by Nick Harrow
“Fucking hero shit,” I grumbled and stepped over the line of death.
The next few yards were a mess of tattered skin and shards of red-stained bone. Dots of corrupted senjin smoldered on the floor like splatters of acid, wisps of shadow rising from their hearts. The only good thing about the mess of mangled corpses was that it was proof, finally, that the goddamned Jade Seekers were dead.
I stepped around the worst of the carnage, but still managed to get nasty shit stuck to the bottoms of my feet. If I ever got out of there, I was going to take a bath for days.
A mound of something wet and red lay atop the intersection of the dream meridians at the center of the room. The pile of slop was surrounded by a spiral of bones that started very small and gradually increased in size until they reached the heart of the bloody mess. The largest of the bones was a cylinder the size of my clenched fist, and the smallest was no bigger than the last digit of my pinky. It was a bizarre sight, all the more horrible because I couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing.
My traitorous foot took another step, knowing full well I really, really didn’t want an up-close-and-personal look at the massacre.
A woman’s face stared up from the center of the gore, eyes wide, mouth hanging open as if in shock. Streaks of blood sliced her face into a hundred pale patches between their crimson lines. A dagger, black and glossy, had been plunged through her open mouth as if to nail her to the floor.
That tied my stomach into knots. I had no idea what kind of motherfucking beast could do this to anyone, and I didn’t want to find out.
“Oh, gods, no.” Ayo’s voice broke the silence. She unleashed a wailing sob that punched through my heart like a crossbow bolt. “Nononono.”
I’d been so horrified by what I’d seen that I hadn’t noticed the spirits enter the chamber behind me. They were too far away to see any details, but the light from my lantern was more than enough to show them the glistening red heap of flesh in front of me.
“Don’t look,” I shouted, far too late.
I raced across the room. I no longer cared if I stepped on a crack or slipped in the gore. Ayo was hurting. That was all that mattered.
I crossed the floor in seconds and swept her into my arms.
“You weren’t supposed to come down here,” I whispered into her ear, not sure she could even hear me over her inconsolable wails.
Aja stood mute before me, her eyes half-lidded, pain etched in cruel strokes across her face in the small shio light in her hand. If I’d had any doubt that the dead woman in the center of the floor was her mistress, it shattered into icy crystals under the weight of the spirit’s cold, dead stare.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I URGED THE SPIRITS to return to the surface, but they were having none of it.
“Take us to her,” Aja demanded. Her tone was unyielding as steel. “We have to know what happened.”
I guided them between the meridians and helped them avoid the worst of the carnage, but there was nothing else I could do for the spirits. Whatever dangers had been there, they were long gone now.
The spirits needed space to grieve for their mistress, and I needed space to think. After warning them to stay away from the lines on the floor, I headed back to the surface.
I took a short stroll to the south beach and threw myself down on its rocky shores. The pain of gravel biting into my ass and thighs sharpened my thoughts, and I welcomed it. I had to figure out what came next.
The dead woman at the bottom of the temple was a terrible tragedy, but she was only one problem on top of a very large pile of shit that needed my attention.
There was a goddamned army on the lake’s south shore, and they were building barges to come and kill the fuck out of me. By dawn, that problem would be so far up my ass I’d need a stick and a quart of oil to dislodge it.
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about the Jade Seekers showing up again. They’d taken their shot at the goddess and paid the price for it.
The island I was standing on was so badly corrupted, its stink was permanently lodged in my nostrils and the hum of its evil in my thoughts made it hard to concentrate on anything else for more than a few seconds at a time.
I wrestled my thoughts back into some semblance of order and reviewed the list of things that needed fixing.
Oh, yeah. The spirits were low on shio, their cores were still fucked, and they’d be dead before sunrise if I didn’t recharge them. I wasn’t sure they’d ever be in the mood to bump uglies again after what they’d seen down there. They’d been that woman’s familiars. There was a very real chance they’d want to die now that she was gone.
I tried not to imagine how I’d feel if I were them, and failed. If I’d stumbled onto the crimson bear’s body, savagely mutilated like that...
You’d kill whoever did it. And that’s what you should do now.
She was right, I supposed, but I had no idea who’d done this, or even where to start looking for the murderer. The Jade Seekers were involved, but I didn’t suspect there’d been any survivors of the slaughter down there.
“I need your help,” I whispered, hoping Mielyssi could hear me. “I’ve come all this way to save these two, and now I’m trapped in a dead end, and we’re all going to die. I don’t know what to do.”
The damp wind off the lake slapped my cheeks, coating them with mist.
“That’s a shitty answer.”
A goose honked, and a peep frog squeaked in a desperate search for a mate.
I guess that was the best answer I was going to get.
“Fine,” I muttered. “I’ll figure it out on my own.”
My resources were pretty fucking limited. I had a war club that lit up thanks to my sexy spirit animal’s kiss. I had a satchel with a few herbs left in the bottom, a couple of core-stabilizing pills I’d made back in Jiro Kos’s camp, two low-level techniques, and the bedroom skills to make humans and spirits alike weak in the knees.
None of those assets seemed capable of pulling my ass out of the swiftly growing fire I’d landed in.
