Path of the Divine

by Harmon Cooper

  “Agreed. A warmer climate is a must. It’s better for our brains.”

  He turned toward the cave. “I suppose it is time that we wake Sona.”

  “Do you think she’ll try to fight us?”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Sona Awakes

  “Just be ready,” Lhandon said as he took a step closer to Sona, who was still resting on her side.

  “So you’re going to wake her, huh?” Roger asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to keep her asleep?”

  “It would,” I told the bird, “but we may need her help, and she’s going to have to wake up at some point.”

  “This should do it,” Lhandon said as he finished tracing up a character, stepping away as it lightly dissipated over her body. Sona blinked her eyes open and sat up immediately, a confused look on her face as she glanced from the monk to the bird, and finally to me.

  “You are one of the escaped slaves,” she said, her eyes narrowing on my face.

  “Not even a thank you?” Roger asked.

  “And why is that bird here?”

  “That bird’s name is Roger, he’s a friend of mine,” I said.

  “Where’s my weapon?”

  “I have it,” Lhandon told her, showing her the blade.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Hold on a moment,” I said, my hand coming to the hilt of the Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom. “We have saved your life, and more importantly, we aren’t looking for a fight. If that’s your intention, then we might as well just end this here.”

  A curious smile with a hint of depravity to it stretched across her face. “It’s true, you did save me from the treasure hunters. So for that reason, and that reason alone, I will spare your life. For now. I’m in no position to fight, plus there are three of you.”

  “She actually considers me an opponent?” Roger cackled. “She’s smarter than she looks.”

  “And you can understand this bird, right?”

  I nodded at her. “But no one else can.”

  “How do you know that you aren’t crazy?”

  I shrugged. “I really don’t know that I’m not crazy, but I do know this bird saved my life, and he sort of saved yours too. So have some respect for him.”

  “Very well,” she said, slowly standing. She brought her hands over her chest, shivering.

  “You aren’t really dressed for the mountains,” Lhandon told her.

  “Normally, it doesn’t matter what I wear because of the sword that you’ve stolen from me,” she explained.

  “It gives you an inner warmth?” Lhandon asked, looking at the covered weapon in his hands.

  “It does. What else were you expecting from the Mummified Hand of Dolma?”

  I drew my blade, flames igniting, shedding light on the far corners of the cavern. “Hand her the blade back,” I instructed Lhandon.

  He nodded, coming forward with the weapon in both hands, bowing his head slightly as he offered it to Sona.

  I wanted to tell him to take a step back, that he was completely at her mercy.

  But Sona didn’t swing at him.

  She merely took the weapon, pink energy radiating from it and spreading down her arms, covering her body. The woman took a deep, satisfied breath.

  “I missed you,” she whispered to the blade.

  “We don’t know where the sheath is,” Lhandon said. I still had my flaming weapon drawn, just in case she decided to try something.

  And for a moment I thought that was her intent, especially when she flourished the blade, bringing it back, a cocoon rippling down to the tip of the sword.

  She placed it on her waist and it stuck.

  “The weapon is alive,” she explained. “And I am its master. I see that you now have the Flaming Thunderbolt.”

  “I do,” I said, slowly starting to lower my own weapon into its sheath.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that you are someone else’s property,” she told me. “And in that case, that blade belongs to Madame Mabel, you’re just using it temporarily.”

  “I thought we already went over this,” I told her, annoyed yet slightly intrigued by the woman. She commanded a power unlike any I had seen before, that was for sure, but something told me she was toxic, that she was a snake in waiting. “I am nobody’s goddamn slave.”

  “Are you suggesting that you would like to buy your freedom?”

  “Do you want me to stab her?” Roger asked. “I don’t like the way that she’s talking to you. Something’s off here, Nick, I can sense it. I’m sure your monk friend can sense it as well.”

  I shook my head at the bird. “I have some gold, so I suppose I could buy my freedom with that,” I said, referring to the money that I’d taken off the treasure hunters. “But to be frank: I was illegally sold into captivity, and no human should be held captive in my opinion anyway.”

  “Are you suggesting a liberation of sorts? Because if you are, I will have to end this now.”

  Sona lowered her hand to her blade. I heard Roger flutter near me, landing near his dagger and wrapping his claws around its hilt. “I’ll fucking do it, Nick, just give me the word.”

  “You won’t be able to take all three of us,” I told her. “Plus there are other things in these mountains that we are affiliated with that won’t take too kindly to you if you win.”

  She kept her hand on the hilt of her weapon, a pink energy radiating off her hand.

  “Do you feel like you’ve cultivated enough karma to die here?” I asked her.

  “I don’t cultivate karma, I cultivate something else,” she said, smiling at Lhandon. The monk shuddered and I saw his fingers twitch as if he were prepared to trace something up.

  “Rather than kill each other, how about you introduce me to Madame Mabel? I’m not a slave, and not many people know who I am anyway, so I think you could overlook that, especially considering the fact that we have saved you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’m not from here. I mean that in every sense of the word. I’m not from the Underworld, I’m not from the Overworld, and I am not from anywhere that you have heard of on the Middle Plane. I’m from a different world entirely, a world called Earth, from a country called America, and a state called Massachusetts, if you can believe that.”

