A rip like a ravine ran straight through Samir's shoulder.
Obika was a great shot, and Samir looked young, clean, and healthy.
Thank Mkubwa for rest days; they still would've made Samir shovel with a hole in his arm.
But the Sahrawi wouldn't take this rest day off, either. No, his work then was more important than any he'd ever slaved for.
Samir winced and threw himself up, stumbling to his feet. The simmering pain in his arm beat with pure pressure.
He watched Obika and Merek fly off on that fat devil.
The crowded slaves mumbled and looked around.
That was that, then.
Everyone gathered for their assignments and boarded the personnel carriages. They bumped past Samir as they marched.
The throng had two large holes, one around Fortus' body, and the other around Faraji's corpse. People gasped and shrilled as they passed the massacre. Some friend or other brought Faraji's head back close to his body.
Samir hung by the Barracks and waited. He could feel a horrid bunching under his eyes and a purple rot in his chest, but it was held in amber. His brain was gagged and muted, it could say nothing to his heart until this was done. He stared with black eyes.
A Raven smelled the dying of his core, and dove.
Samir roared a pathetic grunt and caught it by the chest. It snapped its jaw at him and slashed its talons like a rabid dog. He held it far, and stared into its empty sockets. It was tearing at his forearms. He held it, and pressed, pressed harder, on its sides. His arms were quivering.
The man yelled and threw it back into the sky.
He cried.
The whole time he waited, Samir kept running in, yelling to stave off Ravens from the bodies. After four or five of these bouts, the first trains arrived full of rubble, and they were poured out to the sorting teams. Samir stared at the Encampment wall as he dragged the bodies into the Barracks. He wouldn't look down, not once. Shielded from the scavengers, Samir left them for a moment to retrieve the newborn shovel from their secret cache.
He heard his wife sobbing behind the wall.
She was hushing young Atiena.
He almost went to them.
Samir marched back down to his cold family. Nobody had touched them. He dragged the bodies one at a time around the side of the Barracks, to shade under stable overhangs. He went to the sorting carts and came back bit by bit with enough gravel to bury them. The ground was too rocky to pierce. But at least this way, the Ravens would be starved of them, and they would have Mbombo's dignity in the rock.
He retrieved a candle from inside, and placed it between the burial mounds, a small flame flickering in the wind. Samir brought his hand over the fire and held it, until his skin was throbbing and red. With that hand he scooped up and strained gravel until he had the finest sandy pieces again and again.
When he had enough, he unwrapped his turban with the clean hand and burned it. As it sent up black smoke and burned through his sweat, Samir droned prayers for his family under his breath. They were addressed to his beloved Karumite Queen, the Supreme Goddess of the Sand and Dust, Šarratu Ramla, Daughter of Geb.
Samir took his fine gravel, threw his head back, and poured it over his closed eyes, onto his lips, down his neck and under his robes.
He dirtied himself completely, brought his lips to the gravel that separated him from his rock, and left.
* * *
Old Man Bhek watched the white Superiors as they left.
He watched the sickly pallor of their white mansion as he rode the circuit train along the rim of the crater.
He watched their sorry fortress as he slipped into jobs he wasn't assigned.
He watched their muddy pen as he snuck towards it.
Anuohia, great guard dog, recognized him. She watched him from her perch. She cocked her hamadryas head and they locked eyes. Bhek's throat tumbled through his ribs and he froze. Anuohia, great guard dog, turned her back, and chomped on a Raven.
There was a knock on those great maroon-wood gates. Elónga answered. She saw the elder's wild red eye and gasped. Bhekizitha clutched his dagger so hard his palm was bleeding. He begged the girl with his one, good, eye.
"Odegbami…" he whispered.
They stared at one another for a good long while.
Elónga hauled the gate open. "He is bathing, Mzee."
Bhekizitha whispered a blessing in his language. He patted her trembling hand as he passed.
"Oh!" she squeaked. "And, Mzee…be careful of the rifle on your left when you enter. Its bullets are in the case in the vase beside it. Be careful."
Bhek stared at her, and bowed his head.
A while later, a Magharibi voice boomed through the halls of his mansion, "Elónga, who is–—!"
* * *
He could not breathe. He could not see. He could not move. For a moment, Fortus wondered if he was even awake.
Black pressed his lungs against his spine.
Fortus' once-dried heart dropped through his stomach— he was suffocating.
