The line inched like a wounded snake beneath the painted warning sigils. Red, black, and white faces stared down from the wall, Esu-Odan’s laughing mouth split in a dozen masks. Coal-black eyes. Forked tongues. Crossed roads scratched into plaster and stone. Every mark a threat and a promise.
When Ademilade reached the threshold stone he paused, letting the weight of the place press against his skin. The air here carried incense over the stink of bodies and river mud. Somewhere inside metal rang, a slow, steady hammer-beat. Like a heart under the earth.
He set his jaw, then lowered his eyes. Two fingers to his forehead, then to the dust. He had watched the people ahead of him do it, measuring the rhythm of their movements the way he once measured the time between rainy seasons. Not his shrine. Not his god. But the stone did not care whose blood had baptized it, only whose skin bent low.
His cowrie-threaded hair drew a few sidelong glances. Outsider. Hinterland man. He felt the prickle of it, but he kept his shoulders rounded, neck loose, spine bowed. The posture of a man who expected nothing, who had learned to move around other men’s tempers like a dry-season stream around rocks.
The guards at the gate barely looked at him. Their eyes slid past his calloused hands, his travel-worn wrapper, seeking metal, seeking hidden blades. They saw only a lean, dusty farmer and turned away, more interested in a trader with jangling bracelets and a loud complaint.
Good.
Let them see nothing.
Ademilade stepped over the threshold stone. The dust changed under his bare feet, cooler, pressed flat by a thousand supplicants. A faint tingle crawled up his scars, as if some unseen palm had brushed his chest in greeting. Or in warning. He did not look back.
Inside the gate, the Outer Courtyard sprawled in layered circles of need. Traders in bright wrappers crowded one side, voices sharp as machetes as they argued over disputed debts and spoiled cargo, waving wax-marked tablets and broken calabashes like weapons. Mothers knelt with fever-hot children pressed to their breasts, whispering hoarse prayers, fanning tiny faces while they waited for a priest’s glance. Elders sat on low stools beneath the shadow of carved pillars, spines straight despite their years, reciting wrongs done to their lineages in voices that did not tremble. Junior kin hovered behind them with offerings, palm oil in gourds, trussed fowls kicking weakly, bundles of cowries knotted in fraying cloth, arms aching, eyes fixed on the diviners.
Ademilade lingered at the edge, as unremarked as old dust. He watched how each petitioner shaped their plea. How no one blurted their need raw. They waited for the diviner’s hand to still, for the priest’s staff to tap twice, for the soft clatter of sacred cowries on wooden trays. Words here moved like water around stones, bending to unseen channels. He counted the beats. Learned the bends.
He marked the way mouths pinched shut as feet crossed certain chalked lines, white strokes on red earth like thin bones. Laughter snapped off. quarrels cut mid-word. Even the loudest tongues grew meek until soles cleared the marks. Only then did sound return. And there. The carved pillar with Esu-Odan’s laughing face, eyes half-lidded as if listening. Men who swaggered and spat in the dust bent their necks before it, bracelets stilled, voices lowered. When one woman forgot and strode past without dipping her head, an old man caught her wrapper hard.
“Road no straight for the one wey forget who hold the crossroad,” he rasped. “Quick feet meet quick trouble.”
Ademilade rolled the words on his tongue. Crooked roads. Swift misfortune. They sat beside the picture of flames running in maize rows, chains clinking in the dark. Esu-Odan loved bargains, they said. He wondered what the god had taken, that night, in payment for his silence.
He settles by a cracked wall where ancestor faces have peeled to ghost-smears, and lets his bundle sag open: a thumb-gourd of palm oil, three wrinkled kola, a twist of dried cassava leaf. Rain-man’s gifts. Nothing sharp. Nothing that speaks of blood. He shapes the lie under his breath, grinding it smooth, sanding anger from each word until only dust-worn pleading remains.
Attendants drifted past like lean, alert fish in a muddy stream, palm-leaf strips fluttering, reed pens scratching names and grudges. Ademilade bowed when their shadows brushed him, voice low, steady. “Rot catch my yam-hill. Goat dey cough. Rain dodge my farm.” Common troubles. Harmless sorrows. With each practiced complaint, he packed hot memory tighter, shoveling ash over flame, waiting for the god’s true gate to show its mouth.
The first gust knifed through the courtyard with the taste of river grit and distant rain, whipping headscarves and rattling the hanging charms on shrine posts. The lamps in their clay saucers guttered; smoke smeared sideways. Petitioner lines buckled as people threw arms over offerings and children screwed up their faces in confused, angry wails. Loose palm leaves leapt like frightened fish. Someone cursed. Someone laughed too loud, then bit the sound in half when it slid toward one of the chalked lines.
Sand stung Ademilade’s eyes. He did not wipe it away. He had bent his back through dust-devils in the harmattan, watched storm-fronts come marching like dark armies across his yam ridges. This was only a squall. He squinted into the shifting dusk and tasted the air the way he would taste a field: wet on one side, dry on the other. The rain smell sat high and thin. Not yet ready to fall. Wind noise without the deep belly of thunder. It would pass quick.
Around him, the courtyard shifted from orderly murmur to churning confusion. Petitioners jostled, seeking shelter that did not exist in the open space. A woman in faded blue tried to gather the strips of palm-leaf where a scribe’s basket had overturned, her wrapper flapping like a torn sail. Two boys dashed after a rolling gourd of palm wine, laughing until their mother hissed their names and yanked them back from a chalked curve. Shrine attendants snapped at folk to mind their feet. Bells tied to the eaves of the colonnade chimed madly, as if some unseen hand shook them.
Ademilade stayed still long enough to see the pattern in the panic. How people flowed around the painted warnings on the ground without looking, how every rush came up short before the carved pillars where Esu-Odan’s faces watched. Even in fear, they obeyed. The god’s lines held stronger than the old women’s scolding tongues.
A second blast came, harder, curling dust up from the red earth in low, stinging swirls. It flung grit into his mouth, tasted of rust and old river. Loose wrappers snapped, anklets clashed. A thin child broke free of her father’s grip and stumbled blinded toward one of the white-cross sigils, arms flailing. Her heel slid, one step more and,
He moved then, not with the wild flapping of the others but with the tucked-in, patient speed of a man harvesting before flood. A half step, one hand out, catching her wrist just as her bare foot scraped the very edge of the chalk. “Easy,” he murmured, voice rough but even, turning her with his own body between her and the mark. Her small fingers clung to his scarred palm like a burr clings to cloth. Her father reached them, breath sour with fear, eyes wide, already nodding thanks before his tongue found words.
Ademilade only dipped his head, let the man drag the child back. The squall’s edge roared across the stone faces and baobab trunks, shaking leaves, shaking breath. He felt its shape in his bones. Short-tempered wind, no depth, no staying power. A tantrum sky. It would blow itself tired soon.
He licked dust from his teeth and swallowed. Storm in the courtyard. Storm in his chest. Both had to be ridden without showing how badly he wanted to strike something, anything, for daring to blow around Esu’s house as if it were common bush.
When the next gust knifed through, one of the low ancestor tables at the courtyard’s edge shuddered on its uneven stones. Libation cups rattled. A squat calabash of kola tipped, hesitated, then began to roll, slow but sure, toward a painted crossroads sigil chalked on the packed earth below.
Ademilade was already on his feet.
He slid out from his cracked-wall shadow with a farmer’s unhurried certainty, that gait he used when a goat had slipped its tether and was nosing toward tender shoots. No rush. No shouting. Just the right step at the right time. His left hand dropped to the altar’s plank, fingers spreading like roots, weight settling to still its trembling. With his right he reached, palm open, and scooped the calabash up just as its rim kissed the white line of the sigil.
The kola nuts inside knocked dully, like small hearts against gourd walls, then went quiet.
He did not look at the painted crossroads long. A forked path, four ways, Esu’s laughing face scratched faint in the center. A place where accidents became answers, where spilled things could turn into omens folk would carry for years.
Not today.
He lifted the calabash back, setting it square, turning its carved mouth away from the edge. A few nearby petitioners sucked their teeth in soft relief. An old woman with red palm oil shining on her lips clicked her tongue. “Hand dey quick,” she muttered, half to herself, half to the god. “Good. Make Esu no catch play from this side today.”
Ademilade bowed his head toward the altar, the way he would nod to a neighbor’s boundary marker. Respect for the line, not for the owner. “Forgive our clumsiness,” he said under his breath, words shaped like any villager’s small fear. Not the true fear that gnawed behind his ribs: the dread that the trickster, hungry for sport, might have seized on a rolled nut to twist someone’s life sideways.
He felt the watching weight of carved stone faces and painted eyes. Felt, too, the old reflex in his shoulders, the memory of flung torches and falling roofs. How quick chance became story. How story hardened into chain.
His hands, empty now, remembered hoe and cutlass. They hung loose at his sides. He stepped back into the milling crowd as if nothing had happened at all, letting their bodies swallow him, letting Esu-Odan find his games elsewhere.
The dust came thicker, a brown curtain. Out of it a priest’s runner burst like a spooked antelope, bare feet drumming the packed earth, a fist of palm-leaf petitions clutched high against his chest. “Way! Clear way for judgment!” he shouted, voice torn thin by the wind. People shrank back, but sound went sideways in the grit. The limping elder in front of Ademilade only blinked, deaf ear turned toward danger, bad leg planted right in the runner’s path.
Ademilade did not think. His hand closed around the old man’s twig-light forearm, skin dry as peeled bark, and he drew him aside with a muttered, “Forgive me, Baba,” just as the runner slashed past, his slipstream yanking at wrappers and spinning only a few loose leaves into the air instead of a brittle body.
Children’s cries rose sharper as grit thickened, one bare‑chested boy blundering close to the tethered goats, whose eyes rolled white, horns jerking at the sting. Ademilade caught the lead rope of the nearest, palm firm on the corded neck, murmuring low, the way he used to talk skittish cattle down from panic. The animal’s breathing eased. He lifted his gaze to the boiling cloud‑edge over the river mouth, reading color and shape the way others read cowries. This was a temper, not a season, fierce, sudden, already fraying at the skirts.
Wind dropped as if a fist unclenched. Dust fell in slow veils. The courtyard drew breath again, a long, ragged sigh. Eyes found him in the settling murk: the calabash upright, the elder unharmed, the goat quiet under his hand. A few nods. A muttered blessing. “Farmer hand.” “Sense like rain-man.” Then their gazes slipped away, dragged back to petitions and hunger and sick children, leaving his face plain, his eyes banked and dark, the furnace in his chest tamped flat beneath travel dust and ordinary silence.
When the dust’s last veil has settled and the courtyard’s buzz crawls back to life (petitions lifted, traders arguing like crows at a carcass, children chasing one another between clay pots and tired goats) Ademilade eases himself out of the flow.
No one sees him leave. That is a skill he has carried since boyhood, walking field edges while others shouted in the village square. He lets his shoulders drop, his steps fall into the rhythm of those with no urgent quarrel to present, weaving between supplicants and shrine-guards, past a woman pounding her open palm against a clay pot in mute frustration, past a young man pressing forehead to the red earth, lips moving too fast for any god to answer.
The noise blurs. His ears catch snatches (“debts,” “bride-price,” “stolen goats,” “spoiled child,” “spoiled land”) all the small aches that push people to kneel before Esu-Odan and call it justice. Underneath it all, the river’s growl and the sea’s slow hiss bite through, old as the first story.
He angles toward the courtyard’s far edge, where the torchlight thins and the crowd thins with it. There the sacred baobab rises, a dark, swollen pillar against the dimming sky, trunk banded with old libations and newer chalk sigils. Its bark gleams slick in places from palm oil and blood, the offerings of other desperate hands.
From its lower branches hang ancestor masks, hooked by raffia cords. Some are smoothed with age, cheeks hollowed, noses sharp, lips pursed in permanent disapproval. Others are newer, the knife-marks still fresh, white kaolin staining their carved brows. The wind has gone quiet, but still the masks shift, ever so slightly, wood creaking, as if leaning nearer to hear the murmurs below.
Lamp‑light from the courtyard’s scattered stands throws thin blades through the tree’s crown. The masks’ eye-holes catch those stray glints, turning blank voids into wet, watching points for a heartbeat at a time. To a man with guilt lodged under his ribs, they look too much like faces he knows: a father’s patient contempt, a mother’s quick laugh gone still, a younger brother’s wide, accusing stare just before the flames licked higher.
He slows. The dust on his feet changes feel where the tree’s shade begins, cooler, damper, clotted with poured drink and crushed kola nut. Someone has sacrificed a cock here not long ago; the faint iron tang of its blood lingers under incense and sweat. He remembers his own shrine-tree at home, the way the ground around it held heat even at dawn, as if the dead sat just below the skin of the earth, listening with their chins in their hands.
His fingers brush the cowries threaded in his hair, an old habit, a wordless greeting to those who once claimed him. He does not bow. Not to this god’s tree. His jaw works, but the prayer that forms is crooked, half curse, half bargaining, and he swallows it back. Esu-Odan loves such twisted tongues. Better to keep the worst of it knotted behind his teeth.
A child’s laugh flares and fades behind him. Somewhere near the main gate, a slave-soldier snaps at a petitioner to hold his peace. From the Inner Shrine drums answer one another in layered phrases, talking of thresholds and opened ways. The whole sanctuary hums like a hive about to swarm.
Ademilade stands a moment longer at the edge of the baobab’s gloom, feeling the weight of the carved eyes on his neck, the old scars on his arms prickling as if freshly cut. Then he steps fully into the shadow, letting the tree swallow him from the courtyard’s restless gaze.
Yewandele waits there as if she has grown from the baobab’s own root, not merely standing in its shadow but claiming it. The leather of her forge‑apron is still damp in streaks, smelling faintly of quenched iron and charcoal; heat seems to cling to her even here, as if the Oath‑Fire below still licks at her heels. Gold‑and‑iron bangles rest heavy on her wrists and throat, their usual bright clink subdued, wrapped in dark cloth so that metal speaks only in a dull, private murmur when she shifts her weight.
She inclines her head once in recognition. Not the deep tilt owed to a visiting chief, not the careless nod for a common petitioner, but something measured between: for a man with no land yet carrying a lineage on his back. Her eyes travel over him in one slow pass. She does not step closer. A careful arm’s length remains between them, the space where caste and oaths and watching masks all insist they must stand.
Her voice comes low, ground‑tone, for his ears and the masks’ alone. She names iron first, as is her right: metal that remembers every hammer‑stroke, every promise quenched in its glow. She tells him her lineage was yoked to Esu‑Odan long before either of them were born, sworn to keep this crossroads‑house unbroken, its thresholds clear, its bargains held straight enough that the world does not split. Then she turns that same iron toward him. Before this god’s forked roads, before the old graves inland, she has already laid his dead ones’ names, has already staked her standing that she will not abandon his hunt for justice, nor close her hand against any true word of Mofeyisola.
So he must tread the red earth like a man walking the narrow ridge between graves: speak where speaking is allowed, strike only where iron and law have already been heated for it, let stories and witnessed oaths do the wounding. Otherwise, she murmurs, any blood he spills will richen the chains, not loosen them, and his dead will taste that bitterness in their dust‑dry mouths.
She lets him see none of this is threat alone but accounting. One corpse in the wrong courtyard, she says, and Esu‑Odan’s priests will cry sacrilege, not justice. The oaths that half‑shelter collar‑wearers will twist, their loopholes soldered shut with fear. Chains will grow teeth. His family’s name will be spoken beside curses, not libations, and his vengeance will belong to his enemies.
From the vantage of the inner wall‑walk, Mofeyisola moved with measured steps, spear balanced easy in her right hand, shield resting against her thigh. The stone beneath her sandals held the day’s heat, breathing it back into her calves with every pace. Below, the Outer Courtyard swirled and churned. Traders in salt‑stained wrappers argued over goat hides and palm oil, their hands cutting harsh shapes in the evening light. Petitioners knelt in dusty rows before lesser altars, lifting calabashes of kola and cowries, voices rising and falling like a restless tide against the painted walls.
Drums from the outer gate beat a slow, patient pattern. Somewhere under that rhythm, old women’s chants threaded through the noise. Lineages unrolled like cloth, names stacked on names until they brushed the ears of the buried in the Ancestor Grove. The sound used to pull her like a hook. Now she read it the way she read the courtyard: where anger gathered thick, where fear ran thin, where trouble shivered the air. Mostly, she ignored it. Duty demanded a narrower focus.
The sanctuary’s sigils, black, white, red, stared back from the walls below, faces of Esu‑Odan and ancestor masks painted in quick, sharp lines. Crossed roads, forked tongues, split eyes. To most, they were warnings. To her, they were also locks. She had helped keep those locks unbroken, year after year, watch after watch.
Her iron bangles whispered at each step. The other guards on the wall‑walk kept proper spacing, boots thudding in dull unison, spears angled just so. From the ground, they would look like part of the architecture. Moving teeth set into the sanctuary’s rim. Mofeyisola let her gaze pass over the crowd, counting blades, noting clusters of men too tightly packed, arguments rising too sharp, the way smoke from the incense braziers twisted as if something unseen brushed through.
Nothing yet that required steel. Nothing that justified breaking the god’s peace.
Still, her neck prickled. The air tasted of river mud and iron and something waiting.
She barked a pattern of names and numbers, each syllable sharp as a spear‑butt on stone. The guard‑slaves under her charge moved as one body, not as men and women with their own small sorrows. A turn to the left, shields snapping up to catch the last light. A half‑step forward, spearpoints angling down toward the courtyard where tempers sometimes boiled. Another order, and they wheeled to face the river side, feet stamping in unison, the sound folding into the steady heartbeat of drums from the outer gate.
Iron bangles kissed and clinked on wrists and ankles, a thin bright music answering the duller thunder rising from beneath the earth where Yewandele’s forges lived. Hammer to anvil. Bangle to bone. A chain of sounds tying wall to courtyard to hidden fire.
To anyone below, it was only drill. Sanctuary discipline. Esu‑Odan’s teeth showing along the rim of his house. No one would see how Mofeyisola’s eyes slipped, between each shouted word, toward the river’s flicker. How her lids narrowed against the glow like a farmer squinting at storm‑clouds stacking where the horizon should be.
At the edge of that gleam, he marked how the river’s skin buckled. Dark shapes slid out from under the bluff’s shadow. A knot of canoes, low in the water, nosed in toward the landing. Their paddles dipped with the ragged pull of men whose arms had forgotten steady farm work and learned only the grind of surf and lash. No trader’s easy stroke there. The hulls rode heavy, not with yam mounds tied plain in raffia or palm‑oil gourds creaking in open baskets, but with something that bent the water wrong. A sunk, secret weight. Tarpaulins cinched too tight. Bundles that did not roll when shoved. The river itself seemed to hesitate around them, as if listening for a name it did not like.
From that height, she watched them crawl like beetles over wet rock. Overseers’ voices cut the dusk, thin whips of sound. Iron kissed iron, a faint, hateful chime beneath the river’s hush. Bales wrapped too neat, handled too careful, slid from hull to shore as if they were sleeping bodies. No trader’s bustle. No open boasting. Only hurry and the smell of fear.
Recognition knifed through her. That limp. That narrow, sharp face turned too often toward the painted sigils. Deko. River‑rat. Oath‑twister. A name she had heard in murmurs about night landings and chains blessed in laughter. Her grip locked on the spear until her knuckles burned. Every tendon screamed to point, to shout. Instead she swallowed iron, smoothed her jaw, let her voice crack out another drill command, and paced on as if the river below carried only lawful trade.
In the barracks after drill, the air still tastes of dust and sweat. The echo of barked commands hangs under the rafters like smoke. Mofeyisola watches her guard-slaves fall into their familiar lines, wooden bowls in hand, bare feet scuffing the hard-packed floor in a tired shuffle that still holds discipline. The clang of ladles against iron pots rings out in the long room, sharp and steady, marking the slow return to routine the way a gong marks the turning of a watch.
Palm-oil lamps spit and hiss along the walls, throwing low, wavering light over iron bangles and scarred shoulders. The smell of boiled millet, dried fish, and woodsmoke wraps itself around the rank stink of worn cloth, old leather, and human bodies. A thin line of river-cool air slips in through the high vents, carrying the faint cry of some night bird and, beneath it, the slow suck of water against stone.
She stands with her back to the door, facing the length of the hall. No one passes in or out without sliding under her gaze. Names tick through her mind as bowls move forward and back. Old raid-wounds, fresh punishments, small loyalties, hidden mutters. Who needs calming. Who needs watching. Who can be trusted with a half-heard secret. Who will talk too freely if given palm wine.
The iron pots sit in a rough line along the fire trench. Men and women bend over them, steam wreathing their faces, softening hard jawlines into something almost childlike. A murmur runs through the room: low talk of aching backs, of a priest’s temper at the gate, of a cousin glimpsed in the Outer Courtyard and gone before a greeting could be called. Nothing about the canoes below. Nothing about Deko. Not yet.
A pair of younger guards try to hide snorts of laughter at some crude joke. She lets it run a heartbeat, then shifts her weight. Her bangles give a small, chiming warning. The sound ripples outward. Spines straighten. Voices drop. Order settles again, light but firm, like the weight of a practiced hand on a restless shoulder.
“Rations first,” she says, voice even, carrying just far enough. “Grumbling later. If the god hears you waste breath, he will take it as an offering.”
A few smiles flicker, nervous, grateful for the familiar rhythm of her dry half-threat. The line inches forward. Routine closes around them, a worn cloth pulled over sharper fears. Outside, the sanctuary mutters and shines. Inside, under cracked plaster and carved beams, Mofeyisola counts her people as they eat, filing each face away like a name on a tally-stick, like a debt she intends one day to see paid.
She moves along the benches with a ledger-sure gaze, the same steady weighing she once used to count yam heaps and seed gourds. A nod for more millet here, a flat palm for less fish there. No one dares complain the ladle has short-changed them when her eyes are on the bowl; they only shuffle, swallow, glance away. She notes who trades a strip of dried fish for an extra scoop of grain, who pushes their share toward a limping comrade without a word. Favors. Debts. Quiet loyalties she might one day need to call in.
When a sharp clatter of wood and a hissed curse flare from the far bench, she is already turning. Two women half-rise, shoulders tight, bowls forgotten between them. The old quarrel: whose turn to scrub the spear-racks until iron shines like river water at noon.
She lets silence stretch, then lifts one eyebrow. “Did Esu-Odan give either of you extra hands?” she asks, voice soft as ash.
Shame and a flicker of laughter cut their anger. They sit. “You’ll scrub them together,” she adds. “If the god wants more, he can come wash.”
The oil master brings the jar; Mofeyisola takes it, notching her thumb in the slick. One by one the lamp horns and shallow saucers pass through her hands to waiting fingers. As each pool of oil tips and settles, she names a post, north gate, inner corridor, armory threshold, shrine passage, her voice a dry thread stitching light to labor. “You, south wall. You, roof walk. You, barracks door till second gong.” A murmur answers her, the tone shifting from idle complaint to the clipped questions of people measuring hours and shadows. By the time the last wick is pinched and set, the room hums with talk of rotations, weak hinges, blind corners. Fear pressed down beneath the weight of task.
To the others she remains what they know, spine straight, bangles singing softly when she moves, voice measured as a priest’s drum, composed, dutiful, a pillar no quarrel can shake. Only when she turns from their circle toward the barred river-window does the stillness harden, the calm draw tight over cheek and jaw like cured hide stretched too far on a frame.
Beyond the grating, dusk pools purple over the water, river and sea breathing together in a slow, heavy sigh. Her jaw knots; for one bare breath the low mutter of the barracks thins to the remembered crackle of thatched roofs taking flame, to high, ragged shouts, to chains beating canoe-sides like mad iron drums: until she grinds her teeth and shoves the sounds back down into silence.
The river cave yawns cool and damp around them as Deko braces his bare feet on the slimy planks, passing one heavy, oil‑reeking bundle after another to the next man in the chain. The timbers sweat with old river slime; his toes curl, searching for grip. Each wrapped load thumps against his palms, soaked cloth binding whatever waits inside. Palm oil. Powder. Iron. Things men will burn and bleed for, things that will never belong to him.
Above, the last smear of sun bleeds along the horizon, turning the water to dull brass while the Landing itself sits in a half‑dark that feels watched. The light up there is soft, lying. Down here, under the bluff, it breaks in ragged strips through gaps in the rock and warped boards, smearing across their bent backs and the thick black rope of the mooring lines. River breath and sea breath meet in this hollow, salt, rot, fish guts, old offerings the priests pretend not to know about.
He works without looking at the men beside him. Canoe slaves like him, shoulders roped with the same labor, eyes going the same hard, empty distance when the bundles grow too heavy. Iron rings knock dully on the planks each time someone shifts their weight. Somewhere behind, a man coughs wetly, half‑choking on the moldy damp, but the bundle never stops moving from hand to hand.
Deko’s own ankle chains are light today, just a short length between his feet to keep his stride obedient. The overseer prefers it that way down on the Landing. They must move quick, but not too quick. Obedient, but not hopeful. The iron bites anyway. River damp has wormed its way into the old scars on his left leg; every shift of weight sends a thin, needling ache up his thigh. He rolls his shoulder, grimaces, passes another bundle along.
Something shifts in the black rock over his head. At first he thinks it is only bat shadow or the flicker of the pitch‑brand wedged into a crack near the cave mouth. Then he sees the mouth. Carved stone, half‑lost in slime and lichen. A small, smirking face just at the line where river water kisses the bluff when the tide is high. Teeth chipped by time. Eyes full of angles.
Esu‑Odan, watching his own back door.
Deko’s hands go cold on the next bundle. For a heartbeat his grip slips; the weight lurches toward the water. The man beside him snarls, jerks it back into the chain before it can tumble through the gap in the planks. The overseer’s whip cracks the air in lazy warning. Deko forces his shoulders to loosen, forces his jaw to unclench. Just a stone. Just a trick of light. Just another mouth waiting to swallow men’s oaths and spit back curses.
He swallows and spits, quick and low, between the planks into the sluggish black water. Not on the rock. Not on the carved face. Let the river take it. Let the spirits that live in the mud choke on it if they dare. His spit vanishes without a ripple.
From where he stands he can see, through the cave mouth, the path that snakes up toward the sanctuary, white dust striping the dark rock. A few torches burn there already, little orange teeth biting at the dusk. Tiny figures move along the path. Ants crawling toward the god’s laughter.
He counts without seeming to count. One, two, three torches spaced along the climb. A shadow where a side track splits off and hugs the bluff, half‑hidden by scrub. Two guards at the bend, their spears bright where they catch the last of the sky. One more shape above them, bulkier. Maybe a noble’s retainer. Maybe a priest. Maybe no one who would notice a single man slipping aside, moving between river and shrine like a fish diving from sun to shadow.
The bundle in his hands drips on his forearm, a slick trail of oil and river filth. He lets the numbers slide through his mind like beads on a cord. How many guards. How many bends. How many heartbeats it would take to vanish. How many lashes if he is caught. How many years left in his body if he does nothing at all.
Another crack of the whip. Another bundle. The cave breathes damp against his skin. Above, Esu‑Odan’s stone smile listens, amused.
The overseer moves slower than the bundles. Back and forth along the slick planks, bare feet slapping, iron beads at his wrist chiming each time the whip-hand twitches. The lash does not fall hard, not yet. It whispers. Testing the air, testing their nerves. A soft hiss, a little snap against damp skin. A stripe raised here, another there. Enough to sting. Enough to remind.
No one cries out. Not properly. A hiss of breath between teeth. A word bitten off and swallowed. Shoulders flinch, then square again. The chain of passing hands does not falter. Bundle from canoe to plank, from plank to shore, from shore to the shadowed gap in the bluff. River-slaves have learned the overseer’s moods the way Deko reads currents. This is not rage. This is maintenance.
Fear lies thick as old oil in the grain of the wood. Pressed down over seasons of runs like this. First time, a man jumps at every whisper of leather. Third season, his body moves without asking his mind. Duck, turn, pass. Obey. The lash becomes part of the work-song, another beat in the counting of loads.
When he finally dares to straighten, vertebrae popping like wet seeds under a pestle, his gaze snags on a small stone face sunk crooked where raw river rock kisses the first blocks of the sanctuary wall. Not bat shadow. Not stained lime. A mouth he knows. Esu‑Odan’s own sly likeness, worn by damp and time but still grinning, lips parted in a crooked laugh that shows chipped teeth and silence together.
For a breath it feels as if that mouth is drinking in the creak of rope, the soft grunt of men, the muffled thud of forbidden iron and powder. As if the god is balancing every bundle and every unspoken oath, weighing profit against punishment, counting, counting.
Unease crawls his spine like a wet centipede. He turns aside and spits into the murky current where torchlight dies, muttering that river spirits have fatter offerings to chew than one slave’s crooked thoughts. This is just another run, he tells himself. Another night of bundles and bribes skirting the god’s blind side. Keep the chain moving. Keep his head bowed. Keep his value high enough that no one thinks to throw him away.
As the canoes rock emptier against the pilings, his gaze keeps sliding to the narrow stair and goat‑track that zigzag from landing to gate. He notes which guards slump at the bend, which torches gutter low, which stretch of path lies blind to both overseer and shrine. With the right noise, the right lie, a man could pour himself into river mist, climb as shadow, and arrive at some new name beneath Esu‑Odan’s painted eyes. Not free, not that, but uncounted. Unclaimed. A gap in the ledger where a slave used to be.
By midmorning the rumor sharpens into detail, like a knife drawn slow along a whetstone. Not just any war‑canoe out beyond the river mouth, but one flying the split‑red banner of Olori Kanjora. That name moves through Ketu mouths like a bitter kola nut. Spat between teeth, wrapped in curses. Ademilade has heard it before, in broken stories along the coast: smoke over villages, chains bright in moonlight, children vanishing into black water.
In the sanctuary’s trading lane, market women falter in their calling. Pestles hang motionless above mortars. Fishmongers’ hands drip brine onto the packed earth, forgotten. Someone whispers, “Kanjora,” and someone else answers, “May his canoe split on a hidden rock,” but their voices lack weight. The air itself seems to listen.
Word reaches the Outer Courtyard like harmattan dust, thin at first, then thick in every breath: the envoys have passed the lower gate, coming up the river path beneath the bluff. Junior priests meet them there: boys in white and red cloth, foreheads streaked with chalk. Ademilade watches from the courtyard’s edge as these priests bend and smile, smiling too wide, bending too low. Their laughter sounds like cowries poured into a deep calabash.
He feels the old heat rise under his ribs. His blistered feet shift in the dust, but he does not move closer. He knows the way a field looks just before locusts fall: too quiet, too bright. The sanctuary feels like that now.
The bronze gong at the gate gives a soft, uncertain note. The carved faces on Esu‑Odan’s pillars catch the light; stone lips curve in half‑smiles, unreadable. Market chatter gutters and dies. No one is sure whether to draw nearer for spectacle or shrink back from sacrilege.
A boy runs past Ademilade, breathless, shouting to no one and everyone, “They’ve brought gifts! Iron! Cowries! Captives taken by law!” His words scatter like frightened birds, but the phrase clings: “taken by law.”
Ademilade’s hands curl, remembering the feel of a hoe that became a weapon too late. Law did not stand in his village that night. Fire did. Rope did. The law arrived afterwards, on other men’s tongues, to bless what had already been done.
Across the courtyard, an old woman at the kola‑nut stall mutters a lineage under her breath, calling ancestors to witness this morning’s turn. Ademilade almost joins her, throat working, but the names of his own dead stick like ash. Instead he watches the lower gate arch, where the junior priests’ obsequious smiles gleam like wet oil, and waits for the raiders’ feet to dirty Esu‑Odan’s red earth.
They come in a slow, rehearsed swagger, as if the courtyard were already theirs. The envoys stride onto the red earth beneath Esu‑Odan’s carved pillars, wrappers stiff with dried salt and spray, shoulders oiled, hair braided with tiny shells that click like teeth. Their wrists are heavy with cowries and iron rings that catch the sun and throw it back into the eyes of those who watch. Each step smears a damp trail of river mud over the swept ground, a quiet insult to the broom‑women’s morning labor.
Behind them stand Deko and a handful of slave‑marked sailors in ankle irons, bare chests smelling of smoke, palm wine, and the sea. The chains are light enough to move quickly, heavy enough to clink with every careless shift. Their bodies hang loose with practiced insolence, weight on one hip, mouths tilted in half‑smiles, as if they are men and not goods. But their eyes work hard. They flick to every exit and shadowed colonnade, gauging distances, counting guards, measuring how far the god’s protection might reach and where it might conveniently fail.
The lead envoy claps once, sharp as a cutlass on stone, and his boys move. Before the ring of gathered petitioners and stiff‑backed nobles, they unfurl their “gifts” with slow, taunting care. Bars of river‑smelted iron, dark and slick as drowned wood, thud onto the mats. Leather bags sag open to spill cowries stamped with foreign chiefs’ marks, each shell a tiny white eye. Last come the captives.
They are driven forward with flat palms and knotted ropes, made to kneel with faces to the sanctuary wall so that Esu‑Odan’s carved laughter will not meet their own. Ankles chained, backs striped from recent bindings, they tremble in the shade. The envoys call it order on the river. “Piracy tamed into law.” They promise that every neck‑ring stamped beneath Esu‑Odan’s gaze will swell the shrine’s coffers and keep the smith‑lords’ fires fat with work.
When they petition for “formal sanction” to hallow the River Landing as a staging place, their spokesman turns, slow and deliberate, toward the priests’ dais and the shaded balcony where Yewandele’s iron‑and‑gold crest hangs like a watching eye. He wraps the demand in sweetened proverbs and, with an easy shrug, proposes that ink and palm‑wine oaths can name slaves as “goods in transit,” their chains translated into tally marks, their bondage folded neatly beneath the clean, bloodless language of trade.
Ademilade, pressed in among traders and widows, feels the shift ripple through the crowd like a bad wind. He cannot hear the words but he reads the sailors’ posture, the priests’ narrowed eyes, the way one scribe pauses his scratching when a guard‑slave’s name is breathed. A shiver runs along the packed faces, and more heads turn toward the unseen slope to the river.
By dusk the heat has sunk low and sour, clinging to the red earth. Smoke from cooking fires and sacrifice pots hangs under the baobabs, stinging eyes, but the usual rattle of cowries at the courtyard’s edge does not come. It is like a missing tooth in a familiar mouth. People feel the absence before they name it.
