by Jeremy Finn
“Jehoshim!” an oddly familiar voice shouted. “Leave him and face me! The dark master has marked you and I will fulfill his mark.”
The look on the guardian’s face was a mixture of emotions. It was hard to read, but James thought he saw traces of disappointment, surprise, rage and even possibly fear slide across its countenance. The creature pulled the blade over his head in attack posture and pivoted to face the source of the voice. As he turned, James was able to get a full view of the newcomer. What he saw brought a sudden wave of joy followed by confusion. Joe Senagi was standing on the opposite end of the room near the door. He looked ragged and worn, but he was very much alive as he stood holding his rhema firmly before him.
“You are but his plaything,” the Guardian of Light-turned-traitor bellowed, “and you will die as such.”
James remained wedged in the corner unable to move as his mind tried to comprehend the situation. Apparently, Joe was not killed that fateful night when Hanasan was besieged. Jehoshim had been the guardian whose unexplained disappearance had the Intercessor concerned, but it seemed evident now that he had not disappeared, but rather had fallen in as the minister’s aide for some reason. But who was on what side? Jehoshim was a Guardian of Light, but now he seemed to be influencing the minister down a dark path, and attacked James with the obvious intent to kill him. Joe, on the other hand, was a servant and a friend who just now claimed to be fulfilling the dark master’s mark and seemed intent on destroying Jehoshim. The two were already engaged in a fierce duel, though, and he hastily decided to join the man who had been his friend and saved him from the Darkness when it fell on Hanasan.
James tugged his rhema free from the wall and looked for his opportunity to aid Joe in the battle. By now already, half the furniture in the room was strewn about in perfectly cut pieces that looked as if a laser had divided them from their original forms. Blades whirled and clashed with a violence and rapidity that James had never witnessed before. With such a dance in full effect, he could find little opportunity to intervene. At one point, both contestants had attacked and narrowly repelled each other’s blows, leaving them a short distance apart as their momentum carried them through their attacks. After a short pause and wails of rage from both, they rushed at each other with blades held high overhead. In a flicker of movement that James could only follow in his mind’s afterimage, both brought their swords down toward the enemy’s head, but Joe shot his right foot out at an angle and followed with his right shoulder as he curved the blade around the expected target above the neck and brought it down into the unprotected side of the guardian. He brought the blade through its full motion as he dropped to a knee and held his weapon behind him ready to make a protective move. No such move was necessary, though, as Jehoshim’s blade struck the ground where he expected it to meet Joe’s body and then dropped as he staggered a step. He turned to look at Joe, then fell to the ground as the two pieces of his severed torso slid apart. Before his monstrous body had even come to rest, though, it seemed to evaporate in a luminous mist.
For a timeless moment, James stood with one hand holding his rhema at his side while Joe kneeled frozen in his finishing pose, his eyes fixed gravely upon the empty spot that recently held Jehoshim’s formidable figure. The rain was beating against the windows in full force, and the gusting wind caused it to swirl and spin in dizzying patterns.
“Joe, thank you. I can’t believe you’re alive. What…”James trailed off as Joe stood up and approached him with no change in his expression. At the same time, something seized him from behind. It was the minister, who had emerged from his sanctuary beneath the desk.
“No, don’t let him near me!” the man pleaded. “He wants to kill me too.”
“That’s ridiculous,” James countered. “This man is my friend. He saved my life.”
“Step aside, James,” Joe said grimly.
“Joe, what are you doing? I was sent here by the Light to protect this man…or at least influence him. Why do you seem upset with him?”
“He’s going to kill us both!” the minister howled in panic. His grip on James’ shoulder sent waves of nausea over him as the man’s fingers dug into his fresh burns.
“Joe, surely…”
“I said step aside. I have a mission and it involves getting rid of this man,” Joe said as he brought his blade threateningly nearer.
With a feeling of sad disbelief, James brought his sword up to meet Joe’s.
