“Your snake, Heshima!” Aba said, holding out her hand without lifting her attention from Tomoe.
Heshima let out a cry that would have scared a banshee. For a second Augustus thought the girls were going to tussle, but the snake slithered toward Aba. Once it was within reach, Aba grabbed it, bit off its head, and squeezed its blood out over Tomoe’s mid-section, making sure to cover the surfaces of both severed body parts. The whole time Aba was chanting her words of power and rocking back and forth, the whites of her eyes showing, while the others were illuminating the darkness with their radiant glowing eyes, no longer shielded, that served as the sole source of illumination in the barn.
Aba slid both parts of Tomoe’s body together until they were touching. When the ritual seemed as if it was not progressing and the magic was failing her, Aba screamed, lifted Tomoe’s spilled sword off the ground and drove it into her heart.
The blade never reached its target. Tomoe clapped her hands about it and trapped it, less than an inch from her chest. “Thank you,” she said finally, after giving Aba an ugly look.
Aba gasped relief, slipping out of the trance, her radiant eyes showing once again.
She stood with the help of a couple of the girls.
Then, Aba took a couple steps toward Augustus that he couldn’t entirely read. Augustus took a step back, already painting himself an exit. “Enough, wizard. This is one corner you won’t paint your way out of. Spill, everything you know about the cabbalistic magic you wield.”
Heshima grabbed his hands so he couldn’t continue his painting, and to help him grasp the gravity of Aba’s words. The part of his brain trying to comply but unable to seemed to come back on line then.
He sighed. “I know only the rudiments, a few paltry incantations, that is all. It is incredibly complex and not meant for human minds to wrap themselves around. So far, the only ones who’ve gotten far with it are the dragon morphs.”
Murmurs whipped around the room like a bolus of cold air.
“In the thousands of years some of them have lived, they’ve only decoded a few more lines, giving them access to powers I don’t yet have access to,” Augustus explained. “Still it is only the tiniest of fragments of what is possible. The only one making real headway with the language—”
“Is Soren and the beast,” Aba finished for him. Of course she would know; she was there when all six blind huntresses—and their dragon morphs they’d been in league with at the time had taken on Soren and the beast—only to be repelled as the minor nuisances they were.
Aba’s eyes focused again—back on Augustus. “Still, you wormy little man, as a budding dragon morph, if you’re worthy of the name, your cunning would give you some additional insight. And knowing your kind, getting you to share secret knowledge won’t be easy. But I think I and the rest of the girls have enough strength remaining still to pull it out of you.”
Augustus held out his hands disarmingly. “I’ll tell you what I surmise. That is all I can do. When I meditate on the cabbalistic images, I get the sense that one of the things they’re capable of doing is connecting us to our past life memories.”
“Like the rituals some of us were performing earlier?” Aba said.
Augustus shook his head. “Far more powerful. You essentially become the oversoul, the crystal from which all the other lifetimes, past and future lives, are but shards.”
“Ninth chakra access.” It was the Native American, Makya who’d spoken. The others turned to her. “My people believe, unlike the Eastern mystics, that we have nine principal chakras, not seven. Only two are out of body—above the crown chakra. One is a neutral witness to all that we experience in this life, here to help us with transcending egoistic desires; the eighth chakra. But the ninth chakra—that is the seat of the soul. Though the dragon morphs may master physical immortality, they do so from the place of ego. Only the soul is truly immortal, for only it is one with the Great Spirit.”
The girls were whispering among themselves again, no doubt eager to get their hands on this magic after the trouncing they’d taken from the alien queen. But Augustus was shivering; he didn’t know if he could deliver on a promise like this.
Aba must have read his reticence for what it was. “Easy, wizard. You have to crawl before you can walk. Is it not so? You will combine your cabbalistic magic with our potion we make to link with one another psychically. We will provide strength to one another to own whatever it is in our past lives that we need to integrate into our sense of self in this life, if we are truly to claim our power. Somewhere in those past lives are traumas that we’ve yet to heal from, cobbling our abilities to come into our own. Alone, perhaps we’re not strong enough to do this, but together, I think we can.”
“It won’t be enough,” Augustus said. “You saw how that queen reacted to everything we threw at it.”
“Maybe not, but at least then we can better assist you with figuring out how to anneal the crystal, no? How to access the oversoul. United with us through the potion, you might have the strength you need, scared little man. Too scared to ponder the oversoul for fear of the implications. You dragon lords live long as much from you refusal to overreach yourself as from your longevity potion and your cunning. We will provide the missing link of courage that will help you to learn faster than the other dragon morphs, and so to overtake them. And then we will go and hunt them down, take from them what they would not give us willingly. That is how we will strengthen our position and yours so you do not have to worry about the dragon morphs doing you in before you can become a threat to them.”
Augustus was breathing more easily. He was standing and pacing and rubbing the back of his head. It sounded almost too good. He knew he was being manipulated, but he couldn’t deny Aba’s logic. And he so wanted what she was offering—a way to ensure he’d live long enough to take on the dragon morphs—who did have a nasty habit of eliminating all threats to them—including up and coming dragon morphs.
