Screams ripped through the night, penetrating through the slumbering skull of Red Sonja, shocking her to full wakefulness. Leaping from her bed, the red-haired Hyrkanian warrior woman unsheathed her sword, crossed the small and simply-furnished room she had been sleeping in, flung open the door, and leapt out into the corridor of the inn, shouting "Tarim and Erlik, who or what assails this place at this hour!" No sooner had she spoken than the screams suddenly terminated, leaving the sound of hoarse sobbing.
From just around the corner came the weeping, and round the corner Red Sonja ran, with only a few strong kicks smashing open the door behind which the crying emanated. At the same time the inkeeper, an elderly woman in a nightgown, was at Sonja's side in the doorway, a hastily lit candle held aloft in her shaking hand. "Oh, holy Mitra!" she gasped in horror as the candle's light revealed what the room contained. In front of them were two men from the far east; one might have supposed they were from Khitai, but Sonja knew they were from farther east than that, from the islands of Yamatai. One of the men was old, his hair white and thinning, his knees drawn to his chest as he rocked back and forth and whimpered. His name, Sonja knew, was Kozuku, and he was the manservant of the other, younger Yamatan man, Juumo...who lay lifeless on the floor, his arms and legs broken and his throat ripped open.
Sonja approached Kozuku carefully and said to him "Kozuku, what happened here?"
The elderly Yamatan did not look up at her as he whispered "I warned him...told him to remember his promise. Now...now she has punished him...I tried to save him...I did..."
Sonja had met Juumo late that afternoon. She had only just arrived in the small town in Koth, but someone must have recognised the far-travelled Hyrkanian and spread word of her presence, for just a few minutes into her mug of ale at the inn, the shadow had fallen over her and she had looked up at the man with his black moustache and hair tied in a topknot, clad in a kimono with his sword in a scabbard at his belt, and heard him say "You are Red Sonja of Hyrkania, yes? It is a pleasure to meet you. I am Juumo, warrior of Yamatai." He casually indicated the slightly trembling old man with him who kept his eyes to the floor. "This cringing old fool is Kozuku, my retainer." Sonja nodded. She had heard of Yamatai, a realm as far east of Hyrkania and Khitai as Cimmeria, Nordheim and the Pictish Wilderness were west of Hyboria. "Like you," Juumo continued, "I am a wanderer and adventurer, a sword for hire. Your legend has become widely known, and in the years since leaving the land of my birth and entering the kingdoms of the west, I have heard much of you, all impressive. But now, on seeing you in person, I am awed not only by your valorous deeds, but by your intense beauty. I am, however, aware of your vow to your goddess. And so I offer you a duel. If I win...you are mine. Are we agreed?" So Sonja had accepted the man's offer, walking with him into the street outside the inn, where they briefly fought, and she won...sparing his life. Juumo accepted his defeat with dignity, bowing low to Sonja. That, she thought at the time, was the end of the matter. Now, he was dead.
Juumo, Kozuku now told her, had years ago been married to a woman in his homeland of Yamatai. They had loved one another deeply and intensel. Then the lady succumbed to a deadly illness, and sitting beside her on her deathbed, Juumo had sworn that he would never pursue any other woman, that no one could ever replace her in his heart. She commanded her husband with her final breath to honour his vow to her, before the last speck of life left her frail body. And this night, Kozuku had woken to behold the vengeance-driven ghost of Juumo's wife gleefully tearing apart her screaming, unfaithful husband, snapping bones and spraying blood before fading away with a smile. "She will torment his ghost now," Kozuku muttered, "in the afterlife."
The faintest light of dawn was tinging the sky when Sonja returned to her room and sat on her bed. She reflected on how Yamatai was sometimes called 'The Land of the Sun Being Born.' Something had come west ahead of the sun this night, Sonja was sure. The rage of a woman wronged...