Dai-San - 03 (31 page)

Moeru narrowly missed being decapitated by crashing jaws, slammed her blade down the center line of the forehead, and the deathshead skull splintered, blinding her momentarily with shards of bone and marrow and bits of brain. She felt a searing pain along her left arm and spun away as the acephalous body swung again reflexively, the fanged globe dark in the torrential downpour.

She slipped along a smooth piece of armor underfoot as she dismounted, the way clogged with bodies and her horse bleeding from a dozen wounds. She cracked a skull with her boot. Off balance, she swung, correcting her weight, her sword shearing through the torso of another warrior. This time, she ducked as the globe hissed in the air where her head had been. Then she raised her sword and slew her horse.

Waving to Bonneduce the Last, she waded through the soldiers and swung up upon his steed, just behind him. They went forward.

Adrenalin and something more soared through the Sunset Warrior’s huge frame as he moved further into the enemy’s ranks. His immense blade swung like a blurred scythe, so swiftly that his very outline dimmed. It ripped through four warriors on the forward strike, three as he reversed the momentum, swung the other way.

At his back, the foot soldiers, fresh from Kamado’s gates, broke like a wedge into the midst of the deathshead warriors.

As Rikkagin Aerent saw the Sunset Warrior wade into the central attack, he wheeled his mount and signaled to his remaining cavalry to move out onto the army’s right flank where the defense appeared weakest. Strange crested creatures were now directly behind the wave of deathshead warriors, commanded by the insect-eyed rikkagin.

He spurred his horse along the foaming banks of the river, the water a high silver spray in the hissing sleet. He heard the ram’s horn sounding the charge. He leaned forward in his saddle, slashing at the enemy warriors who climbed out of the turbulent water. Here they were short muscular men with no necks and broad backs. They carried long black metal pikes and thick-bladed single-edged swords scabbarded at their hips.

Rikkagin Aerent turned in his saddle, shouting to be heard above the roar about him, attempting to deploy his men along the near bank, for the defense was weaker here than he had at first thought.

A blade flashed over one ear and the haft of a pike splintered and fell across the pommel of his saddle. He turned back, cursing, decapitating the warrior who had tried to impale him. He lifted his streaming blade to the soldier who had saved his life, then spurred his steed onward.

The squat warriors and the plumed soldiers poured up from the river crossing in great numbers now and Rikkagin Aerent sent two of his men back up the field for reinforcements.

The foot soldiers were falling back under the intense assault of the pikemen, giving ground grudgingly as the wave forced them from the near shore up onto the field.

‘Into the river!’ called Rikkagin Aerent, and his horsemen plunged into the pink water in an attempt to outflank the emerging warriors. He used his men as a wedge, surging horses’ bodies and flashing horny hoofs against the solid wall of the pikemen, forcing them in upon themselves.

His arm grew weary as he lofted his sword, striking downward over and over, as the squat soldiers fell beneath his assault.

Seeing the effectiveness of the cavalry, the foot soldiers rallied themselves under the cries of their rikkagin, standing their ground, then gradually beginning to advance upon the foes.

Then over the deafening tumult of the battle, Rikkagin Aerent heard a muted shout and he saw a squad of warriors streaming across the river crossing directly at him. In their midst, riding an ebon creature that was difficult to look at, he saw the rikkagin of the central forces of The Dolman.

He was an immense bulk of a man, with obsidian eyes. Long dark hair swept back from his temples like the wings of some predatory bird. Above him and just behind arced two banners, fresh and whipping in the sleet storm. Straining, Rikkagin Aerent made out the ensign of silk: an ebon field with a writhing lizard as crimson as the flames which danced at its feet.

The Sunset Warrior felt it before anyone else. Deep within the tangle of metal and flesh, bone and blood and gore, he tensed. The pressure of numbers which had occupied him all the morning was mysteriously giving way.

He looked up. Still the deathshead warriors streamed across the river crossing, mixing with the plumed warriors and the pikemen. But now they came in two lines and their shouts echoed through the din of battle. They called to each other and pointed off to their right.

Putting a gauntleted hand to his forehead, he peered into the distance, downriver. And now he saw a dark shape, emerging from the sleeting mist. He began to fight his way to his left, to get nearer to it.

