Shadow of the Fox

by Julie Kagawa

  “Why would I think it’s Kabuki makeup, Okame-san?”

  He sighed. “Never mind.”

  I watched Yumeko take a cloth from her obi and walk over to the ronin, then crouched down to look at his face. “What about the gaki?” she asked, dabbing at his cheek. “Do you think there could be more out there?”

  “I sure hope not. Ite.” He flinched back from her administrations, making her frown. “Damn hungry ghosts. Well, come morning, I know several farmers who are going to die screaming for mercy.”

  Yumeko lowered the cloth, her eyes going wide. “Why?”

  “Yumeko-chan.” The ronin shook his head in exasperation. “This was a setup if I’ve ever seen one. That headman knew about the gaki, hell, the whole village did. We were bait—they might as well have tied a bell around our necks. I know it, and Kage-san knows it, right, samurai?”

  “They were expecting us to die,” I agreed, pressing salve to my own wound. “That’s why they were so eager to have us spend the night. So the gaki would eat us and leave the village alone.”

  “Yep.” The ronin gave a grim nod. “Only, now I’m very much alive and a lot angry.” He took the cloth from Yumeko, then stood and sauntered over to my corner, gazing down at me. “So, Kage-san,” he began, “I think a bit of retribution is in order. What say we go kick down the headman’s door, stick his head on a pike for the gaki and burn this whole cursed place to the ground?”

  19

  Talking to Yurei

  He’s not serious. I stared at the ronin, who stood over Tatsumi expectantly. Though Okame wore a grim smile, his eyes were flat and dangerous, promising reprisal.

  He was entirely serious.

  “Okame-san, you can’t,” I protested. “They’re not even armed. We can’t slaughter these people in their homes.”

  “You might not be able to.” Okame’s evil smile grew wider, showing those slightly pointed canines. “I, however, don’t take kindly to being fed to gaki, especially by treacherous, lying farmers. At the very least, I think the headman’s house should be razed, and his head stuck on a post at the edge of town, as a warning to other travelers. What d’ya say, Kage?”

  Tatsumi wound a cloth strip around his wounded arm and used his teeth to tug it tight. “No.”

  “No?” The ronin gaped at him, even as I slumped in relief. “Why the hell not? Aren’t you a samurai? These peasants just tried to kill us.”

  “My mission is not to burn down villages.” Tatsumi didn’t look up. “It would be a waste of time. Stay and take your vengeance if you wish, it doesn’t matter to me. Yumeko and I will be leaving this place at dawn.”

  The ronin gave a disgusted snort. “Suit yourself,” he muttered. “I suppose that’s poetic justice though—let these peasants get eaten by their own hungry ghosts. I bet in a few years there won’t be a village left at all, just a graveyard full of gaki.”

  “But why are there so many gaki around?” I wondered. “Where do they come from? Do they just pop out of the ground, starving and cranky?”

  “Gaki are the souls of humans who were greedy in life, whose selfishness caused great harm,” Tatsumi said. “They are being punished for their greed, and will continue to be eternally hungry, until they have suffered enough to move on.”

  “But the villagers here were the complete opposite of greedy,” I argued. “You saw them. They were almost frantic to give things away.”

  Okame shrugged. “Maybe they’re hoping not to come back as gaki when they’re inevitably eaten. There’s probably a bad joke in there somewhere, but I’m too tired to figure it out.”

  I shook my head. “Something is wrong here,” I murmured, walking to the door to stare down the path. “There’s more to this village and the gaki than we’re seeing. And I bet that monk has something to do with it.”

  “Monk?” I heard the frown in Okame’s voice. “What monk?”

