They crossed the raked sand of the courtyard, following the white path made of different sand to the rest of the yard. Ren didn’t know what it was, but it felt grainy underfoot and seemed to reflect the firelight from the torches spaced at regular intervals along the path.
Somebody, Ren decided, had spent a lot of time lighting torches and raking this yard, to keep it looking so pristine.
He shivered a little as they stepped down from the wooden veranda of the main house. With the setting sun all the warmth of the day had gone. It was the onset of autumn and hadn’t been a warm day to start with. Aoi saw him shiver and looked at him with concern. ‘Are you cold, wagakimi?’
‘You don’t have to keep calling me “my lord”, you know,’ Ren told her. ‘Ren will do fine.’
‘It would be disrespectful, wagakimi,’ she replied.
‘But much less annoying,’ Ren replied in English, certain she would have no clue what he was saying.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It would please me if you called me Ren.’
‘Not Renkavana?’
‘No. Just Ren.’
‘Very well. If you insist … Ren.’
‘Arigatou gozaimasu.’
‘You are welcome,’ Aoi said, smiling up at him. ‘We of the Ikushima would do anything to please one of the Youkai.’
‘Why is that?’ He was curious, having given up trying to convince anybody in this reality he was an ordinary human. ‘Your neighbours thought I was Youkai. They called me feral and tried to slit my throat.’
‘That is because of the Empresses,’ Aoi explained. ‘They have decreed all Youkai be killed on sight.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, wondering what the Faerie in this realm must have done to piss off the Empresses so badly. ‘Your Obaasan, Masuyo, said that last night. And she has a point. If the only people who can use magic need Youkai blood, it’s a bit silly to run around the countryside eradicating them all from your realm.’
‘The Konketsu are very protective of their bloodlines,’ Aoi shrugged, as if it were nothing to be surprised about. ‘They fear yabangin blood polluting their pedigrees.’
It sounded more as if they were breeding dogs than magicians, with all this talk of bloodlines and pedigrees and being polluted by feral Faerie. ‘But Konketsu would have to be part-Youkai anyway, wouldn’t they?’ he asked. ‘If they’re using magic and Masuyo is right that you can’t wield it any other way?’
Aoi nodded. ‘Of course.’
That brought up a tricky question — despite the fact he’d been here more than a day, and his hosts were treating him like royalty. ‘So how come you’re feeding me, instead of feeding me to the hounds?’
Aoi glanced around, as if making certain they could not be overheard, before answering him in a low voice. ‘There are some among us who believe the Konketsu are corrupt.’
‘Some like the Ikushima?’
She frowned. ‘Please, do not say that — even in jest.’
Hey, you brought it up, he was tempted to point out, and you haven’t killed me. Yet. But he kept the thought to himself. Aoi was being remarkably forthcoming, and he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise his chance to discover how he might find one of these Konketsu, because he was going to need one of them to open a rift for him if he ever wanted to get home.
‘I’m sorry. What do you mean by corrupt, exactly?’ Ren had a mental picture of dark-robed magicians lurking in alleys, taking kickbacks for working black-market spells — which would have been fine if it meant all Ren had to do was bribe the right wizard.
He was certain the truth was going to prove far more troublesome.
‘They are supposed to share the magic, but they don’t,’ Aoi explained, her anger apparent in her tight whisper. ‘They hoard it for themselves. If one is not of the Great Families, it’s almost impossible to find a mahou tsukaino sensei prepared to do anything for the rest of us. Unless you’re willing to pay dearly for it.’
‘Is that why you don’t have a magician here?’ Ren asked. He wasn’t sure that was it, but he needed to know if they were holding out on him. For all Ren knew, the solution to his problem might be sitting in one of the many outbuildings scattered around the compound, meditating on the price of rice in the paddy fields, or whatever magicians did for fun.
Aoi shook her head, her expression so forlorn he didn’t doubt she was telling him the truth. ‘Not since Ichirou died, and that was before Kazusa was born. I barely remember him.’
