Blue light flashed, and the air turned cold. The ice sword stabbed at my face.
I shoved the frozen blade to the side with my forearm. The sword point dug into the hardwood floor next to my face. Before he could wrench it out again, I chopped down with the scythe.
The tip of the scythe dug into his back. His fell forward onto me. He howled, acrid smoker’s breath laced with terror filling my nose, and tried to twist loose. I wrapped my leg around the scythe’s handle and put my weight into it.
There was a split second of resistance, then the blade cracked through his breastbone and poked out the front of his shirt, dripping with pale blue blood. His grip on the ice sword loosened, and the Spirit weapon dissolved into thin air.
He twitched and tried to say something, then his whole body went limp. A long, loud breath hissed out of his lungs. The last one.
“Justice,” the Emperor rumbled, his eyes glowing with amber light.
A turquoise cloud of Miasma rose from the corpse. I let the scythe rip back into my skeleton so I could push the dead weight off me.
“Is yours, Death cultivator,” Takeshi said. “Spoils of war.”
It took me a second to realize he was giving me permission to cultivate the Miasma rising from the blue guy’s corpse.
I gave the Emperor a jerky bow, then started Swallow the Universe breathing. The Miasma flowed into my lungs, making the tissue there cold and heavy, before moving on to settle in my Spirit sea.
My whole body was shaking. Muscles in my neck and arms were cramping, either from that last bit of grappling on the ground or because I’d been unknowingly tensing them up during the fight. I almost started up my internal alchemy to calm down all of that, but I remembered just in time that making any unauthorized Spirit moves around the Emperor was grounds for his double-0 rank to stop me with extreme prejudice.
Wood creaked as Takeshi-ketsu settled on the edge of his desk. “You hesitated at crucial moment. Why?”
With the meat back on my body, I had the vocal cords to answer, I just didn’t know what to say. There was a heavy feeling at the pit of my stomach like an icy hand had grabbed hold and was pulling me down, but it wasn’t as strong as right after I killed the Nameless assassin. This blue guy had deserved to die. I knew that. I didn’t know why I’d hesitated.
The Emperor grunted to himself, then nodded at the double-0 rank standing just outside the spreading pool of blood. The suit opened the inlaid doors.
A pair of sharks, male and female, came into the Emperor’s study, holding each other.
“Is done,” Takeshi-ketsu told them, gesturing to the corpse cooling on the polished hardwood floor.
The shark woman looked down at the dead guy, then burst into sobs and pressed her face to the shark man’s shoulder. He patted the back of her neck, behind her dorsal fin.
“Thank you, Emperor,” he said in a choked voice. “Thank you for avenging our pup.”
“Don’t thank Takeshi.” The Emperor nodded solemnly at me. “Thank him.”
Fight in the Pagoda
THE SKY WAS BLACK, dotted with stars but no moon. The shaking had stopped. The script tattoo had cleared the damage from the fight, but my messed-up side still throbbed. I felt heavy. Like the scythe was weighing my skeleton down more than usual. Thoughts fuzzed in and out of my brain as I headed across the dark lawn to the pagoda.
Was I supposed to be feeling good? Satisfied? Righteous? I couldn’t find a way to categorize the last thirty minutes in the context of the rest of my life. It had all made sense when the Emperor was talking about justice and vengeance. Watching those sharks find out that the guy who’d murdered their kid was dead was supposed to fit into that somehow. Being the one who killed the murderer was supposed to be part of it, but right then my brain was refusing to process anything.
Gold light spilled out of the pagoda’s open door, illuminating a wide rectangle of stairs and lawn. Bugs swarmed around it, but luckily, someone had pulled a mosquito net over the opening. The breezes could get through, but the bugs couldn’t.
I lifted the netting out of the way and ducked inside. Nobody in the sunken living room or kitchen.
Movement out by the pool caught my eye. Warcry was practicing jab-cross-roundhouse combos.
He saw me. “What’d the Emperor want?”
“Nothing.” My stomach snarled. I wasn’t hungry, but I needed to feed the script tattoo again. I headed into the kitchen to find that icebox Rali had mentioned. “Gang business.”
Sushi shimmered to visible over one of the seating cushions. “Grady’s hurt?”
“I’m fine, Sush.” I went through the cabinets and turned up a loaf of bread. I tore off a big chunk of it. “What have you been up to here?”
“Sushi eats water bugs.” She stuck out a thin fish-tongue covered in grippers. “Salty.”
I wasn’t quite able to laugh at that, so I gave her some scratches and leaned back against the countertop while I ate. The bread didn’t taste like anything. It was just lumps of stuff moving around in my mouth, then squeezed down my throat.
Warcry came in, wiping sweat off his face with the hem of his shirt.
“You met with the Emperor alone earlier,” I said before he could ask any more questions. “How’d it go?”
“Got me assignment. Bruiser, hooligan, bodyguard.” He shrugged. “Clear the ruins, like he said, work on advancing toward Ketsu, watch his new Death cultivator’s back.”
“Wait, you’re my bodyguard?”
“’Til you advance to Ten.” Warcry scowled at the sink. “Gotta protect the asset.”
“What’d he offer you?” I asked.
“Steady credits, what d’ya think?”
“Not a shot at an IFC championship?”
“That’s down the road, ain’t it? After you make it
