“All about perspective.”
“So what happened?”
“She got the drop on me.”
“How?”
Django took another drink. The tea was already almost gone.
“So what now?” the cat asked.
“Why do you care?”
“I’m a cat, so it could be said that I don’t reliably care about much...”
They walked in silence for a couple of blocks. The sky brightened. Django’s head swam, but his legs were steadier.
“So are you going to let her go?” the cat asked.
“I can’t.”
“So you’re going to kill her?”
“I can’t.”
“A bit of a pickle then, as they say nowadays.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“That is a dangerous path,” the cat said.
Django turned on him with a glare. “Since I can’t get rid of you, what the hell should I call you, anyway?”
The cat shrugged. “How about Cat?”
Django rolled his eyes. “Inventive. So are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What my problem is.”
“I’m fairly certain you already know. You just choose to ignore it.”
“Women?”
“Living in the past.”
“So are you going to tell me the zen story about the two monks?” Django asked.
“I don’t know that one.”
“Two monks are walking along the road. They see a beautiful young woman wanting to cross a stream, but there’s been heavy rain so she can’t get across. One of the monks offers her a ride on his back. They cross the stream. He puts her down. They go their way. A little way down the road, the second monk scolds the first one for allowing that beautiful young girl to touch him. The first one says, ‘I put her down miles ago. Why are you still carrying her?’ That story.”
Cat nodded with thoughtful appreciation. “Seems appropriate.”
“Shut the hell up.” Django clenched his teeth.
Cat sighed. “So much anger.”
“Funny, that’s what my old mentor used to say. But then, being dumped on the street to fend for myself in a country where I don’t speak the language might have put a tiny chip on my shoulder.”
“You sound bitter.”
Django hmphed and shrugged. “Maybe I am.” He hadn’t ever considered that he might be.
“So who was this mentor?”
“The guy who found me and brought me to the Council. After letting me live on the street for a year as some sort of test, they apprenticed me to him. He disappeared.”
“What were the circumstances?”
“No clue. Poof. Gone.”
“Mahō is a dangerous game.”
Django shrugged. Shrugging made his headache pound harder.
They continued toward the train station as the city awakened for another day’s frenzy.
“So what are you going to do?” Cat asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a lie.”
Django sighed sullenly. “What I want to do is save her from the yakuza. Maybe then I could take her to the Council, and we could see about being together. She could be a Hunter-Seeker like me.”
“You think she still has feelings for you.”
“She could have killed me. But she didn’t.”
“What about your orders? Weren’t you supposed to kill her immediately if she refused?”
“I’ll explain it to them.”
“If you refuse, your own life is forfeit.”
“Like I said, I’ll explain it to them.” A realization sneaked through his thickening hangover. “Wait, how do you know that?”
“You keep your secrets. I shall keep mine.”
Django narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure that’s good enough.”
“It’ll have to be.”
He snorted in disgust. “I’m still too drunk to deal with you.”
“Fine,” Cat sniffed. “Perhaps when you’re sober, you’ll be more amenable to polite company.” The cat leaped into a shadow and disappeared.
Django rubbed his eyes. Had that cat just Shadow Blinked?
HE WAS EXHAUSTED, BUT he didn’t dare sleep until he’d seen the Council. The events of the night were not something that could be adequately transmitted via his Brand. Even though the Council’s identities were hidden, being in their presence allowed him a sense of their reactions. Some of them would wish to kill him immediately, most likely the Japanese man. He seemed the most heartless and pragmatic of them all. Some would say Django should have taken her head the moment she refused. But they would vote, and he believed at least some of the Council would tend toward leniency.
What he did send through his Brand was a request for a meeting. He opened his Celestial pool, formed his message, and sent it out in a blast through the planes that the Council would pick up like antennae tuned to the proper frequency.
A few minutes later, the reply echoed through this skull, somewhat unpleasantly: We await your arrival.
With no time to waste, he took a taxi to Sensō-ji. So early in the morning, the temple was not yet open to tourists and supplicants. Only a couple of old men with rubbish brooms and dustpans sweeping up cigarette butts, wrappers, fallen prayer papers, and other detritus puttered about before the morning’s first visitors.
A major facet of being a successful spy, as early practitioners of ninjutsu had developed almost a millennia ago, was to behave as if you belonged wherever you were trying to infiltrate, so between attitude and humans’ natural tendency to look past the incomprehensibly out of place, he was able to walk right up to the vending machine portal and zip into the Council chamber’s anteroom.
He took off his shoes and weapons and waited in seiza until the doors opened. While he knelt, he opened his Root and Celestial pools to clear out as many saké cobwebs from his mind as he could. Delivering his report while in a visibly drunken state would be a serious insult.
But the doors didn’t open. An hour passed, and his legs went from agony to numbness, requiring him to suppress his physical discomfort with mahō. On any other day, he would have had the strength of will and mind to endure it, but not today.
