The Desert and the Blade

by S. M. Stirling

  “I’ve seen ranch headquarters that looked a little like this, in some parts of the country over the Cascades, on some of the bigger spreads,” Órlaith said meditatively. “And in the Commonwealth of the San Luis, that time we visited for the Charter signing. Red tile like that and this layout, around a courtyard. But with more serious exterior walls . . . this is as big physically, but like a plaything compared to those, as if someone were toying with the thought of it. Toying with the thought of a castle, and of a manor-house at the center of an estate.”

  Walking closer in the growing red light of dawn they saw a firepit before the courtyard entrance. It had been crudely built up above the pavement with chunks of this and that and rocks, three or so feet deep, and then used repeatedly with little attempt to clear away ashes. There was a stale smell about it, of ancient grease gone bad, and crusted grills and spits lay about it. Reiko looked around, her hand on the hilt of Kotegiri, while Órlaith squatted and poked with a stick.

  I feel . . . observed, she thought.

  “Bones,” Órlaith said as she investigated. “Birds, rabbit, small beasts of some sort. Antelope, this is a hoof. Whoever was doing the cooking wasn’t much at breaking game.”

  She dug a little more, and exhibited a human tooth on the end of the stick. “This on the bottom layer,” she said grimly.

  As the light grew they could see that the stucco that covered the rambling buildings was mostly intact; it looked very much as it had in the ancient photographs. Except that something had been written on it—scored into the material, in fact, scratched deep into its substance over the doors. The writing was in the Roman alphabet, and in English:

  Cody Biltmore is dead and damned, it said. Then below, the letters larger and wilder: Damned— Damned—Damned . . .

  Órlaith took a step forward, then hesitated and stopped. “I have a feeling I’m not welcome,” she said seriously, her palm resting on the crystal hilt of the Sword of the Lady.

  Reiko nodded. “It was your part to bring me here, Orrey-chan,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Through you your land grants me leave. But the next . . . that is mine. Give me a day and a night.”

  At the arched entrance she turned and bowed; Órlaith returned the gesture. Then she faced the doors and laid her hand on the hilt of her father’s sword; another deep breath, and she stepped past the sagging gates of bolted timbers and wrought-iron and into the courtyard within.

  “Many clouds arise:

  The clouds which come forth as a manifold fence:

  For the husband and wife to retire within

  They have formed a manifold fence:

  Ai! A fence!”

  Reiko murmured the words as she walked, feeling them welling up from within. A dry wind whispered through the courtyard, louder than the sliding of cloth upon cloth as she moved, and a sound seemed to come upon it.

  That is a child crying, she thought; the thought slid through a consciousness wholly focused on its purpose.

  A thin bitter sobbing, lost and hopeless. She waited, absolutely still, by the entrance, letting her awareness spread outwards. The courtyard was a paved rectangle, with buildings on three sides; two stories to left and right, with an open balcony atop the one to her right and a covered one to her left with the roof supported by square pillars. A low section blocked the north side. Nothing moved, and she heard nothing but the wind, and the whimpering.

  Follow the sound, then.

  Quickly to the left, and along the arcade. More large doors, solid carved wood this time, but they yielded to a nudge with her foot. She waited. Nothing . . .

  The door swung back as she kicked and spun into the room, the katana hissing free and her back to a solid wall. The room within was a great hall, hammer-beams above, with a gallery surrounding it and a great hooded fireplace. Her nose wrinkled at a hard stink of human filth. The floor was mostly bare, and from the pile of charcoal and ashes in the fireplace the furniture had been burned at one time or another. There were bones there too. Some light penetrated from high windows, but they were caked with decades of dust and sandblasted by wind-storms.

  The weeping came from an overturned sofa near the hearth. Her back prickled as she crossed the room, staying close to the wall. Someone with a bow on that gallery would be a problem without a solution save flight. She felt a little relief when she reached the massive overturned piece of furniture and knelt by it, a little sheltered and close enough to the gallery that anyone on it would have to lean far over to bear on her.

