by Zoe Marriott
Hikaru shuddered, letting out a low, pained groan. But one of her clammy, bleeding hands lifted, and her fingers closed around Jack’s.
Jack held on tightly.
CHAPTER 25
FRAIL HUMAN HEART
T his is useless, Izanami!” Izanagi screamed, face incandescent with fury. “You cannot keep me here once the hour of midnight is done. Your gateway will close, your powers will be cut off and you will sink back into your grave, where you belong!”
The shrill cackle of Izanami’s laughter mixed with the deep roar of the water, sending chills down my spine.
“Answer me!” Izanagi’s whole body flared with white light, on fire with the force of his anger. “Don’t you dare ignore me, you rotting bitch!”
In my hand, the sword was rattling with eagerness. My fingers twitched with the urge to draw it, to fight – to end this. Our plan was redundant now. There was no need for the element of surprise. Izanagi couldn’t escape me. I was ready.
“Shinobu.” I turned to him.
He nodded, eyes fixed on mine. “It is time.” He opened his coat and reached inside for the short sword attached to his belt—
Izanagi appeared in front of us in a flash of light. He ripped the wakizashi, still in its sheath, from Shinobu’s grip and backhanded him with it in one smooth, deadly motion.
The terrible blow lifted Shinobu off his feet and sent him flying. He disappeared over the handrail of the bridge into the darkness below. Into the water, or into the portal itself, I had no way of knowing. It happened so fast, I didn’t even hear a splash.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…
Suddenly I was all alone.
“So this is your plan, you stupid woman?” Izanagi shouted to his wife as I backed away warily, giving myself space. “To turn my own servants against me? Pathetic. You have only helped me − do you understand? You have handed me the item for which I have been searching. Did you truly believe that these weak human children could be a threat to me?”
“She is,” Izanami shrieked. “She is!”
“She is nothing. A tattered old soul that I kept as a souvenir of my victory. She and her line are of no further use to me. I will bind the god-killing blade so tightly that you will never be able to find it or unseal it. You think that she can stop me? She should never even have been born.”
“You’re the one who should never have been born,” I whispered. I ripped the black, flame-shaped blade from the saya and tossed the sheath away. “Shinobu! Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi!”
Power enveloped my body, driving down into my core like a spike. The sword caught light with a sharp crack. I couldn’t even see its shape or colour – it was a fiery bar of pure energy, whistling in my hands. My skin burned with it, shining like mother-of-pearl. My eyes leaked tears of fire.
Let’s kill him, the sword whispered.
“Yes.”
I lunged at Izanagi. He flashed out of existence. The red lightning overhead sparked – was he trying to break out? – and a moment later he reappeared at the other side of the bridge, the sheathed wakizashi firmly clutched in his hand.
“Just as big a coward as ever,” I taunted. I circled the sword forward and backward in my grip as I moved towards him, warming up my wrist. “What a shame you never had a mother. You’d have made a perfect mummy’s boy.”
He frowned in confusion, apparently realizing he’d been insulted, but not how.
Now! the sword said.
I jumped, and the power of the leap propelled me right into Izanagi’s space. My blade flashed, quicker than the human eye could follow. Izanagi yowled as the blade cleaved him open from shoulder to waist. The wound flared with white fire.
He zipped into nothingness again.
Grating laughter sounded behind me. I whirled around to see him balanced on the handrail less than three feet away. The diagonal wound I’d inflicted was already gone, his kimono gaping open over a torso so smooth and unmarked it looked like wax instead of flesh. As I watched, the ragged edges of the dark cloth sealed together, mending the rip in his clothing. It was as if I’d never touched him.
“You are truly stupid, even for a mortal. No mere human can harm a god.”
“Oh, really?” I sneered. “Cos that looked like it hurt to me. And if you’re not shit-scared to fight me, then why do you keep running away? Or can’t you help yourself? Yeah, I bet that’s it. After a few thousand years of hiding from your own wife like a frightened little boy, it’s just habit.”
