Excerpt - ZamaShort #7 'When Two Sorcerers Collide' by T.L. Huchu
EXCERPT
WHEN TWO SORCERERS COLLIDE
T.L. HUCHU
On All Hallows’ Eve the darkness blanketing the city is pierced by the daring beams of solar and generator powered LED lamps, since all the streetlights were broken decades ago. Harare decays slowly like felled mukwa. Regardless, day or night, the music in the Avenues never stops. It’s the spirits who power the melodies of long dead sungura legends spilling through the speakers recalling a bygone age. Whiny electric guitars punctuated by thumping drums compel the hypnotised bodies on the open lawn to gyrate in Charanga’s Cocktail Bar on Central Avenue. It is these vibrations that keep the eternal night at bay.
A tall, slender man wearing brown herringbone tweed and a matching fedora stalks through the jivers. He is overdressed for the sweltering African night and his impeccable visage glistens with beads of sweat that pool at the corners of his moustache and drip down to his bare chin. Thankfully he is outside; if the bar were indoors it would be an inferno. The man pauses in the middle of the heaving lawn, marking his quarry, a small woman in a green dress with a puffed-up Afro sitting at the bar, an untouched cocktail lingering in the coupe glass next to her. Unlike the other working women, and most of the ladies in the bar are on the clock at negotiable rates, she politely declines any male attention and keeps her own company. Her eyes gaze into nothingness as though she is distracted, seeing past people into…
Perhaps she’s a dreamer suspended in time right here in the haze of cigarette smoke.
Someone in a red shirt bumps into the man in the fedora and mumbles an apology, but the man doesn’t care. He ignores this and draws closer, wary that she will fly and his efforts will be in vain. He was sent for her weeks ago—and, despite spending a small fortune on local informants, had thus far been unable to locate her—but at last, after a fortuitous tip-off, he has her in his sights. Everything in the bar becomes a synesthetic blur of colour and sound, the movement of dancers dripping oil in the corner of his consciousness. Just a few feet from her, an overwhelming wave of nausea hits and he dry heaves, cupping his mouth in his hands. In the second or so it takes to regain himself, the man notices the woman in green is gone.
The chair is empty.
Desperately, he scans around the bar, before noticing her slipping out the metal gate perimeter behind an intoxicated couple.
He rushes to follow, barging through the dancers and earning a few choice curse words in Shona, a language he does not understand. And he stumbles outside the gate, scanning left and right before someone taps him on the shoulder from behind. Startled, he turns quickly before spotting the woman holding her palm up. She seems annoyed, maybe a little impatient too.
‘If you must insist then I suppose I should take that business card off you, Ian Callander. But know that my answer is no, and I have more important things to do than stand here talking to you,’ she says, glancing anxiously down the dark street.
‘You know my name?’ he says and snaps his fingers making a gold foil business card appear in her open palm.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ she replies, dropping the card onto the ground.
‘Forgive me,’ Ian stutters, embarrassed. Usually people are impressed or at least surprised when he does the card trick.
‘Follow me,’ she replies. ‘I’ve decided you might be useful after all. The spider weaving this web hasn’t drawn your thread to mine for no reason, Mr Tourist. If you’d rather not come along, then I advise you go back inside and confront the man in the red shirt who picked your pocket on the dancefloor and now has your cell phone. I’m sure you can handle him yourself.’
Ian checks his right trouser pocket and discovers the smartphone is gone. It’s an expensive piece of kit his employer, the Royal Bank of Scotland, will easily replace. He’s annoyed by the theft, but this is more important, so he follows as she briskly walks into the darkness. This is his first time in Harare, but Ian has no fear of the muggers he was warned prowl the city centre at night, and he follows with an ease that’s indistinguishable from arrogance positioning himself beside the short woman who barely reaches his navel. They pass drunkards pissing on walls, street children begging at the intersections, some homeless men sleeping on the pavements cracked by the roots of old jacaranda trees.
‘I have a profitable business proposition for you, Ms Mhondoro. Or can I call you Melsie?’ he says, flashing a smile to add a bit of charm. He is only in his twenties and is savvy enough to know women are swayed by his good looks.
