Tong Lashing

by Peter David

  “Interesting,” said Veruh Wang Ho. “I thought you would say that I should not kill you because you love me, and I love you, and our souls are intertwined—”

  “Why would I waste your time with that which you already know. I could not…” I paused, tried to find the best way to phrase it. “Veruh… I have utilized in my life every trick, every contrivance, every deception I know for the purpose of staying alive. I could not take what I feel for you… and what I hope you feel for me… and turn it into just another tool in my tool chest.”

  Her gaze held mine steady for an eternity, and then she smiled. “Well said.” She nodded toward the Imperior. “Take him in the back,” she said to the sisters. “I will attend to him. And then… we shall see what we shall see.”

  The Anaïs Ninjas did as they were instructed, although some of them still fired annoyed glances in my direction. But I didn’t care. At that moment, my soul was singing within my breast.

  She had accepted what I had done. She was not angry. If anything, my actions had brought me closer to her than ever before. The notion filled me with so much joy that I thought my heart would literally explode from my chest with joy. Then I got a mental image of just what exactly that would look like, and that dampened my enthusiasm. But even so, my passion for her was boundless, my certainty that we could be united forever growing with each passing moment.

  Except it all hinged upon what she was going to do now with the Imperior. She needed to do more than just save his life. She had to mend the broken fences between them. She had to…

  Shite.

  She was going to have to get back together with him.

  How could they mend fences, after all, if she was continuing to lead a crime family? How could they possibly be allies if they remained estranged as man and wife? For my true love to be able to do what had to be done, I would have to lose her to the man who had tried to have his soldiers kill me. Well, I supposed I didn’t resent him all that much over the killing part. Too many people had tried to have me killed or tried to kill me themselves for me to single out one individual for the transgression.

  But how could we have any sort of future together if she were to reunite with the Imperior?

  So… what was I to do now? Hope the Imperior died? If he did, Mordant would forever stay a transformed dragon, and very likely Veruh would remain as head of the Skang Kei family. With the death of the Imperior and no one apparently in line to inherit the throne—since Mitsu, as a “mere woman,” would not be allowed to rule—there would probably be a struggle for power that would leave many dead. Chaos would conceivably descend upon the whole of Chinpan.

  But if the Imperior lived, and matters were sorted out between them, then I would lose my love.

  It will all work out for the best. No matter what, it will all work out for the best, my inner voice assured me, even as frustration washed over me.

  The next hours stretched on interminably. The silence did not help. All the Anaïs Ninjas simply stared at me, as if waiting to be told what to do. I thought I spotted the one I’d known earlier. She was looking me up and down, and I noticed that her hand seemed to be sliding into the top of her trousers, descending downward toward her privates.

  I didn’t need to see that. And I certainly didn’t want to imagine what she was thinking about as she did it.

  Even Mitsu said nothing. She simply sat there in what appeared to be a deeply meditative state. Mordant had curled up next to her, and she was idly running her fingers along his scales. He would look up at her every so often with a gaze of pure adoration. Here I had treated him like a pet, or a talking oddity, and he was a human trapped in this form. Unaccountably I felt guilty. It wasn’t as if I could have known. Still… I felt as if I should have figured it out somehow, with the same type of intuition that had enabled me to divine Veruh Wang Ho’s true identity.

  Then others began to arrive.

  Men, mostly. Men who seemed cut from rough cloth. Men who appeared to be, at the very least, criminal types. They arrived one by one until they numbered roughly a dozen.

  Each of them, I saw, had a tattoo on the back of his hand: a snake, its tongue lashing out, curled around a pair of what appeared to be grasping scissors.

  The Forked Tong. They had to be.

  When they were assembled en masse, one of them stepped forward and said to Mitsu, “Where is he? Where is the Imperior? We know he is here.”

  “The Noble Ho is attending to him. Trying to save his life.”

  “The Noble Ho should let him die.” There were nods of agreement from the men.

  Slowly Mitsu rose to her feet. Mordant, perched upon her shoulder, flared out his wings and conveyed a threatening air.

  “You see before you the assembled might of the Anaïs Ninjas,” she said. “Furthermore, the might of the Skang Kei family is in the next building, being held in reserve lest you attempt any… ugliness.”

  “What are you saying?” demanded the spokesman.

  “I am saying that if you desire to maintain our alliance, then you will do nothing until—”

  At that moment, there came a noise from the doorway through which Veruh Wang Ho and the Imperior had passed. A scuffle, a soft footfall. The attention of everyone in the room was drawn to it.

  Slowly the Imperior moved forward into the light of the lamps. He looked around the room, his face dark as a thundercloud, his gaze malevolent.

  “So. The Noble Ho healed you.”

  “Yes, daughter. I did not ask it, nor did I desire it. But it was done.” He appeared to be glaring at everyone all at once. His life had been saved, and it did not appear to have improved his disposition one bit. “I am going to depart now. Unless one of you desires to get in the way of the anointed of the gods.”

  “You,” said the leader of the Forked Tong, and he started forward.

  The Imperior looked up at him and there was something in his eyes that froze the man where he stood. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the criminal backed away.

