Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Both of them had a gentle chuckle at this, their laughter tinged with melancholy.

  ‘Regardless of the beliefs we once held,’ Awang said, ‘and the religious teachings we all once followed, prior to becoming beastwalkers and learning of the teachings of the Councils, deep in our hearts, in the marrow of our bones, in the aether of our souls, we have always known our purpose … most of our kind does, at least.’

  Zakaria snarled suddenly and spat onto the earth in disgust.

  ‘Not so for the traitors who have allied themselves with the forces of darkness and destruction, the Alliance scum.’

  ‘Evil beings they are,’ Awang agreed, his own face scrunching into a stormy frown. ‘But such is the way of true balance, yin and yang; one cannot exist with the other.’

  Zakaria clenched his hands into fists.

  ‘To be given such a gift as ours, and then to use it for evil, for oppression, exploitation and destruction … ugh! Devils! Hellspawn! They can only be demons!’

  ‘Demons indeed,’ William, who had been listening in silence, said. ‘And their head Devil has a name: Sigurd Haraldsson.’ His expression was grim and sombre, and his eyes gleamed with the lightning-flare of a ravenous desire for vengeance, for violent retribution. ‘He and all his devils must be thrown back, with all the force we can muster, into the pits of whatever stinking hell they crawled out of,’ he growled.

  ‘Aye, my friend,’ Zakaria murmured, his eyes shining with the zealous glow of a spirit-possessed paladin. ‘We will cauterise their evil from the face of this planet. Those traitors and their vile masters, the Huntsmen. We must, or all will be lost for every peaceful and gentle being that resides on this Earth. All will fall before the ambition, power and greed of our enemies. The moment for action is now; too much of this planet is on the verge of collapse. The time of the soil, insects, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians and mammals will be over if we cannot stop them. The Sixth Great Extinction is well underway, and we must be the warriors of light who fight those who would oversee the destruction of all life on this planet for the mere furthering of their short-sighted goals of profit and avarice.’

  ‘The Seventh Age will be the age of cockroaches if we fail,’ Awang whispered, his barely audible voice laden with grave severity. ‘Those humble scavengers will be the only survivors of the storm that is brewing, the storm that the Huntsmen are doing their utmost to unleash.’

  ‘I can’t stand cockroaches,’ a new voice interjected. ‘So we’d better make sure we do everything we can to prevent the age of cockroaches becoming a reality.’

  The beastwalkers all turned around, experiencing the tingling sensation that indicated the presence of one of their kind, and saw a Japanese woman approaching. She was of an average height, and neither slender nor curvy but somewhere in between. Indeed, at a quick glance she initially appeared to be completely physically unremarkable, yet if one held their attention for a tad longer on her, scrutinising her deceptively plain features with more focus, one would discern quite clearly that she would not have blended too easily into a crowd. There was something about her that stood out, yet it was not easy to pinpoint. On her wide face delicate yet striking features were arranged, all seemingly equidistant from one another, the most captivating of which were her piercing obsidian eyes, sharp with a quick, easily discernible intelligence, which were set beneath straight, bold eyebrows. About her bare shoulders, revealed, like her arms, by a black tank top, long, straight jet-black hair swished like falling ink transmuted from liquid to solid. Aside from the pale skin of her face, every other square inch of her body – as much of it as could be seen, anyway – was covered in intricate and colourful tattoos in the old Japanese style. While she outwardly appeared to be in her thirties, perhaps, she was far older than that; older, in fact, than most of the beastwalkers here, aside from Zakaria. William smiled as he saw her and rushed over to give her a long, tight embrace.

  ‘Kimiko!’ he exclaimed, his mouth stretched wide in a grin of joy. ‘It’s been far too long, far too long my old friend.’

  ‘That it has,’ she said, her voice soft, lilting and almost hypnotic. ‘I hope I’m not too late for the party,’ she added with a grin.

  ‘I think you arrived just on time,’ William said. ‘Come, have a seat.’

  ‘What were you saying about this age of cockroaches, Awang?’ she asked the shaman.

  Awang squatted down next to the rock and sipped on his coffee, his eyes seeming to stare through his companions at some far-off, unseen vista.

