Page 99 of The Merciless Ones
Nevertheless, Belcalis is trying to point something out to me, only I’m too tired, too anxious to play guessing games. I sigh. “Why don’t you just say what you—”
I stop when the fragment of a memory wafts past. The first moment I touched Melanis, I felt the strangest sensation. It was like lightning coursing through my body. I can’t believe I almost forgot it.
“I touched her,” I say, astounded. “I touched her when she was still healing.”
My thoughts are whirling now, the pieces finally settling into place. I thought the sensation that jolted me in that moment was a result of my entering Melanis’s memories, but what if that wasn’t the cause? What if it was actually my power calling on hers? The power the Idugu told me I possessed.
It’s always been you – that’s what both Elder Kadiri and Keita said.
Could this be what they meant?
“Ever since you first came in contact with the kaduth in the Oyomosin, you’ve been changing,” Belcalis says. “You resurrected those new jatu. You’re faster, stronger. You even used doors for a tiny bit—”
“Not that I’ve ever been able to do it again,” I say bitterly, thinking of last night and this morning, when I tried, once again without success, to replicate what I did in the Grand Temple and at the Warthu Bera.
“You’ve been growing stronger and stronger – especially once you took off the ansetha necklace.”
“Wait,” Britta gasps, her eyes widening. “So have we! Before ye took off the ansetha, I could barely shape a pebble. After ye did—”
“You created those shelters like it was nothing!” I cry, remembering.
“And I turned my entire body into gold and used it as a shield while we were in the Warthu Bera,” Belcalis adds. Then she thinks. “Wait, let me see something.” She takes her dagger from its hilt and cuts her palm. “Look,” she says, gasping.
The blood is creeping across it, as before, but its movement is slower now, laboured. It falters just before it reaches her wrist.
Trembling now, I swiftly wrap the ansetha necklace in its pack, as I have all this time, so it’s not touching my skin. “Try it,” I urge.
Belcalis nods, squeezes her hand so the blood can well and holds up her arm. The blood immediately moves, gliding swiftly down her arm all the way to her shoulder and hardening as it goes. The moment I unwrap the ansetha necklace and press my finger to it, however, the blood falters again.
“Let me try,” Britta says, taking out a pebble from her robes.
When I’m touching the ansetha necklace, she can only barely shape it, but after I remove my fingers, a gleaming, sharp stone dagger forms in her hands.
She gasps. “It’s ye,” she says. “It’s ye that’s makin’ us grow stronger. Yer the one giving us our powers, not them.”
“That’s why they lied to you,” Belcalis says pointedly. “Because you’re the one who has the power.”
She lifts her hand, inhales, and the blood recedes back into her palm, her wound healing as if it were never there in the first place. I don’t even have to look into her using the combat state to know that she has complete control over her ability.
I glance down at the ansetha necklace as if it were a snake waiting to strike. And in a way, it is. The mothers were so pleased when they gifted it to me, so proud when I wore it as if it were the crown of Otera itself. And all this while, they were using it to cut me off from my own abilities, to hide what I truly am.
I’m the Nuru, the only child born to all four of them – that’s what the mothers always told me. But thinking of it now, even that could have been a lie. I didn’t want to accept the vision the Idugu showed me – all that gold hurtling from the sky – didn’t even understand what I was seeing, if I’m being honest. Still, I have to try. Have to pierce the real truth about who and what I am. Even as I think this, another memory flashes past: the Singular looking dispassionately at Okot. I can’t remember what the fifth Oteran god looked like, can’t even truly fathom their existence, but I do remember one thing: they felt safe. Somehow familiar, even despite how remote their existence is from mine.
I hold on to that feeling. I don’t know the truth of Idugu’s claims about what I am. I don’t even know what will happen when we reach the mothers. But I do know this: if anything goes wrong today, there’s one last deity hiding somewhere in Otera. One being that can sway the balance. The Singular. And if everything falls to pieces and the entire empire burns to the ground, I just pray they’ll see what’s happening and act to restore the balance to Otera.
The feeling of wrongness descends the moment we reach the N’Oyos’ foothills. Keita and I are sitting on the back of Ixa’s tail, curled in each other’s arms, when I feel it: the sudden force in the air, the ungainly thickness I immediately recognize. The Idugu. They’re somehow here, all four of them hovering invisibly over the mountain, an oily, dark presence in the late evening air. But how? I thought they were still imprisoned in their temple, bound by the gold that has shrouded their bodies for so long. That’s obviously not the case, because their power is suddenly overwhelmingly present, an ugliness tainting the very air I breathe. Emotions radiate from it – hatred, anger, envy. The Idugu are ready to attack their counterparts. The battle that I’ve been fearing has already arrived.
I wrench myself from Keita’s arms in a panic, trying to understand how all of this is possible, but as I do, my eyes latch on to something horrifying: a massive hole in the river of glass surrounding the mountains. Ever since the mothers created the Bloom, the river has stood as its boundary, a visible signal of how far their power has grown. But a wide portion of it has been blasted through, shards of obsidian now littering the space where jagged spikes of black once undulated through the sands.
“No…” I whisper, horrified.
“What is that, Deka?” Keita asks, alarmed by my sudden agitation.
“The Idugu! They’re here!”
“What? How?”
“I don’t know!”