  “Those words mean nothing to me.”

  “And they mean everything to me, which is why I want to meet with Madame Mabel. I have a few friends here that may or may not be alive. One of them is already in your employ.”

  “You are familiar with Sir Evan?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “Yes, and I don’t know why you are calling him sir.”

  “That is how he introduced himself.”

  I shook my head, trying not to curse under my breath. “I need to have a few words with him,” I told her. “In fact, if you must know, he’s one of the reasons I was sold into slavery.”

  Sona relaxed her posture a little, her hand no longer near the hilt of her sword.

  “I came here with four other men, and Evan was one of them. We all came at the same time but got lost because of a number of things, including a sea dragon.” I shook my head, recalling all of it. “Anyway, I helped a family of bandits rid themselves of an evil spirit, and for my troubles they poisoned me. They planned to sell me into slavery, and on our way to the city, we ran into Evan with one of your patrols. He claimed to not know me, and that’s how I became a slave. Had he claimed to know me, all this might have turned out differently. We might not be standing in this cave right now.”

  “And if you know Evan, then you must know Bobby,” she said.

  My eyes went wide, my heart skipping a beat. “You’ve heard from Bobby?”

  “He has taken a role as an alchemist for Madame Mabel. He knows things about alchemy, about what he calls the natural sciences, that most of us had never seen before. He has a device, a small black rectangle with living images inside. I’ve only seen it once, but it was miraculous,
unlike anything in this world.”

  “A smartphone,” I told her with a grin.

  “You know of this object?”

  “I think it’s safe to say that you should consider me, Bobby, and unfortunately Evan as aliens from a futuristic world. We may not have magic and runes and mythological weapons, but we do have the technology, and Bobby knows a lot about that kind of stuff. Always did.”

  “So you’re related to these two men.”

  “Not Evan, we’re not related; Bobby is an old friend of mine. Have there been any other outsiders that you have heard of?” I asked her, trying to hide the hope in my voice. “A man named Hugo, or Tom?”

  “No,” she said. “Just Bobby and Sir Evan.”

  “We can’t call him Sir Evan, just… just don’t call him that. Trust me there. Why would you let him into your ranks anyway?”

  “He has a mind for strategy that we have come to appreciate. The other two baronesses of the Kingdom of Lhasa, especially Madame Blanche, are always looking for war. This was one reason I was in the mountains, on my way to Mongar to secure winter elephants, when the treasure hunters came for me. Madame Blanche’s forces have been spotted in the Cultivation Hills digging up old spirits. It was my goal to stop them from doing so.”

  “Fascinating,” Lhandon said.

  “And these other baronesses are huge landowners like Madame Mabel?” I asked both of them.

  “They are,” said Lhandon. “But Madame Darwina and Madame Mabel have an agreement of sorts, Mabel providing lotus and food for Darwina’s miners in exchange for minerals. It’s relatively easy to ship food supplies up the Dorje River to Mongar.”

  “Which has angered Madame Blanche,” Sona added.

  “To think that the three women pretty much own Lhasa, yet they are still at war with each other is beyond me,” Roger commented. “This is why I hate humans sometimes. You people can never get enough. I mean, how rich is Madame Mabel? What does she need with minerals? Why does she need slaves? And this isn’t even considering the other two, who are equally bad.”

  “The bird has a point,” I said.

  “We can’t understand the bird,” Sona reminded me.

  “That’s too bad, he’s quite clever. Well, in that case, and in light of all this, I still would like to meet Madame Mabel, and speak to Bobby. In fact, I would like to speak to Bobby before I meet her, but I’m feeling it would be proper to go through her first, correct?”

  Sona nodded.

  “Is that something that we can make happen here? Can we forget the fact that I was ever a slave and treat me as an outsider, as you have Bobby and Evan?”

  “In the end, that may not be up to me,” she finally said. “The truth will come out sooner or later. It always does.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Cat Men and their Cargo

  The path down was easy at some points, and more difficult at others, especially when it came to crossing crevices and wading our way through a few of the deeper gorges, the snow up to our waists.

  Sona’s inner warmth seemed to be working.

  No matter how much snow we came into contact with, she never once seemed cold, even though her skin was exposed.

  This made me think that there was more to her armor than met the eye, that maybe just as the sheath had formed, the armor also formed when she was attacked, that it was symbiotic in a way.

  And if this was the case, it only made her more deadly.

  Roger chatted with me along the way, telling me about some of his journeys, again going over his story about how he had taken Evan’s eye out and possibly adding a little hyperbolic flare to the story, especially the part where he claimed Evan screamed like a sissy and shat his pants.

  Lhandon never said much, mostly trying to keep up, the portly monk red-faced by the time we came upon a group of cat-men guiding a pair of mules pulling a big cart.

  “In the name of Madame Mabel, I demand you allow me to inspect your cargo,” Sona said, stepping forward with her hand on the hilt of her weapon. She commanded attention, that was for sure, but the men before her weren’t quite convinced.

