The Summoner: (35 page)

He held her right arm down with his free hand. With his other he dug the knife into her skin. She watched him, horrified, unable to move.

He ripped another slice of flesh from her arm. She whimpered and felt herself slipping away, but he shoved the rag under her nose, jolting her back to consciousness. Her eyes rolled and she heaved. She couldn’t take any more.

The
N’anga
stepped back and replaced the mask. “I must see to my flock once more, and then we shall complete the ritual. Your real pain begins then, upon your death, when our fates become intertwined. Know this, and cry out in fear. Wail for the Orisa. Scream your torment to the spirit world. Bring him, my child. Bring Esu to me!”

55

G
rey asked where Father Cowden kept his things. The priest pointed down the hall. “His office is the second door on the right.”

Grey had already walked away. He checked the door to the office; locked. He shouted for a key.

“I’m not sure if we should enter without his permission to—

“Sorry, Father,” Grey said, and kicked the door. It splintered open. He heard the priest gasp.

Grey ran to the desk and started going through the papers. He didn’t see anything helpful. The anger bubbled like a trapped geyser when he saw the bibles, rosaries, Catholic accoutrements.
A priest
.

He checked the furniture, the wastebasket, then went to a closet on the far side of the room. Inside he saw a priest’s frock and a pair of black shoes. He checked the pockets of the frock and shoved it away, disappointed.

He stopped the door just before it closed. He’d caught a whiff of something, something familiar. A slightly spoiled or rotten odor.

He leaned down. The smell was faint, but stronger at the bottom of the closet, near the shoes.

He flipped the shoes over. The bottoms were crusted with a dried brown substance. Where had he smelled that stench?

He squatted and held one of the shoes in his hand. His first thought was of dog feces, but this smell was sharper, tinged with ammonia. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind, tried to associate an image with the odor.

Then he remembered, and a shock of excitement tingled his nerve endings. He dropped the shoe and raced out of the church, leaving a mystified priest in his wake.

The bottoms of the shoes were covered in dried bat guano.

• • •

Grey stood in Viktor’s parlor, face pale. He told Viktor what he’d found.

“We were too focused on Harare,” Viktor said, in dawning recognition.

“The girl’s string talisman, that
igbo-awo
thing—we must have missed something when we were there. He’s in the caves, isn’t he?”

“So close to Great Zimbabwe, the spiritual heart of the country… he’d find that fitting.” A slow, hardened smile crept onto Viktor’s face. “A leave of absence means he’s preparing to return to Nigeria. He must have what he came for.”

Grey tensed. “We still don’t know where the entrance is. It feels right, but there could be other caves. We might not find it in time.”

“Even if we don’t find the
igbo-awo
, Great Zimbabwe is the perfect place for the final ceremony. It’s a risk worth taking.”

“If we go there and we’re wrong…”

Viktor didn’t respond.

• • •

Viktor left the room, and returned carrying a black duffel bag and a leather rucksack. He placed a quick call to reception. Grey led the rush to the lobby, and through the reception doors he saw the valet pulling up in Viktor’s Mercedes.

Viktor crammed into the driver’s seat and handed Grey the rucksack. Grey looked inside and saw a coil of rope, a compass, a flashlight.

“You know where you’re going?” Grey asked.

“Yes.”

They sped out of the city in silence. An uncommonly humid afternoon lent a somber density to the air, as if the red, boulder-strewn landscape were coated with a glaze. Dexterous warm wind rushed past them, alive only in the way air can be before an approaching storm.

“We should arrive by dusk,” Viktor said.

“I’ve been thinking about Fangwa’s story. How does Addison play into this? I still don’t see it.”

“A Juju ritual, especially the type of ritual led by the
N’anga
, is a promise of protection, of wealth, of power.”

Grey snorted. “It’s a promise of getting to watch strangers have sex.”

“Whatever the reason, I assume the
N’anga
used Lucky to lure William Addison to the ceremony. But as to the reason Addison was chosen—I don’t know.”

