Heretic, Betrayers of Kamigawa

CHAPTER 5

Summoning the snow woman was not something Toshi wanted to make a habit of. She would have come for them on her own eventually-this was her mountain and she its curse. Every time he drew the symbol he felt her presence, with all its terrible gravity and endless cold. Leaving these special kanji in his wake was like tossing raw meat out to lure a hungry wolf. She was drawn to the symbols and the much larger group instead of poor Toshi, miserable and defenseless all by his lonesome.

He crouched now on a wide, flat shelf below a rocky point overlooking the path below. After making sure the nezumi would find him, he scaled the point to watch his game play out. He had spent most of the night setting the stage, and now he was ready to enjoy the show. The circular clearing below him was completely unremarkable, his efforts hidden under a light dusting of fresh snow. As he had with the wind shear kami at the base of the mountain, he had combined Night’s blessings with the practical and reliable tools he knew best. He was eager to see how effective this mixture could be.

Something whirred in the cold morning sky and Toshi leaned back against the rock. He shielded his eyes from the rising sun and saw a fluttering figure descending toward him. He mistook it for a bird at first, but then he saw it was a messenger kanji-a simple spell for communicating across great distances.

Toshi drew his jitte. He knew precious few people who used messengers and he didn’t want to hear from any of them. If the kanji didn’t attack, he was ready to nullify it before it could return to its master and report his location.

The kanji messenger fluttered down like a butterfly. It was a crude job, drawn with heavy bold strokes, and it did not seem to have cutting edges. Neither was it moving fast enough to inflict damage. Toshi kept his jitte handy as the messenger oriented on his shelf and then hovered just a few yards away, bobbing and rotating in the air.

“Well?” Toshi said. “Get on with it.”

The edges of the kanji began to vibrate. A dull, droning buzz rose, then a soft and throaty female voice said, “I have a new commission for him and his band of reckoners.

Toshi blinked. He recognized the voice, but he could not credit what it was saying. And when had the daimyo’s daughter learned to work messenger kanji?

“I am in my father’s tower. I am a prisoner. Rescue me, and his reward will stagger the greediest of hearts. Even his.”

Toshi shook his head in disbelief and muttered, “She really must be desperate.”

The kanji bobbed again, and Michiko’s voice said, “I will be waiting for him.”

The edges of the symbol began to flake away. A real beginner’s effort, Toshi thought. It isn’t going to wait for a reply or even return to its starting point. Michiko might as well have tied a note to a rock.

He had offered his services to Michiko-hime only to get them both out of a tight spot. He had thought she would keep him on retainer or just use him for information. In a pinch, she might have him spy on someone. She was too young and held no official offices for her to send him on missions that might endanger him. Now she wanted him to break her out of the most tightly guarded piece of property in Kamigawa.

Toshi sighted. This was the result of working with the noble classes. He thought about sending her a return messenger, but the only reply he could give her was, “I’m working on it.” Best to let her sit tight until he could figure out how to handle this new challenge. Right now, he had enough to worry about.

Down below, he saw his old friend Marrow and two more nezumi creeping toward the edge of the kanji circle he’d made. Trust Kiku to send in a sacrifice first. It was a smart move, but Toshi was unconcerned. His plan would work even if the nezumi were the only ones to break the circle of kanji that waited beneath the snow.

The rats were cautious, though, sniffing around the edges of the broad, flat section of the path. A hundred years ago, before the mountain was cursed, this spot would have been a perfect place to pitch a tent and ride out a storm. Now the nezumi crawled through the snow with only the tips of their noses poking out. They left dull gray furrows in as they spread out in a slow, careful formation. Marrow was taking no chances.

Toshi watched them explore. They were very close to the circle now. Just a few more moments …

Something else moved on the distant path, and the nezumi stopped where they were. Toshi peered through the midday glare and saw people coming up the path. Three men trying to be cautious and unseen but failing miserably.

Kiku’s second wave, obviously. The jushi wasn’t taking any chances, either, in case Toshi’s trap was powerful enough to keep killing after it had been triggered.

