by Nick Harrow
“Complicated costs a lot more than simple,” he said with a smirk. “And no one gets on my boat with secrets. Hazardous cargo has a way of blowing up in my face.”
“I can explain.” I reached for my satchel. I’d pay whatever he wanted if we moved right fucking now. “Once we’re downriver.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Fuck,” I snapped and paced the shore. Moored boats formed an archipelago of sampans that stretched from one side of the river to the other.
Without another word from Marok I ran past his boat and onto the deck of another vessel. The spirits raced after me, and we jumped from one sampan to the next, leaving bobbing vessels and shouting captains strung out behind us. Yata circled above us, nearly invisible against the night sky.
“You’re really making friends today,” Ayo shouted as we dodged past an irate captain and his gaff hook.
“Fuck ’em,” I shouted back.
“Where are we running?” Aja asked. She dodged under a swung oar, then leapt onto the next boat.
“Toward the second-best offer we got.” I blocked a pilot’s rowing pole with my war club and kicked him into the water. “Sorry!”
I found the boat I was looking for in the middle of the river. I jumped onto its deck and raced to the door of the low-slung cabin at its aft.
“Jaga!” I shouted and banged on the wooden door like my life depended on it. “You still need someone to watch your ass while you harvest senjin?”
“Shut the fuck up!” The pilot groaned from behind the curtain. “Blood God, what fucking time is it?”
“Before dawn.” I shoved the door open and felt my cheeks redden when I saw Jaga standing naked in front of me, her hand raised as if she’d been about to open the door. A vivid blue tattoo encircled her breasts, and a pair of golden rings through her left nipple glinted in the firelight.
“Never seen big tits before?” Jaga asked, hands clutching her head. She tilted her head back, eyes wide, and sniffed at the air. “Mother of fuck, is Ulishi on fire?”
“Yes.” I opened my satchel and grabbed a fistful of chains and rings from its guts. “I need to get out of here, now.”
“Fucking hell.” Another voice groaned from inside the cabin, and a pale-faced man with rings through both of his nipples staggered out of Jaga’s bed. He wobbled from side to side, then caught himself on the cabin’s wall. “I’ve had too much to drink to deal with this shit.”
“Then get the fuck off my boat, you limp-dick cocksucker.” Jaga grabbed the man’s clothes off the floor near the cabin’s door, shoved them at his chest, then kicked him in the ass. “Go. I’ve got paying customers.”
“Bitch!” The man stumbled past me, noticed the spirits at my back, and covered his cock with his clothes. “Not you two. Excuse me.”
He shuffled past the spirits, looked up bewildered at the fire, then shrugged and jumped into the water. The smooth strokes of a practiced swimmer carried him through the dark water toward another sampan veiled by the fog and smoke.
“What the fuck is that?” Jaga shouted as Yata landed on the gunwale with a croak and loud flap of its wings.
“I’m a three-legged raven,” Yata cawed. “Haven’t you ever seen a bird before?”
“Blood God, boy, you have any other guests you haven’t told me about? Maybe a singing bullfrog? Pull up that fucking anchor,” Jaga shouted and pointed at a chain dangling over the side of the sampan. “And you two booby girls sit the fuck down. We’re gonna move quick, and if you fall overboard, I am not coming back for you.”
“Let me help,” Ayo said.
“I said park your asses on the deck!” Jaga had untied a mooring line and was busy coiling it into a basket on the starboard side. “And hurry the fuck up with that goddamned anchor.”
“It’s already onboard.” I pointed at the heavy lead weight and the iron chain coiled next to it. “Anything else you need?”
“An explanation.” Jaga pointed past me. “You running from those assholes?”
Marok’s sampan threaded its way through the water, a trio of Jade Seekers standing in its prow. Their heavy armor pushed the boat deeper into the water than Jaga’s boat, but they’d get here soon enough despite the extra load.
“That piece of shit,” I snarled. The pilot had sold me out.
“Yeah, Marok’s a cocksucker.” Jaga retreated into her cabin with my loot. She hollered at me from her quarters. “If we get too close to any of those stilts, push us off with that pole on the port side.”
