Tales of the Slayer, Volume II Read online

  Sesostris swung a blow at Buffy’s head and it connected with an unfair strength. What happened to the Jell-O? Again she got up, took her stance, and waited until he was moving toward her to add his momentum to her blow, but again it connected with less force that she would have wished.

  “You tire me, Slayer,” said Sesostris as he turned away from her. With a blow of his fist he smashed not Buffy, but the display case containing his mummified body. Glass flew everywhere, and Xander and Buffy had to cover their heads from flying shards. Sesostris picked up a large piece of the broken glass and began slicing away at the mummy’s wrappings. The brittle cloth shred easily, and dust, threads, and little stone figures fell to the ground.

  “We could both rush him,” said Xander low to Buffy. He had sidled around the display room until he was standing beside her.

  “It wouldn’t work. He isn’t formed enough,” Buffy whispered back. “I don’t think we have any choice. I can’t kill him in spirit, so I’ll kill him in the flesh. If Willow, Tara, and Josh can’t stop him, we’ll have to wait until he’s in that body, and then . . .” She let the idea of the fight ahead hang there.

  The specter of Sesostris was hacking through the last wrappings, seeming not to care if he damaged the body beneath. He was in a frenzy of excitement, jabbering to himself in his own ancient tongue. He abruptly stopped and stepped back. Buffy and Xander could see the shriveled body now revealed. All the clothing left to it was shreds of cloth. They could see the deep scars of the ancient embalmer’s knife, the oddly flattened ribs fighting for release from their leathery covering, the body engendered both awe and sadness.

  Now Sesostris raised his hands to the sky and intoned, “Great Anubis, Lord of the Underworld, I return to the realm of the flesh as you promised me I would. I will act in your name. Let judgement begin.”

  And with that, the room seemed saturated with shadows and movement, like all manner of spirits had arrived at once and were dancing around a fire. Buffy and Xander watched as the flickering image of Sesostris stepped forward, then into the archaic body. As the spirit merged with the flesh, it drew all the jittering dark shadow-forms in with it, and the thirsty corpse absorbed them in an instant. There was a silent pause, and then the dried thing on the slab began to move.

  At first it moved slowly, tentatively, with a sound of twisting leather. Then all at once it jumped up and came forward like a predatory spider. The illusion they had seen of a starved scholar vanished, as did all pity for the abandoned corpse. That body was very much inhabited now.

  “At last! I am flesh. Let the mortal world quake before me.” Sesostris’s voice seemed as strong as ever, giving lie to the desiccated form in front of them. The two watched in horrified fascination as the muscles and tendons of that ancient mummy strove spasmodically to respond to the instructions of its owner. Then the face morphed. The exaggerated brow of the vampire was exceptionally horrid to see fashioned from the grainy dried skin. The withered creature looked almost burnished with a soft shine that rendered each harsh line unnaturally clear in the dim light.

  The sight of the vampire face made Buffy come out of her spell.

  “Okay. Just a bag of twigs. I can do this.” She leaped toward the half-naked monstrosity, finding a sure two-footed landing in its midsection. Buffy had expected the skin would crumble and she might even punch through it, but it was more like fighting beef jerky. The body was very tough, and she fell sideways from the reflected blow. She was up in a second and coming again. Sesostris swung and connected with her shoulder and chest, flinging Buffy against a wall. The wall fell away to reveal the chicken wire and foam understructure. Buffy was up again. This time she tried to thrust a stake forward, but the stringy arm of the mummy swung and knocked the weapon out of her hand. Next he was holding her shoulders and trying to bring his fangs toward her throat.

  Xander threw himself on the creature’s back hoping to pry its hold loose from Buffy. It worked for a second, until Xander found himself looking up from the floor on the other side of the room.

  “Such insignificant lives, and yet you struggle so,” Sesostris whispered intimately into Buffy’s ear as his attention came back to her. He had his taloned hand about her throat now and Buffy was definitely in trouble.

  Xander shook his head clear and stood up.

  “Alright, fighty-fight not working.” He started to look around the floor for a weapon, running a list in under his breath. “Stake, not here. Sun, hours away. Fire would be good.” Then he noticed the little amulets and protective images that had fallen from the mummy’s bandages. “A cross?”

