by Nick Harrow
Jaga emerged from her cabin, a ceramic slate clutched in her left hand. She sat on the gunwale next to me and turned the slate so I could see it.
The off-white surface was covered in a watercolor map, and it oozed powerful blue shio. I wondered where Jaga had found such a potent item and just how much it had cost her. Before I could ask any questions, she dove into an excited explanation.
“Okay,” she said. “We’re right here, and there used to be a Deepways station just down here. That’s about twenty minutes away with the current.”
“That’s good.” I was relieved that I’d guessed correctly about the location of the Deepways. I’d known they were situated along powerful meridians, but that was about the extent of my knowledge this far from my home village. “We should be able to reach it before the Seekers catch us.”
“We may not want to.” Jaga tapped a series of symbols next to the Deepways location on her map. “The notes on my maps say it’s haunted. Something about crushing spirits.”
“I’ll take my chances with some ghosts over the Jade Seekers,” I said. “If we run into angry spirits, I’ll deal with them. I’m a shaman. That’s my job.”
I didn’t want to admit it to the pilot, but after seeing the desolation of the first Deepways I’d encountered, I wasn’t sure I could handle more badass corrupted spirits. If the next one was in as bad shape as the last one, dark entities would have an almost limitless reservoir of tainted senjin to power their techniques. Given a choice, I’d much rather stick to the river.
Sadly, Jiro wasn’t giving me a choice.
“Your call.” Jaga didn’t seem pleased about that. “A stream off the river flows straight into the Deepways. It’s wide and deep enough to handle cargo ships, or at least it was, so I don’t think the horses can follow us in there. I also don’t have any idea where the other end of it is.”
That was an interesting problem. But it was also a problem that future Kyr would have to worry about. Present Kyr’s job was to get us the hell off the river and away from the Seekers before they killed us. I needed to recharge the spirits and myself. Maybe with enough senjin, I could advance to skybound.
“We’ re going in. At the very least, it will buy us some time away from Jiro so I can replenish the spirits’ cores. They won’t last much longer.”
“Is that going to be a repeat of what happened on the deck here?” Jaga asked with a raised eyebrow.
“It depends,” I said, “on whether or not you want to join in.”
“We’ll see,” Jaga said. She slapped me on the ass and took the rudder from my hand. “Go up front, watch for any trouble. I’ll get us there in one piece.”
The stream appeared a few minutes later, and Jaga angled us toward its mouth. Jiro cursed when he realized what we were up to, and his jinsei-amplified voice rolled across the water in an echoing wave.
“You can’t escape me!” The words were filled with so much rage, the spirits flinched away from them.
I didn’t have a technique to boost my voice, so I made do with sign language. Jiro’s horse reared at my obscene gesture, and his mean cowered back from their commander’s roar of anger.
He could be as pissed as he wanted to be. It didn’t matter. I’d beat the asshole, and there was no way he’d catch me before I reached the lake and returned the spirits to their mistress.
We reached the Deepways a half hour later. Its entrance was an enormous cave that opened like a giant’s mouth in the side of a hill. The limestone cavern’s opening had been carved into an elaborate archway inlaid with silver scripts and golden plaques. The workmanship was exquisite, though the years of neglect had taken its toll and eroded much of the fine detail into oblivion.
“When was the last time anyone used the Deepways?” I asked Jaga as we drifted under the arch and into the cavern’s gloom.
“At least twenty years.” The riverboat pilot gestured toward a pole that lay against the boat’s side. “Check the depth for me. I can’t see a goddamned thing in here.”
I snagged the bamboo pole off the deck and lowered its point into the water until I felt the riverbed.
“It’s four marks deep.” I replaced the pole and leaned against the boat’s edge.
The sun’s light didn’t penetrate far past the cave’s mouth. As darkness closed around us, I spotted several glowing stones mounted on raised platforms along the edges of the river. Their weak light revealed the outlines and shadows of a subterranean shipyard, complete with slips for boats of all shapes and sizes to dock. When it was in use, this must’ve been an impressive place. Now, though, nature had gone a long way toward reclaiming the cave.
