Dai-San - 03 (33 page)

‘If dor-Sefrith were here—’

The Salamander’s huge face darkened momentarily. ‘But he is not. He has been destroyed. Yes’—seeing the look on the other’s face—‘he is finally gone for all time. As he promised, The Dolman destroyed him, attacking him directly when he was otherwise occupied. That foray delayed The Dolman’s arrival but it was worth it, I believe. No more tampering—’

The black beast reared high in the air, its eyes rolling madly.

‘Now it is but you and I. For you are the last of the race and you alone can tell Ronin—’

Bonneduce the Last had spurred his luma forward. He kept his features in careful repose but beneath the stone exterior he exulted. The Dolman must know of the coming of the Sunset Warrior, of who he had been, yet he had chosen not to inform his disciple.

‘The end is nigh, Tokagé!’ called Bonneduce the Last as he closed with the huge man. The Rhyalann was gone and its safety with it. He shrugged inwardly. It had been given to him, a sacred trust he could not refuse, just as he could not refuse the suffering of his quest. Not after the shame his lord had brought to his folk.

‘The old name!’ hissed the Salamander, his face twisting in rage for the first time. ‘On your knees, if you would use it, little man!’ And he flung out his hand.

Bonneduce the Last saw them coming.

Suriken.
Black metal stars.

His boots had already been freed from the prison of his stirrups.

He slid from the saddle.

There was time for nothing else.

His ears were filled with the buzzing as if from a swarm of angry bees. Two of the weapons buried themselves in his luma’s head and it went down on its knees, toppling, and he had to roll, roll in the filth to avoid being crushed by its weight.

Over the sticky, slippery ground, spiked with fallen weapons. Hearing the booming laughter of Tokagé and, in his mind, the echoes reverberating along the vast corridors of Time, the long eons of his sorrowful existence, mocking all the good men whose blood he had spilled. Tokagé! The bones he had splintered, the tears of death he had caused. The unspeakable anguish.

Bonneduce the Last rose, climbing the mountains of the dead and the dying, his leg paining him now, his mind turning automatically away from the long-known, familiar physical agony. He tuned himself now to the grief of his long-dead people. Restless still. Crying out for retribution. Shamed by history. By Tokagé, their liege.

‘I learned many things over the ages,’ Tokagé was saying to him. ‘I am no longer an animal, despite what you believe. I wish you to understand this before I kill you. It is evil’s day, the cycle has come, as I knew it would. It is as simple as that. Who will be victorious—’

Bonneduce the Last came on, oblivious to the words flying at him, adrenalin pumping through his body, vibrating his sword arm. He heard only the cries of his shamed people calling to him over the interminable centuries. He felt only their torment. He meant only to end it.

‘I would not wish this alliance,’ Tokagé continued, and his massive head turned briefly to look across the river, to the hissing charcoal pine forest, no more than a kilometer away. He turned back. ‘I do not love that hideous thing; no man could. It is annihilation. But what choice did I have? It was this or death—’

Bonneduce the Last felt the eyes of his people upon him, felt their strength bubbling inside him, and for the first time in long eons he felt what it was like to be alive. He marveled.

Now I am what I am, he thought.

‘You would have made the same bargain,’ said Tokagé. ‘I know that. You have not stared death in the face. You have not felt its cold embrace, the slipping away of all consciousness, all volition—’ The ebon beast reared again at Bonneduce the Last’s approach. ‘I could not let go of life!’ His eyes got small as a cunning look spread over his face. ‘And then I understood that it would be all right for I found that with each passing day I grew more powerful and secretly I began to leech more power away from him and soon, very soon, even he will not be able to stop me. Then can I end this servitude and destroy him!’

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Bonneduce the Last felt some last shred of compassion for this haunted man, driven by the unrelenting ghosts of power. Old associations, perhaps, he told himself. Then that too disappeared, engulfed by the red storm of his final avenging assault.

Carrying out the Salamander’s directive, flogged mercilessly by their insect-eyed rikkagin, the squat warriors poured through the widening rent in the defenses of the army of man. They set a picket line of pikes which they moved outward, breaking the attempt at a counteroffensive.

Through the rent which they protected charged the plumed warriors, up the plain, toward the high walls of Kamado.

