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.
Suddenly there were tears in Asanda's eyes, turned thick and black as they mixed with the soot on her lashes. She closed her eyes to shut them off but that seemed only to make them flow harder. Sobs racked through her pained muscles, and there was pain in her heart, mighty gods there was so much of it, more than her vessel was built to hold.
She had known this ache before, at the death of her father. It had been as if someone had carved a piece out of the side of her body. It was the type of loss that took with it some capacity for joy but also for pain, and in its place was an emptiness that made grief bearable. But the evening after her father's burial, Anket had appeared in her garden, a figure draped in white, frowning at the parchment she had left there the day before.
"My dear, I know you are hurting," he had said, not looking up from her unfinished work, "but that is no excuse to mistake the third joint theorem for the fifth."
"I was trying to build a window seat for my mother," she had said, her grief briefly replaced by anger at this stranger questioning her work.
He looked up at her then, eyes the colour of old honey. She mistook his expression for disapproval, but there was a smile to be found, she realised, if one looked between the creases of those eyes. "Well then, let us build one correctly."
And just like that, the grief had been carved out of her. It was not a perfect surgery, because the spirit is not broken up into neat pieces. It is closer to gobs of multi-coloured clay that are kneaded together all the days of one's life, but with those simple words Anket had gently hollowed out the sobs that bubbled under her every breath and taken out the lead ball between her shoulders.
From that day to this one, Asanda's body had been a house divided in two. In one half there was light from grand windows, busy feet marching down corridors, and the warmth of ovens, hearths, and good conversation. In the other half, the drapes were closed and the tables covered in canvas to keep the dust off, even as mildew grew in unopened cabinets. Anket had been the keeper of the barrier between those halves, and his death now threw harsh light into the deepest shadows and with it awoke ever wood worm and gnat that had called the dark home. They crawled into the light and dimmed it, even as the darker half brightened.
She was whole again, a bone snapped into place, and the shock would have emptied her stomach if there was anything in it. Instead, her mouth went dry with the spittle she was coughing out.
Look at the danger your mother's foolish ways have cast around you. Lang'engatshoni was in the middle of the room now. His eyes fell to her, then to Khaya, who lay unconscious against the side of the desk. Your enemies are given hospitality and use it to turn your household against you.
"Move away from him." Asanda had opened her mouth to say the words, but all she managed was a quiet exhale that died halfway up her throat. He had heard her, though, in spirit if not in voice.
Why should I? I am no closer to him than the General was, than your father's killer was. You could not move them, with what power will you move me?
His spirit flickered around the contours of her mother's flesh again, lingering longer this time before corroding beneath the surface again. Asanda's awareness of him went beyond what she had felt when Anket lived. Then, she had seen her mother's body but felt the Sunspear. Now, their forms flickered into each other, her mother's form becoming more transparent, the Sunspear's more opaque.
He was killing her. The body would survive but Lang'engatshoni's spirit was pushing her mother's out of the safety of flesh, letting the natural world slowly burn away from it.
Ma, no.
He took three slow steps towards Khaya. They were not the controlled, languid steps he had taken through Anket; he walked as if a force were pulling him backwards. The Queen's face frowned. Her mother fought. Two spirits waged war inside Nomvula's frame – one a mortal, one an ancestral god – and for a moment, her mother was winning.
Their battle dizzied Asanda. It was like drowning at the intersection where two oceans meet. Their spirits flared, brushing up against her own, and in that brief touch she knew a fear like no other. Lang'engatshoni's spirit simply bounced of her as twin magnets do. But her mother's, just briefly, stuck at the point of contact, as though an adhesive bound it there.
Asanda pushed them both away violently. Her body was spent but her spirit had flooded the space Anket had opened with his sacrifice, doubling it. She had almost absorbed her mother's spirit again, without the rune eye. That would have been as good as death. After her father and now Anket, she was not ready to bare a third one of that magnitude. Not yet, perhaps not ever.
But you must. Her mother's voice, husky and warm and brightening Asanda's awareness like a lacquer. Bare it one more time. Please, Asanda.
"I can't." Another shallow breath. Her throat burned, but her thoughts were clear. Please stop asking for difficult things.
I will, after this final one. I swear it. I ask you and no one else because you are my first and my greatest, my strongest and loveliest, Asanda I beg you as only one who has no other choice can beg.
"Ma--"
I beg for your brothers and your grandmother. For yourself and for your father.
Please, mama. No more.
Lang'engatshoni took a hard, painful step towards Khaya.
I have nothing left to give, Ma. If I did I would throw it at you. Asanda's tears ran freely at an angle down her face. She sniffed and breathed one in. Please, do it. You were always the strong one.
No! Banish that falsehood. I was always the one willing to take the pain of being strong, but over me there has always been another of greater reserve.
What would you have me do? Anket is dead, my body is broken, Khaya cannot move and Ndoda—
Where was he?
The answer came in a blur of dark flesh and prism light. Ndoda did not roar as he burst into the room; his feet were silent pads, even at a sprint. He cut halfway through the room before Asanda even noticed the milkwater still dripping from his beard; her attention had been on the fractals of rainbow light that had suddenly filled the room. Now it was on the fireglass spear in Ndoda's hand. It almost glowed as it went through Lang'engatshoni's back. Dark blood smothered the glass head when it came out through his breast.
