War priest the complete.., p.99
War Priest: The Complete Series, page 99
“The shinobi-ess is right,” Meosa said upon his return. “Let’s head to the hills, and do so quickly. It looks like a sandstorm is picking up from the east.”
They hustled toward the cluster of hills and small plateaus, ones that provided pockets of shade. Progressing along a dry riverbed, Arik noticed signs of wildlife, from skeletons to a nest that had been pillaged, the eggs broken. They reached a series of batholiths that cast long vertical shadows onto the ground. These gargantuan rock formations reminded the disciple of how the towers at his Academy looked during the summer, the shadows a much-needed refuge after a hot day.
Once they circled around these batholiths, Arik and his group came to an area that was shielded by several large boulders. Not only did the boulders provide shade, but an overhang on the cliff beyond would protect against rain.
If it ever rains here, Arik thought as he turned to the east. As Meosa had pointed out earlier, there was certainly a windstorm blowing through, one that was twisting granulated bits of sand through the air.
Tayaura sat with her back against one of the rocks. “Unfortunately, we are less prepared than we had hoped. This would have been halfway doable if we’d had our hats and some time to gather supplies.”
“What happened exactly?” Istvan asked the disciple. “You never explained how you were chased over the border.”
Arik provided a deeper explanation once he was seated as well, happy to be out of the sun.
“And the kami?” Istvan asked him once he had finished.
“She’s alive.”
“Still. I’m surprised to see that your sword can nearly kill kami.”
“I was surprised as well. But it worked, and next time, I will finish the job.”
“And good riddance,” said Meosa. “Although, the fact that the Whispering Sword has this power makes me wonder why Coro Pache didn’t do the same to me. Instead, as you know by now, they sealed me away in a cave. Now that I think back, especially with how long I was trapped in that cave, death may have been easier to digest.”
“But then you wouldn’t be here,” Arik said. “We would have never met.”
“How did I know you were going to tell me something like that? If I wasn’t here, I’m sure you would figure out some way to go about saving the three realms.” Meosa’s form appeared, the wind cutting through portions of it. He brought a hand to what could be considered his chin and stroked it. “Actually, you would probably be dead as well, and this little tryst the two of you have started would never come to be.”
“Tryst?” Tayaura asked. “Me and the disciple? Please.”
She started to laugh, which only made Arik feel slightly foolish. She stopped when she saw the look on his face.
Istvan opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but decided against it. Instead, he took a walk around, licking his lips as he did so, before the northern man finally turning back to them. “We need to find food if we are going to travel through the night. I am assuming that you can do that for us, right?” he asked Meosa.
“Bah. How did I know that you were going to ask me to find something to eat?”
“Because you can hear our stomachs grumbling? I don’t know about you two, but I hadn’t had breakfast yet when all the commotion started, and I ran into the streets to find my friends jumping from rooftop to rooftop like drunken snow monkeys.”
“Drunk snow monkeys?” Arik cracked up. This was a reference to a classic Onyxian tale about a group of monkeys breaking into a tavern and eating vegetables that had been soaking in beer. What followed was a night of terror for the local villagers as the snow monkeys moved from house to house, pillaging and plundering. The village was never the same after that.
“We can probably eat the flowers on those cacti as well. At least I have in the past,” Tayaura told them. “They aren’t too bad, especially if you boil them.”
Istvan did little to hide the disgusted look on his face. “Eating flowers? I spent enough time with Nyoko to know that I’d prefer actual meat. Let the sandstorm pass first. And then we can eat, rest, and set out. Unless someone has a better idea?”
Once Arik and Tayaura exchanged glances, Arik spoke: “That seems like the best idea to me. Travel through the night, rest during the day tomorrow, travel another night, and hopefully reach Mogra.”
“Once we settle down, someone also needs to tell me more about what we are looking for in Mogra as well,” said Istvan. “I’m still unclear about that part.”
“We are looking for the Demon Charm of Katano. And all we have to go on is a cryptic little passage written in his biography,” Meosa said. “But that is how we found the Mask of the Fallen and the Whispering Sword, so I think our odds are pretty high. I could be wrong.”
“And do we know what this charm does?” Istvan asked Arik.
“No, but we’re going to find out.”
****
Meosa managed to capture a pair of desert hares, which they cooked using the flames from Istvan’s hammer and kindling that Tayaura gathered. The meal turned out to be good, even if Arik could still taste it at the back of his mouth. After resting most of the afternoon, Arik and Tayaura stepped away, leaving Istvan behind for a moment.
The sun hadn’t completely set, but it would soon, the temperature starting to drop. The colors that now traced across the sky, from marigold to a deep salmon that reminded Arik of some of the fish up north, added a calming effect to the vast desert. Suddenly, it didn’t seem as intimidating as it had been during the day, when heat waves blurred the distance and everything yearned for water.