‘And you’re not one of the Great Families, so there’s no Konketsu?’
She nodded. ‘Obaasan says it’s a trade tactic as old as time. She claims it’s why the Empresses ordered all the Youkai killed. The rarer a thing is the more valuable it becomes.’
The old girl might have a point, Ren thought. If magicians were thin on the ground, you could charge quite a bit for magic, something that would prove difficult if there were Faerie about, doling out their wizardry for free. But the information left Ren with a dilemma. Aoi and her family had sheltered him, fed him, and kept him safe from the Tanabe, and while he was grateful, he realised they lacked the one thing he needed to escape this reality.
There was no polite way of telling Aoi that. And even if he did, what good would it do? The people who had what he needed to get home — the Tanabe — were determined to murder him on sight.
The most frustrating part of it all was that Ren knew how to open a rift. He could draw the knowledge from his brother’s memories. But he couldn’t do it without the right tools. In Darragh’s world, they used carved jewels — rubies — to open the rifts, and the stone circles to focus their power. What he lacked was a ruby, any way of finding a suitable one, or the faintest idea about how to carve the magical symbol for his reality into its depths.
That was a skill owned by the sídhe and one they had never shared with the Druids. It was, he supposed, their way of maintaining some control over who could go rift running.
He was about to ask Aoi if she knew of any other way to open a rift — besides dealing with some hideously expensive magician on the take belonging to a clan who wanted to kill him on sight — when a yell went up from the main gate. There followed a shouted exchange too fast for Ren to follow between the guards along the top of the wall. A moment later, Namito and Daichi burst out of the main house, unsheathing their katanas as they ran.
‘What’s going on?’ Ren asked, as other doors opened around them and other men ran toward the walls, arming themselves as they ran.
Aoi summed up the situation with a glance and then grabbed Ren’s hand. ‘Come with me.’
‘Why? What’s happening?’
‘We are under attack. Quickly, you must hide before they see you!’
‘Is it the Tanabe?’ he asked, wondering if they were attacking because of him, how they’d known he was here. Did they have spies in the Ikushima compound, just as the Ikushima had spies in theirs?
‘Of course it’s the Tanabe,’ Aoi told him impatiently, taking him by the arm. She was trying to pull him away from the gate. ‘They —’
Her words were cut off by a massive concussion that shook the ground and knocked two of the Ikushima samurai off the wall.
‘What the fuck was that?’ Ren asked, as he staggered against the force of it. It felt like an earthquake and sounded like a bomb had gone off.
‘Chishihero,’ Aoi said.
‘That was magic?’
‘Of course. Now please, Renkavana, you must hide.’
‘No way,’ he said, shaking free of her grasp. ‘I want to see this.’ A whistling noise sounded somewhere behind them as he turned and ran toward the wall, scrabbling up the nearest wooden ladder until he was standing on top, amid a cluster of samurai in various states of undress. As he reached the top and looked down over the huts clustered outside the walls, the whistling noise turned to a loud bang and the night was banished by a blinding flare that exploded in the sky overhead, exposing everything for a good hundred yards around the co
mpound. The occupants of the huts were nowhere to be seen. They’d either managed to get inside the walls or were hiding in their houses.
Beneath the wall in front of the village, the Tanabe forces were arrayed.
There were forty or fifty of them, all mounted, all carrying bows that at this distance could have hit every man standing on the walls. That the bows remained slung over the warriors’ shoulders was probably a good sign. They were attacking, but they weren’t going for a bloodbath.
At least, not yet. Not until Chishihero had done her thing.
Ren spied her at the head of the troop with Hayato at her side. She was busy folding something. Probably another magical concussion grenade. The mastiff, Kiba, sat calmly at the side of her horse, waiting for the command to attack.
A moment later, Chishihero looked up, finished with her folding. The flare was fading fast, so Ren couldn’t make out what she’d fabricated, but he felt it. A split second before the next blast of magical energy slammed into the gate, the origami shape disintegrated into a shower of confetti. Ren felt the magic surging.
