Abe no Seimei
“What’s your wreck’s name, stranger?”
Carmichael padded a slow circle as he posed the question. The stranger seemed to have no rifle, but his folded blue robes might easily have hidden a handheld emitter.
At the top of the dust mound, Carmichael’s brother Addam rested a javelin on his shoulder. The two were Wet Thieves.
“My wreck?” asked the man.
“No fooling us,” said Adam with a yawn. “Saw the flare. You came down over the dunes.”
“Ah. You mean my lightstrider. She is The Greywolf.”
Carmichael stopped behind the stranger, close enough that he could step in with a goring swing of his hangar hook, far enough that he wouldn’t interfere if Addam threw his javelin. They had practiced their routine. “Was she carrying water?” Carmichael asked.
“Water? No.” The man glanced about at the upright, half-buried, derelict ships. Sunburnt sand stretched in all directions. “I’m thirsty myself.”
“So’s everyone,” Carmichael grumbled.
“Everyone?”
“A town,” Addam said with a smile. “Half a day’s walk toward the red sun. We’ll guide you all the way there, with frequent rests in the shade of the freighters. But, my friend; we demand fair trade.”
“I’ve said I have no water.”
Carmichael moved closer to the stranger. He held the hangar hook ready for a strike. “Answer some questions,” he said. “We’ll decide what you have and have not. Answer some questions.”
“Alright.”
“What’s your name?”
“Does it matter?” The stranger smiled. Only Addam saw it.
“Just give us something, man.”
“Some have called me The Sorcerer.”
Addam scoffed. “Like from a fairy tale? Do you fly to primitive worlds and dazzle them with emitters?”
The stranger shook his head.
“You human?” asked Carmichael with a prod of the hook.
“More or less.”
“Show us your hands.”
Obediently, the stranger swept a hand from beneath the billows of his robes. He extended a finger to one of the derelicts. The vessel’s chrome was scarred by sand, but still shone under the sun. “Did you land in one of those ships?”
“Nobody lands, fool,” said Carmichael.
“A signal pulls down every vessel which passes by this planet,” said Addam with cheer. “They all land about here in this graveyard. That’s how everybody arrives.”
“Mm.” The stranger scratched his chin. “That is good to know.”
“Enough,” Carmichael prodded again with the loop of the hook. The stranger turned to face him. “Take off that shiny aegean suit of yours. Drop whatever’s strapped underneath.”
“No.”
Behind the stranger Addam shifted. “Aww please don’t make trouble.”
The stranger grinned at Carmichael. “This is not trouble,” he said. “The real trouble lies ahead.”
Fourteen bodies turned as one from the stools and benches where they were seated in the New Buda Taproom. Fourteen sets of eyes settled on the stranger in the aegean blue robes as he zippered shut the plastic aperture after stepping inside. Fourteen people stared as he turned toward them. The stranger stared back.
“I was told I could find a glass of water in here,” said the stranger. No one answered. Beyond the plastic door there sounded a steady hiss.
Finally a woman’s voice said, “Water isn’t free.”
The stranger turned to his left, to the bar. As his eyes adjusted to the soft, undulating, neon light cast from the opaque plastic door and the windows, he saw an olive-skinned woman in a brown apron. She stood by two metal tanks with spigots, and some shelves with glasses.
The stranger stepped across the space. The eyes followed him. He stood at ease before the woman. He said, “I’ve just arrived.”
The woman collapsed her fingers together before her on the counter. The stranger saw her pass a look over the other patrons. Hushed conversation resumed, though all were listening still. “From the dunes?” asked the woman.
“Yes. I met two men, who told me about this town.”
“Are they dead?”
“Would it matter?”
The woman shook her head. “I told those boys, ‘If you can’t make it here by going straight, you’ll run into trouble.’” The stranger only smiled at this. The woman shook her head again and folded her arms. “Listen Mr…?”
“Let’s say my name is Abe. And yours?”
“Sophia. Listen Abe, we’re all stuck here together. We have to get along. Capiche?”
“Capiche.”
Sophia stepped back from the counter. She leaned against one of the metal vats, arms crossed. “Like I said, I’m not permitted to just pass out cups of water.”
Abe leaned in closer and asked, “Permitted by who?”
Sophia didn’t answer. The hiss beyond the habitat door swelled louder, until the other patrons realized and spoke to fill the silence. Abe seemed not to notice. He only said, “I can pay.”
