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The sea took. This wasn’t any kind of secret; it was a truth you lived and breathed beside, in Water. Fishermen carried amulets and prayed for safe passage and consulted shamans for fortunes, for ships, for routes, tracked stars and storms and currents. Villages paid tithes to the Four Kings. Shinobi left offerings on roadside shrines, or on altars in deep water, or set far out on craggy coastlines, hid in strange coves.
Offerings varied. Fish and gold for sea kings; rice and dumplings for lesser spirits, alcohol, old cotton and textiles. Sometimes someone would leave something for the Lost, and those were easy to spot; there’d be a design scrawled over the surface. A whorl of flame, or a tear twisted into a whirlpool, depending on how you looked.
(The Lost were something on the edge of awareness, in Water. The idea of ghosts coming back and taking. Food, or boats, or cloth. Warmth, and loved ones, and life…)
(If you left something for the Lost, the idea went, they’d be drawn to the spiral’s centre — to the promise of flame — the reasoning varied, but the story stayed the same. You made offerings, you left them trinkets. You hoped any lonely demons claimed your offering, and didn’t come into your house seeking more than you could afford to part with.)
Landbound lords might think themselves above such toils and trifles. What was a superstition beside a king, kept in lofty safe towers? These preparations fell to unseen work, carried out by servants and peasants and a thousand little people scurrying blessedly under the king’s notice, and if the gods liked your offerings they might be enough.
But always, always the sea took.
You made an offering to the gods and they considered it. A village might be made a promise. Good harvests for this long. This many men gone.
But you did not know and you did not know when and luck was ephemeral, divine favour secret and strange and not always in line with the ideals of mortals. And beyond them and around them and below them and sometimes, perilously, above, the sea took.
And further below those storm-churned waters there were altars and gods and god-kings, and below those altars and those kings’ shining courts there was the sea floor full of bottom feeders and volcanic vents and monsters, and below that — if you dug into the caves and coral and stone and eternity — there was the Abyss, where the lost went to linger and things that went there only rarely came back.
He didn’t mean to lose himself, though it must have been rare that anyone did.
Or maybe he did mean it. Maybe — soaked in blood and close to breaking and thinking that, really, there must be anything besides this — maybe he had decided better lost than this, and cast himself into the sea. Memory was murky.
What he remembered, was: blood on his hands. What he remembered was: his teacher, taking a bag of coin, smiling like a secret.
What he remembered, was: his katana, biting cleanly into flesh, faithful and efficient and then discarded when its job was done. It was only a tool.
There wasn’t a fight. Kisame hadn’t left the chance for one.
And then he was in strange country, wandering in a moonless night. And then he was staggering toward the scent of flame. And then — and then — the sea rushed in, and he had enough about him to think that it shouldn’t have been so, but no pain had released him from genjutsu’s grip and when he called on his summons they answered and still when he turned around he wasn’t in any forested country at all, but somewhere deep, deep below the crashing waves of the stormy Eastern Sea. Fish scattered from him and disappeared in all directions.
His gills sucked in water. His weapons corroded.
He called summons to be sure he wasn’t in their realm; they came in clouds of foam and bubbles, seemed as confused as he did. He asked them to find an exit, and watched six sharks split in six directions and disappear into dark caves that spiralled away from him. He twisted his body and remembered how to swim, he kicked out, he looked for something.
It was something to focus on, besides anything but this. It was strange and terrible and for a long moment he forgot why he’d been walking into those woodlands at all, only that he should have been inside them, that he needed to go back to them, and that he had no idea at all how he’d ended up here.
The sea took. But it was supposed to take you when you were somewhere on the coastline, or else out on vast water. Not like—this.
It was natural that water burial was common in his country, for all that the mainland balked about it. Land was in short supply and the sea was vast and sprawling. Rites varied. He’d heard the north would send you out on a boat into the Frozen Sea loaded with kindling, and have an archer shoot flame onto the bow once it was well in the harbour. A burial for men in good regard, for lords and kings. He’d never asked what was done with commoners, and no one had ever told him, but he suspected it was something closer to home.
You prepared the body. Held the funeral, if there was to be a funeral. You brought it out to sea, an hour before dawn’s light, in a sturdy ship. Funerary ships varied by the town. Sometimes it was a trawler repurposed for the day, and sometimes it was a sprawling confection of gold and finery, strung with streamers and sutras. The important part was it be blessed by a priest, and that you have a man with a drum who could keep a steady beat no matter what came after.
The spouse of the deceased might be allowed along; sometimes they would throw themselves after the body. The body, bound for funerary rights, would have the ties around it undone and the tarp drawn open. Six strong men, unclean caste if you had them, shinobi or soldiers if you didn’t, would heave the naked corpse up on the unwrapped death-shroud and lower it into the water by the same ropes that had bound it.
As the sun crested the water, sharks would be drawn in by the bell, and around the boat the waves would turn black and churning.
