“Here.”
General Ginjiro’s voice pulled her out of his head, back into the dungeon’s bowels. The stink made her eyes water, and both she and Michi pulled kerchiefs up around their faces. Misaki seemed to be reveling in the new scents and sights now her face was uncovered, and she breathed deep despite the reek.
They’d stopped outside an iron door, nothing remarkable about it, save what lay beyond. Yukiko opened the Kenning just wide enough to feel inside. She sensed the impossible knot of human emotion beyond the door—a kaleidoscope of thoughts, too bright and numerous to look at for long. Her head began to ache like it was cracking.
“I think…” A frown. “I think there’s something wrong with him.”
“Stay back,” Ginjiro warned.
The general pulled aside a viewing slot and peered through, eyes narrowed in the gloom. Unlocking the door, he led his samurai into the cell. Yukiko heard scuffling, a low moan. Ginjiro reappeared in the doorway, motioned the trio inside. His lantern hung on the wall, illuminating bare slick granite, a pile of dirty straw in one corner, and an empty, filth-encrusted bucket in another. Six by six.
The samurai had seized the Inquisitor, one on each elbow, another with his arm locked around the man’s throat. The prisoner was barely an inch taller than Yukiko, sickly gray skin filmed in sweat, wrists manacled. His head lolled in the samurai’s grip as if his neck were broken, bloodshot eyes rolled back in their sockets. An awful bruise purpled his cheek, left eye swollen near-shut. His jailers had stripped him of mechabacus and tunic, revealing a black serpent coiled down his bicep, beautiful and intricate—the work of a master inksmith. The bayonet fixtures in his skin reminded Yukiko of Kin, running his thumb around the input jack at his wrist, standing in the Iishi rain.
“I’d never hurt you. Never betray you. Never.”
“… I know that,” she’d said.
“You mean everything to me. Everything I’ve done. All of it. You’re the reason. The first and only reason…”
The Inquisitor was shaking, drool slicked on his chin. Yukiko recognized the look immediately—she’d seen it in her father on days he’d lost too much at cards and had no coin for smoke.
“He’s going through withdrawal,” she said. “He’s a lotusfiend.”
“I told you,” Misaki said. “They breathe it every minute of their lives.”
“But Kin…” Yukiko faltered. “I was told the Guild had to stay away from lotus. You eat purified food, live inside those suits. How is it these Inquisitors breathe it every minute?”
“Guild doctrine says it helps them to recognize ‘impurity.’ They look into the darkest places so the rest of the Guild don’t have to. Lotus helps them ‘see.’”
Michi’s lip curled in disgust. “I wonder what he’s seeing now.”
The general reached into a satchel on his shoulder, pulled out a small combustion chamber on a leather harness, affixed with a grinning mouthpiece.
“He was wearing this when we found him. We found three others like him on the ships we captured, but they’d all committed suicide. This one was knocked unconscious during the attack, otherwise he’d probably have gone the way of his fellows.”
Yukiko stepped closer to the Inquisitor, wrinkling her nose at his stink; smoke and sweat and something rotten. “Can you hear me?”
A shuddering moan was her only reply, and she sighed.
“We’ll never get anything out of him like this.”
Closing her eyes, she reached out into the tangle of his thoughts. She found them chilled and oily, edged in blue-black, just as impossible to untangle as any human mind she’d tried to touch. Wiping a trickle of blood from her nose she made a face, her head throbbing.
“We could give him some lotus?” Ginjiro aimed the question at Misaki.
“I do not know what will happen if we do that, General…”
The general tapped on the Inquisitor’s forehead with his forefinger, held up the lotus breather in front of the man’s mouth. “You want this?”
Mumbled nonsense. A spray of drool.
Ginjiro affixed the breather over the little man’s face, fiddled with the nozzles on the combustion chamber until it started hissing. The change was astonishing. Within a moment the shakes had stopped. Within two the Inquisitor was supporting his own weight. Within three he’d opened his eyes, and was staring right at Yukiko.
Right through her.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
A voice like a man woken from deepest sleep, still shaking the sand off his eyes.
“Kitsune Yukiko.”
“How do you know my name?”
A rolling, bloodshot gaze roamed the room. “I have been here before.”
“When?”
“Every night for as long as I can remember…”
Yukiko remembered Kin speaking of his Awakening ceremony. The visions of the future he’d seen. “The What Will Be.”
The little man tilted his head, whispering. “Do I dream this now?”