by Dante King
From the tall trees behind the house, a flight of brightly-colored birds rose shrieking in alarm. The trees swayed as the echoes died away, and to my surprise I heard clapping. I looked up and saw most of Toshiro’s servants crowded around the doorway of the house. They were clapping and cheering. Cara seemed a little embarrassed at them having seen her, but then she swallowed her embarrassment and gave them a little bow.
“I think that’s enough for the moment, don’t you?” she said, nodding at the mess the explosion had made of the practice court; lumps of smoldering wood and partially-melted ice lay scattered around one end of the area.
“As you wish,”said Toshiro. “For my part, I’m pleased to see some combat magic being practiced here at Ferndale again. It reminds me of the old days, and even makes me think about the future...”
“On that point,” I put in, “I think it’s about time we had some talk about what comes next, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said solemnly. “There is indeed a great deal to discuss. Come with me over to the pond, we’ll have some refreshments and talk things over.”
I looked at Cara. She nodded, then looked abstractedly away for a moment. I saw with satisfaction that she was applying her will to the Kitsune Persona. She was learning fast. The Shinobi outfit melted away, to be replaced with a beautifully patterned robe of silver-gray.
The civilian outfit aspect of the Kitsune Persona was perfect on Cara. For me, the gray robes had been comfortable and practical, but I preferred the familiar feel of the Saxe-style Ironside clothing. On Cara, the Kitsune manifested a gorgeous, figure-hugging robe of light yet warm and strong material. It had a plunging neckline, showing off the top of her well-formed breasts, and it was slashed up the side from ankle to hip, so that if she chose, it could leave her shapely legs bare to the open air.
She caught my admiring look and gave me a private smile. We followed Toshiro away from the practice court and into the garden, where we sat with him at a little wooden table beside a small pond in which fat golden fish moved lazily under white lilies.
“I have a question that’s been burning in my mind,” I said to Toshiro. “Did anyone ever try to fight the Festering?”
He shook his head. “That would be a foolhardy act. Only one man ever tried to do that. Not long after I left the Shogun’s retinue, I heard that another man, a close friend of mine, and one of the greatest Samurai in the retinue, had also left. There were dark rumors that he had seen something terrible, and some folk said he had gone mad, because he claimed there was some evil power in the mountains behind Otara. Suspecting the cause, I traveled to Otara to try to intercept him and stop him from going off alone, but I was too late. He was gone, and he was never heard of again. That was two years ago. But recently, stories have reached me from the villages at the foothills of the mountains. They say that a hungry ghost roams the hills on moonlit nights, dressed like a Samurai, but with a face of unspeakable horror. I suspect.... no, I know in my heart, that it is my old friend, corrupted by the Kanosuru.”
Cara and I glanced at each other, remembering what the keeper had told us when he had given us the quest—that a brave Samurai had gone out alone to investigate the threats, and had been ensnared.
“Your friend,” Cara asked gently. “What was his name?”
“Yakuna,” Toshiro whispered. “His name was Yakuna.”
We looked at each other again. Yakuna was the name the Keeper had given us. This, then, was one of the objects of our quest. We would find Yakuna and cleanse the Festering from him, freeing the land of his dangerous presence and laying Toshiro’s friend to rest in the process.
“Should we make a plan to find Yakuna?” I asked.
The sound of hurrying feet prevented any answer to my question. We all looked around to see old Win moving quickly toward us. He looked worried.
“What’s wrong?” asked Toshiro, instantly picking up on the old man’s concern.
“There is a large party of horsemen coming up the road toward the valley entrance. They are led by a man in a Kitsune priest’s robes, but they are a heavily armed and mean-looking band. My gut tells me they mean to bring trouble.”
“Very well,” Toshiro said, springing to his feet. “We will go and see them, though I’m not sure what I will be able to do...”
“You don’t have to worry,” I said reassuringly, laying a hand on Toshiro's shoulder. “Cara and I will see them off if they try to start trouble.”
