Title: The Wizards of Ceres, chapter 11 - Second Meetings
Pairing: Kurogane/Fai
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In which Ashura decides to spare Kurogane's life, and Kurogane gets a shock about Fai's true identity.
Kurogane instinctively went for his sword, only to halt with the realization that not only were his weapons still buried under the rockfall somewhere behind them, but he was thoroughly surrounded and outnumbered. Apart from the wizards - and Kurogane had well learned the peril of underestimating a wizard - now that his eyes were adjusted to the light, he saw a dozen shorter, more darkly dressed men in military uniform, all of them armed with halberds. Clearly, Ceres had sent some serious firepower after their stray mage. All of them wore stances and expressions that showed that they knew exactly how to use their weapons.
The tip of something sharp scraped over his backplate, creeping up to rest a point of ice against the back of his neck. Kurogane mouthed a silent curse to himself and slowly straightened from his fighting stance, holding his hands carefully away from his body with his palms open.
No one had yet moved, waiting for orders from their king, who was watching Kurogane with a cold stone-hard expression. Kurogane took a breath and said, slowly and carefully, "Do you have a doctor with you? My friend was injured in the cave-in, and he needs help."
"Ran," the king called without moving his eyes from Kurogane's face; one of the men in blue and white stepped forward. The king rattled off a string of instructions in a hard voice, an odd combination of liquid syllables and sharp, angry inflection.
Kurogane felt disoriented for a moment before he realized that the king was not speaking the language of Nihon. In fact, it suddenly clicked into place, it hadn't just been the baffling of the stone that had kept him from understanding the voices earlier; they had been speaking the same foreign tongue as the king.
But the wizard always spoke my language! he thought angrily. What's going on here?
The wizard being addressed bowed, and then he and two of the halberd-wielding soldiers disappeared into the collapsed part of the tunnel behind them. Kurogane looked slowly around, moving his head as little as possible. Judging by the angle of the sun coming in the tunnel, it was late afternoon, although he couldn't have said of what day.
After a few moments, the wizard reappeared from the cave-in, a white blur in Kurogane's peripheral vision. He gave Kurogane an odd look as he passed by him to the king's side, and spent several minutes speaking in a hushed tone to his ear.
The king responded in the same language, his tone surprised; whatever reply he received made him glance sharply at Kurogane, his gaze now more speculating than hostile.
After a few more moments of incomprehensible conversation, the king lifted his head, looked around at the surrounding guards and wizards, and gave a command to the room at large; with some exclamations of surprise, they stood down. Kurogane breathed easier as the pressure on the back of his neck eased, and took the opportunity to look around.
The stone gallery extended a few more hundred paces before opening out onto a stone path beyond; it looked like there had been several other falls of rock between them and the entrance which had been cleared away. More and more soldiers, and another white-clad wizard, were moving around the entranceway; Kurogane's already dismal calculations of the odds against him sank even lower.
He was more surprised than any of them when the king turned back to him and said with a distinct but clear accent, "So it is you who has taken charge of my lost sheep."
Kurogane couldn't help a small double-take. "Er - you speak nihongo?" he blurted out.
The king gave him a wintry little smile. "It would be very careless of us, would it not? To have no knowledge of the language of such a close, aggressive and dangerous neighbor. I insist that all members of my court learn to speak it."
The king's tone left Kurogane feeling like he'd been rebuked somehow, but the other man pushed on. "I had heard much about Nihon's formidable warrior-mages. Now I am privileged to meet one at last. Your name?"
"Kurogane," he replied stiffly, deciding not to contest the 'mage' part of it right now. "Kurogane Demon-Queller. Lord of Suwa." He didn't normally use his official title, let alone the dead rank of his homeland, but he was feeling deeply in over his head and wanted all the weight he could throw around right now.
If the king was impressed, he didn't show it. He merely nodded acknowledgment, his attention already visibly on other things. "A storm is coming soon. You will accompany us to the castle of Ruval... as a guest."
'Guest' was the Ceres word for 'prisoner of war,' it seemed, but at the moment it looked like Kurogane had no choice; and anyway it was better than being killed on the spot. "All right," he said grudgingly.
