Fushigi Yuugi:
The Mirrorverse
by Fox in the Stars
Yui and her Seishi were aided as they entered Hokkan's capital, but the laws and customs of that place are both unfamiliar and absolute. Hotohori's transgression of looking upon Hokkan's princess led to his arrest along with Nuriko and Chichiri, and before Tamahome could find Yui to tell her, she heard the news as rumor and was seized with dread. Hotohori is now summoned before the princess, able only to hope that her face will be a familiar one.
Episode Thirty-six:
The Power of Disguise
As Hotohori walked through the halls with the monk in front of him and the soldier behind him, the palace of Hokkan felt at once familiar and alien. Its grand scale and some elements of its structure formed common threads with his own long experience, but as stifling as the palace of Konan could be, this place, he thought, must be much worse. The halls were silent except for their footsteps; the servants whom they passed worked without a word. Little decoration and still less color relieved walls of a translucent gray stone with only subtle threads of hue, bounded by black woodwork. Everywhere they led him it was closed corridors, never a walkway with a view, if such a thing was even imaginable in this climate. Although this one and his own were both palaces, they were palaces of different colors; that of Konan was the vermilion of warm, lively exuberance, and here in the palace of Hokkan, it was the black of close formality.
Such was the place to which his younger sister and only surviving sibling had been sent at barely over ten years old, upon her political betrothal to the crown prince of Hokkan. He remembered his own loneliness at having her taken away, but what must those years have been like for her?
And was it her that he was about to see? That was the reckless gamble he had made. Even if it were another princess, he told himself, his situation wasn't necessarily hopeless; the Sacred Order of Genbu, headed by the royal family, had offered their help to the Suzaku Seishi in their quest. Still, he remained alert against the possibility that he would have to defend himself and escape, noting as best he could the location of the soldier's sword.
They arrived at a pair of heavy black carved wood doors where a second soldier waited; the first one broke step behind Hotohori and the two of them took positions flanking the doors, which the monk ceremoniously opened onto a long, empty antechamber that smelled of Genbu's sacred incense. The monk led him in, and as the doors closed behind them, Hotohori saw that there was a second monk, also, who raised a bell and struck it sharply. The two seated themselves beside the same doorway, back to back with the soldiers, separated by the mere inches of the wall, and yet seemingly in two different worlds.
Another pair of massive doors at the far end of the room opened, first one side, then the other. A soldier with an oversized halberd stood backlit in the aperture. "Come forward!" It was a woman's voice.
It struck him as strange, given all the formality and security, that they left him to make the crossing alone, but a strange energy dragged at his steps as though the room were somehow enchanted. As he came close to the waiting soldier, he could clearly see her feminine figure and her long hair falling down her back in a number of small, tight braids, and she motioned him across the threshold to a cushion laid out on the carpeted floor. Uncomfortable turning his back on her huge axe, he twisted around to keep his eyes on it as he settled into the offered seat and she refastened the doors with a methodical boom of wood.
"He's here; coast is clear!" the guardswoman announced over his shoulder, suddenly very casual. "Don't worry, I won't tell on you," she assured him.
Hotohori turned at last and found himself seated before a black curtain of the same heavy slubbed silk as the draperies on the palanquin, rising nearly to the ceiling, brushing against the floor, and closing off from view a square of the room about six feet on each side. It rustled slightly; four delicate fingers appeared beneath its lower edge and lifted it up to reveal a flowing red dress with draping sashes such as a noble woman in Konan would wear, and above that, at last, a delicately sculpted face, brown eyes touched with gold, and rich chocolate-dark hair.
His joy even eclipsed his relief, and he smiled irresistibly as he recognized his younger sister. Not only had her features not changed so completely since their childhood, but even all these years after nursemaids had remarked on the two of them looking like twins, her face was still very much like the one he knew so well from admiring it every day.
She stared at him as if hardly daring to believe it. "S... Seishuku...?"
He lifted his chin in facetious dignity. "I would prefer that you address me by my august name."
"Sai-niichan!" Kin'umi threw the curtain aside and sprang forward to embrace him with such force that she knocked him backward, and the two of them tumbled to the floor, laughing.