  “The yurei who...never mind. We should talk to the headman,” I said, turning back. Okame looked incredulous, but it was Tatsumi’s gaze I sought, meeting his eyes. “I’m thinking he can tell us what’s going on. We already survived the attack—they’re not going to expect us to go marching back through the village, not when we were supposed to be eaten by gaki. I bet he’ll explain everything now.” Tatsumi didn’t answer, and I frowned at him. “Don’t you want to know what’s going on, Tatsumi? Aren’t you even a little curious?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “I am, too,” Okame announced, to my surprise. “Now that you mention it, I sure would like to have a chat with our friendly headman and ask why he’s feeding travelers to the resident gaki. In fact, I think we should go right now.” He strode to the doorway and peered out, dark eyes searching. “I don’t see any hungry ghosts wandering around,” he muttered. “And if we do run into more, we know they can be killed, or banished or whatever.” He looked back, a challenging smirk crossing his face. “To the headman’s house, then. You coming or not, Kage-san?”

  Tatsumi continued to say nothing, his expression blank as he watched us. Finally, he rose gracefully to his feet, slid Kamigoroshi through his belt and glided across the floor. I felt a strange tingle in the pit of my stomach, my heartbeat quickening as he drew close.

  “Let’s do this quickly.”

  * * *

  The villagers watched us as we marched down the path toward the headman’s house. No one had slept tonight, it appeared. Not a soul was in the open, but I saw them peering through the slats in their windows, eyes wide with amazement and fear. Clearly, they hadn’t expected us to survive the gaki attack, and they were wisely staying out of reach. No one challenged us as we strolled through the village, past the headman’s front gate and up the steps to his house. Only now I did I notice that his door was made of heavy, reinforced wood, and that several long gashes had been raked across the surface.

  Unsurprisingly, it was barred from the inside. Okame rattled it a couple times before stepping back with a dark smile. “Kage-san?” He glanced at Tatsumi and gestured to the door. “Would you like to do the honors?”

  Tatsumi’s sword flashed from its sheath, slicing through the thick wood like it was made of rice paper. Stepping forward, Okame raised one finger and tapped the surface, and the doors swung back with a groan.

  Warily, we stepped into the house. The entryway was empty, but a faint light came from farther inside, flickering over the walls and floors. Sliding open a panel, we saw the headman kneeling in the center of the floor, a lit brazier casting his features in a red glow.

  As soon as the door opened, he fell forward, prostrating himself to the floor, pressing his face into the wood.

  “Mercy!” His muffled voice floated up from the floor, shaking and terrified. “Have mercy, my lords. Kill me if you must, but spare the village. They don’t deserve your wrath.”

  “They don’t?” Okame crossed his arms. “So, you’re telling me that they didn’t try to feed us to the gaki? That they were completely ignorant of what was happening tonight?” He snorted in obvious disbelief. “Well, don’t I feel foolish, thinking this whole village was setting us up to get eaten.”

  I frowned at him. “But I thought they were setting us up to be eaten. That’s why they were...oh. Sarcasm again. I see.”

  “Please.” The headman didn’t lift his face from the boards. “Have mercy. We were desperate. You’ve seen what we face. You don’t know what it’s like, living with those creatures. We don’t know what else to do.”

  “They’re not unkillable.” This from Tatsumi, his voice hard and unimpressed. “If your people would take a stand to destroy them, you wouldn’t have so many gaki wandering around.”

  “We’ve tried! We’ve tried killing them, burning them, cutting off their limbs, trapping them underground. No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they always come back.” The headman clenched his
fists on the floor in distress. “It’s part of the curse! The curse that damned monk placed on us, and now we’re doomed to be haunted by gaki for the rest of our days and beyond.”

  Ah. Now things started to make sense. “What curse?” I asked, stepping forward. “We’ve seen the monk. Is he the one responsible for the gaki?”

  “You’ve seen him? Merciful Jinkei, will he never be satisfied?” The headman shuddered violently and sat up, closing his eyes. “I suppose there is no point in hiding it anymore,” he whispered. “Please, sit down, and I will tell you our village’s greatest secret, and greatest shame.”

  Okame and I edged forward and knelt on the tatami mats. Tatsumi chose to remain standing, hovering in the doorway, though the headman didn’t seem to notice him.

