In all the books and television shows, journeys on the road by foot were always made under sunny skies with a light, cheerful breeze. The sun-dappled dirt roads were always perfectly dry and rustic-looking. None of those books or movies ever showed the heroes moving out under overcast, slate-grey skies with mizzle (not quite mist and not quite drizzle, but a cold, clammy combination of the two) and the threat of rain, the roads were never half-puddle nor were they muddy in all places where they were not rock or puddle. In short, it was cold, wet and miserable again. After an hour of foot-aching, shoulder and back pressing travel, Yuka was beginning to sympathize with Bilbo Baggin's assessment of adventures; "nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things that make you late for dinner!" Still, she knew from her last journey in this world that traveling to that apocryphal "safe haven" that Eishou wanted them to go to wasn't going to be any more comfortable, she would far rather be going to a place where there was a chance she could do something, instead of sitting in an abandoned fort, twiddling her thumbs.

"If I wasn't aware of it before, I surely am now... real life is nothing like the movies!" Kaname remarked in an uncanny echo of her thoughts.

"Try to look at it this way," Yuka comforted him. "At least it hasn't rai-"

"Don't say it!" Kaname snapped, clamping a hand over her mouth.

The sky overhead rumbled threateningly and both of her companions glared at her for possibly jinxing it. Yuka gave an apologetic, wincing smile back.

"Sorry..." she said in chagrin.

It was drawing toward evening when the party of three travelers came across their first real obstacle. It was not, thank heavens, a party of bandits, or worse, a party of Black Guards. Instead a massive Youma about the size of a bull-dozer and shaped like a cross between a lion and a crow, with horns like a prize bull, had planted itself across the pass. Yuka drew out her bow and Eishou unsheathed his sword.

"Kaname, I don't think we're getting out of this one without bloodshed," Yuka said as the enormous monster eyed them with a decidedly predatory look on its face. It crouched low with the intent look of a cat with a mouse in sight, looking at the three of them like they were the mouse.

"Please retreat to safety Your Excellency," Eishou added.

Yuka drew out two arrows, held one in her teeth and nocked the other one to the string of her bow, as Kaname, knowing he was worse than useless in a fight, withdrew as he had been asked to. He would have stayed behind out of loyalty, but he was perfectly aware that he would be unable to tame the creature as he had Gouran for in his interim in the Other World the spell he had learned to do so had faded from his memory (and with the lives of his friends on the line, right then would have been a bad time to try to jog his memory!).

Eishou charged in directly at its front, and Yuka let fly the the arrow she had pulled back. The swipe that the brave general had made at its forepaw bloodied it, but did little damage. Yuka's arrow flew fast and straight, but only hit the outer rim of its eye. The youma screamed and reared up in pain and anger. Eishou dodged a return swipe by the beast and ducked in to stab at its rib while Yuka nocked and aimed another arrow. When the Youma had reared up, it bared its throat, which was a considerably larger target than its eye had been. The arrow flew straight once more, and this time it buried itself deep into the flesh of the youma's neck, but only in the side, piercing the skin and going out the other side, but not cutting off the flow of blood or air. Eishou landed a long stab into the ribs of the youma and the beast curled up a bit, lashing and thrashing at the closer target. One blow struck the soldier and sent him flying to the side to tumble for a ways. The beast turned at bay and lowered its head at the only other target it saw, Yuka.

:Not good,: she thought in a benumbed state of fear that wasn't yet panic, but was certainly headed in that direction.

It was to the school-girl's credit, certainly, that she did not turn and run, but stood her ground. She pulled another arrow out of her quiver, nocked it and drew, aiming for the eyes that regarded her with murderous intent. Suddenly there was a flash of russet red from off to one side and a shape blurred in to attack the Youma. Gouran. The Youma let out a bone-chilling howl of pain as the larger shirei under the command of the Tai kirin sank his teeth into enemy flesh on the scruff of its neck and jerked his head side to side as a terrier worried a rat. Yuka needed no further prompting, she let fly her arrow and this time managed to plant it in the soft tissue of its eye. Eishou rushed in while the beast was distracted, rearing up to try to shake off Gouran and screaming in pain from the arrow, and dealt the finishing blow, gutting the creature all the way down its navel. It gave one last weak cry and fell over. Yuka panted with reaction-fear and her stomach roiled, trying to make her sick. Eishou politely retrieved her arrows from out of the beast, cleaned them and returned them to her.

