The Withering Flame (The Year of the Dragon, Book 6)

by James Calbraith

  Hanpeita peeked around the corner of the tavern.

  “Clear,” he said.

  The three samurai turned into the narrow street, lined with flaming braziers and cloth curtains marked with signs of the fine dining establishments.

  This was the most luxurious entertainment district in Edo — its patrons included daimyos, hatamoto retainers, and castle courtiers. The three samurai were none of those things — two of them were low-ranking Tosa retainers, the third was a fugitive from Kumamoto — so they had to be careful not to raise an alarm among the bouncers and bodyguards patrolling the streets.

  They were following a lithe nobleman, who wore a black, elegant kimono marked with three stripes inside a circle. He didn’t seem interested in any of the establishments he was passing; he strode onwards, purposefully, striking his pointy beard repeatedly in thought.

  “What is he doing here?” whispered Hanpeita.

  “I told you,” replied Okada, his fellow Tosa retainer, “he’s meeting here with somebody every three days.”

  “Be quiet,” barked the third samurai. His name was Kawakami Gensai, and he was the man whose arrival from the South they had been expecting for days. Without him, their mission could not succeed. His muscular, lean presence dominated the group; a long, two-handed sword slung over his back only enhanced his authority.

  Another aristocrat appeared from the shadows, with a giggling girl hanging over each shoulder. The three samurai clung to a wall. Gensai reached slowly for the hilt of his big sword.

  “Zōzan-sama? Sakuma Zōzan-sama?” the newcomer exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. “Fancy meeting you here!”

  The pointy-bearded nobleman froze in his tracks, surprised. “Do I — do I know you?”

  “Kuso,” swore Gensai. “Who the hell is that?” he whispered.

  “That’s not the usual contact,” replied Okada.

  “Should we move in?” asked Hanpeita. “There’s nobody here in this part of the street.”

  Gensai raised his finger to his lips, and silently drew the sword. The blade was almost invisible in the shadows, pitch-black, and quietly humming.

  The stranger tilted his head, overacting as if in shock. “I was your neighbour in Kiyō. Don’t you remember me? I once bought an automaton from you for my daughter.”

  “Oh, of course.” Zōzan nodded. “Excuse me, I must—”

  “How’s your son doing? Last I heard he was ill.”

  “Yes — yes he was. The Kiyō air did not suit him, that’s why we had to move.”

  “You should bring him here some day. He’s going to be a man soon,” the stranger said and chuckled lewdly. The girls giggled on cue.

  “He’s not here — he’s… in Heian. I really have to go,” Zōzan attempted to side-step the stranger, but the Kiyō nobleman stepped in front of him again.

  “What do you want, man?” Zōzan asked, now visibly annoyed. He glanced around — no doubt in search of guards. “Money? A favour at the court?”

  “I want you to die!” The stranger drew a dagger in a flash and pierced Zōzan’s stomach. Blood spluttered on the sand; the girls shrieked and ran off. In the distance, Hanpeita heard whistles and heavy footsteps of the approaching bodyguards.

  “This is for dealing with barbarians,” the stranger cried, stabbing Zōzan again, “and this is for dabbling in forbidden magic!” One more stab, then he dropped the dagger and fled.

  Hanpeita spat out a string of expletives. “He’s ruined everything!”

  “No,” said Gensai, calmly. “In a way, this is much better. Now we can test the true power of the blade. Okada, keep those guards busy.”

  “Of course,” replied Okada and ran off, sword drawn, in the direction of the whistles.

  Gensai approached Zōzan’s body. His sword trembled in his hands, as if eager to drink blood. The closer it got to the nobleman, the louder was its hum.

  Zōzan stirred, put a hand to his stomach, and sat up.

  “Sakuma Zōzan,” said Gensai. “I have come for you.”

  “Oh, thank the Spirits,” replied Zōzan. “I thought I’d — ” He turned around and saw Gensai, with the black blade raised ready to take a blow. The wounds on his body had already healed, leaving only crimson-edged tears in the kimono. “No!” He cried out. “Not yet — !”

  Gensai brought down the sword without a word, slicing the nobleman’s head clean off. As the blade ran through Zōzan’s neck, it flashed bloody red. The headless corpse leaned forward. Gensai stepped aside and let it fall to the ground with a thud.

