Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa

CHAPTER 18

"Great," he said. "Just great."

The first orochi attacker fell out of the trees onto Kobo. Toshi saw only a wild tangle of reed-thin arms and legs clad in green scales before Kobo threw himself back and crushed the orochi-bito between himself and the trunk of his sitting tree.

Then the woods around the campsite exploded into violent action as the snakefolk attacked en masse. Toshi drew his jitte with one hand and his long sword with the other, spinning in place as the blade cleared the sheath. The tip sliced across the outstretched hand of an orochi behind him, and the snake-man fell back, hissing.

Toshi looked the orochi up and down as it circled to his left, its long forked tongue flickering between its dripping fangs. It was almost as tall as Kobo, but narrower around than either of the bald youth's legs. Even with its four arms held tight to its sides and its legs pressed together, the orochi was thinner by far than a human being. Its face was a broad, flattened parody of a human-serpent hybrid, with eyes of solid red that gleamed over a sheet of smooth green and brown scales. It was so well camouflaged against the forest background that Toshi could barely tell where the orochi's limbs ended and the underbrush began. When it was in the shadows, all he could see was a glimmer of scaly motion and those terrible red eyes.

The orochi-bito he had slashed undulated back. It kept two more of its arms out in front and the last curled protectively over its stomach. The fourth hung down past its knobby knees, a trickle of greenish blood dripping from between its fingers where Toshi had cut it.

He heard an ear-shattering shriek and ducked just as another orochi sailed over his head, smashing the one Toshi had cut back into the underbrush. Without turning, Toshi said, "Thanks, oath-brother."

Kobo grunted in reply. From the sounds, he was hard at work.

Toshi pressed his back to a tree and quickly scanned the campsite. A dozen or more orochi were grappling with the kitsune party. The unarmed fox-man was getting the worst of it-his enemy had both his arms and both his legs clamped in its long-fingered hands and was preparing to bite. The sharp little fox thrashed and flailed to get free, which didn't actually work, but it did force the orochi to hang on instead of strike.

The three kitsune samurai had formed a small circle with the tall girl in the center. They hardly seemed to move, but every time a snake came close, there was a blur of polished steel and a spatter of reptile blood. They weren't going to win in the long run, but they were keeping their foes at bay.

The wizard boy's eyes were full of blue light and he wore a halo of water. An orochi snapped at him, extending its long neck, and he blasted it out of the campsite with a geyser of water from his hands.

The wizard girl, on the other hand, had broken out a bow and fired into the pair of orochi slither-walking toward her. The first snake took the bolt on its top shoulder, but barely slowed its charge. The second flowed over the first and fell on the wizard, splintering her bow and crashing into her like a wave.

"Lady Pearl-Ear!"

The tall girl's shout turned everyone's head. She was yelling for the fox-woman, who had one orochi by the back of the neck and was forcing its face into the soil. A second snakefolk, a female, had fastened herself mouth-first onto the fox-woman's shoulder from behind. As the orochi clamped down, Toshi could see the glands in her throat pumping venom into Pearl-Ear's body.

Lady Pearl-Ear's eyes opened wider than Toshi would have believed. She swooned and crumpled to the ground.

One of the kitsune swordsmen skewered the female orochi before she could slither clear. The snake-woman's death rattle was like wind-driven sand in Toshi's ears.

In turn, another orochi clamped onto the samurai's arm. He was able to transfer his weapon to his free hand and cut the snake-man's throat, but his eyes rolled back and he fell on top of his dying foe's body.

The confusion intensified around the tall girl, and soon the entire kitsune party had closed ranks around her. A half-dozen orochi corpses littered the campsite, but there were dozens, perhaps scores, slither-walking in. Toshi looked around, noticing that no one seemed to care about him, where Kobo was fairly covered in snakes.

Like the akki, the orochi-bito had swarmed over the huge ogre's apprentice and covered him from head to toe with their bodies. Toshi estimated that Kobo had engaged at least as many snakes as the rest of the both groups combined. If not for him, they all would have been overwhelmed and bodily carried off long ago.

The bald youth's tetsubo lay at his feet, buried in the skull of a large orochi. Deprived of his weapon, Kobo was continuing to break their bones between his enormous hands. Without the hideous grinding and grating sound, it looked as if Kobo was merely grabbing the snakes and hurling them off. Whenever he touched an orochi-bito, however, the snake hissed in agony. When they landed, their limbs, spines, or skulls had lost any semblance of rigidity.

