Haruto pushed open the tavern door to a motley collection of hostile stares, exaggerated shivers, and one bearded bear of a man frozen with his drink halfway to his mouth. He took a single step inside the tavern and kicked the caked snow from his sandals. He eyed each of the patrons, hand on his katana. They were all men, some wearing kimonos, others still in their work aprons. The owner fretted over a clay cup, wiping at it with all the vigour of a newly wedded couple. Snow drifted in behind Haruto, settling on the floor.

“Out the way, old man,” Guang growled, shoving Haruto in the back and sending him stumbling into the tavern. “It’s colder than a snowman’s shoulder out there.”

Guang Meng bustled inside and slammed the door behind him, then shook the snow from his heavy fur cloak and hung it on a hook next to the door. The tableau broken, the tavern lurched back into life. Conversations resumed and the two newcomers were all but forgotten. Guang had a wonderful habit of putting folk at ease, even without trying.

They found an empty table in the corner, as close to the fire as they could manage, and Haruto knelt before it. He took his five ritual staffs from the holster on his back and leaned them against the wall behind him. Then he slid his katana, saya and all, from his belt and laid it on the floor next to him. Always within reach. A shintei should never be without their sword, not that he was a shintei anymore. Hadn’t been for so long he’d almost forgotten the rituals. Guang all but collapsed on a pillow by the table and then set to lounging. He stretched his legs out and rubbed his cracking knees.

“Have I mentioned I hate Ipia?” Guang asked quietly as he struggled to get comfortable. He was a small man who wore his age like a ratty old cloak, loved well enough to keep, though it stank of mildew and was held together by a few threads and a handful of hope.

“Once or twice,” Haruto said, smiling. “Today at least. You’ve been quite reserved for a change.”

“Would chairs be such an imposition?” Guang said as he brushed ice out of his patchy beard. He’d long since lost his hair, but he loved his failing attempt at a beard. He claimed it kept his face warm, even as he complained about the cold.

“If we had chairs, you wouldn’t be able to reach the table,” Haruto offered unhelpfully.

Guang grunted and wriggled about on the pillow, folding one leg under him, then trying the other. “Cabbage!” he swore. “At least give us a bigger cushion.”

“I hate that vow of yours,” Haruto said. He ran a hand through his long hair, shaking out the snow that clung there. He shivered as a chunk of ice slivered down his back.

“I don’t give a turnip what you hate, old man,” Guang said and chuckled.

The owner arrived and bowed to them. A tall man with a cherubic face and kind eyes, he glanced at the ritual staffs against the wall and his eyebrows jumped like a bean on a drum. “What can I get you?”

“We’ll start with two bottles of wine,” Guang said, finding himself some cheer amongst the grump.

“Three bottles,” Haruto corrected his friend. “We’ll have company soon enough.”

“She’s here?” Guang asked, glancing about the tavern. “I don’t see her, old man.” The owner glanced at the two of them in turn, a question forming on his lips.

Haruto shrugged. “Some food too, whatever you call the house special.” He waved a hand in Guang’s direction.

Guang fished inside his purse, pulled out five lien, and handed it to the owner with a wink. “I keep the money or the old man will lose it.”

“Old man?” the owner asked, glancing between them once more. He gestured at Haruto. “He does not look old, but you…” He fell silent when he saw Guang’s glare. “Apologies.” The owner bowed low.

Haruto pulled out a little wooden imperial seal from the sleeve of his kimono and held it up. “And if you could hang this in front of the bar while I’m here, I would be grateful.”

The owner’s eyes lit up like a sunrise. “We have work for you, Master Onmyoji. Wait right here and I’ll fetch your food.” The man dropped into another respectful bow, then grabbed the seal, and shuffled away.

“Work work work,” Guang mused. “What I wouldn’t give for a day off.”

Haruto scoffed. “One of us has to earn some lien.”

“Hah! I’ll have you know I’m heavily sought after in Hosa.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Powerful men send me gifts to have me pen their histories.”

Haruto rolled his eyes. They’d repeated this conversation every other day since they left Ban Ping. “They really don’t.”

