Dai-San - 03 (3 page)

They were of obsidian, rough-hewn, sparking in the lowering sun, which peered out from behind jagged rents in the rippling clouds with a heavy light that was painful to the eyes. The high prows, sleek and sharp, still shattering the green water beneath them as they came on, were carved into grotesque faces, horned and beaked, resembling, uncannily, the Makkon.

The masts seemed to be carved from vast alien rubies, for they were translucent, shedding thin escarpments of bloody shadow across the narrow decks and into the sea before the ships.

‘These craft are from another time,’ said Moichi with some professional awe. ‘I’d give an arm to pilot one.’

Already they could discern movement along the enemy’s decks. Through the crashing, creaming bow waves, they could make out bright flashes of high helms and short-bladed swords like shining, articulated insects within a teeming hive.

And now they saw that those who sailed the obsidian ships were not men at all. These beings were wide-shouldered, without the characteristic human slant. They were wasp-waisted with legs distinguished by bulging thighs and virtually no calfs. Their heads seemed stuck directly onto their shoulders without benefit of neck or throat. They wore sweeping conical helms of ebon metal and their barrel chests were encased in dark armor.

Look at their faces.

Ronin stared. Above the nose they had the skull of man, but below, black nostrils were gouged directly into the flesh, as if plunged by some murderous scalpel, and lower, the massive bone was pushed out into a snout, making them appear as if they had been dropped on the backs of their heads as they had been born. Their eyes were not the ovals of man but were round and beaded, glossily obsidian, like those of birds of prey. Indeed, as the ships drew closer, he saw that the helms were in fact long glistening plumage, which covered the heads of these strange warriors from crown to the centre of the back.

Ronin looked around the
Kioku.
All the men were armed and the first mate had fully half the complement along the port sheer-strake, preparing to repel the boarders.

And now the crash of the sea, as if the violent surf were striking a knife-toothed shore, and the three obsidian effigies loomed over them, momentarily blotting out the fading light. In that instant the penumbra of the alien masts crisscrossed the
Kioku
in a bloody foreshadowing.

And now the air was filled with the whirring of the grappling hooks as they arced in the air like a rain of black lava, thick ropes snaking behind their flights. The
Kioku
shuddered, its prow lifting momentarily out of the water like a trapped animal, then crashed into an oncoming wave, the decks awash now with sea water as well as clambering creatures.

Drawing his sword, Ronin leapt from the high poop, hurtling himself into the oncoming wave of warriors. They shouted, high, piercing sounds, and parted like grain at his intrusion. They reared back, their short, heavy blades clashing into his longer one.

Within their midst, he swung two-handed at their bodies, but finding them too well protected by their ebon armour, he shifted his aim higher. In a blur, he sheared off a head in a welter of yellow bone, pink and gray matter. Feathers fluttered and blood fountained up, pumping from a dying heart, staining the air, filling it with an awful stench.

Again and again he swung, his long, double-edged blade a platinum swath amidst dark masses of scrambling warriors. His arteries swelled as he increased the depth of his breathing, compensating for the adrenalin’s oxygen drain to his system. An exquisite sensation gripped him, his blade running with beaded blood and bits of brain, as if he were looking within an infinitude of mirrors and the strength of all his replicated selves layered him in an invulnerable mantle of strength and endurance.

Now the strange warriors attempted to scatter before his berserk attack, but using the
Kioku
’s rigging, he cut them off. Some continued to flee only to meet the ready edges of his sailors’ blades.

At length, he turned to see Moichi still on the poop, defending his territory with his curving broadsword. A clutter of warriors blotted out his view, then, moments later, he spied Moeru beside the navigator, cutting her way through the enemy with a preciseness and efficiency that surprised him.

There was little time to marvel, for a trio of blades came whistling at him in great rapidity. He slew these three warriors and hacked through another group, finding himself in a small clearing. He glanced around. The sailors appeared to be holding their own, but now the second and third ships were closing, their grappling hooks already spinning through the air. Soon their warriors would join the battle.

He began to fight his way starboard, hoping to sever the new lines and thus delay the arrival of the reinforcements. But the warriors divined his intent and converged to block his way. Still he fought on, soaked now in blood and marrow.

