by RW Krpoun
“In this case we most definitely are,” Shad nodded. “Which brings up a point: why are you eating with the help?”
“No master, fewer social boundaries,” the Ronin shrugged. “I cannot lose On that I do not have. There are still limits, which is why I have my own room, but I’m pretty free. A lot of Samurai resent Ronin for that reason, but the fact is we are too valuable to the economy to do away with us.”
Conversation halted as a girl brought a duck baked a deep rich brown and then chopped into domino-sized rectangles, a pot of seasoned rice, a platter of what the Talons would call small pancakes, a pot of tea and a flask of cider.
Shad was not unpleased that the serving girls didn’t dress like Geishas; instead they wore flowing dresses that looked something like the native dress of Vietnam. He wasn’t sure if Geishas were serving girls in any case.
“Can’t fault the cooking,” Fred pried meat from the bone into a pancake and rolled it up like a burrito. “The kids are getting fed, right?”
“Yeah,” Derek bobbed his head as he chewed. “Not like this, but better than they are used to eating.”
Shad sniffed a cruet, then poured soy sauce onto his rice. “Is this Japanese food?”
“No, Chinese,” Jeff noted.
“Thought it was familiar.”
“The good old slow fat dog,” Fred rolled another pancake. “Too bad they don’t have buffets here.”
“I think that is a modern invention,” Derek sighed. “Probably American.”
“Stands to reason that we improved on the system,” Shad wiped his mouth. “Good thing I bought more handkerchiefs, since apparently napkins haven’t been invented here yet.”
“I think you are supposed to use the pancakes. You are wiping away food residue, after all,” Derek pointed out.
“Barbarians,” Shad added more soy sauce. “This stuff has more of a tang to it than what I get at Wal Mart. The soy sauce, I mean. Not as much bowing going on, and I expected the clothing to be a lot more colorful.”
“There has been culture shift,” Derek shrugged. “Colors are restricted to the Samurai and some retainers. I saw a lot of furs and leather in use; in old Nippon they had a cultural bias towards handling dead things, but it looks like that has passed. The non-people are being used differently, I think. They’re more like Indian untouchables, a permanent underclass exploited as unskilled labor.”
Shad waved away the details. “After lunch I’m hitting my coins, and Fred needs to work on his charms. Jeff, see to it the kids are squared away with a bath and their new clothes, then suss out local conditions.”
“How long are we staying put?” Fred mumbled.
“Until the brain trust gets something out of the books that points us in the right direction. Cecil couldn’t phone ahead, so either he comes for us personally or he has to hike to the nearest Death Lord hangout and explain who he is and why he is here. Way I see it we have some time, and we should use that time to gear up. Once I get a decent firefight’s worth of combat spells and some Undead essentials prepped I’ll hook up our enchantments.”
“Being level seven will really help,” Derek tapped his wrist. “And we’re getting an XP bump every noon, same as before.”
“Stands to reason,” Fred muttered. “Cecil still wants us dead.”
“There’s a novelty,” Jeff added more rice to his plate. “Every place we go someone wants to kill us. Shad even killed a guy on R&R.”
“Probably killed a guy,” the warder shook his head. “And somehow we’re talking about it again.”
“We just don’t want you bottling it up and becoming distraught,” the Shop teacher grinned.
“No danger of that. What regrets I have generally involve not killing people when I had the opportunity.”
“That I can believe,” Derek refilled his tea cup. “Do you think the people we kill here count? The spheres, not just the Isle.”
“Count as what?” Fred took a couple more pieces of duck.
“You know…as killing.”
“I think we get a pass on the non-Humans,” Shad said thoughtfully. “They were banished here, after all.”
“Especially the Elves,” Jeff said with feeling.
“Very true. The Tek, too, should count as non-Human. As to Humans…I can’t think of any we offed who didn’t have it coming.” Again, the image of the young muleskinner he had shot at the Expedition’s stand rose before Shad’s eyes, and again he forced it down.