(Red sunrise meant something different in Water than in most places. In Konoha, a red sunrise meant a summer storm, welcome rain, a beautiful day. In Water it meant funerals. Red sunrise for storms rolling in. Red sunrise for hurricanes. Red sunrise because the sharks were hungry, and sometimes those little trawlers weren’t much against the frenzy, and remember — this many men gone, and you didn’t know who and you didn’t know when.)
In Kiri, you weren’t dead until your body hit the water for the last time, and the sea took you home forever.
A ruined ship. The vessel’s title, half-obscured by spreading algae, took a moment to uncover: night… bright… ah. Yoake.
He turned away from the unfortunate name and swam around the wreck. Inside and scattered on the ground around it was an embarrassment of treasures; overturned crates of wool and cotton and silk, barrels of oil and alcohol, books. Books and paper and scrolls, luxuries untold, rotting along stone shelves at the seafloor.
He wasn’t dreaming. He could smell brine and blood on the water, the foetid wood rot, the dust and sulfur of the deep sea. He wasn’t in a genjutsu. He kept checking anyway.
He wasn’t sure he was anywhere, or how he might have moved from one place to the other. He wasn’t in the realm of summons. So, where…
He took up a scroll and drew the water from it, testing its integrity with a fingertip before he dared draw it open. Water’s climate was unkind to wood and its derivatives. It wasn’t uncommon for paper to be made of shredded cotton, sized with animal glue, in a manner utilised for artists’ papers in other regions. So it was not a complete surprise to find the scroll intact; it told him that the contents were likely important. Wood-pulp pages were destined for disposable use, cotton for more lasting records. He dared hope it was a ship log, or trade receipts, something that could tell him where he was or whose ruined ship he was settled in the shadow of.
What he’d opened wasn’t a trade log. It was names. Names on names, dates, provinces. A census, maybe. He worked his way down, trying to make a pattern of it.
It kept going. He’d unravelled his height of the paper and it kept going. A very involved census, then. But not useful to him. Kisame hesitated over the paper, calculated his time wasted, and then rolled it away again to tuck back with the others. Perhaps if he tried another.
More names. Ships, this time.
Kisame paused when he reached a familiar set of characters, near the middle of the list. Yoake. He considered the ship beside him, the date on the page, the likelihood of two residents of Water naming a tradeship Dawn. Could have been a coincidence.
Here and now, without knowing how he’d come to be here, he didn’t think he could write it off as coincidence.
That scroll was rewound and returned with the others, too. He checked the other books and found… something approaching an answer, or it might have been were things not already so strange. Clan registers, families with bloodline limits. Families long extinguished. He might have found one of the Fourth’s dumping grounds.
Maybe he’d been dumped there, himself. Couldn’t imagine how it had happened, or why he’d be alive for the doing, or how they’d ever caught up without his notice. But he didn’t have a lot of other explanations. Tried to break a genjutsu that wasn’t there, again, for habit.
Stretched out his senses, after, looking for something. There was nothing but the faint energy of his summons, swimming labyrinthine tracks and seeking exits, scattered around him.
He was good at this. He knew he was.
That was the problem, really. If he’d been bad at it, he’d have something to focus on, a locus for the ebb and flow of frustration, a point to blame.
But he was good at this: he was one of the best, and he’d proved it every year he kept living.
Every month he came back, every day he soaked himself in blood, he knew, and that was the whole trouble of it. A shinobi was a tool for use and a vassal served his lord and these things should have left him satisfied.
He was good at his job. He could be satisfied with that. Why… was it, then.
Analysis was useful insofar as completing your assignments. Superiors pleased with a subordinate clever at ferreting out enemy tricks wouldn’t find themselves quite as happy if some equally clever subordinate ferreted them out. He did his best to be the first kind, and buried the impulse to be anything else as deep as he could.
The longer he stagnated, left adrift with this niggling sense of sick tired wrong, the closer that impulse came to resurfacing.
He got nosy. He was a shinobi. Of course he had.
Someone lived down here. He came to that revelation quickly. There were shelves past the shipwreck.
Not natural shelves, variations in a sea floor; real wood structures, stretched between feldspar towers and lightly coated by barnacles and by algae. Stained scaffolds turned black-violet by the brine, but not disintegrating. Distressingly whole.
There were items collected along those shelves. Seashells, trinkets; a child’s doll; a piece of boro; a pile of broken cups, mismatched. A spill of red gems crusted with mineral and salt over a rotten scrap of silk; they smelled strongly of blood, and when he brought one to his face to inspect it he realised they were made of the stuff.
They should have broken down in the water. Maybe they were and that was the source of the scent.
A section of gem as-yet covered caught the faint light of above and glittered, brief and bright and golden.
Kisame put it back with the others and turned his eyes upward.
There was a cavern ceiling overhead. Or he thought it was a cave they were inside, until he’d seen that light. When he looked longer — no, he wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t sure where the light was from, either. The sense of wrongness grew. He called back his summons, who appeared one by one from the dark passages ringing the cavern.
“Anything?” He asked, and was met with a chorus of refusals. One of them, a nurse with a scar along his left flank from a fisherman’s spear, admitted to the tunnels twisting back on themselves.