With a sigh, I sat up, opened my satchel, and looked inside to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
Turned out, I had. The Formation Manual, its sleek cover so glossy it almost glowed, was right where I’d left it.
I opened the manual and took a closer look at its contents. The Wall of Sanctity was still the only formation I could read.
“I don’t think any light reading is going to save your ass.” Yata returned from its scouting mission and landed on the beach next to me. “The White Tigers have almost finished their boats.”
“Well, fuck.” I closed the book and shoved it back into my satchel. “I’ve only got one thing to try. Might as well get going on it.”
I paced the circumference of the island and discovered it was a small circle in the middle of a very big lake. The temple itself was a fifty-foot square in the island’s center, with thirty feet of land between it and the island’s shore on all sides.
I retraced my steps, though this time I dropped a pyramidal pylon of rin energy every few steps. When I reached the end of my jaunt around the island, the barrier was almost ready to light up. One more jolt of rin and it’d throw up a barrier that might just keep the bad guys at bay.
For a little while, anyway.
Unfortunately, my core was empty and there was no way for me to refill it. Any senjin I drew from the island would be tainted, and the spirits were far too grief-stricken to help me cleanse the power. That would leave me with nodes filled to the brim with corrupted energy that would quickly eat me from the inside out.
Don’t die, or the world dies with you.
“I’m trying to stay alive,” I promised Mielyssi. “But there are a lot of assholes fucking things that up.”
“Talking to yourself is a sign of insanity,” Yata said. “Nice pyramids. What are you going to do with them?”
“Nothing,” I confessed. “They mark the boundaries of a barrier, but I don’
t have any rin to fire them up.”
“Want some of mine?” The bird hopped off my shoulder and landed on the ground next to the last pyramid I’d placed.
“You can give me sacred energy?” My jaw dropped. “How long have you been holding out on me?”
Yata hopped back defensively, and I realized I’d raised my war club. I must have been more stressed out than I realized to lift a hand to my familiar.
“You didn’t need it before now!” Yata crowed. “And I don’t have all that much. I was saving it for a special occasion.”
“I needed it when we ran into that trap in the river Deepways,” I grumbled.
“You were fine. I would have jumped in if it looked like you were going to die.” Yata preened and flicked a tattered feather onto the ground. “You want it or not?”
“I can’t believe you were holding out on me.” I stared at the raven’s core with my spirit sight and saw that it held seven nodes filled with pure senjin. “How fast do you fill up?”
The raven squawked and paced back and forth in front of me.
“No idea.” It flapped its wings. “I’ve been full since before we met. Didn’t have anything to spend the juice on.”
I cursed myself for an idiot. I should have known to check my familiar for a reserve of power. I’d been playing with tainted senjin when I could have used the pure stuff stored in Yata.
“I’m going to try something. You’ll probably hate it.”
“I hate everything you do to me,” Yata squawked. “Remember that time when we met and you almost killed us both? Good times.”
“No promises.” Before the raven could protest any further, I imagined one node of its senjin draining through our connection into me.
“You were right. I hate this.” Yata let out a loud caw, then ducked its head under its wing.
A strand of senjin flowed through the bond between us, slow as cold honey, and eased into my core. It didn’t hurt, nothing exploded, and we weren’t on fire, so I was off to a good start. It took most of five minutes to transfer the single node from Yata to me, but we were both alive at the end of the process.
My core quickly broke the mercurial dream energy down into rin and shio, absorbed the rin, and let the shio ooze out of my pores in tiny beads of azure light.
“That worked.” My words came out in a rough croak, and I cleared my throat. Must have been getting dehydrated. “Now we wait to see how long it takes for your senjin to come back.”
“What if it never comes back?” The bird hopped nervously from foot to foot to foot.
“Then I’ll thank you for your sacrifice.” I yawned. The long day had finally caught up with me. “Don’t be so dramatic.”
“Says the sacred energy thief who may have just crippled me for life,” Yata squawked and dodged the pebble I threw at it. “Bastard.”
“Whiner.” I took a deep breath, hoping the cool lake air would revive me a little. No such luck. I meditated, hoping that would help me find a better route through the maze of hazards that was closing in on me from all sides.
After three hours, I hadn’t discovered any new insights that would save my ass, and the raven’s senjin hadn’t refilled.
“Crippled,” it groaned. “I’ll spend the rest of my life with an empty node.”
“How was I supposed to know!” I shouted at the bird. “Maybe it’s not refilling because the senjin here is tainted.”
“Or maybe I’m crippled.” Yata jumped into the air and circled around me. “You’re the worst shaman ever.”
It flapped its wings indignantly and landed on the top of the temple.
“For fuck’s sake—”
“Kyr!” Aja shouted as she burst from the temple’s doorway. Her crimson hair trailed behind her in unruly tangles, and her eyes glowed with a feral light as she stumbled toward me.
Her core was nearly empty, the nodes flickering weakly as she struggled back to her feet.
I rushed to the spirit’s side and scooped her into my arms.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have tried to—”
“She’s alive,” Aja gasped, skin pale, nostrils flaring. “Our mistress is alive, Kyr.”
