Beneath an Opal Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

smashing blow against the navigator’s shoulder. The dirk flew from Moichi’s grasp and the Green’s fingers went for the throat, the nails long and deadly.
    Moichi let the hands in, looped his own around them, slamming his balled fists into the other’s ears with such force that blood immediately sprayed out as the eardrums ruptured. The Green rose up, bellowing with pain, and Moichi brought his massive hands together, breaking his neck.
    Rolling the bloody body off him he rose, watching the third Green approach. He was the squat man and he circled Moichi with some caution. His ax blade shimmered crimson in the sunlight.
    Moichi, keeping the splintered brickwork of the wall at his back, drew his silver-hilted sword. “Why did you kill him?” he said thickly. “We meant you no harm.”
    â€œMeant us no harm?” spat the Green. “He was a Red, wasn’t he?”
    For an instant, Moichi felt disoriented, almost as if he had somehow slipped backward into time, into the Sha’angh’sei before the advent of the Kai-feng. “What are you saying?” he breathed. “The Reds and the Greens are at peace.”
    The squat man hawked and a gob of phlegm spattered at Moichi’s feet. “No more, by the gods. No more! That ill-omened truce is thankfully at an end.” He brandished his ax menacingly. “It was unnatural. We all felt ashamed. As unclean as defilers of little boys.” By the great god of Sha’angh’sei, Kay-Iro De, war is returned to the streets of the city!”
    He rushed at Moichi then and they fought close together for long moments, breathlessly thrusting and counterthrusting, each seeking a weakness in the other’s defense.
    Moichi shifted his sword to his left hand and in the same motion swung it at the squat man in a flashing flat arc. Thus occupied, the other failed to see Moichi’s right hand in time, fingers extended and rigid as a board. He turned, far too late. Moichi’s hand, edge first, plowed into the nerve cluster at the side of his neck and the Green crashed heavily to the cobbles.
    The street was deserted now, save for the strewn bodies; the kubaru had long since disappeared. But Moichi could feel the eyes staring at him from the many shop windows. Taking deep breaths, ignoring the fire in his left shoulder, he hastily retrieved his dirks, shoving them into his wide sash. Returning his sword to its tattooed leather scabbard, he turned down a side street, disappearing almost immediately from view.
    â€œWhat I do not understand is what set it off.”
    â€œThat is one of the reasons for your hasty summons.”
    â€œYou know?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œTell me, then.”
    â€œI am afraid that it is not a simple matter. Not simple at all.”
    Moichi sat in a room on the second floor of the Seifu-ke. Through the large leaded-glass windows which were open now to catch any hint of a sea breeze, he saw the thick verdant trees lining Okan Road still as a painting above the nearby slanting rooftops.
    Months before, after the ending of the Kai-feng, they had cleared away the old palace of the Empress, leveling its grandiose sleeping quarters and its vast work chambers, its cold marble columns and long echoing halls. Not because of any disrespect to the fallen Empress; the monument in Jihi Square was more than proof of that. The palace, like its hereditary occupant, simply belonged to another era. In its place had been constructed a three-story dwelling—smaller and more functional—of rough oxidized brick relieved by glossy platinum fillwork at the interstices and edges. This singular combination of the grittily stark and the softly sensual gave the new Regent’s home a look of having been in the center of Sha’angh’sei’s tumult forever. This was the Seifu-ke.
    Across a dark, highly polished sandalwood table, rikkagin Aerent, the first Regent of Sha’angh’sei, sat in a