Roulette Wheel
by Cryptographic DeLurk
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AN: As a disclaimer, this fic has a Western Imperialism vs. Japanese Xenophobia & Nationalism bend to it – a false dichotomy was meant to be reflective of political attitudes that dominated this historical period. In addition, there is overt colourism in how Seto interprets the Ishtars and Isis's (non)conformity to beauty standards. I'd like to assert the sociopolitical views of precisely none of the characters are meant to be empathetic or persuasive, neither in a historical sense, nor in a contemporary one.
Also please beware depictions of child abuse, patricide, and graphic violence. If it suits, please Read & Relax. And apologies in advance for any typos and anachronisms.
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It haunted Seto, in the early hours of the morning once the parlour had closed.
There was a steady stream of noise, even at this hour. They had a water wheel in the garden, and it spun at a steady pace with the canal they'd dug through it. There were the crickets too. And lovers in the inn, giggling and moaning. The walls were light wood and thin paper, and everyone pretended not to hear.
Seto spun the roulette wheel, and listened to the steady spin of the ball and the tick-tick-tick as it fell to the wheel. He had paper, and noted the position where it landed, before spinning again. Rinse. Repeat.
The roulette wheel was an ugly foreign thing, built into a rickety wooden cabinet on too-skinny legs. But Gouzaburou had loved it, and the ugly foreign customers loved it. And Seto did not understand why it was so hard for him to comprehend. He had grasped the concept of Arabic numerals rather easily, translated them against the push and pull of wooden beads on the soroban. This roulette table favoured the numbers six and twenty-nine. It hardly ever landed on seventeen. He had calculated the probability for each number, taking into account the bias of the cabinet's manufacture – the tilt of its wood and unevenness of its grain.
Seto spun the wheel, again and again, a thousand times, until it broke. He then repaired it, and began again.
He was very good at what he did. It was why Gouzaburou had chosen plucked him off the street, and no one else. He could turn a flower card down to the bottom of the deck, or switch ivory tiles into the sleeve of his yukata, or tap a tumbler to change the position of a set of dice just before the patrons could see. But many could, and the more impressive thing about Seto was he never needed to. He observed, and calculated, and he knew how to stack the rates and payoffs. The parlour might lose coin over the course of a round, it might lose coin over the course of ten rounds, but in a hundred? A thousand? Never.
This had held true for everyone so far except her.
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.
Seto did not have the luxury to indulge fear, but he reacted almost instinctively to the threat the woman posed. Seto was here and was Gouzaburou's heir because he was useful. If he failed to be of use, his position might be forfeit. Worse, Mokuba's position and safety might be forfeit.
Kaiba Gouzaburou was not one to put all his eggs in one basket, Seto recognised. They ran hundreds of transactions on half a dozen gambling stations a night. They sold wine and sake and arms. They had the inn, and a collection of girls to rent out to patrons. Gouzaburou had heard the winds changing early on, and offered to exchange silver for gold on behalf of foreigners for a modest percentage. Now they collected money in bits and Mexican dollars traded them for land before the coin could whither away further into metal with no value at all. Gouzaburou made friends with every foreigner who would give him the time of day, and was now discussing opening a track for horse races. But he appeared to have contacts everywhere, among the Imperial Court, the Shogunate, and anyone with a heavy pocket in Kanagawa.
When Seto pointed out that Gouzaburou's actions seemed in direct conflict with the ideological leanings of many of his associates, Gouzaburou had simply replied that there was more to a man than ideology.
Seto disagreed.
Gouzaburou had seemed disappointed in him, and then backhanded him across the face hard enough to bruise. All these years and you haven't learned anything. I picked you and your brother up from a pile of filth. I can always put you back.
Seto had seen springtime twenty times that he remembered. He was fully grown, and taller than his foster father. He was not sure how Gouzaburou always managed to make him feel like a child.
Someday he'd prove he wasn't a child. Someday he'd kill Gouzaburou.
In the midst of all of this, the profits lost on one dark foreign woman should have amounted to little. Seto knew he was being inane. His rigidity in focussing on this was a greater threat to his position with his foster father than the woman herself. But he kept the losses secret anyhow, and obsessed over the mechanics of this game he had somehow failed to master. She was everything he found repulsive, and he would not lose to her.
