by Dante King
I took a sip of the clear liquid. It was as he had said, sweet and sharp at the same time, very different from the rough grape and apple wines I’d been used to in Saxe. It burned pleasantly on the way down, and I felt the warm flush of the alcohol settle into my system. Cara let out a contented sigh, settling back into her chair with the wine in her hand. When I glanced at her, she met my eyes and gave me a secret smile, and the promise in her eyes of what would come later this evening made my heart beat a little faster.
Toshiro drained his glass and refilled it immediately, then sat back, as if waiting for one of us to break the silence.
“You said, ‘since your retirement,’” I prompted him. “What profession did you retire from?”
“Ah,” he said slowly, and there was a regretful look in his eyes. “I was a warrior. A killer, if you will. I took the lives of men with my sword, that was my profession. I was a Samurai in the service of the Shogun, the military ruler of Yamato. For many years,” he added, nodding sadly to himself. He knocked his cup back, swallowed, and refilled it a third time. I wondered for a moment if the old servant Win was correct that Toshiro had gained an unhealthily large taste for the drink. Tasty as it was, I was still only halfway down my first cup.
“Why did you leave the service of the Shogun?” Cara asked him gently. He had lapsed into silence again, but he gave himself a little shake and glanced around at us.
“It was the Kanosuru that ended my career as a Samurai. The evil that you call the Festering. I trust you both, and I’m going to tell you that which few people but my old manservant Win have heard before. You, I saw you destroy the Festering-corrupted spirit at the shrine. You seem unaffected by the terror that it gives out, the horror and evil which are the hallmarks of the Festering. In all my days as a wandering Samurai after I left the Shogun’s service, I saw the Festering in many lands, and in many forms, but I never saw anyone willing or even able to fight it. For this reason, I’m putting my trust in you.”
He took a deep breath and glanced down at the cup in his hand. I saw him consider drinking it off again. Then he replaced it on the table and sat up straight.
“You can safely trust us, Toshiro,” I reassured him. “We are here to cleanse the Festering, whatever form it takes.”
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Well, in this land, it has taken the Shogun. It was years ago now. I was one of the Shogun’s retainers. We had been in countless battles together as he subjugated and put down the bandit rebellions in the northern provinces. I was one of the elites, his closest unit of bodyguards. We were an unbeatable force in campaign, and stronghold after stronghold fell before us. Shogun Morai’s coming was like the advancing of the great sea; none could stand before him, and we all basked in his glory.”
Toshiro’s eyes were unfocused now, gazing into the distance as he remembered his old life. “The campaign was won, of course, and peace was brought back to the land. Shogun Morai ruled well and justly at first, but as the years passed some began to whisper that not all was as it should be. There were complaints about trade taxes, about favoritism, that kind of thing. I paid no heed to any of that; politics was never my interest. We had become a ceremonial retinue, now that there were no more rebel groups left to fight, and I was dissatisfied with life. There was a woman in Otara whom I had my eye on, and I knew that I had this place to retire to if I so chose.”
He gestured around him at his beautiful, peaceful home. “One night, I couldn’t sleep, and so I decided to ask the man I admired the most for advice: Shogun Morai. I climbed from my bed and made my way up the stairs to the Shogun’s chambers on the top floor of Otara castle, knowing that he was always generous with his time for those he favored. I would ask him for an audience, and I felt sure it would be granted. When I reached the door to his chambers, I found to my surprise that he had sent all his servants away. There was a flickering light coming from behind the screen door, and a sound of... voices. Voices like I’d never heard before, as if there were ten thousand people all whispering in unison. Fear came over me, but I mastered myself. I stepped forward and pushed aside the door.”
This time he did lift his cup. He drank half his wine down in a slow, methodical gulp and then put it back down. There was an unsteady clink as the ceramic cup met the iron table. It was the first real sign of disturbance he had shown since we’d met him, despite his terrible experience of earlier.
