Prologue 2: old friends

Mountains Northwest of Tanabe — 1700 A.D.

"What are you doing here? How can this be?" Seijuro asked, his voice cut short by disbelief, taking half a step back without letting go of his wife's body.

The blond silhouette atop the rock stopped singing, straightened slowly, and dropped down in a soft, almost feline leap onto the path, with a movement so unbecoming a human adolescent that to Seijuro it confirmed, if confirmation were needed, what he already knew: that creature did not belong to the natural order of the things of this world.

"The portal has opened again, Seijuro," she answered, in the same foreign accent. "I have come back. No… we have come back, my dear. This time there are more of us. And this time I shall make certain, by one means or another, that no one stops us. Neither you, nor your father, nor any of your kind."

In Seijuro's head, everything fell into place with the speed at which pieces fall into place on a shōgi board when an experienced player, at the fourth move, has already foreseen the next twelve. If she had returned, if she had said it in the plural, then the portal whose existence only a handful of officers in the army knew of had opened again, and through it had entered the real world the akuryō and other beings worse than the akuryō. The creature before him was no common akuryō, no faceless gray creature of the kind that moved in waves and that he had fought by the dozen in the north; she was a kōtei, that was what the high command of the army called them to set them apart from the rest, a higher rank of creature to whom terrible honors were granted in the secret reports. And she was, moreover, the very same kōtei he had faced years before, the one who had left him the badly closed scar on his side and who had promised to return. Now she had returned. And she had a concrete objective, because that creature did nothing by chance: she had come to kill him. Him, Seijuro Nakata, who in those days, in the barracks of the empire, was held to be the strongest man in Japan.

All of that Seijuro understood in the two seconds that separated Klepsa's last sentence from his own answer.

All of that, while he held his dying wife in his arms.

The situation, analyzed with the cold procedure with which a veteran officer of the army analyzes a battle map, was very simple. He could not fight. He had no chance whatever in single combat against a kōtei of that rank, much less while carrying Otsuru. He had to flee, reach the doctor's house as fast as possible, and leave his wife with the midwife before the fever took her altogether. But at the same time, if the kōtei followed him, he could doom whatever village took him in to a massacre. So he must escape, yes, but without fighting, and without her following him. He must slip away. He must convince her that he was not worth the trouble. Seijuro, who was no man of words in normal circumstances, knew that in this circumstance words were going to have to do for him what fists were not going to be able to do.

"I have no time for you right now," he said, and he said it with the greatest serenity he could summon, weighing each word as if it were a step on thin ice. "Let me cure my wife, who is dying in my arms, and I will come back for you. You have my word. But not now."

He turned without waiting for a reply, with the deliberate slowness of a man who does not wish to look as though he is fleeing, and tried to continue toward the heart of the mountain, where, a little higher up, the first houses of the doctor's village could already be seen between the trunks.

CLANG.

A thin chain of dark steel struck the ground a step ahead of his sandals, with a dry sound that rang briefly among the cedars and that startled two crows perched on the heights, which took to the air with a long, ugly cry. Seijuro stopped. He understood that he could not flee. He understood, too, that the warning had not been a misjudgment of aim but a deliberately clear message: that chain had fallen exactly where its owner had wanted it to fall. A step earlier, a step later, and it would have killed someone.

Him, no. Not yet.

"It does not seem to me that you understand the position you are in, Seijuro," Klepsa observed, in the relaxed voice of one who negotiates from a height, without moving from her place, as if the chain had been a signature at the foot of a contract she had already signed without reading. "It is not for you to decide when to come back."

Seijuro turned again, this time looking her straight in the eyes, and looked at her for a very long stretch of time, with that impersonal cold gaze of the army officer who has decided to calculate before he feels, the gaze that even superiors at the barracks took care not to meet for long.

"Let me put my wife in a safe place first," he said at last, his voice still. "Then I fight. With you. With you alone. And as far as it must go."