Isis Ishtar sat across him at the roulette table. Four, twenty, twenty-nine, six, sixteen, twenty-nine, one, she recited in crisp Japanese.
Seto spun the roulette wheel seven times. Four. Twenty. Twenty-nine. Six. Sixteen. Twenty-nine. One. Not a single miss.
He thought he'd hid the losses well, buried in falsifications in the bank books. But Gouzaburou approached him at the end of a particularly frustrating evening with something like pride.
"It's good you're letting her win," he said. "That family is delusional. They believe they're chosen by some crazy foreign gods, and that they have supernatural powers. But they're in good with the British. Very rich. We create more opportunities for ourselves by playing along." He studied Seto. "Perhaps you've learned something after all."
Seto mumbled his thanks and held his tongue, and Gouzaburou let him be.
That morning he dreamed of ripping paper from the walls, and burning forests, and the earthquake.
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"Seto, my boy, come over here and let me introduce you to our special guests."
Seto finished the hand he was dealing, bowed his head slightly to his patrons, and waved for another dealer to step in for him. He stepped seamlessly from seiza into standing, and buried his arms in his sleeves, as he approached to greet Gouzaburou's latest contacts.
This pattern had been repeated multiple times with multiple families: the Hopkins, the Schröders, the Crawfords.
These foreigners were unique because they had dark skin and sharp features, and looked on the outside as demonic as Seto knew all foreigners to be on the inside.
Gouzaburou introduced them in order of importance:
Mister Ishtar, who has come all the way from Egypt to negotiate iron and lumber on behalf of the British. He held some ornamental rod at his waist, like a blunted axe, made entirely of gold.
Then his firstborn son, Malik Ishtar, who looked petulant and bored and looked Seto too directly in the eye. "Charmed," he said curtly. He wore a suit and a black top hat that didn't suit him.
Then the daughter, Isis Ishtar, who smiled mysteriously. She wore a black dress and black hat, with gold around her neck, and though it was improper and wasted on her, she appeared to have the only fashion sense among them.
Then Seto himself. "My eldest son, Seto," Gouzaburou said. "Too shy for his own good. But a whizz in the gambling room."
There was another foreigner in the back, even taller and darker than all the others. But he bent over himself like a servant, and nobody introduced him.
Gouzaburou and Mister Ishtar talked about their work. Who Gouzaburou could introduce him to in order to ease the difficulties of doing business in this foreign country. What kind of prices he could expect for what the British had brought to trade, and vice versa. The details of their stay at the inn, and its various services. Seto's mind zoned in on the numbers, spinning them into a rapid web of figures, based on where Gouzaburou had been honest or misleading. The rest he tried to ignore.
He already knew what kind of person Gouzaburou was, long before the Ishtars came. He was a leech, and an opportunist. It didn't matter to him that these foreigners bombed the harbour and forced their way in, bringing with them disease and thievery and moral decay and the earthquake – the wrath of the gods themselves. It did not matter that children were dying in the streets from cholera and starvation and exposure, or that drunks wasted away here in the gambling parlour and were thrown out as soon as their last pennies had been taken. It did not matter that their country was falling apart. Gouzaburou planned to suck whoever he could dry, for as long as he could.
"Miss Ishtar said she was interested in the parlour. Why don't you show her around, Seto? Show her the roulette table we just purchased." He turned to the others, and bragged a bit too immodestly for the sake of foreign sensibilities. "It was offered to us at a generous discount since it was broken. Seto repaired it himself."
Seto didn't understand why his foster father was doing this. There were women in the gambling parlour – courtesans, or cleaners, or washed out wives who had picked up smoking and other bad habits, but not the unmarried daughters of important clients.
Or perhaps Gouzaburou was throwing sons and daughters at each other like a matchmaker? If so, he might have chosen a woman less repulsive – dark and ugly and older than he was. In addition to being a foreign barbarian. Seto wanted her out.
