Beneath Ceaseless Skies #82

by Ashley, Michael Anthony

  He danced to his flank but had hardly cleared his head when Uji tackled him, fists raging, contorted grimace of frustration. Saga took blows to the jaw, nose and brow before he wrenched his arms free and hugged Uji’s face to his chest. “Hold your breath!” he hissed in the man’s ear, then flung the last four chisshi bombs skyward and watched them explode their suffocating powder over everything in sight.

  * * *

  Over-I

  The room was organized with precision: scrolls and books in attentive formation against one wall, shelves bearing bandages and bottles of liniment and clay jugs of boiled stream water standing rigid against another. The eight-man samurai guard waited in likewise punctilious array, aiming the points of nocked arrows and the edges of drawn swords, none with steady hands. At their feet a stretch of raw planking marked the obstruction used to seal Marrow’s tunnel, the smooth wood floor an otherwise clean-swept uniformity. Amé and Tomuchi sat upon the platformed half of the room near a heavy strongbox, side by side, the crippled lord’s brazier adding heat to an already stifling room. Tomuchi held one half of the Knotted Rope in his lap. Amé toyed with the other. And ruling all, clearly of akunin make, four lamps squatted in each corner, heavy on iron legs, pouring the stink of burning chemicals and a scathing, white, unflickering light. Beneath them, there were no shadows.

  Saga observed this detail in an instant before he shoved Uji inside and slammed the door behind them.

  His mind was strained taut, his senses and Marrow’s and the thralls’ telling of footsteps thudding through the floor, the stifling prison of the strongbox, the odor of samurai being beaten and the thud of Amé’s heart and the green of Tomuchi’s robe and.... Saga steadied himself, brought his physical person to the fore: quiet inside the room; the war raging outside.

  He jammed the door with a throwing knife. “You’ll die here,” he told them all, wedging more knives. “There’s nothing you can do to change that. So I’m asking that you please cooperate without theatrics.”

  Uji, sooty and bruised, gathered himself to stand with his fellow samurai, all staring at Saga with hatred.

  “You look terrible,” Amé said.

  “A mirror wouldn’t flatter you either,” retorted Saga, leaning on his knees. She still wore Marrow’s bruise at her temple—and how she’d resisted the three-tap sleep, he couldn’t guess—but her new face was what he’d meant, so like Amé’s and yet so different. There was more age in her brow. And that cant to her lips.... Anxiety? Excitement?

  “I know you’re angry—”

  “Wrong,” Saga interrupted, gesturing to the strongbox. “Marrow’s angry.”

  Tomuchi’s grunt was bitter. “So it has a name,” he said, face waxen and sheened with sweat. Even in the heat of his brazier the old chill in his joints seemed to bend him small.

  Saga bowed, as was Rope-proper. “I apologize, but I’m not here to discuss that.”

  Tomuchi scowled. “I? Which is the real I? The shadow? The rope?” He pointed at Saga with the hilt of his knife, a gesture of deep contempt. “Do you even know?” Tremors shook the building as one of the akunin arrows exploded outside in a muted thump and frizzle.

  Saga found himself unprepared for Tomuchi’s question. The real “I” was a thing he’d never known, a thing he sought to find, both facts of an intimacy hardly fit for sharing in the circumstance. He anxiously felt he was losing the initiative.

  “You out maneuvered me,” he admitted, “thinking to manipulate me by capturing Marrow, stealing the Rope. But you miscalculated. Your prizes are only extensions of me, and I, however you wish to define the word, don’t matter. My wants don’t matter. The mission goes on. And not one of you,” he said meeting their stares, “has a shield for what’s coming.”

  A trick in echo smuggled rumor of the battle through odd places in the walls—one man screaming hoarsely for his arm, curses from another before a blast cut him short, the thud of flesh, the snap of bone, a truncated explosion of breath from a broken chest. The fighting was closer by the instant.

  Saga bowed once more to Tomuchi. “I would know something of you,” he said, then to Amé, “of both of you.”

  Her smile was joyless, her head inclined to the noises without. “A shame, then, that we’ve run out of time. I do hate leaving young men unsatisfied.” She gathered the Knotted Rope in both hands and held a length of it taut for all to see. “I admire your skill—marvelous cunning, and patience to match. If you’d even suspected the truth of my purposes here, I’ve no doubt that all you said about this assault of yours would be true, the lord and I trapped hopelessly at your mercy. So trust me, Sofurabi-child, when I say that your miscalculation is not your fault. My hostage, you see, was taken the moment we met. And my shield. Well, it’s here.”

