by Nick Harrow
The pilot patted my cheek and slipped out from under my arm before I could pick my jaw up off the deck. I’d thought things were going so well, too.
“She is super fucking hot.” Aja watched Jaga’s naked ass sway as the pilot snatched her vest from where it had fallen and headed toward the rudder. “Too bad she’s going to dump us like a load of rotten fish heads.”
“Yeah, that’s a pain in the ass,” I admitted. “I’ll figure something out.”
If we couldn’t find another pilot at the next port, we’d still have days of walking ahead of us before we reached the Lake of Moonsilver Mist. The Jade Seekers had found us in the first village somehow. I wasn’t sure we’d have much hope of outrunning them if they found us while we were tramping overland.
I had to convince Jaga to stay with us.
Or we were all as good as dead.
Chapter Sixteen
I NEEDED SOMETHING to distract me from my worries about Jaga leaving us at the next village. Fortunately, I had a built-in distraction courtesy of the senjin that currently sloshed around in my core from the mini orgy. The sacred energy filled me with a warm, comfortable lethargy that made me want to lie down and nap for a week or three. The last time I’d felt like this, my core had advanced from earthbound to seabound. If I was lucky, I might be able to use the power I’d gathered to advance again.
“I need to meditate,” I said to Aja. “I’ll be up at the prow. If anything happens, give me a shout.”
“You’ll be the first to know if anything happens,” Aja said. “Because you’ll probably be the one who caused it.”
“Smart-ass.” I swatted her on the backside and headed to the fore of the sampan.
The river was much wider here than it had been back at the village. It was a least a mile wide and a hundred feet deep based on the glimmers of sacred energy I spied in its depths. No boulders or trees jutted from its depths, and though the current was still swift it was much gentler than it had been previously.
I sat cross-legged on the polished wooden deck and rested the backs of my hands on my knees. A deep breath filled my lungs, and trickles of rin energy followed it into my core. Or at least they tried to.
All my nodes were already filled with the crimson sacred energy, and the shell that surrounded them bulged with senjin the spirits and I had created with Jaga during our festival of fucks.
“You called?” Yata asked as it landed on the gunwale next to me. “I was out scouting. It better be important.”
“I didn’t call you, but now that you’re here you might be able help me out.” I tapped two fingers over my solar plexus. “My core is stuffed with senjin. I want to use it to try to advance to skybound, but I’m not sure of the best way to do it. I was going to meditate, try to will it to happen.”
“Well,” the three-legged raven said hesitantly. It stared at me with black eyes eyes, tilted its head to one side, then the other. “Your core is a disaster. It’s tangled up worse than a bowl of noodles in there.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked. Inside the shell of my core, all ten of my nodes glowed a solid rich red. There were surrounded by a soup of churning silver senjin that looked like a liquid mirror. I didn’t see any tangles, though, or anything that could be tangled.
“Your nodes are connected to your core’s shell.” Yata paced back and forth along the boat’s rail, three sets of claws ticking against the wood with every move. The dark bird reminded me of one of the Moonsilver Bat’s priests lecturing his congregation during the weekly worship. “Your shell, in turn, is attached to your body through other connections. That’s how sacred energy gets from your nodes out into the world. Following so far?”
“Yes,” I said sarcastically. “I’ve been a shaman for a lot longer than I’ve known you.”
But I hadn’t really known the details of those connections. I’d assumed there was some way for the rin to do my bidding, but I’d never really given it any thought. The crimson bear hadn’t seemed interested in teaching me that particular bit of shaman theory, either. I was starting to worry there might be some significant gaps in my knowledge.
“It’s those connections that are all snarled inside you.” Yata stopped and jutted its beak in my direction. “When you push rin out of a node, it has to work its way through those tangles before it can activate a technique or strengthen your body. You’re wasting lots and lots of sacred energy every time you use it.”
“How do I fix that?” I asked. “I know the connections are there, but I can’t see them.”
“You need to straighten them out.” Yata went back to pacing, and its head bobbed up and down absentmindedly as if pecking for an idea, or, more likely, a way to explain its ideas to me. “Try this. Turn your spirit sight inward. Really look hard at your core. Get right in there.”
“In other words, you don’t know how to do it, either.” I frowned, then shrugged. “I’ll figure it out.”
The slap of water against the hull of the sampan created a gentle, rhythmic pattern. I closed my eyes, then focused on the sound, letting it transport me into a deep trance that Mielyssi had taught me during our time together. The world receded, and my senses narrowed and retreated into my body. I took a mental inventory of myself, starting at my toes, working up through my calves, then into my thighs, through my torso, and finally out the top of my skull. The simple exercise put me completely in tune with my body and centered my spirit sight squarely on my core.
I inhaled deeply once, then again. My core pulsed with silver light as the purified senjin swirled around its shell, unable to find space for itself within me. The sacred power emitted sharp bursts of light that transformed my translucent sea-blue core into a dazzling display of spiritual energy.
After a few seconds of staring at the orb inside me, I was about to give up on finding these connections that Yata seemed certain were tangled up inside me. It was easy enough to see the red nodes of rin energy and the swirling globs of mercurial senjin, but it was impossible for me to spot any connections between the nodes and the shell.
