Chapter Thirty-Six Rui
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Rui
The messenger had arrived at dawn. News. Rumors from the capital.
The night before, Rui had hurried to the outriders’ tent in time to hear of the coup and Yora’s flight with Kai. They were in hiding with Prince Nioh, hunted by the Keishi, the messenger said. “We must hurry.”
Myorin, Tsuna, and the Jibashiri had been waiting at the small temple-village along the Kiseda road for days.
Tokuon was late. He had spent longer in his Gisan lands than Myorin anticipated, but the messengers had finally come: He would arrive within the next day.
Until then, there was nothing for them to do but to scout the local woods and mountain trails, sit, and prepare.
Rui had found her teacher alone under the starlit sky, casting bones into a fire he had made. None of the other soldiers would go near it. He turned, peering up at the stars.
“Constellations of the dragon and the tiger are at war,” he said, as she sat beside him, curling her arms around her knees and staring into the fire. “The dragon of the east, white tiger to the west. A great cloud rises between them.”
She followed his gaze. “An omen?”
He hefted his staff with the prayer rings at the top and thumped it against the dirt at his feet. Once, twice. Clapping his hands together over the wood, he lowered his head in prayer. When he rose, his eyes were grim.
“Bad weather,” he said. “You should be in bed.”
She looked out over the woods and the low-lying fields, feeling a weight of pressure wash over her, surrounded by fatigue. Her joints ached; her eyes stung. The clouds had started to come in, sunset stabbing through them to the west in bright violent sweeps of light.
“What’re you doing?”
Jobo sprinkled wood shavings into the fire, bit by bit. “Trying my hand at divination, as the Hassho does. Let’s see what the gods will tell us. O great god of the road, we are plagued by monsters. Will you show us the way?”
A silence resumed. The fire flickered. Ash and embers danced. “Give us some answers, you asshole!” he shouted, and burst into laughter as the shavings ignited and sent a flutter of sparks into the air.
“What the hell,” Rui said. “What’re you doing?”
“Oh, just living,” he said.
“Are you mocking them? You are, you of all people.”
“Don’t worry. It’s just having fun. The gods understand. We’re not so different, and they have a sense of humor, too.”
“I don’t think it’s very funny.”
“If you were to die tomorrow, don’t you think it would’ve been worth it to enjoy a little more?”
“It’s hard to enjoy it when you’re cursed,” she said.
“It’s hard to enjoy it when you don’t let yourself.”
He shook his head, serious now, holding the small bone he’d been carving in his hands.
“Everything will fade,” he told her. “Everything is impermanent. And no matter how strong or determined you are, death always comes before you want. Such is the way of things. It’s something, I think, everyone understands, though maybe not so many would admit it.
What a miracle it is, that we’ve made it through today, don’t you think?
” His gaze went back to the fire. The bone in his hands. “Yes,” he said. “A miracle.”
He placed the bone carefully into the embers.
“It’s true, nothing is perfect. And in the end, all is emptiness. But… is that to say we can only watch the plum blossoms when they’re in bloom? Or the full moon only on nights like tonight, when the sky is clear, and unclouded?”
He shook his head. “Life may be suffering, but it will pass as we do. So, what will we do, while we’re here? That is the path we can choose. Those steps are ours, after all.” He shrugged. “We can still choose to take them.”
“You’re not no’in,” Rui said. “You haven’t lived a life where everything’s been decided from the start. Where you’re born, who you are…”
“Don’t tell me what I haven’t lived, child,” he said.
“How do you have a choice when it’s all happened already? Before you even get a chance.”
He indicated the frozen fields beyond, nodding at the rise of the hill.
“Would you not want to watch the sun sink beyond the slope of a hill, covered with a blanket of budding peonies or azaleas in the spring? Or the gentle turning of the tides on the western islands, the calls of seabirds and divers searching for pearls? No, in this life, I say we can still choose our steps.”
He fell silent then. “Three will fall,” Rui said. “The Hassho told me… ‘Three will fall like dead leaves.’ What does that mean?”
His face grew grim. “Ten’in, Keishi, Gensei. Three families who once were allies.”
“What happened?”
“Same thing that always happens,” Jobo said.
“Prestige, wealth. Greed. They used the system to take power, and once they got it, they didn’t want to share.
That’s why Sen’s father rebelled. Not very noble, is it?
