by Arthur Stone
Degrees of Enlightenment: Empty
Attributes: none
Skills: none
States: none
I didn’t know what kind of sorcery mother had flashed, only that it proved ineffective. As for her first attack with the naginata, I had missed it due to my eyes being closed, but that, too, had clearly missed the mark.
I opened my eyes to see Pence effortlessly dodging the fervently flickering blade. Moving as fast as lightning, he was nonetheless doing everything possible to show how amused—not threatened—he was by the attacks, doing everything short of scratching his ass in between the feverish sweeps and lunges executed by Treya at breathtaking speed.
Despite the utter loathing I felt for this wretch with every cell of my half-baked brain, I found myself admiring her fighting. Never would I have guessed that the mother of this pitiable body was capable of such feats. She fought with the agility and skill of a distinguished martial artist, and the grace of a professional ballerina.
Yet, she couldn’t push back Pence so much as an inch. Somehow the man kept moving in between the blades of a working propeller—always a fraction of a second ahead with a crouch, a sidestep, or a duck. He hadn’t even bothered unsheathing his sword, and his careless grin made the futility of mother’s efforts painfully obvious. At times, he seemed on the verge of roaring with glee.
Having apparently refused the gracious offer to stand aside, Camai was approaching Pence from the back, gauntleted hand gripping the hilt of his sword. Two years ago this warrior had needed but one swing of his curved sword to slice right through a brigand wearing a quilted jerkin reinforced with plates fashioned from cow hooves. Hardly the finest armor available, but it still offered decent protection.
The blade had cut through the armor, the body, and the handle of a massive cleaver, used one day earlier by the brigand to ruthlessly cut down Quisse, our blacksmith, who had been carrying home a sack filled with swamp ore he’d mined that day. The killer must have assumed the sack held a far more valuable bounty.
The assumption had proved fatal for him. Camai knew the worth of capable people, and couldn’t forgive the demise of our finest blacksmith.
Now that same sword slid out of its scabbard too quickly for the eyes to register, the blade a blur in the air approaching Pence’s neck.
And upon striking the neck, it bounced back as if it had hit a concrete wall.
Spinning around to face the warrior, Pence returned the attack for the first time in the fight. It was a lax backhand, like a pimp slapping one of his hoes for stepping out of line.
The blow knocked Camai back a good dozen yards, as if he’d been smashed into by a car going eighty miles an hour on a freeway. His sword gone from his hand, his face buried deep in the mix of dirt and hay that covered the ground of the entire yard. He kept lying there, unmoving.
Was he dead? Possibly. I would certainly be dead if it had been me. But Camai was made of harder material.
But would that matter? This was the first time I was seeing a master at work, and I had no idea what he was capable of. If Pence’s nonchalant attitude, the power of the blow, and the fact that his henchmen were happy to remain silent spectators through the fight were any indication, fighters of Camai’s caliber were tantamount to dirt for him to wipe off his shoes.
Still rebuffing mother’s constant stream of attacks, Pence grinned, then proceeded to inform mother of his plans concerning her immediate future. His tone was as relaxed as ever, but at least he took the pathos down a notch.
“Lady Treya, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you. Of course, you won’t die right away. Before the Order rewards me for this victory, you’re going to watch the death of your degenerate spawn. Lord Resai insisted that he die first, and that you watch it happen.”
Again with the insults. Enraged, mother skipped a beat in her dance of death—the blunder was obvious even to an ignoramus like me.
As if weaving the missing element into her dance pattern, Pence let the blade of the naginata pass overhead as he stepped forward and threw up the same left hand.
Mother screamed as she flew back several feet, falling and skidding on the ground. She tried to get up, faltered and collapsed again, then crawled on one side towards her halberd. Having spun a few times through the air, the weapon had plunged point first into the ground halfway to the terrace.
I couldn’t tell what the master had done, only that Treya was in serious trouble. She seemed to no longer control the left half of her body, her arm and leg limp as she dragged them along. Even if she made it to the weapon, what would she do in such a sorry state?
Pence’s actions, on the other hand, seemed obvious. He wouldn’t bother with mother any longer, but would simply pass her, maybe even step over her crippled body.
Then he would ascend the terrace and snuff me out.
As he had promised.
I had already decided that I wasn’t afraid of death. And I didn’t mind the accompanying pain if it would free me from this vegetative state, which would be prolonged in the event I were spared.
There was just one thought that kept nagging at me. Nay, not nagging—it was making my blood boil: the fact that my murder would go unpunished.
That would be the second time I allowed such a thing.
I didn’t want to start a bad trend.