The first roll of the roulette wheel had Seto irritated. The next irritated further still. It wasn't until the third he began to get perplexed. When he narrowed his eyes at her at the fourth and fifth, she finally spoke more than predictions.
"It doesn't matter how many times you spin. I can always see the results of things before they happen."
"I do not believe in sorcery," Seto said, though it was only half true. He drew a hand around the wheel, and the ball track, looking for smoke and mirrors as if she could have installed them sitting demurely with her hands across her lap. He briefly considered some foreign conspiracy by the sailors who'd sold them the wheel, but they had been churlish and boorish and Seto would have disbelieved them capable of such subtle deception, even if he hadn't repaired the wheel himself.
"You do not need to believe in the Grand Game to be a piece in its design," Isis said. "Spin again. Zero."
Seto spun again. Zero.
"How are you doing it?" he asked.
"Our family are the chosen watchers for the tomb of the nameless pharaoh, the restless one, the King of Games. And we've been blessed with some of his powers. Mine is the power of foresight. Fate is like a web all around us, if you are able to see and interpret it."
Seto scowled.
He could not believe in fate. He'd seen things too wretched to justify with premeditation. If such a thing as fate existed, he'd tear it apart with his own hands.
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When Seto was a child, Mokuba had not been allowed in the parlour, or the east side of the inn, or in any place that Seto could be found. This was enforced by a number of guards that stood at the doors of the rooms Seto occupied, Daimon being the first.
For a time, Mokuba had even been sent away – to the capital for school, or the mountains for vacation, or any number of places. Seto didn't often find out where until Mokuba returned. Seto only knew he was gone. And whenever Seto fell behind in his studies or otherwise made himself disagreeable, Gouzaburou made idle chatter about all the ails that might befall Mokuba, so far from home and under the care of those Seto had no sway over.
Maybe he would have believed even without further artifice. But with it, it became nigh impossible to guard against these idle threats. Daimon would come by his room in the night and rasp his hands against the frame of his room to wake him every hour or two – then slide away so Seto thought he'd imagined it. Letters came from Mokuba with pressed red maple leaves between the paper and blotted black redacted text. The lines Seto could read carried a distinct flavour of loneliness, ennui, and the desire to be elsewhere. It was too easy to imagine one of Gouzaburou's thugs hitting Mokuba with a switch, drawing a knife to cut under his nails, pressing Mokuba to the ground and grasping him by the neck. And then setting him in a chair to write this note in careful, neutral language. It did not matter that Seto knew it was imagined. It was all too vivid and real when sun peeked up in the horizon and he'd slept an hour at most and had thought of nothing else for days.
Somewhere in the middle of that, Gouzaburou had him taught Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Shanghaiese. Who knew the way the wind was blowing? It was best to know them all.
Slowly, the restrictions had lifted as Seto aged. Mokuba was allowed inside the east wing of the inn and the gambling parlour and in Seto's quarters. And it didn't matter anymore, because they had grown into strangers and there was no room for Mokuba in these holy spaces anyhow.
Mokuba was something of a libertine at age eighteen. He ran about the town at all hours, and did not come home for meals. He had many friends, and talked to women as easily as men. He interrupted couriers to scan their missives, stowed away on fishermen's boats, and seemed to have no inclination towards work.
Seto searched him out in those few free hours Gouzaburou had given him around noon. Seto walked through the streets brusquely.
Even now there were waifs at every corner. Splintered and mildewed piles of wood. The waves would carry in debris that everyone thought they had forgotten about. And there were buildings the tsunami had torn open that lay gutted and empty, in some limbo of ownership with no manpower to see rebuilt. The inn and parlour had been only minimally damaged, sheltered in a blind spot further up the hill. But whenever Seto left them, he could feel the effects of earthquake all around.
Seto found Mokuba in the gully behind some residential huts. Mokuba leaned against its side, feet in the mud. He was laughing with his friends, and holding a bright red temari. Child's toy. Mokuba seemed impossibly like a child.
Seto called out to him from the precipice over the opposite side of the gully.
Mokuba looked towards him with a resigned expression.
"Come here."
