A Mortal Song

by Megan Crewe

  I walked to the open door and stepped onto the narrow platform outside. My breath caught at the view. I hadn’t realized Mt. Fuji would be visible from here. Pine trees towered over the shrine grounds on three sides, but to the south the land sloped away, and the familiar craggy peak rose between the two nearer mountains.

  A mournful shudder seemed to pass through the air, from it to me. I’m coming back, I promised, my fingers curling into my palms. Just hold on.

  Chiyo’s voice carried across the wide yard in front of the building. “Yes, I get it; I know the whole plan.” I turned to see her and Takeo standing by the torii, a plain structure of unstained cypress wood. The tall pillars of the gate and curved lintel fixed over them were designed to soothe the spirit of anyone walking through, but it didn’t appear to have had an effect on Chiyo. Her hair had frizzed overnight, her bangs puffing from her forehead in a lavender cloud. She was twisting the rest back into her usual ponytail. An energetic flush colored her cheeks.

  “I know I can’t hang out in the city anymore,” she continued. “Last night was awful. Believe me, I’m looking forward to taking down a whole world of ghosts now. We just need to go back quickly and get Haru, and then we can start.”

  Takeo shook his head. “I understand that he’s very important to you,” he said. “But it’s too dangerous for any of us to go back to Tokyo so soon, even briefly. Our enemies know we were there—they’ll be combing the streets for us.”

  “But we agreed that Haru would come with me, remember?” Chiyo said. “I don’t want him to think I’ve run off on him. And he’ll be a lot of help. He’s the top competitor in our school’s kendo club, and he practices with real swords too—he could teach those spooks a lesson.” She sliced the air with her arm.

  “The one destined to save the mountain is you, not him,” Takeo said. He was speaking calmly, but I could hear his voice becoming ever so slightly strained. “We can’t risk losing you for the little assistance he may give us.”

  “You’re just not going to listen, are you?” Chiyo let out a huff of breath and gave Takeo a fiercely cheerful smile. “I’m going to go see if those kami ladies who’re looking after the shrine have any way for me to call him and my parents, but this conversation is not over.”

  She marched off around the side of the building. As I watched her go, a thread of uneasiness wound around my stomach.

  The city had already been swarming with ghosts last night. The ones we’d encountered must have been in Tokyo when the spell had started—otherwise, even with Omori’s demonic powers strengthening them, they couldn’t have followed the light to Chiyo’s neighborhood that fast. Had they somehow known the girl they wanted was in Tokyo? Or did Omori have so many ghosts at his command that he could send thousands of them all across the country while holding Fuji’s palace?

  How had he known to target her at all?

  Takeo sighed. I walked down the wooden steps to join him, noticing the rot creeping through the cracks on the railing. Grit and pine needles scattered the granite tiles between the four stone lanterns in the courtyard. This was another shrine humans no longer cared much for.

  “Chiyo looks as if she’s recovered from last night’s attack,” I said, but Takeo’s grave expression didn’t budge.

  “She is well,” he agreed. “I just don’t see—” He grimaced, raking his fingers through his unbound hair. “Why can’t she understand how urgent this situation is?”

  Only five days left until Obon. His frustration echoed through me. But that was the problem: Chiyo didn’t feel it. “We grew up knowing the responsibilities of being kami,” I said. “We grew up knowing kami were real. She didn’t. But I think she’s starting to see.”

  “She is,” he said. “And we have put a lot on her. Of course it’s difficult for her. But I don’t see why she has to seem so... happy all the time.”

  I looked up at his solemn face and had to clamp my lips together to stop an unexpected smile. Apparently the greatest challenge to Takeo’s steadfastness was one cheerful girl.

  Well, I could be the strong one when he needed that, couldn’t I?

  “We need to get her to Sage Rin,” Takeo went on. “Perhaps she can get through to Chiyo. But I worry the demon’s magic will reach us again.”