"Good work," He said gruffly, as a commanding officer might to one of his young, green soldiers under his command after his first battle. "You do not lack for courage."

"Ah... Thanks..." Yuka said, as she tucked away her bow and quiver. "You too. Good stab there."

Eishou acknowledged the compliment with a nod, but was occupied in cleaning all of the blood off from his armor so that he could continue to travel in the presence of a kirin and not make him sick.

"You too Gouran," Yuka called to the youma beast, which was already on its way back to its master. Its only reply was a snort in her general direction. Shortly afterward they were on their way again.

They made camp in a clearing that Eishou had found off the road. It was close enough to a river that they would have water but far enough away to avoid ant aquatic predators or youma on the way to a watering hole. The fire, when they at last got it to light, was a pitiful spluttering thing that fizzed and popped fitfully and just barely stayed lit but it was enough to cook the now almost inevitable rice on. After the days exertions they were all famished. Eishou caught fish from the river for Yuka and himself and a nice salad of wild greens and early apples for Kaname. In the process he taught Yuka a quick lesson in forage and fishing (that did not include all of the fancy gear and tackle she was accustomed to when she thought of fishing).

The rain started up in earnest when Yuka and Kaname were three quarters of the way done with setting up thier tent on high ground. They finished quickly and all three of them crowded inside for shelter and to hopefully fry off some. There was no way that Yuka was changing her clothes crowded back to back with a strange man, especially when it was much more expedient to just sleep in them now and change in the morning. They huddled together to keep as warm as possible through the cold night and Eishou, a veteran of worse campaigns than that one, told them both the story of how Gyousou had become so famous in the province of Bun that there was actually a saying that reflected his feat. "To show one a white shield."

The main city on Shin Province, where the seat of the provincial government was was called Sa which apparently meant "brown" but utterly belied its appearance for all of the walls were white-washed stone and the roof tiles were blue-fired grey clay from the river nearby. Yuka would have called Sa sizable town, but she was accustomed to living in cities that took the better part of a day to cross even using automotive transport. Eishou considered the place to be a rather good-sized city and Yuka and Kaname both had to remind themselves that they came from a world with probably twenty or thirty times the population that this one held... especially if the populations kept getting decimated by youma every other decade or so.

Outside the gates to the city was a sizable migrant workers camp. Clearly they were not the only ones who had heard of construction work to be found in the new palace in Shin Province and thought to profit by it. The migrant camp was no neat military unit of orderly rows of tents and ample food and water for all, it was a squalid little town in and of itself with ramshackle pitched-tent houses set up wherever a given person or family thought was best to put it. Scrawny, half-naked children and flea-ridden mongrels ran, played and fought on the packed dirt "streets" of the little town, no-one was enforcing fresh-water rules (or hygiene standards for that matter) so it smelled pretty ripe.

"Are you sure we have to camp here?" Yuka muttered with distaste as she looked around them.

"The best way to remain unnoticed," Eishou murmured back in a very low voice. "Is to blend in with the people we want to imitate. There would be some eyebrows raised if we claimed to be poor laborers looking for work but we had coin enough to pay for lodgings."

Yuka tried not to sigh too loudly by the fact that the man had a good point.

"We'll establish our identities and see what we can hear on the streets for a few days and if this route doesn't pan out, we'll just move on to another location," Eishou tried to reassure her.

