The Fox's God (19 page)

Hachiro straightened. “
The
sword? Jien will need help! We must—”

“You’re hurt.”

“This is nothing! This—” Hachiro’s words died in a whimper as Mamoru poked the wound, hard.

“Sorry,” he lied. “We’re not going anywhere except back up the road to get someone to see to this. We’ll tell them to send help.”

Preferably before the excitable monk caught the thief and got skewered for his troubles.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Jien

G
randmother Naoko was stingy. She’d healed his injured leg, but not completely. Something about letting him suffer for his mistakes so he might learn from them. Now here he was chasing down a man trying to get away with the rather important Soul Eater sword, and his leg’s muscles were already screaming.

The thief clearly had no idea where he was going; his path wavered wildly and anyone could have tracked him by the noise he made. A trained
shinobi
this guy was not. Successfully stealing the sword wasn’t all that impressive either; the foxes had been so distracted since Inari arrived that they wouldn’t have noticed a parade of dancing bears going by.

Grandmother Naoko appeared.
Others are on their way,
she said.
I’ll direct them to you. Don’t worry about losing sight of him; I’ve had a good look at his aura. He can’t get away.

He ran on and on. The area was growing familiar. That river here, was it—?

When the first foxes showed up—four-footed, furry ones—he told them, “I have an idea. Can someone run ahead and find out whether there’s still a hot spring with a low, overhanging cliff?”

A fox he didn’t know personally shot ahead in a red blur. When it returned, he got the confirmation he wanted; this was the place he remembered.

“Great!” He looked at the other foxes, who were keeping pace with him. “Who wants to play ‘run the thief off the cliff and see what that does to his motivation?’ Everybody?”

Eight foxes constituted a small army. Directing prey where they wanted it to go was no hardship; they spread in a half-circle and made sure the thief knew they were there. They kept pace, but did not attempt to catch or overtake the thief. Not yet.

The thief’s stamina was failing him, and he would not stop looking over his shoulder as he stumbled onward. He would regret that, very soon.

Just like Jien remembered, the low cliff was hidden by a thicket of evergreens. With eight foxes snapping at his heels, the thief didn’t bother checking whether there was something bad on the other side of the thicket; he merely pushed through.

His scream of surprise was deeply satisfying. So was the almost simultaneous splash.

Jien made his way down cautiously; he could afford to, since the foxes were already there, circling the pool’s low side.

The thief, wet and limping and surrounded by half a dozen growling furry foxes, didn’t look optimistic about his chances, but nonetheless brandished the Soul Eater.

“How about this,” Jien said. “You hand over the sword without fighting and I promise I won’t let them eat you alive.”

The thief put the sword back in its scabbard. “I surrender,” he said weakly. He tossed it to Jien.

“Great, thanks. Can we get the name of your employer, too?”

“The person who hired me didn’t give his name, but he implied the mission was for the emperor. Please believe me.” He eyed the milling foxes nervously.

“I believe you,” Jien said to placate him. It did sound logical.

When Akakiba finally showed up, Jien gestured to the hot spring with a flourish. “There’s no hot spring under a cliff, you said. It’s impossible I managed to accidentally fall into a hot spring full of naked women, you said. I must be a pervert, you said.”

“This is the place you twisted your ankle before we met?”

“Yes. We herded Mr. Thief right off the edge after I recognized where we were.” He stared at Akakiba, who stared back as if he had no idea what was expected. Jien had to prompt, “Where’s my apology?”

“I apologize for calling you a pervert.”

“
Thank you.
” It’d only taken four years, but here it was at last, vindication!

Perhaps he’d overdone the victorious tone, because Akakiba looked genuinely taken aback as he said, “It bothered you that badly?”

“Only as much as it might bother you if I kept saying your hair’s pretty as a girl’s.”

Akakiba twitched. “Is it?”

“Possibly. But if you have a crisis about it and cut off all your hair, Yuki is going to
murder me in my sleep
.” It wouldn’t have been appropriate to mention he rather liked long hair on Akakiba, too, so he went with, “My death will be so gruesome it will contaminate every spirit residing in this forest and you’ll have a thousand Jien copies haunting you forever. No hair cutting.”