They bit him repeatedly, but their fangs were not strong enough to penetrate his skin. Clear venom dripped from his biceps and forehead, and the occasional broken tooth shook loose when he struck. He punched his massive fist into a pair of orochi and they folded around his knuckles like wet paper. The blow continued until it struck a cedar sapling, which exploded into a shower of splinters and bark. Kobo shook the crushed pieces of dead snake from his fist, then crushed another orochi to the ground with his huge right foot.

Toshi suddenly had a clear line of sight to the white-haired boy. He was staring at Kobo with undisguised astonishment, eyes wide, head shaking in disbelief. Toshi took a split-second to enjoy that expression, then turned back to parry an incoming orochi's clawed hands.

Across the clearing, the littlest fox-man succumbed as the orochi holding him finally pinned him long enough to strike. As Toshi took a reflexive half-step forward, another kitsune samurai fell to a bite on the leg.

There were now four orochi for each member of the party and a dozen or more for Kobo. The tall girl, her wizard friend, and the last samurai were surrounded by a cluster of snakes. The wizard boy was gone-perhaps he had reverted to type and run screaming for his life. Kobo continued to bear the brunt of orochi attacks, but he was still largely unharmed.

But now there were so many snakefolk in the camp now that there weren't enough targets for them. A half-dozen of the leftovers turned and slithered toward Toshi on their long, flexible legs.

Kobo let out a muffled curse. Toshi turned and saw that the venom on his head had run down into his unmarred eye, painfully blinding the ogre's apprentice. Sensing his weakness, the orochi slithered across his body and folded themselves around his chest, linking their multiple arms to completely encircle their prey. More orochi wound themselves around Kobo, and the entire mass cinched tight and began to squeeze.

Kobo held his ground for a moment, and then a huge rush of air blew past his lips. Toshi saw him struggling to inhale but the pressure on his chest prevented his lungs from drawing air. His face reddened, then grew purple. His eyes bulged wide as they locked on Toshi.

The triangle tattooed on Toshi's hand began to burn, and the ochimusha snarled. The first of the approaching orochi caught Toshi's blade square between the eyes, and Toshi rolled under the second's grasping fingers, driving his short sword between the snake's ribs as he went. He kicked the third in its broad, flat nose and slashed an arm off the fourth.

Charging past the final two, Toshi sprinted to Kobo and struck the head from one of the constricting snakes. The pressure on Kobo's chest eased, but the other orochi closed the circle quickly enough to keep any air from entering the giant's lungs.

Toshi raised his sword again just as a stinging pair of needles injected liquid fire into his back. He reversed his blade's tip and shoved it back and up, under his own arm. The snake behind him died even as it injected venom into Toshi's body.

Toshi staggered, then fell to one knee. His throat closed. His vision doubled. The muscles around the bite cramped and spasmed. He felt the swords falling from his numb fingers.

The campsite spun before him and he heard the tall girl scream. She sounded a hundred miles away.

The last thing Toshi saw before falling to the ground was a flash of the tall girl's hair, almost lost among a wall of grasping hands and scaly skin.

In a painful black void, Toshi drifted. He was cold, but he could not actually feel his surroundings. His arms and legs tingled as if he had slept on all four at once, and his forehead burned with fever, though cold sweat poured down his face and back. Blind, he struggled to turn his head, searching for the barest glimmer of light. He saw nothing, a vast nothing that was darker than the space behind his own eyelids.

I'm dead, he thought dimly. The stony gray hell has finally claimed me.

His throat felt clogged, and his breath wheezed through it. No. That wasn't his breath. Something else was wheezing.

Hissing, he corrected himself. There was a constant, droning hiss all around him. That should mean something to him. He ought to remember why hissing was important, but all he wanted to do was restto rest and not to think.

The numbness in his limbs continued, but Toshi also became aware of a stinging, burning sensation across the back of his left hand.

His back still felt wet, but there was resistance. The void became more solid beneath him. Was he floating on water? It felt now as if he were spinning lazily like a leaf in a stream. He began to swirl faster, and a drop of something wet splashed across his forehead.

The burning on his hand grew worse. The fingers seemed thick and swollen, and searing agony came with each attempt to move them. Another drop splattered on his cheek.

His stomach lurched, and the muscles throughout his torso convulsed. Another drop hit him on the tip of the nose. As the water ran into his sinuses, Toshi coughed.

His hand seemed to explode on the end of his wrist. Toshi bolted upright from his supine position on the forest floor, clutching his left hand with his right. He tried to cry out, but his throat was too narrow and produced only an anguished wheeze.

It was dark. Soft, misty drizzle was falling, but larger drops had collected on the broad cedar leaves and were dripping down all around him. It had been raining, hard, from the dampness of the soil and the soaking wet bark on the trees. Moonlight illuminated the sky above the canopy overhead, but only pinpricks of silver light shone through. He was in some sort of natural enclosure, a room with walls made of live cedar.