  Buffy was struggling in the crispy grip of the vampire when Xander flung the little amulets at Sesostris’s back.

  “Ahhh!” The vampire dropped Buffy and turned to face this new distraction. There were little smoky burned patches on his skin where the amulets had done their thing.

  “Buffy, the stake!” Xander cried. Buffy, bent and coughing, spotted the stake and made a grab for it. Just as Sesostris was about to return to her, Xander held out an ankh.

  “Looks like a cross. Hope it works like a cross.”

  “That is a symbol of eternal life, child, not a weapon.” Sesostris sneered, grabbing the ankh from Xander’s hand and tossing it aside. Sesostris was distracted just long enough for Buffy to retrieve the stake and lunge, but the wood couldn’t penetrate the mummy’s rubbery hide. Sesostris turned his attention back to Buffy, which gave Xander the time to retrieve a shard of glass and wade into the fight.

  Buffy was alternating left and right punches and saw Xander coming in. She grabbed Sesostris and spun him about so the loathsome vampire was facing Xander.

  “Cut him!” she shouted. “Over the heart, so I can get the stake in!”

  Sesostris was thrashing wildly in her hold, but she had successfully pinned his arms back and had him immobile.

  “Me?” was Xander’s reply. “Okey-dokey.” With his eyes half squeezed shut, he lunged. It took a little hacking, but he managed to saw a little rip in the creature’s chest, when suddenly Sesostris made a violet jerk forward in a bid to free himself from Buffy and Xander found his arm buried half way into the dead thing’s chest.

  “Heart! Heart!” squeaked Buffy.

  “Oh, man.” Xander wiggled his fingers in the dried innards. He gave a quick search with his hand of the stringy insides and feeling something like a shriveled plum, he yanked. The room filled with a loud thrumming that resolved into an ascending scream that faded into a ghostly echo. Sesostris’s body exploded into skin fragments, bone chips and dust and the room was silent.

  In the moments following, both Buffy and Xander, breathing heavily, became aware of another wailing noise: an alarm.

  “Can you carry Giles?” Buffy asked urgently.

  “Fireman style.”

  “Leaves me free to fight if I have to. Let’s go.” Buffy helped Xander heave Giles over his shoulder, and they made their way as fast as they could to the rear entrance they came in by.

  * * *

  “So Josh didn’t make it?” asked Anya. She had gone to Giles’s place to find Xander when no one showed up at the Bronze. The gang was all assembled now to help Giles, who had come around with the sunrise.

  “I . . . I’m sorry to say, we had a casualty,” ventured Tara. Willow and she looked gloomily around at their friends.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Giles offered, replacing the damp padding on his forehead. “The universe mandates that there be consequences to all actions, particularly magickal actions. Those witches who abide by the these universal laws strive to act in ways that cause the least harm to themselves, to others, and to the Earth and its inhabitants.” He recited the last words of the wiccan rede: “Eight words the wiccan rede fulfill. An ye harm none, do what ye will.”

  “I’ll call his mom today,” Buffy said, breaking the silence following Giles’s lecture.

  “Do you think there’s anything we can do?” Anya asked. “I don’t know how to handle
these things. Xander?”

  “No, we spent all night with his family. We went to the hospital with them,” Willow answered. “Let the family have some time.”

  Although he didn’t say anything, Xander pulled Anya a little closer. He was relieved to find she wasn’t still mad about his sudden disappearance last night. Things were good. He might even really be in love, and that thought brightened the sadness and made his terror of mummies feel very far away.

  There was another quiet moment.

  “Well, I seem to be getting quite adept at this,” Giles said, hoping to lighten the mood. “I’m making an art of being knocked unconscious. Can I assume that, as I remember nothing of last night, and the sun is indeed shining this morning, that we have averted disaster once more?”

  “I think it’s safe to say civilization is going to last a few more days,” Buffy answered.

  “If that’s what we may call it,” added Giles getting up to make tea.