“No hair cutting,” Akakiba repeated, probably hoping agreement would shut him up.

They returned to the clan house, escorting their shiny new prisoner. Takashi was awaiting them at the gate, along with the entire clan and a few guests. Gossip moved
very
quickly in this clan.

Jien brandished the sword. “Good news; we got it back. Bad news; he has no idea who hired him. They implied the order came from the emperor, which means it didn’t. Of course they’d say that to convince him to take the job.”

Mamoru shuffled forward. “We suspect Advisor Yoshida knows who’s behind this,” he said reluctantly. “He isn’t as loyal to the emperor as he pretends.”

Takashi’s eyes fastened on the
shinobi
. “We would be extremely grateful for any information you can give us on this matter. As soon as the swords have been disposed of, I will warn the emperor.”

In other words, they still weren’t willing to trust the emperor completely, in case he really had planted a thief among his own men. Hachiro clearly hadn’t known one of his “friends” had a secret goal; he had the stab wound to prove it.

The sad, remorseful eyes didn’t lie either. “Forgive me,” Hachiro said, speaking to—who? “I almost allowed this villain to make away with the Soul Eater!”

Kasumi hooked her comparatively stick-thin arm around Hachiro’s giant one. “Father didn’t say you were allowed to walk off,” she said sternly, towing him away. “He wants Grandmother Naoko to take a look at your wound.”

Jien was perfectly content to hand the evil sword over. It hadn’t bitten him yet, but he still didn’t like it. “I might as well go update Aito on everything.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Akakiba

F
or such an important event, it was a strangely peaceful one. It looked like a picnic; half a dozen people on the grassy shore of a glittering blue lake, talking and arguing and hauling objects around according to the directions of either Marin or the scribe.

Akakiba lay on his back in the grass—it was oh-so-slightly damp, but he’d survive—and contemplated his uselessness. His sword was not needed and security was in the hands of others. Grandmother Naoko was busy investigating all and any human within a few hours’ walk, the two junior
shinobi
were kept under watch at the clan house, and Inari herself supervised the activities here. What was there for him to do? He might as well enjoy the peace.

Jien flopped down the ground besides him. “All we’re missing is sake and this would be a cherry blossom viewing party.”

“We’re missing the cherry blossoms, too,” Akakiba noted. Their immediate surroundings were plentiful in needle trees but lacking in leafy ones.

“Not true.” Jien pointed across the lake to a slender tree dripping with the characteristic pink flowers. Their color stood out beautifully against the greens of neighboring vegetation. The tree stood alone, its seed perhaps once blown there by an unusually fierce wind.

“I don’t believe cherry blossom viewing is supposed to be done so far away from the cherry blossoms that one has to squint to see them.”

“Details, details. We should have brought sake.”

“You can view all the blossoms you want at the clan house. The gardens are full of them.”

“But everybody is here, not there. It’s not a party if it’s just me and a bottle of sake, is it?”

Akakiba closed his eyes, enjoying the way wind and sunlight danced across his skin. “Feel free to pretend this is a party. But no poetry.”

“Poetry is only fun after the sake, anyway,” Jien mumbled. “I’m sorry. About, you know. Four years ago. It was a misunderstanding.”

The abrupt change of subject left Akakiba blinking against the sunlight, squinting to catch a look at Jien’s face. Where had that come from? “It was a long time ago.”

“It was.”

He waited, but if Jien had further thoughts on the subject he kept them to himself.

He might have drifted off, because the next thing he noticed was a foot digging in his ribs.

“Do you plan on missing everything?” Yuki said, peering down at them. “While the two of you lazed about, we finished the preparations.”

“Why is your hair wet?” It was the wet of someone fresh out of the bathhouse, the excess water already squeezed out.

“Oh, I went swimming. Grandmother Naoko had already looked, but I wanted to be sure there’s no dragon living in this lake.” He grimaced. “I didn’t enjoy it. The water’s frigid. Now come on, let’s get to the safe area.”

There was now a tiny boat on the lake, loaded with the containers Marin had supplied. Sunlight glinted off the three blades half sunk into an open container of grey powder. The scabbards had been stripped from them because it was the metal’s surface, the glyphs, that needed damaging.

