Demon Beast (Path of the Thunderbird Book 3)

by eden Hudson

  “A corpse puppet should have returned to a death state as soon as the Ro animating it was consumed,” Cold Sun said, his low rumble commanding their attention.

  The hulking Uktena was on the opposite side of the tower room, circling the mummified woman, studying her from every angle. The woman stood on the spot, her eyes lit with magenta light. Her necromancer was dead, and yet, as Cold Sun said, she moved and acted as if she were alive.

  “What do we do about her?” Koida asked.

  “You won’t do anything,” Lysander said, his mocking attitude taking on a sharp edge. He strode to the mummified woman’s side and shoved Cold Sun away from her. “You three stay here and set up a proper camp while I take Kwai Un to the oasis’s sacred funereal site and put her to rest properly.”

  A contrary part of Koida wanted to argue, but something in the shadows of Lysander’s face stopped her. Even as frustrating and infuriating as he could be, even if he had admitted to killing this woman, she had once been his wife. No matter what he said, the pain in his eyes each time they’d seen her in the streets and the softness in his voice when he had said he regretted her death couldn’t have been faked.

  “Do you...” Koida swallowed. “Do you want help?”

  His icy blue eyes cut to her as if he expected an attack, but after a moment, they eased a fraction.

  “No. Start looking for a scroll marked with the Deep Root characters for Crimes of Legend from the Primitive North. It’s the only known record from that time, so unless it’s been moved, it should be stored here in the Paramount’s office. The rest will be in the stacks. I’ll help find them when I return.”

  Koida nodded.

  Very gently, Lysander picked up the woman’s leathery hand. “If you’re ready to go, Kwai Un?”

  The mummified woman gave a halting nod. Lysander lifted her into his arms almost tenderly and carried her to the public stair leading down the center of the tower.

  Just before they disappeared below the level of the floor, Koida saw the dead woman rest her desiccated head against Lysander’s chest, as if she were too exhausted to hold it up any longer.

  A sharp pang of unidentifiable melancholy pierced Koida’s heartcenter. She retreated from the feeling as if stung. With her weak stomach, she should be feeling nothing but queasy revulsion at the sight. If that was Lysander influencing her emotions again...

  “We may find some clue as to the methods the necromancer used in his notes,” Cold Sun said, giving her a welcome distraction. The Uktena warrior knelt and began shuffling through the parchments strewn among the detritus. “It could illuminate a great many as of yet unanswered questions about the natures of the body and the soul.”

  Koida grimaced as Cold Sun plucked a paper wet with a faintly green liquid from the floor and fanned it softly through the air. A drip slid off the corner and splattered to the floor, triggering the nausea she knew had been hiding somewhere.

  “I don’t think that’s something I want to know, Cold Sun,” she said, searching for any place in the room she could look without staring at piles of decaying body parts, freshly dead Librarians, or puddles of putrid gore. Even the ceiling had flecks of dried juices in various hues on it. “Not if it involves killing an oasis full of men, women, and children and using them to do your bidding while they rot.”

  “If your squeamishness is the true obstacle, retreat into your Stone Soul,” Cold Sun said. “I will gather the notes while you search the shelves for the scroll Lysander mentioned. Both are likely to add valuable knowledge we did not have before, and both could give us clues as to the restoration ritual your half-brother used to return to life after Lysander killed him.”

  Koida nodded, strengthening her resolve. She closed her eyes and retreated into her Stone Soul, but without the immediate demand to fight for survival, her senses refused to be shoved aside. The strongest Stone Soul in the world wouldn’t allow her to ignore the appalling sights and smells that filled the tower.

  This was the only way to find answers, she reminded herself. She couldn’t give in to something as trivial as a weak stomach, not when Raijin was counting on her.

  She dug the two-headed glass moon serpent from its puzzle box in her jacket. The momentary sting of its fangs was quickly swallowed up by relieving numbness as the venom spread. The revulsion retreated, along with the exhaustion and numerous aches and pains that remained from the battle outside the library.

