Blade's Edge, page 10
part #1 of Chronicles of Gensokai Series
But today Mishi couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by her armor, or Tenshi’s presence, or even by the jo that had struck her back and which her katana was now struggling to beat back. She had to maintain her center, hold on to all the threads that wove the room together. She must not lose track of Sachi, even though Ami was the closest threat. She had to be present. She had to be a part of this space as she had never been before, for to lose one thread was to allow the entire room to unravel. So she gasped breath back into her lungs, parried Ami’s jo attacks with her katana, and waited for the next arrow to come.
Another sai came first, but that was alright because she heard it cut the air before her, felt its vibrations in the fabric of the room, and ducked, causing it to impact Ami’s chest plate instead of her own helmet.
Mishi didn’t take the time to appreciate the fall of one of her opponents; there was no time to take. There was only now. As Ami collapsed, Mishi stood and turned to face the arrow that had been aimed at her back. She brought her sword in front of her, and the arrow fell in two pieces. She dropped to the ground almost as quickly as the now-severed arrow, and a second arrow thunked into the wall behind her. She rolled to one side, just missing the shuriken that would have skimmed her face, and lunged to her feet. Without conscious thought, she charged Kuma-sensei, who dropped the shuriken he was preparing to throw and reached for his third sai. That was all the time that Mishi needed. Before Kuma-sensei’s hand was even on the grip of his three pronged blade, Mishi had cut a deep groove across his chest plate.
Even as Kuma-sensei collapsed to the floor in mock death, Mishi was rolling away from where she had just been standing, as yet another arrow embedded itself in the wall. Mishi kept her breathing deep but even. It had taken her cycles to be able to do so while sparring at full speed, but Kuma-sensei had insisted and Mishi finally understood why.
Inhale, sense all the threads in the room; exhale, clear your mind of everything but the present.
She ran flat out and ducked into a forward roll on her third stride. As Mishi rolled, Sachi loosed another arrow, impaling the wall behind Mishi. Without hesitation, Mishi stood from her roll and continued her forward charge towards the far corner of the room, where Sachi was poised with her bow. Until that moment, it seemed she had been shooting only when she was likely to catch Mishi unaware. Now Sachi fired in rapid succession. Mishi assumed that Sachi’s single goal was to take her down before she could close the distance between them.
Mishi’s movements were calm and centered, but to an onlooker they would have seemed chaotic at best. She ran forward, then rolled to the side, stood up and rolled forward, ran sideways, jumped to touch the ceiling, and then rolled sideways again. She didn’t make much forward headway except in fits and spurts, but Sachi’s arrows kept missing. Finally she stood before Sachi with her katana at the other girl’s neck and the arrow that Sachi had nocked dangled on the string.
“Well done, Mishi-san,” came Kuma sensei’s voice from his place on the floor. “You are ready.”
“Ready?” Mishi asked. She hadn’t thought this was a test, just a vigorous exercise.
“Ready for your first mission as a Kisōshi of rank,” he replied.
MISHI KNELT IN front of the rack of weapons that covered the wall from ceiling to tatami and tried to ease the bruising on her ribs from yesterday’s test by shifting her weight slightly. She winced, even as she smoothed a thin layer of choji oil over the length of the blade in her lap. Normally, she took comfort in the repetitive motions of applying the clove scented oil to the steel and carefully checking for any sign of rust. Today, her muscles objected to every wiping motion, her ribs protested her requests to remain upright, and her mind cried out for a chance to rest and focus on the mysterious mission that she would be asked to complete.
“Ah, Mishiranu-san!” said a voice from the other side of the room, making her fingers twitch in agitation. Luckily, her grip on the blade never faltered, and she did not sacrifice any digits to the oiling of the school’s katana.
“I’m glad to find you in here,” the voice continued, as it came closer. Mishi didn’t need to look up to know who was addressing her, or to know that she’d rather remove one of her own fingers with the blade in her hand than continue the conversation.
