From Darkness, Silence by Moto Maratai
"No wall stands forever. Only duty stands forever."--Kaiu Hosaru, A Perfect Cut
* * *
From Darkness, Silence
by Moto Maratai/Yoon Ha Lee
Dedicated to Helen Keeble and Nancy Sauer, who inspired me with their depictions of honor and darkness. Thanks to Helen for allowing me to borrow Shen, to my husband for the one-line death challenge, to Alioqui for reasons she knows already, to Arabelle for keeping me up all night, and to the RicePaper Society for many helpful comments.
Sequel to From Darkness, a Song and Oni Dinners and Field Rations. Entered in the nth Jade Hand story contest. Also check out Helen Keeble's riff from Shen's viewpoint, In Darkness, Silence.
*
even amid storms
heart breaks, wave crashes, flute mourns
from darkness, a song
In the darkness, Moto Maratai played her bamboo flute. She sat cross-legged, close to the fire, with the other Jade Hand archers as they compared improbable exploits over sake. The firelight changed their faces into cryptic masks of red and orange, accented by moving shadows. Maratai was reviewing pieces from her apprenticeship. She had just begun one of her favorite Crane compositions, a setting for a morbid series of haiku likening death to a lover, when one of the aides-de-camp stepped out of the darkness and toward her.
The aide-de-camp, aware that Maratai preferred not to leave music unfinished, waited fidgeting for her to lower her flute after the last note dwindled into the other noise. "Hiruma-san," she said, reflecting that Kakita Migite's tutelage had not prepared her to play to the tastes of rough soldiers. Though these soldiers were her comrades and friends, after accompanying bawdy, violent barracks songs many an evening, it had been a relief to switch to something melancholy and genteel for her own pleasure. The Hiruma, she was sure, would have preferred a barracks song. Well, there would always be another night.
"Maratai-san," he said, "Okami-sama has a message for you, on a family matter."
Her pulse quickened. Perhaps, after all this time, it was news of her vanished sister. "Hai." She rose in a rustle of shabby silk and clutched her coat more closely around herself. She hated letting her fingers go stiff and cold. It mattered more to her as a musician than as an archer--on the steppes, one learned to send arrows true no matter how numb one's fingers became--and that, of course, was the problem. She was a Crane-trained musician and sometime poet, but music and silken words would not drive back the Shadowlands, and that, not campfire music, was the Jade Hand's goal.
When she arrived, Hida Okami waved aside her hesitant greeting and handed her a sketch on a scrap of paper. Maratai peered at the smudged marks of charcoal and sweat and grime until the lines resolved into writing, transcribed by a hand whose owner had more immediate things to worry about than stroke order and elegance; the lines formed a poem.
when blades cross and cross
again, when the shadows sing,
you shall see my face
Moto Arioki, it was signed.
Maratai saw the words unspoken in Okami's eyes, and said them. "My sister." Who had apprenticed to a Crane, only to disappear with her sensei under circumstances involving an oni-hunt. Maratai had joined the Jade Hand in hopes of finding out what had happened to Arioki, but had given up a long time ago.
"A Crab scout came back with this near Hiruma Castle," he said, and, sparing her nothing: "The original was carved on the forehead of a severed head. The rest of the body--well."
She paled.
"But the scout found no other trail, and frankly, she was too busy trying to survive returning to camp. Her commander passed this on. Unfortunately," he added, "we're spread too damn thin as it is right now to go haring off after elusive clues. But I thought you'd want to know."
She straightened her shoulders. She had a purpose now, however; she had a way to redeem inadequacy. "Okami-sama, I must leave the Jade Hand for a time."
The silence stretched until he said, "It never hurts to have another archer in camp, Maratai."
"Arioki is my sister," Maratai said. "My ancestors and daimyo would desire it. And one archer no better than competent will not be missed, I trust." She had not performed shamefully this past season when reassigned to a unit that saw more risk than most. But she was no soldier, either, and the month's harrowing engagements had convinced her that it was only a matter of time before her lack of excellence resulted in the death of someone more critical to the Legion's success. On their last mission, if she had fired a little faster, her friend Hiruma Kai might have lived. She contributed by training recruits in orienteering, basic mathematics--useful to the engineers' corps--and beginning archery, to be sure, but among fine-honed veteran soldiers, she felt like a liability. "I ask no help."