“Why aren’t you out here to pilot this damned boat?” I shouted.
“Because some guy woke me up from a dead sleep, and I need to get some shorts on so my coochie doesn’t catch a chill from all this night air blowing through her lips.”
Oh, yeah. My bad.
The current carried us below the village, the sampan’s prow drifting in a slow circle with no one at the rudder to right it. I grabbed the pole and used it to fend off an impending collision with one of the village’s many stilts. The sleek boat turned away from the obstacle and slipped through water turned red by the blaze above us. The fire had spread and would keep on spreading until there was nothing left of the thriving outlaw river port but jagged and charred stumps.
“What the hell did you do, boy?” Jaga asked as she stomped out of the cabin. She wore tight black shorts and a purple vest she hadn’t bothered to tie closed over her ample breasts. “They’re burning down the whole goddamned place to find you.”
“Nothing,” I answered truthfully.
“That sounds like what a criminal would say.” Jaga laughed and grabbed the rudder. “I don’t give a rotten fuck what you did, man. Just trying to keep my mind off how bad it’ll hurt if those Jade Seekers catch up to us.”
“I’ll tell them it’s not your fault.” I said. “If they catch us.”
“Won’t fucking matter.” The pilot steered us through a narrow gap between a pair of boulders and cursed. “That cocksucker Marok’s boat is fast as hell. If he didn’t have a ton of armor onboard, he’d have caught us by now.”
Despite the weight of his passengers, Marok’s boat was gaining on us. If we didn’t lose them soon, they’d catch us.
“Ayo,” I shouted over the roar of the river. “This is your domain. What can you do?”
I focused my spirit sight on the other pilot’s craft, and my heart sank. Twin lines of silver script ran down the sleek boat’s keel, and a small core glowed within its cabin. It was hard to make out exactly what techniques were held in the scripts, but they were tied to the sampan’s speed and maneuverability. It was no wonder the piece of shit was catching up to us.
“Better do something quick,” Yata croaked from the top of the cabin. “I’d hate to have to find another shaman after they kill you all.”
“I’ve got it!” Ayo shouted.
“Don’t fuck with my boat!” Jaga cried.
If Ayo had heard the captain, she didn’t show it. Her brow was furrowed with concentration, and she’d raised both hands toward the sampan behind us. The strain of whatever she was doing was clear on Ayo’s face, and shio danced around her like fireflies as she focused her will on our enemies.
“If she fucks with this boat, I’ll skin you alive,” Jaga promised me. “The last cocksucker who channeled that shit into my boat snapped the beam right in half.”
“She’s not going to break your boat.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but I didn’t really care, either. If we didn’t do something, the Jade Seekers would catch us, and there’d be a hell of a lot more to worry about than a busted sampan.
“She better not—”
Ayo shouted something in a language I didn’t understand. A wave of power burst from her outstretched hands and dove into the river. The energy streaked toward Marok’s boat like a school of glowing fish, breaking into smaller and smaller shards of luminescence. By the time the darts of light were thirty feet ahead of the boat on our tail they’d split into a hazy field of power stretched across
the river.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Ayo sagged against the side of the sampan, and Aja grabbed the white-haired spirit’s shoulder to keep her from pitching over the side into the water.
Whatever the spirit had tried to do, it hadn’t worked. I hefted my war club and prepared to trigger the crimson bear’s techniques for the melee that was sure to come.
And then, for the blink of an eye, a five-foot-wide section of the river in front of our pursuers just stopped.
Marok’s sampan hit the line of motionless water at full speed. The hull shattered into kindling, and the Jade Seekers howled in surprise and rage as wooden shrapnel slashed at their armor. The power held in the sampan’s scripts escaped from the ruptured prow in a rainbow spray that lit up the night like a second moon.
The boat’s wreckage flipped into the air and tumbled end over end past the trap Ayo had laid for it. Marok was hurled free of the sampan’s carcass and splashed into the water with a surprised yelp. He bobbed to the surface a moment later, spluttering but otherwise unharmed.