Cara and I waited. We were totally absorbed in his story. Toshiro sat silent for a moment. Around us, the light had dimmed to a blue and hazy dusk, and the chirring of evening insects filled the air with a homely, comforting sound. Fireflies danced in the darker air away from the house. Nearer at hand, fat white moths fluttered around the hanging lamps that were suspended from the house’s outer walls.
After a short time, Toshiro sighed and continued.
“I will remember that sight until the day I die,” he said reluctantly. “Shogun Morai stood alone in the center of a ring of candles. His arms were raised, and he wore a black and hooded robe from head to foot. Outside the ring of candles, shadows had gathered like a fine black mist. They swirled and danced all round the circle, and faces leered in the darkness, terrible, evil faces that leered and chattered at him, but seemed unable to pass the barrier of the candle light. I stood, frozen, witless, with the door half drawn, staring into the room. As I watched, a figure began to materialise inside the circle. It was made of the condensing mist, and as it grew and took shape I saw that it had skin the color of wet ashes. It was horrible, like one of the Wokou, but deformed...”
“The Wokou?” Cara said gently.
Toshiro startled, glancing around fearfully for a moment as if he had become so absorbed in the memory that he had lost touch with where he sat at this moment. His eyes snapped back into focus and he looked from one to the other of us. “Of course, you do not know. Forgive me, I was forgetting you are new to the land. The Wokou are... small people, like men, but short and stocky. Even the tallest ones do not come up higher than my chest. They are always bearded, and they take pride in their beards. They are fierce fighters with axe and bow, and mighty cunning at building with stone and at the casting of weapons from metal. We have gained a great deal of our metalworking knowledge from the Wokou, and we buy a great deal of our raw metal from them. They are famous traders, and they run mines and smelt ore in great quantity in their mountain settlements, far away up the coast from here.”
Cara and I looked at each other. These Wokou sounded familiar.
“Dwarves?” I said.
Cara nodded. Quickly, she explained to Toshiro about the Dwarven miners who inhabited the mountain ranges to the north of Saxe. Skilled builders and metal workers, fierce, proud, long-bearded fighters, the dwarves were the allies of the men of Saxe. Long ago, there had been war between us, but it had benefited neither party, and for long years now the men and women of Saxe had been profitable trading partners with the Dwarves.
Toshiro was nodding. “Dwarves,” he mused, trying out the strange word. “They certainly sound the same, except for one thing; in Yamato, the Wokou are seafarers. They mine with great skill, as your Dwarves do, but when they have ore or ingots to sell, they set out on epic trading missions, living in their long ships for long periods of time and trading far up and down the coast of this land, and even further afield.”
“But Toshiro, I’m sorry,” Cara said, “I interrupted your story with my question. Won’t you tell us what happened after you saw the dwarf-like figure manifesting in front of Shogun Morai?”
“Ah, I will. But please, do not apologize. I had forgotten where I was for a moment, becoming lost in the unpleasant memory, and you brought me back. Where was I? Yes, there is not much more to tell. At first I thought that the creature would attack the Shogun, and I nearly ran in. Then I saw that it was not so. Shogun Morai himself had summoned the thing, created it with magic of some evil kind. He pushed back his deep hood and his head was wreathed in dark mist. Then he spoke to the creature, and when
he did so, tentacles writhed and lashed out from the back of his neck, and I knew that he was corrupted by the Kanosuru. The creature he had conjured cringed before him, but he gave it some command in a strange language and it fled, leaping from the window and transforming into a transparent smoke. Then, two days later, one of the Shogun’s most dangerous political rivals was found dead, alone in his bedroom in the town. There was no apparent cause of death, but I made it my business to look at the room in which the man had died. There was a thick gray paste, like wet ashes, smeared on the wall outside, and splattered upon the back wall of the dead man’s room. I had no doubt that the Shogun had summoned some horrible creature of evil to do his bidding for him, and assassinate his rival.”
