Takeo's Chronicles, page 53
Nicholas was assaulted first, two samurai coming at him with their long, thin, curved blades trying to hack his massive bulk into tiny pieces. Nicholas became a flurry of dodging and parrying, his maul a spinning haft of metal that deflected from both ends while the samurai took turns attempting to catch him off guard.
Two more engaged Gavin, who charged rather than retreated, slamming his raised shield into the first samurai to bash the man’s nose in with the heavy metal. That samurai stumbled back, his vision blurred by blood and tears, but Gavin was unable to press the attack as three more came upon him, and it was all he could do to keep from being hacked down in an instant. Yeira came to his aid, taking the attention of one, but quickly found herself outmatched and pressed away from the relative safety of Gavin’s side.
The last two of Hyun’s samurai paused, scanning the scene for where their help was needed most, and Takeo saw his only chance.
The golem came at Takeo with a legendary combination of fury and single-mindedness, trampling the hacked bodies left by his blade and swinging both fists in a series of frightful blows that made the air tremble and the ground quake. Takeo dodged and retreated at every opportunity, hindered only by the blow to his shoulder, but the warmth of his sword and the press of necessity drove him to push through the pain. He let the golem back him into a corner, his eyes taking in every aspect of his surroundings with a warrior’s competence. The ground erupted with every blow from the golem, and Takeo counted its strikes and timing like so many opponents before. When the opportunity came, he took it without hesitation, dodging over one fist and sliding under the other, tumbling under the golem’s legs once again and sprinting to stand. He heard the golem turn to pursue, but Takeo was already several paces away, closing the distance to those who dared ignore him.
I’ll only get one pass.
Takeo caught the two hesitating samurai first, hacking one down as he charged and then catching the neck of the other with a murderous backswing, leaving a violent scene of spurting blood and death rattles in his wake. A fraction of second later, the two dying samurai were silenced forever as the golem’s heavy weight trampled over them.
Two more! I can reach two more!
Takeo ran at a full sprint past Nicholas, then Gavin, his katana erupting into flames as he hacked apart one enemy and sliced in half another, and suddenly both knight and viking faced only one opponent each, and Takeo was already beyond them. He cast a gaze at Yeira, but she was too far away; the golem’s heavy footsteps were too near, and Takeo heard the pause in its stride that told him the golem had reached him and was swinging with all its might. He turned his speed into a vault and leapt into the air toward the nearest boulder, catching it with his foot and pushing off while turning towards the golem.
His vision was filled with the sight of the clay statue’s fist connecting with the ground, with Nicholas bashing his opponent’s head in with his mighty maul, and with Gavin stabbing his enemy with his longsword, then turning to help Yeira, who’d found herself backed into another corner. All this in a flash as Takeo soared over the golem’s head and dashed straight for Hyun.
The golem turned just as quickly and rammed a heavy arm into the sands less than a pace behind Takeo, shaking the ground so badly that he stumbled and nearly fell, interrupting his otherwise flawless landing. Hyun saw all of this occurring, and the color drained from his face. He had two heartbeats to make a decision on what would happen next, and for whatever reason, he decided to grab the rakshasa cub and hold her up as a shield.
As if Takeo could ever be so clumsy.
He closed the distance, knowing all the while that the golem was less than a hair’s width behind him. He swung, knowing that if he missed, if Hyun didn’t die in an instant, if any last lingering breath survived in the zealot, Takeo would be destroyed. He swung with all the rage, warmth, and fury that flowed through his sword.
He swung, knowing that he’d wanted to kill Hyun from the very moment he first saw him.
The Karaoshi family sword belched flames as it split Hyun’s skull in two, and the man crumbled to the ground with the tied-up, unharmed cub collapsing with him. Takeo would have sighed a breath of release had the chance been given, but as the last light from Hyun’s eye’s faded, the golem’s enclosed fist struck Takeo in the back and swept the samurai off his feet. He lost all sense of what was happening around him as pain wracked his limp body and he folded over, sailing through the air until he struck yet another hard surface and crumpled to the ground as well.
