Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4)

by James A. Hunter

  FOURTEEN:

  Kung Fu Fighting

  In that moment, everyone stopped.

  Frozen by the crystalline sound of a thousand bells all singing in perfect resonance, all crying out golden light in a thousand little streams of tears. In that moment, the frenzied violence ceased, and the chaotic maneuvering was temporarily forgotten as we all watched the otherworldly spectacle, which I didn’t understand. The light ran over me in a warm trickle, pinpricks of refreshing energy filling my limbs with new purpose and renewed strength. Felt like I’d just slugged a cup of trucker joe after getting a solid night’s sleep. My back still hurt something fierce, but the ability to move was suddenly back on the table.

  A swirl of violent motion followed as the soft light settled over the Prophet and Darth-Bathrobe. One moment they were still, captivated like the rest of us by the light show extravaganza; the next, they were flying through the air, swept up on currents of gold, only to be smashed against the far wall near the entrance with a sickening thud that shook the room. Both men slid down into dual heaps as pinpricks of golden brilliance pulsed and shifted before eventually settling into the walls, which began to glow with a dull luminescence like polished bronze.

  “You three”—the monk turned toward me, then shifted his gaze to Darlene and Ferraro in turn—“though our time together was short, it was a most welcome blessing. You know where you must go. What you must do.” His gaze shifted to me and stayed there. Take the Seal, that look seemed to command.

  With muffled groans, the Prophet and Darth-Bathrobe gained their feet, and boy oh boy did they look pissed. Like someone had smashed them in the face with a pie, then pushed them down an -up-escalator. It was in the way they stood—backs arched, arms flexing, fists curled—their body language screaming I’m-about-to-feed-you-to-a-pack-of-hungry-hyenas.

  Despite his obvious anger, the Prophet ignored us for a moment, turning to regard the wide open entryway door, looking out onto the streets of Little Bangkok. Except now there was also a thin sheen of light standing guard between him and the exit. Carefully he extended his hand, pressing his fingers against the barrier, which didn’t give an inch. He exerted a hairsbreadth more pressure and suddenly there was a sizzle-crack like bacon frying in hot grease and he withdrew his digits with a muttered curse.

  “Cute,” he said, voice low and cold, which was somehow more threatening, more ominous, than his boisterous posturing had been. “But it’s not gonna stop me from ripping your limbs from your body, Abbot, and beating you to death with them.”

  “Perhaps not,” the monk replied, face calm, voice serene. “But it will prevent you from leaving for a time, I think, and that will serve my purpose.” He folded his hands behind his back and strode forward, placing himself squarely between the baddies and us. “This barrier is the temple’s defense system. Once triggered, no enemy of the temple may enter from without. Or leave, if they should find themselves within these walls. It will not last forever, but it will last long enough for these three to escape.”

  “You really mean to stop us, monk?” the Prophet spat. “I can be lenient, just give me what I want and you can walk away from here.” A crackle of energy, noxious and purple, seeped from his palm, tendrils of power crawling up his limb until his whole arm was wreathed in cool, purple flame.

  “Young man,” the abbot said, “Do not be naïve. Both of us know this encounter is destined to end in bloodshed. All is as it must be. Lachesis has allotted us this moment and Atropos waits, shears ready to clip my string, which you must surely see.” He tapped his nose and offered the kid a wink as though they shared some secret conspiracy. Oddly, the Prophet nodded in cryptic understanding, a slight inclination of his head.

  “Your death won’t stop me from getting what I want,” the Prophet replied, his voice dropping a few octaves into a guttural rasp as his skin waned, his eyes glowing with a soft violet light. “My associate can harvest the information we need directly from your corpse if it comes down to it.” His eyes flared brighter and brighter, casting his face in harsh, flickering shadow.

  “Last chance, abbot,” he said. “You don’t need to die here—Lady Fate or no. Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, fate is fluid. An ever flowing river with many branches. You’re going to throw your life away, and it won’t do a thing to stop me. Nothing. Your interference won’t even be a speed bump. Your death doesn’t serve me, so I’ll let you live unless you give me no other option. Don’t be a fool, Abbot, choose a different branch. Give me another option.”

