by Nick Harrow
I pulled Ayo down to me almost before she could shed her own clothing, and parked her ass on my chest, her knees even with my shoulders, her feet flat on the forest floor on either side of my head. My tongue probed the velvet opening of her sex, and she melted against my mouth and tangled her fingers in my hair. She tasted like the sea, wild and untamed.
It went on for what felt like hours, a carnal delirium that dragged us down into crashing waves of pleasure. We collapsed at last, spent, our bodies slick with sweat and sticky with the fluids we’d smeared over each other in our hunger for more. I don’t know how long I slept after that, but it wasn’t anywhere near long enough.
“Get up.” Yata woke me with a tap of its beak on my forehead. “Sun’s been up almost an hour.”
That was strange. Most days I woke before the first rays of daylight brushed against my shaman’s senses. Even after I shook loose from sleep’s embrace, though, I felt sluggish and had a hard time dragging myself out from the cozy space between the still-sleeping Ayo and Aja. There was a warm weight at the heart of my being that made it hard to rouse myself.
What the fuck was happening here?
“Thanks for the wake-up. Can you keep an eye on these two for a minute?” The bird nodded and croaked out a caw, and I headed away from our small camp to answer nature’s call.
With my business completed, I hiked a bit deeper into the forest and examined myself with my spirit sight. My body was in perfect shape, though all the physical activity of the last couple of days had left me on the verge of dehydration.
My core, though, looked strange.
Bright blue-green swirls flowed over my earthbound core’s surface in brilliant contrast to its normal deep brown. Crimson sparks of power danced along the borders between the two colors, radiating a soothing warmth that made me want to curl up into a ball and sleep for the next week.
“Holy shit,” I gasped. “My core’s advancing.”
Under Mielyssi’s training, I’d advanced my core from foundation level to earthbound, expanding its capacity to five nodes and bonding me to the crimson bear. Though it hadn’t seemed like it at the time, the single advancement had taken decades of training under the tutelage of the most powerful spirit I’d ever encountered. I hadn’t expected to advance again for years, maybe longer.
And, yet, here I was with my core covered in swirls of glowing aquamarine light.
“Fuck.” I had no idea what to do.
“Just breathe,” Yata croaked from a tree limb above me. “You’re not going to die.”
“How do you know?” My core didn’t hurt, exactly. It felt like someone had filled it with a few dozen pounds of cold lead. The heat from the sparks between the brown and blue flowed through me in soothing pulses that left me weak and wobbly. The combination made me feel woozy and disoriented, almost drunk.
“I don’t know how I know anything about this.” Yata sounded irritated and confused. It flapped down out of the tree and landed on the ground in front of me. “There’s a lot of stuff in my head that I didn’t put there. Must be a perk of our bond.”
“That’s comforting.” It was not. Trusting a surly three-legged raven who didn’t know where its information came from seemed like a fantastic way to get screwed over by the universe.
A cool breeze blew across my brain, and I clamped a hand over my head to make sure the advancement hadn’t blown the top of my skull off. My stomach lurched and the world tilted on its axis around me. My eyeballs rolled in their sockets, completely out of my control.
And, then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the advancement ended. My core was no longer earthbound, but seabound.
The shell around my spirt was now the color of fresh seawater in my spirit sight, an almost luminous blue-green dotted with ten nodes. Five of those glowed with an intense red light I recognized as rin energy, while the other five were a ghostly white. There was also a new bruised-looking spot on the opposite side of my familiar bond with Yata. It looked like I could form a new bond if I wanted, though that was the furthest thing from my mind. Being tied to the raven was more commitment than I really wanted.
“Love you, too,” the bird cawed. “You’ve also got space for a new technique in there. Better find a teacher.”
“That would be nice, but I’m the last shaman.” I stretched and marveled at how easy the advancement had been. I’d worried it would be more difficult without the crimson bear by my side, but maybe I was a natural. “Not sure where I’ll find someone to teach me shaman shit now.”
