Dragons on the Sea of Night (11 page)

Think!
he berated himself.
Think!

The avalanche of sand now drowned out all sun. The blessed shade inundated them and for an instant it seemed utterly delicious. Then Moichi was scrabbling at his Fe'edjinn cowled robe, clawing at it to get it off.

‘What are you doing?' Aufeya screamed.

‘Take off your d'alb!' Moichi shouted, throwing his aside in a knot and pulling Aufeya's over her head.

‘Are you mad? You–'

The avalanche took them, tumbling them down, down into the maw of the rumbling waad. Had he gotten the d'alb all the way off Aufeya? He couldn't be certain. Then a huge fistful of clotted sand struck him full in the face and he began to suffocate. He struggled but a weight, growing heavier, lay upon his chest. The blood rushed to his head as he was flung upside down; the world went black and he lost consciousness.

Blood was still on High Minister Ojime's hands, metaphorically speaking, as he hurried through the city of Haneda. He could feel the lumped package of the Makkon's tongue burning like a live coal against his lower belly.

He could not mourn the Rosh'hi's death because from the first he had seen Qaylinn as an enemy. Not that that was necessarily immutable. Over the years, by dint of bribe or other less savory coercion, Ojime had proselytized many enemies to his cause. But not Qaylinn. He was a stubborn man, some might say a righteous man, though that term left a bitter taste in Ojime's mouth. Ojime's father had thought of himself as righteous. He had beaten Ojime mercilessly when his ‘righteousness' was in full flower. Ojime had no idea why his father beat him, and the fact he was never given the reason made it all the more terrifying. The randomness, the pure irrationality of it, scarred Ojime more deeply than any laying on of the chain his father had used on him.

As a result, Ojime was properly skeptical of those who characterized themselves as righteous, divining in their strict rectitude the bud of evil and twisted psychosis.

And yet there was another reason, just as compelling, why he could not mourn the Rosh'hi's passing: he had enjoyed plunging the blade into Qaylinn's breast. This vertiginous rapture was what made him stab the Rosh'hi over and over. He could not stop, did not want to stop.

Deep down, his delight in death appalled him, turned his belly to ice, but it had also turned his heart to stone and, these days, he found it ever more difficult to understand what he had found appalling in the first place.

Ojime crossed a narrow and rotting bridge into the Hinin, the area of the city that lay in the lowest section of the capital's terrain. It was to this place that all of Haneda's sewage flowed on its way to the bay, and it was here that the garbage of Bujun society had been dumped, eking out of the wet, clayey earth the semblance of an existence.

Down alleys dark and slimy even at noon-time Ojime hurried, following a convoluted path that he had devised days ago. He paused frequently to check whether he was being observed, and he altered his pace, doubling back often to ensure that no one was following him. And with each clever detour he made, as he advanced further into the squalid and dangerous depths of the Hinin, he felt increasingly secure.

At length, he came upon a packed dirt-lane that even for the Hinin was putrid. He ducked into this and, holding his breath down its entire length, knocked upon a thatch and willow door. He was just becoming slightly light-headed when the door opened a crack. It was unnaturally dark in the interior, and, gasping for breath, Ojime breathed in an odor from the gap so fetid that he was certain he would faint.

‘Who sent you?' said a rough voice. The reek of foul breath sent Ojime back a pace.

‘Tokagé.' Ojime uttered the forbidden word as softly as he could. Even within the Hinin the name of the arch-collaborator with the forces of Chaos should not be used.

‘Inside,' the voice commanded harshly, raising Ojime's anger. But he had been warned repeatedly about the ill-mannered creature who dwelled within this mud and thatch hovel, and he held his tongue.

The door banged shut behind him and immediately his eyes began to water.
What is the floor made of
, he wondered,
feces?
For that was precisely what it smelled like.

Some hump-like thing shuffled just ahead of him, leading him through room after room, until Ojime began to distrust his senses. Surely, something was amiss. From the outside, the house at the end of the evil-smelling lane looked as if it could contain no more than four rooms, and yet he had already counted three times that.

Alarmed that he had been entrapped, his hand crept to the long-bladed dirk sheathed on the inside of his left boot.

