Their eyes met.
A shout went up in the village behind them, a cry of panic: the blaze was overtaking the temple, framing the entire village with an eerie orange glow. Flames burst and the main hall was consumed in a shower of sparks.
“Hoshiakari!” A voice made them turn. It was Ohori’s bodyguard, Masakari Saito, shouting at them from the main paths far away. He sounded small in the distance. “Get back! Hoshiakari!”
Sen could just make out his voice:
“Keishi!”
Sen went for his sword. That instant, the four women converged on him, sharp sickles and blades appearing from nowhere, and it was already too late.
A geyser of blood and Saito’s man fell with a sickle in his throat before he could utter a word, his great barrel-chest making a wet, crunching sound when it hit the dirt. The broadleaf crest was trampled. Two others leaped at Ise Tadanobu, whose blade flared in the weak light as he drew.
Sen ran.
Four more women burst from the muddy water in an explosion of muckand half-formed ice and reeds. Something hit him in the back, mud in his eyes, and he lost his footing in the frenzy.Assassins, he thought,sent by Akiyo Musha’in. All with shaved heads and no’in tattoos to make them blend in.
The tall woman charged in, hit him in the face, and Sen fell, gasping in pain. Sword clattering away. Mud on his knees. The woman attacked him again. The world ripped sideways, smashed his head on the sod earth, and the assassin stomped down as he tried to stand. Mud exploded into his face. Air gone. Wiped out. Sword coming up. He heard:
“Ame’in!”
Ise Tadanobu leaped from the ridge with fury, felled one opponent in a vicious sideways stroke and stabbed at another as Sen got up. He was surrounded by the mud-streaked assassins, more exploding from the rank black water, striking as if there were poison in their little blades like reeds. He couldn’t breathe, the world spun, and he reeled from the blow to his face and the boot to his gut as Ise tried to reach him. The killers spread out, blocking him, attacking him too; Ise fell into the shadows, calling his name.
He doesn’t know where I am, Sen realized. The field was a wall of shadow and Sen was still caught in the muck. He could barely see. He slipped, tried to stand again as Ise held his own against the women.
“Here!” he cried out, cursing. “Saito, where are you!”
He fell once more; the tall assassin came back. Sen grappled with the woman’s hands, kicked at her feet. Tried to squirm free; the woman punched him in the gut. Hands searching for his throat. Sen gasped, lying on his back, dazed eyes blinking at the sky. He clawed the muck for his sword, nearly cutting his own fingers; swung it up, flung mud in the woman’s eyes with a slashing motion. The assassin fell, blinded; he kicked one last time before he twisted and found his sword in the rushes again, speared it deep into the killer’s abdomen, heaving, all his weight, all his frantic force behind the blow – and then drew it back and cut off the woman’s head before he realized what he’d done. The head rolled into the muddy water at his ankles, and Sen pulled away, and heaved black muck onto the reeds.
He had killed her.
He tottered, off-balance. Finally his eyes began to focus, finding wet and mud everywhere, the body, and the raised footpaths beside the paddies, and the sky; the cold, terrible night sky.
Something hit him in the face.
He flew off the side of the embankment into the mud. The secondassassin flipped him over. He felt strong hands gripping the back of his head. He rose, sputtering, and was hit again. Fell into the gritty water. Couldn’t tell where it came from, couldn’t tell if it was a sword or a fist. Just thrown back into the muck.
Grabbing him. Surrounding him. Drowning him.
“Sen!”
The word came to him from far away, distant, pained, but clear. A voice. A call.
I know that voice, he thought.
It’s Rui.
The thought floated through his consciousness with strange clarity.She’s here. She’s calling for me.
They were waiting, he realized.This is Kiseda-township. We were going to meet them here…
She came out of nowhere. Leaping forward, a wildcat among the killers, moving faster than Sen had ever seen.Like she’s possessed, he thought, and remembered the god. For when he saw her, he saw a fury in her that he did not understand, a red rage that made her seem almost a monster.
Two assassins were forcing his face into the clay. They did it with practiced care, so slowly, so smooth. He thrashed, screaming even as the gritty mud oozed over his face with a sucking sound, covering his eyes and ears and flooding his mouth like thick paste. He thrashed again, wildly, trying to do anything to get up, but nothing would help.
They plunged his head in, lower and lower, until Sen was lying splayed out, upside down in the paddy mud. His mouth flooded with thick, choking silt. His eyes wouldn’t open. Black faded at the corners of his vision.
He had just enough strength left to push them off. A deeper thing came out of him, something he didn’t know he had, something primal, fed by fear. He gagged, vomited a glob of silt but didn’t stop, didn’t think, didn’t fail. Once free, his lungs burst with fresh air. Pain lanced through him, but it felt so, so good, and he ran at them, screaming like an animal, and stabbed at the closest killer, heard the impact in their throat.