It plunged into the river where the water was very deep and quite swift, perhaps two hundred meters downriver from him, directly across from a jutting headland on the near shore.

He saw clearly the cold orange eyes pulsing through the snow, heard now its hideous cry echoing across the rampaging water.

The Makkon.

But he was a long way from that part of the river and though he swung his great blade to and fro, though he lurched through the heaving sea of writhing, flailing bodies, he could make little headway, so packed was the near bank.

The Makkon came on, swinging its wickedly curved talons. Its beaked mouth opened and closed spasmodically, revealing its stubby, gray tongue. Its call was an ululation, hitting the water flatly and rebounding like a skipped stone.

Kiri, riding her saffron luma, raised her head from the slaughter about her and, jerking her mount’s reins, spurred it along the near bank and out onto the promontory.

Upon this narrow spit of land Kiri now rushed, her flashing blade and the hoofs of her luma throwing aside the deathshead warriors and squat pikemen from in front of her.

Her eyes were wild, the pupils dilated with excitement and fear. With a swipe of her sword, she cut a foe in two. Her heart pounding, she stared into the baleful gaze of the Makkon midway across the river.

She was at the edge of the land now, her luma rearing, the idea burning in her mind.

‘I am Kiri,’ she seemed to speak to the river. ‘Empress of Sha’angh’sei. I call you now to your task, for vengeance must be ours and you must heed my call!’

She drew the short knife in its ceremonial scabbard from the warm place at the base of her stomach and threw it behind her. Then, leaping from the saddle, her body arched in a long dive, cleaving the surface of the choppy water.

The Sunset Warrior, making his slow way toward the Makkon, saw Kiri, heard her words over the din of battle, and reaching down for another bright shard of someone’s memory, knew what was coming.

Out in the river with the white sleet slanting down and the wind rising, the waters before the oncoming Makkon began to boil. The Sunset Warrior saw Kiri’s head and arms as she broke the skin of the water, as she swam toward the waiting Makkon.

Into the boiling water.

Her head went down suddenly as if something below the surface had sucked her below. For only a brief moment, her white fist remained above the churning waves, a hard, defiant gesture, then it too disappeared into the midst of a dark stain spreading itself directly in the path of the Makkon. Where the water churned madly.

The Sunset Warrior bellowed his war cry and his great sword became a blur. He was a killing machine. Berserk and lethal, he advanced upon the enemy along the near bank. And now even the deathshead warriors, who knew no fear, fell back under his fierce assault, fleeing from the death that came at them on an inexorable tide.

In the river, the Makkon slapped the unquiet waters with the flat of its great hands. A funneling waterspout rose before it, whirling moisture into its beaked face. And its head raised to the top of the spout, black with its living center, and its inhuman orange eyes gazed upon the face of the Lamiae, Kay-Iro De, half goddess, half sea serpent, the protectress of Sha’angh’sei.

Now Kay-Iro De rose from the top of the spout, the great scaled serpent’s body surmounted by the female head with dead-white skin and dripping seaweed hair.

Now the head of the Lamiae turned and her eyes locked with the Sunset Warrior and even though he was prepared, still he felt a shock travel through him.

What he saw was Kiri’s face, fierce and serene. A languid smile spread across the lips as the graceful head turned back and, with a writhing of her coils, Kay-Iro De twined herself about the muscular, pulsing form of the Makkon.

Tighter and tighter the slick body wrapped about the creature, squeezing while the thing screamed and flailed at the water. Its powerful arms were pinioned to its side by the spiraling coils and it used its cruel beak to bite into the enwrapping serpent. Water creamed upward and outward, in a frantic froth.

The Makkon screamed again, calling, calling, and at last out from the fog-bound shadows of the far shore another hulking shape loomed.

The Sunset Warrior clove through the ranks of the enemy like a deadly whirlwind, preceded by the sounds of crunching bones, in his wake the moans of the dying.

Out in the writhing river, the Lamiae’s coils slid upward, wrapping about the Makkon’s sturdy thick neck. Its eyes bulged and the beak ripped at the scaled hide. But Kay-Iro De’s eyes blazed like living lightning and her lips drew back, half-snarl, half-laugh. The Makkon began to choke.