Yuka nodded, looking for a place that wasn't too close to someone else's little camp nor too close to what seemed to be the latrine areas or the distemperate-smelling areas where people gathered water. She found a spot that seemed like it would suit on the western edge of the migrant camp, they would have to go further for water but it didn't smell. Eishou went to look for firewood while she and Kaname set up the tent. After half an hour the young former general returned saying that the nearby wood had been picked clean of fallen drift and that any other supply had to be bought at exorbitant prices. Judging by the roll of cord-wood slung over his shoulder, Eishou had been forced to give in to one shady opportunist or another.

They made dinner and carefully didn't talk about their mission. As part of their ruse to establish themselves, Yuka took out her instrument and started to play. Kaname's face was hidden by a hood and cowl, ostensibly for warmth in the chill of the evening, but mostly because Eishou insisted on keeping the kirin's face hidden (for obvious reasons). Yuka's violin attracted curious looks and she with it. The children of the camp had apparently not had anything that remotely resembled fun in their lives for a very long time, for when they started playing the faster celtic reels the children seemed to equate it with "festival" and they started to dance, impromptu, to the music. Some of them were so skinny that Yuka wondered where they found the energy, but find it they did. It seemed that kids were kids no matter the world. Yuka, feeling sorry for them, played until her out-of-practice fingers were sore and Kaname sketched them in his sheaf of papers with charcoal. In gratitude, when they at last did pack it in, there were gifts of flowers and pretty stones and the occasional stick to add to the fire after all of the children scampered back to their nests.

"Well, it looks like we won't have much of a problem establishing ourselves," Eishou grumbled. "I just wish you had picked a way that wasn't quite so noticeable."

"I wouldn't worry about it," Kaname replied. "In a city active as this one, and with this many soldiers in it, I'd bet entertainers are everywhere."

They found out how right he was the next morning with the three of them broke camp and took thier things with them to find work rather than trust that they would be in the camp when they came back. The city of Sa might as well have been a city of buskers and beggars. Every form of them, from the crouching, lowly old "blind man" to the ten year old child tootling on a tin whistle staked out corners and lanes, market squares and the curbs of shops where the city watch was less diligent about moving the rabble out of the way of "honest working citizens". They problem for Yuka and Kaname wouldn't be standing out, it would be finding a place that wasn't already staked out.

They found a place at an open market in between a stall selling bread and another stall selling fruits and she and Kaname took up her fiddle and began with the songs in their repertoire. They had the novelty of a new sound, and their hat, while it didn't fill quickly, did get the occasional copper tossed in it more often than not. Better than that, the place they'd staked out was a fount of gossip; much of it was useless, who was courting whom, whether or not the price of bread and rice might go up, how scarce the fruits and grains were compared to the year before... but some of it was useful; who had gotten taken up by the blackguard for sedition and whether or not they were to be shipped out to work in the mines, and where the others were going to be sent. The sun was setting when a small group of what were clearly laborers from the nearby camp on their way home from their job dropped by the bread stall to hopefully buy some of the day old bread or loaf-ends at a discount price stopped by. Yuka and Kaname kept playing their instruments, even as they strained to overhear what was said. Mostly it was the usual complaints; sore muscles from the heavy labor, not enough money for the work they did, the price of bread and other necessities, but Yuka managed to overhear two interesting bits; one was that the overseers in charge of the construction on the new palace had started hiring again for another section and the other was that there had been a major increase in the guard on the finished wing of the palace the wing which contained the new Tower of Penitence.

"What's this Tower of Penitence I've been hearing about?" Kaname asked Eishou as they wolfed down a large bowl of rice, while Yuka soaked her finger tips which had lost their callouses in the time since she's stopped needing to play to violin for competition.

"It seems to be a new feature on the governmental palace," Eishou replied.

He had spent the day out hopping from bar to tea-house getting in touch with all of the contacts he had scattered about the city and still hidden within the army. Yuka strongly suspected that a number of people in the crowd that day had been assigned by Eishou to protect them and next asked him about it.

"You had people watching us, didn't you?"

Eishou blinked in surprise.

"Ah! Good eyes! Did you notice how many, and who they were?"

"I think so," she said, a little uncertainly. This had the feeling of him being a sensei giving a review quiz to a particularly promising young student.

