by Jeff Rovin
“Then you must act… against Liu.”
Shang Tsung nodded. He would love to find a way to act against Rayden himself, but he dared not step into the circle to consult with Shao Kahn. He didn’t want to face the god’s ire now that they knew the blundering idiot Kano was being followed – and by three members of the White Lotus Society no less – men, women, and even children who were masters of the martial and ninja arts. Even if he were to send Goro out to intercept them, that was no guarantee of victory. The giant Shokanite might have no trouble stopping one of the White Lotus members, but three? For that, Shang Tsung would need special assistance. Help that was sly and moved like the hornet, quietly and unseen.
“Where is he, Ruthay? Where is the only one who can help me?”
There was a long pause. “I… am looking.” Then, the disembodied voice said, “I see him… Shang Tsung. He is hiding.”
“Where?”
“In a cave… in a cliff… north of Wenzhou.”
“That’s just like him,” Shang Tsung said. “With the fees he charges, he could live in splendor. Yet he chooses a life of hardship and study.”
“And death!” Ruthay said.
“Yes, death,” Shang Tsung admitted. “Don’t be too harsh on him, Ruthay. Some people deserve to die. I will summon him–”
“Wait! Be warned, Shang Tsung. He is cursed!”
“Cursed? By whom?”
Ruthay wailed, “By the immortal Yu.”
Shang Tsung felt cold spiders crawl up his spine. “The demigod Yu?”
“Yes… he who is said to dwell in the underground caverns of Horse Ear Mountain… which is sacred to the goddess Kuan Lin. He who protects the canals… and the tunnels… and looks after all who use them, human and animal.”
“What did our brash friend do to Yu?”
“He… killed a man,” said Ruthay.
“What man?”
“A toll-taker… one who had given up a life of crime… one who had been a partner of the man… you… seek.”
“And how did that crime come to the attention of the spirit of Yu?” Shang Tsung asked.
“The man was killed… slowly disemboweled with a sword… while accomplices forced his wife and his son to look on! After his murder… the man’s remains… were dumped into a canal!”
Shang Tsung raised an eyebrow. “Is that all? I was expecting something truly terrible!”
“It was!” Ruthay shrieked. “When he disposed of the body… in that way … he profaned one of the sacred waterways… of Yu!”
Shang Tsung smiled now. “Then he is definitely the man I want,” he said. “Anyone who is impudent enough to insult a demigod won’t be afraid to attack a member of the White Lotus Society, or the gods who watch after them. I will send Hamachi, Ruthay. When he nears his goal, see through his eyes and guide him!”
“Yes… Shang Tsung….”
Turning and leaving the room, his green-and-gold robe swirling around him, Shang Tsung went up the stone staircase to the highest room of the southern pagoda. Though anger was still hot on his features, at least he saw a way to protect Kano without having to give Shao Kahn another portion of his soul.
Opening the door, the wizard pushed past the two hooded souls that were attending to the many birds in the palace aviary. The bulk of the collection of birds from around the world, and their ornate cages of balsa and steel, of bamboo and ivory, of twigs and even string, was for Shang Tsung’s own enjoyment. He luxuriated in the specimens, which ranged from the common nightingale to the imposing pine grosbeak, from the rufous-sided towhee to the glorious yellow warbler, from the black vulture to the red-tailed hawk.
But some of the birds were kept more for practical purposes. His falcons were trained to fly to the mainland and kill with claws of poison, while his beautiful white pigeons were trained to carry messages to spots all across eastern China.
Going to a small writing table tucked in a corner of the stone chamber, Shang Tsung lit a candle, dipped a fountain pen in red ink, and wrote in small, tight characters on a slip of rice paper:
LIU KANG AND TWO OTHER MEMBERS OF THE WHITE LOTUS SOCIETY ARE CAMPED TO THE WEST OF WUHU, HEADED EAST TO INTERCEPT A BAND OF BLACK DRAGONS. THESE INTERLOPERS MUST BE STOPPED. YOU ARE MY LAST HOPE. RETURN THE BIRD WITH A TOKEN SO I WILL KNOW THAT YOU HAVE GONE AFTER THEM.
