DISCLAIMER: We both know I don't own Soujiro, ShiShiO, Kenshin, Senkaku, or any of the other characters that are making Watsuki Nobuhiro and his corporate sponsors/affiliates rich. If I did, I wouldn't be living in a measly four-person dorm room and praying that I can finish my freshman year of college without a nervous breakdown. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. If not ... chikushou, aku baka!
That reminds me ... my Japanese is next to nonexistent. Don't fault me for it. At least I'm trying.
Happy reading!
ANTI-DISCLAIMER (would that be just a "claimer?"): Some of these characters ARE my own creation, as well as many elements of the setting; the town of Ichibou, Kim Young-eun, Karachi Hoebu, Yamashina Ito, and several other minor characters are my own ideas. Use your head. If it never appeared in anywhere in the Kenshin series, then it's probably mine. Not that anyone cares but me.
SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: To Kenshin TV ep 61, "Remaining Ju Pon Gattana, Choice of Life."
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CHAPTER 12:
THE CHALLENGE
"More trouble?!" Ukita asked in amazement as the torches of the town guards came into view in the distance. "You really know how to stir up a hornet's nest, boy!"
"Anou ..." Soujiro replied uneasily. He had not thought this far ahead when he vanished from the gatehouse only hours earlier.
"Oh, never mind," Ukita growled. "Come on, maybe we can make it work for us."
Ukita was already off his horse and leading it into the concealment of the rough, broken rocks along the north side of the road. Soujiro quickly saw what Ukita was getting at, and promptly took cover with the older samurai.
It did not take long for the torch-bearing guards to reach the place where Soujiro and Ukita lay concealed, but Soujiro counted every second like it was an hour. ShiShiO would have been very disappointed in him, he knew. ShiShiO had always said that the person who lost his patience lost his life, but he had never had to say that to Soujiro. Soujiro simply focused on remaining still and allowing the guards to pass without an inkling of their presence.
Ukita was having a harder time of it, not for himself, but for his horse. Fortunately, the horse was not a very restive or fiery animal, and Ukita seemed to have acquired some skill with horses at some point in the past. However, trying to keep a horse completely still and noiseless took a lot of effort and a little luck. Fortunately, the guard patrol was fairly noisy itself. Soujiro was glad of that. He did not have time for another unnecessary, drawn-out fight, and there were more than seventy men in the patrol. They must have sent for reinforcements before they left the gate, though Soujiro had no idea where they might have gotten them from.
As the last of the patrol passed by, Ukita suddenly turned to Soujiro and lofted the sheathed Oh-waza-mono blade in Soujiro's direction. Startled, Soujiro snatched it out of the air, but turned a puzzled expression on the samurai he had just rescued. Ukita simply nodded his head in the direction of Ichibou.
"Go," Ukita hissed. "It'll be too long before I can leave here with this," he added with a nod towards the horse. "You can be quieter without me. She trusts you, so I guess I can, too."
Soujiro looked at Ukita for another long moment before he smiled. Trust was a rare thing in his line of work, but all the more welcome. He didn't make a big deal of it, though.
"Arig ..."
"Go!" Ukita snapped, as loudly as he dared. Soujiro had vanished from his sight before the sound of the word died.
Unfortunately, the Shuku-chi was purely a sprinting move, and Soujiro could not maintain that quasi-mythical state of motion forever. Even during the fight with Himura, which he had been almost as well-rested and physically well-prepared for as possible, he had needed to take momentary breaks every few seconds. With all the hype about the Shuku-chi among the Ju Pon Gattana, however, people forgot how light he was on his feet in a distance race. He had always been the one sent when ShiShiO needed to send messages to members in remote locations, and he had never needed a horse. ShiShiO had been one of the Ishin ShiShi, and their ability to slip effortlessly and noiselessly through long streches of harsh terrain was not just a rumor. Soujiro had picked it up easily, and he was pushing his limits now.
He slowed somewhat when he came within sight of the gate, but he was right in guessing that the patrol that had passed him had severely drained the number of guards on duty. There looked to be less than a tithe of the number that there had been on Soujiro's way out. They had simply shut the gate, probably barred it from the inside, and were just holed up in their gatehouse with their rifles. Soujiro couldn't see a single one along the parapet.
Soujiro approached the gate without incident, and actually began to grow a little suspicious. He was still out of rifle range for all but the best marksmen, but he expected that he would have seen some sign of activity from the remaining guards by now. Even if they were unsure of where he was at the moment, they had to have seen something moving out here. They had an elevated viewpoint, even higher than the valley floor because of the sharp slope from the gatehouse to the level at which Soujiro stood. Then again, it was dark, and Soujiro was not carrying any form of light.
Suddenly, the faint sound of shouting on the far side of the wall reached Soujiro's ears, and he took cover. He could not hear what was being said, but he recognized the tone of authority. Apparently the guards were not completely leaderless without Genji. The shouting faded a few moments later, however, and Soujiro crept forward again.
Another surprise came a few moments later, when the gates in the wall above him opened wide with a loud creak and a dull boom. Soujiro quickly took cover again, expecting another guard patrol to emerge from the gaping archway. He could see the glow of torchlight from inside the gate, even at this distance. Shortly, a small group of men emerged from the gate, and Soujiro tensed. These were not town guards. The black leather armor revealed them as Yamashina's foot soldiers. It didn't make any practical difference, since Yamashina controlled both forces one way or another, but it was something to note. Soujiro also had not completely known that the town watch and the Yakuza forces worked so openly together. Then again, it was extremely late at night, and the valley and the town were both all but deserted; maybe it wasn't exactly 'open' by most standards.
Suddenly, the black-armored soldier at the front of the tiny squad called brazenly into the crisp night air. "Soujiro!" he cried. "Seta Soujiro! Are you listening?" Soujiro did not react, and stayed hidden in his small rocky crevice, but his eyes narrowed.
"Soujiro!" the man called again. "You can come out! We're not here to fight! I'm just a messenger! And the rest of the guards here are scared shitless of you, anyway!"
While Soujiro had no doubt that the last part of that was true, he was uncertain how that somehow made it reasonable for him to step out of his concealment. Frightened people did unpredictable things, he knew, and some of the guards in that tower probably had guns. Even if they had been ordered not to shoot, well ... frightened people didn't always follow orders, either.
"Soujiro!" the soldier called once more. "I know you're out there somewhere. If you don't trust me, fine! Copies of my message have been left at the blacksmith's house, at your inn, and the East Gate! You'll just end up doing a lot more walking!" With that, the man spun on his heels and strode back through the gate.
Soujiro did not waste any more time after that. He never had the air of being hurried, but the fact was that somehow, Yamashina had anticipated him. In general, people had had even more trouble anticipating him than ShiShiO. It had to be Yamashina. No one else could possibly have had the instincts to feel him out.
As soon as the gate had been closed again, Soujiro darted from his cover again, and picked up his pace. He was beginning to care slightly less about remaining concealed, since part of his cover was already blown. He had already attracted Yamashina's attention.
He could not figure out how Yamashina had taken such a sudden interest in him. He had not been involved with Young-eun that long, and he had entered town as a merchant's guard, nothing more. Come to think of it, the Yakuza had reacted to his presence in Ichibou before he had gotten very involved with Young-eun. The strike at the inn had to be more than routine for them; there was no way they did things like that on a regular basis without attracting either organized resistance or federal investigators. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that Yamashina had taken an interest in him as soon as word reached him of Soujiro's presence. Soujiro couldn't imagine why, though. Soujiro had never even heard of Yamashina before he came to Ichibou, and he had never done anything that might have touched or hindered the man's organization. Yamashina and ShiShiO both had ties to the Ishin ShiShi, however, and the internal politics of that group were dark and twisted. Even after his death, ShiShiO's specter hung over the land ... and his surviving proteges.