“Your standards might be a little more accommodating than most,” Jeff pointed a duck bone at Shad. “Remember the guy whose camels you shot in Iraq? If the platoon leader hadn’t been nearby it wouldn’t have just been camels.”
“The SOB had a twelve-year-old wife,” the warder shrugged. “And him at least forty.”
“Local culture and mores,” the Shop teacher pointedly shrugged back.
“Well, my culture says that when you catch a pedophile, you shoot him, or failing that you kill his camels and blow up his house. They should accept that if we’re just going around accepting things willy-nilly.”
“Don’t forget the shaped charge down his well,” Derek added helpfully.
“Yeah, yeah. You got a medal for rescuing a kid under fire; why is getting raped less bad than getting shot?”
“You want a medal for what you did?” Jeff cocked an eyebrow.
“No. I would just like to avoid having to think up innovative excuses when I am out there making the world a better place for children.”
“You did come up with some amazing stuff,” Derek nodded. “Like that time Fred beat that guy half to death for whipping that little girl.”
“I always wondered if she was his wife,” Shad muttered. “Yeah, that was one of my best.”
“No, the best was that time you shot the guy for looking at you funny, and it turned out he was wearing a suicide vest,” Jeff snickered.
“I did not shoot him for looking at me funny,” Shad sighed. “I thought he had a weapon.”
“Dude, he was leaning against the wall of a shop in the middle of town,” Derek objected. “You shot him square in the head.”
“He was wearing twelve pounds of C-4.”
“Actually, I think the EOD guys said it was explosives from a Soviet anti-tank mine,” Fred pointed out. “Not C-4.”
“But you didn’t know about the vest,” Derek persisted. “That’s is why you grabbed your patrol pack as you dismounted.”
“Yeah, the patrol pack with his throw-down folding-stock AKR,” Jeff chuckled.
“You can all bite me. And as a point in fact, the only time I actually used a throw-down weapon was to pull Derek’s fat out of the fire. Remember that roadblock?”
“C’mon, Shad,” Derek jabbed him in the shoulder. “We’re outside anyone’s jurisdiction. Just tell us why you shot that particular guy.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. For the hell of it. Because you can.”
Shad sighed and poured himself more cider. “OK. I was sitting on the HUMVEE’s hood waiting for Third Squad to finish with the search and I saw the guy and…I don’t know. I had been on edge all day, more so than the usual degree. He was just leaning there, and he looked over at me, and I just knew. One look and I knew he was going to do something.” He shrugged. “So I shot him. It wasn’t a conscious thought-I was kind of surprised when my weapon went off. Not utterly surprised, but sort of…shocked.”
“Huh,” Derek thought about that. “Well, that was late in our tour. We all were pretty good at the game by then.”
“He was wearing a vest,” Jeff shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter why you shot, just that the vest didn’t get brought into play. Count it as a win and drive on.”
“We got other issues,” Fred muttered. “There were cleaned-over patches on walls.”
“What?” Derek frowned.
“When we came in there were patches on walls that had been intensely scrubbed. Like with an abrasive.”
“You mean like th
ey were removing graffiti?” Shad caught the reference.
“Yeah.”
“Derek, how much Japanese graffiti is normal?”
“In this period, none insofar as we know it. What would be graffiti be of, anyway? The difference between political and social structure is about nil.”
“That is something to look into, brain trust,” Shad decided. “In the meantime we work at laying low and not attracting attention.”
“That’s kind of hard to do,” Fred observed. “I’m awesome.”
“Since when?” Jeff demanded.
“Since always. I drank six Roman Nose warriors under the table three days after I was gut-shot.”
“That was pretty impressive,” Jeff conceded, and the others nodded.
“Well, keep a lid on your awesome nature,” Shad rubbed his face. “You know, I bet we end up sleeping on the floor.”
“Futons, not the floor,” Derek corrected him.
“Barbarians.”
