It should have been a crippling, if not fatal, blow. Only it wasn’t. The strike hadn’t come close to cutting through the assassin’s armor.
“Surprised?” the assassin taunted. Cade could see his face now; the man was much older than he anticipated. A coarse white beard—slowly turning red from the blood that seeped out of his wound—covered his cheeks and neck; deep wrinkles splintered outward from his eyes, and a condescending smirk stretched across his lips. “‘There’s nothing as strong as a shido’s blade. And we Rai are the only ones who wield this sacred weapon,’” came a singsong voice from his cruel lips. “That’s still the bedtime story the Masters tell you, correct? Seems like there’re a lot of things they’re hiding from you. Things they don’t want you to know.”
“You bastard,” Cade spat. “Your mask was just the start—I’ll take the rest of your armor piece by piece if I have to.”
Mocking Cade with a chuckle, the assassin removed the rest of his headgear and tossed it to the side. “You just try.”
Cade leapt at the assassin again, who was ready for his attack. He lunged with his blade forward, bearing his momentum into the movement—something Jorken had yelled at him many times never to do. The assassin sidestepped, but not before letting Cade’s forward motion plow right into his shido’s hilt. Cade heard the crunch of his nose and felt hot blood pour from his nostrils before he registered the pain blooming in his face. Wounded and off-balance, Cade expected the assassin to cut his feet out from under him, but he didn’t. The huge, armored man stood his ground, waiting. Provoking Cade to attack again.
Cade smeared the blood on the sleeve of his tunic and drew a deep, ragged breath. He deliberately kept his eyes off Tristan’s body and focused on the weapon in his hands. It was part of him; it was an extension of his own self. And he had to be calm for his shido to do its work. That is what he’d been trained to do, but he knew it was all a lie. He couldn’t defeat the assassin; he couldn’t even cut him. Which meant he had a new objective: escape. Get past the assassin, get the Rokura, and get off Quarry while he still could. Because whoever this lunatic was, Cade couldn’t let him get his hands on the Rokura. He couldn’t let the weapon of alleged limitless power go wild in the galaxy. As much as he craved vengeance, he couldn’t let his brother’s birthright fall into the hands of some psycho who probably had grand dreams of despotism—or worse. That wasn’t happening.
Cade’s eyes flicked to the Rokura lying on the ground just a few paces behind the assassin. It had rolled out of Tristan’s grip, but his hand was open and outstretched, like he was still reaching for the weapon. And then Cade launched himself at the monster before him. Toe-to-toe, blades flashing in the chrysthums’ light and clanging as they met, the fighters seemed evenly matched. Cade suspected that the assassin was just toying with him, trying to prove his superiority by showing how easily he could take whatever Cade offered.
And the moment Cade felt an ounce of weariness, the assassin—with what seemed like preternatural recognition—went on the offensive. He was fast for his age, and his strength pushed Cade back on his heels. The assassin’s shido locked with Cade’s; he leaned in close, close enough for Cade to feel the heat of his breath and see the fury in his eyes. This man, whoever he was, was as good as any Master at the Well, but his technique was so much fiercer, a graceful rage flowing through every stroke. He may have wielded the weapon of the Rai and fought like one, but he was no Rai.
“You’re not leaving here with the Rokura, boy,” the assassin spat.
The tide was turning. Cade knew that once the assassin took control of the battle’s tempo, there’d be no going back. He’d wear Cade down, create an opening, and then kill him and take the Rokura.
Cade was determined to not let any of that happen.
The assassin continued to press his weight and strength against Cade, and Cade continued to lose ground. The muscles in his arms were beginning to slacken; his knees burned from resisting someone much stronger than him. Something was going to give, and soon.
“It’s not your fault,” the assassin grunted. “You’ve been lied to and made to fight in a war you don’t even understand. But it will all be over soon.”
Cade had only one chance, one counter he had to execute if he wanted to make it out of the cavern alive. Moving as fast as he could, Cade spun away, disentangling his weapon in the process. He hoped the assassin’s own momentum would work against him, that he’d stumble forward and lose balance. And in that narrow window when the assassin was defenseless, Cade could knock him down, maybe brain him, and pray that the armor keeping out a killing strike would also keep the man on the ground long enough for Cade to grab the Rokura and run.
