![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fromastudio posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
almondinflowerDice, in a Game of War - ch. 1
Characters: (this chapter) Waya Yoshitaka, Touya Akira
Wordcount: 2100
Summary: The city of Ki is ruled by the seven Oligarchs, guided by the foresight of the State Diviners who monitor the balance of order and chaos. Waya, a former aspiring Diviner, works in the city as a private investigator.
Note: ...the above summary contains nearly the entirety of my worldbuilding and backstory thus far. Be very afraid.
Note 2: No, really. What exactly am I writing here?
From the far origin of all antiquity,
who hands the story down to us?
Touya Akira was waiting in my office when I came back from lunch. Until then it had been a rather good day.
He had broken and entered politely. The front door swung in, unlocked, when I tried the handle; stepping in, I found the room as I'd left it: the lights off, the curtains drawn, the air-conditioner emitting a breathy continuous drone of recycled air. Touya sat before my desk in the half-darkness, his back facing me. While I dealt with my mounting surprise, he stood up, turned, bowed and spoke:
“Waya.”
A good detective is never at a loss for questions. A great detective manages to make his questions sound socially appropriate; ergo, I floundered for seconds before deciding to go with: “What are you doing in my office?” (A classic query, not nearly as overused as people assume.)
Touya bowed again. If he meant to look apologetic, he failed. Touya has never managed to look humble to anyone in his entire life. In my office he was an offense of luxury against my faded painted walls, my bare furniture, the cramped and dreary dimensions of the room. Embroidered cream silk billowed out around his thin figure, making him seem larger than life. Ruby studs glimmered at his ears, and on his fingers rested the rings of a Diviner, one for each rank he had attained. He wore eight rings.
I sighed. “Suppose I can't blame you for deciding to come in; if you'd waited outside in this part of town, you'd have been robbed before you could even think of divining it.” I flicked on the sole ceiling light and took my place behind the desk. “Sit down again and tell me what you came here for.”
He did as I asked, folding his arms in his lap. “You will not like it.”
He was still the same, still Touya, and it both worried and relaxed me. “I've never liked any surprise you brought me. Spit it out.”
“I need you to find Sai.”
All right, so the surprise was more unpleasant than usual. “You've got to be kidding.” A stupid thing to say to Touya Akira, who wouldn't know a joke if if it pirouetted naked in front of him singing lewd lyrics. “Why?”
He hesitated. “Is this office secure?”
The question rankled, bringing to surface memories of inferiority, insecurity, and the eternal chasm between Touya and everyone else in the universe. “I'm good at my job. But don't take my word for it.” I pulled open my desk drawer and extracted a plastic gridded board that had been folded in half, snapped it open. Stacks of tiny black and white magnetic rounds tumbled out. “Check for yourself. Nine-by-nine should do, right?”
I shoved the entire magnetic Weiqi set towards him. Several stones fell to the floor; I didn't care. Touya however, did. He bent down, picked them up, gathered all the black and white pieces into two piles, and then aligned the board so that one side was flush with the edge of the desk, frowning all the while.
Contrary to my expectations, he didn't chastise me.
He began to arrange the black rounds one at a time, picking up each stone between his index and middle fingers and making a composite geometric shape on the board that looked like a pentagon stuck to a square. It took ten stones to construct.
“Place a white stone,” he said.
I used the Weiqi board in my line of work, on a weekly basis even, but I never touched it, never looked at it, without feeling a pang of – something. Not quite regret. A little bit of envy. Far too much resignation. I chose my move, and put my stone in the upper right star, at a diagonal opposite from his black design.
The board rattled, and the stones began to slide back and forth. We waited for their movements to settle. I watched Touya watching the board. His brow furrowed subtly. His breathing was very even. Perfect calm, perfect concentration. Nobody was better or more proper at this than he was. The sounds died down. The white stone was dead center, the black stones clustered around in brief arrangements of two and three.
“The place is secure,” Touya said.
“I know.” I bit back the urge to remind him that yes, I could read a divination, even if I was slower and less accurate than he was. Wasn't everyone slower and less accurate than he was? “Tell me why you're so keen to find Sai all of a sudden?”