“The ferryman?” a woman with salt‑streaked wrappers murmurs, shifting the child on her hip. “He should have come by now. He always comes when the judges sit.”
Her neighbor only shrugs, but his gaze keeps slipping to the narrow pass between the shrine walls, where the path drops toward the river. There, the evening light folds itself into a dark throat, thick with reeds and shadow. No crooked silhouette climbs it. No hoarse voice calls out greetings to the old stones.
Word moves the way it always does here. Under breath, along the line of clay pots and waiting mats, passed from the palm‑wine seller to the drummer dozing by his talking drum, from the drummer to the woman who plaits hair in the shade of the iroko. The old man who keeps the ancestor pots by the Landing has not come to knock his cowries, has not come to pour libation before the priests call names. The little clay faces at the river’s lip will go thirsty tonight.
Some say maybe his legs finally failed him. Some say he has gone upriver to bury a cousin. A boy with split reed sandals and a net‑rope burn on his wrist swears he saw the ferryman at noon, squatting by his cracked calabash, laughing alone at nothing in particular. By midafternoon, the boy says, the river had swallowed the old man’s song.
Ademilade hears only fragments, “not like him,” “never missed a judgment day,” “the ancestors don’t like to be neglected”, but the skin at the back of his neck prickles. Men like that ferryman were always there in his own village: thin, stubborn elders who knew each family’s dead by name and temper. Raiders burned them first.
A gust presses the murmur tight against the sanctuary walls. Someone clicks a tongue and mutters that Esu‑Odan loves such small disarrangements, that the god will send another old man in his place by morning. But others, older, watch the river path with narrowed eyes. It is not only ships and canoes that vanish on that water.
The priests on the dais do not look down toward the bluff. Their lips move over cases and contracts. Yewandele’s crest does not stir. Yet in the crush of bodies, Ademilade feels a thin thread tugging from the missing ferryman’s empty place to the new “gifts” gleaming on the mats, to the slope where the Landing lies unseen.
The wind from the sea shifts, bringing up the thick green smell of the river mouth. It tastes of mud, iron, and something freshly disturbed.
They had gone down laughing, those two attendants, jostling each other with calabash and chalk pot, told to “drag the old river‑rat up if he’s fallen asleep again.” When they come back, the laughter is gone. Their hems drip a thin line of brown water across the courtyard dust. Their faces look like clay left too long in the sun, cracked around the mouth, eyes refusing to settle.
They lean close to the supervising acolyte, speaking too low for most to hear, but the pieces leak out. The ferryman’s three‑legged stool lying on its side in the mud, one leg snapped clean. His cracked calabash found adrift, rocking itself in the shallows like a skull. The gourd of palm‑wine still beaded with sweat on the flat stone, half‑drunk, the rim smudged with his yellowed teeth marks, as if he only turned his head for a moment.
The clay around that stone is smeared in broad, broken arcs, heel marks wiped out by something heavier. Bare footprints twist and double back, swallowed under deep gouges where ankles in iron rings were braced and dragged. A scuffed drag‑line trails right to the water’s lip, then vanishes under the river’s slow, brown tongue.
In a side passage where the smell of river mud seeps up through the stones, a skinny boy with salt in his hair tugs at a guard’s wrapper. His eyes are wide and red‑rimmed from missed sleep. He insists he heard it: low voices arguing in the dark by the moored canoes, one rough with command, another shrill with fear, then a choked cry cut short and the heavy splash of something (or someone) hurled into the current. He mimics the sound with his hands, slap and sink. His words snag briefly in the air. A few older traders fall silent. Heads turn, quick and guilty, toward the envoys’ quarters and the path that slips down, unseen, to the hidden moorings below the bluff.
Before more questions can be asked, a senior priest in black‑and‑red beads appears, fingers stained with kola juice, and declares that the matter will be “examined in due course” by Esu‑Odan’s servants. His voice is oil poured over troubled water. The boy is briskly handed a wrapped parcel and ordered upriver to “deliver offerings at the satellite shrines,” his thin protests drowned beneath the clang of a gong summoning all to evening rites. A guard steers him toward the gate with a hand that looks gentle from a distance. By the time the courtyard settles again, the only proof of his story is the damp outline of his sleeping place among the rolled nets and a few grains of sand fallen from his bare heels.
Night folds tight around the bluff. Torches spit and sway along the paths, painting restless masks on stone. No hoarse chant rises from the Landing, no cracked voice calling ancestor names into the river’s throat. The silence beneath the water’s roar grows thin and sharp. By dawn, drums and horn‑blasts for the warlord’s gifts drown it. Priests fuss over kola and cowries. The old ferryman becomes a shrug, a half‑told whisper traded between calabashes: one more uneasy shadow clinging to the news that raiders now seek Esu‑Odan’s laughing stone to shelter their canoes.
The lesser priest, sweat beading along his hairline despite the morning cool, murmurs perfunctory invocations as he steers Ademilade through knots of traders, petitioners, and gossiping elders toward a clear view of the main altar. His fingers brush Ademilade’s elbow just enough to guide, just enough to warn. “Mind your tongue,” he breathes, half‑prayer, half‑threat, as they slip past an old woman muttering lineages into a calabash and a knot of youths arguing in low tones about bride‑price and fishing rights.
The crowd’s low buzz thickens, then breaks into respectful silence as the coastal envoys step forward. Bare‑chested and oiled, skin gleaming like wet stone, they move with the slow boldness of men who have never been turned from a gate. Their escort of slave‑marked sailors forms a wary half‑circle behind them, iron at their ankles, charms at their throats. Ademilade’s eye snags on the iron, on the way one man’s chain bites into swollen flesh, on the bored, distant stare of another who has learned to keep his face empty while his masters bargain.
His guide stops at the shadow of a carved pillar whose twin faces (one laughing, one weeping) stare down at the scene. The priest bows shallowly and gestures for him to do the same. Ademilade lowers himself, spine stiff, the red dust cool against his toes. The priest’s tone slips into rote piety as he names the god of crossroads and “fortunate bargains,” each practiced phrase rolling out smooth as palm oil.
Ademilade tastes grit behind his teeth. “Fortunate for who?” the thought flares, quick and hot, but he swallows it with the same care he used to swallow smoke the night his village burned. Around him, bodies press in, breathing one breath. Some eyes gleam with hope of trade, some with fear, some with the flat resignation of bond‑folk who know that every new oath tied here might tighten a chain somewhere else.
On the steps before the altar, one envoy raises a hand. A junior drummer cuts the rhythm. Silence pools, thick and expectant. The lesser priest at Ademilade’s side straightens his shoulders, as if the god himself had just leaned closer to listen.
At Esu‑Odan’s black‑and‑red altar, priests in layered cloth marked with forked sigils spread out a white goatskin, hair turned inward, flesh side gleaming faintly with chalked symbols. Cowries glint along its edge like small, watching teeth. The envoys begin to lay down their offerings one by one: rings of bright brass that chime against one another, jars of imported palm wine beaded with sea‑salt sweat, bolts of sea‑dyed cloth that fall in blue‑green waves, smelling faintly of rot and foreign resins. Last comes a small chest that clinks heavily when they set it upon the stone, iron corners biting the altar.
A senior priest laughs softly, the sound too smooth, and taps the chest with a staff carved in twisted spirals and crossroads knots. Oil catches on the wood, makes the spirals look like snakes.
“Does our lord prefer the shine of metal,” he purrs, “or the music of profit?” His words float out over the crowd like kola‑spit, half blessing, half insult.
Uneasy amusement ripples through the onlookers. Ademilade feels the old shrine‑etiquette of his childhood twist sour in his gut, every proverb about honest sacrifice curdling on his tongue.
At the line’s far edge, half‑eaten by torch‑shadow, stands a wiry sailor with iron biting his ankles and a carved wooden charm resting in the hollow of his throat. His head is dipped just enough that his face blurs into anonymity, but the small hitch in his left leg as he shifts weight, the way his shoulders hunch as if always waiting for a thrown fist, strike Ademilade like a hand closing on his windpipe. Breath deserts him. The carved pillar, the murmuring crowd, the goat‑skin at the altar all smear and run. River‑smell shoves out incense. In its place: pitch and blood, war‑canoe thudding under his feet, torches flaring on black water, that same compact frame outlined in leaping firelight as villagers screamed and were hauled aboard like struggling fish.
The priest at Ademilade’s side tugs his sleeve, mistaking his rigid stillness for awe, and breathes a glib gloss of the rite into his ear: how the warlord’s men only wish to “regularize” their canoes at the River Landing, to let Esu‑Odan “turn suspicion into trust and disorder into orderly trade, as is fitting.” By the altar, an envoy with gold‑capped teeth flings his arms wide and proclaims that their master comes as a friend, desiring merely safe passage for “honest commerce along the Ketu waterways, under the god’s smiling eye.” To seal the lie, another sailor kneels and tips open the clinking chest, strings of cowries spilling like pale seeds, a glint of worked iron winking up that makes the nearest priest’s gaze sharpen and brighten like metal meeting fire.
“Honest commerce.” The phrase drifts over heads and hanging charms, sweet to most tongues, bitter as burnt yam on his. Ademilade tastes river mud and blown‑ash roofs. He remembers the ferryman’s empty jetty at dawn, the silence after. The envoy’s patter beats like paddle‑strokes before a raid. Beside the piled gifts, Deko’s bowed skull and slave‑rings stamp the lie into iron. The same hands that dragged his kin in chains now stretch toward Esu‑Odan for shelter. Ademilade digs his nails into the pillar’s grooves until old shrine‑scar scars prickle, swallowing rage like a live coal. He forces himself to stand, to listen, to remember every word.
Ademilade shifts deeper into the shadowed bend of the passage, back pressed to stone still faintly warm from the day’s heat. Sweat slicks between his shoulders and the rock, turns dust to paste. The air here tastes of old incense and river‑damp, the two scents wrestling in his nose. Voices seep through the carved lattice like smoke: a priest reciting the names of rivers and headlands in a slow, sing‑song cadence, an envoy answering with the times when tides rise thick and fast, perfect for slipping heavy canoes past watchful villages.
He lets his breath fall shallow, ribs barely moving, as if the stone itself is holding him. The lattice patterns break the lamplight beyond into small, trembling squares that creep over his fingers. He closes his eyes and lets their words paint maps over the darkness. Headland after headland, creek after creek. Mouths of rivers he has stood beside with a hoe in his hand. Coves where he once watched fishermen mend their nets. Now, in these men’s mouths, each place is not a home or a story but a notch in a hunting route.
They speak of sandbars that snag the unwary, of channels that stay deep even at low tide. Of how smoke from cooking fires on certain bluffs can serve as waymarks in the night: signals read from afar by men who come with ropes already coiled. They talk of where village drums fall silent near dawn, when fear is heaviest and watchfulness is thin. Their words move like a canoe sliding along reed‑choked banks, hugging darkness, gliding just out of sight.
His fingers curl against the wall, nails scraping lightly. He forces himself not to spit, not to curse, not to give the stone a witness it might carry back into the chamber. He traces, in his mind, the long curve of the coast where his own world burned: the wide estuary where the war‑canoes first appeared like black teeth against the sunrise, the narrow inlet where smoke from his village had once risen straight and calm before it twisted into a storm. Every place they name he anchors to a memory (of a face, a field, a particular bend of the road) for fear that if he lets those names belong only to raiders’ tongues, his dead will be exiled twice.
A priest laughs softly at something the envoy says about “avoiding unnecessary alarm.” The sound has oil on it. They debate which stretches of river are already cowed, where chiefs have learned to look away once a “proper share” is promised. They speak of the sanctuary’s blessing as if it were another kind of tide: something that, once turned in their favor, will carry them swift and safe along blood‑marked water.
Ademilade listens until the map they build begins to knot itself around the sanctuary like a noose. The River Landing below the bluff. The fork where village canoes turn back in awe of the god’s house. The hidden mouth of a side channel that leads beneath the walls. With each calmly spoken detail, he feels the space around him shrink, as if the stone itself is learning new paths for chains to follow.
He opens his eyes to the thin line of lamplight cutting across his feet. His world has already burned once. Now they are drawing careful lines to carry that same fire under Esu‑Odan’s laughing stone face. He presses his spine harder into the warm rock, as if he might burn his own map of grief and rage into the sanctuary’s bones.
The rustle of a scroll being unfurled scratches at his nerves, dry against the humming air. Someone, envoy, by the coastal slant of his vowels, begins to read a list that is not of harbors but of people. Each name is followed by the soft clatter of cowries dropped into a wooden bowl, shell on wood like teeth on bone: a gate‑guard at the river stair, a steward over stores, a night‑watch captain on the eastern wall, a clerk in charge of entry tallies, a shrine‑sweeper who sleeps near the side gate. Each life reduced to a role, each role weighed and priced.
None of the priests object to the naming. No one asks why a god of crossroads needs such careful keys to other people’s doors. Instead, their questions glide around the edges: are these “hands” discreet, do they pray regularly, are they known to “revere Esu‑Odan’s mysteries more than village gossip?” Can their loyalty be written as devotion to the god, stamped clean in the shrine records, so that when they open a gate for raiders it will look, on paper, like piety?
The scroll-voice reaches a line and pauses on a title he knows too well, a post Mofeyisola once wrote of in charcoal-smudged scraps ferried along trader paths. Inner watch. Third gate from the shrine. His heart slams once, hard, then hammers wild, a bird flinging itself against cage bars. The envoy remarks that certain guard-slaves in that tier “already bend when river captains lean,” that some have sons and sisters vanished seaward, kept dangling like hooks in distant water. A lighter chain for a cousin, a flogging diverted to some nameless field-hand, and eyes will glaze at the right moment for the rest of their lives. The priests murmur of “maintaining order” and “shielding the sanctuary’s reputation,” stepping delicate circles around the iron fact of bondage, as if leaving the word unsaid can scrub the blood from it.
Another voice, smoother, suggests how the words might be twisted: grain tallies and canoe‑repair fees that in truth mark the weighing and sale of human bodies; schedules of “ritual processions” whose drumbeats will cover the loading of bound captives at the river landing. “If the oaths are spoken here,” a priest muses, “they will be seen as blessings on trade, not bargains over flesh.” A dry chuckle answers him, then a hush, the kind that falls when men feel a god listening. Laughter, low and uneasy, crawls along the stone, and Ademilade feels the corridor tilt under his bare feet, as if the whole sanctuary were slowly sliding toward the river’s dark mouth.
Then an envoy, almost reverent, breathes that with such arrangements “every raid from here to the western shoals will pass safely beneath Esu-Odan’s laughing face, under the shelter of his crossroads, counted as lawful passage, not theft.” The boast slams into Ademilade like a hammer striking half-cooled iron. Sparks of memory fly: village fields lit by burning roofs, the river gleaming red between thrashing bodies, Mofeyisola’s voice torn away in the roar. This is no petty bribe but the spine of a new order, a road of iron and blood with the sanctuary as its beating heart. He presses his brow to the sweating stone, breath ragged, understanding that if this bargain hardens, the path that destroyed his world will be paved and blessed, branching like river mouths until the whole coast lies hooked in its glittering net.
Robes whisper as men shift on their mats. Cowries clack softly in a diviner’s calabash. A rustle of cloth and iron charms answers the envoy’s proposal as the senior priest of the Forked Roads leans forward, wrists heavy with red‑black beads that catch the lamplight like tiny, watching eyes. His lips twist in a smile that does not touch his gaze.
“Esu‑Odan opens paths for bargains,” he says, voice smooth as palm oil poured over flint. “He carries words between mouths, he carries oaths between hands.” His fingers trace a lazy sign in the incense‑smoke, the forked crossroad mark that is both blessing and warning. “But he does not bind his own hands to any man’s chain.”
There is a ripple of relieved laughter, light and rehearsed, like a chorus they have all learned by heart. A few elders slap their palms softly against their thighs, as if to dust off the notion, as if the very idea of sanctifying raids were an amusing misunderstanding tossed up by ignorant sailors. Jokes rise to meet the fear: talk of fools who tried to yoke a trickster, of goats that thought they could lead the butcher.
“The god is not a warehouse clerk,” someone chuckles. “He does not count bodies like cowries.”
“Nor is he a war‑chief,” another adds quickly. “He blesses crossroads, not ambushes. Men choose what they carry along his paths.”
Their words skate over the heavy silence beneath. No one speaks of the iron to be hammered into ankle rings. No one names the faces that will vanish into those “paths.” They circle the envoy’s offer like men testing a snare with their toes, laughing, shaking their heads, pretending it is only a child’s trap, while their eyes, in the lamplight, gleam with calculation.
Somewhere behind the polished phrases, Ademilade hears what none of them will say aloud: that a god who will not be chained might still be hired to look away.
Yet when a younger priest objects (voice rough with real fear, speaking of ancestors dragged from their soil and of shrines left cold and nameless) the envoy only inclines his head, patient as a man baiting a trap.
Not slaves, he says, but “secured labor,” bound by ink and witness instead of cutlass and rope. Not raids, but “corrective expeditions” to tame “disorderly” villages that refuse proper tribute. Not bondage, but “service under witnessed agreements,” each brand on a shoulder translated into a neat line on a palm‑leaf scroll.
At a gesture, the coastal men unroll those scrolls. Palm leaves crackle like dry bones as they spread across the mat. By torchlight, the inked columns gleam: tallies of kola nuts, cowries, iron ingots, jars of palm oil. Here and there, a mark that could be a name, could be a number, could be a life folded into trade.
They speak of how names and prices can be tucked beneath cargo lists, how every human sale can be folded into ordinary commerce, so that even the gods, looking down, will see only baskets and tools moving along the river’s path.
As the torchlight flickers over carved stone faces, the tone in the chamber shifts, soft laughter drying into tight, measuring silence. Where moments before the priests spoke of taboos and reputations, now they begin to ask different questions, testing edges like smiths tapping cooled metal. Could such contracts be worded so that responsibility falls on distant captains rather than on the sanctuary? Might oaths be framed as protections for “goods in transit,” with no mention of who or what those goods are? Could a blessing over river safety be stretched, with careful phrasing, to cover chains without ever naming them? They chew the envoy’s poisoned kola, spitting out the word “slave,” but rolling “guaranteed delivery” and “secure passage” around their tongues.
One of the older councilors, her voice thin but sharp as a smith’s file, reminds them that Yewandele’s house is oath‑sworn to keep Esu‑Odan’s name clean of certain stains. The chief envoy bows low, crocodile‑smooth, and replies that this is precisely why they have come. To root their ventures in law and ritual, to let iron chains hide beneath silk words, to ensure every canoe passing the bluff does so under “orderly, god‑guarded custom.” The priests who balked at chains around human necks now haggle over clauses, exemptions, layers of witnesses, and how softly the true terms must be spoken so the god may pretend not to hear.
Outside the consultation room, where the torches burn lower and the air tastes of damp stone and old libations, junior acolytes and ink‑stained scribes move in narrow file, clutching message gourds and trays of kola. Their whispers bump like beads on a broken string. Only talks, they insist. Only testing of paths. The ancestors will balk. Esu‑Odan loves riddles, not raw shame. Yet when their steps draw near the recessed alcove where the grey‑bearded ferryman once sat, back against the wall, spinning river stories of overturned war‑canoes and slavers swallowed whole, their gazes skid aside. The stool is empty, its mat rolled away, its calabash cup gone. No one names the plantation that claimed him. They walk faster, sandals slapping, as if speed can carry them past the place where refusal used to sit, and where, in their silence, a thin, new agreement has already started to grow.
By the time the priests file out and the last of the envoys’ formal bows are offered, Ademilade has already heard the crier’s bell before he hears the words. A hard, bright clanging that cuts through the murmurs in the courtyards like a machete edge through cane. The man in red-and-black beads strides beneath the painted walls, voice trained to carry over market noise and ancestor wailing alike.
“Seven days of listening at the crossroads,” he calls, repeating it in three tongues, so no one can pretend confusion. “Seven days Esu-Odan has demanded. Seven days before any covenant is sealed.”
Around him, people breathe out as if this is mercy. A stay of the knife. The crier’s phrases are washed with piety: time for oracles to cool the head, for elders to pour palm wine and consult the bones, for the god to turn the matter over on his tongue. He speaks of patience, of caution, of how a trickster must be courted slowly lest his favor twist.
Ademilade hears only the frame hiding the blade.
Seven days with the warlord’s men inside the sanctuary. Seven nights their anklet-bells and quiet laughter will move through guest quarters and inner yards, under Esu-Odan’s own carved stare. They will eat from the same kitchens as the priests, wash their hands in the same basins where supplicants rinse away oaths and curses. They will sleep under roofs braided with charms against treachery and storm.
Seven days for their captains to learn every echo of the place. To map the sound of each gate bar, the rhythm of each watch-change, the softness of each noble’s spine.
“Honored guests,” the crier names them, and the words land like grit between Ademilade’s teeth. Honored, while iron still kisses their ankles. Guests, though the path they open leads back to burning that smells like his village.
In the shade of a baobab, women with market baskets nod, relief loosening their shoulders. A few old men chuckle and say that Esu-Odan has not yet sold his tongue. Young warriors lean on their spears and argue over whether seven days means the god leans for or against the river.
Ademilade watches the way their eyes keep drifting downhill.
Toward the bluff.
Toward the hidden stair he has never yet seen but can feel, like a splinter under skin, pulling.
He tastes the air. Incense. Sweat. A faint iron tang from below, where the river rubs itself raw against stone. The sanctuary’s paths seem to bend, ever so slightly, to funnel all movement toward the water.
Seven days, the crier proclaims again, circling the courtyard like a hawk. Seven days of “listening at the crossroads.”
Ademilade has walked enough forked paths to know when a choice has already been made and only the story is being stretched, so the fall feels like flight.
In the shade of colonnades and along the shadowed runs between barracks and kitchens, it travels mouth to ear instead of bell to crowd. During those same seven days, some of the guard-slaves (only a handful, the whisperers insist) are to be “reassigned” for special night duty along the bluff path and at the half-hidden stair to the River Landing.
No decree is shouted. No herald lifts a staff. It comes carried on the smooth tongues of scribes who pretend at boredom, clutching tablets streaked with fresh ink and stamped with sigils the ordinary eye is not meant to read. They say it is a trial rotation, nothing more. A kindness to weary feet. A tightening of the watch in restless times.
In the guard barracks, iron bracelets lie in neat rows on a mat, still warm from the smith’s quench. Their inner rims are etched not with the usual house marks of shift and gate, but with tiny forked strokes, crossing and recrossing like a laughing mouth. Esu-Odan’s sign, if one knows how to look. Duty shaped already like a bargain.
In the screened-off hollow of the Inner Shrine, where direct blood and direct blows are both forbidden, another kind of violence takes shape. Priest-scribes unroll palm-leaf and cured hide, dipping reed pens into soot-black ink mixed with kola and a shaving of river clay. Their tongues move in patient tandem with their hands, testing phrases on the air before cutting them into law.
Oaths are braided like ropes with hidden knots. A vow “to keep the god’s chosen pathways to the water clear and secure” curls back on itself until “pathway” may mean slave-chain, “secure” may mean gag and fetter. Another line binds “eyes that do not look away when profit passes,” which sounds like vigilance until one hears what is not said.
Names are floated like cowries on water. Mofeyisola. Others from the barracks. Each syllable followed by dry remarks on how steady their spear-arms, how seldom they question, how much their fear of sacrilege outstrips their hunger for freedom. One steward notes who still pours libation with both hands, who flinches when a priest raises his voice, who has surviving kin in the outer towns that could be threatened.
Marginal sigils sprout beside certain names: forked crosses, tiny hooked lines leading down toward a sketched wave-mark. River duty. Bluff duty. “Temporary reassignment under divine trial,” one clause hums, offering piety as a sheath. Another buries, three lines deep, permission for “necessary restraint of unsettled bodies,” a phrase elastic enough to wrap any cruelty.
For now, these test oaths are to be spoken softly before side-altars, little, watching faces of Esu-Odan set into niche and pillar. Incense will thicken the air until words blur, praise-singers will pound drums and pour out bright strings of flattery to drown the sharp click when a name meets a chain. On the surface, it will look like promotion: select guards stepping forward to receive fresh bracelets, new duties, the god’s supposed favor.
Underneath, in the ink, the river already owns their nights.
Dismissed the moment his usefulness as spectacle ends, Deko is waved from the audience hall like smoke. In a side chamber, a junior priest thrusts a wax-sealed packet into his hand, eyes sliding away, voice clipped: no lingering, straight to the river, “for your captain alone.” “Preparations at the water’s edge,” the man murmurs, oily with courtesy that never quite reaches his gaze.
Two temple guards fall in beside Deko as he’s hustled through shadowed corridors and down toward the bluff path. Their spears rest easy on their shoulders, their contempt does not. One spits in the dust just ahead of his bare, iron-weighted feet. Ship-slave. River chattel. Not worth a curse unless he disobeys.
The path tilts under him, old limp flaring at each step, but the ache is an old friend. Below, the Ketu River glitters between stone teeth, the landing tucked like a secret in its gums. He feels the current’s pull in his bones, that low humming promise of escape and drowning both.
Seven days those envoys will sleep under Esu-Odan’s charms. Seven nights boats will nose the cliff like dogs at a back gate. With sealed orders in his hand and priests drunk on “hospitality,” Deko tastes something sharper than river salt.
Seven days to learn every echo between shrine and shore. Seven nights to sell whatever he maps.
Heat presses like a palm on the back of his neck. Each bell-stroke feels out of joint, too slow for the danger it names. Seven days? Raids were made in less. Villages burned in the time it took a goat to wander home. His own had.
He shifts his weight, blistered soles stinging against sun-hot stone, and forces his breathing to steady. If the noose is being braided in daylight, the knife must be shaped in shadow. His gaze snags on a knot of guard-slaves crossing the court, iron bangles chiming like small, bitter bells. One walks with Mofeyisola’s stride, broad-shouldered, head high despite the chain. For a heartbeat his vision narrows, throat tightening. Not recognition, but the nearness of it.
He drags his eyes away, following instead the lines of movement that most people do not see: the way priests drift, always, toward the Inner Shrine; the way stewards angle their steps so their paths might “accidentally” cross those of chosen guards; the way every errand, every scroll, every murmured invitation seems to tilt downslope, toward the hidden stair and the smell of river-mud. The sanctuary hums like a hive just before swarming, all its ordered cells preparing to pour themselves in one direction.
If the first kneeling comes at the main altar, before Esu-Odan’s laughing stone, it will not be only a guard’s tongue that’s caught. The oath will hook itself into ancestral names, into the old oath Yewandele’s house swore to keep this place clean of certain stains. It will slide barbs into the praise-songs sung here, into the stories of justice that villagers carry back to their compounds. Every future bargain will catch on it, as on a buried hook. To tear that free later would be to rip through more than brick and carved pillar. It would mean dragging god-face and ancestor-mask into the dust, making open enemies of powers that prefer to work behind veils.
He tastes iron, realizes his jaw is clenched hard enough to bruise his own tongue. Seven days. Not a reprieve. A count. A slow, measured drumbeat to the moment when blood and chain will be called “contract” before a watching god.
Yewandele pauses at a nondescript wall shrine where petitioners have left kola nuts and cowries, the little heap already fattened with red palm oil and the ash of old prayers. Her fingers move among the offerings as if merely straightening them. Ademilade watches the way her calloused thumb brushes a cracked kola nut, the way her rings click softly against the stone bowl. To any onlooker she is a noble woman tending a god’s plate.
Then her hand slips higher, into the soot‑blackened shadow beneath a carved wooden mask of Esu‑Odan. The trickster’s lips are split in a crooked laugh, eyes drilled through so that darkness peers back. She finds something behind that leer. A ridge of iron. A notch.
With a practiced twist she presses the hidden catch. The stone slab beside the shrine shivers. Incense smoke trembles. A thin line opens in the painted wall, widening into a vertical mouth. Cool air breathes out, coal‑scented, edged with river damp and old metal. It swallows the courtyard noise, the muttered petitions, the clink of chains, the women reciting lineages, until all that remains is a hollow hush.
Yewandele does not bow or whisper any apology to the mask. She only glances once at Esu‑Odan’s laughing face, as if measuring what price he will demand for this trespass. Then she steps through the opening without ceremony, wrappers whispering against stone.
At the threshold she tilts her head, a small, sharp motion, inviting Ademilade to follow. Not a plea. Not a command. An offer laid at a crossroads.
He feels the pull of it in his chest. One more door that cannot be unopened. One more path chosen in a house that belongs to a god he does not trust. Behind him, sun‑hot dust and open sky. Before him, the cool throat of the sanctuary’s secrets.
He shifts the weight of his bundle on his shoulder, fingers brushing the worn handle of his hoe, and steps after her into the dim, knowing that whatever waits below will not leave his rage unchanged.
The stair beyond tilts his body forward, dragging him down. Steps hacked straight from the bluff’s spine drop in a tight spiral, each tread cupped and thinned where countless, careful feet have worn a shallow basin. Damp beads on the stone, cold against his fingers. Ademilade keeps one hand on the wall, letting his palm ride the sweat-slick curve of it, mapping as he moves. Here, the rock dips inward, a natural hollow where a man might press himself flat. There, a rougher patch where iron has bitten deep, leaving parallel scars like claw marks. Under his feet, grit shifts. Coal dust, not courtyard sand.
He counts without meaning to. Twelve steps, a turn. Twenty more, a tighter bend. He folds the numbers away as he once folded planting cycles into his bones. Above, the courtyard thins into a woolly hum. Below, other sounds rise to meet it. A hidden river whispering through stone throats. A low, steady pounding that is not his heart. Hammer on anvil. Hammer again. The pulse of the sanctuary’s buried work, beating like something alive and listening.
At each turn, Yewandele brushes some small, half‑hidden mark: an ochre triangle tucked into a crack, a thumbprint of palm oil gone sticky with dust, a single nail head driven so smooth into the stone it is more idea than metal. Wards. Permissions. Quiet bargains nailed into the rock. Ademilade does not know the full tongue of such signs, but he feels the way they thin and thicken the air, the way the river’s whisper shifts after her touch, as if unseen mouths mutter, “Let them pass.” The path forks, reforks. She never pauses, never sniffs the air, never glances back. Of course she knows. Nobles always know the back doors while villages like his burn outside the front gate. The thought bites deep. Still, he keeps her silhouette framed in the curl of the stair, tracing each branching in his mind like furrows he will one day walk alone, when he must descend without her and without permission.
Heat thickens as they spiral lower, a slow bloom that beads sweat along his spine despite the stone’s cool damp under his fingertips. The hammer‑ring resolves into distinct tempers: one slow and measured like a ritual drum counting hearts, another quick and staccato, arguing against it, a third distant and faltering, as if some apprentice iron were learning how to take a blow. At the bend ahead, sparks leap and vanish, orange ghosts flaring against the curve of rock, and with them comes the breath of the hidden chamber: burning charcoal, scale, hot iron, and something sharper underneath. The iron‑rich tang of blood quenched in metal, familiar from village shrines yet heavier here, thick as spilled promises, as if broken oaths themselves had begun to smoke.
The stair throat spits them out without warning. The rock falls away into the Oath‑Fire Forge, a vast wound bitten from the bluff and ribbed with soot‑black beams hung with twisted‑wire charms, cowries, rusted bells mute from long smoke. Braziers squat along the walls, their coals banked to a steady white‑red that throws everything into hard, unforgiving planes: ranked anvils like altars, racks of shackles and hooks, tongs and brands, lengths of chain coiled like sleeping serpents. Iron masks of Esu‑Odan stud the pillars, each face hammered into a different slyness: one laughing, one yawning wide, one split down the middle as if mid‑decision. Ademilade checks himself at the threshold, sliding his shoulders to the rock, feet braced on bare stone, letting his gaze comb every alcove, every shadowed niche, counting doorways, quench‑pits, ladder‑holes. No cough of hidden guards, no rustle of cloth; only the heavy breath of the fires and the small, dry sounds of charms twisting in the heated air, as if the god’s many mouths are already tasting his presence.
Ademilade forces himself closer, until the heat breathes against his face and the chain’s shadow lies across his bare feet like a test. The iron’s skin is not smooth. It is pitted, ridged, as if each link has been worried by teeth. Those knotted‑path scripts do not sit still. The longer he stares, the more they seem to bend, doubling back on themselves, turning simple curves into crossroads, crossroads into snarls. The tiny eyes cut into the opposite side catch the lamplight in pinpricks, dull yet intent, a whole colony of watching things pretending to be metal.
His fingers twitch toward the chain, then tighten into fists at his sides. Sweat crawls down his ribs, gathering in the shallow valleys of his old scars. The lines there: once clean cuts made with new razors and clean kola juice, the night he first swore before his village shrine to guard his mother’s compound and his father’s yam mounds. Flare hot, then hotter, until it feels as if someone has pressed a cooking iron flat against his skin. His breath hitches. The pain is not just in the flesh. Something in the air tastes him, follows old grooves under his skin, runs counting fingers along every promise that has cracked under fire and iron and the night of the raid.
The chain hums, low and hungry, as if answering his unspoken flinch. For a heartbeat he smells not coal and forge‑smoke but burning thatch and singed hair, hears not hammers but the remembered clatter of manacles thrown from a canoe to waiting hands. The iron between Yewandele’s palms feels like the same metal that pinned his people’s wrists, yet thicker with purpose, swollen with all the words men like him once shouted at the sky and could not keep. It is as if the links lean toward him, measuring his weight, asking without mercy what he has done with the vows that raised those first scars.
She does not lift the chain as if it were only weight. Her hands slide under it with the care of a midwife catching a child. When she lays the first links across her broad forearms, the anvil light crawls over them like oil over a black river. Yewandele names the metal with a smith’s precision, each word falling like a hammer‑blow: sworn‑iron, ore smelted in silence, tempered in sacrificial blood, dedicated to Esu‑Odan’s “straightening” of crooked tongues. She tells him this is iron that has drunk more vows than rain, iron that remembers. These are not common shackles. They were hammered during midnight rites where priests and nobles stood as witnesses, bare feet on consecrated stone, palm wine on their breath, lineage names on their tongues, swearing that whoever wore these links after breaking a public oath would feel the god’s laughter twist their luck, their mind, their children’s futures until they crawled back to truth or madness. “They listen,” she says at last, tapping one link so it gives a thin, shivering ring. “Not only for oaths made here. For any words you toss carelessly into the air and dare the crossroads to carry.”
