...
They moved to exit the Miohuito mansion quickly. Mizumi had acquired permission to go out and enjoy some of the Exclusion's limited festival night offerings but Mister Miohuito would likely have still insisted on a whole guard detachment to accompany her if he'd seen them departing. If he knew they were going all the way to the Inner Ring he would have locked his daughter up. Ayika had to admit, things looked bad when they rushed out the door of Mizumi's rooms and skidded to a halt in front of an expensively dressed old man Ayika had to assume was Mizumi's grandfather. However, Mizumi just leaned in close to whisper something to him in the Islander language. Whatever it was the old man replied with a sly grin, a nod, and some sentences Ayika didn't understand.
Mizumi stepped back and explained, "He says go. In fact, he will send out the second best carriage to drive around the Exclusion so it will look to my father like I am on it. Grandfather says he learned long ago that strong women can take care of themselves. Especially against weak little earth kingdom..." She paused and considered how to delicately phrase the last part of her translation. "Um, he trusts I will be fine out in the city."
Beneath her silver mask Ayika felt comfortable giving this elderly patriarch a very disapproving look. Her scorn at his casual racism just seemed to delight him more. He met her eye and pulled down the collar of his embroidered robe slightly to expose the white mark of a scar. Then he said something else and winked.
Ayika spoke out of the corner of her mouth, not completely trusting that this man was as ignorant of the Kingdoms' language as he claimed.
"And what was that?"
"He says that is how he learned about strong women. That and some other things I am not going to translate."
Mizumi's grandfather grinned at Ayika and waved the two girls off. Ayika gave a small bow of thanks and felt the silver disk on the headband tap against her forehead as she straightened up. Together, Ayika and Mizumi slunk away down the mansion's hallways made their way out onto the street.
The Exclusion streets were as busy as always but this evening their usual energy was curiously muted by comparison to what was happening in the City. The vibrant Islanders showed a hint of hesitancy as they went about their business. As the girls reached the bridge over the Exclusion moat Ayika could see the colored paper lanterns hanging from every window in the harbor town. The kingdom's citizens were out in their most colorful costumes, any customary reserve thrown heedless to the winds. Strings of flags in yellow, green, blue, and purple flew from archways and fluttered over dirty stone city streets that were for once swept clean. Strands of music rose from multiple directions. Against this backdrop the normally flamboyant Exclusion seemed to hunker back into itself, uncertain of what to make of this transformation in its elderly and staid host.
They had reached halfway across the Exclusion bridge when Ayika stopped and turned to the side, "Mizumi, look!"
Muzumi turned and her eyes were instantly filled with a blazing red. The sun hung low in the sky, swollen to a shimmering globe of smoldering color. Mizumi flinched and looked away as she felt the pain of staring too closely at that astronomical regent. The mask's wide eyeholes provided no obstruction of vision but at this moment she wished she had been a little less practical. The Festival of Veils had a very uncertain demarcation point for its consummation. According to Mizumi's book on local culture one of several signs listed by tradition was the point in the evening when you could look dead into the eyes of the sun. If that condition was not met then it soon would be.
Ayika laughed as she lifted her silver mask to rub at her own eyes. "Ah, I'm sorry! That was stupid, making you look into the sun. My bad."
Mizumi smiled and bumped her shoulder against Ayika's as they stood side by side against the bridge railing. "The apology is accepted. But if that brings me to go blind then you will be responsible for leading me through the streets."
Ayika grabbed Mizumi's arm and linked it gently in the crook of her own. She spoke in mock seriousness. "Of course, my unfortunate lady. I shall dedicate my life to making amends for my heinous mistake, if only you will accept my service." She held her face so still and somber that Mizumi could not help but let out an embarrassing snort of laughter. Ayika's false facade cracked instantly. They laughed together as the two of them strode out into the Festival of Veils and evening deepened around them. But they were not just two girls out enjoying the holiday. They had a mission that could prove extraordinarily dangerous. Why then was it she could only feel joy?
...
