“Such a golden voice on you,” he say, then yell at the guard to take her away. Later that night in the jail cell, the Green Guards pour melted gold down her throat.
Is not as if people didn’t know Kwash Moki was cruel. But out of the Aesi’s presence, he gone so unhinged that people start saying out of his control. Control, at least, over the King’s moods. Meanwhile the fetish priests find nothing. Many come with Ifa bowl, many come with sacks full of divining tools from years and years of craft. Two come from far west, the Purple City in the middle of Lake Abbar. All but one say the Aesi is dead, and the first six to say so get whipped to near death. “I have no love for the stinking lot of them, but give them credit for not telling the King what he want to hear,” Keme say. A priest from Kongor say that he is now roaming a street in Taha district as a small beast. A rat perhaps, or a near-wild cat.
“Why would the second most significant man in the empire leave his spirit in such an insignificant animal?” another priest ask before the King ask it with the spear that he now take upon himself to throw, though he never once hit his target. All but one agree the Aesi is dead. None could agree if the death was final, even though he is just a man with perhaps some magic.
“We should ask a man who speaks to the ancestors, Most Magnificent.”
“I thought that man was you. I thought my room was fat with such men,” say Kwash Moki.
All but two say the Aesi is dead. All but two end up in the dungeons. Two things people know. The first that there are many cells, holes, jails, and keeps, but nobody has ever seen a man return from the dungeons. Second that despite their nuisance, without the fetish priests, many a holy place fall into disarray, run over by beggars and monkeys, for there is nobody to divine the wisdom of the gods and guide the lost. So it come that cities, towns, districts, and houses all start to shake asunder. But the two who claim the Aesi is alive didn’t say he was living, but that they feel his strong presence. And that presence was in Ibiku.
Seeing as they couldn’t find a dead Aesi, Kwash Moki had no confidence that his guard could find him living. So he send the Sangomin.
I remember the day.
Ibiku is not like Taha, or the floating city. Many people live together but the houses are apart and almost scattered, which is why I can never hear anybody nearby and they can never hear us. Or so I would think. But if one home don’t know the other home’s business, it mean that news travel slow if at all. But that day I can see clear even though it was a moon ago. See me there in the house, walking from room to room though it feeling like I am fleeing from room to room and the walls won’t stop screaming at me. I stumble over little Keme, who was on the floor looking up at the ceiling, and nearly kick Aba, who was by the door saying she playing a game with Ehede but he won’t come out and play. My hands push her out of the way and my feet take me out of the house to a sky that somehow look new. A sky telling me to follow it. So I follow, down the one street too wide to snake you with a twist or a turn. People are out in the street. A man I never see before say to nobody that they kick down his door and grab his wife asking where he be. He run out of the house and thought his children were running behind him. Then the ground jerk and a house down the street rumble. A crash and a scream come the same time, from the same house. The man run off and some of the neighbors follow him. Others stand still and look, but one fool move in closer. Me.
Ibiku streets not made of bricks. I stumble over stones but don’t stop walking, and the voice that sound like me say, All this mourning take away good sense. But my mind catch fire from the moment I hear Sangomin. The house in front still shiver and shake. A woman run out clutching her baby but don’t reach street before a smooth pink rope shoot out after her, wrap around her calf, and pull her down, the swaddled baby flying out of her arms. The woman scream and I am running to the baby on the ground, snug in the bundle and smiling. The pink rope start to pull her back into the yard until the source of it come through the door. Not a rope, but a tongue reeling back into a yellow face that change to green as purple eyes bulge out. At his foot, he let go of her. I never seen him before, nor the boy beside him, black as coal and his whole head one big mouth with jagged teeth hanging out. Beside him, a girl as clear and loose as water, and coming up behind her, the Sangomin witchfinder.
“Fool, where you running to? Scamper like some crab when I telling you we believe you,” he say.
The chameleon boy hiss into laugh. The boy who was all mouth turn into a smile.
“Regard yourself. A lanky titty goat like you, how you going ever serve my master?”
They leave the woman house, passing me still holding her baby. My heart pounding in my chest hard enough to burst through, though I know they not supposed to know me. When the Aesi take away the King Sister from people’s memory, he also wipe away everybody else who was on that mountain. They not supposed to know me. And yet when the witchfinder pass me, I catch the shudder and quake from the house.
The house still rumbling like it was trying to toss something off. Then something burst through the front, too big for the doorframe, and I almost drop the baby to stop the gasp from becoming a scream. Two jagged legs first, brown and black and furry, and two at the back that scramble like a crab. The legs passing by all taller than me and getting even longer as he stretch himself out. He, the darkchild, now a full spider, spread wider than four buffalo and higher than a giraffe. Last time I see him, he have two arms and two legs, but now he have four each, including two small baby arms bulging from his side. A young man’s head, neck, and chest, enough of the boy to fool you until you look below his belly to see him sprouting a fat bulb like an insect.
He can’t remember me, I whisper over and over. He can’t remember me, he won’t remember me, he can’t remember me.