Page 101 of The Gilded Ones

“But you can’t be,” I gasp at her. “You can’t be an alaki.”

“Why, because you never sensed me with your intuition, as you did with the other alaki?” White Hands smirks. “Your mother never felt me either, and she was quite intuitive for an alaki of such tender age.”

A deep roaring sounds in my ears. “Mother was an alaki?” I rasp, my throat suddenly hoarse. “That’s not possible! She bled pure, I saw it!”

“You saw what she wanted you to see – both you and your father.”

Memories flash past; the last few days before Mother died. She was so sickly, all that blood draining from her eyes and ears, all that red. Was it truly all false, everything I saw? I can’t accept it.

But then…Mother was a Shadow. The thought sends a shiver through me.

Subterfuge is their art, disguise their trade.

“What happened to her?” I ask. “Is she truly dead?”

For a moment, hope blossoms, tentative buds unfurling. Then White Hands looks at me with grim eyes and my hope dies a swift death. “My deepest apologies, Deka,” she says, “Your mother is well and truly gone.”

“How did she die – truly?” It’s almost painful to voice the question, but I have to ask it.

White Hands sighs. “She was making arrangements to save you from the Ritual of Purity, when she was caught by the jatu. They sentenced her to the Death Mandate.”

A sob breaks free from my throat. The Death Mandate. If Mother’s final death was anywhere as hard to find as mine, I can’t even begin to imagine the agony she endured before she left this world.

My tears are falling freely now, so I’m almost startled when White Hands places a hand to my cheek. “Take comfort in the fact that your mother loved you very much, Deka. Everything she did, she did for you.”

The words burn through me. I don’t want to hear them – don’t even want to think them – but I have to push past my pain. It’s time to ask questions. Difficult ones.

“How did you meet her – Mother? Did she help you create me?”

“Create you?” White Hands laughs, seeming taken aback. “Even I do not have that power. No, it was my duty to watch you, and I’ve done so all your life. Even before you entered Umu’s belly, I watched you. It was my duty, you see.”

Duty? My mother’s belly? What is she saying?

White Hands walks closer, her smile becoming something more fervent, more intense. She has the same look priests of Oyomo do when they read from the Infinite Wisdoms. The other alaki part for her, like subjects making way for a queen. Like soldiers making way for their general. Behind them, the deathshrieks silently watch the scene, giants towering above their much-smaller sisters.

“When the Gilded Ones wept and created the golden seed you sprang from, I was there,” she announces. “When the jatu created the Death Mandate against our kind and wrote it into the Infinite Wisdoms to give it legitimacy, it was I who hid you in my belly. And when my sisters reunited in preparation for this war, it was I who found your mother – a young alaki on the verge of her transition, unaware of her divine heritage.”

Divine heritage…

Something about the phrase sends shivers through me, but I force myself to remain quiet as White Hands continues: “Umu began bleeding the divine gold at fifteen. She rushed to me in a panic, so I told her what she was, told her what had happened to our kind.

“She wept at my feet, asked how she could be of service. That was when I knew she was the perfect vessel. We waited till she was of age to carry you, and then, as she bathed in the Warthu Bera’s lake, I put your seed into the waters. Ten months later, there you were, shaped in both her image and that of the man she chose to raise you. The perfect mimicry of a human.”

By now, my chest feels tight and I can barely breathe. Seed? Vessel? What is she saying?

Beside me, Keita shakes his head. “You’re confusing her,” he says. “All this talk of divine gold and seeds. Speak in the language of facts instead of legends.”

“Legend is what humans call the things that they do not understand,” White Hands scoffs. “They call me a legend, and yet I existed from the beginning, from the time Otera was birthed from the warring tribes. I helped create this empire – me, my sisters, our mothers…we’re the ones who made Otera what it is.”

“Mothers?” I gasp. “You’re talking about the Gilded Ones – the demons.” All those temples we saw flash into my mind. Did she send me there on purpose, so I could see the statues for myself?

“Demons?” White Hands dismisses the word with a wave of her hand. “The Gilded Ones were never demons. They were goddesses. They ruled Otera until their own sons rose up against them. The jatu desperately wanted to rule Otera, so they imprisoned our mothers and killed us, their sisters, along with all our children.

“They thought they had succeeded in wiping us out, the traitors, but our mothers used the last of their power to thwart them. With their last free breaths, they rendered us alaki truly deathless by giving us the power to resurrect as even fiercer creatures – deathshrieks. And then they created the Nuru, the one creature that could exist between the alaki and the deathshrieks. The one daughter who could free them all.”

Something shatters inside me. Now I understand why the deathshrieks always sounded so wounded whenever they said the word Nuru.

White Hands wades closer, looks into my eyes. “You are the Nuru, Deka. You are the deliverer. It is your task to free our mothers. It is your task to free us all.”

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