“My father is missing.” He said it in the tone of voice most people use for public announcements. “You've heard that the countrywide divinations have been unfavourable for the last several months?”
“Plague in the streets, blight on the crops – everyone's heard. Couldn't have missed the gossip if I tried. Your divining, I assume?”
“Of the State diviners, Ochi and Ashiwara were the first to see the coming disasters. Eventually I was asked to verify their results, and my work confirmed their foretellings.”
There are diviners who, over time, come to believe that their acts of divining themselves affect the futures that they see. No such moral quandaries for Touya Akira.
He continued: “The Council of Oligarchs were determined to do something. Father decided to leave Ki, to see if a solution could be found elsewhere. But it's been months since we last heard from him. Worse still, I can't divine his location.”
As a private investigator, I like to think I can read people's expressions. Touya, however, has always defeated all my expertise in this regard. So the fact that I could tell that he was worried meant that he was very worried. “You know, it's not all that unusual for divination to fail in locating people--”
“It's unusual for me.”
Okay, so he was a very worried arrogant little prick. “You think Sai can help?”
“Father has probably gone to look for him.”
“And failed?”
“I didn't say that.”
I thought about the situation. It was clearly government business – unofficial, since Touya was here on his own. The kind of case I prefer to keep my nose well out of. On the other hand, the job involved the luxury of travelling (and I would make Touya pay the expenses) and a probably-generous fee. Plus if I succeeded, the Touya family would owe me one.
Besides, there was the possibility of meeting Shindou again.
“If you're not interested--”
“I'm interested. State your terms.”
“I need you to find Sai within one month.”
“One month? He could be anywhere in the world. We don't even know what country he's living in.”
“Are you not up to the task?”
An easy hook to fall for, especially when spoken in Touya's haughty expressive voice. But I don't promise more than I can deliver. “I can try. I have as good a chance as anyone else does. Better.”
He reached inside that overdecorated dragon-and-phoenix robe of his and pulled out a cloth bag that jingled heavily when he placed it on the desk. “Five thousand credits upfront; another ten thousand if you succeed.”
I'd known it was a big job; still, my eyes widened. “You know, you really shouldn't be walking around the city with that kind of money on your person.”
“I expect regular reports,” he said, ignoring my comment. Very well. He could do as he liked. He was scarcely defenseless. “You know which address to send it to.”
“What about your father? Do you want me to find him?”
“...No.” The pause was definite, but when I looked at Touya, his mouth was calm, his gaze steady. “I don't need to hear about it.”
“As you wish.” I shrugged. “I do as I'm paid to do.”
The silence grew awkward. Touya said: “I regret that you were not able to join the State Diviners. You would have done well in our group.”
I'd half-seen the blow coming. Even then, he couldn't have landed more squarely if he'd tried. “Diviner Touya, there are some subjects I only allow a few special people to mention to me. You are not one of those special people.”
His almond-shaped, limpid eyes widened fractionally before he bowed his head. “My apologies for offending you. Unless you have any questions, I won't trouble you any longer.”
A queasy sensation sat in my stomach as he left, the door clicking shut behind him.
I recognised the feeling for what it was: profound indigestion.
#
My name is Waya Yoshitaka. I am nineteen. For the last two years I've been a private detective in the city of Ki – the only independent private investigator in this city. In this business most people depend on patronage from the state, or one of the great houses (like say, the Touya family), to make ends meet. Me, I have a special reputation. So I make more money on freelance work than most - at least enough to keep me from bowing to the family I ran away from half a decade ago.
Most of my jobs are pretty mundane. At time of Touya's departure from my office, I had three unresolved cases. The first was the investigation of a merchant's wife, whose jealous husband was my client, who despite my best efforts appeared to be the one of the rare faithful women in the city of Ki. Nothing I said to reassure the man could convince him to stop paying me to shadow her on a daily basis. Not being in a position to complain about easy money, I had gone along with his demands so far.