Chapter Twelve
Cara and I, clothed in our Personas, followed Toshiro through the main hallway of the big house and out onto the road in front. On the left, the wide expanse of the deep lake filled most of the valley, curving around to protect the left side of the house. On the right, the land dropped away into the valley, and the road climbed up in front of us to the high ridge over which we had come yesterday.
Now, looking up from the porch, we could see dark mounted figures streaming over the ridge.
“There are very many of them,” Toshiro said in a quiet voice. Then he called over his shoulder, “Win, tell everyone to get inside the house. They should go into the stone wing, they’re least likely to be injured there.” The old servant, who had followed us out front, hurried off to carry out the master’s orders.
“Those mounts don’t look like horses,” I commented as the dark mass of figures moved down the slope at an even pace toward us.
“They’re almost like wolves,” Cara added.
“They are Byakko, white tigers,” Toshiro confirmed. “In the northern islands there are places where the local people train the tigers as war mounts, then capture their spirits, but here in the south there is only one group who use them; the Byakko mercenaries.”
There was fear in his voice as he said it, and that made me glance at him. “Particularly fierce mercenaries, I take it?”
He gave me a wry look. “You could say that. They are bound to the spirits of the tigers they ride, and they are imbued with the ferocity of their mounts when in combat. It’s said that the Byakko mercenaries have never been defeated in battle.”
I reached out and felt the reassuring presence of the heavy armor of Ironside just waiting for me to reach out and claim it.
“Perhaps we’ll break that myth for them today,” I said.
The mounted horde thundered down the sloping incline toward Toshiro’s house. They pulled up fifty yards from where we stood, a band of two hundred battle scarred and fearsome looking men armed with all manner of bladed weapons; long spears with curved heads, graceful, slightly curved samurai swords, axes, straight swords, daggers, and knives. Many had bows on their backs as well. Their armor was brightly colored and followed no uniform pattern, except that every man has somewhere on his gear a symbol of a tiger’s head.
Their mounts were like nothing I’d ever seen during my life in Saxe. We’d heard of tigers—I’d seen images of them in books, and once I’d seen a carving made of stone which had been traded from an unknown land—but nothing in my previous experience prepared me for this.
They were easily as tall as horses, and broader than any warhorse I’d ever seen. Heavy muscles bunched and bulged under thick coats of dense white fur, striped in black. They were dressed in battle harnesses of leather, chain mail, and plate, and like the armor of their riders, this was brightly colored and followed no discernible pattern except for the lion’s head motif stamped into the metal and worked into the leather.
A deep, grumbling growl came from deep in the throats of the creatures. Heavy paws with claws like swords scraped the ground, and red eyes glowed from the shadows of helmets. Their long tails flicked menacingly back and forth.
Suddenly, these demonic riders parted to let a much less impressive figure through. It was, of all people, the little priest who I’d seen at the Kitsune shrine earlier, the first person I had met upon entering Yamato. He was mounted not on a tiger but on a tall warhorse, and he looked small and ridiculous perched on top of the enormous, noble creature.
&nb
sp; Beside him rode a much more impressive figure, a tall samurai with a long spear on his back and two blades at his belt. From his armor, and his horse, I guessed he was not one of the Byakko mercenaries. He wore a tall, red-lacquered helmet with a flared neck guard and a half disk of gold, like a half moon on his brow. His armor was made of flexible, hanging plates of leather and metal, layered over chainmail. He had a thick black beard, and his eyes were dark and fierce.
“You,” he said, pointing a finger of one gauntleted hand at me. “I am General Koshu. I'm here to arrest you in the name of the Shogun.”
“On what charge?”
“Despoiling the Kitsune shrine and binding the Kitsune spirit, and causing unnecessary damage to the woodland around the shrine, stirring up the local Tengu, and using black magic to steal the spirits of Yamato for your own evil purposes.”
“Anything else?” I asked him sarcastically.
