The warlock paused as if thinking this over, then said, “Very well.” But Django wasn’t sure he meant it.
His warning instincts jumped into high gear when he looked at the guy. He was dressed in skinny black jeans and a leather jacket that was fashionable ten years ago. Django knew this because he’d been into leather jackets back then. He might have shoplifted the same one himself. The warlock wore his stringy black hair shoulder-length, now wildly disheveled, but one couldn’t fault a guy’s hairstyle when he’d just been cocooned by a giant spider.
The field of flames continued to burn. With so many webs burnt away, flames licking everywhere, they had an unimpeded view of much of the cavern, which stretched beyond the limits of Hage’s lights. Tiny flames moved like fireflies in the distance.
Hage said, “You’ll be visible again soon. We’d better find your parents.”
“You want to venture out there?” the warlock asked incredulously. “Into the open?”
“I got you out, didn’t I?” Django said, frowning. “Look, we could use your help, but if you don’t have the spine, just stay out of our way.”
The warlock’s face darkened, his thin lips pinching.
Django said, “You all stay here.” He looked out into the cavern and handed the sword to Hage. “Hold this.” A floating sword might make spiders curious. He could see the unfamiliar spaces well enough to Shadow Blink now. He hoped he had enough Third Eye essence left for enough Blinks to find his parents before the spiders found him.
He could still see which cocoons contained living victims. Would his parents be found near each other? Spotting a cluster of three still-living victims about thirty yards away, he Blinked to a space right beside it, kneeling, all senses hyper-focused for danger. The skittering and near-ultrasonic shrieking of the scorched jorogumo still filled the air. He felt for the human face within the silk and then tore through the sticky strands with his fingers. It was like trying to tear apart handfuls of stretchy fishing line. A human face, a middle-aged man, but no one he recognized. The next one, a teenage girl, and the third, an old man.
Some property of the strands was numbing his hands.
Even if he could save his parents, how could he leave the rest of these people here to be devoured?
It was simple. He couldn’t. Dammit.
But his parents were formidable martial artists. Having their help might be the key to saving all these unfortunate victims. The tsuchigumo had to die.
He Blinked to the next cluster, another thirty yards deeper into the cavern, closer to the remaining webs. He could not yet see the far side of the cavern. The echoes of the spiders told him it went on for some distance. The next cluster proved to be an elderly couple dressed in traditional Korean robes. How long had they been here?
He Blinked to the next cluster, this time of five people plus several cocoons containing animals of various sizes. The cluster was stashed in an alcove among several stalactites and stalagmites, perhaps explaining why they had not been eaten, as this cluster had been out of the line of sight of much of the cavern. Out of sight, out of mind.
He ripped through the cocoons to reveal the faces of three more victims before he discovered the face of his mother.
She lay quiescent, as if merely asleep. She looked so young, maybe early twenties. Tears burst forth, and he clamped a hand over his mouth—more difficult than one might think when one’s hand is both invisible and numb, and he slapped himself in the nose first. For a long moment, he just looked at her. He had forgotten how beautiful she was, how full of strength, even unconscious. And he had never seen her this way before. She hadn’t given birth to him until she was thirty-two; Kuan-yin came along when she was thirty-five. To this girl, children were not yet even a dream. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he finished stripping away her cocoon.
Then she opened her eyes and released a little groan.
He clamped a hand over her mouth and hesitated for an instant, having no idea what to say. She tensed weakly against him, then he whispered in her ear, “Naoko! Hold still. It’s...I’m...a friend, here to get you out. But you have to stay perfectly quiet. Understand?”
She nodded.
“I’m going to find Chen Xiu now,” he whispered. “Don’t make a sound.”
It didn’t matter that he was invisible. She couldn’t see him anyway. There is no darkness more absolute than in a cave. In the greater cavern, a few flames still licked at webs, but the warlock’s field of magical napalm had died, letting darkness reclaim much of the cavern.
