The Chrysanthemum Seal (The Year of the Dragon, Book 5)

by James Calbraith

  “What about blood magic?” she overheard one of the students speaking behind the paper wall.

  “What about it?” another asked.

  “Well, you know what they say. If it can bring back the dead… maybe it could work here.”

  They started arguing vigorously.

  “There are no adepts of blood magic here, Aoki,” said one of them, “unless you wish to tell us something.”

  The voice of the one they called Aoki trembled.

  “No. No. How can you say that?”

  Satō stood up and opened the doors. “Keep an eye on him,” she ordered the students, “but don’t do anything yet. I’ll be right back.”

  Master Dōraku gave Satō a heavy look from under a furrowed brow. He ran his hand down his face and stared at the wall for a long time before answering.

  “If there was no hope, you’d say so already,” said the wizardess, breaking the brooding silence.

  The Swordsman sighed. “It’s not that easy, girl. Blood magic — ”

  “I know all about blood magic,” she said. “I also know what it does to people — or have you forgotten why I had to bury my own father?”

  “No, I remember. I remember everything. That’s why I think your family has dabbled in it enough.”

  “I’m willing to take the risk.”

  His eyes turned golden as he leaned towards her, black fangs bared.

  “Are you?” he spoke. A cold stench of decay burst forth.

  She stepped back and covered her mouth in disgust.

  “Are you really? Would you give your life for the boy? Your very soul? And maybe his?”

  She failed to find a quick answer to that. After all, it was just a leg... Bran could live without it. Besides… he only had himself to blame. Why did he have to endanger himself like that? What was in those papers that was so important?

  “I see you hesitate.” The Swordsman scoffed, his pupils black again. “The power of blood is not for the weak-willed.”

  “No, wait!”

  The power of blood.

  The words burned bright in her mind, like a beacon, beckoning her forth.

  Greater than Rangaku. Greater than that of the shrine healers. Invulnerability. Immortality. Could I really harness it? Even at the risk of…

  “My soul…” she whispered.

  “No.” Master Dōraku stood up.

  She grabbed his cold, dry hand in hers.

  “Please... Grant me the power, one last time. Think of Nagomi — it would break her heart if anything happened to Bran.”

  She was surprised how easy it was for her to say those words. In some part of her mind she rarely visited she had long known the priestess had fallen in love with the foreigner. Maybe even since that day when they had found him at the beach in Kiyō…

  The Swordsman released his hand. He rose and came up to the door, looking out at the courtyard in deep, brooding silence.

  “None must know,” he said at last.

  “None will,” she assured him in a heartbeat.

  He turned back to her.

  “Do you still have Tanaka’s glove?”

  “I do.”

  “Bring it to the infirmary in an hour. And your dagger.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I know you will come to rue this decision one day,” he said. “And so will I.”

  “Then why did you agree?”

  “Sometimes…” He pinched his thin beard. “Sometimes the only way to move on is to let go of the cliff’s edge.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Satō picked up the glove and the dagger from her room and crossed the courtyard — passing at a safe distance from the unconscious dorako – towards the infirmary. She could only hope it would not wake up while she was dealing with Bran. Sitting on the same bench she had earlier shared with Shōin, was Nagomi and her inseparable Kumaso companion.

  The priestess stood up and barred her way.

  “Don’t do it, Sacchan.”

  “Don’t do what?” she said, trying to sound casual.

  Nagomi grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Whatever it is you’re planning. I don’t know exactly, but I know it ends badly.”

  “How do you know?” Satō asked.

  “I know — I’ve seen it…”

  “Tell me.”

  Nagomi leaned closer and whispered.

  “You and Bran, standing on the threshold of the Gates of the Otherworld. Bran was on this side but you… you were on the other, in the shadows.”

  Satō brushed her hands off.

  “That could have meant anything. It doesn’t have to apply to today.”

  “But you are planning something,” said Nagomi, staring at Satō with eyes wide open, worried. “Something you dare not tell — ”

  None must know.

  “You love him, don’t you?” Satō asked.

  Nagomi blinked, her cheeks turned crimson. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, as if she was catching her breath.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispered quickly, looking at her feet.

  “What I’m about to do, I’m doing for you as much as him,” said Satō. “I know that if you could, you’d do anything to help him. But you can’t. So it’s up to me.”

  “Sacchan…” Nagomi said, quietly. “I’ve known you all my life. I barely met him a few months ago. So please… don’t make me have to choose.”

  “You don’t have to choose anything.” Satō forced a laugh. “We will both be just fine, and we’ll all be laughing about it in a few days. Trust me.”

  She glanced nervously to the infirmary.

  “I have to go. I’m already late.”

  There were soldiers posted now before the infirmary, two Mori samurai from the retainers group. She looked around the courtyard and noticed more of Kunishi’s men guarding key positions around the school. The short-lived siege was over, and Meirinkan was under complete control of Lord Mori and his samurai.

  One of the guards stepped forward. He had a flat, pudgy, dull face.

  “Only physicians and healers are allowed in,” he said. “Are you one?”