But when Cade turned to strike, the assassin was waiting; he’d barely lost his composure. Cade, though, was already wildly plunging forward. The assassin swatted Cade aside easily, using just one hand to do it; with his other hand, he removed a small knife that was tucked behind his chest plating. Cade knew what was going to happen, but he couldn’t move his body before the assassin drove the knife into his thigh, twisting it as it tore through his muscle.
Cade cried out in anguish, but his scream was stopped when he was punched in his mouth by the assassin’s armored fist. He was struck again, then again, and when he made a feeble attempt to fight back with his shido, the assassin knocked it out of his hand and then pushed him to the ground.
Though disorientated, Cade tried to stand, but it was useless; his wounded leg couldn’t support his weight. His only option was to use upper-body strength to drag the rest of him along, though there was nowhere for him to go.
“You fight well enough for a little Rai,” Cade heard the assassin say as he crept behind him. “But I have a mission to complete, and I will not disappoint my master.”
Cade spat blood, then he felt a sharp pain dig into his midsection as the assassin kicked him in his ribs; that was his way of asking Cade to turn over. He pointed his shido directly into Cade’s face, the tip of its black blade hovering directly between his eyes; Cade could see the dried blood, Tristan’s blood, and it filled him with a renewed, but hollow, fury. He shoved the assassin’s shido out of his face, only to be met with it once again.
“Your brother died quietly. Why can’t you?”
Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Cade caught a flash from a chrysthum as it started to glow. He glanced over at it, as well as he could, and noticed what was directly below it: the Rokura, just out of his reach.
The assassin followed Cade’s line of sight and spotted the Rokura as well. “As if you could wield such power,” he said. “Accept your defeat and make this easier on yourself.”
The assassin’s warning was hollow; after all, it’s not like he could kill Cade twice. Okay, he could torture Cade and make his one death as terrible as possible, but dead was still dead. And while going for the Rokura didn’t make any sense—Cade had no idea how to unlock its supposed power, and using it just as a shido was pretty much pointless—Cade couldn’t resist.
Though it felt like fire was ripping through his thigh, Cade willed his wounded leg to move. He kicked the assassin in his knee, catching him off guard. The large man staggered backward, and, using his good leg, Cade swept the assassin’s ankle, knocking him to the ground. With precious few moments to act, Cade dove for the Rokura and grabbed it.
He was rewarded with pain. Like being electrified, stabbed, and burned, Cade’s body—every inch of it—erupted with agony.
When Cade grabbed the Rokura before, it played nice with him; it even tried to warn him, Cade realized now, of the masked lunatic waiting for Tristan to claim the weapon so he could make his move. But now—now it rejected Cade. Now it wasn’t in the safety of its stasis. The Rokura was free, and its instinct must have been to protect itself from whomever came near, because the moment Cade came into contact with it, his mind was punctured with stabbing pain. The Rokura was not only fighting him, but it was letting Cade know that he had no business trying to use the
weapon. He was not the Paragon, and the pain of that message being conveyed was unbearable.
“And what are you going to do with that thing?” the assassin yelled over Cade’s screaming. “Look at you—it’s killing you just to hold it.”
The Rokura continued to resist as the assassin drew nearer. In just a few paces he’d be on top of Cade, close enough to aid the mystical weapon’s efforts to kill him. Still, Cade couldn’t let go. That weapon was the only hope he had.
“Come on!” Cade yelled, slapping the Rokura with his free hand and hoping for it to respond. “Do something!”
As the assassin stood over him, biding his time, Cade pleaded with the Rokura, trying to will it to action. Cade pointed the weapon at the assassin, urging lasers, fire, a stiff breeze, anything, to come out. Nothing happened.
The assassin laughed, a low belly laugh up from deep inside his armor. “It’s a shame your Masters told you so little. Your brother wouldn’t be dead, and you wouldn’t be joining him.”