The boy thrashed wildly and threw himself forward with everything he had, bursting out of the jagged gravel. He nearly swam out of the mound, and then collapsed.
He heaved in deep, full breaths, and let his torso lay on the rocky gravel. He would finish crawling out in a moment, but right then all he wanted to do was breathe.
He felt saliva leak out of his mouth and pool around his cheek. He would wipe it away in a moment.
It was already the late afternoon, the hot sun radiating from the ground and sneaking into the shade of his overhang. It wouldn't be until the sun was almost fully submerged beneath the horizon that the red mist in Fortus' eyes started to dissipate. By the time he could see clearly, there were stars in the sky, swirling but present. In another hour they steadied, and in one more he could muster the strength to move.
A bit.
Fortus focused on the easiest things. Wiggling toes, lifting his tongue, moving his eyes. And breathing. Always, breathing. Soon enough he was on his knees, and tried to stand.
He folded right back down and vomit erupted. He'd continue for another forty minutes, until he forced himself to stop, a burning in his abdomen and a fire in his mouth.
In ancient times, the Igazi Lomoya gave the Amathunzi all of Kusini, even parts of the central jungles.
Fortus was their most recent conquest.
The boy didn't say a word to himself. He got up, felt the cold night air, and wandered out into the moonlight. At the engine houses and stations there was a mess of people unloading and shouting. And of course, the CHUF—
He wouldn't think of it. Fortus wouldn't think of anything. Every bolt in the Encampment reminded him of his own life. Of course. They were one, and he would do anything to avoid the goings-on of his life in that moment. His mind was filled with hums, like a child playing with toys. He sat cross-legged and stared at the rock, lost in the infinite detail of his world.
A while, or hours, later, Fortus felt what working ears would've heard. A Stone Raven flew off with a chunk of his ear. Hot blood started pouring down his neck.
The pain beat hard through his ear with metal rods and infected his whole head. Life was breathed into him then, and he dashed towards the closest entrance to the Barracks. Stone Ravens never tasted a meal and quit. Just before he entered, a second Raven dove down and latched onto the boy's patchy curls with his talons, trying with all its might to fly him off. Fortus smacked the beast away and it yanked a mass of hair with it. He dove into the Barracks.
The boy yelped as soon as he straightened out.
It stunk.
Horrible Sāfil was jammed into the ground by his shaft, begging to greet him. On his rotten cutting edge, the sorry weapon pierced the fat skull of Merek Corbin, nearly split in two by the blade. His inflated cheeks were pale and his flaxen hair gray and pasted to his skin.
Obika's white fila hat was red with blood and shoved onto the Orosian's curls, the Dying Sun's split symbol embroidered on the front. Two severed black hands clutched it against the head with four fingers, their thumbs each shoved through one of Merek's eyes like glasses.
And finally, was Merek's mouth. Forced open far too wide, a chunk of flesh was lodged in it, swinging a flaccid member between his teeth.
The skillful butchery of Ts'itibe hunters.
There was nothing in the world sufficient to think, not of this. Fortus stared at the horror and felt his skin bunch, like burned paper falling away to the power of a flame.
His stomach boiled in his throat.
But more.
His eyes dropped to the shaft, and Fortus saw Old Man Bhek's crude Amathunzi characters scratched into the shaft. My Son, he wrote. Fortus couldn't read that old script, but he could. It was a local tongue, and that was enough. It was Bhek, and that—
It was a grave marker.
Fortus bunched into himself and fell. He sobbed into his arms. It was their grave marker. Baba's grave marker.
The boy clawed at himself and his chest heaved, and in every jagged, horrible breath he forced himself to take he saw his father's face.
He was beautiful and stupid.
And stupid.
And stupid.
And good.
And stupid.
And good.
Fortus hugged himself and clutched his good ear in his palms, he rocked himself and sobbed. And when he had to shush himself, to purse his lips and cry through his nose because he was getting too loud, because if they heard him and saw him there they would kill him, he cried harder.
And his ear burned and the Ravens lusted and they squawked over the doorway and it never, never, stops.
He cried for a very long time in that jagged mausoleum.
When his breaths were slow and terrible, but breaths and not sobs, he got up. He had to. He'd definitely missed dinner by that point, and he needed as much sleep as he could get before breakfast was served. The machine never slept.