He sat back, looking at us both, then extended his open hands toward us in a pleading gesture. “What could I do? The Shogun had been caught by me in a shameful, horrible act, the act of summoning demons to kill a rival by stealth magic. Nobody in Yamato can do such a thing without great shame. We know it is possible, we know that such magic exists, but it is not something an honorable man can even consider. I was placed in a terrible position. The Shogun was my lord, I had served him in battle. I had sworn my life to him. How could I betray him? I decided that the only thing I could do to preserve my honor—and his—would be to take my own life.”
“To take your own life?” Cara repeated, disbelieving. She gasped, and sat back in her seat, her hands on the table in front of her. I recoiled in horror. In Saxe, suicide was considered one of the worst things a person could do, certainly one of the most dishonorable possible endings for a warrior to come to. It was bad enough for a farmer or a merchant, but for a warrior it was an unforgivable act.
Toshiro looked from one to the other of us and nodded slowly. “This, I see, is another one of the many differences between your land and mine, my friends. Here in Yamato, the ritual we call Seppuku plays a powerful role in our politics and how we conduct our wars. For a man who has lost all honor through defeat or poorly judged action, ending his own life in Seppuku is often the only way he can regain some of his honor.”
That was the biggest difference we had found so far between Yamato and Saxe. Cara shifted in her seat, and I could tell that it made her uncomfortable. I didn’t like the idea either, but I wanted to find out more about it. I would ask about it later. For now though, I was eager to find out what Toshiro had done to save himself from that fate.
“Go on,” I urged him. “What made you change your mind?”
The old Samurai’s eyes lifted up from the table where he was looking, and I saw that they had fixed on something over my shoulder. I glanced round. The old serving man, Win, who had shown us to our rooms had approached silently from the direction of the house, carrying a little paper lantern which shone with a clean, pale light. The old serving man was dressed simply, in practical purple tunic and trousers. He had tightly-fitting shoes of cloth laced up past his ankles, and a round skull cap perched upon his head. Tufts of white hair stuck out from under the cap, and his little goatee beard was white as snow against his sunburned skin. Toshiro smiled up at him. Win looked down at us all with a polite, neutral expression.
“I’ve come to see if you are needing anything else?” he said.
Toshiro smiled and looked back at me. “You asked what saved me from Seppuku? I talked it over with the man I trusted the most in all the world, my loyal squire. This man here.” He gestured at Win.
The old servant’s face crinkled into a sudden smile as he took in the bottle and glasses. “Ah, you have been at the saké again, have you, master? And have you been telling our guests all our old stories?” Win scolded him gently, but there was a flash of urgent enquiry in his eyes as he looked at his master. Toshiro nodded, looking tired.
“That’s right, Win. I’ve been telling our guests the tale. You did not see what they did earlier today, how they drove out the Kanosuru which had infested the shrine of the fox-spirit. The Kanosuru taint has never come so close to Otara before, and these warriors have a power to resist it such as we have never seen before. I have decided to open my heart to them, and if we can make progress against the Kanosuru together, then perhaps I will not have failed in my life after all.”
The old servant gazed thoughtfully at me and Cara for a long moment. He did not look entirely sure of us, and I suddenly saw myself from his point of view; a tall, pale-skinned, fair haired, broad-shouldered man with a strange accent in a land of small, dark-skinned and darker-haired folk. It was no surprise he wondered who we were, and questioned whether his master was right to trust us with his dark tale.
“We’re here to help,” I said reassuringly to the old man, and after a moment longer, he nodded. Quickly, I explained to him our knowledge of the Festering, how it had come to our land, and how Cara and I had driven it away and traveled here, looking for more Festering-taints to fight and cleanse. I didn’t go into detail about the Keeper or the Personas, nor about exactly how we’d got here, but Win seemed satisfied with my explanation.
“Well,” he replied eventually, “if my master trusts you, that’s good enough for me. He was not such a good judge of actions back in the old days as he is now. I will trust his judgement on this.”
“Thank you, Win,” Toshiro said sincerely, and I realized that these two had a relationship of mutual respect that went back way further than master and servant, and even than warrior and squire. Toshiro and Win had fought together on countless battlefields and had probably saved each other’s lives more than once. They were true brothers-in-arms.