Soujiro reached the bottom of the slope leading up to the base of the wall within moments, a good way north of the gate. He began to scale the slope, but stopped a few yards up. He looked at the wall that awaited him when he finally did get to the top of the hill. Soujiro was an accomplished climber, and his balance was as sure as anyone in the country, but that wall was going to take some time to scale. He was in a hurry, and he had a better idea. He had never done this before, but he had not felt fear in more than a decade.
He hopped back down to the base of the slope, and searched around until he found a place where the slope was as even as he could find. Keeping his eye on that point on the slope, he backed up several more yards into the rocky valley. Then he crouched forward, tapping his trail foot on the rocky earth.
"Here goes nothing," he breathed to himself. With that, he vanished from human eyes.
Using the Shuku-chi was almost like entering another world. It required absolute crystal clarity of thought, and a level of concentration that did not allow room for any distraction from within. This was one of the reasons that so few fighters, even the best in the world, progressed further than ShiShiO-san and Himura-san's Shinsoku. It had nothing to do with physical conditioning. ShiShio, Himura, even Aoshi and Saitoh, were physically capable of it. Himura had actually achieved it without even knowing it at the climax of their fight at ShiShiO's headquarters. The fact was, however, that the Shuku-chi could be absolutely terrifying to the user. Soujiro's complete repression of his emotions was the only thing that enabled him to use the Shuku-chi on a regular basis. Soujiro got a firsthand reminder of this as he watched the sharp slope rising up from the valley floor seeming to come at him as though fired from a cannon. An eyeblink later, the Tenken altered his stride just enough to let the momentum from his dash carry him up the slope.
He did not stop at the summit, however. Timing his strides with the precision of a champion high jumper, he planted his right foot at the exact point where the slope levelled off, only a few feet from the wall, and leapt. The force of the Shuku-chi propelled him up the slope like a giant ramp, and he leapt out into the sky above.
The valley had been low, and the rough terrain had somewhat sheltered from the mountain wind. Soujiro's leap had propelled him well above that level, however; he cleared the town wall like a wooden fence, and was still on his way up. He didn't start descending until he was across the street on the inside of the wall, and this was when he realized that he had probably put too much force behind his jump. He landed heavily on the far side of the rooftop of the two-story building across the street from the wall, rolling into his landing to absorb the impact. It took everything he had to simply avoid breaking his legs, and he only narrowly avoided falling off the eastern side of the building.
He was glad of the relative darkness; there was moonlight, but not enough to make his silhouette stand out against the midnight blue of the sky unless anyone happened to be directly looking at him as he took off. His landing had been fairly quiet, too, for all of its difficulty; he had probably awoken anyone sleeping on the second floor of the building, but otherwise, he probably hadn't alerted anyone in the neighborhood. He made himself get up, vault to the lower roof of a single-story building to the north of the one he was on, and then drop to the ground. As soon as he found a small stone bench in a well-concealed alley, though, he curled up on it to think.
Soujiro had seldom turned the Shuku-chi loose like that. It took a lot out of him, and it was risky and seldom necessary. Even there, he could have gotten away with two or three steps short of it and still made it up onto the top of the well. Nonetheless, he was glad he had. The mental state of the Shuku-chi had brought him back to himself, and the brief moment of basking in the north wind had brought memories of Young-eun back to him. He realized that he had been beginning to feel distracted again, the way he had when his mind first started to crack against Kenshin. He had not picked up on what was happening to him then, and he was not sure what he would have done ... or if he would have even understood it ... if he had realized what was happening then. Now, however, he knew what was in store for him if he let himself keep breaking down like this. He was letting Yamashina get into his head before he ever even saw the man--not even Kenshin had had that effect.
Thinking of the wind and Young-eun brought back memories of their night on the roof of the blacksmith's house. He had no idea what he was doing thinking about Young-eun at the moment when he was trying to calm his mind, but her image refused to vanish from his mind. Shortly, Soujiro even strengthened the image by climbing softly back up onto the roof of the house he was sitting next to, and allowing the north wind to come rushing down on him again. The wind carried memories of the little Korean girl, but it also cooled his mind, and it helped him to think of her as he wanted to think of her ... the almost ethereal spirit of the north wind that he had seen in her when she was with him on a rooftop like this.
Gradually, the cool wind cleared the distractions from Soujiro's mind. Yamashina, Genji, Senkaku, Ichibou, and everything else slowly disappeared from his mind. Even Young-eun's current plight shrank to a small corner of his awareness.
*Much better,* Soujiro thought to himself as he stood up, hopped down from the low roof, and continued his journey.
There was a reason that Soujiro had chosen that moment to take a quick breather, even though he knew time was of the essence. He was on his way to check out whatever Yamashina had left at the Young-eun's home, and he had a feeling he was not going to like it. He doubted that Yamashina had actually set up a trap for him there, though he would not put it past the man, having never met him; however, that didn't mean that he would like what he found there, or that there would not be more traps later. Nevertheless, Soujiro had no intention of going any further without a clear head. ShiShiO had often emphasized that the Ishin Shishi loved to play mind games with their opponents, before, during, and between fights. Soujiro was really not in the mood for it at the moment, however.
He wound his way southeast through the dim, gloomy streets of Ichibou until he reached Young-eun's street, using the shadows as best he could. The relative lack of streetlamps helped, and he was fairly sure that no one had followed him as he approached the blacksmith's vacated home.
He had planned to enter the house by the rooftop hatch again, but was surprised by the fact that the front door was now unlocked and propped open. Soujiro's eyes narrowed. Yamashina's people had been here since he had last come through, but he could not sense anything in the house. He skirted quickly around and approached the house from the back alley, keeping low to the ground in the samurai's crouching gait. Even as he reached the walls of the house, however, he could detect nothing within, neither sight nor sound nor sixth sense. Eventually, Soujiro made up his mind to go in, and darted out into the street for a brief moment, crossed in front of the building, and slipped quietly into the front door.
Soujiro took the time to light the lantern that had been left hanging by the front door this time. It took him only an instant more to find Yamashina's message. Yamashina's courier had apparently actually told the truth. Lying plainly on the table in the middle of the living room was a large scroll, sealed with a blue wax seal in the stylized emblem of a heron wading through water. Soujiro's eyes narrowed again, and he took one more look around the area before he was convinced he was alone. He broke open the seal and began to read.
*Seta Tenken-no-Soujiro,*
*I am intrigued that such an enigmatic legend has entered my demesne. Somehow, you've managed to convince everyone I've ever talked to who ever served in any position with my old rival, ShiShiO Makoto, that you're one of the most deadly men alive ... and none of them ever even saw you. That kind of reputation with that kind of secrecy is a mark of great pride among us, so I must assume that Makoto taught you well.
*I have been told that you have already beaten Senkaku, and if you are reading this, that most likely means that you have already beaten my lieutenant, Genji Taku as well. Congratulations. I do hope you have stamina left, however, as I do not like waiting.
*I dreamed for more than ten years of confronting ShiShiO myself and proving to us that I did in truth deserve the position which he took from me. Himura-san has denied me that, though he did what was needed. By the old code, you are ShiShiO's successor, thus my challenge now falls to you.
*You will also be concerned with the health of Young-eun-chan. Don't worry. I have no intention of forcing myself on her. Credit me at least with a deeper mind than Senkaku. However, I intend to move her away from my estate very shortly, so if you wish to see her again, it would probably be best if you answered this challenge before long.
*This battle is between you and me now. You will encounter no more resistance from my guards or agents until you reach Heron's Ward, my ancestral seat beyond the ravine to the east. I should have called them off earlier. I did not realize until after you bested Senkaku that you were in truth the Tenken, and for that I apologize.