He’d been struck so hard his ears were ringing and his vision was blurry. He thought he was bent over, lying on his head upside down, but couldn’t be sure. He tried to breathe, but his lungs refused to expand. He thought he heard someone calling his name, but nothing seemed quite clear at all in the moment.
The darkness closed in around his vision. The ringing grew quiet, and yet nothing filled its place. His eyelids felt heavy, and he just couldn’t seem to muster the strength to open them. He opened and closed his hands, trying to use them to wipe the dark from his face, when it occurred to him he was weaponless.
My, my sword. Where did it go? And the darkness took him.
Chapter 26
Reality returned to Takeo in a haze, with nothing but blurry figures and shadowy light clouding about the center of his vision. His head hurt like it’d been split with an axe—or perhaps Nicholas had struck him with his maul. Then came muffled speaking, which sharpened quickly, and familiar words echoed in his ears.
“Hey, he’s waking,” a deep voice said.
“Takeo,” another said, sounding genuinely concerned. It was probably Gavin. “Takeo, can you hear me?”
He thought to nod, but trying to move his head proved as difficult as it was painful. Every fiber in his body railed against the shift. His vision cleared slowly, and the first thing he noticed was that both his hands were lying in his lap empty.
“Sword,” he mumbled.
“It’s fine,” Gavin replied. “We have it over—”
“Sword,” Takeo repeated, firmly.
A moment of silence, followed by a grumble, then some quiet shuffling, and Takeo’s family blade was pushed into his hand. Warmth and energy flowed through him, and he breathed deeply. His vision focused, his headache subsided, and his ears stopped ringing.
“Better,” he sighed. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it,” Gavin replied.
Takeo lifted his head and took in his surroundings.
He hadn’t been moved from the place he’d landed, other than to be turned upright and propped against the rock. A small fire had been built in front of him, the tinder being old clothes and long-dead driftwood. Nicholas was using some samurai’s sword as a spit to roast a hunk of meat—Takeo guessed it to be karkadann—which filled the air with a juicy, fatty smell that had Takeo’s mouth watering in an instant. Also seated around the fire were Gavin, Krunk, and Yeira. Gavin was giving Takeo an appraising stare, watching him unblinkingly with his gaze full of judgement. Takeo avoided making eye contact by looking to Krunk, who was bandaged and propped against a boulder, breathing heavily and taking long, slow blinks. Out of the corner of Takeo’s eye, he saw Yeira staring into the fire with an empty gaze. Her hands were covered in wet sand and blood.
A quiet shift of orange and black near Krunk caught Takeo’s attention, and he saw the rakshasa cub peak out from under Krunk’s arm, make brief eye contact, and then disappear from sight again.
Then he scanned beyond the small gathering and saw the golem standing just a few paces away, dull yet overbearing, stoic yet dead. Beneath it was the corpse of Hyun, his head spilt open and pouring a mixture of blood and brains out onto the sands. Littered elsewhere were the corpses of those in his command. Not one had survived.
“Where is Aiguo?” Takeo croaked, and he wondered how long he’d been out.
“Gone,” Gavin replied, flatly. “During the battle, he snuck away with Qadir. A week ago, I would have wondered at how I could have missed him, but now I know he uses the power of a jinni to pass unnoticed. I’m not sure when it happened, but he must have fled right away. After you killed Hyun, I saved Yeira from the last samurai, and we checked on you and started bandaging up Krunk. It didn’t even dawn on me that Aiguo existed until the cub crawled out from the boulders into Krunk’s lap, and I thought of Qadir. We ran outside to find all but one of the karkadann we purchased for Hyun dead or dying. The other was missing. Aiguo and Qadir probably aren’t that far ahead at this point, but with a sturdy mount like a karkadann carrying them both, we’ll never catch them.”
Nicholas turned the blade over in the fire, evenly roasting the meat and destroying the metal’s temper at the same time. Takeo stared at its handle, seeing the delicate carvings in the wood, and wondered its origins. The katana was probably a family sword, just like his own, long respected and passed down from generation to generation, only to end up here.
“Any idea where he’s headed?” Takeo asked.
“Do we care?” Gavin replied. “Don’t we have bigger problems right now?”
