The Quantum Wanderer

Inside the public office, my first curiosity is towards the kind of quests they have around here. There is a board. Instead of pieces of paper, they use little tablets made of bamboo. They have a whole on the top, and are placed by it.

It makes for a large table, with some empty cells, most of them with one tablet, and some of them with more than one tablet in it. There are a couple with three tablets. Each tablet contains the name of a particular beast on it. Some say bandit, accompanied by a number.

The middle height of the board is mostly empty, while the top is mostly filled. Some of the bottom ones are missing. The columns with the smaller number, to the left, are mostly empty.

It looks like the quests are not really that different from the guilds I am used to.

I hand half a dozen gold coins to Akiko, so that she can exchange it. We go to one of the booths. The counter here is separated with dividers, providing some privacy. Akiko helps us with these kinds of tasks. I want to avoid any cultural issue from popping up, we are very inconspicuous already.

“Excuse me.” She bows lightly to the attendant, a young person in a somewhat elaborate uniform.

“Yes?”

“We would like to exchange currency.”

He nods at her, she places the coins on the counter. He picks one, looking at it.

“I have never seen this design. Where is it from?”

“I don’t know. A friend of mine was pearl diving, and she found those. Who knows?”

He takes a long look at the coin, then inspects us. He doesn’t care too much about hiding it.

“Very well. I will test it, and I will base the currency based on gold weight. Wait here.”

He goes back through a door. The time passes slowly, I wonder what kind of test he is doing to the coins. They are dwarven gold coins, so I am not expecting them to be mixed with something.

After some delay, he comes back. He hands us 10 gold rectangular coins and 8 silver.

“Each of your coins weights two gold coins. The tax is 10%.”

Akiko grabs the coins on the counter.

“Thank you.” She bows lightly to the official.

He bows back, we get out of there. Once we hit the street, we get close. I turn to Akiko.

“Is there anyplace we can sit to strategize?”

“Yes, honored guest. We can go to a café.”

There are several around. There is one with a picture of cat on it. I myself am a dog person, but it is as good as any.

The moment we slide the noren aside and step in, a little familiarity strikes me. The walls have those cat stands, as well as poles with rope around it that they scratch. There are a lot of cats around.

The tables are low, there are cushions near them. Some patrons are sitting on their heels, some with a cat on their laps. Some, with children, are using a wheat stem to play with a cat. One of the patrons was petting a cat close to the tail.

I hear a cat murmur, and the cats’ attention suddenly switch to us. There is an energy shift.

Muninn and Huginn are perched on my shoulders, black shapes against armor and travel dust, and that proves more interesting than the rest of us. Two cats appear from nowhere with the eerie silence only cats and assassins truly manage, stretching their necks upward, whiskers forward, pupils wide. Another drops from a shelf with a soft thump, circles once around my legs, and rises on its hind paws as though trying to catch the scent of feathers.

We sit down on the cushions provided. I take a look around, and I notice that some men just sit normally with their legs crossed. I do the same. Akiko kneels, sitting on her heels. Cecilia and the dragonesses follow suit.

For a second the room gains a second, quieter current under the tea-house calm: feline curiosity concentrating itself on my shoulders. One gray cat comes close enough that its nose almost reaches Huginn’s wing. Another, bolder and younger, creeps toward Muninn with the focused confidence of a hunter that has not yet learned what should not be hunted. Then something changes. There is no hiss from the crows, no snap of beak, no obvious threat at all. Muninn lazily look around. I notice the tips of his beak lifting a little, his weird hidden smile. At once, the cat closest jumps back, and runs desperately. All hunters around us scatter, a couple of them hissing before disappearing somewhere.

One of the cats approaches Cecilia slowly, cautiously.

Meanwhile, a waitress approaches our table. She gets a cushion that was against the table, and kneels down, same position Akiko is in. She is wearing a kimono.

“Excuse me, guests. Good afternoon.” She takes a look at the two crows at my shoulders. “Sir, we cannot guarantee your pets safety.”

I smile at her.

“No problem. You don’t have to worry about that.”

She nods.

“Excuse me, guests. Do you already know what you are going to order?”

I look at Akiko.

“We will have 7 lattes for now.” She turns to us. “You are going to enjoy this, it is a local specialty.”

I turn to the waitress.

“Make it nine, please.”

The waitress raises her brows, but stands up, sets the cushion she used back where it was, and moves to the kitchen.

After the first cat success approaching Cecilia, some other cats approach as well. They smell the dragonesses with caution. I had never seen a puzzled cat before.

