Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
The great frame shuddered, spasming, and its ruined face turned into the snow as the Sunset Warrior pulled the short blade free.
He bathed the sword in the snow away from the corpse and, sheathing it, he retrieved
Aka-i-tsuchi
and his high helm. Transferring the long sword to his left hand momentarily, he set the helm back upon his head.
Above him the amber sky was darkening still although there was much time before sunset. The day died and now he lived in perpetual twilight.
He quit the clearing and the sprawled body seeping its wastes blackly upon the whiteness of the forest’s floor, plunging northward into the twisted, charred maze.
No birds sang here, or insects fluttering delicately amid the ribboning boles of the trees; no brush, no lichen, nothing save the endless trunks like makeshift grave markers set in the frozen, snow-covered ground.
He embarked upon an incline, the way becoming abruptly steep, the wood’s floor littered with gray boulders around which the trees thrust themselves with tenacious fury as if in defiance of the force which exfoliated them.
Upward he climbed toward the ridge’s high crest. He clambered through the snow and ice, using the blackened branches now to haul himself upward with increasing speed.
The ridge went on and on, stretching away from him on both sides in an undulating line, the end of the world. As he neared its crest, he saw the scarlet cloth billowing in the wet wind, the banners of the damned.
The lapis and sea-green jade of his ribbed armor gleamed as he lifted one hand to his high helm and carefully lowered its visor. And the world was finite now, seen through the ebon bars, a prison of vengeance and death. The crimson banners beckoned to him.
He topped the rise, just to the east of the immense figure who stood astride the crest of the ridge garbed in a breastplate of carved obsidian. Over the heart a lizard of dusky red was set like a giant, malformed ruby. His crimson cloak flapped behind him.
Fat fleshed out the face so that the prominent cheekbones which Ronin would have considered alien were successfully hidden. Folds of skin cleverly cloaked the shape of the long almond eyes whose irises had been as bright as obsidian so that the Sunset Warrior wondered if he had seen some surgeon. Because now he saw beneath the layers of fat and flesh to the face’s bone structure and he saw the ancestor of the Bujun. What had happened to the Salamander’s right eye? It was a blackened hole over which a makeshift patch flapped ineffectually. Bonneduce the Last?
‘Oh, Ronin, how foolish to have found me,’ said the Salamander, leaping at the Sunset Warrior. Their blades clashed once and parted. They stood facing each other.
‘I see that your new friends have given you another sword,’ said the Salamander, ‘but it will do you no good. You were never my equal in anything.’ They eyed each other. ‘Do you still think your punishment so severe for your betrayal? Fidelity is a hard lesson but once learned it is salvation.’
‘Freidal is dead,’ said the Sunset Warrior, his voice muffled by the closed helm so that the Salamander could not make out its strange new tones.
‘Well, I expected nothing less from my pupil. Was his death slow and agonizing? It should have been. The man was a sadist.’
The Sunset Warrior laughed.
‘You are amused?’
‘K’reen.’ He just managed to say it.
‘You defied me!’ cried the Salamander, ‘I made you what you are. Only I knew what you could have been. You were mine to mold. You had no right to leave!’
Blue-white sparks flying, the echoing clang of metal against metal. The Sunset Warrior let
Aka-i-tsuchi
speak for him.
‘I have his power now,’ said the Salamander. ‘See what your vengeance brings you? Only your own death!’
Their blades came together over and over in oblique strikes as they moved along the humped back of the snaking ridge, a white scar along the gray and umber land.
‘Your new weapons and armor do not fool me! I was told what to expect.’ His laugh bounded through the wood, sharp and distorted by the clogged air, the twisted trees like cracked mirrors sending off shards of reflections pulled out of shape.
He went against the fat man with short chopping arcs and the Salamander parried them all, standing his ground, then counterattacking with enormous swiftness, his blade a blur of living lightning, and now it was the Sunset Warrior’s turn to parry all that was sent against him.
They hurled themselves at each other, battering, feinting, lunging. The Salamander moved to the right, his sword swinging out in a flat arc, the Sunset Warrior moved to counter as the blade hit the extreme edge of its parabolic arc and began to slash inward. But the Salamander’s body moved the opposite way and the edge of his knee slammed into the Sunset Warrior’s hip just below the protective lower edge of the ribbed breastplate.
