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almondinflowerCharacters: Touya, Waya, Suyeong, Yeongha.
Wordcount: 2240
Summary: In a world where divination is used to predict the future and govern nations, State Diviner Touya Akira and private investigator Waya Yoshitaka embark on a search for the heretic Sai, the ghostly diviner who may be the most powerful of them all.
This chapter: ...and finally, Hikaru.
Earlier chapters.
The ferry docked at midmorning. By then Touya was genuinely unwell and dehydrated; Suyeong and I decided that it would be wise to check into a motel until he felt better.
“Mind you,” I commented as we dragged our luggage upstairs, “I asked around and we'll have to take a dinghy out to the ruined city anyway, and Touya'll probably start throwing up again.” I said this mainly to provoke a glare out of Touya, who except for the occasional death-look hadn't been up to human interaction since I woke up.
We shared a room with two single beds and a cot in one corner, which Touya immediately tumbled into. By his own admission, he hadn't slept at all last night. While he rested, Suyeong and I brought out our portable boards and tried to divine the approaching situation – or at least, confirm that performing divinations was impossible in this area.
“Stationary as the dead,” I announced, after about five attempts. “If this isn't the tengen, then it's a stronger star-point than either the Shrine or the Pagoda.”
“I still don't understand how you and Touya identified the area so quickly,” Suyeong said, demonstrating his own inert, failed board. “Isumi told me you had some help from the Honinbou.”
I flipped him a smirk. “Trade secret.” When he looked disgruntled, I added, “It's not so hard if you think about it in terms of necromantic divination and geomancy. I had some help there – I talked to Shindou's grandfather before we set out from Ki.” Suyeong developed that little irritated expression that he sometimes wore when he wasn't following a conversation. I stood up. “Come on, I'll show you.” I led Suyeong to the window and opened the blinds. (Touya stirred a little when the daylight fell across his face, but his eyes remained shut.)
Our room overlooked the sea; we had a direct view of the jutting, coniferous peninsula and the extensive stony ruins standing at its end, facing out to ocean. Seagulls cluttered the sky, circling, hovering, buffeted by a wild whistling wind. On the beach immediately below us, a pair of children were making an energetic terrier fetch sticks.
“Pretty cheery, this place, considering what's lying less than a mile away.” I nodded at the crumbling remains on the headland. “Old Siwang, former jewel of the Go Empire. The city of the dead.”
I could see that Suyeong was making the connections in his head, but was exasperated with my mode of explanation. As far as I could tell, his mode of deduction was systematic, and very linear; I would have questioned his Weiqi abilities if he hadn't proven to be, time and time again, a terrifyingly competent diviner.
I continued: “We've more or less figured out that the geomantic board has been used twice, right? First time, to complete the incarnation of Sai in a new body. Second time, by Touya Kouyou – to seal Sai away again.” Discussion between Isumi and me had resulted in the conclusion that the land goban itself was the only one powerful enough to have destroyed Sai – which meant that the Meijin had died in Old Siwang, somewhere within those massive rotting buildings. I had yet to broach the subject with Touya Akira. “And now a third time, by Shindou, who's trying to pull Sai's spirit back from the realm of the dead. That's the hardest feat of the three by far. Even the greatest diviner on the continent” – and Shindou wasn't yet a contender for the title, surely-- “would have trouble managing that without being able to take advantage of, ah, a certain weakness in the barrier between life and death.”
My backpack was sitting in the wardrobe. I went there to retrieve my copy of the divination record that Touya and I had made the night before last. I handed it to Suyeong to study: The city that watches ocean. Death by water, death by fire, death by air.
Old Siwang was a staple of our history textbooks. Abandoned due to plague in the pre-Imperial Age, fifteen hundred years ago; resettled some two centuries later, only to fall to a tsunami during the cultural and economic peak of the Go Empire. Finally it'd been sacked and burned by the Yihian conquerors, to whom it'd occurred that the site itself might be inauspicious – hence the establishment of modern Siwang, the modest town in which our motel was located.
“I reckon there's at least a couple hundred wraiths haunting those mouldy old structures.” I flopped back on the bed closest to the window. “What do you think?”
Whatever Suyeong thought, it was clear that he felt considerable unhappiness at the idea. I'd have laughed at him a little more, if I weren't so discomfited myself.
At least Touya didn't seem like the sort to be afraid of ghosts.
Right on cue, Touya struggled upright, yawning.
