"That is quite enough," Kougaiji finally remarked, rising to his feet fluidly. "Any further complicated plans will merely confuse the issue."
Gojyo yawned, a little too elaborately. "So what are you going to do? Tell them that there's been a serious mistake in the whole sacrifice choice business?"
Kougaiji looked down his nose at the sprawling Gojyo, who'd taken over one of the other chairs and hiked up his skirt in order to give one shin a really satisfying scratch. "No. I will teleport out of here with you, then leave you and reenter the fortress. I'll make some sort of excuse about why I had to go."
"Oh. One of those," Gojyo snapped his fingers, "things, right? The sort you do when you and your friends run out on us all the time?"
Kougaiji smiled blandly. He was aware that teleporting well required real artistry, and that he was rather good at it. Arriving on a high surface above the area for a battle took precision and craftsmanship. Managing to do so with the wind in one's face needed a touch of genius. "Fortunately the only other sorcerer round here is the Princess -- and possibly the Queen, but she seems to be staying out of matters. All they'll notice is that I teleported out of here. A touch discourteous, but nothing actually rude."
Gojyo sighed, and made a great business out of pulling himself up from the armchair and smoothing down his skirt. "Yare yare, I guess I'll have to go along with it. Good luck with the diplomatic mission, Prince. Don't sign any contracts without reading them first."
Kougaiji was feeling much better about things in general. All this confusion and worrying about what to do with Sanzou's minion (keep on thinking about him like that, don't remember any other moments, don't think about that dizzying vertiginous tilt and clutch for balance and embrace) could be neatly resolved. He should have thought of this earlier. (And don't think about why you didn't.)
He gestured Gojyo to take a step closer, and raised one hand to twist at his earring in the familiar personal mnemonic for raising power and invoking the spell.
And it went wrong. It went badly wrong, wrong to a degree that twisted his gut and doubled him over, but by then the spell was already working, no, already malfunctioning, and he could sense in his bones that the destination wasn't going to be where he had meant it to be. Someone had laid a working in this room before him, had tangled the lines of magic and warped them so that any teleport would go somewhere else. Through the crackling light of power he could see Gojyo's mouth opening and closing as the half-breed shouted something at him, but he couldn't hear what it was.
The back of his mind pointed out, glumly, I told you it was some sort of trap, and then there was thick curtaining darkness.
---
"That's our intruder?" asked the Captain of the Guard, looking down at the unconscious Genjou Sanzou. "Took you lot long enough to catch him. Okay, we have a simple enough case here."
"Excuse me," said Yaone politely.
"Man in stronghold," the Captain continued obliviously, "breaking Queen's Law. Anyone know why he's in that outfit, by the way?"
"He's a monk," one of the guard helpfully said.
"I don't know about that," grumbled a member of the group who'd brought him in, rubbing several body parts with the pained air of one who was expecting sympathy. "Monks don't call you assholes and try to kick your head off."
"He's a Sanzou," Yaone put in. "Genjou Sanzou, actually."
The Captain turned to squint at her. "Are you sure? I heard that Genjou Sanzou was a big guy, lots of muscles, commanding presence, divine aura, saintly behaviour, the works. Not, you know . . ." She waved at the unconscious body in the tangled robes and disarranged sutra. "Not a foul-mouthed piece of skin and bone like that. There isn't even any good eating on him."
"If he is a Sanzou, you can't eat a Sanzou," one of the gathering crowd of guards pointed out. "It's bad luck."
"What do you mean? The gods punish you with seven years misfortune?" her neighbor queried.
"Naah. I mean that the humans get really pissed off about it and do stuff like besiege you and call you a cannibal and burn your family home to the ground."
"Yeah," put in a third. She prodded the unconscious Sanzou with one booted toe. "Besides, I heard that you can't just eat him. You have to keep him for a year and devour his primal masculinity first."
There was a thoughtful pause. "Naah," said the first guard. "Too scrawny."
Yaone drew herself up to her full height, uncomfortably aware of how it compared with the seven-foot women surrounding her. With her best court inflection, she stated, "I'm afraid I must claim custody of this man."
"Ah," replied the Captain, in a voice which sounded rather more suitable, to Yaone's mind, to intoning Fee Fie Fo Fum. "How . . . interesting that you should say that."
Yaone stalked across and put one foot on Sanzou's chest. "He's an enemy of Kougaiji-sama. Clearly he entered this fortress as part of some plot to assassinate him. As Kougaiji-sama's bodyguard, it is my job to take him into custody and find out what's going on." She hoped that it sounded plausible. If she could at least keep him safe from the spider youkai, that'd deal with that question of honour, and then Kougaiji-sama himself could decide what to do about the whole sutra business.
"Mm." The Captain didn't sound very convinced. "You're the Prince's bodyguard. Well, I suppose there may be more to you than there looks to be."
Yaone felt her spine stiffen in sheer affront. "Certainly Kougaiji-sama would not have me in his service if I were not competent," she hissed. "How dare you insult him by suggesting such a thing!"
