Sunset Warrior #02 - Shallows of Night by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader [Lustbader, Eric Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General, Science Fiction; American
ISBN: 9780385129688
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1978-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

Shallows Of The Night

FOUR

•Hart of Darkness•

“Strange,” she said, reining in her mount.

To their right the sky was pearled lavender, the sun still but a ghost ascending

behind the morning’s thick haze. To the north and west it was not yet light.

Their luma snorted and stamped at the earth, eager to be galloping before the

wind again. Sha’angh’sei was a sprawl at their backs, a dirty smudge stretching,

entangled, to the sea.

They were on a hill burned brown by the sun which overlooked the wide snaking

river whose mouth Ronin had glimpsed when first he sailed into port aboard

Rikkagin T’ien’s ship. It was deep, turbulent in spots, quiet and sluggish in others. It

ran out from the edge of the city at seaside almost due north. The Makkon was

following its path and they it.

“What is it?” asked Ronin.

She turned to look at him, her long hair trailing across her face.

“The autumn wind is blowing,” she said.

He felt the strong gusts, chill and damp, plucking at their cloaks, shivering the

lines of tall slender pines.

“What of it?”

There was a curious cast to her face caused perhaps by the oblique light.

“It is,” she said softly, “the season of high summer.”

* * *

“You are going after it and I am coming with you.”

He was about to say no but he saw across her visage the play of stormy

emotions. She was beyond weeping, her face a white mask of hatred.

“I want to tell you something—” His chest hurt as if he had been struck down.

“There is no need.” The sound of bitter tears, the dash of gleaming metal.

“I do not understand. You cannot know—“

“I can and I do.” She turned to the window, the budding light strange and spectral

still. “Matsu was more than sister to me. More than daughter.”

“What then?”

“If I told you, you would think me mad.”

* * *

They sped through the new day, the light quickening around them like molten

metal, the winds of autumn whipping at their cloaks. Kiri’s unbound hair swept

behind her like the tail of some mythical creature, half animal, half human.

Over the bleak countryside they raced, past the long level fields of marshy plants

in precise rows down which myriad kubaru women and men in wide-brimmed straw

hats, skirts gathered and tied about their waists, waded, bent almost double as they

plucked the raw rice. Along the shooting waters of the river as it sliced ever

northward toward the death and destruction of the war, its banks wide and brown

with mud and silt, precious minerals thrown up to nourish the far-flung fields.

After the Makkon they flew and Ronin, glancing at Kiri, the noble profile with its

firm nose and high cheekbones, failed to notice the movement behind them, as a

pursuing luma kept pace with them.

* * *

By midday the land had swallowed them and all vestiges of civilization, all

habitation and settlement, seemed a thing of the past. The remnants of the alluvial

delta which was the source of much of Sha’angh’sei’s material wealth had long since

dropped away. The terrain became increasingly dry and rocky, undulating in ever

higher waves, like a storm-tossed ocean.

There was little vegetation now.

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