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Everyone coughed and spluttered around him, and when he looked up he saw a group of Adze staggering towards him on foot. They stopped at the edge of the net, where Jimoh had carefully laid out their unconscious comrades. Each one heaved a limp Adze over their shoulders and stumbled off into the forest, emitting an occasional shower of sparks, leaving nothing behind but the fading stench of the insecticide.

“Are you okay? You look very pale.” Tariro hunkered down in front of Ethan. “That was pretty crafty. Pretty vile too.” He said, “Who would have thought you could fish such a horrible smell out of thin air. Man, I cannot wait to sharpen my magic skills. When I get strong enough, will you teach me to do that?”

“I don’t know how I did it. I seem to just make it up as I go along,” Ethan said, hoping to divert Tariro. He felt quite nauseous. Somehow, being able to hypnotise someone into believing they were under attack seemed a lot less sinister than being able to call up something real out of thin air, no matter how tiny. He was going to have words with that leopard when he got back.
 

“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Joe said shakily. “I just didn’t know what else to do.”

Long moments passed while the young lady stood silhouetted against the backdrop of the valley, glaring at him. Her hand moved towards her wound as if she couldn’t quite believe it, and lifted her tunic. A single drop of blood travelled down her side. A deathly chill swept over the vast hall as the Almohad stood silently waiting for... something.
 

She moved so fast, Joe had no time to react. One minute she was standing in the archway clutching her side, and the next she was behind him. She grabbed his wrist and twisted it cruelly up behind his back, bringing a gasp from him.
 

“Missed!” she hissed into his ear, her voice heavy with the promise of lethal consequences, her warm breath on the back of his neck sending a chill up Joe’s spine.

Hajiri reacted almost as swiftly, his huge face looming up in front of Joe. His yellow irises turned to dark ochre, making them even more startling and terrifying, as he glared menacingly past Joe’s face at the lady. “Drop… my… boy!” he growled through clenched teeth. All trace of his charming, convivial persona vanished.

“Make me!”

Hajiri’s eyebrow lifted just a hint. “Praxades,” he purred in a low dangerous voice. “I will not be drawn in to your psychotic game. You asked for it.”
 

“I want retribution,” Praxades said, looking over at Galal.

“Oh, it was not that bad, you hardly felt it,” Galal said dismissively. “You can lop off a finger.”

He’s only trying to scare me
, Joe thought, glancing anxiously at Galal’s face to gauge if he was serious, but Galal accepted his emerald bao stone from a girl who had retrieved it from the floor and turned back to his game, wiggling his fingers in a dismissive gesture to indicate he was not to be disturbed.

Joe shot a baffled look at Hajiri. What he saw in the tiger’s face confirmed that despite Galal’s disinterest, they were in fact about to cut off one of his fingers. Instead of standing his ground against Praxades, the tiger nodded once to the girl, Nandi, then turned and stalked out of the room, stiff with suppressed rage.

Praxades jerked Joe’s twisted arm further up his back and marched him out of the room, across a courtyard and into a small chamber with a number of horrible looking knives and plier-like tools hanging from the walls. A torture room. Joe could not believe his eyes. The young man from the library, Kitoko, trailed in behind her. He held Joe from behind while Praxades placed Joe’s right hand on a wooden block.

No, my bowling hand!
he thought in panic.

“Don’t move,” Praxades said, gleefully tucking three fingers under his palm, leaving his middle finger awkwardly exposed. Joe gritted his teeth and tried not to panic, but instead he was overcome by a bewildering welter of emotions. Nothing in his short life had prepared him for such a virulent bout of spite, or casual willingness to cause pain. How had he gone so quickly from normal everyday life to this destructive madness? His three un-condemned fingers started to creep out from under his shaking palm of their own accord and Joe struggled to hold them in place. Good grief, he thought, what if she missed, and took off his whole hand?
 
He froze, trying to ignore the
woosh-woosh
of his heartbeat roaring in his ears as he waited for the blinding pain to shoot through him, desperately hoping he would not give her the satisfaction of hearing him scream.
 