  The monk shrugged, an unworried smile spreading across his lined face. “To some, young man—like the decrepit fae being dwelling in your body—death is a ravaging enemy to be feared, but that is foolishness. To one with wisdom, death is but another step on the road to enlightenment. Everything is mutable, everything appears and disappears as the ocean tide swells and recedes in turn.

  “There is no blissful peace until one passes beyond the agony of life and death. Perhaps today I will pass into the next world, but death cannot rob me of my good deeds.” He crouched, feet planted wide, legs nearly parallel with the deck, hands raised, palms open. A royally badass martial artist preparing to unleash Fists of friggin’ Fury. “I have stood watch over this temple for a thousand years,” he said, “and I shall watch over it one day longer—one last good deed to see me into the afterlife. And I think you will find a little fight left in these old bones.

  “There is a concealed door behind the Buddha statue,” the abbot said, speaking to me, eyes still firmly fixed on the intruders. “It leads to my living quarters. There, you will find a set of stairs descending to a prayer garden on the ground level. Go with the blessing of the Naga riding at your back. Go and do what you must. Save my master from himself. Take the Seal.”

  The abbot roared into abrupt motion as the final word left his mouth, charging forward so quickly it was hard to follow.

  As he moved, he changed.

  His human body, a masterfully crafted flesh-mask, evaporated as his true form bubbled up and out. Slim human arms gave way to thick muscled limbs, covered in bronze scales, and hands tipped with black claws. His torso expanded and lengthened, a massive barrel chest tapering down to a serpentine trunk, long as a city bus from head to whipping tail. His kind, grandfatherly face also disappeared, traded in for a velociraptor’s reptilian mug, framed by a thick leathery hood of multicolored scales—shimmering copper and gold, glittering ruby, brilliant sapphire.

  I knew we needed to go—the monk had made it clear that if we didn’t amscray, we’d all be dead—but my legs still weren’t fully operational, so I was having one helluva time getting to my feet. Plus, I’ll admit, there was some part of me that wanted to stay, to watch, to bear witness to the last stand of the Abbot of Wat Naga Thong. Who knew how long he’d walked the face of the earth? He’d overseen this temple for a thousand years. And today? Today was his last day.

  There was a sadness in that.

  This was the death of an institution, and with it came a profound truth: That everything ends in time. That everyone, one day or another, will face the gleaming steel of the Reaper’s blade. That the only real legacy you’ll have is the relationships and good deeds you filled those too-few days up with. It seemed wrong that no one should bear witness to the monk’s last stand, his last noble act.

  Not to mention, how often do you get to see a badass monk-monster go kung fu apeshit on a bunch of well-deserving baddies?

  The Naga-monk collided with the Prophet, feinting left, then ducking low and right, whipping around and smashing his tail into the Prophet’s stomach. The kid took the blow hard to the gut and flew backward, as though blasted from the barrel of a circus cannon, on a crash course with Darth-Bathrobe. The hooded asshole, however, was already moving, darting out of the way while he called up a vibrant green shield to buffer the Prophet’s meteoric fall.

  Then Darth-Bathrobe was throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at the abbot: gouts of flame, walls of force,
huge chunks of stone floor, ripped away and hurled with contemptuous ease. The two magi should’ve swatted the monk down like a pesky gnat. But they didn’t. Couldn’t. Because the monk moved like greased lightning, slithering this way then that, dodging each attack in a fluid, graceful tango. The Prophet gained his feet—skin now a deep cobalt, his eyes glimmering chips of glacier ice—but it didn’t matter. The monk simply slithered among them, evading devastating attack after devastating attack while he rained down a flurry of blows.

  Brutal strikes with his tail slapped against legs and ankles.

  Powerful hammer fists and knife-hand strikes battered shoulders and faces and torsos.

  Conjured balls of golden light beat at the pair of invaders.