Then I hear Ruby inhale. Not sharply. Deeply. Appraisingly. One of the brave cats around them raises its fur and runs. Opal’s eyes follow a fat calico sleeping beside a lacquered bowl. Aquamarine watches another cat stalking along the top of a shelf with the careful interest she would normally reserve for a fish whose size she is judging. Shandon tilts her head at a white one curled like a folded cloth on a zabuton. None of this would have worried me if I did not know exactly how dragonesses think about food. Ruby leans just close enough to murmur without, in her mind, causing a scene.

“My lord,” she says, in a tone of genuine admiration, “this is the first restaurant I have seen with live food.”

For a full heartbeat I do not answer, because every possible answer is worse than the silence.

Then Aquamarine, still watching the shelf-walker, asks in the same low, thoughtful voice, “Do the clients choose one themselves, or does the house decide which cat matches the tea?”

Shandon frowns very slightly. “Wouldn’t that make the room emptier throughout the day, sister?”

Opal, who is already trying to understand the business model with the seriousness of someone evaluating military logistics, narrows her eyes at the patrons. “Perhaps they only eat one on feast days. Or the cats breed quickly.”

I clear my throat before any of them can test the theory by reaching for the nearest animal. “No one is eating the cats,” I whisper. “They are the attraction.”

All four turn to me. Ruby looks openly betrayed by civilization. “The attraction?” she repeats, as if I have told her the roof beams are there to be admired rather than to hold up the roof.

“You come here, drink tea, and pet them?” Aquamarine glances from me to a scribe whose sleeve is currently being kneaded by a gray cat with ecstatic concentration.

“That sounds wildly inefficient.” Shandon, to her credit, adjusts first. “So they are like little furry courtesans of relaxation?”

Cecilia chokes on a laugh so suddenly that she has to cover her mouth. Even Akiko, burdened as she is, lets out the smallest, strangest breath of amusement.

Opal gives the room another measuring look and seems to come to terms with the custom by treating it as one more local absurdity.

“Very well,” she says under her breath. “As long as no one expects us to pretend not to notice that several of them would fit on a skewer.”

That earns her a horrified look from an old woman nearby, though thankfully she does not understand a word. I bow an apology in the woman’s direction on instinct, and the striped inspector at our boots chooses that moment to rub itself against Ruby’s greave. Ruby looks down at it with grave suspicion. “You are very bold for menu item,” she informs it.

The lattes arrive, the foam on top is a drawing of a cat. The waitress puts a cup in front of each of us, and leaves the additional two in the middle of the table.

Muninn and Huginn jump from my shoulders and land on the table. We start sipping the coffee, including Muninn and Huginn. People around stare a little bit, but don’t pay too much attention. The waitress, however, keeps staring at Huginn and Muninn. After some moments, I stare back at her, and she turns around, back to walking in the café.

I cast a silence spell around us.

“Now we can talk, “ I say. “So, what are our options here?”

“We can just go to the palace and shake the prince. Why make it so complicated, my lord?” Ruby says, still eyeing the cat around her legs.

I turn to Akiko.

“How hard would it be to get an audience with the shogun?”

Akiko stops to think for a little bit.

“Very hard. We have no leverage. We have no one vouching for us. Even the head priest would have to wait weeks for an audience.”

“How hard can we do things?” I ask Akiko.

She sighs.

“Honored guest, every moment lost could mean the difference between finding my daughter alive or not. I don’t want to carry the regret of having chosen others instead of her.”

Cecilia makes some faces, but I don’t think Akiko noticed. Aquamarine, on the other hand, is pointing to two clients for the café that have just entered and sat down. They are a little bit too interested on us. They have a lot higher level than the other people in the café, these two are in their mid forties. My senses show me that they have several weapons hidden on them, and they still move very silently.

One of them stands up and goes towards the kitchen. When we look at him, the other one shoots a dart in the back of Cecilia’s chair, half an inch above the ground. There is a very thin wire, unnoticeable, that is on the floor, connecting the dart and being held by the client that stayed on the table.

Still with my back towards him, so I don’t make it known, I watch through my magic sense. He discreetly puts a part of the thread in his mouth.

We turn to look at each other again. I clear my throat, and I talk in the local language.

“Well, in that case, let’s just enjoy our latte.”

I undo the silence spell. Ruby bends down and pets the cat around her leg. It lays on its side on the floor, and props the stomach up. Ruby approaches with her hand, the cat attacks it and runs.