A floating bridge was attached to the boat, supporting a long rope soaked with oil. The rope ran from the boat to the shore and all the way up to a large, ancient rock the spectators would use as a shield. This rope would convey the fire from the shielded area to the boat. The other option would have been to use a flaming arrow, but distance and wind could have made the operation needlessly long and complicated even if they did have excellent archers in the clan.

“We’re outside the danger zone from the explosives and the water should keep the forest from going up in flames,” Marin explained once everybody had gathered round. “But I’m told the swords will generate explosions of their own, and we don’t know how big and dangerous those will be.”

“I’m not sure explosion is the right word,” Domi said. “Energy packed tightly flattens everything in its path until it loses density enough to, ah, evaporate. The shockwave will travel onward, but without causing further harm.”

“I’d rather not be flattened,” clan leader Takashi said dryly. He shouldn’t have been here, exposed to unknown danger, but Akakiba was nearly certain his father had already had that argument with him behind closed doors. There was a reason so few had been permitted to come. Should they have catastrophically miscalculated, the casualties would be limited to a few people and vast stretches of inhabited forest.

Marin herded them to the rock and the safety of the hollow behind it. “Get in, get in. Do we have fire?”

The scribe passed her a torch. A dozen people held their collective breath as Marin applied torch to rope. The fire latched onto the rope, racing down the slope towards the water as it greedily devoured the oil.

“It’ll take a few moments to get there,” Marin said as she joined them into the rock’s shadow, “but don’t be stupid and step out of cover. I’m not your mother and I won’t go after you.”

The warning didn’t stop anyone from peering around or over the top of the rock to follow the fire’s progress along the rope. Was it going to work? If it didn’t, they’d have to fish the swords out of the lake. It would be annoying, but not as difficult as it would have been if they’d tried this in the ocean.

A furtive movement at the edge of the forest caught Akakiba’s attention. Foxes, but not wild ones.

“Tell me those aren’t ours,” he said, feeling eerily calm. “Down there, near the fallen tree sticking out of the forest.”

“Kits,” Takashi said, sucking in a breath. “The twins sneaked out.”

Who else but kits would lack the most basic common sense? Grandmother Naoko was guarding the perimeter from humans, not from idiotic kits.

Perhaps he made an involuntary move, because both Yuki and Jien wordlessly and firmly grabbed hold of his sleeves. Weird, that his instinct was to go after the kits. He would have thought either of his friends more likely than himself to want to do something so completely hopeless.

“You can’t, Domi,” Marin said without looking at her lover. “The rope will burn faster than you can open the worlds both ways.”

“Inari,” Takashi said sharply.

She’d left cover without a word, her body a blur the color of spilled blood. It was rare, very rare, for a clan member to bleed red while in their fox form. They usually used the ability to gain strength for the purpose of fighting, not to gain speed for the purpose of running. Not even to run towards danger.

Bleeding red, she might have managed to catch up to the burning rope and sever it. But she went straight for the kits instead, perhaps for fear she’d fail to stop the fire.

“She’s fast,” Akakiba said, “faster than any of us.” He still felt calm, the icy calm of knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do. “She’ll get to them before it blows.”

“She’ll have to open the other side very quickly,” Domi said, “but it can be done. Once isn’t as difficult as twice in a row.”

Only a few moments passed, but each of them felt like infinity. The fire reached the shore, and burned onward onto the bridge.

Inari reached the kits, gathering them to her with her paws.

“Open it,” Domi murmured. “Open it.”

“Heads down,” Marin snapped. “Now.”

Akakiba didn’t move. He couldn’t, eyes fixed on the scene.

Yuki and Jien, who hadn’t yet let go of their hold on him, yanked him down. Marin had done the same for Domi.

The first explosion shook the ground with less strength than the last couple earthquakes he’d ridden. Almost immediately, there was another one, but this one was silent. The noise they heard, wood snapping brutally, was the result, not the origin. Akakiba’s skin itched furiously, as if he were feeling the wave of spiritual energy going out. Maybe he was.

Jien recklessly popped his head over the rock, and dove back down. “I don’t see them,” he said shortly.

It had to mean Inari had been successful.

Unless they were pulp hidden under destroyed trees.

