It was the fan with the Air Spirit construct from the train, the one I’d seen Warcry mailing off the day after we got to the Heartchamber.
His face twisted into an ugly scowl. “That was me having a go at her, nothing else.”
“How is Sushi doing that?” I asked. “This is the first time I’ve seen her do anything besides disappear or eat bugs.”
Rali cupped his chin. “Maybe she’s cultivated enough to start showing us things while we’re awake. We gain new abilities as our kishotenketsu advances, so a creature who took the Dragon Gate must be able to do the same. Is that what happened, little fish?”
“Happened!” Sushi spiraled around excitedly.
“I wish you could do more than echo us,” Rali said. “I’d sure like to know more about your cultivation. Do you show us these things—or make us remember our dreams of them more clearly—because the Lost Mirror Spirit collects around us somehow?” When he didn’t get a reaction out of Sushi, he guessed again. “Or maybe it’s our reaction to what we lost that creates Lost Mirror Spirit. Do you know, Sushi?”
“Know,” Sushi said, shaking her head. Or maybe that had been a no. It was hard to tell.
“What I want to know is how a fish got a Spirit affinity in the first place,” Warcry growled. “Even Dragon Gate animals ain’t supposed to have an affinity.”
“In the sword legends, really cunning centuries-old creatures can steal Spirit types,” Rali said. “Or trick cultivators out of them.”
“No!” Sushi’s blue and brown eyes widened, panicked. “No, no, no.”
She swam out to the center of us and grunted like she was lifting something heavy. The air above her shimmered with purple Spirit again. The image of a boat gliding down a wide river appeared, grainy like a found footage horror movie.
The people in the boat were dressed in robes that looked like they’d come from ancient Egypt, but the boat was a cross between a Viking dragon boat and one of those royal barges. Male servants poled it along while female servants waved fans at the queen reclining in the center. The queen held a little circle of bronze in her hand. Every now and then it caught the day suns just right and glinted like a tiny supernova. I’d read about mirrors made of polished bronze in old Bible stories and those books about mummies and ancient Egypt, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one.
Arrows sliced out of the tall reeds surrounding the river, knocking down servants, and all hell broke loose. With Ki-enhanced jumps, bandits leapt aboard the barge.
My eyes bugged out when I recognized their leader. He was a little older than when he’d killed that starburst-jawed dog, but not as old as he’d been when he destroyed the barbarian horde single-handed.
With him leading the charge, the ambush was fast and brutal. They slaughtered everyone. The queen and a few of her female servants tried to swim away, but he got them, too, tearing out their life points and swallowing the fresh Miasma as he went.
The shaky-cam footage followed the bronze mirror as it fluttered down through the blood-clouded water, glittering and glinting, until it hit the muddy river bottom.
I got the feeling of time passing, and then a little fish with purple and white scales appeared. It was fascinated by the glittering circle, nudging it, bumping it, studying its shine from all angles.
In a move that defied physics, the purple and white fish swallowed the bronze mirror whole, its gut bulging out to the sides for a second before returning to the right shape.
The image disappeared. Sushi let out a huge breath, panting with exhaustion, then swam back to me and slumped across my shoulder. I petted her, smoothing her fins back.
“Are you bleeders gonna believe that?” Warcry demanded, waving his hand at the space where the movie had played out. “If it’s like you said, big man, she could just be outsmarting us.”
Rali shrugged. “If she’s cunning enough to come up with a story like that, I have to respect the effort.”
“Anyway, what are we supposed to do?” I said. “She’s been helping us.”
“Sushi helps,” she agreed wearily. “Sushi eats bugs.”
Warcry wasn’t convinced. “Oughta tell her to take a swim and not come back. Nobody helps nobody without wanting something in return, grav.”
I scowled. Kest had said the same thing about Van Diemann, totally ignoring the fact that she and Rali had grown up there and helped me for nothing when I first got dropped on the prison planet.
Before I could speak up, though, Rali beat me to the punch.
“I have to disagree with you there, Burning Hatred cultivator. You might’ve missed it, but Hake just raided a Big Five base to free an enemy he could’ve left to rot, and he did it because it was the right thing to do, not because he got anything out of it.”
“And you think the fish’s got the same crack in its brain he does?” Warcry jerked his chin at Sushi. “You said it yourself, big man, she gets a cultivation boost from the stuff we lost. She’s a bleedin’ parasite.”
Instead of arguing with him, I looked down at Sushi.
“Hey, Sush, can you tell us...er, show us why you decided to follow us?”
She slumped like I’d asked her to hold up the planet for a few million years, but took a deep breath and made the air shimmer.
This time, everything happened in fast-forward like she had to get it all out before she ran out of Spirit. We saw her swallow the mirror, return to the right shape, cultivate for years or maybe centuries. Then one day she saw another shiny thing glinting between the bars of a trap and swam inside. A guy wearing spectacles scooped her out of the water, studied her, dumped her into a round flask, labeled it Lost Mirror, and put her in a case full of other flasks.
