by eden Hudson
“You’ve let your anger get the better of you and lost hold of your Stone Soul,” Cold Sun said.
Hush helped Lysander back to his feet.
Koida kicked blindly at the hulking Uktena, trying to break free, but he simply manifested his thick plated armor and squeezed her tighter, until blackness swam at the edges of her vision.
“You don’t understand. Yoichi took Raijin’s Ro.” Angry tears choked Koida. She shook her head viciously, trying to banish them. “I was supposed to keep it safe for him, but somehow, Yoichi stole it. We could have taken it back to Raijin’s body and rescued him, Cold Sun, but Lysander—”
“Lysander Foreign-Born made a calculated decision in the heat of battle which saved your life,” Cold Sun said. “Hear me, Koida. While the possibility that my brother Raijin might have been restored was both a great hope to me and a wound always tearing open, I agree that Lysander’s decision was the most logical. Your brother and the false master Takama Lao are somehow able to return to life when they are killed. You are not.”
That single heartbeat of peaceful certainty that she was about to die by Yoichi’s poisoned fan rose to the surface of Koida’s mind, and the fight drained from her body.
Cold Sun sat her on the sand and took a place beside her, crossing his thick legs.
Hush looked from Lysander to the two of them, then gestured to the war ram nosing in the side of the dune.
“Hush is right, we need to keep moving,” the foreigner said, wiping a bit of blood from a split lip. “We don’t know how long it takes Lao and that white-haired dandy to rebuild themselves. Call back your nasty-tempered mount, Princess.”
“We came here for answers and got ashes,” Koida said, scrubbing her eyes with her flesh and blood hand. “We’re no closer to learning how to kill Yoichi for good.”
“This is not entirely true,” Cold Sun said. He went to his demon ram and unhooked an oiled leather satchel from the beast’s enormous iron horn. “I brought with me as many of the necromancer’s notes as I could save. If Lysander can recall any of the rituals in the texts, he can review the notes and tell us whether the methods are similar. From there, we may be able to deconstruct the Water Lilies’ restoration rites and learn how to prevent them from resurrecting themselves.”
None of that would return Raijin’s jade Ro to her. Koida knew of only one thing that would accomplish that. But Lysander and Hush would never agree to it. Even Cold Sun, presented with all the evidence in the world, would likely just say that she should be especially wary of her feelings and advise her against it.
Koida turned her focus inward to her assaulted heartcenter. It ached like the socket of a freshly knocked-out tooth, and her amethyst Ro wandered it as if bewildered by the sudden disappearance of its jade companion.
She took a long, shuddering breath. There were times to argue and there were times when it was best to let others think you agreed until you could show them the truth.
“All right.” She opened her eyes and stood, dusting sand from her robes. “I’ll try to call Pernicious back, but I don’t know if he will come. He usually won’t without the promise of candied blood oranges.”
Chapter Forty-four
MORTAL LANDS
Yoichi woke when the fire reached his clothing. He smiled to himself as he slapped out the flames, rolling on the more insistent ones. He had given Koida the power to choose whether he lived or died, and obviously she had taken it.
To others, he knew, the killing seemed so small, a justifiable revenge, and yet it was vital to their journey ahead. As the Reaper could tell his little sister, the first life taken was the turning point. Once that irrevocable step had been taken, a second life was easier to justify, and then what was the entire world but one more?
Yoichi’s hands and knees blistered against the burning floorboards as he crawled toward the balcony, but he ignored them. He needed to get out. His Ro was already cycling furiously to repair the last of the damage to his brain and skull. In this empty desert he would have a hard time finding enough Pool of Life to drink from to repair deep burns.
Clumsily, he pulled himself up over the low wall of the balcony and dropped the twelve stories to the sandy street below.
WHEN YOICHI RETURNED to consciousness again, the moon was high overhead, and his shattered bones were repairing themselves. It seemed he was taking quite a bit of abuse tonight. The back of his skull was smashed flat, and his upper and lower ribs had collapsed, staving in his lungs. Black Ro pumped through the injuries, mending as quickly as possible, but every breath shot pain through his chest.
