Redemptor: Part II

Sanjeet chuckled and sat beside me, his molten eyes contemplative as he took in my ensemble—especially my scant top of cowrie shells.

He lifted me from the ground. I could feel his pulse against mine, pounding and erratic as he climbed the short steps to my sleeping dais and we fell toward the silk-covered pallet.

A tall loom rested in one corner, shadowed in the weak morning light, where Umansa had spent every evening weaving in a fugue.

His Hallowed tapestries—which featured the only images his milky white eyes could see—told stories in fractured pieces, each blazing in a chaos of glyphs and constellations, empires rising and falling with the capricious turn of planets.

Amidst the packing chaos, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, peering into her glass scrying orb. “I’ve searched the city borders. No sign of fires, lava, anything. If Umansa’s vision is so urgent, why didn’t he say something earlier?”

“No. It’s not like that,” Kirah said, coming to put a placating hand on my arm.

“You can’t promise that,” Theo said, plucking despondently at his lyre.

It’s said that abiku consume lost souls. Defile, reshape them until what’s left are creatures between death and resurrection.

Sanjeet had stayed back to secure the capital and had sent a cohort of trusted warriors in his place.

The villages, while numerous, were little more than tenements and mudhouses crowded together, with the occasional tourist’s inn surrounded by beggars. As far as I knew, the forge had employed Olojari commoners for hundreds of years. So why did so many live in squalor?

A phrase in large script, mottled with ash and soot, had been carved into the entryway:
IN THE EYE OF KUNLEO, OLOJARI WILL PROSPER.

But all of them swayed, voices lifted in rasping song and jaundiced eyes alight with hunger.

Other acolytes stood with the wealthy, sneering at the rabble, and making signs of the Pelican to ward off evil.

A crimson glow emanated from the forge’s mouth...and then a smoldering hand the size of a boulder punched through the top of the mountain.

The force blew back my hair, and bluebloods scrambled for cover while all around me, the rabble ululated in rapture.

Paupers who descended into the mine before sunrise and emerged with the moon, raking a pittance wage to fill the bellies of infants they rarely saw.

I groaned through the discontent of scar-handed blacksmiths, fleeced into buying iron of paltry quality, while nobles whisked the best specimens far away to the Imperial Armory.

The majority of the priests and villagers sank to genuflect in the dirt.

But others, especially the gentry, just stared, frozen in shock.

"...The nobility of Olojari,” I went on, nodding at the apoplectic huddle of well-dressed lords and ladies, “who have until now, so deftly managed the mine on the crown’s behalf, are hereby relieved of this service. Let the record be sealed—my word is passed.”

“I’ve heard of you. You’ve been inciting insurrection across the continent. And this was only the beginning, wasn’t it? You want to wake all the alagbatos. Start disasters everywhere.”

From an ever-so-slight hunch of the Crocodile’s shoulders, I could tell my reprimand had hit home.

They were to live free from the yoke of exploitation.

As long as that quarry continued to line the coffers of your gentry sycophants, the people of Olojari would never be liberated.

News of our cancelled coronation ceremony, which Dayo still insisted on postponing until I returned from the Underworld, had shocked the volatile social world of Oluwan City.

“I wish our family was home,” I said, staring back wistfully at the moonlit An-Ileyoba turrets.

The warriors passed him a chalice, from which he sipped palm wine and poured a libation.

When Dayo and I returned to the palace, the Guard warriors sequestered us in the Imperial Suite, where Ai Ling and Sanjeet—along with an army of healers, attendants, and courtiers—flocked to greet us in the anteroom.

The air grew thin. My chest began to palpitate, and before I knew it, I had stepped out of Sanjeet’s grasp and gestured sharply at the carved anteroom doors.

Sanjeet set me down on a low salon chair, rummaged through the cabinets above his war table, and produced salve and linen strips.

They are poison, however, killing the user slowly and cursing them with deformity. Only one guild of assassins is depraved enough to carry them: the Jujoka.

I stared at its limpid green eyes, and it squeaked, licking my face.

My Kunleo sisters, reviled and erased.
Exiled, for daring to shine like the sun.

But they jumbled in my head with a dissonant tune, one no less true than the first.

“This is awkward enough as it is,” I said as she giggled, twirling away in her satin dressing gown. “Don’t make it worse.” Secretly though, I was relieved at Ai Ling’s levity: It made the coming morning seem less ominous.

I didn’t want my council siblings wading through the mire of my past any more than I wanted strangers there.

Dayo and I sat up and stretched, doing our best to look regally awakened as courtiers trilled in grating, cheerful song.

When at last we were handed our sandals, completing the Rising, a throng of courtiers turned on their eyes on me, bowing and simpering with smiles that set my teeth on edge.

Then she shot me a furtive glance, touching the mark on her brow.

“We found her busking outside the forge,” crowed another noble. “Begging, really. She doesn’t even have a gele.”