*My carriage will await you at the East Gate, if you so desire its service; if you do not trust me enough, I take no offense, but I would ask that as a matter of professional courtesy, you spare the life of the driver. I know ShiShiO would behead him and send him back to me as a message; he was always one for dramatic gestures. I sent only one man with the carriage, my family driver who has passed his fifthieth birthday. I even refrained from sending a doorman ... one less person to fear for you, one less person to lose for me.
*I look forward to our meeting. It has been a great while since I faced a challenge, and my blood will be racing in my veins until you arrive.
*Yours in waiting,
*Yamashina Ito of Heron's Ward*
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CHAPTER 13:
HERON'S WARD
The blacksmith's shop and the street outside were silent save for the rustle of the wind. The single lantern flickered and made shadows dance across the living room, and across the face of its solitary occupant. For a long while, nothing moved but the incessant flicker of the flame within the lantern and stray locks of hair across Soujiro's forehead.
Slowly, Soujiro rolled the message up again and slipped it into his jacket. He then ghosted over to the lantern, cupped his hand behind the wick, and softly extinguished the flame. His expression was soft and innocent, and there was still enough light in the starlit darkness to reveal a boyish, carefree smile on his face.
He turned and strolled back out into the street, and turned his feet eastward. To a casual observer, there would seem to be nothing hurried about his movements at all. He looked for all appearances like he was just out for a walk after midnight; if it weren't for his swords, one might think him just a lost little boy out in the streets at night. He seemed like he almost had no idea where he was, and had no particular goal in mind. Nonetheless, he knew where he was going.
A strange thought occurred to him as he walked along the grimy streets of Ichibou. He had killed more men than just about anyone he knew, but never once had he actually been challenged. He racked his brain for any exceptions, but none came up. His battle with Himura-san was about as close as he could think of a legitimate duel; well, it was, but it had actually been ShiShiO, not Soujiro or Kenshin, that had issued the challenge on the deck of the smitten Ren-goku. Maybe this was just another one of those differences between soldiers and assassins that Yumi had always talked about. Of course, Soujiro had already been heading for Yamashina's manor when he received the challenge, so he imagined they would have ended up fighting anyway. However, the fact that Yamashina had challenged him--and knew so much about him--piqued Soujiro's curiosity. Very few people knew of him, that he knew of.
Soujiro was not sure what he was expecting to see when he arrived at the East Gate, but what he did see was not much of a surprise. The East Gate looked somewhat more decorative and somewhat less fortified than either of the gates on the main road or the Iron Gate. It was still functional, but it did not have the menacing look of the others. It was also propped open, and a carriage stood idly in the plaza in front of the gate, hitched to a team of six horses. There were no guards on the ground outside; Soujiro counted four on the parapet, and probably more hiding within the towers, but he doubted they were there for an ambush. Soujiro stood in the shadows outside the semicircle of streetlamps surrounding the plaza, and briefly pondered what do next.
He had been planning to avoid the gate and decline Yamashina's offer, but he decided against it at the last minute. If it wasn't a trap, then it would get him to Heron's Ward quickly. If it was, well, Soujiro had always enjoyed turning webs back on the spiders that spun them. Besides, on some level, he actually believed that Yamashina intended to see him to Heron's Ward safely. The Ishin ShiShi never gave quarter in battle, but when they made promises, they did not consider them pacts sealed with words. They considered them sealed with blood.
Calmly, Soujiro ghosted out into the circle of light. Nothing happened. His eyes narrowed. They might have at least said hello. He shrugged his shoulders and approached the carriage.
He was halfway across the plaza when the door of the carriage opened and Yamashina's driver stepped out. Yamashina had not been lying; Soujiro could tell when men were faking infirmity or not, and this man was not only clearly past fifty, he might well have been almost sixty. He was bald on the top of his head, and wrinkles creased all parts of his skin that Soujiro could see. He did not have the look of someone who had ever been a soldier.
He did not say anything until Soujiro was almost upon him. "The legendary Seta Soujiro," he said then. His voice definitely sounded old, but it was steady, at least. "I'm honored. Nagata Yasui, at your service." With that, the old man bowed and held the door of the coach for Soujiro to mount the steps.
"Arigatou," (1) Soujiro responded, though he was earnestly scanning the area for traps as he entered the carriage. It took him a moment to realize what was different about the carriage, but he almost laughed when he did. The feel of the floor and sense of weight that the carriage gave off gave it away. The carriage had an inner lining of thick, solid steel underneath the surface of the plush interior. Yamashina had a bulletproof carriage! *No wonder it takes a team of six horses to pull,* Soujiro thought to himself.
Nagata wasted no time in getting the carriage moving. The pace was actually not much faster than Soujiro could have walked, but it was sparing Soujiro's legs, which he guessed he was going to need, and it was a little faster than his walking pace.
Soujiro breathed a little easier once the carriage was safely out of range of the towers, but he did not let his guard down. The terrain was not as broken here as in the gorge to the west, but there were still plenty of places an assassin could hide. The road snaked back and forth as it climbed up a steady slope to the east of Ichibou, until it crested in a small cleft at the height of a slope and plunged down into a ravine. The slope on either side of the cleft kept right on climbing, so whatever was in the ravine was well sheltered from the rest of the world. The general stench of Ichibou and the mines quickly faded as the road ascended as well, which Soujiro noted with a sense of relief.
At the height of the slope, just as the road crested the rise and was about to plunge down into the ravine beyond, Nagata stopped the carriage. "Heron's Ward!" he called. "I know you're in a hurry, and Yamashina-sama doesn't want me to waste time either, but this is a view worth seeing."
Soujiro had never been one for natural scenery or views, but he figured that he might as well oblige the old man; he was just going to end up arguing with him if he didn't. He poked his head out the carriage door cautiously at first, spreading out his awareness to see if he could sense anyone else in the vicinity, and couldn't. He cautiously hopped out of the carriage and looked down on Heron's Ward. His eyes widened. He still wasn't one for natural scenery, but he didn't have to be one to appreciate what he saw.
The ravine widened quickly several hundred feet beyond the cleft where the road went through. The result was a small, forested, sunlit valley, the focal point of which was a palace that looked as though it had been built at the same time the land itself was. It stood on a hill at the far north side of the valley, and a stream flowed out of it through a series of four cascading, terraced water gardens that ringed the palace on its southern, western, and eastern sides. The gardens followed the contours of the landscape and eventually combining into a small crystal lake in the base of the valley. In the rear of the palace, a waterfall fell straight into the courtyard from the mountains above, forming the base of the stream that flowed out the front gate. In the middle of the lake, a huge fountain sent a crystalline mist of water skyward. The lake was ringed with a blossoming orchard, which faded into the more familiar mountain evergreens as the valley sloped up away from the lake. The palace itself reared above the water gardens at the height of the northern rise, but its walls were largely covered with hanging plants of all kinds, and the road that led up to the front gate was a seamless part of the water gardens, so much that Soujiro could barely see where it acended from tier to tier. The mist churned up by the waterfall ringed the lowest level of the palace itself in a glittering prismatic cloud, as well as the entire rear of the palace; Soujiro could not see where the palace touched the precipice behind it. The early rays of the pre-dawn sun were just beginning to crest the mountains to the east, casting the palace on the hill, and the waterfall above it, in a dim, dreamlike light while leaving the rest of the valley remained wreathed in slumbering shadow.
"Quite a view, eh?" Nagata said smugly. Soujiro simply nodded. It was all he could do, even though the fact remained that someone down in that valley wanted him dead.
Soujiro climbed back into the carriage, and Nagata quickly stirred the horses into motion again. It wasn't long before another sight came into view that the driver felt worth commenting on, however. At least he didn't stop the carriage; he simply opened a window in the front wall.
