by Travis Bughi
“Would you rather I not tell you what a ninja is?” he asked.
“Of course not!”
Takeo let his head roll back to rest against the tree. Emily shuffled again and checked her arrows, making sure they would not be disturbed.
“Ninjas are Juatwa’s homegrown sellswords, so to speak. They are the opposite in every way to a samurai. They accept anyone into their ranks, if you can find them, including even farmers and ronin, while the rank of a samurai is a caste one must be born into. They fight for money or for personal gain, whatever suits them. Some use the training to protect their families, but those tend to be a rare breed. Most form clans that act like a sort of business. They perform assassinations, professional thievery, or even espionage. Openly, they are shunned by the daimyo, and their ways are considered outlawed. In practice, the daimyo are the ones who most frequently hire ninjas to perform the dirty work they don’t want to be linked to.”
“That doesn’t sound like any warrior I’ve ever heard of,” Emily said, “except pirates, perhaps.”
“Ninjas are fighters, in their own way, set apart from every other warrior in the world by one thing: subtlety. Have you ever noticed, Emily, how little regard every other warrior gives subtlety?”
Emily shook her head, her hair brushing against the bark.
“Pirates are about as close to ninjas as you’re going to get,” Takeo said. “Thieving and backstabbing, I mean. However, for the ninjas, thieving and backstabbing are an art, not a hobby. They take it seriously, mastering stealth and trickery with the kind of dedication you amazons show archery. They are silent and quick. If you see or hear one coming, it’s because you were meant to. You’ll only see their weapons the moment before they strike. There could be ninjas filling the trees all around us right now, and if they were true ninjas, we’d never know it.”
“They sound scary,” Emily commented, her eyes scanning the trees with renewed energy.
“Parents often use stories of ninjas to frighten their children away from playing in the forest,” Takeo said. “Lei, however, was encouraged by the stories. He wanted to be a warrior so badly, but he wasn’t born a samurai. It was something I teased him about because I was a child and I didn’t know the cruelty of what I was doing. He had a strong will, though, and he always told me that one day he’d best even me in combat. I still remember waving goodbye to him when Okamoto took me off to swear allegiance to Katsu.”
“So, Mako didn’t give you the idea, then,” Emily said. “She just confirmed what you expected?”
He nodded.
“So, how do you know the ninjas are this way?” Emily tilted her chin in the direction they traveled.
“Do you remember when I told you about my past, and I said Okamoto hid us among a clan of ninjas? This is where they were.”
“And you’re certain Lei went to these ones? They are that easy to find? I thought these ninjas were secretive.”
“Oh, they are.” He waved. “We probably won’t find them. They keep moving and cover their tracks. It’s entirely possible Lei never found them either. For all I know, he’s nothing but a skeleton in these woods, providing life to one of these trees, having been hunted down by a komainu or a gashadokuro.”
“A gashadokuro?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he said. “But for now, the ninjas. Yes, we won’t find them. Even if they’ve returned to this place, they’ll be hidden and their camp camouflaged. Our only hope is that they’ll find us, and if we are stalking their old grounds, they will. They keep eyes on things like that, preferring to know when someone is after them and then approaching on their own terms. So we’ll travel this way to where I last remember them being, and there we’ll wait.”
“For how long?” Emily said.
“As long as it takes. If Lei is with them, hopefully, that won’t be long. Then again, he might not be, and they’ll want our weapons and slit our throats in the night.”
Emily froze.
“But that’s rather unlikely,” he finished.
“Still not comforting,” she muttered.
“Next time, just go to sleep.”
Chapter 8
Emily dreamed of being a colossus. It was a familiar dream—one that came and went, but always felt more real than any dream had a right to be—and she would always remember it clearly when she woke up, as if she had been conscious the entire time.
In the dream, she neither moved nor spoke. She was a colossus: a huge statue of stone more than ten times taller than any human. She knelt between two other colossi outside Lucifan, all three facing west. She looked down, saw the morning sunlight illuminating the yellow grass far beneath her, and did absolutely nothing.
She didn’t move. She didn’t shift. Not a single thing ever happened. It was calming, boring, and frustrating all at the same time.
When Emily awoke, she told Takeo that it happened again before they’d even left the tree.
“Another one?” he asked, stretching his weary muscles. “What is that, now? Seven days since the last one?”
“Eight,” Emily corrected.
“And still nothing?” he asked.
“I don’t move, I don’t speak, I don’t even think,” she said. “It makes no sense.”
Emily had been having these dreams on and off since she had met a jinni in Savara. It had been a trap, that meeting, carefully setup by the jinni with the intention of taking something valuable from within Emily’s mind. As to what that was, Emily still had no idea. All she knew was that about once a week, she would dream of being a colossus kneeling outside Lucifan.
She remembered the colossi fondly. There were only three of them in the world. They were created by the angels long ago when they founded Lucifan to protect the city from outside foes, but they had never been used for that purpose. Their mere presence had been enough to deter all such invaders throughout Lucifan’s entire existence.
Now, though, they did nothing. They knelt outside Lucifan, facing west, and Emily could only wonder what fate held for them.
