On the ballcourt in Acapulco, she would have had more room to dodge. Its playing alley was broader, and the painted walls leading up to the goals ascended at a gentler, more-traversable angle. But the builders of this Metica City court must have liked their action closer. The alley was only seven yards wide, and the end zones were capped. There wasn’t much room to run.
Not that she needed to.
As the sailor drew closer, Haru planted the butt of her ko-naginata in the earth, as if preparing to receive a cavalry charge. After all, this fellow was big enough to be a horse. But at the last moment, she dropped the front of her polearm and swept the blade at his shins.
Caught off guard, the sailor slammed his sword down to parry so hard the tip stuck in the ground and nearly tripped him. He turned a near-somersault to avoid cutting himself on his own weapon.
Humming to herself, Haru danced out of the sailor’s bumbling way and gave a quick bow to the crowd. Only a few cheered. Good. That meant the rest had bet against her.
Normally, she would have dragged this out. A stumble here to make it seem like an even fight, a fall there to drive up the betting. But she had her little samurai out scouting, on the lookout for an Anglo with a toddler, a Han woman in a wheeled chair, or—
The wiry man who’d been pushing her. He was here, watching the fight.
Frowning, Haru made space for herself by whirling her ko-naginata in a crescent arc again, this one directed at the sailor’s face. As he leapt back, his expression no longer so confident now that he realized how much reach her polearm gave her, she took the opportunity to study the wiry Han in the crowd.
Yes, it was him. The same man she’d spoken to on the northern causeway the day before and seen this morning in Chintown. He met her eyes, then held up a peso, gave it to Deepak, and pointed at her.
Making her want to throw the fight.
But the wiry Han’s money was already in play. Better to win it than cede her take to an oaf and his backers. So Haru refocused on the sailor.
“Yield,” she said in Mandarin as she darted her ko-naginata past his frantic swordplay and slapped him on the cheek with the flat of her blade.
“Yield,” she repeated, forcing him to hop over a second sweep at his shins before slapping him on the other cheek.
“Yield,” she said a third time, making as if to bring her ko-naginata down atop his skull in a half-moon swing. When he moved to block, she reversed the polearm’s direction and lunged forward to slam him in the stomach with the butt of the shaft.
She didn’t have to ask again. After the big sailor had fallen to his knees and finished gasping for air, he croaked “I yield,” and Deepak stepped back into the playing alley to hold up her hand.
“Victor by surrender,” he yelled, eliciting a few cheers and several curses. “Winners, come get your payout!”
The Hindoo would find Ju-long later and give him Haru’s cut. For now, she pulled away as the smarter gamblers moved onto the court, the wiry Han among them. As soon as he collected his payment, he tossed it to her.
“Well done,” he said. “Can we talk?”
Haru scanned the crowd while pocketing the unexpected coins. The woman with the bamboo braces wasn’t here. Neither was the scarred Anglo or the toddler. “What about?”
“A job. For good money.” The Han gestured toward the street. “Meet me outside if you’re interested.” Without waiting for an answer, he headed for the exit.
Curious.
Haru had a quick word with Deepak about fighting again tomorrow, then climbed over the wall of the nearer end zone and into one of Metica City’s busiest thoroughfares.
“Thank you, Rong,” the Han was saying to a young boy who could have been Ju-long’s twin. The boy gave Haru a speculative look before scampering off to the north.
She rested the butt of her ko-naginata on her foot, a pose that looked idle but still left her free to move at a moment’s notice. “What’s this job, then?”
“You’re fast,” the Han said, nodding at her ko-naginata. “And if your Espan is as good as your Mandarin, you must be quite the translator.”
She shrugged.
“Are you onna-bugeisha?”
So he knew the word for female samurai—good for him. “Near enough. What’s the job?”
“In a moment.” The Han clasped his hands together. “A ‘near’ onna-bugeisha in Metica City, patrolling with gente pardes and dueling for money … How did you come here?”
“I’m a champion swimmer.”
