Pilgrim 4, p.12
Pilgrim 4, page 12
“Stupid, but makes sense,” Jelmay said as he too ate a biscuit. “Do I detect honey in these?”
“Yes, you do, and it isn’t easy to get either. It takes a team of villagers to get the honey in an area to the north of here. I generally have to get special permission for them to enter it as well. The yokai can be a little protective between here and the next village. Or at least, that’s what I’ve told the villagers. There is honey closer to here, but the good stuff is further out.”
“Smart.”
“Heh. I’ve been called worse.”
“So sweet, so savory. Pilgrim, you have to try one.” Jelmay grabbed one of the biscuits and handed it to him. Danzen ate it even though he wasn’t hungry, noticing that it not only had a hint of sweetness to it, but also a touch of an herb that he hadn’t tasted before.
“Right? Right?” Jelmay asked once he didn’t comment on the biscuit. “I could eat a whole basket of these.”
“I have already eaten a basket!” Elder Bahjee shouted, food flying out of his mouth.
Danzen tilted to the side to avoid the crumbs, and offered the elder a short nod.
“Look at you, Pilgrim,” Jelmay said. “Always a man with his mind on the mission, even when he’s eating. A man who looks like you could use some sleep…”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You could always go in and curl up with the fox. I’m sure she’s warm by now.”
Danzen didn’t take the bait.
“Tell us everything,” Elder Bahjee implored, “every detail of what happened last night. I’ve only heard bits from our mutual acquaintance here,” he said, gesturing toward Jelmay, “and I’m not one to trust the bakeneko’s story. Ho! I’d be a fool to do something like that.”
Jelmay laughed so hard that he nearly started choking. “Same here. Bawa, are you going to sleep through breakfast or finish that bit of fish on your plate? Asking for a friend.”
When Bawa didn’t reply, Jelmay flicked a bone at him.
“I ate a bit too much food last night,” said the kitsune, who lay on his side, still digesting his previous meals.
Jelmay took Bawa’s fish and stuffed it in his mouth. “That was nothing last night. Nothing.”
“We ate and drank until…” Bawa’s eyes went wide as he tried to recall what hour they’d finally stopped. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Morning,” Yato said as she suddenly appeared, the female assassin with her hair wet, and slicked back behind her ears. Her robes were clean, her sleeves rolled up, gauntleted blades wrapped around her arms and securely fastened.
“Lady Pilgrim!” Jelmay grabbed one of the biscuits and threw it to her. “You have to try this!”
“Drink, first.” She sat down next to Jelmay and placed the biscuit he’d tossed her on a clean enough plate. Yato poured a boiling liquid from a carafe into a ceramic cup. The smell of the liquid caused Danzen to want a cup as well, hoping that it would invigorate him to some degree. Upon bringing the cup to his lips, he noticed that the flavor was akin to the herb that he had tasted in the biscuit, yet stronger, an almost medicinal flavor to it.
It did make him feel better after a few drinks, however.
“Please,” Elder Bahjee said, now gritting his teeth. “I must hear how you did it.”
“First, information about the remnant,” Yato said, surprising Danzen to some degree. Then again, she was a student, and she had learned from his former teacher Thane. Not only that, she had spent some time around Jelmay. If an exchange was to be made, an assassin used whatever they could as leverage, be it a person or simply information itself.
“You… you want to know about the remnant?”
“That’s why they dealt with your oni, otherwise, we would have left it to you,” Sansar reminded Elder Bahjee, the raven now on the ground next Danzen, picking at a biscuit. “You do have information about a remnant, do you not?”
“Why… why of course, I do!” Elder Bahjee said, a bit of a scowl forming on his face. “Do not question me, yatagarasu! I am a bakeneko of my word. If you want to know where the nearest remnant is, I’ll tell you. It’s easy. Head toward the end of the lake. Once you reach it, there will be a series of ridges you’ll have to cross over to get to the next lake over. In the middle of the lake, on an island, is a small shrine. The remnant is inside. What can I say? It’s a well-kept secret.”