"Oy," the guard remarked. "You weren't kidding about the resemblance."
"That's Gyoushi; oh, I'd go crazy without her," Kin'umi said as they picked themselves up. Her childhood voice had matured into a smooth, womanly contralto, but her light, babbling cadence still made it sound girlish. "But what are you doing here? For you to be out of the palace and come all this way, it must be..."
Hotohori nodded. "She finally came."
Kin'umi squealed with delight. "The Suzaku no Miko! They don't tell me much in here, but I did know that. So then, that must be the girl who was with you — but why would the Miko have a Zashiyo dialect...?"
"No, no, that's Chichiri, one of the other Seishi. She and Nuriko are still locked in your dungeon," he reminded her.
She clapped her hands to her mouth. "Oh! Gyoushi, send someone to tell them he's safe and let them go."
"Yes, Milady."
Kin'umi scrambled under the curtain again, and the two of them sat silently while Gyoushi went out into the empty antechamber and delivered the message to the soldiers and monks waiting outside; they didn't speak again until she had returned and shut the doors behind her.
"I've given everyone a terrible scare," he admitted. "I couldn't know that it was you."
"Isn't it awful?" she said, pushing the heavy veil aside again. "That's the law here; anyone who looks at the Emperor or any of his family, they just cut off their heads like that; they're not even allowed to say anything."
"I know."
"I didn't really know it was you, either," she said. "I thought I must be imagining it, that you couldn't possibly be here, but it looked so much like you, and even if it wasn't, I couldn't let them do that to anyone, could I? Maybe they won't like it, but they just humor me because I'm the silly foreigner... I'm not even supposed to talk! Look at this; I want to show you this." She gestured him in behind the curtain, which Gyoushi finally lifted out of the way and propped up with her halberd. Beside the cushion where Kin'umi sat was a chest with numerous tiny drawers and a tray laying on top. She pulled a drawer to reveal files of thin ceramics slips, and she took a few out and turned them over to show a raised character on each face. "I'm supposed to talk with this. Can you imagine sorting through thousands of tiles every time you want to say anything? They say it's because of the Mandate of Heaven, but it's crazy! Am I such a living goddess that looking at my handwriting will burn people's eyes out?"
"I've been seeing how formal everything is here," he said. "It must have been terrible for you..."
"It wasn't this bad before I came of age and we had the real wedding," she said. "And I have Gyoushi and everyone humors me — there are some things I just won't do...And at least I got away from Mother."
Hotohori smiled ruefully. "Were you told when she died?"
She nodded. "I didn't know what to do..."
"I don't think there was anything you could have done," he said.
"But it made me so happy, all the dresses and silks you sent when I got married," she said. "I know it was horrible to make you wait at a time like that, but I just had to change clothes before I brought you in here. I feel like a widow the way they dress me, not that anyone sees me anyway..."
He chuckled, not having it in him to be angry at her for her vanity.
"You really rescued me, you know," she said.
"Did I?"
"Yes. My husband had finally just ordered me to go to the big temple and monastery, after I told him again and again that I wouldn't..."
"But—!" Hotohori stopped and looked back at Gyoushi.
"I told you, I know how to keep my mouth shut," she said.
"But the Monks of Genbu are helping us," he told Kin'umi. "They were planning to meet us at the monastery at sunset; could that be why...?"
"I don't trust him that much," she said. "As soon as we were married, he started in — he wants me to be a nun, can you believe that? To be a nun for Genbu and wear one of those black veils all the time! I told him if I was going to do that, I would have stayed home and done it for Suzaku, but he never gives up, that stupid man..."
"So you're unhappy with your husband?" he asked sadly. After all, she hadn't been given any choice in marrying him.
"Well, he does do things like that, and I have to tell you he's not handsome..."
Hotohori hugged her. "My dear little sister, I've made you unhappy!" he lamented theatrically. "How could your husband charm you with his looks when you have a brother like me to compare him to?"
She burst out in giggles. "Oh, it's not a matter of comparing!" she laughed. "He has these little black eyes with thick eyebrows, and a big flat nose and a double chin, but..." she trailed off.
"But...?" he asked.
