by Nick Harrow
“I’m Aja.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “That’s Ayo. How do you feel, Shaman Kyr?”
“Just Kyr,” I said. Somehow the two of them had used sex to split the corrupted senjin into purified rin, which now filled my core’s five nodes, and shio that glowed inside them. “I feel great. How about you?”
“Alive.” She showed me her predator’s grin. “We were in that bottle for far too long.”
“You can say that again,” Ayo chimed in from my left side. She, too, raised up on one elbow and stared at me with glowing crystal eyes. “It’s been a long time since we’ve felt better. Our cores are filled again, and we have bodies. Your core looks good, too. We cleaned you right up.”
“You’ll have to show me how you did that.” I knew a lot of shaman tricks, but fucking corrupted sacred energy out of someone wasn’t on the list of things the crimson bear had taught me.
“We will.” Aja bit down on my earlobe. “After.”
“After?”
“After we do that again.” Ayo shoved Aja’s leg off me and straddled my hips.
“Now?”
“Unless you want us to die.” Aja raked her nails down my chest just shy of drawing blood.
“We definitely can’t have that.” I squeezed the taut muscles of her ass in both hands. “At least not until you teach me that trick.”
Chapter Six
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING with Ayo and Aja sleeping on either side of me, heads on my chest, their hair spilling down my torso in a vivid clash of blue and scarlet. They breathed slowly, evenly, and perfectly in sync with one another. I was surprised to find my breath in time with theirs, as well. Our little cuddle puddle felt less like three distinct bodies than a single creature with six lungs and three hearts.
Which, by the way, all beat in perfect rhythm, too.
That was weird.
It also raised my hackles and made me wonder just how much crazy I’d stuck my dick in. Before I made a move to wake the lovely, and possibly insane, creatures sprawled on and around me, I needed to know more about them. My spirit sight roamed over their naked bodies and showed me some very interesting details about them, starting with the fact that they weren’t even remotely human.
Ayo was a river spirit with two nodes in her core, both now filled with shio. The vibrant blue connection in the center of her core identified her as a familiar bound to a feminine practitioner of the sacred arts. Aja was a hunting spirit and also had two nodes and a familiar’s binding within her core. It was hard to be certain, but it appeared they were both bound to the same practitioner, which explained how close they seemed to be. Both spirits had a technique, but I couldn’t get a read on what those techniques did.
The pair reminded me of Mielyssi in many ways, though they weren’t nearly as powerful. Unlike humans and other higher-order creatures, spirit cores weren’t categorized by level or type. A spirit’s power was measured solely by the number of nodes they contained, and the only thing that limited that power was the age and experience of the spirit. Some of the most ancient spirits were said to be more powerful than even the Emperor, and some priests claimed he was nearly a god himself.
While knowing what kinds of creatures I’d been in bed with the night before was enlightening, it didn’t tell me all that much because they were also familiars. A mist spirit could be as benign as a warm spoonful of honey, but if she served a killer, then her master’s demeanor could bleed into her personality. More worrisome, one of the spirits was a hunter.
She could easily have been sent out here to hunt me.
“You think very loudly,” Aja grumbled. She shifted her position, and the soft weight of her breast settled against my side. “Please stop.”
“They can’t do that.” Ayo sat up, stretched, and yawned. Her lean frame glowed with the inner vitality of her crystal-clear core. She shook her hair out in the most distracting way possible, breasts swaying in the first rays of dawn, which found their way through the tent’s open flap. “It’s what makes mortals so adorable.”
“Who sent you?” The question sounded a lot ruder out loud than it had in my head.
Aja frowned at me. She dragged her nails through the tangles in her red hair as she considered an answer, opened her mouth as if about to speak, then returned to grooming herself.
“It’s complicated.” Ayo adjusted her legs and sat cross-legged next to me. She smiled when my gaze drifted to the velvet shadow between her thighs, and a faint blue blush crept into her cheeks. “We’re bound servitors.”