“It’s not just a maze. The path changes.”
“But you found me.”
The sharks circled; not as uneasy as him, but unhappy. “That was easier. I think… It was trying to send us back to you.”
The implications of that might have been comforting, if Kisame didn’t focus on the idea that the tunnels could have just as easily directed them away. He could still summon them back the usual way, he could have, and yet.
Yet nothing was right about this place.
“When you look up,” Kisame said, turning his gaze toward the cavern ceiling, and disliking that it wavered. “What do you see? Could we leave that way?”
The sharks considered that without replying. One and then another swam up to investigate, stopped well shy of the top, and circled back.
“We could take you back with us,” the great white supposed. She was the largest of the summons, and the least suited to navigating caves in the dark deep. Kisame had called for her out of a sense that if you didn’t know where you were or how you’d got there, you really wanted backup, and the bigger and toothier that backup the better.
“Could you?” Kisame was amenable to trying. She made a noise of agreement and flicked her tail, disappeared over the edge of the ship and then dispelled herself. He watched the spray of bubbles drift over the prow. Waited.
The reverse-summon didn’t come.
The other sharks exchanged looks. Another narrowed their eyes and dispelled themselves.
The four left kept a tighter circle around him.
He tried to call the first two back. The jutsu took — he knew it took. There was a frisson of chakra, a pop of displacement, a pull behind his stomach as something tried to force its way from one world into another.
And then the pull reversed and the jutsu fizzled, and he and four sharks were swimming alone on the sea floor, somewhere with unclear lighting and unnatural paths, beside a shipwreck, with no clear reason for anything about the situation. Kisame took a fortifying breath and thought of explanations on a rapidly dwindling list.
Undispellable genjutsu. Yagura’s dumping ground. A place where contracts could be refused — a place that had let him call summons, before.
He was forced to consider new boundaries to test, and newer and unhappier possibilities for his location. What were the chances he’d ended up in a Court, anyway? The sharks assured him it wasn’t theirs, and he believed them. The place seemed too desolate.
Yet there were items on the shelves, arranged like someone often came to view them. And between some of those shelves was a throne, cut to the size and shape of something far bigger than Kisame, strewn with thick pillows and more water-worn textiles.
(What had he been doing in the country? What didn’t he remember?)
The space changed. His sharks, which had been swimming aimless, stirred to attention and swam — in four directions, each seeking something far from what Kisame had noticed. There was a pocket of water between two shelves that he felt shift from empty to occupied in the space of a few breaths, and he was focused on that — another Kiri shinobi, a strange technique? — when a tentacle the size of his upper arm drifted over the back of the throne and coiled there.
Kisame twisted to redirect and swam further from the throne. The tentacle drew itself up in bunches; the body that followed was massive, dark violet and speckled with matte-velvet skin. Kisame tried, again, to dispel the genjutsu.
Something changed. The shape wavered.
The awareness of someone else in the area moved from a pocket of empty water to the mass in front of him — to the creature drawing itself up between the shelves, sprawling long limbs across the space and covering it. The outflung web of a spider. Leaving meant running the gauntlet.
The nearest tentacle to him, the one curled over the throne, unstuck itself and drifted out.
His heart hammered. He was looking at a summon, or a jutsu, or something—
Something that wavered in front of his eyes — something that shifted between a massive octopus, coated with algae and barnacles from its long sleep in the dark, and something faintly humanoid, though too long and too large to be human. A sea priest, or a jutsu, or something, he kept telling himself something, because it was there and now he had to decide whether it was an enemy or a neutral party.
Probably an enemy. Something that big could make a meal of him. He called back his sharks, again.
One luminous eye opened, on the side of its head, and blinked at him. Looking at it made his stomach churn and his head ache, so he stopped looking, and focused on the pebbled skin of the head in place of it.
He’d only called one combat summon. The four sharks left with him were a leopard, a nurse, and two black-fins. Flexible species, good at navigating tight spaces and strange tunnels. Not so good at outright battle.
Kisame tried to call another shark, and when she wouldn’t come, another.
The pull came. Took.
He felt his chakra leave him in a rush, more than it should have, and a tiger shark spun out of nothing and swam toward the octopus to investigate with teeth.
Blood hit the water. The octopus didn’t recoil, the way a living thing should have. It watched the shark tear a bite from one outstretched arm and, slowly, unwound its other tentacle from the throne.
The blood clouding the water excited the other summons, and they drew closer.
Kisame inhaled; euphoria gripped him, hot and coiling and foreign. The shape wavered again — the water grew dark — a deep, unnatural blue, like gemstones, before stars burst into existence and he could feel the beat of his heart in every centimeter of skin and there wasn’t one great eye but a dozen smaller, scattered over the crown of a pointed hat, arranged on tentacles far smaller than the beast he’d been watching, and there was a man draped over the back of the throne, blindfolded, and staring at him nonetheless; staring like Kisame was the most interesting thing he’d seen in a very long time, or possibly ever.
