Samurai

by Jason Hightman

  “Wrong with me?” said Visser, his lips trembling.

  “This is not scary,” said the woman. “It’s just random notes and…and poetry. Poetry about snakes. Is that what you write?” She was bewildered.

  “Not snakes,” said Visser through clenched yellowish teeth. “Serpents. Dragons.”

  Nothing seemed funny to the woman anymore.

  The other two customers looked over, alarmed.

  Visser rose. Now he towered over the woman, seven feet tall, his skin rippling as heat waves passed through him, and her jaw dropped as she realized she was staring at a black-and-white Beast with eyes like yellow marbles.

  “True poetry is not written in ink,” said the Ice Dragon, “but in fire.”

  And he set the woman ablaze in the colors of good and evil, a black-and-white fire that matched his own skin, and the fire leapt into the air and carried her up to the ceiling, dropped her ashes in a split-second, and then spread to the photographers, one burned away in white fire, the other burned away in black.

  “Burn a little hope, today, snuff out a little light.

  Ebony doesn’t burn, my friend, it only turns to white.

  Die, die, and learn to like it, child….

  It only stings a little while, it’s really very mild.”

  His Serpentine mind was humming.

  But he found himself abruptly disappointed, for the fire he had made was turning to ice. It behaved like fire, flickering and moving about, but it was ice, no doubt about it. He had no control. The ice-fire stopped its quivering, the sharp spires of ice stilled, and the moving mass of crystalline flames ceased their crunching, breaking passage. The Serpent was left alone with frost-filled walls and ceiling.

  His fire had gone cold.

  Gloomily, he watched the rest of his TV show in the frigid ruins.

  Then he left the little café in the mountains and he headed for the sea to set his plans in motion.

  Chapter 9

  THE LONELINESS OF A GREAT SHIP

  SIMON ST. GEORGE AND his father had found their way to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where the globe had shown Alaythia, but there had been no sign of her. Simon began to have serious doubts they would find her even with the tracer device, because they could never quite catch up.

  “If she took a plane, she would be in China by now,” commented Simon.

  “Yes, but if she took a boat,” said Aldric, “she would be closer to the ocean, and she’d have a better chance of sensing the Black Dragon. He may very well be on the sea, on the move.”

  Simon frowned, considering the predicament.

  They were at the table in the galley, and the stove began belching black smoke. Aldric cursed and tried to save his stew. Nearly everything they cooked went bad now; it was as if the ship were punishing them for losing Alaythia.

  The ship itself seemed lonely without her. At night it made howling noises with the wind in its sails, and the rigging clanged rhythmically, as if calling out to her.

  Simon and Aldric knew exactly how the old ship felt.

  To stave off the emptiness—Aldric could spend entire days not talking at all—Simon had begun writing letters to Emily back in Ebony Hollow, though he knew he’d never send them; and if he did, she’d never read them. There were too many details in them about Dragonsigns, about Dragonhunting; they would have sounded insane to her, but he kept trying to find a way to make the dark world he knew seem reasonable.

  The ship felt like the most desolate place on earth, and the only thing that filled it up was the thought of Emily. He had started talking to her in his head. He knew he was thinking about her mainly because he had no real friends, but it was a useful way to kill time, and he figured it honed his skills for talking to people his own age. He worried that Emily might be in danger if a stray Serpent still seeking Alaythia somehow found its way to New England. He worried that he and his father wouldn’t find Alaythia, or that they’d find her dead, and then he feared that even thinking about it could make it happen. There was always something to worry about.

  His stomach churned that night as he began a new letter.

  “I think I’m getting an ulcer,” he muttered and looked over at Fenwick on the floor. “I wish you could talk,” he added, lying in the dim light of his bunk built into the ship’s wall. The fox stared back with no particular expression.

  Fenwick would have no sympathy for him. Fenwick had no worries. He was strong.

  “Never mind. I’m glad you can’t talk,” said Simon, feeling chastised.

  Then he heard his father clanging around in his room, sparring with no one, brandishing his sword. These days, Aldric never seemed to sleep. He blamed himself for everything, and Simon wished things would go back to the way they were in the old days—when Simon got blamed for everything.

  After awhile, Aldric came out of his room and into the hall where Simon’s bunk was. Simon stood staring, afraid he was in trouble.

  Gruffly, Aldric handed Simon a bottle of Irish ginger ale. “Here. Drink with me.”

  And that was all he said.

  Simon looked at him, holding the warm bottle in his hand.

  “I was thinking we might talk,” his father said sharply.

  Simon just stared.

  “Well, go on, then, open it,” Aldric said, and Simon pried off the bottle cap. He stood there awkwardly.

  The time passed like sandpaper over skin, the two of them in the hall, saying nothing, the ship rocking gently.

  Aldric was in another world altogether. Staring at his bottle, he didn’t look at Simon. The silence stretched on between them, and Simon shifted on his feet. Aldric still wasn’t saying anything. And then finally his father, grunting some indecipherable apology or explanation, pulled out his pipe and just walked away, returning to his room. His door clanked shut.

  Simon remained unmoving.

  He looked at the bottle in his hand, the top of it staring back, like the eye of some odd animal.