  “I — yes, I am a physician,” she replied, “I’m here to help with the surgery…”

  He nodded and moved aside, but the other guard stared at her attentively, frowning, thinking — with visible effort. She reached for the door.

  “Wait!” The other guard reached for her. “You’re a woman, aren’t you?”

  “What if I am?”

  “He said not to let the woman one in,” the guard told another, “remember?”

  “Oh, yeah!” The first one slapped his forehead. “He’s right. You can’t come in.”

  I don’t have time for this, she thought.

  Satō stepped back. Her hand reached for the sword. The samurai did the same.

  That they understand.

  She tensed up, ready to strike. The infirmary door slid open quietly behind them. Master Dōraku appeared outside and, in a blur of movement, struck the two guards on the necks with his hands. Before they started sliding to the ground, he grabbed them and propped them up against the wall. They looked as if they were dozing off in the afternoon sun.

  “Not a drop of blood more than necessary,” he admonished Satō. His eyes darted left and right around the courtyard. “I don’t think anybody saw anything, but we won’t have much time. Come quickly.”

  The walls and the floor of the infirmary were covered in complex patterns drawn in red ink: spirals, concentric circles, stars, polygons, straight and zig-zagging lines, all interconnected in hellish, mind-numbing arrangements. Satō was straining her memory to the limits, trying to remember as many of the drawings as she could.

  Master Dōraku was kneeling beside Bran’s mattress, finishing a long line made of interlocking crescents and angled strokes running straight through the blanket across the boy’s body.

  “How can you remember all this?” Satō whispered in awe. �
��I know you’ve lived long, but still…”

  The Swordsman put a final dot on the pattern and stood up, heavily.

  “It’s not a matter of memory. The Blood Runes are like letters of the kana alphabet, only instead of words, they form spells. This — ” he said, pointing to the wall, “is more than just a simple incantation: it is an essay in blood magic.”

  “How many Runes are there?” asked Satō. Now that she knew what to look for, she was beginning to spot smaller, repeating patterns in the greater design. She even recognized some of the runes from the inscriptions on Ganryūjima.

  I could learn this. It looks no more difficult than Qin writing.

  Master Dōraku shrugged. “Who knows? A thousand, ten thousand… I know several hundred off the top of my head. For more, I would need to consult the ancient scrolls, but I don’t need more for this spell.”

  “And this is enough to bring Bran back to health?”

  “Don’t speak so lightly of what you don’t understand,” the Swordsman scoffed. “Come here, we must begin.”

  He led her to a corner between the floor and two walls, from where the complex pattern started.

  “Put on the glove. Don’t use the needle — it’s too small for the job; I just want you to keep an eye out for that dial.”

  Too small…?

  “Give me your dagger.”

  She handed him the weapon. Master Dōraku took her hand in his and studied it before slashing straight through the forearm at an angle.

  Satō hissed, but didn’t twitch.

  “Fill the pattern with your blood. Don’t put too much at one time — you will have to last for the entire process.”

  The entire thing!

  “Eeeh! But it would take all my blood…!”

  “Not at all, if you let me drain it. It takes a certain… skill. But hurry, it’s drying up.”

  She dabbed a finger in her wound and then ran it along the line of red ink. The pattern glowed — just like the runes at Ganryū’s gate — and swallowed the blood hungrily.

  “Thousands of years ago,” the Swordsman spoke, as Satō continued with the ritual, “when the first men discovered blood magic, they carved simple patterns into the stones. Spirals, angles, dots and lines. They did it at random, trying many things out, improving and developing the patterns for generation after generation.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asked. The incision dried out and she came up to the Swordsman for a new cut. This one was slightly more painful than the first.

  “I studied Vasconian lore for decades, trying to find a way to cure my condition. It was they who brought blood magic to Yamato. Long before the Bataavians, with their Rangaku.”

  Satō looked at the wall. It seemed she had barely just started… there was so much to go. But, strangely, it didn’t worry her as much as it should have. She felt oddly light-headed.

  “You’re using too much,” the Swordsman warned her. “What does the dial say?”

  “It’s barely up.”

  Bran moaned and stirred. Satō stopped to check on him.

  “Don’t worry,” said Master Dōraku, “I gave him a sleeping extract. He will not wake. Continue.”

  He stepped further away from Bran’s bed; his face hid in the shadow.

  “Those small patterns,” he picked up the lecture from where he had finished, “were initially harmless. The shamans and later priests felt the danger, but nobody believed them — they were natural rivals of the blood mages, after all.”

  Satō’s hand slid across the slippery wall. She giggled.

  “All of this happened before history, before the written word, and we only know it from the sagas and legends. All writing came later, born out of increasingly complex blood runes… What we do know is that they started going mad. Some simply went insane, and harmed only themselves. Others became power-hungry, and grew stronger and stronger, enslaving others with their magic. The wizard-kings of Ejiputo, Babiron and other kingdoms the names of which are forgotten in the mists of time, controlled tens of thousands, and the more slaves they had, the more blood was at their disposal. They became unstoppable, immortal beings of immeasurable power.”

  Why is he telling me this? Satō wondered. I’m getting a headache from all this talk.

  “What happened to them?”