He smiled politely. “Was it Sakoku?”
Oh, well done. He also knew that the Tokugawa shogunate had enacted a “closed country” policy to bar foreigners from coming into Nippon and Nippons from leaving. What a clever fellow. Give him a prize! “Near enough,” she repeated. “So: the job?”
“The madness of emperors,” the wiry Han muttered, shaking his head. “The job is that I need a guide to Huancavelica. A guide and a guard.”
That cinched it. This was him. The man who’d taken Isaura’s child and left her that cryptic note. But … “Why?”
“I heard it’s a hard road. Have you been there?”
“Near it. I’ve helped guard the Espans’ silver caravans from Toposi. What’s in Huancavelica? Aside from quicksilver and death.”
The wiry Han studied her, then laughed. It sounded strained. “Shall we stop pretending?” he asked after she’d raised her eyebrows.
She tightened her grip on her ko-naginata. “Pretending this is interesting, you mean?”
“Pretending that I didn’t see you with Isaura and Amadi earlier today, and that they didn’t hire you to find me.”
Haru gauged the busy street. Wielding her ko-naginata effectively might be difficult with so many passersby, but there was always her kaiken. It would only take a heartbeat to free the knife from its belt sheath and jam the blade into this foul-smiling kidnapper. “They only hired me to translate your note … Shen Da.”
“Ah.” He seemed equal parts surprised and relieved. “So they didn’t know what it said until today? Yet they still came south … Perhaps the vision moves them as well.”
Well, that didn’t sound crazy at all. “What’s in Huancavelica?” she repeated. “And what does the child have to do with it?”
Da grimaced. Was that shame? “More than I’d like.” He leaned back and exhaled, unmindful of how her hand had moved to the handle of her kaiken. No warrior, this one.
“Aren’t you curious about your role in all this?” he said after a moment.
“I know my role: get the boy from you and return him to Isaura.”
“So quick to help a white woman.”
“So quick to help a child,” Haru corrected.
“I see.” Da leaned back in, still oblivious to how much he kept exposing himself to a quick thrust. “Here’s what I know: my sister saw you the other day. Just after you and your friends started down the northern causeway.”
Haru snorted. “What extraordinary vision she must have.”
“You’re righter than you realize. She didn’t see you with her eyes. She saw you in her mind.”
At least this had become halfway entertaining. “Oh? And what does that mean?”
“It means you’re wu, even if you don’t realize it yet. It means you’ll make for an excellent guide.” He grimaced again, as if tasting something foul now. “And you know what else?”
“I know your breath smells like scented sewage. Have you considered—”
Before she finished responding, and without making any motion that would have tipped her off and triggered a strike from her kaiken, Da breathed purple-inflected air into Haru’s open mouth.
And everything went hazy.
Chapter Ten
The Causeway
There were too many people on the causeways.
Each bridge—to the north, south, east, and west—had been packed with too many merchants leaving Metica City for the day. Too many farmers and fishermen returning from fields and
nets along the coast, too many construction crews hauling materials back and forth.
Too many people in Amadi’s way.
But despite the ache in his crooked leg, he hadn’t stopped running, not since Isaura had asked him to search the city’s perimeter while she checked Chintown and the Plaza Mayor’s immense market. Supposedly Haru had her orphans watching the eastern and southern causeways—the likeliest paths to this Huancavelica; hadn’t that been where Hattack, the dented Chata, had told him to go?—but Amadi wasn’t expecting any help from the Nippon. Not for free. No, he just had to keep moving, weaving through the endless crowds and shouting apologies when he misjudged an opening and jostled someone as he pounded past. To make things harder still, every so often one of the causeways’ raiseable portions was pulled up to allow a boat (or two, or three, or four) to glide through, forcing everyone on foot to wait.
Like now. He’d already been held up by this section of the southern causeway on the way out to the coast, and as he jogged back toward the city, he could see the same cursed platform angling upward. He’d waited then, but this time there were seven vessels of various sizes forming a line, and more coming.
A swim would feel good anyway.