  “Do you have any idea how Omori knew about her—or what sort of spell could have affected her like that?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking on it,” he said. “The best answer I can come up with is... There’s a sort of magic that allows a connection between two things. One might build a figure with a specific person in mind, using a part of them in its construction: a hair or a fingernail, or an item they had a strong emotional connection to. Blood sings to blood, heart to heart, spirit to spirit. If done correctly, the sorcerer could act on the figure and have the effects travel to their victim.”

  “But Omori shouldn’t have had anything like that of Chiyo’s,” I said. “He shouldn’t even have known she exists.”

  “No,” Takeo agreed. His jaw worked. “And if it were as small a connection as that magic allows, Chiyo’s instinctive defenses should have been enough to block it. So I suspect the demon drew on deeper ties of blood, heart, and spirit.”

  His tone turned my skin cold. “What do you mean?”

  “Any kami in the palace could reveal that the daughter of their leaders must have escaped—the demon would only have to break one. Even without knowing of the prophecy, this Omori would suspect that girl would try to fight back. He must hope to disable her before she has the chance. He meant to get at you. But to do so, in a way to create such an immense effect, I think he must have acted on one of your—her—parents. He... must have set one of them on fire and cast that fire into their daughter’s body. So it hit Chiyo.”

  My throat closed up with a sudden swell of nausea. If he’d put Mother or Father through such torment— If he was still doing it, trying to strike out at Chiyo again— How long could they survive, even as strong as they were?

  I drew in a breath, trying to bury that horror under my determination. If we were going to get to them in time, there was still so much we had to do.

  “Then we need to start training Chiyo right away,” I said, managing to keep my voice from quavering. “We wanted to teach her the basics before we started traveling anyway. We’ll begin right away and go to Sage Rin when she can defend herself.”

  “That requires we get Chiyo to agree to the training at all without her young man here,” Takeo said.

  I reached for his hand. “She’ll come around,” I said. “It’s been less than a day.”

  His fingers tightened around mine. Ki hummed between us, warm with gratitude. And I felt what he was too loyal to my parents to say out loud.

  He wished their true daughter, the girl of the prophecy, was me.

  The shrine platform creaked behind us. I started, dropping Takeo’s hand.

  Keiji was watching us from the doorway, his shaggy hair sticking up in tufts across his head. He gave me a crooked grin.

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything like breakfast here?” he said.

  Takeo paused. “I apologize,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that. We kami don’t need to eat as you do. I’ll see if the shrine guardians can help.”

  “Don’t worry about it then—I packed supplies just in case,” Keiji said. He bobbed his head and ambled off. “Good morning, Ikeda!” he called as he disappeared behind the building, and a moment later Chiyo strode into view. The shrine’s kami trailed behind her: two willowy figures with waterfalls of pale hair.

  “So,” Chiyo said brightly, halting in front of Takeo. “About Haru. There’s no way for me to even talk to him from here.”

  I didn’t want her to get any more caught up in that argument. “Chiyo,” I said, stepping forward, “even if we did go back for him, you’d need to be able to fight off our enemies first—you know that too. Why don’t you let us begin the essential parts of your training, and after that’s finished, we can deci
de what our best next step is?”

  Chiyo considered me. Then she clapped her hands together. “All right,” she said. “Fine. Teach me about this ‘ki’ and how to use it to stop demons from messing with me, and then I’ll take down anyone who gets in my way.”

  We arranged ourselves in the middle of the courtyard. Takeo let me take the lead. I supposed my mastery of ki work meant something, even if the energy I’d moved through myself had come from the mountain. Now, Midori settled close on my head with a tickle of curiosity. I wondered if she even remembered the long ago time when she hadn’t been fully competent in her powers.

  I thought back to my earliest lessons with Father, his rumbling voice filling the training room as he guided me. Then a different image wavered into my mind: the ghosts stabbing him with their knives the way they had the palace guards. I swallowed thickly. It was by training Chiyo that we would save him and everyone else.

  As much as I wanted to hurry, I knew if I tried to rush Chiyo and she tensed up, her progress would take longer. I reached inside me for the calm, reassuring tone my teachers had taken with me. “The most important step is being able to feel your ki,” I told her. “Once you have a sense of it inside you, all you have to do is learn to control it.”

