Dai-San - 03 (28 page)

In the next instant, the jhindo planted his feet and swung from his shoulder. Tuolin saw him wince, then he was struck in the face.

Flesh ripped away and he felt a searing pain. He looked down. A row of black metal spikes covered the jhindo’s knuckles, shiny now with blood.

Tuolin circled to his left, toward the jhindo’s hurt side. He wiped the blood from his face. His cheekbone was not broken as it most surely would have been if the jhindo had not been injured, thus preventing the blow from landing with full force. Tuolin counted himself lucky and moved in.

In dimness, one learns to memorize outlines and shapes and when those change, the body moves and thinks later. Tuolin sank to the floor, his mind racing to recall the instant before the action, tracing in slow motion what his eyes had seen to trigger the instinctive response.

It was the jhindo’s face. An added line, silvered by the light of the thin shafts of moonlight. He heard the whirring above him as he hit the floor and rolled away into deep shadow. His mind retained the latent image of the outward puffing of the jhindo’s cheeks as he prepared to fire the poisoned dart.

The jhindo spit and Tuolin heard the tiny clatter of the concealed blowgun.

He ran straight at his foe, his arm locking about his waist. He grimaced with the pain.

He slammed his balled fists against the rib cage, heard several sharp cracks.

The jhindo’s eyes rolled whitely and Tuolin almost missed the puckering of the lips. Then he saw the glint of the blowgun still within the jhindo’s mouth. Despairingly, he cursed himself for falling for the ruse.

He increased his grip as he heard the soft phit through the air and at the same instant he saw the hand descending in a blur.

Slim fingers pressed inward at the base of the jhindo’s neck. The eyes rolled up and the lips went slack. Air, withheld, abruptly sighed out of his mouth, the blowgun dropped. The jhindo fell to the floor.

‘I do not want him to know yet.’

Her blue-green eyes stared into his.

She finished bandaging him.

‘Do you understand?’

His eyes were still filled with the pain of his burning shoulder. His neck ached. He could not lift his left arm.

‘Not really. No.’

Her gaze left him and swung to the unconscious ebon figure spread-eagled on the bed. His hands and feet were bound securely to the four metal corners. An obsidian star, like one of his own weapons.

‘He came for me, Tuolin, do you realize that?’

‘But I thought—’

‘Naturally. You assumed that he had come to kill the Sunset Warrior and found me here instead.’ She shook her head, dark hair floating. ‘There was no mistake, of that I am certain. He attacked me, Tuolin. He was searching for no other.’

Tuolin turned.

‘We must tell the Sunset Warrior—’

Her hand on his good arm stopped him.

‘Do you know what he would do,’ she said quietly, ‘if he were to come in here now?’

‘And
you
will not kill him?’

She laughed, her voice a cool nocturnal whisper. ‘Oh yes, rikkagin. I shall kill him, but not now and not soon. Not before he tells me what I wish to know.’

Tuolin moved his left arm into a more comfortable position. Already blood was darkening the bandage. His hand was numb.

‘I too am curious about how our enemies knew of you but, Moeru, he is jhindo. He will die rather than say one word.’

‘Still,’ she said, staring at the cloaked figure, ‘I must know who sent him here.’

‘You will get nothing from him.’

Her eyes glittered in the pale moonlight.

‘Watch.’

She moved silently to the bed and, reaching out, slapped the jhindo sharply across the face. Again.

She waited patiently until he was fully conscious, until the eyes were no longer glassy, before she tore off his ebon mask.

His dark eyes locked onto hers.

‘Who sent you?’

She said it quietly, making sure that he could see her lips forming each word.

He stared at her unblinkingly.

She reached down, seeming only to press gently against his body. The jhindo’s eyes opened wide. His face went white as blood drained from it. After a while, he opened his mouth to scream but nothing came out.

She repeated the process, talk and movement, and gradually Tuolin became aware that she had set a rhythm that somehow intensified the effect of her actions.

The air in the room grew heated even though the night was chill. The smell of sweat and something else hung heavily.

Tuolin went to a pitcher on a plain plank table, drank the cool water.

Every so often, the jhindo passed out. During one of these times, Tuolin said:

‘Is this truly necessary? We waste time here. This man will not talk.’