“But our mistress can no longer communicate with us.” Aja rested her hand on the flat of my stomach and walked her fingers along the lines of my muscles. “We’ve been away from her so long her thoughts are less than whispers to us now.”
“Though we’ve not been gone as long as you.” Ayo corralled her white hair and tied it into a sloppy braid to get it out of her face. “Our mistress has been waiting a very long time to see you.”
“You aren’t making any sense.” I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands and let out a frustrated sigh. “If the crimson bear is right, I’ve been gone for decades. And yet the minute I show up in my old village a bunch of assholes try to kill me and the two of you ambush-heal me. Thanks, by the way.”
“You’re welcome.” Ayo bounced happily and clapped her hands together. “Surely you can see that this isn’t a mere coincidence. The stars were aligned to announce your coming to our mistress, and she sent us to find you.”
“We’d planned to go up the mountain after you.” Aja’s hand stopped moving and she shuddered. “That asshole Jiro Kos captured us before we could reach the second gate. The things he planned to do to us...”
“The Jade Seekers are the Emperor’s agents.” I furrowed my brow and tried to make sense of this. “Why would the ruler of all humanity send his most trusted servants out to murder a neophyte shaman and capture a couple of spirits?”
“The world has changed.” Ayo leaned into me, her head resting on my shoulder. She took my hand in hers and pressed my knuckles against the swell of her breast. “It’s sick. There isn’t much time left before this world dies.”
“The world can’t die.” I sat up and drew my knees up to my chin. I didn’t want to hear this bullshit. It was all too much to take in at once.
Aja adjusted her position and leaned on my right shoulder to mirror Ayo. The pair of them wrapped their arms around me and held on tight. I’d be a liar if I said their bodies pressed against mine didn’t make me just a little more willing to hear them out.
“You’re a shaman. You know this strange mist that clings to everything is foul.” Aja stroked my arm with one soft hand. “You can’t deny that there is something very wrong happening.”
I struggled to avoid the truth of what the spirits said. I concentrated on the way they felt against me, their breasts pressed into my arms, the heat of their breath against my skin. Any distraction was a welcome one if it kept me from contemplating this horrible new world I’d been cast out into.
Because I did feel something evil in the air. It squirmed against my spiritual senses and left a strange crawling sensation in my core. There was a darkness out in the world, coiled up like a centipede in the bottom of a water jug, just waiting for its chance to fuck my life right in the mouth.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” I wrapped an arm around each of the spirits. “If the Jade Seekers are villains now, that means the Emperor and the other leaders are, too.”
“The last true emperor has been in his tomb for more than a hundred years, Kyr.” Ayo kissed the side of my neck and cupped my chin in her hands.
The Emperor had been a man in his prime when I’d left for my vision quest. Given his access to life-extending senjin treatments, he couldn’t have died from natural causes.
“I’m no hero.” I was a kid. A strong kid with more experience and shaman powers than your average teen, sure. That didn’t make me the star of some legend about saving the world. “I can’t
march across the Sevenfold Empire and kick in the Emperor’s door to have a chat about how to fix this. I’m not a hero.”
“Then you better learn to be one.” Aja’s fingers tightened on my bicep, and the tips of her nails poked into my skin just shy of making me wince. “Our mistress will soon be dead. She read the auguries and sent us to find you because there is no one else who can do what needs to be done.”
“What is it she thinks I can do?” I couldn’t take sitting down for even a second longer. My stomach was empty, my bladder was full, and my thoughts were chasing themselves in impossible circles. I surged to my feet and stormed out of the tent. I didn’t want to hear any more of this shit. Everyone wanted to lay the burden at my feet, but I didn’t see anyone around to help carry the load.
The latrine’s sour stink was easy to pick out with my sharp senses, and I stomped over to its edge to take a piss in peace. I owed those spirits my life, there was no denying that, but the words that spilled out of them sounded like bad fairy tales. I didn’t know what had gotten into me when Mielyssi had told me the same thing. Everything had seemed so much more believable up on the mountain. Down here, it all seemed like bullshit.