“Don’t!” Joe yelled. “There is nothing about this man that is worthy of your sacrifice. He is power hungry and deceitful and he is in the way of the master’s plans.”
“What plans? What are you talking about, Joe?” James asked in disbelief.
“You don’t need to know. Just stand aside or I will run you both through.”
“No,” James said firmly. “Joe, I am no match for you. You will have to kill me. But I won’t turn my back on a man the Light sent me to persuade. It can’t be right.”
Joe’s expression did not change at first, and James prepared himself for a final desperate struggle. Then, however, something in Joe’s eyes seemed to twitch – almost break in a manner of speaking – and his whole countenance seemed to relax for an instant. But the moment was short-lived, for just then the whole room dropped into darkness illumined only by the haze of the city lights through clouds of shifting rain and the two blades that lit the area immediately surrounding the two servants. James could hear the minister scrambling out of the room behind him, but otherwise silence reigned.
“Kill him,” a voice rattled gravely out of the emptiness surrounding them. It was both terrifying and familiar.
“No,” Joe said with his eyes still fixed on James. “I am finished doing your bidding. You use me as your tool and twist our agreements to your favor.”
There followed a short pause in which the air around them seemed to grow thick and charged with some sort of building energy. A low hiss sizzled behind Joe.
“If you are tired of being a plaything, then you must also die along with your…friend,” the voice finished with a note of sarcasm.
Fury brewed in Joe’s eyes. “You will not harm him!” he roared and turned with his blade ready to strike. For an instant, James saw the outline of a horrible creature in the dim light of Joe’s blade. It was tall and robed in black clothing fringed with elaborate symbols, but beneath a cowl James could make out the scaled face and slit eyes of the evil guardian who threatened him in the southern glades. It stood sneering with both hands at its side. A brief glimpse was all James had, though, because the beast threw its hands into the air and the world seemed to erupt around them. Lightning struck the high rise suite and danced along the fringes of the windows. All the glass burst and flew about the room followed by forceful gusts of typhoon winds with cold driving rain carried on them.
James fell backwards over a coffee table as a blast of flying glass assaulted his body. It felt as if hundreds of wasps stung him at once. He tried to stand, but a small piece of glass lodged in his right eye and nearly immobilized him with pain. As he struggled to remove the shard, he could just make out Joe and Jaeil with his good eye. Joe had fallen against the desk, but used it as a support to keep his balance. Both stood facing each other and flew suddenly into furious combat.
The fight was intense as Joe launched into a series of violent attacks only to be whisked to the side at the last moment with a skilled move by the beast. Though the monster seemed to have the upper hand, Joe was holding his own as he dodged and narrowly deflected a string of counter assaults by his enemy. Meanwhile, James cautiously tried to dislodge the speck of glass in his eye that further impaired his vision of a scene that was already confused by darkness only pierced by the dim outside light and the glow of Joe’s sword flickering through the air. In combination with the frequent lightning strikes, it created an environment not unlike a basement dance club with strobe lights and wild dancers moving to a deadly rhythm.
To James’ utter relief, the piece o
f glass in his eye suddenly popped out just as a stray slash of Joe’s blade sent half a chair flying out the empty window to be swallowed by the swirling fury outside. Though he could barely open his eye due to the small but debilitating scratch the glass left, James groped for the hilt of his rhema and stumbled over a sea of debris toward the warriors. Unlike his opponent, Joe was visibly tiring, and James felt he better get involved now or risk losing Joe, despite the notion he had that his participation in the fight would probably make little difference.
