The Fox's Quest (2 page)

Chapter Two

Sanae

S
anae had come to the conclusion that losing one’s physical body and existing as a pure soul, a spirit, wasn’t all that bad. People with bodies knew nothing of the way forest spirits sang, the melody not so much a sound as a feeling, one that reverberated in her essence. People with bodies had never experienced the complete freedom of drifting through the world like a leaf on the wind. People with bodies were limited by their physical eyes. Human words were inadequate to describe the things she could now see.

But people with bodies had one undeniable advantage: they could eat dessert.

Sanae stared at the tiny roadside shrine. Someone had left a sweet red bean bun before it as an offering. Whenever she tried to close her jaws on it, they just went through it. She couldn’t even smell it.

This is ridiculous,
she ranted at the world in general.
Why do people leave offerings of food and sake if spirits can’t taste them? How did it get started?
Offerings were supposed to be about respect, but this felt like taunting. Look at this delicious bun you can’t have!

Very well, then.
She glowered at the bun before turning round and “walking” away.

What to do now? It was boring waiting for Yuki and her brother to arrive. Physical bodies couldn’t go very fast. Perhaps she should go and ensure her discovery hadn’t undergone any change since she’d last visited.

She shifted to the other side of reality, to the spirit side. Applying human words to this place was inaccurate but she had no better words to use. Everything was layered in different shades of what she might as well call gray. Living things from the other side were paler than shadows here, barely noticeable except for the fact they had little lights—soul sparks—in them. But even those lights were dim compared to the lights of spirits who existed on this side. The other spirits here were like her, bright and free. They floated or zoomed past, each about its own business. She didn’t try to talk to them. She had tried, at first, to ask them about her mysterious discovery and what they knew about it. They hadn’t seemed to understand her questions and she certainly hadn’t understood a word of their answers—not that they used anything that could be called words.

Ah, she’d have time enough to learn about her fellow spirits’ way of thinking after she found out how to end the draining of spiritual energy from the world. By following the flecks of her spirit body that broke away when she didn’t guard herself closely, she’d found out from where the pull came.

But knowing where it was didn’t tell her
what
it was, for the simple reason she couldn’t approach it. If she went too close, whether in the physical world or in the spirit realm, its power began to suck at the edge of her being with frightening strength. As she had no desire to be sucked into what might be complete and final death, she had to rely on others to investigate.

The area around the mysterious energy-eating object had the look of a wasteland. Spirits had fled or been consumed and living things that couldn’t move had their soul sparks sucked away slowly, so the trees and plants were dead or dying. Even with the limitations of flesh, Yuki and Akakiba would know when they were near.

Sanae paced at the edge of what she considered the safe zone, the area where plants were yet clinging to life. The mysterious thing was calling to her essence in an insistent way, but she wasn’t fool enough to get any closer. Just fool enough to come back again and again, to fret and wonder. What was it? Why was it stealing spirit energy? Could it be stopped? What if it was a living being rather than a thing? Must they kill it?

Sanae froze. Without really noticing, she’d taken a few steps toward danger. Lingering here, where the object of her obsession might lure her to her death, wasn’t such a good idea.

Ahhh, I need a distraction!
Her exclamation was a tiny ripple of life in this deserted place, noticed by no one but her. She forced herself away from the fascinating pull.

Held back by no such constraints as physical distance, she could go anywhere she wished and still be back before Yuki and Akakiba arrived. It had taken her time to understand how to travel to a physical place via the spiritual realm, but now it was as easy as breathing. Or as easy as it had been, back when she actually had the body parts needed for breathing.

From within the spirit realm, Sanae sought her father’s spiritual signature. It was like picking out a specific star in a sky of millions. She could only do it with people whose spiritual signatures she knew intimately. Once she’d found the distant flicker of her father’s existence, she headed for it.

Neither wind nor physicality held her back, so she streaked away like a shooting star, faster and faster, feeling her existence stretching infinitely long, feeling the passage of other spirits through her, and her through them. The contact tickled, reassured. She was not alone here, but one in a million, in a billion.

