Chapter 2:
Reirin Puts on the Pressure
THE FIRST RAYS of morning sunlight streamed in through the eastern windows of Cloud Ladder Gardens. One by one, the contents of the room were bathed in majestic light: the furnishings too elegant to belong in an encampment, the sword reverently placed on display, and the extravagant robe on the hanging rack.
Sitting on his bed, Genyou growled with the realization that a new day had begun. “Blast it…”
The Repose of Souls was two days away. That meant two days remained until the Day of Ultimate Yin, when the solar eclipse would occur and the yin would reach its peak. With so little time left, it was hard not to feel impatient.
“I know he must be here somewhere.”
By “he,” Genyou was referring to the body-swapping sorcerer. The man who had absconded with Prince Gomei’s body was bound to be lurking somewhere close by, still trapped inside his blind vessel. He always left shriveled corpses in his wake, most of them concentrated in war zones and disaster areas. It made sense that he would gravitate toward such areas, as no one would make a big deal out of encountering a blind man or a few disfigured corpses there.
Living in someone else’s body clearly demanded a lot of qi, and it appeared the amount he needed was steadily increasing over time. During the period immediately following the sorcerer’s escape, only a few shriveled corpses would show up per year. Within a decade, that number had increased to ten. Now, twenty-five years later, they discovered as many as twenty or thirty bodies annually.
It couldn’t have been easy to blend into the populace while churning out that many cadavers, and above all, it had to be tough on the sorcerer to live in a body that was falling apart at the seams. His burden must have been increasing with each passing year.
That means it should be easier for me to track him down, Genyou told himself, clenching his fists atop the bed.
Over the past twenty-five years, he had covertly and exhaustively searched for places where the sorcerer might show himself and had narrowed down the possibilities to a handful of locations. Among those, Tan Pass was the region where the concentration of yin would be highest this year, so it was extremely likely that the sorcerer would put in an appearance there. Visiting the land with the greatest yin energy on the Day of Ultimate Yin would allow the man to finally fulfill his long-held ambition.
On the Day of Ultimate Yin, he will use his body-swapping spell for the first time in twenty-five years and steal the form of another.
If he switched bodies with a complete stranger, it would become all the more difficult to track him down.
The Day of Ultimate Yin was only two days away. Genyou had to catch the sorcerer before then at all costs.
Unfortunately, I could not find my brother’s face among those I assembled from the disaster sites.
His brow furrowed as he thought back to the disaster victims the Maidens had brought him yesterday. He had used the verbal alms as a pretext to gather up the blind and injured, but none of the visitors to Cloud Ladder Gardens had looked a thing like Gomei. Despite Genyou’s efforts to maintain anonymity, the enemy might have realized what he was up to.
If so, he’s bound to make a run for it. Tan has stationed his men all around Tan Pass. Anyone who attempts to flee the area is sure to be caught in his net.
He would lure the man out and block off his escape. Genyou was in the habit of employing two-pronged strategies. Over and over, he assured himself that everything would go well.
For now, I should order a careful sweep of the area for any desiccated corpses lying about. If the search yields results, that will prove that the sorcerer is storing up qi in preparation for a body swap—and that he is somewhere in the vicinity.
As Genyou watched the sunrise soak the floor in its hue, he stood from his bed with repugnance. For the past twenty-five years, he had never once welcomed the dawn of a new day.
Why isn’t Tan back yet?
Idly stroking the flute by his bedside, Genyou thought of the head of his secret service. For all the man’s insolence, he was highly skilled at his job, yet he had never shown up last night to give a report. Granted, the emperor had heard word of Shu Keigetsu tumbling down the mountain in her palanquin, so it followed that Tan would still be in the mountains as well. One would never guess it from his personality, but he was quite methodical with his work. Now that Genyou had ordered him to find out whether Shu Keigetsu was a sorcerer, he would use every trick in the book to put pressure on her and confirm the facts.
Still, it was taking far too long. With the Day of Ultimate Yin fast approaching, Genyou regretted wasting a master spy like Tan on unmasking Shu Keigetsu.