The crimson bear had kept me as her personal fuck toy for decades. My village had changed so much it was almost unrecognizable, and there’d been no sign of the people who’d lived there. I could accept that, as much as it was starting to annoy me.
But the world couldn’t die.
That was just crazy talk.
“You can save it.” Aja planted her feet next to mine and crouched down to unleash a torrent of piss into the latrine’s trench. “They hunted down all the other shamans, trapped the witches with spells to rob them of their power. Even those tree-fucking druids got it in the neck when the Midnight Empire clawed its way to power. But they couldn’t kill you, Kyr. Because you were hidden from them.”
“I’m one shaman. I heal wounds. I treat diseases. The crimson bear gifted me with claws to fight and a hide tough enough to turn aside a sword. I’m strong, and tricky, and mean enough to kill when I have to be. But none of that makes me a hero.” I shook the last drops off my dick and stared out into the misty forest. This place had once been pure and pristine, as clean as winter’s first snow. Now the ground was mushy with rot and the air was fouled by the reeking, ever-present mist. “I cannot save the fucking world.”
Aja finished her business and stood to face me. She pressed her chest into mine and the hard nubs of her nipples pressed against my skin like accusing fingers.
“Someone has to.” Her eyes held my gaze with a fierce challenge.
We stood nose to nose for a string of moments that stretched out into what felt like hours of uncomfortable silence. Aja’s breath tickled my face and the heat of her naked body so close to mine made me want to throw her down on the ground and ravish her. Fiery sparks danced in her eyes, and her lips drew tight over her teeth. She reminded me of the crimson bear, who I’d never been sure meant to fight or fuck when she looked at me like that.
In the end, the two activities had been much the same.
“Let it go, Aja.” Ayo stood a few yards away, her arms crossed over her chest, one leg crossed in front of the other. Her skin seemed paler at the edges of her form, almost translucent. “We’ll have to search for another.”
The redhead dashed away from me and wrapped an arm around Ayo’s waist. The blue-skinned woman looked at the other spirit gratefully and visibly sagged into her for support.
My spirit sight swept over the woman, and a cold stone of dread settled in my heart.
Ayo’s core was empty.
Mortals could survive without rin, shio, or senjin in their core. They’d grow tired until rest replenished their sacred energy, of course, and they’d need more food and rest to sustain them while their nodes were empty. A few martial artists even learned to live with an empty core, claiming it freed them from worldly fears and allowed them to stare into the heart of the Void without flinching.
Most people thought those guys were full of shit.
The point was, humans didn’t need the sacred energies to survive.
Spirits did.
“Bring her to the tent.” I rushed past the spirits, thoughts racing. I didn’t want to run off into the-devils-only-knew-what trouble with these two, and I also didn’t want either of them to die so soon after they’d saved my life.
While the spirits shuffled toward the commander’s tent, I looked over the medicine rack. A few phials of shio would have been just what the doctor ordered. Unfortunately, the Jade Seekers hadn’t needed any feminine energy to power their armor or fighting styles, and so hadn’t brought any of it with them.
They had, however, brought along enough other medicines for me to come up with a temporary fix for Ayo’s problem. Sex could fill her nodes with shio, but she needed something more advanced to keep the scared energy from leaking away too quickly.
“Sit her down on the cot.” I scooped up a handful of packets, phials, and tins and knelt next to Jiro’s bed. The instant Ayo settled onto the cot’s edge, I cracked open the first waxed packet and handed it to Aja. “Help her take all this. Chew the leaves, then swallow them.”
Aja opened her mouth to say something, then clenched her jaw and did what I’d asked.
While Ayo munched on the hifir leaves, I pulled together what I needed. The medicine at my disposal had enough sacred energy in it to stabilize the spirit, even if it wasn’t exactly a perfect cure. I fed her two pills from a tin of gulvas essence, a few sips from a phial of mourndew, and eight stalks of sinmint weed.