  Eyes peered at her from beneath it, and then a figure crept out. It was a small spider-thin child of about two, obviously a girl-child, for she wore nothing but caked filth and a chain around her ankle, running to a massive iron fixture beside the fireplace. Huge green eyes looked at her with awed curiosity below a tangled mass of hair that was probably ginger-red when it wasn’t so dirty; that turned to a ferocious focus when she held out her canteen and showed it held water. Though she spilled not a drop as she drank.

  At least I do not see any lice on her, Reiko thought.

  That was oddly chilling; the only way she could think someone this innocent of cleanliness could not be lousy was an isolation so total that there had been no opportunity for humanity’s old, old companions to reach this spot.

  The girl cried again after she drank. When Reiko extended a biscuit she stared at it with no recognition until the Nihonjin woman bit off a corner and ate it; then she snatched it and gobbled and drank again.

  “Hada birdie,” the child said; what she spoke was English but slurred by more than her age. “S’m bugs. S’m quickie-crawlies. S’gon. Hongry bad.”

  Reiko’s eyes dipped back to her and then up to the gallery and the darkened corners of the hall again. A great iron chandelier overhead showed how it had once been lit, but shadows moved in every corner.

  “Who are you, little one?” she asked softly.

  “’m Kid,” the girl replied, obviously finding it incomprehensible that someone should not know who she was. Again, with more emphasis: “’m thuh Kid.”

  The answer left her blank for a moment, until she remembered that was a slang term for child in some dialects of English.

  I am the child is what is meant, she thought. The only child, I think; she has never seen another or imagined one.

  “Where are your parents?” Reiko asked softly. Then, when there was no understanding in the odd green cat-like gaze: “Father? Mother? Dad? Mom? Mama?”

  “Mama. Bad Auntie took ’er,” she said, lip trembling. “Wanna mama!”

  No idea of a father. Probably never knew him, Reiko thought.

  She felt pity for the wretched feral thing dwelling amid horrors, but it was detached and abstract now. Someone had obviously put that chain on her ankle. That someone was almost certainly of her kin and they were probably somewhere in this darkened maze.

  “Bad Auntie?” she said, handing the child another biscuit and some of the dried fruit.

  The fruit puzzled her until she shoved some of it into her mouth experimentally; then she gobbled with an expression of wonder at the sweetness.

  “Took ’er. Down-down.”

  She bared her teeth and growled and made clawing gestures and then shrieked; it took Reiko an instant to realize she was playacting something beyond her capacity to express in words.

  “Dark, dark, down-down bad.”

  Reiko set the canteen down on its base after she took a long drink herself, and the packet of rations. The child promptly lost interest in her as she clutched the food and drink; she evidently hadn’t even had enough of a concept of outsider to be much afraid of one.

  Probably she saves fear for the ones she knows, Reiko thought. Two, perhaps three . . . at that age children can still live as an animal does, wholly in the moment, accepting anything.

  The girl made an inarticulate sound and crawled back under the sofa
as Reiko ghosted away; as she did she drew the wakizashi with her left hand, walking with a springy tensile lightness.

  Into another room, also large, but full of counters and sinks and pans, covered in once-bright tiles and darker still. A woman’s body hung from an overhead hook sunk into her armpit, her arms bound behind her and her feet just above the floor . . .

  No, one foot.

  The other leg ended above the knee, in a crusted tourniquet. Reiko swallowed, but she had seen things as bad before, in the wake of jinnikukaburi raids.

  The body’s eyes opened, and the mouth. The tongue was gone, the stump cauterized. She held up the blade, and the dangling figure nodded, once, slowly. Reiko lunged, trying to be as accurate as possible. That was easier because the body had a terrible scar running from just below the breastbone to about the navel, old and dusty-white and healed . . . which was very strange, because she could not imagine that wound not killing.

  I will end this.

