Page 32 of The Gilded Ones

Relief coursing through my veins, I shake my head and face forward again just as Karmoko Thandiwe removes her foot and points to the unconscious deathshriek.

“This is a deathshriek, the enemy that is now invading the One Kingdom,” she states. “Your natural enemy. All across Otera, deathshrieks hunt your kind, but here in the Warthu Bera, you will learn how to withstand them – their cries, their infernal strength and speed. You will learn how to transform from the hunted to the hunter – how to train harder, more ruthlessly, until you become the best, the most fearsome warriors in all of the emperor’s alaki regiment.

“Then, when you have served the emperor for twenty years each, you will be rewarded with the Rite of Purification, a sacred ceremony by the high priests to cleanse you of your demonic blood.” She looks across the room now, her eyes pinning each and every one of us in place as she declares, “You will be pure again.”

Pure… Breath catches in my throat.

The next twenty years can’t pass quickly enough.

Around me, whispers sound, exclamations of joy and relief. “Did you hear that?” a girl near me says, gaping. Katya, I think her name is. She’s the one from the line to the wagons, red hair so bright, it looked like a fire springing from her head. Now she’s as bald as the rest of us, even her eyebrows shorn from her face. “We’re going to be pure. Truly pure,” she exclaims.

She looks almost as excited as I feel. Even though Karmoko Thandiwe has just repeated the same sentiments Captain Kelechi did, something about her delivery set a fire in me. Or perhaps it’s the fact it was a woman that said them.

Not everyone is as impressed, however. Adwapa manages to somehow seem bored as she murmurs: “Well, that’s a relief.” Being already bald, she was spared the indignity of a shearing, but her sister Asha’s head now also gleams when she nods in agreement beside her.

Karmoko Thandiwe holds up her hand for silence, and the hall quiets.

“Look to your left,” she commands. We quickly obey. “Now to your right.” Again, we obey her words. “Standing on either side of you are your sisters – both in blood and in arms. Bloodsisters. They will live and die with you on the battlefield. They are your family now, is this understood?”

It takes me a moment to realize she means for us to answer. “Yes, Karmoko Thandiwe,” I reply, joining the chorus of voices.

“Now look to your elder bloodsisters, the novices.” She points to the armoured girls. “From now on, you will refer to them always as ‘honoured elder bloodsister’. They have been here for a year now. They will show you the way.” As we nod, she turns to face us once again. “I would have you understand one thing. Of all the hundreds of alaki that have come to Hemaira, you are the fifty most talented – the fastest, the strongest, the most deadly. Most of you were noted by your village elders before you underwent the Ritual, or as you tried, futilely, to escape your fates. You all showed promise. Strength, cunning, resilience – much more than the average alaki. That is why you were chosen.”

I suddenly remember Britta telling me how she was so strong she could almost lift a cow, remember White Hands marvelling at all the times I’d died and been resurrected.

“Remember this well,” the karmoko warns, “because you are here for one purpose and one purpose only. In ten months precisely, the emperor will go on campaign against the deathshrieks, and he has chosen the alaki who will lead the charge.”

She glances around the room, her eyes deadly serious.

“You will be at the forefront of the emperor’s armies,” she declares. “You will ride into battle and fight for the glory of Otera, and you will win the war against the deathshrieks or you will die trying – however many times that may take.”

In the aftermath of Karmoko Thandiwe’s speech, silence descends over the hall.

My breath comes in short, ragged bursts, her words ringing in my ears. Win the war against the deathshrieks… The forefront of the emperor’s armies… My hands shake, and I clasp them together. Knowing the bargain I agreed to is one thing. Actually being here, seeing the deathshrieks hidden underneath my feet – the monsters I will one day fight against – is another.

I barely see the novices hefting the unconscious deathshriek and returning it to its cage, barely see Matron Nasra closing the floor behind them, then bows deferentially to the karmokos. Only when Karmoko Thandiwe nods at us do I return my attention to the present. That’s when I see something strange. The karmoko is staring right at me, a peculiar look in her eyes. It’s almost as if she recognizes me. The expression is gone before I can blink, but I know my eyes weren’t deceiving me.

You have a familiar look about you… Matron Nasra’s words ring in my head.

As if my mind summoned her, the matron walks to the front of the hall and claps her hands for attention. “All right, neophytes, move it along. Time for dinner!” she bellows.

I obey along with the rest of the girls, following her into the next hall, which is filled with long wooden tables and similar chairs. As I take a seat beside Britta and the others, my mind whirls, darting back to the symbol on the karmokos’ eclipse pins – to the strange feeling I had when Karmoko Huon traced it with her fingers earlier. I mentally trace it again, imagining the shape of that shadowed sun gliding under my own fingertips, its edges softened by years of daily use.

A gasp explodes from my chest.

I’ve felt that symbol before, touched it a thousand times before I ever saw it on the seal White Hands gave me. It’s the same symbol that’s on my mother’s necklace, the one I could never make out because it had become so worn, and it’s everywhere I look now: the archway above the door from which the assistants are emerging, steaming plates of food in hand, the centres of the tables, even the middle of the ceiling, which soars high above us.

I point up at it and ask the girls beside me, “Do any of you know what that symbol is?”

All this time, and I’ve never once asked. Belcalis and Asha shake their heads, but Adwapa nods. “It’s the umbra, the emblem of the Shadows.”

My brow furrows, thoughts rushing faster. Mother had it on her necklace, wore it every day. And symbols like that, ones connected to the emperor, can be used only with special permission. Even mistakenly carving one warrants a death sentence – the smallest child knows that. The ground tilts under my feet as a strange, impossible theory slithers into my mind.

What if Mother was a Shadow?

It seems far-fetched – impossible even – but it would explain so many things: the reason she was always so careful to remain at the periphery of the village, the fact that she moved all the way to Irfut in the first place. Most women never leave their home villages, and if they do, it’s to move the next village over, not an entirely different province.

Some of the village men back in Irfut used to gossip that the emperor collects strange people to serve him, people who defy the natural order but have been granted special dispensation by the priests. What if Mother was one of them? If she was, what does that make me?

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