Shallows of Night - 02 (20 page)

She drew him inside and the sea breeze followed them to the edges of the bed, soft and downy, upon which they tumbled as one.

Her hair whipped his face as he opened her robe and kissed the opalescent flesh. His thirst was enormous.

“Ah,” she moaned. “Ahhh.”

And the tide took him.

Floating in the loss of tension.

The window doors all folded back now so that sea and sky were before them.

“You went to see the Council today.” Her voice held a note of puzzlement.

“Yes, this afternoon.”

“And fought the Greens. That was most foolish.”

He sighed. “It could not be helped.”

“Did you have to kill one?”

“I have killed more than one.”

She made a sharp sound.

The moon had disappeared and they had had to relight the lamp. He listened to the quiet splash of the sea for a while.

“They will come after you now.”

“I am not afraid.”

Her hand stoked his chest. “I do not want you to die.”

He laughed. “Then I shall stay alive.”

“The Greens are not to be taken lightly—”

“That was not my intention. I mean only that what has been done cannot be altered. I am a warrior. If Greens come for me, then I shall destroy them.”

She stared at him, her eyes unreadable. He thought he could hear the plaintive cry of a sea bird far out on the water.

“Yes,” she said at last, “I believe you would.” Then, “I cannot imagine saying that to anyone else.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She laughed then, a clear sparkling sound, and he reached for her hand in the night, feeling its warmth, the fingers twining in his.

She scraped a nail along his flesh. “Why did you seek out the Council?”

He told her.

“But you cannot mean that the tales are true?”

“That is just what I do mean, Kiri.”

“But Godaigo—”

“The rikkagin was not at Tenchō this morning.”

Her head twisted so that she could see him more fully. “What has Sa’s death to do with tales of beings that are not men fighting our soldiers in the north? My men have already dispatched the murderers.”

“Murderers?” Ronin said thickly. “Who?”

“Why, the last men with her, of course, but—”

“Kiri, she was not killed by men.”

He felt her quiver and the skin along her arms was raised in gooseflesh. It might have been the strengthening wind.

“How could you know that?”

“Because,” he said, “I have fought the creature that killed her. It destroyed a friend of mine in precisely the same manner.

He felt her pull away from him. “I cannot believe that; just as I cannot believe that the war is anything but what it has always been from a time long before you or I were born.”

“Still, I ask you to aid me with the Council. I cannot see them without your assistance.”

“Why do you believe that the Council can aid you?”

“Tuolin told me of the Council.”

A cloud passed across her face, fleeting. She shrugged. “I cannot think why he did. The Council will be of littl—”

Ronin gripped her shoulders.

“Kiri, I must see them!”

“There is no other way?”

“None.”

She tousled his hair. “All right, my warrior. Tomorrow you will be within the Council chambers.”

He drew her to him and kissed her hard, feeling her melt as her sinuous body began to writhe slowly against him. The unbound forest of her hair lifted in the wind, a tremulous bridge between their coiling muscles. The lamp sputtered and went out.

She reached under a pillow and her hand lifted, a signpost, long and white and slender, the nails as black as dried blood in the almost-light. Between thumb and forefinger a small black shape, between forefinger and middle finger, its mate. She put thumb and forefinger to her lips, inhaled, then reached out, the arm extending to him, her lips calling, calling in the werevoice of the sea bird flying lonely above the tossing waves. Fingers against his lips. A cold sensation.

“Eat this.”

And after he had opened his mouth, “Do you trust me?”

But it was rhetorical and he felt no desire to reply.

The warmth suffused him, friction like a satin glove stroking yellow ivory.

Again and again her open lips, wet and shiny, spoke a kind of litany of sound and motion and form. Words were a distant concept, dim and unremembered, discarded within a far-off cave of bright light and animal smells.

The wind died and the air grew calm, ceasing its dancing. The darkness of night hung like a black velvet curtain, containing them. The atmosphere paused between breaths and he hung suspended, listening to the lapping of the waves, as clear and powerful as thunderclaps, rushing against his eardrums in time with the throbbing of his body.

