Nine years pass before the people of Kalindar themselves drive the South back below the Kegere River and liberate Wakadishu as well. Wakadishu just as quick declare that they are independent and won’t take dominance from either North or South, even though there was never a time that this place could defend itself from either. Things calm from Netu’s last days into Dara’s reign, but calm never mean cool. Not much news come to the forest, but enough to know that North and South all but coming to war. Again. Living in the South didn’t give me sympathy for the South, but it did give me indifference to the North. Indifference to kings and princesses, say the voice that sound like me. This man look at me like he expecting gratitude for telling me news, some of which I already know. As for me, I did wonder if sucking his tongue instead of his cock would make him talk less. I leave before he wake up to tell me that I look different in the dark.
After we deliver the King Sister to Dolingo and the boy to Fumanguru, I deliver myself back to the bush. By the time I get back South to the woods by the Sunk City, woman stop sending word for the Moon Witch. It make me burn that a few women, all suffering, one or two probably dead now, braved the woods for the Moon Witch’s help, only to find her gone. To help royals she care nothing about. So like a hermit woman I be then, until they send word.
Word that bring me to Malakal, the other mountain, but nothing like Fasisi. Fasisi start at the foot of the mount, but the desire of people to lord over people, with the King of the North lording the most, lead them to building higher. Malakal start high and build lower. Old Malakal start at the foot of the mountain and drive itself into ruin. New Malakal, founded three hundred years later, change their tactic from breaking ground at the bottom and building up, to the reverse.
Come to it straight and you can see why some people call it the great lighthouse, or used to back when I still mess with the North. When Malakal start to burst, they build another wall lower to swallow the first, a wall that also surround the mountain. But that wall couldn’t hold a growing province either, hence another wall, lower and wider, and yet another. House below house, window below window, and towers like needles, the towers Malakal is famous for, some so skinny that they forget to have steps. Some so lean that lean is what they do, collapsing on each other like spent lovers. Also this, they build the third wall after the fourth, not because that wall was swelling to burst but because over the years rise many who think themselves too good for the bottom, but who run into other people who don’t think them good enough for the top. I never could settle my thought on this city. Roads snaking and pointing, rising then plunging, as if they can’t decide where they want to go. Four forts for a city still acting like it was the last stand of the North, which it was before even Netu was King, when the South invade everywhere but here. Malakal is barely a day away from the Hills of Enchantment, Sangomin territory and another reason why I don’t give no fucks for this place. But they do produce gold and they do reach to the sea.
Somebody book me a lodging at an inn behind Malakal’s second wall, a room with a mirror hanging by the door. And this mirror, the like of which I don’t see in at least an age, hanging but looking like it is floating, which make it appear like an enchanted window, one that curse you to see only what is behind, never what is ahead of you. A past that flip on itself, warped, impossible to read. I look in the mirror and see an old woman at last. Head near total white, hair shaved all around, leaving just the tree on top. But I can’t trust it, for the mirror flip my face, put my right-arm scars on the left, and draw a crooked line under my jaw. Some women regard just one strand of white hair with more fear than they would a demon, but I been waiting for white and gray for over a hundred years. As for years, it take them three before they finally send word to me, three years that might be two years and ten moons too late. It come from the whisper of a Yumbo, who get it from a Yumbo, who get it from a Yumbo, who get it from Bunshi, who would never tell me herself that the boy gone missing.
So when Nsaka come to tell me, I say nothing at first. They lose the boy before the mother name him, which mean he is three years old now, if not dead. Bunshi didn’t check for his whereabouts in the Malangika, the tunnel city and the secret underground witches’ market, and I know why. For Bunshi know that if she so much as slither down there, a necromancer mightier than she would trap and sell her whole or butcher her for parts, upping the price for each piece cut while she was still alive. But I don’t need the voice to tell me that if a little boy long done gone, that is the first place to look. So before I sail from Lish, that was where I head, above the Blood Swamp but below Wakadishu to find out what become of this no name boy.
Somebody come looking before you, say a man who work a spell to flip his street cart in one movement and turn potions into toys and jewelry. Not the mother but a man on her behalf, he say. Well not a man but a snake, who say he looking for a no name boy and whoever it be that was selling him. Truly I never see this sort of man but I hear of them, built with two arms and two legs—but this is how you know, for the eyes lighter than most people, the skin colder than mountain water, and his tongue, mark how it is forked. Not a shapeshifter, a man. But praise the gods that he don’t bother with clothes and should really call that thing his third leg, mansnake, who shed his skin every two moons and who have forked tongue and cold blood. He speaking of Nyka, who Ne Vampi is still pretending not to fuck. I used to fuck a lion, I want to tell her. No shame in fucking a snake.
The child is gone, Basu Fumanguru’s corpse is in a crouch, and in an urn and long past rot, but that is neither the beginning nor the end of the story. I didn’t like the man when I meet him, so news of his death didn’t move me one way or another. This is what I know, that Fumanguru produce writs against the house of Akum, in particular this King, but other than passages on walls in Fasisi and Juba, nobody see the actual writs. Writs is serious business in the North Kingdom, for once the people read or hear them they can never be unread or unheard. But writing on the wall with no purpose or author is writing people forget as soon as they walk past the next wall. Nsaka speak of outcome before cause, saying that only Basu know where he keep the writs, but if one was to kill him, and one did, then the secret of their location die with him. But that was assuming evil come for Basu because of something he was about to do, and if the answer was so simple, then I wouldn’t be here. Writs contain a serious rebuke to the King, but that man is Kwash Dara, and to be scared of a scroll’s power he would first have to read it. Evil come for Basu because of what he already done do.