The boy started up the concrete slopes he'd known before sunlight. The fifth step came undone all at once, and dropped him back to the ground on a bed of finer sand than any beach. It had simply disintegrated into grain.
Fortus sighed and soothed the bruise on his elbow. He started back up. On the eleventh stair, just before he made it to the second floor, the slope collapsed again into pure sand, and he dropped far and hard onto his tailbone and screamed.
He cursed to himself as he rubbed his aching bone. He went out to another building, mumbling angrily the whole way. He started up the stairs there, and immediately the first step turned to sand under his foot.
"Fine…" he growled.
He went and curled by a candle to try and fall asleep.
He saw woeful Sāfil behind his eyelids, and it demanded him. Fortus got up and went back to it. He sat at the base of that shovel like it was his altar, and thought. He picked at his scabs.
"Ow–my god! What—?!" The boy winced and shook his head fast and hard, hoping that burning pin would die.
He slowly brought a finger to his face. His skin was caked in grime, blood and dust mixed black. He scratched it slightly with his overgrown nail, and the same burning pin stabbed again. His flesh was raw. Every touch was icy pain in waves, salt and ice. He brought his hand before his eyes and saw the dried blood under his fingernail.
Fortus was unconscious for each one of Obika's blows. His ruin was news to him. He ran his fingers across the many swelled bumps and deep cuts of his face, the salinity of his hands burning his wounds. Under his left brow was a big mass of swollen, purple flesh shut tightly over his damaged eye. He licked his inflated lips and tasted pure blood. He was sure he'd appear red to anyone who saw him.
He looked up at the altar, and saw a face looking quite like his. He saw Merek's white skin against Obika's darkness, smashed and tied together. He saw the fila pushed onto his yellow curls.
Orosians, Mchangans. Superiors, Slaves. Mudstains, Magharibi. It was all so convoluted. It was desperate, like Atiena stuttering and stumbling through the made up rules to her board game. He looked up into the messy Barracks, fifty years of eating itself. The whole Encampment smelled cheap and tacky.
It was so desperate.
His whole life Fortus felt nothing but hate and fear for those green-garbed Superiors. At that second, Fortus was finally annoyed. He rolled his eyes. A child, performing power, had the power to destroy everything he was. There was no up and down, left or right, in the world.
Could it be that everything changes, and nothing at all?
Could he let it?
It made him feel pinned by the neck, the idea of going back to the worship of Superiors.
Fortus spit on the ground and stood. He walked out the door and stared at his life's work, the grand crater. His father's entire life, infant to gray.
Fortus felt his emotions inflate and press hard against his skin, bloating and tightening his body. The bar in his throat slid up and down, pumping an ever-thickening gloss into his eyes. His machine never slept.
He hiccuped a single sob and yanked it in. He tried to control his breath so it wouldn't spiral until sunrise.
The only moral thing to do was die,
to dive from the rim and splatter,
to give the horrid opera its crescendo and honor it.
Fortus thought of his family up in the bramble of the Barracks. He did love them. More than anything, he did.
But he did not love them enough. Not to live as a cog in that shantytown for a second longer.
There couldn't be anything left in the world worth it, not anymore.
He felt his heart sink, and the beasts dared him to dive onto the tracks.
A Raven chomped its fangs around the boy's spine and tried to pull it out like fat in cooked meat. Fortus screamed and fell backwards onto it, rocky scales ripping up his back. He screamed again.
The boy growled and whipped around to grab the Raven by its long, sharpened beak. He yanked it up and slammed it into the rock until its neck snapped like a chicken. He dropped it and watched that monster twitch and its black blood spill.
Before the pool got any bigger than its body, two more Ravens dove down and feasted on their brother. One Raven makes two.
If he killed those, then four, and if—
His eyes shot to the abyss, but the Ravens yanked them back.
…
…
…
…
Well, If he was going to be dying that night anyway…
…
…
"Mjinga," Fortus moaned to himself.
* * *
Fortus hung around the great waste pits between the Barracks and the wall as if he was working sanitation, those beds of feces and carcass. He wouldn't have been able to run the full mile in time, he was sure. So the boy brought the mangled Raven and lured its two diners to the waste pits.
Fortus looked out at the purple Ringmen and their Gargoyles along the great walls of the Encampment. When work was slow, and it always was, he entertained some plans, some things that, in a just world, might even work. They'd never work. But he thought of them now and then. It would've been inhuman not to wonder if it was possible; even he wasn't so stupid.