Without slowing, Amadi ran to the raised platform’s edge and dove off the side. The water was wonderfully cold, and as he swam deep enough to pass beneath a canoe, he wondered why he hadn’t done this earlier.
But once he’d clambered back onto the causeway and reentered the city, he knew it was time to check in with Isaura in Chintown. They’d agreed to meet by the big scribe’s stall when the neighborhood’s Mohammedans were called to sunset prayers, and he could already hear a muezzin sounding the call from a nearby mosque. He’d have to hurry, wet feet or not.
Accelerating into a sprint, Amadi fairly flew the rest of the way to Chintown. He was coming from the opposite direction this time, which meant he still had several minutes of all-out running ahead of him before he reached the stall. Hopefully Isaura would wait for him. She’d seemed like a patient person before this all started, but now …
Not that he’d be acting differently if it were his child that had been taken—or Oseye. No, he’d understand if the Espan wasn’t there when he arrived. She’d just be out searching again, and it would be easy enough to pick her auburn hair and ivory skin out of the endless crowds. He’d find her.
But it would be easier if he didn’t have to.
After cutting in front of a merchant and his mule, Amadi ignored the ensuing stream of curses (which he couldn’t understand anyway), tore around a corner, and—
Nearly smashed into Haru. The short Nippon woman was standing in front of what looked like a healer’s shop, holding her sword-spear upright and staring into the distance.
Amadi slowed and cocked his head. He didn’t share any languages with Haru, but what he wanted to know wasn’t complicated to express. “Shen Da? Chase Harper?”
The Nippon blinked, but gave no further reaction.
“Shen Da?” he tried again, miming shielding his eyes from the sun and looking about as if trying to find something.
Still nothing. Was she playing a game with him? Had she decided not to respond until he offered payment? Even if he’d been willing, he didn’t have any coin. Isaura had the little money remaining to them.
“I don’t have time for this,” Amadi muttered in Gbe. He turned to leave, then stopped— the corners of Haru’s mouth were leaking purple bubbles.
“It almost looks like rouge,” Isaura had said on the earthen pyramid when she’d wiped his lips clean of a similar substance. “Prettied yourself for the Red Wraith, did you?”
What was this?
He tapped his mouth, then gestured at hers. “Are you all—”
Shouting erupted from inside the healer’s shop. A second later, the door flung open and a wheeled chair emerged. On it sat the Han woman with the bamboo braces, and behind it was the man who’d accompanied her that morning.
Shen Da.
He was pushing the chair with one arm and throwing coins inside the shop with the other, clearly furious at someone, probably the healer. The Han woman looked just as sick as she had earlier. Was that the reason for Shen Da’s anger?
Amadi surged forward, darting around Haru and grabbing the wheeled chair’s closest arm. His other hand seized the Han woman’s throat. “Shen Da!” he roared as he lifted the woman, surprised at how light she was, even with the braces. “Her life for the boy. Now!”
Shen Da jerked his head around. The Han’s eyes flashed from angry to murderous, and he spat two words in Mandarin.
Their meaning became clear when Haru’s sword-spear severed the hand Amadi was using to hold up the Han woman. And as the invalid and her braces clattered back into the chair, Haru flipped her sword-spear so that its cutting edge sliced through his other wrist on her upswing.
Then she started humming.
For a moment, Amadi could only watch as his hands dangled in space, the one still wrapped about the Han woman’s throat and the other clutching the wheeled chair. But his unmoored fingers quickly relaxed their grips, both appendages began to fall, and pain ripped through him like a brushfire as his spirit armor surged to seal the gushing stumps at the ends of his forearms.
“Mercenary bitch!” he snarled as he rammed his right elbow behind him. But Haru had already leapt to the side, and his looping blow served only to help spin him around to confront her.
The Nippon’s face still bore no expression.
But she kept humming, and her hands moved as if possessed, whirring the sword-spear through a dizzying storm of thrusts and feints. Amadi dodged two of the strikes almost by accident, but a third cut through his cheek and a fourth cleaved into his shoulder as he stumbled back.