"Yes, Seto." Mokuba climbed from the ditch, hand over hand, pulling at reeds and roots as he went. The temari stayed fixed in his hand.
"I need to talk," Seto said, when Mokuba was next to him.
"Sure," Mokuba agreed.
"Alone." Seto looked down into the gully, where Mokuba's friends had collected, following Mokuba to the edge but unwilling at this juncture to put in the effort to climb.
"You know I'm just going to tell Hiroshi and Vera everything anyhow once you leave?" Mokuba said. "I've known them for years. Anything you can tell me you can tell them."
Seto disagreed. But he supposed this was not one of the things that strictly required confidentiality.
"I need your lodestone."
"The one you gave me when we were kids?" Mokuba asked. "What for?"
"There's this foreigner-"
"They have names, you know." And now Seto could tell Mokuba was already defensive, barely a sentence into their conversation.
"I need it for work," Seto said. "There's a woman cheating in the gambling parlour and I need to get to the bottom of it."
"Why?" Mokuba asked.
The question seemed absurd. Of course, Seto did not really need Isis to stop winning at roulette. Gouzaburou had assured him that there was more money to be made off flattering her. But would one normally need to justify stopping a cheat when one worked in this business?
"Gouzaburou would be-" Seto began.
"I don't care about him," Mokuba said savagely. "I don't know why you care so much about that man and his stupid business."
Seto thought that was quite an attitude to take with what saw Mokuba fed and clothed and not sleeping on the streets with the other orphans. Gouzaburou, however awful, was an investment Seto made. One that was likelier than not to turn a profit.
He told Mokuba this.
"We're smart enough. And clever enough," Mokuba said. "And we're adults now. We don't need him any more. We can just leave, Seto. We can just travel north along the coast, and find our own way." He looked back down into the gully. "You guys can come too," he told his friends.
Seto did not believe that. Gouzaburou's contacts were everywhere. No matter how far they ran, they'd be blacklisted and turned out and would never amount to anything.
Also, Seto would kill Gouzaburou someday. Running away was not part of the plan.
"We're not doing that, Mokuba," Seto said. He would not leave with Mokuba, and Mokuba would not leave without him.
"Of course you won't." Mokuba spat. "If that's everything-"
"Mokuba," Seto persisted. "I need-"
"Fine, take the lodestone," Mokuba said, slipping against the dirt back down into the ditch. "Take back everything you've given me."
Seto had understood the object was sentimental. That was why he'd come to ask permission. Or that's why he told himself he was here.
There was little point in sticking around with Mokuba in this mood. So Seto left.
But in some ways Mokuba's anger was more palatable than the other things Seto had seen him be.
He'd hid behind a wall once, and eavesdropped as Mokuba and the Russian girl talked on the other side.
I don't know if it's okay to ask, she'd said in a small voice. But your father is Kaiba Gouzaburou, right?
Chichi-ue? Mokuba's mouth had moved around the sounds like they were foreign words. Why do you ask? Did you need some favour?
The girl hadn't said anything in return.
Mokuba's voice had cracked a little. And what had been left was something sad and vulnerable. He's not my father. He's my brother's father only. I just live in the west wing of his estate… He's an awful old man, and I hate him. He's awful to my brother.
You talk about your brother all the time, the girl had said. You really love him, don't you?
The moment had dragged, with only the cicadas chirping.
He doesn't have time for me, Mokuba had said.
Seto had left. It was the truth.
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It wasn't until the third spin that Isis began to get perplexed.
"Thirty-six?" she said, for the fourth time.
Seto spun the wheel. Thirty-six.
Twice more the wheel landed on thirty-six.
"How are you doing it?" Isis asked. She looked under the cabinet, as if for a pedal or some other rig.
"So there are things you can't see," Seto confirmed.
"Everything has limitations," Isis agreed. "I can't look back so easily at what has already been done. Nor can I automatically understand something I see if I have no knowledge of it."
Seto considered leaving her to flounder in her ignorance. But did it make a difference? Isis had not second-guessed herself into giving a false number. He had only confused her.
"I put a steel plate just under the wood." Seto pointed at the number. "And sanded this ball out of lodestone. It is attracted to certain metals."