Another of greater reserve. "Thank you," Asanda breathed, then all breath left her.
Lang'engatshoni turned on his heel, hard enough to rip the spear out of Ndoda's grip. He caught Ndoda by the jaw as he stumbled back and drew back the fist that had belonged to their mother.
No! came Nomvula's voice, and in a surge her spirit flared, locking her body in place as Ndoda struggled against an unyielding grip. Blood spouted from the Sunspear's chest, so much of it, rivers and rivers.
Asanda didn't recognise the spark of hope that had ignited in her until absolute despair swallowed it.
The spear had gone through the heart. That would have killed any person with only one spirit to sever from the body. But to spirits like the Sunspear, the flesh was only a vessel, whether it had blood or a heart or not. It did not rise because bleeding woke it. It rose because bleeding weakened the host's spirit. Even now, tatters of Nomvula's spirit splashed against the ashen floor in bright red, until there was no longer enough of her to hold Lang'engatshoni back.
Asanda shut her eyes.
She heard his fist explode into Ndoda's throat, and heard the splash of her brother's body being tossed into the milkwater pool.
A wail warped out of Nomvula, anguished enough to shame a hundred mourners in their grief. Time and place melted away for Asanda, until there was only that wail that was like acid flooding the throat and iron hands squeezing at the head and heart. Her mother's spirit flared to cover the whole Hill in a mist of anger and despair and terror. Sadness had not touched her yet, it would never be as immediate as the frightened rage that followed the death of a son.
Whatever Asanda felt, it was swallowed by that rage. It poisoned her through every pour and covered her own ether as the smog outside covered the sun. Such power, in her mother, turned acrid and poisonous and dangerous. Asanda's heart seized twice under the weight of it. A third time and she would be dead.
The only thing that saved her, was her mother slowly dying. By the time the mist receded enough for Asanda to draw breath, the Sunspear was just turning away from the milkwater pool. It had all happened in less time than it took a dead bird to fall from a willow branch. Her mother's spirit had faded from a wildfire to a flame floating on the pooled wax of a spent candle. She didn't even have the strength to beg. The matriarch of the Hill had fallen to its weakest member.
And so, having been taught all her life, Asanda took up the reigns.
She found Anathi first. The Bound's spirit was barely detectable. It was like a thin layer of dust against the walls – scattered by the force of Anket's death, but not herself dead. Rather than collecting it, Asanda focused on the clay form on the floor. With no regard for the paranatural pain it caused her, Asanda took the newfound half of her spirit and pushed it into Anathi. It was quick; the spirit realm lived whole seasons in the time it took natural flesh to live a day. The scattered fragments around the room were suddenly drawn to the new gravity inside the clay body.
Asanda was half-alive again. She could no longer see Lang'engatshoni's ethers, and with her awareness of the spirit world halved, she could barely feel the warmth of her mother's spirit. To a Diviner of normal sensitivity, her mother would technically be dead.
The Bound will not save you, Lang'engatshoni said, his voice once again only grating her skin and not her bones. Your brother did not save you. It is time I purged this house of weakness, and made room for the Strong who will come.
"I'm here already," Asanda said, finding her voice.
Her spirit ghosted outward, searching for that speck of warmth that was her mother's remaining essence. She found it – there was more of her left than she had thought, so much of it smothered under Lang'engatshoni. Asanda scooped it all up, as Anket had scooped up her grief, and in one violent motion, she ripped it free from root to stem.
The dark side of her spirit was once again flooded, this time with all that was purely, essentially Nomvula. She had ripped the spirit out without the rune eye to bridge it; simply, she had banished her mother from her natural flesh and held her spirit inside her now. Asanda swaddled it and held close to her own, as she had once been held to her mother's breast.
Lang'engatshoni frowned. The body that had once belonged to Nomvula was fully his now, and its brow arched in quiet amusement.
In ripping your mother free of this vessel, you have not weakened me, only granted me full freedom.
Asanda rose, because her body was living for two. What pain could possibly overcome that? One only weakens their enemy when they do not trust in their own power.
The voice was two speaking as one, its tenor sharp and a little cold and yet layered in a dimmable warmth.
Asanda was given then the rare gift of seeing a god unsure of himself. What—
Her spirit surged through her and into the Sunspear, knocking Lang'engatshoni halfway out of the body. The natural world ate that exposed portion of him up, a pearl dissolving in vinegar. He wailed, and that was the only opening Anathi needed.
The floor cracked under the weight of her clay feet as she charged into the Sunspear and hooked its legs clean off the ground.
Asanda was given a second gift then, one she would never in her life treasure. She saw fear as pure as any distilled cleaning spirit in her mother's old eyes as Anathi plunged them both into the pink milkwater.
The sun had set by the time Anathi climbed out of the pool, Ndoda's corpse slung over her shoulder. She had taken no chances and drowned the Sunspear for almost a full hour. In all that time, Asanda had not moved. She was upright, her eyes on the pool, but her attention was turned inward.
Somewhere inside the vessel of her flesh, a girl sat in a dark corner, her knees drawn to her chest and her head buried between them. A second figure, this one a little larger, drew her into a mother's closeness and held her tightly as she wept.