by Julie Kagawa
That was very unlikely, I mused. Not if Genno was the same angry, arrogant human I’d encountered four hundred years ago. Though he wasn’t always all-powerful. The empire knew Genno as a talented, terrifyingly evil blood mage, and the history scrolls were full of the atrocities he’d committed as the Master of Demons. There was not much information about the life of a certain farmer, the headman of a village somewhere on the edge of Earth Clan territory. At that point in time, the clans were all at war, tearing each other apart and, as was the case in most wars, the commoners suffered in the cross fire. According to one small part of a history scroll, the headman of the Earth Clan village became aware of an invading Hino army and sent word to the local samurai lord, imploring him to send help. But rather than heed Genno’s request, the Earth lord pulled all his warriors out of the area to fortify his own castle, abandoning the village to the Fire Clan. The Hino army swept through the defenseless village and razed it to the ground, slaughtering nearly everyone there, including Genno’s family.
What happened next wasn’t hard to imagine. The enraged headman swore vengeance upon the samurai caste and the empire that had failed him, and turned to blood magic to exact his revenge. Unlike the fickle magic of the kami-touched, Jigoku was always happy to bestow its dark power to willing mortals, in exchange for the practitioner’s soul. The angry, grieving headman of the Tsuchi village became an extremely powerful blood mage, and the rest of his story became legend.
Four hundred years ago, I thought, swatting away a mosquito the size of my hand that kept buzzing around my face. Genno has had plenty of time to scheme and plot revenge while he’s been in Jigoku; I wonder if his plans to conquer the empire are the same, or if he’s going to try something dif—
My musings were interrupted by a scream somewhere overhead, as something big and black dropped from the branches of a hackberry tree. I leaped back, drawing Kamigoroshi in a heartbeat, as the trio of hags scuttled away and whirled around, raising their claws with menacing hisses.
The bloated, disembodied head of a black horse dangled upside down from the tree branch, mouth gaping to show rotten yellow teeth. There was no body; a sinewy coil of muscle at the base of its neck was all that kept it attached to the tree. Bulging white eyes rolled back to stare at us, as the creature opened its jaws and screamed again, the shrill, wailing sound of a dying animal.
“Wretched sagari!” The blue hag straightened, giving the swinging horse head a disgusted look. “A curse on all your kind, for I cannot think of a more useless creature to exist in the mortal realm.”
I rolled my eyes. Sagari were twisted creatures that came from the spirit of a horse whose body was left to rot where it had died. They were grotesque but harmless; the most they could do was drop down from the tree branches and scream, though some humans had been known to die of fright when they saw one. The bigger concern wasn’t the sagari itself, but the hair-raising shriek it produced that could be heard for miles. On a lonely road it was merely an annoyance; here in the Forest of a Thousand Eyes, it had just announced our presence to the entire wood, and every demon, ghost and yokai that lived here.
With a flash of steel, I severed the pathetic beast’s neck. The head hit the ground with a thump and another ear-piercing wail, before seeming to melt into the dirt and disappear.
Silence descended, and in that heartbeat, I felt the entire forest turn its attention inward and find us in the shadows. I grinned back at it. Come on, then. I’ve gone nearly a week without a fight, and Kamigoroshi is thirsty for blood. What ever murderous horde, vengeful yurei or towering monster you have hiding in this forest, send it at me. I’m dying for a little slaughter.
I turned to the hag sisters, who were gazing warily into the trees; they knew something would be coming, too. “Hope you’re ready for a fight,” I told them. “Everything knows where we are now, and things are going to get interesting.”
The hags looked nervous. True, they were demons themselves and fairly powerful, even appearing in a few legends throughout the mortal world. But within the Forest of a Thousand Eyes were things even demons were afraid of. Old, angry things, driven mad with corruption, who cared nothing for legends and who would challenge even an oni. A thousand years ago I was the strongest demon general of Jigoku, and nothing dared to stand against me, but right now I was the size of a mortal and very edible-looking.
We continued deeper into the forest, which grew even darker and more tangled the farther we went. The leaves themselves began to drip with malevolence, mist coiled around our legs, and the ground turned spongy and disturbingly warm, as if the blood of thousands was still steeped into the very earth. I curled my claws around Kamigoroshi, aware that something was about to happen.