The abunai was the shrine of the Crow Clan. Generation after generation they had poured their chi into it. Their offerings might have even been too generous, weakening the clan and potentially becoming one of the causes behind the dynasty’s extinction. In the end, nothing remained but a power-hungry bitch and her defective offspring. And the latter was anything but pureblooded, for the shell that was his body presently contained the same man his mother had sacrificed in vain hopes that this would turn her wretched progeny into a functional human being.
Legend had it there would come a time when the Crow Clan gave birth to a unique child, capable of harnessing the abunai’s hidden reserves of chi in a way that would bring glory to the clan for all eternity, elevating it above the firmament itself. And until then, the standing mandate was to keep filling it at every opportunity. The vessel had been fashioned from enchanted dragonglass by a craftsman who took the secret of its fabrication to the grave. Still, though the technology was lost, it was a known fact that the vessel could hold unlimited amounts of the ubiquitous energy poured into it.
As long as the abunai was handled with care. That meant no throwing it into a pit or drilling it with a diamond bit. Dragonglass wasn’t impervious to hard impact or friction against a hard enough material, and any damage to the walls could disrupt the structural integrity of the vessel and instantly unleash all of the energy stored within.
Now, chi wasn’t exactly trinitrotoluene in terms of explosiveness, but discounting its potential for destruction would be foolish. In my hand I held the equivalent of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound aerial bomb. Mother had let slip once that the power stored in the abunai would turn to primordial dust anyone but those in whose veins coursed the blood of the Crow Clan.
I was going to test the veracity of her words.
I had no diamonds on me—the Crow Clan wasn’t so rich as to let a feeble manchild carry precious gemstones in his pocket. But I did have the amulet. A black claw on a string. The eternal companion hanging on my neck, enabling me to subsist in a relatively tolerable state. The moment it got removed, I turned into a helpless vegetable.
And it had to be removed on the regular. For Camai to take it south to the city, where a paid enchanter would apply to it the required effect. A temporary effect, alas. The procedure required chi, which wasn’t cheap, and had to be replenished from time to time. It was one of the clan’s main expenses.
What mattered now wasn’t the magical effect, but rather the amulet’s material. The claw had once belonged to one of the nastiest creatures of the Void. It took a great hero and a fair bit of luck to slay the beast, winning this mighty artifact for his clan. The Crow Clan.
Th
e claw was every bit as hard as a diamond, maybe even more so. I could sense with every fiber of my soul the vibration of the abunai, held close to the chest, the curved claw pressing threateningly against the vulnerable glass. Was it my imagination or was the tempest within really churning and roiling, sensing imminent escape from its age-old prison?
Hang on, it won’t be long now...
True to form, Pence stepped over mother, who reached out with her right hand in a pathetic attempt to grab hold of his ankle.
“No!” she shrieked after the killer as he headed for her darling son.
Pence stopped, turned around and asked, his voice dripping with scorn.
“Maybe now you’ll finally confess the identity of the freak’s father? It remains one of the greatest mysteries of our time. I’m aware of the official version: a secret short-lived marriage with an anonymous noble. There are also the unofficial rumors about your youth, being locked away in a tower of stone, your chastity out of reach for everyone—until it wasn’t. But as I look at Gedar now, I find either scenario equally unbelievable. More likely, his father was some scoundrel, addicted to drink and other substances that violate the structures of Order. And I’m damned sure he wasn’t noble. A total failure like that could only have come from defective stock. So, how about it? The Crow are finished. There’s no sense in keeping the secret any longer. Who was he? A stableboy? A vagrant? Come on, Treya, fess up. Do it, and I promise to make the degenerate’s death quick.”
Gee, thanks, mister. How mighty kind of you. But I’m in no rush!
The bloody glass was still resisting pressure from the sharp claw. Damn that abunai! Damn the Crow and their damned politicking!
Scraping the ground helplessly with her weakening hand, mother hissed at Pence, her eyes burning with hatred.
“If the father of my boy were here, you would be long dead.”
“Right, of course,” Pence nodded archly, then turned back to me. “I’m struggling to remember being foretold that I would die of laughter. So I doubt I’ll get to see the pleb who had managed to worm his way under your skirt... Hey, what are you up to over there?”
“Gedar! Do it now!” mother yelped in a voice I could hardly recognize, with madness in her eyes.
Somehow she had realized why I was holding the abunai before me. And she wasn’t chastising me for careless handling of the relic. No, she was calling on me to follow through with my plan right away.
And I would have done so gladly, only the damned thing wasn’t playing ball. Though already sporting a fairly deep furrow around the middle, it still resisted a proper shattering.
Meanwhile, I was quickly running out of time. Mother’s outburst had pushed Pence to full alertness, his expression suddenly tense. It would appear that he knew the legend of the abunai—and he wasn’t dismissing it outright.
Behind the master, Camai struggled up to his feet and stumbled toward the enemy on unsteady feet, his hand producing a curved dagger from the sheath on his waist. What would that joke of a weapon do against an enemy whose bare neck had stopped a hard blow from a proper sword?
