Blade of the Lucan: A Memory of Anstractor (22 page)

She closed her eyes and uttered her last rites in preparation for the inevitable. Either the witches would kill her or slowly torture her—which was the same as death, or worse.
Thype this
, she thought,
I won’t die in the dirt
, and she sprung up to her feet, then ducked and spun with one leg out, knocking the first witch off her feet.

The stun rods hit her but she ignored the pain and kicked another in the abdomen before following up with a roundhouse, then climbing the woman while using the cuffs to cut off her circulation. More witches appeared, plentiful and angry, like serpents roused from their concealed pit. But there was a new sound, the sound of humming, and they all stopped to see what it was.

All that Marian could make out was blackness, and then a bright white light which she recognized as the hot edge of a las-sword. Next, a figure was swinging arcs everywhere, and the smell of burning flesh caught her nose. The witches screamed and fell under the blade, and two took off running into the woods. The las-sword’s wielder had managed to kill one of them, but three stood firm with their staffs extended, trying to fight back against it.

Marian killed the big witch that she had mounted, and then stepped into a sidekick to stop one of the others from fleeing the sword.

There was a violent swipe that resounded in a thump, and an ear-shattering scream as two of the remaining witches fell down dead. The last witch was brave and charged the shadow, but the white streak danced around multiple times, forming beautiful half circles that resulted in the woman being chopped into three separate parts.

The white light faded to black and Rafian came over to unlock Marian’s cuffs. He leaned in and looked at her, trying to assess the damage, then he kissed her and brushed the leaves from out of her hair.

“Forgot to warn you about the wildlife,” he said calmly.

She hissed her teeth and dusted herself off. “Well,” she said, “Looks like I’ve had the highest moment of my career and now … possibly the lowest. How is a skilled, war-proven Phaser going to be handcuffed by a bunch of savages with sticks? You are not to speak a word of this to anyone, Rafian, or I’ll never forgive you!”

“I won’t say anything, Rhee, but I can’t promise to keep quiet if there’s drinking involved,” he said, laughing loudly. “It’s not like they had you, my lovely hatch kitten. You were already working them out by the time I got here. We just had to – you know, show them our worth. I bet that they won’t be hunting around these parts again for a really long time.”

“Why did you come here, anyway?” Marian said, ignoring his attempts to get her worked up. “I thought you would be waiting for me in the casino.”

“Rhee, seriously? Do you really think I wasn’t going to come out here to retrieve you? When you told me that you were near the city, I came out to find you, but then I saw the witches roaming about. They couldn’t see me, and I stayed low amongst the fallen buildings. Lucky for you that I came along ... who knows what their intent was? From what Blu and Orion have told me, these witches actually eat their enemies.”

“H
ow come you never talk about your sister, Rhee?” Rafian asked Marian, and she spun and stared at him with her mouth quivering as if she fought to keep her words suppressed. “I don’t know if it’s okay to ask you this because I feel like I’m crossing the line, but I would like to know, since it will allow me to understand you more – I think,” he said.

“You can never cross the line, Rafian. You can ask me anything. If I cannot be open with you as your wife, then who can I be open with? I guess it’s kind of good to talk these things, out isn’t it? To not keep them in.”

“That’s what I hear. So, your sister, who was she?” Rafian asked.

“Well, her name was Wharena, and she was beautiful like my mom. I remember her photos and vids the most, since I used to stare at them and try to look like her. You call me beautiful but you should have seen her. Oh, and she was feisty. My father said that they would argue all the time because my sister was so feisty. For a common girl under the old regime, it was a bad thing to be considered spirited, so my parents always worried that she would get herself into trouble. I question the truth of this, though because my parents are the only ones who remember her this way. Maybe she was only feisty with them, but to everyone else she was a sweet, quiet girl.

“One of the things that made everyone like Palus back then was that he was one of the only men to stand up against the
Manas
. They were a small group, not unlike our resistance, but they had big aspirations. Their leader, Mikah, wanted to take over Tyhera in order to bring in his own regime, but he wasn’t really a good person. When Palus showed up and fought against him, my parents thought he was their savior. Palus started his coup, and my parents helped – they helped a lot actually, and once the gangs were eliminated, Palus didn’t forget their service.

“As a matter of fact, due to my father’s loyalty, Palus told him that I would never ever have to work. I was made into my family’s first royal. A baroness, a privileged brat who never hesitated to remind others of my station.” She sighed with frustration and shook her head, then sat back on the bed so that her back touched the wall as she stared at her husband.

“So, why you and not your sister?” Rafian asked.

“Well, originally I was supposed to be married off to a man named Okov Wilder. My Uncle Okov – which is what I called him, did not agree with Palus’s decree of forced marriage and took me under his wing as a sort of niece or daughter. He was the one that made me into a true baroness, instead of one of his wives.