  Saga’s mouth had gone dry, Marrow-tendrils grasping at his thoughts with confusion, his jaw twitching in time to the chills thrilling anxious pulses at his nape. “What did you do?” he whispered, reaching toward the gap where three Knots had been undone. Serve the client: gone. infiltrate the troop: gone. destroy the troop from within. All three, with their familiar twists and twines, vanished.

  He started forward to grasp that horrible naked span, but his legs held rigid as ideas he’d once known for law simply ceased to exist. He remembered the message reeds, and the Denrai clients, and the terrible need to kill Tomuchi. But suddenly he couldn’t care a whit for them. They were obligations struck, baby teeth knocked free to leave gaps full of empty space and a deep discomfiting apathy. What need did he have to ruin Tomuchi? What did it matter if there were witnesses? To what purpose had Kumo died? Saga had no answers, not anymore. The mission was untied. “How?” he asked. But even as his lips spoke the words his akunin mind, meticulously trained, ever-working, made abrupt sense out of mystery. And Saga’s already haggard breath caught hard.

  Amé nodded, her voice rising rich and steady over the approaching carnage. “I am a leaf of the grass. I ply the earth. I tread the wind. I birth wraths of fire and take suck from the rain. I have slipped the light into a world of shadows and am returned to the field bearing a gift of seed. I am a leaf of the grass.”

  Lord Tomuchi looked from Amé to Saga to the Rope with a brow knit hard and dark.

  But Saga pressed his fists to the floor and knelt to Amé in humble respect. The way he’d been taught. The way the Rope commanded. For she had given the code phrase—in perfect gesture, intonation, and word—for welcoming agents safely home to Kagehana.

  “I was away on a mission the night of your—” she jumped at the crash of another explosion and waited, listening, until a code pounded from the roof. She stood. “On the night of your Uremon, and your... gift to our beautiful Kagehana. And I’ve been a long time contracting with the southern clans. But I do remember the day you were presented to the village, so long ago, the little Ink boy, wide-eyed and knowing nothing. One of the elders gave you a gift of a beaded necklace and you asked her if it was another rope for you to mind. The elder laughed. We all laughed.”

  Saga, on his knees, stared at the jut of a throwing knife in his own belt. Amé... of the village? He raced his thoughts over all he knew of her, and a picture emerged that alarmed. How they’d become friends, and that fastly. The easy cadence of their wordplay. The comfort she’d always made him feel. And tonight, the conversation he’d spied upon between her and Tomuchi, it came to him in a new understanding: the things she’d chosen to say, the way she’d curbed Tomuchi’s words, the lies she’d told. She lied so well.

  Saga stared his knife. She could be lying now. She’d admitted to finding the Kagehana archives, hadn’t she? She could have gleaned the passphrase from them, could have discovered accounts of his Presentation Day. Could have studied him for three years. Could have planned the lie, every day, for three years. She could be lying. But from the knife he raised his eyes to look at her and her pitying mouth and her mother’s eyes, and he knew it didn’t matter. He was convinced. So the Rope was convinced. And he suddenly realized why
Amé, unlike her maids, had allowed him to see her true face.

  (Filthy trap!) Marrow declared.

  Saga agreed.

  He was lost in the immensity of it, his efforts through the night finally overtaking him in an abrupt onset of leaden muscles and remembered pains. And thus dazed and weary, he felt nothing of the invading thralls.

  Two owned-men came crashing through the wall with demon faces torn and chests gone ragged by impossible wounds. The samurai leapt in shock. Tomuchi shouted for attack. Saga scrambled upright, grasped for his killing sword, remembered throwing it to escape a death by throttling. He lurched to a protective stance in front of Sister Amé and drew his short sword instead.