“We will head there after breakfast. Yato, please explain what happened last night. I’m going to check on Kudzu.” Danzen quickly prepared a plate of meat and stood, ignoring Elder Bahjee as he insisted that he stay and eat with them.
“He does what he wants, when he wants,” Jelmay said as Danzen moved away. “Don’t let it bother you, Bahj. Plenty of food for all of us. Now, Yato, about what happened out there…”
Danzen pressed through a wooden door, the wall on his left consisting of the same stone he had seen used as a walkway in the village, the grout white. From there, it was up a flight of short wooden stairs to the second floor, where he found Kudzu’s room. Danzen knocked, and once she didn’t answer, he let himself in, the white fox lying on her side on a tuft of wool, her head resting on a pillow filled with straw.
She looked over at him, her nostrils flaring to some degree. “Pilgrim?”
“I thought you may be hungry.” Danzen sat before her and set his plate on the ground. “We are going to get the remnant that Elder Bahjee promised us.”
“Sure, I just need another hour…”
“No, for now you should rest. In fact…” Danzen reached into his robes and produced the remnant that they had found along the cliff walk, still in its wooden box. He tucked it under the corner of Kudzu’s pillow. “Look after this.”
“Did you sleep?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Not really,” Danzen said.
Kudzu smiled. “You are as lucky as you are cursed. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Maybe.”
She yawned, her tongue curling out of her mouth. “Thanks for bringing the food. I’ll eat some later. And… this isn’t as bad as last time I was injured. I just want to sleep some more. I had the wind knocked out of me.”
Danzen didn’t mention that it looked more like she had the life knocked out of her. He simply nodded, as he always did. “Rest well. We will try to return by sunset. I don’t think this remnant will be very difficult to retrieve.” He instantly regretted saying these words. “At least, I hope not.”
“And Elder Bahjee has told you where it is?”
“He has. A lake to the east of here.”
“I see… In that case, good luck.”
****
Danzen, Yato, and Jelmay set off, Sansar hovering in the air above them, the four leaving Bawa the kitsune behind to recover from his night of revelry. They hugged the shoreline of the glacial lake, following the path that Elder Bahjee had pointed out to them, the sun bright as it reflected against the water. Older men fishing in the lake did little to acknowledge their presence, which Jelmay shrugged off in typical bakeneko fashion.
“They may not like us, but we’ll be eating the fish they catch later,” he said, the yokai back in his nondescript human form, belly slightly distended. “What a guy, Bahj, what a guy. That’s every bakeneko’s dream, you know?”
“What is?” asked Yato.
“To run a village of obedient humans who keep you well-fed and give you an ungodly amount of power. I know it may be hard for someone like you to imagine, but think about it. You’re comfortable, you’ve got plenty of food, people respect you, people don’t know they’re being exploited. It’s the best of all worlds.”
“It doesn’t seem like he’s done much for them…”
“Do you mean how the village looks as if it is in shambles and that someone could knock over a few of the buildings with just a wee bit of flatulence? Bah! If the villagers don’t like it, they’ve had decades to do something about the Bahj, or leave. Decades. No one is keeping them there. So they must like it.”
Yato made eye contact with Danzen, the former assassin offering her his thoughts on what Jelmay had said with a terse shake of his head. He agreed that the villagers could have done something, but didn’t understand why Elder Bahjee would put them in that position to begin with, especially if he’d had a long time to cultivate the village and bring about its better aspects.
Local politics were never one of Danzen’s specialties, even if many of the disagreements ultimately led to his services, at least based on the contracts he had once received through the Brotherhood. Political killings, various forms of extortion, espionage, kidnappings—Danzen wasn’t proud of some of the things he’d been part of in the past, yet this was the realm of an assassin, and it had truly made him wonder since his retirement about the Diyu Brotherhood’s power over the entire kingdom, if it operated as some sort of shadow government.
It sure seemed that way.
His Blade of Darkness sheathed behind him, Astra at his side, Nomin’s replica sword tucked into the front of his robes, and gauntleted blades wrapped around his arms made Danzen appear more intimidating than he hoped to look, which could have been another explanation as to why some of the fishermen didn’t make eye contact with them.