“Women swoon over my words.”

“Not for a good twenty years.”

Guang narrowed his eyes at Haruto. “With hurtful words, the dagger drives deep. But the ice does crack, and beneath, the water runs clear.“

Haruto chuckled. “You are a terrible poet.”

Guang scratched a hand through his beard and nodded. “I admit, it wasn’t my best.”

The owner brought them three bottles of wine and some cups. Haruto poured a cup for himself and set another aside. After a while, a small tortoise crept out of the kitchen, plodding toward the table. It stopped next to Guang, stared up at the ageing poet, and pawed at the table with one stumpy foot.

Guang glanced at the tortoise. “Do it yourself.”

The tortoise made another laboured attempt to raise a foot high enough to mount the table, failed, and looked at Guang once more. Then it opened its mouth and whistled.

With a sigh, Guang whisked the tortoise from the floor, flipped it over and placed it on the table, shell side down. The tortoise flailed at the air with its legs.

“That’s a little mean,” Haruto said.

Guang scoffed. “She can right herself if she wants to. Just likes to play at being helpless.” He leaned down to stare at the little beast, reached out a finger and poked it, setting it spinning around.

With an audible pop, a dark ball of fuzzy hair the size of a kitten leapt free of the tortoise. She looked like a giant dust bunny with wide eyes and thin, hairy legs. She paraded around the table while the tortoise waved its legs about in the air. Shiki was a playful little spirit who loved to possess animals, but she rarely gave much thought to the position she was leaving them in when she gave up the possession. She stared at Guang with wide, glimmering eyes, she pushed a spindly arm out of her furry body and shook it at him, chirruping softly.

“What’s she saying?” the old poet asked.

Haruto smiled. “She says you’re an ignorant brute.”

Guang flipped the tortoise onto its feet, then set it down on the floor. “I shouldn’t have bothered asking.” The tortoise turned and walked back toward the kitchen.

Shiki gave up her tirade and waddled over to the third cup of wine. Her thin legs never seemed strong enough to hold her weight, and she always seemed so ungainly in her natural form. It was probably why she often possessed animals instead. She sat down on the table in front of the cup of wine, her legs vanishing as if they had never existed, and lifted the cup in unsteady black paws. A wide mouth opened up within the depths of her fur and she swallowed down the wine in one gurgling gulp. She licked her lips, then her mouth vanished as if it had never been there. She’d been Haruto’s companion spirit for as long as he cared to remember, but her antics still never failed to make him smile.

“Delightful,” Guang said.

Haruto shrugged.

“No no no,” the owner said when he arrived carrying two bowls of what appeared to be steaming broth. “No… uh, animals? They frighten my tortoise.”

Shiki glanced up at the owner, blinked at him, and then looked at Haruto and fluted.

“Shiki isn’t an animal,” Haruto said. It seemed he had this same conversation with every tavern owner in Hosa, Ipia, and Nash. Well, maybe not Nash, but then they didn’t even care if you brought a horse into the tavern with you. “She’s a spirit.”

The tavern owner gawked for a moment, his eyes flicking to Shiki and then again to the ritual staffs against the wall. “A yokai? That’s worse.”

“She’s not a yokai,” Haruto argued. “She’s a companion spirit. My companion spirit.”

Guang scoffed. “Yokai cause trouble. She causes trouble. What’s the difference?” Shiki glared at him.

“You’re not helping, Guang.”

The tavern owner stood there red-faced, holding their food hostage.

“Shiki,” Haruto said, nodding at her. She stood, twirled around on the spot, leapt up onto Haruto’s shoulder, and stared at the owner for a long moment, blinked and vanished. Haruto could still feel her little hairy tail tickling the back of his neck. He’d pay for it later. Shiki hated going invisible.

“I thought your kind kill yokai?” the owner said as he placed the bowls on the table.

Haruto winced. “I’m an onmyoji,” he said. “We don’t kill spirits. Well, we do, but only evil spirits. Yokai mostly. Shiki is not a yokai.”

