Nomvula

61. Asanda

The wooden floor panels pushed up into her shoulder, her thigh, the side of her face, and her body sunk into it. Some of the muscles in her back were lax, others spasmed violently where they joined to her spine. Her eyes were hooded against a glare as an orange sunset cut itself along the remaining shards of her shattered window. Asanda had always kept her room sterile of dirt or grime, but now motes of dust floated in a band of sunlight, and flecks of ash settled on her lashes. 

Burning reached her nostrils. It was not the earthy smoke of a wood fire, or the sharp sweetness of a red-tipped wick; the air was acrid with the stench of green wood set ablaze, of fire-baked clay, iodine, varnish sugars burnt black. 

Garden.

Dark smoke rolled onto the lawn, swallowing itself and still expanding, so thick at its centre that it blotted out the sunset. Its hazy edges were tinted blue.

Her eyes opened a twitch wider, and through her lashes she saw the willowy orange trees at the end of the lawn, swaying... she couldn't make out their direction through the haze. A breeze lapped against her back. South, then. A small victory. Some of her muscles relaxed, but that only made others spasm. If the wind had carried that chemically tainted smoke into the manse, there would have been death.

No, child, there has already been death. The Sunspear. Before, its voice had been the wind brushing against all the hairs on her skin, but now that mocking tone soaked into her flesh and knitted itself between the fibres of her bones.

Asanda's heart leapt like a hare frightened out of the brush and her blood went thundering past her inner ear. She felt the adrenaline that seized her muscles, a cold sack of poison leaking into her heart and flooding her bloody, squeezing her lungs. The most she managed was a slow painful roll onto her other shoulder, so she was staring into the room, her back to the smog.

The Sunspear was slumped against the wall, just to the side of the splintered door frame. Anathi lay motionless at its feet. Its eyes had cooled to the mineral-rich brown of her mother's, but its true form flickered beneath the flesh. All spirits took the shape of the flesh that hosted them; if one died a willowy child or a portly old woman then that would be the mold their spirit was cast from until it found a new vessel. A spirit that came into contact with the physical plane without flesh to guard it would burn as a hand burns in a blue fire. But what Asanda saw now frightened her more than the smog rolling onto the lawn, more than the sound of Dumani's final, wordless plea, more than the skull fragment Ndlovu had shown her.

Over her mother's shoulder, under her jaw, along the inside of her thigh, blue-grey ether rose out of the skin before coiling back in again.

There is death enough for all who seek it.

A tendril of ether ghosted through her mother's bleeding cheek, and for a moment it took the shape of a man's face, in his middle years and thinly bearded. He had a distant resemblance to Ndoda, and his blue-grey eye was the exact shape of the brown one it overlayed. Like iron corroding, the image was eaten up until only her mother's face was visible, but there beneath her skin was Lang'engatshoni, the Unsetting Sun. The first Sunspear himself.

The roof of Asanda's mouth tasted like a zinc galvan, and the muscles that connected her skull to the back of her neck felt heavy and inflamed.

Her mother's body rose, and Lang'engatshoni spoke.

There is death for my enemies. He put a foot on the side of Anathi's head and casually walked over her. There if they cross me, there is death for my allies and even the allies of my allies.

Anket's corpse lay before him now, white robes limp against his lanky frame. Lang'engatshoni simply walked through him like air. Her great mentor shimmered slightly, his robes glowing iridescent at the frays, then he disappeared. There was no blood stain on the floor where he had just lain.