Smart girl, he thought. Of course it is. Then again, I didn’t tell you to follow me, did I? Each choice in life brings rewards and punishments. The choice to bring me back to Uramon just carries more of the latter.

Marrow-Gnawer had turned and lifted his head out of the snow. Seeing the hatchet men, he hissed a warning and motioned for them to drop lower to the ground. The thugs resisted at first, unwilling to take orders from a rat. Then they remembered Marrow was far sneakier than they were and they’d do well to follow his lead. Clumsily, they crouched and began to creep forward.

Toshi was so intent on tracking Marrow’s progress that he almost missed the sound. The soft scrape of a boot on frozen rock filtered through his brain. As he was beginning to wonder where Kiku was, he saw a flash of purple spinning gently toward him.

He barely got his short sword out in time to intercept the camellia. The delicate purple bloom fastened onto his weapon, green stems and brown roots wrapping tightly around the blade. Its subtle fragrance changed from perfume to poison in his nostrils and the flower bore down on him, pressing on the sword as if its weight had increased a thousand times. Toshi was forced back into the sheer rock behind him, all of the strength in his arms and legs now devoted to keeping the flower and its grasping tendrils away from his face.

Kiku pulled herself onto the shelf. Her cloak was tossed back, revealing one shapely silk-clad shoulder and another purple flower.

“Hello, Toshi,” she said. Her eyes were hard and bright.

Toshi struggled to keep the flower from pressing his sword into his own face. “Hello, Kiku. I … wasn’t expecting you. At least-” he grunted and took a step forward, but the flower pressed him back once more-“not this high up.”

“Yet here I am.” She casually sniffed the camellia on her shoulder and stepped to the edge of the shelf.

“I have him,” she said. “Marrow-Gnawer and you-” she pointed at the smallest hatchet man-“come help get him down.” She turned back to Toshi.

“You can call off the yuki-onna,” she said, “or you die here. Personally, I want you to come back and beg Uramon for mercy. I’d like to see that.” She smiled coldly.

Toshi sneered over his blade. “Can’t … call her off. But maybe …”

He turned his wrists so the blade’s edge bit into the camellia. The flower pressed on, slicing off a third of itself as it slid over the blade toward Toshi’s face.

Toshi sidestepped the lunging bloom and drew his jitte from his belt. The long, spiked truncheon was normally a defensive weapon, suited for blocking incoming swords and catching them in the metal tine that rose up from its handle. As the camellia flew by his face, Toshi thrust the sharpened end of his jitte through the bottom of the flower, spiking it against the cliff face. He pivoted around the pinned flower then slung it off the end of his weapon like a stone from a sling.

The ruined flower smacked against Kiku’s chest, but it did her no harm. Even if it weren’t crushed, impaled, and in pieces, she was the gardener who’d grown it … it could no more harm her than a snake could suffer from its own venom.

Toshi suddenly winced as an icy, stabbing pain lanced through his forearm. He glanced down past Kiku to the clearing below.

“We should talk,” Toshi said. He kept his sword and his jitte ready. “I think one of Uramon’s hatchet-heads just stepped inside my circle.”

The clouds overhead thickened, and a dense shadow fell over them all. Kiku’s eyes narrowed. She spread her fan, took a step back, and looked down.

It was dark as dusk in the clearing. The nezumi were whining and mewling in terror, their beady red eyes darting around for an escape route. The hatchet men were slightly more composed but at least as frightened. Halfway up the wall to the shelf, Marrow-Gnawer and the third hatchet man had stopped and were staring down in horror. The thug on the wall below Marrow screamed.

A pale figure materialized from the gloom, small-boned and graceful. Her gleaming white robes dragged along the surface of the snow without disturbing it, and though she came steadily forward her legs did not move. Her head was tilted forward so that her long, lustrous black hair completely concealed her face as it hung almost to the ground.

The nezumi wailed. The hatchet men on the ground turned to run. Kiku glared at Toshi over the edge of her fan.

“You’re a bastard, Toshi Umezawa, and you’ve killed us all.”