Hello, a voice called from inside his chest, and Kisame very nearly tried to claw it out.
Memory muddled, again. He remembered blood, enough to bathe in, and he remembered his summons converging — a cloud of black ink — a spray of viscera. A soft, pained sigh, settled deep inside his body like whatever they’d killed had taken up its home in his ribs.
He remembered growing heavy, and he remembered that the ceiling was gone, that they could leave, that there was a churning cloud of something in lieu of hard stone and he could swim through dark or silt or anything if it meant escaping here.
And then he swam through the dark and found another shipwreck, far worse and far older than the last, to judge by the rotting skeleton of the hull.
He swam closer, and thought — must have been the Sea Wife’s Strait, if he was under the Arashi. There were a dozen wrecks there every year, more; people trying to brave the whirlpools and currents or fleeing officials or just damn unlucky. Young sailors or foolhardy drunks, testing their mettle.
A little of the interior remained. He found a brass plaque, badly patinaed, with the characters eaten away. Still, in the shape of the first, he thought he could read Yoru.
Yoake.
The awareness of being watched came after. He swam from the skeleton and twisted around.
There was no single point this time — no other chakra in the dark, not even his summons. Had he sent them away?
Had they taken the damage to dispel on their own?
His head ached, and memory refused to intrude. He was alone.
The water was different, jewel tone cyan and star flecked, faintly wavering with light. When he reached out his senses even the fish were gone; Kisame was surrounded by vast nothing. Kai didn’t resolve it.
He couldn’t pinpoint the eyes.
He swam away from the wreck, chose a cave, and went looking for another way out.
And swam, and swam, in tunnels that twisted back and went nowhere and with no path staying the same for longer than a circuit. Swam himself almost to sleep, before the voice came back.
If I come out, it whispered, in a tone that was soft but not enough to cover the edge of exasperation, are you going to attack me again?
Kisame jarred himself awake and reached for a kunai, so riddled with rust it tried to fracture in his grip. “No,” he said, steady and even friendly, and brought a smile to his mouth. “Of course not. That was you, then?”
The voice was silent, the sense of being watched steady. There was a faint impression, conveyed by shifting currents and the vast lifelessness of the cave and some peripheral sense shinobi most oft styled their instincts, of scepticism.
… alright, the voice allowed, but if you are lying, I may leave you to wander. Your teeth are rather unpleasant.
“Of course,” Kisame agreed, tone warm, heart hammering. The tides shifted again — the sense of another mind in the dark shifted, here and there and everywhere and then abrupt and focused on a point ahead of him, three body lengths away, where it managed to halfway resolve into the man with too-long limbs and a broadly brimmed cap, before Kisame closed on it and tore in with rusted blade and hard white tooth.
After? Hours of wretched peaceful nothing, enough that he was growing sick of it, and tired besides. He wanted to go home. He wanted to be nowhere, and nowhere was where he’d ended up, and perhaps there was something fundamentally broken about him, that he kept achieving what he wanted and he was still unhappy… or maybe hours trapped in limbo were making him maudlin.
There’s a way out, you know. You do… know, right?
Kisame twisted in the water and found nothing, except that the distant awareness of observation had returned. “You’re still alive?”
… that’s something of a loaded question. You seem tired. Perhaps we could discuss it over tea?
Kisame bared his teeth and turned, seeking a target. The voice — nowhere he could latch onto, unless he wanted to lay himself open — sighed in a way that filled Kisame up and made his stomach flip. His grip tightened on the crumbling blade. “You can’t keep me here. I’ll find a way out.
That might pose something of a problem.
The currents displaced; there was a moment where he could feel a body beside him, and he lashed out and caught nothing but swirling water. Kisame twisted and lunged again after the shifting awareness, and everywhere his blade caught or his fingers closed it would disappear and then pop up somewhere else, never far; most likely another shinobi using teleportation to toy with him. If they made the mistake of letting him catch them again, they’d regret it.
You’ve already tried leaving. How did you find it?
“Excuse me? You dragged me back here — you can let me out,” Kisame seethed, and darted after another brush of chakra.
The voice still lodged inside him let out a disconcertingly human grumble, as if from deep in its the throat. I haven’t. I don’t. If something comes unmoored, it might drift down here — that’s all.
“I was in the woods,” Kisame accused it, snatching up another empty current. He knew by now that it was a pointless game meant to exhaust him, but he was angry enough to play for a while longer. “How would something drift to you from the woods, friend?”
A long moment of silence, a sense of surprise and then befuddlement. One of the entities didn’t slip back out of reality quickly enough, and Kisame closed his fingers around waterlogged silk. He dragged it forward — the stranger appeared between whorls in the current, one arm outstretched and caught by the wrist in Kisame’s fingers, mouth pursed in a moue of discontent. Half a body, bloodless but cut off at the chest, like someone leaning into another room. Reminded him of the Hōzuki brothers, and he disliked it more for the false-familiarity.
