Chapter Seventeen Rui #2
“They’re always watching,” Jobo said. “They see in all directions. If they show themselves to you, Rui, it is for a reason. But until that happens, I can’t say where, or when, that will be.
I can do my best to summon them, but until they come…
No, the Hososhi will not reveal themselves until they need to. We must be careful.”
“Teacher.” Sen moved, quietly, beside them. “What did the message say?”
Jobo nodded heavily, as if confronting a difficult task.
“It feels as though the barrier between the worlds has changed. As though the very earth itself is on edge, waiting, in anticipation. The woods are quiet. The mountain is still. The gods have stopped talking to us. Come.” He hurried them along the path. The sun was falling; Rui tasted rain.
“Teacher,” Sen said again. “Iyo’s message. What’s happened?”
“We are going to Kitano,” said Jobo. “We’ve been summoned. Your stewardmother, Sen, has asked for our help. We leave tomorrow.”
“What’s happened?” Sen repeated.
“Nothing,” Jobo said. “Not yet. But Iyo feels it as I do. Pack your things. Rui.” He came to her. “You understand I must leave you at the gates?” She nodded slowly. They would never let her inside the castle walls again.
“I can stay with old Goro in the outvillage,” she said.
He gave her a gentle look. “It will be all right. Yes, I’m sure old Goro will be happy to see you. Now, come. I must prepare the sacred items.”
That night they snuck into the inmost shrine and found Jobo performing a ritual at the hearth.
The flames rose every time he threw a bone into the fire, and every time, he muttered something, eyes narrowed in concentration, mouth turned down.
If he knew they watched him, he gave no notice, eyes focused solely on the fire, the burning objects there.
Rui tried to peer into the flames, as he did, but if there was a message there, for her, it was obscured.
She watched her teacher. She wondered what he saw.
The following day, Jobo led them down the old road toward Kitano fortress, the great gate and the houses Rui had not seen in a year.
He carried the spear-blade, safely sheathed and wrapped in purple-brocaded silk on his back; they would mount it at Kitano.
The day splintered under gusts of wind. Rui couldn’t help but notice that her companions seemed to feel as apprehensive as she did; no one talked, and there was little sound but for the clinking of the prayer rings on Jobo’s staff.
She felt like someone – or something – was watching her, following in the trees just out of sight; a mysterious figure at the edge of the woods, and in the earth, and sky.
Even the gods feel wrong, she thought. As though there was a voice, a distant echo, saying, Let me in.
When Rui was nine or ten years old, she often saw someone walking in the woods.
The no’in called him the Old Tree Man, and told stories of a strange, skeletal figure, dressed in rags the color of moss.
She could never be sure of his age, or if it was really a man at all, for as soon as she thought she saw him, standing silhouetted on the top of a rise, or by the bend of the river, or perhaps nestled down among the foxberry plants or at the edge of a copse, she would try to go to him, to say hello and ask him for his name.
But every time, he started when she came close, reacting as if afraid; and every time, he fled.
She had the same feeling in her bones now, as she held the small sword they’d given her and crossed back along the trail.
The same feeling of being watched, of being observed, as though the earth itself were listening to her every step.
For a moment, she actually thought she had seen the soft mossy rags and the bony shoulder of the old man at the edge of sight, in the shadow of a huge elm, wreathed from behind in the setting sun.
“It will be good to see it again,” Sen said quietly, pulling Rui from her thoughts. “Kitano.” But the strange omens were getting to him, too, Rui saw. She was about to say something in consolation when Sen jolted to a stop.
“Teacher,” he whispered. “Look.”
A group of soldiers had entered the wooded crossroads below them.
At least a dozen men, a scouting party, laced armor glinting through the shade in varied colors, red and gold and black.
On small poles, they carried flags marked with a three-mountain symbol in a ring. One carried a conch horn at his neck.
“Careful,” Jobo said.
“What clan is that?”
Jobo said nothing; Sen shook his head. They lingered, watching as the soldiers trampled toward them.
Someone called an alarm, and a group of mounted horsemen came into view, led by a trio of kijin dressed in armor of a deep crimson, so dark it was like blood, with helms of terrifying visage, adorned with different demons’ horns and crests of other decoration.
Their leader emerged, a tall, imperious man with a handsome, viciously proud face, cold eyes black as ink, and sharp cheekbones that gave him a hard, nearly hungry look.
His movements were measured, dangerous, yet his every breath and glance seemed to sneer at the world as he surveyed it from his horse; his upturned nose gave the impression that he was surrounded by a stench.
His guard moved in a column around him, twenty riders in deep red. The footmen had armor unique to each, but the kijin were all dressed in the same blood-red, with bows and quivers full of hawk-fletched arrows, spare bowstring in rings at their sides.
Hunters, Rui thought. Warriors.
Jobo said, darkly, “That is Tokuon Sei’i.”
Sen had gone wide-eyed. “Who’s that?”
“He is Toryo, lord of the Gisan mountains…” Jobo said.
He turned to Sen. “He’s your cousin.”
