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I take one last look at the vale wraith, its eyes bleeding an angry fluorescent blue, its tentacles flailing all around it. Less than an hour ago, it was a monarch in the darkness, a squat toad sucking the life out of its unwitting victims so it could feed their essence to the Idugu. Now it is a roaring, shrieking mass of pain. As its makers will be when I’m done with them.
Okot will suffer for what he tried to do. I will ensure it.
“I hope you die a slow and painful death,” I say to the monster shrieking in the darkness. Then I step out of the shadows into the light.
* * *
The grove looks exactly as it did when I first saw it via White Hands’s gauntlets: groups of ancient ganib trees intertwined with each other, each one a miniature forest in its own right. Velvety yellow flowers and dark red fungi sprout from the colossal purple trunks; bright-winged birds flit through the glossy green leaves and the masses of leathery vines that connect each tree to the next, making the entire grove seem like a single gigantic, interconnected plant. Except it’s so much more than that. I glance around, mouth agape with awe as I realize that what I thought was just a grove of trees is actually the edge of some sort of monument—a sprawling, expansive network of stone steps that lead down to what appears to be a deep forest spring.
“Deka!” a familiar voice calls.
I turn, and there, running toward me, is Katya, the towering deathshriek who was my bloodsister back at the Warthu Bera before being reborn into this form. Her much shorter betrothed, Rian, struggles to keep up with her, his human legs no match for Katya’s gigantic ones.
“Deka!” Katya shouts again, overjoyed. Then she skids to a stop a few steps in front of me, her green eyes suddenly unsure. The last time we saw each other, I was still very much injured, and easy to anger as a result.
I hold out my arms, tears dripping down my cheeks. “It’s all right, you can embrace me.”
“Truly? White Hands said you were healed but—”
“Come here, you!”
Katya squeals with delight as I clasp my arms around her, squeezing her tight. Well, squeezing her legs, that is.
Like most deathshrieks, Katya is inhumanly gaunt and tall, her body stretching nearly half the length of a ganib tree, her claw-tipped fingers nearly reaching past her knees. I have to crane my neck to look up at her.
“I’m fine now,” I continue swiftly. “I learned how to keep myself from being injured.”
“Oh, Deka!” Katya flings me up, the quill-like red spikes down her back rustling as she swings me round and round. “You’re all right, you’re all right!”
“I won’t remain that way if you don’t put me down soon,” I grunt as I feel the bile rise inside me. It’s one thing to be embraced but quite another to be spun about like a drunken whirligig.
“Oh, my apologies!” Katya swiftly releases me, then turns to the others in the grove, who have been walking cautiously closer. “It’s all right, everyone, it’s Deka! It’s really her!”
That’s all it takes to open the floodgates. Masses of people suddenly come rushing from beyond the ganibs, all of them calling out greetings to me and my other friends. There, hurrying over, is Mehrut, the plump, butter-brown alaki who is Adwapa’s sweetheart. Acalan and Kweku, Belcalis’s and Adwapa’s uruni, follow Mehrut, burly, jokey Kweku already grinning while studious, quiet Acalan seems almost nervous in his excitement to see us. Behind them are more groups of alaki and jatu, and even deathshrieks, many of whom I’ve never seen before. It seems White Hands truly has been successful in her attempts to acquire more allies to resist the gods.
Then a pair of familiar white forms appear, relief in their eyes as they canter unhurriedly toward me. “Quiet One,” the equus twins, Braima and Masaima, say together as one, “it’s truly you.”
“Couldn’t be certain you weren’t those tricky goddesses,” Masaima continues, his pure white mane glistening in the late afternoon sun. The equus looks almost human from the waist up, except for his inhumanly large eyes and flattened nose that resembles a muzzle; the rest of him is horse, except for the iron-tipped, raptorlike talons that stand in for hooves. His coat is a velvety white that covers nearly his entire body.
“Their worshippers are always lurking about,” adds Braima, who looks identical to his brother except for the black stripe in his mane, which travels all the way down his back to his carefully manicured tail.
“Precisely, which is why one can never be too cautious.” This comment comes from White Hands, who is now striding forward, footsteps as unhurried yet businesslike as ever. “And the Deka I knew didn’t know how to open doors, especially not ones to places she’d never been.”
“White Hands!” I hurry over and embrace my former mentor. To my relief, she embraces me back, her arms as strong and capable as ever. “The Deka you knew is much changed from when you last saw her. She’s a bit more accomplished now. Much less wounded, certainly.”
White Hands glances down at the ebiki armor covering my body. “So, it yet holds—the ebiki armor?”
I nod. “As does the power inside it.”
And I’m not speaking of the ebiki’s power either.
It’s the Greater Divinity’s power that’s kept me going so far, the one thing that’s kept the emptiness inside from growing. Even though I only call upon the amount sufficient to power my abilities, it’s enough that I never need to draw from my own well. As long as I continue in this manner, the ebiki armor should hold, as should the time I have left.
I’ll still die if I don’t connect to my kelai, but it’ll be at least months yet, instead of the mere weeks I had when I first crossed into Maiwuri.
“It seems you’ve had a time of it, Deka,” White Hands says, looking me up and down.
“Like you cannot even imagine,” I say with a sigh.