“There it is,” Jaga said and nodded toward the prow of the boat. “That’s the cocksucking Deepways.”
After the gloom of the cavern, I’d expected more darkness. Instead, the mouth of the Deepways swirled with flashes of sacred energy like bolts of lightning in a thunderhead. It was brighter here than it had been at the entrance, and the light cast harsh shadows across the water.
“I wonder if it’s still active,” I said. “If it is, there’s no telling where we’ll end up once we go through.”
“I don’t think it’s active,” Jaga said. “When I was a kid, my mom and dad took me on a trip through the Deepways. You could see clear from one end of the Deepways to the other when they were working the way they ought. There weren’t any clouds or that swirly light bullshit.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Cross your fingers.”
My spirit sight told me there wasn’t anything threatening hidden in the cloud. The flashes of energy were senjin, but it wasn’t tainted. Whatever bindings had been used to create the Deepways had spared at least this part of it from the worst of the corruption.
“If this wrecks my boat, I’ll chew your dick off,” Jaga promised.
The sampan slid into the churning cloud, and I instantly knew we’d made a terrible mistake.
The cavern vanished behind us and was replaced ahead of us by a long, straight tunnel composed entirely of agitated mist. Jagged strokes of sacred energy crawled through the foggy walls, pulsing and flashing in an eerie pattern that made my skin crawl. A moaning wind echoed around us, and I wondered where the hell this tunnel would take us.
The river under the sampan still flowed, though its surface had turned inky black broken only by phosphorescent glimmers as oddly shaped things swam past us in both directions. My spirit sight showed me lurking shadows at the edges of the tunnel, their eyes red sparks, their mouths lined with electric-blue teeth. With the way my luck had been running, I expected the creatures to surge out of the shadows and attack us. Instead, they waited, watched, and then closed ranks behind us.
“What the fuck is going on?” Jaga asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m going up front to get a better look.”
The spirits’ hunger was palpable. It surrounded us like a wet blanket, heavy on my shoulders, suffocating with its intensity.
“The tunnel’s getting narrower,” Ayo said. “A little at a time.”
“She’s right,” Aja said. “It’s closing around us.”
That’s why the spirits hadn’t attacked. They were waiting for the tunnel to do the heavy lifting and crush the sampan so we’d be stranded in the water with them. Then they’d tear us apart like feeding sharks.
“I’m not dying here today,” I growled.
The Deepways were sacred energy constructs. They’d been built to allow quick travel between distant points, and they ran on pure senjin. There was so much raw energy here that it crackled like static on my skin. I wasn’t sure what had turned this place into a death trap, and I didn’t care. I doubted I could unravel that puzzle before we were smashed to pulpy bits.
I could, however, suck the juice out of the tunnel. With any luck, that would be enough to get it to stop.
“Don’t let anything eat me for a minute. I need to meditate.” I flopped onto the deck in a cross-legged meditation posture and closed
my eyes.
I drew in a series of deep, hungry breaths. Pure senjin rushed into my core. It was powerful stuff, so potent it left me feeling drunk. In only a handful of moments, the untainted mercurial energy had strained my core to its limits. It rested inside me like a lead balloon, the density of its power almost overwhelming.
It also wasn’t nearly enough.
The walls were still closing in, and the senjin still surrounded us in dizzying quantities.
“Okay, that didn’t work.” I stood and paced up and down the deck. “I can’t pull enough energy out of the walls to stop them from closing in on us. We’d need some kind of barrier. Something to keep it from —”
Holy shit. A barrier.
I ran into the cabin and grabbed the satchel I’d taken from the other Deepways station. The black book was still where I’d left it, its glossy cover gleaming with potential. I’d only been able to read the table of contents when I’d discovered the book. I’d advanced since then, though, and hoped I could at least make use of the first of its techniques.