Their rooms were nothing more than featureless sleeping chambers, so Shad and Fred worked on their coins and charms in the common room; they were not the only specialists sitting at a table with the tools of the trade spread around, sipping endless cups of tea as they worked. The management were clearly comfortable with the arrangement.
Derek joined them after the noon meal and began working his way through the written material. Although he was not currently a spellcaster he had spent a great deal of time as one in two other spheres, and enough remained with him that, combined with his class education, he was able to get the gist.
A tipsy Jeff joined them for their evening meal, which was a dish of thick noodles and grilled chicken in a vegetable-laden sauce. “Bought myself both ordinary clothes and stuff suitable to my rank,” he cheerfully advised the other Talons. “That let me mingle.”
“There are a lot of peasants drinking in the middle of the day?” Shad looked surprised.
“Criminals, hustlers, stevedores for the river traffic resting between boats,” the Shop teacher ladled noodles and meat onto his plate.
“So what did you learn?” Derek prompted him.
“A little bit of everything. The Nightland has been quiet for a while, like months, so everyone is expecting a big offensive.” Jeff dragged a clinking pouch from inside his shirt and passed it to Fred. “The locals make terrible muggers, by the way.”
“Is that going to come back on us?” Shad jerked his chin towards the blood-spattered pouch as Fred tucked it away.
“Nah. Anyway, that bit with the Nightland has everyone on edge. And the peasants are fed up with getting the shitty end of the stick with extra feces on the side. Taxes are rising, the Hui, or criminal organizations are raising their rates, the Samurai and their troops are making free with commoner girls, all that underprivileged woe stuff.”
“Derek already established that it sucks to be a peasant,” Shad shrugged. “That is the nature of the Human existence.”
“Yeah, but now the peasants are growing restive.” Jeff paused to swig tea. “They have formed the Red Dragon Hong, a hong being a secret society. The members are called hongmen, and the rumor is they are spoiling for a fight.”
“The graffiti,” Fred nodded.
“Yeah, they like to put out slogans in red.”
“What is their agenda?” Derek asked.
“Change, that sort of thing. More for them, less for everyone else, death to their enemies: the usual sort of agitator stuff.”
“You get any idea of a timeline and the possibility of violence?” Shad poured more cider.
“Most of what I heard I got from low-ranking Hui, who are not friends of the Reds, so, no timeline. But violence is a joke: can you imagine peasants going up against Bushi? You saw the peasants: skinny, short, old beyond their time because of hard work and short rations. They can’t stand against guys who have eaten well and trained hard all their lives.”
“What about the ashigaru?” Fred asked. “They’re drawn from the commoners.”
“They’re higher-echelon, like me, and professionals,” Jeff waved a hand dismissively, then belched. “They know which side their rice crackers are buttered on.”
“What about the Ronin?” Derek wondered.
“They’re still Samurai,” the Shop teacher mopped his plate with a pancake and then ate the pancake. “Besides, war is good for sell-swords, and it is a lot safer fighting peasants than other Bushi.”
“The there’s othing to worry about,” Shad agreed. “We’ll just keep an eye out when we’re around peasants. Anything else?”
“Politics are pretty lively. The Samurai are fussing over how to respond to the impending trouble with the Death Lords: mobile defense, static defense, spoiling offensive, all that. And who will lead the armies, where they draw the line in the sand, that sort of thing. Litam being close to the border, it is at the epicenter of a lot of the drama.”
“Yeah, Derek picked up a map, we’re right on the Canadian border.”
“Nightland border,” Derek corrected him.
“Mordor is Mordor,” Shad shrugged. “Remember Tribe 8? The most horrific RPG we’ve seen was set in Canada. The truth is out there.”
“So are a lot of things,” the Ronin rolled his eyes.
“You learn anything so far?” Jeff asked Derek.
“Not so much today. I got the material sorted out and made a lot of notes. I expect I’ll start getting a feel for what is going on tomorrow. The nuts and bolts are beyond me, but I’m discerning patterns. I’ll report when I know more.”
“How much longer do you guys need?” Jeff asked.