“How?” I asked, almost certain that Aja was delirious.
I’d seen the remnants of her mistress, and there was no way that messy pile of shredded meat was alive. The spirits had to be mistaken.
“Ayo fed her energy,” Aja insisted. “She bled herself and our mistress revived. She’s hurt so badly, Kyr. She needs you.”
“You need me, and Ayo definitely needs me if she sacrificed her shio to feed your mistress,” I said. Suddenly, I hated the mutilated woman below the earth. If the spirit died in a vain attempt to save her mistress’s life, I didn’t know what I’d do.
“We’re not important,” Aja insisted. “Go down there. Save her.”
My pulse surged with new hope. If their mistress was alive, there was a chance I could heal her and the spirits.
I raced into the temple, the rising sun throwing its first copper rays through the mist behind me, Aja in my arms, and prayed I was up to the task before me.
Don’t die.
“No promises,” I muttered to myself.
A baying horn sounded from the south side of the lake.
The White Tigers were coming.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I POUNDED DOWN THE stairs as fast as my legs would carry me, careening off the rail at every corner, heedless of the bruises and bumps I picked up in my rush to reach the gory room. My club dangled from my right hand, banging off my shins with every step, throwing out just enough light to cast confusing shadows in every direction.
Aja’s life was fading before my eyes. She felt lighter by the second, as if her body was fading away with the last of her rin. In a very few minutes, she’d be lost forever. Ayo had to be at least as bad off, maybe worse. I couldn’t imagine their mistress was in a better place, either, and I had no idea how much time it would take to heal them all.
More time than I had, to be sure.
If that horn had been the army casting off its barges to head for the island, we had less than an hour before they arrived. That might give me enough time to recharge the spirits and figure out what was wrong with their mistress. There was no way it would be enough time for much of anything else.
Still, I had to try. I hadn’t come all this way, suffered through so much, to give up now.
I found Ayo slumped over her mistress. The woman at the heart of the pattern was still every bit as bad off as she had been when I’d left her. Her body was mutilated, torn open and its pieces rearranged like some disgusting art project.
But she was also undeniably alive.
Her eyes fixed on me as I approached the nexus of the dream meridians. Someone had pulled the knife out of her mouth, and her jaw worked soundlessly for a moment. She blinked and furrowed her brow, and something stirred inside the mound of torn meat beneath her face.
A bony finger, its flesh flensed away, emerged from the carnage. Its bloody tip pressed into Ayo’s cheek, and the woman stared hard into my eyes. Her thoughts blazed bright in my mind for a moment. She needed the nexus cleansed, and she needed me to do it.
“I don’t know if I can,” I gasped. “I’ll do my best.”
Aja was weak, but Ayo was unconscious and her core held so little shio I couldn’t even see the sacred energy. I laid the redhead down away from the remains of her mistress, careful not to let her touch the lines, then carried Ayo over and laid her down next to her companion. They looked so small and weak like that, their flesh pale and washed out in the silver light of my war club. Their eyes fluttered and tried to focus on me, and they stirred weakly, struggling to reach out to me.
“Heal us,” Aja whispered, her words faint and trembling. “Save us.”
I knelt down above their heads and kissed each of them gently on the lips. Faint sparks passed between us, the barest flicker of power from the one node of rin still in my core. The s
pirits started restlessly at its touch. It was a start, but they needed more. There was an endless source of sacred power in the dream meridians on either side of us, but I hesitated to draw from it.
Using that power would fill me with corruption. If the spirits were too weak to complete the purification ritual, we would all die.
But if I did nothing, the spirits would definitely die, and I’d probably be killed by the army when it rushed ashore by dawn’s early light. There was nothing for this but to throw the dice and gamble they came up in our favor.
I didn’t have time for fancy breathing techniques or meditation to cycle the corrupted power into my core. Instead, I shoved my fist into the churning current of the dream meridian that ran through the channel inscribed on the floor beside me.
The instant my knuckles touched the sacred energy, it flowed into me. Tainted senjin rushed up my arteries, found my heart, and exploded through every inch of my being in a cataclysmic flash of black fire.
A seizure racked my body, and I fought it with every fiber of my being. The corruption wanted to drag me down into the meridian and consume me. It was more powerful than anything I’d ever experienced before, and it dared me to defy its might.
Clearly, it didn’t know it was dealing with the stubbornest shaman in the world. The crimson bear had taught me to never back down from a fight, and I wasn’t about to start wimping out now. I held my ground, and let the energy pour into me.
With a guttural groan, I finally dragged my hand out of the current. Sticky rivulets of corrupted senjin dripped from my fingertips and splattered like drops of oil on the cold stone floor. My core was filled to bursting with the tainted energy. If I didn’t purify it, right now, I was dead.
Ayo’s eyes burned into mine as I lowered my mouth to hers. She gasped at the instant of contact, and her back arched as power flowed between us. Her skin glowed blue and her armor burned away as the power overflowed her core and illuminated her essence. She cried out and her arms curled around my neck. She sucked greedily on my tongue and yelped in surprise as crashing waves of intense sensation rippled through her muscles.