"Don't be stubborn. No one will starve because we send you out with rations; Hida knows, after the way you showed up here delirious with hunger, it's the least we can do."
By his somber expression, Maratai knew that he understood that what she was really asking was permission to find her death in the Shadowlands, in a last attempt to find her missing sister. Her own daimyo, Moto Jede, had given it years ago. "Domo," she whispered, unable to summon eloquence, or even the proper mask of dignity.
If he wished her a clean end as she bowed and departed with his letter of release, she did not hear him.
blood writes me a path
away from jade and arrow
into winter's snare
She left with her horse, Wing, and no farewells. As with most Unicorn, wanderlust drove her to ride alone on hunts with no quarry but her own restive thoughts; the sentries recognized her, and did not question Hida Okami's seal when she presented it to them. The darkness shrouded her face and obscured the fact that she was leaving with more supplies than a night's pleasure-ride warranted.
Ghosts accompanied her on her journey along the Wall. Her parents, who looked at her in silent reproach for failing to keep her younger sister safe. The Crane magistrate who had almost certainly been her grandfather, smiling at her as though he saw another woman's answering smile in her eyes. Maratai refused to think of the Daidoji whom she had loved, to lose herself in memories of his clear tenor, his laughter, his lean strong hands. But the katana she carried was his gift.
Inevitably, in the days that followed, her thoughts turned to Arioki. Sister-mine, Maratai thought. She carried some of the letters Arioki had written her, poking fun at ikebana arrangements, or parodying the latest fashionable dramas; she had sent the rest back to Moto Jede for safekeeping. Her daimyo was tolerant of such sentimentalities. He was, after all, the one who had allowed her and her sister to pursue studies with the Crane.
Arioki, while no slouch on a horse, had found her gift in iaijutsu. Maratai remembered laughing and crying when she first saw her sister practicing an austere iaijutsu kata. On that occasion, Arioki had launched into an unauthorized variation that ended in a hug. Thankfully, no one, Crane or otherwise, had been watching this reunion.
Although the sisters were of a height, Arioki had worn her hair long, bleached with a white streak; she possessed a grace that made Maratai, already awkward, look even clumsier. Arioki could also convey more emotions with the set of her eyebrows than anyone but a full-fledged courtier. And she had vanished hunting an oni.
And left, years later, a poem carved over a man's skull.
Sister-mine.
Maratai could not associate those dark, mocking words with the sister she had known. If what she feared had befallen Arioki, this could prove fatal. She needed help.
Well, she acknowledged, she had always needed help. Despite her time with the Jade Hand, she was under no illusions that she was prepared to face the Shadowlands alone. Braver bushi had failed to escape death or Taint. Maratai rode now toward a gamble for advice from someone who might be just as likely to eat her as a snack.
But she did not ride alone after all. Her ghosts accompanied her.
O death, your hand rests
lightly, so lightly, upon
my waiting shoulder
All she had to do, at Hiruma Castle, was show her letter and her Legion of the Jade Hand badge, and they acquiesced to her mission. Maratai heard the odds on her return--gambling was not solely a Unicorn vice--and would have been dismayed, had return been her purpose. She asked no escort, no resources from the Crab; and, she suspected, after watching her trip over her own feet and down the stairs, they reckoned that even if she fell and rose again she would prove no threat. It was perhaps the first time in her life she was grateful for her clumsiness.
The Crab did warn her to avoid the territory of a black-winged Shadowlands creature that had taken to returning the heads and daisho of Crab scouts to the fringe of Hiruma lands. Maratai, feigning difficulty, elicited detailed directions. Her training in mathematics and navigation meant, in fact, that she had some idea of where to go.