Another small, cold smile. "So glad you approve," the king said with withering irony, then turned away towards the dark end of the tunnel, visibly dismissing Kurogane from his attention.
Kurogane snapped his mouth on his next retort, and glared around at anyone who had been listening. Most of the soldiers and wizards, however, seemed to be paying no attention to him now that his fate had been decided; they were coming and going, chattering busily to each other in their own tongue.
No one tried to stop him when he moved back towards the cave-in. King Ashura might have decided on a whim to spare him, at least for now, but that was no guarantee that he'd be equally lenient towards Fai. Kurogane was damned if he'd let the king terrorize his friend while he was here to prevent it.
He stopped at the entrance to the cave-in. Ashura and two wizards were enough to fill up the small space by themselves; there would not be room for him as well without some serious crowding. The dust from the opening of the wall had mostly settled by now, and the small space was being lit by an silver-white glow emanating from the end of one of the wizards' staff. The light made the small space seem eerie and unfamiliar, completely washing out the dim red light of the dying fire, and the pallor it cast over Fai made him look even worse than before.
Seized with a sudden anxiety for his friend, Kurogane glared at Ashura as the man walked past the fire. He knelt beside Fai, one gloved hand reaching out to touch Fai's throat, then his forehead, and Kurogane almost snapped at him to keep his damn hands to himself. If the bastard raised his hand the wrong way -
Fai's eyes were still closed, but his face was not slack with unconsciousness; the strain from before was even more evident now, and long shivers were periodically racking his frame even through the layers of insulating cloth. The king sighed, and picked up Fai's unbroken arm, folding his hand in his own. "Fai," he said, quietly but with a strong, deep note of command. "Malchik moy, Fai."
After a moment, Fai's eyes fluttered open, and slowly came into focus, tracking up to Ashura's face. He gasped, suddenly and deeply, like a drowning man who had unexpectedly struck air; his chest heaved as he sucked in breath after breath, and his hand clutched fiercely at Ashura's like a lifeline. "My lord?" he said faintly. "King Ashura!"
"Yes, I found you, my boy," Ashura said, and smiled; a gentle smile that completely transformed his face from the cold and distant visage it had been before. His free hand reached out and smoothed Fai's hair back from his face, cupped his jaw. "I've come to take you away from here."
Fai's expression was like a dawning sunrise, so much hope and relief and adoration that it was almost blinding to look at, and Kurogane felt like he'd been punched in the stomach.
A cascade of conflicting thoughts and feelings ran through him. Fai had never looked at him like that. This wasn't what he'd been expecting. He'd thought that Fai was terrified of Ashura, abused by him, not -
Before he could get hold of himself, make sense of what was and what should be, one of the wizards was in his face, blocking his vision of Ashura and Fai together. "Lord Kurogane, you should move away from here," the wizard said, in accented but polite nihongo. "The ceiling is very not stable, it may collapse shortly."
"No -" Kurogane said, confused; he looked past the man's shoulder, but Ashura's voice and Fai's had sunk into murmurs, and he could no longer make out the conversation. "What about my friend? If it's dangerous you have to move him too -"
"We will move him when we can take over," the man said, somewhat cryptically. "But you should move away from here, to the outside."
Somehow, the man was crowding him away from the cave-in, back towards the brightly-lit end of the stone corridor. Kurogane made another attempt to get past him, but was neatly blocked by the staff. Kurogane eyed that staff with loathing, and the wizard with scarcely any less; he could certainly force his way past, but somehow he didn't think the soldiers in the cave would like that. Instead, he tried guile. "Wait - all my gear is in the cave there. I have to get it."
A second, shorter blue-clad man had appeared to back up the first, who turned to him and said something in their own language. The second wizard vanished, and reappeared after a few minutes carrying the packs that held all the remnants of his and Fai's gear.
"There are your things," the first wizard said politely. "You should move to the outside now."
Kurogane dug in his heels. "My swords," he said. "They're still in there somewhere. I won't leave without them."
The second wizard looked at him; his Japanese was considerably less formal, but still perfectly intelligible. "I didn't see swords," he said.