‘I do not think you understand.’

‘What can it matter who sent him? Kill him and be done with it.’

‘He will tell me, eventually.’

‘I do not like this.’

Her eyes never left the white face beneath her.

‘Can a rikkagin be so squeamish?’ Then she said: ‘Perhaps I frighten you.’

He laughed hollowly.

‘You begin to fear that I enjoy this work.’

‘No, I—’ He came nearer to her. ‘Well, it could be true.’

‘What if it is—?’

‘You are with him always—’

She turned her head to him now, still crouched over the sweating body.

‘Look, I did not mean—’ He paused, conscious of her clear eyes raking his face. ‘You saved my life. You are Bujun, an exceptional warrior, but I—’

‘What?’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘What you mean,’ she said simply, ‘is that you cannot equate good and evil within one person.’

He stepped back a pace.

‘I do not think that you—’

‘Oh, I understand you well enough, Tuolin.’ At precise intervals she kept glancing back at the gleaming, drawn face beneath her.

‘So you think of yourself as a good person, hmm?’

He thought of Kiri.

‘Yes.’

‘Then it is not possible for you to harbor any ill feelings, any hate? You cannot destroy.’

‘I am a soldier,’ he said warily. ‘My business is to destroy.’

‘So it is your profession; you chose it.’

‘Yes. Certainly.’

The jhindo groaned. His eyelids began to flutter as he rose again toward consciousness.

She put a hand on the waxen chest, monitoring respiration and pulse at the same time.

Now Tuolin bristled somewhat.

‘I
am
a professional. What would you have done if I had not—’

‘And that is the extent of it.’

He checked his discourse.

‘Yes.’

‘Fool! Have you never looked inside yourself? Have you been so busy going about your efficient, professional killing that you have failed to recognize your totality?’

She turned her attention back to the jhindo and, when she was certain that he was fully conscious, commenced to work on the nerves high up on the inside of his thighs. Sweat broke out anew on his forehead and his chest fluttered. His eyes rolled up, going white as he went into a trance, but she reached her fingers across his body, manipulating, pulling him out of it. His eyes snapped open, focusing, and for the first time, some emotion swam there.

She leaned over the trembling body, whispered:

‘The thing is, that you will not die after all this. Because I will not let you. You know now that I have that power. If you do not tell me who sent you, I will bind your hands and feet and throw you back across the river. What will happen then, when they know? What will your masters do to you when they find out you have failed?’ She paused for just the right amount of time, allowing grudging seconds to pile up before she continued. ‘And were captured?’

Her slender, powerful fingers dug in once more. His body arched and his mouth stretched soundlessly. He passed out.

‘So I am an evil woman, Tuolin. Why listen to what I have to say? I will only lie.’

‘No,’ he said heavily, ‘I do not think that.’ He sat down on the bed, as if he were infinitely weary. ‘What is the truth, then?’

Her eyes left him, for a moment, flicking across the haggard visage of the jhindo.

‘The truth lies within yourself, rikkagin. There are no easy answers. Words of wisdom from the sages are a part of myth. Life is rarely that simple.’ She checked again. ‘Have faith in yourself. Do not fear the bestial side of you. Accept it. You cannot live without doing that.’

‘What have I been doing up until now?’

‘You have survived.’

She palpated the jhindo’s chest, bringing him out of it prematurely. His eyes sprang open, slightly glazed. They focused. She reached down and now, for the first time, Tuolin saw clearly what she did. With infinite slowness.

‘Tell me.’

Tighter.

And he was drenched in sweat. He tried to vomit but she depressed his windpipe and his body would not let him strangle on his own fluids; his jhindo control was finite.

‘Tell me.’

The violent cramping of his body began at last and she pressed the advantage, bringing the threshold of pain into the realm of the unbearable. His eyelids fluttered and his breathing became irregular. He gasped but already one spreading palm was across his mouth, forcing him to breathe through his nose. The oxygen intake was insufficient to maintain the system in his present state and she knew now that it was a matter of time.

She maintained the pain level, marveling at his fortitude, saddened still that it would end, how it would terminate itself.

The lack of oxygen was now acute, intensifying the pain, and it was not the fear of death which obsessed him now but the knowledge that when he retained consciousness, the process would begin anew.