He flickered out of existence – and appeared again next to me, his arm already blurring into motion. I barely had time to register the knife of white energy in his hand before he thrust it into my side. The flaming blade cut through my armour as if it was tissue, slicing my innards with freezing fire.
I convulsed and coughed out a mouthful of blood, unable even to scream. My hands tightened into a knot on the hilt of the sword. I thrust it straight into his chest. The sword’s power and the god’s collided in a mini-explosion of sparks and heat, like plunging white-hot metal into ice water.
Izanagi shrieked. He yanked the knife out of me, and it flickered and disappeared as its energy was reabsorbed into his body. Blood gushed down my hip in a warm torrent. He grabbed me by the neck, lifted me off the ground – jerking my hissing blade from his heart – and threw me away like a scrunched-up ball of paper.
I hit the bridge on my left side and skidded several feet on my face and shoulder. My skull crunched, loud enough to deafen me. There was an agonizing pop as my arm dislocated from its socket. The world swam. Everything went black…
None of that! Wakey, wakey, the sword urged.
I was still lying on the bridge. I had passed out, but only for a second.
Half my field of vision was gone. I didn’t know what had happened to my left eye, but it wasn’t working any more. My left arm was useless too. Slithering and slipping in the rapidly spreading pool of my own blood, I flopped over onto my back and forced myself into a sitting position, biting down on a groan of anguish.
Izanagi loomed over me. I could hear Izanami’s shrill screams as she watched her one chance of getting her husband back flush straight down the toilet. Izanagi still held the sheathed wakizashi absently in his left hand, fingers wrapped loosely around the worn grip. The wound to his chest – what should have been a death blow – was already healed.
“I don’t get … it,” I said, playing for time as I painfully transferred the sword from a two-handed grip to my right hand only. My words were slurred. I was pretty sure I had concussion. Maybe a fractured skull. If I took one more hit I’d be a goner.
I could feel the blade’s energy working frantically inside me, struggling to fix the massive amount of damage I’d taken – maybe the bleeding in my side was already slowing down. If I could just stall him long enough…
“Get?” Izanagi repeated, reluctantly interested.
“You. Why do you even … want to live? What do you … have … to live for?” I asked, forcing the words out despite my lazy tongue. “Your wife is a … rotting corpse. You … murdered … or tried to murder … half your kids. The ones who tolerate you … now … only do it from fear. You have all this … power. And you do nothing … with it … but try to extend … your own … miserable existence. There’s no being … in this realm, or any other … who loves you. You have nothing… Nothing worth living for… Why? Why fight … so hard?”
Izanagi’s face jerked. The blank white eyes narrowed, and for less than a heartbeat I thought I saw something within them – something that might have been sorrow. His lips compressed into a thin line.
“Do not seek to understand me, human. You have no concept of what it is to be a god. Your loves and joys are finite by definition, as are your insignificant lives. The gods are infinite. We are forever. We are eternal. And eternity is despair.”
In his right fist, a long, curving blade of white energy slowly formed. I shoved myself backward, dragging myself away from him. But I couldn’t get up. Everythin
g below the waist was numb. Even with the sword screaming and smoking in my grasp, even with its power rippling out of my skin, I couldn’t get my legs to obey me.
I couldn’t get up.
“Noooo!” Izanami wailed. “No, no, no!”
“Be grateful for that which you are about to receive.” Izanagi’s feet splashed through my congealing blood. “I will end your suffering forever, and you will know what a blessing mortality is.”
Izanagi’s white blade rose above me. My sword’s scream of rage filled my ears.
Behind Izanagi there was a flash of movement. A sleek black head rose above the bridge’s silver handrail.
Shinobu.
With a heave of his arms, Shinobu flipped over the rail, water streaming off his clothes and hair, and landed silently in a coiled crouch. He was already moving as his gaze darted over us, flinging himself forward. In an instant, Shinobu dived under Izanagi’s left arm, both of his hands outstretched. He seized the battered black saya that hid the wakizashi.
Our gazes met.
