The Sword of Kaigen, page 54
What if the bomber hadn’t come alone? What if there were more littigiwu? She had a sudden, sickening image of a stranger putting on the face of Ginkawa Yukimi’s mother or father. If the tattooed man had watched and memorized Mamoru’s features, he had almost certainly done the same to other residents of Takayubi. Takeru and Misaki had nearly fallen for their attacker’s illusion; a traumatized five-year-old wouldn’t stand a chance.
“The person my wife and I encountered earlier used illusions to take the form of our son,” Takeru said. “My wife has experience with his type of sub-theonite. She will explain how to see through one of these illusions.”
Misaki told the men to watch for flickering or ripples of light, like those on the surface of water. “Be wary of anyone who doesn’t speak,” she added. “Littigiwu can’t imitate voices. As long as members of your search parties exchange words every time you cross paths, you should all be fine.”
As the men scrambled to organize a search, Takeru sent Setsuko to gather the women and children so that he could conduct a second count and Misaki could instruct all of them on seeing through a littigi’s illusions.
When all the men were gone, Takeru knelt outside the Matsuda compound and put his palms to the snow.
“What are you doing?” one of the women asked.
Takeru closed his eyes. “I’m going to find Ginkawa Yukimi.”
He stayed there, perfectly still, for nearly a waati, leaving Misaki to try to explain to confused villagers and volunteers what he was doing. Some of them looked skeptical, but none of them were willing to question Takeru’s abilities, however bizarre they might seem. When his eyes finally opened, he was frowning.
“Call the men back,” he said quietly.
“What? Why Matsuda-dono?”
“The intruders are no longer on the mountain, and neither is Ginkawa Yukimi.”
“What do you mean? Is she dead?”
Takeru shook his head. “I didn’t sense any bodies in the snow or in the lake, and if she was exposed—up on rocks—our scouts would have found her. She is no longer on the mountain.”
“So, someone just took her away?” one of the women asked, clutching her own little girl closer to her chest. “Why would anyone do that?”
Theories raced like flurries through the village through the rest of the evening. In the past week, the people of Takayubi had begun consolidating their food supplies in the wrecked remains of what had once been the Matsuda sitting room. Come spring, the half-room would not be structurally sound enough for occupation, but for the moment, Takeru’s ice reinforcements made it a decent cafeteria, with the icier half serving as a refrigeration unit while the wooden half, open to the rest of the village became a cooking area.
Every night, Misaki would gather a handful of women and they would cook together in a few large pots. With no electricity to run a grill or the single remaining rice cooker, it was more efficient to prepare the food for the whole village at once. Tonight an unprecedented number of women showed up to help with dinner, nearly half the women in Takayubi. Some came to talk. Some came for companionship. All made their hands busy helping.
“Do you think this is the government’s way of trying to intimidate us?” Mayumi asked, passing Misaki the ladle she had asked for.
“First, it’s dangerous to say things like that,” Misaki said. “You want to be careful about who hears you. And second, I really doubt it.”
“But Matsuda-dono, you were the one who suggested that the Emperor might send assassins—”
“I know,” Misaki said, “but there are certain tactics a tyrannical government uses to intimidate its subjects. For one thing, they like to make themselves known for what they are—soldiers in uniform, not foreigners in weird costumes. I also think that if this was an attempt at intimidation, the kidnappers would have taken a child with living parents. That’s what...” That was what the Yammankalu used to do to the Native Baxarians to keep them in line, but Misaki decided that she had spoken enough treason against the Empire without dragging their closest allies through the mud as well.
She shook her head. “If they wanted to maximize the psychological impact, they wouldn’t have chosen an orphan.”
“But she wasn’t just any orphan,” Fuyuhi protested, looking wounded. “She was a child of Takayubi, our blood. It’s as your husband said: she belonged to all of us.”
