Five Kingdoms (24 page)

His hand went to his head, where he found some hair yet, but its previous length had been claimed as a casualty of battle. He had intended to cut it off anyway, once he’d completed his work. Undoubtedly, the name Ma Shou would be known as a fugitive. He had once considered taking on a new name and making his own clan, one that spoke more of accomplishment than idleness. He could do so now. Perhaps he might find one of his saviors to be of a worthy family that he might be adopted into. If so, he would strive to keep the name unmarred. He would become a better assassin, and leave no identifying mark upon his future deeds, which included the assassination of Lord Han Quan. If only he could arrive at the Imperial City and set fire to the betrayer at a key moment that would gain him both honor and station. Saving Xu Liang’s life would be quite an unexpected turnabout, though he did not know for certain whether or not the Imperial Tactician had intended to execute him before. Han Quan’s deviously laid enchantment had not provided the opportunity to learn.

A firefly lit suddenly within the tent, startling him, letting him know that he had a more important task ahead of Han Quan, and that was recovering. He lowered his hand from the uneven remains of his hair, deciding against running his fingers over his face. For the moment, he could convince himself that he was in a position to be strong again. He would avoid any evidence that might contradict that for now.

Turning onto his side, he laid his hand on a body beside him. Startled once again, he recoiled instantly. The body did not move. He wondered now if his saviors had actually thought him dead and piled him into the tent with the corpse of Zhen Yu or any of the other pirates. But that made no sense, unless they were bone collectors. The practice had been shunned long ago, along with the wild magic that accompanied it, but that didn’t mean that practitioners no longer existed…that he might not be in the presence of them.

He resolved not to panic. He was alive, yet. He would rely on his own art. His lips stung somewhat when he formed the minor prayer to his ancestors that would properly channel the energies necessary to summon fire. The prayer was whispered, and a small ball of flame hovered in his hand, illuminating scars that were more minor than he anticipated in light of the pain. But, of course, they would be. A pyromancer held some resilience to the fire that he cast. Not enough to come away undamaged after reversal, but enough to survive. He began to recoup his confidence, and guided the firelight over the body next to him.

It was indeed that of Zhen Yu. The tattoos identified him as if they were scars. They were very dark upon his skin just now, appearing almost as bruises. The scoundrel had gone pallid, taken on the bleached tone of death. “What a fool you were,” Ma Shou whispered, “to try to take glory so recklessly. That was not in the plan. Death is your earning, and you wear it appallingly.”

Ma Shou had no sooner doused the flame spell when the dead pirate bolted to life, sitting up quickly enough that they knocked heads, which summarily knocked Ma Shou back onto the pallet. Fresh pain swelled behind his eye, but he managed to catch himself on his elbow, which enabled him the leverage to hold Zhen Yu back when the dead man lunged at him as if to murder.

Ma Shou reached for something with which to strike Zhen Yu, but his fingers scarcely made firm contact with anything before he was seized by the back of the neck and dragged toward the tent’s entrance. The grip—familiar in its sureness—transferred from his neck to his shoulder while the individual swiftly hooked him beneath the arm and hauled him out into the night.

The man dropped him in the grass. Zhen Yu emerged from the tent soon afterward, moonlight revealing his bruised and beaten flesh. It made eerie distortions of his tattoos. His face was a caricature of its former self, twisted with an anger the pirate had never demonstrated in life.

“No!” someone said briskly.

Zhen Yu halted, looked beyond Ma Shou, then walked on heavier, more deliberate feet than the River Master would have ever used in the past. He plodded around Ma Shou and toward the speaker as in an instant trance.

Ma Shou followed his former accomplice visually, confused by the sudden mindlessness about him. He could only stare at him morbidly, until the night spirit came into view once again.

It sat gracefully beneath the light of the moon, its animal companion yet near. The vulture raised its silvery neck and eyed the oncoming pirate while its master patiently awaited the approach. The spirit—Ma Shou could think of no other way to reference the individual—was even more astonishing now that he was fully awake. He rose to his feet and found himself tempted to follow Zhen Yu’s obeisant path. Surely, this creature was to be revered.

Ma Shou stayed where he was, however, and watched as Zhen Yu arrived within several paces of the spirit, and dropped to his knees.

The spirit, wrapped in pale robes and hair the color of the hour, opened its eyes. They appeared red…the burning tone of damnation. This spirit was of the Infernal Regions.

Ma Shou was again not so certain he remained alive. The presence of the one who had dragged him felt suddenly nearer and he looked in the man’s direction. He was a large man—broad in a similar way that Xiadao Lu had been, but his face was not quite as broad nor was it bearded. The tone of his skin was darkened—perhaps by the sun, making the flaws more apparent. From his upper lip to his left eye, the man had been ravaged by a blade. It had left its mark in the form of a torn lip, a broken gash at his cheek and above his eye, and an eye that was discolored from scarring and quite likely sightless. The stranger compensated with an intense focus of the undamaged eye. From head to toe his appearance was barbaric, the stark opposite of his unnatural companion, whose courtly splendor was such that the effect became suddenly eerie.

