Shallows of Night - 02 (25 page)

T’ung feinted right, came in on the left. The blow was deceptively sluggish and he got in behind Ronin’s guard, the crescent of sharp metal rushing toward the collarbone. Ronin was in no position to block the attack so he swatted at the ax with his gauntleted hand.

The blade made contact and T’ung’s eyes widened as, instead of slicing through flesh into bone, it was deflected harmlessly.

Ronin saw the look and immediately dropped his sword, lunging for T’ung with the gauntlet. Light spun off the scales as his hand went in. He slammed the right arm to get the ax out of the way and his fist hammered at T’ung’s windpipe. The eyes bulged, the tongue came out in reflex and the ax dropped.

T’ung tried to get his hands inside Ronin’s arms so that he would have the leverage but Ronin would not let him. The gauntlet, balled into a fist, slammed into T’ung’s face and his cheekbone shattered. He screamed and his head twisted. His hands scrabbled along the floor for his ax. The remaining Green moved to give it to him but stopped at a motion from Du-Sing. Again Ronin smote him, visions of the dark alley and the pleading and teeth cracked under the force of the blow, the lower jaw smashed and hanging, eyeless sockets like the gates of hell and a mouth that could not speak, and he drove in again with a kind of black joy and the nose a pulpy mass spread over the crimson face.

Then he was rolling off and grasping the hilt of his sword all in one motion, moving in on the last Green, the balanced weight in his right hand like holding lightning.

And now he moved in, the blade a humming instrument of destruction, hacking at his opponent with the blood singing in his ears and his vision pulsing with the power welling up, shooting through his arms, his skin gleaming with sweat and sea salt, rippling as if a serpent reared beneath his skin.

Terrified, the Green retreated, and then he stumbled, his ax coming up centimeters to the right of where it should have been, and Ronin’s blurred blade, pulsing platinum along its length, screamed ownward and clove his head in two. The body leapt into the humid air like a speared fish and he whirled, the blur a halo of death surrounding him.

One step, two, the corpse jerked as if it were still alive and as it crumpled to the slick floor Ronin scooped up the fallen silver necklace. He raced for the door and, picking up momentum, crashed into the Green just outside, sending him flying.

Chei came through the door, ax over his head.

Du-Sing made a brief gesture. “Leave him.” And then, after a moment, “Close the door and come here.”

Chei went through the carnage, stepping carefully across the outflung corpses, thinking of the dangerous man. Crimson dripped along the shining bamboo, beading like bright tears of pain.

Du-Sing rubbed at his eyes with his thick hand, waiting for Chei’s return.

“Summon a runner,” he said slowly, “and an escort of three Ching Pang. Our best. You will go with them.” He stared at the man in front of him. “I wish you to take a message to Lui Wu.”

“But, Du-Sing, you cannot mean that you will now—”

“Yes. That is precisely what I mean to do. I am contacting the taipan of the Hung Pang.”

“The Reds,” breathed Chei, and there was only wonderment on his face as he gazed upon the cold blue eyes of Du-Sing.

He was not running from the Greens. It was not in his nature and, too, he felt that somehow they were not a danger to him now. Not after what he had seen in Du-Sing’s eyes. The man knew of The Dolman, or at least that the war to the north was no longer what it had been for so many centuries.

Nonetheless, he ran through the torpid Sha’angh’sei night, down back streets filled with slumbering families and roaming yellow dogs, skin ribboned with jutting ribs, through the wider thoroughfares where nocturnal revelers staggered and moaned and vomited, sodden with drink and lust and the smoke of the city’s notorious pleasure houses, coughing and shaking as with a fever, kissing, pressed together against filthy brick and wood walls, fighting with bleeding fists and crusty knives, locked within the penultimate stages of arguments whose beginnings had already been forgotten. A woman screamed somewhere in the jasmine night, a piercing shriek abruptly cut off, and at last he knew that it did not matter where the sound came from.

And he ran on, his lungs on fire, his legs pumping on their own, desperation sweeping over him as he headed toward Okan Road. His mind was filled with a succession of minute details, words and events and hints which he had absorbed but which had been floating in the back of his mind. Separately, they were meaningless, yet as pieces of a whole they held a terrifying imperative. Oh, Kiri, like a song in his dazzled brain, as he slipped through the crowded labyrinth of streets.