Finally, after an hour of making him wait, the Council signaled they were ready to receive him. The doors opened, and he attempted to stand. His feet were numb and his legs shot through with a hundred needle shuriken, but he managed it slowly and with as much dignity as he could muster, hiding his unsteadiness with slowness. He entered the chamber and prostrated himself.
The Japanese man said, “You wish to report on your mission.”
Django straightened into seiza again and said, “Lords and ladies, I beg your patience. I found her, but we...I did not get the opportunity to make her choices clear to her.”
“Why not?” said the Japanese woman.
“We...we were interrupted. What I discovered, however, is that she is more powerful than most Level Ones, with abilities that require study. She was able to sense my Soul Sight and shut it down. I think she has been cultivating her various pools and studying techniques while avoiding any Awakening.”
“With that kind of power, she must be dealt with,” said the Korean woman.
“As I’m sure the Council is aware,” Django said, “she has been in the clutches of the Black Lotus for a decade. They were likely aware of her inherent potential. So they’ve been trying to cultivate her pools as long as they could, knowing that as soon as she Awakened, we would come for her. Her Third Eye is Awakened, but she also potentially has abilities in Water and Heart. They wanted a powerful Level One witch who could challenge most Hunter-Seekers, someone they could keep on their side.” Most Hunter-Seekers were Level Two or Level Three. Higher levels were increasingly rare.
“Does she work for them willingly, or is she a slave?” said the Japanese woman.
“Irrelevant. Why did you not kill her immediately?” said the Japanese man.
Because they were lovers, you fool. The boy clings to his past.
“I want to hear him say it,” said the Japanese man.
Django’s face heated. “It is true, we were lovers while I was...on the street. I entreat you for one more chance to bring her before you alive. I believe she wishes to be free of the Black Lotus.”
“And you think you can convince her,” said the Korean woman.
“Yes, Exalted Ones,” Django said.
“I think you underestimate the size of the Black Lotus’s hooks,” said the Chinese man. “They will not readily let her go, even more so now that she is a powerful witch.”
“All the more important that she be destroyed,” said the Japanese man. “The chaos even a Level One can cause—”
The Japanese woman interrupted, causing the man to stiffen. “It is probable they have a purpose for her. A plan. They have other unsanctioned, un-Branded mahō users among their ranks, but without Brands, they will never approach real power.”
All of the Council were Level Sevens, each with seven Awakened pools. As far as Django knew, the Council comprised the only Level Sevens in existence.
The Council conferred among themselves, but silence descended around him. He could see from their body language that the discussion was intense, restrained, simmering.
During the wait, he did his best to simply breathe. It was possible he would never walk out of this chamber. He didn’t think they would be so merciless and abrupt, but the Council held their secrets and intentions close. Sitting in seiza returned his legs to the hell of needles and numbness. His stomach was a typhoon of surging acid. Clasping his hands into a meditative position did not stop them from shaking.
Then a voice made him open his eyes. “You have four days. Bring her to us, alive or dead. If you fail, your life shall be forfeit.”
Chapter Eight
WHEN DJANGO AWOKE IN his apartment from his death-like slumber, it was already dark, but at least his head had stopped pounding. He barely remembered the subway ride back to Shinjuku. Fortunately, navigating the train system was something he could manage in his sleep. Between the saké, the mahō, and the lack of sleep, he’d burned himself out. He’d lost valuable time in the process, but he’d have been dead on his feet in any case.
He flung himself out of bed and into a blistering hot bath. In his ofuro, only the bathtub worked. The shower head was broken and squirted water in all directions except on him, so, Japanese style, he scrubbed himself off and then climbed into the steaming tub for a bath. As relaxation seeped through him, he rubbed at a throbbing ache in the forearm where Yuka’s serpent-arm had bitten him.
Then he thought about how when he might go back to the Council’s complex to study and test the limits of his new level before he faced Yuka or any other potential perils again. If he could get faster at Shadow Blinking, he could reliably emerge instantaneously and at will behind a target. Directly behind a target, free to act, was the best place for ninja-warlock to be. Maybe he could increase the number of projectiles he could infuse with Fire, or increase the range of his roving Third Eye, or add senses to it like smell. Maybe he could decrease the time required to siphon off a creature’s mahō essence so that he was vulnerable for a much briefer time, perhaps even to the point of being able to do it as an instantaneous attack. That would be a true Finger of Death for any magical creature. Beyond these, there were no doubt abilities or spells he had never conceived, which were now available to him for study.
When he stepped out into his kitchen amid a cloud of steam, wrapped in a towel, he found Cat sitting on his table licking a paw.
“You’re like an STD,” Django said.
“What, pray tell, is that?” Cat said.
“A sexually transmitted disease.”
Cat fixed him with a look of withering disdain. “You seem to speak from great experience.”
Django got dressed. “So are you going to tell me what you are, or do I have to banish you back to whatever hell you come from?”
“No, but I will tell you where I’ve been today. You might like to know what your friend Yuka has been up to.”
“How do you know?”
