Never Die

by Rob J. Hayes

  Finally the oni was released in a flash of red light that left War steaming in Cho's hand. The ancient yokai disappeared inside the emperor's chest and for a moment the throne room went still. Cho dropped to her knees, done. She was dying and nothing could stop it. Then the emperor's mid-section exploded — his legs fell one way; his torso fell the other. The flashing red light of the oni vanished out of the broken balcony, escaping into the world once more.

  War clattered to the floor of the throne room. Its burden spent, it was just a sword again. Cho knelt there on the floor, feeling her life dripping away from her. She was so tired her eyes closed against her will and it was just too much effort to keep her head up. She let it droop forwards, her chin resting on her chest.

  "You did it," Ein's voice, far away, or maybe close. It really didn't matter anymore.

  Cho forced her eyes open one more time to find the boy kneeling in front of her, staring up at her with his pale gaze. He was so empty, nothing more than a shell really. Cho wondered how she hadn't seen it before. She was yokai, a vengeful spirit raised to serve the shinigami's purpose. But so was Ein. They were, all of them, nothing more than ghostly pawns in a greater game.

  "You once said you wonder what your name would have been, had you become a hero," Cho said. She couldn't even find the effort to lift her head, but she smiled. "Death's Echo."

  "How did you know?" Ein asked. But Cho couldn't answer. She felt it all slip away and everything went dark.

  Chapter 42

  Roi Astara - Death's Echo

  Somewhere between the crack of thunder and the hammer striking the anvil, lies Death's Echo.

  Those who hear it have mere moments to describe the sound, for they are already dead.

  Roi drifted down the hallway like a ghost. Bodies lay all around him, some dead, but many more still alive. Bingwei Ma's handiwork. The soldiers of Wu had met their match and more in that one. He truly lived up to his legend, to the stories Roi had read as a boy. He picked his way between the bodies, using his rifle as a crutch, until he came upon the Master of Sun Valley and crouched down by the man's side to pay final respects.

  Bingwei Ma was lying next to a beautiful woman, her neck was snapped and her head lay at a damning angle. They were so close they almost looked like lovers, but the truth was as far from that thought as could be. Bingwei Ma was dead, a dozen small cuts marring his skin on his arms and chest and even his face. Not enough to kill a man like that, unless there was something more sinister involved. Sin, then. The emperor's bodyguard. She was well known to use poison, as well as skill, to bring down her opponents. Her brother, Saint, would no doubt be close by. Those two never went far from one another.

  "You finally learned to forsake your principles for the greater good, Bingwei Ma," Roi said as he crouched next to the man. "You first died almost sixty years ago. Never defeated. Not once after earning the title of master. But far too trusting of your fellow man." Roi smiled as he remembered the story. "You died to a Cochtan spy who you refused to execute even when caught. The man returned and murdered you in your sleep. Hopefully this death will find you some peace. The Last Master of Sun Valley."

  Roi bowed his head for a moment, then he stood and found Saint crumpled against a wall. Blood leaked down from a head wound that had painted his face mostly red. He still had a pulse, but only barely. Roi couldn't leave the man alive to take revenge for his fallen emperor. He had learned that lesson from Bingwei Ma's history. He picked up one of Saint's swords and sunk it into the man's chest, piercing his heart.

  The door to the throne room was heavy, but swung open easily and quietly when Roi pushed it. The room beyond was chaos stacked on top of wreckage. Even from a distance he could recognise two bodies in the centre of the room. One was a tall man, rent in two at the waist. The other was a woman, kneeling before the body, one arm dangling at her side and the other severed at the elbow. Beyond them the throne stood untouched, but to the right of it the floor and ceiling both were torn up, leading to a chasm that dropped off sharply where a balcony used to hang. Roi moved forward slowly, his rifle and wooden sandals tapping the floor with each step.