Nandi’s green outfit pushed its way in between two of the youths from the library. Her velvet brown eyes stared intently into Joe’s. An intoxicating glow wrapped around him, and Joe felt himself losing his sense of time and place, and even the will to brace himself.

The blade swung down.

“Bugger!” Praxades cursed, her black eyes glaring suspiciously around the room before she bent down to pick up her bloody prize from the floor and stormed out.

Kitoko let go of Joe and ran out after her, followed by his entourage from the library.

Joe stood as if in a dream. He wasn’t sure if it was the shock, but he felt strangely detached from the incident. It hadn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d thought it would. Nandi watched him with solemn eyes, an expression of frantic concentration on her face, till the last person had followed Kitoko out of the room. As she broke eye contact with him, excruciating pain shot up Joe’s arm. He gripped the block for support, his breath coming in shuddering gasps. She ran forwards to catch Joe as he slumped to the ground.

~~~

Some time afterwards he lay on his back, his eyes squeezed shut. He’d tried to lift his hand to look at it, and pain such as he had never known shot up his arm. He flinched as someone touched him on the shoulder.

“It’s not that bad. She only got the tip of your finger,” Nandi said, as if that were some great victory. She leaned over him and placed her small hands on either side of Joe’s face, turning it towards herself. “Now open up, I can only reduce the pain if I can see into your eyes.”
 

Her face swam momentarily in front of Joe, but his pain subsided to a dull throb the moment he looked into her eyes. Quite a lot of time must have passed, he realised, because she had changed into black pyjamas, and wore her long unruly hair pulled back tightly into a plait that hung down her back.

Joe coloured as he glanced down at himself. He was clean. His dirty hyena pelt had been removed and he was wearing some sort of white linen pyjamas. He grimaced as a wave of pain threatened to overcome him again.

Nandi pulled his face back to face hers. “You have to keep eye contact, or it will hurt. Don’t worry, the healer removed your clothing and put the kurta on you. She has gone to fetch some herbs for the pain so that I don’t have to keep looking at you like this.”

Nandi climbed up on top of him and sat on his chest, gazing steadily into his eyes, but went on speaking in a conversational tone. “Don’t be too angry with Praxades. She has been here since birth so she does not understand how painful pain is. Most of them don’t. It’s just a word to the Almohad. She doesn’t make trouble out of malice... just out of bored frustration.”

“She should be caged!” Joe grumbled. “What kind of people are you?”

“Praxie is so focused on learning the magic of the beauty that she forgets to apply herself to the magic of the coaxing,” Nandi explained, as if that made it okay. “I haven’t spent much time becoming beautiful. I’m working on becoming a healer. I am going to be a
great
healer one day.”

Joe was about to argue, because she was in fact prettier than Praxades, but the healer returned just then, and Joe was even more embarrassed than he had been when he thought Nandi had undressed him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she was not much older than Nandi, and breathtakingly beautiful. He wished she had not seen him like this.

He drank the bitter concoction she gave him and she said jokingly, “You can safely tear your eyes away from Nandi now.”

Closing his eyes for a moment did not bring back the pain, so Joe tried gently to detach Nandi’s hand from his face with his good hand. But she seemed reluctant to let go.
 

“He’s such a funny colour,” Nandi said to the healer.
 

Joe was amazed at how quickly he felt better, but that was no reason for her to take advantage of him. “Excuse me, I am right here, and I am not a funny colour. Lots of people are this colour where I come from, even if most of them look like you,” he said, taking a proper look at her. She had mocha brown skin, like Jimoh’s family, but as unruly as her hair was, it was not as kinky. More like the silky stigmas from the ends of a leaf of corn, except jet-black.

“I want him!” Nandi said, leaping off his chest onto the floor. “I am going to ask Daddy for him.” With that, she spun on her heels and rushed out of the room.

“What is she talking about? Wants me? Is she the captain of some sort of team?” Something told him this had nothing to do with gangs or teams.

“What do you mean team?” the healer said. “Do you mean ‘tribe’? There are no tribes here. The tribes live beyond the river.” She pointed over the balcony to the silvery lake across the valley.

If they had no concept for team, and she did not belong to a tribe that she wanted Joe to join, what could she possibly want him for? She couldn’t possibly want to marry him or anything, he told himself. Or could she? They were both years too young. But he had heard of such things happening in India and other places, and with a dad like Galal, they could probably make him do it too.

“What does she want me for?” Joe said, scrubbing his fingers through his hair with his good hand.

“She wants you to be her bondsman,” the healer said, as if that had been obvious.

“I can’t be her bondsman, or anything else, for that matter!” Joe yelped. A bondsman sounded suspiciously like a glorified servant. “I have to get home before my folks go down to the pools and find me missing... Or there is going to be hell to pay!”
 

“Young man, you will do whatever Galal decides, and like it,” the healer said with an exasperated sigh. Then she shrugged, “Well, it would be better than being given to Kitoko.”

“What do you mean, ‘given’!” Joe said, realizing with a sudden chill what the elusive thought had been. “They still have slavery here?”