"What do you think of that?" he asked, pointing to a six-foot-high crimson steel spike driven into the ground beside the road a short way down into the ravine.
Soujiro was confused again. "Uhh ... nothing," he replied simply. "Sculpture of some kind?" If the man was about to start talking about art, Soujiro was seriously considering what Yamashina had said ShiShiO would have done in the first place. Art was only barely tolerable with Yumi around.
"That's the high tide marker," Nagata said smugly. "That was the furthest any of ShiShiO's men ever reached into this valley, until today. So congratulations."
"Arigatou," Soujiro replied with no trace of sarcasm. Nagata's eyes narrowed, trying to find some hint that Soujiro was being sardonic with him, but there was none there.
Soujiro continued, "Who had it built? Genji?"
Nagata laughed. "Perceptive, I see. It was me, actually, but you're right, Yamashina actually laughed at me when I suggested it. How did you know?"
Soujiro simply smiled and didn't reply, though his assessment of Yamashina had just increased a hair. Another one of ShiShiO's lessons came back to him: *Samurai who stop to gloat over dead enemies soon become dead enemies themselves. Learn from the past ... but don't live in it. If you live in the past, you won't be living in the future.* ShiShiO had had a way with words sometimes.
The carriage began to pick up speed as it hurried down into Yamashina's sheltered valley, and Soujiro soon lost sight of Yamashina's palace as the carriage entered the orchard surrounding the lake. Soujiro wondered where all the groundskeepers were ... it should have taken an army of servants to keep a plot of land this large looking this well-kept. The only thing he could think of was that Yamashina had ordered the area cleared, or at least all areas within sight of the road. Probably the entire area, since he would have no way of knowing that Soujiro would actually accept the carriage ride. Of course, the sun hadn't even broken the horizon yet, so it was hardly the prime working hours of the day, but most nobles had at least some people working for them around the clock.
Nagata stopped the carriage when they reached the entrance to the first of the terraced gardens leading up to the palace. Soujiro looked around warily, expecting something with one corner of his mind, but Nagata simply hopped down from the driver's seat and opened the carriage for Soujiro. "Sorry I can't take you any further, but everyone's been ordered either into the hills or to the heart of the palace. Yamashina-sama should be waiting for you in the courtyard."
Soujiro leapt lightly to the ground. "Arigatou," he repeated.
Nagata simply shook his head. "Good luck, Seta-kun. You're going to need it." With that, the old man climbed back up into the driver's seat and led the carriage off on a narrow dirt trail wending around the base of the lowest garden tier, leaving Soujiro to begin the ascent up the terraced hill alone.
Soujiro took the long way up the gardens, though he had to make a mental effort to make himself do that. It would have been easy for him to speed across the surface of the countless lily-covered pools and rocket up the sides of each terrace, and he could have reached the summit in a quarter of the amount of time he was taking. However, he somehow knew that Yamashina was watching him, and he wanted to give away absolutely nothing until he was within striking distance of the ex-Ishin Yakuza overlord.
The first crimson sliver of the rising sun was just beginning to show itself over the rim of the eastern mountains when Soujiro ascended the last rise onto the lawn in front of Yamashina's palace. The gates were closed, but it never even occurred to Soujiro to wonder how he was going to get inside. The light of the rising sun fell on a figure in front of the palace gates a hundred yards away, and Soujiro knew Yamashina had come out to meet him. The man was absolutely motionless, but Soujiro could feel immediately that it was him, and tried to size the man up as much as possible as he approached him.
The man was older than Soujiro, but looked like he was probably slightly younger than Kenshin. His hair was jet black, falling in a tightly bound tail to just above his shoulders in the back. A pair of swords, one a full katana and one a shorter wakizashi, hung at his left at his hips. His posture, his swords, and the light in his eyes marked him instantly as much more than a doorman, and Soujiro recognized the man's katana. He had borne one just like it for many years, the Kiku-Ichi-Monji. He had known that it was part of a set, but he had never seen any of its sister swords. The man was dressed in a light ensemble of pale grey and blue-grey, somewhat more decorate than a standard ninja or soldier's ensemble but without the ostentatiousness that had characterized ShiShiO and Aoshi, with their capes and trenchcoats. He shunned sandals in favor of slightly more agile thick socks, which Soujiro had used on occasion himself; he had been wearing similar footwear in his first encounter with the Battousai. He also wore similar fingerless gloves to Soujiro's, though his were somewhat darker in color, and looked to be slightly lighter than Soujiro's. He was not as demure as Soujiro, but he did not have ShiShiO's air of incomparable arrogance.
"Good morning, Soujiro-kun!" he called as Soujiro approached within fifty feet of him. "A pleasure to finally meet you in person!"
Soujiro stopped, and dropped a hand to his sword. "Good morning to you, too, Yamashina Ito," he replied politely. "I think this visit is more business than pleasure for me, but I'm honored to receive such warm hospitality."
Yamashina actually arched a quizzical eyebrow at him. "I'm amazed," he said after a moment. "I would never have believed ShiShiO could raise such an apprentice."
It was Soujiro's turn to arch a confused eyebrow. "I haven't even drawn my sword yet," he replied, puzzled.
"Oh, not that, not that," Yamashina replied lightly. "I was expecting that he could teach you that as well as anyone. I never would have thought that he could teach anyone to be polite."
"He didn't teach me that," Soujiro answered.
"Really?" Yamashina replied. "I'm not surprised. Well then, if you're all ready, why don't we find out what he did teach you?" The man's katana slid free of its sheath, though he left the wakizashi in its sheath.
"Yare yare," (1) Soujiro replied, dropping back into the Battou stance. "I was hoping you'd tell me where to find Young-eun first. But I'd like to get going as well."
Yamashina actually laughed. "I never would have thought any of ShiShiO's pupils would ever be able to show so much compassion, either. You know she actually doesn't need your help as much as you probably think."
"Probably not," Soujiro responded lightly as well, "but I came all this way to see her, it'd be a shame to stop now, don't you think?"
A feral grin split Yamashina's face. "Good luck to you then, Tenken-no-Soujiro!" With that, he charged, and Soujiro sprang forward. They crossed the ground that separated them in heartbeats, and Soujiro's sakaba blade flew from its sheath in the form of the Tenken Battou Jutsu. He struck nothing but steel. Yamashina was not finished, however. He spun away from the impact, using the force of the meeting of their blades to augment his spin, and lashed out with the wakizashi that came slashing from its sheath in Yamashina's left hand. Soujiro twisted aside and skidded away, but the wakizashi left a cut in Soujiro's glove and a scrape on the flesh beneath. If Soujiro had been a hair slower, Yamashina might have slit the top of his wrist.
In the split-heartbeat that it took for Soujiro to regain his fighting posture, Yamashina had the wakizashi back in its sheath again, ready to do it all over again. His feral grin had not even wavered, though his eyes were bright with concentration. "Genji wouldn't have even fallen for that," he quipped. "You've gotta have something better than that!"
"Don't worry," Soujiro replied, the blood starting to race in his veins as the halfway-forgotten passion of battle began to simmer in his mind again. "We're just getting started."
* * * * *
(1) Thank you
(2) Oh well
COMING SOON: What, you think I left you hanging or something?! (Isn't this how they always do it in the series?) Anyway, next up are Chapter 14, "The Heavenly Sword" and Chapter 15, "A Shooting Star." As you can probably tell, this story is approaching the end, though I'm hoping I can tie up enough loose ends (that you might have forgotten about if you read this over the course of several days) to keep it interesting.
For the second installment in a row, I'm sorry it took me so long to put this out! I'm in the midst of campaigning for our University Senate, and time has not been a resource I've had much of to spare! No promises on the last part, either; it may be a while, but I'll try to get working on it ASAP. I have the outline for it, I just need to find time to sit down and get it done.