“Very well,” he said, relenting. “I’m in.”
The women smiled.
With a nod, Aba set them to procuring the potion.
***
The cabbalistic magic—damn him for even entertaining getting closer to it. Augustus sensed only too late that one of the dragons in the barn was not just a dragon—but a dragon morph. That meant whatever magic they stirred up together in the barn, whatever personal and group empowerment came of it, sooner or later he was going to have to take on the dragon morph traitor in their midst—they all were—who would know everything they discovered.
He tried to let the strength of the blind huntresses saturate him, but it was no good. It was too early on with playing that game. Worse, he couldn’t tell which dragon was the dragon morph. Again, his command of the cabbalistic magic was too primitive.
The potion was taking hold, making it easy to let go of his fears, even though doing such a thing was abhorrent to him. His psyche and sense of self was starting to blur with the others in the room.
The women had collapsed into one posture or another; if they weren’t lying flat on the ground, it was because wherever they’d fallen, there was something to lean against to prop them up. Soon, no one noticed their bodies or the discomfort any of them were experiencing.
They were dead to this world, soon to be born again into some other.
***
Augustus awoke to find himself inside Tomoe’s head. The actual Tomoe that the one in his lifetime had been named after. She was under attack, panicked, but also so grief-stricken the skin of her face pulled uncomfortably, shriveling up beneath the repeated salt baths of her tears. Before her, her family lay dead, their bodies shredded like so much rice paper used to make the impossible-to-defend walls of her home in Japan.
Her parents, brothers and sisters, had taken their own lives, confused by the thought projections into thinking they were fighting off actual samurai warriors instead of one another. The more valiantly, the more relentlessly they fought, the more they tortured on
e another with their deaths by a thousand cuts. The battle had raged for hours within the house. The only reason she wasn’t swimming in blood was that it had leached out the floorboards into the earth below. Out of that accursed earth now rose demons Tomoe was forced to contend with.
They came at her from all directions. Her deftness with her sword meant nothing. The blade cut through the ghostly apparitions without leaving a mark. How could she fight off the intangible world with only tangible weapons?
Augustus, not used to being so brave, reacted mostly to Tomoe’s self-doubts and self-ridicule, as she cursed herself and her impotence. It was easy to confuse his own thoughts and reactions for hers because this was what it was like to be inside his head most days.
The other blind huntresses kept showing up throughout the house in strange manners. Aba manifested as a ceramic figurine that had refused to break in all the earlier tussling about the room. Makya presented as a Rorschach impression—a stain of blood on a rice paper panel that had stood up to the slashing of swords where few others had. Each time Tomoe’s fears started to get the better of her, one of the blind huntresses would show herself. Just when Tomoe thought she didn’t have the strength to swing her sword yet again to accomplish little but to get a disembodied ghost to dissolve briefly before rematerializing again, she would see one of the women. This time it was Heshima, seen out the window, up on the hill of the rural property, jumping up and down and chanting a Masai warrior song. Tomoe sensed they were here to lend her their strength, their job to remain calm and unmoved even as Tomoe’s last nerve reverberated to the point of breaking.
But they could not, would not get inside her head. This battle was hers to win or lose. Seeing the blind huntresses in their unruffled state allowed her to find the calm center in herself again. Now that Tomoe was calmer, Augustus was calmer; he found it easier to think. He whispered inside her head, “If your enemies send you thought projections, maybe you can find a way to turn that back on them.” He had an idea how to do it, but wondered if Tomoe would arrive at the conclusion for herself.
She did. Had she simply read his mind, since they were sharing the same headspace? Tomoe started moving more and more energy through her. A tai chi master in addition to a being a master samurai swordswoman, she was well accustomed to channeling chi to empower her every move. This time she channeled it into the spirits tormenting her, gradually making them more solid—solid enough to kill.
Gaining confidence with the effectiveness of her ploy, she took things a step further. She turned the golems on their masters. They stopped attacking her, and headed back whence they came.
Tomoe followed. Village after village she traversed, cutting past the defenses of the samurai lords that had sent their thought projections at her. They had been antagonized by the fact that a woman would dare to take up their trade, and would dare to surpass them in skill and merit. The golems handled enough of the bodyguards so she had energy and stamina remaining by the time she reached the headmasters. She politely bowed to the latest one with a mocking leer on her face before drawing her sword.
To her credit, she let the master of the house choose whichever weapon he fancied from his arsenal—always within arm’s reach. These men would not meditate, take meals or sleep apart from their weapons, always prepared for nights like this.
There were four head masters, all in all, to slay. Each one required swimming upstream of a virtual armada of private security. The golems continued to play their parts. All the same, when she had dispatched the final samurai lord, she was exhausted to the point of death. She stood by will alone, her body no longer able to respond to anything but the supernatural force which possessed her.
Killing the samurai lords had not been how she had intended to prove her worth. And it had not been the most satisfying element of her evening. It was putting faces to the people who had slaughtered her family. Finally, her soul could rest that her family had been avenged.
But Tomoe of ancient times had not been an actual ancestor, just someone this Tomoe, belonging to the present, had modeled herself after. So why then had she seen fit to take on this debt for her? To go back in time and balance the scales of justice for a woman she felt she owed so much to?