Ayika still held Mizumi's arm as they walked down the streets of the Kuang Harbor towards the City Gate. As part of the new restrictions placed down by the King's ministers in the wake of the riot, people without government passports could not ride the tram line all the way from the Harbor to the Inner Ring. That meant the two of them would have to walk through the Craftsmen's Gate and board in the Lower Ring. That was concerning but right now Ayika was much more concerned by the arm she held linked with hers. Ayika had initiated this physical contact as part of a joke but now she was worried that she had held on for far too long. They'd made their way several blocks past the bridge, arm in arm and in a constant commentary about the surrounding decorations. To Ayika the surroundings were comfortable and familiar if not revealing a lackluster poverty in their construction but to Mizumi they still were all strange and fascinating.
But what to do about the arm? If Ayika let go of Mizumi's arm now it would seem an abrupt change. Mizumi might wonder if she'd given offense. Or perhaps Mizumi was very uncomfortable with the excessive familiarity and was silently waiting for Ayika to come to her senses. But then again, Mizumi had been comfortable with initiating intimate contact before. Ayika had assumed it was an Islander thing or it could have been some friendly quirk of Mizumi herself. And yet Ayika was still holding this soft arm against her. This small decision was growing in magnitude with each passing moment and Ayika's heart was beating harder with the stress.
Suddenly a man in a woven straw mask pushed past them in the street. To judge from his wobbling gait, he had gotten a head start on the night's festivities by a bottle or two. Ayika felt Mizumi stiffen. After a brief moment Ayika suddenly realized why. The Fire Nation woman had never seen this festival before. The only men in masks she had seen in in this city were the Initiated screaming about the evils of foreigners and ripping apart iron with their hands. Of course she would be frightened. But she was still Mizumi Miohuito and so the next time she was jostled by someone on the street she instead responded with a sudden flurry of insults and jeers in a passable imitation of a Kingdoms accent. Then she laughed, reassured that she didn't stand out from the rest of the revelers on the street.
Ayika shook her head with a smile. Mizumi could have sounded like anything she chose and it would have made no difference in allowing her to pass by unnoticed. Her fancy costume might not stood out not by strangeness, but it did by quality. Every eye was on her, but apparently no one made the leap to assume her true ethnicity. Islander fashions and fabrics were popular all over the city so no one thought twice about the exotic design. The two of them passed others on the street with costumes just as elaborate, some far more garish, and even the poorest denizens of the Bed walked these roads with a strand of ribbon wrapped over their nose and cheeks to be tied behind their head. Little strips of colored paper fluttered from all over their clothes as a substitute for a costly costume. If Mizumi and Ayika attracted attention it was only for being two beautiful young ladies out at sunset. Of course Mizumi was a beauty but Ayika noticed with sudden surprise that she had also thought of herself as beautiful. And she still held Mizumi's arm in the crook of her own.
The sun had now set but streets were still awash with light and the normal rhythms of the city were reversed. On this festival night the sinking sun brought shutters thrown open instead of latched. Salespeople set their stalls up as they lit the lamps instead of taking them down. Small children sat on their doorsteps and giggled as they whispered to each other, their cheeks marked with ash to disguise them from any passing ghosts who were out for a stroll. A little girl pointed a chubby finger at Mizumi as they passed. The girl's eyes were big as she said, "Pretty!" From inside the window her father muttered something in agreement which earned him a light smack from his smirking wife.
Ayika felt her neck tingle with the sensation of more eyes on her but she could not spare thought for that. There was a feverish heat of excitement and agency rising in her. It was a pleasant anxiety. They were now nearing the central canal that ran through the town and she had an idea. Grinning, she slipped her arm free to grab Mizumi's hand.
"Come on, I want to show you something!"
Mizumi laughed as she was tugged along and they darted around the other people in the street. Then they were on the arching stone bridge and looking out at a spectacle. The thickly packed boats on the Grand Canal were burning with the colored light of a thousand paper lanterns. The hundred hues reflected off the lapping surface of the water forming ten thousand twinkling stars imbued with the heart of the rainbow. This sight raced out into the distance under sweeping spans of other bridges as the canal stabbed its way through the town towards the city wall that blanked out the horizon, still faintly visible as a slightly lighter black, glowing orange in places from the reflected light of the town and the star-like guard stations that punctuated that artificial cliff.