I pulled out a letter-pad and fountain pen, wrote him to say that I was terminating our contract, and thought about the second case, a Divination request from Kuwabara Honinbou. Divinations make up over half of my income, and old man Kuwabara was one of my regulars. He didn't ask for my services all that often, but he paid handsomely when he did; in return, I didn't think too hard about why he asked me to do divinations for him instead of, as Honinbou, ordering the State Diviners to do so. His requests ranged from topics as trivial as next week's weather to the guilt and innocence of criminals on death-row. I performed all of them using the glossy golden torreya wood board I'd bought as a preteen, that I kept hidden and locked in the cupboard behind my desk, and brought out only when absolutely alone; and sent my answers back with my usual disclaimers about Divination -- in the end, it only tells you what will probably happen, and not in a lot of detail.
Not that old man Kuwabara needed any lessons from me where Divination was concerned. I was constantly torn between questioning his motivations for sending me work (Leftover, misdirected interest in Sai? The joy and delight of being a pain in the ass?) and shutting up and accepting the badly needed money.
Money, we've already established, ranks much higher than curiosity on a private investigator's hierarchy of needs. I would perform the divination tonight, send the results and my bill to Kuwabara.
My third client was Isumi.
I finished my letter, signed it with a squiggle, and after furnishing it with stamp and envelope, tossed it into my empty plastic Out tray. Then I yanked open the file cabinet that sat beneath my desk drawer, drew out the dull pink manila folder marked “Isumi/Le Ping”.
Inside the file was a sole telegram, the one Isumi had sent me three days ago: “Urgent case. Le Ping will visit pronto, bring details.”
Last time I'd checked, Isumi and Le Ping lived in the city of Wuzi in Yih. From there, it took about two days to get to Ki by train, depending on the timetable, which meant that Le Ping might show up any minute now.
It wasn't as if I was looking forward to seeing Miniature Me again, but I needed to meet the brat for Isumi's sake.
Of course, it didn't mean I had to sit around eagerly awaiting his arrival.
I reached for the receiver of my black rotary-dial phone, listened to the monotone as I placed it to my ear, and began to turn the metallic wheel, digit by digit, retrieving an old number from a woolly crevice of my memory.
I had begun my second search for Fujiwara no Sai. I was going to start with the most likely source of information.
Fujisaki Akari.
On to Chapter 2
The couplets at the beginning of each chapter are taken from 'The Question of Heaven', in Classical Chinese Poetry, translated by David Hinton.
Characters: (this chapter) Waya Yoshitaka, Touya Akira
Wordcount: 2100
Summary: The city of Ki is ruled by the seven Oligarchs, guided by the foresight of the State Diviners who monitor the balance of order and chaos. Waya, a former aspiring Diviner, works in the city as a private investigator.
Note: ...the above summary contains nearly the entirety of my worldbuilding and backstory thus far. Be very afraid.
Note 2: No, really. What exactly am I writing here?
From the far origin of all antiquity,
who hands the story down to us?
Touya Akira was waiting in my office when I came back from lunch. Until then it had been a rather good day.
He had broken and entered politely. The front door swung in, unlocked, when I tried the handle; stepping in, I found the room as I'd left it: the lights off, the curtains drawn, the air-conditioner emitting a breathy continuous drone of recycled air. Touya sat before my desk in the half-darkness, his back facing me. While I dealt with my mounting surprise, he stood up, turned, bowed and spoke:
“Waya.”
A good detective is never at a loss for questions. A great detective manages to make his questions sound socially appropriate; ergo, I floundered for seconds before deciding to go with: “What are you doing in my office?” (A classic query, not nearly as overused as people assume.)
Touya bowed again. If he meant to look apologetic, he failed. Touya has never managed to look humble to anyone in his entire life. In my office he was an offense of luxury against my faded painted walls, my bare furniture, the cramped and dreary dimensions of the room. Embroidered cream silk billowed out around his thin figure, making him seem larger than life. Ruby studs glimmered at his ears, and on his fingers rested the rings of a Diviner, one for each rank he had attained. He wore eight rings.
I sighed. “Suppose I can't blame you for deciding to come in; if you'd waited outside in this part of town, you'd have been robbed before you could even think of divining it.” I flicked on the sole ceiling light and took my place behind the desk. “Sit down again and tell me what you came here for.”
He did as I asked, folding his arms in his lap. “You will not like it.”
He was still the same, still Touya, and it both worried and relaxed me. “I've never liked any surprise you brought me. Spit it out.”