Isis regarded the ball curiously.
"And I put a pin in the track," Seto said, scooting back from his chair. "I press it in to dislodge the ball when the right side of the wheel comes around. And let magnetism do the rest."
"You're a scientist at heart, aren't you? Very clever and industrious," Isis complimented.
Seto said nothing. He replaced the lodestone ball on the side of the cabinet. This game was over for today.
"If you wanted to test the limits of my abilities, we could have just played another game… I'm curious about the one with the flower patterned cards."
Seto crossed his arms and said nothing.
"Show it to me," Isis urged.
It was Seto's job to do so, so he obliged her. "We will need a third player."
"Rishid," Isis called for her family's servant. Seto slid the panel over the roulette wheel, and reconfigured the cabinet back into a regular table. And the three sat around it as Seto explained the rules of Eighty-Eight, and all its special hands. Isis translated into a strange language for the sake of the servant, and they sat and drew and discarded cards.
"Why are you here?" Seto asked.
"My father came on behalf of the British Empire," Isis reminded. "He's a dignitary in good standing for his knowledge about North Africa. For now, he is overseeing trade in the Pacific." Isis smiled. "You don't believe that's all?"
Seto did not. But he was not sure the answer he was looking for.
"Have you heard of the Ottoman Empire?" Isis asked. "Muhammad Ali Pasha, and his dynasty?"
Seto had heard some. But very little.
"They dug us out from the tombs," Isis said. "They stole from us, and drove us from the place that was ours. And now we are here… The British will put us back. For a price. But they will do it." Isis sighed. "They all fight for power and thrones, but they will never be king. Not ever. That power is ours. That throne is ours."
"But why are you here?" Seto asked. Why had the barbarians come to his country? To his city?
"Father believes we can find the nameless pharaoh if we search wide enough and far enough," Isis said. "I have told him it is too early, but he did not want to listen."
Seto snorted. "He brags about all these powers at your disposal, but he does not trust in them?"
"He is reaching the end of what Shait has measured for him," Isis said. "Even if I could have, I would not have denied him a final vacation."
The servant interrupted before Seto could ask for clarification. Whispering to Isis covertly. She indulged him, and leaned over his arm to direct his hand of cards.
"You're very familiar with your servant," Seto said blandly.
Isis blinked. "Yes," she agreed. "Rishid is my brother's brother."
"The brother of your brother." Seto took this in. "Shouldn't he be your brother too, then?"
Isis shrugged.
As it turned out, Isis was far less capable in this game than with the roulette wheel. And her brother-servant was even worse. Even allowing for their relative unfamiliarity with the rules.
"I cannot do anything if I'm to be dealt a bad hand," Isis said. "I only know not to bet so much on one that I know will turn out poorly."
So she had the power to see a bad hand, but not the power to make one good. Seto found this disappointing. So many paths were only dead ends.
"Tell me more about where you're from," he asked, as he shuffled the cards and dealt again.
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"I am not from there," Malik Ishtar said, drawing a finger across the rim of his top hat. "I was two when I left Egypt."
Seto thought that was the end of it, but Malik was a man of anxious and temperamental habits. He tore at his nails and scratched at his back. Then he rounded and hissed, responding to a comment Seto had not made and could scarcely imagine the contents of.
"I should claw your back up, Priest," Malik spat. "And tell you it was in service of the plot of land you wailed on when you were a baby."
It did not seem constructive to further indulge conversation with a madman.
Gouzaburou invited them into a guest room. There were four western style chairs set out in a semi-circle. It seemed obvious the way they should sit, with Gouzaburou and Mister Ishtar at the centre and their sons at their right and left hands respectively.
Malik interrupted. "Sit, Rishid," he said, in a commanding English voice.
Mister Ishtar frowned, but did not interrupt. And, after a moment, Rishid sat, and then Malik next to him and his father next to him.
Gouzaburou shrugged at Seto, in a way that was too unconcerned to be taken for apologetic, and took the last seat.
"Pour us something to drink, Seto."
They had any number of hostesses in the parlour, who had been hired for just such a task. Seto considered passing it off to one of them, wondered if he'd be pummelled across the face for it later.