  He stopped by Whispering Blade and looked down at her. She looked in a sorry state, pale as a ghost and quite dead, blood still dripping from her severed arm and congealing on the floor. But she was smiling. Her eyes were closed and her mangled, matted hair hung down over her face, but she was smiling in death. The smell of burning hair was strong, and there was a little charred knot of remains in front of her. Roi crouched down in front of Itami and picked up her black sword from her side. He fetched her other sword too, shaking it loose of the severed arm's mangled hand. He placed both swords in front of her, paired and hers as they had always been.

  "I remember seeing Kaishi on my way to Long twenty years ago, just before my father killed me." Roi let out a sigh; they were difficult memories. "Flaming Fist's sacking of the city was only a few months old and still the people were recovering. They spoke your name as a blessing, Whispering Blade. Yours and the Century Blade's both, even though you failed to protect them. I'm glad, in death you claimed the justice you could not in life. Thank you, Itami Cho." He bowed his head and was silent for a time. She deserved that much at least.

  Roi left her there, kneeling in the centre of the throne room. It seemed fitting somehow. He skirted the body of his father, stopping only briefly to look down on the corpse. He didn't mean to speak, to pay any respects, but the words came unbidden. "I never wanted this, father. You killed me. And long ago I accepted that. Power comes at a price, and you were willing to pay it. I respect that. But I wish I could have told you about my life. I wish I would have had time to tell you how painful it has been these last twenty years, my body decaying. You killed me, and the shinigami brought me back, and put my soul into a body that doesn't know if it's alive or dead.

  "I don't hate you, father. I don't blame you." Roi coughed then, feeling the pain deep in his chest and the bleeding that came with it. "Though I should." He stopped and looked down into his father's lifeless eyes. There was fear there, that look of terror when a person knows they have met their end and can do nothing to stop it. Roi shook his head slowly. "Goodbye."

  The throne sat empty and Roi had waited long enough. He limped towards it, turned and collapsed into its waiting embrace. His body was small, barely larger than a boy's and the throne was built for a much larger man, but Roi sat it as regally as he could. It faced into the room and there, sitting on a small table that should hold a shrine, was the boy. He grinned at Roi, wide and wolfish, his pale eyes piercing.

  "Must you continue to wear my old skin?" Roi asked as the boy hopped off the table. He showed none of the pain he had felt over the past few days, and his feet, though still bare, no longer bled. But that didn't surprise Roi. What approached him now was not really the boy he had been following. The shinigami stopped before the throne and sketched a mocking bow.

  "I quite like it," the shinigami said in a voice so similar to Roi's own. "Everyone underestimates me in this body. Just like they did you so long ago."

  "It's insulting," Roi said. He placed his rifle against the side of the throne. He wouldn't need it any more. "We're the only ones left. There's no one else to fool." It also reminded him of a time before the disease had wreaked its havoc on his body. A time when debilitating pain had not been a constant companion.

  Roi blinked and where his younger body had stood, now stood an old man. He was hunched in the shoulders with squat legs and a face that held too much skin. His nose was long and fat, and his smile cruel. There was nothing human in the pale eyes the old man looked out from. There was nothing human in him at all. "You have questions. You should ask them while I am still in a pleasant mood." The shinigami's voice was like buzzing insects in what was left of Roi's ears.

  "It's done," Roi said. "He's dead. Will you now cure me like you promised?"

  The shinigami rocked forward on his feet and laughed. "It's already done. No more will your body
rot and decay and fall apart like the dead thing it was. Congratulations on your good health."

  Roi didn't feel healthy. He felt stronger, further from death, but not healthy. He knew then that the shinigami may have cured his necrosis, but never would the god restore his body's true health to him. He would forever be trapped in a body that had been devastated by a disease. It was a reminder. A reminder of where Roi came from, and to whom he owed all that he had. He let out a bitter laugh then, and for a wonder, it didn't send him into a coughing fit. He realised that for the first time in almost ten years, he could breathe easily.

  "Thank you."

