Dragon of the South Sea: The Slayer's Son
Chapter 1
They named him Quipuha when he was born, but took to calling him Kipa for short. And since it was little Kipa who had once toddled off in a soiled diaper and went missing for an entire afternoon, and was found at sunset munching on star fruit that he had harvested himself by throwing sticks up into a tree; who at 5 years old was discovered sitting at the foot of his grandmother's sleeping mat, the machete in his hands dripping with gore, surrounded by pieces of the constrictor that had invaded their hut; since it was their little Kipa who had done these things, Kipa is the name that stuck with him into manhood.
Not that there was much to be surprised about. His mother was Keilani, the Slayer, after all; everyone in the village knew that. Such things cannot and need not be kept secret in these small, isolated pockets of the world. The people of this island chain had not blinded themselves to the existence of hellmouths and the creatures that issued from them; they had not hidden themselves beneath shells of electric and neon light, had not insulated their lives within layers of technology and concrete. Here, the Slayer was neither shunned nor ridiculed as a freak or an oddity. She was the Mother Protector of the innocent and the sacred, and the people loved and revered her, as they had her great-aunt before her, and the women who had served before them both, flowing back through time along this branch of the great Slayer lineage.
This branch, which through treachery and twisted fortune had been violently cut off…
It was Kipa who, seven years ago, had found his mother's mangled body tossed up on the coral reef at low tide, like a wicked child's discarded doll. It was Kipa who had sent Keilani's spirit to join her ancestors in the way of their people, rising from the funeral pyre on a column of golden smoke. And it was Kipa who had taken up Keilani's sword—"Tomoe"—a wondrous weapon fashioned of flashing steel and dragon-carved ivory; a gift from her watcher and trainer, Hokusai, who had come from the land still known as Nippon in this part of the world, but which the modern world called Japan. And, finally, it was Kipa who had tracked down Keilani's betrayers and split each of them in two from head to tail, those three hag sisters—water demons whose ancestors were first sighted by human mariners of ancient times and given the misleading label of "mermaid."
But how, one may ask, does a demon become a Slayer's betrayer? When that demon is family, of course. The hags had been Keilani's sisters-in-law; the villagers knew this as well as they knew her legacy. They had always, albeit grudgingly, been willing to accept the fact that Keilani had fallen in love with the water demon, Gregor, and taken him as her husband. They had shaken their heads and prayed to the gods, but such things were not unheard of in the chronicles of the Slayers. Even in this day and age, tales had traveled the trade winds from that strange land of the Americas, tales of a Slayer from a village with the comically incongruous name of "Sunnydale," who had consorted with, of all beings, a vampire.
Yes, Kipa had avenged his mother's murder, but that had only been the beginning. He had a hundred questions that needed answering, one of them being—where was his father? A water demon, by nature, was always on the move, wandering the world's watery currents on deep, dark business unfathomable to us surface beings. Gregor would go off for weeks, even months at a time. Whenever he resurfaced, allowing his powerful tail to morph into those awkward land-legs, he would stay long enough to romance Keilani, and make her laugh in that way only he knew how, and school Kipa on the finer points of free-diving and the wielding of hook and trident.
Where was his father? This question never left Kipa's mind for long. It lingered like the salt mist on his tongue as he raced in his sailboat along the silver-tipped waves on one of his solitary moonlit rides. It pulsed beneath his skin like the blood beating through his veins as he padded silently through the jungle, keeping his mother's patrols until a new Slayer was born to the village. It echoed in his ears whenever he roared his battle cry and drew Tomoe from its scabbard to dispatch a vampire, or cave crawler, or river serpent, or any of the myriad denizens of darkness who preyed on humans.
And the question was throbbing dully like a bruise in the back of his skull even now, as he scrambled up the mountain near his village, towards the training compound located at its summit, where Master Hokusai waited to administer this day's combat lesson. Master Hokusai: a rich mixture of emotions always accompanied the thought of this simple, deadly little man from the Land of the Rising Sun—fondness, dread, admiration, sorrow, pain—but mostly, love. Hokusai had practically raised Keilani from girlhood, had loved her like a daughter even as he forged her through tortuous daily sessions into a living weapon. On the sunrise following her funeral, Kipa had found the old man kneeling in his garden, preparing to plunge a shortsword into his own belly in the act of seppuku, ritual suicide. It was Kipa who reminded Hokusai that he still had duties to fulfill; that Kipa needed a master to train with in order to carry on his mother's work, until the mystery of her murder could be solved, until a new Slayer could be found.
Kipa was sure to wash his feet before entering the dojo, where he found the master kneeling in the posture of meditation. Kipa knelt at the edge of the training mat and bowed his head to the ground. He then began walking to the center of the mat, already wincing inwardly at the tumbles and strikes and joint locks that the old man would be putting him through in a minute. However, when the master finally stood, he fixed his inscrutable eyes upon his pupil and declared, "I am going to make us some tea. Come." Half an hour later, as they sat in the tea room gazing out over the garden and the sunset beyond, the Master began to speak.
"When I was a young man," intoned Hokusai, gazing out over the reddening horizon as if that distant memory were drifting somewhere beyond the ocean's edge, "I was invited to tea by my aunt, who happened to be the village seer. As she and I sat and looked out towards a sunset not unlike this one, she uttered my destiny like a spider weaving its web. She said my path lay to the south, where I would find a skinny little worm of a girl and turn her into a dragon, a scourge of demons, a Slayer." A corner of the master's mouth twisted, whether in a smile or in a grimace of pain, Kipa could not be sure. "My aunt also predicted that my path would end in the Land of the Sun. At the time, I assumed she meant my homeland, Nippon." Now the Master was smiling, but it was a bitter, sarcastic smile; the smile of a man who has figured out that the gods have a sense of humor, but that their idea of funny doesn't exactly match ours.
The Master turned to Kipa and asked, "Have you ever flown in an aeroplane?"
"No, Master."
"Then you are in for a new experience. We are called…" Kipa opened his mouth to protest, but the Master raised a finger to silence him, and Kipa had long ago learned the painful consequences of showing either impatience or discourtesy in the Master's presence.
"We are called," continued Hokusai, "to a special gathering of Slayers and their Watchers." The old man focused his eyes on Kipa, who tried not to squirm under their intense predatory gaze. "Your mother is dead, yes. But you have been an adequate pupil, and the nature of this emergency is such that the Council cannot be picky about the resources available to it." Kipa tried not to let the pride that was welling up in his breast show outwardly. To be labeled "adequate" by Master Hokusai was high praise to anyone who knew him; to be considered worthy enough to accompany the old man on an errand of this importance was an honor worth dying for.
Kipa swallowed, cleared his throat, and asked, "Where are we bound, Master?"
"We are going to the Land of the Sun," replied the old man, again allowing that strangely twisted smile to distort the corner of his mouth.
"We are going to Sunnydale."