She let her face fall and for a long moment savored a frown, but one more wistful than bitter. "Whoever said 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' was an idiot," she said at last. "I say those things, but what I hate the most about him is that he's so busy. Sometimes it's a month at a stretch that I never see him. Then I think about things he did or said or wanted me to do that offended me, and I think about how plain-looking he is. After a week of that, I hate him, and I think when he comes I'll say something nasty to him, but as soon as I see him, I forget it all. Even when he asks me over and over to go to the temple, he never tried to force me, at least not until today. He tells me I'm beautiful even behind a curtain, because I think about things differently from everyone else here, and maybe he's patronizing me, but I never start thinking so until after he leaves. When we're together, for a while I forget that Mother shipped me away to this crazy country and you or I didn't have anything to say about it. For a little while, it's like that..." She sighed. "And then he always leaves again."
Her brother held her around the shoulders; it was a sad story, but it also gave him a sense of relief and hope. She had given him a glimpse beyond the surface grievances, and he could see that it wasn't a completely lonely and joyless life she had been delivered into.
"And what about you?" she asked. "Did Mother pick out someone from the Inner Palace for you?"
"Do not speak to me about that place," he said bluntly, with a twitch.
"It sounds like she must have tried."
"'There are some things I just won't do,'" he echoed.
"But you can't go on alone forever," she said.
He smiled knowingly. "I didn't say I was alone."
"Oh? Who is it?"
"She finally came... The Suzaku no Miko."
Kin'umi squealed with delight again. "I wanted to ask you before, what she was like, and now I have to!"
"Well..." He was struggling with how to put Yui into words when the bell sounded in the antechamber and his sister ducked back inside her enclosure.
Gyoushi snatched her axe and let the drapery fall back into place before she went out and brought back a letter on a tray, which she slid under the curtain before returning to close the doors again.
"My husband says I can't keep you," Kin'umi summarized.
"I'm afraid you can't," Hotohori told her. "I have to meet the others at sunset, and after that, speed is too important to our mission to spend more time here..."
She shouldered through the screen to show her pouting face. "It's not fair, just to come in and go out like the wind when we might never see each other again..."
"It isn't, is it?"
"At least you got this far," she said. "Without you, I'll just be sitting behind a curtain again, for the rest of my life..."
Hotohori knew that she wouldn't really want to keep him away from Yui and the others, but bitterness at the situation was only natural, and he of all people could understand how she felt. Only days ago, it had been himself in the palace of Konan, thinking that the lively breeze that had swept into his life was passing out again, leaving him in the gilded cage where he would remain forever. The barriers around his sister might be even more opaque, but he couldn't help thinking, If only she had someone like Chichiri...
"The Suzaku no Miko..." she said wistfully. "I wish I could have met her just once..."
As evening approached, Yui pulled together several of the floor cushions in the meditation room and lay on them with her eyes closed in an effort to take a nap, now with everyone but Hotohori there watching over her and conversing in hushed tones. The earlier terror and confusion had run the worst of its course within a couple of hours, but it had still exhausted her, and just when she would have wanted to be energetic and alert. Despite Tama curling up against her chest, she couldn't fall asleep, but just laying still — and, as cold as it might seem, exempting herself from interacting with anyone — had some value as rest and gave her space to calm down.
She had still been crying when Master Tan had arrived, leaving it to Chiriko and to Tasuki, who had turned highly protective in the crisis, to explain the rumor they had heard, and when Tan had revealed that the princess in question was Kin'umi, the princess from Konan whose name Yui recognized from Hotohori's story in the cave, it had only raised a new dread. What a cruel fate, if he were inadvertently killed by his own sister! But Yui didn't dare breathe a word of it; to let slip that Hotohori was the princess's brother would be to reveal that he was the Emperor of Konan and invite unpredictable repercussions.
Tan had arranged to send the princess a message with all possible haste; he could even get one on such short notice from Kin'umi's husband, the crown prince, proving Chiriko's suspicion about what a highly-placed official he must be. Her reply had arrived in due time. It also avoided the personal aspects of the situation, but it said that all of "the prisoner's" companions had already been freed, that he would be delivered by the end of the day, and that she was so fearful that her husband would follow his native customs and avenge the transgression against her that she demanded to have them all, together with Hotohori, brought before her again as quickly as possible, writing even that she would not eat, sleep, or recieve any visitors until she had seen them safe.