She brought him to the edge.

Tell me—’

And in twilight, he did.

His brain half numbed, his training stripped from him for precious moments, he uttered two words. Her thumbs went in all the way and blood gouted, a viscous cloud.

Drenched, she quit the bed and, turning to Tuolin, helped him to a low couch across the room. He seemed feverish, his shoulder swollen. She peered beneath the bandage, then fed him some water. She looked at him.

‘Now who,’ she said, ‘is the Salamander?’

‘A
RE YOU CERTAIN NOW?’

‘Perfectly. There was never a question.’

‘How long?’

‘Long enough.’

‘Um. Tell me again. Everything.’

She repeated the story.

He listened, looking for a moment at the white, anguished face of Po, the bitter trader who had loved his people above all other things and who had betrayed mankind for them. He was a mess now.

The Sunset Warrior turned away, knowing what she had done and understanding it.

‘How did they know about me?’

‘There is another question of far more import which needs be answered.’

He looked at her oval face, pale and exquisite in the dancing lamplight: at the forest of her hair, the long sweep of her neck, the full arch of her lips, the crimson of her lacquered nails, gleaming with light flecks. A dark, glittering drop of blood lay on her collarbone.

Something inexplicable stirred within him. Ronin had loved her, he knew, yet there was about their strange relationship an abstractness, an implicitness rather than an explicitness, which resolved itself in a striving for something further. Now he knew that it went beyond love, far beyond, into territory new and mysterious. He trembled in anticipation.

‘Ronin knew that man.’

‘The jhindo?’

‘Another wasted life—’

‘He knew the Salamander too—’

The Sunset Warrior laughed but his eyes were quite cold. It seemed quite logical now and he wondered why he had not been able to predict this moment.

‘Your voice still seems strange to me.’ He walked to the high windows. It was pitch black outside save for the pin points of the small lamps visible here and there along the narrow street. He peered up at the thick cloud cover, feeling its oppressive weight.

Shall we speak this way?
she said in his mind.

The moon is down now, I think. It reminds me—

He did not finish the thought and she did not press him. And perhaps she caught a hint of a picture, an image that she understood better than he might expect.

She went across the room, unself-consciously opening the sash of her robe, caked with dried blood and flecks of viscera, watching the lamplight firing across the strange, fierce planes of his arcane face. She poured water into a bowl, cupped her hands.

‘You are less alien to me now, do you know that?’

He turned from the window, closing the shutters behind him.

Her long lithe legs, the narrow waist, the flaring hips, her firm breasts gleamed now with spilled water.

‘I thought I loved my husband.’ Hair, dark and jeweled with moisture, flung itself across her shoulders. ‘For a time I fought my feelings. I
would
not let myself care. After all Ronin was not Bujun, even though he fought like one.’ She pulled a large cloth from the back of a couch, toweled her body dry. ‘But then I found you.’
Like this.
Her voice in his mind, a caress.

‘And then—?’

And then you found me.

Her hair cascaded over her face momentarily as she moved. She brought a hand up to move it aside.

His eyes watched hers, then broke away.

‘What of Tuolin?’

Dropping the cloth, she stood quite naked before him. Then, stooping, she belted a fresh robe around her.

‘I will get Kiri—’

‘Let one of the men—’

‘No.’

‘The security—’

‘Is adequate. I wish—’

‘The blowgun missed him.’ As if he was just now beginning to understand.

‘Yes, but the suriken that wounded him was also poisoned. His left arm is already paralyzed.’

‘There is nothing—’

‘I will fetch her.’

For a long moment, she kissed him.

Kiri shuddered and stopped in the midst of refilling her long, thin pipe. For just a moment, she thought she heard Matsu crying out as if she were still alive somewhere. She shook her head. She knew too well the effects of the poppy. It was why she smoked now. Matsu used to smoke, she knew, but the feeling now was far different. Her fingers automatically filled the small bowl while she thought. But what if Matsu
were
alive? Impossible! She castigated herself again with the frightful images: the beautiful white body pooled in steaming blood, her head attached to the torso only by a thin stretch of wet skin; the Makkon’s talons gripping her throat and the base of her brain.