Without hesitation Shinobu ripped the sheath away from the blade.
I sucked in a breath that seemed to take ten minutes to fill my lungs. The world stopped again. This time, instead of going black, everything seemed to brighten, to freeze, caught as if in a flashbulb photograph. Izanagi’s expression of utter disbelief as he stared down at the unsheathed short-blade he was holding. Shinobu’s deep, beautiful eyes, gazing into mine for the last time.
Goodbye again, my love.
Words burst from my lips:
“Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi!”
The wakizashi shattered into a million pieces in Izanagi’s hand. Fragments, nothing more than glittering metallic dust, rained out of the god’s clutched fist. Shinobu dropped the empty sheath and fell, clutching at his chest. His back arched with pain. Blood spilled through his fingers, glowing red against his hands.
Izanagi let out a primal roar of anger and fear.
In my hand, the sword – the blade that had been my katana, my beloved, and the bane of my existence – detonated like a nuclear bomb.
A column of light erupted around me, stretching up through the lightning cage into the heavens above, and down beneath me, through the churning water, to the very depths of hell. Power broke within the column like a tsunami and I screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
I was lifted up from my sprawled position on the bridge, suspended in a sea of pain and power. I kept on screaming as the blade’s energy scoured through my body, taking possession of every fibre, every cell, every atom. My skull crunched brutally and my left eye suddenly worked again. My shoulder slid back into its socket with a hard thock. The deep wound in my side sealed up the way that a zip draws shut, the damage inside reknitting itself. Blood loss? Who needed blood when there was pure, liquid power running through their veins instead? I screamed and screamed as pain, doubt – emotion – burned away. Burned to nothing.
My screams cut off as if someone had flipped a switch.
Mine. Mine. All mine… the sword gloated gleefully. Its consciousness unfolded within my body with a sinuous stretch that straightened my arms and legs, unbent my back. At last, at long long last. Freedom.
Everything was clear. Everything was bright and new. I was the sword-bearer, the flesh-and-bone extension of the blade’s will. I was the sword-bearer, and that was all. That was everything.
The sword’s final form fitted into my hand as if I had been made to hold it, the hilt smooth and warm against my palm. So elegantly simple and lovely. A leaf-shaped blade, carved from a single piece of priceless moss jade, the diamond-shaped pommel and angular guard etched with the twisting shapes of celestial dragons. To cover such beauty with a workaday skin of metal and silk had been a crime.
Izanagi’s crime.
Where had he scurried off to? I turned, slowly drifting within the mantle of power. My eyes passed over the crumpled form of the boy – Shinobu – lying almost at the edge of the column of light. A tiny pang of sorrow touched my heart. I crushed it swiftly. No more of that. He was dead, or soon would be. What did it matter? Such meaningless things were beneath me now.
Ah, there was the little god, cowering on the other side of the bridge, as far away from me as he could get. Time to begin, then. The column of light narrowed into a shining corkscrew and sank into me like a sword into its sheath. Underfoot, the centre of the bridge and the concrete struts that had supported it disintegrated into glowing white ash, and the swirling red mouth of Yomi gaped directly below me. I walked lightly across the air, feeling it ripple against the soles of my feet, until I reached the edge of the hole and stepped onto the bridge again.
“Now,” I purred, my voice a silvery, metallic mixture of my own human tones and the sword’s inhuman ones. “What were you saying? Something about mortality being a gift?”
“Stay back,” Izanagi ordered. Six-foot-long blades of energy – so crude, so … macho – trembled slightly in his hands. He swiped them through the air in a shining figure of eight. “Do not dare to approach me. I am a Kami. I am a god. You … you are nothing but a tool. A weapon. My weapon. You belong to me and you will obey me.”
I yawned exaggeratedly, putting my left hand up to cover my lips. “Oh, sorry. It’s just – I’ve heard all this before, a long time ago. Even then you couldn’t hide the fact that you were afraid of me. That’s why you imprisoned me and hid me away.”
“I fear nothing,” he hissed.
