by Nick Harrow
Oh. Well, shit.
“I figured this would get the job done faster.” I pursed my lips and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I’m a shaman. I’ll fix it.”
“You better.” She stormed to the aft of the boat, a stream of “motherfuckers” and “cocksuckers” trailing through the air behind her.
My spirit sight showed me the river’s essence consisted of a mixture of mostly blue shio with spots of more energetic crimson rin sacred power. There were threads of black corruption in the water, too, though they lacked the intensity of the ebony lines that radiated from the senjin. If I was careful, I could undo this mess and get the pots out of the water before disaster struck.
“Please make sure I don’t fall overboard.” I sat down cross-legged on the deck and rested the backs of my hands on my knees. “I’m going to see if I can clean up this mess before the whole fucking boat goes to the bottom of the river.”
“What can we do?” Ayo asked.
“I’ll free one pot from the river’s grip at a time.” I pointed to the clay jug the farthest from me. “Starting with that one. When the sticky water’s cleared away, haul the jug aboard.”
“I’ll do it.” Aja walked to the prow and looked down at the pot. “Keep an eye on him, Ayo. Make sure he doesn’t get himself killed.”
“I’m not doing anything dangerous.” I let my breath cycle through my body, and the nodes of rin in my core twitched and stirred, eager to be used.
“Says the man who tried to sink the boat with a few pots.” Aja grinned at me to take the worst of the barb from her words, but she had a point. I’d made this mess because I hadn’t understood the implications of what I’d done. That was the kind of mistake that could get everyone killed if I wasn’t careful.
I took a deep breath, let it out, and shifted my vision into spirit sight to get a better look at the sacred energy around me.
The problematic patch of river essence was twice the size of the sampan and growing in every direction at an alarming pace. To my enhanced senses, the crystallized water consisted of straight threads of blue shio held in rigid order by wire-like rods of rin.
The rest of the river was composed of unruly tangles of shio stirred into chaotic motion by the clusters of rin that blazed through the river like a meteor shower.
Be careful. The crimson bear’s words startled me. It felt like she was inches behind me. I swore I felt the heat of her breath on the nape of my neck and smelled the rich scent of her flesh. Energy work is tricky. I’d hate for you to lose yourself in the flow.
I ached to turn and embrace Mielyssi. I’d been gone from Mount Shiki for a few days, but my heart ached for her as if we’d been separated for months.
This isn’t the time. A spectral hand tousled my dream-self’s hair. Save the world you’re in, then you can be with me once again.
You don’t ask for much, I thought.
I’m worth it.
The crimson bear’s laughter, low and throaty, wrapped around me like a warm blanket. A thousand memories burst through my thoughts and filled my heart with a longing so deep and powerful it ached like a wound. My time with the spirits was amazing, but it had been like drinking water after a lifetime enjoying the finest wines.
I shook my head and pulled my thoughts back to the task at hand. Save the world, save the bear. If I screwed this up, then there’d be no one left to heal this corruption. I wouldn’t only lose my life, I’d lose Mielyssi.
She left me to my work, every hint of her presence vanishing save for her rich, wild perfume.
My plan was simple. The problem wasn’t the shio, it was the layers of rin that held the water’s essence stiff and unyielding. If the rin was gone, the shio would go back to its normal, chaotic self, and the water would flow like, well, water.
Clearing the rin from a large area was beyond my seabound core’s abilities, but I only had to purge the sacred energy from the crystallized water closest to each jug. Surely that couldn’t be hard.
My little experiment in the Deepways station had taught me that the first step in drawing energy was to clear out some space in my nodes so I wouldn’t risk overloading my core. I focused on a single node and released the energy it contained. Because I didn’t direct it to a specific technique, the sacred power flowed out of the node and into my body. The vibrant crimson energy traced lines of warmth along the arteries in my abdomen, then found its way into the muscle fibers in my arms and legs. With the node empty, it was time to move on to the next stage of my master plan.