  With a newly dispassionate eye, Koida glanced around the room, viewing the litter of body parts, parchment, scrolls, books, and the enormous catalogue. Everywhere but the balcony, the walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. There were thousands of texts in this room alone. Unless they stumbled upon the scroll on accident, this was not going to be a quick search.

  Belatedly, she realized that something was missing.

  “Where’s Hush?”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  MORTAL LANDS

  Hush stalked through the oasis to a low, terraced pyramid at the edge of the city. She climbed the wall and pulled herself up into a small round window just large enough to sit in. From her perch, the central room seemed much larger than the pyramid itself, cut into the rock beneath the ever-shifting desert sands. High on each of the four walls was another window like hers, shedding dim light on the vast chamber below. Small desert owls had nested in the window to her left.

  Decorating one wall was a bubbling fountain of clear water. Another wall was lined with a lush hanging garden of flowering plants and fruit trees that would not normally survive in the desert. Along a third, various brightly colored devices spun and danced and chimed in an unfelt breeze. The final was recessed too far beneath Hush’s perch to see, but the flickering blue light led her to believe an onlooker from the opposite side of the chamber would find a series of century lamps burning below.

  Footsteps echoed through the cavernous room. Lysander descended a stone ramp to the center of the floor and gently laid his wife’s body on a high altar. The woman’s leathery hand gripped his for a moment. Lysander pressed his forehead to hers, whispering something Hush couldn’t hear, then placed her hand on her skeletal stomach.

  He went to the fountain and returned with a sprinkling of water to wet her lips, then to the wall of plants to gather a bundle of firewood. These he stacked carefully around his wife’s body. With that done, he disappeared below Hush, retrieving a blue-flamed century lamp. Last, he went to the wall of whirling air mechanisms and came back with an ornate bellows.

  Hush leaned against the rounded window frame and watched as Lysander lit his wife’s pyre. The woman’s withered body took the flame like dry tinder. Minutes passed as the fire grew in intensity, helped along by the bellows. When it reached her heartcenter, the sparkling magenta Ro broke free.

  The brilliant cloud stopped almost tentatively in front of Lysander.

  Hush blocked her pathways, expecting him to unleash the ravenous void in his chest, but he didn’t. After a time, the magenta Ro skimmed past his cheek, then disappeared.

  Lysander turned and looked up at Hush.

  “The air is cooler down here, without the smoke,” he called.

  Smiling beneath her facemask, Hush scaled down the wall and dropped to the floor beside him.

  On the altar, the pyre blazed, the flames a shade lighter than Lysander’s irises.

  Hush didn’t ask him what had happened. Lysander knew her sins, and he had never asked her to explain herself. Like her lost fellow practitioners in the Monastery of Hidden Whispers, he understood that there were some pains better left unspoken.

  “I was so young twenty years ago, Hush.” A trace of wonder tempered the words, an affection for an old wound that had never quite healed. “For a few years, with her, I was young.”

  Hush took his hand, not attempting to communicate with anything but her presence. Too often in these circumstances people rushed to speak, hoping they could find the right combination of words and thoughts to drive away the pain, when in truth
all that was needed was a steady presence to remind the injured party that they weren’t alone.

  As the scorching desert sun made its circuit across the sky outside the pyramid, Hush stood with Lysander, watching the fire make smoldering ashes where once there had been a woman.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  MORTAL LANDS

  Attacking the Water Lily grandmaster was like attacking an enormous spider. Wherever Raijin struck, an arm was already there to block him. He threw Ro-less punches and chops, moving faster than he’d ever moved before, but Youn Wha deflected every technique.

  Raijin tried a handful of Ro-less kicks against the grandmaster, but quickly abandoned them. Chunks of ice skittered around the floor, bumped by their constantly moving feet. The guai-ray couldn’t keep track of where they were while focusing on the battle and listening to that poisonous buzz screaming inside his head.

  Youn Wha made no effort to strike back, merely defending herself. An undercurrent of amusement radiating from her raised the guai-ray’s invisible hackles. She was toying with him.

