Gaiden 6.5
Three paths met at a crossroad; to the northwest, Lookshy; to the east, a great woods; to the south, Marukan. On other days, the crossroad might be home to any number of tinkers or peddlers who sold their wares to travellers and merchants; today, though, the rains had slackened barely an hour ago, and the vendors had all fled for shelter long ago. The hard-caked wagon-rutted roads remained solid as brick, while the afternoon's drizzle pooled in the muddy grasses on either side.
A young monk walked along the first of these roads, his face sheltered by a broad-brimmed straw hat. A kitten clambered around his neck, darting under the folds of his cotton robes, chasing some imagined horsefly. Every so often, the monk reached up with his free hand into his robes, grabbed the kitten by the scruff of its neck, and reseated it on his left shoulder.
Abruptly, the kitten stiffened, ceased its gymnastics, and started hissing at what it sensed ahead. Soho stroked the kitten with one hand, while his other tightened into a fist."Yes, little one, I sense it too. Please hold on tight, this could get a bit messy. Such a shame that it's too wet to use my bow." He continued his walk towards the crossroads.
Shai Mei was in high spirits as she walked west along the forest road. How odd that she should feel this way? The world around her was spinning out of control; on every village street corner from God Crossing to Great Forks, travellers spoke of looming war with ever greater urgency; rumormongers whispered of tragedies in the river-towns to the East, and her uncle, Shu Zhuang had sent her a letter confirming the rumors of Nameless Ravine's disgraceful defeat at Varsi. She was on her way back to the Plum Blossom Retreat, where the bureaucrats of the New Deliberative certainly wouldn't give her a new assignment; they were always so polite to her, but she was no fool; she knew that they regarded her as a loose bowstring.
In spite of all that, war had not yet arrived. The gardens of the Retreat remained open to her. And in a little village to the East, Shimmering Golden Cascade in Autumn had just put forth her first flowers after ten years on death's door. Shai Mei wore one such blossom tucked in her ear as she listened to the raindrops spatter on her parasol. "What," she asked herself, "could possible spoil such a deep feeling of hope?"
Right then, she noticed the horrible smell coming from the crossroad ahead. Shai Mei cursed the heavens as she saw where - and who - it was coming from. "Roots of patience, don't you know a rhetorical question when you hear one!"
The thing that once was Tozo Han had waited for days at the crossroads. It was only a stroke of good luck that some poor hedge-necromancer had been toying with forces far beyond his ken at the very moment that the accursed seraph had plunged a knife into his blackened heart and shattered the bonds that affixed his soul to his Nemissary's shell. Thanks to the necromancer's folly, he once again walked the earth of Creation. He promptly devoured what was left of the his rather surprised savior, and then spent many days killing unwary farmers and lone travellers; with their essence, he reconstituted his body and journeyed south from Port Callan in search of the Servants of the Righteous.
He dared not approach the heart of the hated Solars' land without a more perfect disguise, both for fear that their agents would spot him... and for fear that the Mask's own agents would find him and subject him to long-delayed punishments for his failures at the Daimyo's banquet. But he was clever; he knew how to listen, and knew how to wait. Lu Fei, Hsuan Lin, and Bones Like Jade had not been seen on this road, but Shai Mei was known to frequent it. So he came to the crossroad and waited. He could afford to be patient.
And now, on this bleak, damp, lonely day, he could see his quarry approaching. If the muscles of his face had not rotted away long ago, he would have grinned.
Shai Mei reached the muddy crossroads, stood before the walking corpse, and scowled. "You seem to have forgotten that we killed you and banish your spirit."
"You did. Almost. Not good enough." When it spoke, it showed a mouthful of bile-encrusted, razor sharp teeth. Its stench was appalling. "I'm famished; Care to join me for dinner?" The Nemissary drew a pair of throwing knives and began to advance towards her.
Shai Mei lowered her parasol and began twirling it before her. "I'm afraid you have a habit of ruining my appetite, Tozo Han, or whoever you are." She shifted into her stance, with the parasol still in hand. "Are we done exchanging pleasantries? I'm kind of in a hurry, so if you don't mind, I'd prefer to skip to the part where I banish you again."
The Tozo-Han-Thing laughed its death-rattle laugh and hurled both knives in rapid-fire succession. Shai Mei fouled them both on her spinning parasol and lunged forwards, wielding it like a spear. The corpse brought up its rotting, bone-encrusted arms to parry the blow and shatter the improvised weapon. Shai Mei smirked, for this was exactly as she had planned; her right hand dropped the broken handle while her left, which had been concealed behind the parasol's wooden slats, shot forward and propelled a small, fragile silk bag of Shrine-Sanctified Salt into the creature's eyes. It roared, clutched its burning face, and backpedalled rapidly.
Shai Mei drew a pair of Sais from her obi and dashed forward in pursuit. Now, however, it was the corpse's turn to grin, for this was exactly as he had planned. As she passed the point on the ground where he had stood waiting, a pair of rotting hands shot up from the mud on either side of the road and grasped at her feet, tripping her up. Soon, she was fighting for her life against a pair of zombies, as Tozo Han stood back, watched, and laughed. The zombies were slow, but they felt no pain, and try as she might, Shai Mei lacked the strength or the tools to do much more than hold them at bay.
She absorbed strike after strike with her forearms, sending sprays of essence into the air; each mote shaped like a shower of tiny leaves that faded from green to brown in a heartbeat, occasionally accompanied by cries of fear and pain. The Nemissary licked his broken, oozing lips as he watched; he knew she could not keep this up much longer. He would take her corpse, and with it he would infiltrate the Plum Blossom Retreat; there he would find the others who had humiliated him, and kill them as they slept. His plan was perfect.
