Nomvula

58. Daughter of Nomvula

Asanda's voice echoed in the abandoned hallway as Anathi dragged her back. She clawed at the walls until her fingertips burned and tried to dig her heels in, but Anathi was a force unturnable, pulling her lightly by the arm down the wrong way.

"Ma needs us! Let go!"

Khaya tried to dash past them, but a hand whipped out, bunched a third of his loin skirt in a black fist, and threw him five steps back. He crashed into Ndoda just as the elder brother rounded the corner.

"Enough," he said, pushing Khaya aside. "Bound of Third Hill, let my sister go and let us pass."

"Ma's command overrides yours." 

Asanda stopped squirming focused on keeping Anathi from crushing her foot with each step. There was a weight and density to the arm that held her, the force of a mountain squeezed into a twelve-year-old's frame.

"Shit."

"What was the command?" Khaya rammed his shoulder into Anathi's face. He may as well have thrown himself against the side of the manse. This time, she grabbed him and didn't let go.

"She can't hold all three of us," Asanda said. "Ndoda, go!"

Asanda watched him dart around them, but then her vision blurred as she was hurled against the corridor wall. She hit it hard enough to buckle, just before Khaya smacked into it. In the same fluid motion Anathi had hurled them in, she scooped Ndoda's ankles off the floor and sent him tumbling. By the time Asanda staggered to her feet, Anathi was striding towards her again. 

"I've just broken in my old bruises," Khaya said, his shortspear in hand. 

Asanda pulled him back, blinking away the nebula crawling at the edge of her vision as she stumbled forward. And still Anathi came, stone limbs moving in the perfect imitation of flesh. 

What did Ma tell you?

"Level," Asanda said, and the skewed plane tilted between flesh and spirit balanced. 

The world washed itself in a colour she had no name for as one world bled into the other. Straddling the ancestral veil so soon after her last attempt might have fatally broken all but twelve known minds in the world. Not considering herself one of them, Asanda took care to tighten the seam that bound her essence together. Her mind survived but her knees buckled again.

Anathi caught her, and Asanda pressed her fingers against the hardened clay of her belly, roughly where Anathi's liver would be, and pushed.

"Don't let her--" Ndoda cried out, but he disappeared, as did the distant echo of Dumani's voice, the ache in her back, the pressure of stone-solid hands against her ribs. 

The whole world turned pure black, but without the vastness of the space between stars or the cold of a river's depth at midnight. It was an intimate darkness closer tp a shroud across the back of her shoulders, one sown through with veins of pulsing warmth. When she thought of Anathi's clay shell, the last thing she expected was the swell of life churning under it. Then again, Asanda was so removed from the physical world that she struggled to think what clay might even feel like between her fingers. In these depths, she wondered how only a moment (a year? decade?) ago there had been a moment where her biggest concern was backache.

Get out, the darkness said. Trouble here, to the holding cells with you.

Asanda pushed past the urge to fall asleep, to just let go and obey. She felt around the void of Anathi's spirit, careful not to disturb things that were not hers to touch.

Clumsy. Stop. 

Wonder, curiosity, headiness, joy, terror struck her all at once as she felt Anathi's annoyance brush against her. It was a sensation she forced herself to forget, because she would go back into the physical world and tear her hair out for years trying to fit its description into the tiny, awkward frame of human words.