L5r - scroll 03 - The Crane (26 page)

Ashamed that she would speak of such things in front of Aramoro, Hoturi murmured, "Take me from here, Kachiko. Let this be between us. Your people have suffered, but I have offered you aid. This torment does not suit you, and it does not benefit your clan."

"My clan?" she whispered with hatred. "You forget, Lord of the Crane. I have no clan. They are scattered, destroyed by your blades and your empire. All that I have loved has died— except you, Hoturi. But I plan to change that small fact." Brushing her fingernail across his lips, she smiled with pleasure as they began to blacken and burn. "But not tonight."

Her smile faded into hatred and her claws slashed five rents across his pale chest. Pouring some of the powder upon each wound, Kachiko backed away to see Hoturi struggle in anguish.

His flesh smoked as black blood trailed down his torso. He could barely suppress a shout, and his face twisted into a mask of pain. Hoturi closed his eyes, shaking with the torment of a thousand small agonies.

Kachiko turned to Aramoro. "You may begin now, Brother. I am done with his first lesson."

Aramoro drew a coiled whip from his obi.

Hoturi's head lowered like that of a charging bull. His blue-gray eyes opened and shone with hatred. The poison that laced his wounds flooded through him. Aramoro lifted his weapon. After the first strike, Hoturi's blood-filled eyes began to fail. The room swam in a haze of colors.

Beneath his black mask, Aramoro wore a victorious smile.

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In a drug-filled pain, Hoturi felt time pass around him. One by one, the long empty days sealed in stone were followed by nights of agony and whispered lies. Visions swam through Hoturi's mind. He wondered if Kachiko was trying to drive him mad. Each morning before the empress retired to her chambers, she placed cool rags on his wounds, pressing his hair back upon his head and smiling as if to comfort him.

Always she returned in the evening and bore the strange golden box. It shimmered and glowed to be near him, something inside lending a strange radiance. The box shone twice as brightly as she carried it away each dawn, as if its glow had grown from his suffering.

Hoturi did not know how many such days passed, only that she was always near him, giving agony and pleasure with the same hand. Her touch burned with memory. Hoturi began to dream.

"Do you remember love?" she whispered. Nights of passion, her body moving beneath his own, her kisses like sweet rain upon his face. Once they had known love. In his memory, he moved his hand upon the soft flesh of her breast, but felt only the chains that bound his wrist to stone.

"Kachiko ..."

"Think of the battles, Hoturi, when the Scorpion fell." The face of his father leered at him, cursing him for his weakness and his foolishness. Toshimoko, too, stood before Hoturi, but the old sensei turned away as Kachiko's fingers brushed against his spine. "Remember my boy ..."

Dairu. My first duty. The only son of Bayushi Shoju, heir to the throne of the Scorpion clan.

Kachiko's son.

Images turned to blood and fire. Otosan Uchi reared up before him once more in dream. Satsume's roar from horseback, spinning a tall pony through the twisting streets. Beside him, Hoturi ran with the other guardsmen, cutting down the Bayushi soldiers as they fled through the burning city.

Later, in the palace, Hoturi stepped over the broken body of a Scorpion samurai-ko, turning toward a young boy filled with pride and anger.

Remember the boy. Among a contingent of guards, Dairu stood proudly, blocking the Crane from passing into the inner chambers of Otosan Uchi. They defended the last sanctuary of the Scorpion, preventing the Crane from freeing the hostages held there.

The image spun. Faces swirled together—Dairu's, his own, Satsume's____

"Is that why you are doing this?" Hoturi heard himself whisper. The words were brittle on his swollen tongue, on lips charred by poison kisses. Dairu's face moved like water, focused and then lost in the Crane Lord's mind. "Because I killed your son."

No longer was he in the corridor of Otosan Uchi, but on the street where Satsume had fought his last battle against an enemy that had dishonored his name.

In the vision, Hoturi's own sword moved. Cut. Killed.

He was in the palace once more, and Dairu's belly tore apart. . . . Dairu. . . . Satsume. . . . Blood spilled onto the ground. Hoturi heard his own voice—"Tell your father hello when you see him in Jigoku...."