  “Father, wait!” Mitsu said urgently, desperately. It hurt me to hear her speak in that manner, but she had tossed aside considerations of personal dignity. “Wait… please. The Noble Ho cured you. Saved your life. I ask a boon, in the name of honor. Restore him,” and she indicated Mordant, who was looking at the Imperior hopefully. “Only you can do it. Please. In honor’s name, you owe us…”

  “What do you know of honor?” the Imperior grunted. He looked around. “What do any of you know? Honor is all! Honor is above everything! It is even above petty considerations of personal gain!”

  “And who determines all that?” I asked. “Who sets the standard for honor? How does anyone know …?”

  “It is determined here,” said the Imperior, and he touched his chest. “That is all you need to know.”

  “But that’s not all you need to know,” I said, standing in his path.

  “Mitsu is right. You owe her—”

  “I owe her nothing. If not for her, I would never have been in danger. And I certainly owe that nothing.”

  He pointed toward the doorway. Veruh Wang Ho was standing there, hands on either side, looking tired. Whatever she’d done to minister to his needs and cure him of his wounds, it had taken a good deal out of her. My feelings were so torn. Clearly she was not going to reunite with her husband, but still… the alternative was not going to be pleasant. But at least she would be mine, and we could be together.

  “So after all this time,” said Veruh Wang Ho, “I am simply to be referred to as ‘that’?”

  “It is all that you deserve and more,” said the Imperior with greater force than ever. “You are a disgrace. A travesty, a—”

  “Hey!” Fury was building in me. I was becoming so angry with the Imperior that I was starting to reach a point where I didn’t trust myself. Where I might actually assault him for his abuse. “Hey, that’s enough! How dare you? How dare you? Whatever it is you believe she did to you, or you to her, Veruh deserves better treatment a
t your hands than this. She saved your life, and gave you your daughter. You may not think much of Mitsu simply because of her gender, but still, this woman,” and I pointed at Veruh, “is the mother of your child. A woman that I love with all my heart, and who loves me as well! At least I can appreciate her for the wondrous creature she is! How can you not also—”

  There was a chuckle then, from one of the men of the Forked Tong. A guffaw from another. A snicker from several of the Anaïs Ninjas.

  “What?” I demanded. “What’s so funny?”

  The laughter grew, and grew. I looked at Mitsu in a quandary.

  “What are they laughing at?”

  Mitsu appeared chagrined. “I… I thought you knew.”

  “Knew?”

  “You…” She lowered her voice… why, I don’t know, since everyone could hear her anyway. “You said your time with the bathing maiden… it meant nothing to you. That you wanted something else. And all that time with me, you never… tried to touch me, or…”

  “Because I thought of you as a friend! I didn’t want to presume, to…”

  And the laughter was getting louder still. Above it, I fairly shouted, “What does any of this have to do with your mother!” and I pointed at Veruh.

  “You idiot,” snapped the impatient Imperior. “That is not my daughter’s mother. That is my daughter’s uncle… my sick brother. Except I have no brother.”

  A faint buzzing started in my head, behind my eyes. Just as everyone else was laughing, so did I start to laugh, even as my mind began to shrink away in horror. Veruh was smiling at me sadly, shaking her head. Her head. Veruh’s head her head she…

  She…

  She…

  “Yes. No, I…” I laughed louder than any of them, for it was driven by mounting terror and nausea. “Yes, this is… this is a joke! An amazing joke! Some… sort of indoctrination, or ritual of acceptance, I understand that now. You… you wacky Chinpanese! I’d never have thought that you—”

  “When you disappeared,” said the Imperior to Veruh, “I thought you had the good grace to go somewhere private and kill yourself, and not even leave us a body to clean up. I never dreamt, when I heard of this ‘Veruh Wang Ho,’ that it was you. Would that I never had.”

  She…

  She…

  Veruh continued to shake her head and stepped back into the adjoining room, and she…

  She. She was a woman. Of course she was a woman. She was my soul mate, the love of my life, the creature of my dreams, and besides, any number of times, Mitsu had referred to Veruh as “she” or “her,” why, there was the time that…

  … that…

  And I ran our conversations through my head with the same type of copious memory that lets me write down my memoirs now, and desperately sought for Mitsu using the female pronoun in reference to Veruh Wang. There must have been one time… one…

  “No,” I said, and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to scream, and I charged after Veruh with the hysterical braying of the most villainous beings in all of Chinpan ringing in my ears.

  I staggered into the next room, and Veruh turned to face me, and there was such sadness in her eyes. Me, I was still giggling, which was all I could do to force down my temptation to scream, because I was afraid that if I did, I would never stop.

  “It’s a mistake. Tell him it’s a mistake,” I said, sounding crazed.

  “We were not a mistake, Apropos,” Veruh said softly. “We are as one. We saw each other truly from the moment we set eyes upon each other. What do the details matter?”

  “This is… this is taking a joke too far.”

  “He never understood, Apropos,” she said, slowly coming toward me. “Never. But you… you understood me more in our short time together than all the time when the Imperior and I were brothers…”

  “We were lovers!”