‘Violence in any form will get you dead.'

Ojime started erect at the sound of the voice. He looked ahead, saw a shadowy figure sitting in a fan-backed chair in what could only be called a solarium. Sunlight flooded through the highly polished panes of glass, illuminating a bewildering array of dwarf potted plants, herbs, ferns, mushrooms and curious flowers, none of which Ojime had ever seen before.

Ojime, blinking heavily after the long journey in darkness, looked around for his humped guide but it appeared that, for the moment at least, he was alone with the figure in the fan-backed chair.

‘Who sent you?' the shadowy figure asked.

And Ojime gave the same answer: ‘Tokagé.'

‘Present yourself,' the figure said as imperiously as if they were in the Kunshin's opulent castle instead of here in the village of the pariahs.

Ojime stepped forward. As he crossed the threshold into the solarium, the evil odors vanished as if they had never existed. Instead, the sweet scents of new-mown grass and packed hay mingled with the pleasant spices and nectars of the unknown herbs and flowers.

Light fell upon him in a steady stream, like waves upon a shore, until Ojime felt himself to be in the center of a celestial spotlight, singled out, chosen.

‘What have you for me?' the voice rustled.

Ojime hesitated for just an instant. Instinctively, he trusted nothing and no one, but he also understood that great risk was a necessary part of his plan. The Makkon's tongue meant nothing to him in its present state. He had been assured that this creature was the only one in Ama-no-mori – perhaps in the entire world – who knew what to do with this piece of otherworldly flesh. And so, long before he would steal the Makkon's tongue, he had schemed and connived, cajoled and threatened and, lastly, had given up lordly sums of jewels, mother-of-pearl and platinum to arrive, untouched and unknown, at this place at the far end of Haneda.

‘Have you come this far only to be ruled by your fear?' the voice rustled crossly.

‘I
have
no fear,' Ojime said, believing this to be so.

‘Then give it to me.' An impossibly long-fingered hand extended out of the shadows, and Ojime found himself wondering, not for the first time, what foul and perverted creature would lock itself away in such a gilded cage surrounded by a moat of stinking excrement.

His fingers trembled slightly as he dug inside his robe and placed the lump of sueded cloth into the outstretched hand.

‘
Ahhhh!
' It was like a long-drawn sigh. The fingers were trembling as they unwrapped the flaps of cloth, revealing the grayish-blue lump of otherworldly flesh. ‘It is true, then!' she cried. ‘Damn his soul to a thousand hells unknown!

‘But have I a revelation for him!' The figure rose and stepped out of the shadows. Though Ojime had steeled himself for the worst his imagination could conjure up still he was unprepared for the sight that greeted him. For he found himself standing face to face with the most ethereally exquisite female he had ever seen.

She was as delicate as a butterfly and when she moved she seemed to float like a fairy on a current of fragrant air. Her skin was the color of the first snow and her long hair was jet black, floating about her face in a style alien to the Bujun. The perfect bow of lips was a scarlet so intense it seemed to sear his retinas, and the heavy lids of her enormous eyes were powdered in silver dust. Her long, graceful neck was girdled by a chain of perfectly matched pearls the color of sea-foam. Her slim frame was cloaked in a kimono of white, on which were brocaded egrets in cloth-of-platinum. It was cinched tightly with a wide sash of white silk studded with seed pearls. They looked like stars flung into the ocean.

Ojime, his face flushed, whispered, ‘You are magnificent!'

The woman smiled with the innocence of a child. ‘You are kind to say so.' Her long fingers closed over the Makkon's tongue, and her voice changed, momentarily chilling him, ‘You did not touch this?'

‘No.'

‘Did anyone else?'

He heard the tenseness in her voice but did not understand it. ‘Not to my knowledge. Except for the Dai-San.'

Her head swiveled. ‘The Dai-San knows.'

‘Yes. He held it. But he was wearing that hideous six-fingered glove of his.'

‘The Makkon's skin.' She nodded. ‘But he knows nothing. No harm done, then.' She looked at him. ‘I can do it, then, what you wish, what you have paid handsomely for. I can make the potion that will make you immortal.'