  ‘On my people’s ancestral lands,’ he began, not talking to any of his fellow beastwalkers in particular, but rather to the silent trees and plants that swayed and rustled in the mountain breeze, ‘there was once a great rainforest. Ecologists estimate that it was over one hundred and thirty million years old, and as such was one of the oldest forests on the planet. Was, you see. I grew up there as a boy and saw such a density of life, such an infinite spectrum of wonder, that one could hardly believe it. Birds of all kinds abounded, as did all manner of insects and reptiles and amphibians and mammals from great to small, and all kinds of fish and aquatic creatures in the rivers. As a boy it was not unusual for me to see elephants, rhinoceroses, leopards, tigers, and even creatures that are now extinct, or on the verge thereof.’

  He paused and his voice dropped in register, the words almost bursting into splinters as the invisible fingers of deep, merciless emotion wrapped themselves around his windpipe.

  ‘Now … now it is all gone. My people have long since been torn from the forest in which countless generations before them had been born, grown, lived, loved and died. Millions of square metres of what was one of the oldest ecosystems on this planet have been razed to the ground. Trees that stood for thousands of years have been hacked down and burned to ash. Animal, bird, insect, amphibian, fish and reptile populations have been decimated, with many having become extinct, and this theatre of life, this brilliantly colourful symphony of pure wonder … it has all been wiped out. The one who made me one of us, she was a wise woman of the forest who could heal many wounds and illnesses. Her animal form was that of a clouded leopard. Huntsmen troops hunted her down, cornered her, trapped her … and then cut her up alive with a chainsaw, one of the same chainsaws they used to tear the forest apart. As they destroyed that network of life with such vicious abandon, so too did they destroy her and her body with that awful machine.’

  Zakaria slammed his fist into the trunk of a nearby tree and growled. William and Kimiko both simply sighed, exhaling slow, gentle breaths of crushing sadness, and shook their heads.

  ‘Monsters! Demons!’ Zakaria rasped, both his blind eye and his seeing one bulging with wrath.

  ‘She was fifteen hundred years old, one of the oldest of our kind who still lived,’ Awang said, a sadness seeping into her words and curling them like sheaves of paper in fire. ‘Yes, for fifteen hundred years she spread peace and compassion throughout the world. Yet in a mere fifteen minutes, the Huntsmen turned her into nothing but a pile of hacked-up meat and fur.’

  ‘It is a profound tragedy,’ Kimiko interjected, her eyes moist with sadness, ‘that one as beautiful in spirit as her met with such a horrific end.’

  ‘And her kingdom was decimated, turned into palm oil plantations,’ Awang continued, ‘for Huntsmen-owned snack and fast food corporations. And they continue to burn it all down, as their corporations do in Brazil, razing the Amazon rainforest to the ground for beef cattle. They will not stop, not while such obscene profits are to be made from destruction, and not while the vast mass of humanity slavers and drools over the products of this destruction, the spoils of which they consume like zombies.’

  ‘That is why we will make them stop,’ Zakaria rumbled. ‘We will strike them at their core and stab our lances deep into the blackened heart that drives the whole body of the dragon that is the Huntsmen Corporation.’

  ‘Ah, Templar, still a dragon-slaying knight at heart, I see!’

  The others, in
whose bones the electricity that indicated the presence of another beastwalker was sizzling, turned around at the sound of the intruding voice, which was soft, husky and almost effeminate in tone.

  Walking into the camp was a tall, lithely built man with an Arabic look about him. He wore a cavalier smile on his long, handsome face, and close-set, mischievous eyes of onyx regarded the other beastwalkers with an odd blend of arrogance and amusement. His high cheekbones would have been the envy of any catwalk model, and in the centre of his face sat a hooked beak of a nose, the skewed slant of which marred an otherwise impressive symmetry. The organ was perched above a wide, thick-lipped mouth, which seemed to be perpetually curled, like a strand of hair that stubbornly resists even the most persistent attempts to straighten it, into a cheeky grin. His cheeks were rough with black, curly stubble and his coffee-coloured pate, shaved to the skin with a cutthroat razor, gleamed as it passed through a frozen javelin of sunlight. Unlike the others, he was hardly dressed either for the jungle or the sauna-like heat; he wore an impeccable Italian suit in light khaki, with a mauve shirt beneath it, a purple satin tie, diamond-studded cufflinks and gleaming black and white wingtips … which were caked with mud.