The Sunset Warrior cut through the last of the enemy line foaming in the shallows of the river-bank as he saw the bulk of the second Makkon wading out into the water almost directly across the river from him. Between them, the struggle.

The Makkon, entwined, gave a great heave but the Lamiae’s coil wound ever tighter. There came a sharp snap, as distinct as a crack of thunder on a wind-swept day, and the Makkon’s head lurched to one side.

A great cry of triumph trumpeted from the Lamiae as she shot upward, bleeding profusely. Then she sank beneath the gray waves of the river.

The dim, close skies cracked with lightning and the sleet became tinged with silver, so that it had the appearance of metal. The day grew dark and oppressive, dense with cold and pressure.

The strange, plumed warriors poured across the river crossing, directed by the immense rikkagin under the billowing lizard banner, sprinting upriver where the defenses of the army of man seemed weakest.

Okami, at the head of one of the Bujun divisions, met with three other daimyos in order to revise their co-ordinated strategy.

Slowly, they began to work their divisions down the plain in a pincer movement, in order to destroy the vanguard of the deathshead warriors who were threatening to breach the first line of the army’s defense.

The far shore still teemed with soldiers waiting to ford the river, for in all other places it was far too deep for them to cross.

Moeru and Bonneduce the Last galloped along the near bank into the conflagration upriver, rallying the forces of man. She ducked the thrust of pike and, off balance, slid from the horse. She waved for the little man to go on without her and he raced off as she began to lead a group of foot soldiers out into the water.

The Sunset Warrior stalked the second Makkon, moving with the current to his left, away from Kamado. Downriver, the creature had not yet seen him and he intended that it should remain that way until he was ready.

The thing’s outline pulsed darkly through the fog and the pink sleet and even at mid-river he could smell the stench. He swam effortlessly, hindered neither by the swift current nor the weight of his armor and weapons.

He moved cautiously into the shallows, using a stand of high reeds to cover his movements until he had gained the far shore.

The plain stretched away from him, littered with the detritus of half a million soldiers.

The camp of the enemy.

And but a half kilometer further back he could make out the hazy outline of the great pine forest, black, charred beyond restoration, where lurked The Dolman.

Up the far bank he ran, slipping in the mud that the sleet had washed into the churning brown and gray waters of the river.

Coming up on it in a rush.

Visions of Ronin’s battle in the City of Ten Thousand Paths, or G’fand’s screaming face, his dead, bulging eyes. The were-dawn at Tenchō when Ronin had burst into Matsu’s room, the thing’s baleful, uncurious eyes staring into Ronin’s as it deliberately tore out her throat, shredding it in a spray of blood and viscera.

And the power of the Hart, at his core, white-hot, atavistic, inexhaustible, crying its rage, swept through him and he screamed, a holocaust, and the Makkon turned its cold orange eyes like beacons probing his. And he wondered if this was the one, for while he knew now that they were all linked in some unfathomable way still he hoped for the body which had caused the suffering and death.

His great sword whispered in the air and the head snapped back, the beak opening soundlessly. It batted at the sword, then howled in pain and rage. It had never before been afraid of metal. But this was
Aka-i-tsuchi
and immediately it grew wary, dodging the swift strikes, attempting to move in for the deadly blows of its talon-tipped claws. Its thick tail whipped back and forth.

It lunged at him abruptly in an effort to get within his defense but the Sunset Warrior reversed the sword in his two-handed grip, using
Aka-i-tsuchi
as if it were an enormous dagger. With explosive force, the blue-green blade penetrated the Makkon’s chest and he drove it swiftly downward into the creature’s bowels.

Then he was spun off his feet by a tremendous blow. He saw the Makkon staggering, its heavy legs trembling, its claws scrabbling to pull the sword from its innards, howling as its hide burned from the contact. It sank to its knees, began to topple over and for the first time he saw a Makkon bleed, a sticky black viscous fluid flowing over the ragged wound.

Darkness fell over him.

A third Makkon.

The creature smiled a secret smile as it bent over him. It reached down, its talons outstretched. He rolled but the straddle of its legs prevented his escape.