"They're buried under the rock somewhere," Kurogane said; truth be told, he'd already given them up for lost, but if he could use them as a delaying tactic... "They're very valuable, they've got spells worked on them for the killing of demons. My father's sword has been the mark of nobility in our family for hundreds of years. I won't leave without them." He folded his arms across his chest and tried to look stern.
Another brief conversation ensued, this one punctuated by annoyed tones and head-shaking. With a roll of his eyes, the smaller wizard vanished back into the cave, but the first one stayed, still blocking Kurogane's way. "Wait, please," he said, the polite tone taking on an edge.
The minutes seemed to crawl past; Kurogane's restlessness grew. He itched with the desire to go back to Fai's side, make sure no one was hurting him as they prepared to move him. Come to that, if the corridor was as dangerous as all that, why hadn't they just brought him outside already? None of his injuries extended to his neck or spine, there should be no reason why they couldn't rig a litter and bring him out. What was the damn holdup?
Someone called out, and Kurogane's guardian-captor turned his head and called something in response. He frowned, and tightened his grip on the staff before he turned back towards the cave-in. "Stay here, please. Or go outside," he added, before he went.
Hell if he was going to follow orders like those. Kurogane began to follow him back - and nearly ran into the second wizard, the irritable one, emerging from the stone chamber carrying Kurogane's swords bundled under his arm.
"These swords?" he demanded impatiently. Kurogane stared, dumbfounded; he'd never expected to see his weapons again. Souhi was missing her scabbard, and they were both coated with dust, but still...
Before Kurogane could try to take them back, the King emerged from the cave-in, a faint smear of dirt on one cheek but otherwise completely calm. "Ah," he said, sounding unsurprised to see Kurogane there. "Tools of the trade, for a demon-hunter, are they not? I'm sure you will understand if we keep possession of those, for now." He gave a sign and a brief order to one of the guards, who came forward and took the swords; then swept off towards the gallery entrance without looking back.
"Wait a minute! What's going on? Where's the wizard?" Kurogane demanded, but he was ignored. He looked at the guard holding his swords; the man looked back at him uncertainly, but if he understood Kurogane's language at all he gave no sign of it, and Kurogane was not about to start a brawl over his swords.
Two of the wizards, the polite one and the rude one, had taken up station on either side of the gap that lead to the cave-in. They raised their staffs over their head, crossing them to form a sort of arch, almost like an honor guard. There was nothing that Kurogane could see or hear, but he felt a low hum that raised the hair on the back of his neck.
Finally, finally two of the dark-clad guards emerged from the space, carrying a pole litter between them; Fai's hair color was unmistakable drifting over the edge, dulled with stone dust as it was. Another of the white-clad wizards was accompanying the litter, one hand on Fai's chest and his lips moving on some inaudible words. He looked intent; Kurogane didn't think it would be a good idea to interrupt him. They walked by him as though he weren't even there; he barely got a glimpse of Fai's face as they went past, still deathly pale and with dark rings under his eyes, but much more relaxed, as though a terrible burden had been eased.
For a moment, Kurogane hesitated, torn between following the litter and staying with the man who had his swords. He glanced back at the cave-in which had been their prison, could have become his tomb, and so he saw the two wizards standing on either side of the arch lower their staffs.
Immediately, the echoing rush of stone began to fill the hallway, building to a loud crackling rumble as the tunnel beyond them collapsed. Kurogane was filled with horrified visions of what would have happened if the tunnel had collapsed on Fai, burying him under tons of rock at the last moment. Without conscious intent, he leapt forward and grabbed one of the mages by the fringes of his jacket.
"What the hell are you doing, you bloody idiot?" he roared. "If that had come down five minutes earlier, my friend would have been crushed!"
The pale man shoved him away with more force than he'd expected, glaring at him as he gathered the lapels of his coat back around him. "Keep your hands off me, barbarian!" he shot back. "We know what we're doing!"
The second wizard had moved to intervene, placing himself physically between Kurogane and the other wizard. "The tunnel would have collapsed no matter when we'd moved him," he said in a calming voice. "In a shell-based incantation like that one, when you move the central focus of the spell outside the delimiters of the area effected -"
He was using Japanese words, or at least Kurogane thought he was, but otherwise he made as little sense as if he'd lapsed back into his own language. He tried to get hold of his composure. "What... are you talking about?" he managed. "Why would it have come down when you moved him?"