“How late is it?” he asked, fumbling around for his watch. He found it next to his pillow, checked the time, and glowered at me. “I told you to wake me after an hour--”
“Details, details.” I waved airily. “There's plenty of daylight left. How about we go shopping for anti-nausea drugs before we leave?”
The desire to argue flitted across his face, then dissolved as he sagged in exhaustion. “Whatever you like,” he said sulkily.
It was almost endearing. “Just kidding.” I beamed, holding up a small pill bottle. “I stopped by a pharmacy just after we checked-in. Not that you need to express your gratitude or anything.”
“...Thank you.” He said it like it would be breaking some fundamental law of the universe not to say the words. His movements were lethargic but determined as he got dressed and gathered his things.
I remained seated on the bed, waiting, trying not to feel sheer panic.
It was time.
#
One of the locals took us out to the peninsula. Touya did not vomit, or even look nauseous, which I considered a great success. Unfortunately I was feeling too ill myself to appreciate the small victory.
Until today I'd never realised just how much I didn't want to see Shindou.
Luckily I was given no time to dwell on the fact. The young woman manning the boat for us steered between some viciously pointed rocks, then came to a standstill, about five yards away from the beach proper (a sliver of sand really, hardly a proper beach). We were apparently supposed to disembark here.
I'd picked my attire in anticipation of getting soaked, and Touya's loose, cottony outfit coped with the task just as effectively; Suyeong's jeans, however, did not fare as well. The girl agreed to pick us up at sunset. We waded our way up to dry sand, and, while Suyeong was indignantly wringing his clothes dry, stared at the silhouette of Siwang looming on a low cliff above us.
Time had eroded the land and exposed the city to the edge of the sea. It was walled, elevated, and turreted, built from sand-coloured stone that was gradually being weathered away. We wandered up a precarious path leading from the seashore to Siwang's main entrance – a gaping hole that had evidently once been filled by metal gates.
“There's a temple at the heart of this place,” Touya said. “The priests there were divination specialists right up till the end of the imperial age. It's most likely that the focal point is there.”
Suyeong frowned. “So we go there, and then--?”
“Destroy the continental goban. It's not hard to do; any one of us could manage it. But the city might collapse when the board breaks.” Touya paused. “It would be safer for me to go alone.”
“No way,” I said flatly, just as Suyeong answered, “I don't think that'd be a good idea.”
Touya opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, appearing to realise the futility of changing our minds. I refrained from pointing out that I was considerably more athletic than he was, in addition to not being sick, and was probably the only one among us three with a hope in hell of outrunning a building that was falling apart.
We entered the city.
Inside was a world of caved-in shops, broken pediments, lichened statues, bright weeds growing from between shattered cobblestones. Old Siwang was far more extensive than it appeared when viewed from a distance – somehow I'd expected to just waltz in and find Shindou waiting.
“This could take a while,” Suyeong commented.
“The temple should be due south of here.” Touya treaded his way across a long stretch of rubble and into a narrow, shadowy alley. “Walk faster.”
Seabirds had nested in the belfries and towers of Siwang, and their raucous cries echoed over us as we stepped through the lonely streets. Their noise was comfortingly alive – apart from ourselves and the occasional bug, I'd yet to notice anything animate on the city floor.
I'd just spotted the temple in the distance, with its curved tiered roofs and decorative figures on its ridges that were probably imperial-style phoenixes, when the air around us began to crackle.
The world rained fire.
Bright drops fell and seared my bare arms. A cry escaped Suyeong's lips. I whirled, looking for cover, and instead saw a man about my age, sitting lazily on the worn rooftop of a nearby house, a goban beside him.
As I lifted my gaze, he smiled and picked a stone off his Weiqi board. The drizzle of flame stopped abruptly.
The name that Suyeong had called out moments earlier finally registered in my mind: Yeongha.
Ko Yeongha and I exchanged glances, tried, and found each other wanting. He was handsome in an obnoxiously obvious way, with a titian sweep of hair that fell to his waist.
Once more, Yeongha moved the stones on the goban at his side, and a perfect circle of fire rose up around us, dancing and flickering in heat.
“Waya. Lend me your magnetic board,” Touya said sharply. I passed it to him. The nine-by-nine set was still dripping seawater; when he flipped it open, the white and black rounds fell out in clumps and left wet stains on the dusty ground.
Kneeling, Touya placed three stones on the board; the fiery enclosure disappeared.
Ko Yeongha looked rather impressed.