My special thanks to loyal fans who have been with this series since its inception back in December, and to everyone who's left a good review or piece of constructive criticism! As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this latest section! Ave Soujiro!!
That reminds me ... my Japanese is next to nonexistent. Don't fault me for it. At least I'm trying.
Happy reading!
ANTI-DISCLAIMER (would that be just a "claimer?"): Some of these characters ARE my own creation, as well as many elements of the setting; the town of Ichibou, Kim Young-eun, Karachi Hoebu, Yamashina Ito, and several other minor characters are my own ideas. Use your head. If it never appeared in anywhere in the Kenshin series, then it's probably mine. Not that anyone cares but me.
SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: To Kenshin TV ep 61, "Remaining Ju Pon Gattana, Choice of Life."
* * * * *
CHAPTER 12:
THE CHALLENGE
"More trouble?!" Ukita asked in amazement as the torches of the town guards came into view in the distance. "You really know how to stir up a hornet's nest, boy!"
"Anou ..." Soujiro replied uneasily. He had not thought this far ahead when he vanished from the gatehouse only hours earlier.
"Oh, never mind," Ukita growled. "Come on, maybe we can make it work for us."
Ukita was already off his horse and leading it into the concealment of the rough, broken rocks along the north side of the road. Soujiro quickly saw what Ukita was getting at, and promptly took cover with the older samurai.
It did not take long for the torch-bearing guards to reach the place where Soujiro and Ukita lay concealed, but Soujiro counted every second like it was an hour. ShiShiO would have been very disappointed in him, he knew. ShiShiO had always said that the person who lost his patience lost his life, but he had never had to say that to Soujiro. Soujiro simply focused on remaining still and allowing the guards to pass without an inkling of their presence.
Ukita was having a harder time of it, not for himself, but for his horse. Fortunately, the horse was not a very restive or fiery animal, and Ukita seemed to have acquired some skill with horses at some point in the past. However, trying to keep a horse completely still and noiseless took a lot of effort and a little luck. Fortunately, the guard patrol was fairly noisy itself. Soujiro was glad of that. He did not have time for another unnecessary, drawn-out fight, and there were more than seventy men in the patrol. They must have sent for reinforcements before they left the gate, though Soujiro had no idea where they might have gotten them from.
As the last of the patrol passed by, Ukita suddenly turned to Soujiro and lofted the sheathed Oh-waza-mono blade in Soujiro's direction. Startled, Soujiro snatched it out of the air, but turned a puzzled expression on the samurai he had just rescued. Ukita simply nodded his head in the direction of Ichibou.
"Go," Ukita hissed. "It'll be too long before I can leave here with this," he added with a nod towards the horse. "You can be quieter without me. She trusts you, so I guess I can, too."
Soujiro looked at Ukita for another long moment before he smiled. Trust was a rare thing in his line of work, but all the more welcome. He didn't make a big deal of it, though.
"Arig ..."
"Go!" Ukita snapped, as loudly as he dared. Soujiro had vanished from his sight before the sound of the word died.
Unfortunately, the Shuku-chi was purely a sprinting move, and Soujiro could not maintain that quasi-mythical state of motion forever. Even during the fight with Himura, which he had been almost as well-rested and physically well-prepared for as possible, he had needed to take momentary breaks every few seconds. With all the hype about the Shuku-chi among the Ju Pon Gattana, however, people forgot how light he was on his feet in a distance race. He had always been the one sent when ShiShiO needed to send messages to members in remote locations, and he had never needed a horse. ShiShiO had been one of the Ishin ShiShi, and their ability to slip effortlessly and noiselessly through long streches of harsh terrain was not just a rumor. Soujiro had picked it up easily, and he was pushing his limits now.
He slowed somewhat when he came within sight of the gate, but he was right in guessing that the patrol that had passed him had severely drained the number of guards on duty. There looked to be less than a tithe of the number that there had been on Soujiro's way out. They had simply shut the gate, probably barred it from the inside, and were just holed up in their gatehouse with their rifles. Soujiro couldn't see a single one along the parapet.
Soujiro approached the gate without incident, and actually began to grow a little suspicious. He was still out of rifle range for all but the best marksmen, but he expected that he would have seen some sign of activity from the remaining guards by now. Even if they were unsure of where he was at the moment, they had to have seen something moving out here. They had an elevated viewpoint, even higher than the valley floor because of the sharp slope from the gatehouse to the level at which Soujiro stood. Then again, it was dark, and Soujiro was not carrying any form of light.
Suddenly, the faint sound of shouting on the far side of the wall reached Soujiro's ears, and he took cover. He could not hear what was being said, but he recognized the tone of authority. Apparently the guards were not completely leaderless without Genji. The shouting faded a few moments later, however, and Soujiro crept forward again.
Another surprise came a few moments later, when the gates in the wall above him opened wide with a loud creak and a dull boom. Soujiro quickly took cover again, expecting another guard patrol to emerge from the gaping archway. He could see the glow of torchlight from inside the gate, even at this distance. Shortly, a small group of men emerged from the gate, and Soujiro tensed. These were not town guards. The black leather armor revealed them as Yamashina's foot soldiers. It didn't make any practical difference, since Yamashina controlled both forces one way or another, but it was something to note. Soujiro also had not completely known that the town watch and the Yakuza forces worked so openly together. Then again, it was extremely late at night, and the valley and the town were both all but deserted; maybe it wasn't exactly 'open' by most standards.
Suddenly, the black-armored soldier at the front of the tiny squad called brazenly into the crisp night air. "Soujiro!" he cried. "Seta Soujiro! Are you listening?" Soujiro did not react, and stayed hidden in his small rocky crevice, but his eyes narrowed.
"Soujiro!" the man called again. "You can come out! We're not here to fight! I'm just a messenger! And the rest of the guards here are scared shitless of you, anyway!"
While Soujiro had no doubt that the last part of that was true, he was uncertain how that somehow made it reasonable for him to step out of his concealment. Frightened people did unpredictable things, he knew, and some of the guards in that tower probably had guns. Even if they had been ordered not to shoot, well ... frightened people didn't always follow orders, either.
"Soujiro!" the soldier called once more. "I know you're out there somewhere. If you don't trust me, fine! Copies of my message have been left at the blacksmith's house, at your inn, and the East Gate! You'll just end up doing a lot more walking!" With that, the man spun on his heels and strode back through the gate.
Soujiro did not waste any more time after that. He never had the air of being hurried, but the fact was that somehow, Yamashina had anticipated him. In general, people had had even more trouble anticipating him than ShiShiO. It had to be Yamashina. No one else could possibly have had the instincts to feel him out.
As soon as the gate had been closed again, Soujiro darted from his cover again, and picked up his pace. He was beginning to care slightly less about remaining concealed, since part of his cover was already blown. He had already attracted Yamashina's attention.
He could not figure out how Yamashina had taken such a sudden interest in him. He had not been involved with Young-eun that long, and he had entered town as a merchant's guard, nothing more. Come to think of it, the Yakuza had reacted to his presence in Ichibou before he had gotten very involved with Young-eun. The strike at the inn had to be more than routine for them; there was no way they did things like that on a regular basis without attracting either organized resistance or federal investigators. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that Yamashina had taken an interest in him as soon as word reached him of Soujiro's presence. Soujiro couldn't imagine why, though. Soujiro had never even heard of Yamashina before he came to Ichibou, and he had never done anything that might have touched or hindered the man's organization. Yamashina and ShiShiO both had ties to the Ishin ShiShi, however, and the internal politics of that group were dark and twisted. Even after his death, ShiShiO's specter hung over the land ... and his surviving proteges.