~~~

Joe stumbled after Nandi towards the grand hall. He couldn’t remember the way but he had no trouble following Kitoko’s raised voice.
 

“No!” Kitoko shouted. “I want him. She cannot have him!” Joe could almost imagine the spoiled brat stomping his foot.

“I don’t see why you should have him, Kitoko!” Nandi shouted back at him. “You have had the last three captives, and hardly anyone ever comes across the river these days!”

“Those boys were unsuitable, Nandi,” he spat contemptuously. “They tried to escape. I cannot be forever monitoring my minions. They must do as they are told and be patient until I see fit to release them.”

“That’s exactly what I am talking about! You fail to release them, even if they have given you good service. And you deliberately withhold from them the ways of the magic, so they are never ready. You treat them so badly, they would rather risk the hunting, or even the witches, than stay with you.”

Joe heard Kitoko shift to a more wheedling tone. “No, those ones were cowards! This one is better. He hardly flinched when we cut his finger off.”

Joe pushed his back into the wall, cradling his injured hand in his other hand, a knot of dread growing in his stomach. He should run right now and get it over with, he told himself. If he could reach the stream above the city he could follow it back to the Tokoloshe. He licked his lips. It was no good; he had a strong feeling from all this talk of hunting that he couldn’t outrun the Almohad. His injured hand would most certainly hold him back. He glared at it. It didn’t hurt now but he had no idea how long the painkilling potion would last. And if they caught him, they would probably cut something else off! What on earth had the tiger been thinking of? Things had obviously not panned out the way Hajiri thought they would, but the stupid cat must have had some inkling. These people were lunatics – if they chopped fingers off as minor punishment, what did they do when they were really angry?
 

Nandi, the only one who seemed at least partially sane to Joe, started to say something but stopped suddenly. Ears straining towards the door, Joe heard the sound of people shushing others to be quiet. With a horrifying compulsion to look inside, Joe crept forwards and carefully poked his head around the door.

“Ah! Just the boy!” Galal had risen from his divan beside the bao board. The way he strode towards Joe, it was as if he had felt him just outside the door. Putting a comradely arm around Joe’s shoulder, he drew him into the room.

“What to do... what to do?” he said as if choosing between sugar or honey in his tea. “Nandi wants so badly to have you, but alas, she is too young to be training an attendant, and Kitoko wants to have you but he has misused his last three attendants.” He shook his head and tut-tutted at Kitoko, but Galal did not look too distressed about it.
 

“What to do?” he said again. “Do I give you to Nandi? She is, after all, my favorite.” His eyes crinkled indulgently at the young girl. “Or do I give you to Kitoko? He is, after all, my heir.”

Joe didn’t know what to say. Was the man actually asking him? If he had to choose it would obviously be Nandi, but either way it amounted to captivity. He felt himself getting angry with the girl. People here were just not normal. She should have warned him. She should have helped him get away, not jumped on the bandwagon. And where was Hajiri when he really needed him?

“Bao,” suggested a barrel-chested man with a shock of wavy hair.

“Bao... Bao,” nodded several others.

“Well, bao it is then,” Galal agreed, losing interest just as suddenly as he had when he had made the decision to have Joe’s finger chopped off. He went back to his own extravagantly carved game, and his pipe in the corner. His opponent and the group of spectators around his game had hardly moved a hair.