Forget — Forget —
The stink of corpses and ashes was all around her. The rampant noise of the dying was by now something she could mute into a quiet buzz, bouncing around the back of her mind, compartmentalized and desensitized after years and years of battlefields, the keening of friend after foe after friend.
Not so with the stink. No time to maunder on stubborn mammalian perceptions, though. Kazuko Khan’s heart hammered away at her ribcage, mid-body trapped under the weight of her dying horse, hammering away irregularly as blood guttered out of the stump of her sword arm. She could not reach the drugs issued to officers-of-prowess meant to keep her body from sliding into shock, obstructed as they were by seven hundred pounds of horseflesh (or perhaps a bit less; she could not see how much of it was scoured away).
She did suppose that perhaps now would be when she would learn firsthand whether the rumors were true, whether those trained in the Weeper’s stolen arts did not see their life flash before their eyes when they died. She was not in the mood to reminisce, anyways. She had very little time. She had very little time to… time…
“Well!” said a voice. “Isn’t that just a pretty horse. Makes you tall and in charge, right? Not anymore, I guess.”
She reacted on instinct, clenching her one good hand around her wakizashi and spinning her shadow out, reaping like a scythe — her animus, her subconscious mirror-self, whirled to take this creature from behind. If she could materialize something out of its shadow, she could translocate and finally —
The creature that had bent down to her smoothly ducked its head under the strike and obliterated her shadow with pure light and heat from an outstretched hand. She perceived the light as a burst behind her eyes, too much like a concussion as the tether to her animus was violently cut. She reeled from it all, at the instantaneous reversal. Empress, she would die, but if only she could die without being humiliated.
But her world was not made for small mercies like that. The creature, a hazy figure now in her blurred vision, knelt down to her again, wiggling its fingers and chuckling. “Ooh, that was close. You almost had me there.” A pause, as it watched her. “Hard crowd today, I see. That’s alright, that’s alright. I get it. I’ve had plenty of bad days, too.”
It had gotten very quiet. Kazuko retreated from the useless hob making noise at her and tried to remember the names of the men who had just finished wailing at Death.
A laugh interrupted her. “Haha! You really do care! That’s rich.” He bent close. “Do you think they remembered your name as they passed, Khantos Khan?”
Her eyes narrowed. Her gaze slid back to the creature, which had now leaned in very close. She did not expect to see an ovoid mirror instead of a face, reflecting her own face back at her. In the convex surface she could see the blood and the dirt, the fires that flickered in the periphery. Its mask revealed nothing and reflected everything.
“I don’t like liars,” it said. “I don’t like you soldiers in general, but at least most of you are honest about it when you’re in the action of it, right? No big stories really survive the moment of a massacre, do they? But you…”
It couldn’t smile, but she heard faintly a perverse giggle as her vision blackened at the edges. “You know my favorite thing about theatre? If you want to know about someone, you can learn a lot by how they pretend.” It held up a vague flat shape, and reached out at her with it. “So let’s play a game, and see how much we learn, hm?”
Something cool pressed against the skin of her face. Images began to flash behind her eyes, so quickly they blinded her. And then —
And then —
—