  “The dragons ate them.”

  She burst into uncontrollable laughter. Master Dōraku waited patiently. When she finished laughing, her wounds were all mended, and he had to cut her again. It was even more painful this time, but she didn’t mind. In fact, it was perversely pleasant.

  “Seriously, what happened?”

  “I am serious. The elemental wizards fled to the East and hid in the marshes of Bharata and Qin. They used crocodiles and giant turtles they found there as the basis to create creatures strong enough to fight the blood-crazed kings.”

  She blinked.

  “The dragons… dragons were made by humans?”

  The Dragon Book didn’t mention that.

  The Swordsman nodded. “That’s what some of the legends say. There were wars — we do not know for how long, how many people died, what treasures and secrets of ancient lore were lost to us forever… but when the elemental wizards and their dragons emerged victorious, blood magic was banished for centuries, pursued only in secret by sinister, devious men – who wished for more power than...”

  Satō didn’t hear the end of the sentence. The world around her turned and she fell to her knees, dizzy.

  Master Dōraku lifted her to her feet and looked at the dial on the glove. “Almost half-way there… and you’re half-way through. This is going to be close.”

  “I’m fine, really…” she said, slurring her words. Her tongue felt like cotton wool.

  “Too late to go back now, anyway. We must finish this, or we are both damned.”

  His hands trembling, he cut her again. She didn’t feel pain at all; the wound radiated warmth and bliss. She felt the same warmth emanating from her left shoulder, but could not remember why. The inside of her mouth tasted of iron.

  “From here on, I won’t be able to help you. I will need to leave the room. Do you understand why?”

  She nodded, though she could barely make out his words, coming as if from a great distance, muffled through the white mist rising from the floor.

  “Izzit… is it because of your addiction?”

  “You must make the final cut yourself,” he said, ignoring her question. He pressed the dagger in her slippery hand. “Here. Along the inside of your shoulder. No deeper than a grain of rice. Takashima Satō!” He shook her awake.

  “I hear you,” she said. “A grain of rice. I’ll be all right.”

  “Remember why you are doing this. Remember Nagomi. Remember Bran.”

  She pushed him away. “Enough. Let me finish.”

  She could barely see the red ink symbols. The walls and the floor glowed bright white, and the trace of her blood was a line of deep, thick, light-consuming black. There was nothing else in the world but that line, and those walls. She no longer remembered anything, or anyone; all she knew was that she had to finish drawing the pattern.

  She crawled on her hands and feet across something soft, a bundle of colourful lights, and, at last, she reached the final dot.

  The walls around her disappeared, leaving only the black pattern suspended in nothingness, whirling, turning and pulsating, a source of unending power, pulling the entire universe towards it. With a jolt, Satō felt her soul wrenched from her body.

  She was standing feet-deep in soft, red, dry dirt, in a place of darkness, looking out through a great stone portal onto the slope of a bald, rocky, boulder-strewn mountain.

  Cold wind picked up loose gravel from the surface and scattered it over the grey boulders, and into the slow-flowing river below. Everything on the other side was the same shade of morbid, sickly grey, even the sky; and yet, Satō knew that the mountain was in the land of the living — unlike the red dirt place where sh
e was stood.

  She dared not turn around. She heard whispers behind her, and laughter, mocking and sinister, growing in the darkness. They were getting closer and louder with every second.

  I could just step through that door, she thought, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her will was already bound to the darkness.

  The voices behind her grew to a loud din, like a nest of angry hornets, and she felt their gaze upon her body. It was cold, slippery; she shivered with disgust. Still more came, wrapping spiny limbs around her hands and legs. Their heads bobbed in the air in the corner of her eye, pale white, wispy, laughing skulls. She ignored them and stared ahead, at the grey rocks, at the grey sky.

  They started dragging her back; she struggled, planting her feet firmly in the red dirt, but she was sliding, slipping. They called her with sweet voices: “Come with us… you’ll be happy here… there’s no pain here, no suffering…” Then others, snarling angrily: “Come with us, or you’ll regret it… we will torture you… tear your soul apart…”

  She was losing her strength, her will faltered. Tears ran down her face, as she dared not even to blink, not wanting to lose the sight of the land of the living. But she was being dragged away from the portal, little by little, inch by inch. More ghostly hands grabbed her, more voices hissed obscenities into her ears. She fell down to her knees, then on her face, scratching the red dirt with her hands, trying to grab onto something – anything — that could slow her down. But there was nothing here but the sand the colour of blood.

  A thunderclap struck, and a web of lightning buzzed all around her, then another. In an instant, all the wraiths were gone. She was free.

  She stood up, and started turning slowly, when a voice she would have recognized always and everywhere, stopped her.

  “No, don’t turn around. You must never turn around in this place.”

  “Father!”

  She felt him come closer — almost close enough to touch. Her chin trembled.

  “Don’t weep, daughter.”

  “I thought …I’ll never hear you again.”

  “Well, this time probably is the last one,” Shūhan said.

  “How did you …?”

  “This place has strict rules. A balance that needs preserving. My death… broke some of those rules. I had to break a few more to bring back this balance. That is all I can say.”