It had been some time later that first Tamahome, then Nuriko and Chichiri had come to the monastery looking for Yui so they could tell her as much of the situation as they knew, only to find her with the letter in hand to reassure them rather than vice versa. Chichiri acted as if she had never been the least bit frightened, Nuriko as if she would stay alarmed until she had Hotohori back before her eyes, and this time, Yui felt more in accord with Nuriko, at least enough to keep her stubbornly suspended above the threshold of sleep.
She opened her eyes immediately at the sound of the door and recognized Tan's sash.
"He's here. I'm having him brought directly to the rear courtyard, so if you'll follow me, I'll take you there now."
Everyone got back into their coats, and Yui tied Hotohori's sword on her back again. Tan, joined by a few other monks, led them out through the wide corridors to a sprawling courtyard behind the monastery, where a cultivated band stretched the entire width of the complex to high walls in the distance on each side. Ahead, toward the first footing of the northern mountains rising close before them, a park of pine trees with needles almost blue-black stood sharply splashed in the sunset light that threw long shadows over the entire scene. A single paved pathway cut through the center of the pines, marked with archways, and at some distance Yui could see the long rooftop of an enclosed tunnel rise beyond the trees and snake its way up the mountain to a pagoda perched on the slope.
"Isn't that the Shrine of Genbu?" Chiriko asked.
"Yes," Tan said. "We will be leading you just beyond it."
At the sound of footsteps, Yui and the others looked around to find two more monks bringing Hotohori, dressed in the same coat and scarf from before. Yui's deflating relief at seeing him, however, didn't let her down into perfect happiness; the joy was mingled with anger at the scare he had given everyone, and she couldn't decide which to act on.
But Tasuki could. He ran to meet him, drew back a fist, and Yui gasped as he punched Hotohori across the face so hard that if the monks hadn't caught him, it would have knocked him down. "What the &$% were you thinking you %*#$ing moron!" he roared. "Yui cried for an hour — you scared the #%$ out of her!"
After the first sharp cry of pain, Hotohori just averted his eyes and stared shamefacedly at the ground, rubbing his cheek where he'd been hit.
"Well?"
"Tasuki, stop it!" Yui insisted. "We can deal with this later."
Nuriko and Chichiri had already gone to bring Hotohori back to the group with Tasuki stalking after. "Are you all right?" Nuriko asked.
He nodded.
"Are you sure? ...Can't you talk?"
"Please, it would be better... to talk later..." he said, his voice quiet and oddly strained. It was difficult to see his face clearly in the fading light.
"If Hotohori-chan breathed a lot of Genbu's incense in the palace, it could suppress his Power of Suzaku for a little while no da," Chichiri said.
"Yes, yes that must be it..." he agreed, glancing at her.
"It will not be needed," Tan said. "Please, all of you, follow us." Hotohori seemed to stare at him.
The monks led the way down the path through the trees, some bearing lanterns in front. When they came to the rear wall of the monastery complex, a final archway led from the paved path into the enclosed tunnel, where their steps echoed against black walls that stifled the lantern light and made it feel as though they were walking through a tunnel of night itself. It stretched on and on through folding turns and a wearying uphill slope, but the otherworldly atmosphere and their guides' silence discouraged them all from speaking.
At last, the hallway turned almost perpendicularly into a wide staircase surmounted by massive doors. The assisting monks opened the portal, and Tan led them through it into what Yui immediately recognized as the Shrine of Genbu. The wide, soaring space and the tiered fountain at the center were like those of the Shrine of Suzaku, but there was one immediately obvious difference: panels of sheer black silk hung in layers that screened the golden statue of Genbu, their hems hovering so low over the fountain at its base that they swayed slightly from the breath of the flowing water. Through them, only a hazy shape was visible: the great flat mound of a body, the flourish of the tortoise's head reared over its back, and the golden wisp, almost lost behind the veils, of a serpent coiled around the shell and rising in a high, graceful arch.