“Thank you.” Ayo chewed on the final stalk and grimaced at the bitter taste. “This is horrible.”
“More horrible than your core bleeding out?” The mixture of herbs and medicines I’d fed her had returned a single node of unrefined shio to her system. Hopefully that would stabilize her until I could determine why her core had let so much of her life force drain away.
“No.” Ayo sighed. “I’m sorry you had to deal with this.”
Aja rubbed the blue spirit’s back and eyed me seriously. She wrestled with some inner struggle that showed itself clearly on her face, then spoke up.
“We’re on borrowed time. The bonds to our mistress are stressed and leaking.” She leaned against Ayo and kissed the top of her blue head. “She needs more energy than we can give her, and it drains us.”
Well, fuck.
If their bonds were sprung, the spirits would need regular infusions of energy to sustain them or they’d fade away to nothing. There was a way to repair the damage they’d suffered, though it was dangerous and likely to fail. The crimson bear had showed me many ways to treat wounded spirits during my time with her, and this one was the most dangerous. If I fucked up, they’d die, their mistress would end up with a crippled soul, and I’d be lucky if I only ended up a dead man.
The wisest choice was to part ways with these beautiful, damaged creatures and wish them well on their journey. Getting involved in whatever madness followed them would just get me killed.
I’d never been terribly wise.
“I can’t save the world.” I rested my hand on Aja’s shoulder. “But you saved my life. The least I can do is take you back to your mistress and help fix you up.”
“She’s in the Lake of Moonsilver Mist.” Ayo clutched my hand with the desperate strength of a frightened child. “You swear you’ll come all that way with us?”
If I remembered my geography, that lake was a bit of a hike. Overland, it would take us more than a week’s travel to the south before we reached it. But if we took the Deepways, we could cut that trek down to two days, three at the outside. The spirits would need more energy during the trip, but I thought I could handle that.
Three days of regular carnal activities with a pair of spirits who gave the crimson bear a run for her money in the supernaturally attractive category sounded pretty perfect. Maybe their mistress could even answer a few of my questions after I worked my magic
on her.
“I swear.” I gestured around the tent. “Grab whatever you think will be useful and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Chapter Seven
WE SPENT THE NEXT FEW hours tearing the Seekers’ camp apart looking for anything even remotely valuable. Our efforts netted us a few dozen dinged, dented, and rusted weapons, some leather scraps useful for repairing jade armor and not much else, the overcooked remnants of the pig I’d left on the spit the night before, and the herbs and other medicines I’d been able to salvage from Jiro’s tent.
“It’s not much,” Aja said with a frown. “You’d think a force of this size would have had more supplies.”
“It’s more than we had before we searched the place.” I tried to look on the bright side, but the truth was, I’d expected at least some trail rations amongst the tents. The fact that there’d been nothing of the sort meant either the Seekers had been receiving regular supply shipments from their home base or the hunting around here was so bountiful they didn’t feel the need for preserved foods. I hoped it was option two, because I was an excellent hunter.
If, on the other hand, there was a supply caravan headed here, they’d likely come up through the Deepways. It would be awkward as hell to run into more Jade Seekers on our way to the station.
“I can do something with those.” Ayo scooped a few scraps of leather off the pile and started knotting them together.
“I’m going to put together some medicine for the trip.” I headed back to Jiro’s tent. “Take whatever you need. We’ll leave as soon as I finish in here.”
“I’ll make sure no one sneaks up and kills us while you two are playing arts and crafts,” Aja called after me. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
Inside the commander’s tent, I mixed up a batch of herbal powder and fashioned it into a dozen tablets with the help of the pill press I’d found behind the medicine rack. I would have liked to have brought the equipment with me, but it seemed more than a little impractical to lug a hundred pounds of machinery along on our jaunt. If we needed more pills than we had on hand, we were fucked anyway. Even with my medicines and enough sex to leave us all blissed out of our gourds, the leaking bonds would kill the spirits in a matter of days.