Screaming.

Moeru, seeing the foot soldiers routed, gathered up the few remaining cavalry about her and, wheeling, galloped downstream, searching for the Bujun.

They fought each other with long blades, as they had been taught eons ago, in the ancient manner, the thrusts and parries so swift that one began before the other ended, a constant flow of precisely directed energy.

‘There is no one better than I, little one,’ said Tokagé. ‘Accept your fate. You shall die honorably, like a warrior.’

‘The time for talk is long past,’ said Bonneduce the Last. ‘Your acts speak for themselves. There is nothing you can say to expiate your guilt.’

‘My guilt? I did only what I had to in order to survive—’

‘You groveled like an animal—’

‘And I lived, fool!’

‘To survive is not enough. Life must have meaning.’

‘All that matters is that I am here now. And I will destroy you!’

She found Okami in the muddy shallows of the river, thrice wounded but battling still. He mobilized the Bujun battalions under his command and they moved off upriver in an attempt to enfilade the enemy breakthrough.

Up from the silty banks and across the littered plain rushed the Bujun, reaping a bloody harvest of all who stood in their path.

The thin round blade flicked out as they closed. A sixth finger, it was aimed for the jugular, but Tokagé countered with the
tokko,
the short metal weapon with a clawed trident at each end.

Tokagé jerked his wrist and the thin blade emanating from the inside of Bonneduce the Last’s wrist snapped. Immediately he reversed the
tokko,
dragging it across the little man’s chest.

Bonneduce the Last groaned inwardly with the pain. He reached up and pulled Tokagé down from his high saddle. The black beast leapt high in the air as the little man jabbed it with a powerful strike.

Into the mire of the grisly battlefield.

‘Feel what it is like to be down here in the quagmire of death, Tokagé,’ Bonneduce the Last said.

Tokagé lurched, slipping across the curvature of a partially buried helm under his boot sole.

Bonneduce the Last attacked, a thin-bladed stiletto pushed forward.

In the instant of his attack he understood the nature of the other’s ruse.

He ignored the blade which bloomed in Tokagé’s fist, concentrating on what he knew he had to do.

He felt the cold metal like a fire as it pierced his armor and the flesh of his shoulder.

Perception narrowed as he consciously dulled the agony which swept through him as Tokagé’s arm descended.

The point of his stiletto pierced Tokagé’s right eye at the precise instant he felt the shock wave of the other’s cruel blade.

A peculiar warmth suffused his body and, as he completed the strike, he had time to remember, a feeling denied him for many centuries. It was all he wished for.

Then Tokagé’s blade swept relentlessly through his torso, splitting his spine.

He toppled over, his blood spilling out, mingling with the entrails, the bones, of the warriors piled beneath his body.

His eyes stared upward. The great black and crimson banners filled a hazy sky. Dimly he was aware of the prickle of the sleet against his upturned face. It filled him with a sudden bright passion and, unaccountably, he wept.

Slowly, the banners seemed to settle over him like a shroud.

Dripping from the river’s moisture, the Sunset Warrior climbed the high shore, shaking the encroaching enemy warriors from him almost as if they were drops of water.

Seizing the reins of Kiri’s abandoned luma, he swung into the saddle and dug his boot heels into the foam-flecked flanks.

In a silver shower, he sped along the near bank, upriver to where the enemy had broken through the defenses and was pouring across the plain toward Kamado.

Onto the field of battle he plunged, screaming as he went, drawing
Aka-i-tsuchi,
and indeed his wake across the undulating plain was an explosion of blood and bones. He leapt barriers of broken bodies, barricades of war horses and fallen pikes. Corpses clung to him, their corded muscles twitching in death, their legs flapping like shredded banners against his steed’s flanks, slowing him down. He hacked at their limbs, shedding them like great, frozen tears.

The fluttering of the Salamander’s standards bloomed before him out of the driving sleet. He passed a ragged fence of waving pikes.

And then he caught sight of the huge frame clothed in ebon armor and ebon robes. He rode a black beast. As he watched, the Salamander bent to the side for a moment, reaching down to wipe his blade upon the tattered clothing of a warrior who had died upon his feet because there was no longer any space for his body to fall.