She shifts her weight, crosses to a side rack where thicker cuffs sag from pegs, some blunt as plow‑rings, others set with river pebbles and pale cowries that wink like teeth. Her calloused thumb traces a particular pair, their insides smoked black and slick as if from old sweat. Only when she tilts them toward the brazier does he see the hair‑fine script cut along the inner curve, looping in on itself like ant trails. These, she tells him, were born the season coastal chiefs first stood beneath Esu‑Odan’s masks and swore to tame their hunger: to raid only in “lawful war,” to leave sanctuary roads and shrines untouched. The iron took that word. Each time canoes slipped past those bounds (night snatches, market kidnaps, sacred groves trampled) no links were clasped on raider wrists. New metal was hammered quietly onto the chains that waited here for the chiefs and nobles who fattened on the trade, their ears stuffed with cloth against the crying the sea carried upriver.
When she faces him again, she lets the chain spill from her grip, a slow black current pooling between her palms, etched eyes winking in the forge‑glow like fish in deep water. Her voice does not rise. She says her own house quenched such links, helped twist the first pacts into pretty talk of “order” and “lawful taking,” while canoes slid out at dusk and returned at dawn with decks slick from weeping. They stood here, she says, between furnace and flood, telling themselves that if hunger wore the clothes of oath and altar, it offended the gods less. Her gaze never leaves his. “But the iron,” she adds, giving the chain the smallest shake so it shivers, “kept count of every scream that passed beneath a sealed promise.”
Only then does she name the newest design: river‑oath chains cooling in a side alcove, shaped for wrists and throats of guard‑slaves like Mofeyisola, links thin as mercy, strong as spite. If priests bless them and nobles consent, she warns, any step toward escape will ring in Esu‑Odan’s ears as treachery. Such bonds will not merely hold flesh; they will hook the wearer’s own tongue, turn every whispered wish for freedom back on itself, souring luck, driving helpers mad, until even dreaming of flight feels like calling a curse down on one’s blood.
Deko lets the dust-smear of the canoe stretch longer, its prow nudging an invisible shore. “You think the captains love chasing goats through bush every planting season?” he asks, as if it is a joke shared between equals. “Cooking smoke, dogs barking, women throwing stones at the paddles? No. Too messy. Too noisy. Villagers remember your face.” He taps the drawn hull. “Better to have men already lined in rows. Already drilled. Used to orders.”
The boy shifts his spear from sweaty palm to sweaty palm. “We serve the god,” he mutters, half to himself. “Not…not any war-canoe chief.”
“Ah.” Deko’s tongue clicks softly. “You serve where your chains say you stand.” His finger adds little strokes along the canoe’s flanks, each mark a notional back bent to the paddle. “When the new words are spoken up there”, he jerks his chin toward the ceiling, toward shrines and altars and judging eyes, “these walls become like a safe pen. Tidy. Counted. No need to risk storms and rocks to fetch fresh bodies. The river just carries orders, not raiders.”
He flicks a glance at the barred door. “You mark how this postern opens?” he asks, as if testing the boy’s attention. “Not to the holy courtyards. Down. Always down. Toward landing and tide. Men who understand such doors get trusted with messages. With ‘transfers.’” His mouth twists around the foreign word.
The guard‑slave’s throat works. “They would not sell us,” he says, but there is no weight in it. “We belong to Esu‑Odan.”
“Belong,” Deko echoes, tasting the word like sour palm wine. “You think the god leaves his own house to bargain on the docks? No. That is for chiefs, for scribes with soft hands.” He brushes dust from his knuckles, careless. “There is one scribe‑priest here. Little belly, ink always on his nails. He will sign anything if the ink smells like palm wine and the cowries clink loud enough. Transfer papers. New rosters. Fresh ‘duties.’”
He looks past the boy now, as if seeing the river through rock. “You wake one morning, they tell you your watch is changed. No more shrine door, no more courtyard. Just a rope ladder down to a canoe with painted eyes.” His voice stays light, but something in it hardens. “You climb because the god’s name is on the tablet. Because your oath says obey. By the time you taste the sea-salt proper, your feet already forget the feel of this red earth.”
The torch spits resin. Far below, the dull slap of water carries up the stone throat of the passage. Deko rises in a fluid motion that belies his limp, rolls his shoulders as if work is done. “Best hope,” he says, dusting his hands, “that when they start asking for names, your head stays small, your tongue stays quiet.” He lets his gaze rest a heartbeat on the boy’s thin neck, on the iron bangle there that is not yet a collar but could remember how to be one. “Men like our warlord, they don’t need to burn villages when shrines send them worshippers tied up in pretty words.”
The young guard‑slave, barely bearded, wrists ringed with iron lighter than Mofeyisola’s but just as real, swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing like something caught in a net. He risks a glance upward, toward the unseen barracks where snores and chain‑rattles filter faint through stone, as if some older, sterner overseer might be listening. No one answers. Only the slow drip of river‑sweat from the ceiling.
Deko leans in, close enough that the boy can smell kola nut on his breath, the river’s damp clinging to his skin. He bends and sketches the low, hungry curve of a canoe in the dust with one rope‑scarred finger. A prow. A thin spine. Little notches along the side like teeth. “They say new oaths are coming,” he says, almost lazy, voice rolling like shallow water over stones. “Chains that listen better than captains. Iron that hears you grumble in your sleep, that carries your name downriver faster than rumor.”
His finger taps one dusty notch. “When those are on you, a man like our warlord doesn’t need to raid your home. He just asks the priests for the ones who don’t sleep well. The ones whose tongues run like this river at flood.” He gives the boy a sideways look, measuring. “They’ll call it reassignment,” he murmurs. “Promotion, even. New post. New duties. Same chains. Different tide.”
The boy’s mouth works, words stumbling over his own fear. He mutters that the sanctuary is not a canoe yard, that Esu‑Odan’s eyes sit in every crossroads, that no one can be shifted like a yam sack without the proper palm‑leaf docket, the right sigils, the red thread through the knot. “There are rules,” he insists, voice cracking. “Marks. Witnesses. The god would see.”
Deko’s chuckle is a dry stone knocking another. It comes back to them from the curved rock, thin and cold. “You think the river cares who owns the paddle?” he says. “Down by the landing there’s a scribe‑priest with ink on his cuticles and wine on his breath. You sweeten his cup, and his god‑ink starts to stammer. Names blur. Duties swap places. A thumb smears one line, a reed‑pen twitches on another, and suddenly the docket says your feet belong to the planks of a war‑canoe instead of this red earth. The altar stamp is the same. The god’s name is the same. Only the road beneath your chains has changed.”
He only brushes the bars with his knuckles, not enough to draw a shout, just enough to make the loosened hinge whine like a throat clearing. “Hear?” he murmurs. “Door already learning to answer another master.” His gaze slides along sweating stone. “There’s one under the grain‑pits, another behind the palm‑oil sheds. Your captains count keys; my people count cracks. When those new oaths come, they won’t nail these mouths shut. They’ll teach them which way to swallow men.”
The boy’s bravado folds in on itself, leaving only a hard, wet shine in his eyes. Deko tastes it and files it away like a route between sandbars. His hand on the lad’s shoulder is light, almost brotherly, but his mind is busy measuring shoulders, counting links, tracing how sworn backs might be steered from this blind bend to the waiting tide, with dockets, sigils, and altar‑stamps all saying “service” while meaning sale. His careless talk of a priest who inks away scruples, of captains already tallying “sanctuary‑trained hands,” turns the corridor’s damp into something colder, a proof that the warlord’s shadow has already slipped, laughing, beneath Esu‑Odan’s painted eyes.
Ademilade watches the shackle vanish into the hissing basin. The water leaps and recoils as if something alive has been thrust under, steam coiling up in thin, pained ropes. It smells of quenched iron and old blood. The sound is too much like fat meeting fire on the night his village burned.
Yewandele’s hammer-hand hangs at her side, fingers still curled as if gripping an invisible handle. Her voice does not rise. That is how he knows the wound is deep. She names dates, councils, the quiet summoning of senior priests to this very underbelly of the sanctuary. How they stood where he stands now, nodding, their white-clothed shoulders shining in forge‑light while they agreed that “limited trials” could proceed. No full casting of cowries before the oldest mounds. No open calling of ancestor names in the grove. Only a muttered invocation here, beneath stone, where the river’s echo eats up doubt.
He hears more than corruption. He hears a tired truth, dragged at last into the smoke. The god’s own house is bending its doors, teaching its locks new tricks. These chains are not just for runaways and raiders. They are tools to swallow promises, to clamp down on any back that twitches toward refusal.
“Guard-slaves first,” she says, and he sees Mofeyisola without needing the name. Men and women who sleep in rows under painted sigils, who have bled for these walls, who have learned to call this bluff of rock a kind of shelter because the open sea means canoes and nets and the long scream toward a foreign shore. They trust the sanctuary’s rules, its rhythms, its watching eyes.
Now those same rules are sharpening their teeth. The test will be simple, the priests have said. A pledge of loyalty renewed. A way to prove that the new bindings only catch liars and rebels. The shackles will drink their words, taste their fear, and close coolly around both.
Ademilade feels the old rage rise: but narrower now, hotter, finding a channel in the grooves of iron Yewandele has shown him. The betrayal is not a single cut; it is a patient engraving, line after line, until even faith reads like a contract written in someone else’s hand.
Her words strip the shine from the walls. The orange wash of the coals turns sickly, like lamp‑light over spoiled meat. He sees, as she speaks, not priests but butchers in white cloth, their hands clean while the floor drinks everything. High voices blessing “order” while the knives work beneath the chanting.
She names them without naming: the chief diviner who insists the cowries are “unclear” while his nephews escort sealed baskets to river canoes; the grey‑bearded elder who preaches patience in the Outer Court, then comes down here at night to watch iron drink the breath of those with no escape. Petitions delayed. Consultations postponed. All the sacred delays lining up neatly with the warlord’s timetable.
Around them, the chains on their pegs look different. Not tools. Not protections. Hooks waiting for the first carcasses. The quench‑basin at his feet becomes a trough, ready to catch whatever spills when the test oaths bite down.
The forge had been a promise, in his mind: fire turning raw metal into something straighter. Now he hears only the slow, professional calm of people who learned long ago how to cut and call it sacrifice.
Yewandele lays out the lattice of obligations like iron bars, each crossing another until no path runs straight. Nobles sworn to keep Esu‑Odan’s house unsullied, yet forever haggling in back courtyards with men whose canoes come home heavy with chained bodies. Priests who stand in the Outer Court and pour palm oil for the ancestors, then slip below to this underbelly and quietly redraft what “protection” means: not shielding the weak, but guarding the shrine’s prestige, its tribute, its power to frighten. Merchants and war‑chiefs already lean over charcoal plans, seeing in these sigil‑cut chains a way to lock caravans to their ledgers, to leash captives and rivals alike, all under the god’s laughing seal.
He asks why none of them simply say no. Her jaw knots. She raps the basin’s iron lip; the dark water shivers, catching coal‑light like a watching eye. Then she speaks the heart of her house’s vow and turns it in her mouth, showing its barbed edges: how “integrity” has come to mean the walls, the coffers, the god’s reputation, never the people chained beneath. To strike openly at the raiders, she says, could be judged breaking that promise, tearing the roof down on ancestor and captive alike. So they patch over rot with fresh plaster, pray the smell does not reach the altar, and call that obedience.
She names, with a smith’s precision, each missing pillar he might have leaned on: the cautious land‑rich cousin who reads famine in every lost coin; the diviner whose bowl now clinks with foreign cowries; the rival house already counting how her fall would free this forge. One by one they vanish from his reach, until he sees it plain: when the storm hits stone, every roof with power will already be braced beneath oaths curled like snakes: tight enough to protect their holders, twisted enough to let him drown outside.
Yewandele lifts one of the manacles from the coals with iron tongs. It comes up glowing sullenly, sigils along its curve breathing dull red like banked anger. She sets it on the anvil between them, not gently, not harshly: just enough that the impact rings in the small chamber like a struck word. Between them. As if she has laid a question there, hot and waiting.
The forge feels tighter around him as the coal-smoke curls, heavy with iron and old sacrifice. Oil lamps smear light along the stone, making the carved faces in the walls seem to lean closer. Ademilade can taste salt and ash on his tongue. His blistered feet throb in his sandals; the heat licks his scars until they remember other fires.
Her voice comes low, ground down by years, edged like a file. No council, she says. No summoning of titled heads to pound staffs and declare his grief sacred. No drum-roll from the ancestor grove to bless a clean rising. Those paths are closed to him, mortared shut with things he has never touched: slave tribute, caravan levies, foreign iron bought with blood he can still smell.
She lists what stands behind each carved door above them: ledgers fat with names that were once people; shrines gleaming with offerings poured by hands that also seal raiding contracts; warriors whose spears are anointed here before they cross the river in the night. The god’s house, she says, floats on that flood. To demand justice in the open councils is to demand that they cut their own legs from under them. They will never do it.
If she presses them, they will not yield. They will hiss “sacrilege” like a curse and draw their oaths around themselves like iron cloaks. They will say she twists her ancestral vow for village quarrels, that she sets one god’s sanctity against the hunger of many households. They will point to these very flames and claim she profanes them with peasant anger.
Then, as one, they will turn. Not toward the warlord, not toward the canoes slick with river-dark water, but toward her. Close ranks, she says, the way soldiers close shields. Noble to noble, priest to priest, each more afraid of a cracked oath than a chained man. The sanctuary’s integrity will become their battle cry. And under its sound, whatever is left of his people’s story will be trampled flat and swept into the river tunnels where no one listens.
Her jaw tightens. The manacle smokes softly between them. All the straight roads he imagined, petitions, rulings, official decrees, melt in its heat, running like slag. What lies ahead of him now are only narrow tracks, crooked as Esu-Odan’s smile. Paths no drum will announce, no council will bless. Paths he must walk alone, with no shield but the weight of his own rage and whatever bargains he dares to strike in this god-haunted place.
She twists the manacle with the tongs until its glow licks the stone, tilts it so the inside faces him. There, half-hidden by soot and old oil, run tiny forked-road cuts, no thicker than ant trails. Every few finger-breadths the line splits, rejoins, doubles back on itself. Crossroads inside iron. Choice trapped and hammered flat.
She tells him how, when a name is spoken into that metal with the right invocations, the roads inside it close. The chain remembers. It hunts that name like a scent. On a prisoner’s flesh it is only weight and shame. On an oath-breaker, she says, it becomes a mouth. It claps. It does not open again until the god has taken his fee.
Her thumb runs, almost gently, along one glowing fork. Her own house’s praise-names live there; she laid them in with these same hands when she was younger and more certain. If Esu-Odan’s keepers declare her vow spoiled, those marks will answer their call before they answer hers. One public challenge, one word too sharp at the wrong altar, and she will not only lose forge and title. The very iron she fashioned to catch slavers will leap to catch her instead, her wrists locked in her own work while the raiders’ chains go on ringing downriver.
She does not speak the name into the iron; even hinting at it scorches the air. Instead she lays the manacle flat and paints the picture for him with spare, brutal strokes. Mofeyisola hauled in chains before the Forked Roads, accused of “confusing loyalties,” of letting village blood outweigh shrine law. Priests chanting, nobles nodding, warlord envoys watching with clean hands while the guard who once bled for the sanctuary is cut loose like bad meat. Her death would stand in place of justice. A sacrifice to prove the house still cleanses itself, while the real filth runs free. That, Yewandele says, is what this threshold does now: turns the bravest servants into offerings, so the powerful can walk away stainless.
Between hammer blows she sketches the only opening she can see: a hidden lattice of passages, servant corridors, ash-chutes, and river tunnels that cut through the sanctuary like nerves through flesh. Ademilade must learn their pulse. Slip along these unseen paths, listen at doors where nobles bargain over ledgers and shrines, watch who comes and goes from the river landing at forbidden hours. He must gather the small, sharp fragments of truth and carry them like barbed seeds in his memory until, brought together, they make denial impossible.
At last she meets his eyes across the anvil, forge-light catching the tired lines carved by years of holding back. When the proof is ready, she says, he must carry it alone into Esu-Odan’s brightest crossroads, before the main altar or in the outer court on a judgment day, where spoken tale hardens into iron and no official can kick it into some dark corner. She will not stand beside him; neither will Mofeyisola. No decree, no ritual shield, no noble drumbeat will claim his act as theirs. Yet the god will be watching, the oaths will be listening, and whatever storm he calls down will strike more than his own head: her house, Mofeyisola’s chains, every bargain grown fat on stolen breath.
Ademilade leaves the forge with the sting of Yewandele’s words still burning in his chest, the imagined weight of those inscribed chains ghosting his wrists. Heat follows him up the first stretch of steps, then falls away. The air thins. Coal smoke gives way to stone dust and lamp oil, to the faint wet breath of the river somewhere under the rock.
He moves through the dim service corridors toward the outer courts, shoulders brushing whitewashed walls smudged by generations of bare hands. Every branching passage feels like a choice: to sink back into the warren where nameless servants pass like ants, or to step toward the kind of storm that cannot be dodged. He thinks of village paths that once forked only toward farms and stream, simple roads that carried only harvest and gossip. Those crossroads burned with his home. These ones carry oaths.
He keeps to the quieter routes Yewandele indicated, low tunnels where the ceiling presses close and the lamps are few. Above, muffled, come the sounds of the sanctuary’s surface life: a drumbeat marking some minor rite, the thin wail of a petitioner, an iron bangle clinking in a guard’s stride. Down here, rats whisper in the walls. Ash-chutes breathe out faint warmth. The hidden lattice she spoke of begins to take shape in his mind, a ghost-map overlaying every turn.
He moves light-footed despite his blisters, pausing at each narrow grate and half-open door to listen. Snatches of speech drift down: priests debating fines, a steward tallying kola nuts and cowries, someone laughing too easily about a ship delayed by storms. No one speaks the word slave, but he hears it anyway, in every careful price.
His mind circles the question that gnaws him raw: how to make a god listen without becoming just another sacrifice. Esu-Odan loves bargains, Yewandele said, and witnesses. What if the god only listens when blood hits the floor? What if the only way to force open those sly, carved eyes is to break something sacred where all can see?
He touches the faint ritual scars on his chest, feeling sweat and dust in the grooves, and forces his hand down. Not yet. Rage is a blade; used wild, it only feeds their stories about “mad villagers.” Used right, it might cut through the fat of their lies.
At one branching he stops, breath shallow, weighing his path. To the left, the corridor curves toward the outer courts and the safer noise of many eyes. To the right, a steeper way drops toward the river side and the hidden landings where war-canoes kiss the rock. He smells salt, faint but real, bleeding into the damp.
The thought of Deko (the sailor with mockery in his mouth and chains on his ankles) slides into his mind like a knife. Somewhere between these walls and that water, the trail of his village’s ruin runs hot. Somewhere above, Mofeyisola walks her rounds beneath a god who might trade her life for the illusion of justice.
He swallows, jaw clenched so hard it aches, and steps forward into the fork, letting his feet choose even as his thoughts knot tighter. Every corridor here is a question. Every threshold is a tongue. And whether he hides in the narrow dark or climbs into the open courts, Esu-Odan is already listening.
Below, the air cools and dampens as Mofeyisola’s patrol carries her toward the river side of the bluff, where lamp-light thins and the stone sweats with trapped mist. Smell changes first: coal and palm oil fading, river rot and salt creeping in. She falls into the pattern she has walked a hundred times: counting heartbeats between doorways, listening for the hollow note that means an unused side passage, feeling with her bare heel where the flagstone dips from old water.
Iron bangles murmur at her wrists and ankles, a soft chain-song that keeps time with her breath. Left turn, ten steps, low arch. Right turn, smell of mold from the ash-chute. A pause at the small shrine-niche where Esu-Odan’s face is only a smear of chalk and a cowrie, no priest watching. She touches brow, lips, spearhead. Habit more than faith.
The corridor narrows ahead into a blind corner where torchlight dies into a gray smear. Nothing should move there at this hour but rats. She is already counting the beats past it when a faint scrape of sandal on stone breaks the rhythm, wrong as a dropped drum.
Instinct tightens her grip. She shifts her spear, weight settling into the balls of her feet, and slides wide of the corner instead of hugging it, giving herself space to thrust or pull back. The butt of the weapon slams down hard on the flagstones, sound cracking the hush just as Deko comes shouldering out of the shadows, river-damp glistening on his chains.
They stand measuring one another in the choke of stone, the corridor a throat that could swallow any scream. Lanterns swing somewhere behind and ahead, throwing slow bars of light that crawl across their bodies but never fully show their eyes. Deko shifts his weight, casual as a man in a palm-wine yard, fingers spread to show he holds no blade. The pose is theatre. His gaze is working, quick and sharp, tracing the set of her shoulders, the clean line from spear-butt to tip, the alcoves a man might slide into if the point came thrusting.
Mofeyisola’s own stillness is a kind of net. Without glancing down she clocks the wet gleam on his ankle rings, the tacky stripe of fresh mud above one heel, the sour tang of river muck under the sharper salt. Too close to the Landing, at an hour when no bell has called ship-slaves to shore. He has slipped past a watch. Or someone has opened a door that should have stayed shut.
“Your route is wrong,” she says first, voice carrying the flat cadence of recited rules. Patrol lines, gate orders, arches marked with cowrie and soot where no slave should walk. He answers in the same stiff cloth, naming an overseer, a message for a priest, a sudden errand that required haste and a clever man who knows the tunnels. Titles and honorifics fall between them like cowries on a court floor.
Yet even as he speaks the proper words, one corner of his mouth twitches, mocking. The formality thins. She hears the lie in the too-smooth sequence of names, the way his eyes flick once. Not toward the priest’s quarter he claims, but downslope, toward rock and water. And he, for his part, hears the steel underneath her ritual phrasing, the unsaid threat that guard-bands can close as tight as shackles.
The polite cloth tears with the next breath.
Words turn knife-edged. Deko’s lazy apologies sour into jabs about “guard-dogs” who polish their chains and call it honor. Mofeyisola’s answer is a surgeon’s cut: why a ship-slave prowls inner stone instead of rotting in the bilges. He laughs, bitter, painting coasts smeared black with burnt compounds, men who ran after vengeance and fed the sea iron. Sparks jump in her chest; his jaw ticks. Yet hand and spear stay low, both remembering that blood spilled in Esu-Odan’s throat of stone can twist back on killer and killed alike.
Torch-glow thins. No priests. No other guards. Only the wet whisper of the river below and, far above, the faint iron heartbeat of Yewandele’s hammer. Deko’s shoulders loosen. His grin turns private.
He lets the name fall. Ademilade’s village. Drawled, stretched, tongue clicking on the last syllable like spitting gristle from his teeth.
The sound hits Mofeyisola like a spear haft to the ribs. Smoke. Screams. The drag of a chain across her collarbone. In that one careless flourish she hears it all: ship-boards slick with her people’s blood, war-canoes nosing upriver like hunting dogs, this same man laughing while houses fell.
He thinks he is only boasting. To her it is a map. The path from her burned fields to these sweating stones runs through his hands. Through his memory of faces shoved into the hull. Through whatever bargain lets him stalk the sanctuary’s throat at night.
Her fingers flex on the ash-smooth shaft of her spear. One thrust, one scream, and Esu-Odan’s walls would drink his blood. The god would answer. The overseers would come. Chains would tighten on every ankle in reach of his shadow.
Her breath stumbles once, then hardens. She steps aside, not in surrender but in judgment deferred.
“Keep to marked stone,” she says, voice flat. “Stray again, and it will not be my spear that eats you. The god at these crossroads chews oath-breakers bone from bone.”
The words slide over his back like oil, half warning, half prayer he is wise enough to hear what lies beneath. He chuckles, mutters something about village ashes and clever dogs, and limps past, iron rings kissing the floor.
When the echoes thin to nothing, she rests her brow against the cool wall. The stone sweats against her skin, grounding and pitiless. In its chill she feels the shape of the snare closing: raiders in the tunnels, nobles in council, a trickster god listening at every fork.
Ademilade is no ghost wandering outside these walls. His enemies speak his village name in the sanctuary’s own veins. To pretend she can shield him by keeping him unseen is a child’s dream.
She straightens, jaw set. Whatever storm his rage calls down, on Deko, on the warlord, on Esu-Odan’s crooked house, it will break not in hidden passages but under open sky and witness.
In the dim hush before dawn, Ademilade begins leaving signs instead of footprints: a single cowrie shell placed on a blood-stained ledger, a line of palm oil traced from altar step to record-room door, a tally mark quietly erased and redrawn beneath another priest’s name. Each small disturbance echoes his village’s lost order, turning routine into omen.
He moves where smoke clings low and lamps burn to stubs. Past the outer courtyard where petitioners still sleep in huddled knots, past pillars carved with Esu-Odan’s sly grin. Bare feet silent on packed red earth, he hugs the shadows of shrine walls, slipping through half-latched doors meant for kitchen girls and water-bearers. The sanctuary is tiered like a termite mound; he learns its tunnels the way he once read furrows in his father’s field.
In the record-room he breathes shallow, listening to reed pens scratch in the next chamber. Ledgers lie open on low stools, pages stiff with dried ink and spills of sacrificial blood. Names. Villages. Numbers of “heads taken.” He runs one calloused thumb along a familiar village name, pulse hammering. His home reduced to a row of neat marks and an oily thumbprint.
He does not tear the pages. Not yet. Instead he tilts the ledger so that one splatter of blood touches the date of a feast-day, a small blasphemy of association. He slides a shell into the crease of another book where a junior priest keeps his secret tally. White curve of bone against black ink, like a tooth grinning up from a grave.
In the Inner Shrine of Forked Roads, where violence cannot cross the threshold without tripping invisible snares, he dares not linger. But even there he leaves a sign. Not on the god’s altar (that would be too naked a challenge) but at the base of a pillar where petitioners brush their robes as they bow. A smear of palm oil in a crooked line that forks halfway, each branch pointing toward a different door: record-room to the left, barracks to the right.
He remembers his father’s hand guiding a boy’s small finger along planting rows. Straight, boy. The land loves straight work. Now his hand shakes as he draws the fork. Esu loves crookedness. Let the god taste his own food.
He slips through servant corridors meant for firewood and ash baskets, where cooks curse quietly and yawning boys haul water. His body folds into alcoves whenever chains jingle too near. He walks like one of the sanctuary’s own shadows, hugging smoke-blackened beams, moving when others bow or turn, stopping when they straighten. A guard shuffles past, spear butt tapping rhythm on the floor. Ademilade closes his eyes, feels the rhythm pass, counts three breaths, then crosses behind like a gust.
In a narrow passage by the Oath-Fire Forge’s back entrance, he finds a slate board where a scribe has chalked yesterday’s deliveries: iron, salt, human chattel listed only as “hands.” He wipes one number away with the heel of his palm, reduces it by two, and below writes in small, careful strokes: Where are their names? The chalk dust coats his fingers like ground bone.
Every act is small enough to be blamed on carelessness. A miscount. A clumsy novice. A rat. Yet each carries his own memory burned into it: the crackle of thatch roofs, the iron stink of blood on trampled yam mounds, Mofeyisola’s voice shouting his name and then cut off by a blow he never saw. The sanctuary hums around him with bargains and prayers. He answers with these quiet counter-oaths, seeded like stones in a furrow, waiting for some crooked harvest.
In smoky kitchens and cramped sleeping huts, the story fattens on fear. They call him the shadow questioner, the ear at the wall, the tongue of forgotten villages. He asks for nothing a trader would care about, no prices, no weights of salt or cloth, only river bends, half-buried shrines, places where the mud still remembers fire.
A pot-girl whispers that he knew the name of her uncle taken at Oyo-bend five floods ago. A paddler from the River Landing swears a lean man moved along the canoe-shadows without stirring the water, touching each mooring post as if counting sins.
One guard-slave, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, swears before her squad that she saw him slip through a half-open servants’ gate and walk straight into stone. “By Esu’s own crossroads,” she says, sweating, “he passed where there is only a blank wall and the laughing mask above it.” The others laugh too loudly, glancing at that same carved face when they patrol, watching its stone smile for any sign it has begun to listen.
Low-ranking priests, once careless with ink and blood, wake to find their own handwriting altered: numbers of captives crossed through, columns rearranged, a cowrie shell resting on the page beside the word “redeemed.” Ink that had dried a dull brown now seems fresh and glistening, as if stirred by unseen fingers in the night. One ledger bears a faint palm-oil thumbprint pressed over the name of a village long erased from public prayers.
Some rush to the Inner Shrine to protest that spirits are meddling, babbling before Esu-Odan’s pillars about forged records and malicious ghosts. Others, remembering oaths taken for bribes, simply burn their scrap notes in charcoal braziers and sleep no better for the smoke, coughing on their own forgotten sums.
Deko catches fragments of these rumors between shouted orders on the river landing: talk of a village-name whispered in the dark, of a lean man asking after a particular raid where the sky “burned like palm wine in a forge” and children were counted like cowries. His mocking grin tightens. That night he prowls the barracks, ankle rings clinking, reminding the canoe crew how easily an idle story can be twisted into confession, how swiftly confession becomes a sacrifice on Esu’s steps. Old journeys, he tells them, belong to the river now; any tongue that drags them back up from the mud will be cut before dawn.
Up in the high courtyards where red earth kisses polished stone, the warlord’s envoys begin to haunt the benches like carved statues, all soft words and heavy gold. They linger after judgments, watching which scribes swallow hard at the word “river,” which junior priests smell suddenly of fear-sweat. Their guards pace the perimeters, counting steps between pillar and altar, weighing where spearlines might bloom. Old gossip about bride-prices and market dues dries up mid-sentence; bargains are struck in half-voices, laughter cut short as if a crack in the ground might answer back.
The first “example” comes during a humid dusk, when the sky hangs low and yellow over the sanctuary walls and sweat beads even on stone. Drums from some distant courtyard thud like a slow, uncaring heart. In the Outer Courtyard of Petitioners, where farmers and traders wait with calabashes and disputes, a young stable-boy is dragged in by two guard-slaves whose faces are carved into careful emptiness.
His tunic is half-torn, dust sticking to his knees where he stumbled. One of his sandals has slipped off somewhere along the way. The iron bangles on the guards’ ankles jingle softly, a cruel counterpoint to the boy’s ragged breaths. People shift aside, making space as if a sickness were being carried through.
Ademilade watches from the shade of a leaning pillar, head bowed like any other weary supplicant. His eyes are the only sharp thing about him. He sees the boy’s hands still smelling of horse and palm-fiber rope, not of any altar; sees the raw fear trembling in his shoulders. He hears, in snatches, the cause: the boy had laughed in the stables, repeating a cook’s late-night tale about a priest who washed stolen silver in bloodied river water, muttering over it to make “ghost-chains” behave.
The senior priest of Esu-Odan steps forward, robes white and red, cowries clicking at his belt. His voice rolls out over the courtyard, smooth as palm oil on a blade. “Reckless tongues invite storms,” he declares. “Storms wash away houses, herds, whole villages. Storms are not choosy.” He does not name the silver. He does not name the river.
On his word, the boy is stripped to the waist and forced to his knees before Esu’s carved pillar, the trickster’s laughing face drinking in the scene. Guard-slaves raise canes cut fresh from river reeds, their green skins still weeping sap. The first strike lands with a wet crack. The second draws a high, startled cry that silences even the birds roosting in the baobab above.
They do not stop when his cries break into hoarse gasps. They do not stop when his forehead kisses the red earth and stays there. Each blow is counted aloud, not by number but by proverb and warning: “A tongue is a road; walk it carefully.” Crack. “Those who speak of chains bind themselves.” Crack. “Esu hears every whisper.” Crack.
Petitioners avert their eyes, but their ears drink in every sound. Mothers grip their children’s wrists tighter. A trader who once grumbled about missing cousins now studies his own sandals as if they hold the price of his life. A scribe near the back bites his lip until it bleeds, remembering ink-smeared tallies he thought forgotten.
Ademilade tastes bile. The pattern is clear. Make one boy’s skin a scroll, write the warning in blood, let everyone read. Yet he also feels the air thicken, feels something in the courtyard shift as Esu’s stone face seems to smile a little wider. The god loves bargains. Even this.
By the time the cane-handles sag and the senior priest lifts his hand, the boy can no longer stand. His back is a lattice of raised, darkening lines, sweat and blood mixing into a shine that catches the last light of dusk. The priest pronounces him “cleansed of dangerous stories,” then flicks a few drops of palm wine toward Esu’s pillar as if closing a ledger.
The lesson spreads faster than the boy’s groans. By nightfall, in kitchens and stables and behind laundry lines, the tale changes shape as tongues roll it over like hot stones. Some say the boy spoke of ghost-chains rattling under the river landing. Others swear he named a priest and a war-canoe in the same breath. The details blur; the message hardens.
Anything that smells like talk of crooked oaths, ghost-chains, or silver washed in blood will now be met not with quiet warnings but with sanctified violence. Every gossip feels the cane on their own back. Every whisper learns to swallow itself halfway formed.
From his corner of shadow, Ademilade notes who flinched at the word “river,” who watched too closely, who would not look at all. Pain has been offered up as a warning. He accepts it as a sign.
Word of trouble by the River Landing follows, carried faster than smoke. The kitchen slave is the first ghost they try to make while she still breathes.
They find her at dawn, when mist still clings to the bluff. Wedged behind stacked baskets of dried fish, half-hidden in the sour-salt reek, wrists and ankles lashed with rough rope. One eye sealed shut, lips split, teeth pink with blood. Fish-scales glitter on her cheek like mockery. Whoever worked her over knew where bone sits close to skin, how to bruise without breaking.
She was the one who moved between hearths and courtyards with pots of palm-oil and pepper-sauce, carrying words as easily as steam. Now her tongue stumbles. She babbles about “chains you cannot see, clinking in the reeds,” about shadows that bent the water without any guard’s feet, about whispers counting heads in the dark. At the first rustle of a priest’s robe she chokes, eyes rolling white, and falls into a thin, stubborn silence.
Officially, she “slipped, angered the river spirits.” The priests say it, the scribes write it. Down among the pounding-stones and cookfires, the tale hardens otherwise: speak of ghost-chains, and the river will borrow hands (any hands) to beat the knowing out of you.
In the dim hush of an inner passage, where lamp-smoke turns the walls the color of old bruises, a junior acolyte vanishes from his usual post at the oil-niche. He is the same one who once sidled up to Ademilade, voice too loud, boasting of “jesting blessings” over a war-canoe, as if laughter could hide the stink of blood.