“But the government wouldn’t understand that,” Misaki said. She paused, midway through stirring the soup, a handful of spices poised above the bubbles. With the heat from the boiling water rushing over her skin, she remembered something Robin had said to her a long time ago, on that rooftop, when she had questioned whether the North Enders of Livingston were worth saving.
Everyone in this part of town has been oppressed or abandoned by theonite powers the rest of the world depends on. But they don’t give up. Instead, they’ve made a life and a culture here for themselves. It’s not perfect, but it’s worth protecting, even if the ruling theonites, and the politicians, and the police have all decided otherwise.
She had never expected to understand that part of Robin, never thought those words would make so much sense to her.
“Matsuda-dono?” Fuyuhi said. “Are you alright?”
“Fine.” Misaki opened her hand, dropping the spices into the soup. “Just remembering something...” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, you saw what Colonel Song and his men were like. The way our village works, the way we care for each other, is something they wouldn’t understand. This just doesn’t have the hallmarks of a government trying to scare its people into obedience.”
“Then do you think it’s the Ranganese?” Fuyuko asked.
“I don’t know,” Misaki said, “and I really don’t know why you ladies expect me to have all these answers. You know I’m a housewife, not a spy, right?”
Fuyuko shrugged. “You talk like one sometimes.”
“And a lot of the time, you’re right,” Hyori said.
Misaki shook her head. “My husband and the other men will keep doing everything in their power to find out. In the meantime, all we can do is keep each other safe.”
Yukimi’s disappearance had the effect of making the village pull closer together. In another town, a missing orphan might have gone unnoticed, but this was Takayubi, and the loss reverberated through every parent and every home. Kotetsu Katashi and his children fashioned a set of standing torches, which the koronu then placed throughout the village to keep the space illuminated through the night, hopefully discouraging intruders. Mizumaki Fuyuko and two volunteers moved into the orphanage to make sure there were extra eyes on the children, a pair of Ameno men climbed to the Kumono temple to guard the monks who had taken up residence there, and sleep schedules were rearranged to ensure that at least three people were on watch at different stations throughout the village at all times. Except for the few men Takeru sent to inquire after Yukimi in the nearest fishing towns, everyone—residents and volunteers alike—stayed in or near the village.
Misaki had not known Ginkawa Yukimi or her parents, but she still felt an ache for the little girl as she put her own children to bed. Everyone in the village felt it—like the failure belonged to all of them.
When Misaki slid open the door to the bedroom, she found Takeru kneeling on the tatami, his back to her.
“Sorry,” she whispered, recognizing the stillness of meditation. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“It’s alright,” he said. “She’s gone.” He shook his head and turned to Misaki, his face looking hollow and tired in the lantern light. “There’s no point.”
“You’ve kept trying to find her this whole time?”
“I promised you that I would keep all of us safe.”
“You did everything you could,” Misaki said softly. “No one could have predicted this.”
Kneeling before the wooden plank that now served as her dressing table, Misaki pulled the pins from her hair and let it down over her shoulders.
“So, you haven’t had any ideas about what might have happened?” Takeru asked as she ran her fingers back through her hair, easing the tension from her scalp.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Takeru-sama.”
“Who is Kalleyso?”
That question made Misaki pause, her fingers still in her hair. “Sorry?”
“You asked the littigi about someone called Kalleyso,” Takeru said. “The name sounds familiar.”
“You probably heard it on the TV at some point. He’s a Livingston crime lord. He was well known in Carytha when I was—when I was a teenager. His followers wore gray robes, but they never had facial tattoos... or voice-activated bombs.”
“But you thought to ask about him almost immediately,” Takeru said. “What business would a local crime lord from the other side of the world have with Takayubi?”
“Well, it’s possible that it’s not Takayubi he has business with.” Misaki’s fingers slid to the end of her hair to fiddle with a knot there. “It’s me.”
“Why?” Takeru asked. “What is your relationship to this crime lord?”
Gathering a breath, Misaki turned from her makeshift dressing table to face her husband. “I spent my final year at Daybreak Academy fighting him.”