Cade gripped the Rokura tightly, absorbing the pain it caused him. In a flash, his life came into focus. Anger over being stuck in a pointless rut; shame that he didn’t have the guts to do anything about it. Fury over his brother’s death raged inside of him, and he felt more alone than he ever had in his entire life. Despair threatened all.
And then, out of nothing, he felt a twin flame inside him, a rage that matched his own. A mutual grief, a shared fear of being misused and alone in the world. Nothing was happening as it was supposed to, and millennia of plans had been wrecked in an instant. It was all gone in the blink of an eye, and none of what was lost would ever come back.
“I hope that means we’re on the same side,” Cade prayed, hoping the Rokura was open to suggestion. Because as the assassin’s shido came down on him, Cade flashed one thought and one thought alone:
Revenge. We need to take revenge on the coward who murdered my brother. Who murdered the Paragon.
The Rokura agreed.
Light sparked off the Rokura’s tip, just like Cade’s own shido, just like described by legend. But this light burned white, it burned brighter. The light was more.
Blistering heat surged through the weapon, scorching Cade’s hand; even though they both wanted the same thing—to make the man who murdered the Paragon pay—Cade got the sense the weapon wasn’t happy about being wielded by someone unworthy of its power.
But neither the Rokura’s feelings nor Cade’s melting hand mattered. Not in this moment. The assassin screamed as he threw all his strength and weight into driving his shido down on Cade, but it was of no consequence. He was frozen, painfully, exactly where he was. “You’re not the Chosen One!” he yelled. “You can’t use the Rokura!”
As if to only prove him wrong, a single beam of energy burst from the Rokura and enveloped itself around the assassin. It lifted him in the air, and as he hovered there, his armor began to disintegrate, piece by piece, until the entire carapace was gone. His body trembled uncontrollably, and Cade could see the agonizing pain in his face; the assassin wanted to scream, but his jaw was locked shut. Then, just as his armor had, the assassin’s flesh began to disintegrate, revealing tissue, muscle, then eventually bone.
Cade tore his gaze away from the gruesomeness in front of him only to be exposed to the damage the Rokura had inflicted on his hand. All Cade could feel was burning, white-hot pain, but what he saw was different: His flesh had blackened from the wrist to his fingertips, not like it was burned but like it was dead. Like the vitality of everything in his hand—from flesh to muscle to bone—had the life drained out of it. The torment was no more unbearable than it had been before he laid eyes on the actual effects, but Cade’s revulsion at what was happening to his own body lumped in his throat.
A cascade of light caught Cade’s eye, and he turned in time to see the last remaining bits of the assassin’s corporeal existence flash out of sight. Cade was horrified by the gratuitous display, but his response meant nothing. The Rokura was in control now, and it was much, much too late for anything to be undone.
In an instant, all the Rokura’s light extinguished and the cavern was dark again. Cade lay on the ground taking short, shallow breaths. He couldn’t move. The shock of what had just happened—so unreal, so awful—gripped him tightly. The assassin was just gone. Obliterated. What kind of weapon was this?
And his hand—Cade couldn’t forget his hand. The fading trauma of the assassin’s death was replaced by a searing pain, but it wasn’t confined to his hand. It was in his arm, his chest, his entire being, like a poison coursing through his veins. Cade was terrified to look, even though he already knew. He lifted his arm and saw the lifeless hand. Cade couldn’t even move it an inch. Still, the pain was so intense that it brought Cade to the brink of unconsciousness, which he was ready to welcome.
Then the cavern began to violently shake, just like it did when Tristan had taken hold of the Rokura. Chunks of rock smashed on the ground all around him, and Cade knew that if he wanted to live, he had to muster the energy to get on his feet and run.
* * *
Cade couldn’t remember how he found the platform that protruded out from the spire about halfway between the ground and the Rokura’s sanctum. It took every ounce of his energy—and tolerance for pain—to hobble even that far. He stumbled onto the jutting rock and lost his footing; he fell to the ground and he knew he wouldn’t be able to get back up. His hand was dead. His leg had been stabbed, his face busted, and he was pretty sure the assassin cracked a few of his ribs with his boot. Cade was physically and emotionally spent, and this was as far as he could go.