“You’re still certain it’s not the angel?” Takeo asked.
Emily sighed. “Quartus is dead, and besides, even if he was reaching to me from beyond the grave, I’d know it was him. He has used dreams to communicate with me before, and I know that feeling. This is similar, this feeling of my mind shifting, but it’s not him. He’d be in my mind if he were alive. This, though, it’s like I’m being pulled out and away. I don’t know what to make of it, and if you’re implying it’s another angel doing this, it’s not. The only angel left is Ephron, and he can speak. He wouldn’t be communicating in riddled dreams.”
“Alright, I get it,” Takeo replied. “We’ll rule out communication from a divine being.”
He spoke calmly, like they were casually hypothesizing about whether or not it would rain. Emily appreciated that he took her word for just about everything concerning this matter. She thought she sounded crazy sometimes, but if Takeo felt the same way, he never betrayed it. He remained patient, which was a feeling she found difficult to mimic. Rather than share his placid attitude, Emily often raged at the lingering mystery of how and why the jinni had lured her.
She released her restless frustration by jumping out of the tree.
“Whatever is causing this dream has something to do with Quartus giving his life to me. Yes, I know that,” she repeated, mostly to herself, “but I don’t know what it is. For all I know, it could be nothing.”
Takeo climbed out of the tree before brushing off some leaves that had become attached to his kimono. He checked his katana and then opened up the pack of smoked meat he’d taken. Emily drew her knife, and the two cut portions of breakfast for themselves.
The meat was a light orange color with white, parallel lines running through it, and that made Emily hesitate. Nearly all the meat she’d ever eaten had been red. She watched Takeo take a large bite without hesitation, and so she did so as well. She found the stuff to be surprisingly soft, rather mild, and dis
tinctly fishy.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Kappa,” he explained. “They are like small komainu that dwell in large rivers and along the coast: four legs, about the size of a small child, scaly, and with a long tail. They are some of the least vicious things that live in Juatwa—somewhat tasty with the right sort of seasoning.”
Emily looked at the kappa meat in her hand and decided to agree with that. Her growling stomach was also in concurrence, and she finished her breakfast on the go as they continued their journey deeper into the woods.
“So, now, back to the colossus,” Takeo said. “You need not be so hard on yourself. We both know there’s something going on, and I know a jinni in Savara who will agree with me. It might just be that we’ll have to start looking for answers outside of your dreams.”
“And how will we do that?”
“Not the slightest clue,” he answered, “but it’s the only thing we haven’t tried.”
Emily gave a heavy sigh but offered no insight. After thinking about this same subject many times before, she was growing tired of running in circles.
Now, however, her mind was stuck on the colossus and, by extension, Lucifan and her homeland far, far to the west. It had been so long since she’d seen the Great Plains—roughly a year now—that she was beginning to miss certain things about it.
For one, she had never really appreciated the comfort of consistency. Life on the Great Plains had been a never-ending circle of repetition. Every day was the same: get up, work on the farm, fix what was broken, prepare food, eat, and sleep. It was just as dull as it sounded, and an entire lifetime of such a routine had driven Emily and her brothers to voraciously seek out a life of activity. Her older brother, Abraham, was a gunslinger back home. He stood in front of charging behemoths and attempted to shoot them dead before they could trample him. It was dangerous work for behemoth hide was so thick it deflected bullets, and only the beasts’ eyes were vulnerable.
Emily’s younger brother was a viking. He traveled with a clan of hardened warriors who sought battle with the fiercest foes for the highest stakes. They robbed from the rich and powerful, and they sought death in battle as an eternal reward. It was terrifying to think about, really, knowing that at any moment, either one or both of Emily’s brothers could be dead, and she might not know for years, perhaps decades.
It gave her a small taste of what her mother must be going through.
Emily attempted to shake that thought from her mind, but it was too late. A twinge of guilt caught in her heart, and Emily pictured her mother lying in her bed at night, wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for her children to come home. It was enough to make Emily frown and her throat tighten, and she reaffirmed her promise to visit home when she could. It was the best that she could do, because although she felt guilty, Emily never questioned her purpose anymore.
She would end Heliena and her husband, Katsu, by any means necessary.
There was once a time when she considered ending her pursuit of Heliena. Emily had, quite literally, followed the wicked woman from one end of the world to the other, risking life and limb to both avenge Chara and stop Heliena’s plans, whatever they may be. It had been her promise to Quartus—the entire reason he’d sacrificed his life for her—and she’d felt bound by both destiny and passion to fulfil that goal.
However, still she’d wondered.
Quartus was dead, and she had not had the chance to ask him just how deep into this tunnel of revenge she should travel. She’d sacrificed much for this goal, not just her own life, but the lives of others. Minotaurs, knights, amazons, and even pirates had perished in their assistance of her, and she felt the guilt acutely at times. She thought about those deaths and wondered if Quartus had intended them or understood that more sacrifices would need to be made beyond his own. Emily wondered these things often, staying awake some nights, searching to determine his will and hoping that she had not become a herald of death in her pursuit of Heliena.
And then Emily had met Takeo, and all of that had changed.