Sounds of combat erupted from the direction of the passageway. Django sensed other movements in the cavern coming closer. The returning of the jorogumo, but also more human footsteps—and the flap of wings. All of it moving past the alcove toward the passageway.
Django moved to the next cocoon and tore away the silk covering the face. Inside was his father.
Another wave of emotion crashed over him, raking him across the rocks of his own regrets. His breath trembled, and his limbs felt weak as he ripped at the tough, sticky silk. His father wore his hair in a long braid that stretched down his chest to his waist. And he was clean-shaven, which Django had never seen before. He could only remember his father wearing a buzz cut and well-trimmed goatee.
Chen Xiu’s eyes snapped open, and Django repeated what he’d said to his mother.
His mother whispered from a couple of steps away. “Chen Xiu, is that you?”
“I am here, xiao hua.” My little flower.
Django handed each of them a fruit. “Eat this. It’ll help wake you up.”
They did, and he could see their auras brightening.
But as he moved to the mouth of the alcove, his mouth went dry and his chest tightened. The cavern was full of moving shapes, not just jorogumo but yokai galore. Feral-eyed kappa, rabid-looking tanuki, mangy badgers walking on their hind legs carrying naginata, walking corpses, a woman with a neck like a snake, even a bird-faced tengu, and many others he could not identify.
They were cut off.
He knew it was possible to Shadow Blink carrying one of them back to the group, but he had never tried Blinking with a human passenger. It would spend extra essence, and he didn’t have enough left in his Third Eye pool to return for the other. Glancing back at his parents, he could see they were still groggy but quickly recovering thanks to the fruit. A quick scan with Celestial mahō revealed them to be uninjured, if a little dehydrated.
The battle had fallen full strength on Hage, Cat, and the warlock. Cat’s roars filled the cavern. The sea of yokai moved with uncanny silence toward the battle.
Django had to rejoin forces with them, and he found himself yearning for offensive capabilities that didn’t require weapons. They would have to rely on stealth for as long as they could.
He told his parents of his plan to rejoin the others and his intention to save the rest of the victims. Without a moment’s hesitation, they agreed.
“The spider must die,” his mother said.
Django said, “Oh, and uh...don’t be surprised by how my friends look.”
Their eyes focused on him as he spoke. His invisibility was spent.
His father said in Japanese, “We came to Jianghu six months ago, uh, I think. We know strange.”
Django led them out into the cavern, hugging the wall and the jumping shadows created by Hage’s lights and the warlock’s bursts of flame. Hage’s oni form wielded the enormous club with efficient ferocity, crushing jorogumo and sending other yokai flying. The clamor of battle masked all other sound, so the trio moved quickly.
Then, as they neared the passageway, Django noticed that the defeated yokai were losing their substance, collapsing into wads of colored silk, just as the apparition of Yuka had in the mansion above. What was more, every one of them trailed a single silver thread that led back into the darkness.
To the tsuchigumo.
“Oh, shit!” he said at the sudden epiphany.
At the sound, a nearby doppelgän
ger of Yuka spun and faced him. Her mouth, filled with tiny fangs, stretched wide enough to swallow a human head. She rushed them at a speed no human could accomplish, a six-inch spike bursting from each palm.
Instantly his parents assumed defensive stances unique to their arts, his father in a crouching Monkey pose and his mother in ichimonji no kamae, a ninjutsu stance that turned her body to the side with one hand extended to fight or block and the other held back to counterstrike or protect the face. They both made it look effortless.
The spiked arms slashed at Chen Xiu, but he ducked and rolled and bounced like a monkey until he came up with a hooked claw and tore off half the spider’s face. It came off in a squelch of dark ichor, the flesh that resembled Yuka no more substantial than a casing of a sausage stuffed with wet silk. The jorogumo screamed, and then Naoko leaped forward, hooked an arm around what was left of the spider’s head in a vicious choke hold—and twisted it off.
The jorogumo stopped screaming and toppled, its human-shaped limbs twitching and bending inward toward its abdomen like a dead spider’s. Django thought of harvesting the spider’s essence, but the commotion caught the attention of the nearby yokai. They swarmed in.