Absorbed as he was in this moment of triumph, only one thing bothered him... If Shai Mei was soon to die, why did she suddenly start grinning? At that, she danced in front of one of the zombies, crouched and shattered its kneecap with a single strike of surpassing excellence. As the zombie crumbled to the ground, the Nemissary's eyes opened wide. She's holding back - she's stalling! But why? Right about then, Soho's hand touched the small of the Nemissary's back, and it doubled over, wracked in pain as vines of glimmering wood essence wrapped around its blackened soul.
Tozo Han staggered backward, drew another knife and whirled around to face the monk, who unhurriedly adopted the Wood Dragon form. Here was no mere spirit-blooded dabbler, but a Chosen of the Earth. As the monk and the corpse sized each other up, Shai Mei felled the second zombie with a final exertion of essence; it went down with a sickening thud. She turned to the monk. "Soho, what a pleasant surprise. Your timing is... immaculate."
Quite in spite of himself, Soho smiled. "Please do me a favor, Shai Mei. This little rascal is being quite distracting; would you mind holding on to him for a moment?" His hand shot up to his shoulder, grabbed a very wide-eyed kitten by the scruff of its neck, and hurled it through the air towards Shai Mei. It was too startled to even put out its claws as she caught it in her arms and backed away from the fight.
With the kitten safely out of harm's way, the time for patience was over. Wood essence burned on Soho's palms as he moved through the patterns of Sextes Jylis. Heedless of his foe's knife-blows, he proceeded to sever the spiritual tethers that held the Nemissary's soul to its body with a deliberate series of strikes. It was over in moments.
With the Nemissary's salted, anointed, dismembered corpse safely consumed by a bonfire, the two travellers found themselves sharing the same road. They walked side by side, both of them soaked by the drizzle, for Tozo Han's knives had made short work of her parasol and his straw hat. Meanwhile, the kitten had found a new game to play, as it lept back and forth from his shoulders to hers, ever seeking dry shelter. Truth be told, it was having enough fun that it hardly noticed the chill and the wet. Soho ducked as the kitten landed deftly on his tonsured scalp, scrabbled vainly for purchase, and slid into a fold of his robe.
"...so that's what the commotion was about at the gate that day; you weren't really emissaries of the Marukani Anathema."
"Oh, we were emissaries. Just not diplomats. The whole affair was rather improvised. The bureaucrats back at the Plum Blossom Retreat weren't happy about granting our emergency request. But still... we mostly thwarted a Nemissary, we made a pretty good impression on a foreign power, and both Choshu Aya and Choshu Ishi have decided to seek their fortune in the Solars' service."
"Improvisation is a rare skill, Shai Mei. You and your fellows served your Anathema masters well."
She cast him a skeptical look. "Thanks for the compliment, but I'm not really sure they want me serving them anymore. I think that they think that I'm going to go back to Port Callan and join Satsu Sora's service. I'm having a hard time convincing them that really, I really am grateful for everything they've done for my family, and I do want to help. But if they don't want me, why shouldn't I serve Satsu Sora instead?"
The monk chose his words with care. "Then if your masters are wise, they'll see your sincerity. Your Anathema have few enough allies these days, they'd be foolish to cast you aside."
She looked him in the eye. "Soho, I know you're using 'Anathema' in a very technical sense, but when you get to the Plum Blossom Retreat, find some other term of address unless you're actually trying to pick a fight."
"I'll be sure to do that. But I'm not going to the Plum Blossom Retreat - not immediately, anyway. The letter that I received says that that I am invited to a place called 'Flying Pearl Lake', some ways further East."
"Oh..." Shai Mei walked in silence for a few minutes, and then reached into her pack and pulled out the letter from Shu Zhuang. "If you're going there, then Nameless Ravine wants to meet you personally. You should probably read this first. Remember the rumors you told me about? About Nameless Ravine and your sifu Abbot Goruk?" She passed him the paper; wordlessly, he read it once, folded it very carefully, and handed it back.
Finally, he spoke. "The truth can be... very complex and difficult sometimes. Thank you."
That was the last of the day's conversations.
They spent the night at the inn by the next major crossroad; here, their paths diverged. Shai Mei's route went south, while Soho's travels took him southeast. They both broke their fast at dawn, and bowed deeply to one another.
"I never got a chance to compliment you on your handling of the fight yesterday. You did an excellent job of playing to Tozo Han's vanity to keep him distracted long enough to mask my approach. And you acquitted yourself quite well against superior numbers."
She grinned at him. "You weren't so bad yourself. It's a shame that I'll never learn the deeper Mysteries of the Wood Dragon style; it was marvelous even to watch."
He met her grin with a very serious look. "I wasn't joking back at Choshu Koda's banquet when I suggested that you consider taking up a monastic life. You're very talented."
At this, she laughed. "Oh come now, I think it's plain to see that I don't really have the temperament to be a nun. I'm not really ready to put down roots in just one grove when there are so many gardens out there to see. And besides, I have some other plans."
He persisted. "Still, with proper training, you could probably learn some of the Outer Mysteries."
She shook her head. "I doubt it. Besides, where would I find a sifu who would teach a god-blooded follower of an Anathema spiritualist anything about the Immaculate Dragon styles?"
"I would." Soho's voice carried not the slightest hint of mockery or irony.
"You're... serious? You would teach me?"
"At least enough to get you started down the path. You could choose for yourself where to go after that."
"Soho..." she straightened, and bowed very deeply. "...I would be honored."
Dawn was spectacular over the plains.
