Nomvula

36 - And The Oil of Souls

Asanda stood in the middle of her room and stared at the three beds in front of her. On the left, the Royal Diviner slept, her lips slightly parted in a thin strip of teeth against her featureless face. Every third breath was interrupted by a soft shudder. Lifa snored on the right. Her mother's spiritless body took up the middle one, the heavy chains over its chest making the noise of sliding iron in time with its breathing. Both eyes were open.

Anket stood silently just to her left, tending to the cut to her cheek with numbing unguent.

"I would rather not pry," the old Kemite said, his eyes pinned on his work. The trembling in his hands flared a moment and he frowned. "But from the height of the garden I saw the Queen's Guard drag at least a score of old men out of the building I saw you enter a moment before."

She said nothing.

"Ah, better not to pry in royal business," said Anket.

Asanda's cheeks warmed with a surface anger. Anket's voice did not waver from its usual demureness, but there was disappointment and worry in it that on any other day would have been well-hidden, yet now it was as bare as if he had said as much.

"You aren't prying," she eventually said.

"So why not answer?"

"The East Afrique Maxims of Moral Conversation." One of Ma's favourite tomes.

Anket paused in his work a moment, then smiled as he continued. "Ah, the Third Maxim?"

"The fourth but close enough." For only the third time since Asanda had entered the room, her mother's vessel blinked. "A question implied and not asked is theft."

"Of course." He cleaned around her cut with the cuff of his cotton sleeve. "What happened in the commune?"

Asanda gently pulled his hand away. "I'd like to be alone with Ma now."

"Second Maxim," Anket said, before pursing his lips and turning towards the ladder leading up to the garden. He put a hand on a rung and turned back. "The Seventh, as well, or am I thinking of the Eighth?"

"Seventh." Asanda walked towards the middle bed so that her back would be to him. Her mother was silent and shapeless in the left side of her mind, a speck of grain in a barren field. "Go now, please... and thank you for the unguent."

"Tea?"

"Another time." Perhaps over designing Ma's cage. At the same time the thought formed – at the very concept of her mother sparking inside her – the vessel turned its clay-dark gaze on her. Asanda took a half-step back, then two forward. She lay her hand on the bed to steady herself, careful not to touch the vessel's skin; a human life was a long time to spend in madness.

Knowing that she would never find the courage to say the words to her mother's face, she met the vessel's unblinking eyes and hid the tremble in her fingers by bunching some of the bed sheets in a fist. She had expected lifelessness behind those eyes, a void that could only be made by the absence of a human spirit. What she found instead was some cloudy composite of suspicion, judgement, and casual malice. Asanda hated the folk stories of great and terrible war heroes, but in all of them, this was the look the chiefs gave to an enemy they found wanting.

Ma's spirit was starting to grow again, to will calm against the natural reactions in Asanda's body. She pressed her mind wall against it, and pushed it into a silent corner. It scratched desperately against its confines.

"That was a betrayal of everything you stand for," she said. For once, her voice was her own, uneven, clumsy in its cadence, breaths frayed at the edges. It held the comfort of old cloth. "Not to you, not to the Hundred Hills, not to Ta, not to your sons, your ancestors, or your subjects. To me alone. I've never felt hatred this personal or this sharp – it is enough to fill three people, Ma, not just you and I. Taking over like that, it was..." She swallowed. "It was..."

The wall cracked and something cold seeped through. Unforgivable.

Asanda nodded, a pearl of a tear rolling down the base of her nose. "Yes."

The sheet was wrinkled and dark with sweat when she pried her fist open. Mouth pressed shut, she walked to the opposite end of the room and plucked a knife and a tin boiling cup off her desk as she went. Her bed still sat to the side of its platform. Milky waters stared up idly at her as she knelt by the pool and dipped the cup in. A thin strand of blood floated suspended just beneath the surface, slowly blackening around its edges as it burned away.

She pulled a small solar tile of mountainstone from the east-facing window and set it down on a corner of her desk coated in black iron. The fission runes scribed on the tile and iron respectively clicked together and started to hum. Asanda set the cup of milkwater down on the mountainstone to boil.

She clawed at the rune-eye and yanked so hard its string snapped. Glass beads rolled across the floor, all towards the concealed drain in the middle of the room. With a sigh, she cut her bound lock just above where it had fused with the pouch and dropped the burnt mess of hair into the milkwater. Unlike the blood, it dissolved immediately, and she was at last alone in her own body. Only then did she sit down at her desk and peel back the first of a dozen layers of a delicately-crafted anger.

When she looked up at the bed, the vessel was writhing against its chains as if burning from the inside. Hooked fingers clawed at the sheets, the bared teeth of her grimace reflected the flickering runelights, and the bed base groaned with strain. It was the type of contorting pain born of demons exiting or entering. Asanda did not look away.