One day he is there, trimming wicks with shaky fingers; the next, another boy stands in his place and will not meet anyone’s eyes. By the week’s end, word seeps along broom-handles and water-gourds: the acolyte has been sent down to the river caves, “to learn humility from stone and echo.”
The caves sit under the sanctuary like a second, drowned throat. Priests use them for oracles and punishments both. No one is ever simply “sent” there.
When they finally haul him back up by a rope threaded under his arms, his skin is puckered and gray from long soaking, lips blue-edged, nails cracked where he clawed at something that was not mud. River stink clings to him: silt, bat droppings, the cold iron tang of hidden channels.
His eyes do not know the ceiling, do not know the faces leaning over him. They stare past everything, pupils blown wide as if he still stands in the dark. Between bouts of hacking, he spits up thin water and river-grit, then begins to babble.
Not prayers. Names.
He raves about voices that laughed from inside the rock itself, laughter that came from behind his own teeth. He says the stone spoke back his jests in a dozen tones. Old women, drowned men, children choking. He says the echoes hissed the names of ships whose hulls he anointed with oil, the very war-canoes he bragged about to pass the terror away.
Some of the names Ademilade recognizes in his own bones, though he hears them only in fragments as he passes by with a bundle of firewood: the syllables of his river, the nickname of a canoe his people once feared.
The priests cluster, murmuring about a “test from Esu-Odan,” about a foolish tongue being taught reverence. They sprinkle consecrated water over the boy’s brow, draw sigils of crossroads on his chest, and warn that those who mock the god’s bargains will be answered by stone.
Among servants and low guards, another story roots itself. They say the caves have begun to eat those who know too much, sucking secrets out through their ears. They say the rock repeats every crooked oath ever whispered in the dark, and that if Esu is laughing, it is because he is counting.
In the record-room’s close, chalk-dust air, wooden tally boards and cowrie-strung cords once gave a clean measure of every bonded rower. Now fresh cuts creep down the grain: “lost at sea,” “capsized in mist,” neat lies marching in ink. Too many. Far too many for a sky this clear.
The old scribe, back bent like a question mark, pauses mid-stroke. He has written shipwreck seasons before. He remembers the taste of real storm-years. The torn nets hung like shrouds, the wailing at the river banks, the way wet wind forced its way under every door. This is not that.
“The sea’s been sleeping,” he mutters under his breath, scratching at a faded scar on his forearm. “River runs gentle. No white teeth on the waves.” His reed pen still moves, obedient to orders, but each curve of “lost” feels like a small betrayal.
He is not alone in that thought. Down at the River Landing, where tar and fish-rot sting the nose, boatmen and dock-slaves share a sharper murmur over calabashes and coiled ropes. No storms. No cracked hulls. Yet names vanish from the cords.
They say some rowers are not lost at all. They say certain men are taken off the boards the way a net lifts fish from water. No burial, no libation. Just a priest’s thin mouth speaking “lost at sea” while the man is dragged into some hole beneath the bluff, chained where ink and cord cannot follow.
“Drowned on dry land,” one old canoe-man whispers, thumb rubbing the groove where his own tally once hung. “Esu hear it. The god know who truly feeds the river, and who only feeds the trade.”
Bruises and broken bodies rise like a second ledger beside tally boards and oath-scrolls, a book written in meat. Where gossip once flowed like kitchen smoke, talk folds into glances, throat-clicks, half-raised brows. Priests who once soothed now bare their teeth around words like “discipline” and “purification,” borrowing the warlord’s tongue while swearing they speak for Esu. The cost of hiding the trade carves itself into skin and absences. Every punished rumor, every vanished acolyte, every too-neat “lost at sea” cut becomes another stroke in a grim account that Ademilade must learn to read in welts, limps, and empty sleeping-mats instead of ink.
The first time Ademilade slips toward the record alcoves off the Oath Court, he moves as he once did along yam ridges at dusk. Bare feet soft on cool stone. Breath held when voices swell, released when they ebb. The walls here are close, painted with faint crossroads sigils that catch lamp-glow like wet eyes.
He expects the smell of dry palm-leaf and ink. The rustle of tally cords. Instead, wet chill slaps his face.
The floor mats squelch under his toes, still damp, edges curled like tongues bitten through. Scroll-shelves along the alcove walls sag and bow, dark with water. A thin trickle still runs from a cracked spout high in the corner, dripping into a clay basin brimming with gray, muddied ink.
Priests flutter around the mess, hems darkened, hands lifted in fussy, useless gestures. One older man with a braided beard shakes his head and clicks his tongue.
“Ah, Esu-Odan has washed away disorder,” he proclaims, loud enough for the carved god-face over the arch to hear. “The channel cracked of its own will. The records were…confused. The god desires clean paths.”
Ademilade stands just outside the threshold, in the shadow where the lamplight stops. His eyes move over the scene, wary. This is no storm’s work. No flood surged through the outer courts. The air carries no river roar, only the slow, bitter drip of ruined work.
On the low tables, scrolls lie like drowned snakes. Letters that once marched in straight black lines have burst their shapes and melted into dark, formless swirls. Cargo-marks. Canoe names. Numbers of rowers. All bled into the same meaningless smear, as if the river itself had dragged its thumb through their bones.
He clenches his jaw until it aches. Names. He needs names. How many taken. Which canoes. Which houses paid. Without them, his village’s ashes are just one more ghost-story in a place thick with stories.
A junior scribe kneels near the basin, reed pens scattered around him like snapped twigs. His eyes are rimmed red from smoke or from weeping; Ademilade cannot tell. The boy keeps glancing at the cracked spout as if expecting it to shudder again.
“Just this morning,” the scribe mutters when a senior priest snaps at him for moving too slowly. “The channel, it. It burst at dawn. We barely had time to lift the oath-scrolls.”
Ademilade’s head tilts. Dawn? He was in the outer courtyard at dawn, listening to women quarrel over a boundary line, the river running low and mild beside their anger. No roar. No shaking.
Another priest laughs too loudly. “Esu’s humor,” he says. “When the god chooses to cleanse, who can predict?”
The word “cleanse” sticks in Ademilade’s ears like grit. He watches the way the older priest stands, careful, between him and the ruined shelves. Watches the quick, guilty flicker that passes between two acolytes when the junior scribe speaks of time.
“Low river all week,” Ademilade thinks, heart beating hard enough to shake his ribs. “No storm, no upstream flood. Yet this one narrow throat of water breaks itself exactly where the tallies slept.”
He shifts his weight, making no sound. The priests glance past him without truly seeing. To them he is another errand-hand, another shadow with a bundle. They mutter about repairing channels, about new blessings, about petitioners waiting in the Oath Court. None of them say what their shoulders reveal: relief. Relief that the old boards are unreadable. Relief that whatever was written there has been swallowed.
He imagines the cargo-chits Yewandele described. The small marks beside certain nobles’ names. The count of rowers pressed into a war-canoe that passed his own village’s bend. Ink is easier to drown than men.
He kneels beside a torn mat, pretending to wring it out, fingers digging into the weave. Beneath the sour reek of stagnant water he catches other scents: oil, old dust, and the sharp, metallic tang that clings to anything hidden too fast. Iron seal-wax. Chest-locks.
“Just this morning,” the boy said. Yet the mats are soaked through to the plaiting. Water that has sat, that has seeped.
Ademilade’s gaze drifts to the cracked spout. The break is clean, almost chiseled. Not the jagged tear of stone forced by sudden weight. Someone has guided the god’s “cleansing,” then wrapped the lie in Esu’s laughter.
Behind his teeth, a childhood prayer rises, unbidden: “At the crossroads, count us true.” He bites it back before it can form. Esu-Odan has already turned from his people once.
Instead he counts his own. Shelves warped. Scroll cases gone entirely from one side. Bare gaps where something heavier than palm-leaf once sat. The way the nearest priest angles his body, blocking view of that emptiness from anyone standing in the Oath Court.
“The tallies were here,” he thinks. “And someone feared them more than the god’s displeasure.”
Bitterness burns his tongue. Yet beneath it, a hard, cold line of understanding forms. If they are breaking channels and drowning ink, then he has stuck his hand into a real wound. The trade he hunts is not rumor; it is fearful, clumsy hands splashing to hide their own reflection.
He lets the wet mat drip through his fingers, eyes lowered like any obedient servant. But in his chest he begins a new ledger, one written on memory and bone. Cracked spout. Red-rimmed eyes. Lies about dawn. Relief in priestly shoulders.
If the sanctuary will not yield its truth in ink, he will wring it from the places where water cannot reach: from tongues, from bruises, from the patterns of fear.
He will not abandon the trail. The drowned ink only sharpens him.
By dusk he has a name and a trembling promise. By full dark he stands beneath the crooked iroko in the outer colonnade, back pressed to a pillar streaked with old libation stains. Above him, a carved ancestor mask leers down, teeth bared in a humor he does not share. The moon crawls between broken clouds, smearing silver along the flagstones and leaving pockets of thick, forgiving shadow.
Ademilade waits in one of those shadows, still as a termite mound. Footsteps pass, sandals slapping, gossip riding their heels. None slow. None look twice.
The clerk comes late. Of course he does. A narrow man, shoulders hunched as if expecting blows, sweat shining at his temples though the air lies cool and river-salted. He keeps to the lamplight’s edge, fingers worrying the cord of his waist wrapper. He will not sit on the low stone bench. Will not lean his back against the iroko’s trunk. Will not meet Ademilade’s eyes.
Words spill from him in halting bursts. Ship tallies. Cargo-chits. Names of canoes and crews. All “elevated,” he whispers, latching onto the priestly word like a charm-bead. Lifted from the record alcoves and carried up, up, to the warlord’s steward’s private chest “for safekeeping.” There are new seals, he says. Thick red wax stamped with the warlord’s sigil and the god’s forked-face together, pressed so deep it almost draws blood from the palm.
“Only nobles,” the clerk breathes, throat bobbing. “Or their sworn envoys. To break such seals without a council summons is…is to invite oath-fire. Madness. Ruin.” His eyes flick once toward the ancestor mask, then away, as if even carved wood might carry word of this meeting.
Ademilade tastes iron on his own tongue. Another gate. Another chain disguised as piety.
He lets the man’s fear run its course, asks no questions that would force him to louder lies. The clerk’s feet keep shifting, inching backward, already in retreat. When he finally folds, muttering that he has said too much, no silver passes between them. Fear was payment enough.
As the clerk’s footsteps fade down the colonnade, Ademilade remains beneath the iroko, listening to the leaves scrape like dry tongues overhead. The proof he needs now sleeps in a chest bound by oaths and nobles’ hands. Esu-Odan’s sanctuary has turned its own records into sacred contraband.
If ink and wax have been lifted beyond his reach, he will climb by other branches.
He turns to the barracks, to the living ledger carried in tongues and scars. Nights, he lingers at doorways, by water-jars, in the steam of millet porridge. He bends his back like any porter, head down, ears open. Deko’s crew cluster in knots, muscles loose, voices thick with palm-wine and cruel memory. They boast of “fattened nets” and “villages that forgot to bow to the tide,” of “canoes that came back heavier than they left,” of iron that “sang against wood and bone.”
Each time talk drifts toward a named river bend, a shrine-tree he half-remembers, Deko’s sharp glance slices the air. Words shear off. Laughter flips into rough work-songs or grumbling over rations. Where Ademilade needs a clear confession, only muddy hints swirl, refusing to settle.
When word slithers to Deko that some nameless dog has been nosing in scroll-nests and tracing river routes with his questions, the sailor’s easy mockery tightens. He pours poison into his masters’ ears about “enemies of the god” plotting to foul the landing, suggests new watch-rotations that just happen to strangle the side paths Yewandele once mapped for Ademilade. Drowsy gate-men find themselves reassigned, iron jingling as they pace along freshly drawn patrol lines that carve the dusk into squares of watched light and choked shadow. Where shadows once flowed freely between warehouse walls and shrine-steps, now they are netted, pinned, driven back from the very cracks Ademilade had hoped to slip through.
Testing the river’s edge himself, Ademilade creeps down a rock-cut stair one dusk, intending to mark boats and memorize mooring knots, only to find the landing bristling with torches, doubled sentries, fresh chalked charms on the stones. A captain from the warlord’s entourage stands conferring with Deko, their silhouettes framed by the river’s dull sheen. At some unheard signal, a new cordon of spearpoints swings outward toward the dark, as if expecting the very shape of him. Each thwarted attempt drums one lesson deeper: this enemy is not merely cruel but quick-fingered, tugging threads ahead of him so that every path he reaches has already been knotted tight, every shortcut turned into a noose.
Ademilade’s old talent for slipping along the edges of sight frays, strand by strand, under the drag of too many watching eyes. What once was a sanctuary of gaps and blind corners turns slow and sticky around him. Corridors that used to lie empty at dusk (cool stone, echoing only with his own bare footsteps) now rattle with anklets and spear-butts. Pairs of guards drift where one used to do. Lanterns bloom in niches he had mapped as dark. Even the small doors that servants propped open for air now slam shut at odd hours, bolts thudding like the closing of a jaw.
The kitchen girls, soft-faced and brisk with their wooden spoons, had once let him pass with a half-smile, a jerk of chin toward the steaming pots as if to say, “You are nothing to us; be nothing to the walls.” Now their eyes slide away from him. Heads wrap tighter. Voices drop. One clutches a string of cowries at her throat when he appears, another sprinkles a pinch of salt in a corner after he leaves. He catches scraps of their whispers. It is closer to omen.
Twice, three times, he stalks toward the barracks by paths he has paced in his mind until they feel like grooves in his bones, only to find a doorway that “never” closes suddenly yawning shut. The first time, the bar falls while his hand is still half a span away. Wood thumps into the socket, and a voice inside mutters a quick charm to seal gossip. He stands there with his fingers on cold grain, listening to laughter fade deeper into the room. No one answers his soft knock. No one “hears” him.
Another night, he times his approach to the rock-cut stair that curls down toward the River Landing, counting heartbeats between patrol passes. He knows the rhythm of the watch. Or thought he did. But as he reaches the alcove where he should be able to slip through sideways, shoulders turned like a thief’s prayer, the iron-bound hatch at the top of the stair grinds shut. From the other side comes the scrape of a heavy bar being dropped, the low hiss of a warding song. He smells fresh chalk and palm oil seeping under the threshold, the sting of charms still wet.
It feels, in his bones, less like humans changing their habits and more like the sanctuary itself has noticed the shape of his movement. As if Esu-Odan, all those carved faces stacked in stone and wood, has leaned forward to watch this one thin man threading his anger through forbidden places. Routes he once trusted curdle behind him, closing with a kind of mocking timing. Passages that opened like friendly mouths now clamp shut just ahead of his reach, teeth of bolt and bar fitting together with ritual precision.
He changes his angle, tries another path, another time of night. The pattern repeats. Where he goes twice, an extra lamp appears the third time. Where he lingers, gossip dries up stone-cold. His old country skill is not enough in a house where even shadows belong to a god. Here, every footprint can be read. Every hesitation tastes like intent. And intent, in Esu-Odan’s court, is a thing that draws eyes.
The more he presses, the louder the place seems to breathe against him. Door-frames creak just as he nears them, warning those within. Dogs that once slept through his passing now lift their heads and growl low, as if some scent of restless purpose clings to his ragged cloth. Children, seeing him twice in one day at different courts, whisper “stranger,” then “spy,” then fall silent when an older hand squeezes their shoulders.
He is not caught. Not yet. But the paths that once sprawled open before him narrow into a tightening braid. Each aborted approach leaves him standing alone in some threshold that is no longer empty, feeling the weight of unseen listeners gather, amused, at the crossroads of his next step.
At the inner thresholds, the air itself turns against him. Guards whose faces he knows from Mofeyisola’s orbit, women who once waved him through with bored eyes, begin to square their shoulders when he appears. Their spear-butts plant across his path. Their questions come clipped, official. What errand? For which priest? Where is the token, the palm-stripped wand, the clay seal that proves he belongs?
He has none. His lies grow thin under their steady stares.
They make him stand in doorways where light falls hard on his travel-worn cloth and hollow cheeks. Passersby glance, then glance again. A runner is sent “to confirm.” The wait stretches. Sweat creeps down his spine as he feels every eye in the corridor weigh him like a mismeasured load.
One evening, at the choke-point before the inner barracks, a junior spear-guard with the sanctuary’s sigil painted fresh on her brow tilts her head and asks, too casually, “Which house holds your name, stranger?” He tries to twist his tongue around half-truths. They tangle. His answer comes out crooked.
She watches him struggle. Lets the silence lengthen. Then, with a small, dissatisfied click of her tongue, she steps aside and orders the others to let him pass.
Only after his back is to them does he hear the soft rasp of reed on paper. In the shift ledger by the door, her voice is flat as she recites: “Lean man. Scarred arms. Cowries in the hair. Asking too many questions.” The scratch of her frown goes into the record with the ink.
Yewandele’s presence, once a constant anchor, becomes an intermittent rumor. Smoke from the Oath-Fire Forge still coils up through the floor grates like a dark prayer, but more and more often the hammer-falls are from another smith’s hand. Her name rides past him in snatches, “summoned again,” “council still sitting,” “envoys grew loud”, while he waits in cramped passages that smell of coal and sweat.
When he finally catches her between summons, in a side-corridor streaked with soot, her voice is low and hurried. No greeting. No blessing. Just a hard shove of a folded scrap and a crust of bread into his palm. Her eyes flick to the carved lintel, as if it has ears.
“My movements are counted now,” she mutters. “Yours too. If they see my hand on your shoulder again, the god himself may call it broken oath.”
He starts to protest. Her jaw tightens. The gold-and-iron bangles at her wrist clink once, like a warning bell.
“Listen with your feet,” she says. “Not your mouth. The forge remembers its promises, but the walls keep tally. Any help I give you in the open will be weighed as treachery. To him, to them, to all these bound souls.”
Then she is gone, swallowed by a runner’s summons and the stairway’s curve, leaving only the warm bread in his hand and the iron taste of being suddenly very, very alone.
His hidden stores bleed away faster than he can think of replacing them. The last cowries from his pouch vanish into the trembling hands of a boy‑porter who glimpsed account tablets at the River Landing; he adds a muttered blessing to dull the boy’s fear. A smoked fish he meant to stretch over two nights blackens instead in a sudden offering at a neglected corner shrine, after he wakes choking on the remembered stink of burning thatch and iron, his people’s cries braided with the surf. Hunger gnaws with small, sharp teeth; his blistered feet pulse with each circuit of the sanctuary as he buys whispers with food and favors he cannot spare, feeling his own body turn into a kind of coin.
Weariness creeps into his bones like damp. His steps drag. Sleep comes in snatches on hard benches and tool‑racks in forgotten alcoves, shattered by distant hammering or the rattle of chains that might be memory, might be the forge below. Faces blur, names slip. Even those who once helped him seem sharpened with hidden edges. At water jars, under colonnades, his presence is chewed into rumors. “The thin stranger.” “The one always listening.” “The man who walks like he has no master.” Laughter follows some of it. Fear threads the rest. He tastes the truth behind their words: his anonymity, like his coins, like his strength, is almost spent, and the sanctuary’s many eyes are finally turning toward him as a problem to be solved.
The first time he hears her name twisted, Ademilade is pressed into a shadowed corner of the barracks veranda, feigning sleep among snoring bodies and sour sweat. Night air moves slow over them, heavy with palm gin and river damp. Lantern light from the colonnade smears across the packed earth, catching chains in dull glints.
He lies among the canoe crew, a borrowed wrapper over his shoulders, his back to the wall. Someone’s bare heel digs into his hip. Another man’s breath saws in and out, rank with fermented cassava. He lets his own chest rise and fall in a sleeper’s rhythm, eyelids slitted just enough to taste the room.
Laughter cracks the murmur like a whip. A half‑drunk river hand, ankles linked by iron, sloshes cheap gin in a calabash as he jabs it toward the inner compound.
“Ah, leave those fat priests,” the man crows, words thick. “It’s that tall gate‑spear I’m watching. The one with eyes that don’t bow. You’ll see. Even her iron will learn to bend when a true warlord leans.”
Scattered chuckles answer. Someone spits on the floor.
“Her eyes already chose a side,” another voice calls from the gloom, older, wary. “You think she stands there for her own pleasure? The god sees where she looks. The nobles too.”
The first man snorts. “Gods eat what they’re fed. Men feed them. Wait and see. A few more oaths, a few more chains, and that tall one (” he makes a crude thrusting gesture with the calabash, gin slopping onto his own ankle rings) “will be guarding more than gates. Not always so untouchable, that one. They say even she had a village once. Villages burn.”
A low “ehn” ripples across the veranda. Some of the chained men shift, metal kissing metal. One mutters a quick ancestor name under his breath, as if to ward off the image.
Ademilade lies rigid under his wrapper. The words drop into him like stones into a deep well. Each insult. Each hint. Tall gate‑spear. Eyes that have already chosen. Village. Burn.
For a heartbeat his body betrays him; his fingers twitch toward the clay cup at his own side, the old village reflex to offer drink in challenge, to demand names, to mark the boaster as enemy. He forces his hand flat against the mat, nails digging into his own palm until pain steadies him.
He listens for more, measuring the men by their laughter. One voice he recognizes from the landing, Deko’s crew, the thin, amused drawl that always sounds like it is two steps away from betrayal.
“Careful with your tongue,” that voice floats out, soft, oily. “Some posts are not wise to lean on without making your own oath first. That spear might cut both ways.”
The drunk river hand barks another laugh, but it is smaller now. “Oath, oath,” he mimics. “Esu’s house is choking on oaths. This one, that one. The envoys, the priests, the gate‑spears. Who can tell whose side is whose anymore? All I know, brother, is that when the canoes come calling, even stone steps make way.”
Another man hums agreement, a sound like a tired drum. “Long as they don’t sell my leg next council,” he says. A few men laugh, but the sound shivers at the edges.
Ademilade stares into the dark, seeing only the red glare of another fire, years gone. Mofeyisola’s face flashes against it. The way she stood on their village path with a spear across her shoulders, mocking him about a crooked yam row. The way she had not bowed to the raiders’ shouts, even with blood on her side.
Tall gate‑spear.
He tastes bile at the back of his throat. Part of him wants to rise now, to seize the drunk’s ankle chain and drag him across the veranda, demand every rumor, every glimpse. To tear the knowledge out of his meat.
Instead, he counts his breaths in the old way, in fours and sevens, like pacing furrows. He lets their talk roll over him, over and over, memorizing stray phrases, tones, which men laugh too quick and which fall silent. He sorts them the way he once sorted seeds: sound, cracked, dangerous.
No one speaks her name outright. They cloak her in titles. Gate‑spear. Iron post. Guard whose eyes have chosen. That, more than anything, knots his gut. Here, among men who talk easy of selling brothers and burning villages, they still leave her name in their mouths’ shadows. Either fear. Or a price being slowly weighed.
The calabash passes from hand to hand. The talk slides to tallies and lash‑marks, to whether the warlord’s gifts have softened the priests. Chains rattle as men shift into sleep or sullen silence.
Ademilade lies awake until the lantern gutters. Each careless word sinks through him, stone after stone, down into that deep, black water where rage lives. He cannot yet see the full shape of the ripples, but he feels them spreading under the sanctuary’s floors, moving toward her, toward him, toward some meeting place he has not chosen.
When the veranda finally sinks into snores and mutters, he closes his eyes proper. In the dark behind his lids, crossroads multiply like cracks in fired clay. Every path he imagines has her at its end. Guarding a gate, standing on a canoe, or lying still beneath a god’s blind altar.
He does not sleep. He waits, jaw clenched, as the night thins, and promises himself that the next time her name enters a drunkard’s mouth, it will not leave unmarked.
Dawn thins the barracks into grey shapes and breath-smoke. Men stir, cough, fart, roll over. Ademilade moves between them like a shadow slipping through broken fence slats, following last night’s whisper of “tallies hidden where dice fall.” His bare feet find the gaps between outflung limbs and iron links.
He ducks under a low beam into a side alcove where the air smells of stale sweat and palm oil. A rough plank table squats there, scarred by years of boredom and rage. Knives have been busy on it. Names. Obscenities. Little boats. Crooked breasts. Tally cuts like prison bars.
His gaze snags on four cramped characters, pressed hard into the wood as if the carver feared the grain might swallow them.
Mofeyisola.
The letters are small but certain. Beneath, someone has hacked the outline of a shackle, its circle cracked open by a simple, stubborn key. Hope made into a child’s drawing. A breath squeezed between chains.
But another hand has come after. Deeper gouges ride over the key: the long hull of a war‑canoe, oars like many teeth. The split shackle becomes a wave under its prow.
Promise. Warning. Lure. Betrayal.
His fingertip follows each line. The table feels warm, as if newly burned. Anger climbs his throat like smoke; dread coils under his ribs, cold as river water. His chest forgets how to widen. For a moment he stands bent over the wood, caged by his own body, hearing only the slow rattle of waking chains and the drum of his heart.
Someone shifts in the next room, muttering. He snatches his hand back, wipes his finger against his wrapper as if the marks could stain skin.
Who carved this? Her? One of her guards? Some drunk dreaming of selling her name? Or Deko himself, neat little trap-layer, turning wood into bait?
He forces his breath long again, in fours and sevens. The message will not declare itself. So he takes it as all three at once and adds it to the growing ledger in his mind.
Days stretch into a grinding litany of eavesdropped half‑sentences and sidelong glances. A pattern crawls out of the noise. Deko’s voice at the edges of gatherings. Light. Mocking. Never at the center, always just close enough to stain.
“Soft‑hearted gate‑watchers.” “Inner‑wall spears who don’t love their chains.” “Eyes that look outward more than in.”
In smoky doorways and dice‑rings slick with palm oil, Ademilade hears the canoe slave boast he can name which guards dream of slipping past the shrine drums, which keep lovers hidden in river hamlets, which flinch when lash‑songs start. Laughter follows, but it is the clipped, nervous kind.
He never shapes Mofeyisola’s name. He walks around it. Describes height. The way her gaze cuts sideways when priests talk of obedience. The iron music of her steps. The scar that pulls one shoulder a little tight.
Close. Too close.
Each near‑miss scrapes Ademilade raw. He hears, beneath the brag, the careful testing of a snare: showing meat without naming the goat, watching which men lean in hungrily, which look away. The trap’s teeth glint plain enough to him now. Someone has mapped her value, weighed her loyalties, and begun to set a price.
When the forged report travels up the chain, it reaches Yewandele’s hands wrapped in proper seals and pious phrasing: a guard under Mofeyisola’s command accused of “misplacing vigilance” during a night watch near the River Landing, an unnamed “fugitive” slipping past. Ademilade, crouched in a cramped, soot‑dark stairwell above the Oath‑Fire Forge, hears Yewandele’s low, controlled anger as she questions the messenger about details that refuse to line up: the time of tide, the roster marks, which drumbeat signaled the change of watch, the conveniently missing witness. Iron rings on her wrists click like teeth when she shifts. Even as she sends word demanding that the accused be held for formal inquiry under her house’s seal, she cannot prevent the priests, already scented with warlord gifts, from summoning Mofeyisola to stand before them, alone, beneath Esu‑Odan’s laughing masks.
News reaches him on a spill of stew and fear. The kitchen boy’s hands shake so hard the calabash chatters against the floor; his eyes won’t lift from Ademilade’s feet as he stammers it out, Mofeyisola called before masks, her watch stripped apart, her name turned over like a suspect coin. Among guards, the penalty for even a scent of slave‑oath trouble needs no priest to proclaim it. “External service.” The words move through the barracks like smoke, needing no drums. Ademilade stands in a doorway later and watches iron‑linked escorts herd a disgraced spear‑sister down toward the river path. No shrine drums follow. Only gull‑cries and the hollow thud of oars. Now he knows. “External” means war‑canoes, salt in open wounds, raids sung in other people’s screams. No altar taboos there, no trickster’s accidents to break a killing stroke. Just orders and waves. With Mofeyisola’s name already snagged in the same rumor‑net he’s been casting, every secret he turns, every tongue he loosens, might be the one that offers her up in his place.
The rumor of the “great bargaining” stops being a whisper when a crocodile‑line of junior priests pours into the Outer Courtyard, white wrappers flaring against red earth. They move slow and solemn under the noon glare, each one bare‑foot, each one carrying a sheaf of fresh‑cut palm fronds dripping river water. Behind them, boys beat hollow gourds in a steady, heartbeat pulse. The sound gathers people like chaff to a winnowing basket.
Ademilade, half‑hidden by a leaning baobab, watches the red earth darken in a wide swath where the priests sweep. River water and dust. Mud of promises. They chant as they go, voices thin but sharp enough to catch on every ear.
“In three days’ turning…Esu‑Odan sits in the forked road…
“In three days’ turning…chains and words will be weighed together…”
Petitioners and traders tilt their heads, conversations fraying. A kola‑seller stops mid‑cry. A woman with a land dispute holds her bundle closer, listening. Men with salt‑stained cloaks, faces burned by sea glare, drift nearer to the sound. Envoys in fine cloth stand at the edges, pretending to be bored, their eyes bright and hungry.
“New treaty,” one priest calls between lines of chant, sweeping the ground in a slow, deliberate arc. “Peace on the river,” another answers, flicking droplets from his palm fronds so they patter against anklets and sandals like soft rain.
“Cleansing of old quarrels.” The phrase rides the air from mouth to mouth. “Cleansing. Old quarrels. Old blood.” Some speak it with relief, some with doubt. Others bite it off like a stone in their food.
Then, wrapped inside the holy talk, the other words thread through. “Fresh captives brought as proof.” “Chains given lawful names.” “Hostages made into offerings of peace.”
Every time “fresh captives” passes close to him, Ademilade feels it like a thumb grinding into a bruise. His stomach knots, a hard twist under his ribs. He smells iron on the wind that comes up from the river, though no forge smoke drifts this way, only the sour‑sweet of bodies and incense.
Three days, he counts, while Esu‑Odan’s carved masks around the courtyard seem to grin wider in the flicker of passing shadows. Three days, and the god will sit where river and road and law meet, to weigh metal and breath and story on the same invisible scale. Three days, and what he came to break may be bound so tight no hand, mortal or divine, will claim it can be unshackled.
That night, slipping through a grease‑smelling gap behind the kitchens, shoulders brushing warm clay, he feels a sudden hand snatch at his wrist. Fingers bird‑quick, bone and fear. A narrow face glints once in the brazier glow, eyes wide and rolled white, then the boy shoves something hard and cold into Ademilade’s palm and vanishes down the dark like a rat that knows all the cracks.
He presses his back to the wall, heart beating in his teeth, listens for pursuit. Only pots clatter, oil hisses, a woman curses a lazy apprentice. No alarm. No drums.
By the dull orange glow of a charcoal pan, he uncurls his fist. Hammered copper, thin as dried plantain skin, edges biting his callus. Yewandele’s marks groove the metal in cramped, hurried strokes, as if the stylus feared to stay too long in one place.
“Once sworn, the oath will sanctify past raids. After that, no charge may touch them.”
The words sit in his chest like a stone. He lifts the strip, presses it to his tongue. Copper, ash, iron, a ghost of forge‑smoke. As if even the warning is already half caught in Esu‑Odan’s mouth, waiting to be swallowed.
By next sunrise the sanctuary’s heartbeat is different. Drums change tempo. Footsteps multiply. Extra spear‑carriers plant themselves at each gate, shields bright with fresh chalk marks of Esu‑Odan’s forked paths. Chains on the armory doors are doubled, links oiled so they whisper instead of rattle. Bare‑chested runners pant past with clay tablets hugged to their ribs, folded palm leaves knotted with red thread, shuttling between Inner Shrine and noble quarters like ants before a storm.
New orders seep through the ranks. Mofeyisola’s lieutenants murmur them under their breath: once the treaty is sealed, no outsider without clear, written business may linger in any court. Even familiar faces are stopped. A kitchen boy is slapped bloody for loitering near the River Landing steps, his protest swallowed by the slap of waves on stone. From then, every path Ademilade walks seems to prick with watching eyes. Questions sharpen at checkpoints. Jests die when he nears. The sanctuary’s easy blind spots, the gaps behind storerooms, the servant alleys, grow narrower, as if the place itself is closing a fist. He feels the noose of notice tightening around him, braided from rules, rumors, and the sudden, hungry discipline of men afraid of being caught asleep.
From roof-edges, from the shadow of shrine-pillars, from the stink‑dark of stairwells where only spiders pray, he maps the coming rite. Envoys with bracelets of gold and salt. Priests with tongues dipped in palm oil. Chains lifted like incense. Kola nuts cracked like skulls. One spoken oath, and every river raid becomes “law,” every burning village renamed “tribute.” Unless the ledgers he has stolen, the muttered guilt he has coaxed from junior mouths, the swaggering boasts he has overheard in Deko’s barracks can be dragged into that same circle of light, Esu‑Odan will swallow them as offerings, not accusations, and spit back only a neat, polished lie called peace.
By the second night, sleep abandons him entirely. Pacing the rim of the Outer Courtyard where petitioners’ chalk marks blur under his bare heels, Ademilade counts down the dwindling hours and sees only one opening left: the public gathering itself, when nobles, priests, guards, and envoys must all stand under Esu‑Odan’s gaze and pretend to bargain as equals. There, and only there, can he force their secrets into the open before the oath descends like a lid, iron‑tight, word‑locked. If he falters or waits, the same sanctifying words that shield the raiders will also fix Mofeyisola’s service to the sanctuary, and perhaps to the war‑canoes, into a chain no mortal hammer, not even Yewandele’s, will be allowed to break, for fear of shattering the god’s own law.
For a heartbeat the courtyard holds its breath with him: chains glinting, incense smoke curling, river-mist drifting in from the bluff like the breath of watching spirits. Ademilade feels every eye on his back, every ancestor name he has ever spoken crowding behind his teeth. His own words still throb in the air, heavy as a curse.
Then, as his last syllable dies against the stone, the senior priest in indigo and red steps neatly into the silence, bare feet whispering on the red earth. His cowries clack softly. His palms rise in a soothing gesture that is not meant for Ademilade at all, but for the nobles, the envoys, the crowd whose fear he tastes like kola on his tongue.