“This should do,” Tayaura said as she traveled up a slight incline and sat. “I want to show you something new.”
Arik took his seat across from her. “While we’re at it, I thought that maybe we should see if we can’t summon Hojo later. He did say that he would be able to provide lessons to us, or something of the sort. And we need to update him on what has happened. He will find the betrayal from both Nyoko and Master Guri Yarna surprising.”
Tayaura shook her head, but did so in a soft way, her movement barely discernible. “No, he won’t find it surprising at all.”
“We can ask him more about Saiyo Haro—”
“I don’t know what we are going to learn about Saiyo from my father. His motives now are quite unclear to me, aside from Saiyo’s desire to gain immeasurable power in a short amount of time. Maybe in the morning we will seek my father’s guidance, or wait a day or so. It might be more helpful after we have seen what is to come in Mogra.”
“Good plan. What did you want to show me?”
“I’ve shown you the basics for using Chimaura to change your appearance. Have you been practicing?”
“I have. Have you been practicing recovery?”
Tayaura lifted her sleeves to show Arik that her arms were completely smooth. For a moment, he took this to mean that she hadn’t been practicing. It was only after he stared at them for a moment that he realized what she was showing him. Last time she’d shown him her arm, there had been cuts from her failed healing attempts. Now, they were all gone.
“You are getting better.”
“I still can’t heal deep wounds, like the one given to me earlier.” She touched the side of her body, where there was still a slit in her robes, one marked by dried blood.
“Deep wounds take longer. But it is a point that you can reach, I’m sure of it. You should try healing someone else soon. Just a small wound. We can practice together.”
“Yes, we can.”
For a moment, the two were quiet. As a subtle wind blew through the desert, Arik heard his own heart beating and noticed that it was racing. He knew that he was starting to fall for Tayaura, but he also didn’t want this to distract him from what they were planning to do. There was risk, and the likelihood that either of them could die was quite high. It would be foolish to add any romantic feelings into a situation like that.
“About what you wanted to show me,” Arik said, once the silence had grown uncomfortable.
“Right. I’m going to show you something—or at least I will try to show you something—that I don’t think my father ever demonstrated to you. Did he show you, or did he ever tell you, anything about becoming smoke?”
“Becoming smoke?” Arik thought of the lessons he had taken from Hojo, from some of the sword lessons to a truncated version of the first year of study in the School of Illusion. “I don’t believe so, no.”
“It was one of the last things that I worked on with him, before our separation. I wanted to show it to you.”
“By all means.”
Tayaura stood. She paced for a moment, and then slowly lowered her head. Part of her form began to filter away, as if the wind had picked it up and run with it. She exhaled again, her form fading entirely.
Suddenly, with a deep gasp, she was back. Tayaura dropped to her knees. Stumbling to his feet, Arik moved over to Tayaura and helped stabilize the illusionist. “What did you just do?”
She grinned at him. “I disappeared.” It was then that Arik realized that his hand was on her shoulder, his other hand on her arm, near her elbow. He was as close to bringing her into his arms as he had ever been, and the disciple was glad yet again that Meosa had stayed back with Istvan.
“Disappeared?”
“I have to be careful,” Tayaura whispered. By this point Arik had pressed away, sure now that she was able to sit on her own.
He got on his knees in front of her. “That is one of those powers, isn’t it? The kind that Hojo would warn against. I can see it in your eyes.”
Tayaura bit her lip and then relaxed to some degree, as if she had just remembered that her father wasn’t there watching. “It is one of the riskier moves an illusionist can perform, yes.”
“Then why did you want to show me? If it’s going to hurt you…”
“It’s all about the strength of your mind, all of this.” Tayaura tapped her finger against her temple. “The strength of your mind, disciple. It was one of my father’s earliest lessons, it was one that he couldn’t come to grips with. He believed in the Hidden Warrior Sickness. He was obsessed with it, and he made it a possibility. That’s what I believe, anyway.”
“You yourself just said that you needed to be careful.”
Tayaura didn’t reply to the statement. Arik pressed her again. “Why would you say that if this wasn’t the case?”
Rather than answer, she began speaking about what she had just done: “You’ve used Chimaura to change your features. This is an extension of that, but it takes place over the entire body. It uses your chi aura to reflect whatever is behind you through you. It is not disappearing, it is an illusion, it is a very advanced one, which…” Tayaura sighed. “I’m not going to lie and tell you that it isn’t risky.”
“You don’t need to do it. Why did you show it to me in the first place?”
“As we establish whatever it is we are going to establish,” she said, vague as ever, “the more we share what we are capable of, the more ideas we may gain. These are just set techniques, if that makes sense. Same with your healing, I believe. You learn to do one, then you learn another, and you improve upon it, and that compounds in a way that improves your overall skill. Both of us are experiencing, through each other, new usages of chi. That’s why I showed it to you. I wanted you to know what was possible. And, I just wanted to try it again.”
