by David Parkin
Sato’s master had taught him that “Pain was nothing more than the body endeavoring to right a wrong.” As he wrestled with this thought, a sudden flash of white agony shot across the samurai’s vision and forced him to fight back. Like the cold hand of death pushing though the door, the demon thrashed against Sato’s chi and forced his eyes open again.
At once the pain rebounded, now with the heavy yolk of nausea riding on its back. “Poison,” the master deduced as his hands and feet began tingling like glowing fireflies through the swamplands. Sato battled against his own body’s instinct to give in as he picked up his sword and forced his legs to move against the reeds.
The grass felt suddenly heavy and sharp like katana blades. Finally, he made it through the foliage and stumbled into the fields below the base of the Broken Mountain. The samurai hit the blackened ground searching for something familiar, but the bright green fields he remembered had changed, streaked with stalks of dead and dying grass like the inside of a tree burned out by lightning.
As Sato looked to the black water flowing past his shoulders, he remembered the last time he stepped foot on the green fields; it had been while perusing Kyodai. His cave was just to the north, inside the same canyon giving birth to the disease surrounding him.
As the pain swelled the master’s quest suddenly became clear: the cave in which he had left his old student had somehow been found by his only daughter. A coincidence maybe, but knowing Kyodai, Sato had just stumbled into a plot for revenge ten years in the making.
In the distance, a strange black whirlwind erupted from the canyon, carving a high arc through the yellowing sky. The master closed his eyes, searching for a quiet place among the anger and pain fighting to consume him.
Through the darkness, he found a small empty frame, a blue fire burning like a lighthouse through a storm. Sato moved through the tempest to embrace it and the cool dry flame consumed him somehow, opening the never once more and quieting the dragon’s breath that screamed down his throat.
SATO HAD AWAKENED in the black cavern with the chill of the cold earth biting against his back. He was shackled to the walls of the familiar cave in which he had been held prisoner for weeks if not months, the same cave in which he found Kyodai all those years ago. In the place of the silent blackness that had once filled the cavern, torchlight revealed the shimmering edges of the wet walls and the sounds of whispers, footsteps, and, for the first time since Sato arrived, the silhouette of an old man standing over him in the dark.
“I was wondering when you’d show, Kyodai,” Sato said with a voice that hadn’t been used in all this time.
“Since the moment we met, you were unbreakable,” the shadow answered. “Your code, your family, the endless stories. Now, I have broken them all and you don’t even know it yet.”
The master trained his eyes on the slate floor beneath his knees. He remembered the crystal water seeping in from the rocks, but a stream of the strange obsidian poison bled through the slate in its stead pumped as if from the rotten core of a witch’s heart.
Slowly, Sato tilted his line of sight toward his captor. Oni, as he was now referred to, seemed to have aged a lifetime since last they met. The sharp eyes Sato remembered stared down at him as pure white spheres, sunken into dark bags hanging from the poisoned wizard’s cheeks. His robes were black as tar and writhed about his shoulders as if blown by an unseen wind.
“You remember when last we met,” Oni mused between a set of long mustaches growing in two tendrils from the corners of his mouth. “Leave it to my old master to turn a glob of spittle into his best-known story.”
Sato stayed his words. Any effort to communicate would have no meaning to a heart this black. With the rusted movements of an old man, Oni reached a bony hand to the wall over Sato’s head and caressed the chips in the slate they had carved with their swords a decade ago.
“That day,” he continued, “after you walked away, I stood in the darkness and cursed you. I didn’t understand why the voice of this cave brought me here just to fail but then . . .” Oni looked to a small shrine of carved jade on the slate ground before him, “. . . there it was,” he said. As Oni relived the memory, he bent to pick up an imaginary object, inspecting it as if each of his very ancestors stood across the bridge of his thumb. “A worm,” he continued, “fallen from the jade box.”
Suddenly, a deep guttural roar thundered through the chamber, shaking the very ground on which Sato knelt. “And that’s when my master called,” Oni continued, unaffected by the sound.