  “Yes, we were. In new and exciting ways for you. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that—”

  “But…” I shook my head desperately. The laughter was still resounding from outside. Me, I had stopped. “But it simply can’t be, because I would never fall in love with another man! It couldn’t happen! That is the province of… of sick, demented men! Of perversion! Not of normal…”

  “Has it never occurred to you, sweet Apropos, that ‘normal’ is not an absolute? That we are what we are? And we must accept ourselves for what we are? You accepted me. You accepted our bond.”

  “The… the only way a man could make me fall in love with him—and not that it’s possible, you understand, but if it was—was to do something to sap my mind. Brain-warping perfumes, or trick lights or—”

  “No,” she said. “No, I did nothing like that. The fragrances you smelled, the dim lighting… simply atmosphere. I would never have done anything to impair your judgment, sweet Apropos. What we have is real. What we have transcends physical limitations. What we have—”

  “You’re not a man!” I shrieked. She reached toward me, and I stumbled backward and fell. “You’re not the Imperior’s brother! You’re Veruh—”

  She threw open her robe, revealing her nude body.

  “—Wang Ho,” I finished weakly.

  She… he… it… looked at me with infinite sadness, allowing the robes to drop, covering the indisputably male body she… he… it… possessed. “Apropos… you love me. I know you do, for I love you.” He reached toward me. I backed up, crab-walking across the ground, shaking my head furiously. “And what we had,” he said, “we can still have, only greater than ever, for we know each other now fully. No more hiding. No more uncertainty.”

  I couldn’t think. Couldn’t feel. I wanted to rip my body away and leave it behind and run off into oblivion.

  “Apropos… there is so much good that can be between us.”

  “I don’t care,” I whispered.

  “But don’t you see? It—”

  “I don’t care,” I said again, this time a bit louder. There was a warning vibration at my hip. At that moment, I didn’t notice. All I was trying to do was get myself as far away from him as possible.

  “Apropos, I love you!” cried out Veruh Wang Ho, baring his soul to me since he had already bared his body.

  It was the words no one had truly spoken to me and meant since the death of my mother. It was the words that could have filled my life with meaning.

  And I looked at the face of the man who said them, and screamed, “I don’t care! I don’t care! I DON’T CARE! I DON’T CARE I DON’T CARE I DON’T CARE! I DON’T CARE! I DON’T CARE! I DON’T CARE! I DON’T CARE! I DON’T C—”

  And then the blinding white light exploded.

  The world crashed and smoked around me, and burned into my inner eye was the image of a cloud going up and up and up, spreading outward in all directions like a giant toadstool. Something burned at the side of my head, and then nothingness enveloped me.

  I welcomed it.

  Chapter 4

  The Trinity Test

  I floated peacefully, wondering if I was dead, hoping that I was, because if I was simply dreaming or sleeping, then inevitably I would have to awaken. And I had no desire to do so.

  I saw an image floating toward me. It was my mother. She was shaking her head, and she looked disappointed in me, but also appeared to understand. “It’s all right,” she whispered to me. “Everything is all right.”

  “What happened? Am I…” I hesitated to ask. “Am I dead?”

  “Oh, no, my love. No, you’re not dead.”

  “Then… then what…?”

  “You were warned, my love. Warned about intensity of emotion. Warned about what it could do, especially when it came to unleashing of power.”

  “But… but I don’t…” I was trying to understand. “The sword. I… didn’t pull the sword. It shouldn’t have…”

  “Ah, that’s the problem with destructive power,” she assured me.

  “You think you control it. You think, ‘As long as I don’t intend to use it, it won’t be used.’ But it does g
et used. In this case, because of the intensity of your denial. You wanted Veruh gone.”

  “No.”

  “You wanted all of them gone. All of them. Their laughter, their pity, their knowledge of what a complete and utter fool you’d been. It ripped a hole in your heart greater than any that had ever come before. Your antipathy for their very existence, your revulsion for your own, was so overwhelming that it activated the demon sword even when you weren’t planning to do so. But because it was still within the sheath, the energy built and built and then just… just released. And now they’re gone. Just like that.”

  “No,” I whispered. I wanted to push her away, but I felt as if I had no body with which to do so.

  “It’s all right. Don’t be concerned. You were right. Eventually they would have just killed each other anyway. Gone to war in a long, protracted power struggle. By unleashing the power of the ultimate weapon, you avoided that war. You did them a favor.”

  “A favor?”

  She smiled at me with all her mother love. “Yes, my dear. It was for the best. It truly was.” She patted my face. Her hand felt cold. All around us was pure, stark, white nothingness. “There’s only one problem.”

  “Just one?”

  “The power is unleashed now. More power than the demon sword even knew it was capable of. It loves that power now. It wants to release it again. And again.”

  “I’ll… I’ll destroy it!”

  “You can’t.”

  “Throw it into the sea!”

  “If you wish,” she said. “But the seabeds shift, tides come in and out. Sooner or later, the weapon will surface. Who knows who will have it then? Anyone could acquire the power. Anyone at all.”

  “It could… it could obliterate the world…”

  She considered that a moment. “Yes,” she decided. “Yes. It could. That would be… interesting…”

  “But… you said I’m not dead. It didn’t destroy me?”