Shallows of Night - 02 (27 page)

Then the Makkon’s arms came up across his back, the talons seeking his flesh, trying to pry him from its maw. There was no longer air in his lungs and he subsisted from heartbeat to heartbeat, time taken, molded like putty in some monstrous claw, perverted and realigned so that it no longer bore any resemblance to the concept which ruled his world. His heart pounded and he was Outside, his stomach churning in nausea, his back aflame with pain, his legs hanging uselessly, a cripple, and still he persisted, though the numbness now lapped at his brain, an unstoppable crimson tide, and still he strove, long after his last inhalation, his lungs deflating, pulse surging vainly—And he took the last step, all thoughts but one gone, out into the deep.

From his hip, up through his massive shoulders and along his arm, as unyielding now as a forged metal blade, pushing solely by instinct, reasoning at an end, berserk at last, reduced to pure matter, elevated to pure matter.
Survival!
It bellowed through his brain like a firestorm, battering behind his blind eyes, and a warm rain now washing the lining of his body, emanating from his core, the central vortex of which he mercifully had no understanding, and blue lightning ringing the sky above him, gyring across the opening heavens, something feeding him now and, though he was past knowing it, the shaking fist enclosed within the sanctity of the Makkon gauntlet, scales bright with alien saliva, finally slipped past the spasmodically working tongue, breaching the roof of the creature’s mouth, driving with inhuman power upward into its eye cavity.

The vibrations became intolerable and he burst apart then into ten thousand fragments, his hot red flesh drifting upon a cool wind which gusted upward in a tenacious spiral, the serpentine breaching the roiling lavender clouds, away, away…

First it was the sweetness and then the darkness.

Night had fallen.

He attempted to rise but he seemed incapable of any movement. All about him the susurrations of the poppies. Above him the nodding bell petals.

He rested, concentrating on his breathing, his mind turning over with curiosity each of his senses. Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch: life.

At length able to move his fingers, then his hand, finally his arm. He attempted to sit up. No movement. He explored, found that he could not feel his feet. It was his back then, where the Makkon had enwrapped him.

He called Kiri but his voice was a quiet croak in the restless meadow. His throat was dry. He heard movement, above and behind him, and he called out again as loudly as he was able and there was a snort, hesitant, questioning. The sounds of the poppies parting, stalks whooshing, and he longed to look but could not.

A long head and wet muzzle were abruptly over him. His luma. Its blue eyes looked at him with intelligence and he whispered to it softly, wordlessly, a crooning singsong as he had heard its attendant talking to it in Kiri’s jeweled garden. The luma moved closer, extending its muzzle. He heard its hoofs very close and felt the columns of its strong forelegs almost touching his head. It opened its wide mouth and licked at his face and then lower so that he could drink its saliva. Then it rested its head against his while he spoke to it again, stroking the side of its head, reassuring it.

After a while he slept and the luma stood over him, watchful in the night, its wide nostrils flared for first scent, its triangular ears twitching to pick up any movement. Several times it called to the mare who stood some meters away, over Kiri’s sleeping form.

The luma guarded them through the night. But no one came.

And only Ronin heard, deep within his being, below the dreams that played across his mind, the confused jumble of echoing voices, calling, calling in some desperation now,
Have you found him? You must find him. Yes, I will. But if he does not have it? We are truly lost then. Even if I find him, the Kai-feng still comes. There is little time then, even for us
—

Abruptly, borne on some desolate wind, the voices drop away from him.

The blue morning light woke him. Above him stood the roan luma, its coat a glowing red in the sun’s first oblique rays. It shook its head and stamped the poppies beside him. The exhalations from its nostrils were white clouds in the chill air.

Ronin reached up, grabbing for the swinging stirrup, pulled himself hand over hand until he stood on his feet, testing his legs and back. The numbness was gone but his co-ordination was off and he leaned on the luma for a moment, gathering his strength. He walked with its help across the white and blue field to where the golden luma stood over Kiri.

She was still asleep deep within the rustling sea. A large purple bruise swelled along the left side of her forehead.