Perhaps he heard the insistent drumming of the Sunset Warrior’s luma approaching, for the Salamander’s huge head turned and his cruel obsidian eyes focused on the oncoming rider.

He spent no time in identifying the figure but wheeled his mount, calling to his guard. He took off over the plain toward the bank of the river, his ebon banners rippling in his wake.

The Sunset Warrior topped the last rise and sped across the shallow valley to the spot where the Salamander had stood. He missed Rikkagin Aerent atop the pile of the dead but he saw the still form of Bonneduce the Last and although he longed to overtake the Salamander now he knew that he could not.

Dismounting even as he drew back on the reins, he ran over the jellied earth. He knelt almost knee deep in the viscous slime and picked the small body off the ground.

‘Oh, my friend, what has he done to you?’

There was no response and the Sunset Warrior felt his heart breaking. He had thought he was beyond all that. And at last he understood. As Ronin he had cut himself off from any more hurt after he killed K’reen. Because of that he had not seen the love that Matsu had for him. Worse he had not understood his own love for her until it was too late. To live was to feel. Thus he wept for Bonneduce the Last.

The little man opened his eyes. He felt the life leaking out of him yet he was glad to see the strange, terrifyingly fierce face so close above him. He felt the enormous strength of the arms which held him tightly and was comforted. Only then did he feel the rears mingling with the sleet on his face.

‘Do not mourn for me, old friend, there is no time.’ He closed his eyes, heard the harsh rustle of his own breathing. His lungs were beginning to fill up with his own fluids. ‘There is much to tell you before I die, so listen to me now. Your old nemesis, the Salamander, is known to me. When I was given the Rhyalann, sent on my quest, I thought all of my folk had perished.’ He coughed and the Sunset Warrior wiped the pink spittle from his dry lips. ‘He is Tokagé, my liege. It was he whose unquenchable thirst for power caused the creation of The Dolman. Yes. Yes. It is true.’ His voice was harsh and insistent. ‘For all these eons I thought him dead, destroyed by the very thing he had caused to be born. But I was wrong. He was too clever to die. He made a pact with The Dolman. It is his master now and it has made him immortal, given him great power.’ His head went slack and his eyelids fluttered as he fought for a few more moments of life. Time, he thought, you were always my enemy.

‘My friend, there is a chance for you now. I know it. He has not been told what you have become. He calls you Ronin still. The Dolman has kept the knowledge from him. He believes he can win against that horror but even he does not understand what he unleashed. He cannot face that fact.’ He was racked with coughs and he thought: Must hold on just a little longer. He clung to the Sunset Warrior like a child.

‘Rikk-Rikkagin Aerent, did you see him?’

‘No.’

‘Tokagé felled him near here. Find him. I do not think that he is dead. He tried to destroy Tokagé. Such a hero.’

‘I will find him.’

‘And Moeru?’

‘Somewhere on the battlefield.’

‘No. No. She must be beside you—’ He became agitated.

‘Calm yourself, my friend.’

‘Tokagé told me. The Dolman attacked dor-Sefrith while he was otherwise occupied. That is-is how he put it—’

‘What does that—’

‘The Dolman attacked him while the process of change—’

‘Mine.’

‘Yes.’

‘I see, but—’

Bonneduce the Last’s body convulsed, his entire frame shuddering as if a titanic struggle were taking place within him. The worn face drained of all color. The Sunset Warrior was drenched with his blood. And there was little left. Only this:

‘Tokagé is dor-Sefrith’s father.’ The voice was but a dry rattle.

‘The Dolman killed his son. As-as Tokagé wished.’

The Sunset Warrior knelt in the chill quagmire holding the dead man. He got to his feet, slowly, slowly.

A shout came to him over the tumult of the battle and he spun about.

Moeru spurred her steed toward him. The smile on her face disappeared as she saw the small body he held. She reined in, her mount reared, and she patted its glistening hide. She was covered with blood and gore, her breastplate dark and running, her leggings sopping wet. Her hair flew from the confines of her dented helm.

‘Okami also,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘Rikkagin Aerent is wounded somewhere near. Can you spare someone?’

‘Now perhaps yes.’

She pointed downriver, toward the sea so many kilometers away.