I suppose, the man in front of him said, or must have said; at least his lips moved to match it, mouthing something disconnected from sound. The voice was still inside of Kisame; far, far louder than before. That you must have been terribly lost, if you were the woods and crossed over to here.
Kisame reeled his captor in and caught a hand in the cowl of his robes, and smiled with real pleasantry. The man grimaced and shied back from his teeth. The eyes on the hat — the damn eyes tracked him.
“Are you a defector?” Kisame asked, head cocked. “Never seen a bloodline limit like this. Tell you what: it’s not really my business, if you knock this off and let me go.” He didn’t mean it; if someone could trap him here and they were stupid enough to let him go, he was rearranging his priorities to make sure they never caught him again, and there was a very quick and permanent way of ensuring that.
He felt easier, with the problem in front of him. There was a solid body — a well of chakra — a problem to solve. When he kicked back he pulled the stranger with him, and the rest of their body was pulled out of whatever pocket dimension they’d seen fit to toy with him from. Outside of it they might have made a proper fight, if they had strength to match their size. Bigger than Fuguki, and he had to marvel at that, because Fuguki had been monstrous.
This monster was slender and unarmoured. The long limbs were thinner than they ought have been for any kind of fighter, a little too thin to seem natural, with jutting bone and blue veins outlining white skin. The body was weak. Whoever he’d caught wasn’t a taijutsu specialist, if they could fight at all, and didn’t rely on illusions and spellwork wholesale. The clothes reinforced the impression. Long thin robes, the only metal was a necklace of shiny baubles, gems ornamenting the limbs, thin leather strips wound around the face and the forearms. A defector turned wannabe mystic. Those happened sometimes. Especially since Yagura had started culling the old ways, those happened; people could make up any kind of nonsense and the poor bastards who needed something to believe in, something that said things were different once, would latch on…
The tentacles were admittedly new, but hanyou existed. Maybe this was… another variety. That would explain a lot. And it would make someone uniquely suited to work the mystic angle on a downtrodden populace. (It would also make whoever he was facing at least seventy, unless someone had kept another hanyou’s birth very, very quiet. Unlikely. Yet.)
The man in his grip felt uneasy, as he should have. Kisame’s grip tightened.
“Tell me how to leave, if you would.”
The man’s hand came up and folded over Kisame’s, long and broad enough to cover it entirely. Kisame’s gaze flickered down. The man made no effort to pry up Kisame’s fingers. The gem on the back of the sleeve gleamed strangely, like a bloodstone except when it wasn’t; and then it was a strange bright eye in flickers. Kisame forced his breathing to steady. Kai. Nothing.
Does someone know your name? The voice asked from the edge of his awareness, and the sense that his captive was uneasy shifted and rearranged. He wasn’t afraid of Kisame, but he was afraid of something. If someone knows your name, and they call you — you can follow that home.
Kisame squeezed until it should bruise. The man’s lips thinned.
If you don’t have that, he said, slowly, with a hint of pain. Then it will be a long way back.
“But I can leave.” Kisame flicked a suspicious glance over the area around them. Dark caves and a stone throne and a ruined ship, roiling clouds overhead. “Now.”
Always, the voice agreed, though Kisame hadn’t been able to before. Kisame examined it and then the storm above them, and then cast his eyes below; he’d drifted back to the centre of the place without his noticing.
The throne had greenish smears along the back of it. Bloodstains, long oxidised. Those hadn’t been there before. No scent of blood on the water.
“How long have I been here?”
The man’s head tilted. There was a deformation in the blindfold-cloth, of brows furrowing. Softly, from low in Kisame’s back, came: How long have you been lost? Minutes, years, hours. I can’t tell you that.
I’m only the keeper.
Kisame didn’t dare let go of them. He squeezed hard enough that the bone should break, and when it didn’t, he laid his other hand on the man’s shoulder and started to twist. There was another moue of discomfort, a moan of pain that left a rattle in Kisame’s ribs. The voice said,
You’re being remarkably rude.
Which Kisame resented. “You are keeping me prisoner.”
You misdirect your anger.
Something tore. Snapped. A low moan of agony filtered through the depths of him, other and alien. The voice came ragged. You have been here — as long as you thought there was no way back. And you will be here — until you decide on a course — and follow it. If you don’t—
“I’ve asked you nicely.” Another twist and jerk of his arms. Sometimes people needed emphasis. He was a patient man.
If you don’t, you will come back here. The voice managed this while thin from pain, and Kisame was coming around to the idea of stamping out bloodlines — at least when they produced something this monstrously inconvenient. It took a good deal of brute strength to rend a limb from its body. Kisame was very irritated, and so he made the effort for the demonstration.
The man’s blood clouded the water, red-violet where it wasn’t murky black. Kisame remembered the sense of euphoria from hours past — days? — and forced himself not to open his mouth and taste it. The blood had something to do with it. He’d been able to make out the shape once he’d tasted the blood.
He’d lost track of his summons and himself after tasting it, too.