The man’s voice pours out smooth as palm oil over hot iron. He repeats Ademilade’s phrases about “not leaving” and “reckoning bondage,” but he strokes them, rounds them, stuffs proverbs into their mouths until they no longer bite. “A son who ties his own feet to the shrine,” he says, “is a son who loves peace.” “Bondage weighed openly,” he murmurs, “is bondage already half redeemed.” The sharp point of accusation is wrapped in woven praise-names, hidden beneath mats of pious language.
Ademilade feels it as a hand closing over his mouth. The crowd murmurs agreement to the rhythm rather than the sense. Each proverb the priest throws is a stone into still water, breaking the reflection of the night of fire that Ademilade has just laid bare.
He shifts his grip on Yewandele’s inscribed chain, knuckles whitening. The iron is warm from his palm, etched sigils biting his skin like teeth. He opens his mouth to speak again, to drag his words back from the priest’s tongue, but the man is already gliding forward, robes whispering, body placing itself squarely between Ademilade and the altar.
Incense thickens. The god’s carved face on the nearest pillar seems to grin wider.
“Behold,” the priest proclaims, and his voice leaps like flame up the stone pillars, “this son of Ketu lays down his own wandering feet as pledge that no further blood shall spill while we stand at Esu-Odan’s gate.”
He does not face the altar. He turns his back on the carved grin of the god and bows instead toward the nobles’ dais, toward the warlord’s sleek envoys glinting in imported cloth. His arm sweeps wide, presenting Ademilade not as accuser but as offering.
“With his vow,” the priest continues, rhythm tightening like a noose, “he binds himself to this ground as a living crossroads. His standing here is our shield. His refusal to depart is the god’s own seal upon a season of peaceful passage, of new covenants walked without fear.”
Ademilade’s attempt to speak is swallowed whole. The priest rolls on, piling proverb upon proverb, each one turning the blade of the oath until it lies flat.
At the pillars’ feet, the scribes bend low. Reed pens rasp against smoothed bark and clay. They chase each slanted word as if the air itself were scripture, as if the god had spoken through no mouth but this. Every twist is fixed in ink and groove, hardening like cooling iron.
Ademilade’s protest snags in his throat like bone. The courtyard’s mood tips under his bare feet. Confused murmurs swell into little waves that slap against the pillars and die. Some petitioners near the front press their hands to their chests and nod, eyes soft with admiration at his supposed “sacrifice,” already making a quiet story of him: the farmer who tied himself down for peace. Others edge sideways, wrappers whispering, faces pinched as if he has spat a curse that might splash.
The nearest ring of guards shifts. Not a rush, not an open threat. Just a tightening. Spear-butts scrape, sandals scuff. The circle firms around him, no touch laid, yet his body is suddenly counted as sanctuary property, not a free man’s stance.
Yewandele takes a half-step from the nobles’ line before she can stop herself, the chain she birthed in her fire still shining in Ademilade’s raised hand, iron links and oath-marks now paraded as the priest’s proof. “You see,” he intones, fingers painting the air around it, “even the sacred metal of the oath-smith confirms this pledge: he will remain within Esu-Odan’s walls as living surety while the treaty is shaped.” The words strike her like sparks, trying to weld her craft to this lie. Her mouth opens, breath drawing for protest, but another priest is already lifting his voice, rolling out a proverb about “the one who stays at the crossroads so others may pass,” his chant sliding neatly across hers, turning any denial into open defiance of her god’s own house.
When the senior priest at last deigns to face the altar again, he has already wrapped Ademilade’s vow in a net of new names and duties: “living collateral,” “peace-bearer,” “witness bound to the new order,” “stone at the threshold.” Each title hisses through the courtyard and catches. Nobles murmur assent; lesser priests echo. Consent congeals around him. What he flung like a spear is cooling into record as surrender. In the court of a trickster, words have bodies; his have been seized and branded, marched away from him in chains he never agreed to wear.
The officiant’s voice is oil on hot iron, all hiss and no flame. He smiles a temple-trained smile as he speaks for Ademilade, not to him.
“Consider,” he tells the crowd, “the storm that tears up the old yam mounds. Is it wicked? No. It clears the brush, opens the way for straighter ridges, fatter tubers. So too the raiding flood upon that village. A hard cleansing. Painful, yes. But from such crossings, greater roads are laid.”
Murmurs of uneasy assent rustle like dry leaves. People like having their fears pressed into parables; it makes horror less sharp on the tongue.
Ademilade hears his own story broken into neat segments and rearranged, like someone cutting his mother’s body into teaching pieces. The names he spoke, his father, the laughing boy who used to chase goats, the old women who pounded grain under the moon, vanish under the priest’s palm. They become “some,” “many,” “those who were taken.” His river, his soil, his burned compound are now “a certain place” where “a necessary crossing” once occurred.
“Think also,” the officiant continues, “of a rotten granary. If left standing, the rot spreads. Sometimes a wise king orders it pulled down, even with grain still inside. Those inside are not hated; they are the bitter kola chewed so the throat may accept medicine. The gods, through the hands of warriors, chose such a kola that night. Hard, but wise.”
Laughter flickers at the edge of the crowd. A few traders nod more firmly now. They understand kola. They understand profit wrapped in piety.
Rage claws up Ademilade’s chest, hot, bright. He steps forward, iron chain in his hand biting his palm, but each stride is matched by a tiny shift of spears, a subtle creak of leather. The guards’ silent correction reminds him: he has sworn to stand here. Not to strike. Not to tear out this man’s throat for making his dead an example.
The officiant never looks at him. His gaze sweeps over the nobles, the envoys, the priests, gathering their approval like ripe pods.
“In every age,” he concludes, “there are villages chosen to fall so that kingdoms may stand steady. We do not rejoice in their burning. We honor them as toll paid. And see” “even now, the son of such a village stands among us, offering himself as stone at the threshold, that no more needless fires be lit. Is this not the work of Esu-Odan, who turns grief into guiding sign?”
A low “Ahh” rolls from the benches, that soft sound people make when something ugly has been dressed in fine cloth.
Ademilade feels the courtyard tilting further away from him, as if the red earth itself has become a smooth slope, sliding his story down into the priests’ waiting mouths. His memories, the stink of flesh, the iron taste of fear, the crack of club on bone, are no longer evidence. They are seasoning in this man’s proverb, a little salt to make the lesson sit well on noble tongues.
Inside, his oath hardens. If they will grind his dead into parable to feed their order, then he will grind their order into an offering his ancestors can recognize.
His first words crack out anyway, raw as fresh-burnt wood. “They were my people, not proverbs. Not kola. Not grain.” The nearest priest flicks a glance his way, makes a tiny circling motion with his flywhisk, and the chorus swells like a river raised against a leaking boat.
Voices rise in interlocking lines, smooth and practiced. “Burdens balanced… paths closed with costly offerings… grief poured into the common calabash…” The phrases are old; every ear knows their grooves. They roll over his protest, sanding it down, fitting it into their pattern. Each time he opens his mouth, a new refrain blooms to meet it, just a breath ahead, as if they had been waiting for this very resistance.
He tightens his grip on the chain until iron cuts skin. “You will not wash them away with sayings,” he snarls, but already his words are catching on the edges of their harmony. Even to himself, he begins to sound like a man interrupting a rite, a wild note spoiling a careful drum-circle, rather than a son insisting the dead be named.
Around the courtyard, nobles and envoys murmur, measuring which way the wind now blows. Some lean toward one another, bracelets clinking softly as they trade quick assessments: what this story, tamed and trimmed, will cost them, what it might buy. A few cannot quite meet Ademilade’s eyes when he lifts the chain again; shame flickers across their faces like passing cloud-shadow on water, there and gone. Others let thin smiles slip free, relief loosening their shoulders as the priests’ phrases turn the raid into a tragic, necessary transaction, a toll already paid and therefore spendable.
At the edges, ink-stained scribes bend low over tablets and palm leaves. Their styluses whisper and tap, pinning the softened tale into record, baking it into law while the blood is still warm in his memory.
Watching his village’s night of fire and screaming mouths reduced to a line in a case record, Ademilade feels a cold clarity settle beneath the boiling of his anger, like iron plunged in water. These walls and altars were never built to drag raiders naked into the light; they are an anvil where raids are beaten flat and named “policy,” where the blood of people like his kin is alloyed into the shining language of “order” and “prosperity” and “road-building.” The chain in his hand, once mere proof, now shows its hidden face: not just one man’s guilt made metal, but a pattern, a measured curve of links repeating into the distance, part of a long, deliberate design that binds gods, nobles, and slaves into the same hard circle.
Understanding comes like a knife drawn slow. He has not fled the raiders’ world at all; he has walked into its inner room, where smoke is given new names and theft is rinsed and called tribute at the god’s forked roads. This sanctuary of judgments is a counting-house for bodies, weighing how many villages can burn without cracking the pillars of power. And with his own oath already cooling around him like fitted iron, forged from his tongue and their listening, he feels the machinery close. He is not outside it, shouting at its walls; he is lodged inside, a shaped tooth on a turning wheel that Esu-Odan and the nobles fully intend to grind against other, softer lives.
The clay token feels deceptively light in Ademilade’s palm, no heavier than a dried kola slice, yet his hand trembles as if it holds a stone dredged from deep water. The surface is still damp from the press-mould, cool against his calloused skin, and faint grit from the courtyard dust clings to its rim. Around the careful strokes of his name and lineage, Esu-Odan’s forked-sigil runs in a tight circle: tiny crossroads cut into clay, each intersection a mouth, each mouth a promise.
The scribe turns the token once between his own ink-stained fingers, inspecting it the way a trader weighs a cowrie string, then lifts his chin. His voice is thin but sharp, made for cutting through crowd-noise. He recites the marks in a clear, unhurried cadence, each syllable snapping into place like a bead on a story-string, Ademilade son of Adesina, of the red-earth fields by the Ketu road, of the shrine of so-and-so ancestors, witnessed this day under Esu-Odan’s painted eyes.
When he comes to the vow, his tone shifts, gaining a ritual weight that drags at the air. He speaks the clause in the high, formal speech of courts and altars, a language Ademilade knows in fragments from funerals and harvest rites. There are no soft places in it. No “unless,” no “save that,” no “if the god so wills.” Until the grievance is judged, until Mofeyisola’s bondage is brought into the open and named, until the sanctuary’s own mouth closes on the matter, Ademilade’s feet (by his own tongue) belong to these grounds.
As the last word drops, silence ripples outward. Birds on the baobab branches fall quiet. Somewhere, a chain bangle gives a single, hollow clink and then is still. The phrases settle over the courtyard like fine harmattan dust, unseen but inescapable, creeping into nostrils and folds of cloth, into the cracks of the clay itself.
Ademilade feels those words settle inside him too, sifting down through anger and fear, lodging in bone and blood. The token warms slightly in his palm, as if some thin vein of fire has been threaded through its center. He knows, without needing any priest to explain, that this small circle of baked earth is now more than a record. It is a tether. A held breath. A closed gate behind him, and a god’s crooked road opening ahead.
Ademilade’s tongue feels thick, but he forces the words out, rough as gravel. What if a man mislays such a token, walks away by accident, forgets some clay in his pocket when he crosses a road? The question hangs there, sounding foolish even to his own ears. The scribe’s face does not so much as twitch. Only the reed pen in his hand taps once against his palm, a tiny, insect sound.
With the calm of one repeating prices in a market, he names the old cases. A river-merchant whose canoes sat in still water while all other currents ran strong; palm oil turning sour in their gourds, hull-planks swelling and splitting as if chewed from within. A petty-chief whose eldest son woke each night screaming names that were not his own, until one dawn he walked straight into the bush and was never found. A widow whose kola and salt, laid down faithfully before Esu-Odan’s lesser altar, flowered with white maggots between one heartbeat and the next.
“Esu-Odan is patient,” the scribe concludes, tone almost gentle, “but not forgiving when a path is named and then denied.” He inclines his head, the gesture precise, and steps back into the shade of the pillar, leaving Ademilade alone with the cooling token and a hundred half-turned faces pretending not to stare.
Heat beating against his skull, Ademilade pushes through the dispersing ring of petitioners toward the nearest boundary gate, where the sanctuary wall breaks to meet the dusty road inland. Loose dust smokes up around his ankles, smearing the sweat on his shins. The painted faces of Esu-Odan on the gateposts leer in red and black, tongues and teeth picked out in chalk-white, but he keeps his eyes on the open sky beyond, on the flat blaze of afternoon and a lone vulture circling far above the palm groves. Beyond that gate lies scrubland, termite mounds, the long road north and west; things he understands. For a moment the distance between him and that ordinary world feels no wider than a single stride, no stronger than one more breath held and loosed.
He steps, heel hanging a hair’s breadth beyond the gate-line, and the world tips sideways. Hard-packed earth ripples soft and sucking, like riverbank clay under flood. The air clots in his throat, hot with the iron stink of old sacrifice and fresh-spilled blood. Thin laughter flutters at his ears, high and many-mouthed, children mocking from behind masks. The painted blacks, whites, and reds smear, whirl; his sight tunnels into a spinning, forked road that knots upon itself, every branch curving back toward the sanctuary’s painted teeth.
Gasping, Ademilade jerks his foot back inside the gate and the vertigo snaps off, leaving only the echo of that thin laughter and the clay token a cold, unreasonable stone against his chest. Sweat ices along his spine. When he turns, every painted eye, every carved face on the walls has shifted, just so, half a heartbeat off where he remembers them. Amused. Weighing him. Paths that a moment before led clean to river, market, and forest now feel like spokes on a wheel whose hub is a grinning altar. He sees himself walking until his blisters split, until his teeth rattle in his skull, and every road bending, bending, back to Esu-Odan’s doorstep.
Ademilade stalks the colonnade’s shadowed length, sandals whispering over stone veined with old libation stains. Each step drums the same thought against his skull: No road out. Only through. The murmur of petitioners fades behind him, swallowed by the high-pillared hush. Incense smoke drifts in thin gray threads between carved faces on the columns, all those stone mouths curved in knowing half-smiles, all of them watching.
At the far end, where the shade breaks into a spill of white-hot courtyard light, gold flickers against indigo and crimson. Yewandele. Her regalia catches the sun like hammered flame, thick bracelets and collar-rings marked with the small, precise cuts of her house. She stands with a junior priest robed in chalk-white, their heads bent close. Her palms are streaked dark from the Oath-Fire forge below, ash ground into the fine old burns that ladder her skin. Even here, away from the roar of the anvils, he smells her work: charcoal, quenched iron, the faint copper sour of blood once spilled to seal a promise.
He does not slow, does not bow, does not call her name. Courtesy belongs to a world where roads still fork wide.
He closes the last stretch in three long strides. The priest begins some murmured greeting, half blessing, half rebuke, but Ademilade’s hand is already at his belt. He yanks the wrapped length of iron free, cloth rasping over metal, and brings it down hard on the stone bench between them.
The chain hits like a hammer on an altar. The sound leaps up under the colonnade roof, a clean, ringing note that slices through the hum of distant voices and the steady boom of the hidden forge. Oil lamps along the pillars shiver. A pair of old women reciting lineages in the shade fall abruptly silent.
The links splay where the wrapping falls away. Each one is thick, carefully forged, its surface crawling with etched sigils that catch and hold the dim light. For an instant the marks seem to writhe like a nest of small snakes, then settle into stillness. The chain does not just lie there; it sits in the air, heavy as spoken judgment. Its ring still quivers in his bones.
Under the nearest arch, supplicants pause. A trader with kola-nut baskets shifts his load and peers over. A mother rocking a fevered child presses a palm flat to the boy’s brow, eyes sliding sideways. They all know the sound of something dangerous laid bare in a god’s house.
The junior priest’s mouth snaps shut. He steps back from the bench as if the iron might leap at him of its own will. His fingers pinch nervously at the fringe of his sash, but he does not yet speak. The painted masks above them, red and black and chalk-white, seem to lean closer. The air thickens with watching.
“This is yours,” he says, voice low but shaking, finger stabbing at the inscribed links. “Your house’s cut. The same kind that closed on my people’s wrists. On Mofeyisola.”
The name leaves his mouth like a curse. Or a prayer strangled halfway.
Yewandele does not flinch. Her gaze drops to the iron, not to him. She lays her burn-scarred hand on the metal, palm flat, as if steadying a restless beast. The old ladder of scars on her forearm gleams with sweat. Slowly, with a smith’s care, she runs thick fingers along each link, feeling not for weight or temper, but for the shallow ritual bites a chisel leaves in hot metal.
Her thumb pauses. Her eyes narrow.
Here: a sequence of cuts meant to call down protection. Here: a twist that shifts protection into “custody.” There: a final crooked mark that makes custody into sale, all under Esu-Odan’s laughing eyes.
“Who forged this pattern?” she murmurs, more to the iron than to him.
The junior priest finds his tongue, sputtering about sacred order, about petitions properly filed in the Outer Court, about how one does not slam chains beneath Esu-Odan’s painted faces. His voice rises thin and reedy in the high-pillared hush.
Yewandele lifts her head, the gold at her throat chiming softly. One sharp tilt of her chin. “Go.”
The word lands like a hammer blow. The priest blanches, bowing himself backward, almost stumbling over a step in his haste to be gone. His white robes flash once in the courtyard glare, then vanish into the press of petitioners.
Only the chain remains between them. Yewandele’s hand still rests on it. When she looks at Ademilade now, it is with the full weight of her office and her oath, measuring the fire in him as if it were metal half-drawn from the forge.
Her voice, when it comes, is flat as quenched steel. The chain between them, she says, is the only blade he has left: and it cuts both ways. He has thrown his grief into the god’s ears, into the mouths of nobles and slaves alike. Esu-Odan has heard. The courtyard has heard. The warlord’s men have heard. From this hour, every word of peace they try to pour out at the altar must pass through the stain of his accusation. No blessing will sit easy on a treaty that pretends his charge is wind.
But if he flinches, if he lets the matter die outside the right forms, the record will hold another story: a man who cried “blood” before a god and then swallowed it. Then the raiders will lift his silence like a shield, saying, “Esu-Odan himself did not press the case.” Chains such as this will be justified, stamped clean in the god’s name, and the next village burned will have his broken oath whispering in its smoke.
He snaps that rites are useless against men who weigh human bodies like yam sacks. Yewandele’s jaw tightens. She nods toward the sanctuary’s dark throat, where drums beat slower. Justice, she says, is not hammered out in this open yard of gossip and quick coins. He must drag his grievance into the Inner Shrine of Forked Roads, under Esu-Odan’s layered, watching masks, and wedge it into the god’s own traffic of bargains. There, at the main altar where iron, blood, spit, and breath knot together, even a landless man’s words can bite like forged steel: if he dares pay the price they call down.
Yewandele tells him plain: inside the Inner Shrine, his hoe-calloused hands and ship-men’s knives are nothing. Direct violence there twists sideways; men who reach for blades slip on dry stone, break necks on low steps, or are dragged shrieking by nothing anyone can see. Only tongues, testimonies, and cunningly forged vows can draw blood. Standing between the painted pillars, oil smoke in his lungs, Ademilade feels his fists hanging useless, his rage pacing in his chest like a starving dog biting its own tail. For the first time he understands that this crossroads has no thorn-bush path back to ambush and quiet murder: only the narrow, perilous road of open contention within the trickster’s own house.
That night, with drums and praise-songs still echoing faintly from the emptied courtyard, Ademilade slips along a servant’s passage Yewandele once pointed out in passing, following the leak of lamplight and low voices toward a side cloister where suppers and secrets are often shared. The main gates have closed to traders, but the sanctuary can never be fully shut; there is always a crack somewhere, a door propped on a stone, a gap between pillars where smoke and gossip slide.
He moves barefoot, hoe-blistered soles silent on the packed earth. Sweat and river-mud still cling to his wrapper, streaked with dust from kneeling in the altar-yard. Incense clots the air, sour with old blood and kola, but under it he catches roasted fish, fermented beans, the sweat of men who think themselves safe. He ducks under a hanging raffia curtain, shoulders brushing knots of cowries and iron that clack softly like teeth warning him back.
He feels the tug of his fresh oath like a hot chain about his ribs, links tightening with every careful step. It is not on his skin but in his breath, braided through the words he spoke before the main altar: landless son, bereaved son, who will not leave until justice is done. The memory of pouring his spit and breath onto Esu-Odan’s stone makes his tongue feel thick. Somewhere deep below, river-water runs in hidden channels under the shrine, carrying his vow through stone like a message scratched on a canoe’s hull.
He cannot name how he knows, only that he does: he is no longer just a man sneaking in the dark. Something listens with him now. Every footfall feels counted, witnessed. If he were to turn back, to slink out through some side gate and flee into the bush, the same presence that pricked its ears at his oath would follow, snapping at his mind like a dog at a fleeing goat.
Pressed into the cool stone shadow between two carved pillars, he forces his breath shallow, ribs straining against the invisible iron. Trickster god of crossroads, gate-mouth Esu-Odan, laughing in every split path: this is your house, he thinks, anger tasting of metal at the back of his throat. You let men trade lives under your painted face. Hear, then, what they say when they think you are only smoke and carved wood.
Oil-lamps hiss and mutter beyond the bend. Light seeps around the corner in a dirty smear, crawling up the pillar’s carved masks so that their eyes seem to twitch and glimmer. Fox, hyena, horned man, woman with two mouths, Esu-Odan’s many faces look down in chipped pigment. One has its tongue stuck out, red paint flaked but still bright. In the wavering glow it seems to lick its lips.
Ademilade shifts his weight, careful not to clink the chain coiled beneath his wrapper: the inscribed length from Yewandele’s forge that he raised before the crowd. The scratch-marks of oaths and names along its links press against his hip like teeth. He remembers Yewandele’s warning: this chain cuts both ways. Let it taste the truth of those who use its sisters to bind wrists.
Low laughter drifts toward him, the rough, easy sound of men with full bellies and no fear of being called to account. Words slide through it, half-swallowed by the corridor’s turn. Ademilade leans closer to the carved stone, cheek almost brushing a mask’s cold nose, and edges his gaze toward the thin spill of light, the oath’s heat tightening inside his chest as if eager for what it is about to be fed.
Through the slatted screen of a half-open lattice, he glimpses them clearly now. The warlord’s envoys sprawl on low woven mats, wrappers hitched up, bare calves stretched toward a charcoal brazier. Anklets of imported brass shine fat and yellow against the red-clay floor, glinting each time a foot idly swings. Their spears lean forgotten against the wall, charms dangling, as if no danger can ever reach men who travel under such patronage.
Opposite them squats a senior priest of Esu-Odan, robe loosened, chest-scarifications bare in the lamp-glow, beaded charms unmasked and clacking softly when he moves. He tips a calabash, pouring palm wine in slow white arcs into their waiting bowls, letting the foam crest and settle like a small, private blessing. No drums, no chants. Only men at ease.
Their words run unguarded, thick with the easy salt of comradeship. They speak of the Ketu coastline as if reading a trader’s ledger, not a homeland. Villages are named and weighed: by the sweetness of their soil, the width of their river-mouths, the number of “strong backs” that can be taken before alarm ripples down the shore.
The priest unrolls an oiled goatskin on the low table, its creases dark with old palm-wine stains. Inked coastlines snake across it, the estuaries and inlets pricked with cowries and iron studs. Each stud glints dully in the lamplight, a little eye set where the Ketu River and its sisters open their mouths to the sea. He taps them one by one, naming each as a “protected” landing under sanctuary patronage, lips curling around the word. Protection, he explains, means order. It means captives brought ashore beneath Esu-Odan’s painted sigils, stripped, washed, smudged with chalk. It means drums beaten, kola broken, shells cast, so every sorting of flesh is wrapped in omens and libations. Thus the crossroads become weirs, catching whole villages and turning them aside like schooling fish.
One envoy lifts a length of chain from beside the goatskin, links etched with the same tiny cuts Ademilade has seen hiss and glow in Yewandele’s forge, and laughs that these “oath-chains” travel better than any scribe. Clamp two wrists together before Esu-Odan’s painted face, he says, and the bargain holds. No ink, no witnesses: only iron and fear. Names spill lazily as they count their “reliable tools”: ship captains who do not flinch at children crying in the bilge, shrine attendants who look away when captives file past, and, at last, Deko. Praised for slipping between river landing and inner compound with messages, cowries, and bound bodies, never once stirring a visible taboo or waking a questioning drum.
In the dim passage his breath comes thin, but his mind stretches wide. The scale of it unfurls like that goatskin map: not a single war-canoe to stalk in the reeds, not one priest to drag before a village council, but a braided cord. Nobles who commission iron and ink. Merchants who tally flesh by cowrie weight. Priests who rinse blood-guilt in palm wine and call it “order.” Sailors like Deko, slipping between river-mouth and shrine-door, ferrying misery beneath painted sigils. His rage cools, hardens, takes shape. This sanctuary is no neutral crossroads; it is a central knot in the rope hauling his people seaward. Any vow he hurls here will jerk that whole rope: either to drag it snarling into the light or to snap it and be dragged with it into ruin.
The courtyard’s noise rose and fell like surf against rock, but his own words stayed sharp in his ears. They hung there, nailed to the air before the main altar, long after the last murmur died.
Yewandele’s face (he saw it even as he spoke) had gone still, all softness quenched. Not the look of a noble affronted, but of a smith sighting a flaw in hot metal. Her jaw tightened, eyes narrowing as if she could already hear the echo of his vow ringing along the sanctuary’s hidden beams.
When the priests finally intoned the closing blessings and the crowd began to spill toward the outer gate, she did not come to him at once. She moved through envoys and petitioners with heavy, deliberate steps, exchanging the expected courtesies, her gold-and-iron bangles chiming like muted warning bells. Only when attention drifted, when gossips had turned their tongues toward the scandal of his accusation and the outrage of the slaver envoys, did she angle her path toward the inner wall.
“Walk,” she said, without looking directly at him, her tone flat as quenched steel.
He followed. They threaded past carved pillars and flickering lamps to a shaded recess where a narrow stair dove down toward the Oath-Fire Forge. Here, the courtyard roar dimmed, swallowed by stone. The air tasted of coal-smoke and old palm oil. A rust-streaked shrine niche, hardly bigger than a man’s two hands, held Esu-Odan’s laughing face in miniature, its lips worn shiny where fingers had touched for luck or lies.
Yewandele halted with her back to the stair’s mouth, half in shadow. Bare torchlight from the courtyard brushed the planes of her cheek and the old burn scars on her forearms, turning them into pale river-lines.
“Say it again,” she murmured. “Every word you offered him. Do not adorn it. Do not cut it short.”
Her gaze pinned him more surely than any chain. Ademilade swallowed. The iron weight of what he had done pressed behind his ribs, but the rage that had driven him to the altar had not cooled. He straightened, feeling the tug of invisible cords. The altar up there, the god’s mask, the eyes of the crowd still turned in memory toward him.
“I said,” he began, voice rough, “that I am son of Ketu soil, blood of the burned village at Odu-Ayin. I said I lay my charge before Esu-Odan and all gathered ears.”
“After that,” she cut in, soft but relentless. “The vow, Ademilade.”
He drew breath through his teeth, forced himself to remember the exact shape of each phrase as it had left his tongue. Words were metal here; if he misremembered them, he would be lying to the same god whose altar he had just seized.
“I said: I will not leave this sanctuary’s ground,” he recited slowly, “not by gate, not by hidden path, not carried nor dragged, until justice is done for the village at Odu-Ayin.” His throat clenched, but he forced the last part out. “Until the bondage of my people, and of Mofeyisola in this house, is reckoned openly, before god and men.”
The shaded corner tightened around them. Below, hammers beat a dull, steady pulse through the stone. Yewandele’s nostrils flared. Her lips moved as she repeated his words under her breath, testing them like a smith testing the give of iron across an anvil.
“Will not leave,” she said at last, eyes shuttered. “Not by hidden path, not carried nor dragged. Until justice is done. Until bondage is reckoned openly.”
Each fragment fell from her mouth as if it were a bar she was laying across his back. She opened her eyes again. The calm there was worse than anger.
“You tied yourself not only to a wrong, Ademilade,” she said, voice gone hoarse. “You tied yourself to a measure. ‘Justice.’ ‘Open reckoning.’ Esu-Odan does not let such words hang loose.”
He shifted, suddenly aware of the stone beneath his feet, the painted sigils on distant walls. The sanctuary felt like a great beast holding its breath.
“You think my tongue slipped?” he asked. Bitterness edged his tone. “After what we saw on that goatskin? After what they boasted of with your chains?”
“I think,” she replied, stepping closer until he could smell forge-smoke embedded in her wrappers, “that you have thrown your whole weight on the scale in a house where scales do not balance gently. ‘Will not leave’ binds your feet, yes. But ‘until justice is done’: that reaches into every bargain they hope to strike here. Every oath inked, every chain locked or opened.”
Her hand, scarred and strong, rose as if to grip his shoulder. Instead, she let it hover a finger’s breadth away, as though some part of her feared to touch a man so freshly bound.
“You have sunk an iron hook,” she said, low, “into Esu-Odan’s own crossroad. If he pulls, it will drag more than you.”
That night, while the formal drums above chattered themselves hoarse with praise-songs for order, Yewandele went below.
The Oath-Fire Forge lay half-asleep, bellows slack, coals banked to a smolder. Hammer-echo still clung to the stone like ghost-noise. She sent the apprentices away with a look and a curt word, then knelt by the oldest wall-cupboard, keys heavy at her waist.
Iron scraped iron. Hinges sighed. The chest within was older than her grandmother’s scars: carved iroko dark with palm oil, its lid clasped shut by a lattice of rust-streaked bands incised with Esu-Odan’s tiny laughing faces.
She undid them one by one.
Inside lay clay tablets smoked almost black, goatskin scrolls stiffened around narrow bars of iron, each bound bundle threaded with cowries the color of old teeth. The air that rose from them tasted of dust, blood, and thunder long past.
Yewandele spread them on a low anvil. Burn-scored fingers traced cramped characters, following old case-threads where oaths had once snarled like fighting dogs. A river-chief who swore endless raid and plunder, while his age-mates, weary, vowed peace and sealed it with wives exchanged. A market-priest who promised prosperity over a stretch of floodplain three different lineages had already cursed, each for a different famine.
She read the judgments, the outcomes. In none did Esu-Odan simply pick one vow and cast the other aside. The god knotted both, pulled until they cut.
Blight that struck rich and poor together, grinding rival houses down to the same ash. Sudden slave uprisings that spared no banner: rebels and masters swallowed alike when chains snapped in the dark. Bloodlines sealed like quenched iron, wombs dry from one generation to the next, until the last bearer of a broken promise lay in an unmarked grave.
Balance returned, yes. But only after something irreplaceable had been paid into the crossroads.
Ademilade found her in the half-glow of the banked coals, sleeves rolled, arms streaked black to the elbow. She did not waste prayer-names or proverbs. She spoke like a smith listing cracks.
The treaty the nobles courted (the warlord’s envoys fat with palm oil and promises) would pull all the river-raids and forest-snatchings under this roof, give them law-cloth and altar-blood. To stand in Ketu and sell Ketu’s children, with Esu-Odan’s own sigil watching, and call it order.
“That oath,” she said, “must bite the same stone where your words already sit.”
His vow lay there like a naked edge: no leaving, no peace, until bondage was dragged naked into the light. The treaty’s vow reached for the opposite: chains wrapped in blessing.
“Two mouths,” Yewandele rasped, “chewing the same kola. The god cannot spit only one.”
As she speaks, the danger uncoils before him in slow, cold loops. Esu-Odan’s answer might not be a clean plague on the warlord’s ports or revolt in a few chained barracks. The backlash could shear through the oaths that keep river clans from burning inland farms, that hold rival nobles from blood-feud, that force priests to honor even the sanctuary’s simplest protections. If the scales tip wrong, ancestral pacts that pin whole lineages into uneasy truce could snap in a single planting-season, sending the Ketu coast into spirals of vengeance where no shrine is trusted, no herald safe, and every contract tastes like a lie the moment it is spoken.
His teeth ache from how hard he holds them shut. He had wanted a god to look him in the face, to taste his hurt. Instead the crossroads has swung wide, and he stands where caravans, war-canoes, and unborn children’s names all meet. Any path he chooses now will not only cut his enemies. It will cut him, Mofeyisola, and the whole Ketu shore in the same stroke.
Ademilade feels the ring closing long before anyone names him. Doors that were open yesterday shut a heartbeat too quick when he passes. Conversations fold like mats. The air itself seems to lean away.
So he walks into the open.
At the next hearing in the Outer Courtyard of Petitioners, when the drums call and people shuffle in with their bundles of grievance, he does not skulk beneath the colonnade. He takes a place near the speaking stone, dust thick on his ankles, shoulders bowed like any road-stained farmer. The presiding priest, a narrow man with an oiled beard, barely glances his way.
Two brothers quarrel over a footpath between their yam fields. Voices rise, hands chop the air, each man swearing that his grandfather’s hoe first broke that strip of earth. The priest sighs, preparing to recite the old path-laws.
Ademilade steps forward.
He bends his head, respectful. “Allow me, Baba-priest. I have walked many roads.”
Murmurs. The priest hesitates, measuring him. A stranger, but harmless-looking. And the crowd is restless, impatient for entertainment as much as justice. He flicks his fingers: speak, then.
Ademilade draws a line in the dust with his toe. His voice comes low, steady, like someone calling names for an ancestor feast.
“Once, in a village by a river, there was a footpath that ran straight as a spear between two farms,” he says. “But a man with a fat compound built his walls wide. The path came to his gate and found its way blocked.”
People lean in. He does not rush.
“So the path bent. It bent around his yam mounds. It bent around his goat pens. Each season, the bend grew wider. Those who carried loads walked farther, their backs breaking, while the big man’s courtyard stayed smooth and empty.” He looks up, meeting eyes. “When they went to the judges, the judges measured the path not with string, but with the weight of the calabashes set before them.”
A hiss of breath from somewhere in the back. Traders shift on their mats. The priest’s mouth tightens.
Ademilade smiles without mirth. “Some said, ‘It is still the old path, only curved.’ Some said, ‘It is a new road altogether, built to please one house.’ Me, I only ask: when a road must crawl on its belly around a greedy man’s feet, is it still a road, or has it become his slave?”
He does not name warlords. He does not name nobles or priests. He does not have to.
The words hang in the incense-heavy air like smoke that will not rise.
The presiding priest clears his throat. “We speak here of yam land, not men’s reputations,” he says, trying to sound amused. “Be careful, stranger. Parables can wander too far from their mother.”
