Black Leopard, Red Wolf

This is where I, your inquisitor, set a different bait. He had come, that ninth morning, to talk of the year he reunited with the mercenary called Leopard. Indeed, he had said before that it was the Leopard that came to him with the offer to search for the child. But a lie is a house carefully built on rotten stilts. A liar often forgets the beginning of his tale before he gets to the end, and in this way one will catch him. A lie is a tale carefully told if allowed to be told, and I would seek to break his untruth by asking him to tell a different part of the tale. So I asked him not of the first search or the second, but of the four years in between.

INQUEST:Tell me of the year of our King’s death.

TRACKER:Your mad King.

INQUEST:Our King.

TRACKER:But the mad one. Forgive me, they are all mad.

INQUEST:Tell me of the year of our King’s death.

TRACKER:He is your king. You tell me.

INQUEST:Tell me of —

TRACKER:It was a year, as years go. There were days, there were nights with nights being the end of day. Moons, seasons, storms, drought. Are you not a fetish priest who gives such news, inquisitor? Your questions grow stranger by the day; this is true talk.

INQUEST:You remember the year?

TRACKER:The Ku don’t name years.

INQUEST:Do you remember the year?

TRACKER:It was the year your most excellent King shat his most excellent life out in the most excellent shit pit.

INQUEST:Speaking ill of the King is punishable by death in the South Kingdom.

TRACKER:

He’s a corpse, not a king.

INQUEST:Enough. Tell me of your year.

TRACKER:The year? My year. I lived it full and left all of it behind when it ended. What more is there to know?

INQUEST:You have nothing else?

TRACKER:I fear that you would find greater tales among those of us dead, inquisitor. Of those years I have nothing to report but steadiness, boredom, and the endless request of angry wives to find their unsatisfied husbands—

INQUEST:

Did you not retire those years?

TRACKER:I think I am the best to remember my own years.

INQUEST:Tell me of your four years in Mitu.

TRACKER:I spent no four years in Mitu.

INQUEST:Your testimony on the fourth day said after the first search you left for the village of Gangatom and from there, Mitu. Your testimony on the fifth day began, When he found me in Mitu I was ready to leave. Four years remain unaccounted for. Did you not live it in Mitu?