The man’s head turned, tracking the path of his discarded arm while it drifted toward the sea floor. (There was an image, broken and shaking and gone, of a katana discarded — a tool clattering to the floor — the blade chipped on concrete, but it didn’t matter whether the tool broke after you discarded it, and he had a new sword to take— but then he was here, and he pushed the memory out of sight.) A little cloud of silt stirred up where the arm landed.
The voice was strained. The emotion — it seemed mostly offput, which was less emotion than a fresh-severed limb was really due. I liked this robe. I wish you hadn’t torn it.
Kisame reached for the other arm. “I’ll shred your whole body if you don’t give me better answers,” he told the man, letting his smile crawl wider. “I don’t mind a bit.”
The man tensed in his grip and tried to draw back, and couldn’t really manage it — squishy caster, had to be. It told him, You are the most intractable person I’ve met in the last decade. I have told you how to leave. However will this aid your task?
“Either you’ll give me better directions, like I asked nicely for, or I’ll make myself feel better taking out the pain on your corpse.” This was simple, eminently understandable, and should make sense to his company.
The man did not seem to agree with him on these points. His hand twisted in Kisame’s grasp and caught against Kisame’s bicep. It felt — it felt very nearly like the limb of a cephalopod—
Kisame lashed out with his rust-worn kunai, and broke it off in the eye of the monstrous octopus. The lid squeezed shut over it too late in a cloud of blood, and a tentacle caught his ankle — wrist — limbs, then dragged him down into the dark below the mantle.
That hurt. I’m confiscating your things.
Really, really coming around to the idea of bloodline purges. Kisame opened his eyes.
It was dry here. It still smelled like the ocean. He wasn’t using his gills to breathe, and there was a table laid out with a tea set, and candles scattered around — around — his mind stalled.
There was a space around him, a cave looking out to the seaside, and his awareness of anything past that was curiously blank. The stars weren’t in the sky; they hung on the air as motes of light, unnaturally close, dimming and brightening in time with the respirations of the space.
The chair in front of him was empty until it wasn’t. The man was back after, less like teleporting and more like he’d simply… slid into place. His robe sleeve had been pieced back to the body with red thread, and he had a frown on his mouth, and his arms crossed. One of the tentacles that emerged from his head, the way hair should have, picked up the teapot to pour steaming streams of liquid into nacre-inlaid cups.
Kisame’s kunai was gone. His shuriken. His sword.
He reached for the teapot, and the man drew it out of his reach.
No. No. You have done enough.
Kisame found he couldn’t stand, and counted this as the newest in a series of insults against him. When he got loose, he’d cut this man into so many pieces that plankton could make a meal of him.
The teapot was heavy iron, a squat design with designs impressed on the sides of it. One of them caught his eye — a whorl of flame, or a teardrop turnt into a whirlpool, depending on how you looked. That stalled him, a moment.
Roadside shrines, and the sea taking. Sometimes he’d seen things cut with that image.
Kisame considered the man in front of him in light of that, and discarded the thought almost instantly. Kisame was alive. If this was a ghost, especially the sort of ghost that took, he wouldn’t have been.
… but there were all sorts of ghosts in the ocean. Kisame tried to get out of the chair again, and considered that a priest would be convenient for his purposes. “If the idea is keeping a mortal, you’ll find I’m not good company.”
Then you’ve realised I’m not like you, the maybe-ghost said, with some relief. Still in his chest. Kisame didn’t like how that felt at all.
“Will you quit that?”
I’m afraid this is the only way I can speak to you. The ghost leaned back in its chair and frowned a little more. I suppose we could play charades. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do that — I may not be very good at it.
Kisame kicked his own chair over. The world wobbled a moment, and then something pushed him back upright. He swore.
The ghost pushed him a teacup. You’ve decidicated yourself to this aim, I see. One set closer to home would be better. It paused a moment and tipped its head to the side, considering something. The eyes narrowed to slits — the fabric distorted around them, Kisame thought, but he couldn’t really be certain because he couldn’t focus on the damn things without his head swimming — and then widened. Think of somewhere you go to be alone.
“Die in a pit and let eels eat your bones,” Kisame snapped, and took the tea when it was pushed closer to him to stare balefully at the cup. “Is this drugged?” It seemed pointless to drug him, but everything else about this was pointless so wild suspicion was most of what he had to fall back on.
The man’s head tilted.
… no. If you listen to me, I’ll tell you how to get home. Picture somewhere—
“I go to be alone. You’ve mentioned.” Kisame’s head hurt. “I need to go back to where I was. I can’t—I can’t disappear in the middle of a mission, do you understand that?” Frustration was bleeding into his voice, and he couldn’t force it down far when he focused on it. Hours in the strange dark were catching up. He’d thought he was stronger than this.
He had no idea how long he’d been here, or what was waiting when he went back home.
That probably won’t work, the voice said, with a hint of something like apology that Kisame believed exactly none. If you could find your way then you wouldn’t be here.
“What do you want?” Kisame pulled at the chair again. “I’m not unreasonable. I’ll work with you. But I cannot stay here.”