He needed more.
A burnt corpse lay in the sand beside him.
Lao.
Yoichi reached out to draw in the leech’s life force, but found someone else had already consumed it. The savage perhaps. Unless Koida had killed the leech in a rage and taken the Ro herself. He didn’t know whether she could even absorb Ro with her deficiency, but the thought was a pleasant one. Perhaps his little sister had gotten a taste for blood from killing him.
Closing his eyes, Yoichi sent Questing Roots throughout the oasis. The demon beast ram was nothing more than a core stone being covered by sand. He must have consumed its Ro instinctually after his fall. The oasis was harboring a colony of rats, however, and a single, near-starving dog too stupid or loyal to eat the corpses of the humans the rats were subsisting on.
By the time the dog and rats were hollow husks, the bones in Yoichi’s head and chest had grown back together. He continued searching. A nest of owls. He chuckled at the irony of drinking Life from the harbinger of death.
When their Ro had been emptied, Yoichi found a small collection of plants nearby. With his skull mended, he could think clearly again. Drinking the plants dry of their Ro wouldn’t provide enough healing to get him on his feet, and he doubted he could find anything living in that desert of death.
This would require controlled drinking, then. Sipping the Ro from the plants day by day without killing them would heal him much slower than if he had a living creature or a forest of trees to drain, but patience would provide him with more life force over time, and more healing than this wasted desert could.
And there was no reason to hurry now. He chuckled to himself, remembering the moment the fear in Koida’s eyes shifted to fury and the sting of her blade tearing at his flesh. His mother’s Far-Reaching Taproot couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
The scent of lush lotus blossoms filled his mind, out of place in such a stark, dry land.
It’s true that Youn Wha served an unexpected purpose, my white-haired hero, but your cunning is what ultimately turned the surprise to our advantage, the Whisperer told him. Ha-Koi will never leave you alone now that she thinks you have the Thunderer’s Ro.
Agreeing silently because most of his teeth were still growing back, Yoichi turned on his stomach and began to pull himself away from the burning library toward the plants he’d sensed. He’d been in this Ro-forsaken desert for days without a drink, and he was parched. Where there were plants, there was water, and where there was water, he could wait patiently for Koida to return to him.
Chapter Forty-five
MORTAL LANDS
Koida stayed silent for the rest of the night and most of the next morning. She waited for Lysander or Hush to call a stop for the day, but the scorching desert sun rose without a word from either.
“We’re riding through?” she asked.
“Hush wants to put as much distance between you and your brother as possible,” Lysander said from behind her. “There’s a village on the southeast edge of the desert. Oroi Iri. We’ll rest there.”
She couldn’t argue that Pernicious or Cold Sun’s war ram needed rest. Demon beasts could run forever without tiring. She could say that she needed rest, but she doubted Lysander would care. He might even see through her.
She tucked her hood around her face, hiding everything but her eyes from the blistering sunlight, and stared straight ahead at the s
hifting sands, wondering how far Oroi Iri was.
The next two days passed in a haze of half-sleep, exhaustion, and thirst. They had no water this time around, but Lysander shared his never-emptying flask. These were the only pauses in their headlong run out of the desert, stopping just long enough for Hush to go behind a dune, take down her mask, and drink. Hardly worth the effort to dismount, though Lysander and Cold Sun usually did. Koida was too impatient to get to Oroi Iri to do the same.
“You said it was bitter,” Koida said while they waited for Hush. She licked the sweet spirits from her cracked lips. It tasted like the breeze over a field of freshly mown clover. “That the liquor in your flask was as bitter as tears, but in truth, it’s as fine as the palace’s best blood orange vintage.”
“It goes down easy enough today, but imagine twenty years from now,” Lysander said, glancing over his shoulder toward the oasis they had left behind. He chuckled and shook his head. “Sounds like a cautionary tale.”