The Salamander’s booted foot reared into the air, blurred with momentum, a striking reptile, and the sole struck the Sunset Warrior on the point of his chin. He staggered under the force of the strike, felt the imminence of the killing blow as it headed for his unprotected neck. He knew the sequence, heard the soft whistle of the blade through the dense air on its way to cleave his head from his shoulders. He swayed, stood his ground, lifted his weaponless left hand, and almost languidly, allowed the Salamander’s blade to strike the gleaming scales of the Makkon gauntlet. The sword edge slid harmlessly away.
He looked for it then, within the hard depths of the Salamander’s eyes, and saw it, the first glint of emotion long foreign to the big man. For just an instant it fluttered nakedly. Then it was gone, squeezed out by the flat glitter of the ebon pupils.
‘If it is sorcery you wish,’ said the Salamander, ‘then it is sorcery you shall have.’
As the Sunset Warrior advanced there was a dizzying swirl of crimson and the huge man was gone from the ridge. In his place stood his dusky-red namesake, a giant lizard, long forked tongue questing from its lipless mouth at one end of the wedge-shaped head.
Hissing, it leapt upon the Sunset Warrior, its jaws hinged wide, snapping at his face. The fangs dripped with dark venom. But he slashed sideways with
Aka-i-tsuchi,
sliced open its belly as if it were rice paper. He was engulfed by a warm wind of putrefaction.
The lizard was gone, not even its stretched corpse remained upon the ridge’s crest.
‘So you have disposed of my vassal,’ said the Salamander, returned in a billow of scarlet and onyx. He struck at the Sunset Warrior. ‘Still I have delayed you and the Makkon will be here shortly.’
The Sunset Warrior struck downward, then across, obliquely, shearing through the Salamander’s blade.
‘The last Makkon is gone,’ he said.
Again that foreign emotion slid across the Salamander’s visage.
‘I do not believe you. You could not have slain it.’
‘The one with the crystal claws? But I have. It lies back, behind us, just another feast for the vultures.’
‘So, have I underestimated you?’ As he spoke the Salamander drew from the folds of his billowing robe a tasselated black metal fan. Arcing up from its hilt the Sunset Warrior saw the pointed
jitte
and he set himself for the finality of this moment, for from Ronin’s memory he knew that in all the Freehold there was none to stand against the Salamander when he chose to use the
gunsen.
In times gone by, his students would shudder at its appearance for he never opened it unless he wished to kill.
Now the
gunsen
fluttered open in the stifling air, the flight of a lethal insect. The black metal was dull in the uncertain light, the spiked
jitte
a constant threat even as a defensive weapon.
The Sunset Warrior attacked with his shorter sword, thrusting upward from below his hips, and the
gunsen
described its barely seen patterns. The
jitte
spiked his sword, locked to it near the narrow guard. The Salamander twisted his wrist and, turning, made a flicking movement with his other hand.
A moment before the Sunset Warrior had seen the glint of pale light off one of the honed points. He ducked. But the distance was the major factor, for and against. He had no time but the weapon could not gain much momentum.
The star-shaped suriken embedded itself in his armor at the juncture of his right arm and shoulder. At the same instant, the Salamander twisted the
gunsen,
hooking away the Sunset Warrior’s short sword. The
gunsen
blurred upward, smashing into his high helm. The visor was ripped away and, even as he slapped at the
gunsen
with his gauntlet, bending one of its metal ribs, he watched the flat onyx eyes staring into his and at last he saw the fat face react. For it was not Ronin upon whom the Salamander now gazed but some strange alien creature whose countenance he found terribly frightening, and within those searing, singular eyes he found that which he could not imagine: his death.
He fell back as if stricken, calling upon his master for salvation. But the nightmare came after him. The Sunset Warrior used his legs, lashing out with immense force, so that he cracked the Salamander’s obsidian breastplate.
‘Why did it not tell me?’ wailed the Salamander.
‘The master deceiver has been deceived,’ said the Sunset Warrior. He used the edges of his hands now, pummeling the Salamander.
‘Who are you?’ cried the Salamander.
‘He who comes to slay you.’
‘Tell me!’