“Like what?” Takeo blinked.
Gavin sighed and looked sidelong at Nicholas, but the viking refused to enter the conversation just yet, so the knight shifted his gaze to Yeira. The woman seemed to be struggling internally, the evidence being a single tear welling in her eye before dripping onto her dirty hands. A few grains of blood-soaked sand were washed away, but it would take a lot more crying than that to clean herself.
“Well, for starters, what did you wish for?” Gavin replied. “Actually, let’s go back some. What happened to you once we entered the cave? It looked like the hydra poison was taking over, and then suddenly you were up and moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Not even a minotaur can sprint like you did. What happened with the jinni?”
Takeo sighed and stared at his sword, unwilling to meet Gavin’s gaze.
“You’re going to hate this, but,” Takeo paused, flicking his eyes at Yeira before deciding to continue, “it seems we’ve been had all along. The jinni not only knew that we were coming, it somehow knew what I wanted, too. It acted as if it had orchestrated the entire affair, and it taunted me while I was lying helpless, watching you fight a losing battle. The experience as a whole was rather . . . unsettling.”
“You made a wish though,” Gavin pressed. “Obviously, you did. What was it?”
“I,” Takeo paused again, “I don’t remember the specific words. I asked for the power to defeat my enemies and that this power should be put into my sword. That whoever holds my sword should have this ability. And that was that.”
“And the cost?” Gavin seemed poised. “What did it cost?”
Takeo hesitated again, debating if he should lie. He couldn’t, though, because a convincing lie wasn’t conjured in his mind quickly enough.
“My soul,” Takeo said.
A dead silence filled the space between them, and for a moment, no one breathed. Then Nicholas burst into laughter.
“Your soul?” he said. “That’s what it wanted? Ha! Sounds like that jinni got gypped.”
He laughed some more, though no one joined him. When he finally settled into a quiet chuckle, Gavin resumed command of the conversation.
“All jokes aside, what does that even mean?”
“I honestly have no idea.” Takeo shrugged. “Not that I expected to understand, however. According to legend, all exchanges with the jinn are vague, their rewards and costs unknown until explored. I’m not even sure what power I’ve been granted.”
“You think it’s possible you can do more with that sword than move and kill quickly?” Gavin clarified.
“Like fly?” Krunk asked.
“Or perhaps you’re really strong,” Nicholas said. “Like a cyclops or something? Maybe you can breathe underwater.”
“Can you bring people back from the dead?” Yeira whispered.
All eyes fell on her, and the silence was deafening. Even the roasting meat and the crackle of the fire went audibly dead for one morbid moment, and Takeo remembered he wasn’t the only one in that cave who’d lost someone they cared about. Gavin slid closer to Yeira, and she dropped her head onto one of his broad shoulders, her gaze still focused on the flames.
“I don’t think so,” Takeo replied. “I don’t think my soul was worth the price of raising the dead, but I could try. Where are your sisters?”
“I burned them,” Yeira replied, voice struggling, new tears forming to run down her cheeks. “It’s what they would have wanted, to be sent to the afterlife in the traditional Kshatriya way. They’re not coming back.”
Her last words were barely audible, and had there been so much as a light breeze, Takeo would have missed them. As things stood, though, Takeo felt a strange touch of sympathy at Yeira’s loss. It was strange because Takeo rarely felt anything for the dead, especially for those he hardly knew. The annihilation of war had been a part of him since birth, bathing him in the stench of murder for so long that he was immune to the smell. Yet here he was, feeling a quiet clench in his stomach at the turmoil and grief Yeira was clearly going through.
Was it because she was beautiful? He wondered at that thought a moment, that perhaps he was like Gavin and prone to thoughts of chivalry at the sight of a pretty face. It didn’t ring true, though, and a moment later, reality struck hard.
Takeo pitied her. Yeira had just been stripped of her closest companions—her only companions, according to Gavin—in a harsh and brutal way, swiftly and deftly in a manner in which she had no control or ability to stop. In one fell swoop, she’d been ripped of her friends, her promised oaths, and the illusion of control new warriors often put up before fighting their first battle. She was broken, alone, and lost. Just like he’d been when Emily had died.