A shout came up, and in an instant, the footmen pushed forward, surrounding them.
More red riders came from the trees, quiet as ghosts, while the stern man, Lord Tokuon, peered down as he approached.
“Jobo Daiten,” he called. “The crow monk.” He gave a tilt of his head, neither dismissive nor reverent. Then he saw Sen.
“Ame’in.” Tokuon’s demeanor remained impassive, like a statue, but his eyes held fire. “Fate has done well to meet us at the crossroads. I’ve been looking forward to this moment for quite some time.”
“What do you want?” Sen asked, uncertain.
Now a smile spread across Tokuon’s face.
“Hoshiakari,” he said. “I’m here to bring you home.”
When they arrived at the terraced paddies at the edge of Iyo’s lands, they found a country preparing for war.
Tokuon had come with a retinue to meet the eastern lords, and had already made camp with the help of some of Iyo’s men.
Sen’s sister Kai, they claimed, called for all Gensei to unite under her banner.
“Your sister was raised in the capital,” Tokuon said, “ward of Lord Masashige of the Zusho family, a house in the Keishi line. In that way they wanted her to be in their control.”
He called out a greeting as his soldiers came near.
“But the gods are angry,” he said. “Something’s coming. I don’t like these dark winds, this shifting of the air.”
“I’ve felt the same,” Jobo said.
“Where’s the Ogami’in?” Sen asked.
Tokuon nodded: up ahead. They entered the maze of tents in Lady Iyo’s meadow, where Tokuon’s retainers had set up their camp. “Hassho!” Tokuon called, and soon an old woman came forward. “My seer.”
Jobo turned his head. “Hassho Tayu, I should have known. How’d he manage to bring you away from your stone temple on the cliffs?”
“My lord Sei’i is searching for gods,” the old woman said, her voice like scraping coal.
“Giants walk the borders of this earth, and he listens for them, hearing portents of good or ill. As do I. I have heard, Jobo crow monk. I have heard ill-tidings as of late. The gods speak. They speak of the four directions. The endless barrier will break and the red giants will descend into our earth, and walk the shores of these islands again. They come between our worlds.”
Jobo went still. “What do you know of those pilgrims?”
“I know what you know, crow monk. I know: they’re coming back.”
Soon Lady Iyo arrived with her guard, Nihira and Hakaru at either side, and Rui was brushed away like a pet when the kijin began their talks.
She tried to speak to Sen, but he was whisked off before they could do so much as share a glance.
She felt the cold, judging gaze of the lord Tokuon Sei’i coming down on her as they left: it was not the look of a lord to a servant.
It was a question mark, the gaze of someone who’d seen something that didn’t belong, and was trying to figure out what it was, if it meant an omen good or ill.
The gods should tell me, she thought, because I don’t know either. And yet I meet it everywhere I go.
The woman, Hassho Tayu, was staring at her.
“Come,” Jobo said.
Rui managed to send a nod of encouragement to Sen, just one, before the newcomers roused their horses and moved off. Tokuon offered a stallion to Sen, saying, “Here, cousin,” and Sen didn’t look back at Rui when they went.
“Rui,” Jobo said. He and the old woman, the Hassho, were waiting.
“I’m coming,” Rui said, and followed him.
They went to a tent in the open field beneath the shadow of the trees, where Tokuon’s bannermen were setting up their camp.
“The Hassho is a diviner,” Jobo said. “She can hear the rumblings of the earth and spirits better than I can.”
When they reached her tent, at the low edge of the meadow, the Hassho ran talismans against their hands and foreheads, cast them to the river, seeing the path they took, and when they were seated, she tossed stones and oracle bones into her fire.
“What’s she doing?”
“Making invocations to the guardians of the four directions: east, for the dragon; south, for the crane; the tiger, to the west; and the bear to the north. By gaining the blessings of the four directions, we can see the truth.”
The Hassho fell still. “The god of four directions is coming,” she said. “The One Who Sees. They come to warn us.”
“I have felt them, too,” Jobo admitted.
The old woman looked at him. “It is the demon’s curse… Three will die, three houses will be emptied. Three branches will break. They will blow away, scattered as dead leaves…”
She bent over her bones, mumbling and shaking, and shivered, as though a deathly chill had passed through her.
“Hassho,” Jobo asked. “What do you hear?”
“Flames,” she said, gripping his hand in hers.
“Flames.” She began speaking in tones, as if reciting a song: “A tyrant king will fall, and rise under the moon. The curse of the demon-emperor returns…” Her eyes, wider now, reflected the red embers of the fire.
“I hear it… I hear his voice… he speaks of vengeance! He speaks of names. There is a ghost, walking with demons in the four directions of the world… They have crossed the endless gate. Look!” She gasped harshly. “You can see it. You can see.”
At the end, it was Rui she turned to, not the crow monk. Her voice cracked, raw as if she had been screaming. It trembled when she spoke. “Flames,” she said again, and once more, “flames.”
She looked into Rui’s eyes. “The capital is on fire.”