Toshi grinned. He sheathed his sword but kept his jitte in his hand.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but I think I can save one or two of us. Interested?”

The closest nezumi stood like a statue, rigid with fear as the yuki-onna approached. She extended a pale hand from beneath the cascade of hair and white robes. Shuddering, weeping, helpless, the nezumi could only stand and sputter as that gentle hand touched his face.

Even from the height of the rock shelf, Toshi heard the crackling as the rat-man’s body froze. A patina of frost spread out from the yuki-onna’s hand, crusting the nezumi’s hair with crystals of ice.

The two fleeing hatchet men reached the far side of the clearing. Before they hurtled down the path, they both stopped and cried out.

The snow woman was there, having finished with the first nezumi, as if she were a hostess unwilling to let her guests go without a proper goodbye. She stood before them, her face still hidden beneath the shroud of hair, and reached out with both hands. She placed her palms tenderly, almost lovingly on each man’s shoulder. The vapor from their exhalations fell in fine crystals like snow as their eyes clouded and the blood froze in their veins.

Kiku did not take her eyes off the dread creature. “I’m interested, Toshi. Tell me more.”

The yuki-onna shimmered from sight then reappeared and claimed the second nezumi. The rat-man fell back and disappeared into a snowdrift. Below Toshi and Kiku, the last hatchet man yelled as he lost his footing and tumbled down to the ground.

“What do you know about kami worship?” Toshi said. “Quickly-she’s running out of thugs to play with.”

“I know a great deal … probably more than you. What are you getting at?”

Toshi pulled up his sleeve. “See this mark? It’s a powerful kanji we professionals use to make subtle entrances and exits. I made this one under the blessing of a powerful myojin. It works much better than it ever has before, and it won’t heal. I think it’s permanent.”

Below, the hatchet man hurled his weapon. The yuki-onna barely paused as the axe sailed through her.

Kiku shrugged. “So what?”

“So, I think it means something. You don’t pray to the kami of fire when you want it to rain, right? But if you make the right prayer to the right spirit, you get a thing of beauty. Something you can really use. I asked Night to let me fade away, but she did much more. You think about how much happens in the dark, how much of our business is conducted but never seen. How many people come and go, how many major events occur unnoticed in the shadows? I think I tapped into something larger and deeper than a concealment spell. I think this kanji makes me formless, like a shadow. It doesn’t make me invisible-it makes me not there.”

Screaming in terror, the last hatchet man bolted up the path, heading for the summit of the Heart of Frost. He made it ten steps before the snow woman appeared in front of him.

Kiku opened her hand, revealing a fresh camellia. “This is an interesting theory. Even if I believe you’ve been blessed by the Myojin of Night’s Reach, it doesn’t explain why you’re still talking. Do something, if you can.”

Toshi slid his sleeve back down. “I already did.”

Kiku nodded toward the rampaging yuki-onna. “Maybe you should tell her, because she hasn’t noticed.”

Marrow-Gnawer pulled himself up on to the shelf. Below, the final hatchet man fell dead in the snow.

“Please,” the nezumi said. He fell to his knees and placed his hands on the shelf. “Don’t let her get me.”

Kiku made as if to kick Marrow’s trembling form off the shelf, but Toshi stopped her with a raised hand.

“I harnessed … I became part of an essential aspect of the myojin. And she let me.”

The snow woman looked up at the shelf. A stiff wind blew her black tresses away from her face. Marrow-Gnawer screamed.

Her eyes were vacant black pools, terrible holes that led to a vast frigid void. She opened her pale lips and let out a ghastly, shrieking cry that stabbed through Toshi’s ears and made him wince.

She floated towards the wall that Marrow-Gnawer had just climbed.

Kiku grabbed Toshi’s arm. “Get to the point, ochimusha.”

“Shadow is an aspect of Night. So is cold … that frigid emptiness that forces people to huddle together during the winter.” He pointed. “She embodies cold. Cold is part of night. With my myojin’s help, I think we can bend the yuki-onna to our will. Because if you think about it, hers is just another aspect of my patron’s power.”