“I need you to find Sai.”
All right, so the surprise was more unpleasant than usual. “You've got to be kidding.” A stupid thing to say to Touya Akira, who wouldn't know a joke if if it pirouetted naked in front of him singing lewd lyrics. “Why?”
He hesitated. “Is this office secure?”
The question rankled, bringing to surface memories of inferiority, insecurity, and the eternal chasm between Touya and everyone else in the universe. “I'm good at my job. But don't take my word for it.” I pulled open my desk drawer and extracted a plastic gridded board that had been folded in half, snapped it open. Stacks of tiny black and white magnetic rounds tumbled out. “Check for yourself. Nine-by-nine should do, right?”
I shoved the entire magnetic Weiqi set towards him. Several stones fell to the floor; I didn't care. Touya however, did. He bent down, picked them up, gathered all the black and white pieces into two piles, and then aligned the board so that one side was flush with the edge of the desk, frowning all the while.
Contrary to my expectations, he didn't chastise me.
He began to arrange the black rounds one at a time, picking up each stone between his index and middle fingers and making a composite geometric shape on the board that looked like a pentagon stuck to a square. It took ten stones to construct.
“Place a white stone,” he said.
I used the Weiqi board in my line of work, on a weekly basis even, but I never touched it, never looked at it, without feeling a pang of – something. Not quite regret. A little bit of envy. Far too much resignation. I chose my move, and put my stone in the upper right star, at a diagonal opposite from his black design.
The board rattled, and the stones began to slide back and forth. We waited for their movements to settle. I watched Touya watching the board. His brow furrowed subtly. His breathing was very even. Perfect calm, perfect concentration. Nobody was better or more proper at this than he was. The sounds died down. The white stone was dead center, the black stones clustered around in brief arrangements of two and three.
“The place is secure,” Touya said.
“I know.” I bit back the urge to remind him that yes, I could read a divination, even if I was slower and less accurate than he was. Wasn't everyone slower and less accurate than he was? “Tell me why you're so keen to find Sai all of a sudden?”
“My father is missing.” He said it in the tone of voice most people use for public announcements. “You've heard that the countrywide divinations have been unfavourable for the last several months?”
“Plague in the streets, blight on the crops – everyone's heard. Couldn't have missed the gossip if I tried. Your divining, I assume?”
“Of the State diviners, Ochi and Ashiwara were the first to see the coming disasters. Eventually I was asked to verify their results, and my work confirmed their foretellings.”
There are diviners who, over time, come to believe that their acts of divining themselves affect the futures that they see. No such moral quandaries for Touya Akira.
He continued: “The Council of Oligarchs were determined to do something. Father decided to leave Ki, to see if a solution could be found elsewhere. But it's been months since we last heard from him. Worse still, I can't divine his location.”
As a private investigator, I like to think I can read people's expressions. Touya, however, has always defeated all my expertise in this regard. So the fact that I could tell that he was worried meant that he was very worried. “You know, it's not all that unusual for divination to fail in locating people--”
“It's unusual for me.”
Okay, so he was a very worried arrogant little prick. “You think Sai can help?”
“Father has probably gone to look for him.”
“And failed?”
“I didn't say that.”
I thought about the situation. It was clearly government business – unofficial, since Touya was here on his own. The kind of case I prefer to keep my nose well out of. On the other hand, the job involved the luxury of travelling (and I would make Touya pay the expenses) and a probably-generous fee. Plus if I succeeded, the Touya family would owe me one.
Besides, there was the possibility of meeting Shindou again.
“If you're not interested--”
“I'm interested. State your terms.”
“I need you to find Sai within one month.”
“One month? He could be anywhere in the world. We don't even know what country he's living in.”
“Are you not up to the task?”
An easy hook to fall for, especially when spoken in Touya's haughty expressive voice. But I don't promise more than I can deliver. “I can try. I have as good a chance as anyone else does. Better.”
He reached inside that overdecorated dragon-and-phoenix robe of his and pulled out a cloth bag that jingled heavily when he placed it on the desk. “Five thousand credits upfront; another ten thousand if you succeed.”
I'd known it was a big job; still, my eyes widened. “You know, you really shouldn't be walking around the city with that kind of money on your person.”