The wizard picked up a torch and approached a dark passage hidden in shadows behind him. The firelight revealed a greasy stalactite, dripping the dark poison onto a grotesque black worm the size of a house cat. The animal writhed and pulsated inside a wooden box as it produced a steady line of thin black silk, collected on a spindle. Beside it, an ancient black loom wove the fine silk into the same unholy textile shifting across Oni’s back. “Easy, my pet,” the poisoned assassin whispered as he ran a bony a finger across its skin.
Oni placed his torch in an iron shackle on the wall, revealing a naked man standing motionless in the darkness. He was Kaitian, a warrior judging by the scars on his chest and arms. Like Oni, the man’s eyes were white with dark veins stretching like mycelium across his face.
Despite his grotesque appearance, Sato felt sick when he realized that he knew the man. It was his old friend Ping, Captain of the Emperor’s Royal Guard. “The manta runs deep,” Oni boasted. “All who taste it join the shadow Ninja.”
“Except for me,” Sato said, erasing his old student’s grin from his wrinkled face.
Oni ignored the comment as he took a swatch of the dark cloth from the clacking loom. “Unfortunately, our pet works alone and the Shinobi, the few of us who wield its gifts, are scarce.”
Oni draped the fabric over Ping’s shoulders, and it suddenly came to life, pouring over the man like tar until it covered him completely, taking the form of a Ninja’s shozoko.
“Kill the emperor,” Oni commanded.
Without hesitation, the slave housed inside what was left of Ping’s body dissipated into a cloud of fog and shot from the cavern like the tail of a comet.
Sato froze. He thought of Akiko as he looked over the pit of despair in which he had found himself. He wasn’t yet sure how but he knew she was associated with this dark world.
Oni described the wearers of the living shozoko as few, the master thought as Sato’s old student disappeared into the darkness. All I can do now is beg our ancestors that Akiko isn’t one of them.
CHAPTER NINE
After the living wall of serpents spilled from the eastern rim of the basin, Ping watched each soldier under his command fall into the nest of writhing evil until the moistened fangs finally found him.
Since their first meeting, Akiko, the lonely-hearted Ninja, had proven herself time and time again as one who could be trusted, a warrior apart from the lair of wickedness from whence she hailed. As Ping lay among the gray bones of his ancestors, listening to the footsteps of his prisoners fade into the canyon, he found himself hoping his mark would succeed in that which he had fought so hard to prevent.
As the captain felt the backlash of his carelessness swallow him whole, he expected his mind to fade and his body to die. On the contrary, his consciousness shook and twitched as if the system of nerves controlling it lengthened, touching the minds of others with manta in their sinews, seeing through their eyes and feeling their pain.
For a moment, he was a pack of wolves pulsing through a misty wood on black paws and blacker instinct. He wasn’t just one but each dog, moving through the passing timber like the fingers, clawing for a frightened farmer.
As quickly as it came, the vision faded into the still surface of a rice paddy below him. Ping was an entire swarm of hornets, gliding over the red rice fields, searching for their next victim. He was a rampaging monkey tearing apart a terrified band of outlaws. He was a group of men in a starlit canyon, falling to the
arrows of a silent Ninja. Then, he was something huge submerged in a cold bath of manta.
He was a spider, a rabbit, a falcon, and suddenly he saw himself against a stroke of mist, wielding his onyx sword outside a sheep farm. These were the eyes of the witch, and Ping felt her fear as she faced him.
Whispers and thoughts of a wife and family wretched and burned through the captain’s visions, but as he grasped for them they ran like sprites into the woods, always just out of reach.
Then there was the torch fire dancing across the black and moistened walls of a dank cave where he stood naked in the darkness. Before him stood an old man with long dark robes who he somehow recognized.
