Beneath an Opal Moon by Eric Van Lustbader Page A

high down bed against the far wall. Above its covers, a double, leaded-glass window was open onto the now quiet bund and the ships at anchor just beyond. The scent of the sea was very strong.”
    â€œI can see where this is leading.”
    Kossori turned to him. “No, my friend,” he said quietly, “I don’t believe you do.” He pointed left and they turned off of Four Forbidden Road into a tiny crooked lane, seemingly without a name. “I went to sleep, exhausted.”
    The lane had begun to run on a slight incline and Moichi became abruptly aware that they were ascending its winding way up a hill. It was darker here, the narrow houses piled one against the other without surcease. Too, the city’s night lights were fading, left behind in the tangle of wider streets, and the starlight, where it touched them, gave their faces and hands a slightly bluish cast.
    â€œI awoke late in the night,” Kossori continued, “when the moon had already gone down. I heard the cry of a gull quite close and that put me in mind of being on a ship far out to sea. I think I even imagined I could feel the pitch and roll of the vessel beneath me. I was still half asleep and, turning over, I came in contact with her curled body. Her warmth and the scent of her rich musk suffused me. Quite without thinking, I put my arm around her. She stirred and, in her sleep, put her hand against my cheek and neck with such tenderness and a kind of specialness that I cannot adequately describe save to say it was as if I were the first and only person she had ever touched in that manner; I began to weep silent tears. There was an inexplicable tightness in my chest and crying seemed the only way to ease it. She awoke then, by what stroke of magic I still cannot imagine. Her eyes, so close to mine, seemed like the sighting of a far shore through some mysterious telescope. Her kiss was the most beautiful in the world.”
    The lane, in its myriad turnings and switchbacks, at length crested, giving out onto a rather wide street totally devoid of residential life. Large shops lined both sides without the usual second-story apartment windows in evidence. Rather, here, the upper levels stared blackly at them, windowless, apparently used for storage only. They paused for a moment.
    Moichi was moved by Kossori’s story but, beyond that, he found himself shaken by the intensity of emotions he felt being recreated. It had obviously been an enormously powerful union. “And she taught you to play the flietē,” he said.
    Kossori nodded. “That. And the koppo .” He pointed to a narrow alleyway running between two shops. “It is just behind there tonight, the Sha-rida.”
    But Moichi grabbed his arm, held him back. “The black death take the Sha-rida, Kossori! Finish your story.”
    Kossori smiled, spread his hands. “But I have, my friend. I have told you all there is to tell.”
    â€œBut what happened to her? Where is she now, this woman of yours?”
    Kossori’s face darkened. “Gone, Moichi. Away, very far away. She disappeared one day as if into the very air. I made inquiries all along the bund but no one had seen her. If she had departed on some ship bound outward into the world, no one knew of it.”
    â€œAnd she never returned?”
    â€œNo,” Kossori said. “Never.” One hand went to his sash. “But she left me this.” He lifted out an oilskin case from which he slipped a flietē of ebony and silver.
    â€œHer flietē!”
    â€œYes. And, of course, there’s the koppo . She was an adept and, as such, well capable of teaching. So now I know how to use my hands to break bones, a feat which, some believe, is sorcerous in nature. Naturally, that’s not so. Well, you know that. I’ve taught you all the basic responses. Those, as you well know, are much easier to learn than the attacks. But here is something I’m quite certain