Kampala arrived as heat and sound and the texture of a city that had not been designed so much as accumulated — layered over its seven hills with the organic logic of a place that had been building itself for centuries and had not finished.
The portkey deposited him in the Ugandan Ministry's atrium, smaller than the British one and considerably more interesting — the walls covered in a continuous mural depicting scenes from Ugandan magical history that he recognized in fragments from the texts he had read and did not recognize in the larger part because the British curriculum did not cover what it considered peripheral.
He filed this.
The Ministry liaison — a brisk, warm man named Okello who was approximately his father's age — walked him through the documentation and put him in a car to the magical district.
Kampala's magical district was not a hidden alley the way Diagon was hidden. It was integrated into the Nakasero neighborhood with the specific subtlety of a place that did not need to hide because the people who needed to find it already knew where to look. The buildings announced themselves through texture and presence rather than through signs — a doorway that had the quality of somewhere important, a courtyard with a quality of stillness that the street outside did not have.
The inn was three floors, built around a central courtyard with a mango tree that was too large to have been planted when the building was built and had therefore been there first, the building arranged around it with the courtesy of a structure that understood it was the younger party. The proprietor — a woman called Nalukwago, who ran the inn and the attached restaurant and apparently the social life of the entire block — showed him to a room on the second floor with a window that looked out over the hill toward Lake Victoria.
He stood at the window for a long moment.
The lake was visible as a brightness at the edge of the horizon — not the grey-green of the North Sea or the specific blue of Mediterranean travel photographs but something that was its own color, vast and present and entirely itself.
He took a photograph.
Then he unpacked with the efficient thoroughness he brought to setting up any working space. He set the expanded pouch on the desk and checked its contents: the bug-out kit, the two-way mirror, the Goblin knife, and the warding materials. Everything in order. He went downstairs to find dinner.