Not when she’d first met him, though. They’d been enemies then, and discussion had been in short supply. He’d tried to kill her and nearly succeeded. However, the thought of him today as anything other than a trusted friend was so foreign that Emily didn’t even consider that encounter her first meeting with Takeo. No, she considered her first meeting with him to be in Savara when they had escaped the clutches of a rakshasa together. They had learned that they both sought the same thing, and Takeo had imparted upon her a piece of the puzzle she hadn’t known she’d been trying to solve.
Quartus didn’t just intend for Emily to stop Heliena; he intended for her to save Lucifan.
Emily had always wondered what benefit Katsu received for aiding in the assassination of the angels. The best she had ever come up with was that he would receive special tax breaks for goods he shipped into Lucifan. It seemed largely inadequate compensation at the time, but then again, what did she know? She’d been too busy trying to halt Count Drowin’s takeover of Lucifan to be concerned about what some shogun far to the east was up to. It seemed Count Drowin had been too focused, too, for the clever vampire had never known that Katsu was secretly playing them all.
When the angels left Lucifan, the colossi stopped patrolling the city. They went outside, knelt, and moved no more. With this, the Knight’s Order, which was nothing more than a policing force when last Emily left Lucifan, became Lucifan’s only protection against outside forces. The Order would never stand a chance against an invading army like that of a powerful shogun from Juatwa.
Takeo and his brother had been a part of this plan before Katsu had exiled one and Heliena had killed the other. Takeo remembered well Katsu’s ambitions plans and had explained them in detail over their journey to Juatwa. Katsu wanted not just to sack Lucifan, but to put its people to the sword and burn the place to the ground. Doing so would grant Katsu the vast wealth of a rich city, but more importantly, it would eliminate the world’s largest trading hub. With Lucifan gone, the next most stable ports of trade were in Juatwa, and Katsu hoped to secure himself as the ruler of the entire province.
The Katsu dynasty would be built by blood and sustained by gold. The plan was ambitious, ruthless, and absolutely cunning. It was well on its way to working, too, and the only hiccup Katsu faced was that Quartus had seen it coming.
Emily could not be sure how Quartus had found out, or why he had put all his faith in her, but neither question needed an answer. Surprisingly, sleep came easier after Takeo told her all of this. Somehow, knowing her actions carried weight beyond her selfish desire for revenge brought a soothing chill to the fire that had once plagued her.
That, and she was no longer alone.
Her eyes flickered to Takeo at that thought. He caught the movement and tilted his head to meet her gaze. She smiled, and he smirked back.
Yes, she thought. It’s good not to be alone anymore.
All her life, at least until she’d left to pursue Heliena across the sea, she’d been surrounded by family and friends, but six long months living amongst strangers—pirates at that—followed by another month as a slave had taught her what a comfort that previous life had been. She’d gotten more out of this adventure than she’d ever bargained for, and doing it alone had been harrowing.
She still felt like she’d only just met Takeo, but he was growing on her every day. His confidence and strength seemed never ending, and she’d come to rely on both. With him, she was reminded of how she’d felt around Adelpha, the amazon queen who was her best friend and quasi sister. Takeo, though, was easier to talk to.
“So, are you going to offer any suggestions?” Emily asked.
“Suggestions on what, exactly?” he asked back.
“My, well, dreams, of course. Whatever you want to call them really—or it. It could be an it. I’m not really sure at this point.”
Takeo looked at her again and narrowed one eye.
She frown
ed. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Oh, I know what you’re referring to,” he said. “I just don’t know what you expect me to do about it. I’m not the one who’s had an angel and a jinni in my mind.”
“Trust me, even if you did, it wouldn’t help you to better understand my dreams. I’m running out of ideas of what they could mean, and I could use a new perspective. Just lend me a hand here and tell me what you think. Anything to get me headed in a new direction.”
Takeo rolled his tongue across his teeth and glanced up into the forest canopy. Emily looked, too, but if Takeo saw answers written there, she did not. A few moments of silence took over as they trudged through the forest and Takeo pondered Emily’s questions.
“You said you’ve felt something like this before,” he said.
Emily nodded. “I have—similar, anyway.”
“So this is new, then. When did you very first have this new feeling, or whatever you want to call it?”
Emily’s first reaction was to say when she reached Savara and had her first dream, but that wasn’t quite right. A lingering memory told her it hadn’t started with a dream at all. It had been when she almost drowned just off of Savara’s coast. She’d had a vision of flowing yellow grass just before she’d blacked out.
Just as quickly as that realization hit, so did another, and she remembered her last time in Lucifan. When she’d touched one of the colossi, her vision had exploded into white light, and her mind had been tugged rather than pushed. That had been the first, she realized, and she told Takeo about it.
He shrugged. “Well then, that settles it.”
“It does?”
“This . . . what are we going to call this, anyway? We really need a name.”
“Just call it my dream.”
“Dream, then. Sure, your dream.” Takeo paused as they came before a thick grove of trees and he had to sweep aside some hanging vines. “It has something to do with the colossus you touched.”
Emily followed Takeo into the throng, and they began to wedge between the tightly packed trees.
