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.
Still holding the torch, I grabbed another jar full of palm oil and started upstairs. Five steps up my head pounded, the floor started to shift, and I leaned into the wall. I passed a man with a hole in his chest that went straight through his back. At the top of the stairs, I put down the jar, shook my head to clear it, and looked straight into yellow eyes and a long, thin face, red skin and white stripes up the forehead. Ears pointing up, hair green like grass on his arms and shoulders, white streaks all the way down his chest. He stood half a man above me, and smiled, his teeth pointed and sharp, like a great fish’s. In his right hand a leg bone that he filed down to the shape of a dagger. He cackled something over and over, then lunged at me, but two flashes of light made his belly explode black blood. Mossi, jumping down, his two sword arms spread wide. He swung his hands across his chest, left sword slicing through the devil’s back, his right sword slicing through half his neck. The devil fell, and rolled down the steps.
“Eloko, Eloko, he kept saying. I think his name is Eloko. Was,” Mossi said. “Tracker, stay down.”
“They come down.”
He ran back into the fight. The room was a school. That was why they chose it and why it would have been so easy for the boy to fool whoever came to the door. Yet there was no sign of children. Across the room, near the window, Venin-Jakwu smiled as two Eloko charged, one from the floor and one from the ceiling. From a hanging plant the Eloko swung off to jump them, but they ran into him with the butt of their club, ramming him in the chest. He swiped with a long bone knife but Venin-Jakwu dodged and rammed the club handle straight into his nose. Another, behind, swung his knife, and cut across the back of their thigh. Venin-Jakwu yelled and dropped, but dropped into a dodge, swooping low and swinging the club from low right up into his face. The third Eloko snuck up from behind. I shouted, but I said Jakwu! And they swung left, though he was coming from the right. Just a breath behind them, Venin-Jakwu stopped the hard swing of the club, sent it down so that it swung right up, past their right side and right up between the Eloko’s legs. He shrieked and fell to his knees. Venin-Jakwu bashed his head again and again until there was no more head. Thunder cracked again and mortar broke from the ceiling.
“Your leg,” I said, pointing to the blood running down.
“Who you plan to kill with those?”
I looked at my torch and oil. Venin-Jakwu ran off. I followed, stronger, my mind less stormy, but still I wobbled. The Adze swung from a rafter in the ceiling as a hunchback, but dived after Sadogo as a swarm. He attacked Sadogo’s left arm and shoulder. Sadogo swatted away many and crushed many, but Adze was too many. Some started burrowing in his shoulder and near his elbow and Sadogo yelled. I threw the jar and it shattered on his chest, splashing palm oil all over. He looked at me, enraged.
“Rub on your arm … the oil … rub it.”
The flies dug into his skin. Sadogo scooped oil running down his belly and rubbed on his chest, arm, and neck. The bugs, they popped up in the quick, slipping out of larger holes like wounds, all falling to the floor. The rest of the swarm flew into madness, popping into each other, squeezing tight into one form, the form dropping lower and lower until on the floor and changing back into an Adze with one foot and half of a head, and in the head, bugs and larvae wiggling like maggots. Quicker than a blink, Venin-Jakwu smashed the rest of its head into a red, pulpy pool on the floor.
“Where is Sogolon? The boy?”
Sadogo pointed with his good arm to another room. Venin-Jakwu ran towards it, clubbing guards with lightning coursing through them. She ran to the door, right into a thunderclap that knocked her away from the archway and shook me off my balance. Inside, Mossi pulled himself out of a pile of tumbled shelves and clay pots.
His back was to me, and his feet were off the ground: Ipundulu. White streaks in his hair, long feathers at the back of his head sticking out like knives and going all the way down his back. White wings, black feathers at the tips and wide as the room. Body white and featherless, thin but muscular. Black bird’s feet floating above the clay floor. Ipundulu. His right arm raised, claws around Sogolon’s neck. I couldn’t tell if she was alive, but blood spattered on the floor below her. Lightning crackled and jumped all over his skin. Ipundulu pulled a knife out of his shoulder and threw it at Mossi, who jumped out of the way, raised his swords, and glared at him. Sogolon, her lips white, opened one eye halfway and looked at me. Behind me, Venin-Jakwu rolled on the floor, trying to get up. Lightning jumped from Ipundulu’s skin to Sogolon’s face and she groaned through clenched teeth. Mossi was unsure how to strike. Maybe somebody told me, maybe I guessed, but I threw the torch straight for the lightning bird. It hit him in the center of his back and his whole body exploded in flames. He dropped Sogolon and shrieked like a crow, rolled and jerked, and tried to fly as the flames burned away feathers and skin so quick, so hungrily. Ipundulu ran into the wall and kept running, flaying and shrieking, a ball of bursting flame feeding on feathers, feeding on skin, feeding on fat. The room stank of smoke and charred flesh.
Ipundulu fell to the floor. Mossi ran over to Sogolon.
The lightning bird did not die. I could hear him wheeze, his body back in the shape of a man, his skin blackened where it had charred and red where the flesh was ripped open underneath.
“She lives,” Mossi said. He stomped over to the Ipundulu, on the floor jerking and wheezing.
“He lives also,” he said, and pushed the blade right under Ipundulu’s chin.
Something drew me to look over at the toppled shelves—the plates, pots, and bowls of drying fish—and under a chair. Under the chair looked right back at me. Eyes wide and bright in the dim, staring at me staring at him. A voice in me said, There he is. There is the boy. His hair, wild and natty, for what else would a boy’s hair be without a mother to groom and cut it? He jumped, frightened, and first I thought it was because of them who had him, for which child is not frightened by monsters? But he must have been in dozens of houses and seen dozens of kills, so much that the killing of a woman, and the eating of her, and the killing of a child and the eating of him was child’s play. If you lived all your life with monsters, what was monstrous? He stared at me, and I stared at him.
“Mossi.”
“Maybe you should have skipped Dolingo,” he said to the Ipundulu.
“Mossi.”
“Tracker.”