What followed next happened in a fraction of the time it takes to explain in text. In fact, to James it felt almost as if it all happened within the same moment or breath. He opened himself to the Light as he approached Jaeil with his sword held ready before him. Jaeil was deeply preoccupied with an assault on Joe, and it looked as if James might actually achieve surprise and do some sort of good in this fight. Just as he readied a thrust to the dark guardian’s side, though, Joe saw him and James noticed the brief panic of his widened eyes as he realized James had entered the fight. Without even shifting his gaze from Joe’s face, Jaeil dropped his right hand imperceptibly to his waist and drew a second dark blade of about half the length of the one he still held against Joe’s sword. With a tiny turn of the wrist and shift of his right foot, Jaeil sent the smaller blade directly toward James’ stomach. Before James even perceived what the dark guardian was doing, he instinctively pulled his sword inches down and to the left just in time to meet the thrust and cause it to slide against his blade and veer to the right of its target. Still, the blade tore through his clothes and slipped through about a centimeter of flesh along the edge of his waist. The force of the thrust coupled with the surprise of the rapid move caused James to stumble backwards. Joe looked shocked and lowered his guard for an instant. Jaeil reacted instantly and shot a forceful kick into Joe’s chest, sending him flailing backwards and almost to the edge of the open precipice. James was leaning on the desk and tried to regain his footing to face Jaeil again when the serpentine creature lifted his hand and sent a mass of black, tubular cords flying toward him. The sticky conglomeration struck him in the chest and glued him to the desk. He still held his rhema, but he was fixed so solidly to the abused piece of furniture that he could barely move his hand a few centimeters in either direction. Jaeil’s attention immediately shifted back to Joe, though, who was scrambling to his feet with blade in hand. The Dark Guardian took advantage of the distance separating them and threw a second web of wet black coils at Joe. They hit him with a momentum that threw him back and would have sent him out into the bottomless night if not for the support beam behind him.
So, the fight ended with both James and Joe immobilized by a sticky net that fixed James to the chairman’s executive desk and Joe to the support beam that once held the wall length windows in place but now held Joe centimeters away from a drop to the streets far below. James glanced down at his prison and noted with a wave of nauseating disgust that the mass was composed of what appeared to be oily, scaled snake bodies slowly moving around and through each other. Their forms heaved slightly with the appearance of breathing and life.
“Who to finish first?” the creature hissed as he sheathed his smaller blade and grasped the hilt of his long sword with both hands eagerly. “Well, obviously the most dangerous of the two. You should have taken advantage of my favor, Joe. Once you turned to me, there was no going back. It seems you have burned all your bridges, yes?”
Jaeil did not wait for a reply, and it seemed Joe was not ready to give one as he merely stared with contempt at his approaching executioner.
“Joe!” James shouted. He meant to say more, to ask what was going on or what he should do, but the flood of emotions engulfing him caused his faculties to fall short.
Joe turned his head as much as he was able, and looked out of the corner of his eyes toward James as he simply sighed, “I’m sorry, James, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
By then, Jaeil was standing before Joe with his dark blade poised before his throat.
“Fool,” he said with thin, curled lips as he drew his blade back for the strike, but his derogatory accusation mixed oddly with the distant, whimsical chime of the elevator. While the meaning of this was processing in James’ mind, Jaeil’s blade shot forward, James screamed unintelligibly, and a pin-wheeling jet of flame raced through the room. A rhema was cast through the air and struck Jaeil’s blade just as it met the whiskers on Joe’s throat. Both black and white sabers wheeled erratically through the air and were consumed by the stormy night. Jaeil shifted to catch his balance and recover from the shock, then turned just in time to face a figure clad in white who was dashing through the room toward him. James felt it before he saw it – it was the Intercessor. Before anyone in the room had the time to even gasp in surprise, the Intercessor collided with the dark guardian of destruction and propelled them both out into the midnight abyss. As the embraced bodies flew silently into the swirling rain, James noticed the tip of a black blade, the short blade, protruding from the Intercessor’s back. Then both were gone, swallowed by the raging storm, one heading toward destruction of its temporary body, the other falling toward his undeserved, permanent grave.
Both captive men remained silent for some seconds when suddenly their bindings uncoiled and fell to the ground as dust. Apparently, Jaeil was no longer capable of holding the bonds. This should have come as a relief to James, but instead, the first thing that came to his mind was that the broken bonds signaled the same instant when the Intercessor’s bones broke on the cold streets far below. Joe slid down the side of the column and bore a distant look on his rain-pelted visage.