A stray mongrel trots across the road.
‘The Royal Bank of Scotland will be bust within a year, and your rivals will be picking at your carcass. They’ve had three hundred years, which is a good run by any standard. If I were you, I’d seek alternative employment… Normally I charge for information like that, but you get it for free since you look like Bambi looking for his mum,’ she replies brusquely.
‘There are other powers tied to the Bank and they have a vested interest in its continued success,’ Ian says, trying not to be offended by her condescension. He holds up his palm and incants, ‘Spark of Prometheus.’ There’s an instant entropic shift and bright light illuminates the night, driving away the shadows. A scent, like paraffin, wafts into Melsie’s nostrils. It’s a strange flame he’s conjured, a sort of glowing black giving off an ultravioletesque effect.
‘I don’t need proof you are a magician, Ian Callander. Kindly put out your unnatural light; it’s blotting out the stars.’ She’s squinting, a slight frown on her brow.
Ian turns red, a bit embarrassed, and curses himself out for employing cheap parlour tricks before extinguishing his spell. It used to be that one could come to Africa with trinkets from Europe and turn a profit. He can’t afford to disappoint the Bank. He is young, very hungry, and intends to rise to the top, which means making sure it survives and thrives, continuing to print money well into the future. Prognosticators have already hinted at its demise, as yet unknown to the bullish stock markets where its share price continues to soar. In secret, a new division is being founded to help it through these choppy waters. They need rowers and he has been told Melsie Mhondoro must become one of them. The bank is ancient and cannot be denied. Entire countries have been born and wiped off the map while it has endured. Supreme Leaders, Führers, Emperors, Prime Ministers, have risen and fallen, their lives mere fluctuations punctuating the bank’s graphs. Wars, famines, languages and entire peoples wiped out, stock market crashes and rallies, all these things and more, and still the bank continues.
They walk through Josiah Tongogara Street, following rows of flats near the CBD that have seen better days. Now and again, they are blinded by the headlights of a passing car swerving to dodge potholes. Ian’s getting wary. Following a strange woman in a strange city in a strange country in the dark would unnerve even the most astute practitioner.
‘Where are we going?’ he asks, turning to scan if they are being followed.
‘To a party,’ Melsie replies.
She halts in front of the gate on Calder Gardens and flashes Ian a mischievous grin. He understands she’s toying with him; the obvious Scottish name this block of flats bears, the dubious history between his people and hers. He’s read files prepared by the experts at the bank about her and her peculiar talents and she is signalling she’s read him too. Ian scoffs. The brown brick cladded four storey flats look nothing like anything they have back home anyway. The building is dotted with small satellite receivers on each unit. It’s then he notices the blood red tinge in the sky above the building. Were it twilight, one might mistake it for the palette of sunset, but this late at night, the colour is an aberration.
Melsie leads him through the car park to the locked door of the communal entrance. The steel security door is locked.
‘Open it.’ Not a request. A confident command and Ian sighs. He employs these petty power plays at work too as he jostles for position against other junior practitioners.
Let her think she’s in control until I have her in Edinburgh. That’s all that matters. Ian knows power is fluid and it moves with the tides.
An inexperienced practitioner might resort to something brute to crack the lock, perhaps a Hephaestus forge spell to melt the mechanism, damaging it permanently. Not Ian, he touches the door and pushes it open with a subtle Hecate incantation, her whose keys connect her to the underworld, and it works with hardly any noticeable entropic shift.
Like a gentleman, he gestures for Melsie to enter first. He doesn’t trust her behind him in a narrow space, as she slips in and scurries up the dimly lit stairs.
<...>
T.L. Huchu’s work has appeared in Lightspeed, Interzone, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, The Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2023), Alex Award (2022), the Children’s Africana Book Award (2021), a Nommo Award for African SFF (2022, 2017), and has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize (2014) and the Grand prix de l'Imaginaire (2019). The fifth and final instalment of his Edinburgh Nights fantasy series is titled Secrets of the First School. Find him @TendaiHuchu.
Released: 31st October 2025
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