‘Moichi!’ he called over the din. ‘The lines to starboard!’

The navigator left the few remaining enemy in his area to Moeru and leaped to the main deck, his massive frame a battering ram of muscle and force of will.

Sheathing his sword, he kicked out at an advancing warrior and went into the ratlines and, above the battle, worked his way to midships where, drawing a copper-handled dirk, he went to work with tight arcs, snapping the lines. They whipped into the sea, but the ships came on and new lines snaked aboard.

Ronin dodged a blow meant to disembowel him and, ducking, ripped his sodden sea cloak from him; its weight had begun to hinder his movements. He smashed a two-handed blow into the seam along one side of the attacker’s body armour. The warrior screamed and clutched at his side. Blood spurted. He went to his knees. Ronin swiveled as he swung, shearing off another warrior’s snout. A flurry like heated snow.

Ronin made his laborious way towards Moichi, through forests of warriors. He thrust straight ahead and his blade shattered the breastplate of a warrior. He jerked it free and, in the same movement, arced it violently backward, severing the jugular of an advancing warrior to his rear. He slammed headlong into two more, scattering them in a flutter of feathers. He swung right, then left, his bulging arms sticky and running with moisture.

Before the mast he fought, as the decks were piled high with corpses and the footing became treacherously slippery. He was aware of a tall figure near him, hewing at the warriors, the man’s long blade just visible on the far periphery of his vision, shearing through a plumed head. He swung again into a mass of avian warriors then he was on his knees, coughing and shaking his head. Lights danced in front of his eyes. He tried to focus and could not. Just the hint of a blurred shadow, blossoming. He tasted blood and gore, still warm and moving as if alive. He spat, attempting to rise, slipping in the slick muck on the deck. His vision cleared. Severed head of a plumed warrior staring at him accusingly from the deck. Hit me, he thought dazedly. Who threw it?

He blinked back the mingled sweat and blood running down his scalp. Looked up, stared into the twisted face of the first mate.

Indeed there was no lower jaw. White scars, livid and pulsing, were raised from the otherwise sunburned flesh like the hideous distended veins of the dead. They ran from the twisted upper lip across the gouged bridge of the nose onto an island of scar tissue pooled under the right eye.

The first mate laughed, a strange susurration, and slashed out with his boot. The plumed skull flew into Ronin’s chest. And in that moment Ronin knew, saw the swift flash of white as the light caught the sheen of the artificial left eye, and abruptly he was hurtled back in time to twin feluccas flying across a vast, uncharted sea of ice, locked together, one now to the howling, chill wind, as two powerful figures fought, one for control, the other for freedom, darkness and light, a vicious battle. Ronin had fought Freidal then, had felled the Security Saardin of the Freehold with a brutal blow to his face.

He had thought Freidal dead, his sadistic torturings and murders of Ronin’s old friends avenged at last as the two ships parted with only the Saardin’s ever-present scribe left standing, immobile and mute, aboard the helmless vessel as he had cut it away.

Ronin twisted away so that Freidal’s next kick only grazed his ribs instead of breaking them, as the Saardin had intended.

He regained his feet and lifted his sword.

‘Come to me,’ hissed Freidal, his misshapen mouth giving his words a distorted, leaden quality. ‘Come and meet your death.’ He raised his own blade. But it was he who advanced on Ronin. Their swords clashed.

‘And where is Borros? He too I must seek out and destroy.’

The blades swung away, sliced through the air.

‘Dead and buried long ago. Free at last of his terror and beyond your blade.’

Freidal lunged, in and down, and Ronin turned, parrying.

‘Do you expect me to believe that? Traitor! You have spat upon the Law of the Freehold and there is only one penalty for such a transgression.’

‘After seeing this world, you still cling to the Law of the Freehold?’

Swords flashing, the panting of hot breath, muscles locked and straining, eyes seeking an advantage.

‘This world only validates the Law; if you were not such a fool, you would understand that. All is chaos here. War, death, and the dying lying broken in streets of mud and filth. We of the Freehold are beyond all that. The Law is our mistress; it is what sets us apart from this scum. We set the Law above all else, thus are we to remain men. But this is something that I do not expect you to understand. You had already reverted to the animalisms of the Surface world while in the Freehold. You were never one of us.’ He lunged again. ‘You flaunted the Law; now you must die.’ With a grunt, he swung hard into Ronin’s side, twisting his blade in an attempt to evade Ronin’s block. But Ronin felt the excess pressure and leaned away from it instead of fighting it and they were at a deadlock, their faces only centimeters apart.