"Okay." The Captain folded her arms across her heavy breastplate. "We've got a problem here, Little Miss Competence. Now, anybody could walk in here and claim to be the Prince's bodyguard. Anyone could fly in on dragonback and make it look convincing. Anyone could try to smuggle out a man that way. And given the Prince is currently in his bedroom with that new girl they brought in as tribute, I don't feel like disturbing him. But I'll make you an offer."
The Captain's voice seemed to echo in her head. In his bedroom with that new girl. "I'm listening," said Yaone, her voice placid and controlled. Little red sparks danced at the edges of her vision.
"I'm going to have to submit this one to higher authority anyhow. He's going to the Queen, no question about it. But the Queen might listen to another woman. You prove to me that you're really the Prince's bodyguard by showing your form against one of my best girls, I'll let you go along, you can make your case to her. You lose or back out . . ." The Captain shrugged. "I'll have you shown up to the Prince's door, and he can identify you later. Or not. And as for him," she pointed to Sanzou. "He goes in the cellars for the Queen. Au naturel."
Yaone looked down at Sanzou for a moment, and saw his eyelids begin to flutter open. A vivid picture of what he might say when he woke flashed through her mind. Action followed on thought; she slammed the back of her heel into his forehead. He subsided back into unconsciousness with a grunt. "Of course," she said flatly. "It will be my honour to serve my Prince in all ways."
---
Hakkai could feel the delicate balance at the back of his mind tick over from mildly irritated to profoundly irritated. It had been difficult enough to avoid the guards and reach the door to the Prince's room without being caught. Fortunately the lock on the door had been susceptible to a needle-thin ki-blast, and he hoped that nobody would notice the small smoking hole in the wood any time soon.
But now it seemed that Gojyo and Kougaiji weren't here at all. The room was empty - and had been locked from the inside, he noted thoughtfully - and there was no trace of a struggle or anything similar having taken place, which was good. There was also no trace of the large four-poster bed having been used, which gratified him on a totally different level.
Fortunately there was enough space to hide beneath the four-poster, too.
They'd heard the women coming, and he'd just had enough time to grab Lirin and drag her underneath the bed with him. She seemed quite conversant with the concept of hiding under beds to spy on people, and hadn't made a single noise so far.
"There's been no trace of them?" asked an extremely upper-crust voice. Hakkai was fairly sure that it belonged to the expensive pair of sandals on perfectly manicured feet.
"Nothing, your Highness," replied a voice that probably went with the black leather boots. "We'll search the place again. Possibly that intruder had something to do with it."
"I am concerned," said Expensive Sandals. There was a note to her voice that intrigued Hakkai, a degree of what he could only term private motive or speech meant to be heard. "During my supper with him, Prince Kougaiji spoke rather wildly about certain matters. I - ah, but it is unreasonable of me to be so nervous. I am sure he meant no genuine harm, and certainly he would never go so far as to threaten the Queen."
"Threaten the Queen?" whispered Leather Boots. There was an overtone of something crawling to her voice, an ominous rustle of danger. "He . . ."
"No. I am quite sure that I am mistaken. Go to the Captain. We must search the fortress again. If anything should happen to the Prince, I don't know how we could possibly apologise to the Empress."
Both pairs of feet left the room. After several minutes, Hakkai let Lirin scramble out from under the bed.
Lirin was spitting with fury. "The bitch!" she whispered penetratingly. "How dare she criticize big brother! How dare she be so rude! He'd never threaten anyone who didn't deserve it!"
Hakkai rubbed his forehead thoughtfully, then dusted off his skirts. "Lirin-san, do you know exactly what the Empress' 'evil plot to make Kougaiji get into trouble' is?"
Lirin pouted. "I didn't hear that bit. I just know it's something to do with the other people who support him. Not everyone likes madam-my-mother that much."
"Ah," Hakkai murmured. Certain things were starting to make sense. If this was the frame-up job which it was starting to sound like, then Kougaiji -- and Gojyo -- were either being stored while the evidence was prepared, or they were already in the middle of it. The increasingly important question was, where were they?
---
"Jan-ken-pon!"
Bie Liao sighed as she fetched more buns. "No," she said to Doku again, "it's not quite like that. The Princess currently has control of the fortress and the troops, but her mother the Queen has ultimate authority, and the Princess has to clear everything important through her first."
"Then why's the Queen in the cellar?" Doku asked thoughtfully, borrowing one of the buns from Goku's plate. "Some sort of religious custom?"
The older woman raised her eyebrows. "And I thought you youkai knew something about each others' habits."
Doku spread his hands. "Some customs get a bit strange, out among the more isolated tribes."
She shrugged. "Oh, it's simple enough. You have noticed that all the ladies round here are, you know, sort of spider-ish?"
"Mm mm squash spiders mm," commented Goku through a mouthful of bun.
"So?" Doku asked.
"So what do spiders do after sex? The Queen's in the cellar because she's been laying eggs. And from what I've heard the guards saying about it, they're due to hatch real soon now. The Queen will be taking full control again at that point. At the moment, though . . . she can get a bit irrational, or so I hear tell. Mother defending her young, you know? Like that."
---
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