Chapter 4: A hostile little takeover

“I… I’m…” Faishatu tries to speak, but her voice shakes and her lips tremble.

“Nice job calling me earlier,” Chiadi says. “One last attempt to throw me off-track, abi?”

“I—I didn't want you getting any more involved,” she sputters. “No need for more people to suffer for…”

“Spare me, your highness,” the Dibia cuts in. “I think we’re past that sentiment. I just saw the army of izombi you and that loony Loa have raised. Yeah, I know Akinyele’s murder victims have been coming back to roam the crossroads, awake but not alive; I caught his Mopol goons busting up a street rally three days ago just to corral a few of them.”

A sound like a bulldozer hydraulic arm crashing against the wooden door rings through the cramped space, but the flimsy thing inexplicably holds. Looking around what is undoubtedly a shrine, all the Dibia finds—besides the platform bearing Lasiremi—is an altar in the corner, long disused and consisting of crumbled wood figurines and rotted vegetation. Other odd paraphernalia litter the floor.

“He said her soul would be the final offering. You can’t stop what’s coming,” blurts Faishatu, her sharp tone belying a rising panic. As if in response comes another crash, one that sends shards of frayed wood and plaster chips flying across the room. The creature outside vents its fury in a cry that is far from human.

Chiadi spots a small, cracked gourd on the shrine floor. Going over to grab and tip it over, he feels relief when a trickle of dark powder spills from it to the floor.

The high priestess of the Awori keeps gabbling: “You can imagine what it’s been like all these years after my husband’s… disappearance. My people have all scattered. I was… I was promised sovereignty above all. Beyond all other oracles…”

Her voice crackles with… what? Despair mixed in with hope, maybe. Chiadi didn’t care either way. Of all the Ghede brotherhood, Sagbata—Samedi—was the most devious, the most apt to offer a left-handed boon since beings like them could not lie outright.

“I’m sure you were,” he says, pulling other objects from his shirt pocket and placing them at the foot of the altar.

The door, instead of being already reduced to vitrified pieces, still holds, though great chunks of it had been torn off. Through the resultant holes the dandy-dressed gargoyle raging against it is clearly visible, as are the dead-eyed bodies from the storeroom, now gathered behind him like a festering horde completely under his control.

“Cigars and candy,” the Dibia mutters, sprinkling the powder from the gourd onto the floor. “Tobacco and rum…”

Faishatu halts her rambling, and her scoff trails his machinations. “What are you doing?” she asks. “The temporal gateways are disused, and Sagbata holds sway. This place… this shrine was once fit for my followers to congregate and worship, but now it’s a bad joke—a lifeless monument to long departed gods…”

“See, that’s just the thing sister,” he goes on while using a wedge of nzu chalk to etch anew the symbol that had once been permanent on that dusky floor: a key-limbed cross, with a hooked walking stick suspended above its right arm. “There was a reason I kept quiet about some things even to you. Hard to know whom to trust these days…”

Another crash, a new shower of splinters and rotted wood. Any non-ogwu fortified door would have been reduced to sawdust at the first blow, but for the totem hung on its knob. Still, such glamors had their limits—it wouldn’t take more than a couple more strikes for even a house built of mystic brick to come tumbling down before as big and bad a wolf as that which bashed on it.

Then… something else happens: a change to the already charged air in the room, one that Faishatu notices such that her look of scorn turns to one of suspicion. The arcane effect reaches even the figure laid on the platform between them, as Lasiremi stirs and mumbles from deep inside the thrall she’s been placed. At that, the Dibia feels another ache of relief in his gut: the mambo is still alive.

Iya-lorisha swings her widening gaze between where Chiadi kneels and the other atop her ceremonial bed of palm fronds and hibiscus. “Is it… are you saying…?”

The Dibia looks up with an impish grin.

 Next moment, the door explodes inward and a mightily p!ssed-off Death Loa—dark aspect on full display—swarms into a space that already seems too small to comfortably contain its existing three occupants. With a taloned backhand he swats the Dibia, sending him slamming against a near wall.

“You’re not worth the effort.” Sagbata’s growl reverberates through the room. “And you have no idea what you’re up against.”

Eyes stinging from wood dust and grit, Chiadi drops, rolls over, and tries to ignore the pain that now seems to come from… everywhere. With a grunt, he crawls forward, the agony of movement clear in his narrowed eyes and bared teeth.

Sagbata turns to his female houngan as his dead flesh army, his offering to a higher and more malicious entity—golems of men, women, and children—silently mass outside. “The hour draws near,” he instructs her. “My rite will commence. Release the mambo’s spirit while I wipe off this annoyance.”