  A memory of his duel with the false master flashed through Raijin’s mind as he circled and struck. His intention then had been to expose Lao for the fraud he was by showing that the Ro-leech’s understanding of the warrior arts was only superficial, just strong enough to exploit a mostly untrained victim. Raijin had simply slipped out of the way of Lao’s attacks and used his own momentum against him, toying with the false master.

  Fighting Youn Wha, Raijin felt as if he were reliving his duel with Lao from the leech’s shoes. She let every bone-shattering fist and rigid hand fall within a breath of their target before deflecting them, but she didn’t use Raijin’s momentum to throw him off balance like a defensive artist should. She just let him attack again, all the while hardly containing her laughter.

  He was missing something obvious.

  While the human part of his mind raced for an answer, the guai-ray attacked relentlessly, darting in from every angle and roaring for blood. It wanted torn flesh, a throat in its teeth, battle-won Ro swelling its heartcenter. Every time the spider-armed grandmaster knocked one of his attacks aside, its determination to rip her limbs off intensified. Fury built like electricity in a storm bank of thunderheads, but with no Ro to execute the lightning bolt, the anger had nowhere to go.

  Little by little, pain crept into the edges of Raijin’s awareness. It felt like liquid fire seeping through his skin and into his muscles. The guai-ray urged him on, relentless, but his strikes grew clumsy, his senses clouded by the growing agony. His veins felt like branding irons burning down into his bones. With every breath, his lungs tried to melt together and close for good.

  Mortal Aura, Lysander’s voice echoed in his mind.

  That screaming poison buzzing through the guai-ray senses. Each time he got close, it grasped at his skin, clawed at his nose and mouth. Youn Wha wasn’t even trying to counterattack because she knew all she had to do was wait while Raijin killed himself on her toxic halo.

  The guai-ray surged forward. It didn’t care if Raijin died, as long as it eventually broke through her defenses and tore into her hide. Blood meant victory and glory, proof of his own strength, and that was worth anything, even death.

  Fighting to restrain the demon, Raijin retreated, backing away from the grandmaster until his hip bumped the edge of a table. Sweat ran down his face and dripped off his chin. Or was it blood? In the Dead Waters Kingdom, he had seen a poisoned aura powerful enough to melt the skin from a body, but it had belonged to the Dark Dragon. Was Youn Wha’s aura that strong?

  “Growing tired, nephew?” The Water Lily grandmaster tittered with glee. “Let me draw you up a chair.”

  Youn Wha stepped toward him. Raijin slid back along the table, maintaining the distance between them.

  The guai-ray roared, enraged at being held back. Animal fury crashed through Raijin as the demon strained to break free. Blood. Battle. Death. The same thoughts whirled through it like an endless tornado of violence.

  The Water Lily grandmaster advanced on him. He wrestled the guai-ray back another step. For every step he retreated, she pressed forward, until they were prowling warily around the floor.

  “Oh, nephew, you look so feverish,” Youn Wha said in a saccharine familiar tone. “Come, let auntie fix you an elixir to cool your brow and settle your heart before it bursts your little heartcenter.”

  As they circled, Raijin’s head cleared a measure, and he realized he was breathing easier. The longer he stayed out of her reach, the less the poison burned. That was why she was so intent on getting near him once more. Her aura must be limited to close range.

  The guai-ray’s single-minded bloodlust had gotten Raijin out of Misuru’s prison, but to listen to it now would kill him. It was as the Grandfather Spirit had said—one couldn’t be all man or all demon without taking on the weaknesses of his choice. Instinct and unchecked violence were powerful weapons when facing another mindless beast, but against Youn Wha they were only swords to fall on. If he was going to defeat her, he would have to be more man than demon beast.

  Raijin slowed his steps and raised his head and shoulders, straightening his spine. He brought his hands up to Inviting Attack. His feet slid over the wet floorboards, searching.

  The guai-ray sensed a change in Youn Wha at his new posture. A bemused scrutiny.