“Every caught fish says that.”
From beneath the folds of his robe Abe produced a hand. In it he held a flat, needle-thin knife, gleaming even in the dim green light, and with a grip the length of a finger.
“Will you take this sharp throwing blade for a pitcher of water?” Abe asked.
Sophia leaned forward and took the knife. She looked between the blade and Abe’s face. She noticed now that this man was older than she’d initially thought. His hair was black and shiny, but she saw small lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
Abe noticed her look. “I mean you no harm,” he said with a smile.
Sophia handed the knife back. “We’re content here. New Buda gets by with simple jobs. Free of space’s worries.”
Another patron sitting on a steel chair in the corner raised his voice and said, “We’ve got a hydroponics bay working at the bottom of The Chateau. That’s the big frigate we’re built around.”
“It’s farming,” said Sophia. “Pre-industrial. Simple. But others work at the solar farm. Or with the condensers. Everyone who crashes here finds a way to use their own happy talent.”
Abe smiled again. “Fear not, grieve not,” he said in a dry voice. “Did you all come from different ships?”
“A few came in groups,” said Sophia. “And there’s probably some sleepers we don’t know about. Kept frozen on the lightstriders by fume energy.”
“Where does the water come from?”
“There’s moisture in the air. But only a little.”
Abe coughed. “Pity,” he said. “Perhaps I may find some repository in your Chateau.”
“Listen, maybe I can make a trade. But not for a knife.”
“Mmm?”
“We want poem’s, riddles, stories. Tell us something to lean to and listen ‘round. I’ll give you a glass in return.”
“What kind of story would-”
Just then a shadow thickened over the swirling green light. Abe heard the sound of the habitat door unzipping. He turned.
Abe watched nine men and women step from the hissing green mist into the silent interior of the taproom. The first eight wore shiny, form-fitting, black thermal suits, though they had no helmets. Two of them had handheld emitters strapped at their hips. The rest had various knives or swinging hooks. Their faces were flat and expressional. At the same instant as they entered a few of the original patrons rose and slipped through the open zipper. Abe now counted a total of twelve people in the habitat, aside from himself.
The ninth newcomer zipped the entry shut. Instead of a thermal suit, he wore an archaic battle coat - a heavy covering of leather and reinforced steel plates that covered his torso, arms, and upper legs. He was unarmed.
While the other eight took seats in open chair, this armored man stepped over to the counter. He rubbed a hand over his bald head, wiped it on his coat, and shook his head at Sophia. “Can’t cross the street without sweating like a lobster over a pot.”
Sophia nodded without meeting the man’s eye. “Would you like a glass of water, sir?”
The man turned to Abe. “Sophia’s too courteous to tell me off. If I want water, I can drink my own supply in the frigate!”
Abe met this man’s eye. “I myself was about to sell a myth in exchange for one glass.”
The armored man laughed. “Do you have such a valuable tale?”
“You are the master here?” Abe asked.
Still laughing softly, the armored man nodded. “My name is Tiresias.”
“Then perhaps you and your soldiers will sit for my story, and tell me if it is worth one drink.”
Tiresias turned to Sophia. “Pour a glass,” he said. She took one from the shelf and began filling it from one of the gurgling, spigoted tanks. Tiresias returned his eyes to Abe’s. “Let’s hear it.”
Abe breathed deeply through his nose, then began. “Long ago, when the stars were younger, I traveled with a mission to one of the old planets. The people - humans - who lived on its surface still clung to their old superstitions. One of these was of a monster called a Vampire. Have you heard of this thing?”
“I have,” said Tiresias.
“The vampire is almost always a being of evil. Sometimes it feeds on human blood, sometimes on the human soul. It is like a leech, or a mosquito - but with features as alluring as a pale moon. It lives in high mountains, black forests, desolate lake shores. It lures the innocents who pass its lair, then hypnotizes them. It dominated the possessed humans, starving them, placing their minds in an illusory paradise. Its servants are Dustmen. No mundane power is equal to the monster. Only great magic, and a great magician, can set the vampire to rest.”
“This is a strong creature you describe.”
“Perhaps. But this vampire must abandon greater associated society for this domination over a small few. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“The vampire would rather be king of a cage than anyone’s pawn.”
Tiresias held up a flat hand. “Do you wish for trouble? Telling this story?”
Abe shook his head slowly, without looking away from the man’s face. “This is not trouble, the real trouble lies ahead.”
