Ryojin- the Bonded Blade

by Noah Ward

  “C’mon, you lanky fucker,” Kaz yelled, the words echoing around the area.

  A flock of birds off in the trees fled for the skies.

  A few silent seconds passed. Kaz kept her knees slightly bent and her sword gripped tight.

  The stalker advanced. Plumes of fresh snow churned in its wake, long strides eating up earth. Its piston muscles chugged and metal crunched, yet its talons were relatively muted in the deep snow.

  Fewer than six gallops separated the two of them. Kaz steeled herself, didn’t budge.

  “Please let this work,” she muttered under her breath.

  The stalker’s right talon shot off the ground, hauling a lump of white powder into the air. Crashed down. Stumbled. The other limb tried to compensate, suffered the same fate. The tall, bipedal construct pitched forward and jettisoned its rider into the air like a confused missile. The human bullet sunk into the snow, rolled a couple of times. Stopped abruptly with a bone-crunching thud.

  But no scream. No yell as they soared through the sky. No anguished cry upon whacking against the snow-camouflaged logs and stumps. Silence.

  The whack of the stalker’s talon had partially uprooted one of the stumps and excavated one of the several obscured logs.

  Kaz slowly picked her way across the ground, careful as not to suffer the same fate. Offering a silent prayer to the shogens, she rounded one of the chunks of wood to find their pursuer.

  Blood stained the snow and had begun soaking through the fabric covering their skull. The odd angle of their right leg told Kaz it had been broken; the limp right arm had possibly been dislocated. Thankfully, it all spelled a rather one-sided battle.

  “Who sent you?” Kaz asked the silent figure. When no response was forthcoming, she tapped the flat of her katana against their mask. They turned to face her but offered no answer. “You’re in pain. I can help with that. I charge for my charity, however.”

  Still nothing. The figure didn’t seem to be too concerned with their shattered body.

  A chill ran up Kaz’s spine. She used the tip of her blade to sever one of the straps keeping the mask attached to person’s face. It swung to the side.

  Kaz nearly dropped her blade. Her stomach somersaulted.

  “Shogens…” she whispered.

  Eyes and mouth stitched up yet this...woman, for she could determine that at least, still focused on Kaz. A nightmarish existence. She held up her blade, ready to put the woman out of her misery.

  “Don’t!” Shay yelled at her from a short distance away.

  The woman reacted to that, groggily shifting her head in the girl’s direction. Her ears still worked, then. And there was the very real possibility this woman was sworn, maybe even the reason why they were sewn up, though Kaz had never seen it before.

  “You--” Shay began, but ended up gasping when she saw the mutilated face before her. “What...what happened to her?”

  “I don’t care to find out,” Kaz replied. “She’s not too talkative. Chances are we’ll never know why those stalkers are here and why they wanted to kill us.”

  “They wanted to kill us?” Shay said in disbelief.

  “Made a deal with bandits to do the dirty work of attacking the carriage and stealing the krystallis, then they just had to kill us so their hands were the least bloody.” Kaz raised an eyebrow at the broken woman. “Didn’t quite work out that way though, did it? Wouldn’t surprise me if they were the lackeys of some daimyo who wanted to piss off Retsudan. I’ve seen the like before.”

  “And they had these...things,” Shay said as she motioned at the stalker. “And had their eyes and mouths…” The girl shuddered.

  “Well...no,” Kaz conceded.

  In truth, looking further into this than was necessary would only cause trouble. She should just be done with this woman and leave this place.

  “Best we not let it happen again.” She took her blade and placed it on the woman’s chest.

  Movement in her periphery. Shay grabbed her sword hand.

  “No. You can’t!”

  Kaz frowned and shook her off. “Why not? She and her friends would have slaughtered us.”

  “But, you beat her…”

  “And now I plan to kill her. That’s how this works.” She glanced to Shay. “You want her telling--well, not telling, but somehow communicating--”

  “She can’t speak, can’t see, how will she do anything?”

