Seijin was unaccustomed to nursing wounds and found the sensation was not uninvigorating. Female self was resigned to the situation, but male self had been giving Seijin no small degree of grief.
"This is shameful! The loss of face has been—" Male self stammered for an appropriate adjective. "Insupportable!"
"Face has been lost before," female self reminded him gently. Seijin was once more in the upper story of the Shadow Pavilion, looking out across the shifting, gray landscape of between. The crowds that had heralded the arrival were now dispelling on the upper slopes, but the light was low, sending golden streaks across the gray plain below. Seijin watched as a small herd of ghostly deer emerged from behind the rocks and made their way out onto the plain; then something must have startled them, for their white tails went up and they skittered away, finally fragmenting into mist.
"Face has not been lost for many years!" male self protested. "This is a great dishonor."
"My defeat was by the Celestial Emperor," Seijin reminded himself. "There is little dishonor in that."
"All the same—"
"And now we have a notion of his mettle," Seijin went on. In fact, the Emperor's abilities had come as a surprise. It just went to show that one should not underestimate an opponent, no matter how much inside information one thought one had possessed.
"His time on Earth has weakened him," the Dowager Empress had informed Seijin. "His liaison with this—this human ghost—has shown a deplorable degree of self-indulgence. He will not submit to duty, he shows no reverence for the past."
From the words of the Emperor's mother, Seijin had formed certain opinions of Mhara: someone young, in Celestial terms, probably willful and petulant. There would be power there, yes, but little guile. Yet the Emperor had not only seen Seijin coming, but had gained enough knowledge of the assassin's movements to outsmart Seijin and seize a weapon.
That, if Seijin had been the anxious sort, was the really worrying thing. Female self, herself shadowy against the shifting tapestries on the Pavilion's wall, sank onto a seat and wrapped her hands together. "He has taken a pin! He can follow us here, if he chooses."
"I am not so concerned about his pursuit," Seijin said, reflecting. "After all, his powers will be greatly diminished here in between. But what it does afford him is the opportunity to spy."
"What if he sends someone else?" female self asked.
"Who? A necromancer? You forget who we are."
"I remember what we were," female self faltered. And of course, Seijin remembered, too.
A river, at twilight, the water flowing oily and slow between the high banks, crashing with the blocks of ice that snowmelt had brought down from the heights. Seijin stood in a cold wind, looking out across the steppe. From the slight rise beyond the river, the plains stretched gray and endless, the grass shifting and whispering in this last wind of winter, spring on the way. Its taste came fresh on the air and Seijin reached out hands, welcoming this change of season when power came most easily. These liminal points, the change of the season, the hour. Power ran strong under the land, beneath the black, still-frozen earth, arcing in webs from the mountain summits, all the way across the plains to the distant birch-haunted tundra.
Seijin had been up in the mountains for the past week, hunting the spirits of a wolf pack that had threatened a tribe's meager herds. Sometimes, things did not know they had died, living so close to the otherworld that their recognition of their own death was no more than the sense of a cold wind blowing. Running the wolf pack down among the icy rocks, the black glitter of a ghost's eye in the darkness, drawing on the power of the waning moon to rip the beast apart, send it screaming down to Hell. Now, years later, Seijin wondered how many of those ghosts had ended up in between, racing the shadow plains. All the wolves had gone, the last cub spirit shrieking out into the winter air, disappearing. Then Seijin had come down from the heights, bearing spirit-scalps on a long thread, casting it down before the tribe's shaman as the warriors had stared in awe and horror. It had amused Seijin to allow female self the dominance, seeing the desire in their eyes as she shyly smiled, need chased by fear as they saw the scalps wither into a bloody smoke and blow away.
One of them had come after her. One of them had died.
Pleasant memories. Seijin, standing, curled hands against the windowsill, feeling the muscles ache. Not a familiar feeling. Memory brought the river back, standing on that rise and watching the ghost lords ride the steppes, the Golden Horde on their fast, sleek ponies, sweeping from the east as they had once done, to sack and plunder the rich cities. But that was over a hundred years gone, Samarkand rebuilt into a glory of blue tile and golden dome, a city of sun and sky. If the horde reached it now, Seijin knew, watching the warriors ride by, they would sweep through the walls unseen. Perhaps they might make a child cry, give a seeress bad dreams. Nothing more than that. And as if he had heard, the man who rode in their midst turned his head and looked toward Seijin. Under the domed helm, his face was contorted into a familiar snarl, the eyes flat, black, mad.
"Hey, cousin!" Seijin cried to the Khan. "Guess what? I'm still here. Who'd have thought that, eh?" Then turned to the river and spat. In an instant, the ghost horde was gone, the grass hissing in the night wind. Seijin looked up and saw the Hunter of the Greeks striding across the late winter sky with the blue star at his heels.
"Enough," Seijin said aloud, raised a hand and slit the air.
And now, back at Shadow Pavilion, the only home Seijin had for a handful of hundred years. Returning again, as so often. The servants were staying out of the way, although there was no real need. Seijin had grown tired of torture, some while back. But then again, that had been during the tedium of invincibility, and that, it seemed, was no longer an issue.