I crossed my fingers and flipped open the Formation Manual of Borders and Boundaries to the first page after the table of contents.
“The Wall of Sanctity,” I read aloud, so relieved I struggled to keep my voice from shaking. “A boundary-formation technique that will exclude all types of sacred energy from entering or leaving its confines. Useful for transporting dangerous practitioners or shielding your domicile from hostile techniques.”
I studied the manual’s detailed instructions as quickly as I could. The words burned into my thoughts, transforming themselves into strange glyphs and sigils in my mind’s eye. My spirit sight blurred, then snapped into focus as the details of the Wall of Sanctity formation etched themselves into my core.
“If you’re going to do something, this would be a good time,” Aja said, her voice high and nervous.
“Watch and be amazed,” I said with a grin. The walls were dangerously close to the boat’s hull, but that was all right. I had this.
I transferred a node’s worth of rin out of my core and up through my arm. Following the manual’s instructions, I formed the sacred energy into a small, crimson pyramid and placed the new construct on the boat’s prow. I repeated the process nine more times, and evenly spaced the pyramids around the boat’s perimeter. The exercise left me exhausted, but that was all right. With my nodes empty, I could refuel on pure senjin.
“Those better come off my fucking boat,” Jaga snapped. “They’re ugly, and they’ll get in my way.”
“They’re going to save your life,” I said.
“Sure they are.”
“Just watch!”
I drew in a deep breath, and pure senjin rushed into my core. My spirit separated the silver dream energy into its masculine and feminine components, transferring the rin into my nodes and shedding the blue shio from my pores. In a few moments, I’d have enough energy to activate the pyramids.
I hoped.
I coaxed a thread of energy from each of my nodes to each of the pyramids in turn. It was incredibly draining because the pyramids slurped the energy out of the node the instant it made contact. The sudden loss of all that sacred energy almost dropped me to my knees. As it was, I had to catch myself with one hand against the boat’s cabin and still nearly toppled into the river.
The tunnel’s collapsing walls were an inch or so away from the sampan’s hull. I clenched my teeth and prayed something, anything, would happen. The pyramids had eaten all my spirit’s energy, but they hadn’t done anything but glow a sullen red.
It was going to be very embarrassing if I’d been wrong. Fortunately, everyone who’d witnessed my foolish mistake would also be dead before they had a chance to tease me about what I’d done.
Small victories.
The walls closed in around the boat. There was a high-pitched grinding noise like pieces of steel being dragged across each other. The boat shuddered violently, and the river’s current slowed suddenly, almost pitching all of us onto our faces. Jaga wrestled with the rudder, while the spirits shouted in surprise and backed away from the prow. I watched, helpless to do anything else, as the tunnel prepared to crush the sampan.
At the last possible second, a curtain of brilliant red power flared from the tips of the pyramids. The brilliant radiance pushed back against the walls of churning senjin, and our boat lurched into motion again. The barrier had held.
But not for long.
A sudden ugly crackling sound slapped against my ears, and the pyramids went dark.
Chapter Ninteen
MY BREATH CAUGHT IN my throat in the space between heartbeats. The light had gone out of the pyramids and the flickers of senjin disappeared from the trap’s walls. We were blind, and not even my spirit sight could find any light to focus on.
And then, miraculously, radiant red sparks shuddered to life inside each of the pyramids. The formation repelled the trap, at least for the moment, and gave us a tiny sliver of breathing room. By the formation’s light, I saw that the misty tunnel was still closing in around us, though at a much slower pace.
I ignored the shouts and cries of dismay from the spirits and the pilot. They seemed certain we were about to die.
Not if I had anything to say about it.
“Do something, Kyr!” Jaga shouted.