… we’re putting aside that you’ve killed me twice, then?
“Reasonable kills,” Kisame muttered, because they had been. “If you don’t want to end up dead you shouldn’t startle people.” He was being looked at like he was something of interest, again, and he disliked it. “Who are you?”
Ruri, the man said, without hesitating at all. Kisame supposed it was a use-name.
“No clan?” He pulled at his bonds. “You’re a shinobi or, what, a ghost? Did I fall into your haunting ground?”
Something to that effect, yes. I’ve been attempting to communicate as much. Is there a particular reason you’re willing to believe it now?
Well, he couldn’t leave the chair and he couldn’t throw the teacup. He’d been trying. His hands wouldn’t work, and his stomach had the particular churning feeling he associated with being held down and used which… well. It wasn’t… it wasn’t in the usual sense, yet it certainly did apply, here.
The ghost didn’t force him to drink. Kisame tried to appreciate that he had that left up to him, but the anger wouldn’t ebb. Being held captive would do that. Being treated like a doll, it was a miracle he could think much of anything. “Your arm’s back,” he reasoned, staring at the limb in question. Ruri looked down at it, then unfolded his arms and held them up, palms flat and open, for Kisame to confirm.
Yes, it was the limb he’d ripped off, or a close imitation. Flesh and probably blood. He licked the back of his teeth and put down the cup, testing what he could do. “Right. I suppose I owe you an apology. In my defense, I’ve never actually met a ghost, and assuming you were an enemy combatant seemed… reasonable.”
Ruri took a drink of tea without replying to that. Despite the blindfold, Kisame was left with the impression that he was being blinked at, and regarded sceptically besides. Is someone being unlike you the same as their being a ghost?
“… I’m afraid I’m not a good conversation partner for theology, either.” Nor the physiology of souls; his understanding of them was limited to a general and straightforward suite of information, mostly applying to various ninjutsu, and that the pesky things left the body once you killed it. He didn’t understand how they worked while they were still inside, as was apparently the case here.
Usually killing someone sent those off. Sometimes they could be caught and sealed into something else, but it was easier to snatch one anchored to a body than catch it while it was loose. They had a terrible habit of slipping… right out of reality.
Familiar, that. He would have been better off keeping his temper earlier. He realised that with no amount sense of annoyance.
Ruri took another drink of tea, then let the tentacle holding his cup drift away. He brought an arm up to tap spindly fingers against the sallow arch of a cheekbone.
It might be beside the point, Ruri allowed, and settled deeper in his seat; someone preparing for a long wait. I could let you go into the library. He sounded doubtful. But… things that are lost in there, they find themselves in other and stranger places. You want to go back to somewhere. That’s not the same as anywhere, yes?
He decided to dislike being led by ghosts as much as being puppetted by them. “I’ll think of somewhere I go to be alone,” he decided, and picked a place of no strategic importance.
Pictured it for several long seconds, for all it was worth. He knew he was still in the cave, could still smell the ghost and tea, feel the twisted chakra of his company. Nothing else happened. Kisame frowned at Ruri. “That’s all it is, right?”
A side street in Kiri should be fine, under those criteria…
It has to be somewhere you know well enough to picture. If you shut your eyes you could step out into it — can you do that?
Kisame drew his lip back and wracked his mind for somewhere that wasn’t sensitive but was slightly easier to actually recollect. He hated ghosts. “What do you want for this?”
… want?
“For my leaving. There’s conditions.”
Oh. Ruri leaned forward, setting an elbow on the table and resting his cheek in the hand. Well, of course. You can only come here once, unless you’re marked. Once you leave, you can’t come back.
Not what he’d meant. “If I leave right now, I owe you nothing.” No tithe, no souls, nothing to collect on. Couldn’t be that easy.
There was a sense of disconcertment, and Kisame wasn’t sure how much of it was his. He did his best to picture the Iron Coast, a thicket he’d spent years hiding in. The northern wind had twisted the trees there until they were gnarled and misshapen, more like demons than foliage. The name of the area was more plebeian; most of Water’s iron ore came from mines scattered along that coastline.
There was a particular tree with huge roots; upflung, arching things that let the waves lap under them when the tide was high and hid wet sands and little creatures when the water receded.
Ruri’s voice came as if from a distance, fainter, muffled: You were running.
Something pulled in his stomach. He tried to push the voice away and thought of home.
Trees and the sea breeze, the north road, the mangrove. And the path past it, winding down into a salt marsh and a glade of mangroves. Hulking dark forms gathered over low lying land as vultures on a corpse. Always something rotting, in the mangroves, and always the salt marsh stunk of it. More birds than he’d seen anywhere else in the world, nesting on the ground or in the trees, picking at rotting fish caught in sloughs when the tide left, fine if it was foggy. If the sun was out, though, or if it was a dry season. If the roots were thirsty, and the water burned off or the earth drank it up. Then those fish would suffocate, and the birds came down in swathes of glittering dark wings…
It’s something broken, isn’t it?