  There was a single convulsive jerk as the steel went home, the feeling in the hilt the familiar soft heavy resistance . . . until the point grated on something. Not bone, on steel. And—

  Fire.

  It ran through her; every vein, every nerve, and she felt the hair rising on her head, writhing and fighting against the braids and pins. The steel within the body flowed, flowed down the sword, into it, towards her. She thought she flung her arms wide and screamed . . .

  And she was elsewhere, watching, and it was a man screaming. A very old man, but she knew him; it was the pillager of the Atsuta Shrine, gone bald and fat and wrinkled as if half a century had passed—half a very long lifetime, half the time between that moment and now. Enough to be in the year of the Change. Screaming as he was dragged out of the very gate she had entered a few minutes before. Less worn, less sagging from its hinges, some of the damage she had seen happening before her eyes as he clung to it and wept and one of those pulling at him hit his fingers with a blade, a katana of classic lines that must have been part of his plunder.

  There were half a dozen of them, from middle-age to their teenage years, and they all had a look of him, beneath bruises and gauntness and staring eyes. As fugitives might look, who found themselves imprisoned in what they had thought to be a refuge from the madness that swept over the world. Imprisoned in a stretch of barren desert that city-dwellers had no skill to use in any event, like a cyst of sand and rock and heat . . .

  The old man’s screams grew louder at the sight of the firepit’s glowing coals, and the knives and cauldrons.

  Suddenly she was back in the defiled room, kneeling. The hook swung empty before her, and ash drifted on the still foul air. Kotegiri was stretched out—

  No, she thought. Not quite Kotegiri.

  The blade was different. Slightly longer, perhaps a hair broader, though with the same pure curve and no heavier in her hand. She stared with fascination as thin traceries of fire curled up along the steel, filaments far finer than a human hair, that she was not sure she saw with the eyes of the body. Yellow and ruddy and white, crawling somehow through the very substance of the katana. Weaving through the thirty thousand layers of the jewel steel the ancient master-smith had hammered, permeating it as his will and skill had done. Remaking not only what it was, but what it had been.

  Full consciousness returned, and she started to her feet. Eyes probing the darkness where anything might lurk, alerted by the noise that had been torn from her.

  But it is not so dark.

  There was a wash of light; light that cast no shadow. Light that might not be light as humans thought of it. Perhaps it was the essence of which physical light was merely a reflection, the shadow cast on the wall of a cave.

  A door stood open across the kitchens. Within it she could glimpse stairs, descending. Down-down, she thought, echoing the child’s terror. Dark, dark.

  Her sandals were soundless on the tile of the floor as she walked towards it. She was conscious of all movement, of a cockroach scuttling behind a stove, of the spider that waited for it. The room and the stairs ahead were full of waiting. Past the door without touching it, foot on the stairs, stair, stair, stair . . .

  A rush of cloven air above her, and she twisted like a cat with the katana for a claw. A glimpse of a wild figure with blades in both hands, dropping down from above with a snaggle-toothed snarl and a mane of wild graying hair, down towards Reiko’s rising steel.

  Fire.

  This time she was the fire as the sword struck the metal within the body, a wash of light and heat, energy pouring into darkness with prodigal generosity. Feeding life itself, keeping at bay the hostile cold that would freeze the worlds without it. Potential pouring into nothingness, structuring it with warmth and order, making nothing of the self-consuming sacrifice at its burning heart.

  The vision that came next was merely a woman crouching in darkness. She held a shard of rusting metal in her hands, like a fragment of a sword. Pressing it against her flesh, cutting, cutting, whimpering as she pressed it and murmuring over and over:

  “Mine, mine, mine.”

  When Reiko came to herself hoarse sounds were coming from her throat. There was no pain; this was a sensation beyond pain, a suffusion that threatened every instant to scatter the very particles of her being in a blaze of infinite energy, as if she was being torn to pieces instantly, in an instant that went on forever.