Soujiro reached the bottom of the slope leading up to the base of the wall within moments, a good way north of the gate. He began to scale the slope, but stopped a few yards up. He looked at the wall that awaited him when he finally did get to the top of the hill. Soujiro was an accomplished climber, and his balance was as sure as anyone in the country, but that wall was going to take some time to scale. He was in a hurry, and he had a better idea. He had never done this before, but he had not felt fear in more than a decade.
He hopped back down to the base of the slope, and searched around until he found a place where the slope was as even as he could find. Keeping his eye on that point on the slope, he backed up several more yards into the rocky valley. Then he crouched forward, tapping his trail foot on the rocky earth.
"Here goes nothing," he breathed to himself. With that, he vanished from human eyes.
Using the Shuku-chi was almost like entering another world. It required absolute crystal clarity of thought, and a level of concentration that did not allow room for any distraction from within. This was one of the reasons that so few fighters, even the best in the world, progressed further than ShiShiO-san and Himura-san's Shinsoku. It had nothing to do with physical conditioning. ShiShio, Himura, even Aoshi and Saitoh, were physically capable of it. Himura had actually achieved it without even knowing it at the climax of their fight at ShiShiO's headquarters. The fact was, however, that the Shuku-chi could be absolutely terrifying to the user. Soujiro's complete repression of his emotions was the only thing that enabled him to use the Shuku-chi on a regular basis. Soujiro got a firsthand reminder of this as he watched the sharp slope rising up from the valley floor seeming to come at him as though fired from a cannon. An eyeblink later, the Tenken altered his stride just enough to let the momentum from his dash carry him up the slope.
He did not stop at the summit, however. Timing his strides with the precision of a champion high jumper, he planted his right foot at the exact point where the slope levelled off, only a few feet from the wall, and leapt. The force of the Shuku-chi propelled him up the slope like a giant ramp, and he leapt out into the sky above.
The valley had been low, and the rough terrain had somewhat sheltered from the mountain wind. Soujiro's leap had propelled him well above that level, however; he cleared the town wall like a wooden fence, and was still on his way up. He didn't start descending until he was across the street on the inside of the wall, and this was when he realized that he had probably put too much force behind his jump. He landed heavily on the far side of the rooftop of the two-story building across the street from the wall, rolling into his landing to absorb the impact. It took everything he had to simply avoid breaking his legs, and he only narrowly avoided falling off the eastern side of the building.
He was glad of the relative darkness; there was moonlight, but not enough to make his silhouette stand out against the midnight blue of the sky unless anyone happened to be directly looking at him as he took off. His landing had been fairly quiet, too, for all of its difficulty; he had probably awoken anyone sleeping on the second floor of the building, but otherwise, he probably hadn't alerted anyone in the neighborhood. He made himself get up, vault to the lower roof of a single-story building to the north of the one he was on, and then drop to the ground. As soon as he found a small stone bench in a well-concealed alley, though, he curled up on it to think.
Soujiro had seldom turned the Shuku-chi loose like that. It took a lot out of him, and it was risky and seldom necessary. Even there, he could have gotten away with two or three steps short of it and still made it up onto the top of the well. Nonetheless, he was glad he had. The mental state of the Shuku-chi had brought him back to himself, and the brief moment of basking in the north wind had brought memories of Young-eun back to him. He realized that he had been beginning to feel distracted again, the way he had when his mind first started to crack against Kenshin. He had not picked up on what was happening to him then, and he was not sure what he would have done ... or if he would have even understood it ... if he had realized what was happening then. Now, however, he knew what was in store for him if he let himself keep breaking down like this. He was letting Yamashina get into his head before he ever even saw the man--not even Kenshin had had that effect.
Thinking of the wind and Young-eun brought back memories of their night on the roof of the blacksmith's house. He had no idea what he was doing thinking about Young-eun at the moment when he was trying to calm his mind, but her image refused to vanish from his mind. Shortly, Soujiro even strengthened the image by climbing softly back up onto the roof of the house he was sitting next to, and allowing the north wind to come rushing down on him again. The wind carried memories of the little Korean girl, but it also cooled his mind, and it helped him to think of her as he wanted to think of her ... the almost ethereal spirit of the north wind that he had seen in her when she was with him on a rooftop like this.
Gradually, the cool wind cleared the distractions from Soujiro's mind. Yamashina, Genji, Senkaku, Ichibou, and everything else slowly disappeared from his mind. Even Young-eun's current plight shrank to a small corner of his awareness.
*Much better,* Soujiro thought to himself as he stood up, hopped down from the low roof, and continued his journey.
There was a reason that Soujiro had chosen that moment to take a quick breather, even though he knew time was of the essence. He was on his way to check out whatever Yamashina had left at the Young-eun's home, and he had a feeling he was not going to like it. He doubted that Yamashina had actually set up a trap for him there, though he would not put it past the man, having never met him; however, that didn't mean that he would like what he found there, or that there would not be more traps later. Nevertheless, Soujiro had no intention of going any further without a clear head. ShiShiO had often emphasized that the Ishin Shishi loved to play mind games with their opponents, before, during, and between fights. Soujiro was really not in the mood for it at the moment, however.
He wound his way southeast through the dim, gloomy streets of Ichibou until he reached Young-eun's street, using the shadows as best he could. The relative lack of streetlamps helped, and he was fairly sure that no one had followed him as he approached the blacksmith's vacated home.
He had planned to enter the house by the rooftop hatch again, but was surprised by the fact that the front door was now unlocked and propped open. Soujiro's eyes narrowed. Yamashina's people had been here since he had last come through, but he could not sense anything in the house. He skirted quickly around and approached the house from the back alley, keeping low to the ground in the samurai's crouching gait. Even as he reached the walls of the house, however, he could detect nothing within, neither sight nor sound nor sixth sense. Eventually, Soujiro made up his mind to go in, and darted out into the street for a brief moment, crossed in front of the building, and slipped quietly into the front door.
Soujiro took the time to light the lantern that had been left hanging by the front door this time. It took him only an instant more to find Yamashina's message. Yamashina's courier had apparently actually told the truth. Lying plainly on the table in the middle of the living room was a large scroll, sealed with a blue wax seal in the stylized emblem of a heron wading through water. Soujiro's eyes narrowed again, and he took one more look around the area before he was convinced he was alone. He broke open the seal and began to read.
*Seta Tenken-no-Soujiro,*
*I am intrigued that such an enigmatic legend has entered my demesne. Somehow, you've managed to convince everyone I've ever talked to who ever served in any position with my old rival, ShiShiO Makoto, that you're one of the most deadly men alive ... and none of them ever even saw you. That kind of reputation with that kind of secrecy is a mark of great pride among us, so I must assume that Makoto taught you well.
*I have been told that you have already beaten Senkaku, and if you are reading this, that most likely means that you have already beaten my lieutenant, Genji Taku as well. Congratulations. I do hope you have stamina left, however, as I do not like waiting.
*I dreamed for more than ten years of confronting ShiShiO myself and proving to us that I did in truth deserve the position which he took from me. Himura-san has denied me that, though he did what was needed. By the old code, you are ShiShiO's successor, thus my challenge now falls to you.
*You will also be concerned with the health of Young-eun-chan. Don't worry. I have no intention of forcing myself on her. Credit me at least with a deeper mind than Senkaku. However, I intend to move her away from my estate very shortly, so if you wish to see her again, it would probably be best if you answered this challenge before long.
*This battle is between you and me now. You will encounter no more resistance from my guards or agents until you reach Heron's Ward, my ancestral seat beyond the ravine to the east. I should have called them off earlier. I did not realize until after you bested Senkaku that you were in truth the Tenken, and for that I apologize.
