Chapter Thirty-Five Sen #2
The man pointed one shaking hand toward the edge of the paddy, where a group of people could be seen on the fieldridge. All was darkness beyond, the rise of the western mountains but a shadow; the whistling of wind threatened ice and rain.
“Who are they?”
The man just shook his head. The crowd murmured; no one met Sen’s glance. Finally, he pushed his way through the farmfolk, parting them like grass as they slunk back with fearful, wary eyes. Hori Yataro and Ise Tadanobu formed up alongside him, pledged to protect him by order of their lord, Nihira.
Behind them came Masakari Saito and the rest of Ohori’s scouts.
The paddies lay ahead. Once more, the farmer pointed to the distant field.
“Body-removers,” the old man said, with a hint of fear.
Under the edicts of the True Path, only low-status were permitted to touch a dead body or perform impure acts, such as tanning leather.
And the man was no’in; he would have lived under these rules his whole life.
“I’m going to see what’s going on,” Sen said.
“Stay close,” Saito began.
“You just watch that fire.”
Ise Tadanobu of the Kitanohara clan went with him, along with one of Saito’s men, a bearded fighter with the broadleaf ivy of House Oba on his sleeves.
They approached a group of no’in women by the paddy, whispering in hushed tones and looking about in the muck. One of them, a willowy, lean figure, turned at their approach. “Amé,” she said, greeting him in the slow, wide-voweled accent of the west.
Something pricked Sen’s neck again. We’re not in the west, he thought.
Soon the no’in had surrounded him, asking for help. One bowed lightly. “You have come with the army?”
“What happened here?”
“A body,” called another. “They found him in the water. On the paddy, look.” Four sets of hands pointed in the dark, a swathe so deep the torches could barely penetrate.
“Someone has drained the aqueduct,” said a tall no’in with shorn hair and tattoos on her arms. “Flooding the paddies we’ve been preparing for next planting in the spring. Waste of all our irrigation water…”
The woman turned. “It was an attack, amé. Came up the slope’n we found him…”
“Who?”
“The body.”
She led them deeper into the fields. “Foun’ in the water, there…”
“The headman?” Sen asked.
“Dead. Killed in the night. Killed by ’em Keishi. Mountain-wolves.”
Sen felt something in the air. His neck tingled. These strange women, he thought, whom the other villagers seemed to fear…
“Show me.”
They brought him along the footpath at the edge of the paddy, far from the town.
Around them was a world in darkness; behind, a warm glow bathed the fields, as the fire spread at the local temple, and distantly, faint shouts could be heard, from the villagers and from Tokuon’s men, who were in the town now, helping put the fire out.
His main host, Sen knew, still waited on the road.
But that was on the other side of the village, and here, in the flat, empty rice field of the paddies, the world was dark, and cold, and still.
They went out, along the little ridge-line road that rose above the paddy, and as they did, a pair of women split off and ran back into the night.
But they were running away from the town.
Sen craned his head, confused. “Where are they going?”
“Everybody’s scared,” the woman said. “Now please, just up here. Go on.” She was leading him forward. The others began walking around them, on either side.
“Hey.” Tadanobu pushed behind him. “Step away.”
The women turned and murmured. Sen’s guard bristled. “Apologies, amé. But come,” the leader said. “It’s just ahead.”
He grabbed the woman’s arm by the wrist. “You first.”
Her arm felt strong and well-muscled. With a flash, Sen realized she moved like someone who had martial training, not a commoner. Yet she had old servant tattoos. She had the clothes of a body-remover.
But she was too tall. Too sure. Too careful.
They didn’t move like farmers.
They moved like something else.
Like killers.
The woman turned.
Their eyes met.
A shout went up in the village behind them, a cry of panic: the blaze was overtaking the temple, framing the entire village with an eerie orange glow. Flames burst and the main hall was consumed in a shower of sparks.
“Hoshiakari!” A voice made them turn. It was Ohori’s bodyguard, Masakari Saito, shouting at them from the main paths far away. He sounded small in the distance. “Get back! Hoshiakari!”
Sen could just make out his voice:
“Keishi!”
Sen went for his sword. That instant, the four women converged on him, sharp sickles and blades appearing from nowhere, and it was already too late.
A geyser of blood and Saito’s man fell with a sickle in his throat before he could utter a word, his great barrel-chest making a wet, crunching sound when it hit the dirt. The broadleaf crest was trampled. Two others leaped at Ise Tadanobu, whose blade flared in the weak light as he drew.
Sen ran.
Four more women burst from the muddy water in an explosion of muck and half-formed ice and reeds. Something hit him in the back, mud in his eyes, and he lost his footing in the frenzy. Assassins, he thought, sent by Akiyo Musha’in. All with shaved heads and no’in tattoos to make them blend in.
The tall woman charged in, hit him in the face, and Sen fell, gasping in pain.
Sword clattering away. Mud on his knees.
The woman attacked him again. The world ripped sideways, smashed his head on the sod earth, and the assassin stomped down as he tried to stand.
Mud exploded into his face. Air gone. Wiped out. Sword coming up. He heard:
“Ame’in!”
Ise Tadanobu leaped from the ridge with fury, felled one opponent in a vicious sideways stroke and stabbed at another as Sen got up.
He was surrounded by the mud-streaked assassins, more exploding from the rank black water, striking as if there were poison in their little blades like reeds.
He couldn’t breathe, the world spun, and he reeled from the blow to his face and the boot to his gut as Ise tried to reach him.
The killers spread out, blocking him, attacking him too; Ise fell into the shadows, calling his name.