SHANG TSUNG
After finishing the message, the sorcerer went over to one of the cages, carefully removed a pigeon, rolled the paper around its right leg, and fixed it there with a length of red string. Holding the bird in both hands, he made his way under and around the many cages to the window. The black shutters of the window were closed, and one of the hooded servants scuttled over, released the catch, and threw it open.
Shang Tsung bent close to the bird and said softly, “I know you won’t fail me as my fellow humans have, devoted Hamachi. Fly true and take my urgent message to the region you know so well. Ruthay will see through your eyes and guide you from there. Then return to me, my delicate servant. Come back safely and soon, and I will offer up a human sacrifice to you.”
With a last look into the black-pearl eyes of his precious messenger, Shang Tsung threw the pigeon out the window and watched the bird bat its white wings until it was swallowed by the starlit sky.
“Fly, my precious. Fly! You who do not need the waterways, the tunnels, or the favor of the arrogant Yu to accomplish your mission!”
When the bird was gone, the magician turned slowly, walked across the black tiles of the corridor to his private chamber, dismissed the hooded attendant who offered him food and drink, and lay on his thick satin pillows to await the dawn.
As he stretched out and shut his tired eyes, tried to stop his exhausted mind from reviewing the long day’s events, Ruthay’s voice sounded inside his head.
“Shang Tsung – you must come quickly!”
“What is it?” the wizard said tiredly.
“I see him… He awaits them!”
“Who does? Who is trying to interfere with me now?”
“Ruthay’s voice screamed in his brain. “Rayden! Rayden waits!”
Shang Tsung was on his feet in an instant, racing toward the shrine. Though he was exhausted from the long day of plotting and counterplotting, he would not – dared not – allow the god to stop him… even if it meant entering the circle and tapping the power of Shao Kahn himself.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He dwelt in a cave two hundred feet up the face of a cliff by the sea. The mouth of his home was barely wide enough to accommodate a slender adult, and was accessible only by climbing the sheer wall of rock, a feat that was impossible for most adults and daunting even to the few arachnids and marsupials that tried it.
Maybe some of them were even sent by Yu, he thought with a smirk, little assassins who would chastise me for having spilled blood in his precious canal. The smirk faded as he thought back to the murder. The blood of a traitor… one who took the oath and then turned his back on us. One it had taken two decades to find.
The traitor Yong Park had committed the ultimate crime: even if Yu himself crawled into the cave, he would find the killer unrepentant and willing to kill the former ninja again.
The cave was located two hundred miles south of Shimura Island, though it was still hours before dawn when the pigeon reached it. Landing in the narrow mouth, the bird cooed once then stood still, as it had been trained to do.
The ninja was awake and beside it in an instant, crouched beneath a ceiling that didn’t allow for him to stand. Dressed only in a white loincloth, despite the cold floor and chill air in the cave. He was reading the message by moonlight a moment later.
A smile crossed his lips, lips so pale and claylike that they appeared dead. His small, very narrow eyes looked from the message to the bird to the moonlight that lit just the entrance of his dark abode.
He ran the back of an index finger up and down the bird’s breast. “Good Hamachi. Return to your master so he will know that I have receive
d his message and am on my way to do his bidding. For a price, of course,” he said. He glanced at the several pyramid-shaped stacks of scrolls in the rear of his cave. His fee was another manuscript from Shang Tsung’s library, one of the many scrolls that were centuries old, dating back to the dawn of the days of the first ninjitsu and containing arcane secrets of the league of assassins to which he belonged, the widely-feared Lin Kuei.