When Sanae reached the spark of spiritual energy that was her father’s presence in this realm, she stopped and focused, seeking to once again ooze through the veil between the worlds like light through thin curtains. She pooled herself into a coherent whole on the other side, adopting the shape of a fox with multiple tails.

She stretched, delighting in her return to the real world, and took in her surroundings. She was in the gardens, near the Mirror Pool, and her father sat there in contemplation. He was in his fox form, for he had no choice: he’d lost the ability to shift to human years before.

She retreated to allow him to finish his meditation, moving on to patrol the halls as she had taken to do recently. It was after the evening meal, a stretch of time normally reserved for gathering with family and friends after a day’s chores and training. She ghosted along, keeping her presence in the physical world to a minimum so passing foxes would see no more than a shimmering in the air. These days, few seemed to notice much. Their eyes were haunted and sunken with lack of sleep and their frames were thin, beginning to lose muscles that needed to be maintained with near-daily training sessions.

The children she saw seemed subdued. Sanae could only guess at how they felt. Their once-solid world had fallen apart and left them to cope with the still-recent loss of several parents, siblings, cousins, uncles, and aunts. They also had to cope with those remaining loved ones who had been profoundly changed by those same events. Six months was too short a time to heal everybody’s wounds.

She sought the children, all cousins of hers to one degree or another, and found a few in a hidden tunnel meant for emergency escapes. She twirled about the pair of whispering twins in her mist form.
Good afternoon, Kaoru, Hikaru.

They knew who she was and therefore addressed her in the manner of children speaking to an older female relative as they complained, “Stop it, Sister! It tickles!”

What mischief are you planning now?

“We’re not planning anything,” Hikaru said.

Is that so?
She manifested, fox shaped, and stared. And stared.

“We’re going to help cook dinner tomorrow. We want to put a lot of wasabi in everybody’s food,” Kaoru admitted.

Sanae contemplated the mess it would cause and said,
Wonderful idea. Do it. You’ll have to tell me how it went next time I visit.

The twins eyed her as if they weren’t certain she was serious.

I’ll leave you to your planning. Good luck.

If their little prank succeeded, it might bring some cheer to this gloomy clan house.

Sanae misted back to her father’s location and manifested fully at his side with her tails curling about herself. She didn’t speak right away, contemplating their reflection in the Mirror Pool’s water. Here sat a fox of flesh and blood and one of neither. Father and daughter, sitting close enough to touch and yet unable to do so.

I wonder what the spirit of this pool makes of you,
her father said.

I did try to ask her,
Sanae said, feeling foolish for admitting it.
I thought she might actually be the First Lady. I was wrong, though. This spirit has never been human and doesn’t understand our speech.
She’d realized that the moment she tried to address the pool spirit and got the same not-using-words answer as she got from the other spirits. The First Lady, their ancestress and the founder of their clan, was long gone.

One day she’d figure out how to communicate properly with spirits. On that day, she would come here and ask the pool spirit whether any other members of the Fox clan had escaped their flesh upon death and continued their existence as spirit beings. If there had been others like her in the past, surely the pool spirit would have been aware of it. She was of two minds about the matter, both yearning for companionship and wishing to be an intrepid adventurer going where no samurai of her clan had gone before.

Your mother mourns still
, Kiba said at length.

Should I show myself to her?

I cannot say. She may react as your brother did. Denial would not help.

You said it would be easier for her to accept my new existence after she’d finished grieving for the physical me…

So I did. But I begin to wonder whether that will happen. She has little interest in food or sleep.

Just like the others who wandered the clan house with dead eyes, Sanae thought. It was the result of what they called The Last Battle.
Such fools they are, giving in so easily! We are warriors and we expect to die on the battlefield. Doing it one by one or all together hardly makes a difference. Besides, death isn’t so bad.