  To even an untrained eye, Inviting Attack appeared entirely defensive. There was no inherent aggression to the Darkening Skies fighting stance. But it was promissory in nature. It promised that peace would be repaid with peace and that violence would be repaid with violence.

  Youn Wha would be reading all of this in his bearing. Knowing that his body was clearing itself of her poison for every second her aura remained out of contact with him. Seeing in his stance the promise that he wouldn’t attack unless she attacked first.

  Raijin’s heel bumped against one of the larger chunks of ice, about the width of his chest. He stopped circling.

  The grandmaster stopped, too. No wariness touched the guai-ray senses, only a slight curiosity, like a predator who had cornered her prey and now waited to see whether it would turn on her and fight for its life or die of terror.

  The guai-ray bristled. It couldn’t fathom being seen as prey. That was exactly what Raijin had hoped for, however. Tension coiled in the pit of his stomach like an adder waiting to strike, but he kept his stance relaxed and passive.

  Finally, Youn Wha lunged, toxic Ro sprouting like the hand-long honeylocust thorns from her fingertips.

  Raijin held his ground. Poison seared his skin as the Water Lily grandmaster’s aura flowed over him. Her hand darted out so quickly that Raijin never would have been able to avoid the strike without the guai-ray senses. He twisted away, her deadly thorns tearing into the shoulder of his jacket.

  Using the short distance he’d put between them, Raijin kicked the chunk of ice into the air and slammed his fist through it. A Ro-less version of Driving Sleet. The ice splintered with the impact, and the slivers shot toward Youn Wha’s face and chest.

  The grandmaster’s toxic aura burst outward, knocking the ice from the air. But the distraction gave Raijin time to land a finger-strike in the hollow of her throat.

  She spun after him, thorns slicing through the air, but Raijin evaded and struck below the ball of her shoulder.

  Youn Wha cackled and stopped in her tracks. Between heartbeats, her thorns and aura disappeared, sucked back into her heartcenter so quickly that they pulled at the air around her.

  The sudden breeze chilled Raijin’s sweat-soaked skin, and the guai-ray screamed a warning. Before he could complete the final two blows of the Path of Endless Day’s Blistering Touch of Sun finger-strike set, the grandmaster thrust her fists to her sides, silken sleeves snapping against her legs, then shot her hand out like a striking adder.

  A lance of Ro speared Raijin through the heartcenter, pain shooting off in every direction like a bursting star. His world shrank to the pain in his
chest. Far outside, he felt his knees hit the wooden floor and heard his own ragged screaming, but he couldn’t drag his attention from the brutal intruder in his heartcenter.

  Roots grew from the lance, twisting into the meat and bone. The greedy black tendrils drank up the pale jade mist Raijin had brought back from the Land of Immortals. Drank it dry and kept drinking.

  Raijin heard Koida scream in pain.

  The Water Lily grandmaster laughed as she stole his Ro.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  MORTAL LANDS

  Night fell over the desert, replacing the scorching sunlight with a brilliant moon and chill wind that howled across the balcony door and sighed through the stacks. Now and again, the faint scent of smoke drifted in with it.

  Using a handful of the glowing prairie hen buttons she had collected at the edges of the grassland, Koida continued to search the shelves that lined the destroyed office for the scroll Lysander had named. So far she had gone over less than a quarter of the collected texts without any luck. Without the glass moon serpent, she thought it likely she would have lost her patience hours ago. Hopefully when Lysander returned, he would be able to lead them straight to it.

  Nearby, Cold Sun had fashioned a paper lantern from his prairie hen buttons and was poring over the insane scribbles of the dead necromancer, sorting them into a series of piles around his folded legs.

  It wasn’t until she heard his stomach give a deep rumble that Koida realized they hadn’t eaten in nearly two days, and everyone but her would be feeling gnawing hunger pains. She pressed her finger to the line she’d been reading and looked up from the catalogue.

  “Are you hungry, Cold Sun? We could probably find food somewhere in this oasis. These people were alive at some point, and even if that was long ago, there must be at least some grain that hasn’t molded yet.”