The snow woman floated up the side of the sheer rock wall. Kiku waved away Toshi’s argument. “The snow woman is not a horse to be broken or a dog to be leashed. She is a force of nature.”

“That she is. I don’t even think she has a will to be broken. But I’ve proven she can be led. Now all we have to do is prove she can be compelled.”

“Enough of this. By the stony gray hell, stop making speeches and do something.”

“All right, but don’t yell at me when you don’t like it. Give me your hand. You too, Marrow.”

The nezumi leapt to his feet and thrust his hand into Toshi’s. Behind Marrow-Gnawer, the top of the yuki-onna’s head rose, bringing her eyes level with the shelf.

Toshi quickly scratched a symbol into Marrow’s hand and turned to Kiku. He held out his hand.

The jushi hesitated, took a last look at the snow woman, and gave Toshi her hand. He made the same mark, sheathed his jitte, and held on to Kiku’s hand as he grabbed Marrow’s.

“We are free,” Toshi said, “bound only to each other. My life is yours, yours is mine. Harm one, harm all. The survivors must avenge. Whatever is taken from the hyozan, the hyozan recovers tenfold.”

As he spoke, a cold wave passed through his hands to theirs. Kiku’s spine stiffened, and she inhaled sharply. Marrow-Gnawer screeched in terror.

“She’s here!”

Toshi held onto them. “Don’t let go,” he said. He stepped forward as the yuki-onna stretched out her hand. He kept his eyes fixed on her own terrible black wells.

The snow woman placed her hand on Toshi’s forehead. He convulsed, almost crushing Kiku’s hand and pulling Marrow’s arm out of the socket. Ice formed in his eyebrows, and he felt his body temperature drop.

In the clearing, below the frozen corpses and a blanket of snow, the ring of symbols Toshi had made flashed to life. He had spent hours positioning the characters for his patron kami, his reckoner gang, and the cold embrace of endless shadow until they formed a ring on the ground. These symbols now glowed with an eerie purple light, the same light that now shone from Kiku’s, Marrow’s, and Toshi’s linked hands.

The purple light flashed beneath the yuki-onna’s palm where it touched Toshi. He heard a muffled explosion and felt a great concussion that drove him back. Kiku and Marrow-Gnawer came with him, and the snow woman herself was blown back like a leaf in a storm.

The dread spirit screeched as she plummeted to the ground. She landed within the ring of Toshi’s glowing symbols, drawing the purple light from them to her like a lightning rod. Wailing, thrashing, the yuki-onna screamed so loudly that the stones around them cracked.

She was gone. The flickering lights vanished, the awful sound died away, and the three were left battered and dazed on the rocky shelf.

The terrible gloom dissipated, and the mid-morning sun returned. Toshi rose to his feet, peering down on the clearing. All of the snow that had fallen was gone, leaving the kanji and the corpses of Uramon’s party behind.

Marrow-Gnawer was on all fours, praying and weeping. Kiku was on her haunches, leaning against the cliff face and rubbing the fresh mark on her hand.

“Welcome to the hyozan reckoners,” he said.

“I’ll kill you for this, Toshi.”

“Not without consequences,” he said cheerfully. He showed her his own hyozan tattoo on the back of his hand. “It would be extremely unlucky for any of us to turn on the others now. I’ll give you a quick primer about how things operate in my gang. For now, let’s just say that we’re obliged to look after each other and enjoy the fact that we’re all still alive, eh?”

Kiku snapped open her fan and sat heavily on the stone shelf. “Don’t celebrate long, ochimusha. This is not over.”

“In a way, it is.”

“For now.” Kiku primly adjusted her skirt. “What happens now?”

Toshi grinned mirthlessly. “We’re already deep in the Sokenzan,” he said. “I think a visit to your fellow reckoner and oath-brother would be in order.”

Kiku snarled but held her tongue. “And after that?”

“After that, I think we should go back to Uramon. She’s got something I want, so I’m going to offer her something she wants in exchange.”

“What does she want?”

Toshi winked. “Me.”