Moon Witch, Spider King

While studying the map, Venin/Jakwu flees on a horse, but the binding spell prevents her from going too far. When they return to Ikede’s house, Tracker claims he heard the griot singing, something he hasn’t done in 30 years. The next morning, they find him dead (he jumped from the roof). They bury him and move on.

They reach Dolingo within two days. They are transported to the highest branches of the “first tree,” where the queen awaits them. She welcomes them as guests but forestalls any discussion of their mission until she decides it is time. Later that night, she summons Sogolon to court to discuss the matter. Sogolon fills her in—the boy’s captivity with the Ishologu, their use of a portal in Dolingo to travel through the land unnoticed. The queen, unaware of this system of portals, threatens her chancellors for their ignorance of this crucial development. When Sogolon asks for protection for the boy, the queen, again, claims never to have gotten Sogolon’s notes. Her carrier pigeons, it seems, were intercepted by the Aesi, who is on his way to Dolingo.

Later, Sogolon stands in the queen’s bedchamber. Mossi is led in and forced to disrobe for the queen’s pleasure, but Mossi prefers boys. Two boys are then brought in, and Sogolon is escorted out. As she leaves, the white scientist makes a cryptic claim about the queen conceiving a child without actually bearing it: “You want to see how we reproduce? How generation beget generation?” (583).

Sogolon tries to figure out who has informed the Aesi about their mission to Dolingo, and the only one that makes sense is Tracker. She suspects the Aesi invaded his dreams, although he claims he didn’t sleep on the night in question. This leads to a conversation about Sogolon’s true motives, and Tracker deduces that this is all about her blood feud with the Aesi. The talk then turns to Dolingan breeding methods. After generations of inbreeding, Dolingan women are barren, and the white scientists have devised a method of growing humans from a man’s seed. Men who are “drained” for such purposes are rewarded with a comfortable life.

That night, Sogolon perceives that the boy is in Dolingo. In the dark, two hooded figures enter Tracker’s cell, and Sogolon hears him scream. She sees the two figures—white scientists—leave his cell, followed by an amorphous blob that crawls onto one of the scientists and fuses into his flesh. Sogolon orders troops to “Mwaliganza, the fifth tree” (590). As they wait for a tram, they see below them a massive scattering of bodies—the enslaved Dolingans who operate the complex mechanisms that power the city have rebelled. Amid the chaos, Sogolon and the soldiers make their way to an apothecary, where she hears a child’s cry. Inside, they find two boys, one dead, floating in the air, his body infested with Adze (blood-sucking insects). The other is in a trance. Several “grass demons” and the Ishologu hover on the ceiling. Then, the room explodes in a chaos of lightning, heat, and swarming Adze. Soldiers are blown apart or infested by the vampire bugs. The Ishologu grabs Sogolon by the throat and tries to tear out her heart, but Jakwu, Tracker, Mossi, and the Ogo enter the fray. The Ishologu is wounded, and its demon minions are dead. A “Sasabonsam” (bat-winged ogre) crashes through the walls, snatches the Ishologu and the boy, and flies away.

Sogolon, wounded by the Ishologu, drifts in and out of consciousness as they pursue the boy. By morning, she is fully awake but barely mobile. Still distrustful of each other, Tracker and Sogolon argue over whose allegiance lies with whom. Eventually, Tracker opens a portal, and they all step through.

Sogolon is interrogated by an Inquisitor who wants to know who is on her death list. She tells him she found Lissisolo and reported to her that her son is fully in thrall to the Ishologu and that he prefers drinking blood to mother’s milk. The queen is in denial, however, and still waits for her true son to appear and ascend the throne, restoring the legitimate line of heirs. She begs Sogolon to bring him back, but she refuses.

After passing through the portal with Tracker and the others, Sogolon’s body burns, and she lies abandoned and on the verge of death until she is found and brought to the Nnimnim woman. She nurses her back to health, but the burns have done permanent damage. Through her semi-conscious haze, she learns that the rebellion destroyed Dolingo, and the queen has been locked away for the rest of her life. Kwash Dara sent troops from Fasisi to restore order, but without enslaved people to work the gears and pulleys, the city barely functions.