“My lord, it attacked me… Shouldn’t I defend myself?” Ruby asks, passing her tongue over her lips.

I just stare at her. She makes a puppy face. Cecilia and Akiko laugh.

After we have our coffees, Akiko calls the waitress. I pay for the lattes with a single silver coin. The waitress go into the back and comes back with 10 copper coins for change. Akiko is surprised by it somehow.

We fall in behind Akiko and leave the cat café by the same noren we entered through, trading the muffled warmth of tatami, tea steam, and animal dander for the sharper pulse of the street outside. The city receives us differently now that we have spent some time inside it. Earlier it had felt like a wall of impressions arriving all at once. Now its order begins to show through the noise. We do not simply walk at random through a crowded place.

We are drawn along channels already laid down by use and intent. The lower streets nearest the gate still labor under traffic: handcarts, shoulder poles, laden porters, crates of fish, bundles of reeds, jars of oil, bolts of cloth, bamboo baskets, and men carrying lengths of timber balanced so expertly that no one else even flinches when they pass. The workshops remain open to the road, each trade advertising itself through sound and smell before the eye has time to catch up. Somewhere to the left a dyer lifts a cloth from a vat and wrings from it a stream of dark liquid that runs into a stone gutter. To the right a cooper’s mallet beats its patient rhythm into the afternoon. Beyond that, unseen but impossible to mistake, metal rings on metal in a smithy where someone is still working despite the heat.

Akiko does not head straight for the highest road. That would have been too obvious, and in a city built like this obvious movement is its own kind of announcement. Instead she threads us through the lower arteries first, using the city’s own logic against itself. We pass along one canal narrow enough to be crossed by a single plank bridge and then beside another broader one lined with flat stones where women kneel washing greens and daikon while children slap water at one another until a grandmother’s voice cuts through the lane and restores order. The channels are never far, courtesy of being built literally across a river. They pass under buildings, vanish beneath latticed walkways, reappear between storehouses, and gather light in places where the street itself has gone dim beneath overhanging eaves. More than once we are made to pause at little choke points where a cart must be let through first or where a pair of ashigaru stand at a corner not to challenge anyone, but simply to be seen seeing. The city controls its circulation the way a fortress controls its gates. Even here, among merchants and common labor, there is no forgetting that all of this is arranged beneath a higher authority and for a harder purpose than trade alone.

Little by little the streets begin to tilt upward. It is not dramatic at first. The slope only reveals itself by the way carts strain more, by the way drainage channels run faster at our feet, by the widening glimpses we get whenever one lane opens briefly onto another. The houses here change almost imperceptibly before they change completely. The lowest quarters crowd every building shoulder to shoulder, practical and smoke-darkened, but farther in the façades grow cleaner, the wood less weather-bitten, the plaster whiter, the gates broader. Courtyards begin to appear behind walls instead of every family spilling its work into the street.

Shops give way, one by one, to compounds. The people thin just enough that each passing pair of retainers draws more notice. The amount of guards increase as we walk towards our goal. We cross a broader bridge whose railings are capped in dark lacquer and whose foundations are stone rather than timber. Beyond it rises a stepped district of official buildings, armories, residences, and administrative halls arranged with the same dense discipline as the lower town, but with more separation between them and more men under arms moving quietly through that separation. Prayer tablets still hang here. Incense still burns in little roadside shrines. Yet the smell of office, storage, and soldiery grows stronger the higher we climb. Ink. Oiled wood. Horse tack. Leather. Rice in sealed stores. Iron fittings warmed by the day. This is no longer the city that feeds the center. It is the city that serves it.

At last the approach to the shogun’s palace begins to separate itself from the rest of the high precinct. The distinction is not made by extravagance alone, though there is some of that in the lines of the tiled roofs and the width of the approach court. The road leading toward it has fewer side lanes and more places where a body of men could be halted. Walls grow higher, not enough to make the compound vanish, but enough to hide its interior arrangements from casual eyes. Guardhouses sit where the road narrows, each with a bell beam and spear racks under the eaves.

A ditch, dry for the moment but cut with intention, parallels part of the outer wall before joining one of the water channels below. The gates ahead are not those of a temple welcoming petitioners in endless flow nor those of a market district taking in the day’s commerce. They are the gates of a residence that governs and expects resistance for doing so. Men in better armor stand there, more uniformly equipped than the watchmen at the outer bridge, and the retainers moving in and out carry themselves with that clipped reserve of people accustomed to rank pressing down from above them.