Seto brought in a tray with a sake jar and cups. You had to pick your battles.
He poured for Gouzaburou, Mister Ishtar, and finally Malik with more than a little reluctance. He went to set the tray down.
"One for Rishid too," Malik said pointedly.
It was a challenge, and everyone in the room knew it.
Seto hesitated with his hand hovering over the rim of the jar. Then they all watched, as Seto poured a cup for the brother-servant.
Gouzaburou cleared his throat. Then put on that smile, like he understood his audience.
Seto stood to the side, as they spoke, face blank.
Malik slumped in his seat and looked unquestionably bored.
"There's a long history of horse racing here," Gouzaburou said. "The people love it. I'm excited to see how the British do it."
Gouzaburou palmed the riding crop, and drew it across his hand.
"They're talking about moving everything over to Yokahama – sleepy little town. So much room to build and expand, though.
Gouzaburou set the riding crop down on the table, and drunk from the sake cup. Replaced the cup, and picked up the riding crop.
It was a monologue, Seto realised. Mister Ishtar would cut in at different intervals, to offer factoids or advice. His brown wrinkled face would scrunch and relax to make his opinion on matters known. But, really, this was Gouzaburou's monologue, and Seto heard it dole itself out in little sound bites.
"There's so much of the world for the taking."
"If your business isn't expanding, it's failing."
"We can clear out a bit of wetland, build a racing track."
"Crowds would be in the hundreds. The money they'd throw at the betters, the horses, the jockeys."
"Sell snacks in the stands. Oden. Sausage."
"And Seto could do the books."
"Seto – Come here."
Seto looked up.
"Come here," Gouzaburou urged, with an impatient wave of his hand.
Seto stepped forward, and once he was close enough Gouzaburou stood and rapped the tip of the riding crop lightly across his cheek.
Malik and his father seemed to sit at sudden attention, mildly amused at the proceedings. Gouzaburou did, in fact, understand his audience well. Only Rishid sat with his eyes trained upon the floor.
It was vivid. Daimon hovering over him with the switch, waiting for Seto to slip up. Just waiting to beat him with it. Waiting to wake him up. Gouzaburou knew exactly how weighty the pressure on his cheek was.
Seto would kill Gouzaburou someday.
"A bit of a stud horse, isn't he?" Gouzaburou asked. "Why don't you run the track for us, Seto?"
"I-?" Seto began.
Gouzaburou flicked the riding crop behind him, and struck him across the thigh. "Run!" he barked, and then it peeled off into a laugh.
Seto ran.
.
.
That was another thing Seto hated about foreigners. They were so arrogant.
Gouzaburou would say, "Let them mistake politeness for humility. Let them believe they're better than us. For now. Easier to take their money that way."
Some might have called it hospitality. The kind of facade you needed to run a successful inn and gambling room.
But the foreigners had the audacity to take it for truth. And the more Seto watched Gouzaburou scurry to appeal to the foreign guests, the less convinced he felt it was anything but genuine.
Seto had thought his foster father proud once.
And there was nothing to see in this city. And Seto was stuck trying to take Isis Ishtar sightseeing anyhow.
Seto hated them all.
"You say you hate us, but really you're curious, aren't you?" Isis asked. "You've asked so many questions about what it's like in Egypt and Britain, and everywhere else we stopped on the way here."
Seto did not deign her chatter with an answer.
"You've never wanted to see the world?" Isis asked. "You could study abroad, you know. You are already well-spoken in many European languages. And you know more about technology than I do. I think many schools and institutions would welcome you. You don't want to?"
Seto thought about lying. He thought about snapping at Isis and telling her he had no need for the strange notions of foreigners and their strange education.
Oh, but he wanted. He did.
He'd been a student of Rangaku for as long as he'd known how to read. He knew about the Scientific Revolution and Age of Englightenment. Western philosophy and medicine. The steam engine, and electricity, and the telegram. He'd struggled with primitive materials to recreate any gadget he found instruction for in foreign books. He studied it all greedily and voraciously. And he wanted nothing more than to participate first-hand. He wanted to talk to the great thinkers of their time, and take their knowledge, and expand it into something that was his, and only his.