Well, she wasn’t fully alone, actually. She was with them, which was worse as far as Takeo was concerned. Yes, he definitely felt sorry for her.
“I,” Takeo paused, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She blinked, another tear escaping from her eyes to roll down her cheek and splatter on Gavin’s shoulder.
Takeo waited what he assumed was a respectable amount of time and then turned to Gavin. He said, “I assume while I was out, you discussed what our next plans should be?”
“You assumed wrong.” Gavin shrugged with the shoulder Yeira wasn’t leaning on. “We did talk about the golem a bit.”
“Please tell me no one carved their name into it.”
Gavin shook his head. “We saw its limitations pretty clearly. We need stealth and secrecy now more than ever, and there’s no chance of that happening with a hunk of clay following us around. It’s a tempting offer, but we came to realize a single golem won’t help our situation. We’re utterly hopeless.”
“Good to hear, I think,” Takeo replied. “How utterly hopeless are we?”
Gavin sighed and was about to speak when Nicholas pulled the roasted karkadann meat out of the flames and sliced off chunks for everyone. The viking frowned apologetically as he did so, as if eating in this moment was a tactless thing to do. If anyone agreed, they didn’t voice their opinion, not even Yeira, who took small bites of the meat Gavin held up to her.
The knight spoke slowly between his own bites, taking his time explaining their abysmal state.
“Krunk is in bad shape,” he said. “The mercenary cut him deep, and I’ll say he needs at least two weeks’ time before he can travel. That gives Aiguo and Qadir two more weeks’ head start on a mount, which means we’ll never catch them before they reach Juatwa. Oh, and speaking of staying here in this cave, I’m not certain it’s a wise idea. That hydra might come back. Best we not speak anymore on that.
“But let’s just ignore those two things and focus on other problems. Aiguo slayed all the other karkadann and left their bodies to rot on the beaches. On one hand, that leaves us plenty of food, but the reality is that we don’t need it with all the supplies we scavenged from Hyun and his dead soldiers. Instead, it makes those karkadann bodies a liability because their rotting flesh is going to attract predators. Might just be a phoenix or two, might be a pride of sphinxes. Might be another hydra. Might even be a squad of wandering mercenaries. Essentially, the vast majority of what is likely to find those corpses is going to be hostile to us, and it’ll be difficult to hide from them when we’re relaxing in the only clear shelter within several days’ travel. We could use the golem for protection, but that would just attract more foes eager to steal the monstrosity from us. Like I said before, seeing Hyun showed me the statue is more of a liability than an asset.
“So now let’s move past that. Let’s say a miracle occurs, and we ride out these two weeks unmolested in this cave, and Krunk makes a full recovery in record time. Now what in the world do we do with ourselves? We have a rakshasa cub that hisses and claws at everyone—and that also seems deeply attached to Krunk—and she will attract mercenaries from all corners of the world, wanting to cut off her head for blood money—and ours, so they don’t have to split the profit. Even if we can find a way to sneak her about, it’s only a matter of time before Aiguo and Qadir reach Lady Xuan and that old woman sends a parade of samurai and ninjas to track us down. Yet another reason we can’t take the golem with us. We’d have our throats slit at the first opportunity. Not that Xuan doesn’t want this little cub badly enough already, as does Qadir, who risked life and lost limbs to bring this little one into existence.
“However, let’s just move on from all that and pretend for a moment we’re not at the top of literally everyone’s kill list. Let’s just live in a fantasy world for a few seconds and imagine that Lady Xuan harbors no ill will towards us for denying her a rakshasa female and for killing her top samurai. Let’s just focus on what our original plan was: to join some force and stop the wars plaguing this world. That’s how this whole thing started, right? Well, now how do we accomplish that? I thought our best bet was to join Lady Xuan, but now she’s made it clear she wants our heads on pikes. What are we supposed to do? Oppose her? Isn’t that just going to plunge the world further into chaos by opposing the one with the strongest chance of unifying the war-torn world? Not that I want Xuan to win, not after what Hyun did to Yeira’s sisters, but what can we do?