On my next inhalation, I focused my entire mind on the stiff lines of rin that surrounded the pot next to Aja. One of the red wires snapped out of shape and blazed like a star. My breath plucked it out of the surrounding shio and drew it into my core as easily as pulling a splinter out of my finger. One by one, the rin lines emerged from the water and sank into the empty node at the heart of my core.
“Now!” I emerged from my trance and jabbed a finger at the pot I’d freed from the clutches of the crystallized water.
“On it!” Aja reeled the pot up by its spider silk cord, careful to keep the swinging jug from sloshing its contents onto her or the sampan. “Fuck, that’s heavy.”
Ayo rushed over to her friend and grabbed the scripted jug’s handles to steady it on the deck. The two of them wrestled the jug over to me, and I had to brace myself to keep from recoiling away from it.
The manifested senjin within the jug radiated a sickening aura. It filled my nostrils with the rich stink of decay and my thoughts with streaks of vile shadows. My guts tightened into a knot as I closed the daisy wheel.
The jug’s script glowed like molten gold and the lid locked closed with a faint click. Sealing the container did nothing to alleviate the queasiness that emanated from it, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about drenching myself in tainted senjin while I freed the rest of the jugs from the river’s death grip.
It took me another fifteen exhausting minutes to free all the jugs. My core ached with the effort of continually emptying and refilling its nodes, and the rin I released exceeded the capacity of my flesh and dripped from my pores in scarlet beads that slid through the deck drains and vanished back into the river. I hated to waste energy like that, but the rin that splashed around the sampan’s side did help to churn the water and break up the crystallized river essence around the pots, so it wasn’t a total loss.
“Pots are full,” I called back to Jaga.
“That’s nice,” she shouted back. “You might want to take a look behind us, though. I think you’ve got a new friend.”
With a groan, I dragged myself to my feet and staggered past the boat’s cabin to see what the fuck Jaga was talking about. My skin itched with a prickly heat from all the rin I’d cycled through my body, and the excess energy trapped in my muscles left me feeling jittery and irritable, like I’d had about twenty too many pots of tea. I wanted to punch something, and I wasn’t picky about what that something was.
“What the fuck—” I bit the question off as soon as I saw what had gotten Jaga’s attention.
The sampan’s wake was a smooth V behind us, the water rolling away from the boat’s hull in gentle, foamy lines. Beyond that, though, the river was much more turbulent. Something was swimming toward us.
Something big.
Chapter Fourteen
THE CREATURE’S HEAD breached the water as it approached, and the sight of it made me want to run into the cabin and hide. The beast’s mouth was almost as wide as the sampan, and it was surrounded by barbed whiskers as thick as my forearm. Its scaly hide was the revolting red of an open wound, and its eyes bulged from their sockets like a pair of black marbles each the size of my head. The crimson blade of its dorsal fin rose from the water behind it, spines jutting toward the sky. The enormous catfish came on fast, and its hunger was a palpable wave that pushed against me with the force of a storm front.
“Fuck me.” My breath caught in my throat as the mutant bottom-feeder sliced through the water with sinuou
s sweeps of its tail. Its aura pulsed with angry flashes of crimson rin.
It wanted me in its belly. Now.
“Please tell me you’re going to do something more than stare at that cocksucker,” Jaga called to me.
“I’ve got it.” I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d get it, but that had never stopped me from doing something before.
I raced back to the boat’s prow and grabbed my war club. The fish was big, but it wasn’t so big that I couldn’t crack its skull open. One good shot between the eyes might be enough to bring it down.
Maybe.
“You can’t be serious.” Aja took up a position beside me at the sampan’s rail. “You’re going to hit that monstrosity with a stick?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I didn’t blame Aja for doubting me. She didn’t know the full extent of my new seabound core. Hell, even I didn’t know just how strong I’d become since the advancement.
We were about to find out.