Escape was an idiotic notion. Between the Scindreux rings of the purple guards, the Gargoyle's base strength and their Igazi Lomoya, and the fact that 'escape' would only be into a wide, barren desert with no civilization for a couple hundred miles, escape was an idiotic notion. He'd be yanked up by search teams in that rocky hell like a mouse by hawks.
But he looked down at those Stone Ravens eating their own flesh. More were gathering in the sky. He'd thought about it before.
"Mjinga…" he whined.
He couldn't escape. If someone like him could, people much stronger than him would.
He knew that, he did.
But he would not go back to the Barracks.
The only moral thing to do was die.
So Fortus started to sneak. The Stone Ravens were gluttons who prioritized having a meal over any sense. They had terrible tunnel vision. The boy sneaked up behind one of the Ravens and tackled it, whipping it by its beak again and cracking its neck against the rock.
Two more came.
He killed the other, two more came.
He killed one of the new ones, two more came.
Five. And now twelve were swarming in the sky.
Stone Ravens mobbed like people. Where there were many, there must've been food for many, and so many arrived. Exponentially.
After thirty-four minutes and hands roughened by scales and blood, a thick cloud of scavengers circled high above the boy. It must've been at least forty. Another ten were flying in.
On the next, as he was tackling those wild rocky wings to the ground, one of the corvids got antsy. It dove, bit into his arm, and tore out a chunk. Fresh, warm, red blood gushed. That doubled the hoard.
They all dove at once, and forced his plan into motion
The boy ran. As fast as he could.
One of the Ringmen, purple-garbed Superiors with plum fila hats and agbada gowns, was cross legged at the base of the wall, writing poetry about his dog back home while his Gargoyle napped. The hand that held the pencil wore a round, crackling, Scindreux ring. Every one of the fifty purple soldiers along the wall did, too, and each had a Gargoyle with a unique skull.
The Ringman leapt into action and called to his watch partner when he saw a desperate boy running with everything he had from a swarm of Ravens the size of Arziki.
Fortus' legs were burning and sloshing acid up his calves, his pumping arms were numb and full of static, and his breaths froze his mouth and cracked his lungs.
Every step he took was slower than the last. And yet the Ravens never overtook him, as if the very sand of their bodies was holding them back; dogs on a leash.
Every time Fortus breathed he could feel his stomach sneak into his throat.
He heard the Ringmen yell and snap their fingers, and two great Gargoyles, one of a giraffe's skull and the other of a bullfrog's, leapt into the sky and zipped towards him.
But they were starved, to keep their good souls vicious.
And they were flying towards a swarm of Ravens the size of Arziki.
Fortus winced and blocked his face as the great ancient demons crashed into the Ravens and dropped to the ground, armfuls of squawking monsters to be shoveled into their ivory mouths. The birds were too greedy to escape.
The Ringmen screamed and clapped their hands, demanding their slaves return, and the Gargoyles only gorged themselves. Some daring Ravens even smelled the purple blood seeping out of the Gargoyles, cut by their stone wings, and tried to bite down on the Blessed war machines.
The ornery bullfrog Gargoyle went from hungry to enraged, and waged a war of his own on the Ravens all around him. The pleasant Giraffe-Skull joined for the fun of it. Neither returned. Fortus kept running.
Every Stone Raven in Kusini wanted a piece of whatever that cloud was chasing. It replaced its dead in seconds.
Fortus kept running.
The Ringmen lit a torch and called into the night air for reinforcements. They shot their swords forward in such a panic that one sliced his bronze Dying Sun pendant down the side. Their hands trembled as they struggled to strike the blades just softly enough to send their psionic evil and not shatter.
Pink blasts of sheer energy like thunder boomed from the blades like volcanoes and barreled towards Fortus. One of them cracked his sword a bit.
The boy dived to the ground and curled into a ball. His cloud went on ravaging towards the wall. Stone Ravens had terrible tunnel vision, and they already committed to flying straight. The Ringmen started to throw out bursts rapidly in a panic. One shattered his sword and shrapnel ripped across his chest. Another piece lodged in his partner's thigh.
Fresh, warm, red blood gushed.
The Ravens frenzied. They forgot all about the cold old blood of the boy.
