Chapter Twenty-Five Rui
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Rui
Rui saw something dark, something that felt like thunder, in her dreams. She saw a shaded figure, eyes shining with pale fire, holding a baby in his arms; she cried out, for the shadow was coming for her, trying to give the child to her.
She stood at the edge of a waterfall, a torrent of water raining down, and a hawk landed lightly on her shoulder.
All she was left with, when she woke, was a vague sense that something – that thunder, that darkness – was coming close. The leaves were falling.
Jobo, as always, sat at the foot of her bed. Tea, in a steaming kettle from the hearth, the air heavy with its warmth. A tinge of smoke. “How’re you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” she lied. His eyes seemed to pierce her with a fire of their own; she looked away. Even now she could hear the Hososhi whispering in the back of her mind.
“Sen came to you,” Jobo said, “in the night. You were sleeping with ill dreams… he didn’t want to wake you.”
Rui blinked. “Where are they?”
“Gone,” Jobo said. “Tokuon rode out at dawn. Sen was with him.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“You are unwell.”
But she tore away, reeling, from the bed, pulling herself up.
“You must be reasonable,” he said, “you still have the fever.”
“That’s not going to change.” She lifted her straw coat over her shoulders, grabbed the sword the crow monks gave her, and ran headlong through the door.
“Rui,” he called. But she ignored him, staggering when she reached the outvillage road.
The world was gray, dim and cold in the budding light of predawn, and the village lay quiet, the rice paddies abandoned, the road empty.
They’d already gone. She slid to her knees in the dirt, tears in her eyes.
I don’t want this… I don’t want this god, I don’t want to go to the three wells… I don’t want any of this…
But it was too late.
Sen’s family had come. Had taken him back. Had brought him to their world. He is a Gensei again, Rui thought. And I am cursed. He is a Gensei, he has his family…
And they are leaving me behind.
She arrived at the shrine and hid there, furious. At herself, at the gods, at the kijin and the world. Hiding, praying for something to change at the ancient shrine below the cryptomeria trees.
“O-ine,” she said. “It’s me, it’s Rui no’in.
I pray to you, O-ine, for the harvest across the land, so small beings like me may eat and be happy…
I pray to you, I pray to the gods of the mountain and the valley, I pray to the rain; I pray to the god of lightning, wife of O-ine.
And will dedicate my life to your peace.
I marry my life to you, O-ine, if you may bring me peace.
And… and help the god of four directions to spare me, and to lift this killing curse from inside my heart. ”
Around her, the great cryptomeria murmured slowly in the breeze.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please just tell me it’s going to be all right. That’s all I want to know. Just tell me it will be all right.”
She prayed in silence. The woods were still. She turned and saw a small fox watching her from the side of the shrine in the trees. It raised a forepaw, and when she gasped in awe, vanished into the woods.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
The guardian statues seemed to watch her as she fell to her knees before the sacred rope and the box.
She almost fell asleep there, descending into the cool, calm blackness of dreams, but forced herself awake.
What am I going to do? A sound – a movement – and she jerked to her feet, ready to fight, only to find that it was nothing.
A stray breeze along the trail. She sank to her knees again.
The god loomed behind her.
“Please,” she said. “I just want peace.”
“You will have none,” the god said. “No peace until you have paid for what you did.”
Her heart wrenched in her; her muscles cramped and seized. She crumpled. “I don’t want to kill.”
“You must.”
“No.”
“You must.”
“No!”
An explosion. A sudden movement, a burst from the trees. Rui flinched back, feeling the god in her veins, and she lashed out with her knife, and a tiny bird plummeted to earth. When she looked at what she’d done, she saw it. A small sparrow.
An innocent creature that she had decapitated mid-flight.
But the moment that she did, she could breathe again. Her heart went still. Her mind came back. The color returned to her skin, and she looked at her hands – they’d stopped shaking. The effect was immediate. Taking the sparrow’s life – small as it was – immediately gave life back to her.
“No…” she said. No.
“You must,” the spirit told her. “Your soul is cut. The longer you go, the more will die, and in the end the demons will take this one. Your body.”
“Please, Hososhi,” she said. “Show me what to do…”
“You would make a bargain for your life?” said the god.
“What would you have me do?”