“The weapons are always at their finest when you have treated them,” Katagi said, finally stepping into view. Mishi could no longer ignore the boy without giving offense, so she looked up and bowed her head slightly in deference. The thing she hated most about her guise as a servant was the need to defer to all of the male Kisōshi in training that Kuma-sensei instructed during the day. Having just passed her first test of rank, Mishi was Hebi-kyū and consequently outranked Katagi, who would be leaving in a few days to test before the Rōjū for his first ranking even though he was a cycle her senior. Yet no one outside of Ami, Sachi, Kuma-sensei, and Tenshi was allowed to know that she was a Kisōshi at all, let alone a trained one, so she had to treat this boy with the same amount of deference that she would a Kisōshi who outranked her. It wouldn’t bother her at all if she didn’t find his incessant chatter so irritating.
“Where did you learn to treat blades so well?” he asked, looking at her eagerly even as she tried to continue cleaning the blade in peace. “Is your father a Kisōshi?” he prodded.
Mishi did her best to contain her emotions; allowing her kisō to slip in the presence of another Kisōshi would be a stupid give away, one she would be in no danger of if she weren’t so exhausted from her increased training over the past few mooncycles.
Mishi briefly considered telling the boy the truth. Yes, my father was a Kisōshi, and so was my mother for that matter, and I am one too, which is why I am so good at treating weapons. I value them as the tools that may someday save my life. But that, of course, was not something she could tell him, and, in truth, she rather hoped the boy would just go away and leave her to her chores.
“I never knew my parents, Katagi-san. They died right after I was born.” She hoped that would shut him up. She was too tired to deal with his usual nattering, the pain in her ribs, and the wall of weapons she had yet to clean, all at once.
“I’m so sorry, Mishiranu-san, I didn’t know,” Katagi said, as he folded himself to the floor beside her. His voice sounded sincere, which made Mishi flinch with a tiny bit of guilt. She hadn’t meant to make the boy feel bad, only to make him stop bothering her. Unable to use kisō to scan him without his noticing, she simply looked at his face.
His golden eyes, set above high cheekbones and a narrow face, told the same story that his voice had. They were drawn together with concern, and his mouth was set in a soft line. For the first time, Mishi thought she saw why Sachi constantly tittered about Katagi being handsome, a fact that was generally repressed in her mind by his incessant need to let words dribble out of his mouth.
“It’s alright,” she said, refocusing on the blade before her. “How could you know? I never told you.” She regretted the words as soon as she said them. She’d felt guilty for making the boy feel bad about her parents and then her resolve had been weakened by a moment of finding him handsome. Now that she’d said that, he was bound to try to keep talking to her. She glanced at him briefly out of the corner of her eye and was dismayed to find him dressed for weapons practice. A sure sign that he would remain here for a full candle’s worth of practice at least.
“Do you know anything about them? Your parents, that is?” he asked, his face still emanating genuine interest.
Oh dear. This wasn’t a safe topic at all. What Mishi knew about her parents was not information she could readily share with anyone. Why yes, I know that they met here at this school, where they both trained to be Kisōshi even though female Kisōshi aren’t supposed to exist, and then they had me and had to run for their lives when they refused to let the Rōjū kill me just for being born a girl with senkisō! That was not the kind of information she could share with… well, anyone who didn’t already know it. She hated lying, especially to another Kisōshi, but she wasn’t sure what else to say. She decided on a lesser form of the truth.
“Not much, really. Kuma-sensei knew them both and was kind enough to take me in when he found me at an orphanage eight cycles after they died. He’s told me what little I know.”
“Iya! How horrible! Does he know how they died?”
Mishi blanched. Now there was a question she certainly couldn’t answer honestly. Why was the boy so nosy? Did he have no sense of respect?
Katagi must have sensed her discomfort, or realized his blunder, for he very quickly began to reverse course. “I’m sorry, Mishiranu-san. What a terrible question for me to ask. It’s none of my business and I doubt you’d want to talk about it even if—”
“They were killed,” Mishi said quietly, for some reason wanting to tell him as close to the truth as she could manage, now that he had so earnestly retracted the question. “They were killed by bandits.”
