Piotr scowled, leaned closer, pointing to his blind right eye. “Touched!”
“I haven’t laid a finger on her, if that’s what you mean. We’re just friends.”
Michi coughed, mumbled something inarticulate. Akihito ignored her.
“No, no, can’t do for the touching.” Piotr seemed alarmed. “She Zryachniye. Is white, da?”
“She’s half white. Half Shiman. And I talked to her about her eye. If there’s something special about it aside from the color, she hasn’t noticed it in four years.”
“Of course.” Piotr looked at the big man like he was simple. “She sleeping.”
“Sleeping?” Akihito rubbed his temples. “Listen, no offense, but you make as much sense as my grandmother when she’s smoked her ‘arthritis medicine.’”
Piotr sighed, exasperated. His eyes roamed the floorboards as if the dead leaves were scattered words, searching for the right ones to collect into a sentence.
“Gods?” he finally said. “You Shima have gods? Uzume? Fūjin? Izanami?”
“Izanami is a death goddess.” Akihito made the warding sign against evil. “But we have gods. So what?”
The gaijin held his hand to the sky. “Gods.”
He held his other hand down low. “Girl. You pretty girl.”
“Izanagi’s balls, she’s not mine…”
Piotr reached down with his “god” hand and lightly touched his palm with one finger. Looking impossibly pleased with himself, he smiled and said “Zryachniye.”
Akihito blinked, then downed the rest of his saké. “Zryachniye…”
“Da! Good is for him.” Piotr clapped his hands, tapped his forehead. “Was thinking he for slow, but no, no, is good. Haha.”
“Right.” Akihito lowered his voice to a mumble. “Round-eye corpsefucker…”
The drum of pounding footsteps hushed Akihito’s thoughts. The big man looked across the garden, saw Hana sprinting along the verandah toward them. Her jagged bob was tangled about her face, cheeks flushed, her eye wide and bright and all aglow. Akihito found himself swallowing a sudden lump in his throat.
The girl stopped beside the table, bent double, gasping for breath. Michi put aside her calligraphy, placed one hand on her chainkatana. Akihito leaned on his crutch, pulled himself upright and put one hand on Hana’s shoulder.
“Are you all right?”
The girl shook her head, glanced at Piotr, trying to catch her breath.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Gaijin…” Hana gasped.
Akihito looked at Piotr. The gaijin was almost standing at attention in Hana’s presence, his eyes downcast from the girl’s face.
“What about him?” Akihito said.
“Not Piotr,” Hana wheezed. “The gaijin have invaded Shima. A fleet. An army. They just hit the Dragon capital. Frontal assault on Kawa city.”
“Izanagi’s balls,” Michi breathed. “Kawa city is a fortress. How many gaijin are there?”
Hana dragged sweat-soaked locks from her face, straightened with a wince.
“Sounds like all of them…”
*
This wasn’t exactly the future Akihito had planned.
His father had been a hunter, his grandfather before him. In a clan of artistes, his were a family of destroyers. And though his head sang with poetry, though in his hands beauty was only a knife and chisel away, any desire to be an artisan had been beaten from him at an early age.
“You can’t make a winter coat out of godsdamned poems,” his father had said. “And there’ll always be animals to hunt.”
On reflection, the old man didn’t have much talent for planning futures either.
When he’d been apprenticed to the Imperial Court at sixteen, Akihito had felt contentment rather than pride. He knew his future now. He’d hunt the hellsborn black yōkai, find a wife (later), give his mother some grandchildren (much later) and that’d be that. A normal life. Not even worthy of a footnote in history. And here he was—twenty-eight years old, not a son in sight, and so far from a normal life he couldn’t imagine what one looked like anymore.
Not what he’d planned for at all.
Eight figures knelt around the long, low-slung table, the scent of burning flowers woven amongst the lantern smoke. Old Daimyo Isamu at the head, thirty paces from his houseguests. General Ginjiro sat to his right, a dozen samurai around them. The warriors were dressed in armor old enough to have been plucked from a museum—Kitsune fuel stores were so low wearing chi-powered armor was out of the question for anyone but command staff now.