“And Nya’s father?” Grey said. “How’d the
N’anga
find him in Harare after all this time?”

“The
N’anga
would tell you he used Juju to divine his location.”

“And I’d tell you he’s a charlatan with a very limited life expectancy.”

An uneasy silence fell inside the car.

Grey said, “Aren’t we supposed to be convincing ourselves not to believe in anything the
N’anga
does? If there’s something I should know that might help tonight, now’s not the time to be mysterious.”

“Rest assured I’d already have provided you with any necessary information. I believe Fangwa was right—the
N’anga
will call upon Esu one last time with his worshippers before he finishes the ritual with Nya. With luck you’ll be able to free her and escape before he returns.”

Viktor’s tone eased. “The only thing you need remember is what I’ve told you from the beginning. The mind is a powerful weapon, and you must be the master of yours. Don’t listen to him, don’t think about him—let your mind be a clean slate.”

Grey was looking out the window, but all he could see was the look on the man’s face at the ceremony, trapped inside the circle. Grey thought he had known evil, had known depravity, but Doctor Fangwa and the
N’anga
were something else entirely. These men didn’t just take human suffering to another level, they did it because they believed in its power
.

Grey told himself that none of it was real, but his mind kept returning to the impossibilities he had witnessed. The mental path of least resistance. The same thing that happened when every single passenger on a plane, regardless of religious belief or lack thereof, shut their eyes and prayed during heavy turbulence.

He remembered watching his mother die, when he’d both cursed and pleaded with God. It was human nature. Show me the atheist who doesn’t want to believe, Grey thought grimly, and I’ll show you a liar. Deep down, everyone possesses the same desire.

“Don’t worry about me,” Grey said. “There’s only one thing on my mind.”

Grey willed himself to believe in his own words, but he knew they weren’t entirely true.

There were other things on his mind. Darker things. A dead monkey, glassy-eyed servants and villagers, lines of blood, men trapped by air.

“Viktor,” Grey said.

“Yes?”

“Do you believe in God?”

“That,” Viktor said, “is a question for another day.”

56

T
hey escaped the brewing storm. The last of the daylight gleamed with golden-tinged hues as the sun submerged into the horizon, feathering the boulders and msasa trees with evanescent brushstrokes.

Grey noticed the changes in landscape with a dull interest. He only cared about the appearance of lowland forests and then drier, boulder-and-mopani stippled bushveld because the changes signaled that they were drawing nearer to Nya.

Viktor had estimated a dusk arrival, and Grey knew their destination approached. A mix of emotions surged through him, but one emotion trumped them all, an anger which clawed upwards out of his depths and threatened to overwhelm him.

He could hardly allow himself to think about Nya without risking losing his reason entirely, and becoming an ineffective weapon blinded by rage and revenge. Anger was the worst possible emotion to be enslaved to during a fight, followed by love. These emotions strip a fighter of his ability to coldly calculate and react to a situation. When Grey allowed his mind to slip into the precarious realm of contemplation of Nya’s suffering, a world where love and anger became as one, he felt the fabric of his reason breaking apart.

So he roamed elsewhere. He tried to focus on William Addison and the other victims, past and future, of the
N’anga
. He tried to focus on his enemy, on what he needed to do to prepare. But that, too, proved precarious: if he dwelled too long on the
N’anga
, on what he’d seen with his own two eyes, he risked traveling to the one place Viktor said he must not go.

He opened the window to Nya just a little bit, let the anger slip back in. A delicate balance, he knew. A dangerous one. He had to keep his focus tonight. If he failed, Nya would die, and probably himself and others.

A sign gave him escape from his thoughts: the entrance to Great Zimbabwe.

• • •

Viktor slowed and turned onto the narrow road that wound deeper into the bush, and then pulled into the visitors parking area.

“Too many cars,” Grey said. “Last time we were the only visitors, and that was daytime.”

“He’s here,” Viktor said.

Please God, let this be the place.
Grey hadn’t asked anything of God since his mother had died. But he was asking for this.

Not asking. Begging.