Batsai’s face flickered in Koida’s memory for a moment, the old bear telling her stories on the long winter nights of her childhood. “Now, what does that teach you, little dragon?” he would ask after he reached the end.
Koida shielded her eyes against the bright desert sun. “The lesson could be, ‘have a care what you fill your never-emptying flask with.’ That, or ‘clover liquor ages poorly.’”
Hush returned from behind the dune. Cold Sun put the necromancer’s notes back into the scholar’s pack, and they mounted up.
“As long as it’s not written in that Ro-forsaken poetry, you can make the lesson of my life whatever you wish,” Lysander said, climbing up behind Koida once more.
Throughout their ride, Koida reached for the empty space where Raijin’s jade Ro had been, knowing she wouldn’t find it. She could have used the glass moon serpent, then she wouldn’t have noticed the pain and sickness in her heartcenter, but she wouldn’t allow herself to touch the little demon adder.
She needed to strengthen her Stone Soul until it was unbreakable. Every time she looked inside and found only her amethyst Ro, she felt as if she were digging into an open wound with broken glass. She cut herself over and over on the jagged edges of her failure, each time retreating into her Stone Soul. When the pain became too much, she called up the steadfast resolve she had felt from Raijin in the days before she lost his Ro. He had sacrificed himself to save her from Yoichi. She could suffer at least this much for him.
They rode into Oroi Iri near sunset of their third night. After they drank deeply from the town’s well and washed their faces and hands, Lysander led them to the tiny village inn. A handful of links from the skeleton’s scholar pack bought a night in the only two rooms available and a meal of sticky, reheated congee, which tasted like heaven to Koida’s empty stomach.
While she and Lysander ate and Hush took her bowl outside, Cold Sun took up his customary place standing guard behind their table.
“You must be at least as starving as I am, Cold Sun,” Koida said. “You should eat with us.”
Lysander huffed a soft laugh under his breath. “You’re wasting your time, Princess.”
“Why? This isn’t the chief’s longhouse. Cold Sun is as much a guest here as we are. He doesn’t need to watch over us until we’ve finished eating.”
Lysander just shook his head and took a bite of congee.
Koida ignored him, turning to Cold Sun. “Come eat with us. You ate with me on the ship.”
“There were other sailors who had already eaten nearby,” Cold Sun said. “One should always be on their guard. We had no guardian of knowledge at the Great Library. This is why we were taken by surprise.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” Koida said. “We should all have been more careful.”
“Fault is a senseless concept if one does nothing to right the mistake,” Cold Sun said. “I will stand guard over the knowledge.”
So the huge warrior stood guard in his billowing black woman’s dress robes while they ate, like some kind of enormous curtain between them and the rest of the inn’s empty common room. Much to Koida’s discomfort, when Hush returned, she and Lysander began studying the necromancer’s notes. Koida tried not to look at the crusted spots wrinkling the parchment. She was still eating, and she couldn’t afford to lose her appetite. Not now that they had finally stopped.
After a time, Hush laid a page on the table and tapped a series of drawings.
Lysander glanced over it. “That’s the animation of the corpse puppets. Matches the information your people gathered, Cold Sun. Ro forced into a dead body by the necromancer.”
Cold Sun gave a fractional nod.
Then Hush laid out another page, this one stained with a yellow-green substance. The congee lodged in Koida’s throat. She swallowed hard and focused her stare on the crackling fire in the hearth.
“You’re right,” Lysander said. “It’s the evolution of his methods.”
Papers shuffled. From the corner of her eye, Koida saw Lysander set a page from his sheaf beside Hush’s.
“Next he tried making a Ro trap, but by then her Ro was long gone. Do any of your pages have this symbol on them? It’s a Librarian symbol to show continuation in another place.”
While Hush and Lysander pieced the notes together, Koida finished the last of her meal. She returned the bowl to the innkeeper, giving the woman a grateful bow, then went back to Cold Sun.