“That’s enough to be going on with. You’ll come with me quietly, or you’ll come with me dead. Your choice.”
“You seem to feel the need for a lot of backup,” I commented, running my eye over the two hundred or so mounted mercenaries.
“We don’t take risks when dealing with unknown outsiders. Come on, you and your friends must be brought before the Shogun.”
“I don’t think so,” I said quietly. “My friends and I are staying right where we are. We have a job to do in this land. We’re here to cleanse the land of the taint you call the Kanosuru. The Kitsune spirit of the shrine was infested with the Kanosuru. I cleansed the taint from the shrine and...”
“He resists! Kill him!” screeched the priest.
“Last chance,” warned the samurai, but there was a look in his eyes, just a quiver of doubt.
I looked him in the eye and shook my head, slowly.
He shrugged. “A pity.” Two steps took him back to his horse, and he leaped up onto it and wheeled it around, riding hard up the hill away from us. The priest threw me a malevolent look over his shoulder and followed.
It was clear to everyone what would happen next. I reached for the Persona of Ironside, and as I did so, someone blew a horn high up on the hill. The monstrous tigers reared up, the terrible riders screamed their battlecries and shook their weapons in the air, and all two hundred of them charged down the hill toward me.
Heat ran through me like liquid fire in my veins as the white armor of the Ironside Persona snapped into place around me. My two-handed axe was in my hand. The Byakko had formed into a massive wedge, and I saw the lead rider, a giant of a man armed with a three yard lance bearing down upon me. Drawing on the troll strength, I leveled the pointed tip of the spear head straight at him and sprinted up the hill to meet his charge.
I ran fast, the huge weight of the Ironside armor feeling like nothing to my boosted strength. I saw fear blossom in the man’s eyes as he realized what was about to happen, but by then it was too late. I took the full force of his lance on my breastplate and it exploded into a million pieces. The impact rattled my teeth but did me no other damage. Not so for him. I braced, and his own unstoppable momentum drove his monstrous mount onto the cruel spike which graced the head of my axe. It slammed up through the creature’s mouth and into its brain.
The monster dissolved into a thick cloud of white smoke, and the rider crashed to the ground. I swung my axe but he dropped and rolled, springing to his feet and leaping away from me. He dropped the smashed shaft of his lance and swept out his sword, coming at me with a ferocious two-handed swing. Holding my axe with a hand at the base and one at the head, I caught his sword blow and turned it with the axe shaft, then shoulder-barged him with the massive shoulder plate of my armor.
With my axe in my right hand, I swung my gauntleted left forearm into his face as he tried to recover his balance. Blood exploded from his nose and his helmet flew off. At the back of his head, there was a sudden squirming of black. Was it the Festering, or was it just his hair? I didn’t have time to find out. I hefted my axe and brought it down on his head with a blow that almost cut him in half.
Around me, the Byakko mercenaries with their tiger spirit mounts swarmed like white sea foam. I felt a slamming of claws on my back as one of the tigers leaped at me, and I used my sheer weight and bulk in the Ironside suit to unbalance the monster, then I caught a handful of its harness and shoved it down the hill. Monster and rider separated, both crashing and tumbling down the slope toward the house.
Two riders charged me, lances leveled at my helmet. I swung my axe left and right, knocking the lances away, then hit the rider on the right in the belly with my axe blade, shearing through his armor and sending him tumbling over onto the ground clutching at his belly. The rider on the left wheeled his mount, trying to bring his great curve-bladed naginata spear to bear on me.
I leaped up onto the back of his tiger, head butted him and then punched him in the neck with a gauntleted fist. I felt the bones of his neck crunch, and he tumbled off the tiger’s back, blood spurting from his mouth.
The tiger was less than pleased with my presence on his back, but I threw my great axe onto my back and gathered up the creature’s reins. It responded reluctantly, and I wheeled it around, getting a look over the battlefield.
