The Sea Peoples(105)

“Kangshinmu!” Reiko barked.

That was the enemy’s own term for their adepts, the instruments of the Power that ruled and drove them.

Their eyes met. Then they faced the enemy and put their hands to their blades and drew.

Shock.

The world flexed as the Sword of the Lady gathered the light and shone like crystal and silver.

“órlaith and Montival!” rang out.

“Tennoˉ Heika banzai!” from Reiko’s followers. “Banzai! Banzai!”

To the eye, the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven was steel lightly chiseled and inlaid with gold. Part of it was steel shaped by human hands and had a human history, albeit one that stretched back into quasi-legend. The gold . . . wasn’t.

It was the Sun itself; it was Amaterasu-oˉmikami’s being stretching into the world of human kind. Faintly, órlaith’s ears heard a roar as of inconceivable fires as the Grasscutter was drawn for war. Existence stretched, as if the weapon was too real for the story that contained it. Was that Reiko, or a nine-tailed fox that reared back with its fur bristling and white teeth barred, the Ghost Fox that shared her name?

The cold black hatred from the kangshinmu struck the light of the twin Swords; nothing physical happened, in a way, but the enemy rushed forward in a wave that matched their master’s thought. The Montivallans and their enemies met them, and órlaith felt as if her feet were dancing with the spirits of Air as the Lady’s Sword rose to defend Her people. . . .

? ? ?

órlaith staggered as the world became hard and firm once more. Black threads seemed to writhe in the kangshinmu’s shattered skull, and then the Grasscutter finished what the Sword of the Lady had begun.

Reiko went to one knee, the Grasscutter outstretched in the classic follow-through to the ten-uchi strike. Where a man had been, there was only floating ash, dust that vanished with a sigh of wind. Silence fell like a ripple spreading out from them, the roaring crush of battle fading. The enemy shrank back, blinking as if they were men waking from a dream, and weapons clattered to the deck.

“Accept surrenders!” órlaith shouted. “I’ll have the heads of anyone who kills those who’ve thrown down!”

She switched to Choso?n-o?. “Throw down your weapons and you will be spared! We have no desire for your blood.”

The need to do that brought her fully back to the world of common day, to the slaughterhouse stinks of blood and dung. She heard Reiko echoing the command in Nihongo, and Kalaˉ kaua doing likewise. There were plenty of all three folk within hearing, since the Sea-Leopard now lay at the center of a drifting mass of ships, Korean and Montivallan and Hawaiian and Japanese lashed together into one raft of death.

órlaith felt her hand shaking slightly as she sheathed the Sword. A stagger brought Heuradys’ arm beneath hers, supporting. She turned, her mind stuttering with the struggle between exhaustion and the things that needed to be done, dully wondering where the blood that coated the whole right side of her armored body came from.

Then the world brightened. Alan Thurston was near behind her, along with many more from the transports who’d come over the quarterdeck and plunged into the melee. His mail shirt was red-daubed too, and he had a rather odd-looking fighting knife in one hand . . . a hand in an armored gauntlet like a knight’s, not the leather glove Boisean cavalry favored.

Their eyes locked as the blade was raised. Dimly, somewhere, she heard Heuradys’ shout of alarm and the beginning of the blurring speed of a draw-and-strike, hampered by the press of bodies and órlaith’s own body. Then his eyes changed.

“No,” he said clearly. “Prince John freed me, and not for this. I choose otherwise. I shall do as I choose, not you, King of Nothingness. For the first time in my life I am one and whole, and that one knows what he must do.”

The knife seemed to fight him as he turned it and drove it up under his own ribs. He fell just beyond her reaching fingers and lay; she knelt beside him and bent low as he struggled to speak.

“Light . . .” he said. “I wish . . .” and died.

Distantly, she heard a voice: “Where’s the knife?”





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


KERAJAAN OF BARU DENPASAR

CERAM SEA

NOVEMBER 25TH

CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

“Don’t stop! Don’t you dare stop!” Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie said.

Deor’s hands moved on the drum, despite the sweat and exhaustion and stubble on his face. A light breeze off the sea moved the gauze of the curtains, but brought little relief from the hot night. Moths with gaudy wings fluttered around the single lamp that cast a slight pale-yellow light from the top of the dresser, giving off the hot fruity smell of burning palm oil. It was the dark of darkest night, about two hours before dawn, and the others looked nearly as ghastly; she felt ghastly. . . .

And John just lay there, his breathing as regular as the shsssshhshs of the surf on the beach not far away. Ruan Chu Mackenzie wiped his face and dribbled a little water between his lips, then went and did the same for Deor without interrupting his movements. The skill of his hands was the same with both men—the young Mackenzie took his duties as a healer very seriously; they were part of his religion, from what she’d gathered. If there was an extra tenderness and anxiety in his smile for the scop, who could blame him?