Not long ago, a peculiar Unicorn named Utaku Sojuan had joined, then departed, the Jade Hand. That was all she knew for certain; she had, in fact, played steppes songs while Sojuan brooded in camp, sensing that he would appreciate them for reasons that had nothing to do with being Unicorn. The rumors after that became tangled: Sojuan's wife claimed an oni had impersonated her husband; others said he was a Kuni experiment named Shen, escaped from his keepers; or he was a maho-tsukai whose black feather-amulets protected him from manifestations of the Taint. Whatever the story, Sojuan-Shen had vanished in this region, fleeing a challenge from Sojuan's furious wife.
Maratai was willing to gamble twofold: first, that this particular Shadowlands creature was the Sojuan-Shen oni-experiment-tsukai, and second, that Sojuan-Shen (whichever name he preferred; she wasn't about to argue with an oni-experiment-tsukai on that point) might, might tell her something about her sister, instead of feasting immediately upon her.
She spent a day in meditation at Candle Temple before entering the Shadowlands, as was proper. On any other occasion, she would have admired the depictions of Osano-Wo smiting his enemies, but she already felt small, too small, for the task she had set herself.
Maratai left Wing at Hiruma Castle, with instructions that if she did not return within five days, Wing should return to her daimyo. The horse nuzzled her hand that cold morning with no awareness that Maratai was going into danger without her. Maratai gave her a handful of candies, a treat normally reserved for festival days, and turned away.
Beyond Hiruma Castle, winter became her world. Even a Moto bushi might think twice of venturing into a Shadowlands winter, amid drifts of snow that obscured the Wall at her back, and the songs of a hunting wind. Maratai had bundled herself into padded coats. On the steppes she would have worn fur, but she could not in conscience carry katana and biwa and flute, and wear fur.
Pride may kill me, she told the wind, but at least I won't have dishonored my sensei with my choice of attire. Yet.
Maratai stopped not far past the borderlands that would molt, if she kept walking, into stark landscapes of shadow and crag and forbidden beauty. Here, it looked no different from any other snowbound plain. She huddled in the lee of a boulder, grateful for the respite from the wind, and set down her supplies.
Flute or biwa? she wondered as she ran through warm-up exercises to loosen her fingers. A flute would carry better. Of course, for all she knew, she had attracted the attention of a dozen bakemono who would leap out from ambush any second now. One did not normally try to attract attention, here. But she had heard, smelled nothing beyond snow. After a moment, she realized an experienced bushi would have been suspicious a long time ago.
I am who I am, thought Maratai, and lifted her flute to play "The Hawk's Flight," with its skirling opening of arpeggios. The feather-amulet rumors repeated themselves in her head, although she had no idea whether such a thing were possible.
Wingbeats differentiated themselves from the wind's howl.
Maratai did not look up, even as she finished. Her hands spasmed; she almost trapped a fingertip in one of the flute's holes. Death? she thought, waiting for its touch upon her shoulder. Or ripping through her spleen. Or tearing the network of arteries out of her skin--
Death plummeted from the sky, with a hawk's great wings, and pinned her to the ground, jarring the breath from her lungs. If her heart hammered any louder it would beat free of her ribs and fly away.
Wingspan, Maratai thought inanely, too dazed by the rank smell of sweat and rotten meat to respond to the eyes of hellfire orange, or the black, black talons a fingerwidth from her throat. My daimyo would kill for a falcon with that wingspan--oh.
No falcon hatched had a wingspan two? three? times the height of a man. On the body of a man. With the face of a man, sharp-featured beneath the grime and matted tangles of hair. If you could call it a man.
"Your bow isn't even strung, pony," it said in a harsh voice. The smell of rotten meat became overwhelming; only politeness kept Maratai from gagging. "Unless you're planning to bludgeon an ogre to death with that flute."
The flute did, by some miracle, remain in her hand. No, the miracle was that she still lived. "Are you an ogre?" This was not how she had wanted to begin the conversation, but the words were out.
"No, I'm Fu Leng."
She did recognize that voice, altered though it was. The flaying sarcasm was unmistakable. "Sojuan-san, then. Or Shen--?"