There was a flash of movement in the branches, as something large and bulbous flew at the back of the blue ogress. A human head, pale, disembodied and glowing with sickly red light, swooped through the trees, its gaping mouth showing serrated, sharklike teeth. It shrieked as it came in, and the hag whirled, throwing up her arm to slash it out of the air. But the head clamped its jaws around her forearm, and a second later there was a wet, tearing sound, the smell of blood, and the hag screamed. Fascinated, I watched the head rise into the air, the hag’s spindly arm clutched between fang-filled jaws, streaming blood behind it. Its jaws worked, smacking greedily, and the ogress’s limb vanished down its gullet in a crunching of bones and flesh. Gazing down at its victim, the head’s colorless lips curved in a wide, bloody grin as it licked its teeth and the hag shrieked in rage.
There were more flashes in the trees, and nearly a dozen heads came swarming from the branches. Jaws gaping, they descended on us, teeth like broken bits of steel aiming for whatever flesh they could reach. A woman’s head, trailing a ragged curtain of hair, swooped at me with a howl, and I split the skull down the middle. The head erupted into reddish-black mist and disappeared.
At the first apparition’s death, the rest of the swarm paused and gazed at me in what looked like stunned surprise, then baleful fury. I raised Kamigoroshi and stepped forward.
“What’s the matter?” I taunted, flourishing the bloody sword. “Bit off more than you could chew?” The heads didn’t answer, but the way their lips pulled back to show jagged fangs indicated they understood every word I said.
With earsplitting screeches, the swarm rushed me, sending a jolt of adrenaline through my veins. I snarled a battle cry of my own and leaped forward to meet them. The first monster lunged at my face, jaws unhinged like a serpent, gaping wide to bite off my head. I swept Kamigoroshi between its teeth, splitting the head in two, and immediately turned to slash another darting in from the left. The blade sliced a bloody ribbon down its forehead to its chin, and the apparition reeled away with a scream. Turning, I flung out my empty claw as another head lunged, slamming my palm into the pale forehead and curling my talons into soft, rotting flesh. Dragging it from the air as it growled and shrieked and snapped at my arm, I raised the sword and plunged the blade between the eyes, pinning it to the earth.
As the head wailed and disappeared, the rest of the swarm hesitated again and floated back to glare at me. From the corner of my eye, I could see the hag trio, the red and the green standing protectively over the body of their moaning sister. Their claws were raised, and they appeared to be chanting something.
I glanced at the swarm, which had drawn into a cluster of hovering faces, still glaring at me with sullen hunger and rage. They seemed reluctant to approach Kamigoroshi now, and for a moment, I thought they would turn and flee.
With frenzied hisses and snarls, the swarm rose higher and began to congeal. One head turned and latched on to the side of another’s skull, clinging like a leech, as its victim did the same to a third. As I stared in bemused fascination, the roiling cluster of faces each turned and clamped down on their neighbor, and as they did, their features began to blur and melt together. Eyes shifted and ran into one another, mouths began to slither together like eels, individual faces dissolved like
ink in water, shifted around and became one. Two enormous eyes opened and stared at me with the malice of a dozen souls, and a single huge mouth gaped like a pit, glittering with hundreds of teeth.
“Neat trick.” I smirked, seeing my reflection in its malignant glare as the single gigantic head loomed over me. “Now things have gotten interesting.”
The head roared and fell toward me like a boulder. I dove aside as it crashed into the earth, mouth snapping and chewing as it thrashed about, turning rocks, dirt and tree branches into mulch. I rolled to my feet and sprinted forward, then drove the point of Kamigoroshi into its huge ear, sinking the blade in to the hilt. The head screamed and jerked away, tearing free of Kamigoroshi. There was a ripping, sucking sound as it rose into the air, leaving a normalsize head impaled on the end of my sword.
I snorted and flung the limp head to the ground, where it melted into the earth. “And the tricks keep coming,” I told the giant face, which whirled around to face me. With a smile, I raised Kamigoroshi and prepared for the next attack. “Do you have any more surprises, or is that the last one?”
It lunged with another roar. Planting my feet, I lifted Kamigoroshi over my head and brought it straight down in front of me, splitting the head right down the middle. Blood flew everywhere, as the face tore in half and flew to either side of me.
