“Come out…” she said. “Help me… You wanted death. This is death!”
An echo of the Hassho’s words:
“It’s in your heart, child; the only way to kill it is to die.”
Then let me die if I have to, she thought.
Just end this.
End it now.
Then: a silence. She became aware of the ringing of a bell. She looked down. Somehow, a dozen men were dead at her feet. Her hair was loose. Everything felt cold, wet, and yet burning all at once. Her hands were streaked with blood.
Her clothes. Her chest. Her face.
The dead lay all around her.Is this who we really are?She remembered the smell of manure, and the sight of old Goro tilling his field, the green of the rice plants and the flowers; she remembered the smell of leaves, the cries of the cicadas, and the dry, dusty smells of the hillside in late summer, when there was no wind and the sun seemed to hang for ever, curling into dusk and shining madder red. She remembered the hands of her people, the no’in who helped her to the top of the ladder when they laid out rice stalks in the harvest. The flutes they’d played. The drums.
And now this.
Hurry.
Everyone shouting. A million things all around her, but she saw only one. She fell out of herself. Time slipped. She was lost. Vaguely aware as the god moved through her; as in a dream.I might as well be dead, she thought.She saw nothing, heard nothing.I am no one.
No.
The voice came from somewhere far away. Her own voice.
Rui. You are the god; the god is you.
She was the source of her power and the victim of it, and when she blinked, when she came back to herself, she was surrounded by the fallout.
She blinked, and was back on earth.
Keishi soldiers lay around her, grotesque, motionless in death.
The sword in her hands, a charred taste of fire, thick smoke.Killer.Killer. She heard the god’s whisper through the fast wind along the hills.
She tried to take a step. She sank to her knees on the cold dirt and grassof the lawn, wet with melting ice and blood. Her heart pounded. Every muscle screamed in agony. She heaved.
It’d be so easy, she thought,to just stay here and let everything pass away. I won’t have to do anything. I could just give up.
Then she thought:Jobo.
She thought:The demon.
The sound of fighting still rang faintly from the garden, across the temple path; it rang from the little village, with its thatched huts and dirt.
He needs my help.
She tried to rise. Her body disobeyed, falling to the stone. Her knuckles, raw and bleeding, skin shredded from where she’d punched and clawed and smashed her fists. She fell out of herself again. It was more terrifying this time because she felt it coming, and when she did, a vicious glee erupted in her. She welcomed it.
She lay back among the corpses, and smiled, blood on her teeth, an animal shout rising unbidden from her lungs, chest and ribcage aching, as if a boulder had fallen on her, as if she’d leaped from a waterfall onto the rocks below.
Remember who you are, she thought. There is a story of your life and you are the creator of it. And what happens can be met along the road, and changed.
Hososhi, what do you want?
You still have a role to play, bird-child, the god said.Get up.