The monstrosity swerved around the sampan’s rudder and surged ahead to draw alongside the boat. The beast stared up at me, and my reflection wavered in the nightmarish darkness of its mirror-smooth black eye.
My spirit sight showed me the beast’s core, all ten of its nodes glowing with red rin energy. At least some of that power was mine, shed when I’d struggled with Jaga’s fishing pots. That was what had attracted the critter, and it was hungry for more.
A lot more.
The beast’s core also glowed with three techniques, one that reinforced its powerful jaws, another somehow tied to its immense hunger, and a third tied to a much, much more powerful creature. The silver senjin thread that floated away from a shadow on the beast’s core told me this fucker was the familiar of something very, very dangerous.
Well, fuck. That changed things.
If I smashed this thing in the skull and didn’t kill it immediately, it might call out to its master for help. The sampan was a speedy craft, but if the catfish’s bigger, meaner boss showed up, I had no doubt we’d be capsized in the blink of an eye.
Fighting was out of the question, then. It was time to do some shaman shit.
“Hey, buddy,” I said to the fish. “I know you’re hungry and think I’d be super tasty, but trust me when I say that is not how you want this to go down.”
The fish tossed its head in response, showering the sampan with a few dozen gallons of water. The spray blinded me for the space of a heartbeat, and I was sure the beast would follow up its trick with another attack. And then I felt a surge of rin in the air and knew the fucker was up to something much more dangerous.
As a shaman, I had a strong affinity for beasts of the wild, even if they were giant catfish powered up by sacred rin energy. That affinity warned me that the river monster had activated two of its techniques, and it was so close to me I felt them thrum to life. My teeth itched with the urge to bite as its first technique kicked in, and my stomach ached with a wash of hunger when the second power switched on. This guy wasn’t messing around. He’d come to eat, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“I don’t fucking think so,” I snarled and locked eyes with the giant fish again. I didn’t want to fight this asshole and risk angering its boss, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it eat me, either. “I’m a shaman, you’re an animal. Don’t upset the fucking pecking order.”
The fish didn’t seem impressed by what I had to say. It opened its mouth wide, sucked in a bellyful of water, and reared up out of the water.
Before the asshole could spit on me again, I dug into the bag of shaman tricks I’d learned during my time with the crimson bear. We were healers and masters of nature, and that included dealing with the spirits of the wild and all kinds of animals. Even giant ones who wanted to eat us.
My core opened, and a strand of raw rin surged out of me and harpooned the overgrown bottom feeder’s core.
Like spirits and other beasts, the catfish’s core wasn’t ranked, it was just a plain shell with a jumble of nodes inside. Eight of those ten nodes were filled with sacred energy, almost all of which I recognized as coming from me.
Fuck, but I’d shed a lot of sacred power trying to clean up Jaga’s pots.
The line of rin snapped taut, and a temporary bond between the catfish and me sprang to life. A sudden surge of blind, animal panic flared through the creature’s primitive mind as it registered the strange presence that had just taken root at the heart of its innermost being.
I pushed back against the catfish’s urge to feed and its fear, willing it to calm the hell down and go away. As persuasive as I can be, my good thoughts didn’t make much headway against its primal drive to eat and eat and fucking eat. In fact, that animal instinct wormed its way back up through the temporary bond and infected me with a primal hunger.
“You all right?” Aja asked. “You’re looking a little strange.”
“I’m fine. It’s just shaman shit.” Unlike Yata, the catfish was just a big dumb animal of unusual size. While I could only form temporary bonds with beasts, these connections had benefits I couldn’t get from my familiar. For starters, I’d adopt characteristics of the bonded critter, and the longer the temporary bond lasted, the more pronounced those aspects became. At its best, that ability would grant me an eagle’s sight, a shark’s bite, or a snake’s venom. At its worst, it’d grow some barbed whiskers out of my cheeks and make my eyes all googly like my friend the catfish. I crossed my fingers and hoped this little struggle would be over before shit went that far.