Django threw up his Earth Fortress and faced them, side by side with his parents. A hairy caterpillar the size of a motorcycle undulated toward them with a toothy, circular maw that could have swallowed any of them whole. Django vaulted over the creature and found the silver thread trailing behind it. Before it could double over to attack him, he scooped up the thread and pulled it apart. The caterpillar collapsed into a wad of lifeless silk.
His parents were trading blows with a human-sized figure with the head of a fox. Django leaped behind the fox, grabbed its thread, and broke it. The fox, too, collapsed like a dissolving doll.
“What...?” his mother cried.
Django held up the thread. “Illusions! Break this and they die!”
Then five figures emerged from the crowd that was attacking Hage, Cat, and the warlock.
“Hey, shithead!” one of them called to Django in English.
Silhouetted against the mahō light stood five rough-looking teenage boys wearing gang colors and carrying street weapons: a bike chain, an aluminum baseball bat, a switchblade, brass knuckles, and a stolen police nightstick. Django knew them all. “Skinny” Jimmy Ho. “Long Dong” Duckhwan Jackson. “Chains” Chang Wong (no relation to Django’s family). “Tangy” Trang Lam. “Bad” Banoy Santos. There they stood, just as Django remembered them, so ludicrous in what they believed real strength was, so pitiable in the way they turned themselves into stereotypes in their directionless mutiny against the Man, but still dangerous in their cocksure arrogance.
The one who had spoken was Chains. “Long time, you fucking traitor. Time for some payback.” After leaving Hawaii, Django had no idea what had happened to his former friends. All of them were probably dead or in jail.
Chen Xiu said, “You know these hoodlums?”
Django said, “I used to. The tsuchigumo must still be probing my memories.” His throat felt thick and his cheeks grew hot. What a fool he’d been. And if he could save his parents, if they all got out of here alive, they would still have to bear a son and live through his stupidity. A fist closed around his heart and squeezed.
Django charged in and stepped inside the reach of Chains’ bike chain, executed a crippling wrist lock that also wrenched the chain out of the apparition’s grip. Then he kicked the boy’s knee sideways, snapping it from under him, and slipping around behind to slap the chain around his neck. His mother had already disarmed and taken down two of them, and his father scratched the face off the second-to-last one, revealing not blood and bone, but a pale, blank mask of cotton-like fluff.
Django tried to pick up the fallen switchblade, but it dissolved to nothing in his hand.
The last one, “Skinny” Jimmy, was a kid who was all gawky elbows and knees with the kind of teeth that would let him eat an apple through a knothole. Django almost felt bad about taking him down. A block of the incoming brass knuckles, a step, a twist, and the apparition was flat on its back. The limbs didn’t feel right, as if he was fighting a big stuffed animal. But that didn’t make them any less deadly. He dropped his knee into the apparition’s face, crushing the head like a melon. Then it was gone.
The oni form that Hage wore was much more substantial than the images this tsuchigumo threw at them. Hage waded out into the enemy throng, swinging and crushing, splattered with spider ichor and shreds of webbing, clearing the way for Django and his parents to rejoin the group. Hage paused to toss the ancient Chinese sword to Django.
Warm relief gushed through him as he caught it and whipped it out, felt the Sunblade flare anew, and swung at the nearest apparition, a walking corpse dressed in the rotting finery of Heian times. His swing not only slashed through the thing like paper, cleaving it in two, but also sent an arc of searing light blasting onward through the swarm of enemy creatures, shearing a swath of spiders and yokai in two.
Django stared at the blade in shock. That had never happened before.
But an instant later, he was back on the attack, hacking and hewing, and each blow took out another swath twenty feet deep.
Within seconds, all the jorogumo and yokai in sight were destroyed, leaving nothing but smoking heaps of silk, licking flames, and severed spider parts glowing with embers. The acrid stench of smoking ichor and scorched spider silk stung Django’s nose and brought his gorge into his throat.