  Lady Shobu

  Kara Dalkey

  SAGAMI PROVINCE, JAPAN, 980

  Whistling Arrows

  “Ai! Ai! Ai!” Kishi Minomoto yelled to her pony, digging her knees into its flanks. She dropped the reins on the pony’s neck and held her bamboo bow at the ready. The pony’s hooves pounded the Kanto Plain, releasing the scent of damp summer grasses. The air was heavy with the promise of another evening storm, and thunder rumbled in the distance.

  Kishi stood in the stirrups, taking the pony’s gait on the balls of her feet and in the bend of her knees. She drew the bowstring taut, pulling her hand back by her ear, as she rode closer . . . closer. Then, just before passing the straw-man-in-armor, twang! She let loose her arrow.

  With a satisfying thunk, the arrow lodged in the chest of the target. “Hai!” Kishi raised her fists into the air as the pony carried her toward her waiting brothers. She was glad they were letting her practice with real arrows today, instead of the blunt whistling arrows whose only use was to signal the beginning of battle. Now she knew she would be ready for the tournament.

  “Very good, Kishi!” said her elder brother, Higashi. “If I were a man made of straw, I would be very afraid of you. Now we had better go home. The storm is coming in.”

  “One more run!” said Kishi, flushed with her success. “I will do it again, and this time I will hit the neck.” The neck was a small but prime target, least likely to be armored, most likely to be fatal.

  “But it’s getting dark,” complained her younger brother, Hiroi.

  “That only makes it a better challenge,” said Kishi, turning her pony for another run past the target. “I want to be ready for the Dragon Horse Tournament.”

  Higashi sighed and shook his head.

  Hiroi said, “You’re not a boy, and you’re only fifteen, Kishi.”

  Kishi looked over her shoulder at him while she nocked another arrow to the bowstring. “I will compete in a mask. People do it all the time. Besides, I’m tall for my age. No one will know. Don’t be jealous, little brother. You will have your turn someday.”

  “And what will you do if you win your dragon horse, Kishi?” asked Higashi. “Hide it? Give it as a bride-gift to your husband-to-be, Matsuo?”

  “Nonsense,” said Kishi. “I will . . . I will donate it to the Hachiman Shrine. Maybe Bennin will let me visit the horse sometimes.” She made sure her wide sleeves were still tied securely back.

  “Have you told papa you’re going to compete? Maybe someone ought to,” said Hiroi.

  Kishi glared at Hiroi and then smiled a ferocious grin. “Why don’t we wrestle for it after I’m done here? If you win, you can tell Papa. If I win, you don’t.”

  “No,” moaned Hiroi. “You always win.”

  “Right.” Kishi nodded once and cantered her pony into position at the far end of the field.

  “Sometimes I think you forget you’re a girl!” Hiroi called after her.

  “That is the whole point, little brother,” Kishi muttered to herself. She held up her bow in the ready position and nudged the pony forward with her knees. “Hajime!”

  The pony began to run, and again Kishi rose off the saddle, standing in the stirrups. Blessed Hachiman, let my arrow find my enemy, she prayed. Kishi aimed her arrow as the target neared. She let fly—

  “Lady Kishi!”

  “Yi!” Kishi herself went flying as her pony stopped suddenly. She landed in a muddy puddle as thunder boomed and rumbled overhead.

  Her two brothers erupted in peals of laugher as Kishi grunted, stood, and tried to brush the mud off. In front of her was the family chamberlain sitting on his plain brown horse. “Lady Kishi, are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course I’m all right, Sankumo-san.” Kishi had fallen off her pony many times and never broken a bone . . . unlike her brothers. “What do you want?”

  “You have a visitor at the mansion. You must come at once.”

  Kishi sighed. “Oh, not now! Who is it? Is it Matsuo?”

  “It is an important personage. That is all I know,” said Sankumo. “A bath will be waiting for you.”

  “Thank you. You are living up to your name and clouding my day,” said Kishi.

  “If it will make you feel any better,” said Sankumo, “look there, my lady.” He tilted his chin toward the target.

  Kishi looked. Her arrow had penetrated precisely between the helmet cord and the breastplate of the target. Kishi smiled.