A peculiar compulsion came over Ping as Oni picked up a swath of the strange black fabric worn by him and the witch. He burned with a desire to feel the silk against his skin and absorb its infinite potential. As Oni placed the black across Ping’s shoulders, he felt a sudden and terrifying sense of invincibility as the shifting cloth covered him in a cool and comfortable mantle. This was the source of the Shinobi’s power, and suddenly he understood their terrifying lust for darkness.
“No,” he fought back, “it took your body, don’t let it take your mind.”
As Oni gave an order, Ping felt the manta cut through his thoughts like a sharpened sickle. “Kill the emperor,” he heard, three words that burned though his chest like hot coals.
He tried again to resist, to shout Oni down, to tell him he’d rather die himself than obey such an order but it was the manta that answered back, throwing Ping’s body into a cramping pain that he longer had the strength to fight.
A moment later, he was in the air again, gliding over a dead canyon and the rippling foothills of the Dragon’s Tail. Like Kubaba, his body had dissipated into a fog. He felt the wind brush through each particle of him before the visions returned. He saw Shilo, Gishan, Signa, and the rest of his men as a sword in his hand carved through them one by one.
The Broken Mountain whipped past Ping as his mind coalesced with his body and he materialized in a dark chamber on the upper-most level of the Shattered Palace.
Across the rotten floor of the stateroom, he spotted Emperor Han standing in the shadows, looking out a broken window.
Ping recognized the room from the endless tapestries and paintings hanging in Pylo Palace. These were the quarters where the Emperors Mako and Kenji ended the infinite war.
The Shattered Palace, split by the ancient ones as punishment for the endless fighting of its people was the perfect setting for two tired men to come together to mend their fragmented kingdoms. Fifty years later, Ping stood in that very room against his will to kill the son of the peacemaker and start the fighting anew.
Ping struggled to call out to his friend and warn him of the danger, but no sound came from his lips. Instead, a dark tendril of silk from his robes coursed into the Shinobi’s fingers and solidified into a perfectly balanced blade.
“No,” he begged through his futile struggle to keep his feet planted, “there must be a better way.” Ping’s body didn’t so much as quiver as it eased its way toward his unarmed friend.
As Ping positioned his a poisoned saber, the emperor suddenly spoke. “Do you know what they said here that day?” He asked without taking his eyes from the moonlit landscape. Ping paused, whatever controlled him wasn’t expecting such honed perception from the emperor.
“Nobody knows what they said,” gargled an unrecognizable voice from Ping’s mouth.
“My father told me,” Han replied, “just before he died. Would you like to know?”
Ping cringed, afraid Han would recognize him. Without so much as a hint of fear or pleading, however, the emperor continued, “Each and every school in Kaito had described Bushan’s emperor as a monster who ate the flesh of babes with sharpened teeth and claws. However, as my father entered this room fifty years ago, he greeted nothing but a man who loved his home as much as any ruler could. My father stepped forward and told Emperor Kenji a story. He said that when he was young, he asked my grandfather why he hated Bushan.
“My grandfather had a long and detailed answer filled with the same propaganda my father had heard as a boy. Then he asked my grandfather why Bushan hated Kaito so much. . . and there was no answer.
“The day he became emperor, my father asked his advisors the same questions. They told him that the Bushanese were deviants who lived like animals. At that, Kenji stepped forward but my father held up his hand as a respectful request to let him finish.
“After such a description, my father asked his advisors if any of them had ever known anyone from Bushan. . . and they had no answer. He then asked, ‘If what the advisors of Pylo Palace knew of their enemy had only come from centuries of rumor, couldn’t the same be true of Bushan?’ Again, they had no answer.
“My father told Emperor Kenji that he had called that meeting in the center of the most brutal fighting in all of the Backbone to tell him, his mortal enemy, ‘Kenji,’ he said with tears running down his cheeks, ‘I do not hate you. Do you hate me?’ And again, there was no answer.
“Moments later, the two great men walked from this room together and the war was over.”