“Who…are you?” Ma Shou finally asked.

The spirit answered, providing a name that Ma Shou could not decipher, as it came in the dual tones of a softly spoken man and of a song-voiced woman simultaneously. Hearing it, Ma Shou became instantly terrified that he was truly in the presence of a demon. The beauty of the creature was immense and overwhelming. The voice was torment. The eyes were doom.

“You do not seem to recognize one of your own,” the beast of the Infernal Regions said, isolating the gentle register of the male voice. “I am also a mystic of Sheng Fan. My name is Lei Kui.”

Ma Shou was both mortified and fascinated by the claim—the claim that was substantiated by Zhen Yu’s state of living from his previous state of death. This cursed stranger was no demon, but a necromancer…a mystic of death.

Their final day
of travel toward the interior of Sheng Fan began with clouds that swept quickly across the green and gold terrain of wide fields and valleys beneath low mountains. There were higher mountains in the distance, their shape sculpted and upright, adorned with bright bands of green and swatches of brown. Alere imagined that they were the cousins to the nearer mounds of rock and lush, articulate growth that gazed down upon the grasses and groves of the kingdom Xu Liang had called Ji. It was the realm of the Blue Dragon, the mystic had said, which Alere took for the bright sky undulating through and arcing over the steep hills. It was like no terrain Alere had ever traveled. His appreciation for it was great enough that he felt moments of better peace over the consistent anxiety he’d felt about being in a land harboring unfriendliness, if not outright hostility toward them.

Still, in spite of the serenity of the current environment, Alere’s guard could not be completely lowered. The land and the people were two different elements. If his reasons for following Xu Liang to his homeland were not already solid and validated, he would have turned around. He remained ready to do so at any time.
Aerkiren
might have had siblings, but it remained the sword of Morgen Shaederin, and his inheritance. He would not surrender it to anyone, for any reason, save the gods.

That considered, the gods’ involvement in all of this was clear to him, particularly since the arrival of Tristus, whose relationship to the god of fury spared Alere the permanent revocation of
Aerkiren
. He had not seen Ilnon since that evening in Yvaria, when Xu Liang had confronted it with his own spirit—godlike, at the time. He retained his belief that Xu Liang was of both the mortal and the spirit planes. His soul burned brighter than his body, even after his near death had retracted his energy back inside of his physical form. It was that instinct—the reflex to preserve the physical part of him—that bound him to the mortal world. Perhaps it was the Phoenix Elves’ deity that had something to do with the renewed brilliance of the mystic’s spirit, and if that were so, it continued to prove that the gods were involved in this.

While the thought reverberated at the back of Alere’s mind, the land eventually slung itself low beneath hills that were virtually pillars of brown earth adorned with delicate trees. A lake, or the illusion of one, caught daylight and appeared as a golden mirror, reflecting shades of life and glory upon the cache of uniquely formed structures cradled in the valley.

As their caravan began a gentle descent toward what could only be the imperial city of Xu Liang’s people, no one stopped to gaze upon its beauty. It was with an almost somber air, and perhaps with some relief, that each of them guided their mounts over a shallow ledge of rock and brush and carried on toward their destination.

Ma Shou felt
held in a limbo. While he sat within the tent he had previously awakened in, the sound of the Tunghui pervaded his thoughts, reminding him constantly that he had gone nowhere since awakening after what was nearly his death. It seemed possible that the necromancer and his—or her—companion had been allowing him time to heal. It may also have been that raising the dead meant waiting a period for the dead to recognize themselves. He wondered if Zhen Yu would.

He wondered also if he were their captive. He had not been banned from leaving, but at the same time he did not feel invited to leave. The necromancer had said very little. The necromancer’s scarred ally had said less. Ma Shou knew only that the man’s name was Guo Sen. He wondered if Guo Sen had also at one time been dead, and if he served the one who had syphoned death from him and returned it to him as life. Ma Shou was not at all versed in the ways of a necromancer. The element of death was forbidden to practice with. The Seven Mystics had condemned those who were called by their ancestors in such a manner, believing that the calling manifested of bitterness, dangerous ambition, and abhorrent souls. Those who prayed to the spirit of the dead were empowered by the hells, it was said. Their prayers were claimed to be as the breath of doom, carrying the tortured cries of the damned in order to enact their vengeance. They inspired disorder and illness.

Whether or not any of it was true, it was easy to believe with the impression made by Lei Kui. The necromancer was a creature of ill beauty. Ma Shou was still undecided whether or not he was in actuality a demon. His very appearance was one of ambiguity and guile, trickery that would lure the living to disaster. Why Ma Shou had been pulled from the river and why Zhen Yu had been given back his breath was unknown to him.

Footsteps pressed against the soft earth outside of the tent. Ma Shou tensed, and listened. He had slept through much of the day. He’d been too exhausted and in pain to do much else. He had required food at one point and had also found need to relieve himself, and so took that to mean that he had not actually died. Whether or not that logic was sound, he also determined that the nature of his thoughts and his ability to think had not changed. He imagined that Zhen Yu’s mind could not have been what it once had been.