Every Raven struck by the blasts was knocked to the ground and started clenching their dinosaurian talons between their beaks and tearing them off their rocky bodies.
But there were more.
The Ravens frenzied.
The Ringmen dove out of the way.
The monsters couldn't turn their dives fast enough, and smashed into the wall. Half of them died. But the Ringmen were leaking. Those Ravens who could, and even those who couldn't, shook off the concussion and leaped into the air. They swarmed the men in two groups, dozens of wings the sharpness of shrapnel tore their purple aso oke apart. The men barely had time to scream.
Fortus stumbled to his feet. Behind him were Gargoyles, now fighting bloodily over the scraps, and before him half a hundred Ravens, eating the Dying Sun alive.
Green Scindreux was glowing through the holes of that wicked, scavenging bramble. Fortus ran to it.
The screaming Ravens crowded so violently that their sharp feathers created a meat grinder. Fortus dropped to the ground and tried to crawl. His eyes twitched and he flinched as chaotic knives flew in front of his face. He craned his neck back, reached in, and immediately felt himself skinned. But he felt the pommel. With a scream he yanked out the Scindreux blade right through the bodies of twelve ravens.
He let himself have just one second. One second in that cool night where he felt the trilling of Scindreux run up his arm, saw his body bathed in that green glow, and was totally and entirely free of threat. Just one second. He saw the smoke billowing for reinforcements.
Fortus rushed to the wall and stabbed in his Scindreux. It went through the concrete like a needle through fabric. He dragged it along the seam with all his strength and then yanked it downwards, carving a door. When the slab was loose, Fortus pushed his shoulder against it with everything he had, and it did not move. He tried again. Again. He didn't even breathe between attempts, the veins in his neck bulging and his face red and hot. He would pass out soon. He pushed.
More Ringmen were yelling from their Gargoyles, zipping towards him from their posts half a mile away. His heart dropped and the night was never colder. Fortus started slashing the slab wildly until it was pureed into gravel. He dove through.
Immediately he was washed with the thickest, driest heat he had ever felt. He was faced with one of five-hundred thick twenty-foot pukumani posts, funerary art of the Blessed Palyingu-patu of Kāpura. Each one was massive and unique, carved with impressive stacks of cubes, cylinders, balls, gaps, windows, and poles like cairns. The entire post was detail and color, every level with its own patterns and designs, great X's filled with seas of dots and hatch marks.
But the colors of their paint were barely visible. Every line of art and polka-dots covering the poles was replaced with neon, glowing orange, like the furnaces of hell were burning inside of them. The restless souls of great Palyingu-patu. The posts were embedded deep into the ground all around the walls like some henge, Kusini's dry earth filled with orange cracks like roots at their bases, beaming up the core's heat to the surface.
Their heat was truly unthinkable, unbearable; not fatal but just under.
See, Mbombo was clever to hide by the sea. The crater would've flooded the moment a hole was dug more than five inches deep. Those old Kāpuran posts burned up every drop of groundwater.
The Eyes of Máti were first brought to war against them and the oven they created over the Encampment. They kept the slaves alive, kept the heat survivable. They were good dogs.
Fortus looked back and wondered how they must've felt, to be abandoned. His temples pulsed.
The shouting got closer, and so did the insectoid buzzing of more than one Gargoyle. Once he could see them it would be too late. He whipped his eyes between the wall and the furnace and chose.
He pressed his face between his arms and tried his best to block his eyes, nose, and mouth behind the expendable flesh of his forearms. He dove through the poles.
Fortus screamed as he came out the other side, his hair singed and stinking and his skin burned badly with a few boils. His heart thumped and he looked at the tender burns of his arms.
Sheenk! snapped him back to reality. Yes, it burned, it burned, it burned, but Sheenk!
Sheenk! and he knew that if he wasted time looking back he'd die before he could turn back around.
Fortus ran, as hard as he could.
Sheenk! Sheenk!
Sheenk! Sheenk! Sheenk!
Sheenk! Sheenk!
There must've been anywhere from five to ten, and each surely with their own Ringman.
Fortus ran. With every step all he could think of was how it would feel in his body to die. Of whether he'd know and see when he devoured his own leg.
He ran faster than he could. He ran if it killed him.
Fortus tripped on some boulder and fell into a ravine two hundred feet down. He thudded onto a tall sand pile that caught him like cotton candy. The mouth of the ravine closed up, and the boy could hear Gargoyles clicking and Ringmen arguing as they stomped around over his head.