Klepsa tilted her head very slightly, granting it to him with the condescension of one who grants small things before taking great ones.

Seijuro stepped a few paces off the main path, chose a thick cedar with its roots breaking through the leaf-mold, and laid Otsuru down with an almost liturgical delicacy in the hollow between two roots, resting her head against the trunk and arranging the silk quilt around her body so that the cold could not get in through the openings. He brushed a strand of damp hair from her face with the tip of his index finger, exactly as he had brushed it from her face hours before in the birthing room, and pressed his forehead to hers for a few seconds, not to take leave of her — he refused to take leave of her — but to speak in her ear with the lowest voice he could modulate, a voice that the Klepsa waiting ten paces off, despite the ear of a creature, would not be able to make out.

"Easy, Otsuru. Hold on. We will come out of this together, I swear it. Soon you will be looking after our son."

He rose.

He turned.

He went back to the path.

He planted himself before Klepsa, still, silent, firm, grave, his pulse as clean and regular as that of a metronome. His heart could be felt beating hard, though in that moment it was still a human heartbeat, ordered, disciplined, with nothing yet of what was about to come.

"Whenever you wish," he said.

And he took up his characteristic combat stance: the left hand fully closed in a fist at the height of his left cheek, loaded like a hammered projectile; the right hand open, palm turned toward the enemy, half extended, farther from the body. It was the guard with which Seijuro Nakata had fought since he was five years old. A guard without weapons. Because Seijuro, unlike his father Jirōbei and the rest of the army officers, who carried the regulation katana at the belt, had never cared for weapons of any kind; and he was, in that, an eccentric in his own house, an officer who in the barracks brought uneasy smiles each time he turned up to training with bare hands and went home with bare hands. But the years had silenced those smiles one by one. Because Seijuro had carried his obstinate insistence on fists to such a virtuosity that his left was a deadlier weapon than any regulation katana in the army.

"Let us see how far you have improved," Klepsa murmured, smiling very faintly, with that smile of hers that had more of scientific curiosity in it than of cruelty.

And she drew from the sleeves of her dress the two thin chains of dark steel she carried coiled around her forearms, let them fall to the ground with an economical movement of the shoulders, and at that instant the fight began.

Seijuro felt, more than saw, the first chain whip toward his head at a speed no human, however trained, would have had time to process with his eyes. He did not even see it coming. Only, by pure reflex long since drilled into him, he deflected it leftward with the open palm of his right hand, taking the scrape of metal against skin with a coldness that from the outside would have passed for impassivity. The friction of metal against flesh opened a deep cut in his palm, of the kind that does not heal in weeks. He did not protest. Not a grimace.

Without breaking the rhythm, while Klepsa was gathering the chain to attack again, Seijuro charged at her. He covered the distance in two strides, bent his knees, lowered his center of gravity until his right elbow was nearly grazing the ground, and from that bent position, like a spring tensed to its limit, he drove the left fist upward in a hook that sought the kōtei's chin, loaded with all the weight of his hip and a lifetime of training. It was a blow that would have knocked out any soldier, any samurai, any professional fighter in Edo. Any human.

But before he could let the blow go, Seijuro saw, out of the corner of his eye, a chain pulled tight as a bowstring, so tight that it looked as if two people were drawing it from two impossible angles with equal force, cut into the path of his fist. The impact stopped him short. The left fist burst against the steel with a muffled crunch and the whole arm shuddered up to the shoulder. Blood. Two broken knuckles, perhaps three. Bone splinters in the hand, almost certainly. Pain, for a man like him, was a familiar language. It did not interrupt the conversation. He sprang back several yards, recovered the guard, thought again. The difference of level between the two fighters was no longer evident: it was abyssal. In two movements, Klepsa had shown herself to be several leagues above him.

Was the human creature so weak, Seijuro wondered for the first and last time in a long while, before the monsters of the other world?