  (Come!) Marrow cried as the thralls stumbled clumsily upon a pile of debris, crawling for the nearest lamp. The samurai arrows hit them in a swift meaty tattoo, thud-toc-smack. The first volley yet thrummed as Tomuchi’s men nocked and drew and fired again. And again. And again, until the owned-men were bristling. Too little, Saga thought. Too weak. Yet he watched, startled, as first one thrall then the other flopped to his belly and begin to writhe, their blisters full and pulsing, Marrow shouting joy clear as a birdcry through Saga’s mind. And abruptly he realized what came next. He tackled Amé to the floor beneath the safety of a lamp.

  “What’s this?” growled the soldier who stood above them, an instant before the blisters erupted.

  From eggs to larvae to pupae in less than an hour, the new wasps burst from the flesh six-hundred strong. They were identical to the first five dooms, darkness in motion, grave silence where buzzing ought be. Many died instant deaths in the light of the lamps, dark vapors vanishing upon the air, but others forced directly from the flesh through the wooden floor, into the safety of the crawlspace.

  They began to tear the room apart. Under the floor, through the walls, against the stout beams that held the ceiling aloft, the children swarmed and sped and bashed. Where one could do no damage, thirty gathered in an amorphous fist of Marrow’s will to crush the wood to splinters. The samurai turned this way and that, shuffling into ever-tightening formations to protect the light of the lamps. When a floor beam snapped and sent one lamp rocking, three pairs of hands jerked to hold it still. Ten throats sighed in simultaneous relief.

  Footsteps pounded and a squad of the troop came thundering down the hallway to stare agape through the hole in the wall.

  “Get those things out of here!” Tomuchi commanded of the two shredded corpses. “And seal up that hole!” He had taken a defensive position beside a column, one hand clutching a samurai’s shoulder, the other his drawn knife.

  Saga helped Amé stand, bit his cheek as a jut of floor jammed his torn foot. His fist clenched so hard his fingertips went numb. But he fought the agony and closed his eyes. All across the grounds the owned-men fell as the new swarm burst to life, dozens of bodies, thousands of wasps, and every wasp intent on this room. “You untied the Knots,” he said, coming back to himself, “but too late.”

  Amé was brusque. “You can’t control them, I know. But you survived Kagehana. You defended the village against your own creations—you had no choice—and yet here you stand. So it’s not too late, child. The wasps won’t attack you if you combine with Marrow.” It was not a question.

  Was he so naively transparent, his history nothing more than a flippant simplicity to this woman? “Sister Amé is correct,” he said begrudging.

  As the samurai carried the corpses out, every soldier flinching at the roar of the chaos of the wasps, a slim armor-clad figure slipped through the breach in the wall. She wore a cloth face-mask like her partner and moved with the same grace, and like the throatless carcass in the bamboo wood, she was at once familiar to Saga and strange. This the second maid leaned near Amé and whispered fiercely. Amé nodded, coiling the Rope at her hip.

  “Have your men build a shelter over the strongbox,” she said to Tomuchi. “Use this debris, this wood, and those planks there. No need for precision, just a place of shadow large enough for Saga to fit. Saga, you help.”

  He bent and grasped a plank, Rope-proper and obedient, but inside him Marrow’s influence was seething. (Fingers full of lusting wrath to shred the hateful trapper’s skin, shred her bones, shred her life, shred her stupid heavy burning choking hating slavery....) The building shuddered, the swarm a din of enormous brutality ripping through the outer rooms, lashing down beams and columns and plaster until storeys collapsed and splinters pinged against the walls with the sound of jagged hail. Uji fought a slat bulging from the wasps pushing on the other side. Many samurai had fallen to their bellies to hold the lamps in the hug of their arms.

  Saga was slow to realize that no one had heeded Amé.

  She was staring at Tomuchi. “He’ll protect me,” she assured the lord. “He’ll protect Kagehana, and you too, if you stay close. We can survive this night with your mission intact. But we must act now.”

  The sound as Tomuchi spat was thick and flat and hard with force, loud even over the din. “Take her!” he ordered, furious.

  Swift as a doe the maid nocked her bow and took a position at Amé’s flank, even as the samurai leapt, swords leveled, arrows aimed. Protect Kagehana was the will of the Second Knot, but the soldiers dashed to hold Saga in hard grips across the chest and arms, his sluggish muscles affording no time for escape.