“Pull the other one, little man.” The sword’s laughter echoed out of my mouth, a delighted gurgle. “You are weak. A trembling coward with the powers of a god. It’s some kind of cosmic joke! So let’s see, shall we, how you fight against a real opponent? Let’s see how you do against an enemy who can make you bleed.”
“I do not fear you!”
“You will.”
Izanagi flashed out of sight and reappeared directly behind me, his swords carving the air where I had stood. Except I wasn’t there any more. I had already ducked beneath his strike. My blade lashed out almost lazily and I straightened as one of Izanagi’s legs buckled beneath him. He crashed down and evaporated.
“Wave goodbye to your hamstring,” I sang out merrily.
Izanagi flashed back into existence about twelve feet away – and fell to one knee with a whimper. He touched his leg, face twisting with disbelief as he saw dark liquid staining his fingers. “Impossible.”
“Nope. I’m always right you know. So now…” I skipped and shuffled in place like a boxer. “It’s time to fight for your life. Come on, give it your best shot. Impress me.”
He zipped away, flickering back into existence behind me again. That seemed to be a favoured trick of his – the sneak attack. I stood still for him as he swung his right blade into a powerful overhead sweep, meant to slice my body in two.
At the last second, I twisted fluidly out of the way, my green blade snaking up to catch Izanagi’s on its edge. There was a fierce sizzle, and Izanagi’s white bolt of energy snapped. He dropped the other half with a yelp. I slid around him, too fast for him to dodge, and just kissed the crease of his left elbow with the blade. His arm jerked and his other sword fell, vanishing before it hit the bridge. “Annular and collateral ligaments,” I told him. “That’ll be hell on your tennis serve.”
The blade flicked out, down, sideways, taunting and tormenting him, too fast for him to dodge. “Nicked your carotid. And your saphenous vein. That was your kidney, there. How do you feel about a pierced lung? Oops, too late!”
He whisked away into a cloud of writhing black and gold filaments – his non-corporeal form. It surged and flowed like mist, trying to surround me.
“Funny how god anatomy is exactly the same as human,” I told him. “I had a lot of time to think about anatomy, you know – learn about it, learn about the human jailors who should have been my slaves – while I was trapped within my metal prison. A lot of time to imagine the battles I could have fought, the lives I could have ended. I could have
spent the last thousand years bathing in blood. If it weren’t for you.”
Wait. No.
“Shut up,” I said savagely. “I don’t have to listen to you any more. Now, Izanagi, just a word to the wise: you can hang about in your cloud form for as long as you like, but you won’t heal. And you won’t be able to escape me. Your lovely zombie wife still has thirty minutes of cage-time left. I wonder how many chunks I can carve you into before her time is up?”
A knotted rope of black and gold shot out of the vaporous cloud of Izanagi’s power, its end sharpening into a gleaming spear-point. I caught it left-handed, an inch from my heart.
“Ah ah ah! I can’t have you damaging my nice new body now – not when I’ve just broken it in.”
A tortured scream echoed out of the coruscating blot of Izanami’s power as I chopped the black and gold rope in two. The spear-point dissolved in my grasp and re-formed into a severed hand. The other end of the rope spurted dark liquid as it snapped back, withdrawing into the darkness. The black and gold cloud shrank into itself, boiling upwards off the bridge to hover just under the top of the red lightning cage.
“Ooh, that must have stung.” I giggled. I considered the severed hand for a moment. “Should I keep this as a souvenir?”
This is sick. Stop torturing him. Just end it! Finish him off!
“Why should I?” I asked, smiling. “I’m going to play with him. I’m going to enjoy it. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me, mortal child.”
Izanami’s voice wailed up through the gaping hole in the bridge. “Do it! Do it now! Return him to me!”
“You shut up, too!” I yelled back. “I don’t take orders from you. I don’t take orders from anyone. Wreck this wretched world if you like – devour it all. I don’t care.”
No. I didn’t give my life for this. Shinobu didn’t give his. We’re supposed to end this and save everyone.