At least not until after I’d saved the world and traipsed back up to the summit of Mount Shiki.
The new core filled me with a sense of strength and power beyond anything I’d ever experienced. I stood and hefted my club, marveling at how light the heavy spiked weapon felt in my grip. I swung it with one hand, and it whistled through the air like an arrow fired from a crossbow. It took hardly any effort to lift, and scarcely more than that to swing.
“Nice swing,” Yata cawed and preened itself. “Be careful, though. You don’t know your own strength.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I hoisted the club over my head and started back toward camp. Yata flew to the top of a tree ahead of me. “I see the river up ahead. Little less than half a day’s march for you and your trollops.”
“Don’t let them hear you say that. They’ll cook you for dinner.”
“Those slowpokes can’t catch me.” The raven tossed its head and took off again.
“Hey there, stranger.” Ayo was tending to some skewers of meat when I returned to camp. “We thought you might have gotten tired of us and skipped out.”
“And break my promise?” I scoffed at the idea. “Never.”
“You look different.” Aja raised an eyebrow, then scrutinized me with greater intensity. “Oh, wow. You’re seabound now.”
“Yep, just advanced.” I struck a pose and flexed my newly improved muscles. I wasn’t bigger, exactly, but my muscles were more defined and symmetrical. I’d always thought heroes in paintings looked so buff because they took care of themselves, but now I knew they cheated. Advancing your core made you stronger and hotter.
“That was fast.” Ayo tapped her chin with her index finger as she considered something. “I bet it’s all the purification we’ve been doing. The tainted senjin is hard on your core, and it takes a lot of effort to get it cleaned up.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” I’d been too busy trying to stay alive to notice the details. It was also hard to focus on that sort of thing because saving my skin involved a pair of gorgeous spirits and lots and lots of frenzied fucking. “Now that you’ve brought it up, we should definitely keep purifying senjin.”
“How about now?” Aja licked her lips and stretched her arms over her head. “I could use a top-off.”
“Later.” The spirits still had full cores. The herbs I’d given them helped slow their leaks, which would help us make better time. The sexy times that kept them alive did nothing for their mistress, and I’d promised to try to save her life. We needed to get moving to do that. “But when we get to our next stop, I will definitely take you up on that.”
“Where are we headed?” Aja plucked a skewer of seared meat off the fire and dropped it onto a flat rock we’d used as a serving tray the night before.
“There’s a river village not far from here. Map had it marked as Ulishi. We can get a pilot to take us downstream from there.” My stomach growled at a whiff of breakfast. “With any luck, we’ll be able to ride the river all the way down to the Lake of Moonsilver Mist.”
“Sounds good.” Aja took a mostly raw hunk of meat from the skewer. She blew across the steaming slice for a few seconds, then gobbled it down. Blood dribbled down her chin, and she wiped it away with the back of one hand. “How long will that take?”
“If everything goes right, shouldn’t be more than two days.” I tried not to think too hard about how many more things could go wrong in two days’ time.
“Finger
s crossed,” Ayo said.
“And toes,” I added.
After breakfast, we covered the fire with dirt, gathered up our belongings, and headed out.
The terrain, rolling hills on a gently descending slope, would have made for a very pleasant hike if the air hadn’t been soggy with gloomy, reeking mist. The stuff was relentless and left our skins slick with a layer of greasy moisture. I doubted I’d ever be dry again.
Yata did a great job as a scout, though, which kept us from getting turned around in the dense fog. The three-legged raven flew high above us, coming down only to let us know when we needed to change direction or give us an update on how far we were from our destination. I wasn’t sure how it could see through the fog, but it hadn’t failed us yet.
We decided to skip lunch to get to the river town faster and finally reached our destination a couple of hours after noon.
The river was a hundred feet wide, its surface black and turbulent. White caps dotted the water where it crashed over submerged boulders or tumbled around fallen trees. Sampans plied the treacherous waterway, their sleek hulls cutting through the water under the expert guidance of their pilots. The boats ranged in size from barely large enough to hold a single crewman to long vessels capable of carrying significant amounts of cargo. The sampans arrived at or left the village in a confusing swirl, and their pilots cried out with greetings and curses as they glided past one another or nearly collided.