Ademilade bows again, eyes lowered. “Forgive me, Baba. I am only a farmer. I have no wealth to bend roads. I have only seen how some feet never touch dust, while others bleed to keep the path open.”
Laughter, rough and uneasy, ripples along the courtyard’s edges. Villagers and small traders trade sideways glances. A woman with a baby on her hip mutters, “Which compound is he talking about?” A cloth-merchant answers, “Whichever one feels pricked.”
The priest cannot strike him. The man has only told a story. The story tastes like proverb, smells like custom. To silence him without cause, before Esu-Odan’s painted faces, would be to admit a wound.
He rules on the yam path with forced briskness, pretending the stranger’s words have no teeth. Yet as he speaks the formal phrases, he keeps darting sharp little looks at Ademilade, as if trying to scrape him clean of intent.
Behind them, the carved stone masks of Esu-Odan grin their many grins. The god’s sigils watch from pillar and gate, red and white against black. Every crossroads in the courtyard seems to tilt, ever so slightly, toward the dust line Ademilade drew with his toe.
When the hearing ends, people drift away in knots, tongues busy. “Who is that man?” “Did you hear how he spoke of judges?” “Ah, leave it. Our ears are not stones. We know who sells their tongues.”
Ademilade walks out through the press, head bowed like any other petitioner.
Inside his chest, his rage paces, caged but awake.
By afternoon, his name has become a question passed from mat to mat. Who is he? Whose son speaks so? Small people carry large stories; by the time they reach the far shade of the baobab, the stranger has already cursed three chiefs and shamed five priests.
The next hearing, they watch for him.
An old widow hobbles forward with a complaint about a stolen goat: her only goat, she tells them, voice breaking like dry wood. The presiding priest looks bored. It is a small matter. A poor woman. No one important will lose face.
Ademilade lingers at the courtyard’s edge, dust on his calves, arms folded. A woman selling kola-nuts elbows him. “Eh, farmer. Speak sense for her, the way you did yesterday.”
Others nod, eager for spice in their dull grievances. The priest hesitates, then gestures, trapped by his own role as “listener of all tongues.”
Ademilade steps into the circle.
“This goat,” he says, “was tied within sight of a god’s painted face, was it not?” The widow nods, surprised. “You pour palm oil there, you break kola there. You say, ‘Watch this house. Keep my tether safe.’”
He turns, sweeping the crowd with his gaze.
“Yet the beast walked away in another man’s hand. Its rope blessed, its throat unsanctified. No sacrifice, no sharing, no word to its owner.” His voice sharpens. “Tell me, fathers, mothers. When a thing is taken under a god’s gaze, with its tether blessed but its throat unsanctified, is it gift, or is it theft?”
A low murmur stirs, like wind moving raffia.
He waits, then drives the iron deeper.
“And if a clever tongue stands before an altar and says the right names, if he sprinkles salt and palm wine and calls witnesses, can that tongue turn a stolen thing into lawful property?” He lifts his hand toward the painted pillars, toward Esu-Odan’s grinning masks. “What kind of oath is that? One that washes the thief’s hands while the owner still cries?”
The question carries, clear, to the back rows. Men shift on their heels. Women tighten cloth around their waists. Traders avoid each other’s eyes.
Near the speaking stone, a junior priest stiffens. He has spent years memorizing the forms: how to bless a sale, how to seal a bond. Now he hears those same phrases twisted, gutted, held up to the light like rotten meat.
His cheeks burn. The goat is forgotten. All he can feel is the courtyard’s gaze sliding, slowly, from the widow’s empty tether to the iron rings on certain ankles, the guarded gates, the river path below the bluff.
“Careful,” he snaps, a little too sharp. “Do not mix goat business with matters of gods and oaths, stranger.”
Ademilade bows, but he does not soften.
“How can I help it, Baba?” he answers, voice mild and carrying. “These days, it seems everything walks away under a god’s gaze. Goats. Men. Children. Only the rope remembers who owned them first.”
The murmurs swell and break, no longer easy to laugh away.
As dusk thickens and the petitioners’ drums fall silent, Ademilade slips into the sanctuary’s half-forgotten veins. Narrow passages that smell of old palm oil and rat droppings, storage yards where only sweepers and errand-boys tread. His fingers are black with charcoal, gritty with river mud scooped from beneath the bluff.
On the back wall of a grain store, hidden from the main courtyard but not from kitchen boys, he scores a crooked forked crossroad (Esu-Odan’s sign as his grandfather drew it in ash) then, beneath, a row of huts swallowed by tongues of black flame. Smoke without color, fire without mercy.
At the water-jar stand where guards and chained porters drink, he sketches the same crossroads again. Beside it, a clumsy file of stick-figures, necks ringed, arms bound, walking into the open jaws of a canoe.
The drawings look like a child’s hand, but the meaning is sharp as a cutlass. Burned villages. Night raids. Gods watching.
He chooses walls the priests’ eyes glide past, places where gossip breeds: by the woodpile, near the sweepers’ corner, along the path to the refuse pit. Let the lowest tongues find them first. Let news climb upward like smoke through a thatch roof.
Proclamations can be denied. A whispered picture burrows.
By the third night, sweepers whisper that the god himself is walking the latrines, leaving crooked crossroads where only shit and flies keep watch. Kitchen boys trade the phrases like charms against bad luck, half-afraid, half-thrilled. When a junior priest scrapes one mark away, he slips on the wet stone and bloodies his mouth. Omen or accident, no one agrees.
Whispers harden into lines of proverb. “Oath over iron, oath over flesh,” someone mutters whenever a priest weighs a case too quickly. A bride-price hearing sours when an old uncle asks, “If she comes in chains, is it marriage or market?” Faces stay smooth, but eyes flicker toward the stranger. The warlord’s men taste the shift. Move too openly, seize him in broad daylight, and every gossiping tongue will call it proof. So the orders change. Deko is told, in a low corner smelling of salt and rust, to fetch this troublemaker quietly. Through river mist, back alleys, servants’ doors. Let no drum announce it. Let no altar see.
At first, Ademilade slips deeper into the sanctuary’s half-forgotten spaces using his farmer’s patience to watch rather than run. He moves like someone thinning yam shoots, not a leaf stirring more than it must. From these edges of torchlight he tracks the sailor’s pattern.
Deko walks as if the place has grown around him. He cuts across some courtyards without challenge, passing between prayer lines and waiting litigants, ankles ringing faintly. At one outer gate, the guard barely glances up, merely lifts two fingers in a lazy salute; at another, a spear-tip drops just long enough for a muttered joke before swinging aside. Ademilade notes who laughs, whose eyes slide away, whose hands stay too close to their weapon shafts when the sailor nears.
He lingers in alcoves thick with old kolanut dust and splashed palm wine, where junior priests lean against carved pillars to gossip. When Deko appears, their postures change almost without thought. A tilt of the head toward a side passage. A thumb jerked at a half-shuttered door. A muttered phrase, “Go around,” “Not that way today,” “The river’s mouth is open”, that sounds casual but tastes, to Ademilade’s ear, like code.
In every nod and brief clasp of forearms shared with the sailor, every smirk that flickers and dies when a senior priest strides past, Ademilade reads the outline of an invisible corridor of favor and corruption. These are not the straight, sun-baked village paths he once knew. These are crooked tracks worn by bribes and fear, by debts paid in secret and promises whispered over iron.
He marks them as he would mark the spread of blight: this doorway safe, that veranda watched; this pillar a turning point where men step from lawful daylight into shadow-bargains. Hours stretch. Torches gutter and are replaced. He does not rush. Vengeance, he reminds himself, is like coaxing fire from damp wood. You watch the wind. You feed the embers at the right place.
The sounds and smells of the lower passages become his map, sharper than any line carved on wood. Down where the lamps burn low and the walls sweat river-breath, the air is thick with rot, iron, and old offerings poured out and forgotten. In the damp stairwells that fall toward the hidden caves, water drips in slow, patient beats, but other rhythms cut across it.
He learns to sift them.
There, on the third flight, when the stone turns green and slick, comes the sailor’s breath: that phlegmy catch in Deko’s cough after climbing, like a man swallowing curses. Then the uneven scrape of his bad leg on algae-slick steps, a soft drag-stop, drag-stop that no other footfall carries. The lingering mix of tar, palm oil, smoke, and sea-brine clings to his passing, sour against the clean chill of river stone.
Ademilade waits at bends where echoes twist and double back. He presses himself into shadow, eyes closed, hoe-callused fingers on the wall, and lets the sanctuary speak. Step by step he separates Deko’s cadence from any other slave’s tread, until the man is no longer a face but a moving mark in his mind, a crooked line threading between river and shrine.
Once he is sure of the pattern, Ademilade turns to speech as snare. In smoky kitchens and between stacked water jars, where steam blurs faces and no priest stoops to listen, he leans close to scullions, sweepers, ledger-boys. His voice stays low, almost tired, as if gossip is just another burden on his back.
He speaks of “the canoe-rat who walks like a free man and carries words that could buy his freedom twice.” Never a name. Only a neck-charm that has tasted too many raids. A sailor who jokes with priests like partners, who never waits in the petitioners’ sun.
He lets silence finish the tale. In a house where stories ripen into judgment, those fragments begin to cling to the limping man who moves so easily between river and shrine, marking him in other mouths before steel ever finds him.
Following these murmurs, Ademilade traces the physical spoor of Deko’s trade: faint streaks of rich palm oil along a supposedly unused side stair, threads of foreign-dyed cloth snagged on a rough stone corner near a locked door, the scuffed marks of heavy bundles dragged at odd hours toward the sound of distant water. Each small sign confirms a hidden route, a crooked path between shrine and ship. He lingers at the mouths of those tunnels just long enough to see which guards glance away when Deko slips past, whose shoulders ease, whose fingers drum against spearshafts instead of tightening, storing their faces and habits like seeds he will one day plant in the right ears and the right season.
With the paths and loyalties mapped, Ademilade begins to place himself like an omen at certain thresholds. A flicker at the end of a corridor, a lean shadow slipping across a courtyard just as Deko emerges from some side door, always gone before a challenge hardens into words. Once, their eyes almost meet in the warped shine of a water-jar. Another time, Deko turns at the scrape of sandals on stone and finds only a stirring of lamp-smoke.
Ademilade lets his voice carry, a touch too loud, near the barracks doors and weapon racks, talking of “river-men who think the god’s laughter will shield them from every bargain they’ve nailed with blood and iron.” He never says sailor, never says Deko, but he tilts the words toward the river like spilled libation, trusting the sanctuary’s gossip-hungry air to bear them back along the tunnels.
With each small risk, each deliberate glimpse and seeded phrase, something in him shifts. He stops tasting himself as quarry in his own mouth. The sanctuary’s twisting passages no longer loom as jaws waiting to snap shut on his neck; they become the teeth of a trap he is setting, stone by stone, around the limping man whose war-canoe once helped drag fire and chains through his father’s fields.
The rumors Ademilade has seeded begin to coil back toward their source.
They do not come as a single shout, but as small changes in the air that a man like Deko cannot help but taste.
In the guard barracks, talk chops off mid-laughter when his shadow crosses the threshold. Calabashes go down too quickly. Men who once tugged him close to share palm wine and filthy river jokes now shift their weight, eyes finding other corners of the room. Their greetings come late, thin as watered stew.
He notices who stops calling him “river-brother” and starts saying only “you.” Who used to slap his shoulder and now nods from a safer distance. Their glances slide, never quite settling on the wooden charm at his throat. As if the little carved face might be watching them back.
In the passage by the washing courtyard, two spear-women break off a low argument the moment his limp approaches. Their words leave a ghost behind: “…said the god listens… if the story is sweet enough…” They bow too deep for a man still marked with iron. One makes the sign against dangerous tongues as soon as his back is turned, thinking he does not see.
He sees.
Later, by a narrow stair that smells of old incense and river damp, a junior priest sidles up beside him as he unloads a bundle. The priest’s face shines with palm oil and unease, his beaded neck-cords clicking softly as if to remind both of them where power sits.
“Brother of the river,” the priest begins, voice oiled with false warmth. “You move between ship and shrine more than most. Tell me. Any of the river-brothers been whispering to that landless petitioner? The one who asks too many questions with his eyes.”
The words are light, almost playful. The eyes are not.
Deko hears the hook buried in the soft meat of the question. Hears the suspicion that did not used to be there. He feels it in the way the priest’s hand never quite relaxes on the doorframe, in the way two acolytes pause with their load of lamp oil just out of earshot, pretending not to listen.
He has sailed enough bad waters to know when a current turns.
Something in the sanctuary’s hum has shifted. The laughter under the god’s painted faces sounds more like teeth. The easy paths he walked, the side doors, the half-forbidden stairs, the knowing nods from sleepy gate-keepers, now feel like channels cut to steer him, not free him.
He forces a crooked smile, spits on the flagstones for show, and answers with his own easy lie. But inside, his stomach knots tight, and the old limp in his left leg throbs in warning. The ground under him is moving. Stories, once his cover, are beginning to circle like sharks.
Someone is feeding the water. Someone wants the sanctuary to taste his name and find it sour.
Dropping the posture of the amused onlooker, he sheds it like a torn cloth. The grin dies. What remains is all sharp angles and barked orders.
In the long barracks hall, between hanging shields and stacked spears, he paces like a tethered dog, limp hitching his stride, eyes raking every shadow. Smoke from guttering lamps clings to the low ceiling, making the air thick, sour with sweat and old fear. One by one he jerks startled guard-slaves from their mats, from dice games, from half-finished bowls of yam mash, fingers twisted in collars and harness rings.
“Up,” he snaps. “Who’s been listening to the stranger? Who’s repeating his filth? Speak.”
His voice slams off mudbrick and wood, runs down the narrow passage like spilled oil. Men and women who can face steel without flinching now fumble their answers, tongues clumsy, eyes sliding to the floor. In the adjoining rooms, conversation frays and dies. Even the habitual jangle of iron bangles turns cautious; hands still, bodies freeze. No one wants to be the throat he chooses to prove a lesson.
A younger canoe-hand, all sharp elbows and river-salt bravado, snickers to a cluster of bunkmates, voice pitched just loud enough to travel. “They say a village ghost walks the crossroads now,” he mutters, rolling a cowrie across his knuckles. “Talks like he owns them. Maybe Esu-Odan’s found himself a new tongue.”
The nervous laughter that answers him is the last sound he owns.
Deko is on him in three limping strides, fist twisted in the boy’s collar, dragging him out into the bare strip of courtyard between barracks and inner wall. Dust lies there like old ash; lamp-smoke drifts low, catching on carved faces and weapon-racks. No drums, no ceremony. Just work.
He beats the boy with the cold, mechanical rhythm of a man mending a hull. Elbow, knee, knotted fist, the flat slap of calloused palm against cheek. No waste, no wild rage. Only a steady, punishing economy. Each strike spells out a lesson on skin and bone: this is what comes of letting an outsider’s story live in your mouth; this is what comes of tasting his name with anything but contempt.
Blood spatters the packed earth in dark commas. The boy’s breath hitches into wet whimpers, then grunts, then a low, animal moan. Around them, guard-slaves freeze along the walls and doorways, shoulders tightening, hands finding the safety of spear-shafts and bead-cords but not daring to intervene. Eyes snap down to the ground, to their own bare feet, to the trembling shadow-lines cast by the lamps.
Fear sews their lips shut with invisible wire. The rumor that had been swelling like a drum-skin collapses in their throats. In the sour air, under painted trickster faces, the only story now is the one Deko writes in bruises.
Leaving the boy groaning and half-conscious as a warning nailed to the dust, Deko stalks straight to the warlord’s envoys lodged near the inner courts, where thick cloth screens drink lamplight and muffle but cannot swallow the hiss of arguments and the dry clatter of counted cowries. Bowed by his ankle irons yet eyes flint-hard, he kneels only as far as iron allows and spits the danger at their feet: the landless villager’s tongue is souring the very paths of the sanctuary, bending ears that should face the river toward other stories. “He’s not mere nuisance,” Deko rasps. “He’s a spark in dry harmattan grass. Let him burn, and even Esu-Odan’s painted crossroads will lean away from your canoes and your profit.” He names Ademilade not as rival but as a creeping fire that, if not stamped out, will scorch every bargain tying ship, shrine, and slave together.
The envoys, fingers drumming on cowries and seal-stones, trade glances that flash like drawn blades. Stories loose in Esu-Odan’s house are worse than knives. Their answer comes in clipped phrases and a single, heavy concession: Deko is loosed to the sanctuary’s back-ways, licensed to “deliver” the troublemaker to an inner dark where eyes and pity seldom reach. Dismissed with that brutal blessing, iron singing faintly at his ankles, he limps out already reshaping the command in his mind. It will not be enough to drag the villager breathing to some quiet cell. In every dim stairwell and side court he walks, he begins to choose corners where a man might be bent without witness, broken down into a lesson that will solder shut the cracks in his own fraying worth.
The first day, Ademilade moves as if still a supplicant.
Head bowed. Shoulders rounded in the old, learned curve of deference. Cloth pulled higher to shadow his cheek-scars and the glint of cowries in his hair. A battered calabash tucked under his arm, gourd-mouth stoppered with folded palm-leaf: the sign of one waiting on judgment: land dispute, bridewealth quarrel, accusation of theft. He lets the weight of it drag his arm, as if fear lives inside.
In the Outer Courtyard he drifts toward a knot of market wives circling a priest’s aide, their wrappers bright as spilled dye, their voices sharp as grinding-stones. They spit numbers and names: goats promised, kola refused, a son who shamed a lineage. Ademilade eases himself into their shadow the way a man eases into river reeds. When a pair of guards begin to rake the crowd with their gaze, he lowers his own and borrows the wives’ anger, muttering their complaints under his breath, lips moving in their rhythms. Their rising voices swell and crash around him, a sound-wall that eats his shape.
Deko watches from the colonnade’s shade, back to a carved pillar where Esu-Odan’s laughing face grins over his shoulder. His eyes do not blink much. He notes how the stranger never stands square to any door or open arch, always with one foot angled toward a side path, a shrine, a stall. A man who has learned that straight roads lead quickest to chains.
At each painted gate, Deko leans on his limp and his iron, playing the humble slave who knows his place. He questions doorkeepers with downcast eyes and an almost-respectful smile, palms greased by thin-stacked cowries that clack softly like teeth. Where coin is not enough, his voice drops, the promise of a night visit in the river mist coiling under his words. “Remember him,” he says quietly. “Cowrie-threaded hair. Talks soft, eyes like he’s measuring your doorway.” The gatekeepers nod, unsettled, and their memories sharpen like spears pointed inward.
By noon, Ademilade can feel the notice tightening around him, invisible but real as a noose woven from whispers and painted crossroads.
By late afternoon the chase presses closer, the whole sanctuary seeming to tilt against him. Ademilade feels the air tighten as word of a “suspicious villager” ripples through the courts: doors that were open in the morning now swing shut before he reaches them, door-beads clattering like hurried prayers. Petitioners who had met his eyes earlier now study the ground, lips sealed, as if a glance might drag them into his trouble. A gourd of palm wine, once pressed into his hand in idle kindness, is snatched back with a mumbled excuse.
Forced from the open spaces, he peels away from the flow of bodies and into a side passage where walls sweat old smoke. The plaster is streaked black from years of lamp-flame, red and white paint ghosted beneath like buried bones. Lineages are being recited behind reed curtains, low chants tumbling names and praise-titles into the dim like slow rain. Each syllable pricks his skin with memory.
He moves in their shadow until a flicker at the corridor’s far throat freezes him. Deko’s narrow face, fox-quick eyes, framed beneath the red-and-white sigils of Esu-Odan daubed over the arch. Iron at his ankles. The sailor’s gaze combs the passage, hunting edges and exits.
Ademilade drops instantly, palms to the soot-gritted floor, knees settled before a threshold chalked with cowries and palm ash. He bends low, muttering an old farmstead blessing so it sounds like prayer. A novice in faded indigo rounds the corner with a bowl of lamp oil balanced on her head. She clicks her tongue at the sight of him blocking the way.
“Up, elder brother,” she scolds, stepping between him and Deko’s line of sight. “Do you pray with your whole body like a stump? Others must pass.”
Her slim frame and flapping cloth become a moving screen. Ademilade ducks his head further, using her chiding to mask his shift sideways along the threshold. For a breath-long moment, as Deko’s tread scrapes nearer, he hides in the shadow of her annoyance, then lets her bustling form tow him past like driftwood caught under a passing canoe.
As dusk leans in, the sanctuary’s inner geometry sharpens the hunt. Shadows lengthen like spears. Courtyards that felt broad at noon now pinch into funnels. Ademilade begins to read the place like a field under threat of flood, tasting danger in the air. He listens for where footsteps pool, where silence runs deep, where the mutter of prayers thickens enough to hide a man.
A patrol swings unexpectedly into a cross-corridor ahead, brass spear-butts knocking the flagstones. Ademilade slips sideways into a circle of old women seated on low stools, their gray heads wrapped in faded cloth, recounting their ancestors. He bows so low his forehead grazes the dust, as if summoned from birth. The women’s voices roll over him in waves of praise-names, lineage stacking upon lineage, each name a stone in a wall.
One, catching the naked panic in his eyes, cackles, teeth brown and broken, and clamps a bony arm around his shoulders. Her fingers bite like roots.
“Ah-ah!” she cries in a carrying voice, loud enough to cut across the corridor. “Have you people no eyes? This is my sister’s lost grandson from the inland farms. He bears our mother’s scar here. Look!”
Her free hand smacks his chest where old ritual marks lie beneath his cloth. She does not know the pattern, but the lie rides true on the rhythm of her tongue.
The guards hesitate at the edge of the circle, bootheels grinding to a halt. To cross between reciters and their dead would be to slice words already rising toward listening ancestors. Their sergeant shifts, uneasy, glancing at the nearest shrine-mark daubed in red and white. Sacred names hang in the air like hooked fish; no one wants to be the first to tear the line.
The old woman’s arm tightens, and she rocks as she chants, dragging Ademilade with her sway. He lets his body go slack, letting the tide of their praise-names bear him, inch by inch, around the circle’s far curve. Behind the veil of recitation, he slides out through a gap between two stooped backs, never lifting his head, swallowed by deepening dusk.
Deko reaches that crossroads heartbeats later, breath sharp, limp worse with the long day. He sees only a knot of elders crooning to the dead and tastes the sour edge of a chance slipped past. To demand they stop, to tear through their circle, would be to tug Esu-Odan’s beard in his own house. The trickster might laugh. Or bite.
Deko swallows his curse, jaw working, and the hunt tilts further downward, the quarry already pouring away into the sanctuary’s darker veins.
Night thickens until the painted courts feel like a story he has already left. Down here, lanterns spit and gutter, throwing jagged light along servant corridors that stink of smoked fish, palm oil, sweat, and the faint hot-iron breath rising from the buried forge. Ademilade hugs damp walls, one hand on rough stone, slipping through kitchens where pot-girls startle at his shadow, eyes gone white in fireglow but tongues held tight by fear and the nearness of shrines. A narrow archway funnels him into a passage where novices file past with great water-jars balanced on their heads, bodies taut with the careful pride of not spilling a drop before the god. He means to wait for the line to pass. Then Deko’s voice scrapes close behind, hard and low, bargaining information from a trembling pantry boy with the soft clack of cowries and the colder click of blade on pottery. Ademilade drops flat, ribs striking stone, and slides on elbows and hips beneath the swaying line, matching his breath to the measured shuffle of bare feet. Above him, clay bellies brush his back, cool and sweating; one jar tilts, sloshing, a thin trickle of river-water kissing his neck like a warning. He bites down on a gasp and keeps moving. Behind, Deko bursts into the passage, curse snapping out as the novices halt in offended confusion, jars wobbling, bodies bunching into a human wall that blocks his view and buys Ademilade a few thin, precious heartbeats of darkness.
Pushed ever inward by questions, bribes, and the glint of Deko’s knife at hesitant throats, Ademilade feels the walls thicken, painted plaster giving way to sweating stone veined with salt. The mutter of outer courts thins into distant echo, replaced by the hollow boom of waves striking rock far below, as if the bluff itself had a heartbeat. Following half-remembered hints about “river mouths beneath the god’s feet,” he takes stairwells that spiral down, past storage niches rank with old grain and shuttered oracular chambers whose doors bleed faint, forbidden light. River mist beads on his lashes. Each turn is stolen, not chosen. Stairs behind him suddenly patrolled, once-open corridors roped off “for cleansing,” leaving only cramped, echoing tunnels that nose toward the bluff’s hollowed belly. Unaware that Deko shadows the same routes from the opposite side, sliding through smugglers’ paths with a limping, relentless pace, the man who came to hunt the raiders is funneled, step by step, into the sanctuary’s stone throat, where escape narrows to a single, treacherous way and Esu-Odan’s laughter seems to ride the dripping rock.
By the time the sun stands high and merciless, the stranger has become a mouthful of ash passed from tongue to tongue.
“Wandering troublemaker,” one priest mutters to another as they sip sour palm wine in the shade, making the words sound like a diagnosis. “Spy from upriver,” a guard tells a laundry woman, who repeats it to a mortar-pounding auntie, who hisses it into the ears of two errand-children as they trot past with calabashes.
The girl is one of them. Bare legs dusty, hair in tight, hurried plaits, she still remembers the rough sweetness of stolen plantain shared behind a storage shed two days past, the stranger’s quiet thanks and the way his eyes had softened, just for a heartbeat.
Now those same eyes flash through her mind when she spots him ahead, slipping toward a back stair near the smoke-streaked kitchens. Behind, she hears Deko’s limp-clicking stride, the sharp call of his voice as he barks questions, cowries rattling like teeth. Fear prickles her scalp.
She steps deliberately into Deko’s path, calabash hugged to her bony chest.
“Big brother,” she says, gaze wide, voice pitched just shy of tremble. “The wandering man? I saw him join the prayer queue by the north gate. He went to ask judgment.”
Her smile stretches too long. Deko’s eyes narrow, traveling from that smile to the fine tremor in her arms. He knows hungry children and the lies they dare. His jaw works. He grunts, nods as if convinced, turns toward the north gate with a curse for slow guards: and then, three paces on, the hairs on his arms lift. Esu-Odan loves a forked tongue.
He spins back, finds the back stair empty, stone still whispering the last ghost of fleeing feet. Rage heats his face.
By dusk, the girl’s name has passed along a different chain. Hands seize her in the courtyard. No one explains. They don’t have to. An iron ring is hammered shut around her ankle, the metal biting hot into skin. She is paraded past the barracks where other children stare and fall suddenly silent, then driven toward the reeking latrine pits with a shove between her shoulder blades.
Her new chain clanks with every staggering step, louder than gossip, louder than warning drums. The lesson does not need words: see what happens to those who tilt the hunt, even by a finger’s breadth, in favor of the man the priests now call disturber of sacred peace.
In the Outer Court’s patchy shade, where petitioner dust hangs with incense and fly-whine, a junior priest of Yewandele’s faction risks a pause that lasts one breath too long.
He bows as if merely correcting a stranger’s route. His voice stays low, for shrine-walls have ears.
“If you seek binding,” he murmurs, eyes on the packed earth between their feet, “walk where the stone sweats and the waves speak under the god’s heels. River mouths. Not market mouths. You hear?”
His fingers, veined and ink-stained, ghost across Ademilade’s elbow as if steadying him toward the right archway. The touch is small. The warmth inside the words is not. It softens the edges of “disturber of peace,” makes the hunted man sound, for a heartbeat, like a pilgrim.
An older officiant, watching from the colonnade, notes everything. The tilt of the junior’s shoulders toward the stranger. The softened endings of his phrases. That forbidden, human nearness.
By evening recitations, the story has turned. Before two dozen tight-faced novices, the junior is called forward. His staff is taken from his hand, his ritual beads tugged loose so hard they snap, scattering polished seeds across the red floor.
They do not call him heretic. They call him careless with boundaries.
The next dawn he walks out between spearmen, bound for some forgotten village shrine upriver, exiled not for wrong doctrine, but for the crime of letting his compassion lean toward a man the sanctuary has decided must be prey.
The sanctuary shifts around him like a hunting snare tightening.
Patrol routes knot and re-knot. Squads double back on themselves, boots scuffing old dust into new patterns. Side cloisters once open to any sweat-shining supplicant are suddenly “under cleansing,” white cloth and incense pots barring the way. Fresh chalk sigils bloom on plaster. Crossroads marks, warning eyes, crooked mouths that seem to smirk as spears cross before Ademilade’s chest and turn him aside.
From an upper walkway, Mofeyisola tracks it all. The angles of search. The gap that will close. When one hunt-party swings toward a dead-end cloister he has just slipped through, her throat hardens. She lets fall a cough turned command along the line, voice flat as iron.
“Report of quarrel by the grain-stores. Go. Now.”
The officer hesitates, then snaps a hand signal. Spears pivot. Sandals scrape. The patrol peels away, diverted by a lie offered like a small, sharp prayer.
That night, her commander studies her in the lamplight. Too long. Too still.
“Your judgment,” he says at last, rolling a kola nut between thumb and forefinger, “has begun to taste of… sentiment.”
The word is soft. The punishment is not. At the next watch-bell, a colder-eyed guard with a scar like a knife-smile along his jaw falls into step at her shoulder, chains on his wrists chiming in time with hers, turning every mercy she might dare into a risk with witnesses.
Beneath the painted courts, the air turns to breathless stone and damp. Driven by whispers of tunnels under the god’s feet, Ademilade follows the corridors’ forced logic, roped-off chambers behind, only downward-sloping steps ahead, until river mist slicks the walls and lamp-smoke tastes of salt. In one dim cavern, his bare foot hits algae on the narrow ledge; the world lurches, stone shouts under him, and he pitches toward a black-throated shaft where water roars unseen like a buried crowd. He snatches at the rock, skin peeling from his palms as he hangs for a heartbeat over the unseen plunge, wrists shuddering, cowries at his hair clicking like teeth, before dragging himself back, blood seeping between his fingers like a quiet libation none of his ancestors asked him to pour.
By the time he wraps his torn wrapper tight around his bleeding palms, the pattern glares like fresh chalk on shrine-stone. The girl limping to the shit-pits. The shorn-badged priest marched upriver. Mofeyisola shadowed by another’s eyes. His own almost-vanishing in the roaring dark. Not accidents. Offerings.
The sanctuary is making a story out of him.
Not a quiet one.
Every hand that strays his way is seized, branded traitor, paraded as lesson. Every wrong foot he sets calls forth spectacle. As he edges deeper into the stone throat dragging him toward the river mouth, Ademilade feels the god’s house clench like a jaw, promising that from here on, any move he makes will spend not only his flesh, but the thin, fragile futures of all who dare bend even a finger toward his cause.
Yewandele tastes the turn in the air before any decree is read aloud.
Conversations kink and break when she nears. Junior nobles who once rushed to flatter her now busy their tongues with prayers, eyes fixed on the floor. Priests who used to argue fine points of ritual with her suddenly remember other appointments. Gossip curls around her like smoke that has learned to move without scent.
So she gives them a blaze they can all see.
In the Outer Courtyard, before petitions begin, she stands with arms bare and voice ringing. She calls for lists. For ledgers. For iron. Every shackle and bolt along the river approach is to be counted, weighed, and brought to her notice. She names it devotion to Esu-Odan’s thresholds. She names it fear of “careless handling of sacred bodies.”
“Disorderly petitioners,” she says with a thin smile that never reaches her eyes, “must feel the god’s order in their bones.”
Fresh chains clatter onto mats at the Oath-Fire Forge. Apprentices sweat and hurry. She sends half of them away, claiming that this work demands only her hands. Alone, she works slow.
Hammer. Quench. Whisper.
On the inner curve of a cuff, where flesh will hide it, she scratches the forked mark her grandmother taught her. Not Esu-Odan’s public sign, but the old, narrow one that snags a spoken promise and drags it screaming back if broken. On another manacle, a twist of lines that will answer not to priests, but to the buried fire under her house’s first forge. Chains meant for wrists are tempered to bite into oaths.
In council, when the warlord’s envoys push for tighter control of the undercroft Yewandele wraps herself in piety like an extra cloth.
“To clutter the god’s under-ways with soldiers,” she murmurs, gaze lowered, “is to confuse the paths along which messages pass. Esu-Odan delights in order beneath the seeming tangle. You would risk sacrilege. Accidents. Misread signs. Who will you blame when a misstep in the dark offends a listening ancestor?”
Priests, pricked by fear of unseen taboos, nod and hedge. Nobles exchange looks. The envoys grit their teeth but yield ground by finger-widths. She offers compromise upon compromise, an extra tally at the river locks here, a ritual inspection there, until what they win is smaller than what they asked, and what she is granted is just enough authority to walk where they mean their snares to spring.
Let them think she is shoring up their trap.
At her forge that night, as sparks leap like small spirits, Yewandele feeds each marked link into the brazier’s glow and thinks of Ademilade’s jaw, set like unworked ore, and of Mofeyisola pacing stone corridors between river and shrine.
If the god’s house insists on chains, then she will decide which way they pull when the story snaps tight.
The reassignment orders for Mofeyisola arrive wrapped in the scent of palm oil and incense, stamped so deep with a priest’s sigil the wax looks wounded. No room for refusal. No space for questions. By evening bell she is walking a new line: the night-ward along the lower passages, that damp belt of stone between the river’s black mouth and the first barred doors of the inner shrines.
Here the air tastes of rust and salt. Here the god’s breath runs underfoot.
She is to inspect every side alcove, every storage niche where nets and fetters hang, every mouth of cave where river-mist creeps in like a ghost on its belly. She is to listen for unsanctioned movement in the dark, smugglers, rival spies, “wandering troublemakers.” The words on the order are careful. The placement is not.
They are making her a door.
Between Deko’s hidden landings and the sanctified stone. Between the man who hunts and the man who fled the fires with her name in his teeth. So she walks the circuit again and again, until she knows each echo like a face, memorizing the difference between river slap, guard-slave shuffle, and a stranger’s desperate footfall, because when steel finally clears leather in this throat of stone, she must know, without prayer or doubt, whether she stands between hunter and prey, or between lover and the god who means to swallow him.
Deko moves like another shadow among shadows, bare feet silent on the damp stone. He leans over a prow, fingers testing a mooring rope with the idle care of a man afraid of the whip, and lets his voice wander.
“Inspection from above tonight,” he murmurs to one knot of guard-slaves, eyes on the water. “Priests counting spears. Chains. Faces. Better you’re seen near the main landing when they come.”