And at last Sha’angh’sei came alive for him, a glowing throbbing entity with a corporeal existence of its own. As he rushed through its sinuous entrails, filled with naked thighs and almond eyes, thrusting breasts and canted hips passing him by, pouting lips, drowsing children and petty thieves sharing the same oblique bars of shadows, comfortable in the blackness, he felt its presence like a lover’s body, hot and moist, exciting and frightening, possessive and insatiable, and the mingling of triumph and terror was overwhelming within him.

The Okan Road was perfectly silent in the unlight of predawn, the tall trees still and calm, the night sounds of the city seemingly faraway, as if they belonged to another time, some dimly perceived future perhaps, voices chiming in the slow changing of the centuries.

Up the gracefully curving stairway he flew, reaching the top and pounding on the massive yellow doors. When they opened, he clutched at the wide-eyed woman, panting, “Kiri, where is she?”

She recognized him of course and stayed the guards who would otherwise have attempted to restrain him, taking him to the room of tawny light and then leaving him hurriedly.

He prowled among the settees and tables, searching anxiously for some wine, but as usual it had all been put away. He turned as the woman came down the staircase.

“She will be with you.”

Relief flooded him and he allowed himself to relax somewhat and he opened up his breathing to oxygenate his system.

Then she was on the stairs, slender and lithe, black hair falling around her, and for a moment she seemed to be someone else. Then he gazed into her violet eyes, platinum flecks swimming in their depths.

“What has happened to you?” She came down the stairs quickly, with an economy of movement. “Are you hurt?”

He glanced down at his torn and bloody robe.

“Hurt? No, I do not think so.” He looked up. “Do you know Du-Sing?”

She stared at him. “Where have you heard that name?”

“Greens were waiting for me at the apothecary’s. They took me to him.”

“Yet you are not dead.” She looked surprised. “He thought you had information. But what kind—”

Ronin sighed. “In the alley that evening, when I fought the Greens, remember, I told you—”

She waved a hand, flowing lavender along her nails. “Yes, goon.”

“I took a silver chain from around the dead man’s neck. It was an impulse only. That was the basis of my altercation with the Greens at the walled city.”

“You showed it to them.”

“Like a fool. Trying to buy my way into seeing the Council.”

“It would be funny if it was not so serious.”

“Yes, well—”

“What is the chain’s importance?”

“It holds a silver flower. The ‘sakura,’ Du-Sing called it.”

“I—”

He held up a hand. “I will show it to you when there is more time. Right now I must see the woman I brought to you. Moeru.”

“But it is so late. I do not want to wake her.”

“Kiri—”

She smiled. “All right, but then you must tell me what Du-Sing wanted. And about the man in the alley—”

“Come on,” he said.

She led the way upstairs into one of the rooms along the dim corridor. They went in and she lit the lamp on the wooden table beside the wide bed.

She was quite beautiful, he saw now. Stripped of the filth and mud and pain, dusky face in repose, with days and nights of food and rest behind her, Moeru was lovely. Her long oval eyes and wide mouth gave her face the openness of innocence, a child asleep in a distant land.

Kiri bent over her. Her eyes came open and she stared at Ronin. He saw the wild open sea.

“This is the man who saved you, Moeru. Matsu told you about him.”

The woman nodded and reached out a slim hand. They had cut and polished her ragged nails and they had already begun to grow shiny and translucent with clear lacquer. She touched his hand, stroked the back of it. He watched her mouth, but the coral lips did not move. Mute from birth, he thought.

“Moeru, I must ask you to do something for me. It is very important. Will you do it?”

She nodded.

“Pull down the bedcovers,” he said.

Kiri watched him silently.

Moeru did as she was told. She was naked. Skin like burnished gold. Perhaps a trace of olive. Her body was as beautiful as her face, firm and rounded and sensual.

“Has the bandage been changed?”

“You asked Matsu that it not be,” Kiri said.

“Moeru, I will take the bandage off now.”

The long blue-green eyes regarded him placidly. She opened her legs.