Relief welled up inside me in a dizzying rush. Seeing the village, hell, seeing other people, after the disaster at the Deepways left me nearly breathless. Since I’d returned from Mount Shiki, the only other humans I’d encountered had been very intent on killing me. The simple sight of other humans going about their mundane, ordinary lives filled me with a powerful, almost painful, sense of gratitude. While there were still pockets of normalcy in this world, it wasn’t yet doomed. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let the moment sink into my bones.
“Be careful here,” Yata croaked as it landed on my shoulder. “The Deepways conductors always said the river pilots were outlaws and cutthroats.”
“Outlaws, for sure.” The riverboat pilots were part of an unofficial, but still powerful, criminal organization that was said to stretch across the continent. It was well known that they’d do just about anything for the right price, and only paid lip service to the rulers of the Sevenfold Empire. At least, those were the stories I’d heard a hundred years ago. It was time to find out just how badly my information had aged. “And outlaws are just what we need. Come on.”
We headed downhill to the river, and more of the village emerged from the mist. Its buildings rose from the river on thick stilts. Swaying rope bridges and rickety wooden planks connected the aerial structures, and their inhabitants moved between them with practiced ease.
More stilts, thick as old tree trunks, jutted from the river’s center. The buildings atop these were taller and wider than their cousins nearer the banks, and ladders hung from their sides to just above the water line. Passengers from brightly colored sampans clambered up the stilts like monkeys rushing up the sides of trees, while pilots moored their boats on stout docks that emerged from the dark waters.
Despite its seemingly precarious position on the mighty river, the village had clearly been around for a while. Its buildings were weathered and stained by the hands of time, and obvious signs of wear and tear marked every surface. It looked seedy and rundown, and I couldn’t have been happier.
“Give me your jewelry,” I said before we reached the river’s edge.
“Good idea.” Aja stripped the gold and jewels from her body and handed them over. “I wouldn’t want these river scum to kill us and dump our bodies in the river for a few bracelets.”
“Nobody’s getting murdered.” I was confident I could protect my group from an outlaw or two if it came to that, though I hoped there wouldn’t be any violence. “My father always said these pilots were smugglers, mostly. That works in our favor.”
“How?” Ayo handed me her jewelry and I added it to Aja’s in my satchel.
“We need to get smuggled.” I grinned. “Look, the Jade Seekers that captured you were in my village to kill me. These pilots don’t want any Imperial attention, and they’re good at getting illicit cargo from one place to another.”
“Now that you put it that way, I see your point.” Aja bumped my shoulder with her fist. “I guess there’s more in that hot body than just a healthy sexual appetite.”
“Thanks.” I chuckled and hoisted my satchel back over my shoulder.
We headed down the hill to the river’s edge, with no idea just how much trouble we were walking into.
Chapter Eleven
“OUTTA THE WAY, GRUB!” a riverboat pilot, dressed in sleek black shorts and a striped, red-and-yellow short-sleeved shirt, barked as he hustled past me and made his way down the dock. The captain scampered up a long, rickety ladder to the village overhead. His black ponytail danced along his spine with every rung, and a few seconds later he’d vanished onto the balcony twenty feet overhead.
“Rude,” Yata croaked. It flapped its wings and flew up to the balcony railing.
“That’s very high.” Aja glared at the ladder as if willing it to shrink down to a more manageable height. “If you fall, it’ll break your leg. Maybe your neck.”
“It’s not that high.” I looked up at the top of the ladder, then back to Aja. “Are you scared of heights?”
“I’m not scared of anything,” Aja growled. She crossed her arms over her chest. “But this seems unnecessarily risky. If someone falls, we’ll be delayed.”
A gaggle of riverboat passengers flooded past us and shot up the ladder one after another. They were all children, and if any of them had seen more than twelve summers, I’d have been surprised.