The boy's black hair tumbled beneath a fallen helm.

Kachiko's lips brushed his skin. Her body, her voice whispered beside him in the dark. Shoju never knew, never suspected ... or never cared.

"I loved you... ."Who had spoken? She? He? Or was it just the memory of her voice, so real in the darkness.

Her laughter rang again, echoing through stone chambers and the corridors of his mind.

"Your son ..."

Rain washed over him like the tears of a broken man. Rain, and a vision of the Bayushi palaces. Aramoro stood at the gates, his sword drawn. "Go home, Crane. It is done. She will not see you now." It is done.

Her silken body rose like the tide.

It is done.

The dead boy's face. . . . Shoju's corpse, cradled beneath the throne of Otosan Uchi, Toturi's katana through its chest....

Hoturi's mind struggled to put the pieces together, fighting to understand. "She will not see you now." Shoju's scream, behind the closed oak doors of the chambers. Toturi's victory. The boy's face, his eyes wide as Hoturi's sword cut through his chest. Dairu . . . my first duty. Pain lanced through Hoturi.

My first duty.

The boy's face, his blue eyes wide beneath a Scorpion's mask.

"Remember," she whispered. Her words kissed his scorched and bleeding skin. "Remember."

Bayushi Dairu on the floor of the emperor's palace. His eyes were as pale as the sky above the city.

The long years rushed forward to envelop Hoturi, and Aramoro's voice echoed in his mind once more. "It is done. She will not see you anymore."

Dairu. Kachiko's son.

Another voice spoke, that of a Crane soldier, on the day of Satsume's death. "Your sword has struck a great blow against Shoju ... you have taken away his heir, and destroyed the future of the Scorpion...."

My first duty. Dairu. Crane-blue eyes stared up at him from beneath scarlet blood and a black mask.

Hoturi's son.

This time, the scream was his own.

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"No, Brother," Kachiko smiled as Aramoro lifted the stinging lash once more. "Enough."

Hoturi hung limply in his chains, blood trailing from numerous wounds. His pale skin shone white against the gray stone. Kachiko touched him once, feeling the skin shift beneath her fingers. He did not move, nor rise, nor speak. The silence was her victory.

"Look at me, Hoturi."

Something in her voice forced his head to lift. His eyes were swollen from days of agony and pain. She was still beautiful, more than a decade later—her face, the gently curved red lips and smooth skin.

"What you have seen is the truth. But now, I will show you a lie greater than any in the empire."

The golden box opened beneath her questing fingers. A shimmering glow eclipsed the dim torches of the dungeon cell. From within the elaborate container, Kachiko lifted an object of such beauty and perfection that its very existence hurt Hoturi's heart. It was shaped like a great egg, golden and gleaming with intricate wires twined through its form. Each golden wire seemed a thread of a great skein. They wove among themselves, pulsing slowly. Within the threads, Hoturi could see red and black, gemstones of such beauty that they gleamed with an almost feral light. The egg swelled and shimmered in Kachiko's soft hand.

Somehow, it almost seemed alive.

"This, my love," the words were smooth but bitter in Hoturi's ears, "is the prize I promised to show you when we spoke on the emperor's terrace. The last gift of my fallen clan, stolen from the caverns beneath Kyuden Bayushi as a child is torn from a dying woman's belly."

It gleamed and glowed as if alive, and some sentience within it reached for Hoturi's mind. The golden threads of the egg's shell continued to move in Kachiko's fingers. It was larger than her hand and throbbed with a bloody light that reflected from the chamber walls. Hoturi could hardly move his eyes from the gleaming surface—perfect in every way. As he watched, the threads twisting into faces, screams, and images of his own past.

His sole thought was, it knows me....

Kachiko stepped closer to Hoturi, holding the egg before her womb. Her hips moved with a seductive sway, teasing I loturi's tortured gaze. "Pan Ku is the name that the First Bayushi gave to the Dragon that bore this. Have you ever heard the tale, Beloved? Let me tell you its tale so that you can appreciate its true value before I reveal its secret.