Each tried to blame the other for losing sight of the slave. Fortus could hear the frontmost claim the boy fell into a now nonexistent ravine, and get punched in his face. In a while the men huffed and went back to the Encampment.
* * *
Fortus waited in the dark blackness for a long time.
The glow of his Scindreux couldn't even illuminate his hand. Pitch black.
At some point, his anxious imaginings in the dark became indiscernible from his dreams and he must've fallen asleep.
When he woke up, he saw light cracking through an opening high and far from him. He started spelunking his way towards it.
A while later, Fortus re-emerged in the badlands of Kusini, and it was quiet. Freezing, but quiet.
Fortus looked down and saw the deep cuts and burns of his flesh plugged by a thin layer of white sand. He inspected himself and found it all over, covering every part that was even bruised so no infection could exploit it.
Fortus scratched at it and felt no pain, not even a speck dusting off. It was sturdy and hard like stainless steel. And fresh. He left it. He was stable, in the quiet. Freezing, but stable.
He looked towards the Encampment and saw great arched aqueducts rushing water to it from miles away. Definitionally, they must've led to some river or body of drinking water. They must've led to civilization.
They brought water down from a massive escarpment that rose up thousands of feet against the sky— the sheer ancient walls which separated the Encampment's dry, empty peninsula from the lush civilization on the northern side. The Mto wa Baba was damned and redirected down that steep drop, to fill the storehouses of the Encampment and the slaves' waterskins.
Maybe at one time Tlaloc loved the Mchangans. It was obvious to the geologists of Arziki that at one point the escarpment wasn't an austere wall of brown rock, but rather a place of enormous waterfalls. But after millennia of crashing down thousands of feet onto the peninsula below, they dried. Now all that was left were the jagged peaks running from the wall down to the dirt, and a peninsula of eroded, arid, badlands.
Fortus grinded his teeth and turned. There was no kind of civilization worth having anywhere north. Whoever built those aqueducts would be wicked company.
He went the opposite direction, which he knew must've meant south. There was no plan. No, no schedules in the badlands. Perhaps he'd swim down to Raphi, if it pleased him.
Fortus' mouth curled into a smile.
He felt the absolute dryness of his chapped, swollen lips. He barely acknowledged it. He was thirsty, yes, but he had been thirsty before. He was wounded, badly wounded, yes, but he had been wounded before.
He was free, to do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, and that was new.
As Fortus marched along the sides of the jagged peaks and ravines, gorges and gullies, of the rough badlands, he spotted a fire atop a distant butte.
He squinted his eyes. He could've sworn he could make out a hamadryas-skulled Gargoyle on its tip. He tried his best to define its features against the bright sky of galaxies and systems. He watched its silhouette morph as its wings disappeared and it turned to look right at him. From all those hundreds of feet away, he could feel the eye contact.
Fortus dove into a gully, and waited a long while.
Pity. Had he looked a second longer, he might've seen a little black speck beside the beast, and the way Anuohia wrapped her wings around Elónga to hide her.
Surely, had the free girl seen Fortus, she would have seen him, in the cold air of free lands.
A time passed before Fortus continued his trek.
A while later, Fortus could hear the fuhwoom of waves and the ground in front of him stopped expanding. He came to the edge of a coastal bluff in the timid white and burgeoning yellow of soft morning.
"Ah…" he gasped, and he dropped. His eyes were wide and young. He sat and watched the infinite silver ocean, and its white foaming lines of slow-moving waves.
Fuhwoom. Out.
In.
Fuhwoom. Out.
In.
Fuhwoom. Out.
He watched them go until brilliant orange and dancing purple spilled across the sky, after which there was no question about it; he must visit the sea.
Fortus rushed down the sandy slopes of loose rock and onto the beach. He threw himself onto the damp sand and laid down. He spread out his back on soft bedding for the first time in his life. He carved a pillow for his head and just watched the ebb and flow. He hadn't seen a raven for an hour.
But he should've learned from his nights at home.
His bed was a nest of flies, waiting to crawl into his ears and lay maggots in his brain. He thought. A torture, he thought. Every night. And this morning.
Atiena, Samir, Nandi and Bhek were dead. Certainly. Like the bones of wars two thousand years old, they will never speak to him again, never laugh, scold, or gossip. They would never touch him, eat at his table. They were dead, sure as the bodies hidden away under the tons of sea that danced before him.