If it turns out that Shu Keigetsu is innocent and has no information of value, this will have been a complete waste of time.
Just as a small sigh escaped his lips, he heard a voice from the window behind him. “Excuse me, Your Majesty.”
Genyou whirled around. He had sent all his pages elsewhere, so there was only one person who would enter his room without hesitation.
“You’re late.”
“Believe it or not, I actually came down from Treacherous Tan Peak as fast as I could.”
The man who had let himself in without so much as a sound was the same one Genyou had just been thinking of: Tan of the secret service. Or, to call him by his true name, Akim. He was supposed to have disguised himself as a porter for the Congee Conferment Rite, but his neat bun had come undone, his face was back to normal, and he had stopped making the effort to hide his tattoo.
He glided across the room with the ease of a cat, then offered Genyou a perfunctory bow. “May I give my report?”
“Proceed.”
“I caught Shu Keigetsu wielding magic on Treacherous Tan Peak.”
Genyou’s hand involuntarily clenched around his flute. “Did you find any evidence of a body-swapping spell? It wasn’t someone else in her body, was it?”
“I can’t say with certainty. I put her through water torture, but she never confessed to anything of the sort.”
Not a moment after that solemn reply left his mouth, Akim snapped to attention and took a great leap backward.
Wham!
A sword had streaked across the room and struck the spot where he had just knelt.
“Preposterous.” Genyou was the one responsible. Without batting an eye or kicking up a hint of a breeze, he had drawn the displayed sword from its sheath and hurled it at his spy. “I refuse to believe that you would be so incompetent.”
Detecting a deep fury in that icy voice, Akim stroked his chin with a distressed twist of his lips. “Aw, jeez… I guess that was a stretch, huh? I was sworn to secrecy, so I figured I’d try playing dumb. Hmm, but if I refuse to come clean, I might die by Your Majesty’s hand instead… I’m caught between a rock and a hard place here.” His stubby fingers slid up to the black lizard tattoo on his temple. “For my reference, does this tattoo look like it’s about to catch fire? Supposedly, I’m cursed to have my whole body burst into flames if I report anything related to a body swap.”
“Oho.”
Genyou didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a water jar sitting in a corner of the room and emptied its contents onto Akim.
“Yikes! That’s freezing!”
“That ought to last you a little while. Now get to talking while you’re still wet. If that won’t suffice, I will happily toss you into a well.”
“Boy, what a considerate boss I have.” His face twitching, Akim swept back his wet bangs. Then, so casually it was hard to believe his life was at stake, he told all there was to tell. “It turned out she had swapped bodies with Kou Reirin. It’s true that she didn’t confess to being a sorcerer while I was torturing her, but that’s because she was actually a different person on the inside. As evidence, the real Shu Keigetsu rushed to Treacherous Tan Peak upon learning her body was in danger—in Kou Reirin’s form, of course.”
The color drained from Genyou’s face. He picked up the flute once more and squeezed its bloodstained tassel in his hand.
“Where are they now?”
“I had them undo the switch, since it would get hard to keep them straight otherwise. Or, well, they were the ones to suggest it, technically.”
Genyou’s voice came out hoarse, while Akim’s response was as breezy as could be. At that point, however, Akim touched his tattoo to check on how it was doing. When he found that it hadn’t so much as heated up, he muttered, “What, seriously?”
After that, his explanation grew more confident. “I was originally planning to take only Shu Keigetsu into custody, but then Kou Reirin and the others who rushed to the scene—the crown prince, her brother, and so on—threw a fit. It was getting to be a nuisance, so I doused Shu Keigetsu in water to keep her fires in check and brought them over as a group. For the moment, I have them all tied up in a deserted area.” He pulled back his hair as he spoke, losing patience with the water dribbling down his chin. “They claim to have something to say for themselves. A desperate plea for their lives, I assume? I’ll take you to where I’ve detained them. Do with them as you see fit.”
“Well done,” Genyou tersely replied, not the least bit upset to hear that his own son and the non-sorcerer Maiden were among the apprehended. All he cared about at the moment was wringing information out of Shu Keigetsu. Everything else was equally irrelevant to him.