He was almost knocked off the wall by the force of the explosion.
The Ikushima men picked themselves up and remained standing like a row of proud sitting ducks, waiting for the next blast and for Chishihero to blow them off the wall.
Ren scrambled to his feet, pushing his way along the wall until he reached Namito. The young warrior frowned when he saw Ren, pushing him behind Daichi so he could not be easily spotted from the ground. ‘You must hide, Renkavana,’ Namito warned. ‘It is you they have come for.’
‘Screw that,’ Ren replied in English, as another flare exploded overhead. Then he asked, in his almost fluent Japanese, ‘Why are the Tanabe warriors just sitting there? And why aren’t you fighting back?’
‘It is high treason to interfere with one of the Konketsu when they are working,’ Namito explained with a shrug. ‘Once Chishihero has finished her —’
‘You’re going to sit here and wait for her to finish bombing you? Dude, she’s trying to blow your walls down!’
The young man shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do, wagakimi. Chishihero may work whatever magic she pleases. The battle proper cannot commence until she is finished.’
‘Are you shitting me?’
Namito seemed unnaturally accepting of the situation. ‘Only another mahou tsukai no sensei may challenge the Konketsu,’ the young lord told him. ‘We have none.’
Enough of this bullshit. He was one of the Undivided. That must count for something, even in this reality where they’d never heard of Druids. ‘You do now,’ Ren announced, sounding full of bravado, even to himself.
Before he could question exactly how he was going to save the day, Ren turned to face Chishihero, stepping through the cluster of waiting samurai until he was standing on the edge of the wall — another bit of foolish posturing, he realised a little too late.
Another one of her concussion blasts and he’d be off the wall, on the wrong side, at Chishihero’s mercy.
A third flare exploded overhead. Ren stepped forward, trying to look menacing as he feverishly trawled through the jumble of his brother’s memories for something magical that might save these people. Unfortunately, as Darragh had warned him several times, the Comhroinn had shared their memories, not given him the experience needed to bring any sort of finesse to his magical ability. At his appearance, the Tanabe suddenly stiffened, sitting taller in their saddles.
Hayato unsheathed his katana.
Chishihero stopped folding her next bomb and looked up at him. Although the light was fading fast, she looked … frightened.
‘Leave now,’ Ren announced loudly, in what he hoped was a commanding tone, ‘and I will spare you!’
‘You dare challenge us, Youkai?’ Hayato called back. ‘Surrender yourself now! As the law commands!’
‘Your law,’ Ren shouted back, opening his palm and extending his left hand. ‘Not mine.’
Ren closed his eyes for a moment, calling on the easiest trick he thought he could manage. Fire.
Almost as soon as he thought of it, flames danced across his palm painlessly, as if the triskalion branded into his hand was alight. Everyone around him gasped. He didn’t think it was an impressive trick, but he’d done it without folding anything, which is probably why they were so awestruck. Ren was fascinated by it too, and had to remind himself to keep focussed on the problem at hand.
Chishihero wasn’t impressed. She looked up at his paltry flame and laughed scornfully, her fear fading at the realisation that she was facing an inferior foe. ‘Is that all you can do, Youkai? Make a little fire?’
‘It’s all I need to do, lady,’ he called back.
‘I can blow these walls to dust,’ she shouted up at him.
‘I can burn your forest down.’
His words brought a gasp, even from the Ikushima.
Another flare shot up into the sky, showering the night with sparks, lighting the worried faces of the Tanabe. Ren glanced up at the white flare, thinking their precious kozo forest was in far more danger from a random spark from one of their fireworks than his untested powers.
‘You would not dare burn the Empresses’ forest,’ Chishihero called up to him after a long pause.
‘Try me,’ he called back.
Hayato and Chishihero consulted for a few moments and then the Konketsu held up her half-folded magical bomb and symbolically crushed the paper with one hand.