“What?”
“Well—not directly fighting,” she amended, fingers working at the knot in her hair. “I think we only had the one physical confrontation. Mostly, my school friends and I fought his followers and tried to prevent him from overrunning Livingston’s other gangs.”
Takeru blinked at her with the blank look of a man absolutely oversaturated with new experiences for the day. He had been assaulted by his own subconscious, his wife, an illusionist, and a bomb all within the past twenty waatinu—that was to say nothing of all the talking he had done, which had to be taxing for a person who was most comfortable in the silence of his study or dojo. He was probably at the end of strange things he could absorb.
“It’s probably not important,” Misaki sighed. “Kalleyso was the first suspect who came to mind when I saw the gray cloak, but the rest doesn’t add up. Sekhmet—Kalleyso—shouldn’t even know my real identity. The only time we fought, we were both masked.”
“You fought this person?”
“Not very successfully. He threw me off a building.”
“You were... a crime-fighter?” Takeru said.
“Assistant crime-fighter,” Misaki said. “My friends did most of the work.”
“Your friends.”
“Yes. Um… you’ve met one of them actually.” Misaki looked into her lap, not meeting Takeru’s eyes.
“The boy who came here for you,” Takeru said. “Robin Thundyil.”
Misaki winced. “Yes.” Her shoulders tensed but Takeru didn’t comment further on Robin.
“I thought you had just trained in the sword with your father,” he said instead. “I didn’t realize your practical experience went so far.”
“Of course, you didn’t,” Misaki said, too tired to hide her annoyance but also too tired to muster genuine anger. “You told me never to speak about my time at Daybreak Academy.”
“Ah, yes. I think… given the circumstances, we might revisit that order.”
“Why did you do that?” she asked before she could stop herself. She wasn’t sure if she was pushing her luck. She was unfamiliar with this new Takeru and how far his patience with her would extend, but it hurt, and she had to ask. “Why wouldn’t you let me talk about my past?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured, stern eyes studying her in the lantern light. “Perhaps I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“My mother... whenever she talked about her life before us, it would make her sad... or angry.”
Misaki didn’t think she had ever heard Takeru speak about his mother. He looked troubled.
“Are you alright, Takeru-sama?”
“Just tired.”
“You should get to sleep then,” she said. “Remember, you promised to train Hiroshi before dawn.”
“Oh.” A vaguely miserable expression crossed Takeru’s face. “That’s right.” He paused for a moment, frowning at the opposite wall. “He really killed a man with your sword?”
“Yes.” Misaki looked at the floor. “I wish he hadn’t—things had gotten out of hand. I’m sorry—”
“You’re not the one who should be sorry. I should have been there to protect all of you. And even without me there, you had no reason to think a five-year-old would leave the safety of his hiding place to join the killing. No normal five-year-old would attempt that, let alone succeed. It’s not your fault that boy turned out too much like me.”
“Like you?”
“Not completely human. I think it can be dangerous, mixing powerful bloodlines the way we do in this family. Breed too strong and offspring start to become less like humans, more like gods.”
“Isn’t that the point?” Misaki asked. “To bring out that precious gods’ blood, make the strongest offspring we can?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s dangerous—for the children and their mothers. I’m only thankful that Hiroshi didn’t kill you.”
“What?”
“Not with the sword,” Takeru clarified. “Before that…”
“Takeru-sama, what are you talking about?”
He stared off somewhere she couldn’t see, the ripples of lantern light accentuating the circles under his eyes. “You know. Even a strong woman doesn’t fare well trying to birth a god.”
“I’m not following, Takeru-sama.”
“My mother, Yukino Tatsuki, was an uncannily powerful jijaka. Of course, as a woman, she did not have much occasion to use her jiya on a large scale, but... I do remember that she could clear the courtyard of snow with barely the wave of her hand. The women talked about a time a small child fell in the river and was pulled under by the current. Before the boy’s mother could dive in after him, my own mother lifted the river, placing him back on the bank.”
