The medicine seller dropped to a knee, the chattering teeth of the taima sword echoing in the nearly silent room. The mononoke had retreated once again into the depths of the night, the ofuda plastered across the walls falling quiet. It had been awhile since a mononoke had managed to nearly best him in a show of force. The hinnagami had come close, though the fall through the floor had been more damaging than the mononoke itself.
Wordlessly, Kayo leapt over the table with bandages and some salve. He didn't fight her when she took his arm and began tending to the large wound. The pain was written on his face as he gritted his teeth, the pronounced fang in the back barely showing past the edge of his lips.
A moment had passed before anyone had spoken. "What is…" Lord Ii stumbled over his words for a moment. "What is this tatarimokke?"
"An omen owl," the medicine seller replied. "They are normally harmless, lost souls getting stuck to an owl upon death. Yet this one, it was created with regret and anger, turning it very vicious and vengeful."
Lord Ii sucked in a strained breath as one of the farthest scales tipped just slightly. "R-regret that the assassination failed?"
"This ire runs much deeper than that," the medicine seller reasoned. The taima sword hadn't responded to the notion despite repeated mentions of the possible truth. He watched the scale tip a bit, indicating where the mononoke had passed by the room, before standing back upright and falling silent. "Do you see how the scales are moving?"
Kayo peered up from her work in wrapping his arm. "It's tracking the mononoke's movements like it was with the bakeneko. Is it prowling?"
"Hunting," the medicine seller replied. "Something very specific is driving this tatarimokke. The most vicious of the sort of tatarimokke are capable of cursing not only those who have wronged it but also their entire family. This one seems to be enacting a physical sort of curse."
"That's…. unsettling," Kayo swallowed hard, trying not to think of the body smeared across the walkway outside.
"What truly happened last week with the assassin, Lord Ii?" the medicine seller questioned. "All the details."
"That's all that I know, honestly," Lord Ii replied with a shaky voice. "I wasn't even there. I had only seen the aftermath despite Akinobu's insistence not to."
"Curious that he would insist against it," the medicine seller peered at the wounded samurai on the table.
"It's not exactly becoming of a young lord to vomit over the side of a balcony," Lord Ii frowned sharply. He huffed when he saw the slight amusement in the medicine seller's face.
"I don't think Mr. Akinobu is really up for talking at the moment," Kayo pointed out, seeing that the samurai had passed out for a moment. His wounds were rather deep and rest was necessary, though she wasn't entirely certain how he'd slept through all that noise.
Kayo leapt, dropping the gauze as a scream resounded through the courtyard followed by sounds of steel and cracking wood. She leapt behind the medicine seller, clinging to his shoulders. She really didn't want to think of another person being eviscerated outside as the mononoke hunted and hungered.
As the clamoring drew closer, the medicine seller wrapped up the last of the gauze, tucking in the tail end and taking to his feet. The seals would hold for the moment, yet as the mononoke could stand its ground against his own magics, he wasn't certain for how long.
Yet as the sound approached, neither the scales or the ofuda reacted when the door suddenly slid open. Kayo yelped, leaping onto the medicine seller's back and clinging to him.
"Miss Kayo. He is human," the medicine seller pointed at the samurai now stumbling into the room.
Kayo cautiously peered around his shoulders at a rather panicked samurai who looked white as a sheet with way too much smeared makeup. She hid back behind her protective medicine seller shield as the scales began to tip suddenly.
The medicine seller reacted, quickly swiping his hand to close the door and throwing more ofuda at the door to reinforce it. The door rattled as the screeching and clawing returned.
"It… it can't get in again, right?" Lord Ii stammered.
"For now," the medicine seller replied. "But these seals will not hold forever. We must find the mononoke's truth and reason before more die."
"More have!" the blue-clad samurai reported.
Lord Ii looked horrified. "What happened, Hisamatsu?"
"That creature. It flew out of the night!" the samurai replied. "Some black mass of who knows what! It ripped Yasunao into pieces and strewn him across the balcony!"
"It won't stop killing, will it?" Lord Ii worried.
"It may never stop," the medicine seller confirmed. "Mononoke do not think as humans do. Their desire for vengeance may be beyond our understanding. The killing may stop with those it feels has wronged it, or it may extend the ire to anyone here on the estate. Perhaps even the entire han."
"We… we need to protect Lord Ii," Akinobu stirred.
Hisamatsu stumbled past the medicine seller and Kayo, nearly falling over himself as he settled near the table. "At all costs, we'll slay the mononoke."
