Extra content posted at the end! I thought as I was dividing up the chapters that that scene really belonged in this chapter but I reluctantly left it alone figuring I'd fix it later but I forgot when I posted. So now its fixed and the narrative flows a little more freely.
I dropped by my office in Sixth for a little while to read over those papers that Lieutenant Kurostuchi had dug up for me. I left my door cracked with a little music from earth playing to signal that I was open to take visitors. The papers didn't tell me much that Ukitake hadn't already summarized for me.
The accounts themselves were conflicting in the details; most accounts held that The Believed were a Human convention, that humans had somehow been able to tap into the vast reservoir of spiritual energy that flowed through all of creation, in the human world and elsewhere, and somehow by simply believing hard enough in it, they had managed to simply will the massively powerful spirit entities into being. Other accounts said that the spirit beings that had been labeled the Believed had actually been in existence long before humans had ever existed and that the impact that Humanity had had over them was to create a structure and indoctrinate them into a system that defined them and their abilities. One thing the documents all agreed upon was the fact that, however they had come to be, the Believed relied upon the spiritual force that came from out of worship. They also seemed to think that once a particular entity was no longer the nexus of a system of worship, that being, having lost a great deal of its purpose became disconnected from its place in the Mortal World. A vast majority of the other accounts were about something that was called the Great Exode, a time when nearly all of the Believed, having lived in the mortal world (supposedly) for millenia, were either excised from their traditional places of worship by new worship systems or simply chose to leave for Divine Realms (it was a place that was supposedly like the Siereitei only for spirit beings that were not Human) in order to escape the strange new ways that Humans were coming to define their world. Much of it, however new and kinda interesting, was actually pretty dry. Trust the weirdos at Twelfth to suck out all the life interest from something even that mysterious. A lot of the account was dry scholarly stuff speculating about their nature of their reiatsu and whether or not they built their homes in the Divine Realms of reishin like we did, and whether or not they were subject to entropy (whatever the hell that was) and so on.
I was interrupted not infrequently by various members of Sixth, three of the younger officers had certain concerns to bring to my attention. One kid had fallen in love with a woman in the Rukon District and wanted a place to keep her well, so I had him fill out the necessary forms and congratulated him (and tried not to feel just a bit envious of him) the other two just had routine matters to ask me about. The last three were Seated officers I'd requested to meet with me that day to talk about the newbies I had picked out for their elements. After having waded through the reports from Twelfth I grabbed a late lunch at the chow hall and then took up my cloak for another visit to Hangdog. I was just spendin' all kindsa time in my old haunts lately.
Jidanbo gave me a friendly nod and said
"Pleasant day, Lieutenant."
I waved back to the massive gatekeeper as the gate to the Seireitei thumped shut behind me, cutting off the vewi of the Seireitei's neat streets and clean houses. I was so accustomed to the cleanliness and orderliness of the Seireitei that sometimes finding myself back on the streets of my old life came as a bit of a surprise still. I shrugged off the mental shift, pulled my worn cloak around me and blurred into flash-step. The trip to the very outer districts from the inner ring was a journey of days, perhaps weeks, for a normal soul. It had taken Rukia and me over a week to make it all the way from Hangdog that first trip in. As a Soul Reaper it was a matter of mere hours using flash step and dusk was coming on as a blurred into being outside of the neatly walled courtyards. In contrast to the streets that surround it, Barai house was (nearly) as clean and orderly as any of the buildings within the Seireitei, part of this was probably just because of the nature of the place; it was a bath-house after all, but mostly the fact that it was so clean and unmolested was the simple fact that no-one within even the dog-eat-dog world of the Lower Districts would risk pissing off the proprietress.
Barai House was one of the better, if not the best, building in the district. It rose above all of the other shacks and shanties cobbled together from refuse that were the homes in good ol' District seventy-eight. Three stories tall and made of proper wood planks with real rice paper screens, it would even have fit in (sort of) in one of the upper districts. There were even actual furnishings in it. The first floor was the place where the courtesans amused thier clients with songs, dancing, entertainments and food and wine, and the spots with various tubs sunk into the floor surrounded by walls and screens for privacy while the customers bathed. I remembered perfectly well how much work it took to clean the tile-lined tubs daily and to refill the copper boilers underneath with water from the well nearby. The bath-house was where Amber made most of her money, but it just wouldn't be Hangdog if that was all it was. For an extra surcharge a thug could get an extra long and thorough bath and towel-off from certain of the bathing assistants who were willing. The upper two stories were where the women, ah, plied their trade. The second floor was where the women "worked" and the top floor were their actual living quarters combined with the nursery area where the street orphans were kept.