The two wizards exchanged a long glance, and one of them said something in his own language. Kurogane waited with rapidly fraying temper, nerves still jangling from the close call of a few minutes before.
Finally the wizard turned back to him. "He was holding it up," he said. "Didn't you realize?"
They turned and walked away, leaving Kurogane in stunned silence.
"That bastard," was the first thing to escape him when his mind cleared. His mind flashed back to the strange frozen immobility of even the smallest rocks, the tingling numbness he'd felt when he touched them, which he'd mistaken for cold. All the time Kurogane had been making a fool of himself trying to find the way out, and Fai had never said a word. He'd out and out asked Fai if there was anything his magic could do, and Fai had lied and said no.
Fai had been half killing himself trying to keep them both alive, and he'd never said a word, and Kurogane hadn't even guessed.
Back stiff, he turned and walked out of the stone tunnel that had nearly been his tomb.
It took a moment for him to adjust to the open air again, after so long underground. He'd misread the light; it was far enough past noon that the sight of the sun was cut off by the peaks above, and the light bounced down from white-crested slopes to fill the pass with a cool silver radiance. The wind was icy cold, tugging at his arms and legs as it blew through the pass, but as cold as it was at least it didn't have the clammy chill of the underground stone, so Kurogane set himself to endure.
The rocky defile was full of people and horses, most of them wearing the dark bulky furs and carrying the halberds of Ceres soldiers. Half a dozen blue-and-white robed figures flitted among them, talking to each other or going about some mysterious task. In the gloom of the tunnel he'd mostly identified them by their glittering robes, but out in the light he could see them better. Their hair coloration, far from all being the same, ran a dizzying gamut from almost-black through bewildering orange to a medium yellow. But they all shared an alienness of feature that made it hard for Kurogane to tell them apart at first. He'd expected them all to look similar to Fai, but it was hard to see the resemblance.
He looked around, trying to pick out the important targets in this bustle. The king was easy to spot, surrounded by a swarm of guards and wizards further up the slope to his right; Fai's litter was not far away, with several intent figures bent over it. He didn't immediately see the soldier who had taken his swords, and when he turned in the other direction to search for him, he gasped in shock.
Not a hundred yards away from him down the path, the ground vanished. Kurogane advanced cautiously towards the precipice, stopping well before the rock edge; a couple of Ceres men who were working on something incomprehensible near the edge glanced over him and called out in a warning tone which Kurogane was only too happy to heed. The destruction that the avalanche had wrought on the mountain pass was easy enough to see, but hard to comprehend.
The valley for half a mile beyond the pass was clotted with shattered ice and broken stone, and Kurogane wondered how many of his own countrymen were buried beneath that cold and final grave; the thought made him sick. The rockfall finally petered out into a spray of gravel and frost nearly a mile on, and past that boundary he could see that the army of Nihon had retreated down the valley, all their previous violent energy now stilled to a shocked numbness.
What are you going to do now, Kendappa? Kurogane wondered. Beyond the broken edge of the path, the mountainside dropped in a sheer cliff for well over a hundred yards, before giving way to a slope too steep and treacherous for any human or animal to scale. The implacable face of stone made a barrier between Ceres and Nihon as effective as any warded stone wall; no one was going to be getting up or down through this pass ever again, unless they could fly.
He glanced over at the wizards by the side of the pass, working intently on setting up some kind of runed circle, and amended that uneasy thought. No one except those who could fly.
It seemed that Ceres and Nihon were at an impasse, at least for now. There was no way for Kendappa to continue her advance up the valley - but neither, having suffered such ferocious losses, could she possibly give up and go home. The upper reaches of Ceres were safe for now, but they'd lost a devastating amount of territory and had no army left to speak of.
All they had left were the wizards, and Kurogane realized that he had no idea what the next move in this game would be. Whatever it was, he was certain that King Ashura would not miss a single opportunity to turn the game in his favor.