No, Camai wasn’t going to distract Pence from my person.
I had maybe two seconds left to live.
They say that extreme states of despair can push men to perform unnatural feats of strength. I would never know if it was that—or if the glass had gotten sufficiently damaged from my previous infringements—but when I pressed on the claw again with every bit of strength I had, the glass wall of the vessel yielded at last, snapping as the hand-held amulet burst through it.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pence leap into the air. Not in my direction, but away from me, towards Camai.
The next instant, the whole world drowned in an explosion of light so unbearably bright, it instantly incinerated everything around.
Including my consciousness.
Chapter 5
After the Battle
Degrees of Enlightenment: Unknown
Attributes: none
Skills: none
States: none
“Asami pae dacto,” said the strange woman in a melodious voice.
I had to mentally stop myself from wolf-whistling as I studied her. A tall woman of indescribable beauty was looking down at me, her expression suggesting that it wasn’t me sprawled out here, but the world’s filthiest hobo, suffering through the final stages of leprosy, syphilis, and gas gangrene. I had never seen a look of such utter contempt.
Nor such utter beauty.
Truly otherworldly beauty.
No creature of Earth could be this beautiful. She was perfection squared, and entirely natural. Not an ounce of makeup, not the faintest line from a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. Even her hair had the look of being arranged not by a brush but by the wind itself, putting every single hair precisely in its proper place. Her attire—a loose-fitting black robe-like garment that covered everything save for her palms and head—was entirely unfashionable. Her face had mostly Western features, yet with a touch of the exotic, suggesting partially Asian ancestry.
“Taise amushabi, abi Treya,” said the other person present, his head slightly cocked.
This one, in contrast, was not good-looking at all. Though, admittedly, I was no expert on male beauty. I could tell a voguish pretty boy from a macho gym rat, but that was probably the extent of it.
Though either prototype enjoyed some success with the fairer sex, you could never know in advance which of them, if any, would be preferred by any particular female. Hell, the female herself couldn’t answer that question most of the time.
As befitting those mercurial creatures.
As far as Traco Darce went, he was about as close to a voguish pretty boy as a grizzly bear roused awake from hibernation in the dead of winter. The man was in charge, emanating an aura of danger and unwavering confidence strong enough to send beta males within a four-block radius running for cover. Dirty traffic cops from third-world countries probably paid him, as did escorts from first-world ones after copulation. How else could you explain how he managed to look so regal while wearing the same modest attire as Treya?
He had the air of every waiter’s dream customer. The kind who left a bar of gold as a tip.
In short, here was a man who was the alpha of alphas, which made his presence in these gloomy ruins rather suspect. He was fiddling with a brazier of some kind, as if prepping for a barbecue. Only instead of meat, he was heating a long curved dagger with a hilt sparkling with red gemstones.
The walls were ancient. The sections that weren’t gaping with missing blocks, were covered with moss instead. Piles of bones and skulls hid in numerous niches. A huge flat slab of stone stood in the center, to which my body was securely bound. A young child squealed somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t turn to see what was happening.
Where the hell am I? Is this a dream? The last thing I remembered was falling back in my seat on the bus for a nap. That was preferable to staring out the window, as the driver had apparently believed himself to be not a municipal employee but a getaway driver for a Mexican cartel.
What was this basement? Who were these people? What language were they speaking? And how did I know their names?
Odd that none of this seemed like a dream. Typically, I would wake up immediately upon realizing I’d been dreaming.
Hold on just a minute! I did know their names!
And I understood what they were saying, too. Only I hadn’t realized it until just now.
There was one other thing I realized at the same time.
An important thing—and a terrifying one.
I realized that this was no barbecue.
That knife with the fancy hilt. I knew the purpose for which it was being heated.
Finally, having remembered everything, I realized that this was, indeed, a dream.
And that it was time to wake the hell up.
* * *
So, having escaped one incipient nightmare, somehow I found myself in another one that I hadn�
�t yet experienced. At least I was still alive, if only because no dead body could suffer like this. Even if I were a soul cast down to hell, my suffering would be strictly spiritual in nature, and not so blatantly corporeal.
I squinted one eye open as my hand twisted to hide my palm from the unbearable heat. My skin was already starting to smell of cooked flesh. A unique, unmistakable stench.
My consciousness, though dim, still registered the peculiar depth of the disturbing odor. We were well past the point when a steak goes from being well done to hopelessly burnt, transforming even the tenderest piece of meat into inedible waste.
It couldn’t be my burnt palm exuding such an odor. The fire hadn’t even gotten to it.
Right, the fire. I hadn’t even noticed it until now. It was taking my consciousness way too long to get going, perceiving reality fragment by fragment instead of the complete scene as a whole.