  He knelt down quickly to check the cut. Satisfied with the result, he wiped the blade in a handkerchief and sheathed it.

  “Did it work?” asked Hanpeita. He dared not approach the corpse until he was certain.

  Gensai’s victorious smile was all the answer he needed.

  “I know what I saw,” said Samuel firmly.

  Nobelius scoffed again. He stared down the gunwale and measured it with a long, straight bamboo stick, then consulted his leather-bound notebook and jotted something down. “They must have known you were there, and played a trick on you,” he said.

  “It was no trick,” insisted Samuel. “A bald man in a silk robe came out of that vermillion building, touched the carpenter’s leg, and… just as you said — good as new.” The chief carpenter, working on the boat’s aft, noticed Samuel’s gaze and waved. The doctor waved back.

  “Power of suggestion,” said Nobelius. “Hypnosen, maybe. Or maybe they have Faer blood in them, and heal quickly. There’s no such thing as healing magiska — you know it better than anyone.”

  “Actually, I’ve read about some successful experiments with thaumaturgy in Midgard…”

  “Pah!” Nobelius shook his head. “And you think these primitiver have figured it out before the Midgarder?”

  “I know what I saw,” repeated Samuel, crossing his arms on his chest. He watched the chief carpenter again, nimbly leaping from one beam to another.

  If it was hypnosis, as the Varyagan suggested, it was like nothing Samuel had ever seen. The carpenter would not allow him to get near enough to the broken ankle to examine it, but there seemed to be no trace of the injury whatsoever, except a slight reddening around where the bone had shattered.

  Samuel looked to the blue-on-blue horizon; Admiral Otterson had managed to salvage only a scrap of a map, but it was enough to tell them that Edo was no more than two to three days sailing away. Their sloop — christened “Heda” after the fishing village — was almost finished; two cloth squares, stitched together from fishing boat sails, lay flat on the sand, ready for hoisting.

  He was curious of Edo; a city almost as big as Lundenburgh, by all accounts, yet built out of the same wood and paper as the rest of Yamato… But will we be allowed to see any of it? I bet they will have us all packed in some walled-off place, like in Fan Yu.

  A distinct shape on the horizon caught his attention. “What’s this?” he asked. “This doesn’t look like one of our fishermen.”

  Nobelius shielded his eyes with his hands and stared into the distance. The ship was closing in fast, at full sail. “It’s big,” he said. “It must have come from Edo.”

  “That’s good, right? They’ve come to take us to the Taikun? We won’t need the sloop, after all.”

  “Nobody is supposed to know we’re here,” said Nobelius and cried orders to his men. “Get back to the big house,” he told Samuel. “The Amiral will know what to do.”

  Through a narrow gap in the sliding window, Samuel observed the Yamato delegates approaching the big house, where all of Diana’s survivors had gathered around their injured Admiral. An aristocrat in a golden robe waded through the mud of the village yard with a permanent scowl of disgust on his face, followed by a dozen warriors, armoured in glistening black breastplates, and armed with long spears and swords. The villagers prostrated themselves around them, not daring to look up. The aristocrat approached the big house and ordered one of his men to open the door. It
wouldn’t budge: on the other side, two Varyagan sailors held it fast.

  The aristocrat shouted a brief, angry speech. The Admiral responded in a few struggling sentences. The Yamato, taken aback by the fact that the foreigners spoke his language, replied even more agitatedly. He and the Admiral exchanged a couple more increasingly angry cries.

  There was something odd about the aristocrat that Samuel was unable to pinpoint. His skin was paler and thinner than that of the villagers, or even his own soldiers, but that may have just been a feature of the noble-born, shunning manual labour and sunlight. His voice was cold and gritty, and his entire manner icy and deliberate. He hissed his Ss and rolled his Rs. And, from the moment the Yamato came closer to the house, a strange, metallic smell hung heavily in the air.

  “No good,” said Otterson. “The headman betrayed us. They are here to arrest us.”

  “But the letter from the bugyō…!” protested Nobelius.

  “He says bugyō is a traitor and a rebell. His seal means nothing here.”

  “We could fight our way out,” proposed one of the sailors.