“I expect regular reports,” he said, ignoring my comment. Very well. He could do as he liked. He was scarcely defenseless. “You know which address to send it to.”
“What about your father? Do you want me to find him?”
“...No.” The pause was definite, but when I looked at Touya, his mouth was calm, his gaze steady. “I don't need to hear about it.”
“As you wish.” I shrugged. “I do as I'm paid to do.”
The silence grew awkward. Touya said: “I regret that you were not able to join the State Diviners. You would have done well in our group.”
I'd half-seen the blow coming. Even then, he couldn't have landed more squarely if he'd tried. “Diviner Touya, there are some subjects I only allow a few special people to mention to me. You are not one of those special people.”
His almond-shaped, limpid eyes widened fractionally before he bowed his head. “My apologies for offending you. Unless you have any questions, I won't trouble you any longer.”
A queasy sensation sat in my stomach as he left, the door clicking shut behind him.
I recognised the feeling for what it was: profound indigestion.
My name is Waya Yoshitaka. I am nineteen. For the last two years I've been a private detective in the city of Ki – the only independent private investigator in this city. In this business most people depend on patronage from the state, or one of the great houses (like say, the Touya family), to make ends meet. Me, I have a special reputation. So I make more money on freelance work than most - at least enough to keep me from bowing to the family I ran away from half a decade ago.
Most of my jobs are pretty mundane. At time of Touya's departure from my office, I had three unresolved cases. The first was the investigation of a merchant's wife, whose jealous husband was my client, who despite my best efforts appeared to be the one of the rare faithful women in the city of Ki. Nothing I said to reassure the man could convince him to stop paying me to shadow her on a daily basis. Not being in a position to complain about easy money, I had gone along with his demands so far.
I pulled out a letter-pad and fountain pen, wrote him to say that I was terminating our contract, and thought about the second case, a Divination request from Kuwabara Honinbou. Divinations make up over half of my income, and old man Kuwabara was one of my regulars. He didn't ask for my services all that often, but he paid handsomely when he did; in return, I didn't think too hard about why he asked me to do divinations for him instead of, as Honinbou, ordering the State Diviners to do so. His requests ranged from topics as trivial as next week's weather to the guilt and innocence of criminals on death-row. I performed all of them using the glossy golden torreya wood board I'd bought as a preteen, that I kept hidden and locked in the cupboard behind my desk, and brought out only when absolutely alone; and sent my answers back with my usual disclaimers about Divination -- in the end, it only tells you what will probably happen, and not in a lot of detail.
Not that old man Kuwabara needed any lessons from me where Divination was concerned. I was constantly torn between questioning his motivations for sending me work (Leftover, misdirected interest in Sai? The joy and delight of being a pain in the ass?) and shutting up and accepting the badly needed money.
Money, we've already established, ranks much higher than curiosity on a private investigator's hierarchy of needs. I would perform the divination tonight, send the results and my bill to Kuwabara.
My third client was Isumi.
I finished my letter, signed it with a squiggle, and after furnishing it with stamp and envelope, tossed it into my empty plastic Out tray. Then I yanked open the file cabinet that sat beneath my desk drawer, drew out the dull pink manila folder marked “Isumi/Le Ping”.
Inside the file was a sole telegram, the one Isumi had sent me three days ago: “Urgent case. Le Ping will visit pronto, bring details.”
Last time I'd checked, Isumi and Le Ping lived in the city of Wuzi in Yih. From there, it took about two days to get to Ki by train, depending on the timetable, which meant that Le Ping might show up any minute now.
It wasn't as if I was looking forward to seeing Miniature Me again, but I needed to meet the brat for Isumi's sake.
Of course, it didn't mean I had to sit around eagerly awaiting his arrival.
I reached for the receiver of my black rotary-dial phone, listened to the monotone as I placed it to my ear, and began to turn the metallic wheel, digit by digit, retrieving an old number from a woolly crevice of my memory.
I had begun my second search for Fujiwara no Sai. I was going to start with the most likely source of information.
Fujisaki Akari.
On to Chapter 2
The couplets at the beginning of each chapter are taken from 'The Question of Heaven', in Classical Chinese Poetry, translated by David Hinton.