He hesitated but a moment as she turned and led him now to the rear of the solarium where there were fires burning from an unknown source. She thrust the Makkon's tongue unceremoniously into a blocky stone and ceramic square not unlike a forge. The orange flames turned immediately black and a cloud of chokingly thick smoke rose into the air. The stench made Ojime forget about all the dark rooms he had passed through. He fell to his knees and gagged.

The fairy-like woman stood motionless, staring down at him until the flames returned to their original color. Then, astonishingly, she slid her right hand into the forge's opening, into the flames and the incredible heat. Ojime gasped but she did not so much as flinch. A moment later her hand, blue with cinder, emerged in a fist. She walked over to a zinc-topped table filled with the implements of gardening and grinding.

She opened her fist over a large marble mortar and Ojime watched a colorless ash sparkle down in a thin stream. What she added to this residue of the Makkon's tongue he could not even begin to say. An hour after she had first beckoned him into the solarium, she announced that she was done.

‘I will take possession of it now,' Ojime said.

She turned and, smiling that innocent childlike smile, said, ‘You must meet my price.'

Ojime's face darkened. ‘Why, I have paid you more than a score of men and their sons will earn in their lifetimes. I have met your price.'

‘That you have,' she affirmed still smiling sweetly. ‘That was my price for making the potion. What you have asked for, after all, is unique, highly dangerous.' She held a small glass phial aloft. It contained a thick liquid that seemed to flash and fluoresce. ‘You could hardly have gone anywhere else to get this.'

‘Damn you,' Ojime said menacingly, taking a step toward her. ‘We struck a bargain. We have a deal.'

The woman appeared unperturbed. ‘My price for delivery is simple. You will grant me your allegiance
after
you have become immortal.'

Ojime, who had no intention of honoring any promise he made to this witch, laughed out loud. ‘Is that all?'

‘I warn you.' She lifted a long finger. ‘There will be dire consequences should you refuse to grant my wish.'

Ojime, his mind aflame only with the consequences of what she held in her hand, knew he had no reason to heed her counsel. ‘I agree to your price for delivery,' he said.

Power!
his mind cried, transfixed by this moment.
Power!

The woman nodded, and he stepped forward, took the glass phial out of her hand and, with a quick flick of his wrist, upended it over his open mouth. He swallowed convulsively, and felt a peculiar burning in his gullet, working its way down to his stomach. Any liquid that was powerful enough to raise the dead, he had reasoned, would make of him, a living human being, something akin to a god. Someone to challenge and defeat even the great Dai-San.

It is working!
he thought, gripped by exhilaration. He began to laugh. ‘I've tricked you, witch,' he said, looking at the ethereal woman through eyes that had begun to water.

That angelic smile. ‘Have you, Chief Minister Ojime?'

‘No names!' he cried. ‘How do you know my name?'

The woman began to laugh. ‘Why, you fool, I know
everything
.' She spread her arms wide. ‘Did you think I didn't know that you lied to me?' She leaned forward and now – though Ojime could not be sure because his eyes were streaming tears – her aspect did not seem quite so angelic. In fact, she did not appear benign at all. ‘
Power
, Ojime. That is your ambition. And now that you have it, tell me whether it meets with your expectations.'

Ojime had fully intended to do just that, to tell her that despite her gloating he still maintained the upper hand. He was Chief Minister, after all, and a Bujun warrior. What was she? He opened his mouth to utter these things and more but at that moment the liquid cascaded into his stomach.

The pain hit him like a swordsmith's hammer. Every cell in his body seemed on fire, bleeding, imploding, the agony feeding on itself, until …

Ojime kept right on screaming all the way through the transformation.

SIX

B
ELLY OF THE
B
EAST

Moichi awoke into musty darkness
. It was warm, but far from the broiling heat of the Mu'ad. ‘Aufeya?'

He reached out, but could not find her. He rolled over and groaned, holding his head steady until the waves of vertigo subsided. He got up on his hands and knees, felt for his dirks. They were gone; he had been disarmed. He began to move, but almost immediately paused. Didn't the floor feel spongy? Didn't it feel moist and almost sticky?