Toshiro took up the story. “After I saw the terrible sight of Shogun Morai communing with the Kanosuru demons, Win convinced me that I would be serving a greater purpose by learning about the terror that had come to taint the heart of the land, even as high as the Shogun himself. Win made me realize that committing Seppuku would be a selfish action, since it would save my honor, but might cause me to miss the opportunity to save the land and the Shogunate from even worse doom.”
He glanced fondly at his old retainer, who stood by the table, listening to the conversation with a quiet smile. “Foolish is the wise man who cannot heed the wisdom of another,” Win said, and both he and Toshiro nodded emphatically as if this was an old saying. I liked the sound of it; it made sense to me.
“We were convinced that we had to tell people of what I had seen,” Toshiro went on. “I retired from the guard company—it would have been unthinkable to stay—and that did not create much of a stir, since many knew I’d been considering leaving anyway. The Shogun gave me a handsome payment, and Win and I set out to discover what we could about this cursed magic that our Shogun was involved in.”
“We traveled far and learned much,” Win said, “but everywhere we went we found a reluctance to speak about it. Yamato—you may not know—Yamato is an archipelago, a great group of many hundreds of islands all packed close together in the sea. We traveled throughout Yamato and we found pockets of the Kanosuru taint all over the land. Yet everyone we spoke to was in denial about its existence. We found that it took over remote shrines and corrupted the spirits there, but rarely went further. Most people simply stopped going to the shrines. They would shake their heads and say, “No, that has become a bad place,” but no one ever decided to do anything about it.”
Between them, Toshiro and Win told Cara and me how they had traveled away from the archipelago of Yamato, taking ship to the continental coast off to the northwest of their land, looking for more evidence of the Festering and for people who were willing to fight it. They found none, instead finding only denial and people determinedly ignoring the influence. Eventually, they had returned to Yamato.
Back home, they had spoken discreetly to a few trusted people in Otara and in the other nearby towns, and found that things were strange at the top of the power structure. The Shogun was wilful, causing problems for his subordinates and sometimes displaying cruel traits. He sought sorcerers and soothsayers, and some said he communed with evil forces in th
e darkness when other men slept.
Despite these rumors, there was no acceptance that anything should actually be done about it. The few to whom Toshiro directly told his story had refused to believe him. The power structure of Yamato was based on a rigid, immovable code of honor and hierarchy. People would rather die than ever be suspected of openly questioning their superiors. It made my head hurt, and I could see that Cara was as bewildered by this attitude as I was.
In Saxe, men and women alike gained rank and prestige based upon their actions, whether warlike or otherwise. We prized honesty above all things. If a ruler—a warband leader, or even a thane of a town—were suspected of using evil magic, his nearest warriors would be the first to call him out for it. Even a merchant suspected of slicing coins or smuggling would freely admit his scam and take the lashing which was due him as punishment. He would rather cut his tongue out than lie about it. And if he did he did happen to tell a lie, his friends would gladly cut his tongue out for him.
Here in Yamato, by contrast, the goal of their honor code seemed to be to maintain the facade of decency even when what was going on behind the scenes was dark, dangerous, and deadly.
“Eventually,” Toshiro concluded, “we came to realize that there was nothing to be gained by our investigation of the taint. Too many people were beginning to ask questions about us, and word got back to us that the Shogun himself had shown an interest in our questionings and prying. We could not risk being publicly accused of being rumour mongers or trouble stirrers. After all, we had no actual evidence of wrongdoing. And since the Festering did not seem to be active in the landscape anywhere near Otara—we could find no pockets of contamination in the woods or the mountains within sight of the town, no matter how we looked—we decided to retire quietly and see if anything would change.”
“That was some years ago now,” Win said, “some years indeed. And my master did not have such a taste for Otara saké back in those days. Now, he spends his evenings out here or on the balcony above, drinking and thinking, and his sword, his armor, and his naginata gather rust, or would if I did not oil and sharpen them regularly.”