*My carriage will await you at the East Gate, if you so desire its service; if you do not trust me enough, I take no offense, but I would ask that as a matter of professional courtesy, you spare the life of the driver. I know ShiShiO would behead him and send him back to me as a message; he was always one for dramatic gestures. I sent only one man with the carriage, my family driver who has passed his fifthieth birthday. I even refrained from sending a doorman ... one less person to fear for you, one less person to lose for me.
*I look forward to our meeting. It has been a great while since I faced a challenge, and my blood will be racing in my veins until you arrive.
*Yours in waiting,
*Yamashina Ito of Heron's Ward*
* * * * *
CHAPTER 13:
HERON'S WARD
The blacksmith's shop and the street outside were silent save for the rustle of the wind. The single lantern flickered and made shadows dance across the living room, and across the face of its solitary occupant. For a long while, nothing moved but the incessant flicker of the flame within the lantern and stray locks of hair across Soujiro's forehead.
Slowly, Soujiro rolled the message up again and slipped it into his jacket. He then ghosted over to the lantern, cupped his hand behind the wick, and softly extinguished the flame. His expression was soft and innocent, and there was still enough light in the starlit darkness to reveal a boyish, carefree smile on his face.
He turned and strolled back out into the street, and turned his feet eastward. To a casual observer, there would seem to be nothing hurried about his movements at all. He looked for all appearances like he was just out for a walk after midnight; if it weren't for his swords, one might think him just a lost little boy out in the streets at night. He seemed like he almost had no idea where he was, and had no particular goal in mind. Nonetheless, he knew where he was going.
A strange thought occurred to him as he walked along the grimy streets of Ichibou. He had killed more men than just about anyone he knew, but never once had he actually been challenged. He racked his brain for any exceptions, but none came up. His battle with Himura-san was about as close as he could think of a legitimate duel; well, it was, but it had actually been ShiShiO, not Soujiro or Kenshin, that had issued the challenge on the deck of the smitten Ren-goku. Maybe this was just another one of those differences between soldiers and assassins that Yumi had always talked about. Of course, Soujiro had already been heading for Yamashina's manor when he received the challenge, so he imagined they would have ended up fighting anyway. However, the fact that Yamashina had challenged him--and knew so much about him--piqued Soujiro's curiosity. Very few people knew of him, that he knew of.
Soujiro was not sure what he was expecting to see when he arrived at the East Gate, but what he did see was not much of a surprise. The East Gate looked somewhat more decorative and somewhat less fortified than either of the gates on the main road or the Iron Gate. It was still functional, but it did not have the menacing look of the others. It was also propped open, and a carriage stood idly in the plaza in front of the gate, hitched to a team of six horses. There were no guards on the ground outside; Soujiro counted four on the parapet, and probably more hiding within the towers, but he doubted they were there for an ambush. Soujiro stood in the shadows outside the semicircle of streetlamps surrounding the plaza, and briefly pondered what do next.
He had been planning to avoid the gate and decline Yamashina's offer, but he decided against it at the last minute. If it wasn't a trap, then it would get him to Heron's Ward quickly. If it was, well, Soujiro had always enjoyed turning webs back on the spiders that spun them. Besides, on some level, he actually believed that Yamashina intended to see him to Heron's Ward safely. The Ishin ShiShi never gave quarter in battle, but when they made promises, they did not consider them pacts sealed with words. They considered them sealed with blood.
Calmly, Soujiro ghosted out into the circle of light. Nothing happened. His eyes narrowed. They might have at least said hello. He shrugged his shoulders and approached the carriage.
He was halfway across the plaza when the door of the carriage opened and Yamashina's driver stepped out. Yamashina had not been lying; Soujiro could tell when men were faking infirmity or not, and this man was not only clearly past fifty, he might well have been almost sixty. He was bald on the top of his head, and wrinkles creased all parts of his skin that Soujiro could see. He did not have the look of someone who had ever been a soldier.
He did not say anything until Soujiro was almost upon him. "The legendary Seta Soujiro," he said then. His voice definitely sounded old, but it was steady, at least. "I'm honored. Nagata Yasui, at your service." With that, the old man bowed and held the door of the coach for Soujiro to mount the steps.
"Arigatou," (1) Soujiro responded, though he was earnestly scanning the area for traps as he entered the carriage. It took him a moment to realize what was different about the carriage, but he almost laughed when he did. The feel of the floor and sense of weight that the carriage gave off gave it away. The carriage had an inner lining of thick, solid steel underneath the surface of the plush interior. Yamashina had a bulletproof carriage! *No wonder it takes a team of six horses to pull,* Soujiro thought to himself.
Nagata wasted no time in getting the carriage moving. The pace was actually not much faster than Soujiro could have walked, but it was sparing Soujiro's legs, which he guessed he was going to need, and it was a little faster than his walking pace.
Soujiro breathed a little easier once the carriage was safely out of range of the towers, but he did not let his guard down. The terrain was not as broken here as in the gorge to the west, but there were still plenty of places an assassin could hide. The road snaked back and forth as it climbed up a steady slope to the east of Ichibou, until it crested in a small cleft at the height of a slope and plunged down into a ravine. The slope on either side of the cleft kept right on climbing, so whatever was in the ravine was well sheltered from the rest of the world. The general stench of Ichibou and the mines quickly faded as the road ascended as well, which Soujiro noted with a sense of relief.
At the height of the slope, just as the road crested the rise and was about to plunge down into the ravine beyond, Nagata stopped the carriage. "Heron's Ward!" he called. "I know you're in a hurry, and Yamashina-sama doesn't want me to waste time either, but this is a view worth seeing."
Soujiro had never been one for natural scenery or views, but he figured that he might as well oblige the old man; he was just going to end up arguing with him if he didn't. He poked his head out the carriage door cautiously at first, spreading out his awareness to see if he could sense anyone else in the vicinity, and couldn't. He cautiously hopped out of the carriage and looked down on Heron's Ward. His eyes widened. He still wasn't one for natural scenery, but he didn't have to be one to appreciate what he saw.
The ravine widened quickly several hundred feet beyond the cleft where the road went through. The result was a small, forested, sunlit valley, the focal point of which was a palace that looked as though it had been built at the same time the land itself was. It stood on a hill at the far north side of the valley, and a stream flowed out of it through a series of four cascading, terraced water gardens that ringed the palace on its southern, western, and eastern sides. The gardens followed the contours of the landscape and eventually combining into a small crystal lake in the base of the valley. In the rear of the palace, a waterfall fell straight into the courtyard from the mountains above, forming the base of the stream that flowed out the front gate. In the middle of the lake, a huge fountain sent a crystalline mist of water skyward. The lake was ringed with a blossoming orchard, which faded into the more familiar mountain evergreens as the valley sloped up away from the lake. The palace itself reared above the water gardens at the height of the northern rise, but its walls were largely covered with hanging plants of all kinds, and the road that led up to the front gate was a seamless part of the water gardens, so much that Soujiro could barely see where it acended from tier to tier. The mist churned up by the waterfall ringed the lowest level of the palace itself in a glittering prismatic cloud, as well as the entire rear of the palace; Soujiro could not see where the palace touched the precipice behind it. The early rays of the pre-dawn sun were just beginning to crest the mountains to the east, casting the palace on the hill, and the waterfall above it, in a dim, dreamlike light while leaving the rest of the valley remained wreathed in slumbering shadow.
"Quite a view, eh?" Nagata said smugly. Soujiro simply nodded. It was all he could do, even though the fact remained that someone down in that valley wanted him dead.
Soujiro climbed back into the carriage, and Nagata quickly stirred the horses into motion again. It wasn't long before another sight came into view that the driver felt worth commenting on, however. At least he didn't stop the carriage; he simply opened a window in the front wall.
"What do you think of that?" he asked, pointing to a six-foot-high crimson steel spike driven into the ground beside the road a short way down into the ravine.