Ronin reached between them, fingers on her warm thigh. A muscle jumped under her skin at the contact. He pulled carefully at the dirty fabric, a bulge against her inner thigh. He looked at her legs. Apart, they formed the configuration of an inverted V. He lifted the bandage from her thigh. Beneath it, nestled within the cloth, was the man-shaped root.

Moeru stroked her thigh where the bandage had come off, then covered herself.

“She had no wound under the poultice, Ronin,” said Kiri.

“Yes, I know. The old apothecary used that as a ruse to hide this.” He showed her the root.

“What is it?”

“The root of all good,” he said with a laugh. “Or of all evil.”

The scream came then, filled with terror and something more, and he bolted out the door with Kiri just behind him. Down the hall he ran, his ears questing ahead for sounds of scuffling. Then he smelled the stench and felt even through the closed door the unutterable cold.

He stopped.

“No,” moaned Kiri. “Oh no.”

And he did not understand until he had flung the door open and was already within the room. Then the enormity of his error hit him and he cursed aloud and, brandishing his sword, slammed the door shut behind him. Kiri pounded on it from the other side. He ignored her, concentrating on the thing in front of him.

It was over three meters in height with thick powerful legs, short, twisted, hoofed. Its upper limbs were much longer, with six-fingered hands tipped by curved talons.

Its head was monstrous. Baleful alien eyes, the orange pupils no more than vertical slits below which protruded obscenely a short curving beak opening and closing spastically. The creature pulsed unsteadily, its outline ebbing and flowing. A tail whipped behind it.

It turned to look at him and a short eerie cry broke from its beak. It threw the remains of what must once have been a man at him, a broken pink and white husk.

Ronin moved easily out of the way but it had Matsu and his stomach contracted again because he should have known. He had been with Matsu, not Kiri, that night when the Makkon came to Tenchō and killed Sa.
Thee,
The Dolman had called in his mind.
Thee.
Thus had he raced to return to Tenchō, less concerned with Du-Sing and the Greens than he was with the revelation that the Makkon had been searching for him that night and that it would surely return soon. He had thought only of Kiri, with whom he had been so much lately, and now he saw the look in Matsu’s eyes and his heart cried out in sudden pain.

His lips moved, calling softly her name.

The Makkon cried out again and its taloned fist slammed into her hip and she screamed in pain as her pelvis cracked and white bone pushed itself through her soft flesh.

“Matsu.”

Ronin rushed the Makkon now, nauseated by its awful stench, his unprotected face already beginning to numb from its unearthly chill. He yelled reflexively as the pain raced through him, his blade sliding off its scaly hide.

The hideous beak opened and a peculiar sound filled the room, a dreadful laughter, and the thing brushed Ronin aside with a lightning motion, moving toward the open window and the werelight of predawn.

The whistle came then, high-pitched and piercing, echoing in his mind, and the Makkon fell silent. The sound came again, insistent now. The Makkon screamed in fury, wrenched at Matsu’s arm, ripping it from its socket, and as Ronin advanced, still dazed from the mighty blow, the thing reached up and slowly, deliberately, tore her throat out, all the pale flesh of her body running red now, and the Makkon threw her at him finally as it went swiftly out the window.

Ronin staggered as she came into his arms. Too late, he thought numbly, why did I not think of the gauntlet? He stared down at her crimson corpse, oblivious to the renewed pounding at the door, did not even turn around when it splintered and flew open.

He knelt in the center of the room, a cold wind blowing over him, cradling all that was left of Matsu. Only when a shadow dropped across his face did he look up to behold Kiri in breastplate of deep yellow lacquered leather, high polished boots, and light leather leggings.

She went straight to the window and looked out. She gasped as she saw through the dawn’s deep haze the hideous orange beacons, pulsing, the snapping beak with its thick gray tongue.

The Makkon screamed again.

And Ronin, clutching the chill frame to him as if he could prevent the life from leaking from her, thought of the night he had held her close, feeling the delicious warmth seep into his body, listening to her speak as he watched the slow wheel of the stars in the glowing heavens. Again and again, bound upon a tortuous circlet. Are my feelings so well hidden? Ah, Chill take me.

Surely, he thought, I am a doomed man.

“S
TRANGE,” SHE SAID, REINING
in her mount.