And his body changed, filled now with a delicious warmth, a sexual ecstasy, suffusing his feet, climbing upward through his legs and groin and torso and into his brain, and in that moment the strength of Kiri’s body moving against his became an exquisite physical sensation. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and the visions in the theater of his mind became one while he was made aware of them as totally discrete inputs, savoring them independently and simultaneously, time stretching out before him like a new-found joyous, friend, endless and concurrent. A conduit.

He plowed the heaving seas at the prow of a mighty ship filled with warriors bent on revenge, the feeling a taste at the back of the mouth, sweet and hot. He climbed the curving neck of the high prow, carved into the sinuous head of a dragon, brandished a long sword, screamed at the wind. He was the ship, feeling the heavy water washing over his flanks, his bow cleaving the seas, sending shivering spume into the bright air, leaving white spray in his wake. Man and vessel, he was both and more.

He plunged into the sea, yellow and turgid, and felt his legs grasp the slick scaly coils. He reached down and triumphantly brought the head up, ineffably exquisite, Kiri’s deep violet eyes, dark as the depths of the sea, platinum flecks like schools of flying fish, with soft seaweed hair and a face as white as snow. The coils writhed beneath him and he rode the Lamiae from out of the shallows of the Sha’angh’sei sea, past the creaming reefs, teeming with life, and out, away, away, on the great westerly currents, into the deep.

It was then that the cold terror came, a dread presence, and he was swept up like an animal in the vortex of a whirlwind. And for the first time he knew its name. From his core, which beat like an incandescent stone and which remained unmoving in the flux caused by that which he had eaten, came the sound: The Dolman. His entire being opened now and attuned, he felt it drawing near. And it was devastation; it was annihilation. A suprahuman observer, he saw the cinder of the world, blasted and lifeless, blown through the fabric of space by a firestorm of incalculable power. The terror gripped him in its fierce claw and he felt his chest contract until all the air was forced from his burning lungs. He struggled against the coming, feeling helpless. Hearing what he could not comprehend.
Thee,
howled The Dolman, the universe trembling.
Thee. Thee!

He screamed and came off the bed, stumbling, crashing into the wall. The shutters shivered. He was drenched with sweat. Or sea water.

Kiri came after him, lovely and naked, ivory and charcoal, crouching beside him.

“It’s all right,” she said softly, mistaking his reaction. “I had forgotten that you are not used to the smoke; this was much more. I had thought to give you only pleasure.”

He put his arms around her, felt the whip of the chill night wind racing in from the water. He looked out at the black sky and willed himself to breathe deeply, oxygenating his body.

“No, no, Kiri,” he said his voice thin and strained. “I felt it, more than seeing. Whatever you gave me created a connection of some kind. I felt—The Dolman is close, very close.” His voice was now a metallic whisper in the rising notes of the wind.

“And it comes for me.”

She would not let them rest and he felt the rising terror within her, as deep as an undug wellspring, although he was calm now, the intensity still with him but a shell forming, replacing the aftershock that allowed normal thought.

They dressed and went out into the narrow shiny streets. It was the time of night when the moon was down and dawn had not yet begun to pull upon the last thread of darkness. It had begun to rain and the air was heavy with an acrid, active smell.

They raced the downpour to the patiently waiting carriage and the kubaru took off at his steady rocking pace, across the marshy delta of the port and into the black back recesses of Sha’angh’sei.

Lightning wreathed the sky like the twisting branches of a great ancient tree and peals of thunder echoing off the buildings’ walls caused the runner to break his stride now and then.

By the storm’s pale flickering light he watched the lovely profile, the eyes pools of shadow, the cheekbones whitely limned, emphasizing the face’s strength and sweep.

They were in what looked to be the most ancient section of the city now, traveling down narrow unpaved streets, earth churned to mud by the rain and the fleet passage of the kubaru’s soles, slap-slap, slap-slap, black water splashing in a bow wave, presaging their progress.

Small houses of board and reed grew here as if from the soil itself, dilapidated yet with a peculiar sorrowful dignity that was impossible to define. Perhaps it was merely the congruence of meager dwelling to its surroundings that was sufficient to impart this feeling to him. Nevertheless, he understood without being told that he was seeing Sha’angh’sei as it must have been before the Canton priests and the round-eyed rikkagin had come to the land.