Soujiro was confused again. "Uhh ... nothing," he replied simply. "Sculpture of some kind?" If the man was about to start talking about art, Soujiro was seriously considering what Yamashina had said ShiShiO would have done in the first place. Art was only barely tolerable with Yumi around.
"That's the high tide marker," Nagata said smugly. "That was the furthest any of ShiShiO's men ever reached into this valley, until today. So congratulations."
"Arigatou," Soujiro replied with no trace of sarcasm. Nagata's eyes narrowed, trying to find some hint that Soujiro was being sardonic with him, but there was none there.
Soujiro continued, "Who had it built? Genji?"
Nagata laughed. "Perceptive, I see. It was me, actually, but you're right, Yamashina actually laughed at me when I suggested it. How did you know?"
Soujiro simply smiled and didn't reply, though his assessment of Yamashina had just increased a hair. Another one of ShiShiO's lessons came back to him: *Samurai who stop to gloat over dead enemies soon become dead enemies themselves. Learn from the past ... but don't live in it. If you live in the past, you won't be living in the future.* ShiShiO had had a way with words sometimes.
The carriage began to pick up speed as it hurried down into Yamashina's sheltered valley, and Soujiro soon lost sight of Yamashina's palace as the carriage entered the orchard surrounding the lake. Soujiro wondered where all the groundskeepers were ... it should have taken an army of servants to keep a plot of land this large looking this well-kept. The only thing he could think of was that Yamashina had ordered the area cleared, or at least all areas within sight of the road. Probably the entire area, since he would have no way of knowing that Soujiro would actually accept the carriage ride. Of course, the sun hadn't even broken the horizon yet, so it was hardly the prime working hours of the day, but most nobles had at least some people working for them around the clock.
Nagata stopped the carriage when they reached the entrance to the first of the terraced gardens leading up to the palace. Soujiro looked around warily, expecting something with one corner of his mind, but Nagata simply hopped down from the driver's seat and opened the carriage for Soujiro. "Sorry I can't take you any further, but everyone's been ordered either into the hills or to the heart of the palace. Yamashina-sama should be waiting for you in the courtyard."
Soujiro leapt lightly to the ground. "Arigatou," he repeated.
Nagata simply shook his head. "Good luck, Seta-kun. You're going to need it." With that, the old man climbed back up into the driver's seat and led the carriage off on a narrow dirt trail wending around the base of the lowest garden tier, leaving Soujiro to begin the ascent up the terraced hill alone.
Soujiro took the long way up the gardens, though he had to make a mental effort to make himself do that. It would have been easy for him to speed across the surface of the countless lily-covered pools and rocket up the sides of each terrace, and he could have reached the summit in a quarter of the amount of time he was taking. However, he somehow knew that Yamashina was watching him, and he wanted to give away absolutely nothing until he was within striking distance of the ex-Ishin Yakuza overlord.
The first crimson sliver of the rising sun was just beginning to show itself over the rim of the eastern mountains when Soujiro ascended the last rise onto the lawn in front of Yamashina's palace. The gates were closed, but it never even occurred to Soujiro to wonder how he was going to get inside. The light of the rising sun fell on a figure in front of the palace gates a hundred yards away, and Soujiro knew Yamashina had come out to meet him. The man was absolutely motionless, but Soujiro could feel immediately that it was him, and tried to size the man up as much as possible as he approached him.
The man was older than Soujiro, but looked like he was probably slightly younger than Kenshin. His hair was jet black, falling in a tightly bound tail to just above his shoulders in the back. A pair of swords, one a full katana and one a shorter wakizashi, hung at his left at his hips. His posture, his swords, and the light in his eyes marked him instantly as much more than a doorman, and Soujiro recognized the man's katana. He had borne one just like it for many years, the Kiku-Ichi-Monji. He had known that it was part of a set, but he had never seen any of its sister swords. The man was dressed in a light ensemble of pale grey and blue-grey, somewhat more decorate than a standard ninja or soldier's ensemble but without the ostentatiousness that had characterized ShiShiO and Aoshi, with their capes and trenchcoats. He shunned sandals in favor of slightly more agile thick socks, which Soujiro had used on occasion himself; he had been wearing similar footwear in his first encounter with the Battousai. He also wore similar fingerless gloves to Soujiro's, though his were somewhat darker in color, and looked to be slightly lighter than Soujiro's. He was not as demure as Soujiro, but he did not have ShiShiO's air of incomparable arrogance.
"Good morning, Soujiro-kun!" he called as Soujiro approached within fifty feet of him. "A pleasure to finally meet you in person!"
Soujiro stopped, and dropped a hand to his sword. "Good morning to you, too, Yamashina Ito," he replied politely. "I think this visit is more business than pleasure for me, but I'm honored to receive such warm hospitality."
Yamashina actually arched a quizzical eyebrow at him. "I'm amazed," he said after a moment. "I would never have believed ShiShiO could raise such an apprentice."
It was Soujiro's turn to arch a confused eyebrow. "I haven't even drawn my sword yet," he replied, puzzled.
"Oh, not that, not that," Yamashina replied lightly. "I was expecting that he could teach you that as well as anyone. I never would have thought that he could teach anyone to be polite."
"He didn't teach me that," Soujiro answered.
"Really?" Yamashina replied. "I'm not surprised. Well then, if you're all ready, why don't we find out what he did teach you?" The man's katana slid free of its sheath, though he left the wakizashi in its sheath.
"Yare yare," (1) Soujiro replied, dropping back into the Battou stance. "I was hoping you'd tell me where to find Young-eun first. But I'd like to get going as well."
Yamashina actually laughed. "I never would have thought any of ShiShiO's pupils would ever be able to show so much compassion, either. You know she actually doesn't need your help as much as you probably think."
"Probably not," Soujiro responded lightly as well, "but I came all this way to see her, it'd be a shame to stop now, don't you think?"
A feral grin split Yamashina's face. "Good luck to you then, Tenken-no-Soujiro!" With that, he charged, and Soujiro sprang forward. They crossed the ground that separated them in heartbeats, and Soujiro's sakaba blade flew from its sheath in the form of the Tenken Battou Jutsu. He struck nothing but steel. Yamashina was not finished, however. He spun away from the impact, using the force of the meeting of their blades to augment his spin, and lashed out with the wakizashi that came slashing from its sheath in Yamashina's left hand. Soujiro twisted aside and skidded away, but the wakizashi left a cut in Soujiro's glove and a scrape on the flesh beneath. If Soujiro had been a hair slower, Yamashina might have slit the top of his wrist.
In the split-heartbeat that it took for Soujiro to regain his fighting posture, Yamashina had the wakizashi back in its sheath again, ready to do it all over again. His feral grin had not even wavered, though his eyes were bright with concentration. "Genji wouldn't have even fallen for that," he quipped. "You've gotta have something better than that!"
"Don't worry," Soujiro replied, the blood starting to race in his veins as the halfway-forgotten passion of battle began to simmer in his mind again. "We're just getting started."
* * * * *
(1) Thank you
(2) Oh well
COMING SOON: What, you think I left you hanging or something?! (Isn't this how they always do it in the series?) Anyway, next up are Chapter 14, "The Heavenly Sword" and Chapter 15, "A Shooting Star." As you can probably tell, this story is approaching the end, though I'm hoping I can tie up enough loose ends (that you might have forgotten about if you read this over the course of several days) to keep it interesting.
For the second installment in a row, I'm sorry it took me so long to put this out! I'm in the midst of campaigning for our University Senate, and time has not been a resource I've had much of to spare! No promises on the last part, either; it may be a while, but I'll try to get working on it ASAP. I have the outline for it, I just need to find time to sit down and get it done.
My special thanks to loyal fans who have been with this series since its inception back in December, and to everyone who's left a good review or piece of constructive criticism! As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this latest section! Ave Soujiro!!