Tiresias raised his eyes. He quickly set his expression in a frown, however, and stared hard at Abe. Abe reached for the glass of water. Tiresias reached out first and set a palm over the cup. “That story’s too cheap,” he said.
Abe stared back. “If you won’t give me the water, then give me a story in exchange.”
Slowly, Tiresias nodded. “There’s another old world legend, a mighty sorcerer named Abe no Seimei. Have you heard it?”
Abe said, “I know some versions.”
“In this one he began as an ordinary man, with many friends in society. But Abe no Seimei was secretly a man of lust. Not for flesh, but mastery. He was really a great defiler who wanted to strip the world of its mysteries and its legends. He ventured among the stars to learn secret magic. He abandoned his friends.”
“Abandoned?”
“In any case, the Abe that returned home was so much changed that his friends could not recognize him. The magic spells he learned were of a wide, dazzling, powerful nature. Some of the magic arts can paint in black magic, charring surfaces with their spells. Abe no Seimei, however, learned to cast spells of sharpened steel; he alone painted in red. He stepped into a pool of magical water too, and became invulnerable to fire and bullets. Except for his head, his Achilles heel, which remained above the water. It is even said that he died and was reborn. He no longer needed food or drink, but took all his energy from the elements of sun, wind, earth. I have heard that his true appearance is scarcely human now. He wears an illusory skin, and may choose to make it appear as hale or gaunt as he wishes.”
The atmosphere hummed with the distant hissing sound in an interval of long silence. Abe hummed. “Mmm.”
“How are my parents?” asked Tiresias.
“They’re well. But they’ve aged because of you.”
“Is that so…”
Tiresias’ knuckles turned white around the rim of the water glass. He lifted it from the table. He flung it at Abe. He lunged.
The glass shattered against Abe’s shoulder as he blocked the swing. He glided like a wraith backward, faster than Tiresias, who stumbled. Abe’s hands swung from the billows of his blue robe as he slid back. Two thin knives flashed from his fingers. Two men in thermo suits caught the knives in their necks. They sank, fingers failing to stem the crimson spray.
Abe already had his hands ducking back into his robes. Behind him one of the regular patron’s sprang from his seat. Abe spun. Both arms whipped out, two slashing knives cutting an X-pattern. The man fell back clutching his face.
All inside sprang to their feet now. Sophia screamed. She ducked behind one of the tanks.
Tiresias found his feet. He and one of the women in a thermal suit lurched toward Abe from two diagonals. Abe threw himself into a roll between them, ducking their hands, one knife swishing through suit and flesh to sever the woman’s achilles. As he came up his right hand whistled the second knife across the room. It stuck fast in the eyesocket of a bearded man in a thermo suit. He clutched his face, choking on pain.
One of the suited men had already been moving to intercept the sorcerer. The man swung a flat steel bat as Abe came out the roll. The blow struck Abe across the arm. He stumbled into another roll to mitigate the blow, this time falling sideways across one of the round metal Taproom tables. The thermal-suited man gave chase. He wound back the steel bat for another strike, but Abe jabbed with one of the needle knives. The blade punctured the man’s gut. Abe then whipped forth a second blade from the blue robe, slashing up at an angle. The edge opened a slit in the man’s jugular; a vivid, shiny red geyser spattered Abe and the steel table.
A whistle like a firework resounded. A flash lit the space. Abe felt a sudden impact as an emitter beam blasted against his back. His robe instantly evaporated in a wide hole, the edges still flaming. The armor beneath protected his skin.
A second shot whistled - Abe lurched to avoid it. Smoking and on fire he dove right. He caught the edge of a second table and flipped it on its side. He huddle behind it just as two more shots flashed from an emitter in the hands of another suited foe. The blasts struck the bottom side of the table. The top side’s steel glowed red and warm beside Abe’s face.
“Together,” someone shouted.
Abe heard three sets of boots thudding in unison on the packed plastic floor. He paused; one breath. The boots thundered. He tucked his hand inside his robe; breathed again. The three were nearly upon him.
Abe rose in fluid motion - up through the trail smoking from the back of his blue robe - and spun, in the same motion allowing his left arm to glide forth. His left hand flicked out in a fination maneuver like an adder. Three knives whipped from between his fingers. Each sailed on a different course set by the fractional twisting of Abe’s knuckles.