“I’m a shaman. If someone falls, I’ll fix them up and we’ll be back on the road in no time.” I held out one hand to the spirit. “Come on. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to climb.”
“No.” Aja didn’t move an inch. “There has to be another way.”
“This is the fastest way to the lake. We just need to hire a pilot, then we can climb back down and—”
“You go. I’ll stay here.”
The idea of leaving Aja down here didn’t sit well with me. If anything happened to her, I’d lose my mind.
“Out of my way.” Ayo shot past me and scrambled up the ladder. She looked down from the top and shouted, “It’s easy!”
Aja glared at me, then tackled the ladder with more violence than agility. She kept her eyes locked on the wooden stilt in front of her face and wrapped her arms around it every time she went up a rung.
“Blood God,” a man cursed as he hopped out of his boat with a bundle of deer hides over his shoulder. “Is she trying to climb that ladder or hump it?”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” I snapped.
The pilot glanced at me with anger in his eyes. Too bad for him I was a solid foot taller and thirty pounds heavier than he was. He looked away, wisely deciding that the better part of valor was not getting his shit kicked in by a mostly naked shaman.
“Geez, Kyr,” Aja called down from the balcony. Her face was red and her eyes wild. “Don’t be such a baby. There’s no reason to be afraid of a stupid ladder.”
I gawked at the spirit, considered a comeback, and let it go. We’re all afraid of something; there wasn’t any point in riding Aja about her fears. If razzing me made her feel better, that was a victory I could let her have.
Climbing the ladder with my war club was tricky, but I managed it without breaking my neck. Ayo took the weapon from me when I reached the balcony, and Aja slapped my shoulder with a grin.
“Let’s find that pilot,” she smirked and sauntered off with her hips swinging.
“She gets like this,” Ayo whispered to me. “She’s not afraid of anything, really, but sometimes she gets nervous.”
“And then she gets cocky when she gets past the fear.
I get it.” I’d felt much the same after I’d sent the Jade Seekers to one of the Frozen Hells. There was something about ducking death’s claws that made a person feel pretty awesome about their skills.
The elevated parts of the village were even more chaotic than the river’s traffic. People passed one another on the narrow rope bridges, cursing as the unstable walkways swayed from side to side and threatened to dump them into the water far below. The planks were only used by the brightly dressed pilots, who ran along them with suicidal speed without even looking down.
“Now what?” Aja asked. Her wild-eyed confidence was fading to caution, and she was very careful to keep her eyes off the river.
“Excuse me,” I called out to a riverboat captain as she reached the balcony.
“Fuck off, lander,” she growled and stormed past me in an obvious hurry to be somewhere else.
“You should kill one of these people,” Yata suggested. “Maybe that would convince the rest of them to be more polite.”
“This way.” I chased after the rude woman. If pilots were anything like the merchants I’d known growing up, the first thing she’d want to do when she made landfall would be to get a drink. And wherever she was drinking, there’d be plenty of other pilots doing the same.
A few minutes later we pushed through the swinging doors of an enormous bar over the center of the river. It was the noisiest, most crowded building I’d ever been in. I couldn’t tell if I was excited by the buzz of energy in the air or nauseated by the overwhelming smell of cheap alcohol and cheaper cigarettes. The heavy mist that covered the world couldn’t compete with the dense wall of steel-gray smoke that filled the bar, and I couldn’t help but cough as we crossed the threshold.
“Get out of the goddamned way, lander,” a man growled as he bulled through. “I need a beer and a slice of pussy.”
Ah, yes. This was definitely the place.
My eyes adjusted to the dimly lit interior and showed me a clientele predominantly dressed in light, garish clothes. The waitresses that plied the pilots with booze, cigarettes, and pipes loaded with sticky black balls wore skirts so short the bottom halves of their swaying ass cheeks jutted proudly from below their hems. Most of the serving girls wore garish necklaces and jangling bracelets, and not another stitch of clothing.
