Shallows of Night - 02 by Eric Van Lustbader

shoulders, muscular arms, and short legs made him seem almost other-wordly. Then there was the fact that he was hairless.
    “So pleasant to relax every now and then, so?” He lifted the small pot, lacquered in a multicolored wheel pattern. “You must excuse the lack of a lady,” he continued as he delicately turned the small cups. “It is most unseemly for a rikkagin to perform this function.” He poured the honey-colored liquid. It steamed the air. He tilted his head. “However, war causes us to make do with so many things that we would normally find abhorrent.” He shrugged as if talking to an old friend. His yellowish skin gleamed in the low lamplight, his wide oval head with its small ears, black almond eyes, and smiling mouth seemed almost regal in this atmosphere. The distant sounds of the ship wafted around them like a fragrance, dominated by the rhythmic singing. Rikkagin T’ien ceremoniously presented Ronin with a filled cup. He smiled dazzlingly and sipped at his own cup. He sighed broadly.
    “Tea,” he said, “is truly the gift of the gods.” Then his face fell. This made him appear oddly childlike. “How strange that your people are ignorant of its existence.” He sipped once more from his cup. “How tragic.”
    They sat cross-legged on opposite sides of a low wooden table lacquered in squares of green and gray. “You are comfortable in your new clothes?” Ronin put a hand to his loose shirt, looked at his light pants.
    “Yes,” he said. “Very. But this material is new to me.”
    “Ah, it is silk. Cool in the heat, warm when it is cold.” Rikkagin T’ien sipped again at his tea. “Some things are changeless, so?” He placed his cup precisely in the center of a green square. “Now that you are at your ease, please tell me again where you are from and why you are here.”
    Something pulled on his feet. His descent was checked. He was cradled, the sea washing over him. Then he rose toward the rippling emerald pool of light, rising from the depths, from the awful liquid silence, from the buoyancy of death, into the clean sweet air, the churning of the waves. Gripped again by gravity, he coughed and retched sea water, his lungs working like bellows, automatically, independent of his brain, which was still fogged, in the coruscating quietude of the ocean, not yet ready to accept the return to life. Then he rose into the air, a gasping, wounded phoenix.
    “So,” Rikkagin T’ien said, nodding. “A Bladesman you call yourself.” He stared hard at Ronin; at his face, at the muscles along his arms, at the deep chest. “A soldier you are, a tactician. Well. You are ill and the injury to your back is quite serious. My physician informs me that you will carry those scars for the rest of your life.” He stood up, planted his bare feet wide apart, bending his knees, slightly. Three men came into the room, swiftly, silently, all armed, and if he had made a move to summon them, Ronin had not seen it. “Yet a soldier knows one thing. He knows how to fight, so?” He beckoned Ronin to stand. “Come,” he said in a light tone that held no overtones, no rancor. “Come against me.”
    A song in his brain. A song. It dominated his senses, filling the air with a smoky tang, washing over him like the sea. It was a singsong tide of voices, rhythmic, sleepy, and muscular at the same time.
    Slowly, numbly he turned over. Dazed. He had been drowning, tumbling gracefully down, twisting on the currents. He stretched out his arms. And now?
    He was looking down through the slimy web of a net within which he lay. Below him, the swell and suck of the sea against long wooden planks. Curved. His eyes traveled upward and a word forced itself into his brain. A ship, he thought dizzily.
    Drenched and dripping, he swung perhaps thirty meters above the water. Above him, the ship rose another forty meters. Its immense side sloped outward near the bottom. The hull was painted a deep green from the gunwale until almost