Kiba barked a laugh, a strange sound coming from a fox throat.
You would say that, you red-haired child. But you have no children. When one grows old, one begins to put a great deal of importance in the idea of continuity, of legacy. We are now faced with the reality that our legacy will die, that we are doomed to disappear despite our best efforts. Our remaining children may live full lives, but there will be too few grandchildren after them and only the looming darkness of extinction after that. This knowledge robs us of direction, and life without a goal is hardly worth living.

Sanae made the best non-committal noise she could produce without the use of a physical throat. One didn’t argue with one’s father. Not when he was in this strange mood.

How’s your brother?

Besides the irrational denial?
she said with exasperation
. He’s safe on the road. They visited Yuki’s family grave today.

I see. No sighting of any possessed?

No. I looked and listened, but there’s no sign. Perhaps they learned their lesson.

Ah, daughter. The enemy never gives up. We’ve unearthed interesting information.

Sanae’s ears perked.
Tell me.

Chapter Three

Jien

T
he Great Eastern Temple and the Great Western Temple were both situated in the city of Nara, barely far enough from each other to be considered distinct. Yet
sohei
were fiercely loyal to their home temple and rarely visited the other one outside of official business. The best way to start a fight in Nara was to claim one temple was better than the other. When he’d been in training, Jien had considered fight-starting a good way to alleviate his boredom.

Jien belonged to the Great Eastern Temple, having trained there for long years before finally being allowed to escape into the wild to do as he pleased on the roads. He had no choice but to return occasionally, if only to beg a change of clothes. He couldn’t say he hated visiting, because the temple would always be home to him, far more than the hovel where he had lived the first few years of his life while his sick parents lived their last few.

The bowing and scraping got on his nerves. Monks
of his age and rank were most often found on the road, meaning the majority of the ones found at the temple were either trainees (who bowed to him obsessively) or old men above his rank (who expected him to bow to them obsessively).

At the gate, two guards and one dragon inspected him. The latter wasn’t a member of the great breed, the one that grew bigger than oxen and lurked in deep rivers, but of the small breed that didn’t get much bigger than a cat.

“The dragon’s new,” Jien said.

“Weren’t you at the battle with the demon-possessed?” one of the guards inquired, suspicion coloring his voice. “Everybody is jumpy because of it. We inspect every visitor now.”

The dragon rumbled contently and went to curl on a cushion strategically placed to catch sunlight.

“Clear,” the guard said. His demeanor brightened at the confirmation Jien wasn’t possessed, his previously tense expression relaxing into a smile. “Do you require any assistance, Brother?”

Jien ignored the side-glance they gave to his bedraggled clothing. He still wore the same clothes he’d gone to war in six months back. He couldn’t be blamed if they’d grown stained and tattered.

“I seek Aito,” he said to the guards. “If you could pass a message for him to meet me by the Buddha hall…”

“Certainly. I’ll send a runner.” By which the guard meant he’d ask a trainee to run in circles until Aito was located. Jien had once been the trainee most often favored with this chore. He didn’t miss it.

Jien thereafter headed for the Buddha hall, the largest wooden structure in the land and likely the whole world too. Similarly, the Buddha statue within was the largest of its kind. Various other statues and important relics were also housed in the temple. Surely his teachers had told him what they were, but he’d long forgotten.

He sat by the purification fountain and rested, nibbling on a crumbling rice cake that was the last of his supplies. The cool water in the fountain was meant strictly for purification of hands and mouth, not for drinking, but he furtively drank it anyway.

Within moments, a voice called, “Good morning, Jien.”

He turned to greet Aito, whose clothes were far cleaner than his travel-stained ones. “That was quick. Were you watching the gate?”

“Yes and no. I had a familiar watching the gate.”

“Ah, I should have expected that.” Jien spared a thought for the unfortunate trainee currently trying to find Aito before focusing on the business at hand. “I got your message. I have no idea how it found me on the road, but it did.”

The way Aito shifted position before answering seemed to speak of unease or guilt. “I sent a familiar after you, long enough to know which road you chose to follow. I was concerned when you took off without warning. I didn’t mean to spy.”