“How many times have you done that?”
“Not many.”
“Tayaura.”
“Yes, disciple?”
“Call me Arik.”
She peered at him for a moment. “Yes?”
“I just want you to be careful, that’s all. I don’t know what else to say.”
Tayaura approached Arik and offered him a hand. Once he was on his feet, she let her hand linger in his for just a moment before releasing it. “It’s dark enough now for us to leave.”
“I’m sure Istvan and Meosa are waiting.”
“Patiently, I hope.”
****
Traveling through the desert at night could have been a pretty intense journey considering just how far they were from civilization. But with Tayaura and Istvan, Arik felt safe, not to mention his mask, his sword, and the garrulous and often cantankerous kami who kept them entertained with his numerous stories from the past.
“You’ve never seen someone angry until you have seen a Jadean nobleman chasing away suitors because they have heard unfounded rumors about his daughter. No, I wasn’t the one to spread them. But they were the kinds of rumors that would certainly bring young men to Avarga by the droves.”
It was much cooler than it had been in the early evening. Like Tayaura, Arik now wore a haori cape over his shoulders. Istvan didn’t seem to be as affected by the cold, the large hammer on his back naturally warm, even when it wasn’t ignited.
“Why are you telling us this again?” Tayaura asked Meosa once they reached a ridgeline, the desert stretching out in from every direction.
“To keep all of your minds off the fact that we could easily die out here. Or, you could. I may dry up trying to get to the city, but I’d at least attempt it. This is the desert, you know. People perish here all the time. I’ve heard there are even giant worms that live beneath the sands.”
“Do they?” Istvan hopped from the ridgeline to a rock, and from there to the ground below. “And giant worms don’t exist.”
“Not to your knowledge they don’t. Nice jump, by the way. I see you have borrowed some skills from the rabbit that you ate earlier,” Meosa said. “And yes, people always die in the desert. That’s why deserts are so scary. Actually, to your kind, most natural environments are scary. Whereas most yokai and kami find your filthy cities scary. Funny, that. I guess it all boils down to a simple question—who knows what lurks in the dark? It doesn’t matter if we are in the desert or we are traveling to the border of the Jade Realm. There’s always something watching.”
“Like Koharu?” Arik asked, referring to the bakeneko they had encountered along the border.
“Sure, like her.”
“The yokai council she mentioned. Do you know any more about that?”
“I am not a yokai, my boy. But yes, I do know of their little meeting group. As she explained, they mostly discuss humans. Or at least they did back in my day.”
“I would like to see that,” Arik said.
“You have to be invited first. Now, shinobi-ess, there’s something you haven’t told Istvan.”
“What’s that?” Tayaura asked Meosa.
“Your little theory.”
“My what? You mean about the disciple’s master working with the Onyx Realm, that all of this was a ruse of sorts meant to strip away power from Nobunaga, install a puppet leader in the Crimson Realm, and rally the Onyx to invade or force the Crimson to work with the Onyx?”
Istvan stopped walking. “Why would anyone high enough in my realm agree to so much senseless killing? Especially disciples and priests?”
“You know as well as I do that the affairs of the high courts don’t necessarily align with what would be best for the people. And as I told the disciple, we don’t know how many of his kind are actually dead or not. None of us have been up north in some time.”
“I saw my entire Academy destroyed. Everyone killed aside from my sister.”
“I am aware,” Tayaura said, a tenseness to her voice. She had been there during the incident. If anyone knew, it was her. “But we don’t know what happened at the other academies. How many were there?”
“Twelve,” Arik answered.
“It may have been an attack just to make your master’s capture more plausible. I don’t know exactly what happened, even if I was there. I was simply doing what Sengum Minamoto had ordered, as part of my infiltration into his organization. That is the problem with what we do sometimes.”
“You take things too far.”
Tayaura didn’t say anything. Instead, she pressed ahead, keeping a distance of about twenty feet from Arik. The group continued onward for the next several hours.
“She is stubborn,” Istvan said at one point.
“We all can be,” Arik told him as he squinted at the horizon, noticing a slight change in the light. It would be morning sooner than they thought.
“What do you think about what she said? I’ve been trying to put the pieces together. I can’t tell if it’s just so crazy that it might be true, or if there’s no way that all these things could be linked.”
“I don’t know if we will ever truly know. There are only a few people who may have the information that would reveal this. Saiyo Haro, Kogu, and Master Guri Yarna. I don’t think that we will get to a point where we will be able to have an extended conversation with any of them.”
“You intend to kill your old master?” asked Istvan.
“I do. He betrayed all the people I grew up with, from my peers to my teachers and the others who worked at the Academy. He’s partially responsible for the deaths of my mother and father. I’m doing this for them.”
“And your sister?”
“For her, as well.”
“If it comes down to killing him or saving your sister, what will you do?”