“To face Cecil? A lot,” Shad shrugged. “Right now I don’t really have a fix on what our next move should be; hopefully the written material will give us an idea. Or you guys come up with a plan.”
“Not me,” Jeff ate another pancake. “I’m gonna take a nap and wait for Cecil to come kill us.”
The next day the evening meal was long noodles in a sauce or gravy filled with pork chunks and a variety of diced vegetables.
“This is pretty good,” Shad observed thoughtfully as the four dug in. “My mom used to fry potatoes, dumplings, and sauerkraut together and serve it with fried Spam. This kinda reminds me of that.”
“I have trouble imagining you having a mother,” Jeff observed.
“I did, and I’m sure she regretted having me; I was a terrible kid.”
“Hard to doubt that,” Jeff grinned.
Shad shrugged. “However bad my personality is, I’ve always stood on the side of right. What we are trying to accomplish here ought to count for something.”
“Speaking of which, Jeff and I cracked the purpose behind Cecil’s special ed program,” Derek announced.
“What is it?” Fred mumbled.
“Remember how in the Realm the Death Lords really hated on the Teks, specifically their pyramids?”
“Yeah,” Shad nodded. “The Tek had the secret to pulling concentrated magic at specific points. I always figured that was one reason the Realm was magic-poor.”
“Well, you would be wrong,” Derek grinned, eyes glowing. “The Tek figured out a way to tap the Rift via strategically-placed pyramids.”
“What?” Fred stopped eating.
“Yeah. The Tek were crippling the Rift, or defusing it, it’s hard to say without class knowledge. Anyway, their power drain is standing in Cecil’s way. The written works are to teach guys to seal off active points and to locate and safeguard inactive access points.”
“So Cecil planned to train ten Death Lords and send them out to seal up the leaks,” Shad mused. “Brought a complete set of study guides for that purpose. So it’s not as simple as marching to Mount Doom and tossing in the One Ring, he is going to take a while before he is ready.”
“Longer now that we have his portable library,” Jeff nodded. “He will have to increase the training time before he can send out the plumbers to patch the leaks.”
“So we have time. Can we use the ma
terials we have to plot the locations of the leaks? That would tell us how long we have to work with,” Shad loaded more noodles onto his plate.
“No,” Derek sighed. “And they are all in or near the Nightlands.”
“Are the materials any use to us?”
“Nope.”
“Then I say we torch ‘em. No point in giving Cecil any advantage should he get lucky and take us out.”
“You have a plan?” Jeff asked slyly.
“Yeah, unless someone comes up with a better one: Fred and me prepare, while you two work towards four goals: find out everything there is to know about the Nightlands, the Rift, what the chance of locating allies in this venture is, and a way to find Cecil, maybe by tracking the Staff.”
“Five things,” Fred mumbled. “Or maybe six: write up everything we know about Cecil and the Death Lords, and figure out who to get it to, and how, should we get ganked by Cecil.”
“Revenge from beyond the grave-the Death Lords ought to love the irony,” Derek slapped the table.
“Sounds like a plan we would undertake,” Jeff agreed. “Vague, unproven, and likely to get us all killed. A plan like that feels like home.”
Chapter Four
“Good afternoon, sir.”
Shad looked up from the finishing touches he was putting on a coin to see a slender balding Asian man in a plain kimono without weapons or an obi belt standing at the table. “Yeah?”
“May I join you? I am seeking a Warder.” The way the man said it you could hear the capitalization.
Shad hesitated, eyeing the Mons that decorated the man’s breast. He was clearly a commoner, but a commoner in the service of Samurai, a Hiemin-ra retainer of some sort. “Yes, by all means. Tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“I am recovering from earlier engagements which have stripped me of much of my powers…,” Shad began, and then trailed off as the man set a small purse on the table, the bag making the sort of noise that suggested that the coins within were packed too tightly to move much. They also sounded heavy, while zay were so thin that Fred could bend them, and silver bu were the size of a quarter but no thicker than a dime.