“As for my sister, she wasn’t even considered. She had taken her own life way before Palus’s army purged the streets. If she had been alive, they would have given her to Uncle Okov, but she was dead, so I was chosen instead.”

“Why would Wharena take her own life?” Rafian asked, leaning in with his arms resting on one of the pillows, his gaze intense.

Marian started talking but she didn’t look at him. “One of Mikah’s main lieutenants came across my sister in the market one day. She had actually gone there to get my dad a gift since they had been arguing and—” Marian, paused as if to collect herself and swallowed hard. She looked up at Rafian with her large, sparkling eyes and he could see that they were filled with tears before she looked away. He reached down and took her hands, then brought them together and kissed them.

Marian took a deep breath and continued. “Wharena worked at the store and since she had said some nasty things to him, she went to purchase a peace offering. But when she was in the streets, Mikah’s gang took notice of her. My mom was the one who told her to do it, to go out there to get that gift. She has not been able to forgive herself since,” Marian said.

“We should go visit them,” Rafian said, but Marian shook her head at him.

“Please respect my wishes to stay away, Raf. Rienne Laren is dead to my parents, and they are dead to me. Anyway, one of the gangsters wanted Wharena, so they went ahead and kidnapped her. Now, my father, who was a very brave man in his own right, went after my sister and took on the gang. They beat him bloody and spared his life only because Wharena begged them to. My father came back home, defeated and humiliated, but what was he to do? Nobody would do anything, not the local magistrate, not the guards. They were allowed to snatch up girls, these filthy bastards, and there was no one there to make them pay, not until Palus Felitious.

“Now, I hadn’t been born yet but I heard about these things as I grew up, mostly in arguments between my mother and father. Then there were the whispers from neighbors who talk, but it came to a point where my parents lost Wharena. She married Mikah – apparently he liked her enough to take her from his man. She swore herself to him and became a member of the gang. My sister at this point had lost the will to live, and had committed her body to the gang, so when the gang members were beheaded for treason, she was one of them. She died with her own twisted sense of honor.

“My parents forbade anyone from talking about Wharena. They wanted her to be forgotten. To be honest, babe, I wish that I had known her. I wish that I knew her so I could see if I am anything like her. I’ve always thought that if it had been me in that situation, I would have done the same thing, especially being the fact that she was only 16.”

“No,” Rafian said. “I know for a fact that you would not have dealt with it the same way your sister did, Marian. Knowing you, there would not have been a surrendering of your neck for that gang. You would have died trying to kill Mikah and the rest of those kidnappers. A Marian, I’m sorry, I mean a Rienne Laren, would have fought tooth and nail before she would let anyone take her away against her own will. Rhee, we can’t begrudge our past too much because without it we wouldn’t be the people that we are,” he said.

“You’re right,” she said and nodded continuously, as if the motion would force her mind to accept it. “Well, this is different,” she teased. “I’m getting counsel from what sounds to be Rafian the Mera Ku monk, and not Rafian, Supreme Leader of the Phasers.”

“I can be wise when I want to be,” Rafian said with a smile.

“I rather like this version of you,” she said. “You know, I came upon one of your temples on my travels here.”

Rafian sat up suddenly and regarded her darkly. “Which temple?” he asked, and she noticed that his tone was no longer playful or endearing, but cold and dangerous.

“It’s the one temple that you probably thought nobody would ever get access to,” she said.

Rafian raised an eyebrow, “Oh really?” he said, still watching her as if hoping she was only joking.

“I think they call it the navel of the gods,” Marian said. “It was deep in an inaccessible valley, north of Apun. I had flown across a body of water to access the Aria Mountains, but it was there. I used a crystal to get down there since I was desperate and needed to find a way to reach the rebels.”

Rafian stood silent for a time and Marian took the opportunity to get up and walk into the kitchen. She opened the old cupboards and poked around until she found a large red jug. She opened and did a celebratory dance after sniffing it. She brought out two teacups and poured wine into them, then walked back over to the bed. She placed the jug on the ground and handed one of the cups to Rafian.

Rafian was thinking of his time in the temple that Marian had visited. The pilgrimage that he and the other monks took to reach it would take them several long days. The first time he had gone, it was with Lucci, back when he was only a swordsman in training. He had to lie to his friends that he was on a mission, and it had taken them over a month to reach it.

He had undergone the trials there, broke his mind as they would say, and emerged from the temple a master, a brother of the Mera Ku, and a deadly weapon against the Felitians.