The ricksha halted unbidden before the towering columns of a stone temple, squat and thick, its face slick now with rain, cracked and half covered with climbing plants.

They went into the narrow street, following the kubaru through double doors of bamboo bound in black iron. He took them through a crowd of kubaru who milled about the entranceway and who, Ronin suspected, would turn away those who they did not wish to enter.

The gray stone floor, the arching stone walls, caught murmurings and mutterings, echoing them along their length and height like the desultory flame of a guttering candle. This temple had a completely different feel than the one Ronin had come upon in the midst of his wanderings.

“What is this place?” Ronin whispered.

Kiri turned her face toward his and he saw that she had produced a plum-colored silk scarf from somewhere and had wrapped this around her head as if she did not wish to be recognized, though who here would possibly know her he had no idea.

“Kay-Iro De,” she said, using a word that was of the ancient tongue of the Sha’angh’sei people and which had no ready translation into modern speech. It meant variously sea-song, jade-serpent, and she-who-is-without-members, and it perhaps had more meanings of which no one spoke.

“I have told you that tonight is the culmination of the Festival of the Lamiae,” she said softly, her violet eyes shining. “Yet tonight is more. Every seventh year on the last night of the festival comes the Seercus of Sha’angh’sei.” A simian-faced woman wrapped in a green cloak, a hairless man by her side gathering in the taels, her clandestine whisperings.

It appeared now that the temple was immense as they followed their kubaru down a narrow, windowless hall that seemed endless. The dank stone walls, beaded with cold moisture, echoed their footsteps. At regular intervals, stone arches were built into the passageway and from their apexes were hung iron braziers casting a dim, fitful light. At length they reached a wide stairway down which they descended. He noted with some curiosity that the hall seemed to have no other egress at this end.

They went carefully downward, their way lit now by flaring torches set into scorched metal sconces, encrusted with the detritus of the ages. Fifty steps and then a landing, peopled by kubaru who scrutinized all who passed. Down and down they went with the air becoming increasingly humid and chill, the stairs slick with moisture and slime, until he gave up counting the number of landings.

The atmosphere was thick with salt and phosphorus and sulphur by the time they reached the last landing and passed through the guard of the kubaru there. The runner motioned silently to them and they stooped, half crawling through a cramped passageway, utterly dark, rough-cut from the living rock. Small creatures skittered past their feet in the wetness.

The tunnel gave onto a vast grotto lit by immense guttering torches, crackling and smoky in the damp air. Great natural columns of stone, flecked and streaked with minerals winking metallically in the light, rose up from the craggy floor into the dark reaches of the unseen ceiling.

There were so many people crowding the cavern that at first Ronin did not see that which actually dominated the place. Then, in some unfathomable shifting, the throng parted momentarily and he saw the pool.

He stepped closer, mesmerized. It was an immense oval stripped out of the floor of the cavern by some cataclysmic upheaval eons ago and the water that filled it was of the most remarkable color he had ever seen. Not a trace of blue or brown could be seen in its shifting depths, yet surely no water could exist without at least a hint of these shades. Yet the water into which he now gazed was the most extraordinary green, halfway between a forest of firs in deep summer and the translucence of the most exquisite jade. Its depth seemed limitless. Surely it led to the vast ocean beyond Sha’angh’sei’s shores.

He thought again of the simian-faced woman and her hissed words,
the Seercus,
her inflection imparting to them a mysteriousness that Ronin had supposed was merely a part of her pitch. Now he found himself at the Seercus and he wondered.

Kubaru continually poured into the grotto from several low apertures in the walls similar to the one they had used. Almond-eyed, black shining hair pulled back into long queues, wearing loose suits of dark cotton and coarse silk. He felt that he was, at last, viewing the true Sha’angh’sei, naked in the arena of Kay-Iro De on this most sacred of nights. They were free now of the immense burden of the fields and of the war, of intruder and of time. The betrayals were held for this moment suspended. Ten thousand years had fallen away like so much dead skin to reveal—what? Soon the answer.