Ping sensed a growing confusion in the manta. “Why do you tell me this?” he heard himself ask again.
“I’m the only living soul who knows that story,” the emperor said. “If I don’t tell you, it would be lost forever. Maybe,” he concluded, “someone in the future will use those words to stop the war again.”
Ping tried to close his eyes as the manta pushed against him, but the evil inside wouldn’t spare him the pain in watching the poison-soaked blade in his hand sink deep into his best friend’s back.
As quickly as it happened, Ping was in the air again with pageants of darkened imagery dancing through his head. He saw Akiko in the back courtyard of her restaurant, fighting through tears to free herself from the darkness binding her to her to her past. He saw the shimmer of a sword in the hand of a floating monk, dressed in bright orange robes.
Suddenly, Ping caught his breath as he saw Han crawling across the cracked floor of the Shattered Palace. Ping’s cursed sword had infected the emperor with manta and now, the results of his own heinous act came back through the eyes and emotions of his victim.
Ping felt Han’s fear and his sorrow along with a desperate need to reach for something. All the captain could do now was root for his old friend as the most powerful man in both worlds struggled to his knees and reached for a torch on the wall.
Ping felt the emperor’s relief as he pulled the flaming cone from its stirrup and, with a final gasp for breath, fell through the open window beside it.
The captain felt the air rushing through Han’s robes as he fell from the top of the Shattered Palace with the flaming torch in his hand. As he descended, Han turned toward a large pyre of wood below, a warning beacon, a signal that, when lit, cued others across the Backbone to call the nation to war.
Ping watched through his adopted brother’s eyes. He suddenly froze when he felt Han look back. “Ping,” Han said.
“You knew it was me?” Ping asked through the course of magic connecting them. “I’m so sorry.”
“No sorrow,” the emperor said as the wood below rushed toward him in the night, “Now it’s my turn to take a whipping for you.”
A rush of emotion gripped the captain as the emperor’s body crashed into the oil-soaked wood, and the flames burst around him. “Rest easy,” he said, “this isn’t over yet.”
As he flew high over the basin, Ping watched the distant beacons light across the mountaintops, one after another until the manta spoke again, revealing Ping’s next mission.
“Good luck,” Ping taunted the evil inside him. “You have it in you to stab an unarmed man in the back, but now you have a war to fight, and you’re sending me to kill the greatest warrior the two worlds have ever known.”
To be continued…
PART V PREVIEW
Akiko had grown accustom
ed to fleeting glimpses of sleep that came to sudden, crashing halts. Even with friends and brothers surrounding her, it appeared this night was no different. The sudden noise that had woken her fired against impulses and threw her into a roll forward as Patrick’s saber collided with the blade of a dark assassin.
The shadow Ninja followed her movement and struck again. Akiko’s instincts made her reach for the sword on her belt but when she found her obo empty, the events of the previous days followed her into consciousness. After raiding the damaged supply cart, her strap, with a reserve of projectiles and other weapons, was back around her waist, but the Red Sword of Sato was nowhere to be found.
To defend herself, she pulled two throwing stars and caught a procession of the assassin’s attacks with the steel shuriken in the palms of her hands. As the fight progressed, Toji and Ozo leapt from their bedrolls and took their place at Akiko’s side.
The attacking Shinobi dissipated and reappeared across camp, shadowed in the purple light of the horizon as Patrick and Sendai joined the Ninja and her two brothers, facing the mysterious attacker.
“Kubaba?” Toji asked.
“No,” Akiko admitted, “this is someone new.”
Part V out on April 7th!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Parkin has been a writer and screenwriter for ten years. His graphic novel, The Devil is Due in Dreary was named by Crave Online as one of the top twenty comic books of the year in 2015 and is currently in development as a major motion picture. He has film and TV projects in various stages of development for many Hollywood production companies including Fox Television and Disney. He is also a writer and co-host for the fiction and audio drama podcast, The Junto Presents, available on iTunes and Stitcher.