The Nnimnim woman offers Sogolon an enchantment that will disguise her true appearance to the outside world. As nurses tend to her, Sogolon’s room fills with all the women she has saved over the years as the avenging Moon Witch. They have come to offer their gratitude, to tell her that she has empowered many other women to fight for themselves, many of them laying claim to the title: “Moon Witch, she is me” (609). After a year, Sogolon has healed enough to leave, but she still hasn’t found peace.

Sogolon discovers that Tracker, Mossi, and Leopard rescued the boy from the Ishologu. She tracks Tracker and Mossi to the village of Mitu, where they live in a massive baobab tree with their six children. She watches them from a distance, nursing her anger at being abandoned, waiting to kill Tracker. While she waits for him to return, the tree is attacked by a Sasabonsam. Mossi fights to defend his children, even helping some of them escape, but in the end, the creature kills and devours him. The boy, Lissisolo’s son, is not frightened by the attack and wanders out in the open toward Sogolon’s hiding place. He stares at his reflection in the river, and the creature seizes him in its talons and flies off. She watches as Tracker returns the following day, sees the carnage, and is destroyed by grief. She decides at that moment not to kill him, for death would be a mercy.

War breaks out, the south occupying Wakadishu and Kalindar, and the north striking back. Lissisolo declares war on her brother, Kwash Dara. In Omororo, Sogolon reflects on her long life and her many names, none of them truly hers.

When Tracker saddles his horse and rides west, Sogolon follows him to the Mweru, to Lissisolo, where he asks where her boy is. She doesn’t know, but her soldiers are searching. As she waits for him, Sogolon sees Tracker scribing a rune in the air, opening a portal, and passing through, the Aesi at his side. She tracks them to Malangika, the witch market, where they purchase an Ishologu to lure back the Sasabonsam (and with it, the boy). The Sasabonsam attacks the market and flies off, and the two men pursue it, running headlong into Lissisolo’s army. The Aesi manipulates the soldiers into attacking each other, and only one survives. Sogolon, in pursuit, reaches a hill ahead of them and waits. As the Aesi senses a mind he cannot manipulate, he dismounts and approaches the hill. They battle, first using their powers, then hand-to-hand. He opens the earth and it swallows her, and her only recourse is to use her wind as a protective bubble. Still, she can hear his words foretelling a great threat from the West that will bring “fire and disease and death and slavery” (620).

The next morning, she claws her way out of the ground and heads for the nearby Red Lake. There, she sees a dozen of Lissisolo’s troops, one of them holding her son. Across a small inlet stands the Tracker and the Ishologu. The boy struggles to reach the Ishologu, the only guardian he has ever known. He pulls free of the soldier, who reveals himself to be Leopard, and he chases after the boy. Two spears fly and pierce Leopard, whose body drifts into the lake. Tracker retrieves him, the big cat dying in his arms. The Aesi keeps the soldiers in a daze, and the boy rushes into the cradling arms of the Ishologu, who flies into the air. A bolt of lightning strikes, extinguishing them both in a burst of flames. The Aesi grabs Sogolon, but her wind fills his body, imploding him once again.

Next, she tracks Jakwu, still in Venin’s body, to Juba, where he entices men into sex with her, killing them afterward. Sogolon finds him and kills him. She hears that Tracker is accused of killing Lissisolo’s son, a serious offense since Lissisolo’s alliance with the south would have assured her son a rightful place on the throne. Sogolon, meanwhile, boards a pirate vessel and sails down the river to Nigiki, a region in the southern part of the North kingdom. On the way, she dreams of Keme. At last, she turns herself over to the Inquisitor, claiming knowledge of the death of Lissisolo’s son. She is left in a cell, where she waits for the next incarnation of the Aesi.