They gave him a horse before the train set off through the pass; Kurogane had never been particularly sentimental about horses, seeing them primarily as transportation, but he found himself missing his familiar black gelding as he tried to adjust himself to the unfamiliar gait. Somewhat to his surprise, after less than an hour of riding, the king dropped back from the head of the column to ride beside Kurogane for a space. Kurogane watched him warily; the wizards and the king's bodyguards watched Kurogane suspiciously; and the King appeared carelessly amused by it all.
"So, Lord Suwa," Ashura said conversationally, easily checking his stallion's attempt to bite Kurogane's horse's ear off. "You seem to be quite concerned about Fai."
"He's an idiot," Kurogane said, uncomfortably aware that this was not an adequate response, but unable to articulate through his confusion and caution just what the truth was. "But I guess so."
"Ah." Ashura appeared to be regarding the mountains with some interest. "Are you in fact aware that his original mission was to find you and kill you?"
Kurogane growled under his breath. "Yes, in fact. I am."
"Did he tell you so?" Ashura said, in a voice of studied casualness.
"No," Kurogane said, refusing to get Fai into any more trouble than he already was. "I found out when he tried to kill me."
Ashura's eyebrows went up. "He tried to kill you?"
"Yes," Kurogane said. "I fought him off," he added, a trifle defiantly.
Ashura smiled, and Kurogane had no trouble reading the faint mockery behind it. "He can't have been trying very hard," he said.
Kurogane bristled at that comment, but given that his own suspicions had run along uncomfortably similar lines, couldn't really deny it.
"Why, then," Ashura continued, "would you choose to accompany him back to Ceres, knowing of his mission? Out of... concern?"
This conversation was drifting onto dangerous ground. Every possible response had its own hazards; Kurogane decided to hell with it, and took it in the direction he wanted to go anyway. "I made him take me back to Ceres so that I could confront you directly," he said bluntly. "Not through any proxy or on anyone's orders. I thought that if you wanted me dead so badly, then you should fight me man-to-man."
Ashura looked taken aback, which gratified Kurogane. The king repeated, in a puzzled tone, "You came over miles of wilderness in winter, across a hostile border swarming with troops and through an unstable tunnel that almost buried you alive, because you wanted to give me a chance to kill you in person?"
Put that way, it did sound a little ridiculous - except for one additional element. "Well," he said, "I was also thinking of me a chance to kill you in person."
This provoked an angry buzz from the king's bodyguards, several of whom clutched at their weapons and spurred their horses closer, but Kurogane kept his eyes on Ashura. The king smiled, and there was a feral gleam in his eyes behind the cultured facade.
"I see," was his only reply. He raised one hand absently, and the bodyguards reluctantly fell back. "You know, Lord Suwa, there are very few people who would care to threaten a king to his face."
"You're King of the country who's making war on my people," Kurogane pointed out. "If I can't, who can?"
Ashura actually laughed. "Well said," he replied. "Well then, Kurogane, this is a topic we must discuss at length later. I regretfully must decline your offer at this time, however, until we have reached the castle and shelter, where we can attempt to kill each other in safety."
"Your Majesty!" one of the bodyguards objected faintly, but it sounded like his heart wasn't really in it.
"Fine," Kurogane said, thinking of the ominous clouds, and he found his eyes drawn unconsciously to the litter which was riding near the head of the column, obscuring its passenger from view.
Ashura followed his gaze, and Kurogane kicked himself for drawing the king's attention back to Fai, when he'd finally managed to distract the bastard.
"I must say," Ashura said, in that almost-casual tone that immediately put Kurogane back on his guard. "Traveling with you seems to have been good for Fai. You've taken fairly good care of him, all things considered."
Kurogane eyed Ashura warily, but for a change Ashura almost seemed sincere. "He was injured on my watch," he said tentatively. "I'm no doctor, but I did what I could."
"That was well enough, if crude," Ashura said, waving it away. "But not what I was referring to. Apart from the injury, his overall condition looked quite good. Most notably, he seemed to have put on a bit of weight."
That got Kurogane's attention. "Yes, well, there was nowhere to go but up on that one," he growled. "When I first met him, he could have blown over in a high wind. Don't you feed your wizards in Ceres?"
"When we can," Ashura said with an edged smile. "But Fai is a difficult case. It's not a question of us refusing to feed him, but of him refusing to eat."