‘I am a friend of Bonneduce the Last. That is all you need to know,’ said the Sunset Warrior. ‘The eons have caught up with you at last. Chill take you! All the people you have killed, all the people you have caused to be slaughtered under your cursed banner, for your holy cause.’
‘Power!’ screamed the Salamander. ‘You must give me more!’ He called to the billowing amber clouds.
‘Finished,’ said the Sunset Warrior. The one word, echoing within the twisted, nightmare forest, an epitaph.
And
Aka-i-tsuchi
was raised, came down upon the huge head with titanic force that was as much will as muscle. For Ronin. For the Hart. For all of Bonneduce the Last’s folk. For K’reen.
The skull shattered.
But it was no longer the Salamander’s. Nor was it Tokagé’s. For the fat had already commenced to run like rivulets of wax down the rapidly atrophying musculature. The arms and legs bloated up as if filled with a violent, bubbling fluid. The fat torso split apart, massing itself into another configuration, growing before him, horrifying in aspect though it had barely begun to form.
The Sunset Warrior stepped back, feeling the intense cold swirl about his ankles, knowing that at last the great battle had commenced, for here upon this last lonely ridge in the arcane forest of charcoal, he gazed upon the still-forming shape of fear and annihilation.
The Dolman.
They moved with great deliberation into the blackened forest, a strange pair: a Bujun woman and a four-legged creature who was far more than an animal.
Hynd was concerned now. He did not know where he was leading her. But he was compelled as if through some atavistic homing instinct to cross the river, take them into the forest. He knew what lurked there. They all did. This did not bother him.
Something was wrong and he worried at it as a dog would a fresh, juicy bone, turning it around so that he could see all its faces, every angle. Still he could not understand it.
And then the thought came to him: Dor-Sefrith is gone, Bonneduce the Last is gone. What had they in mind?
Circling the massive broken body with the curious crystal hands, the ripped, blackened face, they commenced to climb the first gentle slopes of a wide-ranging ridge.
COME.
Echoes.
COME, WAVE-MAN.
Echoes upon echoes.
DEATH AWAITS, WARRIOR WITH NO NAME.
The words a physical assault.
THY MENTOR IS NO MORE. I HAVE SLAIN HIM.
Brain buzzing with reverberations.
THEE HAS NO POWER NOW. NICHIREN PASSES, DOR-SEFRITH PASSES. NOW IS THY TURN TO DIE. SOON ALL MEN. WE NEAR THE WALLS OF KAMADO.
Hallucinations beginning.
ONLY THE DOLMAN SURVIVES.
Flashes of pain.
COME WITH ME—INTO THE DEEP.
The twisted forest dissolving into, a waving morass of copper kelp, fuzzy fronds filtering the purple light which spread over him in ever-widening ripples of dark and light, zebraed bands fluttering hypnotically away forever, replicated without end, a seashell world.
Outside.
Time lost in a fevered dream, caught on the lip of an incipient sunrise, held motionless, halted in midflight. Impaled helplessly.
No one beside him.
Alone, within the jaws of annihilation.
And The Dolman in front of him, growing and glowing, writhing, hideous, a madness, the embodiment of fear, the nemesis of life itself.
It was not clear what The Dolman was.
Perhaps it had a multitude of tentacles, a spade-shaped tail, huge round eyes, lidless with double pupils, slit of a maw which pulsed.
Perhaps, too, it had an enormous beak and ridged skin. Was it horned? It had no teeth, yet its gaping mouth was far more abhorrent than if it was fanged.
Felt something rising within him, thought it was panic and chased it down, away into the unfiltered, unplumbed depths of his being.
He did not know how to fight it. He swung with
Aka-i-tsuchi
but the alien atmosphere was so thick that all momentum was dissipated.
It drew him toward it, saying:
IS THIS WHAT I HAVE FEARED?
Broke upon his mind like a violent storm, shaking his universe.
He was stunned.
Numb, he felt himself being pulled into its pulsing grasp and he felt death enwrap him.
Consciousness fled. He was impotent.
And soon he would be a lifeless husk, swaying on the tide, another bit of copper flotsam in the death sea.
Perhaps they heard a voice as they topped the long snaking crest of the forest ridge.
A calling.
It was snowing, the unnatural light lending the flakes a pink hue as if some vast animal bled upon them as they were driven downward through the thick, exhausted air.