The medicine seller snorted derisively.
"How disrespectful!" Hisamatsu seethed.
Lord Ii glanced between Hisamatsu and the medicine seller. "There is a way to slay it, right?"
"As soon as we learn the truth and reason," the medicine seller replied, wedging free of Kayo's grasp. "Only then can the taima sword be used to stop its rampage. Until then, we are unfortunately at its mercy."
"And there's something we're missing about the assassination incident," Lord Ii reasoned with concern.
"Unless there were other deaths recently," the medicine seller pointed out.
"Not that I'm aware of," Lord Ii shook his head. "I heard of a fire in a village some ways out, but that's not close enough for here, is it?"
"Perhaps," the medicine seller replied, though he wasn't ready to dismiss the incident outright. A fire could produce wrongful deaths and negative emotions, but that wasn't always enough to create a mononoke.
"It's the assassination," Akinobu spoke suddenly.
Lord Ii peered at his fallen samurai with concern. "Something else happened, didn't it?"
"Akinobu," Hisamatsu hissed.
"No," the red-clad samurai hissed. "We've stained our honor with our lies. This thing could kill Lord Ii!"
The blue-clad samurai pushed on the hilt of his sword quietly, gasping when he could push it no further. The medicine seller had suddenly approached, placing one simple finger on the hilt and barring him from drawing the katana. "How did you-"
"Don't interfere," the medicine seller glared down at Hisamatsu.
"How dare you," he hissed back, moving to stand up and fight but found he couldn't fight that one singular finger on the hilt of his sword. "What are you?!"
The medicine seller defiantly ignored the question. "Mr. Akinobu, do you know more of this incident?"
"There was no assassin," Akinobu replied.
Lord Ii gasped. "N-no assassin? But who was smeared across the balcony?"
Kayo desperately wished they'd stop using 'smeared'.
"A local lord," the red-clad samurai continued despite Hisamatsu's hissing. "There was never an assassination attempt. It was all fabricated."
Hisamatsu had enough of Akinobu's loose lips. He pulled a dagger from within the folds of his robes while his other hand was still wrapped around the katana's hilt. With a twist in his body, he drew the knife back, aiming to drive it into the red samurai's neck. He would've been quite successful had he not found a tabi socked-foot driven into his chest before he could complete the task.
The medicine seller stood statuesquely still with his leg barely coiled up at his side as Hisamatsu tumbled across the tatami before colliding with the wall. "Don't interfere."
Lord Ii stared, shocked. He wasn't as surprised with the medicine seller's tactics as he was with how Hisamatsu was acting. "Oh… kami protect us."
The medicine seller didn't need to hear any of Hisamatsu's words to know he was hiding the truth about the assassination attempt. Something happened a week prior that was so incredibly horrible that he would even kill his own companions to keep it quiet. Akinobu's death would risk the truth and reason be buried forever and cause Lord Ii more pain that he was already in. And the medicine seller seemed to have a bit of a soft-spot for the kind-hearted, often paranoid feudal lord. There were still some good humans left in this world.
"What was fabricated?" the medicine seller demanded with a sharpness in his voice. "Do be specific."
"What happened with this local lord?" Lord Ii wanted answers as well.
"He was murdered," Akinobu replied. "It wasn't an assassination. Hisamatsu ordered him killed and fabricated the story."
"Lies!" Hisamatsu screeched.
"It was to cover something even deeper up," Akinobu added. "It was an unnecessary and brutal murder and now we've caused all this."
The taima sword chattered in confirmation. The truth had finally been revealed. He glanced at Lord Ii wringing his hands anxiously as he stared silently in shock. A pity this wasn't kittens beneath the balcony.
...
Author's notes!
Tatarimokke are quite the yokai. They are called omen owls and their name translates to curse baby, but they're not bad normally. They look like regular owls but their hoot sounds like a crying child. The yokai is created when a child's soul gets stuck to a regular owl.
In older eras, babies weren't considered fully human yet, so if a baby died, it wasn't buried in a cemetary or given a funeral. So the soul of the baby wanders and might get stuck. If a baby died recently in a house, the family looks for any owls that appear and consider them part of the family. They are likened to zashiki warashi (though Mononoke's version was as aggressive as this fic's tatarimokke) and are generally revered.
Like in the story here, a tatarimokke can be created by a family discarding babies into the river (too many mouths to feed!) or a brutal murder. In the latter case, a tatarimokke can curse a family and even their future unborn children.
A pity it's not just kittens under the walkway, isn't it Lord Ii?