Beyond the first roofline and above the wall, I can see the upper structures of the palace proper: layered roofs, long galleries, white plaster, dark beams, and a central hall set back on higher ground so that anyone approaching must do so under several different sets of eyes before ever reaching it.

Akiko slows just enough for the change in our surroundings to register, then keeps walking as if this were nothing more than another street among many. The rest of us follow her lead. But even without speaking, all of us feel the same thing settling over the group. We are no longer merely inside the city. We are entering the orbit of the man who holds the texts.

I gesture for Akiko to stay back while the rest of us approach the compound. The barrier hums faintly against my senses, a thin invisible skin stretched between us and the front gate. Soldiers lounge along the wall, relaxed enough that I almost feel bad for what is about to happen.

I turn to Ruby.

“Ruby, we are going to break the barrier. After that, I want a war cry. Put almost everyone inside to sleep, but try not to kill anyone.”

“As you wish, my lord.”

I turn and cast a silence spell, using the mandala form this time. The fractal pattern unfolds around us, and a soundproof mana coat settles over the outside of their barrier. We remain inside the muffled space. Akiko stays safely beyond it.

“BOOM!”

I turn at the sudden explosion, only for Ruby’s roar to slam through the courtyard a heartbeat later. The sound does not escape the spell, but inside the barrier it hits like a physical wave. Cecilia, farthest from the gate, still takes two stumbling steps back. The guards along the wall crumple where they stand, dropping like puppets with cut strings.

Ruby brushes dust from her armor with exaggerated dignity, though the little hops in her steps ruin the effect. She comes back to me with bright eyes, clearly waiting for praise.

I give her a peck on the lips, and we go inside after Shandon pushes the heavy wooden gate inside. Something cracks behind it, but the gate opens. We enter through the small opening in the huge gate. If we act naturally, people outside the silent spell might not even notice what is going on.

We move to an inside garden, that has a wide walk with sand pits on the left and right. It is more akin to a garden, though, with a tree here and there, with a fountain pouring water. It has the same bamboo device the temple had, it is currently filling up. The walk leads straight ahead, towards the big construction. I can sense from the amount of mana moving around that we are going to be met in this place.

Two lines of guards come through the large door double door in the construction. There are about a dozen people, they are wearing armors and helmets that are masks, with horns. The armors are very different, they look like several plates tied on top of each other.

The front 4 guards have spears, the 4 guards in the middle have bows, and the last four guards have their hands empty.

The guards in the back start muttering something, it reminds me a barbarbar sound with a second tone, a musical one. They start creating seals with their hands. At the same time the two archers on each line step to the side, with their bows out, arrows knocked. They don’t quite hold the bow right in the middle, but rather a little bit down. The bow is a kind of tilted. Four arrows fly.

The guards in the front point their spears towards us.

Ruby’s face lights up with pure joy as she steps forward. I grab the back of her armor. Shandon moves next, just as eager, and I catch her too. I pull them both backward before they can turn the courtyard into a slaughterhouse, and they land on the ground with offended thuds.

The arrows explode against my armor. I feel the momentum. It would pack a punch for someone of a lower level. I feel the hit distributed by the padding underneath the armor. I let the two dragonesses go, and they stand up.

“I said I don’t want a bloodbath!” I tell Ruby and Shandon, with the intent of being heard by the opposing group.

The other guards are not idle. Four in the rear are already finishing the seals with their hands. They finish together, inhale sharply, and shout with one voice.

“UWABAMI-SAMA!”

A gate opens above them. The doors within it slide apart, revealing darkness, and from that darkness comes an enormous snake, spilling forward through the air as if the portal had poured it out.

I reinforce my brain, and time slows. Behind me, Opal has already moved in front of Akiko and Cecilia. Huginn and Muninn perch on her shoulders, both ready to protect her.

I am shaken by my shoulder. I look to my side, and I see Ruby, in a silent plea to go play.

“Go ahead.”

Her sword leaves her back in a silver blur. She darts right like a streak of lightning, then launches herself toward the creature while it is still rushing at us.

The snake’s head goes one way. Its body goes another. A warm red wave bursts across the courtyard and soaks all of us before either half hits the ground.

I clean my face with my hand, enough that I can talk without blood on my mouth. The snake is having spasms on the ground. The guards in front take two breaths. I can see their mood change. Their faces go from usual service to something darker. They are prepared to lay their lives for their lord, apparently. Ruby, on the other hand, is smiling. I sigh.

“STOP THE MADNESS NOW!” I yell to the shogun.