” After a moment he continued: “They say the emperors are descended from the sun-goddess, and that may be true. The ancient seals have stayed intact for generations and even the most vengeful of gods know there would be only pain if they were to break the truce. They don’t want to destroy the world any more than we do.
But they are petty, as we are. When they have been wronged, they want revenge.
“Some of them, the higher gods, or the oldest, maybe, can see past the foolishness of retribution. Some, they say, can see all of time, what was and what will be, spread out before them like a map. They see us, here, at this point, in this place, in this time, and they see where the map will lead. But those gods will never share their answers. Though,” he said, chuckling softly to himself, “humans never cease to ask.”
He stared into the dying fire, the charred remains of bone that lay among the embers and the ash. She tried to figure out what he saw in them, but no matter how she looked, she saw nothing more than what they were.
At first, the signs were subtle. An abandoned oxcart. An empty field. A road trampled by heavy feet. The ruins of a barn in the distance. Something smoking, burned.
They reached Oda-town after sunset the next day.
Surrounded by smaller villages along the Tose road, at the edge of the home-provinces, they found their welcome subdued.
“These were part of the Gensei estates,” Myorin had said. “Our cousin owns the land here. But what does the capital care of that?”
The sun had set in a pale, purple flood. The village lay in shambles, roads laid bare, as if a war had already been fought, and lost.
“Who would do such a thing?” Rui glanced about, wide-eyed. There was a commotion in the town nearby, sounds of worry under the purple sky.
“What’s going on?”
Tsuna swore under her breath. Myorin just shook her head.
“The paddies have been flooded,” she said.
Rui looked for her teacher, to follow his lead. But Jobo was standing shock-still, gripping his prayer staff, watching the commotion in the town. The shouts were growing worse. Daylight ebbed away. He said: “Something’s wrong.”
Shouts rose again, to the south this time, in the low-lying paddies.
Rui felt a shock like she’d been stung.
The enemy is here.
They sent chaos through the rushes. They burned these farms.
They’re trying to lure Tokuon into a trap.
Kill, a voice in her head seemed to say. Kill them all.
A whisper of air swept past, colder, but calmer, too. A flicker caught her attention on the lane.
They rounded the bend and she saw: the temple was on fire.
Tokuon’s forerunners had come. A group of horsemen, awash in the chaos. Peasants, flooding from the town, trying to form a water-line. Trying to put the fires out. But there were dark shapes moving in the space between the fields. Shadows. Wraiths.
The attack came from the night itself.
Rui had just gotten to the base of the hill when she heard the shouts, the ringing of alarm bells. There was a commotion ahead; with eyes still strangely acute in the dusk, she saw several no’in figures surrounding someone at the edge of the paddy.
“Rui, don’t,” Jobo began, but it was too late.
Tsuna hissed: “It’s Sen,” and Rui leaped into the fray.
Myorin shouted. “Rui!”
After this, her mind went blank. She couldn’t recall how she got to the bottom of the hill, how she’d drawn the short-sword at her side.
She couldn’t recall how she’d gotten so close.
But she heard the sounds of combat, and the echo of a god, roaring, in her mind.
She leaped, from the edge of the slope. She surged into the open field.
Instantly, a dark-clad woman with no’in marks on her arms appeared in the twilight. Rui wasn’t ready, but something slipped, turned, cracked inside her, and the Hososhi roared, and when she looked up, the pale woman was dead, and she had blood on her hands. Hososhi, she thought. How…?
I have a use for you, they’d said. Then came rage.
With the Hososhi’s power in her veins, in her heart, she fell out of herself; the god took over.
Time slipped, and in a heartbeat, became the enemy.
Pulling her from her mind, or her heart or her souls, it made her rip away, gone, lost to the world.
And the glint of knives in the clouded moon. Blood in the air. She felt nothing.
Nothing when the enemy closed in.
Nothing when a low jab nicked her in the side.
Nothing when the Hososhi moved her spirit and cut them down.
When she found herself again, it was over. She’d killed them all.
She opened her eyes. There were more dead bodies than there were before.
There was a blade in her hands and the smell of blood on the soil, the sound of it still leaking from a gut.
It had the finality of cut wire, the bile in her throat, and everything started to spin.
The sword dropped from her hands and her legs went weak.
She buckled. The word floated over her, as it always did, unchangeable as a brand:
Killer.
It’s what you are.