The Jade Seekers weren’t so lucky.
They hit the water like stones, and their heavy armor dragged them to the river’s bed. I caught flashes of glowing jade as the current tumbled the warriors through the dark water. Moments later, even those traces of our pursuers had been swallowed by the currents. The armored warriors were gone.
“Holy shit, Ayo,” I whispered.
“Told you that shit would break a boat,” Jaga shouted from the aft end of the sampan.
The spirits and I sat down on the deck, heads leaned together, and chuckled under the moonlight as we floated down the river with smoke billowing into the sky behind us.
I kissed Ayo, gently, and held her tight. She’d done very well, and now it was time to rest.
Chapter Thirteen
BY THE TIME THE SUN’S golden face shone through the mist, we were far, far away from the burning village. Yata had done a quick sky patrol first thing and hadn’t spotted any more boats filled with Jade Seekers on the river, which was a win in my book. Against all odds, it looked like we’d escaped.
“Get up, fucker.” Jaga prodded my ass with her bare toes. “Time to get to work.”
“I paid you!” I protested. I’d been awake for half an hour already, but I didn’t feel like doing anything. After the day I’d had yesterday, all I wanted to do was lie around and soak up what little sun there was.
Jaga, it appeared, had other ideas.
“You did,” the pilot agreed. “For the trouble of getting you away from the Jade Seekers. Now it’s time to pay me for letting you stay on my boat.”
“You have to be kidding.” I hauled myself upright, balanced against the swaying of the narrow boat, and turned to face the pilot. She was shorter than she’d looked in the bar, though the muscles she showed off looked bigger than I remembered. The pilot was older than me, probably in her thirties or close to it, but she’d held up well despite a career that kept her out in all kinds of horrible weather and encouraged her to drink herself into a stupor as often as possible. All in all, she was nice to look at, but a lot less nice to deal with.
“I never kid about money, my man.” She gestured toward a small set of clay pots held along the sides of the sampan by lengths of knotted spider silk cord. “It’s time to get to fishing for senjin.”
“You know it’s corrupted, right?” I focused my spirit sight on the dream meridian that ran down the length of the river as far as I could see. Oily black threads crawled through the line of power. “It’s basically poison to anyone who handles it.”
“I don’t give a rat’s tight assfuck,” she said with a shrug. “There’s a magi in Simdelo who’ll pay me very goddamned well for jugs of this shit.”
“What’s he doing with it?” I tried to think of a single good use for the tainted senjin and couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve significant amounts of death and destruction. “Does he purify it before he uses it?”
“Don’t fucking know, don’t fucking care.” Jaga flashed me a startlingly white smile. “Cocksucker can shoot it up his ass, long as I get paid.”
“There are more important things than money,” I said quietly. My shaman’s soul ached at the idea that someone would willingly traffic in the corruption that was destroying the world.
“You don’t say, nature boy.” Jaga looked at me like I’d grown a third head. “I don’t know who you think you are, coming on my boat and telling me what I should or shouldn’t do for money. Not all of us have the luxury of living off the land like some kind of animal.”
“There’s nothing wrong with living like an animal,” I growled down at the pilot, the crimson bear’s rage burning like a hot coal in my heart.
We stared at one another for a long, tense breath. Jaga’s eyes burned into mine, and a dark flush spread across her cheeks and upper chest. My anger was a tight fist in my gut, and I knew I was a few seconds away from either coming to blows or saying something I’d regret.
“Okay, fuck, you win.” I took a deep breath and let go of my anger. Fighting with Jaga wouldn’t help anything. It was clear I’d never convince her not to sell the tainted senjin, and I needed this boat. Better to swallow my pride and get the spirits back to their mistress as quickly as possible than risk pissing off the pilot any further. “What do you want me to do?”
“Untie a jug from the string there, open the top, hang onto the cord, and stick it in the water. When it’s full, pull it out of the water, close the lid, and give it to me.” With a snort, Jaga stomped off to man the rudder. Just in time, too, because the stretch of river ahead of us was littered with jutting boulders and splintered tree stumps that looked like they could rip out the boat’s flat bottom in the blink of an eye.