By the vodun, she was fast.
He’d taken worse punishment before, but never so rapidly, with fresh agony stacked atop fresh agony. He also wasn’t sure his hands would heal on their own. The last time he’d lost a limb, it had taken the combination of Quecxl’s healing and the Red Wraith’s power to put things right.
Yet he wasn’t helpless on his own. His stumps had mostly stopped bleeding, and the two flaps of his cheek were already knitting back together, a development Haru seemed to have noticed. For a fleeting second, her humming faltered and her eyes widened in shock, the first emotion he’d seen from her since the fight began.
Then Shen Da barked something else at her, and she stepped in front of the Han as he wheeled the sick woman into the street at a near-sprint. But Haru’s next web of bladed wizardry didn’t seem designed to press her attack. Most of her hyper-quick movements looked defensive now, her sword-spear forming a blurry, elongated shield to protect the Han’s flight.
Amadi charged in anyway.
Haru hit him three times before he passed her: across his neck, between his ribs, and through his back. One of these blows would have been enough to disable or kill someone without spirit armor. Combined, the torment caused the thick energy inside him to sputter for an awful moment before reasserting itself.
But the last strike was what he’d been waiting for.
Before the Nippon could pull her sword-spear out of his torso, he tensed his stomach muscles, pressed his forearms to either side of the blade protruding from his belly button, and twisted.
The ploy worked. Haru hadn’t been expecting him to cause more damage to himself, and the maneuver ripped the weapon from her grasp, leaving the sword-spear quivering in his back like a newly planted flagpole. Except the pain was shattering, and Amadi could feel his spirit armor sputtering again, flickering in warning.
A warning he ignored.
Dashing forward before Haru could reclaim her sword-spear, Amadi half-spun, half-rolled so that the shaft swung towards the Han woman’s bouncing chair. His aim was true. The sword-spear lodged between two of the nearest wheel’s spokes, and—still anchored in his back—caused the wheel to lock, the chair to flip over, and his spirit armor to nearly fail.
It did more than sputter this time. As the impact flung him down the street and sent the sword-spear’s blade scraping along his spine and ricocheting through his intestines, he felt the thick energy abandon him entirely for a few breaths. But it returned in time to shove aside the encroaching darkness and bring him back to the present, where Shen Da was shouting and lifting the Han woman into the chair while Haru righted it.
And now Amadi could hear the screams.
They must have started earlier. The street was too empty for people to have just begun panicking. But as he struggled to a stand, bleeding from half a dozen mortal wounds, a chorus of wails in different languages finally pierced his consciousness.
Bystanders weren’t the only people he’d scared. Shen Da cast him a worried look, and Haru’s expression flickered uncertainly before reverting to her mercenary’s mask of indifference. Good. She should be afraid now that he had her sword-spear.
There was no taking it out of his torso, however. Not without the hands he’d left behind on the healer’s doorstep. And advancing with the blade still sticking out of his stomach hurt. But he had no doubt it looked fearsome.
With the Han woman at last reseated, Shen Da gave him another frantic glance before rushing to push the chair further down the street, its wheels coated in Amadi’s blood.
He grinned, knowing his teeth were the same color. He would be as terrible as he needed to be to get the Han to lead him to Shoteka. And Chase Harper.
“Isaura!” Amadi bellowed, hoping the Espan was nearby. Surely the screaming would have drawn her. “I’ve found the Han! They’re headed north, and they’ve bought Haru!”
Still humming—was it her version of a battle cry?—the Nippon drew a long knife and watched him come, no doubt waiting for a chance to take back her sword-spear. But he kept her in front of him, leaving her nothing to grab but the blade’s slippery edge.
“Liar!” he spat in Gbe as he lunged at her. “Sellsword jackal!”
Haru skipped away, swiping at him with her knife. But her reach wasn’t the same without her primary weapon, and Amadi avoided further injury.
The Black Resurrection Page 9