  The shinigami laughed at that. "I'll be going soon. Best ask those questions."

  "Why? Why did you decide to kill my father? Why now?"

  "Twenty years," the shinigami said with a cackling laugh. "It seemed a bit much for such a paltry sacrifice as you. But twenty years is what I gave him. Twenty years of immortality and power." The shinigami paused and looked around the throne room. "He didn't squander it."

  Roi nodded at that. He knew it was all the answer he would get. The shinigami had given him one just as vague twenty years ago when he had brought Roi back from the death his own father had given him. Shouts echoed from far away, deeper within the palace — Wu soldiers coming to check on their emperor. Roi could only guess at what they might do once they found the emperor cut in half.

  "There was no other shinigami, was there?" Roi asked quickly. "You sent the yokai after us."

  Again that cackling laugh. "The goat wasn't mine. One of my brother's maybe. I needed to keep you all pushed along, and I needed to charge that terrible sword with both the mizuchi and the oni." The old man turned his head to look at Whispering Blade and the two swords before her. "It was the only thing that could kill him."

  "You could have killed my father any time you wished."

  The shinigami laughed, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  "Why lie to them all? Why tell them they were still alive?" Roi said.

  "Mostly alive." The shinigami clapped his gnarled hands and chuckled. "They needed to believe they weren't dead. Whispering Blade and The Emerald Wind were the toughest. I had to show them the consequences of Flaming Fist's attack on Kaishi. I had to show them the past. I had to show them the Century Blade's death. Quite an illusion to weave."

  Roi looked up at that. "Why not bring back the Century Blade? Surely he—"

  "Men like him can't be controlled. They follow their own path, not the path of any other." A cruel grin spread across the shinigami's wrinkled face. "I chose those I did because I knew how to control them. For Whispering Blade I just needed her oath. I pushed for it until she gave it, and then she was mine. The Emerald Wind was even easier: all he needed was a reward. The promise of a second chance at the life he squandered. An impossible reward, but men like him will believe just about anything if the price is right. All Iron Gut Chen needed was a chance for glory. I dangled renown in front of him and he was willing to ignore all the signs that said he had long been forgotten. And then there was the Last Master of Sun Valley. Bingwei Ma spent his entire life not leaving his Sun Valley, hoping a worthy cause would come along, something to give him a glorious death." The shinigami stopped talking and spread his hands wide.

  "And what about me? You promised me a reprieve from the disease you planted inside of me. You've given me that and more. But in twenty years will you don my old skin again? Or maybe another? In twenty years will you come to kill me like you did my father?"

  The shinigami turned and waddled towards the table next to the door. He clambered up onto it and squatted there, a mocking grin on his face. Roi couldn't tell the moment when flesh became stone. One moment he was locked in a staring contest with a shinigami, and the next moment it was just a statue.

  The doors swung open on silent hinges and a dozen Wu soldiers rushed in. The shock of what they saw stopped them in their tracks. Roi saw more men behind them out in the hallway, some checking on their fallen comrades, and others struggling to push into the throne room. It was now or never.

  Roi Astara rose from the throne, standing up to his full height and sweeping his single eye over the men gathered before him. He drew in a deep breath and shouted. "Emperor Henan WuLong is dead. My name is Einrich WuLong, and I am the Emperor of Ten Kings."

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  Books by Rob J. Hayes

  The Ties that Bind

  The Heresy Within

  The Colour of Vengeance

  The Price of Faith

  First Earth Stand Alone

  City of Kings

  Best Laid Plans

  Where Loyalties Lie

  The Fifth Empire of Man

  It Takes a Thief...

  It Takes a Thief to Catch a Sunrise

  It Takes a Thief to Start a Fire

  Science Fiction

  Drones

  Copyright ©2018 Rob J. Hayes

  (http://www.robjhayes.co.uk)

  Cover image ©2018 Felix Ortiz

  Cover design ©2018 Shawn King

  Edited by Mike Myers

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