“You worry too much,” Masaru smiled.
Six men sat in a semi-circle around the low table of the gambling house, their cushions torn from some abandoned motor-rickshaw. The walls were rice-paper, painted with figures of exotic women and even more exotic animals: fat panda, fierce leopards and other extinct beasts. Low light flickered in the overhead globes. A sound box sat above the bar; crafted out of dull, gray tin, its speaker cans connected to the main unit with frayed spools of copper wiring. Guild-approved music spilled from its innards; the thin wavering notes of shakuhachi flutes, accompanied by the clicking beat of wooden percussion. The growl of a struggling generator could be heard somewhere downstairs. Fat, black lotusflies swarmed among the rafters.
Each man had stripped to his waist in the sweltering heat, displaying a myriad of irezumi—tattoos—in all colors of the rainbow. A few of the players were Tiger clansmen, sporting ink from the hands of minor artisans that marked them as men of moderate means. Two others at the table had no kami spirits marked on their flesh at all, just simple patterns of koi fish, geisha girls and wildflowers that singled them out as lowborn. Known as Burakumin, these clanless types lurked at the bottom rung of Shima’s caste system, with little hope of ascending. Unable to afford elaborate ink-work, a straight razor and a smudged handful of cuttlefish ink was the closest any of them had come to a real tattoo parlor.
The intricate imperial suns radiating across Akihito and Masaru’s left upper arms had been noted by everybody in the room, and not for the fact that the irezumi marked the pair as the Shōgun’s men. There was no shortage of desperate folk in the streets of Downside, some perhaps even desperate enough to risk Yoritomo-no-miya’s wrath, and the simple fact was that the more elaborate a man’s ink, the fatter his purse was likely to be.
Hushed conversations could be heard from the thugs and lowlifes skulking at other tables. Rumors of last week’s refinery fire, news of the war against the round-eyes overseas and whispers about the latest attack of the Kagé rebels on the northern lotus fields all drifted in the air with the smoke.
Masaru cracked his neck and touched the exquisite nine-tailed fox design sleeving his right arm, whispering a prayer to Kitsune. Fox was not as fierce as Tiger, brave as Dragon, nor as visionary as Phoenix. His people were not great warriors or explorers, nor lauded artisans; among the clan kami spirits, he was the easiest to discount. But Fox was cunning and quick, silent as shadows, and in long-forgotten days when the kami still walked Shima with earthly feet, Fox had imbued his people with his most precious gift. The gift of a desperate, uncanny luck.
Masaru rolled a kouka coin between stained fingers; a two-inch rectangular braid of dull gray iron stamped with the seal of the imperial mint. The game was oicho-kabu, a pastime older than the Empire itself. It was Masaru’s turn as first player; he would determine how many cards were dealt to each of the four fields in front of them. He pointed at the second field on the table, asking for another card, and left the others alone. The assembled gamblers glanced at each other and muttered, each bidding his stake a reluctant goodbye.
The dealer was a blubbery slug of a man, his fat, shaved head gleaming in the dirty light. The serpentine design spiraling down his right arm declared him a member of Ryu, the Dragon zaibatsu; once a clan of seafarers and raiders in the dark, uncivilized days before the unification of the Empire and the rise of the Lotus Guild. Irezumi across his left arm heralded his allegiance to the Sasori-kai; a gang that ran the illicit card dens across the toxic portside slums of Kigen city. To find a blooded clansman among the yakuza gangs was a rarity, but from the quality of the dealer’s ink, the syndicate of cutthroats, pimps and extortionists was doing very well for itself.
The man-slug placed Masaru’s declared card on the unfinished wood, and taking the fourth card from the deck, he added it to his own hand. A gaptoothed grin spread behind his braided mustache, and he turned over a maple and chrysanthemum. The gamblers scowled and sipped their drinks. One gave Masaru an unappreciative shove.
Masaru held up a hand, tapped his cards with his forefinger.
“What’s the point?” moaned Akihito. “He has nine, dealer wins ties.”
“Fox looks after his own.” Masaru brushed a lotusfly away. “Turn them.”