Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two by John Meaney Read Free Book Online Page B

– at which he ordered the imperial guard to behead one of the wives.
    ‘The emperor tried to intervene, but Sun Tzu reminded him of the promise. Then the wife was beheaded, and the remaining wives marched in perfect, coordinated silence.’
    The gaijin had asked what happened afterwards. When Kanazawa told them that the emperor gave Sun Tzu command of all his armies, both foreigners had laughed.
    Perhaps it was national pride or shame that prevented Kanazawa from discussing Miyamoto Musashi, the heroic
kensei
– sword saint – that his countrymen revered in preference to the Chinese Sun Tzu. But Musashi, that most solitary of men, had suffered from scrofulous skin, stinking since he never bathed – after assassins ambushed him in a bath-house once – and had the temerity to write of a lifetime committing homicide as if he were the greatest of artisans or artists.
    Kanazawa touched the tiny shinto shrine in the corner of the room.
    My country is wrong
.
    From the two-sword stand, he took a sheathed
katana
: the warrior’s primary sword, his a century old. Then he put it back, and picked up its smaller companion for close-work, the
wakizashi
.
    My emperor is wrong
.
    He knelt, placed the sword on the tatami mat, then sat back on his heels. Time slowed as millimetre by millimetre he pulled open his light robe, shucked it from his shoulders, and bared himself to the waist.
    The Japanese spirit is wrong
.
    It whispered from its sheath, the killing blade. Forged in the ancient way, incandescent metal folded on itself over and over in ritual, the
wakizashi
could part falling silk, or split iron-hard bamboo without sustaining damage. Or slice through a man’s body with ease.
    It hurt.
    He hardly felt it. Just the beginning: the parting of the skin.
    So beautiful
.
    Pantheistic, his view of the world: everything imbued with its own spirit; everything beautiful; the universe demanding worship.
    Even the dust
.
    White-gold dust in sunlight. Straw scent from mats. Softness of cotton on skin.
    All to be extinguished, because of the …
    Now is the time
.
    Because of the …
    Time to do it
.
    The darkness, the twisting evil.
    End it
.
    Amid beauty, the loathsome
other
, the enemy.
    End it all
.
    Blade, ready to be pulled in, elbows close to his body for one tug inwards, then the sideways drag through stomach and intestines, to feel hot slickness spilling out.
    Golden, the light
.
    So exquisite, the pain.
    Sweet, the dreaming.
    When he woke, sprawled on the mat, he knew the world had saved him. Sunlight had spoken, told him he was better than the darkness, and directed him to live for himself, not wrongheaded others who confused bullying with courage, sadism with strength.
    There was a monastery, and he knew the way.
    I will find the path
.
    Not just the physical way.
    I swear it
.
    His body moved slowly but his spirit danced as he prepared to leave possessions and his world behind.

MOLSIN, 2603 AD
     
    Orange clouds pulled away from the front of their ship; and there, across a kilometres-wide gap, hung the floating city of Barbour: elongated and convex, gleaming orange encrusted with sweeping, ice-like external promenades, spars and buttresses: beetle-like from their first perspective, changing as they flew beneath, nearing the pendulous stalactite-form that depended from the asymmetric underside.
    Jed slowed their flight, docking against a questing quickglass tendril, as gently as if his ship were kissing a long-time lover. At Jed’s command, an oval melted open in the control cabin wall. The city’s hollow tendril, to which the hull was conjoined, formed a tunnel into the city, wide enough for Jed and Roger to walk in side by side.
    They wore black – in Jed’s case, edged with narrow gold – and their eyes were natural obsidian. Pilots, openly so.
    ‘They’ll want to talk to us first,’ said Jed. ‘Before off-loading the cargo. Er …’
    ‘It’s all right. I know what you mean.’
    Roger had been feeling sick,