"Shen." A pause. "Unstrung bow; the quiver at least is in the right place, not that it helps you without the bow; a katana with your supplies, which I take to mean you still can't wield it worth a damn; and whatever you're carrying under those coats, it's still not enough." The sarcasm shaded into exasperation, and he let her up. "Jigoku's tortures, Maratai, what are you thinking? I could have killed and eaten you before you even twitched." Shen stepped backwards, wings folding in a remarkable bit of geometry.
She sat up, aching. And noted the betraying flex of his voice on eaten. She might be a snack yet, for all that he remembered her name. The bruises hurt, but were far better than the alternative. "I know." He looked nothing like Utaku Sojuan now, even allowing for the eyes, the talons, the gauntness ill-obscured by rags tied any way they would fit around the wings. She conceded that it would take an exceptional tailor to accommodate the wings.
Shen settled back on his haunches, although he still looked ready to spring upon her. "Then why--"
"I wanted to ask your help." Maratai glanced at his feet and realized, belatedly, that he could not help but look ready to pounce, with those additional talons. It did not comfort her.
The snarling, choking sound, she realized after a second, was laughter. "Oh," he gasped, "that's rich. Do you know what I am, pony?"
"An oni, a Kuni experiment, or a maho-tsukai," Maratai said. "I think my odds are out of date, though, or I'd quote them."
His tone became thoughtful. "A Kuni--well. I'm Damned, among other things. If you hadn't figured that out."
"But not Lost."
A long pause. "No. Which is what you're going to be if you keep heading out this way. That, or bakemono fodder."
Maratai wanted to ask, Did the bakemono kill the Crab scouts, or did you? but did not. Perhaps it marked her weak. That answer, however, Shen owed to someone else, not to her. "I'm looking for my sister." She did not know if he had heard the story during his time at the Jade Hand; she had rarely spoken of it. "Moto Arioki. A duelist. She vanished several years ago," the same year I lost the man I loved, "and I never heard from her, until now."
Another pause.
Maratai brought out the copied haiku, wondering if Shen's silence meant he was paying attention, or savoring the dinner conversation. She explained the circumstances in which the haiku had been found, and held it out.
He took it from her without rotating it right-side-up to read, then pressed it back into her palm. "A Lost duelist," he said finally, confirming what Maratai had feared. His eyes flared as he studied her face. "No wonder the face looked familiar when she tested the boundaries of my territory. I told her that iaijutsu is not my domain"--he waved his right hand at her, revealing twisted fingers--"and she went away."
"You know where I can find her."
"You're mad, and you should be locked up in the rice cellars of Hiruma Castle until you come to your senses."
"I can't leave without seeing her," she whispered. "She's my sister. It would offend all my ancestors if I abandoned her."
"No matter how unprepared you are."
"No matter how unprepared I am." Maratai lowered her eyes. "You've met her, Shen, tell me."
"Not my domain," he repeated, and spat.
"Shen-san--"
"Oh, please. You don't need to fake being a sodding Crane around me."
That surprised a laugh from her, although it came out as more of a gasp. "I'm not." She opened her coat just wide enough to show him the weapons she had concealed there, which no Crane would wear, along with her wakizashi.
He looked at her blankly. "Sai? You're still bakemono fodder, no matter how good you are with those things. Which probably isn't very."
"My father came from peasant stock," she admitted. "I learned saijutsu from him." It was a relief to be talking to someone who just didn't give a damn about it. "And no, I'm not very. But better with sai than with a sword."
Shen snorted. "That doesn't take much, in your case. Look, how can I say this any more clearly? Go back. Go home. Get out of the snow. Roast your toes by a nice warm fire and forget about the Shadowlands. If it's for anyone, it isn't you. You're terrible with weapons except that bow, which isn't enough, and Jade Strike is a shugenja thing, and the last thing that might prolong your existence is discipline, which I doubt you have either--"
"I am a musician," said Maratai. "I can play music until my fingers are cut to ribbons and go through the last fifty years' court repertoire from memory in order. Or match pitch to the worst singer born. No, it's not the discipline you're used to. It's not even the discipline that would save me here. But I do have discipline. And if you can't tell me anything about how I can live long enough to confront my sister, I am going to keep going south with my flute and my biwa until I find her, or only my bones are left to chime in the wind."