  “This village,” he began, “has always been prosperous. The stories said that when my great-great-grandfather was headman, he made a bargain with Ojinari, the Kami of the Harvest, that as long as they took care of the land, it would always be fertile. Even after the rice tax at the end of the season, after the daimyo took his share of the harvest, the village always had enough to eat. The fields never withered, never dried out. The streams and lakes always yielded fish, and the gardens, small as they were, always produced a plentiful bounty. We were never rich, but we never went hungry. In this, we knew we were lucky, far more fortunate than other villages that faced starvation every winter, and we thanked the kami for blessing the land.

  “However, as the decades passed, the villagers began to fear that others might discover their wealth of food, and try to take it from them. We are a small village, isolated from the rest of the world—if word got out, ronin or bandits might descend upon us in waves and take all our food for themselves. The village would never have peace again.

  “Such was our thinking, flawed as it was. Even though we continued to have bountiful harvests, we began hoarding our food, hiding it away like squirrels burying their nuts. The few travelers that stumbled upon the village were told that we were but poor farmers who could barely feed ourselves, and were sent away with nothing.

  “And then, one night in the coldest of the winter’s months, a monk passed through the village. He went from house to house, asking for a bowl of rice, a single potato, anything that we could spare. The village turned him away—my great-grandfather ordered everyone to bar their doors and ignore the monk until he left.

  “For three days, he stayed around the village, sitting in the snow with nothing but his hat and robes to keep him warm. He would offer to pray for loved ones, to say a blessing over the fields, in exchange for a bite of food. He was ignored. No one gave him anything. They pretended not to hear him, not to see that he was starving, though he never uttered a word of complaint.

  “Three days later, they found him sitting outside the headman’s door, frozen stiff. He clutched a strip of paper in one stiff hand, written in blood from his own fingers, cursing our greed.

  “Three months after he was buried in the cemetery outside town, a young famer’s daughter fell on a kama sickle and died. She, too, was buried in the graveyard with the rest of the dead. But that night, she returned, starving and violent. She broke into her former home and tore her family to pieces. The next month, the family returned as well, wretched and wandering, seeking warm flesh to consume, and more lives were lost to their terrible hunger.

  “So began the cycle,” the headman finished, his eyes dark and haunted. “Every month, on the final three nights, one for each day we left the monk to starve, the hungry ghosts rise from their graves to wander the village. They are not interested in normal food—offerings of rice, vegetables, or sake are ignored. They hunger only for living flesh, consuming those who were once kin. The gaki you saw tonight—those are our dead loved ones, our families, all who perished after that monk drew his last breath outside this door. He is an onryo, a grudge spirit, and his curse continues to punish us for the greed of our ancestors.”

  “Why don’t you just leave?” Okame asked when the headman was finished. “Seems like an easy solution. Pack up and go find a new village, leave the graveyard and your hungry ghost problems behind.”

  “It’s not that simple.” The headman shook his head. “Some have tried to flee the village, of course. But the curse follows them. Gaki stalk their footsteps, the ghosts of their families trailing them wherever they go, appearing every night instead of the last three. The ones who try to flee either return to the village in terror, or they die and return as hungry ghosts themselves.” The headman looked out the door with bleak, dead eyes. “There is no escape. We are trapped here, and the curse will continue until there is no one left, until the gaki are all that remain of us.”

  “Huh.” Abruptly, Okame rose to his feet. “Well, I was thinking about killing you for throwing us to the gaki, but on second thought, it seems your lives are pretty awful as is.” He glanced at me and smirked. “So, what say we get out of here before the curse latches on to us?”

  “Can we?” Tatsumi wondered, his eyes grim. “Will we be stalked by gaki ourselves if we try to leave?”

  “No,” the headman said dully. “Your ancestors did not anger the monk. The curse will not follow you. You can leave and not look back. I would not blame you, of course. This is our punishment, no one else’s.”

  “Has anyone tried talking to him?” I asked, and those dead eyes shifted to me. “The monk? His ghost is still hanging around.”