“Quite simple. I went back to the club and followed her. Until we choose to be seen, no one notices cats. Plus, we’re natural ninja, whereas humans have to work at it.”
“So tell me.”
“Are you going to be polite?”
“I thought I was being polite,” Django said.
“Not with all this talk of beheading me or banishing me.”
“For all I know, you’re a spy sent by the Black Lotus Clan. I know nothing about you.”
Cat stood up on his hind legs and bowed. “Then allow me to say that I am very much on your side, in so far as cats can be on anyone’s side but their own.”
“What do you want?”
“A bevy of nubile females I can visit when the heat strikes them. A host of children I don’t have to raise. A fat, squirming mouse. A nice sunbeam from time to time.”
“That’s not answering my question.”
“Suffice to say that our aims are aligned for the time being. I want to help you save your friend, and I would prefer that you not meet an untimely demise, as you seem like a decent sort. Is that enough?”
Since Django had little experience reading the subtleties of feline facial expressions, he said, “That’ll do for now. So if you tell me what Yuka was up to today, I’ll open a can of tuna for you.”
Cat dropped to all fours, licking his chops, eyes bright.
“Story first,” Django said.
Cat sighed. “Very well. Have you ever heard of the Yamabushi Scroll?”
“I’ve heard of yamabushi. They were ascetic hermits, early mahō users who lived in the mountains. They were kind of like shamans, or priests of shugendō, a mishmash of Taoism, Buddhism, Shinto, and stuff that predates all those things.”
“Perhaps you don’t know that what you call mahō grew out of shugendō centuries ago. It could be said that yamabushi wrote the first books on mahō.”
Django wanted to yell, And how in the hell does a cat know all this? But he bit his tongue. Nevertheless, it was intriguing. The Annals were vague about mahō’s origins, and the Council was not exactly a font of information.
“Those early books,” Cat went on, “going back to the Heian Era, were compiled in the Yamabushi Scroll. The Scroll was lost during the Warring States Period, sometime during what you gaijin call the 1500s.” The Warring States Period, also known as the Sengoku Era, Era of the Country at War, was a hundred fifty years of unending civil war, fanned into constant flame as samurai lords battled for control, laying waste to entire provinces, killing untold tens of thousands of warriors and peasants alike. It ended in 1603 when Tokugawa Ieyasu destroyed his last significant rivals and established himself as shogun.
It was a little insulting being called a gaijin, a “foreigner,” by a cat, but Django still held his tongue. He’d lived in Japan for a decade, but he would always be an outsider, even though he was half Japanese. On the other hand, this cat understood more about the way the world worked, more subtleties about Japanese culture than any average foreigner, and more than any cat had a right to—such as the fact that they based their calendar on the year of the current emperor’s reign, which started over at Year One whenever a new emperor took the throne. As a culture, the Japanese knew and understood the Gregorian calendar, but most official documents used the native nengō calendar. The more Django learned about Cat, the more intrigued he became. This was not a simple bakeneko.
“When the Yamabushi Scroll was lost,” Cat continued, “mahō lost much of its accumulated wisdom. Witches and warlocks had to rebuild from nothing. They had to write a new book.”
“The Annals.”
Cat made a circle with its front legs, in the Japanese gesture for You got it.
Django said, “S
o what does this have to do with Yuka?”
“About half an hour after you were thrown out of the bar, she left with four men. All of them were simple yakuza thugs, except for one. He looked like a nasty customer, clearly the leader. I followed them to Sakura City, to the old samurai district.”
Sakura City was a quiet country town not far from Tokyo. In various cities and small towns around the country, a handful of residences that dated back to the samurai era still existed, spared the bombing of World War II, some of them still in the hands of families that had once been samurai caste.
“They went to a place that looked like the residence of an old daimyō, someone named Masamoto Hotto. It’s a museum now. There was a caretaker there. They questioned him somewhat harshly. Poor fellow.” The cat shook his head. “He’ll spend some time in a mental hospital if he wakes up.”
“What did they do?”
“The nasty one, the leader, held the caretaker in Shadow Coils like an octopus, then rifled through his memories like he was tossing a room.”
That Cat knew the names of mahō spells and abilities made Django think he was a shapeshifted human, another mahō user perhaps trapped in feline form. The question then became: who was he? What was the nature of the transformation? Was it willing, permanent, or some sort of curse? And why was he helping Django?
“So what does this have to do with the Yamabushi Scroll?” Django asked.
“Because the leader and your friend asked about a scroll. They were looking for it and had information suggesting the Masamoto family of old had possession of it. They acted as if it were hidden somewhere in the house. But they didn’t find it.”
“How did you learn all this without being noticed?”
“Oh, I was indeed noticed. Your friend Yuka was kind enough to pet me. But they were in a hurry.”
“They couldn’t tell you’re a bakeneko?”
“Oh, I made sure they knew, suggesting I had claimed the house as my own. It made them very polite.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill you and harvest your essence. What makes you think the scroll they were after is the Yamabushi Scroll?”
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 7