  Kaz rolled her eyes. “She did a good job of killing a couple of bandits already and shogens know how many others. She’s sworn...maybe. Letting her live gets me killed.”

  Her blade bit into the armoured woman’s chest, felt resistance. Kaz stopped. Her hand shook. Her sword reverberated; she nearly let it slip through her grasp. Swallowed.

  Breathe.

  The woman’s battered face stared at Kaz, almost childlike. This wasn’t right. Her breathing became laboured, palms sweaty. Her legs buckled and she was forced to grab onto the log to stabilize herself.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Shay said, her eyes roving Kaz’s body for signs of sudden illness or open wounds.

  Kaz batted the girl’s hands away. “Nothing,” she snapped and then righted herself. “Get the keval, we’re leaving.”

  “So you won’t--”

  Their pursuer flicked their wrist, revealing a slender knife. Kaz’s sword cut the air. The woman’s hand was severed at the wrist; Kaz followed the slash through to slit her neck. Blood sprayed against in the snow and the woman’s head lolled to the side.

  “You…” Shay fumbled.

  “Get the damn keval!” Kaz spat.

  Shay’s mouth worked over invisible words for a stunned moment until she ran to do as she was told. Kaz didn’t care. She just stood there, staring at this non-person for what seemed like an age.

  Her head hurt, like an army of memories were battering on a castle rampart, trying to invade. She pushed them all back and unleashed her frustration on the stalker by slashing the exposed and spongy fibre-like wires at its joints. She didn’t know the engineering behind these damn things. Knew how to destroy them, though. So she did just that. Hopped on one of its limbs, to the spot at the rear of the rider’s seat that contained a hatch. Her smaller blade sheathed at her side severed the lock and the metal flap whipped open. Inside was the hunk of krystallis, green, just like the damn carriage.

  She huffed. She was no oremancer and may well shatter the fragment trying to extract it. However, she had no intention of anyone else utilizing the stalker, so drew her shorter wakizashi and plunged it into the krystallis. A flare of emerald light, like the last breath of a dying creature, bathed her face in green. Kaz shielded her gaze; when she next opened her eyes, there was naught left of the krystallis but dust. Job done.

  “I put your things back in the saddlebag,” Shay said, determined not to meet her gaze, when Kaz returned to the girl’s side. “What was that light?”

  Great, now you have a moody child to look after, Kaz. This should make a fun journey.

  “Nothing. My thanks,” said Kaz. She stomped towards the keval and swung into the saddle. With one hand on the reins, she offered the other to Shay. The girl’s wide eyes showed the hope of reconciliation.

  Kaz just wanted to smoke a rollup and forget this ever happened. She yanked the girl up to occupy the saddle space behind her.

  “Thank you,” said Shay.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Kaz grumbled. “There’s still a lot of things out there that will want us dead.” She dug her heels into the flank of the keval, and they were off.

  10

  A Murder of Thieves

  It was a massacre all right. Even in the crepuscular dawn light, Gin picked out the bloody corpses with ease, a stark contrast to the dirt and fallen snow. Even from the outcropping of rock on which he rested, it was plain as the coming day that these bandits had really gone at it. Something must have really pissed them off.

  More likely someone.

  He rolled over onto his b
ack and knitted his fingers across his chest. The intel that brought him here was his only lead and even that was shaky. Word from an agent that Saito Kitagami had been spotted heading into the mountains combined with the fact that this was the only attraction worth seeing here still failed to uncover the “why” of it all. Because, from the looks of things, Restudan’s sworn band of killers hadn’t actually committed murder.

  “Well, can’t just sit here staring at the sky, Gin,” he muttered to himself before springing to his feet.

  The dawn light, or lack of it, provided him with convenient pockets of shadow all the way down the side of the mountain. A drop of cold rippled outwards from his heart to consume his body as he melted into darkness, descending. The journey took seconds, and Gin materialized from his near-incorporeal form just atop one of the crumbling fortress’s defensive walls.