‘It is done, Youkai,’ she called up to him through gritted teeth. ‘But this is not the end of it. The Empresses will hear of your threat to destroy their forest — and the treason of the Ikushima.’ She turned her attention to Namito, adding, ‘Enjoy your brief victory, Daimyo. It will not last long. You will be killed, your sisters sold into slavery, your grandmother turned out into the winter to roam the roads as an outcast, your warriors disgraced and Shin Bungo destroyed. Trust me when I tell you … no power that this yabangin Youkai you’re harbouring owns can save you from the wrath of the Empresses now.’
With that, she gathered up her reins as Hayato gave the order to withdraw and the Tanabe turned for home, leaving Ren surrounded by the accusing stares of the people he’d just saved and the sickening realisation that his foolish attempt at heroism may well have sentenced everybody in Shin Bungo to death.
CHAPTER 15
It took Trása two exhausting and worrying days, but finally she found the entrance to this reality’s Tír Na nÓg. She’d spent so long searching for some remnant of the Youkai in this realm, she was half-expecting it not to exist at all.
She was considering abandoning her search for Tír Na nÓg to find Rónán when she stumbled over it. Trása was so excited to discover an entrance into the Otherworld, when she finally spied it she almost flew straight into it without stopping to wonder why it lay open and untended by even the smallest of the sídhe creatures normally posted to guard such things.
Trása could travel in and out of Tír Na nÓg in her own reality with impunity. She was known there, and had never been challenged or prevented from entering or leaving. Had a sídhe from another reality arrived at the veil seeking entrance, however, they would have attracted all sorts of attention.
Trása stepped through the veil to a world full of magic and little else. Although the trees grew abundantly and the air hummed with magic, just like the world outside this Tír Na nÓg, it seemed empty of all her kind.
Trása wept.
She was tired and hungry and hadn’t been able to find Rónán. For all she knew he was dead — and Darragh with him in a matter of days, wherever he was — murdered by the same people who’d tried to murder her.
They were probably the same people who had murdered all the other sídhe.
Exhausted by her searching and two days on the wing with nothing but crabs and small fish to eat, Trása finally cried herself to sleep, curled into an abandoned bower that had once been home to someone like her — lost, alone and lonely.
Trása woke some time later, feeling a tickle on her nose. Sitting up abruptly, she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. It vanished into thin air at the very top of the branch where she’d been sleeping. She jumped to her feet and ran to the edge of the wide branch. The leaves shimmered as she moved, but it was the only movement she could see now she was fully awake.
‘Wait!’ she called out. ‘Come back! I won’t hurt you!’
Silence greeted her plea. Whatever lesser sídhe was out there, it was too frightened to show itself. Or it might have waned away to somewhere safe, miles from here, and she was calling out to no one.
It didn’t matter. The important thing was that she had spied a lesser sídhe, and where there was one, there would be more. How many more, she didn’t dare hope.
Trása sat down, dangling her legs over the edge of the branch, as she tried to puzzle it out. She was sure she was still in Eire, but the landscape was different — the topography of her homeland was the same, and she’d identified enough landmarks that not even a completely different human history could erase, and she had found Tír Na nÓg.
This was Eire, and it had been colonised by the Japanese.
For some reason, they had killed all the Tuatha Dé Danann, and yet maintained the magic. Or perhaps they had not killed all of them — there were still a few lesser sídhe around, but they were so frightened they were not even willing to answer the summons of a Daoine sídhe.
The only way to talk to one of the wee folk, she decided, was to trap one.
It was easy to bait a trap for a lesser sídhe. Human children in every reality she had ever visited did it all the time. They would set up a basket or a box, bait the trap with something shiny, and wait. More often than not, helpful parents would trip the trap while the child slept, leaving behind a treat, which entertained everyone except the sídhe, who considered the practice barbaric, demeaning and misleading.
There was only one way to truly catch a Leipreachán — summon him by his real name to a trap baited with bacon.
That presented Trása with another problem. Finding bacon would be easy enough. Seagulls were scavengers. Nobody would remark on one scratching through a midden heap in search of a scrap of meat. The problem came from knowing the Leipreachán’s name.
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