"If you keep going south," he snapped, "you're going to be in my territory. And I eat things in my territory."
Again, that flex of the voice. He's hungry. Oh, Shinjo. Her courage broke. "Shen, if you eat me--" She swallowed. "If you eat me--can you promise--if my sister comes this way--give her a clean death--" Shadowlands creatures sometimes fought each other, didn't they? Maybe Shen would view her sister as a rival.
"Now I've heard it all," Shen said, shaking his head. "Look, I don't eat stupid naïve ponies. I have too much self-respect."
Maratai retained enough presence of mind to stagger over to her supplies and retrieve some rations. After a moment's consideration, she slipped her comb in with them, to give him the option of grooming, and tossed the bundle to him. He caught them easily, talons retracting. "Do you take bribes? Shen, I just want to know--if you can't tell me anything else, or won't, at least point me in the right direction and I'll leave."
He pointed north, toward the Wall, with his free hand.
"Other than that. Wherever Ari is."
"You're really not planning to return, are you." It came out as a growl.
She smiled sadly.
"There are people in the Jade Hand who might miss your playing." His voice became brisk. "I could knock you unconscious and toss you back to the Crab." He flexed his right hand.
"I'd come back. You'd have to break both my legs. And even then I'd crawl."
"Your horse would hate that. Wherever you left it."
Maratai looked at him.
"I could break your arms, too, now that you mention it."
"You've seen snakes move, Shen, haven't you?"
"You," he said, "are a sodding stubborn idiot. I'm not going to be responsible for your soul."
She knew then that he would give her what she wanted, and that it had nothing to do with the bribe. "I don't know who Sojuan was, if that's not you," Maratai said softly, "but I think Utaku Midori was wrong. Even if I don't blame her."
He glared at her. "She wasn't wrong."
"And Midori-san's daughter grows more beautiful every day, my clansmen tell me."
"I'm not Sojuan, I don't sodding care."
"Tell me where to go," Maratai said, "and you need never hear my voice again."
He told her, and she went.
O death, your shadow
more constant than the flowers
walks in my footsteps
Maratai had known the Shadowlands bred terror, but she was not ready for it, as Shen had warned her. In truth, it could have been worse, for nothing attacked her. Perhaps Shen had arranged this, or perhaps her sister had. She had no way of knowing.
By nightfall, however, the darkness began speaking to her. At first she blamed sleeplessness, or the uncanny alien landscape that flowed away from attempts to map it precisely, or a lifetime of misgivings and inadequacies speaking with a new voice. It took waking up with her hand around the jade amulet, ready to cast it away, to realize what was happening.
The rocks started to stare at her with human faces. The wind had fingers. The snow blushed with color, even in starlight. Creatures with red smiles tracked her in her dreams. She woke before they ate her, and dared not sleep again.
The next night, all strength beyond her, she eschewed sleep in favor of sitting vigil beneath a barren tree. More of this and she would have to admit failure and slit her own throat rather than allow the Shadowlands to claim her as one of its own, though what the Shadowlands would want with a musician was beyond her.
You could be strong, the darkness whispered. Strong and swift. You would never have to fear again.
"No," she whispered. "It is not who I am."
It is who you could be.
"No," but her conviction was waning.
Then she looked up, and saw her sister.
At first, Maratai thought that time in the Shadowlands had touched her sister not at all: that same lithe grace, honed like winter's first wind; the same merry dark eyes. But the shock of recognition wore off soon, too soon, and stifled Maratai's greeting. Arioki's skin was ice-pale, almost translucent, and her hair was now white with a streak of black; her ungloved hands ended in glass-colored claws.
"Maratai," said Arioki. There was no mistaking her joy. "After all this time you've come."
"Arioki," she said. "It wasn't as though you told me where to find you."
"I didn't?" Arioki's vague, bemused expression almost made her human again. "Well. You're here now."