"Ta da," Ayika said weakly as she had just realized they would have walked up to this bridge in just a moment anyway so there was no reason to suddenly pull Mizumi off her feet by running. There were other people standing on the bridge who had stopped and were watching them now. Ayika shrank behind her silver mask, feeling her costumed confidence retreat a her normal self returned. "Sorry about just-"
Mizumi turned and hugged Ayika tightly. Their masks bumped together slightly as she spoke in to Ayika's ear. "I love it." The foreign girl spun around to take in the view down both directions of the long canal. She let out a brief laugh of pure excitement at the general expanse of the night and the energy around them.
Ayika's cheeks faintly hurt with this smile but she couldn't have stopped if she wanted to, even when she realized the other bridge-crossers were still watching them. In that moment an ignored sense tickled at her awareness. She now looked, actually looked, at the masked figures who were standing on this bridge with them. Her breath caught in her chest as an icy shiver raced through her core. Masks did not get as good as these. Nor did they allow permit the light of distant lanterns to come flickering through your translucent body as these figures demonstrated.
Ayika and Mizumi were the only true humans on this bridge. The Festival of Veils was when spirits could walk openly through this world and here they were. But strangely Ayika seemed to be the only one who noticed. Mizumi continued to marvel at the passing boats in blind ignorance of the nature of the other travelers that shared their view.
Ayika turned to the nearest spirit. Her heart pounded as she stepped forward to place her body front of Mizumi. The spirit had the face of a beautiful woman, but shiny and plated like the back of an ornamental beetle, shimmering with greens and purples. Her eyes sparked like faceted gems. Ayika, lost for what else to do, bowed very slightly. The spirit stared on in silence. Then she returned the bow and her iridescent robes shifted to reveal that they were attached to her back like dragonfly wings. The spirit then turned and walked on down the bridge and off into the winding streets of the Kuang Harbor. The other pressing spirits, in all their many colors, separated as well, drifting down the street or simply stepping off the bridge to walk unconcerned across the surface of the water. Ayika couldn't help shiver as the magnitude of the task she had taken on came back to her with new intensity.
Mizumi had noticed a change in Ayika's mood. She turned around and looked at the iridescent beetle woman walking off. To Ayika's surprise her gaze traced the spirit's movement exactly. "Well, I guess some people are content with just a simple green mask. I suppose that fulfills the function but it does not seem to be in the spirit of this holiday, does it? Why not go all the way?"
Ayika whipped back to search Mizumi's eyes. They were genuine. She had seen the beetle woman as a normal human wearing a simple mask. The Festival changed the rules apparently, but even when the spirits walked openly they still held secrets. Mizumi saw this confusion and tried to reassure Ayika.
"Don't worry. I am sure we can prevent Mua from doing anything disastrous. After all, she will probably not even be able to get through the Inner Ring gate and our job will already be done! An invitation clearly made out to the Fire Nation Embassy staff can only get her so far. Then we will just have a night where we enjoy a party and eat all of that hateful Erliao's food."
Now Mizumi took Ayika's hand. The merchant's daughter's hand was soft, but now Ayika could feel faint calluses where the writing brush had pressed against her skin for long hours. There were other little faint ridges as well, the signs of martial training? She didn't know.
Ayika looked up to meet Mizumi's eyes behind that gold mask she wore. Then Ayika found herself giggling faintly at the absurdity of all this. There were spirits in the streets that only she could identify, she was trying to stop a deadly water-bender from killing a man who hated her race, while the city was being pushed towards chaos by powerful men in magic masks. Yet Mizumi was silently promising to protect her from all that and more that she couldn't even see. And Ayika believed her.
...
Mizumi frequently found herself disoriented in the unending urban landscape of this city. In the dark, even with the Wall looming in the distance, it was much worse. But she trusted Ayika to lead them to the entry gate and so she followed the native easily. She supposed it was odd that she thought of Ayika as an Earth Kingdom native. Strictly speaking of blood, the tribal girl was just as foreign to this land as Mizumi herself. But watching Ayika for even a moment revealed the lie of her skin. That girl owned this city.