Because the historical Tomoe had been with her all along, something the Tomoe of the present had not realized. She understood what it meant to be plotted against and subject to the whims of distant lords who would unleash forces on her which she could scarcely comprehend or anticipate for the purposes of teaching her to respect her place. She felt she had developed a genius for slipping out from under the heel of such oppression. She had hovered near Tomoe all this time because she knew what was coming. She had seen the arrival of the alien queen, and knew what she represented—a master race that had taken the art of enslaving other civilizations to never-before-reached heights. She knew that the Tomoe of this time would not stand a chance without her. But that maybe together….
And now that the Tomoe of the present had helped make the Tomoe of the past whole, her psychic energies were even more available to her.
Still, the ritual was meant to reunite the Tomoe of the present with her other lifetimes, in order to pull all of her psychic energy into the present, not just part of it, leaving the majority of that energy scattered across so many parallel universes. So, considering the goal she was shooting for, what was this Tomoe of the past offering her but a poor consolation prize?
The Tomoe of the present was stuck for an answer to the riddle. The calming centeredness and presence of the other blind huntresses which could be felt, even when they couldn’t be seen was not enough this time to break through the veil surrounding her understanding. Augustus tried to embrace the same calm, tried to make this moment as much an opportunity for redemption and rebirth as it was becoming for the huntresses. If for no other reason than he might be able to assist the Tomoe of the present yet again, feel more of a valuable member of the team; it would be an added source of protection for him, but the gesture might prove more than simply self-serving; developing a habit of assisting others might well protect him from the dreaded fate of all dragon morphs, to refuse to use the powers they were amassing for anything but their own protection, thus making them as hated as they were feared.
Augustus permitted himself to melt further into the Tomoe of the present, their minds becoming as one. He whispered words of power in her mind, the spell meant to invoke insight and clarity of how to best guard against danger. Budding dragon morphs were quite adept at this. And so the answer came to Tomoe that she had been clamoring to get her hands on.
The answer was this: the blind huntresses had, one and all, incarnated in this lifetime to continue the work of shifting their center to the oversoul that had begun in prior lives. No longer did they identify with the failings or hang-ups or shortcomings of any one lifetime. They were already seventy-percent annealed; they were here in this lifetime to finish the work of reuniting with the oversoul already begun. It was the reason they had access to so many powers already. But to take things further, they needed to confront the alien queen. They needed to get inside her head and observe how she used the cabbalistic magic to harness still more power across more lifetimes. It was just that power that had allowed the alien queen to perform her rebirthing ritual after Naomi’s ancestor had disintegrated her earlier body.
And so now, in one master stroke, as economical and as slicing as that of any master samurai’s blade, the Tomoe of the past had shown the Tomoe of the present—and the rest of the blind huntresses—what their real work was. And it was not to lie about on the floor of their barn trying to dissolve the hurts of the past in order to claim more psychic energy for the present. Such a tactic might well work—if they had an entire lifetime at their disposal. They just had the here and now.
The spell was broken. The revelation about their path and their destiny pulled all of the blind huntresses out of the trance at once, and threw Augustus out of the altered state as well. He awoke, bleary eyed
to find them towering over him on the floor, nodding approvingly. “You did well, young dragon morph. Perhaps you will be the one worth saving.”
“So, we’re not going after the dragon morphs then?” he said.
“No, change of plans,” Aba declared. “That path may yet yield answers, but it will not lend us the empowerment we need in the time we need it. No, we’re going after the queen directly.”
“The Tomoe of the past was trying to show me the way when she prompted me to jump into the alien queen’s head,” the Tomoe of the present said.
“But we will be smarter about how we do it this time,” Aba informed him.
“How?” Augustus didn’t like the way his voice was shaking, or the rest of his body, for that matter.
“I can’t promise you you’ll survive this, Augustus, but if you do, you might well be the first dragon morph worthy of other’s slavish dedication.” Aba’s words were crafted so as to make him smile and swell with pride—and to squash the rising fears within him.
Heshima pricked Tomoe with one of her bone shards, sucked the drip of blood trough the hollow makeshift pipe denuded of marrow. Tomoe flared with anger briefly, but they had already been through too much for it to last long. Heshima’s eyes went white for a moment as she examined the blood before showing their radiance and their colors again. “It appears the wizards Player and Stealy are already dogging the dragon morphs, so that path is covered in any case. And the alien queen…”
She took a deep breath.
“Yes?” Aba goaded.
“What we’re contemplating will not be easy.”
ELEVEN
Elektra. It would be the name she would have on Earth; the closest equivalent to the name her people had given her. Though, for now, she remained to them, simply, the alien queen. For, once upon a time, the electrical pulses coursing through her brain was the pulse of life for her people. It allowed them to read what was on her mind which she wished to convey. It also provided them with will to live, and so it granted life itself. The pulse could be felt across galaxies, and, as she grew in power, across universes. She was rapidly reaching the point where no amount of distance would have prevented her from influencing her people, on whatever worlds they’d conquered in her name. But tragedy had befallen her.
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