  ‘Sharaf!’ Zakaria boomed in his sonorous voice, his grim frown buoyed into a smile that radiated an infectious warmth from every line, crease and pore on the old warrior’s broad face. ‘It has been too long, my friend!’ He tramped over to the newcomer, and they embraced.

  ‘1978, Tehran,’ Sharaf said as they disengaged. ‘The last summer of freedom in Iran, before the Revolution. I remember it well, my friend. I’m sure you do too.’

  ‘Heady times, Sharaf, heady times.’

  ‘Heady indeed! I even managed to get a grizzled old grinch like you into the clubs! Do you remember the car I was driving? Come on, you have to. It was a glorious vehicle, my man, glorious!’

  Zakaria scratched his chin and gazed at the trees, raising an eyebrow as his mind travelled back through time and space.

  ‘I remember that it was red … Italian…’ After a few moments he threw his hands up in the air and laughed. ‘I give up! I’m not one for cars or motorcycles, Sharaf, you know this.’

  ‘Ferrari 308 GT4! Templar, you are hopeless,’ Sharaf sighed with mock disappointment, mirth sparkling in his eyes all the while. ‘No wonder I got all the girls … and boys. You were an all right wingman though, I suppose. Passable, only just though, truth be told’

  As they were talking, Chloe and Ranomi strolled into the circle. Chloe and Sharaf stared at each other, and Sharaf’s expression morphed rapidly from one of genial playfulness into one of an abrasive harshness that verged on aggression.

  ‘So you’re the new fish, the mortal kid,’ he grunted, cocking his head to the side in a brash gesture of dismissal. ‘I don’t see how babysitting a child will help us in any way to take down some of the toughest sons of whores on the planet … but here you are, dressed up all hardcore with a dash of sexy in your army getup. Let me tell you something, though: this isn’t some fucking comic book movie, and you’re not Harley Quinn or Tank Girl. This isn’t a game we’re playing; people are going to die. You’re probably going to die, and it won’t be quick or painless either. And if Sigurd and his boys get hold of you, with that tight little body of yours…’

  Anger blazed across Chloe’s face, and her jaw hovered half open while her enraged mind scrambled for a comeback, but before she could respond William stepped in, calm and cool, raising his hands in a submissive gesture, all too used to Sharaf’s mercurial mood swings and standoffish attitude – a reactive mix when combined with Chloe’s short fuse. This was a concoction that would need careful handling.

  ‘She’s no mere child, Sharaf, and seriously, come now old boy, that wasn’t the nicest way to make an introduction—’

  ‘When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it, Tiger,’ Sharaf snapped, his tone acerbic. His words were directed at William, but his withering gaze never once left Chloe’s eyes. ‘Come on Harley Quinn, what’s the matter, you need Gisborne to speak for you?’

  ‘Sharaf,’ Ranomi began, moving to step between him and Chloe.

  ‘Thank you, William and Ranomi,’ Chloe said, putting her hand on Ranomi’s forearm and holding her back, ‘but as much as I appreciate your help, I don’t need it. I can stand on my own two feet. This douchebag doesn’t know a damn thing about me, and his ignorance is literally showing in a seriously embarrassing way.’

  The corners of Sharaf’s mouth inched upward, and the resulting smirk, dripping with condescension, was mirrored in his gleaming eyes.

  ‘You may think you can handle what you’ve gotten yourself into, but we’re not at a fucking cosplay convention. That nine-mil you’re wearing on your hip, you ever killed a man with it? Have you ever taken a bullet yourself? Sure, you may have squeezed off a few rounds at a paper target, but—’

  ‘Yeah, I literally have killed a man, actually,’ Chloe retorted in a matter-of-fact tone, folding her arms with assertive aggression across her chest, the gleam of her eyes bright with defiance and a cockiness that matched the Arab’s. ‘But with an AK-47, not with this gun. Um, and I shot another guy as well, but I’m not sure if he died or not. And I’ve probably had a few hundred bullets literally fired in my direction too. I got hit too, but I was wearing a bulletproof vest.’

