James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

The Armorer considered it, looking past her at the steep roof of the main house. She could see the fountain reflected in his spectacles.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Don’t be too enthusiastic, love,” she said tartly. “I can always go and watch the water dripping.”

“Sorry.” He squeezed her hand. “Just thinking how well built this place is. To have survived a hundred years of quakes. Knew what they were doing.”

RYAN HAD BEEN TOLD that the captured ronin was being examined and tried in front of a panel of the surviving samurai, headed by Mashashige.

“Wonder what the punishment is going to be?”

“I heard him say that he would fight the prisoner himself if he was found guilty,” Krysty said. “I can’t imagine that there’ll be much doubt about that. Not with a hundred or more dead servants floating in the sea back there.” She shook her head. “Their attitude to death and dying is strange. Most villes that’d lost three-quarters of their fighting men would be in a state of total shock and anger. They just seem to feel philosophical about it. It’s happened. So we might as well get on with living. Don’t understand it.”

As they strolled together through the quiet corridors of the fortress, they saw a pile of magazines set on a lacquered bamboo table in a room that looked out over the courtyard and formal garden. They spotted Mildred and J.B. walking past the window, hand in hand. Ryan was about to call out to them, but Krysty hushed him.

“Leave the lovers alone,” she said.

“Yeah. Guess you’re right.”

She walked to the table and picked up one of the magazines, finding that it was a hand-printed comic in bright colors. She flipped through the pages.

“Gaia!”

“What is it?”

“Look at these mags.”

“What about them?” He picked one up and started to look at it. “Fireblast!”

“Strong meat, huh?”

He didn’t answer, his eye held by the amazingly pornographic and startlingly violent sexual images portrayed in the pages of the comic.

Though he couldn’t read the Japanese lettering that was splashed across the side of every page, it wasn’t difficult to follow the story.

A woman pirate queen seemed to have taken a ship prisoner and was having all the captives taken to her cabin for the most hideously inventive bouts of sexual torture.

Krysty’s was an alternate version of a similar story. It seemed like a Japanese general from the Second World War had taken a truckload of American womennurses by their uniformsprisoner, and was submitting them to an almost identical hell to that shown in the magazine Ryan held.

“I’ve seen porn before,” Ryan said. “Mostly I don’t mind it, long as there’s not kiddies or animals in it. What’s the old phrase they used to say before sky-dark?”

“Consenting adults?”

He nodded. “I don’t mind, long as it’s consenting adults. But this is real triple-sicko stuff.”

One of the victims was bloodily bound with barbed wire, and his hands had been severed at the wrists. He was stretched out on a rack in front of the pirate queen, who was forcing him to pleasure her with his tongue. One of her minions was straddling the mutilated prisoner while pouring hot candle wax over his chest. In the background there were some even more unspeakable tortures going on, cunningly and graphically drawn and colored.

The principal color on the pages of the comics was a brilliant crimson.

Ryan dropped the comic on the pile. “I think Mildred mentioned these things,” he said. “They got a special name. Manga. I think that was it.”

Krysty nodded. “Rings a bell with me.” She threw the magazine she’d been looking at back onto the table. “I think I’ve seen enough to get the picture.”

THE TRIAL HADN’T TAKEN very long.

No more than an hour had passed since the prisoner, Mashashita, had been taken into the secret court, still wearing his bloodied, muddied green kimono.

Ryan and Krysty saw Jak coming toward them, with Issie tottering along after him on her tiny bound feet, hands clasped together in the sleeves of her beautiful gown, her eyes fixed adoringly on the teenager.

“Hey. Heard trial over,” Jak called.