The top tier naturally belonged to Amber herself, she reigned over her little kingdom like a queen, settling disputes between the servants, overseeing the training rosters of the new ladies, inspecting performances, guiding new girls through their first uncertain days, and more importantly, gathering information and gossip on those outside of her House (and even her District) like a spider gathers flies. She knew all the dirt on all the leading thugs in the area, knew who to ply with what to get a particular thing done, kept an eye on the ever-shifting patchwork of inter-gang and thug politics on the streets. She was a mastermind when to came to political strategy, and if one thought that the nobles in the Seireitei could politic... heh, they had nuthin' on Madam Amber. The fact that she was quite beautiful only made her all the more dangerous because the menfolk tended to dismiss that keen mind of hers out of hand. All they saw was a sensual courtesan with a full figure and milk-soft hands, they didn't know that all the danger they could ever be prepared to face lay hidden beneath the surface. And she was my onee-san. She'd made something of a particular pet of me when I had been under the age of turn-out, I think she'd liked my hair color, which had been an amber color in between the orange and the crimson stages. I'd been her errand boy and messenger as a young child before I went out on the streets with my gang. Even after the Academy I still kept in touch, more so after I'd lost Rukia. It didn't fill the void but it helped a little to know that I still had a connection with someone in my past. Amber and I had never been lovers, I didn't even ask for one of her girls, mostly we talked gossip and politics while we played mahjong and I lost money to her on a regular basis.
I presented myself to the waiting greeter by the front door and said
"Tell Amber that Renji would like to see her at her earliest convenience."
I was always polite when I requested an audience with the queen of the sector, certainly I could easily fight my way out of there (her guards didn't have a tenth of the training I had had over the years) but Amber-onee-san was the closest thing I had to a mother figure, and I would never dream of being disrespectful towards her in her own house.
I was something of a familiar face there, and well liked too, not the least because I tended to bring money with me that took a great deal of the strain off Amber's purse strings trying to support the children upstairs. One of the Ladies, Onyx, a dark voluptuous woman with hair and eyes as dark as her name-stone, seated me in a private chamber with a tray of tidbits and some sake. A few of her friends, who were off duty at the moment stopped to flirt politely with me. Even if it wasn't meant on either side, flirting and coquetry was the language of the house.
"We-el, if it isn't my Little Orangey," a familiar voice said to me about a half hour after the ladies left to go get ready for the night. She pronounced the word with an accent like or-renji.
I turned and scowled over at her for the use of that nickname. But she was my onee-san so it was her right. I took a lot more crap from the women in my life than I ever would tolerate from anyone else.
"Hey Amber Onee-san," I said with a casual wave.
"Is my Little Orangey here for business or pleasure?" she inquired politely.
She probably already knew I was there for business seeing as I asked for her specifically, if I were interested in something else I'd have settled in one of the common rooms and waited.
"Business, but it's always a pleasure to see you," I replied easily.
It was always wise to flatter the Madam. She knew I didn't mean a word of it, but she detested a spineless man with no turn of phrase and no manners. While under Amber's roof, I was James Bond.
"Are you sure I can't interest you in an evening with company, my girls are just dying to know how far down your tatoos go, and if you'll let them add on to them," Amber said with a lazy smile that was all teasing sensuality. She didn't mean it either really, that's just how she was. The act had become so ingrained in her tenure as Madam that it was second nature.
"Much as it pains me to leave your lovely ladies on their own for company, my hours ain't... aren't my own I'm afraid."
Amber despised street cant.
"Then to business," she replied promptly.
She gestured to her nearby right hand, an eternally young-looking woman who tended to fade into the background no matter where she stood, it wasn't that she wasn't dressed flamboyantly, but everything in Ambers was brilliantly colored but still managing tasteful. The woman had this sort of blandness about her that made the eye pass right over her unless she called attention to herself deliberately. The woman handed over an account book to Amber and took herself out of the way to give the illusion of privacy.
The account book detailed how much I gave on a regular basis and where the money was spent so that I could see for myself that it wasn't being was, naturally some small amount of graft but that was only to be expected, it was Hangdog after all. What was mportant was that the children at Barai House got the benefit of the majority of it.
"I had to bribe the courier from District seventeen and extra silver piece for the formula this month," Amber said as I pored over it and noted that the donation hadn't gone as far as it usually did.
"It seems that all the Couriers and messengers who run reliable businesses are raising their prices a little these days," she said. " All those rumors about the Shadows seem to have given them a reason to charge more for increased danger."
Well that was the actual reason I had come to visit so I figured it wouldn't hurt to fish a little for information to see what she'd let drop for free.