One blade sank to the handle in the belly of a woman in a white silk shirt. Blood bloomed on her front as she fell. A second knife lodged in the cheek of another woman in a thermo suit. She howled, twisting away.
The third knife rebounded off metal. Tiresias had deflected it with his forearm plate. Abe swung out with his offhand and launched another. Teresias kept his arms high, the second knife rang harmlessly. The armored man closed the distance. He bent, caught the steel table by its legs, and hurled it up. The flat, heated topside smashed against Abe, who stumbled against the wall. The table banged off to the side.
Abe caught his breath. Tiresias closed in and swung a right hook at his ear. Abe raised his own arm to block the blow. Tiresias came in with a jab that caught Abe in the stomach. Abe hunched. Tiresias slammed a plated shoulder against his head. The armored opponent pressed his greater size and weight against Abe, squeezing him against the wall. Abe brought his knees up. Raised his arms. Tried blocking the punches. But the stronger man had the advantage. Tiresias rained blows on Abe’s skull and shoulders almost unopposed.
Abe darted a wrist into the chest seam of his robe. Tiresias saw the motion and slammed a fist against exposed ribs. But, though Abe arched and gasped with the blow, his face betrayed no pain. His hand darted out from the folds and wound back for a stab. Tiresias stepped back - too late. The shiny steel dove between two plates in the coat. It punched through leather. It punctured the armored man just above his left hip.
Tiresias gasped and started back. “Shoot him!” he cried.
Abe saw the two men with emitters taking aim as Tiresias moved aside. Reeling from the beating, he ran, stumbling, along the Taproom’s wall. Six shots hummed and flashed. Five missed. Abe caught the sixth on his back again. His robe was still on fire, though now it hung loose as the scorched hole across his shoulder blades burned wider.
Reaching a second steel table, Abe grabbed it to raise a cover from the shots. He found immediately that this one was bolted to the floor. Without stopping he picked up one of the shot steel stools and hurled it at the nearest of his two foes. The man ducked but the stool caught him by the dome of his head. He fell. The other shooter used the opening to burn another hole in Abe’s robe, across his front. The aegean blue garment was almost a pillar of smoke, with fire burning down the blue sleeves and waist.
Abe heard a sound of ripping plastic. A second later there was a buzz and flash, but Abe blocked this emitter blast with a second raised stool.
Keeping that stool raised like a shield, Abe bounded zigzag in a diagonal across the open space. The thermo-suited enemy in the opposite corner, standing by the bar, missed thrice. Abe reached him in five strides. As he made the last step the man raised his arms to cover his head. Abe swung the stool low. Its rounded thin seat dug a groove in the man’s quadricep. The man screamed. He instinctively brought his hands down. Abe carried the stool back, up, and down in one chop. He chunged a deep groove in the man’s skull.
Behind him Abe heard the other man with an emitter stumble upright. He rolled quickly over the bar. His trail of smoke showed his position behind the cover.
The taproom seemed to breathe. Abe’s sizzling robe, the groaning of an injured attacker, Sophia’s wimpers behind the bar, and the louder hiss from outside; these things filled in the gap.
“Killer,” said the one man still standing. The word shook in his mouth. “Y-you’re out of knives. Must be. You’re pinned. C-come up slow and-”
Abe rose two meters to the side from where he’d left his robe burning. With the emitter he’d taken from the foe with the gouged skull, he shot a hole in his enemy’s unmasked face.
Abe no Seimei scanned the Taproom. The tall woman in the thermo suit who’d taken a knife in the cheek had crawled to the corner. She was gasping, but she would be dead soon. The plainclothes man whose face he’d slashed was already dead. Beside him, the woman with the severed tendon clutched at the steel rim of a table, trying to raise herself.
The rest were bodies. Bright, bloody bodies.
Abe still smoked from his neck, though he’d discarded the burning robe. Without its cover his black carbon torso, upper arms, and quadriceps were on full display. Where the heatproof carbon chassis met his forearms, lower legs, and neck, his artificial skin was ruddy and blistered like regular skin.
Tiresias did not lay among the dead. Abe looked at the door. Hot greenish daylight spilled in through the rent-open zipper, gleaming off a bloodstreak on the plastic.
“You’re a fabricant.” Sophia’s dulled words came from behind the steel water-tank.
Abe kept his eyes on the woman trying to prop herself up on the table, but addressed himself to Sophia. “Where would Tiresias go?”
“You’re a killer.” Sophia’s voice sharpened. “You’re a machine for butchering humans.”