  “Or we could just let them go…” Roger suggested. He was tucked in my robes, his head near my neck.

  These men weren’t like the lion people, not like Saruul; no, these guys resembled the big cat-man I had fought just before becoming a slave, the one with the young girl and her chain. If what Lhandon had told me was correct, they hailed from the Forbidden City of Trongsa, one of the independent municipalities of the Kingdom of Lhasa.

  They towered over the rest of us, each of them easily five heads taller than me, with sculpted muscles and sharp faces, the four of them not budging an inch at Sona’s demand.

  “You’re pretty far away from Nagchu,” the leader of the group finally said. “Madame Mabel or not, this shipment doesn’t concern you. It would be best for you to leave now before we have to show you just how much the shipment doesn’t concern you.”

  Sona drew her blade, energy radiating over her hand. “This is your last warning, Cat. Open up your cargo and let me inspect it. The treaty between Madame Mabel and Madame Darwina warrants an inspection. If that cargo is heading for Cultivation Hills, I will be forced to confiscate it.”

  “Here we go,” Roger said. “I hope you’re ready to use that flaming sword of yours.”

  “Shit,” I whispered as I lowered my hand to the hilt of my weapon.

  The big cat-man grinned. “It’s funny how demanding you people can be out here in the middle of nowhere, where all you have in terms of protection are two lowly monks.”

  The other three men chuckled at his statement.

  “Perhaps there is another way for us to handle this dispute,” Lhandon said, taking a step forward. “The head of Madame Mabel’s elite guard is simply looking for a quick inspection, then you may be on your way. If you aren’t harboring anything illegal, and if you aren’t heading to Cultivation Hills, then you have nothing to worry about. Am I to understand this correctly, Sona?”

  She nodded, not taking her dark eyes off the men.

  “You know, you’d be a little more intimidating if you had your sword girls to back you up. But by yourself, and with these two…” the leader of the cat-men snorted.

  One of his ears was pierced, and as he threw his head back to laugh, Sona shot forward, slicing his ear off and returning to where she had just stood, the pierced ear dangling between her fingers.

  “It seems I have your attention now,” she said.

  The other cat-men drew scimitars, startling the mules. Everyone’s attention turned to me when I brandished my sword, its flames igniting.

  “Let her inspect your cargo, or face the consequences,” I said, in as steady of a voice as I could muster.

  I had already fought one of these men before, one who was a bit clumsy.

  I wasn’t interested in seeing what four of them with more training were capable of, especially as they seemed to possess catlike agility with superhuman strength.

  “That got their attention,” Roger said, still tucked in my robe. “And if you’re planning to really fight them, let me know so I can get the hell away from here.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I told him out of the corner of my mouth, my blade still trained on the first man, who touched his bloody ear, a dazed look on his face.

  “Your cargo,” Sona said, tossing his ear to the ground, “or more of your ears. Which will it be?”

  “As you wish.” Their leader growled as he made his way around the two mules, to the large cart that they were pulling. Letting go of his bloody ear stump, he unfastened the rope, the other three men with their blades still trained on us.

  From there he removed the tarp, revealing a series of…

  Coffins?

  “Have at it,” the cat-man said, popping open the first coffin.

  A dwarf with rotting flesh sprang out.

  More of the coffins popped open, and the dwarf was joined by a variety of partially decomposed fighters, from the
reptilians I’d seen in Nagchu to an elven woman who held two broken blades.

  The mules tried to kick away, and one of the zombies immediately leaped onto the creature and sank its teeth in.

  “Madame Blanche’s necrotic magic,” Lhandon said, starting to back away. “I did not know that she was able to…”

  “How do you know it’s her?”

  “There are things I just know,” he said, his voice tinged with fear, “things that the Exonerated One told me. And I’m from Bamda, remember. But she finally was able to?”

  “Apparently,” I said, stepping in front of Lhandon. “Stay back, and keep Roger with you.” I loosened my collar, letting Roger escape.

  Sona charged forward with her blade, stopping short of attacking the first zombie.

  She sent a bolt of pink energy at it instead, jumping in time to avoid one of the cat-men. She pressed off the back of his head with her foot and flipped in the air, swiping at the zombie dwarf and taking his head off.

  I came forward as well, settling my breath as I swung my Flaming Thunderbolt at one of the zombies. I cut it from the shoulder down across his torso, the monster screaming out as the top half of his body slid downward.

  One of the cat-men came at me, lifting his curved blade into the air, and time slowed at the very last moment, allowing me to sidestep it, bring my free hand back and send a rippling energy shooting forward that connected with his upper back.

  As he fell forward I drove my blade into his back, practically guiding him to the ground as his body ignited.

  Time now at its normal pace again, I met the blade of another cat-man. I shoved him forward and sunk my blade into his abdomen, the flames engulfing his body even as he tried to claw me with his free hand.

  But the fire was too much for him to handle. Screaming at the top of his lungs, the man leaped to the snow, trying to cool himself.

  More of the zombies lunged for me; one of them met my free fist, power oscillating all around my knuckles as I delivered a blow that knocked its teeth out, blood spraying into the air as my punch rippled through its face.