"Shadows huh?" I said, my tone carefully absorbed in the ledger before me. "And what do you make of those rumors?"
"Oh they're real enough, or at least they are a real clever smokescreen," Ambers voice held a note of consternation in it. "If someone wants certain children dead across the Districts he's being very cautious to hide his trail. No thug will go near the title anymore since the last three thugs that tried to claim that they were the Shadow's master wound up very emphatically dead."
Her tone said that the people who had gotten hold of the poor bastard to make him that way had taken their time about it.
"And it's just children?" I asked curiously.
"It's hard to tell," she answered honestly. "As you know, young people wind up dead all the time around here, it's difficult to sort out who the real victims are from those who are being attributed as victims of the Shadows. It's getting worse as the rumors spread. It's not difficult to foresee at all that things might get very bad down here with certain powerful thugs see this Shadow fear as carte blanche to get rid of people they find inconvenient without having to answer to their gang-lords."
I nodded my head sagely at that. She was right about the very bad part. The lower districts were run on two things, fear and respect. One got the other in this place. If people lost their fear of retribution all hell could break loose and destroy anyone and everyone who got caught in the middle. There would be rampant gang-wars and riots, fires, people would loose their homes and their access to food and water. Desperate people were dangerous. Maybe not to the Seireitei, but life on the streets of Rukon was tough enough as it was...
She had to have already been dealing with some of the fall-out. The thugs that frequented her place were the men in the upper echelons of local gangs and Amber enforced her neutrality with threat of assassination, she had to be hip deep in the bitter rivalries and suspicions that the gangs were likely already starting to form. Things were probably getting tense.
I pulled my money pouch filled with a good portion of my personal wages from the front of my cloak and laid it nonchalantly on the table. It wasn't a bribe, it was an offering from a respectful former son to a former matron who would see it put to best use. She pretended not to notice it but it disappeared an instant later. Madam's clever and quick hands hadn't lost their touch, I noted.
"Have you talked with anyone who has seen one of these Shadows, or has one appeared here?"
"I sent my guard out to make some inquiries when a few of the local kids went missing,: Amber said, looking surprisingly worn for a moment before the mask slipped back into place. "A few said they saw something take their gang-mates, but no-one could say anything definitive other than it looked like nothing and it came out of the dark."
"Do any of your littles have spiritual power?" I asked next.
"None in this batch have shown any of the usual signs," she replied sounding both relieved and disappointed. Amber liked kids with spiritual power because they could use a particular skill that reversed the effects of aging and did healer-stuff on the women.
"You certainly seem interested," she noted with a shrewd sharp look.
"Anything that affects a beautiful woman is of interest to me," I said with my bright, lying gentlemanly smile. She looked back at me, non-plussed and said
"Huh, nice try, boy. If you are interested in information you'll have to pay for it like everybody else."
I thought about it for a minute, trying to decide if I had gotten enough out of her and the rest might be found elsewhere or if she'd purposely held the best from me in hopes of a good bribe. She was smiling smugly, but that could be a draw for something trivial. I shrugged to myself and pulled two silvers from my pocket, I had only been going to waste it on sake anyway.
"I'll be asking something more than a few silvers for it then."
"Like what?" I asked suspiciously, already fearing I knew the answers.
"It's my shift for littles tonight and I'm more of a mind to mingle..." she trailed off, smiling at me brightly.
My shoulders slumped, she wanted a babysitter. She already knew I wasn't going to say no.
"I can only stay a few hours," I qualified. "I still have my Captain's paperwork to finish and practice tonight."
"hmm..." she said consideringly. "You know for a young man with a reputation as the rebellious sort, you're certainly very studious."
How had she heard about my reputation? On second thought, I probably didn't want to know.
"Alright then, you'll be working with the two new girls in the nursery until high-moon."
I sighed a little and tried to look pathetic, which she didn't buy any more than Rukia had. She knew I was only faking it anyway. To be honest, even though the little kids could be terrors, I sort of liked playing big brother for an evening. There weren't any kids in the Seireitei, or at least if they were they were all cloistered away behind the walls of the noble estates. Either way, I never got to see them and I sort of liked kids.
"Deal," I agreed and we shook on it.