“Stay down,” Marin snapped again. “That was only one sword. We can’t move until the others go off, or until we’re sure they aren’t damaged enough to—”

Another sword’s glyphs failed, with less ensuing noise—the first blast must have cleared the nearest trees—and the same itchy feeling.

Jien popped his head out again. If he hadn’t, somebody else would have.

“Still don’t see them,” Jien said. “Shouldn’t they have come out?”

“Shockwave,” Domi said. “If it went off while they were on the other side, it might have swept them away exactly like a big seawave would do to a boat.”

“Can they, uh, capsize and drown?”

“I don’t believe so,” Domi said, but his low-knit brows weren’t reassuring. “They may need to swim back, in a way.”

“How much stronger is the original sword?” Marin asked. “Twice? Thrice?”

“If not more,” Akakiba said. “Why?”

“If the two that went off were the copies, I estimate the original one is strong enough to take out this area too.” Marin was looking out at the destruction. “I can see something sparking; it must be about to blow.”

It was stupid and time-wasting, but everybody looked. There was indeed intermittent flashing coming from under the lake surface. It was like underwater lightning, gorgeous and deadly.

“Domi can’t take everybody away,” Marin said. “I suggest we use our legs. Now.”

They didn’t need to be told twice. They raced away like rabbits, more or less staying together. Jien was ahead of the pack, long legs serving him well. Akakiba slowed to keep pace with Yuki, who couldn’t keep up with those who were faster.

“How far?” he panted at Marin. He reached back, snatching Yuki’s hand to keep him moving.

“Don’t know,” she replied. “As far as we can. It must be of much better quality, to still hold.”

The sword gave up before they did. They heard the crunch of splintering trees too late to flatten themselves to the ground, too late to be anything but leaves on the wind when it hit them in the back and picked them up.

He rolled with it, pulling Yuki to his chest. Landing was almost gentle, all considered; they merely skidded along the ground until fabric ripped and flesh burned.

Groans arose.

“Names,” Takashi wheezed from somewhere near.

A chorus of names rose.

“Injuries?”

“My nose,” Jien groaned, limping over with a hand over his nose and blood dripping down his chin.

“Skin burns,” Marin said, staring at her bleeding legs. They looked skinned because they hadn’t been protected by so much as a single layer of fabric. “This will hurt very badly once the shock wears off.”

Akakiba tried to sit up, and hissed as his arm flopped like a dead fish. “Broken arm,” he reported. He must have landed on it. He had skin burns too, on the arm and on his side.

They cleaned up with what they had, using water to remove dirt from wounds and tearing layers of clothing to cover them. Akakiba stayed very, very still. Even breathing jolted his arm. They set it with branches, shifting the bones around until he wanted to weep with pain.

“Sorry,” Yuki said. “We have to be sure it’s straight when it starts healing, right?”

Two fox kits and one adult tumbled to the ground out of thin air. The kits were alive; the adult was not.

“Inari!” the scribe said, scrambling over to press his hands to the motionless body. “She’s dead,” he choked out.

The body was too old,
Inari said wistfully.
I shouldn’t have been bleeding red in it. I had to get out when it expired.

Everybody turned around. Inari sat on the ground, as a pure spirit.

Jien burst into laughter. “Life with foxes!”

Domi, bent on the task of covering Marin’s legs, said, “I still think it would have been less dangerous to create an acidic solution, bury the swords with it, and wait for the blades to corrode.”

“Hush,” Marin said. “That wouldn’t have been any fun.”

“This was fun?” Domi repeated. “
Fun?
”

“Well, yes. Very exciting. And fun. Aside from this part.” She gestured at her legs. “I’m starting to feel the pain. Ow.”

Akakiba prodded his broken arm. How long until it set? He was so weakened it was pathetic.

Yuki helped him up. “We did it,” he said. “How does it feel to have finally saved the day?”

“So far, it mostly hurts.”

They shared a knowing grin at the old joke.

“I foresee a bath and a scolding from the healer in our near future,” Jien said.

“And after?”

“Anything we want. We’re heroes, remember? Aito is going to be so disappointed he missed everything.” He lifted his arm dramatically. “Onward, heroes! Let’s limp our way back home!”

One of the twins complained,
It’s not fair.
We didn’t even see the explosion.