  “What does it feel like?” Chiyo asked, peering down at herself.

  “Like a sort of energy, rippling through you... It’s almost like standing under the sun with its beams raining down on you, warm and bright, except the glow is inside you. Close your eyes while you’re looking for it,” I suggested. “That makes it easier to focus.”

  Chiyo lowered her head. After a few seconds, the faint shimmer that never quite left her body quivered and intensified, and then contracted into her skin. “I think I’ve got it!” she said. “Wow. That’s—that’s so cool. So weird I never noticed it before.” She opened her eyes. “You know, I never really got cold in the winter, even when I’d forget my hat or gloves. I bet this is why.”

  She had so much ki radiating through her, of course she’d find it quickly. “Good,” I said. “Now let’s try one of the basic practice exercises.”

  “What about going invisible? You’ve got to teach me that.”

  “Shifting out of our corporeal state takes a lot of concentration until you get used to it,” Takeo said. “It’s better if you learn how to manipulate your energy in simpler ways first.”

  “Fine, fine,” Chiyo said. “Lead on!”

  “Let’s try exchanging ki with direct contact,” I said, taking her hand. “Pick a feeling or an image you want to share with me. Picture it flowing with your ki from your mind through your body to my hand. It might take a while, so don’t—”

  A jolt of pain shot up my arm and blasted into my chest so violently it rocked me on my feet. My fingers slipped from Chiyo’s. I gasped, clutching my shoulder. The burning aftershock seared through me and slowly died away.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” Chiyo was saying. “I was getting ready to send this gorgeous flower I saw by the fountain, but all of a sudden I remembered last night, and everything got mixed up.”

  The pain had left a tingling in my palm. I drew in a breath, gathering myself.

  She had so much power. I’d never felt anyone’s ki that intensely before.

  Well, she was going to need that power to be able to crush a demon and an entire army of ghosts.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “That’s the control part you need to work on. Want to try again?”

  “If you want me to—” Takeo began, and I shook my head quickly. Was he already doubting me?

  Had he seen how completely I’d drained myself last night?

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It just startled me.”

  I expected control to take a lot of trial and error, and braced myself as Chiyo and I linked hands again. But her mistake seemed to have made her determined to avoid any others. She sent me a shaky image of her gorgeous flower. Then she shared the taste of her favorite ice cream, the jangling harmonies and sweep of lights at a stadium concert, the rush she got on the school track just before she crossed the finish line. With each attempt, the impressions became clearer, until I was almost there with her in her memory.

  “You’re a runner?” I asked, letting the last sensation linger. The exhilaration of it felt almost like dancing.

  “Sprinter for the track team since my first year of junior high,” Chiyo said, giving me a thumbs up. “So the next time we’ve got a pack of ghosts chasing us, as long as I don’t have some crazy magic burning me up, you can be sure they won’t catch me.”

  “You may have inherited that talent from your mother,” Takeo remarked. “Her affinities to air and water make her the swiftest of any on her feet.”

  “So you two know my... my kami parents?” Chiyo said. She looked down at her hands, clenching and relaxing her fingers. “I guess everyone does, if they’re the leaders of all the kami. Is everyone going to be okay about me just showing up out of nowhere?”

  “You’ll have saved them,” I said. “And they would welcome you anyway, once they hear the story.”

  “What else do they do?” Chiyo asked, raising her head, her expression avid now. “My parents. Other than whatever rulership things, I mean. Do they—”

  My chest tightened so sharply for a second I couldn’t breathe. “We can talk about that later,” I said, cutting her off. “Right now we have to focus on the training—to make sure they’re still alive for you to save.”

  The glint in Chiyo’s eyes wavered. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, of course.” She set her hands on her hips. “What’s next?”

  I paused, willing my scattered emotions aside. “Why don’t we try sending without touching?” I said. With a thread of thanks to Midori, I held out my hand and let a thin, silvery ribbon rise from it into the air. It swayed gently to a melody I felt more than heard.