Guang slurped his wine and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. “I have written a few poems about his deeds. Perhaps The Battle of Two Bridges? How did it go? Two bridges crossed the river Shou, yet only one could you see. The other led to parts unknown–“

“Guang,” Haruto said, shaking his head. Apart from being a terrible poem, it painted neither of them in a bright light.

The tavern owner frowned and then waved another of his patrons over. A squat fellow with a messy scraggle of hair and an apron so stained with old blood it belonged on a battlefield stood from a crowded table and approached.

“Nobu.” The owner gestured to Haruto. “Tell them.”

“You sure?” the man in the apron asked.

The owner nodded. “He’s an onmyoji, even has the empress’s seal.” He pointed to the wooden charm Haruto had asked him to hang on the bar.

Nobu glanced at the charm, then at the ritual staffs, and finally at Haruto. “Have you heard of the Wailing Woman?”

Guang chuckled and took another sip of wine. “Have we heard of the Wailing Woman?” He crossed his legs, put his hands on his knees and leaned over the table. He was going to tell a story. “Have you?”

[ Image: ink_flourish.png ]

Long ago, before Hosa’s ten warring kings and before Cochtan’s infernal Blood Engines, the world was a more peaceful place. Hara Chinami, a young woman with eyes like a hawk and hands steady as a buried rock, loved to paint and produced some of the finest works of art Ipia has ever seen. So revered was her skill that Ise Katsuo, the Emperor of Ipia, despite her humble birth, wished to bestow upon her the honour of painting him. To render him immortal with her brush. But Hara looked upon the emperor, and her piercing gaze saw beneath the surface of the man, for that was her true technique – not her skill with the mixing of paints, nor her flourish with the brush, but to see the truth of things. She refused Emperor Ise, declaring that she only painted scenery. Valleys so beautiful none could look upon them without tears, a river so lifelike it swept viewers away upon currents of brush strokes.

Emperor Ise was not pleased. After all, he was the emperor and nobody refused the emperor. He came to her again the next day and demanded she immortalise him in her vision, make a painting of him so vivid that all who see it would weep. Again she refused, for Hara was strong like the konara trees of Mount Soka, and she was not easily intimidated, not even by the emperor. He was not the first powerful man to make demands of her.

Enraged, Emperor Ise sent soldiers to Hara’s house. They dragged poor Hara Chinami away in chains, burned down her home and all her paintings. Inside the palace grounds stood a well long since dried to dust and mud, and into its black depths they threw Hara. Ise Katsuo placed a cover over the well so no light shone down. Until Hara agreed to paint him as only her skill could render, she would see no light, no colour, none of the beauty of nature that so inspired her. She would make art of him, even if he had to break her first.

Hara wept. She had tried to spare the emperor the pain of looking upon his true self, for that was what her brush would reveal. But in refusing him, she had revealed him all the same.

Come the tenth day of Hara Chinami’s incarceration, Emperor Ise pulled back the well cover and stared down upon her. She begged him to free her, and he demanded she paint him. Of course, she refused, knowing that to do so would only stoke his ire. For when men like Emperor Ise Katsuo are forced to look upon their genuine selves, they always place the blame for what they see on others. Ise ordered the cover replaced and left Hara to the darkness.

On the fiftieth day of her incarceration, long past Hara’s counting, the emperor came to her once more. Again, he demanded she paint him. Again, she refused. She believed he would set her free. For despite the monster she saw in him, she would not do as he asked, and he would see she would not be broken.

Hara was wrong. Emperor Ise replaced the cover and went in search of another artist of equal skill to paint him.

Three years passed and three hundred artists failed to paint Emperor Ise in the glory he knew he deserved. Compared to the divine skill of Hara Chinami, all others were amateurs. He went to the well, certain that after three years of darkness and isolation, Hara would have no choice but to agree to his demands. But when he pulled back the well cover and stared down into the darkness, it was empty. He sent men into the depths to search for Hara, but they found no sign of her, no tunnel out, no remains. No trace of the woman at all.