He’d had a crow land beside him once. He’d been in the shadow of a tree, thinking about courts and home and clothes, a blue juban. A teacher that favoured him. He must have been still enough that it mistook him for stone.
(Always something broken.)
Crows weren’t any good to eat, and he’d never had one land close enough to look, before this one. It had a scrap of fish in a sharp beak, a dark glittering eye that watched him while it snapped down the morsel. He remembered thinking it was bigger than he’d expected.
The crow let out a low, guttural croak. He remembered that. It was an ugly noise. He remembered smiling, and knew he was dangerous. The bird cocked its head like he was something interesting. Hopped back onto its other foot, and called an inquiry.
He knew the way back from here. That was the trouble.
(The voice was growing fainter. Just on the edge of hearing, now.)
… How many times… did you try to lose the path?
He remembered it the way he remembered the look of his gear. Well-worn, familiar, catalogued and set away. Somewhere so well-known he barely remembered anything about it clearly. The crow had been an aberration. It called to him twice, jumped back, and leapt off the muddy ledge to wheel away into a red-lit sky, leaving eddies in the mist behind it.
Kisame breathed in the stink of something rotten. Curled his lip and opened his eyes; muddy earth churned over, prints from a fishercat, the beat of a heron’s wings. And the chatter of crows. Kisame stumbled forward into the salt marsh and caught a hand against the old mangrove, panting for breath. His fingers closed on a whorl in the bark, and he felt it change; wood crept and hissed and wound itself out of a spiral and into a tear drop. He took his hand away and saw the mark glaring out from the bark like a warning, and squeezed his palm against the phantom burn.
Kiri. He was outside Kiri. He needed to go back, salvage what he could of the mission. Discarded the idea of reporting what he’d seen, because no one would believe it, and forced himself to turn onto the path. Evening fog was rolling in.
The rot-scent grew stronger, the longer and further he walked. A quarter mile in growing dark, his weapons gone, and his body aching, he walked, and all the time the scent of dead things burrowing deeper into him until he was half mad with it, convinced that every tree was a strung out corpse.
The path bent, and the branches bowed down over it, secret keepers. Mist whispered around his ankles. He walked.
A heavy yellow moon drifted over the woodland, unmoored, blessedly full. It was enough to see by, diffused by wet air and painting the clouds ghostly silver.
He came down the hill slowly, listening in the dark, and heard a clacking beak — a crow muttering in the branches overhead.
There were feathers in the mud. He couldn’t see past two meters. The road was well-worn; he took his eyes from it only long enough to check that the crows were staying well out of reach, before he resumed his following.
The smell was so thick that it churned in his gut, coaxing bile to his throat. Pressing a hand over his face did little to change it.
Somehow, he found it hard to stay on the path, that if he let his eyes slip up from the road a moment he’d almost stagger off into the fog. He caught himself thrice with one foot off the path. It was only the north road. He’d walked it a hundred times.
The thick fog should have been welcoming, a veil to conceal him. He couldn’t make out landmarks for the curtain of it, and had to find his way one step after another.
Time dragged. He might have walked hours. Ahead of him, a shape resolved against the roadside: a bedraggled and gutted lump, stinking of carrion. He should have moved past it. Any other night he would have. Tonight his limbs were lead; tonight he was tired, and it stunk so badly he thought he would vomit, and he caught himself wondering what could have smelled so utterly wretched to force bile to his throat.
He drew closer, and he looked. A shaft of moonlight broke through barren trees and rolling fog — enough to pick out the angled head, surrounded by a scatter of black feathers. The eye socket pecked bloody. The distorted jaw, with gore trickled down from the corner long dried.
Someone had ripped it open, a hack job so thorough he couldn’t speak to species in more than approximates, but the teeth were still in the jaw. He’d seen worse. He didn’t understand why it forced up the sickness he’d been trying to keep down for all his walk. Kisame threw a hand to his mouth and stumbled past the shark to the treeline just before the vomit came.
The fog didn’t clear after he’d spent his sick over the brush, but he found it… easier, a shorter road in a softer dark, with a little of the oppressive quiet receded, a little more life in the world, like it had become more real around him.
Kisame believed in ghosts like he believed in gods; distant things, not likely to touch you, yet… better safe than sorry, wasn’t it? Better not to meddle outside of your sphere. A shinobi had enough to concern himself with, in the land of living. Are you scared of them? You shouldn’t be. You should be scared of me.
Yet. A dead shark well inland, picked clean on Kiri’s north road. Whatever he thought of anything else, whatever he made of stumbling through the dark — that wasn’t a sign so much as a bullhorn. He wanted to say he hadn’t lived this long by ignoring the obvious, but he wasn’t sure he could back that anymore.
The sea took. Water was superstitious because it was a place surrounded by sea. When you lived on an island you could never forget long that you were very small, and that the sea had given you up once, twice, for a lifetime. And someday it would call you back.
Someday, if something worse didn’t catch you first.
He left a token in every offering bowl he saw, every meagre shrine, on his way out. He figured he’d need it.
He wasn’t ready to go home yet.