To get to the temple, one would have to go through a series of hidden caves, riddled with predators, deep blackness, and bottomless pits. Everything that Rafian was had come from that temple: it was built to only be accessed by his brothers, so hearing of Marian violating its grounds gave him mixed feelings.

It was there that he mastered meditation. It was there that he mastered the sword. And it was there that he had gotten the power that would allow him to defeat Arn Stryker, the then leader of the Jumpers, an organization that he usurped and later renamed as the Phasers.

Marian sat next to him and held his hand as she inhaled the sour aroma. She let it clear her mind from the stress of her sister’s remembrance.

“I don’t know what that temple did to me, Rafian, but something happened as I examined the artifacts and poked around, trying to find out more about you. I remember chairs, lots of chairs, one of which I sat in and received some of your memories.” She then noticed that Rafian seemed tense and concerned with her story, and though he sipped at his wine infrequently, his mind was not there in its entirety.

Something about the temple had caused him to become uneasy. He finished the wine and placed it down on the stone floor. Marian leaned in so that he had to look at her and asked, “Who was Iharia?”

Rafian looked as if his greatest fear had been realized and he placed his head inside of his hands and rubbed it. When he had done this for a time, he sat back up, and then looked at Marian with eyes that were both sad and filled with regret.

“Part of being a Mera Ku monk is an extremely painful process that we are made to suppress,” he said. “We take apprentices…well, we took apprentices back then, but not all who trained were worthy to become masters and transcend. Iharia was in love with me, and I didn’t know this at the time because – well, you know how I was back then. I was completely devoted to the cause, and I accepted no distractions. Part of me knew that she liked me, but I kept it professional between us. She must have thought that this was how I was with everyone, so she kept on trying. I ignored her, and then I met you.

“You managed to get past my iron exterior to find my heart. You set yourself apart to me as something more important than saving this
thyping
world. Iharia couldn’t handle that, so she took her own life. It angered me, and I was sad that I lost a student I had been training for over a year. She was a good friend. Iharia lent ear to many of my problems, especially since I had no memory of my past back then. She meant a lot to me, but a Mera Ku monk is meant to be stronger mentally than normal people. For her to give up her life force because of an aching heart was beyond disappointing. I thought I’d taught her to be stronger than that.

“I never told you this, but I was hurting, Rhee. I was hurting the night when I slept next to you and woke up and found my true memories. I was hurting a lot, so when opportunity gave me a chance to leave this world and make it possible to consider all of this a dream, I leaped at it. I got us out of here as quickly as possible. When you asked me to come back here to Luca, to check in on friends and loved ones, all I could see was Iharia’s face, and the disappointment in her eyes when she leaped from that precipice and fell broken to the arena.

“It was selfish of me, and I am sorry, Rhee.” Rafian said.

Marian finished her wine, collected the cups and jug, and then walked back into the kitchen where she set them down inside the sink.

“I wonder why it was that I was able to receive your thoughts and no one else’s,” Marian said.

“The way of the Mera Ku is mysterious, Marian. Everything cannot be explained through technology or by conventional means, unfortunately. There is an energy here, a life force that isn’t easily explained by any of us. What we did in those days was to learn how to open our minds and bodies to it. To let it heal us and preserve us. For anyone who would bring our loved ones harm, we learned how to manipulate it to allow us to hurt them. My sword sent home so many souls of the Felitians and it makes no sense how much power we Mera Ku have. The same goes for my master, Lucci. He took out whole armies on the plains of Talula.

“What we had down there in that temple was a school for the galaxy’s elite order of Mera Ku monks. I dare not divulge everything that we did down there since much of it was appalling. It would devastate you to know what your darling husband has done to gain his power. But, we aimed to set things right here in Luca. This is why we did it. We were going to be the ones to remove the Felitians, and we were going to be the ones to amass the troops to do it. Lucci and I started doing that here on Tyhera, but we had an infiltrator,” Rafian said and sat without talking for such a long time that Marian wondered if he would finish. He seemed tired and she reached up and rubbed his bald head.

“Beloved masters fell to this man and I lost a brother. So we hunted this individual down in the palace of Veece, and took back everything from him,” Rafian said.

Marian was confused. “What do you mean everything? What did he have?”

“We took back the training, we took back our love, and … we took back the life force from him,” Rafian replied.

“Seems like we both have a lot of painful memories here, huh?” Marian said.

He looked at her and smiled. “Lots of sweet memories, too, Rhee, not just negative. You received my memory because of our link. It may seem trivial that the rings we wear and the love we feel are personal, but a bigger, much greater energy knows. You are my wife, the woman that I am meant to be with – forever. So my thoughts were the ones that would find you. Had you been a stranger to the Mera Ku fellowship, that chair would have killed you instantly,” Rafian said as he regarded Marian.