Mizumi had noticed this confidence from the first time she saw Ayika. She possessed a solidity that said she was always oriented, always confident of where she stood. In defiance of blood, her roots led straight down to the stone in the earth. Even when she was afraid and unsure, she held a precise image of the world as it spread out around her and knew what was just and what was necessary. Mizumi missed feeling like that. Since her father had moved her to this country a year ago she had been cut adrift from the world she knew, a flying paper lantern buffeted by every breeze as it burned its way into the featureless sky. Everything was simply too big here and despite her eduction she understood far too little.
The brick-paved road on which they traveled now transitioned to another broad stone bridge over a broad foul smelling river. Then, as Mizumi casually glanced to the side, she was seized with a sudden sense of disorientation. For a moment she could not understand what was causing her vertigo but then she looked over the bridge railing at the water below and realized she was instead looking down at the dry roofs of buildings. The drained Kuang riverbed was beneath her. Ayika saw Mizumi wobble as if beginning to lose balance so she turned to her with concern. But Mizumi was already laughing at the sudden ridiculousness of her own reaction. As she laughed Mizumi realized that she must have been carrying more tension in her tonight than she had realized and now she was letting some of it out. They had arrived above the sunken neighborhood of the Bed.
Ayika managed to look at their surroundings with a stranger's eyes and noticed what had happened. "Ha! Yeah, strange waters here. Welcome to the Bed, sort of. My home town as it were. Don't lose your step." She made a brief mime of swaying to fall on the flat street-stones, and then immediately stopped and blushed deeply in mortification at having just joked about Mizumi's moment of confusion. Mizumi had to join in the good-natured mockery with a grin to show she did not begrudge Ayika the familiarity at all.
Reassured, Ayika took the opportunity to point out some personal landmarks as they continued across the bridge that apparently connected one part of the Harbor Town to what had once been an island in the now absent river and was now a raised respectable neighborhood in the middle of a slum. That the light of the bridge lanterns only reached a few dozen meters and Mizumi could see nothing that Ayika was pointing at was not a bother at all. She found Ayika's enthusiasm adorable.
However, when Ayika was looking off in another direction to point out where the Bao brothers' house was located Mizumi could not help but frown a little behind her gold mask. The homes below them were very poor. She had known, of course, that Ayika's family represented something close to the bottom of the societal structure in this city, but to hear her nonchalantly describe the daily threat of flooding and collapsing construction was something else. Mizumi smelt the foul odors rising up from that soggy depression where hundreds if not thousands of families made their homes shook something in her heart. She looked at the gold thread fringe on her costume sleeve and her gold bracelet and tried to think how Ayika would have interpreted the outfits she had selected. Did Ayika think she was rubbing in the fact of her relative wealth? Had she poisoned this night with an undercurrent of resentment?
But when she looked back to Ayika, Mizumi could not believe that. Tonight Ayika wore a smile that was beautiful and wicked. In moments of crisis Ayika always burst forth into something Mizumi had never encountered before in all the upperclass daughters of two countries. And tonight, behind that flimsy paper mask painted silver, Ayika had blossomed again. Ingrained gestures of subservience that Mizumi had not even noticed before had now fallen away. As they made their way down the bustling nighttime streets and cut through hidden side alleys and bridges over tiny stone channels flowing with water the other woman would sometimes suddenly draw close and Mizumi found herself surprised to remember that Ayika was several centimeters shorter than her. This woman projected height by force of personality. Mizumi breathed out and felt a shiver of relaxation travel down her spine. It was fun to give up control and trust herself completely to another's protection.
Ayika did in fact seem very protective tonight. More than perhaps was reasonable. Mizumi began to watch her friend more closely and noticed that Ayika now and then became serious, moving to walk slightly closer as they passed some innocuous costumed pedestrian. There was no indication Mizumi could see as to why those people in particular were chosen. These were not threatening looking figures and no one showed any sign to indicate they were involved with the conservatives. In fact, half the time Mizumi's eye would have drifted past them unseeing if Ayika had not displayed her strange reaction.