"There was one young man who settled himself down on the curb shortly after Kaname and I found our spot. He had a bandage over his eyes, pretending to be a blind beggar, but he didn't call out to the crowd with his sob story, he just waited there quietly, pretending to stare at nothing."

"How did you know he was pretending?"

"When he got up to move the way he used his walking stick was more like an accessory, and he dodged out of the way when people moved too fast."

"Good," Eishou said approvingly. "Any more?"

"There was one fellow, a burly man," Kaname volunteered. "He kept chatting up this one girl and one minute she'd be turning him aside and the next she acted like she might be interested."

"Was the girl part of it?" Yuka asked.

Eishou smiled.

"Possibly. Any others?"

Yuka shook her head, echoed by the kirin.

"There were a small squad of four down the street pretending to hawk skeins of yarn, then down the other way I had set up another squad of six selling blankets. There was two other pairs later on, one set disguised as buyers for the booth nearby, and other set were watching the gambling going on just across the way. Oh, and a small gambling ring of four just toward sun-down. Those were dual purpose though, the fastest way to divest a soldier of both rumors and coin is by gambling ring... surround him with enough nodding cronies and wine and he'll spill his guts to anyone."

Yuka tucked the information away. It might be useful to one day disguise herself as a beer-pourer or gambler herself sometime.

"And as to the Tower of Penitence, it's a new part of the Governmental palace, just added on recently. It overlooks an executioners block where those citizens who have difficulties with the new emperors rule can look out over their fate and rue the day they opened their mouths. I gotta say, even after all this time of having that bastard in place I never suspected he was that sadistic underneath it all."

"Me neither. Back when I lived in the palace he was always so nice to me. I never sensed any evil from him at all," Kaname taiki said sadly.

Yuka looked at Eishou and Kaname in perplexity.

"Ansen," Eishou explained. "Was once the twin general to Gyousou back in the days of the previous emperor. Everyone in the military called them the twin swords. They were both amazing, intelligent and formidable men. The soldiers and citizens protected by them prospered even as the reign itself waned."

Eishou shook his head, clearly bringing himself out of his own reverie.

"But that was then. Now, as you can see he's used his tactical brilliance trid us of our king in a way that we cannot track."

"Has everyone tried to make it into..." Yuka hesitated, reluctant to use the word "palace" in a place where there might be interested listeners. "To your former home?"

Some few, but you must understand," Eishou replied. "That place is a world unto itself. Because it is located above the Sea of Clouds, it is difficult to get to even when times are peaceful and the guard is relatively lax. At a time like now, with a pretender on the throne tightening security around him, anyone we have sent to sneak in or try to question the staff has been discovered. Furthermore, there is an additional reason besides wanting to protect himself that the security at the palace has been tightened."

"What's that," asked Kaname.

"Ansen has taken hostages from every province and even down to the county level in some particular cases," Eishou replied. "He keeps the hostages there in order to keep the province lords and their vassals that he cannot replace, from deploying thier troops against him. Well, now a days, with so many of the black guard in place, perhaps the hostages have become redundant, but he keeps them just the same."

"Kaname and Yuka exchanged a long look and finally it was Yuka who said

"If Ansen feels comfortable enough to keep hostages there, then that must be where he's keeping his prize."

"What about the Tower?" Kaname asked. "Wouldn't keeping him in a place that he himself designed be even safer than that other place?"

"It's a compelling thought, but think of this. A pretender to the throne knows that he rules only so long as the real king is kept out of the way. Ansen's clearly found a way to make that happen, but even the most arrogant man would want a surety. He won't be keeping his main prize thousands of miles away from him where someone might sneak him out. He's going to keep it right under his nose, where he can check up on it often and make sure that nothing has happened to it."

"Well, how do we get in there then?" Kaname asked.

"We should hold off on any plans to go charging up there," Yuka said. "I mean, it's not exactly like we have an army. You can't even change. For now, we should keep our ears open."

"As for not having an army," Eishou said. "Wait another day or two, and we'll see if there's not something that can be done about that."