He doesn’t know where I am, Sen realized. The field was a wall of shadow and Sen was still caught in the muck. He could barely see. He slipped, tried to stand again as Ise held his own against the women.
“Here!” he cried out, cursing. “Saito, where are you!”
He fell once more; the tall assassin came back.
Sen grappled with the woman’s hands, kicked at her feet.
Tried to squirm free; the woman punched him in the gut.
Hands searching for his throat. Sen gasped, lying on his back, dazed eyes blinking at the sky.
He clawed the muck for his sword, nearly cutting his own fingers; swung it up, flung mud in the woman’s eyes with a slashing motion.
The assassin fell, blinded; he kicked one last time before he twisted and found his sword in the rushes again, speared it deep into the killer’s abdomen, heaving, all his weight, all his frantic force behind the blow – and then drew it back and cut off the woman’s head before he realized what he’d done.
The head rolled into the muddy water at his ankles, and Sen pulled away, and heaved black muck onto the reeds.
He had killed her.
He tottered, off-balance. Finally his eyes began to focus, finding wet and mud everywhere, the body, and the raised footpaths beside the paddies, and the sky; the cold, terrible night sky.
Something hit him in the face.
He flew off the side of the embankment into the mud.
The second assassin flipped him over. He felt strong hands gripping the back of his head.
He rose, sputtering, and was hit again. Fell into the gritty water.
Couldn’t tell where it came from, couldn’t tell if it was a sword or a fist. Just thrown back into the muck.
Grabbing him. Surrounding him. Drowning him.
“Sen!”
The word came to him from far away, distant, pained, but clear. A voice. A call.
I know that voice, he thought.
It’s Rui.
The thought floated through his consciousness with strange clarity. She’s here. She’s calling for me.
They were waiting, he realized. This is Kiseda-township. We were going to meet them here…
She came out of nowhere. Leaping forward, a wildcat among the killers, moving faster than Sen had ever seen. Like she’s possessed, he thought, and remembered the god. For when he saw her, he saw a fury in her that he did not understand, a red rage that made her seem almost a monster.
Two assassins were forcing his face into the clay.
They did it with practiced care, so slowly, so smooth.
He thrashed, screaming even as the gritty mud oozed over his face with a sucking sound, covering his eyes and ears and flooding his mouth like thick paste.
He thrashed again, wildly, trying to do anything to get up, but nothing would help.
They plunged his head in, lower and lower, until Sen was lying splayed out, upside down in the paddy mud. His mouth flooded with thick, choking silt. His eyes wouldn’t open. Black faded at the corners of his vision.
He had just enough strength left to push them off.
A deeper thing came out of him, something he didn’t know he had, something primal, fed by fear.
He gagged, vomited a glob of silt but didn’t stop, didn’t think, didn’t fail.
Once free, his lungs burst with fresh air.
Pain lanced through him, but it felt so, so good, and he ran at them, screaming like an animal, and stabbed at the closest killer, heard the impact in their throat.
Then the second hammered him with a gloved fist that whipped his skull onto the cornered muck, and he heard the crunch before he felt the pain, and then everything, everything went away. The world blinked and came back.
“Sen!” Rui cried out, trying to get to him, fighting her way closer, step by step.
Sen was still conscious enough, as a low, warm feeling washed over him, to think, It’s too late.
An ache, a wetness on his neck. A feeling of being far away. His head lolled. The world wavered; he thought he heard a scream. He couldn’t tell if it was him, or someone else.
Then something was burning. A ringing in his ears and he couldn’t see straight. The world off its axis. Tar-black night and mud painted red with blood. He took a step and fell. He tried to stand and couldn’t. He lay there. In the dirt. Trying, just trying, to breathe.
Then found himself lying on his stomach on the soft earth beside the silt, and realized that he’d passed out, before everything came back all at once.
The first thing he saw was another of the hooded killers running at Rui from behind. She made a blistering series of blade-strikes against two others and didn’t see the one to her rear.
Sen threw his sword without thinking, straight into the back of the neck; the killer fell.
He rose. Took a step. The world swayed beneath his feet. No matter. Reach in. Pull the sword from the corpse’s neck. Run, trip, regain balance. Lash out, cut the other killer from behind. No glory. No grace. No poetry in this. Blood in the air and in his eyes and mixed with mud.
Rui evaded a blow, stabbed forward, gutting the last.
And they were done.
The two of them, standing side by side, heaving, hurt, grinning at each other like it was all an awful joke. There was fighting, still: Ise and Saito and the others, but it was far away. Here they were alone. The dirt. The mud. The distant press of fire at the town; his blood-streaked hands.
“Hell,” Rui swore. “I thought you were dead.”
Sen’s breath wavered. “Me too.”
Exhausted, stunned: the immensity of it made him laugh. He mumbled, looking at the bodies, “When the hell did you learn to fight?”
Rui tried to grin. “You didn’t do so bad yourself.”
Sen pitched to his knees then, rose, and fell again. Rui came to him. “Easy, easy. It’s all right.”
He coughed, overwhelmed. A sound, half-groan, half-whimper, escaped his lips. “Gods in hell…”
“I’ve got you now,” said Rui. “I’ve got you.” Behind her, the orange breath of flames from the buildings lashed about, rising.
Sen couldn’t stand. The moment any weight pressed down on his left foot, everything flashed with lightning pain and gave way. He buckled to the mud again, panting at the shock.
Finally Rui pulled him from the paddy, and they collapsed together, out of breath, aching, cut in a dozen places, and gloriously, gloriously alive. When Sen looked up, he saw the flames rising higher in the town, growing out of control. And something else. Someone had come to them.
A figure, draped in white, was standing on the road.