As much as the catfish wanted to eat me, it wanted to be free of the bond I’d forged with it even more. The giant fish thrashed and dove deep into the river in a desperate bid to shake my connection loose, and the line of power between us followed it. Frustrated that it couldn’t escape into the river’s churning depths, the bottom-feeder surged to the surface and threw itself into the air. Its blood-red skin gleamed in the faint sunlight, and its black barbs glistened like oil as it thrashed its tail. At the height of its arc, the creature glared at me with raw, bestial rage and a gnawing hunger. More than anything, it wanted to jump into the boat and eat me and everyone else it could fit into its mouth.
For the moment, though, the catfish couldn’t attack me. Our spiritual connection held it at bay, and it could no more take a bite out of my hide than it could chew off its own face. The same was true for me, too. If I attempted to hurt the creature in any way, the connection would snap in an instant.
I needed to do something, though, because the fish’s hunger technique was already chewing away at our bond, inflaming the creature’s natural instinct to eat into a berserk frenzy. I had a minute or two before that instinct overcame our bond, and then the pissed-off catfish would be free to do whatever the fuck it wanted.
Like smashing Jaga’s sampan to pieces and swallowing me whole.
Because hurting the monstrosity was out of the question, I needed another plan. With our cores so close together, the animal’s urge to feed was a powerful ache inside my mind. The critter had gotten a taste of my sweet, sweet rin and was now completely bonkers for the stuff. That was the real problem.
If I could heal that insane hunger, the catfish should lose its urge to eat me. I was a shaman. I could handle that.
The hunger technique was fed by a thread of rin energy anchored in one of the catfish’s nodes. Removing that power would shut down the technique, and the fishy would be off the hook. The hard part was, I didn’t know how to sever that thread.
I focused my will on the node that powered the hunger technique. It was still mostly filled with my rin. The hunger technique looked like it didn’t take much energy to power, likely because it was so closely tied to the catfish’s natural instincts. There was no way we could wait out the hunger, because it would chew through the bond long before the rin ran dry.
Maybe, though, I could steal the sacred energy and end the technique in a hurry.
I pulled on the sacred energy, trying to coax it out of the fish’s node
and into my core. It was right there, so close I could feel it. Yet it wouldn’t move or respond to my will in any way.
I guess that made sense. Shamans probably weren’t supposed to run around sucking the juice out of wild animals to fuel our power. That seemed more like something a sorcerer or necromancer might try.
Fine. If I couldn’t leech rin out of the fish to kill its hunger, maybe I could satisfy its need to feed.
Rin rushed out of my core through our connection and flooded the catfish’s core. The beast shuddered as my gushing power filled its empty nodes.
That had taken the edge off the critter’s hunger, even if it hadn’t sated it. Fine. Five of my ten nodes were still filled with rin. I could afford to spend more to end this fight.
“Here you go,” I growled and pushed three nodes’ worth into the monster catfish’s core.
“Who are you talking to?” Aja asked.
“The fish,” Ayo said. “It’s shaman shit.”
“Shaman shit,” I confirmed through gritted teeth.
The catfish slurped up every drop of the rin I’d pushed to it. Its core had swelled to almost double its normal size, and every one of its ten nodes glowed as brightly as a lighthouse beacon. The animal cycled the rin through its nodes in a desperate attempt to take in more power. It couldn’t. The beast was too full of sacred energy to take in even one more bite.
In fact, it was overfull.
Without warning, the beast gagged and shoved rin through our connection and into my core. The power was different when it came back to me, as if its time in the belly of the beast had imbued it with some aspects of the catfish’s essential being.
That was all right with me—the energy felt great as it flooded into me. The power was wild and unbridled, like a brief, glorious flashback to my life with the crimson bear on top of Mount Shiki. I wanted to throw back my head and howl at the sky until my throat was hoarse. I needed to hunt and fill my belly with the flesh of my prey.