"Once, long ago, the First Bayushi's eldest son was murdered by treachery and the deceit of the Dark Lord of the South. Bayushi's wife was inconsolable, and her tears watered the ground until the mountains of the Beiden Pass grew from her sorrow. At last, unable to see his wife in such pain, Bayushi swore to bring her a Dragon's tears, to properly mourn their son. Only through such grief could his tortured soul rest in Jigoku. He went to the Dragon of the North, and of the East and West, and to the Dragon of the South—but none would hear him, and he could convince none to shed a tear, even to save the life of his lady."

Moving in small, swaying steps as she told the tale, Kachiko stood close before Hoturi. Soon, their bodies were only inches apart. The golden egg throbbed with eagerness between them.

She continued, "Only one Dragon from the far off Celestial Heavens, calling himself 'Pan Ku,' listened to Bayushi's tale. Together with Pan Ku, the First Bayushi made an oath. The Dragon would give Bayushi a tear to save his lady, but in return, Bayushi would murder a child of the Dragon's choice. Bayushi agreed. Pan Ku gave him the shell of a golden egg, that he could carry the blood of the slaughtered child into the heavens to collect his prize."

Murder a child ... his son. Her son.

The haze around Hoturi's mind flowed gently, encompassing her smell and the glow of the golden orb into a vision of gentleness and love. Almost forgetting his pain in the vision of her, he whispered Kachiko's name. Again, the egg shifted and glowed, pulsing with lust and desire.

The egg . . . was feeding on his pain, on his memories. Feeding his desire with its own.

"The child that the Dragon chose, Hoturi, was the youngest son of the First Hantei, and Bayushi murdered him without regret. The blood of the child was caught up in this egg and turned to stone. Bayushi carried the egg and its precious contents to the Dragon in exchange for the life of the First Scorpion's beloved." She smiled, relishing Hoturi's reaction to the golden bauble's lustful emanations. She watched him flex against the iron chains. He struggled to reach her, cursing at himself for a desire that was not his own. In her hands, the Egg of Pan Ku pulsed, growing stronger as Hoturi's will weakened.

"But the Dragon my ancestor served was not a Dragon at all. Pan Ku was nothing less than Fu Leng, the Dark God of the Shadowlands in disguise, testing his brother's loyalty to the empire.

"A test," Kachiko purred, "that Bayushi failed."

The Egg of Pan Ku swirled in her hand. For a moment, the face of a child formed, screaming as his life was destroyed, and his blood was drained into the ancient artifact.

"Sealing the blood of the murdered innocent into the golden shards of this egg, the First Bayushi cast a terrible curse upon it. One day, he vowed, another child would come forth from the blood of the Hantei and the tear of the wicked Pan Ku. That child would be as evil as the deed that formed it, and its rise would break the very mountains that had risen from his dead wife's tears.

"This egg, Hoturi, will be our child."

Kachiko lifted the golden globe from her belly, holding it delicately before his face. Smiling at the ruined lord of the Crane, Kachiko whispered his name again. Her breath blew green and gold mist from the strange object. The tendrils of smoke began to drift more thickly, wrapping them in a soft cloak of forced desire.

Hoturi moaned, trying again to free his hands, not sure if he wanted to choke her or embrace her. The mist shrouded them both. Thick arms of smoke held them close. Slowly, as if to kiss him, Kachiko lifted her lips to his. She held the egg between them, pressing its smooth golden shell to Hoturi's lips. Then, with a soft sound, she pressed her own to the opposite side of the shell.

The mist condensed. A terrible wind tore through the small stone room. Aramoro leapt to his feet to defend his mistress, but could see nothing.

"Kachiko-sama!" He shouted in fear, reaching for his weapon.

Her laughter pealed within the clustered mist that blocked his sight. Strange red eyes glowed through the cloying smoke. Kachiko stepped back. She was safe.

Then, within the smoke, a second figure appeared.

Holding the hilt of his sword, Aramoro leapt between his Bayushi mistress and the Crane Lord, now free of his chains and without any sign of wound.

"No, Aramoro," her voice was sleek in victory, purring with a kitten's throaty pleasure. "You do not understand." Kachiko stepped forward, running her fingertips over Hoturi's chest and shoulders.