A pair of smaller heads thumped to the ground near my feet, eyes unseeing, before dissolving into ethereal goop. But the severed halves of the large head turned on me, becoming two separate faces in midair. I had about a second to be surprised, before they both shot forward and clamped their jaws around my arms, sinking jagged fangs into my flesh.
Pain stabbed through my arms. With a snarl, I jerked back, trying to tear my limbs free. But the teeth were hooked like the jaws of a shark and only sank in deeper. One head had its jaws locked around my forearm, preventing me from using my sword. They rose into the air, taking me with them, and began yanking at my arms like a pair of dogs with a bone between them. Fangs ground against bone and sent flares of agony jolting up my arms.
Through the blinding pain and fury, I could sense Tatsumi’s sudden, grim hope that this was it; that the heads would rip me apart, rip us both apart, forcing my spirit back into Kamigoroshi and sending his soul to whatever afterlife awaited him.
You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Tatsumi? Between yanks by the floating heads, I caught glimpses of the hag sisters on the ground below. The two uninjured ones had their arms raised toward us, a sphere of roiling purple flames forming between them. Don’t get too excited; this is far from over.
With a snarl, I drove my horned forehead into the face on my right arm, bashing it between the eyes as hard as I could. There was a resounding crack as our foreheads met, and the jaws around my arm loosened. I ripped the limb free, just as a ball of balefire smashed into the dazed head, engulfing it with a roar. The head screamed, this time in pain and terror. It split apart, a half dozen heads scattering in different directions, but none could escape the consuming flames. One by one they dropped, shrieking and burning, to the earth and dissolved to cinders on the wind.
My sword arm was free, but the head chewing on my other wrist refused to let go, even though we had drifted back to the earth. I turned, raising Kamigoroshi, and plunged it repeatedly into the head still clinging to my arm, stabbing it at several different angles, until the jaws finally loosened. Wounded and bleeding, the head finally tried to spit me out and fly away, but I shoved my hand deeper into its mouth and grabbed the back of its throat, sinking my claws into the slimy, disgusting tongue.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I growled, and sank Kamigoroshi into one of the huge, staring eyes, ripping it sideways through its skull. Blood sprayed me, and a head dislodged, falling to the earth with a thump.
“You started this fight,” I continued, plunging the blade into the other eye, then yanking it down through the chin. The head screamed a choking gurgle, jerking and thrashing wildly, but I kept my grip. “You should’ve known that to start a fight with me means finishing it. So, let’s finish it!”
I raised Kamigoroshi, and slashed it straight through the middle of the bloody face, cleaving the skull in two. With a final shriek, the giant head fell away into four smaller heads, bloody and torn as they scattered around me. By the time they hit the ground, they were nothing but blobs of ethereal muck, melting into the fallen leaves.
I kicked away an oozing head, setting my jaw as pain stabbed up my lacerated muscles. The skin from wrist to elbow on both arms looked as if a pack of frenzied amanjaku had chewed on it. I growled softly, cursing this body’s pathetic healing abilities. In my real form, wounds like this would be gone in a few heartbeats; even severed limbs would regrow in an hour or two. Still, this was half my body; now that I was fully free, my spirit suffused every part of this mortal form, granting it half of my considerable power instead of the fraction the demonslayers had used when I was trapped in the sword. Even if Tatsumi’s body was small and frail, the gashes would be vanishing scars by the end of the day. They weren’t life-threatening, merely annoying, and yet another reason I desperately missed my real form. Humans were so fragile and healed so ridiculously slowly, it was a wonder any of them survived till adulthood.
The blue ogress staggered to her feet, holding the white, jagged nub that had been her other arm. Blood oozed between her talons and her skin had gone rather pale, but her yellow eyes sought mine as she lurched forward with a gasp.
“Lord Hakaimono! You are injured. Are your wounds serious?”
“I’m fine,” I told her, as the other two clustered around as well, barely giving their sister a second glance. For them, lost limbs were not a concern; they were demons and would regrow them eventually. “Hardly even scratches. They’ll be gone by the end of the day.”
“Oh, that’s a relief,” breathed the red hag. “With how weak your body is now, we were afraid an injury like that would be debilitating.”
