“You make me think, this ‘man is simple’ is no bad thing.”
I laughed.
“You may be speaking truth there, dear Ogo.”
“You said the boy might be in Nigiki or Wakadishu.”
“They use the same doors we used to escape the Darklands, but they use them in reverse. We had word of an attack on a household at the foot of the Hills of Enchantment that beat even their sacred magics. Twenty and four days ago, almost a moon. They spend seven to eight days in one place, killing and feeding, which means they have used the door to Nigiki. From Nigiki they kill and go to Wakadishu.”
“They’re almost there.”
“They are there already. It takes five days to get to Wakadishu on foot, maybe six, and they are on foot. My guess is that no beast can stomach the filth of them, so no horses. If they are in Wakadishu they will only be there for another two days, maybe three. Then they walk to the next door, the one we came through on the way to Dolingo.”
“Shall we not meet them there?”
“They will go through the citadel. They will want to feed, and who can resist such noble stock as the Dolingon? Besides, Sadogo, our numbers are few. We might need help.”
“So we cut them off?”
“Yes, we cut them off.”
He clapped his hands and it echoed across the sky. Then he spread them and I walked right to him as if to embrace. He flinched a little, not sure what I was doing. I wrapped my arms around him, my head in his armpit, and inhaled deep and long.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Trying to remember you,” I said.
Sadogo then asked me if I thought the girl was pretty.
“Venin, I told you her name,” he said.
“She is pretty as girls go, I think, but her lips are too thin as is her hair, and she is only a little darker than the prefect, whose skin is hideous. Do you think her pretty?”
“I feel like half of an Ogo. My mother died when she had me, which is fine for she would have lived to curse me and my birth. But I feel like not the Ogo in many things.”
“You are right and you are true, dear Ogo. And yes she is pretty.”
The rest of my words I left to my own head, which might have been a crude joke. He nodded and pressed his lips together, satisfied with my answer, and lowered his head on his rugs.
Downstairs, I passed the room with the prefect. “It is yet early, but good night, Tracker,” he said as I walked by.
“Night,” was all that came out of my mouth.
I only then noticed the old man had stopped playing and was in the room, staring at darkness, maybe. I went down to the ground floor and waited for Sogolon.
Your old man, he was singing.”
The girl had come in first, huffing and panting. Sogolon grabbed her hand and the girl pushed her away and pinned her against the wall. I jumped up but the girl let go, growled, and started up the stairs. Sogolon closed the door.
“Venin,” she said.
The girl cursed back in that language I did not know. Sogolon replied in the same tongue. I knew that Sogolon tone: I am here to speak and you are here to listen. I imagined the girl wishing her a thousand fucks from a man covered in warts, or something just as vicious. She cursed all the way up two flights and slammed the door shut.
“Nobody in this house know what night is for,” Sogolon said.
“Fucking? Or working witch magic? Sleep is for the old gods and who follow him, Sogolon. Your old man was singing.”
“A lie.”
“No great stake in lying to you, old woman.”
“But great sport, maybe. You was right there in the room when only today he refuse to sing. The songs stay inside him mouth and none come out since Kwash Netu was King.”
“I know what I heard.”
“He don’t sing in thirty years, maybe more, but he sing in front of you?”
“Truth, his back was to me.”
“A silent griot don’t just open him mouth.”
“Maybe he was biding time for you to leave.”
“Your sting already duller than a moon ago. Maybe somebody giving him something new to sing about.”