that rose high like flame. The creatures on the right covered themselves in dust, the creatures on the left covered themselves in blood. Also this, the flutter of wings, though none of them had any wings. One swooped in and knocked Mossi down. She raised her hand and her claws grew. She would slice him to nothing before he turned over. I jumped in front of him and swung my ax at her hand, chopping it at the wrist. She screamed and backed away.