"I know that," Kurogane said. "He just needs someone to sit on him and order him to do it, and he'll do it."
Ashura's smile widened. "Ah, but it's not quite that simple. You see, it's not just enough to tell him to eat; even then he'll find a way to refuse more often than not. He won't eat unless forced to - by someone he deeply trusts and admires."
That gave Kurogane something to chew over, even when Ashura pushed his horse back to the top of the column.
Not that there wasn't plenty else on the ride to worry about. The king had said something about a storm, but since the sky was still clear when they'd begun the ride, Kurogane had discounted the comment. Now, however, he was beginning to pick up on the uneasiness of the men and animals; the way the horses stamped and shied away from sudden gusts of wind, the increasing frequency with which the men looked up at the still-clear sky.
But the wind was dropping in temperature and increasing in force, rising in volume to a vibrating whistle as it forced its way through the narrow stone passages that they followed. Up this far in the ranges, with stone walls on every side, the view of the sky was limited to a few slices almost directly overhead. It occurred to Kurogane that by the time you could see the clouds up here, it would be too late to find shelter.
The thought made him feel hemmed-in and oppressed almost as badly as he had been underground; that and the close quarters of the stone walls squeezing in on either side. It would be a terrible, cramped place for a fight, should they come across any demons - or human enemies.
As they passed out of the narrow gap between two mountains, the stone walls fell away on either side and Kurogane began to relax, take in the land around them. While the pass had mostly been a stony gulch with no more than grey-green grass or turf clinging determinedly to the rocks, now he began to see plants and trees again; conifers and scrub brush, still holding onto their green needles even this late in the season. It was surprising somehow to see green even amidst so much cold gray stone.
The path also grew broader, became a proper road lined with stone and with markers every few miles, but it continued to wind upwards and around the peaks like a thread through a labyrinth. Though the elevation was always rising, sometimes the road would crest a ridge and drop suddenly into a shallow dell filled with houses and fields, crowding over the shallower slopes and around frozen streams and lakes.
Kurogane looked with great interest at these little hamlets as they passed; this was the first chance he'd gotten to see the fields and stone houses of Ceres as living towns, not smoking ruins. The houses seemed even stranger to his eyes complete and whole; they were made of cut stone, not wood and thatch like most peasant houses in Nihon, each one like a miniature castle. But then, if there was one thing they had in abundance up here it was stone, so perhaps the towns were not as rich as they first appeared.
The clusters of houses seemed rustic and tiny to Kurogane's eyes; he was used to the sprawling boundaries of the Nihon empire, which would go for miles and miles as long as there were fields to be sown and roads to follow. His first impression was that without the lost lower valley, all of Ceres could have fit within the bounds of the castle city in Edo. But as the journey continued and more and more of the little valleys appeared and disappeared into the stone, he began to realize that although the communities were small, there were a lot more of them than he suspected.
Instead of one large city, it was like a city had been broken into a hundred pieces and scattered among the interstices of the mountain folds. Roads branching off the main roads wound away in other directions, suggesting more towns nestled in the arms of the mountain peaks; he caught a glimpse of some of them in the distance, and wondered how many of them there could be. More, he wondered how they could possibly stay in communication with each other, isolated as they would be during the winter.
Winter. Kurogane glanced uneasily upwards; in the more open territory now he could even see the grey overcast beginning to build in the sky. The sunlight had never been strong, but now it was fading fast, and flurries of ice almost too small to see were carried along in the whipping wind.
"Hey," he called out to one of the wizards, who was riding within earshot and also frowning up at the sky. The man glanced over at him, obviously startled to be addressed. "Shouldn't we take shelter? In one of these towns, I mean."
The man shook his head, then pulled his hood more tightly around his face. "No room for us," he said. "All these lower towns have too many people already, refugees from the valley. They would not be able to feed us through the storm."
"How long do storms usually last up here?" Kurogane asked, alarmed by the implications. From what Fai had said food was seriously short in the winter, but things were even worse than he'd implied if a town couldn't afford to feed their king and his court even for a few days.