Maratai's hands tightened. "I read your poem."
"Which one?"
The implication took a moment to sink in. "Shinjo's hooves, tell me you were just doing calligraphy exercises."
"Well, of course." Before Maratai could relax--relax, in the Shadowlands while facing one of the Lost--Arioki added, "With my katana. To practice dexterity of the wrist. It's a very different medium from brush and ink, but it has potential."
She was going to retch. Or faint. In fact, she did neither. "I wouldn't know."
Arioki peered at her, at the katana across her knees. "That's a beautiful sword, sister-mine. If I may--?"
Why not, Maratai thought, the world is mad anyway. Or she was. She was in shock, that must be it. Her palms felt clammy as she handed the katana to her sister.
Arioki drew the blade from its saya with practiced reverence. "You didn't have this when I last saw you."
"No." Maratai did not elaborate. It seemed unclean to mention Daidoji Nabiken in this land of shifting darkness, under this winter moon.
Arioki resheathed the katana with a last admiring glance at the tsuba's crane-and-ki-rin, and passed it back. "You would not dishonor yourself in a duel, wielding this. Even if you haven't trained in iaijutsu, which I can see from your stance."
"What stance?"
"Exactly."
"Ari," Maratai said before she broke down entirely, "why?"
"Why which?"
She could not say, Why did you fall? It was not always a matter of choice. "The poetry. This." She gestured toward Arioki, at the slim and deadly claws.
"Beauty," she said, like a caress of petals. "Beauty and balance. Even here. Especially here, where no one looks for it." That bright smile. "I knew you'd come to share it with me."
What condemned Maratai along with her sister was that she understood this even as her stomach rebelled and her soul cringed. She had seen clotted blood, cruelty, death among those whose duty took them past the Wall; she had also seen rocks that clustered together in stark and unforgiving monuments, strange pale flowers blooming between a corpse's fingers, moonlight over unbroken snow. "No. I cannot accept this. Or you. Even if I die here, others"--her voice broke, and her voice never broke--"others will hunt you and give you the rest you have refused."
"You didn't come to join me, then."
"No."
"Not even after seeing my calligraphy?"
"No."
The joy in Arioki faded, or rather, it molted into a duelist's keen anticipation of crossed blades, which Maratai had encountered before, although not in her Crane-almost-lover. "I can't let you leave. And I'd so hoped to hear you play the latest music. One last song, sister-mine, before we duel. Just one."
"One song," Maratai said, flexing her fingers, and picked up her bamboo flute. Although Arioki had requested something new, something courtly, Maratai picked a wild carefree song from the steppes, which alluded to hoofbeats and the rustling of grass in its rhythms. As she played, breath steaming into the air, she could almost pretend that they were back on the steppes, that she and Arioki were still children huddled together exchanging riddles whose answers were the sun, or the stars, or the moon reflected in a handful of water.
The song changed as she played, though, echoing where no echoes should have lived. The resulting discordant harmonies spoke of--Maratai broke off mid-phrase, trembling and dizzy.
The luminous liquid streaking Arioki's face was tears. The duelist's eagerness had waned, although it lurked in the light of her eyes. "Come with me," she said. "Even in blood there is music. Even in bone there is music. You could find it." For me, her eyes said.
Find it, the darkness whispered to Maratai through the wind's keen whistle, the numbing cold. Even in a cry for mercy, unheeded, there is music. Even in the soul's last scream there is music. You could find it. For yourself.
"No," Maratai cried, and heard, against her will, the music in that, too. She held her sister's gaze as she lowered her flute. "It doesn't matter if you offer me all Rokugan as an audience. I would not play the music you would have me learn."
Maratai was an archer, and so the bamboo yielded under her hands, driving splinters into her palms. Cursing, she dropped the flute's remnants and fumbled for her amulet of jade. She succeeded only in dropping it into the snow, although it had not burned her. She had always been clumsy with anything but bow or instrument. The jade flared and left a circle of water around itself.
Arioki made an abortive motion, as though to retrieve the amulet for her, as she had done with numerous other fumbled objects during their childhood. Her mouth twisted.