Soon, it didn’t matter. They were long past them.
Walking at a quick pace, Yato at his side, Jelmay a few steps behind them and now in his bakeneko form, Danzen fell into the spell of quiet as he listened to Jelmay tell yet another of his hyperbolized stories. Had the bakeneko really faced off against the yokai equivalent of a dragon? Had he really stolen the eggs of a shukaku? Had he once rolled a remnant twice his bodyweight up a hill to a monastery that had long since vanished in exchange for a bundle of rare silk?
There really was no telling, Danzen occasionally hearing Kudzu comment in his head, the responses she likely would have had in regards to some of his claims. This caused a rare smile to form on his face, the former assassin wishing she had joined them yet glad that she had stayed behind once they reached the top of the ridge separating the two glacial lakes.
“There’s… there’s a camp,” Jelmay said, interrupting his own story to point out a series of white tents along the shore of the smaller lake, a good five hundred yards away. His ears flitted back. “What’s a camp doing this far out?”
Danzen recognized the eye emblem painted on one of the tents, and recognized that the campsite had been set up quickly, as if they were only there temporarily. Penumbra was the name of a clan of bandits started by a man known as Jinkai, who had been the first person Danzen had seen use shadow weapons that were conjured through a series of Sunyata talismans around his neck. He didn’t know if Jinkai was still alive, but his legacy was alive and well.
“Penumbra,” he said under his breath.
It was instinctual for Danzen to shift over to the other side of the ridgeline, Yato doing the same, the female assassin having to grab Jelmay by the arm and pull him down.
“Hey, I’m still looking!”
“Quiet,” Yato said, her eyebrows lifting to some degree as she watched Sansar lower. “Can you see how many there are?”
“I certainly can.”
“Wait, hold on. Hold on. Hold on a minute. You don’t think…” Jelmay gritted his teeth. “You don’t think that Bahj set us up, do you?”
“I didn’t consider that,” Danzen told Jelmay, “but I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Jelmay started to growl, his whiskers lifting. “After all we’ve done for him, listening to his stupid stories, eating his stupid and quite frankly bland food, killing the oni? This is how he responds? He sends us to a known camp of the enemy and… say, wait a minute.” Jelmay stood, the bakeneko swatting Yato’s hand away. “There’s not even a shrine in the center of that lake. We were lied to! I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him!”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Lady Pilgrim, I’ll have you know…” Jelmay was muffled by Yato, who quickly slipped around him and placed her hand over his mouth.
Jelmay struggled, but she held firm.
“See how many there are,” Danzen told the raven, “and be on the lookout for an older man wearing a collection of talismans around his neck. He’s a shadow user named Jinkai. I don’t know if he’s alive or not, but if he is, he’s their leader, and he’s dangerous.”
Sansar rose into the air, Yato finally removing her hand from Jelmay’s mouth once the raven was gone.
“Bah! Bah, I tell you! That’s no way to treat a bakeneko such as myself!”
“Jelmay,” Danzen said, not needing to raise his voice or even turn to Jelmay.
“Right, sorry. I…” He grunted. “I’m just mad at Bahj. I mean, I suspected he was up to something. But after we scratched his back? This is how he repays us. Ugh. Bah. Bah to all of it. As soon as we get back to Verba, the bakeneko is mine. We’ll treat him like the yamachichi. We can find the right plants out here, blow up his stupid little home!”
“Or we call his bluff,” Yato said. “Always an option as well.”
“He’ll just go along with it and ask us to run another of his errands.” Jelmay clenched his fists together. “Every time I get tricked by a bakeneko, I tell myself it is the last time I’ll let it happen, and I’m always wrong.” This statement caused him to laugh, albeit quietly. “I guess we really are that clever! Heh. But what you said, Lady Pilgrim, calling his bluff… I’ll have a think about how we can pull that off. Maybe… maybe there’s a way.”