"Different times, but this time of the season, a storm this strong..." The wizard tilted his head upwards to look back at the sky, lips moving silently for a moment. "Two, three weeks? A... fortnight, I think that is how you would say it in your language."
"What?" Kurogane stared up at the sky with a new dismay, stared around at the inhospitable rock. "You're kidding me!"
"Kidding? No, no," the man said in surprise. Then a small, cruel smile touched his face. "I hope that all Nihon soldiers know as little as you. Winter in the mountains is not kind. If they try to stay by the pass the whole time, they will be buried by the snow and frozen by the cold and blown away by the wind." He sounded almost gleeful at the idea.
Uncomfortable, Kurogane looked away, reminded pointedly once more of his position among enemies. "I just hope that we aren't," was all he felt safe saying.
The wizard laughed, the malice fading somewhat from his voice. "Don't be afraid. We will reach the palace soon. You can see it already over this direction." He pointed northwards, slightly to the left of the gap their road seemed to be making for, and Kurogane followed his arm.
For a moment he wasn't sure what he was looking at; the glowing white spire appeared to be just another of the ice-capped mountain peaks, if narrow and more symmetrical. But a shift of the angle or the light as they rode suddenly brought it into perspective, and his eyes widened as he took in the sight of a castle, formed all of white stone, apparently just floating there among the clouds.
It was nothing like Shirasagi castle; the lines were all wrong, with columns and spires clawing vertically into the air rather than overlapping horizontal tiers; the highest pinnacles seemed to be challenging the sky itself. He couldn't identify what kind of stone had been used to build it, but it seemed to catch the dimming winter light and glow with it, carefully worked stone tracing like frost across the walls and angles.
Fai had spoken offhandedly about a castle in the sky; now, seeing Ruval palace for the first time, Kurogane thought he understood what that meant.
The persistent illusion did not fade as they closed the last final hours of the journey. Especially not when Kurogane, capping a turn on one of the switchback trails, made the mistake of turning and looking down the mountainside and valleys which they'd climbed. None of the slopes the road had covered had been too steep at one time, but it all added up to a dizzying distance from the safe level ground he was used to. Looking out over all that empty air left him feeling entranced and horrified at the same time. He'd never felt this pitching vertigo looking out from the branches of a tree, or standing on the battlements of Shirasagi castle; then again, it had never been so far to fall before.
He hoped he wasn't going to be one of those men who were allergic to heights, the way Fai had been allergic to closed spaces; although if Fai had been raised up here, with such expanses of open air around him, that aversion to tight quarters seemed to make a kind of sense. He wondered if it was a common affliction among the people of Ceres, or if Fai was just unlucky.
The first sight of the castle over the ridge turned out to be the best look he had of the place. As they drew closer, the light dimmed even further, the clouds closed in, and snow began to fall in earnest. The wind which had been whistling about their ears the whole climb up the mountain rose to a howling pitch, and Kurogane had no more time to look about him at the countryside, concentrating instead on staying on his horse and not freezing to death.
He was still dressed for autumn in the lowlands, after all, and even the warm padding under his armor was little barrier against the chewing cold that came with this storm. When one of the soldiers rode him to him and thrust a heavy, bearskin cloak into his arms without a word, he took it and was grateful for the warmth it provided.
By the time they reached the palace at last, passing out of the gale into the surprisingly warm and brilliantly lit halls of marble, it no longer mattered to Kurogane that he was a prisoner in the heart of enemy territory. All that mattered was that it was shelter.
A small army of servants was waiting for them when the heavy palace doors finally closed behind them with a crash; they descended on the King and his train, filling the air with questions and anxious comments. Ashura cut through them all with calm, precise authority, and sent people running in various ways to carry out his orders. Meanwhile, more strangers, wearing neither the white robes of the wizards nor the dark brown of guards, appeared and attached themselves to Ashura's elbow; judging by the richness of their clothes and the sad lack of fitness among them, Kurogane guessed they were ministers or courtiers, and dismissed them as none of his concern. He was more interested in locating Fai among all the hubbub, or at the very least track down what had happened to his swords; but neither of them were visible in the crowd, and he was at a loss which way to go in this new, strange building.