“I’ll take your post while you eat, guardian of knowledge,” she said.
“Gratitude, sister in battle,” Cold Sun said, giving her the shallow bow of the Uktena. His lips twitched.
Koida caught the minute shift in her friend’s expression.
“Is the phrase not sister in study?” she asked.
“You do not study enough,” the huge Uktena said, his dark eyes sparkling. “But wherever you go, fighting seems to follow.”
A smile broke across Koida’s face. “Eat your meal, Cold Sun.”
At the table, Hush and Lysander were leaning over another page, a handful of prairie hen buttons providing extra illumination, as the fire in the hearth had begun to dim. Cold Sun sat with his bowl and craned his neck to read while he ate.
“He keeps making reference to a conduit,” Lysander said, running his thumb down a line of text. “But where did he pull her Ro back from?”
“The afterlife?” Koida suggested, her mind drifting to the blue-gray world of smoke and incense.
But the foreigner and the silent physician were too absorbed to pay her any attention. Hush indicated a symbol, then made a questioning motion with her hands.
“It denotes a reference to a separate nonconsecutive page,” Lysander said. “Do you have anything matching that?”
They sifted through the notes again, Cold Sun helping this time. They came up empty-handed.
“Of course not.” Lysander cursed. “Without a location to pull from, the conduit is useless.”
Koida thought about repeating herself, but decided against it. Impatience was making her restless. She retreated into her Stone Soul, forcing herself to look interested. It was just for a bit longer, just until Cold Sun finished eating. If she hadn’t offered to take his place, the dutiful warrior probably would have stood guard all night, refusing to eat until she returned. Or was found.
“The conduit itself is the weak point,” Cold Sun said. “If one is able to destroy it, the Ro cannot be returned to the body.”
Hush looked at Lysander.
The foreigner nodded. “That would explain why Kwai Un’s Ro was freed when her body burned. It says one end of the conduit must be anchored in the physical body.”
They went on discussing it, Cold Sun taking maddeningly few bites. Eventually, Koida turned to idly Pouring Ro into Itself so she wouldn’t suggest he speak less and eat more. She thought once that he was finished eating, but instead of returning his bowl, he asked for a second helping. She felt the surge of frustration tingle along her left arm, urging the lavaglass toward the surface, but
she fought it down. If she ever saw Cold Sun again after tonight, she would have to tell him how his leisurely eating had helped her practice holding the Stone Soul.
The thought was enough to dampen her irritation.
Finally, the hulking warrior returned his bowl without asking for another. He rejoined them, giving Koida a shallow bow of thanks.
She returned it, then stretched and yawned as she rose. After their nonstop ride and the heavy congee, fatigue was one thing she didn’t have to fake.
“Apologies,” she said, “but I am going to attempt to drink the well dry, then find my bed.”
Hush started to get up, but Koida stopped her.
“That is not necessary,” she said, surprised to hear the evenness in her voice. The time had come, and inside she was vibrating like a plucked lute string. “The well is not far, and these two need your knowledge and wisdom more than I do.”
For her part, Hush did not require much convincing. In spite of her protests, it was clear the physician was far more interested in deciphering the notes.
Koida pressed her palm to her fist and bowed to each of them, then slipped out of the warm firelight of the inn and into the chilly darkness.
Chapter Forty-six
MORTAL LANDS
“Hungry,” Lao muttered. “So hungry.”
Yoichi plucked purple beautyberries from the vines growing in the oasis pyramid’s hanging garden, sating his own hunger. It was the one plant he’d avoided Drinking Life from, as it was the only fruit he could stand the taste of, and in spite of his healing abilities, he required solid food to survive.
Lao, on the other hand, did not eat. The leech put his hand to his own chest, weak black Taproots delving into his heartcenter. The fool’s brain was so far gone that he didn’t realize he couldn’t cannibalize his own Ro.
The leech turned to Yoichi, reaching out with fingers tipped in curling, yellowed nails.