  “You send your energy out, just like you sent it to me,” I said. “But because there isn’t a place right there for it to go, you have to concentrate on shaping it and holding it in that shape. If you stop paying attention...” I let my mind go blank, and the ribbon disintegrated.

  Chiyo stared down at her hands, her brow knitting. Then she laughed. A tiny, swirling ball of ki danced in her grasp. She drew her palms apart, stretching the ball larger, and tossed it up in the air. “This isn’t so hard. It feels like—like I could have done it all along, but I forgot I knew how. Hey, I bet you I could—”

  The edges of her body glimmered. “Chiyo!” I said, but my alarm was unnecessary. Her body faded into a gleaming afterimage of itself. She blinked, and then grinned at me, even more luminescent than usual in her ethereal state.

  My mouth had dropped open. It had taken me hours to learn how to do that, with Mother and Father explaining and demonstrating patiently, after I’d spent months mastering other more basic skills. And they’d told me I’d picked it up faster than most did. Chiyo had managed it in a matter of minutes.

  “Most of the ghosts were like this when they attacked us, weren’t they?” Chiyo said. “How do you fight people you can’t really touch? Can they hurt you?” She waved her ethereal arm through a stone lantern.

  “Ki can touch ki, just as matter can touch matter,” Takeo said. “Whether you keep your physical body or shift to fight with energy only, you can direct your ki to affect them, and they can twist yours with theirs. You have to concentrate more, and it feels a little different, but many of the techniques are the same. The ghosts prefer to stay in their natural state because it requires a great deal of energy for them to form physical bodies. But their ki is more limited than ours, so even if we’re fighting them on their own plane, we usually have the advantage.”

  “That makes sense,” Chiyo said. She jabbed at the air with a crackle of ki. “Can we try that now?”

  “Why don’t you take over for a bit?” I said to Takeo. “Combat is more your area than mine.”

  He was a good teacher—I’d learned most of wh
at I knew of martial arts from him. And if Chiyo touched me again, our energy mingling, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep her from seeing the mess of emotions now churning inside me.

  She was born for this, I reminded myself as I climbed onto the shrine building’s platform. She had nearly two decades of suppressed ki clamoring to be put to use. We’d have no chance at all of saving Mt. Fuji if she couldn’t handle it so well. And no matter how strong she was, I could still help, as long as I had Midori with me.

  I knew all of that, but my stubborn human feelings wouldn’t settle. They whipped around inside me like branches in a storm. I leaned against the worn wooden railing, wrestling with myself as I watched Takeo teach Chiyo how to fight.

  She was picking that up quickly too, maybe because she was already an athlete. She moved easily and precisely, and when Takeo demonstrated how to angle her hand or position her stance, she always did it just as he’d shown her from then on. She was still grinning, but there was an intensity in her expression that made her beautiful.

  They looked right together, I realized as Takeo cupped her elbow and explained how to use ki to more effectively escape an attacker’s grasp. The smile he flashed at her when she successfully broke from his hold, as warm as those I’d seen so often directed at me, made my gut clench.

  He wasn’t frustrated with her now. He was impressed. Wouldn’t that make the perfect story: the palace guard falling in love with the girl he’d been tasked to bring home?

  Footsteps tapped across the platform toward me. Keiji threw his arms over the railing and looked into the courtyard. After a minute, he rolled his gaze toward me.

  “Are you just lost in thought, or is something actually happening down there?”

  “They’re sparring,” I said. How strange it must be to see only the empty yard. As I would have, if not for Midori.

  “Do you want to watch?” I asked, offering my hand. Keiji glanced at it, at me, and then took it.

  His skin was smooth and dry against mine. I sent him a wisp of ki so light I doubted he’d even feel it, but enough to give him a hint of kami sight. My own vision shivered, and the forms in the courtyard dimmed slightly, but I resisted the urge to draw more energy from my dragonfly friend. She was giving me so much of herself already.