 Before his lantern gaze returns to the sprawled Dibia, Chiadi finally spots what he’d been searching for across the rubble-strewn ground, where it had been ejected from its former place on the now disintegrated door’s jamb. A half second is all its takes him to snap the aja’s string—it’s only hemp rope after all—before he has an essential piece of it in his hands. Reaching out, he slams the object onto the veve he’s just drawn on the floor, a short-key sketch designed to forcibly summon a being whose supplications have gone dry as the Sahara; whose worship is hazy memory.

Swathes of eldritch light—yellow, purple, and crimson—bloom from nowhere to swirl within the cramped confines. It lasts only a few seconds and as they subside a figure stands there, a silhouette familiar enough to drive Faishatu to her own knees with a choked cry and both hands raised in dire supplication.

“Esu… eshu baba Elegbara…!” she wails, a black-bladed knife falling from her grip as the Loa of the crossroads, accompanied as always by his faithful hound, raises his stick and drives it once into the ground in fresh acknowledgement of an existence driven almost to the fringes by years of listlessness. “Baba wa oju-ibo legba ti de o…!”

“No,” mutters Sagbata, unease touching his serpentine face at last.

The lord of the Rada surveys the others in his drab surroundings: a frightened failed priestess, a battered Dibia, a mami-wata mambo sacrificial offering, an upstart Petwo Loa with intentions of grandeur. Outside the shack, a soulless mob—fodder for an unholy ascension.

And he laughs.

Sagbata snarls, angry and defiant. “Dis be of no concern to you, ole man gatekeeper. Jus’ taking my due, after all this d@mn time…”

Papa Legba bestows him a long, meaningful glance. His only other response is a casual wave of one hand, itself enough to raise a flicker of uncertainty in the other Loa’s eyes.

As more sounds and light erupts, all at once what had been narrow and drab enclosure becomes an impossible void, an endless vista of space and time, of multiple veils and dimensions. Faishatu’s features turn bloodless with terror; Chiadi’s exude tired triumph.

“No,” Sagbata says again, tone less challenging than whiny. “It’s not that serious…”

One by one, like embers coming to life within an eternity of twilight, other shapes and forms blaze into existence. In mere moments, they were there: from all the seven nachons—families—of Loa that are. With names, appellations and characteristics as varied and colourful as the aspects ascribed by various worshippers, they stand in grim congregation as if already aware of the sly transgressor amongst them.

Chiadi knows some of them: the aspects of Erzulie Freda and Simbi Andezo, both of whom he has encountered before, are easy to recognise. Ibo Lele the Chatterer—he of the joys and agonies of the insane or the inspired, Filomezi, water spirit and Duchess of the mami-wata faith. Simbi Andezo and Anansa, also mami wata, but of salt waters, not the sweet lakes and streams. Even Barons Criminel and Cimettiree, twin peers to Sagbata, are present, wielding sneers of perverse amusement.

The Dibia, meanwhile, has already played his final gambit. Moments before, he’d sidled up to where Lasiremi lay and furtively flicked forefinger and thumb at her face and nostrils, the acrid powder on them designed to bring her entirely awake. In a few moments, she gasps, shakes off whatever drug had been used to put her in near-comatose state, and opens her eyes. As Chiadi hopes—maybe even expects—the mami-wata notice the affront to their oracle. The collective anger that flares in their eyes is tempered only by Papa Legba’s command and call to counsel.

In the brief parley that commences, the words echo endlessly in a language only understood by demi-gods, and at its conclusion Papa Legba turns to include even the mortals in his address.

“Kalfu here, also known to you as Baron Samedi or Sagbata, has broken the pact between Loa respecting the fates of humans,” he begins, depthless eyes reflecting an abysmal light.

“Sh!t, I could have told you that…” Chiadi intrudes. Next second, a shaft of ephemeral light strikes him; cutting him off, seizing him and dangling him aloft.

Legba’s thunder seems to fill the entire vista. “You—Dibia of little or no repute. You will guard your tongue.”

The Dibia’s look goes quickly from startlement to obstinacy. “I could have just let him do it, you know,” he says. “I guess it only takes so long before one or two of you want to shake things up, especially when those supposedly on watch decide to take extended leave of absence.’’

“That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it Samedi, Sagbata or whatever face you’re selling these days?” tone caustic as he continues. “Using the obvious neglect of your brother Loa to do a hostile little takeover; nothing major—just to ensure broader control over the affairs of men, and all to your personal benefit…”

Sagbata serves up an oily grin. “Clever insect. I should have made sure you didn’t walk away from that d@mn alley behind Ikorita.”