Jien didn’t hide his wince. He’d abandoned Aito, leaving him alone to report everything that had happened. “I owe you an explanation, don’t I?” He looked away, jaw working. Thinking about those long-gone events still angered him. “I had to leave before I pummeled the next person to call Akakiba the ‘Mad Fox.’ You must have heard them, speaking in that disgusting tone of ‘Look, a fox who isn’t perfect! Let us vilify him and use this as an excuse to feel superior to those weird half-humans!’ Saying things like that about someone who’d just lost a sibling… I would have punched someone if I’d stayed.”

Even enraged beyond words, he’d known it would have been a terrible idea. The fight would have been noticed, foxes might have gotten involved, and Akakiba might have heard of it. Leaving had been the better choice.

There was no telling where Akakiba and Yuki were now, but one might hope they were doing well.

“I understand,” Aito said. Maybe he did, or maybe it was an empty reassurance, but Jien was grateful for the implied forgiveness either way.

Jien waved a hand as if to chase off his unhappy thoughts. “Enough about me. You sent for me and here I am. I’m honored the great and mysterious Aito wishes for my help, but the message didn’t say why. Curiosity is killing me.”

A smug look briefly animated Aito’s normally impassive features. “I did hope curiosity would hasten you along. Walk with me, please.”

Turning away from the Buddha hall, Aito headed for a much smaller building. It was pleasantly cool inside and it smelled of oil and accumulated dust. Preserved scrolls rested on pedestals and a great many demon-slaying swords covered the walls.

“Our blade makers’ greatest works are hung here,” Aito said, his eyes grown distant. After a moment he added, “There’s no living being nearby at the moment. It’s safe to talk.”

Jien couldn’t help but grin in anticipation. Aito was keeping secrets from other monks? Oh, this was going to be good. “My curiosity grows. Tell me.”

“Look at these blades,” Aito said, gesturing around the room. “On most of them you’ll see the same glyphs, the ones that weaken and ultimately destroy the coherence of spiritual energy, effectively causing the death of any spirit creature struck with it. We call them demon-slaying blades but they could slay a white spirit just as easily. These are the glyphs we know now, the ones we deem safe enough to use. There are many more glyphs our order has worked to condemn to oblivion because they’re dangerous and have been put to unwise uses in the past.”

“Like the Soul Eater,” Jien said, glad to be able to show he wasn’t completely ignorant, even if this tidbit of knowledge had come to him from legends heard at drinking houses rather than from the mouths of his teachers. “How did that story go? A long time ago…”

A long time ago, spiritual beings were frighteningly powerful and conflicts between them and humans were common. In those times, a single spiritual being could grow to god-like strength by devouring others to strengthen its own power. The emperor’s army fought long and hard, but they grew tired and fewer in numbers, and the emperor came to fear his land would be lost to raging beasts of surpassing powers. He went to the monks of the Great Temples, who held the secrets of every glyph known, which in those times were much-needed items of everyday survival, and asked them to help.

“We cannot survive this assault for long,” the emperor said. “We are a small island nation and cannot flee the ravages these monsters do to our lands.”

“We will do what we can to assist,” the monks promised, for they too had suffered heavy losses since they had begun to train and send out
sohei
, warrior monks, to battle.

The monks conferred, pouring over their scrolls of secret knowledge, and set upon the ambitious task of forging a weapon that absorbed spiritual energy rather than dispelling it like normal glyphed weapons did. In this way, they reasoned, the sword would grow more powerful the more monsters it slew, and even the worst spiritual beast would be brought down by its bite.

The best sword makers bent to the task for weeks upon weeks, creating and testing dozens of different swords, until at last they were satisfied they had created the perfect weapon.

The highest ranked monks went to the Imperial Palace, which in those times was in Nara, to present their work to the emperor.

The emperor witnessed the sword with joy. “At last, a weapon that will turn the tides. Come forth, Okuninushi, and take this sword as your own.”

Okuninushi was already then a great hero, for he had led countless armies to battle and never suffered more than superficial wounds. It was said he could cower spirits with a gaze, and stare into the eye of the most terrible creatures without fear.