  “There are ten of us, and a dozen of them,” noted Samuel from the window. “And we have no weapons other than kitchen knives and carpenters’ axes.”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” said Otterson, shaking his head sadly. “We’ll have to give ourselves up and hope to explain this missforstand once we’re in Edo.”

  “If the Vinlander are in Edo, we may not get the chance to explain anything…” murmured Nobelius.

  “We’ll have to risk it.”

  A blood-curdling sound, like the barking of a dozen rabid dogs combined into one howl, shattered the air. Otterson and the others froze.

  Samuel slid the window open a little more.

  The nobleman and the warriors looked around anxiously, searching for the source of the noise. The barking repeated, closer this time. The warriors drew their swords and brandished their spears. The nobleman retreated to the wall of the big house, shouting. Samuel still could not see what was causing the commotion. His throat suddenly felt dry.

  A blurry, grey shape entered his field of view. Snarling and growling, it leapt from one warrior to another, leaving each man with a gaping, torn wound in his chest or neck. The remaining soldiers dropped their weapons and ran away towards the beach. The blur stopped in front of the nobleman.

  It was a roughly human-shaped creature, the size of a bear, but leaner and more muscular; its skin was covered with short, bristling grey fur, its hands and feet were clawed, and its face was long and tapered, shaped like a wolf’s muzzle.

  The aristocrat drew his short-sword and charged at the monster. The two met in a clash, which, surprisingly, lasted a good few seconds longer than the beast’s dealings with the warriors of the escort. They rolled on the ground in a deadly embrace, out of Samuel’s view; at length, he heard a burbling growl and a shriek, followed by the sickening noise of torn flesh and snapping tendons. The monster appeared again, slouching, its muzzle covered with dripping blood. It sniffed around, and, dropping to all fours, ran off back into the forest.

  The Varyagan sailors slid the door open, revealing the scene of the massacre in its full gory glory. Blood of the slaughtered soldiers soaked into the mud. The terrified villagers remained on their knees throughout the ordeal, and still refused to stand up. Admiral Otterson limped to the door on the shoulders of his men.

  “Was that the…” The question stuck in Samuel’s throat.

  Otterson nodded and smirked. “Ja. That was our Weapon. The varulv has caught its first prey.”

  She knew that door. The rectangular stone frame, with darkness inside. Only this time, there were shards of torn silver sheet hanging from the lintel; and this time, she was standing facing the darkness. A cold wind blew at her back, showering her kimono with grey dust.

  There was nobody here to stop her this time — or to attack her; Satō was all alone in the black tunnel. She heard a faint murmur in the distance, but it was neither threatening nor inviting — it just was, and she was certain that the noise had always been there, and would forever remain, regardless of her presence.

  She stepped forward. Her foot hung in the air; there was a staircase in the darkness, with wet, stone steps. Carefully, she walked down it, supporting herself against the walls; they were soft and slimy to touch, almost organic.

  She lost count of the steps. She felt no fear, no anxiety about whether she would be able to return to the surface. In fact, she felt nothing at all. At length, she saw a red glow at the bottom of the staircase. As she neared it, the glow spread, revealing it was coming from a floor made of a fine red dust.

  She stepped onto the final step, and felt a surge of power. The glow brightened suddenly, and she saw that she stood on a vast, blood-red plain. All around her, in every direction, and reaching the distant horizon, strange, tentacled creatures of dark shadow slithered about; an entire army of monsters.

  Two men marched towards her; as unlikely a pair as she had ever seen. The one in front was a Yamato, but he wore a Western-style steel breastplate, a ruff collar, and bore a pointy beard and whiskers; he would look almost comical if it wasn’t for the terrifying authority with which his cold, golden eyes gleamed. The one behind him was a giant in ill-fitting samurai armour, seven-feet tall, muscular. His thick-lipped face was unlike any she had ever seen — neither Western, nor Yamato; his skin was the colour of charcoal.

  She moved forward. Still, she felt no fear. The shadow creatures turned towards her in unison, a dark, silent ripple in the sea of blackness. Each of the monsters moved its front tentacles forward, and bent the rear ones, flattening itself on the red dirt.

  “How do you like your new domain?” asked the Yamato man. His dark-skinned companion remained silent and grim.

  “I… I don’t know where I am,” she replied. “What’s happening? What are they doing?”