The boy collapsed into sobs.
His family was as distant as Faraji.
They were in that gravel with him, and with Tariq, and with Asha, and with everyone and everything he has ever known.
No, worse. They were alive.
His family would live for years and years, in the same six-hundred feet of stone.
He cried himself sore.
Fortus understood it all then.
Every piece of land wrapped around the globe was hell. Hell in frost and glaciers, hell in thick jungles and tall cathedrals.
It would be hell. Aimless, empty, hell, for as long as he lived.
He had earned it, he was sure.
As Fortus held himself on that damp sand, a dark mass started to bulge out of the waves. At first, all that appeared was grand tilework of orange-red sunbursts on browns, blacks and yellows, all coated in slime and moss— the scutes of a sea turtle's shell.
Of course, Fortus knew no better, but they were strange and abnormal scutes. Instead of shields laid like armor, the scutes looked like oil swirled in water, a spiral from the center out to the edges, each plate warped along it.
An old smell like rotten libraries wafted over the sea.
The shell rose until a wrinkly armored head of beak and browns peeked out of the water. The sea turtle was large, larger than Fortus realized, for her kind. Her head alone was almost the boy's height. Her bulging eyes were…
Unknown. Every second that passed, every millimeter his eyes scanned, every time he blinked, they seemed to change from one color to another. They were a nebula, exploding and dying every moment.
The sea turtle was almost double Fortus' height. She could probably swallow him, if she tried. And she looked ancient, overgrown. She was so covered in barnacles, anemones, moss, and seaweed that Fortus saw a little orange crab emerge from somewhere in that ecosystem and disappear somewhere else. The life grew wildly, over her head, legs, and a forest on her shell.
The turtle squinted at Fortus, waiting for him to be ready. The boy was just shaking his head absently and letting the salty air dry his open mouth. She was like something out of the Griot of the Broken Rock's stories, and there she stood, with skin that could brush his.
Fortus' hands trembled and he raised his Scindreux to the creature's face. He'd never seen any of those spirits the slaves always went on about, but he'd met his fair share of monsters.
The sea turtle blinked. Then her beak curled in the corners and morphed into a pleasant smile. She gestured back to the sea with her head, and seemed to bow low for him to climb on.
Fortus just stared. He wasn't the sort to kill something without reason. The turtle just stared. This was all she had to do for a long time. He thought back to everything he'd ever learned or overheard. It seemed obvious that if a giant sea turtle lived near—
Fortus dropped his sword completely. "Bahari?"
The Supreme Goddess of the Sea and Waves, Bahari, Daughter of Tlaloc, nodded slowly, shaking off seaweed and sand.
Fortus dropped to his knees and tried to remember the songs he'd heard Bhekizitha sing all his life over he and Atiena's beds. "Bahari, ngiyakhuleka," he mumbled into the sand.
Of course, this was his first prayer in years, but, again, she could swallow him.
"Thu—" Fortus' mind caught up with his racing heart.
He grabbed his Scindreux and rose to his feet.
"You…umjikelezo? Goddess Bahari, are…" He swallowed and tried to hold it in. "Are your cycles random?"
She shook her head. A snail fell.
Fortus' eyebrows tightened.
"Do you do good to good people?"
She nodded.
Fortus' hands trembled around the grip of his Scindreux.
For a moment, that young slave became Shujaa Mkubwa. He wanted to see that old god dashed and spilled onto the sand.
He looked at the ground and shook his head.
The boy burst into a roar and swung his Scindreux across the goddess's throat.
It glanced right off.
Fortus gasped and let his sword fall. He stared into the goddess's eyes and felt suspended in the air. This was the moment he died. It was happening.
Bahari sighed out of her nostrils and shook her head.
She bit into the ground and flipped herself onto her back, crushing Fortus completely in a thud.
Bahari rolled back onto her stomach and yawned. She started to crawl back into the sea. The boy was phased into her scutes, his head poking out at one place, his leg another, a thumb somewhere else. He was encased completely. He could barely move his jaw.
"Bahari!" he growled. Tears ran down his face.
"I hate you!
"We didn't deserve it!
"Bahari!
"Bahari!"
The goddess yawned, and pushed off into the open ocean.
The boy went crying, into freedom.