One man moving amid all the turmoil caught his attention, however, an attractive young man who looked only a few years older than Kurogane himself. All the northerners seemed pale to his eyes, Fai more than most of them; but this man's skin was as white as the robes he wore, completely colorless except for the faint shadow of veins and arteries peeking through at the wrists and neck. His hair was likewise an ashy grey like an old man's, free of pigment; the only color about the man was his eyes, a startlingly intense amber. His color was strikingly unnatural, even more so than the rest of these foreigners, and Kurogane couldn't stop staring.
The man must have felt his stare, because he turned those sharp eyes on Kurogane and began to make his way through the crowd towards him. He was wearing large, round spectacles not unlike those of Kyle Rondart, the court scribe, and Kurogane realized that the glass was faintly tinted. To protect his eyes? He wondered if this man even could go out in the sun, or if he would burn worse than Fai ever did.
"You must be Kurogane?" the man said, breaking into his tired, half-hypnotized ruminations. "I watched you come in."
Startled, Kurogane jerked a nod of confirmation. "How did you know my name?" he blurted out.
The stranger smiled; his soft voice and expression were refreshingly free of the background hostility that pervaded all the others, and Kurogane found himself warming to this young man almost despite himself. Friends, or at least allies, were going to be in short supply in the coming weeks; he should do all he could to cultivate them. "I heard about you from Fai, when he gave his report after the last mission," he said. "You are exactly as he described you. You could be no one else."
"He reported to you?" Kurogane studied his robe, mostly white with only blue stripes and a great deal of silver gilt around the cuffs and shoulders; he couldn't read the meaning, but it suggested a certain amount of seniority. He had to get in the habit of not judging wizards by their apparent youth; probably none of them looked their natural age. A name surfaced in Kurogane's memories and clicked into place with a sudden certainty. "You're Yukito, aren't you?"
The man blinked, and then smiled wider and nodded. "Yes. Yukito Tsukishiro. I serve King Ashura as second senior wizard to his court."
"Right," Kurogane said. "Fai's boss. He told me about you."
Yukito started, losing his smile, and looked at him sharply. Blue light slid across the glass of his spectacles as he moved, not at all the color of the light from the lamps, and Kurogane thought with a sudden bone-deep certainty that those glasses must be enchanted too. "He said that to you?" Yukito asked cautiously.
"When I asked him, yeah," Kurogane said. "You are, aren't you?"
"Well," Yukito said cautiously, "we don't usually think of ourselves in such hierarchical terms -"
"He said that, too," Kurogane said.
" - but actually, you could say that Fai is my boss."
Kurogane's jaw dropped. "What?" he managed after several seconds. "But he can't - that would make him -"
"High Senior Wizard," Yukito confirmed with a nod, and then hastened to add; "Oh, he's not the eldest of us - Guru Clef is older, and certainly very well respected, but he's not nearly as powerful as Fai, and he doesn't really have the, well, flexibility of mind to serve as Ashura's primary lieutenant."
Kurogane shook his head, feeling as though parts of his brain had been frozen. "You're trying to tell me that that idiot is King Ashura's right-hand man?"
"Well, yes," Yukito fidgeted with the slender staff he carried, tracing his fingers over the intricate carvings in the wood, and studied Kurogane's expression a little nervously. "He'd almost have to be, as the King's heir - not by blood, of course, but for all intents and purposes he is King Ashura's adopted son, and when his engagement to Princess Sakura is consummated, that will only complete the formalities."
The frozen feeling spread out over his face, down the rest of his body. Kurogane wondered idly what his expression must look like; judging from the reflection in Yukito's eyes, nothing good.
"He never told me that," Kurogane said, his voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere very far away. He supposed he should feel upset, but right now all he could feel was numb.
Yukito looked at him, his amber eyes solemn behind the panes of round glass. "No, I can't say I'm surprised he didn't," he said, with something almost approaching compassion in his voice. "He was going out into wild territory, after all, with dangerous, untrustworthy people - it pays to be a little cautious."
Kurogane wanted to be outraged by the implied insult, but he couldn't seem to muster up the nerve, and so he said nothing.
"You must be tired from your journey, Lord Suwa," Yukito said quietly. "You should go to your quarters now. These guards will escort you there."
~to be continued...