That night, a terrible wailing woke everyone in the castle. It came from the walls, from the floor. It rose from the foundations and echoed all the way up to the stars. None could find the source of the ghastly screams, but everyone knew the voice. All had heard Hara crying down in the well. For three years, all had heard the artist’s screams.

The next morning, soldiers opened up the emperor’s rooms to find them empty. He had vanished. Hanging above the emperor’s bed was a new painting. Ise Katsuo’s likeness painted in shades of red. The canvas reeked of blood.

No one ever saw Hara Chinami or Ise Katsuo again. But Ise Katsuo is forever remembered as the Crimson Emperor. And now and then in the dead of night, if you listen hard, you can still hear Hara’s chilling wail echoing from the well.

[ Image: ink_flourish-1.png ]

The entire tavern had fallen silent to listen to Guang’s rendition of the Wailing Woman, and a few of the men looked terrified.

Most village stories of nearby yokai were nothing but fiction, but Haruto had to wonder if perhaps there was some truth to this one. Though he had lost count of the inconsistencies in Guang’s tale, he had learned over the many years they had been together to let the poet tell tales his own way. There was no better way to drive up the price of dealing with a yokai than to attach a ghastly story to its history.

“It can’t be Hara Chinami,” the cherubic tavern owner said.

“There is a well at the academy,” said a man with a bulbous nose covered in a web of red veins.

“She only wails at night,” said a rakish man with a hair lip. “We’ve all heard her.”

“So I was right?” Nobu said, wringing his hands together. Haruto took him for the town magistrate, despite his bloodstained apron, dishevelled hair, and the substantial bags under his eyes. Suchi did not appear the most prosperous of places, and in remote towns the magistrates often held other jobs. “It’s a yokai? A vengeful spirit on account of the academy burning down?”

Guang heaved himself to his feet, knees popping. “Heiwa Academy burned down?” he asked, grabbing Nobu’s arm.

Nobu tried to pull his arm free, but Guang held on tight. “Uh, yes. Two weeks ago. The students and teachers have all disappeared, and no one will go search for them with the Wailing Woman haunting the ruins.”

Shiki whistled in Haruto’s ear. There was a yokai close by, she told him. One steeped in pain, driven mad by a desire for revenge. The vengeful spirits of the dead came back in many forms, and it was his job to send them on their way.

“There’s the matter of payment,” Haruto said. “Onmyoji do not work for free. One hundred lien, and I will deal with this yokai of yours.”

Nobu coughed and gaped at Haruto. “A hundred lien?” He glanced at the other patrons for support. Most of them looked away. “We couldn’t possibly manage that. You must understand, Master Onmyoji, that much of Suchi’s income came through the academy. Without it, we are struggling to pay many of the artisans who moved here. I could scrape together fifty lien.”

Haruto pulled his pipe from his kimono and set about packing the small bowl with loose leaf. The pipe had a long, plain wooden stem, and the bowl was copper and bell shaped. It was not the best pipe he’d ever owned, but he had a regrettable habit of losing them. He flicked a glance at Guang.

Guang cleared his throat. “Hara Chinami is an exceptionally dangerous yokai,” the old poet said, not missing a beat. “The older they are, the more dangerous they are, as I’m sure you wise fellows know. And if much of your income came from Heiwa, well, I assume you would want the area cleared of danger sooner rather than later so you can petition Empress Ise Ryoko to rebuild. We are not uncaring, but there’s the danger to consider. And the law states that onmyoji do not work for free. That is Imperial law.”

The magistrate looked to the baby-faced tavern owner who gave him a brief nod. “Sixty lien is the absolute most we can afford.”

Haruto finished packing the bowl and tucked the stem in his mouth. Shiki reappeared with a pop and leapt into the lantern on the wall behind Haruto, possessing the flame. She floated over to them, eyes wide as a full moon and mischievous inside the flames, and lit the leaf in the bowl. Haruto puffed a few times to get it burning and nodded. Shiki popped back into her spirit form, her flames guttering out, and scrabbled up Haruto’s kimono to sit on his shoulder. “Sixty lien will do just fine,” he said around a mouthful of smoke. “We’ll deal with your yokai as soon as I’ve finished my soup.”