‘You thought me dead,’ whispered Freidal, ‘but I survived our last encounter, your traitorous blow. I clung to life, I would not die, for my mission was not yet complete. The strength of the righteous flowed through me and, as the cold days and nights passed, my scribe opened his veins to me. He knew his duty. He fed me the warmth and the life from his own body so that the Law might be served, so that I might seek you and Borros out, so that justice might be done.’

Freidal broke away, feinted, then swept in the opposite direction, saying: ‘Law must ever be the victor against chaos!’ He cut in under Ronin’s defense and the edge of his blade sliced through cloth and skin. Then Ronin’s blade was up, breaking the momentum of the blow and he would not retreat.

‘Agh!’ screamed the Saardin. ‘What sort of man are you? Coward! Why do you not attack?’

The whisper in his ear: a soft susurration with a core of steel. Ronin heard again the Salamander, his Senseii, talking to him as he took Ronin through Combat practice on one of the high Levels of the Freehold: ‘It is not just the strong arm, my dear boy, which wins in Combat. Let your eye judge your opponent. Stand your ground. Do not attack, yet neither do you retreat. Be the rock upon which your opponent throws himself, thus will you see his weaknesses. And then, dear boy, when his frustration turns inexorably to rage, his reactions will suffer and, if you are most clever, you will find the proper path to victory.’

Thus he stood upon the unquiet deck, in the shadow of the looming obsidian ships, their strange avian sails dominating the sky, and repulsed all that Freidal threw at him. He parried the powerful horizontal strokes, he turned aside the vicious oblique cuts, he blocked the swift vertical strikes, all the while gauging the feints and false movements, the careful counterbalancing of Combat that made it such a complex art, that lifted its finest executors into a realm far above a mere warrior’s. And in this Ronin recognized the truth within the distortions the Saardin mouthed: The Freehold’s Combat system had made him a superior artist in weaponry. Knew too, on an instinctive level, just how dangerous Freidal was. His belief in his righteousness, in the iron fastness of the Law, could not be shaken. He was no mercenary, proficient but easily dealt with. His fanaticism was his power, would feed him deep reserves of strength and will. Thus at last did Ronin recognize his evil as the Freehold’s.

Freidal feinted another blow, threw his sword at Ronin instead, and in the same motion, slammed his balled fists into Ronin’s throat. His knee lifted and smashed into Ronin’s stomach. Ronin fell against the starboard sheer-strake, his breath gone and his eyes watering. He gagged, willing his lungs to do their work. Freidal’s good eye gleamed as he swung from the hips, slamming his fists alongside Ronin’s head. He watched the other sink to his knees.

Freidal looked down and, grinning wolfishly, bent and picked up Ronin’s fallen sword. Languidly, almost lovingly, he tested its weight and judged its balance. Ronin’s head came up and the Saardin swiped at the face with the back of his hand.

Now he held Ronin’s sword with both hands and slowly lifted it high above his head. It gleamed all along its length, a bolt of stiff lightning that too soon began its blurred descent.

Ronin tried to focus but all he could see was a dark shape looming over him, a streak of white light that hurt his eyes. The world drained of color: two polymorphous black entities, two shards of bitter ebon will, linked by a slashing line of white.

His fingers like lances, stiff as steel inside the Makkon gauntlet, his body already moving without conscious volition as something bellowed darkly inside him, echoing on a torrent of wind filled with animal scents. Bright and unbidden, the Hart, stately, black, fearsomely atavistic, shook his antlers within a deep pine glade.

Something coalesced within him, with the motion. The rushing of the white blade, his forked fingers rising upward, Freidal’s cruel gloating hideous face, confident of victory, upward and downward, the weapons crossed in an ‘x’ pattern, the Saardin’s incipient surprise as the fingers plunged into his eyes. Black and white; white and black. Whistle of the impotent sword blade, a dying insect beside his ear.