“Which way?” Viktor said.

“You think the ceremony will be in the ruins?”

“Yes.”

“Park and follow me. The road to the village is on the other side. We can’t risk the car.”

They stepped out of the car as the sun disappeared, and moments later a loud boom sounded. A throbbing reverberation that lingered on the night air, followed seconds later, just before fading, by another boom, and then another. The powerful cadence caused the hairs on the back of Grey’s neck to writhe in an unholy rhythm. After a grim smile at hearing the drums, he quickened his pace. They still didn’t know where Nya was.

They headed down a path marked as leading to the Great Enclosure, the drums a constant presence. They walked a brief distance along the darkened trail, under the shadowy outlines of the ruins looming in the distance. The din of nocturnal insects rushed forth in the brief lulls between drumbeats, as if freed from a century-long imprisonment.

They topped a small hill halfway to the ruins, close enough to get a good look at the Great Enclosure. Inside the remarkably intact remains of the gargantuan circular wall, under a brazen moon, the Great Enclosure swarmed with worshippers. There had to be thousands. As the drums picked up speed, the crowd came to life, heaving and swaying with a sinister rhythm. Heads reared to quaff palm wine, bodies arched in abandonment to the drums.

Grey pulled Viktor around to face him. “If it’s the wrong cave, I’ll rejoin you here.”

“Wait until you see the
N’anga
,” Viktor said, his voice low and even. “If the
igbo-awo
is nearby, the
N’anga
will remain there until he surfaces for the ceremony, with his bodyguards close by. When he leaves the
igbo-awo
—this is when you go to Nya.”

“And you?”

“I’ll see to him.”

Grey scanned the worshippers. He forced himself to think about something besides Nya. He wrung his hands and tried to pick out individual faces in the crowd.

The throbbing of the drums increased, the intensity of the worshippers with it. They began to chant for the
N’anga
, and Grey tensed. A giant hand squeezed his shoulder. “Almost.”

Grey could sense her nearness, and the waiting tested every ounce of self-control he possessed.

The drums and chanting hammered the night sky. Finally the massive crowd shifted, opening a path into the Great Enclosure through an archway on the far side. Grey saw the horned tip of the
N’anga’s
mask rise above the crowd, and he strode into the Great Enclosure like a king returning to his ancient homeland.

Viktor held Grey’s gaze for a brief moment, long enough to express all that needed to be said.

“
Go
.”

57

G
rey ran.

He skirted the edge of the ruins, propelled by adrenaline and the pounding of the drums. He slipped to the side of the labyrinthine Valley Complex and then circled behind the Hill Complex. The fortress ruins towered over him as he picked his way among the boulders and thorny brush surrounding the bottom of the hill.

He found the dirt road he and Nya had followed before. He hunched over the flashlight and raced down the road to the village. He reached it within minutes, and when he did, he sucked in air.

The village was deserted.

It took him precious minutes to find the faint trail they’d followed the last time, and then he stepped into the bush. The dry terrain, which from a distance looked easily traversed, swallowed him.

The low density of the bushveld toyed with his nerves; denser landscapes provided more cover, a false sense of security from predators. The soft moonlight allowed Grey to see between the trees and scrub, leaving him with a constant feeling of vulnerability.

The sound of the drums faded, and he stepped now to the cadence of the insects. Although Nya had said this wasn’t lion territory, the threat of lesser predators was very real, and Grey tried not to think about it. The bush was threatening enough during daylight. Walking alone at night, without proper protection, was a fools’ errand.

Grey stiffened and switched the flashlight off. He’d seen a light down the trail. After a few moments he saw it again: a powerful golden beam flicked on, swept the bush, and then flicked off.

Grey’s emotions soared. Someone had bothered to put a guard up in the middle of the bush, which meant there was something here. Something worth hiding.

He left the path and stole ahead and to his left, approaching the light from a side angle. He soon made out a shadowy human shape in front of the same rocky outcropping he’d seen with Nya, the one next to where they’d found the string. A man-sized opening yawned behind the figure.