He swallowed the question without answering it. He had no time for questions. He could not allow himself to doubt. No, he could not allow himself that. Another chain hissed toward his head; again he deflected it with the right; again the cut opened deeper, right at the center of the palm. And so, attack after attack, for a minute that to Seijuro felt like half a day, Klepsa carved his right hand into a steaming ruin of blood and torn flesh, while he, with a patience no one outside himself could have understood, still did not use the left to defend himself.

"It's amusing," Klepsa remarked at last, in a pause between chain and chain, speaking in the offhand tone of one making a remark over dinner, without ceasing to coil the steel around her forearm. "Your right hand is red with blood. Cuts on every part of it. And still you do not use the left to defend yourself. You have used it only once to attack me, and, by the way, you missed. How long do you mean to go on like this, Seijuro? Until you have no hand left?"

"I am faithful to my style, nothing more," he answered, in the calm voice of one who answers something insignificant, and he said it without lifting his eyes from the ground, fixed on an indeterminate point between his enemy's two feet.

He lied.

He lied as cleanly as he had seen his own father lie in the war councils, when one had to deceive the enemy with what the enemy wished to hear. Seijuro Nakata would do everything possible to come out of that clearing alive, even if it meant betraying his style, his tradition, and the name of every Nakata who had taught him to fight. Loyalty to style was a schoolmaster's luxury. It had no place in the soldier's code, and far less in the code of a husband whose wife stood ten paces from death.

He had been spending a long while studying every motion of the chains, every pull, every tension, every micro-gesture of Klepsa's shoulders before each strike. He had voluntarily sacrificed his right hand to keep the left intact. He had decided, from the second attack onward, that he was not going to win that fight by strength or by speed: he was going to win it by calculation. He needed only one clean blow. One. And then to use the resulting concussion to gather Otsuru up and escape. Seijuro knew how to strike like no one in the army; all he needed was a window of time in which the kōtei could not use one of her chains to defend herself.

A single opening.

"Faithful to your style?" Klepsa pressed on, now with a mocking note she had until that moment been avoiding. And the mocking note, in fighters of a certain caliber, is usually the symptom that they are beginning to grow bored, and therefore the symptom that they are beginning to make mistakes. "I am curious, Seijuro. You do not use the left to defend yourself. But… will you use it to defend your wife?"

And in that instant Seijuro understood, with a chill that sprang from the back of his neck, that he had committed a negligence. The whole fight, without having foreseen it consciously, he had fought with Otsuru just behind him, motionless against the cedar, thirty paces off. He had done so instinctively, by the reflex of shielding the wife with the body; but that same reflex, which under normal circumstances would have been a virtue, had just been turned into an offering to the enemy. Klepsa, whose scientific curiosity had always taken the form of an elegant cruelty, was not going to waste an offering.

The two chains, one tied to each of her arms. She had not used the left chain in the whole fight. Now, all of a sudden, she had two.

The two chains pulled tight at the same time.

She let them go.

Both.

At once.

And no, the two chains were not flying toward Seijuro.

The second one, the one on Klepsa's left arm, went straight for Otsuru's neck.

Seijuro had only two hands. He had no choice.

He deflected the first with the wounded palm of the right, which opened a finger wider in the process, and with the left — still whole, still uninjured, still loaded with the hammered projectile he had been holding back the entire fight — he caught the chain bound for his wife a hand's breadth from her face.

"Klepsa!" he roared with a rage he had not let out until that instant, and the name, which neither of them had spoken in the whole encounter, came out of him as if he had been keeping it inside for three years.

"Well, well," she answered, almost surprised. "So you still remember my name. You flatter me, my dear."

"You are a coward. She cannot defend herself!"

"Oh, Seijuro. I expected her dear little husband to protect her. And, look, you have protected her. There is no cause to insult me."

"I have no more time for this. The fight ends here."