“Where is Tiresias?”
“We were peaceful and content. Then you-”
Abe spared her a narrowed glance. “I saw three piles of working clothes - covered in a shiny, dry, glistering substance - when I came into town. Were those ‘peacefully’ dealt with as well?”
Sophia fell silent. The cut-tendon woman managed to stand upright unaided. She looked around. Abe caught her attention with a flick of the emitter. The woman held up her hand. “I want to live,” she whimpered.
Abe glanced at Sophia. Sophia said, “Those were Oozelings.”
“So I gathered,” said Abe.
“They came to make trouble.”
“Tiresias - your ‘vampire’ - has hypnotized you. He has made your huddling village hate any minds which he himself cannot possess.”
“The Oozelings were like you.” Sophia spat. “They tried to do what you’ve done. Hurt people. You think you’re justified because you waited to start killing until one of us swung first? It’s stupid not to take the first swing when one’s enemy is enhanced to kill. Tiresias saw through your robe. If I’d had more sense I’d have shot-”
Abe kept his emitter aimed at the woman across the room, but he turned to look at Sophia. His eyes were brown and not soft. “Where is Tiresias?”
“He’d use stitching pods,” said Sophia.
“Where?”
“In the frigate of course.”
Abe hitched the emitter to a loop on his plastic belt. He walked down the length of the Taproom counter, right past Sophia. She cast her eyes aside as he passed.
Abe took long, quick, smooth strides toward the door. He bent and pulled one of his knives from the woman in the silk shirt as he went, wiping the blood on his artificial forearm skin.
The tall woman, as Abe stepped toward the door, glanced sideways at the second emitter on the floor.
The moment her eyes turned in the direction of the weapon, Abe spun and fired. There was a bright flash.
The woman swayed in place. Her severed Achilles buckled. She collapsed on the ground, a scorched crater smoking beside her eyesocket.
Abe had already stepped through the zipper.
Hazy blue fog - cold and dry - ran like a current around Abe’s legs as he stepped along the slanting frigate corridor. The corridor was dark, but some reservoir of frozen energy must have still been thawing within the derelict, for the striplight running along the ceiling glowed a faintly toxic yellow.
The blue mist was thin. Abe found it a simple thing to follow the trail of blood through the labyrinth of bulkheads and gantries. From the outside the frigate had looked over a kilometer from nose to exhaust. But Abe had hardly entered the open hatch from the sandy world - following the trail for a few corridors beyond - when he came into the medical facility.
He found Tiresias. The muscular larger man looked shriveled to Abe, where he lay at a forty-five degree angle in one of the open-faced stitching pods. A portable gravity engine sat beside the pod. It gave life to the strutlike appendages with phalanges of needle and blade, which were industrious seaming Tiresias’s split guts back together.
Tiresias was awake. He wore no pained expression - the stitching pad had pumped him full of numbing agent. “I presumed you would catch up,” he said. He wore a resigned look.
Abe stood with relaxed arms. “You weren’t difficult to track.”
“How’d you narrow me to this remote county of Outer Space?”
“Your pulse lure.”
“Did I pull in the wrong ship or something?”
Abe shook his head. “The pattern matched your psychological profile. The Imperial Center calculated that - along with the remote setting, and your particular folkloric enthusiasms - you were the most likely culprit.”
Tiresias frowned. “Of course. Undone by a government math machine.”
“You should have given me the water, old friend.”
“We’re not friends.” Tiresias’s hand rose shakily and he rubbed his fingers together once, but the numbing agent prevented him from snapping. He let it fall back to his side; the stitching pod appendages resumed their work. “My friend chose to die. You’re an artificial person, just imping a human soul. You- you don’t even need water, do you?”
“No.”
“What will you do?”
Abe raised a hand and pinched his scorched chin. “Your beacon. I’m going to disable it. Then return to the Greywolf and leave this planet.” He shrugged. “I will need some aftercare. For the surface damage.”
“My people won’t leave with you.”
“They are not my concern.”
“And the beacon is hidden.” Tiresias chuckled. “And the terminal is encoded as well. You will have trouble returning to your masters when-”
Abe flicked his wrist. The flat needle-knife buried itself dead center beneath Tiresias’ chin. The larger man’s eyes pulled wide. He gurgled. Once. Then fell silent. The blood slowly slid down his throat.
The stitching machine powered off.
“That is not trouble,” said Abe.