  “Can’t you tell?” The man laughed. “They are kneeling before you, Takashima Satō. All hail the Queen of the Shadows!”

  THE END

  APPENDIX: GLOSSARY

  (Bat.) — Bataavian

  (Yam.) — Yamato

  (Pryd.) — Prydain

  (Seax.) — Seaxe

  aardse nor (Bat.) spell word, "Earth Tomb"

  amazake (Yam.) a traditional sweet drink from fermented rice

  ardian (Seax.) the Commander of a Regiment in the Royal Marines

  banneret (Seax.) the Commander of a Banner in the Royal Marines

  bento (Yam.) a boxed lunch, usually made of rice, fish and pickled vegetables

  bevries (Bat.) spell word, "Freeze"

  biwa (Yam.) fruit of loquat tree

  blodeuyn (Pryd.) spell word, "Flowers"

  bugyō (Yam.) chief magistrate of an autonomous city

  bwcler (Pryd.) magical shield covering a fighter’s arm, a buckler

  cha (Yam.) green tea

  chwalu (Pryd.) spell word, "Unravel"

  chwalu’r dan (Pryd.) spell word, "Unraveling Fire"

  Corianiaid (Pryd.) a race of red-haired dwarves from Rheged

  cwrw (Pryd.) beer

  dab (Pryd.) creature, thing or a person

  daimyo (Yam.) feudal lord of a province

  daisen (Yam.) chief wizard

  dap (Pryd.) the same size and shape as something

  dengaku (Yam.) a meal of grilled tofu or vegetables topped with sauce

  denka, —denka (Yam.) honorific, referring to the member of the royal family

  derwydd (Pryd.) druid

  deva (Latin) demon

  diffodd (Pryd.) spell word, "Extinguish"

  dōjō (Yam.) school of martial arts or fencing

  dono, —dono (Yam.) honorific, referring to a noble man of a higher level

  dorako (Yam.) Western dragon

  doshin (Yam.) chief of Police

  dōtanuki (Yam.) a type of katana, longer and heavier than usual

  draca hiw (Seax.) spell word, "Dragon Form"

  dr
aigg (Pryd.) a dragon

  duw (Pryd.) a swearword

  dwt (Pryd.) a young child

  egungun (Yoruba) a holy spirit, also a shaman dancer representing Egungun

  enenra (Yam.) a spirit born of smoke

  eta (Yam.) "untouchables", the lowest caste in Yamato class system

  faeder (Seax.) father

  ffrwydro darian (Pryd.) spell word, "Bursting Shield"

  fudai (Yam.) an "inner circle" clan; one of the vassals of the Tokugawa Taikun before the battle of Sekigahara

  futon (Yam.) a roll-out mattress filled with rice husks

  gaikokujin (Yam.) a foreigner, non-Yamato person

  genoeg (Bat.) spell word, "Enough" (to mark the end of a continuous spell)

  gi (Yam.) outer jacket

  gornestau (Pryd.) magical duel

  graddio (Pryd.) school graduation ceremony

  gwrthyrru (Pryd.) spell word, "Repel"

  hakama (Yam.) split trousers

  hamon (Yam.) visual effect created on the blade through hardening process

  haoma (Latin) ritual potion of the Mithraists

  haori (Yam.) a type of outer jacket

  hatamoto (Yam.) the Taikun’s retainer, samurai in direct service to the Taikun

  hikyaku (Yam.) a system of fast couriers

  hime, —hime (Yam.) honorific, referring to women of high position

  igo (Yam.) a board game for two players, using identical black and white tokens

  ijslaag (Bat.) spell word, "Ice Layer"

  ijsschild (Bat.) spell word, "Ice Shield"

  inro (Yam.) a wooden container for holding small objects, hanging from a sash

  inugami (Yam.) a dog spirit

  jawch (Pryd.) a swearword

  joi (Yam.) a political concept, "expulsion of foreigners"

  jutte (Yam.) police truncheon

  kabuki (Yam.) a form of classical dance theater

  kagura (Yam.) a type of theatrical dance with religious themes

  kakka (Yam.) honorific, referring to lords of the province or heads of the clans

  kambe (Yam.) a shrine servant taken from an adjacent village

  kami (Yam.) God or Spirit in Yamato mythology