  “The monk.” A shadow of real terror crossed the man’s face. “We’ve occasionally seen glimpses of him around the village,” he said. “But he disappears before we can speak to him. We think it’s more an effect of the curse, an echo of the monk, not the ghost himself.” He shivered. “The onryo...we’ve seen him in the cemetery sometimes, a glowing spirit in white, walking among the graves. But none of us dare venture close—the gaki would tear us to pieces.”

  “And he only appears when the gaki come out?” I asked.

  “Yes. It is as if he wishes to see our misery and terror, to make certain we are suffering.” The headman sighed. “I cannot blame his anger, our ancestors did him a great wrong. But it pains me, knowing I am destined to become a wretched thing that preys on my own family. I cannot even take my own life if I am simply to rise as one of them.”

  “Yumeko,” Tatsumi said in a warning voice from the hallway, as if realizing what I was thinking. I pretended not to hear him and rose, turning to face my companions.

  “We have to help them.”

  “What?” Okame gave me a look of disbelief. “March through a cemetery crawling with gaki to talk to a ghost? In case you didn’t notice, I was almost eaten a few minutes ago. I could really go the rest of my life without having to experience the real thing.”

  I ignored the ronin, locking eyes with Tatsumi, who was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. “We have to do this, Tatsumi-san. After hearing their story, how can we walk away now? These people have suffered enough—they aren’t the targets of his wrath any longer. If we could just talk to the monk, maybe we could convince him to lift the curse.”

  “Yumeko.” Tatsumi’s gaze was hard, and he shook his head. “Grudge spirits can’t be reasoned with,” he said in a grave voice. “Their anger has consumed them, and their vengeance can never be satisfied. If the monk is truly an onryo, you won’t have any hope of placating it, and it could very well turn its wrath on you.”

  Fear prickled my stomach. “I’m...willing to take that chance,” I said. “It won’t take long. I just need someone to keep the gaki away while I talk to the monk. This is the last night of the month,” I reminded him, as his eyes narrowed. “It will be the only time we can talk to him. When dawn comes, he’ll disappear with the gaki and we’ll lose our chance to lift the curse.”

  Tatsumi held my gaze a moment longer, then let out a breath. “You’re going to talk to him with or without me, aren’t you?” he murmured.

  I
nodded. “I might not be able to wield a sword or shoot an arrow,” I told him, “but I can talk to ghosts and kami. I want to help, and this is something I can do.”

  He sighed again and glanced out the door. “We don’t have much time,” he said, making my heart leap in my chest. “When dawn comes, spirits tend to fade when the first light breaks over the horizon. If we’re going to speak to the monk, we should do it now.”

  Okame groaned. “Hold on,” he growled as we turned toward the door. After pulling the sake gourd from his obi, he yanked off the top and tipped the container upside down into his open mouth, emptying it fully. He wiped his lips, then tossed the bottle at the headman and turned back to us with a grin. “Okay, now I’m ready.”

  The village was silent as we walked back outside. Overhead, the moon blazed down, outlining the houses in silver and casting hazy light over the distant rice paddies. I didn’t glimpse any gaki wandering about, but as we drew closer to the graveyard, I could see the faint green light coming from the bottom of the rise.

  We sidled around the wall of the guesthouse, then peered down the slope.

  The gaki were back. Or a few of them were, anyway. Certainly not in the numbers that had swarmed us earlier, but more than I was expecting, considering Tatsumi had wiped them all out. And we had been inside the hut when they attacked, which had allowed the demonslayer to deal with them one at a time. Out in the open, fending off a huge mob would be much more difficult.

  “And you want us to go down there.” Okame sighed and made a face as he stared at the figures lurching about. “Ugh, this isn’t going to be fun, but lead the way.”

  “Wait.” Tatsumi held out his arm, stopping us. “We may not have to fight.”

  I glanced at him. He hesitated, as if struggling with himself, then exhaled. “If we march down there in plain sight, the gaki will be on us in a heartbeat. However, I might be able to perform a technique that will render us unseen, for a short while.”