Dai-San - 03 (36 page)

The curling mist made them choke.

The ridge had no far side.

There was nothing but mist, green and opaque, encroaching upon the reality of the world as if eating it alive, the old flesh crumbling, dissolving in the oncoming tide.

Here,
said Hynd in her mind.

Moeru and Hynd, staring at each other.

Silence, more complete than was possible on the world of man.

Still their eyes locked. Still their minds exerted their wills, seeing only what they wished to see.

Hynd prowled restlessly.

‘What is happening?’ whispered Moeru.

Something. Are you afraid?

‘Yes.’

Even he did not know the answer.

They heard it then, the calling.

Abruptly there was no air.

She turned to the mist, the woman, stepped quickly into it, out from the shallows into a darkness more complete than night.

Had it been a trick of the billowing mist or had two figures vanished into its solidity?

Hynd knew at last, and without a backward glance, he loped easily down the ridge back toward the Kai-feng across the wide river.

It came to him, crying on the lonely wind which whipped the slender pines atop the last hillock of his soul.

His body was taken, the tentacles, if such they were, lacerating his flesh, seeping into his bones, melting them.

Yet he held onto the last shreds of his existence knowing that he held the key.

What is it?

I have no name.

Stillness entering his soul as death crept higher.

And he let in the bright spark, the rain at the core of his being, because he had nothing left to lose and it was all now that was left for him. Whatever it held.

Salvation.

He called, understanding at last that he was the sorcerer now, accepting it. Karma. And more. He accepted who he was, opening the floodgates. At first he had thought to call the blacksmith, for he recognized that he had no anchor, thus no solidity. He was being destroyed, drowned in The Dolman because of this. The blacksmith was the anchor and he needed her and he had set his thoughts to the snowbound slopes of Fujiwara. But he had seen in his mind the cold forges, the empty house, and knew that she was not the answer. What then?

He called, the crying of gulls off a limitless shore, an end to drowning, an end to hiding himself from himself. He felt her close now, his final third, the last piece of dor-Sefrith’s handiwork, balked by The Dolman’s fierce attack at Haneda.

They would not come together.

Why?

He turned inward, ignoring annihilation.

And found the blacksmith within himself.

Then she entered him and he felt the bright sparks gyring about him, red, green, blue, and he touched them, one by one, in wonderment and delight, laughing, crying, his entire being alight with the knowledge that at last he was whole; that this is what The Dolman feared. There were no more masters, no more protectors—thus the Aegir’s death—no more sages. An end to childhood.

Ronin, Setsoru, and now the Sunset Warrior caressed the facets of his final third. Red, green, blue. K’reen, Moeru, Matsu. Love, strength, trust. The merging of all his traits, all his power: the Dai-San.

Energy ran through him like a rushing river, endless, depthless, ageless. He thought of dor-Sefrith’s last trick. The mage, knowing his defeat was imminent, had cast one final card: he created the blacksmith, using Matsu’s essence pulled from the sleeping mind of the forming Sunset Warrior. As a signpost. And the Sunset Warrior had used it. Now his universe was infinite, the source of his power illuminated. Himself.

His great mailed fingers curled about the thick haft of
Aka-i-tsuchi—
Red Tidings—and he plunged its glowing tip into the heart of The Dolman. His intense kineticism lashed the being surrounding him like a cruel whip. Bolts of green and blue fire, hotter than the core of the sun, rippled like molten ribbon along the lavender edges of his slashing blade, rolling all along its length from hilt-guard to its double-edged tip, eating, eating ravenously. He heard a delicious humming which grew with a great heat until it filled all his world, matching the fierce beating of his heart. Exhilaration turned to ecstasy.

Perhaps The Dolman screamed, realizing the proximity of its death.

Swirling, its life force gushed over him, spilling like a gurgling sewer from the enormous rents made by
Aka-i-tsuchi
as he struck downward at it again and again with unbridled fury. And now he inhaled its entire hideous history. Scene after scene of torment and destruction swept over him, each one more ghastly than the next. The taste of incalculable despair.

The atmosphere wavered as he labored. Then it bubbled as if blistering, boiling. The horizon buckled and heaved and he heard dimly the hoarse hissing of steam under immense pressure. There came an unbearable whining and then—

A soundless scar upon the fabric of the universe.

When Moichi saw the figure cross the river, he did not know what to make of it.

Day was done. A last pale streak of sunlight was being bludgeoned into the wet crimson snow.

Even with the aid of his folk, the army of man had been sorely pressed, forced to retreat into the shadows of Kamado’s high walls. Defeat had been at hand for a siege now within the citadel would surely mean starvation and death.

And then, not long ago, so swiftly that none could say truly when it began, the tide of battle turned. The black, insect-eyed rikkagin who so cleverly directed the enemy began to lose control. Perhaps they went mad, for they sent their warriors careening insanely into each other. Entire platoons of the pike men were easily decoyed and slaughtered.

The Bujun came to the fore, having destroyed the remaining deathshead warriors, and now they sought out the insect-eyed rikkagin, killing them wholesale. Other soldiers who had for most of the long day feared the intervention of the Makkon and The Dolman saw now that these sorcerous creatures were not forthcoming and their superstitious fear fell away and they launched themselves upon their foes with enormous ferocity.

The Bujun and Moichi’s folk led the counterattack and now only the last few pockets of enemy warriors remained, isolated and fast crumbling. All the sorcerous creatures were so much carrion.

The field was a mounded sea of corpses, a vast humped marsh of spilled blood and seeping entrails, shattered skulls and broken bones.

Moichi was sick with battle, weary beyond exhaustion. It went beyond his muscles into his soul. His clothes, under his armor, were sopping, so heavy with soaked up blood that he felt disfigured with the added weight. Where the blood had already dried, the cloth was so stiff that it might have been metal plate.

His gaze swept over the vast plain of death to the swirling river, pearled and frothy, and at once he had seen the splashing, like a fount of liquid light.

And now he watched the tall figure stride up the near bank, swollen with bodies, bristling with fallen swords, water streaming from him, and he knew even before he saw that strange transfigured face that he beheld the last living legend of the sorcerous age of mankind. The only one to cross the barrier into the last dying days of this year, with the winter’s chill still staining lovely, faraway Sha’angh’sei, jeweled snow hanging in the columnated gardens and on the flat roofs of the harttins of the city, the promise of spring already a thought held close in the minds of the kubaru who jammed the long wharves and slept their short dreamless sleeps upon the rocking tasstans.

The numinous figure stopped now and raised his great blue-green sword so that its long tip caught the last ray of sunlight breaking through the rents in the flying clouds at the rim of the horizon in the west. It fired all along the gleaming length until the light seemed to stretch upward into the very heart of heaven.

And Moichi, sheathing his blade, caked with blood and brains, ran out into the mounded field of the dead, out from the high blank walls of Kamado behind which fires had already begun, memorials for the dead, a razing against the Kai-feng, a celebration of the day of man, out from the dark loomings of the citadel’s shadows, out into the light of a new age.

Out to meet the Dai-San.

Eric Van Lustbader is the author of numerous bestselling novels including the Nicholas Linnear series,
First Daughter
,
Blood Trust
, and the international bestsellers featuring Jason Bourne:
The Bourne Legacy
,
The Bourne Betrayal
,
The Bourne Sanction
,
The Bourne Deception
,
The Bourne Objective
,
The Bourne Dominion
, and
The Bourne Retribution
. For more information, visit
www.EricVanLustbader.com
. You can also follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1978 by Eric Van Lustbader

Cover design by Angela Goddard

978-1-4804-7103-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com