“Something evil has crossed the boundary of the worlds. Help me stop it.”
Rui felt the pain in her chest again. It radiated from her heart to the tips of her fingers. She brought a hand to her sternum, rubbing it, but it never did any good.
“I’m dying,” she said. “Whatever this is… it will kill me before you get what you want…”
“To save one soul is to save the future of the worlds,” they said. “If you ask us to end the curse on your body, your spirit must pay the price.”
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Rui said, overwhelmed.
“To save one soul is to save the future of the worlds,” the god repeated. “Something is coming. A vengeful ghost, a demon dressed in white. Summoned by a curse years ago. It will come to kill him.”
“Who?”
“Your friend. You know this. You have seen it too.”
“If I help you stop it, will you let me go?”
“It is not that easy, child.”
“Then – save him,” Rui said. “Sen. At least let him be saved.”
“It is not up to me to decide a human’s fate,” said the god.
“But you know,” Rui said. “You see the future, you must know…”
“Have you learned nothing, child?” The Hososhi roared through the earth itself. “You see many paths. What may happen. What may not. The roads are there. Take one.”
With that, they vanished, and Rui felt another sharp stab of pain in her chest, a white-hot flash that cut below her heart and radiated outward like lightning until she screamed in agony and fell to the dirt, unable to stand.
She remained like that, by the sticks and the fallen leaves, trying to catch her breath.
Afraid, yes, afraid of the demon in white, afraid of the killer they said she must become, afraid of the future the Hososhi saw but would not tell her.
Because the god was right – she felt something coming, and when she closed her eyes, she could see it, too, a shadow in her mind, ever present, and coming closer. The god of four directions had seen it.
The woods fell silent; the normal chittering of birds and whispers of the wind had gone. Only the trees looked down, and the air itself lay still.
“What must I do?” she asked, to the emptiness.
“What is the worth of an earthly soul compared to that of gods?” the Hososhi thundered. “The demon walks this land. You… may have a role in stopping her.”
“I can’t kill a demon,” she said. “How can I kill a ghost… Why’re you doing this?”
“Because in all the myriad futures of the world, you may still have a role to play. I have seen it. But one path is not the only path, and I must make sure my mission is done.”
“You keep saying that… What is your mission?”
A hissing sound. The Hososhi’s laughter. “I am at the gate between the worlds,” they said.
The voice disappeared more quickly this time. Rui sat back with her head against the base of a sakae tree. The wind returned, and the frozen joints of the trees began to creak. Her heart pounded in her chest, the ache spread with every beat, and she felt as though her blood itself was still aflame.
The dead sparrow remained where she had killed it, at her feet. She looked at it for a long time. There were no other creatures anywhere in sight. She heard nothing but the wind in the leaves. What have I done? she thought. What have I done?
That night, she fell into a fitful sleep. In her dream, she was bombarded by sensations. The feeling of hands like thin smoke tracing the contours of her shoulders, ghosts guiding her to some destination known only to them.
In her dream, she saw a dark path in the woods over a low-lying field, empty rice paddies full of mud.
Ice fell from the air. She saw a figure walking through the trees on a high hill overlooking the plain, a woman in white, who had no face, just a featureless mask, two black eyes, unblinking.
Strange words were written across the mask and the woman’s skin, in the ancient seal-script of the diviners. She couldn’t read the words.
No, she shouted, soundlessly. No, get away.
I know you, the vision said. I know…
She tried to run, fell to the base of a ravine, where she found a tiny girl, no more than six years old, crying, in a ditch deeper than Rui was tall.
Is that me? she thought. I am looking at myself as a child.
Birds flew overhead, dotting out the stars.
They were too fast, too sharp and too thin, like they were made of rice-paper.
They rained down upon her, surrounding her, tiny strips of paper with the same magical seal-script that had summoned them: shikigami, small-spirits summoned by ancient magic, marks written on the paper seals.
Rui couldn’t move. She could do nothing but wait as the paper swirled in the air, small, sharp cuts slashing themselves around her, as the ghosts came near.
Then they were gone, flying back over the slope of the hill, toward the spectral dreamscape where the woman in white still waited, hand out as though calling them back to her.
“She’s coming.” The Hososhi spoke. “Coming for him.”
“For who?”
“For Sen.”