  ‘She’s more capable than you realise, my friend,’ William added, doing his best to suppress a smile of amusement. ‘And she’s been through so much more than you could imagine.’

  ‘William,’ Chloe said to William, ‘like I said, I appreciate—’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Sharaf drawled, interrupting Chloe, his sneer remaining lodged firmly in place. ‘It appears that maybe Tank Girl here is more than just a pretty face. Apologies m’lady, I had no idea you actually knew a thing or two about violence. Real violence, not fake comic book action movie bullshit.’ His words were jocular, but every jagged syllable was barbed with sarcasm and vitriol. His obsidian eyes blasted their rusty harpoons into Chloe’s, probing and seeking for any sign of weakness. He was surprised to find none, though.

  ‘I’m no expert,’ she retorted, her eyes even brighter now, and her jaw and neck muscles tight with defiance and a barely contained wrath that hissed and spat like boiling oil doused with water, ‘but I’m no damn freshman either. So I’d appreciate it, Sharaf, if you didn’t talk to me like I was some starry-eyed fangirl or some shit, okay?’

  Sharaf’s sneer blossomed into a mocking smile, and he stood with his arms akimbo.

  ‘You act as if I owe you some form of respect, girl. Let me say this: respect is earned, not given.’

  ‘She may be a child in biological years,’ Ranomi interjected, before Chloe could respond, ‘but she’s already lost a close friend to the Huntsmen, and has had to engage in gunfights with their troops on more than one occasion. She’s been uprooted from everything she’s ever known, and thrown into the middle of a war, on which the fate of the entire living world rests. She’s not only learned that we beastwalkers are the stuff of reality, rather than the half-remembered dreams and whispers of old myths and superstitions, she’s had to prepare to go into battle against some of the most powerful – and ruthless – beastwalker warriors to ever walk the earth. And what’s more, Sharaf, she chose to do this. Zakaria offered her the chance to walk away, to start a new life with a new identity, and forget about all of this wretched business, but this child, this seventeen-year-old girl, chose to fight alongside us, knowing full well that she might not get out of it alive. If that’s not enough to earn your respect, you arrogant windbag, then I honestly don’t know what is.’

  ‘This child, as you call her,’ Zakaria said sternly, entering the conversation now, ‘has impressed me more than most mortals who are triple her age. She has fortitude and courage in spades, and an unshakeable faith in justice. Brother, I say this to you, your attitude towards her is based on false assumptions, and, quite frankly, it’s a little shameful.’

 
‘By the time I had turned seventeen,’ Sharaf countered hotly, his own fiery temper raging, ‘I’d already fought in pitched battles against the crusader armies, killed a French knight in full armour with my bare hands, taken an arrow—’

  ‘That’s enough now, all of you!’ William shouted.

  The sound of his raised voice was not something anyone in the clearing was used to hearing, and it was enough to silence everyone. ‘Sharaf, bloody well come off it, man!’ he growled, his eyes ablaze with jagged anger. ‘There’s no damned hierarchy here, no structures of power! We’re all equal, all of us, we’re all brothers and sisters. I know it’s not how you’re accustomed to dealing with others, but if we don’t do it this way, everything will fall apart, so just stop with your bloody attitude, yeah? The last thing we need is tension and conflict within our group. Our strength lies in our unity, because without it everything collapses. Now, do you really want that? Do you want to hand the Huntsmen our heads on a platter for the mere sake of petty rivalry and a dent in your pride? Over this, this insecurity or jealousy or resentment, or whatever the hell it is you’re feeling, towards a seventeen-year-old child, for God’s sake? She’s braver than most people twice her age and more, and she’s got more guts and drive than many of our own kind. Look mate, I love you, like I love everyone else here, but just shut your bloody gob, yeah? We’re all in this together, but one weak link can shatter the entire chain, and what we’re doing, what we’re fighting for, is so much more important than any one person.’

  Sharaf scowled darkly and jutted his jaw out with defiance, but said nothing. Chloe, meanwhile, drew in a deep, calming breath and held it in her lungs for a while, and then slowly released it, as the beastwalkers had shown her to do in situations of extreme stress. With the trickling of air out of her lungs, so too did the anger leave her.