The fight had carried me up the hill away from the house. I kicked the tiger and moved back downhill just as another three mounted warriors charged me from the right, their lances lowered at my mount. I summoned my twin axes and let go of the reins, and the tiger charged into his fellows. He seemed to have decided that I was his rider now, and he lashed out at the other tigers with his massive claws, swiping to the left to kill a man and his mount while I took down the two men on my right with my twin axes.
The tiger he had killed vanished in thick white smoke which filled the air and drifted across the battlefield, but the tigers whose riders I had just killed fell in beside me. I felt a strange pricking at the edge of my awareness, a warm, questioning sensation, similar to the feeling of a Persona waiting to be used.
All around me, a mass of the Byakko mercenaries were circling, but they looked scared now, glancing at one another as if they feared to attack.
A voice spoke to me, mind-to-mind, a deep voice like the boom of the sea.
“Yasei,” it said. “My name is Yasei. If you will free us from our captivity, we will do your bidding.”
It was the tiger that I was riding speaking to me, and as I glared around at my enemies, he turned his huge head and rolled one eye at me. The other two had fallen in beside me, one on either side. I didn’t have to think about it.
“Yasei,” I said. “I will free you and your kin. Kill the men.”
“Gladly,” his voice rumbled in my mind.
He reared up to charge, and suddenly there was a loud whistling in the air around us as a flight of hurtling projectiles cut through the air. It was a flight of shuriken stars, and twelve of the Byakko riders tumbled backward off their mounts, the deadly stars sticking out of their heads and chests. I looked around for Cara and saw a flash of black and red hurtling down the hill toward me.
I charged the circling mass of Byakko mercenaries as their freed mounts leaped forward to join me. They stood their ground, forcing their bound mounts forward to meet us with a crash of spears and claws on metal. I laid about with my axe, killing six men as their lances and swords scored and smashed against my armor, jolting me but causing no damage. Every tiger who was freed of his rider wheeled about and attacked the Byakko mercenaries, until I found myself charging up the hill toward Cara at the head of an ever-increasing wave of ferocious white tiger spirits.
Cara was holding her ground with her black straight sword now, in the midst of a cloud of thick white smoke. For a moment, I wondered where the smoke was coming from, and then I realized—the Byakko mercenaries, seeing that their bound mounts were turning on them, were killing the tigers before they could turn and join me. The tigers, when killed, turned into this strange mist-like substance. Now, a mass of fifty of the men were dismounted
, and they held in a ragged rectangle of ten abreast and five deep. Cara had charged them leaving a trail of dead in her wake, and the rest of them had made a wall of pikes to try to hold her off.
Riding my new tiger mount Yasei, I thundered toward the braced line of pikes, but before I could reach them Cara had disengaged from the fight. She leaped in the air and backflipped three times to put a bit of distance between her and the front line, then flung a flight of shuriken stars, this time trailing comet tails of freezing air behind them.
They thudded into their targets and five men were instantly covered in thick ice. I saw her potion in her hand, a flash of bright yellow, and then three arrows were loosed at the frozen targets. Black smoke and gouts of dirty orange flame exploded outward from the men, and a rain of ice and charred flesh thudded to the ground around us.
From the left, a small unit of the remaining Byakko mercenaries who were still mounted were charging toward me. I wheeled Yasei’s head around and charged to meet them head on.
On impact, I leaped from Yasei’s back and flung myself at the leader of the mercenary company. He was armed with a long naginata polearm. I landed on his mount’s back, wrapped my left hand around the shaft of the naginata and wrapped my right hand around the man’s throat. His bound tiger mount reared up, flinging us both up into the air. I kept my grip on him, but he twisted as we crashed to the ground together and he landed on top of me. I brought my feet up and shoved him off me, and he let go of his naginata as he arched up and away, landing hard fifty feet away from me.
Behind me, the tigers were overcoming the soldiers. Away off to my right, Cara was dealing with the dismounted men in a thunder of explosions and flying ice. I focused all my attention on the dismounted leader in front of me and charged him, using his own naginata against him.