Seto wanted, very badly, to build.
Gouzaburou had been a proponent of many of Seto's studies, but the one way he couldn't extend his support was naturally that which Seto coveted most.
Seto was the eldest son. He needed to be here, in Japan, to learn to run and inherit his foster father's business. He could not go traipsing off into the world in pursuit of science and innovation and art.
"If you say so." Isis walked further along the line of shops, taking the lead. The street was densely populated and Isis seemed to have little regard for the passers-by. There was more than one couple, walking arm-in-arm. No doubt it would have been embarrassing to do so with Isis Ishtar, but it was worse to walk behind her like a servant.
"Every question I ask you only have half answers for," Seto sneered, partly out of bitterness, partly just to draw her attention back. "It seems I don't need to go abroad to be smarter than you."
Isis turned back to him. "Is that your only ambition?" she taunted. "Malik is better read than I am, if you'd rather speak with him."
Seto had no desire to do so.
"But there are many things only I know," Isis grinned. "Should I teach you something about our Gods and our history? About your history?"
Seto's eyes caught on her necklace. The sun was hotter than he ever felt. Molten gold burned across his arms. Demons ran in the streets after a girl so pale and white she burned. And for a minute it seemed the screaming was happening in some other time, some other place.
But it wasn't. Seto cursed. It was only a little up the boulevard, he could see the crowd gather. A foreigner with a curly grey beard screamed as the swordsmen surrounded him, and drove in the blades. He wore a puffed white naval cap, that fell to the ground before the body.
These were samurai, or perhaps rounin, ready to riot. Seto thought for a moment he might surrender Isis to them, if they wanted her. But who knew what their code of honour might encompass. There were too many ways things could go that might endanger his position with Gouzaburou. And, then there was what rang truest in his heart – he could not let anyone take Isis, not until he had figured her out.
He grabbed her by the arm and went up the street the other way. Around them was screaming in the crowd. Someone had raised a torch that looked ready to catch on any of the buildings nearby. But nobody seemed to take notice of them. Everyone was too busy moving closer or further away from the epicentre of the chaos.
Seto ducked behind a dock house and pulled Isis after him. Seto listened for evidence that the mob, the fire, death, was moving in their direction. But all there was was the heaving sound of their own breaths. Seto had barely realised he'd been running.
Had he been afraid for himself as well?
"Nothing bad will happen to me," Isis said, with all the conviction of one who knew it to be so.
"Nothing bad will happen to you," Seto agreed, "because I won't let it."
Isis let him press her up against the side of the building. She was not very large, he realised suddenly. It was not difficult to cover the entirety of her skin with himself. To anyone passing by, would they appear just one man huddled against the wall?
His hand brushed her thigh, and he braced himself against it. It was soft and warm. And it wasn't that Seto had never been this close to a woman before, but he'd never been this close to one he'd talked to this much or revealed this much of himself to. The girls at the inn were chatty amongst themselves, but grew silent every time he or his foster father came close.
Isis's breathing was even, as she tilted slightly and leaned her side against his chest, one hand tracing the folds on his yukata. And, after a moment, Seto stooped down to rest his chin atop her head.
.
.
There were so many ways it could have ended.
There were the ways in which Seto could be triumphant. He would outmanoeuvre his foster father, drag allies to his side. Gouzaburou would be arrested and detained and executed, when Seto revealed his illegal dealings to an Imperial Court no longer sympathetic to him.
Or Seto would head a great business venture of his own. Create a brand new gambling game, that left all the others paling in comparison. He and Gouzaburou would take time off to celebrate and visit the mountains. Gouzaburou would be proud, and propose a toast to his success at the summit. And then Seto would push him off a cliff.
There were also tragedies where none of them won. Where the inn would be burned down by Ishin Shishi, with all of them and all the foreigners inside. Seto could not say it would be unwarranted.
Or maybe Gouzaburou would lose everything, too far in over his head with his foreign business partners. He would hang himself in the empty shell of a horse racing track. The rope swaying back and forth, and the dust kicking up on the track to mat on his lolling tongue. He would leave Seto and Mokuba with nothing.