"That is not for you to decide," she replied, in the same singsong voice. "I shall not leave this place until I have made certain you are dead. I told you so three years ago, and three years are but a breath to one such as me."

Klepsa, without further fuss, made to gather both chains at once, with the routine mechanics of one who has made that gesture ten thousand times. And then she understood. Then Klepsa understood, with the icy delay with which virtuosos understand their own errors, that she had committed a great one.

Because all through that fight, while she had been playing, Seijuro Nakata had been studying her. She had two chains, one bound to each arm; she would tighten them or slacken them according to whether she needed more or less length; and, most important, she always kept both ends of each chain fastened to her forearm, so that, when she let one of the two ends go, the chain could deliver that impossible whip-crack capable of cutting a cedar in two. At the same time, she was able to spin both chains in a nearly perfect radius around her body, at an inhuman speed, forming a kind of revolving shield like that of a girl skipping rope at a thousand revolutions; if anyone dared step into that radius with a fist, the fist flew off into the air before it could find anything to strike.

But now it was Seijuro who held one of those two ends. Because, without realizing it, Klepsa had thrown the left chain at Otsuru at a speed lower than the one she used against Seijuro — she did not need more, the target was motionless, it was enough to kill her with sufficient force, there was no need to hit a moving mark — and that small reduction of speed, though more than enough to kill any human or animal, was not enough to keep a Seijuro driven by panic and strategy from catching it instead of merely deflecting it. It was in that instant that Seijuro's heart changed. It began to beat with a force that was not its own, in a rhythm that was not human. Five quick beats, sharp, against the ribs, one after another, like five small fists tapping on a drumhead from within.

A brief pause.

Four more beats, slightly slower, deeper, as though a second drum, larger than the first, had taken up the relay. And then back to the beginning. Five quick. Four slow. Five, four. An ancient cadence, inherited, that neither of the two drums had learned in this world but in other forests and other centuries, and which surfaced in Nakata blood only when Nakata blood was about to lose something it loved. Even Klepsa, several yards away, heard it. She heard it and, for the first time that afternoon, her smile lost a little of its geometry.

"It's over, Klepsa," Seijuro said, certain of his victory now, his voice changed. A voice that was not his own and yet had been his from the beginning, the voice that had been lent him by the grandfathers of his grandfathers.

"Don't talk nonsense just because you've grabbed one of my chains," she answered, with a swagger less firm now, more hurried, trying to reposition herself. "You know I have another, don't you? Don't underestimate me now."

But before Klepsa could fully gather in her right chain and launch another strike, Seijuro Nakata executed the maneuver he had been preparing for the whole fight. He pulled with all his strength, multiplied by the drums in his chest, on the left chain he had snatched in midair, drew Klepsa toward him by the sheer momentum of her own weight, and let go of the end at the precise moment. When he let go, Klepsa, who by physics could not stop the pull already in motion, kept flying toward him at a speed she would never have chosen. Seijuro, in that half-second, bent his knees, lowered his center of gravity, advanced his right leg, drew the left fist back to shoulder height, and held the right half-extended, palm pointing at the target, so as not to lose his spatial reference.

When Klepsa came within range of the left arm, he did not hesitate.

The forest thundered.

A dry crack.

The birds took to the air.

The fist landed square on her jaw, on the left side, with all the accumulated force of a lifetime of training; Klepsa's body, so small beside his own, was hurled sideways, traveled several yards through the air with the chains floating behind her like streamers at some perverse festival, and slammed into a cedar to the right of the path with a snapping of bark and bone and metal that sounded like a sentence signed.

A blow square on the chin that would have knocked out anyone.

No one would walk away from such a blow.

No one human, of course.

Seijuro did not wait for confirmation. He did not watch her finish falling. He did not check whether she rose. He took Otsuru in his arms with the same gesture with which one takes up a sacred bundle and broke into a run up the path, toward the doctor's red torii, with both hands broken and his soul half broken too, and with the drums in his chest receding very slowly, the way the tide recedes, until they had returned to their human rhythm.