"Please wait while we pay our respects," Tan said. Chichiri joined their hosts in burning incense and bowing, but Yui could only think to offer a brief mental prayer and wait as requested. As she looked around, she saw more monks and nuns who had been there when they came in and sat out of the way along the walls.
The guides finished their observances and led Yui and the others around the statue to the rear of the shrine. Yui kept looking at it as they walked around it; its veils didn't overlap, and in places she could see through a gap between them, but never more than a tiny sliver.
"Only when Genbu is summoned does anyone see his statue completely no da," Chichiri whispered to her, noticing her gaze. "Not even the shrine attendants; they're all blind no da."
That surprised Yui a little as they came to the back of the shrine where more of those attendants were sitting. The walls were entirely covered with carved panels framed in grids of timbers, and she thought that perhaps this helped them know their way around the shrine by touch.
"It is time," Tan told them. "The Suzaku no Miko will face the guardians' challenge."
Sure enough, they rose to their feet and moved easily with just one hand brushing over the wall. The two nearest the center unerringly found an exact spot, where they removed sections of timbers from the wall to reveal hidden ropes which they and their fellows took hold of and pulled. An entire section of the wall, bearing a large carving of two warrior generals, slid forward.
Tan and his lantern bearers led Yui and her Seishi in through the gap. As the entry was closed again behind them, the monks began lighting more lanterns around the walls, and they found themselves in a wide cavern with rock walls that glittered in the light, except in the one place where a narrow cave led deeper into the mountain, and the lanterns' glow barely penetrated into its foreboding blackness.
Tan turned to Yui and raised his hand toward its dark mouth. "This way the guardians await you, Suzaku no Miko. Beyond this point, we will not interfere, and your Seishi may not accompany you. If you seek Genbu's Shinzahou, then enter."
Yui's stomach tightened. The entire quest hinged on what she would do within the next few minutes, and with no idea what the guardians or their test might be, she had no way to prepare. She nervously gripped the strap of Hotohori's sword. "Everyone wish me luck," she said.
Chichiri seized her in a sudden hug. "I know you'll do it no da!"
As the others joined in a chorus of confidence and advice, Yui looked up between them at Hotohori; his face was uncharacteristically tense, but gave her one firm nod into his scarf.
Tama meowed beside her ankle, and she bent to pick him up. "Sorry. They probably don't want cats to come either," she said.
Chiriko stepped forward to take Tama from her. She was still crouching at his level, but was distracted from Chiriko's wide eyes by Tama's tail switching across the lump in Chiriko's robe where she knew he was carrying Mitsukake's medicine jar. She looked at it seriously, but the feeling of melancholy it gave her now felt calming and strengthening. Maybe facing this test bravely and doing her best was all she could do for Mitsukake now, but she could at least do that.
"I'll be back soon," she said. One way or the other... She took a deep, bracing breath, rose and turned in one motion, and plunged forward into the dark before the sight of it could intimidate her.
In the lighted cavern she left behind, her echoing footsteps dwindled away, and long moments crept by in awkward silence.
"Dammit," Tamahome grumbled. "We're supposed to protect her, and now when she needs us, all we can do is wait..."
Hotohori looked around nervously, then with a sudden burst of resolve ran into the cave after her.
Their guides cried out in shock. "Stop! You mustn't—!" Tan started.
But Chichiri caught his arm. "Don't worry, Tan-chan; she'll be fine no da."
The monk's veil couldn't hide his shocked stare.
Nuriko gaped. "He didn't—!"
Tan's hands hovered tremblingly in front of his chest; his voice came out broken and wordless. "Whah...? Aa-ahh!"
Yui made her way carefully through the total darkness of the cave, keeping one hand on the smooth, knobbly stone of the wall to guide her. It wouldn't do any good to wonder how far she would have to go or what she would find, the task at hand was to keep moving forward, so she just kept walking, feeling out the ground ahead with each step.