Seto would have preferred to be victorious. (Someday he'd kill Gouzaburou.) But in his mind even these tragedies were poetic and cathartic. The world was corrupt and terrifying, but these tragedies gave suffering a purpose. It made them ideological and romantic.
The reality was far more prosaic. There was a commotion in the inn. Screaming like dying.
Seto was standing at the door to the gambling parlour, observing the flow of the room. Gouzaburou was talking with a client, who had brought him a rich and pungent box of Havana cigars.
"What in the blazes is that?" Gouzaburou demanded. He walked to the doorway where Seto waited, on the threshold of the gardens. He didn't even need to signal for Seto to fall into step behind him. They had only a few weapons stashed outside their rooms. Gouzaburou had procured a flintlock pistol, and cocked the weapon. All Seto had was a short sword stashed in a gap against the wall, no longer than his forearm. He frowned at it, a self defence weapon like a woman's.
The shrieking had stopped. But there was the sound of begging, quick speech in foreign tongues, and shadows on the other side of the shouji lattice.
Gouzaburou flung the screen open. And shot the pistol at the ceiling.
He did not say a word before Malik Ishtar startled and swung and drove his golden rod through Gouzaburou's chest.
The pistol dropped, and for a moment everyone seemed wide eyed and startled to silence.
Then Malik grit his teeth, removed the rod, and plunged it in again. Screeching something in one of the languages Gouzaburou hadn't had Seto taught.
The brother-servant, Rishid, leapt up from where he'd been cowering in the corner, and began to pry Malik off of Gouzaburou. Forcing hands over to cover Malik's eyes and smother his face. Pulling the rod away after its third stab.
Seto, at the same moment, caught his father underneath the shoulders. He was limp as Seto pulled him back.
There was the rest of the room. The glowing lantern light, money on the futons, a terrible gash on Rishid's arm and across his face, and Mister Ishtar with a blank expression in a bloody crumpled heap in the corner.
"Baba! Baba! Rishid!" Malik wailed, as Rishid tried to press his hand to cover his mouth, as the other groped for the rod.
Seto blinked down at his father and knew it was over. (No. Please no.) He was going to bleed out, if his heart didn't stop before then.
Seto would kill his father someday. And he wasn't going to let a raving lunatic – Malik fucking Ishtar – take that away from him.
He sat down, and laid Gouzaburou across his lap. Seto could see him try to speak, but he only managed to wheeze. His eyes grew wide when he saw Seto draw the short sword across his neck. They didn't have time for parting wisdom or last goodbyes.
Seto grasped him by the hair, and sawed through his neck down to the spine. And then he yanked his father's head back to crack his neck bone to make sure.
.
.
There was already panic in the gambling parlour when Seto got there. No doubt Rishid had forewarned this when he picked up his brother, like a child of two, and dashed through to the exit of the estate.
Seto had two corpses in the master bedroom, and an inn and gambling hall all to himself.
"Out!" he yelled. Knowing he must look a terror in a yukata drenched in blue and blood. He pointied to the exit with a bloody sword. "My father is dead! I think we can agree that means ownership of his estate passes to me! And I want every single one of you out! Get out of my parlour!"
Everyone scrambled. All but one.
He needed everyone to leave. He needed to find Mokuba.
Isis it seemed had just finished collecting on her winning bets. The attendant by the door had fled, but Isis remained, folding coin into her purse.
"Get out!" Seto said, pointing the sword at her.
"Gladly," Isis said. She took her sweet time smoothing the skirt of her gown, and tucking her purse under her arm.
"I've already sent the guard after your brothers." Too little, too late. But Seto was not even sure he cared if they were caught. "I don't need their help to dispose of one woman, though."
He needed to find Mokuba. He needed to tell Mokuba that-
"I'm leaving," Isis agreed. She was rude right up until the end, Seto saw, and she looked him straight in the eye. "The only question is this: Are you coming with me?"
Seto cursed. Never had he met a woman so vile.
The Eye of Wadjet blinked at him.
It was not a question when she already knew the answer.
..