He tingled with pride – and burned with fresh hatred for Yong Park – as he thought of the rich history of the breed to which he belonged. Formed in A.D. 1200, the ninjitsu were entrusted with the protection of the shoguns in ancient Japan. The Lin Kuei was a breed of ninja that moved from Japan to China in 1310. They would kidnap children when they were five or six and raise them in secret caves or woods to become superb athletes, great scholars, and unparalleled fighters, able to use all weapons and to improvise arms from common objects such as paper rolled to a knife-point or sand packed into a sock. They would train the children, boys and girls both, to be masters of many trades: carpenters, fishermen, priests, and even beggars, so they could blend in and make themselves useful in different towns as they traveled on missions for their lords.
Many young people died during training: some could not hold their breath for five minutes and drowned, others weren’t fast enough to avoid the weapons of the masters, some starved or froze or dehydrated when they were stranded, naked, in deserts or on mountaintops and told to make their way home. But those who survived were the Lin Kuei.
Removing the string from a scroll Shang Tsung had long ago given him in payment, the ninja placed it in the bird’s beak, gently turned the white pigeon around, and coaxed it into the night. Then the ninja crept toward a chest in a far corner of the cave, a chest that he had carried up here on his back; a chest containing all of his worldly belongings, the tools of his trade.
He opened the chest and began removing what he would need for his mission. He pulled on the black tights and cowl that would keep him warm and enable him to move in shadow. He donned the silver mask that covered his face and throat and protected them from harm. He put on the white belt and billowing vest that enabled him to glide, if necessary, for short distances. He donned shoes that had pockets of air which, when inflated, temporarily enabled him to walk on water, and he strapped on armor that covered his forearms and the backs of his hand – silver plates that allowed him to reach deep into his dead soul and generate waves of cold that temporarily froze his opponents.
Inside his belt, in specially sewn pockets, he concealed a pair of kyoketsu shogs, knives attached each to a length of nylon cord; smoke bombs and vials of poison; a breathing tube for travelling underwater; and firecrackers to create distractions. Around his wrists he donned hooks which could be used to impale enemies or climb sheer rock, and across his back he slung a length of chain and a long staff, in the hollow end of which was a knife.
Despite his many accoutrements, the ninja was able to move with ease and secrecy. Slipping back toward the mouth of the cave, the feared and enigmatic Sub-Zero crept out and made his way quickly down the face of the cliff to the beach below.
As he reached the shore, still standing in the deepest shadows by the cave, he experienced something he had never felt before: a sense of dread. It didn’t come from the job he’d been asked to do, or the place that was serving as his temporary home. It came from something out there… something he couldn’t quite see or hear, but something he could feel.
But part of his ninja training since early childhood had been the overcoming of fear through rational sublimation. He took a moment to remind himself that the worst thing that could happen was not to die but to die with dishonor. That would never happen, and since it would not, there was nothing for him to fear.
Able to push the dread to a place where it didn’t bother him, wouldn’t interfere with his performance, the agile Sub-Zero ran along the silvery, moonlit sands to the path that leads to the woods and hills below Wuhu.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Yong Park was drifting in utter blackness, comfortable and dreamy… and dead. He wasn’t sure whether he was facedown or upright; in the dark there was no direction, only a sense that he was moving somewhere. Whatever he was made of, whether corporeal spirit, he couldn’t see it; he felt as though he were part of the blackness in which he moved.
The toll-taker tried to collect his thoughts. The memory of the pain came back quickly and easily: the searing, unbearable torment of the pole with its knife as it cut… cut slowly from inside his thigh upward. Up to his belly, then to his ribs before it stopped.
Why hadn’t he died then, right away?
Yong Park had always had time to think as he sat in his little booth by the centuries-old canal. He couldn’t read, and there was nothing else to do as he raised and lowered the pike and collected tolls from merchants and fisherman and travelers using the waterway, monies which he turned over to the local government in exchange for his modest wage of five yuan a week. It wasn’t an exciting or especially rewarding life, but that was exactly what he wanted. He had turned his back on the ways of the ninja so that he could take a wife and have a family.
Now and then, his thoughts were about death. When he was a young ninja, full of vigor and trained to think only of honor, he never contemplated dying. But later, who wouldn’t think of it as he approached thirty, past middle age in a land where very few people lived to be sixty?