  A hand fell on my shoulder, grabbing the fabric of my jacket, hauling me upright with a sharp tug. Finally, I tore my eyes from the battle as Ferraro slipped beneath my shoulder, drawing my weight onto her. We limped our way over to the massive Buddha statue and found Darlene standing guard over a narrow door recessed into the wall. I glanced back once more, but couldn’t see anything, not with the statue blocking my line of sight, then let Ferraro guide me down a dark passageway of stone with Darlene at our backs, guided by a pinprick of amber light at the far end.

  The tunnel let out into a cubbyhole of a room, a couple hundred square feet, devoid of any furnishings save for a small straw pallet in the corner and another Buddha shrine butting up against one wall. I hardly saw any of it, though, my mind still lingering on the abbot waging an unwinnable war, one he wasn’t going to walk away from.

  Ferraro helped me down a winding set of stone stairs at the rear of the tiny sleeping quarters, my legs pumping, my breathing heavy, a spreading numbness creeping through me as we spiraled down and down, eventually emerging in the monk’s prayer garden. Not a big area, but beautiful. The garden, maybe twenty-five feet in diameter, was a shaped like a wheel. A cobblestone path encircled the space, while eight more stone walkways shot inward like the spokes of a tire.

  The Dharmachakra, the Wheel of Law, a symbol I’d seen on plenty of Buddhist temples during my time in Nam.

  The open spaces between the spokes were filled to overflowing with flowers and plants of every variety: graceful orchids and long-stemmed birds of paradise, mixed with blue-petaled passion flowers and puffy pink chrysanthemums. There were pungent, black-leafed voodoo lilies—eerie considering where we were headed next—and scores of other species I couldn’t even begin to put names to. At the center of the garden was yet another golden sculpture of the seven-headed Naga, Ong.

  Quiet and serene, despite the almost constant drone of Little Bangkok, and perfumed from the riot of flowers.

  I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs with the sweet, humid evening air, held it for a long beat, then pushed the air out through my nose. My legs collapsed a moment later, my ass dropping to the garden path in sheer exhaustion.

  “We need to move,” Ferraro said, all business. “Need to get as far away from here as possible before …” She trailed off, unwilling to say what we were all thinking, before the monk dies.

  “Yeah,” I said, finally starting to come back to my senses.

  Losing people is hard and it always seems like the ones who least deserve to go are the ones who end up on the chopping block. Nothing we could do about it now, though. Nothing except to honor the abbot’s final wishes and his sacrifice. I couldn’t be sure if the Prophet had been bluffing when he said Darth-Bathrobe could harvest the information they needed from the monk after his death, but I had to assume that was the truth.

  Such a thing could be done in theory through a nauseating practice called splanchomancy, which evolved using the Vim, the life force, of a person to do all kinds of things, including limited divination. I didn’t know of anyone who trucked with that shit, mostly because all forms of the practice were illegal, but Darth-Bathrobe and the Prophet hardly seemed overly concerned with the law.

  “I know you’re tired, Yancy,” Ferraro said, scanning the temple towering over us, searching for signs of movement, “we all are, but we can rest once we’re gone.”

  I waved a hand at her. “We’ve got a second. Splanchomancy isn’t a quick process. There’s a lot of ritual that goes into it, so it’s gonna take Darth-Bathrobe a good while to get what he needs from the abbot. We don’t have long, but we can catch our breath and come up with a plan.”

  “What’s there to plan?” she asked, voice sharp. “We get in a cab and find a way to Haiti. It’s as easy as that.”

  “Yeah,” I said, still sounding dazed in my own ears. “Except we’re not all going to Haiti. There’s an exit for Cité Soleil over in the Remington Corridor—I’ve used it before—but it’s just gonna be the two of us, Ferraro.” I shifted my gaze to Darlene, who stood a little way off, shifting on uneasy feet, hands fidgeting with the edge of her shirt. “You’re going back to Quantico.”

  I expected some sort of protest from the Judge—after all, she’d been charged to oversee this case and she wasn’t the sort to shrik her duties—but she just nodded, face weary. Dejected.

  “Darlene,” I said, “this isn’t about what happened in there. At least not entirely.”