Lying on his back, he fought unconsciousness. He pressed his wrist comms device to his face, thankful it was on his left wrist and not his right, activating it. He could only hope that Duke was listening.
“Duke,” Cade mouthed, but all that came out was a raspy murmur. Cade could hear his labored breathing, could feel the darkness closing in every time he blinked. “Duke,” he said, this time more coherently. “Lock on to me, Duke. I need … I need…”
Cade drifted. As he did, his thoughts were of Tristan and the lifeless body he’d been forced to leave behind. He had tried to take his brother with him, but it was no use. Cade could hardly drag him an inch without collapsing. The best he could do was take his shido and make a promise, a solemn oath, to use it just as Tristan would have.
But then Cade remembered that Tristan’s shido wasn’t his weapon anymore—the Rokura was, and Cade brought that with him as well, even though part of him believed leaving it in the cavern to be buried under a mountain of rubble might be for the best. How could Wu-Xia, master of peace, bring something so monstrous to life? How could this be Tristan’s birthright? Something had to be wrong, and whether it was with the Rokura or the legend that surrounded it, Cade didn’t know. But this was no instrument of peace. Unless peace meant the wanton destruction of everything and everyone that stood in its way. Sure, Cade had no problem imagining how a Paragon could use the Rokura to effortlessly smooth out the galaxy’s problems, from the Galactic Fringe to the Inner Cluster of planets, in the blink of an eye. All he or she had to do was demonstrate the weapon’s atrocious might, and every superpower, every rogue state, every backwater planet that no one bothered to even put on a star chart would tremble in fear. But that person would be no better than Praxis. Praxis offered order through fear, not peace. It demanded obedience by training a blaster—or a magical weapon, or technology that could obliterate a sun, take your pick—on the heads of the entire galaxy.
Cade could be wrong, though. After all, if Wu-Xia really was a totalitarian warlord and not an apotheosis of peace, there was no way his reputation would have survived unblemished, regardless of how powerful he had been. And despite what had happened in the spire, Cade didn’t know what the Rokura was capable of when placed in proper hands. Cade wasn’t meant to wield the Rokura, and of all the things racing through his mind, that he was certain of.
If the problem wasn’t
with the Rokura, and if the legend of Wu-Xia held true, that left Cade with only one option: The problem was with him. The Rokura didn’t want him, and, truth be told, he didn’t want it in return. Still, something had to be done with the damn thing. It was too powerful to be left to bounce around the galaxy, and as much as Cade tried, his mind was fading too fast for him to come up with an idea of what should be done.
Darkness consumed him. The edges of his vision blurred, and just before he faded away, Cade thought he saw the outline of a ship hovering in the sky above him. But any conclusions of what that might mean failed to materialize as his thoughts remained fixed on the Rokura and how he didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t want to see it.
He wanted nothing to do with it ever again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Praxis found him.
Cade startled awake to the sound of a homing alarm. The blaring siren pierced his brain, and he had to scan his surroundings twice to realize that he was in the Horizon Dawn’s cockpit, seated in the pilot’s chair. He had no idea how he’d gotten there, as the last thing he could remember was desperately calling for Duke to come scoop him up before death’s grip got to him first. Now Cade was yelling for Duke again, but nothing came out of his throat but a dehydrated, raspy gasp. It was great that the mouthy drone had saved him, but how did he let them get into this mess? Cade pinched the bridge of his nose, focusing his vision so he could study the nav system; as far as he could tell, the ship was free-floating in space just outside of Quarry. No wonder they’d been found.
Putting together the pieces that connected Cade being trapped outside the spire to being back in his starship would have to wait. At the moment, he had to figure out how he was going to lose the four Praxis Intruders—and who knows how many more were waiting outside of his scanner’s range—that were closing in on him, fast. Cade couldn’t help but curse Duke once more, even though it didn’t help his situation in the least. It just made him feel better.
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