I made my goodbyes to Amber and went straight up to the nursery where I promptly reported for duty. The two young ladies already there were juggling a crying baby in one arm each while three tiresome little brats tried to play tag around their legs. They both gave me melting looks of gratitude when I took charge of the three running around like half-naked little monkeys. To distract them, I showed them my one-handed juggling act and the way I had of walking a coin across my knuckles. Kids loved that. It wasn't very hard to keep their attention while the two other girls finished washing and feeding the four little infants. Three of them quieted down, but the fourth, a wizened looking little fellow, was having none of it. He started setting up a hue and cry every time his unfortunate nurse tried to put him down. She looked harried and exhausted so I silently took the child while she traded me mine (with a great many protests) and pushed them into the nursery washroom for bathing. The baby was far from happy about being handled by a strange man and let me know it. Luckily, the little bundle of noise was as susceptible as any baby was to tossing and being played with. What finally won him over was my summoning up a tiny speck of reiatsu and making it dance. He quieted down after that. All the kids gathered in the middle of the nursery and I played songs from the mortal realm with a guitern to keep them amused and quiet for the rest of my stay. It was a surprisingly short few hours later when Madam came to relieve me and by then, most of them had dropped off as I started playing slower songs. The ones who were clinging to wakefulness were doing so by a hair.
"It never ceases to amuse me how a man who prides himself so much on being such a tough-guy can be so sweet around all these screaming little demons," Amber noted, leaning against the nursery doorway entrance.
"Shh!" I hissed. "You're gonna ruin my rep. Besides, I just got th' little demons to sleep an' I don' want 'em wakin'--"
"Your language Renji," she admonished me. "Please don't speak in such a way that is far from elegant in my presence."
"Yes ma'am."
I had always sort of wondered how a place like Hangdog had produced a woman like Amber. This place was filled with rough, crude, thuggish types and Amber was ever the epitome of grace and elegance. It was like seeing Eleventh Squad produce someone like my boss. Amber was on the taller side of average, and so voluptuously built so that even a full Kimono didn't hide her feminine curves. Her heart-shaped face, framed by full, thick waves of hair that was auburn but with highlights of deep crimson, was smooth and young-looking without a single wrinkle or worry line, even though I knew she was older than me and the Captain combined (but a woman never discussed her age and I had always had just enough sense not to ask). Her eyes were green-flecked gold in color, and never seemed to give anything away of what she was feeling, her straight patrician nose sat above full sensual lips that were always set in a smile was always enough and never too much. She used her feminine beauty to advantage too, I'd seen her do it. Even if a man went onto the room fully knowing how dangerous she was, Amber filled her role as hostess, and traditional-seeming female so well that they always let their guard down in spite of themselves. No wonder she ran Hangdog, she was formidable and I was always oddly proud to call her my onee-san. It was she who had taught me that the best thing I could ever do was to play into people's expectations of me, and Amber who had also taught me that what I claim as mine I am responsible for, not just for that short time, but for forever. I owed a lot of my more redeeming qualities to her, she was more like a mother to me than an older sister though she'd look at me in horror and scold me for saying so; no woman ever wants to be told that they look old enough to be someone's mother (and especially not Amber).
"Here," she said handing me a scroll sealed in red wax and written on in her finest calligraphy, or maybe it was her scribes finest calligraphy.
"Is this it?" I asked.
"That's all I've been able to gather so far," she said. "It isn't much but it might help. I want this thing or bastard caught and sliced up to be served with sauce, Renji."
For a moment her mask slipped, and she went from the elegant and congenial mistress of the Barai House to the commanding amazon queen that lay underneath her urbane persona. She was easily as tough as any of the war-lords or leading thugs here in Rukon and twenty times as clever easily; she'd have to be in order to not only acheive the level of success she had, but to keep her establishment solvent and not beholden toany of the various gangs of thugs that ran the patchwork of gang-territories in Hangdog. Barai House was neutral territory, unbeholden to any one gang, serving all of their members equally; to maintain that neutrality was a delicate balancing act requiring equal measures of tact, subtlety, bribery and threat, and it was a game that a woman like Amber excelled at.
:And the Captain married a woman who got on well with Amber,: I thought, mentally shaking my head at it. Of course, it did sorta make sense. Captain was a Kuchiki after all, and I knew from personal observation that he was deep into politics right up to his aristocratic chin, he would only fall for the kind of woman who could match him. Scary.
I bowed my gratitude to her and soberly promised
"I'll do my best. Thanks Amber."
With that I took myself off. I was halfway through the districs heading back when I abruptly thought of another possible source of information out there that wouldn't neccessitate two trips to the Rukongai. There was another woman around these parts that might know of something useful.
Kuukaku Shiba.
I hadn't met her much directly but I kneew that her little brother had been Rukia's first lieutenant, and her first crush. Call me petty but I'd sort of avoided contact with that family for just that reason. Still, we sorta had a common cause right then so it couldn't hurt to try it out.
I good set-up chapter, but the next one is the pivotal one where the story really gets started. Look forward to it please!
~Nightheart.