And then, at the peak of my frustration, my sight slipped inside the core and into the very center of my being. After a moment of disorientation, my senses righted themselves at the heart of my core. The red nodes filled with rin orbited around me, the silver blobs of senjin floating around them.
I pushed my attention toward one of those rotating orbs and focused every bit of my concentration on the node. Up close, I realized the node wasn’t a solid ball. A fine thread filled with crimson power was wrapped around an empty space to form a hollow sphere. Through the tiny gaps between that thread’s core, I saw the heat of red rin energy.
And I saw something else.
Translucent threads unspooled from an almost invisible dot of pale light at the very center of each node. Those almost imperceptible strings slithered through the narrow gaps in the node’s exterior to twist and tangle around the inside of the core like a fish’s guts.
“I see them,” I said. My voice sounded slow and sleepy, and it echoed through my core as if I were standing at the bottom of a deep pit.
“Good!” Yata said. “You have to be careful, but you should be able to untangle them using the senjin.”
“Any other advice before I try this?” I asked. “I don’t want to cripple myself in here.”
“I said be careful.” Yata went silent after that, so apparently it did not have any further useful information.
I stared hard at one thread until it snapped into sharper focus in my spirit sight. I tried to grab hold of it, but my fingers passed through it without disturbing it in any way. The string might as well have been a mirage.
“Use the senjin,” I muttered to myself.
There was plenty of the mercurial dream energy around me. It floated in thick blobs, moving in currents I couldn’t feel. I reached out and brushed my hand through one of the globs, wincing in anticipation of the sharp pain I expected. Senjin was extremely powerful stuff, and in its pure
, manifested form, it could burn flesh like acid. I’d hoped that my spirit sight wouldn’t be affected in the same way, but I couldn’t be sure and my luck had been running pretty shitty lately.
Instead of sizzling on my fingers, the mirror-like fluid flowed around them. It coated my hand like a shining glove and stuck to me when I pulled my hand out of the bubble.
That was new.
I found the thread I was working with again and reached for it with my senjin-slicked fingers. This time, I grabbed hold of the thin strand and easily teased it away from its neighbors. I traced the line all the way back to the node it had emerged from, and my fingers left it slick with senjin as they passed down its length. To my surprise, the section of the thread I’d coated with silver energy stiffened and repelled the threads around it, like magnets with their polarities reversed.
Excited by my progress, I coated both hands with the senjin and went to my work. A few minutes later, half of the thread I was working with gleamed with silver energy, though it was still a terrible mess of twists and loops and convoluted patterns that created a horribly inefficient trail through my core. I spent a few more minutes sheathing the rest of that connection with senjin, then stepped back to get a better look at my work.
It was a fucking disaster. The tangle couldn’t have been more convoluted if it had been laid out by a monkey drunk on hellfire wine.
Okay, I could figure this out. Now that the connection was covered in senjin, I no longer needed to glove my hands in the stuff to touch it. I grabbed hold of the gleaming thread and looped a length of it under my left elbow and over my left thumb. The thread was firm and slightly stretchy and offered no resistance as I pulled it away from its former path into neat coils around my forearm. After I’d gathered the first half of the silver line, I moved on to the second part of my experiment.
My core seemed like it was ten feet across in my mind’s eye, and each of the nodes was roughly the size of my head. The red orbs floated in a perfect circle just inside the core’s shell.
I eased the connection’s node toward the shell side of the red sphere it emerged from. The node rotated as I tugged on the thread, but it remained stable in its position. So far, so good.
With exaggerated care, I pulled the connection taut from its node and pressed the silver thread firmly against the core’s shell.
There was a faint clink, like two glasses touching, and the connection stuck to the shell’s wall. I gave it a tug, but it wouldn’t budge. That was a good start, though the connection was still ridiculously long and followed a convoluted path from the node to its connection point. Even if I coiled the rest of the connection around my arm, it would still have to go through dozens of tight curves before it reached the shell. The opposite end of the connection was also attached to the shell all the way across my core, which seemed like a spectacularly shitty way for my core to have been constructed.
After I’d saved the world, I was going to track down the Celestial Bureacracy and ask them what the fuck they’d been thinking when they made me.
I couldn’t shorten the connection, and coiling it up would still force the rin through a bunch of tight curves every time I activated a technique. What I needed to do was make it as easy as possible for the sacred energy to flow from its origins to its destination.
I imagined the power moving like a river. Where it had to pass through tight curves or around obstacles, it became more turbulent, and the smooth flow bubbled and frothed against its confines. Through unobstructed straightaways, the current was tranquil even when it moved quickly.
I considered straightening the connection, from one side to the other, then back again until it reached the shell. There would still be a few tight corners for the power to flow through, but overall it would be a straight line from one point to another. That would work for the single connection I was dealing with at the moment, but I’d run into trouble as more and more connections had to be straightened. There just wasn’t room through the center of my core to accommodate all of the connections, and soon I’d have to route the threads through twists and turns that would defeat the whole purpose of this exercise.