  “I . . . cannot,” she whispered, shaking. Nothing could, nothing human could contain this. “I cannot! Cannot!”

  A voice that was memory rang through her mind: Subdue your soul. It is your giri, and your karma, daughter of the Empire, daughter of the Sun.

  And a thought; callused hands thrusting a shoot of rice into the mud of a paddy, and the next and the next and the next, bent back and dogged will and never ceasing.

  Shaking, she thrust the shortsword back into its sheath and gripped what was no longer a thing of human craft in both her hands. Light and fire and power, flowing through her, swirling in her substance and remaking her, then channeled back into the thing she grasped.

  The tunnel would have been utter blackness, but it was not. She went down it, sword poised.

  Memory shredded as she did, until she was not sure if she was experiencing or recalling; or if there was a difference. A figure that wriggled on its belly towards her, teeth wet, reaching for her ankles, and the blade slashed and the flame swept through her. Two that rushed towards her back, gripping a long pole with a knife lashed to its end. She leapt over that, running up the wall, and the sword slashed twice and the world exploded in suffering that was almost ecstasy. Two gibbering shapes that lurched towards her, their ankles fused into a creature with three legs and four arms waving club and hatchet and knife and sharpened shovel, and she cut diagonally, and the shock was faster and faster as if she were plunging through endless depths even as she walked on her own feet.

  A last one that crouched laughing in the ultimate crevice of the tunnels, holding a gnawed skull out to her in both hands as if offering a cup of tea. From somewhere there was a hint that the ancient bone was somehow aware.

  “Cody Biltmore is dead,” she said as she stroked the skull. “Dead and damned . . . damned . . . damned . . .”

  It is mercy, she thought, and cut; the bone shattered and then the screeching figure flung herself onto the blade. This must end.

  Images flashed; she was not sure if she saw them, or lived them, or traveled through them. The ginger-haired gaijin in a vast shed with others uniformed as he was, and an envelope passing unseen between him and another who slashed a chalk-mark on to his duffel bag. The same man older, in a crowded room where machines spun in circles and women in abbreviated costumes tossed balls upon them. Older still, gray in his hair and sagging pouches under his eyes, and pushing a katana across a table in a small room, and counting the bills handed to him.

  Then he was the ancient who would b
e dragged out by his descendants to meet an unclean death, sleeping rolled in a blanket as the others pedaled with him through the night towards the place of his long waiting.

  Then she was back in the great hall, unsure if she walked or flowed through it. The thing in her hand hummed, hummed with a potential beyond even the understanding she possessed now. As if it trembled on the edge of a precipice, and yearned to fall upward. The fabric of things strained and creaked about it.

  Huge green eyes peered out at her from beneath the sofa again, and some part of her wondered how much of what she felt was visible to them. Then the girl-child shrieked, shrieked and pointed.

  “Bad auntie! Bad auntie!”

  Reiko whirled. A sword was raised, already descending, one that might have been a twin to the one she had carried into this place. The figure wielding it was a swirl of darkness to her sight now, the human within withered and slight as if it had eaten itself. She stepped in and cut with a snapping twist. The sword that had been raised to kill her clattered on the ground, but within the body was something that drew her edge towards it like a lodestone of swirling light.

  This time there was no scream, as the eighth part merged with the thing, the thing in the process of becoming that was her and the Grass-Cutting Sword and neither and a combination greater than both. No sensation of almost-dissolution; instead she was destroyed, and yet completed. Arcs of flame rose and fell in a world where matter itself twisted and fused; something massive beyond conception, but inherent with a delicate structure that made a snowflake seem like a smear of chaos. Then she fell, fell inward, fell into herself down eons and leagues. Fire exploded from her, from every pore and particle. Beam and wall erupted, and she stood swaying as the savage heat beat upon her—entirely physical heat, as every scrap of wood and paint and the very lime mortar between the stones began to burn.

  “Seinaru hono!” she whispered. “Divine flame!”