  “Peasant bitch!” Tomuchi, still propped on a soldier, pointed at the Rope at Amé’s side. “You could have taken command of him at any time. Days ago. Months! Oh, fool that I am. I see it now. This was a... a test! A test of his strength. My men dead, for a test. My honor, for a glimpse of this monster’s power.” He stomped against the strongbox with all his might, pain and rage cavorting upon his face, unseemly. “Do not deny it!”

  Amé for an instant seemed poised to do just that, but then she shrugged. “We approached you, you arrogant idiot. Or did you forget?” She produced a flare from somewhere in her sleeve, similar to the one she’d used to blind Saga in the wood. “This was our operation from the beginning.”

  Saga twisted against the hands that held him, struggling hard so as to stay ahead of the bubbling panic-tide creeping cold and inchwise over his heart. Protect Kagehana. He was obedient. He was a proper agent. No matter if he failed those years ago on the first night of wasps, no matter if he failed to protect Amé now. He was safe from punishment, so long as he gave his all. So long as he tried. And he did give his all. All to the Knotted Rope. He struggled.

  But abruptly, with all the skin-prickling bliss of true epiphany, he made sense of a beautiful truth, quivering so ripe here on the murderous air he could pluck it for himself with the ease of a spoken word: he no longer needed to struggle. Not for the Rope, not ever again. For, Amé by haste or ignorance had untied only those Knots as governed his mission. The Knots of akunin behavior remained. And so did the samurai. And here, in this dying room, the akunin and samurai, the two halves of his Rope, the poles of his conscience, stood ready to kill each other. Time was the mother of chance. And this was the moment, his chance to be free, to go where he would, to do what he would. Free to finish his experiment. Free to—

  (Be king!) exalted Marrow.

  Just that, Saga thought.

  But there was first a thing that nagged him. An important thing.

  “My question,” he shouted, still contesting against his captors. The samurai squeezing his chest hissed in his ear and squeezed tighter. Saga rounded his back to give room for breath. “You never answered my question,” he said, Marrow’s influence making him loud.

  “Quiet,” Tomuchi ordered.

  Amé arched her brow, taunting, and brushed her fingers against the First Knot. “Speak.”

  Obey Kagehana above all.

  “We’ve all done our duty,” said Saga, “and deceived each other. But yesterday, before. Was it only a lie? Were we truly friends?” he asked of Amé. “Were you truly proud?” of Tomuchi. It seemed so foolish a thing to ask in a moment as this, but for Saga it had been a horrible pu
zzle. As a boy he’d watched the families in the village, and he’d recognized nothing of what heaved their breasts and tugged their smiles and set flowing their tears, nothing of “family” in his own understanding. Was he incapable? Deformed? Or had he simply been deprived? The troop, this mission, was the first season of his life spent in close company with others. And that season was dying. He had to know.

  Amé, in echo of a playfulness that seemed long dead, said, “There are some things, Deeply Serious Little Brother, that can’t be feigned.”

  Tomuchi, ever gruff, met Saga with a hard stare. “You were a good samurai, for a liar.” But as his mouth swallowed the end of those words, its corners turned down in the slivered hint of sorrow.

  Saga took their gifts, knowing for once that he could be acknowledged as a human being, and gave his thanks.

  Then he betrayed them both.

  “Sister Amé,” he said with the strength left to him. “It’s my duty, made law by the will of the Knotted Rope, to inform you of a danger, the chance that Tomuchi-sama has begun to suspect the First Knot, there at the end of the Rope nearest your foot, controls my loyalty to Kagehana. And that if he were to destroy that Knot, he would be better able to claim me for himself.” It was something she needed to know. For her protection. Just like you want, he thought to the Knots. If it was betrayal, then legal betrayal, and no fault of his own. Still, Saga braced for the panic-tide, clenching his teeth. But there was nothing!

  In response, Marrow’s swarm drew back as an ocean on the ebb before crashing in with ferocity to burst a half-dozen holes in ceiling, floor, and wall, wasps bulging into the white-lit room, the creatures at the fore dying in ebon wisps to screen the others behind. In this wise they cascaded arm lengths inside before the samurai recovered and raced with debris to force them back. Men were stung and fell prone. Their fellows dragged them into the hallway and hacked off their heads.

  The air was sweat-dank and alive with swirls of dust, lamp light dancing crazily. As death pressed in, deforming one corner and the next, the samurai threw Saga to the floor and all but crushed him in their fervor to protect their lord.