The motionless bodies of the kitsune party lay strewn about the area-mostly those of the foxfolk themselves. The boy wizard, the tall girl, and Kobo were not here. Toshi himself and the wizard girl were the only humans in the pen.

He crouched down beside the female, Lady Pearl-Ear. She stirred when Toshi shook her, but did not wake.

"Michiko," she groaned.

Toshi turned his attention to his hand, which still throbbed and ached. Through dull, clouded eyes, he stared at himself, turning the wrist so he could see the surface of the entire fist. They had taken his weapons and his leather mail shirt. He sat for a moment, naked to the waist with one hand clutched in the other, shivering in the rain.

He staggered to his feet. Toshi wiped the moisture from his brow and took a tentative step toward the nearest wall of trees. It was a good cell, he thought. There wasn't a door to jimmy or a lock to pick.

Mechanically, with his eyes fixed on the wall before him, Toshi's hand drifted down to his hip. He picked absently at the exterior seam of his leather breeches. When the end of a thin, shining thread came loose, he wrapped it around his index finger and lifted his arm up.

A length of metallic wire pulled free of the seam. Toshi wrapped the free end around his aching hand and scanned the ground until he found two stones that were roughly the size of his fist. He tied the stones to the end of the wire with precise, tight knots and then placed them far enough apart to stretch the wire tight. Then Toshi ran his finger across the wire, slicing open the tip and producing a slow, steady flow of red drops.

Toshi quickly inscribed the same kanji on both stones, then connected them with a line of blood along the wire. The symbols puffed out a jet of dark smoke, and the entire apparatus tarnished to a dull, flat black.

Toshi picked up both stones in one hand, drew back, and hurled them at the nearest tree. The stones separated as they flew, drawing the wire taut. When the makeshift bolo made contact with the tree trunk, the stones and the wire shimmered, passing through the tree like a phantom.

The device's patina of dull black spread outward from where it struck the tree, withering the healthy cedar as it went. Toshi watched blankly as the entire tree became coated in a layer of flaky grime. He continued to stare as the tree withered in on itself, contracting down to less than a third of its original size.

Toshi turned sideways and slid through the gap he had created. Once outside the walls of the pen, he found and retrieved the stone-and-wire device.

There were no sentries he could see. Toshi turned south and shuffled like a sleepwalker through the dense woods. He still felt drugged, like part of him was back on that aimless sea of black.

Slick with drizzle and sweat, Toshi lurched through the trees, climbing a small rise to a rocky ridge. There was a hole in the canopy here, and as he looked down Toshi could see an open space with two identical trees growing on a raised platform of dirt. They were planted several yards apart. Tough hemp rope stretched between them, meeting at the center on the extremities of a large human figure.

Toshi's slack face did not change, but the terrible dread of recognition punched through his stomach like a cold fist. Slowly, deliberately, he climbed down the ravine and up onto the dirt platform.

Kobo hung between the two trees, thick ropes wound multiple times around both wrists and ankles. A wide, livid bruise stretched across his breastbone and disappeared under each arm. His head was tilted straight back, his eyes and mouth wide open. Rainwater had collected in the bald youth's jagged features, filling his eye sockets and nostrils, running continuously from the corner of his lips. The pools of liquid helped smooth out the rough terrain of Kobo's face, leveling out his scars, gashes, and badly healed bone.

The hyozan mark on Toshi's hand throbbed. He stretched that hand forward and placed the palm on Kobo's breast, where the ragged, raw outline of the same symbol had been seared into the great youth's skin.

The giant was cold and his heart was silent. Toshi lowered his hand. The ogre's apprentice was dead.

Toshi closed his eyes, rage crowding all other thoughts from his mind. His hand throbbed anew, but he merely clenched it into a fist. His eyes lost their drowsy sheen and his vision became clear, cold, and precise.

He reached out, holding his hand over the mark on Kobo's breast without touching. Both hyozan symbols burst into red flame that quickly faded into a seething black glow.

"Farewell, Kobo, oath-brother of the hyozan," Toshi said softly. "Rest now. But there is no rest for us until the job is done and you are avenged."

Toshi carefully reached forward and tilted Kobo's head forward, releasing a small deluge from his face. He placed his hand on the bald youth's sternum and pressed in. More water burbled from Kobo's open mouth and splashed down his chest. Toshi stared at the rivulets running to the ground and he nodded grimly.

"Your apprentice is gone, Hidetsugu," he whispered. "But I am still here. And there will be a reckoning."