  “You don’t need to lie, Mage Lazarus,” she replied formally, almost clinically. “I’ve demonstrated a severe error in both judgement and moral character. In light of that, the only appropriate thing to do is remove myself for the safety of the mission. That’s what the operations manual would call for.”

  It hit me like a brick to the face: bureaucracy was Darlene’s shield—her coping mechanism. She wrapped herself in the pages of text as a way to distance herself from hurt and disappointment, as a way to avoid conflict. She probably didn’t like all those rule books any more than I did—okay, maybe that was reaching a bit—but there was safety and a sense of order in between those pages. With a groan, I gained my feet and shuffled over to her, putting my arms around her shoulders and pulling her into an awkward hug.

  Now, I’m not a hugger by nature—a fact which should be apparent by now—but even I could tell Darlene was a lady badly in need of a hug.

  She broke, sobbing in hitches. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled into my chest. “Gosh, I just choked. He was walking toward me and my mind retreated. I kept thinking, I don’t belong here, I don’t stand a chance, not against someone like this. He’s going to kill me and I’ll never see my family again. I felt so powerless, so useless, and then I couldn’t do anything. Nothing.”

  “Hey, crazy,” I said, aiming for reassuring, “everyone freezes at some point. Back during my Marine Corps days, I knew lots of guys that were tough as nails until the rounds started flying, and then they just couldn’t handle it. Combat does that to people sometimes. Sometimes it even does it to folks who know what they’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with it either. Not everyone is cut out for this line of work, but that doesn’t make you less of a person or less of a mage. It just means you have a different skill set, and that’s groovy too.

  “Besides,” I said, scooting back, holding her at arm’s length, “there’s no reason to beat yourself up because you’ve done a shitload better than I ever could’ve hoped for. You helped me escape from Moorchester. You saved my ass from that Pearl-Weeper. You figured a way to get us here. You, Darlene Drukiski, did those things. And the reason you’re not coming to Haiti is because I have a different job for you. One only you can do.”

  “Really?” she asked, looking up at me with a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “You’re not just saying that? You’ve got a real job for me?”

  “Hell yeah I’ve got a real job for you. Plus, this job happens to be far away from Haiti, which is maybe the worst place on the planet, so in my book it’s a win-win-win.”

  She swiped the back of her hand across her nose. “What job?” she asked, sniffling again, but now looking up at me with serious eyes.

  I let go of her and briefly explained my theory about Darth-Bathrobe—that he was hiding his identity because he was pr
obably the traitor inside the Guild. “During our dustup, I caught a glimpse of a tattoo, right up on here.” I tapped at my shoulder. “Could be I’m wrong, but doesn’t the Guild document all tattoos, scars, and identifying marks in the personnel files?”

  “My word, yes,” Darlene said, her voice a high-pitched squee of excitement, realizing where I was headed. “It helps with corpse identification in case a member gets dismembered or blown up while on assignment. Which means that if I can find the tattoo, I can find the traitor.”

  “So the question is,” I interjected, “can you access the Guild records without going back to Moorchester?”

  She twitched her nose, one eyebrow arched, then tentatively nodded. “Obviously I can’t get to the hard copies, but over the past several years we’ve been in the process of switching those records over to a private encrypted server. We haven’t done all the files yet, but we started with all active and inactive field agents, so there’s a solid chance the info we need is on that server. It’ll take some time, but I’m pretty sure I can access the files remotely.”

  “Might be a long shot,” I replied, “but if you can get a hit on that tattoo, that could be a game changer.”

  “My place should be safe,” Ferraro said, “and I’ve got a computer and a landline, so Yancy and I should be able to get ahold of you when we find something or vice versa.”

  “Got it in one,” I said. “Everyone have warm-and-fuzzies about this plan?”

  Ferraro and Darlene each nodded in turn.

  Good. The only thing left to do now was get a cab and get our asses to Cité Soleil. Home to murderous machete-wielding street gangs, twisted black-hearted voodoo of the worst sort, and a bona fide murder god.