Sansar returned a minute or so later, the three-legged raven landing before Danzen. “There are five bandits; they are eating their morning meal at the moment.”
“And there could be more in their tents…” said Yato.
“Perhaps,” Sansar told her, “but if you were planning to strike, now would be the time to do so, while they are distracted.”
Danzen nodded. Even if Elder Bahjee had tricked them into dealing with this particular group of bandits, the Penumbra were bad people. Their presence in this region meant that they were seeking remnants to exploit their powers, putting them into direct competition with Danzen’s goal to rebuild Sunyata.
They would need to be dealt with.
With this in mind, Danzen turned to Yato. “I’ll go in first with my Blade of Darkness. There are enough shadows caused by their tents to gather quite a bit of power. Keep to the periphery, and use your speed to intercept them after I’ve made the first two kills. Jelmay?”
“I’m fighting too,” the bakeneko volunteered. “I can morph into someone and lure a few away.”
“There are only five,” Yato said.
“I can count!”
“We should treat them as if they are more powerful than they may be. The only thing is…” Danzen brought his hand to his chin. “Sansar, were they gathered together?”
“Yes, sitting around a campfire.”
“That means I could make the most of my Blade of Darkness. No distraction this time, Jelmay, but that is always a good strategy.”
“Aww…”
“Join the fight after Yato,” he told the bakeneko with finality. “Let’s move.”
Danzen kept low as he traveled over the ridge, the former assassin dropping down to the other side without making any noise. He withdrew his Blade of Darkness and began running at his top speed, glad that Penumbra’s tents gave him a small amount of cover ahead.
It didn’t take Danzen long to clear the distance between the ridgeline and their camps. As he did, he brought his Blade of Darkness behind him and leaped into the air, shadows bubbling around the tip of his blade once the Penumbra clansmen finally spotted him.
Whoosh!
Danzen landed outside of the campfire and swept his blade forward, its shadow-enhanced tip cutting into two of the Penumbra men and killing them, the three other members able to press away just in the nick of time. Danzen saw a flash on the periphery indicating Yato had arrived, the former assassin feeling a lot less confident than he did just moments ago once the three Penumbra men he hadn’t killed had disappeared.
It was as if they had vanished entirely.
Something had turned their forms invisible.
****
Danzen clenched his eyes shut, recognizing echo usage when he saw it.
He spotted the three Penumbra men, their bodies rimmed in purple, talismans imbedded in their wrists and ankles glowing through their clothing.
“Yato, stay back!”
It wasn’t his intention to use his Demon Speak ability to control her; his response had been one of preservation, Danzen concerned that one of them could move on Yato before she realized what was happening.
Even their weapons were obscured; the closest assailant went for a jagged dagger and took off toward Yato, who was backpedaling, entranced by Danzen’s power. Holding his Blade of Darkness with one hand, Danzen withdrew Astra from its porous scabbard, the boomerang sword airborne in a matter of seconds.
Fwitt!
It struck the invisible Penumbra man in the back, Danzen still with his eyes closed as Astra returned to him. The second Penumbra clansman, one with a scarf tied around his head, twisted toward Danzen wielding a spear. Danzen hopped back just as the man thrust his weapon forward, his stance telling Danzen that he was clearly trained in the weapon.
Even more striking was his speed as he managed to bat Danzen’s boomerang sword away, Danzen responding by sending the weapon back to its sheath. Both hands on his Blade of Darkness, he hopped back a few paces, allowing it to gather shadow as the spearman continued to thrust his weapon forward.
His eyes still shut, Danzen waited until the perfect moment to lift his Blade of Darkness, which caused a small tidal wave of purple-hued shadow to cut through the sand on the shoreline and lift, striking the man between his legs.
He wasn’t entirely ripped in two, Danzen’s shadow power not quite strong enough to do that at the moment, especially with the daylight, but it was clear that his opponent was finished, and soon to be dying.
Jelmay burst onto the scene, the bakeneko jumping much higher than Danzen had seen him jump before. Jelmay came down with his knees onto the first clansman Danzen struck with the sword, and stabbed him.