“This looks like it’ll be fun.” Ayo joined me at the rail, her shoulder bumping against my left side as I untied the first jug from the rope that ran down the port side of the sampan’s deck.
“Don’t get any of that garbage on you,” Aja warned me. “Those jugs are scripted to manifest the senjin. Physical contact with that tainted liquid energy might kill you before we can purify it.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised. “Keep an eye out for any big fish.”
The biggest worry I had about fishing for senjin was how much attention it would attract from local wildlife and any spirits who might be in the area. Manifested sacred energy drew spirits like bees to honey, and they had no reservations about possessing animals to get to the stuff. If a river leviathan came nosing around Jaga’s boat, there’d be one hell of a fight.
“You’re the boss.” Aja grinned at me and leaned on the sampan’s edge to let the wind blow through her hair.
“Don’t let Jaga hear you say that.” I winked at the spirit and went to work.
The jug was a simple red clay pot with a daisy wheel lid. A circle of golden script around the jug’s mouth glimmered with shio energy as I opened the lid. One end of a thin spider silk cord was knotted through a pair of brass rings on top of the jug, and the other end of the ring was tied to a wooden peg that jutted from the deck.
“Here goes nothing.” I lowered the pot into the water until it was fully submerged and focused my spirit sight on the vessel. I’d never seen anything like this and wanted to know how it worked.
The dream meridian glowed down the middle of the river like a ruler-straight streak of cobalt blue shot through with ebony threads of corruption. It took me long seconds to see past the meridian’s power to the rest of the sacred energy around me.
The river’s waters were laced with sparks of power the same color as the meridian, complete with their own lines of tainted shadow. Those sparks were drawn to the jug like iron filings to a magnet. When enough glimmers of sacred energy had gathered around the lid, they coalesced into globs of liquid sliver and slipped through the holes in the daisy wheel. In the few seconds I watched, Jaga’s contraption captured dozens of those blobs. The script must have been en
try only, because the silver didn’t leak out of the pot after it went in.
“Huh,” Ayo said, her eyes bright. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
“There’s a good reason for that,” Aja countered. She leaned on my right side and kissed me on the cheek. “No one with any sense would ever use such a thing.”
“No one’s ever accused me of being sensible.” I tossed another jug over the side, then another. Now that I had the hang of it, I only needed a few seconds to get each jug into the water. In the space of a few minutes, all thirteen of the clay pots bobbed in the water alongside the sampan.
Aja was more nervous than I’d ever seen her, and Ayo moved around me to comfort her fellow spirit.
“It’s just not safe.” Aja pointed at the water that churned around the pots. “Look at that. You think that’s how water should act?”
The river thickened around the string of jugs connected to the sampan’s side. The water was already as sticky as rice pudding, and jagged bolts of black corruption flickered like lightning inside its clotted mass. Even as I watched the patch of glutinous fluid expanded.
“The senjin’s crystallizing the water’s essence,” I muttered to myself. While the sacred energy was potent, it wasn’t the only power in the world. Every living thing, every object, every substance had an essence of its own. As the senjin manifested, it forced the river’s essence to mimic the same process. The more senjin that manifested in the jugs, the more of the river that would crystallize around them. Left unchecked, the process would mire Jaga’s sampan in a growing field of gel-like water. “Fuck.”
“Like I said,” Aja muttered.
I pulled on one of the spider silk cords, but the jug wouldn’t budge. There was already too much congealed water essence surrounding it.
“Jaga!” I shouted. “Your pots are a fucking disaster!”
With an exaggerated sigh the pilot locked the rudder and hustled around the sampan’s cabin. Her face was flushed, and her eyes spat daggers at me as she stomped across the deck to confront me.
“Why the fuck did you put all the pots into the water at the same time?” She stood up on her tiptoes to shout into my face, and her ample chest smashed against mine. “I said to put one pot in the water and bring it to me when it’s full, right? One motherfucking pot!”