Park had always imagined that death would come quicker when one’s blood was spilled, that a wounded man would lose consciousness and feel very little. Even as a ninja, he was told that the body went into a shocked state when it suffered a serious wound, a state that prevented it from feeling the full extent of the pain.
That was wrong, he had to admit. Very, very, very wrong.
As the knife had scored the flesh inside his thigh, and the blood had begun to flow, and he’d heard the screams of his family, Park had realized that nothing kept one from dying like intense pain. To the contrary, it brought one to life – from the burning agony of the wound itself, to the raw insides of one’s screaming throat, to the hate in one’s hart for the one who was doing the killing.
Sub-Zero. That was what the man who held him down on the floor of the tollbooth had been called. That was the name of the monster who had dragged his wife and son from their hut nearby to watch his flesh ravaged and his blood spilled, to see his intestines and stomach exposed, still alive, as he squirmed and shrieked and died….
And now he was drifting.
He knew he had died, because he had stopped breathing. He had felt the pain envelop him and squeeze him and then leave him, though that wasn’t what had killed him: he had been thrown facedown in the canal and he’d drowned. It was almost comical, as he thought about it now: to be cut nearly in half with a sword, his flesh and muscles shredded, his blood and viscera spilling everywhere, yet to actually die by drowning.
If he had been alive, he’d have laughed. That – and if he hadn’t thought of his poor wife and teenaged son, screaming and crying as they watched. At least they were still alive, but how this would scar them for the rest of their lives! Especially his sweet and wonderful son Tsui, an artist who was so sensitive… so loving.
Suddenly Yong Park stopped drifting. He felt weightless, unable to feel even his own self, and then suddenly he was no longer alone. The blackness was still everywhere, but in his mind he saw a creature unlike any he’d ever seen or dreamed of. It had the muscular torso of a man, the head of a wolf, the lower body of a mountain cat, the shell of a beetle, the forelegs of a frog, the hindlegs of a bear, and the tail of a scorpion.
And he heard a voice.
“Yong Park.”
“Yes?” he said.
“I am Yu, god of the waterways and tunnels.”
“I – I know of you, Yu! My grandmother used to tell me stories. But you are a myth!”
“Behind every myth there is some truth, and behind every truth there is more myth. I am real, Yong Park.”
“Why are you here?” Yong asked. “Why am I here?”
“You are in the limbo between life and death,” said the demigod. “But it is not yet time for you to pass over. There is work you must do.”
“What work?”
Yu’s canine eyes grew angry, and his maw pulled back to expose long, white teeth. “The man who took your life defiled the canal. Not just with your death, Yong Park, but in the manner of it. He tore away parts of the souls of your wife and son, left them to wander my waterway forever. They will not know peace until we have been avenged.”
Upon hearing those words, Yong Park’s spirit – for he realized now that that was what he was – felt some of his old ninja fire return.
“I want you to go back,” Yu said. “I want you to return and bring me the soul of the man who slew you.”
“How will I do that?” Park asked. “My body was destroyed.”
The demigod leaned forward. “You have a son.”
“I do,” said Park, “but he… he is an artist! He has no training in these matters, no skills!”
“He is young and strong and has the will to avenge you. With your spirit inside of him, he will be able to move through space in a moment. His weapons will be the hooks and barbs of those who live on the waterways. With our help he will become an artist… of death!”
“No!” Park said. “Tsui and my wife have suffered enough. If he leaves, she will have no one–”
“She will not have no one,” the demigod said as he evaporated into the darkness. “She will have you both.”
And then Yong Park felt himself drifting again. Slowly at first, and then faster as he was sent from limbo back to the world of the living, to a place he knew well–
CHAPTER TWENTY
He watched from the top of a tree, waiting for the moment to reveal himself to them….
A low fog began crawling along the grasses of the field as Kano, Schneider, Senny and Sonya “Gilly” Blade followed the glow of Kung Lao’s flashlight.