With sword in hand, Okuninushi led many more battles, against berserk spirits or mutinous lords or mainland invaders. When his sword bit, the person or spirit died, their vital energy sucked out. With the worst spirits laid down to rest, the land gained such calm and peace as it had rarely before known.

As a result of peace with spirits, battles between humans became more common. But whenever Okuninushi appeared on the battlefield with the sword named the Soul Eating Sword, the enemy bowed to his will, for no man wished to lose his soul to that terrible weapon.

The emperor called Okuninushi to court and said to him, “I have three beautiful daughters. Take one as your wife as proof of my gratitude for your loyal services. With that sword you could have felled even me, but you did not. Wed one of my daughters and become my son.”

“I would wed your third daughter, for she is so beautiful spirits blush to see her and so clever no fox would dare try to trick her.”

So it was Okuninushi wed a princess who was as clever as she was beautiful and who protected him from countless assassination attempts by jealous rivals. It was said small spirits loved her so well they served her and protected her from harm.

There was but one thing from which the princess could not protect Okuninushi: the sword itself. Every time Okuninushi wielded the sword in battle, he returned home a little more tired, a little grayer in the hair. One day he came home carried by his men, uninjured but too exhausted to rise, and the princess could stand it no more.

The princess went to the monks and said, “What ails my husband? Is it the sword?”

The monks conferred and had to agree. “It is the sword. Its power is so great it now eats its bearer’s soul, bit by bit. It must be put away, and never used again, or it will kill him.”

Taking this to heart, the princess hid the sword and would not give it to her husband, no matter how much he begged or threatened her. Years passed, and Okuninushi remained a superb general even without the Soul Eating Sword. A son was born and they were glad.

But there arose a new berserk spirit, one so large and fierce it destroyed the
sohei
army sent to kill it.

“Wife, I need the sword,” Okuninushi said. “None other can stop this beast from ravaging the countryside. I beg you, let me use it this one last time, or the beast will fell me.”

Her heart heavy, the princess surrendered the weapon. She waited weeks for him to return, praying to any god who would hear her.

Alas, Okuninushi had wielded the sword one time too many, and as he plunged the sword into the berserk spirit, he fell to his knees and expired along with the beast.

The sword was wrapped thickly, for none dared touch it directly, and brought back to the princess, who cried and raged for days, so deep was her sorrow.

“I will cast this sword into the sea so it may never again bring such tragedy!” she declared. She went forth and threw the sword into the ocean’s depths, where it could harm none.

So it was a weapon that had saved countless lives killed the hero bearing it, and was discarded forever after.

“I think that’s how the story is told,” Jien finished. “You mean that sword?”

Aito didn’t smile but he thawed. Relaxed, even. “You didn’t have to narrate the entire story. I’m glad you know it. Your version is essentially true. The part that isn’t generally known is the sword was recovered. It was hidden here, among the other swords. It was supposed to sit forgotten until it turned to dust.”

Oh, here was the good bit. “I take it something happened?”

“The so-called Soul Eater was stolen years ago. We were both fresh trainees at the time, if I’m not mistaken.”

Jien thought back on his training years. “I never heard of a theft.”

“It took time before anyone noticed. It was then decided the news should be kept quiet. No sense encouraging rumors.”

“If that’s so, why were you told? You’re hardly higher ranked than I am.”

“I was one of a few men chosen to search the premises in case the blade had been hidden somewhere. Because I have familiar spirits, I have far more spiritual energy than any normal person. In theory, I should have felt a pull if I’d wandered close to the sword. But we never found it. The theft was eventually blamed on
shinobi
. It’s an unsatisfactory explanation.”

Jien grunted in agreement. “How would outsiders have known of it, when so many who live and train here don’t? One of ours would have had to leak the information. It’s old history though. Why is it important now?”

“Recent events have me worried it may have been stolen with a goal in mind. Think on it—here is a blade that would make short work of a fox samurai. The smallest wound may prove fatal. Now that the Fox clan has been weakened, consider what a blade master could do with such a weapon. There are those who would seize the chance.”