Kendo Katamuro appeared to float over mud and all else as he cut through the black clan, turning grey puddles a shade bloody. Wild yet still in control, Kat decapitated one young man, and then cut a horse at the shins to throw the rider onto his neck. No enemy caught him with a graze, my north star was all consuming, a force even more destructive than the cyclone.
Wisely then, most of the opposition avoided Kat to settle their swords on more feasible opponents; but not the black samurai, not him. He stopped his own murderous rampage to spy Kat through the falling bodies and drizzle. Kat sensed the burn of his enemy's eye, and faced him down with the blood of other men soaking his beard through. These killers had a past, a great rivalry that intensified with every passing year. Both clans pondered a possible fight and argued repeatedly over the victor, but they could only speculate, for the interests of these two men never came into direct conflict, their paths never once crossed — until now.
Kat armed the smaller wakizashi in his free hand, and the black samurai duplicated the action. Then the two warriors, leaders of men defending their Lords, charged through the fury of fighters to smash their blades together. Four swords blurred in a spray of energy and water. Steel appeared to glow after each impact and in their hearts; both knew they had met their match this day.
The pace stunned samurai onlookers, who called a temporary truce to watch the duel. For all their awe-inspiring skill however, these Gods of the sword were still human, and the end, one of them weakened first.
Kat spewed out hot blood as his opponent's wakizashi pierced through his stomach. The shocked audience gasped, but an exhale later, the black samurai took Kat's katana deep into the ribcage. Blood streamed down their mouths and noses, and Kat howled in agony as his opponent turned the steel around in his guts.
Refusing to go alone into darkness, a grimacing Kat stabbed his short sword several times into his foe's neck, lavishing his own face in spurting blood. Together, these two dinosaurs then clunked to their knees, and light fading from the eyes, they slunk their foreheads to touch, then toppled to a splash…
***
All tightly sprung, we drifted through a red shroud, catching sight of what appeared to be an upturned whale floating dead over the water. The ferryman kept his distance from the object, which with closer observation revealed, not a whale, but a U-boat with still propellers, beached and rotting here on the shallow tar. Submariners waited at the prominent periscope, frantically waving their caps and coats at us.
"I cannot hear what they're saying?" said Eddinray.
"I don't want to know,” replied Harmony, as our ferry sailed on.
***
Floating trouble free for at least an hour, an abrupt thud made all but our navigator stumble forward. The raft bobbled against greasy boulders and beyond that was a horizon of flat, blindingly orange sand.
"This is not the stop," said Kat, with a bad taste in his mouth. He snatched the ferryman's cloak and yanked the bony man at him. "You have led us astray! This is not the way!"
"You wanted to cross the lake,” the skeleton replied. "Hell changes with the seasonsss. No sssoul can map thisss land — not even the Kat'sss."
Our samurai glared daggers into that face, but seeing only ambiguous bone, Kat relinquished the ferryman's robe then moved cautiously off the raft. We followed, and once free of us, the ferryman pushed his oar off boulders and hissed on his way backwards. "The Kat,” he said, vanishing little by little into a scarlet dream. "I eagerly await newsss of your downfall. I await…good newsss."
Kat flipped him the middle finger as the morbid ferryman disappeared, off to spread the word.
"Can't see a thing,” I said, feeling my feet on daunting new ground. "Kat? You think we're okay?"
Already crouched to one knee, the samurai collected a handful of sand. I expected to be waiting at this makeshift shore for some time, but was pleasantly surprised by Kat's decisiveness. "Follow me,” he said, discarding the handful and taking charge over a desolate and Martian terrain.
***
The desert was flat, dry and tough, and the many cracks over it soon ground our progress. They first appeared like scars on the landscape, but all were gaping trenches, some spanning thousands of feet wide, others a foot apart. Our path over this shattered quagmire was sporadic and speculative, and with a pulverising set of seven suns above us, there was no shade to recover.
Kat's preferred course between the cavities was a path of earth so threadbare that we had no choice but to keep in single file throughout. Obscurity waited at each side of us, blanketed by a sinister churning of red clouds and orange sand. Occasional geysers blew skyward from these depths, and we four were minuscule in their supernatural scale.
Disturbingly, our route of rock became thinner and thinner until there was simply nowhere left to go. We faced a crevasse, with nothing but sandy air and fall before us. "We cannot venture back!" exclaimed Harmony, resting hands on her knees.
Kat ordered us quiet while he surveyed the smoking plunge at his toes. "No going back,” he uttered.
Then, without word or warning, he leapt a five footed trench toward another route left of us — the only option left. "Come!" he exclaimed, landing safely on the other side and making it look so typically straightforward.
Eddinray wasn't convinced. He stared with a sickly expression at the smouldering gap between himself and Kat. "I'll drop through that hole like a boulder, a boulder I say!” Perhaps," he proposed, "perhaps we should go back?"
"Back to what?" I yelled, hot and frustrated. "This is it Eddinray! This is all we got!"
Kat yelled at us again, and delaying no further, I collected my feet over the ledge, bent my knees and dived toward the samurai. Landing safely on the other side, my heels had nothing to spare behind me.
"You won't fall!" I cried, turning to hold my arms out for Eddinray. "We won't let you!"
"Lady's first, Harmony,” offered the knight, attempting to shake the butterflies from his system.
Made of tougher stuff, Harmony moved into position, and the blue steel in her eyes told me she was ready for the leap; but as she bent her legs, an explosion of gas erupting from the gap smashed her backward. Cradling one another, Harmony and Eddinray squawked for dear life as that gas went on to shroud all the suns in the sky.
I felt Kat's hardy grip on my shoulder, and he arose my attention to the rock at our feet, breaking away like wet biscuits. We backed off two steps and when the eruption and dust eventually discharged, we saw our petrified friends smeared in a wash of red clay.
I sighed, relieved upon hearing Harmony's gentle sobbing.
"This time angel," said Eddinray, standing; "I shall go first."
"Together knight,” she insisted.
"Impossible dear! My mail is simply too heavy — together we fall!"
"Then we fall!"
Her tears smudged the muck under her eyes as they took their position at the crag, and faced us opposite.
"Now!" Kat moaned, fearing another surge of gas or the surface to give way.
Thankfully, they waited no longer, and simultaneously hopped for our outstretched hands and rigid fingers. We snatched them in a lock of grips but their combined weights threatened to pull us all to our dooms. "Back Fox!" snarled Kat. "Baaack!"
Grimacing, Kat and I leaned fully backward, heaving Harmony and Eddinray with us and away from danger
***
The cavity-covered landscape had long filled in. The seven differential suns sucked all the moisture from our bodies and roasted our skin. "Mother always said pale boys look ill,” mumbled Eddinray, delirious. "I'm not ill, mother. I won't drink my tears, please do not make me!"