He laughs, offers a quick sip from a gourd that has made tougher men careless. At the next post he repeats the tale, turned a half-breath different, so no one can say it came from his mouth alone.
By mid-watch, keels are snug, torches ring the busy paths, and the side tunnel he has chosen yawns oddly quiet.
The usual spearmen have been “reassigned” to check a phantom cargo farther downstream. The skinny drummer who dozes by that cave’s mouth is coaxed away to warm his hands at another brazier, his drum head loosened and hung on the wrong peg so its hollow warning will not carry true.
To a casual eye, it is nothing. A gap born of tired bones and muddled orders. The sanctuary has many mouths; one forgotten toothless corner means little.
But Deko knows that cave’s voice.
He has listened to it on raid-nights, when men dragged captives past, when waves slapped up its throat. The stone there throws back every footfall twice. A cough becomes a confession. A man who steps onto the narrow ledge finds water on one side, rock on the other, blackness ahead.
No room for a crowd. No straight run to a gate. Just enough space for two bodies to meet, for one to fall, and for the river to swallow what the sanctuary prefers not to see.
Whispers ride cookfire smoke and libation-scent, slipping through kitchens, down servant corridors, along the backs of gossiping acolytes. Ademilade, pressed to the less-trod edges of the inner wall, nets phrases as if they were stray seeds: new terms for river raids, “necessary sacrifices” to sweeten Esu-Odan’s humor, a nameless villager who has “overstepped his place,” whose tongue must be stopped. The words fall into the old furrows in his mind. Canoes gliding in by night, chains weighed and counted, blood washed where ancestors cannot see. A negotiation moved downward, away from burial mounds and public altars, into stone that keeps its own counsel. The faint metallic tang bleeding up from below, hammered iron, wet links, a forge’s breath, confirms it. Somewhere in those depths, men will speak openly of prices and villages burned, of which war-canoe took which bodies. That promise hooks him harder than any warning. Jaw tight, shoulders raw with travel, he turns his feet toward the undercroft passages, knowing the sanctuary has begun to bend its paths against him and walking them anyway.
When the priest-reciter traces her patrol in chalky words, Mofeyisola feels her nape prickle. Twice past that hollowed tunnel; twice past the place Yewandele once spat and named fit for fools and offerings. She roughens her spear’s leather, tests each bangle’s jingle, then sends her under-guards to loiter by the roaring falls, noise to hide their nerves, keeping for herself the thin-voiced quiet.
Elsewhere, beneath a shrine-kitchen’s smoked rafters, Ademilade bends through a servant’s postern. The air drops cooler, stone sweating, chains whispering behind walls. He follows the murmur of men who think themselves unheard.
By the river’s black lip, Deko vanishes against wet rock, charm cold on his chest, breath shallow with old shipboard fear.
Three hungers (shielding, knowing, surviving) draw inward along the same narrow veins of stone. The dripping chamber ahead seems to breathe, waiting, as if Esu-Odan has already counted their steps and laid out his laughter like a net.
Ademilade hugs the tunnel wall, shoulder brushing slime-slick stone, breath shallow so it will not echo ahead of him. The oil lamp in his hand is hooded with his fingers, its flame a dull orange eye that sees only a few paces. Beyond that, the dark presses close and wet. His bare feet move slow, toes reading the ground where the light cannot, feeling for dips and ridges, for the telltale groove of water-cut stone that might twist his ankle and send him crashing.
He tracks the rise and fall of murmurs the way a farmer reads the wind through tall grass. A swell of sound where the passage widens. A thinning where the roof dips low. Now and then a faint clink of metal. Men, he tells himself. Human throats. Human schemes.
The words smear together on the cave’s damp tongue. “Envoys… oaths… chains delivered…” Each scrap slips through dripping echoes, comes back rubbed raw of meaning. Still, each half-heard phrase feeds the coil in his chest. A tight, bright thing. Purpose. Rage wrapped in reason.
Proof. The word beats in him like a second heart. Proof of raiders and nobles trading blood in the god’s own house. Proof of oaths twisted around necks like rope. Something he can drag, filthy and undeniable, into the light of the courtyard and lay at Esu-Odan’s sneering feet.
“See it,” he mutters under his breath, hardly more than a breath-shaped thought. “Swallow it now, trickster. Choke on it when I am done.”
His fingers brush the cowries threaded in his hair. Tokens from a shrine that burned. The shells click softly, like teeth. Behind his ribs, memory flares: the orange wash of fire, the iron stink of hot chains, Mofeyisola’s cry swallowed by the night.
He pushes it down. Not here. Not now.
Water drips somewhere ahead with slow, patient rhythm. The tunnel breathes cool against his sweat. Each step carries him deeper under the god’s hill, away from sky and sane paths, into the throat of whatever bargain waits in the dark.
Yet as he listens, the sounds ahead peel away from human shape. They stretch thin and needling, scrape the high edges of his hearing, then plunge down into wet, gurgling mutters, like someone drowning and laughing at once. Words tangle into sing-song, nonsense verses that chase their own tails. “Iron for blood, blood for bread, bread for. A question curls through the dark. “Who hunts who?”
It comes from somewhere ahead, muffled by dripping stone. Then, without breath between, the same words breathe warm and close just behind his left ear. Ademilade’s skin tightens. He does not turn. He knows there will be only rock if he looks, only his own shadow kneeling on the damp wall.
Old tales slip their hooks into him. Stories of children led astray by echo-games. Of hunters who followed voices underground and came back years later with white hair and no names. Of Esu’s caverns that borrowed your own tongue, then sent it walking back to you crooked.
Cold fingers trace his spine, knuckle by knuckle.
He pauses beneath a twisted root hanging like a shriveled arm, presses one calloused palm to the damp stone, and closes his eyes just long enough to listen as he would to a restless field. The cave has its own heartbeat: slow drip like sap from a wounded tree, distant boom of waves chewing rock, a low, buried hum that might be trapped air or sleeping spirits. Threaded through it all, the faint, metallic tremor of chains barely stirred, as if something had shifted its weight and gone still again. The air smells scrubbed, almost purified: no cook-fire smoke, no bat droppings, none of the sour rot of a truly forgotten passage. A kept path. A fed path. A watched path.
Yewandele’s warning drops through him with the weight of a hammer blow: only a fool or a chosen sacrifice walks here alone. He tastes iron at the back of his tongue, fear, rage, or the god’s own breath, he cannot tell, and makes his shoulders soften by force. No running. No stumbling. If this is a snare, let it close on a man who walks with his dead ranked at his back, not a panicked goat bolting for slaughter. He shifts his grip on the staff, angles it low like a root seeking water, and moves on, counting each drip like kola seeds in a diviner’s tray, a ritual he does not fully know but dares to pretend.
The mutter breaks into hard sound: metal biting stone, that clean, bright clank of chain settling into hook: then it dies mid-ring, strangled, as if the cave itself has been gagged. Silence drops like a grinding door. In that held instant he sees the pattern: swept floor, easy turns, shadows placed just so, like yams in a trap-pit. His shoulders knot. He pivots, too late. The passage gathers around him, narrowing, its damp breath on his neck, no longer a road but a throat remembering how to swallow.
Ademilade eases one foot back, testing the stone behind him, and feels the sudden wrongness of the air: breath too tight, echoes too clean, the damp chill of watched prey. The cave’s sweat beads colder along his spine. Sound sits up and listens.
He shifts his weight as if merely settling his load, shoulder rolling to hide the coil in his muscles. Fingers flex once on the staff. Not yet. Let them believe him blind.
A flicker of movement, no louder than cloth brushing rock, slides across the tunnel mouth, a shadow trimming itself to fit the stone. His ears pick out the tiny betrayals: leather creak, toes scuffing grit, a held breath rasping too close to be his. The drip of water seems to pause to hear.
From the dark water channel at his side, the faintest rattle of iron answers, shy at first, then twice, like a spirit clearing its throat. Not loose chain. Set chain. Waiting chain. Yewandele’s forge-fire stories return in a rush: links quenched in oath-blood, hammered with names, hungry for wrists that break their word.
He smells oil now under the river musk, the sharp, bitter tang of fresh-wiped metal. No bat stink. No guano slick. A clean cave, scrubbed like a shrine floor, prepared for a ceremony no priest has blessed aloud.
His heel touches a slick patch, as if many feet have turned and braced there. He knows that stance from threshing floors when the ox panics and surges: where men plant themselves to receive the charge. The cave is a threshing circle. He is the grain.
He draws a slow breath, tasting stone and old salt. “Ancestors,” he thinks, not daring to move his lips, “if I must fall, let it crack something in this house of tricks.” The damp air presses closer in answer, the unseen watchers tightening their circle just as a new shadow thickens at the tunnel’s edge, cutting off the last thin suggestion of escape.
Deko’s voice oozes out first, slick as palm oil on bad kola. “You followed well, farmer. Almost like you’ve done this before.” The words crawl along the stone before the man himself appears, peeling away from the jagged spur that had hidden him. He slides into the thin wash of lantern light seeping from a cracked niche, a short blade resting lazy against his thigh, point down, like he has all the time in the world. Rope scars cross his wrists like old fetters drawn in pale ink. His crooked grin shows small, tight teeth.
“Or maybe,” he adds, tilting his head, “the god led you by the nose.”
Behind Ademilade, the scrape of iron on rock thickens. Two broad-shouldered guard-slaves pack the passage, shields lifted high enough to rasp the low ceiling, shedding dust. Their spearpoints slant down like teeth in a closing jaw, ash-wood hafts braced against their hips. Faces blank, eyes careful not to meet his, they move with the drilled patience of people who know every wrong step costs blood that is never their own to spill.
The river-channel at his other side bulges, then parts. First the gleam of wet iron, then shaven skulls, then shoulders slick with river sheen as a pair of figures heave up from the black water, slow as curses being born. The current clutches their waists, sulking around iron bangles and ankle rings that chime faint beneath the cave’s steady drip, a thin, miserable music. Their spears rise with them, reeds after flood, angling across his flank, cutting off any thought of sliding past. Stone at his back, shields at his front, cold water at his side: together they knit into a net with no visible seam. Every cautious shift turns his own shadow into cage-bars crawling long along the sweating walls, closing as he breathes.
Ademilade measures the narrow space: slick rock treacherous under thin sandals, low roof brushing his cowrie-threaded hair, no margin to sprint or twist free. His heartbeat thunders into a drum the cave gleefully repeats, mocking his control, shouting his fear. He feints toward the water, shoulders dipping, then snaps the other way, driving an elbow toward Deko’s ribs. Only to meet the sudden downward blur of a club from the rear guard, knotted wood cracking across his forearm, pain bursting bright as fresh-tapped palm wine up the bone, fingers spasming open against his will.
Fingers clamp his shoulder and throat, another hand wrenches his wrist until his makeshift staff flies from numb grip and skitters into the dark channel, swallowed by the muttering current. Knees smash stone slick with river seep; rough palms like gnarled roots grind his face toward the floor. Iron circles him with dreadful familiarity. Cool links bite his wrists and ankles in practiced motions, each click a small verdict. The weight settles like wet earth. A faint humming chill creeps up his bones, tasting the old scars on his chest. Even through the blur of pain he knows these are no common fetters, but forge-marked bindings Yewandele once warned could drink a person’s very promises dry, leaving only an obedient husk.
They put her on her knees on the cool packed earth, palms open, head bowed so her neck faced the painted doorway like an offered joint of meat. Lamp-smoke wreathed the barracks antechamber, thin and bitter, clinging to the old sweat worked deep into the walls. Beyond the threshold, the murmur of mustering guards rose and fell. Iron on leather, sandals scuffing, low coughs swallowed back. Here, in the narrow pocket before the inner corridor, everything narrowed to the rustle of the junior priest’s wrappers and the slow drip of his words.
He stood above her, lean and careful, white chalk dusted along his temples like false age. One hand rested on the talking staff, its carved faces grinning down at her; the other toyed with a string of cowries as if fingering the tongues of absent petitioners.
“Tonight,” he said, voice smooth as palm oil poured over stone, “Esu-Odan’s house must show only one face to our guests. Orderly. Unquestioned.” Each word dropped with the weight of a small stone into a calabash. “The warlord’s men come to bargain in good faith. They must find every gate watched. Every crossroads guarded. Every tongue disciplined.”
Mofeyisola’s knees burned against the hard floor, but she kept still. She knew this posture. Knew how to hide defiance behind lowered lashes. The iron bangles at her wrists and ankles lay cool against her skin, humming faintly with each breath.
“There are,” the priest went on, “whispers from beneath. Unsettling rumors. Restless thoughts in the under-chambers.” His gaze slid over her bowed head to the shadowed door that led down, then back. “It must be clear, tonight of all nights, that such…unsteadiness finds no soil here to take root.”
He did not have to say blood. He did not have to say example. The silence that followed spoke both.
“You will oversee the special watch along the inner wall,” he concluded. “You and those under you will keep the thresholds clean of trouble. You will not be…distracted by tales from below. Your eyes belong to the paths I mark. Your feet will not wander.”
He stepped closer. The scent of kola nut and old incense folded around her. With two fingers, he touched the cloth wrapping her braids where the sanctuary sigil lay stitched. A blessing, on the surface. A brand, beneath.
“Esu-Odan sees all crossings,” he murmured. “Remember where yours lie, guard.”
Mofeyisola murmured the expected response, voice sand-dry in her own ears: the god’s name, the promise of obedience. The words tasted like iron filings, like she was grinding her own teeth to say them. Somewhere under her breastbone a tightness pulled, sharp and cold, as if a hand had reached through bone to twist.
He withdrew his touch, satisfied. The talking staff knocked once against the floor, judgment passed, duty set, then his footsteps receded down the corridor, soft and certain, swallowed by the greater mutter of the sanctuary preparing itself for guests and bargains and carefully arranged lies.
When his footsteps fade and the talking staff’s echo dies, another sound seeps in: the tiny, ceaseless chime of iron on iron.
A shadow eases from the line of guards by the wall. Older woman, thick about the waist, scar split white across her lip. Her bangles never rest; even now they shiver against one another like teeth.
She bends as if to tighten the leather across Mofeyisola’s shoulder, fingers fussing at the spear-strap. Her breath brushes Mofeyisola’s ear, carrying kola and old smoke.
“Tonight they’ll sweep the under-belly,” she whispers, words tumbling fast, too soft for the watching junior priest’s retreating back. “River tunnels. Lower cells. Restless spirits in flesh, they called them. Men who think too loud. Women who remember too much.”
Her hands work at the strap, making the gesture look busy, harmless.
“They’ll take them quiet,” she goes on. “Blood to cool hot talk. Silence to sweeten the warlord’s drink. To show priests and slavers both that Esu-Odan’s house keeps its own chains tight.”
She does not dare shape a name. But her gaze sinks to the packed earth, to the unseen stairs coiling down through it, before she straightens her spine and steps back into rank.
Mofeyisola walks the prescribed route with a scribe-slave at her side, the boy’s bare feet whispering over stone. He keeps pace half a step behind, scratching hurried sigils and notched marks onto a waxed tablet, the stylus clicking like insect mandibles. At each checkpoint a runner meets them, breathless, pressing new slivers of instruction into his hand. Armory doors, noble compounds, the side passages that feed the council hall like veins. All high ground. All dry. All far from the damp-throated echo of the river caves.
When she requests a post nearer the underways “to prevent escape,” the boy won’t quite meet her eye. He murmurs, almost gentled, that the priests have already marked those paths as “accounted for,” stylus hovering, waiting, refusing to write her protest.
At a cramped stairwell landing where torch-smoke curls like whispering ghosts, she halts and traces the chalked route with her thumb. What was blur becomes design. Each post she’s given grips the upper courts like a bracelet of spears, a bright circling wall that leaves the sanctuary’s belly soft. Her gut twists as the trick of it settles: her ordered vigilance is a show-face, a glittering seal meant to draw all eyes upward while unseen hands below do their cutting in the dark.
For a heartbeat between watch posts she finds herself unwatched, alone, the boy-scribe already trotting ahead. Mofeyisola lays her palm flat to the inner wall, cool stone drinking her heat. Beneath limewash and packed earth she feels it: the faint, familiar tremor of the river’s voice, that under-murmur the sanctuary was built to ride like a calabash on floodwater. Memory rises with it: Ademilade’s stubborn jaw, the way his eyes had once burned when he spoke of dragging truth out of any shadow that tried to swallow it. Dread moves through her like cold dye in water. She sees him in her mind’s eye, lean and tired and unbending, walking straight into the softest part of the sanctuary’s belly where the knives will already be laid out. Orders and oaths crowd her like spears at her back. To turn aside from the route is to defy priest, god, and the very chains that keep her wrists ornamented instead of raw. So she tears her hand from the stone and forces her body onward, each sanctioned footstep an agonizing turn away from the damp, echoing tunnels where, she knows in her bones, someone is already deciding what price his defiance will fetch in blood.
The chain from the Oath-Fire Forge eats into him with a patient, thoughtful cruelty, each link pressed tight across his ribs and arms like fingers taking his measure. When he drags breath into his chest the metal answers, tightening, its weight settling deeper until it feels less like something laid upon him and more like something growing out of his bones. Faint warmth runs along the iron, not from the cave’s chill air but from sigils he cannot see, stirred awake by sweat and pulse and the sound of his name dragging ragged through his throat.
His back is wedged hard against the pillar, river-damp stone greasy under his skin. The carved grooves there are older than any war-canoe, older than his grandfather’s grandfather, worn shallow where worshipers pressed foreheads and palms and bled out promises. He feels them like blind mouths along his spine, taking the shape of his shoulder blades, his ribs, listening. Every twitch grinds him against them, every shift rubs his flesh against words once spoken here in fear and hope. The stone takes his heat, drinks it like an offering.
He works the manacles because a body that has swung a hoe since childhood does not know how to sit still in bondage. He tests the angle of his wrists, the play in the links between chest-chain and pillar-ring, the slickness of river slime on stone. The iron answers with dull, numb pain that rolls up his arms and settles in the hollow behind his eyes. Not the bright cut of common shackles biting flesh, but a slow, humming pressure that feels like someone pressing a thumb to a drum-skin, testing for the right note.
It is not just metal. He can feel that now. Each small pull sends a vibration along his marrow, like a spoken word that refuses to be unsaid. The forge’s fire is far above in Yewandele’s underworld of anvils and hammers, but some echo of its ritual heat nests in this chain. It hums against the old scars on his chest where other oaths were once written in knife and ash, recognizing their ghost-trace, coiling around them like a snake around old bones.
His heart trips and then forces itself steady. A man can lie with his tongue, he thinks, but iron does not lie. This thing has already decided he is bound. Not just hands, not just feet. Bound to this pillar. Bound to this god. Bound into some bargain he never agreed to, written in a language of hammer-strokes and blood-smoke he cannot read.
He remembers Yewandele’s courtyard, the way she had turned a length of glowing iron with her tongs, murmuring to it as if to a stubborn child. Chains that drink words, she had said once, sweat glistening on her arms. Chains that remember. He had thought then of other people’s slavery, other people’s broken promises. Now, as the river’s distant roar pushes in through the cave’s throat and the lamplight wavers on the wet rock, he feels the remembering turning toward him.
Somewhere beyond the pillar, beyond the circle of lamplight and spear-points, the sanctuary’s whole weight leans down. Gods, ancestors, nobles, warlords. Profit tallied in bodies. Rage surges up, hot and choking, and the chain tightens as if answering, as if warning. Each breath he drags is another notch, another twist in some invisible knot.
He bares his teeth into the dark, the taste of rust and river-salt thick on his tongue. If this is an oath fastening itself around him, then it is fastening around everything that touched him, everything that drove him here. Let the iron drink that, too.
Deko prowls the edge of the lamplight, keeping just beyond the first slick ring of water that pools on the cave floor. The thin flame paints his cheekbones in copper and shadow, leaves his eyes as two shifting hollows. He flicks a glance at the guard-slaves posted at the tunnel mouths, men and women as chained as he is, but with spears leveled in Ademilade’s direction, and his mouth quirks like they share some private joke. Their spearheads catch the light, bright teeth in the dark, but their wrists shine dull with iron. He rolls his own ankle, lets the soft clink of his rings answer theirs.
Each step he takes is measured, circling, head tilted, studying Ademilade the way he would study a sandbar or treacherous current: sound it from every side, feel where it sucks hardest, where it can be used. Not a man to him now, but a hazard on a chart. Something to be mapped, skirted, exploited, and left behind for others to break themselves on. His gaze ticks over the chain, the pillar, the sweat on Ademilade’s ribs, calculating.
Deko’s voice barely lifts. No triumph in it, just the flat patience of a man tracing a coastline from memory. He talks of that night the way sailors talk of currents. The river was high to a man’s chest, he says, good depth for the war-canoes to ride in heavy. He remembers which prow nosed the shallows first, how they cut their drums so the villagers would think it thunder until the paddles were almost at the ford. His hand sketches the arc of fire, where the first roofs were lit so the wind would do the rest, smoke pushing sleepers toward the nets. They tallied not names but weights. Marked sound shoulders with palm ash, left the coughing and the limping to burn where they fell.
Ademilade’s jaw knots as Deko names landmarks only bare feet and a hoe-hand would know: the bent palm at the cassava edge, the termite mound that marked good yam soil, the shrine stone his grandfather oiled each new moon. Each detail tears away the mercy of distance. This was no storm from nowhere. This man had walked his ridges in daylight, counted plantains, weighed children with a market-man’s eye, then turned breath and muscle into cowries, into iron, into praise from a warlord. The chain takes all of it. Each word sinks into the links, drags at his ribs, as if the metal is drinking his fury like hot liquor and locking it away, cold, heavy, and still inside his chest.
He brightens when he speaks of gain. How the warlord’s name rose in distant mouths heavy with foreign salt. How ash-choked furrows meant no rival harvest, no new levy of warriors to trouble the river road. Villages like Ademilade’s, he says, do not die; they are pressed thin and neat into ledgers. Wood charm, iron rings, same mocking tap. He leans close, breath sour with old fire. “To men like that,” he murmurs, almost kind, “you were always only weight and smoke. Count that well when you dream of balance.”
Yewandele lets the nobles’ accusations wash over her like furnace heat, outwardly composed while their words (“rebellion,” “sacrilege,” “lost tribute”) ring against the anvil of her thoughts. Smoke from the council lamps curls about the rafters like spent offerings, stinging her eyes, but she does not blink. She has stood before hotter mouths than these. Fire teaches stillness, not flinching.
They talk of order, of smooth caravans and quiet river-roads, of war-canoes that must not be “provoked” by rumor of sanctuary meddling. They dress fear in fine wrappers and call it prudence. Beneath their phrases Yewandele hears what they will not name: profit counted in backs and wrists and necks. Wants wrapped in the god’s colors.
Every instinct in her flames high. Her tongue longs to strike like a hammer: to name the raider captains she has seen at the river landing, the priests who take secret cut of oaths sworn over chains, the noble cousins in this very circle whose sons ride in war-canoes and laugh over burning yam heaps. To say plainly: the ones you shield are the true desecrators. They bring smoke into the god’s nostrils and call it incense.
But the old words of her house lie coiled around her throat like a hot iron torque. She has knelt at Esu-Odan’s altar, palm on cold anvil, and sworn: her lineage will keep the sanctuary’s order, maintain its doors and thresholds, tend its bindings, not shatter them in one wild blow. That oath hums now in her bones, in the scars along her arms, in the weight of the key-ring at her waist. Break it, and the god’s laughter will turn, sharp and cutting, upon her blood for generations.
So she swallows the true names. She tempers her rage in silence. On the surface she is iron cooled in oil, dark, steady, unrippled, while inside, old ore remembers the furnace. She answers their charges with measured words about balance and obligation, even as another fire builds: the fierce, stubborn heat of finding a way to turn the very rules they wield against her back upon their hands.
So she lets them circle nearer to the threat, lets the old one’s voice grow weighty with the promise of “reassigning custodial burdens” from any house “too soft on sparks of unrest.” The phrase lands like a hammer on uncooled metal. Beneath her calm she hears the true shape of it: not just her name scraped from the sanctuary ledgers, but the Oath-Fire Forge itself passing into hands that would joyfully feed it shackles by the barrow-load. Chains that once could bite traitors of the covenant would instead drink the cries of villages like Ademilade’s and hold the sound forever.
For a heartbeat, rage flares white. She sees strange smiths at her hearth, stoking her bellows for the warlord’s captains, blessing iron meant to drag whole bloodlines downriver. She tastes ash.
That is when she stops speaking of principles. Fine talk will not quench this fire. She pivots, inward and cold, begins to count instead. Who among them still flinches at Esu-Odan’s name? Whose fathers died badly under crooked oaths? Who fears the god’s sideways laughter more than they crave the warlord’s cowries?
She turns that memory like a coal between her fingers, blowing it back to heat. Not just any bargain, not just any trinket waved before a smirking mask. The covenant was precise, hammered word by word while first metal ran red in the dark: if a compact in Esu-Odan’s name so much as brushes bondage, draws blood, or sets who shall guard whose doorway, then every tool of it must taste the Oath-Fire. Iron, leather, even woven fiber if it binds wrist to will. No chain, no collar, no blade of “guard duty” may climb to the altar cold from another’s hearth. Let it skip her forge, and the god is free, no, invited, to bend the pact back through its makers’ bones.
Yewandele bows her head, lets her shoulders sink in a show of yielding, framing her defiance as obedience. She speaks of “calming troubled waters,” of how the sanctuary must not seem to spit in the warlord’s face, how a visible pledge of cooperation will soothe talk of instability. Then, as if recalling a burden rather than unsheathing a blade, she invokes the old clause, voice steady, almost regretful: if the envoys demand a prisoner, chains, or any emblem of bond-service to display before Esu-Odan, those bindings, and the flesh they bite, must first be carried down to her forge, laid upon her anvil, and ritually tested, tempered, and marked, or the whole bargain invites the god’s sideways laughter and ruinous mischief.
Several lords stiffen at the implied delay; tongues click, gold manillas clink. But unease ripples wider. Old men mutter of ship-keels split on calm, star-bright seas, of proud lineages thinned to madmen when untempered iron touched Esu-Odan’s altar. Yewandele feels them tilt and leans hard, saying this is no obstruction, but proof: Ketu’s word walks through fire, not around it. Let the warlord see the chains glow on her anvil. And the captive within them.
The guards haul Ademilade to his feet and drag him along the slick rock, chains rasping in counter‑rhythm to the river’s slow slap. The iron bites his skin in old ritual patterns, burning cold where once consecrated oil had warmed similar scars. He stumbles, not from weakness but from the sudden memory of hoe‑handles slick with dew, not stone and chain. A jerk on the neck ring snaps him back; the collar grates against his throat, scraping away the ghost of soil.
One of the guards, a broad‑backed woman with Mofeyisola’s unit mark faint on her shoulder, keeps just behind his left arm. The brand is blurred with time and smoke, but he knows that sigil: three crossing lines, a small circle where they meet. He has traced it on the inside of his skull since the first rumors reached him. She does not meet his gaze. Her fingers move with drilled care as she checks the shackles at his wrists, then the bar that links them to his throat piece, thumb pressing the iron knots that Yewandele’s house worked into every link.
Her lips stir. The warding phrases come out soft, hoarse, learned by rote: words to keep bound spirits sleeping, to keep Esu‑Odan from taking too keen an interest in the flesh they grip. Ademilade feels the breath of them fan his skin, thin as spiderweb, and something bitter twists in him that even their muttered mercy must serve the chain.
Deko walks ahead with the lazy ease of a man used to walls that open for him. Bare feet slap water and stone. Now and then he taps the cave with the butt of his knife, counting out turns on rock like a drummer calling changes. The sound is small, arrogant, a man marking paths he thinks he owns. He brags as he goes, voice bouncing from the low ceiling, saying the warlord’s envoys will be pleased with such a quiet, obedient offering, that nobles relax when trouble lies flat and trussed at their feet.
River smell thickens, sour with trapped salt and old blood. Hidden channels gurgle beneath the path, answering the slow boom of drums far above. Each drip from the ceiling lands cold on Ademilade’s shoulders, his neck, the hollow of his back, sharp, counting drops like a diviner’s cowries. Step, drip. Step, drip. The distance between this damp dark and some nameless cell shrinks with every fall.
He lets his mind move where his body cannot. He weighs the guards’ grips, the distance between them, the way the woman with Mofeyisola’s mark holds the chain slightly looser than the others, as if unwilling to bruise more than duty requires. He notes the hitch in Deko’s left stride when the ground slopes, the way the knife hand swings wide when he laughs. All of it he tucks away, grain by grain.
The cave narrows, breath closing in. The laugh of Esu‑Odan, carved in stone far above, seems to curl down through the rock in the scrape of his chains. Somewhere over his head, hammers ring on hidden anvils, a distant answering pulse to the iron circling his limbs. The guards march on, blind to the way time itself has begun to march with them, lockstep, toward a door that has not yet chosen who will be on which side.
Near a fork in the tunnel where the river’s mutter grows louder and the air turns sharp with hidden current, Ademilade stumbles and lets his weight sag into the chains. He does not fight the fall. He rolls his shoulders, slackens his knees, becomes dead weight. Iron jerks tight. Anklets bite bone. The guards curse and yank him upright, knuckles grinding into his arms, one fist twisting the collar so it saws at his throat.
Deko wheels around, irritation already curdling into pleasure. He saunters back along the wet stone, knife swinging loose, and crouches close enough that Ademilade can smell old palm wine and river salt and the sour tang of smoked fish trapped between his teeth. Droplets patter from the ceiling onto Deko’s bare shoulders, streaking his skin like ghostly fingers.
In a low, cruel voice, he begins to recount the raid in unhurried detail. How the canoes drifted in before dawn with muffled paddles and blackened hulls. How the paddlers smeared river mud on their faces so ancestors would not recognize them. How the first huts were set alight on the windward edge of the village, flames coaxed with palm fronds dipped in oil, so smoke would drive sleepers coughing toward the open paths.
He speaks of nets strung between leaning palms, of men waiting with clubs where the goat pens broke, of women tripping over tether ropes and going down under bare, dirty heels. He laughs softly as he recalls how some tried to run for the shrines, only to find canoes already beached there, spears planted in the sand like new-grown trees.
Then he adds the smallest cruelties. How one elder’s beard caught fire as he shouted curses, how the raiders wagered cowries on who would be the first to fall. How a child with a cowrie‑threaded braid (one pale shell set just above her left ear) tried to claw his face, little nails raking his cheek before she was clubbed down and kicked aside as if she were spilled grain.
Each word lands like a blow, timed to the slow, hollow boom of drums seeping down from above. Ademilade feels them strike the thin places inside him where memory has no skin. Smoke. Screams. That single white cowrie swinging as a small head snapped back. His jaw tightens until his teeth ache, but he forces his face to remain stone, eyes dull as river rocks.
He lets the pain sink roots. He stores every detail as if each were a seed he will one day press into blood‑wet soil.
One of the younger guard‑slaves flinches at Deko’s relish, tongue worrying a cracked lip. “This is god‑ground,” he mutters, eyes flicking to the sweating rock above, as if Esu‑Odan’s face might bulge from it at any moment. “Not canoe talk.”
Deko only laughs, a low river‑laugh with no joy in it. He thumbs the carved charm at his throat until the wood and tiny iron rings click softly against his chest. “You think the god does not eat such stories?” he asks. “This is exactly what the envoys will pour out for him. Not just gold, not just cowries. Proof.”
He leans close to Ademilade, voice gone almost intimate. “Proof that noisy villages can vanish. That troublesome tales can be dragged down into holes like this and shackled. They’ll bring you in irons to the altar at dawn, or at least the word of you, and swear that Ketu bends. Esu‑Odan loves a symbol more than any goat.”
Unease ripples through the line. Shoulders tense; a throat is cleared, too loud. Yet when the chains shift, every hand tightens by instinct. Professional grip swallowing private fear.
The tunnel pinches tight, forcing them into single file along a slick stone lip, the river gnawing black and swift below like a hungry throat. The ceiling drops so low sweat beads on rock and falls back on them. Every rattle of iron, every rasp of sandals, Ademilade’s careful, measured breaths, drum together into a harsh boxed‑in rhythm that matches the river’s surge. Sound has nowhere to go; it crawls over skin. From somewhere above, through thin stone shafts he cannot see, the first slow boom of temple drums rolls down like distant thunder, answered a heartbeat later by the faint clash and ring of metal from the forge far overhead. Hammer, drum, river. With each echo the air thickens, tasting of old smoke and palm oil and rusted blood. Ademilade feels the whole sanctuary stirring, ritual gears biting into place, grinding toward some arranged bargain. When those drums quicken, he knows, names will be spoken and sealed. If nothing breaks before then, his own will be laid among them like another chain link.
At a final bend, where a carved stone pillar juts from the cave floor marked with Esu‑Odan’s forked‑tongue sigil, Deko hisses for a halt. Torchlight licks the grinning grooves. The guards hitch Ademilade’s chain to an iron ring at the base, jerking it twice, three times, with impersonal care. Deko paces before them, knife describing small bright circles as he talks. They will drag this “gift” to a holding cell by the forge mouth before the drums find their dawn cadence; at first light, word will climb to the Inner Shrine that a rebel from the raided villages lies safely bound under Ketu’s hand. Iron scrapes as the chain is unhooked again. Then a sharper peal from the drums spears through stone, an Oath‑Fire summons that stills every wrist. Deko curses low, charm clicking against his chest, and snaps at them to move, driving Ademilade and his clanking bonds toward the very depth where Yewandele’s terms will soon haul every schemer into the god’s hearing.
The procession swells behind the warlord’s men like a blocked river. Priests in white and red, junior acolytes clutching calabashes of oil and kola, scribes with ink‑stained fingers, chain‑bearers with eyes fixed on the floor. Ademilade moves with them, close enough to smell the resin and salt sweat on their skin, the iron taste of fear under the incense. His wrists sting where shackles had sat not long ago; phantom weight ghosts his steps.
They reach the stair mouth. Cool stone breath from below meets the warm press of the inner courts. Crossroads air. The hinges of the world.
Yewandele is already there.
She does not shout for guards. She does not draw a blade. She simply plants her bare, scarred feet on the threshold and lets her presence harden like quenched steel. Gold‑and‑iron bangles along her forearms clatter as she raises her chin, each ring a memory of an oath struck and held. In the lantern light her cheek scars catch and throw back the glow, an ancestral script written in flesh.