“Well, I did,” retorts the Dibia. “I also don’t take kindly to innocents being used to achieve the obscure aims and designs of ambitious demi-gods. We already have enough to keep us stressed out here in Lagos.”

To the recalcitrant Loa Papa Legba declares, “Kalfu, your function is to escort the souls of the newly dead to the afterlife; sometimes even to grant those who wish some additional years of life if they warranted it. Never to be the wilful cause of such passing to those whose time have not come. This you have done so as to garner enough souls to petition the gods of darkness and boost your power and influence. It is our decision that you place the souls you have thus stolen in my care. I will guide them through the gates of life and death myself, after adequate reckoning has been performed…”

“Mayhap I didn’t acquire dem souls fair ‘n square,” Sagbata spits. "Nonetheless, they’re mine now…!”

“No!” screeches Anansa of the mami-wata, her emerald-blue robes swirling wide as if buoyed by unseen waters. “You are ours! For the sin of desecration of our chosen voice and ears on this side of the world, we have demanded and been awarded discretion over your fate.”

Sagbata runs eyes across the grim faced orishas gathered before him. “What? That’s not… how can you allow this? This isn’t how it’s done…!”

As Papa Legba raises his cane every eye—human and Loa—watches. A rush of light and shadow commences, sweeping overhead like a cosmic storm, one with the brass headed implement as its nexus. “It is decided, Kalfu. Be glad it wasn’t up to your peers to name your penance. It could have been worse.”

Both standing to one side, Criminel and Cimettiree smirk in tandem, uncaring of their brother’s audacity, his imminent fate… perhaps even a bit resentful they hadn’t tried something similar.

All that the less frightening, somewhat wilted form of Baron Samedi can do is utter one wild and truncated bellow of outrage before he is enveloped in a shimmering globe of effervescence cast by the vengeful sisters of the waters and dragged beyond the veil of human awareness. Then, as more of the other Loa begin to wink out of sight, the fantastic plains swirl and increasingly evaporate, leaving behind the dank Awori shrine room.

When only the lanky figure of Papa Legba remains, the gaze he turns upon others in the confined space is cold and unforgiving, and the dog at his feet looks ready to attack at the smallest command. Faishatu is crumpled in a far corner, her features a drooping mask of dejection and misery, her body quaking with fat sobs. On the platform Lasiremi is propped on her elbows, blinking to clear her eyes of what must feel like a bad dream.

Still trapped in mid-air by esoteric forces, his sneakered feet inches from the floor, Chiadi meets the Loa’s gaze and attempts a weak smile. “Weh done, sir,” he rasps.

 “You stole from me,” growls the eternal lord of the crossroads and gatekeeper between the living and the spirit worlds. “When we shared a cab ride.”

The Dibia attempts a chuckle. “Heh. Okay, but I didn’t think you’d mind too much. It’s been a big help as a protection totem against your guy and, well, yours is still a very nice waistcoat…” As he speaks, a single, solitary button floats up from the ground, finally free of being one among the other objects strung on his aja. It sails through the air to find its place once more on the leather vest under Legba’s grey tweed jacket.

The Loa king flicks the fingers of his right hand. Chiadi feels his arcane hold release, and rests unsteady feet on solid ground once more as the other turns away.

“Before you leave, Papa,” he calls to the being about to walk through the solid wall trailed by his pet, and who swivels at the hip to rest yellow eyes on him.

“You know you can’t absolve yourself of all responsibility here, right?” Chiadi is sweating a little but knows must speak. “All this happened because you basically abandoned your followers; stopped receiving their offerings. Iya-wo-lorisha and what’s left of her sect were led astray because of your negligence. It’s been chaos out there.”

If a profound response is expected from the Loa king, the Dibia doesn’t know what it is. Still, what he gets is no more than a lingering glance at the stricken form of the high priestess of his cult in Lagos before the entity lets out a grudging grunt.

“I will be more heedful in future,” he says, “but you are done.”

And then he is gone.

Faishatu falls face forward on the floor and begins to moan piteously.

Chiadi goes to help Lasiremi off the platform and, removing his soiled polo shirt, uses it to cover her nudity as they both exit the shrine hand-in-hand. Outside it, the open ground is so piled up with scores of fallen izombi that have reverted to inanimate corpses that they have to pick their way through.

As they are about to go through the door leading into the boutique fronting for Akinyele’s murderous spree, the disgraced priestess’ plaintive voice issues from within her shrine: “Dibia! What am I supposed to do now?”

Pausing to scan the macabre scene he is leaving behind, Chiadi’s response is to pull a mobile phone from his hip pocket.

“I don’t know,” he replies to her. “But I’m calling a good friend at the police control station, so you better have a d@mn good explanation for all this by the time they get here.”

 THE END