  Squatting on the tiles like a cat, he scratched the fabric of the balaclava that covered his chin, surveying the damage.

  Most of the walls severing the space off from the rest of the mountain were fit to fall apart after suffering a few more winters. Already debris collected where fortifications had just relented and spilled their stone guts to the earth. The handful of stone housing--notably the two-storey barracks across the gate and squat food stores--had been patched up with wood and fabric to stave off the cold. There were a few wooden shacks close to the walls with thatched roofs, but the central area was a mostly empty mix of slush--aside from all the corpses of course.

  Gin counted over twenty frozen bodies. Not a bad number for a bandit outfit. They were probably all quite lucrative before they decided to go and meet Kagen by hacking each other to bits.

  And this whole bloody affair wasn’t your average “You took too much of a share of that gold so now I’ll be stabbing you”. It was more like “We’ve gone insane and must sever limbs, disembowel, and decapitate”. There was something almost...ritualistic about the scene.

  “You couldn’t have sent me to infiltrate a brothel, now could you, Kusanagi?” Gin sighed before he hopped down into the snow for a closer look.

  He still kept one hand on his short-bladed tanto as he began his investigation. He also kept several, very literal tricks up his sleeve which could end an encounter before it became too close for his liking.

  A plume of hot air escaped his lips. Above, the vultures circled. On the walls, ravens sat perched in murders, ready for a feast. A few squawked and several had even popped down for a bite to eat. A few dozen feet away, a goat was busy chewing hay in a small pen, oblivious to everything. There seemed to be a stable next to the barracks, too, but no signs of any kaval.

  Gin’s initial search uncovered very little and only served to compound his confusion at this whole bloody incident. The dead were clearly bandits. Why were they dead--and only them? Did they know something? Did they have something. Sure, he’d found a stash of trinkets hoarded in the barracks, but it was untouched. Even the krystallis.

  Cursing under his breath as he stepped out into the breaking day, he was about to leave when a rustling from one of the storage houses stopped Gin in his tracks. Hand on blade, he waited. Scanned the area. If someone would have appeared, he would have heard or seen them. The goat continued to chomp hay.

  A falcon squawked from its perch on one of the shanty shacks. Its wooden door swung open. A frail man stumbled out into the dirt and pitched into the snow. He was soaked in blood. Gin waited.

  For a moment, the man seemed to gather his strength before shakily pushing himself to stand. His ragged clothes were torn, the blues and whites of his wrappings dyed red. Prisoner? Bandit? Intruder? Whatever he was, the man appeared to be the sole survivor. A possible lead.

  “Please...please…” said the man in a hoarse, rasping voice. He sounded weak, appeared emaciated.

  Gin checked his surroundings before taking a few tentative steps forwards, though there was still enough distance between the both of them just in case.

  “What happened here?” Gin asked.

  “They’re...dead. All dead,” replied the man. He looked up and met Gin’s eyes.

  “Yes, they’re all very dead. I can see that. Why are they dead and you aren’t?”

  The man approached; Gin held his ground. “They began killing each other. I don’t know why. But when it started, I hid.”

  “Did other people--not bandits--come here?”

  “I don’t know…”

  Gin chewed his bottom lip. The man wasn’t telling him everything. In truth, Gin couldn’t fault him. Everyone before you dies, you think it’s safe to poke your head out of your hidey hole only to be accosted by someone else. But some people have all the bad luck.

  Regardless, interrogating the man here wasn’t the best course of action. Vultures would bring interested parties sooner or later and who knew if this was truly all the bandits. Backup may be close by and Gin’s keval was tied up a good distance away.

  You’ve made a new friend, Gin.

  Whether he lived or died would depend on how forthcoming he was with what had transpired here.

  Gin crossed the small distance between them, just within reach of one of the man’s reedy arms. He cowered in front of him. “We’ll see what you do or don’t know.” He latched onto the man’s arm, ready to tie him up. Couldn’t having him running away now.