  “Okay,” Simon said quietly to himself. He sat on his bunk. Then he lay down and waited for something to happen.

  He heard Aldric go up on deck. Maybe the night air would cool him down.

  Fenwick padded over to Simon slowly, and nuzzled Simon’s hand with his snout. He seemed to want to cheer him up. It took a moment to realize the fox wanted him to move.

  He got up and followed Fenwick down the hall, past the cold night air streaming from the hatchway above, all the way to the end, to Aldric’s quarters. Simon almost never went in there.

  The fox nudged the door open. Feeling a nervous heat in his stomach, Simon hesitated, but Fenwick scurried into the stateroom. Simon figured he could always claim that he was just getting the fox out of there.

  The room was a mess, the way it always was before Alaythia had come along. Tunics and coats lay in a pile, old scrolls, spellbooks and travel guides were sprayed out everywhere. Weapons were unsheathed; the chest of international money lay open with currency stuffed in crudely; and an out-of-place notebook computer of Alaythia’s was left in the corner, probably from Aldric’s anger at not being able to make it work.

  Fenwick climbed onto the bed, with its wool blanket and animal pelts—a Viking’s idea of comfort—and poked at a bookshelf.

  Looking back to be sure Aldric wasn’t coming, Simon moved to examine it.

  Fenwick knocked open a small door in the bookshelf, revealing a stack of old photographs. Surprised at this secret cache, Simon took them out, and felt a stab of guilt as he stared down at his mother’s face.

  There were pictures of Maradine and Aldric from a long time ago; stacks of them.

  His heart raced with excitement. The past stared back at him.

  In black-and-white or faded color, pictures from all over the world.

  Aldric was young, in his twenties or thirties, his face more rounded and less hardened. He looked a lot like Simon, and he was handsome. Maradine was smiling, sometimes laughing, bright-eyed and longhaired and strong—and bearing more than
a passing resemblance to Alaythia.

  He’d seen pictures of her, but never so many. He knew she had lived on a ranch, and she was often pictured next to a horse, one Simon hadn’t seen before. She was his mother, and he felt somehow the images should have told him more, and that he should have felt more. It was strange. What stirred his emotions was the man in the photos.

  Aldric. He was the same in many ways. Tough gaze, clenched jaw, ill at ease in front of a camera. Still, in a few pictures, he looked calm, satisfied, happy.

  Simon looked to Fenwick. Why did he want him to see this? Is this how you cheer me up? he thought.

  The fox’s eyes flashed and turned black, and Simon was seeing the animal’s memory. It was the strongest feeling Fenwick had ever sent to him. Simon’s surroundings faded away, and he now felt himself on the ship in a different time and place. What he saw amazed him.

  In that moment, Aldric St. George was a young man. He was on the deck with Maradine, and they were dancing slowly; he was spinning her around. It was night, and there were a thousand stars, and he was singing an Irish tune, low and murmured. Simon couldn’t believe it—his father was actually singing, and it was good. He sounded just the way Simon would have expected, but he had never heard him before, not ever.

  He knew then that his mother had died because of her feelings, that was how the Creature was able to find her. But there was no sadness in the knowing, there was just a bright night before him, and his mother spinning, her long hair swinging about.

  He smiled, hearing his father sing. He was there, with them both. He wanted to laugh, and then it was gone. Everything vanished.

  He was in the creaking ship with Fenwick staring back at him.

  It was then he realized the only picture in the room that Aldric had on display was one of Ebony Hollow: he and his father…and Alaythia.

  If he didn’t get her back, he wouldn’t get his father back; not fully, not ever. He shoved the pictures back where they belonged and got out of there as quickly as he could.

  Chapter 10

  THE TIGER DRAGON

  THE BLACK DRAGON OF PEKING had unleashed a never-before-known hatred among Serpent-kind. It was common knowledge that he had helped the Dragonkillers and been instrumental in burying the Queen of Serpents.

  Many had died in the Grand Battle of the Serpent Queen, and the remaining Dragons were now trying to take over their territories. The entire Serpentine world had been thrown into disarray, the hierarchies demolished; all over the map, Serpents were fighting for new turf.

  There were new avenues opening up in crime, terrorism, business, and military dictatorships, and as always with these things, there were some who grasped the opportunities better than others.

  One such creature was the Dragon of Bombay.

  She was a Tiger Dragon, bearing a shapely, female, humanesque form with a thin set of huge transparent wings, useless wings. They stretched down her back, pretty and striped, like a fashion accessory, like a mink coat or some other insolent, useless thing.

  In fact, fashion was her domain. In her human manifestation, she had made herself look like a beautiful East Indian model, so beautiful she had been on the cover of countless magazines, appearing as a young woman with mocha-cinammon skin, a tall frame, high cheekbones, sleepy eyes with long black lashes, and a lanky body. You couldn’t quite tell where she came from or how old she was. She had used her looks to earn a small fortune on the catwalk, some years back, before an ugly argument with an American model had caused her to lose her temper—and she had torched the Manhattan girl in a New York minute.

  Several more of these arguments, usually over boys, resulted in more deaths—and dodging the police had made the whole thing hardly worthwhile.