  An Important Personage

  As Kishi soaked in the barrel of hot water, steam rose like wraiths around her and floated out to the rainy courtyard beyond. Kishi poked playfully with a finger at the steam ghosts, as if stabbing each one with a sword. Thunder rumbled almost continuously outside, and Kishi remembered her grandmother’s stories of how thunder was caused by the sky dragons snapping their tails.

  The servants had been evasive about her visitor, but their anxious, intense glances suggested that something had changed. They had behaved this way when Kishi’s grandfather had died. I hope it is not bad news. Perhaps Matsuo’s father has come to discuss our marriage with my father.

  Kishi was content with her father’s choice of bridegroom for her. At least Matsuo had seemed to enjoy her tales of how she mastered the short sword at nine years old and could now throw a spear farther than her elder brother. Kishi thanked Hachiman that she had been born into a noble warrior clan. She didn’t have to play at the social niceties that girls of higher—or higher-striving—families did in order to be ladies.

  Her handmaid arrived with towels and evening-informal kimonos to wear. As Kishi dressed—first the white under-kimono, then a layer of yellow, then an over-kimono of green shading to golden brown—she said to the maid, “It can’t be a terribly important personage if I’m not asked to wear brocades.”

  “I was told there wasn’t time for formality,” said the maid. “Your visitor is an old friend of the family. You won’t even need a screen of modesty.”

  “Thank Hachiman for that,” said Kishi. “The only good thing about a kicho is that you can make silly faces at someone without them seeing you.” Kishi tied her long hair back with a simple silk ribbon and followed the maid into the mansion. She was led to the lesser formal dining hall, where her father and mother were already seated on floor cushions with teacups and bowls of rice. Kishi’s stomach growled.

  And then it clenched as she saw the fourth personage in the room: an old man in the white hunting kimono of a Shinto priest and wide green trousers that showed he was of Third Rank nobility. He wore a broad, round straw hat from which hung a veil of black silk netting to keep off the bite of summer insects.

  “Kishi, you remember Bennin-san, don’t you? From the Hachiman Shrine?” asked her father.

  Kishi said, “Yes, of course. You helped bless our new stables when they were built. And you performed Hiroi’s trouser ceremony when he turned seven.” She bowed low in greeting, but also to hide her distress. Bennin is here because he has somehow learned that I intend to compete in his shrine’s tournament. A
nd he has told Father. I am in big trouble.

  “Bennin has had that honor, yes.” The old man’s voice was lower, more resonant than she had remembered. But it had been a long while since she’d last seen him. “And now I hope I shall perform a task to bring even greater honor . . . to you.”

  “Honor? Me?” On a flight of fancy, Kishi wondered if word of her archery prowess had already spread so far that she was going to be allowed to compete openly. Exceptions were made, on rare occasions—especially for the nobility. Perhaps she could win her dragon horse after all. Kishi looked at the faces of her parents and saw a mixture of pride and sorrow . . . and a bit of fear. “What is it?”

  “Kishi-chan,” said her father, his voice breaking so that he had to clear his throat, “Bennin has informed us that you are called to serve as a lady-in-waiting in Heian Kyo, at the Imperial Palace.”

  Thunder cracked and boomed overhead. “The heavens themselves congratulate you, Kishi-san,” said Bennin. Kishi had the impression that, behind his black veil, he was smiling.

  Kishi’s stomach now felt as though it had fallen to the floor. “The . . . the Imperial Palace?”

  Her mother added, “You are to serve the Great Lady Ankimon-in. She is a Fujiwara and a cousin of the emperor.”

  Kishi’s mouth fell open. “A Fujiwara!” Fujiwara was the highest ranking nobility next to the imperial family itself. “W-why me?”

  “All will be explained as we journey to the capital,” said Bennin.

  “When will I go, then? This autumn?” Spring and autumn were traditional times for new ladies to be presented at court.

  “I am afraid we must leave at once. Tonight, in fact,” the old priest said.

  “Tonight?” Kishi looked again at her parents and now the sorrow in their eyes was understandable. “But—I must say proper good-byes.”

  “You may send all the letters you like from the palace,” said Bennin.

  But the competition! “Forgive me, holy one, but . . . but I . . . had plans!” Kishi protested. “What about . . . what about Matsuo?”