A sudden pain in my side dragged my attention away from my problem. The stabbing sensation was fleeting, if irritating, and I ignored my body’s aches and pains to get back to the challenging work of cleaning up my core.
A curve with a wide enough radius wouldn’t constrict the sacred energy or force it to make any abrupt changes in direction that would interfere with its smooth flow. Excited by this idea, I laid the thread of the connection around the inside of the shell in a long, smooth spiral. The gently curved path encircled the inside of my core exactly three times before it reached the point where it connected to the shell.
Fucking perfect.
The success excited me, and I dove back into my project. After the past few days of chaos, this work was soothing and peaceful. I lost myself in the simple motions of coating my hands with senjin and guiding the threads between the nodes and their terminal connection points. The silvery lines cooperated with me and seemed almost to guide themselves into the correct positions with only gentle coaxing on my part.
I still had half of the connections left to route around my core when a rough slap across my cheek dragged me out of my meditative trance. I opened my eyes to find the riverboat pilot towering over me and my cheek stinging and hot.
“Wake the fuck up, you asshole!” Jaga shouted and reared back to slap me again. Her attractive face was twisted into a mask of rage, and her striking green eyes shone like emeralds.
In the split second before her second slap landed against my cheek, a few details jumped out at me.
First, it was almost dark. The pale white disk of the sun no longer struggled through the thick mist that cloaked the world, and the sky had taken on the pink hue of fading daylight. Second, Jaga wasn’t just pissed, she was scared. Third, Ayo and Aja stood behind the riverboat captain, their eyes wide with shock, unsure what to do next. Finally, Yata hopped back and forth on its three legs, cawing and croaking with dismay.
“What the fuck is going on?” I shouted and grabbed Jaga’s wrist before she could slap me again. She raised her other hand, and I grabbed that one, too. “This better be good. I was on the verge of a breakthrough.”
“How nice for you.” With her hands restrained, Jaga’s temper ebbed, and her sarcasm fired up. “Well, we’ve got company. Some of your friends are looking for you.”
“Blood God,” I growled and stood up from where I’d been meditating, careful to keep a firm grip on Jaga’s hands. Both my cheeks stung, and I didn’t want to get a bloody nose out of the deal, too.
I looked behind us but didn’t see any other boats on the river. I scanned the eastern shoreline. There was nothing there, either.
The western riverbank, though, was a whole different beast.
Warriors encased in heavy jade armor rode along the shore on spectral horses that gleamed like molten gold. The strange creatures bore the weight of their riders without complaint and threaded through the dense forest with uncanny ease. The supernatural beasts kept pace with the river’s current without even galloping.
Fuck.
“How many of these assholes are there?” I growled and dropped Jaga’s hands. “I killed a few dozen of them back at Floating Village, and we left a bunch more behind us when we left Ulishi. Where the hell did these come from?”
The leader of the Jade Seekers emerged from the trees, his golden stallion’s hooves splashing in the water at the edge of the river. I’d seen the man plummet hundreds of feet into a ravine lined with jagged rocks. His body should have been pulped inside the cracked shell of his armor. Jiro Kos was supposed to be dead.
And yet, there he stood, as big and scary as ever.
“They’re on horses.” That, at least, was some blessing. “Without a boat, they can’t reach us. As long as we stay on the river, we’re safe.”
“The river’s deep here,” Jaga said. “But if they c
an keep up with us for another hour or so, they’ll catch up to us at the next town. Where I’d planned to stop for the night.”
Well, that wasn’t so bad. I hadn’t wanted Jaga to leave us, anyway. The Jade Seekers were a pain in my ass, but if they forced the pilot to let us stay aboard, they’d done me a favor. I was about to explain the bright side to Jaga when everything went to shit.
The mounted warriors drew bows from their saddles, nocked arrows, and unleashed a hissing swarm of missiles at us.
Chapter Seventeen
THE FIRST SALVO FROM the Jade Seekers fell yards short of the sampan, and the thick arrows splashed into the water . We wouldn’t be so lucky once the warriors found their range. It was hard to get a solid count of their numbers as they raced through the trees, but there were at least two dozen, maybe more.
“Get us closer to the middle of the river,” I barked at Jaga. The pilot stomped toward the rudder, and I turned my attention to the river spirit. “Ayo, can you do anything to help us outpace these motherfuckers?”
The white-haired spirit narrowed her eyes, and they flashed like sapphires. Ayo focused her spirit sight on the river, then leaned over the gunwale and thrust both hands toward the water. Nothing happened for a moment, and nothing happened in the moment after that one, either.
Another flight of arrows took to the sky, and I watched helplessly as they reached the pinnacle of their arc and plunged down toward us. Yata flew off the deck and through the cabin’s door.
Smart bird.
“Cocksuckers!” Jaga shouted. She wrenched hard on the sampan’s rudder, and the vessel veered away from the shore. For a moment, I thought she had turned us too far and we’d get flipped over when the current hit us broadside. But she was a better pilot than I’d imagined, and we sliced smoothly across the river to put some lateral distance between us and the hunters on their golden steeds.