  “Please...please…” mewled the man, but Gin copped a deaf ear. Time spent on sympathy was time best used for other pursuits.

  “You’ll be fine. Just a talk is all. Now--”

  It all happened so quick that Gin didn’t quite register what was happening until he was rocketing through the air.

  The thin man had shrugged off Gin’s hand like he was nothing more than a drunk infant. Then, he’d latched on to both of Gin’s wrists like twin vices. As his feet left the ground, his stomach had been trying to spring out of his mouth. The thin man had spun Gin around several times before finally letting go, leaving him to soar high above the crumbling fortress walls and into the mouth of the valley below.

  The murder of ravens and even the goat offered him a quizzical if noncommittal glance as he flew by.

  Then Gin was descending, wondering what the in the shogens many names had just happened.

  11

  Keval Sick

  The Sea of Spears was a thick bamboo forest which spread for miles, separating the Shiromanzu region’s flat lands and more convoluted trade routes east from the western region of Kansei. They said, in Zenitia, the west was where trade flourished and the east was where it withered. No doubt for having suffered heavy casualties in the war. Few still carved a life out of the ice, however; and many travelled its roads thinking dereliction bore safety. They were often proved wrong, though did not live long enough to regret it.

  The spear-like shafts of bamboo seemed to stretch infinitely into the distance over undulating earth spared the full brunt of the snow. The thin leaves rustled above them as their keval trudged dutifully along desire paths forged from centuries of use. Waypoints and signposts had been hammered into the ground every so often, but it was easy to be led astray along myriad snaking paths if you lost track of your general direction.

  Ropes with small wooden charms hanging from them were lashed around various bamboo trees in the hopes of honouring Minori. The little stuffed effigies of the shogen, swinging in the breeze from branches and modelled like that of a small, impish child with a crown of leaves, reminded Kaz sharply of her encounter in another forest. Thankfully, she had literally put that behind her.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Shay said from behind Kaz on the saddle. She sniffled, then sneezed.

  “Something tells me you’re not used to Zenitia,” mumbled Kaz.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You may look like you’re from here, but that’s about it.” Kaz straightened. “Zenitia isn’t like the south. You at least know that much. You may not get the luxury to decide if someone lives or dies on the way to Akimaru.” She turned in the saddle
. “You’ve never taken someone’s life, have you?”

  Shay shied away from the woman’s gaze. “You say that like it’s a bad thing…”

  “Trust me, girl, it’s not.”

  “Are we...safe here?”

  Kaz looked around the seemingly empty forest. “At this time of year, safe enough. Back where we came from is worse, Kansei on the other side a little less so. Back before Retsudan’s war of unification, the forest was used more. Since guerilla troops had a habit of luring soldiers in here for easy pickings, people are reluctant to travel its roads. They say spirits of the dead lurk here.”

  Shay shuddered at the tale and Kaz couldn’t help smirking.

  “You...fought in the war?” the girl asked a few moments later after Kaz had finished consulting a crude crossroads marker.

  “Everyone of fighting age fought in the war,” said Kaz, then looked over her shoulder. “And don’t bother asking your next question.”

  Shay pursed her lips. “But how--”

  “You were going to ask me which side I fought for, and that’s none of your business.”

  The girl’s eyes wandered back to the forest as the keval trudged up a gradual incline. “It’s just...no one in my village talked about it. Not even my mother. And I had family who…”

  “Like your uncle?”

  “Yes, like him.”

  “No one likes to talk about it. Probably because it always feels like we’re on the edge of another one. Saying the words might be all the push it needs.”

  Kaz felt Shay loose a big sigh behind her and then battle through a coughing fit. “Why did those people attack us?”

  “I already told you: they wanted us to do their dirty work.”

  “You think they will come again?”

  Kaz couldn’t help searching the rows of trees. It was like the girl was trying to summon them. “If they’re smart, they’ll give up.”

  Shay sniffled. “If they’re not?”