The wall suddenly turned away, abandoning her searching hand, and the crunching of her feet on the rocky floor echoed a wider emptiness. She had just decided to keep following the edge rather than risk getting lost blind in open space, when she was suddenly caught in the glare of a brilliant black light — nothing like the novelty electric bulbs of her own world, but a true black as vivid as the sky at the height of the clearest night. How it could be possible for a black light to flash in the dark, she didn't understand even as she saw it, and for one moment it clearly described a character: "Danger." Another glow, pale and moonlike, blossomed in places among the rocks and showed her that the cavern ended here, in a large, rough chamber where a man in a white robe stood downcast and silent, so wreathed in this new ghostly light that he seemed almost to be made from it.
"Hello...?" Yui hesitantly approached him. At first, the strange illumination made his features difficult to read, but the recognition was already dawning as he lifted sad eyes from behind his long sweep of dark, light-washed hair, and she cried out and ran to just within arm's reach of him. "Hotohori! But how—!" He wasn't supposed to enter the cave with her. He was already behind her, in different clothes than these — but then the horror broke over her with sudden, brutal clarity: when "Hotohori" had been brought to the monastery to rejoin them, he had acted so evasive, trying to mask his voice; the light had been too poor to see his face clearly; the scarf would have hidden the absence of the scar on his neck; Chichiri hadn't been able to feel his Power of Suzaku. They had been sent an impostor, and now that the real Hotohori was standing in front of her, Yui knew in her heart that she was looking at a ghost. She struggled even to take ragged, gasping breaths; words were beyond possibility.
He stepped forward and embraced her, resting his forehead on hers light as a breath and stroking her cheek with cool fingers. "Yui, please forgive me," he said softly. "I've failed you because of my foolishness. It was all a trap..."
Footsteps in the cavern behind them suddenly came up short; Yui started and looked back. It was the other Hotohori standing there in the coat and scarf, staring transfixed with horror. "No! It's a lie!" This time the impostor spoke with a full voice — the wrong voice, one low and full but unmistakeably feminine. She clapped her hands to her mouth and shook her head as though hardly less devastated than Yui. "It has to be a lie..." she quavered. "Isn't it...!"
"Yes, it's a lie," a soft-spoken man announced from the darkness. The glow from the rocks spread and grew stronger and revealed another figure, a man dressed all in black who had until that point been hidden in the shadows. Yui could see at a glance that he was a Monk of Genbu, with a costume that differed from Master Tan's only in details: the hat was taller; the veil bunched up on his shoulders without slits at the sides; where Tan's cuffs and edges had decorative tucks, there was instead the patterned sheen of black on black embroidery; and instead of a cloth sash he wore a white cord over his shoulder, tucked into his belt rather than tied at the hip, and with only one elaborate knot in the shape of a seven-pointed star that rested in the center of his chest. He stood beside an altar-like niche carved into the wall where a heavy necklace was reverently displayed, its elaborate surface turning the silver light into grains of gold and jewel-color.
The monk turned toward the Hotohori in the luminous white robe, who still had a hand on Yui's shoulder, and addressed him in a reproachful tone. "Umiyame."
With a poof! the figure of Hotohori was completely transformed. "Hikitsu!"
Yui's head was sent whirling in a wave of relief and registered only that it was a woman's voice and a colorful costume that shrank into a miniaturized figure and charged at the monk. He held her back as she flailed at him, but it seemed no more than a well-practiced theatrical routine. So that's where Chichiri gets that, Yui thought, recovering herself, although not even Chichiri made it look so absurdly natural. If Umiyame's power of disguise was even stronger...
Reinflating to natural size revealed her as trim but curvaceous, with full chest and hips, and even her face was roundish, but with enough definition to the nose, chin, and eyes to give it a sharp look. Her hat was the style with shaped upturned flaps, decorated with medallions and hanging strands of beads, and her clothing was covered with vivid geometric embroidery motifs, from the cloth tubes that bound her pine-green hair to the panels of her tunic to her fur-lined boots with their pointed, upturned toes.
She confronted the monk Hikitsu with an upraised finger between their faces. "I was supposed to be testing her!"
"That's no excuse for torturing our princess or making our people look like murderers," he insisted.
Too many questions about everyone present tumbled through Yui's mind, but the words "our princess" turned her to the fake Hotohori first as she remembered: "The nursemaids always remarked that she and I were like twins..." "You're Kin'umi?"