It was true, after a fashion. It was certainly what their deaths had been made to look like, according to what Kuma-sensei had told her, and anyone who would try to kill two new parents and their infant daughter simply because she was born a Kisōshi certainly met Mishi’s definition of the term bandit.
“Iyada,” Katagi said, as the blood left his face. “I should never have asked. It was completely thoughtless of me to—”
“Are you never quiet?” Mishi asked, as she sheathed the katana she’d finished cleaning and replaced it on the wall in front of her, grabbing the next one before returning to her place on the floor. She wasn’t sure if she was upset with Katagi for his chatter, or herself for having revealed personal information to him. Probably both, she decided.
Katagi simply looked at her, his eyebrows high on his pale forehead, reaching towards the hair he kept pulled back in the standard Kisōshi knot. Mishi couldn’t help it, she laughed.
“Is that all it takes to silence you? I wish I’d known that cycles ago.” She unsheathed the katana she had retrieved from the wall and began her methodical application of the choji oil that would protect it from rust. After a few moments of blissful silence, Mishi looked up at the boy who was supposed to be a man, and sighed as she took in the fallen expression that lowered all of his features.
“I’m sorry, Katagi-san,” she said quietly, as she continued her work. “I’m exhausted from…” she paused as she realized that she couldn’t tell him why she was exhausted. “Well, I’m exhausted,” she continued. “And I shouldn’t take my frustration out on you. You were curious. That’s fine. I have a strange past, it matches my strange eyes, and I should never be surprised that I’m a curiosity to the people around me.”
She fell quiet as she continued her work on this new blade and she almost didn’t hear Katagi when he next spoke.
“They’re beautiful,” he said, so softly that at first Mishi thought the sound was only in her mind.
“What?” she asked, before her mind processed what her ears had heard.
“Your eyes. They’re not strange; they’re beautiful.” Katagi stood as he spoke, and then walked out of the room.
A heartbeat later Tenshi bowed her way into the room and stood before Mishi.
“Mishi-san,” the older woman said, as Mishi tried to blink her way back to a reality in which handsome boys didn’t tell her she had beautiful eyes and then walk away. “Kuma-sensei wishes to speak with you.”
Taka ran a hand protectively over the pouch tucked into her obi, and brought forward the memory of Kiko telling her what province she had lived in before she had come to the Josankō. It was an affirmation more than anything; Taka had spent most of the past five seasoncycles trying to find a hall of records in Hokushin province that actually kept records for the entire area. The fact that there were ten towns that claimed to be the capital hadn’t helped matters at all, and none of the seven she’d yet searched had possessed even local records of who was sent to the Josankō. The fact that she could only remain in any town for a handful of days before she raised curiosity to dangerous levels didn’t help matters either. Unattached women who were not seeking employment drew attention that Taka neither wanted nor tolerated.
Taka had begun to doubt that anyone kept the kind of records she was looking for at all, until she’d overheard two clerks in a town a few days south of this one decrying how slow the provincial record keepers in Kengaishi were when it came to forwarding important documents. She hadn’t had a chance to follow them, caught up as she had been in selling a brace of hares to a market shopper, but she’d made a mental note of the name of the town and beseeched the Kami that her eighth try would prove lucky.
So she was full of hope, as she used the tiny steel shim that she pulled from her obi to slide between the doors of the records hall and lift the latch on the other side.
~~~
It took her nearly a full candle’s burn to find the records she was looking for. The Kengaishi hall of records was a maze of random stacks of scrolls and books woven through with the smell of musty parchment and drying ink. She found it easy to imagine that it took the people who worked here long enough to find anything, let alone copy and send it, that the clerks in Aokame complained. However, after a rather disorienting search in a darkened room with little interpretable organization, she finally came across something promising.