Mizumi halted her thought process to examine that last observation. They were in fact very hard to notice. She decided to investigate. The next time she felt Ayika casually begin to walk closer and slightly in front of her, Mizumi focused her attention on the plain man walking opposite them on the street. He looked like any other city dwelling celebrant and his costume was a simple yellow mask and some paper streamers on his clothes. In fact he was so normal that Mizumi had to fight the impulse to look away within a second. If she had, she would not have noticed that his arm passed straight through the outthrust edge of a peddler's goods tray as if the solid wood was made of mist.
Mizumi was fumbling inside the sleeve of her dress to grasp at what she had hidden there before she even noticed that she had never let out her last breath. Ayika noticed too. She turned to look at Mizumi and said:
"Ah, you saw them."
The man in the yellow mask continued his way down the path completely ignoring the impossibility he had just committed. Other pedestrians casually parted around him in a common curtesy which Mizumi now realized was not that common in on the streets of this city. Then the man stopped, turned and glanced back. For a second, under Mizumi's intense inspection, there was a suggestion of something like vines about him. Then he was normal again and walking along the street again. Mizumi looked back at Ayika and widened her eyes still further in shock at Ayika's lack of surprise. Then she made the the connection. Ayika could always see spirits and tonight, it seemed, so could she.
Mizumi made an effort to render her voice casual and disguise her hints of hyperventilation. "So. On the night of the Festival of Autumn Veils the spirits walk among humans. Mama Mua had mentioned that. That is certainly...something."
Ayika smiled guiltily. "Yeah, I've been seeing them everywhere since the sun set. I knew I should have told you but I-"
"No, is ok. Spirits. Yes." Mizumi felt she was not at her most eloquent right now but at this moment she was having flashbacks to her foreign language instructor and the flashcards she had produced. Her proud fluency did not seem to be standing up well against this. "But this is normal. By cause of the festival, yes? The spirits walking is not the bad consequence of the Masks activity Mama Mua said she was warned about?"
Their walking path now crossed back over a second bridge above the Bed. Ayika answered, deep in thought. "No, from what the fire spirit said I think we'd notice that. But I'm not sure this is entirely normal. Grandma Aka told me about the stories of the festival even if she resented me celebrating the kingdoms' holidays more than those of the People, er, the Tribes. But she always made it sound like it was an outside chance to see a single spirit walking these streets tonight. I must've already seen thirty! This has to be about the weakening of the walls to the spirit world. The spirit in the fire had said that it's getting easier for them to cross over these days. I suppose that on a day when the whole city sends out an entreaty the effect would only be magnified."
Mizumi nodded along uncertainly although she was not sure Ayika was actually talking to anyone other than herself. Mizumi tried to remember what little education she had received on spiritual matters back home in the Nation or here from the sermons of Fire Sage Huitzlan.
"Your festival of veils signals welcome to the spirits. However, we are still months from the solstice so there is no chance of them sealing people away to the spirit world, is there not?" She then gave up and returned to things she might have a more firm grasp on. "Is Mama Mua gathering spirit fighters again like you say she did the night of the riot? I only say because when I estimated that she would not be able to gain full entrance to Erliao's party I was not thinking of a force of spirit allies. The minister may be in more danger than I had assumed." She remembered the fight in the fog. She'd only seen Mua in her barehanded attack. Yet Ayika said that the street had been swarming with spirits Mua had convinced to help her. Mizumi shuddered. How could she fight something she could not see? But tonight she could see the spirits in some limited way. Mizumi was not sure that provided any comfort.
"Maybe." Then Ayika glanced up at the drooping branches of a willow tree that had managed to work its way up through the perpetually paved ground of this stone city and squeeze its trunk between two walls of grey brick. A thought flitted across her face and she smiled at the corner of her mouth. "Tonight the spirits are out walking. But I think I know someone who won't be going anywhere. Someone who might help. Let's see if he'll talk to us. We're almost to Gold Toad Square."
...