I'd had quite enough of this. I saw a rock at my feet, picked it up, and hurled it through the air, aimed at the centre of Yeongha's brow. About three feet short of its target, the missile imploded into a hundred stone fragments.
“He's got a kind of chaos shield around him,” Touya said, still fiddling with my goban. “Just give me some time to break it apart--”
“Let me do this,” said Suyeong, in a tone that brooked no discussion. “This is what I came here for.”
Suyeong had brought out his own portable board (nineteen-by-nineteen), and was unfolding it. “I'm going to create a distraction,” he told us. “The moment it comes, you two make a break for it. Find Shindou.”
“Okay,” I said quickly, before Touya could protest. “It's a sensible plan.” I had a feeling that Suyeong was pissed off at me for launching a direct physical attack on Yeongha and was trying to preclude me from doing worse, but it was hardly the right situation for hashing out niceties.
Yeongha watched with an amused expression – the kind I would rather have liked to strangle off his face – as Touya and I packed up the magnetic set and Suyeong began setting out his own layout of stones. He appeared to be waiting to see what we would do next.
He didn't have to wait long. Within minutes Suyeong tossed a final stone out, making the formation rattle and spin – and flooding my entire field of vision with a white burning light.
I grasped Touya's hand and ran in a southerly direction.
Some rather impressive explosions followed our departure, judging from the sounds. I didn't stop running until we were a good several hundred yards away from where we'd encountered Yeongha. As soon as we halted Touya began gasping for air.
“You went too fast,” he said, when he'd finished being out of breath.
“We had to get out of there before he noticed we were leaving. You kept up, didn't you? Barely.” He was too winded to retort. I hid my amusement and took stock of our surroundings instead, then whistled. “Well, it looks like we're here.”
Touya turned in the direction of my gaze. Suddenly he went very still.
A moment later, so did I.
The temple rising up before us was set on a raised granite platform, with a massive set of shallow steps leading to its entrance. Five red roofs crowned its exterior, each featuring faded, shattered ceramic dragons. Part of the front wall had been smashed into a spread rubble that spilled right into the courtyard we were standing in.
Someone had emerged from the broken hole in the wall and was now descending the steps towards us.
It was Shindou Hikaru.
“Hello,” he said. “I've been waiting for you.”
On to Chapter 10.
Wordcount: 2240
Summary: In a world where divination is used to predict the future and govern nations, State Diviner Touya Akira and private investigator Waya Yoshitaka embark on a search for the heretic Sai, the ghostly diviner who may be the most powerful of them all.
This chapter: ...and finally, Hikaru.
Earlier chapters.
The ferry docked at midmorning. By then Touya was genuinely unwell and dehydrated; Suyeong and I decided that it would be wise to check into a motel until he felt better.
“Mind you,” I commented as we dragged our luggage upstairs, “I asked around and we'll have to take a dinghy out to the ruined city anyway, and Touya'll probably start throwing up again.” I said this mainly to provoke a glare out of Touya, who except for the occasional death-look hadn't been up to human interaction since I woke up.
We shared a room with two single beds and a cot in one corner, which Touya immediately tumbled into. By his own admission, he hadn't slept at all last night. While he rested, Suyeong and I brought out our portable boards and tried to divine the approaching situation – or at least, confirm that performing divinations was impossible in this area.
“Stationary as the dead,” I announced, after about five attempts. “If this isn't the tengen, then it's a stronger star-point than either the Shrine or the Pagoda.”
“I still don't understand how you and Touya identified the area so quickly,” Suyeong said, demonstrating his own inert, failed board. “Isumi told me you had some help from the Honinbou.”
I flipped him a smirk. “Trade secret.” When he looked disgruntled, I added, “It's not so hard if you think about it in terms of necromantic divination and geomancy. I had some help there – I talked to Shindou's grandfather before we set out from Ki.” Suyeong developed that little irritated expression that he sometimes wore when he wasn't following a conversation. I stood up. “Come on, I'll show you.” I led Suyeong to the window and opened the blinds. (Touya stirred a little when the daylight fell across his face, but his eyes remained shut.)
Our room overlooked the sea; we had a direct view of the jutting, coniferous peninsula and the extensive stony ruins standing at its end, facing out to ocean. Seagulls cluttered the sky, circling, hovering, buffeted by a wild whistling wind. On the beach immediately below us, a pair of children were making an energetic terrier fetch sticks.