She awoke as he bent over her and he stepped quickly back, half expecting her to unsheathe her blade and cross swords with him. She was, after all, the Empress of Sha’angh’sei and he had struck her. But she was quite calm.

She broke out food from her saddlebags, feeding the luma before she would eat herself. She offered some to Ronin.

“Against your strong advice, I rushed the Makkon,” she said ruefully. “You did not hit me that hard. When I looked it already had you and I struck at it with my sword.” She gave him a small smile then. “I did not believe you, I suppose. I thought, well, you are a warrior and—the rikkagin do not approve of women warriors; they are frightened, I think.”

Coming against him in the metaled ellipse just below the crust of the surface, his equal perhaps as warrior, who knows, no one ever will now.

“Now you know I told you the truth.”

“Oh, but yes!” She reached up and gingerly touched the bruise. “It slapped me, just a backhand swipe of its claw. I have never felt such power. I was flung a good distance away. That is all I remember.”

Ronin chewed on his food. “I wounded it.” he said.

“But how?”

He lifted the gauntlet so that the strange scales caught the light of dawn.

“With this! Its own hide.” He laughed then. “Thank you, Bonneduce the Last, wherever you may now be. A better gift you could not have left me.”

He went to pick up his sword and as he buckled the belt around his waist she said, “What now? Where has it gone?”

“Impossible to say. Too much time has already passed for us to attempt to continue to pursue it. Do you know of Kamado?”

“Of course.”

“Can you guide us there?”

“It lies north, along the river. I do not think that we shall have a problem finding it.”

They rode hard due north, keeping the snaking river on their left, and it was not long before they encountered soldiers streaming northward in long lines, columns bristling with weaponry and machines of war.

They joined this caravan for the last part of their journey, riding swiftly by the soldiers’ sides.

Flags fluttered in the wind, the men in leather jerkins and metal helms, armed with long curving swords and bright, finely tipped lances. There were archers, their immense longbows strung vertically on their backs, and cavalry, acting as outriders and scouts, protecting the column’s flanks. Metal clanged and jangled and the wooden carts, laden with food and spare arms, creaked under their heavy loads.

They moved up gradually until they reached the horsemen of the rikkagin’s retinue who directed them to their commander. He was a sharp-faced man with a long queue and many scars along his desiccated cheeks.

“Are you bound for Kamado?” asked Ronin.

“All are bound for Kamado these days,” said the rikkagin darkly. “Or away from it.”

“Do you know the Rikkagin T’ien?”

“By name only. There are many rikkagin.”

“I have heard that he is at Kamado.”

The rikkagin nodded. “Yes. That is my understanding also. You may ride along with my men, if you wish.”

“Thank you.”

They rode in silence for a time, listening to the wind and the creaking of leather, the clop-clop of hooves in the dust, the clash of metal.

“You have been to Kamado before?” asked Kiri.

The rikkagin turned his bleak gaze upon her.

“Too often, lady. We were not due back there for another fortnight but the enemy grows stronger each day and we must return now. From whence they come, I cannot say. Nor can anyone else, though we have made strenuous, efforts to find out.”

“You have learned nothing?” said Kiri.

“Nothing at all,” answered the rikkagin. “For none of our scouts have returned.”

They caught sight of Kamado just past midday, its dun-colored walls, thick and high and crenellated, dominating the huge hill on which it had been built long ago. The wide river crashed along the left of the fortress and, to the north, it was possible to make out the verdant splash of a forest.

It was truly cold now and the sky had been lowering as they moved farther north. A fine rain had sprung up a short time before but it was freezing, turned to sleet by the unnatural weather, and it hammered now against the soldier’s helms, caked the mounts’ hides.

They had broken the crest of a rise and, across the last gentle valley the yellow outline of the great fort had come into sight, rising like a spectral city in the wilderness of the bleak landscape.

The stone walls rose upward, an extension of the dusty hill, wider at the bottom. It was roughly circular, with newer extensions to the east and west, rectangular bulges which gave it a peculiar look.