“Great Nami, Takeru-sama,” Misaki said jokingly. “You’re making me feel very inadequate.”
“No.” Takeru shook his head. “It can be a mistake, I think, to marry Matsudas and Yukinos. Creatures of such great power—the same sort of power—can have disastrous results.”
“But your father wasn’t—” Misaki stopped herself before the disrespectful comment could pass her lips. This new practice of conversing honestly with her husband might have confused her sense of propriety, but she had to remember that this was Takeru she was talking to. She couldn’t speak ill of Matsuda Susumu.
“My father was not a master of the Whispering Blade,” Takeru conceded, clearly knowing what she had meant to say, but he didn’t seem angry, “nor did he ever achieve greatness as a jijaka, but he still carried the blood of the Matsuda line. Paired with my mother’s power, that produced offspring so unnaturally powerful that even she struggled to carry them—carry us.”
Takeru looked down, a shadow of guilt touching his features. “It almost seems that human limitation resists our existence, that maybe… the Gods are the sort of parents who do not wish their descendants to exceed them.”
Misaki studied her husband for a moment. She had traced the lines of his perfect face so many times, wondering if there was really human flesh and blood to him, when he seemed like a creature sculpted by the Gods from pure winter. She had never thought to wonder how strange it would feel to be that creature, to know what a bizarre creation you were.
“I’m told that Takashi-nii-sama’s birth left my mother weakened and sick. My birth nearly killed her, leaving her bedridden for a year. She miscarried late in her third pregnancy, while I was still very young. She might have been alright after that, but my father insisted they try again. She died a few months into that fourth pregnancy.”
“I’m sorry, Takeru-sama. I didn’t know any of that.”
All anyone had told Misaki of her mother-in-law was that she had died of a persistent illness. She hadn’t realized that miscarriages and death were commonplace in the Matsuda household. She wondered if her father had known. If he had known, would he have married her to this house? She shoved those thoughts away. It didn’t matter. It was all done now. It had been done many years ago. And Misaki was still alive in this moment with her husband. That was all that mattered.
“We didn’t talk about it,” Takeru said. “If Takashi or I mentioned it—if we talked about our mother—Tou-sama would beat us.”
This too was a new thought to Misaki. For years, she had viewed Matsuda Susumu as her tyrant; she never really considered what Takeru and Takashi would have suffered as his sons. And she had never thought to be thankful that neither of the brothers had carried on their father’s violent tendencies.
The instances in which Takeru had raised a hand to Mamoru were few. Perhaps there had just been the once—that strange day Mamoru had called into question his Empire and everything he lived by. Of course, there was the dojo, where Takeru would hit Mamoru’s side or his knuckles in training, when he left an opening, when there was a lesson to be learned. But Takashi and Takeru had learned their superior swordplay from their grandfather, Matsuda Mizudori. Susumu had never had any lessons for them. Only resentment.
“I think,” Takeru said very slowly, “he was not a good father. He was certainly not a good husband.”
Misaki looked at Takeru in complete shock.
“What is it?” he asked, seeing her eyes go wide.
“I just... I don’t think I’ve ever heard you criticize your father.”
She hadn’t intended the look of shame that crossed his face. “I shouldn’t disrespect him. I know. But...”
“But?”
“He hurt my mother.”
That was no surprise to Misaki, especially if Takeru’s mother had been as powerful as he described. If there was one thing Susumu had hated over anything else, it was being reminded of his own inadequacy.
“She hit him as well,” Takeru continued slowly, as if reaching far back into his memory for things he had probably never articulated, things he had probably tried to forget. “They were always fighting. With other people, my mother was alright, she was a kind person, but she and my father could never agree on anything, and they made each other miserable. If he spoke to her, he was yelling. If she spoke to him, she was crying. Takashi-nii-sama told me much later that she had a wonderful smile.” He shook his head. “I have no memory of her smiling.”