Josankō intake rosters Rōjū 1100 - 1115
Taka sighed. Fifteen cycles of names to search through, and she had to hope that Kiko had included her given name along with her family name. Still, hope sparked within her as she opened the scroll and pulled her small, shaded lantern closer. Was she truly this close to an answer?
~~~
Taka had already had to refill her lantern once from the small skein of oil she kept tucked within the sleeve of her kimono, but she was sure she was getting close to the entries that should contain Kiko’s name. She’d brightened considerably when she saw that the majority of the entries contained the name of the town the girl was from. Yet, she was mystified by the sheer volume of names she encountered. She’d attended the Josankō, and she could attest that there weren’t even half as many girls there as this document suggested. Where had the rest of them gone?
She didn’t have long to consider the matter before she heard the quiet swish of a shoji screen moving down the hall. Was someone here? Iya! She had no excuse to be here that anyone would believe. She couldn’t take the scroll with her, as that would ignite curiosity she couldn’t afford. She scoured the page before her. She simply had to hope she could find the entry before—
There! She restrained herself from cheering aloud, as she heard the slow shuffle of cautious feet moving towards her.
Zōkame, Kiko-san Rōjū 1111 - 10 seasoncycles of age - Shikazenshi, Hokushin Province
Shikazenshi! Zōkame! Two answers in a single scroll, and all before whoever had shuffled down the hallway—
“What are you doing here?” asked a cold voice from the other side of the room.
Kami-curse it! How had he gotten here so quickly? His steps had sounded like the shuffle of an old man, and Taka had expected to have more time before he reached her.
Taka looked up, and was relieved to see that the man who confronted her was wearing the kimono of a clerk and not the uwagi and hakama of a Kisōshi. In addition, the fool had crossed the room and now stood on the other side of the desk from where she was. If she could find a way to distract him, the path to the doorway was clear.
“I’m looking for an old friend,” she said, the truth making an oddly convenient lie.
“And you expected to find her hidden in the stacks of our scrolls?” the man sneered.
“She agreed to meet me here,” Taka replied, leaving truth completely behind.
“Oh? And why would she do that in the middle of the night, I wonder?”
“She said she wanted to surprise her supervisor…” Taka hedged, hoping the hall of records had at least one female employee.
“She works here?” the man asked.
Taka nodded. “I’m worried though, she’s supposed to have been here by now.”
The man scowled at her. “I don’t know what you and your friend are up to, girl, but I’ve no choice but to bring in the nearest Kisōshi. He’ll handle this matter, and woe to you if you’ve been lying—”
Taka waved to the empty air behind the man. “Oh, there you are! What took you so long?” she said, with an excited smile plastered to her face.
The man turned around, just as she’d hoped, and she flipped the desk over in his general direction. She didn’t think it would do much to stall him, but she hoped it would create a sufficient mess that they wouldn’t be sure which scroll she’d been examining before her hurried exit. Even as the scrolls and inkwells from the desk were still hitting the floor, Taka was out the door and headed down the corridor to the main exit.
“Stop, THIEF!” the clerk shouted behind her.
Kami-curse him! She hadn’t stolen a thing, only read some words and made a bit of mess, but she’d never have a chance to explain any of that if anyone heard the clerk’s cries. Now she’d have to be extra cautious if she wanted to exit the town unseen. She slid back the wooden door that she’d first unlocked to break into the hall and flew down the steps before her, stopping only when she slammed into a wall that shouldn’t have been there.
“What have we here?” asked the voice attached to the massive chest that she’d just bounced off of. Unfortunately, she hadn’t ducked away before the hands attached to said chest had grabbed her arms.
“Did I hear someone call thief?” the voice asked. Taka kept her head down and stared at the two hilts sticking out of the man’s obi. She cursed silently. If she got caught now, everything was over. She’d be killed for thievery, or killed for the presence of her name on a wanted poster that had circulated Gensokai for the last five cycles, but she would die, certainly, if she didn’t get away from this Kisōshi.