Leave the jade, suggested the darkness. What need have you for such things?
Maratai picked it up: soft, but not yet drained of virtue. "No," she said in a steadier voice. Was the sting in her palm from the splinters, or from holding the jade?
"Then only the duel remains," said Arioki, with regret.
Maratai replaced the jade amulet around her neck. She shed her outermost coat and spread it on the ground. She lowered the katana, still sheathed, from her lap to the padded wool. Then she rose and said,
"The snow knows my name
and whispers it to the night:
into darkness, death."
With an exquisite bow, Arioki replied,
"After one last song,
the birds soar ever southward
into summer's heart."
As if the Shadowlands offered all the days of summer, and the Taint were nothing more than a welcome migration.
Brows furrowing, Arioki added, "Your katana, sister."
Maratai shook her head and fought back the ache of shame as she drew out her pair of sai from the coat she was still wearing. "You said it yourself, Ari. I am unversed in iaijutsu. I will fight as I know how." As our father taught me. "If you send the katana back to the Wall, they will know it as mine."
You could learn, said the darkness while Maratai envied her sister's perfect stance and unthinking poise. You could be stronger, swifter, graceful like the flight of birds. Her skill could be yours.
It tempted her: her, the awkward older sister, the clumsy Unicorn who had lived for a time amid a nest of Cranes, the archer who was competent but never anything more. It tempted her, and her shame deepened. That is not who I am, she said again to the darkness and her own traitor longing.
You could choose otherwise.
No. And that was why she had set down the katana Daidoji Nabiken had given her. She carried memories of past duels, of kata, of the beauty to be found in blades wielded by other hands, and if she took up the sword those memories would betray her. Better to reject the sword and rely on her own poor skills rather than casting after something that did not belong to her.
A duelist would not have done such a thing, or would have chosen empty hands over the sai, a peasant's weapon. But here, at the last, Maratai was Unicorn enough not to care, and Jade Hand enough to desire dishonor above corruption.
As she faced Moto Arioki, she thought she heard a voice long departed, saying, "I never intended that you should die trying to wield that katana, my blossom." The cold and shock must be causing her to hallucinate.
For a shining moment, Maratai thought that she had a chance, that the katana-breaking technique her father had showed her would succeed. But if even her grip hadn't shifted infinitesimally on the sai, at the wrong moment, Arioki's silken, assured grace was more than equal to Maratai's rusty skills.
"Ari," Maratai gasped before her guard dissolved completely, "I lied."
"What?" asked Arioki, pausing with her katana, a creature of gleaming dark metal, poised beneath Maratai's chin.
"I lied. Not one last song, but two," she said. And sang.
She sang about nightfall. About armies marching broken into endless dust. About the texture of flayed skin. Battlefield scavengers savoring every crimson tearing bite. Pyres lying unburnt beneath the stars. Wheels unresting through a thousand years of agony and sweat. Fortresses of unpolished obsidian. The fragrance of undulating fungus. Living feasts. Laughter. Dark eyes, watching for bright blood. The sound of crushed bone. Snow and ice. Rivers in which all the hues of black lived together. Skulls worn paper-thin. Wounds that would not heal, or healed too quickly. Haiku carved with a katana.
She sang. And sang. And sang.
Corruption, in all its names of forbidden beauty. A serenade to the shadows.
And in the end, she had no voice, and never would again; in the silence, it was the older sister who moved with a grace born of despair, and struck the younger, unmoving, into a different kind of silence.
I love you, Ari, she thought as she drew Nabiken's katana for its first taste of blood, so Arioki could find true rest. And because Arioki had come to love the darkness, she had, too. It was why, even expecting death, she had killed her voice. Perhaps it Tainted her in ways beyond jade.
She stood until dawn, until even the memory of echoes died.
sun and sister fall
beyond the reach of music
from darkness, silence
Perhaps, in the Shadowlands, someone listened to Maratai's last song. And perhaps not. But nothing followed her back to the Wall but another ghost, either way.
* * *