She nodded nervously into the borrowed scarf. "I hope you're not too angry, but they never let me out of the palace and I was telling Sai how much I wanted to meet you just once..."
Yui didn't know whether to be happy or angry and rested her face on her hand. Still thrilled with relief from the latest scare and with even the guardians seeming like such ordinary characters, she let herself chuckle.
"Don't worry, either of you," Hikitsu said. "Her majesty has already been a great help to the Suzaku no Miko."
Yui could at least admit that; she didn't know what she would have done if Kin'umi hadn't stepped in and disrupted the ruse.
"But it was really just a trick?" the princess asked anxiously. "Nothing actually happened to my brother?"
"It was really just a trick; I swear I didn't mean anything by it," Umiyame said.
"He is waiting for you safely in the palace," Hikitsu confirmed.
"But what if someone found him out after I left? How do you know?" she persisted.
"I can see it." He raised his hands to the hem of his veil and lifted it up onto his hat, and for the first time, Yui saw a Monk of Genbu uncover his face. That impossible black light blazed over his left eye, forming the character "Dipper," but as its brilliance faded, Kin'umi gasped beside her, and Yui herself couldn't suppress a pang of revulsion. His brows, his nose, his mouth were all normal, but in the orbits where his eyes should have been were soft concavities of flesh, each with only a small, constricted fleck of lashes. After the first shock, she remembered the blind shrine attendants outside, and when her mind, nourished by years of precociously-consumed medical texts, offered up the term "anophthalmia," it actually made her feel quite a bit better.
"You... You were born without eyes?" Yui asked.
"Of course he was; he's Hikitsu," Umiyame answered.
"My power of Genbu is Spirit Sight," he explained. "Regardless of direction or obstacles, and over long distances, I can see many things. I can see life, magic, spirits, the gods' power, even the glow that people impart to objects through their intentions. The red light burning in the palace is very clear to me."
"But he can't see walls," Umiyame added. "Or furniture. Or stairs."
He gave a deflating sigh. "That's why I always had an attendant..."
"You 'had'...?" Kin'umi questioned nervously. "I mean, if the two of you are Sei of Genbu, Genbu was summoned something like a hundred and fifty years ago."
"That's right," Umiyame told her, with a witchy wave of her fingers. "We're ghosts!"
The princess recoiled. "Eek!"
She actually just said 'eek,' Yui thought, staring at her. For her to look so uncannily like Hotohori and have such a girlish demeanor was jarring.
"Because we two had a special connection to our Miko, our spirits have remained in this place to watch over the relic she left behind," Hikitsu said. "We bear you no malice, Suzaku no Miko, but you must understand that we do not take this duty lightly. Before we can allow you to claim Genbu's Shinzahou, you must prove to us that you are worthy."
Yui felt again the tightening of apprehension in her belly.
"Are you ready to face our challenges?" he asked her.
Kin'umi gripped her arm as she looked him in the face as steadily as she could. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be," she said.
Umiyame showed her a wicked grin that cast doubt on Hikitsu's denial of malice. "Well put, Suzaku no Miko," she said. "Well put."
To Be Continued...
PREVIEW
As Yui faces the guardians' tests at last, Umiyame's power at its height threatens to overwhelm her. A hidden truth lies behind the Sei of Genbu's desire to protect this last remaining relic of their Miko, and the revelations they offer will reach even across the boundary between worlds.
NEXT TIME:
Genbu no Miko
Behind the Scenes Trivia:
Improving research methodologies forced me to change Umiyame's name not once but twice. Old Fushigi Yuugi guides gave the name as "Uramiya," later ones as "Urumiya," and when I looked up the constellation in non-FY sources, they finally gave its name as "Umiyame" — and of course it had to happen for the Sei of Genbu with the largest role in my story. This research also changed a couple of the Byakko Seishi's names on me, but in their case I caught it before I had gotten nearly as far.
On an unrelated note, it wasn't in our original plans, but I had been hanging onto the idea of Hotohori having a sister who looks just like him for almost that long, and I had some of the major ideas for the "Genbu Arc" in its current form during The Long Hiatus, years before I actually got back to work.