---

Doctor's Village, Up the Mountain

A short while later

Several minutes later, Seijuro at last reached the village, a handful of humble houses tucked into a flat ledge of the forest, with a central well and a small stone shrine dedicated to some local deity he had never heard of. He searched desperately for the house the doctor had pointed out to him, with his haori torn and the blood from his right hand dripping onto Otsuru's quilt, until a gray-haired woman with intelligent eyes, who was waiting at the door with a basin of boiling water at her feet and an apron full of clean cloths, recognized him from the description and let him in with two sharp gestures, no words needed. Inside, the doctor, who had arrived only minutes earlier by the main path, was already preparing his hands.

How long had he taken?, Seijuro wondered, confused, noticing for the first time that Otsuru's body had stopped trembling against his chest and that she scarcely weighed anything at all anymore.

"Lay her down here, please," the doctor said in a low voice, pointing to a clean pallet spread beside the hearth. "I will examine her."

"Yes. Please, doctor, cure her. Cure her. I ask nothing more of you."

The doctor knelt beside the pallet. He took her pulse at the neck. He took it again, this time at the wrist. He lifted an eyelid with his thumb, as he had done in the street, and this time he did not even hold it up two seconds before closing it again, with a delicate gesture that meant to be, and could not quite be, a form of respect. Seijuro, two paces away, could not get out of his head what had just happened on the path, the sound of Klepsa's jaw, the crack of the cedar, the drums; but none of that mattered, he kept telling himself, the point was that they had arrived, that the doctor was going to examine Otsuru, that she was going to recover within days, that they were going to raise their son together, that the akuryō had returned, yes, but that he would deal with them later; first was his wife.

The doctor turned to him very slowly.

"She is dead."

Seijuro pretended he had not heard him properly.

"Pardon, doctor? I couldn't hear you well. What did you say?"

"This woman has been dead for some time now, sir," the doctor repeated, in the same low voice, without ceremony, with that compassionate coldness that country physicians develop from having to deliver bad news without a hospital between them and the news. "There is nothing I can do. I am very sorry. I am very, very sorry. I wish I could have arrived sooner."

Seijuro went pale.

---

Among the Cedars, At That Very Moment

"Well, well…" Klepsa muttered, sitting on the ground against the splintered cedar, her dislocated jaw hanging slightly to one side, speaking through her teeth with a strange professional calm, like one pulling a splinter from her foot. "Well, well…"

She placed both hands on either side of her jaw, breathed in deeply once, then again, and on the third try yanked sharply upward and slightly inward, snapping the bone back into place with a brief, ugly click. She flexed the joint in silence, made sure it worked, spat a thread of blood, and smiled half a smile, more to herself than to anyone in particular.

"I didn't expect to find you flat on the ground, Klepsa," a woman's voice said from up the path, in a different accent, more western still than Klepsa's, cleaner, more educated. "How unlike you."

Klepsa looked up. The silhouette of a woman, taller than herself, dark-haired, a long sword sheathed at the hip and the calm step of one who has never been in a hurry for anything, was coming down the path with a small smile.

"Eh? Lucy? What are you doing here?"

"I've finished what you asked of me," the newcomer answered, settling beside the other with the familiarity of two friends meeting again. "And I was curious to see in action this man you'd told me so much about. I had to come and watch. He seems rather strong."

"Yes," Klepsa conceded, spitting another thread of blood with an indifferent gesture. "Not bad for a mere human. But it's not his strength, Lucy, don't be mistaken; it's his cursed cunning that drives me out of my wits. He always finds a way to come out on top. I can't stand that man, damn him. I need to be rid of him once and for all."

Lucy, her arms folded across her chest as she gazed down the path where Seijuro had vanished, merely tilted her head and smiled, as though she had come upon something interesting for the first time in many years.

And yet, this time, Seijuro had not come out on top.