Second Skin by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page A

poisonous stingray, indigenous to the Andaman and South China Seas, whose skin was striped like a tiger prawn’s – or the ocean bottom where it lay flat as a pancake and camouflaged, waiting to paralyze and kill its prey.
    Perhaps the snorkler had reached out for a particularly beautiful shell lying on the ocean floor. Whatever, he’d had the singularly bad joss to touch a Banh Tom and had been stung on the hand. ‘See here’ – the fisherman had pointed at the palm of the snorkler’s hand – ‘the blue spot shows the poison.’
    Kappa Watanabe had been poisoned by the venom of a Banh Tom through a tiny needle that had punctured his palm. Why? Nicholas used a nail to strip open the skin at the wound site, bent over it, and began to suck out as much of the venom as he could, spitting the stuff onto the floor. Then he stripped off his bow tie, used it as a tourniquet around Watanabe’s wrist. Had he done enough to save the man’s life? There was only one way to tell for sure.
    Bending over Watanabe, Nicholas closed his eyes. And opened his tanjian eye. The world appeared to go into eclipse as he plunged into Tau-tau. A kind of darkness descended like a veil. Nicholas opened himself to Akshara, the Path of Light, whose philosophy was built around the ability to transmogrify energy, more specifically thought, into physical deed.
    The discipline taught that there was at the center of all things kokoro, a membrane upon which certain repeating rhythms were beaten. Like chants or mantras, these rhythms excited the membrane kokoro, causing in the adept an altered state in which psychic energy could be harnessed. In the end, Tau-tau was not so different from the power of Tibetan mystics, Chinese ascetics, or the shamans of many different tribal cultures. All drew energy from the same ancient source from which man, as he became ever more civilized, had been driven.
    But for Nicholas, Akshara was imperfect because embedded within the esoteric psychic discipline were dark kernels of Kshira, Akshara’s black other half, a discipline that had killed many of its adherents – or turned them mad. Nicholas had made this terrifying discovery while battling Do Duc Fujiro. Since then, his inner struggle – and urgent search – had been to overcome Kshira by merging it into Akshara in a fusion known as Shuken, before the dark path overtook him. Shuken – the so-called Dominion – sought to negate Kshira via integration into a whole that was at least partially mythical. Tanjian scholars disagreed on whether Tau-tau had ever been a whole of darkness and light or was ever meant to be. Those skeptics doubted that Shuken had ever existed.
    But Nicholas had to believe because there was a great danger, growing like an evil flower inside him. Each time he involved Akshara more fragments of Kshira loosed themselves in his psyche. Soon, he knew, if he did not find the path to Shuken, it would be too late. Kshira would claim him as it had his tanjian mentor, Kansatsu.
    Sounds echoed and re-echoed, suspended in the liquid of time. It was like being underwater, being able to hear as whales did over a distance of miles, sounds so acute they impacted upon the skin with a physical presence. The world itself seemed simultaneously close and far away, a bowl from which Nicholas could pluck a single element – a voice, an insect’s flight, the path of a vehicle – and dissect it with the most minute scrutiny.
    And in this state he reached into the bowl of the world and plucked out Watanabe’s psyche, attaching himself like a lamprey to a shark’s sandpaper skin. He was with the tech now – though he could not know it – a part of him. And Nicholas knew he was dying. The dose of venom that had been introduced was far more concentrated than that found in nature. Enough of it had already moved past the entry point, the tourniquet’s barrier, and had entered Watanabe’s bloodstream.
    Element by element, as he had been taught by Kansatsu, he went