“Pretty cheery, this place, considering what's lying less than a mile away.” I nodded at the crumbling remains on the headland. “Old Siwang, former jewel of the Go Empire. The city of the dead.”
I could see that Suyeong was making the connections in his head, but was exasperated with my mode of explanation. As far as I could tell, his mode of deduction was systematic, and very linear; I would have questioned his Weiqi abilities if he hadn't proven to be, time and time again, a terrifyingly competent diviner.
I continued: “We've more or less figured out that the geomantic board has been used twice, right? First time, to complete the incarnation of Sai in a new body. Second time, by Touya Kouyou – to seal Sai away again.” Discussion between Isumi and me had resulted in the conclusion that the land goban itself was the only one powerful enough to have destroyed Sai – which meant that the Meijin had died in Old Siwang, somewhere within those massive rotting buildings. I had yet to broach the subject with Touya Akira. “And now a third time, by Shindou, who's trying to pull Sai's spirit back from the realm of the dead. That's the hardest feat of the three by far. Even the greatest diviner on the continent” – and Shindou wasn't yet a contender for the title, surely-- “would have trouble managing that without being able to take advantage of, ah, a certain weakness in the barrier between life and death.”
My backpack was sitting in the wardrobe. I went there to retrieve my copy of the divination record that Touya and I had made the night before last. I handed it to Suyeong to study: The city that watches ocean. Death by water, death by fire, death by air.
Old Siwang was a staple of our history textbooks. Abandoned due to plague in the pre-Imperial Age, fifteen hundred years ago; resettled some two centuries later, only to fall to a tsunami during the cultural and economic peak of the Go Empire. Finally it'd been sacked and burned by the Yihian conquerors, to whom it'd occurred that the site itself might be inauspicious – hence the establishment of modern Siwang, the modest town in which our motel was located.
“I reckon there's at least a couple hundred wraiths haunting those mouldy old structures.” I flopped back on the bed closest to the window. “What do you think?”
Whatever Suyeong thought, it was clear that he felt considerable unhappiness at the idea. I'd have laughed at him a little more, if I weren't so discomfited myself.
At least Touya didn't seem like the sort to be afraid of ghosts.
Right on cue, Touya struggled upright, yawning.
“How late is it?” he asked, fumbling around for his watch. He found it next to his pillow, checked the time, and glowered at me. “I told you to wake me after an hour--”
“Details, details.” I waved airily. “There's plenty of daylight left. How about we go shopping for anti-nausea drugs before we leave?”
The desire to argue flitted across his face, then dissolved as he sagged in exhaustion. “Whatever you like,” he said sulkily.
It was almost endearing. “Just kidding.” I beamed, holding up a small pill bottle. “I stopped by a pharmacy just after we checked-in. Not that you need to express your gratitude or anything.”
“...Thank you.” He said it like it would be breaking some fundamental law of the universe not to say the words. His movements were lethargic but determined as he got dressed and gathered his things.
I remained seated on the bed, waiting, trying not to feel sheer panic.
It was time.
One of the locals took us out to the peninsula. Touya did not vomit, or even look nauseous, which I considered a great success. Unfortunately I was feeling too ill myself to appreciate the small victory.
Until today I'd never realised just how much I didn't want to see Shindou.
Luckily I was given no time to dwell on the fact. The young woman manning the boat for us steered between some viciously pointed rocks, then came to a standstill, about five yards away from the beach proper (a sliver of sand really, hardly a proper beach). We were apparently supposed to disembark here.
I'd picked my attire in anticipation of getting soaked, and Touya's loose, cottony outfit coped with the task just as effectively; Suyeong's jeans, however, did not fare as well. The girl agreed to pick us up at sunset. We waded our way up to dry sand, and, while Suyeong was indignantly wringing his clothes dry, stared at the silhouette of Siwang looming on a low cliff above us.
Time had eroded the land and exposed the city to the edge of the sea. It was walled, elevated, and turreted, built from sand-coloured stone that was gradually being weathered away. We wandered up a precarious path leading from the seashore to Siwang's main entrance – a gaping hole that had evidently once been filled by metal gates.
“There's a temple at the heart of this place,” Touya said. “The priests there were divination specialists right up till the end of the imperial age. It's most likely that the focal point is there.”
Suyeong frowned. “So we go there, and then--?”
“Destroy the continental goban. It's not hard to do; any one of us could manage it. But the city might collapse when the board breaks.” Touya paused. “It would be safer for me to go alone.”