“Joe,” James ventured in a voice probably too weak to hear over the gusting wind, “what’s going on? I thought you were dead? You seem to know Jaeil. I don’t get it.”
For a moment Joe sat silently as if he had not even noticed James’ string of questions before he finally spoke, “Don’t you? Don’t you get it?” He shot a look at James that seemed half defiance and half bitter regret. Tears seemed to be forming in his bloodshot eyes though James could not be sure it was not just the cold rain spattering his face. “I’m a traitor. I turned on them…I turned on you. And then this…and he just…” he trailed off and broke eye contact with James.
“How could you have turned on me?” James asked. “You saved my life at Hanasan.”
“Hanasan was my fault,” Joe confessed. “How do you think they were able to find the way?”
James paused in disbelief. Before he could gather his thoughts to respond, Joe spoke.
“But why, you want to know? Why would I turn on the Light? You are so young in this world, James.” He slowly rose to his feet. “You don’t know what went on up there at Hanasan. The hypocrisy and the power play infuriated me. They were so intoxicated by power – they were fools.”
“You’re right,” James agreed. “I don’t know much about what went on at Hanasan, but I know DaNyang, and I know the Intercessor. Joe, he just saved your life! Is that the kind of selfishness you are talking about?”
“You don’t understand!” Joe said with a raised voice. “I never meant any harm to come to them. My grudge was with the chief servants. They are the ones who lived lies and abused people who trusted them with their lives. I wanted them dead.”
“So you brought the Dark to Hanasan? Didn’t you know they would want to destroy everything?” James pressed.
“No!” Joe shouted. “I had a deal with Jaeil. I would show him the path and he would limit his destruction to the taking of the chief servants’ lives and the burning of the hall of paintings. It was going to be a hit and run. No one would be awake to even see them before they dispatched the chiefs and set the hall ablaze, thus no one would have to be killed for getting in the way.”
“But it didn’t work that way.” James reminded him. “Plenty of regular servants were killed.”
“Because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Joe cast him an accusing look.
A pang of guilt swept over James, but he soon repressed it. “You didn’t have to save me, Joe. If you let them kill me the plan would have worked. Besides, there was a seirin sent after the Intercessor. Was that part of your deal?”
“Obviously Jaeil didn’t stand by his part of the deal,” Joe admitted, and the challenge in his tone of voice died. “I thought I could use his power, but he used me in turn.”
“And Jaeil,” James queried, “why did he want me dead so badly? Like you said, I’m just a new servant, yet he sent all kinds of seirin after me.”
Joe turned toward the shifting black void beyond him. “I didn’t know about that until it was too late, but those assassins were not from Jaeil. They were from Jehoshim. Nefarin do not fear young servants, especially not Jehoshim. He was making a stand against the dark prince in a bid to rob him of his power and position. He thought he could manipulate men and nefarin to his advantage over Jaeil. Why would he shy from you? In fact, he would have killed you himself, but he had a vision that caused him to fear you.”
“What vision?” James asked.
“He foresaw his own death. Not in perfect clarity, but in enough detail to perceive you were present. He feared you because he feared the vision would be fulfilled if he appeared in your presence. As you can see, his vision was accurate.”
“But why were you trying to kill him? And why was Jaeil trying to kill me?” James asked.
“I was working for Jaeil. I still thought I could work some advantage out of the relationship. Light and Darkness are not the only forces at odds with each other, James, often times they war within as well. As for Jaeil’s attempts on your life, I tried to stop him. I know he was interested in you at first because he didn’t know why Jehoshim feared you. Once he realized you would not join him, he decided you would be better off dead, even if it benefited Jehoshim in some way. After he tried to kill you in the glades, he promised me he would leave you alone. He shrugged you off as just another worthless novice, I guess.”