“Is that so?” I crooned.
The hag’s face went pale. “I didn’t mean—” she began, but it was too late. I stepped forward, reached out and slammed my palm into her face, sinking my claws into her skull. Flexing my fingers, I squeezed until I felt the bone under my talons start to give, then stopped. The ogress squeaked, flailing and waving her hands, while the other two looked on in fearful anticipation.
“Do you feel how weak this body is?” I asked conversationally. “Do you feel safe now, knowing that a mere human cannot crush your skull like an overripe plum and let your brains leak out your ears?”
“Forgive…Lord Hakaimono,” the hag gritted out, as a stream of blood ran from one nostril down her chin. “I meant…no disrespect. I was simply concerned that—”
“Did you think I was in danger of being eaten?” I went on, letting scorn seep into my words. “Or that I was unaware of what we just faced? I have lived among the Shadow Clan for centuries, listening to their ghost stories and tales of the horrors that roam this land. I have heard many stories of the family that was murdered in this forest, how their heads were chopped off by bandits and left to rot in the dirt. Did you not think I would recognize the most infamous ghost that haunts these woods?” I flexed my claws, and the ogress gasped, sinking to her knees before me. “I am Hakaimono, First Oni of Jigoku,” I growled, “and I was feared long before the legend of the Man-eating Head became known throughout the country. I have killed thousands of men to its dozens. Remember that, for next time I might become truly annoyed.”
I released the hag, throwing her back, and she and her sisters immediately fell to their knees and pressed their faces to the dirt. “Forgive us, Lord Hakaimono,” the blue ogress pleaded, even as the blood from her jagged stump continued to drip to the ground. “It has been so long since you have walked Ningen-kai, we forgot that you are truly the greatest of all demons. Forgive our insolence. It will not happen again.”
“This time,” I told them, and turned away, feeling strangely irritated with myself. Not for r
eminding them who I was or putting them in their place; among demons, if you weren’t strong, you were prey. Even the hag sisters, though they called me Hakaimono-sama and recognized my superiority, would turn on me in an instant if they thought I was weak. If one of them had spoken to me like that when I was in my real form, I would have done more than threaten; I would have torn the offender into little pieces and made the other two watch.
But I hadn’t, and that was the problem. There were three ogresses; killing one to prove a point was what should have happened. I should have crushed the hag’s skull between my fingers and let her brains leak over the ground, as I had threatened. I should have made certain the survivors knew that Hakaimono was someone to be obeyed, feared and never questioned. And yet, I’d let her live.
I had shown mercy.
Irritation flared into disgust, and I clenched a fist, barely stopping myself from spinning around and driving my claws through the back of the hag’s skull, after all. I was not myself, I realized. I’d spent too many years in the sword, in the minds of weak-willed humans with their feeble emotions polluting me like Jigoku’s corruption poisoned the souls of men. I had once been the most feared, ruthless oni lord with no concept of human feelings, but for the past four hundred years, I had been continuously exposed to repulsive sentiments like honor, mercy, kindness and love. And now that frailty was seeping into my consciousness.
Resolve settled over me like a grim cloak. There could be no hint of weakness in Genno’s court, no shadow of doubt or hesitation. If I was going to make the self-proclaimed Master of Demons do what I wanted, I would have to be just as ruthless, if not more so, than him.
We continued through the forest, which had grown eerily still after the battle with the Man-eating Heads, as if the rest of the inhabitants were in hiding. Perhaps they had decided that any creature that could slay the most dangerous ghost to haunt the Forest of a Thousand Eyes was something best left alone. But as night fell and the woods grew darker and even more tangled, I began to see movement in the trees; pale figures sliding through the undergrowth. A woman in a bloody white dress, watching me between tree trunks, a samurai walking behind us on the narrow trail, the front of his armor smashed open to reveal a gaping, bloody hole. They floated or flickered around us, a host of yurei and restless spirits; mortals that had fallen in the tainted forest and were now trapped, unable to find their way to Meido, or wherever human souls ended up. Most of them seemed confused, grief stricken, but one ghost—the bloody woman in white—stalked us through the trees, winking in and out of existence, until I finally drew Kamigoroshi in annoyance. The yurei fled as the blade’s cold purple light washed into the trees, and did not bother us again.