“The path is closed,” she says. Not loud. Not needful. Her forge‑honed voice cuts clean through the layered murmurs, and talk dies like quenched coals.
Ademilade feels the words in his ribs. Hears the echo of hammer and anvil beneath them.
She calls Esu‑Odan by his old names, the ones villagers whisper when bargains go wrong. Witness of Iron. Path‑Divider. Market‑Mouth. She names the day, generations ago, when her ancestor swore that no king, no raider, no trader could pass chains through this house without feeling the heat of his scrutiny. Her lineage spills out in short, ringing phrases, each ancestor another link. Ademilade knows the pattern; it is how you tie a god’s attention to a place, how you remind spirits what they once promised.
Around him, the envoys shift. One of the warlord’s men laughs, thin and sharp. “Smith‑lady, we go to altar, not to furnace.”
A junior priest, sweating under his beaded cap, mutters about the warlord’s “gift,” about timing, about sunrise and auspicious drums. Their words slide oily across the threshold.
Yewandele lifts her hand.
Burn scars on palm and fingers gleam like old rivers. Silence falls again, thicker this time. She does not argue. She recites.
The forgotten clause comes out of her like iron pulled from deep ore: no covenant that touches blood, chain, or river‑path may be sealed in the Inner Shrine unless its instruments have first tasted oath‑fire below.
The syllables strike stone. The stairwell throws them back, doubled. For a breath, Ademilade almost sees them, hot, red lines curling along the walls, catching on old sigils cut into rock before his grandfather’s birth.
Some elders flinch as if slapped. One grey‑bearded priest presses his lips together, eyes flicking toward the carved trickster face above the passage. The iroko‑wood mouth seems to curve a little wider.
Ademilade tastes sudden metal on his tongue. A clause like that is a trap with two jaws; whoever steps through, slave or lord, bleeds equally when it snaps.
To refuse now, in hearing of so many witnesses, would be to say openly that the warlord’s bargain is unclean. Worse: to hint that they fear Esu‑Odan’s true judgment. That they would rather use his name than stand in his fire.
For a trickster, that is an insult that cannot be ignored.
Chains jingle as Deko shifts somewhere ahead, ankle irons kissing each other in a nervous rhythm. Ademilade does not yet see his face, but he knows that sound. It drags memories up: night water, canoe wood, screams thinned by distance. His hands curl.
Above, the temple drums roll like distant thunder climbing toward dawn.
Below, the stair waits. Hot breath rises from it, smelling of coal, oil, and something older. Something watching.
Yewandele lowers her hand. “Forge first,” she says, voice flat as an anvil. “Or no oath at all.”
Murmurs swell, sour and restless. One of the envoys (a narrow‑eyed man with coral beads at his throat) clicks his tongue. “We will not be dragged through every dusty custom,” he says, impatience snapping off each word. “The warlord’s gift ripens with the drums. Let us go to altar, not burrow like moles.”
A junior priest hisses agreement under his breath, fingers worrying the fringe of his white cloth. “These are matters for inner councils, Mother of Iron. The god awaits. Delay is…unfortunate.”
Yewandele does not move aside.
She only lifts her thick, burn‑scarred hand, palm toward the stair, as if feeling the heat rising from below. When she speaks, the cadence changes. Old words. Ore‑deep.
She recites the buried clause, each phrase struck clean and slow: no covenant that touches blood, chain, or river‑path may be sealed in the Inner Shrine unless its instruments have first tasted oath‑fire below.
The stairwell catches the sentence and throws it back doubled, a hollow, ringing echo. Stone seems to drink the sound. Red‑painted sigils along the jamb quiver in the lamplight.
Several elders go pale. One chews his lip until it reddens. To flout that provision now, with so many eyes and unseen ears upon them, would be to admit (before ancestor mounds and the sly god of crossroads) that the warlord’s bargain will not bear fire. That it is dirty work seeking clean blessing.
Even the envoy with coral beads looks briefly away.
Voices sharpen like blades. The warlord’s spokesman snaps that such depths are for festival days and children’s tales, not for men who carry kingdoms on their backs. Another scoffs that the drums already climb toward the sealing beat; if they miss the cadence, the omens sour, the warlord is insulted, the whole coast will talk.
Yewandele does not shift so much as a toe.
Her bangles answer for her, clashing once, twice: hammer on iron. She speaks then of Esu‑Odan’s hunger for crooked paths, how the god listens hardest where custom is skipped. An oath not heated may cool wrong, she says; a chain not shown the fire may find itself turned, clasping the masters’ throats instead of slaves’ ankles. Laughter, not blessing, would follow them home.
Cornered by the threat of public spiritual disgrace, stories of cowardice and fraud that would streak from this sanctuary to every market‑road and river‑wharf, the high priest’s painted mouth hardens. He grinds out assent, voice dry as old kola, declaring that all chains, contracts, and sworn tongues touched by the warlord’s bargain must pass beneath oath‑fire. Deko, dragged forward as the one who “caught the rebel” and steered his body here, is named witness and chain‑bearer. His jaw knots; iron anklets answer for him, clinking in sullen, uneven time, like a canoe striking hidden rocks.
Under the red‑and‑black painted arch carved with Esu‑Odan’s forked‑tongue sigil, the company turns from the rising light of the Inner Shrine and starts down the spiral cut into living rock. Each turn strips away incense and song. Heat thickens. Metal stings the tongue. The upper chanting thins to a dull throb of drums, swallowed by the low roar of buried fire and the wet hiss of quenched iron. Lamps dwindle. Only smeared orange breathes along the walls, making mask‑faces in the stone. Anklets and bangles mutter. Deko limps, jaw tight. Priests clutch scrolls and charms. Envoys sweat through fine cloth. All are funneled, smaller and smaller, into the earth’s throat. Toward the forge where Mofeyisola’s quiet gambit and Ademilade’s unspent stories wait like set blades.
Heat hits them like a living thing.
As the procession spills into the forge’s belly, the air thickens, tasting of iron, ash, and the sour breath of the river where it runs in hidden veins beneath the stone. Sweat beads on noble brows, crawls under priestly veils, soaks the stiff collars of coastal envoys who are used to open decks and salt wind, not this cramped, glowing throat of earth. Here, the god’s painted faces of the upper shrine are gone; instead the walls are blackened, veined with old hammer-marks and soot, as if the rock itself once flowed and froze mid‑groan.
Four anvils crouch in a rough circle like squat altars. Around them, braziers roar, guts full of charcoal and sacred ore, turning their rims orange‑white. Sparks spit and die on the stone floor, star‑bursts crushed under sandaled heels, bare feet, iron rings. Chains and manacles lie coiled on low tables, links overlapping like scales on some patient metal serpent, each length already daubed with chalk sigils and streaks of river‑mud. Tongs, hammers, and chisels hang from pegs, mute as waiting witnesses.
Yewandele’s apprentices, bare‑armed youths with burn‑shiny scars and soot‑dusted faces, move in practiced arcs to greet the descent. They bow to the blacksmith‑lord, then to the painted charms hammered into the ceiling beams, then to the priests, in that exact order. Their eyes flick, quick, to the chained strangers at the central hearth, but discipline holds their tongues. With a few snapped words from Yewandele and a tilt of her chin, they melt back to the periphery, folding themselves into shadow and heat-haze, becoming only the occasional clink of tools, the hiss of quenched iron.
Left in the heart of the circle stand Mofeyisola and Ademilade.
They have been placed at the main hearth like any other heavy tool: close to the glowing coals, within arm’s reach of the master’s hand. Their heads are inclined, postures careful, iron collars catching and throwing back the forge‑light. To the priests, to the warlord’s men, to Deko with his swollen pride and clinking ankles, they are part of the furnishings. Muscle and scar and obedience made convenient. One grips the great bellows‑pole, the other stands by the chain‑tables, as if born to lift and turn hot metal at a word.
Ademilade feels the gaze of the room slide over him, dismissing. Good. Let their eyes skip. Let their tongues mark him down as nothing. Beneath the smeared palm‑oil and charcoal Mofeyisola rubbed into his wrists in the night, the etched sigils on his manacles lie dulled, their bite loosened. Under the collar’s rim, his skin itches: not from heat, but from that near‑freedom, that trembling edge between bound and unbound.
Mofeyisola does not look at him, not fully. Only the smallest angle of her jaw, the controlled pace of her breath, tells him she knows each step of this dance. Her stance is humble, shoulders rounded as a guard‑slave’s should be in a noble’s forge. But her hands rest near the laid‑out chains, and the iron remembers her grip.
The others see tools. Yewandele, watching from beside the nearest anvil, sees kindling stacked in the god’s own fire.
Yewandele does not raise her hammer. She does not need to. Her voice, iron-deep and ritual-flat, strikes the chamber instead, cutting through the murmurs like a blade on hot metal. She names the forge, the river beneath, the first smith of her line who swore with Esu‑Odan that no great oath would be sealed without passing its chains through oath‑fire and river‑steam. She calls it not request, but requirement older than any priest’s paint.
The words settle heavy as slag. Priests shift, veils damp, muttering about schedules, auspicious hours, the waiting altar above. Envoys from the coast glance at one another, lips tight, fingers worrying at seal-bags and carved tally-sticks. This night was meant to be smooth: a bargain signed, a god invoked, ships secured. Not this detour into the blacksmith’s underworld.
But in this place the walls remember her hammer. No one dares answer her with open refusal. The high priest coughs something that sounds like consent wrapped in complaint. Warlord envoys bow, shallow and sour. Deko, named chain-bearer by the same voice that once forged his anklets, shifts his weight, eyes flicking toward escape-routes that do not exist down here.
At Yewandele’s small, economical gesture, Mofeyisola steps forward. Her deference is perfect: eyes lowered, shoulders softened, the obedient arc of a guard-slave at command. She speaks only what is required. Offerings of “skilled hands,” assurances that the hot iron will be turned and lifted as custom demands. No one hears the thin thread of guard‑ritual under her words, reversed and hollowed like a calabash scraped clean.
She guides Ademilade to the waiting coils of chain. To watching eyes, it is simple logistics: one strong slave to work the bellows, another to bear and cool the oath‑links. The priesthood sees only useful muscle. The envoys see only property shifted like cargo. Even Deko, jaw clenched, lets his gaze slide past, too busy nursing his own resentments to read the tilt of her wrist, the careful way she does not touch the sigils on his collar.
The true work is already done, written in charcoal and palm oil on Ademilade’s skin, sung in whispers over his sleeping chains. Now she only needs to place him close. Close to fire, close to oath‑iron, close to the throat of the god’s listening.
The spear-men who first hauled Ademilade through the sanctuary gates now hover at the line where sacred heat blurs the rights of any common guard. Their spear‑tips dip toward the coals in clumsy reverence, sweat running shiny tracks through soot on their cheeks. Here, in the smith’s underworld, their usual barked commands turn thick in their throats. To shout over oath‑words, to jostle a link or slave at the wrong moment, would stain their own collars with offense.
So they grip ash‑black shafts and keep to the shadows, eyes averted whenever Yewandele’s gaze passes. Their hesitation stretches like a thin hide between Mofeyisola and the outer ring of power. Within it, Ademilade’s dulled sigils lie quiet, his hollowed chains rattling like a lie waiting to be broken.
As Yewandele begins the formal intonations over the warlord’s gleaming oath‑chains (naming iron’s memory, fire’s temper, river‑water’s witness, and the first blacksmith who bargained sparks into law) Ademilade lowers his gaze like any other slave waiting for command. Inside, he leans into the loosened weight at his wrists, savoring the faint grind where sigil‑bitten metal no longer quite fits his skin. The officials’ attention knots around the ceremony’s choreography, around clauses and cowries and promised bodies, leaving a hollow at the forge’s heart. In that hollow, something older and sharper than their contracts stirs, testing its teeth in the heated air.
Into that silence, before any envoy can loose the first smooth legal word, Ademilade drinks the coal‑thick air and lets the opening praise‑names drop from his tongue. Not to nobles. Not to priests. He speaks to iron, to the hidden river under the stones, to Esu‑Odan’s laughing mouths carved at pillar‑feet. Line by line he lifts his dead: not in soft reverence but in hard, exacting remembrance, compound by compound, season by season, raid by raid, so precise that even the chains seem to ring in answer. The forge’s breath slows. Oath‑smoke hangs, listening. By the time the officials understand that the “handling slave” has begun a different ritual entirely, the first spirits have already turned their faces toward him.
Ademilade does not look at Deko at first. His eyes stay fixed on the bed of coals, on the slow breathing of the bellows, on Esu‑Odan’s many smirking faces cut into the soot‑black pillars. He lets the next names fall like hammer‑blows struck in rhythm with the bellows’ sigh.
“Igbesa,” he says, and the word comes out hard, flat. “Where yam barns burned at new moon. Where they tied a grandmother to her own mortar and kicked it into the fire so she would watch the seed of her labor crack.”
The chains near his wrists shiver. Somewhere behind the envoys, a junior priest makes the sign against witnessing too much. Ademilade goes on.
“Odo‑Aye. Where palm oil floated on the river in a thick red skin. Where the raiders washed their blades and sang that their hands were clean.”
He tastes the old smoke on his tongue as he speaks it, the way the burning thatch had coughed sparks into a sky already dark with storm. Yewandele’s hammer hangs motionless above the anvil, waiting on his next word.
He gives them children.
“The three from Keta‑Crossing,” he says, voice gone rough. “Too small for proper shackles. So they used fish‑net rope that cut into their ankles and left scales on their skin. One girl tried to hop after her baby brother when he fell, but the rope held her fast.”
He does not turn, but he feels Deko hear it. In the way the air tightens. In the tiny scrape of iron at an ankle ring adjusting on stone.
He walks his tongue down the coast and upriver, season by season. “At Ibere‑Sandbank, the moon was still thin, so they took only the strong and left the sick to rot. At Arimoro, the raiders drank from calabashes carved with turtle backs and spat toward the ancestor mounds.”
Each place he names is one Deko knows not from market talk but from the sore swell of his rowing hands. From the pattern of stars they steered by. From the particular groan of planks when too many bodies were loaded at once.
Ademilade threads in details no outsider should hold. “At Ufon‑Spur, your war‑canoe grounded on a hidden log. The crew cursed the river spirit and beat the captives for its anger. The third oar from the bow snapped that night, and you wrapped it with red cloth instead of rope, saying Esu liked the color.”
The forge listens. The god’s carved faces shine with oil and heat, their stone eyes catching every twitch at the edge of Ademilade’s vision. He keeps his own gaze steady on them, trusting the iron’s memory more than any man’s oath.
He does not yet say Deko’s name. He does not need to. He lays out the raids like a smith lays charcoal and ore and flux, one careful layer on another, building a bed of proof that heat will soon turn molten.
Only when the weight of unspoken recognition presses heavy as a hammer raised high does he draw breath for the next story, the one of “the village where the raiders sang off‑beat”, and at last let his head begin, slowly, to turn.
He lets them wait for it.
“The village where the raiders sang off‑beat,” he says at last, and the bellows seem to stumble with the words.
He does not say name or river. Only the flaw. “Their paddles could not find the moon’s own rhythm that night. Someone in the boarding‑crew had a bad leg. Left leg. Dragged, then struck. Dragged, then struck.” His own foot scuffs the stone in that same crooked cadence.
A murmur stirs along the line of envoys, a dry chuckle at peasant theatrics, but Ademilade walks past their noise and lays the next iron on the fire.
“The one with the limp cursed the timing. Cursed the song‑leader. Cursed even Esu’s ears. When a small boy fell in his path, he did not stop. He kicked him aside like a gourd in the way.”
The words fall flat as hammer‑faces.
“His charm swung when he kicked. A carved face with a split tongue.” Ademilade touches the faint scar on his cheek. “It struck me here when they dragged my promised wife past.”
The envoy nearest Deko is still laughing when the smoke thins. Long enough for everyone to see Deko’s involuntary flinch. His hand jumps, unthinking, to the wooden amulet at his throat. His bad leg shifts, as if remembering the drag‑and‑strike of old wounds.
Ademilade seizes that moment like a smith snatching red‑hot iron before it cools. His voice hardens, edges catching. Lament burns away; only accusation remains. He speaks of a boarding slave who hesitated, just once, when a weeping grandmother clutched his ankle. He makes that pause into a hook and drags it through the room. He repeats the hesitation as refrain, beating it like a talking drum: the angle of moonlight on wet stone, the smell of burnt shea‑butter in a courtyard already lost, the slap of bare feet, the splash of a body flung into a war‑canoe. Each turn tightens the noose. Heads swivel, then stare, until even the priests cannot pretend their eyes do not rest on Deko.
Words tumble out jagged as broken shells. He names back‑river byways where no tax is taken, side‑channels where canoes slip in with muffled paddles and leave heavy with weeping. He blurts which shrine‑keepers look aside for cowries, which house‑symbols are carved on the war‑lord’s paddles. Each detail, meant as shield, becomes confession laid bare before iron and god.
The envoys surge forward to drown him in titles and outrage, but Deko, driven by the panic in his own mouth, only sharpens the blade. He spits that Esu-Odan “likes oaths clean, even when they bind filth”: that chains for slaves have come here before, laid on this very anvil and licked by consecrated flame so their locks bite with god-witnessed teeth, turning any broken link into blasphemy. His words fall, and the forge’s roar seems to draw back. Eyes wheel, slow and disbelieving, toward the red-bright fetters in Yewandele’s tongs, then slide to the priests who had sworn such rites were kept for “lawful quarrels between free men.” In the breathless pause that follows, the truth hangs over them like a coal poised above dry raffia, one twitch away from setting the whole room alight.
The room splinters like green wood thrown on sudden coals. Voices crack, spit, overlap.
One priest, soft‑bellied and slick with sweat, stumbles forward. His beaded collar hangs askew. He jabs a trembling finger at the chains in Yewandele’s tongs, pupils blown wide by the glow. “These. These are for household matters only,” he stammers. “Private redress between owner and owned. Domestic discipline, not public covenant.” The words come out thin and reedy, eaten almost at once by the forge’s roar. He hears how they sound as he says them. His throat bobs.
Another priest (older, lean as a drought goat, eyes sharp as flint) hisses from the side, “Brother. Enough.” His hand snatches at the first man’s sleeve, knuckles white. He has seen the nobles’ mouths flatten, seen the way Yewandele’s jaw has set like cooling iron. “You forget yourself before witnesses.”
“I forget nothing,” the sweating priest protests, but it is half‑whisper now, half‑plea. “We did as was…requested. As was customary. There were offerings. The god…approved.” The last word frays, his gaze skittering to the carved sigils blackening on the chain as heat licks them.
The warlord’s chief envoy cuts across them like a blade. He is tall, robe crusted with salt and gold thread, staff capped with a knob of worked iron. He slams that staff into the packed earth so hard the ring of it jars teeth. “Enough prattle,” he snaps. “Blacksmith‑lord, you twist sacred craft into insult. If you smear dung on the names signed tonight, our master’s warriors will come with fire. They will strip your ancestral forges to bare rock and sow your hearths with ash.”
His words boom against the low ceiling, catch in the smoke.
A younger envoy, cheeks still soft beneath sparse beard, lurches to echo him. “Yes,” he blurts, voice pitching too high. “We will tear down this whole trickster’s den if you defy us. Your oaths, your gods, your. Heads turn. The threat hangs in the soot‑thick air like a spear mid‑flight, its point searching for a throat.
Around the ring of guards, shoulders tighten. A few hands shift on spear‑shafts, then freeze. Tradition says no gate here may fully close; yet no one moves toward the doors. The air itself seems to lean in, waiting to see where that invisible spear will fall.
Yewandele neither flinches nor answers. She sets her jaw and throws her whole weight into the bellows, arms bunching, shoulders rolling like a smith at judgment day. Leather wheezes and snaps under her grip. Each stroke hauls breath into the coals, drives the forge from red to yellow, from yellow to a pitiless, white‑blue heart that makes the air itself shy away.
The chains creep into that glare link by link. Dull iron sweats, blushes, then burns with a feverish white‑orange that peels tears from watching eyes. Heat shivers off them in wavering veils. A low, insect hum leaks out, grows, tightens, until it is like a swarm of bees sealed in a hollow skull. Ademilade feels it in his teeth, in the scar‑lines on his chest. The hair on his arms lifts.
Every word ever laid on that metal wakes.
Sales murmured at river landings. Whips raised “for correction.” Oaths of obedience forced through split lips. Vows of “protection” whispered by men counting profit. All of it stirs, rubs against itself, climbs the glowing links in a many‑throated, soundless wail.
At Yewandele’s curt nod, Mofeyisola snaps a single word, no louder than a cough, sharp as a whip‑tip, and her chosen guard‑slaves move as one. Sandaled feet scuff, iron bangles hiss. They drift to the arches and side‑passages with the slow inevitability of closing jaws, narrowing each exit to a spear‑length slit that obeys the letter of Esu‑Odan’s decree that no path be fully sealed. Shafts cross, not quite touching. Anyone may leave, in theory; in truth, they would have to push through iron and watching eyes.
Spear‑butts begin to fall. Thud. Thud‑thud. A rough, layered heartbeat that drowns the envoys’ bluster, shakes dust from the rafters, sets loose tools jingling on their pegs. Faces around the ring flare and sink in forge‑light, suddenly naked, suddenly ugly.
Beneath their feet, the low murmur from the hidden channels swells into a rushing roar, too loud for such cramped stone throats, as if the Ketu River itself has pressed its ear to the sanctuary’s bones and begun to mutter judgment. Iron hooks along the walls shiver; a hammer leaps from its peg with a clatter, yanked sidewise as if by spiteful fingers. A sweating envoy’s hand worms into his wrapper, closes on the hilt of a flat‑hidden knife. He shifts his weight to draw, planting his heel: and the damp stone betrays him. Sweat, dust, and river‑breath make a slick paste; his foot skids, his shoulder wrenches, and the blade flies from his grasp in a bright, treacherous arc, flashing long enough for every watching eye to mark it before it clatters harmlessly across the floor at Yewandele’s feet.
The nearest priest snatches at that misstep like a drowning man at driftwood, shrieking that the god will twist their tongues and blight their lineages if a single drop spills here, jabbing a shaking finger toward Ademilade and howling for him to be gagged as a profaner before worse befalls them. Yet each lunge toward him or Mofeyisola breeds its own sly disaster. A loose chain, stirred by no visible hand, lashes up and coils a would‑be assailant’s ankle, pitching him hard to his knees. A spray of sparks spits sideways from the roaring coals into an accusing priest’s face, driving him back with a strangled curse, eyes streaming. Another guard’s palms turn slick as palm oil; his spear‑haft jumps free the instant he tries to level it, clattering away like a fleeing lizard. Hemmed in by those mocking “accidents,” by the ring of unblinking spear‑points, and by the remembered taboo that Esu‑Odan forbids open killing in his deep places, the assembled powers are forced into a narrower kind of war. Only tongues and iron vows may cut here now; every insult, every grudging concession, every half‑step around the forge feels as sharp and binding as a knife laid cold against the throat.
The messenger’s cry frays into echoes along the stone, chased by the insistent drums above, each beat a hammer‑stroke driving the warlord’s bargain toward birth. Dust sifts from the stair’s throat with every thrum, making the air taste of earth and old bones. In the forge’s red gloom, Yewandele’s jaw tightens as she feels the pressure of generations in her shoulders; all the names of her house sit there like anvils. With a guttural breath she plants her feet, leather apron creaking, and thrusts the long tongs deep into the bed of coals.
The Oath‑Fire answers her. Flames lean inward, licking like tongues at the buried iron, then leap high in a sudden, hungry bloom, white at the heart, red at the edges. The hidden channels beneath the floor seem to roar in answer, river‑voice thickening, as if the Ketu itself strains to look up through cracked stone. Sweat beads instantly along Yewandele’s brow and forearms, scalded from a hundred old burns, but her grip does not tremble.
She heaves.
Ash billows. Cinders whirl in a tight spiral, then flatten like a bowing crowd as the chain rises. White‑hot links slither from the fire’s throat, each one humming like a struck bell, carrying a faint, almost inaudible chorus of remembered screams and sworn promises. Scale blisters and flakes away, falling in tiny, stinging meteors to the flagstones. A slow, dangerous music fills the forge: metal singing in pain, tongs groaning, bellows‑leather creaking like lungs that refuse to fail.
The gathered priests and envoys flinch at the sight of it, not from heat but from the memory of how many throats, wrists, and vows such iron has held. Some instinctively clutch at their own necks or forearms, fingers grazing gold, bronze, or bare skin as if to reassure themselves that nothing yet bites there. One young envoy, soft hands, city perfume still clinging beneath the forge‑reek, takes an involuntary half‑step back until his shoulder meets the unyielding wall of Mofeyisola’s chosen guards. Iron bangle kisses his spine with a dry chime. He freezes.
Ademilade watches it all from just inside the ring of light, the chain’s glow washing his lean face in fever‑bright color. The heat scours his lungs with every breath; each inhale rasps thin and ragged in his throat, tasting of rust and river‑mist and old blood. Sweat crawls under the fraying cloth at his shoulders, tracing the faded ritual scars on his arms. His fingers close around the haft of the hammer Yewandele pressed into his hand earlier, feeling its weight, its promise. The drums above keep pounding, closer now, like a heart about to choose whether to spit a curse or a blessing into the god’s waiting ear.
Yewandele strides into the cleared space before the anvil, where coal‑dust and chalked sigils make a rough circle of no one’s land. Firelight bites hard along the fine scars on her cheeks and the old burns on her forearms; it strikes sparks from her layered gold‑and‑iron, so that her whole body looks hammered out of dusk and flame. She lifts the chain until her shoulders knot and rise, until the lowest links sway just above her brow. Each segment reddens and whitens in turn, ember by ember, like a line of verdicts being read aloud.
When she speaks, the forge’s breath takes her words and drives them through the room. Her tongue falls into the old cadence, the forked‑road rhythm of shrine proclamations. She names Esu‑Odan by his trickster titles and by his buried, older names. She walks the founding pact clause by clause, not hurrying, each phrase an iron bead on a string.
She calls the Binding Chain of Witness by its forgotten praise‑name, “that which remembers every mouth that used it as a knife.” She recites the condition that no oath, no contract, no slave‑sale or war‑canoe bargain may be sealed while such a chain hangs unquenched in the Oath‑Fire. She marks the loopholes that were closed, the games the first oath‑breakers tried, and how the god laughed and shut those paths.
Then she turns the blade.
Any word loosed in defiance of that order, she declares, does not wander harmless into the dark. It strikes the threshold, finds no passage, and whips back upon the tongue that flung it, laden with the full weight of the doom they tried to hang on another’s neck. Let a man decree chains. His own limbs will hear. Let a priest sanctify a death. His own lineage will taste the grave he names.
The older priests pale as those buried turns of speech claw up from memory like bones rising through eroded soil. A few mouth the lines with her before they catch themselves, horror dawning too late. Envoys shift and murmur, suddenly pricked by the thought that this “formality” they followed down into the forge is no passive blessing, but a sprung trap with its teeth already set around them.
Around the circle, fear and calculation ripple like heat‑shimmer off a kiln’s mouth. An envoy with oiled braids and inked ledgers in his eyes spits that such an interpretation is obsolete, that no court has uttered those clauses in two generations. His protest breaks thin. An elder acolyte, voice trembling like an old drumskin, stammers that the archive scrolls do hint at just such a safeguard against tyrant‑kings who would bend shrines into auction blocks. A junior priest quietly unclasps a ceremonial torque heavy with slaver’s gold, sliding it into his sleeve as if its very gleam might betray him when the iron begins to “remember.”
Deko, caught between the warlord’s gaze in his mind and the god’s gaze in this place, stares at the molten links. In his head they cool, darken, cinch shut around his own throat, stamping him forever as expendable cargo. No more clever than a branded goat. His old punishments flare across his skin: the lash, the cold of iron after rain, the stink of cramped hulls. His usual smirk has fled. He licks dry lips, hunting for some crooked path through the words, some bargain, some betrayal. For once, his quick mind finds no angle that does not end with him ground between masters, a joke told for Esu‑Odan’s amusement and then forgotten.
The drums above swell into a long, rolling flourish that announces the last moment before the sealing call, each accent beating against the sanctum’s stone ribs, shaking soot from old oaths. Time narrows until even the drip of sweat down Ademilade’s spine seems to fall in slow, separate beads, each one a memory: firelight on thatched roofs, chains clinking, Mofeyisola’s scream cut short. He steps up beside Yewandele, close enough to feel the heat blister his skin, and lays his hand flat on the anvil’s scarred face, claiming a supplicant’s place that is also an accuser’s, palm burning, scars prickling as if his ancestors press from the other side. Drawing breath past the ash in his throat, he speaks not as a petitioner for favor but as a man who has walked the burned furrows of his own memory, naming Esu‑Odan as gatekeeper and witness before whom no crossroads can be declared neutral, no silence counted as innocent.
His voice does not rise; it sinks, heavy as poured metal. No flattery, no pleading: only a wager laid bare. Let Esu‑Odan take a side, he says, or be named for what he shelters. Let the god’s own fame stand in the balance with the lowliest shackle. He stakes his rage, his lineage, his last scrap of faith as payment. The drums hover over silence; sweat beads, hangs, refuses to fall. Even the coals seem to lean inward, listening for where the word will land.
The off‑time drumbeat cracks the moment open like a calabash dropped on stone. Cold river breath knifes down the stair‑throat into the forge, tasting of mud and salt and graves disturbed before their time. It cuts through smoke and sweat, through the thick, hot breath of bellows and men, until the very coals seem to flinch. Lamps shudder on their hooks, oil slopping, flames guttering low then flaring high, throwing jagged shadows that leap and duck across the walls. For a heartbeat, every carved face of Esu‑Odan seems to be laughing in a different direction, mouths split too wide, eyes black and bottomless.
On the anvil, the heated chains do not simply glow. They bloom. Each link swells with light, pulsing from forge‑orange to a wet, arterial red, as if the iron itself were remembering blood, remembering the wrists and ankles it has bitten, the necks it has weighed down. The air above them shimmers with a faint, coppery stink that is not in the room and yet is everywhere.
One by one, sounds die. The bellows creak trails off. The low murmur of priests rehearsing their invocations snaps shut. Envoys’ mouths hang half‑formed around their next threat, teeth bared but voiceless. Even the distant drums above seem to stumble and catch their breath. Deko’s habitual smirk goes slack, lips parted, tongue pressed against a tooth as if to shape some sly word that will not come. His fingers twitch at his sides, remembering ropes and cuffs, then go still.
A hush falls that is not simple silence but pressure, like the moment before a storm breaks, like a hand laid flat across the mouth of the world. Even chains hanging idle along the walls grow motionless, their faint, constant clink swallowed whole as the iron on the anvil begins, unmistakably, to move of its own accord.
The chains writhe like struck snakes. Links loosen, swivel, and then clamp shut again, biting into their own bellies, weaving braids and knots no hammer blow has ever taught them. Cross‑bars slip, rings flip through rings, until a new script of loops and angles rises from the tangle, as if the iron has remembered how to write in its own tongue.
Heat flares, licking Yewandele’s face, but she leans in, forearm thrown up to shield her eyes. Sweat steams from her brow, hissing when it falls on the metal. Her gaze tracks the shifting coils, searching. There. In the doubled turns, in the hooked crossings only a smith‑line would notice, old signs surface like bones after rain: “oath snapped under witness.” “Burden turned in the road.” “Debt walking backward to its master’s gate.”
The sound that comes with it is not a clank. It is a low, braided susurrus, as if a crowd speaks through closed teeth. Names, prices, dates, vow‑phrases. Promises made over branded flesh. Promises spat. Promises swallowed. The iron repeats them all, then twists the tail of each word until it points upstream.
Beads rattling like teeth in a gourd, the nearest diviner jerks his hands from the warlord’s contract bundle as if it has turned to live coal. Inked palm‑marks smear; his lips shine with sudden sweat. “This…this is no longer the form we agreed,” he manages, voice thin, eyes fixed anywhere but the altar‑shaft where Esu‑Odan’s gaze might be peering down like a spider in its hole. One by one, the other priests peel away from the envoys, sliding their feet back over the soot‑black floor, eager to become mere onlookers instead of guarantors whose minds might be forfeit. Confidence curdles to self‑preserving caution. No one wishes to be the mouth that blesses a bargain the god himself has twisted sideways. The envoys’ menace thins; without priestly tongues to dress their threats in holiness, they are only men with paper and daggers. They glance at each other, at the bloom of red‑lit chains, at Ademilade standing unbowed beside Mofeyisola in the furnace‑glow, and understand: if this oath’s teeth turn, the sanctuary will not cover their throats.
Stripped of easy holiness, the envoys knot themselves in hissed debate, voices sharp as broken calabash. To proceed is to swear, before iron that now remembers every wrist it has chewed, that any chain fastened tonight may leap for the nearest open neck, lord’s as quick as slave’s, when an oath snaps. To retreat is to pole upriver heavy with shame: a broken bargain, a god offended, a master suddenly watchful, rivals’ laughter already sharpening like knives. Deko drinks in their panic, lip curling, but the taste sours; he feels the same net tightening over his own throat. Whatever hand has turned the road here does not sort bondage by rank. At last the chief envoy smooths his wrappers, bares too many teeth, and names their fear “a prudent delay for clearer divination,” trying to weave cowardice into ceremony. No one answers. The bargain unravels like rotten rope, not cut by spear or decree but by men who dare not sleep with Esu‑Odan’s laughter rattling their chains.
Custody of the waking iron slides into Yewandele’s scarred hands. She grips a tether of red‑white links in her tongs, lifts it like a live snake, and speaks forging‑phrases that bend its hunger: from chewing field wrists to leaping for liars, oath‑breakers, and those who fatten themselves on perjured chains. Heat licks the floor. Guards and slaves feel it under their bare soles, a slow, sideways tilt of the world. No neat miracle answers. No manacle drops and rolls laughing into the coals. Ademilade’s wrists still remember weight; Mofeyisola’s bangles still sing her duty. Yet the road to the warlord’s gate kinks, barred by Esu‑Odan’s own hooked marks. Above, rumor climbs ladders and stairwells faster than smoke: how, in the belly of the trickster’s house, a farmer, a guard‑slave, and an oath‑bound smith leaned on the crossroads until it shuddered, half a finger‑width toward justice, leaving the way ahead long, crooked, but no longer running straight to the war‑canoes.