“No way,” I said flatly, just as Suyeong answered, “I don't think that'd be a good idea.”
Touya opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, appearing to realise the futility of changing our minds. I refrained from pointing out that I was considerably more athletic than he was, in addition to not being sick, and was probably the only one among us three with a hope in hell of outrunning a building that was falling apart.
We entered the city.
Inside was a world of caved-in shops, broken pediments, lichened statues, bright weeds growing from between shattered cobblestones. Old Siwang was far more extensive than it appeared when viewed from a distance – somehow I'd expected to just waltz in and find Shindou waiting.
“This could take a while,” Suyeong commented.
“The temple should be due south of here.” Touya treaded his way across a long stretch of rubble and into a narrow, shadowy alley. “Walk faster.”
Seabirds had nested in the belfries and towers of Siwang, and their raucous cries echoed over us as we stepped through the lonely streets. Their noise was comfortingly alive – apart from ourselves and the occasional bug, I'd yet to notice anything animate on the city floor.
I'd just spotted the temple in the distance, with its curved tiered roofs and decorative figures on its ridges that were probably imperial-style phoenixes, when the air around us began to crackle.
The world rained fire.
Bright drops fell and seared my bare arms. A cry escaped Suyeong's lips. I whirled, looking for cover, and instead saw a man about my age, sitting lazily on the worn rooftop of a nearby house, a goban beside him.
As I lifted my gaze, he smiled and picked a stone off his Weiqi board. The drizzle of flame stopped abruptly.
The name that Suyeong had called out moments earlier finally registered in my mind: Yeongha.
Ko Yeongha and I exchanged glances, tried, and found each other wanting. He was handsome in an obnoxiously obvious way, with a titian sweep of hair that fell to his waist.
Once more, Yeongha moved the stones on the goban at his side, and a perfect circle of fire rose up around us, dancing and flickering in heat.
“Waya. Lend me your magnetic board,” Touya said sharply. I passed it to him. The nine-by-nine set was still dripping seawater; when he flipped it open, the white and black rounds fell out in clumps and left wet stains on the dusty ground.
Kneeling, Touya placed three stones on the board; the fiery enclosure disappeared.
Ko Yeongha looked rather impressed.
I'd had quite enough of this. I saw a rock at my feet, picked it up, and hurled it through the air, aimed at the centre of Yeongha's brow. About three feet short of its target, the missile imploded into a hundred stone fragments.
“He's got a kind of chaos shield around him,” Touya said, still fiddling with my goban. “Just give me some time to break it apart--”
“Let me do this,” said Suyeong, in a tone that brooked no discussion. “This is what I came here for.”
Suyeong had brought out his own portable board (nineteen-by-nineteen), and was unfolding it. “I'm going to create a distraction,” he told us. “The moment it comes, you two make a break for it. Find Shindou.”
“Okay,” I said quickly, before Touya could protest. “It's a sensible plan.” I had a feeling that Suyeong was pissed off at me for launching a direct physical attack on Yeongha and was trying to preclude me from doing worse, but it was hardly the right situation for hashing out niceties.
Yeongha watched with an amused expression – the kind I would rather have liked to strangle off his face – as Touya and I packed up the magnetic set and Suyeong began setting out his own layout of stones. He appeared to be waiting to see what we would do next.
He didn't have to wait long. Within minutes Suyeong tossed a final stone out, making the formation rattle and spin – and flooding my entire field of vision with a white burning light.
I grasped Touya's hand and ran in a southerly direction.
Some rather impressive explosions followed our departure, judging from the sounds. I didn't stop running until we were a good several hundred yards away from where we'd encountered Yeongha. As soon as we halted Touya began gasping for air.
“You went too fast,” he said, when he'd finished being out of breath.
“We had to get out of there before he noticed we were leaving. You kept up, didn't you? Barely.” He was too winded to retort. I hid my amusement and took stock of our surroundings instead, then whistled. “Well, it looks like we're here.”
Touya turned in the direction of my gaze. Suddenly he went very still.
A moment later, so did I.
The temple rising up before us was set on a raised granite platform, with a massive set of shallow steps leading to its entrance. Five red roofs crowned its exterior, each featuring faded, shattered ceramic dragons. Part of the front wall had been smashed into a spread rubble that spilled right into the courtyard we were standing in.
Someone had emerged from the broken hole in the wall and was now descending the steps towards us.
It was Shindou Hikaru.
“Hello,” he said. “I've been waiting for you.”
On to Chapter 10.