The rest of the group stared at him and at each other: four humans, a tiger, and an apparent oni.
“Uh, Chen Xiu and Naoko, this is Cat, who’s really a housecat, and Hage, who’s really a tanuki, and...” To the warlock he said, “And you are?”
“Impatient to get the hell out of here,” the warlock said.
Chen Xiu said, “How you know our names?”
“Uh, I read your minds,” Django said. “I’m a warlock.”
They nodded sagely as if it didn’t sound crazy.
“Call me Django. Maybe it’s a weird time to ask this, but how did two non-mahō humans get into Jianghu anyway?”
Naoko said, “Practice and meditation—and some ancient family scrolls.”
The other warlock stiffened with heightened attention, but Django had just been pummeled with too many mental bricks to consider why. He still had his mother’s family scrolls. One of those untranslated portions must contain some sort of technique or ritual for normal humans to cross into Jianghu.
But then all conversation halted at the sound of a massive shape shifting in the darkness. Its claws sounded like pickaxes against the cavern floor, and it was coming toward them.
Chapter Twenty-One
THEY FANNED OUT IN the mouth of the passageway. Django’s ancient Chinese sword still glimmered with the effects of Sunblade. Hage hefted his tetsubo. Cat’s massive muscles coiled like springs, tail thrashing. Chen Xiu and Naoko assumed ready stances. Chen Xiu spotted something among some nearby webs and rubble, scampered and rolled over, and dragged a pair of rusty butterfly knives out of the mess. He returned with grim elation on his face. Django had seen many times what his father could do with a pair of butterfly knives, the broad-bladed, single-edged short swords favored by many a kung-fu master.
“Some honeymoon, eh, xiao hua?” Chen Xiu said.
“The best ever,” Naoko said with a smile, appearing relaxed, but Django knew she could turn either hand into a lethal weapon in a split second. She had told him once that his Japanese grandfather, her teacher, now deceased, could stab his fingertips an inch deep into the trunk of a living tree. It had taken him a lifetime of study and practice, something she was working toward.
A spider the size of a dump truck heaved its bulbous bulk out of the blackness.
But it wasn’t just a spider. Unlike other spiders, which combined head and thorax into a single body segment, this beast had a thorax and a head. Its face was a nightmarish, eight-eyed oni, with horns and stringy black
hair and gnashing, scimitar-like tusks. Its awful eyes gleamed like crimson globes lit from within. Below that hideous face, a pair of taloned, human-like arms dangled in place of pedipalps. Its gigantic, bulbous abdomen, fifteen feet in diameter, was striped orange and black like a tiger and covered in coarse hair. Trailing from its spinnerets were endless cables of silver thread. Each of its legs was tipped in a pair of shiny, black claws long enough to punch through a human body.
Django could feel its incredulous outrage and hatred boiling in waves from its eyes and smell its potent stench, like a thousand years of death and putrefaction, like the dust of an ancient tomb.
“This one is old,” Cat said.
“And well fed,” Hage said.
Without any further plan, they charged the monster en masse.
It reared up and, with blinding speed, slashed with its front legs. One of them took Cat in the ribs with such force that it sent him tumbling back against the far wall, where he lay still. The other leg Chen Xiu ducked and counter-struck with a butterfly knife, striking sparks against the carapace.
Another leg slashed at Naoko, but she shifted to let it narrowly whoosh past her.
Hage batted another aside with his massive club. A heavy crack echoed in the cavern, like someone cracking crab legs, if those crab legs were the diameter of a telephone pole. But the carapace looked to be unscathed.
But that carapace would not withstand a blow from Django’s sword. He raised his sword high, shouting a challenge as if he were going to strike high. When one of the legs slashed toward him, he dive-rolled and came up under its hideous body.
Then a deluge of webbing splatted him across the face and chest, driving him down and gluing him to the floor directly beneath the tsuchigumo’s head, those talon-tipped, human-like arms, and those sword-like tusks. The webbing covered his face and filled his mouth. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe.
But the webs couldn’t blind his Third Eye.
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 19