  She decided to move into manufacturing, using sweatshop labor. Little girls and boys, and incredibly poor men and women were chained to sewing machines for long hours so she could make millions selling high fashion at shocking prices.

  She had a formula. In the factories there was an ivory sculpture with a giant tiger’s eye painted on it on every floor. The eyes hypnotized the workers. The workers never complained.

  Each tiger’s-eye sculpture had a pupil, like a giant pearl, which moved back and forth with a very slow, eerie clicking. At the same time, the sculptures gave off a low hum, like a growl, that would grow louder whenever the workers showed the slightest rebellion. Then the laborers would grow weak, uncertain, and decide not to challenge their masters.

  The Tiger Dragon could not decide which was better, the pain and suffering of her sweatshops (which gave her so very much joy), or the thought that millions of girls had seen her in magazines and starved themselves to look like her. She probably preferred her factories; so much agony to feed on, all in one place.

  The sweatshops lay beneath her magnificent, modern palace in Bombay.

  Her palace was itself a factory, home to the darkest suffering of all. The workers’ pain floated up to her and gave her strength to begin each day.

  The Tiger Dragon, whose name was Issindra, came from a family that had ruled over the ancient jungle lands of India, watching as Bombay grew around their domain over the centuries. Through all the squabbles—and she had of course killed the rest of her family by now—Issindra had kept their palace complex intact. In fact, her bedchamber remained a part of the prehistoric wild, with great trees and plants of the forest shooting out of the ground and wrapping around the indoor support columns, as well as her furniture, the bed, the desk, everything. It was like sleeping in an overgrown greenhouse.

  She tended this dense garden with sorcery, lovingly protecting its legendary secrets, which were special and fearsome even to the Serpentine world. The power of the palace, hidden in its heart, was kept safe under her watch.

  Issindra was now feeling that a nation with a billion people was far too small a place for someone so great as she.

  She licked her tiger-striped skin, reflecting.

  It would be too much to say that she wanted to be Queen of Serpents herself. She would be content with simply expanding her empire—an empire that encompassed every form of smuggling known to man. This included a very good trade in exotic animals: stolen elephants, rhino, giraffe, zebra, birds, lions, and, of course, tigers, all for private owners, who usually cooked them up and ate them, no matter how rare, as well as a fairly good business in tea exports (her tea was rotten; it made a person feel spiteful and jealous and mean).

  The tigers she kept close to her, roaming about her lazy, opulent palace. They could often be found beside her in a giant canopy bed—until she sold them off, and once in a while she would allow the animals to eat one of her workers alive, just for fun.

  That is, if she didn’t eat the workers herself. She’d been picking at a piece of human meat that had been stuck in one of her teeth since yesterday, and was reconsidering whether the flesh was really worth the bother. She worked at the fat, greasy tidbit with her tongue, squeezing juice from it, and decided it was.

  Her entire palace was built to accommodate the tigers, which moved through hollow passages, so that at any time, a worker might hear the tigers moving behind the walls or above them, in the ceilings, sniffing or growling. The beams and columns of the structure creaked as they passed, tigers roaming, padding heavily on the wood floors. A careless seamstress might peek into a hole in the wall by her workspace and find a giant feline staring back. Issindra loved how unsettling all this would seem to a human.

  Still, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  For her to be happy, she needed more. Already she had criminal enterprises sprouting up throughout Africa. The Tall Dragons were newly dead, others were being moved out by her growing operations, and China was yielding nice profits, too. But business was moving too slowly, and Issindra had begun thinking about moving in on the other big fish in the sea.

  She had begun to daydream about the Serpent of Japan.

  This was no accident. Issindra had begun receiving correspondence from another ambitious
Serpent who had felt Japan was weak and ready for the taking. He was a smart old Pyrothrax, one of the oldest out there. He would give her information about the entire Serpent world, and all he wanted in return was a safe haven—and knowledge of the secret to her palace, its strange power, so that he could put the complete past of the Indian Serpents into his insane little history book.

  It was not a bad bargain, she thought.

  Yes, the Ice Dragon was turning out to be a wonderful spy and ally.

  Just the other day, he’d sent the loveliest note:

  Issindra,

  Thought of you today as I destroyed a couple of nuns. I know how bothersome do-gooders are to you. They left me with the most interesting verses in my head—a good murder always brings on poetry. Have a look:

  “Insect me, and I’ll butterfly you.

  Flay the meaning, fool the fool.

  This is the night. I painted it in blood. It used to mean something, now it’s a fiddler in a moonlit field. With no moon and no one to play for.

  It’s candy canes melting twelve hours after Christmas.

  It is the rat in the trap, waiting for the meaning of his life to come to him at the end of his breathing, but it will not come. Not the breathing, but the meaning. I was

  referring to

  The meaning.”

  Issindra smiled. The old darling. He had no idea how senile he was.

  Obviously, she would never consider him proper material for a mate. Recently Issindra had begun looking for a partner. She didn’t actually want a mate; a mate would only bring her tremendous jealousy. What she wanted was children—a brood that she could teach, or at the very least, a Serpentine daughter to talk to.