While the pylons of the Wall of Sanctity were still ready and willing to protect us, they didn’t have enough juice left in their structures to affect sacred energy. That was good enough because it meant I was able to draw more of the raw, pure senjin that surrounded us into my core. I gulped it in, ignoring proper breathing technique in a mad rush to fill my nodes as quickly as possible. The mercurial power battered my core, and by the time I’d processed it into rin and stuffed it into my nodes, my guts felt like I’d gone a few rounds in the sparring ring with the king of kidney punches and body blows
I filled all but one of the pyramids with my sacred energy. That left an opening in the cage for me to process even more senjin, and I used it to refill my empty nodes. I’d never gone through this much senjin and rin in such a short period of time, and it left me feeling punch-drunk. It was hard to hold my head up, and even harder to think clearly. I’d pay for this little stunt tomorrow, but at least I’d be alive.
I filled the last pyramid, and the Wall of Sanctity formation ignited. I maintained my connection to the pyramids, pushing more of my rin into them whenever their lights dimmed. Minutes passed, my skull throbbed, and my eyes burned from the light of the blazing barrier. Even with my eyes closed, I couldn’t escape the glare of the cage I’d created. It was impossible to see beyond the wall of sparks that surrounded us, and I hoped we weren’t about to run aground.
At some point, I screamed. I was overwhelmed, my mind, body, and spirit taxed beyond their limits. Cool hands pressed against my chest, soothing voices murmured meaningless words into my ears. None of it mattered. I pushed the rin out of my core and into the pyramids until there was nothing left of me to give. My nodes were dark, but still I pushed, wringing sacred energy from my flesh and blood, burning my life force to keep the barrier up and my people safe.
Then I sagged against the boat’s cabin, blind and deaf, lost in a darkness that closed around the fitful spark of life that was all that remained in my core.
At least the pain was gone. If this was death, I was grateful that it didn’t hurt at all.
In fact, it felt pretty fucking good.
Really fucking good.
Someone kissed me and a tongue flickered across the sharp edges of my teeth. Hands tangled in my hair, and something warm and wet closed around my fingers. Liquid heat enveloped my cock, and that was all it took to drag me out of the darkness.
Jaga was astride me, her back facing me, her feet flat on the deck next to my hips, her knees pulled up to her breasts. She was hot and tight around me, the muscles of her sex squeezing and relaxing in a counterpoint rhythm to her rocking hips. She bobbed up and down, the long, lean muscl
es of her legs flexing as a dragon tattoo on her back danced along the curve of her spine.
“You could’ve asked,” I said sarcastically. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s not polite to fuck an unconscious guy?”
“Oh, good, you’re not dead,” Jaga said over her shoulder. Her dark hair had fallen over her eyes, hiding them. Her full lips were twisted into a wry grin. “This was their idea. Doesn’t feel like it’s bothering you much.”
That was very true. I hadn’t exactly been a virgin when I went up to the top of Mount Shiki, but the only sex I’d had since then had been with spirits. They were vigorous and talented lovers, don’t get me wrong, but there was something about the feel of another human that was different and exciting.
“You scared the fuck out of us,” Aja snarled. She kissed me fiercely and bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. “Don’t you ever do anything like that again.”
“Or what?” I laughed. “You’ll kill me?”
“Yes,” Ayo replied. I realized my fingers were deep inside her. With her free hand, she parted the lips of her sex and stroked the swollen pearl above her dripping opening with her middle finger. The motion dragged a low, guttural groan from her, and she swallowed my fingers entirely.
With a start I saw that her core was nearly empty. Aja’s was little better. They’d been near death before they’d woken me, and the idea filled me with a combination of anger and regret. I’d been so preoccupied with Jiro and then the problem in the cavern I hadn’t noticed how dangerously close to oblivion the spirits had come.
I grabbed Aja by the back of her head and pulled her mouth to mine. She licked the blood from my lip, and I tasted it on her tongue like a hot, bright spot of metal. That flavor ignited a spark of primal lust inside me that urged me to push deeper into Jaga. My tongue flashed over Aja’s, searching, desperate, and greedy.
Raw, tainted senjin flooded into my hollowed core, where it boiled and added its heat to the passion running through my veins.