Massive metal-bound doors faced them, guarded by wide outcroppings of the walls along which soldiers constantly patrolled. To the west, the hill dropped away, sweeping down to the water. A wooden bridge with two stone pillars spanned the river at that point. On the far shore, a multitude of tents and pavilions could be seen among which strode many soldiers, some leading horses. Cooking fires were already being started in several places.

The rikkagin halted the column and sent a rider ahead to inform the citadel of their arrival. The man spurred his mount up the slope of the hill, through the thickening sleet, calling out to the guards on the ramparts.

After a brief time he turned in his saddle and signaled the rikkagin who, spurring his horse forward, ordered the column to move out.

With an enormous clash of arms and booted feet, the soldiers marched to the war, trudging in a tired procession through the huge gates of burnished bronze, dwarfed by the towering walls, into the dark and dismal depths of Kamado, the stone citadel.

It was a city unto itself, constructed expressly for the agonies of war; not petty raids or vengeful strikes but centuries of sustained conflict. There was no way of determining this by observing it from outside, where all that was visible were the awesome stone fortifications four and a half meters thick so that men could walk atop the walls, safe behind the stone crenellations. And perhaps this was artfulness also, for it gave no hint at all of the citadel’s interior.

Kamado was so vast and so complex in construction that, seated atop his luma just inside the southern postern, Ronin could not discern the far northern limits of the fortress.

Long two-story buildings formed the immediate southern area of the citadel. The walls facing outward were windowless and constructed of stone so that they could not burn should any invader choose to rain liquid fire into Kamado’s streets. They were blank, featureless, save for the stains and scars of the years.

However, their appearance changed as one went between them, down the angustate streets. Their inward faces were of wood, with wide beams carved in the shapes of the ancient gods of war, fierce women in high curving helms, attended by dwarfs with curling beards and rings in their noses, from whom the warriors of yore sought advice and favors to assure victory.

Certainly, from this evidence alone, Kamado predated the building of Sha’angh’sei which, Ronin had been told, had sprung up largely because of the rikkagin from other lands. Who then had constructed this fantastic monument to battle? Surely not the Sha’angh’sei people.

All about them as their lumas danced gingerly down the dirt streets, the corps of the conflict were to be seen preparing themselves for battle. Grinding wheels sharpened axes and scimitar-bladed swords in a shimmering cascade of cold blue sparks, archers stringing their bows, fletchers gluing feathers to thin wooden shafts that would soon, in their diligent hands, become arrows. Soldiers doubling as stable hands fed and watered horses, wiping at their lathered flanks. Men trotted by them, relief for the soldiers manning the battlements. Up narrow stone stairways they clambered, reaching at last the topmost ramparts.

All about them too were the wounded, a pain-filled world of blood and bandages, of the one-armed and the one-legged, of the eyeless and the scarred. They lay, backs against the wooden pillars or curled in the dust in front of their lost gods of war, who looked down upon them, arrogant and uncaring. Perhaps their rikkagin had not gone before these deities with sufficient humility, perhaps their sacrifices were not great enough, or, more likely, the time of their power had long since been swept from the face of the world. Alone and forgotten, they yet looked out mutely on a domain no longer theirs.

Ronin stopped before one group of wounded men and asked for directions to Rikkagin T’ien’s quarters.

They moved on, through inner gates and circular courtyards, along straight avenues and around stone buildings, and at length dismounted before a wooden-fronted barracks. They turned, hearing voices and the heavy tramp of boots.

He saw Tuolin first, his blond hair and height unmistakable in the crowd of soldiers.

“All right, bring him out here.”

A group of soldiers with drawn swords emerged from the barracks. Ronin strained to see whom they held prisoner. Slowly, he drifted toward the men, circling to get a better angle. He stopped short.

The man the soldiers escorted, hands bound behind his back, was Rikkagin T’ien. Light gleamed along his hairless head. He stared straight ahead.

At Tuolin’s command, T’ien and his guards halted.

“You are Ching Pang, do you deny this?”

“No.” Eyes straight ahead.

“You are a spy.”

“I am Ching Pang, that is all.”