Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“We will see what he knows and does not know.”

I went right up to Mossi.

“Listen to me. He is no different from Ekoiye. Told only what he could be trusted to know, which is nothing. Told by just a messenger, not the man sending the message. Maybe chieftain army, maybe not. Somebody is both one step ahead of us, waiting for us to come, and one step behind us, waiting for us to move so that he can follow. Somewhere in the course of the last hour we were being watched, and that person heard enough.”

“Tracker.”

“Listen to me.”

“Tracker.”

“What?”

“The keeper.”

I cursed. The keeper was gone.

“That old man could not have gone far,” Mossi said, just as some women screamed and a man shouted, No, old man, no.

“He didn’t plan to,” I said.

Right then the library roof caved in and killed some of the flames, but the whole square was hot and bright.

“Distance between us and this place, we need now,” I said.

Mossi nodded. We turned down an empty alley that had puddles even though the rains were long gone, and where wild dogs tore through whatever people threw out. A dog looking almost like a hyena made me shudder. Sogolon was nowhere eyes could see and neither was the girl. All I knew of Sogolon’s smell was lemongrass and fish, which could have been any of hundreds of women. I’ve never smelled her skin on the girl’s and the Ogo did not have much of a smell. I never thought to make mark of the lord of the house, or the buffalo.

“We should head east,” I said.

“This is south.”

“You lead, then.”

He turned right at the nearest alley, also deserted.

“We Kongori must lack entertainment if a little fire can pull us away.”

“There was nothing little about that fire,” I said.

He turned to me. “And they will think it the work of a foreigner first.”

“Except it was members of your own force.”

He tapped my chest. “You need to cut that thought loose.”

“And you need to look at what is loose all around you.”

“Those were not my men.”

“Those men wore your uniform.”

“But they were not my men.”

“You recognized two.”

“Did you not hear me?”

“Oh, I hear you.”

“Don’t give me that look.”

“You can’t see my look.”

“I know you have it.”

“What look, third prefect of the Kongori chieftain army?”

“That one. The one saying he’s a fool, or he’s slow, or he denies what he sees.”

“Look, we can leave or we can have words, but we cannot do both.”

“Since your ways of seeing are so superior to mine, look behind you and say if he is friend or foe.”

He walked slow as if with his own business. We stopped. He stopped, perhaps two hundred paces behind us, not in the alley but where it crossed the lane going north. This could not be the first time I am noticing that it was dark, I thought. Mossi was beside me, breathing fast.

His hair short and red. Earplugs glimmered in both ears. The same man I saw back in the pool in the Darklands. This man Bunshi called the Aesi. In a black cape that flapped open like wings, waking up the wind and whipping up the dust. Mossi drew his sword; I did not draw my knives. The dust around him would not settle, rising and falling and swirling and shifting into lizard-like beasts as high as the walls, then swirling again into dust, then into four figures as huge as the Ogo, then falling to the ground as dust, then rising again and flapping like wings. The prefect grabbed my shoulder.

“Tracker!”

Mossi ran off and I followed. He ran to the end of the alley and dashed right. Truth, he ran faster than the Leopard. I turned back once and saw the Aesi still standing there, wind and dust unsettled around him. We had run into a street that had some people. They all walked in the same direction and slow as if coming from the fire. He would notice us running faster than everyone else. Mossi, as if he heard me, slowed. But they—women, some children, mostly men—were moving too slow, taking for granted that bed would be as they left it. We were passing them, looking back at times, but the Aesi was not following us. A woman in a white gown pulled her son along, the son looking back and trying to pull away from her. The child looked up and stared at me. I thought his mother would pull him away, but she had stopped too. She stared at me like the boy did, like the blank stare of a dead man. Mossi spun around and saw it too. Every man, woman, and child in the street was looking at us. But they stood still as if made of wood. No limb moved, not even a finger. Only their necks moved, to turn and look at us. We kept walking slow, they kept standing still, and their eyes kept following us. “Tracker,” Mossi said, but so under his breath that I barely heard it. Their eyes kept following us. An old man who was walking the other way turned so much, with his feet planted on the ground, that I thought his backbone would snap. Mossi still gripped his sword.

“He’s possessing them,” I said.

“Why is he not possessing us?”

“I don’t—”